17194	----	THE RELATIONS BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE EIGHT LECTURES PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN THE YEAR 1884 ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE REV. JOHN BAMPTON, M.A. CANON OF SALISBURY BY THE RIGHT REV. FREDERICK, LORD BISHOP OF EXETER London MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1903 _First Edition_, 8vo, 1884. _Reprinted January and February (twice)_, 1885, _April_, 1885; _Re-issue_ (_Crown_ 8vo), _November_, 1885, 1903. OXFORD: HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY EXTRACT THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF THE LATE REV. JOHN BAMPTON, CANON OF SALISBURY. --"I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the said Lands or Estates upon trust, and to the intents and purposes hereinafter mentioned; that is to say, I will and appoint that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford for the time being shall take and receive all the rents, issues, and profits thereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, and necessary deductions made) that he pay all the remainder to the endowment of eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, to be established for ever in the said University, and to be performed in the manner following: "I direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in Easter Term, a Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads of Colleges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining to the Printing-House, between the hours of ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary's in Oxford, between the commencement of the last month in Lent Term, and the end of the third week in Act Term. "Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following Subjects--to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics--upon the divine authority of the holy Scriptures--upon the authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith and practice of the primitive Church--upon the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ--upon the Divinity of the Holy Ghost--upon the Articles of the Christian Faith, as comprehended in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds. "Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons shall be always printed, within two months after they are preached; and one copy shall be given to the Chancellor of the University, and one copy to the Head of every College, and one copy to the Mayor of the city of Oxford, and one copy to be put into the Bodleian Library; and the expenses of printing them shall be paid out of the revenue of the Land or Estates given for establishing the Divinity Lecture Sermons; and the preacher shall not be paid, nor be entitled to the revenue, before they are printed. "Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be qualified to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he hath taken the degree of Master of Arts at least, in one of the two Universities of Oxford or Cambridge; and that the same person shall never preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons twice." CONTENTS. LECTURE I. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC BELIEF. Psalm civ. 24. _O Lord, how manifold are Thy works: in wisdom hast Thou made them all; the earth is full of Thy riches._ The subject introduced: Scientific belief. Mathematics and Metaphysics excluded. The Postulate of Science: the Uniformity of Nature. Hume's account of it. Kant's account of it. Insufficiency of both accounts. Science traced back to observation of the Human Will. The development of Science from this origin. The increasing generality of the Postulate: which nevertheless can never attain to universality. LECTURE II. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF. Genesis i. 27. _So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him._ The voice within. The objection of the alleged relativity of knowledge. Absolute knowledge of our own personal identity. Failure to show this to be relative; in particular by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The Moral Law. The command to live according to that Law; Duty. The command to believe in the supremacy of that Law; the lower Faith. The Last Judgment. The hope of Immortality. The personification of the Moral Law in Almighty God; the higher Faith. The spiritual faculty the recipient of Revelation, if any be made. The contrast between Religion and Science. LECTURE III. APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL. Genesis i. 27. _So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him._ Contradiction of Free-Will to doctrine of Uniformity. Butler's examination of the question. Hume's solution. Kant's solution. Determinism. The real result of examination of the facts. Interference of the will always possible, but comparatively rare. The need of a fixed nature for our self-discipline, and so for our spiritual life. LECTURE IV. APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. Romans i. 20. _For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead._ Foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. Great development in recent times. Objection felt by many religious men. Alleged to destroy argument from design. Paley's argument examined. Doctrine of Evolution adds force to the argument, and removes objections to it. Argument from progress; from beauty; from unity. The conflict not real. LECTURE V. REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. Hebrews i. 1. _God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past to the Fathers by the Prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by His Son._ The evolution of Knowledge. Does not affect the truth of Science. Nor of Religion. Special characteristic of evolution of Religious Knowledge, that it is due to Revelation. All higher Religions have claimed to be Revelations. The evolution of Religious Knowledge in the Old Testament; yet the Old Testament a Revelation. Still more the New Testament. The miraculous element in Revelation. Its place and need. Harmony of this mode of evolution with the teaching of the Spiritual Faculty. LECTURE VI. APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. Psalm c. 3. _Know ye that the Lord He is God: it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves._ Evolution examined. The formation of the habitable world. The formation of the creatures which inhabit it. Transmission of characteristics. Variations perpetually introduced. Natural selection. On the other side, life not yet accounted for by Evolution. Cause of variations not yet examined. Moral Law incapable of being evolved. Account given in Genesis not at variance with doctrine of Evolution. Evolution of man not inconsistent with dignity of humanity. LECTURE VII. APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER. St. John xiv. 11. _Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me: or else believe Me for the very works' sake._ The claim to work miracles parallel to the freedom of the will. The miracles of Revelation need not be miracles of Science. Our Lord's Resurrection, and His miracles of healing, possibly not miraculous in the scientific sense. Different aspect of miracles now and at the time when the Revelation was given. Miracles attested by the Apostles, by our Lord's character, by our Lord's power. Nature of evidence required to prove miracles; not such as to put physical above spiritual evidence; not such as to be unsuited to their own day. Impossibility of demonstrating universal uniformity. Revelation no obstacle to the progress of Science. LECTURE VIII. THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT. 1 Corinthians xii. 3. _No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost._ Uniformity of nature not demonstrated, but established, except in two cases; the interference of human will and of Divine Will. The exception no bar to the progress of Science. Unity to be found not in the physical world, but in the physical and moral combined. The Moral Law rests on itself. Our recognition of it on our own character and choice. But we expect it to show its marks in the physical world: and these are the purpose visible in Creation, the effects produced by Revelation. Nevertheless a demand for more physical evidence; but the physical cannot be allowed to overshadow the spiritual. Dangers to believers from leaning this way: superstition; blindness; stagnation. The guarantee for spiritual perceptiveness: to take Jesus as the Lord of the conscience, the heart, the will. LECTURE I. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC BELIEF. The subject introduced: Scientific belief. Mathematics and Metaphysics excluded. The Postulate of Science: the Uniformity of Nature. Hume's account of it. Kant's account of it. Insufficiency of both accounts. Science traced back to observation of the Human Will. The development of Science from this origin. The increasing generality of the Postulate: which nevertheless can never attain to universality. LECTURE I. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC BELIEF. 'O Lord, how manifold are Thy works: in wisdom hast Thou made them all; the earth is full of Thy riches.'--_Psalm_ civ. 24. Those who believe that the creation and government of the world are the work of a Being Whom it is their duty to love with all their hearts, Who loves them with a love beyond all other love, to Whom they look for guidance now and unending happiness hereafter, have a double motive for studying the forms and operations of Nature; because over and above whatever they may gain of the purest and highest pleasure in the study, and whatever men may gain of material comfort in a thousand forms from the results of the study, they cannot but have always present to their minds the thought, that all these things are revelations of His character, and to know them is in a very real measure to know Him. The believer in God, if he have the faculty and the opportunity, cannot find a more proper employment of time and labour and thought than the study of the ways in which God works and the things which God has made. Among religious men we ought to expect to find the most patient, the most truth-seeking, the most courageous of men of science. We know that it is not always so; and that on the contrary Science and Religion seem very often to be the most determined foes to each other that can be found. The scientific man often asserts that he cannot find God in Science; and the religious man often asserts that he cannot find Science in God. Each often believes himself to be in possession, if not of the whole truth, at any rate of all the truth that it is most important to possess. Science seems to despise religion; and religion to fear and condemn Science. Religion, which certainly ought to put truth at the highest, is charged with refusing to acknowledge truth that has been proved. And Science, which certainly ought to insist on demonstrating every assertion which it makes, is charged with giving the rein to the imagination and treating the merest speculations as well-established facts. To propose to reconcile these opposites would be a task which hardly any sane man would undertake. It would imply a claim to be able to rise at once above both, and see the truth which included all that both could teach. But it is a very useful undertaking, and not beyond the reach of thoughtful inquiry by an ordinary man, to examine the relations between the two, and thus to help not a few to find a way for themselves out of the perplexity. And this inquiry may well begin by asking what is the origin and nature of scientific belief on the one hand and of religious belief on the other. In this Lecture I propose to deal with the former. It is not necessary to include in the Science of which I am to speak either Mathematics or Metaphysics. In as far as I need touch on what belongs to either, it will be only for the purpose of answering objections or of excluding what is irrelevant. And the consequent restriction of our consideration to the Science which concerns itself with Nature greatly simplifies the task that I have undertaken. For it will be at once admitted in the present day by all but a very few that the source of all scientific knowledge of this kind is to be found in the observations of the senses, including under that word both the bodily senses which tell us all we know of things external, and that internal sense by which we know all or nearly all that takes place within the mind itself. And so also will it be admitted that the Supreme Postulate, without which scientific knowledge is impossible, is the Uniformity of Nature. Science lays claim to no revelations. No voice of authority declares what substances there are in the world, what are the properties of those substances, what are the effects and operations of those properties. No traditions handed down from past ages can do anything more than transmit to us observations made in those times, which, so far as we can trust them, we may add to the observations made in our own times. The materials in short which Science has to handle are obtained by experience. But on the other hand Science can deal with these materials only on the condition that they are reducible to invariable laws. If any observation made by the senses is not capable of being brought under the laws which are found to govern all other observations, it is not yet brought under the dominion of Science. It is not yet explained, nor understood. As far as Science is concerned, it may be called as yet non-existent. It is for this very reason possible that the examination of it may be of the very greatest importance. To explain what has hitherto received no explanation constitutes the very essence of scientific progress. The observation may be imperfect, and may at once become explicable as soon as it is made complete; or, what is of far more value, it may be an instance of the operation of a new law not previously known, modifying and perhaps absorbing the law up to that time accepted. When it was first noticed in Galileo's time that water would not ascend in the suction pipe of a pump to a greater height than 32 feet, the old law that nature abhors a vacuum was modified, and the reasons why and the conditions under which Nature abhors a vacuum were discovered. The suction of fluids was brought under the general law of mechanical pressure. The doctrine that Nature abhorred a vacuum had been a fair generalization and expression of the facts of this kind that up to that time had been observed. A new fact was observed which would not fall under the rule. The examination of this fact led to the old rule being superseded; and Science advanced a great step at once. So in our own day was the planet Neptune discovered by the observation of certain facts which could not be squared with the facts previously observed unless the Law of Gravitation was to be corrected. The result in this case was not the discovery of a new Law but of a new Planet; and consequently a great confirmation of the old Law. But in each case and in every similar case the investigation of the newly observed fact proceeds on the assumption that Nature will be found uniform, and on no other assumption can Science proceed at all. Now it is this assumption which must be first examined. What is its source? What is its justification? What, if any, are its limits? It is not an assumption that belongs to Science only. It is in some form or other at the bottom of all our daily life. We eat our food on the assumption that it will nourish us to-day as it nourished us yesterday. We deal with our neighbours in the belief that we may safely trust those now whom we have trusted and safely trusted heretofore. We never take a journey without assuming that wood and iron will hold a carriage together, that wheels will roll upon axles, that steam will expand and drive the piston of an engine, that porters and stokers and engine-drivers will do their accustomed duties. Our crops are sown in the belief that the earth will work its usual chemistry, that heat and light and rain will come in their turn and have their usual effects, and the harvest will be ready for our gathering in the autumn. Look on while a man is tried for his life before a jury. Every tittle of the evidence is valued both by the judge and jury according to its agreement or disagreement with what we believe to be the laws of Nature, and if a witness asserts that something happened which, as far as we know, never happened at any other time since the world began, we set his evidence aside as incredible. And the prisoner is condemned if the facts before us, interpreted on the assumption that the ordinary laws of Nature have held their course, appear to prove his guilt. What right have we to make such an assumption as this? The question was first clearly put by Hume, and was handled by him with singular lucidity; but his answer, though very near the truth, was not so expressed as to set the question at rest. The main relation in which the uniformity of Nature is observed is that of cause and effect. Hume examines this and maintains that there is absolutely nothing contained in it but the notion of invariable sequence. Two phenomena are invariably found connected together; the prior is spoken of as the cause, the posterior as the effect. But there is absolutely nothing in the former to define its relation to the latter, except that when the former is observed the latter, as far as we know, invariably follows. A ball hits another ball of equal size, both being free to move. There is nothing by which prior to experience we can determine what will happen next. It is just as conceivable that the moving ball should come back or should come to rest, as that the ball hitherto at rest should begin to move. A magnet fastened to a piece of wood is floating on water. Another magnet held in the hand is brought very near one of its poles or ends. If two north poles are thus brought together the floating magnet is repelled; if a north and a south pole are brought together the floating magnet is attracted. The motion of the floating magnet is in each case called the effect; the approach of the magnet held in the hand is called the cause. And this cause is, as far as we know, invariably followed by this effect. But to say that one is cause and the other effect is merely to say that one is always followed by the other; and no other meaning, according to Hume, can be attached to the words cause and effect. Having established this interpretation of these words, Hume goes on to ask: What can be the ground in reason for the principle universally adopted, that the law of cause and effect rules phenomena, and that a cause which has been followed by an effect once will be followed by the same effect always? And he concludes that no rational ground can be found at all, that it is the mere result of custom without anything rational behind it. We are accustomed to see it so, and what we have been so perpetually accustomed to see we believe that we shall continue to see. But why what has always been hitherto should always be hereafter, no reason whatever can be given. The logical conclusion obviously is to discredit all human faculties and to land us in universal scepticism. It was at this point that Kant took up the question, avowedly in consequence of Hume's reasoning. He considered that Hume had been misled by turning his attention to Physics, and that his own good sense would have saved him from his conclusion had he thought rather of Mathematics. Kant's solution of the problem, based mainly on the reality of Mathematics, and especially of Geometry, is the direct opposite of Hume's. It will be most easy to give a clear account of Kant's solution by using a very familiar illustration. There is a well-known common toy called a Kaleidoscope, in which bits of coloured glass placed at one end are seen through a small round hole at the other. The bits of glass are not arranged in any order whatever, and by shaking the instrument may be rearranged again and again indefinitely and still without any order whatever. But however they may be arranged in themselves they always form, as seen from the other end, a symmetrical pattern. The pattern indeed varies with every shake of the instrument and consequent re-arrangement of the bits of glass, but it is invariably symmetrical. Now the symmetry in this case is not in the bits of glass; the colours are there no doubt, but the symmetrical arrangement of them is not. The symmetry is entirely due to the instrument. And if a competent enquirer looks into the instrument and examines its construction, he will be able to lay down with absolute certainty the laws of that symmetry which every pattern as seen through the instrument must obey. Just such an instrument, according to Kant, is the human mind. Space and Time and the Perceptive Faculties are the parts of the instrument. Everything that reaches the senses must submit to the laws of Space and Time, that is, to the Laws of Mathematics, because Space and Time are forms of the mind itself, and, like the kaleidoscope, arrange all things on their way to the senses according to a pattern of their own. This pattern is as it were super-added to the manifestations that come from the things themselves; and if there be any manifestations of such a nature that they could not submit to this addition, or, in other words, could not submit to Mathematical Laws, these manifestations could not affect our senses at all. So too our Understanding has a pattern of its own which it imposes on all things that reach its power of perception. What cannot be accommodated to this pattern cannot be understood at all. Whatever things may be in themselves, their manifestations are not within the range of our intelligence, except by passing through the arranging process which our own mind executes upon them. It is clear that this wonderfully ingenious speculation rests its claims for acceptance purely on the assertion that it and it alone explains the facts. It cannot be proved from any principle of reason. It assumes that there is a demonstrative science of Mathematics quite independent of experience, and that there are necessary principles of Physics equally independent of experience. And it accounts for the existence of these. With Mathematics we are not now concerned, and I will pass them by with only one remark. The ground on which Kant's theory stands is not sufficient, for this simple reason. It accounts for one fact; it does not account for another fact. It accounts for the fact that we attach and cannot help attaching a conviction of necessity to all mathematical reasoning. We not only know that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, but we know that this is so and must be so in all places and at all times, and we know it without any proof whatever. This fact Kant accounts for. Space is according to him a part of our kaleidoscope; you can always look into it and see for yourself what are the laws of it. But there is another fact. This space of which we are speaking is unquestionably to our minds not a thing inside of us but outside of us. We are in it. We cannot get rid of a sense that it is independent of ourselves. We can imagine ourselves non-existing, minds and all. We cannot imagine space non-existing. If it be a part of our minds, how is it that we can picture to ourselves the non-existence of the mind which is the whole, but not the non-existence of space which, according to the hypothesis, is the part? For this fact, which we commonly call the objectivity of space, Kant's theory does not account. In fact Kant appears to have no escape from assigning this objectivity of space to delusion. But a theory which requires us to call an ineradicable conviction of consciousness a delusion cannot be said to explain all the facts. John Stuart Mill maintains that the other fact, namely, the conviction of the necessity of mathematical truth, is a delusion. And his account also must be pronounced for that reason to fail in accounting for all the facts. But our present concern is not with Mathematics but with Physics. And here Kant fails altogether to convince; for, taking Time and the Perceptive Powers of the Understanding as parts of the human mind, he shows, what indeed is clearer and clearer every day, that the principles (so called) of Physics are indispensable Postulates, not indeed of observing with the senses, but of comprehending with the understanding, whatever happens. In order to give anything that can be called an explanation of any event we must show that it falls under the general rules which constitute the uniformity of Nature. We have no other meaning for the words understanding or explaining an event. Thinking, when analysed, is found to consist in bringing all that happens under universal laws, and no phenomenon can be said to be explained in thought except by being so related to all other phenomena. But it does not by any means follow that events cannot happen or cannot affect our senses without being susceptible of such explanation. To say that an event cannot be understood, and to say either that it cannot happen or that it cannot be observed by the senses, are two very different things. The fact is that Mathematics and Physics do not, as Kant assumes, present the same problem for solution, and do not therefore admit of one solution applicable to both. It is not the case that there is a science of abstract Physics corresponding to the science of Mathematics and sharing in the same character of necessity. In Mathematics we have truths which we cannot but accept, and accept as universal and necessary: in Physics we have no such truths, nor has Kant even endeavoured to prove that we have. The very question therefore that we are asked to solve in regard to Mathematics does not present itself in Physics. I am constrained to believe that two and two are four and not five; I am not constrained to believe that if one event is followed by another a great many times it will be so followed always. And the question is, why, without any constraint, I nevertheless so far believe it that I require special evidence in any given case to convince me to the contrary. And Kant's answer is irrelevant. He says that we cannot think the sequence of events unless they fall under the postulates of thinking, that is, the postulates of science; but this is no answer to the question. Why do we believe that, unless the contrary be proved, everything that is observed by the senses is capable of being reduced under these postulates of thinking? The sequence of things cannot otherwise be explained; but why should the sequence of all things that happen be capable of being explained? The question therefore still remains unanswered. What right have we to assume this Uniformity in Nature? or, in other words, what right have we to assume that all phenomena in Nature, observed by our senses, are capable of being brought within the domain of Science? And to answer this question we must approach it from a different side. And there is the more reason for this because it is undeniable that both the definition and the universality of the relation of cause and effect, as they were accepted by Hume and his followers, are not accepted by men in general. In ordinary language something more is meant by cause and effect than invariable sequence, and the common assumption is not that all Nature obeys this rule with absolutely no variation, but that the rule is sufficiently general for all practical purposes. If then we begin by asking what is the process of Science in dealing with all questions of causation, we find that this process when reduced to its simplest elements always consists in referring every event as an effect to some cause which we know or believe to have produced some other and similar event. Newton is struck by a falling apple. His first thought is, 'how hard the blow.' His second is wonder, 'how far the earth's attraction, which has caused this hard blow, extends.' His third, 'why not as far as the moon?' And he proceeds to assign the motion of the moon to the same cause as that which produced the motion of the apple. Taking this as a working hypothesis, he examines what would be the motions of all the planets if this were true. And the examination ends with establishing the high probability of the Law of Gravitation. Now this being the invariable process of Science, it follows that our conception of cause must come originally from that cause which we have within ourselves and with which we cannot but begin, the action of the human will. It is from this action that is obtained that conception which underlies the ordinary conception of cause, namely, that of force or power. This conception of force or power is derived from the consciousness of our own power to move our limbs, and perhaps too of passions, temptations, sentiments to move or oppose our wills. This power is most distinctly felt when it is resisted. The effort which is necessary when we choose to do what we have barely strength to do, impresses on us more clearly the sense of a force residing in ourselves capable of overcoming resistance. Having the power to move our limbs, and that too against some resistance, we explain, and in no other way can we explain, other motions by the supposition of a similar power. In so doing we are following strictly the scientific instinct and the scientific process. We are putting into the same class the motions that we observe in other things and the motions that we observe in ourselves; the latter are due to acts of our own wills, the former are assigned to similar acts of other wills. Hence in infancy, and in the infancy of mankind, the whole world is peopled with persons because everything that we observe to move is personified. A secret will moves the wind, the sun, the moon, the stars, and each is independent of the others. Soon a distinction grows up between the things that seem to have a spontaneous motion and those that have not, and spontaneous motion is taken as the sign of life. And all inanimate things, of whatever kind, are held to be moved, if they move at all, by a force outside themselves. Their own force is limited to that of resisting, and does not include that of originating motion. But though they cannot originate motion they are observed to be capable of transmitting it. And the notion of force is expanded by the recognition that it can be communicated from one thing to another and yet to another, and that we may have to go back many steps before we arrive at the will from which it originated. We began with the notion of a power the action of which was or appeared to be self-originated: we come to the notion of a power the action of which is nothing more than the continuance of preceding action. And the special characteristic of the action of this force as thus conceived, which we may call the derivative force, is seen to be its regularity, just as the special characteristic of the self-originating action was its spontaneity. As experience increases the regularity of the action of the derivative force is more and more observable, and then arises the notion of a law or rule regulating the action of every such force. And a perpetually increasing number of phenomena are brought under this head, and are shown to be, not the immediate results of self-originating action, but the more or less remote results of derivative action governed by laws. And even a large number of those phenomena, which specially belong to life and living creatures, in whom alone, if anywhere, the self-originating action is to be found, are observed to be subject to law and therefore to be the issue not of self-originating but of derivative action. And this observed regularity it is found possible to trace much more widely than it is possible to trace any clear evidence of what we understand by force. And so, at last, we frequently use the word force as it were by anticipation, not to express the cause of the phenomena, which indeed we do not yet know, but as a convenient abbreviation for a large number of facts classed under one head. And this it is which enables Hume to maintain that we mean no more by a cause than an event which is invariably followed by another event. We discover invariability much faster than we can discover causation; and having discovered invariability in any given case, we presume causation even when we cannot yet show it, and use language in accordance with that presumption. Thus, for instance, we speak of the force of gravitation, although we cannot yet prove that there is any such force, and all that we know is that material particles move as if such a force were acting on them. As Science advances it is seen that the regularity of phenomena is far more important to us than their causes. And the attention of all students of Nature is fixed on that rather than on causation. And this regularity is seen to be more and more widely pervading all phenomena of every class, until the mind is forced to conceive the possibility that it may be absolutely universal, and that even will itself may come within its supreme dominion. But to the very last the idea of causation retains the traces of its origin. For in the first place every step in this building up of science assumes a permanence underlying all phenomena. We cannot believe that the future will be like the past except because we believe that there is something permanent which was in the past and will be in the future. And this assumption of something permanent in things around us comes from the consciousness of something permanent within us. We know our own permanence. Whatever else we know or do not know about ourselves, we are sure of our own personal identity through successive periods of life. And as our explanation of things outside begins by classing them with things inside we still continue to ascribe permanence to whatever underlies phenomena even when we have long ceased to ascribe individual wills to any except beings like ourselves. And without this assumption of permanence our whole science would come to the ground. And in the second place let it be remembered that we began with the will causing the motions of the limbs. Now there is, as far as we know, no other power in us to affect external nature than by setting something in motion. We can move our limbs, and by so doing move other things, and by so doing avail ourselves of the laws of Nature to produce remoter effects. But, except by originating motion, we cannot act at all. And, accordingly, throughout all science the attempt is made to reduce all phenomena to motions. Sounds, colours, heat, chemical action, electricity, we are perpetually endeavouring to reduce to vibrations or undulations, that is, to motion of some sort or other. The mind seems to find a satisfaction when a change of whatever kind is shown to be, or possibly to be, the result of movement. And so too all laws of Nature are then felt to be satisfactorily explained when they can be traced to some force exhibited in the movement of material particles. The law of Gravitation has an enormous evidence in support of it considered simply as a fact. And yet how many attempts have been made to represent it as the result of vortices or of particles streaming in all directions and pressing any two bodies together that lie in their path! The facts which establish it are enough. Why then these attempts? What is felt to be yet wanting? What is felt to be wanting is something to show that it is the result of some sort of general or universal motion, and that it thus falls under the same head as other motions, either those which originate in ourselves and are propagated from our bodies to external objects, or those which, springing from an unknown beginning, are for ever continuing as before. This then is the answer to the question, Why do we believe in the uniformity of Nature? We believe in it because we find it so. Millions on millions of observations concur in exhibiting this uniformity. And the longer our observation of Nature goes on, the greater do we find the extent of it. Things that once seemed irregular are now known to be regular. Things that seemed inexplicable on this hypothesis are now explained. Every day seems to add not merely to the instances but to the wide-ranging classes of phenomena that come under the rule. We had reason long ago to hold that the quantity of matter was invariable. We now have reason to think that the quantity of force acting on matter is invariable. And to this is to be added the evidence of scientific prediction, the range of which is perpetually increasing, and which would be obviously impossible if Nature were not uniform. And yet again to this is to be added that this uniformity does not consist in a vast number of separate and independent laws, but that these laws already form a system with one another, and that that system is daily becoming more complete. We believe in the uniformity of Nature because, as far as we can observe it, that is the character of Nature. And I use the word character on purpose, because it indicates better than any other word that I could find at once the nature and limitation of our belief. For, if the origin of this belief be what I have described, it is perfectly clear that, however vast may be the evidence to prove this uniformity, the conclusion can never go beyond the limits of this evidence, and generality can never be confounded with universality. The certainty that Nature is uniform is not at all, and never can be, a certainty of the same kind as the certainty that four times five are twenty. We can assert that the general character of Nature is uniformity, but we cannot go beyond this. Every separate law of nature is established by induction from the facts, and so too is the general uniformity. Every separate law of Nature is a working hypothesis. So too is the uniformity of Nature a working hypothesis, and it never can be more. It is true that there is far more evidence for the uniformity of Nature as a whole than for any one law of Nature; because a law of Nature is established by the uniformity of sequences in those phenomena to which it applies; whereas every uniformity of sequence, of whatever kind, is an evidence of the general uniformity. The evidence for the uniformity of nature is the accumulated evidence for all the separate uniformities. But, however much greater the quantity of evidence, the kind ever remains the same. There is no means by which we can demonstrate this uniformity. We can only make it probable. We can say that in almost every case all the evidence is one way; but whenever there is evidence to the contrary we cannot refuse to examine it. If a miracle were worked science could not prove that it was a miracle, nor of course prove that it was not a miracle. To prove it to be a miracle would require not a vast range of knowledge, but absolutely universal knowledge, which it is entirely beyond our faculties to attain. To say that any event was a miracle would be to say that we knew that there was no higher law that could explain it, and this we could not say unless we knew all laws: to say that it was not a miracle would be _ex hypothesi_ to assert what was false. In fact, to assert the occurrence of a miracle is simply to go back to the beginning of science, and to say: Here is an event which we cannot assign to that derivative action to which we have been led to assign the great body of events; we cannot explain it except by referring it to direct and spontaneous action, to a will like our own will. Science has shown that the vast majority of events are due to derivative action regulated by laws. Here is an event which cannot be so explained, any more than the action of our own free will can be so explained. Science may fairly claim to have shown that miracles, if they happen at all, are exceedingly rare. To demonstrate that they never happen at all is impossible, from the very nature of the evidence on which Science rests. But for the same reason Science can never in its character of Science admit that a miracle has happened. Science can only admit that, so far as the evidence goes, an event has happened which lies outside its province. To believers the progress of Science is a perpetual instruction in the character which God has impressed on His works. That He has put Order in the very first place may be a surprise to us; but it can only be a surprise. In the great machinery of the Universe it constantly happens to us to find that that which is made indispensable, is nevertheless not the highest. The chosen people were not the highest in all moral or even in all spiritual characteristics; if we refuse the explanation given by Goethe that they were chosen for their toughness, yet we have no better to give. The eternal moral law is of all we know the highest and holiest. Yet the religious instinct seems to have been more indispensable for the development of humanity according to the Divine purpose than the observance of that moral law in all its fulness. It would never have occurred to us beforehand to permit in Divine legislation any concession to the hardness of men's hearts; yet we know that it was done. Science now tells us that Order takes a rank in God's work far above where we should have placed it. It is not the highest; it is far from the highest: but it appears to be in some strange way the most indispensable. God is teaching us that Order is far more universal, far more penetrating than we should have supposed. But, nevertheless, it is not itself God; nor the highest revelation of God. It is the stamp which, for reasons higher than itself, He appears to have put on His works. What is the limit to its application we do not know. There may be instances where this Order is apparently broken, but really maintained, because one physical law is absorbed in a higher; there may be instances where the physical law is superseded by a moral law. But we shall neither refuse to recognise that God has stamped this character on His works, nor let it on the other hand come between us and Him. For we know still that He is greater than all that He hath made, and He speaks to us by another voice besides the voice of Science. LECTURE II. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF. The voice within. The objection of the alleged relativity of knowledge. Absolute knowledge of our own personal identity. Failure to show this to be relative; in particular by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The Moral Law. The command to live according to that Law; Duty. The command to believe in the supremacy of that Law; the lower Faith. The Last Judgment. The hope of Immortality. The personification of the Moral Law in Almighty God; the higher Faith. The spiritual faculty the recipient of Revelation, if any be made. The contrast between Religion and Science. LECTURE II. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 'So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him.' _Genesis_ i. 27. The order of phenomena is not the highest revelation of God, nor is the voice of Science the only nor the most commanding voice that speaks to us about Him. The belief in Him and in the character which we assign to Him does not spring from any observation of phenomena, but from the declaration made to us through the spiritual faculty. There is within us a voice which tells of a supreme Law unchanged throughout all space and all time; which speaks with an authority entirely its own; which finds corroboration in the revelations of Science, but which never relies on those revelations as its primary or its ultimate sanction; which is no inference from observations by the senses external or internal, but a direct communication from the spiritual kingdom, the kingdom, as philosophers call it, of things in themselves; which commands belief as a duty, and by necessary consequence ever leaves it possible to disbelieve; and in listening to which we are rightly said to walk not by sight but by faith. Now, before going on to say anything more about the message thus given to us from the spiritual world, it is necessary to consider an objection that meets us on the threshold of all such doctrines, namely, that it is simply impossible for us to know anything whatever of things in themselves. Our knowledge, it is urged, is necessarily relative to ourselves, whereas absolute as distinct from relative knowledge is for ever beyond our reach. We can speak of what things appear to us to be; we cannot speak of what they are. We know or may know whatever comes under the observation of our senses as phenomena; we cannot know what underlies these phenomena. And sometimes it has been maintained that we not only cannot know what it is that underlies the phenomena, but cannot even know whether anything at all underlies the phenomena, and that, for aught we can tell, the whole world and all that exists or happens in it may be nothing but a system of appearances with no substance whatever. This doctrine of the relativity of all knowledge is not only applied to things external but to our very selves. We know ourselves, it is maintained, only through an internal sense which can only tell us how we appear to ourselves, but cannot tell us in any the least degree what we really are. Now this contention is an instance of a tendency against which we are required to be perpetually on our guard. The final aim of all science and of all philosophy is to find some unity or unities that shall co-ordinate the immense complexity of the world in which we live. Now there is one and only one legitimate way of attaining this aim, and that is by patient, persevering study of the facts. But the facts turn out to be so numerous, so multifarious, that not one life nor one generation but many lives and many generations will assuredly not co-ordinate them sufficiently to bring this aim within probable reach. Hence the incessant temptation, first, to supply by hypothesis what cannot yet be obtained by observation, and, secondly, to bend facts to suit this hypothesis; and, if the framing of such hypotheses be legitimate, the distortion of facts is clearly not legitimate. It seems too long to wait for future ages to complete the task. We must in some sort complete it now; and for that purpose if the facts as we observe them will not suit, we must substitute other facts that will. Accordingly every doctrine must be made complete, and to make this doctrine of the relativity of knowledge complete, we must get rid of all exceptions. But there is one exception that we cannot get rid of, and that is the conviction of our own identity through all changes through which we pass. Every man amongst us passes through incessant changes. His body changes; he may even lose parts of it altogether; he may lose all control over some of his limbs, or over them all. And there are internal as well as external changes in each man. His affections change, his practices, his passions, his resolutions, his purposes, his judgments; everything possibly by which he knows his own character. But through all these changes he is conscious of being still one and the same self. And he knows this; and knows it, not as an inference from any observation of sense external or internal, but directly and intuitively. All other knowledge may conceivably be relative, a knowledge of things as they appear, not of things in themselves. But this is not; it is a knowledge of a thing as it is in itself; for amidst all changes in the phenomena of each man's nature, this still remains absolutely unchanged. We do speak of sameness in application to phenomena; we say this is the same colour as that; this is the same musical note as that; this is the same sensation as that. But here we mean a different thing by the word same. We mean indistinguishability. We mean that we cannot distinguish between the two colours, the two notes, the two sensations. And this no doubt is a relative knowledge, not a knowledge of things in themselves. But we do not mean incapacity of being distinguished when we speak of our own personal identity. When a man thinks to-day of his life of yesterday, and regards himself as the same being through, all the time, he does not simply mean that he cannot distinguish between the being that existed yesterday according to his memory and the being that exists to-day according to his present consciousness: he means that the being is one and the same absolutely and in itself. And this conviction of personal identity will presently be found to fall in with the revelation of the Moral Law, which is my subject in this Lecture. For it is by virtue of this personal identity that I become responsible for my actions. I am not merely the same thinking subject, I am the same moral agent all through my life. If I changed as fast as the phenomena of my being changed, my responsibility for any evil deed would cease the moment the deed was done. No punishment would be just, because it would not be just to punish one being for the faults of a totally different being. The Moral Law in its application to man requires as a basis the personal identity of each man with himself. If corroboration were needed of the directness of the intuition by which we get this idea of our own personal identity, it would be found in the entire failure of all attempts to derive that idea from any other source. Comte, the founder of the Positive School, can do nothing with this idea but suggest that it is probably the result of some obscure synergy or co-operation of the faculties. John Stuart Mill passes it by altogether as lying outside the scope of his enquiries and of his doctrine. Mr. Herbert Spencer deals with it in a very weak chapter[1] of his remarkable volume of First Principles. He divides all the manifestations made to our consciousness, or, as we commonly say, all our sensations, into two great classes. He selects as the main but not universal characteristic of the one class, vividness; of the other class, faintness; a distinction first insisted on, though somewhat differently applied, by Hume. He adds various other characteristics of each class, some of them implying very questionable propositions. And we come finally to the following astonishing result. Sensations are divided into two classes; each has seven main characteristics which distinguish it from the other. One of these classes make up the subject, that which I mean when I use the words I myself; the other the object or that which is not I. But there is absolutely nothing to determine which is which, which class is the subject and which is the object, which is I myself, and which is not I myself. Vividness and faintness plainly have nothing in them by which we can assign the one to that which is I, the other to that which is not I. If we were to conjecture, we should be disposed to say that surely the most vivid sensations must be the nearest and therefore must be part of that which is I; but we find it is quite the other way. The faint sensations are characteristic of that which is I, and the vivid of that which is not I. And the same remark applies to each pair of characteristics in succession. The fact is that Mr. Spencer has omitted what is essential to complete his argument; he has not shown, nor endeavoured to show, nor even thought of showing, how out of his seven characteristics of the subject the conception of a subject has grown. It is quite plain that he not only makes his classes first and finds his characteristics afterwards, which we may admit to have been inevitable; but he fails altogether to show how that by which we know the classes apart has grown out of the characteristics that he has given us. The characteristics which he assigns to that which is I, all added together, do not in the slightest degree account for that sense of permanent existence in spite of changes which lies at the root of my distinction of myself from other things. The very word same, in the sense in which I use it when speaking of myself, cannot be defined except by reference to my own sameness with myself. It is a simple idea incapable of analysis, and is indeed, as was pointed out in my last Lecture, the root of the character of permanence which we assign to things external. To say that this conception has been evolved from the characteristics that Mr. Spencer has enumerated is like saying that a cat has been evolved without any intermediate stages from a fish, or a smell from a colour. But, if we now go a step further, and ask in what form this personal identity presents itself in the world of phenomena, the answer is clear: our personality while bound up with all our other faculties, so that we can speak of our understanding, our affections, our powers of perception and sensation, as parts of ourselves, yet is centred in one faculty which we call the will. 'If there be aught spiritual in man,' says Coleridge, 'the will must be such. If there be a will, there must be a spirituality in man.' The will is the man. It is the will that makes us responsible beings. It is for the action of our will, or the consent of our will, that we come to be called in question. It is by the will that we assert ourselves amidst the existences around us; and as the will is the man in relation to phenomena, so on the other side the will is the one and only force among the forces of this world which takes cognizance of principles and is capable of acting in pursuit of an aim not to be found among phenomena at all. The will is not the whole spiritual faculty. Besides the power of willing we have the power of recognising spiritual truth. And this power or faculty we commonly call the conscience. But the conscience is not a force. It has no power of acting except through the will. It receives and transmits the voice from the spiritual world, and the will is responsible so far as the conscience enlightens it. It is the will whereby the man takes his place in the world of phenomena. It is then to the man, thus capable of appreciating a law superior in its nature to all phenomena and bearing within himself the conviction of a personal identity underlying all the changes that may be encountered and endured, that is revealed from within the command to live for a moral purpose and believe in the ultimate supremacy of the moral over the physical. The voice within gives this command in two forms; it commands our duty and it commands our faith. The voice gives no proof, appeals to no evidence, but speaks as having a right to command, and requires our obedience by virtue of its own inherent superiority. Its first command we call duty. The voice within awakes a peculiar sentiment which, except towards its command, is never felt in our souls, the sentiment of reverence. And it commands the pursuit of that, whatever it may be, to which this sentiment of reverence attaches. This is the positive test by which we are to know what is ever to be our highest aim. And along with this there is a negative test by which we are perpetually to correct the other, namely, the test of universality. The moral law in its own nature admits of no exceptions. If a principle of action be derived from this law it has nothing to do with time, or place, or circumstances; it must hold good in the distant future, in planets or stars utterly remote, as fully as it holds good now and here. This duty we can subdivide under four heads, accordingly as we apply it to our dealings with ourselves, with other moral and spiritual beings, with other creatures that can feel pleasure and pain, with things that are incapable of either. If we are thinking of ourselves only, duty consists in the pursuit of holiness, that is, in the absolute subjection of what does not demand reverence to that which does. It is plain that what deserves reverence in us is that which approaches most nearly to the moral law in character. The appetites, the affections, the passions, have each their own separate objects. They may be useful in the highest degree, but they cannot in themselves deserve reverence, for their objects are not the moral law; they must therefore be absolutely subordinated to the will and the conscience which have for their objects the very law itself. Holiness consists in the subjection of the whole being, not in act alone, but in feeling and desire as well, to the authority of conscience. If we are thinking of other moral agents, duty prescribes strict and unfailing justice; and justice in its highest and purest form is love, the unfailing recognition of the fullest claims that can be made on us by all who share our own divine superiority: to love God above all else, and to love all spiritual beings as we love ourselves, this is duty in relation to other spiritual beings. If we are thinking of creatures which, whether moral agents or not, are capable of pain and pleasure, our duty takes the form of goodness or tenderness. We have no right to inflict pain or even refuse pleasure unless, if the circumstances were reversed, we should be bound in conscience to be ready in our turn to bear the same infliction or refusal. The precept, Do as you would be done by, is here supreme, and it is to this class of duties that that precept applies, and the limits of our right to inflict pain on other creatures, whether rational or irrational, will be determined by this rule. And, lower still, our duty to things that are incapable of all feeling is summed up in that knowledge of them and that use of them which makes them the fittest instruments of a moral life. The sentiment of reverence is our guide in determining our duty, and the test of universality perpetually comes in to correct the commands of this sentiment and to clear and so to refine the sentiment itself. As is the case in a certain degree with every other kind of knowledge or belief, so in a very special degree the Moral Law finds its place even in minds that have very little of thought or of cultivation. The most untutored is not insensible to the claim made on our respect by acts of courage, self-sacrifice, generosity, truth; or to the call upon us for reprobation at the sight of acts of falsehood, of meanness, of cruelty, of profligacy. Even in the most untutored there is a sense that these sentiments of respect and reprobation are quite different in kind from the other sentiments which stir the soul. And this is even more clear in condemnation than in approval. However perverted the conscience (the seat of these sentiments) may be, yet the pain of remorse, which is self-reprobation for having broken the moral law, is always, as has been well said, 'quite unlike any other pain we know,' and is felt in some form and measure by every soul that lives. And as the sentiment thus holds a special place in the most untutored, so too does the sense of universality by which we instinctively and invariably correct or defend that sentiment if it be challenged. The moment we are perplexed in regard to what we ought to do or what judgment we ought to pass on something already done, we instinctively, almost involuntarily, endeavour to disentangle the act from all attendant circumstances and to see whether our sentiment of approval or disapproval would still hold good in quite other surroundings. We try to get, at the principle involved and to ascertain whether that principle possesses the universality which is the sure characteristic of the Moral Law. It will be matter of consideration in a future Lecture how our knowledge of the Eternal Law of the holy, the just, the good, and the right, is thus purified in the individual and in the race. At present it will be enough to have indicated the general principle of what may be called the evolution of the knowledge of morals. But I now go on from the Moral Law as a duty to the Moral Law as a faith. For the inner voice is not content with commanding a course of conduct and requiring obedience of that kind. This is its first utterance, and the man who hears and obeys unquestionably has within him the true seed of all religion. But though the first utterance it is not the last. For the same voice goes on to require us to believe that this Moral Law which claims obedience from us, equally claims obedience from all else that exists. It is absolutely supreme or it is nothing. Its title to our obedience is its supremacy, and it has no other title. If it depended on promises of reward or threats of punishment addressed to us, it might be considered as a law for us, but could be no law for others. It would in that case, indeed, be a mere physical law. Things are so arranged for you, and as far as you know for you only, that terrible pain will come to you if you disobey, and wonderful pleasure if you obey. Such a law as that might proceed from a tyrant possessed of absolute power over US and the things that concern US, and might be either good or bad as should happen. But such a law would not be able to claim our reverence. Nay, rather, as is the case with all merely physical laws, it might be our duty to disobey it. In claiming our reverence as well as our obedience, in making its sanction consist in nothing but the fact of its own inherent majesty, the Moral Law calls on us to believe in its supremacy. It claims that it is the last and highest of all laws. The world before us is governed by uniformities as far as we can judge, but above and behind all these uniformities is the supreme uniformity, the eternal law of right and wrong, and all other laws, of whatever kind, must ultimately be harmonised by it alone. The Moral Law would be itself unjust if it bade us disregard all physical laws, and yet was itself subordinate to those physical laws. It has a right to require us to disregard everything but itself, if it be itself supreme; if not, its claim would be unjust. We see here in things around us no demonstrative proof that it is supreme, except what may be summed up in saying that there is a power that makes for righteousness. Enlightened by the Moral Law we can see strongly marked traces of its working in all things. The beauty, the order, the general tendency of all creation accords with the supremacy of the Moral Law over it all. But that is by no means all. We see, and we know that we see, but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. And the result of this partial vision is that, while there is much in things around us which asserts, there is also much which seems to deny altogether any supremacy whatever in the Moral Law. The universe, as we see it, is not holy, nor just, nor good, nor right. The music of creation is full of discords as yet altogether unresolved. And if we look to phenomena alone, there is no solution of the great riddle. But in spite of all imperfections and contradictions, the voice within, without vouchsafing to give us any solution of the perplexity, or any sanction but its own authoritative command, imperatively requires us to believe that holiness is supreme over unholiness, and justice over injustice, and goodness over evil, and righteousness over unrighteousness. To obey this command and to believe this truth is Faith. This is the Faith which is perpetually presenting to the believer's mind the vision of a world in which all the inequalities of this present world shall be redressed, in which truth, justice, and love shall visibly reign, in which temptations shall cease and sin shall cease also; in which the upward strivings of noble souls shall find their end, and holiness shall supersede penitence, and hearts shall be pure of all defilement. This is the Faith which holds to the sure conviction that all things shall one day come to judgment; and whether by sudden catastrophe or by sure development, the physical system shall surrender to the moral. This is the Faith which supplies perpetual strength to the hope of immortality; for though it cannot be said that the immortality of the individual soul is of necessity involved in a belief in the supremacy of the Moral Law, yet there is a sense, never without witness in the soul, that all would not be according to justice if a being to whom the Moral Law has been revealed from within is nevertheless in no degree to share in the final revelation of the superiority of that Moral Law over what is without. We cannot say that it is a necessary part of the supremacy of the Moral Law that every one of those who know it should partake of its immortal nature. We cannot even say that it is a necessary part of the ultimate redressing of all injustice and resolution of all the discords of life that the hope of it should prove true in the individual as it will certainly prove true in the universe. For we are unable to weigh individual merit or demerit, and cannot assert for certain that the balance of justice is not maintained even in this present life. But nevertheless the hope that it must and will be so is inextinguishable, and Faith in an Eternal Law of Morals is inextricably bound up with hope of immortality for the being that is endowed with a moral and responsible nature. Faith in the absolute supremacy of the Moral Law is the first, but this again is not the last step upwards in Faith. We are called upon, and still by the same imperative voice within, to carry our Faith still further, and to believe something yet higher. For the supremacy of the Moral Law must be a moral, not merely a physical supremacy. In claiming supremacy at all the Moral Law does not assert that somehow by a happy accident, as it were, all things turn out at last in accordance with what is in the highest sense moral. The supremacy of the moral over the physical involves in its very nature an intention to be supreme. It is not the supremacy of justice, if justice is done as the blind result of the working of machinery, even if that be the machinery of the universe. In our very conception of a moral supremacy is involved the conception of an intended supremacy. And the Moral Law in its government of the world reveals itself as possessing the distinctive mark of personality, that is, a purpose and a will. And thus, as we ponder it, this Eternal Law is shown to be the very Eternal Himself, the Almighty God. There is a sense in which we cannot ascribe personality to the Unknown Absolute Being; for our personality is of necessity compassed with limitations, and from these limitations we find it impossible to separate our conception of a person. And it will ever remain true that our highest conceptions of God must fall altogether short of His true nature. When we speak of Him as infinite, we are but denying that He is restrained by limits of time and space as we are. When we speak of Him as absolute, we are but denying that He is subject to conditions as we are. So when we speak of Him as a person, we cannot but acknowledge that His personality far transcends our conceptions. But it still remains the truth that these descriptions of Him are the nearest that we can get, and that for all the moral purposes of life we can argue from these as if they were the full truth. If to deny personality to Him is to assimilate Him to a blind and dead rule, we cannot but repudiate such denial altogether. If to deny personality to Him is to assert His incomprehensibility, we are ready at once to acknowledge our weakness and incapacity. But we dare not let go the truth that the holiness, the justice, the goodness, the righteousness, which the Eternal Moral Law imposes on us as a supreme command, are identical in essential substance in our minds and in His. Indeed, the more we keep before us the true character of that law, the more clearly do we see that the Moral Law is not His command but His nature. He does not make that law. He is that law. Almighty God and the Moral Law are different aspects of what is in itself one and the same. To hold fast to this is the fullest form of Faith. To live by duty is in itself rudimentary religion. To believe that the rule of duty is supreme over all the universe, is the first stage of Faith. To believe in Almighty God is the last and highest. It will be seen at once by those who have followed me that I am in this Lecture only working out to its logical conclusion what was said long ago by Bishop Butler in England and by Kant in Germany. Butler calls the spiritual faculty whose commands to us I have been examining by the name of conscience: Kant calls it the practical reason. But both alike insist on the ultimate basis of morality being found in the voice within the soul and not in the phenomena observed by the senses. Science by searching cannot find out God. To reduce all the phenomena of the universe to order will not, even if it could ever be completely done, tell us the highest truth that we can attain to concerning spiritual things. Science may examine all the phases through which religions have passed and treating human beliefs as it treats all other phenomena it can give us a history of religion or of religions. But there is something underlying them all which it cannot treat, and which perpetually evades all attempts to bring it under physical laws. For just as all attempts to explain away our conviction of our own personal identity have invariably failed and will for ever fail to satisfy human consciousness, so too the strictly spiritual element in all religion cannot be got out of phenomena at all. No analysis succeeds in obliterating the fundamental distinction between moral and physical law; or in enabling us to escape the ever increasing sense of the dignity of the former, or in shutting our ears to the still small voice which is totally unlike every other voice within or without. To bring the Moral Law under the dominion of Science and to treat the belief in it as nothing more than one of the phenomena of human nature, it is necessary to treat the sentiment of reverence which it excites, the remorse which follows on disobedience to its commands, the sense of its supremacy, as delusions. It is always possible so to treat these things; but only at the cost of standing lower in the scale of being. But we have one step further to take. For as the spiritual faculty is the recipient directly or indirectly of that original revelation which God has made of Himself to His rational creatures, so too this appears to be the only faculty which can take cognizance of any fresh revelation that it might please Him to make. If He commands still further duties than those commanded by the supreme Moral Law, if He bids us believe what our reason cannot deduce from the primal belief in that Law and in Himself, it is to that faculty that the command is issued. If over and above the original religion as we may call it there is a revealed religion, it is the spiritual faculty that can alone accept it. Such a revelation may be confirmed by signs or proofs in the world of phenomena. He who is absolute over all nature may compel nature to bear witness to His teaching. The spiritual may burst through the natural on occasion, and that supremacy, which underlies all nature and which is necessarily visible to intelligences that are capable of seeing things as they are in themselves, may force itself into the world of phenomena and show itself in that manner to us. But this always is and must be secondary. The spiritual faculty alone can receive and judge of spiritual truth, and if that faculty be not reached a truly religious belief is not yet attained. External evidences of revealed religion must have a high place but cannot have the highest. A revealed religion must depend for its permanent hold on our obedience and our duty on its fastening upon our spiritual nature, and if it cannot do that no evidences can maintain it in its place. This account of the fundamental beliefs of Religion when compared with the fundamental postulates of Science shows that the two begin with the same part of our nature but proceed by opposite methods. Both begin with the human will as possessing a permanent identity and exerting a force of its own. But from this point they separate. Science rests on phenomena observed by the senses; Religion on the voice that speaks directly from the other world. Science postulates uniformity and is excluded wherever uniformity can be denied, but compels conviction within the range of its own postulate. Religion demands the submission of a free conscience, and uses no compulsion but that imposed by its own inherent dignity. Science gives warnings, and if you are capable of understanding scientific argument, you will be incapable of disbelieving the warnings. Certain things will poison you; certain neglects will ruin your health; disregard of scientific construction will bring your roof down on your head; to enter a burning building will risk your life; some of these things you may learn by ordinary experience, some of them by that combination of experience which is called Science. But if you are capable of the necessary reasoning you cannot doubt, however much you may wish to do so. And yet to defy these warnings and take the inevitable consequences of that defiance may be your highest glory. Religion also gives warnings; it assures you that the Eternal Moral Law is supreme; that, sooner or later, those who disobey will find their disobedience is exactly and justly punished; that no appearance to the contrary presented by experience can be trusted. But Religion will not compel you to believe any more than Science will compel you to obey. Disbelieve if you choose and Religion will do nothing but perpetually repeat its warnings and add that your disbelief has lowered you in the scale of being. So too Science gives promises; it promises, to the race rather than to the individual, life on easier conditions, and of greater length; fewer pains, fewer diseases; perpetually increasing comforts; perpetually increasing power over nature. And Science is sure to keep the promises. And yet we may refuse to accept the promises, and it is conceivable that the refusal may be far nobler than the acceptance. And Religion promises also. It promises stainless purity in the soul; and truth and justice and unfailing love; and tenderness to every creature that can feel; and a government of all that is under our dominion with a single eye to the service of God. And we may refuse to believe these promises or to care whether they are kept or not. But the refusal or pursuit of such aims as these determines our position in the judgment of the Supreme and in the court of our own conscience. God has made man in His own image: that is, He has given man power to understand His works and to acknowledge Himself. And it is in acknowledging God that man finds himself divine. He is a partaker of the divine nature in proportion as he recognises the Supreme Law and makes it the law of his own will. And therefore has his will been made free as well as his mind rational: he has the power to choose as well as the power to know. And our choice lays hold on God Himself and makes us one with Him. LECTURE III. APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL. Contradiction of Free-Will to doctrine of Uniformity. Butler's examination of the question. Hume's solution. Kant's solution. Determinism. The real result of examination of the facts. Interference of the will always possible, but comparatively rare. The need of a fixed nature for our self-discipline, and so for our spiritual life. LECTURE III. APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL. 'So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him.' _Genesis_ i. 27. Religion and Science both begin with the human will. The will is to Science the first example of power, the origin of the conception of cause; the bodily effort made by the will lies at the root of the conception of force. It is by comparing other forces with that force that Science begins its march. And the will is to religion the recipient of the Divine command. To the will the inner voice addresses itself, bidding it act and believe. It is because we have a will that we are responsible. In a world in which there were no creatures endowed with a will, there could be no right-doing or wrong-doing; no approval by conscience and no disapproval; no duty and no faith. Here is the first possibility of collision between Science and Religion. Science postulates uniformity; Religion postulates liberty. Science cannot ever hope to reduce all phenomena to unity if a whole class of phenomena, all those that belong to the action of human will, are to be excluded from the postulate of invariable sequence. The action of the will is in this case for ever left outside. The evidence for the absolute uniformity of nature seems to be shaken, when it is found that there is so important a part of phenomena to which this law of uniformity cannot be applied. If a human will can thus interfere with the law of uniformity, there enters the possibility that behind some phenomena may lurk the interference of some other will. Religion, on the other hand, tells every man that he is responsible, and how can he be responsible if he is not free? If his action be determined by something which is not himself, how can the moral burden of it be put on him? To tell a man that he is to answer for it if he does something which he is tempted to do, is unmeaning, if he has no power to prevent himself from doing it. But this is not all. For besides the sense of responsibility we have a direct consciousness of being free, a consciousness which no reasoning appears to extinguish. We sharply distinguish between that which goes on within us in regard to which we are free and that in regard to which we are not free. We cannot help being angry, but we can control our anger. We cannot help our wishes, but we can restrain our indulgence or our pursuit of them. We cannot directly determine our affections, but we can cherish or discourage them. There are extreme cases in which our wills seem powerless, but even here we are conscious of our power to struggle for self-assertion and self-control. There is very much in us which is not free; nay, there is much in us which impels us to action which is not free. But we never confound this with our wills, and when our wills are overpowered by passion or appetite, we call the act no longer a perfectly free act, and do not consider the responsibility for it to be quite the same. This question of the freedom of the will was considered by Bishop Butler in the Analogy. He contented himself with proving that, make what theory we would concerning the necessity of human action, all men in practice acted on the theory of human freedom. We promise; we accept promises; we punish; we reward; we estimate character; we admire; we shun; we deal with ourselves; we deal with others; as if we and all others were free. And this was enough for his purpose. For he had to reconcile a Divine system of rewards and punishments with our sense of justice. And if he could show, as he did, that rewards and punishments were plainly not inconsistent with that sense of justice in our dealings with one another, it was impossible to call them inconsistent with that sense of justice in God's dealings with us. But the purpose of these Lectures requires something more, and that for two reasons. For, in the first place, the doctrine of necessity was most often in Bishop Butler's days derived from a conception of a Divine foreknowledge arranging everything by supreme Will, not from the conception of a blind mechanical rule holding all in its unrelaxing grasp. And though to the cold reason it may make no difference how the will is bound, yet to the moral sentiment the two kinds of compulsion differ as life and death. To have no liberty because of being absolutely in the hands of Almighty God is quite another thing from having no liberty, as being under the dominion of a dead iron rule. It seems possible to accept the one and call it an unfathomable mystery; but to accept the other is to call life a delusion and the moral law a dream. And in the second place, the doctrine of necessity advanced as a theory and based on arguments not resting on facts, is a very different antagonist from the same doctrine advanced as a conclusion of science, and as deducible from a mass of co-ordinated observations. We may dismiss the mere theory after showing that it has not substance enough to hold its ground in ordinary life. We cannot so treat what claims to be a scientific inference. The modern examination of the question begins with Hume, who maintains that the doctrine of liberty and that of necessity are both true and of course compatible with each other. But his arguments touch only the broad question whether they are true for practical purposes, not whether either is true in the strict sense and without exception or modification. To Kant's system, on the contrary, it was essential that both doctrines should be true in the strictest sense. Holding that invariable sequence was a law of Nature known independently of experience and applicable to all phenomena in the minutest detail, he could not allow that any act of the human will lay outside the range of this law. Such an act being a phenomenon must, in his view, be subject to the law which the constitution of our minds imposed on all phenomena apparent to us. And yet, on the other hand, holding that the eternal Moral Law made us responsible for all our acts, he could not but maintain that in the doing of those acts we must be free. His mode of reconciling the two opposites amounted to this, that our action throughout life considered as a whole is free, but that each separate act considered by itself is bound to the preceding acts by the law of invariable sequence. We may illustrate this by the familiar instance of a prism acting on a ray of light. The ray has or may have a colour of its own before it passes through the prism. The prism spreads it out and shows a series of colours. The order in which this series is arranged is determined by the character of the prism acting on the nature of the ray. The colours when combined give the colour of the ray; when separated by the prism each has its own distinct character, and the order of the colours is determined, and invariably determined, by the prism. So too in Kant's view the character of a man in itself may be free, but when it passes through the prism of time into the world of phenomena and is spread over many years it shows a number of separate actions, no one of which taken by itself exhibits the man, though all put together are the true representation of him to human perception. The man is free. His life represents his free choice. But his separate acts are what that free choice becomes when translated into a series of phenomena, and are bound each to the preceding by the law of invariable sequence. It is plain at once that this does not satisfy our consciousness. We are not conscious of freedom as regards our life as a whole; we are conscious of freedom as regards our separate actions. Our life as a whole embraces our past which is absolutely unchangeable, and our future which is not yet within our reach; we are conscious of no present power over either. Our separate acts are perceptibly subject to our own control; nay, it is by the use of our free-will in our separate acts that we are able to change the character of our life or to preserve it from change; and with this corresponds our responsibility. We hold ourselves responsible for each act as it is done; we hold ourselves responsible for the character of our lives only so far as we might have changed it by our acts. The solution leaves the difficulty where it was. It is now customary with the advocates of the doctrine of necessity to express it by a different word, and call it the doctrine of determinism. The purpose of changing the word is to get rid of all associations with the idea of compulsion; just so in Science it is thought better to get rid of the words cause and effect, and substitute invariable sequence, in order to get rid of the notion of some compulsion recognisable by us in the cause to produce the effect. Determinism does not say to a man 'you will be forced to act in a particular way;' but 'you will assuredly do so.' There will be no compulsion; but the action is absolutely certain. Just as on a given day the moon will eclipse the sun, so in given circumstances you will do the precise thing which it is your character in such circumstances to do. And your sense of freedom is simply the sense that the action proceeds from yourself and not from any force put upon you from without. But this too does not solve the problem. It is true that in regard to a very large proportion of our actions the sense of freedom seems to be no more than negative. We do what it is our custom, our inclination, our character to do. We are not conscious of any force being put upon us; but neither are we conscious of using any force ourselves. We float as it were down the stream, or hurry along with a determined aim, but having no desire nor purpose to the contrary, the question of freedom or necessity never seems to arise. It is even possible and common for us not to know ourselves as well as others know us, and to do many things which an observer would predict as sure to be our actions, but which we ourselves fancy to be by no means certain. Even in these cases we sometimes awake to the fact that what we are thus allowing in our lives is not consistent with the law of duty, and, do what we may, we cannot then escape the conviction that we are to blame, and that we had power to act otherwise if only we had chosen to exert the power. But it is when a conflict arises between duty and inclination that our inner certainty of our own freedom of will becomes clear and unconquerable. In the great conflicts of the soul between the call of duty and the power of temptation there are two forces at work upon us. We are never for a moment in doubt which is ourselves and which is not ourselves; which is the free agent and which is the blind force; which is responsible for the issue, and which is incapable of responsibility. There is in this case a real sense of compulsion from without, and a real sense of resistance to that compulsion from within. It is impossible in this case to account for the sense of being a free agent, by saying that this merely means that we are conscious of no external force. We are conscious of an external force and we are conscious that this will of ours which struggles against it is not an external force, but our very selves, and this distinction between the will and the forces against which the will is striving is ineffaceable from our minds. That the will is often weak and on that account overpowered, and that after a hard struggle our actions are often determined, not by our wills but by our passions or our appetites, is unquestionable. Often has the believer to pray to God for strength to hold fast to right purpose, and often will he feel that without that strength he must inevitably fall. But he knows that whatever source may supply the strength, it is he that will have to use it, and he that will be responsible for using it or neglecting to do so. The advocates of determinism urge that every action must have a motive, and that the man always acts on that motive which is the stronger. The first proposition may be granted at once. The freedom of the will is certainly not shown in acting without any motive at all. If there be any human action which appears to be without any motive, it is not in such action that we find human freedom. Such action, if possible at all, must inevitably be mechanical. A man who is acting from mere caprice is even more completely at the mercy of passing inclination than one who is acting from passion or from overpowering temptation. The freedom of the will is not shown in acting without motive, but in choosing between motives. But when it is further said that a man always acts from the stronger motive, the question immediately follows, what determines which is the stronger motive? It cannot be anything in the motives themselves, or all men would act alike in the same circumstances; and it is clear that they do not. It must be therefore something in the man. And if it be something in the man, it must be either his will acting at the moment, which in that case is free, or his character. But if it be his character, then follows the further question, what determines his character? If we are to maintain the uniformity of nature, we must answer by assigning the determination to the sum total of surrounding and preceding circumstances. Nothing will satisfy that law of uniformity but this; that, given such and such parents, such and such circumstances of birth and life, there must be such a character and no other. At what point is there room in this case for any responsibility? I did not on this supposition make my character; it was made for me; any one else born in my stead, and living in my stead, would of necessity have acted exactly as I have done; would have felt the same, and aimed at the same, and won the same moral victories, and suffered the same moral defeats. How can I be held responsible for what is the pure result of the circumstances in which I was born? But if, on the other hand, it be said that our character is not the mere fruit of our antecedents and surroundings, the law of uniformity is clearly broken. A new element has come into the world, namely, my character, which has not come out of the antecedents and surroundings according to any fixed law. The antecedents and surroundings might have been quite the same for any one else, and yet I should have my character and he his, and our lives would have altogether differed. It is clear that determinism does not get us out of the difficulty. Here, too, as in regard to the necessary truths of mathematics, and in regard to the relativity of all our knowledge, the theory has purchased completeness by the cheap expedient of calling one of the facts to be accounted for a delusion. Such a solution cannot be accepted. In spite of all attempts to explain it away, the fact that we think ourselves free and hold ourselves responsible remains, and remains unaffected. But let us examine how far the difference between the scientific view and the religious view of human action extends. Observation certainly shows that a very large proportion of human action, much even of that which appears at first sight to be more especially independent of all law, is really as much regulated by laws of nature as the movements of the planets. I have already pointed out how often an observer can predict a man's actions better than the man himself, and how often the will is certainly passive and consents instead of acting. In these cases there is no reason whatever to deny that nature and not the will is producing the conduct. And not only so, but that which seems most irregular, the kind of action that we call caprice, there is very often just as little reason to call free, as to assign free-will as the cause of the uncertainties of the weather. But it is not in observing individuals so much as in observing masses of men that we get convincing proof that men possess a common nature, and that their conduct is largely regulated by the laws of that nature. That amongst a given large number of men living on the whole in the same conditions from year to year, there should be every year a given number of suicides, of murderers, of thieves and criminals of various kinds, cannot be accounted for in any other way than by the hypothesis that like circumstances will produce like conduct. So, too, in this way only can we account for such a fact as the steadiness in the proportion of men who enter any given profession, of men who quit their country for another, of men who remain unmarried all their lives, of men who enter a university, of men who make any particular choice (such as these) which can be tested by figures. Now, this argument is unanswerable as far as it goes; but it succeeds, like all the other arguments for the uniformity of nature, in establishing the generality, and not at all the universality of that uniformity. Indeed, it falls far short of proving as much uniformity in human action as is proved in the action of inanimate things. The induction which proves the uniformity of the laws of mechanics, of chemistry, of physics, is so far greater than the induction which proves the uniformity of human conduct, that it is hardly possible to put the two side by side. When we turn from abstract arguments to facts, the doctrine of necessity is unquestionably unproven. And this agrees with the result of a careful examination of the facts of human consciousness from the opposite point of view. We cannot but acknowledge that when we look very closely we find a very large proportion of our own actions to be by no means the result of an interference by the will. A large proportion is due to custom; a large proportion to inclination, of which the will takes no special notice, and is not called on by the conscience to notice; a large proportion to inclinations which we know that we ought to resist, but we do not resist; a much smaller proportion, but still some, to passions and appetites against which we have striven in vain; only a very small proportion to deliberate choice. There is, in fact, no irresistible reason for claiming freedom for human action except when that action turns on the question of right or wrong. There is no reason to call action free that flows from inclination or custom, or passion, or a desire to avoid pain, or a desire to obtain pleasure. The will claims to be free in all these cases, but it is free in the sense that it might be exerted; and so, since it is not exerted, the action is not free. But when, at the call of duty, in whatever form, the will directly interferes, then and then only are we conscious not only that the will is free, but that it has asserted its freedom, and that the action has been free also. The relation of the will to the conduct falls under four distinct heads: for sometimes the will simply concurs with the inclination; sometimes it neither concurs nor opposes; sometimes it opposes but is overpowered; sometimes it opposes and prevails. In the first case, inclination of some kind or other prompts the man to action. The inclination, whether set up by an external object of desire or by an internal impulse of restlessness or blind craving or the like, comes clearly from the nature, and is not free choice. There is no reason to believe that it is not in most cases, possibly in all cases, under the dominion of fixed law. It may be as completely the product of what has preceded it as the eclipse of the sun. And if the will concurs in the inclination, it is needless to discuss the question whether the will acts or not. The conduct is the same whether the will adds force to the inclination or is simply passive. The freedom of the will may in this case be considered as negative. So, too, may the freedom of the will be considered negative in the second case, which is that of the will neither concurring with inclination nor opposing it. In this case there may be a distinct consciousness of freedom in the form of a sense of responsibility for what inclination is permitted to do. A man in this case knows that he is free, perhaps knows that he ought to interfere and control the conduct. But as he does not interfere, the freedom of the will is not asserted in act. And it is possible that, as far as all external phenomena are concerned, there may be no breach in uniformity of sequence. This, however, can hardly be in the third case, which is when the will and the inclination are opposed, and the will is overpowered. Although the inclination prevails, yet the struggle itself is an event of the most important kind, and is sure to leave traces on the character, and to be followed by consequences. In this case we are distinctly conscious of a power to add force to that one of the contending opposites which is most identified with our very selves, and we know whether we have added that force or not. And not only may we add this force directly from within; we may and we often do go outside of ourselves to seek for aids to add still more force indirectly, and we do for this purpose what we should not do otherwise. We dwell in thought on the higher aims which are the proper object of will; we read what sets forth those higher aims in their full beauty; we seek the words, the company, the sympathy of men who will, we are sure, encourage us in this the higher path. And, on the other hand, we turn away from the temptation which gives strength to the evil inclination, and if we cannot escape from its presence we endeavour to drive the thought of it from our minds. All this action is not for the sake of anything thus done, but for the sake of its indirect effect on the struggle in which we are engaged. Whenever there is a struggle, we are not only conscious that the will is free, but that it is asserting its freedom. In these struggles there is not a mere contest between two inclinations. We are distinctly conscious that one of the combatants is our very selves in a sense in which the other is not. But, nevertheless, when all has been said, it still remains in this case that the will is beaten and inclination prevails, and the conduct in the main is determined by the inclination, which is under the dominion of the law of uniformity, and not by the will, which claims to be free. The fourth case in which the will prevails may, of course, make a momentous breach in the uniformity of sequence of the conduct. But in far the largest number of cases the struggle is very slight, and the difference between the will and the inclination is not, taken alone, of grave importance in the life. And in those instances in which the struggle is severe and the resulting change is great, it is very often the case that the way has been prepared, as it were in secret, by the quiet accumulation of hidden forces of the strictly natural order ready to burst forth when the fit opportunity came. In the great conversions which have sometimes seemed by their suddenness and completeness to defy all possibility of reduction to natural law, there are often nevertheless tokens of deep dissatisfaction with the previous life having swelled up slowly within the soul for some time, even for some long time beforehand. The inclination to go on in evil courses has been broken down at last, not merely by the action of the will, but by the working of the machinery of the soul. To this it must be added that the action of the will is such that it very often happens that, having been exerted once, it need not be exerted again for the same purpose. A custom is broken down, an exceedingly strong temptation has been overpowered, and its strength so destroyed that its return is without effect. Or sometimes the act of the will takes the form of deliberately so arranging the circumstances of life that a dreaded temptation cannot return, or if it return cannot prevail; the right eye has been plucked out, the right hand cut off, and the sin cannot be committed even if desired. While therefore the will is always free, the actual interference of the will with the life is not so frequent as to interfere with the broad general rule that the course of human conduct is practically uniform. In fact the will, though always free, only asserts its freedom by obeying duty in spite of inclination, by disregarding the uniformity of nature in order to maintain the higher uniformity of the Moral Law. The freedom of the human will is but the assertion in particular of that universal supremacy of the moral over the physical in the last resort, which is an essential part of the very essence of the Moral Law. The freedom of the will is the Moral Law breaking into the world of phenomena, and thus behind the free-will of man stands the power of God. When the real claim of the will for freedom has been clearly seized by the mind, it becomes apparent that there is no real collision between what Science asserts and what Religion requires us to believe. Science asserts that there is evidence to show that an exceedingly large proportion of human action is governed by fixed law. Religion requires us to believe that the will is responsible for all this action, not because it does, but because it might interfere. Science is not able, and from the nature of the case never will be able to prove that the range of this fixed law is universal, and that the will never does interfere to vary the actions from what without the will they would have been. Science will never be able to prove this, because it could not be proved except by a universal induction, and a universal induction is impossible. At present there is no approximation to such proof. Religion, on the other hand, does not call on us to believe that the will often interferes, but on the contrary is perpetually telling us that it does not interfere as often as it ought. Revealed religion, indeed, has always based its most earnest exhortations on the reluctance of man to set his will to the difficult task of contending with the forces of his nature, and on the weakness of the will in the presence of those forces. And when we pursue this thought further we see that for such creatures as we are the subjection of a large part of our own nature to fixed laws is as necessary for our dominion over ourselves as the fixity of external nature is necessary for our dominion over the world around us. The fixity of a large part of our nature--nay, of all but the whole of it--is a moral and spiritual necessity. For it requires but a superficial self-examination to discern the indications of what the profoundest research still leaves a mystery--that we are not perfect creatures of our own kind--that our nature does not spontaneously conform to the Supreme Moral Law--that our highest and best consists not in complete obedience to which we cannot attain, but in a perpetual upward struggle. Now such a struggle demands for its indispensable condition something fixed in our nature by which each step upwards shall be made good as it is taken, and afford a firm footing for the next ascent. If there were nothing in us fixed and firm, if the warfare with evil impulses, wayward affections, overmastering appetites had to be carried on through life without the possibility of making any victory complete, the formation of a perpetually higher and nobler character would be impossible; our main hope in this life, our best offering to God would be taken away from us; we could never give our bodies to be a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God; we could give our separate acts but not ourselves, for we should be utterly unable to form ourselves into fitness for such a purpose. The task given to the will is not only to govern the actions but to discipline the nature; but discipline is impossible where there is no fixity in the thing to be disciplined. And this becomes still more important when we search more deeply and perceive that not the nature only but the will itself is in some strange way infected with evil. We can hardly imagine even a perfectly pure will capable of continuing to the end a conflict in which no progress ever was or could be made. The tremendous strain of fighting with an enemy that might be defeated again and again for ever without ever suffering any change or relaxing the violence of any attack or giving the slightest hope of any relief, would seem too much for the most unearthly, the most noble, the most godlike of human wills. But wills such as ours, penetrated with weakness, perhaps with treachery to their own best aspirations, how utterly impossible that they could persevere through such a hopeless conflict. It is the sustaining hope of the Christian that he shall be changed from glory to glory into the image or likeness of His Lord, and that when all is over for this life he shall be indeed like Him and see Him as He is. But that hope is never presented as one to be realized by some sudden stroke fashioning the soul anew and moulding it at once into heavenly lineaments. It is by steady and sure degrees that the Christian believes that he shall be thus blessed. And this progress rests on the fixed rules by which his nature is governed, and which admit of the character being gradually changed by the life. The Christian knows that God has so made us that a temptation once overcome is permanently weakened, and often overcome is at last altogether expelled; that appetites restrained are in the end subdued and cost but little effort to keep down; that bad thoughts perpetually put aside at last return no more; that a clearer perception of duty and a more resolute obedience to its call makes duty itself more attractive, fills us with enthusiasm for its fulfilment, draws us as it were upwards, and ennobles the whole man. The Christian knows that the thought of the Supreme Being, the contemplation of His excellency, the recognition of Him as the source of spiritual life has a strange power to transform, and evermore to transform the whole man. In this knowledge the Christian lives his life and fights his battle. And what is this but a knowledge that he has a nature subject to fixed laws, which he can indeed interfere with, but without which his self-discipline would be of little value, and assuredly could not long continue. And if the progress of Science and the examination of human nature should eventually restrict more closely than we might have supposed the length to which the interference of the will can go; if it should appear that the changes which we can make at any one moment in ourselves are within a very narrow range, this, too, will be knowledge that can be used in our self-discipline and quite as much perhaps in our mutual moral aid. It is conceivable that the branch of science which treats of human nature may in the end profoundly modify our modes of education, and our hopes of what can be effected by it. But if so the knowledge will only add to the store of means put within our reach for the elevation of our race. And we may be sure that nothing of this sort will really affect the revelation that God has written in our souls that we are free and responsible beings, and cannot get quit of our responsibility. LECTURE IV. APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. Foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. Great development in recent times. Objection felt by many religious men. Alleged to destroy argument from design. Paley's argument examined. Doctrine of Evolution adds force to the argument, and removes objections to it. Argument from progress; from beauty; from unity. The conflict not real. LECTURE IV. APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 'For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.' _Romans_ i. 20. The regularity of nature is the first postulate of Science; but it requires the very slightest observation to show us that, along with this regularity, there exists a vast irregularity which Science can only deal with by exclusion from its province. The world as we see it is full of changes; and these changes when patiently and perseveringly examined are found to be subject to invariable or almost invariable laws. But the things themselves which thus change are as multifarious as the changes which they undergo. They vary infinitely in quantity, in qualities, in arrangement throughout space, possibly in arrangement throughout time. Take a single substance such, say, as gold. How much gold there is in the whole universe, and where it is situated, we not only have no knowledge, but can hardly be said to be on the way to have knowledge. Why its qualities are what they are, and why it alone possesses all these qualities; how long it has existed, and how long it will continue to exist, these questions we are unable to answer. The existence of the many forms of matter, the properties of each form, the distribution of each: all this Science must in the last resort assume. But I say in the last resort. For it is possible, and Science soon makes it evident that it is true, that some forms of matter grow out of other forms. There are endless combinations. And the growth of new out of old forms is of necessity a sequence, and falls under the law of invariability of sequences, and becomes the subject-matter of Science. As in each separate case Science asserts each event of to-day to have followed by a law of invariable sequence on the events of yesterday; the earth has reached the precise point in its orbit now which was determined by the law of gravitation as applied to its motion at the point which it reached a moment ago; the weather of the present hour has come by meteorological laws out of the weather of the last hour; the crops and the flocks now found on the surface of the habitable earth are the necessary outcome of preceding harvests and preceding flocks and of all that has been done to maintain and increase them; so, too, if we look at the universe as a whole, the present condition of that whole is, if the scientific postulate of invariable sequence be admitted, and in as far as it is admitted, the necessary outcome of its former condition; and all the various forms of matter, whether living or inanimate, must for the same reason and with the same limitation be the necessary outcome of preceding forms of matter. This is the foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. Now stated in this abstract form this doctrine will be, and indeed if Science be admitted at all must be, accepted by everybody. Even the Roman Church, which holds that God is perpetually interfering with the course of nature, either in the interests of religious truth or out of loving kindness to His creatures, yet will acknowledge that the number of such interferences almost disappears in comparison of the countless millions of instances in which there is no reason to believe in any interference at all. And if we look at the universe as a whole, the general proposition as stated above is quite unaffected by the infinitesimal exception which is to be made by a believer in frequent miracles. But when this proposition is applied in detail it at once introduces the possibility of an entirely new history of the material universe. For this universe as we see it is almost entirely made up of composite and not of simple substances. We have been able to analyse all the substances that we know into a comparatively small number of simple elements--some usually solid, some liquid, some gaseous. But these simple elements are rarely found uncombined with others; most of those which we meet with in a pure state have been taken out of combination and reduced to simplicity by human agency. The various metals that we ordinarily use are mostly found in a state of ore, and we do not generally obtain them pure except by smelting. The air we breathe, though not a compound, is a mixture. The water which is essential to our life is a compound. And, if we pass from inorganic to organic substances, all vegetables and animals are compound, sustained by various articles of food which go to make up their frames. Now, how have these compounds been formed? It is quite possible that some of them, or all of them to some extent, may have been formed from the first. If Science could go back to the beginning of all things, which it obviously cannot, it might find the composition already accomplished, and be compelled to start with it as a given fact--a fact as incapable of scientific explanation as the existence of matter at all. But, on the other hand, composition and decomposition is a matter of every-day experience. Our very food could not nourish us except by passing through these processes in our bodies; and by the same processes we prepare much of our food before consuming it. May not Science go back to the time when these processes had not yet begun? May not the starting-point of the history of the universe be a condition in which the simple elements were still uncombined? If Science could go back to the beginning of all things, might we not find all the elements of material things ready indeed for the action of the inherent forces which would presently unite them in an infinite variety of combinations, but as yet still separate from each other? Scattered through enormous regions of space, but drawn together by the force of gravitation; their original heat, whatever it may have been, increased by their mutual collision; made to act chemically on one another by such increase or by subsequent decrease of temperature; perpetually approaching nearer to the forms into which, by the incessant action of the same forces, the present universe has grown; these elements, and the working of the several laws of their own proper nature, may be enough to account scientifically for all the phenomena that we observe. We do not even then get back to regularity. Why these elements, and no others; why in these precise quantities; why so distributed in space; why endowed with these properties: still are questions which Science cannot answer, and there seems no reason to expect that any scientific answer will ever be possible. Nay, I know not whether it may not be asserted that the impossibility of answering one at least among these questions is capable of demonstration. For the whole system of things, as far as we know it, depends on the perpetual rotation of the heavenly bodies; and without original irregularity in the distribution of matter no motion of rotation could ever have spontaneously arisen. And if this irregularity be thus original, Science can give no account of it. Science, therefore, will have to begin with assuming certain facts for which it can never hope to account. But it _may_ begin by assuming that, speaking roughly, the universe was always very much what we see it now, and that composition and decomposition have always nearly balanced each other, and that there have been from the beginning the same sun and moon and planets and stars in the sky, the same animals on the earth and in the seas, the same vegetation, the same minerals; and that though there have been incessant changes, and possibly all these changes in one general direction, yet these changes have never amounted to what would furnish a scientific explanation of the forms which matter has assumed. Or, on the other hand, Science _may_ assert the possibility of going back to a far earlier condition of our material system; may assert that all the forms of matter have grown up under the action of laws and forces still at work; may take as the initial state of our universe one or many enormous clouds of gaseous matter, and endeavour to trace with more or less exactness how these gradually formed themselves into what we see. Science has lately leaned to the latter alternative. To a believer the alternative may be stated thus: We all distinguish between the original creation of the material world and the history of it ever since. And we have, nay all men have, been accustomed to assign to the original creation a great deal that Science is now disposed to assign to the history. But the distinction between the original creation and the subsequent history would still remain, and for ever remain, although the portion assigned to the one may be less, and that assigned to the other larger, than was formerly supposed. However far back Science may be able to push its beginning, there still must lie behind that beginning the original act of creation--creation not of matter only, but of the various kinds of matter, and of the laws governing all and each of those kinds, and of the distribution of this matter in space. This application of the abstract doctrine of Evolution gives it an enormous and startling expansion: so enormous and so startling that the doctrine itself seems absolutely new. To say that the present grows by regular law out of the past is one thing; to say that it has grown out of a distant past in which as yet the present forms of life upon the earth, the present vegetation, the seas and islands and continents, the very planet itself, the sun and moon, were not yet made--and all this also by regular law--that is quite another thing. And the bearings of this new application of Science deserve study. Now it seems quite plain that this doctrine of Evolution is in no sense whatever antagonistic to the teachings of Religion, though it may be, and that we shall have to consider afterwards, to the teachings of revelation. Why then should religious men independently of its relation to revelation shrink from it, as very many unquestionably do? The reason is that, whilst this doctrine leaves the truth of the existence and supremacy of God exactly where it was, it cuts away, or appears to cut away, some of the main arguments for that truth. Now, in regard to the arguments whereby we have been accustomed to prove or to corroborate the existence of a Supreme Being, it is plain that, to take these arguments away or to make it impossible to use them, is not to disprove or take away the truth itself. We find every day instances of men resting their faith in a truth on some grounds which we know to be untenable, and we see what a terrible trial it sometimes is when they find out that this is so, and know not as yet on what other ground they are to take their stand. And some men succumb in the trial and lose their faith together with the argument which has hitherto supported it. But the truth still stands in spite of the failure of some to keep their belief in it, and in spite of the impossibility of supporting it by the old arguments. And when men have become accustomed to rest their belief on new grounds the loss of the old arguments is never found to be a very serious matter. Belief in revelation has been shaken again and again by this very increase of knowledge. It was unquestionably a dreadful blow to many in the days of Galileo to find that the language of the Bible in regard to the movement of the earth and sun was not scientifically correct. It was a dreadful blow to many in the days of the Reformation to find that they had been misled by what they believed to be an infallible Church. Such shocks to faith try the mettle of men's moral and spiritual conviction, and they often refuse altogether to hold what they can no longer establish by the arguments which have hitherto been to them the decisive, perhaps the sole decisive, proofs. And yet in spite of these shocks belief in revelation is strong still in men's souls, and is clearly not yet going to quit the world. But let us go on to consider how far it is true that the arguments which have hitherto been regarded as proving the existence of a Supreme Creator are really affected very gravely by this doctrine of Evolution. The main argument, which at first appears to be thus set aside, is that which is founded on the marks of design, and which is worked out in his own way with marvellous skill by Paley in his Natural Theology. Paley's argument rests as is well known on the evidence of design in created things, and these evidences he chiefly finds in the frame-work of organised living creatures. He traces with much most interesting detail the many marvellous contrivances by which animals of various kinds are adapted to the circumstances in which they are to live, the mechanism which enables them to obtain their food, to preserve their species, to escape their enemies, to remove discomforts. All nature thus examined, and particularly all animated nature, seems full of means towards ends, and those ends invariably such as a beneficent Creator might well be supposed to have in view. And whilst there is undeniably one great objection to his whole argument, namely that the Creator is represented as an Artificer rather than a Creator, as overcoming difficulties which stood in His way rather than as an Almighty Being fashioning things according to His Will, yet the argument thus drawn from evidence of design remains exceedingly powerful, and it has always been considered a strong corroboration of the voice within which bids us believe in a God. Now it certainly seems at first as if this argument were altogether destroyed. If animals were not made as we see them, but evolved by natural law, still more if it appear that their wonderful adaptation to their surroundings is due to the influence of those surroundings, it might seem as if we could no longer speak of design as exhibited in their various organs; the organs we might say grow of themselves, some suitable, and some unsuitable to the life of the creatures to which they belonged, and the unsuitable have perished and the suitable have survived. But Paley has supplied the clue to the answer. In his well-known illustration of the watch picked up on the heath by the passing traveller, he points out that the evidence of design is certainly not lessened if it be found that the watch was so constructed that, in course of time, it produced another watch like itself. He was thinking not of Evolution, but of the ordinary production of each generation of animals from the preceding. But his answer can be pushed a step further, and we may with equal justice remark that we should certainly not believe it a proof that the watch had come into existence without design if we found that it produced in course of time not merely another watch but a better. It would become more marvellous than ever if we found provision thus made not merely for the continuance of the species but for the perpetual improvement of the species. It is essential to animal life that the animal should be adapted to its circumstances; if besides provision for such adaptation in each generation we find provision for still better adaptation in future generations, how can it be said that the evidences of design are diminished? Or take any separate organ, such as the eye. It is impossible not to believe until it be disproved that the eye was intended to see with. We cannot say that light was made for the eye, because light subserves many other purposes besides that of enabling eyes to see. But that the eye was intended for light there is so strong a presumption that it cannot easily be rebutted. If indeed it could be shown that eyes fulfilled several other functions, or that species of animals which always lived in the dark still had fully-formed eyes, then we might say that the connexion between the eye of an animal and the light of heaven was accidental. But the contrary is notoriously the case; so much the case that some philosophers have maintained that the eye was formed by the need for seeing, a statement which I need take no trouble to refute, just as those who make it take no trouble to establish, I will not say its truth, but even its possibility. But the fact, if it be a fact, that the eye was not originally as well adapted to see with as it is now, and that the power of perceiving light and of things in the light grew by degrees, does not show, nor even tend to show, that the eye was not intended for seeing with. The fact is that the doctrine of Evolution does not affect the substance of Paley's argument at all. The marks of design which he has pointed out remain marks of design still even if we accept the doctrine of Evolution to the full. What is touched by this doctrine is not the evidence of design but the mode in which the design was executed. Paley, no doubt, wrote on the supposition (and at that time it was hardly possible to admit any other supposition) that we must take animals to have come into existence very nearly such as we now know them: and his language, on the whole, was adapted to that supposition. But the language would rather need supplementing than changing to make it applicable to the supposition that animals were formed by Evolution. In the one case the execution follows the design by the effect of a direct act of creation; in the other case the design is worked out by a slow process. In the one case the Creator made the animals at once such as they now are; in the other case He impressed on certain particles of matter which, either at the beginning or at some point in the history of His creation He endowed with life, such inherent powers that in the ordinary course of time living creatures such as the present were developed. The creative power remains the same in either case; the design with which that creative power was exercised remains the same. He did not make the things, we may say; no, but He made them make themselves. And surely this rather adds than withdraws force from the great argument. It seems in itself something more majestic, something more befitting Him to Whom a thousand years are as one day and one day as a thousand years, thus to impress His Will once for all on His creation, and provide for all its countless variety by this one original impress, than by special acts of creation to be perpetually modifying what He had previously made. It has often been objected to Paley's argument, as I remarked before, that it represents the Almighty rather as an artificer than a creator, a workman dealing with somewhat intractable materials and showing marvellous skill in overcoming difficulties rather than a beneficent Being making all things in accordance with the purposes of His love. But this objection disappears when we put the argument into the shape which the doctrine of Evolution demands and look on the Almighty as creating the original elements of matter, determining their number and their properties, creating the law of gravitation whereby as seems probable the worlds have been formed, creating the various laws of chemical and physical action, by which inorganic substances have been combined, creating above all the law of life, the mysterious law which plainly contains such wonderful possibilities within itself, and thus providing for the ultimate development of all the many wonders of nature. What conception of foresight and purpose can rise above that which imagines all history gathered as it were into one original creative act from which the infinite variety of the Universe has come and more is coming even yet? And yet again, it is a common objection to Paley's and similar arguments that, in spite of all the tokens of intelligence and beneficence in the creation, there is so much of the contrary character. How much there is of apparently needless pain and waste! And John Stuart Mill has urged that either we must suppose the Creator wanting in omnipotence or wanting in kindness to have left His creation so imperfect. The answer usually given is that our knowledge is partial, and, could we see the whole, the objection would probably disappear. But what force and clearness is given to this answer by the doctrine of Evolution which tells us that we are looking at a work which is not yet finished, and that the imperfections are a necessary part of a large design the general outlines of which we may already trace, but the ultimate issue of which, with all its details, is still beyond our perception! The imperfections are like the imperfections of a half-completed picture not yet ready to be seen; they are like the bud which will presently be a beautiful flower, or the larva of a beautiful and gorgeous insect; they are like the imperfections in the moral character of a saint who nevertheless is changing from glory to glory. To the many partial designs which Paley's Natural Theology points out, and which still remain what they were, the doctrine of Evolution adds the design of a perpetual progress. Things are so arranged that animals are perpetually better adapted to the life they have to live. The very phrase which we commonly use to sum up Darwin's teaching, the survival of the fittest, implies a perpetual diminution of pain and increase of enjoyment for all creatures that can feel. If they are fitter for their surroundings, most certainly they will find life easier to live. And, as if to mark still more plainly the beneficence of the whole work, the less developed creatures, as we have every reason to believe, are less sensible of pain and pleasure; so that enjoyment appears to grow with the capacity for enjoyment, and suffering diminishes as sensitivity to suffering increases. And there can be no doubt that this is in many ways the tendency of nature. Beasts of prey are diminishing; life is easier for man and easier for all animals that are under his care: many species of animals perish as man fills and subjugates the globe, but those that remain have far greater happiness in their lives. In fact, all the purposes which Paley traces in the formation of living creatures are not only fulfilled by what the Creator has done, but are better fulfilled from age to age. And though the progress may be exceedingly slow, the nature of the progress cannot be mistaken. If the Natural Theology were now to be written, the stress of the argument would be put on a different place. Instead of insisting wholly or mainly on the wonderful adaptation of means to ends in the structure of living animals and plants, we should look rather to the original properties impressed on matter from the beginning, and on the beneficent consequences that have flowed from those properties. We should dwell on the peculiar properties that must be inherent in the molecules of the original elements to cause such results to follow from their action and reaction on one another. We should dwell on the part played in the Universe by the properties of oxygen, the great purifier, and one of the great heat-givers; of carbon, the chief light-giver and heat-giver; of water, the great solvent and the storehouse of heat; of the atmosphere and the vapours in it, the protector of the earth which it surrounds. We should trace the beneficent effects of pain and pleasure in their subservience to the purification of life. The marks of a purpose impressed from the first on all creation would be even more visible than ever before. And we could not overlook the beauty of Nature and of all created things as part of that purpose coming in many cases out of that very survival of the fittest of which Darwin has spoken, and yet a distinct object in itself. For this beauty there is no need in the economy of nature whatever. The beauty of the starry heavens, which so impressed the mind of Kant that he put it by the side of the Moral Law as proving the existence of a Creator, is not wanted either for the evolution of the world or for the preservation of living creatures. Our enjoyment of it is a super-added gift certainly not necessary for the existence or the continuance of our species. The beauty of flowers, according to the teaching of the doctrine of Evolution, has generally grown out of the need which makes it good for plants to attract insects. The insects carry the pollen from flower to flower, and thus as it were mix the breed; and this produces the stronger plants which outlive the competition of the rest. The plants, therefore, which are most conspicuous gain an advantage by attracting insects most. That successive generations of flowers should thus show brighter and brighter colours is intelligible. But the beauty of flowers is far more than mere conspicuousness of colours even though that be the main ingredient. Why should the wonderful grace, and delicacy, and harmony of tint be added? Is all this mere chance? Is all this superfluity pervading the whole world and perpetually supplying to the highest of living creatures, and that too in a real proportion to his superiority, the most refined and elevating of pleasures, an accident without any purpose at all? If Evolution has produced the world such as we see and all its endless beauty, it has bestowed on our own dwelling-place in lavish abundance and in marvellous perfection that on which men spend their substance without stint, that which they value above all but downright necessities, that which they admire beyond all except the Law of Duty itself. We cannot think that this is not designed, nor that the Artist who produced it was blind to what was coming out of His work. Once more, the doctrine of Evolution restores to the science of Nature the unity which we should expect in the creation of God. Paley's argument proved design, but included the possibility of many designers. Not one design, but many separate designs, all no doubt of the same character, but all worked out independently of one another, is the picture that he puts before us. But the doctrine of Evolution binds all existing things on earth into one. Every mineral, every plant, every animal has such properties that it benefits other things beside itself and derives benefit in turn. The insect developes the plant, and the plant the insect; the brute aids in the evolution of the man, and the man in that of the brute. All things are embraced in one great design beginning with the very creation. He who uses the doctrine of Evolution to prove that no intelligence planned the world, is undertaking the self-contradictory task of showing that a great machine has no purpose by tracing in detail the marvellous complexity of its parts, and the still more marvellous precision with which all work together to produce a common result. To conclude, the doctrine of Evolution leaves the argument for an intelligent Creator and Governor of the world stronger than it was before. There is still as much as ever the proof of an intelligent purpose pervading all creation. The difference is that the execution of that purpose belongs more to the original act of creation, less to acts of government since. There is more divine foresight, there is less divine interposition; and whatever has been taken from the latter has been added to the former. Some scientific students of Nature may fancy they can deduce in the working out of the theory results inconsistent with religious belief; and in a future Lecture these will have to be examined; and it is possible that the theory may be so presented as to be inconsistent with the teaching of Revelation. But whatever may be the relation of the doctrine of Evolution to Revelation, it cannot be said that this doctrine is antagonistic to Religion in its essence. The progress of Science in this direction will assuredly end in helping men to believe with more assurance than ever that the Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth, by understanding hath He established the heavens. LECTURE V. REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. The evolution of Knowledge. Does not affect the truth of Science. Nor of Religion. Special characteristic of evolution of Religious Knowledge, that it is due to Revelation. All higher Religions have claimed to be Revelations. The evolution of Religious Knowledge in the Old Testament; yet the Old Testament a Revelation. Still more the New Testament. The miraculous element in Revelation. Its place and need. Harmony of this mode of evolution with the teaching of the Spiritual Faculty. LECTURE V. REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. 'God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past to the Fathers by the Prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by His Son.' _Hebrews_ i. 1. The doctrine of Evolution has been applied not only to the formation of all created things, but to the development of human knowledge; and this with perfect justice, though with some risk of misunderstanding. It is certain, and, indeed, it is obvious, that knowledge grows. The ordinary experience of mankind becomes larger and clearer in the course of time, and the systematised experience which we call Science makes the same progress in still greater measure and with more assurance. Our Science has been built on the labours of scientific men in past ages. New generalisations imagined by one thinker, new crucial experiments devised by another, new instruments of observation invented by another,--these have been the steps by which Science has grown and established its authority and enlarged its dominion. When or by whom the first steps were made we have no record. No mathematician that ever lived showed greater natural power of intellect than he, whoever he was, who first saw that the singular contained the universal; but we know neither his name nor his age, nor his birthplace nor his race. But after those first steps had been taken, we know who have been the leaders in scientific advance. And we know what they have done, and what they are doing; and we can conjecture the direction in which further advances will be made. And so we can trace the development of this kind of knowledge, and in a certain and very real sense this development may be called an evolution. But there is this difference between the evolution of nature and the evolution of the science of nature. The evolution of nature results in the existence of forms which did not exist before; the evolution of knowledge results in the perception of laws which were already in existence. The knowledge grows, but the things known remain. The knowledge is not treated as if independent of the things known or believed to be known, as a phenomenon belonging merely to the human mind, with beginnings and laws and consequences and history of its own. And, consequently, its having a regular growth is not used as an argument against its substantial truth. The Science of Mathematics, for instance, has a history; but no mathematician will admit that the fact that it has a history affects its claims to acceptance as truth. We may ask, how men have been brought to believe the deductions of the higher mathematics, and we may answer our own question by tracing the steps; but our conviction is not shaken that these deductions are true. And so, too, we can trace the steps by which the great generalisations of Science have been reached, and we may show that Kepler grew out of Copernicus, and Newton out of Kepler; but the proof that the knowledge of one truth has been evolved out of the knowledge of another, and that out of the knowledge of another, is not used to show that all this Science has nothing to do with truth at all, but is only a natural growth of human thought. Science has grown through all manner of mistakes--mistakes made by the greatest thinkers and observers, mistakes which men ignorantly laugh at now, as their own mistakes will be no doubt laughed at in turn hereafter. But we do not, therefore, treat scientific thought as nothing more than one of the phenomena of humanity; ways of thinking which necessarily grew out of the conditions in which men have existed, but sufficiently accounted for by their origin and mode of growth having been shown, and having no solidity of their own. What has been said of Science may be said also of Religion. Religion also has had its development, and in some respects a development parallel to that of Science. It is possible to trace the steps by which men have obtained an ever larger and fuller knowledge of the Supreme Law of Right, a clearer perception of its application, of its logical results, of its relation to life, to conduct, to belief. It has grown through mistakes as Science has. There has been false Religion, as there has been false Science. Unsound principles of conduct have been inculcated in Religion as unsound generalisations have been set up in Science. There have been improper objects of reverence in Religion, as there have been impossible aims proposed for scientific investigation. Ezekiel rises above the doctrine that the children are punished for the sins of their parents, just as Galileo rises above the doctrine that nature abhors a vacuum. The parallel is all the more complete in that in many cases false religions have been also false sciences. The prayer to the fetish for rain is as contrary to true religion as it is contrary to true science. Many false religions are most easily overthrown by scientific instruction. Many false sciences begin to totter when the believers in them are taught true religion. The ordinary superstitions which have so strong a hold on weak characters and uninstructed minds, are as inconsistent with true faith in God as with reasonable knowledge of nature. Science grows, but the facts, whether laws or instances of the operations of those laws, are not affected by that growth. And Religion grows, but the facts of which it takes cognisance are not affected by that growth. Neither in the one case nor in the other is the fact that there has been a development any argument to show that the belief thus developed has no real foundation. The pure subjectivity of Religion, to use technical language, is no more proved by this argument than the pure subjectivity of Science. But there is one most important particular in which the development of Religion entirely differs from the development of Science. The leaders of scientific thought, from the time that Science has been conscious of itself, have never claimed direct divine instruction. For a long time, indeed, scientific thought rested largely on tradition, and that tradition was handed on from generation to generation without any examination into its foundations. The stores of past observations seemed so very much larger in quantity than any that men could add in their own day, that it was natural to give more weight to what was received than to what was newly observed. The experience of each generation in succession seemed nothing in comparison with the accumulated experience of all preceding generations. And in many cases old traditions stopped the growth of Science by preventing the acceptance of observations inconsistent with them. But such old traditions never claimed to rest on a revelation from God; or, if such a claim was made here and there, it never had strength enough to root itself in Science and form part of the recognised authority on which Science stood. Science, from the time when it recognised itself as Science, has owed its development to observation of nature, and long before it shook off the fetters of unexamined tradition it had disclaimed, even for that tradition, any other basis than this. But not so Religion. Many religions, and among them the purer and higher religions, in proportion to their nearer approach to perfection, have claimed to rest on a Divine Revelation, and to be something more than either speculations of philosophic observers of nature, or deductions from innate principles of reason or conscience. Not thinkers, but prophets, or men claiming to be prophets, have given the purest religions to their disciples among mankind. It has always been possible to bring all religious teaching to the bar of conscience; it has been possible to put all religious teaching to logical examination; to systematise its precepts, whether of faith or conduct; to inquire into its fundamental principles, and to ask for the authority on which the whole teaching rests. But these applications of our intellectual faculties to Religion have always been admitted as coming after, not as preceding, the teaching to which they are made. The prophet does sometimes reason when he is deducing from principles already accepted, new precepts, or new prohibitions; but he does not confine himself to such reasoning in the fulfilment of his mission. He professes to have a message to give. He will accredit it by such means as He supplies Who has sent him with this message. He will, in order to open the consciences of his hearers, appeal to past revelations which they have already received, and with which his new message is in thorough harmony; but he often appeals also to his power over nature to bear witness that the Lord of nature has sent him. The Hebrew prophet will appeal to the teaching of the Law, will repeat the old revelation with its old unshaken and unshakeable precepts, but he will not stop there: he will also give signs from the Lord to prove that he has a right to the title of prophet which he claims. Armed with this title, he will go on to predict the coming of the Great Restorer, the Messiah; he will insist on the judgment of all things, sure to be passed in its appointed day; he will hint at the immortality of the soul, and the execution of the Almighty justice on every man that lives. It is probable enough that many of the inferior religions have grown up with no such claim at all. The worship of ancestors, where it has prevailed, has very likely, as has been suggested, grown out of dreams, in which loving memory has brought back in sleep vivid images of the dead who were reverenced while they lived, and cannot be readily forgotten after death. Such worship barely attains to what may be called in strictness a religion. Its connexion with the spiritual faculty, the true seat of religion, is weak and vague. It is like the honour paid to a sovereign residing in a distant capital, with only the difference that those who receive this worship are supposed to reside not in a distant capital, but in another world. So, too, the worship of fetishes, of trees, of serpents, of the heavenly bodies, while they have some of the inferior elements of religion in them, yet hardly deserve to be called religions. There is in them the sentiment of fear, the acknowledgment of persons or some resemblance of persons imperceptible by the senses; the acknowledgment of powers possessed by these persons. But the central idea of a rule of holiness is either altogether wanting, or so very feeble and indistinct as to contain no promise of developing into ultimate supremacy. These religions do not often lay claim to a revelation from a supreme authority. And they have withered away with the growth of knowledge and with clearer perceptions of what Religion must be if it is to exist at all. All the higher religions have claimed to rest on a divine revelation, and the Christian Religion on a series of such revelations. The Christian Religion does not profess (as does for instance the Mahommedan) to be wrapped up in one divine communication made to one man and admitting thereafter of no modifications. Though resting on divine revelation it is professedly a development, and is thus in harmony with the Creator's operations in nature. Whether we consider what is taught concerning the heavenly Moral Law, or concerning human nature and its moral and spiritual needs, or concerning Almighty God and His dealings with us His creatures, it is undeniable that the teaching of the Bible is quite different at the end from what it is at the beginning. The New Testament considered by itself as a body of teaching is such an advance on all that preceded it as to be quite unique in the history of the world. The ideas conveyed in the Old Testament are absorbed, transformed, completed, so as to make them as a whole entirely new; and to these are added entirely new ideas sufficient by themselves to form a whole system of doctrine. And because of this it is difficult to speak of the new teaching as having grown out of the old. But the Old Testament covers many centuries, and within its range we can trace a steady growth, and that growth always of the same character, and always pointing towards what the Gospel finally revealed. The strength of the moral sentiment in the earlier books is always assigned to the belief in, and reverence for, Almighty God. It is evidently held to be more important to believe in God and to fear Him than to see the perfection of His holiness. If we distinguish between Religion and Morality, Religion is made the more important of the two. It is more important to recognise that the holy God exists and reigns than to see clearly in what His holiness, and indeed all holiness, consists. The sentiment of reverence is more important than the perception of that universality which we now know to be the essential characteristic of the Moral Law. In analysing the origin and nature of Religion in the second of these Lectures, it was necessary to follow the order of thought, and beginning with Duty to end with God. But the order of fact is not the same. In actual fact man began with God and ends with a clearer perception of Duty. Hence in all the earlier stages the morality is imperfect. The profaneness of Esau is a serious offence. The ungenerous temper, the unfairness and duplicity of Jacob are light in comparison. Truth is not an essential. Blood-shedding and impurity when in horrible excess are treated as most grievous sins; but restrained within limits are easily condoned. Women are placed below their true and natural place; polygamy if not distinctly allowed is certainly condoned; divorce is permitted on one side, not on the other. Slavery is allowed though put under regulation. But the unity and spirituality of God are guarded with the strongest sanctions, and nothing could be said against idolatry and polytheism now, in sterner and clearer language than was used then. The reverence for God required then was as great as the reverence required now. But the conception of the holiness which is the main object of that reverence has changed; has in fact been purified and cleared. And the change is traceable in the Old Testament. The prophets teach a higher morality than is found in the earlier books. Cruelty is condemned as it had not been before. The heathen are not regarded as outside God's love, and the future embraces them in His mercy even if the present does not. Conscience begins to be recognised and appealed to. Idolatry is not merely forbidden, its folly is exposed; it is treated not only with condemnation, but with scorn. Individual responsibility is insisted on. Children are not held responsible for their fathers, though the inheritance of moral evil and of the consequences of moral evil is never denied. And even trust in God rises to a higher level in Habakkuk's declaration that that trust shall never be shaken by any calamity that may befall him, than in the earlier belief that calamities would never befall those who held fast that trust. If we review this progress in moral teaching we recognise that it corresponds to the natural and for the most part unconscious working of that instinctive test which, as was pointed out before, we apply to all moral questions, the test of universality. The pivots of all the prophetical teaching are the incessant inculcation of justice and mercy; justice which requires us to recognise the rights of others side by side with our own; mercy which demands our sympathy with the feelings of other creatures that can feel. We are bound to recognise the claims of others to equal treatment with ourselves, and any refusal or apparent refusal to do so must be justified by a universal rule applicable to all alike. The perpetual attempt to justify exceptions in this way is sure to end in diminishing the number of those exceptions. If we are compelled to think much of the position of woman in marriage, we are sure at last to come to Malachi's declaration that God hateth putting away. If we are compelled to think of the position of slaves, we cannot continue for ever to believe that there are some beings with consciences and free wills, who nevertheless, because of the accidents of their lives, have no rights at all; and we acknowledge the righteousness of Jeremiah's denunciation of the breach of covenant when the nobles of Judah re-enslaved those whom they had solemnly emancipated. If we think of the nature of responsibility and the justification of punishment, we find it impossible to believe that an innocent man shall be rightly punished for the wrong-doing of another, even if that other be his father or his mother; and we are convinced that Ezekiel is speaking God's words when he proclaims on God's behalf that 'the soul that sinneth it shall die; the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.' And once more, whatever divine purpose gave the chosen people a priority among all peoples in knowledge of divine will and possession of divine favour, it is impossible to find any rule by which this priority shall for ever exclude all other peoples from being within the range of God's manifested love; and conscience cannot but accept as a divine message that the Gentiles also shall come to the Heavenly 'Light, and their kings to the brightness of His rising.' So again, to turn from justice to mercy, we recognise that we are bound to spare pain to all creatures that can feel, and this duty can only be set aside by some higher duty which makes that pain the means to a higher moral end. And if we are set by our consciences to seek for some rule of universal application for this purpose, it becomes perpetually clearer that nothing can excuse cruel punishments inflicted on criminals or enemies, or hard-hearted indifference to the poor and the weak. Our own nature cries out for kindness in our pain, and that very cry from within compels our consciences to listen to the cry from without. And the denunciations of cruelty and oppression we recognise as we hear them to be the voice of God. But however true it be that this progress corresponds exactly throughout with the necessary working of the great moral principles implanted in the spiritual faculty, it nevertheless remains true also that all this teaching in its successive stages is given by men who did not profess to be working out a philosophical system, but who claimed to bring a message from God, to speak by His authority, and in many cases to be trusted with special powers in proof of possessing that authority. Looking back over it afterwards we can see that the teaching in its successive stages was a development, but it always took the form of a revelation. And its life was due to that fact. As far as it is possible to judge, that union between Morality and Religion, between duty and faith, without which both religion and morality soon wither out of human consciences, can only be secured--has only been secured--by presenting spiritual truth in this form of a Revelation. When we pass to the New Testament, all that has previously been taught in the Old, in so far as it is related to the new teaching at all, is related as the bud to the flower. The development, if it be indeed a development, is so great, so sudden, so strange, that it seems difficult to recognise that it is a development at all. First, the morality is in form, if not in substance, absolutely new. The duty of justice and mercy is pushed at once to its extreme limits, even to the length of entire self-surrender. The disciple has his own rights no doubt, as every other man has his; but he is required to leave his rights in God's hands and to think of the rights of others only. The highest place is assigned to meekness in conduct and humility in spirit. The humility of the Sermon on the Mount may possibly by careful analysis be shown to be identical at bottom with the magnanimity of Aristotle's Ethics. But the presentation of the two is so utterly opposed that in the effect on life the identity is altogether lost. And as justice and mercy, so too self-discipline is pushed as far as it can go. Instead of the enjoyment of life being an integral part of the aim set before the will, hunger and thirst for righteousness, and penitence for failure in keeping to it, are to fill up the believer's hopes for himself. Of inward satisfaction and peace he is often assured; but these, and these only, are the means to that peace. The disciple's life is to consist in bearing the cross, and bearing it cheerfully; in returning good for evil, and love for indifference and even for hatred; in detaching his affections from all the pleasures to be obtained from external things; in fixing his trust and his love on his Eternal Father. Taken as a whole, this is quite unlike all moral teaching that preceded it, and there is no indication that any philosophy could ever have evolved it. It has fastened on the human conscience from the day that it was uttered; and whatever moral teaching since has not been inspired from this source has soon passed out of power and been forgotten. We find when we examine that it exactly agrees with the fundamental teaching of the spiritual faculty when that teaching is applied to such creatures as we are, and to such a God as the New Testament sets before us. But we find it impossible to assert that by any working of human thought this morality could have been obtained by the spiritual faculty unaided. On the contrary, it seems more near the truth to say that we could never have obtained so clear a conception of the great Moral Law, if the teaching of the New Testament had not enlightened and purified the spiritual faculty itself. And to this is to be added that the moral teaching of the New Testament recognises what we may now almost consider a proved necessity of our nature, or at least a sure characteristic of the government of the world, that perpetual progress without which nothing human seems to keep sweet and wholesome. Perfect as the New Testament morality is in spirit, it is nevertheless imperfect in actual precepts. It leaves questions to be solved some of which have not been solved yet. It left slavery untouched, though assuredly doomed. It said nothing of patriotism. It gave no clear command concerning the right use of wealth. It laid down no principles for the government of states, though such principles must have a moral basis. There has been a perpetual growth in the understanding and in the application of this perfect teaching, and there will yet be a growth. Of no philosophical system of morals is it possible to say the same. But in the second place, the New Testament contains not only a new morality, it contains also a new account of human nature. The mystery of that discord which makes the noblest and best of human souls a scene of perpetual internal conflict is acknowledged and its counterpart in God's dealings with mankind is set forth. The struggle between the spiritual faculty asserting its due supremacy, and the lower passions and appetites, impulses and inclinations, is so described by Saint Paul that none have ever since questioned his description with any effect. And our Lord's teaching of our absolute dependence on God and helplessness without Him; and Saint John's teaching that the whole world, outside Christ, 'lieth in the wicked one,' lay down the same truth. And as the mystery of moral evil in mankind is thus set forth, so too the mystery of the remedy for that evil. In the love of God shown in the Cross of Christ, in our union with God through that same Death upon the Cross is the power which conquers evil in the soul and carries a man ever upward to spiritual heights. And as all profounder thinkers have confessed the truth of the account thus given of the internal contradiction of man's moral nature, so have all believers borne witness (and only they could bear witness) to the account thus given of the solution of that contradiction and the renovation of that nature. Millions have lived and died in the Christian faith since the teaching recorded in the New Testament was given, and among them have been the purest, the justest, the most self-sacrificing, the most heavenly-minded of mankind. And they all concur in saying that the one stay of all their spiritual lives has been communion with God through Christ. Thirdly, the New Testament affirms with a clearness previously unknown the immortality of the soul and the future gift of that spiritual body which shall in some way spring from the natural body as the plant grows from the seed. There had grown up, no doubt quite naturally, anticipations of this doctrine and ever stronger and more deeply-rooted persuasion that it must be true. But it is revealed in the New Testament as it is taught nowhere else, and it is sealed by the Resurrection of our Lord, ever since then the historical centre of the Christian Faith. How exactly it harmonises with the teaching of the spiritual faculty I have pointed out before. And, lastly, the New Testament not only tells us what never was told before of man's nature as a spiritual being and of his destiny hereafter; it tells also what was never told elsewhere of the nature of God and of the relations between Him and His creature man. The unity and spirituality of the Godhead so strenuously insisted on in the Old Testament, is no less insisted on in the New. But the mysterious complexity embraced within that unity, though darkly hinted at in the older teaching, is nowhere clearly set forth, but in the latter. We may find anticipations of the teaching of St. Paul and St. John, and of our Lord Himself as recorded by St. John, in the Book of Proverbs, in the Prophets, in the Rabbinical writers between the Prophets and the New Testament, and we can see in Philo to what this finally came unaided by Revelation. But the Christian teaching on our Lord's nature and on the Incarnation is distinct from all this. And it is in the Christian form, and only in that form, that the doctrine has satisfied the spiritual needs of the great mass of believers. Now there cannot be any doubt that the hold which this teaching has had upon mankind has depended entirely on the extraordinary degree in which the teaching of the Bible has satisfied the conscience. Without that no miracles however overwhelmingly attested, no external evidence of whatever kind, could have compelled intellects of the highest rank, side by side with the most uncultivated and the most barren, to accept it as divine, nor could anything else have so often rekindled its old fire at times when faith in it had apparently withered away. The teaching of the Bible has always found and must always find its main evidence within the human soul. And the fact that the teaching of the Bible, though when examined afterwards it turns out to be development or evolution, yet was always given at the time as a revelation, so far from diminishing the force of this internal evidence adds to it still more force than it would otherwise have. For what underlies the very conception of revelation is the doctrine that all progress in higher spiritual knowledge is bound up with conscious communion with God. Now it is an experience common to all believers that in that communion is to be found not only all strength but all enlightenment also. The believer knows that he learns spiritual truth in proportion as he refers his life to God's judgment, prays to God for clearer vision of what is duty and what is right faith, and makes it his one great aim to do God's will. He uses all the faculties that God has given him to understand the great divine law; but he perpetually looks to God for instruction, and whatever else may be said of that instruction his experience tells him that his advance in spiritual knowledge is in proportion to his nearness in thought and feeling to God Himself. That the progress of the human race in spiritual knowledge, unlike progress in scientific knowledge, should be due not to thinkers intellectually gifted, but to Prophets and Apostles inspired by God, thus exactly corresponds with what the spiritually-minded man finds within his own soul. And so too does it correspond with what he sees in others. Often and often the unlearned and untrained by sheer goodness of life attain to wonderful perception of spiritual truth, and the holiness of the unlettered peasant reveals to his conscience the law of right conduct in circumstances which perplex the disciplined and well informed. As the human race has learnt the highest spiritual truth by direct communication from God, so too on communion with God far more than on intellectual power, depends the progress of spiritual knowledge in every human soul. But though the hold of the Bible on the faith of believers unquestionably depends on its satisfying the conscience in every stage of its enlightenment, it is equally certain that those who gave the messages recorded in the Bible claimed something more as proof of their authority than the approval of the conscience of their hearers. They professed to prove their mission by the evidence of supernatural powers; and the teaching of the Bible cannot be dissociated from the miraculous element in it which is connected with that teaching. If, indeed, the Old Testament stood alone we might acknowledge that the miraculous element in it occupied comparatively so small a place, and was so separable from the rest, and the evidence for it was so rarely, if ever, contemporaneous, that it might be left out of count. But we cannot say this of the New Testament, nor in particular of the account that has reached us of the sayings and doings of our Lord. The miracles are embedded in, are indeed intertwined with, the narrative. Many of our Lord's most characteristic sayings are so associated with narratives of miracles that the two cannot be torn apart: 'I have not seen so great faith, no, not in Israel;' 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;' 'Son, thy sins be forgiven thee;' 'Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees;' 'It is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to dogs;' 'This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting;' 'Were there not ten cleansed, but where are the nine?' 'Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.' In fact, there can be no real doubt that our Lord believed that He could work miracles, and professed to work them, and that His disciples believed that He worked many, and included that fact in their meaning when they spoke of Him as going about doing good. And these disciples professed to work miracles themselves and believed that they did work them. It is of course true that they had no strictly scientific conception of a miracle, and would often have called by that name what was in reality extraordinary but not miraculous. And it is true too that, if we take each miracle by itself, there is but one miracle, namely our Lord's Resurrection, for which clear and unmistakeable and sufficient evidence is given. But while the exclusion of any one miracle as insufficiently attested is possible, the exclusion of the miraculous element altogether is not possible without a complete surrender of the position taken by the first Christian teachers. As they claimed to be inspired and to have enlightenment which was not shared by mankind at large, so did they claim, if not each for himself, yet certainly for our Lord, power not shared by ordinary men, power to step out of the ordinary course of natural events, and, whether by virtue of some higher law operative only in rare instances, or by direct interference of the Almighty, to prove a divine mission by exhibiting in fact what is an essential part of the supremacy of the Moral Law, the dominion of that Law over the physical world. The teachers of other religions besides the Christian have claimed supernatural powers, and have professed to give a supernatural message. This is a strong evidence of the deep-seated need in the human soul for such a direct communication from God to man. Men seem to need it so much that without it they are unable to accept the truth, or to hold it long if they do accept it. All who thus claim supernatural authority must, of course, justify their claim. They must justify their message to the human conscience. What they teach must be an advance towards, and finally an expression of, the Supreme Moral Law. And if they profess to have miraculous power they must give reasonable evidence that such power is really theirs. But if they fail in this, still the fact remains that their very claim must answer to something in the spiritual nature of man, or it would not be so invariably made nor so largely successful. It seems as if, whatever may be the ground of belief when once revelation has penetrated into the soul, the exercise of supernatural power was needed to procure that access in the first instance. We believe because we find our consciences satisfied, and we bring up our children in such discipline of conscience that they too shall have sufficient training to recognise and hold fast divine truth. And if we had lived at the time and could have had our eyes opened to see the spiritual power of the Christian Faith, we might have believed without any external evidence at all. But the first receivers of the message, to whom the revelation was new, and, as must have often happened and we actually know did happen, to whom it was hard to reconcile that revelation with previous teaching, how sure were they to need some other and outer evidence that it really came from God. The supernatural in the form of miracles can never be the highest kind of evidence, can never stand alone as evidence; but it seems to have been needed for the first reception. And there seem to be minds that need it still, and to all it is a help to find that reasonable ground can be shown for holding that such evidence was originally given. Revelation, in short, takes a higher stand than belongs to all other teaching, and except for its having taken that higher stand it does not appear that the highest teaching would have been possible. To look back afterwards and say that we find a development or an evolution is easy. And at first sight it seems to follow that, being an evolution, it may well be no more than the outcome of the working of the natural forces. But look closer and you see the undeniable fact that all these developments by the working of natural forces have perished. Not Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor the Stoics, nor Philo have been able to lay hold of mankind, nor have their moral systems in any large degree satisfied our spiritual faculty. Revelation, and revelation alone, has taught us; and it is from the teaching of revelation that men have obtained the very knowledge which some now use to show that there was no need of revelation. That altruism which is now to displace the command of God is nothing but the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount robbed of its heavenly power, robbed of the great doctrine which underlies the whole sermon. For that doctrine is the Fatherhood of God which has been shown most especially in this, that from the beginning He has never forgotten His children. LECTURE VI. APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. Evolution examined. The formation of the habitable world. The formation of the creatures which inhabit it. Transmission of characteristics. Variations perpetually introduced. Natural selection. On the other side, life not yet accounted for by Evolution. Cause of variations not yet examined. Moral Law incapable of being evolved. Account given in Genesis not at variance with doctrine of Evolution. Evolution of man not inconsistent with dignity of humanity. LECTURE VI. APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 'Know ye that the Lord He is God: it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.' _Psalm_ c. 3. Religion is rooted in our spiritual nature and its fundamental truths are as independent of experience for their hold on our consciences as the truths of mathematics for their hold on our reason. But as a matter of fact Religion has taken the form of a revelation. And this introduces a new contact between Religion and Science, and of necessity a new possibility of collision. There is not only possible opposition or apparent opposition of Science in what is revealed, in what we may call the actual substance of the revelation; but also in the accessories and evidences of the revelation, which may be no actual part of the revelation itself, but nevertheless are, to all appearance, inseparably bound up with it. It is therefore no more than might have been expected that the general postulate of the uniformity of nature should appear to be contravened by the claim to supernatural power made on behalf of revelation, and that the special, but just at present leading scientific doctrine, the doctrine of Evolution, should be found inconsistent with parts, or what appear to be parts, of the revelation itself. And we have to consider the two questions, What has Revelation to say concerning Evolution? and what has Science to say concerning Miracles? Concerning Evolution, we have first to consider how much in this direction has been made fairly probable, and what still remains to be determined. It cannot then be well denied that the astronomers and geologists have made it exceedingly probable that this earth on which we live has been brought to its present condition by passing through a succession of changes from an original state of great heat and fluidity, perhaps even from a mixture mainly consisting of gases; that such a body as the planet Jupiter represents one of the stages through which it has passed, that such a body as the moon represents a stage toward which it is tending; that it has shrunk as it cooled, and as it shrank has formed the elevations which we call mountains, and the depressions which contain the seas and oceans; that it has been worn by the action of heat from within and water from without, and in consequence of this action presents the appearance when examined below the surface of successive strata or layers; that different kinds of animal and vegetable life have followed one another on the surface, and that some of their remains are found in these strata now; and that all this has taken enormous periods of time. All this is exceedingly probable, because it is the way in which, as Laplace first pointed out, under well-established scientific laws of matter, particularly the law of gravitation and the law of the radiation of heat, a great fluid mass would necessarily change. And the whole solar system may and probably did come into its present condition in this way. It certainly could have been so formed, and there is no reason for supposing that it was formed in any other way. Once more, if we begin, as it were, at the other end, and trace things backwards from the present, instead of forwards from the remote past, it cannot be denied that Darwin's investigations have made it exceedingly probable that the vast variety of plants and animals have sprung from a much smaller number of original forms. In the first place, the unity of plan which can be found pervading any great class of animals or plants seems to point to unity of ancestry. Why, for instance, should the vertebrate animals be formed on a common plan, the parts of the framework being varied from species to species, but the framework as a whole always exhibiting the same fundamental type? If they all descended from a common ancestor, and the variations were introduced in the course of that descent, this remarkable fact is at once accounted for. But, in the second place, observation shows that slight variations ARE perpetually being introduced with every successive generation, and many of these variations are transmitted to the generations that follow. In the course of time, therefore, from any one parent stock would descend a very large variety of kinds. But if, in the third place, it be asked why this variety does not range by imperceptible degrees from extreme forms in one direction to extreme forms in the other, the answer is to be found in the enormous prodigality and the equally enormous waste of life and living creatures. Plants and animals produce far more descendants than ever come even to such maturity as to reproduce their kind. And this is particularly the case with the lower forms of life. Eggs and seeds and germs are destroyed by millions, and so in a less but still enormous proportion are the young that come from those that have not been destroyed. There is no waste like the waste of life that is to be seen in nature. Living creatures are destroyed by lack of fit nourishment, by lack of means of reproduction, by accidents, by enemies. The inevitable operation of this waste, as Darwin's investigation showed, has been to destroy all those varieties which were not well fitted to their surroundings, and to keep those that were. One species of animal has been preserved by length of neck, which enabled it to reach high-growing fruits and leaves; another by a thicker skin, which made it difficult for enemies to devour; another by a colour which made it easier to hide. One plant has been preserved by a bright flower which attracted insects to carry its pollen to other flowers of its kind; another by a sweet fruit which attracted birds to scatter its seed. Meanwhile other animals and plants that had not these advantages perished for the lack of them. The result would be to maintain, and perpetually, though with exceeding slowness, more and more to adapt to the conditions of their life, those species whose peculiarities gave them some advantage in the great struggle for existence. Here again we have the working of known laws of life, capable of accounting for what we see. And the high probability cannot be denied that by evolution of this kind the present races of living creatures have been formed. And to these arguments the strongest corroboration is given by the frequent occurrence, both in plants and animals, of useless parts which still remain as indications of organs that once were useful and have long become useless. Animals that now live permanently in the dark have abortive eyes which cannot see, but indicate an ancestor with eyes that could see. Animals that never walk have abortive legs hidden under their skin, useless now but indicating what was useful once. Our knowledge no doubt in this as in any other province of nature is but the merest fraction of what may be known therein. But there is no evidence whatever to show that what we have observed is not a fair sample of the whole. And so taking it, we find that the mass of evidence in favour of the evolution of plants and animals is enormously great and increasing daily. Granting then the high probability of the two theories of Evolution, that which begins with Laplace and explains the way in which the earth was fitted to be the habitation of living creatures, and that which owes its name to Darwin and gives an account of the formation of the living creatures now existing, we have to see what limitations and modifications are necessarily attached to our complete acceptance of both. First, then, at the very meeting point of these two evolutions we have the important fact that all the evidence that we possess up to the present day negatives the opinion that life is a mere evolution from inorganic matter. We know perfectly well the constituents of all living substances. We know that the fundamental material of all plants and all animals is a compound called protoplasm, or that, in other words, organic matter in all its immense variety of forms is nothing but protoplasm variously modified. And we know the constituent elements of this protoplasm, and their proportions, and the temperatures within which protoplasm as such can exist. But we are quite powerless to make it, or to show how it is made, or to detect nature in the act of making it. All the evidence we have points to one conclusion only, that life is the result of antecedent life, and is producible on no other conditions. Repeatedly have scientific observers believed that they have come on instances of spontaneous generation, but further examination has invariably shown that they have been mistaken. We can put the necessary elements together, but we cannot supply the necessary bond by which they are to be made to live. Nay, we cannot even recall that bond when it has once been dissolved. We can take living protoplasm and we can kill it. It will be protoplasm still, so far as our best chemistry can discover, but it will be dead protoplasm, and we cannot make it live again; and as far as we know nature can no more make it live than we can. It can be used as food for living creatures, animals or plants, and so its substance can be taken up by living protoplasm and made to share in the life which thus consumes it; but life of its own it cannot obtain. Now here, as it seems, the acceptance of the two evolutions lands us in acceptance of a miracle. The creation of life is unaccounted for. And it much more exactly answers to what we mean by a miracle than it did under the old theory of creation before Evolution was made a scientific doctrine. For under that old theory the creation of living creatures stood on the same footing as the creation of metals or other inorganic substances. It was part of that beginning which had to be taken for granted, and which for that reason lay outside of the domain of Science altogether. But if we accept the two evolutions, the creation of life, if unaccounted for, presents itself as a direct interference in the actual history of the world. There could have been no life when the earth was nothing but a mass of intensely heated fluid. There came a time when the earth became ready for life to exist upon it. And the life came, and no laws of inorganic matter can account for its coming. As it stands this is a great miracle. And from this conclusion the only escape that has been suggested is to suppose that life came in on a meteoric stone from some already formed habitable world; a supposition which transfers the miracle to another scene, but leaves it as great a miracle as before. Nor, if it was a miracle, can we deny that there was a purpose in it worthy of miraculous interference. For what purpose can rank side by side with the existence and development of life, the primary condition of all moral and spiritual existence and action in this world? In the introduction of life was wrapped up all that we value and all that we venerate in the whole creation. The infinite superiority, not in degree only, but in kind, of the living to the lifeless, of a man to a stone, justifies us in believing that the main purpose of the creation that we see was to supply a dwelling-place and a scene of action for living beings. We cannot say that the dignity of the Moral Law requires that creatures to be made partakers in the knowledge of it, and even creatures of a lower nature but akin to them, must have been the results of a separate and miraculous act of creation. But we can say that there is a congruity in such a miracle, with the moral purpose of all the world, of which we are a part, that removes all difficulty in believing it. Science, as such, cannot admit a miracle, and can only say, 'Here is a puzzle yet unsolved.' Nor can the most religious scientific man be blamed as undutiful to religion if he persists in endeavouring to solve the puzzle. But he has no right to insist beforehand that the puzzle is certainly soluble; for that he cannot know, and the evidence is against him. Secondly, if we look at the Darwinian theory by itself, we see at once that it is incomplete, and the consideration of this incompleteness gravely modifies the conclusion which would otherwise be rightly drawn from it, and which, indeed, Darwin himself seems disposed to draw. For the theory rests on two main pillars, the transmission of characteristics from progenitor to progeny, and the introduction of minute variations in the progeny with each successive generation. Now, the former of these may be said to be well established, and we recognise it as a law of life that all plants and animals propagate their own kind. But the latter has, as yet, been hardly examined at all. Each new generation shows special slight variations. But what causes these variations? and what determines what they shall be? In Darwin's investigations these questions are not touched. The variations are treated as if they were quite indefinite in number and in nature. He concerns himself only with the effect of these variations after they have appeared. Some have the effect of giving the plant or animal an advantage in the struggle of life; some give no such advantage; some are hurtful. And hence follows the permanent preservation or speedy destruction of the plants and animals themselves. But we are bound to look not only to their effects but to their causes, if the theory is to be completed. And then we cannot fail to see that these variations in the progeny cannot be due to something in the progenitors, or otherwise the variations would be all alike, which they certainly are not. They must, therefore, be due to external circumstances. These slight variations are produced by the action of the surroundings, by the food, by the temperature, by the various accidents of life in the progenitors. Now, when we see this, we see also how gravely it modifies the conclusions which we have to draw concerning the ancestry of any species now existing. Let us take, for instance, the great order of vertebrate animals. At first sight the Darwinian theory seems to indicate that all these animals are descended from one pair or one individual, and that their unity of construction is due to that fact; but if we go back in thought to the time at which the special peculiarities were introduced which really constituted the order and separated it from other animals, we see that it is by no means clear that it originated with one pair or with one individual, and that, on the contrary, the probabilities are the other way. Although the separation of this order from the rest must have taken place very early, it cannot well have taken place until millions of animals had already come into existence. The prodigality of nature in multiplying animal life is fully acknowledged by Darwin, and that prodigality is apparently greatest in the lowest and most formless type of animal. There being, then, these many millions of living creatures in existence, the external surroundings introduce into them many variations, and among these the special variations to which the vertebrate type is due. It is quite clear that wherever the external surroundings were the same or nearly the same, the variations introduced would be the same or nearly the same. Now, it is far more probable that external surroundings should be the same or nearly the same in many places than that each spot should be absolutely unlike every other spot in these particulars. The beginnings of the vertebrate order would show themselves simultaneously, or at any rate independently, in many places wherever external conditions were sufficiently similar. And the unity of the plan in the vertebrata would be due, not to absolute unity of ancestry, but to unity of external conditions at a particular epoch in the descent of life. Hence it follows that the separation of animals into orders and genera and even into species took place, if not for the most part yet very largely, at a very early period in the history of organic evolution. Of course the descendants of any one of the original vertebrata might, and probably in not a few cases did, branch off into new subdivisions and yet again into further subdivisions, and we are always justified in looking for unity of ancestry among all the species. But it is also quite possible that any species may be regularly descended, without branching off at all, from one of the originals, and that other species that resemble it may owe the resemblance simply to very great similarity of external conditions. To find, for instance, the unity of ancestry between man and the other animals, it will certainly be necessary to go back to a point in the history of life when living creatures were as yet formless, undeveloped--the materials, as we may call them, of the animal creation as we now see it, and not in any but a strictly scientific sense, what we mean when we ordinarily speak of animals. The true settlement of such questions as these can only be obtained when long and patient study shall have completed Darwin's investigations by determining under what laws and within what limits the slight variations which characterise each individual animal or plant are congenitally introduced into its structure. As things stand the probabilities certainly are that a creature with such especial characteristics as man has had a history altogether of his own, if not from the beginning of all life upon the globe, yet from a very early period in the development of that life. He resembles certain other animals very closely in the structure of his body; but the part which external conditions had to play in the earliest stages of evolution of life must have been so exceedingly large that identity or close similarity in these external conditions may well account for these resemblances. And the enormous gap which separates his nature from that of all other creatures known, indicates an exceedingly early difference of origin. Lastly, it is quite impossible to evolve the Moral Law out of anything but itself. Attempts have been made, and many more will no doubt be made, to trace the origin of the spiritual faculty to a development of the other faculties. And it is to be expected that great success will ultimately attend the endeavours to show the growth of all the subordinate powers of the soul. That our emotions, that our impulses, that our affections should have had a history, and that their present working should be the result of that history, has nothing in it improbable. There can be no question that we inherit these things very largely, and that they are also very largely due to special peculiarities of constitution in each individual. That large part of us which is rightly assigned to our nature as distinct from our own will and our own free action, it is perfectly reasonable to find subject to laws of Evolution. Much of this nature, indeed, we share with the lower animals. They, too, can love; can be angry or pleased; can put affection above appetite; can show generosity and nobility of spirit; can be patient, persevering, tender, self-sacrificing; can take delight in society: and some can even organise it, and thus enter on a kind of civilisation. The dog and the horse, man's faithful servants and companions, show emotions and affections rising as far as mere emotions and affections can rise to the human level. Ants show an advance in the arts of life well comparable to our own. If the bare animal nature is thus capable of such high attainments by the mere working of natural forces, it is to be expected that similar forces in mankind should be found to work under similar laws. We are not spiritual beings only, we are animals, and whatever nature has done for other animals we may expect it to have done and to be doing for us. And if their nature is capable of evolution, so too should ours be. And the study of such evolution of our own nature is likely to be of the greatest value. This nature is the main instrument, put into the grasp as it were of that spiritual faculty which is our inmost essence, to be used in making our whole life an offering to God. It is good to know what can be done with this instrument and what cannot; how it has been formed in the past, and may be still further formed for the future. It is good to study the evolution of humanity. But all this does not touch the spiritual faculty itself, nor the Moral Law which that faculty proclaims to us. The essence of that law is its universality; and out of all this development, when carried to its very perfection, the conception of such universality cannot be obtained. Nothing in this evolution ever rises to the height of a law which shall bind even God Himself and enable Abraham to say, 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' The very word right in this, its fulness of meaning, cannot be used. Evolution may lead the creature to say what is hateful and what is loveable, what is painful and what is delightful, what is to be feared and what is to be sought; it may develope the sentiment which comes nearest of all to the sentiment of reverence, namely, the sentiment of shame; but it cannot reveal the eternal character of the distinction between right and wrong. Nay, there may be, as was pointed out in the last Lecture, an evolution in our knowledge even of the Moral Law, just as there is an evolution in our knowledge of mathematics. The fulness of its meaning can become clearer and ever clearer as generation learns from generation. But the principle of the Moral Law, its universality, its supremacy, cannot come out of any development of human nature any more than the necessity of mathematical truth can so come. It stands not on experience, and is its own evidence. Nor indeed have any of the attempts to show that everything in man (religion included) is the product of Evolution ever touched the question how this conception of universal supremacy comes in. It is treated as if it were an unauthorised extension from our own experience to what lies beyond all experience. This, however, is to deny the essence of the Moral Law altogether: that Law is universal or it is nothing. Now, when we compare the account of the creation and of man given by the doctrine of Evolution with that given in the Bible, we see at once that the two are in different regions. The purpose of giving the accounts is different; the spirit and character of the accounts is different; the details are altogether different. The comparison must take note of the difference of spirit and aim before it can proceed at all. It is then quite certain, and even those who contend for the literal interpretation of this part of the Bible will generally admit, that the purpose of the revelation is not to teach Science at all. It is to teach great spiritual and moral lessons, and it takes the facts of nature as they appear to ordinary people. When the creation of man is mentioned there is clearly no intention to say by what processes this creation was effected, or how much time it took to work out those processes. The narrative is not touched by the question, Was this a single act done in a moment, or a process lasting through millions of years? The writer of the Book of Genesis sees the earth peopled, as we may say, by many varieties of plants and animals. He asserts that God made them all, and made them resemble each other and differ from each other. He knows nothing and says nothing of the means used to produce their resemblances or their differences. He takes them as he sees them, and speaks of their creation as God's work. Had he been commissioned to teach his people the science of the matter, he would have had to put a most serious obstacle in the way of their faith. They would have found it almost impossible to believe in a process of creation so utterly unlike all their own experience. And it would have been quite useless to them besides, since their science was not in such a condition as to enable them to coordinate this doctrine with any other. As science it would have been dead; and as spiritual truth it would have been a hindrance. But he had, nevertheless, great ideas to communicate, and we can read them still. He had to teach that the world as we see it, and all therein contained, was created out of nothing; and that the spiritual, and not the material, was the source of all existence. He had to teach that the creation was not merely orderly, but progressive; going from the formless to the formed; from the orderless to the ordered; from the inanimate to the animate; from the plant to the animal; from the lower animal to the higher; from the beast to the man; ending with the rest of the Sabbath, the type of the highest, the spiritual, life. Nothing, certainly, could more exactly match the doctrine of Evolution than this. It is, in fact, the same thing said from a different point of view. All this is done by casting the account into the form of a week of work with the Sabbath at the end. In so constructing his account, the writer made use of a mode of teaching used commonly enough in the Bible. The symbolical use of the number seven is common in other inspired writers. The symbolical use of periods of time is not without example. That the purpose of the account was not to teach great truths, but to give men information upon scientific questions, is incredible. And, in fact, if we look in this account for literal history, it becomes very difficult to give any meaning to what is said of the seventh day, or to reconcile the interpretation of it with our Lord's words concerning the Sabbath, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' There is no more reason for setting aside Geology, because it does not agree in detail with Genesis, than there is for setting aside Astronomy because all through the Old Testament the sun is spoken of as going round the earth. And when the writer of Genesis passes from creation in general to man in particular, it is still clear that he has no mission to tell those for whom he was writing by what processes man was formed, or how long those processes lasted. This was as alien from his purpose as it would have been to tell what every physiologist now knows of the processes by which every individual man is developed from a small germ to a breathing and living infant. He takes men--and he could not but take men as he sees them--with their sinful nature, with their moral and spiritual capacity, with their relations of sex, with their relations of family. He has to teach the essential supremacy of man among creatures, the subordination in position but equality in nature of woman to man, the original declension of man's will from the divine path, the dim and distant but sure hope of man's restoration. These are not, and cannot be, lessons of science. They are worked out into the allegory of the Garden of Eden. But in this allegory there is nothing whatever that crosses the path of science, nor is it for reasons of science that so many great Christian thinkers from the earliest age of the Church downwards have pronounced it an allegory. The spiritual truth contained in it is certainly the purpose for which it is told; and evolution such as science has rendered probable had done its work in forming man such as he is before the narrative begins. It may be said that it seems inconsistent with the dignity of man's nature as described in the Bible to believe that his formation was effected by any process of evolution, still more by any such process of evolution as would represent him to have been an animal before he became a man. But, in the first place, it is to be observed that Science does not yet assert, and there is no reason to believe that it ever will assert, that man became a fully developed animal, with the brute instincts and inclinations, appetites and passions, fully formed, an animal such as we see other animals now, before he passed on into a man such as man is now. His body may have been developed according to the theory of Evolution, yet along a parallel but independent line of its own; but at any rate it branched off from other animals at a very early point in the descent of animal life. And, further, as Science cannot yet assert that life was not introduced into the world when made habitable by a direct creative act, so too Science cannot yet assert, and it is tolerably certain will never assert, that the higher and added life, the spiritual faculty, which is man's characteristic prerogative, was not given to man by a direct creative act as soon as the body which was to be the seat and the instrument of that spiritual faculty had been sufficiently developed to receive it. That the body should have been first prepared, and that when it was prepared the soul should either have been then given, or then first made to live in the image of God,--this is a supposition which is inconsistent neither with what the Bible tells nor with what Science has up to this time proved. And to this must be added that it is out of place for us to define what is consistent or inconsistent with the dignity of man in the process or method by which he was created to be what he is. His dignity consists in his possession of the spiritual faculty, and not in the method by which he became possessed of it. We cannot tell, we never can tell, and the Bible never professes to tell, what powers or gifts are wrapped up in matter itself, or in that living matter of which we are made. How absolutely nothing we know of the mode by which any single soul is created! The germ which is to become a man can be traced by the physiologist through all the changes that it has to undergo before it comes to life. Is the future soul wrapped up in it from the first, and dormant till the hour of awakening comes? or is it given at some moment in the development? We see in the infant how its powers expand, and we know that the spiritual faculty, the very essence of its being, has a development like the other faculties. It has in it the gift of speech, and yet it cannot speak. Judgment, and taste, and power of thought; self-sacrifice and unswerving truth; science and art, and spiritual understanding, all may be there in abundant measure and yet may show no sign. All this we know; and because it is common and well known we see nothing inconsistent with the dignity of our nature in this concealment of all that dignity, helpless and powerless, within the form of an infant in arms. With this before us it is impossible to say that anything which Science has yet proved, or ever has any chance of proving, is inconsistent with the place given to man in Creation by the teaching of the Bible. In conclusion, we cannot find that Science, in teaching Evolution, has yet asserted anything that is inconsistent with Revelation, unless we assume that Revelation was intended not to teach spiritual truth only, but physical truth also. Here, as in all similar cases, we find that the writer of the Book of Genesis, like all the other writers in the Bible, took nature as he saw it, and expressed his teaching in language corresponding to what he saw. And the doctrine of Evolution, in so far as it has been shown to be true, does but fill out in detail the declaration that we are 'fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.' There is nothing in all that Science has yet taught, or is on the way to teach, which conflicts with the doctrine that we are made in the Divine Image, rulers of the creation around us by a Divine superiority, the recipients of a Revelation from a Father in Heaven, and responsible to judgment by His Law. We know not how the first human soul was made, just as we know not how any human soul has been made since; but we know that we are, in a sense in which no other creatures living with us are, the children of His special care. LECTURE VII. APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER. The claim to work miracles parallel to the freedom of the will. The miracles of Revelation need not be miracles of Science. Our Lord's Resurrection, and His miracles of healing, possibly not miraculous in the scientific sense. Different aspect of miracles now and at the time when the Revelation was given. Miracles attested by the Apostles, by our Lord's character, by our Lord's power. Nature of evidence required to prove miracles; not such as to put physical above spiritual evidence; not such as to be unsuited to their own day. Impossibility of demonstrating universal uniformity. Revelation no obstacle to the progress of Science. LECTURE VII. APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER. 'Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me: or else believe Me for the very works' sake.' _St. John_ xiv. 11. Science and Religion come into apparent collision on the question of the freedom of the will. Science and Revelation come into a similar apparent collision on the possibility of miracles. The cases are precisely parallel. In each individual man the uniformity of nature is broken to leave room for the moral force of the will to assert its independent existence. This breach of uniformity is within very narrow limits, and occurs much more rarely than appears at first sight. But the demand to admit not only the possibility but the fact of this breach is imperative, and to deny it is to turn the command of the Moral Law as revealed in the conscience into a delusion. So, too, Revelation asserts its right to set aside the uniformity of nature to leave room for a direct communication from God to man. It is an essential part of the Divine Moral Law to claim supremacy over the physical world. Unless somehow or other the moral ultimately rules the physical, the Moral Law cannot rightly claim our absolute obedience. Revelation as given to us maintains that this superiority has been asserted in fact here in the world of phenomena. To deny this is very nearly equivalent to denying that any revelation has been made. In this way Revelation asserts, for God's message to the human race precisely the same breach of uniformity which every man's conscience claims for himself in regard to his own conduct. It is, however, necessary to point out that when we speak of a breach of uniformity we are never in a position to deny that the breach of uniformity may be physical only and perhaps apparent only. It may be found, it probably will be found, at last that the Moral Law has in some way always maintained its own uniformity unbroken. The Moral Law has in its essence an elasticity which the physical law has not. It often takes the form, that, given certain conduct, there will follow certain consequences; and the law is kept though the conduct is free. It is further possible, and Revelation has no interest in denying it, that the intervention which has apparently disturbed the sequence of phenomena is, after all, that of a higher physical law as yet unknown. For instance, the miraculous healing of the sick may be no miracle in the strictest sense at all. It may be but an instance of the power of mind over body, a power which is undeniably not yet brought within the range of Science, and which nevertheless may be really within its domain. In other ways what seems to be miraculous may be simply unusual. And it must therefore be always remembered that Revelation is not bound by the scientific definition of a miracle, and that if all the miraculous events recorded in the Bible happened exactly as they are told, and if Science were some day able to show that they could be accounted for by natural causes working at the time in each case, this would not in any way affect their character, as regards the Revelation which they were worked to prove or of which they form a part. Revelation uses these events for its own purposes. Some of these events are spoken of as evidences of a divine mission. Some of them are substantive facts embraced in the message delivered. And if for these purposes they have served their turn, if they have arrested attention which would not otherwise have been arrested, if they have overcome prejudices, if they have compelled belief, the fact that they are afterwards discovered to be no breach of the law of uniformity has no bearing at all on the Revelation to which they belong. The miracle would in that case consist in the precise coincidence in time with the purpose which they served, or in the manner and degree in which they marked out the Man who wrought them from all other men, or in the foreshadowing of events which are in the distant future. Thus, for instance, it is quite possible that our Lord's Resurrection may be found hereafter to be no miracle at all in the scientific sense. It foreshadows and begins the general Resurrection; when that general Resurrection comes we may find that it is, after all, the natural issue of physical laws always at work. There is nothing at present to indicate anything of the sort; but a general resurrection in itself implies not a special interference but a general rule. If, when we rise again, we find that this resurrection is and always was a part of the Divine purpose, and brought about at last by machinery precisely the same in kind as that which has been used in making and governing the world, we may also find that our Lord's Resurrection was brought about by the operation of precisely the same machinery. We may find that even in the language of strict science 'He was the first fruits of them that slept,' and that His Resurrection was not a miracle, but the first instance of the working of a law till the last day quite unknown, but on that last day operative on all that ever lived. Let us compare the general resurrection with the first introduction of life into the world. As far as scientific observation has yet gone that first introduction of life was a miracle. No one has ever yet succeeded in tracing it to the operation of any known laws. If it is a miracle it is a miracle precisely similar in kind to the miracle which believers are expecting at the last day. And assuredly if a miracle was once worked to introduce life into this habitable world, there is very good reason to expect that another miracle will be worked hereafter to restore life to those that have lived. But there are scientific men who think that the introduction of life was not a miracle, that it came at the fitting moment by the working of natural laws; or, in other words, that such properties are inherent in the elements of which protoplasm is made that in certain special circumstances these elements will not only combine but that the product of their combination will live. If this be so, it is assuredly no such very strange supposition that there may be such properties inherent in our bodies or in certain particles, whether particles of matter or not, belonging to our bodies, that in certain special circumstances these particles will return to life. And if this be so the general resurrection may be no miracle, but the result of the properties originally inherent in our bodies and of the working of the laws of those properties. And as the general resurrection so our Lord's Resurrection may in this way turn out to be no breach of the uniformity of nature. But this new discovery, if then made, would not affect the place which our Lord's Resurrection holds in the records of Revelation. It is not the purpose of Revelation to interfere with the course of nature; if such interference be needless, and the work of revealing God to man can be done without it, there is no reason whatever to believe that any such interference would take place. Or, take again any of our Lord's miracles of healing. There is no question at all that the power of mind over body is exceedingly great, and has never yet been thoroughly examined. We know almost nothing of the extent of this power, of its laws, of its limits. Marvellous recoveries often astonish the physician, and he cannot account for them except by supposing that in some way the powers of the mind have been roused to interfere with the working of the nervous system. And some men, on the other hand, have died or their health has been shattered by mere imaginations. Some men of note have attributed the recoveries claimed for homoeopathy to this cause. Some have assigned to this cause the extraordinary cures that have been undeniably wrought at the shrines, or on sight or touch of the relics, of Roman Catholic saints. The different impostures that have on many occasions prevailed for a time and then lost their reputation and passed out of fashion, are generally supposed to have owed their short-lived success to the same obscure working of unknown natural laws. They have been tested by their successes and their failures. They have succeeded, and for a time continued to succeed; but at last they have ceased to work because faith in them for some reason or other has been shaken down. Their falsehood has thus been detected; but nevertheless their genuine success for a time has been enough to show that they rested on a reality, and that reality seems to have consisted in the strange power of mind over body. In this region all is at present unexamined; and all operations are tentative, and for that reason most are only successful for a time. Now our Lord's miracles are never tentative; that is not the character given to them either by friend or by foe. Nor is there any instance recorded either by friend or by foe of an attempted miracle not accomplished. Nowhere is there any record given us by the assailants of the Gospel of any instance of His action parallel to the record given in the Acts of the Apostles of the seven sons of Sceva the Jew. The accounts of his enemies charge Him with deceit, which is identical with saying that they did not believe Him. But they do not ever charge Him with failure. Nevertheless it is quite conceivable that many of His miracles of healing may have been the result of this power of mind over body which we are now considering. It is possible that they may be due not to an interference with the uniformity of nature, but to a superiority in His mental power to the similar power possessed by other men. Men seem to possess this power both over their own bodies and over the bodies of others in different degrees. Some can influence other men's bodies through their minds more; some less. Possibly He may have possessed this power absolutely where others possessed it conditionally. He may have possessed it without limit; others within limits. If this were so, these acts of healing would not be miracles in the strictly scientific sense. They would imply very great superiority in Him to other men. But they would be in themselves under the law of uniformity. Now it is clear that if this should turn out to be so, though these acts would not be miracles for the purposes of Science, they would still be miracles for the purposes of Revelation. They would do their work in arresting attention, and still more in accrediting both the message and the Messenger. They would separate Him from ordinary men. They would prove Him to be possessed of credentials worth examining. To the believer it would make no difference whether Science called them miracles or not. To him it would still remain the fact that here was a Messenger whom God had seen fit to endow with powers which no other man ever possessed in such degree and such completeness, though others may have possessed some touch of them greater or less. Further, it is necessary to repeat what was briefly remarked in a previous Lecture, that the position which miracles take as regards us who read them many centuries after, and as regards those who witnessed and recorded them at the time, is quite different. To them the miracles were the first and often the chief proof that the man who wrought them had been sent by God, and that His message was a revelation, not an imposture; to us they are, if accepted at all, accepted as a part of the revelation itself. There are no doubt a few minds that are convinced by Paley's argument, and beginning with accepting the miracles as proved by sufficient external evidence, go on to accept the conclusion that therefore the teaching that was thus accompanied must be divine. But most men are quite unable to take to pieces in this way the records in which Revelation is contained, and to go from external evidence taken alone to the messengers who thus proved their mission, and thence to the substance of the message which they taught. To most of us, on the contrary, the Revelation is a whole, capable of being looked at from many sides, and found to be divine from whatever side it is seen; and one of its aspects is this supernatural character by which it appears to assert its identity with that Moral Law which claims absolute supremacy over all the physical world. The main evidence of the Revelation to us consists in its harmony with the voice of the spiritual faculty within us; and the claim which it asserts to have come through teachers endowed with supernatural power is so far corroborative evidence as it falls in with the essential character of the Moral Law. That eternal law claims supremacy over the physical world and actually asserts it in the freedom of the human will; and a Revelation which comes from Him Who in His own essential Being is that very law personified, might be expected to exhibit the same claim in actual manifestation in its approach to men. Bearing these limitations and characteristics of the miraculous element in the Bible in mind, let us ask how that miraculous element is therein presented. First, in the account of the creation, it is taught that the original existence of all matter flows from a spiritual source. We do not define God as the cause, meaning that that is His essence, and that except as causing other things to exist He does not exist Himself. But we describe Him as the Cause, meaning that all things exist by His Will, and that without His Will nothing could ever have existed. And as the Revelation tells us that He is the source of all existence, the Creator of the substance of things, so too does it assert that He gave all things their special properties and the laws of those properties, and that not only the original creation, but all the subsequent history of all things has been the outcome of His design, and that He has thus prescribed the government of the whole universe. And yet again the Revelation from the beginning to the end maintains His living Presence in and over all things that He has thus formed, and denies that He has parted with His power to do fresh acts of creation, fresh acts of government, whenever and wherever He sees fit. For He is necessarily free and cannot be restrained by anything but His own holiness. And unless He expressly revealed to us that His own holiness prevented Him from interfering with His own creation, we could not put limits to what He could do. The Revelation that He has given us says just the contrary, and from end to end implies that He is present in the government of the creation which He has made. What evidence, then, is there in the world of phenomena that He has ever thus interfered? Putting aside as untenable all idea of _a priori_ impossibility, admitting that God can work a miracle if He will, admitting that a miracle avowedly worked in the interest of a divine revelation stands on a totally different footing from a miracle avowedly worked in any other interest, putting the breach of the law of uniformity made by a miracle on the same footing as the breach of the same law made by a human will; we have to ask what evidence can be given that any such miracles as are recorded in the Bible have ever been worked? It is plain at once that the answer must be given by the New Testament. No _such_ evidence can now be produced on behalf of the miracles in the Old Testament. The times are remote; the date and authorship of the Books not established with certainty; the mixture of poetry with history no longer capable of any sure separation into its parts; and, if the New Testament did not exist, it would be impossible to show such a distinct preponderance of probability as would justify us in calling on any to accept the miraculous parts of the narrative as historically true. But in the New Testament we stand on different ground. And we have here first the evidence which Paley has put together to show that the early Christians spent their lives and finally surrendered their lives as witnesses to a Gospel which included miracles both among its evidences and as part of its substance. It is not possible to get rid of miracles nor the belief in miracles from the history of the Apostles. They testify to our Lord's Resurrection as to an actual fact, and make it the basis of all their preaching. They testify to our Lord's miracles as part of the character of His life. It is necessary to maintain that they were mere fanatics with no claim to respect but rather to the pity which we feel for utterly ignorant goodness, if we are to hold that no miracle was ever wrought by our Lord. It is difficult to maintain even their honesty if they preached the Resurrection of our Lord without any basis of fact to rest on. No man who is not determined to uphold an opinion at all hazards can question that St. Paul and St. Peter believed that our Lord rose from the dead, and that they died for and in that belief. But, in the second place, behind the Apostles stands our Lord Himself, and whatever may be said of the documents that compose the New Testament, they are at any rate sufficient to show that our Lord was universally believed by His disciples to have the power of working miracles and to have often worked them. There is no hesitation in regard to this; no hint of any doubt. But not only so, there is no hint of any disclaimer on His part. He must have known whether He could work miracles or not. He must have known that His disciples believed Him to possess the power. There is not the slightest trace of His ever having implied that this was a misconception. He did sometimes disclaim what was ascribed to Him, even when what was ascribed to Him was truly His, but was ascribed to Him without real knowledge of what it implied. 'Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God,' we DO find. But 'Why askest thou Me to do this? There is none that can do this but One, that is God,' we do NOT find. It is plain that He accepted the belief that assigned Him powers above those of other men--powers given Him by His Father in heaven--and never discouraged it. Nay, He demanded it. Take the lowest ground, and admit for argument's sake that the New Testament contains a legendary element, and still you cannot cut the miracles out of the Gospels and Epistles without altering them beyond recognition. The Jesus Christ presented to us in the New Testament would become a different person if the miracles were removed. And if He claimed to possess and exercise this power, the evidence becomes the evidence of One Who must have known and Whom we cannot disbelieve. And this claim, which He has thus made, and which was thus accepted by His disciples, is corroborated by the power, different in form but similar in kind, which He exerted then on the men of His own day, and has ever since continued to exert on all succeeding generations. The first disciples were under His absolute dominion. They preached Christ and not themselves. They referred everything to Him, and professed to have no power but from Him. St. Paul with all his genius and marvellous power of influence, yet professes to be nothing without Christ and to be everything in Christ. Our Lord left no writing behind Him, but committed His Revelation to His Apostles, and we only know Him through them. But they are not like ordinary disciples of a great teacher; philosophers succeeding a philosopher; prophets succeeding a prophet. To no one of them does it occur for a moment to teach anything except as from Him. St. Paul gives advice sometimes which he does not profess to be giving by our Lord's command, but when he does so, he puts the mark of his own inferiority on what he says, and claims for it no such authority as belongs to a word from Christ. A word from Christ was final on all subjects. And this power over men has never weakened from that day to this. There is no other power like it in the world. Science proceeds in far the majority of cases by trial of some theory as a working hypothesis. Such too has been the procedure of Christian Faith. Trust Christ; stake your happiness on Him; stake your hope of satisfying all spiritual aspirations on Him; stake your power of winning the victory over temptation on Him--this is the exhortation of Apostle, and martyr, and saint, and evangelist, and pastor, and teacher. And those who have thus tried the strength of the Christian hypothesis have not failed. The Christian Church has been stained with many a blot. Ill deeds have been wrought in the name of Christ. Evil laws have been passed. Strange superstitions have prevailed. But no other body can show such saints, no other body can produce so great a cloud of witnesses. It is certain that the lives and the deaths, the characters and the aims, of those who have trusted their all to Christ have made them what He bade them be, the salt of the earth. And they testify with one voice that they know no other power which has upheld them but the power of Christ whom they have taken for their Lord. Others have sometimes been set up as in some sort rivals to Him as teachers or as examples; but here there is no rival even pretended. In no other man have men been called on to believe as a living present power, able to give strength and victory in the conflicts of the soul. The Church, too, has passed through times of spiritual depression, we may almost say of degradation. And in the worst of times within the Church there has always remained a wonderful recuperative power, which has shaken off inconsistencies and defects in the past, and will do so yet more in the future. But this recuperative power has always shown itself in one form, and in one form only, namely, a return to Christ and to trust in Him, a trust which has never been falsified. The martyrdom of our Lord's disciples is enough to prove that belief in His supernatural powers and in His exercise of those powers was no gradual growth of later times, but from the very beginning rooted in the convictions of those who must have known the truth. The character of our Lord as revealed in the Gospels makes it impossible to disbelieve His claims whatever they may be. His power attested by generations of believers ever since corroborates those claims by the persistent evidence of eighteen centuries. Against this evidence what is to be said? It is said that the evidence for the uniformity of nature is so overwhelming that nothing can set it aside. And further it is said, that, even if it be conceded that it might be set aside, no evidence sufficient for the purpose has yet been produced. Now to deal with this second assertion first, we must ask what is the nature of the evidence that would be deemed sufficient? If the inquirer does not believe that God created and still governs the world, assuredly no evidence will ever be sufficient to convince him that God has worked a miracle. The existence of God is certainly not to be proved by His interference with nature. Had He desired to reveal Himself to us primarily in that way, He would have wrought many more miracles than we now know of, and would have kept our faith alive by perpetual and unmistakeable manifestations of His presence and power. But He has not so willed. He has made our belief in Him rest mainly on the voice within ourselves, in order that we might walk by faith and not by sight. It will be a hopeless task to convince men that there is a God by pointing, not to His creation but to His interference with creation. But if a man do believe there is a God, what kind of evidence ought he to expect to show him that God has interfered in the course of the creation? In the first place, he must not expect that the physical evidence, that is the miraculous evidence, for Revelation should be of such a character as to stand above the spiritual evidence. Just as the fundamental evidence for the existence of a God is to be found in the voice of conscience, and the arguments from design and from the order and beauty and visible purpose of the creation are secondary--corroborative not demonstrative--so too the primary evidence of a Revelation from God must be found in the harmony of that Revelation with the voice of conscience, and only the secondary and corroborative evidence is to be looked for in miracles. And in both cases the reason is the same. For it is not God's purpose to win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated, the clever, but to win the spiritually gifted, the humble, the tender-hearted, the souls that are discontented with their own shortcomings, the souls that have a capacity for finding happiness in self-sacrifice. It would defeat the purpose of the Revelation made to us if the hard-headed should have an advantage in accepting it over the humble-minded. The evidence must be such that spiritual character shall be an element in the acceptance of it. There would be a contradiction, if the faculty whereby we mainly recognised God were the spiritual faculty, and the faculty whereby we mainly recognised His Revelation were the scientific faculty. And, in the second place, we have no right to expect that the evidence for miracles wrought in one age should be such evidence as properly belongs to another age. It is sometimes urged that the evidence supplied by the testimony of the early Christians is of little value because it was never cross-examined. No such precautions surrounded the evidence as would now be required to give any value to evidence of similar events. The witnesses gave up their lives to attest what they taught; but there was no one to scrutinise what they asserted. St. Paul's evidence on our Lord's Resurrection cannot now be put to the test of searching questions. But to make such objections as these is to make what is on the face of it an absurd demand. It is to ask that the scientific processes of the nineteenth century should have been anticipated in the first, that men should be miraculously guided to supply a kind of evidence which would be utterly superfluous at the time in order to be convincing eighteen hundred years afterwards. This would indeed have put the miraculous incidents in the New Testament narrative altogether out of place, and made the miracles more important than the Revelation which they were worked to introduce. Now, if these two conditions are borne in mind, it is difficult to see what better evidence could be obtained of a miraculous life than we possess concerning the life of our Lord. The moral and spiritual evidence is His own character which intentionally overshadows all the rest, and it is inconceivable that He should have made a false claim. And the material evidence is the testimony of men who freely gave their lives in proof of what they said. Nor has anything yet been said or written to shake Paley's argument on this point. But, if we pass on to the other objection, that no evidence can ever be sufficient to prove a miracle because the evidence for the uniformity of nature is so overwhelming, we can only see in such an assertion an instance of that inability to get out of an accustomed groove against which Science has perpetually to guard. In Science the uniformity of nature is so indispensable a postulate, that without it we cannot stir a step. And if the student of Science is to admit a breach, it can only be by stepping outside of his science for the time and conceiving the possibility that there is some other truth beside scientific truth, and some other kind of evidence beside scientific evidence. We have all heard of the need of guarding against the bondage in which custom binds the mind. We have heard of the student who when first he saw a locomotive looked perseveringly for the horses that impelled it, because he had never known, and consequently could not imagine any other mode of producing such motion. But this danger attends not only the separate investigations which Science makes into phenomena; it attends Science as a whole. And it is necessary repeatedly to insist on the fact that Science has not proved and cannot prove that the scientific domain is co-extensive with nature itself. The evidence for the uniformity of nature consists in the fact that from the beginning of Science the known reign of physical law has been steadily extending without a check; that instance after instance of apparent exception has been brought by further examination within its province; that the hypothesis of uniformity has now been long on trial and has never yet been found to fail; that no one who has so tried it has the slightest hesitation in trusting it for the future, as he has proved it in the past. But clearly as this evidence proves a general, it never gets beyond a general, uniformity. It has not succeeded in showing that the human will comes under the same rule. It has not succeeded in silencing the voice within us, which claims superiority for the moral over the physical. And when the utmost extent of human knowledge is compared with the vastness of nature, the claim to extend the induction from generality to universality is seen to be utterly untenable. So much as this, indeed, Science has rendered highly probable, that the uniformity of nature is never broken except for a moral purpose. It is only for such a purpose that the will is ever free. It is only for such a purpose that Revelation has ever claimed to be superior to nature. But beyond this Science cannot go. Let it be granted that the claim for freedom of the will has been often unduly pushed far beyond this limit, and let it be granted that religions professing to be revelations have included records of miracles which had no moral purpose. This does not affect the general conclusion that the evidence for uniformity has never succeeded, and can never succeed in showing, that the God who made and rules the universe never sets aside a physical law for a moral purpose, either by working through the human will or by direct action on external nature. Science will continue its progress, and as the thoughts of men become clearer it will be perpetually more plainly seen that nothing in Revelation really interferes with that progress. It will be seen that devout believers can observe, can cross-question nature, can look for uniformity and find it, with as keen an eye, with as active an imagination, with as sure a reasoning, as those who deny entirely all possibility of miracles and reject all Revelation on that account. The belief that God can work miracles and has worked them, has never yet obstructed the path of a single student of Science; nor has any student who repudiated that belief found any aid in his study from that repudiation. The rush of Science of late years has for the time made many men fancy that Science is everything; and believers in Revelation have helped this fancy by insisting on their part that Revelation is everything; but such waves of opinion, resting really on feeling, are sure to pass away, and scientific men will learn that there are other kinds of knowledge besides scientific knowledge, as believers are already learning that God teaches us by other methods besides the method of Revelation. The students of the Bible will certainly learn that Revelation need not fear the discoveries of Science, not even such doctrines as that of Evolution. And the students of nature will certainly learn that Science has nothing to fear from the teaching of Revelation, not even from the claim to miraculous power. For most certainly both Science and Revelation come from one and the same God; 'the heavens declare His glory, and the firmament showeth His handywork; His law is perfect, converting the soul; His testimony is sure, making wise the simple.' LECTURE VIII. THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT. Uniformity of nature not demonstrated, but established, except in two cases; the interference of human will and of Divine Will. The exception no bar to the progress of Science. Unity to be found not in the physical world, but in the physical and moral combined. The Moral Law rests on itself. Our recognition of it on our own character and choice. But we expect it to show its marks in the physical world: and these are the purpose visible in Creation, the effects produced by Revelation. Nevertheless a demand for more physical evidence; but the physical cannot be allowed to overshadow the spiritual. Dangers to believers from leaning this way: superstition; blindness; stagnation. The guarantee for spiritual perceptiveness: to take Jesus as the Lord of the conscience, the heart, the will. LECTURE VIII. THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT. 'No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.' 1 _Cor._ xii. 3. It is now the proper time to review the argument of these Lectures, and to endeavour to trace, if possible, the source of the estrangement which just at present separates Religion and Science. The postulate of Science is admitted on all hands to be the uniformity of nature, and the proof of this postulate has been found to consist in an induction from the facts which nature presents and our senses observe. Uniformity is quickly noticed, and after it has been noticed for some time it is instinctively used as a working hypothesis. So used it accumulates perpetually increasing evidence of its truth, and if we except two great classes of facts, we never find any instance of its failure. The two classes of facts which are thus excepted are the acts of the human will and the miraculous element in Revelation, both of them instances of one thing, namely, the interference of the moral with the physical. To complete the induction and to deprive the denial of universal uniformity of all evidence to rest on, all that is necessary is to get rid of these two exceptions. If Science could get rid of these exceptions, though it could not be said that the fundamental postulate was demonstrated, it could be said that all the evidence was in its favour and absolutely no evidence against it. And although scientific belief would then still rank below mathematical belief, it would nevertheless have a cogency quite irresistible. Science would not thereby gain in power of progress, in practical acceptance, or in utility to man. But men are so constituted that completeness gives a special kind of satisfaction not to be got in any other way. If Science could but be complete it would seem to gain in dignity, if it gained in nothing else. And it is easy to foster a kind of passion for this completeness until every attempt to question it is resented. I have seen a boy first learning mechanics show a dislike to consider the effect of friction as marring the symmetry and beauty of mechanical problems; too vague, too uncertain, too irregular to be allowed any entrance into a system which is so rounded and so precise without it. And something of the same temper can sometimes be seen in students of Science at the very thought of there being anything in the world not under the dominion of the great scientific postulate. The world which thus contains something which Science cannot deal with is pronounced forthwith to be not the world that we know, not the world with which we are concerned; a conceivable world if we choose to indulge our imagination in such dreams, but not a real world either now or at any time before or after. And yet the freedom of the human will and the sense which cannot be eradicated of the responsibility attaching to all human conduct, perpetually retorts that this world in which we live contains an element which cannot be subdued to obedience to the scientific law, but will have a course of its own. The sense of responsibility is a rock which no demand for completeness in Science can crush. All attempts at reconciling the mechanical firmness of an unbroken law of uniformity with the voice within that cannot be silenced telling us that we must answer for our action, have failed, and we know that they will for ever fail. If indeed it could be said that the progress of Science was really barred by this inability to make the induction complete, and to assert the unbroken uniformity of all nature; if it could be said that any uncertainty was thus cast over scientific conclusions, or any false or misleading lights thus held up to draw inquirers from the true path, it would undoubtedly become a duty to examine, and to examine anxiously, whether indeed it could be true that our faculties were thus hopelessly at variance with each other, the scientific faculty, imposing on us one belief, and the spiritual faculty another, and the two practically irreconcileable. But there is no reason whatever for thinking this. Newton's investigations were unquestionably pursued, as all true scientific investigations must ever be pursued, in reliance on the truth of the uniformity of nature, and yet he never felt it the slightest hindrance to his progress that he always tacitly and often expressly acknowledged that God had reserved to Himself the power of setting this uniformity aside, and indeed believed that He had used this power. The believer who asserts the universality of a law except when God works a miracle to set it aside is certainly at no real disadvantage in comparison with an unbeliever who makes the same assertion with no qualification at all. It is granted on all hands that miracles are, and ever have been, exceedingly rare, and for that reason need not be taken into account in the investigation of nature. It is granted that the freedom of the human will works within narrow limits, and very slowly and slightly affects the great mass of human conduct and what depends on human conduct. And Science has often to deal with approximations when nothing but approximations can be obtained. We perpetually meet in nature with quantities and relations that cannot be accurately expressed nor accurately ascertained, and we have to be content with approximations, and we know how to use them in Science. Many chemical properties can only be so expressed; many primary facts, such as the distances, the volumes, the weights of heavenly bodies; and yet the approximations serve our purpose. And so too, if there be a reserve still uncovered by the scientific postulate, that will not in any degree affect our investigation of what is so covered. In short, the unity of all things which Science is for ever seeking will be found not in the physical world alone, but in the physical and spiritual united. That unity embraces both. And the uniformity which is the expression of that unity is not a uniformity complete in nature, taken by itself, but complete when the two worlds are taken together. And this Science ought to recognise. Let us turn from the physical to the spiritual. The voice within us which demands our acceptance of religion makes no direct appeal to the evidence supplied by the senses. We are called on to believe in a supreme law of duty on pain of being lowered before our own consciences. And this law of duty goes on to assert its own supremacy over all things that exist, and that not as an accidental fact, but as inherent in its essence. And this supremacy cannot be other than an accidental fact unless it be not only actual but intended. And intention implies personality; and the law thus shows itself to be a Supreme Being, claiming our reverence, and asserting Himself to be the Creator, the Ruler, and the Judge of all things that are. And this same voice within us asserts that we are responsible to Him for all our conduct, and are capable of that responsibility because free to choose what that conduct shall be. We are to believe not because the truth of this voice is proved independently of itself, but simply because we are commanded. Corroborative evidence may be looked for elsewhere, but the main, the primary evidence is within the soul. Hence the strength of this belief depends on ourselves and on our own character. To every man the voice speaks. But its authority is felt in proportion to the spirituality of each who hears. Its acceptance is bound up in some way with our own wills. How far it is a matter of choice to believe or to disbelieve it is not possible to define. The will lies hidden as it were behind the emotions, the affections, the nobler impulses. The conscience shades off into the other faculties, and we cannot always isolate it from the rest. But though it be impossible to say precisely how the will is concerned in the spiritual belief, there can be no doubt that it always takes its part in such belief. It is the keen conscience, it is the will that can be moved to its depths by the conscience, that grasp most strongly the certainty of the law of duty. It is the man with the strongest and noblest aspirations, the man who sees the beauty of humility, the man who feels most strongly the deep peace of self-sacrifice, _that_ is the man who finds the voice within most irresistible. It is not by any means always the man who lives the most correct life; correctness of life may be due to natural and not to spiritual causes. And the man whom we should find faultless in point of morals may yet be wanting in spiritual depth, and not have as yet, and perhaps may not have to the last, the spiritual faculty strong within him. But the man, even if he have many and grievous faults, who nevertheless is keenly susceptible of higher things, is the one to whom the voice within speaks with authority not to be gainsaid, and to him that voice is final. It is this fact that the perception of things spiritual varies from man to man, and depends on character, and involves action of the will, that makes it always possible to represent our knowledge of the law of duty as in itself standing on a less sure foundation than our knowledge of scientific truth. Whether a man has or has not the necessary power of mind to comprehend scientific reasoning is tested with comparative ease. And if he have that power, the reasoning is certain in course of time to be understood, and when it is understood it compels assent so long as it keeps within its own proper domain. But the perception of spiritual truth depends on a faculty whose power or weakness it is far more difficult to test; and it involves the will which may be exerted on either side. And for this reason men sometimes dismiss this truth as being no more than an imagination, needed by some men to satisfy an emotional nature, but having no substance that can be brought to an external test. The believer in God knows that the truth which he holds is as certain as the axioms of mathematics; but he cannot make others know this whose spiritual faculty is not awake; and he is liable to be asked for proof not of the spiritual but of the physical kind. Now this much must be acknowledged, that we cannot but expect the claim to supremacy over all things to show itself in some way in the creation which has come from Him who makes that claim. It would, no doubt, be a serious difficulty if things physical and things spiritual were cut off from one another by an absolute gulf; if we were required to believe that God had created and now ruled everything, and yet we could trace not the slightest evidence of His hand either in the creation or in the history of the world. There are then two ways in which we are able to recognise Him even in this world of phenomena. For in the first place, the creation in its order and its beauty and its marvellous adaptation of means to ends, confirms the assertion of the spiritual faculty that it owes its origin to an intelligent and benevolent purpose, exhibited in the form in which purpose is always exhibited. It works towards ends which we should expect a holy and benevolent Creator to have in view, and it accomplishes those ends in so large a proportion that, making allowance for the limited range of our knowledge, the general aim of the whole is seen with sufficient clearness. The argument is not strong enough to compel assent from those who have no ears for the inward spiritual voice, but it is abundantly sufficient to answer those who argue that there cannot be a Creator because they cannot trace His action. And the scientific doctrine of Evolution, which at first seemed to take away the force of this argument, is found on examination to confirm it and expand it. The doctrine of Evolution shows that with whatever design the world was formed, that design was entertained at the very beginning and impressed on every particle of created matter, and that the appearances of failure are not only to be accounted for by the limitation of our knowledge, but also by the fact that we are contemplating the work before it has been completed. And in the second place, while the creation, the more closely it is examined the more distinctly shows the marks of the wisdom and goodness of the Creator, so the history of the world exhibits in the Revelation made to man clear proofs of that heavenly love which corresponds to the character of Him who has put love at the head of all the requirements of His law. The Revelation given to us has undeniably made a real mark on the world. It has upheld millions of men in a holiness of life corresponding in a very real degree to the holiness required by the law of duty. It has perpetually more and more cleared up the true teaching of that law. It is still continuing the same process, and generation after generation is better able to understand that teaching. Its fruits have been a harvest of saints and martyrs, some known and reverenced, some quite unnoticed. It has leavened all literature and all legislation. It has changed the customs of mankind and is still changing them. And if it be replied that all this is nothing but one form of the development of humanity and shows no proof of a Divine Ruler, we have a right to ask what then could be the source of such a development, and how is it that so great a power should always have worked in the name of God and should have always referred everything to His command? That fanaticism should plead God's authority without any right to do so is intelligible. But is it intelligible that all this truth and justice and purity and self-sacrificing love, all this obedience to the Supreme Law, should be the fruit of believing a lie? If there be a God, it is to be expected that He would communicate with His creatures if those creatures were capable of receiving the communication; and if He did communicate with His creatures it is to be expected that His communication would be such as we find in the Bible. The purpose of the Bible, the form of it, the gradual formation of it, the steadily-growing Revelation contained in it, these harmonise with the moral law revealed originally in the conscience. And the effect which the Revelation has produced on human history is real and great. The power which God's Revelation has exerted on the world is an undeniable fact among phenomena. It is not a demonstration of His existence; but it is a full answer to those who say, 'If God made and rules the world why do we find no signs of His hand in its course?' And thirdly, this Revelation has not merely taken the form of a message or a series of messages, but has culminated in the appearance of a person who has always satisfied and still satisfies the conception formed by our spiritual faculty of a human representation of the divine law. Our Lord's life is that law translated into human action, and all the more because human faculties had not first framed the conception which He then came to fulfil, but He exhibited the ideal, and our conception rose as it were to correspond to it. And, as He includes in Himself all the teaching, so does He give from Himself all the power of the Revelation which He came to crown. And every true disciple of Christ can bear witness to the reality of that power in sustaining the soul. Thus has the God, whom our spiritual faculty commands us to worship and to reverence, shown Himself in the world of phenomena. And He has given proofs of His existence and His character precisely corresponding to the conception which He has enabled, and indeed commanded, us to form of Him. And it is because the proofs that He has given are of this nature that we are tempted to ask for more proofs of a different kind. For it is undeniable that believers and unbelievers alike are perpetually asking for proofs that shall have more of the scientific and less of the religious character, proofs that shall more distinctly appeal to the senses. Believers in all ages have longed for external support to their faith; unbelievers have refused to believe unless supplied with more physical evidence. Believers shrink from being thrown inwards on themselves; they fear the wavering of their own faith; they are alarmed at the prospect of the buttresses of their belief being taken from them. They find it easier to believe the spiritual evidence, if they can first find much physical evidence. They wish (to use the Apostle's words) to walk by sight and not by faith. And unbelievers want a tangible proof that shall compel their understanding before it awakes their conscience. They demand a Revelation, not only confirmed by miracles at the time, but confirmed again and again by repeated miracles to every succeeding generation. They want miracles in every age adapted to the science of the age, miracles which no hardness of heart would be able to deny, which would convince the scientific man through his Science independently of his having any will to make holiness his aim when he had been convinced. This kind of evidence it has not pleased God to give. It is not the scientific man that God seeks as such, any more than it is the ignorant man that He seeks as such. And the proofs that He gives are plainly in all cases conditioned by the rule that the spiritually minded shall most easily and most keenly perceive their force. And, as far as unbelievers are concerned, I do not see that more need be said except to tell them that this rule is inflexible, and that it is by another way that they must look to find God, and not by the way that they insist on choosing. But believers who are in the same case need to be warned of some very real dangers that always attend a faith which makes too much of things not spiritual. For, first, there is a real and great danger that the spiritual may be altogether obscured by the literal and the physical. We look back with astonishment on the Rabbinical interpretations of the Old Testament, and all the more because of the really great and true thoughts that are sometimes to be found in the midst of their fanciful conceits. We can trace the mischief they did to true Religion by the perverted reverence with which they regarded the words and even the letters, and the very shapes of the letters, in which their sacred books were written. Their perversions of the law of God, their subtle refinements of interpretation, their trivial conceits, their false and misleading comments and inferences, all certainly tended to encourage the hypocrisy which our Lord rebuked, and against which St. Paul contended. But we still see something of the same spirit in the attempt to maintain a verbal and even literal inspiration of the whole Bible, filling it not with the breath of a Divine Spirit, but with minute details of doctrine and precept often questionable, and, whenever separated from the principles of the eternal law, valueless or even mischievous. God's Word, instead of leading us to Him, is made to stand between and hide His face. But, secondly, there is a serious risk that if the mind be fastened on things external in some way connected with, but yet distinct from the substance of Revelation, it may turn out that these external things cannot hold the ground on which they have been placed. They have to be given up by force at last, when they ought to have been given up long before. And when given up they too often tear away with them part of the strength of that faith of which they had previously been not only the buttress outside but a part of the living framework. It is distinctly the fault of religious, not of scientific men, that there was once a great contest between the Bible and Astronomy, that there has since been a great contest between the Bible and Geology, that there is still a great contest between the Bible and Evolution. In no one of these cases was the Revelation contained in the Bible in danger, but only the interpretation commonly put on the Bible. It is easy long afterwards to condemn the opponents of Galileo and speak of their treatment of him and his teaching as fanaticism and bigotry; and such condemnation has not unfrequently been heard from the very lips that nevertheless denounced the teaching of the geologists. But in all these cases the principle has been the same, and believers have insisted that the Bible itself was gone unless their interpretation of it was upheld. And the mischief is double. For many believers, and more especially unlearned believers, instead of gently helping one another to form the necessary modification of their view of the Bible teaching, instead of endeavouring to find the way out of the perplexity and to disentangle the true spiritual lesson from the accessories which are no part of itself, insisted that it must be all or nothing, and prepared for themselves a very severe trial. There was no doctrine involved whatever; there was nothing at stake on which the spiritual life depended. The duty to be patient, to enquire carefully, to study the other side, to wait for light, was as plain as any duty could be. But all this was forgotten in a somewhat unreasoning impulse to resist an assault on the faith. And there cannot be a doubt that on all these occasions many believers have been seriously shaken by slowly finding out that the position they have taken is untenable. When men have to give up in such circumstances they generally give up far more than they need, and in some cases an unreasonable resistance has been followed by an equally unreasonable surrender. And while believers have thus prepared a stumblingblock for themselves they have put quite as great a stumblingblock before others. For students of Science, informed by instant voices all around that they must choose between their Science and the Bible, knowing as they did that their Science was true, and supposing that the lovers and defenders of the Bible best knew what its teaching was, had no choice as honest men but to hold the truth as far as they possessed it and to give up the Bible in order to maintain their Science. It was a grievous injury inflicted on them; and though some among them might deserve no sympathy, there were some whom it was a great loss to lose. But in the third place, the result of this clinging to externals is to shut out Science and all its correlative branches of knowledge from their proper office of making perpetually clearer the true and full meaning of the Revelation itself. It is intended that Religion should use the aid of Science in clearing her own conceptions. It is intended that as men advance in knowledge of God's works and in power of handling that knowledge, they should find themselves better able to interpret the message which they have received from their Father in Heaven. Our knowledge of the true meaning of the Bible has gained, and it was intended that it should gain, by the increase of other knowledge. Science makes clearer than anything else could have made it the higher level on which the Bible puts what is spiritual over what is material. I do not hesitate to ascribe to Science a clearer knowledge of the true interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, and to scientific history a truer knowledge of the great historical prophets. The advance of secular studies, as they are called, clears up much in the Psalms, and much in the other poetical Books of Scripture. I cannot doubt that this was intended from the beginning, and that as Science has already done genuine service to Religion in this way, so will it do still better service with process of time. On this side also, as on the scientific side, the teaching of the spiritual faculty and the teaching of Revelation indicate that the physical and the spiritual worlds are one whole, and that neither is complete without the other. Science enters into Religion, and is its counterpart, and has its share to take in the conduct of life and in the formation of opinion. And the believer is bound to recognise its value and make use of its services. In conclusion, it is plain that the antagonism between Science and Religion arises much more from a difference of spirit and temper in the students of each than from any inherent opposition between the two. The man of Science is inclined to shut out from consideration a whole body of evidence, the moral and spiritual; the believer is inclined to shut out the physical. And each, from long looking at that evidence alone which properly belongs to his own subject, is inclined to hold the other cheap, and to charge on those who adduce it either blindness of understanding or wilful refusal to accept the truth. And when such a conflict arises it is the higher and not the lower, it is Faith and not Science that is likely to suffer. For the physical evidence is tangible, and the perception of it not much affected by the character of the man who studies it; the spiritual evidence stands unshaken in itself, but it is hid from eyes that have no spiritual perception, and that perception necessarily varies with the man. By what means then can a man keep his spiritual perception in full activity? And is there any test by which a man may know whether his spiritual faculty is in contact with the source of all spiritual life and is deriving from that source the full flow of spiritual power? Revelation, if it tells us anything, ought to tell us this. And the answer which Revelation makes is expressed in the words of St. Paul, 'No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.' This doctrine runs through the New Testament, and it implies that one main purpose of our Lord's appearance among men was to give them in His life, His character, His example, His teaching, at once a touchstone by which they could always try their own spirits, and judge of the real condition of their own spiritual faculty, and also a vivid presentation of the supreme spiritual law by which they could for ever more and more elevate and purify and strengthen their own spiritual power and knowledge. Let a man study the Jesus of the Gospels. Let him put before his _conscience_ the teaching that Jesus gives; the picture drawn of our Father in Heaven whose holiness cannot allow a stain upon a single soul, and whose tenderness cannot endure that a single soul should perish; Who ruleth all the universe, and yet without whom not a sparrow falleth to the ground; the picture drawn of the ideal human life, the humility, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, the utter self-sacrifice, the purity; the picture drawn of human need, the helplessness, the hopelessness of man without God. Let him ponder on all this and on the many touching expressions, the truth, the depth, the force, the superhuman sweetness and gentleness with which all is presented. And if his conscience bows before it, and can say without reserve and in unalloyed sincerity, 'This is my Lord; He shall be my teacher; here I recognise the fulness of the eternal law; at His feet will I henceforth sit and learn; through Him will I drink of the well-springs of eternal truth; His voice will I trust to the very utmost;' then may that man be sure that his conscience is in contact with the Father of spirits, and that his study will guide him into fuller and clearer knowledge, and more certain conviction that he is grasping the truth of God. Let a man put before his _heart_ our Lord's own character. Let him think of the life of privation without complaint, of service to His kind without a thought of self; of His unfailing sympathy with the unhappy, of His tenderness to the penitent; of His royal simplicity and humility; of His unwearied perseverance in the face of angry opposition; of His deep affection for the friends of His choice even when they deserted Him in His hour of darkness; of His death on the Cross and the unearthly love that breathed in every word He uttered and everything He did. Let him read all this many times; and if his heart goes out to the Man whom he is thus beholding, if he can say with all his soul, This is my Lord; here is the supreme object of my affection; Him will I love with all my strength; from Him I will never, if I can help it, let my heart swerve; no other do I know more worthy to be loved; no other will I keep more steadily before my eyes; no other will I more earnestly desire to imitate; no other shall be my example, my trust, my strength, my Saviour; if a man can say this, it is certain that his heart is touched by God, and the heavenly fire is kindled in his soul. Let a man put before his _will_ the Lord's commands; the aims, the self-restraints, the aspirations that the Lord required in His disciples. Let him ponder on the call to heavenly courage in spite of all that earth can inflict or can take away; the call to take up the Cross and follow Him that was crucified; the warnings and the promises, the precepts and the prohibitions; let him think of the Leader who never flinched, of the Lawgiver who outdid His own law; let him think on the nobleness of the aims to which He pointed; of the promise of inward peace made to those who sacrificed themselves, made by our Lord and re-echoed from the very depths of our spiritual being; let him think of the sure help promised in return for absolute trust, tried by millions of saints and never yet known to fail. Let a man put this before his will, and if he can say with all his soul, This is my Lord; here I recognise Him who has a right to my absolute obedience; here is the Master that I mean to serve and follow; and in spite of my own weakness and blindness, in spite of my sins, in spite of stumbling and weariness of resolution, in spite of temptations and in spite of falls, I will not let my eyes swerve, nor my purpose quit my will; through death itself I will obey my Lord and trust to Him to carry me through whatever comes; that man most certainly is moving in the strength of God, and the power of the Eternal Spirit lives within him. Our Lord is the crown, nay, the very substance of all Revelation. If He cannot convince the soul, no other can. The believer stakes all faith on His truth; all hope on His _power_. If the man of Science would learn what it is that makes believers so sure of what they hold, he must study with an open heart the Jesus of the Gospels; if the believer seeks to keep his faith steady in the presence of so many and sometimes so violent storms of disputation, he will read of, ponder on, pray to, the Lord Jesus Christ. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: The Data of Philosophy.] 
28672	----	Scientific and Religious Journal. VOL. I. SEPTEMBER, 1880. NO. 9. THE DIVINITY OF OUR RELIGION AS CONCEDED BY ITS ENEMIES. Voltaire says, "I am ever apprehensive of being mistaken; but all monuments give me sufficient evidence that the polished nations of antiquity acknowledged a supreme God. There is not a book, not a medal, not a bas-relief, not an inscription, in which Juno, Minerva, Neptune, Mars, or any of the other deities, is spoken of as a creating being, the sovereign of all nature. "On the contrary, the most ancient profane books that we have--Hesiod and Homer--represent their Zeus as the only thunderer, the only master of gods and men; he even punishes the other gods; he ties Juno with a chain, and drives Apollo out of heaven. "The ancient religion of the Brahmins explains itself in a sublime manner, concerning the unity and power of God, in these words found in the 2d chapter of the Shastah, 'The Eternal, absorbed in the contemplation of his own existence, resolved, in the fullness of time, to communicate his glory and his essence to beings capable of feeling and partaking his beatitude, as well as of contributing to his glory. The Eternal willed it, and they were. He formed them partly of his own essence, capable of perfection or imperfection, _according to their will_. The Eternal first created Brahma, Vishna and Siva, then Mozazor and all the multitude of the angels. The Eternal gave the pre-eminence to Brahma, Vishna and Siva. Brahma was the prince of the angelic army. Vishna and Siva were his coadjutors. The Eternal divided the angelic army into several bands, and gave to each a chief. They adored the Eternal, ranged around his throne, each in the degree assigned him. There was harmony in heaven.' "The Chinese, ancient as they are, come after the Indians. They have acknowledged one only God. They have no subordinate gods. The Magi of Chaldea, the Sabeans, acknowledge but one supreme God, whom they adored in the stars, which are his work. The Persians adored him in the sun. The sphere placed on the frontispiece of the temple of Memphis was the emblem of one only and perfect God, called _Knef_ by the Egyptians. The title of Deus Optimum Maximus was never given by the Romans to any but Jupiter." Voltaire adds, "This great truth, which we have elsewhere pointed out, can not be too often repeated. Jupiter was the translation of the Greek word Zeus, and Zeus a translation of the Phenician word Jehovah."--_Philosophical Dictionary, vol. 1, pp. 374, 375._ Ever remember, that there is, in all the ancient theories of gods, the grand idea of one supreme God. Unbelievers keep this great truth out of sight. R. Dale Owen says of Christ, "His character and his doings, as exhibited in the gospel biographies--are almost as marvellous as the system he gave to the world. They accord neither with his country nor with his time, nor--except as one illustrious example disclosing to us what man may be--with that human race with which, on a hundred occasions, he expressly identified himself. It were difficult in this connection, to improve on the words of an anglican clergyman, whose early death was a misfortune to the church he adorned. 'Once in the roll of ages, out of innumerable failures, from the stock of human nature, one bud developed into a faultless flower. One perfect specimen of humanity has God exhibited on earth. As if the life blood of every nation were in his veins, and that which is best and truest in every man, and that which is tenderest and gentlest and purest in every woman, were in his character; he is emphatically the Son of Man.' 'Christ is the crowning exemplar of the Inspired; for he, while abiding among us, lived, more nearly than any other of God's creatures here, within sight and hearing of his future home. Therefore it is that his teachings are the noblest fruits of inspiration.'" A.J. Davis says: "He (Christ) was A TYPE OF A PERFECT MAN, both in physical and spiritual qualifications. His general organization was indeed remarkable, inasmuch as he possessed, combined, the perfection of physical beauty, mental powers and refined accomplishments. He was generally beloved during his youth for his great powers of discernment, his thirst after knowledge, and his disposition to inquire into the causes of mental phenomena, of the conditions of society, and of the visible manifestations of nature. He was also much beloved for his PURE natural sympathy for all who were suffering afflictions either of a physical or mental character--It is true that at the age of twelve years he was admitted to the presence of the learned doctors. There he manifested some of his powers of discernment, interior and natural philosophy, unsophistocated love, simplicity of expression, kindness of disposition, and universal sympathy and benovolence. These he displayed with all the naturalness and spontaneousness resulting from the promptings of an uncorrupted and purely-organized spiritual principle." Gregg, a Deist, says: "I value the religion of Jesus, as containing more truth, purer truth, higher truth, than has ever yet been given to man. Much of his teaching I unhesitatingly receive as, to the best of my judgment, unimprovable and unsurpassable--fitted, if obeyed, to make earth all that a finite and material scene can be, and man only a little lower than the angels. 'Not every one that saith unto me, Lord! Lord; * * * * * * but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven.' 'By their fruits ye shall know them;' 'I will have mercy, and not sacrifice;' 'Be not a slothful hearer only, but a doer of the work;' 'Woe unto ye, Scribes and Pharisees, for ye pay tithes of mint, and anise and cummin, and neglect the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and temperance, (faith left out.)' "'The _enforcement of purity of heart as the security for purity of life, and of the government of the thoughts, as the originators and forerunners of action_.' 'He that looketh on a woman, to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her already in his heart;' 'Out of the heart proceed murders, adulteries, thefts, false witness, blasphemies; these are the things which defile a man.' "_Universal good-will toward men._--'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself;' 'Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, that do ye also unto them, for this is the law and the prophets.' "_Forgiveness of injuries._--'Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you, pray for them which dispitefully use you and persecute you;' 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us;' 'I say not unto thee, until seven times, but until seventy times seven;' 'If ye love them only that love you, what reward have ye? Do not even publicans the same?' "_The necessity of self-sacrifice in the cause of duty._--'Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake;' 'If any man will be my disciple, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me;' 'If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee;' 'No man, having put his hand to the plough and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.' "_Humility._--'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth;' 'He that humbleth himself shall be exalted;' 'He that is greatest among you, let him be your servant.' "_Genuine sincerity; being not seeming._--'Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them;' 'When thou prayest, enter into thy closet and shut thy door;' 'When thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face, that thou appear not unto men to fast.' All these sublime precepts need no miracle, no voice from the clouds, to recommend them to our allegiance, or to assure us of their divinity; they command obedience by virtue of their inherit rectitude and beauty, and vindicate their author _as himself the one towering perpetual miracle of history_."--_Creed of Christendom, pp. 318, 319._ "We hold that God has so arranged matters in this beautiful and well-ordered, but mysteriously-governed universe, that one great mind after another will arise from time to time, as such are needed, to discover and flash forth before the eyes of men the truths that are wanted, and the amount of truth that can be borne. We conceive that this is effected by endowing them, or by having arranged that nature and the course of events shall send them into the world endowed with that superior mental and moral organization in which grand truths, sublime gleams of spiritual light, will spontaneously and inevitably arise. Such a one we believe was Jesus of Nazareth, the most exalted religious genius whom God ever sent upon the earth; in himself an embodied revelation; humanity in its divinest phase, 'God manifest in the flesh,' according to eastern hyperbole; an exemplar given in an early age of the world to show what man may and should become in the course of ages; in his progress towards the realization of his destiny; an individual gifted with a grand, clear intellect, a noble soul, a fine organization, marvelous moral intuitions, and a perfectly balanced moral being; and who, by virtue of these endowments, saw further than all other men, 'Beyond the verge of that blue sky, where God's sublimest secrets lie.'"--_Creed of Christendom, pp. 306, 307._ We regard him * * as the perfection of the spiritual character, as surpassing all men of all times in the closeness and depth of his communion with the Father. In reading his sayings, we feel that we are holding converse with the wisest, purest, noblest being that ever clothed thought in the poor language of humanity. In studying his life we feel that we are following the footsteps of the highest ideal yet presented to us upon earth. By the very next sentence Gregg's eulogy upon Christ becomes an eulogy upon the Old Testament. He says the Old Testament contained his teaching; it was reserved for him to elicit, publish and enforce it.--_Creed of Christendom, pp. 300, 310._ "But it must not be forgotten that though many of the Christian precepts were extant before the time of Jesus, yet it is to him that we owe them; to the energy, the beauty, the power of his teaching, and still more to the sublime life he led, which was a daily and hourly exposition and enforcement of his teaching."--_Gregg, C.C._ Strauss allows that it was not possible that the early Christians should have looked upon Christ as their Redeemer and Mediator between God and men, if the apostles had not proclaimed this very doctrine; and the apostles could not have preached it if Jesus himself had not designated himself as the Redeemer from sin, guilt and death, and demanded faith in himself as a religious act. He asserts that the distinguishing features of the Christian church must be traced to Christ, his ministry and teachings about himself; that Christ claimed the power to secure peace to his followers. He also claims that the moral and religious character of Christ is above every suspicion, and unequaled in its kind. He says, "The purely spiritual and ethical conceptions of God as the '_only one_,' he owed to his Jewish education, and, also the purity of his being. But the Greecian element in Jesus was his cheerfulness, arising from his _unsullied mind_." Again he says, Jesus, by cultivating a frame of mind that was cheerful, in union with God, and embracing all men as brethren, had realized the prophetic ideal of a New Covenant with the heart inscribed law; he had to speak with the poet, received God into his will; so that for him the Godhead had descended from its throne, the abyss was filled up, all fear was vanished. His beautifully organized nature had but to develop itself to be more fully and clearly confirmed in its consciousness of itself, but needed not to return to begin a new life. Gregg, the Deist, after presenting Jesus as the "one towering, perpetual miracle of history," says, "Next in perfection come the views which Christianity unfolds to us of God in his relation to man, which were probably as near the truth as the minds of men could in that age receive. God is represented as our Father in heaven, to be whose especial children is the best reward of the peace-makers, to see whose face is the highest hope of the pure in heart, who is ever at hand to strengthen his true worshipers, to whom is due our heartiest love, our humblest submission, whose most acceptable worship is righteous conduct and a holy heart, in whose constant presence our life is passed, to whose merciful disposal we are resigned by death. His relation to us is alone insisted on. All that is needed for our consolation, our strength, our guidance, is assured to us. The purely speculative is passed over and ignored." It may be that the prospect of an "exceeding, even an eternal weight of glory" may be needed to support our frail purposes under the crushing afflictions of our mortal lot. It may be that, by the perfect arrangements of Omnipotence, the sufferings of all may be made to work out the ultimate and supreme good of each. He next makes this grand concession: To the orthodox Christian, who fully believes all he professes, cheerful resignation to the divine will is comparatively a _natural_, _an easy_, _a simple thing_. To the religious philosopher (meaning such as himself) it is the highest exercise of intellect and virtue. The man who has realized the faith that his own lot is so regulated by God as unerringly to work for his highest good--with such a man, resignation, patience, nay cheerful acquiescence in all suffering and sorrow, appear to be in fact only the simple and practical expression of his belief. If, believing all this, he still murmers and rebels at the trials and contrarieties of his lot, he is of the childishness of the infant which quarrels with the medicine that is to lead it back to health and ease. Huxley says: "The belief that the divine commands are identical with the laws of social morality has left infinite strength to the latter in all ages. The lover of moral beauty, struggling through a world full of sorrow and sin, is surely as much the stronger for believing that sooner or later a vision of perfect peace and goodness will burst upon him, as the toiler up a mountain for the belief that beyond crag and snow lie home and rest."--_Modern Symposium, page 250, 1._ Baldwin Brown, of the Liberal School, speaking of a very singular effort of Mr. Harrison, says: "I rejoice in the passionate earnestness with which he lifts the hearts of his readers to ideals which it seems to me--that Christianity which as a living force in the Apostles' days turned the world upside down, that is right side up, with its face toward heaven and God--alone can realize for man. I recall a noble passage written by Mr. Harrison some years ago: 'A religion of action, a religion of social duty, devotion to an intelligible and sensible head, a real sense of incorporation with a living and controlling force, the deliberate effort to serve an immortal humanity--this, and this alone can absorb the musings and the cravings of the spiritual man.' A.J. Davis speaking of the first century, says: 'Jesus Christ and his apostles were at this time establishing the only true religion.'" Now, I wish to say a few things in view of all that I have given from the opposite side. And first, as it is the part of science to find a cause for every effect, we will look after the causes as given by those men who reject the essential divinity of the religion of Christ, and also look after the strength or weakness of their cause, as the case may be: 1. What is the cause of the character they ascribe to the Christ? We will begin with the Deist Gregg. He claims that God has endowed men differently--has endowed some with brains so much larger and finer than those of ordinary men as to enable them to see and originate truths which are hidden from the mass; and that when it is his will that mankind should make some great step forward, should achieve some pregnant discovery, that is, discovery loaded with benefits to our race, he calls into being some cerebral organization of more than ordinary magnitude and power, as that of David, Isaiah, Plato, Shakespeare, Bacon, Newton, Luther, Pascal. _Here we discover the cause of the superior character of Christ as a teacher_, which is assigned by all the leading spirits in modern unbelief, viz: a finely endowed cerebral organization, and a Jewish education; these are constantly presented as sufficient to meet the scientific demand for the cause of his life and teachings, _or the cause of Christianity_. But there is a scientific demand lying behind all this, viz: what is the cause of this fine cerebral organization, which was so wonderful as to produce the most wonderful character of all ages? The answer, given in the clear-cut words of all except Atheists, who say there is no God, _is this_, "The all-wise disposer of all things sends just such men into our race, when any great step forward is necessary to be made--that he endows them with direct reference to the discoveries and achievements to be made." So the great cause, after all, is, upon their own showing, the will and power of God; for if he endowed him, as they claim, with direct reference to his teachings and achievements, it follows of necessity, that he willed that those very teachings and achievements should not only be made, but be made just when they were, and just as they were; so Christianity finds its origin in God, and is a manifestation from God, according to the showing of _Gregg_ and _Strauss_. For Strauss will have it that the finite must not be separated from God. But you must remember that Strauss is a Pantheist, and that he, as such, claims that the infinite, or God, who with him is not a person, but _all-pervading_ life, receives the finite into itself, and so it becomes a part of the idea of the Godhead; in such a manner, however, that it is not peculiar to Jesus alone, but to humanity as such. So Strauss reaches the same thought that Gregg expresses--so far as the relation of Christ to Godhead is concerned. While he and Strauss differ upon the subject of the Godhead, one being a Deist and the other a Pantheist, they find their agreement in naturalism, that is to say, they account for the Christ character upon the score of his being more finely organized and endowed by relation to the Godhead; Gregg claims that this is attributable to an all-wise Godhead, and Strauss claims that it is attributable to the all-pervading life, or Pantheistic Godhead, and both include as a second cause of his character his education. We then systematize as follows: first, the Deist who accepts the character of Christ as exhibiting a superior life. His first cause for the existence of Christianity is the fine organization of Christ. His second cause is his education. The pantheist has it as follows: first cause for the existence of Christianity, the fine organization of Christ. Second cause, his education; both, however, must find a cause _behind_ that fine organization, and that cause, they claim, is the Godhead, however much they may differ about that Godhead. This relation between Christ and the true Godhead is the fundamental article in the Christian religion, and becomes at once, by common agreement, the first great cause of the origin and existence of the Christian religion. No Pantheist, or Deist, or Naturalist gets away from this conclusion without avowing Atheism. What does it amount to? Answer: _Christianity is of God._ The reason is this, the fine cerebral organization of Christ was of God. Hence we have it, first cause, God; second cause, Christ; effect, Christianity. Common admission, Christ is the grandest character, the purest life, the finest teacher, finest organization ever yet given to the race. The Christian says, _Amen!_ But science must find a cause for every effect. What was the cause of the teachings of the apostles, whose sincerity was such that they died for their religion? Well, Strauss says, It is inconceivable that they should have done it if Jesus himself had not designated himself as the Redeemer from sin, guilt and death, and required faith in his person as a religious duty, claiming the power to secure peace in the Holy Spirit. According to Strauss, we have this arrangement: First, the infinite--the Godhead took the finite Jesus into itself. Second, he was above suspicion--the finest, purest specimen of all ever known among men. A.G. Davis, R.D. Owen, Renan and Gregg, and Tom Paine, and a host of others in unbelief say _Amen!_ Gregg says God sent him, and sent him to do _just that_ which he did do. Strauss says, He taught his desciples, and they consequently taught the world. OUR INDEBTEDNESS TO REVELATION. THE TEN SCEPTICS IN COUNCIL--No. 3. BY P.T. RUSSELL. _Christian._ Gentlemen; I am happy to meet you again. Be seated. Have you weighed the matter I gave you in our last interview? If you have, I would like to hear your objections, if you have any. _Reason._ We think we have some valid objections. First, we are satisfied that your position is unscientific, although it is ingeniously taken. Among scientific men it is conceded that nature reveals her own birth, and declares her creation. Now, if it is true that Nature _herself_ tells the history of her origin, then your idea that God the creator told this, is to us unreasonable, for there is no need of the same story being told to the same auditors by two different parties; so we must regard your position as untrue. _Christian._ Are you sure that Nature ever gave the history of her origin, of her birth? do you read it in the book of Nature, or does she tell it vocally? _Reason._ Tell it vocally? No! Nature has no power of speech! She wrote the history of her origin upon the pages of her own book, and the eye of the Scientist reads it there. _Christian._ Are you certain of this? how was she qualified to do so? Could you write the history of your origin, of your birth, without the aid of some one older than yourself? Did you have the powers of observation in active exercise, watching every movement among the causes that brought you into being? Now, if man could not be an eye-witness to his own origin, upon this planet of ours, was there anything else in nature that could be, and so gave that history, which you know you could not? Is it not possible that you have obtained your intelligence from another source--from what I call the revelation of the Creator? May it not be true that you have thus borrowed your information, and falsely credited it to Nature? If you found it in the book of Nature and read it there, you can tell me on what page it is written? will you do this so that I may read it too? _Reason._ Read it there, and on some certain or well-known page! Really, you are very captious. This great truth is on every page; the whole face of Nature declares it; I can not tell you anything about the page. _Christian._ There is a German maxim which, translated into English, reads, "The clear is the true." The natural converse of this German proposition is this: The truth of the ambiguous is very doubtful. This leaves your claim in a very suspicious condition, if it does not brand it with falsehood. Again, you say it was written in the book of Nature. By whom was it written? A book can not write itself. Nature, or the material universe, neither did nor could write it, for she has no power of action, inertia being her property. She might be acted upon. I can write upon this sheet, but it can not write upon itself. If it is written upon it is _self-evident_ that a foreign power has done it. So Nature, being the aggregate of everything, can not move without the hand of a foreign power moving her. I suppose you are now ready to ask, "Is it not a scientific truth that matter is eternal?" _Reason._ Yes, we are satisfied that matter is uncreated, and hence eternal. The idea that something was made of nothing might do for the dark ages, but it will not stand the test now. The penetrating eye of the scientist has exploded that dream. _Christian._ I am glad to hear you speak thus with confidence, and yet the sequel may show that you are the dreamer. Science, falsely so called, has declared matter eternal. True science contradicts this. "None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules, or the identity of their properties, to the operation of any of the causes which we call natural. The quality of each molecule gives it the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent."--Prof. Clark Maxwell, lectures delivered before the British Association, at Bradford, in Nature, vol. 8, p. 441. Prof. Maxwell is a star of first magnitude among British scientists; he has made a specialty of molecular organizations. No real scholar would dare to risk his standing by disputing the conclusion of Prof. Maxwell. An idea that is shut out by matter of fact discoveries will not be made the basis of an argument by any scholar who has not been taking a "Rip Van Winkle sleep" while the rest of the world has been advancing. The great improvements resulting in the astonishing increase of power has enabled us to closely examine the smallest known particles of matter, molecules. And under the best glasses, these give every possible indication of being a created, or manufactured article. Thus, the latest and most grand discoveries in this field of science do unequivocally confirm the declaration of Moses in Gen. 2: 3, where, according to the Hebrew in which he wrote, speaking of the creation of all things, he gives us this idea, "Which God created to make." See marginal reading, Gen. 2: 3. Hebrew scholars tell me this is the correct reading. The word, rendered, "and made," is in the infinitive mood, and hence should read, "to make;" also, that the word rendered, "created" is the proper term by which to indicate the producing cause. This, then, is the thought presented by both of our witnesses, _i.e._, by Moses and science. Moses says God created the material to make globes, or worlds. The material was molecular, and science declares that every molecule gives every possible indication of being manufactured or created. So, true scientific discoveries have so completely vindicated the Mosaic cosmogony that it leaves no chance for any, outside of three classes, to object. For two of these classes I am not writing, viz., the cowardly and the dishonest. To do this would be "casting pearls before swine." But for the ignorant I send this on its mission. Read and digest. In my next I will demonstrate the divine origin of language and religion. Till then, farewell. INFIDELS IN A LOGICAL TORNADO. There is nothing but matter. Matter is eternal. Therefore all things are eternal. Does this have the right ring? It must be so if infidel materialism be the true philosophy. And if it is so we are all deceived; for universal conscience, and universal language, are both against it. If there is anything that is not eternal there was a time when it began to be, it was created in some way, intelligently or by accident. If intelligently, the Bible idea is, and _must be_ correct. If without an intelligence it was not, and could not be by evolution, for creation by evolution could not, and can not be; because that which is not in a thing can not be evolved out of it, unless you can get more out of a thing than there is in it; which is absurd. So evolution is a negation of the doctrine of a creation. And the doctrine that there is nothing but matter, and that matter is eternal, is a denial of creation by intelligence or otherwise. The infidel says, life began to be; for there was a time when there was no life. But they say matter is eternal. And life is not eternal. Therefore life is not matter. Gentlemen, will you get away with this conclusion? The opposite is equally fatal to the materialistic theory. Thus, matter is eternal. There is nothing but matter. Therefore life is eternal. Can you get this conclusion out of, or away from logical deductions? But infidels say, "Life is a property of certain elements of matter." Very well; can you separate things and their properties? Can you get them so far apart as to hold the one class--things--to be eternal, and the other class--properties--not? Your philosophy of spontaneous generation of life says, Yes, yes, there was a time when it began to be, and it was spontaneously generated, of course it was. Very well; there is nothing but matter. Matter did not begin to be; it is eternal. Life began to be, therefore it is not matter; otherwise it is eternal according to infidel logic, unless you take the position that life is _nothing_! Matter is eternal. That which began to be is not eternal. Mind began to be; Therefore, mind is not eternal. Very well; let's look at it once more. Matter is eternal; it did not begin to be. Mind is not eternal; it began to be; Therefore, mind is not matter. Where, gentlemen, O where will you place mind? is it also nothing? That which began to be was created. Life and mind, both, began to be; Therefore, life and mind were created. _Question._ Were they the effects of an inadequate cause? Inanimate and unintelligent nature would not be an adequate cause. Did these do more than animated intelligence can do? Gentlemen of skeptical proclivities answer. If so, is this not evolution backwards? Is it not retrogression, or development at the expense of the loss of power to rise to the plane of unintelligent mind and life evolving nature? Do you say, organic life does evolve organic life and mind. From a state of death? Without antecedent life and mind being drawn upon? Come, gentlemen; how is this? You say inanimate Nature produced life and mind without the previous existence of either; can you duplicate that feat with your power? If you can't are you not below the inanimate Nature which did it for the first time? Can inanimate forces do more than living intelligent Nature? Do you say no! Then demonstrate the philosophy of spontaneous generation of life, and show yourself A GOD. An effort to produce organic life without antecedent life, or where it is not, is an effort to create organic life. The efforts of unbelievers to produce organic life by spontaneous generation, is an effort to produce organic life where it is not. Therefore the efforts of unbelievers to produce organic life, by spontaneous generation, is an effort to create organic life. An effort to create organic life where it is not is an effort to rise into the character of a God, and show one's self the equal of God. But why should this effort not be made? If unintelligent dead matter has performed the feat, without wisdom or design, why should it not be performed by living intelligent Nature? Gentlemen, demonstrate your theory. Do you say, we have given up all hope of witnessing its demonstration? Well, well, has any man ever witnessed it? You say no. Then it is not certain knowledge. Science is certain knowledge. Therefore spontaneous generation of life and intelligent being is not science. Now, gentlemen, don't prostitute science at the shrine of your nonsensical guessing any more. Throw your guessing to one side and acknowledge God like wise men, and be no longer foolish. Do you say life was always in matter? "Then we must conclude that it is in matter in the same sense in which all other corporeal qualities are in bodies, so as to be divisible together with it, and some of it be in every part of the matter." This is ancient Hylozoism. On the other hand, the "Stoical Atheists supposed there was one life only in the entire mass of matter, after such a manner, as that none of the parts of it by themselves should have any life of their own." Now, according to this Stoical theory, "life is no corporeal quality or form, but an incorporeal substance." There are, really, but two sorts of Atheism which have been in any thing like extensive notice. First, "Such as claim that life is essential to matter, and therefore _ingenerable_ and _incorruptible_." Second, "Those who claim that life and everything, besides the bare substance of matter, or extended bulk, is merely accidental, generable, or corruptible, rising out of some mixture or modification of matter." Is life, perception and understanding essential to matter, as such? Is senseless matter perfectly wise, without consciousness? Such is Hylozoism, and it is outrageous nonsense. Very few men ever had credulity enough to receive and appropriate it. This form of Atheism was a forlorn and abandoned thing, without form or systemization, for centuries gone by--and it has few--very few--votaries, even now. The second kind of Atheism "is that of a true notion of body, that it is nothing but resisting bulk," associated with atomic physiology, which is an old theory resurrected of late, and displayed anew, with a _show_ of deep philosophy and wisdom. But that mind and understanding itself sprang from senseless nature and chance, as a mere accident, or from the unguided and undirected motions of matter, is also nonsensical, and utterly absurd. Were there infinite atoms in mutual encounters, dashing and striking against each other? Did these atoms, devoid of sense and life, with their reflections and repurcussions, their cohesions, implexions, and entanglements, their scattered dispersions and divulsions, produce life and intelligence? If so, we will call it by the name of chance. Hear this, O, ye scientists, there is but one choice, and that is between _God_ and _chance_! The chance theory is that "infinite atoms of various sizes and figures, devoid of life and sense, moving fortuitously from eternity in infinite space, and making successive encounters and various implexions and entanglements with one another, produced first a confused chaos of these omnifarious particles or atoms, which, jumbling together with infinite variety of motions by the tugging of their different and contrary forces, hindered and restricted each other until, by joint conspiracy, they conglomerated into a vortex or vortexes, where, after many convulsions and evolutions, molitions and essays, in which all manner of tricks were tried," without design, "they _chanced_ in length of time to settle into the form and system of things known as earth, air and fire, sun, moon and stars, plants, animals and men;" so that senseless atoms unconsciously moved themselves, although dead as grains of sand, and kept up the motion until, without any _living substance_ underlying, and adequate to produce motion, all things so beautifully arranged sprang into life and being. O, ye stars, what is the magnitude of an infidel's credulity? What is there which he can not believe? It is no longer to be set down that he is a reasonable man. "The fool saith in his heart there is no God." There is a grand relation between the eternal spirit and that eternal substance which lies behind and underneath all that is, and that relation is the relation between the "King Eternal" and that over which he presides and which he controls. So out of nothing nothing comes. RELIGIOUS HYSTERIA, OR GETTING INSTANTANEOUSLY CONVERTED. BY GEORGE HERBERT CURTEIS, M.A., _Late Fellow and Sub-Rector of Exeter College, Principal of the Litchfield Theological College, and Prebendary of Litchfield Cathedral._ I fear it is impossible to deny, that in the early part of the eighteenth century--amid the general coldness, languor, and want of enthusiasm which characterized that effete epoch--"the Church of England, as well as all the dissenting bodies, slumbered and slept." At this epoch, the Puritans were buried, and the Methodists were not born. The Bishop of Litchfield, in a sermon delivered in 1724, said, "The Lord's Day is now the Devil's market day." In Litchfield Cathedral Library is a copy of Dr. Balguy's Sermons, delivered in 1748, containing on the fly-leaf an autograph remark by Bishop Bloomfield. It is in these words, "No Christianity here." It is said of that period of time, by a noted minister of the Church of England, that a dry rationalism had taken possession of the church, and that all the powers of her best intellects were engaged in hot contests with Deists and Unitarians; that an equally dry morality and stoical praise of "Virtue" formed the chief part of the exhortations from the pulpit. It was just in these times that the causes of the reformation of John Wesley sprang into being. Seven biographies of John Wesley have already been written, and the subject seems far from being exhausted even yet. As usual in such cases it is the earlier publications which take the more sober view of his character and history; while those of a later date surround their hero with a halo of extravagant admiration. Alexander Knox, a personal friend of Wesley's, thus writes of him: "How was he competent to form a religious polity so compact, effective and permanent? I can only express my firm conviction that he was totally incapable of preconceiving such a scheme. * * * * That he had uncommon acuteness in fitting expedients to conjunctures is most certain; this, _in fact_, was his great talent." (_Letter appended_ to Southey's Third Edition, 2, p. 428.) Methodism, at the first, sprang up simply as a revival. Half a century ago a distinguished Wesleyan wrote as follows: "Though Methodism stands now in a different relation to the establishment than in the days of Mr. Wesley, _dissent_ has never been professed by the body--and for obvious reasons: (1) A separation of a part of the society from the church has not arisen from the principles assumed by the professed Dissenters, and usually made so prominent in their discussions on the subject of establishments. (2) A considerable number of our members are actually in the communion of the Church of England to this day. (3) To leave that communion is not, in any sense, a condition of membership with us." (R. Watson's Observations, p. 156.) "What may we reasonably believe to be God's design in raising up the preachers called Methodists? Not to form any new sect, but to reform the nation, particularly the church; and to spread scriptural holiness over the land." (Large Minutes of Conference, 1744-89, Qu. 3.) In the same, Qu. 45, we have this answer: "We are not seceders, nor do we bear any resemblance to them. We set out upon quite opposite principles." Southey says: "Wesley had now proposed to himself a clear and determinate object. He hoped to give a new impulse to the Church of England, to awaken its dormant zeal, infuse life into a body where nothing but life was wanting, and lead the way to the performance of duties which the church had scandalously neglected." (Southey's Life, p. 193, ed. Bohn.) Mr Curties says: "A disastrous period of Wesleyanism opened with John Wesley's voyage to America, in 1735. It was a mission nobly undertaken, at the instance of Dr. Burton, of Corpus College, and of the celebrated mystic, William Law; and its purpose was twofold; first, that of ministering to the settlers in Georgia, and then of evangelizing the neighboring tribes of red Indians. (Southey's Life, p. 47). But its results were far different from those which either Wesley, or those who wished him well, could have anticipated. For not only were his services for the settlers rejected, and his mission to the Indians a failure. (R. Watson's Life, p. 38.) On his voyage out he had fallen in with twenty-six Moravian fellow-passengers, on their way from Germany to settle in Georgia; and they spoilt all. On his as yet unsettled, enthusiastic, self-dissatisfied frame of mind, the spectacle of their confident, tranquil, yet fervid piety, fell like a spark on tinder. He writes, in his journal, now first begun, 'From friends in England I am awhile secluded; but God hath opened me a door into the whole Moravian Church.' Here, Wesley learned, and took in, the doctrines of Peter Bohler, the Moravian, who taught thus: First, when a man has a living faith in Christ, then he is justified. Second, this living faith is _always given in a moment_. Third, in that moment he has peace with God. Fourth, which he can not have without knowing he has it. Fifth, and being born of God he sinneth not. Sixth, and he can not have this deliverance from sin, without knowing that he has it." (Southey's Life, p. 113.) Such is the origin of the Methodist tenet "that there is a swift and royal road, not only for some men, but for all men, by which the highest spiritual things may be reached at a bound." Under such an impression John Wesley set about realizing an instantaneous and sensible conversion. If a man under high mental excitement is looking for such a thing to occur, something will take place sooner or later that will answer the expectation. So, on Wednesday, May 24, 1738, about nine o'clock in the evening, at a society's meeting in Aldersgate street, Wesley persuaded himself that he had felt the desired transition and had passed--from what, to what? In the answer to that question lies the whole doctrinal difference between modern Methodism and the Church of England. Stevens, in his history of Methodism 1, 108, says, Methodism owes to Moravianism special obligations: (1) It introduced Wesley into that regenerated spiritual life, the supremacy of which over all ecclesiasticism and dogmatism it was the appointed mission of Methodism to reassert. But a still stranger event occurred in John Wesley's life, which contributed still farther to darken and confuse his teaching at this critical period of his career. He had been carried away by his love of the Moravians so far as to take a long journey, and to visit the headquarters of their communion at Hernhutt, in Saxony. There he had been an honored guest at the retreat which the enthusiast Count Zinzendorf had carved out of his estate for these hunted Bohemian followers of Huss and Wickliff. But he had returned home, after a brief residence among them, as Luther returned from Rome, not a little shaken in his allegiance to their system. Indeed, shortly afterwards he broke from them entirely; set up a sort of English Moravianism of his own, and organized it with "bands" and "class-meetings" on the Moravian model. But his feelings as a churchman revolted against their ultra-spiritualism; repudiated their doctrine that sacraments and outward means were nothing, and protested that a man must do something more than wait, in quietude, until the influx of God's spirit came upon him, and filled, like a rising tide, all the sluices and channels of his soul. But no sooner had this unquiet soul emancipated itself from one foreign influence than it was warped out of its true course by another. _German mysticism_ had done its work on him, and its doctrine of regeneration into God's kingdom by an interior convulsion of the mind had left its mark upon Wesleyanism for all future time. But just as this extravagance seemed likely to subside, and to be absorbed amid the healthier atmosphere of an English churchman's common sense, most unhappily a strong breath of _French fanaticism_ suddenly set across his path, from quite another quarter. And the singular phenomenon now presented itself of an epidemic religious-hysteria commingling with, and emphasizing into lamentable extravagance, all the most dangerous features of the Methodist-Moravian doctrine about the new birth. So wonderfully is all the world connected together! * * * * * These French "convulsionists," who had, just before this time, brought their curious mental malady with them into England, were refugees from the atrocious _dragonnades_ of Louis the XIV. Maddened by his abominable and relentless persecutions, deprived by his autocratic edicts of all that life held dear, robbed of their children at the sweet age of seven years old, broken on the wheel, hunted among the mountains of the Cevennes, beggared, insulted, tortured, massacred--what wonder that these poor Protestants lost the balance of their mental powers and engendered a hysterical disease? The disease is (I believe), under its strangely mutable forms, well known to medical science, though science has never yet been able to probe all its mysterious depths. Its seat is, apparently, the great nervous ganglia of nutrition, which lie in the center of the body, and whose strange sympathetic action with and upon the brain has led to all the popular notions about the heart and neighboring organs being the seat of various impassioned feelings. Suffice it, however, at present, to observe that the phenomena which this extraordinary and infectious disease presented had sufficed to cheer the faith and animate the ardor of the Calvinists in the Cevennes against Rome. The Cevennes is a range of mountains in the south of France, divided into N. and S. * * a wild rugged country, and the abode of many Protestants, who here maintained themselves against the persecutions of their enemies. (See _Cavalier Jean_). Such, in fact, were the causes of the extasies or irregular inspirations; the want of spiritual guides and schools, spoliation, suffering, liability to torture, and constant apprehension of the galley or the gibbet, the minds of these unfortunate creatures became excited. * * * This religious enthusiasm began in Vivarais, an old territory of France, in Languedoc, on the Rhone, with the dragonnades and the revocation, repeal of an edict, about the year 1686. A practical proof of the morbific power of the emotions and passions is found in the frequent occurrence of _psychopathitis_ in times when all the elements of social life are in a state of fermentation. In and after revolutions sudden changes of fortune produce a thousand cases of mental disorder. The very same disease broke out among the Romanists themselves, at Port Royal, in 1729. In the previous century it had thrown whole nunneries near Bordeaux into wild confusion. In the sixteenth century it was known in Italy as the "Dancing Mania," or Tarantism. At the close of the fifteenth century _Tarantism_ had spread beyond the borders of Apulia. * * * The number of those affected by it increased beyond all belief. Inquisitive females joined the throng and caught the disease from the mental poison which they eagerly received _through the eye_. * * * Foreigners of every color and race were, in like manner, affected by it. Neither youth nor age afforded any protection; so that even old men of ninety threw aside their crutches, and joined the most extravagant dancers. * * * Subordinate nervous attacks were much more frequent during the seventeenth century, than at any former period. (Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 107-115, Engl. Trans.) During the Middle Ages it appeared in Germany. It was a convulsion, which in the most extraordinary manner infuriated the human frame; * * * and was propogated by the _sight_ of the sufferers. They continued dancing, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death. * * * They were haunted by visions, and some of them afterwards asserted that they had felt as if immersed in a _stream of blood_, which obliged them to leap so high. George Fox, Journal 1, p. 100: "The word of the Lord came to me again. * * * So I went up and down the streets crying, Woe to the bloody city, Lichfield! And there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a pool of blood." In Germany it was called St. John's or St. Vitus's dance. And long before its first appearance in that precise form, in 1374, it had, no doubt, been the real secret of the bacchanalian orgies among the Greeks, and of the frantic, dervish-like gestures and cuttings with knives and lancets which we read of among Asiatic races. In our own day and country (thank God) these extraordinary and degrading spectacles are scarcely to be seen. But the disease still lurks among the superstitious Christians of Tigre in Abyssinia; in Siberia; among the revivalists of Ireland and America; and (in a very mild form), among the ignorant Welsh Methodists,--who are on this account popularly called "Jumpers." Now it so happened that these poor hysterical French refugees had arrived in great numbers in London, and had also visited Bristol, shortly before the critical year 1739,--when the excitable George Whitfield landed from America, and John Wesley returned home from Germany. Men's thoughts were then full of the (so called) "French prophets." A new religious enthusiasm was floating in the atmosphere, and it only needed the impulse of some exciting preaching, and the mental tension which is always produced among expectant and heated crowds, to generate infallibly an outbreak of this unaccountable and infectious malady. Such an occasion soon presented itself. In February, 1739, Whitfield, for the first time, preached in the open air, at Kingswood, near his native place, Bristol, to the wild and lawless colliers of the then _Black Country_ of England. In the May following he persuaded John Wesley to join him there, and to imitate his example. And then, for the first time, _religious hysteria_ began to manifest itself in England. Men and women of all ages fell down in convulsions, and cried aloud for mercy. And honest John Wesley said, "I am persuaded that it is the devil tearing them as they are coming to Christ."--_Wesley's Journals._ THINGS HARD TO BELIEVE. BY D.H. PATTERSON. "For myself I still live and doubt. You know I can't believe everything. There are so many things hard to believe--I can't see them." So wrote an honest, intelligent young man, who was standing on the verge of infidelity. Nor is he alone in his doubts. Many persons will not accept the Bible on account of its mysteries _or miracles_. To doubt seems to be as natural as to believe. Sir Wm. Hamilton says: "Philosophers have been unanimous in making doubt the first step in philosophy." When Paul says, "Prove all things," he tells us doubt a thing until it is tested. To doubt is not necessarily a fault, but to continue in doubt is blameworthy. If we are doubtful about a thing it is our duty as intelligent beings to examine the testimony concerning it, and so end our doubt. But shall we reject a thing because it is hard to believe? If the Bible had nothing in it hard to comprehend we would not be likely to accept it as divine in its origin; because the mind that comprehends a matter is no more limited, in regard to that matter, than the mind that conceived it. Consequently, if we could comprehend everything in the Bible there would be no divinity of infinite attributes about it to contrast with the limited powers of human nature. Its miracles are proof of its divine origin. If you leave the Bible, to what will you go? Are all things hard to believe in the Bible? Does a man's believing power rest upon flowery beds of ease in the teaching of infidelity? In the so-called realms of free-thought is there nothing hard to believe? Will it no more be said that-- "Not a truth has to art or to science been given, But brows have ached for it, and souls toiled and striven?" Rejecting the Bible, you must either accept Deism or Atheism. Deism admits the existence of a God of infinite power and intelligence. A Deist need have no trouble in believing a miracle. The question with him is not, can God work miracles, and thereby reveal himself to man, but has he done it. Reason teaches us that intelligent design characterizes every act of God. Which theory ascribes the more intelligence to God--the Deist's or the Christian's? It is universally conceded that man has a worshiping nature. This is evinced by the almost universal idolatry of past ages. Would an act of wisdom reveal to man the true object of worship? Man has a conscience which smites him for his wrong doing, and approves him for his well doing. Would wisdom and love tell him what is right? Or would such attributes allow him to remain in ignorance of his duties? Man has a desire for eternal life; would Deity prepare a place of happiness for him and not reveal the fact to him, that he might better prepare for it, and enjoy the hope of it? Man has a desire for the knowledge of his origin, and for a knowledge of the attributes of his God; would an intelligent being create him with these desires and refuse to gratify them? Surely there are some things in Deism hard to believe. Deism allows that man has in his nature this empty bucket, which is not to be filled during his stay in this world, _if it shall ever be_! Nor are these all the hard things which Deists ask me to believe. He wishes me to believe that the history of the Nazarene is legendary, that he was a fanatical enthusiast. Some Deists have refused to believe so hard a thing as this. Yet I am asked to believe, in addition to this, that he, Christ, "has become," as Renan says, "the corner-stone of humanity so entirely, that to tear his name from the world would be to rend it to its foundations." I am asked, also, to believe, with Renan, the prince of Deists, that, "Whatever may be the surprises of the future, Jesus will never be surpassed. His worship will grow young without ceasing; his legend will call forth tears without end; his sufferings will melt the noblest hearts; all ages will proclaim that among the sons of men there is none born greater than Jesus." I am asked, with this same Renan, to "place the person of Jesus on the highest summit of human grandeur." Is it not hard to believe all this about Jesus, and at the same time believe that he gave to the world a false religion? Truly there are many things hard to believe--"_I can't see them!_" I can not believe that "the passion of an hallucinated woman gave to the world a resurrected God." I can not believe that his legend was the fruit of a great, altogether spontaneous conspiracy. A conspiracy implies conspirators; and I can not believe that the apostles were such outrageous fools as to make a conspiracy, and work so zealously in it, and cling so firmly to it, when it promised nothing but stripes, imprisonments, hunger, nakedness, and death. Neither can I believe that these unlearned Galilean fishermen had the ability in themselves to concoct a conspiracy that would, and did, deceive nearly the whole civilized world. Nor can I believe that an ignorant, deluded Nazarene founded a religion that has held the attention of the thoughtful of all ages. He that refuses to believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ, along with the claims of the Bible, has many more and greater difficulties in accounting for the existence of Christianity. It is here, and its existence is the greatest miracle man has ever witnessed. To deny its divinity only increases its wonderfulness. We can not have an effect without an adequate cause. It is hard to believe that humanity is an adequate cause of Christianity. For eighteen centuries it has been living and acting; persecuted by enemies without, and torn and betrayed by enemies within; oppressed by government, and corrupted by Popes and priests; shorn of its grandeur and glory by paganism; its spirituality crippled by stripes and animosities; its fervid love and deep piety replaced, to a great extent, by policy; its rites and ceremonies changed by councils; yet, it continues a monumental proof of the divinity of its glorious founder. Rescued from the wreck of the Dark Ages by Luther and others, it commends itself more and more to every reflecting mind as the only living religion of the present and future. Deliver me from the credulity that believes that such a wonderful soul-redeeming institution had its origin in the passion of a crazy woman or the conspiracy of a few ignorant fishermen. THE RESULT OF IGNORANCE, AS VIEWED FROM THE SKEPTIC'S STANDPOINT. "A singular forgetfulness is sometimes noticeable in quarters where one would least expect it; that the education of an immature mind, and the prosecution of a _scientific inquiry_, are two perfectly distinct things; that the former requires faith, the latter skepticism; and that while the former is the work of the church, the latter is the work of individuals. Thus the Duke of Somerset goes to church, and finds an ignorant generation _reposed in a paradise of illusions_, while its more learned and thoughtful progeny _is excruciated with doubt_. In vain preachers now exhort to faith. * * * The Protestant oftentimes takes up his open Bible; he wishes to believe; he tries to believe. * * * All these efforts avail nothing." _Christian Theology and Modern Skepticism, 1872, p. 144._ "The Duke and the Protestant are simply trying to do two things at once; and, naturally, Professor Huxley is tempted in the same direction." _Lay Sermons, p. 21._ "But then he is keen enough to suspect some absurdity in the position, and honestly proclaims that the army of liberal thought is, at present, in very loose order; and many a spirited freethinker makes use of his freedom mainly to vent nonsense." _Lay Sermons, p. 69._ According to the above quotations, if it is wise to be skeptical, to be ignorant is bliss. Give me a "_paradise of illusions_;" let me _repose in them_; if I am disappointed in the end I shall fare as well as the skeptic, with this difference, that in case there is any hereafter, I shall know that in my ignorance I lived a life of blessedness with reference to the _now_ experienced eternity; while, in case there is no hereafter for us, we shall just be equal. Again I repeat it, let me have the side where I take no risks when viewed from the skeptic's standpoint, and where I can "_repose in a paradise of illusions_," in preference to the _skeptic's excruciating doubt_. But we shall not be disappointed. Neither are we necessarily a generation of immature minds. We are willing as a whole to compare with non-church going people as a whole. And we are further conceded to be the happiest people in the world, unless you can find a people happier than those who "_repose in a paradise of mental illusions_." Yes! But we shall find in the end that it was neither ignorance nor illusion, but the wisdom of the wise. Let us continue thus, _to live_. EVOLUTION. WHAT DO EVOLUTIONISTS TEACH? DEDICATED TO C.F., DANVILLE, IND. Many scientists who reject religion put on an air of superiority that is repulsive. If you call their speculations in question you at once receive credit for being an uneducated fool, a worshiper of the Bible. Mr. Huxley advises theologians to let science alone. _Wonderful advice!_ Do such men let religion alone? They can't agree among themselves, not even in their advice to theologians. And they ask more of religionists than they are willing to give. Dr. Lionel Beale, an English physiologist has written a volume of three hundred and eighty pages to prove that the phenomena of life, instinct and intellect, are not referable to the blind forces of nature. He avows his belief that mind governs matter; that a "never-changing, all-seeing, power-directing and matter-guiding Omnipotence" presides over all things. He also avows faith in the miracles underlying Christianity. But Prof. Huxley says, there is overwhelming and crushing evidence that no event has ever occurred on this earth which was not the effect of natural causes, meaning thereby physical causes. The factor of a divine intelligence he sets aside as of no consequence. His words are, "the doctrine that belief in a personal God is necessary to any religion, worthy of the name, is a mere matter of opinion." Tyndall, Carpenter and Henry Thompson teach that "prayer is superstitious absurdity." Herbert Spencer is regarded by infidels as the "great philosopher," and he labors to prove that there can not be a personal God, or human spirit or self; that moral laws are simply "generalizations of utility," or, as Carl Vogt would have us believe, that self-respect, and not the will of God, is the basis and law of moral obligation. And Mr. Haeckel would have us believe that a few "monistic materialists" are the only men entitled to a hearing upon the question of "Evolution." So he excludes all true and intelligent Christians, for they are not and can not be "monistic materialists." His words are, "It is only a select few, therefore, of learned and philosophical monistic materialists who are entitled to be heard on questions of the highest moment to every individual man, and to human society." But just what the man means by the "_highest moment_" we are anxious to know, as he is the most blank negative of religion that we can conceive. When he attempts to answer the religious objections to evolution, or, as he terms it, the descendence theory, he unceremoniously dismisses them as beneath his notice, giving his only argument, viz.: "All faith is superstition." He disposes of the objections drawn from first, or intuitive truths, by a simple denial of their existence, asserting that all our knowledge is from our senses. The objection that so many noted naturalists reject evolution, as it is advocated by himself and others, he considers at some length. He says, first, "Many have grown old in another way of thinking and can not be expected to change." Second, "Many are collectors of facts, without studying their relations, or, they are destitute of the genius for generalization, and so, can not rear the building. Others, again, are specialists." He says "It is not enough that a man should be versed in one department, he must be at home in all, in Botany, Zoology, Comparative Anatomy, Biology, Geology and Paleontology. He must be able to survey the whole field." His next, and mainly, is the statement that naturalists are generally _lamentably deficient_ in philosophical culture and spirit. He says "The immovable edifice of the true monistic science, or what is the same thing, natural science, can only arise through the most intimate interaction and mutual interpretation of philosophy and observation." (See Philosophie and Empirie, pp. 638-641.) This statement alone should stir up all Deists to a consideration of their teaching touching the sufficiency of the "Book of Nature;" for if it be true, then we must expect some other revelation, or be left to the conclusion that the Great Father has left his creatures in a great measure in a state of helplessness, unless Mr. Haeckel, or some other man like himself, can show us that the "Great Spirit" intended that he, and others like him, should do our thinking for us, seeing that we are incapable through mental deficiency, of raising the edifice, and seeing that, Mr. Huxley advises us poor (?) theologians to "let it alone." And Mr. Haeckel himself would not allow that any man is entitled to a hearing until he comprehends Biology, Botany, Comparative Anatomy, Zoology, Geology and Paleontology. Ho! evolutionists, ninety-nine out of every hundred of you, get out! You have no right to speak on the subject; otherwise, Haeckel is one of the foolish men, and talks without understanding himself. You must be at home in all those sciences, and emancipate yourselves from all religious beliefs before you have a right to be heard upon the grave question of evolution from an ancestral moneron; for you are incapable of comprehending your own _monistic_--_materialistic origin_. For, according to Haeckel, before a man is entitled to be heard he must renounce all faith in God, in the Bible, in the human spirit, and in the future life. Mr. Haeckel knows a great deal? Well, there are some very weighty men in this world? But, when they are in the east, our planet does not tip up in the west? We Christians have no right to be heard? Mr. Huxley advises us to keep our mouths shut (?). Well, that is grand? It correllates so beautifully with "_free thought_" and "free speech." One evolutionist is all the time spreading himself about the preachers of religion knowing nothing in science, and another is saying to them, let science alone, and another says you can't rear the building if you try; you don't know enough. What a grand harmony there is just here? We theologians would advise "natural selection to be present with such instructors as thus advise us, and continue with them long enough, at least, to reject the worst from the school and give us a blessing in the survival of the fittest, for we would like to know our duty." _So much for liberalism and broad principles._ "Monistic materialism," according to Haeckel, finds its primeval parent in a moneron, a creature of one substance, and that a semi-albuminous fluid. Now, it would be very interesting to know just how all the different substances, in all the creatures of this earth, got in, in order to get out, for involution lies behind evolution. But then, we theologians "have no right to be heard?" "are not entitled to be heard?" and, besides this, Mr. Haeckel has set aside intuitive, or first truths, and, as all axiomatic truths are of this class, perhaps it is wrong for us to bother you with our logic? Nevertheless we can't refrain from speaking our piece; we are advocates of free thought and free speech. It must be conceded that there was a time when life and organisms began to exist upon our planet. From whence did they come, and how? The "high-priest" of Germany, who claims to be entitled to a hearing, says, by "spontaneous generation" they first appeared in the "monera." His words are these, "Only such homogeneous organizations as are yet not differentiated and are similar to the inorganic crystals in being homogeneously composed of one single substance, could arise by spontaneous generation, and could become the primeval parents of all other organisms." Such is Haeckel's germ of life. Did it always exist? Is a moneron an eternal life germ? No. Neither Haeckel or Darwin advocates such a foolish idea; nor yet the idea of life-germs always existing. Life-germs are material organisms, and they may be alive or dead; for we know there is no period in the history of a living organism when it is not liable to die. Spontaneous generation does not correlate with the idea that "life-germs always existed." And it is also opposed to the Christian idea that all life is from God, the eternal, ever-living spirit. So we Christians say, there is no life without antecedent life. If men prefer to deify life-germs, of course that is their business, but we have no disposition to accept a distinction without a difference, excepting the sacrifice of our common sense. It is more rational to believe in an ever-living intelligence as the source of all life, intelligence and moral nature. Did an eternal life-germ evolve all the forms of organic life known upon our earth? The eternal life-germ idea of materialistic philosophy represents no evolutionists of any note whatever. I know of one gentlemen only, at the present writing, that it represents. Haeckel says, We can, therefore, from these general outlines of the inorganic history of the earth's crust deduce the important fact, that at a certain definite time life had its beginning on our earth, and that terrestrial organisms did not exist from eternity, but at a certain period came into existence for the first time. The _godless advocates_ of spontaneous generation thus allow that life in its first appearance was without antecedent life; and so more was produced by the blind forces than was in nature to be evolved. Tell me how that was done, and I will tell you how to create something out of nothing. Haeckel says, "All the different forms of organisms which people are usually inclined to look upon as the products of creative power acting for a definite purpose, we, according to the theory of selection, can conceive as the necessary productions of natural selection, working without a purpose."--_History of Creation, Vol. 1, pp. 176-327._ He says, "We have before this become acquainted with the simplest of all species of organisms in the _monera_, whose entire bodies when completely developed consist of nothing but a semi-fluid albuminous lump; they are organisms which are of the utmost importance for the theory of the first origin of life."--_History of Creation, Vol. 1, p. 330._ Here we part with our friends of the Haeckel school. They maintain that there was life without antecedent life, and so get more out of dead atoms than was in them, which is equal to something made of nothing. Mr. Darwin, being apprised of this difficulty, claimed a miraculous origin for the first form, or forms, of life, but retired the Creator at once upon the great achievement, leaving all to be evolved from these first forms by and through natural agencies, denying even design in nature. Mr. Buckner, a bold advocate of the "spontaneous generation" of life, who has published two volumes on Darwinism, says Darwin's views "are the most thoroughly naturalistic that can be imagined, and far more atheistic than those of his predecessor, Lamark, who admitted, at least, a general law of progress and development; whereas, according to Darwin, the whole development is due to the gradual summation of innumerable minute and accidental operations." It is admitted that the doctrine of evolution of species from other and entirely different species is a mere hypothesis, an opinion, _or guess_. What have we to gain by the adoption of this unknown factor in the vegetable and animal _kingdoms_? Answer, nothing but _irreligion_; a world of godless infidels tearing afresh the wounds that death has made, and restoring to the grave its victory over the human heart. Renan, in his recent lectures talks about the "torture consequent upon the disappointment in his efforts to attain to the unattainable;" and Strauss said the "sense of abandonment is at first something awful." This is the inheritance that the tenet of evolution leaves to all infidels in their last extremity. WHEN SHOULD CHILDREN BECOME CHURCH MEMBERS? We have looked with great anxiety upon the efforts being put forth in our Sunday-schools, believing that they would result in bringing intelligent Christians from the extremes into which they have fallen by means of the controversy going on upon the subject of infant church membership; but it seems that there is great need of some one to speak out against the old, fossilized ideas touching this subject. And at the risk of being faulted we shall say our piece. First, The Apostle John addresses a class of Christians which he terms "little children," classifying them in contradistinction from young men and fathers. He says, "I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for his name's sake." This class included neither young men nor fathers, for John addresses young men and fathers as separate and distinct classes. Jesus also recognized this class of disciples by saying, "Better were it for a man that a mill-stone be hanged about his neck, and he be drowned in the depths of the sea than for him to offend one of these little ones which _believe in me_."--_Matt. 18._ Second, The gospel of Christ undoubtedly reaches the lowest capacity of responsible creatures, and just where the ability to believe in Christ and commence a Christian life comes in, there responsibility comes in, whether that be at eight, ten, or any other year in the child's history. We can not conceive of a sinner in youth without a Savior provided, nor of a sinner in childhood without the gospel privilege of becoming a member of the body of Christ. Fathers and mothers, where are your children? Are they reading novels between Sundays, and all other kinds of literature? Are they believing this, that, and the other story, which they read? Are they old enough and wise enough to know what is wrong? Do they know what is right? Have you taught them? If you have, that settles one important question, viz.: are they teachable? If they are not, of course you have not taught them. Well, teach them the knowledge of our Lord just as soon as you can, as soon as they are teachable, and then point them to the Savior of men, for they are then old enough and wise enough to become Christians. The gospel of the blessed Savior is so loaded down with divine mercy that it simplifies its requirements to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and obedience to his will. But ability measures responsibility, and where ability begins responsibility begins, and as ability increases responsibility also increases. I am, and have been, for many years, satisfied that a great and grievous wrong exists on both sides of the question of infant church membership. First, no one can be a member of the body of Christ who is incapable of enjoying spiritual union with Christ through faith and submission to his will, for "he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit." So membership in the body of Christ is, so far as unteachable babes are concerned, a _misnomer_. On the other side, the neglect to teach children when they are teachable, and to instruct them to come to Christ in their childhood, when they can come in faith, is a great and grievous wrong. Will not all our brethren speak out upon this subject? _Brethren, let us have no laziness here!_ Where a soul finds condemnation there the gospel finds it. OUR INDEBTEDNESS TO THE JEWS. It is the business of mind to follow facts and mark their results. The Jewish nation had an existence prior to the Augustan or Athenian age, and was far ahead of either in civilization and morality. The Jewish people have often been reprobated, as a people almost without literature, art and civilization, but we are persuaded that it is base ingratitude upon the part of any scholar living in a civilized land to speak of that ancient family thus in terms of reproach. What are the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments but Hebrew productions? It certainly corresponds with infidelity to speak contemptuously of the people who, more than all others, were under the influence of those scriptures for ages in the past, and who were the chosen people through whom they were to be given to the world of mankind. The Hieroglyphics of Egypt, and the Classics of Greece, are perishable monuments constructed in memory of intelligence and civilization, when compared with the undying influence of the Bible upon the hearts of the millions who resort to it to find their way through life. For one edition of the classics we have had ten thousand Bibles. Why is this? Men of the profoundest wisdom have investigated the claims of the Bible upon the attention of the literary and scientific, upon the attention of the moral and civil in every nation. They tell us that its morality and theology are far superior to the teachings of any and all of the ancient teachings of the greatest known philosophers, and that the writings of those philosophers are much inferior to those of Moses and the prophets. The poetry and philosophy of the Hebrews, as presented in the Bible, surpasses Homer and Aristotle. And their independent religion, existing amidst the heathenism of the surrounding pagan nations, was the only religion calculated, by virtue of its "one God" to worship, to unite the human family in one great brotherhood. It is conceded upon all sides that the Bible is the most remarkable book that the world ever read. How base and unjust is it, therefore, to be speaking reproachfully of the Hebrews as a nation. We should remember them with great kindness for the inestimable treasures of wisdom and knowledge handed to the people of the ages through them. To them the whole Christian world is indebted for its morality and civilization. Even Thomas Paine got his notions of civil government from the Pentateuch. If you doubt this read his work entitled "Common Sense," and you will doubt it no more. Jewish writings and American life and character are very intimately blended, and we can not separate them without being guilty of great injustice. "If British, Scottish, Roman, Saxon, Danish and Norman blood runs through our veins, our minds have been cast in a Hebrew mould." To this cause we owe the most of our greatness as a nation. THE SECOND FIVE POINTS IN CALVINISM, WITH TWO OTHER FIVES. Some one has submitted the second five points in Calvinism. Here they are: _First_--If you seek religion you can't find it. _Second_--If you find it you don't know it. _Third_--If you know it you haven't got it. _Fourth_--If you have got it you can't lose it. _Fifth_--If you lose it you never had it. --_Virginia Missionary._ THE FIVE POINTS OF METHODISM. _First_--God is able to give religion to all the world. _Second_--If you seek it you can find it. _Third_--If you find it you are sure to know it. _Fourth_--If you don't know it, you haven't got it. _Fifth_--If you lose it you can easily find it. FIVE POINTS IN THE RELIGION OF JESUS CHRIST _First_--The gospel is the embodiment of the religion of Jesus Christ. _Second_--God gave it as a system of good news, to the whole human family. _Third_--If you lay hold upon it by faith you have it. _Fourth_--If you have it, and will obey it in your every day life, you will enjoy it. _Fifth_--If you don't enjoy it, it is because you don't obey it. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S EPITAPH AS THE EXPONENT OF HIS FAITH. [Copy, from the _Virginia Missionary_ of August 12th, 1880.] A correspondent of the _Inter-Ocean_ not long since sent the following comment upon Ingersoll's claim that Benjamin Franklin was an infidel: "As Col. Ingersoll appears to be trying to appropriate our old and esteemed friend, Benjamin Franklin, as a recruit for his infidel doctrine, let me call his attention, through your widely circulated journal, to the following epitaph, written by himself for himself: "'The body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer, Lies here food for worms, Like the cover of an old book, Its contents torn out and stripped Of its lettering and gilding; But it will (As he believed) Appear again, in a New and more beautiful Edition, corrected and Amended by THE AUTHOR.'" HONESTY, OR THE INNER-SELF. I have thought that the inner-self upon the surface both in words and actions is necessary to the existence of an honest man. The conclusion forces itself upon me in such a manner that I can not forbear expressing it, and yet, if this be true, how few are strictly honest. But it is not intended that this conclusion shall be applied beyond its proper limits; that is to say, to those elements of thought which should, in righteousness, be kept forever in the heart. But it is intended that the remark shall be applied to all that is said and done. The surface man should always find his prototype, or counterpart, in the inner-self, otherwise there is a want of harmony between the outer and the inner-self. This want of harmony is dishonesty; so dishonesty is always hypocrisy. There is much more hypocrisy in the world than men are accustomed to think. What an immense distance there is between the inner and the outer self. The distance is not always measured, for men often keep much in their hearts that is not known by others, and which they themselves do not counterfeit. In this we can not charge them with _necessary_ dishonesty. Men may be dishonest in keeping a secret, but keeping a secret is not necessarily dishonesty. The distance between the heart, the inner-self and the outward-man, is very great, even as respects the secrets of the heart which may be honestly kept as secrets, and it is certainly very great as respects those secrets; which should not be kept as secrets. It is a fact, so well known in our time that we need not argue the question. There is a great deal of religion in the human heart which is latent until some misfortune, that brings a man to a sense of his need of help from a higher source, brings it to the surface. It is true of dishonest men, who try to stultify their religious nature, and make the world believe that they are genuine, honest infidels. I very much doubt the honesty of every infidel known in our history. Transcriber's Note The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. 
26397	----	MIRACLES AND SUPERNATURAL RELIGION BY JAMES MORRIS WHITON, PH.D. (YALE) _Portentum non fit contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura_ --AUGUSTINE New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1903 _All rights reserved_ COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up, electrotyped, and published May, 1903. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Variant spellings have been retained. {=e} represents e with upper macron. To M. B. W. PREFATORY NOTE While the present subject of discussion tempts to many an excursion into particulars, its treatment is restricted to general outlines, with an aim simply to clarify current ideas of miracle and the supernatural, so as to find firm holding ground for tenable positions in the present "drift period" of theology. The chief exception made to this general treatment is the discussion given to a class of miracles regarded with as much incredulity as any, yet as capable as any of being accredited as probably historical events--the raisings of the "dead." The insistence of some writers on the virgin birth and corporeal resurrection of Jesus as essential to Christianity has required brief discussion of these also, mainly with reference to the reasonableness of that demand. As to the latter miracle, it must be observed that in the Biblical narratives taken as a whole, whichever of their discordant features one be disposed to emphasize, the psychical element clearly preponderates over the physical and material. J. M. W. NEW YORK, April 11, 1903. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTORY 13 THE ARGUMENT I The gradual narrowing of the miraculous element in the Bible by recent discovery and discussion.--The alarm thereby excited in the Church.--The fallacy which generates the fear.--The atheistic conception of nature which generates the fallacy.--The present outgrowing of this conception. 25 II The present net results of the discussion of the miraculous element in the Bible.--Evaporation of the former evidential value of miracles.--Further insistence on this value a logical blunder.--The transfer of miracles from the artillery to the baggage of the Church.--Probability of a further reduction of the list of miracles.--Also of a further transfer of events reputed miraculous to the domain of history. 37 III Arbitrary criticism of the Biblical narratives of the raising of the "dead."--Facts which it ignores.--The subject related to the phenomena of trance, and records of premature burial.--The resuscitation in Elisha's tomb probably historical.--Jesus' raising of the ruler's daughter plainly such a case.--His raising of the widow's son probably such.--The hypothesis that his raising of Lazarus may also have been such critically examined.--The record allows this supposition.--Further considerations favoring it: 1. The supposition threatens no real interest of Christianity.--2. Enhances the character of the act as a work of mercy.--3. Is independent of the belief of the witnesses of the act.--4. Is coherent with the general conception of the healing works of Jesus as wrought by a peculiar psychical power.--Other cases.--The resurrection of Jesus an event in a wholly different order of things.--The practical result of regarding these resuscitations as in the order of nature. 47 IV A clearer conception of miracle approached.--Works of Jesus once reputed miraculous not so reputed now, since not now transcending as once the existing range of knowledge and power.--This transfer of the miraculous to the natural likely to continue.--No hard and fast line between the miraculous and the non-miraculous.--Miracle a provisional word, its application narrowing in the enlarging mastery of the secrets of Nature and of life. 75 V Biblical miracles the effluence of extraordinary lives.--Life the world's magician and miracle-worker; its miracles now termed _prodigies_.--Miracle the natural product of an extraordinary endowment of life.--Life the ultimate reality.--What any man can achieve is conditioned by the psychical quality of his life.--Nothing more natural, more supernatural, than life.--The derived life of the world filial to the self-existent life of God; "begotten, not made."--Miracle as the product of life, the work of God. 85 VI The question, old and new, now confronting theologians.--Their recent retreat upon the minimum of miracle.--The present conflict of opinion in the Church.--Its turning-point reached in the antipodal turn-about in the treatment of miracles from the old to the new apologetics.--Revision of the traditional idea of the supernatural required for theological readjustment. 95 VII Account to be made of the law of atrophy through disuse.--The virgin birth and the corporeal resurrection of Jesus, the two miracles still insisted on as the irreducible minimum, affected by this law.--The vital truths of the incarnation and immortality independent of these miracles.--These truths now placed on higher ground in a truer conception of the supernatural.--The true supernatural is the spiritual, not the miraculous.--Scepticism bred from the contrary view.--The miracle-narratives, while less evidential for religion, not unimportant for history.--Psychical research a needed auxiliary for the scientific critic of these. 107 VIII The cardinal point in the present discussion the reality not of miracles, but of the supernatural.--Fallacy of pointing to physical events as essential characteristics of supernatural Revelation.--The character of a revelation determined not by its circumstances, but by its contents.--Moral nature supernatural to physical.--Nature a hierarchy of natures.--Supernatural Religion historically attested by the moral development it generates.--Transfer of its distinctive note from moral ideals to physical marvels a costly error.--Jesus' miracles _a_ revelation, of a type common with others before and after.--The unique Revelation of Jesus was in the higher realm of divine ideas and ideals.--These, while unrealized in human life, still exhibit the fact of a supernatural Revelation.--The distinction of natural and supernatural belongs to the period of moral progress up to the spiritual maturity of man in the image of God.--The divine possibilities of humanity, imaged in Jesus, revealed as our inheritance and our prize. 131 INTRODUCTORY In a historical retrospect greater and more revolutionary changes are seen to have occurred during the nineteenth century than in any century preceding. In these changes no department of thought and activity has failed to share, and theological thought has been quite as much affected as scientific or ethical. Especially remarkable is the changed front of Christian theologians toward miracles, their distinctly lowered estimate of the significance of miracle, their antipodal reverse of the long established treatment of miracles. Referring to this a British evangelical writer[1] observes that "the intelligent believer of our own day, ... instead of accepting Christianity on the ground of the miracles, accepts it in spite of the miracles. Whether he admits these miracles, or rejects them, his attitude toward them is toward difficulties, not helps." By this diametrical change of Christian thought a great amount of scepticism has already been antiquated. A once famous anti-Christian book, _Supernatural Religion_, regarded as formidable thirty years ago, is now as much out of date for relevancy to present theological conditions as is the old smooth-bore cannon for naval warfare. That many, indeed, are still unaware of the change that has been experienced by the leaders of Christian thought, no one acquainted with current discussions will deny; the fact is indubitable. It is reviewed in the following pages with the constructive purpose of redeeming the idea of supernatural Religion from pernicious perversion, and of exhibiting it in its true spiritual significance. The once highly reputed calculations made to show how the earth's diurnal revolution could be imperceptibly stopped for Joshua's convenience, and the contention that the Mediterranean produced fish with gullets capable of giving passage to Jonah, are now as dead as the chemical controversy about phlogiston. Yet some sceptical controversialists are still so far from cultivating the acquaintance with recent thought which they recommend to Christian theologians, as to persist in affirmations of amazing ignorance, _e.g._ "It is admitted that miracles alone can attest the reality of divine revelation."[2] Sponsors for this statement must now be sought among unlearned Christians, or among a few scholars who survive as cultivators of the old-fashioned argument from the "evidences." Even among these latter the tendency to minimize miracle is undeniably apparent in a reduction of the list classified as such, and still more in the brevity of the list insisted on for the attestation of Christianity. A transitional state of mind is clearly evidenced by the present division and perplexity of Christian thought concerning the Christian miracles. Many seem to regard further discussion as profitless, and are ready to shelve the subject. But this attitude of weariness is also transitional. There must be some thoroughfare to firm ground and clear vision. It must be found in agreement, first of all, on the real meaning of a term so variously and vaguely used as _miracle_. In the present imperfect state of knowledge it may be impossible to enucleate miracle, however defined, of all mystery. But even so will much be gained for clear thinking, if miracle can be reasonably related to the greater mystery which all accept, though none understand,--the mystery of _life_. This view of the dynamic relation of life to miracle[3] is here suggested for what it may prove to be worth. The great and general change that transfigured theology during the nineteenth century was characteristically ethical. This, indeed, is the distinctive feature of the so-called new theology, in contrast with that which the Protestant Reformers inherited from St. Augustine. God and Man, Faith, Salvation and Inspiration, Redemption and Atonement, Judgment and Retribution,--all these themes are now presented in orthodox pulpits far more conformably to ethical principles, though in degrees varying with educated intelligence, than was customary in the sermons of half a century ago. "One great source and spring of theological progress," says Professor Bowne, in his recent work on _Theism_, "has been the need of finding a conception of God which the moral nature could accept. The necessity of moralizing theology has produced vast changes in that field; and the end is not yet." The ethical character of the theological change will perhaps be most obvious in the field of Biblical study, to which the present subject belongs. The traditional solution of such moral difficulties in the Old Testament as commands, ostensibly divine, to massacre idolaters has been quite discarded. It is no longer the mode to say that deeds seemingly atrocious were not atrocious, because God commanded them. Writers of orthodox repute now say that the _Thus saith the Lord_, with which Samuel prefaced his order to exterminate the Amalekites, must be understood subjectively, as an expression of the prophet's belief, not objectively, as a divine command communicated to him. This great change is a quite recent change. If a personal reference may be indulged, it is not twenty years since the present writer's published protest against "The Anti-Christian Use of the Bible in the Sunday School,"[4] the exhibition to children of some vestiges of heathen superstition embedded in the Old Testament narratives as true illustrations of God's ways toward men, drew forth from a religious journal a bitter editorial on "The Old Testament and its New Enemies." But a great light has since dawned in that quarter. It is no longer deemed subversive of faith in a divine Revelation to hold that the prophet Gad was not infallible in regarding the plague which scourged Jerusalem as sent to punish David's pride in his census of the nation. A significant fact is presented in the comparison of these two aspects of the theological change that has come to pass,--the growing importance of the ethical, and the dwindling importance of the miraculous in the religious thought of to-day. This may reassure those who fear whereto such change may grow. The inner significance of such a change is most auspicious. It portends the displacement of a false by the true conception of supernatural Religion, and the removal thereby of a serious antagonism between Science and Christian Theology, as well as of a serious hindrance of many thoughtful minds from an intelligent embrace of Christianity. FOOTNOTES: [1] Professor W. T. Adeney in the _Hibbert Journal_, January, 1903, p. 302. [2] See the recent new edition of _Supernatural Religion_, "carefully revised." [3] For an earlier statement of this by the present writer, see a discourse on "Miracle and Life," in _New Points to Old Texts_. London: James Clarke & Co., 1889. New York: Thomas Whittaker. [4] _The New Englander_, September, 1884. MIRACLES AND SUPERNATURAL RELIGION I I SYNOPSIS.--The gradual narrowing of the miraculous element in the Bible by recent discovery and discussion.--The alarm thereby excited in the Church.--The fallacy which generates the fear.--The atheistic conception of nature which generates the fallacy.--The present outgrowing of this conception. It is barely forty years since that beloved and fearless Christian scholar, Dean Stanley, spoke thus of the miracles recorded of the prophet Elisha: "His works stand alone in the Bible in their likeness to the acts of mediæval saints. There alone in the Sacred History the gulf between Biblical and Ecclesiastical miracles almost disappears."[5] It required some courage to say as much as this then, while the storm of persecution was raging against Bishop Colenso for his critical work on the Pentateuch. The evangelical clergymen in England and the United States then prepared to confess as much as this, with all that it obviously implies, could have been seated in a small room. But time has moved on, and the Church, at least the scholars of the Church, have moved with it. No scholar of more than narrowly local repute now hesitates to acknowledge the presence of a legendary element both in the Old Testament and in the New. While the extent of it is still undetermined, many specimens of it are recognized. It is agreed that the early narratives in Genesis are of this character, and that it is marked in such stories as those of Samson, Elijah, and Elisha. Even the conservative revisers of the Authorized Version have eliminated from the Fourth Gospel the story of the angel at the pool of Bethesda, and in their marginal notes on the Third Gospel have admitted a doubt concerning the historicity of the angel and the bloody sweat in Gethsemane. Furthermore, some events, recognized as historical, have been divested of the miraculous character once attributed to them,--the crossing of the Red Sea, for instance, by the Hebrew host. A landslip in the thirteenth century A.D. has been noted as giving historical character to the story of the Hebrew host under Joshua's command crossing the Jordan "on dry ground," but in a perfectly natural way. Other classes of phenomena once regarded as miraculous have been transferred to the domain of natural processes by the investigations and discoveries that have been made in the field of psychical research. The forewarning which God is said to have given the prophet Ahijah of the visit that the queen was about to pay him in disguise[6] is now recognized as one of many cases of the mysterious natural function that we label as "telepathy." The transformations of unruly, vicious, and mentally disordered characters by hypnotic influence that have been effected at the Salpêtrière in Paris, and elsewhere, by physicians expert in psychical therapeutics are closely analogous to the cures wrought by Jesus on some victims of "demoniac possession."[7] The cases of apparition,[8] also, which have been investigated and verified by the Society for Psychical Research have laid a solid basis of fact for the Biblical stories of angels, as at least, a class of phenomena to be regarded as by no means altogether legendary, but having their place among natural though mysterious occurrences. But this progressive paring down of the miraculous element in the Bible has caused outcries of unfeigned alarm. Christian scholars who have taken part in it are reproached as deserters to the camp of unbelief. They are accused of banishing God from his world, and of reducing the course of events to an order of agencies quite undivine. "Miracle," writes one of these brethren,[9] "is the personal intervention of God into the chain of cause and effect." But what does this mean, except that, when no miracles occur, God is not personally, _i.e._ actively, in the chain of natural causes and effects? As Professor Drummond says, "If God appears periodically, he disappears periodically." It is precisely this view of the subject that really banishes God from his world. Those who thus define miracle regard miracles as having ceased at the end of the Apostolic age in the first century. Except, therefore, for the narrow range of human history that the Bible covers in time and place, God has not been personally in the chain of natural causes and effects. Thus close to an atheistic conception of nature does zeal for traditional orthodoxy unwittingly but really come. The first pages of the Bible correct this error. "While the earth remaineth," so God is represented as assuring Noah, "seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease." The presence of God in his world was thus to be evinced by his regular sustentation of its natural order, rather than by irregular occurrences, such as the deluge, in seeming contravention of it. To seek the evidence of divine activity in human affairs and to ground one's faith in a controlling Providence in sporadic and cometary phenomena, rather than in the constant and cumulative signs of it to be seen in the majestic order of the starry skies, in the reign of intelligence throughout the cosmos, in the moral evolution of ancient savagery into modern philanthropy, in the historic manifestation throughout the centuries of a Power not our own that works for the increase of righteousness, is a mode of thought which in our time is being steadily and surely outgrown. It is one of those "idols of the tribe" whose power alike over civilized and uncivilized men is broken less by argument than by the ascent of man to wider horizons of knowledge. It is for the gain of religion that it should be broken,--of the spiritual religion whose God is not a tradition, a reminiscence, but a living presence, inhabiting alike the clod and the star, the flower in the crannied wall and the life of man. So thinking of God the religious man may rightly say,[10] "If it is more difficult to believe in miracles, it is less important. If the extraordinary manifestations of God recounted in ancient history appear less credible, the ordinary manifestations of God in current life appear more real. He is seen in American history not less than in Hebrew history; in the life of to-day not less than in the life of long ago." FOOTNOTES: [5] _Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church_, Vol. II, p. 362, American edition. [6] 1 Kings xiv. 1-7. [7] It is not intended to intimate that there is no such darker reality as a "possession" that is "demoniac" indeed. It cannot be reasonably pronounced superstitious to judge that there is some probability for that view. At any rate, it is certain that the problem is not to be settled by dogmatic pronouncement. It is certain, also, that the burden of proof rests on those who contend that there can be no such thing. On the other hand, it may be conceded that the cases recorded in the New Testament do not seem to be of an essentially devilish kind. On the general subject of "possession" see F. W. H. Myers's work on _Human Personality and Survival after Death_, Vol. I. (Longmans, Green & Co., New York and London.) Professor William James half humorously remarks: "The time-honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is on the point of being admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that he has the name of hysterodemonopathy by which to apperceive it." _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 501, note. [8] See _Dictionary of Psychology_, art. "Psychical Research." [9] Dr. Peloubet, _Teachers' Commentary on the Acts_, 1902. [10] Dr. Lyman Abbott in _The Outlook_, February 14, 1903. II II SYNOPSIS.--The present net results of the discussion of the miraculous element in the Bible.--Evaporation of the former evidential value of miracles.--Further insistence on this value a logical blunder.--The transfer of miracles from the artillery to the baggage of the Church.--Probability of a further reduction of the list of miracles.--Also of a further transfer of events reputed miraculous to the domain of history. The cultivation of scientific and historical studies during the last century, especially in its latter half, has deepened the conviction that "Through the ages one increasing purpose runs;" has disposed a growing number of thoughtful minds to regard occasional signs and wonders, reported from ancient times, as far less evidential for the reasonableness of religious faith than the steady sustentation of the Providential order and the moral progress of the world. Fully convinced of this, we should now estimate, before proceeding further, the present net results of the discussion, so far as it has gone, of what is called the miraculous element in the Bible. First, its former evidential value in proof of divine Revelation is gone for the men of to-day. The believer in a divine Revelation does not now, if he is wise, rest his case at all on the miracles connected with its original promulgation, as was the fashion not very long since. This for two reasons; chiefly this: that _the decisive criterion of any truth, ethical or physical, must be truth of the same kind_. Ethical truth must be ethically attested. The moral and religious character of the Revelation presents its credentials of worth in its history of the moral and religious renovations it has wrought both in individuals and in society. This is its proper and incontrovertible attestation, in need of no corroboration from whatever wonderful physical occurrences may have accompanied its first utterance. Words of God are attested as such by the work of God which they effect. It may well be believed that those wonderful occurrences--the Biblical name for which is "signs," or "powers," terms not carrying, like "miracles," the idea of something contra-natural[11]--had an evidential value for those to whom the Revelation originally came. In fact, they were appealed to by the bearers of the Revelation as evidencing its divine origin by the mighty works of divine mercy which they wrought for sufferers from the evils of the world. But whatever their evidential value to the eye-witnesses at that remote day, it was of the inevitably volatile kind that exhales away like a perfume with lapse of time. Historic doubts attack remote events, especially when of the extraordinary character which tempts the narrator to that magnifying of the marvellous which experience has found to be a constantly recurring human trait. It is simply impossible that the original evidential value of the "signs" accompanying the Revelation should continue permanently unimpaired. To employ them now as "evidences of Christianity," when the Revelation has won on ethical grounds recognition of its divine character and can summon history to bear witness of its divine effects in the moral uplift of the world, is to imperil the Christian argument by the preposterous logical blunder of attempting to prove the more certain by the less certain. A second net result consequent on the preceding may be described as the transference of miracles from the ordnance department to the quartermaster's department of the Church. Until recently they were actively used as part of its armament, none of which could be dispensed with. Now they are carried as part of its baggage, _impedimenta_, from which everything superfluous must be removed. It is clearly seen that to retain all is to imperil the whole. That there are miracles and miracles is patent to minds that have learned to scan history more critically than when a scholar like John Milton began his _History of England_ with the legend of the voyage of "Brute the Trojan." One may reasonably believe that Jesus healed a case of violent insanity at Gadara, and reasonably disbelieve that the fire of heaven was twice obedient to Elijah's call to consume the military companies sent to arrest him. Cultivated discernment does not now put all Biblical miracles on a common level of credibility, any more than the historical work of Herodotus and that of the late Dr. Gardiner. To defend them all is not to vindicate, but to discredit all alike. The elimination of the indefensible, the setting aside of the legendary, the transference of the supposedly miraculous to the order of natural powers and processes so far as vindicable ground for such critical treatment is discovered, is the only way to answer the first of all questions concerning the Bible: How much of this is credible history? Thus it is not only thoroughly reasonable, but is in the interest of a reasonable belief that divine agency is revealed rather by the upholding of the established order of Nature than by any alleged interference therewith. With what God has established God never interferes. To allege his interference with his established order is virtually to deny his constant immanence therein, a failure to recognize the fundamental fact that "Nature is Spirit," as Principal Fairbairn has said, and all its processes and powers the various modes of the energizing of the divine Will. A third net result now highly probable is a still further reduction of the list of reputed miracles. The critical process of discriminating the historical from the legendary, and the natural from the non-natural, is still so comparatively recent that it can hardly be supposed to have reached its limit. Nor can it be stayed by any impeachment of it as hostile to Christianity, whose grand argument appeals to its present ethical effects, not to ancient thaumaturgical accompaniments. There is, however, a considerable class of cases in which the advancing critical process is likely even to gain credibility for the Biblical narrative in a point where it is now widely doubted--the resuscitations of the apparently dead. Among all the Biblical miracles none have more probably a secure historical basis. FOOTNOTES: [11] The Anglicized Latin word, "miracle," indiscriminately used in the Authorized Version, denotes the superficial character of the act or event it is applied to, as producing wonder or amazement in the beholders. The terms commonly employed in the New Testament (_s{=e}meion_, a sign; _dunamis_, power; less frequently _teras_, a portent) are of deeper significance, and connote the inner nature of the occurrence, either as requiring to be pondered for its meaning, or as the product of a new and peculiar energy. III III SYNOPSIS.--Arbitrary criticism of the Biblical narratives of the raising of the "dead."--Facts which it ignores.--The subject related to the phenomena of trance, and records of premature burial.--The resuscitation in Elisha's tomb probably historical.--Jesus' raising of the ruler's daughter plainly a case of this kind.--His raising of the widow's son probably such.--The hypothesis that his raising of Lazarus may also have been such critically examined.--The record allows this supposition.--Further considerations favoring it: 1. The real interests of Christianity secure.--2. The miracle as a work of mercy.--3. Incompetency of the bystanders' opinion.--4. Congruity with the general conception of the healing works of Jesus, as wrought by a peculiar psychical power.--Other cases.--The resurrection of Jesus an event in a wholly different order of things.--The practical result of regarding these resuscitations as in the order of nature. Of resuscitation from apparent death seven cases in all are recorded,--three in the Old Testament and four in the New. Some critics arbitrarily reject all but one of these as legendary. Thus Oscar Holzmann, in his recent _Leben Jesu_, treats the raising of the widow's son, and of Lazarus. But he accepts the case of the ruler's daughter on the ground that Jesus is reported as saying that it was not a case of real but only of apparent death,--"the child is not dead, but sleepeth." But for the preservation of this saving declaration in the record, this case also would have been classed with the others as unhistorical. And yet the admission of one clear case of simulated death, so like real death as to deceive all the onlookers but Jesus, might reasonably check the critic with the suggestion that it may not have been a solitary case.[12] The headlong assumption involved in the discrimination made between these two classes, viz. that in a case of apparent but unreal death the primitive tradition can be depended on to put the fact upon record, is in the highest degree arbitrary and unwarrantable. The scepticism which lightly contradicts the Biblical narratives of the raising of the "dead" to life is seemingly ignorant of facts that go far to place these upon firm ground as historical occurrences. Catalepsy, or the simulation of death by a trance, in which the body is sometimes cold and rigid, sensation gone, the heart still, is well known to medical men.[13] In early times such a condition would inevitably have been regarded and treated as actual death, without the least suspicion that it was not so. Even now, the dreadful mistake of so regarding it sometimes occurs. So cautious a journal as the London _Spectator_ a few years ago expressed the belief that "a distinct percentage" of premature burials "occurs every year" in England. The proper line of critical approach to the study of the Biblical narratives of the raising of the "dead" is through the well-known facts of the deathlike trance and premature burial. Where burial occurred, as in the East, immediately after the apparent death,[14] resuscitation must have been rare. Yet cases of it were not unknown. Pliny has a chapter "on those who have revived on being carried forth for burial." Lord Bacon states that of this there have been "very many cases." A French writer of the eighteenth century, Bruhier, in his "_Dissertations sur l'Incertitude de la Mort et l'Abus des Enterrements_," records seventy-two cases of mistaken pronouncement of death, fifty-three of revival in the coffin before burial, and fifty-four of burial alive. A locally famous and thoroughly attested case in this country is that of the Rev. William Tennent, pastor in Freehold, New Jersey, in the eighteenth century, who lay apparently dead for three days, reviving from trance just as his delayed funeral was about to proceed. One who keeps a scrap-book could easily collect quite an assortment of such cases, and of such others as have a tragic ending, both from domestic and foreign journals. A work published some years ago by Dr. F. Hartmann[15] exhibits one hundred and eight cases as typical among over seven hundred that have been authenticated.[16] Facts like these have been strangely overlooked in the hasty judgment prompted by prejudice against whatever has obtained credence as miraculous. Some significant considerations must be seriously entertained. It cannot be that no such facts occurred in the long periods covered by the Biblical writers. Occurring, it is extremely improbable that they should have altogether escaped embodiment in popular tradition and its record. Furthermore, while on one hand the custom of speedy burial rendered them much rarer than they are now under other conditions, and so much the more extraordinary, the universal ignorance of the causes involved would have accepted resuscitation as veritable restoration from actual death. As such it would have passed into tradition. In cases where it had come to pass in connection with the efforts of a recognized prophet, or through any contact with him, it would certainly have been regarded as a genuine miracle. Among the raisings of the "dead" recorded in the Scriptures probably none has been so widely doubted by critical readers as the story in the thirteenth chapter of the second book of Kings, in which a corpse is restored to life by contact with the bones of Elisha. Dean Stanley's remark upon the suspicious similarity between the miracles related of Elisha and those found in Roman Catholic legends of great saints here seems quite pertinent. Let the record speak for itself. "And Elisha died and they buried him. Now the bands of the Moabites invaded the land at the coming in of the year. And it came to pass, as they were burying a man, that, behold, they spied a band; and they cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha; and as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet." The bizarre character of such a story excusably predisposes many a critic to stamp it as fabricated to enhance the glory of the great prophet who had been a pillar of the throne. Yet nothing is more likely than that tradition has here preserved a bit of history, extraordinary, but real. There is not the least improbability in regarding the case as one of the many revivals from the deathlike trance that have been noted by writers ancient and modern. It is entirely reasonable to suppose that the trance in which the seemingly dead man lay was broken either by the shock of his fall into the prophet's tomb, or coincidently therewith; and stranger coincidences have happened. Such a happening would be precisely the sort of thing to live in popular tradition, and to be incorporated into the annals of the time. Here it may be rejoined that this is only a hypothesis. Only that, to be sure. But so is the allegation that the story is a mere fantastic fabrication only a hypothesis. Demonstration of the actual fact past all controversy being out of the question, all that can be offered for the attempt to rate the narrative at its proper value, either as history or as fiction, is hypothesis. The choice lies for us between two hypotheses. Surely, that hypothesis is the more credible which is based on a solid body of objective facts, and meets all the conditions of the case. Will it be replied to this that the critics can show for their hypothesis the admitted fact of the human proclivity to invent legends of miracle? The decisive answer is that the burden of proof rests on him who contests any statement ostensibly historical. If such a statement be found to square with admitted objective facts, it must be accepted notwithstanding considerations drawn from the subjective tendency to invent extraordinary tales. Were raisings of the "dead" recorded in the Old Testament alone, objection would less often be offered to this transference of them, along with other occurrences once deemed miraculous, to a place in the natural order of things. The statistics of premature burial and of the resuscitation of the apparently dead before burial are sufficiently strong to throw grave doubt on any contention that the resuscitations narrated of Elijah[17] and Elisha[18] do not belong in that historical series. It has been frequently observed, however, that there is much reluctance to apply to the New Testament the methods and canons of criticism that are applied to the Old. It will be so in the present case, through apprehension of somehow detracting from the distinctive glory of Christ. That fear will not disturb one who sees that glory not in his "mighty works," the like of which were wrought by the prophets, but in the spiritual majesty of his personality, the divineness of his message to the world, and of the life and death that illustrated it. One case, at least, among Jesus' raisings of the "dead," that of the young daughter of the ruler of the synagogue,[19] is admitted even by sceptical critics to have been a resuscitation from the trance that merely simulates death. But the fact that there is a record of his saying in this case, "the child is not dead, but sleepeth," and no record of his saying the same at the bier of the widow's son,[20] is slight ground, yet all the ground there is, against the great probabilities to the contrary, for regarding the latter case as so transcendently different from the former as the actual reëmbodiment of a departed spirit recalled from another world. Were these the only two cases of restoration to life in the ministry of Jesus, it is most probable that they would be regarded as of the same kind. The raising of Lazarus[21] presents peculiar features, in view of which it is generally regarded as of another kind, and the greatest of miracles, so stupendous that the Rev. W. J. Dawson, in his recent _Life of Christ_, written from an evangelical standpoint, says of it: "Even the most devout mind may be forgiven occasional pangs of incredulity." But the considerations already presented are certainly sufficient to justify a reëxamination of the case. And it is to be borne in mind that the question at issue is, not what the eye-witnesses at that time believed, not what the Church from that time to this has believed, not what we are willing to believe, or would like to believe, but what all the facts with any bearing on the case, taken together, fully justify us in believing as to the real nature of it. What Jesus is recorded as saying of it is, of course, of prime importance. "Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep, but I go that I may awake him out of sleep." Were this all, the case might easily have been classed as one of trance. The disciples, however, understood Jesus to speak of natural sleep. "Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, _Lazarus is dead_." Tradition puts the maximum meaning into this word "dead." But if this word here qualifies the preceding word, "fallen asleep," so also is it qualified by that; the two are mutually explanatory, not contradictory. These alternatives are before us: Is the maximum or the minimum meaning to be assigned to the crucial word "dead"? For the minimum, one can say that a deathly trance, already made virtual death by immediate interment, would amply justify Jesus in using the word "dead" in order to impress the disciples with the gravity of the case, as not a natural but a deathly, and, in the existing situation, a fatal sleep. For the maximum, no more can be advanced than the hazardous assertion that Jesus _must_ have used the word with technical precision in its customary sense; an assertion of course protected from disproof by our ignorance of the actual fact.[22] But whatever support this view of the case derives from such ignorance is overbalanced by the support supplied to the other view by the long history of revivals from the deathly trance, and by the probabilities which that history creates. Many, to whom the view here proposed seems not only new, but unwelcome, and even revolutionary, may reasonably prefer to suspend judgment for reflection; but meanwhile some further considerations may be entertained. 1. Aside from the unwillingness to abandon a long-cherished belief on any subject whatever, which is both a natural, and, when not pushed to an unreasonable length, a desirable brake on all inconsiderate change, no practical interest is threatened by the adoption of the view here suggested. Religious interest, so far as it is also intelligent, is certainly not threatened. The evidences of Jesus' divine character and mission resting, as for modern men it rests, not on remote wonders, but on now acknowledged facts of an ethical and spiritual kind, is altogether independent of our conclusion whether it was from actual or only apparent death that Lazarus was raised. Since all the mighty works wrought by Jesus, and this among them, were identical in type with those wrought by the ancient prophets, with whom his countrymen classed him in his lifetime, their evidential significance could be, even for the eye-witnesses at that tomb, no greater for him than for an Elisha,--signs of a divine mission attesting itself by works of mercy. 2. As works of mercy these raisings from the "dead," including that of Lazarus, rank far higher in the view of them here proposed than in the traditional view. This regards them as the recall of departed spirits from what is hoped to be "a better world." Yet this, while it turns sorrow for a time into joy, involves not only the recurrence of that sorrow in all its keenness, but also a second tasting of the pains preliminary to the death-gate, when the time comes to pass that gate again. But in the other view, a raising from the death that is only simulated is a merciful deliverance from a calamity greater than simple death, if that be any calamity at all,--the fate of burial alive. In the former view, therefore, the quality of mercy, distinctive of the mighty works of Jesus, is imperfectly demonstrable. In the present view, as the rescue of the living from death in one of its most horrible forms, it is abundantly conspicuous. 3. The onlookers by the tomb of Lazarus doubtless regarded his awakening as revival from actual death. Their opinion, however, does not bind our judgment any more than it is bound by the opinion of other onlookers, that Jesus' healing of the insane and epileptic was through the expulsion of demons that possessed them. In each instance it was understood as a sign of control over beings belonging to another world. But such an attestation of Jesus' divine mission, having been superseded for us by proofs of higher character, is now no more needful for us in the case of the "dead" than in the case of the "demons." 4. The power of breaking the deathly trance, of quickening the dormant life, reënergizing the collapsed nervous organism, and ending its paralysis of sensation and motion, may be reasonably regarded as power of the same psychical kind that Jesus regularly exerted in healing the sufferers from nervous disorders who were reputed victims of demoniac possession.[23] In this view these resuscitations from apparent death appear in natural coherence with the many other works of mercy that Jesus wrought as the Great Physician of his people, and may be regarded as the crown and consummation of all his restorative ministries. Jesus' thanksgiving after the tomb had been opened--"Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me"--shows that he had girded himself for a supreme effort by concentrating the utmost energy of his spirit in prayer. Physically parallel with this was the intensity of voice put into his call to the occupant of the tomb. This is better represented in the original than in our translation: "He shouted with a great voice, 'Lazarus, come forth.'" The whole record indicates the utmost tension of all his energies, and closely comports with the view that this stood to the sequel in the relation of cause to effect.[24] Another circumstance not without bearing on the case is the energizing power of the intense sympathy with the bereaved family that stirred the soul of Jesus to weep and groan with them. And it is not without significance that this strong factor appears active in the larger number of the Biblical cases,--three of them only children, two of these the children of the pitiable class of widows. Peculiar, then, as was the case of Lazarus, our examination of it reveals no substantial ground for insisting that it was essentially unlike the previous case of the ruler's daughter, that it was the bringing back into a decaying body of a spirit that had entered into the world of departed souls. The actual fact, of course, is indemonstrable. Our conclusion has to be formed wholly upon the probabilities of the case, and must be formed in a reasonable choice between the greater probability and the less. The restoration of Dorcas to life by Peter, recorded in the book of Acts,[25] needs no special discussion beyond the various considerations already adduced in this chapter. The case of Eutychus, recorded in the same book,[26] requires mention only lest it should seem to have been forgotten, as it is not in point at all. The record makes it highly probable that the supposed death was nothing more than the loss of consciousness for a few hours in consequence of a fall from the window. * * * * * If one should here suggest that no mention has yet been made of the resurrection of Jesus himself, it must be pointed out that this is a fact of a totally different kind from any of the foregoing cases. To speak, as many do, of the "resurrection of Lazarus" is a misuse of words. Resuscitation to life in this world, and resurrection, the rising up of the released spirit into the life of the world to come, are as distinct as are the worlds to which they severally belong. We here consider only the _raisings_ which restored to the virtually dead their interrupted mortal life. The _rising_ from the mortal into the immortal state belongs to an entirely different field of study. * * * * * Apart, then, from traditional prepossessions, examination of the Biblical narratives discloses nothing to invalidate the hypothesis which one who is acquainted with the copious record of apparent but unreal death must seriously and impartially consider. The reputedly miraculous raisings of the "dead" related in both the Old and the New Testament may, with entire reason, and without detriment to religion, be classed with such as are related outside of the Scriptures, in ancient times as well as modern, and as phenomena wholly within the natural order, however extraordinary. The practical result of such a conclusion is likely to be a gain for the historicity of the Scripture narratives in the estimate of a large class of thoughtful minds. FOOTNOTES: [12] An objection to the historicity of the raising of Lazarus which is made on the ground that so great a work, if historical, would have been related by more than one of the Evangelists, yields on reflection the possibility that Jesus may have effected more than the three raisings recorded of him. John is the sole narrator of the raising of Lazarus. But he omits notice of the two raisings recorded by the other Evangelists, while Matthew and Mark do not record the raising of the widow's son recorded by Luke. All this suggests that the record may have preserved for us specimens rather than a complete list of this class of miracles. (Compare John xxi. 25.) [13] "We have frequent cases of trance, ... where the parties seem to die, but after a time the spirit returns, and life goes on as before. In all this there is no miracle. Why may not the resuscitations in Christ's time possibly have been similar cases? Is not this less improbable than that the natural order of the universe should have been set aside?"--_The Problem of Final Destiny_, by William B. Brown, D.D., 1899. [14] On account of the ceremonial "uncleanness" caused by the dead body. See Numbers v. 2, and many similar passages. [15] _Buried Alive_ (Universal Truth Publishing Co., Chicago). See also _Premature Burial_, by D. Walsh (William Wood & Co., New York), and _Premature Burial_, by W. Tebb and E. P. Vollum (New Amsterdam Book Co., New York). [16] Other writers might be mentioned, as Mme. Necker (1790), Dr. Vigné (1841). Yet on the other hand it is alleged, that "none of the numerous stories of this dreadful accident which have obtained credence from time to time seem to be authentic" (_American Cyclopedia_, art. "Burial"). Allowing a wide margin for exaggeration and credulity, there is certainly a residuum of fact. A correspondent of the (London) _Spectator_ a few years since testified to a distressing case in his own family. [17] Kings xvii. 17-23. [18] Kings iv. 32-36. [19] Mark v. 35-43. [20] Luke vii. 12-16. [21] John xi. 11-44. [22] Was Jesus aware that Lazarus was really not dead? It is impossible to reach a positive conclusion. In some directions his knowledge was certainly limited. That he was not aware of the reality might be inferred from his seeming to have allowed his act to pass for what, in the view of it here suggested, it was not,--the recall to life of one actually dead. This, however, assumes the completeness of a record whose silence on this point cannot be pressed as conclusive. It is, indeed, unlikely that Jesus knew all that medical men now know. But awareness of any fact may be in varying degrees from serious suspicion up to positive certitude. While far from positiveness, awareness may exist in a degree that gives courage for resolute effort resulting in clear and full verification. Jesus may have been ignorant of the objective reality of Lazarus's condition, and yet have been very hopeful of being empowered by the divine aid he prayed for (John xi. 41) to cope with it successfully. [23] See pages 28, 29, Note. [24] Jesus' works of healing are explicitly attributed by the Evangelists to a peculiar power that issued from him. In Mark v. 30, Luke vi. 19, and viii. 46, the original word _dunamis_, which the Authorized Version translates "virtue," is more correctly rendered "power" in the Revised Version. Especially noticeable is the peculiar phraseology of Mark v. 30: "Jesus perceiving in himself that the power proceeding from him had gone forth (R. V.)." The peculiar circumstances of the case suggest that the going forth of this power might be motived sub-consciously, as well as by conscious volition. [25] Acts ix. 36-42. [26] Acts xx. 9-13. IV IV SYNOPSIS.--A clearer conception of miracle approached.--Works of Jesus once reputed miraculous not so reputed now, since not now transcending, as once, the existing range of knowledge and power.--This transfer of the miraculous to the natural likely to continue.--No hard and fast line between the miraculous and the non-miraculous.--Miracle a provisional word, its application narrowing in the enlarging mastery of the secrets of nature and life. At this point it seems possible to approach a clearer understanding of the proper meaning to attach to the generally ill-defined and hazy term _miracle_.[27] Matthew Arnold's fantastic illustration of the idea of miracle by supposing a pen changed to a pen-wiper may fit some miracles, especially those of the Catholic hagiology, but, if applied to those of Jesus, would be a caricature. In the New Testament a reputed miracle is not any sort of wonderful work upon any sort of occasion, but an act of benevolent will exerted for an immediate benefit,[28] and transcending the then existing range of human intelligence to explain and power to achieve. The historic reality of at least some such acts performed by Jesus is acknowledged by critics as free from the faintest trace of orthodox bias as Keim: "The picture of Jesus, the worker of miracles, belongs to the first believers in Christ, and is no invention." It has already been noted that a considerable number of the then reputed miracles of Jesus, particularly his works of healing, do not now, as then, transcend the existing range of knowledge and power, and accordingly are no longer reputed miraculous. And one cannot reasonably believe that a limit to the understanding and control of forces in Nature and mind that now are more or less occult has been already reached. It is, therefore, not incredible that some of the mighty works of Jesus, which still transcend the existing limits of knowledge and power, and so are still reputed miraculous, and are suspected by many as unhistorical, may in some yet remote and riper stage of humanity be transferred, as some have already been, to the class of the non-miraculous and natural. Dr. Robbins, Dean of the General Theological Seminary, New York, after remarking that "the word _miracle_ has done more to introduce confusion into Christian Evidences than any other," goes on to say: "To animals certain events to them inexplicable are signs of the presence of human intelligence and power. To men these miracles of Christ are signs of divine intelligence and power. But how is miracle to be differentiated from other providential dealings of God? Not by removing him further from common events. Abstruse speculations concerning the relation of miracles to other physical phenomena may be safely left to the adjustment of an age which shall have advanced to a more perfect synthesis of knowledge than the present can boast."[29] The truth to which such considerations conduct is, that no hard and fast line can be drawn between the miraculous and the non-miraculous. To the untutored mind, like that of the savage who thought it miraculous that a chip with a message written on it had talked to the recipient, the simplest thing that he cannot explain is miraculous: "_omne ignotum pro mirifico_," said Tacitus. As the range of knowledge and power widens, the range of the miraculous narrows correspondingly. Some twenty years since, the International Sunday-school Lessons employed as a proof of the divinity of Christ the reputedly miraculous knowledge which he evinced in his first interview with Nathanael of a solitary hour in Nathanael's experience.[30] Since then it has been demonstrated[31] by psychical research that the natural order of the world includes telepathy, and the range of the miraculous has been correspondingly reduced without detriment to the argument for the divinity of Christ, now rested on less precarious ground. Under such conditions as we have reviewed a miracle cannot always be one and the same thing. Miracle must therefore be defined as being what our whole course of thought has suggested that it is: in general, an elastic word; in particular, a provisional word,--a word whose application narrows with the enlarging range of human knowledge[32] and power which for the time it transcends; a word whose history, in its record of ranges already transcended, prompts expectation that ranges still beyond may be transcended in the illimitable progress of mankind. Professor Le Conte says that miracle is "an occurrence or a phenomenon according to a law higher than any yet known." Thus it is a case of human ignorance, not of divine interference. On the other hand, we must believe that the goal of progress is a flying goal; that human attainment can never reach finality unless men cease to be. And so all widening of human knowledge and power must ever disclose further limitations to be transcended. There will always be a _Beyond_, in which dwells the secret of laws still undiscovered, that underlie mysteries unrevealed and marvels unexplained. This will have to be admitted, especially, by those to whom the marvellous is synonymous with the incredible. We have not been able to eviscerate even these prosaic and matter-of-fact modern times of marvels whose secret lies in the yet uncatalogued or indefinable powers of the mysterious agent that we name _life_: witness many well verified facts recorded by the Society for Psychical Research.[33] How, then, is it consistent to affirm that no such marvels in ancient records are historical realities? Nay, may it not be true that the ancient days of seers and prophets, the days of Jesus, days of the sublime strivings of great and lonely souls for closer converse with the Infinite Spirit behind his mask of Nature, offered better conditions for marvellous experiences and deeds than these days of scientific laboratories and factories, and world-markets and world-politics? FOOTNOTES: [27] "Early and mediæval theologians agree in conceiving the miraculous as being above, not contrary to, nature. The question entered on a new phase when Hume defined a miracle as a violation of nature, and asserted the impossibility of substantiating its actual occurrence. The modern discussion has proceeded largely in view of Hume's destructive criticism. Assuming the possibility of a miracle, the questions of fact and of definition remain."--_Dictionary of Psychology._ "When we find the definition for which we are searching, the miraculous will no longer be a problem."--PROFESSOR W. SANDAY, at the Anglican Church Congress, 1902. [28] For exceptions see Matthew xxi. 19; Acts xiii. 10, 11. [29] _A Christian Apologetic_, p. 97. [30] John i. 47-50. [31] In the opinion of such psychologists as Professor William James, of Harvard, the late Professor Henry Sidgwick, of Cambridge, England, and others of like eminence. [32] A hint of this was given by Augustine: "Portentum non fit contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura."--_De Civitate Dei._ [33] Consult the late F. W. H. Myers's remarkable volumes on _Human Personality and Survival after Death_ (Longmans, Green & Co.). V V SYNOPSIS.--Biblical miracles the effluence of extraordinary lives.--Life the world's magician and miracle worker; its miracles now termed _prodigies_.--Miracle the natural product of an extraordinary endowment of life.--Life the ultimate reality.--What any man can achieve is conditioned by the psychical quality of his life.--Nothing more natural, more supernatural, than life.--The derived life of the world filial to the self-existent life of God, "begotten, not made."--Miracle, as the product of life, the work of God. Be it noted, now, that the marvellous phenomena of the Biblical record, whatever else be thought of them, are, even to a superficial view, the extraordinary effluence of extraordinary lives. Here at length we gain a clearer conception of miracle. _Life_ is the world's great magician,--life, so familiar, yet so mysterious; so commonplace, yet so transcendent. No miracle is more marvellous than its doings witnessed in the biological laboratory, or more inexplicable than its transformation of dead matter into living flesh, its development of a Shakespeare from a microscopic bit of protoplasm. But its mysterious processes are too common for general marvel; we marvel only at the uncommon. The boy Zerah Colburn in half a minute solved the problem, "How many seconds since the beginning of the Christian era?" We prefer to call this a prodigy rather than a miracle,--a distinction more verbal than real; and we fancy we have explained it when we say that such arithmetical power was a peculiar endowment of his mental life. Now all of the inexplicable, inimitable reality that at any time has to be left by the baffled intellect as an unsolved wonder under the name of miracle is just that,--_the natural product of an extraordinary endowment of life_. More of its marvellous capability is latent in common men, in the subconscious depths of being, than has ever yet flashed forth in the career of uncommon men. Some scientists say that it depends on chemical and physical forces. It indeed uses these to build the various bodies it inhabits, but again it leaves these to destroy those bodies when it quits them. The most constant and ubiquitous phenomenon in the world, the ultimate reality in the universe, is _life_, revealing its presence in innumerable modes of activity, from the dance of atoms in the rock to the philosophizing of the sage and the aspirations of the saint,--the creator of Nature, the administrator of the regular processes we call the laws of Nature, the author of the wonders men call miraculous because they are uncommon and ill understood. The works of which any man is naturally capable are conditioned by the psychical quality of his life, and its power to use the forces of Nature. Through differences of vital endowment some can use color, as wonderful painters, and others employ sound, as wonderful musicians, in ways impossible to those otherwise endowed. So "a poet is born, not made." So persons of feeble frame, stimulated by disease or frenzied by passion, have put forth preternatural and prodigious muscular strength. By what we call "clairvoyant" power life calls up in intelligent perception things going on far beyond ocular vision. By what we call "telepathic" power life communicates intelligence with life separated by miles of space. Such are some of the powers that have been discovered, and fully attested, but not explained, as belonging to the world's master magician, _Life_. And when the poet asks,-- "Ah, what will our children be, The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?" we can only answer with the Apostle: "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." But we cannot deem it likely that the powers of life, "Deep seated in our mystic frame," and giving forth such flashes of their inherent virtue, have already reached their ultimate development. We look with wonder and awe into the secret shrine of life, where two scarcely visible cells unite to form the human being whose thought shall arrange the starry heavens in majestic order, and harness the titanic energies of Nature for the world's work. There we behold the real supernatural. Nothing is more natural than life, and nothing also more supernatural. Biology studies all the various forms that the world shows of it, and affirms that life, though multiform, is one. This embryology attests, showing that the whole ascent of life through diverse forms from the lowest to the highest, during the millions of years since life first manifested its presence on this globe, is recapitulated in the stages of growth through which the human being passes in the few months before its birth. And philosophy, which does not seek the living among the dead, affirms, _omne vivum ex vivo_. The varied but unitary life of the world is the stream of an exhaustless spring. It is filial to the life of God, the Father Almighty. What the ancient creed affirmed of the Christ as the Son of God--whom his beloved disciple recognized as "the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested unto us[34]"--may be truly affirmed of the mysterious reality that is known as life: "Begotten not made; being of one substance with the Father; through whom [or which] all things were made." Looking from the derived and finite life of the world, visible only in the signs of its presence, but in its reality no more visible than him "whom no man hath seen, nor can see," up to the life underived, aboriginal, infinite, we recognize _God_ and _Life_ as terms of identical significance. How superficial the notion of miracles as "the personal intervention of God into the chain of cause and effect," in which he is the constant vital element. If an event deemed miraculous is ever ascribed, as of old, to "the finger of God," the reality behind the phenomenon is simply a higher or a stronger power of life than is recognized in an event of a common type--life that is one with the infinite and universal Life, "Life that in me has rest, As I, undying Life, have power in Thee." FOOTNOTES: [34] 1 John i. 2. VI VI SYNOPSIS.--The question, both old and new, now confronting theologians.--Their recent retreat upon the minimum of miracle.--The present conflict of opinion in the Church.--Its turning-point reached in the antipodal turn-about in the treatment of miracles from the old to the new apologetics.--Revision of the traditional idea of the supernatural required for theological readjustment. The present line of thought has now reached the point where an important question confronts us,--a question not wholly new. Within the memory of living men theologians have been compelled to ask themselves: What if the geologists should establish facts that contradict our Biblically derived doctrine that the universe was made in a week? Again have they been constrained to put to themselves the question: What if the evolutionists should supersede our doctrine that the creation is the immediate product of successive fiats of the Creator by showing that it came gradually into existence through the progressive operation of forces immanent in the cosmos? Still again have they had to face the question: What if modern criticism by the discovery of demonstrable errors in the Sacred Writings should fault our doctrine that, as the Word of God, the Bible is free from all and every error? In every instance the dreaded concession, when found at length to be enforced by modern learning, has been found to bring, not the loss that had been apprehended, but clear gain to the intellectual interests of religion. Now it is this same sort of question which returns with the uncertainties and difficulties widely felt in the Church to be gathering over its hitherto unvexed belief in miracles as signs of a divine activity more immediate than it has recognized in the regular processes of Nature. The majority of uneducated Christians still hold, as formerly in each of the points just mentioned, to the traditional view. Miracle as a divine intervention in the natural order, a more close and direct divine contact with the course of things than is the case in ordinary experience, they regard as the inseparable and necessary concomitant and proof of a divine Revelation. To deny miracles, thus understood, is censured as equivalent to denial of the reality of the Revelation. But it is rather surprising, because it is rare, to find a man of such note in literature as Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll affirming[35] that one cannot be a Christian without believing at least two miracles, the virgin birth and the physical resurrection of the Christ. Without comment on the significance of this retreat upon the minimum of miracle, it must here be noted that a minority of the Church, not inferior to their brethren in learning and piety, believe that there are no tides in God's presence in Nature, that his contact with it is always of the closest:-- "Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet." All natural operations are to them divine operations. "Nature," said Dr. Martineau, "is God's mask, not his competitor." While his agency in Nature may be _recognized_ at one time more than at another, it _exists_ at any time fully as much as at any other. In the interest of this fundamental truth of religion they affirm that miracles in the traditional sense of the word, and in their traditional limitation to the small measure of time and space covered by Biblical narratives, never occurred. Events reputed miraculous have indeed occurred, but simply as unusual, inexplicable phenomena in the natural order of things, the natural products of exceptionally endowed life, and, whether in ancient time or modern, the same sort of thing the world over. To the argument that this involves denial of a supernatural Revelation they reply that it is mere reasoning in a circle. For if one begs the question at the outset by defining supernatural Revelation as revelation necessarily evidenced by miraculous divine intervention, then, of course, denial of this is denial of that, and how is the argument advanced? But, besides this, the question-begging definition is a fallacious confusing of the contents of the Revelation with its concomitants, and of its essentially spiritual character with phenomena in the sphere of the senses. The turning-point in this argument between the two parties in the Church has been reached in the antipodal change, already referred to, from the old to the new apologetics,--a change whose inevitable consequences do not yet seem to be clearly discerned by either party in the discussion. The contention that denial of miracles as traditionally understood carries denial of supernatural Revelation has been virtually set aside, with its question-begging definition and circular reasoning, by the apologetics now current among believers in at least a minimum of miracle in the traditional sense of the word,--especially in the two chief miracles of the virgin birth and the physical resurrection of Jesus. As an eminent representative of these the late Dr. A. B. Bruce may be cited. These adduce "the moral miracle," the sinlessness of Jesus, as evidential for the reality of the physical miracles as its "congruous accompaniments." "If," says Dr. Bruce, "we receive Him as the great moral miracle, we shall receive much more for His sake."[36] But what a turn-about of the traditional argument on the evidences! The older apologetes argued: This crown of miraculous power bespeaks the royal dignity of the wearer. The modern apologete reasons: This royal character must have a crown of miraculous power corresponding with his moral worth. In this antipodal reverse of Christian thought it is quite plain that for evidential purposes the miracle is stripped of its ancient value. And it has already been observed that modern knowledge has now transferred many of the Biblical miracles to the new rooms discovered for them in the natural order of things. It is not premature, therefore, for leaders of Christian thought to put once more to themselves the question, constantly recurring as learning advances: What theological readjustment should we have to make, if obliged to concede that the ancient belief in miracle is not inseparable from belief in a supernatural Revelation, not indispensable to belief therein? What modified conception must we form, if constrained to admit that the living God, ever immanent in Nature, intervenes in Nature no more at one time than another? What, indeed, but a revised and true in place of a mistaken conception of the term _Supernatural_? FOOTNOTES: [35] "The Church asks, and it is entitled to ask the critic: Do you believe in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ?... If he replies in the negative, he has missed the way, and has put himself outside of the Church of Christ."--_The Church's One Foundation_, p. 4. [Note that "Incarnation" and "Resurrection" are terms which Dr. Nicoll construes as denoting physical miracles.] What Dr. Nicoll here means by "outside of the Church" he indicates by saying elsewhere, that philosophers who reckon goodness as everything, and miracles as impossible, "are not Christians" (_op. cit._, p. 10). This conditioning of Christian character upon an intellectual judgment concerning the reality of remote occurrences is both unbiblical and unethical, as well as absurd when practically applied. Some years since, Dr. E. A. Abbott, who admits no miracle in the life of Christ, published a book, _The Spirit on the Waters_, in which he inculcated the worship of Christ. Yet, according to Dr. Nicoll, such a man is no Christian! [36] _The Miraculous Element in the Gospels_, p. 353. VII VII SYNOPSIS.--Account to be made of the law of atrophy through disuse.--The virgin birth and the corporeal resurrection of Jesus, the two miracles now insisted on as the irreducible minimum, affected by this law.--The vital truths of the incarnation and immortality independent of these miracles.--These truths now placed on higher ground in a truer conception of the supernatural.--The true supernatural is the spiritual, not the miraculous.--Scepticism bred from the contrary view.--The miracle narratives, while less evidential for religion, not unimportant for history.--Psychical research a needful auxiliary for the scientific critic of these. To the true conception of the supernatural we shall presently come. But we cannot proceed without briefly reminding ourselves of the certain consequences of this now far advanced dropping of miracles by modern apologetics from their ancient use as evidences of a supernatural Revelation. We are not ignorant of the law, which holds throughout the material, the mental, and the moral realms, that disuse tends to atrophy and extinction. Disused organs cease to exist, as in the eyeless cave-fish. For centuries the story of the miraculous birth of Jesus was serviceable for confirmation of his claim to be the Son of God. In the address of the angel of the annunciation to Mary that claim is expressly rested on the miraculous conception of "the holy thing."[37] But as ethical enlightenment grows, the conviction grows that, whether the physiological ground of that claim be tenable or not, the ethical ground of it is essentially higher. _Father_ and _son_ even in human relationships are terms of more than physiological import. It is matter of frequent experience that, where the ethical character of such relationship is lacking, the physiological counts for nothing. Moreover, the divine sonship of Jesus in a purely ethical view rests on ground not only higher but incontestable. And so in our time theologians prefer to rest it on foundations that cannot be shaken, on his moral oneness with God, the divineness of his spirit, the ideal perfectness of his life. The strength of this position being realized, the world begins to hear from Christian thinkers the innovating affirmation that belief of the miraculous birth can no longer be deemed essential to Christianity; else it would not have been left unmentioned in two of the four Gospels, and in every extant Apostolic letter. And now we hear theologians saying: "I accept it, but I place it no more among the evidences of Christianity. I defend it, but cannot employ it in the defence of supernatural Revelation." Such a stage of thought is only transitional. An antiquated argument does not long survive in the world of thought.[38] Military weapons that have become unserviceable soon find their way either to the museum or the foundry. It is shortsighted not to foresee the inevitable effect on our theological material of the law of atrophy through disuse. The case of the miracle is the case of a pillar originally put in for the support of an ancient roof. When the roof has a modern truss put beneath it springing from wall to wall, the pillar becomes an obstacle, and is removed. But as in such a case the roof, otherwise supported, does not fall in when the pillar is removed, so neither is the central Christian truth of the incarnation imperilled by any weakening or vanishing of belief in the doctrine of the virgin birth. In a discussion of the subject in Convocation at York, England, while these pages were being written, the Dean of Ripon (Dr. Boyd Carpenter) urged that it must be borne in mind that the incarnation and the virgin birth were two different things, and that some who found difficulty in the latter fully accepted the former. In a recent sermon Dr. Briggs insists likewise upon this: "The virgin birth is only one of many statements of the mode of incarnation.... The doctrine of the incarnation does not depend upon the virgin birth.... It is only a minor matter connected with the incarnation, and should have a subordinate place in the doctrine.... At the same time the virgin birth is a New Testament doctrine, and we must give it its proper place and importance.... The favorite idea of the incarnation among the people has ever been the simpler one of the virgin birth, as in the Ave Maria. The theologians have ever preferred the more profound doctrine of the Hymn of the Logos [John i. 1-18]."[39] Nay, it may even be found that the weakening of belief in the incarnation as an isolated and miraculous event may tend to promote a profounder conception of it, that brings the divine and the human into touch and union at all points instead of in one point.[40] A similar change of thought, less remarked than its significance deserves, is concerned with that other great miracle, the corporeal resurrection of Jesus, which such writers as Dr. Nicoll couple with that of his virgin birth as the irreducible minimum of miracle, belief in which is essential to Christian discipleship.[41] For many centuries the resurrection story in the Gospels has served as the conclusive proof both of the divine sonship of Jesus,[42] and of our own resurrection to immortality.[43] In the churches it is still popularly regarded as the supreme, sufficient, and indispensable fact required for the basis of faith. But in many a Christian mind the thought has dawned, that a single fact cannot give adequate ground for the general inference of a universal principle; that a remote historical fact, however strongly attested, can evince only what _has_ taken place in a given case, not what _will_ or _must_ occur in other cases; while it is also inevitably more or less pursued by critical doubt of the attestations supporting it. This rising tide of reflection has compelled resort to higher ground, to the inward evidences in the nature of mind that are more secure from the doubt to which all that is merely external and historical is exposed. A clear distinction has been discerned between the _real_ resurrection of Jesus--his rising from the mortal state into the immortal, and his _phenomenal_ resurrection--the manifestations of his change that are related as having been objectively witnessed. What took place in the invisible world--his real resurrection--is now more emphasized by Christian thinkers than the phenomenal resurrection in the visible world. So conservatively orthodox a writer as Dr. G. D. Boardman goes so far as to say: "After all, the real question in the matter of his resurrection is not, 'Did Christ's body rise?' That is but a subordinate, incidental issue." The real question, as Dr. Boardman admits, is, "Whether Jesus Christ himself is risen, and is alive to-day."[44] The main stress of Christian thought to-day is not laid, as formerly, on the phenomena recorded in the story of the resurrection, but on the psychological, moral, and rational evidences of a resurrection to immortality that until recent times were comparatively disregarded.[45] Meanwhile the vindication of the reality of the phenomena related of the risen Jesus, including his bodily ascension, though not a matter of indifference to many of those who have found the higher grounds of faith, has become to them of subordinate importance. It is well for Christian faith that its supersensuous and impregnable grounds have been occupied. It is certain that ancient records of external phenomena cannot in future constitute, as heretofore, the stronghold of faith. But it is by no means yet certain that they have lost serviceableness as, at least, outworks of the stronghold. While the doctrine of the virgin birth seems to be threatened by atrophy, the doctrine of the bodily resurrection, though retired from primary to secondary rank, seems to be waiting rather for clarification by further knowledge. Something of an objective nature certainly lies at its basis; _something_ of an external sort, not the product of mere imagination, took place. To the fact thus indefinitely stated, that hallowing of Sunday as a day of sacred and joyful observance which is coeval with the earliest traditions, and antedates all records, is an attestation as significant as any monumental marble. No hallucination theory, no gradual rise and growth of hope in the minds of a reflective few, can account for that solid primeval monument. But _what_ occurred, the reality in distinctness from any legendary accretions, we shall be better able to conclude, when the truth shall have been threshed out concerning the reality, at present strongly attested, and as strongly controverted, of certain extraordinary but occult psychical powers.[46] A point of high significance for those who would cultivate a religious faith not liable to be affected by changes of intellectual outlook or insight is, that this lower valuation of miracle observable among Christian thinkers has not been reached through breaches made by sceptical doubts of the reality of a supernatural Revelation. They have, of course, felt the reasonableness of the difficulties with which traditional opinions have been encumbered by the advance of knowledge. But so far from giving way thereupon to doubts of the reality of divine Revelation, they have sought and found less assailable defences for their faith in it than those that sufficed their fathers. And their satisfaction therewith stands in no sympathy with those who hold it a mark of enlightenment to assume with Matthew Arnold, that "miracles do not happen." It has resulted rather from reaching the higher grounds of religious thought, on which supernatural Revelation is recognized in its essential character as distinctively moral and spiritual. The true supernatural is the _spiritual_, not the miraculous, a higher order of Nature, not a contradiction of Nature. The Revelation of Jesus was altogether spiritual. It consisted in the ideas of God which he communicated by his ministry and teaching, by his character and life. But this, the real supernatural, was not obvious as such to his contemporaries. They looked for it in the lower region of physical effects. And here the Church also in its embryonic spiritual life, in its proneness to externalize religion in forms of rite, and creed, and organization, has thought to find it. Jesus' reproof, "Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe," is still pertinent to those who will not have it that the supernatural Revelation--spiritual though it be--can be recognized or believed in apart from an acknowledgment of attendant miracles, wrought in physical nature by an intervention of God. Such a contention, however, is as futile and desperate as was John Wesley's declaration, "The giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible." Such mischievous fallacies succeed only in blinding many a mind to the real issue which the moral and spiritual Revelation of Jesus makes with men of the twentieth century. It is these fallacies, and not their critics, that create the most of scepticism.[47] But while the question whether miracles are credible has ceased to be of vital importance, it has by no means lost all importance. On the contrary, so long as the path of progress is guided by the lamp of experience, so long will it be of consequence that the historical record of experience be found trustworthy. It may suit the overweening pride which defies both the past and the present to say with Bonaparte, that history is only a fable that men have agreed to believe. But it is a human interest, and a satisfaction of normal minds to establish, so far as reason permits, the credibility of every record ostensibly historic. To discover that ancient experiences, once supposed to be miraculous raisings from real death, may reasonably be classed with well attested experiences of to-day, better understood as resuscitations from a deathlike trance, should be welcomed by unprejudiced historical critics, as redeeming portions of the ancient record from mistaken disparagement as legendary. That further study may accredit as facts, or at least as founded on facts, some other marvels in that record cannot, except by arrant dogmatism, be pronounced improbable. Nevertheless, it cannot be expected that the legendary element, which both the Old and the New Testament in greater and less degree exhibit, can ever be eliminated. Such stories as that of the origin of languages at Babel, and that of the resurrection of ancient saints at Jesus' resurrection are indubitable cases of it. But the legendary element, though permanent, is at present undefined. To define it is the problem of the critical student, a problem most difficult to him whose judgment is least subjective; and he will welcome every contribution that advancing knowledge can supply. Regarding miracle as the natural product of exceptionally endowed life, there is no source from which more light can be shed on its Biblical record than in those studies of the exceptional phenomena and occult powers of life which are prosecuted by the Society for Psychical Research, whose results are recorded in its published _Proceedings_. For those familiar with this record the legendary element in the Bible tends to shrink into smaller compass than many critics assign it. In the interest both of the Bible and of science it is regrettable that the results of these researches, though conducted by men of high eminence in the scientific world, still encounter the same hostile scepticism even from some Christian believers that Hume directed against the Biblical miracles. Mr. Gladstone has put himself on record against this philistinism, saying that "psychical research is by far the most important work that is being done in the world." Were one disposed to prophesy, very reasonable grounds could be produced for the prediction that, great as was the advance of the nineteenth century in physical knowledge, the twentieth century will witness an advance in psychical knowledge equally great. In this advance one may not unreasonably anticipate that some, at least, of the Biblical miracles may be relieved from the scepticism that now widely discredits them. FOOTNOTES: [37] Luke i. 35. [38] To what extent the law of atrophy has begun to work upon the doctrine of the virgin birth appears in the recent utterance of so eminent an evangelical scholar as Dr. R. F. Horton, of London. The following report of his remarks in a Christmas sermon in 1901 is taken from the _Christian World_, London. "We could not imagine Paul, Peter, and John all ignoring something essential to the Gospel they preached. Strictly speaking, this narrative in Matthew and Luke was one of the latest touches in the Gospel, belonging to a period forty or fifty years after the Lord had passed away, when men had begun to realize what he was--the Son of God--and tried to express their conviction in this form or that." The implication here is unmistakable, that, in Dr. Horton's view, subjective considerations in the minds of pious believers, rather than objective fact, form the basis of the story. [39] See the Sermon on "Born of a Virgin," in the volume on _The Incarnation of Our Lord_. [40] "Christian thought has not erred by asserting too much concerning the incarnation of God, but, on the contrary, too little.... If ever overblown by blasts of denial, it is for wanting breadth of base.... Men have disbelieved the incarnation, because told that all there was of it was in Christ; and they reject what is presented as exceptional to the general way of God. They must be told to believe more; that the age-long way of God is in a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ."--From a discourse by the present writer on "Life and its Incarnations," in the volume, _New Points to Old Texts_. (James Clarke & Co., London. Thomas Whittaker, New York, 1889.) [41] See page 97 and Note. [42] Romans i. 4. [43] 1 Corinthians xv. 16-23. [44] _Our Risen King's Forty Days_, 1902. [45] In strong contrast with this are the reactionary protests of Dr. W. R. Nicoll: "To talk of the resurrection of the spirit is preposterous. The spirit does not die, and therefore cannot rise.... The one resurrection of which the New Testament knows, the one resurrection which allows to language any meaning, is the resurrection of the body, the resurrection which leaves the grave empty" (_op. cit._ p. 134). It should be noted here that Jesus' argument with the Sadducees on the resurrection (Luke xx. 37, 38) logically proceeds on the assumption that living after death and rising after death are convertible terms. Also, that the contrast involved in the idea of the resurrection (the _anastasis_, or rising up) is a contrast not between the grave and the sky, but between the lower life of mortals and the higher life immortal. For an extended exhibition of this line of evidence see "The Assurance of Immortality," and "The Present Pledge of Life to Come" (in two volumes of discourses by the present writer), London, James Clarke & Co. New York, Thomas Whittaker, 1888 and 1889. [46] Could it have been only an apparition? The "census of hallucinations" conducted some ten years since by the Society for Psychical Research evinced the reality of veridical apparitions of deceased persons at or near the time of their death, showing the number of verified cases to be so large as to exclude the supposition of chance hallucination (see _Proceedings_, August, 1894). Or could it have been a material body suddenly becoming visible in a closed room, as narrated by Luke and John? First-class evidence, if there can be any such for such occurrences, has been exhibited for such phenomena as the passage of solid substances through intervening doors and walls--easy enough, say mathematicians, for a being familiar with the "fourth dimension"--and of the levitation of heavy bodies without physical support. (See _Proceedings_, January, 1894, and March, 1895.) As to such things scepticism is doubtless in order, but dogmatic contradiction is not. _Sub judice lis est._ [47] Professor Borden P. Bowne has thus exhibited this great mistake and its grievous consequence:-- "In popular thought, religious and irreligious alike, the natural is supposed to be something that runs itself without any internal guidance or external interference. The supernatural, on the other hand, if there be any such thing, is not supposed to manifest itself through the natural, but by means of portents, prodigies, interpositions, departures from, or infractions of, natural law in general. The realm of law belongs to the natural, and the natural runs itself. Hence, if we are to find anything supernatural, we must look for it in the abnormal, the chaotic, the lawless, or that which defies all reduction to order that may be depended on. This notion underlies the traditional debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.... This unhappy misconception of the relation of the natural to the supernatural has practically led the great body of uncritical thinkers into the grotesque inversion of all reason--the more law and order, the less God."--_Zion's Herald_, August 22, 1900. VIII VIII SYNOPSIS.--The cardinal point in the present discussion, the reality not of miracles but of the supernatural.--Fallacy of pointing to physical events as essential characteristics of supernatural Revelation.--The character of a revelation determined not by its circumstances, but by its contents.--Moral nature supernatural to physical.--Nature a hierarchy of natures.--Supernatural Religion historically attested by the moral development it generates.--Transfer of its distinctive note from moral ideals to physical marvels a costly error.--Jesus' miracles _a_ revelation, of a type common with others before and since.--The unique Revelation of Jesus was in the higher realm of divine ideas and ideals.--These, while unrealized in human life, still exhibit the fact of a supernatural Revelation.--The distinction of natural and supernatural belongs to the period of moral progress up to the spiritual maturity of man in the image of God. The divine possibilities of humanity, imaged in Jesus, revealed as our inheritance and our prize. It remains finally to emphasize the point of cardinal importance in the considerations that have been presented. This is not the reality of miracles, but the reality of the supernatural, what it really is, as distinct from what it has been thought to be. The advance of science and philosophy has brought to the front this question: "Have those who reject the claims of supernatural Religion been misinformed as to what it is?" Is it, as they have been told, dependent for its attestation on signs and wonders occurring in the sphere of the senses? Does it require acceptance of these, as well as of its teachings? Or is its characteristic appeal wholly to the higher nature of man, relying for its attestation on the witness borne to it by this, rather than by extraordinary phenomena presented to the senses? There is at present no intellectual interest of Christianity more urgent than this: to present to minds imbued with modern learning the true conception of the supernatural and of supernatural Religion. Miracles, legitimately viewed as the natural product of extraordinary psychical power, or, to phrase it otherwise, of an exceptional vital endowment, belong not to the Hebrew race alone, nor did they cease when the last survivor of the Jewish apostles of Christianity passed away at the end of the first century. This traditional opinion ought by this time to have been entombed together with its long defunct relative, which represented this globe as the fixed centre of the revolving heavens. Miracles have the same universality as human life. Nor will their record be closed till the evolution of life is complete. Animal life, advancing through geologic æons to the advent of man, in him reached its climax. Spiritual life, appearing in him as a new bud on an old stock, is evidently far from its climax still. To believe in miracles, as rightly understood, is to believe in spirit and life, and in further unfoldings of their still latent powers. This, however, is just now of subordinate importance. The present interest of chief moment is a riddance of the hoary fallacy that vitiates the current idea of a supernatural Revelation by looking for its specific characteristics to the physical world. By this deplorable fallacy Christian theology has blinded the minds of many scientific men to the essential claims of Christianity, with immense damage in the arrested development of their religious nature through the scepticism inevitably but needlessly provoked by this great mistake. When Elijah proclaims to idolaters that their deity is no God, and, as we read, corroborates his words by calling down fire from heaven to consume his sacrifice, it is reckoned as supernatural Revelation. But it is not so reckoned when the sage in the book of Proverbs proclaims to a nation of religious formalists the moral character of God: "To do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice." This is accounted as ethical teaching, somewhat in advance of the times. A pagan rather than a Christian way of thinking is discoverable here. In each of the cases cited the specific character of supernatural Revelation is equally evident,--the disclosure of spiritual truth above the natural thought of the natural men to whom it came. The character of any revelation is determined by the character of the truth made known, not by the drapery of circumstances connected with the making known. Clothes do not make the man, though coarse or careless people may think so. What belongs to the moral and spiritual order is supernatural to what belongs to the material and physical order. This way of thinking will be forced on common minds by thoughtful observation of common things. Animate nature of the lowest rank, as in the grass, is of a higher natural order than inanimate nature in the soil the grass springs from. Sentient nature, as in the ox, is of a higher order than the non-sentient in the grass. Self-conscious and reflective nature in the man is of a higher order than the selfless and non-reflective nature in his beast of burden. In the composite being of man all these orders of nature coexist, and each higher is supernatural to the nature below it. Nature, the comprehensive term for _all that comes into being_, is a hierarchy of natures, rising rank above rank from the lowest to the highest. The highest nature known to us, supernatural to all below it, can only be the moral nature, whose full satisfaction is necessary to the highest satisfaction of a man, and in whose complete development only can be realized in permanency his perfected welfare as a social being. Now it is precisely in the progress of moral development that supernatural Religion manifests itself as a reality. Religion, indeed, is as natural to man as Art. But there is religion and Religion, as there is art and Art--the sexual religion of the primitive Semites, the animistic religion of China, the spiritual Religion that flowered on the Mount of the Beatitudes, embryonic religion and Religion adult; all, indeed, natural, yet of lower and of higher grade. Doubtless, Religion of whatever grade outranks all other human activities by its distinctive aspiration to transcend the bounds of space and time and sense, and to link the individual to the universal; and so all Religion sounds, feebly or distinctly, the note of the supernatural. But this is the resonant note of the spiritual Religion which unfolds in the moral progress of the world. As moral nature is supernatural to the psychical and the physical, so is its consummate bloom of spiritual Religion to be ranked as such, relatively to the religions which more or less dimly and blindly are yearning and groping toward the light that never was on sea or land. Thus defining the word according to the nature of the thing, supernatural Religion, with its corollary of supernatural Revelation not as an apparition from without, but as an unfolding from within, is both a fact and a factor in the development of spiritual man. The term _supernatural Religion_ has been rightly applied to that system of religious conceptions, ideals, and motives, whose effective culture of the moral nature is attested historically by a moral development superior to the product of any other known religion. Whether the greatest saints of Christianity are all of them whiter souls than any that can be found among the disciples of any other religion, may be matter for argument. There can be no gainsaying the fact that, of great and lowly together, no other religion shows so many saints, or has so advanced the general moral development in lands where it is widely followed. But its essential character has been obscured, its appeal to man's highest nature foiled, and its power lamed by the wretched fallacy that has transferred its distinctive note of the supernatural from its divine ideals to the physical marvels embedded in the record of its original promulgation, even conditioning its validity and authority upon their reality. Such is the false issue which, to the discredit of Christianity, theology has presented to science. Such is the confusion of ideas that in the light of modern knowledge inevitably blocks the way to a reasonable religious faith in multitudes of minds thereby offended. From this costly error Christian theology at length shows signs that it is about to extricate itself.[48] As to the Christian miracles, there can be no reasonable doubt that "mighty works," deemed by many of his contemporaries superhuman, were wrought by Jesus. These, whatever they were, must be regarded as the natural effluence of a transcendently endowed life. Taking place in the sphere of the senses, they were _a_ revelation of the type seen before and since in the lives of wonder-workers ancient and modern, in whom the power of mind over matter, however astonishing and mysterious, is recognized as belonging to the natural order of things no less than the unexplored Antarctic belongs to the globe. But _the_ Revelation which he gave to human thought as a new thing, a heavenly vision unprecedented, was in the higher realm of the moral and spiritual life. This was the true supernatural, whose reality and power are separable from all its environment of circumstances, and wholly independent thereof. The characteristic ideals of Jesus, his profound consciousness of God, his filial thought of God, his saturation with the conviction of his moral oneness with God,[49] his realization of brotherhood with the meanest human being, still transcend the common level of natural humanity even among his disciples. As thus transcendent they are supernatural still. Till reached and realized, they manifest the fact of a supernatural Revelation in that peerless life as plainly as the sun is manifest in the splendor of a cloudless day. In the coming but distant age, when man's spiritual nature, now so embryonic, shall have become adult, it will doubtless so pervade and rule the physical and psychical natures which it inhabits that the distinction between natural and supernatural, so important in the period of its development, will become foreign alike to thought and speech. But until the making of man in the image of God is complete, when the spiritual element in our composite being, now struggling for development, shall be manifest in its ultimate maturity and ascendency as the distinctive and proper nature of humanity, it is of supreme importance for the Christian teacher, who would point and urge to the heights of being, to free men's minds of error as to what the real supernatural is. Not the fancied disturber of the world's ordered harmonies, but that highest Nature which is the moulder, the glory, and the crown of all the lower. Imaged to us in the human perfectness of Jesus, the ideal Son of man, it is revealed as the distinctive inheritance and prize of the humanity that essays to think the thoughts and walk the ways of God. To each of us is it given in germ by our human birth, to be fostered and nourished in converse with the Infinite Presence that inhabits all things, till its divine possibilities appear in the ultimate "revealing of the sons of God,"[50] full grown "according to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."[51] FOOTNOTES: [48] "Upon the conception of the supernatural as the personal," says Professor Nash, "apologetics must found the claims of Christianity."--_Ethics and Revelation._ [49] The words in which Jesus expresses this are much more extraordinary and profoundly significant than any of those mighty works of his, the like of which are recorded of the ancient prophets. Jesus was conscious of God as living in him, and of himself as living in God, in the unity of the one eternal life. Not merely as a man _of_ God, but as a man _in_ God, as no other man has consciously been, does Jesus utter such sayings as, "I am the light of the world," "I and my Father are one." (See "Jesus the Ideal Man," by the present writer. _The New World_, June, 1897.) [50] Romans viii. 19. [51] Ephesians iv. 13. New Testament Handbooks EDITED BY SHAILER MATHEWS _Professor of New Testament History and Interpretation, University of Chicago_ Arrangements are made for the following volumes, and the publishers will, on request, send notice of the issue of each volume as it appears and each descriptive circular sent out later; such requests for information should state whether address is permanent or not:-- THE HISTORY OF THE TEXTUAL CRITICISM OF THE NEW TESTAMENT Prof. MARVIN R. VINCENT, Professor of New Testament Exegesis, Union Theological Seminary. [_Now ready._ Professor Vincent's contributions to the study of the New Testament rank him among the first American exegetes. His most recent publication is "A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistles to the Philippians and to Philemon" (_International Critical Commentary_), which was preceded by a "Students' New Testament Handbook," "Word Studies in the New Testament," and others. THE HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM OF THE NEW TESTAMENT Prof. HENRY S. NASH, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Cambridge Divinity School. [_Now ready._ Of Professor Nash's "Genesis of the Social Conscience," _The Outlook_ said: "The results of Professor Nash's ripe thought are presented in a luminous, compact, and often epigrammatic style. The treatment is at once masterful and helpful, and the book ought to be a quickening influence of the highest kind; it surely will establish the fame of its author as a profound thinker, one from whom we have a right to expect future inspiration of a kindred sort." INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT Prof. B. WISNER BACON, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Yale University. [_Now ready._ Professor Bacon's works in the field of Old Testament criticism include "The Triple Tradition of Exodus," and "The Genesis of Genesis," a study of the documentary sources of the books of Moses. In the field of New Testament study he has published a number of brilliant papers, the most recent of which is "The Autobiography of Jesus," in the _American Journal of Theology_. THE HISTORY OF NEW TESTAMENT TIMES IN PALESTINE Prof. SHAILER MATHEWS, Professor of New Testament History and Interpretation, The University of Chicago. [_Now ready._ _The Congregationalist_ says of Prof. Shailer Mathews's recent work, "The Social Teaching of Jesus": "Re-reading deepens the impression that the author is scholarly, devout, awake to all modern thought, and yet conservative and pre-eminently sane. If, after reading the chapters dealing with Jesus' attitude toward man, society, the family, the state, and wealth, the reader will not agree with us in this opinion, we greatly err as prophets." THE LIFE OF PAUL Prof. RUSH RHEES, President of the University of Rochester. Professor Rhees is well known from his series of "Inductive Lessons" contributed to the _Sunday School Times_. His "Outline of the Life of Paul," privately printed, has had a flattering reception from New Testament scholars. THE HISTORY OF THE APOSTOLIC AGE Dr. C. W. VOTAW, Instructor in New Testament Literature, The University of Chicago. Of Dr. Votaw's "Inductive Study of the Founding of the Christian Church," _Modern Church_, Edinburgh, says: "No fuller analysis of the later books of the New Testament could be desired, and no better programme could be offered for their study, than that afforded in the scheme of fifty lessons on the _Founding of the Christian Church_, by Clyde W. Votaw. It is well adapted alike for practical and more scholarly students of the Bible." THE TEACHING OF JESUS Prof. GEORGE B. STEVENS, Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale University. [_Now ready._ Professor Stevens's volumes upon "The Johannine Theology," "The Pauline Theology," as well as his recent volume on "The Theology of the New Testament," have made him probably the most prominent writer on biblical theology in America. His new volume will be among the most important of his works. THE BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT Prof. E. P. GOULD, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Protestant Episcopal Divinity School, Philadelphia. [_Now ready._ Professor Gould's Commentaries on the Gospel of Mark (in the _International Critical Commentary_) and the Epistles to the Corinthians (in the _American Commentary_) are critical and exegetical attempts to supply those elements which are lacking in existing works of the same general aim and scope. THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE UNTIL EUSEBIUS Prof. J. W. PLATNER, Professor of Early Church History, Harvard University. Professor Platner's work will not only treat the writings of the early Christian writers, but will also treat of the history of the New Testament Canon. OTHERS TO FOLLOW "An excellent series of scholarly, yet concise and inexpensive New Testament handbooks."--_Christian Advocate_, New York. "These books are remarkably well suited in language, style, and price, to all students of the New Testament."--_The Congregationalist_, Boston. * * * * * THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK Transcriber's Note (Significant Amendments): p. 28, 'Saltpêtrière' amended to _Salpêtrière_. 
28669	----	Scientific and Religious Journal. VOL. I. AUGUST, 1880. NO. 8. THE IMPORTANCE AND NATURE OF REFORMATION FROM SIN. This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come; for men shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, truce breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those who are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof.--2 Tim. 3: 1-5. The Savior once began his instructions with these words, "This day is this Scripture fulfilled." They seem to be an appropriate introduction to our lesson upon this occasion. What is the religion of thousands? They were made the special objects of God's favor in their infancy (?), were christened in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit (?), were dedicated to God and his service by their parents (?), who, for them, took a solemn vow to forsake the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires, to forsake, also, all the carnal desires of the flesh, and not to follow or be led by them. It is said that the christened took this vow when they were children, and understood it not; when they became men they understood it about as well as when they were children. But in all candor, I confess that I never could believe they took this vow; their sponsors took it upon themselves to make it for them, and usually pledged themselves to see it fulfilled. What fearful responsibilities are assumed just here. It is too frequently the case that those very sponsors serve more devoutly, love more affectionately, and confide more heartily in the profits, honors and pleasures of the world than in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Survey the lives of many of these men, of all conditions, and then deny, if you can, that the profits, honors and pleasures of the world are the gods they worship. Their daily and constant employment is either a violent pursuit of the vain pomp and glory of the world, or of its power, riches and profits; or it may be that they are led on by pride, malice or revenge. Such persons live, not knowing or regarding the fact that the baptism which now saves us is "not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, _but the answer of a good conscience_ toward God." There are many such who live but little in advance of pagans in a commonwealth of Christians, and know but little more of God or of Christ than if they had been brought up in India. A great many are taught to act over this play in the name of religion, and learned to say, "Our Father who art in heaven," and "I believe in God the Father Almighty;" but do they live as though they did believe in earnest that God is their Almighty Father? Do they fear him and trust in him? Do they love and obey him? Mere pretense, or, as Paul termed it, a _guise_ of godliness, for such is the meaning of the original term, is so common that we meet with it almost daily. Men have learned to tamper with the word of God until the world is full of theorists. How many talk about religion who set aside a great portion of the word of God as worse than useless? And that which they profess to believe they do not believe with half the simplicity which they manifest in believing the words of their earthly parents. It has been said, "He who is not industrious to obtain what he professes to desire does not desire it, and he who is not industrious to bring about that for which he prays, prays with his tongue _only_, and not with his heart." All such have simply a "guise" of godliness, while they deny its power. A great many people profess to believe the Scriptures are true, and that they present the plain and only way to infinite and eternal blessedness, and yet they neglect the study of the Scriptures. How is this? If there was a book revealing a plain and easy way for all men to become rich and enjoy health and pleasure and this world's happiness, would it not be studied by all men? And why is it that the Bible is not studied by the masses and regarded more? Why are so many professors of religion negligent in this matter? May it not be because they prefer all other business and pleasures before this? If professors of religion throughout christendom heartily believed the Scriptures even as they profess, they would be more diligently studied, and in many instances treated with greater respect. The faith of many is undoubtedly very weak. If the laws of our country provided a plain way of escape from temporal death for the benefit of the condemned criminal, as plain and pointed as the great commission given to the apostles of Christ, would any condemned criminal hesitate to obey or treat the stipulations of law as men are constantly treating the precepts of the gospel of Christ? When a man believes the Bible contains _the facts and truths_ which concern us infinitely more than all earthly matters, his care and diligence should be, _to some extent_, in harmony with his persuasion. At this point men _seem to be_ most strangely careless and grossly negligent. How few people do, or will, understand that the terms of salvation are written as with the beams of the sun? Is the trouble a low degree of faith, approximating unbelief? The shadows are always the longest when the sun is lowest. Is the sun of righteousness low in your spiritual heavens? Or have you given him the uppermost seat in your affections? What think you of Christ? Whose son is he? When I tell you that thousands received the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins, even before the Holy Spirit was given, and were clean through the words spoken unto them, many are ready to cry out, "These are hard and strange sayings--who can hear them?" Yet, strange as it may seem, these facts have been upon record near _nineteen hundred_ years. Jesus said, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature; he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned." In the record of St. Luke, chapter 24, the condition of the new covenant, to which remission of sins is promised, is expressed by the term _repentance_: "Thus it behooved Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." The word repentance, when used in the law of Christ, is always equivalent to the use which the ancient martyrs made of it, viz: "Amend your lives." We have it beautifully expressed in these words: "If the wicked turn from all the sins which he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die." Paul summed up the whole matter of his preaching in the sentence, "Repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ." In some of the best Latin translations this passage in Acts 20th is rendered, "_Conversion to God_;" also in Hebrews, 6th chapter, we read, "And _conversion_ from dead works." Such is more clear and natural; but if we should read, according to modern theology, _sorrow_ towards God, and _sorrow_ from dead works, it would sound very unnatural, and almost ridiculous. This is a grand argument in favor of the reading of the _Geneva text_, which reads, "_Amend your lives_ and _turn_, that your sins may be blotted out." But if heaven may be gained at an easier and cheaper rate, how is it that we are so frequently and so plainly assured that without actual newness of life, holiness and sanctification unto obedience, there is no hope, no possibility of salvation? John the Baptist, preaching repentance, said: "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire." It is not the leaves, simply, of a profession, nor the blossoms of good purposes and intentions, but the fruit, _the fruit only_, that will save us from the fire. "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire." Our Savior said, "Not every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doth the will of my father who is in heaven." After he had delivered all the beautiful precepts found in the lesson given upon the mount he closed up all by saying, "He that heareth these sayings of mine and doth them not I will liken him to a foolish man, who built his house upon the sand, and when the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house, it fell, and great was the fall of it." They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts. If they have not done this, and so attained fitness of character to dwell with God, it matters not what their sorrow has been, nor their intentions, they will not enter the kingdom of God. Paul says, "The works of the flesh are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditious, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, of which I forewarn you, as I have told you in time past, that they who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God." He does not say they who have done such things shall not be saved, but just the contrary, for he adds: "Such were some of you, but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified;" but he teaches the doctrine that those who do such things and do not amend their lives shall not be excused by any pretense of sorrow and good purposes; they "shall not inherit the kingdom of God." "In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature"--a creature living by a faith, which worketh by love. It is not simply wishing you were a new creature; not simply wishing for a working faith; nor sorrowing because you are not a Christian; but "keeping the commandments of God," that will permit you to enter heaven. In the final closing of the New Testament writings it is said: "Blessed are they who do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life and enter in through the gates into the city." Paul says, "Follow peace with all men and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord." And Peter says, "Add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity"--and finally says, if ye do these things ye shall never fall, for so an abundant entrance shall be ministered unto you into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And John says, speaking of the Christian's hope, "Every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself even as he is pure;" then the impure may flatter themselves, and presume upon the favor of God without "purifying their souls in obeying the truth," but they are without hope in the world. And again he says, "Little children let no man deceive you, he that doth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous." So all the writers and teachers of the New Testament, with one consent, proclaim the necessity of obeying the commandments of the gospel. What a vain whim it is to think that sorrow and mere intention without reformation of life will admit you into heaven. This golden dream of heaven has sent thousands out of this world unpardoned and unsaved. A great many persons satisfy themselves with a mere confession and acknowledgement of their sins. They seem to think they have done enough, if to confession of sins they add some sorrow for it. They think all is well if, when their fit of sinning is past and they are returned to themselves, the sting remains, breeding some remorse of conscience, some complaints against their wickedness and folly for having done so, and some intentions to forsake it, though never carried into effect. There are many persons in the churches of our country who seem to think the church is a stage, whereon they must play their parts, who make a profession every day of confessing their sins with humble hearts, and yet, after having spent twenty, thirty or forty years in this manner, their hearts are as stubborn as ever, and they as impenitent and disobedient to the gospel of Jesus Christ. If giving thanks to God for the blessing received at his hands is performed with words only, with simple hosannas, and hallelujahs, and "_gloria patris_," and psalms, and hymns, then I presume it is done very efficiently, (?) though our lives are provoking to his majesty. _It is not the office of a friend (?) to bewail a friend with vain lamentation._ To be thankful to God is not to say God be praised, or God be thanked, but it is to remember what he desires and execute what he commands. A dying Roman once said, "It is not the office of a friend to bewail a dead friend with vain lamentations, but to remember what he desires and execute his commands. It is the office of the friends of Christ to remember his desires and carry out his instructions. If we do so we are thankful, and if we do not our thankfulness is nothing more than mere talk." Jesus said to his disciples: "Ye are my friends if ye do what I command you." And again: "If a man love me he will keep my words; he that loveth me not, keepeth not my sayings." Again: "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Those who love God love his cause. When that cause prospers they rejoice; when it declines they are hurt. When clouds and darkness are round about the church it is time to double our diligence and pray to God for help. Circumstances, over which no human being can have control, sometimes cause sluggishness in the character of a church. The hearts of God's people are often deeply affected by witnessing the indifference and carelessness of the people, and still more affected by a falling off in their numbers. When the godly man ceaseth and the faithful fail from among the children of men, it is distressing; but such is the lot of man that we are often called upon to witness the truthfulness of the prophet's statement. All true Christians love the godly because they are faithful. The term _faithful_ implies truth, sincerity and fidelity. Christ, our great example, is called the faithful and true witness. The use of the term in our religion indicates believers in Christ--_obedient believers_--_faithful brethren in Christ_. Col. i: 2. Sometimes it is equivalent to the word _true_, as in 2d Tim., ii: 2--"Faithful men;" the fidelity of the persons alluded to had been tried--_proven_. And again, it means a Christian, in opposition to an infidel, as in 2d Cor. vi: 15--"What part hath he that believeth with an infidel?" A good man is faithful in his business transactions; faithful to his _profession_, adhering to the principles of the gospel and laboring to be faithful to death; faithful in the discharge of his duties; faithful in the employment of his talents; faithful in all things committed to his trust; faithful to his promises; faithful in his friendship. These men fail and cease by means of death. The fathers, where are they? And the teachers, do they live forever? The visitations of death are often mysterious to us. Sometimes the most brilliant in intellect and the most useful in talent, also the most pious and useful in the church, are cut down, while mere cumberers of the ground remain. The profession of some is only transient; they soon disappear from the assembly of the saints. Some improper motive, some peculiar excitement may have moved them, or their goodness of heart may have left them. They have possibly been stony ground hearers or thorny ground hearers. The world allures thousands and kills the vitality of their religion. Judas betrayed his master from the love of worldly gain; and Demas, an acceptable preacher and companion of Paul, abandoned his profession, "having loved the present world." Many fail by endeavoring to unite the world and their religion, maintaining a good moral character, but are destitute of energy in Christianity. When this spirit gets hold of a man, and he is disposed to secularize his religion, or subordinate it to his worldly interests, he is sure to fail sooner or later. Some fail by falling into temptations of various kinds, and disgrace their profession; and some fail through intemperance. Many fail through the influence of error and the enemies of Christianity. These frequently beguile the unwary. There never was a time in our history when unbelief and skepticism was more determined in its opposition to the Christian religion than at the present. There is an incessant attempt to instill into the minds of the young principles in opposition to, and destructive of Christianity. Many have split upon the rocks of infidelity, and stranded upon the quicksands of doubt and skepticism, in spite of the fact that Christianity presented them an example, which is the light and life of men--a character without a blot! And this example is the only foundation upon which to build a moral and pious temple in which the Lord does, and the creature may dwell. OUR INDEBTEDNESS TO REVELATION--THE TEN ATHEISTS IN COUNCIL--No. II. BY P.T. RUSSEL. A rap is heard at the door. It being opened, Christian enters. "Good morning, gentlemen. I am very glad to find you all here. Since our former interview I have been very anxious to continue our investigation of the evidence of the existence of God. I presume, as you are '_Free-thinkers_' and lovers of truth, you are by this time ready to give a scientific reason for the existence of the idea of God, and, as you agree with me that we only obtain ideas through the aid of the five senses, our only idea of color by the eye, of sound by the ear, etc., I wish to ask you to account for the idea of God. Will you oblige me?" _Atheists_--Certainly. We have consulted on this theme since our last interview, and now declare it to be the work or nature of the imagination. It is a scientific truth, as you will readily admit, that imagination can and does get up some singular and unreal forms. We now assume that the idea of a God is but the thought of an imaginary being. _Christian_--True, gentlemen. Fancy, or imagination, does, in active moments, bring for our amusement some fantastic pictures. Her work, however, is never simple, but always complex. This that we are in search of is the idea of a simple being--a being that is single, and not duplex. I will now illustrate the extent of the power of the imagination. Taking a walk through nature's flower garden, we gather one of every variety, and examining them closely, one by one, we notice their difference in form, color and size by the eye. Their fragrance we note by the smell. Thus, by the aid of the senses, we note all their sensible properties. Now, allowing that memory is perfect, we have in store all the peculiarities of each and every individual flower. Gentlemen atheists, am I correct in this conclusion? _Atheists_--Well, yes. _Christian_--Very well; then I'll proceed. Having learned, by what we saw, the art of combining, we can and will imagine all these single flowers blended in one large conglomerated flower, containing all the peculiarities of each and every single flower. Now, gentlemen, is not this all that the imagination can do? _Atheists_--It is. _Christian_--Very well. Is this a simple or compound idea? _Atheists_--It is a compound idea. It is simply the blending of the idea of each single flower. _Christian_--And this is all the imagination can do? Then, gentlemen, do you not see that as the idea of God is the idea of a single person, it would be utterly impossible for imagination to be its author? It is not a conglomerate idea, but a single one. Now, if there is no God, we have a clear, definite idea of _nothing_. How will you account for this? Are you not now unable to give a reason for your premises? Is it not the truth that fools are wiser in their own conceit than men who can give a reason? _Atheists_--Mr. Christian, we did not think that you would thus call us all fools, and as our investigation has taken such an unlooked for turn, we must ask time for consultation before we proceed further. _Christian_--Very well. When will you be ready to resume? this I am anxious to know; as you are "liberalists" and "free-thinkers," you will be equally anxious to reach the truth in the premises? _Atheists_--At two P.M. It is two o'clock, and all are present. Mr. Reason, who was an atheist, opens the discussion as follows: "Mr. Christian, we have held a council on the subject under discussion, and our conclusion is that you are right. There must be, and is, such a being as God. Were this not so, we never could have had the idea of him. We are now deists. We deny that he has ever imparted knowledge to man by revelation." _Christian_--Gentlemen, do you think your present position is a scientific one? _Deists_--We think it is both scientific and invulnerable, and we also think that if you continue this investigation with us you will find it so. How did you obtain this idea? Have you seen God? No. Have you heard him speak? No. If we had we could not be honest without being Christians? _Christian_--Gentlemen, have you not contraband goods in your warehouse? As your eyes have not seen, nor your ears heard, nor your powers of observation perceived him, and as you acknowledge that every one of your ideas entered the mind through the aid of one or another of the five senses, now, I ask, are you logically any better off than before you found yourselves obliged to relinquish your atheism? Do you not now, as well as then, occupy unreasonable ground? Having rather conceded that atheists are fools, and turned _deists_, are you really any better off? Can you give a reason for your present infidelity? Out of your own mouths you stand condemned as unreasonable and foolish. You pretend to venerate reason, while you discard her first principles. You need not try to evade me at this point by an appeal to nature. Here you can find no aid, for nature tells us of no first cause. The apple tree, before this window, now so richly laden with fruit, tells not of its first cause. If you say it came from an apple-seed, and that from an apple, and that from another tree, another seed, and another tree, and so on, in a circle you may always go, for nature does not tell you of a first tree as a cause uncaused, nor of a Creator, a God. She does not go behind herself. Gentlemen, have you any reply? If you have, I would like to hear it. Reason timidly says: "Mr. C., in your very severe strictures on the deists, are you not condemning yourself? You pretend to place full confidence in the teachings of your Bible, and does it not say: 'The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork?' Can nature thus declare and not make known?" _Christian_--Yes, your quotation tells the truth; yet in this also you have taken too much for granted. There stands a clock; it keeps correct time, but does it declare the glory of any one? _Deists_--Yes, that of its maker. _Christian_--But who was its maker. You say you do not know. That is true, and, for ought you know, or can learn from its mechanism there might have been several makers connected with its origin. If you had stood by and seen it made, then you might have told me all about it. In that which you call the works of nature, neither you, nor I, nor any of our fellows, are instructed by actual observation consequent upon being present when they were made--we were not standing by when the heavens were made; so that source of information is closed up. There is now but one resort left to us--but one reasonable means of information. That is, the maker of all things must, necessarily, have told man that he created all these things. Then, with David, he could sing, "The heavens declare the glory of God." Man first learned from God that he was the creator of all things, for God alone could tell it. Gentlemen, the Christian is the only reasonable being upon the earth, and the only _fearless free-thinker_. The atheist, you see, is proved a fool, and the deist is no better. Think this over, then call again. _Deists_--We will. _Good evening._ THOMAS PAINE WAS NOT AN INFIDEL WHEN HE WROTE HIS WORK CALLED COMMON SENSE. "In the early ages of the world, according to the Scripture chronology, there were no kings, the consequence of which was there were no wars. It is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion. Holland, without a king, hath enjoyed more peace for the last century than any of the monarchical governments of Europe. Antiquity favors the same remark, for the quiet and rural lives of the first patriarchs have a happy something in them which vanishes when we come to the history of Jewish royalty." (Common Sense, p. 12.) Mr. Paine, did the God of the Bible approve of the Jewish royalty? _Ans._ "As the exalting one man so greatly above the rest can not be justified on the equal rights of nature, so neither can it be defended on the authority of Scripture; for the will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings." * * * Near three thousand years passed away, from the Mosaic account of the creation, until the Jews, under the national delusion, requested a king. Till then their form of government (except in extraordinary cases, where the Almighty interposed) was a kind of republic, administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes. King they had none, and it was held sinful to acknowledge any being under the title but Lord of Hosts. * * * Monarchy is ranked in Scripture as one of the sins of the Jews, for which a curse in reserve is denounced against them. The history of that transaction is worth attending to. The children of Israel being oppressed by the Midianites, Gideon marched against them with a small army, and victory, through the divine interposition, decided in his favor. The Jews, elate with success, and attributing it to the generalship of Gideon, proposed making him a king, saying, "_Rule thou over us, thou and thy son, and thy son's son._" Here was temptation in its fullest extent; not a kingdom only, but an hereditary one. But Gideon, in the piety of his soul, replied, "_I will not rule over you; neither shall my son rule over you._ THE LORD SHALL RULE OVER YOU." (Common Sense, pp. 13 and 14.) How many Gideons are there among leading infidels whose soul-piety would resist such a temptation as that? Say, was Thomas Paine an infidel when he wrote that? "In short, monarchy and succession have laid, not this or that kingdom only, but the world in blood and ashes. 'Tis a form of government which the word of God bears testimony against, and blood will attend it." (Common Sense, p. 19.) "'But where,' say some, 'is the king of America?' I'll tell you, friend; he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Britain. Yet, that we may not appear to be defective in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth, placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America _the law is king_." (Common Sense, p. 33.) After quoting sundry passages of Scripture against a kingly form of government, Thomas Paine says: "These portions of Scripture are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocal construction. That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true, or the Scripture is false. And a man hath good reason to believe that there is as much of kingcraft as priestcraft in withholding the Scripture from the public in popish countries." (Common Sense, p. 15.) From the foregoing _verbatim_ quotations it will be seen that Thomas Paine was no infidel until he PARTED WITH "COMMON SENSE," which bears date of February 14, 1776. Common Sense is of noble worth. We cheerfully concede to Thomas Paine all the honor due him for services rendered in behalf of our country while he was Thomas Paine the Quaker. He did nothing for our country after he avowed his infidelity that deserves being mentioned by any intelligent Christian. A CLUSTER OF THOUGHTS, GATHERED FROM JENYN'S INTERNAL EVIDENCES, WITH ADDITIONS AND MODIFICATIONS. When the religion of Christ made its appearance it was entirely new, infinitely above, and altogether different from any other which had at any time entered into the mind of man. Its object was new. It was to prepare us with fitness of character, through a state of trial, for mutual association with the pure and lovely in the kingdom of heaven. This is presented in all the gospel, as the chief end of the Christian's life. Until Christ, no such reward was offered to mankind, nor means provided for its attainment. Many of the philosophers in old times had ideas of a future state, but they were mixed with a great deal of uncertainty and misgivings. Ancient legislators endeavored to inculcate the idea of rewards and punishments after death, to give sanction to their laws. This was the sole end in view, and when their laws were virtuous, it was a noble, a praiseworthy end. But the religion of Christ is related to the same object, brings it about; and, also, has a nobler end in view, and that is to prepare us here for a more noble society among the citizens of the kingdom of God in the great hereafter. In all the older religions the good of the present was the direct, and the first object, but in the religion of Christ it is the second. The first great object of the gospel of Christ is to prepare us for the realities of eternity. There is a great contrast between adhering to morality from the motive of present profit, in expectation of future reward, and living such a life as to qualify us for the realization of future happiness. The character of those who are governed by these different principles is not the same. On the first principle, present utility, we may have mere moralists, men practicing simple justice, temperance and sobriety. On the second, we must add to those graces of moral nature faith in God, resignation to his will, and habitual piety. The first will make us very good citizens in a civil government, but will never be sufficient to make us Christians. So the religion of Christ insists upon purity of heart and benevolence, or charity, because these are essential to the end proposed. "That the present existence is one of trial with reference to another state of being, is confirmed by all that we know in what is termed the course of nature. Probation is the only key that unfolds to us the designs of God in the history of human affairs, the only clue that guides us through the pathless wilderness, and the only plan upon which this world could possibly have been formed, or upon which its history can be explained." This world was not formed upon a plan of unconditioned happiness, because it is overspread with miseries. Neither was it formed upon a plan of unconditioned misery, for there are many joys interspersed throughout the whole. It was not formed for the unconditional existence of both vice and virtue, for that is no plan at all, the two elements being, as we know, destructive of each other. By the way, in this very fact we find the grand necessity for the remedial scheme. The mixture of vice and virtue, of happiness and misery, is a necessary result of a state of probation, trials and sufferings consequent upon offending or violating the will of heaven. The doctrine of the religion of Christ, with its ultimate object and its ideas of God and man, of the present and the future life, and of the relations which these all bear to each other, was and is wholly unheard of until you come to the teachings of Christ. No other religion ever drew such pictures of the worthlessness of earthly-mindedness and of living merely for this present world. And no other ever set out such beautiful, lively and glorious pictures of heavenly-mindedness, along with the joys of a future world, nor such pictures of victory over death and the grave, nor of the last judgment, nor of the triumphs of the redeemed in that tremendous day. The personal character of the great author, Christ, is as new and peculiar to this religion as anything else that we can possibly name--"He spake as never man spake." He is the only founder of a religion which is "unconnected with all human policy and government," and, as such, should not be prostituted to any mere worldly purposes whatever. Numa, Mohammed, and even Moses, blended their religious institutions with their civil, and by such means controlled their adherents. Christ neither exercised nor accepted such power. He rejected every motive which controlled other leaders, and chose those which others avoided. Power, honor, riches and pleasure were alike disregarded. He seemed to court poverty, sufferings and death. Many impostors and enthusiasts have tried to impose upon the world with pretended communications from the world of spirits--some of them have died rather than recant; but no history is found to show one who made his own sufferings and death a necessary part of his plan and essential elements in his mission. This distinguishes the Savior of the world from all mere enthusiasts and imposters. He declared his death in all its minutia; with a prophet's vision he saw it, declared it was necessary, and voluntarily endured it; and he was neither a madman nor idiot. Look at his lessons, his precepts and his wonderful conduct, and then imagine him insane if you can. Still, if he was not what he pretended to be, he can be viewed in no other light; and yet under the character of a madman he deserves much attention on account of such sublime and _rational insanity_. There is no other person known in the world's history so _rationally_ and _sublimely_ mad. In what madman's career can you find such a beautiful lesson as his instructions given upon the mount. What other leader enforced his precepts and lessons upon men's credulity with such assurances of reward as, "Come, ye blessed of my father! Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; I was naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee; or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in; or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick and in prison, and came unto thee? Then shall he answer and say unto them, Verily, I say unto you, inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Before the appearance of Christ there existed nothing like the faith of Christ and Christianity upon the face of the earth. The Jews alone had a few of its types and shadows, but the great mystery of Christ had been kept hid since the world began. All the Gentile nations were wrapped up in the very worst idolatry, having little or no connection whatever with morality, except to corrupt it with the infamous examples of their gods. "They all worshiped a multitude of gods and demons, whose favor they sought by obscene and ridiculous ceremonies, and whose anger they tried to appease with the most abominable cruelties." With them, heaven was open only to legislators and conquerors, the civilizers and destroyers of mankind. This was the summit of their religion, and even this was limited to a few prodigies of genius and learning, which was but little regarded and understood by the great masses. One common cloud of ignorance and superstition involved them. At this time Christ came as a teacher; his appearance was like a rising sun, dispelling the darkness and blessing the earth with light and heat. If any man can believe that the son of a carpenter, together with twelve of the meanest and most illiterate mechanics, unassisted by any superhuman wisdom and power, should be able to invent and promulgate a system of theology and ethics the most sublime and perfect, which all such men as Plato, Aristotle and Cicero had overlooked, and that they, by their own wisdom, repudiated every false virtue, though universally admired, and that they admitted every true virtue, though despised and ridiculed by all the rest of the world--if any man can believe that they were _impostors_ for no other purpose than the promulgation of truth, _villains_ for no purpose but to teach honesty, and _martyrs_ with no prospect of honor or advantage; or that they, as false witnesses, should have been able, in the course of a few years, to have spread this religion over the most of the known world, in opposition to the interests, ambition and prejudices of mankind; that they triumphed over the power of princes, the intrigues of states, the forces of custom, the blindness of zeal, the influence of priests, the arguments of orators, and the philosophy of the world, without any assistance from God, he must be in possession of more faith than is necessary to make him a Christian and continues an unbeliever from mere credulity. If the credulous infidel, whose convictions are without evidence and against evidence, should, after all, be in the right, and Christianity prove to be a fable, what harm could ensue from being a Christian? Are Christian rulers more tyrannical and their Christian subjects more ungovernable? Are the rich more insolent _when Christianized_? Are poor Christians most insolent and disorderly? Does Christianity make worse parents and worse children? Does it make husbands and wives, friends and neighbors less trustworthy? Does it not make men and women more virtuous and happy in every situation in life? If Christianity is a fable, it is one the belief of which retains men and women in a regular and uniform life of virtue, piety and devotion to truth. It gives support in the hour of distress, of sickness and death. "If there were a few more Christians in the world it would be very beneficial to themselves and by no means detrimental to the public." THE RESURRECTION OF THE CHRIST. "He, who gave life to man at first, Can restore it when it is lost." Our Savior claimed to be the Son of God, and put the validity of his claim on this, that he should die openly by crucifixion, be buried, and rise from the dead upon the third day. Among all the impostors known in earth's history there is not one instance of a _plot_ like this fact. A mere plot of this nature would be hard to manage. That the first part of this prophesy was fulfilled even our enemies admit. It has not been alleged by infidels of any note that the crucifixion was a fraud, and did not take place, and that Jesus, as a consequence, did not die. The chief priests seem to have had considerable concern about the prediction of the resurrection. Why this? Was it because they had discovered in the person of Christ an impostor, a mere cheat? No; this alone would have caused them to utterly disregard the prediction of his resurrection. Those priests saw something in the character of Christ which caused them to fear the fulfillment of his prediction. What other person ever created such a concern about such an event? There is not a similar case in the world's history. What other dead person was ever known to create such a feeling as that which moved his enemies to confront him, if possible, in his rising power. Those priests had, doubtless, witnessed his miracles again and again. It is beyond all question true that they feared him in his death. If they had seen no wonderful power exerted during his life they certainly would have feared none after he was dead. The fear of the chief priests over the Savior's dead body is an insurmountable evidence of the mighty works which he accomplished during his life. Those priests addressed themselves to the Roman governor, and requested a guard placed around the tomb; three days and nights would settle the question, for the prediction would terminate on the third day. Pilate granted the request, and a guard was set to watch; they sealed the door of the sepulcher, placing the seal of the state upon the great stone. The object of the seal was, doubtless, for the satisfaction of all parties concerned in this matter. It was a precaution against fraud. If the seal upon a door or box is broken we know at once that it has been meddled with. When Darius thrust Daniel among the lions he put his seal upon the door of the den, to satisfy himself and his court that no human hand had interfered for Daniel's delivery. When he came to the den and found his seal unbroken, he was satisfied. A seal thus used is of the nature of a covenant. If you deliver sealed writings to an individual his acceptance amounts to a covenant between you that the same shall be delivered just as they were received. If the seal is broken, it is a manifestation of attempted fraud. There is no special agreement needed in order to the existence of covenants by seals; it is an agreement which men are placed under by the laws of nations. The sealing of the sepulcher where the body of Jesus lay was to impose, by all the solemnities of the Roman state, obligations upon all the parties interested in the person of Christ. It was a grand effort on the part of the authorities to prevent any interference with the dead body. When impostors are known they become odious, and are but little noticed. How was it with Christ? When the popular sentiment was that he was a prophet the priests and scribes sought his life, believing that his death would end his cause? When they and the people learned that he was an impostor (?) they thought him unsafe after he was dead. The prediction of Christ that he would rise the third day was publicly known throughout Jerusalem; but why the chief priests should concern themselves so much about it as to take all the steps to prevent its fulfillment, is a puzzling question with infidels. Was it because they had detected him as a cheat and an impostor? No, this is an unreasonable conclusion. It must have been a secret conviction touching his mighty power. The seal was a proper check upon the guards; the Jews could have no other object in having it placed there. They were not so foolish as to think, that by this contrivance they would outstrip Providence. Guards were set to watch, and, doubtless, did their whole duty. But what are sentinels when the power of Omnipotence is put forth? An angel of the Lord makes his appearance. The keepers saw him, and fell down like dead men. The angel rolled away the stone, and the conqueror came forth to live in the hearts of millions, and to live forevermore. The disciples, receiving power from on high, soon make their appearance in Jerusalem, and boldly assert the fact of the resurrection. The murderers of the Savior were there. What do the priests do next? They had bribed the soldiers to tell a lie which was so base that it only needed to be told in order to be known as a lie. Next, they arrest the apostles; they beat them, they scourge them, and bid them shut their mouths, and insist that they shall say no more about this matter. They did not seem to regard them as liars and impostors, else they would doubtless have charged them with the fraud. They try to assassinate and murder these witnesses of the resurrection. They prevailed with Herod to put one of them to death; but they never seemed to think of charging them with stealing the body away. Their orator, Tertullus, could not have missed such a topic as imposition and fraud if any had been practiced. He did not seem to think of anything of the sort, but contented himself with the charge of sedition, heresy, and the profanation of the temple. Yet the very question of the resurrection was under consideration; for Festus tells Agrippa, that the Jews had "certain questions against Paul of one Jesus, which was dead, whom Paul affirmed to be alive." After this Agrippa heard Paul's testimony, and so far was he from suspecting imposition, that he said, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." Not long after the resurrection the apostles were taken before the council and sanhedrim of the Children of Israel. They make their own defense, a part of which is in these words: "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree." The first impulse of the council was to slay them all; but Gamaliel, one of the council, stood up and related the history of several impostors who perished in former days, and said: "If this work be of men it will come to nought, but if it be of God ye can not overthrow it." He advised them to refrain from the men and let time tell the story. The tree shall be known by its fruits. The council acquiesced; they gave the apostles a whipping and let them go. A resurrection is a thing to be ascertained by men's senses. We all know whether a man is dead by the same means by which we know whether a man is alive. There are those who claim that "a resurrection could not be proven by any amount of testimony, because of its being contrary to the course of nature." But this is mere prejudice and ignorance. First: Who can measure the extent of natural possibilities? Are they generally known? Is it a greater thing to give life to a body once dead than to a body that never was alive? The objection rests upon the thought that testimony should be respected only in such cases as seem to us possible, or in the ordinary course of nature. According to this, no amount of evidence could establish the fact that water freezes and becomes solid in a country where such is not the ordinary course of nature. Does a man's ability in discerning and his truthfulness in reporting depend upon the skill or ignorance of those who hear? We know facts that seem to be as much contrary to the course of nature as anything could possibly be. But, in all candor, I must claim that in appealing to the settled course of nature, in a case like the one under consideration, the question is referred not to the laws of evidence or maxims of reason, but to the prejudices of men and to their mistakes, which are many. Men form a notion of nature from what they see; so, under different surroundings, their notions about the course of nature will differ. The objection falls worthless at the feet of the INFINITE ONE. There is no greater difficulty in accounting for the fact that the dead live again than there is in accounting for the fact that they did live. PUBLIC NOTORIETY OF THE SCRIPTURES. Origen was born in the year one hundred and eighty-five of the Christian dispensation, and lived sixty-eight years. He gives in his writings five thousand seven hundred and sixty-five quotations from the New Testament. Tertullian gives eighteen hundred and two quotations from the New Testament. Clemens, of Alexandria, labored in the year one hundred and ninety-four. He gives us three hundred and eighty-four quotations from the New Testament. Ireneus lived in the year one hundred and seventy-eight. He gives us seven hundred and sixty-seven quotations from the New Testament, making a grand total of eight thousand seven hundred and twenty-three quotations, given by four ancient writers. If all the copies of the New Testament in the world were destroyed, the whole, with the exception of eleven verses, could be reproduced from the writings of men who lived prior to the Nicene Council. Unbelievers quote from all ancient heathen authors as though they were books of yesterday, without manifesting the least doubt in reference to their authenticity or authorship. The evidences necessary to establish genuineness of authorship are ten-fold greater in the case of the New Testament Scriptures than in the case of the histories of Alexander, Julius Cæsar and Cyrus, as given by ancient writers. The notoriety of the New Testament writings during the first centuries is without a parallel among all ancient writings. Their effect upon society during those centuries can never be explained in harmony with unbelief. But this is not all that is to be considered. Their notoriety extends over the centuries between us and the times of the apostles. Such notoriety is the grand support upon which the New Testament stands. All other ancient writings stand upon the same kind of evidence, but this kind of evidence is more than ten-fold greater in the support of our religion than it is in the support of any other ancient documents. We may obtain some idea of the influence of the New Testament Scriptures during the first centuries from the statements of Gibbon. He says there were "six millions of Christians in existence in the year three hundred and thirteen." It is reasonable to allow that there were three millions in the year one hundred and seventy-five. Under the best emperors of the second century books were cheap. Thousands of persons engaged in writing histories for a livelihood. It is allowed that there were as many as fifteen thousand copies of the four gospels in circulation among the people in the last quarter of the second century. This state of things seems to convey the idea that it would be hard work to introduce successfully any corruption into the text after this period of time. It would be too easily detected. There is also a grand argument in favor of the genuineness of our religion, which is in the fact that it was in deathly opposition to both Judaism and Paganism, its success being the destruction of both. If Christianity was an imposition, its success during the first three centuries of our era is utterly inexplicable. WHAT PEOPLE HAVE BEEN AND DONE WITHOUT THE BIBLE. Our ancestors complained of the reign of wickedness; we complain of it and our posterity will complain of it. I sometimes think we are all a set of complainers and grumblers. Of ancient pagans it is said: "They worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator." Of their idols Persius, who was a Roman satirical poet, born A.D. 34, said: "O, cares of men! O, world all fraught With vanities! O, minds inclined Towards earth, all void of heavenly thought!" Sedulius, an ancient Christian poet, and by nativity a Scotchman, says of the same: "Ah! wretched they that worship vanities, And consecrate dumb idols in their heart-- Who their own Maker, God on high, despise, And fear the works of their own hands and art! What fury, what great madness doth beguile Men's minds that man should ugly shapes adore Of birds, or bulls, or dragons, or the vile Half-dog, half-man, on knees for aid implore." One of their own poets jests them thus: "Even now I was the stock of an old fig tree, The workman doubting what I then should be, A bench or god, at last a god made me." The Romans, for a time, were without images for any religious use, but afterwards they received into their city the idols of all the nations they conquered; and as they became the lords of the whole earth, they became slaves to the idols of all the world. Seneca says: "The images of the gods they worship, those they pray unto with bended knees, _those_ they admire and adore, and contemn the artificers who made them." The character and condition of their gods was worse than their own. The common opinion touching their god of gods, _Jupiter_, was that he was entombed in Crete, and his monument was there to be seen. Lactantius _wittily_ says: "Tell me, I beseech you, how can the same god be alive in one place and dead in another; have a temple dedicated to him in one place and a tomb erected in another?" Callimachus, in his hymn on _Jupiter_, calls the Cretians liars in this very respect. He says: "The Cretians always lyars are, who raised unto thy name A sepulchre, that never dyest, but ever art the same." Lactantius informs us in book 10, chapter 20, that they gave divine honor to notorious common prostitutes, as unto _goddesses_, to _Venus_, or _Faula_, to _Lapa_, the nurse of _Romulus_, so called among the shepherds for her common prostitution, and to Flora, who enriched herself by her crime, and then, by will, made the people of Rome her heir, and, also left a sum of money by which her birthday was yearly celebrated with games, which, in memory of her, they called _Floralia_. They claimed that their great goddess, _Juno_, was both the wife and sister of Jupiter; and Jupiter, and the other gods, they held, were no better that adulterers, sodomites, murderers and thieves. Such was not held in private but published to the world. They were described by their painters in their tables, by their poets in their verses, and acted by their players upon their stages. (Lactantius, b. 5, ch. 21.) As respects the manner in which they worshiped their gods, Alexander, in his Dierum Genialium, b. 6, ch. 26, insists that the most odious thing in their history was the effusion of human blood in the service of their gods. This same author says, "This unnatural, barbarous practice spread itself well nigh over the known world; it was in use among the Trojans, as it seems from Virgil's lines touching �neas: "Their hands behind their backs he bound whom he had destined A sacrifice unto the ghosts, and on whose flames to shed Their blood he purposed."--_�nead._ Some ignorant infidels seem at a great loss to understand why the Lord should order the groves and altars of the heathen destroyed. (Again and again their groves were cut down.) The children of Israel were to make no offerings in the groves. If infidels will only exercise common sense inside of the history of the worship of Priapus and Berecynthia, they will cease fretting over the destruction of those beautiful forests. Those groves were the most corrupt places upon the earth, places of retirement from the altar into prostitution, carried on as a matter of worship pleasing to Priapus. Here, on account of becoming modesty, the half can not be told. The removal of nuisances in our own country is conducted upon the same principles upon which groves were destroyed by the Israelites. Lycurgus dedicated an image to laughter, to be worshiped as a god, and this is said to be "the only law he ever made pertaining to religion." While his great object was to make warriors, he ordained some things noted for the education of youth. He ordained other laws so much in favor of lust and all carnality of the worst kind, that it might justly be said he made his entire commonwealth ludicrous. He instituted wrestlings, dances and other exercises of boys and girls naked, to be done in public at divers times of the year, in the presence both of young and old men. Adultery was also approved and permitted by the laws of Lycurgus. Plato and Aristotle advocated community of women, of goods and possessions, to the end that no man should have anything peculiar to himself, or know his own children. This was ordained by Plato, in order to establish in the commonwealth such a perfect unity that no man might be able to say, that is thine, or this is mine. Aristotle, in the second book of his "_Politiques_," sets forth many other detestable things. Lactantius, in the third of his Divine Institutions, shows that Plato's community of property and women took away frugality, abstinence, shamefacedness, modesty and justice itself. Plato, like Lycurgus, ordained that young men should, for the increase of their physical strength and agility of body, at certain times exercise themselves naked; that girls and servant-maids should dance naked among the young men; that women in the flower of their youth should dance, run, wrestle and ride with young men naked as well as they, which, says Plato, "whosoever misliketh understandeth not how profitable it is for the commonwealth." The morality of ancient times may be clearly seen in the fact that all manner of debasing things were brought to the front. How could men be persuaded that adultery should be punished when they were taught from infancy that it was a virtue among the gods? _Lucian_ gives his experience thus, "When I was yet a boy, and heard out of _Homer_ and _Hesiod_ of the adulteries, fornications, rapes and seditions of the gods, truly I thought that those things were very excellent, and began even then to be greatly affected towards them, for I could not imagine that the gods themselves would ever have committed adultery if they had not esteemed the same lawful and good." To all this it may be added that the opinions of the ancient philosophers concerning virtue, vice, the final happiness, and the state of the spirit after death, were diverse and contradictory. The Epicurean doctrine was, that sovereign happiness consisted in pleasure. They granted a God, but denied his Providence; so virtue was without a spur, and vice without a bridle. The Stoics also granted a Divine Providence, but they maintained such a fatal necessity that they blunted the edge of all virtuous efforts and excused themselves in vicious conduct. Both Stoics and Epicureans doubted the immortality of the human spirit, and thereby opened the way to all manner of licentiousness. I am persuaded that eternity alone will fully reveal the consequences of a denial of a future life and retribution; it is a physical leprosy which removes all the most powerful incentives to virtue and loosens up the soul to all manner of lustful gratifications. A man once remarked: "I have lived four years an avowed infidel. I have boasted that I would live a good man and die an infidel. I have formed the acquaintance of all the leading infidels of my country, and I am now prepared to candidly confess that I do not believe any man can keep a good heart without the fear of God. Such is my observation and experience." THE LATEST EVOLUTIONARY CONFLICT. THEY FIRST WISH IT TO BE SO, THEN SOON, WITHOUT PROOF, THEY ASSERT THAT IT IS SO! (_From the Cincinnati Gazette, of June 26, 1880._) "Prof. Huxley is assured that the doctrine of evolution, so far as the animal world is concerned, is no longer a speculation, but a statement of historical fact, taking its place along side of those accepted truths which must be taken into account by philosophers of all schools." This statement was the summing up of an address delivered at the Royal Institution on the 19th of March. The address was specifically an account of "The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species"--it being nearly twenty-one years since Darwin's work bearing that name was first published. The lecturer glanced at the general replacement of the catastrophic theory of geology by the uniformitarian hypothesis, claimed that many of the most important breaks in the line of the descent of plants and animals had been filled, noticed the great advance made in the science of embryology, and held that the amount of our knowledge respecting the mammalia of the Tertiary epoch had increased fifty-fold since Darwin's work appeared, and in some directions even approaches completeness. The lecture closed with these words: "Thus when, on the first of October next, 'The Origin of Species' comes of age, the promise of its youth will be amply fulfilled and we shall be prepared to congratulate the venerated author of the book, not only that the greatness of his achievement and its enduring influence upon the progress of knowledge have won him a place beside Harvey, but, still more, that, like Harvey, he has lived long enough to outlast detraction and opposition, and to see the stone that the builders rejected become the head-stone of the corner." This is plain and emphatic speaking, but it has not been suffered to pass unchallenged. Dr. Charles Elam, a writer who has already more than once measured swords with the school of naturalists of which Professor Huxley is a foremost champion, has been moved to respond to this latest utterance. He has contributed to the _Contemporary Review_ a paper entitled "The Gospel of Evolution," which, whatever may be its conclusiveness, is one of the sharpest attacks recently sustained by the opposing party. Acknowledging at the start Mr. Darwin's pre-eminence as a naturalist, and Prof. Huxley's equal accomplishments in the department of biology, he yet ventures to continue his doubt regarding the evidence of their peculiar doctrines. He first cites Darwin's admissions that it would be fatal to his theory if any organs existed which could not have been evolved by minute selective modifications, and his further concession that "man, as well as every other animal, presents structures which, as far as we can judge, are not now of any service to him, nor have been so during any former part of his existence. Such structures can not be accounted for by any form of selection or by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts." Having contrasted Darwinism proper with its exaggerations, in the system of Haeckel, who regards Darwin's admissions of an original creation as contemptible, and recognizes only one force in the universe--the mechanical, Dr. Elam compares Huxley's statement in his American addresses that belief which is not based upon evidence is not only illogical but immoral, with his last assertion that evolution is a fact, doubted only by persons "who have not reached the stage of emergence from ignorance." In 1862 Huxley also said--republishing the statements as late as 1874: "Obviously, if the earliest fossiliferous rocks now known are coeval with the commencement of life, and if their contents give us any just conception of the nature and the extent of the earliest fauna and flora, the insignificant amount of modification which can be demonstrated to have taken place in any one group of animals or plants is quite incompatible with the hypothesis that all living forms are the results of a necessary process of a progressive development, entirely comprised within the time represented by the fossiliferous rocks." Since this confession was uttered, whatever discoveries may have been made, there has not been the faintest indication of the development of any new species by artificial selection, the individuals of which are fertile among themselves and infertile with the parent stock. It may properly be alleged that there has not been time enough for such a slow process, but it yet remains as true as ever that there is no direct evidence in nature of what the Darwinians call _favorable variation_. It is the unwritten law of nature that one race must die that another may live, this other, in its turn, subserving the same end. Without this law nature would be a chaotic impossibility. If natural selection were a real agency, we ought to meet with frequent, if not constant, evidences of transition, and a slow and gradual, but perceptible improvement in species, especially marked in those whose generations succeed each other rapidly. But we see nothing of the kind. But did selection really exist, it would be incompetent to account for a multitude of structures and functions to which any efficient cause should be applicable, notably to the earliest rudiments of useful organs. Such organs as the eye and the internal ear are quite out of reach of any explanation by natural selection. Since the development of the eyes, due to the simultaneous growth of parts from within and without, the organ itself would be absolutely useless until it had attained such a degree of development as to admit of these separate parts meeting, and so the principle of preserving any useful variety would be quite inapplicable. The same is true of the internal ear. Dr. Elam next passes in review Haeckel's Geneology of Man from the Lowest Monera to his Present Station as Lord of Creation. What the Germans call invention of species to fill troublesome gaps is illustrated in many ways, but we have room only for a single example: "The vertebrata must be developed from something, and as yet there has been no smallest indication of anything like a spine or a rudiment of anything that could represent or be converted into one. It costs our author nothing but a stroke of his pen to invent the 'Chordonia,' and whence did they come? They were developed from the worms by the formation of a spinal marrow and a _chorda dorsulis_. Nothing more--the most trifling modification!--and we are at once provided with the root and stem of the whole vertebrata divisions. It is scarcely any drawback to this stroke of genius to say that there is no evidence whatever that such an order of living beings ever existed; that no one has the least conception of what they were like, or of any of their attributes. Prof. Huxley's responsibility for this imaginative science is evidenced by his declaration that the conception of geological time is the only point upon which he fundamentally and entirely disagrees with Haeckel." It still remains true that all our positive and direct knowledge as to species contradicts the evolution hypothesis. Its evidence is purely inferential, and, as Dr. Elam quietly says, "As a psychological study it is interesting to observe how many things are deemed impossible to the infinite wisdom and power (which by the terms of the supposition, presided over the arrangements of our world) which are perfectly clear and comprehensible when considered as the result of blind chance and the operation of mechanical causes only." Omitting for lack of space his keen analysis of Huxley's claim of the evidence of evolution from the orchippus to the modern horse, we follow our author from his array of what is not proved to what is actually taught by geology. We quote: "THE SUCCESSION OF FORMS OF LIFE ON OUR GLOBE IS DEMONSTRABLY NOT SUCH AS OUGHT TO BE THE CASE ON THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION." It was not the small and feeble species or most generalized forms that first appeared, either among mollusks, fish, reptiles or mammalia. We look in vain now for the representatives of the gigantic fishes of the Old Red Sandstone. And where are the mighty reptile tyrants of air, earth and water of the Oolite? * * * These races appeared in the plenitude of their development and power; and, as their dynasty grew old, it was not that the race was improved or preserved in consequence, but they dwindled, and were, so to speak, degraded, as if to make room in the economy of nature for their successors. Next follows a closely linked argument that will not bear abridgement, showing the physical improbability that man, a walking animal, was descended from a climbing one, and the deplorable consequences which obliterate free will and necessitate the secularization of morals, as elaborated by Prof. Huxley's friend, Mr. Herbert Spencer. This part of the subject has a special interest to Americans, since the work in which Mr. Spencer's views are inculcated has been introduced as a manual in one of our oldest colleges, but its reproduction would widely lengthen our article. It is sufficient to say that Dr. Elam concludes that Mr. Spencer's doctrine, that "actions are completely right only when, besides being conducive to future happiness, they are immediately pleasurable," would justify him in concealing any injury done by him to a friend's scientific apparatus, provided he could attribute it to the weather, or the intrusion of a dog. Such, in brief, are the points of an essay which, as a whole, is one of the most brilliant responses that the declarations of leading evolutionists have called forth. Of course, all its points are not new, but old objections have been skillfully refurbished and new ones brought into play. * * * * * To mourn for the dead, is to mourn for the lost casket when you still retain the jewel it held. The memories of the dead one's virtues are the jewels, and the cold clay but the casket. AUTHORSHIPS OF THE BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. I have a few questions to put to every man who says Christianity is not true. They are these: If Christianity is not true, where did it come from? How came it into the world? What is its origin? These questions are not trifling ones. Infidels have given as many different answers to them as there are days in the week. There is no agreement among them that amounts to a settlement of the questions among themselves. The Scriptures are ancient. Porphyry, born at Tyre in 233, wrote a book against them, which was burned by order of Theodosius the Great, in the year 304. (Zell's Encyclopedia.) The Emperor Julian, born in the year 331, and Hierocles, who lived in the fourth century, both wrote against Christianity, against the Scriptures, but did not call in question the existence of Christ, nor the fact that he wrought miracles. Celsus, an Epicurean philosopher who lived in the second century, was the author of a work written against Christianity, entitled "Logos Aleethees," that is, "Word of Truth." To this work Origen replied. Celsus, in this work, quotes from the gospels by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and does this over and over, and shows that the Christians valued the books very highly; they suffered death rather than repudiate them. A TABLE OF THE ANCIENT TIMES OF TRIAL AND OF PEACE. DATE-- A.D. 64 to 68--Persecution under Nero. 95 to 96--Persecution under Domitian. Banishment of John. 96 to 104--Time of peace. 104 to 117--Persecution under Trajan. Martyrdom of Ignatius. 117 to 161--Time of peace. Apologies of Aristides, Quadratus and Justin Martyr were written. 161 to 180--Persecution under Marcus Aurelius. Martyrdom of Polycarp and the martyrs of Lyons. 164--Justin Martyr was put to death. Statistics concerning the sufferings of the first Christians show that they were in great earnest. Eternity alone will reveal the true number of the martyrs. They all suffered and died just as we would expect, in case they knew the facts of our religion. Twenty-two books of the New Testament were written before the martyrdom of the Apostles Paul and Peter. Infidels often boast, in their ignorance, that the books of the gospels were not written by those whose names they bear. If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did not write those books which bear their names, then are they false in fact? and if so, what did the authors die for? The sufferings of primitive Christians were great; the persecutions which they endured were outrageous, cruel and inhuman in their character. Such is the universal verdict of ancient history. Of the persecution under Nero, Tacitus, a celebrated Roman historian, who was born in the year 56, just twenty-three years after Pentecost, writes, that Nero "laid upon the Christians the charge of that terrible conflagration at Rome of which he himself was the cause." He says, "A vast multitude were apprehended. And many were disguised in the skins of wild beasts and worried to death by dogs, some were crucified, and others were wrapped in pitched shirts and set on fire when the day closed, that they might serve as lights to illuminate the night. Nero lent his own garden for these executions, and celebrated at the same time a public entertainment in the circus, being a spectator of the whole in the dress of a charioteer, sometimes mingling with the crowd on foot, and sometimes viewing the spectacle from his car." (Annals of Tacitus, 15: 44.) Juvenal, the coarse and bitter satirist of the same time, writes of the martyred Christians as "those who stand burning in their own flame and smoke, their head being held up by a stake fixed to their chin, till they make a long stream of blood and sulphur on the ground." (Juv. Sat., 1: 155.) Seneca also refers to their fearful sufferings: "Imagine here a prison, crosses and racks and the hook, and a stake thrust through the body and coming out at the mouth, and the limbs torn by chariots pulling adverse ways, and the coat besmeared and interwoven with inflammable materials, nutriment for fire, and whatever else beside _these_ cruelty has invented." (Seneca's Epistles, 14.) One of Diocletian's coins commemorates the blotting out of the very name of Christian: "Nomine Christianorum deleto." But the age of martyrdoms ended with the accession of Constantine to the Roman empire, and to-day there are more Christians in the world than ever before. Skeptic, take one long look at the unbelieving, bloody, persecuting hosts, and choose your future associates. Strauss says: "No man knows who wrote the Gospels." Can he mean that they are anonymous books? Does he mean that they are not biographies--books containing, in their historic matter, an account of the authors _themselves_? Who does not know that those books are and have been called the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? And who has, in all the past centuries, produced evidence showing that those are the wrong names. No one. Insane men might say such a thing. Infidels don't like to say that; they just say you can't prove your religion, nor show that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote those books. Will any sensible man affirm that they are the wrong names? How do we judge and believe respecting the authorship of other ancient books? Why do we believe that Cæsar wrote the Commentaries on the Gallic War? And why do we believe that Virgil wrote the �neid? No sane man ever doubted the authorship of those writings. Preoccupancy during the ages past is considered by infidels themselves a sufficient ground for belief. The fact that those books exist has certainly been known from the age of the apostles to the present time, for men quoted extensively from them in the second century. The names they bear were in the possessive case then, and it is but fair to consider them the true owners. Why are skeptics and infidels so partial among ancient books? They doubt the authorship of no ancient books unless they are written in favor of the religion of Christ. Will some wise one tell us why this strange inconsistency? O, it is an evidence of a wicked heart--that's all! all!!--ALL THERE IS OF IT!!! Here are the dates of the books of the New Testaments, along with contemporary landmarks: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | BOOKS. | AFTER | CONTEMPORARY LANDMARKS. | PENTECOST. | -------------+------------+---------------------------------------------- 1 Peter | 16 | Claudius Cæsar ruled from A.D. 41 to 54. Galatians | 18 | 1 Thess | 19 | Romans settled in England between 41 and 54. 2 Thess | 20 | 1 Cor | 24 | Nero ruled from 54 to 68. 2 Cor | 25 | 1 Timothy | 25 | Paul and Peter were martyred at Rome in or Romans | 25 | about the year 63; 30 years after Pentecost. James | 28 | Matthew | 28 | Persecution continues under Nero until the Mark | 28 | year 68. The satirist Juvenal, who lived Philemon | 29 | under Nero, and his brother satirist Martial, Collosians | 29 | both allude to the burnings of the Christians Ephesians | 29 | in pitched shirts. Philippians | 29 | Luke | 30 | Suetoneus, writing of what took place under Acts | 30 | Emperor Claudius, in 53, makes mention of Hebrews | 30 | Christ. 2 Peter | 34 | 2 Timothy | 34 | Galba, Otho and Vitelleus rule from 68 to 69. Titus, about | 34 | Jude, about | 34 | Christians have peace from 68 to 95. Epistles | | of St. John | | 1, 2, 3 | 40 | Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70. Revelations | | of Jesus | | Christ | | to John | 64 | Vespasian rules from 69 to 79. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- CARLYLE'S ESTIMATE OF THE BOOK OF JOB, IN HIS OWN WORDS. "I call the book of Job, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest books ever written with a pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew--such a noble universality, different from noble patriotism or sectarianism, reigns in it. A noble book! All men's book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem of man's destiny and God's ways with him here on this earth, and all in such free, flowing outlines, grand in its simplicity and its epic melody and repose of reconcilement! There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true every way; true eye-sight and vision for all things--material things no less than spiritual; the horse--'thou hast clothed his neck with thunder;' 'he laughs at the shaking of the spear!' Such living likenesses were never since drawn. Sublime sorrow! Sublime reconciliation! Oldest choral melody, as of the heart of mankind! So soft and great, as the summer midnight, as the world with its seas and stars! There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit." (Dr. Cotton's Scrap-Book.) WHAT I LIVE FOR. "I live to hold communion With all that is divine, To feel there is a union Between God's will and mine; For the cause that lacks assistance, For the future, in the distance, For what'er is good and true, For all human hearts that bind me, For the task by God assigned me, And the good that I can do." THE MOLECULE GOD. AIR--_The Fine Old English Gentleman._ [To be sung at all gatherings of advanced "siolists" and "scientists."] We will sing you a grand new song evolved from a 'cute young pate, Of a fine old Atom-Molecule of prehistoric date; In size infinitesimal, in potencies though great, And self-formed for developing at a prodigious rate-- Like a fine old Atom-Molecule, Of the young world's proto-prime! In it slept all the forces in our cosmos that run rife, To stir creation's giants or its microscopic life; Harmonious in discord and co-operant in strife, To this small cell committed the world lived with his wife-- In this fine old Atom-Molecule, Of the young world's proto-prime! In this autoplastic archetype of protean protein clay All the human's space has room for, for whom time makes a day, From the sage whose words of wisdom prince or parliament obey, To the parrots who but prattle, and the asses who but bray-- So full was this Atom-Molecule, Of the young world's proto-prime! All brute life, from lamb to lion, from the serpent to the dove, All that pains the sense or pleasure, all the heart can loathe or love; All instincts that drag downwards, all desires that upwards move Were caged, a "happy family," cheek-by-jowl, and hand-in-glove, In this fine old Atom-Molecule, Of the young world's proto-prime! In it order grew from chaos, light out of darkness shined, Design sprang by accident, law's rule from hazard blind; The soul-less soul evolving--against, not after kind, As the life-less life developed, and the mind-less ripened mind, In this fine old Atom-Molecule, Of the young world's proto-prime! Then bow down mind to matter; from brain fiber, will, withdraw; Fall man's heart to cell ascidian, sink man's hand to monkey's paw; And bend the knee to Protoplast in philosophic awe-- Both Creator and created, at once work and source of law. And our Lord be the Atom-Molecule, Of the young world's proto-prime! PUNCH. Transcriber's Note The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. 
19321	----	Services at Concordia College, Bronxville, New York, USA EVOLUTION. An Investigation and a Criticism by TH. GRAEBNER, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Mo. Milwaukee, Wis. Northwestern Publishing House, 1921. _Species tot sunt, quot diversas formas ab initio produxit Infinitum Ens. Linne._ To the Memory of my teacher (New Ulm, 1892) John Schaller Educator, Theologian, Student of Science these chapters are dedicated by The Author TABLE OF CONTENTS. Chapter 1. An Outline of the Theory...11 Definition--Historical Review--The Darwinian Hypothesis--Lines of Evidence--The Descent of Man--The Nebular Hypothesis--The Origin of Life--The Bearing of Evolution on Christianity. Chapter 2. Unexplained Origins...29 The Origin of the Universe--The Origin of Life--Biological Barriers-- Man. Chapter 3. The Testimony of the Rocks...47 Chapter 4. The Fixity of Species...62 Chapter 5. Rudimentary Organs...70 Chapter 6. Instinct...74 Chapter 7. Heredity...80 Chapter 8. A Scientific Creed Outworn...87 Chapter 9. Man...94 Chapter 10. The Verdict of History...113 Chapter 11. Evidences of Design...124 Chapter 12. The Fatal Bias...141 PREFATORY. I first read Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species" in the library of my sainted uncle, John Schaller, at New Ulm, Minnesota, in 1892. I did not comprehend all of it then, a cause, to me, of considerable chagrin, for which I later found some consolation in the opinion of Dr. Frederick Lynch, who pronounces Darwin's epochal work "one of the two most difficult books in the English language." But like many others, I understood enough of Darwin's book to catch glimpses of the grandeur of the conception which underlies its argumentation. It was then that my beloved uncle, out of that wide and accurate reading which so frequently astonished his friends, and with that penetrating dialectic of his, opened my eyes to certain fallacies in Darwin's argument, especially to the fatal weakness of the chapter on Instinct. The reading of St. George Mivart's book "The Genesis of Species" later convinced me of the accuracy of my uncle's judgment. But the fascination of the subject persisted, and for a time Herbert Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy," by the comprehensiveness of its induction and its vast array of data, exercised its thrall. Alfred Russel Wallace's "Darwinism," Huxley's "Lectures on Evolution," Tyndall's "The Beginning of Things," Grant Allen's "The Evolutionist at Large," Eimer's "Orthogenesis," Clodd's "Story of Creation," occupied me in turn, until the apodictic presentation of John Fiske's Essays on Darwinism, no less than the open and haggard opposition to Christianity which prevails in Huxley's "Science and Hebrew Tradition" and in Spencer's chapters on "The Unknowable" (so the Synthetic Philosophy denominates God), caused a revulsion of sentiment,--the anti-religious bias of evolution standing forth the clearer to my mind, the longer I occupied myself with the subject. I determined to investigate for myself the data on which the speculations whose mazes I had trod these years were built up. The leisure hours of three years were devoted to the study of first-hand sources of Comparative Religion. The result of this research was deposited in two articles contributed to the _Theological Quarterly_ in 1906 and 1907. I fear that the forbidding character of the foot-notes served as an effective deterrent to the reading of these articles. I have now given, in several chapters of this little volume, in popular language the argument against evolution to be derived from the study of Religion. The reading of Le Conte's and Dana's text-books of geology and various other treatises supplied the data on palaeontology embodied in the first chapters of the book. The notable circulus in concludendo ("begging the question") of which evolutionists here are guilty was first pointed out to me by Prof. Tingelstad of Decorah, Iowa, who was in 1908 taking a course in Evolution at Chicago University, and who called on me for discussion of the doctrine as he received it from "head-quarters." An an excursus in the subject of Pedagogy, I have treated in my Seminary lectures the past years, under the head of natural sciences, the argument against evolution, and the outlines of these lectures have furnished the framework for the present volume. It is hoped that especially our young men and women who take courses at our universities will examine the case against the fascinating and in some respects magnificent conception of evolution as this case is presented in the following chapters. I realize that they, as well as intelligent readers generally, may not meet with confidence the statements of a theologian on a scientific question, least of all when he essays to treat such a question from the standpoint of science. He is presumed to be at home in theology, but a stranger in the domain of geology, astronomy, and biology. It is for the purpose of obtaining a hearing at all that these introductory remarks are written. But the argument must stand on its own merits. The writer will now retire to the background. The facts shall speak. TH. G. EVOLUTION. CHAPTER ONE. An Outline of the Theory. Definition. Evolution is a name comprehending certain theories which seek to account for all operations of nature as carried on according to fixed laws by means of forces resident in nature. Prof. J. LeConte of the University of California defines evolution as: "Continuous progressive change according to certain laws and by means of resident forces." Evolution is a theory, a philosophy, it is not a science. The theory is called _organic_ evolution in its relation to living forms (plant and animal life), _cosmic_ evolution, inasmuch as attempts have been made to account by certain laws and the working of resident forces for the development of the universe,--the earth, the sun, and the starry heavens. Also the development of society, of religion, morals, politics, art, and mechanical inventions is accounted for on the theory that there are forces which, acting according to certain laws, have through many changes made human life and institutions as we see them today. The doctrine of Evolution briefly stated, is as follows: That in some infinitely remote period in the past, how or from whence science does not affirm, there appeared matter and force; that within matter and in association with force there also appeared a primordial cell, how or from whence no man knoweth, in which there was a spark of life; and that from this cell all things animate have emerged, being controlled by certain laws variously stated by various evolutionists; that these laws in connection with the modifying influences of environment (surroundings,--soil, climate, etc.) account for and explain the various species that have existed in the past and now exist upon earth, man included. That there are no gaps in the process but that there is demonstrable a steady ascent from lower to higher (simple to more complex) forms of life, until man is reached, the acknowledged highest product of evolution. The extreme evolutionists hold that all the power and potency of the universe was stored up in that primordial cell, and that all things have been worked out without any superintending agency other than the forces resident in matter. Every operation of God is ruled out, or deemed unnecessary. This is sometimes called atheistic evolution. The theistic evolutionist ("theistic" from "theism," the belief in a personal God) makes place for God in the beginning and all along the line of development, as overlooking the process, perhaps reinforcing and to a certain extent directing the energy, but not interfering with the fixed law or rule of evolution. According to theistic evolution, God did not create plants and animals as separate species (as related in Genesis 1) but created matter as a crude form and placed it under certain laws, by which this matter was, during untold ages, gradually evolved into worlds. That out of this matter, called inorganic, plants came into existence, from some germ or property existing in matter. The origin of animal life is explained in various ways by the so-called theistic evolutionists. Some hold that the primordial plant life contained potentially the lowest and simplest principles of animal life, and from it the simplest animal forms were evolved; that from these latter were evolved forms a little higher, until, after long ages, all the gradations were passed through until man, the highest form, was the result. Others believe that there is such an essential difference between plants and animals that the latter could not have come from the former, that there must be a new start on the animal side of life. Therefore they claim that when the evolutionary development of matter reached a certain stage, God appeared on the scene and endowed certain forms with the principle of animal life, in its lowest elements. These lowest forms of animal life then entered upon a series of evolutionary growth, each lower form evolving one a little more complex, each series gaining the use of and developing organs which existed essentially in the lower form but were small, imperfect, and useless, because not needed. Thus the hand and arm in man are structurally or essentially the same as the leg of the brute, the wing of the bird, the flipper of the whale, and the fin of the fish; and the endeavor to adapt itself to the water caused the bird to develop a fin, as by a similar process the fore-leg of brutes developed into the human arm and hand. For our present consideration, we need not distinguish between atheistic and theistic evolution, as the latter is subject to the fundamental objections urged against evolution in general, and is, like atheistic evolution, without a single fact to support it and in direct contradiction of all that is known of the laws in operation now, and as far back as knowledge penetrates. Moreover, so-called "theistic" evolution is universally approved by infidels and skeptics and is used by them as a favorite means of assault on revealed Truth. Historical Review. While in our own day the names of certain English and German scientists (Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, Romanes, Buechner, Vogt, Haeckel) are inseparably connected with a history of this hypothesis, its roots are found far back in the early ages of Greek philosophy. A theory of evolutionary development was first propounded by Greek thinkers living about 600 years B. C. The human mind is ever on the search for unifying principles, principles which account for entire groups of natural phenomena, and not for isolated phenomena only. The Greek mind sought a principle by which to account for the manifold and diverse forms of life in nature. Whence do all things come? How have they come to be what they are? Questions about the nature of the universe in which we live have been asked from the very beginning. The moment the human mind began to reflect the notion that the vegetation which covers the earth, the animals which inhabit it, the rocks and hills, the mountains and valleys which constitute its physical features, may have undergone changes in past time, and that all the phenomena which constitute the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds as they now exist, are but modifications of other forms which have had their day and their philosophy, the idea of development became prominent. The early Greek philosophers were the first to attempt answers to these problems. Many of them held that all things natural sprang from what they called the original elements--fire, air, earth, water. Anaximander held that animals were begotten from the earth by means of heat and moisture; and that man was developed from other beings different in form. Empedocles had a fantastic theory, viz., that the various parts of man and animals at first existed independently, and that these--for instance, arms, legs, feet, eyes, etc., gradually combined--perhaps after the manner in which automobiles are assembled; and that these combinations became capable of existing and even of propagating and reproducing themselves. Anaxagoras was of opinion that animals and plants sprang from the earth by means of germs carried in the atmosphere which gave fecundity to the earth. Aristotle held opinions not very unlike those of our own day. All of which goes to show that speculation about the origin of the universe and the why and wherefore of living things did not come into existence with the Darwinian hypothesis and that the doctrine of descent with modification as an explanation of all biological phenomena antedates by over two thousand years the publication of the "Origin of Species." In modern times a theory of development was first suggested by Goethe in his _"Italienische Reise."_ Acting under the same mental urge for seeing diverse forms under a unifying principle, Goethe looked for the original form of plant life, the _Urpflanze_, the plant which would be at once simple enough to stand for a type of all plants and yet susceptible to variation in so many directions that all plants might derive from it their origin. Goethe has also clothed this conception in poetic form. The first philosophic statement of the hypothesis is found in Immanuel Kant's _"Kritik der Urteilskraft,"_ 1790. In paragraph 80 we find a discussion of the similarity between so many species of animals, not only in their bony structure, but also in the arrangement of their other parts, a similarity which, says Kant, "casts a ray of hope," that all forms may be traced back to original simple forms, to "a generation from a common ancestor," rising from the lowest forms to man, "according to mechanical laws." Kant assumes that, for instance, certain aquatic animals by and by formed into amphibia, and from these after some generations were produced land animals. A treatise of the same philosopher entitled _"Presumable Origin of Humanity"_ suggests that man in the early age of the world was developed from "mere animal creatures." Even a universal law of world-formation (cosmic evolution) was set forth by Kant in a work which he published anonymously in 1775. In its relations to animal life a development theory was first clearly set forth by Karl Ernst von Baer (died 1876). In his _"Entwickelungsgeschichte der Tiere"_ (1828), the author explains "Entwickelung" as a progress from simple to complex forms. He believes that in evolution there is a fundamental idea that "goes through all the forms of cosmic and animal development." A predecessor of von Baer had been the Frenchman, Lamarck. From von Baer, Herbert Spencer, about 1850, adopted the definition of evolution. The hypothesis entered a new phase through Charles Darwin's epochmaking work: _"The Origin of Species."_ The keynote of Darwin's theory is Natural Selection, by which term the development of all living forms is referred to the working of certain laws which in the reproduction of plants and animals preserved those individuals which were best fitted to survive the struggle for existence. The Darwinian theory may be summarized thus: The Darwinian Hypothesis. 1. Every kind of animal and plant tends to increase in numbers in a geometrical progression. 2. Every kind of animal and plant transmits a general likeness, with individual differences, to its offspring. 3. Past time has been practically infinite. 4. Every individual has to endure a very severe struggle for existence, owing to the tendency to geometrical increase of all kinds of animals and plants, while the total animal and vegetable population (man and his agency excepted) remains almost stationary. 5. Thus, every variation of a kind tending to save the life of the individual possessing it, or to enable it more surely to propagate its kind, will in the long run be preserved and will transmit its favorable peculiarity to some of its offspring, which peculiarity will thus become intensified till it reaches the maximum degree of utility. On the other hand, individuals presenting unfavorable peculiarities will be ruthlessly destroyed (_Survival of the Fittest_), [tr. note: sic punctuation] The basis of the theory then is that animals and plants multiply very rapidly and, second, that the offspring always vary slightly from the parents, though generally very closely resembling them. Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace says: "From the first fact or law there follows, necessarily, a constant struggle for existence; because while the offspring always exceeds the parents in number, generally to an enormous extent, yet the total number of living organisms in the world docs not, and can not, increase year by year. Consequently every year, on the average, as many die as are born, plants as well as animals; and the majority die premature deaths. They kill each other in a thousand different ways; they starve each other by some consuming the food that others want; they are destroyed largely by the powers of Nature--by cold and heat, by rain and storm, by flood and fire. There is thus a perpetual struggle among them which shall live and which shall die; and this struggle is tremendously severe, because so few can possibly remain alive--one in five, one in ten, often only one in a hundred or even in a thousand. "Then comes the question, Why do some live rather than others? If all the individuals of each species were exactly alike in every respect, we could only say it is a matter of chance. But they are not alike. We find that they vary in many different ways. Some are stronger, some swifter, some hardier in constitution, some more cunning. An obscure color may render concealment more easy for some, keener sight may enable others to discover prey or escape from an enemy better than their fellows. Among plants the smallest differences may be useful or the reverse. The earliest and strongest shoots may escape the slug; their greater vigor may enable them to flower and seed earlier in a wet autumn; plants best armed with spines or hairs may escape being devoured; those whose flowers are most conspicuous may be soonest fertilized by insects. We can not doubt that, on the whole, any beneficial variations will give the possessors of it a greater probability of living through the tremendous ordeal they have to undergo. There may be something left to chance, but on the whole _the fittest will survive." (_"Darwinism"_ p. 7)_. The same writer gives a probable instance of the working of _Natural Selection_ in the origin of certain aquatic birds called dippers. He says: "An excellent example of how a limited group of species has been able to maintain itself by adaptation to one of these 'vacant places' in Nature, is afforded by the curious little birds called dippers or water-ouzels, forming the genus _Cinclus_ and the family _Cindidae_ of naturalists. These birds are something like small thrushes, with very short wings and tail, and very dense plumage. They frequent, exclusively, mountain torrents in the northern hemisphere, and obtain their food entirely in the water, consisting, as it does, of water-beetles, caddis-worms, and other insect-larvae, as well as numerous small fresh-water shells. These birds, although not far removed in structure from thrushes and wrens, have the extraordinary power of flying under water; for such, according to the best observers, is their process of diving in search of their prey; their dense and somewhat fibrous plumage retaining so much air that the water is prevented from touching their bodies or even from wetting their feathers to any great extent. Their powerful feet and long curved claws enable them to hold on to stones at the bottom, and thus to retain their position while picking up insects, shells, etc. As they frequent chiefly the most rapid and boisterous torrents, among rocks, waterfalls, and huge boulders, the water is never frozen over, and they are thus able to live during the severest winters. Only a very few species of dipper are known, all those of the old world being so closely allied to our British bird that some ornithologists consider them to be merely local races of one species; while in North America and the northern Andes there are two other species. "Here, then, we have a bird, which, in its whole structure, shows a close affinity to the smaller typical perching birds, but which has departed from all its allies in its habits and mode of life, and has secured for itself a place in Nature where it has few competitors and few enemies. We may well suppose,* [[*Note characteristic phrase "We may suppose that,--." G.]] that, at some remote period, a bird which was perhaps the common and more generalized ancestor of our thrushes, warblers, wrens, etc., had spread widely over the great northern continent, and had given rise to numerous varieties adapted to special conditions of life. Among these some took to feeding on the borders of clear streams, picking out such larvae and mollusks as they could reach in shallow water. When food becomes scarce they would attempt to pick them out of deeper and deeper water, and while doing this in cold weather many would become frozen and starved. But any which possessed denser and more hairy plumage than usual, which was able to keep out the water, would survive; and thus a race would be formed which would depend more and more on this kind of food. Then, following up the frozen streams into the mountains, they would be able to live there during the winter; and as such places afforded them much protection from enemies and ample shelter for their nests and young, further adaptations would occur, till the wonderful power of diving and flying under water was acquired by a true land-bird." (_"Darwinism,"_ p. 81-82.) Lines of Evidence. The evolutionary hypothesis (both in its atheistic and theistic or "Christian" form) is understood to rest on the following lines of proof: i. _Primary:_ The evidence of palaeontology (the study of fossil remains in the rocks). The surface of the earth underneath the top soil consists of layers of rock. Some of them are made up of lime deposits, others of the shells of shell-fish, others of sand-stone, others of dead trees of the forest (coal), all of them turned hard by the pressure of the weight lying on top of them. Besides these sedimentary rock there are formations like granite, showing the influence of heat. Digging among the sedimentary rock (limestone, sand-stone, principally) we come across preserved remains of all sorts of animals; some just like those which live to-day, some similar but somewhat different, others quite dissimilar from living animals of our day. These are the fossils. Now, evolutionists assert that the oldest and simplest animal and plant remains are found in the oldest layers of rock. This is said to prove that in the history of plants and animals on earth, the simplest forms are the oldest and that later the more complex forms were developed from these. LeConte states the matter thus: "The farther back in time we go, the simpler the forms of animal and plant life become, and these forms occur in the order of their origination, just as if they were developed one from another." 2. _Corroborative:_ a) The Argument from Morphology (Structure). The resemblance of the structure of various animal types is asserted to imply a community of descent. "Large groups of species, whose habits are widely different, present certain fundamental likenesses of structure. The arms of men and apes, the fore-legs of quadrupeds, the paddles of whales, the wings of birds, the breast-fins of fishes, are constructed on the same pattern, but altered to suit their several functions. Nearly all mammals, from the long-necked giraffe to the short-necked elephant, have seven neck-bones; the eyes of the lamprey are moved by six muscles which correspond exactly to the six which work the human eye; all insects and Crustacea--moth and lobster, bettle [tr. note: sic] and cray-fish---are alike composed of twenty segments; the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils of a flower are all modified leaves arranged in a spire." (Clodd, _"The Story of Creation,"_ p. 102.) These _resemblances_ are looked upon as evidence of a common origin. b) The Argument from Embryology. The individual animal in embryonic development passes through temporary stages which are similar to permanent conditions in some of the lower forms in the same group. Evolutionists believe that these forms were actually possessed by the ancestors of these animals in the course of their evolution. They hold that the changes which take place in the embryos epitomize the series of changes through which the ancestral forms passed. Because the embryos of some four-footed animals have gill-slits, this is pointed out as evidence that land animals are evolved from fishes. c) Geographical Distribution. In geological time, natural barriers have sprung up which separated the species which have since developed. In this way the existence of marsupials (pouched animals--kangaroo, oppossum) [tr. note: sic] on certain limited areas, the limitation of certain plants to certain islands, etc., are explained. d) Classification. The so-called Tree of Life. All living forms can be arranged in a diagram called the Tree of Life. The Tree has a short trunk, indicating common origin of the living from the non-living, and is divided into two large trunks representing plants and animals respectively. "From each of these start large branches representing classes, the larger branches giving off smaller branches representing families, and so on with smaller and smaller branches representing orders and genera, until we come to leaves as representing species, the height of the branch from which they are hanging indicating their place in the growth of the great life-tree." (Clodd, _"Story of Creation,"_ p. 103.) There is an exact gradation from the lowest life forms to the highest. First such simple forms as the sponges and corals, then, through the worms, crabs, oysters, and snail to the fish, and thence through amphibia, reptiles, beasts of prey, ungulates (hoofed animals) and apes to man. Evolutionists say that in this gradation of life we see illustrated the evolution of complex from simple forms. The Descent of Man. According to the evolutionary hypothesis man is related to the animal kingdom by descent from a brute ancestor, who, apelike in appearance, is the common ancestor of ape and man. The evidence of such derivation is believed to be: i. Rudiments of structure which were useful in some brute ancestor. There remain in man a few elementary muscles for twitching the skin, as in the forehead; and it is pointed out that many animals have such muscles at the present time, and it is argued that the ability of some men to move the whole scalp points to the existence of muscles with such function in our brute ancestors. The vermiform appendix in man is termed rudimentary, being but a remnant of the much longer and more complex appendix of the same nature in living animals today. 2. Embryonic Development. Because the young of all animals resemble one another while in the embryo stage, and since such resemblances are found in man, it is concluded that the evolution of man from some related animal form must be accepted as the most reasonable explanation. 3. Some diseases are common to animals and man (tuberculosis, cholera, hydrophobia, etc.). 4. The similarity in structure of man and the apes. 5. The fossil remains of man. Certain skulls and leg bones have been found which are said to represent forms higher than the ape and lower than man. On the strength of such finds it is said that the "missing link" has now been supplied. The Nebular Hypothesis. The Frenchman de La Place (1827) first promulgated in modern terminology the theory once held by Greek philosophers, that the earth and the system in which it is a member originated from a primitive cosmic-vapor or universal fire-mist filling all space with infinitely small atoms. In this homogeneous mass _motion_ originated, resulting in a concentration at one point. This condensation resulted in heat and light. The planetary system at first consisted of a huge gas-ball which gradually cooled, contracting into a molten mass which under the influence of centrifugal force began to rotate. This rotation became more rapid as the mass condensed, throwing off the planets, in which the process was repeated (the moons being cast off), until the earth became sufficiently cool to sustain life. The Origin of Life. When asked about the origin of life on earth, the evolutionists generally reply that this is not a question for science but for philosophy to answer. However, the question comes with such insistent force that the biologist finds himself constrained to offer some explanation of the origin of the simplest plant and animal life after the globe had, according to the hypothesis, sufficiently cooled to present areas in which life might arise. Necessarily, the assumption must be that life was generated out of lifeless matter. Huxley says: "If the hypothesis of evolution be true, living matter must have arisen from not-living matter, for by the hypothesis, the condition of the globe was at one time such that living matter could not have existed on it, life being entirely incompatible with a gaseous state." (The earth having been a ball of gases at the time.) Tyndall is a little more specific; he says that the combination of electrical and chemical forces acting on the primal ooze caused germs of life to originate in small bubble-like forms, (vesicles). His words are: "The first step in the creation of life upon this planet was a chemico-electric operation by which simple germinal vesicles were produced." The vesicles consisted of protoplasm, the simple substance (white-of-egg) which exists in the cells of animal and vegetable tissues, and which is composed of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and traces of other elements. From this original protoplasm the great variety of living things has been developed. The Bearing of Evolution on Christianity. It is evident that the evolutionary theory not only contradicts the Bible story of creation but, if true, deprives Christianity of every claim of being the true religion. If all things have come into being through the action of forces residing in matter then the world did not come into being through a divine fiat or command. As Haeckel says: _"Every supernatural creation is completely excluded."_ (Quoted by John Fiske in _"A Century of Science,"_ 1899, p. 51.) Thomas Huxley is quite as definite: "Not only do I hold it to be proven that the story of the Deluge is a pure fiction; but I have no hesitation in affirming the same thing of the story of the Creation." (_"Science and Hebrew Tradition,"_ 1896, p. 230.) Furthermore, the theory, by its implications, disposes summarily of the _immortality of the soul_. The belief in an immortal soul is termed by Haeckel as "quite excluded" by the bearing of evolution on the origin of man. The _fall of man_ becomes a myth, since man has not fallen from a high estate but has through many ages of slow development arrived at the use of reason and the dominion over nature; not a perfect man, made in the image of God, but a cousin to the tail-less apes, newly accustomed to walking on two feet, is the ancestor of our race. Without a fall of man there is no possibility nor even a necessity of _redemption;_ our entire Christian theology would be dealing with shadowy abstractions, unreasonable fears and hopes, and purposeless strivings. The belief of the Christian is to the evolutionist of some value as a phenomenon in the history of the mind, but not the slightest intrinsic value is recognized in any of the doctrines of Christian faith, not even in the belief in a _personal God_. God is, according to Spencer, _the Unknowable_. Naturally, there can not be _miracles,_ since all processes in nature are conceived as governed by laws not directed by a Divine Intelligence but by forces resident in nature. Hence, too, there can be no inspired _revelation_ of God, since that would presume not only the existence of a personal God but an intervention in natural processes of thought (miracle). John Fiske wrote: The hypothesis of inspiration "conveys most certainly a conception of Divine action as local, special, and transitory; and in so far as it does this, it bears the marks of that heathen mode of philosophy which was current when Christian monotheism arose." (_"Darwinism and Other Essays,"_ 1895.) Evolution says: If there is a God we have no means of knowing Him; and what we know of nature certainly precludes the idea that God, if He exists, will concern Himself about man or break down the laws of nature even for an instant in his behalf. The conclusion is, that there is no inspired Bible. Nor indeed an absolute religion. All religious truths are considered relative, with no such distinction as true religion and false religion, since there is no criterion revealed (according to the theory) by which we can test a religion whether it be true or false. Finally, there is no absolute _standard of morals_. Moral truths, like the religious, are relative only. In other words, the teaching that "Christ has atoned for sin," is as little to be accepted as an absolute truth, as the command: "Thou shalt not steal" must be accepted as embodying an absolute rule of conduct. Clodd says in _"The Story of Creation"_: "Man by himself is not only unprogressive, he is also not so much immoral as unmoral. For where there is no society there is no sin! Therefore the bases of right and wrong lie in conduct towards one's fellow; the moral sense or conscience is the outcome of social relations, themselves the outcome of the need of living..... While the lower instincts, as hunger, passion, and thirst for vengeance, are strong, they are not so enduring or satisfying as the higher feelings which crave for society and sympathy. And the yielding to the lower, however gratifying for the moment, would be followed by the feeling of regret that he had thus given way, and by resolve to act differently for the future. Thus at last man comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps inherited habit, that it is best for him to obey his more persistent impulses..... Morals are relative, not absolute; _there is no fixed standard of right and wrong_ by which the actions of all men throughout all time are measured..... That which man calls sin is shown to be more often due to his imperfect sense of the true proportion of things, and to his lack of imagination, than to his willfulness." Clodd adds that if conduct has been made to rest on _"supposed divine commands_ (!) as to what man shall and shall not do," that is an assumption which at best serves to restrain the "brutal and ignorant." J. B. Warren, of the University of California, has well stated the effects of the evolutionary theory on religion and morals: "Its legitimate tendency is to degrade mankind from that mental and moral dignity that is always recognized as belonging to them, and to place them on an essential level with the brute creation--even with the lowest forms of vegetable and animal existence. According to that theory, man differs from the lower organisms not in kind so much as in the degree of development. Mr. Darwin himself was troubled about the value of his own convictions, on the ground that his mind was evolved from that of lower animals. That is to say, he reckoned his own mental actions as valueless and untrustworthy, because of the essential identity between his mind and that of the lowest creatures that live in the mud of our swamps. Thus we see the legitimate tendency of this theory to degrade the mental dignity of man. And it also degrades the moral nature and faculties of man, and undermines the very foundations of moral and religious principle, in that it teaches that man is only a better developed brute--the natural result being that man is no more under moral obligation than the brute, or has no different basis of moral obligation from the brute, but only a better idea of right and wrong, because on a higher plane in the process of evolution. It strikes at the root of the doctrine that men are, by their origin and nature, under peculiar and special obligations to God. In the words of the late Dr. Robert Patterson, such a theory tends to 'obliterate a belief in the divine origin and sanction of morality, and in the existence of a future life of rewards and punishments, and to promote the disorganization of society, and the degradation of man to the level of the brutes, living only under the laws of their brutal instincts.' Such a theory is dishonoring to man and offensive to God." When these discrepancies between a world-view governed by the Christian's faith in Revelation and one governed by the theory of evolution are once clearly understood, there will be no need to inquire, why, on the one hand, enemies of the Bible in all ranks of life greeted with such joyous acclaim the principle announced by Darwin and, why, on the other hand, a chief purpose of Christian apologetics has become the demonstration that Christianity _is justified even by reason_ in the world-view which it inculcates, and that, on the other hand, _the evolutionary hypothesis is contradicted by the facts of religion, of history, and of natural science_. CHAPTER TWO. Unexplained Origins. The evolutionary scheme of development is, by its originators and defenders, accepted as a working hypothesis by which it is believed that the origin of all forms which matter has taken, and of the activities of living things, including man and human society, can be accounted for. It is an attempt to answer the old question, suggested to the thinking mind by a contemplation of nature: _Whence_ these things? It it a theory of origins. Now, a hypothesis, being "a theory, or supposition, provisionally employed as an explanation of phenomena," must be verified before it can be accepted as truth. Moreover, it can stand _even as a hypothesis_ only if it meets the test of observation and experiment. It it can demonstrate its adaption to explain all the facts, it may, until another and better theory is propounded, be accepted as a theory. When it does not explain the facts, it must be modified or abandoned. Since the evolutionary hypothesis is employed as an explanation of certain origins, a legitimate test of the theory is its adaptation to explain these origins. This test we now shall apply. We shall try to answer the question: Is the evolutionary theory entitled to the name of a working hypothesis? Is it able to account for those things which it is set forth by its spokesmen to account for? Does it account for the origin of the universe, of life, and of the various forms of life? Scientists as a rule disclaim any intention to account, on the basis of their hypothesis, for the origin of matter. When it is suggested to them that any theory of origins should also account for the FIRST ORIGIN, the beginning of things, they direct us to philosophy: "Evolution is not concerned with the origin of matter; it takes matter for granted; the origin of matter is properly a philosophical and not a scientific problem." Let us note the fallacies of this position. In the first place it is not proper to introduce the word "science" into this plea. Science is, indeed, only concerned with things that can be demonstrated by observation and from experience; and since no one has seen the beginning of matter, science is very properly not concerned with it. But evolution is not a science. It is a hypothesis, a theory. It is an explanation proposed for certain phenomena. 'And we have a right to demand that, if it wants recognition even as a theory, it must explain those phenomena. Now the principle of evolution is: All things have developed through certain forces which inhere in matter. In other words, without being acted upon from the outside, (without a creative word of God, for instance,) the unvierse [tr. note: sic] has come to be what it is to-day. In matter there are from the beginning certain forces inseparable from matter. These acted in such a way that very simple plants and animals became very complex; and this without any directing Intelligence. This is the evolutionary theory. Now, we hold that a theory which claims to account for the beginning of all animal life (and every species of animal life), for the beginning of plant life (and of every species of plant life), for the beginning of life germs, of the globe, of the sun and stars, cannot stop short when we press our questions still farther and ask: Whence is matter? Whence is force? Nor, indeed, do evolutionists hesitate to express an opinion concerning the origin of matter and force. The universe, as it exists to-day, is made up of matter disposed in various forms,--stars, rock, plants, animals,--and endowed with energy in various forms; and from the earliest age of speculation, as we have seen, the human mind conceived of a time in which there was _unorganized_ matter, substance without form. Like the ancient Greek philosophers, evolutionists to-day try to formulate a working hypothesis to account for the origin of the universe. It is believed that, in a broad way, the _Nebular Hypothesis_ put forth by La Place indicated the manner in which the earth and the system to which it belongs have been evolved. We have outlined, briefly, in our first chapter, the main features of this theory. We shall now indicate the difficulties which stand in the way of its acceptance even as a working hypothesis. 1. The Nebular Hypothesis assumes that during a past endless time there has existed an incalculable number of original atoms. Let us understand that according to the so-called atomic theory, matter is composed of indivisible particles, called _atoms_. Since the discovery of radium this theory has been considerably modified, each atom now being understood to consist of many thousands of smaller particles, called electrons. However, whether we call them atoms or electrons, the smallest, indivisible particles of matter are assumed to have existed during infinite past time. Now, the origin of these simplest component parts of matter _remains an unsolved mystery_. The mind is unable even to formulate a guess with reference to their organization. 2. A second postulate of the Nebular Hypothesis is the _origin of force and motion_ in the huge gas ball which existed in the beginning. La Place says that "at some point concentration took place in the homogeneous mass, this contraction produced radiation of heat and light, and through the differences in temperature, _motion_ and dynamic reaction were produced." The difficulty which inheres in this postulate is the unquestioned fact that all motion in nature follows certain immutable _laws_*, [*These laws, so far as known, form the basis of what we call physics and chemistry.] and _the origin of these laws_ is not accounted for by the theory. Laws never make themselves, and their complexity,--immeasurably beyond our power of exploration--yet everywhere adjusted to a definite end, is so intricate that their origin can by no means be accounted for by chance. 3. According to the theory matter was first in _"nebular" (gas) form,_ and that the gases existing diffused through space were, through the motion which originated, changed from a huge ball of fire-mist to a semi-solid sphere, which threw off smaller spheres (the planets) that gradually became solid. Now, this is contrary to our knowledge of gases. Gases may be produced from solids, but an incandescent gas will not, through simple motion, become a solid substance. Gases may be solidified, but only in two ways, by pressure or when greatly cooled,--when they become ice. But they do not retain this form when the pressure or the cooling agency is removed. Gases, as we know them, all have a tendency to expand indefinitely. They have no tendency to solidify, as the hypothesis presumes. 4. La Place assumed that the solar system when still in gaseous state, began to revolve upon its axis, and that, as the gas ball continued to revolve, it condensed. As condensation went on, the rotation became faster, and a ring of matter was thrown off from the hardening core. This ring again resolved itself into a rotating globe which, still in a fluid state, threw off other balls, which revolved around their mother, the first planet, even as the latter continued to follow an orbit around the central body, the sun. In this way the planets of the solar system, including the earth, (according to the theory), were evolved together with their satellites or moons. The difficulty attending this view of planetary evolution is found in the difference _between the movements of a number of satellites_ around the planets. While the satellites of the earth, of Jupiter and of Saturn revolve _from west to east,_ the moons of Uranus and Neptune have an orbital movement _from east to west_. This is regarded also by the friends of the Nebular Hypothesis as one of the gravest difficulties, since no mechanical law will explain the reverse movement of the satellites of the remotest planets when they, as well as Jupiter, Saturn, and the rest are supposed to have been cast off by the same central body. 5. According to the theory, the original atoms during the process of world-making united into _molecules_. The laws according to which atoms unite,--so that, for instance, the hydrogen atom each unites with two atoms of oxygen, and so down the list of all known existences,--these laws are among the assured results of scientific study. Now, the entire science of chemistry in all its branches is built upon the axiom that molecules are _absolutely unalterable_ and that molecules of the same kind are always absolutely identical. A molecule of water is always and invariably composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. A molecule of sulphuric acid invariably contains two atoms of hydrogen, one of sulphur, and four of oxygen. A molecule of potassium chlorate is always composed of just one atom of potassium chloride and three atoms of oxygen. Never is there any variation of these proportions in the same element, and a chemist will, without handling the elements, merely by mathematical calculation, unerringly produce new combinations, relying on the absolute constancy of the relations of atoms and molecules. Now, the theory that in the beginning of things, out of a mass of atoms diffused without form through space, molecules came into being, each kind or type composed of atoms according to a proportion peculiarly its own, cannot be accepted unless it is shown in what manner the laws came into existence according to which these combinations take place. Clerk Maxwell concludes a masterly statement of this aspect of the hypothesis by asking: "Who can restrain the ulterior question, Whence then these myriad types of the same letter imprinted on the earth, the sun, the stars, as if the very mould used here had been lent to Sirius, and passed on through the constellations? No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of the molecules throughout all time, and throughout the whole region of the stellar universe; for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule (as known to science) is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction." The Origin of Life. The origin of life on our globe is not accounted for on the basis of the evolutionary hypothesis. At some time in the remote past, there must, according to the theory, have been a development of living substance from a mineral base. But if scientific experiment has shown anything it has shown the unreality of what was called "spontaneous generation." This term was very popular with the scientists of a century or two ago. It was believed that certain animal and vegetable forms gave birth, in the process of decay, to insect life. Putrefying meat gives rise to maggots. The origin of these grubs was referred to the power of "spontaneous generation." When the Italian naturalist Redi discovered that an exclusion of flies from meat was all that was necessary to prevent the production of grubs, the doctrine of spontaneous generation was thoroughly upset, for his time at least. But the microscope revealed in "pure" water the presence of thousands of small creatures, the infusoria. Again spontaneous generation was appealed to in order to explain their presence. But the famous experiments of Pasteur (related by Huxley in his lectures on The Origin of Species, Lecture III), proved conclusively that sterilized water will not produce living forms when the germs floating everywhere about in the air are excluded. Since that time all men of science agree that there is no such thing demonstrable as spontaneous generation. It has become an axiom that "Life only comes from life." But how the first germs of life originated, is a question for which there is no answer. Huxley admits: "Of the causes which led to the origination of living matter it may be said that we know absolutely nothing." "The present state of knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not living." However, while spontaneous generation is "absolutely inconceivable" (Darwin), and while no experiments made on dead matter have ever produced living (plant and animal) matter, life must have originated at some time from non-life according to the evolutionary hypothesis. The theory assumes that at some time the globe was in an incandescent stage. At that time there could not have been any life on our earth. But as the earth cooled, it is held that by some chemico-electric action (electric force acting upon elements in favorable combinations), inert, lifeless matter became endowed with the property which we call life, and this original living substance is called protoplasm. From it, by successive modifications, slow in their operation, the teeming variety of living things is believed to have developed. Now it is a notable fact, that many evolutionists (among them Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory which goes under Darwin's name) frankly admit the inability to account for the origin of protoplasm. From mineral substances, protoplasm differs in that it possesses the power of growth, development, and reproduction. The very first vegetable cell "must have possessed altogether new powers," says Mr. Wallace, "that of extracting carbon from the air and that of indefinite reproduction. Here,"--note this admission,--"we have indications of _a new power_ at work." In other words, forces resident in matter no longer suffice. The evolutionistic principle breaks down. Some fifty years ago it was thought that experimental proof had been found for the presence on earth of the original, simple, unorganized protoplasm; that the basis of all life on earth had been discovered,--in the depths of the ocean. The story of this "discovery" is entertainingly told by the Duke of Argyle in the _"Nineteenth Century"_ magazine. We quote from his article. "Along with the earlier specimens of deep sea deposits sent home by naturalists during the first soundings in connection with the Atlantic telegraph cable, there was very often a sort of enveloping slimy mucus in the containing bottles which arrested the attention and excited the curiosity of the specialists to whom they were consigned. It was structureless to all miscroscopic examination. But so is all the protoplasmic matter of which the lowest animals are found. Could it be a widely diffused medium of this protoplasmic material, not yet specialized or individualized into organic forms, nor itself yet in a condition to build up inorganic skeletons for a habitation? Here was a grand idea. It would be well to find missing links; but it would be better to find the primordial substance out of which all living things had come. The ultra-Darwinian enthusiasts were enchanted. Haeckel clapped his hands and shouted _Eureka!_ loudly. Even the cautious and discriminating mind of Professor Huxley was caught by this new and grand generalization of the 'physical basis of life;' It was announced by him to the British Association in 1868. Dr. Will Carpenter took up the chorus. He spoke of 'a living expanse of protoplasmic substance,' penetrating with its living substance the 'whole mass' of the oceanic mud. A fine new Greek name was devised for this mother slime, and it was christened 'Bathybius,'" (from two Greek words meaning "depth" and "life,"), "from the consecrated deeps in which it lay. The conception ran like wildfire through the popular literature of science. Expectant imagination soon played its part. Wonderful movements were soon seen in this mysterious slime. It became an 'irregular network,' and it could be seen gradually 'altering its form,' so that 'entangled granules changed their relative positions." Such was Bathybius, which once raised such a commotion in the world of science, but which is never heard of or even alluded to in scientific circles today. And now for the issue of this discovery of such mighty promise. In the year 1872, the "Challenger," commanded by John Murray, set out on a voyage of deep-sea exploration. "The naturalists of the 'Challenger' began their voyage in full Bathybian faith. But the sturdy mind of Mr. John Murray kept its balance--all the more easily since he never could himself find or see any trace of this protoplasm _when the dredges of the 'Challenger' came fresh from the ocean bottom_. Again and again he looked for it, but never could he discover it. It always hailed from England. The bottles sent there were reported to yield it in abundance, but somehow it seemed to be hatched in them. The laboratory in London was its unfailing source. The ocean never yielded it until it had been bottled. At last, one day on board the 'Challenger,' an accident revealed the mystery. One of Mr. Murray's assistants poured a large quantity of spirits of wine into a bottle containing some pure sea-water, when lo! the wonderful protoplasm Bathybius appeared! It was _the chemical precipitate of sulphate of lime_ produced by the mixture of alcohol and sea-water! Thereafter 'Bathybius' disappeared from science." The term "protoplasm" has, indeed, been retained by writers on biology. The whole body of an animal, and the structure of plants, are understood to consist of cells. The cells consist of a colorless substance, and this is called "protoplasm." It is a substance of very complex chemical and physical make-up, in fact, no chemist has yet been able to analyze it and a famous biologist says that very probably it may never be analyzed (David Starr Jordan.) Protoplasm, like the white of egg, is the basic substance of life, yet in the variety of forms which it takes it is of _"almost unlimited complexity"_ (Jordan). Now, a new difficulty develops when this complex character of protoplasm as it is now found in animals and plants is considered. Clear (unmodified) protoplasm, as found in white of egg and in the white cells of the blood, is the structureless substance called albumen. However, protoplasm varies almost infinitely in consistency, in shape, in structure, and in function. It is sometimes so fluid as to be capable of forming in drops, sometimes semifluid, sometimes almost solid. In shape the cells may be club shaped, globe shaped, threaded, flat, conical. Some protoplasm produces fat, others produce nerve substances, others brain substances, bone, muscle, etc., each producing only its own kind, uninterchangeable with the rest. Lastly, there is the overwhelming fact that there is an infinite difference of protoplasm in the infinitely different plants and animals, in each of which _its own protoplasm but produces its own kind_. "Here are several thousand pieces of protoplasm; analysis can detect no difference in them. They are to us, let us say, as they are to Mr. Huxley, identical in power, in form, and in substance; and yet on all these several thousand little bits of apparently indistinguishable matter an element of difference so pervading and so persistent has been impressed, that of them all, not one is interchangeable with another! Each seed feeds its own kind. The protoplasm of the gnat will no more grow into the fly than it will grow into an elephant. Protoplasm is protoplasm; yes, but man's protoplasm is man's protoplasm, and the mushroom's the mushroom's." (Dr. Sterling, _"As Regards Protoplasm."_) Hence we are compelled to acknowledge not an identity of protoplasm in all substances, but an infinite diversity. It follows that the derivation of all plant and animal forms from an original speck or germ of living matter is not only un-proven, but is contradicted by biological science. Darwin himself, like his co-laborer Wallace, was constrained to admit that the origin of life constitutes an unsolved problem. Matter and force do not account for it. Darwin accepted a divine fiat somewhere in the beginning. He says. "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into the first forms or into one." In other words, the creation of the first living being was an exceptional kind of power. But if, as Mr. Darwin says, life was breathed by the Creator into the first forms, this constitutes a break in the sufficiency of natural causes alone to produce life. If a special fiat was necessary at this point, why may it not have been at others? If by divine omnipotence, life is believed to have been originated, why shall we not believe that by divine omnipotence the various species of plants and animals were brought forth as related in the first chapter of the Bible? "If the Creator could breathe life into a few forms or into one, as Darwin thinks he did, without violating the law of his own being, and in accordance with the laws which he has established, it seems evident that he might at other times breathe life into other forms in accordance with his laws. I see no necessity for a logic that would compel the Creator to confine the number of his creative fiats to a few, or to one, nor which would limit the fiats to one time." (Fairhurst, _"Organic Evolution Considered."_) Biological Barriers. The atom, the molecule, the life-germ,--these are the barriers which stand against the evolutionistic conception of origins on the physical side. We proceed to investigate the points at which _biology_ touches our problem, and again three barriers call for notice and investigation: The difference between plants and animals; the difference between vertebrates and invertebrates; and the difference between mammals and all other vertebrates. 1. _Whence the animal kingdom?_ This stage in the scale of life, the advance from vegetable to the animal kingdom, is, to quote Mr. Wallace, again "completely beyond all possibility of explanation by _matter,_ its laws and forces. It is the introduction of _sensation or consciousness,_ constituting the fundamental distinction between the animal and vegetable kingdoms." Plants live, animals live _and feel;_ and they have consciousness. At this point again, only a thorough-going materialist will deny the working of an outside power, a power not resident in matter, but altering and molding matter from without and endowing it with new abilities. Only an act of this Power Without could endow living substance with feeling and consciousness. No one can here any longer appeal to that undefined chemico-electric action by which some attempt to account for protoplasm. Mr. Wallace says: "Here all idea of mere complication of structure producing the result is out of the question. We feel it to be altogether preposterous to assume that at a certain stage of complexity of atomic constitution, and as a necessary result of that complexity alone, an _ego_ should start into existence,--a thing that _feels,_ that is _conscious_ of its own existence. Here we have the certainty that something new has arisen,--a being whose nascent consciousness has gone on increasing in power and definiteness till it has culminated in the higher animals. No verbal explanation or attempt at explanation--such as the statement that life is 'the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm,' or that the whole existing organic universe from the amoeba up to man was latent in the fire-mist from which the solar system was developed--can afford any mental satisfaction, or help us in any way to a solution of the mystery." 2. _Whence the backbone?_ All animals are divided into vertebrates and invertebrates, the animals with a backbone and animals without. Between these two groups the barrier of backbone stands impassable till it is explained how a butterfly could become a bird, or a snail a serpent, or a star fish acquire the skeleton of the shark. These two groups, the vertebrate animals and the invertebrate, must be regarded as fundamentally distinct. 3. _Whence the breast?_ Vertebrates are either mammals or submammals. The breastless tribes are brids, [tr. note: sic] reptiles, and fishes. These are far beneath in the scale, while the mammal, by its peculiar endowment in that it gives suck to its young, stands elect, aloft, and apart. Till it is shown how an animal that never got milk from its mother stumbled on the capacity of giving what was never given it, _the breast_ will stand, against all dreams of development, companion-barrier to the backbone. Nor is there an animal that can be regarded as a connecting link between these two master groups. The "theistic" evolutionist, who believes that God at various times "helped out" the forces residing in matter, by creating something new, is inclined to say that at each of these points,--the origin of the first sentient animal, the origin of the first vertebrate, and of the first mammal,--God by his omnipotence caused a new type to originate. Aside from the fact that "forces resident in matter," the basic idea of the evolutionistic theory, here begins to become somewhat faint as a background even for a "theistic" conception of development, it is evident that we have already reached a point far down the scale of organic evolution in which the admission must be made that no possible working of forces within matter can account for the change. Again we say, if we already admit that the various great types of animal life could not originate without a special creative act of God, then why should we not accept the record of Genesis which says that the various species of plants and the various species of animals were created, each a separate species, in the beginning? Once admit special creative acts, and there is no longer any need for a hypothesis of evolution. Man. The difficulty which stands in the way of accepting, on purely scientific grounds, the descent of man from a brute ancestor, is, first of all a biological (physiological) difficulty. Among all the mammalia (to accept the classification of man with that group), man alone has a perfect brain. By this we mean the physiologically and structurally perfect brain. It is present even in the lowest man--present in the negro or the Australian Bushman as in the civilized American; and absent in all living beings below man--absent in the ape or the elephant as truly as in the lowest mammals, the kangaroo or the duckbill. Its sign is _language,_ capacity of _progress, culture_. All healthy human brains are structurally perfect; the highest brute brains are structurally imperfect. The least cultivated human being is susceptible of culture; a savage not only possesses the endowment of language but may be educated to appreciate the art of a Raphael or a Shakespeare. The brains of all other living beings are circumscribed by instinct, which never progresses. The perfect brain thus introduces another impassable biological barrier dividing the world of life. However, the derivation of man from brute ancestry is attended by another and even greater difficulty. The brain, after all, is but an organ, it is the organ of _Mind_. Man possesses faculties of intellect (reason, imagination, the artistic faculties, etc.) and, above all, a moral nature, which raises him far above the brute. These faculties could not possibly have been developed by means of forces resident in matter or by means of the laws which are made to account for the physical universe. The very term "evolution" implies the development of something that was at first involved, or essentially infolded, in that in which evolution began. In man there are attributes and faculties not shown by lower orders. Evolution, seeking to be consistent, answers: "It is true that faculties cannot be evolved out of a thing unless they exist in a crude and undeveloped state in that thing, but these higher faculties _do exist_ in the lower orders, potentially, or in a germ form and are developed and become operative only in the higher forms of life." Evolutionists do not shrink from this application of their theory to the human mind. The attributes of a Shakespeare and the moral nature of a Paul were, essentially or potentially (capable of development), in the star fish and the jelly fish. The difference is not one of kind but of development and degree. Man has these faculties developed, the animals have them undeveloped. In the _"Life and Letters of Charles Darwin,"_ published by his son, is a letter from Mr. Darwin to W. Graham, written in 1881, from which I quote the following: "I have no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless, you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done. But then, with me, the horrid doubt always arises _whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the lower animals, are of any value, or are at all trustworthy."_ Again he says (p. 528), in another letter written to Sir C. Lyell: "Grant a simple archetypal creature, like the mud-fish or lepidosiren (mud eel) with five senses and some vestige of mind, and I believe natural selection will account for the production of every vertebrate animal, including, of course, man." Observe that this language is very definite. It says that the mind of man, with all its wonderful attributes and faculties, was evolved from the mind of the lower animals--and he goes as low as the mud-fish and the eel that live in the slime of the swamps. Now, whoever wishes to believe such a preposterous assumption can do so. He is able to believe almost anything, and to disbelieve everything. Mr. Darwin himself says he looks upon man's convictions as of no value, because they are the convictions of a mind derived from the mind of lower animals; nor can one blame him for being skeptical. Our point, however, is that there is such a tremendous difference between the intellectual and moral faculties of man and the barely instinctive impulses of the lower creatures, that no one can see any connection between the two, unless there is some serious defect in his own mental or moral perceptions. Every instinct and conviction of the human mind rises in indignant repudiation of the theory of man's descent. There are even among thoroughgoing Darwinians some who draw the line at this (necessary) application of the development idea. Wallace says, at the conclusion of his defense of Darwinism: "The faculties of man could not possibly have been developed by means of the same laws which have determined the progressive development of the world in general, and also of man's physical organism"--the human body. He finds in the origin of Mind clear indications of "an unseen universe--a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is altogether subordinate." (_"Darwinism,"_ p. 320.) Yet the development of mind through merely physical forces is upheld to the present day by the majority of evolutionists. The doctrine is even found in public school texts. In Davis' _"Physical Geography,"_ a high-school text, we read page 341: "The greater intelligence of many land animals than of sea animals should also be regarded as a result of the development of land animals amid a greater variety of geographical conditions than is found in the seas. . . . The wonderful intelligence of man has been developed on the lands, because only on the lands is to be found the great variety of form, climate and products which can stimulate the development of high intelligence. It would have been as impossible for man to develop as an inhabitant of the dark and monotonous ocean floor as it has been for civilization to arise out of the frozen and lonesome lands of the Antarctic regions." Thus even the children of our generation are taught a doctrine which is not only unproven but so far falls short of explaining that which it was invented to explain that it cannot, by any correct definition, even be dignified with the name of a "working hypothesis." It is a theory of origins which fails to account for one thing precisely--Origins. CHAPTER THREE. The Testimony of the Rocks. We have seen that the principal argument for a development of the higher types of life from lower organisms is based upon a study of fossil remains (paleontology). The older the strata in the earth's surface, the simpler the animal forms imbedded therein; the more recent the strata, the more complex and highly developed the fossil remains. Popular scientific works, and books of refence [tr. note: sic] generally, quote it as an axiom: In the oldest rocks the simplest fossils are found, hence the higher animals are developed from the lower. Davis "Physical Geograhy" [tr. note: sic] says (page 17): "Age of the Earth.--It is impossible to say what the age of the earth and the solar system is, but it certainly should be reckoned in millions and millions of years. There is every reason to believe that the sun and the planets existed for an indefinitely long period before the condition of the earth's surface was such as to allow the habitation of the planet by plants and animals. It is well proved by the prints or fossils of various plants and animals in ancient rock layers that these lower forms of life existed upon the earth for a vast length of time, millions and millions of years before man appeared." Here, then, we are squarely confronted by the issue. Either the rocks testify to a slow evolution of plant and animal life, or they supply no such testimony. Professor Downing of Chicago University, says that this is indeed, the one primary argument for evolution, the rest being simply corroborative. On this _rock_ evolutionists build their scientific Faith. Let us investigate. We shall note, to begin with, that there are, indeed, a larger number of species, both of animals and plants, preserved in the rocks,--thousands, in fact. There are lowly organisms, of the crab and cuttle fish variety, and more highly organized forms, fishes and birds, and there are the prints and fossilized bones of great monsters, huge lizards and sloths and other mammalia. It is possible to establish a gradation in this great catalog of fossils, beginning with the largest or most perfectly developed, and ending with the animals lower in the scale of life; or vice versa. The evolutionists say, _vice versa,_ the simplest first, the most complex last, and then they add: _So_ they have developed. At this point we shall first quote one of the earliest palaeontologists, and one of the most famous, Hugh Miller, whose _"Old Red Sandstone,"_ first published in 1841, has now been republished in the _"Everyman Library."_ In this brilliant work, Miller pays his respects to the evolutionists of his age. He refers to Lamarck and says: "The ingenious foreigner, on the strength of a few striking facts which prove that to a certain extent the instincts of species may be improved and heightened, and their forms changed from a lower to a higher degree of adaptation to their circumstances, has concluded that there is a natural progress from the inferior order of being towards the superior, and that the off-spring of creatures low in the scale in the present time may hold a much higher place in it, and belong to different and nobler species, a few thousand years hence. . . . He has argued on this principle of improvement and adaptation,--which, carry it as far as we rationally may, still leaves the vegetable a vegetable, and the dog a dog,--that in the vast course of ages, inferior have risen into superior natures, and lower into higher races; that molluscs and zoophytes have passed into fish and reptiles, and fish and reptiles into birds and quadrupeds; that unformed gelatinous bodies, with an organisation scarcely traceable, have been metamorphosed into oaks and cedars; and that monkeys and apes have been transformed into human creatures, capable of understanding and admiring the theories of Lamarck. "It is a law of nature," continues Mr. Miller, "that the chain of being, from the lowest to the highest form of life, should be, in some degree, a continuous chain; that the various classes of existence should shade into one another, so that it often proves a matter of no little difficulty to point out the exact line of demarcation where one class or family ends and another class or family begins. The naturalist passes from the vegetable to the animal tribes, scarcely aware, amid the perplexing forms of intermediate existence, at what point he quits the precincts of the one, to enter on those of the other. All the animal families have, in like manner, their connecting links; and it is chiefly out of these that writers such as Lamarck and Maillet construct their system. _They confound gradation with progress_. Geoffrey Hudson was a very short man, and Goliath of Gath a very tall one; and the gradations of the human stature lie between. But gradation is not progress; and though we find full-grown men of five feet, five feet six inches, and six feet and a half, the fact gives us no earnest whatever that the race is rising in stature, and that at some future period the average height of the human family will be somewhat between ten and eleven feet. And equally unsolid is the argument that from a principle of gradation in races would reduce a principle of progress in races. The tall man of six feet need entertain quite as little hope of rising into eleven feet as the short man of five; nor has the fish that occasionally flies any better chance of passing into a bird than the fish that only swims. Geology abounds with creatures of the intermediate class. _But it furnishes no genealogical link to show that the existences of one race derive their lineage from the existences of another_. The scene shifts as we pass from formation to formation; we are introduced in each to a new dramatis personae. Of all the vertebrata, fishes rank lowest, and in geological history appear first. Now, fishes differ very much among themselves: some rank nearly as low as worms,--some nearly as high as reptiles; and if fish could have risen into reptiles, and reptiles into mammalia, we would necessarily expect to find lower orders of fish passing into higher, and taking precedence of the higher in their appearance in point of time. If such be not the case,--if fish made their first appearance, not in their least perfect, but in their most perfect state,--not in their nearest approximation to the worm, but in their nearest approximation to the reptile,--there is no room for progression, and the argument falls. Now, it is a geological fact, that _it is fish of the higher orders that appear first on the stage,_ and that they are found to occupy exactly the same level during the vast period represented by five succeeding formations. There is no progression. If fish rose into reptiles, it must have been by sudden transformation. There is no getting rid of miracle in the case,--there is no alternative between creation and metamorphosis. The infidel substitutes progression for Deiety;--Geology robs him of his God." Mr. Miller then relates his discovery of the winged fish (Pterichtys): "Of all the organisms of the Old Red Sandstone, one of the most extraordinary, and the one in which Lamarck would have most delighted, is the Pterichtys, or winged fish. Had Lamarck been the discoverer, he would unquestionably have held that he had caught a fish almost in the act of wishing itself into a bird. Here are wings which lack only feathers, a body which seems to have been as well adapted for passing through the air as the water and a tail by which to steer. I fain wish I could communicate to the reader the feeling with which I contemplated my first-found specimen. It opened with a single blow of the hammer; and there on a ground of light-colored limestone, lay the effigy of a creature fashioned apparently out of jet, with a body covered with plates, two powerful-looking arms articulated at the shoulders, a head as entirely lost in the trunk as that of the ray or the sun-fish, and long angular tail." Miller says that he at first thought he had discovered a kind of turtle that partook of the characteristics of a fish. But he continues: "I had inferred somewhat too hurriedly, though perhaps naturally enough, that these wings or arms, with their strong sharp points and oar-like blades, had been at once paddles and spears, --instrument of motion and weapons of defence; and hence the mistake of connecting the creature with the Chelonia (turtles). I am informed by Agassiz, however, that they were weapons of defence only, which, like the spines of the river bull-head, were erected in moments of danger or alarm, and at other times lay close by the creature's side; and that the sole instrument of motion was in the tail. The river bull-head, when attacked by an enemy, or immediately as it feels the hook in its jaws, erects its two spines at nearly right angles with the plates of the head, as if to render itself as difficult of being swallowed as possible. The attitude is one of danger and alarm; and it is a curious fact, that in this attitude nine-tenth of the Pterichthyes of the Lower Old Red Sandstone are to be found." A century has passed since Miller thought he had discovered a turtle which was so modified in structure as to be a link between the turtles and the fish. But to the present day geology has failed to furnish evidence that such a link at one time existed. This _absence, in the geological record, of transitional forms,_ is one of the greatest difficulties of the evolutionistic theory. According to the theory, the fossils found in the various layers of rock ought to show gradual modifications, linking the various species of animals and plants in a finely graduated system, with thousands of forms showing in rudimentary structure those organs which in the more advanced forms have become fully developed. However, no such progress from more to less generalized types has been demonstrated, although many trained investigators have searched the fossiliferous rocks for such evidence of evolution. Professor Huxley in his _"Lay Sermons"_ admits that an impartial survey of the positively ascertained truths of paleontology "Either shows us no evidence of such modification, or demonstrates such modification as has occurred to have been very slight; and as to the nature of that modification, it yields no evidence whatsoever that the earlier members of any long-continued group were more generalized in structure than the later ones." LeConte says: "Although the species change greatly, and perhaps many times, in passing from the lowest to the highest strata, we do not usually, it must be acknowledged, find the gradual transitions we would naturally expect, if the change were effected by gradual transitions." He further speaks of the absence of connecting links as "the greatest of all objections" against the theory of evolution. (_"Evolution,"_ p. 234.) This absence of transitional forms between different species has always been recognized as a serious difficulty; and Mr. Darwin, in the attempt to obviate it, succeeds only in showing how very serious it is. These are his words: "Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." Alfred Fairhurst says, in his _"Organic Evolution Considered"_ (p. 93): "According to the theory of evolution, and especially of natural selection, if we start with any organism and trace its history backward, we would find that through an endless number of generations it had been very slightly changing, so that any individual is always a transitional form between its immediate ancestors and its own offspring. This being true, one would expect, if the theory of evolution is true, to find vast numbers of transitional forms connecting earlier and later species in the various periods where fossils are well preserved. This, however, is not true. Species, when they first appear, stand sharply defined. Darwin expresses his disappointment at the absence of transitional forms as follows: 'But I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor was the record in the best preserved geological sections, had not the absence of innumerable transitional links between the species which lived at the commencement and close of each formation pressed so hardly on my theory.'" Even a cursory study of such texts as Dana's _"Manual of Geology"_ will reveal that the development of the plants and animals through the "ages" of speculative geology does not move forward like a steadily rising flood. There is rather a series of great waves, each rising abruptly, new forms often appearing suddenly and together. The very simplest known fossils, the trilobites, of which nearly a hundred species are known in America alone, and certain cephalopods (sea snails) are animals highly complex in structure and regarded by Le Conte as "hardly lower than the middle of the animal scale." The trilobites possess well developed compound eyes and the cephalopods have simple eyes, almost as complex as the eyes of man, possess a well defined stomach, a systemic heart, a liver, and a highly developed nervous system [tr. note: no period in original] Observe, that these two highly organized forms of animals, "hardly to be regarded as lower than the middle of the animal scale," are the very "oldest" animals found in fossil form! In other words, of at least one half of the total progress of the animal kingdom every vestige is lost. If we turn a few pages in Dana's _"Manual"_ we find in the sandstone of the "Devonian Era" gigantic species of fish. The entire record of evolution from the mollusk to the fish is lost! There is not a single transitional form. These fishes have organs as complex and perfect as the fishes of to-day. Suddenly, in the "carbonic age" amphibia and reptiles appear, and then come, in the "Triassic" the huge reptiles known as dinosaurs. Insects and scorpions have been found in the "Silurian." [tr. note: sic on punctuation] They stand among the highest of even _living_ articulates, and they are the "oldest" known airbreathing animals. "We seek in vain for the progenitors of these highly organized articulates or for some conceivable method by which their wings and special breathing apparatus could have evolved. We do not know that these first insects and scorpions have made any material progress through all the ages." (Fairhurst.) Professor Huxley in delivering the anniversary address to the Geological Society for 1870, quotes the following from an address before the same society in 1862: "If we confine ourselves to positively ascertained facts, the total amount of change in the forms of animal and vegetable life since the existence of such forms is recorded, is small. When compared with the lapse of time since the first appearance of these forms, the amount of change is wonderfully small. Moreover, in each great group of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, there are certain forms which I termed Persistent Types, which have remained, with but very little apparent change, from their first appearance to the present time. In answer to the question, 'What then does an impartial survey of the positively ascertained truths of paleontology testify in relation to the common doctrines of progressive modification, which suppose that modification to have taken place by necessary progress from more to less embryonic forms, from more to less generalized types within the limits of the period represented by the fossiliferous rocks?' I reply, It negatives these doctrines; for it either shows us no evidence of such modifications, or demonstrates such modification as has occurred to have been very slight. The significance of persistent types and of the small amount of change which has taken place even in those forms which can be shown to have been modified, becomes greater and greater in my eyes, the longer I occupy myself with the Biology of the past." From the fact that the trilobites, so highly organized, appeared in the "primordial," or "oldest" strata, it would seem that they were specially adapted to make progress. They lived through "Paleozoic" time, which, according to Dana, represents twelve of the sixteen parts of all geological time, beginning with the Primordial; or, calling the whole geological time 48 millions of years, the trilobites lived 36 million of years, or three-fourths of all geological time. From their great persistence in time (accepting, for the sake of argument, the "ages" of speculative geology) it would seem that they had a remarkably good opportunity to make wonderful progress in structure. During that time there were thousands of species, yet they made no progress. We do not know that in all those "millions of years" a single higher form was evolved from any one of the great multitude of species of trilobites. As Darwin says of the goose, so one may say of the trilobite; it "had a singularly inflexible organization." The remarkable thing about this, however, is that previous to the "Primordial," while it was becoming a trilobite, it must have had a singularly flexible organization, otherwise it could not have obtained its complex structure; but when it reached the "Primordial" it became very conservative. Fairhurst says, in the work already quoted: "It is a most remarkable fact that in the first geological period in which undoubted fossils occur, all the sub-kingdoms except that of the vertebrates are well represented, and that there is no evidence from fossils that one sub-kingdom, or even that different classes of the same sub-kingdom were evolved from each other. The great gulfs that separate the animal kingdom into sub-kingdoms and classes existed then, and have continued till the present time.... If we rely on known fossils as evidence, we would be obliged to conclude that highly organized fishes were suddenly introduced. The break in the supposed chain of evolution between the invertebrates and the highly organized vertebrates of the Lower Silurian is one of the greatest in the whole geological record. The vast gulf between these structures must, I think, remain unbridged except by the imagination." The late Prof. Joseph LeConte, of the University of California, writes in his book, "Religion and Science:" "The evidence of geology to-day is that species seem to come in suddenly and in full perfection, remain substantially unchanged during the term of their existence, and pass away in full perfection. Other species take their places apparently by substitution, not by transmutation." Dr. Robert Watts uses these emphatic words: "The record of the rocks know nothing of the evolution of a higher form from a lower form. Neither the paleozoic age nor the living organisms of our world reveal an authentic instance of such evolution. Both nature and revelation proclaim it as an inviolable law that like produces like." And Hugh Miller went one step further when he testified: "I would ask such of the gentlemen whom I now address as have studied the subject most thoroughly, whether, at those grand lines of division between the Palaeozoic and Secondary, and again between the Secondary and Tertiary periods, at which the entire type of organic being alters, so that all on the one side of the gap belongs to one fashion, and all on the other to another and wholly different fashion,--whether they have not been as thoroughly impressed with the conviction that there existed a Creative Agent, to whom the sudden change was owing, as if they themselves had witnessed the miracle of creation?" (Presidential address before the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh, 1852.) But we have not yet done with this part of our investigation. The argument from geology is based on the assumption that the chronological order of the earth's layers _has been determined_ at least with great approximation to certainty, so that we may say with some assurance that this layer of limestone or sandstone is of earlier, that, of later origin. As a matter of fact, the textbooks do treat the various "ages" of geology as if they corresponded to certain strata of the earth's crust. _But by what method is the age of the various layers determined?_ James D. Dana in his "Manual of Geology" (Fourth edition, p. 398 f.) says that there are four methods by which we may decide the relation of one layer to another. The first is, naturally, the order in which the layers rest upon one another; the lower strata, are, of course, older than the upper. However, he points out in four "precautions" the inability of the investigator to depend on this method, since "for the comparing of rocks of disconnected regions, this criterion must fail." Also the color and mineral composition can be used only "with distrust" and must be "usually disregarded." Then the _Manual_ proceeds: "4 _Fossils_.--The criterion for determining the chronological order of strata dependent on kinds of fossils takes direct hold upon time, and therefore, _is the best;_ and, moreover, it serves for the correlation of rocks all over the world." Now observe how, in the following, the geologist leans upon the evolutionist: _"The life of the globe has changed with the progress of time. Each epoch has had its peculiar species, or peculiar groups of species._ Moreover, the succession of life has followed a grand law of progress, involving under a single system a closer and closer approximation in the species, as time moved on, to those which now exist. It follows, therefore, that _identity of species of fossils proves approximate identity of age."_ Let us bear this in mind. Dana _takes for granted_ the evolutionary process. The simpler forms of animal life indicate the older strata, the complex forms, the more recent. We do not misunderstand Mr. Dana. Such expressions as the following abound: "Where direct paleontological observation has ascertained in particular cases the steps of progress in the development of organs, as, for example, those of the teeth in Mammals, the facts become a basis for further use in the same direction." (p. 402.) "The grander divisions of geological time should be based, in a comprehensive way, on organic progress" (from simple to more complex structures) (p. 404.) "When the relations of the beds to those recognized in other regions have been ascertained through fossils..." (p. 405.) The principle announced by Dana is accepted by geologists generally. Angelo Heilprin in _"The Earth and its Story,"_ p. 153 ff. has the following: "There has been a steady and progressive advance in the general type of organization from the oldest to the newest periods; more highly developed or more complicated forms have successively replaced forms of simpler construction; and this advance is still continuing to-day. Once more, the correctness of the evolutionary hypothesis is taken for granted. In the oldest rocks, for example, no trace of backboned animals has yet been detected; when such do appear for the first time, they show themselves in their lowest types, the fishes; these are succeeded later by the amphibians (frogs, newts, salamanders), and these again by reptiles. And if we take the fishes by themselves, we find that they, too, begin with their lower, if not absolutely the lowest types, and progressively develop their higher ones. This history is repeated in the cases of the reptiles and quadrupeds--in fact, with every class of animals that is known to us. _Naturalists_ (evolutionists) are to-day well agreed among themselves that all animal and vegetable forms are derivatives from forms that preceded them..... Hence it is, that, in following the geological record, we speak of progressive evolution, the evolving of higher or more complicated types of organisms from those simpler and more general in structure." Now read carefully the following: _"This fact_ has permitted geologists to mark off distinct eras or periods in the life-history of the planet, each of them determined by certain characteristic animal or vegetable forms, which either do not appear before or after such period, or else are by numbers so distinctive of it as to typify it clearly." Evidently, the Philadelphia professor, too, _assumes_ "progressive evolution" _as an ascertained fact_ and in accordance therewith classifies the layers of the earth's surface. "Almost every species of fossil has a definite position in the geological scale, and would by itself serve to locate a formation; but oftentimes the determination of species, owing to insufficiency of knowledge of the obliteration of characters, is a most difficult task, and then recourse is had to the aspect of the entire group 'of fossils which a given rockmass contains. This generally _gives the age_ or position without difficulty." Edward Clodd, in _"The Story of Creation, a Plain Account of Evolution,"_ says, page 18. "The relative _age and place of each stratum .... are fixed by the fossils."_ Now, is not this a most extraordinary situation? The evolutionist says: The science of paleontology furnishes the basic argument for our hypothesis,--the older the strata of the earths surface, the simpler the fossils found therein. This sounds impressive. But we ask him: How do you know the age of the strata,--and the answer is, that, of course, is the business of the geologist to determine. We now turn to the geologist and ask: How do you determine the age of the strata? And the geologist answers: Why, evolutionary science has proven that the simplest animals and plants appeared first; hence, where I find simple fossils, I know that I have a more ancient bed of lime-stone or sand-stone than the strata which contain more complex forms,--which appeared later. Note well, the geologists which we have quoted assert that this is the best and final proof for the position of a stratum in the scale of geological history. The geologist depends on the fossils. But he believes these to belong to an earlier or more recent age because he accepts _the evolutionist's_ word for it. And the evolutionist says: the _geologist_ says these rocks are oldest; but in them I find the simplest forms; hence the evolutionary theory is proven. We repeat it,--is not this a very, very extraordinary situation? Have we not here a perfect case of what logicians call "reasoning in a circle," or "begging the question?" How can the evolutionist quote the geologist when the geologist asserts that he classifies his layers of rock according to the fossils,--and that he accepts what the evolutionists asserts [tr. note: sic] regarding these? What, in view of this situation, becomes of the evolutionist's argument from fossils? And what becomes of the "ages" of speculative geology? CHAPTER FOUR. The Fixity of Species. A writer in the _"Lutheran Companion"_ recently said that his seven year old boy brought home a text book some months ago, called _"Home Geography for Primary Grades."_ On page 143 is found this statement about birds: "Ever so long ago, their grandfathers were not birds at all. Then they could not fly, for they had neither wings nor feathers. These grandfathers of our birds had four legs, a long tail and jaws with teeth. After a time feathers grew upon their bodies and their front legs become changed for flying. These were strange looking creatures. There are none living like them now." One is tempted to disgress, [tr. note: sic] for a moment, from the subject at hand in order to draw, from this incident, an argument for the Christian Day School; but we shall desist. The quotation is here adduced to illustrate the vogue which evolution, specifically Darwinism, still maintains in the literature, even in the school-texts of our day. Babes and sucklings are introduced to the theory of evolutionary development, and the theory is presented with an assurance as if it were scientific truth. The words of Agassiz, prince of naturalists, apply to-day. "The manner in which the evolution theory in zoology is treated would lead those who are not special zoologists to suppose that observations have been made by which it can be inferred that there is in nature such a thing as change among organized beings actually taking place." He adds: "There is no such thing on record. It is shifting the ground from one field of observation to another to make this statement, and when the assertions go so far as to exclude from the domain of science those who will not be dragged into this mire of mere assertion, then it is time to protest." Dr. J. B. Warren, of the University of California, more recently said: "If the theory of evolution be true, during the many thousands of years covered in whole or in part by present human knowledge, there would certainly be known at least a few instances, or at least one instance, of the evolution of one species from another. No such instance is known. Abstract arguments sound learned and appear imposing, so that many are deceived by them. But in this matter we remove the question from the abstract to the concrete. We are told that facts warrant the evolutionary theory. But do they? Where is one single fact?" The hypothesis assumes that through environment, certain varieties of species (both of plants and animals) arose, and that the varieties best fitted, through their habits, structure, or color, to maintain themselves in the struggle for existence, survived the species less favorably endowed, and hence persisted. (We have quoted in our initial chapter the classical illustration of the dipper-birds from Wallace's _"Darwinism."_) Now, as a matter of fact, we cannot prove that a single species has changed. These are the words of Darwin himself, quoted from _"Life and Letters,"_ Vol. III, p. 25: "There are two or three million of species on earth, sufficient field, one might think, for observation. But it must be said to-day that in spite of all the efforts of trained observers, not one change of a species into another is on record." Dr. N. S. Shaler, Professor of Geology in Harvard, asserts that "it has not been proved that a single species has been established solely or even mainly by the operation of Natural Selection." Professor Fleischmann, of Erlangen, has gone so far as to say that "the Darwinian theory of descent has, in the realms of nature, not a single fact to confirm it." Dr. Ethridge of the British Museum says: "In all this great museum there is not a particle of evidence of transmutation of species. Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts." Prof. Owen declares that "no instance of change of one species into another has ever been recorded by man." Dr. Martin, Sanitaetsrat, of Germany, who has conducted some highly technical experiments in the blood reactions of various animals and man, on which he bases his conclusions, says: "Since Darwin we have been accustomed to consider the concept 'species' as something insecure and unstable. The whole organic world must be thought of as fluid if the evolution theory is to find room for action. It required, indeed, all the great investigator's keenness to fence his theory against the difficulty which the lack of transitional forms occasioned, and against the fact that the rise of a new species has never been observed, much more against the fact that all processes in artificial breeding have not sufficed to fix permanently the changes which have been attained. We admire the clever structure of the theory, but there is no doubt that the obstinacy with which the organism clings to its species-characteristics is the point on which it is mortal. One is, [tr. note: sic] in fact, as much justified in speaking of a struggle to retain these characteristics as to speak of a struggle for existence." Man has been able greatly to modify many vegetable productions. Witness the comparatively recent changes in the potato plant. The small, almost worthless tubers of the wild potato have changed, under the force of intelligent cultivation, to the large, starchy, nutritious vegetables, which furnish so many people a large portion of their food. Mind has been at work; mind and nature have changed the size, the quality, the productiveness of the _solatium tubcrosum;_ but neither mind nor nature, nor both combined, have, so far as we know, ever in the slightest degree changed the species. Potatoes are potatoes still, and always will be. The present law of vegetation is that intelligent cultivation of almost any plant will either change the original in one way or another, or, what is more likely, will produce several distinct varieties; but that all these changed forms are but mere modifications of the original species, and that, when deprived of intelligent cultivation, they all tend to revert to the original form. It is true that we see many and very diverse varieties of certain species, especially those that have received the most attention from the hands of man. The dog, for instance, exists as the great, shaggy Newfoundland or St. Bernard, or as the tight girted greyhound, as the petted poodle or the despised "yellow dog;" but in every case he is a dog, and not a wolf, and his fellow dogs recognize him as such, too. Hens differ amazingly; new breeds periodically come into existence and into fashion; but turn them loose, and they will all seek the barnyard, and soon your fancy breeds will become corrupt. They "revert to type." By the exercise of intelligent selection and training, man is able to emphasize certain points and to produce new breeds, but not to change the essential structure nor to alter the specific characteristics. The species are _fixed_. Huxley says: "If you breed from the male and female of the same race, you of course have offspring of the like kind, and if you make the offspring breed together, you obtain the same result, and if you breed from these again, you will still have the same kind of offspring; there is no check. But if you take members of two distinct species, however similar they may be to each other, and make them breed together, _you will find a check_. If you cross two such species with each other, then--although you may get offspring in the case of the first cross, yet, if you attempt to breed from the products of that crossing, which are what are called hybrids-- that is, if you couple a male and a female hybrid--then the result is that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred you will get no offspring at all; there will be no result whatsoever. "The reason of this is quite obvious in some cases; the female hybrids, although possessing all the external appearances and characteristics of perfect animals, are physiologically imperfect and deficient in the structural parts of the reproductive elements necessary to generation. It is said to be invariably the case with the male mule, the cross between the ass and the mare; and hence it is that although crossing the horse with the ass is easy enough, and is constantly done as far as I am aware, if you take two mules, a male and a female, and endeavor to breed from them, you get no offspring whatever; no generation will take place. This is what is called the sterility of the hybrids between two distinct species." (Huxley, _"On the Origin of Species."_ p. 212.) He continues: "Thus you see that there is a great difference between 'mongrels,' which are crosses between distinct races, and 'hybrids,' which are crosses between distinct species. The mongrels are, so far as we know, fertile with one another. But between species, in many cases, you cannot succeed in obtaining even the first cross; at any rate it is quite certain that the hybrids are often absolutely infertile one with another. "Here is a feature, then, great or small as it may be, which distinguishes natural species of animals. Can we find any approximation to this in the different races known to be produced by selective breeding from a common stock? Up to the present time the answer to that question is absolutely a negative one. As far as we know at present, there is nothing approximating to this check. In crossing the breeds, between the fantail and the pouter, the carrier and the tumbler, or any other variety or race you may name--so far as we know at present--there is no difficulty in breeding together the mongrels." However, he continues, as soon as you remove the conditions which produced the new variety,--as when you permit pigeons to mate promiscuously,--no matter how different the varieties may have been, you will have, in a few generations of pigeons, the same blue rock pigeon with the black bars across the wings. No new species has originated. All varieties, in a free state, revert to type. "This," says Huxley, "is certainly a very remarkable circumstance." Fairhurst points out the difficulties in which the evolutionist becomes involved through the fixity of species. He writes: "It is well known that as a rule distinct species will not cross, and that if they do cross the offspring are not fertile. On the other hand, it is true that all _varieties_ of a species readily cross, producing fertile offspring. This has commonly been regarded as a well-defined distinction between varieties and species. If the varieties of pigeons which are so different from each other did not freely cross, and if the mongrel offspring were not fertile, Darwin's argument as to the production of new _species_ under domestication would be complete. The fact is, we do not know of the origin of any two species of animals that do not cross and whose offspring are not fertile; in other words, we do not know of the origin of _species,_ but only of _varieties_. The origin of species that will not cross and produce fertile offspring is _assumed_ from the origin of varieties that do cross and produce fertile offspring. This leaves the evolutionists to account for one of the most difficult things in connection with this theory, namely, how did varieties of animals of the same species become cross-sterile?* [[*So that they were unable to interbreed. Only if such cross-sterility exists, could they exist thereafter as independent new species.--G.]] Several things must occur simultaneously before cross-sterility between parent and offspring could occur and become effective, namely, a number of individuals must be born at the same time possessing the same variation, the variation must be useful, these individuals must be fertile with each other, they must be cross-sterile with the parent form," as, otherwise, the offspring would revert to type, "and, finally, the few, if any, individuals thus produced and being widely scattered through the species, must find each other before they could propagate. I regard it impossible that these things could all occur simultaneously." (_"Organic Evolution,"_ p. 333.) Mr. Huxley is forced to this admission: "After much consideration, and with assuredly no bias against Mr. Darwin's views, it is our clear conviction that, as the evidence stands, it is not absolutely proven that a group of animals, having all the characters exhibited by species in nature, has ever been originated by selection, whether artificial or natural." And again. "Our acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis must be provisional so long as one link in the chain of evidence is wanting; and so long as all the animals and plants certainly produced by selective breeding from a common stock are fertile with one another, that link will be wanting." In a recent book, _"Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry,"_ George Ticknor Curtis says: "The whole doctrine of the development of distinct species out of other species makes demands upon our credulity which the [tr. note: sic] irreconcilable with the principles of belief by which we regulate, or ought to regulate, our acceptance of new matter of belief." CHAPTER FIVE. Rudimentary Organs. Darwinism does not account for the fact that the various organs of animals while in process of evolution, must have through many generations, been in a rudimentary, incomplete state. Since it is a basic doctrine of evolution that useful variations were transmitted from parent to offspring _because they were useful_; and since furthermore, only the fully developed eye, the hearing ear, the actively functioning poison glands of insects and reptiles, etc., as well as the fully developed means of defense, were useful, it is not possible to understand how these organs in their rudimentary state (the half developed eye, not yet capable of vision; the rudimentary spinneret of the spider, not yet capable of producing a thread, etc.) could serve any purpose which would make their transmission advantageous to the species. Conversely, the existence of rudimentary organs in living species (the rudimentary spurs of female birds, the rudimentary legs of skeleton of serpents) proves that organs do not change by use or disuse, otherwise they would long ago have disappeared. With regard to this difficulty, Darwin says: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case." Let us see. A difficult organ to account for is the electric organ of the skates. In these fishes it has been shown to be a true electric battery, but the discharges from this battery, even in the adults, are so feeble that they are of no practical use so far as has been ascertained. It is well known that the electric eel and the torpedo use their batteries for stunning other animals. It is evident that, according to the theory of natural selection, these batteries could not have been preserved through their long functionless and useless stages, for that theory assumes that they were preserved because they were useful. It is asserted by evolutionists that wings as organs of flight have been independently evolved in at least four different lines--namely, in insects, the fossil pterodactyls, birds and bats. That an organ so highly specialized as any one of these wings could be evolved seems improbable; while the evolution of the four different kinds, independently of each other, only increases the improbability. The difficulty, however, is to account for the evolution of any known kind of wing. In each case there exists the insuperable difficulty of preserving the organ through the rudimentary stages. The wings of an insect in the first generation of its evolution would be almost imperceptible and entirely useless for any purpose whatever, and so it would continue to be for a great number of generations. It is evident, therefore, that they could not have been preserved through their long rudimentary stage on the ground that they were useful, nor do we know of any theory that will account for their evolution. To say that they were evolved is easy, but to account for their evolution seems impossible. Fairhurst refers to the delicate and complex organs of spiders. "The organs which spiders possess for secreting material and for making a web could not have been gradually evolved. The whole apparatus involved in making the web would be useless until sufficiently developed to make a web. The same is true," he continues, "of the sting of the scorpion, the stings of bees, the mandibles of spiders with the gland of poisonous fluid at the base, and the poison apparatus of serpents. All of these glands for secreting poison would be useless until they could secrete a harmful fluid. The spurs of birds present further difficulties to the theory of evolution. Most birds have no spurs. When they possess them, as a rule the males alone have them well-developed, while they are rudimentary in the females. In some cases, however, both sexes possess them in a well-developed form. But how could a spur be evolved in either sex? As a rudiment, it would for many generations be entirely useless for any purpose, and consequently it would not be preserved by natural selection, nor in any other possible way, so far as I can see. The spurs are in the best possible position on the legs for combat. Why did they appear in the best place and nowhere else? As useless rudiments they would be quite as likely to survive in one place as in another. If spurs could not have been preserved by natural selection through their rudimentary stage, why assume that they have been evolved according to this law? If they could survive through the critical rudimentary period till they became of use, why not assume that their evolution was continued according to the same law? The fact is, however, that we know of no law according to which they could have been evolved." The bat is another highly specialized animal. In many respects it resembles the mole, but its hands are, enormously expanded, and the exceedingly long fingers are connected by a soft membrane, making a most serviceable wing. It is not extremely likely, assuming the development theory to be true, that both the mole and the bat sprang from a common ancestor? And was not that ancestor probably a wingless, though not a legless mammal? Now, how came the bat to acquire his wings? Did he attempt to spring into the air and seize a passing insect, and reach out his paws to catch it? And did those paws gradually become enlarged, till, after some generations, they were real wings? But what happened in the meantime to those connecting links whose wings were but partly developed? A bat with wings only half grown would be a helpless creature, and would surely perish. A mole with hands terminating in long, slender fingers, would be helpless, and would perish. There is no middle ground. If the ancestor of the bat was a terrestrial creature, with limbs fitted for walking, then it must have given birth to a full-fledged bat, fitted for flying. There could have been no middle stage, for such a creature would have been helpless, and must have perished. All this applies with equal force to the diversified and often highly complex structure of plants. As the organs of the various plants are now constituted, they most admirably serve their purpose. Given a slight change, an underdevelopment, and the individual would perish. But such underdeveloped stages must have occurred in the history of every life-form on earth, if a change through slow adaptations is to be accepted as a hypothesis to account for their present form. To our mind, this matter of rudimentary structures presents an insuperable obstacle to acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis even on scientific grounds. CHAPTER SIX. Instinct. How the various instincts of animals, the homing instinct of birds and insects, the building instincts, the migrating instinct, etc., could have been developed though forces working by natural selection or any other law, is a question which has called forth much discussion. It cannot be said that the explanations contained in the pages of Darwin, Romanes, and Spencer are satisfying. The difficulty that remains unsolved is similar to that (already considered) of rudimentary structures. On instinct depends the existence of most animals. According to the theory these instincts have been developed by slow degrees. Hence there must have been a time when these instincts, because not yet completely developed, were useless to the animal. But if useless, the animal must have perished. The strength of this objection to the evolutionary hypothesis will become clear from a brief study of the manner in which animal life is bound up with the proper functioning of instinct. Consider, for instance, the dependence of the honey bee and her hive on the functions, every one instinctive, of queen, workers, and drones. There is the queen, whose sole work is to lay eggs; the drones, or males, whose function it is to fertilize the queen; and the workers, which are females undeveloped sexually. In these three kinds of individuals we see a combination of many most remarkable instincts and peculiarities of structure which look to the good of the community. How could they have been produced by evolution? The workers are sterile and leave no offspring, consequently their instincts cannot be inherited from bees of their own class. Each generation of workers is isolated from all succeeding generations. A colony of bees is not like a community of civilized human beings in whom many of the wants are artificial, and which may remain unsupplied, with simply a certain amount of discomfort, but the wants which the instincts of bees supply are imperative, and, therefore, the instincts themselves, as a whole, are necessary to the existence of the bees. Their instincts are all linked together as a necessary chain, so that if one should fail the community would perish. Each kind of work is perfectly done, and yet the workers are totally unconscious as to what will be the result of their labors. For the most part they work for future generations of their colony, and not for themselves, and yet they are as careful and diligent as if they were guided by the highest intelligence and the most selfish motives [tr. note: sic no punctuation]. Fairhurst, whom we are quoting, adds: "There is nothing more wonderful and mysterious in nature than the instincts of bees. What can be more remarkable than that instinct of the workers which causes them to prevent the queen from stinging to death the young queens in their cells? Here we see the instinct of the workers opposing that of the queen, and thus saving the colony and insuring the propagation of the species. And yet at other but proper times the workers permit the old queen to kill the young ones in their cells. How could these instincts in the workers, which act in exactly opposite ways by just the right times for the welfare of the community, have ever been evolved? Or how could that instinct have arisen which causes two queens when engaged in combat to refrain from inflicting the mortal sting if they would mutually destroy each other, and thus leave the hive without a queen?--acting as if they knew that the life of one of them was necessary for the welfare of the community." Concerning the modifications of structure and the instincts necessary to produce the web of the spider, Fairhurst quotes the following from Orton's _"Zoology."_ "Spiders are provided at the posterior end with two or three pairs of appendages called spinnerets, which are homologous (correspond structually) [tr. note: sic] with legs. The office of the spinnerets is to reel out the silk from the silk-glands, the tip being perforated by a myriad of little tubes through which the silk escapes in excessively fine threads. An ordinary thread, just visible to the naked eye, is the union of a thousand or more of these delicate streams of silk. These primary threads are drawn out and united by the hind legs." From this we see that two special glands, capable of secreting a soft material that can be readily drawn into the finest threads of the greatest strength, requiring no perceptible time for drying, and two to four spinnerets perforated by more than a thousand of the smallest apertures, and hind legs modified so that they can be used to draw out the web through the spinnerets, and also the instincts which enable the spider to use its web to advantage, must all have been evolved. To evolve the silk glands would have required, as for most other organs, a long period of incipiency, during which they would have been useless. We can not assume that a substance so exceptional in its character as the web of the spider could have been suddenly produced by evolution. But the glands would be useless without spinnerets. The hypothesis asks us to assume that two or three pairs of legs that were probably at one time useful for locomotion became so modified that they could perform the function of spinnerets. But in what conceivable way could locomotive legs have become so modified and pierced with more than a thousand apertures through which the web is drawn? And how could these organs serve their purpose while the complex instincts required for their functioning were only in course of development? From a German monthly devoted to aquaria, we quote the following: "But now, dear readers, we come to a fish which shows an exceptionally peculiar and touching care for its young--the mouth-brooder, _Haplochromis Strigigena_ (formerly _Paratilapia Multicolor_). This fish is so much concerned about the safety of its young, that it knows no better and no more secure place than its own mouth in which to preserve them. In no other division of the animal kingdom can we find such an interesting example of fostering care for the young as we find in this species of fish. Immediately after emitting the spawn the female again gathers up the eggs and packs them away in her mouth like herring in a barrel. She naturally must employ the organs of the throat and also the organs between the gills and thus the appearance of the animal is greatly changed even to the extent that it looks very much like as if she had a craw. Furthermore, during ths [tr. note: sic] entire period, which is about fourteen days, the little animal cannot take food and is hampered very much in her movements. Therefore in case of imminent danger it becomes necessary for her to cast out the entire brood which then wretchedly perish, and for this reason it is to be recommended to disturb or disquiet these animals during this period as little as possible. Even after the young leave the mother of their own accord, they always flee to her protecting mouth, and thus they present an exciting aspect, when they are first seen peacefully and contentedly playing about the mother fish, until a shadow or a sudden thrust warns them of danger and quick as lightning they dart into her mouth. "If the fostering care of this mouth-brooding fish is regarded as wonderful and singular, what should one then say, if another fish is spoken of which does not regard this kind of protection as sufficient, and which therefore causes its eggs to hatch outside the surface of the water. The exceedingly adorned and elegant _Phyrrhylima Filamentosa_ performs this masterpiece of truest love. With great dexerity [tr. note: sic] this fish darts from 5 to 7 cm. above the surface of the water and there fastens its eggs on the walls of the aquarium--usually in one corner. Even though one must and can preserve damp air by covering the aquarium, the spawn would nevertheless surely dry up, if the fish itself were not constantly concerned to keep the spawn damp by an extended bombardment of little drops of water. In the performance of this act the fish remains near the surface of the water and then by a quick upward movement of the fins of the tail it throws a drop of water upon the spawn in such an expert manner as is truly admirable. One must also keep in mind here that the spawn require from three to five days for hatching, and now one can understand what a huge task this little fish performs and what efforts are required. Later on the young hatch and then slide down the slick wall of the aquarium into their native element." (V. Schloemp in _"Blaetter fuer Aquarien und Terrarienkunde,"_ Stuttgart, Sept. 1913.) In all the domain of natural science there are no wonders more amazing than those of instinct. The subject is simply inexhaustible. Moreover, every animal is absolutely dependent on instinctively performed actions and habits. The life-story of many wasps, of the various ants,--someone has called the brain of the ant the most wonderful speck of protoplasm in the world,--and of the insects generally, is bound up with instincts that partly interlock marvellously with the life-story of plants, and which are, even viewed in themselves, the greatest wonders of creation. The questions insistently call for an answer: How could these instincts preserve the animal when they were still in an incipient, undeveloped state? How could they arise through natural selection (which is simply _accident,_ of course), at all? Darwin says that there are instincts "almost identically the same in animals so remote in the scale of Nature, that we cannot account for their similarity by inheritance from a common progenitor, and consequently must believe that they were independently acquired through natural selection." Again he says "Many instincts are so wonderful that their development will probably appear to the reader a difficulty sufficient to overcome my whole theory." And here, in the vernacular of the day, we would depose that Mr. Darwin _"said something."_ CHAPTER SEVEN. Heredity. The subject of heredity is intimately bound up with the evolutionary hypothesis and, it must be admitted, creates a new difficulty for the acceptance of the theory. Indeed, the laws of heredity, so far as understood, appear to contradict the theory of Lamarck and Darwin at a vital point, if not at _the_ vital point of the entire structure raised in the _"Origin of Species."_ It is necessary in order to appreciate the strength of this objection, to recall once more the outstanding features of the hypothesis by which scientists have attempted to account for the variety of living forms. The various theories of organic evolution, whether Lamarckian, neo-Lamarckian, or Darwinian, are based upon the assumption that animals and plants have a tendency to perpetuate by transmission to offspring a variation which has proven useful as an aid to the particular species in its struggle for existence. We have just discussed, in the chapters on the Fixity of Species and on Rudimentary Organs, certain difficulties which loom up when the question is raised, How did varieties become distinct species? However, even if it were to be assumed that some satisfying answer might be found to this question so far as the stages of incomplete organs are concerned, there is one fact in heredity which, it would seem to me, strikes at the very heart of the theory. In his _"Philosophic Zoologique"_ (1809), Lamarck first explicitly formulated his ideas as to the transmutation of species, though he had outlined them as early as 1801. The changes in the species have been wrought, he said, through the unceasing efforts of each organism to meet the needs imposed upon it by its environment. Constant striving means the constant use of certain organs, and such use leads to the development of those organs. Thus a bird running by the sea-shore is constantly tempted to wade deeper and deeper in pursuit of food; its incessant efforts tend to develop its legs, in accordance with the observed principle that the use of any organ tends to strengthen and develop it. But such slightly increased development of the legs is _transmitted to the offspring_ of the bird, which in turn develops its already improved legs by its individual efforts, and transmits the improved tendency. Generation after generation this is repeated, until the sum of the infinitesimal variations, all in the same direction, results in the production of the long-legged wading-bird. In a similar way, through individual effort and _transmitted tendency,_ all the diversified organs of all creatures have been developed--the fin of the fish, the wings of the bird, the hand of man; nay, more, the fish itself, the bird, the man, even. Note well, the fundamental assumption is that such acquired characteristics,--greater length of leg, or of neck, a coating of hair, a protective coloring, etc.,--however acquired, can be transmitted from the parent animal possessing them, to its offspring. The question arises: Can such characteristics be transmitted? And the students of heredity answer: They _cannot!_ I find in G. Archibald Reid _"Alcoholism, a Study in Heredity,"_ a lucid exposition of this subject. (Reid is a F. R. S. E. His book was published by T. Fisher Unwin, London, a few yars [tr. note: sic] ago.) "All the characters of a living being, every physical structure and every mental trait, may be placed in one of two categories. Either they are inborn or they are acquired. An inborn or innate character is one which, in common parlance, arises in the individual 'by nature.' Thus arms, legs, eyes, ears, head, etc., and all inborn characters. The child inherits them from his parent. But, if during its development, or after the completion of the development any one of the inborn characters of an individual is modified by some occurrence, the change thus produced is known as an acquired character, or, shortly, as an acquirement. "Thus all the effects of exercise are acquirements; for example the enlargement which exercise causes in muscles. The effects of lack of exercise are also acquirements; for example, the wasting of a disused muscle. "The effects of injury are acquirements; for example, the changes in a diseased lung or injured arm. Every modification of the mind is also an acquirement; for example, everything stored within the memory. "If a man be blinded by accident or disease, his blindness is acquired. But if he comes into the world blind, if he be blind by nature, his blindness is inborn. If a son be naturally smaller than his father, then his inferiority of size is inborn; but if his growth be stunted by ill health or lack of nourishment or exercise, his inferiority is acquired. "Lamarck held, as people in all ages have held, that characters acquired by parents are also transmissible to some extent, and that evolution results from their accentuation during succeeding generations. _Lamarck's theory is rejected totally by the modern followers of Darwin_. "Ten thousand men might break their fingers, yet among their offspring not one might have a crooked finger. Consider on the other hand for how many generations women have bored their ears and noses in India. Yet when is a girl born with ears and nose already pierced? For how many generations have we amputated the tails of terriers, and yet their tails are no shorter. It will then be perceived how overwhelming is the case against the doctrine of the transmission of acquirements. "The general question of the transmission of acquirements is too big and too abstruse to be treated adequately here. Two arguments more I may use, however, partly because they have not been developed, to my knowledge, by other writers, and partly because they seem to me well-nigh decisive. The more than normal development of the blacksmith's arm is rightfully called an acquired trait, since it arises from exercise, from use, not from germinal conditions. But no infant's arm develops into an ordinary adult arm without exercise similar in kind to that which develops the blacksmith's arm, though less in degree. "Every single thing contained within the memory of man, every single word of a language, for instance, is an acquirement. But when are the contents of a parent's mind transmitted to the child? "Again, a man is capable of becoming a parent at any time between extreme youth and extreme old age; a woman from the age of thirteen to fourteen till nearly fifty. Between the birth of the first child and the last such an individual changes vastly. Under stress and fear of circumstances, under the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, all sorts of acquirements are made. The body becomes vigorous and then feeble, the mind grows mature, and then senile. He or she grows wrinkled and bowed and perhaps very wise, or perhaps much the reverse. Yet no one viewing a baby show, a children's party, or an assembly of adults, of whom he has no previous knowledge, can say which is the child of the youthful and which of aged parents. "Apparently, therefore, the whole of the parent's acquirements have no effect on the child. _Surely no evidence could be stronger."_* [[* The undoubted transmission of siphilis [tr. note: sic] to off-spring might be regarded as a case of transmission of an acquired characteristic. But the case is not in point since congenital siphilis [tr. note: sic] is, properly, due to a prenatal infection, the bacillus entering the very germ-plasm of the human ovum (egg). Medical science, generally, has become very cautious in the use of the word "hereditary." There is almost unanimity among medical men in the denial of heredity as a factor in tuberculosis and cancer. Most physicians are honest enough to say that they know considerably less about these things than was "known" ten and twenty years ago.]] Herbert Spencer claims that "the inheritance of acquired characters" is a necessary supplement to natural selection. "Close contemplation of the facts impresses me more strongly than ever with the two alternatives--either there has been inheritance of acquired characters, or there has been no evolution." Again, "the inheritance of acquired characters, which it is now the fashion of the biological world to deny, was by Mr. Darwin fully recognized and often insisted on." "The neo-Darwinists, however, do not admit this cause at all." He admits that known facts which show that acquired characters are inherited are few, but he thinks that they are "as large a number as can be expected, considering the difficulty of observing them and the absence of search." From the above, we see that the biological world is against Mr. Spencer's view; that he would abandon the theory of evolution unless acquired characters had been inherited, but that facts in support of this theory are meager. "Biologists in the above instance, as well as in others, differ in theory as to fundamental principles of evolution. He who imagines that the theory of organic evolution has been proved to the point of demonstration, has but to read the contentions of evolutionists themselves with regard to the most important things involved in the theory, in order to satisfy his mind that there is great diversity of opinion." (Fairhurst.) The general abandonment of the Darwinian hypothesis by biologists, adverted to in our next chapter, is mainly due to the failure of heredity to account for the gradual modification of organs and of habits. Various expedients are resorted to by Haeckel and a few others in their attempts to bolster up a theory which has broken so signally on the rock of heredity. Principal among these is the reference to unlimited time. It is asserted that, after all, such minute differences might, in the course of many ages, result in new and more perfect organs. However, here a new and unexpected difficulty presents itself. The physicist, who has measured the heat of the sun, rises up and says that the age of the earth, as estimated by specialists like Lord Kelvin, is not nearly so great as is demanded by the Darwinian. The period which the physicists, in their mercy, appear to be willing to grant the inhabitable globe is from twenty to forty million years. But the evolutionists maintain with great fervor that this period is far too short for the production of such complicated types of organism as now live on the earth; they demand from two hundred to a thousand million years! And so these two groups of scientists, the evolutionistic biologist and the physicists are hopelessly at odds. A new generation of evolutionists has within the past twenty years arisen which holds that the changes in the organizations of plants and animals do not come by slow growth of favorable characteristics, but arise suddenly. Such is the "Mutation" theory of Hugo de Vries. But science has failed to receive this and similar theories with the same acclaim which once greeted Darwin's _"Origin of Species."_ Naturalists have become cautious. They remember the inglorious collapse of the Darwinian regime and they are slow to hail another "Abraham of scientific thought." They are, in a general way, believers in some kind of evolution; but they prefer not to specify exactly the laws which have been operative in past "geological time." It is only in high-school texts in physical geography, zoology, and botany, that the evolutionary theory as propounded by Darwin is still treated as if it enjoyed among scientific men the same respect as the multiplication table. Speaking in the Darwinian dialect we should say that the authors of these school-texts constitute a case of "arrested development." CHAPTER EIGHT. A Scientific Creed Outworn. The preceding chapter concludes our investigation of that stage of evolutionistic thought which owes its origin and name to Charles Darwin. The question suggests itself, do scientists to-day believe as Darwin did? A great many do. Darwin remains to many scientists what Huxley, I think, called him, the "Abraham of scientific thought." But if we examine the roster of these, we find that they belong, with a single exception (Haeckel), to those whose departments of investigation have nothing to do with the study of life forms (biology, zoology, botany), and who consequently do not speak from first hand knowledge of the facts. Anthropologists (students of the races of man), sociologists, psychologists, and many educated persons generally, accept the Darwinian scheme of evolution as a fact and build their theories on it in turn. They accept the theory and ask no question. The vogue which Darwinism still enjoys among writers of school-texts has already been noted. However, the specifically Darwinian phase of evolutionistic thought, as laid down in Spencer's interminable volumes, for instance, is given up by reputable biologists the world over. There is pretty much of a Babel among them, when it comes to a definition of evolution. There are dozens of theories,--mutation, orthogenesis, Weismanism, Mendelianism, etc.,-- and each has its adherents,--but they agree in one thing, that "Natural Selection" does not account for the forms of life on earth to-day. The revolt against "Natural Selection" came some forty years ago. It was announced in two famous declarations by Spencer and Huxley. This constitutes one of the most remarkable and important, as well as one of the most significant episodes, in the history of evolution. In two of the most remarkable essays which ever appeared in the _"Nineteenth Century"_ magazine, now over thirty years ago, Herbert Spencer stepped on to the stool of repentance and read his recantation and renunciation of the doctrine of natural selection and the survival of the fittest; first doing vicarious penance (unauthorized, however) for Darwin, and then, in no uncertain terms, for himself. There was no mistaking Spencer's meaning. His language was explicit. "The phrases (natural selection and survival of the fittest) employed in discussing organic evolution," he told his readers, "though convenient and needful, are liable to mislead by veiling the actual agencies." "The words 'natural selection,' do not express a cause in the physical sense." "Kindred objections," he continues, "may be urged against the expression into which I was led when seeking to present the phenomena in literal terms rather than metaphorical terms--'the survival of the fittest.' In the working together of those many actions, internal and external, which determine the lives and deaths of organisms, we see nothing to which the words 'fitness' and 'unfitness' are applicable in the physical sense." And he continues: "Evidently, the word 'fittest' as thus used _is a figure of speech."_ Had the sun fallen from the heavens the shock to the followers of Darwin could not have been more stunning than this open apostasy from the Darwinian faith. Nor was this all. New surprises were still in store for the faithful who still clung to the cherished dogma. Now they find their faith itself assailed, and this, too, by these very selfsame leaders, who had been at such pains to make them proselytes. There can be little doubt that misgivings regarding the truth of their claims began to haunt the champions of the Darwinian hypothesis. They were just then masters of the whole field of scientific thought. They had brought all science to the feet of Darwin. The few benighted dissenters who still held out against the doctrine were looked upon as not worthy even of contempt. The whole world had adopted the creed of evolution. Was it wantonness then, or was it conscience, that prompted Huxley in what is now a historically famous speech, delivered at the unveiling of a statue to Darwin in the Museum at South Kensington, to openly declare that it would be wrong to suppose "that an authoritative sanction was given by the ceremony to the current ideas concerning evolution?" Well might his hearers be astonished! But they must have held their breath, when they heard him add boldly and bluntly, in no uncertain tones, that "science commits suicide when it adopts a creed." A creed, indeed! What had science been doing in the field of evolution ever since Darwin has given his doctrine to the world, but proclaiming its faith in the Darwinian creed? There was no blinking the inevitable conclusions. Both Huxley on the platform and Spencer in the _"Nineteenth Century"_ had acknowledged before the whole world that they had lost faith in the idol which for thirty years they had so vociferously worshipped. It is true that both Spencer and Huxley might have intended to warn biologists merely against a too implicit faith in natural selection or the survival of the fittest. But even so, the position of their followers was little to be envied. Their leaders had confidently assured them that Darwin had given to the world coveted knowledge never known until he had discovered it. This had been loudly and confidently proclaimed from the housetops of science; and now--strange reversal--those same leaders tell them that their preachments were of a faith without foundation. The words of Professor Osborn may be adduced: "Between the appearance of _'The Origin of Species'_ in 1859 and the present time there have been great waves of faith in one explanation and then in another; each of these waves of confidence has ended in disappointment, until finally we have reached a stage of very general scepticism. Thus the long period of observation, experiment and reasoning which began with the French philosopher Buffon, one hundred and fifty years ago, ends in 1916 with the general feeling that our search for causes, far from being near completion, has only just begun." Sir William Dawson, of Montreal, the eminent geologist, said that the evolution doctrine is "one of the strangest phenomena of humanity, a system destitute of any shadow of proof," (_"Story of the Earth and Man,"_ p. 317). Even Professor Tyndall in an article in the _"Fortnightly Review"_ said: "There ought to be a clear distinction made between science in the state of hypothesis and science in the state of fact. And inasmuch as it is still in its hypothetical stage the ban of exclusion ought to fall upon the theory of Evolution. I agree with Virchow that the proofs of it are still wanting, that the failures have been lamentable, that the doctrine is utterly discredited." One of the ablest evolutionists today is Professor Henslow, formerly President of the British Association. In his book, _"Modern Rationalism Critically Examined,"_ he shows that Darwinian natural selection is absolutely inadequate to account for existing facts. Professor Bateson, who gave the Presidential Address at the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1914, bore striking testimony to the modifications made by recent science in connection with the Darwinian theory. This is what he said among other things: "The principle of natural selection cannot have been the chief factor in delimiting the species of animals and plants. We go to Darwin for his incomparable collection of facts. We would fain emulate his scholarship, his width and his power of exposition, but to us he speaks no more with philosophical authority. We have done with the notion that Darwin came latterly to favor, that large differences can arise by accumulation of small differences." St. George Mivart as long as thirty years ago wrote an exhaustive treatise entitled, _"The Genesis of Species,"_ in which he subjects the Darwinian hypothesis to a searching examination, and discards it as unproven in every particular and contradicted by the facts of nature in many points. He called it "a puerile (childish) hypothesis." Professor H. H. Gran of Christiana University, an expert in biology, says he believes in evolution, but declares Darwin's explanation of it to be inadequate. His words are: "Darwin collected a great mass of stuff both from the animal as well as from the vegetable kingdom, but these collections were not thoroughly sifted and cannot be used as the basis of theoretical conclusions as Darwin did." Prof. Fleischman, of Erlangen, says: "There is not a single fact to confirm Darwinism in the realm of Nature." Drs. E. Dennert, Hoppe and von Hartmann; Profs. Paulson and Rutemeyer, and the talented scientists Zoeckler and Max Wundt, have given Darwinism up. Men like our own H. F. Osborn may still cling to the beloved theory and furnish imaginary pictures of ape-men as proof, in recent books; but hear Prof. Ernest Haeckel himself: "Most modern investigators of science have come to the conclusion that the doctrine of evolution, and particularly Darwinism, is an error, and cannot be maintained." This was said some years before the Great War. Other names (Friedmann, de Cyon) might be added. The present attitude of naturalists toward the theory may be learned from a symposium by a number of eminent writers in a recent number of the "Biblical World" (February, 1913), on the theme, "Has Evolution Collapsed?" Prof. Moulton, of Chicago, says: "The essence of evolution is that the order which exists one day changes into the order which will exist on succeeding days, in a systematic manner, rather than in an irregular and chaotic one." This states the theory, but adds a mere platitude, for all believe that the universe is orderly and not chaotic. The real question is, What is the nature and the cause of the prevailing order? This question he does not attempt to answer. Prof. Lillie, of Chicago, tells us that there are "differences in opinion among recent investigators concerning the method of evolution," and says: "Opinion in reference to this matter is in a state of flux." Prof. Mathews, of Chicago, says: "While the fact of evolution is universally admitted, the means by which evolution is brought to pass are uncertain." Prof. Patten, of Darmouth, says: "As for biologists, they are now farther from agreement as to what constitutes the processes and conditions essential to organic evolution, * * * [tr. note: sic] than they were a generation ago." Prof. Mall, of Johns Hopkins, says: "It is true that gradual evolution, as advocated by Darwin, is seriously questioned by those who believe that it takes place by 'rapid jumps.'" Prof. Williston, of Chicago, says: "The causes of organic evolution are still an unsolved problem; and he will be a greater man than Darwin, who finally demonstrates them." Thus these recognized authorities, while accepting the theory, add many limitations and admit that the "method," the "manner," the "process," the "conditions" and the "causes" of the movement are still unknown. What, then, remains of the theory? Not much but the name. CHAPTER NINE. Man. "There is no longer any doubt among scientists that man descended from the animals." This sweeping statement was made in 1920 by Edwin Grant Conklin professor of biology in Princeton University. And so evolutionists generally, while giving up geology as hopeless in regard to the evolution of plants and animals, cling to the doctrine that man has ascended, through long ages of development, from the brute. We have seen that Wallace and other profound students of the subject recognize the essential difference between the faculties of man and the instincts of animals. They admit that forces resident in matter do not account for the origin of Thought. They believe that Spirit,--God,--created something new when intelligence first entered the brain of man. But even Wallace holds that the human body is a product of evolution; that there was a common brute ancestor, both for apes and the men. The search for the missing link between man and his animal ancestor is still going on. As soon as any human remains are dug up in the earth, evolutionists begin to measure the skull and bones, and to find how many points of resemblance they have to the apes. If the brain-pan is a bit shallow, or small, or the eyebrows prominent, or the slope of the face acute, or the teeth and jaws large, they announce with much confidence that the "missing link" has been found. But after a while they begin to grow more modest and end in finding other points which show that the specimen was an unmistakable ape, or an unmistakable man, and not something between the two. One could fill a museum with discarded missing links; and yet men refuse to learn caution, and repeat their shoutings every time a new find is announced. It will be instructive to pass in review a few of the more famous prehistoric remains of man which have at one time and another been declared undeniable proof of a development, through intermediate stages, of the human body from the body of a brute. _Pithecanthropus Erectus_ is the name invented by Haeckel for the "missing link," and given by Dr. Eugene Du Bois, a Dutch physician, to certain remains discovered by him on the island of Java in 1891. The remains consist of "an imperfect cranium, a femur bearing evidence of prolonged disease, and a molar tooth." (Dana, _"Manual of Geology,"_ p. 1036.) The discoverer of these bones believed that they are the remains of a being between the man-apes and man. Prof. Virchow and other specialists in anatomy examined this find. It was established that the femur was found a year after the cranium. Some regard the remains as belonging to a low-grade man or to an idiot. (Dana, _I c_.) The cubic measurement of the skull is 60 cubic inches, about that of an idiot, that of a normal man being 90 cubic inches and that of an ape 30. These specimens were found in separate places. The skull is too small for the thigh-bone. The age of the strata in which they were found is uncertain. An authority of the first rank, Prof. Klaatsch, of Heidelberg University, says that the creature "does not supply the missing link." Dr. Smith Woodward and Dr. Charles Dawson, in reconstructing a man from the _Piltdown skull_, discovered in 1912 on Piltdown Common, near Ucksfield, Sussex, England, built up something essentially monkey-like, with receding forehead, projecting brows, and a gorilla-like lower jaw. Prof. Keith, a renowned specialist, checking up on this reconstruction, comes to an entirely different conclusion. He finds that the work of Drs. Dawson and Woodward was done "in open defiance of all that scientists know about skulls, whether ancient or modern." His words are: "I soon saw that the parts of the reconstructed Piltdown skull had been apposed in a manner which was in open defiance of all that was known of skulls, ancient and modern, human and anthropoid. Articulating the bones in a manner which has been accepted by all anatomists in all times, I found that the brain-chamber, instead of measuring 1,070 cubic cm., as in Dr. Smith Woodward's reconstruction, measured 1,500 cubic cm.,--a large brain chamber for even modern man." The _Neanderthal skull_ was found in 1856 in the neighborhood of Duesseldorf by Dr. Fuhlrott, of Elberfeld. When the skull and other parts of the skeleton were exhibited at a scientific meeting held at Bonn the same year, a wide divergence of opinion at once developed among the specialists. By some, doubts were expressed as to the human character of the remains. Others held that the remains indicate a person of much the same stature as a European of the present day, but with such an unusual thickness in some of them as betokened a being of very extraordinary strength. Dr. Meyer, of Bonn, regarded the skull as the remains of a Cossack killed in 1814. Other scientists agreed with him. Modern science accepts the antiquity of the Neanderthal man, but the controversy has never ceased. The great Virchow declared the peculiarities of the bones to be the result of disease. Near Liege, in Belgium, not more than seventy miles from the Neanderthal, the _Engis skull_ was found. After careful measurement it was proved not to differ materially from the skulls of modern Europeans. Such experiences should prevent us from making any assertions respecting the primitive character, in race or physical conformation, of these cave-dwellers. Indeed. Prof. Huxley, in a very careful and elaborate paper upon the Neanderthal and Engis skulls, places an average skull of a modern native of Australia about half-way between those of the Neanderthal and Engis caves. Yes, he says that, after going through a large collection of Australian skulls, he "found it possible to select from these crania two (connected by all sorts of intermediate gradations), the one of which should very nearly resemble the Engis skull, while the other would somewhat less closely approximate to the Neanderthal skull in size, form, and proportions." "The Engis skull, perhaps the oldest known, is," according to Prof. Huxley, "a fair average skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brain of a savage." In this opinion Mr. Huxley is supported by one of the greatest anthropologists of his time, Daniel G. Brinton, who says concerning the cave-man of France and Belgium: "Neither in stature, cranial capacity, nor in muscular development did these earliest members of the species differ more from those now living than do these among themselves. We have no grounds for assigning to these earliest known men an inferior brain or a lower intelligence than is seen among various savage tribes still in existence." Every new find, upon investigation, proves the truth of Virchow's words: "We must really acknowledge that there is a complete absence of any fossil type of a lower stage in the development of man. Nay, if we gather together all the fossil men hitherto found, and put them parallel with those of the present time, we can decidedly pronounce that there are among living men a much greater proportion of individuals which show a relatively inferior type than there are among the fossils known up to this time. . . . Every positive progress which we haw made in the region of prehistoric anthropology has removed us farther from the demonstration of this theory!" Quite recently (in 1913) a remarkable fossil was found in the Oldoway gulch in northern German East Africa, by an expedition of the Geological Institute of the University of Berlin. The remains consist of a complete skeleton, which was found deeply imbedded in firm soil. Unquestionably ancient as these remains are,--the bones are completely fossilized,--they contained lamentably few "primitive characteristics," and hence have not been exploited in the interest of the evolutionary theory. A fragment of skull, a tooth, a thigh-bone, offer much more inviting fields to the evolutionists, since they permit his imagination to range without the restraint of fact. The Oldoway fossil, which is in every essential respect a normal human skeleton, possesses no special attractions for those who would represent man as a descendant of brutish ancestors. Says Prof. Virchow: "We seek in vain for the missing link; there exists a definite barrier separating man from the animal which has not yet been effaced--heredity, which transmits to children the faculties of the parents. We have never seen a monkey bring a man into the world, nor a man produce a monkey. All men having a Simian (monkey-like) appearance are simply pathological variants, (abnormal varieties, due to some diseased condition). It was generally believed a few years ago that there existed a few human races which still remained in the primitive inferior condition of their organization. But all these races have been objects of minute investigation, and we know that they have an organization like ours, often, indeed, superior to that of the supposed higher races. Thus the Eskimo head and the head of the Terra del Fuegians belong to the perfected types. All the researches undertaken with the aim of finding continuity in progressive development have been without result. There exists no proanthrope, no man-monkey, and the 'connecting link' remains a phantom." Dr. Berndt, of Berlin, recently said in the _"Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau der Chemikerseitung"_ (April, 1914): "Max Weber, one of the best authorities on mammals, regards the anthropoid apes of to-day as a branch _parallel_ to the human branch. Scholars like Cope, Adloeff, Klaatsch, prefer to push the origin of man back to the earliest age of terrestrial life, whence he went his way _from the very outset_ separate from the apes." This is a highly significant utterance. It means nothing more than this: there is not one recognizable link which unites man with the animal kingdom. All the intermediate forms between man and the original jelly-fish, which according to Haeckel and Vogt was his ancestor, have disappeared. For their existence we have nothing but the word of speculative scientists. Concerning the Neanderthaler, the Cro-Magnon man. etc., Dr. Dawson has said: "Geological evidence resolves itself into a calculation of the rate of erosion of river valleys, of deposition of gravel and cave-earths, and of formation of stalagmite crusts, all of which are so variable and uncertain that, though it may be said that an impression of great antiquity beyond the time of received history has been left on the minds of geologists, no absolute antiquity has been proved; and while some, on such evidence, would stretch the antiquity of man to even half a million years, the oldest of these remains may, after all, not exceed our traditional six thousand. These skeletons tell us that primitive man had the same high cerebral organization which he possesses now, and we may infer the same high intellectual and moral nature, fitting him for communication with God and headship over the lower world." Similarly Figuier held that "we know of no archaeological find (stone hatchets, etc.) that could not be pronounced only five thousand years old as well as fifty thousand." Lionel S. Beale, the famous microscopist, testifies: "In support of all naturalistic conjectures concerning man's origin, there is not at this time the shadow of scientific evidence." William Hanna Thomson, M.D., LL.D., Physician to the Roosevelt Hospital; Consulting Physician to New York State Manhattan Hospital for the Insane, who has held a professorship in New York University Medical College; been president of the New York Academy of Medicine, etc, in his recent book. _"What is Physical Life?"_ says concerning the doctrine of evolution: "No contradiction could be greater than that between this doctrine and the greatest truth which underlies this human world." The Russo-French physiologist, M. Elie DeCyon, for many years professor in the Faculty of Sciences and in the Academic Medico-chirurgicale at the University of Petrograd, has lately published a book of essays in which he says that the theory of evolution, especially in its relation to the ancestry of man, is a "pure assumption." He quotes Prof. Fraas, who devoted his long life to the study of fossil animals: "The idea that mankind has descended from any Simian (ape) species whatsoever, is certainly the most foolish ever put forth by a man writing on the history of man. It should be handed down to posterity in a new edition of the Memorial of Human Follies. No proof of this baroque theory can ever be given from discovered fossils." And to quote from another address by Virchow, delivered at Vienna: "I have never found a single ape skull which approaches at all the human one. Between men and apes there exists a line of sharp demarcation." One of the most recent authoritative publications by a German anthropologist urges that "the apes are to be regarded as degenerate branches of the pre-human stock." This means, in a word, that man is not descended from the ape, but the ape from man. This is almost what may be called _reductio ad absurdum,_ and yet it is one of the latest pronouncements of scientific thought (Editorial in _"New York Herald,"_ December 30, 1916). To the same effect are the words of Professor Wood-Jones, Professor of Anatomy in the University of London, England, who recently pointed out that so far from man having descended from anthropoid apes, it would be more accurate to say that these have been descended from man. This was claimed not only by reason of the best anatomical research, but to be "deducible from the whole trend of geological and anthropological discovery." On this account Professor Wood-Jones appealed for "an entire reconsideration of the post-Darwinian conceptions of man's comparatively recent emergence from the brute kingdom." (Quoted by W. H. Griffith Thomas in _"What about Evolution?"_ p. 10.) It is refreshing to turn aside from speculation to revelation, from conjectures and theories to proven facts, and no one has stated ascertained facts, touching the origin of man, more succinctly and more clearly than Prof. Dr. Friedrich Pfaff, professor of Natural Science in the University of Erlangen. He shows conclusively that the age of man is comparatively brief, extending only to a few thousand years; that man appeared suddenly; that the most ancient man known to us is not essentially different from the now living man, and that transitions from the ape to the man, or from the man to the ape, are nowhere found. The conclusion he reaches is that the Scriptural account of man, which is one and selfconsistent, is true; that God made man in his own image, fitted for fellowship with himself and favored with it--a state from which man has fallen, but to which restoration is possible through Him who is the brightness of his Father's glory, and "the express image of his Person." We cannot refrain from reverting, in this connection, to the essential difference between the animal instincts and the intellect of man, and would quote, on this subject, the forceful statement of the case by Paul Haffner in his _"Materialismus"_ (Mainz, 1865). We translate: "If the hypothesis of materialism were acceptable, if we were to believe that a merely animal form of consciousness might develop into spiritual and intellectual perceptions, we ought to be able to observe such capacities of change and growth also in the animal world of to-day. Yet this is not the case. For thousands of years we have observed the domestic animals, and still we can see no trace of a dawn of intellect. We expend much training upon them; we make them our confidants and treat them with inexhaustible tenderness, and still we never see them rise out of their narrow sphere and out of the bonds of their primitive desires and instincts. We note external imitation of human activities, such as the ludicrous virtuosity of the apes, and that superficial adaptation which we call 'animal training' and which is nothing but a development of sense stimuli; the animal does not know what it is doing, it is duped by man who knows how to employ its instincts and make them serviceable to his purposes. We cannot fail to note that never, not even under the most favorable conditions, do the animals step out of their original sphere; that neither by their own efforts nor through the aid of man are they able to rise into ideas of a spiritual or suprasensual nature; that they remain forever what they were in the beginning. Hence it cannot be denied that also men would have remained what they once were according to the notions of materialists. Only if from the beginning the light of spiritual life was enkindled in them, could they become, what they are to-day." (_"Materialismus,"_ p. 59 f.) It will be noted that when we hear the specialists in anatomy and biology, their expressions on the subject of man's ancestry are, as a rule, characterized by a strong dissent from the development theory, while the belief in a development of man from an ape-like ancestor, uttered with a note of cocksureness, is found mainly among amateurs in these sciences. Moreover, even among the believers in a rise of our race from brute origins, many, and the most distinguished among them, assert that the faculties of the human mind are indeed to be accounted for only on the basis of a special creative act of God. They cling, however, to the notion that the body of man is evolved from the lower animals--a view which has been very ably met by Prof. Orr of Glasgow, one of the foremost Biblical scholars of our time. He writes: "It is well known that certain distinguished evolutionists, while handing over man's body to be accounted for by the ordinary processes of evolution, yet hold that man's mind cannot be wholly accounted for in a similar manner. The rational mind of man, they urge--I agree with the view, but am not called upon here to discuss it--has qualities and powers which separate it, not only in degree, but in kind, from the animal mind, and put an unbridgeable gulf, on the spiritual side, between man and the highest of the creatures below him. In other words, there is, in man's case, a rise on the spiritual side--the constitution of a new order or kingdom of existence--which requires for its explanation a distinct supernatural cause. Now the weakness of this theory, I have always felt, lies in its assumption that, while man's mind needs a supernatural cause to account for it, his body may be left to the ordinary processes of development. The difficulty of such a view is obvious. I have stated the point in this way. 'It is a corollary from the known laws of the connection of mind and body that every mind needs an organism fitted to it. If the mind of man is the product of a new cause, the brain, which is the instrument of that mind, must share in its peculiar origin. You cannot put a human mind into a Simian brain.' In other words, if there is a sudden rise on the spiritual side, there must be a rise on the physical--the organic--side to correspond." (_"Virgin Birth of Christ,"_ p. 199.) Can anything be more cogent, more conclusive? The strongest _direct_ proof against the "ascent of man," however, has so far only been touched upon. I refer to the evidences derived from the history of Religion. To this I now invite the reader's close attention. If man was developed from a lower order of creatures, or from any member of the animal kingdom, religion must have been a late development. That this "tailless, catarrhine, anthropoid ape" should have had anything resembling a religion, is, of course, not to be thought of. To imagine that he had a knowledge of the one, true God, his nature and his attributes, would be preposterous. How then explain the origin and rise of religion? The evolutionists do not agree on this subject. Herbert Spencer maintains that _Animism_ was the most primitive form of faith. Man reverenced spirits, the ghosts of the departed, then raised them to the eminence of divinities and finally developed the idea of _one_ absolute being, God. Others suggest, that primitive man first adored the terrible powers and awful phenomena of nature, was thus led to Polytheism (a religion of many Gods) and finally evolved Monotheism (a belief in one God). But all agree in this, that Religion in its earliest form was of a very crude and elementary character, and only in the course of many thousands of years, attained to the conception of one Supreme Being. There was at first a faith in gods,--Polytheism, and much later a faith in God--Monotheism. Now, let is [tr. note: sic] be observed that this is the only _possible_ view from the standpoint of Evolution. Remember that this doctrine is not only conceived as bearing on the development of the animal kingdom. The principle is assumed to operate in the development of the earth, of man, of society, of government, of manufactures, of language, of literature, science, art, and religion. According to the theory, there must have been progress from a crude form of spirit-worship to a worship of gods, and thence to a worship of one God. But what are the facts? Has religion so developed? It has not. _Not only has history failed to show a single form of belief which has advanced in the manner demonstrated, but every religion, no matter how pure and exalted, has gone through a process of degeneration, of devolution_. The founders of the comparative study (or Science) of Religion, and the greatest authorities in its various departments, are practically unanimous in their opinion, that all pagan systems of mythology and religion contain remnants of a more exalted form of belief, of a higher, clearer knowledge of the Divinity, which gradually became dimmed and corrupted. From Max Mueller's Lecture on the _Vedas_ (the ancient hymns of India) we quote the following: As a result "to which a comparative study of religion is sure to lead, we shall learn that religions in their most ancient form, or in the minds of their authors, are generally free from many of the blemishes that attach to them in later times." Le Page Renouf expresses his entire agreement with the "matured judgment" of Emmanuel Rouge: "The first characteristic of the Egyptian religion is the Unity of God most energetically expressed: God, One, Sole and Only--no others with Him.... the Only Being .... The belief in the Unity of the Supreme God and in His attributes as Creator and Lawgiver of man, whom He has endowed with an immortal soul, .... _these are the primitive notions,_ enchased in the midst of mythological superfetations accumulated in the centuries." Franz Lenormant reached the same conclusion. Elsewhere, Renouf says: "It is incontestably true, that the sublimer portions of the Egyptian religions are not the comparatively late result of a process of development. The sublimer portions are demonstrably ancient; and the last stage of the Egyptian religion .... was by far the grossest and most corrupt." (_"Religion of Ancient Egypt,"_ p. 95.) This opinion is supported by the testimony of the Egyptian inscriptions. In the very oldest inscriptions reference is had to a Supreme God and Lord of all, to whom no shrines were raised, whose abode was unknown, who was not graven in stone, while the Egptian [tr. note: sic] of a later day adored the crocodile, the ichneumon, serpents, bulls, cats, and ibises. The history of Hindu belief presents testimony of a still more startling nature. In the Vedas we find statements and prayers which are clear proof of an early Monotheism. Thus the IX book of the Rig Veda contains the following prayer. "Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice? The one-born Lord of all that is; he established the heaven and sky; he is the one king of the breathing and awakening world; he through whom the heaven was established; he who measured out the light in the air--he who alone is God above all gods." Here the belief in one Supreme Being is clearly set forth. And yet this faith in one God in the course of time degenerated into a worship of 33,000 divinities--until Gautama the Buddha evolved a system that denied the very existence of God. Turning to Greece we have the testimony of Prof. Max Mueller to this effect: "When we ascend to the distant heights of Greek history the idea of God, as the Supreme Being, stands before us as a simple fact." (_"Essays,"_ II, p. 146.) Carl Boettcher, in his great work on the Treeworship of the Greeks, maintains: "As far as the legends of the Greeks can be traced into prehistoric ages, the entire nation worshipped a single God, nameless, without statues, without a temple, invisible and omnipresent." This he regards as a tradition of "irrefutable inner truthfulness.... The beginning of Polytheism therefore represents the _second_ phase of Greek religion, which was preceded by a Monotheism." Every student of Greek literature knows that this original belief at an early age gave place to a worship of the gods on Olympus, a worship which in turn gave way to openly avowed atheism. The Greeks were aware of this decay. Plato, in his Phaidros (274 B) quotes Socrates as saying: "I know of an old saying, that our ancestors knew what constituted the true worship of God; if we could but discover what it was, would we then have need of _human_ theories and opinions on the matter?" Certainly a startling statement from the lips of a pagan. Undoubtedly Welcker was right when he asserted, as the ultimate result of his researches: "This (Greek) polytheism has settled before the eyes of men like a high and continuous mountain range, beyond which it is the privilege only of general historical study to recognize, as from a higher point of view, the natural primitive monotheism." Concerning the monotheistic ideas of later Greek thought, the same author says that they are to be regarded not as a result of an ascending line of evolution ("aufsteigende Linie der Entwickelung"), but as "a _return_ of the profound wisdom of old age to the feeling of primitive simplicity." Of the Phoenicians the greatest student of their history and religion, F. K. Movers, says: "Nature worship gradually obscured the purer God-idea of a more ancient stage of belief, but has never entirely obliterated it." He refers to an evident "adulteration of a purer and more ancient God-idea." Regarding the Zoroastrians of ancient Persia, M. Haug, the famous Zend scholar, asserts that "Monotheism was the leading idea of Zoroaster's theology;" he called God Ahura-mazda, i. e., "the Living Creator." Zoroaster did not teach a theological Dualism. He arrived "at the idea of the unity and indivisibility of the Supreme Being," and only as "in course of time this doctrine was changed and _corrupted_ ... the dualism of God and the devil arose." "Monotheism was _superseded_ by Dualism." Both Dr. F. Hommel and Friedrich Delitzsch agree on the question of an early Arabian and Sumerian monotheism. Dr. Hommel demonstrates from the personal surnames contained in the inscriptions the existence of a "very exalted monotheism" in the most ancient times of the Arabian nation, about 2500 B. C., and among the Semitic tribes of northern Babylonia. This "monotheistic religion" degenerated under the influence of Babylonian polytheism. The same opinion was held years ago by Julius Oppert, the Assyriologist, who was led to a belief in "a universal primitive monotheism as the basis of all religions." Expressions similar to the above might be adduced from Rawlinson, Legge (_"Religions of China"_), Doellinger, Victor v. Strauss-Torney (the Egyptologist), Jacob Grimm, and others. In short, the majority of independent and unprejudiced students of heathen beliefs, from the days of A. W. v. Schlegel to our own, have reached the conclusion, that all religions in their later stages exhibit a much lower conception of the Divinity than in their earlier form. It is only the hopelessly prejudiced who can say, as does John Fiske, that "to regard classic paganism as one of the degraded remnants of a primeval monotheism, is to sin against the canons of a sound inductive philosophy." Sinning against the consonant testimony of universal history is a venial offense, it would seem, when the integrity of this "sound inductive philosophy"--that is, of the Spencerian theory--is at stake. It needs but a glance at the well-known facts of religious history to show the working of this _Law of Decay_ as influencing the development of every system of ethnic belief which has a recorded history or a literature. The workings of this law can be traced even in the case of the savage tribes of our own day. Of the African negroes, P. Bandin says that "their traditions and religious doctrines ... show clearly that they are a people in decadence.... They have an obscure and confused idea of the only God, .... who no longer receives worship." (_"Fetichism,"_ p. 7-10.) Winwood Reade testifies: "The negroes possess the remnants of a noble and sublime religion, though they have forgotten its precepts and debased its ceremonies." They still retain a recollection "of God, the Supreme, the Creator." Concerning the Zulus, Bastian records that they informed him that "their ancestors possessed the knowledge of .... that _source of being_ which is above, which gives life to men." (_"Vorgeschichtliche Schoepfungslieder."_) A missionary of the Lutheran General Synod, Rev. J. C. Pedersen, wrote in _"Lutheran Observer,"_ August, 1910, concerning the African natives that they still have a considerable display of religion, but "ask him, who is the God in whom you trust? what do you mean by trusting? how can he help you? and he will answer, 'I don't know, but the old people used to say so, and taught us to say so.'" John Hanning Speke, in his _"Journal of the Discovery of the Sources of the Nile"_ records reminiscences among the degraded savages among whom he dwelt, of a supreme God who dwells in heaven, but who no longer received worship. Mungo Park, in the diary of his _"Travels in the Interior of Africa,"_ says that the Mandingoes, a degenerate race of fetish worshippers, still possessed the knowledge of one God, but do not offer up prayers and supplications to him. In the record of his famous circumnavigation of the globe, Captain Cook says that the cannibals of New Zealand still acknowledged a superior being, although their religion was a crude system of spiritualistic practices. Concerning the Koreans Mrs. L. H. Underwood, medical missionary, says that a thousand unworthy deities now crowd the temples, although the great universal Ruler is still worshipped at times, and the "ancient purity of faith and worship has become sadly darkened." The foremost student of modern missions, Johann Warneck, in _"The Living Christ and Dying Heathenism"_ (F. H. Revell Co.,) comes to the conclusion that the Christian religion and its monotheism are not only not a development from lower origins, but that the heathen religions, historically considered, are a degeneracy from a higher knowledge of God. In other words, the application of the doctrine of evolution to the field of comparative religion is a mistake. "Any form of Animism known to me has no lines leading to perfection, but only incontestable marks of degeneration," says the author. "In heathenism the gold of the divine thought becomes dross." Says he, "I have been counselled to recognize that the idea of evolution at present ruling the scientific world must also rule in the investigation of religion. I am not unacquainted with the literature of the subject, I have described animistic heathenism as concretely as I could; I confined myself strictly to that. I began with the facts of experience; then I drew inferences from them. If these do not agree with the dominant hypothesis of evolution, that is due to the brutal facts, and not to the prepossessions of the observer. "I do not deny that something can be said for the idea of evolution in the religions of mankind, but the study of Animism, with which I have long been familiar as an eyewitness, did not lead me to that idea. Rather the conviction which I arrived at is, that animistic heathenism is not a transition stage to a higher religion. There are no facts to prove that animistic heathenism somewhere and somehow evolved upwards towards a purer knowledge of God. I have worked as a missionary for many years in contact with thousands of the adherents of animistic heathenism and I have been convinced that the force of that heathenism is hostile to God." In the same work Dr. Warneck says that among the Battaks of Sumatra there are "remains of a pure idea of God." but there is also a host of spirits, born of fear, which thrust themselves between God and man. "The idea of God which is found in the religions of the Indian Archipelago, and probably also of Africa, cannot have been distilled from the motley jumble of gods and of nature, for it exists in direct opposition to the latter. The idea of God is preserved, but His worship is lost." In reviewing this book the late Dr. Schmauk said in 1910: "A dispassionate study of heathen religions confirms the view of Paul that heathenism is a fall from a better knowledge of God. The idols come between God and man." W. St. Clair Tisdale, concludes an exhaustive study of _"Christianity and Other Faiths"_ with the statement: "It follows that Monotheism historically preceded Polytheism, and that the latter is a corruption of the former. It is impossible to explain the facts away. Taken together they show that, as the Bible asserts, man at the very beginning of history knew the One True God. This implies a Revelation of some sort and traces of that Revelation are still found in many ancient faiths." We conclude that the history of religion does not only fail to support the evolutionistic postulate of a slow upward development of religions from crude original beliefs, but quite the reverse. It is true that the popular handbooks of comparative religion quite generally teach a development of religious belief through animism, fetishism, and polytheism to monotheism. But the consonant testimony of specialists in the field of historical study and of those who have had first-hand acquaintance with the aborigines of heathen lands, is a strong dissent from this position. Here again we find confident assertion of an evolutionistic process mainly among those who lack the qualifications of original research. Even as it is not the specialist in biology that still maintains the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection, but the non-professional and the amateur, even so the specialist acquainted with the original sources, and the explorer, possessing first hand knowledge, asserts a decline, through history, from purer to less spiritual faiths, while the bias of the evolutionist, who has no first hand knowledge of the sources constrains him to begin his scheme of religion with animism and fetish-worship. The theory which holds him in thrall demands such a construction. But the theory is contradicted by the facts, which point unmistakably to a degeneration of the race, to a Fall of Man. CHAPTER TEN. The Verdict of History. John Fiske, who, in the seventies of the last century, popularized Darwinism in the United States, asserts that the scope of evolution is much wider than the organic field. "There is no subject great or small" he wrote in _"A Century of Science,"_ "that has not come to be affected by this doctrine." A development has been recognized in plants, mountains, oysters, subjunctive moods, and the confederacies of savage tribes (p. 35). Fiske is one of those defenders of the evolutionistic philosophy who irritate by reason of their cocksureness. Hear him, in _"Darwinism and Other Essays_:" "One could count on one's fingers the number of eminent naturalists who still decline to adopt it"--the Darwinian hypothesis. That was in 1876. To-day we know that one cannot on one finger the eminent naturalists of the present century who still accept it--Haeckel. It is possible that Fiske's extension of the development theory, along lines laid down by Herbert Spencer, to all human history, even to "tribal confederacies," is likewise subject to a revision. Indeed, it would seem that even without special or detailed knowledge, the failure of human history to conform with this universal law would be apparent. Consider once more the basic concepts of Evolution. They are two in number, 1. Everything that is, has been evolved, having been involved (potentially, as a possibility) in that which preceded it. Potentially, the feather of the blue-bird was in the speck of original protoplasm, potentially the flights of Dante's and Goethe's genius were in the primordial cell. All that has occurred in history has _developed_ out of antecedents. Furthermore: 2. All that exists has developed _according to natural laws_. Scientists have given up the law which Darwin called "Natural Selection," and Spencer himself cashiered the law which he had called "Survival of the Fittest." But evolutionists continue to assert that somehow, by the action of certain laws, that which exists has naturally--there is no need of divine Providence, overruling the affairs of men,--has naturally been developed out of its antecedents. And so history is read by the evolutionist. He sees in all the institutions of civilization, in every department of culture, in the rise and fall of nations, the progress and decay of literatures, a result of natural laws, working out the evolution of human society as it exists to-day. What, then, is the verdict of history? Does it conform to this scheme? Is there a demonstrable development, by inherent forces, of human society, from lower to higher ranges of culture? Civilization [tr note: sic] have risen, civilizations have perished: is there in this traceable the working of natural law? Dr. Emil Reich, in the _"Contemporary Review,"_ 1889. p. 45 ff. pointed out the failure of the development theory as applied to human culture. Hebrew religion as well as the Hebrew state were not derived from Babylonian, Egyptian, Arabic or Hittite culture; Greek art is not a derivative product of Egyptian, Assyrian, or Phoenician art; Greek religion and mythology are not derived from other pagan systems; Roman law has not been developed out of Greek, Aryan, or Egyptian law; the English constitutional form of government has no antecedents in German or Norman-French history; German music is not a result of development out of Dutch, French, or Italian music. Dr. Reich sums up the matter: "Institutions do not 'evolve,' nor are they 'derived,' they step into existence by fulguration"--sudden flashes--, "by a process that is technically identical with the theological idea of creation. The whole concept of evolution does not at all apply to history." In this argument there is considerable force. For, indeed, what natural law can account for the rise of human institutions, so infinitely diversified in their structure? Every age is divided into epochs, and at the center of each epoch there is some personage of force and genius. But how did Cromwell, Lincoln, Bismarck arise? What force produced them? Whence did they evolve? Yet without these three names, three great periods in the world's history would be meaningless. By what combination of forces shall we say that the various geniuses have developed which, in a manner almost spectacular, rise before us as we study the literatures of the past? The youthful years of Shakespeare were spent under circumstances which might have produced in him one dull and unaspiring British country lout, like, as one egg to another, to a hundred thousand others who lived in his age. What made this one country boy the most astonishing genius in all the history of literature? Study the youth of Robert Burns, of Heinrich Heine, or Coleridge, and then tell me why the first two should become the greatest lyric poets of their time, and the third, one of England's deepest thinkers? Why did they not develop, one into a satisfied Scottish farmer, the other into a peddler of notions, and the third into a fat and comfortable English banker? We quote from an article which appeared in _"Theological Quarterly"_ some twenty years ago: "What process of evolution resulted in the lives and deeds of such men as Alexander the Great, Julius Ceasar, [tr. note: sic] Constantine the Great, Luther, Napoleon I, and Bismarck? All these great makers of history were what they were far less in consequence and by the continuation of the course of previous events or developments, than largely in spite of the past and in direct opposition to forces which had worked together in shaping the condition of things with which they had to deal. The Macedonian empire would never have sprung into being but for an Alexander, in whose mind the chief facts for its realization were united. The Rome which Julius Ceasar [tr. note: sic] left behind him was not that which he had found, only carried forward to a new stage of development, but the embodiment of ideas conceived in his mind, a quantity which under God the greatest Roman had _made_ out of a quantity which he had found. The distinctive features of the Constantinian empire as compared with that of Diocletian, or of the tetrarchy of which he was the head, were not evolved from earlier political principles, but stood out in bold contrast and even in direct opposition to the very fundamentals of antique statesmanship, and so new in politics that even Constantine permitted them to slip away from his grasp long before the sunset of his life had come. Luther was not a more fully developed Hus or Savonarola, and the Reformation was not the more advanced stage or completion of a movement inaugurated by the Humanists, but a work of God the actuating spirit of which was as diametrically contrary to the rationalistic spirit which animated Erasmus and, in a measure, Zwingli and his abettors, as it was to anti-christian Rome,--which was in 1517 essentially what it had been in 1302, when Boniface VIII issued his bull _Unam sanctum_ as a definition of the rights and powers of Popery. Napoleon did not carry onward but broke away from the tumult of French politics when he laid the greater part of western Europe at his feet, and the battle of Austerlitz and the rule of the Hundred Days were no more evolved from the French Revolution as by intrinsic necessity than the burning of Moscow and the Russian snows which turned to naught the campaign of 1812." (A. L. Graebner.) According to the theory we would expect that in the various departments of _art,_ perfection would be a late blossom, burgeoning forth only after ages of feeble experiment and attempt. But what are the facts? As we study the history of any art,--be it literature or any department of literature; be it architecture, sculpture, the domestic arts, or even the art of war,--we find the highest culmination either at points which specifically exclude the idea of a development or, indeed, perfection shines forth in the very beginning, all subsequent art being decay and apostasy from that primal perfection. In epic poetry, the greatest work does not stand at the end of a long period of development, but the first and oldest is the greatest. Nothing has ever been produced to equal the Iliad and Odyssey, written 900 B. C. We have epics that will always hold a prominent place in literature, Virgil's Aeneid, Milton's Paradise Lost, but neither these nor the many flights attempted into epic poetry before or since will be seriously considered as rivalling the rhapsodies of Homer. The first novel ever written, Cervantes' Don Quijote, [tr. note: sic] remains one of the greatest. The oldest dramatists, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, have never been surpassed. And so in every department of art, the earliest stage of development seems to be the very most perfect. Pyramid building was a pastime of the earliest Pharaos; [tr. note: sic] the later did not attempt to rival these structures with any of their own. No finer jewelry can be produced to-day than the gold ornaments found in the oldest tombs of Egypt. The finest examples of East Indian architecture are the oldest. Gothic art was not a slow development but came to utter perfection in its earliest examples,--as in the Cathedral of Amiens. Evolution represents the history of our race as a constant climb, from brute or near-brute beginnings, to ever higher forms of civilization, until the heights which our race has reached in the present century were attained. In reality, the reverse process, a constant and invariable process of degeneration characterizes the history of nations and peoples. Where Christianity entered as a factor, as in the history of Western Europe and in the results of Christian missions in heathen lands, we can indeed observe a rise out of barbaric or savage conditions to refinement and culture. But only where the Christian gospel is preached, was the natural process of decay, of degeneration, interfered with. Elsewhere, that is to say, where purely natural forces were given free play, mankind has declined physically, mentally, spiritually. All civilizations illustrate this law of decay. Wilhelm F. Griewe, in his _"Primitives Suedamerika"_ (Cincinnati, 1893), summarizes his observations on the South American continent as follows: "The Malaysian aborigines of South America, in a period of 3,000 years, failed to advance in development. The Japanese discoverers of Peru testify that they found the natives in a condition of extreme decay; within a period of 1,500 years they had made no progress but had retrogressed. When the Spaniards came, they described the natives of Chile and Argentina in such a manner that it is quite evident how little these tribes had progressed in 3,000 years. The Araucanians of Chile have, even in historic times, greatly degenerated; they have lost the very meaning of many words; retaining the shell, they have lost the kernel. In Peru, the age of heroic deeds and wonderful architecture was followed by decay, --religious, moral, intellectual decay. The population was all but destroyed by vices and cruelty. Their neighbors, the Chibchas, likewise described an arc which ended in devil-worship. Similarly, the history of the Botokudes is degeneration, vice, atrocities. The negro tribes in the north and east of South America record no progress, but, on the other hand, sank into abominations, slavery, cannibalism. Where, then, is there support for the evolutionary theory, with its assumption of an upward trend from a brute condition to civilized and cultured life? Everywhere in primitive South America we see before our very eyes the process of decline and decay. Also the religious idea became obscured. Some of these tribes had an original monotheism. They recognized a supreme creator of all things and gave him various names. But the spiritual character of their knowledge of God was gradually obscured, God was dragged into the sphere of sense and lower divinities were associated with Him,--a downward development which absolutely contradicts the Darwinian hypothesis. From an original, pure, spiritual worship to gross idolatry,--that is the religious decay which in the world outside the Bible meets us everywhere, also among the original races of South America." Thus in the history of human society, we observe, unless the divine power of the gospel supplies the sole preserving and regenerating element, a universal law of decay in human affairs. Innumerable times, and at the most crucial moments of human history, not the fittest but the unfittest survived. Dr. A. L. Graebner said: "The principle of the 'survival of the fittest' is so far from accounting for the phenomena of history, that the principle itself is flatly contradicted and utterly exploded by a sober investigation of historical facts. That there are in nature numerous instances of a survival of the _un_fittest, is not only conceded by our evolutionists, but has been deliberately forged into an argument against teleology (divine purpose) and divine providence! And, we ask, was it by the survival of the fittest that Julius Ceasar, [tr. note: sic] one of the grandest rulers of all ages, should succumb under the daggers of Brutus and Cassius: that Paul and Seneca should die by authority of their inferior, Nero; that Popery, rotten to the core and represented by men who would have brought on the ignominous [tr. note: sic] collapse or extinction of every other dynasty in the days of the Roman pornocracy, should survive, while the illustrious house of Henry I. sank away to ruin in the third and fourth generation; that John Hus should die at the stake and Jean Charlier de Gerson in timid monastic retirement, while Balthasar Cossa, by far their inferior in talents and learning, and every inch an infamous scoundrel, having for a time disgraced even the Roman see as John XXIII, ended his days as a Cardinal and Bishop of Tusculum and Dean of the Sacred College; that Girolamo Savonarola, one of the most remarkable and pure-minded leaders of his day and of all times, should be fought down and crushed in a struggle with men not one of whom was worthy of unloosing his shoe's latchet, among them Alexander VI, one of the most scandalous wretches of all history? Survival of the fittest!" The article from which we have quoted points out the relevancy, to the question at issue, of the principle of degeneration and gradual decay in historical organisms or institutions. "Our scientists who bother themselves and others about the descent of man have favored with a keen interest the Bushmen of Australia and other types of savage humanity, with receding skulls, flat noses, thin legs, little or no clothing, and not much of morals or religion. The lower in the scale and the farther remote from the civilized Caucasian a newly discovered or investigated tribe or specimen, living or dead, would appear to be, the greater was the value set on the discovery, because the nearer science was supposed to have come to the missing link, the transition from brute to man. Of course, the missing link will never be discovered, because it never existed. There is no transition from brute to man, and never was. But if there were a species of beings which might be classed either with man or with brutes, a transitional species, even that would not necessarily represent a transition in the direction from brute to man. We do not say that a transition from man to brute is possible; for it is not; but we do say that the evolutionist who sees in Bushmen and other savages specimens of humanity representing the earlier stages of development, through which the more highly developed species had long since passed on the way from the primitive state of man to their present state, makes a great, fundamental mistake, the same mistake which one would make in supposing that the pale and decrepit inmates of a city hospital or a country poorhouse represented the lower stage of development from which the strong and healthy men and women in the surrounding country had been evolved. Our evolutionists are in very much the same plight with Mark Twain and his friend, who, having slept all day, rushed from the hotel in scanty clothing, climbed the observatory and to the amusement of the guests loudly admired what they took to be the famous Rigi sunrise, while in fact they were vociferating and gesticulating at the setting sun. But while our tourists had soon found out their mistake, our evolutionists have not; which does not make it any less a mistake. St. Paul has drawn a vivid picture of the degenerating influence of sin upon the nations under the righteous wrath of God,* [[* Rom. 1, 18-32.]] and the course which the Greek nation and the Roman would have run from their pristine vigor exhibited in the days of Thermopylae and Cannae down to the state of _marasmus senilis_ pictured by Juvenal, a state of rottenness which even the transfusion of German blood into the putrid veins of that degenerate and decaying race could not remedy, is a fearful corroboration of the apostle's testimony." We cannot leave this subject without briefly adverting to a great historic fact, indeed, the most massive and significant fact in all history, which, in its remoter bearings, not only strikes at the very heart of the evolutionistic philosophy, but at the same time wounds it mortally in all its parts. I refer to the Resurrection of our Lord. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central fact of our Christian belief and it is, rightly understood, the all-sufficient answer to the theory of evolution. Christ's resurrection is an historical fact fully as much as the defeat of Xerxes at Salamis in 480 B. C., the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492, and the peace of Versailles of 1919 are historical facts, proven by the word and record of contemporary witnesses. But if Christ was raised then we have proof for the following tenets, all contradicting evolutionary speculation at so many vital points: 1) The existence of a personal God who is concerned with human affairs; 2) The reality of miraculous interference with natural forces; 3) The truth of atonement and the redemption, and 4) The inspiration of the Old Testament Scriptures (hence also of the creation account in Genesis). The details of the argument are beyond the scope of this paper, but a little patient study will bring to light the fact that each of these four basic ideas is dove-tailed, mortised and anchored so firmly in the fact of Christ's resurrection, that you can get rid of them all only by denying that fact. Hence it is, aside from any investigation of proofs of evolutionism, clear to the Christian student that there must be some fault either in reason or in observation that vitiates the whole theory. The resurrection of Christ is a fact, a fact to which the entire history of Christianity testifies, the most tremendous fact in the history of the world. And it stands fore-square against a theory which says that there is no personal God, that there is no sin, no redemption; that there are no miracles, no revelation, no inspiration; that there is no absolute religion nor an absolute standard of right and wrong. CHAPTER ELEVEN. Evidence of Design. Compare all that has been said by scientists themselves about the evolutionary theory, and what remains? This, only, that some how, we do not know when, life arose, and some how, we do not know by what laws, one form evolved from another, until we and the world about us have become what we are now. Now, the fact that no _laws_ have so far been discovered by scientists to account for this presumed development of all things by inherent forces, is very significant and the conclusions which logically follow from it deserve our attention. Since Darwin's solution, Natural Selection, was discarded, twenty or thirty years ago, many other solutions have been propounded, but none has received the assent of even a respectable group of scientists, let alone by all. These solutions, --such as the theories of de Vries and Mendel, are frankly no more than guesses based on certain observation in plant life and insect life and their originators by no means assert that they have found a law by which the universe can be accounted for. But if there is no universal law, there is only _chance_. Hence it is clear that what we are asked to believe is that ancient Greek speculation was after all not far from the truth, that through a fortuitous (accidental) concourse of atoms the world came into being, and that by chance combinations of elements the great variety of living things arose. Such is the condition of evolutionistic thought to-day. That there is no _direct_ evidence for organic evolution is generally admitted. That geology cannot be quoted for it is also quite generally conceded, since the sudden rise of perfect (not half-developed) insects, of perfect fish, of perfect mammals, is clear even to the man who merely turns the leaves of Geikie's, Le Conte's, and Dana's text books, or visits Field's Museum. Yet _some-how_ things must have gotten to be what they are by development from earlier forms,--this about sums up what is really contained in the concept of evolution as it appears in most recent scientific literature, so far as scientists at all touch upon the subject. However, they by no means urge the evolutionary principle as they used to do. Bacteriologists especially, so I am informed by a chemist of international repute, Dr. P. A. Kober, of New York, as a class are inclined to give up the theory as a "bad guess." Why, they find in fossil fish diseased portions which bear unmistakable traces of the action of bacteria which live to-day, in other words, which in "countless millions of years" have not progressed enough to show any change recognizable under the most powerful miscroscope! [tr. note: sic] Anthropologists shake their head when they are told by evolutionists that the animal which shows clearest "resemblance" in a structural way, to certain points in human anatomy, is a small fossil ape, about the size of a house cat, with a skull one inch in diameter! There remains no proof, direct or indirect, of any _principle_ working the changes which are believed to have occurred. All things have evolved, if they have evolved at all, _by chance_. Now, over against this doctrine of chance there stands the monumental fact that throughout nature, living and non-living, there runs a principle of _design_. The minerals, the plants, the animals, all exhibit, as even the superficial observer knows or might know, a plan. There is design in the crystals in which elements exist when they pass from a liquid into a solid state; there is design in the leaf and flower of every plant; there is plan, design, in the structure and physiology of animals. We would add, there is an evident plan in the history of the Chosen Race, the Jews, as we possess it in the Old and New Testaments; there is a plan in the moral sphere, laws producing unvaried results; there is an ordered scheme even in the life of the individual. But let us limit our investigation to the domain of nature. Let us note how little necessity there is for assuming that by mere chance things have come to be what they are. As a rule each chemical substance has an individual crystal by which it can be distinguished. It is possible to classify the thousands of different crystals, since all belong to one of six classes, according as their surfaces are grouped symmetrically around the axes of the crystal. The salt crystal has one form, the topaz another, quartz and beryl another, borax another, and these forms are absolutely unvaried wherever these substances are found in nature or in the chemist's retort. It is not here our intention to point out how impossible it is to assume that there has been an evoluton [tr. note: sic] of one of these forms out of another. The point is that there is not chance, but orderly arrangement, symmetrical shape, in a word, most evident design. Turning to plant life, even the amateur student cannot fail to observe that the entire world of plants is built on a beautiful system which argues most powerfully not for accidental arrangement but for plan. The place of every leaf on every plant is fixed beforehand by unerring mathematical rule. As the stems grow on, leaf after leaf appears exactly in its predestined place, producing a perfect symmetry;--a symnetry [tr. note: sic] which manifests itself not in one single monotonous pattern for all plants, but in a definite number of forms exhibited by different species, and arithmetically expressed by the series of fractions, 1/2, 1/3, 2/5, 3/8, 5/13, 8/21, etc., according as the formative energy in its spiral course up the developing stem lays down at corresponding intervals 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, or 21 ranks of alternative leaves. The position of each blossom is determined beforehand by that of the leaves; so that the shape of every flower-cluster in a boquet [tr. note: sic] is given by the same simple mathematical law which arranges the foliage. Every flower has a "Numerical Plan." Although not easy to make out in all cases, yet generally it is plain to see that each blossom is based upon a particular number, which runs through all or most of its parts. And a principal thing which a botanist notices when examining a flower is its numerical plan. It is upon this that the symmetry of the blossom depends. Thus the stonecrop and the flax are based upon the number five, which is exhibited in all their parts. Some flowers of this same stonecrop have their parts in fours, and then that number runs throughout; namely, there are four sepals, four petals, eight stamens (two sets), and four pistils. Next let us touch upon the plan which connects the plant with the animal world. The wonderful adaptations of many flowers and insects to each other, as to the fertilization of the former, and as to the life of the individual insect and the propagation of its kind, are evidence of design. For example, there are certain species of plants that are dependent for their fertilization on certain species of moths which live in the flowers, and the moths, in turn, are dependent on the plants. They deposit their eggs in the ovaries of the flowers where the young are hatched and nourished. The moths in some cases carry the pollen and place it on the stigmas of the flowers, as if guided by intelligence. So marvellous are the provisions which are made to ensure the fertilization of plants that the dean of Amercan [tr. note: sic] botanists, Professor Asa Gray, exclaims: "If these structures and their operations do not argue intention, what stronger evidence of intention in nature can there possibly be? If they do, such evidences are countless, and almost every blossom brings distinct testimony to the existence and providence of a Designer and Ordainer, without whom, we may well believe, not merely a sparrow, not even a grain of pollen, may fall." (On this entire subject read Selina Gaye's _"The Great World's Farm,"_ published by the MacMillan Co., New York.) We can only lightly touch on the wonders of design in the structure and functions of animals. Here is a feather, any feather, say, the feather of an eagle. We quote the following on "One of Nature's Wonders--the Feather'' from an article in a popular magazine: "To most people a feather is just a feather, either pretty or plain according to how the coloring strikes their individual fancy. Yet when a feather is examined critically, it becomes a wonder and yet more wonderful--it is amazing when its details are understood. Never was there a thing better planned and builded for the uses intended. "Take, for instance, a plain feather--say the tail feather of an eagle. The long quill is made of feather-bone, that wonderfully light, yet strong material that forms the rigid part of all feathers, so tough that it is almost impossible to break it, yet so flexible it will bend into a circle and then spring back like a bit of whalebone! Nothing that man has ever been able to make can equal it. "There is no blood, no nerves, no circulation and apparently no life in a full grown feather, yet it does not decompose; indeed, it is one of the hardest things in the world to destroy by any process of decomposition. It retains its resiliency and all its flexibility for years--all that is necessary is to keep it dry. It is finished all along the rib (or quill) with a hard, glossy enamel on the outside and this enamel keeps its polish as long as the feather lasts. "From [tr. note: sic on punctuation] an engineering standpoint, or the standpoint of the mechanic or artisan, there is absolutely no suggestion of betterment to be made, for the feather is an exact, perfectly finished product. Its long central quill tapers from base to point with geometric precision, thereby giving perfect resistance to bending force, and this is one of the combination of secrets that enables the bird to fly as easily as man can walk. Also this long quill is hollow, thereby all extra weight is done away with and added strength gained because of the tube contraction; and to make it perfect from a mechanical standpoint, the under side of the quill is reinforced by a doublerolled thickening of the shell of the quill itself so that strains are equalized. "This long quill is also curved slightly, to meet air resistance again and overcome it when the whole tail is spread, fan-like, to suddenly alter a direction or check speed in flight. "The long, soft side masses are formed of a multitude of tiny feathers, each one perfectly equipped, perfectly made, mechanically and geometrically without fault. Each of these tiny side feathers has its own midrib that tapers from base to tip, and each of these midribs carries its own equipment of side 'hairs' so beautifully constructed that it locks automatically into the one on each side of it in such a way that it makes a solid yet flexible mass of the whole surface, against which the air flows as the bird flies. "If these side feathers be split apart they will come back into place so exactly that the split cannot be detected. Nothing else in nature repairs itself with such precision. Many things, for instance the claw leg of the crawfish, will replace itself exactly when destroyed, but the feather alone _repairs_ its own breaks precisely and automatically. "Taken as a whole, the feather is one of the most perfect products of nature because the material used is the one best thing throughout, the engineering principles involved are without fault, the mathematical plan is precise, the construction is perfect, the coloring and artistry are flawless, and there is not one single point about it that can be constructively criticized. "This short article can only hint at the wonderful things one may find in a single feather, and it is something well worth not an hour, but weeks or months of the most painstaking and careful study, for it covers an amazing field." The electric battery in certain fishes is so palpable a case of design that Charles Darwin admitted his inability to account for it by Natural Selection. The electric ray, or torpedo, for instance, has been provided with a battery which, while it closely resembles, yet in the beauty and compactness of its structure, it greatly exceeds the batteries by which man has now learned to make the laws of electricity subservient to his will. In this battery there are no less than 940 hexagonal columns, like those of a bee's comb, and each of these is subdivided by a series of horizontal plates, which appear to be analogous to the plates of the batteries used in automobiles. The whole is supplied with an enormous amount of nervous matter, four great branches of which are as large as the animal's spinal cord, and these spread out in a multitude of thread-like filaments round the prismatic columns, and finally pass into all the cells. "A complete knowledge of all the mysteries which have been gradually unfolded from the days of Galvani to those of Faraday, and of many others which are still inscrutable to us, is exhibited in this structure." Well may Mr. Darwin say, "It is impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced. We see the purpose--that a special apparatus should be prepared; but we have not the remotest notion of the means employed. Yet we can see so much as this, that here again, other laws, belonging altogether to another department of nature--laws of organic growth--are made subservient to a very definite and very peculiar purpose.' [tr. note: sic on punctuation] "The new-born kangaroo," says Professor Owen, "is an inch in length, naked, blind, with very rudimental limbs and tail; in one which I examined the morning after the birth, I could discern no act of sucking; it hung, like a germ, from the end of the long nipple, and seemed unable to draw sustenance therefrom by its own efforts. The mother accordingly is provided with a peculiar adaptation of a muscle (_cremaster_) to the mammary gland, by which she can inject the milk from the nipple into the mouth of the pendulous embryo. Were the larynx of the creature like that of the parent, the milk might, probably would, enter the windpipe and cause suffocation: but the larynx is cone-shaped, with the opening at the apex, which projects, as in the whaletribe, into the back aperture of the nostrils, where it is closely embraced by the muscles of the 'soft palate.' The air-passage is thus completely separated from the fauces (mouth), and the injected milk passes in a divided stream, on either side the base of the larynx, into the oesophagus. These correlated modifications of maternal and foetal structures, _designed_ with especial reference to the peculiar conditions of both mother and off-spring, afford, as it seems to me, irrefragable evidence of _creative forsight_. The parts of this apparatus cannot have produced one another; one part is in the mother, another part in the young one; without their harmony they could not be effective; but nothing except design can operate to make them harmonious. They are intended to work together; and we cannot resist the conviction of this intention when the facts first come before us." We cannot stop to pass in review the structural marvels of the human eye and ear, of the digestive organs, and circulatory system of animals, of adaptations of fishes to the watery element. But we must mention an outstanding feature of all animal life, the evident likeness of plan upon which the _entire kingdom_ of sentient life is constructed. From amoeba and other infusorial animals of simplest structure, through coral and oyster, bird, reptile, to mammals, there is an evident gradation, many structures being represented in entire great groups of living beings, such as the air-breathing lung. Here is a grand plan of animal life, which permits us to classify all living things into a system. There are classes and subclasses, orders or families, suborders, tribes, sub-tribes, genera, species, and varieties, just as in the world of plants and even, according to their atomic weight, among the elements. We see in all this, Creative Design. The evolutionist believes that he can percive [tr. note: sic] stages of progress. Similarity of plan is interpreted as proof that there is a common origin. Are we to admit, in the face of all that has been said about the fixity of species (to mention only this), the reasonableness of such an assumption? Does orderliness and plan argue for development? The steam-engine is a machine of remarkable structure. It has had, in one sense of the term, a wonderful "evolution." It is based on certain principles, the foundation one of which is the expansibility of steam, and its ability, when confined in a cylinder, to give motion to a piston. The steam-engine was first used for pumping, then for turning machinery, then for propelling boats, and now its crowning department is seen in the locomotive. There is a plan, a likeness, a similarity, which runs through all steam-engines, whether they be found in the mine, in the mill, beneath the deck of the steamship, or on the railroad track. But the locomotive is not formed from the mine engine; it is made new, and is a distinct type. And yet, the same principles are seen in both. Even so it is with the genera of animals. The whale and the elephant both have backbones, jointed limbs, warm blood, and a hundred homologous organs. They are both mammals, both are sagacious, and are gifted with acute senses. But otherwise they are unlike as the monster locomotive that pulls the heavy train over the Sierras, and the compound engines of the _Vaterland_. Similarity of structures argues powerfully for unity of plan, but by no means proves identity of origin. The evidence of design in nature conflicts with the idea that all things in the organic domain have come to be what they are by chance. But it agrees perfectly with the Christian view of animal nature. What is that? It is that God created the different classes of existences in the strict sense; that is, that he created them separate classes and species, each with its own peculiarities and habits, while, at the same time, they rise one above the other in general and steady order, with certain general organs and functions, which run through nearly all except the lowest classes, each higher class having also some distinct and additional peculiarities not found in those below it. In other words, to the Christian the steadily ascending scale in the work of creation is only the unfolding or development of the great plan of creation that was in the mind of God. He believes that God did not create one or more simple cells or germs, and cause all higher forms to be evolved from them, interfering only once or twice (when the backbone appeared, the nourishing breast, the mind of man, etc.), but that he, in the execution of his plan, created successively as distinct orders and species those things and beings which now exist as distinct orders and species, and many of which have become extinct. This is the Story of Creation as given in Genesis: Each plant, each animal, created in its own place in the scale of living thing, but each created as a species,--"after their kind," the phrase repeated after each creative act of the third, fifth, and sixth day, except with reference to man, who was not created as a "species" but after the image of God. But the evidences of design are yet of a higher nature than we have so far considered. There is not only Creative Intelligence at work in the pollen of flowers, the breathing of sponges, and the eagle's orb of vision; Mind dominates _the universe as a whole_. Everywhere there is law and periodic, rhythmical motion. The Lord, speaking to Job, refers to the "measures" of the earth, the "lines" which He has stretched upon it. He asks, concerning the heavenly bodies: "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?" And Job answers: "I know that Thou canst do everything." And so there is a Reign of Law in the dew on the grass (Job 38, 28), and in the revolutions of the heavenly bodies. The Universe is ruled by Mind. Professor Koelliker (Leipsic) says in his work _"Ueber die Darwinsche Schoepfungstheorie"_ (1904): "The development theory of Darwin is not needed to enable us to understand the regular harmonious progress of the complete series of organic forms from the simpler to the more perfect. The existence of general laws of nature explains this harmony, even if we assume that all beings have arisen separately and independent of one another. Darwin forgets that inorganic nature, in which there can be no thought of a genetic connection of forms," that one form of crystal, for instance, arose out of another, "exhibits the same regular plan, as the organic world (of plants and animals), and that, to cite only one example, there is as much a natural system of minerals as of plants and animals." We can go a step farther and say that there is system and orderly design even in the position and movements of the stars,--which certainly have not been evolved one from the other. More marvellous still, we are permitted to believe that there is an identity of plan connecting the arrangement of atoms in a molecule and the position of the stars and planets. Dr. Charles Young, Professor of Astronomy in Princeton College, says in his larger text-book upon his special theme that "our planetary system (the sun and planets) is not a mere accidental aggregation of bodies," that "there are a multitude of relations actually observed which are wholly independent of gravitation." In other words, in the position and motions of the planets there are evidences of design which cannot be accounted for by natural law. We shall point out an instance of such arrangement,--the progressive distance of the planets from the sun, as first discovered by Titius of Wittenberg, and later (in 1772) brought to the attention of the scientific world, by Johann Bode, the celebrated German astronomer. It is exhibited by writing a line of nine 4's and then placing regularly increasing numbers under the several 4's, beginning with the second. Thus 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192, and 384, each increased by 4, will give the resultant series, 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52, 100, 196, 388. These numbers divided by 10 are approximately the true distance of the planets from the sun in terms of the radius of the earth's orbit, with the exception of Neptune. Hence there is, in the arrangmeent of the planets, as orderly a system as we have noted with reference to the leaves on a plant. Any rational man on earth, finding an orderly system of materials arranged in such relation by such means, would instantly conclude that it must be due to intelligence and not to mere chance. Now, it is a remarkable fact that in the so-called Periodic Law of the elements constituting matter the same relation is observed. Of the eighty elements, no two now known have exactly the same capacity to resist heat, and no two atoms of the same elements have the same weight as compared with an atom of hydrogen. But these differences in resistance to heat and in weight, are not haphazard, but are so regularly progressive that they can be arranged in a series of regularly progressive increasing intervals. Most marvellous of all, however, when these differences in specific gravity are examined, we find that they bear a close resemblance to the arrangement of the planets in progressive distances from the sun. "There appears to be one law for atoms and for worlds." Again we ask, when there is such orderly arrangement and plan throughout nature, should the orderly plan of plant and animal life be regarded as a proof of evolution? Certainly, atoms have not evolved from atoms, nor planets from planets. And again, since omnipotence alone can account for the "sweet influences of the Pleiades," the "bringing forth of Mazzaroth"--the constellations of the heavens in their nightly revolutions,--why resist the conviction that omnipotence, voiced forth in the beginning, accounts for the life on earth that now exists? One more consideration, and we have done. Life on earth exists only through a combination of very complex physical conditions. These conditions are such as cannot, in their combination, be referred to chance, Fairhurst says, in his _"Organic Evolution Considered:"_ "The simple substances which constitute the earth are of such kinds and are found in such relative quantities as not only to render life possible, but also to contribute to the well-being of man as an intelligent and moral agent. I look upon the concurrence of all these things, according to any theory of _chance,_ as being entirely impossible. The conditions that must be fulfilled before living beings are possible are so complex that _nothing short of the wisdom of a Supreme Intelligence could have produced them."_ (cf. Rom. 1, 20.) This view has found support in a most unexpected quarter. No less a person than Alfred Russel Wallace, famed as the discoverer, independently of Darwin, of the principle of Natural Selection, in his last book, _"Man's Place in the Universe,"_ (1903) defended a position so subversive of every cherished belief (or unbelief) of scientists that it easily ranks as the greatest literary sensation, in the domain of natural science, of the century. Wallace assembled all the latest astronomcial [tr. note: sic] and other scientific discoveries and all knowledge bearing on the subject announced in his title. He deduces therefrom the theory:--First, that the earth or solar system is the physical center of the stellar universe. Second, _that the supreme end and purpose of this vast universe was the production and development of a living soul in the perishable body of man._ "Modern skeptics," says Wallace, "in the light of accepted astronomical theories (which regard our earth as uttterly insignificant compared with the rest of the universe) have pointed out the irrationality and absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all this unimaginable vastness of suns and systems should have any special interest in so pitiful a creature as man, an imperfectly developed inhabitant of one of the smaller planets attached to a second or third rate sun, while that He should have selected this little world for a scene so tremendous and so necessarily unique as to sacrifice His own son in order to save a portion of these miserable sinners from the natural consequences of sins, is in their view a crowning absurdity, not to be believed by any rational being." We cannot follow Mr. Wallace's argument in detail. Suffice to say, that he adduces a vast amount of data showing, first, that the universe is not infinite, but has certain bounds, and that our earth and its system are in the center of it, and, secondly, that the entire purpose of the production of the universe is the human race. The earth, says Wallace, is the only body capable of sustaining life. Life is not possible on any of the planets, because they are either too close or too far distant from the sun; some are probably composed of gas. He proves, on the basis of accepted calculations, that of all the stars in the heavens there is not even a remote probability that any are attended by bodies which can provide the elements of life. Now, he says, this very peculiar position of the earth cannot have been due to accident. He refuses to believe that the earth should occupy this favored position "as the result of one out of a thousand million chances." "On the other hand," he says, "those thinkers may be right who, holding that the universe is a manifestation of mind, and that the orderly development of living souls supplies an adequate reason why such a universe should have been called into existence, believe that we ourselves are its sole and sufficient result and that nowhere else than near the central position in the universe which we occupy could that result have been attained." This conclusion of Mr. Wallace has, indeed, not found acceptance among scientists. Naturally not. If a materialistic conception of the universe is to prevail, if evolution in some form is to be accepted, we must have a universe of chance, not of a plan which spans the remotest star and the soul of the new-born infant in one tremendous arc. But it is highly instructive to observe how the scientists in 1903 met Wallace's argument. One very distinguished reviewer said: _"Too little is known,_ the most essential astronomical theories are too much _a matter of conjecture,_ to give much strength to a theory built up entirely of _such conjectural materials_. The argument from _probabilities_ can easily be turned against the author, for when a chain of reasoning depends upon _a long series of problematic premises,_ the doubt of these premises increases in a mathematical ratio. Weakness in an argument is as cumulative as strength and while such of Dr. Wallace's conclusions taken separately may receive the support of eminent scientists, hardly any of them has received such demonstration as to entitle it to unreserved credence." This, at last, is a frank admission. Wallace quoted the generally accepted results of scientific calculation and research. On the basis of these results he demonstrates that the entire object of Evolution (to demonstrate the development of all things by natural causes, without a directing intelligence), is negatived by a proper consideration of "ascertained data,"--since these data, taken all together, prove a stupendous plan behind all natural phenomena, and the end of this plan, the human soul. In rebuttal we are now told that "the most essential astronomical theories"--as e.g. the Copernican System, Herschel's laws, the Newtonian theory of gravitation,--"are matter of conjecture" (in plain English, are blind guesses), are "problematic," and "hardly any entitled to unreserved credence." Thus do we find, that the greatest of Darwinians, on a mature consideration of the subject, reached a conclusion which makes evolution as a theory quite unnecessary; he found that the world is ruled not by blind forces inherent in matter but by Supreme Intelligence. And in their effort to keep themselves from being engulfed in the apostacy of a great leader, the scientists, as by a unanimous chorus, announce that the scientific dogmas which enter more or less essentially into their atheistic conception of the universe, are nothing but surmises! What reason has a Christian to surrender his faith on account of the contradiction of scientists? He has the oracles of God, the sure Word of Him Who created all things in six natural days. And if he but escape the fascination of scientific speculations, and study the works of God without bias, he will find in Nature nothing that does not agree with the Book. CHAPTER TWELVE. The Fatal Bias. If the theory of evolution is contradicted as we believe by the data of experimental science, by the history of civilization, by the facts especially of religion, more especially of Christianity, then the question is justifiable: Why do scientists uphold the evolutionary theory in some form or other, in spite of such absence of proof and such insufficiency of the hypothesis? In answering this question let us first observe that scientists do not stand opposed to Christian belief _as representatives of science_. It is not science, but the scientists, not geology, but the geologists, not physics, but the physicists that oppose Christian theology. In other words, there is no conflict between the _facts_ of science and the facts of revelation. Why should one not be able to maintain Christian faith though one accept the fact that the volume of expired air is one-fifth less than inspired air; that plant substance is composed of cells; that Halley's comet returns to our system every seventy five years; that Sicily was part of the Roman Empire in the time of Augustus? These physiological, botanical, astronomical, and historical facts are not in conflict with the religious beliefs based on Scripture. The same holds good with reference to the so-called laws of nature. These "laws" are but group-names for certain phenomena. Thus we speak of the law of gravity, of the conservation of energy, the Laws of Charles and Mariotte regarding gaseous bodies, zoological laws, physiological, and psychological laws. A book which merely records and classifies these laws and describes the phenomena underlying them, is a truly scientific book, yet the acceptance of all that it contained would not force the surrender of any point of Christian doctrine. Hence we say that there is no contradiction between science and theology, between nature and religion. It is otherwise with the _constructions and the interpretations_ which the scientists place upon the facts of science. For instance, there is an evident similarity of structure in many animals; they are built on a similar plan; their organs have similar or even identical functions. These are simply facts ascertained by observation. Their acceptance does not place any burden on Christian faith. But scientists interpret these facts to mean that there is progressive development in animal and plant life. They have found certain laws (Natural Selection and others) by means of which they require only forces resident in matter to explain the universe. On their hypothesis there is no necessity of miracles nor need we believe in God. Observe, this is the result of speculation, not observation; interpretation of facts, but not a conclusion drawn from facts themselves. It is not science but scientists that are opposed to the Christian religion. This view is supported also by the reflection that the history of speculative thought has ever revealed an anti-Christian intent and purpose, a fatal bias of scientists and philosophers against the teachings of Christianity. The modern anatomist and physiologist may declare that his science precludes the necessity of faith in God and of prayer; that through his research he has become a materialist, an atheist. But even in the Middle Ages, when practically all of anatomy and physiology was yet unexplored, the physicians of that day were as materialistic as those of our own. The medieval saying was: "Tres physici, duo athei," "of every three physicians, two are atheists." The science of the Middle Ages differed very materially from the science of our own day. Is it not clear that the same result cannot be produced by causes so dissimilar? That materialism and atheism which scientists announce as a result, is really the starting point of their speculations. Otherwise, how account for the fact that physicists are, as a rule, gross materialists now as they were forty years ago, although all theories regarding the composition of matter have been radically altered since that day? Evidently, the modern scientist is not on account of his research and speculation induced to proclaim himself as agnostic; quite the reverse, the fact that on _any_ system of physics, zoology, psychology, the conclusions remain the same, proves that these conclusions were in the mind before the facts were investigated. Unbelief is not a product of scientific and philosophic speculation, it is rather their origin and source. There is a settled purpose in relation to which the facts are classified and interpreted. Not all scientists are as honest as Huxley who announces this purpose in the introduction of his _"Science and Hebrew Tradition:"_ "These essays are for the most part intended to contribute to the process of destroying the infallibility of Scripture." Additional light is received from the observation that scientists adhere to their agnostic conclusions even after the premises have been found at fault, on which they based their conclusions. It is the end and aim of evolution to demonstrate that all processes of life and the history of living organisms may be accounted for without the assumption of a personal Creator. Thus the very beginning of our universe is accounted for (in the nebular hypothesis) by the origin of force and motion in matter. However, President Lowell, of Harvard, twenty years ago said that the nebular hyopthesis was "founded on a fundamental mistake." (_"The Solar System,"_ p. 119.) Do we find that scientists, though forced to surrender this prop, have given up atheistic evolution? By no means. Evidently, their atheism is older than their evolution. Fifty years ago it was thought that in the heavenly bodies called nebulae the material of which the world was made had been discovered. It was assumed that these nebulae were worlds in the process of formation. In 1914 the scientists at Lick Observatory concluded, from the great speed at which the nebulae traveled, that they are the _remains_ of worlds which _have been_ or are passing, and are not the constituents of worlds to be. This destroyed another supposition favoring the theory, but we do not notice that scientists have become more friendly to Christianity. Or consider the latest speculations on the composition of matter as contained in the works of Lodge, Crookes, and Lord Kelvin. It is now believed that matter is composed of electrical particles smaller than atoms, called electrons. An atom of gold is said to consist of 137,200 electrons. Now, if one considers how closely physical theories are bound up with the principle of evolution, should we not expect scientists to renounce this principle when another stone in its foundation has been destroyed? And since there is no such renunciation, is it not plain that this class of scientists insists upon an atheistic interpretation of the universe, no matter on what hypothesis? For the slow increase of variations in plants and animals, by which Darwin accounts for the origin of species, the evolutionists demanded more than 400,000,000 years. But it is asserted on the strength of certain calculations by physicists that the earth cannot possibly have existed more than 40,000,000 years. This latter figure, based especially on the calculations of Lord Kelvin, caused doubts to be raised regarding evolution which prompted many scientists to renounce it as a working theory. Rudimentary structures received attention, and as a result, St. John Mivart says: "It is an absolute fad that there is no instance of transmutation of species." Dr. Nathaniel S. Shaler, Professor of Geology in Harvard, wrote: "It is not proved that a single species of the two or three millions now on earth has been established by natural selection." Thus the evolutionary philosopher is compelled to relinquish one theory after another; the biologist knocks out the under-pinning, the geologists and physicists demolish most of the residue; yet the advocates of evolutionism adhere to their purpose to banish God from the universe. In this we have conclusive proof that what evolutionists pretend to find as the conclusion of their research, in reality was a settled conviction in their minds before they commenced their investigation, and to which, in their bias, they propose to hold fast, no matter what happens to the evidence once announced as final. The warfare of philosophy against Christian faith is readily explained. Man is corrupt. He loves sin. He is conscious of his guilt and fears the penalty. Hence every avenue of escape is welcome, if only he can persuade himself that there is no God, that there is no judgment. Man is proud, he desires no Savior. Hence the tendency to prove that no Savior is necessary; that there is no guilt attaching to sin, that there is no absolute right and wrong. Hence, too, the doctrine of the agnostic, that we can ascribe no attribute to God. When we read the _"Synthetic Philosophy"_ of Spencer, we are apt to belive [tr. note: sic] that the agnosticism there set forth is the result of deep philosophic speculation. Nothing further from the truth. Man, even cultured, philosophic man, wants no restrictions placed upon pride and selfishness; hence it is necessary to rid the mind of the fear of divine justice; hence we have an interest in demonstrating that God "has no attributes" --such as "just," for instance. The Psalmist describes this attitude: "Let us break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us." No man who has grasped the inner motive of all scientific effort to demolish faith can fail to understand why the rabble greets with such jubilant acclaim every new attack upon the Biblical narrative. No man who has pondered this motive can be ensnared in the net of science falsely so called. He has seen its inwardness, its fatal bias. Thus a Christian may preserve an attitude of mental balance over against science. The Christian believer may admire the achievements of science without being carried away by the speculations of scientists. Great is the progress of modern medicine, so great, that even the past ten years have witnessed great advances in treating disease. Chemistry has developed greater marvels than was ever ascribed to the wizard's wand by Oriental poets. What astounding performances in applied science--the Panama Canal, the Hudson Tunnels, the development of the automobile and of the airplane, and the perfection of the telephone and the moving picture! We may exult in all these victories of mind over matter, and yet stoutly oppose those theories which would make of the mind which created all these marvels merely a development of the instincts of the ape. It is possible, even, to be a scientist and in no wise compromise one's Christian faith and honesty of Christtian [tr. note: sic] profession. Wherever men have contented themselves with purely scientific research, with investigating and tabulating the phenomena of nature and establishing the laws of life and motion in the universe, they have found no difficulty in retaining a child-like faith. Among those scientists of the first rank who, far from being forced to the atheistic conclusion, recognized a wonderful harmony between science and revelation, was a Kepler, who was led by meditations on the harmony of theology with mathematics to follow those laborious calculations by which he first established the orbit of Mars and then of other planets; among them was a Newton, called by Justus Liebig "the most sublime genius in a thousand years," who asserted that his entire system of mechanics was untenable without the supposition of divine Power; a Davy, prince of chemists, who "saw in all the forces of matter the tools of Divinity;" a Linne, called by Prof. Fraas the "greatest naturalist of all times," who commences his "System of Nature" thus: "Awakening I saw God, the Eternal, the Infinite, the Omniscient, the Omnipotent, and I was amazed. I read some of His traces in creation. What unspeakable perfection!" We find in the roster of scientists who believed in an inspired Bible and a divine Savior, such men as Hans Christian Oerstedt, the great discoverer of electro-magnetism and the father of all modern electrical science, who declared that he "had but a desire to lead men to God by his books;" Lavoisier, father of modern chemistry, a Christian; Maedler, who reached the front rank of modern astronomers without relinquishing his childhood faith and who said: "A real scientist cannot be an infidel;" Ritter, greatest of geographers, who said: "All the world is replete with the glory of the Creator;" Virchow, the surgeon of worldwide fame, who all his life was an outspoken opponent of the evolutionary theory and whose last prayer, uttered in the presence of his fellow-scientists, was: _"Christi Blut und Gerechtigkeit . . . ."_ Speaking of the triumphant Redeemer the Lord says Isa. 53: "I will divide Him a portion with the great and He shall divide the spoil with the strong. The kings of the earth shall serve Him." The prophecy was fulfilled when kings not only on material thrones but kings in the world of intellect and giants of learning have paid homage to the God-man Jesus Christ. Throughout the record of modern science and erudition there are shining examples of the truth that great mental power and profound research are not incompatible with humble acceptance of Bible teachings. The spiritual blindness of natural man, his intellectual pride, and the depravity of his will account for the attitude of many scientists over against the facts of revelation. From the shifting quicksand of their speculation we may rise unharmed on the pinions of a faith guided by the principle: "It is written." 
20248	----	THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM _By_ DR. D. M. BROOKS FREETHOUGHT PRESS ASSOCIATION NEW YORK _Copyright, 1933_ BY FREETHOUGHT PRESS ASSOCIATION _Dedicated to_ JOSEPH LEWIS IN AMERICA AND CHAPMAN COHEN IN ENGLAND OF WHOM IT MAY BE SAID: _"How often it has happened that one man, standing at the right point of view, has descried the truth, and, after having been denounced and persecuted by all others, they have eventually been constrained to adopt his declarations!"_--(DRAPER.) _For the old Gods came to an end long ago. And verily it was a good and joyful end of Gods! They did not die lingering in the twilight--although that lie is told! On the contrary, they once upon a time laughed themselves to death! That came to pass when, by a God himself, the most ungodly word was uttered, the word: "There is but one God! Thou shalt have no other Gods before me." An old grim beard of a God, a jealous one, forgot himself thus. And then all Gods laughed and shook on their chairs and cried: "Is Godliness not just that there are Gods, but no God?" Whoever hath ears let him hear._ _"Thus Spake Zarathrustra"_--FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE ix I. THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS 21 II. THE KORAN, THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 31 III. THE PROPHETS MOHAMMED, JESUS, AND MOSES CHARLATANS OR VICTIMS OF MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DISEASE 65 IV. SOUNDNESS OF A FOUNDATION FOR A BELIEF IN A DEITY 94 V. THE PERSISTENCE OF RELIGION 115 VI. RELIGION AND SCIENCE 120 VII. RELIGION AND MEDICINE 126 VIII. RELIGION AND ASTRONOMY 148 IX. RELIGION AND GEOGRAPHY 151 X. RELIGION AND CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS 154 XI. RELIGION AND GEOLOGY, PHILOLOGY, AND EVOLUTION 157 XII. RELIGION AND WITCHCRAFT 163 XIII. RELIGION AND MORALITY 193 XIV. CHRISTIANITY AND WAR 211 XV. CHRISTIANITY AND SLAVERY 214 XVI. CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR 224 XVII. RELIGION AND WOMAN 242 XVIII. THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE GREAT ILLUSION 251 XIX. THE DOOM OF RELIGION; THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM 269 XX. CONTEMPORARY OPINION 309 PREFACE Plain speaking is necessary in any discussion of religion, for if the freethinker attacks the religious dogmas with hesitation, the orthodox believer assumes that it is with regret that the freethinker would remove the crutch that supports the orthodox. And all religious beliefs are "crutches" hindering the free locomotive efforts of an advancing humanity. There are no problems related to human progress and happiness in this age which any theology can solve, and which the teachings of freethought cannot do better and without the aid of encumbrances. Havelock Ellis has stated that, "The man who has never wrestled with his early faith, the faith that he was brought up with and that yet is not truly his own--for no faith is our own that we have not arduously won--has missed not only a moral but an intellectual discipline. The absence of that discipline may mark a man for life and render all his work ineffective. He has missed a training in criticism, in analysis, in open-mindedness, in the resolutely impersonal treatment of personal problems, which no other training can compensate. He is, for the most part, condemned to live in a mental jungle where his arm will soon be too feeble to clear away the growths that enclose him, and his eyes too weak to find the light." The man who has allowed his mental capacities to clear his way through the dense underbrush of religious dogma finds that he has emerged into a purer and healthier atmosphere. In the bright light of this mental emancipation a man perceives the falsities of all religions in their historic, scientific, and metaphysical aspects. The healthier mental viewpoint holds up to scorn and discards the reactionary religious philosophy of morals, and the sum total of his conclusions must be that religion is doomed; and doomed in this modern day by its absolute irrelevance to the needs and interests of modern life. And this not only by the steadily increasing army of freethinkers, but by the indifference and neglect of those who still cling to the fast slipping folds of religious creeds--- the future freethinkers. It was Spinoza who remarked that, "The proper study of a wise man is not how to die but how to live." Religious creeds can but teach how man should live, so that when he dies, he may be assured of salvation; and the important thing is not what he does to help his fellow men while he is living, but how closely he lives in conformity to a reactionary code of dogmas. Religion has always aimed to smooth the sufferer's passage to the next world, not to save him for this world. Freethought has dethroned the gods from the pedestal, and has replaced, not an empty idol, but an _ideal_, the ideal of a man who is his own god. It has become increasingly apparent that what men have hitherto attributed to the gods are nothing but the ideals they value and grope for in themselves. The ideal of the freethinker, the conception that places the supreme worth of human life in the expanding horizon of man's usefulness to man, is forever menaced by the supernaturalism of the theist which manifests itself in the multifarious religious sects that are the most active and constant menace to civilization and to mankind today. That religion in the past has produced suffering incalculable and has been the greatest obstacle in the advance of secular knowledge is a fact too well attested to by history to be denied by any sincere and unbiased intelligent man. That today it constitutes a cultural lag, an active menace to the best interests of humanity and the last refuge of human savagery, is the contention of the freethinker. The conception of the God-idea as held by society in general stands in the same position as the vermiform appendix does to the anatomy of man. It may have been useful in some way thousands of years ago, but today it constitutes a detriment to the well-being of the individual without offering any compensatory usefulness. Agree or disagree with this contention you may, but only when you are made aware of the facts that can be brought to the aid of this conviction. Just as the fundamental principle of justice is outraged when a man or an institution is condemned by jurist or popular opinion when an opportunity is not given to present the facts on both aspects of the case, just so is no man justified in making a decision between theism and atheism until he becomes acquainted with both sides of the controversy. Freethought but asks a hearing and the exercise of the unbiased reason of the man who has not hitherto been made aware of its contentions. In the religious revolution of this twentieth century, the battle ground is squarely seen to be between supernaturalism and secularism. Although the supernaturalists are well entrenched and fortified, it is well to remember that it is the man with vision who finally prevails. The time has passed when the freethinker could be held up to the community as an example of a base and degraded individual. No manner of pulpit drivel can delude even the unthinking masses to this misconception. The freethinker is today the one who beholds the vision, and this vision does not transcend the natural. It is a vision that is earth-bound; a vision it may be called, since it leaps the boundary of the present and infers for him what the future of a secular organization of the entire constituency of humanity will bring forth. This vision is but a product of his scientific armamentarium and is the means by which he is assured of victory over the well-entrenched and fortified position of the supernaturalists who are still creed-bound to use antiquated and useless weapons. The supernaturalist's armamentarium of God, Bible, Heaven, Hell, Soul, Immortality, Sin, The Fall and Redemption of Man, Prayer, Creed, and Dogma, leave as much impression on the mind of intelligent man as would an arrow against a battleship. And the comparison is apt, the supernaturalists have made full use of force, be it in physical warfare or in mental coercion. The freethinker has as much use for physical force and war as he has for mental coercion; both are abhorrent to him. _Supernaturalism vs. Secularism_--that, and that alone is the field of argument. The supernaturalist, be he the fundamentalist of whatever denomination, or the more advanced modernist, is as tenaciously clinging to the transcendental, to revelation, to the infallibility of the Bible, if not in all respects at least in some (although this is a contradiction _per se_), to the interdisposition of a deity in the affairs of mankind, as were his ancestors of five hundred years ago. In these aspects as well as in the armamentarium enumerated above, the supernaturalists are agreed and are making their last stand. The secularists, the opinion of the theists to the contrary, are also agreed. It matters not what a man calls his mental process; be he infidel, sceptic, rationalist, agnostic, or atheist; he is firm in the conviction that religions of all varieties are rapidly sinking into the limbo of all other ancient superstitions. To him it is but a matter of time for the inevitable crumbling and disappearance of these superstitions, and the time involved is directly proportional to the ease and rapidity with which scientific knowledge is disseminated to men who have the mental capacity to understand the value of this knowledge and its utter destruction of all forms of supernaturalism. When man becomes fully cognizant of the fact that all the knowledge acquired by the human race has been the result of human inquiry, the result of reasoning processes, and the exercise of mind alone, then secularism will have overcome the long night of supernaturalism. And it is this mental attitude of secularism that proceeds with an ever accelerated rapidity to overcome the problems that confront humanity by substituting human inquiry for divine revelation. Thus this attitude of man to proceed through life dependent only on his own resources will expand and strengthen his mentality by doing away with the inferiority complex of the God-idea. This vision of man, the master of his own destinies, the searcher for truth and the shaper of a better life for the only existence that he knows anything about, this reliance of _man upon man_, and without the supposed interference of any god, constitutes atheism in its broadest and true sense. Science and reason, the constituents of secularism, are the mortal enemies of supernaturalism. Secularism, however, is at a disadvantage at this stage of our mental development, since it is approached only by the calm light of the intellect. And intellect can but make an appeal to reason. If the seeds of these appeals fall on the fertile minds of mentally advanced humanity, they will flourish; if they fall on the barren ground of creed-bound minds, they take no root. Recognition of facts and honest deductions are not natural to the human mind. As far as religious matters are concerned, the vast majority of men have not reached a mental maturity; they are still in the infantile state where they have not as yet learned that the sequences of events are not to be interrupted by their desires. The easier path lies in the giving way to the unstable emotions. The primitive instincts are for emotion and for loose imaginings, and these are the provinces of supernaturalism. Supernaturalism arouses the stupid interests and the brutish passions, and from these are born the bitter fruits of ignorance and hatred. The secularist is one in whom the intellect is passionate, and the passions cold. The supernaturalist on the other hand reverses the order, and in him the passions are active and the intellect inert. In each man there dwells a tyrant who creates for him a deity materialized out of these factors of ignorance and fear. It is science and reason which must destroy for him this monstrous apparition. But, as yet, there is no indication that our mental development in relation to social progress has made the great strides that our purely material progress has made. The twentieth century man utilizes and enjoys the material benefits of his century, but his mental progress lies bound and drugged by the viewpoints of 2000 years ago. Sir Leslie Stephen has declared, "How much intellect and zeal runs to waste in the spasmodic efforts of good men to cling to the last fragment of decaying systems, to galvanize dead formulæ into some dim semblance of life! Society will not improve as it might when those who should be leaders of progress are staggering backward and forward with their eyes passionately reverted to the past. Nay, we shall never be duly sensitive to the miseries and cruelties which make the world a place of torture for so many, so long as men are encouraged in the name of religion to look for a remedy, not in fighting against surrounding evils, but in cultivating aimless contemplations of an imaginary ideal. Much of our popular religion seems to be expressly directed to deaden our sympathies with our fellow men by encouraging an indolent optimism; our thoughts of the other world are used in many forms as an opiate to drug our minds with indifference to the evils of this; and the last word of half of our preachers is, 'dream rather than work.'" There is always a great deal of discrepancy between that which is best for the gods and that which is best for the individual and for society in general. One cannot serve man perfectly and the traditional gods as well. It is, therefore, the contention of freethinkers that if man had given to the service of man all that he had given to the gods in the past, our present stage of civilization would be much in advance of where it is today. If there is anything in the discussion to follow that may seem irreverent to the reader, the author wishes to call attention that he has but presented well substantiated facts. It is not only his opinion that he is voicing, but it is the facts as he has found them recorded in the researches of numerous sincere men. Finally, it is the conviction of all freethinkers that, as Professor James H. Leuba has stated, "It is, furthermore, essential to intellectual and moral advances that the beliefs that come into existence should have free play. Antagonistic beliefs must have the chance of proving their worth in open contest. It is this way scientific theories are tested, and in this way also, religious and ethical conceptions should be tried. But a fair struggle cannot take place when people are dissuaded from seeking knowledge, or when knowledge is hidden." The cultivation of the intellect is a duty that is imposed on all men. Even those who still cling to the dying beliefs must admit the force of what Winwood Reade said, "To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall." When the principles of freethought shall have dispelled the intellectual cloud of the God-idea and the vanishing dream of a heaven which has too long drawn men's eyes away from this earth, then, and then only, will these words of Cicero have widespread meaning: "Men were born for the sake of men, that each should assist the others." THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM CHAPTER I THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS _To early man, the gods were real in the same sense that the mountains, forests, or waterfalls which were thought to be their homes were real. For a long time the spirits that lived in drugs or wines and made them potent were believed to be of the same order of fact as the potency itself. But the human creature is curious and curiosity is bold. Hence, the discovery that a reported god may be a myth._ MAX CARL OTTO. The geologists estimate that the age of the earth is somewhere between 80 and 800 millions of years; that the Neanderthal race existed for more than 200,000 years; that between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago, as the Fourth Glacial Period softened towards more temperate conditions, a different human type came upon the scene and exterminated Homo Neanderthalensis. These first "true men" descended from some more ape-like progenitors and are classed by ethnologists with the same species as ourselves, and with all human races subsequent to them under one common, specific term, Homo Sapiens. The age of cultivation began with the neolithic phase of human affairs about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago; about 6000 or 7000 years ago men began to gather into the first towns and to develop something more than the loose-knit tribes which had hitherto been their highest political organization. Altogether, there must have elapsed about 500,000 years from the earliest ape-like human stage of life on this planet to the present time. It necessarily follows that the age of our present civilization is by no means that which the Bible stipulates, but is merely an atom in the vast space-time of this earth. The reason for this disparity is that with the development of the mind of man throughout the ages there was conceived also his self-made religious systems, based on a subjective interpretation of the universe, and not on an objective one, devoid of emotional bias. "Primitive man did not understand the natural cause of shadows, echoes, the birth and death of vegetable and animal organisms. Of this ignorance religion was born, and theology was evolved as its art of expression." (_Draper._) Our story takes us back some twelve thousand years to neolithic man. Squatting in his rude hovel or gloomy cave, he listens to the sounds of a storm without. The howling of the wind, the flashes of lightning, and crashing of thunder give rise to that elemental emotion--fear. Fear was always with him, as he thought of the huge stones that fell and crushed him, and the beasts which were so eager to devour him. All things about him seemed to conspire for his death: the wind, lightning, thunder, rain and storm, as well as the beasts and falling trees; for in his mind he did not differentiate animate from inanimate objects. Slowly, through his groping mind there evolved the thought, due to past experience, that he could not contend with these things by physical force, but must subdue them with magic; his magic consisted of the beating of crude drum-like instruments, dances, and the mumbling of words. Upon falling asleep he dreams, and awakening, he finds that he is still in the same place where he had lain the night before. Yet, he is certain that during the night he had traveled to his favorite wood and killed an animal whose tender flesh he was still savoring. Since the conception of a dream was as yet foreign to him, the logical conclusion he arrived at was that he had both a body and a spirit. If he possessed a body and a spirit, then all things about him, he reasoned, must likewise possess a similar spirit. Some spirits, he felt, were friendly; some, hostile to him. The hostile spirits were to be feared; but that powerful factor, "hope," had at last entered into his mind, and he hoped to be able to win them over to the camp of friendly spirits. In this manner, man passed from the stage of contending against the spirits to one of placating them. It was believed that certain men carried more favor with the spirits than others, and these became the original priests, called the "Shamans." Another expedient for warding off evil spirits was by means of the fetish. The primitive fetish was an object containing an active friendly spirit, which, if worn by the individual, protected him from the evil spirits. In a short while the manufacture of fetishes became a sacred profession, and the men who were thought to fashion the best ones became the professional holy men of the period, the priests. At first, idols were used to drive away the evil spirits, and then, the conception changed to one of attracting the good spirits to man. From the individual fetish man passed to tribal ones, which in their first form were huge boulders and trees. As the primitive mind gained cunning, it slyly smeared the surface of the idol with oily substances, hoping that the spirit, like some wild beast, would come and lick, be gratified, and remain in the idol. When some favorable signs denoted that a good spirit had entered into the idol, it was regularly smeared with oils and then blood, in the hope that the spirit would be pleased sufficiently to remain there permanently. As time went on, it became a custom, a rite, and the spirit having performed to the satisfaction of the tribe, ways were invented to manifest their gratitude. Instead of smearing the idol with blood, it was thought more fitting that an animal be killed and offered to the good spirit contained within the idol. In this manner arose the beginning of "sacrifice." It was at this time, when man began to persuade the idols or spirits to do things for his benefit that religion began. Slowly, slowly, down through the ages, as the mind of man progressed, his self-made religious conceptions advanced. He now worshiped idols, and these idols were his gods. The Celts, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, all had their idols. All were certain that their gods were the true ones, and that the others were all inferior and even false gods. But, is the modern worshipper who is contemptuous of the ancients very different from them? The centuries pass by, and in their wake is man's self-conceived religion. Now, some men take the prerogative in the manufacture of religion, and there evolve Brahmanism, Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism, all inspired, all supernatural, and with their myriads of followers who believed and still believe that theirs is the only true creed. Very recently, in the time-scale of our development, man adopted the methods of "Big Business," and the religion of many gods and idols, polytheism, has given way to one Supreme God, monotheism. Man found that it made for simplicity and saved his valuable time if he worshiped one god, instead of obeying the hitherto many. The "Chosen People" took it upon themselves to bring the next divinely concocted conception of a Supreme God, and they manufactured the creed of Judaism. After many years, a rift arose among the Jews, and the sectarians were defeated and expelled. Foiled in their first object, they cast aside the laws of Moses and offered the Hebrew religion without the Hebrew ceremonies to the Greek and Roman world. Jesus was the man who prepared the way for this remarkable event. When Mohammed conceived the divine conception that he would follow in the footsteps of his brother-prophets, Moses and Jesus, the latest of the major religions was revealed. At the present time, the Hebrews and Christians, although worshiping the same Jehovah, are disputing with each other, and indeed, amongst themselves, with regard to the various attributes, amorous pursuits, and lineal descendants of the Godhead. Jehovah himself appears to be on the decline and his unity is steadily disintegrating into a paradoxical trinity. But we are progressing, for in 1300 years no new prophet has arisen, and no new divine revelation is perturbing our race; the old ones, however, are causing quite enough disturbance. It would be of value for the modern religionist who believes that the worship of a deity in our own age is far removed from the worship of an idol by our savage ancestors, to retrace his steps and compare the savage mind worshiping his particular idol and a so-called civilized mind of today worshiping his deity. The savage prayed to his idol, that is, he _begged_. He begged the idol to watch over his flock or his fields. The modern prays, that is he begs of his idol, his deity, to prosper his business, to guard his life, and, as one of my "super-devout" acquaintances recently informed me, on the eve of an important golf match, for the Deity to give him endurance; in other words, "to cut down his golf score." The savage voiced his incantations; the modern sings hymns, that is he flatters. There is still a great deal of the charlatanry of the magician in the construction of the houses of prayer, with the sunlight shut out and only filtering through the leaded and multi-colored panes, the semidarkness, the solemnity, the rise and swell of the organ; all things combined to overcome the senses, to play upon the emotions, and to subdue the reason. The savage made sacrifices to his idols, that is, he paid tribute, chiefly out of fear, but partly in the hope of getting something better in return. The modern does not offer human or animal sacrifice, it is true; but it must be borne in mind that the wealth of the savage consisted of his sheep, oxen, oils, and wines, not money. Today, the devout offer a sacrifice of money to the Deity. We are all familiar with the requests of religious institutions for gifts, which nearly always finish with the phrase, "And the Lord will repay you many fold." In other words, sacrifice part of your worldly goods to the idol, and he will repay with high interest. He will give in return long life and much riches. The savage was afraid to utter the real name of his god, it was taboo. The modern says, "Take not the name of the Lord in vain." Even today, the followers of Moses consider it taboo to utter the name of Jehovah except in prayer. The present-day methods of worship are no different from those of the savage; the method of supplication has changed with the advance of the years, but the fundamental ideas at the base of all worship are just as crude today as they were 4000 years ago. Primitive man was no more a fetishist than is the modern Catholic. The latter still wears medals and images suspended from the neck and pinned to the inner clothing. Moreover, a survey of the various religions extant indicates that the religious factor is no less prevalent today than it was in primitive societies. In Greenland, one finds, that through nearly all of its vast area religion has no place, but that is chiefly the result of its being largely uninhabited. In Alaska, the population is for the most part Catholic, although the natives are animists. In Canada, 33 per cent are Catholic, the rest are mainly Protestant. In the United States, 20 per cent are Catholic, 3.5 per cent are Jewish, and the remainder are Protestants. Mexico, Central and South America, are almost entirely Roman Catholic. In Europe, Russia was until recently dominantly Greek Orthodox; the Scandinavian peninsula, the English Isles, and Central Europe are dominantly Protestant, while France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the rest of the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea are Catholic. The rest of the continent is divided between Jews and Mohammedans. In Asia, the entire vast area of Siberia is only sparsely settled and its religions include Animism, Taoism, and Christianity. In China, we find the land of three truths, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. India, Tibet, and Burma are dominated by Hinduism and Buddhism; Arabia, Persia, and the rest of the continent are Mohammedan. In Japan, there are the Shintoists. The East Indies, where the population is native, are Animistic. In Australia, the dominant religion is Protestantism. In North Africa, the west coast inhabitants are Mohammedans, while the Abyssinians are Christians. There are some Coptic Christians, in Egypt, while in the Congo and South African countries down to the Cape Settlements, the natives are Animists. The Cape Settlements themselves are Protestants. More concretely, it is estimated that 10.7% of the inhabitants of the globe are Protestants; 16.2% are Catholics; 7.1% are Greek Orthodox; 10% are Animists; 1.4% are Shintoists; 18.2% are Confucians and Taoists; 12.8% are Hindus; 8.4% are Buddhists; 13.4% are Moslems; and 1.8% are Hebrews and unclassified sects. Truly, a religious babel! and 10% of all the inhabitants of the globe, about the same number of people who profess to Protestantism, are Animists. This is the lowest stage of primitive religion, and millions of humans are still quagmired in the sloth of a primitive faith which once must have been the faith of all human beings. The Mohammedan, the Jew, the Christian, will readily agree that the animism, the fetishism, and idolatry of the savage were man-made foolish beliefs. They can readily perceive that there was nothing supernatural, nothing revealed, in such beliefs; but they do not realize that to him, in his infantile development, the fetish and the idol were just as supernatural and superior as the modern conception of a Supreme Being. In each age man creates his god, in his own image, and within the confines of his own mental development. The mind of man has expanded so that it has conquered more and more of his environment; it has grown and wrested from nature those secrets which constitute his civilization. Along with this has progressed the conception of a deity, but only to a certain extent. The mind has embellished the outward appearance of its gods, consolidated them, and built upon them intricate systems of theology, upon which feed vast hordes of clergy; but the basic conception, the fundamental principle, that there must be something supernatural to explain something which we cannot explain at the present moment, that conception still drugs the mind of man. Primitive man did not understand the meaning of lightning, thunder, shadows, echoes, etc., and he placed these among the supernatural phenomena. The modern mind explains these phenomena, understands the laws governing their production. Yet, it is this same modern mind which persists in going back to our savage ancestors and their mental sloth, by attributing the myriads of phenomena which still elude its present stage of mental development, to a particular idol, this time, a Supreme Being. Brahmanism, Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Hebrewism, Mohammedanism, Christianity--which is the true religion? Let us suppose for a moment that an inhabitant of Mars, if there be such, were by a "miracle" to be transported to this earth and endowed with the mental capacity of the average inhabitant of the earth (a thing which perhaps would not be so flattering to our guest), were to be approached by a zealot of each one of these faiths, who hoped to convert this stranger to its ranks. Since the factor of coercion by force of environment to which each of these earthlings was subject would naturally be absent, the Martian would be in a position to make a fair choice. How much would the visitor be impressed by the statements of the Christian, Mohammedan, or Jew, when advised that unless he embraced their particular creed, he would be damned to eternal torture in their particular Hell? If a Christian were to accost him and endeavor to put the fear of God into him, and if our visitor, being from Mars, already knew that of the world's population, only about 27 per cent are Christians, and the other 73 per cent are Non-Christians, is it logical to suppose that he would ever be convinced that an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent, Supreme Being would select only one quarter of his children whom he had created for redemption, with the infallible knowledge that nearly three-quarters of them would be confined to Hell for not believing what He could have made them believe if He were truly omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent? Would he not rather reply that on his planet such a "Father" who would select some of his children for rewards, and maliciously torture his other children, would not be designated as a God but a Devil? Were the Martian to be further informed that each one of God's children was represented in actual figures by hundreds of millions and that these have been living on the planet Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, and were the visitor to contemplate the vast incomprehensible number of souls that have been confined to Hell by such a father, might he not cut his visit short? He would be apt to repeat with James Mill, "Think of a being who would make a Hell, who would create the human race with the infallible foreknowledge and therefore with the intention that the great majority of them should be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment." I believe that our guest would assert that if such a Being actually existed and demanded worship, he would certainly have revealed his true belief to the first man Adam, and therefore saved his children an inestimable amount of suffering. Were the visitor to be further pressed by the zealot with the vision of eternal hell, I believe he would retort that there is no reason for God to punish those who doubt or deny faith in His existence, since it is His own doing; and if He desired each one of His children to worship Him according to the precepts of a certain creed, He surely would have instilled that creed into man's make-up together with the rest of his characteristics. Undoubtedly, He would not esteem any creed which damned the human intellect by cursing the doubts which are the necessary consequence of its exercise, or the creed which cursed the moral faculty by asserting the guilt of honest error. If our visitor would but glance at the history, the evolution, of religious beliefs, he would realize and soundly assert that all religions are human in their origins, erroneous in their theories, and ridiculous in their threats and rewards. CHAPTER II THE KORAN AND THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS _The Jews emerge into history, not a nation of keen spiritual aspirations and altruistic ethics, but that pagan people, worshipping rocks, sheep and cattle, and spirits of caves and wells, of whom the Old Testament, tending towards its higher ideal, gives fragmentary but convincing evidence_. JAMES T. SHOTWELL. _Consider Jahveh. Cruel god of a horde of nomadic invaders settling in a land of farmers, he had his images, ranging in elaboration from an uncut mazzebah or asherah, to a golden bull. He was plural by place and tribe and function. What did the prophetic movement do with his sacred powers? It identified his taboos with a written constitution_. HORACE M. KALLEN. _The mental attitude of these priest-dominated ancestors of ours is amazing. They were like children in the hands of unscrupulous teachers. In reading these old chronicles it is impossible not to be shocked by the incongruity ever arising out of the juxtaposition of theory and practice_. LLEWELYN POWYS. Our Martian visitor, having withstood the blasts of the Zealot, is approached by a Mohammedan who places in his hands the Koran and tells him that it is a divinely inspired revelation, as revealed by Allah through his prophet, Mohammed. Having already had some experience with earthly religionists, the Martian is disposed to avail himself of the historical evidence regarding the life of Mohammed. He finds that Mohammed, from all accounts, was a demagogue, a charlatan, and a victim of mental disease. It strikes him strangely that such an individual should be chosen by Allah as his disciple on earth to make known his commands. He notes Mohammed's appearance on earth in 600 A.D. and wonders why the Creator should have procrastinated for such a long time; but decides to read the revelations anyhow. He discovers that "from the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit. Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic, and incoherence strike him at every turn. He finds it humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries and that millions of men are still wasting time in absorbing it." A Hebrew next takes his turn at this obstinate guest and sets before him the Old Testament. Again, the Martian is informed that it is an inspired book actuated by God. In his attempt to find the historical evidence corroborating this book, the Martian finds that authentic history begins for the Israelites with the constitution of Saul's monarchy about 1100 B.C. All that precedes this--the deluge, the dispersal of mankind, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, the captivity in Egypt, Moses, Joshua, and the conquest of Canaan, is more or less mythical. In the Old Testament, our Martian reads the first chapter, glances at the chronology, and is immediately bewildered since he has a fair knowledge of our scientific advances. As he reads on, he becomes aware of a host of errors, contradictions, and manifest absurdities. When he questions the zealous Hebrew, he comes in contact with what he is informed is Concordism, which he perceives is a false science that consists in determining, at any cost, a perfect harmony between modern science and the knowledge possessed by God's people. He is thus told that the days of creation were not days at all, but periods; although the Bible mentions the morning and evening of each day. Delving further in this most holy of revelations, he learns that God is represented in a manner most unworthy of what such a being should be represented. He finds the Lord walking in the cool of the evening, showing his hind quarters to Moses, ordering abominable massacres, and punishing chiefs who had not killed enough people. On further perusal, there is revealed, "A great deal of Oriental bombast, incoherence and absurdity, that the marvels recounted are often ludicrous or grotesque." In a chance moment, when the Hebrew had relaxed his hold for a second, a vile heretic points out to the visitor (_Exodus XXII, 18_): "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!" and explains the witchcraft delusion to him. From a comparison between Exodus XXXIV and Exodus XX, he is at a loss to decipher which are the true commandments that the Lord gave to Moses. The first five books of the Pentateuch, he finds, are attributed to Moses, although they contain the account of the latter's death. On inquiry, he learns that this is still maintained by the synagogue. His Martian intellect is unable to comprehend the logic of a God who would demand human and animal sacrifice, and the story of Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac fills him with disgust. His estimate of the mentality of Jehovah receives a severe jolt when he reads in Leviticus XVI, "Herewith shall Aaron come unto the holy place with a young bullock for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. He shall put on the holy linen coat, and he shall have the linen breeches upon his flesh, and he shall be girded with the linen girdle, and with the linen mitre shall he be attired; they are the holy garments; and he shall bathe his flesh in water and put them on. And he shall take of the congregation of the children of Israel two he-goats for a sin offering, and one ram for a burnt offering. And Aaron shall present the bullock of the sin offering, which is for himself, and he shall make atonement for himself and for his houses. And he shall take the two goats and set them before the Lord at the door of the tent of the meeting." Our visitor reads on to Leviticus XVIII, after which he must stop to question the Hebrew, for here he finds, "None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness; I am the Lord. The nakedness of thy father, even the nakedness of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover; she is thy mother; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness. The nakedness of thy father's wife shalt thou not uncover; it is thy father's nakedness. The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home, or abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover. The nakedness of thy son's wife--the nakedness of the wife of thy father--the nakedness of thy father's sister, thy mother's sister, the nakedness of thy daughter-in-law, thy brother's wife, the nakedness of a woman and her daughter, thou shalt not uncover. And unto a woman separated by her uncleanliness thou shalt not approach to uncover her nakedness. Thou shalt not be carnally with thy neighbor's wife, to defile thyself with her. Thou shalt not be with mankind as with womankind. And thou shalt not be with any beast to defile thyself thereto; neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto; it is confusion." The Martian, totally aghast, is constrained to exclaim that he cannot believe that a Deity should find it necessary to place this in a divine revelation. The Hebrew Zealot relents somewhat to explain that perhaps this was not revealed, but found its way into the divine text as a moral lesson to the primitive tribes for which it was written. To this, our guest counters with the remark that if this be a parable of manners and morals, then, from what he observes on the earth, we, Earthlings, have certainly outgrown the need for such coarse and obscene statements made some 2000 years ago; and that on Mars, although the inhabitants are not blessed with such divine revelations, common sense and reason have taught their most primitive men the same lessons in morality while they were yet in their infancy. Reflecting on this maze of contradictions, the Martian determines to analyze the Old Testament and the Hebrew religion in the same manner that he would investigate any other problem presented to him. Thirty-five hundred years ago, the Hebrews were a pastoral, primitive people inhabiting the wilderness known today as the Arabian Desert. Their religion was that of all other primitive peoples--Animism, an illusion which made primitive man recognize everywhere spirits similar to his own spirit. They worshiped the spirits of the sun and the moon, the mountains and rocks, as well as the spirits of the dead. It appears certain that the barrenness of this desert land necessitated these wandering tribes to migrate to adjacent areas of greater fertility. To the north lay the fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates and the coast of the Mediterranean Sea; to the west lay the land of the Egyptians. Time and time again, these Bedouin tribes hurled themselves against the inhabitants of the northern fertile valleys. Babylonia, to the northeast, was the first country to be invaded, and later Canaan to the northwest. Successful at times in establishing themselves in Babylonia and Canaan, they were at other times driven back into the desert when the native inhabitants in turn attacked the invaders. Migrating into Egypt in search of food, they were made a captive nation and escaped again into the desert when the Egyptians were engaged in fighting the savage invaders from Libya. The leader of this flight from Egypt was the prophet Moses. The Martian decides to investigate the character and deeds of this influential figure at another time. It is probable that the exodus gave the proper stimulus for the beginnings of a distinctive Hebrew religion, and was the reason for their finally establishing themselves in Canaan, with Jehovah as their chief deity. It has often been proclaimed that the value of Judaism has been in first establishing a religion of monotheism; but it must not be forgotten that centuries before the Hebrews escaped into the desert, the Egyptians were tending to monotheism. It is known that one god was exalted over all the rest in Egypt, and that as far back as 1375 B.C. King Ikhnaton made the religion of Egypt an absolute monotheism. The Hebrews, in proclaiming their Yahveh as the one and supreme deity, were but following what they had assimilated from the Egyptians. The faith of these desert marauders, at the time of their entrance into Canaan, was as crude and savage as the Hebrews themselves. Brought into contact with the gods of the Phoenicians and Babylonians, their Yahveh underwent a change, as have all other creeds since that time when brought into contact with another creed. The final idea of Yahveh accepted by the Hebrews was not the product of a sudden revelation but of a gradual evolution. The Hebrews, about the twelfth century B.C., gained access into Canaan, and at first were successful in warfare, so that under King David they presented the aspect of a united nation. However, following the extravagant reign of King Solomon, the nation was embroiled in a revolution, and the land was divided into two kingdoms--Israel in the north, Judah in the south. These two tiny kingdoms were habitually at war with each other and, finally, in 722 B.C. Israel was conquered, while in 586 B.C., Judah was defeated and its population either scattered or taken into captivity. In 538 B.C., Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylonia and set the exiles free. Returning to their own land, the exiles took back with them the law code which the priests had manufactured for them. Then began a period of priestly domination and corruption, a period of subjugation to Rome, of insurrection against Rome, and the capture and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. With the capture of Jerusalem, the Hebrew nation was finally dispersed. Just as the Martian was able to trace the evolution of the Hebrews from the stage of the marauding tribes of the Arabian desert who wandered into Egypt, Canaan, and Babylonia, and finally established a kingdom for themselves which was dispersed by Rome; just so could he trace the evolution of their religious beliefs from their incipient crudities to their not too great refinement at 70 A.D. This evolution of the Hebrew religion is best exemplified by an analysis of the Old Testament itself. There are several canons, or official collection of books which comprise the Old Testament. The Jews and Protestants accept fewer books than the Roman Catholics. The Jewish Canon consists of those so-called sacred books of which the Synagogue possessed Hebrew texts about a century before the Christian era. "About 150 B.C. the sacred books of the Jews were translated into Greek for the use of those Egyptian Jews who could not read Hebrew. This translation is called the Septuagint, from a tradition that seventy or seventy-two translators had worked upon it." (_Salomon Reinach, "Orpheus._") The earliest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible date only from the tenth century A.D., but there are very much older manuscripts of the Greek and Latin translations in existence. At the time of Jesus Christ, three divisions of the Old Testament were recognized. These were, the Law, the Prophets, and the other Scriptures. The first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, are known as the Pentateuch, and are attributed to Moses himself; although, as has been noted, they contain the account of his death. This conception of the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch was accepted by the Israelites as early as the fifth century B.C. and has been maintained by the Synagogue since that time. Following the example of the Hebrews, the Christian Churches accepted this version as to origin, and the Roman Catholic Church still upholds this view. The Jewish Synagogue and the various Christian Churches further hold that the Old Testament is a collection of works inspired or dictated by God. Even as late as 1861, the famous Dean Burgon, in a sermon preached at Oxford University, declared, "The Bible is none other than the voice of Him that sitteth upon the throne. Every book of it, every chapter of it, every verse of it, every syllable of it, every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High. The Bible is none other than the Word of God, not some part of it more, some part of it less, but all alike the utterance of Him who sitteth upon the throne, faultless, unerring, supreme." The Martian compared this statement with the words of the scholar Loisy, "If God himself wrote the Bible, we must believe Him to be either ignorant or untruthful." As he delves further into the intricacies of the construction of the Bible, our visitor perceives that the Old Testament gradually evolved from the tenth century to the second century B.C., and in its present form is mainly a fifth century compilation, so distorting the facts that it has taken scholars one hundred and fifty years to get them straight. "It may rightly be said that there is not a single book in the Bible which is original in the sense of having been written by one man, for all the books are made up of older documents or pre-existing sources which were combined with later materials, undergoing, in this way, several revisions and editions at the hands of different scribes or compilers. Deep traces have therefore been left upon the text of the Bible by these several stages of expansions, additions, modifications, revisions, and incorporations--they appear to the scholar of biblical literature much like the striations grooved in the rocks by large glaciers to the student of Geology." (_Trattner, "Unravelling the Book of Books._") The Martian ascertains that to most thinking men it has become very obvious that the Bible is the work of man, and not the inspiration of a god; that an increasing number of liberal theologians are discarding the theory of the divine inspiration of the Bible. He likewise clearly perceives that there are as yet many men that have given this matter but little thought; with the Divine inspiration looming up as a corner stone in the Hebrew faith he realizes that it behooves him to carry his investigations further. The Christians, accepting the Old Testament as a book dictated by God, had fixed the age of the earth as 4004 B.C. The harm done by the Christian ecclesiastics in attempting to force science to conform to the ridiculous concept of the construction of the universe as contained in the Bible, and as interpreted by the Church, the Martian considers in a further chapter. Scientists incline to the view that the earth has existed as a separate planet for something like two thousand million years (2,000,000,000). The rocks give a history of 16,000,000,000. Just as in the study of the origin of primitive beliefs, one finds that man made his gods and invented all that they are reported to have said, so a study of the Old Testament reveals that the ancient Hebrew invented his God, and manufactured the vast mass of myth and fable that are recorded as the words and deeds of God. Throughout the ages, the words of these ancient Hebrews have been taken as the words of a god. "Everything goes to show that the Hebrew literature was produced like other literatures. Hebrews were not the first to tell tales. When they did come to write 'for our learning' they borrowed from other people. The only reason why anything more than a literary attention is paid to these old Jewish writings is that Jesus was a Jew. When Christianity was founded--a difficult date to fix--there was no such thing as a Bible. The old Brahmans and Buddhists had Holy Scriptures; the Egyptians had a Book of the Dead, and the Sayings of Khuenaten; the Persians had the Zend-Avesta; the Chinese had sacred books. They were all as sacred as the Jewish books. Priests made them sacred. Priests generally rewrote and edited them, even if they had not originally imagined them. There is nothing to guide the man of common sense save knowledge and reason. Every priest swears his religion and his scriptures are true. But they cannot all be true. If the first are true, then the Jews are past further consideration, for they were not the first in the field with sacred writings.... Holy scriptures are merely Jewish classics. We have had to accept these old writings of the Hebrews as holy and inspired because the priests said so, and for no other reason whatsoever. There is no other reason." Assuming the existence of a deity, a man exercising his common sense would be compelled to deny that the Old Testament is inspired of God, because it abounds in stupidities and errors such as no god could inspire. "But because the Jews accumulated these writings, the subsequent adopters of Christianity, realizing that Jesus was a Jew, and had been a professing Jew, promptly annexed these tales of fancy and of fear, of muddled, sensual, silly things and said they must be accepted with the teachings of Jesus. And in the course of time, people had to believe these old Jewish writings were the Word of God." (_W. H. Williamson, "Thinker or Believer_.") The Hebrews had as one of their gods, Yahveh, whom they endowed with their qualities; qualities inherent in a primitive people: jealousy and might, trickery and fickleness. They evolved a worship that contained in a modified form many of the ceremonials that they witnessed when they came into contact with the Babylonians and Phoenicians. Their Bible they maintained to be a collection of books which appeared at intervals, with divine inspiration, during a thousand years of Jewish history. Similarly, they insisted that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, that Judges, Kings, and Chronicles go back to the times they describe, that the prophecies were added from the ninth century onward, and so on. The Martian found that not a single book of the Old Testament is older than the ninth century B.C. and that in the fifth century B.C. all the older books and fragments were combined together into the Old Testament as we have it, and were drastically altered so as to yield a version of early Jewish history which is not true. The manipulation of the Hebrew writings by the Jewish priests had for its object to represent the Jewish priesthood, and its rights and customs, as having been established in the days of Moses. Deuteronomy and Leviticus have been classed as priestly forgeries. Nearly every occurrence, from the creation of the world to the death of Moses, is related twice and, in some cases, three times; and as the Pentateuch is supposed to have been written by Moses one must assume that Moses had double and triple vision. Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah are impudent forgeries of the fourth century, giving a totally false version of the events. The Martian finds that the terms used for these fabrications are "redaction" or "recension," but, in his understanding, he finds the word most descriptive of the process to be forgery. "The main point is that practically all the experts assure you that in scores of material points the Old Testament history has been discredited, and has only been confirmed in a few unimportant incidental statements; and that the books are a tissue of inventions, expansions, conflations, or recensions dating centuries after the event." The Martian in his analysis becomes aware of instances related in the Old Testament that on his planet would have to be termed forgeries,--deliberate falsifications or fabrications of documents or of the signature to them. "Now the far greater part of the more learned clerical authorities on the Bible say that many books of the Old Testament pretend to be written by men who did not write them; that many books were deliberately written as history when the writers knew that they were not history; and that the Old Testament as a whole, as we have it, is a deliberate attempt to convey an historical belief which the writers knew to be false. But these learned authorities do not like the word forgery. It is crude." (_Joseph McCabe, "The Forgery of The Old Testament."_) They veil the meaning of this word in the elegance, the subtlety, the resources, of diplomatic language. They talk of certain books in terms of "their legendary character," "their conformity to a scheme," and "their didactic purpose." To the Martian these are but an extremely polite description of what he would call a forgery. A theologian in speaking of David states that "Keen criticism is necessary to arrive at the kernel of fact," and, "the imaginative element in the story of David is but the vesture which half conceals, half discloses certain facts treasured in popular tradition." The Martian thinks this is polite language, but the word forgery is much more concise and to the point, and he finds an excellent example of this described by Joseph McCabe in "The Forgery of the Old Testament." He states, "Some time ago we recovered tablets of the great Persian king, Cyrus, and Professor Sayre gives us a translation of them, and he compares them, as you may, with the words of Daniel, 'In that night was Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans, slain, and Darius the Median took the kingdom.' The tablets of Cyrus describe the taking of Babylon, and are beyond the slightest suspicion. The Persians had adopted the Babylonian custom of writing on clay, then baking the brick or tablet, and such documents last forever. And these and other authentic and contemporary documents of the age which 'Daniel' describes show: 1. That Belshazzar was not the king of Babylon. 2. That the name of the last king was Nabonidos. 3. That the city was taken peacefully, by guile, not by bloodshed. 4. That it was Cyrus, not Darius the Median, who took it. 5. That Darius, who is said (XI, 1) by Daniel to have been the son of "Ahasuerus" (Xerxes), was really his father. 6. That all the Babylonian names in Daniel are absurdly misspelt and quite strange to the writer. 7. That the writer described the Chaldeans in a way that no writer could have done before the time of Alexander the Great. It is now beyond question that the man who wrote Daniel, and pretended to be alive in 539 B.C. (when Babylon fell), did not live until three or four centuries later. The book is a tissue of errors, as we find by authentic documents and by reading the real Babylonian names on the tablets." The Martian discovers glaring instances of forgery in the book of Isaiah and the Psalms of David, which, while they pretend to have been written by Isaiah and David, are really compilations by various writers. Similarly, he finds that the Book of Esther has been pronounced by scholars as a clumsy forgery of the second century, and that the story of the slaying of Goliath by David is not consistent with the unlegendary tradition that the slayer of Goliath was Elhanan, and the period of this adventure not in Saul's but in David's reign. The Book of Psalms, although attributed to King David, was not written by King David; and the Book of Proverbs, although attributed to Solomon, was not written by King Solomon. The Book of Genesis relates the mythical traditions of the Hebrews from the creation of the world to the death of Joseph. "A French physician of the eighteenth century, Astruc, was the first scholar to point out that the two principal designations of God in Genesis, Elohim and Jahveh, are not used arbitrarily. If we place side by side the passages in which God is called Elohim, and those in which he is called by the other name, we get two perfectly distinct narratives, which the author of the Pentateuch, as we possess it, has juxtaposed rather than fused. This one discovery suffices to discredit the attribution of these books to Moses, who could not have been an unintelligent compiler, and also discredits the theory of the divine inspiration of the Bible text. A comparison of the two narratives shows that all which relates to the creation of Eve, the Garden of Eden, and Adam's transgression, exists only in the Jehovist text. Thus it is evident that two versions of the Creation are given in Genesis. But there are traces in the Old Testament of a third legend, akin to that of the Babylonians, in which Marduk creates the world by virtue of a victory over the waters of chaos (Tiamat). This conception of a conflict between the creator and hostile forces was contrary to the monotheistic thesis, and has disappeared from our two versions of Genesis; but the suppression sufficiently proves that it was very ancient and had long been accepted." The Martian finds that theologians have attempted to crawl out of desperate situations in their interpretation of the Old Testament by a method of reading into a passage or extracting out of it ideas altogether foreign to its original intent. This method they call "Allegory." By means of this process they have been able to extract any meaning which suits their purposes, and by this method of juggling could prove anything. A classic example is that licentious piece of literature called the "Song of Solomon," in which it is claimed that a woman's breasts, thighs, and belly are the symbols of the union of Jahveh and the Synagogue. Continuing his researches, the Martian notices a number of passages in the Old Testament that lead him to the conclusion that the Hebrews were originally polytheists. The name Elohim, he finds, is plural (singular, Eloah), meaning the gods. Again, in another passage of Genesis, God is described as saying, "Let us make man in our image (I, 26)," and further on, "The man is become as one of us." It becomes evident to him that the Hebrews, like their neighbors, worshiped "baalim" or the gods of the heathens. The "teraphim," the etymology of which is unknown, were little portable idols which seem to have been the Lares of the ancient Hebrews. David owned some (I Samuel XIX, 13-16), and the prophet Hosea, in the eighth century before Christ, seems still to have considered the "teraphim" as indispensable in worship (Hos. III, 4). These evidences of polytheism and fetichism in the people of Israel destroy, in the mind of the Martian, the claim of these people to have been faithful from their earliest origin to a spiritual monotheism. Rather does he find that they took the religions of other peoples with whom they came in contact. The Old Testament contains numerous instances of the practice of magic. Moses and Aaron were magicians who rivalled Pharaoh's magicians (Ex. VII, 11-20); and Balaam was a magician who pronounced incantations against Israel and afterwards passed over to the service of Jehovah. Jacob resorted to a kind of sympathetic magic to procure the birth of a speckled sheep (Gen. XXX, 39). "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," is written in Exodus XXII, 18, and this phrase offered an affirmation of the reality of witchcraft during the period of the Witchcraft Delusion. The Martian notes that the sentence, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," has caused more suffering, torture, and death than probably any other sentence ever framed. His mind revolts at the stupidity and the slavish adherence to so-called authority of the human mind, which is manifested in this example of what occurred in the period of the Witchcraft Delusion, when the words of an ignorant and barbaric Hebrew were taken by Christian followers to be the words of a god. And yet our Martian guest recognizes that in this day all men are aware of the fallacy of this utterance in a book which is still claimed to be infallible. The Martian then considers the many ancient Hebrew rites and religious taboos that have come down through the ages, and are still practiced in a modified form by the modern Hebrew. Thus, in the Old Testament, there are numerous instances recorded of the practices of slaughtering of innocent animals who were offered as peace offerings to Yahveh. As time passed, the practice of slaughtering and then burning the sacrificial animal gave way to the practice of only giving the blood of the animal as an offering. This custom has come down to the present day in the modern worship of Jehovah; the blood of animals is still forbidden to the modern Hebrew. Therefore, the orthodox Jew has the neck of the chicken slit by a "Shochet" who allows the blood to drip to the ground--a modern blood offering to the Gods. The explanations given by the rabbis of our day are spurious. Similarly, the orthodox Jew of our time still persists in salting the meat before cooking, a process which is intended to remove the blood, which is the portion of the Gods. The reason that the pious Jew abstains from pork leads to the consideration of Totemism as found in the Old Testament. Totemism is a kind of worship rendered to animals and vegetables considered as allied and related to man. The worship of animals and plants is found as a survival in all ancient societies and is the origin of the belief in the transmigration of souls. Totemism seems to have been as widespread as the animism from which it is derived, and has been closely intertwined in the development of religious beliefs. Totemism in a modified form is found in the Old Testament where animals speak on occasion, as the serpent in Genesis, or Balaam's ass. In the most remote periods it is probable that every clan had at least one totem animal which might no more be killed or eaten than the human individuals of the clan. The totem was protected by taboo. The totem was sacred and in this capacity it was looked upon as a source of strength and holiness, and to live beside it and under its protection was considered as a righteous custom. In certain communities the idea that it was necessary to abstain from eating certain totems survived the progress of material civilization. The cow is taboo to the Hindus, the pig is taboo to the Mohammedans and to the Jews. The pious Jew abstains from pork because his remote ancestors, five or six thousand years before our era, had the wild boar as their totem. This is the origin of this alimentary taboo; among the ancient Hebrews it arose, and only comparatively recently has it been suggested that the flesh of these taboo animals was unwholesome. In the eighteenth century, philosophers propagated the erroneous notion that if certain religious legislators had forbidden various aliments, it was for hygienic motives. Even Renan believed that dread of trichinosis and leprosy had caused the Hebrews to forbid the use of pork. To show the irrational nature of this explanation, it will be enough to point out that in the whole of the Bible there is not a single instance of an epidemic or a malady attributed to the eating of unclean meats; the idea of hygiene awoke very late in the Greek world. To the Biblical writers, as to contemporary savages, illness is supernatural; it is an effect of the wrath of spirits. Primitive man ascribed all diseases either to the wrath of God, or the malice of an evil being. The curing of disease by the casting out of devils and by prayers were the means of relief from sickness recognized and commanded by the Old Testament. The hygienic explanation of an alimentary prohibition as still insisted upon by the rabbis is entirely erroneous and marks the expounder of such an explanation as one who is entirely ignorant of the evolution of religious beliefs. The entire matter is well stated in one sentence by Reinach, "Nothing can be more absurd, generally speaking, than to explain the religious laws and practices of the remote past by considerations based on modern science." The Martian is able to trace some curious customs that were exhibited by the ancient Hebrews as well as most other ancient peoples, and which have persisted to this day. The customs remain the same, the meanings have become lost in the blind adherence to custom. It is known that the old Jewish mourning customs originated with the desire for protection from the liberated spirit of the deceased. The loud cries uttered by the mourners were thought to frighten away the spirits. The change of dress, the covering of the head with ashes, and the shaving of the hair of the mourners were done with the purpose of making themselves unrecognizable to the spirits. Hence, the custom still prevails of wearing the mourning veil. The covering of mirrors when death occurs in the household may well be an attempt to prevent the spirit from lingering in the vicinity. Similarly, even today, the orthodox Jew, in case of grave illness in his family, changes the given name of the sufferer. To confuse the evil spirit causing the disease? Further survivals of totemism as found in the Old Testament are illustrated by the worship of the bull and the serpent. Portable gilded images of bulls were consecrated and Hosea protested against the worship of the bull in the kingdom of Israel (Hos. VIII, 5; X, 5). The famous golden calf of the Israelites, which was the object of Moses' anger, was a totemic idol. The worship of the serpent was practiced by Moses himself (Num. XXI, 9). A brazen serpent was worshiped in the temple of Jerusalem, and was only destroyed by Hezekiah about 700 B.C. (2 Kings XVIII, 4). The ancient Hebrews, as well as their neighbors, were phallic worshipers. To primitive people it is but a natural phase to have the phallus become the exponent of creative power, and as such to be worshiped. To these primitive minds there was nothing immoral in genuine phallic worship. Signs of phallicism among the ancient Hebrews can be clearly pointed out; the serpent was a phallic symbol. "That the serpent was the phallus is proved by the Bible itself. The Hebrew word used for serpent is 'Nachash,' which is everywhere else translated in the Bible in a phallic sense, as in Ezekiel XVI, 36, where it is rendered 'filthiness' in the sense of exposure, like the 'having thy Boseth naked' of Micah." (_J. B. Hannay, "Christianity, the Sources of its Teaching and Symbolism."_) The ark itself was a feminine symbol, and phallicism would explain why Moses made an ark and put in it a rod and two stones. "The Eduth, the Shechina, the Tsur, and the Yahveh were identical; simply different names for the same thing, the phallus. They occupied the female ark with which they formed the double sexed life symbol. The Hebrew religion had thus a purely phallic basis, as was to be expected from a ritual and symbolism derived from two extremely phallic nations, Babylon and Egypt." (_J. B. Hannay, Ibid._) An intelligent reading of Exodus XXXIV, 13, and 1 Kings XIV, 23 and 24, will prove the above contention. Once more our Martian guest is besieged by the Hebrew Zealot to examine the divine revelation of his religion. This time the Martian notes, "I, Yahveh, thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations" (Deut.), which seems to him to savor of a cruel and monstrous being. He cannot perceive of a just being favoring slavery (Ex. XI), or of a merciful father ordering human sacrifice (Ex. XIII), (Lev. XXVII, 29), (Num. XIII, 3). He is dumbfounded to find references to cannibalism (Lev. XXVI, 14-16-28; Deut. XXVIII, 53-58; Jer. XIX, 9; Ezek. V, 10; Kings VI, 26-29-33). A Benevolent Being, he reasons, would not sanction war and destruction of the captured enemy, yet there are instances of this (Deut. XXI, 10-14; Deut. XX, 13-14; Deut. VII, 1-2-16). The reading of Numbers V, 11-29, and Deuteronomy XXII nauseated him. The Hebrew Zealot, observing the utter disgust with which the reader was regarding his revelation, is obliged to explain to the bewildered barbarian unbeliever that the Old Testament is the foundation for all of our morals and that without it we would have developed into a very shocking and immoral race. Since the visitor wishes to remain courteous he proceeds, but with a great deal of hesitation, to further examine the revelation of God. At this point he is assured that this work is read in most schools and taught to small children. However, our guest is again disillusioned; for no sooner does he arrive at Genesis, XII, 11-20, than he finds that Abraham, good Abraham, the pure, the father of all Hebrews, makes of the sacred relationship of marriage a means of personal gain and safety by betraying his own wife. Now it is the Martian's turn to inquire of the Hebrew whether the latter had ever read this story to his own daughter? Or, the story of Abraham's affair with Hagar, his handmaiden? Was the Hebrew's young daughter aware that Isaac, son of Abraham, was as ready and willing to prostitute his wife for protection for himself as was his father Abraham? The Martian is puzzled by the word "sporting" in Genesis, XXVI, 8-11, and is informed of its meaning. A few moments after reading Genesis XIX, 1-7, he informs his would-be converter that if Lot had lived in Mars and had offered his daughters to appease the mob, the account of that incident would never have found its way into any work on morals. Moreover, he failed utterly to see how the account of Lot's daughters getting him into a drunken state, followed by a statement such as, "Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father," could ever have any moral value. The story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel does not appeal to this infidel Martian, since he still believes that integrity and faithfulness are virtues. Yet, in his endeavor to respect the courtesy due to his host, he reaches for pencil and pad, and notes the various moral lessons he had derived thus far from the Old Testament. He wrote lust, incest, infidelity, and prostitution; arriving at the story of Dinah, Genesis XXXIV, 1-2, he wrote that in addition to those vices already listed, rape should be given a prominent place. The stories of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, Judah and Tamar, King David and his wives, the rape of Tamar by her brother Ammon, did not impress the Martian as stories for the delectation of children, since he was crude enough to hold that anything which would shock the mind of a child, could not have any moral value and would thus be automatically excluded from any religion. He, therefore, returned the volume to the Hebrew with the remark that as an adult he found the stories of De Maupassant and Balzac more interesting, even though they belonged to the same genre. Our guest now repaired to one of our golf courses where, during the interval of a few hours, the fresh air, the sunshine, and exercise dispelled the mental nausea which the reading of the Old Testament had occasioned in him. Returning to his quarters, he is approached by one of the Christian Brethren and the New Testament is placed in his hands with these remarks, "The Christian recognizes that in the Old Testament the Jews have given to the Christian world its greatest heritage." The fact that in exchange for this priceless heritage, the Christians have given to the Jews a series of persecutions unequaled in the annals of human warfare is explained by the quality of the Brotherhood of Man that naturally manifests itself after a complete conversion to the Bible's precepts. The Old Testament contains the first revelations of God; the New Testament, the last revelations. Our Christian Brother "forgets" to remind the visitor that the difference of opinion regarding these two Testaments of God has caused more sorrow, bloodshed, harm, devilment, misery, and devastation than any other single item in the life and history of the human race. The Martian is hard pressed to reconcile the fact that Mohammedanism six hundred years after the appearance of Christianity triumphed over Christianity in a great portion of the earth's surface; yet he is informed that Christianity is _the_ religion of God, that Allah made the Mohammedans, Jehovah the Jews, the Trinity the Christians, and the rest of the believers were illegitimate children of the above gods, was the only conclusion he could reach. In a few moments the myth of Christ begins to unfold itself before his eyes in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Apocalypse. He finds, "The so-called Messianic texts which are supposed to prefigure Jesus in the Old Testament have all been either misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted. The most celebrated is that in Isaiah VII, 14, which predicts that a virgin shall bear a son, Emmanuel, but the word, Al-mah, which the Septuagint rendered "virgin" means in Hebrew a young woman, and this passage merely deals with the approaching birth of a son to the king or the prophet himself. This error of the Septuagint is one of the sources of the legend relating to the virginal birth of Jesus. As early as the second century A.D. the Jews perceived it and pointed it out to the Greeks, but the Church knowingly persisted in the false reading, and for over fifteen centuries she has clung to her error." His attentive reading convinces him that not one of the Gospels is the work of an eyewitness to the scenes recorded; a little side investigation reveals that there were a great many writings called Gospels, from which the Church finally adopted four, guaranteeing their inspiration and absolute veracity, no doubt because they were in favor in four very influential churches, Matthew at Jerusalem, Mark at Rome or at Alexandria, Luke at Antioch, and John at Ephesus. Moreover, what the Gospels tell him, he perceives is what different Christian communities believed concerning Jesus between the years 70 and 100 A.D. In Matthew XXVI, 39, Mark XIV, 35, and Luke XXII, 42, there are words such as those Jesus is supposed to have uttered during the slumber of these very same Apostles. This occurrence enlightens him as to what St. Augustine meant when he wrote, "I should not believe in the Gospel if I had not the authority of the Church for so doing." If the documents are stuffed with the authority of the Church, these Gospels cannot be utilized for a history of the real life of Jesus. A study of the Epistles of St. Paul reveals that St. Paul taught that sin and death came into the world by Adam's fall. In spite of a diligent search the Martian found no mention of this in the words ascribed to Jesus. From St. Paul's utterances he learns that Christ came to redeem mankind by his voluntary oblation of himself. He was the Son of God! Paul, not knowing that in the future a special form of conception would be superimposed on Jesus, states that he was of human birth. The Martian determined to ascertain what effect the teachings of St. Paul have had on Christianity. He learns that, "Ever since St. Paul, the ruling idea of Christianity has been that of the redemption of man, guilty of a prehistoric fault, by the voluntary sacrifice of a superman. This doctrine is founded upon that of expiation; a guilty person must suffer to atone for his fault; and that of the substitution of victims, the efficacious suffering of an innocent person for a guilty one. Both are at once pagan and Jewish ideas; they belong to the old fundamental errors of humanity. Yet, Plato knew that the punishment inflicted on a guilty person is not, nor should it be, a vengeance; it is a painful remedy imposed on him for his own benefit and that of society. At about the same period Athenian law laid down the principle that punishment should be as personal as the fault, thus St. Paul founded Christian Theology on two archaic ideas which had already been condemned by enlightened Athenians of the fourth century before our era, _ideas which no one would dream of upholding in these days, though the structure built upon them still subsists_." In chapter V of the first Epistle of St. John, these words strike the visitor, "There are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, and the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are One." If these two verses are authentic, they would be an affirmation of the doctrine of the Trinity, dating from the first century, at a time when the Gospels, the Acts, and St. Paul ignore it. It was first pointed out in 1806 that these verses were an interpolation, for they do not appear in the best manuscripts, notably all the Greek manuscripts down to the fifteenth century. The Roman Church refused to bow to evidence. The Congregation of the Index, on January 13, 1897, with the approbation of Leo XIII, forbade any question as to the authenticity of the text relating to the "three heavenly witnesses." It appeared strange to the Martian that a god should need the lies of his disciples to be incorporated in a divine revelation. But his confusion was even greater when he read, "We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the substance--and yet, they are not three Eternals, but One Eternal, not three Almighties, but One Almighty. So, the Father is God, the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, and yet they are not three Gods, but One God.... The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son, neither made nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.... And in this Trinity, none is afore or after the other; none is greater or less than another; but the whole three Persons are coeternal together and coequal." He thought this would make a great puzzle, truly an insoluble conundrum, to take back to bewilder his Martian friends. However, he was able to comprehend the remarks of Vigilantius, "who returned from a journey in Italy and the Holy Land disgusted with official Christianity. He protested vehemently against the idolatrous worship of images, the legacy of Paganism to the Church, a practice directly opposed to that of the Mosaic law which Jesus came, not to destroy, but to fulfill. It was idle to reply that these images were the Scriptures of the illiterate, that they were not the object of, but the stimulus to, worship. Experience showed that the majority of the faithful confounded (as indeed they still do) the sign with the thing signified." (_Salomon Reinach, "Orpheus."_) The result of the critical examination of the New Testament by the Martian is that just as most of the Old Testament books are not only anonymous but highly composite productions, that as certain writings traditionally ascribed to Moses, David, Solomon, Daniel, and others are utterly lacking in the necessary evidences in support of authorship, but bear unmistakable evidence of having gone through a long compilatory process; so does each gospel, despite its seeming unity, give evidence of being a composite literary product. Scholars have agreed that Mark first set forth the doings of Jesus and "it was out of Mark that both Matthew and Luke took the framework of their own writings, cleverly fitting into its arrangement their own distinctive material and coloring the whole by their own individual treatment." (_Trattner, "Unravelling the Book of Books."_) It is estimated that Mark was written shortly before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D. "This means that a chasm of 30 or 40 years separates Mark's written document from the ministry of Jesus--a long enough time to create a plastic body of oral teachings and a highly colored tradition embellished with fanciful stories." Luke was a Greek physician living somewhere on the shores of the Ægean Sea. He had been a friend of Paul, just as Mark had been with Peter. Luke had no personal acquaintance with Jesus and had to get his information from what others said, or from what the friends of "eye-witnesses" had seen. The Gospel of "Matthew" is an anonymous composition which, on analysis, has been found to incorporate nearly fifty per cent of what is found in Mark. It is now believed by many scholars to have been written between the years 75 and 80 A.D. at Antioch not, of course, by the Apostle Matthew, but by some unknown editor. The Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John, is vastly different in style, arrangement, and in the description of the words, actions, and general spiritual character of Jesus. Many scholars believe that it was written in the city of Ephesus, somewhere around the year 100 A.D. "Church tradition ascribed it to the Apostle John, the son of Zebedee, one of the fishermen whom Jesus called to be a disciple. Years ago this view was easily entertained, but there now exists too much refractory evidence against assigning this Greek Gospel to an Aramaic-speaking Galilean. That an untutored fisherman could have written so elaborate and so highly philosophical an account of Jesus has always presented a thorny problem. And so to most scholars John's authorship of the Fourth Gospel is unthinkable." Not one of the Gospels is the work of an eyewitness, and the four Gospels do not complete each other; they contradict each other; and when they do not contradict, they repeat each other. The Christ of John is a totally different person from the Christ of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Loisy, in his "_Quelques Lettres_," states, "If there is one thing above others that is obvious, but as to which the most powerful of theological interests have caused a deliberate or unconscious blindness, it is the profound, the irreducible incompatibility of the Synoptical Gospels, and the Fourth Gospel. If Jesus spoke and acted as he is said to have spoken and acted in the first three Gospels, he did not speak and act as he is reported to have done in the fourth." The Martian is forced to the conclusion that the New Testament, with its version of the Virgin Birth, Elizabeth, the cousin of Mary, Zacharias and the Angel Gabriel, Jesus and the Sinner, are on par with the eroticism of the Old Testament. The interpolations, the myth, and fable also compare with the first revelation, and, in his opinion, he prefers Andersen's Fairy Tales, or Æsop's Fables. Meanwhile, a Protestant Brother mentions the name of Luther, and the conclusions he draws are that the exciting cause of the Reformation was an extravagant sale of indulgences conceded to the German Dominicans. The Augustinians grew jealous of the Dominicans, and an Augustinian Monk, Martin Luther, affixed to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral ninety-five articles against the abuse of indulgences. This started the fray in Germany with Luther at the head of this heresy. The gravest difference of opinion had to do with the Communion. "Luther retained one-half of the mystery, and rejected the other half. He confesses that the body of Jesus Christ is in the consecrated element, but it is, he says, as fire is in the red-hot iron. The fire and the iron subsist together. This is what they called impanation, invination, consubstantiation. Thus, while those they called Papists ate God without bread, the Lutherans ate God and bread; soon afterwards came the Calvinists, who ate bread and did not eat God." In short, Luther was in harmony with the Roman Church in nothing but the doctrines of the Trinity, Baptism, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection. Luther thought it was time to abolish private mass. He pretended the devil had appeared to him and reproached him for saying mass and consecrating the elements. The devil had proved to him, he said, that it was idolatry. Luther declared that the devil was right and must be believed. The mass was abolished in Wittenberg, and soon afterwards throughout Saxony; the images were thrown down, monks and nuns left their cloisters, and, a few years later, Luther married a nun called Catharine von Bora. This tale did not greatly impress our guest. A Catholic Brother, not to be outdone, extols the glories of his Universal Church, and the Martian again sets out to investigate. This time he finds: The quotations in the New Testament which the Catholic creed interprets as giving divine authority to its representatives on earth is a late interpolation; the Trinity as stated above is a paradox which no rational being can understand, and its dogmas and idolatry are consistent with a civilization of 4000 years ago. A study of the lives of its popes put to shame the statement that they could possibly be the earthly representatives of a Benevolent Being. "In the ninth and tenth centuries the papacy passed through a period of shameful disorder. The Rome of John X was a cloaca in which the Popes set the example of the worst misconduct." (For a good short account of the lives of the popes, see Draper's, "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe.") During the complete control by the Church of civilization in Europe, it has retarded the progress of humanity for at least 2000 years, and its precepts and fundamental principles are today detrimental to the advance of mankind. It has to its credit a long series of judicial murders for differences of opinion. The Crusades, instigated by the popes and seconded by the monks, cost millions of lives and exhausted the resources of Christian Europe; they aggravated fanaticism, exaggerated the worship of saints and relics to the point of mania, and encouraged the abuse of and traffic in indulgences. There had never been a single opinion persecuted by the Church in the Middle Ages the adoption of which would not have brought about a diminution of her revenues; the Church has always primarily considered her finances. The papacy was responsible for the Inquisition, and it actively encouraged and excited its ferocity. It gave birth to the Witchcraft Mania. The first Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada, received the congratulations of the Pope. It diabolically applauded the St. Bartholomew Massacre, and instigated the numerous religious wars that tore Europe asunder, and was the cause of the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and incalculable suffering. With such savage alacrity did it carry out its object of protecting the interests of religion that between 1481 and 1808 it had punished three hundred and forty thousand persons, and of these, nearly 32,000 had been burnt. "It is perfectly certain that the Catholic Church has taught, and still teaches that intellectual liberty is dangerous, that it should be forbidden. It was driven to take this position because it had taken another. It taught, and still teaches, that a certain belief is necessary to salvation. It has always known that investigation and inquiry led, or might lead, to doubt; that doubt leads, or may lead, to heresy, and that heresy leads to Hell. In other words, the Catholic Church has something more important than this world, more important than the well-being of man here. It regards this life as an opportunity for joining that Church, for accepting that creed, and for the saving of your soul. If the history of the world proves anything, if proves that the Catholic Church was for many centuries the most merciless institution that ever existed among men. We, too, know that the Catholic Church was, during all the years of its power, the enemy of every science. It preferred magic to medicine, relics to remedies, priests to physicians. It hated geologists, persecuted the chemists, and imprisoned the naturalists, and opposed every discovery of science calculated to improve the condition of mankind. There is no crime that the Catholic Church did not commit, no cruelty that it did not reward, and no virtue that it did not persecute. It was the greatest and most powerful enemy of human rights. In one hand, it carried an alms dish, and in the other, a dagger. It argued with the sword, persecuted with poison, and convicted with faggot." R. G. Ingersoll, "_Rome or Reason_." "From the time of Newton to our own day, the divergence of science from the dogmas of the Church has steadily increased. The Church declared that the earth is the central and most important body in the Universe, that the sun and moon and stars are tributary to it. On these points she was worsted by astronomy. She affirmed that a universal deluge had covered the earth; that the only surviving animals were such as had been saved in the Ark. In this, her error was established by geology. She taught that there was a first man who, some 6000 or 8000 years ago, was suddenly created or called into existence in a condition of physical and moral perfection, and from that condition he fell. But anthropology has shown that human beings existed far back in geological time, and in a savage state but little better than that of the brute.... Convicted of so many errors, the papacy makes no attempt at explanation. It ignores the whole matter. Nay, more, relying on the efficacy of audacity, although confronted by these facts, it lays claim to infallibility." The persecutions of Bruno, Galileo, and Copernicus, together with the facts hitherto stated, did not impress the Martian with the "infallibility" of the Church. The only great spiritual power that could have interposed to prevent the outbreak of the World War was the papacy. Pope Pius X had his Nuncio admonish the Austrian emperor, but he failed even to get an audition from that old imbecile. The next Pope, Benedict XV, was under the influence of a majority of pro-German cardinals. He strove to remain neutral. He attempted to solace the Belgians with words, but he did not reprove the murderous invaders. He protested against the new and devilish methods of warfare but he did not condemn, he did not excommunicate those that used them. Had the papacy lost its much-used power of commanding kings and nations, and had it lost its greatest threat, a threat which hitherto could have thrown the masses of its adherents into a panic, the threat of excommunication? No, the papacy still blessed the banners of the armies, just as it did during the middle ages, and sent its adherents out to slaughter; but first took great care that the minds of the devout be completely drugged with the poison of its creed. A creed that told its followers that do what you might, no matter how dastardly that act might be, so long as you repent and confess your sins, life everlasting will be the reward. What is the value of a church that has claimed the moral leadership of the world when such things can happen? Now that the Martian has become acquainted with the three major religions which dominate the world, Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism, and has been amazed and shocked at the significance of their teachings in the history of civilization, his curiosity is further aroused, and he decides to obtain some information of the respective personalities responsible for the amassing of devotees to these creeds, all "infallible," and all detrimental to progress. This time his interest leads him to ancient and contemporary sources, of a literal rather than verbal nature; sources dealing with the three most influential prophets in the history of mankind, Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed. CHAPTER III THE PROPHETS MOHAMMED, JESUS, AND MOSES CHARLATANS OR VICTIMS OF MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DISEASE _The prophet or seer is a man of strong imaginative powers, which have not been calmed by education. The ideas which occur to his mind often present themselves to his eyes and ears in corresponding sights and sounds.... Prophets have existed in all countries and at all times; but the gift becomes rare in the same proportion as people learn to read and write_. WINWOOD READE. Religious apologists are forever reminding us that we must interpret both the lives and the works of their prophets and recorders in the spirit and meaning of the ages in which they lived. To this I agree; but the apologists have so mutilated the meaning of the words of the seers and built about them such a mass of nonsense, myth, and fable that it becomes nearly impossible after the lapse of centuries to differentiate the actual man from the fabled man. But there are certain facts that do come down to us recorded by disinterested observers from which can be derived finally some conception of their mode of life, and the content and significance of their teachings. Although time causes great changes in customs and manners, it only effects a negligible variation in the vast majority of diseases which affect the body and mind of man. We know from the examination of the skeletal remains of prehistoric man that the diseases of the bone of thousands of years ago were similar in their manifestations to those same diseases of bone of today. From the writings of the early Egyptian, Greek, and Roman physicians we identify diseases by their symptoms, and recognize that the symptoms of these diseases have not changed throughout the ages. Therefore, with the knowledge of the signs and symptoms of various diseases which we have today, we can safely assert that if an ancient complained of the same group of signs and symptoms (which is now termed a "disease complex"), he was suffering from the same disease which we can identify in modern man. What applies to physical disease is just as applicable to mental disease. In speaking of mental disease, it is important for the layman to keep in mind a few fundamental principles held by the physician. The physician in speaking of mental disease means a more or less permanent departure from the normal or usual way of thinking, acting, or feeling. In the examination of a patient with mental disease the physician looks for delusions, illusions, and hallucinations. A delusion is a false belief, concerning which the individual who holds it is unable to admit evidence such as would be admitted by ordinary individuals. An illusion is a deception of the senses, a misinterpretation of sensory impressions; the normal person can be convinced of this deception. The mirage, for example, is an optical illusion which has a starting point in an external stimulus. A hallucination is a deception of any of the five senses, in which there is no starting point but it is fabricated in a disordered mind. Illustrations of hallucinations are the hearing of voices when none are present, smelling of odors, the seeing of visions in a vacuum. With the elementary understanding of fundamental symptoms of mental diseases as a point of departure, let us consider the cases of Mohammed, Jesus, and Moses, three of the most influential prophets in the history of civilization. MOHAMMED Of the three, Mohammed should be considered before the others for several reasons. First, there is no question regarding the actual existence of Mohammed. We know that he was born at Mecca about 571 A.D. and died at Medina on June 8th, 632 A.D. From the facts of his life and the religion which he founded we are able to see the manner in which legend and superstition were superimposed on its original simple form. The historical records of his life and teachings are easier of access since he is nearer our time than the other two prophets, and we can get a better understanding of his character. It was Gibbon who said, "It may be expected that I should balance his faults and his virtues, that I should decide whether the title of enthusiast or impostor more properly belongs to that extraordinary man.... At the distance of twelve centuries, I darkly contemplate his shade through a cloud of incense." In attempting to peer through this cloud of religious incense we find the following facts: In the city of Mecca, probably in August, in the year 571, Mohammed, the Prophet of Allah, was born. There seems little doubt that he was descended from those lofty Koreish, whose opposition, which at first nearly succeeded in holding his name in perpetual oblivion, eventually caused him to emerge into the light of deathless fame. His birth was surrounded by all manner of signs and omens, we are told. The labor of his mother, Amina, was entirely painless, earthquakes loosed the bases of mountains and caused great bodies of water, whose names were unfortunately not specified, to wither away or overflow; the sacred fire of Zoroaster which, under the jealous care of the Magi, had spouted ceaseless flames for nearly a thousand years, was extinguished. All the idols in the world except the Kaaba tumbled to earth. Immediately after the babe was born an ethereal light dazzled the surrounding territory, and, on the very moment when his eyes were first opened, he lifted them to heaven and exclaimed: "God is great! There is no God but Allah and I am his Prophet!" All these poetic fancies have been appropriately denounced by Christian scribes, who have claimed that nature would never have dignified the birth of a pagan like Mohammed with such marvelous prodigies as undoubtedly attended the advent of Christ. However, Mohammed was born shortly after the death of his father. At the age of six his mother died also, and he spent the first ten years among the Bedouins under the care of a foster-mother named Halima. At the age of four it was noticed that the child had signs of convulsive seizures which later commentators thought were of an epileptic nature. He was brought up under the care of his uncle Abu Talib, and his early manhood was spent in caring for the flock and in attending caravan expeditions. When the prophet was twenty-five years old, his uncle secured for him a position with a caravan owned by a wealthy widow, Khadija. Thanks to Mohammed's keen business sense the caravan was highly successful, and he was induced to personally report his success to Khadija. That lady, a wealthy widow of forty years, and the mother of three children, was highly pleased at Mohammed's story. As she listened to the proof of his business ability and fondly scanned his large, nobly formed head, his curling coal-black hair, his piercing eyes, and his comely form, it naturally occurred to her that this vigorous and handsome young fellow would make an excellent successor to her deceased husband. She had her way and they were married. During the next fifteen years Mohammed led a tranquil life. His future was provided for and he had plenty of leisure to occupy himself as he chose. In these years Mohammed and his wife continued to be conventional worshipers of idols, who nightly performed rites in honor of various gods and goddesses, among whom were Allah and his female consoler Al-Lat. And so, by the year 610, Mohammed, at the age of forty, was nothing more than a respectable but unknown tradesman who had experienced no extraordinary crises, whose few existing utterances were dull and insipid, and whose life seemed destined to remain as insignificant and unsung as any other Arab's. At this time, he began to retire for days at a time to a cave in the foothills of Mount Hira, a hill several miles north of Mecca. Meanwhile his business languished. As the months passed, he still continued to act in the same incomprehensible manner; it was noticed that little by little certain members of his immediate family attended him to his refuge or gathered with him in some one of their houses. This continued for several years until it was rumored that Mohammed, the camel driver, was confidently claiming the honor of having made a great discovery; namely, that "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet." By what process of thought had Mohammed come to exalt Allah not merely above all Arabian gods, but above the gods of all times? Furthermore, why was he so certain of his own intimate association with Allah? We can understand this if we consider Mohammed in the light of a victim of mental disease. One account informs us that as Mohammed was wandering near the cave at Mount Hira, "an angel from the sky cried to him, 'O Mohammed, I am Gabriel!'" He was terrified and hurried home to impart his experience to his wife. "I see a light," he said to his wife, "and I hear a sound. I fear that I am possessed." This idea was most distressing to a pious man. He became pale, haggard; he wandered about on the hill near Mecca crying for help to God. More than once he drew near the edge of the cliff and was tempted to hurl himself down, and so put an end to his misery at once. He lived much in the open air, gazing on the stars, watching the dry ground grow green beneath the gentle rain. He pondered also on the religious legends of the Jews, which he had heard related on his journeys; and as he looked and thought, the darkness was dispelled, the clouds disappeared, and the vision of God in solitary grandeur rose within his mind, and there came upon him an impulse to speak of God. There came upon him a belief that he was a messenger of God sent on earth to restore the religion of Abraham, which the pagan Arabs had polluted with idolatry, the Jews in corrupting their holy books. At the same time he heard a Voice, and sometimes he felt a noise in his ears like the tinkling of bells or a low deep hum, as if bees were swarming round his head. At this period of his life the chapters of the Koran were delivered in throes of pain. The paroxysms were preceded by depression of spirit, his face became clouded, his extremities turned cold, he shook like a man in an ague, and he called for coverings. His face assumed an expression horrible to see, the vein between his eyebrows became distended, his eyes were fixed, his head moved to and fro, as if he was conversing, and then he gave forth the oracle or Sura. The hitherto mentally and emotionally normal trader, husband, and father was thus suddenly swept off his feet and carried irresistibly away on a mighty tide. His perturbed spirit now soared to the heights of Heaven, now plunged into the chasms of hell. Moments of ethereal bliss would be followed by periods of profoundest melancholy. "It is related that the Angel Gabriel, who thus far had labored only in the field of Christian endeavor, was chosen by Allah as bearer of the divine revelation to Mohammed. One day, while the trader-poet was wrestling with his doubts among the foothills of Mount Hira, he saw a wondrous apparition floating downward on celestial wings. 'Thou art God's Prophet, and I am Gabriel,' announced the awe-inspiring guest before he departed to receive the blessing of Allah for having so successfully executed the heavenly command. Gabriel was a very valuable ambassador, for through the to-and-fro journeying of this indefatigable messenger Allah was able to remain at ease in heaven, thus keeping up the appearance of intangible, majestic remoteness so necessary for dignified gods. And thus Mohammed came into his own. From that moment Mohammed looked upon himself as Allah's vice regent, through whom Allah's incontestable decrees were to be given to man." (_Mohammed_--_R. F. Dibble._) Mohammed's every doubt had now vanished, his soul was completely at ease, and from his lips there burst the wildly exultant chant, "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet." The obliging Gabriel, he said, had borne him on a winged steed over Medina to the Temple of Jerusalem, and from there he continued his celestial journey until he was carried completely out of this world to those ethereal realms of bliss where the Seven Heavens are. Up and up he flew, while he carefully noted the order of precedence of those prophets whose model he had proclaimed himself to be. Jesus and John were in the second or third--he was not quite sure which--Moses was in the sixth, while Abraham alone had the supreme distinction of residing in the Seventh Heaven. There, at the apex of indescribable glory, Mohammed had entered the awful presence of his Maker, Who, after some chit-chat, charged him to see that all Moslems should hereafter prostrate themselves in prayer toward the Temple of Solomon five times a day. The truth of this narrative rests upon two solid facts: from that day to this, all devout Moslems have continued to bow themselves five times daily in prayer, and sceptics may still see, upon the rock where stands the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, the identical print of the Prophet's foot where he leaped upon the Heavenly Charger. His thoughts, whether conceived in a white heat of frenzy, or with deliberate coolness and sly calculations for the main chance, were probably not written down in any definite manner during his lifetime. It is not even certain whether he could read or write. He delighted in the appellation, "The Illiterate Prophet," possibly on account of his humility and possibly because he knew that inspired ignorance had been the indisputable prerogative of all successful prophets in the past. Indeed, the very fact that he was unlearned was rightly supposed to increase the miraculous nature of his revelations. As he tossed the divine emanations from his lips, they were sometimes recorded by hireling scribes upon palm leaves, leather, stones, the shoulder blades or ribs of camels and goats. But often they were not immediately written down at all; the Prophet would go around spouting forth his utterances to his followers, who, trained from infancy to memorize verses and songs of every sort with infallible precision, would piously commit them to memory. Such is the Koran, and through its instrumentality, Allah the Wise, The Only Wise, revealed his immutable decrees: to the good, the rewards of a Paradise that utterly beggared the Christian Heaven; to the bad, the punishments of a Hell that contained an infinity of such refined tortures of heat, and even of cold as neither the most imaginatively gifted Jew or Christian had yet conceived. Reinach aptly states, "It is humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries and that millions of men are still wasting time in absorbing it." Over one hundred and sixty million are adherents of the Koran. In an objective analysis, excluding the emotional factors of religious bias, Mohammed would as unquestionably be considered a victim of mental disturbances as an individual living in our own day and manifesting the same symptoms. Mohammed was the subject of illusions, hallucinations, and delusions. He had suicidal tendencies, and he had alternating periods of exhilaration and depression. To simply assert that he was an epileptic does not explain these symptoms. For epileptics cannot throw a fit at will. However, we know that ten per cent of epileptics develop mental diseases, no particular psychosis but a loss of mental and moral sense. There are two types of individuals who can produce seizures such as Mohammed was wont to evoke at will. One type is the hysterical, and the other is that degraded individual who for the sake of collecting alms will place a piece of soap in his mouth, enter a crowded street, fall to the ground, and proceed to foam at the mouth and twist and contort himself as an epileptic does. That is the charlatan, the faker, and that brings us to the second aspect of his (Mohammed's) character. "Outside of Arabia, Paganism was in general disrepute. The dissolute and declining Romans were cracking lewd jokes in the very faces of their gods, the myriad followers of Confucius, Buddha and Zoroaster were either too remote or too helpless to matter in one way or another. Talmudic Judaism and Oriental Christianity despised idolatry and worshipped the same Jehovah, even though they disputed with each other, and indeed, among themselves, concerning the various attributes, amorous pursuits, and lineal descendants of the Godhead. Now, to one who chose to regard himself as a prophet, Monotheism had distinct advantages over Polytheism." (_Mohammed--R. F. Dibble._) In the first place, it was rather confusing to attempt to obey the behests of conflicting deities; in the second place, the different prophets of Jehovah in Judaism and Christendom had, so far as Mohammed knew, been uniformly successful, for he was familiar with the glorious history of Abraham, Moses, and David, and he always held to the perverse conception that Jesus was not crucified. However deep in the dumps prophets may have been on occasion, they have invariably believed one thing: victory for their particular cause would inevitably come. Neither an unbroken series of worldly failures nor the chastisement of his god have ever shaken the faith of a first-class prophet in himself or, as he would doubtless prefer to say, in his Divinity. Arabia, broken, unorganized, inglorious, idolistic Arabia, obviously lacked one Supreme Being whose prerogative was greater than all other Supreme Beings, and that Being, in turn, needed a messenger to exploit His supremacy. The messengers who had served Jehovah had certainly prospered well; but Jehovah Himself appeared to be on the decline. His Unity was steadily disintegrating into a paradoxical Trinity. Why, therefore, not give Allah, the leading icon in Arabia, an opportunity? Such considerations quite probably never entered the head of Mohammed with any definiteness; yet his behavior for the rest of his days seems to indicate that these, or similar conceptions, were subconsciously egging him on. Of certain facts, moreover, he was definitely aware. He may have had little or no formal education, but his memory was retentive and capacious, and his caravan journeys, together with the scores of conversations he had held at the yearly fairs, as well as at Mecca, with many cultivated strangers, had packed his mind with a mass of highly valuable matter. In these ways he had learned both the strength and the weakness of the Jews and Christians; their fanatical enthusiasm and despairs; their spasmodic attempts to proselytize as well as the widespread defection from their faiths. "Since his conception of religion was largely personal, for he looked upon Moses, Jesus, and the rest of the prophets as merely capable men who had founded and promulgated religions; and since Arabia had no pre-eminent ruler, why should he not seize the reins of power and carry on the great tradition of prophethood? What a magnificent opportunity beckoned, and how fortunate that he had been the first to recognize the call! By keeping only what was best of the Arabic faith, the Kaaba and the Black Stone, and by a judicious selection of the most feasible ideas which lay imbedded in Jewish and Christian precepts, he might establish a code that would supersede all others, and then might dictate to all Arabs alike. What prophets had done, he would also do and do better." (_Mohammed--R. F. Dibble._) Such are the thoughts of a charlatan and _a_ demagogue. If Mohammed actually had such ideas, we can never know; but a study of his further actions and conquests surely shows that he must have had something of the same trend of thought in mind. His "fits" before the oncoming of a new Sura have been mentioned. Eventually, he so perfected his technique that he could throw a cataleptic fit and produce a message without any previous preparation. He would drum up a crowd with his ludicrous snortings and puffings until the resounding cry, "Inspiration hath descended on the Prophet!" assured him that he had a sufficiently large audience to warrant the out-spurting of a new Sura. While in a room that was obviously empty, he declared that all seats were occupied by angels; he cultivated suave and benign expression; he flattered and astounded his followers by telling them facts which he had presumably acquired through private information; he took the most painstaking care of his person, painting his eyes and perfuming his entire body daily, and wearing his hair long. Ayesha, one of the Prophet's wives, remarked that the Prophet loved three things: women, scent and food, and that he had his heart's content of the first two, but not of the last. In fact, Mohammed, himself, argued that these two innocuous diversions intensified the ecstasy of his prayers. In the Koran's description of heaven so much emphasis was put on food that a jolly Jew objected on the grounds that such continual feasting must of necessity be followed by a purgation. The Prophet, however, swore that it would not even be necessary to blow the nose in Paradise, since all bodily impurities would be carried off by a perspiration "as odoriferous as musk." When his wife Khadija was dying he comforted her with the assurance that she, together with three other well-known women, the Virgin Mary, Potiphar's wife, and "Kulthum," Moses' sister, would occupy his chamber in Paradise. On Mohammed's escape to Medina, a long series of holy wars began which, like all holy wars, were characterized by extreme brutality. The Koran of the period contains such pacific doctrines as these: "The sword is the key of Heaven and Hell; a drop of blood shed in the cause of God, a night spent in arms is of more avail than two months of fasting or prayer; whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven. At the day of Judgment his wounds shall be resplendent as vermilion, and odoriferous as musk; and the loss of limbs shall be supplied by the wings of angels and cherubim ... God loveth not the Transgressors; kill them wheresoever ye find them." Mohammed, no less than many other religiously-minded emperors and tsars, appears to have conducted himself in battle according to the wise principle that a head without a halo is infinitely more desirable than a halo without a head. Yet he was profoundly convinced that the ultimate victory of Islam depended upon the sword. The Koran of this period breathes defiance against the enemies of Islam on almost every page. Its profuse maledictions, once confined to the evildoers of Mecca, now include all unbelievers everywhere. When Mohammed once had captured a fortress inhabited by a tribe of Jews, his judgment was, "The men shall be put to death, the women and children sold into slavery, and the spoil divided amongst the army." Then, trenches were dug, some seven hundred men were marched out, forced to seat themselves in rows along the top of the trenches, beheaded, and then tumbled into a long gaping grave. Meanwhile, the Prophet looked on until, tiring of the monotonous spectacle, he departed to amuse himself with a Jewess whose husband had just perished. He continued these conquests until, at his death, in 632, he was the master of nearly all Arabia and revered almost as a god. Yet, when Omar, his first lieutenant, captured Jerusalem in 636, he ensured the conquered Jews and Christians free exercise of their religion, and the security of their persons and their goods. But when the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they massacred all the Mohammedans, and burnt the Jews alive. It is estimated that 70,000 persons were put to death in less than a week to attest the superior morality of the Christian faith. The successors of Mohammed, the Caliphs, in less than a century conquered Syria, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Turkestan, Spain, Northern Africa, Sicily, and Southern France. Today, 160,000,000 are followers of Mohammed,--a man who began as a humble religious leader, and ended as an adroit politician and powerful general; a man who hid during battles, who often broke faith with friend and foe alike, a charlatan and demagogue of general intellectual incompetency, and a victim of mental disease. JESUS When we come to consider the life of Jesus, a far different and more intricate problem is met with. None but the most illogical and purposely ignorant of religious apologists will admit that the life of Jesus has been misrepresented by his followers to suit their particular aims. Had the followers of the moralist Epictetus or the Rabbi Hillel written lives of these two teachers they would be quite similar to the reputed life of Jesus. The moral sentiments attributed to Christ in the Gospels were borrowed from the Jewish rabbis and the numerous cults that flourished in that age. The birth, death, and resurrection of Christ is quite similar to the myths of that time concerning the savior gods Adonis, Isis, Osiris, Attis, Mithra, and a multitude of others. (_For a full exposition of the subject, the reader is referred to E. Carpenter, "Pagan and Christian Creeds."_) The evidence for the point of view that Jesus was actually a historic character is so slight that such scholars as J. M. Robertson, Prof. W. B. Smith, Professor Drews, Dr. P. L. Couchoud, and many others deny the historic reality of Christ on the ground that the Gospels are totally unreliable as history, that Paul bears no witness to a human Jesus, and that the pagan and Jewish writers are strangely silent about the Messiah Jesus. There are in existence only twenty-four lines from Jewish and Pagan writers referring to Jesus. These include a reference in Tacitus' Annals, and brief references by Suetonius and Pliny the Younger. These three references are considered spurious by many scholars, and even if they were all to be accepted it would mean that the total pagan testimony as to the historicity of Jesus is confined to three very vague and brief references written a century after the reputed time of Jesus. The longest reference to Jesus is in the writings of the Jewish historian, Josephus. The passage referring to Jesus in his "Jewish Antiquities" has been considered as spurious even by conservative scholars. A group of scholars has always deemed it very probable, however, that this spurious reference may have replaced an unfavorable reference to Jesus in the original. Working on this theory, Dr. Eisler has purged of interpolations this work by a painstaking and scholarly investigation. However, it must be pointed out that with regard to Jesus' actual existence, what divided the Christians and non-Christians was not the question whether or not Jesus existed; but the vastly more pertinent and essentially different question whether or not the obscure Galilean carpenter, executed by a Roman governor as king of the Jews, was really a superhuman being who had overcome death, the longed-for-savior of mankind, foretold by the Prophets, the only-begotten Son of God Himself. To the Jews, Jesus was indeed a heretic and an agitator of the lower orders; to the pagans, he was a magician who through sham miracles and with subversive words had incited the people to rebellion, and as a leader of a gang of desperate men had attempted to seize the royal crown of Judæa, as others had done before and after him. The non-Christian writers referred to Jesus as a wizard, a demagogue, and a rebel. We are fortunate, at this date, to have brought to our attention a masterful work by Dr. Robert Eisler, a work which will be as revolutionary to the study of Christianity as was Darwin's "Origin of the Species" in the realms of science; and, similarly, the former work will be the basis upon which much progress will be made in a great field. Dr. Eisler unfolds a great mass of hitherto unknown information concerning the life, the actual appearance, and the doings of Jesus. He definitely establishes the proof of Jesus' actual existence, and makes clear many hitherto obscure utterances and deeds of this Prophet. The descriptions which follow are based on the material in this work of Dr. Eisler, "The Messiah Jesus." In the complete statement of Josephus on Pilate's governorship, we find, "At that time there appeared a certain man of magical power, if it is permissible to call him a man, whom certain Greeks call a Son of God, but his disciples, the True Prophet, said to raise the dead, and heal all diseases. His nature and his form were human; a man of simple appearance, mature age, small in stature, three cubits high, _hunchbacked_, with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows, so that they who see him might be affrighted, with scanty hair but with a parting in the middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazarites, and with an undeveloped beard. Only in semblance was he superhuman for he gave some astonishing and spectacular exhibitions. But again, if I look at his commonplace physique, I, for one, cannot call him an angel. And everything whatsoever he wrought through some invisible power, he wrought through some word and a command. Some said of him, 'Our first law giver is risen again, and displays many healings and magic arts. Others said, 'He is sent from God.' Howbeit in many things he disobeyed the law and kept not the Sabbath according to our fathers' custom. "And many of the multitude followed after him and accepted his teachings, and many souls were excited, thinking that thereby the Jewish tribes might be freed from Roman hands. But it was his custom most of the time to abide over against the city on the Mount of Olives, and there, too, he bestowed his healings upon the people. And there assembled unto him of helpers one hundred and fifty, and a multitude of the mob. "Now, when they saw his power, how he accomplished whatsoever he would by a magic word, and when they had made known to him their will, that he should enter into the city, cut down the Roman troops, and Pilate and rule over us, he disdained us not. And having all flocked into Jerusalem, they raised an uproar against Pilate, uttering blasphemies alike against God and against Cæsar. "And when knowledge of it came to the Jewish leaders, they assembled together, with the high priests and spake, 'We are powerless and too weak to withstand the Romans. But seeing that the 'bow is bent,' we will go and impart to Pilate what we have heard, and we shall be safe, lest he hear of it from others and we be robbed of our substance and ourselves slaughtered, and the children of Israel dispersed. "And they went and imparted the matter to Pilate, and he sent and had many of the multitude slain. And he had that wonder-worker brought up, and after instituting an inquiry concerning him, he passed this sentence upon him, 'He is a malefactor, a rebel, a robber thirsting for the crown.' And they took him and crucified him according to the custom of their fathers." Such is the history of Jesus as contrasted with the myth of Jesus in the New Testament. This description of the actual appearance of Jesus for the first time gives us a clue to the mental and physical characteristics of this Prophet. It must be borne in mind that at the time that Jesus achieved manhood, his people and his nation were under the complete domination of Rome, and oppressed by a race whom the Jews looked upon as cursed barbarians and idolaters. The country was overrun with religious zealots who stormed over the cities and villages preaching the immediate destruction of the world and the proximity of the long-awaited coming of the Messiah. The fact that Jesus had to bear the hard fate of a deformed body may go far in helping to explain this remarkable character. It is common knowledge how frequently weak and deformed children have to suffer from the cruelty and neglect of environment, a factor which cannot but produce a peculiar reaction on the childish mind which has a far-reaching effect in later life. This accounts for Jesus' indifference towards his mother and brothers; of a delicate constitution, he must have suffered from insults a great deal more than the others, which throws some light on the severe punishment demanded by Jesus for comparatively harmless insults. Under such circumstances it is easy to explain how every "neighbor," and next-of-kin, although to the weak naturally an "enemy," came to be included in the sphere of that all-embracing love which is the nucleus of Jesus' teaching. For the cripple has to face the dilemma either of warping everything into a powerful, misanthropic hatred, or else to overcome this feeling of revenge for the high moral superiority of a Plato, Mendelssohn, or a Kant. Jesus chose the latter of the two courses, and we may well imagine that it was not at Golgotha that he had the first occasion to cry out, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!" In the case of Jesus, the whole paradoxical thought of his being the vicarious sin-offering and world redeemer can best be understood as the solution, proposed in the Deutero-Isaiah, of the question which had occupied Job--to wit: Why must the innocent suffer? If the maimed in body refuse to consider himself as forsaken by his God, as a sinner punished for some guilt of which he is unconscious, he cannot but assume that there is such a thing as a vocation to suffering, and believe in the inscrutable plan of salvation in which his own life and sufferings are called upon to play some part. Nothing but this conviction of being thus elected can afford him the desired compensation for his depressed and hampered ego. A repressed nature of this type will, in seeking such a compensation, escape from the harsh reality into the realm of dreams. This is the basis of what the physician recognizes in hysteria, and in the mental disease termed "Dementia Præcox." The glorious daydreams of the millennium, the time of bliss when all strife and all hate will disappear from the earth, when all the crooked will be made straight, find their best explanation in this peculiarity. They console the suffering and heavy-laden for the bitter reality which, in the light of the old messianic prophecies, appears only as a nightmare, promptly to be chased away by the dawn of a new day, a new, a perfect era. The Davidic Jesus, in spite or rather because of his servile form, feels that he is himself the secret incognito king of that wonderful realm, the monarch whom God some time in the future, nay, right here and before the passing of the present generation, will transform while at the same time "revealing" his kingdom. It is but natural that in the mental development of such individuals they should seek to be great, glorious, and to achieve the supernatural, since they, themselves, are denied the ordinary satisfactions. If, in addition, such individuals believe that they have had a divine call, if the disability of the body so preys on the mind that the sensitive structure gives way to delusions, then there results an aberration from the normal and usual processes of thought,--to be sure not the rabid, violent form of mental disease, but yet a deviation from the normal manner of thinking. Such was the case with the Prophet Jesus. Afflicted in body but endowed with a sensitive mind, exposed to an unusual environment of seething unrest and political ferment, and firmly convinced in the current fancies regarding the approaching destruction of the world, the conquest of the Evil Power, and the Reign of God, Jesus became the subject of a delusion that he was the only true Messiah who had been presaged by the prophets of old. The greatest difficulty encountered in every attempt to present the life and work of Jesus according to the evidence of his own words preserved in the sources is the sharp, irreconcilable contradiction between the so-called "fire and sword" sayings on the one side, and the beatitudes on the peacemakers and the meek, the prohibition to kill, to be angry, to resist wrong, and the command to love one's enemy, contained in the Sermon on the Mount, on the other. In the early period of his messianic career, the period of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was a thorough quietist. But if we realize that the delusion that he was "The Messiah" had entered his mind so vehemently that he firmly believed that the end of the world was imminent, and that it was his duty to save as many as possible, we can understand his acquiescence to the violence which followed. Moreover, he was clearly forced to the fatal road by the idea that he must set on foot a movement of hundreds of thousands, the picture of the exodus from Egypt with the fantastic figures given in the Old Testament. The Messianic rising he was to initiate could not be regarded as realized if he left the country with a band of some hundred elect. If he wished, however, to put at least two-fifths of the population in motion, the method of sending out messengers had proved altogether unsatisfactory. He must try the effect of his own words in a place where, and at a time when, he was sure to reach the greatest multitude of his people. That could only be in Jerusalem, at the time of the great pilgrimage at the feast of the Passover. Moreover, the desired result could only be obtained of course if he openly proclaimed himself to be the Messiah. Then it was that the Prophet of quiet reversed his words and armed his disciples. Jesus was fully aware of the illegality of this arming of his disciples and of his own direction to purchase a weapon; none the less, he saw no escape from this bitter necessity. The prediction of the prophet must be fulfilled, according to which the righteous servant of the Lord must be numbered among the lawless transgressors. True it is that he did not lead the revolt himself, but tarried with his disciples at the Last Supper at a house near by the fighting. When he becomes aware that his secret hiding place on the Mount of Olives has been betrayed, Jesus hopes for a miracle from God up to the last. Captured, he is led away to the palace of the high priest's family on the Mount of Olives, where, while Jesus is questioned by the high priest, Peter, unrecognized, warms himself at the fire in the courtyard and thrice denies his master. He was then taken to the Roman governor's court-martial, where sentence was passed and he was led off to the place of execution and there deserted by all his followers except a few Galilean women. Then was heard the last despairing cry of the desolate, dying martyr, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Thus ended the career of this deformed Prophet with the sensitive deluded mind; a martyr who attempted only to effect reforms amongst his own people, in his own small locality. MOSES With regard to the life, the deeds, and the words of the Prophet Moses we have no history; only myth and legend. The existence of Moses is not demonstrated by the Biblical books which are falsely ascribed to him, yet we cannot be certain that such a character did not exist. In any event, we must judge his character from the writings ascribed to him. The legend of the child cast upon the waters is to be found in the folklore of all nations. This legend, concerning Moses, relates that one day Pharaoh's daughter, while bathing with her maids in the Nile, found a Hebrew child exposed on the waters in obedience to a new decree. She adopted the boy, gave him an Egyptian name, and brought him up in her palace as a prince. She had him educated and the fair inference is that he was schooled in the culture of the Egyptians. The royal lady made of the Hebrew slave-child an Egyptian gentleman. Yet, although his face was shaved, and outwardly he appeared to be an Egyptian, at heart he remained a Hebrew. One day, when he was grown, Moses went slumming among his own people to look at their burdens, and he spied an Egyptian smiting a Hebrew. He was so overcome by passion at this scene that he killed the man on the spot. The crime became known, there was a hue and cry raised, and the king had a search made for Moses with the intention of slaying him. With all hope of a career in Egypt ended, Moses escaped to the Peninsula of Sinai, and entered the family of an Arab sheik. The Peninsula of Sinai lies clasped between two arms of the Red Sea. It is a wilderness of mountains covered with a thin, almost transparent coating of vegetation which serves as pasture to the Bedouin flocks. Among the hills that crown the high plateau there is one which at the time of Moses was called the "Mount of God." It was holy ground to the Egyptians, and also to the Arabs, who ascended as pilgrims and drew off their sandals when they reached the top. Now is it strange that Sinai should have excited reverence and dread? It is indeed a weird land. Vast and stern stand the mountains, with their five granite peaks pointing to the sky. Avalanches like those of the Alps, but of sand, not of snow, rush down their naked sides with a clear tinkling sound. A peculiar property resides in the air, the human voice can be heard at a surprising distance and swells out into a reverberating roar, and sometimes there rises from among the hills a dull booming sound like the distant firing of heavy guns. Let us attempt to realize what Moses must have felt when he was driven out of Egypt into such a harsh and rugged land. Imagine this man, the adopted son of a royal personage, who was accustomed to all the splendor of the Egyptian court, to the busy turmoil of the streets of the metropolis, to reclining in a carpeted gondola or staying with a noble at his country house. In a moment all is changed. He dwells in a tent, alone on the mountain side, a shepherd with a crook in his hand. He is married to the daughter of a barbarian; his career is at an end. He realizes that never again will he enter that palace where once he was received with honor, where now his name is uttered only with contempt. Never again will he discourse with grave and learned men in his favorite haunts, and never again will he see the people of his tribe whom he loves and for whom he endures this miserable fate. They will suffer but he will not help them; they will mourn, but he will not hear them. In his dreams he hears and sees them. He hears the whistling of the lash and the convulsive sobs and groans. He sees the poor slaves toiling in the fields and sees the daughters of Israel carried off to the harem with struggling arms and streaming hair. He sees the chamber of the woman in labor, the seated, shuddering, writhing form, the mother struggling against maternity, dreading her release, for the king's officer is standing by the door, ready, as soon as a male child is born, to put it to death. The Arabs who gave him shelter were also children of Abraham, and they related to him legends of the ancient days. They told him of the patriarchs who lay buried in Canaan with their wives; they spoke of the God whom his fathers had worshiped. Then, as one who returns to a long lost home, the Egyptian returned to the faith of the desert, to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As he wandered on the mountain heights, he looked to the west and saw a desert; beyond it lay Canaan, the home of his ancestors, a land of peace and soon to be a land of hope. For now, new ideas rose tumultuously within him. _He began to see visions and to dream dreams._ He heard voices and beheld no form; he saw trees which blazed with fire and yet were not consumed. He became a prophet and entered into the ecstatic stage. _That is, he began to have illusions and hallucinations._ Dwelling on the misery and suffering of his people, his mind becomes deluded with the idea that he has been chosen by his new-found God to liberate his people from the tyranny of their oppressors. Meanwhile the king had died, and a new Pharaoh had ascended the throne. Moses returns to Egypt to carry out the great designs which he had formed. He announces to the elders of his people, to the heads of the houses, and the sheiks of the tribes that the God of Abraham had appeared to him in Sinai and had revealed his true name. It was Jehovah. He had been sent by Jehovah to Egypt to bring away his people, to lead them to Canaan. In company with his brother, Aaron, Moses asked Pharaoh to liberate the children of Israel, but after several vain attempts to dazzle Pharaoh with his skill as a magician, he was met with an obstinate refusal. Moses before Pharaoh descends to the level of a vulgar sorcerer, armed with a magic wand, whose performances only draw our smiles. This charlatanry having been unsuccessful, the wizard connives with his accomplice Jehovah to have inflicted upon the Egyptians the ten plagues. Then the loving and kind Father, having killed innumerable Egyptians, as the story relates, so terrorizes the minds of his other children in Egypt, that Pharaoh is finally convinced that he must allow the Chosen People to leave his domain. The Israelites quitted Egypt carrying away with them the gold and silver of their oppressors. They then entered the desert. The magic art of Moses enabled them to pass dry-footed through the Red Sea, whereas the Pharaoh who was pursuing them was engulfed with his whole army. Again the Chosen People are liberated by means of the death of multitudes of Egyptians. Truly, Jehovah at that time must have loved them well, or did some other Deity form the Egyptians? It matters not that the crossing of the Red Sea and the drowning of Pharaoh are romantic incidents, not only unknown to the Egyptian texts, but even to the earliest of Hebrew prophets. It matters not, for the story is the important thing, even though it is an inspired story, inspired by the Jehovah who tortured and killed the Egyptians to show how well he loved _his_ people. This Wild West story, with its multitudes of slaughters, proceeds to the wilderness of Sinai; and there again, the Prophet Moses goes into a secret seance and finally announces that God had delivered laws to him, which had been issued from the clouds. What a great showman was this Prophet! Barnum must have been a devoted admirer of Moses, for Moses was the first to create the two-ring circus; for these laws given by Jehovah are described in two places, and the circus varies in both places. Exodus XX and Exodus XXXIV are the two texts which differ considerably. To further convince the Children of Israel, Moses tells them the story of how he had cajoled Jehovah into allowing him to see what no man had hitherto seen, the form of Jehovah, for it appears that Jehovah was so pleased with this murderer, charlatan, and wizard that he allowed him to glimpse His hind quarters. At least, Jehovah had a sense of humor! What a bag of tricks this Prophet had at his command! The Prophet waves his arms and tugs at his gown, and lo and behold! The Lord has spoken! The following is a specimen of the revelations which the Lord is supposed to have dictated to Moses. (Leviticus XIV, 25.) "The priest shall take some of the blood of the trespass offering and put it upon the tip of the _right_ ear of him who is to be cleansed and upon the thumb of his _right_ hand, and upon the great toe of his _right_ foot, and the priest shall pour of the oil into the palm of his own _left_ hand and shall sprinkle with his _right_ finger some of the oil that is in his _left_ hand seven times before the Lord." Surely, it must have been a God with a superior mentality who dictated this, for it surpasses our feeble comprehension. And we can well imagine Jehovah's wrath when the priest confuses his _right_ and _left_. Twirling his arms again, Moses gives forth this oracle (Numbers XV, 37-41): "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, 'Speak unto the Children of Israel, and bid them that they make them a fringe upon the corner of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of each corner a cord of blue, etc., etc." Jehovah chooses Blue as the divine color. Royal Purple. Divine Blue. Then there is the familiar myth of the Prophet's tapping of the rock to bring forth water in the desert; the story of the manna; the tale of the doves. Thus can the fabled life of Moses be divided into two stages, the early period of illusions, hallucinations, and delusions, and the later stage of wizardry, charlatanry, and demagoguery. Neither must we think that we moderns are the first to peer through this sham, for what the Israelites thought of these laws appears from the bitter criticism of Moses and Aaron, which the Haggadah put into the mouth of the rebel Korah. "When we were given the ten commandments, each of us learnt them directly from Mount Sinai; there were only the ten commandments and we heard no orders about 'offering cake' or 'gifts to priests' or 'tassels.' It was only in order to usurp the dominion for himself and to impart honor to his brother Aaron, that Moses added all this." Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed--these prophets whose adherents number hundreds of millions, about whom there has been built up those vast systems of theology,--what is there of the divine in their characters? What supernatural in their deeds? What wisdom poured forth from their lips which did not come from other philosophers? What immense structures have been founded on these shifting sands, on this morass of ignorance and childish fable? How long can these structures endure, aided by the bolstering up of the theologists, and how long must it be before the light of reason will pierce these foundations of blindness and force them to topple over? How much longer before humanity can begin to build on a sound foundation? Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed; revolutionists three. Moses at the head of a weak, squabbling, and disgruntled group of Hebrew desert marauders. Jesus sanctioning the insurrection against Rome. Mohammed at the head of his Arabian marauders. If the freethinkers firmly believe that in them dwell the hope for a better humanity, for an exhilarated progress, for universal freedom and liberty for all mankind, and emancipation from fear and superstition, then they, too, must destroy. They must first undo the wrong before they can proceed to build on a right foundation. They must build on the corner stone that all religion is human in its origin, erroneous in its theories, and ridiculous in its threats and rewards. Religion is the greatest impediment to the progress of human happiness. CHAPTER IV SOUNDNESS OF A FOUNDATION FOR A BELIEF IN A DEITY _It is better to bury a delusion and forget it than to insult its memory by retaining the name when the thing has perished_. F. H. BRADLEY. _A thousand miraculous happenings have been honoured by the testimony of the ancients, which in later times under a more exacting and sceptical scrutiny can no longer be believed. Inherent in man's nature is his disposition to be gulled.... Emotion is encouraged to supplant cool reason, fanaticism to supplant tolerance. Not by such means can our race be saved_. LLEWELYN POWYS. Our interplanetary visitor is firmly convinced that all religion, no matter what its antiquity or its modernity may be, is an invention of our groping earthly minds. It occurs to him that it would be interesting and proper to lay aside all theology, all creed, all the superficial trappings placed by man about his conceptions of a deity, and consider only the basic God-idea. The literature on the subject revealed to him that even on this broad and basic principle not all religionists were agreed. He found a threefold classification: (1) Those who held to the belief in an anthropomorphic personal God who was benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. (2) Those who saw in the constitution of our universe an impersonal Supreme Power, who had created the universe, but who had not given us any revelation, and thus has no need for worship by prayer and sacrifice. (3) Those who very recently conceived of the deity as a "cosmic force," an "ultimate," or as a mathematical or physical law. Such are the hypotheses of Jeans and Eddington. The Martian set about, therefore, with the principle that, "God is a hypothesis, and as such, stands in need of proof." (1) The belief in a personal God: The Martian, as our guest, had by this time had ample opportunity to survey our civilization, and to acquaint himself with the things with which God in His goodness had endowed His earthly children. A proponent of a personal God informs him that his deity is an infinite personal being of consciousness, intelligence, will, good, unity, and Beauty; the Supreme, the infinite personality, who was loving, benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient. Like the American from Missouri, the visitor hastened to see for himself the marvelous workings of such an exalted being, for surely such a being, with such attributes as he was credited with, would certainly be in an excellent position to bestow great gifts upon his earthly children. The Martian is informed that the vast majority of our inhabitants, no matter what their geographical distribution may be, are suffering from a "financial depression" brought on by the last World War. War and cruelty are synonymous in the mind of our seeker for God; and immediately, there arises a conflict between the conception of an omnipotent, all-wise and loving God and one who would permit war and cruelty. Fearing that he has not comprehended the meaning of an omnipotent being, he turns to the lexicon for verification, only to learn that it means an all-powerful being. How, then, could an omnipotent being permit wholesale and private murder? Is He not rather a demon than a God? On the other hand, if this being is not omnipotent, then He is a useless god, and there is no need for all the fears which religion breeds, no need for creed and worship. Every war, particularly this last one, is an indictment of God. "God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world," is seemly only to minds drugged with an irrational creed. "If there is a God, he is quite careless of human well-being or human suffering. The deaths of a hundred thousand men mean no more to him than the deaths of a hundred thousand ants. A couple of million men locked in a death struggle on the battlefield is only a replica of the struggle that has been going on in the animal world throughout time. If there be a God, he made, he designed all this. He fashioned the hooks for the slaughter, the teeth for the tearing, the talons for destruction, and man with his multiplied weapons of destruction has but imitated his example. A world without God, and in which humanity is gradually learning the way to better things, is an inspiration to renewed effort after the right. A world such as this, with God, is enough to drive insane all with intelligence enough to appreciate the situation." (_Chapman Cohen: "War, Civilization and the Churches."_) When the Martian investigated the annals of the World War he found, despite the opportunities Providence had had of showing its benevolence, the affair of the sinking of the _Lusitania_, the torpedoing of hospital ships, vessels that were not engaged in fighting but in bringing home wounded men who had fought in "God's Cause." He found descriptions of the slaughter of men and women and children in air raids, and he naturally concludes that the "providence of God" is an insult to the earthly intelligence. Greatly disturbed, he picks up one of our newspapers and the stories of hate and racial antagonism rear their ugly heads. These, together with jealousy and fear, seem to him to be the outstanding features of our attitudes. A benevolent, loving, omnipotent father, guiding our destinies, yet allowing such monstrosities to exist! The conundrum grows deeper as he proceeds. It is a bright day, and the Martian is aware of a head-ache brought on by the effort to understand the ways of earthlings, and therefore decides to drive through the city streets. Yet this drive affords him no relaxation, for on every side two diametrically opposed sights meet his keen eyes--luxury and poverty. Poverty and starvation, yet the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father which art in Heaven, give us this day our daily bread!" No Martian father would allow his children to starve; if he did, the law would fine him and imprison him. Since these earthlings are neglected by their Heavenly Father, and are powerless to indict him, the least they could do would be to stop paying tribute to him. If the God of these earthlings bothers not about them, why should they trouble about God? The Son of God who could once create a miraculous batch of fish to satisfy a few fishermen, can do nothing to help these starving millions! Aloud he muses, "Is there no place on Earth which is free from this contradiction?" His automobile happens to stop in front of an immense edifice marked "Hospital," and his curiosity is sufficiently aroused to cause him to alight and enter. The physician in charge courteously asks his distinguished visitor to inspect this refuge for those suffering with pain. He remembers that a religionist had told him that disease is a visitation of the Lord for our sins, in the same breath with which he had added that the Lord was loving and compassionate. If that were so, then this was the ideal place to witness the infinite goodness and compassion of the Creator of all earthlings. But, the first scene to meet his gaze was that of a woman in childbirth. The torture, the excruciating pain, and the mental anguish of the human female before his eyes, defied his Martian power of expression. This process of birth, it was explained to him, was not a pathological one, nor a disease, but a physiological function. To this, the Martian could not refrain from replying, "From your own words, Doctor, it is readily understood that your women experience a torture more acute, more nerve-wracking, and of longer duration than your Jesus experienced during his crucifixion. And your world commiserates and sheds oceans of tears when they contemplate the anguish of Jesus on the cross; but no mention is made of the agony which is the fate of every woman who brings another human being into this 'best of worlds.'" "But, my dear Martian," exclaims the physician, "the Heavenly Father has ordained that in anguish shall woman bring forth her young." The other deliberated on the compassion of the Benevolent Father in silence, and continued on his rounds through the hospital. Nearby was the crib containing a baby of a few days, suffering with a congenital heart disease. The infant's lips were blue, so was the body blue, and the gasping for breath and heaving of the small chest were pitiful to behold. "This infant," nonchalantly remarked the physician, "was born with a greatly defective heart. It will live for a few days, it will thirst for air, it will have intense air-hunger, the lungs will fill with fluid and then it will drown in its own secretions." The Martian recalled the time he had plunged under the water and remained there too long; vividly, he remembered the thirst for air, the seeming bursting of the lungs, the compression and vise-like grip of the muscles of the throat and chest, and he could not help exclaiming, "Benevolent, Compassionate Being!" The physician continued, "This child," pointing to a beautiful, robust boy of ten years, "was in perfect health, until he fell in the street and received a minor cut which the parents treated with home remedies, but which in a few days was diagnosed as Tetanus." And the doctor went on to explain that the compassion of the Lord is great when this occurs, for the child gets convulsions, the jaws become locked, and beads of cold sweat stand out on the child's forehead in his anguish; the convulsions increase in severity and in duration so that finally they are continuous and the child lies with the heels and back of the head only touching the bed, the rest of the body is arched. The convulsions then become so severe that the body is so bent backwards at times that the head and trunk touch the heels. The misery of such a child is sufficient to cause a physician to lose his reason. Again the Martian murmurs, "Verily, the compassion of the Lord is beyond understanding." The child in the next bed had just become paralyzed by an attack of poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis). The Martian observes how the Lord in His compassion saved a certain number of these children upon whom he vents His anger for their sins, by inflicting upon them this hideous disease. He saves their lives, but to serve as an everlasting reminder, as a covenant between them and their Lord, He paralyzes their limbs. The spectacle of these children attempting to move, making intense effort to move paralyzed limbs, was the most revolting and heart-breaking sight that he had ever witnessed. This time, too, the Martian remarked, "Verily, the Lord in His infinite wisdom and goodness strange tasks does perform." The physician then informed him of the many men and women who have died of cancer. A large number of these individuals had reached a period in life where they could just afford to relax from their struggles for mere sustenance; men and women who had reached a calm lake after journeying through troubled and tortuous waters; who had fought the "good fight," and had won the just reward of resting after their labors. But no, the Lord must trouble them for their sins. A group of these sufferers is shown to the Martian, and the normal course of this disease is explained. This time all he can do is to protest that he firmly asserts that not one of our savage chiefs, even were he of the most primitive tribe, of the cruelest imagination, of the most base and insane nature, would nor could conceive of such torture as the Loving Father conceived when he decided upon cancer as a visitation for our sins. The roasting of a witch alive is but a mere trifle compared to the long-drawn-out agony, the slow wasting, the anguish of a cancer patient watching himself sink to death. And when death mercifully releases this sufferer from his hellish torture the preacher murmurs, "Lord, thy will be done." The Martian talks for a few moments with a sufferer from this disease and ascertains that the latter is a devout and true religionist, that he has been a good, moral church-goer, and has lived strictly according to the tenets of his creed, that he firmly and passionately believes that he has lived so that he will merit the reward of heaven, an everlasting sojourn in a land where there is no pain and suffering. And yet, this devout religionist, when he was informed that he had an incurable cancer, traveled the length and breadth of his land, from one surgeon to another, allowing himself to be cut to pieces, in order that he might remain on this earth but a moment longer. To stay and suffer the tortures of the damned when he might go to heaven and get his reward in the land where there is no pain! "I wonder," mused the Martian, "did the grim spectre of death finally instill a grain of scepticism into his mind?" Later, in the quiet of his chambers, he reviews the day's impressions--cruelty, hate, fear, jealousy, racial antagonism, poverty, luxury, disease, pain, superstition, church, religion, and intolerance. "If we suppose that the universe is the creation of an Omnipotent and Benevolent God, it becomes necessary to ask how pain and evil arise. Pain and evil are either real or unreal. If they are real then God, who, being omnipotent, was bound by no limitations and constrained by no necessities, willfully created them. But the being who willfully creates pain and evil cannot be benevolent. If they are unreal, then the error which we make when we think them real is a real error. There is no doubt that we believe we suffer. If the belief is erroneous, then it follows that God willfully called falsehood into existence and deliberately involved us in unnecessary error. It follows once again that God cannot be benevolent. "If we regard pain and evil as due to the wickedness of man and not as the creation of God, we are constrained to remember that man himself is one of God's creations (God being conceived as all creative), and received his wickedness, or his capacity for it, from whom? If we say that man had no wickedness to begin with but willfully generated wickedness for himself, we have to face the double difficulty of accounting for: (a) How man, who is an emanation from God, can will with a will of his own which is not also a piece of God's will; and (b) how a benevolent God could, assuming pain and evil to be a purely human creation, deliberately allow them to be introduced into a world that knew them not, when it was open to Him to prevent such introductions." (_C. E. M. Joad, "Mind and Matter."_) He had seen that crime and immorality exist now, just as they had existed before the belief in one personal God, and just as they promise to exist beyond our time. He had scrutinized evidence revealing the incontestable fact that most criminals were religious, and absolutely and proportionately, a smaller number of criminals were non-believers in a personal deity. Judging by these alone, a belief in a benevolent, loving, omniscient, omnipotent, and compassionate Being could not be sustained. Furthermore, if such a God ever existed, he certainly would have revealed his true religion to the first man, Adam. If he required prayer to satisfy his vanity, he surely would have told Adam how, when, why, and where to pray. Then again, once having neglected to inform his first model about all this, since He is omnipotent, he would certainly have instilled into the minds of men "the" true creed so that no doubt could have ever entered into any one's mind. What a universe of suffering He would have saved! The Martian is aware that a great number of earthlings hold that every event must have a cause, therefore the Universe must have had a cause, which cause was God. Everything as it now exists in the universe is the result of an infinite series of causes and effects. Everything that happens is the result of something else that happened previously and so on backwards to all eternity. Applying this reasoning that everything is the effect of some cause, and that a cause is the effect of some other causes, the theists work back from effect to cause and from cause to effect until they reach a First Cause. By predicating a First Cause, however, the theist removes the mystery a stage further back. This First Cause they assume to be a cause that was not caused and this First Cause is God. Such a belief is a logical absurdity, and is an example of the ancient custom of creating a mystery to explain a mystery. If everything must have a cause, then the First Cause must be caused and therefore: Who made God? To say that this First Cause always existed is to deny the basic assumption of this "Theory." Moreover, if it is reasonable to assume a First Cause as having always existed, why is it unreasonable to assume that the materials of the universe always existed? To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy. The effect noted in any particular case is not of necessity related to a single cause, and science gives no assurance that causes and effects can be traced backward to a simple First Cause. A man is so unfortunate as to contract pneumonia. What is the cause? An infection of the respiratory tract by the pneumococcus. It is not quite so simple as to ultimate causation. The person afflicted was harboring these germs in his nose and throat, and his resistance was weakened by wetting his feet. The day was cold and his shoes were thin. The humidity and temperature were such that rain fell. The temperature and humidity were caused by air currents hundreds of miles distant from the scene, and so ad infinitum. In this series of complications where may we discern a first cause? When applied to the much more difficult problem of physical phenomena, we can conceive of an endless cycle of causes, but we cannot conceive of a First Cause. "Cause and effect are not two separate things, they are the same thing viewed under two separate aspects.... If cause and effect are the expressions of a relation, and if they are not two things, but only one, under two aspects, 'cause' being the name for the related powers of the factors, and 'effect' the name for their assemblage, to talk, as does the theist, of working back along the chain of causes until we reach God, is nonsense." (_Chapman Cohen: "Theism or Atheism."_) A great many theists attempt to deduce the existence of an invisible creator and ruler of the universe from the visible features of nature such as the design, regularity of movement and structure, and the various aspects of beauty which one may find in studying natural objects. This argument from design in nature has been overruled by a study of the evolutionary processes. Paley based his argument on the assertion of a mind behind phenomena, the workings of which could be seen in the forms of animal life. The theists no longer use Paley's original arguments, but a great deal of the theistic arguments are still based on his assumptions. From the humanistic point of view, and the theist bases his entire arguments from design in nature from the humanistic view, an understanding of the merciless character of organic evolution shows clearly that the forces at work in nature are full of waste, there are numerous plans that are futile, there is an unrelenting preying of one form of life upon the other, and it is not always the "higher" form that is victor; there are myriads of living organisms coming to life only to perish before reaching an age at which they can play their part in the perpetuation of the species; and there is a universe of pain and misery that serves no useful purpose. The impartial eye of science observes ugliness as well as beauty, disorder as well as order, in nature. If there is evidence of design in a rose, there is at least as much evidence of design in the tubercle bacillus, and the tetanus bacillus. Whatever in nature produced the peacock produced the itch-mite; whatever produced man produced the spirochete of syphilis. If this earth is evolving for the better, the past is still vivid in all its cruelty. The old and familiar argument from design and beauty in nature is so inconsistent with the facts at hand, that most theists have abandoned this attitude, and the retreat from this position has been turned into a veritable rout by the steady advance of scientific knowledge. God could by exercising His omnipotence reveal His existence with overpowering conviction at any moment; yet, men have been searching for centuries for just the slightest evidence of His presence. The Martian, moreover, holds that the entire argument is irrelevant, for even if he grants that there is a supernatural being that fashions that which we behold at work in the universe, how can we say that he designed all this without first knowing what his intention was? Only by knowing the intention in the mind of a supernatural being before the act, can we infer that something was designed. When the theist finds intention and design in nature he is but reading his own feeling and desires into nature. Considering the universe as a whole, the Martian fails to find anything that suggests a conscious and purposive god, and certainly nothing to suggest a being that considers the welfare of man. The individual is not much interested in God as manifested in nature, what he is vainly seeking is _God as Providence_; he is seeking an intelligence that his clergy tell him is devoted to his welfare, an intelligence that will guide his stumbling efforts, that will relieve him from war and misery, that will shield the innocent from pain and poverty. He finds that his clergy cannot point to one clear trace of the action of God in human affairs. In the whole long record of man's career the finger of God cannot be found pointing to one well-substantiated fact. The Martian considers the theistic argument that it would be impossible to have an orderly universe merely resulting from the inherent properties of natural forces, and that "directivity" is necessary to keep the universe on its present track. Keeping in mind the scientific conception of the universe and the knowledge at hand concerning the atoms and their properties, it is inconceivable that any other arrangement than the present one should have resulted. The Martian cannot marvel as most earthlings do that the present order exists as it does; the marvel to him would be if any other order should be or that any radical alteration in it should occur. He perceives that the state of the universe at any moment is the result of all the conditions then prevailing, and that the natural forces possess the capacity to produce the universe as we see it. It matters not what the ultimate nature of these forces may be, electrons, protons, electricity, or wave energy; these material forces possess the capacity to produce the universe as we see it. If these forces do not possess this capacity it is indeed difficult for the Martian to conceive in what way even a "directing and supreme mathematician" an "ultimate," or any supernatural power however designated could produce this capacity. Unless the capacity for producing the universe as we see it existed in the atoms themselves, no amount of direction could have produced it. The property of the atom and its combinations to produce the material universe is therefore inherent in the atoms themselves and does not necessitate the operation of a deity. The order manifest in the universe is the necessary consequence of the persistence of force. If a supernatural, intelligent force existed, the Martian believes that the claims of the theist could in no way be better substantiated than if this controlling force would in some way manifest an inhibitive influence and prevent certain things occurring which would have transpired but for his interference. Such manifestations have not occurred. It is impossible for the theist to show any instance in which the normal consequences of known forces did not transpire in which the aberration could not be accounted for by the operation of other known forces. A "law" of nature is not a statute drawn up by a legislator; it is the interpretation and the summation which we give to the observed facts. The phenomena which we observe do not act in a particular manner because there is a law; but we state the "law" because they act in that particular manner. It cannot be said that the laws of nature are the result of a lawmaker; it cannot be affirmed that a supreme intelligence told things in nature to act just that way and no other. If the theist claims that a supreme intelligence issued laws for his own pleasure and without any reason, then he must admit that there is something which is not subject to law and the train of natural law is interrupted. If it is claimed that a supreme intelligence had a reason for the laws which he gave, the reason being to create the best possible universe, then it follows that God himself was subject to law and there is no advantage in introducing God as an intermediary. This contention would make it appear that there is a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve the purpose of the theist since he is not the ultimate lawgiver. The anthropomorphic conception of God, our Martian finds, is now denied by most cultured theists; nevertheless, they still maintain a belief in a deity endowed with consciousness. Professor H. N. Wieman states that, "God is superhuman, but not supernatural. He is a present, potent, operative, observable reality.... He is more worthy of love than any other beloved ... He is one to whom men can pray and do pray, and who answers prayer." This can be understood to be not greatly removed from the fundamentalists' conception of God, but when he continues to say, "God is that interaction between individuals, groups, and ages which generates and promotes the greatest possible mutuality of good," and "it responds to prayer and is precisely what answers prayer, when prayer is answered," the personal "He" has suddenly changed to the unpersonal "It." Emotions and intelligence are connected with nerve structures in all sentient beings that we have experience and knowledge of. How can we attribute these qualities to a being who is described to us as devoid of any nerve structure? In former ages the theist saw God in the color and construction of a flower, in the starry heavens, and in a sunset or sunrise. The biologists have driven the theists from this misconception, the physicists have explained the phenomena of sunset and sunrise, and with the advance of astronomy the heavens no longer proclaim the glory of God, and the theistic arguments have shifted from worlds to atoms. At the present moment the vision of God has narrowed down to a perception of the divine intelligence noted in the design of the atom. Astronomy, physics, geology, chemistry, medicine, psychology, ethics, aesthetics, and the social sciences have left no room for a theistic explanation of the universe. The mystics who proclaim God in their intuitive trances are being crowded out into the light of reason by the researches of psychologists. There are still many gaps in our knowledge, and if the theist persists in finding the manifestation of a supreme being in these vague zones of our present ignorance, he is at the mercy of the science of the future. Science is concerned with mind as much as it is with the material aspects of atoms and stars, hence the sciences of psychology, ethics, and aesthetics. The entire universe is the province of science and it is rapidly providing a scientific interpretation of all the contents of the universe. It may well be a few more centuries before the scientific explanation is partially complete, but it must be kept in mind that science as we conceive the term is less than 2500 years old, and out of this infantile period, at least 1000 years must be deducted for the intellectual stagnation of the dark ages. In tracing the retreat of the clergy from the arguments from the First Cause, the arguments from design, causation, and directivity, the Martian recalls the words of Vivian Phelips, "How is it that God allowed earnest and learned divines to commit themselves to arguments in proof of His existence, the subsequent overthrow of which has been a potent cause for unbelief?" "The finite mind cannot expect to understand the Infinite," retorts a theist to our Martian. "What manner of reasoning is this," asks our Martian, "that denies my finite mind the right to question the 'proofs' of the existence of an Infinite, when these same 'proofs' are derived by finite minds? The theist cannot infer God from the cosmic process until he can discover some feature of it which is unintelligible without him." (2) The belief in a deity, but the rejection of revelations, theology, priestcraft, and church. To the Martian the opinion held by these individuals presented two difficulties. First, if the adherents of this hypothesis considered their deity as a providence which took an active part in the life of this world, then the objections heretofore stated against belief in a personal god are still valid. Secondly, if they considered this being as only a creator, who then leaves this world to its own resources, they are only assuming a philosophical existence behind phenomena. Such a being, they believe, they deduce intellectually. But actually who created this creator? They assume a god who remains always hidden behind phenomena, but such a god has no connection with the God that the religious man worships and to whom he prays for guidance and for blessings, for actual interference in the life of this world. Such theories impress our visitor as but a feeble attempt at new concepts of the same hypothetical deity, and it seemed to him that we already had sufficient ideas of God to trouble our earthly minds. (3) The god of the Physicists. It was brought to the Martian's attention that two scientists, Sir Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer, and Sir James Jeans, a mathematical physicist, had still another concept of God. According to Eddington, "Phenomena all boil down to a scheme of symbols, of mathematical equations." He admits that this mathematics of nature does not explain anything. They do not define reality, they only define the relations that exist between the phenomena of reality. So far does he go, and then his limited mind, our Martian perceives, meets an obstacle that he cannot explain. He, therefore, abandons the formula and returns to the human mind which has conceived this formula. From the "spiritual essence of Man's nature," he assumes the spiritual nature of the cosmos itself, which he finds in what religion has known for centuries as God. To him, it is impossible to explain the universe except in terms of spirit. Professor Jeans insists that in the equations which reveal the relations between phenomena, there may reside also the revelation of the ultimate which these phenomena express. He believes that there may exist "a great architect of the universe who is a pure mathematician." However, the Martian argues, "Is it not a fact that in your earthly experience, you have created your gods in your own image? Your savages created God in the only fashion their mental capacities could supply, in the shape of an idol; now the modern physicist creates his god in the light of his own intimate vision, which is that of a mathematician! This is just another attempt to formulate an hypothetical existence of a supernatural being." The theologians, by this time thoroughly aroused, lay down a verbal barrage, and learned Jesuits place before the visitor a recent publication entitled, "The Question and Answer" by Hilaire Belloc. The author, acting as the mouthpiece of the Roman Catholic Church, attempts to prove two things: namely, whether God is, and that the witness to Revelation is the Roman Catholic Church. Were it not for the fact that the work was published by permission of the Church, one could logically suppose from its arguments that the author was attempting to give the answer, "No," to the question propounded, as to whether God is. There is one sentence, however, to which the Martian agrees: this one, "But religions, though not very numerous, considering the vast spaces of time over which we can study them, and the vast number of millions to which they apply, differ and contradict each other; on which account, any one approaching this problem for the first time, and being made acquainted at the outset with the variety of religions, would naturally conclude that every religion is man-made, and every religion an illusion." On reading the opening remarks, the Martian exclaims, "This earthling plainly tells us at the beginning that he will make his theories fit in with his conclusion! He informs us that he does not seek the truth, no matter where it may lead, but he only deems it necessary to fit ideas, no matter how distorted, in order that the final conclusion will simulate what he deliberately sets out to prove." Mr. Belloc's statement, "How many men will agree that wanton cruelty, treason to family or the state, falsehood for private gain, breach of faith, are admirable?" strikes the Martian as absurd when viewed in the light of the historical annals of the Church itself. Mr. Belloc's creed must have considered these very vices as virtues, judging from the actions of his Church. In calling the Roman Catholic Church the witness to revelation, the author continues with, "Yet, that it should suffer from men's hatred and persecution." If God has divinely ordained this institution as His Church on earth, and in His omnipotence and omniscience allows this Church to be hated, then how do the religionists assume that their god is a god of love? The author tells us that He is a god of hate, such a god as was conceived of by the barbarians and the Hebrews--cruel, vengeful, and monstrous. Does not this apologist confuse his god with his devil? Then again, has it not occurred to this apologist that he is in all futility attempting to prove something which is a contradiction within itself? If God is, and is benevolent, is it not logical to assume (since the theologians assume all sorts of attributes to this deity) that he would not have constructed the minds of men when He created them so as to desire to doubt His being; would not have tortured the minds of men with cruel doubt as to His existence? If He is omnipotent, it would have been just as easy to instill into the minds of men only the strongest desire to believe in His reality; and even that would not be necessary had He so arranged matters that by His everlasting presence He would reveal Himself or His deeds to man in such a conclusive manner that even the feeblest of intellects could not doubt His existence. If He is omniscient, as the parable asserts, that not a hair falls from the head of man, not a sparrow dies without His knowledge, it must therefore be apparent that He created man with the foreknowledge that man would doubt His existence. This is a contradiction in itself. The Martian notes that in the entire length of the work not a reference is made to the time-worn theological defense, "the revelation" which the Church has always claimed for its scriptures. Appended as an afterthought, as an apology, as it were, for the philosophical defense and not the theological, the Jesuit father reminds the reader of its messiah, Jesus and the New Testament. The Jesuit states, "The New Testament writings, considered merely as trustworthy historical documents, inform us that--" but at this point the Martian interrupted the speaker, for the audacity of any learned man terming the New Testament writings "historical" was beyond his comprehension. It brought forcibly to his attention the great change which the apologies for the Church had undergone, and the new methods which they assumed. The old theological defense of the deity was gone; not even philosophy was deemed strong enough support for the present day. How the Church had fallen! The Church which had persecuted, anathematized, burned, and tortured the scientist, the geologist, the astronomer, the geographer, the biologist, the chemist, and the physician; this same Church in its last extremus, casts aside theology as its weapon and its appeal to the minds of the sceptics whom they aim to convert. The Church casts aside its own theology, having learned by bitter experience and recanting of opinions, bulls, and infallible statements by infallible popes, and now succumbs to the opinions it has formerly anathematized. In the present age the Church calls science to its aid, and utterly disregards its obsolete theology which it still practices, and attempts, by means of the misinterpretation of scientific facts and statements of a few men such as Eddington and Jeans, to force science into some illogical and unscientific concordance with the conception of a supreme being. Ironically it occurs to the Martian that the shades of Hypatia, Bruno, Galileo, Copernicus, Vanini, Darwin, and the vast numbers of Waldenses, Albigenses, Huguenots, Jews, and the victims of the Inquisition and the Witch Hunt, must, as they contemplate the present tactics of that Holy Institution, the Church, find some consolation in the depths of that hell to which the Church consigned them. The Martian logically deduces that by employing science for its defense, the Church admits the impotence of "divine revelation," in this age, to convince even its own adherents of the problematical existence of a divine being. _Theology is no longer recognized as authoritative even by theologians!_ Will the theologians now discard their theology based on the supernatural, and build a system of theology based on science? Is this all that is left to the theologian: that he must use the pitiful "Theology of Gaps"? That is, wherever there are gaps in scientific knowledge, the theologians insert their idea of God! This is but the replacing of the question mark with a meaningless label. CHAPTER V THE PERSISTENCE OF RELIGION _We believe what we believe, not because we have been convinced by such and such arguments, but because we are of such and such a disposition._ C. E. M. JOAD. _The mind of the ordinary man is in so imperfect a condition that it requires a creed; that is to say, a theory concerning the unknown and the unknowable in which it may place its deluded faith and be at rest._ WINWOOD READE. _Generations followed and what had been offered as hypothetical theological suppositions were through custom and tradition taken for granted as unquestioned truth._ LLEWELYN POWYS. The Martian has had his attention drawn to the statement that religion in some form or other has existed from most primitive times down to the present day. The theologians point to this as a proof of the existence of a supreme being. An investigation of this assertion leads the Martian to the conclusion that religions have continued to exist mainly because of the power which inherited superstitions wield over mankind. Men are born with a marked tendency towards superstitions. Certain isolated families of men are born with an inherited tendency towards tuberculosis. Most of these are born, not with an active tuberculosis, but some as yet imperfectly understood tendency, a defect in their protoplasmic make-up that renders them an easy prey to the tubercle bacillus if they are exposed to it. Similarly, generations of men have been born with a weakened mental vitality towards superstition; a weakened mental capacity that renders their minds an easy prey to that fear which manifests itself in superstition, creed, religion--the God-idea. It was Karl Marx who remarked that, "The tradition of all the generations of the past weighs down like an Alp upon the brain of the living." Since the days of our racial childhood, our beliefs have been handed down from generation to generation, and they have persisted since in all ages it was forbidden to question their existence. Man has persuaded himself that it is so just because he has said it for so long and so often. The force of repetition is great; it is, in fact, taken by a vast majority of men as the equivalent of proof. Most men have to accept their religions ready made. Their daily tasks leave them no time or opportunity for a personal search. The toil for bread is incessant, there is not sufficient leisure to verify the sources of their religious beliefs. Moreover, the ecclesiastic's answers to the riddles of life are easier, by far, to grasp than the answers of science. These two factors, of innate mental inertia and force of repetition, are well manifested by the present tactics of advertising. The manufacturer of any product well knows that constant repetition and the dangling of his product before the eyes of the public will lead to a widespread acceptance of the advertising slogans propounded for his article. The force of so-called authority has aggravated this mental inertia. It takes a tremendous amount of will power and mental courage for any individual to assert an opinion that runs counter to the accepted mode of thinking. It is much easier and much more pleasant to give oneself passively to that delusion of grandeur, that delusion that pleasantly drugs the mind with the assumption that there is a supreme being who is personally interested in our well-being; a providence who, like a school master, at his pleasure dispenses rewards and punishments; as immortality, Heaven and Hell. So firmly has this become entrenched in the minds of men that the irrationalities which manifest themselves against such a conception make no impression. Schopenhauer well states, "Nothing is more provoking, when we are arguing against a man with reasons and explanations, and taking all pains to convince him, than to discover at last that he _will_ not understand, that we have to do with his _will_." The Martian, knowing the widespread extent of religious beliefs and their supposed influence in our daily lives, is prepared to find in our annals a vast literature that would attest to the overwhelming benefits that mankind had derived from his religious beliefs. He is amazed to find that the little good which religion had accomplished, had occurred at the time when our race was in its infancy. Just as fear is instilled into the mind of the child to protect it from the dangers of its environment before the child has reached the age when it can use its reason for protection, just so had religion, by its implantation of fear, served its purpose in the days of our racial childhood. The child, however, as soon as it learns to reason, replaces those fears by a logical comprehension of the laws governing his environment. But in religious matters this fear has clung to man tenaciously; and while at first serving a protective function, at the present stage of civilization constitutes an embryonic impediment. The assertion of ecclesiastics that without the aid of religious learning and influence our civilization would have been retarded is a statement that a study of the development of man shows to be directly opposed to the facts; that religion has been the greatest impediment in the road to progress. This will be shown in the subsequent chapters. The oft-repeated assertion that, during the Middle Ages, ecclesiastic influence was the saving grace is well refuted by Dr. William J. Robinson: "We are told by the Church apologists that during the Middle Ages the priests and monks kept up the torch of learning, that, being the only literate people, they brought back the study of the classics. Historically speaking, this is about the most impudent statement that one could imagine. It was the Church that retarded human progress at least one thousand years, it is the Church that put a thick, impenetrable pall over the sun of learning and science, so that humanity was enveloped in utter darkness, and if the priests and monks later learned to read and write (from the Arabs, Jews, and Greeks exiled from Constantinople after 1453), it is because they wanted to keep the power in their hands; the people they did not permit to learn either to read or write. _Even the reading of the Bible, bear in mind, was considered a crime._ We are told that the priests and monks built hospitals and gave alms to the poor. Having gotten enormous tracts of the best land into their hands, so that the people were starving, they were willing to throw a bone occasionally to the latter. It cost them nothing and it gave them a reputation for charity. They built enormous monasteries with well filled cellars, and lived on the fat of the land, while the people lived in wretched hovels, working their lives away for a crust of bread. The beasts, the domestic animals lived a more comfortable life than did the men, women, and children of the people. And the Church never, never raised a finger to ameliorate their condition. It kept them in superstitious darkness and helped the temporal lords--for a long period the spiritual were also the temporal lords--to keep them in fear, subjection and slavery." The Martian being an impartial observer examined what had been done by Christianity for the intellectual and material advancement of humanity during her long reign, and what had been done by science and purely secular knowledge in its brief period of activity, the period when science and secular knowledge had partially liberated themselves from ecclesiastical domination. He came to the conclusion that in instituting a comparison he had established a contrast. CHAPTER VI RELIGION AND SCIENCE _Science, then, commands our respect, not on the basis that its present assumptions and deductions are absolutely and for all time true, but on the ground that its method is for all time true--the method of discovery, the method of observation, research, experimentation, comparison, examination, testing, analysis and synthesis._ MAYNARD SHIPLEY, "The War on Modern Science." _In the bare three and one-half centuries since modern science began, the churches had conducted an unremitting crusade against it. That much of this crusade had turned into a rear-guard action was due less to the weakness of the defenders of the faith than to the invulnerability of their non-resistant victim._ HORACE M. KALLEN, "Why Religion?" Some sixty years ago in the "Dogmatic Constitution of the Catholic Faith," the Church stated, "But never can reason be rendered capable of thoroughly understanding mysteries as it does those truths which form its proper subject. We, therefore, pronounce false every assertion which is contrary to the enlightened truth of faith.... Hence, all the Christian faithful are not only forbidden to defend as legitimate conclusions of science those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith, especially when condemned by the Church, but are rather absolutely bound to hold them for errors wearing the deceitful appearance of truth. Let him be anathema.... "Who shall say that human sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one may be allowed to hold true their assertions even when opposed to revealed doctrine." Can anything stronger be said to discourage research, investigation, experiment, and retard progress? And only sixty years ago! It is but the restatement of what the Church has uttered so many times and for so long--that all knowledge, material as well as spiritual, is to be found in the Bible as interpreted by the Church. It was this myth which had stultified the mind of man for 1500 years (during the period in which the Church was dominant); it was this that had killed the urge to search and seek for the truth, which is the goal of all science, the means by which humanity is set on the road to progress. This was the damnable precept foisted on the minds of men which enslaved them throughout the ages, and from which we are just emerging. This was the precept that plunged the world into the Dark Ages, and retarded the advance of mankind for centuries. This is the reason that it is utterly impossible for the intellectually honest scientist, and for that matter any individual, to reconcile science with religion. On the one hand, that of religion, we have the forces of intolerance, superstition, and the endeavor to besmirch, repress, and ridicule every advance favorable to mankind; to cloak with meaningless words obsolete rites, to stand in the way of human progress, because it does not permit men to think boldly and logically. Science, on the other hand, does not hesitate to tear down old conceptions, and has only one motive, the ultimate truth. Religion has the purpose of keeping the masses in the narrow and false path of only accepted doctrines. The true scientist is the man with the open mind, one who will discard the worthless and accept only the proven good. The religionist closes his mind to all facts which he is unwilling to believe, everything which will endanger his creed. Religion teaches the individual to place all hope, all desire, in a problematical hereafter. The stay on earth is so short compared to the everlasting life to come, that of what interest is this life; all things are vain. The misery, the suffering, of his fellow men leave him cold; he can only think of living in the light of his narrow creed so that he may gain his future reward. How well this philosophy has fitted in with the schemes of the select few for the control of the many! Truth to the scientific mind is something provisional, a hypothesis that for the present moment best conforms to the recognized tests. It is an evolving conception in a constantly changing universe. It is not that science has attained true conclusions; not that the evidence at hand must remain immutable; but that the scientific method of analyzing and formulating assumptions on the basis of discovery, on ascertained facts, is a superior method to the closed "infallible" method of "revelation." These assumptions, based upon the known facts, lead to a working hypothesis which in turn develops into a theory. If the theory is adopted it must account for the facts known. But the theory is not held as final, it is always changed or abandoned if necessary to conform to the new discovered data. Science welcomes the critical attitude that leads to the refinement of its theories. There may be today various theories held by scientists in which they are mistaken, but the question of the _method_ by which they arrive at conclusions can no longer be under consideration with regard to its validity. To the scientific mind, knowledge is something to be arrived at by study and research. To the religionist, knowledge is something that is contained in an infallible and supernatural statement or insight. Religion exalts the transcendental; science manipulates only the material. To the consistent religionist, his belief, as such, determine the fact; to the scientist it is the evidence that establishes the fact. To the religionist truth is something that is unchanging, that is fixed, final, and heretical to question. Confronted with a constantly changing universe, he would delude himself that his inner convictions give him a finality concerning his evolving environment. It is therefore not so much Science that the religionist is fighting, but the _scientific method_. This scientific method of approach, he rightly perceives, has so pervaded our mode of thinking that it is the subtle and most disintegrating force that is shattering the religious foundations. Dr. James T. Shotwell, speaking of the scientific method, concludes, "But whatever strictures philosophy may pass upon the _conclusions_ of science, as merely relative and provisional, there is no clearer fact in the history of thought, that its _attitudes_ and _methods_ have been at opposite poles from those of religion. It does no good to blink the fact, established as it is by the most positive proofs of history and psychology. Science has made headway by attempting to eliminate mystery so far as it can. Religion, on the other hand, has stressed mystery and accepted it in its own terms. Science is the product of bold adventure, pushing into the realm of the mysterious to interpret its phenomena in terms of the investigator; religion enters this same realm to give itself up to the emotional reactions. Science is the embodiment of the sense of control, religion yields the control to that power which moves in the shadow of the woods by night, and the glory of the morning hills.... "Science does not justify by faith, but by works. It is the living denial of that age-long acceptance which we accord to the mystery--as such. It renounces authority, cuts athwart custom, violates the sacred, rejects the myths. It adjusts itself to the process of change whose creative impulse it itself supplies. Not _semper idem_ but _semper alterum_ is the keynote of science. Each discovery of something new involves the discarding of something old. Above all, it progresses by doubting rather than by believing." (_James T. Shotwell: "The Religious Revolution of To-day."_) _There has never been an advance in science of widespread importance which in some manner or other endangered some mouldy religious concept, that the Church has not bitterly opposed; an advance which in time has proven of inestimable benefit for all mankind. A glance at the history of human progress will reveal scores of such instances._ The two rival divisions of the Christian Church, Protestant and Catholic, have always been in accord on one point, that is, to tolerate no science except such as they considered to be agreeable to the Scriptures. It was the decree of the Lateran Council of 1515 that ordered that no books should be printed but such as had been inspected by the ecclesiastical censors, under pain of excommunication and fine. It is easily understood that having declared the Bible to contain all knowledge both scientific and spiritual, and then passing a decree ordering no books to be printed which did not agree on all points with the Church's interpretation of the Bible, the Church was in absolute control of all thought, both written and spoken. It was to no advantage for the scholar to investigate any new fields, for all knowledge which was possible for the mind to discover had already been revealed in the Scriptures. Thus declared the Church. We understand why it was that Copernicus did not permit his book to be published until he was dying. We understand also that when Galileo and Bruno had the courage of their convictions, and gave voice to their beliefs, they were persecuted. Galileo was made to recant a discovery that the youngest of children now takes for granted. Bruno was burnt at the stake. We know that astronomy was at a standstill under Church domination, chemistry was forbidden, and the study of natural philosophy was contradicted; while anthropology, which showed on what mythical foundations the story of the fall of man rests, was squelched. The attitude of the Church on geography was hostile to the truth, as witness the persecutions of those who dared to venture that the earth was round. Botany, mathematics, and geometry, as well as the natural sciences, slumbered. Geology, which proved that the earth was more than 6000 years old, was anathematized; archeologists had the greatest difficulty to expound the truth concerning the antiquity of the human race. In purely civil matters, the clergy opposed fire and marine insurance on the ground that it was a tempting of Providence. Life insurance was regarded as an act of interference with the consequence of God's will. Medicine met the most strenuous of opposition. It is impossible in this short study to analyze the specific forms of retardation which the Church exhibited to all of these branches of learning, whose only endeavor it was to search for the truth, to state the facts, and to alleviate and make more bearable man's sojourn on this earth. However, a few of the many instances of retardation on the part of the Church will be pointed out. CHAPTER VII RELIGION AND MEDICINE _Now, when physiologists study the living brain of an ape, they have no grounds for supposing that they are dealing with a dual structure. The brain is not a tenement inhabited by a spirit or soul. The spirit or soul is but a name for the manifestations of the living brain. The leading neurologists of the world are agreed that the same is true of the human brain. It was only when they abandoned the dual conception--an inheritance from the dark ages of medicine--that they began to understand the disorders of man's mind and how to treat them._ _Modern medicine thus strikes at the very root of Christian doctrine. For, if man is truly mortal, if death ends all, if the human soul is but the manifestation of the living brain, as light and heat are the manifestations of a glowing bar of steel, then there can be no resurrection of the dead. Man has the seeds of immortality in him, but the gift is for the race, not for the individual._ SIR ARTHUR KEITH. Medicine and religion have been closely associated from the most pristine time. Primitive medicine had its origin in conjunction with the most primitive of religious conceptions, namely, animism; an illusion that made primitive man recognize in all things, and everywhere, spirits such as his supposed spirit; a belief that the world swarms with invisible spirits which are the cause of disease and death. And thus primitive medicine is inseparable from primitive modes of religious belief. All these phenomena which we consider today natural--the rustling of leaves in a forest, the crash of thunder, the flash of lightning, winds, clouds, storms, and earthquakes--were to primitive man the outward and visible signs of angry gods, demons, and spirits. Similar spirits caused disease and death, and these evil spirits that produced disease and death were to be placated and cajoled by man, just as he did his other deities, by magic, by burnt offerings, and sacrifice. The first holy man, the first priest, was the "shaman," and it was his duty not only to placate and cajole the spirits that were thought to control the physical well-being of the individual members of the tribe; but it was his duty also, by the exercise of his magic, to alleviate and cure illness by exorcism. The "shaman" was therefore the first medicine man, the first witch doctor, the first physician. He relied chiefly upon psychotherapy as does the modern witch doctor of Christian Science. Medicine could not begin to be medicine until it was disassociated from magic, religion, and theology. This struggle has been going on from the time of the "shaman" to the present moment. Primitive medicine stands midway between magic and religion, as an attempt to safeguard health by control of so-called supernatural processes, and the warding off of evil influences by appeal to the gods. In all primitive societies, priest, magician, and medicine man were one and the same; and medicine remained stationary until it could divorce itself completely from religion. Primitive medicine, then, springs from folklore, legends, credulity, and superstitions; the same forces that give rise to all forms of religious beliefs. Huxley has stated, "Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed," and from the earliest of times those men who had a scientific trend of mind realized this, however vaguely, and have attempted to divorce science from religion. The science of medicine has been divorced from superstition, but its twin brother religion lies as firmly bogged in the mire of superstition today as it did in the days of the incantations of the first theologist, the "shaman." And it is due to this close association of religion and medicine that ideas of the greatest scientific moment have been throttled at birth or veered into a blind alley through some current theological lunacy. Medicine has advanced through its disassociation with supernaturalism, while religion still remains the last refuge of human savagery. And so it had been that throughout those long, sterile, and barbarous ages primitive man ascribed all diseases either to the wrath of God, or the malice of an Evil Being. With the rise of the Greek philosophers, the human mind for the first time began to throw off the fogs of superstition. In Greece, 500 years before Christ, Hippocrates developed scientific thought and laid the foundations of medical science upon observation, experience, and reason. Under his guidance, medicine for the first time was separated from religion. He relieved the gods of the responsibility for disease and placed it squarely upon the shoulders of man. His findings were passed on to the School of Alexandria, and there medical science was further developed. At this stage of history all advances stopped, and for the following reason: With the coming of Christianity this science, as well as all others, was stultified. A retrogression took place to the ideation of the most primitive of men, namely, the conception of physical disease as the result of the wrath of God, or the malice of Satan, or by a combination of both. The Old Testament attributes such diseases as the leprosy of Miriam and Uzziah, the boils of Job, the dysentery of Jehoram, the withered hand of Jeroboam, the fatal illness of Asa, and many other ills, to the wrath of God, or the malice of Satan. The New Testament furnishes such examples as the woman "bound by Satan," the rebuke of the fever, the casting out of the devil which was dumb, the healing of persons whom "the devil oftimes casteth into the fire," and various other episodes. Christian theology then evolved theories of miraculous methods of cure, based upon modes of appeasing the divine anger, or of thwarting satanic malice. The curing of disease by the casting out of devils, by prayers, were the means of relief from sickness recognized and commanded by the Bible. Thus Christianity perverted the beginning of a science of medicine to a system of attempted cure of disease by fraud. The treatment of disease descended to the cures found in holy and healing wells, pools, and streams; in miracles and the efficacy that was to be found in the relics of saints. Instead of reliance upon observation, experience, and thought, attention was directed toward supernatural agencies. In contrast to the Greek physicians who were attempting to lay a scientific foundation, we have the Christian idea prevailing that the water in which a single hair of a saint had been dipped was to be used as a purgative; water in which St. Remy's ring had been dipped cured lunacy; oil of a lamp burning before the tomb of St. Gall cured tumors; wine in which the bones of a saint had been dipped cured fevers; St. Valentine cured epilepsy; St. Christopher cured throat disease; St. Eutropius, dropsy; St. Ovid, deafness; St. Vitus, St. Anthony, and a multitude of other saints, the maladies which bear their names. "In the year 1585, in the town of Embrun, France, the male generative organ of St. Foutin was greatly revered. A jar was placed beneath his emblem to catch the wine with which it was generally anointed; the wine was left to sour, and then it was known as the 'Holy Vinegar.' The women drank it in order to be blessed with children." (_Joseph Lewis, "Voltaire."_) Enormous revenues flowed into various monasteries and churches in all parts of Europe from relics noted for their healing powers. The ecclesiastics perceived that the physician would interfere with these revenues and gifts of the shrines, and deemed it the will of God to persecute and condemn physicians. St. Ambrose declared, "The precepts of medicine are contrary to celestial science, watching and prayer." St. Augustine declared, "All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to these demons, chiefly do they torment fresh baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless, new-born babe." Gregory of Nazianzus declared that bodily pains are provoked by demons, and that medicines are useless, but that they are often cured by the laying on of consecrated hands. St. Niles and St. Gregory of Tours gave examples to show the sinfulness of resorting to medicine instead of trusting to the intercession of saints. Even as late as 1517, Pope Leo X, for a consideration, issued tickets bearing a cross and the following inscription, "This cross measured forty times makes the height of Christ in His humanity. He who kisses it is preserved for seven days from falling sickness, apoplexy, and sudden death." The Council of Le Mons, in 1248, forbade monks to engage in surgery. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the Council of Rheims forbade monks to study medicine; and shortly after the middle of the twelfth century, Pope Alexander III forbade monks to study or practice medicine. In the thirteenth century, the Dominican Order forbade all ecclesiastics to have any connection with medicine; and when we remember that the policy of the Church had made it impossible for any learned man to enter any other profession, the only resource left for a scholar was the Church; so effectively did the Church kill all scientific endeavors. The Reformation made no sudden change in the sacred theory of medicine. The Church of England accepted the doctrine of "royal touch," and in a prayer book of that period is found a service provided for that occasion which states that "They (the kings), shall lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover." Pestilences were taught to be punishments inflicted by God on society for its shortcomings. Modern man has no conception of the ravages of infections and epidemics that swept over Europe in the Middle Ages, and to a lesser extent, until less than fifty years ago. Tacitus described the plague in Rome thus: "Houses were filled with dead bodies, and the streets with funerals.... Alike, slaves and plebeians were suddenly taken off amidst lamentations of their wives and children, who, while they mourned the dead, were themselves seized with the disease, and, perishing, were burned on the same funeral pyre." In 80 A.D. an epidemic swept Rome causing 10,000 deaths daily. During the ages until the present century, wave after wave of pestilence swept over Europe. The plague in 1384 A.D. took no less than 60 million lives. It was estimated that twenty-five per cent. of the population of the then known world perished in that one epidemic. Between 1601 and 1603, 127,000 died of the plague in Moscow. The epidemic of 1630 took 500,000 lives in the Venetian republic; Milan alone lost 88,000. In 1605, London lost 69,000; 70,000 died in Vienna in 1679; the following year Prague lost 83,000, all from this disease. The horrors of such visitations are beyond description, and can scarcely be imagined. For a time, attempts were made to collect and bury the dead. Wagons would pass through the streets at night collecting the victims. The drivers, benumbed with drink, frequently failed to ascertain whether death had occurred. Living patients, desperately ill, were piled into the wagons with corpses beneath, about, and on them. These gruesome loads were dumped pell-mell into huge pits hastily dug for the purpose. In some instances, living victims crawled out of these pits and survived to tell the tale. As the epidemics progressed, attempts to dispose of the dead were abandoned. Putrefying bodies were everywhere. Whole cities were left desolate, the few survivors having fled. It is not to be wondered at that such epidemics swept over Europe when it was taught that these were the vengeance of God. How could it be discovered that the real causes were the crowded conditions and bad sanitation of the cities, the squalor, the misrule, and gross immorality occasioned by the Holy Wars, when hordes of soldier-bandits plagued the countryside? The devout continued to live in their squalor, to trust in the Lord, and to die by the millions. In all pestilences down to the present time, the Church authorities, instead of aiding and devising sanitary measures, have preached the necessity of immediate atonement for offenses against the Almighty. The chief cause of the immense sacrifice of lives in these plagues was of course the lack of hygienic precautions. But how could this be discovered when, for ages, living in filth was regarded by great numbers of holy men as an evidence of sanctity! St. Hilarion lived his whole life long in utter physical uncleanliness. St. Athanasius glorifies St. Anthony because he had never washed his feet. St. Abraham's most striking evidence of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither his hands nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body save her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in which the nuns religiously abstained from bathing; St. Mary of Egypt was eminent for filthiness; St. Simeon Stylites was in this respect unspeakable--the least that can be said is that he lived in ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors. For century after century the idea prevailed that filthiness was akin to holiness. Another stumblingblock hindering the beginnings of modern medicine and surgery, was the theory regarding the unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead. The dissection of the human body was prohibited since the injury to the body would prevent its resurrection on the Last Day. Andreas Vesalius was the pioneer in the movement for increased knowledge of anatomy, and in 1543, when his work appeared, he was condemned to death by the Inquisition as a magician. He escaped this fate by undertaking a pilgrimage to Jerusalem only to be shipwrecked on the Island of Zante when he attempted to return, and there died in misery and destitution. In the year 1853, cholera, after having committed serious ravages in many parts of Europe, visited Scotland. It was evident to most thinking people that, due to the extreme poverty and squalor of most of the Scottish towns at that time, a great number of people would necessarily succumb to this disease unless stringent sanitary measures were instituted immediately. Instead, the Scotch clergy proposed to combat this scourge with prayer and fasting, which would have lowered the resistance to this disease by producing physical exhaustion and mental depression. They proposed the ordering of a national fast day in which the people were to sit the whole day without nourishment in their churches and retire to their beds at night weeping and starved. Then it was hoped that the Deity would be propitiated, and the plague stayed. To give greater effect to this fast day, they called upon England to help them, and the Presbytery of Edinburgh dispatched a letter to the English minister, requesting information as to whether the queen would appoint a national fast day. The English minister, to his credit, advised the Presbytery of Edinburgh that it was better to cleanse than to fast, and cleanse they must swiftly or else, in spite of all prayers and fastings of a united but inactive nation, the cholera would devastate them. There are today, in this twentieth century, two pestilences which could be wiped from the face of the earth. "There are two pestilences which thus unfortunately involve moral conceptions. They are the plagues of Syphilis and Gonorrhea. Against them medicine has developed methods of control. They could be eradicated, but as yet civilization has not advanced entirely beyond the ancient idea that disease is imposed by God as a measure of vengeance for our sins. It still rejects protection, when without it these plagues will continue to exact death and suffering on a scale which probably exceeds that of any one of the medieval plagues. Those who today look upon Syphilis and Gonorrhea as punishment for sin have not progressed beyond the ideas of medieval Europe. "Ignorance and bigotry are the twin allies of the plagues of Syphilis and Gonorrhea. Medicine and civilization advance and regress together. The conditions essential to advance are intellectual courage and a true love for humanity. It is as true today as always in the past that further advances or even the holding of what has already been won, depend upon the extent to which intellectual courage and humanity prevail against bigotry and obscurantism." (_Haggard, "Devils, Doctors, and Drugs."_) As a result of the lack of control of these plagues there are in the world at the present moment thousands of children suffering from congenital syphilis who would never have been born but for the desire of Christians to see sinners punished. With regard to the spread of sex knowledge, the clergy's attitude is dangerous to human welfare. The artificial ignorance of sex subjects which orthodox Christians attempt to enforce upon the young is extremely dangerous to mental and physical health. The young are much less likely to act wisely when they are ignorant, than when they are instructed. These two venereal diseases are no more controlled under the moral standards of today than they were two centuries ago, and yet medical science offers for these diseases what it can offer for few others; both a prevention and a cure. And it is due to the ignorance and the bigotry of the theists that the spread of sex knowledge is hampered so that a sane conception of sex and the prevention of venereal disease does not eradicate these diseases. The theists have, therefore, without sense or justice, founded their morality on disease; neglecting the fact that all disease is immoral in the widest sense, since it is detrimental to the happiness of man, and that no one disease is more so than another. The morality of the body is health--not disease. So much for the actual facts and reality. In passing to the theoretical, we again see the truth of the statement that religion is the last resort of human savagery. To postulate that a supreme being is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving, and then to assume that he inflicts disease on his children as punishment for sin is a sadistic mental aberration. In his omniscience he full well knows beforehand what each of his children will do. He foreordains their sins and then punishes his children for sins that he wills them to commit. It is just as if a syphilitic father should punish his syphilitic child because the child has that congenital disease for which the father is responsible. If the theist insists that his deity is all that he claims him to be, then it is only logical that instead of man asking his god for forgiveness, what actually should be is that God should ask the forgiveness of man for his bungling and error. Christianity has attempted from its inception to eradicate the sexual instinct and in so doing has antagonized an instinct that is as fundamental as that of self-preservation. All it has accomplished is a distortion. The church, by claiming that it alone was privileged to regulate sexual desires, has done one of two things to each of its adherents. It has either made him a hypocrite or driven him insane. Much of the insanity in this country could be overcome were religion and sex permanently divorced; and an immediate amount of inestimable good could be accomplished when one considers that fifteen per cent of all mental disease is caused by syphilis. Physical disease having been considered as a malicious trick of Satan, it was but natural that the disease of the mind was also attributed to satanic intervention. The conception that insanity was a brain disease, and that gentleness and kindness were necessary for its treatment, was throttled by Christian theology for fifteen centuries. Instead the ecclesiastic burdened humanity with a belief that madness was largely possession by the Devil. Hundreds of thousands of men and women were inflicted with tortures both physical and mental. It was not until 1792 that the great French physician Penel, and William Tuke in England, placed the treatment of mental disease on a rational and scientific basis. And this, in spite of such ecclesiastical attacks as were seen in the _Edinburgh Review_ of that period. These two men, Penel and Tuke, were the first acknowledged victors in a struggle of science for humanity which lasted nearly two thousand years. The clergy resisted Jenner when he introduced vaccination, and yet the application of this measure of defense against disease has probably saved more lives than the total of all the lives lost in all wars. The clergy maintained that "Smallpox is a visitation from God, and originates in man, but Cowpox is produced by presumptious, impious men. The former, heaven ordained, the latter is perhaps a daring and profane violation of our holy order." In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit missionaries in South America learned from the natives the value of the so-called Peruvian Bark in the treatment of ague. In 1638, quinine, derived from this bark, was introduced into Europe as a cure for malaria. It was stigmatized as "an invention of the Devil." The ecclesiastical opposition to this drug was so strong that it was not introduced into England until 1653. The medieval Christians saw in childbirth the result of a carnal sin to be expiated in pain as defined in Genesis. Accordingly the treatment given the child-bearing woman was vastly worse than the mere neglect among the primitive peoples. Her sufferings were augmented by the fact that she was no longer a primitive woman and child-bearing had become more difficult. In these "Ages of Faith" which could be better called the "Ages of Filth," nothing was done to overcome the enormous mortality of the mother and child at birth. Attempts, however, were made to form intra-uterine baptismal tubes by which the child, when it was locked by some ill chance in its mother's womb, could be baptized and its soul saved before the mother and child were left to die together. But nothing was done to save their lives. No greater crimes were ever committed in the name of civilization, religious faith, and smug ignorance than the sacrifice of the lives of countless mothers and children in the first fifteen centuries after Christ among civilized mankind. Approaching our own time, we have the example of Dr. James Y. Simpson, professor of obstetrics at the University of Glasgow about 1850, first administering an anesthetic to alleviate the pain of childbirth. He was bitterly opposed by the clergy on the ground that it was impious to attempt to escape from the curse pronounced against all women in Genesis. It was Dr. Simpson who, in defending this humanitarian practice, asserted that opposition, particularly on theological grounds, had been presented against every humane innovation in the past. When Paul Ehrlich, in 1910, announced his discovery of salvarsan for the treatment of syphilis, the clergy again were horror-struck that man should interfere with a visitation of the Lord. The resistance to the spread of information concerning contraception, commonly known as birth control, is an example of the Church's dominance of government today; and yet this information is as vital to the welfare of humanity as is the control of cancer. In 1926, our newspapers carried conspicuous headlines, "Episcopal Church Joins Catholic to Gag Birth Control"; four years later, 320 bishops of the Episcopal Church met in London, and by a majority of 3 to 1 voted in favor of contraception when "there is morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence." The bishops had by this time become well aware of the insistence of secular opinion towards this movement, and having done their best to prevent this progressive movement for the past one hundred years, they finally accepted defeat, proving once again that religion has never accepted anything that science has shown to be a fact or of benefit to humanity until it was compelled to do so to save its face. The infallible Church, however, still persists in its opposition and in the Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, published in January, 1931, it is said, "The conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children. Those who, in exercising it, deliberately frustrate its natural power, and purpose, are against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious." So speaks the infallible Pope, but the great majority of physicians hold that there are few things more perilous to mental health, intellectual efficiency, moral equanimity, and physical well-being than prolonged denial of the sex urge for the average, normal human being. Every physician can furnish numerous case histories to substantiate the statement that continual sexual abstinence is prejudicial to the health and happiness of the man and woman, and is the causation of hundreds of semiderelicts and psychoneurotics. Furthermore, the rising tide of insanity in this country would be stemmed were religion and sex permanently divorced. Today the modern clergy still endeavor to explain natural phenomena by supernatural theories, and while they do not assign preternatural powers to witches and demons, they yet persist in attempting to pervert facts of science, and delude themselves with faith in some supernatural force. The clergy state that the physician cures disease through the mediation of God, the physician merely playing the part of the agent of God, through whom the real cure is effected. Is anything more ridiculous and at the same time more contradictory, than to suppose that an all-powerful god should have to appoint an intermediary to perform his work? And if it is only by God's will and aid that a cure takes place, then it follows that God must be willing for the individual to be cured; why in the name of reason, did He not prevent the initial step, the contracting of the disease? What a mass of suffering, of mental anguish might thus have been spared us! Thus, this omnipotent being either did not desire to spare us this misery and suffering, in which case he must surely be a monster incarnate; or, on the other hand, he is powerless to halt it, and thus cannot be omnipotent. While the clergy maintain that a cure is only effected by God's will, the physician knows otherwise. The physician accomplishes his cures alone, and definitely cures and saves the lives of human beings by his own skill, intelligence, and application of methods which have been developed by the exercise of secular knowledge, not theological nonsense. When man is so unfortunate as to contract an infection of the appendix, and that inflammation succeeds to pus-formation so that this diseased and non-essential part of the human anatomy is on the point of rupturing and causing a fatal peritonitis, it is not by God's will and intervention that a cure is effected, but by the intervention of the surgeon who removes the diseased part. If man depended upon God's will to save him, as he did in the past, the appendix would rupture, peritonitis would set in, and despite prayers and sacrificial offerings, the Deity would exact his life. When an innocent infant, in the first few weeks of life, develops an intussusception (an infolding of the bowel which causes an acute obstruction), the prayers and supplication of the parents avail not a particle; if the surgeon did not save the infant's life by operating and removing the obstruction, the benevolent being would allow the child to die. The adult who develops a hernia, which is due to a defect in the construction of the human body, which is assigned to an omniscient being who still persists in forming bodies that are defective, and this hernia becomes strangulated (twisted), the deity sits calmly by in omnipotent inaction, while the prompt interference of the surgeon saves the individual's life. When the surgeon observes a superficial cancerous growth, or an internal growth which can be removed in its entirety, does he trust to the Lord to halt this pernicious development? No, the surgeon does not consult God, but resorts to his own knowledge and skill to save a human life. The diphtheritic child who is strangling to death with a diphtheritic membrane in its throat is not permitted by the physician to be left to the benevolent being's will, nor to the prayers of the parents. The physician's prayer is the diphtheria antitoxin, which in his hands is the life-saving device. When the physician administers quinine for malaria, or salvarsan for syphilis, he effects cures for these diseases by using agents to which the clergy strenuously objected when they were first introduced. And when the ecclesiastic attributes to the Deity whatever laws man has been able to evolve out of his own experience and wisdom, he establishes, fallaciously, the corollary that if God is responsible for the cures, He is also responsible for the non-cures. Then what of the countless number that died of disease before man evolved those cures, and what of the wholesale murder of His children in the past ages? Do certain diseases still baffle the physician? Surely it is less often than the pestilences of old which baffled sacrifice and prayer. The cruelest laws ever devised by man have more equity and benevolence in them than the appalling and irrational jurisprudence of the Deity. Do certain diseases as yet remain to plague man? Then it is only because religion has for the past 2000 years been the greatest obstacle in the development of cures for these diseases. Every single individual, in the past 2000 years, who has succumbed to a disease for which medical science has no cure, has died directly at the hands of religion. The obstruction which religion has placed on the development of medical science has laid at its feet the responsibility for the deaths of countless millions throughout the ages. The religionist replies that man's mind cannot fathom the will of God. Which is an irrational statement for it is a well established fact, and indeed, a criterion of insanity, that when the deranged are confronted with facts which are conclusive and with creations of the imagination, they cannot differentiate fact from fancy, and maintain, instead, that fancy is the real fact. The religionists are guilty of the same breach of reason. They suffer with what may be termed, "dementia religiosa." The remarkable feature of the latter disease is its wide prevalence. Dr. Haggard in his book, "Devils, Drugs, and Doctors," declares, "The early and Medieval Christians accepted the doctrine of the power of demons in the lives of men; they saw this power particularly in the demoniac production of diseases. They believed in miracles and especially in the miraculous healing of diseases. The demonological belief of the Christians was inherited from the doctrine of the Jews, who were believers in demons and the 'possession by the devil.' Jesus himself cured by casting out of devils. Following his example, Christians everywhere became exorcists. Jewish demonology was continued among Christian converts, and the belief in supernatural interpositions in human affairs was widely accepted. _Nothing has retarded the growth of scientific medicine during the past 2000 years so much as the iron grip of theology in maintaining practices based on belief in this supernatural origin of disease._" The fabled curing of disease by casting out devils, and the New Testament recordings of Jesus's conviction that disease was caused by evil spirits, have had an inestimable detrimental result on the development of medical science. The fact that Jesus believed in the demoniacal production of diseases and cured them by exorcism was deemed so important by the author of the Gospel according to Mark that he has actually recorded the Aramaic words Jesus was reported to have used in addressing his patients. In Mark V:41, Jesus is reported to have given the command "Talitha cumi" to a little Jewish girl whom her parents believed dead. In Mark VII:34, Jesus is reported as uttering the magical word "Ephphatha," as he "put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue" in behalf of "one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech." An excellent and timely illustration of what occurs when secular knowledge has not yet replaced ecclesiastical ignorance and bigotry, particularly in the field of medicine, is furnished by an article from one of Philadelphia's leading newspapers, _The Evening Bulletin_, of December 23, 1932. We quote it verbatim: "Faith Healers Arrested; Two Charged with Choking to Death 5-Year-Old Girl, Linden, Texas, Dec. 23, 1932. Despite a purported confession, officers to-day continued an investigation of the death of a five-year-old girl, allegedly at the hands of two itinerant preachers who sought to 'drive out the devil' they believed responsible for her partial paralysis. Murder charges were filed against Paul Oaks and his brother, Coy Oaks, and precautions taken to prevent possible mob vengeance. Sheriff Nat Curtright said the accused men admitted they had choked the child to death in an attempt to cure her. Officers said the preachers had been conducting meetings in rural communities and had preached on the subject of faith healing. George Wilson, a neighbor, officers said, found the two men kneeling over the prostrate form of the child. They ordered him to leave, declaring he was a 'devil.' He said the child's father was in the room." Medieval exorcism still practised in one of the leading nations of the world! In America, which prides itself on its scientific advances, towards whom the rest of the world looks for guidance in scientific discoveries and practices! To have retarded the growth of medicine for the past 2000 years! Think of the strides made in medicine in the past hundred years, and dwell on the comfort humanity derives from it, in contrast to the filth, misery, and pestilences of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Would so much progress have been possible had man still persisted in the belief that disease was due to demoniac intervention, and that the sum total of all knowledge humanly possible was contained in the Bible? It is no longer necessary for children to choke to death with diphtheria. Yellow fever, and small pox in civilized countries are, or could be, wiped from the face of the earth. Malaria is controlled; tuberculosis will shortly be a rarity; typhoid fever and cholera have been eradicated wherever there is sanitation; erysipelas can be controlled; hydrophobia prevented; childbirth fever has lost its tremendous mortality; tetanus can be checked; syphilis and gonorrhea can be controlled; diabetes and pernicious anemia can be controlled; surgery is reclaiming vast multitudes and restoring to useful and happy lives thousands who would have hitherto died. So much has been done; but it is especially true that there is as much, at least, yet to be done. But all this has been achieved so recently. What might not have been won had not the minds of men been polluted from infancy, warped by the first professional holy men, the religionists, the priests? Had the idea of a supernatural force been allowed to die in the Dark Ages, as it surely would have, as man's mind expanded and developed, humanity would today find itself more advanced on the road to progress. But as it was, the myth of religion was foisted on the superstitious brain, and man resigned himself to his fate, and lived in such a manner as to please this hypothetical supernatural being. The inevitable result was the abject misery, both material and spiritual, of Europe during the period when the Church was in absolute control. If this myth and mystification had died with the dead ages, as it should have done, what a fitter place to live in this world would be today! Consider the needless misery and the agony of those who died of the various plagues; and think of the advanced stage of medicine of Alexandria, three hundred years before the Christian era, where the physicians were welcomed to the famous library by the emperors. The state gave them their livelihood and their duties were to advance medicine by study and research. Anatomy was studied and dissection was allowed. With the coming of Christianity, the remnants of this library were destroyed, and with them went all progress in that field. If such had been the enlightened state in Egypt three hundred years before Christianity appeared, then why had not science made the same progress then as it does now? Because, to the knowledge stored in the library at Alexandria had not been added a progression of learning, a continued process of research; if this had not been halted by Christianity, how much vaster would our achievements be today? It was not necessary for all of those millions to have been the victims of plagues, of inquisitions, of witchcraft burnings, of religious persecutions and wars. The sorrow and pain brought to untold numbers throughout the centuries could have been prevented; and would have been if man had been interested in the welfare of his fellowmen instead of the glorification of an almighty being. Future generations may well declare religion to have been the curse of humanity. The Church had cursed the human intellect by cursing the doubts which are the necessary consequence of its exercise. She had cursed even the moral faculty by asserting the guilt of honest error. Medicine which has for its sole objects the alleviation of man's sufferings, to cure them when possible, to relieve more often the pains and ills which make this life a living hell, what might it not have accomplished ages ago had religion not interfered with its progress? Whatever cures are known, and preventions that are practiced now, could have been common knowledge centuries ago. And what of the multitudes that perished who might have been saved, and what of the misery which might have been prevented, had not this curse fallen upon man? Since 1906, there have been only five deaths from yellow fever in the United States. Outbreaks of cholera and plague are unknown. In former years, puerperal fever took the lives of from five to fifty of each one hundred parturient mothers. At present, an average of one out of 1250 mothers dies of this infection following childbirth. Deaths from many diseases are less than one-tenth of their former number. These include wound infections, diphtheria, scarlet fever, malaria, dysentery, typhoid, small pox, and many dietary and metabolic diseases. Since 1880, the medical sciences have accomplished a total net saving of human life from all diseases which, if equally distributed among the population, would add sixteen years to the life span of each person. In 1880, the average duration of human life, that is, the average age at which death occurred, was 41.78 years. In 1925, the average duration of life was 58.29 years. In other words, those born at this time live on the average 16.5 years longer than those born at any time prior to 1880. In a population of 120,000,000 this would mean a total of 1,920,000,000 additional years of life. Such a figure is as difficult to conceive of as are the interstellar spaces. This is one contribution, numerically expressed, which medical science and its offspring, preventive medicine, have made to humanity in the short space of fifty years. Indeed if, as the religionists believe, there is a god, he could not have punished his subjects more than by instilling in them the "dementia religiosa." If the Church had not taught that the sum total of all knowledge was contained in the Bible, and prohibited, on pain of death and confiscation of property, the promulgation of any discoveries, men would have reasoned as they are accustomed to at the present day, and we would not be 2000 years behind in all branches of learning. But there has never been an advance in science of widespread importance, which in some manner endangered some mouldy religious concept, that the Church has not bitterly opposed; an advance which in time has proven of inestimable good for all mankind. (A glance at the history of human progress will reveal scores of such instances.) The opposition to medicine, as previously noted, is only one of many examples which might have been chosen. In proportion, as the grasp of theology upon education tightened, medicine declined, and in proportion, as the grip relaxed, medicine developed. CHAPTER VIII RELIGION AND ASTRONOMY In the early Church, astronomy, like other branches of science, was looked upon as futile, since the New Testament taught that the earth was soon to be destroyed and new heavens created. The heavenly bodies were looked upon by the theologians as either living beings possessing souls, or as the habitation of the angels. However, as time passed, the geocentric doctrine, the doctrine that the earth is the center of the universe and that the sun and planets revolve about it, was the theory that held the highest respect. Copernicus, in 1543, was first to bring clearly before the world the then astounding theory that the earth and planets revolve about the sun. But not until he was on his deathbed did he dare to publish it, for he well knew the opposition with which it would be met. Even then he published it with an apologetic lie by a friend Osiander, that Copernicus had propounded the doctrine of the earth's movement not as a fact, but as a hypothesis. "Thus was the greatest and most ennobling, perhaps, of scientific truths--a truth not less ennobling to religion than to science--forced in coming before the world, to sneak and crawl." (_White: "History of Warfare of Science with Theology."_) During the next seventy years the matter slumbered, until Galileo upheld the Copernican doctrine as the truth, and proved it to be the truth by his telescope. Immediately the Church condemned the statements of Copernicus and forbade Galileo to teach or discuss them. All books which affirmed the motion of the earth were forbidden, and to read the work of Copernicus was declared to risk damnation. All branches of the Protestant Church, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, vied with each other in denouncing the Copernican doctrine. One man, Giordano Bruno dared to assert the truth in the hearing of the Papacy. For this heresy he was hunted from land to land, finally trapped in Venice, imprisoned at Rome, burned alive, and his ashes scattered to the winds! Against Galileo, the war against the Copernican theory was concentrated. His discoveries were declared to be deceptions, and his announcements blasphemy when, in 1610, he announced that his telescope had revealed the moons of the planet Jupiter. In 1615, Galileo was summoned before the Inquisition at Rome, and forced to promise that he would "relinquish altogether the opinion that the sun is the center of the world, and immovable, and that the earth moves, nor henceforth to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatsoever verbally or in writing." Pope Paul V solemnly rendered the decree that "the doctrine of the double motion of the earth about its axis and about the sun is false and entirely contrary to Holy Scripture." The climax of this instance of the infallibility of the Church occurred when in his seventieth year Galileo was again brought before the Inquisition; he was forced to abjure under threats of torture and imprisonment by command of Pope Urban a truth which, in this day, is taken for granted by the youngest of children. Galileo was then kept in exile for the rest of his days, died, and was buried ignobly, apart from his family, without fitting ceremony, without monument or epitaph. As late as 1873 there was published, in St. Louis, a work by a president of a Lutheran teachers' seminary in which he stated that the earth is the principal body of the universe, that it stands fixed, and that the sun and moon only serve to light it. Astronomy brings forth a noble array of men who have, by their intense desire for the truth, persevered against the Church, and in spite of the vilest opposition of that Church, brought to the attention of man laws that have given a meaning and order to our universe. Copernicus escaping persecution only by death; Bruno burned alive; Galileo imprisoned; Kepler reviled, and Newton bitterly attacked. In this manner has religion aided astronomy! CHAPTER IX RELIGION AND GEOGRAPHY The ancient Greeks, especially the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle, had evolved theories of the earth's sphericity, which, while vague, were basic for subsequent accurate ideas that developed later. When Christianity sprang into existence Eusebius, St. John Chrysostom, and Cosmos evolved a complete description of the earth. They considered the earth as a parallelogram, flat, and surrounded by four seas, as a kind of house, with heaven as its upper story and the earth as its ground floor. To the north of the earth was a great mountain; at night the sun was pushed into a pit and pulled out again in the morning, with heaven as a loft and hell as a cellar. In the Atlantic Ocean, at some unknown distance from Europe, was one of the openings into hell, into which a ship sailing to this point, would tumble. The terror of this conception was one of the chief obstacles of the great voyage of Columbus. Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and Zwingli held to the opinion that a great firmament, or floor, separated the heavens from the earth; that above it were the waters and angels, and below it, the earth and man. During the time that the sphericity of the earth was still undecided, another question arose that was considered of far greater importance, namely, the conception of the antipodes and the problem of deciding whether human beings existed on the earth's opposite side. It was Lactantius who asked, "Is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? That the crops and trees grow downward? That the rains and snow and hail fall upwards toward the earth? I am at a loss as to what to say of those, who, when they have once erred, steadily persevere in their folly, and defend one vain thing by another." St. Augustine insisted that men could not be allowed by the Almighty to live there, since, if they did, they could not see Christ at His second coming, descending through the air. In the eighth century, a Bishop Virgil of Salzburg dared to assert that there were men living in the antipodes. He was strongly attacked by St. Boniface of Germany, who appealed to Pope Zachary for a decision. The Pope, as the infallible teacher of Christendom, made the following response: He declared it, "Perverse, iniquitous, and against Virgil's soul." And again another infallible statement by the infallible Pope Zachary became a doctrine of the Church. In Italy, in 1316, Peter of Abano, famous as a physician, promulgated the opposite view to that of the Church, for which he was persecuted by the Inquisition, and barely escaped with his life. In 1327, Cecco d'Ascoli, an astronomer, was burned alive at Florence for daring to assert that men lived in the antipodes. The difficulties that beset Columbus are well known. How he was hounded both in Portugal and in Spain by the clergy; and even after his discovery of America, the Papacy still maintained its theory of the flatness of the earth and the nonsense of the antipodes. Pope Alexander VI and Pope Julius II attempted to settle the disputes between Spain and Portugal by drawing some remarkable maps that may still be found; but no one dares to disturb the quiet of the ridiculous bulls that the popes issued on this dispute. In 1519 Magellan made his famous voyage and proved the earth to be round and that men actually lived in the antipodes. But the force of ecclesiastical stultification was so great, as it is today, that men still believed the opposite view for two hundred years after the voyage of Magellan. CHAPTER X RELIGION AND CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS The establishment of Christianity, beginning a new evolution of theology, arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for more than 1500 years. The work begun by Aristotle and carried on to such a high state of relative perfection by Archimedes, was stifled by the early Christians. An atmosphere was then created in which physical science could not grow. The general belief derived from the New Testament was that the end of the world was at hand, and the early Church Fathers poured contempt upon all investigators of the science of nature. Then, too, for science there was established an insurmountable barrier, in that the most careful inductions of science from ascertained facts must conform to the view of nature given in the myth and legends of the Bible. For 1500 years science was forced to confine itself to a system of deducing scientific truth from scriptural texts. It was the accepted word of the clergy that science was futile and dangerous which led to the discrediting of Roger Bacon's works. In 1163 Pope Alexander III forbade the study of physics to all ecclesiastics, which of course, in that age, meant prohibition of all such scientific studies to the only persons likely to follow them. Roger Bacon was first to practice extensively the experimental method of science. Through his researches the inventions of clocks, lenses, and the formula for extracting phosphorus, manganese, and bismuth were brought to light. Bitterly attacked by the clergy, he attempted to defend himself by stating that much which was ascribed to demons resulted from natural means. This statement but added fuel to the flame. For in 1278 the authorities of the Franciscan Order assembled at Paris, solemnly condemned Bacon's teachings, and the general of the Franciscans, Jerome of Ascoli, afterwards Pope, threw him into prison, where he remained for fourteen years. At the age of eighty, he was released from prison declaring, "Would that I had not given myself so much trouble for the love of science." "Sad is it to think of what this great man might have given to the world had ecclesiasticism allowed the gift. He held the key to treasures which would have freed mankind from ages of error and misery. With his discoveries as a basis, with his method as a guide, what might not the world have gained! Nor was the wrong done to that age alone; it was done to this age also.... Thousands of precious lives shall be lost, tens of thousands shall suffer discomfort, privations, sickness, poverty, ignorance, for lack of discoveries and methods which, but for this mistaken dealing with Roger Bacon and his compeers, would now be blessing the earth." (_White: "Warfare of Science."_) Centuries afterwards, for stating the same claim, namely, that much which was attributed to demons, resulted from natural causes, Cornelius Agrippa, Weyer, Flade, Loos, Bekker, and a multitude of other investigators and thinkers, suffered confiscation of property, loss of position, and even torture and death. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, John Baptist Porta, who was the first to show how to reduce the metallic oxides and thus laid the foundation of several important industries, was summoned to Rome by Pope Paul II, and forbidden to continue his researches. Both in Protestant and Catholic countries instruction in chemistry and physics was discouraged by Church authorities, and in England the theologians strenuously opposed the Royal Society and the Association for the Advancement of Science. Francis Bacon and Boyle were denounced by the clergy, and Lavoisier was sent to the scaffold by the Parisian mob. Priestley had his home, his library, instruments, and papers containing the results of long years of scientific research burned by a Birmingham mob that had been instigated by Anglican clergymen. He was driven into exile, and the mob would have murdered him if they could have laid their hands upon him. Yet, in spite of the opposition of the clergy, an opposition of such force that one may well wonder how these tender embryonic sciences could have withstood the terrific ecclesiastical onslaughts, the truths of chemistry and physics continued to diffuse themselves among the intelligent observers. The value to humanity of these two sciences is now established as inestimable. CHAPTER XI RELIGION AND GEOLOGY, PHILOLOGY AND EVOLUTION _The human race has suffered three grave humiliations: when Copernicus showed that the earth was not the center of the universe; when Darwin proved that man's origin was not the result of direct creation; when Freud explained that man was not the master of his own thoughts or actions_. LLEWELYN POWYS. In the writings of the Greek and Roman philosophers are found the germinal concepts of geological truths. But as Christianity took control of the world instead of a steady progression of knowledge in this field there was a distinct retrogression. According to the prevailing belief the earth was soon to be destroyed and the collecting of knowledge was futile and any study of its nature was vain. St. Jerome stated that the broken and twisted crust of the earth exhibited the wrath of God against sin. Tertullian asserted that fossils resulted from the flood of Noah. A scientific explanation of fossil remains was attempted by De Clave, Bitaud, and De Villon in the seventeenth century. The theological faculty of Paris protested against the scientific doctrine as unscriptural, destroyed their treatises, and banished their authors from Paris. In the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon, in France, produced a thesis attempting to state simple geological truths. The theological faculty of the Sorbonne dismissed him from his high position and forced him to print a recantation stating, "I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of the Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact. I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses!" The doctrine which Buffon abandoned is now as firmly established as that of the earth's rotation upon its axis. Yet, in his day, it was heatedly asserted by ecclesiastics that the scientific doctrine that fossils represent animals which died before Adam contradicts the theological doctrine of Adam's fall, and the statement that death entered the world by sin--and this objection was further strengthened when the ecclesiastics became cognizant that geology had proved that the earth was vastly older than the 6000 years determined by Archbishop Ussher's interpretation of the Old Testament. About 1580, there was published by authority of Pope Gregory XIII, the Roman Martyrology, revised in 1640 under Pope Urban VIII, which declared that the creation of man took place 5199 years before Christ. In 1650, Archbishop Ussher announced after careful study that man was created 4004 years before the Christian era. But, this proving too vague, Dr. John Lightfoot, vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, assured the world that, "Heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water ... and this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on the 23d of October, 4004 B.C. at nine o'clock in the morning." When the Egyptologists, Assyriologists, archeologists, and anthropologists showed that man had reached a far advanced stage of civilization long before the 6000 years given as the age of the earth, their efforts were ridiculed by the clergy, and these scientists were forced to bring their findings before the world in the face of the well known methods of ecclesiastical opposition. At a very early period in the evolution of civilization men began to ask questions regarding language, and the answers to these questions were naturally embodied in the myths, legends, and chronicles of their sacred books. Language was considered God-given and complete. The diversity of language was firmly held to be explained by the story of the Tower of Babel; and since the writers of the Bible were merely pens in the hand of God the conclusion was reached that not only the sense, but the words, letters, and even the punctuation proceeded from the Holy Spirit. At the end of the seventeenth century, the ecclesiastical contention that the Hebrew punctuation was divinely inspired seemed to be generally disproven. The great orthodox body of "religiosa dementia" fell back upon the remainder of the theory that the Hebrew language was the first of all languages which was spoken by the Almighty, given by Him to Adam, transmitted through Noah to the world after the deluge, and that the confusion of tongues was the origin of all other tongues. It has only been in comparatively recent time, and in spite of the opposition of the clergy, that language has been accepted as the result of evolutionary processes in obedience to laws more or less clearly ascertained. Babel thus takes its place quietly among the other myths of the Bible. In a purely civil matter, the infallible Church from its inception had displayed a marked hostility to loans at interest. From the earliest period the whole weight of the Church was brought to bear against the taking of interest for money. Pope Leo the Great solemnly adjudged it a sin worthy of severe punishment. In the thirteenth century, Pope Gregory IX dealt an especially severe blow at commerce by his declaration that even to advance on interest the money necessary in maritime trade was damnable usury. The whole evolution of European civilization was greatly hindered by this policy. RELIGION AND EVOLUTION Darwinism, which at first was declared by the clergy to be brutal, degrading, atheistic, and anti-Christian, is now included as part of the Bible teaching. In a similar manner, the Copernican theory, the theory of gravitation, the nebular hypothesis, the theory of uniformity in geology, and every scientific advance has been opposed on the same grounds; that is, that these are against the teachings of the Christian Church. And how many Galileos, Brunos, and Darwins, and other would-be benefactors to the human race have died mute because of this opposition and fear of persecution by the Church? In 1877, an eminent French Catholic physician, Dr. Constantin James, published an elaborate answer to Darwin's book. He called it, "On Darwinism, or the Ape Man." A copy was sent to Pope Pius IX, who was so pleased with it that he sent the author a reply in which he stated that it "refutes so well the aberrations of Darwinism, a system which is repugnant at once to history, to the traditions of all peoples, to exact science, to observed facts, and even to reason itself, would seem to need no refutation did not alienation from God and the leaning toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek support in all this tissue of fables." The Protestant clergy were no less vigorous in their opposition. In our own country it was opposed by Dr. Noah Porter, president of Yale College, and most bitterly by the Rev. Dr. Hodge and the Rev. Dr. Duffield, both leading authorities at Princeton University. Fundamentalism in the United States furnished the spectacle of the trial, in 1925, of a school teacher named Scopes, for teaching the theory of evolution. Dayton, Tennessee, became the laughingstock of the educated world, and the derision with which this effort to obstruct knowledge at this late date was met with by the comments of the press in this country and abroad is at least encouraging. But it is an excellent example of what effect religious obscurantism may exert in backward sections of our country. Dr. Max Carl Otto, considering the implications of evolution, calls attention to the following: "Take the evolution of living forms. The more we learn about biological history the clearer it becomes that the process has been, from the human point of view, incredibly bungling and wasteful. There have been futile experiments without number; highly successful achievements have been thrown aside; one type of life after another has arisen and has pushed up a blind alley to extinction. If there is a God whose method has been Evolution, then seemingly his slogan was 'We'll fight it out along this line if it takes a billennium' but, unlike Grant, he has always surrendered. In this maelstrom, the human species, as Thomas Huxley said--'plashed and floundered amid the general stream of evolution, keeping its head above water as best it might, and thinking neither of whence nor whither.' Many volumes have been written to give a purposive interpretation of the rise and evolutionary ramifications of living forms. The course of evolution itself is their refutation." When the Churches could no longer ignore the rising tide of secular opinion, they resorted to compromise and called to their aid a certain number of intellectually dishonest scientists. The attempt to harmonize Christianity and Evolution can only be accounted for in terms of either dishonesty or stupidity. "And that is true of the whole range of science. Science is, in fact, atheistic or nothing. It knows nothing of God, it does not bother about God, its triumphs are achieved by leaving God out of account." (_C. Cohen_.) What has heretofore been mentioned is but a mere trifle when one considers the vast number of similar incidents in which religion has played the rôle of barrier to progress. These examples, though few, are sufficient to impress the mind of any clear-minded, intelligent individual with the conviction, in spite of all the sophistry and casuistry of the ecclesiastical apologies, that progress in this world has taken place in direct proportion to the degree that the mind of man has liberated itself from the control of theology and the myth of religion. CHAPTER XII RELIGION AND WITCHCRAFT _Better that a man's body should be destroyed than his soul. The worst death of the soul is freedom to err_. ST. AUGUSTINE. _It would be hard to calculate the perilous import of so treacherous an utterance, an utterance the latent sentiment of which has been responsible for I know not how much human agony. Menacing indeed to human happiness was such a claim, and in the course of time when the corporate body of the church became all-powerful in Christendom, it put into tyrannical practice what had been but a theological theory_. LLEWELYN POWYS. It is the purpose of this chapter to trace the origin of witches, wizards, and devils, the widespread belief in them at the time of pagan Rome, and the manner in which these were incorporated into Christian theology. With the rise of Christianity and the gain of political power by its adherents, the perverted pagan idea of witchcraft became the source of the most terrible persecutions in the bloody history of religion. The numerous references to witches and devils in both the Old and New Testaments established the authority for the organized religious mania that scourged both Roman Catholic and Protestant Europe, and extended its tentacles into the New England colonies. Instigated by ecclesiastics, and carried into effect by the intellectual serfs, their adherents, hundreds of thousands of "witches" were tortured and burned during the sway of the Witchcraft Delusion. With the Bible as an inspiration, the clergy inflamed the superstitious minds of the masses of that time with the conception of a ceaseless strife between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan for possession of their souls and their bodies. We of the present age may readily wonder how such a belief could have had so firm a grasp on the minds of our ancestors. Perhaps we will be tempted to attribute it to the ignorance of that time, particularly to the ignorance of the untutored masses. On the contrary, this does not approximate the actual situation. History reveals that the greatest minds of that age, men eminent in law, letters, and philosophy, not only defended this conception strenuously, but even engaged in the extermination of "witches." That men of such superior intellect could defend such a barbaric institution, which today is revolting to our senses, necessitates the conclusion formulated at the end of this chapter. * * * * * The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that it was possible by supernatural means to inflict evil on their fellowmen, and all the sects of philosophers admitted this, with the exception of the Epicureans, who denied the existence of evil spirits. The magicians, in Greece and Rome, were at times punished because they injured men and not because they offended the gods. During the latter period of pagan Rome, some of the emperors passed laws against the magicians, if it was proven that by casting the horoscope the magicians had ascertained what was, according to their belief, the most auspicious time to start a rebellion against their rule. The emperors, however, notably Marcus Aurelius and Julian, were the patrons of magicians who foretold coming events to them. The public methods of foretelling the future, such as the oracle of the gods, formed part of their religion. When the first Christians came into Rome and spread Christianity throughout the empire, they were inspired by an intense religious enthusiasm. They thought much less of the civil than of the religious consequence of magic, and sacrilege seemed much more terrible in their eyes than anarchy. The Christians found in Rome a vast polytheistic religion in contrast to their own in which the entire world was divided into the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan. For them the world seemed to be teeming with malignant demons, who had in all ages persecuted and deluded mankind. "According to these Christians, the immediate objects of the devotions of the pagan world were subsidiary spirits of finite power and imperfect morality; angels, or, as they were then called, demons, who acted the part of mediators, and who, by permission of the Supreme and Inaccessible Deity, regulated the religious government of mankind. The Christians had adopted this conception of subsidiary spirits, but they maintained them to be not the willing agents, but the adversaries of the Deity; and the word demon, which among the pagans, signified only a spirit below the level of a Divinity, among the Christians signified a devil." (_Lecky._) "This notion seems to have existed in the very earliest period of Christianity; and in the second century, we find it elaborated with the most minute and detailed care. Tertullian, who wrote in that century, assures us that the world was full of these evil spirits, whose influence might be descried in every portion of the pagan creed. If a Christian in any respect deviated from the path of duty, a visible manifestation of the devil sometimes appeared to terrify him. The terror which such a doctrine must have spread among the early Christians may be easily conceived. They seemed to breathe an atmosphere of miracles. Wherever they turned they were surrounded and beleaguered by malicious spirits, who were perpetually manifesting their presence by supernatural arts. Watchful fiends stood beside every altar, they mingled with every avocation of life, and the Christians were the special objects of their hatred. All this was universally believed, and was realized with an intensity which, in this secular age, we can scarcely conceive. The bearing of this view upon the conception of magic is very obvious. Among the more civilized pagans, magic was mainly a civil, and in the last days of the empire, a political crime. In the early church, on the other hand, it was esteemed the most horrible form of sacrilege effected by the direct agency of evil spirits. It included the whole system of paganism, explained all its prodigies, and gave a fearful significance to all its legends. When the Church obtained the direction of the civil power, she soon modified or abandoned the tolerant maxims she had formerly inculcated; and in the course of a few years, restrictive laws were enacted, both against Jews and heretics." (_Lecky._) Constantine, after his conversion to Christianity, enacted laws against the magicians. These were made more rigid under Constantius, his son, but suspended under Julian. These persecutions were renewed by Valentinian, spasmodically carried on to a slight extent, and then lapsed. During the period that elapsed between the sixth and thirteenth centuries the executions for sorcery were comparatively rare. It is to be borne in mind, then, that magic as existing in pagan Rome was part of the religious conceptions of the Romans. The oracle as well as the various demons, which to them signified what the word "angel" signifies to us now, formed an elaborate system of mythology and idolatry. The early Christians coming into contact with these conceptions, at first found an insurmountable difficulty in spreading their beliefs among the rural inhabitants of the Roman empire. Polytheism was dominant while their monotheism was as yet a persecuted belief. The road of least resistance was compromise, and so this vast system of polytheism was perverted, while seemingly accepted into their beliefs, by making these "angels," "demons," as we now understand the word. Since the early Christians were dominated by a belief in constant Satanic presence, these demons were said to be the "Hosts of Satan." It was firmly believed that the arch-fiend (Satan) was forever hovering about the Christians, but it was also believed that the sign of the cross, or a few drops of holy water, or the name of Mary, could put him to an immediate and ignominious flight. "In the twelfth century, however, the subject passed into an entirely new phase. The conception of a witch, as we now conceive it, that is to say of a woman who had entered into a deliberate compact with Satan, who was endowed with the power of working miracles whenever she pleased, and who was continually transported through the air to the Sabbath, where she paid her homage to the Evil One--first appeared. The panic created by the belief at first advanced slowly, but after a time with a fearfully accelerated rapidity. Thousands of victims were sometimes burnt alive in a few years. Every country in Europe was stricken with the wildest fever. Hundreds of the ablest judges were selected for the extirpation of this crime. A vast literature was created on the subject, and it was not until a considerable portion of the eighteenth century had passed away that the executions finally ceased. The vast majority of those accused of witchcraft were women, and again the Bible furnished the authority for the belief that women were inherently wicked. That the Fathers of the Church believed this is exemplified by the statement of Chrysostom in which he said that women were a 'necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill.'" (_Lecky._) At this period the conception of a witch is radically different from that which was prevalent in the era prior to this one. The popular belief of the witchcraft ages, a belief sanctioned by most of the learned men of the time, was that the earth swarmed with millions upon millions of demons. They multiplied by reproduction in the usual way, by the accession of the souls of wicked men, of women dying in childbirth, of children still-born, of men killed in duels. The air was filled with them, and one was always in danger of inspiring them with the air, of swallowing them in food and drink. Most Christian writers and legendists said that there were so many of them they could not be counted, but Wierus took a census of them and reported that there were only 7,505,926 divided into seventy-two companies, each commanded by a captain or prince. They could make themselves hideous, or beautiful, as suited their purposes, and assume any shape. While capable of appearing at any time, they preferred the night between Friday and Saturday. Any human being who gave up to them his immortal soul could command their services for a certain time. Occasionally general conferences took place, at the pleasure of Satan, which were attended by all the demons and all the witches. "These 'sabbaths' were held on the Brocken or other high mountain. Upon the spot where they met, nothing would ever grow afterwards, as their hot feet burnt all the fecundity out of the soil. In France, England, and the American Colonies, it was supposed that witches made their trips on broomsticks; in Spain and Italy it was believed that they twirled on the back of the Devil himself, who, for the occasion, transformed himself into male goat. On no account would a witch, when starting for a sabbath, go out through the open door or window; she would pass through the keyhole or up the chimney. While they were gone, inferior demons assumed their shape, and lay in their beds, feigning illness. Assembled on the Brocken, the Devil, as a double-headed goat, took his seat on the throne. His subjects paid their respects to him, kissing his posterior face. With a master of ceremonies appointed for the occasion, he made a personal examination of all the wizards and witches, to see if they had the secret mark about them by which they were stamped as the Devil's own. This mark was always insensible to pain, and it was the sure proof of witchery when found by the inquisitor. Any witches found by the Devil not so marked received the mark from him then and there, also a nickname. Then they all sang and danced furiously. If a stranger came to be admitted, silence reigned while he denied his salvation, spat upon the Bible, kissed the Devil, and swore absolute obedience to him. Singing and dancing was resumed, a mythical formula being used in the singing. When tired, they sat down and told of their evil deeds; those who had not been bad enough were scourged by Satan himself with thorns and scorpions until they could neither sit nor stand. Then came a dance by thousands of toads who were conjured out of the ground and standing on their hind legs kept time to the music Satan evoked from bagpipes or a trumpet. They could all talk, and asked the witches to give them the flesh of unbaptized babes for food. The witches promised to do so. The Devil told them to remember and keep their word and then stamped his foot, and the frogs disappeared instantly into the earth. Next came a most disgusting banquet, except for a few of the most wicked witches, to whom were given rich viands on golden plates and expensive wines in crystal goblets. Then came more dancing; those who did not care for that amused themselves by mocking the sacrament of baptism. For this purpose the toads were again called up and sprinkled with filthy water, the Devil making the sign of the cross, while the witches repeated a formula as absurd as that used in ordinary baptisms. Sometimes the Devil made the witches take off their clothes and dance before him, each with a cat tied around her neck, and another dangling behind as a tail. Sometimes, again, there were lascivious orgies. At cock-crow, all disappeared; the sabbath was over." (_"The Story of the Inquisition"--Freethought Press Association._) This conception of a witch continued from the twelfth century to the time witch-burning ceased. With this idea of a witch being constantly instilled into the minds of their listeners, the clergy set loose fervidly religious mobs to scourge the countries of innocent women. With the entire world divided into the "Hosts of Heaven" and the "Hosts of Satan," with witches abounding in the air, in the water, and in the food, and with their immortal souls at stake, the frenzied population found evidences of witchcraft in all manner of happenings. "Pope after pope set the seal of his infallibility upon the bloody persecutions. At length came Innocent VIII who, on the 7th of December, 1484, sent forth his bull Summis Desiderantis. Of all documents ever issued from Rome, imperial and papal, this, doubtless, first and last, caused the greatest shedding of innocent blood. Yet no document was ever more clearly dictated by conscience. Inspired by the scriptural command, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,' Pope Innocent exhorted the clergy of Germany to leave no means untried to detect sorcerers, and especially, those who by evil practice destroy vineyards, gardens, meadows, and growing crops. These precepts were based upon various texts of scripture, especially upon the famous statement in the Book of Job; and to carry them out, witch-finding inquisitors were authorized by the Pope to scour Europe, especially Germany, and a manual was prepared for their use, the Witch-Hammer, Malleus Maleficarum." (_White: "Warfare of Science."_) Another important and much discussed department was the connection between evil spirits and animals. That the Devil could assume the form of any animal he pleased, seems to have been generally admitted, and it presented no difficulty to those who remembered that the first appearance of that personage on earth was as a serpent, and that on one occasion a legion of devils had entered into a herd of swine. Saint Jerome also assures us that in the desert St. Anthony had met a centaur and a faun, a little man with horns growing from his forehead, who were possibly devils, and at all events, at a later period, the "Lives of the Saints" represent evil spirits in the form of animals as not infrequent. Lycanthropy, however, or the transformation of witches into wolves, presented more difficulty. The history of Nebuchadnezzar and the conversion of Lot's wife were, it is true, eagerly alleged in support of its possibility; but it was impossible to forget that St. Augustine appeared to regard lycanthropy as a fable, and a canon of the Council of Ancyra had emphatically condemned the belief. On the other hand, that belief has been very widely diffused among the ancients. It had been accepted by many of the greatest and most orthodox theologians, by the inquisitors who were commissioned by the popes, and by the law courts of most countries. The evidence on which it rested was very curious and definite. If the witch was wounded in the form of an animal, she retained that wound in her human form, and hundreds of such cases were alleged before tribunals. Sometimes the hunter, having severed the paw of his assailant, retained it as a trophy; but, when he opened his bag, he discovered in it only a bleeding hand, which he recognized as the hand of his wife. A French judge named Boguet, at the end of the sixteenth century, devoted himself especially to the subject and burnt multitudes of lycanthropes. He wrote a book about them and drew up a code in which he permitted ordinary witches to be strangled before they were burnt, but excepted lycanthropes who were to be burnt alive. Now let us examine on what authority the popes and afterwards the reformers so rigorously persecuted the "witches." Both the Old and the New Testaments are riddled with references to witches, wizards, and devils. For example, this passage from Exodus XXII 18, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." From Matthew VIII 28-32, "There met him two possessed with devils coming out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, so that no man might pass by that way. And, behold, they cried out, saying, 'What have we to do with thee, Jesus, Son of God? Art thou come hither to torment us before the time?' And there was a good way off from them a herd of many swine feeding. So the devils besought him, saying, 'If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine. And he said unto them, 'Go!' And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine. And behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea and perished in the waters." The Old Testament, therefore, definitely commands its adherents to kill, and the New Testament gives a brilliant example of its chief magician, Jesus, exorcising devils from men and driving them into swine. There are numerous passages of the Bible which speak of the Devil, the Devil and his angels, spirit of an unclean devil, dumb spirit, foul spirit, unclean spirit, evil spirit, witch, witchcraft, wizards, necromancers, satan, the tempter, prince of the power of the air, prince of devils, etc. These passages in the Bible were at once the chief source and sanction of the terrible atrocities which extended over several centuries and have come to be known, taken collectively, as the "Witchcraft Persecutions." The Devil, with his subordinate demons and the human beings who sold their souls to him, were supposed to be both capable and guilty of blighting the crops; causing the lightning; bringing destructive storms; withholding the rain; drying up cows; killing domestic and wild beasts; afflicting the nations with pestilence, famine, and war; causing all manner of diseases; betwitching men, women, and children; planting doubts in the mind and weeds in the fields; and in brief, doing about everything that was disagreeable to man in general, or that offended the priests as a caste. Thus buttressed by the Bible, and with the nearly entire current of Church literature setting in the same direction, it is no wonder that the witchcraft delusion became one of the most appalling, if not the most appalling, fact in the development of the Christian religion. There is extant no other record of destruction and cruel slaughter growing out of such beliefs in supernatural persons and powers that can ever begin to tell such a story of degradation and mercilessness as the record made by the Christian Church. Theologians laid stress especially upon the famous utterances of the Psalmist that "All the gods of the Heathens are devils," and St. Paul, "The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to the devils." Those suspected of heresy and witchcraft must confess; they were to be tortured until they did confess. This made suspicion equivalent to confession and conviction. In the witch "trial" the victim must not only incriminate herself but her accomplices, or all whom she "knew" to be in partnership with the Devil. She was bound to be tortured until she had given the names or described the persons of those she had seen at the "witches' sabbath." Then they would be put to the torture and the process repeated. It was not in human nature long to bear the awful pain; soon the leading questions of the inquisitors would be answered as they wanted them answered. It would be incredible were it not attested by such a multitude of witnesses, that men could honestly believe that testimony so extorted had the slightest value. But it is indisputable that hundreds of thousands of human beings were sent to a cruel death on this utterly worthless "evidence." As few people realize the degree in which these superstitions were encouraged by the Church that claims infallibility, I may mention that the reality of this particular crime was implied and its perpetrators anathematized by the provincial councils or synods of Troyes, Lyons, Milan, Tours, Bourges, Narbonne, Ferrar, Saint Malo, Mont Corsin, Orleans, and Grenoble; by the Rituals of Autun, Chartres, Perigueux, Evreux, Paris, Chalons, Bologna, Troyes, Beauvais, Meaux, Rheims, etc., and by the decrees of a long series of bishops. The infection was everywhere--Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, England, Scotland, and even America was scourged. It has been estimated that one hundred thousand perished in Germany from the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth century. Pope Gregory IX wrote a great mass of nonsense to the bishop and other chiefs urging stringent methods against the Stedingers, Frieslanders, inhabiting the country between Weser and Zeider Zee. He wrote, "The Devil appears to them (the Stedingers) in different shapes, sometimes as a goose or duck, and at other times in the figure of a pale, black-eyed youth, with a melancholy aspect, whose embrace fills their hearts with eternal hatred against the Holy Church of Christ. This Devil presides at their sabbath when they all kiss him and dance around him. He then envelops them in total darkness, and they all, male and female, give themselves up to the grossest and most disgusting debauchery." The infallible pope of Rome! The result was that the Stedingers, men, women, and children, were slain, the cottages and woods burned, the cattle stolen and the land laid waste. The pope's letter is a fair example of the theological literature of the time; the slaughter of the Stedingers an average illustration of the evangelistic methods of the Church. Millions of men, women, and children were tortured, strangled, drowned, or burned on "evidence" that today would be accepted nowhere unless by a court and jury composed of the inmates of a lunatic asylum, if even by them. It is unnecessary to say that the more severe the persecution, the more widespread did witchcraft become. Every person tortured accused others and whole communities went mad with grief and fear and superstition. No amount of human evidence establishing the actual whereabouts of the accused at the time they were asserted by the witness on the rack to have been at the sabbath would avail. The husbands were told that they had seen or held only the devil-created semblance of their wives. The originals were with Satan under the oak. The confessions of tens of thousands of witches are to be found in Europe's judicial records of the period of the Inquisition. "The Protestant Reformers zealously seconded the exertions of Rome to extirpate witchcraft; they felt that they must prove that they were as orthodox as the Catholics, and were as loyal to the Bible. No one urged their fundamental ideas more than did Luther, Calvin, Beza, the Swedish Lutherans, Casaubon, Wesley, Richard Baxter, the Mathers,--all stood loyally by Rome." (_Lecky._) At Lisbon, a horse whose master had taught him many tricks, was tried in 1601 and found guilty of being possessed by the Devil, for which he was burned. The witchcraft mania proper in England began in the sixteenth century and reached its climax in the early part of the seventeenth century. Sir Matthew Hale, the great jurist, sanctioned the delusions and passed sentences of death by burning. Queen Elizabeth made witchcraft a capital offense in England; and King James I wrote a book on the subject, and lent his personal aid and royal support to the persecutions. Joan of Arc, the noblest of all the victims of this belief, perished by English hands, though on French soil, and under the sentence of a French bishop. In Scotland, during the sixteenth century, as well as the seventeenth, were seen the most horrible examples of what domination of superstitious minds by ecclesiastics could do. "Nothing was natural, all was supernatural. The entire course of affairs was governed, not by their antecedents, but by a series of miracles. Going still further, they claimed the power (the clergy) not only of foretelling the future state, but also of controlling it; and they did not scruple to affirm that, by their censures, they could open and shut the Kingdom of Heaven. As if this were not enough, they also gave out that a word of theirs could hasten the moment of death, and by cutting off the sinner in his prime, could bring him at once before the Judgment Seat of God. "The Scotch clergy preached that, 'Hell was created before man came into the world. The Almighty,' they did not scruple to say, 'having spent his previous leisure in preparing and completing this place of torture, so that, when the human race appeared, it might be ready for their reception.' "Of all the means of intimidation employed by the Scotch clergy none was more efficacious than the doctrines they propounded respecting evil spirits and future punishment. On these subjects, they constantly uttered the most appalling threats. The language which they used was calculated to madden men with fear and to drive them to the depths of despair. "It was generally believed that the world was overrun by evil spirits who went not only up and down the earth, but also lived in the air, and whose business it was to tempt and hurt mankind. Their number was infinite, and they were to be found at all places and in all seasons. "At their head was Satan himself, whose delight it was to appear in person ensnaring or terrifying every one he met. With this object, he assumed various forms. One day he would visit the earth as a black dog, on another day as a raven, on still another day he would be heard in the distance roaring like a bull. He appeared sometimes as a white man in black clothes, and sometimes he became a black man in black clothes, when it was remarked that his voice was ghastly, that he wore no shoes, and that one of his feet was cloven. His stratagems were endless. For, in the opinion of divines, his cunning increased with his age; and having been studying for more than 5000 years, he had now attained to unexampled dexterity. He could, and he did, seize both men and women and carry them away through the air. Usually he wore the garb of laymen, but it was said that, on more than one occasion, he had impudently attired himself as a minister of the Gospel. At all events, in one dress or other, he frequently appeared to the clergy, and tried to coax them over to his side. In that, of course, he failed; but out of the ministers thus tempted, few indeed could withstand him. He could raise storms and tempests. He could work, not only on the mind, but also on the organs of the body, making men hear and see whatever he chose. Of his victims, some he prompted to suicide, others to commit murder. Still, formidable as he was, no Christian was considered to have attained to a full religious experience unless he had literally seen him, talked to him, and fought with him. "The clergy were constantly preaching about him, and preparing their audiences for an interview with their great enemy. The consequence was that the people became almost crazed with fear. Whenever the preacher mentioned Satan, the consternation was so great that the church resounded with sighs and groans. They believed that the Devil was always and literally at hand; that he was haunting them, speaking to them, and tempting them. The clergy boasted that it was their special mission to thunder out the wrath and curses of the Lord. In their eyes the Deity was not a Beneficent Being, but a cruel and remorseless tyrant. They declared that all mankind, a very small portion only excepting, were doomed to eternal misery. "The Scotch clergy taught their hearers that the Almighty was sanguinary, and so prone to anger that he raged even against walls and houses, and senseless creatures, wreaking his fury more than ever, and scattering desolation on every side. "The people, credulous and ignorant, listened and believed. "For in Scotland as elsewhere, directly the clergy succeeded in occupying a more than ordinary amount of public attention, they availed themselves of that circumstance to propagate those ascetic doctrines which, while they strike at the root of human happiness, benefit no one except the class which advocates them; that class, indeed, can hardly fail to reap the advantages from a policy which by increasing the apprehensions to which the ignorance and timidity of men make them liable, does also increase their eagerness to fly for support to their spiritual advisers; and the greater their apprehension, the greater the eagerness." (_Buckle: "The History of Civilization in England."_) James I of England had become imbued with the idea of witchcraft while in Scotland, and he believed that his stormy passage on his return from Denmark was due to witches. This storm was the origin of one of the most horrible of the many horrible Scotch trials on record. One Dr. Fian was suspected of having aroused the wind and a confession was wrung from him by torture which, however, he almost immediately retracted. Every form of torture was in vain employed to vanquish his obduracy; the bones of his legs were broken into small pieces in the boot. All the torments that Scottish law knew of were successively applied. At last, the king (who personally presided over the tortures) suggested a new and more horrible device. The prisoner, who had been removed during the deliberation, was brought in and "His nails upon his fingers were riven and pulled off with an instrument, called in Scottish a 'turkas,' which in England we call a 'payre' or 'pincers' and under everie nayle there was thrust in two needles over, even up to the heads. So deeply had the devil entered his heart, that he utterly denied all that which he avouched," and he was burnt unconfessed. And this from a king of England! The methods of obtaining a confession were as follows: If the witch was obdurate, the first, and it was said, the most effective method of obtaining confession was by what was termed "waking her." An iron bridle or hoop was bound across her face with four prongs which were thrust into her mouth. It was fastened behind to the wall by a chain, in such a manner that the victim was unable to lie down, and in this position she was sometimes kept for several days, while men were constantly with her to prevent her from closing her eyes for a moment in sleep. Partly in order to effect this object, and partly to discover the insensible mark which was the sure sign of a witch, long pins were thrust into her body. At the same time, as it was a saying in Scotland that a witch would never confess while she could drink, excessive thirst was added to her torments. Some prisoners have been "waked" for five nights, one it is said, even for nine. The physical and mental suffering of such a process was sufficient to overcome the resolution of many, and to distract the understanding of not a few. But other and perhaps worse tortures were in reserve. The three principal ones that were habitually applied were the "pennywinks, the boot, and the caschielawis." The first was a kind of thumbscrew; the second was a frame in which the leg was inserted, and in which it was broken by wedges driven in by a hammer; the third was also an iron frame for the leg, which was from time to time heated over a brazier. Fire-matches were sometimes applied to the body of the victim. We read in a contemporary legal register, of one man who was kept for forty-eight hours in "vehement torture" in the caschielawis; and of another who remained in the same frightful machine for eleven days and nights, whose legs were broken daily for fourteen days in the boots, and who was so scourged that the whole skin was torn from his body. This was, it is true, censured as an extreme case, but it was only an excessive application of the common torture. The witches were commonly strangled before they were burnt, but this merciful provision was very frequently omitted. An Earl of Wear tells how, with a piercing yell, some women once broke half-burnt from the slow fire consuming them, struggled for a few moments with a despairing energy among the spectators, but soon with shrieks of blasphemy and wild protestations of innocence sank writhing in agony amid the flames. But just picture this scene for a moment! The horror of such a scene! What a crime for one human to commit against another! A burnt offering to the gods! How well pleased the Almighty God must have been with the stench of burning human flesh rising to his nostrils. And how well he must have rewarded his faithful servants, for was this not done in His name? "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." As Lecky points out in his famous work on the "History of European Morals," such incidents are but illustrations of the great truth that when men have come to regard a certain class of their fellow creatures as doomed by the Almighty to eternal and excruciating agonies, and when their theology directs their minds with intense and realizing earnestness to the contemplation of such agonies, the result will be an indifference to the suffering of those whom they deem the enemies of their God, as absolute as it is perhaps possible for human nature to attain. It is a historical fact that in 1591, a lady of rank, Eufame Macalyane, sought the assistance of Agnes Sampson for the relief of pain at the time of birth of her two sons. Agnes Sampson was tried before King James for her heresy, was condemned as a witch, and was burned alive on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh. It is generally said that the last execution in Scotland was in 1722, but Captain Burt, who visited the country in 1730, speaks of a woman who was burnt as late as 1727. As late as 1736, the divines of the Associated Presbytery passed a resolution declaiming their belief in witchcraft, and deploring the scepticism that was then general. The Pilgrim Fathers brought to our shores the seeds of the Witchcraft Delusion at a time when it was rapidly fading in England, and again history furnishes us with an example of a people with strong religious instincts who, being freed from their persecutors, became in turn the most violent persecutors of those that did not profess their particular creed. It was particularly due to the preaching of Cotton Mather that a panic of fear was created through the New England Colonies. Mrs. Ann Hibbons was tried before the Great and General Court of Massachusetts, sentenced and hanged on the 19th of June, 1656. "Goody Oliver" was executed as a witch on November 16th, 1688. There were twenty murders in 1692, and these before a civil court. The trials took place before the illegal Court of Oyer and Terminer, appointed by Governor Phipps, at the instigation of the Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Justice Stoughton, and Joseph Dudley, formerly governor, and the Chief Judge of the Court which, in 1688, had sent "Goody Oliver" to her death at the gallows. Cotton Mather defended this practice in his book, "The Wonders of The Invisible World," and Increase Mather, the father of Cotton, was equally as strenuous in the "Witch Hunt." Increase Mather survived this massacre thirty years, and his son, five years longer, but there is hardly a word of regret or sympathy to be found anywhere, even in their private diaries and correspondence. These executions in Massachusetts form one of the darkest pages in the history of America. It is not surprising that the clergy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries supported both in practice and theory the Witchcraft Delusion, but when we find the ablest minds of the laity bursting into print with a vehement defense of this belief, it is difficult for us, in the present day, to conceive of such folly. And yet, today, we have able minds defending a precept of which the Witchcraft Delusion is but a part. "The defenders of the belief (Witchcraft), who were men of great and distinguished talent, maintained that there was no fact in all history more fully attested, and that to reject it would be to strike at the root of all historical evidence of the miraculous." (_Lecky._) The subject was examined in tens of thousands of cases, in almost every country in Europe, by tribunals which included the acutest lawyers and ecclesiastics of the ages, on the scene and at the time when the alleged acts had taken place, and with the assistance of innumerable sworn witnesses. The judges had no motive whatever to desire the condemnation of the accused, and as conviction would be followed by fearful death, they had the strongest motives to exercise their power with caution and deliberation. The whole force of public opinion was directed constantly and earnestly to the question for many centuries, and although there was some controversy concerning the details of witchcraft, the fact of its existence was long considered undoubted. For many centuries the ablest men were not merely unwilling to repudiate the superstition, but they often pressed forward earnestly and with the utmost conviction to defend it. Indeed, during the period when witchcraft was most prevalent there were few writers of real eminence who did not, on some occasion, take especial pains to throw the weight of their authority into the scales. St. Thomas Aquinas was probably the ablest writer of the thirteenth century, and he assures us that diseases and tempests are often the direct act of the Devil; and the Devil can transform men into any shape and transport them through the air. Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris, and, as many think, the author of "The Imitation," is justly regarded as one of the master minds of his age; he too, wrote in defense of this belief. "These men," he wrote, "should be treated with scorn, and indeed, sternly corrected, who ridicule theologians whenever they speak of demons, or attribute to demons any effects, as if these things were entirely fabulous. This error has arisen among some learned men, partly through want of faith, and partly through weakness and imperfection of intellect." Bodin was unquestionably the most original political philosopher who had arisen since Machiavelli, and he devoted all his learning and acuteness to crushing the rising scepticism on the subject of witches. The truth is that in those ages ability was no guarantee against error; for the single employment of the reason was to develop and expand premises that were furnished by the Church. And this statement is as valid today as it was three hundred years ago. Bodin was esteemed, by many of his contemporaries, the ablest man who had then arisen in France, and the verdict has been but little qualified by later writers. Amid all the distractions of a dissipated and an intriguing court, and all the labors of a judicial position, he had amassed an amount of learning so vast and so various as to place him in the very first rank of the scholars of his nation. He has also the greater merit of being one of the chief founders of political philosophy and political history, and of having anticipated on these subjects many of the conclusions of our own day. In his judicial capacity he had presided at some trials of witchcraft. He had brought all the resources of his scholarship to bear upon the subject, and he had written a great part of his "Demonomanie des Sorciers" before the appearance of the last work of Wier. John Wier was a physician of Cleves who had in 1563 published a work which he called, "De Præstigus Dæmonum." He was quite convinced that the world was peopled by crowds of demons, who were constantly working miracles among mankind; and his only object was to reconcile his sense of their ubiquity with his persuasion that some of the phenomena that were deemed supernatural arose from disease. "Wier," said Bodin, "had armed himself against God. His book was a tissue of 'horrible blasphemies.' For the word of God is very certain that he who suffers a man worthy of death to escape, draws the punishment upon himself, as the prophet said to King Ahab, that he would die for having pardoned a man worthy of death. For no one had ever heard of pardon accorded to sorcerers." Such were the opinions which were promulgated towards the close of the sixteenth century by one of the most advanced intellects of one of the leading nations of Europe at that time; promulgated, too, with a tone of confidence and of triumph that shows how fully the writer could count upon the religious sympathies of his readers: the "Demonomanie des Sorciers" appeared in 1581. With a man of the caliber of Bodin writing the above, it is not to be wondered at that the mobs were so active in the "Witch Hunt." For as Lecky cites, "Although the illiterate cannot follow the more intricate speculations of their teachers, they can catch the general tone and character of thought which these speculations produce, and they readily apply them to their own sphere of thought." In 1587, Montaigne published the first great sceptical work in the French language. The vast mass of authority which those writers loved to array, and by which they shaped the whole course of their reasoning, is calmly and unhesitatingly discarded. The passion for the miraculous, the absorbing sense of diabolical capacities, have all vanished like a dream. The old theological measure of probability has completely disappeared, and is replaced by a shrewd secular common sense. The statements of the witches were pronounced intrinsically incredible. The dreams of a disordered imagination, or the terrors of the rack, would account for many of them; but even when it is impossible to explain the evidence, it is quite unnecessary to believe it. "After all," Montaigne said, "it is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men alive on account of them." "It was the merit of Montaigne to rise, by the force of his masculine genius, into the clear world of reality; to judge the opinions of his age, with an intellect that was invigorated but not enslaved by knowledge; and to contemplate the systems of the past, without being dazzled by the reverence that had surrounded them. He was the first great representative of the modern secular and rationalistic spirit. The strong predisposition of Montaigne was to regard witchcraft as the result of natural causes, and therefore, though he did not attempt to explain all the statements which he had heard, he was convinced that no conceivable improbability could be as great as that which would be involved in their reception." (_Lecky._) Thirteen years after Montaigne, Charron wrote his famous treatise on Wisdom. In this work he systematized many of the opinions of Montaigne. Voltaire treated the whole subject with a scornful ridicule and observed that, "Since there had been philosophers in France, witches had become proportionately rare." In 1681, Joseph Glanvil, a divine who in his day was very famous, took up the defense of the dying belief. "The Sadducismus Triumphatus," which he published, is probably the ablest book ever published in defense of the superstition, and although men of the ability of Henry More, the famous philosopher Casaubon, the learned Dean of Canterbury, Boyle and Cudworth, came to his defense, the delusion was fast losing ground. Lecky points out that by this time, "The sense of the improbability of witchcraft became continually stronger, till any anecdote which involved the intervention of the Devil was on that account generally ridiculed. This spirit was exhibited especially among those whose habits of thought were most secular, and whose minds were least governed by authority." But the belief did not become extinguished immediately. In France, in 1850, the Civil Tribunal of Chartres tried a man and woman named Soubervie for having caused the death of a woman called Bedouret. They believed she was a witch, and declared that the _priest_ had told them she was the cause of an illness under which the woman Soubervie was suffering. They accordingly drew Bedouret into a private room, held her down upon some burning straw, and placed a red-hot iron across her mouth. The unhappy woman soon died in extreme agony. The Soubervies confessed, and indeed, exulted in their act. At their trials they obtained the highest possible characters. It was shown that they had been actuated solely by superstition, and it was urged that they only followed the highest ecclesiastical precedent. The jury recommended them to mercy, and they were only sentenced to pay twenty-five francs a year to the husband of the victim, and to be imprisoned for four months. In 1850!! A great many may remember the "Hex" murder case near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1930! This is scarcely different from an incident which had occurred in 1892 in Wemding, Germany: An hysterical woman was "exorcised" by the Capuchin Father Aurelian, who accused a peasant woman of bewitching him. * * * * * The foregoing has shown that witchcraft is not an isolated incident in the history of Christianity, as the ecclesiastics would have us believe, but is a vital part of their religion. Witchcraft bears the same relation to Christianity that an arm bears to the body; neither can be removed without destroying the symmetrical aspect of the whole. Witchcraft is an integral part of the Christian religion, but its falsity has become so obvious that even the most devout have had to abandon it. Yet the other precepts are still maintained; and in the Bible which is claimed to be infallible, something is forgotten and discarded, something is declared to be ridiculous. And yet they call the Bible infallible. Again, if witchcraft is given up, why not the chief witch of the Bible, the Devil? Yet if this be yielded, then the idea of Atonement, the central doctrine of the Christian Church, must also go. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." If this be God's word, did God err when He said it? If He erred, He probably did so in many other things; if He did not Christians must either still maintain the Witchcraft Delusion or deny the Bible Delusion. The Witchcraft Delusion is denied and forgotten, and no one thinks of quoting, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." But the Bible Delusion despite all manner of ecclesiastical sophistry still maintains that man was created miraculously some 6000 years ago from the dust of the earth, that woman was made from a bone taken from the side of man, that language came into existence in the course of a single night, that God instituted a horrible massacre of the people by drowning because they did not come up to his expectations. It maintains miracles, virgin births, resurrections from the dead, and a literal heaven and hell. Again, in the New Testament, Matthew tells how the chief magician of the New Testament, Jesus, exorcised the devils from men and drove them into swine. What could be more explicit? If men were possessed of devils in Jesus' time, what has happened to these devils now? Surely, Jesus could not misinterpret his own words or deeds, if the religionists contend that we are now misinterpreting the Bible? If they state that his recorders were in error, then they admit the error of the entire Bible, for it is illogical for one part to be true and another to be false, when both are components of an infallible statement. "But they who abandon belief in maleficent demons and in witches as also, for this follows, in beneficent agents, such as angels, find themselves in a serious dilemma. For to this are such committed: If Jesus who came that he might destroy the Devil, and who is reported, among other proofs of his divine ministry, to have cast out demons from the 'possessed human beings,' and in one case, to have permitted a crowd of infernal agents to enter into a herd of swine; if he verily believed that he did these things, and if it be true that the belief is a superstition limited to the ignorant or barbaric mind, then what value can be attached to any statement that Jesus is reported to have made about the spiritual world?" (_Edward Clodd: "Pioneers of Evolution."_) The old adage that a chain is just as strong as its weakest link is very apt in this case. A belief in witches is part of the Bible; and if the civilized world rejects that concept, it must reject the Bible, for it is no longer infallible, since it is in error. Disregarding the internal evidence which declares the Bible to be spurious, and the scientific advances which have proven the Bible to be a myth and a fable, if man still insists on "revealed religion" he must admit that sorcery and witchcraft are an integral part of the Bible teaching. He must still either believe in witchcraft or disbelieve all of the Bible. For again, one part cannot be true and another false of an infallible statement. I thoroughly and emphatically agree with John Wesley who, in 1769, wrote, "The English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it, and I willingly take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many that believe in the Bible pay to those who do not believe it. I owe them no such service. I take knowledge that these are at the bottom of the outcry which has been raised, and with such insolence spread through the land, in direct opposition, not only to the Bible, but to the suffrage of the wisest and best of men in all ages and nations. They well know (whether Christians know it or not) _that the giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible_." Lecky, in that masterful work, "The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe," from which I have so freely quoted, states, "A disbelief in ghosts and witches was one of the most prominent characteristics of Scepticism in the seventeenth century. Yet, for more than fifteen hundred years it was universally believed that the Bible established in the clearest manner, the validity of the crime, and that an amount of evidence, so varied and so ample as to preclude the very possibility of doubt, attested its continuance and its prevalence.... In our own day, it may be said with confidence, that it would be altogether impossible for such an amount of evidence to accumulate around a conception which has no substantial basis in fact." And yet today, in the twentieth century, we do have an amount of "evidence" accumulated around a conception which had no substantial basis of fact. What a perfect analogy presents itself between one precept of revealed religion and religion in its entirety. In the seventeenth century, scepticism confined itself to a disbelief in witchcraft, one particular of revealed religion; in the twentieth century, scepticism expands and reveals the absurdity of all revealed religion. Just as when we read the annals of witchcraft today we sicken with the horror of this insane conception, so will posterity in the none too distant future, perhaps three more centuries, do for _all religion_ what three centuries did for witchcraft. Just so will they regard revealed religion in its entirety as we look upon the one factor, the _Witchcraft Delusion_. Men came gradually to disbelieve in witchcraft because they learned gradually to look upon it as absurd. This new tone of thought appeared first of all in those who were least subject to theological influences, and soon spread through the educated laity, and last of all, took possession of the clergy. So shall it be with all religions. A belief that was held for 1500 years, in the comparatively insignificant period of 100 years, sinks into oblivion; for the last judicial execution occurred in Switzerland in 1782; and the last law on the subject, the Irish Statute, was repealed in 1821. It is not, therefore, too much of a stretch of the imagination to conceive what the inhabitants of this planet will think of all religion 300 years from now. We have the sterling example of the Witchcraft Delusion before us. Yes, despite the otherwise brilliant men of today who still maintain the Bible Delusion, and the "Hedgers," that group of religious apologists who form those various sects, such as the Unitarians, the Humanists, etc. They are but the middle ground; they are but the intermediate between the delusionists and those that maintain the philosophy that eventually must triumph, the philosophy of atheism. When we think back to that group of capable men headed by Bodin, Gerson, and Joseph Glanvil, who turned their ability and learning to the defense of the Witchcraft Delusion, we find the answer to that ever-present response which the confused of this age give when confronted with the incompatabilities in their religion, namely, "Oh, well, more brilliant men than I believe in this delusion." Bodin, Gerson, and Glanvil could not bolster up a dying belief; and the Bodins, Gersons, and Glanvils of today cannot long bolster up the dying belief in all religions ... no matter what their ability or capacities may be. The handwriting is on the wall; the past teaches us what the future may be, but there is still much work to be done. CHAPTER XIII RELIGION AND MORALITY _The current religion is indirectly adverse to morals, because it is adverse to the freedom of the intellect. But it is also directly adverse to morals by inventing spurious and bastard virtues._ WINWOOD READE, "Martyrdom of Man." It had been formerly asserted by theologians that our moral laws were given to man by a supernatural intuitive process. However, Professor E. A. Westermarck's "Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas," and similar researches, give a comprehensive survey of the moral ideas and practices of all the backward fragments of the human race and conclusively prove the social nature of moral law. The moral laws have evolved much the same as physical man has evolved. There is no indication whatsoever that the moral laws came from any revelation since the sense of moral law was just as strong amongst civilized peoples beyond the range of Christianity, or before the Christian era. Joseph McCabe, commenting on Professor Westermarck's work states, "All the fine theories of the philosophers break down before this vast collection of facts. There is no intuition whatever of an august and eternal law, and the less God is brought into connection with these pitiful blunders and often monstrous perversions of the moral sense, the better. What we see is just man's mind in possession of the idea that his conduct must be regulated by law, and clumsily working out the correct application of that idea as his intelligence grows and his social life becomes more complex. It is not a question of the mind of the savage imperfectly seeing the law. It is a plain case of the ideas of the savage reflecting and changing with his environment and the interest of his priests." Justice is a fundamental and essential moral law because it is a vital regulation of social life and murder is the greatest crime because it is the greatest social delinquency; and these are inherent in the social nature of moral law. "Moral law slowly dawns in the mind of the human race as a regulation of a man's relation with his fellows in the interest of social life. It is quite independent of religion, since it has entirely different roots in human psychology." (_Joseph McCabe: "Human Origin of Morals."_) In the mind of primitive man there is no connection between morality and the belief in a God. "Society is the school in which men learn to distinguish between right and wrong. The headmaster is custom and the lessons are the same for all. The first moral judgments were pronounced by public opinion; public indignation and public approval are the prototypes of the moral emotions." (_Edward Westermarck: "Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas."_) Moral ideas and moral energy have their source in social life. It is only in a more advanced society that moral qualities are assumed for the gods. And indeed, it is known that in some primitive tribes, the gods are not necessarily conceived as good, they may have evil qualities also. "If they are, to his mind, good, that is so much the better. But whether they are good or bad they have to be faced as facts. The Gods, in short belong to the region of belief, while morality belongs to that of practice. It is in the nature of morality that it should be implicit in practice long before it is explicit in theory. Morality belongs to the group and is rooted in certain impulses that are a product of the essential conditions of group life. It is as reflection awakens that men are led to speculate upon the nature and origin of the moral feelings. Morality, whether in practice or theory, is thus based upon what is. On the other hand, religion, whether it be true or false, is in the nature of a discovery--one cannot conceive man actually ascribing ethical qualities to his Gods before he becomes sufficiently developed to formulate moral rules for his own guidance, and to create moral laws for his fellowmen. The moralization of the Gods will follow as a matter of course. Man really modifies his Gods in terms of the ideal human being. It is not the Gods who moralize man, it is man who moralizes the Gods." (_Chapman Cohen: "Theism or Atheism."_) In the formation of the Old Testament, the moralization of Yahveh led to the creation of a god who coincided more with the morality of the later writers, the God Elohim. "Rather must we say that morality begins in human social relations and passes from them to the relations maintained with the other life and with the Gods. Or, if one prefers to consider ghosts and gods as inseparable elements of the primary organism, then we should say that morality is born in that all-embracing psychical atmosphere. But it does not follow from that fact that the rise and development of morality are conditioned by belief in Gods and in immortality. Merely human relations are sufficient to the production of ethical appreciations. The invisible ghosts and Gods would never have been thought interested in the morality of the tribe, had not the leaders realized the importance of courage, of loyalty, of respect for neighbors' possessions, and the other elementary virtues. It is when the disastrous consequences of their absence became evident that the Gods were made to sanction these virtues. God or no God, immortality or no immortality, the essential morality of man would have been what it is." (_J. H. Leuba: "Belief in God and Immortality."_) The best that is in man is generated in the experiences of his daily life. The attributing of moral qualities to the gods was a much later development in the evolution of the moral ideas. At this stage of our development man is fortified by a sense of human fellowship, and in practice, as well as in theory, has long since given up the assumption that he needed superhuman beliefs. He has fully recognized the independence of morality from superhuman beliefs. James Mill and J. S. Mill taught the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the supreme object of action and the basis of morality. And it was this conception that introduced the new ethical principles of duty to posterity. This conception is a much nobler one than the religious interpretation of morality to consist in mainly defining what man's duty to God is; a morality whose chief selfish inspiration is not the helping of one's fellowmen but the saving of one's own soul. A secular morality teaches that what man thinks, says, and does lives after him and influences for good or ill future generations. This is a higher, nobler, and greater incentive to righteousness than any life of personal reward or fear of punishment in a future life. There are today a rapidly growing number of eminent moral teachers who condemn the clinging to the belief of personal existence after death as a hindrance to the best life on earth. Professor J. H. Leuba, in his work, "The Belief in God and Immortality," concludes that, "These facts and considerations indicate that the reality of the belief in immortality to civilized nations is much more limited than is commonly supposed; and that, if we bring into calculation all the consequences of the belief, and not merely its gratifying effects, we may even be brought to conclude that its disappearance from among the most civilized nations would be, on the whole, a gain." There are few educated men nowadays who would claim that morality cannot exist apart from religion. Theists are desperately attempting to harmonize a primitive theory of things, with a larger knowledge and a more developed moral sense. Morality is fundamentally the expression of those conditions under which associated life is found possible and profitable, and that so far as any quality is declared to be moral its justification and meaning must be found in that direction. "Our alleged essential dependence upon transcendental beliefs is belied by the most common experiences of daily life. Who does not feel the absurdity of the opinion that the lavish care for a sick child by a mother is given because of a belief in God and immortality? Are love of father and mother on the part of children, affection and serviceableness between brothers and sisters, straight-forwardness and truthfulness between business men, essentially dependent upon these beliefs? What sort of person would be the father who would announce divine punishment or reward in order to obtain the love and respect of his children? And if there are business men preserved from unrighteousness by the fear of future punishment, they are far more numerous who are deterred by the threat of human law. Most of them would take their chances with heaven a hundred times before they would once with society, or perchance with the imperative voice of humanity heard in the conscience." (_Leuba._) The primary motive of moral standards and practices is man's desire to seek happiness and avoid pain. And so it is not strange that morality has become stronger as the power of religion has weakened. "Right through history it has been the social instincts that have acted as a corrective to religious extravagances. And it is worth noting that with the exception of a little gain from the practice of casuistry, religions have contributed nothing towards the building up of a science of ethics. On the contrary, it has been a very potent cause of confusion and obstruction. Fictitious vices and virtues have been created and the real moral problems lost sight of. It gave the world the morality of the prison cell, instead of the tonic of the rational life. And it was indeed fortunate for the race that conduct was not ultimately dependent upon a mass of teachings that had their origin in the brains of savages, and were brought to maturity during the darkest period of European civilization.... And we know that the period during which the influence of Christian theism was strongest, was the period when the intellectual life of civilized man was at its lowest, morality at its weakest, and the general outlook hopeless. Religious control gave us heresy hunts, Jew hunts, burning for witchcraft, and magic in place of medicine. It gave us the Inquisition and the _auto da fe_, the fires of Smithfield, and the night of St. Bartholomew. It gave us the war of sects, and it helped powerfully to establish the sect of war. It gave us life without happiness, and death cloaked with terror. The Christian record is before us, and it is such that every Church blames the others for its existence. Quite as certainly we cannot point to a society that has been dominated by Freethinking ideals, but we can point to their existence in all ages, and can show that all progress is due to their presence. We can show that progressive ideals have originated with the least, and have been opposed by the most religious sections of society." (_Cohen._) The puerile conception of heaven and the savage conception of hell are still, in modified form, deemed necessary for a religious morality. Why it should be necessary for a supreme intelligence to make all things straight in another world, that he could more convincingly rectify in this one, is a conception which has escaped the reason of a freethinker, but has been very profitable to those on earth that lead their adherents to believe that they hold the keys to our future abodes. Winwood Reade in his "Martyrdom of Man," discussing the moral value of the fears of hell-fire, states, "a metaphysical theory cannot restrain the fury of the passions; as well attempt to bind a lion with a cobweb. Prevention of crime, it is well known, depends not on the severity, but on the certainty of retribution. The supposition that the terrors of hell-fire are essential or even conducive to good morals is contradicted by the facts of history. In the Dark Ages there was not a man or woman from Scotland to Naples, who doubted that sinners were sent to hell. The religion which they had was the same as ours, with this exception, that everyone believed in it. The state of Europe in that pious epoch need not be described. Society is not maintained by the conjectures of theology, but by those moral sentiments, those gregarious virtues which elevated men above the animals, which are now instinctive in our natures and to which intellectual culture is propitious. For, as we become more and more clearly enlightened, we perceive more and more clearly that it was with the whole human population as it was with the primeval clan; the welfare of every individual is dependent on the welfare of the community, and the welfare of the community depends on the welfare of every individual." The teachings of Christianity towards marriage furnishes a well known example of a reactionary philosophy of morals. The views of St. Paul on marriage are set forth in I Corinthians VII 1-9: 1. Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. 2. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. 3. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence; and likewise also the wife unto the husband. 4. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife. 5. Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency. 6. But I speak this by permission, and not of commandment. 7. For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man has his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that. 8. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them to abide even as I. 9. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn. These precepts furnish an example of the harm that can be done when man follows the absurd and unsocial decrees of an ascetic individual written in a barbaric age and maintained as law in a more advanced period. The enlightened physician holds that it is not good for a man not to touch a woman; and one wonders what would have become of our race if all women had carried St. Paul's teaching, "It is good for them if they abide even as I," into practice. Bertrand Russell, in his "Marriage and Morals," has gone to the root of the matter when he states, "He does not suggest for a moment that there may be any positive good in marriage, or that affection between husband and wife may be a beautiful and desirable thing, nor does he take the slightest interest in the family; fornication holds the center of the stage in his thoughts, and the whole of his sexual ethics is arranged with reference to it. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake." But then it is too much to expect of a man living nearly two thousand years ago to have known the psychology of the emotions, but we do know the great harm that his ascetic principles have done. St. Paul took the standpoint that sexual intercourse, even in marriage, is regrettable. This view is utterly contrary to biological facts, and has caused in its adherents a great deal of mental disorder. St. Paul's views were emphasized and exaggerated by the early Church and celibacy was considered holy. Men retired into the desert to wrestle with Satan, and when their abnormal manner of living fired their imagination with erotic visions, mutilated their bodies to cleanse their souls. "There is no place in the moral history of mankind of a deeper or more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affections, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero, and the lives of Socrates and Cato." (_Lecky: "History of European Morals."_) This concept that the closest of association between man and wife is an obnoxious deed, has strewn its evil influence down through the ages to the present day. The stealth and obscurity placed upon sexual matters has had its roots so firmly fixed in our manner of dealing with this purely normal function, that at this late date medical science is just beginning to eradicate the evils. It is now well recognized by educators and physicians and all clear-thinking individuals that it is extremely harmful for men, women, and children to be kept in artificial ignorance of the facts relating to sexual affairs. The obscurantism placed upon sexual matters has caused more physical and mental distress than most of our organic diseases. The physician is constantly correcting the abnormal conceptions that exist. The sex act had become something in the nature of a crime which could not be avoided, instead of assuming the manifestation of the consummation of the greatest love and tenderness that can exist between two individuals keenly attuned to the natural desires of a natural act. "The love of man and woman at its best is free and fearless, compounded of body and mind in equal proportions, not dreading to idealize because there is a physical basis, not dreading the physical basis lest it should interfere with the idealization. To fear love is to fear life and those who fear life are already three parts dead." (_Bertrand Russell: "Marriage and Morals."_) Religion has brutalized the marital relations, and Lecky, dealing with this subject, states, "The tender love which it elicits, the holy and beautiful domestic qualities that follow in its train, were almost absolutely omitted from consideration. The object of the ascetic was to attract men to a life of virginity, and as a necessary consequence marriage was treated as an inferior state. It was regarded as being necessary, indeed, and therefore justifiable, for the propagation of the species, and to free men from great evils; but still as a condition of degradation from which all who aspired to real sanctity could fly. To 'cut down by the axe of Virginity the wood of Marriage' was, in the energetic language of St. Jerome, the end of the saint; and if he consented to praise marriage it was merely because it produced virgins." Indeed, the entire ascetic attitude was well summed up by St. Jerome when exhorting Heliodorus to desert his family and become a hermit; he expatiated with foul minuteness on every form of natural affection he desired him to violate: "Though your little nephew twine his arms around your neck, though your mother, with dishevelled hair and tearing her robe asunder, point to the breast with which she suckled you, though your father fall down on the threshold before you, pass over your father's body ... You say that Scripture orders you to obey parents, but he who loves them more than Christ loses his soul." It has only been with the advance of secular literature that the degrading assumption of St. Paul that marriage is to be regarded solely as a more or less legitimate outlet for lust has been discarded, and the act of love as applied to marriage has come to have any meaning. And in this modern day the conception of the relationship of the sex act to marriage is far from being on the high plane where it rightly belongs. Bertrand Russell comments, "Marriage in the orthodox Christian doctrine has two purposes: one, that recognized by St. Paul, the other, the procreation of children. The consequence has been to make sexual morality even more difficult than it was made by St. Paul. Not only is sexual intercourse only legitimate within marriage, but even between husband and wife it becomes a sin unless it is hoped that it will lead to pregnancy. The desire for legitimate offspring is, in fact, according to the Catholic Church, the only motive which can justify sexual intercourse. But this motive always justifies it, no matter what cruelty may accompany it. If the wife hates sexual intercourse, if she is likely to die of another pregnancy, if the child is likely to be diseased or insane, if there is not enough money to prevent the utmost extreme of misery, that does not prevent the man from being justified in insisting on his conjugal rights, provided only that he hopes to beget a child." What effect has Christianity had upon our moral life, upon crime, drug-addiction, sexual immorality, prostitution, and perversion? These blights upon our moral character existed long before Christianity, and after Christianity. But what effectual check has Christianity contributed? The agitation concerning increased crime after the recent world conflict has brought this subject to the fore, and aroused a great deal of discussion and consideration of this problem. In its relation to religion, we have but one undeniable fact to bring before the thinking public. An examination of the statistics of penal institutions reveals that practically all criminals are religious. _Absolutely and proportionately smaller numbers of criminals are freethinkers._ Although church members nowhere constitute even half the population outside the prisons, they constitute from eighty to ninety-five per cent of the population inside the prison. This can be verified by reference to any census of any penal institution. As strangely as this may strike a great many readers, just so strange did it appear at one time to the multitude that the earth was round. (It is 500 years since the earth was proven to be round, yet there is a large colony of Christians near Chicago officially maintaining that the earth is as flat and four-cornered as the Bible states.) Neither Christianity nor any religious creed has proved an effectual check on civil crime. The prostitute has been hounded and abused by ecclesiastics since Biblical times, yet, it is only true to say that the religionist is not vitally interested in prostitution. Outwardly, he may pour forth a verbal barrage of condemnation, but if he believes he can save her immortal soul, ahunting he goes. He does not attempt to ameliorate the social welfare of this poor, degraded individual, as he thinks; her pitiful condition in the "everlasting present" on this earth interests him not at all, although it is this existence about which he raves, his only interest is in redeeming her soul not her body. If when the religionist tells the prostitute that only those who believe in Christ as God, in His Virgin Birth, and in His Resurrection in the Body, will go to heaven, and she agrees and repents--all is well; the religionist has saved a soul, and the prostitute goes about her business of spreading hideous venereal disease to others whose souls are saved by believing in Christ as a God. Her soul is saved and safe, but the scholar, the poet, the scientist, the benefactor to mankind, all those who make this life bearable and livable, their souls must roast in hell forever if they do not believe in the creed. Divine Justice? The greatest number of prostitutes are religious, yet prostitution continues to flourish. The ecclesiastic condemns the prostitute as the cause, never stopping to think that the cause must have an effect, and that prostitution is but the effect. The cause is our economic conditions. Prostitution is purely a medico-social problem, and the more the ecclesiastic keeps his hands off the problem the sooner will the condition be remedied to its best. Attempts to repress prostitution without changing the economic organization will always result in failure. Prostitution has always existed and will continue to exist until our economic system has undergone a radical change. So long as girls have to fight with starvation or with beggarly wages, so long as men are deterred from early marriage by inability to support a family, and so long as many married men remain polygamous in their tastes, just so long will prostitution exist. But we have seen that the clergy is never anxious to interfere with the "rights of the few to tyrannize the many," and since prostitution is an economic problem, religion never has, and never will be, of any help in this case. (Aside from the fact that there are many instances of a few centuries ago where the Church in a period of temporary financial distress has owned well paying brothels.) When we think of morality we are apt to concentrate more on sexual morality than on the more obtuse moral duties. Religion has from time immemorial been held up to our minds as a great force in the production of this morality. That is another myth. In our own country it is a trite phrase that a man has a "Puritan code of ethics," or as "straight laced as a Puritan." When the Puritan Fathers landed in this country, they began an existence that has revealed to the world for all time the value of a "burning religious zeal." In a sense they showed this zeal in regard to the Witchcraft Delusion. Coming as they did, to avoid religious persecution in their own native country, they should have established a colony which for meekness and beneficence would have shown the value of a true religious fervor. Instead, the persecuted immediately became the persecutors--again proving the worth of a mind that is imbued with a dominating religious zeal. Secondly, the principal vocation and recreation of these Fathers was their religion. It is only reasonable to suppose that in such a truly religious atmosphere morality should have reached its zenith of perfection. What actually happened is well illustrated in a very informative and case reporting work by Rupert Hughes, the novelist, "Facts About Puritan Morals": "Everybody seems to take it for granted that the behavior of the early settlers of New England was far above normal. Nobody seems to take the trouble to verify this assumption. The facts are amazingly opposite. The Puritans admitted incessantly that they were exceedingly bad. The records sustain them.... The Puritans wallowed in every known form of wickedness to a disgusting degree. Considering the extremely meagre population of the early colonies, they were appallingly busy in evil. I do not refer to the doctrinal crimes that they artificially construed and dreaded and persecuted with such severity that England had to intervene: the crimes of being a Quaker, a Presbyterian, which they punished with lash, with the gallows, and with exile. I do not refer to their inclusion of lawyers among keepers of disorderly houses, and people of ill-fame. I refer to what every people, savage or civilized, has forbidden by law: murder, arson, adultery, infanticide, drunkenness, theft, rape, sodomy, and bestiality. The standard of sexual morality among the unmarried youth was lower in Puritan England than it is today for both sexes. "It is important that the truth be known. Is religion, is church membership, a help to virtue? The careless will answer without hesitation, Yes! of course. The statistics, when they are not smothered, cry No! "If church-going keeps down sin, then the Puritans should have been sinless because they compelled everybody to go to church. They actually regarded absence from church as worse than adultery or theft. They dragged prisoners from jail under guard to church. They whipped old men and women bloodily for staying away. They fined the stay-at-homes and confiscated their goods and their cattle to bankruptcy. When all else failed they used exile. Disobedience of parents was voted a capital offense and so was Sabbath-breaking even to the extent of picking up sticks. "Yet, as a result of all this religion, the sex life of the Puritan was abnormal.... Their sex sins were enormous. Their form of spooning was 'bundling,' an astonishing custom that permitted lovers to lie down in bed together in the dark, under covers. They were supposed to keep all their clothes on, but there must have been some mistake somewhere for the number of illegitimate children and premature children was stupefying. Dunton tells us that there hardly passed a court day in Massachusetts without some convictions for fornication, and although the penalty was fine and whipping, the crime was very frequent. "Nothing, I repeat, would have surprised the Puritans more than to learn that their descendants accepted them as saints. They wept, wailed, and refused to be comforted. They were terrified and horrified by their own wickedness. The harsh, granite Puritan of our sermons, on statues and frescoes, was unknown in real life. The real Puritan Zealot spent an incredible amount of his time in weeping like a silly old woman. Famous Puritan preachers boast of lying on a floor all night and drenching the carpet with their tears. Their church services according to their own accounts, must have been cyclones of hysteria, with the preacher sobbing and streaming, and the congregation in a state of ululant frenzy, with men and women fainting on all sides. "The authorities are the best possible, not the reports of travelers or the satires of enemies, but the statements of the Puritans themselves, governors, eminent clergymen, and the official records of the colonies. Hereafter, anybody who refers to the Puritans as people of exemplary life, or morality above the ordinary, is either ignorant or a liar. In our own day, there is an enormous amount of crime and vice among the clergy. Most horrible murders abound, by ministers, of ministers, and for ministers. Published and unpublished adulteries, seductions, rapes, elopements, embezzlements, homosexual entanglements, bigamies, financial turpitudes, are far more numerous than they should be in proportion to the clerical population. "Governor Bradford breaks out in his heart-broken bewilderment and unwittingly condemns the whole spirit and pretense of Puritanism. The Puritans fled from the wicked old world for purity's sake, they were relentless in prayer, they were absolutely under the control of the church and clergy, and yet, their Governor says that sin flourished more in Plymouth Colony than in vile London! "If our people are wicked nowadays because they lack religion, what shall be said of the Puritans who were far more wicked, though they lived, moved, and had their being in an atmosphere so surcharged with religion that children and grown persons lay awake all night, sobbing and rolling on the floor in search of secret sins that they could not remember well enough to repent? It is well to remember that there has perhaps never been in history a community in which Christianity had so perfect a laboratory in which to experiment. "The very purpose of the Colony was announced as the propagation of the Gospel. The Bible was the law book. The Colony lacked all the things on which preachers lay the blame for ungodliness; yet, every infamy known to history, from fiendish torture to luxurious degeneracy flourished amazingly. This ancient and impregnable fact has been ignored. The records have been studiously veiled in a cloud of misty reverence, and concealed under every form of rhetoric known to apologists." We can only conclude that religion does not seem to act as an effectual check against sexual immorality. Furthermore, high moral principles can be inculcated without any religious background, and have been in spite of religion. A man who is moral because of his reason and his sensibilities, and his comprehension of the necessary social structure of the world is a far better citizen than the man who feebly attempts a moral life because he expects a mythical existence in a delusional heaven or wishes to avoid hell-fire. A secular code of morals based upon the best experiences of communal and national life would place its highest obligation not to a deity but to the welfare of all fellowmen. CHAPTER XIV CHRISTIANITY AND WAR "Instead of diminishing the number of wars, ecclesiastical influence has actually and very seriously increased it; we may look in vain for any period since Constantine in which the clergy as a body exerted themselves to repress the military spirit, or to prevent or abridge a particular war with an energy at all comparable to that which they displayed in stimulating the fanaticism of the Crusades, in producing the atrocious massacres of the Albigenses, in embittering the religious contests that followed the Reformation." (_Lecky._) Any institution that can sanction war is the most immoral institution that the mind of man can imagine. That an institution which claims to have under its guidance the moral activity of this earth, has instituted and condoned war is a known historical fact. That the Church has blessed the banners of opposing factions, and has gloried in the butchering of innocent heretics, no manner of present disregard for the facts and apology can refute and redeem. The religious and civil wars, the massacre of the Albigenses and other sects, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, are still alive in the memories of historians and still rankle. The Crusades were a bloody blot in the none too peaceful times of the Middle Ages. Christianity hurled itself at Mohammedanism in expedition after expedition for nearly three centuries. Millions of men perished in battle, hunger, and disease, and every atrocity the imagination can conceive of disgraced the warriors of the cross. When one crusade failed, a papal bull instigated the next. Taxes were imposed to defray the expenses, and Europe was so drained of men and money that it was threatened with social bankruptcy and annihilation. The Inquisition between 1481 and 1808 had punished 340,000 persons, and of these, nearly 32,000 had been burnt. This was the result of the declaration that "The Inquisition is an urgent necessity in view of the unbelief of the present age." The Church forgot to mention the vast amount of wealth that accrued to her by these means. But we need not turn to the dead ages for material, for the present still firmly holds its war memories. "Armenians massacred by Turks and Kurds; Christians slaughtered by Mohammedans is a horror as hideous in the name of religion as in the name of war. The persecution of Jews by Christians in the name of Christ is diabolical. The atrocities inflicted on Christian Belgium by Christian Germany stains the Teuton's hand as red as the Turk's, but with a difference. The Teuton outraged his own 'holy women,' despoiled and murdered his own 'sisters in Christ,' while the Mohammedan hordes perpetrated their nameless infamies on those whom they believed to be the imps of Satan. Mercifully, call these things the logical crimes of a state of war! Then we must admit that savagery still is more powerful than religion, and we must concede that no religion so far has achieved the success that one might reasonably expect of a divine institution." (_Bell: "Woman from Bondage to Freedom."_) The World War proved the utter worthlessness of Christianity as a civilizing force. The nations engaged were not fighting non-Christians; Germany, Austria, Russia, England, Belgium, Servia, Italy, and the United States are all Christian nations. They all worship the same God, they are all brothers in Christ, but that did not prevent their cutting each other's throats on the battlefield. Their common religious belief did not render the war less bitter nor less bloodthirsty. Is it not a fact that if the Christian nations of the world would only live at peace together, war would be impossible? Neither Mohammedan nations nor Japan could threaten. When the Christian speaks of the brotherhood of man, he means a brotherhood of _believers_ only. What kind of brotherhood did Christians bestow on Jews or heretics in the Middle Ages? Was it the brotherhood of man that Christianity bestowed on the conquered Mexican and Peruvian nations, and on the Indians of our own country? If Christianity had expended as much energy in teaching its adherents the fundamentals of a sane social life, as it did to prepare mankind for a mythical life in Heaven, civilization would be today greatly in advance of where it is. Does any one believe that Jew, Mohammedan, Catholic, and Protestant can long live in peace together? Common social needs bring mankind together but religion drives them apart. There can never be a lasting peace until the myth of God is dispelled forever from the minds of men. Then and then only, can the adjustment between economic and political forces lead to a permanent peace. CHAPTER XV CHRISTIANITY AND SLAVERY _Nothing during the American struggle against the slave system did more to wean religious and God-fearing men and women from the old interpretation of Scripture than the use of it to justify slavery._ ANDREW DICKSON WHITE. The Christian Church has had the audacity, in modern times, to proclaim that it had abolished slavery and the slave trade. It is difficult to understand how any "righteous" man could make that contention remembering that it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that slavery became illegal in Christian countries, with one exception, Abyssinia, the oldest of the Christian countries, which still maintains slavery. In our own country, a nation had to be embroiled in a civil war before slavery could be abolished. Abolished by Christianity in the nineteenth century, when Christianity has been dominant in most civilized countries since the third century, and when the traffic in human flesh flourished right through those centuries in which Christianity was most powerful! A reference to the facts show that this claim is as spurious as many others which the ecclesiastics have boldly affirmed throughout the ages. For not only is this contrary to the truth, but it is an undeniable fact that it was only by the aid and sanction of the theological forces that slavery was able to degrade our civilization as long as it did. On referring to that legend which has been the source of most of our suffering and inhumanity, the Bible, a direct sanction for slavery is given in the Old Testament. Leviticus XXV gives explicit instructions as to where and from whom slaves should be bought, and sanctions the repulsive feature of separation of the slave from his family. Leviticus XXVII gives the "price" of human beings. The Koran, which the Christians look upon as a ridiculous smattering of utterances of a spurious prophet, sets a superior example to the Christian "Divine Revelations." "God hath ordained that your brothers should be your slaves, therefore, let him whom God hath ordained to be the slave of his brother, his brother must give him of the clothes wherewith he clotheth himself, and not order him to do anything beyond his power.... A man who illtreats his slave will not enter paradise.... Whoever is the cause of separation between mother and child by selling and giving, God will separate him from his friends on the day of resurrection." The New Testament follows the Old Testament, and there is nowhere to be found in its contents anything to suggest the elimination of this practice. Jesus did not condemn this practice, but accepted slavery as he accepted most institutions about him, and all superstitions. The teachings of Paul on the question of slavery are clear and explicit. Pope Leo, in his letter of 1888 to the Bishop of Brazil, remarks: "When amid the slave multitude whom she has numbered among her children, some led astray by some hope of liberty, have had recourse to violence and sedition, the Church has always condemned these unlawful efforts, and through her ministers has applied the remedy of patience...." St. Peter was addressing himself especially to the slaves when he wrote, "For this is thankworthy, if for conscience towards God a man endures sorrows, suffering wrongfully." The Church certainly saw nothing wrong with slavery when she preached patience to her slaves. It did not condemn slavery, but condemned the slaves for revolting. This in 1888! In the "Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics" is found: "There is no explicit condemnation in the teaching of our Lord.... It remains true that the abolitionist could point to no one text in the Gospels in defense of his position, while those who defended slavery could appeal at any rate to the letter of Scripture." It is true that slavery existed under Pagan civilization, but there it represented a phase of social development, while Christian slavery stood for a deliberate retrogression in social life. It was Seneca who said, "Live gently and kindly with your slave, and admit him to conversation with you, to council with you, and to share in your meals." Think of what would have occurred if one of our philosophers had admonished a slave-holding Christian in the above manner. "We are apt to think of the ancient slave as being identical with the miserable and degraded being that disgraced Christian countries less than a century ago. This, however, is far from the truth. The Roman slave did not, of necessity, lack education. Slaves were to be found who were doctors, writers, poets, philosophers, and moralists. Plautus, Phædrus, Terence, Epictetus, were slaves. Slaves were the intimates of men of all stations of life, even the emperor. Certainly, it never dawned on the Roman mind to prohibit education to the slave. That was left for the Christian world, and almost within our own time." (For a good account of the close association of Christianity with slavery see, "_Christianity, Slavery, and Labor," Chapman Cohen._) In Rome, the slave kept his individuality, and outwardly there was no distinction in color and clothing; there was very little sound barrier between the slave and the freeman. The slave attended the same games as the freeman, participated in the affairs of the municipality, and attended the same college. The ancients kept the bodies of their slaves in bondage, but they placed no restraint upon the mind and no check upon his education. It has even been said that the slave class of antiquity really corresponded to our free laboring class. It is also well known that a well-conducted slave, by his own earnings, was able to purchase his freedom in the course of a few years. There can be no comparison, therefore, between Pagan and Christian slavery, except to the detriment of the latter. The Christian slave trade represents one of the most frightful and systematic brutalities the world has ever known. The contrast between the Pagan and Christian slavery is even more marked when the dependence of the Christian slave upon the good nature of his master is considered. Compare this with the decrees of the Roman emperors: "Masters were prohibited sending their slaves into the arena without a judicial sentence. Claudius punished as a murderer any master who killed his slave. Nero appointed judges to hear the complaints of slaves as to ill-treatment or insufficient feeding. Domitian forbade the mutilation of slaves; Hadrian forbade the selling of slaves to gladiators, destroyed private prisons for them, and ordered that they who were proved to have ill-treated their slaves be forced to sell them. Caracalla forbade the selling of children into slavery." "All that need be added to this is that the later Christian slavery represented a distinct retrogression, deliberately revived from motives of sheer cupidity, and accompanied by more revolting features than the slavery of ancient times." (_Chapman Cohen._) In the "History of Ethics Within Organized Christianity" is recorded, "The Church, as such, never contemplated doing away with slavery as such, even though Stoicism had denounced it as 'Contra Mundum.' Nowhere does the early Church condemn slavery as an institution. Kindness to the slave is frequently recommended, but this was done quite as forcibly, and upon a much broader ground by the pagan writers. It would be indeed nearer the truth to say that the Christians who wrote in favor of the mitigation of the lot of the slave were far more indebted to pagans than to Christian influence." The Church itself owned many slaves, advised its adherents to will their slaves to her, and was the last to liberate the slaves which she owned. Yet, the apologists for the Church would have us believe that she was instrumental in the destruction of slavery, when it is a fact that there is nowhere a clear condemnation of slavery on the part of the Church. H. C. Lea in his "Studies of the Church History" says, "The Church held many slaves, and while their treatment was in general sufficiently humane to cause the number to grow by voluntary accretions, yet it had no scruple to assert vigorously their claim to ownership. When the Papal Church granted a slave to a monastery, the dread anathema, involving eternal perdition, was pronounced against anyone daring to interfere with the gift; and those who were appointed to take charge of the lands and farms of the Church, were especially instructed that it was part of their duty to pursue and recapture fugitive bondsmen." It must not be assumed that the Catholic Church was the only ecclesiastical body to condone slavery, or that it was only the traffic in black slaves that flourished a few hundred years ago. "In the seventeenth century, thousands of Irish men, women and children, were seized by the order or under the license of the English government, and sold as slaves for use in the West Indies. In the Calendar of State Papers, under various dates, between 1653-1656, the following entries occur: 'For a license to Sir John Clotworthy to transport to America 500 natural Irishmen.' A slave dealer, named Schlick, is granted a license to take 400 children from Ireland for New England, and Virginia. Later, 100 Irish girls and a like number of youths are sold to the planters in Jamaica. "Had the Church been against slavery it would have branded it as a wrong, and have set the example of liberating its own slaves. It did neither. Nay, the Church not only held slaves itself, not only protected others who held slaves, but it thundered against all who should despoil its property by selling or liberating slaves belonging to the Church. The whole history of the Christian Church shows that it has never felt itself called upon to fight any sound institution, no matter what its character, so long as it favored the Church. Slavery and serfdom, war, piracy, child labor, have all been in turn sanctioned." (_Chapman Cohen: "Christianity, Slavery, and Labor."_) In Abyssinia, the influence of Christianity has been dominant for a longer period of time than anywhere else in the world. The population of Abyssinia is at least ten million, and of this population not less than one-fifth, probably more, are slaves. In 1929, Lady Kathleen Simon published her book entitled, "Slavery," dealing with the slave trade of the world. In this work it is pointed out that slave-owning is an integral part of the religion of the country, and that opposition to the abolition of slavery comes principally from the priesthood which considers itself the guardian of the Mosaic law, and regards slavery as an institution ordered by Jehovah. Slave raids are constant in this country, and are accompanied by the greatest brutality and cruelty. Vast areas are depopulated by these raids and even at this date, gangs of slaves may be seen by travelers, with the dead and dying bodies of those that have fallen strewn along the roadside. "The slave trade in Abyssinia is open, its horrors are well known, and it is supported by the Christian Church of the country. Such is slavery in the most Christian country in the world today, the country which has the longest Christian history of any nation in the world. Its existence helps us to realize the value of the statement that the power of Christianity in the world destroyed the slave trade. Slavery flourishes in the oldest of Christian countries in the world, backed up by the Church, the Old Bible, and the New Testament. It has all the horrors, all the brutalities, all the degradations of the slave trade at its worst. Such is Christian Abyssinia, and such, but for the saving grace of secular civilization, would be the rest of the world." (_Chapman Cohen._) The slave system that arose in Christian times, created by and continued by Christians in the most Christian of countries, provides the final and unanswerable indictment of the Christian Church. Slavery was unknown to the Africans until it was introduced by the Christian Portuguese. In 1517 the Spaniards began to ship negro slaves to Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Porto Rica. John Hawkins was the first Englishman of note to engage in the traffic, and Queen Elizabeth loaned this virtuous and pious gentleman the ship _Jesus_. English companies were licensed to engage in this trade and during the reign of William and Mary it was thrown open to all. Between 1680 and 1700, it has been said that 140,000 Negroes were imported by the English-African Company, and about 160,000 more by private traders. Between 1700 and 1786, as many as 610,000 were transported to Jamaica alone. In the hundred years ending 1776, the English carried into the Spanish, French, and English Colonies three million slaves. The cruelty experienced by these human cargoes on their transportation defies description. The chaining, the branding, the mutilation, the close quarters, the deaths by suffocation and disease, are a sterling example of man's inhumanity to man when his conscience is relieved by finding support of his inhumane actions sanctioned in that most holy of holies, the Bible. Exclusive of the slaves who died before leaving Africa, not more than fifty out of a hundred lived to work on the plantations. Ingram's "History of Slavery" calculates that although between 1690 and 1820 no less than 800,000 Negroes had been imported to Jamaica, yet, at the latter date, only 340,000 were on the island. Slavery in America received the same sanction by the religionists which it received on the continent. George Whitefield, the great Methodist preacher, was an earnest supporter of slavery. When the importation of slaves finally ceased the states began the new industry of breeding slaves; the leading state for this breeding, and the one which contained the largest number of stud farms, was Virginia. Lord Macaulay, in a speech delivered before the House of Commons on February 26, 1845, said: "The slave states of the Union are of two classes, the breeding states, where the human beast of burden increases, and multiplies, and becomes strong for labor; and the sugar and cotton states to which these beasts of burden are sent to be worked to death. Bad enough it is that civilized man should sail to an uncivilized quarter of the world where slavery existed, should buy wretched barbarians, and should carry them away to labor in a distant land; bad enough! But that a civilized man, a baptized man, a man proud of being a citizen of a free state, a man frequenting a Christian Church, should breed slaves for exportation, and if the whole horrible truth must be told, should even beget slaves for exportation, should see children, sometimes his own children, gambolling from infancy, should watch their growth, should become familiar with their faces, and should sell them for $400 or $500 a head, and send them to lead in a remote country a life which is a lingering death, a life about which the best thing that can be said is that it is sure to be short; this does, I own, excite a horror exceeding even the horror excited by that slave trade which is the curse of the African coast. And mark, I am speaking of a trade as regular as the trade in pigs between Dublin and Liverpool, or as the trade in coals between the Tyne and the Thames." It has been estimated that the members and ministers of the Orthodox churches in the South owned no less than 660,000 slaves. Thomas Paine, in 1775, when he wrote his article on "Justice and Humanity," was the first to demand emancipation in a lucid manner. The campaign for liberation of the slaves was therefore inaugurated by a freethinker, and triumphantly closed by another freethinker, Abraham Lincoln. In this manner did the Church abolish slavery. With characteristic disregard for the truth, the religionists have laid claim to Lincoln, which claim has been amply refuted; but we are still awaiting the Church's claim to Paine as one of her devotees. "And, truly, the case against Christianity is plain and damning. Never, during the whole of its history has it spoken in a clear voice against slavery; always, as we have seen, its chief supporters have been pronounced believers. They have cited religious teaching in its defence, they have used all the power of the Church for its maintenance. Naturally, in a world in which the vast majority are professing Christians, believers are to be found on the side of humanity and justice. But to that the reply is plain. Men are human before they are Christians; both history and experience point to the constant lesson of the many cases in which the claims of a developing humanity override those of an inculcated religious teaching. "But the damning fact against Christianity is, not that it found slavery here when it arrived, and accepted it as a settled institution, not even that it is plainly taught in its 'sacred' books, but, that it deliberately created a new form of slavery, and for hundreds of years invested it with a brutality greater than that which existed centuries before. A religion which could tolerate this slavery, argue for it, and fight for it, cannot by any stretch of reasoning be credited with an influence in forwarding emancipation. Christianity no more abolished slavery than it abolished witchcraft, the belief in demonism, or punishment for heresy. It was the growing moral and social sense of mankind that compelled Christians and Christianity to give up these and other things." (_C. Cohen: "Christianity, Slavery, and Labor."_) CHAPTER XVI CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR _The mortgage which the peasant has on heavenly property guarantees the mortgage of the bourgeois on the farms._ MARX. _The same Christ, the same Buddha, the same Isaiah, can stand at once for capitalism and communism, for liberty and slavery, for peace and war, for whatever opposed or clashing ideals you will. For the life and the power of a church is in the persistent identity of its symbols and properties. Meanings change anyhow, but things endure. The rock upon which a church is founded is not the word of God; the rock upon which a church is founded is the wealth of men._ HORACE M. KALLEN, "Why Religion?" During the Middle Ages the heads of the Church exercised all the rights of a feudal lord, and were even more tenacious of their privileges. The serfs were prohibited from migrating from one part of the country to another. The daughter of a serf could not marry without the consent of the lord, who frequently demanded payment for permission; or, worse still, the infamous "Right of the First Night." The serf was bonded in a hundred different ways, and it is significant of the esteem in which the Church was held that in every peasant revolt which occurred, there was always a direct attack on the Church. Professor Thorold Rogers, writing of the twelfth century, gives the following picture of the poorer classes: "The houses of these villagers were mean and dirty. Brickmaking was a lost art, stone was found only in a few places. The wood fire was on a hob of clay. Chimneys were unknown, except in castles and manor houses, and the smoke escaped through the door or whatever other aperture it could reach. The floor of the homestead was filthy enough, but the surroundings were filthier still. Close by the door stood the mixen, a collection of every abomination--streams from which, in rainy weather, fertilized the lower meadows, generally the lord's pasture, and polluted the stream. The house of the peasant cottager was poorer still. Most of them were probably built of posts wattled and plastered with clay or mud, with an upper storey of poles reached by a ladder." "What the lord took he held by right of force; what the Church had it held by force of cunning. And as, in the long run, the cunning of the Church was more powerful than the force of the robber-lord, the priesthood grew in riches until its wealth became a threat to the whole of the community. In England, in the thirteenth century, the clergy numbered one in fifty-two of the population, and the possessions of the Church included a third of the land of England. No opportunity was lost by the Church to drain money from the people whether they were rich or poor. The trade done in candles, and sales of indulgences brought in large sums of money, and there were continuous disputes between the clergy and the king and the Pope as to the divisions of the spoil. The picture of the Church watching over the poor, sheltering them from wrong, tending them in sickness, and relieving them in their poverty will not do. It is totally without historic foundation. When the poor revolted, and apart from the great revolts, there were many small and local outbreaks, the anger of the poor was directed as much against the Church as it was against the nobles." (_C. Cohen: "Christianity, Slavery, and Labor."_) When the downtrodden masses of Spain, Mexico, and Russia revolted against the tyranny which had held them in the slough of medieval degradation, they likewise, in recent times, proved that they realized that their submission was as much caused by the Church, allied as it is with the state, as by the government itself. The Church did attend the sick, but its trade was in the miracle cures and prayers, and so they very much resembled men hawking their own goods, and attending to their own business. And there is the plain, historic fact, that in defense of its miracle cures it did what it could to obstruct the growth of both medical and sanitary science. It did give alms but these constituted but a small part of what it had previously taken. Through all the changes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, it is impossible to detect anxiety on the part of the Churches, Roman Catholic or Protestant, to better the status of, or improve the condition of, the working classes. Whatever improvements may have come about, and they were few enough, came independently of Christianity, organized or unorganized. Controversies about religious matters might, and did, grow more acute; controversies about bettering the position of the working classes only began with the breaking down of Christianity. And when, as in Germany, there occurred a peasants' revolt, and the peasants appealed to Luther for assistance, he wrote, after exhorting the peasants to resignation, to the nobles: "A rebel is outlawed of God and Kaiser, therefore who can and will first slaughter such a man does right well, since upon such a common rebel every man is alike the judge and executioner. Therefore, who can shall openly or secretly smite, slaughter and stab, and hold that there is nothing more poisonous, more harmful, more devilish than a rebellious man." And in pre-revolutionary France, the Church saw unmoved a state of affairs almost unimaginable, so far as the masses of the people were concerned, in their misery and demoralization. And this at a time when half the land of France, in addition to palaces, chateaux, and other forms of wealth were possessed by the nobility and clergy, and were practically free from taxation. A contemporary observer writes, "Certain savage-looking beings, male and female, are seen in the country, black, livid, and sunburnt, and belonging to the soil which they dig and grub with invincible stubbornness. They stand erect, they display human lineaments, and seem capable of articulation. They are, in fact, men. They retire at night into their dens, where they live on black bread, water and roots. They spare other human beings the trouble of sowing." In pre-revolutionary France, the clergy, counting monks and nuns, numbered, in 1762, over 400,000, with total possessions estimated at two thousand million pounds, producing an annual revenue of about one hundred and forty millions. The clergy were free from taxation and the higher members of the order possessed all the rights and privileges of the feudal nobility. To the end the Church in France, as in our day, in pre-revolutionary Russia, remained the champion of privilege and misgovernment. In England, during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, developed the English manufacturing system. Woman-and child-labor were common in both mines and factories. The regular working hours were from 5 A.M. to 8 P.M., with six full days' labor per week. One investigator remarks: "It is a very common practice with the great populous parishes in London to bind children in large numbers to the proprietors of cotton-mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire, at a distance of 200 miles. The children are sent off by waggon loads at a time, and are as much lost for ever to their parents as if they were shipped off for the West Indies. The parishes that bind them, by procuring a settlement for the children at the end of forty days, get rid of them for ever; and the poor children have not a human being in the world to whom they can look up for redress against the wrongs they may be exposed to from these wholesale dealers in them, whose object it is to get everything they can possibly wring from their excessive labor and fatigue." In the mines conditions were still worse, and a report in 1842 states: "Children are taken at the earliest ages, if only to be used as living and waving candlesticks, or to keep rats from a dinner, and it is in pits of the worst character, too, in which most female children are employed. It would appear from the practical returns obtained by the commissioner, that about one-third of the persons employed in coal mines are under eighteen years of age, and that much more than one-third of this proportion are under thirteen years of age." In certain mines there was no distinction of sex so far as underground labor was concerned. The men worked entirely naked and were assisted by females of all ages, from girls of six years to women of twenty-one, who were quite naked down to the waist. But if oppression was rife, education at a low ebb, and misery prevalent, the religion of the people was receiving attention. The period was, in fact, one of revival in religion. The Wesleyan revival was in full swing, and Evangelical Christianity was making great advances. Between 1799 and 1804 there were founded, "The British and Foreign Bible Society," "The London Missionary Society," and "The Mission To The Jews." When the Education Bill of 1819 came before the House of Lords, out of eighteen Bishops who voted on the measure, fifteen voted against it! Thus the religionists were most active during the period when a condition approximating white slavery existed. And why should this not have been so, when the Church is not interested in the social and economic status of its adherents during their existence on this planet, but is avowedly concerned with deluding its devotees into a mythical belief in a life hereafter? The greatest number of slaves and the greatest degradation of workers is to be found in those times and places where religious superstition is most powerful. In our own country, as well as in England, the labor movement has developed not merely outside the range of organized Christianity, but in the teeth of the bitterest opposition to it. Christianity, since it came into power, has always preached to the poor in defense of the privileges and possessions of the rich. In a recent publication by Jerome Davis, which is entitled "Labor Speaks for Itself on Religion," the author has compiled the opinions of labor leaders in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, China, Austria, Australia, Belgium, and Japan. It is a terrific indictment by labor against organized religion. The author tells us, "Here is labor speaking for itself, and in the by and large it feels that the Church has not understood or helped it to secure justice. The majority believe that the Church has a capitalistic bias. It is a class institution for the upper and middle classes." This is putting the matter rather mildly when one considers their grievances expressed in their own words. Again Jerome Davis asks, "Is it possible that our Church leaders are to some extent blinded by current conventional standards? Are they so busy sharing the wealth of the prosperous with others in spiritual quests that they fail to see some areas of desperate social need? Do they to some degree unconsciously exchange the gift of prophecy for yearly budgets and business boards?" James H. Maurer, the president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, speaks for labor and the title of his subject is, "Has the Church Betrayed Labor?" Mr. Maurer's opinion follows: "A worker living from hand to mouth, and lucky if he is not hopelessly in debt besides, working at trip-hammer speed when he has work, with no security against enforced idleness, sickness, and old age, can hardly be expected to become deeply interested in, or a very enthusiastic listener to sermons about Lot's disobedient wife, who because she looked back was turned into a pillar of salt. He is far more concerned about his own overworked and perhaps underfed wife who, due to the strain of trying to raise his family on a meager income that permits of no rest or proper medical care, is slowly but surely turning into a corpse. To go to a church and listen to a sermon about the sublimeness of being humble and meek, that no matter how desperate the struggle to live may be one should be contented and not envy the more fortunate, because God in His infinite wisdom has ordained that there shall be rich and poor and that no matter how heavy one's burdens on this earth, one should bear them meekly and look for reward in the world to come and remember that God loves the poor--such sermons naturally sound pleasing to the ears of the wealthy listeners, and the usual reward is a shower of gold and hearty congratulations by the sleek and well-fed members of the congregation. But to an intelligent worker such sermons sound like capitalistic propaganda, upon which he is constantly being fed by every labor-exploiting concern in the country, and quite naturally he tries to avoid getting an extra dose of the same kind of buncombe on Sunday.... "In Churches, men have listened for nearly two thousand years to lessons and sermons about 'the brotherhood of man,' 'the forging of swords of war into plowshares of peace,' 'man is his brother's helper,' 'peace on earth, good will toward men,' 'thou shalt not kill,' We are taught to say the Lord's Prayer, and ask for heaven on earth, and yet, at every war opportunity, with a very few noble exceptions, the Church, at the command of the war lords, has scrapped its peace sentiments and turned its back to the Prince of Peace and Heaven on Earth and has shouted itself hoarse for hell on earth. And then the spokesmen of the churches of each nation at war have had the impudence to pray to a just God and ask Him to play favorites, to use His infinite power on their side and join in the mad slaughter of His own beloved children. And those slaughtered are the workers, and their folks at home naturally wonder why the one big international peace organization on earth, the Church, at the crack of the war demon's whip, deserts its principles of 'Thou shalt not kill,' and 'Peace on earth,' and helps to stampede its followers in the very opposite direction." Mr. Maurer points out that labor's struggle to have a Federal Child Labor amendment to the Constitution ratified by the various state legislatures, and to have such legislation enacted as the Workmen's Compensation Laws, Mothers' Pensions, and Old Age Pensions, received no support from the clergy. He concludes by citing this occurrence: "For a good illustration of what the Church is sometimes guilty of let us take a glimpse at what happened in Detroit, during the month of October, 1926, when the American Federation of Labor was holding its annual convention there. Nearly every church in Detroit sent invitations to prominent labor officials to speak in their churches before Bible classes, Sunday schools, and Young Men's Christian Associations. Most of the invitations were accepted by the labor officials, including President Green of the A. F. of L. As soon as the big employers learned about the program they not only frowned upon the idea of allowing their sacred temples to be contaminated with representatives of the working class, but put both feet down as hard as they could on the proposition. Did the clergymen stand firm when men with dollars talked? To their everlasting shame they did not. Ninety-five percent of them bowed to the will of Mammon and the representatives of labor were barred from the sacred temples erected in the name of God and the lowly Nazarene, proving conclusively to the minds of the average citizen who controls the churches and whom they serve. Small wonder that many workers have a poor opinion of the Church, and that so many pews are empty." J. B. S. Hardman, the editor of _The Advance_, the official journal of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, gives us his opinion regarding the religion of labor. "It lulls the social underdog with a sham consolation for the oppression and exploitation which are his lot, and furnishes the exploiter and oppressor with graceful distraction and absolution from his daily practice and meanness. This is the actual basis of Church activity to-day. The religion of labor is godless, for it seeks to restore the divinity of man." James P. Thompson, the national organizer of the Industrial Workers of the World, heads his article for Jerome Davis, "Religion is the Negation of the Truth," and in his militant manner proclaims "This organization designed to praise God and help him run the universe is known as the Church. The established Church has always been on the side of the rich and powerful. Its robed representatives, pretending to be Godlike and favorites of God, having special influence with Him, have ever functioned as the moral police agents of the ruling classes. At one time or another, they have asked God to bless nearly everything, from the slave driver's lash to murderous wars. Thus they strive to extend the blessings of God to the infamies of men. "To-day, under Capitalism, they teach the working class the doctrine of humility: tell them that if they get a slap on one cheek to turn the other, and, 'blessed are the poor.' They tell us to bear the cross and wear the crown, that we will get back in the next world what is stolen from us in this. In other words, they try to chloroform us with stories of heaven while the robbers plunder the world. For this support the ruling classes donate liberally to the Church. The organized robbers and organized beggars support each other." James P. Noonan, vice-president of the American Federation of Labor, asks a pertinent question, "Labor observes an increasing tendency on the part of the Church to regulate what man may eat, drink, or smoke, where and how he shall spend his Sundays, the character and kind of amusements he may participate in, and various other activities, many of which seem more or less trivial; all of which leads the average worker to ponder rather seriously just why it is that the Church can vigorously advocate and promote legislation seeking to curtail his liberty to enjoy, in his own way, the limited number of leisure hours at his disposal, and yet turn a deaf ear to the cry of tortured men, women, and children for relief from the curse of low wages, long hours, and scores of other industrial conditions and abuses which inevitably pave the way for numberless cases of moral turpitude." James S. Woodsworth, a former minister, speaking for the Canadian Labor Party, exclaims: "The Church--a class institution--what does the Church do to help me and those like me? The Church supported by the wealthy, yes, 'He who pays the piper calls the tune.' The well-groomed parson, with his soft tones prophesying smooth things, well, I'm glad I'm not in his shoes!" James Simpson, secretary of the Canadian Labor Party, makes this statement: "I found that the conditions which called for radical change if the social and economic security of the people was going to be established did not concern the Church. As an institution it was concerned in establishing an outlook upon life that would induce men to do the right, but, if the right was not done, there was very little distinction drawn between the wrong-doer and the right-doer. This lack of distinction did not apply so much to what were re-regarded as moral indiscretions as it did to the larger failures to recognize man's relationship to man in the industrial and commercial activities of life. Labor thinks the Church is insincere. It is an exceptional case for a minister to take a stand on the side of the workers, even when the issue between the employers and employees is a clear case of the former trying to enforce conditions upon the latter which are unfair and inhuman." A. Fenner Brockway, the political secretary of the Independent Labor Party in England, writes in this manner: "The hymns of the Church are obsolete; the sermons are very rarely worth listening to; the forms of worship are unrelated to life; and such inspiration as comes from the devotion and beauty of some church services and buildings can be found ever more intimately and fully in the silences and beauty of nature." George Lansbury is another Englishman speaking for British Labor, and he tells us that, "Ordinary working people in Britain think very little about Churches, or about religion. Years ago I was asked, 'Why don't people accept religion? Why don't the masses go to Church?' I said then, as I say now, 'They, the masses, believe we Christians do not believe what we say we believe." Lenin, Trotzky, Lunacharsky, and Yaroslavsky, are the speakers for Russian Labor in Soviet Russia. Their attitude toward Church and Religion is well known.... Arthur Crispien, president of the German Social Democratic Party, gives us his opinion. "Men should not look upon this earth as a vale of tears and fly from rude realities to a world of phantasms; they should embrace the beauties of the world, and realize and fulfill their social rights and duties. Our work lies in this world. As to the other, each is at liberty to decide according to his needs." Karl Mennicke, another former minister, points out the attitude of German Labor. "For modern labor the feeling that human life is first of all a matter of eternal life, and only secondarily a matter of this world, has been entirely lost. The high-strung eschatologic mood, or expectation of Jesus, has no sounding board in the masses of the proletariat of to-day. The Christian epoch in history is obviously on its way to extinction. The eschatological mood of Christianity has been a handicap, and still is, for the Christian community has difficulty finding an organic relationship to the creative problems of social life." Emanuel Radl speaks of labor and the Church in Czechoslovakia. "In general the churches play a far lesser part in our public life than in the United States. People are accustomed to speak of the churches as exploded institutions that are factors only among the uneducated classes. The churches are not measuring up in understanding and helping the poor." Robert Haberman, representing the Mexican Labor Party, gives a clear-cut summation of the tyranny that the clergy of that country yoked upon the masses and the retardation that it has produced. It furnishes striking and conclusive evidence of the harm that is done when the Church and State are still integrally intertwined. There is no better example of the efforts of a reactionary clergy to keep the masses in poverty and ignorance than is this study of the church in modern Mexico. Mr. Haberman gives an account of the church activities in old Mexico and coming to the present, "By the year 1854, the Church had gained possession of about two-thirds of all the lands of Mexico, almost every bank, and every large business. The rest of the country was mortgaged to the Church. Then came the revolution of 1854, led by Benito Juarez. It culminated in the Constitution of 1857, which secularized the schools and confiscated Church property. All the churches were nationalized, many of them were turned into schools, hospitals, and orphan asylums. Civil marriages were made obligatory. Pope Pius IX immediately issued a mandate against the Constitution and called upon all Catholics of Mexico to disobey it. Ever since then, the clergy has been fighting to regain its lost temporal power and wealth. It has been responsible for civil wars and for foreign intervention." Under the rule of Diaz, the constitution was disregarded and the Church was permitted to regain most of its lost privileges. "The Church bells rang out at sunrise to call the peons out, with nothing more to eat than some tortillas and chili, to work all day long in the burning fields, until sunset when the Church bells rang again to send them home to their mud huts. During their work they were beaten. On Sundays they were lashed and sent bleeding to Mass. After Church they had to do Faenas (free work) for the Church, in the name of some saint or other--either to build a new church or do some special work for the priests. It is no wonder then, that after the revolution against Diaz, in many places, as soon as the peons were told they were free, their first act was to climb up the church steeples and smash the bells. After that, they rushed inside the churches and destroyed the statues and paintings of the saints. During the whole period of havoc and exploitation, _not once_ was the voice of the Church heard in behalf of the downtrodden. Illiteracy amounted to eighty-six percent. But the Church helped the further enslavement of the workers. There was not a church ceremony, birth, marriage, or death, that did not cost money. The worker had to borrow for each; and the more he borrowed, the more closely he riveted upon himself the chains of peonage.... The present conflict started in February, 1926, when Archbishop Jose Mora del Rio, head of the Church in Mexico, issued a statement in the press declaring war against the Constitution." Gideon Chen, speaking for Chinese Labor asserts: "The Christian Church in China, brought up in a Western greenhouse, with all its achievements and shortcomings, does not speak a language intelligible to the labor world." Karl Kautsky, the Austrian representative of labor, takes the attitude that, "The less Labor as a whole has to do with Church questions and the less it is interested in the churches, the more successful will be its strife for emancipation." Otto Bauer, another representative of Austrian labor, makes the assertion: "Capitalism forces the worker into the class struggle. In this class struggle he comes across the clergy and finds it the champion of his class adversary. The worker transfers his hate from the clergyman to religion itself, in whose name this clergyman is defending the social order of the middle classes. In Austria the bourgeois parties take advantage of the belief of hundreds of thousands of proletarians in a Lord in Heaven to keep them in subjection to their earthly masters." Ernest H. Barker, the general secretary of the Australian Labor Party, holds forth in an article entitled, "The Church is Weighed and Found Wanting." He is quite emphatic in his statements. "The attitude of the Labor Movement in Australia to the Church is one of supreme indifference. There is little or no point of contact between the two and apparently neither considers the other in its activities and plan of campaign.... The Church preaches the brotherhood of man. What brotherhood can exist between the wealthy receiver of interest, profit, and rent and the struggling worker who sees his wife dragged down by poverty and overwork, and his children stunted and dwarfed physically and intellectually--between the underworked and overfed commercial or industrial magnate and the underfed, overworked denizen of the slums? ... The Church is put on trial in the minds of men. They ask, 'What did the Church do when we sought a living wage, shorter hours of work, safer working conditions, abolition of Sunday work, abolition of child labor?' The answer is an almost entirely negative one. The few instances when church officials have helped are so conspicuous as to emphasize the general aloofness.... In how many of the advanced ideas of our time has the Church taken the lead? Is it not renowned for being a long way in the rear rather than in the vanguard of progressive thought and action? It resents any challenge to its ideas, doctrines, or authority." Emile Vandervelde, the leader of the Belgian Labor Party, discusses the personal religious convictions of the Labor leaders in France and Belgium. "Today as yesterday the immense majority are atheists, old-fashioned materialists, or at least agnostics, to whom it would never occur to profess any creed, no matter how liberal it might be." Toyohiko Kogawa, the secretary of the Japan Labor Federation, says: "Labor considers the Church too other-worldly. It thinks it has no concern with the interests of labor; and that the Church has lost her aim in this world and is looking up only into heaven. And labor forgets where to go, loses its sense of direction. So labor stops thinking about religion, and religion stops thinking about industry. The Church has no principle of economics, and labor has no religious aspiration." The opinions of these men who are daily in contact with the problem of social justice the world over surely furnish a tremendous amount of information regarding both the unconcern of religion upon the furtherance of social justice and its actual negative and harmful influence. The devout Sherwood Eddy, a sincere and noble exponent of social justice, is forced to exclaim; "But I saw that there would be much more opposition from professing Christians if I preached a gospel of social justice, than ever there had been from so called 'heathen' nations in calling them to turn from their idols. Indeed, Mammon is a much more potent idol, it is more cruel, smeared with more human blood, than Kali of Siva. They sacrifice goats to Kali and we shudder; we sacrifice men to Mammon and justify our 'rights.' In simple fact, though they are not worthy of mention, I have met with more opposition and misrepresentation, ten times over, in 'Christian' America, than I ever met in fifteen years in India, or in repeated visits to China, Turkey, or Russia." (_Sherwood Eddy: "Religion and Social Justice."_) Religious philosophy is slave philosophy; it teaches of a God who is personally interested in the individual and who will reward present misery with future bliss. The demoralizing effect of this infamous fraud is apparent everywhere. If a worker is constantly assailed with this nonsense from the pulpit, the result is the production in him of a mental as well as a physical slavery; it aggravates his mental inertia, and the force of repetition achieving its effects, he soon resigns himself to his present miserable state drugged with the delusion of a better life in the hereafter. He believes that his destiny is predetermined by God and that he will be rewarded in heaven for his sufferings on earth. What a marvelous opiate the ecclesiastics have been injecting into the minds of the masses! It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that capital has aided throughout the ages and has stood by religion. The irony of the situation lies in the fact that the slave will fight so valiantly for his tyrannical master, that the unscrupulous few who derive all the benefits, can, like a malignant parasite, suck the life-blood of its victims while their still living prey submits without a struggle! The worker, inebriated with his religious delusion, calmly allows his very substance to be the means through which his parasitic employer grows fat. "That was the net result of Christianity, and of the activity of the Christian Church in spreading abroad a spirit of kindliness, humanity and brotherhood! The coquetry of Christianity with Labor within the last generation or two is only what one would expect. But it is clear that the one constant function of Christianity has been to encourage loyalty to existing institutions, no matter what their character so long as they were not unfriendly to the Church. Slavery and the oppression of labor continued while Christianity was at its strongest and wealthiest; its own wealth derived from the oppression it encouraged. Slavery died out when social and economic conditions rendered its continuance more and more difficult. And the conditions of labor improved when men ceased to talk of a 'Providential Order,' of 'God's Decree,' and dismissed the evangelical narcotic served out by the Church, and began to realize that social conditions were the products of understandable and modifiable natural forces." (_C. Cohen: "Christianity, Slavery and Labor."_) CHAPTER XVII RELIGION AND WOMAN _She was the first in the transgression therefore keep her in subjection._ * * * * * _Fierce is the dragon and cunning the asp; but woman has the malice of both._ ST. GREGORY OF NAZIANZUM. _Thou art the devil's gate, the betrayer of the tree, the first deserter of the Divine Law._ TERTULLIAN. _What does it matter whether it be in the person of mother or sister; we have to beware Eve in every woman._ _How much better two men could live and converse together than a man and a woman._ ST. AUGUSTINE. _No gown worse becomes a woman than the desire to be wise._ LUTHER. _The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation._ ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. It is noticed in most calculations of churchgoers that women have remained attached to the churches in a far higher proportion than men. The proportion of women in the churches is vastly greater than their proportion in the general population. Most of the men who still passively attend their churches do so under the pressure of professional interest or social or domestic influence. The degree of religiosity has always been associated with the free play of the emotions and woman being more imaginative and emotional than man, it seems clear that this strong emotional factor in woman accounts, at least partly, for the greater proportion of women as churchgoers. And this, be it noted, lies not in any inherent inferiority in the mental make-up of woman, but rather in the environmental influences that until very recently shaped woman's education in such a manner that it was little adapted to strengthening her reason, but rather calculated to enhance her emotionalism. Ecclesiastic historians have a notorious habit of viewing pre-Christian times for the single biased purpose of only stating the aspects of that civilization which they deemed inferior to that exerted by Christianity. Researches have established fairly well the position of women in the Egyptian community of 4000 years ago. It is no exaggeration to state that she was free and more honored in Egypt 4000 years ago, than she was in any country of the earth until only recently. Scholars assure us that, at a period which the Bible claims the Earth was just coming into being, the Egyptian matron was mistress of her home, she inherited equally with her brothers, and had full control of her property. She could go where she liked and speak to whom she pleased. She could bring actions in the courts and even plead in the courts. The traditional advice to the husband was, "Make glad her heart during the time that thou hast." Contrast this position of woman in the community and society in general with the statement given in Mrs. E. Cady Stanton's "History of Woman's Suffrage," in which she speaks of the status of the female of the species in Boston about the year 1850. "Women could not hold any property, either earned or inherited. If unmarried, she was obliged to place it in the hands of a trustee, to whose will she was subject. If she contemplated marriage, and desired to call her property her own, she was forced by law to make a contract with her intended husband by which she gave up all title or claim to it. A woman, either married or unmarried, could hold no office or trust or power. She was not a person. She was not recognized as a citizen. She was not a factor in the human family. She was not a unit, but a zero in the sum of civilization.... The status of a married woman was little better than that of a domestic servant. By the English Common Law her husband was her lord and master. He had the sole custody of her person and of her minor children. He could punish her 'with a stick no bigger than his thumb' and she could not complain against him.... The common law of the State [Massachusetts] held man and wife to be one person, but that person was the husband. He could by will deprive her of every part of his property, and also of what had been her own before marriage. He was the owner of all her real estate and earnings. The wife could make no contract and no will, nor, without her husband's consent, dispose of the legal interest of her real estate.... She did not own a rag of her clothing. She had no personal rights and could hardly call her soul her own. Her husband could steal her children, rob her of her clothing, neglect to support the family: she had no legal redress. If a wife earned money by her own labor, the husband could claim the pay as his share of the proceeds." With such a contrast in mind, it is indeed difficult to see where the truth of the assertion lies when it is stated that the status of woman was indeed pitiful until Christianity exerted its influence for her betterment. And it is again curious to note that after a period of nearly 2000 years of Christian influence it was left for a sceptic such as Mrs. Stanton and her sceptical co-workers to bring about an amelioration of the degrading position of woman in Christian society. The degrading picture of womankind as depicted in the Old Testament is well known to anyone who has glanced through this storehouse of mythology. It would be well for the multitude of devout female adherents of all creeds to take the time, just a little of the time they give to the plight of the poor, benighted heathen and read some of the passages in the Old Testament dealing with their lot. The entire history of woman under the administration of these "heaven-made" laws is a record of her serviture and humility. In the 24th chapter of Deuteronomy we find the right of divorce given to the husband. "Let him write her a bill of divorcement and give it in her hand and send her out of his house." The discarded wife must acquiesce to "divine justice." But if the wife is displeased, is there any justice? Under no clause of the Divorce Law could the wife have a divorce on her part. None but the husband could put her asunder from him. In the 22d chapter of Deuteronomy is enacted the law for "Test of Virginity," which states that, "If any man take a wife, and is disappointed in her, and reports, 'I found her not a maid,' then, her father and mother shall bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate." The gynecological elders then go into a "peeping Tom's" conference and "If virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of the city shall stone her with stones that she die." Most probably the male partner in her "crime" was the first to cast the largest stone. The law laid down in the 12th chapter of Leviticus may have been intended for hygienic purposes but it is cruel and degrading to women because it assumes that the parturient woman who has borne a female child is twice as impure as one who has borne a male child. The "law of jealousies" as described in the 5th chapter of Numbers is a good example of the mentality of the writers of this "divine revelation." God in His infinite wisdom had caused to be written for Him, that to test whether a woman has laid carnally with another man, the priest shall, "take holy water in an earthen vessel, and of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take and put it in the water ... the bitter water that causeth the curse, and shall cause the woman to drink the water." The divine revelation then continues with, "if she be defiled, her belly shall swell and her thigh shall rot." But after all, God did not know that in the dust of the Tabernacle sprawled the germs of Dysentery, Cholera, and Tuberculosis, and a few other such mild infections. Or did the Divine Father know that even a self-respecting germ could not inhabit the filthy floor of the Tabernacle? Consequently, it is not to be wondered at that in the "good old days of the old-fashioned woman," the acme of hospitality was the giving of wife or daughter to a visitor for the night. It was not religion that put an end to this barbarous custom; it was the advance of civilization; not the religious force, but the place rational thinking assumed in the life of people. The following is a description of a religious riot which took place in Alexandria during the early days of the Church: "Among the many victims of these unhappy tumults was Hypatia, a maiden not more distinguished for her beauty than for her learning and her virtues. Her father was Theon, the illustrious mathematician who had early initiated his daughter in the mysteries of philosophy. The classic groves of Athens and the schools of Alexandria equally applauded her attainments and listened to the pure music of her lips. She respectfully declined the tender attentions of lovers, but, raised to the chair of Gamaliel, suffered youth and age, without preference or favor, to sit indiscriminately at her feet. Her fame and increasing popularity ultimately excited the jealousy of St. Cyril, at that time the Bishop of Alexandria, and her friendship for his antagonist, Orestes, the prefect of the city, entailed on her devoted head the crushing weight of his enmity. In her way through the city, her chariot was surrounded by his creatures, headed by a crafty and savage fanatic named Peter the Reader, and the young and innocent woman was dragged to the ground, stripped of her garments, paraded naked through the streets, and then torn limb from limb on the steps of the Cathedral. The still warm flesh was scraped from her bones with oyster-shells, and the bleeding fragments thrown into a furnace, so that not an atom of the beautiful virgin should escape destruction." The cruelty of man when spurred on by the mania of religious zeal! In more historic times there are numerous instances of the tyranny exercised over women by the feudal system. Feudalism, composed as it was of military ideas and ecclesiastical traditions, exercised the well known "rights of seigniory." These "rights" comprised a jurisdiction which is now unprintable, and had even the power to deprive woman of life itself. A history of the licentiousness of the monks and the early popes would fill a great number of volumes; and indeed, many are the volumes which have been devoted to this subject. It will suffice to point out only a few representative incidents. In 1259, Alexander IV tried to disrupt the shameful union between concubines and the clergy. Henry III, Bishop of Liege, was such a fatherly sort of individual that he had sixty-five "natural children!" William, Bishop of Padreborn, in 1410, although successful in reducing such powerful enemies as the Archbishop of Cologne, and the Count of Cloves by fire and sword, was powerless against the dissolute morals of his own monks, who were chiefly engaged in the corruption of women. Indeed, the Swiss clergy in 1230, frankly stated that they "were flesh and blood, unequal to the task of living like angels." The Council of Cologne, in 1307, tried in vain to give the nuns a chance to live virtuous lives; to protect them from priestly seduction. Conrad, Bishop of Wurzburg, in 1521, accused his priests of habitual "gluttony, drunkenness, gambling, quarrelling, and lust." Erasmus warned his clergy against concubinage. The Abbot of St. Pilazo de Antealtarin was proved by competent witnesses to have no less than seventy concubines. The old and wealthy Abbey of St. Albans was little more than a den of prostitutes, with whom the monks lived openly and avowedly. The Duke of Nuremburg, in 1522, was concerned with the clerical immunity of monks who night and day preyed upon the virtue of the wives and daughters of the laity. The Church openly carried on a sale of indulgences in lust to ecclesiastics which finally took the form of a tax. The Bishop of Utrecht in 1347 issued an order prohibiting the admittance of men to nunneries. In Spain, conditions became so intolerable that the communities forced their priests to select concubines so that the wives and daughters would be safe from the ravages of the clergy. "The torture, the maiming, and the murder of Elgira by Dunstan illustrates further, amongst thousands and thousands of similar bloody deeds, the diabolical brutality of superstition perpetuated in the name of Christianity upon women in the earlier centuries of our epoch. Indeed, religious superstition always has contrived to rob, to pester, to deceive, and to degrade women." (_Bell: "Women from Bondage to Freedom."_) During the Middle Ages, the ages in which the Church was in complete domination of all forms of endeavor, the status of woman was no better than the general conditions of the time. This Age of Faith is characterized by "the violence and knavery that covered the whole country, the plagues and famines that decimated towns and villages every few years, the flood of spurious and indecent relics, the degradation of the clergy and monks, the slavery of the serfs, the daily brutalities of the ordeal and the torture, the course and bloody pastimes, the insecurity of life, the triumphant ravages of disease, the check of scientific inquiry and a hundred other features of medieval life." (_Joseph McCabe: "Religion of Woman."_) The Church was chiefly responsible for the terrible persecutions inflicted on women on the ground of witchcraft and this must be taken into calculation when one considers what woman owes to religion. The Reformation reduced woman to the position of a mere breeder of children. During the sway of Puritanism woman was a poor, benighted being, a human toad under the harrow of a pious imbecility. The pioneers in the Modern Woman Movement in this country were, of course, Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, and Miss Susan B. Anthony. In their "History of Woman Suffrage" they comment on the vicious opposition which the early workers encountered in New York. "Throughout this protracted and disgraceful assault on American womanhood the clergy baptised every new insult and act of injustice in the name of the Christian religion, and uniformly asked God's blessing on proceedings that would have put to shame an assembly of Hottentots." And while the clergy either remained silent or heaped abuse on this early movement, such freethinkers as Robert Owen, Jeremy Bentham, George Jacob Holyoake, and John Stuart Mill in England entered the fray wholeheartedly in behalf of the emancipation of woman. In France it was Michelet and George Sand that came to their aid. In Germany it was Max Sterner, Büchner, Marx, Engels, and Liebknecht. In Scandinavia it was Ibsen and Björnson. The battle was begun by freethinkers in defiance of the clergy and it was only when the inevitable conquest of this movement was manifest that any considerable number of clergy came to the aid of this progressive movement. The righting of the wrongs imposed on womankind therefore had been started not only without the aid of the churches but in face of their determined opposition. It was not the clergy that discovered the injustice that had been done to women throughout the centuries, and when it was finally pointed out to them by sceptics, it was the rare ecclesiastic that could see it so and attempt to right the wrong. R. H. Bell, in tracing this struggle of woman in her publication, "Woman from Bondage to Freedom," has this pertinent remark to make. "If there are any personal rights in this world over which Church and State should have no control, it is the sexual right of a woman to say, 'Yes' or 'No.' These and similar rights are so deeply imbedded in natural morality that no clear-headed, clean-hearted person would wish to controvert them.... Enforced motherhood, through marriage or otherwise, is a mixed form of slavery, voluntary motherhood is the glory of a free soul." In the age-long struggle for freedom, woman's most rigorous antagonist has always been the Church. CHAPTER XVIII THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE GREAT ILLUSION _But the powers of man, so far as experience and analogy can guide us, are unlimited; nor are we possessed of any evidence which authorizes us to assign even an imaginary boundary at which the human intellect will, of necessity, be brought to a stand._ BUCKLE. There has been an effort made in certain religious publications to imply that there is a dearth of thought and thinkers beyond the pale of theism. The subsequent examination of the theological beliefs of great minds will show that there has never been a lack of brilliant thinkers who have not sought truth apart from the dominant faith of their age. It was Socrates, I believe, who first asked if it was not a base superstition that mere numbers will give wisdom. Granting this truth, it certainly cannot be claimed that the philosophers of any time constituted a majority of any population, nor that the philosopher, as such, was not greatly in advance of the mental status of the populace of his particular age. It would seem appropriate to briefly comment on the opinions of the philosophers, both ancient and modern, concerning their views on "man's giant shadow, hailed divine." In former ages, philosophy was the handmaiden of theology. From the time of Socrates and Plato, and throughout the medieval ages, the foremost task of the philosopher seemed to be to attempt the proof of the existence and nature of God, and the immortality of the soul. The leading thinkers of the seventeenth century, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Malebranche, liberated philosophy from its bondage to theology. The criticism of Kant of the philosophical foundations of belief destroyed the "theological proofs," and modern thinkers now spend little time on the question of the existence and nature of God and the soul. Modern philosophy has been completely secularized, and it is a rare occasion to find a philosopher dwelling on the problems of God and immortality. This question in philosophy, as in all other branches of thought, is utterly irrelevant and at present there is less insistence on God and more on the world, man, morals, and the conditions of social life. It cannot be denied that we are under a heavy obligation intellectually to the Greek philosophers. And it may be that the fruitful efforts of those minds were largely due to their unhampered intellectual freedom. They had no "holy books" and few authorities to check their free speculation and hence these Greek thinkers furnish the first instance of intellectual freedom, from which arose their intelligent criticism and speculation. "They discovered skepticism in the higher and proper significance of the word, and this was their supreme contribution to human thought." (_James Harvey Robinson: "The Mind In The Making."_) We know the teachings of Socrates only through his disciple Plato, as Socrates wrote nothing himself. From this source we gather that Socrates firmly upheld the right and necessity of free thought. He was mainly a moralist and reformer, and attempted to prove the existence of God by finding evidence of design in nature. He rejected the crude religious ideas of his nation, was opposed to anthropomorphism, but considered it his duty to conform publicly to this belief. In his old age, he was charged with rejecting the gods of the state, and was sentenced to death. The philosophy of Plato has given rise to diverse interpretations and there are those who, on reading the Dialogues, believe that it is not amiss to state that in certain utterances there is ground to hold that Plato argued for the pragmatic value of a belief in God and personal immortality; that he does not stress the truth of the matter, but argues mainly for the benefit which the State derives from the belief; that such theistic beliefs cannot be demonstrated, and may well be but a craving and a hope, yet it will be of no harm to believe. He inferred the existence of God from what he considered the intelligence and design manifested in natural objects. Mainly, however, Plato's theism was founded upon his doctrine of a universe of ideas, and as no one today holds that ideas are self-existing realities, the foundation of his theism is destroyed. James Harvey Robinson, in his "Mind in The Making," discusses the influence of Plato, and remarks, "Plato made terms with the welter of things, but sought relief in the conception of supernal models, eternal in the heavens, after which all things were imperfectly fashioned. He confessed that he could not bear to accept a world which was like a leaky pot or a man running at the nose. In short, he ascribed the highest form of existence to ideals and abstractions. This was a new and sophisticated republication of savage animism. It invited lesser minds than his to indulge in all sorts of noble vagueness and impertinent jargon which continue to curse our popular discussions of human affairs. He consecrated one of the chief foibles of the human mind, and elevated it to a religion." The philosophy of Aristotle is commonly known to be the reverse of Plato's. Plato started with universals, the very existence of which was a matter of faith, and from these he descended to particulars. Aristotle, on the other hand, argued from particulars to universals, and this inductive method was the true beginning of science. The accumulated knowledge of his age did not furnish him facts enough upon which to build and he had to resort to speculation. It does not detract from the stupendous achievement of this man that the clergy of the Middle Ages, in control of the few isolated centers of learning, looked upon the philosophy of Aristotle as final and considered his works as semi-sacred, and in their immersion in un-reason and unreality, exalted as immutable and infallible the absurdities in the speculations of a mind limited to the knowledge of centuries before theirs. In the attempt to explain plant and animal life, Aristotle formulated the theory that a special form of animating principle was involved. The "élan vital" of Bergson and the theory of Joad are modern reiterations of this conception. Aristotle is not quite consistent when he attempts to give us his theistic beliefs. At times God is, for him, a mysterious spirit that never does anything and has not any desire or will. Elsewhere, he conceives God as pure energy; a prime mover unmoved. Certain modern physicists still cling to this Aristotelian god. This conception of a deity was far from the beliefs of his age, and it is not strange that Aristotle was charged with impiety and with having taught that prayer and sacrifice were of no avail. He fled from Athens and shortly afterwards died in exile. These three supreme Greek thinkers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, have not contributed a single argument for the existence of a supreme being which is now not discredited. Socrates relied on the now outmoded argument from design; and only in a greatly modified form are the arguments of Plato and Aristotle accepted by modern theists. Holding such heretical views in an age when history was a frail fabric of legends, and the scientific explanation of nature in its extreme infancy, what would their views be today? In the consideration of the Greek thinkers of lesser importance one finds that they were continually storming against the religious conceptions of the populace. The philosophers were ever unpopular with the credulous. "Damon and Anaxagoras were banished; Aspasia was impeached for blasphemy and the tears of Pericles alone saved her; Socrates was put to death; Plato was obliged to reserve pure reason for a chosen few, and to adulterate it with revelation for the generality of his disciples; Aristotle fled from Athens for his life, and became the tutor of Alexander." (_Winwood Reade: "The Martyrdom of Man."_) Anaxagoras, the friend and master of Pericles, Euripides, and Socrates, was accused by the superstitious Athenians of atheism and impiety to the gods. He was condemned to death and barely escaped this fate through the influence of Pericles; which resulted in the accusation of atheism against Pericles. Euripides was accused of heresy, and Aeschylus was condemned to be stoned to death for blasphemy and was saved from this fate by his brother Aminias. The philosophy of Parmenides was distinctly pantheistic, and Pythagoras, who attempted to purify the religion of the Greeks and free it from its absurdities and superstitions, was exiled for his scepticism. Democritus, a materialist and atheist of 2500 years ago, formulated a mechanical view of phenomena in accordance with which everything that happens is due to physical impacts. "Such a materialism was a great liberation from superstition; and had it survived in its integrity, the path of European wisdom would have been vastly different from what it was. What the path would have been, we are beginning to see to-day, for since the nineteenth century we have been treading it more or less consistently but by no means so gallantly and courageously as Democritus." (_G. Boas: "The Adventures of Human Thought."_) Democritus and the Epicureans strove to deliver men from their two chief apprehensions: the fear of the gods, and the fear of death; and in so doing rejected the religious beliefs and substituted a rational and scientific conception of the universe. It was Xenophanes, the Voltaire of Greece, who brought to the attention of his countrymen the discovery that man created the gods in his own image. He attacked the conceptions of the Greek deities with these words, "Mortals deem that the gods are begotten as they are, and have clothes like theirs, and voice and form ... Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.... The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair." Considering Greek philosophy in its entirety, we see that it was naturalistic rather than supernaturalistic, and rationalistic rather than mystical. These gifted men saw no clear indication for the existence of a supreme being; very few of them speak of the deity in the role of Providence and fewer still believed in personal immortality. Professor Boas, in contrasting Asiatic mythology with Greek philosophy, remarks: "The Asiatic myths assumed the existence of beings beyond the world, not subject to mundane laws, who made and controlled the course of events. There was no reason why they should have made a world. They seemed to be living as divine a life without it as with it. The question was one which persisted in Asiatic thought, and when Christianity became dominant in Europe, much of its theologians' time was spent in answering it. The only plausible answer then was that God made the world because He felt like it. For no reason could be given sufficiently compelling to sway the will of the Omnipotent. But such an answer was unsatisfactory to the Greek. In his philosophy all this is changed. No god steps out of the machine to initiate cosmic history. The First Cause is a physical substance, some material thing, which operates by the laws of its own nature. Its every movement is theoretically open to the scrutiny of reason. And hence, a scientific rather than a religious answer can be given to every question." At the beginning of the Christian era, the cultured Romans were stoics or epicureans. The poet Lucretius was an epicurean who regarded the belief in the gods as a product of the terrors of primitive man and recommended that the mind should be emancipated from the fear of the gods and argued against the immortality of the soul. Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius were stoics. Cicero insinuates that the gods are only poetical creations, that the popular doctrine of punishment in a world to come is only an idle fable, and is uncertain whether the soul is immortal. Seneca wrote against the religion of his country, and the philosophy of cultured Romans of the time of the physician Galen tended towards atheism. The prime factor of Greek philosophy was the insistence on intelligence and knowledge, and by these means it reached its pinnacle of reasoning. The blight that exterminated all scientific progress, with the fall of the Roman Empire, carried with it the neglect of the Greek thinkers. Similar to the retrogression of scientific thought, traced in former chapters, is the corresponding retrogression in philosophic thought. In place of the free inquiry of the Greeks we see arising the theology of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Augustine, and finally that of St. Thomas Aquinas. At the time of St. Augustine most of the cultural Greek writings had disappeared in western Europe. The greatest store of Greek thought was in the hands of the Arab scholars and led to a marked scepticism, as we see manifested in the writings of the Spanish Moors. It is significant that during the "age of faith" in Europe no philosopher of merit arose, and the only philosophy permitted was the puerile Scholastic-Aristotelic. This scholastic philosophy, hemmed in between metaphysics and theology, sought to reconcile Plato, Plotinus, and Aristotle with the needs of orthodoxy, and split hairs over subtle essences and entities. Francis Bacon impeaches, in this manner, the medieval philosophers: "Having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors, as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books." The sole preoccupation of medieval philosophy seemed to be conjectures as to what would happen to man after death, and the entire system of thought was based on authority. The medieval philosopher turned in disdain from the arduous path of investigation of actual phenomena and confidently believed that he could find truth by easy reliance upon revelation and the elaboration of dogmas. A few brave minds rebelled against this unnatural imprisonment of the intellect, with the usual consequences. Peter Abelard was condemned for his scepticism at a council at Sens in 1140; the philosophy of John Scotus Erigena was condemned for its pantheistic ideas by a council at Sens in 1225; and the pantheistic views of Bruno had much to do with his martyrdom in the year 1600. Montaigne, the pioneer of modern scepticism, gave voice to his repugnance for dogmas in his brilliant Essays, in which he stated that all religious opinions are the result of custom; and that he doubted if, out of the immense number of religious opinions, there were any means of ascertaining which were accurate. Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes were the inaugurators of a school of thought which is characterized by its practical spirit; and while these men professed theistic beliefs, their systems of thought had done much, when applied and amplified by their followers, to undermine that belief. These men furnished the source of a later agnosticism. Thomas Hobbes agreed with Bacon and Galileo that all knowledge starts from experience, and, carrying out the inductive method of Bacon, he produced his "Leviathan" in 1651. It was promptly attacked by the clergy of every country in Europe. Hobbes says of the immortality of the soul, "It is a belief grounded upon other men's sayings that they knew it supernaturally; or that they knew those who knew them, that knew others that knew it supernaturally." Locke concerned himself with a philosophic inquiry into the nature of the mind itself, and was looked upon as a destroyer of the faith. Descartes based his philosophy on the rejection of authority in favor of human reason for which his works were honored by being placed on the Index in 1663. Hume, with the publication of the highly heretical "Treatise on Human Nature," threw consternation into the ranks of the theists. His theory of knowledge played havoc with the old arguments for belief in God and immortality of the soul. His works were widely read and were instrumental in leading to the philosophical agnosticism of the nineteenth century. Spinoza's religious views seemed in his time little short of atheism and brought him the hostility of both Jews and Christians, to which was added the excommunication from the synagogue. In his philosophy God and nature are equivalent terms and it is pantheistic only in the sense that if man is to have a god at all, nature must be that god, and whatever man considers godlike must be found in nature. Spinoza recognizes no supernatural realm and denies the survival of personal memory. Professor G. Boas, in his "Adventures of Human Thought," discusses the attitude of public opinion of the time of Spinoza. "He was the arch-atheist, the materialist, the subverter of all that was held most dear by the reigning powers. It was only after the French Revolution that he came into his own when certain Germans, captivated by Neo-Platonism, emphasized the pantheistic element in him. But by then Christianity had ceased to be a dominant intellectual force and had become what it is today, a folk belief." In the "Tractus Theologico-Politicus," Spinoza states: "When people declare, as all are ready to do, that the Bible is the Word of God teaching men true blessedness and the way of salvation, they evidently do not mean what they say, for the masses take no pains at all to live according to Scripture, and we see most people endeavoring to hawk about their own commentaries as the word of God, and giving their best efforts, under the guise of religion, to compelling others to think as they do. We generally see, I say, theologians anxious to learn how to wring their inventions and sayings out of the sacred text, and to fortify them with divine authority." In France, Pierre Bayle cleverly satirized the absurdity of dogma, and La Mettrie, an army physician, was exiled for the publication of his "Man a Machine." He insisted that if atheism were generally accepted society would be happier. His views were taken up and expanded by such atheists as Helvetius, d'Holbach, d'Alembert, and Diderot, who taught that morality should be founded on sociology and not on theology. The publication of their Encyclopædia incurred the fierce opposition of the Church. Of Voltaire's anti-clericism little need be said, except to recall our debt to his victory over ecclesiasticism and superstition. His assertion that "a fanaticism composed of superstition and ignorance has been the sickness of all the centuries," still holds too great an extent of truth. His denial of miracles, the supernatural efficacy of prayer, and the immortality of the soul earned for him the undying enmity of the clergy. Condorcet, another deist, was the successor of Voltaire in the Encyclopædic warfare. The "Critique of Pure Reason" of Kant demolished the ontological and the cosmological arguments for the existence of God and showed the weakness in the teleological argument. He demonstrated that all the current arguments for God and immortality; the entire basis of rational proof of religious beliefs; were invalid. The theists protested vehemently, and showed their superiority by calling their dogs "Immanuel Kant." In his "Critique of Practical Reason," however, he went on to restore the credit of religion through the moral sense, the "Categorical Imperative," and, as certain commentators have stated, after having excluded God from the cosmos, he attempted to find Him again in ethics. Holding that the moral sense is innate and not derived from experience, he reduced the truth of religion to moral faith. Kant believed that he found a divine command in his own conscience; but the science of ethics now gives a natural account of moral laws and sentiments. The study of the evolution of our moral ideas has, today, destroyed Kant's theory of an innate and absolute moral sense. When Franklin showed the nature of lightning, the voice of God was displaced from that of thunder. The sciences of ethics and psychology, like modern Franklins, show plainly that conscience is no more the voice of God than is thunder. Schopenhauer, commenting on Kantian theology, offers the suggestion that Kant was really a sceptic, but became frightened when he contemplated what he thought would happen to public morals if belief were to be denied to the masses. Nietzsche speaks of Kant: "With the aid of his concept of 'Practical Reason,' he produced a special kind of reason, for use on occasions when reason cannot function: namely, when the sublime command, 'Thou shalt,' resounds." In his old age Kant became more bold, and perhaps voiced his true views, for we find that in "Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason," he is actively antagonistic to ecclesiasticism, so much so that, for publishing this work, he was censured by the Prussian king, who wrote, "Our highest person has been greatly displeased to observe how you misuse your philosophy to undermine and destroy many of the most important and fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity." Indeed, many a man approaching Kant with a firm theistic belief finds his belief somewhat shaken by Kantian logic. Schopenhauer's "Will" has nothing in common with the God-idea as commonly held, and he was bitterly anti-theistic. In a dialogue entitled "Religion," he places these words in the mouth of his character Philalethes: "A certain amount of general ignorance is the condition of all religions, the element in which alone they can exist. And as soon as astronomy, natural science, geology, history, the knowledge of countries and peoples, have spread their light broadcast, and philosophy finally is permitted to say a word, every faith founded on miracles and revelation must disappear; and philosophy takes its place." Hegel's deification of thought or reason left no room for personal immortality, and his query, "Do you expect a tip for having nursed your ailing mother, and refrained from poisoning your brother?" is well known. A vague conception of a deity whose existence can be proved, if it can be proved at all, only by the abstruse arguments of a Hegel is not a god of practical service to the theists. Schelling was pantheistic, and Feuerbach played havoc with the philosophic evidence for God and immortality and treated all religions as a dream and an illusion. Herbert Spencer, James Mill, J. S. Mill, and Huxley popularized the agnostic standpoint. Spencer in his "First Principles" argues in this manner: "Those who cannot conceive of a self-existent Universe, and therefore assume a creator as the source of the Universe, take for granted that they can conceive a self-existent creator. The mystery which they recognize in this great fact surrounding them on every side, they transfer to an alleged source of this great fact, and then suppose that they have solved the mystery. But they delude themselves. Self-existence is inconceivable; and this holds true whatever be the nature of the object of which it is predicated. Whoever agrees that the atheistic hypothesis is untenable because it involves the impossible idea of self-existence, must perforce admit that the theistic hypothesis is untenable if it contains the same impossible idea.... If religion and science are to be reconciled, the basis of reconciliation must be this deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts, that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is inscrutable." Nietzsche, the great liberator of modern thought, vigorously opposed religious morality, the influence of Christianity, and all religious beliefs. "When the natural consequences of an action," he wrote, "are no longer looked upon as natural, but are considered to be produced by the phantasms of superstition, by 'God,' 'Ghosts,' and 'Souls,' and appear as 'moral' consequences, as rewards, punishments, guidance and revelation, then the whole basis of knowledge is destroyed; and the greatest possible crime against humanity has been committed." William James, claimed as a supporter of religion, argues that our inner experience makes us cognizant of a spiritual world. The advance of psychological research does not deal kindly with this contention, and such works as Leuba's "Psychology of Religious Mysticism" give a rational explanation of the mystic state. Moreover, James did not give his support to monotheism. "That vast literature of proofs of God's existence," he stated, "drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, today does little more than gather dust in the libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for. Whatever sort of God may be, we know today that he is nevermore that mere external inventor of 'contrivances' intended to make manifest his 'glory' in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction." James claimed to be a pluralist in the sense that there are several or many spiritual beings above us, and his writings lead one to believe that he was not convinced that man, as a distinct personality, survives the grave. Royce rejected all the current arguments for God and immortality and argues for the mysticism of internal experience. Eucken offers no support to theologians; and Bergson does not seem to express a clear belief in a personal god or personal immortality. Coming to the more popular of contemporary philosophers one finds that, just as the Greek philosophers reasoned outside the pale of the then held beliefs which were theistic, so do these modern philosophers reach conclusions that are outside the pale of organized religion of today. George Santayana is a materialist and sceptic who, in his "Reason in Religion," reveals his scepticism and frowns upon personal immortality. "It is pathetic," he comments, "to observe how lowly are the motives that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity, and from what a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been drawn. To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously, these have been thought points of honor with the gods, for which they would dispense favors and punishments on the most exhorbitant scale.... The idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea. Whoever entertains it has not come within the region of profitable philosophizing on that subject." Bertrand Russell, considered by some the keenest philosophical mind of the present age, is an agnostic who maintains "The objections to religion are of two sorts, intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are now, and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow." The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce is an atheist who states that philosophy removes from religion all reason for existing. C. E. M. Joad is a young English philosopher who repeatedly predicts the disappearance in the near future of the present forms of theistic beliefs. M. C. Otto holds to "An affirmative faith in the non-existence of God." William P. Montague discards all organized religions for a "Promethean Religion." John Dewey is a naturalistic philosopher who will have nothing to do with supernatural causation and insists that all things be explained by their place and function in the environment. His philosophy is permeated with the secular ideal of control of the external world. What consolation does organized religion receive from the views of such modern philosophers as Russell, Alexander, Joad, Croce, Santayana, Dewey, Otto, Montague, Sellars, and the Randalls? The views of an intellectual incompetent, such as Bryan was, are spread widecast, but few know the extent of the scepticism of Edison, Luther Burbank, Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrlich, Ernst Haeckel, Robert Koch, Fridjof Nansen, and Swante Arrhenius. What consolation can the theists derive from the religious views of Shelley, Swinburne, Meredith, Buchanan, Keats, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, and Anatole France? In the not far distant past deism and pantheism served as a polite subterfuge for atheism. There is a growing tendency in this present age to dress one's atheistic belief in an evening suit, and for the sake of social approbation call such a belief "religious humanism." A quotation from the Associated Press, appearing recently in one of our magazines, states the need for this "new religion" as being the inadequacy of the religious forms and ideas of our fathers, and the new creed to be: "Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. "Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method. "The distinction between the sacred and secular can no longer be maintained. "Religious humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of a man's life, and seeks its development and fulfilment in the here and now. "In place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer, the humanist finds his religious emotions exprest in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being. "There will be no uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural. Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported custom. "We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene, and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking. "The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which the people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. "The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious thoughts throughout the modern world. Science and economic change have disrupted the old beliefs. "Religions the world over are under the necessity of coming to terms with new conditions created by a vastly increased knowledge and experience." Professors John Dewey, E. A. Burtt, and Roy Wood Sellars are among the signers of this statement. It is an excellent and comprehensive statement, but one is left wondering why the name "religious humanism"? It is difficult to become enthusiastic when one realizes that these men take to themselves the thunder of the atheists of the past, and under the misnomer, "religious," place before the public what all atheists of the past ages have been preaching. It is most gratifying to perceive that such distinguished men as signed this statement are frank enough to admit the extent of the religious revolution, and determined enough to take a hand in the clearing away of the débris that clutters the crumbling of all religious creeds. Yet it is only fair to point out that this statement contains nothing that would not be recognized by those intrepid atheists of the past, and little more than they urged in their time. I refer to those brilliant French atheists La Mettrie, Helvetius, d'Holbach, d'Alembert, and Diderot. CHAPTER XIX THE DOOM OF RELIGION; THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM _One should recall the charge of atheism directed against the keenest thinkers of antiquity and the greatest of its moral reformers. But what was personal and incidental in the past, depending largely upon the genius and inspiration of seers and leaders, has now become a social movement, as wide as science_. JAMES T. SHOTWELL. _The drift from God is a movement of events, a propulsion of vital experience, not a parade of words to be diverted by other words_. MAX CARL OTTO. In the Babylonian and Assyrian mythologies we have the chief deities as Ishtar, Tammuz, Baal, and Astarte. In the Phrygian religion we have the Goddess Cybele and her husband Attis. Among the Greeks we have the Goddess Aphrodite and the God Adonis. The Persians had their Mithra. Adonis and Attis flourished in Syria. In the Egyptian religion was found the Goddess Isis and the God Osiris. The Semites have their Jehovah, the Mohammedans their Allah, and the Christians the Goddess Mary, the God the Father, and a son Jesus. Christianity has divided itself into Catholicism and Protestantism; and when Protestantism gave the right of interpretation of the Bible to each individual, there were evolved such forms of Protestantism as Christian Science, Holy Rollerism, Seventh Day Adventism, Swedenborgianism, and the cults of the Doukhobors, the Shakers, the Mennonites, the Dunkards and the Salvation Army. In the early days of the Church were seen the wrangling of sects, the incomprehensible jargon of Arians, Nestorians, Eutychians, Monotheists, Monophysites, Mariolatrists, etc. Today we behold the incomprehensible jargon of the first-mentioned sects. Christ, born of an immaculate virgin, died for mankind, arose from the dead, and ascended into Heaven. Buddha, who lived over 500 years before Jesus, was born of the Virgin Maya, which is the same as Mary. Maya conceived by the Holy Ghost, and thus Buddha was of the nature of God and man combined. Buddha was born on December 25, his birth was announced in the heavens by a star, and angels sang. He stood upon his feet and spoke at the moment of his birth; at five months of age he sat unsupported in the air; and at the moment of his conversion he was attacked by a legion of demons. He was visited by wise men, he was baptized, transfigured, performed miracles, rose from the dead, and on his ascension through the air to heaven, he left his footprint on a mountain in Ceylon. The Hindu Savior, Krishna, was born of a virgin 600 years before Christ. A star shone at his birth which took place in a cave. He was adored by cowherds who recognized his greatness, he performed miracles, was crucified, and is to come to judge the earth. Christ died for mankind,--so did Buddha and Krishna. Adonis, Osiris, Horus, and Tammuz, all virgin-born gods, were saviors and suffered death. Christ rose from the dead, so have Krishna and Buddha arisen from the dead and ascended into Heaven. So did Lao Kium, Zoroaster, and Mithra. A star shone in the sky at the births of Krishna, Rama Yu, Lao Tsze, Moses, Quetzalcoatl, Ormuzd, Rama, Buddha, and others. Christ was born of a virgin, so was Krishna and Buddha. Lao Tsze was also born of a virgin. Horus in Egypt was born of the Virgin Isis. Isis, with the child Horus on her knee, was worshiped centuries before the Christian era, and was appealed to under the names of "Our Lady," "Queen of Heaven," "Star of Heaven," "Star of the Sea," "Mother of God," and so forth. Hercules, Bacchus, and Perseus were gods born by mortal mothers. Zeus, father of the gods, visited Semele in the form of a thunderstorm and she gave birth, on the 25th of December, to the great savior and deliverer, Dionysis. Mithra was born of a virgin, in a cave, on the 25th of December. He was buried in a tomb from which he rose again. He was called savior and mediator and sometimes figured as a lamb. Osiris was also said to be born about the 25th of December; he suffered, died, and was resurrected. Hercules was miraculously conceived from a divine father and was everywhere invoked as savior. Minerva had a more remarkable birth than Eve; she sprang full-armed from the brow of Jupiter. He did this remarkable feat without even losing a rib. The Chinese Tien, the holy one, died to save the world. In Mexico, Quetzalcoatl, the savior, was the son of Chimalman, the Virgin Queen of Heaven. He was tempted, fasted forty days, was done to death, and his second coming was eagerly looked for by the natives. The Teutonic Goddess Hertha, was a virgin, and the sacred groves of Germany contained her image with a child in her arms. The Scandinavian Goddess Frigga was a virgin who bore a son, Balder, healer and savior of mankind. When one considers the similarity of these ancient pagan legends and beliefs with Christian traditions if one believes with Justin Martyr, then indeed the Devil must have been a very busy person to have caused these pagans to imitate for such long ages and in such widespread localities the Christian mysteries. Indeed, Edward Carpenter comments, "One has only, instead of the word 'Jesus' to read Dionysis or Krishna or Hercules or Osiris or Attis, and instead of 'Mary' to insert Semele or Devaki or Alcmene or Neith or Nona, and for Pontius Pilate to use the name of any terrestrial tyrant who comes into the corresponding story, and lo! the creed fits in all particulars into the rites and worship of a pagan God." A legend stated that Plato, born of Perictione, a pure virgin, suffered an immaculate conception through the influences of Apollo (B.C. 426). The God declared to Ariston, to whom she was about to be married, the parentage of the child. St. Dominic, born A.D. 1170, was said to be the offspring of an immaculate conception. He was free from original sin and was regarded as the adopted son of the Virgin Mary. St. Francis, the compeer of St. Dominic, was born A.D. 1182. A prophetess foretold his birth; he was born in a stable; angels sang forth peace and good will into the air, and one, in the guise of Simeon, bore him to baptism. The Egyptian trinities are well known: thus, from Amun by Maut proceeds Khonso; from Osiris by Isis proceeds Horus; from Neph by Saté proceeds Anouké. The Egyptians had propounded the dogma that there had been divine incarnations, the fall of man, and redemption. In India, centuries before Christianity, we find the Hindu trinity; Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. In the Institutes of Manu, a code of civil law as well as religious law, written about the ninth century before Christ, is found a description of creation, the nature of God, and rules for the duty of man in every station of life from the moment of birth to death. Professor James T. Shotwell when speaking of paganism reminds us, "Who of us can appreciate antique paganism? The Gods of Greece or Rome are for us hardly more than the mutilated statues of them in our own museums; pitiable, helpless objects before the scrutiny and comments of a passing crowd. Venus is an armless figure from the Louvre; Dionysos does not mean to us divine possession, the gift of tongues, or immortality; Attis brings no salvation. But to antiquity the 'pagan' cults were no mockery. They were as real as Polynesian heathenism or Christianity to-day." (_James T. Shotwell_: "_The Religious Revolution of To-day._") It is seen, therefore, that from time immemorial, man does not discover his gods, _but invents them_. He invents them in the light of his experience and endows them with capacities that indicate the stage of man's mental development. Religion is not the product of civilized man. Man inherits his god just as he inherits his physical qualities. The idea of a supernatural being creating and governing this earth is a phantom born in the mind of the savage. If it had not been born in the early stages of man's mental development, it surely would not come into existence now. History proves that as the mind of man expands, it does not discover new gods, but that it discards them. It is not strange, therefore, that there has not been advanced a new major religious belief in the last 1300 years. All modern religious conceptions, no matter how disguised, find their origin in the fear-stricken ignorance of the primitive savage. A Christian will admit that the gods of others are man-made, and that their creed is similar to the worship of the savage. He looks at their gods with the vision of a civilized being; but when he looks at his own god, he forgets his civilization, he relapses centuries of time, and _his_ mental viewpoint is that of the savage. Christianity, with its primitive concepts, can make its adherents firm in the belief of great monstrosities. When its adherents believed that the Bible sanctioned the destruction of heretics and witches, they were certainly doing things from a Christian standpoint. It was this standpoint that justified an embittered denunciation of evolution at one time and then recanting, adopted it as a part of the Bible teaching. When the Spaniards blotted out an entire civilization in South America, when Catholics butchered Protestants, or Protestants butchered Catholics, they were all justified from the Christian standpoint. Man has been living on this planet some 500,000 years. Jesus appeared less than 2000 years ago to save mankind. What of those countless millions of men that died before Christ came to save the world from damnation? If the Christian creed, that except a man believes in the Lord Jesus Christ he cannot be saved, is maintained, then it must be that those millions of human beings who lived before Christ and had no chance to believe, are in hell-fire. It is probable that one of the factors that turned primitive man's attention away from his cruel and short, earthly existence to the thought of a more lengthy and less cruel existence in a hereafter, was the extreme uncertainty and short duration of his own life. And this primitive trend of thought that turns man's mind from the here and now to a contemplation of a mythical hereafter persists to this day, produces the same slavish resignation. This false release from the actualities constitute a mental aberration which we see in the hysterical and weak-minded. When such an individual is confronted by problems that tax his mental strength, if that individual has not strength of mind to reason and to persevere so that he overcomes his environmental difficulties, he will seek an avenue of escape in a fanciful existence which the physician recognizes in hysteria and certain forms of mental disease. So, throughout the ages, man has sought release from the realities of his existence into a fanciful and pleasantly delusional flight into a hereafter. "There is no salvation in that sickly obscurantism which attempts to evade realities by confusing itself about them. Safety lies only in clarity and the struggle for the light. No subliminal nor fringe of consciousness can rank in the intellectual life beside the burning focal center where the rays of knowledge converge. The hope must be in following reason, not in thwarting it. To turn back from it is not mysticism, it is superstition. No; we must be prepared to see the higher criticism destroy the historicity of the most sacred texts of the Bible, psychology analyze the phenomena of conversion on the basis of adolescent passion, anthropology explain the genesis of the very idea of God. An where _we_ can understand, it is a moral crime to cherish the un-understood. (_James T. Shotwell_: "_The Religious Revolution of Today._") Religious beliefs are clearly mental aberrations from which it is high time that the progress of knowledge should lead to a logical cure. Man is steadily overcoming and conquering his environment; the uncertainty of life and cruelty are much diminished as compared with the past ages, but man has not as yet fully utilized the means of an emancipating measure from his mental enslavement and fear of his environment." Chapman Cohen, in his "Theism or Atheism," clearly states: "We know that man does not discover God, he invents him, and an invention is properly discarded when a better instrument is forthcoming. To-day, the hypothesis of God stands in just the same relation to the better life of to-day as the fire drill of the savage does to the modern method of obtaining a light. The belief in God may continue awhile in virtue of the lack of intelligence of some, of the carelessness of others, and of the conservative character of the mass. But no amount of apologizing can make up for the absence of genuine knowledge, nor can the flow of the finest eloquence do aught but clothe in regal raiment the body of a corpse." Religion arose as a means of explanation of natural phenomena at a time when no other explanation of the origin of natural phenomena had been ascertained. God is always what Spinoza called it, "the asylum of ignorance." When causes are unknown, God is brought forward; when causes are known, God retires into the background. In an age of ignorance, God is active; in an age of science, he is impotent. History attests this fact. "The single and outstanding characteristic of the conception of God at all times, and under all conditions is that it is the equivalent of ignorance. In primitive times it is ignorance of the character of the natural forces that leads to the assumption of the existence of Gods, and in this respect the God idea has remained true to itself throughout. Even to-day, whenever the principle of God is invoked, a very slight examination is enough to show that the only reason for this being done is our ignorance of the subject before us." (_Chapman Cohen._) The belief in God is least questioned where civilization is lowest; it is called into the most serious question where civilization is most advanced. It is clear that had primitive man known what we know today about nature, the gods would never have been born. "The suspicious feature must be pointed out that the belief in God owes its existence, not to the trained and educated observation of civilized times, but to the uncritical reflection of the primitive mind. It has its origin there, and it would indeed be remarkable, if, while in almost every other direction the primitive mind showed itself to be hopelessly wrong, in its interpretation of the world in this particular respect, it has proved itself to be altogether right." (_Chapman Cohen._) All intelligent men admit that human welfare depends upon our knowledge and our ability to harness the forces of nature. "I myself," writes Llewelyn Powys, "do not doubt that the good fortune of the human race depends more on science than on religion. In all directions the bigotry of the churches obstructs amelioration ... as long as the majority of men rely upon supernatural interference, supernatural guidance, from a human point of view all is likely to be confusion.... Trusting in God rather than in man it is in the nature of these blind worshippers to oppose every advance of human knowledge. It was they who condemned Galileo, who resisted Darwin and who to-day deride the doctrines of Freud." Science has given us an account of the operation of the universe _sans_ God, and investigation has also given us a clear conception of the evolution of all religious beliefs from the crude conceptions of the savage to the but little altered form of the modern conception. "If we are to regard the God idea as an evolution which began in the ignorance of primitive man, it would seem clear that no matter how refined or developed the idea may become, it can rest on no other or sounder basis than which is presented to us in the psychology of primitive man. Each stage of theistic belief grows out of the proceeding stage, and if it can be shown that the beginning of this evolution arose in a huge blunder, I quite fail to see how any subsequent development can convert this unmistakable blunder into a demonstrable truth." (_Chapman Cohen._) Men of today are trying to force themselves to believe that there must be something true in that which had been believed by so many great and pious men of old. But it is in vain; intellect has outgrown faith. They are aware of the fallacy of their opinions, yet angry that another should remind them of it. And these men who today are secretly sceptics, are loudest in their public denunciation of others who publicly announce their scepticism. In ancient Greece, when the philosophers came into prominence, Zeus was superseded by the air, and Poseidon by the water; in modern times, all hitherto supernatural events are being explained by physical laws. Plato regarded it as a patriotic duty to accept the public faith although he full well knew the absurdities of that faith. Today, there are many Platos that hold to the same conviction. The freethinkers hold to the view of Xenophanes who denounced the public faith as an ancient blunder which had been converted by time into a national imposture. All religion is a delusion which transfers the motives and thoughts of men to those who are not men. No ecclesiastic has as yet offered a satisfactory answer as to why there has been a marvelous disappearance of the working of miracles, and why human actions alone are now to be seen in this world of ours. We are witnessing today what happened in the Roman empire during the decline of polytheism. Draper states: "Between that period during which a nation has been governed by its imagination, and that in which it submits to reason, there is a melancholy interval. The constitution of man is such that, for a long time after he has discovered the incorrectness of the ideas prevailing around him, he shrinks from openly emancipating himself from their dominion, and, constrained by the force of circumstances, he becomes a hypocrite, publicly applauding what his private judgment condemns. Where a nation is making this passage, so universal do these practices become that it may be truly said hypocrisy is organized. It is possible that whole communities might be found living in this deplorable state." And, indeed, in our own country we are witnessing an example of this very thing. Religion has led to widespread hypocrisy. Our religious influences have created a race of men mentally docile and obedient to the dictates of tyrannical ecclesiasticism. It has created a fear of truth, and our minds are still brutish and puerile in our methods of reasoning. Credulity has led to stultification, and stultification of the mind is the bitter fruit which we have been reaping for thousands of years. There are probably hundreds of thousands of men and women in these United States that give lip-service to their creed, but deep in the recesses of their minds a small voice cries to them and shames them, for as soon as they reason, they become sceptics. How can we know the actual number of earthlings that are sceptics? It is impossible in our present state of development. Religious persecution today is just as active as it was during the Middle Ages. Surely, a man is not burned at the stake for his scepticism in this age; but is he not done to death? If the grocer, the butcher, the doctor, the lawyer, the scholar, the business man, were to boldly announce his scepticism, what would happen to him? The answer is well known to all. Immediately, each of his religious customers would take it upon himself to act as a personal inquisition. The sceptic would be shunned socially, he would be ignored, his wares would be sought after elsewhere, and he would suffer. His wife, his family, his children, would suffer with him, for our economic scheme makes the would-be sceptic dependent upon the whims of the majority believers. He is forced to hold his tongue, or else is tortured. Are not the wants of his family, the hunger, and ostracism torture? Thus thousands are forced into hypocrisy. Many others, although they have outgrown all fear of the god of orthodoxy, the fear of the god of social pressure remains. There are embodied in all creeds three human impulses: fear, conceit, and hatred; and religion has given an air of respectability to these passions. Religion is a malignant disease born of fear, a cancer which has been eating into the vitals of everything that is worth while in our civilization; and by its growth obstructing those advances which make for a more healthful life. Morally and intellectually, socially and historically, religion has been shown to be a pernicious influence. Some of these influences falling into these classifications have been considered in previous chapters. The modern Christian, in his amusing ignorance, asserts that Christianity is now mild and rationalistic, ignoring the fact that all its so-called mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians. "Historically, churches have stood on the side of the powers that be. They have defended slavery or have held their tongues about it. They have maintained serfdom and kept serfs. They have opposed every movement undertaken for the liberation of the masses of men; the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity are the creations of the camps of their enemies, of the rationalists of the eighteenth century, and the liberals and socialists of the nineteenth century. They have defended and condoned the industrial exploitation of children. They have fought bitterly the enfranchisement of women. They have justified unjust war. They have fought with book and bill and candle and fagot every new great step in the advancement of science from gravitation to evolution. Wardens, ever since Constantine gave the schools of antiquity into the keeping of the Christian bishops, of the education of the people, they have fought with all their power the establishment of free public schools and the spread of literacy and knowledge among the people." (_Horace M. Kallen: "Why Religion."_) If Christianity has made any progress in the assimilation of doctrines that are less barbarous than heretofore, they have been effected in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as a result of the onslaught of freethinkers. Throughout the ages, when a thinking man had questioned the how and why of any secular problem, so long as that problem had no direct or indirect bearing upon religion, or upon any branch of knowledge that was assumed to be infallibly foretold in the Bible, that man was unmolested. The problems falling into the above classification were extremely small due to the strongly defended theological lunacy that asserted itself in the declaration that all knowledge both spiritual and material was contained in the Bible as interpreted by the Church. Man, however, when he broached his religious doubts, was regarded as the most sinful of beings, and it was forbidden him to question and yield to the conclusions that his mind evolved. Think of the irony and tragedy of this self-enslavement of the human mind! There is one characteristic that man prides himself as having apart from all lower animals, his ability to reason and to think. Is it his superior musculature and brute strength that has placed man upon his present pinnacle of advanced civilization, or is it his mental development, his mind, that has taught him to harness the forces of nature? Has not his mind so co-*ordinated his movements that he has enslaved those forces of nature to be his aid? And yet, if mind is one thing that has enabled man to pull himself out of the morass of brute life, why has it been that man himself has been so persistently decrying and degrading the efforts of that mind? The answer is, that religion has provided the shackles and securely and jealously enslaved the mind. With the aid of his religious beliefs man has been ensnared into a mental prison in which he has been an all too willing captive. Surely it is easier to believe than to think. Napoleon, himself a sceptic, was cognizant of this slave philosophy. "What is it," he is reported to have asked, "that makes the poor man think it is quite natural that there are fires in my castle when he is dying of cold? That I have ten coats in my wardrobe while he goes naked? That at each of my meals enough is served to feed his family for a week? It is simply religion, which tells him that in another life I shall be only his equal, and that he actually has more chance of being happy than I. Yes, we must see to it that the doors of the churches are open to all, and that it does not cost the poor man much to have prayers said on his tomb." How well the ecclesiastical psychologists have grasped this fact, and how well they have fashioned a strong chain for the mind out of this weakness of human minds! Church and government have been well aware of this psychology, and have fought constantly the spread of Freethought literature to the masses. Professor Bury, in his "History of Freedom of Thought," speaking of England, tells us, "If we take the cases in which the civil authorities have intervened to repress the publication of unorthodox opinions during the last two centuries, we find that the object has always been to prevent the spread of free thought among the masses." Think but a moment how well the above is borne out by the attitude of the Church in the stand that it took during the Middle Ages, when she prohibited the reading of the Bible by any person except her clergy. When she prohibited the printing of all books except those that she approved of; books that minutely agreed in all details with the phantastic fables of her Bible were the only ones allowed to be printed. The Church also strenuously objected to the printing of Bibles in the languages of the masses. That most efficient shackle to the mind, that precept that there was no knowledge, whether material or spiritual, that was not contained in the Bible, how strenuously the Church upheld that doctrine! And in our own day, the ridiculous assumption that "mysteries" (a special form of ignorance) are the special province of the Church. Considering these few examples as well as all ecclesiastical endeavor, no rational mind can escape the fact that that primeval curse, religion, has had for its object, down through the centuries, the sadistic desire to enslave and trample on the mind of man. It has been a defensive measure on the part of the Church, for she well recognizes that once the mind is free, it will free itself of the shackles of religion also. Nor is this all. I execrate the enslavement of the mind of our young children by the ecclesiastics. Is anything so pitiful to behold as the firm grasp that the Church places on the mind of the youngest of children? Children at play, children of four and five years of age, will be heard to mention with fearful tones various religious rites, such as baptism and confirmation, and to perform in their manner these rites with their dolls. Fear! Fear! instilled into the minds of the impressionable children! Think of the degradation that the ecclesiastics practice when they insist that from the time a child is out of its infancy its instruction shall be placed in their hands. They take the most precious possession of man, his mind, and mould it to their desire. The mind of a child is plastic, it is like a moist piece of clay and they mould it and form it to their desire. Warped and poured into the ecclesiastic mould of fear, the mind of the child becomes set and fixed with the years. Then it is too late for rational thinking, as far as religious matters go, the mind of the adult is firmly set in the form that the ecclesiastic has fashioned for him in his youth. It is impossible for the adult so taught to reason clearly and rationally concerning his religion; the mould is too strong, the clay has set, reason cannot penetrate into that hardened form. That is why it is almost impossible for the adult who has been exposed to this mental moulding from his infancy to break away from the fears and superstitions learned on his mother's knee. If Christianity, Hebrewism, Mohammedanism, or any other creed is true, its truth must be more apparent at the age of twenty-five than it is at the age of five. Why does the ecclesiastic not leave off his advances until the child reaches a mature age, an age when he can reason? Then, if theism is true, he can accept it with a reasoning mind, not a blindly faithful mind. The theist realizes, however, that belief is at one pole, reason at the other. Belief, creed, religion, are ideations of the primitive mind and the mind of the child; reason is the product of mature thought. Schopenhauer remarked that, "The power of religious dogma when inculcated early is such as to stifle conscience, compassion, and finally every feeling of humanity." It is an undeniable fact that if the clergy would but leave their tainted hands off the minds of our children until they would have reached a mature age, there would be no religious instinct. Religious instinct is a myth. Give me but two generations of men who have not been subjected to this religious influence in childhood, and there will be a race of atheists. The ecclesiastic has from earliest times taken the standpoint that the masses of people are of crude susceptibility and clumsy intelligence, "sordid in their pursuits and sunk in drudgery; and religion provides the only means of proclaiming and making them feel the high import of life." (_Schopenhauer._) Thus the theist is led to the conclusion that the end justifies the means. Theism is a hypothesis which, among other things, attempts an explanation of the universe. The theist recognizes a creator who created the universe and is responsible for its operation. The atheist clearly perceives that the assumption of a creator does not advance him in the slightest degree towards the solution of the mysterious problem of the universe. The oft-repeated question still admits of no answer, "Who created the creator"? It is an absurd answer to reply that the creator created himself, yet, even if this is granted, may not the universe have created itself? If the theist puts forward the statement that God has always existed, the atheist may well reply that if God has always existed, why can he not say that the universe has always existed? The atheist is not concerned with the creation of the universe; to him it presents a problem which is beyond the comprehension of his present mental capacities. He comprehends the fact of its being, and that is as far as he or any rational mind can go. Atheism confines itself to a refutation of theism, and avoids the theistic fallacy of assuming without any proofs or reasonable arguments to substantiate the assumption of an intelligent, omnipotent, omniscient, anthropomorphic, and anthropocentric creator. The theistic assumption has but retarded the advance of practical knowledge, and prepared the soil for superstition and the countless terrors of religious beliefs. Atheism, as far as a rational explanation of the universe is covered, although it does not offer an explanation of the "ultimate," or "the riddle of the universe," does insist that any view held be one that shall be based on truth and conformity to reality. It further maintains that if a view be propagated it should be held in the same position that any scientific proposition is held. It must be open to verification; if it be verified as any scientific theory is verified, it will be accepted in part, or in toto, and be proven to be true or displaced by a closer approximation to the truth. To certain types of men there may be a negative attitude expressed in this credo, which leaves the mind unsatisfied. This is but an emotional bias and has nothing to do whatsoever with the attainment of truth. A delusion may be more comforting than the truth, but that does not necessitate the conclusion that a delusion may be of more ultimate benefit than a constant striving for the truth. It has often been said that atheism, in that negative aspect, places a question mark upon our problems. However, while a question mark may indicate a negative value, it may also prove to be a mental provocative. A period placed at the end of a problem denotes that it has been definitely solved. In connection with the origin of the universe, no period can be placed at the end of that problem, and since we are awaiting the solution, it is much more to the interest of further advances to place the question mark there, than to consider the matter solved. Surely, sufficient instances have been enumerated in this discussion to show the stultification and retardation that ensues when an institution maintains an insistence that a problem be held to conform in any of its explanatory aspects to a preconceived infallible statement, or considers a problem not to exist, or closes its eyes to the inconsistencies in an explanation which is being maintained by mental persuasion and force. When the Bible was considered as containing the answer to all our problems we have seen what the result was. If atheism places a question mark upon the problem of the universe, it does so in a constructive manner; for that mark points to the direction in which a logical solution may be possible. Such is the mental attitude of the scientist. He places an interrogation point upon his problems and that mark is the impetus, the mental stimulus, that leads him on to take infinite pains in his labors and, as time passes, each question mark is replaced by knowledge; it is knowledge and knowledge alone, reason not faith, that furnishes the period. It was Haeckel who asserted that, "The most dangerous of the three great enemies of reason and knowledge is not malice, but ignorance, or perhaps, indolence." The question mark as applied to a problem that is recognizably not solved is a signpost to the knowledge that time must bring. The spurious period placed at the end of a problem is the death warrant for that problem and there it must lie devitalized by ignorance and indolence. It has often been affirmed that what we see in this universe is phenomena, and all explanations but interpret the manifestations of these phenomena. What is in back of and beyond these phenomena may never be known, and if it be known, would be of no further use to us. It is equally as true that if we but see phenomena and our mental capacities deny us a conception of the reality beyond phenomena, yet, we have a growing knowledge of the laws that govern these phenomena. And it is a comprehensive knowledge of these invariable laws that govern the universe that are of universal value. These laws have been ascertained by the questioning mental attitude, and not by a futile reliance on faith. Human knowledge has expanded immensely in the last fifty years, and this by the purely scientific method, the materialistic method, and the questioning attitude. The value of these findings when they can be converted into practical applications in industry are well known to all. We have added nothing to our store of knowledge except by the exercise of our mentality and reason. The application of the scientific method to the workings of the mind has made more progress in explaining the mind in the brief period of fifty years than philosophical deductions had made in the past two thousand years. Every new fact that has been discovered has fitted into the mechanistic scheme of the universe, and not one new fact has been disclosed that suggested anything beyond nature. The theistic interpretation of the universe has been completely discredited by the scientific investigations. Science has brought to the confines of invariable laws multitudes of problems that had hitherto been supposed to point to "spiritual" interference. Theology has been driven out of the open spaces of reason and still persists in clinging to the twilight zone of the present unknown, only to be driven from its precarious position constantly by our increasing knowledge and with increasing rapidity from shadow to shadow. There has been an increasing tendency shown by physicists to consider that matter and energy are interchangeable, and that the one ultimate reality is energy. If this be so, we are still dealing with an ultimate that is a material reality. The Nobel prize in medicine for the year 1932 was awarded to two British investigators, Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, professor of physiology at Oxford University, and Dr. Edgar Douglas Adrian, professor of physiology at Cambridge University. Their researches seem to have settled definitely a problem that has long been a bone for contention. Nerve energy has been shown conclusively to be of an electric type of energy. The old question of whether mind was part of the material world has been shown by these experiments to be answered in the affirmative. There is no duality, mind and matter are one, and mind is but a special property of highly specialized matter. It is with a great deal of regret that the freethinker contemplates the attitude of such scientists as Jeans, Eddington, Millikan, and the philosopher Professor Whitehead. Their hesitation to divorce themselves completely from all conceptions of a supernatural force leads to a great deal of confusion. An acquaintance with the writings of Einstein brings one the certainty that he is as much in accordance with the attitude of freethought as is the most militant atheist. The "cosmic sense" and "totality of existence" of Einstein is as far removed from the conception of a Yahveh as is the mentality of an Australian black man from that of Einstein's mental grasp. Similarly with the cosmic consciousness expressed in the writings of Jeans, Eddington, and Whitehead. With characteristic disregard for the truth certain modern theologians have grasped this cringing attitude of the above-mentioned men and have stressed their viewpoints by a dishonest interpretation that these men actually give a scientific certitude to their own theologic creeds and dogmas. Nothing can be further from the truth. The freethinker would have each theologian who tells his adherents that these men lend credence to their beliefs to consider the following: if the above-named men would be asked if they believed in a deity who actively interposed his will and influence in the lives of men, as is commonly expressed in the term "Providence," if they ascribed to the belief in personal immorality, if they themselves believed in the existence of a "soul," if they ascribed to the statement that "prayer" influenced the opinion of an all-powerful being to intercede for them in their problems and grief, if they believed that the Bible was a book dictated by God, or that a god caused to be written for him his "revelations"; that heaven and hell exist in the meaning that theologians assure their adherents that they do; that sin and morality is what theologians still hold it to be; that there has been a "fall" and therefore the necessity for a "redemption" of man; and that creed and dogma are necessary factors in the worship of a deity,--what would their answers be? Eddington, Jeans, Einstein, and Whitehead would answer these questions exactly as would the most militant atheists. The mental attitude of these men can best be explained when one considers certain similarities between theological asceticism and scientific asceticism. And it is the duty of the freethinker clearly to point out why this confusion has arisen. During the ages of faith, the world beheld a swarm of men and women who retired from the grim realities of a world which at that time was made abhorrent to all sensitive men by the most exacting insistence of theologians that "faith" was the all necessary ingredient of life, and that closed its eyes completely to the degrading actualities of life that this insistence led to. Multitudes of men retired to the desert and to the protective walls of monasteries. There, by constant privations, fastings, continual prayer, flagellation, and introspection, they spent their lives. These ascetic individuals by these means were enabled to enter what may be called a "theologic trance" and their subsequent hallucinations, illusions, and delusions gave to them what they deemed to be a transcendental insight into the construction of the universe and what was expected between "fallen" and debased man and his omnipotent creator. These men keenly apprehended what some today, in a gentler age, have called "cosmic consciousness." I do not mean to imply that these before-mentioned scientists have applied such a rigor to their lives. What is meant to be stated is that these men by their research and comprehension of the vastness of the universe stand in awe and fear before this brain-benumbing aspect. Modern astrophysics, to one who attempts to comprehend its vastness, imposes on the mind but a faint comprehension of the vastness of the universe in space, time, and size; but imposes a deep conviction of the infinitesimal meaning of our planet Earth, both as to size and its relation to the millions of related heavenly bodies. The evolution of man on our planet in this broad conception of space and time is most infinitesimal. It has been just a few hours ago in this widened conception of time that Halley's comet was excommunicated from the skies by Pope Calixitus III, who looked upon this comet as one of unheard-of magnitude and from the tail of which was flung down upon the earth, disease, pestilence, and war. Most certainly the minds of Jeans and Eddington carry in their recesses a vast amount of knowledge that was not common to men living in 1456, the year in which the above-mentioned comet caused such consternation. Much as one admires the superiority of the minds of these present-day physicists, yet one cannot help but think that if our present rate of progress meets no serious obstacle, then in another five hundred years, the attitude of awe of Jeans and Eddington towards the vastness of our universe will be held in some similar position to which Jeans and Eddington now hold the misguided conception of Halley's comet in the year 1456. The mind of man is just beginning to emerge from its swaddling clothes and we cannot assume to judge what its broadest capabilities may be. Certain great modern minds, therefore, when they contemplate this vastness of astrophysics are apt to dwell a bit too literally on the "music of the heavenly spheres," and under the influence of these celestial harmonies fall into the trance of scientific asceticism. Men who can no longer seriously hold to a belief in an anthropomorphic god, the soul and immortality are apt to allow themselves when in this mood to emotionalize their knowledge; and these same men are the ones who would in their scientific endeavors be the first to eliminate all emotions from their reasoning efforts in their laboratories. One seems justified, therefore, in stating that this conception of "cosmic consciousness" is but another instance of the mere illusions of a craving heart. Discussing the question as to whether science and religion conflict, the physicist Professor Bazzoni, of the University of Pennsylvania, in a recent work "Energy and Matter," makes the following pointed comment: "Some scientists resort to metaphysics and make contact with a kind of mysticism which may be taken for a religious belief at precisely that point where ignorance prevents further progress along sound scientific lines. The primitive medicine man appealed to the gods to explain the precipitation of rain and the phase changes of the moon, and some modern scientists appeal to metaphysics and mysticism to explain the limits of the infinite and the nature of electricity." He further cautions theologians against placing undue emphasis on the opinions of scientists when they express their minds on religious topics, and he remarks: "They (the laity) should realize that in the spiritual field the opinion of an eminent scientist has exactly the same weight as the opinion of any other cultivated and thoughtful individual." When the scientist examines with the impartial mind of the laboratory the science of the origin of religious beliefs and delves into the complicated intricacies of religious history, he becomes as convinced as any other thoughtful individual that the facts of science and history are deadly to religion. Moreover, as man contemplates the construction and forces at work in the universe he still must exclaim, "end, beginning, or purpose, it knows not of." The theologians are devoting a great deal of their time to the writings of physicists who venture into the field of theology. It may be that in this manner they can divert attention from the drastic findings concerning all religious beliefs that the anthropologists and psychologists are patiently accumulating. "Many physicists and biologists like Pupin, Millikan, Oliver Lodge, J. Arthur Thomson, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, have recently blossomed forth as liberal theologians. They are still emotionally attached to the older religious faith. They are aware that modern physics and biology have abandoned doctrines that once were hostile to religious claims. They, therefore, proclaim that there is no further conflict between religion and science. In so doing, however, they show themselves abysmally ignorant of all that anthropology and psychology have done to study religion and religious man scientifically. They show their ignorance of the philosophy that has built upon such data. They do not realize that the present-day conflict between religious faith and science is no longer with a scientific explanation of the world, but with a scientific explanation of religion." (_J. H. Randall and J. H. Randall, Jr.: "Religion and the Modern World."_) The cultured Greeks and Romans had their omnipotent gods and these have long ago died a death of ridicule. At a time when beauty and sculpture were at their height the religion of these ancient artists was absurd. Similarly, with some of our modern scientists, their religion has not kept pace with their intellect. Their emotions have overbalanced their reason in this field. Professor H. Levy, of the University of London, tersely remarks: "The assertion of contemporary scientists, who state that the universe is a fickle collection of indeterminate happenings, and a great thought in the Mind of its Architect, a Pure Mathematician, serves merely to divert the activity of the scientific brain from its concentration on the contradictions and confusions of the all too real outward world to a state of passive and unreal contemplation." (_Professor H. Levy: "The Universe of Science."_) Among the theologians, some at least have learned the futility of waxing indignant at each new scientific hypothesis that encroached, as they thought, within their domain. A great many liberal theologians have as yet not learned the extreme danger to their theology in grasping at some concept of science that for the present moment does not appear to be detrimental to their theology, or, as they think, seems to bolster up their particular creed. "The enthusiasm aroused in certain theological circles by recent developments in mathematical physics," states Dr. M. C. Otto, "seems to me to indicate just one thing, that these theologians felt themselves to be in so desperate a state that a floating straw assumed the appearance of a verdure-clad island. I am of the opinion that all persons who would work for a more decent and happy existence for themselves and for their fellows must turn their backs upon religion just to the extent that religious leadership seeks spiritual renewal in these hallucinations of despair." (_Drs. Wieman, Macintosh, and Otto: "Is There a God?"_) It is only proper to point out that what certain emancipated minds are trying to reconstruct as a basis of religious belief is not what is held by the masses as their conception of religion. In a recent clear and frank statement of the religious revolution, John Herman Randall and John Herman Randall, Jr., state: "Such beliefs, even so fundamental a one as belief in God, must stand their chances with the philosophic interpretation men give their experience.... The really revolutionary effect of the scientific faith, so far as religion is concerned, has been not its new view of the world, but its new view of religion. Reinterpretations of religious belief have been unimportant compared with reinterpretations of religion itself. For those who have come to share the scientific world-view, even more for those who have absorbed the spirit of scientific inquiry, it has been impossible to view religion as a divine revelation entrusted to man. It has even been impossible to see it as a relation between man and a cosmic deity. Religion has rather appeared a human enterprise, an organization of human life, an experience, a social bond, and an inspiration." (_J. H. Randall and J. H. Randall, Jr.: "Religion and the Modern World."_) To the man who literally entreats his deity, "Our Father, who art in Heaven, grant us our daily bread," the above reinterpretation of what is meant by religion can have no meaning. To the cultivated mind that comprehends what is meant, the above interpretation is what he conceives of as his social secular activities for the betterment of his fellowmen. A living philosophy of life is a much better name for this attitude than is the misnomer "religion," and avoids a great deal of confusion. Some of our "scientists on a holiday," as they have been facetiously called when they stepped into a field in which they had not become well acquainted with the ground, have proceeded to lend assurance that God _is_ by subtracting so drastically from what is generally attributed to the conception of God, that there is nothing much left to what they conceive as what God _means_. They have stripped the conception of what has been heretofore regarded as fundamental, namely, the conception that God is a superhuman personality or mind. In Mr. Whitehead's philosophy, God is spoken of as, "God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality." I believe such confusion of language may have been in the mind of Dr. M. C. Otto when he remarked: "Some persons endeavor more than ever to make necessary distinctions to keep meanings as clear as possible; and to have an eye on the tendency of language to become its own object. Other persons repudiate these obligations. They act as if it were a virtue to love darkness rather than light if your intentions are good. Under their manipulations conceptions are dimmed or replaced by vague intimations. One boundary line after another is obliterated until the whole substance of things swims in mists." History has illustrated that the greatest source of evil on this planet has arisen from the fact that physical phenomena for which our limited mental capacities were not able to formulate a logical solution, were ascribed to preternatural causes. From this original stem arose religion and the Church, the two greatest obstacles which have been a burden to mankind for 2000 years and a barrier to all progress which has made life endurable and desirable. The lower man is in the scale of civilization, the more does he call in the supernatural to explain all the happenings and experiences of his life. When he had been beset by an intellectual failure he had been thrown back to religion. Lacking the courage and mental capacity to proceed further against obstacles he succumbed to the drug of religious explanations. The need was not for a narcotic, but for a stimulant. The mental stimulant was provided for man in the form of science. Science is but organized knowledge, and it is this knowledge that has elevated man to the position where he is now, his own god. When difficulties confront him in this age, he blames them upon his own ignorance and incompetence. And, when he sets about to overcome these difficulties, he does not rely on divine revelation or supernatural aid or on miracles; he relies on his reason. He knows that when a problem eludes his mental capacity, it is not the supernatural which eludes him but some natural force, some law which he has not been able to grasp as yet. There is no resignation in this attitude; only resolute, peaceful patience. The problem that he cannot solve at present will yield to his reason eventually. The ecclesiastic is well aware that science is his natural and implacable enemy. He knows that every time the bounds of exact knowledge are widened, the domain of religion is narrowed. Man's knowledge of the universe is still incomplete, but it is certainly more complete than it was fifty years ago; and when we consider what that knowledge was a few thousand years ago, it is no breach of logic to state that all natural processes, in the course of time, will be brought into the confines of invariable laws. Sir Arthur Keith clearly states: "The ancient seeker, to explain the kingdom of life, with man as its Regent, had to call in the miracle of creation. The modern seeker finds that although life has the appearance of the miraculous, yet all its manifestations can be studied and measured, and that there is a machinery at work in every living thing which shapes, evolves, and creates. His inquiries have led him to replace the miracle of creation by the laws of evolution. "Whichever department of the realm of Nature the man of science has chosen for investigation, the result has always been the same; the supernatural has given place to the natural, superstition is succeeded by reason. The world has never had such armies of truth seekers as it now has. Those equipped with ladders of science have so often scaled the walls which surround cities of ignorance that they march forward in the sure faith that none of Nature's battlements are impregnable." In the last analysis, if we reach a point in thinking where we cannot proceed further, a fathomless landmark, must we revert to the theological error of "thinking," and assume it must be of supernatural character? Because the unknown in the past has been assigned to the supernatural is no indication for us also, in the present age, to relegate the unknown to divine cause. It is unseemly that minds that have emancipated themselves should go just so far--as far as _their own reason_ can explain the unknown--and when their limited reason can go no further to revert back to the primitive stage where solution is considered impossible to man save it be "revealed to him by God." If man's mind is free, if no coercion of any kind is placed on its exercise, it will expand and unravel what at present is still fathomless. Give man endless centuries and ample opportunities and he will unravel the miracles of development and growth just as he has done other miracles which at first seemed impossible of rational solution. For how much longer will man be a slave to his inferiority complex with regard to his own rational capacities? If faith is vital to man, why not relate it to that which at least holds a promise of solution? Man's mind has not as yet arrived at the point which might give even the slightest indication of its ultimate exhaustion. We cannot assume the knowledge of what man's fullest capacities are. All things must unravel themselves with the progress of his mind, those things that he cannot explain now, he must not assign to a superhuman force; man must use his reasoning faculties to investigate and search for the truth so that these unknown may become part of the known. Again to quote Sir Arthur Keith: "Only eighty years have come and gone since the anatomist obtained his first glimpse of the structural complexity of the human brain; it will take him eight thousand years and more to find out the exact part played by every departmental unit of this colossal system of government which carries on the mental life of a human being. _We have no reason to think there is anything supernatural in its manifestation._ As our knowledge of the brain accumulates, the names and terms we now use will give place to others which have a more precise meaning. In our present state of ignorance we have to use familiar and loose terms to explain the workings of the brain--such words as "soul," "spirit," "heart," "superstition," and "prejudice." These manifestations of the mind will be dissected and made understandable." Science has as yet not fully explained the origin of life on earth, but there is reason to believe that it will do so in the future. The laws governing the production of life itself are under investigation in the laboratories and it is highly probable that this law will be unraveled at some future date. It will be interesting for our posterity to witness the confusion of the ecclesiastics and their attempted confirmation of this fact in the Bible; their finding of some obscure phrase that will be interpreted by them as a prediction of the fact in the Bible. The theists have maintained, as we have seen, many false beliefs that have cost the lives of innumerable men and suffering incalculable; beliefs which they themselves have subsequently recognized as false but relinquished only by the onslaught of rising secular knowledge. It was the ecclesiastic who pointed to the God-dictated phrase, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and the various precepts that have been enumerated in the preceding chapters. Surely sufficient evidence has been noted to convince a thinking being that reason is a better guide than theism. Belief is the antithesis of reason; reason is rationality; religious belief is clearly mental abnormality. If a religionist is asked what he thinks of a secular institution which vigorously condemns and persecutes inquiry, experiment, and truth, he will reply with the logical answer. When it is pointed out to him that religion has done and still is doing this, he will hem and haw until he manufactures some illogical answer. It has been stated that the more we think, the less we believe; and that the less we think, the more we believe. The Christian will analyze the creed of the Mohammedan and find it ridiculous; the Mohammedan analyzes the creed of the Christian and in turn finds it ridiculous. That is thinking. But does the Mohammedan or the Christian analyze as critically each his own belief? Will he endeavor to analyze it at all? That is believing. The ecclesiastic concerns himself not with truth or knowledge; it is creed which is his shrine. He definitely is at war with knowledge and he wants to learn only such things as fit in with his preconceived notions and prejudices. When the minds of men are from infancy perverted with these ideals, how can mankind build a virile race? It is often asserted that the alleged universality of the belief in God is an argument for its truth. But what of the fact that men had everywhere come to the conclusion that the earth was flat, and yet a wider and truer knowledge proved that universal belief to be false! In the discussion of witchcraft, it has been shown that a delusion may be as widespread as a truth. During the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Spanish Moors had recognized the sphericity of the earth and were teaching geography from globes in their common schools. Rome, during the same ages, was asserting in all its absurdity the flatness of the earth. It was not until almost five hundred years later that Rome was forced to see its absurdity and then only when the enlightened world mocked at its error. In this twentieth century, certain enlightened men are teaching the absurdity and harmfulness of a belief in a deity. Must it take five hundred years for all mankind to come to a similar conclusion? May it not well be that in a few centuries our posterity will view belief in a deity in the same light that we in this age view the Church's insistence that the earth was flat? The God idea has been one of the most divisive and anti-social notions cherished by mankind. In fact it has been asserted that the idea of God has been the enemy of man. It has driven multitudes of men and women into the unnatural asceticisms and wasted lives of the convent and abbey. It has taxed the economic resources of every nation. Every church, no matter of what creed, is a pathetic monument of God-ridden humanity which has been built by the pennies sweated by the poor, and wrested from them by fraudulent promises of reward, appeals to fear, and the pathetic human tendency to sacrifice. The theologians have in their arguments resorted to philosophy. The consequence of this transference of the idea of God to the sphere of philosophy is the curious position that the god in which people believe is not the god whose existence is made the product of an experimental argument, and the god of the argument is not the god of belief. "It is a nice question," remarks Walter Lippmann, "whether the use of God's name is not misleading when it is applied by modernists to ideas so remote from the God men have worshipped. Plainly the modernist churchman does not believe in the God of Genesis who walked in the garden in the cool of the evening and called for Adam and his wife who had hidden themselves behind a tree; nor in the God of Exodus who appeared to Moses and Aaron and seventy of the Elders of Israel, standing with his feet upon a paved walk as if it were a sapphire stone; nor even in the God of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah who in his compassion for the sheep who had gone astray, having turned everyone to his own way, laid on the Man of Sorrows the iniquity of us all." (_Walter Lippmann: "A Preface to Morals."_) It is one kind of god that is being set up in argument, and it is really another god that is being depended upon and believed. The philosophical conception of a deity that may be in control of phenomena is an impersonal physical law, and has nothing to do with the conception of a personal deity to whom people pray for active intervention in their troubles. Religious belief is a monstrous apparition; the philosophy of atheism is a solid structure laboriously founded on solid rock. The philosophy of atheism had temporarily failed in previous ages, since the knowledge of those ages did not furnish facts enough upon which to build. At the present, although our knowledge is far from complete and the surface has only been scratched, yet sufficient facts have been unearthed to reveal that there is no supernatural and the greatest hope of advancement lies in the philosophy of atheism. A philosophy that builds upon a foundation of purely secular thought, that leaves the idea of God completely discarded as a useless and false relic of bygone days, is the essence of atheism. "Atheism is more than the speculative philosophy of a few, that it is in sober truth the logical outcome of mental growth. So far as any phase of human life can be called inevitable, atheism may lay claim to being inescapable. All mental growth can be seen leading to it, just as we can see one stage of social development giving a logical starting point for another stage, and which could have been foretold had our knowledge of all the forces in operation been precise enough. Atheism is, so to speak, implicit in the growth of knowledge, its complete expression is the consummation of a process that began with the first questionings of religion. And the completion of the process means the death of supernaturalisms in all forms. Circumstances may obstruct its universal acceptance as a reasoned mental attitude, but that merely delays, it does not destroy the certainty of its final triumph." (_C. Cohen._) The philosophy of atheism leads man to a critical, analytical, and logical examination of his environment, and it is this that has lead to all of our advances. Religion creates a stunted standard of reasoning. The pathetic cry of St. Augustine, "But if I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me, where I pray thee, O my God, where, Lord, or when was I, thy servant innocent?" typifies the major concern of the narrow, egotistical mystic. From the time that the ideas of the later Greek philosophers had been forgotten until the present time, man has floundered in a sea of supernaturalism. It is high time that man faced his realities with fortitude in his own mentality, and when he does this, there will be produced a race of men who will seek for truth, for truth's sake, a race of supermen who will lead the world intellectually. It is to Russia that all eyes will turn in the next few generations. At the present, she is going through the throes of childbirth. She is immature, and as a child she staggers. The abuse and ridicule heaped upon her now is but the repetition of that given by all frightened societies of past ages, when they contemplated new ideas which their immature minds could not fathom. But Russia will emerge in the not too distant future, and the infant will shortly reach maturity; and that maturity may set a standard for those timid and frightened societies that at present look with dilated eyes upon her daring. The age is approaching when the god idea in its entirety will be classed with the gods of the Egyptians and Babylonians, when surplices and sacramental plate will be exhibited in museums; when nurses will relate to children the legends of the Christian mythology, as they now tell them fairy tales. The gods of monotheism will join the gods of polytheism and Yahveh and his associates will occupy in the minds of men the position now held by the gods of Olympus. To our ancestors Jupiter and Yahveh will have the same significance. "In a little time the cathedrals and churches will have taken upon themselves the proud, poetical glamour of abandoned temples. Men and women will enter them with reverent indulgence as they now in meditative mood visit the few remaining pantheons of the pagan worship." (_Llewelyn Powys_: "_An Hour On Christianity._") The age is approaching when the current idea of the hereafter will be accounted a strange and selfish idea, just as we smile at the savage chief who believes that his station will be continued in the world beneath the ground, and that he will there be attended by his concubines and slaves. The age is fast approaching when love, not fear, will unite the human race. In that age, the _ideal_, not the _idol_, will be truth, and the one faith, not religion, but a sincere and lofty conception of the dignity and resourcefulness of the human mind; and an overwhelming desire to aid in the progress of all mankind, the extinction of disease, the perfection of genius, the perfection of love, and, therefore, the abolition of war, the exploration of the infinite, and the conquest of creation. Such an age can never come to be during the maljurisdiction of a theistic philosophy. It can only come into being when the vast majority of men are by the force of advancing knowledge made aware of the truth of the atheistic philosophy. An English observer, C. E. M. Joad, remarks: "The churches, no doubt, will continue to function for a time, but they will be attended increasingly, and in the end exclusively, by ignorant men, women, and children. Already, a stranger attending an average church of England service would almost be justified in assuming that the churches, like theatre matinées, were kept up for the benefit of women and children. So far as present indications go, it seems not unlikely that science will deliver the coup de grace to organized Christianity within the next hundred years." We have caught a glimpse of what theism has done, and what the philosophy of atheism might have done, and will yet achieve. Has man profited by having remained in his mental infancy so long? Atheism is an emancipating system of thought that frees the mind from myths, fables, and childish fancies. There can be no inquisition, no witchcraft delusion, no religious wars, no persecutions of one sect by another, no impediment to science and progress, no stultification of the mind, as a result of its teachings. The philosophy of atheism teaches man to stand on his own feet, instills confidence in his reasoning powers, and forces him to conquer his environment. It teaches him not to subject himself and debase himself before mythical superhuman powers, for his reason is his power. The march from faith to reason is the march on which dwells the future hope of a really civilized mankind. Atheism teaches man to endeavor constantly to better his own condition and that of all of his fellowmen, to make his children wiser and happier; it supplies the powerful urge to add something new to the knowledge of mankind. And all this, not in the vain hope of being rewarded in another world, but from a pure sense of duty as a citizen of nature, as a patriot of the planet on which he dwells. This is no cold and cheerless philosophy; it is an elevating and ennobling ideal which may console him in his afflictions and teach him how to live and how to die. It is a self-reliant philosophy that makes a man intellectually free, and this mental emancipation allows him to face the world without fear of ghosts and gods. It relates solely to facts, while theism resorts to opinions that are grounded only upon emotionalism. Joseph Lewis has well noted that, "Atheism does not believe that man's mission on earth is to love and glorify God, but it does believe in living this life so that when you pass on, the world will be better for your having lived." The history of the past ages informs us what the world was like with God. The progress of secular knowledge and science have given us measures by which we could produce a better society than has ever existed under the obstructionism of the Gods. "The knowledge exists by which universal happiness can be secured, the chief obstacle to its utilization for that purpose is the teaching of religion. Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethics of scientific cooperation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment. It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age, but if so, it will be necessary to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion." (_Bertrand Russell._) It is interesting to contemplate the changes that may occur in our civilization in the next few centuries. On the one hand we have that long period of sterile time, 15,000 years, for the stage of neolithic man, and on the other the vast material progress of the past three hundred years. We may not be able to discern with clarity in what direction changes will occur, but in one aspect we can discern a well-marked tendency. That is the inevitable conquest of the philosophy of atheism. And with this conquest can be clearly seen that it would give to this earth a much sounder foundation upon which to build our progress, and that long-delayed freedom, the emancipation of the mind from all myths and fables. The inevitableness of atheism has been well summed up by Chapman Cohen: "Looking at the whole course of Human History, and noting how the vilest and most ruinous practices have been ever associated with religion, and have ever relied upon religion for support, the cause for speculation is, not what will happen to the world when religion dies out, but how human society has managed to flourish while the belief in the Gods ruled.... "Substantially, we have by searching found out God. We know the origin and history of one of the greatest delusions that ever possessed the human mind. God has been found out; analytically and synthetically we understand the God-idea as previous generations could not understand it. It has been explained, and the logical consequence of the explanation is Atheism." Man is fast attaining a mastery of his environment, and his religious creeds are becoming as irrational to him as the witchcraft delusion. Religion with its burden of fear ties him to the dead ages. But knowledge not only supplies him with power, but also furnishes him with courage, and that courage will aid him in freeing himself from that fear--religion. Religion is doomed to occupy the same place in history as the institution of slavery. Lies and imposture, no matter how powerfully sustained, can be dispelled by knowledge. The Church will destroy itself with its own poison. Knowledge and courage spell the doom of religion. CHAPTER XX CONTEMPORARY OPINION _The Vanguard_ _Let us make no mistake--great minds are skeptical.... The strength and the freedom which arise from exceptional power of thought express themselves in skepticism.... A mind which aspires to great things and is determined to achieve them is of necessity skeptical_. NIETZSCHE. BERTRAND RUSSELL My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made _some_ contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others. MAX CARL OTTO It is my conviction that the happiest and noblest life attainable by men and women is jeopardized by reliance upon a superhuman, cosmic being for guidance and help. I know, of course, that God has been defined in various terms. I do not choose among them. For it seems to me indisputable that those who turn to God, however God be defined, do so because, consciously or unconsciously, they seek there the satisfaction of wants, the worth of living, and security for what they passionately prize, which they have not found and despair of finding in the human venture as they know it. Reliance upon God for what life does not afford, has, in my opinion, harmful consequences. It diverts attention from the specific conditions upon which a better or a worse life depends; it leads men to regard themselves as spectators of a course of events which they in reality help to determine; it makes the highest human excellence consist in acquiescence in the supposed will of a being that is defined as not human, a being that is above the driving force of impulse, that does not experience vacillating moods or conflicting desires, that is never harassed by doubts or misled by ignorance.... Theism is in essence repressive, prohibitory, ascetic. The outcome of its influence is that expertness in practical living and expertness in evaluating life, instead of uniting to take advantage of a common opportunity, are set against each other. This is the profound dualism which remains to be mastered. It can be mastered by the concentration upon human needs and powers. JOHN DEWEY The method we term "scientific" forms for the modern man (and a man is not modern merely because he lives in 1931) the sole, dependable means of disclosing the realities of existence. It is the sole authentic mode of revelation. This possession of a new method, to the use of which no limits can be put, signifies a new idea of the nature and possibilities of experience. It imports a new morale of confidence, control, and security. C. E. M. JOAD All through the century (nineteenth), whenever and wherever there is a movement for change and betterment, the clergy are found opposing it. In this they are merely carrying on the tradition of their order. When one looks back over history, one realizes that there is scarcely any discovery which science has made for human advancement and happiness which churchmen and theologians have not violently opposed. Not content with burning each other, they burnt the men who discovered the earth's motion, burnt the men who made the first tentative beginnings of physics and chemistry, burnt the men who laid the foundations of our medical knowledge.... Bad as has been the church's record in the past, it is not greatly improved in the present.... For two thousand years teachers and preachers have striven, by inculcating the principles and precepts of Christianity, to mould men's character and to improve their conduct; yet we still have our prisons, our judges, and our wars, and it remains today, as it has done for two thousand years past, an arguable question whether men are better or worse than they were before Christianity was introduced. WILLIAM PEPPERELL MONTAGUE If we will for a moment imagine the Bible to have come suddenly to our attention today, unencumbered by a tradition of divine authority, and with no more sacredness than a newly discovered writing of ancient China or Egypt, we can see quite readily that it would occur to nobody who took the work merely on its merits either to accept it as scientifically and historically true, or to twist its statements into a far-fetched allegory of the truth. Religion will be _outmoded_; and its tidings of escape to another and better world will ring cold in the ears of those who love this. The new worldliness that religion must face is based on the faith that there is not only no _place_ for heaven, but no _need_ for it. Humanity, adolescent at last, has tasted the first fruits of the victory of secular intelligence over nature, and dreams grandly of far greater victories to come. IRWIN EDMAN The hope of the world certainly lies in intelligence. Certainly, there is no hope anywhere else. I cannot look to anything so remotely definable as God for aid, nor do I ever regret not being able to do so. WALTER LIPPMANN Many reasons have been adduced to explain why people do not go to church as much as they once did. Surely the most important reason is that they are not so certain that they are going to meet God when they go to church. If they had that certainty they would go. If they really believed that they were being watched by a Supreme Being who is more powerful than all the kings of the earth put together, if they really believed that not only their actions but their secret thoughts were known and would be remembered by the creator, and ultimate judge of the universe, there would be no complaint whatever about church attendance. The most worldly would be in the front pews, and preachers would not have to resort so often to their rather desperate expedients to attract an audience. If the conviction were there that the creed professed was invincibly true, the modern congregation would not come to church, as they usually do today, to hear the preacher and to listen to the music. They would come to worship God. H. L. MENCKEN Alone among the great nations of history we have got rid of religion as a serious scourge, and by the simple process of reducing it to a petty nuisance. For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith. When Copernicus proved that the earth revolved around the sun, he did not simply prove that the earth revolved around the sun, he also proved that the so-called revelation of God, as contained in the Old Testament, was rubbish. The first fact was relatively trivial: it made no difference to the average man then, as it makes no difference to him today. But, the second fact was of stupendous importance, for it disposed at one stroke of a mass of bogus facts that had been choking the intelligence and retarding the progress of humanity for a millennium and a half.... I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind; that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overborne by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking. HORACE M. KALLEN It is a significant trait of history that the times and nations most distinguished for piety are also most distinguished for backwardness. Czarist Russia, and contemporary Spain are near examples, but illustrations may be drawn from any part of the world; the Southern States of the United States of America, for instance. Everywhere the scope and intensity of belief in the supernatural seem to be directly proportional to the misery and weakness of the believer (one compensates for the other). Freedom of speech and of press and discussion which means generally restraint of all interference in the amicable threshing out of conflicting opinions, means, with respect to religious beliefs, refraining from talking, writing or discussing candidly at all. In every society belief in the supernatural is privileged belief, and there accrue to it all the advantages and disadvantages of privilege.... But mystics and religionists are not silent. On the contrary, they become, having passed through a religious experience, voluble. ALBERT EINSTEIN I do not believe we can have any freedom at all in the philosophical sense, for we act not only under external compulsion, but also by inner necessity.... I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modelled after our own, a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature. LUTHER BURBANK Our lives as we live them are passed on to others, whether in physical or mental forms tinging all future lives forever. This should be enough for one who lives for truth and service to his fellow passengers on the way. No avenging Jewish God, no satanic devil, no fiery hell is of any interest to him. The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of truth itself, wherever it may lead. Every normal human being has ideals, one or many, to look up to, to reach up to, to grow up to. Religion refers to the sentiments and feelings; science refers to the demonstrated everyday laws of nature. Feelings are all right, if one does not get drunk on them. Prayer may be elevating if combined with works, and they who labor with head, hands, or feet have faith and are generally quite sure of an immediate and favorable reply. Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of scientific truth as they would a cold bath plunge. SIR ARTHUR KEITH Certainly the creative power which is at work bears no resemblance to the personal God postulated by the Hebrews, and the modern man of science cannot fit Him into the scheme of the world as he knows it. He has to try to reconceive God, and when he has done so, nothing but an unsatisfying abstraction is left. It is unsatisfying because even the greatest men of science, although they possess the intellects of giants, have still the hearts of children. And children cling to that which is endowed with a human shape and has been given the warmth of living flesh. H. LEVY A structure of absolute moral and religious beliefs erected initially as beyond criticism, imposed upon a changing society from above rather than emerging from below, has no affinity with science, whatever personal solace and comfort it may provide, for it assumes that the facts of life, including the material facts of the world, can be compassed within a rigidly prescribed framework. It has taken several centuries of history for the scientific movement to be emancipated from just these cramping human assumptions. The writings of many scientists show, alas, that the emancipation has not yet been completed. J. B. S. HALDANE We know very little about what may be called the geography of the invisible world. The religions, if I may continue the metaphor, have covered the vacant spaces of its map with imaginary monsters; the philosophies have ruled them with equally imaginary parallels of latitude. But both have affirmed, in opposition to the so-called practical man, that the meaning of the visible world is to be found in the invisible. That has been the secret of their success. They have failed when they tried either to describe the details of the visible world or to dictate the details of conduct in it. The churches are half empty today because their creeds are full of obsolete science, and their ethical codes are suited to a social organization far simpler than that of today. HOWARD W. HAGGARD, M. D. When in the fifth century the Roman Empire fell at the hands of the barbarians, rational medicine ceased altogether in Europe. Although the Christian religion survived, the Christian theology of that time denied liberty of conscience and taught superstitions and dogma. It was bitterly hostile to the scientific spirit. All knowledge necessary to man's salvation, physical as well as spiritual, was to be found in the Bible as the Church interpreted the Bible. Since the teachings of the Church were supposed to be sufficient for all needs, there was no excuse for observations and experimental investigations. The inquisitive spirit was wholly suppressed, the rigorous methods of Greek logic were for many centuries lost from European civilization, and intelligent thought was replaced by revelation, speculation, tradition, and subservience to the written word of the Bible, to the writings of saints, and later, in medical matters, to the work of Galen. The theological beliefs of the time became the controlling influence in Western civilization. HARRY ELMER BARNES There has never been any religious crisis of this kind before, and any attempt at exact comparisons with the past are here bound to be misleading and distorting. Even the extreme assailant of pagan religions, like Lucretius, had no basis for the critical attitude as the contemporary sceptic. The bitter attack of Lucretius upon supernatural religion was based mainly upon assumptions and intuitions, as incapable of proof at the time as were the most extreme pietistic views of his age. Today the situation has been profoundly altered. Contemporary science, especially astrophysics, renders the whole set of assumptions underlying the anthropomorphic and geocentric supernaturalism of the past absolutely archaic and preposterous. Our scientific knowledge has undermined the most precious tales in the holy books of all peoples. The development of biblical criticism has discredited the dogma of direct revelation and unique nature of the Hebrew Bible. Textual scholarship has been equally devastating to the sacred scriptures which form the literary basis of the other world religions. It avails one nothing to deny these things, for they are actually undeniable. We must face the implied intellectual revolution honestly and see what is to be done about it. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN To be thoroughly religious, one must, I believe, be sorely disappointed. One's faith in God increases as one's faith in the world decreases. The happier the man, the farther he is from God. RUPERT HUGHES It is important that the truth be known. Is religion, is church membership a help to virtue? The careless will answer without hesitation, "Yes!" Of course. The statistics, when they are not smothered, cry, "No!" HU SHIH On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death and decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or for worse, lives on in the immortality of the Larger Self; that to live for the sake of the species and posterity is religion of the highest kind; and that those religions which seek a future life either in Heaven or in the Pure Land, are selfish religions. DR. FRANKWOOD E. WILLIAMS In these difficult times we are told that we should go to the temple, that we should get in touch with God. We do not need the temple. We do not need to get in touch with "God." We need to get in touch with each other. WILLIAM FLOYD This Bible bears every evidence of being a book like every other book, conceived by man, written by man, altered by man, translated by man, printed by man, but--and this is where it differs from every other book--the Bible is swallowed by man. And it has disagreed with him; man has not digested it properly through lack of sufficient dissection of its parts. It has been taken with a spiritual sauce that has disguised its real flavor. Anything in the Bible, no matter how raw, is taken as God's food. It is used to demonstrate problems of diet which do not provide a balanced ration; it is accepted by the gullible though contradicted by the revelations of Geology, Astronomy, Anthropology, Zoology, and Biology. Taken as prescribed by the doctors of divinity, the Bible is a poisonous book. LLEWELYN POWYS The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker? Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung hill croaking and squeaking, "For our sakes was the world created." THEODORE DREISER And why again, composed though we may be of this, that, and the other proton, electron, etc., etc., why should we not in some way be able to sense why we are as we are--assembled as we are of the same ultimate atoms and doing as we do? Why? Good God--surely in the face of all this sense of aliveness and motion, and this and that, there should be some intimation of WHY? But no--none. UPTON SINCLAIR It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated, that the measure of the civilization which any nation has attained is the extent to which it has curtailed the power of institutionalized religion. There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of "true believers"; each damns all the others, with more or less heartiness, and each is a mighty fortress of Graft. * * * * * _The Middle Guard_ _It is terrible to die of thirst at sea. Is it necessary that you should salt your truth that it will no longer quench thirst_? NIETZSCHE. * * * * * ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD Indeed, history, down to the present day, is a melancholy record of the horrors which can attend religion: human sacrifice, and, in particular, the slaughter of children, cannibalism, sensual orgies, abject superstition, hatred as between races, the maintenance of degrading customs, hysteria, bigotry, can all be laid at it's charge. Religion is the last refuge of human savagery. ROBERT ANDREWS MILLIKAN The anthropomorphic God of the ancient world--the God of human passions, frailties, caprices, and whims is gone, and with him the old duty to propitiate him, so that he might be induced to treat you better than your neighbor. Can anyone question the advance that has been made in diminishing the prevalence of these medieval, essentially childish, and essentially selfish ideas? The new God is the God of law and order; the new duty, to know that order and to get into harmony with it, to learn how to make the world a better place for mankind to live in, not merely how to save your individual soul. However, once destroy our confidence in the principle of uniformity, our belief in the rule of law, and our effectiveness immediately disappears, our method ceases to be dependable, and our laboratories become deserted. ALBERT C. DIEFFENBACH The plain truth is, thousands upon thousands of men and women have gone out of the Church. They take no stock in its obsolete teachings to which they once subscribed in order to become members. After great tribulation, they have made their declaration of religious independence. They have taken the right turn for their own salvation. The churches as a whole do not know that today there is a violent intellectual revolution among all people who think. The so-called theism that is embalmed in the old theology and is still preached is utterly defunct for many persons of this generation. Like it or not, that is a fact. DR. CHARLES W. ELIOT The creeds of the churches contain conceptions of God's nature and of his action toward the human race which are intolerable to the ethical mind of the twentieth century. The conception of one being, human or divine, suffering, though innocent, for the sins of others, is revolting to the universal sense of justice and fair dealing. No school, no family, no court, would punish the innocent when the guilty were known. This conception of God is hideous, cruel, insane, and no Christian church which tolerates it can be efficient in the promotion of human welfare and happiness. 
26278	----	+--------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note | |Spelling, punctuation and inconsistencies | |in the original journal have been retained. | +--------------------------------------------+ Scientific and Religious Journal. VOL. I. JANUARY, 1880. NO. 1. THE CONFLICT. The pyramids, temples and palaces of Thebes are monuments of the ancient intellects of our race. Great thinkers only were capable of giving to the world the Vedas, the Apollo Belvidere and the Parthenon. The arts and astronomy of Egypt harmonize very poorly with the idea that modern scientists have all the wisdom and intelligence known in the history of the ages. Among the wonderful characters of olden times we find Epictetus, Josephus, Strabo, Pliny, Seneca, Virgil, Aristotle, Plato, Tacitus, Thucydides and Herodotus. The "Speculation of Evolution of Species" was advocated among the Greeks six hundred years before the birth of Christ. Two thousand and three hundred years ago the entire system of German philosophy, along with modern pantheism, was advocated by the Buddhists and Brahmins. In many very important respects the ancients were in advance of us, especially in the arts, and we can not boast of superiority in either letters or philosophy. "The gentlemen of modern materialistic schools do not compare favorably with Plato and Cicero in the elevation and reverence of their opinions." "Science has certainly made some advancement, but where is the warrant for the boasting" of sciolists of modern times? Buddhists taught the most perfect outline of materialism in general. "They believed in a supreme force, but denied the existence of a Supreme Being. They rejected inquiry into first causes as unscientific," maintaining that facts alone were to be dealt with in all our investigations. The Brahmin contemplated the moment when his spirit would flow back into the great "Pantheistic Being." Modern materialists say, "We deal only with facts." "We never speculate." The Buddhists, and the unbelievers who figure so boastingly upon the rostrum in modern times, speak alike. They say: "As many facts and second causes as you please, but ask no questions about first causes; _that_ is unscientific." We should ask no questions (?) about the invisible. They have been very true (?) to their own principles. There is nothing speculative (?) in the hypothesis that General George Washington was evolved from a crustacean. There never was a more absurd and wild speculation. It is an old speculation. Anaximander, who lived six centuries before Christ, advocated the assumption. His words are the following: "The sun's heat, acting on the original miry earth, produced filmy bladders or bubbles, and these, becoming surrounded with a prickly rind, at length burst open, and as from an egg, animals came forth. At first they were ill-formed and imperfect, but subsequently they elaborated and developed." This has the genuine ring of the language of modern unbelievers. Christianity, in its beginning, had to encounter this "speculation" along with the current literature and philosophy of a civilization which was semi-barbarous and centuries old, but it triumphed over all, and in the third century it triumphed everywhere. Since that time one effort has been made upon the part of paganism to regain her former strength in the old world. Julian made that effort. He tried to revive and establish the supremacy of pagan thought by the power of the state. Subsequent to this it disappeared in the east, and has only plead for toleration in the west. But the dark ages came on in all their hideousness, and unbelief developed itself about the close of the fifteenth century, all over Europe. Paganism, as the result, was fostered near the bosom of the church. The fifth Lateran Council proclaimed anew the tenet of the imperishability of the spirit of man. The Padua University adopted a system of materialism taught in the works of Alexander, of Aphrodisias. A form of pantheism known in the philosophy of Averroes soon became a center of skepticism. In the latter part of the seventeenth century modern unbelievers began their assaults. Lord Herbert and Hobbs in England, Spinoza in Holland, and Bayle in France. In seventeen hundred and thirteen Anthony Collins published a discourse for the encouragement of a "clique" called "Free-thinkers." This discourse was thoroughly answered by Bently. In seventeen hundred and twenty-seven Woolston made an effort to rationalize the miracles out of existence, interpreting them after the style of Mr. Strauss. Three years later Tyndal got out his dialogue called "Christianity as old as the Creation." The world received in return for this "Butler's Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion." In seventeen hundred and thirty-seven Morgan's "Moral Philosophy" made its appearance, claiming the sufficiency of the moral law without any other religion. Warburton's "Divine Legation of Moses" was gotten up in reply to this philosophy. Thomas Chubb wrote a discourse upon reason, and got out a few other small tracts denying the utility of prayer, and calling in question the truth of the Scriptures of both Testaments, in the line of Morgan's philosophy. Bolingbroke, ignorant of the law, "that the greatest good of the greatest number is to be sought after," even at the expense of the lives of a few wicked Canaanites, assailed the justice and the benevolence of the Bible God after Col Ingersoll's style, and boldly avowed that the miracles of the New Testament never transpired; said, "If they did occur they attested the Revelation." Voltaire lived between 1694 and 1788. He made himself busy in France, while Bolingbroke and Tyndal and Woolston, and Hume and Morgan were at work in England. Then Didoret, of France, made his appearance upon the stage as a bold defender of Atheism. Next comes D'Holbach, the leading author of the "Systeme de la Nature," which came out in 1774. Its object was to strike down the idea of a God, of an intelligence separate from matter, of free-will, and of immortality. Didoret and others are accused of assisting in getting this book before the world. Rousseau lived in those times, and assailed Christianity after the manner of Hume. To all these enemies of Christianity we must add Condillac, who originated the materialistic philosophy of France. Gibbon and Paine came into notice after Bolingbroke, and the terrible strife continued. Christianity was pronounced dead, and a prostitute was chosen to impersonate the "Goddess of Reason" in the national convention. God being dethroned in France, we should naturally look there for the "absolute liberty" which unbelievers talk so much about. But how was it? Were the people without a religious nature? Could they think more freely? Were they in any sense better off? No, they "followed the prostitute into the church of 'Notre Dame' in a grand procession and seated her upon the high altar, where she was worshiped by the audience." This was the result of the labors of all the authors to which I have called your attention. It was a wonderful gain? In all the public cemeteries this inscription was read: "Death is an eternal sleep." Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy and Volney close up the seventeenth century, but just about this time the "Critique of Pure Reason," a work which is the bed-rock of modern metaphysics, makes its appearance. According to its teachings there are no realities in the world. The struggle is passed in England. In France all are dull, drowsy. In Germany all are hungry for the food that satisfies unbelievers. The "Critique of Pure Reason" was followed by the labors of Fitche. He was succeeded by Schelling, and he by Hegel. All forms of torture must be added to this account of the conflict if we would get a glimpse of the strength of the Christian religion and of the religious element in man's nature, from the amount of resistance which they have defied. Eusebius says, "The swords became dull and shattered" under Diocletian. "The executioners became weary and had to relieve each other." This would not look as though Christianity would take the throne in four score years, but it did in spite of all those cruel murders. Through Constantine it became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Paganism crumbled down and Christianity triumphed over all the opposition of the old world. The books of the Old and New Testaments have all been thoroughly tested, over and over in the fiery furnace of criticism, but Christianity still lives to bless the hearts of widows and orphans; to bless the disappointed and disconsolate. To-day there are more Christians in the world than ever before. What has unbelief to give to the people of our age more than it offered centuries ago? Nothing! Nothing!! Nothing!!! "There is nothing new under the sun." THE BIBLE--THE BACKGROUND AND THE PICTURE. This book is admired and respected above all others for its antiquity, its usefulness, its conflicts, and character. It has been expressly denominated "The book of books." Its professions are such that no reasonable man can consistently lay it aside without giving it a careful examination. The nature of every question determines its claims upon our intelligence. If it professes to involve only a small interest its claims are not so pressing. The questions of the Bible hold in their principles the present and eternal interests of our humanity, and therefore challenge the attention of the world. Thousands of the wisest and best men of the ages have been intensely interested in its contents. Its great influence and reputation are evidences of its trustworthiness, and of the consistency and intelligence of those who give it their attention; for sensible men do not disregard questions of great importance. This book contains a record of many ugly, dark and wicked deeds, known in the lives of wicked men and nations, with imperfections and apostacies of individuals in high places. This is what we must look for in a book of its pretensions. It professes to contain a revelation of God and his will to man. The ugly, wicked, licentious, and bloody things constitute the background of the picture, representing man in all his ways. It is also shaded with all there was, and is, of moral and noble character in the human. God with his attributes, as the true, grand and glorious Bible picture, shines out through this human background. The justice of God, with his love, long suffering and tender mercies, his approbation and disapprobation, must in the very nature of things be revealed in connection with human character as it presents itself in iniquity and crime, in piety and virtue, both individual and national, in order that the revelation may be complete, full and perfect. The history of men and nations must also be true, sufficiently full to call out, in the divine dealings, all there is in the divine character; otherwise, the revelation would be partial and imperfect. No physician ever revealed his skill without his patients. No court has ever revealed its justice without its cases. The doctor's dealings with his patients measure the extent of his known skill. Allowing that he understands himself and the conditions of his patients perfectly, and does his whole duty, the revelation of his skill must be perfect, to the full extent of its connection with the diseases treated. So it is with the revealed justice of the court. This rule is a necessary law, governing all revelations of character, both human and divine; otherwise we are left in the dark with reference to the true character of the one who makes the revelation. Our common sense is such that we are always led astray by improper action, unless our superior wisdom enables us to know that the action is improper. Improper action upon the part of a doctor reveals imperfect skill; on the part of the court it reveals imperfect justice, if it is not an entire want of skill and justice. No such imperfection belongs to our God; therefore the revelation which he made needs only to be understood and it will never mislead us. These great principles of common sense are to be applied in the revelations of God to the nations as the God of nations. Such being the case, we have a very interesting field of thought before us in the bloody scenes that are known in the history of nations, as it is given in the Bible. Where is the morality and righteousness of the wars of which we read? Where is the justice and goodness of God in the bloody wars of Israel? Where is the righteousness of capital punishment? A great many persons say, in their ignorance, there is no righteousness in those things. Friend, travel slowly over this ground. "Take the shoes off thy feet, for it is holy ground." Go into the Bible and look! God is there. You knew it not. Principles never change. Circumstances change and necessitate changes of law, but that which was right at any time in the history of our race is right at all times, under the same circumstances. Is there such a thing as morality carried into public relations? Is there such a thing as jurisprudence? Yes; jurisprudence is morality carried into public relations in the following law: "That course of conduct which pertains to the greatest good of the greatest number is right." This law is of universal application. It belongs to men in all their relations, both public and private, collectively and individually. In the relation of the State to its citizens it taxes them for the support of government, it fines, imprisons and puts them to death for crime. In the relation of nation to nation it imposes tariffs and declares war, filling history with scenes of blood and woe. The common sense of mankind approves this law, and the Bible declares it just. Wars were approved of God, when they were for the greatest good of the greater number. It was upon the same principle that all the divine judgments were administered, from the destruction of the Antediluvians down to the overthrow of Jerusalem by Titus. This law is the substratum in moral righteousness, underlying all that is right. Such is its wonderful latitude and longitude that, in order to carry it out, it sometimes becomes necessary to tilt a nation into a sea of blood and replace it with a better people. Unbelievers and skeptics who admit this are guilty of wresting Bible facts from their proper places and testing them upon the plane of morality, regardless of the laws of jurisprudence. This erroneous method of reasoning leads the minds of many ignorant and unsuspecting persons away from the right ways of God. The guilty reasoner justifies taxation, fines, imprisonment and wars in the history of his own country. It sometimes seems cruel to carry out this great moral principle of which we are treating; it is nevertheless right, and men who abuse its facts and turn things upside down are guilty of opposing the right. Unbelievers are guilty of selecting from the Bible all that can be tortured out of its place in the laws of jurisprudence and made to look ugly out of its proper relations, and are continually holding such things up before the people, turning them into ridicule, and at the same time they have been through all the bloody scenes of war and justify themselves, wishing to be known in many instances as Major, General or Colonel. We have some such in our own country. They seem to have never learned that many things which are good for humanity are very ugly out of their proper relations. I am glad that God has revealed himself in the jurisprudence of nations, for the facts given inspire confidence in rulers and officials, strength to judges upon the bench, and nerve to warriors who are acting with direct reference to the "greatest good of the greatest number." A history of God in his dealings with states and nations in order to a perfect revelation of himself necessitates a history of states and nations so far as it is necessary to make known the approbation and disapprobation of God in connection with all that may ever enter into national or state character. Without this we would find states and nations where God did not see fit to show himself. We must find him wherever we find man, approving or disapproving. This is just what we do in the Bible. We do it in no other book. But let us ever remember that all that is wicked had its origin with wicked men and demons, and that the Divine Being, with all his attributes, appears in the foreground in all his relations to men and their conduct, as the grand Bible picture shining out through all the darkness and gloom, surrounded with the virtues and noble deeds of all his worshipers, and that he is building up and throwing down as his righteous judgment approves or disapproves. This revelation of God is like the sun at noonday bursting through dark and heavy clouds and blessing the earth with its rays. In making this revelation, which is related negatively or affirmatively to all there is in human history, God saw fit to communicate his will through man, and in his own language, except in the gift of the great charter of the national existence of the children of Israel and the great foundation truth of the church of God. These he uttered with his own wonderful voice. Was it reasonable to expect a revelation from God? Is it necessary to the greatest good of the greatest number? If so, it is a thought at once involving the moral character of God and necessitating a revelation of himself. In answering these questions intelligently we must look after the demands for such a communication. Where shall we find them? Answer, in the wants of our humanity. Here two kinds of light are needed for two pair of eyes in order that we may be happy in two respects. First, physical light for the physical eyes, in order to the enjoyment of physical life in a material world. Second, the light of knowledge for the eyes of the understanding, in order to the enjoyment of spiritual life in a spiritual world. It is universally conceded that there are means provided in nature to meet man's physical wants and adaptations that manifest the wisdom that belongs to God; also, that it would have been the work of a demon to create man with these wants, like so many empty vessels, without any provision to satisfy or fill them. Without those supplies our suffering would be great and our wretchedness unendurable. Is there no liability to mental suffering? Are there no spiritual wants consequent upon the nature of mind? Is it not unreasonable to allow that "Infinite wisdom" provided for all our physical wants and left our spirits with all their demands, like so many children away out in the darkness without hope, uneasy, restless, always dissatisfied, and ever trying to get into the possession of the knowledge of the unseen and future, without one ray of mental light shining out from the heavens upon our relations to perfect our condition and declare the glorious goodness of an all-wise Creator? Volney says, "Provident nature having endowed the heart of man with inexhaustible hope, he set about finding happiness in this world, and failing in his efforts, he set out in his imagination and created a world for himself, where, free from tyrants, he could have all his wrongs redressed and enjoy unsullied bliss." This is Volney's account of the origin of religion, the tap-root of the tree. It contains a most wonderful concession, one that Tyndal made when he said, "There is a place in man's psychological nature for religion." Is there a place in man's physical nature for bread and meat, for food of every variety that man's soul desires? Do we attribute all the mercies of physical life to a supreme intelligence? Has that intelligence created us and left us endowed with "Inexhaustible hope," to be disappointed forever, and the only result, the "imaginary" creation of the Christian's happy heaven. But Volney makes another grand concession in the quotation which I have given, and that is the nature of the Christian's future world in its relations to wrongs as well as tyrants, neither are to exist there. That the Christian's religion, with its beautiful world, does fill up the soul's demands is a fact unintentionally conceded by Volney, and known throughout the land in the contentment and bliss and heroism of the dying Christian. In this hope alone man's spiritual wants are met. This, with all that pertains to it, is in the revelation that God has made to our race. How could this be made? I answer, it was made by the spirit of God. "Holy men of old spake as they were moved upon by the Holy Spirit." This is what we call _inspiration_. This word is a translation of "_Theopneustos_," which is from "Theos," _God_, "pneuma," _spirit_, _Spirit of God_. Is it reasonable to allow that this revelation could be given by the spirit of God through holy men? I will let an infidel answer this question. Bolingbroke said, "It is just as easy to comprehend the operation of the spirit of God upon the mind of a prophet in order to give his will to us as it is to comprehend the operations of our own spirits upon our physical nature in order to an expression of our own thoughts." Has such a revelation been made? From all we know of man, his wants, and the adaptation of means in nature to those wants, we are driven to the conclusion that it has, presenting the means adapted to our spiritual wants so perfectly as to enable us to realize fully what Volney declares our very nature, as creatures of hope, impelled us to create "in our imaginations for ourselves." There is no consistent ground that any man can occupy between Christianity and Atheism. And if there is no God, "nature," or the "forces," or whatever lies behind them, to which they belong, as the manifest energies of the same, call it what you may, has made a very unreasonable, bungling mistake in giving in the very nature of man's mind an empty vessel that is to be filled only by the false whims of the imagination of an ever restless and dissatisfied spirit, which, in that case, is to be eternally disappointed and plunged deeper down by the realization of the fact that all its anxieties and hopes were only so many misleading demons. In order to a perfect revelation of God to man it was necessary that the entire page, the "background" as well as the "foreground," or the human as well as the divine, should be truth, and in every case, all the truth that was necessary to enable man to realize and understand the whys and wherefores of the divine procedure; and also to call out in word or action the Divine Being in all his relations to the conduct of the children of men. Such a record is found in the Bible, given to us by men who were impelled and borne by the Holy Spirit when they wrote and spoke. But it was not necessary that anything upon the dark human "background" of this picture should have its origin with God; it was only necessary that, having originated with man, men or demons, it should be put to record just as it was in all its heinousness and wickedness in order that we might see the true character of God in his relations to it. If a wise physician should undertake to make himself known to the world he would not give us a history of all he did with every patient, and at the same time fail to give us just so much of the true history of each patient as would be necessary to enable us to understand him in all that he did, for both stand or fall together. So it is in the Bible revelation of God to man. Take away the "background" of the picture, and the picture itself is destroyed. That which skeptics in their ignorance are always trying to ridicule is just as essential to a revelation of God in his justice, purity, love and power as the word of God himself. That is to say, the revelation has an objective as well as a subjective side. The subjective is God in his attributes, and the objective is man in his works. It was the objective that drew out the subjective, because all was done for the objective. Take either side away and the revelation ceases to exist. On the subjective side all is of God in its origin, is charged up to him, being spoken by him, and in his name, or done by him, or by his authority. The indices to this great truth are in these or similar phrases, "Hear, O, Israel, thus saith the Lord, thy God," "Thus saith the Lord," "And the Lord said," "The Lord spake, saying," "The Lord said unto me," "The word of the Lord came unto me," "The Lord commanded," "The burthen of the word of the Lord to," "The Lord answered, saying." We are not authorized to charge, as many through their ignorance or wickedness have done, all that we read about in the Bible to God as the author. The words and doings of wicked men and demons are truthfully recorded there, and they are often licentious and blasphemous. The words and doings of good men and angels are there, and the words and doings of God are there. We are authorized to charge to God's account that only which is spoken in his name, or by his instructions, along with that which was done by him, or by his authority, or approved by him. When we get outside of these common-sense thoughts in our interpretations of Bible history we are acting upon our own responsibility, and are liable to be found doing violence to the divine will. If we contradict the record we call in question the veracity of the spirit which controlled the writer, whether the statement relates to God, man or demons. But this statement does not apply to mistranslations, for it is one thing to contradict an uninspired translator, and another altogether to contradict the statement of one controlled by the spirit of God. We fearlessly assert that the Bible is just the book that common-sense and reason demands that it should be in order to contain a revelation of God to man. We would as soon attempt to destroy the divine and lovely side, as change its character, so far as to take from its pages its record of wickedness, misery and woe, for it amounts to the same thing. One more question of importance bearing on this subject demands our attention, and that is the question of miracles. Men have, without any authority from the Bible, treated all miracles as violations of natural law. But it would be well for us to determine the extent of our knowledge of natural laws before we thus dogmatize. That which we call miracle may be in perfect harmony with law that lies just beyond our knowledge. Omniscience seems to be a necessary qualification for such theorizing as asserts that miracles are violations of the laws of nature. Omnipotence is an essential attribute of the Ruler of the universe. But in order to its existence, the Infinite one must be above the laws which he has established, able to take hold of those laws and handle them as he sees proper, otherwise he is not all-powerful. On the simple plane of nature we get lost. Who can account for "Partheno Genesis," or generation without any known sexual organs, which obtains in the animal kingdom. "The spirit of God moved upon," "brooded over" the face of the great deep and life filled the waters. "The Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin" and the Nazarene was begotten. The original expresses the same idea in both cases. Scientists who are radical materialists admit this wonderful feat in the animal kingdom as a natural affair, and yet, without any authority from the Bible, speak of the birth of Christ as the result of "Miraculous conception," in the sense of a violation of natural law. What natural law is violated in "Partheno Genesis?" With me it is allowable that a thousand more just such beings might be, and if necessary to the accomplishment of the great purposes of God, would be produced under the same circumstances and by the same instrumentalities. The feature of the question of miracles which bears on the subject of a divine revelation must now be considered. It is this, would a book containing such a record as that which we have in the Bible, except the record of miracles, reveal God in his attributes to our world? We lay it down as a correct proposition that we must have creative and life-giving power manifested in order to a revelation of God. If the Bible contained no record of the exercise of powers above the human it would reveal only a human God, which would be no God; and common sense would declare, "It is a book treating of, and presenting man in his attributes." Those facts upon its pages which are in the power of God alone confirm, that is, make sure, the revelation of God to man. Without this feature of the book common sense would have at least one good excuse for rejecting its claims. The Master recognizes this fact in the saying, "If I do not the works of my Father believe me not, but if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works, that ye may know and believe that the Father is in me and I in him." Here we have the fact of "God revealed in the flesh," evinced by the works which the Savior performed. The foundation of faith, or the obligation to believe, is identified with those works. They were a greater evidence of his divinity than the words of any prophet, although those words were the words of the Divine Spirit. Jesus said, "I have greater witness than that of John, for the works which the Father hath given me to finish, the same works that I do, bear witness of me that the Father hath sent me." "If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin; their rejection of my claims would be justifiable but for the fact that my divinity is demonstrated in the works which I do." The same thought accompanies the introduction of the gospel of Jesus Christ in the preaching of the Apostles. Paul said, "Our gospel came not unto you in word only, but in power, and in the Holy Spirit." "They went everywhere preaching the word; the Lord working with them and confirming the word with signs following." The confirmation was not in the simple fact that miracles were wrought, but in their character. The miracles of Christ were not in the power of false prophets, magicians, or demons. They were in the power of God. Peter said, "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power," and that "He went about doing good, and healing all who were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him." The presence of God was manifested in his miracles. The question is often asked, "Why were they not continued throughout the Christian dispensation?" Answer: If they had been continued, they would have lost all their power over the mind by becoming ordinary, and then they would cease to have any bearing whatever in the establishment of a divine proposition. It was not necessary to continue them beyond the witnesses whose testimony closed up the revelation of God. "A covenant once confirmed no man disannulleth or addeth thereto." A continual repetition of the evidence of confirmation was not necessary in order to give faith in a communication already confirmed and left in a historic age for the faith of the world. It is true of sense that the continual sensuous experience causes the object experienced to lose its controlling power, but the opposite is true of faith. So he who knew best what man's nature required ordained that the just should walk by faith and not by sense. And to this end he confirmed "once" the revelation of himself and his will, and left it in the world as his witness to produce faith. "If we receive the witness of men the witness of God is greater; for this is the witness of God which he hath testified of his Son. He that believeth hath the witness in himself; he that believeth not God hath made him a liar, because he believeth not the _record_ that God gave of his Son." Is it not a dangerous thing to make God a liar? Is it not a great insult? All unbelievers are thus guilty before God. Our Savior did not speak unadvisedly when he said: "He that believeth not shall be condemned." "Life and immortality are brought to light through the Gospel." Is it not strange that dying men will reject the motive of life? "This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son; he that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." Jesus "came to his own and his own received him not, but as many as received him to them gave he power to become the sons of God." Will we possess him through faith and live, or shall we make God a liar, die in our sins, be condemned and banished from the presence of God and the glory of his power? * * * * * The practice of dating from the Christian era was first introduced about the year 527, by Dionisius, surnamed "Exiguus," but better known as Deny's le Petit, a monk of Scythia and a Roman abbot. It was not introduced into Italy until the sixth century. It was first used in France in the seventh century; it was universally established in France in the eighth century. It was used in England in 680; it was in general use in the eighth century. The years of the Christian era are described in ancient documents as the years "of Grace," of "the Incarnation," of "our Lord," of "the Nativity," etc.--_Chambers._ * * * * * The cardinal virtues are Justice, Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude. _Cardinal_ signifies, in a general sense, principal or pre-eminent. It comes from the Latin word _cardo_, a hinge. Take cardinal things away from any science and its foundation is gone. Everything in science turns upon cardinal things, as the word _cardo_ signifies. A FUNERAL ORATION. BY COL. G. DE VEVEU. Of the future, the hereafter, we are as ignorant as we are of the infinite conditions through which we have passed during the eternity which has preceded our brief present existences. If we could know the history of our past we might get a glimpse of our future; but no message ever reached man from beyond the grave. The past is a mere sealed book, the future is a blank. No records are left to us save those written in the rocks and the evidences brought before our senses; they tell their own stories. Whence came we? Whither are we tending? Ah! who can tell? Some profess to know, but they know not. Where have last summer's roses gone? What will become of yon dry leaf, torn from its parent stem by this wintry blast? Like us they disappear and are merged into the ocean of matter from which they are evolved, ready to be re-combined into new forms of beauty; for although individual existences perish, matter is imperishable; having had no birth it will have no death. Like time and space, it is infinite and eternal. Brought forth into this world without being consulted, we are hurried out of it without our consent. Like that leaf, which was the hope of spring, the pride and glory of summer, we are rudely torn away, the sport of destiny, to return to the elements of nature from which we spring--dust to dust. The past is beyond recall; the future is veiled in obscurity and in doubt; the present alone is ours. The above is from the Boston _Investigator_. It has gone the rounds of the press, and it is regarded as a very fine literary production. But all is not gold that glitters. This oration was delivered as a tribute of respect to the memory of Mrs. Boulay. It is a curiosity when viewed from the speaker's standpoint. The man was evidently broken down in the presence of death. I have sometimes thought it would be well for the unbelievers to adopt the custom of delivering funeral sermons, for it is certain, from all that is known of man, that no strong defense of unbelief, nor even a respectable presentation of it, is made in the presence of death. When an unbeliever speaks at his brother's grave of the "rustling of wings," I intuitively think of the old trite saying, "It is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous." That step is from the "rustling of wings" to "infidelity." Col. G. Veveu, in the above oration, sticks close to his unbelief, but smashes _his science_. If our incredulous friends will continue to respect the dead enough to remember them with an oration at their graves, I think it will be but a short time till the people all over the country will see the hollow, empty, good-for-nothing character of unbelief. Mr. Veveu says, "Although individual existences perish, matter is imperishable; having had _no birth_ (_italics mine_) it will have _no death_." A wonderful discovery! _Matter had no birth_; organisms are born. They existed, however, prior to their birth. The matter that composed them existed before it entered into organic forms. The living element, spirit, or whatever you please to name it, took hold of the elements of matter and built the organism. The life existed before the organism. Why should it perish with it? Matter exists before birth and after death. Spirit also exists before birth and after death. Why affirm the eternity of matter and deny the eternity of spirit? These unbelievers, being materialists, advocate the one substance theory. Yet they talk about the "unknown" which they know, and know it to be the "invisible," the "wonderful," the life, and the cause, at least, of all intelligence and order. They are compelled to deify this. Does this pass out of being with death? Does matter pass out of being with death? No, nothing passes out of being except the organic form. The body returns to the dust, _as it was_, and the spirit to God who gave it. Next, we have this statement with reference to matter, "Like time and space, it is infinite and eternal." Why? The answer is, because it can not be annihilated; death has simply destroyed an organization, changed the condition of matter, the matter of the organism, and changed the relations of the intelligent, living spirit; neither matter nor spirit ceases to be. If matter is therefore infinite and eternal, spirit is therefore infinite and eternal. The sooner scientists learn the fact that birth simply brings us into certain relations, and death takes us out of those relations, the better it will be for all who are concerned in this interesting subject. The next item in that eloquent effusion is that man is "like the leaf," the mere "sport of destiny," returning in his "autumn" "to the elements of nature from which he sprang: dust to dust." This orator asks the questions, "Whence came we?" "Whither are we tending?" "Who can tell?" To them he gives two answers. First, he says, "Some profess to know, but they know not." "The past is a mere sealed book." "The future is a blank." "Of the future, the hereafter, we are as ignorant as we are of the infinite conditions through which we have passed during the eternity which has preceded our brief present existences. If we could know the history of our past, we might get a glimpse of our future," "The past is a mere sealed book." Conclusion, "The future is a mere sealed book." The man is lost in the unbeliever's "narrow vale lying between two cold, bleak, barren eternities," viz: life. Lost (?) in the narrow vale. Yes! He knows nothing about his origin. He knows nothing about his destiny. So he says, and we have no right to contradict him. He is lost! But here he is again, listen! Speaking of the autumn leaves, he says, "LIKE US, they disappear and are merged into the ocean of matter from which they are evolved, ready to be RE-COMBINED into new forms of beauty." (Capitals mine.) Once more he says, "LIKE THAT LEAF which was the hope of spring, the pride and glory of summer, we are rudely torn away, the sport of destiny, to return to the elements of nature from which we sprung: dust to dust." How he contradicts himself! But we must make all due allowances. He is in the presence of death. He says, "The past is beyond recall; the future is veiled in obscurity and in doubt; the present alone is ours." Here confusion is confounded; but let us ever remember that this was a funeral occasion, and the friends of the deceased were present, and this man Veveu was there, for the purpose, ostensibly, of giving a small amount of consolation to bereaved and broken hearts. Oh, how barren, how cold, how gloomy and God-dishonoring the consolation given! Those empty vessels of ours, hearts "endowed with inexhaustible hope," must turn away from the grave (?) _empty still_. No, not necessarily. God has provided a fountain. Go to it and fill your vessels. Let us not be too severe upon the man. There he stands amid bleeding hearts, and the open tomb just before him. Show pity, Lord! The man says, "No message ever reached man from beyond the grave." How very singular it is that many men repudiating God make a god of themselves. What kind of a being must I be to know that "no message ever reached man from beyond the grave?" How much must I know? Away back yonder in the past, in that "mere sealed book," is a grand and glorious message from beyond the grave. But to our friend it is a "sealed book." What becomes of evolution? What becomes of natural selection? What becomes of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest? THE MOTIVE THAT LED MEN TO ADOPT DARWINISM. Before presenting the motive that led some of the great minds in unbelief to advocate the Darwinian theory of creation, it will not be amiss to remind the reader of the fact that the author of the "Vestiges of Creation" presented the evolution theory about twenty years before Mr. Darwin excited the public mind with the "hypothesis." Men who read the "Vestiges" looked upon the assumption as a speculation, but refused its adoption until Mr. Darwin, for the purpose of setting aside the idea of separate creations of species, improved so far upon the "Vestiges of Creation" as to repudiate design in nature. Having done this, many of the leading spirits in skepticism, with a few great minds in unbelief, at once accepted the wild speculation. Their motive may be seen in the following quotations: "The eye was not made for the purpose of seeing, or the ear for the purpose of hearing. Organisms, according to Darwin, are like grape-shot, of which one hits something and the rest fall wide." (Lay sermons, p. 331.) According to the above it appears that Huxley regarded the evolution of species, as advocated by Darwin, as identical with the old, effete idea that circumstances have determined everything. Buchner says, "According to Darwin the whole development is due to the gradual summation of innumerable minute and accidental operations." This is the same idea. Carl Vogt says, "Darwin's theory turns the Creator, and his occasional intervention in the revolutions of the earth and in the production of species, without any hesitation, out of doors, inasmuch as it does not leave the smallest room for the agency of such a being." Haeckel says, "The grand difficulty in the way of the mechanical theory was the occurrence of innumerable organisms, apparently, at least, indicative of design." He further says, "Some who could not believe in a creative and controlling mind, to get over the difficulty of apparent design, adopted the idea of a metaphysical ghost called vitality." He then presents his estimate of the service of Darwin in the following words: "The grand service rendered by Darwin to science is that his theory enables us to account for the appearances of design without assuming final causes, or, a mind working for a foreseen and intended end." Strauss, after making the admission that the evolution theory is a mere guess, that it is no explanation of the cardinal points in descent, adds: "Nevertheless, as he has shown how miracles may be excluded, he is to be applauded as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race."--_Old Faith and New, p. 177._ The same author says: "We philosophers and critical theologians have spoken well when we decreed the abolition of miracles; but our decree remained without effect, because we could not show them to be unnecessary, inasmuch as we were unable to indicate any natural force to take their place. Darwin has provided or indicated this natural force, this process of nature; he has opened the door through which a happier posterity may eject miracles forever." Helmholtz says: "Adaptation in the formation of organisms may arise without the intervention of intelligence by the blind operation of natural law." This author confounds law with cause or agent. "Law is nothing without an agent to operate by it." Law is simply a rule of action. Let us hear Strauss once more: "Design in nature, especially in the department of living organisms, has ever been appealed to by those who desire to prove that the world is not SELF-EVOLVED (capitals mine), but the work of an intelligent Creator."--_Old Faith and New, p. 211._ On page 175 Strauss says of those who ridicule Darwin's evolution hypothesis and yet deny miracles: "How do they account for the origin of man, and, in general, the development of the organic out of the inorganic? Would they assume that the original man, as such, no matter how rough and unformed, but still a man, sprang immediately out of the inorganic, out of the sea or the slime of the Nile? They would hardly venture to say that; then they must know that there is only the choice between miracle, the divine hand of the Creator, and Darwin." According to this statement every man is left to one of three conclusions, viz: 1. That man came up immediately _as man_ from the inorganic, or from the slime of the Nile, or from some other slimy place. Or, 2. That man was evolved from the lowest forms of life, according to Darwinism. Or, 3. That man was created by the divine hand, according to Christian belief. Reader, which will you accept. Will you dethrone the Creator? Choose you this day between the Creator and the slime of the sea with the sun's rays. What does Darwin know about the origin of life and mind? I am informed that he believes in a God, who, by miracle, gave the living unit at the base of his evolutionary series, but it seems to be an admission for the sake merely of avoiding disaster, for he says: "In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms is as _hopeless an inquiry_ as how life itself _first originated_. These are problems for the distant future, if they are ever to be solved by man."--_Descent of Man, p. 66._ This is an open confession; in it all is given up. I am now reminded of one of the last sayings of Strauss; here it is: "We demand for our universe the same piety which the devout man of old demanded for his God." This brings us to the same standard of piety. Then why the opposition? Strauss denied a personal God. Of his mental condition we learn something from these words: "In the enormous machine of the universe, amid the incessant whirl and hiss of its jagged iron wheels, amid the deafening crash of its ponderous stamps and hammers--in the midst of this whole terrific commotion, man, a helpless and defenseless creature, finds himself placed, not secure for a moment, that on an imprudent motion a wheel may not seize and rend him, or a hammer crush him to a powder. This sense of abandonment is at first SOMETHING AWFUL." (Capitals mine.) Reader, the religion of Jesus Christ will save you from the terrible mental condition which is legitimate from a denial of God and his Christ. Will you accept it and experience the fact? SHALL WE ABANDON OUR RELIGION? There is no counterfeit without a genuine. Even a myth is related to something, near or remote, to which it bears some resemblance. There is nothing of great value that is not counterfeited. There is nothing that is not abused. Civil government has been wonderfully abused; in this respect it has fared no better than religion. There are many forms of civil government. There are many forms of religion. Let us ever seek the best form in each. We are often pointed to the blood that has been shed in religious wars; but do unbelievers value civil government less because of the blood which they have cost? No. That blood speaks better things. May we not estimate civil government and religion both by the blood they have cost? Unbelievers are very industrious in keeping before us the disagreements among Protestants. They say, Look! they can't agree among themselves. Well, is there any better agreement among politicians, or in civil governments? Is there any agreement among unbelievers which would serve as a model for us poor souls to imitate? I confess that the way is open for improvement among Protestants in this respect, but is it not just as open for a similar improvement among unbelievers in the scientific field of thought? There we find Atheists, Pantheists, Deists, Polytheists and Theists. In their history will be found an immense mass of contradictory opinions. Man is imperfect in many of his attainments. A few men are more perfect than others, but all are liable to mistakes. Errors are found in all the histories of humanity; shall we therefore discard science and civil government? or shall we turn misanthropists? No; we will do neither. We are in a progressive age. We were capacitated for progression. We would not be men without this capacity. Let us ever remember that man is, after all his mistakes, the noblest creature of God, having God-like attributes. Do you doubt this? Then tell us why it is that a falsehood is always detestible to the mind. Why do men strenuously avoid contradictory propositions? The God-like in man is the great secret of his progression. He is a progressive being. Shall we on this account condemn all that in which man has and does progress? Shall we condemn Christianity on account of man's failures? Shall we discourage his honest efforts by keeping those failures always before him? Have men made no mistakes in science? Shall we repudiate on account of mistakes? Then there will be no end to repudiations. Let us remember and talk of the many mistakes that have been made in both science and religion, like the man "who visits the shadows in the deep ravines, in order that he may more fully realize the fact that the sun shines;" that is to say, let us talk of old, effete dogmas in science and in religion only to more fully realize the fact that the sunlight of truth is shining. Yes! Man has progressed. "Science and religion both stand true to their God." Man alone deviates. How often do we hear men say, "Science is progressive?" Scientific truth is always the same. Man is not always the same. Shall we keep his many deviations from truth and principle before him in order to cause greater deviations? Who will "deliver" the unbelievers of our country "from this dead body?" It contains all the errors of the ages. Their name is "legion." Among them we behold laws in the early history of our own country that to-day would shock the common sense of our country. Examine the old "Blue Laws of Connecticut." Among the errors of the past we find the "rack," the "thumb-screw," the "inquisition"--I was going to add the cross, but I recollect that unbelievers do not put that in their list. They do not sympathize with Christ, so they leave the cross out; in fact they do not like to talk about it. "It is their stumbling stone; the rock of their offense." I am tempted to say more about the errors of scientists in the bygone, but I must forbear; for in so doing I would ape the unbelievers. I have no great love for apes. So far as old, effete, erroneous opinions and faiths are concerned, with the old instruments of torture belonging to the shadows of the dark ages, we should say, disturb not the dead. A man making his appearance among us as a lecturer, condemning all the sciences, presenting to the public mind the hundred and one old false ideas known in the history of scientific investigation, would be hissed out of literary circles. An orator coming before the American people as a speaker, loaded with all the imperfections of our government, with its errors in legislation, its wicked and corrupt men accepting bribes, its mistakes on the fields of battle, resulting in great loss of life, as an open enemy to our country, breathing out treason, would subject himself to the anathemas of our government. The course pursued by unbelievers against the religion of Jesus Christ is without a parallel in the fields of science, civil governments and morals, yet the way is equally open in all those directions for a similar effort. What is the value of the religion of Christ? What is the estimate placed upon it by the best minds of America? Andrew Jackson said, in his last hours, "That book, sir," pointing to the Bible, "is the rock on which our republic rests." Benjamin Franklin said, "As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals, and his religion, as he left them to us, is the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see." John Adams said, "The Bible is the best book in the world." Henry Clay said, "I always have had, and always shall have, a profound regard for Christianity, the religion of my fathers, and for its rites, its usages and observances." U. S. Grant said, "Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet anchor of our liberties; write its precepts on your hearts, and practice them in your lives. To the influence of this book we are indebted for the progress made in true civilization, and to this we must look as our guide in the future." General George Washington said, "It is impossible to govern the world without God. He must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligation." THE DOMAIN OR PROVINCE OF SCIENCE. The Greeks used the word "epistasin" to express the idea that we express by the word science. Our word means certain knowledge. Theirs was understood to mean "coming to a stand," from "epi," upon, and "staseo," to stand. Science takes account of phenomenon and seeks its law. When you apprehend a phenomenon and discover its law you have accomplished all that the term indicates, even though you fail to comprehend the whys and wherefores of the law. "Certain knowledge," this phrase indicates limitation. All that it demands is that you know that which you profess to know. It therefore follows that the word "science" is equally applicable to the comprehensible and incomprehensible. The word is from "scio," _I know_. As men's knowledge, in the present state, at least, is limited, so science, as presented by man, is also limited; but, as men are progressive beings, science and the sciences may increase, adding more and more of truth. There are, however, shores beyond which science will never carry us, but on the contrary will leave us to settle down, to rest forever in content or discontent, just as we choose. The modern hypothesis of materialistic unbelievers is that there is but one substance in the universe, and that is matter. If this be so, then all knowledge pertains to matter, and when you have reasoned yourself to the last element known, or knowable, in physical analysis, which will be the point of departure as well as your ultimate truth behind which you can not go, then, of course, you are where you must rest satisfied or dissatisfied; you have come to the Rubicon beyond which you will never pass. The mere physicist finds, as a legitimate result of his hypothesis of but one substance, his rest in the ultimate of eternal matter and blind force. The Christian, recognizing spiritual substance also, finds his ultimate or resting place in God, who is the last element in vital and mental analysis, and also the Christian's starting point in his inductive reasonings. We realize that scientific knowledge is profitable, even in the field of matter, but if we refuse to science any domain above matter she will lead us to the dust of the grave, there to forsake us forever amid its gloom and sorrow. Here Colonel Ingersoll's "night birds"--for angels he has no use--move with "rustling of wings." When such men reason themselves back to the germ cells and sperm cells, and stand there upon the last element in the analysis of the human body, they are not able to take another step until they acknowledge the existence of spiritual substance as matters master, which ever was, and is above matter, which takes hold of matter and builds germ cells and sperm cells and inhabits them, as the inherent fore which superintends the building, differentiating the species, and determining the sex. Ask the unbeliever, the materialist, what this vital principle is, and he answers: "It is the all-pervading force that is modified by the organic structure." That is, in his philosophy, the "vital force is produced by the organism," and the "organism is produced by the vital principle?" So, being at the last limit of the physical analysis of the organic being, he is involved in a contradiction, while the Christian who believes in a spiritual substance refers all to spirit, and claims a continuation of his identity as an intelligent spirit, resting in his ultimate or starting point, viz: God. Do you say I am lost in God? Well, to be thus lost in God is to be saved from corruption and from the dust of the grave; but to be lost in the dust of the grave and in the ceaseless changes of matter is to be lost to God and to spiritual being. Let me be with God rather than lost amid the dark waves of oblivion. Has science no prerogatives above the physical? Tread lightly here; you might step on holy ground. Do you use the old cry that all outside of matter belongs to the "unknown" and "unknowable?" Exchange the terms for the terms the "uncomprehended" and the "incomprehensible," and we will walk side by side. We know many things which we do not comprehend. Do we comprehend all that belongs to the physical sciences? Do we comprehend matter? I know that I know, but do I comprehend that knowledge? If I should say I know the unknowable, I am guilty of a contradiction in language. Do you say matter is infinite? Can I comprehended the infinite? If science be that certain knowledge which is the equivalent of comprehension, then one of two things is true: First, there is no such thing as physical science; or, secondly, I may have certain knowledge of the infinite--may comprehend the infinite. How is this? Where is the difficulty? It is here: the knowledge which constitutes science is not necessarily that knowledge which is the equivalent of the comprehension of the thing known. Hence the incomprehensible is not to be excluded from the field of scientific investigation. If matter be infinite, and if it belongs to the field of scientific knowledge, then the infinite and incomprehensible belong, also, to the domain of scientific investigation. If the infinite can not be comprehended, matter can not be comprehended, and if all that can not be comprehended should be dismissed from scientific investigation, then matter should be dismissed. In physical science we know the vital force exists which builds the germ and sperm cells, but we do not comprehend it. If you ask physical science to explain this invisible force or power, she will say, Gentlemen, I have given you an introduction to this wonderful builder; you see it is there at the threshold of organic being, but I can not tell you why it is there, nor what its properties are; if it has any, they are outside of my domain. I deal with matter. You must ask at the gate of the unseen, ask the science of the spiritual, the mental and vital. I am in wonderful contrast with mind, with life also. I am inertia. Some of my votaries have tried to give you the answer which you so much desire. They have said, "It is the all-pervading force which was lying away back in the antechambers of eternity." Have said, "It was burdened with a universe of worlds." Have said, "It was destitute of personality." Have said, "It was not, and is not, an intelligence." Have said, "It was without will, purpose or desire." Have said, "All beauty, harmony and order were its results." Have also said, "It was," away back in the ages past, groaning and heaving, travailing, in great anxiety to be delivered. Speaking of it in the light of "natural selection," they have deified it, giving to it all the mental operations of an intelligent, living God. On this account some of my lovers are Pantheists. They deify nature; deify everything, and call it all God. A few ignorant Christians, on this very account, are ready to give up their warfare with Pantheists. But the battle is not won because the word "God" is pronounced; for sober reason says, If nature is _all_ God, she is _a_ God, who is no God; or a nature without a God, just as you choose to express it. After all, it remains an axiom, that "you can not get more out of a thing than there is in it." So, of necessity, there must be, somewhere in this universe, _Eternal life and mind_. Reader, "how readest thou?" BLIND FORCE OR INTELLIGENCE, WHICH? In the discussion of this question I think it proper to submit a few axiomatic or common-sense truths which are universally admitted by the unbiased mind. _First._ "Every effect must have a cause." _Secondly._ "Every series must have a unit lying at its base." _Thirdly._ "In every beginning there must be that which began." _Fourthly._ "Something is eternal." _Fifthly._ "There can not be an endless succession of dependent things." _Sixthly._ "There must be that upon which the first dependent link in the chain of dependent things depended." _Seventhly._ "That thing, whatever it may be, upon which the first dependent thing depended, must be eternal." Was it blind force or intelligence, which? The existence of a supreme intelligence is the first great leading thought made known in the Bible. The first that is made known in unbelief, is the existence of "the unknown." When a man adopts the idea of the unknown, he lays down all his strength to oppose the idea of a supreme intelligence, for what right has he to dogmatize about the unknown? The use of the word force will not help us to a better understanding of things. Force is simply the manifestation of energy, and there must, necessarily, be something lying behind it to which it, as an attribute or quality, belongs. That "something" the Bible calls "spirit." It has never been christened with a name by the unbeliever. Force is the bridge between it and matter, and the bridge between it and all things upon which it operates. The unbeliever's "unknown" lies behind force. Has he ever given it a name? So far as science is concerned, it is paying her proper respect to say she demands an intelligence in order to account for the wonderful things with which she has to deal. Laycock, treating upon the questions of mind and brain, says: "The phenomena of life present a vast series of adjustments and modifications to fill certain purposes and bring about ends."--_Mind and Brain, vol. 1, p. 222 to 224._ Systematic action in the use of means to accomplish certain ends or purposes we regard as the evidence of intelligence. By what other means do we distinguish between the rational and the insane? Winchel says, in his "Religion and Science," p. 102, "Without God we can not account for the correlation presented by the world of structural part to structural part, of structural part to intelligible end, of structural part to persistent plans or archetypes, of correlations which show that they were anticipated." Beal, on Protoplasm, p. 104 to 107, says, "Living matter overcomes gravitation and resists and suspends chemical affinity." He adds, "It is in direct opposition to chemical affinities that organized beings exist." What power is that which lies behind chemical affinities, and controls them with direct reference to organic being? Will some bold unbeliever answer? Carpenter says, "The most universal and fundamental attribute of life is the mode of vital activity manifesting itself in the development of the germ into the complete organism and type OF ITS PARENT, and the after maintenance of the organism in its integrity at the expense of materials derived from external sources. The life in the germ is the controlling agency, superintending the building, charged with the working out the design of the architect." Who is the architect? Or, if you prefer it, what is the architect? Whoever he or whatever it may be, the design and decrees of nature are with that official. All the changes that can be made in environments or food will not change the organism from the type of its parent. Then the structure of the male and the female with reference to future living organisms, or procreation, is in very poor harmony with the idea that the architect is "blind force." The same milk from one and the same animal, with the same heat and air, will build up bodies of different types, one as well as another, making human flesh in the human body, and dog's flesh in the dog's body, and sheep's flesh in the sheep's body. If the living germinal organism has its paternity in a dog, it will remain a dog in spite of food and environments. Carpenter says, "The vital force," in the germ, "is not the entire force or means of growth; heat is a constructive stimulus, but amounts to nothing where there is no life. Food is material for the building, but like heat, it is of no consequence in the absence of life." The constructing force in the germ manifests itself, in the plant, in the conversion of the insoluble starch of the seed into sugar, and in an additional change of a part of that sugar so as to set at liberty a large amount of carbon, which, uniting with the oxygen of the air, forms carbonic acid, and this process is attended with a liberation of heat which supplies the germ with stimulus. "It is different with the advanced plant. The organic compounds required to extend the fabric, are formed by the plant, instead of being supplied from without. The tissues of the green surface of the stem and leaves have the peculiar power, when acted on by light, of generating, at the expense of carbonic acid, water and ammonia, with various ternary and quarternary organic compounds, such as chlorophyll, starch, oil and albumen. A part goes to build new tissues, and a part is stored up in the cavities of tissues for food for parts to be developed in the future." Mr. Carpenter says, "Of the source of this peculiar power we have no right to speak confidently." Is it a blind force that anticipates growth in the plant, and lays away food, in the tissues, for future use? Why should it be different with the young plant? Sixteen simple substances are known to exist in vegetable organisms, and many of them are more strongly inclined to unite with substances which have no existence in vegetable cells; so they separate, in violation of chemical laws, and unite in vegetable cells in utter disregard of the affinities which are known to be their strongest. How do unbelievers manage such objections to the hypothesis that chemical laws explain everything in vegetable life? How is all this accounted for? We, Christians, answer, "The course of nature is the art of God." This answer is equivalent to the thought that vegetable life is the result of the union existing between God and the vegetable kingdom. The force that lies behind all chemical affinities and controls them, together with the wisdom displayed in that kingdom, belongs to God. SPECIES, OR UNITS OF NATURE. Are millions of years adequate as a cause, when associated with all the forces known in nature, to produce new species and extirpate old ones? The teachings of Darwin require an answer in the affirmative. The survival of the fittest is one of Darwin's emphasized laws of natural selection. He says: "In all cases the new and improved forms of life tend to supplant the old and unimproved forms. New varieties continually take the place of and supplant the parent form. New and improved varieties will inevitably supplant and exterminate the older."--_Origin of Species, pp. 264, 266, 413._ Do the facts sustain this assumption? The little animals whose remains compose the great chalk-beds are alive and working. Inarticulate or molluscan life is seen in a sub-fossil condition in the Post Pliocene clays of Canada. They are just as they were in the beginning of their history. Species seem to be immutably fixed. The demand for millions of years, in order to get old species out and new ones in, breaks down with the mollusk of the Pliocene in the clays of Canada. The Pliocene species are the more recent; such is, in fact, the meaning of the term in geology. The mollusk of Canada Pliocene clay has undergone no change since its first appearance upon our globe. In order to account for ancient life, that passed away, as far back as the carboniferous age, it is claimed that millions of years passed before that age began. But here are the very first species of mollusca in the more recent clays unchanged, and here are the same little animals that floored so much territory in the bygone with chalk. How does this look by the side of the last quotation from Darwin? Crabs or lobsters, cuttle-fish, jelly-fish, star-fish, oysters, snails, and worms lived contemporary with the first vertebrates. I have recently read an article in which it is said by an advocate of the Darwinian hypothesis, that man in his original condition was a cannibal, feasting, ordinarily, upon snails and worms. Now, it is claimed that millions of years have passed, and that millions of years inevitably destroy old species and introduce new ones; and yet here are the same old pesky snails and worms. If millions of years have passed the system is false. And if millions of years have not passed the system is false; so it is certainly false. Hybrids are wonderfully in the way of the hypothesis. They can not be saved. All artificial varieties return to their simple form. Mr. Huxley recognizes this as an objection that can not be surmounted. He says, "While it remains Darwin's doctrine, must be content to remain a mere hypothesis;" that is, a mere guess. In the latest productions of Agassiz we have this statement: "As a palæontologist I have from the beginning stood aloof from this new theory of transmutation, now so widely admitted; its doctrines, in fact, contradict what the animal forms buried in the rocky strata of our earth tell us of their own introduction and succession upon the surface of the globe." The first vertebrates are sharks, ganoids and garpikes, which are the highest in structure of all known fishes. Darwin's hypothesis demands this order _reversed_. When you ask an evolutionist for the links connecting new and old species, as he is pleased to denominate them, you receive the satisfactory (?) answer, "They are lost." A painter presented a man with a red canvass, claiming that it represented the children of Israel crossing the Red sea. The question was asked, "Where are the Israelites?" The painter answered, "They have crossed over." "But," said the man, "where are the Egyptians?" "O, my dear sir," said the artist, "they are under the sea." This is a very fine illustration of facts, if Darwinism may boast of facts, for the connecting links between species are "under the sea" of oblivion, never to be found, and the old species "have passed over." Mr. Darwin's apology is in these words: "Every one will admit that the geological record is imperfect; but very few can believe that it is so very imperfect as my theory demands." This is a grand concession. The "wild speculation" has no support from geology. The blanket of oblivion, which Mr. Darwin and his friends spread over the difficulty, is "millions of years." In that length of time the missing species, or links, would, of course, all pass out of sight. Is this true? No. In the geological record millions of specimens are fossilized and laid away in nature's great cabinet. Why not find a few of the missing links there? Just one. "One fact, gentlemen, if you please." Science is certain knowledge. Is there certain knowledge of missing links? Gentlemen, just bridge one gulf for us; the gulf lying between any _two species_ will do. We get impatient, standing and gazing. Look! Can you see across? Mr. Darwin says, "Professor Haeckel, in his general Morphology and other works, has brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny or the lines of descent of all organic beings."--_Origin of Species, p. 381._ This author, Mr. Haeckel, has "lines of descent" which involves the idea of a plurality of beginnings in the history of organic being; that is, Mr. Haeckel claims a vertebrate series with a vertebrate lying at the base of the series, and an articulate series with an articulate lying at its base. So there must be A SPECIAL CREATION AT LAST. Hear him: "There appears, indeed, to be a limit given to the adaptability of every organism by the type of its tribe or phylum. Thus, for example, no vertebrate animal can acquire the ventral nerve chord of articulate animals instead of the characteristic spinal marrow of the vertebrate animals."--_History of Creation, vol. 1, p. 250._ So the vertebrate must forever remain a vertebrate, and the articulate forever an articulate. Were they both evolved from the same unit? We are anxious to know, how from a pulpy mass of flesh, from a moneron, a creature of one substance, _vertebrates_ were evolved. We would like to know, also, how a creature of more than one substance could be evolved from a creature of one substance without more being gotten out of the thing than there was in it. Here spontaneous generation passes into a wreck. Do you see? The pulpy mass of flesh, or moneron, from which so much has been "evolved" was the result of "the sun's rays falling upon the sea slime," and was and is a creature of one substance, homogeneous. "Natural selection" could not operate in the vertebrate type before it existed. It was "limited to the type or phylum." That is to say, natural selection could evolve new species without limitation from each type, but could never evolve a vertebrate from an articulate, nor an articulate from a vertebrate. Then, how are the two series from the same unit; or, if they are connected with two different units, how are those units the effect of the same unintelligent cause? How are we going to cross this chasm lying between the sun's rays and the sea slime upon the one hand, and the articulate and the vertebrate upon the other? Darwin says, "Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity." Well, how is it with the past? We are told that millions of years are the demand for the changes already brought about. Millions of years would certainly be enough to constitute a "distant futurity." How is it now? Is there not one species having its likeness represented by a species in the distant past? Yes; the genus lingula, the species appearing in all the ages, was "connected by an unbroken series of generations from the lowest Silurian stratum to the present day."--_Origin of Species, pp. 293, 294, 428._ Darwin's "theory" claims that the first forms of all life still exist, and are known and named. The ape, if it could talk like a man, would boast of a history reaching all the way back to time prior to the existence of the greater number of the mammals. To get rid of the difficulty of first forms still existing, Mr. Darwin cuts off his unit from the law of "the survival of the fittest," or "the inevitable destruction of the parent form." He says: "A very simple form, fitted for very simple conditions of life, might remain for indefinite ages unaltered, or unimproved; for what would it profit an infusorial animalcule, or an intestinal worm, to become highly organized?"--_Animals and Plants, vol. 1, p. 19._ "Under very simple conditions of life a higher organism would be of no service."--_Origin of Species, p. 100._ How are we to reconcile the conflicting ideas in this speculation? At one time we are taught that all forms of life were, originally, very simple forms, existing under very simple conditions. At another time we are taught that "new and improved forms _inevitably_ supplant and destroy parent forms." At another we are taught, at great length, the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. At another we are taught that all things have worked, and do work, without designs upon the part of a present intelligence. At another we are taught that very simple forms of life, under the very simple conditions of life, have continued to the present day, because of the fact that it would be of NO SERVICE for them to become highly organized. No service to whom? To what end? Out of thine own mouth will I condemn thee. What! Is there an end in view that has governed in the great question of evolution of species, and the survival of the fittest? Darwin seems to think so. The wonderful "machine" that Strauss talked about in connection with the "smashing" and "crashing" that destroys parent forms did not smash the simplest forms of life. Why? The answer is, "It would be of no service for them to become highly organized." Then all the smashing and crashing known in the doctrine of "the survival of the fittest" and in "the destruction of the parent form" was under the supervision of some controlling power, having an end to accomplish. * * * * * If we see a member of the church of Christ living in obedience to the "law of Christ," we say he is a Christian, and speak of him as such; on the other hand, if we know he is in works denying Christ, being disobedient, we tacitly assume that he is not a Christian, yet a _mawkish charity_ keeps us, in too many instances, from speaking out in this matter, and also keeps us from earnestly trying to distinguish the true Christian; and this is one of the great sins of the church in our times, for thus the wicked are not put to shame, and others are caused to hesitate in their graces by the conduct of those whom, in mawk charity, are called Christians. * * * * * "Mouth-glue is made of pure glue, as parchment glue, or gelatine and coarse brown sugar. Take pure glue and add one-quarter or one-third of its weight of brown sugar. Put both into a sufficient quantity of water to boil and reduce the mass to a liquid, then cast into thin cakes on a flat surface _very slightly_ oiled, and, as it cools, cut up into pieces of a convenient size. When you wish to use it moisten one end in the mouth, and rub it on any substance you wish to join; a piece kept in the work-box is very convenient."--_Chambers._ * * * * * The Christian's faith was not intended to sit him down in ease, but to stimulate him to the discharge of his duties. So the work of faith is a noble work, a life of labor. MISCELLANEOUS. The oft-repeated story that man had his beginning in a low state of barbarous cannibalism is a groundless assumption. * * * * * What is the difference between getting more out of a thing than there is in it and creating something out of nothing? * * * * * "If the religious foundations and sanctions of morality are to be given up, what is to be substituted for them?"--_Lord Selborne._ * * * * * The Orang and Pongo monkeys, which are classed with those which make the nearest approach to man, have three vertebra fewer than man. * * * * * "Live while we may;" "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," are natural corollaries from the teachings of modern as well as ancient infidels. * * * * * Finding human skeletons with the skeletons of extinct animals necessitates the bringing of those animals forward, for specimens have been found in modern times with the flesh upon their bones and food in their stomachs. * * * * * If all organized animal life was evolved from the moneron, a creature of one substance, homogeneous, how were creatures of more than one substance evolved without more being _evolved_ than was _involved_? Let some of our scientific "wise-acres" solve this problem. * * * * * Paul says, "Things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." Every negative has its affirmative. The affirmative of the above is this, "Things which are seen were made of unseen things." The Bible does not teach that anything was made of nothing. * * * * * The Chimpanzee has thirteen pair of movable thoracic ribs. Man has two. If man lived up in the bushes, like the Chimpanzee and other apes, he would need more movable ribs so that he might not be ruined by broken ribs every time he might happen to fall. Is there no evidence of design here? * * * * * All unbelievers who advocate the idea of spontaneous generation try to get more out of matter than there was in it, viz: life, sensation, intelligence and moral nature. Can you get more out of a thing than there is in it? Is there life without antecedent life, etc.? Unbeliever, are you mocking the Bible because somebody said the Lord created something of nothing, and at the same time advocating spontaneous generation, and thereby professing to get more _evolved_ than was _involved_? * * * * * The idea that stone implements are an index to man in the beginning of his existence is an unwarranted conceit; they may point to a degeneracy. The lost arts are indicative of that which might have been repeated many times. Stone implements might have been used, as we know they have been, in times of great civilization. They are an uncertain index of civilization among the tribes who used them, and no index of the civilization of other tribes who lived at the same time in other parts of the earth. * * * * * Professor Huxley says, "I understand and I respect the meaning of the word soul, as used by Pagan and Christian philosophers, for what they believe to be the imperishable seat of human personality, bearing throughout eternity its burden of woe, or its capacity for adoration and love. I confess that my dull moral sense does not enable me to see anything base or selfish in the desire for future life among the spirits of the just made perfect; or even among a few poor fallible souls as one has known here below."--_Modern Symposium, vol. 1, p. 82._ 
12852	----	from images provided by the Million Book Project. _CREATION AND ITS RECORDS_. [Greek: Pistei nooumen kataertisthai tous aionas rhêmati theou eis to mi ek fainomenon to Blepomenon gegonenai.]--HEB. xi. 3. CREATION AND ITS RECORDS. A brief statement of Christian Belief with reference to Modern facts and Ancient Scripture. BY B.H. BADEN-POWELL, C.I.E., F.R.S.E. CONTENTS * * * * * _PART I._ CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER II. THE ELEMENT OF _FAITH_ IN CREATION CHAPTER III. THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION STATED CHAPTER IV. CREATIVE DESIGN IN INORGANIC MATTER CHAPTER V. THE CREATION OF LIVING MATTER CHAPTER VI. THE MARKS OF CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE IN THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANIC FORMS CHAPTER VII. THE DESCENT OF MAN CHAPTER VIII. FURTHER DIFFICULTIES REGARDING THE HISTORY OF MAN CHAPTER IX. CONCLUDING REMARKS _PART II._ CHAPTER X. THE GENESIS NARRATIVE--ITS IMPORTANCE CHAPTER XI. SCRIPTURE METHODS OF REVELATION CHAPTER XII. METHODS OF INTERPRETING THE NARRATIVE--ASSUMPTIONS OF MEANING TO CERTAIN TERMS CHAPTER XIII. THE GENESIS NARRATIVE CONSIDERED GENERALLY (i.) THE FIRST PART OF THE NARRATIVE (ii.) THE SECOND PART CHAPTER XIV. THE INTERPRETATION SUPPORTED BY OTHER SCRIPTURES CHAPTER XV. AND SUPPORTED BY THE CONTEXT CHAPTER XVI. THE DETAILS OF THE CREATION NARRATIVE _APPENDIX._ PROFESSOR DELITZSCH ON THE GARDEN OF EDEN CHAPTER I. _INTRODUCTORY_ Among the recollections that are lifelong, I have one as vivid as ever after more than twenty-five years have elapsed; it is of an evening lecture--the first of a series--given at South Kensington to working men. The lecturer was Professor Huxley; his subject, the Common Lobster. All the apparatus used was a good-sized specimen of the creature itself, a penknife, and a black-board and chalk. With such materials the professor gave us not only an exposition, matchless in its lucidity, of the structure of the crustacea, but such an insight into the purposes and methods of biological study as few could in those days have anticipated. For there were as yet no Science Primers, no International Series; and the "new biology" came upon us like the revelation of another world. I think that lecture gave me, what I might otherwise never have got (and what some people never get), a profound conviction of the reality and meaning of facts in nature. That impression I have brought to the attempt which this little book embodies. The facts of nature are God's revelation, of the same weight, though not the same in kind, as His written Word. At the same time, the further conviction is strong in my mind, not merely of the obvious truth that the Facts and the Writing (if both genuine) cannot really differ, but further, that there must be, after all, a true way of explaining the Writing, if only it is looked for carefully--a way that will surmount not only the difficulty of the subject, but also the impatience with which some will regard the attempt. Like so many other questions connected with religion, the question of reconciliation produces its double effect. People will ridicule attempts to solve it, but all the same they will return again and again to the task of its actual solution. That the latter part of the proposition is true, has recently received illustration in the fact that a review like the _Nineteenth Century_, which has so little space to spare, has found room in four successive numbers[1] for articles by Gladstone, Huxley, and H. Drummond, on the subject of "Creation and its Records." May I make one remark on this interesting science tournament? I can understand the scientific conclusions Professor Huxley has given us. I can also understand Mr. Gladstone, because he values the Writing as the professor values the Facts. But one thing I can _not_ understand. Why is Professor Huxley so angry or so contemptuous with people who value the Bible, whole and as it stands, and want to see its accuracy vindicated? Why are they fanatics, Sisyphus-labourers, and what not? That they are a very large group numerically, and hardly contemptible intellectually, is, I think, obvious; that a further large group (who would not identify themselves wholly with the out-and-out Bible defenders) feel a certain amount of sympathy, is proved by the interest taken in the controversy. Yet all "reconcilers" are ridiculed or denounced--at any rate are contemptuously dismissed. Can it be that the professor has for the moment overlooked one very simple fact? [Footnote 1: November, December, 1885; and January, February, 1886.] The great bulk of those interested in the question place their whole hope for their higher moral and spiritual life in this world and the next on one central Person--the LORD JESUS CHRIST. If He is wrong, then no one can be right--there is no such thing as right: that is what they feel. It will be conceded that it is hardly "fanatical" to feel this. But if so, surely it is not fanatical, but agreeable to the soberest reason, further to hold that this (to them sacred) PERSON did (and His apostles with Him) treat the Book of Genesis as a whole (and not merely parts of it) as a genuine revelation--or, to use the popular expression, as the _Word of_ GOD. That being so, can it be matter for surprise or contemptuous pity, that they should be anxious to vindicate the Book, to be satisfied that the MASTER was not wrong? That is the ultimate and very real issue involved in the question of Genesis. As long as people feel _that_, they must seek the reconciliation of the two opposing ideas. If the attempt is made in a foolish or bitter spirit, or without a candid appreciation of the facts, then the attempt will no doubt excite just displeasure. But need it always be so made? As to the first part of my proposition that attempts to reconcile religion and science are received with a certain dislike, it is due partly to the unwisdom with which they are sometimes made. Prof. H. Drummond speaks of the dislike as general.[1] If this is so, I, as a "reconciler," can only ask for indulgence, hoping that grace may be extended to me on the ground of having something to say on the subject that has not yet been considered. Nor, as regards the impatience of the public, can I admit that there is only fault on one side. In the first place, it will not be denied that some writers, delighted with the vast, and apparently boundless, vision that the discovery (in its modern form) of Evolution opened out to them, did incautiously proceed, while surveying their new kingdom, to assert for it bounds that stretch beyond its legitimate scope. [Footnote 1: In the Introduction to his well-known book, "Natural Law in the Spiritual World."] Religionists, on the other hand, imagining, however wrongly, that the erroneous extension was part of the true scientific doctrine, attacked the whole without discrimination. While such a misapprehension existed, it was inevitable that writers anxious alike for the dignity of science and the maintenance of religion, should step in to point out the error, and effect a reconciliation of claims which really were never in conflict. It is hardly the fault of "religionists" that it was at first supposed that one _could_ not hold the doctrine of evolution without denying a "special" creation and a designing Providence. It was on this very natural supposition that the first leading attack--attributed to the Bishop of Oxford--proceeded. And the writer fell into the equally natural mistake of taking advantage of the uncompleted and unproved state of the theory at the time, to attack the theory itself, instead of keeping to the safer ground, namely, that whatever might ultimately be the conclusion of evolutionists, it was quite certain that no theory of evolution that at all coincided with the known facts, offered any ground for argument against the existence of an Intelligent Lawgiver and First Cause of all; nor did it tend in the slightest to show that no such thing as creative design and providence existed in the course of nature. What the discovery of evolution really did, was to necessitate a revision of the hitherto popularly accepted and generally assumed and unquestioned notion of what _creation_ was. And it has long appeared to me, that while now the most thoroughgoing advocates of evolution generally admit that their justly cherished doctrine has nothing to say to the existence of a Creator, or to the possibility of design--which may be accepted or denied on other grounds--the writers on the side of Christianity have not sufficiently recognized the change which their views ought to undergo. As long as this is the case, there will continue to be a certain "conflict," not indeed between science and religion, but of the kind which has been vividly depicted by the late Dr. Draper. It can scarcely have escaped the notice of the most ordinary reader that, in the course of that interesting work, the author has very little to say about religion--at any rate about religion in any proper sense of the term. The conflict was between a Church which had a zeal for God without knowledge, and the progress of scientific thought; it was also a conflict between discovered facts, and facts which existed, not in the Bible, but in a particular interpretation, however generally received, of it. The present work is therefore addressed primarily to Christian believers who still remain perplexed as to what they ought to believe; and its aim is to prevent, if may be, an unreasonable alarm at, and a useless opposition to, the conclusions of modern science; while, at the same time, it tells them in simple language how far those conclusions really go, and how very groundless is the fear that they will ever subvert a true faith that, antecedent to the most wonderful chain of causation and methodical working which science can establish, there is still a Divine Designer--One who upholds all things "by the word of His power." The doctrine of evolution is still the _ignotum_ to a great many, and it is therefore, according to the time-honoured proverb, taken _pro magnifico_, as something terribly adverse to the faith. Nor can it be fairly denied, as I before remarked, that some of the students of the theory have become so enamoured of it, so carried away by the intoxication of the gigantic speculation it opens out to the imagination, that they have succumbed to the temptation to carry speculation beyond what the proof warrants, and thus lend some aid to the deplorable confusion, which would blend in one, what is legitimate inference and what is unproved hypothesis or mere supposition. It only remains to say that the basis of this little book is a short course of lectures in which I endeavoured to disarm the prejudices of an educated but not scientifically critical audience, by simply stating how far the theory of cosmical evolution had been really proved--proved, that is, to the extent of that reasonable certainty which satisfies the ordinary "prudent man" in affairs of weight and importance. I have tried to show that evolution, apart from fanciful and speculative extensions of it, allows, if it does not directly establish, that the operation of nature is not a chance or uncontrolled procedure, but one that suggests a distinct set of lines, and an orderly obedience to pre-conceived law, intelligently and beneficently (in the end) designed. There are obviously two main points which the Christian reader requires to have made clear. The first is that, the modern theory of evolution being admitted, the constitution of matter in the universe and the principles of development in organic life, which that theory establishes, not only do not exclude, but positively demand, the conception of a Divine artificer and director. The second point, which is perhaps of still greater weight with the believer, is that where revelation (which is his ultimate standard of appeal) has touched upon the subject of creation, its statements are not merely a literary fancy, an imaginary cosmogony, false in its facts though enshrining Divine truth, but are as a whole perfectly true. Whatever novelty there may be, is to be found in the treatment of the second subject. The first portion of the work is only a brief and popular statement of facts, quite unnecessary to the scientific reader but probably very necessary to the large body of Churchmen, who have not studied science, but are quite able to appreciate scientific fact and its bearings when placed before them in an untechnical form, and divested of needless details and subordinate questions. But it is around the supposed declarations of Scripture on the subject of creation that the real "conflict" has centred. Let us look the matter quite fairly in the face. We accept the conclusion that (let us say) the horse was developed and gradually perfected or advanced to his present form and characteristics, by a number of stages, and that it took a very long time to effect this result. Now, if there is anywhere a statement in Holy Writ that (_a_) a horse was _per saltum_ called into existence in a distinctive and complete form, by a special creative _fiat_, and that (_b_) this happened not gradually, but in a limited and specified moment of time, then I will at once admit that the record (assuming that its meaning is not to be mistaken) is not provably right, if it is not clearly wrong; and accept the consequences, momentous as they would be. If, in the same way, the Record asserts that man, or at least man the direct progenitor of the Semitic race,[1] was a distinct and special creation, his bodily frame having some not completely explained developmental connection with the animal creation, but his higher nature being imparted as a special and unique creative endowment out of the line of physical development altogether, then I shall accept the Record, because the proved facts of science have nothing to say against it, whatever Drs. Buchner, Vogt, Häckel, and others may assert to the contrary. [Footnote 1: With whose history, as leading up to the advent of the Saviour in the line of David, the Bible is mainly concerned.] In the first of my two instances, the popular idea has long been that the sacred record _does_ say something about a direct and separate creative act; and this idea has been the origin and ground of all the supposed conflict between science and "religion." As long as this idea continues, it can hardly be said that a book addressed to the clearing up of the subject is unnecessary or to be rejected _per se_. As to the method in which this subject will be dealt with, I shall maintain that the Scripture does _not_ say anything about the horse, or the whale, or the ox, or any other animal, being separately or directly created. And the view thus taken of the Record I have not met with before. This it is necessary to state, not because the fact would lend any value to the interpretation--rather the contrary; but because it justifies me in submitting what, if new, may be intrinsically important, to the judgment of the Church; and it also protects me from the offence of plagiarism, however unwitting. If others have thought out the same rendering of the Genesis history, so much the better for my case; but what is here set down occurred to me quite independently. A study of the real meaning of the Record, in the light of what may be fairly regarded as proved facts, cannot be without its use to the Christian. If it be true that a certain amount of information on the subject of creation is contained in revelation, it must have been so contained for a specific purpose--a purpose to be attained at some stage or other of the history of mankind. It is possible also that the study will bring to light a probable, or at any rate a possible, explanation of some of those apparent (if they are not real) "dead-locks" which occur in pursuing the course of life history on the earth. Such considerations will naturally have more weight with the Christian believer than with those who reject the faith. But at least the advantage of them remains with the believer, till the contrary is shown. The extreme evolutionist may cling to the belief that at some future time he will be able to account for the entrance of LIFE into the world's history, that he will be able to explain the connection of MIND with MATTER; or he may hope that the sterility of certain hybrid forms will one day be explained away, and so on. But till these things _are_ got over, the believer cannot be reproached as holding an unreasonable belief when his creed maintains that Life is a gift and prerogative of a great Author of Life; that Mind is the result of a spiritual environment which is a true, though physically intangible, part of nature; and that the absence of any proof that variation and development cross certain--perhaps not very clearly ascertained, but indubitably existing--lines, points to the designed fixing of certain types, and the restriction of developmental creation to running in certain lines of causation up to those types, and not otherwise. It can never be unreasonable to believe anything that is in exact accordance with facts as ascertained at any given moment of time--unless, indeed, the fact is indicated by other considerations as being one likely to disappear from the category of fact altogether.[1] Enough has thus, I hope, appeared, to make the appearance of this little work, at least excusable; what more may be necessary to establish its claim to be read must depend on what it contains. I have only to add that I can make no pretension to be a teacher of science. I trust that there is no material error of statement; if there is, I shall be the first to retract and correct it. I am quite confident that no correction that may be needed in detail will seriously affect the general argument. [Footnote 1: At present it is an ascertained fact that certain chemical substances are elements incapable of further resolution. But there are not wanting indications which would make it a matter of no surprise at all, if we were to learn to-morrow that the so-called element had been resolved. Such a fact is an example of what is stated in the text; and a belief based on the absolute and unchangeable stability of such a fact would not be unassailable. But none of the above stated instances of "dead-lock" in evolution are within "measurable distance" of being resolved.] CHAPTER II. _THE ELEMENT OF FAITH IN CREATION._ In the extract placed on the title-page, the author of the Epistle clearly places our conclusion that God "established the order of creation"--the lines, plans, developmental-sequences, aims, and objects, that the course of creation has hitherto pursued and is still ceaselessly pursuing,[1] in the category of _faith_. Of course, from one point of view--very probably that of the writer of the Epistle--this conclusion is argued by the consideration that the human mind forms no distinct conception of the formation of solid--or any other form of--matter _in vacuo_, where nothing previously existed. And what the mind does not find within its own power, but what yet _is true_ in the larger spiritual kingdom beyond itself, is apprehended by the spiritual faculty of _faith_. [Footnote 1: [Greek: Kataertisthai tous aionas]. This implies more than the mere originating or supplying of a number of material, organic, or inorganic (or even spiritual) forms and existences. Whatever may be the precise translation of [Greek: aion], it implies a chain of events, the cause and effect, the type and the plan, and its evolution all included.] But from another point of view, the immediate action of faith is not so evident. If, it might be said, the law of evolution, or the law of creation, or whatever is the true law, is, in all its bearings, a matter to be observed and discovered by human science, then it is not easy to see how there is any exercise of faith. We should be more properly said to _know_, by intellectual processes of observation, inference, and conclusion, that there was a Law Giver, an Artificer, and a First Cause, so unlimited in power and capacity by the conditions of the case, that we must call Him "Divine." And many will probably feel that their just reasoning on the subject leads them to knowledge--knowledge, i.e., as approximately certain as anything in this world can be. But the text, by the use of the term [Greek: aion], implies (as I suggested) more than mere production of objects; it implies a designed guidance and preconceived planning. If it were merely asserted that there is a first cause of material existence, and even that such a cause had enough known (or to be inferred) about it, to warrant our writing "First Cause" with capitals, then the proposition would pass on all hands without serious question. But directly we are brought face to face, not merely with the isolated idea of creation of tangible forms out of nothing (as the phrase is), but rather with the whole history and development of the world and its inhabitants, we see so many conflicting elements, such a power of natural forces and human passions warring against the progress of good, and seeming to end only too often in disaster, that it becomes a matter of _faith_ to perceive a Divine providence underlying and overruling all to its own ends. The fact is, that directly we make mention of the "aeons"--the world's age histories--we are met with that Protean problem that always seems to lurk at the bottom of every religious question: Why was _evil_ permitted? Mr. J.S. Mill, many readers will recollect, concluded that if there was a God, that God was not perfectly good, or else was not omnipotent. Now of course our limited faculties do not enable us to apprehend a really absolute and unlimited omnipotence. We _can_ only conceive of God as limited by the terms of His own Nature and Being. We say it is "impossible for God to lie," or for the Almighty to do wrong in any shape; in other words, we are, in this as in other matters where the finite and the Infinite are brought into contact, led up to two necessary conclusions which cannot be reconciled. We can reason out logically and to a full conclusion, that given a God, that God must be perfect, unlimited and unconditioned. We can also reason out, _provided we take purely human and finite premises_, another line of thought which forbids us to suppose that a Perfect God would have allowed evil, suffering, or pain; and this leads us exactly or nearly to Mr. Mill's conclusion. Whenever we are thus brought up to a dead-lock, as it were, there is the need of _faith_, which is the faculty whereby the finite is linked on to the Infinite. For this faith has two great features: one is represented by the capacity for assimilating fact which is spiritual or transcendental, and therefore not within the reach of finite intellect; the other is represented by the capacity for reliance on, and trust in, the God whose infinite perfections we cannot as finite creatures grasp or follow. In the difficult scheme of the world's governance, in the storms, earthquakes, pestilences, sufferings of all kinds--signs of failure, sickness, and decay, and death, signs of the victory of evil and the failure of good--we can only _believe_ in God, and that all will issue in righteous ends. And our belief proceeds, as just stated, on two lines: one being our spiritual capacity for knowing that GOD IS, and that we, His creatures, are the objects of His love; the other being the fact that we only see a very little end of the thread, or perhaps only a little of one thread out of a vast mass of complicated threads, in the great web of design and governance, and that therefore there is wide ground for confidence that the end will be success. We rely confidently on God. If it is asked, Why is it a part of faith to have a childlike confidence in an unseen God?--we reply, that the main origin of such confidence is to be found in the wonderful condescension of God exhibited in the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection. This is not the place to enter on a detailed examination of the essential importance of these great central facts of Christian belief in establishing faith in the unseen, and distinguishing its grasp from the blind clutches of credulity; but a single consideration will suffice at least to awaken a feeling of a wide _vista_ of possibility when we put it thus: Do we wonder at the spectacle of a righteous man, passing his life in suffering and poverty, seemingly stricken by the Divine hand?--But is not the case altered when we reflect _that the Hand that thus smites is a hand itself pierced_ with the Cross-nails of a terrible human suffering, undergone solely on man's account? It can be proved easily, by exhaustive examples, to be the case, that wherever the finite is brought into contact with the Infinite, that there must be a dead-lock, a leading up successively to two conclusions, one of which is almost, if not quite, contrary to the other. A very striking instance of this is the question of Predestination and Free-will. From the finite side, I am conscious that I am a free agent: I can will to rise up and to lie down. It is true that my will may be influenced, strongly or feebly, by various means--by the effect of habit, by the inherited tendency of my constitution, by some present motive of temptation, and so forth: but the _will_ is there--the motive-influence or inclining-power is not the will, but that which affects or works on will. A _motive_ pulls me this way, another pulls me that; but in the end, my _will_ follows one or the other. I can, then, do as I please. On the other hand, Infinite Knowledge must know, and have known from all eternity, what I shall do now, and at every moment of my future being: and for Omnipotence to know from all eternity what will be, is, in our human sense, practically undistinguishable from the thought that the Power has predestined the same; and man cannot of course alter that. Here, then, by separate lines of thought, we are brought to two opposite and irreconcilable conclusions. It is so always. We cannot ourselves imagine how a fixed set of laws and rules can be followed, and yet the best interests of each and every one of God's creatures be served as truly as if God directly wielded the machinery of nature only for the special benefit of the individual. The thing is unthinkable to us: yet directly we reason on the necessarily _unlimited_ capability of a Divine Providence, we are led to the conclusion that it must be possible. Here then is the province of _Faith_.[1] [Footnote 1: The Scripture clearly recognizes the two opposing lines. In one place we read, "Thou hast given them a law which _shall not be broken_;" in another, "All things work together for good to them that love God."] It is by Faith, then--combined with only a limited degree of knowledge, founded on observation and reasoning--that we understand that "the aeons were constituted by the Word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear" (the phenomenal has its origin in the non-phenomenal). While allowing, then, the element of Faith in our recognition of a Creator and Moral Governor of the world, our care is in this, as in all exercises of faith, that our faith be reasonable. We are not called on to believe so as to be "put to confusion," intellectually, as Tait and Balfour have it. CHAPTER III. _THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION STATED_. It will strike some readers with a sense of hopelessness, this demand for a reason in our faith. A special and very extensive knowledge is required, it seems, to test the very positive assertion that some have chosen to make regarding the "explosion" of the Christian faith in the matter of Creation. We are told in effect that every thing goes by itself--that given some first cause, about which we know, and can know, nothing, directly primordial matter appears on the scene, and the laws of sequence and action which observed experience has formulated and is progressively formulating are given, then nothing else is required; no governance, no control, and no special design. So that in principle a Creator and Providence are baseless fancies; and this is further borne out by the fact, that when the Christian faith ventures on details as to the mode of Creation it is certainly and demonstrably wrong. If these propositions are to be controverted, it must be in the light of a knowledge which a large body of candid and earnest believers do not possess. Fortunately, however, the labours of many competent to judge have placed within the reach of the unscientific but careful student, the means of knowing what the conclusions of Science really are, as far as they affect the questions we have to consider. At least, any inquirer can, with a little care and patient study, put himself in a position to know where the difficulty or difficulties lie, and what means there are of getting over them. His want of technical knowledge will not be in his way, so far as his just appreciation of the position is concerned. Without pretending to take up ground which has already been occupied by capable writers whose books can easily be consulted, I may usefully recapitulate in a simple form, and grouped in a suitable order, some of the points best worth noting. The theory of cosmical evolution is not, in its general idea, a new thing. The sort of evolution, however, that was obscurely shadowed forth by the early sages of India (much as it is the fashion now to allude to it) really stands in no practical relation to the modern and natural theory which is associated with the name of CHARLES DARWIN, and which has been further taken up by Mr. HERBERT SPENCER and others as the foundation for a complete scheme of cosmic philosophy. The theory is now, in its main features, admitted by every one. But there are a few who would push it beyond its real ascertained limits, and would substitute fancies for facts; they are not content to leave the _lacunae_, which undoubtedly do exist, but fill them up by hypothesis,[1] passing by easy steps of forgetfulness from the "it was possibly," "it was likely to have been," to the "it must have been," and "it was"! To all such extensions we must of course object; there are gaps in the scheme which can be filled in with really great probability, and in such cases there will be no harm done in admitting the probability, while still acknowledging it as such. An overcautious lawyer-like captiousness of spirit in such matters will help no cause and serve no good purpose. Nor is it at all difficult in practice to draw the line and say what is fairly admissible conjecture and what is not. There are other gaps, however, that at present, no real analogy, no fair inferential process, can bridge over; and to all speculations on such subjects, if advanced as more than bare and undisguised guesses, objection must be taken. If this one line had been fairly and firmly adhered to from the first, it can hardly be doubted that much of the acrimony of controversy would have been avoided. It is just as essential at the present moment to insist on the point as ever. But to proceed. Stated in the extreme form, the theory is, that given matter as a beginning, that matter is thenceforth capable, by the aid of fixed and self-working laws, to produce and result in, all the phenomena of life--whether plant, animal, or human--which we see around us. Matter developes from simple to complex forms, growing by its own properties, in directions determined by the circumstances and surroundings of its existence. [Footnote 1: It is enough to instance the theories of Dr. Buchner and, in earlier days, of Oken. The Häckel and Virchow incident in this connection, and the noble protest of the latter against positive teaching of unproved speculation, are in the recollection of all.] If I may put this a little less in the abstract, but more at length, I should describe it thus[1]:-- Astronomers, while watching the course of the stars, have frequently observed in the heavens what they call _nebulae_. With the best telescopes these look like patches of gold-dust or luminous haze in the sky. Some nebulae, it is supposed, really consist of whole systems of stars and suns, but at so enormous a distance that with our best glasses we cannot make more out of them than groups of apparent "star-dust" But other nebulae do not appear to be at this extreme distance, and therefore cannot consist of large bodies. And when their light is examined with the aid of a spectroscope, it gives indications that such nebulae are only masses of vapour, incandescent, or giving out light on account of their being in a burning or highly heated condition. [Footnote 1: The biological evolutionist will, I am aware, object to this, saying that the origin of the cosmos and nebular theories are matters of speculation with which he is not concerned--they are no part of evolution proper. But I submit that the general philosophical evolution does include the whole. At any rate, the materialist view of nature does take in the whole, in such a way as the text indicates.] Now, it is supposed that, in the beginning of the world, there was, in space, such a nebula or mass of incandescent vapour, which, as it was destined to cool down and form a world, philosophers have called "cosmic gas." This cosmic gas, in the course of time, began to lose its heat, and consequently to liquefy and solidify, according to the different nature of its components; and thus a globe with a solid crust was formed, the surface of which was partly dry and partly occupied by water, and diversified by the abundant production of the various earths, gases, metals, and other substances with which we are familiar. These substances, in time, and by the slow action of their own laws and properties, combined or separated and produced further forms. But to come at once to the important part of the theory, we must at once direct our attention to four substances; these would certainly, it is said (and that no doubt is quite true) be present; they are oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. The first three would be, when the earth assumed anything like its present conditions of temperature and air-pressure, invisible gases, as they are at present; the fourth is a substance which forms the basis of charcoal, and which we see in a nearly pure form crystallized in the diamond. Now, if these substances are brought together under certain appropriate conditions, the oxygen and hydrogen can combine to form _water_; the carbon and the oxygen will form _carbonic acid_; while nitrogen will join with hydrogen to form that pungent smelling substance with which we are familiar as _ammonia_. Again, let us suppose that three compound substances--water, carbonic acid, and ammonia--are present together with appropriate conditions; it is said that they will combine to form a gummy transparent matter, which is called _protoplasm_. This protoplasm may be found in small shapeless lumps, or it may be found enclosed in cells, and in various beautifully shaped coverings, and it is also found in the blood, and in all growing parts or organs of all animals and plants of every kind whatsoever. Protoplasm, then, is the physical basis of life. Simple, uniform, shapeless protoplasm, combined out of the substances just named, first came into existence; and as, however simple or shapeless, it always exhibits the property of life, it can henceforth grow and develop from simpler to ever increasingly complex forms, without any help but that of surrounding circumstances--the secondary causes which we see in operation around us. If some readers should say they have never seen _protoplasm_, I may remind them where every one has, at some time or another, met with it. If you cut a stick of new wood from a hedge, and peel off the young bark, you know that the bark comes off easily and entire, leaving a clean white wand of wood in your hand; but the wand feels sticky all over. This sticky stuff is nothing more than transparent growing protoplasm, which lies close under the inner bark. At first, the materialist holds, protoplasm appeared in very simple forms, just such as can still be found within the sea, and in ponds. But the lower organized forms of life are extremely unstable, and a different _environment_ will always tend to evoke continuous small changes, so that there may be advance in forms of all kinds. For if by chance[1] some creature exhibits a variation which is favourable to it in the circumstances in which it is placed, that creature will be fitter than the others which have not that variation. And so the former will survive, and as they multiply, their descendants will inherit the peculiarity. Thus, in the course of countless generations, change will succeed change, till creatures of quite a complex structure and specialized form have arisen. As the circumstances of life are always infinitely various, the developments take place in many different directions; some fit the creature for life in deep seas, some for flying in the air, some for living in holes and crevices, some for catching prey by swift pursuit, others for catching it by artful contrivance, and so forth. Many changes will also arise from protective necessity: if an insect happens to be like a dead leaf, it will escape the notice of birds which would snap up a conspicuously coloured one; and so the dull-coloured will survive and perpetuate his kind, while the others are destroyed. On the other hand, beauty in colour and form may have its use. This is chiefly exhibited in the preference which the females of a species show for the adorned and showy males. [Footnote 1: Not really of course "by chance," but simply owing to such circumstances as cannot be accounted for by any direct antecedents.] Supposing an organism developed so far as to be a bird, but only with dull or ugly feathers. By accident one male bird, say, gets a few bright-coloured feathers on his head. Here his appearance will attract birds of the other sex; and then by the law of heredity, his offspring are sure to repeat the coloured feathers, till at last a regularly bright-crested species-arises. In this way _natural variability_, acted on by the necessities of _environment_ (which cause the _survival of the fittest_ specimens) and the principle of _heredity_, viz., that the offspring repeat the features of the parents, aided by the principle of _sexual selection_, have been the origin and cause of all the species we see in the world. Thus we have an unbroken series--certain substances condensing out of cosmic vapour, some of them combining to form the variety of rocks, soils, metals, &c., and others giving rise to protoplasm which grows' and develops into a thousand shapes and hues, of insect, fish, reptile, bird, and beast. And then it is, that charmed with the completeness and symmetry of such a theory, and overlooking the difficulties that crop up here and here--demanding some Power from without to bridge them over--certain extreme theorists have rushed to the conclusion that in all this there is no need of any external Creator or Providence--nothing but what we call secondary causes, ordinary causes which we see at work around us all day and every day. How inconceivable, they add, is the truth of the Book of Genesis, which asserts the successive creation of fully-formed animals by sudden acts of command; and all accomplished in a few days at the beginning of the world's human history! This I believe to be a fair outline, though of course a very rough and general one, of the Theory of Evolution as regards the forms of matter and living organisms. Now it will at once strike the candid reader, that even granted the whole of the scheme as stated, there is _nothing_ in it that has any answer to the objection,--But may I not believe that a wise Creator conceived and established the whole plan--first creating MATTER and FORCE, then superadding LIFE at a certain stage, and then drawing out the type and design according to which everything was to grow and develop? Is not such a production and such a design the true essence of Creation? Can all these things happen _without_ such aid? Let us then look more closely at some of the steps in the evolution just described. And let us stop at the very beginning--the first term of the series. We may agree (in the absence of anything leading to a contrary conclusion) that matter may first have appeared as a cosmic gas, or incandescent vapour in space. It is probable, if not certain, that our earth is a mass that has only cooled down on the surface, the centre being still hot and to some extent, at any rate, molten; and in the sun we have the case of an enormous globe surrounded with a _photosphere_, as it is called--a blaze of incandescent substances, which our spectroscopes tell us are substances such as we have on earth now in cooled or condensed condition--iron, oxygen, hydrogen, and other such forms of matter. First of all, how did any _substance_, however vapoury and tenuous, come to exist, when previously there was nothing? If we admit, that there was a time when even cosmic gas did not exist, then there must have been _an Agent_, whose _fiat_ caused the change. And as that Agent does not obviously belong to the material order, it must belong to the spiritual or non-material; for the two orders together exhaust the possibilities of existence. If, however, it is urged that "primal matter"--cosmic vapour--containing the "potentiality" of all existence, is eternal and alway existed of itself, then we are brought face to face with innumerable difficulties. In the first place, the existence of matter is not the only difficulty to be got over; not the only dead-lock along the line. We pass it over and go on for a time, and then we come to another--the introduction of LIFE. I will not pause to consider that here; we shall see presently that it is impossible to regard life as merely a quality or property of matter. When we have passed that, we have a third stoppage, the introduction of _Reason_ or _Intelligence_; and then a fourth, the introduction of the _Spiritual faculties_, which cannot be placed on the same footing as mere reason. So that to get over the first point, and dispense with a Cause or a Creator of matter, is of no avail: it is incredible that there should be no Creator of matter, but that there should be a Creator of life--an Imparter of reason, an Endower of soul. But let us revert to the first stage and look at the nature of MATTER. CHAPTER IV. _CREATIVE DESIGN IN INORGANIC MATTER._ I take as self-evident the enormous difficulty of self-caused, self-existent matter. And when we see that matter _acting_, not irregularly or by caprice, but _by law_ (as every class of philosopher will admit), then it is still further difficult to realize that matter not only existed as a dead, simple, inactive thing, but existed with a folded-up history inside it, a long sequence of development--not the same for all particles, but various for each group: so that one set proceeded to form the _object_, and another the _environment_ of the object; or rather that a multitude of sets formed a vast variety of objects, and another multitude of sets formed a vast variety of environments. When we see matter acting by law, then if there is no Creator, we have the to us unthinkable proposition of law without a lawgiver! On the other hand, if we shut out some of the difficulties, keep our eye on one part of the case only--and that is what the human mind is very apt to do--we can easily come round to think that, after all, _elementary_ matter--cosmic gas--is a very _simple_ thing; and looks really as if no great Power, or Intellect, were required to account for its origin. After all, some will say, if we grant your great, wise, beneficent, designing Creator, the finite human mind has as little idea of a self-existing God, as it has of self-existing matter and self-existing law. _You_ postulate one great mystery, _we_ postulate two smaller ones; and the two together really present less "unthinkableness" to the mind than your one. That is so far plausible, but it is no more. To believe in a GOD is to believe in One Existence, who necessarily (by the terms of our conception) has the power both of creating matter, designing the forms it shall take, and originating the tendencies, forces, activities--or whatever else we please to call them--which drive matter in the right direction to get the desired result. To believe not only that matter caused itself, but that the different forces and tendencies, and the aims and ends of development, were self-caused, is surely a much more difficult task. It is the existence of such a _variety_, it is the existence of a uniform tendency to produce certain though multitudinous results, that makes the insuperable difficulty of supposing _matter always developing_ (towards certain ends) to be self-caused. The advocates of "eternal matter" really overcome the difficulty, by shutting their eyes to everything beyond a part of the problem--the existence of simple matter apart from any laws, properties, or affinities. But the simplest drop of water, in itself, and apart from its mechanical relations to other matter, is really a very complex and a very wonderful thing; not at all likely to be "self-caused." Water is made up, we know, of oxygen and hydrogen--two elementary colourless, formless gases. Now we can easily divide the one drop into two, and, without any great difficulty, the two into four, and (perhaps with the aid of a magnifying glass) the four into eight, and so on, _as long as_ the minute particle _still retains the nature of water_. In short, we speak of the smallest subdivision of which matter is capable without losing its own nature, as the _molecule_. All matter may be regarded as consisting of a vast mass of these small molecules. Now, we know that all known matter is capable of existing either in a solid, liquid, or gaseous form, its nature not being changed. Water is very easily so dealt with. Some substances, it is true, require very great pressure or very great cold, or both, to alter their form; but even carbonic acid, oxygen, and hydrogen, which under ordinary conditions are gases, can with proper appliances be made both liquid and solid. Pure alcohol, has, I believe, never been made solid, but that is only because it is so difficult to get a sufficient degree of cold: there is no doubt that it could be done. It might be supposed that the molecules of which dead matter (whether solid, liquid, or vapourous) is composed, were equally motionless and structureless. But it is not so: every molecule in its own kind is endowed with marvellous properties. In the first place, every molecule has a double capability of motion. In the solid form the molecules are so packed together that, of course, the motion is excessively restricted; in the liquid it is a little easier; in the gaseous state the molecules are in a comparatively "open order." In most substances that are solid under ordinary conditions, by applying heat continuously we first liquefy and ultimately vapourize them. In those substances which under ordinary conditions are _gas_ (like carbonic acid, for instance), it is by applying cold, with perhaps great pressure as well, that we induce them to become liquid and solid; in fact, the process is just reversed. As we can most easily follow the process of heating, I will describe that. First, the solid (in most cases) gets larger and larger as it progresses to liquefaction, and when it gets to vapour, it suddenly expands enormously. Take a rod of soft iron, and reduce it to freezing temperature: let us suppose that in that condition it measures just a thousand inches long. Then raise the temperature to 212 degrees (boiling point), and it will be found to measure 1,012 inches. Why is that? Obviously, because the molecules have got a little further apart. If you heat it till the iron gets liquid, the liquid would also occupy still more space than the original solid rod; and if we had temperature high enough to make the melted iron go off into vapour, it would occupy an enormously increased space. I cannot say what it would be for iron vapour; but if a given volume of water is converted into vapour, it will occupy about 1,700 times the space it did when liquid, though the weight would not be altered. It may here be worth while to mention that it is not invariably true that a substance gets contracted, and the molecules more and more pressed together, as it assumes a solid form. There is at least one exception. If we take 1,700 pints of steam, the water, as I said, on becoming cool enough to lose the vapourous form, will shrink into a measure holding a single pint; if we cooled lower still, it will get smaller and smaller in bulk (though of course not at all at the same rate) till it arrives at a point when it is just going to freeze; then suddenly (7 degrees above the freezing point) it again begins to expand. Ice occupies more space than cold water; its molecules get arranged in a particular manner by their crystallization. On the admission of an _intelligent_ Creator providing, by beneficent design, the laws of matter, it is easy to give a reason for this useful property. It prevents the inhabitants of northern climates being deprived of a supply of water. As it is, the solid water or ice expands, and, becoming lighter, forms at the top of the water, and the heavier warmer water remains below. But if ice always got denser and sank, the warmer liquid would be perpetually displaced and so come up to the surface, where it would freeze and sink in its turn. In a short time, then, all our water supplies would (whenever the temperature went down to freezing, which it constantly does in winter) be turned into solid ice. This would be a source of the gravest inconvenience to the population of a cold climate. If we deny a designing mind, the alternative is that this property of water is a mere chance. But to return to molecules. Molecules are endowed with an inherent faculty of motion; only under the conditions of what we call the solid, they are so compressed, that there is no room for any motion appreciable to the senses. Even if the solid is converted into vapour, the molecules are still much restrained in their movements by the pressure of the air. But of late years, great improvements (partly chemical, partly mechanical) have been made in producing perfect _vacua_; that is to say, in getting glass or other vessels to be so far empty of air, that the almost inconceivably small residue in the receptacle has no perceptible effect on the action of a small quantity of any substance already reduced to the form of gas or vapour introduced into it. Dr. W. Crookes has made many beautiful experiments on the behaviour of the molecules of attenuated matter in _vacua_. The small quantity of vapour introduced contains only a relatively small number of molecules, which thus freed from all sensible restraint within the limits of the glass vessel used, are free to move as they will; they are observed to rush about, to strike against the sides of the vessel, and under proper conditions to shine and become _radiant_, and to exhibit extraordinary phenomena when subjected to currents of electricity. So peculiar is the molecular action thus set up, that scientific men have been tempted to speak of a fourth condition of matter (besides the three ordinary ones, solid, liquid, and gaseous), which they call the ultra-gaseous or radiant state of matter. This marvel of molecular structure seems already to have removed us sufficiently far from the idea of a simple inert mass, which might be primordial and self-caused. But we have not yet done. Even imagining the extreme subdivision[1] of the particles in one of Dr. Crookes' vacuum globes, the particles are still water. But we know that water is a compound substance. The molecule has nine parts, of which eight are hydrogen and one oxygen--because that is the experimentally known proportion in which oxygen and hydrogen combine to form water. As we can (in the present state of our knowledge) divide no farther, we call these ultimate fragments of simple or elementary substance _atoms_. [Footnote 1: As to the possibility of _indefinite_ subdivision of matter, see Sir W. Thomsons's lecture, _Nature_, June, 1883, _et seq._] Every substance, however finely divided into molecules, if it is not a simple substance, must therefore have, inside the _molecular_ structure, a further _atomic_ structure. And in the case of unresolvable or "elementary" substance, the molecule and the atom are not necessarily the same. For though there is reason to believe that, the molecule of these does consist, in some cases, of only one atom--in which case the atom and the molecule are identical; in other cases, the molecule is known to consist of more than one atom of the same element; and the atoms are capable of being differently arranged, and when so arranged have different _properties_ or behaviour, though their nature is not changed. This property is spoken of by chemists as _allotropism_. No chemist on earth can detect the slightest difference in _constitution_ between a molecule of _ozone_ and one _oxygen_; but the two have widely different properties, or behave very differently. There is thus a great mystery about atoms and their possible differences under different arrangement, which is as yet unsolved. Those who wish to get an insight into the matter (which cannot be pursued farther here) will do well to read Josiah Cooke's "The New Chemistry," in the International Scientific Series. The mind is really lost in trying to realize the idea of a fragment of matter too small for the most powerful microscope, but existing in fact (because of faultless reasoning from absolutely conclusive experiments), and yet so constituted that it is _practically_ a different thing when placed in one position or order, from what it is when placed in another. Turning from this mystery, as yet so obscure, to what is more easily grasped, we shall hardly be surprised to learn, further, that every kind of, atom obeys its own laws, and that while atoms of one kind always have a _tendency to combine_ with atoms of other kinds, it is absolutely impossible to get them to combine together except on certain conditions. The difference between combination and mixture is well known. Shake sand and sugar in a bag for ever so long, but they will only _mix_, not _combine_ or form any new substance even with the aid of electric currents; but place oxygen and hydrogen gas under proper conditions, and the gases will disappear, and water (in weight exactly equal to the weight of the volume of gases) will appear in their place. It is only certain kinds of atoms that will combine at all with other kinds; and when they do so combine, they will only unite in absolutely fixed proportions, so that chemists have been able to assign to every kind of element its own combining proportion. The substances that will combine will do so in these proportions, or in proportions of any _even multiple_ of the number, and in no other. Thus fourteen parts of nitrogen will combine with sixteen of oxygen; and we have several substances in nature, called nitrous oxide, nitric oxide, nitric di-oxide, &c., which illustrate this, in which fourteen parts of nitrogen combine with sixteen oxygen or fourteen nitrogen with a multiple of sixteen oxygen, or a multiple of fourteen nitrogen combine with sixteen oxygen, and so on. See now where we have got to. When we had spoken of a tiny fragment of primal matter--a drop of water, for instance--it seemed as if there was no more to be said; but no, we found ourselves able to give a whole history of the molecules of which the substance consists; and when we had considered the molecule, we found a further beautiful and intricate order of _atoms_ inside the molecule, as it were. And there is no reason to suppose that science has yet revealed all that is possible to be known about atoms and molecules; so that if further wonders should be evoked, the argument will grow and grow in cumulative force. Let me sum up the conclusion to be drawn from these facts in a quotation from a discourse of Sir John F.W. Herschel. "When we see," says that eminent philosopher, "a great number of things precisely alike, we do not believe this similarity to have originated except from _a common principle independent of them_; and that we recognize this likeness, chiefly by the _identity of their deportment under similar circumstances_ strengthens rather than weakens the conclusion. "A line of spinning jennies, or a regiment of soldiers dressed exactly alike and going through precisely the same evolutions, gives us no idea of independent existence: we must see them act out of concert before we can believe them to have independent wills and properties not impressed on them from without. "And this conclusion, which would be strong even if there were only two individuals precisely alike in _all_ respects and _for ever_, acquires irresistible force when their number is multiplied beyond the power of imagination to conceive. "If we mistake not, then, the discoveries alluded to effectually destroy the ideas of an _eternal_ self-existent matter by giving to each of its atoms the essential characters at once of a _manufactured_ article and of a _subordinate agent_." In other words, continuing the metaphor of the trained army, we see millions upon millions of molecules all arranged in regiments, distinct and separate, and the regiments again made up of companies or individuals, each obeying his own orders in subordination to, and in harmony with, the whole: are we not justified in concluding that this army has not been only called into being by some cause external to itself; but further, that its constitution has been impressed upon it, and its equipments and organization directed, by an Infinite Intelligence? There is, then, no such thing to be found in Nature as a simple, structureless "primal matter" which exhibits nothing tending to make self-causation or aboriginal existence difficult to conceive. To look at matter in that light is not only to take into consideration a _part_ of the case; it is really to take what does not exist, a part that exists only in the imagination. The simplest form of matter we can deal with, exhibits within itself all the wondrous plan, law, and sequence of the molecular and atomic structure we have sketched out; and when we consider that, having taken matter so far, we have even then only introduced it to the verge of the universe, ushered it on to the threshold of a great "aeon," when and where it is to be acted on by "gravitation" and other forces, to act in relation to other matter, and to be endowed perhaps with LIFE, we shall feel that the self-existence--the uncaused existence of matter, and of the principles on which matter proceeds or acts, is in reality not a less mystery than the self-existence of a Designing and Intelligent Cause, but one so great as to be itself "unthinkable." CHAPTER V. _THE CREATION OF LIVING MATTER_. We now come to _Living_ Matter; directing attention, first, to that elementary form of life as exhibited in simple protoplasm and in the lower forms of organism, and then to the perfect forms of bird and beast. In each case, we shall find the same evidence of Design and Intelligence, the same proof of "contrivance" and purpose, which we cannot attribute to the mere action of secondary causes. The simplest form in which LIFE is manifested is in a viscid gelatinous substance without colour or form, called _Protoplasm_. Wherever there is life there is protoplasm. Protoplasm, as before remarked, lies just under the bark in trees, and is the material from which the growth of the wood and bark cells and fibres proceeds. Protoplasm, is also present in the muscles and in the blood, and wherever growth is going on. But protoplasm also exists by itself; or, more properly speaking, there exist living creatures, both plant and animal, which are so simple in structure, so low in organization, that they consist of nothing but a speck of protoplasm. Such a creature is the microscopic _amoeba_. Sometimes these little specks of protoplasm are surrounded with beautifully formed "silicious shells--a skeleton of radiating _spiculae_ or crystal-clear concentric spheres of exquisite symmetry and beauty.[1]" The simplest _amoeba_ however, has no definite form; but the little mass moves about, expands and contracts, throws out projections on one side and draws them in on the other. It exhibits irritability when touched. It may be seen surrounding a tiny particle of food, extracting nutriment from it and growing in size. Ultimately the little body separates or splits up into two, each part thenceforth taking a separate existence. [Footnote 1: Professor Allman.] Now it is claimed that such a little organism contains the potentiality of all life; that it grows and multiplies, and develops into higher and higher organisms, into all (in short) that we see in the plant and animal world around us. This, it is argued, is all done by natural causes, not by any direction or guidance or intervention of a Divine agency. Here we must stop to ask how this protoplasm, or simplest form of organic life, came to exist? How did it get its _life_--its property of taking nourishment, of growing and of giving birth to other creatures like itself? The denier of creation replies, that just in the same way as, by the laws of affinity, other inanimate substances came together to produce the earth--salts and other compounds we see in the world around us--so did certain elements combine to form protoplasm. This combination when perfected has the property of being alive, just as water has the property of assuming a solid form or has any other of the qualities which we speak of as its properties. Now it is perfectly true that, treated as a substance, you can take the gummy protoplasm, put it into a glass and subject it to analysis like any other substance. But simple as the substance appears, composition is really very complicated. Professor Allman tells us that so difficult and wonderful is its chemistry, that in fact really very little is known about it. The best evidence we have, I believe, makes it tolerably certain that protoplasm consists of a combination of ammonia, carbonic acid, and water, and that every molecule of it is made up of 76 atoms, of which 36 are carbon, 26 hydrogen, 4 nitrogen, and 10 oxygen.[1] But no chemist has ever been able either to account theoretically for such a composition, still less to produce it artificially. It is urged, however, that it may be only due to our clumsy apparatus and still very imperfect knowledge of chemistry, that we were unable artificially to make up protoplasm. [Footnote 1: Nicholson ("Zoology," p. 4) gives for Albumen, which is nearly identical with protoplasm--Carbon, 144; Hydrogen, 110; Nitrogen, 18; Oxygen, 42; Sulphur, 2. These figures nearly equal those in the text, being those figures multiplied each by 4 (approximately) and without the trace of sulphur.] And of course there is no answer to a supposition of this sort. Nevertheless there is no sort of reason to believe that protoplasm will ever be made; nor, if we could succeed in uniting the elements into a form resembling protoplasmic jelly, is there the least reason to suppose that such a composition would exhibit the irritability, or the powers of nutrition and reproduction, which are essentially the characteristics of _living_ protoplasm. It is not too much to say that, after the close of the controversy about spontaneous generation, it is now a universally admitted principle of science that life can only proceed from life--the old _omne vivum ex ovo_ in a modern form.[1] But here the same sort of argument that was brought forward regarding the possibility of matter and its laws being self-caused, comes in as regards life. [Footnote 1: _See_ "Critiques and Addresses," T.H. Huxley, F.R.S., p. 239. So much is this the case, that it is really superfluous, however interesting, to recall the experiments of Dr. Tyndall and others, which finally demonstrated that wherever primal animal forms, bacteria and other, "microbes," were produced in infusions of hay, turnip, &c., apparently boiled and sterilized and then hermetically sealed, there were really germs in the air enclosed in the vessel, or germs that in one form or another were not destroyed by the boiling or heating. Dr. Bastian's argument for spontaneous generation is thus completely overthrown. _(See_ Drummond, "Natural Law," pp. 62-63.)] The argument in the most direct form was made use of by Professor Huxley, but it is difficult to believe that so powerful a thinker could seriously hold to a view which will not bear examination, however neatly and brilliantly it may go off when first launched into the air. The argument is that life can only be regarded as a further property of certain forms of matter. Oxygen and hydrogen, when they combine, result in a new substance, quite unlike either of them in character, and possessing _new_ and different properties. The way in which the combination is effected is a mystery, yet we do not account for the new and peculiar properties of water (so different from those of the original gases) as arising from a principle of "aquosity," which we have to invoke from another world. The answer is that the argument is from analogy, and that there is not really the remotest analogy between the two cases. It is true that, as far as we know, electricity is necessary to force a combination of the requisite equivalents of oxygen and hydrogen into water. But though we do not know why this is, or what electricity is, we can repeat the process as often as we will. But mark the difference; the water once existing is obviously only a new form of matter, in the same category with the gases it came from: it neither increases in bulk, nor takes in fresh elements to grow, and give birth to new drops of water. But protoplasm has something quite different--for there may be dead protoplasm and living protoplasm, both identical to the eye and to every chemical test. In either condition, protoplasm, as such, has _properties_ of the same nature (though not of the same kind) as those of water, oxygen gas, or any other matter; it is colorless, heavy, sticky, elastic, and so forth; but besides all that (without the aid of electricity or any physical force we can apply) one has the power of producing more protoplasm--gathering for itself, by virtue of its inherent power, the materials for growth and reproduction. If directly water was called into existence it could take in nourishment, and divide and go on producing more water--and if some water could do this, while other water (which no available test could distinguish from it in any other respect) could not, then we _should_ be perfectly justified in giving a special name to this power, and calling it "aquosity" or "vitality" or anything else, it being out of all analogy to anything else which we call a "property" of matter. In the introduction of LIFE into the _aeon_ of organic developmental history, we have a clear and distinct period, as we had when _matter_ came into view, or when _the change_ was ushered in which set the cosmic gas cooling and liquefying, and turning to solid in various form. The fact is that every organic form, whether plant or animal, derived from the protoplasmic compounds of carbon-dixoide, ammonia and water, is, as Mr. Drummond puts it,[1] "made of materials which have once been inorganic. An organizing principle, not belonging to their kingdom, lays hold of them and elaborates them." [Footnote 1: "Natural Law," p. 233.] Thus by the introduction of LIFE we have a vastly enlarged horizon. Before, in the organic world, we had only the "principle" of solidifying or crystallizing, liquefying, and turning to gas or vapour, ever stopping when the state was attained. Or if a combination was in progress, still the result was only a rearrangement of the same bulk of materials (however new the form) in solid, liquid, or gas, but no increase, no nutrition, no reproduction. In the organic world we have something so different, that whether we talk of "property" or "principle," the things are entirely distinct. The essential difference, stated as regards the mere facts of irritability or motion, nutrition and reproduction, is so grandly sufficient in itself, that one almost regrets to have to add on the other facts which further emphasize the distinction between _life_ and any _property_ of matter. But these further facts are highly important as regards another part of the argument. For while what has just been said almost demonstrates the necessity of a Giver of Life from a kingdom outside the organic, the further facts point irresistibly to the conclusion that we must predicate more about the Giver of Life that we can of an abstract and unknown Cause. The original protoplasm, when dead, is undistinguishable by the eye, by chemical test, or by the microscope, from the same protoplasm when living; and living protoplasm, again, may be either animal or vegetable. Both are in every respect (externally) absolutely identical. Yet the one will only develop into a _plant_, the other only into an _animal._ Nor does it diminish the significance of the fact to say that the differentiation is _now_ fixed by heredity. If we suppose protoplasm to be only a fortuitous combination of elements, what secondary or common natural cause will account for its acquisition of the fixed difference? It is true that some forms of plants exhibit some functions that closely approach the functions of what we call animal life; but, as we shall see presently, there is no evidence whatever that there is any bridge between the two--we have no proof that a plant ever develops into an animal. Here is one of the gaps which the theory of Evolution, true as it is to a certain extent, cannot bridge over; and we must not overlook the fact. We shall revert to it hereafter. Can it be believed, then, that protoplasm, as the origin of life, is self-caused, and self-developed? And this is not all. I must briefly remind my readers that the way in which animal protoplasm deals with the elements of nutrition is quite opposite to that which plant protoplasm follows. I might, indeed, have mentioned this at an earlier stage, when I mentioned Professor Huxley's comparison of the chemical action in the formation of water with what he assumed to be the case in the formation of protoplasm. When water is formed, the two gases disappear, and an _exactly equal weight_ of water appears in their place; but if living protoplasm is enabled to imbibe liquid or other nutriment containing ammonia, water, and carbonic acid, there is no disappearance of the three elements and an equivalent weight of living protoplasm appearing in its place. Protoplasm consumes the oxygen and sets free the carbonic acid. Both kinds of protoplasm do this, until exposed to the light; and then a difference is observed; for under the influence of light, animal protoplasm alone continues to act in this way, and vegetable protoplasm begins at once to develop little green bodies or corpuscles in its cells, and afterwards acts in a totally opposite way, taking the carbon into its substance and giving off the oxygen.[1] [Footnote 1: Certain _fungi_ seem to afford an exception to this. The above is, I believe, true as a theoretical action of plants and animals in protoplasmic form. But practically, in all higher developments of either kind, other distinctions come into play; e.g., that plants can make use of inorganic matter, gases, and water, and elaborate them into organic matter. Animals cannot do this, they require more or less solid food--always requiring "complex organic bodies which they ultimately reduce to much simpler inorganic bodies. They are thus mediately or immediately dependent on plants for their subsistence" (Nicholson, "Zoology," 6th ed. p. 17). It is perhaps with reference to this that in the Book of Genesis the Creator is represented as giving _plant_ life to the service of man and animals--while nothing is said of the preying of _Carnivora_ and _Insectivora_ on animal life.] Not only then has each kind of protoplasm its own mysterious character impressed on it, and is compelled to act in a certain way; but still further, each particle of animal and vegetable protoplasm, when directed into its _general_ course of development as _plant or animal_, will again only obey a certain course of development in its own line. But we must proceed a step further; for those who would believe in the sufficiency of unaided Evolution, bid us bear in mind how very elementary the dawn of instinct or the beginning of reason is in the lowest forms which are classed as animal, and how very small is the gap[1] between some highly organized plants and some animal forms, and argue therefore that they may justly regard the distinction as of minor importance, and hope that the "missing link" will be yet discovered and proved. At any rate, they minimize the difference, and urge that it is of no account if at least they can establish the sufficiency of a proved development extending unbroken from the lowest to the highest animal form. And having fixed attention on this side, no doubt there is a long stretch of smooth water over which the passage is unchecked. [Footnote 1: At the risk of repetition I will remind the reader that nature contains _nothing like_ a progressive scale from plant to animal. It is _never_ that the highest plant can be connected with the lowest animal as in one series of links. The animal kingdom and the plant kingdom are absolutely apart. Both start from similar elementary proteinaceous structures; and both preserve their development upwards--each exhibiting _some_ of the features of the other. It is at the bottom of each scale that resemblance is to be found, _not_ between the top of one and the lowest members of the other.] The Evolution theory is that all the different species of animals, birds, and other forms of life have been caused by the accumulation and perpetuation of numerous small changes which began in one or at most a few elementary forms, and went on till all the thousands of species we now know of were developed.[1] It _is_ a fact that all organic forms have a certain tendency to vary. I need only allude to the many varieties of pigeons, horses, cattle, and dogs which are produced by varying the food, the circumstances of life and so forth, and by selective breeding. The contention then is: given certain original simple forms of life, probably marine or aquatic--for it is in the water that the most likely occur--these will gradually change and vary, some in one direction, some in another; that the changes go on increasing, each creature giving birth to offspring which exhibits the stored-up results of change, till the varied and finished forms--some reptile, some bird, some animal--which we now see around us, have been produced. And at last man himself was developed in the same way. All this, observe, is by the action of just such ordinary and natural causes as we now see operating around us--changes in food and in climate, changes in one part requiring a corresponding change in others, and so on. [Footnote 1: The reader may find this admirably put in Wallace, "Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection," p. 302.] Nature contains no sharply drawn lines. Plants are different from animals; but there are animals so low down in the scale of life that it is difficult to distinguish them from plants. Pigeons are distinct from pheasants, but the line at which the one species ends and the other begins is difficult to draw. This fact seems to invite some theory of one form changing into other. Accordingly the evolutionist explains the working of the process which he asserts to be sufficient to produce all the various forms of life in our globe. After stating this more in detail than we have previously done, we shall be in a better position to judge if the process (which in the main we have no desire to deny or even to question) can dispense with _guidance_ and the fixing of certain lines and limits within which, and of certain types towards which, the development proceeds. That is our point. It is hardly necessary to illustrate the enormous destruction of life which goes on in the world. Even among the human race, the percentage of infants that die in the first months of their life is very large. But in the lower forms of life it is truly enormous. Only consider the myriads of insects that perish from hunger or accident, and from the preying of one species on another. If it were not so, the world would be overrun by plagues of mice, of birds, of insects of all kinds, and indeed by creatures of every grade. The term "struggle for existence" is, then, not an inapt one. All forms of living creatures have to contend with enemies which seek to prey upon or to destroy them, with the difficulty of obtaining food, and with what I may call the chances of nature--cold, storms, floods, disease, and so forth. Now, it is obvious that if some creatures of a given kind possess some accidental peculiarity or modification in their formation which gives them (in one way or another) an advantage over their fellows, these improved specimens are likely to survive, and, surviving, to have offspring. It is this perpetuation of advantageous changes, originally induced by the circumstances of environment, that is indicated by the term "natural selection." Nature chooses out the form best suited to the circumstances which surround it, and this form lives while the others die out. And this form goes on improving by slow successive changes, which make it more and more fit for the continually changing circumstances of its life. Subordinate also to this natural selection is the principle that bright colour and other special qualities may be developed in the males of a race, because individuals with such advantages are more attractive, and therefore more easily find mates, than dull-coloured or otherwise less attractive individuals. Of each of these principles I may give a simple example. Supposing a species of bird with a soft slender beak to be placed on an island, where the only food they could obtain was fruit enclosed in a hard or tough shell or covering. Supposing some birds accidentally possessed of a beak that was shorter and stouter than the others', these would be able to break open the shell and get at the fruit, while the others would starve. Some of the descendants of the birds with the stout beaks would inherit the same peculiarity, and in the course of several generations there would thus arise a species with short and strong, perhaps curved, beaks just fitted to live on fruits of the kind described. In a similar way the webbed feet of birds that swim were developed by their aquatic habits. And so with the long slender toes of the waders, which are so well fitted for walking over floating aquatic plants. Of the other principle, sexual selection, a familiar example is the bright and showy colouring of the male birds of many species: the females of their species, as they need protection while helplessly sitting on their eggs, are dull-coloured like the bark of trees or the sand, among which their nests lie hid. Some of the Himalayan pheasants exhibit this peculiarity to a marked degree. Originally, it is said, the male bird, which was more brightly coloured than the rest, got mated more easily by the preference shown to him for his bright colour. The question is, can we suppose all this to go on, by self-caused laws and concurrence of circumstances, without a pre-existing design for the forms to reach or an external guidance in the processes? CHAPTER VI. _THE MARKS OF CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE IN THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANIC FORMS_. The heading of this chapter does not mark a new departure, for we have been tracing existing forms of matter from the first, and have already seen the necessity of believing in Creative Intelligence and Guidance. We have seen that inorganic matter, with what we call its molecular or atomic structure, cannot be reasonably regarded as self-caused; and we have concluded with Sir J.F.W. Herschell that the sight of such a well-arranged army, performing its evolutions in a regular and uniform manner, irresistibly suggests a great Commander and Designer. We have further found that the advent of LIFE demands a Power _ab extra_. We have called attention to the gap, between plant and animal, which is ignored or made light of, chiefly on account of the close approach of the two kingdoms. But there is one broad distinction, namely, that of elementary reason and no reason, or of consciousness and unconsciousness, which is, in itself, a sufficient difficulty to pull us up shortly. We have not yet fully considered this matter, because it will come more appropriately at a later stage, and in the _à fortiori_ form. But we have justly noted it here. We cannot account for the most elementary reason by any physical change; there is no analogy between the two. The connection of mind and matter is unexplainable; and no theory of development of physical form can say why, at any given stage, physical development begins to be accompanied by brain-power and _consciousness_. Admit candidly that the addition of intelligence at a certain stage, however mysteriously interwoven with structural accompaniments, is a gift _ab extra_, and we have at least a reasonable and so far satisfactory explanation. But when we have got an animal form, however simple and elementary, with at least a recognizable "potentiality" of intelligence, we enter, as I said, a long stretch of apparently smooth water, over which, for an important part of our passage, we seem able to glide without any difficulty from the necessary intervention of the so-called supernatural. I have, then, to show that even here there is really no possibility of dispensing with a Creator who has a purpose, a designed scheme, and a series of type-forms to be complied with. In order to fully exhaust the question how far natural selection is capable of accounting for everything, it would be necessary to take a very wide view of natural history and botany, which it is quite impossible for us to attempt. But this is not necessary for our purpose. We are perfectly justified in selecting certain topics which must arise in the discussion. If, in studying these points, we find that _there_ at least the intervention of a Controlling Power becomes necessary, and the absence of it leaves things without any reasonable explanation, then we shall have good and logical ground for holding to our faith in the universal presence of such a Power. No chain is stronger than its weakest link. If secondary causes cannot succeed at any one part of the chain, it is obvious that they fail as a universal explanation. This part of the work has already been done far better than I could do it. In the first eight chapters of Mivart's "Genesis of Species" [1] the argument has been ably and clearly put, and whatever answer is possible has been given by Darwin and others; so that the world may judge. All that can here be usefully attempted, is, by way of reminder, to reproduce some main topics on which no real answer has been given. These are selected, partly because they are less abstruse and difficult to follow than some which might be dealt with, partly because they are calculated to awaken our interest, and partly because the conclusion in favour of a continual Providence; working through organized law and system, appears to follow most clearly from them. [Footnote 1: Second Edition, 1871.] The points I would call attention to are the following:-- (I) That as natural selection will only maintain changes that have been _beneficial_ to the creature, it is contrary to such a law, if acting entirely by itself, that that there should be developments (not being mere accidental deformities, &c.) disadvantageous to the creature. And yet the world is full of such. (2) That there are forms which cannot be accounted for on the evolutionist supposition, that they were gradually obtained by a series of small changes slowly progressing towards a perfect structure. They would be of no use at all unless produced _at once and complete_. (3) That natural selection, as apart from a Divine Designer, altogether fails to account for _beauty_, as distinguished from mere brilliancy or conspicuousness, in nature. Whereas, if we suppose the existence of a beneficent Creator, who has moral objects in view, and cares for the delight and the improvement of His creatures,[1] and looking to the known effects on the mind of beauty in art and in nature, the existence is at once and beyond all cavil explained. [Footnote 1: "He hath made everything _beautiful_ in his time" (Eccles. iii. II).] (4) That we have positive evidence against _uncontrolled_ evolution (uncontrolled by set plan and design i.e.) and a strong presumption in favour of the existence of created _types_; so that evolution proceeds towards these types by aid of natural laws and forces working together (in a way that our limited faculties necessarily fail to grasp adequately);[1] and so that, the type once reached, a certain degree of variation, but never _transgression_ of _the type_, is possible. Further, that on this supposition we are able to account for some of the unexplained facts in evolutionary history, such as _reversion_ and the _sterility of hybrids_; and to see why there are gaps which cannot be bridged over, and which by extreme theorists are only feebly accounted for on the supposition that as discovery progresses they _will_ be bridged over some day. [Footnote 1: "Also He hath set the world in their heart, so that _no man can find out the work that God maketh_ from the beginning to the end" (Eccles. iii II).] (5) Lastly, that there is no possibility of giving _time_ enough on any possible theory of the world's existence, for the evolution of all species, unless _some_ reasonable theory of creative arrangement and design be admitted. The great objection--the descent of man and the introduction of reason, consciousness, and so forth, into the world, will then form two separate chapters, concluding the first division of my subject. There is one point which the reader may be surprised to see omitted. It is, that if these slow changes were always going on, why is not the present world full of, and the fossil-bearing rocks also abounding in, _intermediate forms_, creatures which _are on their way_ to being something else? But there are reasons to be given on this ground which make the subject a less definite one for treatment. It is said, for example, that in the fossil rocks we have only such scanty and fragmentary records, that it is not possible to draw a complete inference, and that there is always the possibility of fresh discoveries being made. Such discoveries have, it is asserted, already been made in the miocene and again in later rocks; different species of an early form of _horse_ which are (and this we may admit) the ancestral or intermediate forms of our own horse, have been found. I therefore would not press the difficulty, great as it is, because of the escape which the hope of future discovery always affords. I will take this opportunity to repeat that in this chapter I say nothing about the difficulty which arises from the introduction of elementary reason or instinct, and of consciousness, into the scale of organic being; that will more appropriately fall in with the consideration of the development of man, where naturally the difficulty occurs with its greatest force. (1) I come at once to the great difficulty that, if all existing forms are due to the occurrence of changes that helped the creature in the struggle for existence, how is it possible now to account for forms which are not advantageous? yet such forms are numerous. Of this objection, the existence of imperfect or neuter bees and ants is an instance. The modification in form which these creatures exhibit is of no advantage to them. It _is_ a great advantage, no doubt, to the other bees; but then this introduces a view of some power _making_ one thing for the benefit of another, not a change in the form itself adapted of course to its _own_ advantage--since natural laws, forces, and conditions of environment could not conceivably _design_ the advantage of another form, and cause one to change for the benefit of that other. Why is it, again, that crabs and crayfish can only grow by casting off their shells, during which process they often die, as well as remain exposed defenceless to the attacks of enemies? Why should stags shed their horns also, leaving them defenceless for a time? Other animals do not do so, and there is nothing in the nature of the horn which requires it. This brief allusion is here sufficient. Mr. Mivart's work gives it at large. (2) Passing next to the question of the advantage of _incomplete stages_--portions of a mechanism only useful when complete, the most striking examples may be found in the Vegetable kingdom. The fertilization of flowering plants is effected by the pollen, a yellow dust formed in the anthers, which is carried from flower to flower. In the pines and oaks, this is done by the wind. But in other cases insects visit a flower to get the honey, and in so doing get covered with pollen, which they carry away and leave in the next flower visited. Now one of our commonest and most useful plants, the red clover, is so constructed that it can only be fertilized by humble bees. If this bee became extinct, the plant would die out; how can such a development be advantageous to it? But the contrivances by which this process of fertilization is secured are so marvellous, that I confess I am completely staggered by the idea that these contrivances have been caused by the self-growth and adaptation of the plant without guidance. There is a plant called _Salvia glutinosa_[1]--easily recognized by its sticky calyx and pale yellow flowers. The anthers that bear the pollen are hidden far back in the hood of the flower, so that the pollen can neither fall nor can the wind carry it away; but the two anthers are supported on a sort of spring, and directly a bee goes to the flower and pushes in his head to get the honey, the spring is depressed and both anthers start forward, of course depositing their pollen on the hairy back of the bee, which carries it to the stigma of the next flower. This process can be tested without waiting for a bee, by pushing a bit of stick into the flower, when the curious action described will be observed. It is very easy to say that this admirable mechanical contrivance is of great use to the plant _in its complete_ form; but try and imagine what use an intermediate form would have been! If development at once proceeded to the complete form, surely this marks _design_; if not, no partial step towards it would have been of any use, and therefore would not have been inherited and perpetuated so as to prepare for further completion. But many other plants have a structure so marvellous that this objection is continually applicable. Let me only recall one other case, that of the orchid, called _Coryanthes macrantha_. In this flower there are two little horns, which secrete a pure water, or rather water mixed with honey. The lower part of the flower consists of a long lip, the end of which is bent into the form of a bucket hanging below the horns. This bucket catches the nectar as it drops, and is furnished with a spout over which the liquid trickles when it is too full. But the mouth of the bucket is guarded by a curiously ridged cover with two openings, one on each side. The most ingenious man, says Mr. Darwin, would never by himself make out what this elaborate arrangement was intended for. It was at last discovered. Large humble bees were seen visiting the flower; by way of getting at the honey, they set to work to gnaw off the ridges of the lid above alluded to; in doing this they pushed one another into the bucket, and had to crawl out by the spout. As they passed out by this narrow aperture, they had to rub against the anthers and so carried off the pollen. When a bee so charged gets into another bucket, or into the same bucket a second time, and has to crawl out, he brushes against the stigma, and leaves the pollen on it. I might well have adduced this plant as another instance of the first objection, since it may well be asked, How could such a development, resulting in a structure which presents the greatest difficulty in the way of fertilization, be beneficial to the plant? But here the point is that, even if any one could assert the utility of such an elaborate and complicated development, and suppose it self-caused by accident or effect of environment, it certainly goes against the idea that all forms are due to an _accumulation of small changes_. For these curious contrivances in the case of _Salvia, Coryanthes_, and other plants, would in any case have been no use to the plant till the whole machinery _was complete_. Now, on the theory of slow changes gradually accumulating till the complete result was attained, there must have been generation after generation of plants, in which the machinery was as yet imperfect and only partly built up. But in such incomplete stages, fertilization would have been impossible, and therefore the plant must have died out. Just the same with the curious fly-trap in _Dionoea_. Whatever may be its benefit to the plant, till the whole apparatus as it now is, was _complete_, it would have been of no use. In the animal kingdom also, instances might be given: the giraffe has a long neck which is an advantage in getting food that other animals cannot reach; but what would have been the use of a neck which was becoming--and had not yet become--long? here intermediate stages would not have been useful, and therefore could not have been preserved.[2] In flat fishes it is curious that, though they are born with eyes on different sides of the head, the lower eye gradually grows round to the upper-side. As remarked by Mr. Mivart, natural selection could not have produced this change, since the _first steps towards it_ could have been of no possible use, and could not therefore have occurred, at least not without direction and guidance from without. Mr. Darwin's explanation of the case does not touch this difficulty. [Footnote 1: This species was instanced because the lectures which form the basis of the book were originally delivered at Simla, in the N.W. Himalaya, where, at certain seasons, the plant is a common wayside weed. Mr. Darwin notices a similar and, if possible, more curious structure in a species of _Catasetum_.] [Footnote 2: See this fully explained by Mivart, "Genesis of Species," pp. 29, 30 (2nd edition).] (3) The third point, the occurrence of so much _beauty_ in organic life, is perhaps one of the most conclusive arguments for design in nature. Here, if possible, more clearly than elsewhere, I see a total failure of "natural causes." We are told that the beauty of birds (for instance) is easily accounted for by the fact, that the ornamented and beautiful males are preferred by the other sex; and that this is an advantage, so the beauty has been perpetuated; and the same with butterflies and beetles. We are told also that bright-coloured fruits attract birds, who eat the soft parts of the fruit and swallow the hard stone or seed which is thus prepared for germination, and carried about and dispersed over the earth's surface. Again, showy coloured flowers attract insects, which carry away pollen and fertilize other flowers. All this is perfectly true; but it entirely fails to go far enough to meet the difficulty. Now passing over such difficulties as the fact that bright colours in flowers _do not_ attract insects in many cases, but much more inconspicuous flowers if they have a scent (mignonette, for example) _do_; passing over such a fact as that afforded by the violet, which (as some may not be aware) has two kinds of flower, one scented and of a beautiful colour, the other green and inconspicuous, and it is the _latter, not the former_ which is usually fertile;--passing over all detailed difficulties of this kind, I allude only to the one great one, that in all these cases, besides mere bright colour, conspicuousness or showiness, there is a great and wonderful beauty of pattern, design, or colour arrangement, in nature. Now there is not a particle of evidence to show that any animal has, to the smallest extent, a _sense of beauty_. On the contrary it is most improbable. The sense of artistic beauty is not only peculiar to man, but only exists in him when civilized and cultivated. Uneducated people among ourselves have no sense of landscape and other beauty. How then can it exist in animals? If there was nothing to explain but a uniform bright and showy colour, natural selection might be sufficient to account for it. How is it, then, that this is not the case? We have not only colour, but colour diversified in the most elaborate and charming manner. Look at the exquisite patterns on a butterfly's wing! look at the various delicate arrangements of colour and pattern in flowers; or look again at the arrangement of colour on a humming-bird--sometimes the tail, sometimes the breast is ornamented, sometimes a splendid crest covers the head, sometimes a jewelled gorget or ruff surrounds the throat; and these are not uniformly coloured, but exhibit metallic and other changes of lustre not to be imitated by the highest art. But to fully realize this, I had best refer to a more familiar instance. Let any one examine--as an object very easily procurable in these days--a peacock's feather. No doubt the whole tail when expanded is very brilliant; but look closely at the structure of a single feather; is all this arrangement needed only to make the tail bright or conspicuous? Observe how wonderfully the outer parts are varied; part has a metallic lustre of copper, part has this also shot with green: then there is a delicate ring of violet with a double yellowish border, all quite distinct from the inmost gorgeous "eye" of green, blue, and black, and all arranged on the same feather! Take, again, the so-called diamond beetle of Brazil; here the wing case is black studded all over with little pits or specks, which as a whole only give it a powdery pale-green colour; but place it in the sunlight and look at it with a magnifying glass--each little speck is seen to be furnished with a set of minute metallic scales showing green and red flashes like so many diamonds. How does such a delicate ornament answer the demands of mere conspicuousness? But there is a stronger case than this. I before alluded to the exquisite symmetry of the silicious and crystalline coverings of some of the simplest forms of marine animalcules; and also I may here add the beautiful colouring of _shells_ sometimes on the _inside_.[1] In what possible way would this beauty serve for any purely _useful_ purpose? [Footnote 1: See Mivart, p. 61.] Lastly, how are we to account for the beauty of autumnal tints in woods, or coloured _leaves_ in plants such as the _Caladium_? The beauty is of no conceivable use to the plant. "In Canada the colours of the autumn forest are notorious. Even on cloudy days the hue of the foliage is of so intense a yellow that the light thrown from the trees creates the impression of bright sunshine, each leaf presents a point of sparkling gold. But the colours of the leafy landscape change and intermingle from day to day, until pink, lilac, vermilion, purple, deep indigo and brown, present a combination of beauty that must be seen to be realized; for no artist has yet been able to represent, nor can the imagination picture to itself, the gorgeous spectacle.[1]" Have we not here an exhibition which cannot be accounted for on any principle of natural utility? [Footnote 1: "Quarterly Review," 1861, p. 20.] (4) The fourth point, as previously stated, will be best treated by stating beforehand what is the conclusion come to, and then justifying it. My suggestion is that if we suppose a continuous evolution without a series of designs prescribed before life began to develop, and without any external guidance, then we are lost in difficulties. We cannot account for why variation should set in in the very different ways it does, nor why such a vast variety of divergent results should be produced. We cannot account for the tendency to reversion to a previous type, when artificial or accidental variation is not continually maintained,[1] nor for the sterility of hybrids; nor, above all, for evolution performing such freaks (if I may so say) as the origination of our small finches and the tropical humming-birds from earlier vertebrates through the Mesozoic reptiles, the pterodactyles, _Odontornithes_ and subsequent forms. Supposing that the Almighty Designer created a complete _cosmos_ of (1) the starry heavens and the planetary system, (2) then a scheme whereby earth and water were to be duly distributed over our planet; (3) established the relations by which the external heavenly bodies were to regulate our seasons, tides, and times (as we know they do). (4) Suppose, further, that the Designer did not make "out of nothing" the series of finally developed animals as we now have them, but "made the animals make themselves"--that is to say, created the type, the ideal form, and adapted the laws and forces which constitute environment, so that development of form should go on regularly towards the appointed end, but in separate and appropriate channels, each terminating when its object had been attained. Suppose these conditions (which, as we shall afterwards see, are what Revelation, fairly interpreted, declares) to exist; all the known _facts_, and also the fairly certain _inferences_ of Evolution, are then accounted for. [Footnote 1: Pigeon fanciers know that when they have once obtained, by crossbreeding and selection, a particular form or feather, the utmost care is needed to preserve it. If the parents are not selected the progeny wilt gradually revert towards the original wild pigeon type.] We have neither by revelation nor physical discovery an exact _scheme_ of all the types, nor which of the elementary forms were destined to remain unchanged throughout. But some scheme of created types we surely have. Whether what we call _species_[1] are all types or not, we cannot say; probably not. All we can be sure of is that there are definite lines somewhere. We see the sterility of some hybrids, for instance, which would seem to indicate that while some forms can conjugate and their offspring remain fertile, others (approaching, as it were, the verge of separation) give rise to hybrids which are or not absolutely sterile,[2] according as they approach, or are more remote from, the designed barrier-line. And at that point the separation is insuperable. Certain forms of _Carnivora_ and _Ungulata_ seem to be for ever apart--not only the two great orders, but even subdivisions within them. Reptiles and birds, on the other hand, unlike as they at first sight seem, have no type line drawn to separate them; that, at least, is one of the more recent conclusions of biological science. [Footnote 1: It should be borne in mind that what we call a _species_ as distinct from a mere variety, is a more or less arbitrary or provisional thing dependent on the state of science for the time. Species are constantly being lumped together by some and separated by others. It follows most probably, that while some species are really types--i.e., one can never pass into the other and lose its essentials, unless it is destined to disappear (like the pterodactyle), not being wanted in the whole scheme--other species are really only varieties, and maybe lost or modified without limit.] [Footnote 2: We may well regard the mule as a peculiar form just such as the evolutionist would rejoice to see: here is a modified species, which has qualities different from those of either of the parent stock, and well fitted "to struggle for existence." Yet this modified race would, if left to itself, die out.] In other cases where variation has occurred, and especially when it is artificially--i.e., by the aid of selective breeding--caused or favoured, there is the constant tendency to _revert_, which is at once intelligible if there is a type scheme to be maintained. If there were a series of created types, there may naturally have been what I may call sub-types; which would be certain well-marked stages on the way to the final form. Such sub-type forms would naturally occur at different ages, and being marked would show their place in the scale, and their connection with the ultimate perfect form. Such a possibility would exactly account for the series of _Eohippus, Hipparion_, and horse, which we have already instanced; and still more so for the rise and disappearance of the great Mesozoic Saurians when their object was fulfilled. Deny guidance and type, and everything becomes confused. Why should variation take certain directions? how comes it that natural forces and conditions of life so occur and co-operate as to produce the variety of changes needed? And there is also one other general objection which I desire to state. Why should _development_ have gone in different directions _towards the same object_? I grant that different circumstances would produce different changes, but not for the same purpose. For example take eye-sight. The world shows several types of eye. The _insect_ eye quite unlike any other; the crustacean eye also distinct; and birds, fishes, and animals having an eye which is generally similar and is somewhat imitated by the eye of the _cuttle fish_ (which is not a _fish_, but a _cephalopod_). Again, granted that _poison_ is a useful defence to creatures: how is it given so differently?--to a serpent in the tooth; to a bee or a scorpion in the tail; to a spider in a specially adapted _antenna_, and to the centipede in a pair of modified legs on the _thorax_. One would have supposed that natural causes tending to produce poison weapons would have all gone on the same lines. And, curiously, in some few cases, we have a sameness of line. About twelve species--all fish--have an electric apparatus, familiar to most of us in the flat sea-fish called _Torpedo_ and in the fresh-water eel called _Gymnotus_. The only answer the anti-creationist can give to this dissimilarity of development is that there are many vacant places in the polity of nature, and that development takes place in that direction which fits the creature to occupy a vacant place, and is, therefore, diverse. It seems to me that this--the only answer that can he given--is necessarily a modified form or mode _of creation._ How can _natural causes_ know anything about a polity of nature and a vacant place, here and there, so that the creature must develop in one way or another to fill it? Another set of cases is the production of similar functional results by most diverse means, as in the case of flying animals, birds, pterodactyles, and bats; here there is a widely different modification of the fore-arm and other bones, all for the same purpose. The reader will do well to refer to Mr. Mivart's book on this subject. Again, the question of types seems to be pointed to in the curious fact of what I may call the double development of birds from reptiles. Mr. Mivart says, "If one set of birds sprang from one set of reptiles and another set from another set of reptiles, the two sets could never by 'natural selection' only have grown into such perfect similarity." Yet we can trace the _Struthious_ birds (those that, like ostriches, do not fly) through the Dinosaurs and _Dinornis_, and the flying Carinate birds though pterodactyles, _Archaeopteryx_, and _Icthyornis_, &c. It might well be added to this part of the subject, that granted that developmental changes were often small, that progress was attained little by little, this does not appear to have been always the case. The discoveries of the fossil species of horse,[1] _Eohippus, Hipparion_, and so forth, clearly establish a developmental series, and the ancient forms are claimed as the ancestor of the modern horse; but these (Professor Owen tells us) differed more from one another than the ass and the zebra (for instance) differ from the horse. Still, of course it may be that there are still undiscovered intermediate forms; and in any case there need be no desire to detract from the value of the series, as really pointing towards a gradual perfection of the horse from a ruder ancestor up to the latest type. But having reached the type, and though that type exhibits such (considerable) variations as occur between the Shetland pony, the Arab, and the dray-horse, we have still no difficulty in recognizing the essential identity; nor is there any evidence or any probability that the horse will ever change into anything essentially different. All the fossil bats, again, were true bats: and so with the rhinoceroses and the elephants. Granting the fullest use that may be made of the imperfection of the geological record, it is difficult to account for this, and still more for the absence of intermediate forms (particularly suitable for preservation) of the _Cetaceae_. The Zeuglodons from Eocene down to Pliocene, the Dolphins in the Pliocene, and the _Ziphoids Catodontidae_, and _Balaenidae_ in the Pliocene, are all fully developed forms, with no intermediate species. [Footnote 1: The series is thus (Nicholson, p. 702):--1. _Eohippus_--Lower Eocene of America; fore-feet have four toes and a rudimentary thumb or pollex. 2. _Orohippus_ (about the size of a fox)--Eocene. 3. _Anchitherium_--Eocene and Lower Miocene; three toes, but 2 and 4 are diminutive. 4. _Hipparion_--Upper Miocene and Pliocene; still three toes, but 3 more like the modern horse and 2 and 4 still further diminished. 5. _Pliohippus_--later Pliocene, very like Equus. 6. _Equus_--Post-Pliocene.] Mr. Mivart remarks, "There are abundant instances to prove that considerable modifications may suddenly develop themselves, either due to external conditions or to obscure internal causes in the organisms which exhibit them.[1]" If it is not so, granted to the full the imperfection of the Geologic record, but remembering the cases where we _do_ find intermediate forms; we ask why should they not be preserved in other cases? If they ever existed we should surely see _more_ changing forms; not only such as are more or less uncertainly divided species, but whole orders running one into another. No evidence exists to show that any bird has gradually passed into an animal, nor a carnivorous beast become ruminant, or _vice versâ._ [Footnote 1: P. 112] [Transcriber's note: Chapter VIII] The analogy of changes that are known will not bear extension enough to prove, even probably, any such change. Surely if our conclusion in favour of a Divine Design to be attained, and a Providential Intelligence directing the laws of development, is no more than a belief, it is a probable and reasonable belief: it certainly meets facts and allows place for difficulties in a way far more satisfactory than the opposite belief which rejects _all_ but "secondary" and purely "natural" causes. So clear does this seem to me, that I cannot help surmising that we should never have heard of any objection to Divine creation and providential direction, if it had not been for a prevalent fixed idea, that by "creation" _must_ be meant a final, one-act production _(per saltum)_ of a completely developed form, where previously there had been nothing. Such a "creation" would of course militate against _any_ evolution, however cautiously stated or clearly established. And no doubt such an idea of "creation" was and still is prevalent, and would naturally and almost inevitably arise, while nothing to the contrary in the _modus operandi_ of Creative Power was known. What is more strange is that the current objection should not now be, "Your _idea of creation_ is all wrong," rather than the one which has been strongly put forward (and against which I am contending), "There is no place for a Creator." (5) This is the only other _general_ point that remains to be taken up in connection with the theory that all living forms are due to the gradual accumulation of small favourable changes without creative intervention. The objection is that we cannot obtain the inconceivably long time required for the process of uncontrolled and unaided evolution. I am not here concerned to argue generally for the shortness or longness of the periods of geological time; let us, for the purposes of argument, admit a very wide margin of centuries and ages; but _some_ limit there must be. The sun's light and heat, for one thing, are necessary, and though the bulk of combustible material in the sun is enormous, there must be some end to it. Sir William Thomson has calculated (and his calculations have never been answered) that on purely physical grounds, the existence of life on the earth must be limited to some such period as 100 millions of years; and this is far too short for uncontrolled evolution. We know from fossils, that species have remained entirely unaltered since the glacial epochs began, and how many generations are included even in that! If no change is visible in all that time, how many more ages must have elapsed before a primitive _Amoeba_ could have developed into a bird or a Mammal? In Florida Mr. Agassiz has shown that coral insects exist unchanged, and must have been so for 30,000 years. When we remember also the enormous destruction of life that takes place, supposing that in a given form a few creatures underwent accidental changes which were beneficial and likely to aid them--still what chances were there that the creatures which began to exhibit the right sort of change should have died before they left offspring! the chances against them are enormous: and the chances have to be repeated at every successive change before the finally perfected or advanced creature took its place in the polity of nature. Moreover, there is the chance of small changes being lost by intercrossing: our own cattle-breeders have most carefully to select the parents, or else the favourable variety soon disappears. How then, seeing the power of stability which at least some forms are found to exhibit--seeing too the enormous chances against the survival of the particular specimens that begin to vary, and the further chances of the loss of variety by intercrossing; how can we get the millions of millions of years necessary to produce the present extreme divergence of species? The fact is that the force of this objection is likely to be undervalued, from the mere difficulty of bringing home to the mind the immeasurable time really demanded by uncontrolled evolution. Nor is the question of time left absolutely to be matter of belief or speculation. For here and there in the geological records of the rocks, we _have_ certain intermediate forms--or forms which we may fairly argue to be such. But looking at the very considerable differences between the earlier and the later of these forms--differences greater than those which now separate well-defined species, it seems questionable whether any of the divisions of Tertiary time, taking all the circumstances into consideration, could be lengthened out sufficiently to accomplish the change. At any rate, if any particular example be disallowed, the general objection must be admitted to be weighty. Now the intervention of any system of created designs of animal form--however little its details be understood--and the production of variations under _divine guidance_ which would lead more directly to the accomplishment of such forms as the complicated flowers of orchids above described, would unquestionably tend to shorten the requisite time. There would, by a process of reasoning easily followed, be an immediate reduction of the ages required, within practicable limits, though the time must still remain long. More than that is not necessary. The Ussherian chronology is not of Divine revelation, though some persons speak of it as if it was. There is not the shadow of a reason to be gleaned from the Bible, nor from any other source, that the commencement of orderly development, the separation of land and water, earth and sky, and the subsequent provision of designs for organic forms of life and the first steps that followed the issue of the design, began six thousand years ago, or anything like it. It can be shown, indeed, that _historical_ man, or the specific origin of the man spoken of as Adam, dates back but a limited time; and it is calculable with some degree of probability how far; but that is all. We are therefore in no difficulty when ample time is demanded; but we are in the greatest straits when the illimitable demands of a slowly and minutely stepping development, perpetually liable to be checked, turned back, and even obliterated, have to be confronted with other weighty probabilities and calculations regarding the sun's light and heat, and the duration of particular geologic eras. CHAPTER VII. _THE DESCENT OF MAN_. We now approach a special objection which always, has been (and I shall be pardoned, perhaps, for saying _always will be_) the _crux_ of the theory of unaided, uncreated evolution--the advent of reasoning, and not only reasoning, but self-conscious and God-conscious MAN. Here again the lines of argument are so numerous, and the details into which we might go so varied, that a rigid and perhaps bald selection of a few topics is all that can be attempted. But I may remark that naturalists are far from being agreed on this part of the subject. Agassiz rejects the evolution of man altogether. Mr. St. G. Mivart, while partly admitting, as every one else now does, the doctrine of evolution, denies the descent of man. Mr. Wallace, the great apostle of evolution, opposes Darwin, and will have none of his views on the descent of man; and Professor Huxley himself says that, while the resemblance of structure is such that if any "process of physical causation can be discovered by which the genera and families of ordinary animals have been produced, the process of causation is amply sufficient to account for the origin of man," still he admits that the gulf is vast between civilized man and brutes, and he is certain that "whether _from_ them or not, man is assuredly not _of_ them." The first difficulty I shall mention is, however, a structural one. Supposing that an ape-like ancestor developed into man, on the principles of natural selection; then his development has taken place in a manner directly contrary to the acknowledged law of natural selection. He has developed backwards; his frame is in every way weaker; he is wanting in agility; he has lost the prehensile feet; he has lost teeth fitted for fighting or crushing or tearing; he has but little sense of smell; he has lost the hairy covering, and is obliged to help himself by clothes.[1] If this loss was ornamental it is quite unlike any other development in this respect, since no other creature has the same; for ornamental purposes the fur becomes coloured, spotted, and striped, but not lost. It is easy to reply that man being _intelligent_, his brain power enables him to invent clothes, arms, implements, and so forth, which not only supply all deficiencies of structure, but give him a great superiority over all creatures. But how did he get that intelligence? By what natural process of causation (without intelligent direction) is it conceivable that, given a species of monkey, all at once and at a certain stage, structural development should have been retarded and actually reversed, and a development of brain structure alone set in? Nor, be it observed, has any trace of _man_ with a rudimentary brain ever been discovered. Savages have brains far in excess of their requirements, and can consequently be educated and improved. The skull of a prehistoric man found in the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf is of average brain capacity, showing that in those remote ages man was very much in capacity what he is at present. [Footnote 1: It is remarkable that the loss of the hairy covering is most complete when it is most wanted: the back, the spine, and the shoulders are in nearly all races unprotected; and yet the want of a covering from the heat or cold is such that the rudest savages have invented some kind of cloak for the back.] It must, however, be admitted that the special difficulties of the origin of man are not purely structural. We do not know enough of the Divine plan to be able to understand why it is that there is a certain undeniable unity of form, in the two eyes, ears, mouth, limbs and organs generally of the animal and man. Moreover, much is made of the fact, as stated by a recent "Edinburgh Reviewer," that "the physical difference between man and the lowest ape is trifling compared with that which exists between the lowest ape and any brute animal that is not an ape.[1]" This fact no doubt negatives the idea put forward by Bishop Temple and others, that if there was an evolution of man, it must have been in a special branch which was foreseen and commenced very far back in the scale of organic being. For the structural difference might not require such a separate origin; while the mental difference, affording objections of a different class, will not allow of _any_ such evolution at all. That there is _some_ connection between man and the animal cannot be denied, and consequently, in the absence of fuller information, very little would be gained by insisting on the purely _physical_ development question. The Bible states positively that the man Adam (as the progenitor of a particular race, at any rate) was a separate and actual production, on a given part of the earth's surface. All that we need conclude regarding that is that there is nothing known which entitles us to say, "This is not a fact, and therefore is not genuine revelation." [Footnote 1: No. 331, July, 1885, p. 223.] Moreover, as to the question of the possibility of human development generally, there are certain considerations which directly support our belief. For example, directly we look to the characteristic point, the gift of intellect, we can reasonably argue that the action of a Creator is indispensable. The entrance of consciousness and of reason, however elementary, marks something out of all analogy with the development of physical structure, just as much as the entrance of Life marked a new departure in no analogy with the "properties" of inorganic matter. From the first dawn of what looks like _will_ and _choice_ between two things, and something like a _reason_ which directs the course of the organism in a particular way for a particular object, we have an altogether new departure. The difficulty commences at the outset, and even in the animal creation; it is merely continued and rendered more striking when we take into consideration the higher development of intellect into power of abstract reasoning, self-consciousness and God-consciousness. It is perfectly true that the difference between the "instinct" of animals and the reason and mind of man, is one of degree rather than kind. As Christians, we have no objection whatever to a development of reason from the lowest reason solely concerned with earthly and bodily affairs to the highest powers searching into deep and spiritual truths. But such a development, though it is parallel to a physical development--as spiritual law appears to be always parallel (as far as the nature of things permits) to physical laws--still is a development which cannot under any possible circumstances dispense with an external spiritual order of existence, and one which cannot be physically caused. Nor is it conceivable that man should develop a consciousness of God, when no God really exists externally to the consciousness.[1] [Footnote 1: For our consciousness of God is obviously very different from a figment of the imagination, or the sort of reality experienced in a dream. This is not the place to develop such an argument, but it seems to me more than doubtful whether we can even _imagine_ something _absolutely_ non-existent in nature. When the artist's imagination would construct, e.g., a winged dragon, the concept is always made up of _parts which are real_--eyes like an alligator, bat-wings, scales of a fish or crocodile, and so forth. All the members or parts are real, put together to form the unreal. I do not believe that any instance of a human conception can be brought forward which on analysis will not conform to this rule.] The main objection, then, that I would press is, that admitting any possibility of the development of man from a purely physical and structural point of view, admitting any inference that may be drawn fairly from the undoubted connection (increasingly great as it is as we go upwards from the lower animal to the ape) between animals and man, that inference never can touch the descent of man as a whole; because no similarity of bodily structure can get over the difficulty of the mental power of man. We have to deal not with a part of man, but with the whole. The difficulty cannot be got over by denying _mind_ as a thing _per se_; for all attempts to represent mind as the _mere_ product of a physical structure, the brain, utterly fail. Nobody wishes to deny what Dr. H. Maudsley and others have made so plain to us, that mind has (in one aspect, at any rate) a physical basis--that is, that no thought, imagination, or combination of thought, is known to us _apart from_ change and expenditure of energy in the brain. Nor can we, by any process of introspection or observation of other subjects, separate the mind from the brain and ascertain the existence of "pure mind," or soul, experimentally. But still, there is no possibility of getting the operations of mind out of mere cell structure, unless an external Power has added the mind power, as a faculty of His endowing; then He may be allowed to have connected that faculty ever so mysteriously with physical structure; we are content. And I must insist on the total failure of all analogy between the development of bones or muscles and the development of mind; and even if we grant a certain stage of instinct to have arisen, we are still in the dark as to how that could develop into intellect such as man possesses, including a belief in God. On this subject let us hear Professor Allman. Between a development of material structure and a development of intellectual and moral features, the Professor says, "there is no conceivable analogy; and the obvious and continuous path, which we have hitherto followed up, in our reasonings from the phenomena of lifeless matter to those of living form, here comes suddenly to an end. The chasm between _unconscious_ life and _thought_ is deep and impassable, and no transitional phenomena are to be found by which, as by a bridge, we can span it over.[1]" There can be _life_ or _function_ without _consciousness_ or _thought;_ therefore, even if we go so far as to admit that life is only a property of protoplasm, there can be no ground for saying that _thought_ is only a property of protoplasm. [Footnote 1: British Association Address.] "If," says Professor Allman, "we were to admit that every living cell were a conscious and thinking thing, are we therefore justified in asserting that its consciousness with its irritability is a property of the matter of which it is composed? The sole argument on which this view is made to rest is analogy. It is argued that because the life phenomena, which are invariably found in the cell, must be regarded as a property of the cell, the phenomena of consciousness by which they are accompanied must also be so regarded. The weak point in the argument is the absence of all analogy between the things compared: and as the conclusion rests solely on the argument from analogy, the two must fall to the ground together." Try and assign to matter all the properties you can think of, its impenetrability, extension, weight, inertia, elasticity, and so forth, by no process of thought (as Mr. Justice Fry observes in an article in "The Contemporary Review [1]") can you get out of them an adequate account of the phenomena of mind or spirit. We just now observed that consciousness, thought, and so forth, are never exhibited apart from the action of the brain; some change in the brain accompanies them all. We do not deny that. But it is obvious that thought being manifested in the presence of cerebral matter or something like it, is a very different thing from thought being a _property_ of such matter, in the sense in which polarity is the property of a magnet, or irritability of living protoplasm. [Footnote 1: October, 1880, p. 587.] To all this I have seen no answer. The way in which the opponents of Christian beliefs meet such considerations appears to be to ignore or minimize them, so as to pass over to what seems to them a satisfactory if not an easy series of transitions. If Life is after all only a "property" of matter, then given life, a brain may be produced; and as mind is always manifested in the presence of (and apparently indissolubly united with) brain structure, it is not a much greater leap to accept _life_ as a property of _matter_ than it is to take _thought_ as a property of a certain _specialized physical structure_. It is true that the distance is great between the instinct of an animal and the abstract reasoning power of a Newton or a Herbert Spencer; but (as we are so often told) the difference is of degree not of kind, and as the brain structure develops, so does the power and degree of reason. As to the difference in man, that he is the only "religious" animal--the one creature that has the idea of God--that is a mere development of the emotions in connection with abstract reasoning as to the cause of things. No part of our mental nature is more common to the animal and the man than the emotional; and if in the one it is mere love and hatred, joy and grief, confidence and fear, in the other the emotions are developed into the poetic sense of beauty, or the awe felt for what is grand and noble; and this insensibly passes into _worship_, the root of the whole being fear of the unknown and the mysterious. That is the general line of argument taken up. Even accepting the solution (if such it maybe called) of the two first difficulties--life added spontaneously or aboriginally to matter, and thought and consciousness added to organism--still the rest of the path is by no means so easy as might at the first glance appear. Development in brain structure certainly does not always proceed _pari passu_ with a higher and more complex reasoning. In actual fact we find high "reasoning" power, quite unexpectedly here and there, up and down the animal kingdom. Some _insects_, with very little that can be called a brain at all, exhibit high intelligence; and some animals with smaller brains are more docile and intelligent than others with a much larger development. The ape, in spite of his close physical approach to the structure of man, and his still greater relative distance from the other animal creation, is not superior (if he is not decidedly inferior) in reason or intelligence to several animals lower down in the scale. Savages, again, have a brain greatly in excess of their actual requirements (so to speak). Hence the mere existence of brain, however complex, does not indicate the possession of mental power. There is reason to believe that all thought and exercise of the mind--in fact, every step in the process of "Education," whereby an ignorant person is brought at last to apprehend the most abstract propositions--is accompanied by some molecular (or other) change. So that a person who has been carefully educated has the brain in a different state from that of an exactly similarly constituted person whose brain has been subjected to no such exercise. But even if this action could be formulated and explained, it would not follow that thought is the _product_ of the molecular change; or that, _vice versâ_, if we could artificially produce certain changes, in the brain, certain thoughts and perceptions would thereon coexist with the changes, and arise in the mind of the subject forthwith. And if not, then no process of physical development accounts for grades of intellect; we have only mind developing as mind. But the theory of evolution will have nothing to do with any development but physical; or at any rate with mental development except as the result of physical: it knows nothing of pure mind, or spiritual existence, or anything of the sort. In the nature of things we can have neither observation nor experiment in this stage. We cannot by any process develop the lower mind of an animal into the higher mind of man, and prove the steps of the evolution.[1] It is important to remember that the power of _directing the attention by a voluntary process of abstraction_, is one that distinctively belongs to man. It is an effort of will, of a kind that no animal has any capacity for. By it alone have we any power of abstract reasoning, and it is intimately concerned with our self-consciousness and memory, and with our language. I am quite aware that animals possess something analogous to a language of their own; they can indicate certain emotions and give warning, and so forth, to their fellows. But that language could never develop into human language, or the animal will (such as it is) ever rise to a human will, or animals become endowed with self-consciousness, unless they could acquire the power of voluntarily abstracting the mind from one subject or part of a subject and fixing the attention on another. We cannot formulate any process of change whereby the lower state could pass on to or attain to the higher in this respect. [Footnote 1: We can of course follow the sort of mental development which is traceable when we consider the origin of our own sagacious and faithful dogs in the wild prairie dog: but this development is always in contact with the mind of man, and is, as it were, the result of man's action, as man's development in mind and soul is the result of God's action.] Therefore again we conclude that the higher reason is a gift _ab externo_. If we take a step further to the "spiritual" or "moral" faculties of man, we have the same difficulty intensified, if indeed it does take a new departure. To examine the question adequately would require us to go into the deep waters of psychology; and here we should encounter many matters regarding which there may be legitimate doubt and difference of opinion, which would obscure and lead us away from our main line of thought. This I would willingly avoid. But it is quite intelligible, and touches on no dangerous ground, when we assert that there is a distinct ascent--an interval again raising developmental difficulties, directly we pass from the intellectual to the moral. We may wonder at the high degree of intelligence possessed by some animals; but we are unable to conceive any animal possessing a power of abstract reasoning, having ideas of beauty (as such), or of manifesting what we call the poetic feeling. And still more is this so when we look at the further interval that lies between any perception of physical phenomena, any reasoning in the abstract, or investigation of mathematical truth, and the overmastering sense of obligation to the "moral law," or the action of the soul in its instinctive possession of the conception of a Divine Existence external to itself. It is because of this felt difference that we talk of the "spiritual" as something beyond and above the "mental." The distinction is real, though we must not allow ourselves to be led too far in attempting to scan the close union that, from another point of view, exists between the one and the other. In a recent number of "The Edinburgh Review,[1]" the author complains of Bishop Temple thus: "He uses the word spiritual in such a way that he might be taken to imply that we had some other faculty for the perception of moral truths, in addition to, and distinct from, our reason." And the writer goes on to make an "uncompromising assertion of reason as the one supreme faculty of man. To depreciate reason (he says) to the profit of some supposed 'moral' illative sense, would be to open the door to the most desolating of all scepticisms, and to subordinate the basis of our highest intellectual power to some mere figment of the imagination." [Footnote 1: July, 1885, p. 211, in the course of the article to which I have already alluded.] On the other hand, some writers (claiming to derive their argument from the Scriptures) have supposed they could assert three distinct natures in man--a spiritual, a mental (or psychic), and a bodily. Now there is no doubt that, rightly or wrongly (I am not now concerned with that), the Bible does distinctly assert that a "breath of lives" [1] was specially put into the bodily form of man, and adds that thereby "man became a living soul." But it is also stated of the animal creation that the breath of life was given to them,[2] and animals are said to have a "soul" (nephesh).[3] So that neither in the one case nor the other have we more than the two elements: a body, and a life put into it; though of course the man's "life" (as the plural indicates, and other texts explain) was higher in kind than that of the animal. [Footnote 1: The plural of excellence appears to mark something superior in the spirit of man over that of the animals. Also compare Job xxxiii. 4, "The breath of the Almighty hath given me life," with Isa. xlii. 5 and Zech. xii. 1.] [Footnote 2: Though not in the plural of excellence. See Gen. vi 17, vii. 22, &c.] [Footnote 3: Gen. i. 20, margin of A.V.] St. Paul, it is true, speaks of the "whole spirit, and soul, and body.[1]" But our Lord Himself, in a very solemn passage (where it would be most natural to expect the distinction, if it were absolute and structural, to be noticed), speaks of the "soul and body" only.[2] The fact is that we are only able to argue conclusively that, besides the physical form, we have a non-material soul, or a self. And our Lord, whose teaching was always eminently practical, went no further. We are conscious of a "self"--something that remains, while the body continually grows and changes. There was in _Punch_, some time ago, a picture of an old grandfather, with a little child looking at a marble bust representing a child. "Who is that?" asks the little one; and the old man replies, "That is grandfather when he was a little boy." "And who is it now?" rejoins the child. One smiles at the picture, but in reality it conceals a very important and a very pathetic truth. Nothing could well be greater than the outward difference between the grey hairs and bowed figure and the little cherub face; and yet there was a "self"--a soul, that remained the same throughout. In Platonic language, while the [Greek: eidôlon] perpetually changes, the [Greek: eidos] remains. We have, therefore, evidence as positive as the nature of the subject admits that we are right in speaking of the _body and the soul, or self_. And as we cannot connect the higher reasoning, and, above all, conscience and the religious belief, as a "property" of physical structure, we conclude that the Scripture only asserts facts when it attributes both to the soul, as a spiritual element or nature belonging to the body. Man is essentially one;[3] but there is both a material and a non-material, a physical and a spiritual element, in the one nature. But, being a spiritual element, that part of our nature necessarily has two sides (so to speak). It has its point of contact with self and the world of sense, and its point of contact with the world of spirit and with the Great Spirit of all, from whom it came. _Because_ of that higher "breath of lives" given by the Most High, man possesses the faculty of _consciousness of God_ (i.e., the higher spiritual faculties), besides the consciousness of self, or merely intellectual power regarding self and the external world. Therefore, when an Apostle desires to speak very forcibly of something that is to affect a man through and through, in every part and in every aspect of his nature, he speaks of the "whole spirit, soul, and body." To sum up: all that we know from the Bible is that God gave a "soul" (nephesh) to the animals, in consequence of which (when united to the physical structure) the functions of life and the phenomena of intelligence are manifested. So God gave a non-material, and therefore "spiritual," element to human nature; and this being of a higher grade and capacity to that of the animal world, not only in its union with physical structure, makes the man a "living soul"--gives him an intelligence and a certain reason such as the animals have, but also gives him, as a special and unique endowment; the consciousness of self (involving--which is very noteworthy--a consciousness of its own limitations) and the consciousness of God. Hence man's power of improvement. If the man cultivates only the self-consciousness and the reason that is with it, the Scriptures speak of him as the "natural or psychic man;" if he is enabled by Divine grace to develop the higher moral and spiritual part of his nature, and to walk after the Spirit, not after the flesh, he is a "spiritual man." [Footnote 1: 1 Thess. v. 23.] [Footnote 2: Matt. x. 28.] [Footnote 3: The well-known argument of St. Paul regarding the resurrection in 1 Cor. xv. (ver. 45, &c.) is well worthy of consideration in this connection. He deals with man as _one whole_; nothing is said about a man being (or having) a spirit separate from his soul and his body, and that spirit being given a higher body than it had upon earth; but of the whole man, soul _and_ body, being raised and changed into a man, also one whole, with a more perfect body--a body more highly developed in the ascending scale of perfection. I do not forget the passage where the same Apostle (2 Cor. v. 6) speaks of being in the body, and absent from the Lord; and of being "clothed upon;" but this does not in any way detract from the importance of the treatment of the subject in the First Epistle.] It is idle to speculate whether the "nephesh" of the animals, or the "living self" of the man, is an entity separate from the body, and capable of existing _per se_--of its own inherent nature--apart from it. We do not know that animal forms are the clothing of a lower-graded but separate spiritual form, or that such an animal soul or spirit can exist separately from the body; and we do not _know_ (from the Bible)--whatever may be the current language on the subject--that man's spirit is in its nature capable of anything like permanent separate existence.[1] Man is essentially one; and when the physical change called death passes over him, it does not utterly obliterate the whole being. The non-material element is not affected any more than it is by the sleep of every night; and the man will be ultimately raised, not a spiritual or immaterial form, but provided, as before, with a body, only one of a higher capacity and better adapted to its higher environments--the "spiritual body" of St. Paul, in a word. The original union of mind and matter is, on any possible theory, mysterious; and the separation of them for a time is neither less so, nor more. All this is perfectly true, whether the non-material element in man's nature is _necessarily_, inherently and _by nature_, immortal or not--a question which I do not desire to enter on. Hence it is that a certain element of truth is recognized in the protest of the Edinburgh Reviewer. On the other hand, as we have not only intelligence, emotions (which are possessed in lower degree by animals), self-consciousness, the power of abstract reasoning, and the higher faculties of the imagination,[2] but also the consciousness of God and the commanding sense of right and wrong; and seeing that the last-named are different in kind from the former, we give them a separate name, and speak of the moral or spiritual nature or capacity of man, as well as the intellectual or mental. Some (by the way) choose "moral" to include both, holding that ethical perceptions arise out of (or are intimately connected with) our sense of God. Others would make a further distinction, and confine "moral" to the (supposed) bare ethical perception of duty or of right and wrong, and add "spiritual" to distinguish the highest faculty of all, whereby man holds communion with his Maker and recognizes his relation to Him. [Footnote 1: This remark does not, of course, in any way touch the question whether the spiritual part of a man is conscious in the interval between death and resurrection, or whether it can be made sensible in any way whatever to living persons.] [Footnote 2: The poetic sense, the perception of the beautiful, &c.] Whether this further distinction is justified or not, there is a distinction between the moral and the purely intellectual; and we are justified in using different terms for things that are _practically_ different. This the Edinburgh Reviewer seems to have forgotten. It was necessary to my argument to enter on this somewhat lengthy examination of the spiritual nature of man, because, while we acknowledge the unity of man, we are compelled to recognize in his religious sense and aspirations and capacities something quite disparate--something that we could not get by a natural process of growth from such beginnings of reason as are observed in the lower animals. I am aware that Dr. Darwin conceived that the religious feeling of man might have grown out of the natural emotions of fear,[1] love, gratitude, &c., when once men began to question as to the explanation of the phenomena of life, and to ascribe the forces of nature to the possession of a spirit such as he himself was conscious of: and with much more positive intent, Mr. H. Spencer has also, after most painstaking inquiries, formulated what he conceives to be the origin of religious belief in man. He refers us to the early belief in a "double" of self, which double could be projected out of self, and remained in some way after death, so as to become the object of fear, and ultimately of worship. When this ancestor-worship resulted in the worship of a multitude of "genii" (whose individuality, as regards their former earthly connection, is more or less forgotten), then the idea of attaching the numerous divinities or ancestor-souls to the ocean, the sky, the sun, the mountains, and the powers of nature, arises; whence the poetic systems of ancient polytheistic mythology. Gradually men began to reason and to think, and they refined the polytheism into the "higher" idea of one great, central, immaterial all-pervading power, which they called God. [Footnote: 1 See the "Descent of Man," vol. i. p. 68 (original edition). But it is right to state that the subject is not treated in any way whatever so as to argue that the religious belief is a fancy, or development of fancy, with no God and no facts about God behind it.] Mr. Spencer, in effect, concludes that this "God" is only man's own idea of filling up a blank, of explaining the fact that there must be an ultimate first cause of whatever exists, and there is also a great source of power of some kind external to ourselves.[1] I am not going here to enter on any special argument as to the validity of these theories in their relation to the direct question of the nature and existence of God. What we are here concerned with is, whether they enable us to exclude the idea of a gift and a giver of spiritual or mental (we will not quarrel about terms) nature to man, and whether, by any fair reasoning from analogy, we can suppose man's reason and his "_sensus numinis_" to arise by the mere stages of natural growth and development. Dr. Darwin's supposition takes no notice of the moral law and its influence; indeed he adopts[2] the view that conscience is no sense of right and wrong, but only the stored up and inherited social instinct, a sense of convenience and inconvenience to the tribe and to the individual, which at last acts so spontaneously and rapidly in giving its verdict on anything, that we regard it as a special sense. It would of course be possible to expend much time and many words in argument on this subject. There is not, and never will be, any direct evidence as to the origin of conscience; and as that sense (like any other power of our mental nature) is capable of being educated, evoked, enlightened, and strengthened, and may also by neglect and contradiction deteriorate and wither away, there is ample room for allowing a certain part of the theory.[3] But many people who examine their own conscience will feel that the description certainly does not suit them; there are many things which conscience disapproves, of which no great evil consequences to themselves or any one else are felt. Conscience is constantly condemning "the way that seemeth good unto a man." _Ultimately_ no doubt, there is real evil at the end of everything that conscience warns a man against; but not such as "inherited experience" is likely to recognize. Is it, for instance, the experience of the mass of men, as men, that the "fleshly mind is death, but the spiritual mind is life and peace"? Is not rather the world at large habitually putting money-making, position-making, and the care of the things of the body, of time, and of sense, in the first place; and is not the moral law perpetually warning us that the fashion of the world passes away, and that what seems gold is in reality tinsel? As far as the condemnation that conscience passes on the broad evils which affect society--"thou shalt not steal," "thou shalt not lie," or so forth--no doubt it is supported by the transmitted sense of inconvenience; but who has told it of the evil of things that do not affect our social state? and who has changed the inconvenient, the painful, into the _wrong_? It is one thing to instinctively avoid a theft or a falsehood, even if the first origin of such instinct were the fear of consequences or the love of approbation; it is quite another--the inward condemnation of something which "the deceitfulness of sin" is able to excuse, and which the world at large would regard as permissible or at least venial. Even if inherited use has its full play, there is still a something wanted before the one can be got into (or out of) the other. Why, again, are savages prone to imagine natural phenomena to be caused or actuated by "spirits"? Surely it is because there _is_ consciously a spirit in man, and a Higher Power, even God, outside, who exists, though man in his ignorance has many false ideas regarding Him. [Footnote 1: It is not necessary to my immediate argument, and therefore I do not press it into the text (though I should be sorry to seem to forget it for a moment), to urge that St. Paul draws a clear distinction between the intellectual faculties and the higher spiritual ones, when he assures us that the clearest intellect alone cannot assimilate the truths of religion. For the spiritual faculties have been in man grievously deadened and distorted (to say the least of it), so that his intellectual faculties, bright and highly developed as they may be, will always prove insufficient for the highest life in the absence of the "grace of God." It is exactly analogous to the case of a man whom we might suppose to have his sense of sight, touch, &c., distorted, and he himself unable to correct them by aid of the senses of others. However acutely he might exercise his reason, he would be continually wrong in his conclusions. See 1 Cor. ii., the whole, but specially vers. 14, 15.] [Footnote 2: "Descent of Man," vol. i. p, 70.] [Footnote 3: The attempt (already alluded to) to separate moral and spiritual, to imagine something that is ethical, apart from the religious idea, has lent some strength to these ideas of the moral sense; but in fact, the moral sense is _inseparably_ connected with the idea of God, and His approval and disapproval. The idea of God may be obscured and lost, but conscience is the surviving trace of it; the circumference that accounts for the broken arc.] It is an objection of the same order that applies to the other theory (Mr. Spencer's). There can be little doubt that in many respects it is true: as an account of all _human_ systems of religion it is adequate and natural; but it breaks down hopelessly when we try to use it to explain how the conception of God originated in the mind. Just as there is a felt difference--not of degree or in form, but essential and radical in its nature--between the _undesirable_ and the _wrong_, so there is a difference between the idea of a mysterious thing towards which apprehension or awe is felt, and the conception of God. Granted that man believed in his own spirit or double, and attributed similar immaterial motor powers as a cause for the wind and waves, and so forth; granted that he at last "refined" this into the belief in one Spirit whose power was necessarily great and varied--the origin is still unexplained. How did man get the idea of a personal spirit or double--no such thing, _ex hypothesi_ existing? How did he get to formulate the idea of a _God_ when he had simplified his group of many spirits into one? If man is created with a consciousness of his own inner-self, _as a self_, he is able naturally to imagine a like self in other beings; if he has an idea of God innate in him, he can assimilate the truth when it is at last presented to his mind; and that is why he feels that it _is_ a refinement; a rising from the lower to the higher (because from falsehood to truth), to let the many gods give place to the One God. If the idea of God has been obscured, and the power of its apprehension deadened, the man can only grope about helplessly, fashioning this explanation of nature and that--all more or less false, but all dimly bearing witness to the two absolute facts, that there is an inner non-material self, and an external non-material God. If then there are insuperable difficulties in connecting thought with matter by any process of unaided development, there are also great difficulties, even when thought in a rudimentary form is given, in conceiving it developed into man's reason, or man's religious belief, by any known process of "natural" causation. CHAPTER VIII. _FURTHER DIFFICULTIES REGARDING THE HISTORY OF MAN_. There are, however, some other matters connected with the history of man on the globe, unconnected with psychological development, but which demand notice, as making the argument against an undesigned, unaided development of man a cumulative one. It is urged that whatever may be thought of the connection of man with the animal creation, at any rate the received Christian belief regarding the origin of man--especially his late appearance on the scene--is contrary to known facts, and that we have to mount up to a vast geologic antiquity to account for what is known from exhumed remains in caves and lake dwellings, and the like. Now no one pretends that the history of man is free from doubt and difficulty, but the doubt and difficulty are not confined to the "orthodox." For the inferences to be drawn from the exhumed remains are equally doubtful whatever views be adopted. I shall not go into great length on this subject, partly because some recent popular tracts of Canon Rawlinson, Mr. R.S. Pattison, and others, have already made the ordinary reader familiar with the main outlines of the subject; and still more because, be the views of archaeologists what they may, it is impossible for any rational person to contend either that they can be reduced to anything like unity among themselves, or that they lead to any conclusion favourable to the belief in the self-caused and undesigned evolution of man. It may be regarded as known, that at the dawn of history, mankind was passing through what may be called a Bronze age, in which weapons of bronze were used before tools of iron were invented. But this age was preceded by one in which even bronze was unknown. Stone implements, and some of bone and horn, were alone used. It is also well ascertained that there were two _widely divided_ stone ages. The latter, distinguished by the polishing of the stones, is described as the _neolithic_; the former, in which flint and other hard stone fragments were merely chipped or flaked to an edge, is called the _palaeolithic_. It is hardly contended that the neolithic age could have been more than four or five thousand years ago. There is always the greatest difficulty in fixing any dates because from the nature of the case written records are absent, and the stages of growth in the history of peoples overlap so. We know that sharp flakes of stone were still used for knives in the time of Moses and Joshua. We are not out of the stone age yet, as regards some portions of the globe; and it is quite possible that parts of the earth, not so very remote, may have been still in the midst of a stone age when Assyria, Chaldaea, and Egypt were comparatively highly civilized. It is also fairly certain that between the neolithic or smooth-stone age, and the palaeolithic, certain important geological changes took place, though those changes were not such as to have demanded any very great length of time for their accomplishment. The palaeolithic stone implements are found in river gravels and clays, along the higher levels of our own Thames Valley, that of the Somme in France, and in other places. They are also found at the bottom of various natural caverns. No human bones have been found as yet with the implements, but the bones of large numbers of animals have. And it seems certain that the men who made the implements were contemporaries of the animals, because in the later part of the age, at any rate, they drew or scratched likenesses of the animals on bone. Among these representations are figures of the _mammoth_ an extinct form well known to the reader by description and museum specimens of remains. The animals contemporary with these primeval men were the mammoth, species of rhinoceros and hippopotamus, the "sabre-toothed" lion, the cave-bear, the reindeer, besides oxen, horses, and other still surviving forms. In his address to the British Association in 1881 Sir John Lubbock called attention to the fact that these animals appear to indicate both a hot and a cold climate, and he referred to the fact (known to astronomers) that the earth passes through periods of slow change in the eccentricity of its orbit, and in the obliquity of the ecliptic. The result of the latter condition is, to produce periods of about 21,000 years each, during one-half of which the Northern hemisphere will be hotter, and in the other the Southern. At present we are in the former phase. But the obliquity of the ecliptic does not act alone; the eccentricity of the orbit produces another effect, namely, that when it is at a minimum the difference between the temperatures of the two hemispheres is small, and as the eccentricity increases, so does the difference. At the present time the eccentricity is represented by the fraction .016. But about 300,000 years ago the eccentricity would have been as great as .26 to .57. The result, it is explained, would have been not a uniform heat or cold, but extremes of both; there would probably have been short but very hot summers, and long and intensely cold winters. This, Sir John Lubbock thought, might account for the co-existence of both hot and arctic species, like the hippopotamus and rhinoceros on the one hand, and the musk-ox and the reindeer on the other. But such considerations really help us little. In the first place, it is only an assumption that the fossil hippopotamus _was_ an animal of a hot climate--it does not in any way follow from the fact that the now existing species is such; nor if we make the assumption, does it explain how, if the hot summer sufficed for the tropical hippopotamus, it managed to survive the long and cold winters which suited the arctic species. Moreover, no such calculations can really be made with accuracy: we do not know what other astronomical facts may have to be taken into consideration, nor can we say when such "periods" as those which are so graphically described, began or ended. In this very instance, we know that the mammoth only became extinct in comparatively recent times, since specimens have been found in Siberia, with the hair, skin, and even flesh, entirely preserved. Granted that the intense cold of the Siberian ice effected this, it is impossible to admit more than a limited time for the preservation--not hundreds of thousands of years. Professor Boyd Dawkins is surely right in stating that the calculations of astronomy afford us no certain aid at present in this inquiry. As regards the geological indications of age, the best authority seems to point to the first appearance of man in the post-glacial times: that is to say, that the gravels in which the palaeolithic implements are found were deposited by the action of fresh water after the great glacial period, when, at any rate, Northern Europe, a great part of Russia, all Scandinavia, and part of North America were covered with icefields, the great glaciers of which left their mark in the numerous scoopings out of ravines and lake beds and in the raising of banks and mounds, the deposit of boulders, and the striation of rocks _in situ_, which so many districts exhibit. The few instances in which attempts have been made, in Italy or elsewhere, to argue for a pliocene man (i.e. in the uppermost group of the tertiary) have ended in failure, at least in the minds of most naturalists competent to judge. One of the most typical instances of the position of the implement age has been discovered by Fraas at Shüssenried in Suabia; here the remains of tools and the bones of animals (probably killed for food) were found in holes made in the glacial _débris_. But here, again, it is impossible to say when this glacial age terminated, and whether man might not have been living in other more favoured parts while it was wholly or partially continuing. In Scandinavia no palaeolithic stone implements have been found, from which it may be inferred that the glacial period continued there during the ages when palaeolithic man hunted and dwelt in caves in the other countries where his remains occur. The best authorities do not suppose that the men _originated_ in the localities where the tools are found; and there is so little known about the geology of Central Asia (for example) that it is impossible to say whether tribes may not have wandered from some other places not affected by the glaciation we have spoken of. Again, the gravels and brick earths containing the tools are just of the kind which defy attempts to say how long it took to deposit and arrange them. It may be taken as certain, that after the one age ceased and the first men appeared, the beds in which their relics occur have been raised violently, and again depressed and subjected to great flushes and floods of water. The caves have been upheaved, and the gravels are found chiefly along the valleys of our present rivers, but at a much higher level, showing that there was both a higher level of the soil itself and a much greater volume of water. The Straits of Dover were formed during this period. But none of these changes required a very long time; and if we can trace back the later stone age, which shows remains of pottery and other proofs of greater civilization, to the dawn of the historic period not more than 4000 or 5000 years ago, there is nothing in the nature of the changes which, as we have stated, intervened between the palaeolithic and neolithic periods, that need have occupied more than a thousand or two of years. Upheavals of strata and disruptions may be the work of but a short time, or they may be more gradual. And as to the effect of water, that depends on its volume and velocity; no certain rule can be given. Our own direct experience shows that very great changes may take place in a few hundred years. "The estuaries," remarks Mr. Pattison,[1] "around our south-eastern coast, which have been filled up in historical times, some within the last seven hundred years to a height of thirty feet from their sea-level, by the gradual accumulation of soil, now look like solid earth in no way differing from the far older land adjoining. The harbours out of which our Plantagenet kings sailed are now firm, well-timbered land. The sea-channel through which the Romans sailed on their course to the Thames, at Thanet, is now a puny fresh-water ditch, with banks apparently as old as the hills. In Bede's days, in the ninth century, it was a sea-channel three furlongs wide." [Footnote 1: "Age and Origin of Man"--Present-Day Tract Series.] Thus we are in complete uncertainty as to the date of the palaeolithic man, or as to the time necessary to effect the changes in the surface of the earth which intervened between it and the later stone ages. But there is nothing which conflicts with the possibility that the whole may have occurred within some 8,000 years. For the supposition of Mons. Gabriel Mortillet that man has existed for 230,000 years, there is neither evidence nor probability. His theory is derived from an assumption that the geologic changes alluded to occupied an immense time; and the further assumption (if possible still more unwarranted) that the old race which used the chipped stone tools remained stationary for a very long period, and very gradually improved its tools and ultimately passed into the neolithic stage when the art of pottery became known, however rudely. But, in point of fact, we are not required by our belief in Scripture to find any date for the origin of man, at least not within any moderate limits (not extending to scores of thousands of years). The Bible was not intended to enable us to construct a complete science of geology or anthropology, and the utmost that can be got out of the text is that a date can be _suggested_ (not proved) for one particular family (that of Adam) by counting up the generations alluded to in Holy Writ before the time of Abraham. But these are manifestly recorded in a brief and epitomized form; nor do all the versions agree. We may well believe that a watchful Providence has taken care of the record of inspiration, but we know it has been done by human and ordinary agency. The Bible is God's gift to his Church, and the Church has been made in all ages the keeper of it. Now in the matter of early dates and numbers, an unanimous version has not been kept. According to the construction adopted in the Septuagint, the creation of Adam would go back 7,517 years, while the Vulgate gives 6,067 years. Dr. Hale's computation makes 7,294 years, and the Ussherian 5,967;[1] the Samaritan version is, I believe, further different from either. As it is, the facts show nothing inconsistent with an approximation to these several periods. As to any absolute date for the appearance of man as a species, no calculation is possible, because of a certain doubt, which no one can pretend to resolve, as to whether the Scriptures do assert the creation of _all_ mankind at any one period. If, owing to more positive discoveries in the future compelling us to put further back the date of man's first appearance upon earth, we have to suppose a beginning before the time of Adam, we are reminded that there is an allusion in the sixth chapter of the book called Genesis to "the sons of God" and the "daughters of men." Now this passage cannot conceivably refer to angels; nor can we ignore its existence, however doubtful we may feel as to its meaning.[2] [Footnote 1: I take these figures from Mr. R.S. Pattison.] [Footnote 2: The text which speaks of God making "of one blood all nations for to dwell on the face of the earth," would naturally apply to the races existing when the speaker uttered the words: it would be as unreasonable to press such a text into the service of _any_ theory of the creation of man, as it was absurd for the Inquisition to suppose that the Psalmist, when asserting that God had made the "round world so fast that it could not be moved," was contradicting the fact of the earth's revolution round the sun.] It can hardly be denied that such a text opens out the _possibility_ of an earlier race than that of Adam; in that case the creation of Adam would be detailed as the creation of the direct progenitor of Noah, whose three sons still give names (in ethnological language) to the main great races of the earth, with whom exclusively the Bible history is concerned, and especially as the direct progenitor of that race of whom came the Israelites, and in due time the promised seed--the Messiah. I do not say this _is_ so, nor even that I accept the view for my own part; I only allude to the possibility, without ignoring any of the difficulties--none of which, however, are insuperable--which gather round it. It is certainly a very remarkable fact that all about this region in which the Semitic race originated, traditions of Creation somewhat resembling the account in Genesis, the institution of a week of seven days, and a Sabbath or day of rest from labour, existed from very early times; and with these traditions, a belief in distinct races, one of which owned a special connection with, or relation to, the Creator. Here I may appeal to the work of Mr. George Smith and his discoveries of tablets from the ancient libraries of Assyria. Originally, the country to which I have alluded consisted of Assyria in the centre and Babylonia to the south; while to the east of Assyria was a country partly plain and partly hill, which formed the "plain of Shinar" and the hills beyond occupied by Accadian tribes, from whose chief city, Ur, Abraham, the forefather of the Jews, emigrated. The Assyrian documents are copies of Babylonian originals, but the Babylonian kingdom itself was a Semitic one founded on the ruins of an earlier population, the inhabitants of the plain of Shinar and the mountains beyond. Some time between 3000 and 2000 B.C. the Semitic conquerors of Babylonia took possession of the plains, and some time later conquered also the Accadian mountaineers. The Babylonians possessed and translated the old Accadian records: the Assyrian tablets are mostly, but not all, copies, again, of the Babylonian transcripts. The celebrated "Creation tablets," which contain an account closely corresponding to Genesis, are among those which were not copied from Accadian originals; and they do not date further back than the reign of Assur-bani-pal, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks; who reigned in the seventh century B.C. They may therefore be derived from the Bible, not the Bible from them. It would seem from some earlier (Accadian) tablets, that a different account of the Creation existed among them. But though it is doubtful how far the Accadians had preserved this account, or at least had others along with it, _they had a seven days week_ and _a Sabbath_. All this points to _one_ original tradition, which specified days of creation and a Sabbath, though it got altered and distorted, so that the true account was preserved as one among many local variations. This goes to prove the immense antiquity of the story, which is not affected by the fact that the actual inscription of it which we at present have, dates only about 670 B.C. The point here, however, interesting in the legends, is that they contained the idea of a special connection of one particular race with the Creator, and of other races, or of one other race, besides. As far as the possibility of bringing forward the history of mankind as any aid to the theory of Evolution is concerned, I might have very well let the subject alone, or even noticed it more briefly than I have done. For, in truth, there is no _evidence_ whatsoever, and all that the denier of creation can resort to is a supposed analogy and a probability that the peculiarities of man could be accounted for in this way or in that. But the main purpose of my brief allusion is to introduce the fact that, as far as any evidence to the contrary goes, we have an absolutely sudden appearance of man on the scene, and no kind of transitional form. Not only so, but there is no trace of any gradual development of man when he did appear. There was the first palaeolithic man; then a considerable geologic perturbation of the earth's surface, resulting in the upheaval of the cliffs in which the caves of remains occur, and in the alteration of the gravel beds in which the human remains are found; and then the neolithic age, with its evidently greater civilization (as evidenced by pottery, &c.) connected with early and traditional, but still with recent, history; but no trace of any development of one race into the other. The absence of all progressive change is forcibly indicated by the measurements of ancient skulls, which, though not found along with the flint tools, have been found elsewhere. It has been fully shown that they differ in no respect from the skulls of men at the present day; while the skulls of the apes most nearly anthropoid, or allied to the human form, remain as widely separated in brain-capacity as ever.[1] Thus the fact remains, that no intermediate form between the ape and the lowest man has been discovered, and that there is nothing like any progressive development in the races of man. These facts, taken together with what has been brought forward in the last chapter, show how completely the theory of the descent of man breaks down; how utterly unproved and untenable is the idea that he should have been evolved by natural causes and by slow steps from any lower form of animal life. [Footnote 1: The gorilla has a brain size of 30.51 cubic inches; the chimpanzee and ourang-outang (in the males) from 25.45 to 27.34 inches. According to Dr. J. Barnard Davis the average of the largest class of European skulls is 111.99, that of the Australian 99.35 cubic inches.] CHAPTER IX. _CONCLUDING REMARKS_. It will naturally be asked, "If there is all this objection to some parts of the theory of Evolution, or to that theory in an extreme or absolute form, how is it that it has been so eagerly accepted in the ranks of scientific men?" The answer is, in the first place, because the theory of Evolution is to a great extent true. When men speak of controversy with the Evolutionist and so forth, they of course mean such as insist on carrying the doctrine to a total and even virulent denial of any Divine control at all. And it must, I think, be admitted that much of the theological opposition offered to the doctrine was aimed at _this_ aspect of it. At first, men zealous for what they believed to be Divine truth, did not discriminate; they saw that the then new idea of evolution was, in many branches of its application, still very poorly proved, and they conceived that it could not be accepted apart from a total denial of religion. We have grown wiser in the course of time: misconceptions have been swept away; and everybody may be content with the assurance that there is no necessary connection even, far less any antagonism, between evolution and the Christian faith at all. We may admit all that is known of the one without denying the other. Where the controversy has to be maintained is, that some will insist (like Professor Häckel) in carrying evolution beyond what evidence will warrant; and not only so, but will insist on polemically putting down all religion on the strength of their improved theories. If "Evolutionists" complain of the treatment they have received at the hands of "Theologians," they will at least, in fairness, admit that there has been some misconception, some error on both sides. What we maintain is, that evolution (i.e., here, as always, unlimited, uncontrolled evolution) still fails to account for many facts in nature; that we are still far from holding anything like a complete scheme in our hands; there may be _limits_ to the wide circle of progressive changes, to the results of development, of which we are ignorant; and there is, above all, in that most important of all questions--the descent of man--an absolute want of proof of animal _descent_ (i.e., in any sense which includes the "soul" or spiritual faculties of man). Hence that evolution in no way clashes with an intelligent Christian belief. In saying this, I would carefully avoid undervaluing the services which the evolution theory has rendered, and is rendering, to science. Even in its first form as a mere hypothesis, it was an eminently suggestive one; there was from the first quite truth enough in it to make it fruitful, and many working hypotheses have been immensely useful in science, which have in the end been very largely modified. Before Darwin's wonderfully accurate mind and marvellous skill in collecting and making use of facts, turned the current of natural science into this new channel, men seemed to be without an aim for their naturalist's work. The _savant_, for example, procured an animal evidently of the cat tribe, and another species like a polecat. He knew as a fact that the feline teeth had a certain structure, and that the dental formula of the viverrine animals is different. Here, then, he could distinguish and perhaps name the species; but what more was to be done? All natural history as a study seemed to end in classifying and giving long names to plants and animals. The Evolution theory at once gave it a new object. Why is the dental formula of the _viverrinae_ different? What purpose has the long spur in the flower of _Angraecum_, or the marvellous bucket of _Coryanthes_, the flytrap of _Dionaea_, the pitcher of _Nepenthes_? What is the cause, what is the purpose, what is the plan in the scheme of nature, of these structures? Under the stimulus of such questions naturalists woke up to new views of classification, to new experiments, inquiries, and to research for facts and the explanation of facts, in all quarters of the globe. No wonder that science rose, under such an impulse, as a butterfly from its chrysalis. But some will not be satisfied with any scheme the parts of which are separated, or which admits of anything unknown or unexplainable. They want to unite all into one grand and simple whole, which glorifies their own intelligence, and does not force them to humble patience and waiting for more light. And then the fatal enmity of the human heart--which is a plain fact, an undeniable tendency--delights to get rid of the idea of God's Sovereignty, the humbling sense that everything is at His absolute disposal, and nothing could be but as He wills it. It seems so satisfactory to eliminate all external mysterious power, to make the whole "_totus teres atque rotundus_"--having started the great machine of being _somehow_ to see it all expand and unroll of itself and advance to the end. Imagination leaps the chasms, minimizes the difficulties, passes from the possible to the certain, from the "may have been" to the "must have been" and to "it was so," and, fascinated with the _completeness_ of its scheme, commences to denounce and revile as ignorant and unscientific all that would, calmly appeal to evidence, and confess ignorance, or at least a suspended judgment, in any stage where the evidence is negative or incomplete. It has been well observed that "men are so constituted that completeness gives a special kind of satisfaction of its own, and a habit of specially regarding the general uniformity of nature begets a desire to assume its absolute and universal uniformity." There _is_ a great mystery underlying life and the plan in which the animal form, the organs of sight, hearing, and the rest, run through the whole creation: and, given a mystery, there is always ample room for speculation. Taking firm hold of the facts of development and variation, the extreme evolutionist is carried away with the idea of having the same principle throughout: he is impatient of any line or any check; he is therefore prepared to ignore all difficulties, to hope against hope for the discovery of to him necessary--but, alas, non-existent--intermediate forms, till at last he comes to deny, not only his God, but his own soul, as a spiritual and supra-physical entity.[1] [Footnote 1: Those who want a specimen of the way in which extreme evolutionists will _romance_ (it can be called nothing else) will do well to read Dr. Häckel's "History of Creation," only they must be on their guard at every step. The author constantly states as facts (or, perhaps, with an impatient "must have been") the existence of purely hypothetical forms, of which there is _no kind_ of evidence. To such ends does the love of completeness lead!] Such extremes are no part of true science, and have neither helped the progress of knowledge, nor advanced the condition of mankind. But, on the other hand, let us hear no more of a sweeping condemnation of the theory of Evolution as a whole; let us beware of any insistence on, or assumption of, the supposed fact that God created separately--ready-made and complete--all known animal forms, bringing them up from the ground, like the armed men in the Greek legend, from the dragon's teeth. We have no more right to dogmatize and assume a scheme of creation from a popular and long-accepted interpretation of the Bible, than the evolutionist has to ignore the palpable evidences of Divine guidance and design, and construct a theory or organic being which ignores both. PART II. CHAPTER X. _THE GENESIS NARRATIVE--ITS IMPORTANCE_. We have now completed the first portion of our inquiry: there remains the second, which, to a large class, at any rate, will appear of not less importance. For the Scriptures, which they have been taught to trust, contain a brief but direct and positive statement regarding Creation, as well as numerous other less direct allusions to the subject, all (as far as I know) in unquestioned harmony with the first. Is the account in the Book of Genesis true? It is necessary to answer this question, because, even if a general belief in an Almighty Author and Designer of all things is shown to be reasonable, still the Scripture ought surely to support the belief; and it would be strange if, when we came to test it on this subject, we found its professed explanations would not stand being confronted with the facts. No one will, I think, deny that the question is important. Writers of the "anti-theological" school still continue to insist on the falsity of the Mosaic narrative, as if the error was not yet sufficiently slain, and was important enough to be attacked again and again. And theological writers, down to the most modern, continue to explain the text in one way or another;--besides, _they_ admit the importance, under any circumstances. I do not forget that there is a school of thought, which is distinctly Christian in its profession, but does not allow the importance. It would regard the narrative as addressed to Jews only, and therefore as one which does not concern us. If that was all, it would not be needful for me to discuss the position. But it has been held, not only that the narrative does not concern us, but _also_ that it is certainly inaccurate. This view I cannot adopt: it seems not quite fair to ourselves, and not quite fair to the Jews. Let me explain what I mean. If we have nothing to do with the narrative, let us abstain _equally_ from defending it _or_ pronouncing it wrong--that is for ourselves. As to the Jewish Church, a little more must be said. Let us admit, at any rate for argument's sake, that the separation between the Jewish formal and ceremonial religion and Christianity is as wide as can be wished. Nor would I undervalue the importance of insisting on pure Christianity, as distinct from Judaism. And, further, let us (without any question as to ultimate objects) regard the narrative as primarily addressed to Jews, and let us admit that it may have been unimportant, for the purpose of the first steps in Divine knowledge, that any account should be given of Creation beyond the primary fact that all idolatrous cosmogonies were false, and that the Unseen God of Israel alone made the heavens and the earth "in the beginning." Why should the Jews have received that truth through the medium of a story of which the whole framework was false, and nothing but the moral true? The framework, moreover, is one so plainly _professing to be fact_, that it was certain to be received as such by a simple people. It seems to me that there is something very suspicious, something repugnant to notions of truth and honest dealing, in the possible communication of underlying Divine truth through the medium of stories, which are not stories on the face of them, but profess and pretend to be statements of fact and authoritatively made. But, further, it cannot be denied that, whatever allowance may have to be made under the early Jewish dispensation for the ideas and weaknesses of a semi-barbarous people, whatever "winking" there may have been "at times of ignorance," the main object was, by a gradual revelation,[1] by a system of typical ordinances and ceremonies, to lead up to the full spiritual light of the Christian dispensation. Everything written, said, or done, was a step--however small an one--always tending in the one direction, according to the usual law of Evolution. The Christian believer may then look back to the early stages as imperfect foreshadowings and dim illustrations of the whole truth; but he would, I should think, on any ordinary principles, be shocked to find truth developed out of positive error. And should the error have been discovered, as it now is[2] (in the view of these I am contending against), this discovery might have arrested the further development of Divine truth altogether. If Moses, or whoever wrote the Book of Genesis--we will not cavil at that--was allowed to compose his own fancies or beliefs on the subject of Creation, _and to state them as Divine fact_ (no matter that the reader at the time was not able to find out the error), would not grave suspicion attach to whatever else he put forward? Who could tell that, on any other subject, the plainest and most direct statement of fact was not equally a fancy, only embodying or enshrining (under the guise of its errors) some real Divine facts? If Genesis i. is unreliable, we have a case of a writer going out of his way to add to certain truths, which might easily have been stated by themselves, a number of positive declarations, _as of Divine authority_, regarding facts, which are not facts. [Footnote 1: I am not aware of any authority, living or dead, who has gone so far as to deny that God's revelation to the Jewish Church was in any way connected with Christianity; that it was not even a stage of progress, or preparatory step towards the kingdom of Christ.] [Footnote 2: And was _sure to be_ sooner or later, when a science of Biology and Palaeontology became possible.] The great truths that God is really the Maker and Author of all things, and that man has a spiritual being, and so forth, surely _gain nothing_ from being conveyed to the world in the folds of a fable. And when it is not in a confessed fable, but a fable put forth as fact--"God said," "God created," "it was so"--not only is there no gain, but our sense of fitness and of truth receive a shock. A parable is always discernible as a parable, a vision as a vision. When our Lord, for example, tells us of the ten virgins, we do not suppose Him to be revealing the actual existence of ten such maidens, wise and foolish. We know that He is reading a lesson of watchfulness. But looking at the Genesis narrative, who could suppose it to be a parable? If sober, unmistakable statement of fact is possible, we surely have it here, in intention, at least. The plan of teaching truth in an envelope of error is _per se_ difficult to conceive. But how much worse is it when we consider--what criterion does mankind possess for disinterring and distinguishing the elements of truth? If in religion we had only to do (as some would perhaps contend) with obvious enforcements of common morality and kindness, there might be a possibility of getting over the difficulty, because man would possess some kind of criterion whereby to distinguish what was fictitious, by the simple process of considering whether any given statement bore on morals or not. Such a test would not indeed go very far, because the human race is by no means agreed on all moral questions; nor does it always find it easy to say what is, and what is not, directly or indirectly connected with morals. But, in fact, the scope of religion cannot be so confined: and then the difficulty returns; for a revelation that tells us anything of the nature of God and His method of government, of the nature of our own being and of a future state, must necessarily go beyond our own ethical knowledge and powers of judging, or it would not be a revelation. Supposing that the revelation regarding such vital subjects is occasionally conveyed through the medium of erroneous statements, where in any given case would be the certainty as to what was Divine truth, and what not so? This argument applies equally to another school of thinkers, who do not care to tell us what the narrative in itself means: who believe that God did not do what He is said to have done in Genesis, and yet who hold that the narrative is in a sense inspired, and that we may learn from it the great facts that God (and none other) originated all things--that man has a spiritual element in his nature, and that woman is equal in nature, but subordinate in position, to man, and so forth. Not only is enlightened judgment, even, inadequate to pronounce with certainty on how much is true; but the strange feeling still remains, if God designed to teach us these truths only, why was it not possible to enable the writer[1] to state them without the (purely gratuitous) error? The sufferance of such a strange and unnecessary mixture of error seems rather like that "putting to confusion" of the human mind, which we feel sure the Great Teacher would never willingly perpetrate. [Footnote 1: For on the supposition stated, there _is_ a revelation in the text. Nor could any class of believer deny this. It is entirely unnecessary to define the kind and extent of insphation. But "all Scripture is '_theopneustos_'"--I leave the word purposely untranslated (2 Tim. iii. 16); that surely means that the Divine Spirit exercised _some kind_ of continuous control over the writers.] Nor, again, can the narrative be got over by saying it is a poetic side or aspect of the facts, and not to be taken literally. If any one knows exactly what this means, and can tell us always how to translate the matter into plain language, it is to be wished that he would enlighten the world as to the process. But even if such process exists infallibly and universally, still, one would suppose, the narrative must, to begin with, be unmistakable poetry. And here, again, the narrative bears every mark of an intention to state facts, not poetic aspects of facts. Nor can we take the narrative as belonging to a familiar class in Scripture where a dream is used as a vehicle of communication. In those cases there is really no room for doubt; the visible facts themselves are obviously designed only to typify or represent some other facts. The events stated in Genesis are not of this class. Those, therefore, who would be content with getting over the narrative without caring for its details, can, I must suspect, have hardly given adequate attention to the form and to the contents of the narrative as it stands. Not only are the statements positive, but, taking any interpretation whatever of them, they are not nearly imaginative enough to suit the purpose. They have an obvious amount of relation to fact which has never been denied.[1] If the narrative is purely human even (and that the school we are considering do not aver), how did the writer come to be accurate even to that extent? Take only the order of events. I admit it does not correspond with the geologic record in the way commonly asserted; yet it has a very remarkable relation to that sequence. Now, in any case, the writer could have had no knowledge of any kind _of his own_ on the subject: how did he hit on this particular arrangement?[2] It is a mere matter of calculation on the well-known rules of permutation and combination to realize in how many different ways the same set of events could have been arranged; the number is very considerable. And he could derive no assistance from any similar existing narrative. If we conclude from the Assyrian discoveries that a non-biblical but similar narrative existed, still it is certain that the principal one we as yet have is so late in date, that it is more likely to be derived from the Bible than the Bible from it. And though, on referring to the earlier tablets, we find traces of the same narrative, it is so obscured by idolatrous and false details, that the Bible writer must have had to make a virtually new departure to get his own simple narrative. A re-revelation would be required. As to all other cosmogonies, Egyptian, Indian, and Buddhistic, nothing can be more opposed in principle and in detail than they are to the severe and stately simplicity and directness of the Mosaic. [Footnote 1: Not even, for example, by Professor Häckel.] [Footnote 2: How, for example, did the writer come to introduce the adjustment of hours of daylight and seasons in the _middle_, after so much work had been done? How did he come to place _birds_ along with fish and water monsters, and not separately?] We cannot, then, account for the narrative on human grounds; nor can we suppose that any inspiring control would have given the author so much truth, and yet allowed so much error. All this points to only one of two possible conclusions: either the narrative is not inspired at all, and is a mere misleading story, into which the name of God is introduced by the author's piety--and so really teaches us nothing, since it is not revelation; _or_ the narrative is, as a whole, divinely dictated, and must be true _throughout_, if we can only arrive by due study at its true meaning. That part of it is, or may be, true, even on the most cursory study, is not denied; that it is _all_ true will appear, I think, in the sequel. But there is a shorter and simpler reason why the rejection of the narrative in Genesis would be a direct blow to Christian faith. The plain truth is that it can hardly be denied, by any candid student of the New Testament, that our Lord and His apostles certainly received the early chapters of Genesis as of Divine authority. This has always been perceived by the whole school of writers opposed to the Faith. They therefore continue to attack these early revelations, and rejoice to overturn them if they can, because they are aware that hardly any chapters in the Bible are more constantly alluded to and made the foundation of practical arguments by our Lord and His apostles. If these chapters can be shown to be mythical, then the Divine knowledge of our Lord as the Son of God, and the inspiration of His apostles, are called in question. In the New Testament, especially, there are repeated and striking allusions to Adam, the temptation of the woman by the Serpent, and the entrance into the world of sin and death. Our Lord Himself places the whole argument of His teaching on marriage and the permissibility of divorce on Genesis ii. 24 (_cf_. St. Matt. xix. and St. Mark x.). In St. John viii. 44 our Lord clearly alludes to the Edenic narrative when He speaks of the tempter as a "manslayer ([Greek: anthropoktonos]) from the beginning." Still more remarkable is the argument of St. Paul in Romans v.; altogether based as it is on the historical verity of the account of the Fall; and other allusions are to be found in 1 Cor. xi. 8, in 2 Cor. xi. 3, in the Epistle to the Ephesians, and elsewhere. In short, there are at least sixty-six passages in the New Testament, in which the first eleven chapters of Genesis are directly quoted or made the ground of argument. Of these, six are by our Lord Himself, two being direct quotations;[1] six by St. Peter, thirty-eight by St. Paul, seven by St. John, one by St. James, two by St. Jude, two by the assembled apostles, three by St. Luke, and one by St. Stephen. [Footnote 1: St. Matt. xix. 4; St. Luke xvii. 27; and perhaps we might add a third--St. Matt. xxiii. 35.] We cannot, in fact, possibly avoid the conclusion that our Lord and His apostles admitted the Divine origin and historical truth of these chapters. Therefore, we are bound as Christians to accept them, and that without glossing or frittering away their meaning, when we have arrived, by just processes, at what that meaning really is. The fact just stated further warns us against accepting an indefinite interpretation which, while it acknowledges the truth of the general conclusion, still virtually, if not in so many words, allows that the details may be wholly inaccurate. CHAPTER XI. _SCRIPTURE METHODS OF REVELATION_. Passing, then, to a consideration of the explanations of the narrative that may be or have been given at various times, I would first call attention to the fact, that it seems in many instances to have been the distinct purpose of Divine inspiration to allow the meaning of some passages to be obscure; perhaps among other reasons, that men might be compelled to study closely, to reason and to compare, and thus to become more minutely acquainted with the record. Especially in a case of this sort, where the world's knowledge of the facts would necessarily be gradual, was it desirable that the narrative should be confined in scope, and capable of being worked out and explained by the light of later discoveries; because, had the narrative really (as has long been supposed) been revealed to tell us what was the actual course of evolution of created forms on earth, it would not only have occupied a disproportionate space in the sacred volume, but would have been unintelligible to the world for many centuries, and would have given rise to much doubting and false argument, to the great detriment of men's spiritual enlightenment. It would have diverted men's minds from the great moral and conclusion of the whole (and here it is that the "moral" or conclusion is so important) to set them arguing on points of natural science. The Bible was never intended (so far we may agree with all the schools of thought) to be a text-book on biology or geology. We need rather to be impressed with the great facts of God's Sovereignty and Providence, and to know definitely that all the arrangements of our globe and all forms of life are due to Divinely-created types. This is exactly secured by the narrative as it stands; but such a purpose would not be served by a narrative which, while it contained these great facts, had them enwrapped in a tissue of unnecessary and false details. And therefore it is, if I may so far anticipate my conclusion, that the narrative has no direct concern with how, when, and where, the Creation slowly worked itself out under the Divine guidance which is still elaborating the great purpose of the "ages"; it confines our attention to what God, the great Designer, did and said in heaven, as preliminary to all that was to follow on earth. The former was not a proper subject for revelation, because man would in time come to learn it by his studies on earth; but the latter all ages could only learn--the first as well as the latest--from a Divine Revelation. Again, let me address a few words to those who are tempted, half unconsciously perhaps, to think that any lengthy prelude and "elaborate" explanation of Genesis must condemn the narrative _à priori_, or be derogatory to the dignity of Revelation. Why the narrative should be brief and concise I have just suggested. That it needs explanation of _some_ sort is inevitable, because it _must_ be put into human language; and directly such language is employed, we come upon such terms as "let there be," "he created," and "days," which do not always call forth the same ideas in all minds. It will not have escaped the attention of any earnest student, that Scripture has several different methods of describing things so as to reveal them to men. This, a moment's reflection will enable us to expect. However high and wonderful the things to be stated are, in order to be brought within reach of human understanding _they must be expressed in terms of human thought and experience_; and these are imperfect and essentially inadequate. Hence it is, that many truths have to be brought before us in special or peculiar ways. How, for instance, are we told of the temptation and fall of man? How are we to understand what was meant by the Tree of Life or the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, or by the Serpent speaking and beguiling Eve? We are at a great loss to give a precise explanation, though the practical meaning is not difficult. The facts may be none the less true, though from their transcendental character it may have been necessary to put them down in mysterious, possibly even in merely allegorical, language. Another instance of this might be given in the account of Satan in the presence of the Lord as described in the Book of Job, or of the lying Spirit described by Micaiah when prophesying before Ahab. It maybe that these narratives describe to us transactions in a world beyond our own, which _could_ only be conveyed to us in figures or in imperfect form. When St. Paul was caught up into the third heaven, he "heard unspeakable things" which it was not _possible_ for him to utter--the medium of expression was wanting. Divine or mysterious things have, then, to be described in peculiar language which is not always easy to understand. Nor, having respect to the varying requirements of the different ages, or the circumstances of the time and of the inspired writer, is it easy to understand why any particular form of communication was selected, though doubtless if we knew more we should see a good reason for it. This gives us one class of Scripture passages--of methods of revelation. On the other hand, there are in Scripture many facts of the highest import, and in themselves of transcendent magnitude, which are yet capable of being stated without any possibility of our interpreting or understanding the narrative in more ways than one. When it is stated that Christ Jesus rose from the dead, we know beyond all reasonable doubt what is meant. The fact may be true or false, but the narrative of the fact needs no explanation; there are no terms which need expansion--which could bear more than one possible meaning, and which could be used accordingly in one sense or another. This instances a second class. Again, we can bring forward yet another class of Scripture revelations, namely, passages which are necessarily understood with reference to certain other matters which are unexpressed but are taken for granted, or in which the words used may bear more than one meaning, or a meaning which is uncertain or obscure. If the unexpressed matter can be supplied without doubt, then all ages will agree in the interpretation; and if the terms can (by reference to context or otherwise) be explained, the same result follows: if not, then in interpreting the narrative, each age will _make its own assumption_ regarding the terms used, on the basis of such knowledge as it possesses. It follows, then, inevitably, that if the state of knowledge varies, the interpretation will be different according to the different standard of knowledge, according to which the necessary assumptions are made. And yet all the while the authority of the passage itself is not touched. As it is unquestionable that such different classes of passage do occur in Scripture, it is merely a question of criticism whether any given passage is of this class or that, and whether its terms do admit of or require explanation. It is no doubt possible to make mistakes and to err by refusing the direct meaning, and giving to the terms an assumed meaning for which there is no real necessity.[1] We have always to be on our guard against giving special meanings to words where they are not required; but granted that caution, there undoubtedly are passages in which either the terms themselves are not plain, or in which they may really have a meaning different from the ordinary one. [Footnote 1: As, for example, where persons desirous to get over the plain reference to Baptism in St. John iii. 5, try to explain away the term "water" to mean something metaphorically but not actually water.] To descend from the general to the particular, it is obvious that the account of Creation in Genesis i., ii. is in such a form that we must assume our own ideas of the term "day" therein employed, and also those to be attached to "created" and similar terms. In early times, no one would take "day" to mean anything else but an earth day of the ordinary kind, and no one would question whether or not the whole existing animals and plants, or their ancestors, appeared on earth in six such days, or whether anything else was meant. Again, by the time St. Augustine was writing, a little more knowledge of nature and a little more habit of reasoning about the origin of things was in the world, and that knowledge led people to suppose that creation meant only the making of things "out of nothing," but that it would take longer than six times twelve hours, so that "days" might mean "periods." And people imagined for a long time that--taking for an example the work in the middle of the narrative--there was a time when the earth emerged from the tumult of waters, that it then got covered with plants, the waters remaining barren of life; but that when the plants had come up all over the ground, then the waters all at once became full of all sorts of sea-shells, fish, and monsters of the deep, and so on. They did all this, by naturally _assuming_ that the terms "creation," "day," &c., meant what the _existing state of knowledge_ at the time suggested. At the present day, one would have supposed that every one must feel that while the term "day" might or might not admit of explanation, certainly _creation_ (i.e., terms implying it) did require very great care in interpreting, and very great consideration as to what they really meant But however that may be, we have here a passage which _must_ have an explanation; and which must have an explanation that depends on the state of knowledge. The utility of Revelation is not negatived by this necessary result of the employment of human language in describing the facts. It was _not_ necessary before, that all should be understood; it may be now increasingly necessary in the purposes of God that it should be. At any rate the fact is so, that in former days people did not possess the data for knowing fully what creation meant, and certainly they do now possess it to a very much greater extent at least. Always men could learn from the narrative what it always was important for them to learn, namely, God's Sovereignty and Authorship. It is in this way that the value of the _general_ teaching of the narrative comes out, and not by trying to allow a mixture of truth and falsehood in Revelation. All is and always was true; but _all_ the truth was not equally extractable at all times. Again: the dignity of the old written Revelation is not compromised because God has virtually given a further revelation in His works, i.e., by enabling man to know more about the rock-strata and the succession of life on the earth. That is what it really comes to. It should never be forgotten that the book of Nature _is_ a revelation. The _works_ of God, if interpreted truly, are evidence of the same nature as the _word_ of God if interpreted truly. God has created man and his reason. It is impossible to suppose that it can be unrighteous reasoning in God's sight, to derive from the facts of nature any legitimate conclusion to which those facts point. It is childish to believe that God created ready-made--if I may so speak--rocks with fossils in them, marks of rain-drops showing which way the wind blew at the time, foot-prints of birds, animals with remains of the prey they had been feeding on, in their stomachs, and so forth. It is perfectly reasonable and right to conclude certainly, that those creatures were once living beings; that the surface of the earth was once a soft sediment which received the impression of the rain-drops as they fell; and that stratified rocks were deposited out of lakes and seas, as we see alluvial strata deposited at the present day. It is impossible, therefore, that (if we are not misled by appearances) any well-ascertained fact can be contrary to the truth of God as explained by Revelation. If we are not sure of the facts of nature, we must wait patiently till further knowledge enlightens us, and must not hastily conclude that the Bible is wrong. The repeated corrections which successive years have compelled us to make in conclusions which were once firmly accepted and proclaimed as "truths of science," should teach us caution in this respect. Nor, lastly, is it any reproach to the Church, as keeper of the Divine Revelation, that its opinion of certain passages should vary with the growth of knowledge. It would be hardly necessary to make this obvious remark but for the fact that it has been reproached against Christian belief, that science is contrary to the Bible, and that the Church has ever had to confess itself wrong, after having persecuted people for not following its peculiar views. It is, indeed, unfortunate that a blind zeal for God has led, in the past, to persecution; the Church failing to see that such men as Galileo and Bruno never denied God at all, nor did their discoveries really contradict the Word. But persecution is not a sin peculiar to the Church; it is a sin of human nature. It is also true that Christian views may be wrong, but the fault is in the views, not in the Bible. Scientific men, of all people, should be the last to complain of _change_ in views, seeing that what was science two hundred years ago is now (much of it) exploded nonsense. There is no harm whatever in changing our views about the meaning of difficult passages--provided we never let go our hold on the central truth, and put the error to our own account, not saying that the Word itself is wrong. It may, in this connection, be at once observed that any particular explanation, or that one which I propose presently to suggest, of the first chapters of Genesis, may not commend itself to the reader, and yet the general argument I have adduced will hold good notwithstanding. All that I care to contend is, that science does not contradict a syllable of the narrative on _one_ possible interpretation, and that changes in view as to interpretation are no arguments against the truth of the passage itself. CHAPTER XII. _METHODS OF INTERPRETING THE NARRATIVE--ASSUMPTIONS OF MEANING TO CERTAIN TERMS._ Returning, then, to the narrative in the Book of Genesis, I think we may take it as clear that the passage stands in such a concise and condensed form, that it is obviously open to _be interpreted_. Further, that we should not be surprised if the interpretation at the present day, with our vastly increased knowledge of Nature, is different from what it was in earlier times. I make no apology for repeating this so often, because it is really amazing to see the way in which "anti-theological" writers attack what _they suppose_ to be the interpretation of the narrative, or what some one else supposes to be such, and seem to be satisfied that in so doing they have demolished the credibility of the narrative itself. If you choose to assume that Creation as spoken of by the sacred writer means some particular thing, or even if the mass of uneducated or unreflecting people assume it and you follow them, I grant at once that the narrative can be readily made out to be wrong. Permit me, then, to repeat once more, that the narrative is in human language, and uses the human terms "created," "made," and "formed," and that these terms _do_ (as a matter of fact which there is no gainsaying) bear a meaning which is not invariable. Hence, without any glossing or "torturing" of the narrative, we are under the plain obligation to seek to assign to these terms a true meaning _with all the light that modern knowledge_ can afford. Now (having already considered the school of interpretation which declines to attend to the exact terms) we can confine our attention to two classes of interpreters. One explains the term "days" to mean long periods of time; the other accepts the word in its ordinary and most natural sense, and endeavours to eliminate the long course of developmental work made known to us by palaeontological science, and supposes all that to have been passed over in silence; and argues that a final preparation for the advent of the man Adam was made in a special work of six days. All the well-known attempts at explanation, such as those of Pye-Smith, Chalmers, H. Miller, Pratt, and the ordinary commentaries, can be placed in one or other of these categories. Now, as regards both, I recur to the curious fact (already noted) that it seems never to enter into the conception of either school to inquire for a moment what the sacred writer meant by "created"--God "created"--God said "let there be." It _is_ curious, because no one can reasonably say "these terms are obvious, they bear their own meaning on the surface;" a moment's analysis will scatter such an idea to the winds. Yet the terms _are_ passed by. The commentators set themselves right earnestly to compare and to collate, to argue and to analogize, on the meaning of the term "days;" the other term "created" they take for granted without--as far as I am aware--single line of explanation, or so much as a doubt whether they know what it really means! The interpretation that I would propose to the judgment of the Church is just the very opposite. It seems to me that the word _day_ as used in the narrative needs no explanation; it seems to me that the other does. As regards the term "day," it is surely a rule of sound criticism never to give an "extraordinary" meaning to a word, when the "ordinary" one will give good and intelligible sense to a passage. And looking to the fact that, after all, when the days of Genesis _are_ explained to mean periods of very unequal but possibly enormous duration, that explanation is not only quite useless, but raises greater difficulties than ever, I should think it most likely that the "day" of the narrative should be taken in the ordinary sense. But of this hereafter. On the other hand, with regard to the terms "creation,[1]" "created," "Let there be," and so forth, I find ample room for the most careful consideration and for detailed study before we can say what is meant. Even then there remains a feeling of profound mystery. For at the very beginning of every train of reflection and reasoning on the subject, we are just brought up dead at this wonderful fact, the existence of _matter_ where previously there had been _nothing_. The phrase "created _out of_ nothing" is of course a purely conventional one, and, strictly speaking, has no meaning; but we adopt it usefully enough to indicate our ultimate fact--the appearance of matter where previously there had been nothing. Nor is the difficulty really surmounted by alleging such a mere _phrase_ as "matter is eternal," for we have just as little mental conception of self-existent, always--and _without beginning_--existent matter, as we have of "creation out of nothing." [Footnote 1: The entire silence of commentators regarding the doubtful meaning of "creation" is so surprising, that I have had the greatest difficulty in persuading myself that the explanation I propose is new. Yet certainly I have never come across it anywhere.] The human mind has always a difficulty when it is brought face to face with something that is beyond the scope not only of its own practical, but, even of its theoretical or potential ability. The "creation," therefore, of matter by a Divine Power is matter of _faith_, as I endeavoured to set forth in the earlier pages of this little work; but it is _reasonable_ faith, because it can be supported by sound reasoning from analogy and strong probability. All our attention, then, I submit, should be directed to understanding what is "creation" in the sacred narrative. CHAPTER XIII. _THE GENESIS NARRATIVE CONSIDERED GENERALLY._ I.--THE FIRST PART OF THE NARRATIVE. § 1. _Objections to the Received Interpretations_. Taking the narrative as it stands, we find it to consist of two parts. First, a general statement, of which no division of time is predicated, and which is unaccompanied by any detail. Second, there is an account seriatim of certain operations which are stated to have been severally performed one on each of six days. As regards the first portion, we have no definite knowledge of scientific truth with which to compare the narrative. It is obviously necessary for some Divine teacher to tell us authoritatively that God originated and caused the material earth, and the systems of suns and stars which men on the earth's surface are able to discern in the "heavens." We are consequently informed that in the beginning--there is no practical need for defining further--"God created the heavens and the earth." Here the question arises whether the Hebrew "bara," which is a general term, alludes to the first production of material, or to the moulding or fashioning of material already (in terms) assumed to exist. I think that the conclusion must be that the best authority is in favour of the idea of absolute origination of the whole;--the bringing the entire system into existence where previously there was a perfect blank. But even if the secondary meaning of "fashioned" or "forged" be allowed, we have still an intelligible rendering. For in that case the first origination of matter is tacitly assumed by the term itself, and the statement would be, that the matter of the future cosmos so existing, the Divine Artificer fashioned or moulded it into the orderly fabric it has come to be. The narrative then at once refers to our earth, with which, and with its inhabitants, the whole volume is to be in future directly concerned. "The earth was (or became) without form and void (chaotic), and darkness was on the face of the deep (or abyss)." We have no positive knowledge of what the first condition of terrestrial matter was, apart from Revelation. The remarkable discoveries that the spectroscope has enabled, and the facts learned from the physical history of comets and meteorites, can do no more than make what is known as the "nebular hypothesis" highly probable. But it is amply sufficient for our purpose to point out, that if it is true that matter originated in a nebulous haze to the particles of which a spiral rotatory motion had been communicated, and if (confining our attention to one planet only) that attenuated matter gradually aggregated in a ring or rings, and then consolidated into a solid or partly solid globe, then the results are briefly, but adequately and sublimely, provided for by the form of the Mosaic statement. Matter thus aggregating would have developed an enormous amount of heat, and there would have been a seething mass of molten mineral matters, with gases and other materials in the form of vapours, which would have gradually cooled and consolidated. Vast masses of water would in time be formed on one hand, and solid mineral masses on the other; the latter would contract as cooling progressed, causing great upheavals and depressions and contortions of strata. And before the advent of life-forms, it is not difficult to conceive that the first state of our globe was one which is intelligibly and very graphically described as being "without form and void." Nothing more than that, can, from actual physical knowledge, be stated.[1] It is also stated that this confused elemental state of our earth was accompanied at first by darkness. Material darkness that is--for the potentiality of light and order was there; the SPIRIT OF GOD "moved" (or brooded) upon the face of the abyss. This presents no difficulty of interpretation, and may therefore be passed over for the present. [Footnote 1: It would be hardly necessary (but for some remarks in the course of the Gladstone-Huxley controversy) to observe that the term "void" does not imply vacuity or emptiness, as of _substance,_ but absence of defined form such as subsequently was evolved.] Practically, indeed, there has been no grave difficulty raised over this first portion. And if it is argued (on the ground of what I have already in general terms indicated) that the term "created" will, on my own interpretation, get us into difficulties, I reply that here, in its position and with the context, there is no room for doubt, for clearly the word implies _both_ the great primary idea of the Divine design or plan formulated in heaven, _and_ the subsequent result in time and space.[1] This will become more clear when I have further explained the subject. [Footnote 1: And of course if the true sense be "fashioned" or "moulded," the question does not arise.] II.--THE SECOND PART OF THE NARRATIVE. But from this point the narrative commences to be more precise, and to exhibit a very singular and altogether unprecedented division of creative work into "days." Now I have already indicated my doubt whether we ought to import any unusual meaning to explain this term. In the first place, the objection that till the movements and relations of the sun to the earth were ordained there would be no _measure of a day_ will not stand a moment's examination. Nor will the further objection sometimes made, that even with the sun, a day is a very uncertain thing: for example, a day and a night in the north polar regions are periods of month-long duration, quite different from what they are in England, or at Mount Sinai. Obviously, a "day" with reference to the planet for which the term is used, means the period occupied by one rotation of the planet on its own axis. The rotation of the earth is antecedent to anything mentioned in the narrative we are considering. In the nature of things, it would have been coeval with the introduction of the _prima materies_--at least if any nebular hypothesis can be relied on. The "day" would be there whether it were obscured by vapours or not, and whether specially made countable and recognizable by what we call the rising and setting of the sun, or not, and whether we were standing in Nova Zembla or in Australia. Nor is it of much use to refer to the general use of "day" for indefinite periods, which is just as common in the English of to-day as it was in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. But the double use of the term in different senses has become general, just because it was found in practice that no confusion ordinarily resulted; and surely such a practice would not have been common, or at any rate would have been specially avoided in the sacred volume, wherever any mistake or confusion was likely or even possible. No one can mistake what is meant when allusion is made to "the day in which God made the heaven and the earth." No one falls into doubt when the "days" of the prophets are spoken of--any more than they do now when a man says, "Such a thing will not happen in my _day_." Whenever in Daniel, or in similar prophetic writings, the term "day" is used in a peculiar sense as indicating a term of years, we have no difficulty in recognizing the fact from the context and circumstances of the narrative; nor am I aware that any controversy has ever arisen regarding the use of the term "day" _in any passage of Scripture excepting in this_. This fact alone is suspicious; the more so, because there is absolutely nothing in the context to indicate that anything but an ordinary day is intended. Not only so, but there _is_ in the context something that does very clearly indicate (and I think Dr. Réville is perfectly justified in insisting on this) that an ordinary terrestrial day is meant. One of the primeval institutions of Divine Providence for men, my readers will not need to be reminded, was that of a "Sabbath," which any one reading the text would understand to mean a day, and which the Jews--the earliest formal or legal recognizers of it--_did_ so understand, and that under direct Divine sanction. If the _days_ of Genesis mean indefinite periods of aeonian duration, how is the seventh _day_ of rest to be understood? But even if these difficulties are overcome, absolutely nothing is gained by taking the day to be a period. I presume that the object of gaining long periods of time instead of days in reading the Mosaic record, is to assume that the narrative means to describe the actual production on the earth of all that was created; in other words, to assume a particular meaning for the words "created," "brought forth," &c and then to make out that if a whole age is granted, Science will allow us a sequence of a "plant age" a "fish and saurian age," a "bird age," and a "mammalian age";--that is, in general terms and neglecting minor forms of life. But then _to make any sense at all with the verses_ we are bound to show that each age preceded the next--that one was more than partly, if not quite completely, established _before_ any appearance of the next. It is to this interpretation that Professor Huxley alludes when he says, in his first article,[1] "There must be some position from which the reconcilers of Science and Genesis will not retreat--some central idea the maintenance of which is vital, and its refutation fatal.... It is that the animal species which compose the water population, the air population, and the land population,[2] respectively, originated during three successive periods of time, and only during those periods of time." [Footnote 1: "Nineteenth Century," December, 1885, pp. 856-7.] [Footnote 2: These (unfortunate) terms are Mr. Gladstone's.] For my own part, I hasten to say that, as one of the despised race of "reconcilers," not only is this idea no central position from which I will not retreat, but one which I should never think of occupying for one moment. But on the view of the _periods_, some such position must be taken up. And if so, I must maintain that Professor Huxley has shown--if indeed it was not obvious already--that the idea of a series of periods, and in each of which a certain kind of life began and culminated (if it was not fully completed) _before_ another began, is untrue to nature. This, therefore, cannot have been intended by the author of Genesis. I will here interrupt my argument for a moment to say that there is a _certain degree_ of _coincidence_ between the succession of life on the earth as far as it is explained by palaeontological research, and the order of creation stated in Genesis; but that is not concerned with any forced interpretation of the term "day." The coincidence is just near enough to give rise to a desire to identify creative periods with the series shown by the fossil-bearing rocks; while it is attended with just enough of difference to furnish matter for controversy, and to expose the interpreters to be cut up. But to return. Nothing, I submit, is gained by getting _day_ to mean period. Let us put the matter quite squarely. Let us take day to mean period, and let us take all the verses to mean the _process_ of _producing_ on earth the various life-forms. In order to come at once to the point, let us begin with the time when the dry land and the waters are separate. At that moment, there is nothing said (or implied) about life already having begun in either water or on dry land. God commanded plants to grow; consequently during that _whole period_ nothing but plants, and that of all the kinds and classes mentioned, should appear either in water or on land. That period being done, then came the command for water animals, fish and great monsters, and also birds. We ought, accordingly, to come next upon a whole period in which no trace of anything but plants and these animals can be found; and lastly, we ought to find the period of mammalia, smaller reptiles, _amphibia_ and insects (creeping things). That is the fair and plain result of what comes of supposing the terms "let there be," &c., to mean _production on earth of the thing's themselves_, and that the days are long _periods_. All overlapping of the periods is inadmissible. All meaning is taken away, if we allow of fish (e.g.) appearing in the middle of our first period; for God did not command another day's work till after the first was completed--"there was evening and there was morning, a first day" (period), &c. No; to suit the text so interpreted, we must have a full _period_ of plants with no fish; then a period of both but no insects, no creeping things, no animals; and so on. Now it is quite idle to contend any longer, that any such state of things ever existed. If we pass over the long series of the most ancient strata in which doubtful forms of obscure elementary plant and animal life appear _almost_ together, we shall come to shell-fish, and crustaceans fully established in the water, and scorpions, and some insects even on land, _before_ plants made any great show. For the Carboniferous--_the_ age of acrogen plants, _par excellence_--does not occur till after swarms of _Trilobite_ Crustaceans had filled the sea and passed away, and after the Devonian fish-age had nearly passed away; and so on throughout. The groups in nature overlap each other so closely, that though plant-life (in elementary forms) probably had the actual start; virtually the two kingdoms--plant and animal--appeared almost simultaneously. There is nothing like the appearance of a first period in which one _alone_ predominated. And long before the plants are established in all classes, the great reptiles, birds, and some mammals, had appeared. The seed-bearing plants--true grasses and exogens with seed capsules (angiosperms) did not appear till quite Tertiary times. That is the essential difference between the facts and the theory. If we make a diagram, and let the squares represent the main groups, the order (according to the period interpretation) ought to be as in A, whereas it really more resembles B. Thus. [Illustration: The dotted extensions of the squares indicate the fore runners of the families, i.e., their first indications in the ages.] [Illustration: _A New Interpretation suggested_] But then it will be asked, if the day means only an ordinary day--not a long period--what is there that actually could have happened, and did happen, in _three days_ (for that is the real point, as we shall see), such as the writer describes as the third, fifth, and sixth days? I answer that on those days, and on the previous ones, God did exactly what He is recorded to have done. After the creation of light (first day), and the ideal adjustment of the distribution of land and water (second day), He (_a_) "_created_," on the third day, plants, from the lowest cryptogam upwards; then (_b_) paused for a day (the fourth) in the direct work of creating life-forms, to adjust certain matters regarding times and seasons, and regulation of climate, which doubtless would not be essential during the early stages of life evolution, but would become so directly a certain point was reached; then (_c_) resumed the direct creating work (fifth day), with fishes, great reptiles,[1] and birds (grouped purposely so, as we shall see); and, lastly (_d_), before the Day of Rest, created the group of mammals (_carnivora_ and _herbivora_), the "creeping things" of the earth, and man (also grouped together). [Footnote 1: This term may be here accepted for the moment--not to interrupt the argument. It will be more fully dealt with in a subsequent chapter.] But some one will ask, You then accept the earlier theory, that the whole life-series that is now revealed to us by the rocks, from the Laurentian to the Recent, is excluded from the narrative; and that some special acts of creation, regarding only modern and surviving life-forms, were made immediately before man appeared? By no-means; for such a theory is not only in itself improbable, but is contrary to all the evidence we possess of life-history on the earth, and is so hopeless that it is really not worth serious examination and refutation. We have no evidence of any such gap--such sudden change in the history of life. Nor is it possible to find any place in the Mosaic story at which we could reasonably interpolate a _long_ period, such as that indicated by the entire series of rock strata. For a great part of such a period, not only must there have been a regular succession of life just the same in nature (though specifically different) as that now on earth, but a regular distribution of land and water, and a settled action of the sun and the seasons, would be required. No; we must give up all the older methods which try to ignore the study of the word "created," or to assume for it a meaning that it is not intended to bear. All depends, then, on what is meant by such terms as "created," "let there be," "let the earth bring forth," &c. Perhaps it has occurred to but few of my readers seriously to examine into their own mental conception of an "act of creation." Some will readily answer, "Of course it means only that at the Divine _fiat_, any given species--say an elephant--appeared perfect, trunk, tusks, and all the peculiar development of skull and skeleton, where previously no such creature had existed." But what possible reason have they for this conclusion? None whatever. It has simply been carelessly assumed from age to age, because people at first knew no better; and when they began to know better, they did not stop to amend their ideas accordingly. Of course, as Professor Huxley puts it, millions of pious Jews and Christians[1] supposed _creation_ to mean a "sudden act of the Deity"--i.e., to mean just what the knowledge of the time enabled them to imagine. They could do nothing else. The state of knowledge fifty years ago would not have rendered it possible for an article like Professor Huxley's (that to which allusion has several times been made) to have been written at all. What wonder, then, that the multitude did not understand what _creation_ meant, and that a reasonable interpretation of the word has only become possible in quite recent times? Surely all that is the fault of the reader, not of the text. I do not even care that the writer himself did not fully apprehend the subject. When a human prophet is entrusted with the divulgation of high and wonderful things, it is quite possible that he may have been to greater or less extent in the dark as to all or some of the communication he was writing. [Footnote 1: Article quoted, p. 857.] All that can be reasonably required is that the narrative, as it stands, shall be consistent with actual truth, and shall at no time come to be provably at variance with it. But let us look at the word "creation" more closely. We accept what we are told, that in the beginning God called into existence force and matter, the material or "physical basis," and all other necessaries of life. Suppose, then (even dropping the question of Evolution, in order to satisfy the "pious millions"), that this "matter" was all ready (if I may so speak) to spring into organized form and being to take shape on earth--what shape should it take? Why (e.g.) an elephant? Why not any other animal, or a nondescript--a form which no zoologist could place, recognize, or classify? The _form_, the ideal structure, the _formula_, of the genus elephant must somehow have come into existence _before_ the obedient materials and the suitable forces of nature could work themselves together to the desired end. Mr. Mivart has defined "creation" at page 290 of his "Genesis of Species." There is original creation, derivative or secondary creation (where the present form has descended from an ancestor that was originally "directly" created), and conventional creation (as when a man "creates a fortune," meaning that he produces a complex state or arrangement out of simpler materials). That is perfectly true, so far; but it is only a verbal definition, and still does not go inside, into the _idea_ involved. We must go farther. In every act of creation, two requisites can clearly be distinguished: (1) the matter of life, and the forces, affinities, and local surroundings necessary; and (2) the type, plan, ideal, or formula, to realize or produce which, the forces and the matter are to act and react. This second is all-essential; without it the first would only produce a limbo of "Unaccomplisht works of Nature's hand, Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixt.[1]" [Footnote 1: "Paradise Lost," iii. 455.] No _creation_ in _any_ sense whatever could come out of it. In the same way, when we speak of the Divine Artificer "creating," or saying "Let there be," there are two things implied: (i) the Divine plan or type-form, and its utterance or delivery (so to speak) to the builder-forces and materials; (2) the result or the translation into tangible existence of the Divine plan. In every passage speaking of creation it _possible_ that both processes may be implied; it may be clear from the text (as in Genesis i. 1) that this is so. But it is equally possible that the first point only, which in some aspects is really the essential matter, is alone spoken of. And I submit that, given the general fact that God originated everything in heaven and earth (as first of all stated generally in Genesis i. 1-3), the essential part of the _detailed_ or _specific_ creation subsequently spoken of, was the Divine origination of the types, the ideal forms, into which matter endowed with life was to develop; _without_ any _necessary_ reference to how, or in what time, the Divine creation was actually realized or accomplished on earth. It may be that the _form_ so conceived and drawn in Nature's book by the Divine Designer is a final form, up to which development shall lead, and beyond which (at least in a material sense) it shall not go; or it may be that it is a type intended to be transitory;[1] but _both the intermediate and final forms must take their origin first in the Divine Mind, and be prescribed from the Heavenly Throne,_ before the obedient matter and forces and the life-endowment could co-operate to result in the realization of the forms and the population of the globe. [Footnote 1: The idea which I am endeavouring to make clear is well illustrated by another passage in one of the Mosaic books--the account of the Tabernacle. Moses had no idea of his own of the structure, its furniture, implements, or the forms of these. The narrative expressly states that the Divine power originated the designs, and caused Moses to understand them. In a human work the designer would have drawn the objects with measures and specifications, and given the papers to the workmen. With the Divine work, where the design is in the Divine Thought, and the workmen and builders are forces and elementary matter, the process is a mystery, but in its practical bearing is understood from analogy. The Tabernacle was truly God's _creation_, because it was all commanded in design and "pattern" by the Almighty before Moses put together the materials that realized the pattern in the camp of Israel.] The reason why it is the _essential_ part, is, that when once the Divine command issued, the result followed inevitably--that will "go without saying." In human affairs, also, we speak of the architect having _created_ the palace or cathedral, or the ironclad; meaning thereby not the slow process of cutting and joining stone, or riveting steel plates, but the higher antecedent act of mind in evoking the ideal form and providing for all contingencies in the adaptation and subsequent working of the finished structure. And if we limit this use of the term "creation" somewhat in speaking of human works, it is because the concept of the human mind so often fails of realization; that it is one thing to design, and another to accomplish. The grandest design for a palace may fail to stand because some peculiarity of the stone has been forgotten, or some character of foundation and subsoil has been misunderstood. The noblest form of turret-ship may prove useless because the strength of some material will not correspond to the ideal, or some curve of stability has been miscalculated. Not only this: man may create, as a sculptor, the ideal form for his to-be statue, or the dramatist his character; but the perfect realization, either in marble or in an actual being, may be impossible; the ideal remains "in the air." The ideal, therefore, is not the major part of "creation" in a human work. But with the Divine work it is otherwise. The Divine thought in Creation and its result are separated by no possibility of failure. Given the matter and the laws of force and of life, directly the Great Designer has uttered His thought to those that are His builders, they _must_ infallibly and without discord, work through the longest terms, it may be, of an evolutionary series, till, every transitional condition passed, the final form emerges perfect. Our very verbal definition, admitting as it does "derivative" creation, implies this. We all speak of ourselves as "created." How so? We are not produced ready made. Nor do we wholly solve the matter by saying that we are "created" because we are born from parents who (if we go far enough back) originated in a first production from the hand of Nature. We are really "created" because the _design_--the _life-form of us_, which matter and force were to work together to produce--was the direct product of the Divine Mind.[1] My question, therefore, of the Genesis interpreters is: Why will you insist on the text meaning only the second element in Creation--the production on earth, and not the Design or its issue in heaven? The former we could find out some day for ourselves; we _have_ found out some of it (though only some) already; the latter we could never know unless we were told. Surely it is the "_dignus vindice nodus_" in this case. To tell us the earth's history within a brief space would be impossible, and would have been for ages unintelligible if it could have been told; to tell us of God's creation is possible--for it has been done; and the record, unless misread, is intelligible for all time. The narrative, if it is a revelation of Divine Creation in heaven, takes up ground that none can trespass on. None can say "it is not so," unless either he will show that the words will not bear the meaning, or that the context and other Scripture contradict it. [Footnote 1: "_In Thy book_ were all my members written, while _as yet there were none_ of them" (Psa. cxxxix. 16). "How did this all first come to be you? _God thought about me_ and I grew."--_Macdonald_.] So soon as the matter of earth and heaven (and all that is implied therewith) originated "in the beginning," the narrative introduces to our reverent contemplation the solemn conclave in heaven, when, in a serial order and on separate days, God declared, for the guidance of the ever potentially active forces, and for materials ever (as we know) seeking combination and resolution,[1] the _form_ which the earth surface is (it may be ever so gradually) to take and the _life-forms_ which are to be evolved. That this creative work was piecemeal, and on separate days, we know from the narrative. _Why_ it was so arranged we do not know. Vast as was the work to be done, almost infinite as was the complexity of the laws required to be formulated, it _could_ have all been done at once, in a moment of time; for time does not exist to the Divine Mind. But seeing that the work was to be on earth, and for the benefit of creatures to whom the divisions of time were all-important, we can dimly, at least, discern a certain fitness and appropriateness in the gradual and divided work. [Footnote 1: The reader will recognize that there is not the least exaggeration in this. It is plain matter of fact, as I have endeavoured to show in the earlier chapters of this book. Everywhere we see _force_ ready to be evoked by the proper method. Everywhere we see _molecular_ motion, and a perpetual combination and resolution of elements and compounds, whether chemical or mechanical.] CHAPTER XIV. _THE INTERPRETATION SUPPORTED BY OTHER SCRIPTURES._ In interpreting the narrative before us, we have an important aid which has hardly received the attention it deserves. I allude to the other passages of Scripture which were written by men undoubtedly familiar with the Book of Genesis. Now, in more than one of them, I find the idea that the Creation spoken of is the _Divine work in heaven_, and not the subsequent and long process of its realization on the surface of our globe, fully confirmed. In the beautiful thirty-eighth chapter of the very ancient Book of Job, we find a distinct allusion to a time when God "laid the foundations" of the earth, prescribed "its measures," made a "decreed place" for the sea, and framed the "ordinances of heaven," and this in presence of the heavenly host assembled-- "When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy.[1]" [Footnote 1: Job xxxviii. 7. The sons of God are clearly the angels (_cf_. Job i, 6).] The same idea can be gathered from the text which I have placed on the title-page of this book. "By faith we understand that the aeons (the whole system of nature in its various branches, physical, moral, and social) were ordained ([Greek: kataertisthai]) by the word of God." The _process_ of actual development is here passed over, as not being the main thing; what attracts attention is the Divine Design, the "framing" of the wonderful ideal or ordinance without which the "aeons" could not proceed to unfold themselves. I do not mean, of course, for a moment to imply that, after God had formulated the laws and designed the forms, He left the working out of the results to themselves. I should be sorry if, in bringing into prominence what has generally been overlooked, I seemed to throw the rest in the shade. God's providence and continued supervision are as important in themselves as the original design:--but this is not the central idea embodied in the passage. There is another Scriptural allusion which suggests the idea of a Heavenly Conclave, and great act of Creation in heaven. It may be considered somewhat remote, and even fanciful--but the fact is recorded _both_ in the Old Testament and the New, and _something_ must be meant by it. And, moreover, other and very meaningless interpretations have been from the earliest times given, so that I can hardly omit the subject if I would. I refer to the permanent presence in heaven, around the Divine Throne, of the singular forms of being called _Cherubim_, which seem to indicate some mysterious connection between the life-forms of earth and the inhabitants of heaven, and some permanent representation of typical created forms in heaven. In Ezekiel, chapter i., and again in chapter x., this vision is presented to us. The prophet was to be prepared, by a very vivid exhibition of the power and glory of God as the Author and Ruler of the universe, to appreciate the depth of degradation to which the Jews had fallen in their rejection of such a God as their Lord and King and of the justice of the terrible overthrow which was the consequence of that rejection. The vision then displayed (as I understand it) GOD surrounded by the typical forms of creation and the irresistible forces of nature. All forms of life, all energies of nature, were thus shown to be His creatures. There, around the throne, were four "cherubim" of remarkable appearance. They were accompanied by the appearances of fiery orbs like beryl stones, revolving in all directions with ceaseless energy. Any account of this vision that I can give is, however, pitiable beside the inexpressibly sublime picture drawn in Ezekiel, to which I must refer the reader for his own study. And imagine what the feelings of the prophet must have been when, fresh from the impression of this grandeur of Creation--this glory and irresistible power of God as the Centre and great Mover of all, he was taken to witness the pitiable sight of the Jews turning away from His worship, and to see their elders burning incense before walls covered with "every form of creeping things and abominable beasts--all the idols of the house of Israel![1]" How must the vision have prepared him to realize the depth of degradation with which he had to contend, and have fired him with energy to denounce it! There is, then, I think, considerable probability in the contention that the vision represents God in Creation, surrounded by the types of creation and the forces of nature. There is, no doubt, the ancient tradition that the four Cherubim meant the four Gospels; and this has now become deeply associated with ecclesiastical symbolism. But I submit that this is only a fancy which can best be left to church embroidery and stained windows; it is unworthy of any serious notice. The beings are described, it will be observed, with great minuteness: all have the same characteristic powers of rapid motion, and all have _human hands_, a fact that so strikes the prophet that he repeats it three times.[2] These four Cherubim, then, seem to me clearly to indicate the archetypes of Creation, the great design-forms of created life, showing themselves the progressive scale from the Animal to the Man and the Angel. And these four great types exactly answer to the resulting groups of created life. We have the development of _Reptilia_ into _Birds_ as one final type; consequently one face of each cherub has the Bird type--the Eagle head[3]. Two other faces on each give us the _Animal_ type, one representing again the great order Carnivora (the Lion), the other the Herbivorous Ungulates (the Ox or Calf); while the fourth face indicates the last development, _Man_. [Footnote 1: Ezek. viii. 10.] [Footnote 2: See chapters i. 8, x. 8, and x. 21. Remark, in passing, that the human hand has always been the subject of wonder as an evidence of Divine skill in Creation. Sir Charles Bell's Bridgewater treatise, on the human hand as illustrating the proof of Divine wisdom and contrivance in Creation, is just as good an argument _for Design_ now as ever it was. I cannot here resist the temptation to notice one of those small points in which the accuracy of the Bible is so constantly brought to light. The popular notion of angels gives them wings as well as hands--a form quite impossible from the natural history point of view; _all_ animals of the vertebrate orders never have _more_ than two pairs of limbs. And in winged animals the fore-limbs become wings. The popular notion about angels is, however, artistic, not Biblical. Just the contrary in fact. Here _is_ a vision of a mysterious form with wings and hands, but how?--the figures are fourfold; and being winged, each division might have been winged like the eagle, so each cherub would have had _eight_ wings. But as one of the divisions had a human face and human hands, the prophet only saw _six_ wings to each, leaving one division where, nature's _Divine type_ being obeyed, there were _hands_, and consequently no wings.] [Footnote 3: Reptiles are unrepresented, perhaps as not being a final type.] I would say here, as regards the animal creation being represented by a double form, that it is most curious to notice that this double division of animals is found throughout Scripture, and seems to have its counterpart in the actual facts of creation on earth. Accompanying these created beings in this remarkable vision were "wheels" which appeared to be spheres within spheres, revolving with ceaseless activity and never turning, but always going forward. The wheels were full of eyes. It appears to me probable that these symbolize--and if so the symbol is at once full of meaning and grandeur--the inevitable, ever wakeful energies and forces of nature, the marvellous agency of electricity, chemical affinity, heat, attraction, repulsion, and so forth. We are accustomed to speak of "blind force;" but here observe the wheels are _full of eyes_, ever vigilant to fulfil the purpose for which they are appointed. And this representation of _forces_ appears necessary to complete a symbolic representation of God in nature: since the world is made up of dead matter, of living forms, and of forces or energies which are in ceaseless motion and action, producing the changes which in fact constitute the working of the whole system. I cannot help thinking, therefore, that the imagery of this vision lend support to the belief that there was a great Creation enacted in heaven, which was followed by the actual carrying out of the processes on earth, _but which has retained its representative forms in the heaven itself_. Had this vision stood alone, it might have been passed over, on the ground that it deals with high and transcendental matters, and that it would be hardly safe to let a practical argument rest too much on it. But the fact is that again in the New Testament a very similar vision is mentioned (in the fourth chapter of the Book of Revelation): here again the four living creatures represent the typical forms of life, the bird, the carnivorous and herbivorous animals, and man; and it will be observed that in this case there is hardly room to doubt that we have an exhibition of _Creation_, for there is express allusion to it in the address of the elders--"Thou hast _created all things_, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created." CHAPTER XV. _AND SUPPORTED BY THE CONTEXT._ But a step further is necessary: if the conclusion that I have come to, by accepting "day" in its ordinary and natural sense, and by giving a hitherto overlooked (and so far a new) meaning to "creation," is sound, it must not only be rendered probable by reference to other parts of Scripture written when Genesis was much nearer its original publication than it is now; it is still (before all things) necessary, that the interpretation adopted should be conformable to the context. And I have heard it objected that there are verses which imply not only a Divine Act in heaven, with the Sons of God in conclave around the throne--sublime and wonderful picture!--but also distinctly indicate a corresponding action on earth, and so require us to include in our rendering of "creation" _both_ the ideas which (page 169 ante) I have admitted may, on occasion be required by the terms. For example: after the creative command in verses 7, 9, 11, 15, and 24, is declared, it is followed by the words of fulfilment--"and it was so;" and in verse 11, when God has said "Let the earth bring forth grass, &c.", in the next verse it is positively recorded that the earth _did_ bring forth grass, &c. I of course admit all this, but it is in no way opposed to my suggestion. The _commencement_ of the _result_ probably, if not necessarily, followed immediately on the issue of the finished command, viz., the promulgation of the forms to be obtained and the processes to be followed. The _whole_ result did not become accomplished then and there, in the time mentioned, or exactly in the order mentioned: we know that for a fact. Take, for example, the case of _vegetation_. Here the author, in terms at once precise and universally intelligible, speaks of "vegetation[1]" (grass of the A.V.), "herb yielding seed," and "trees yielding fruit," thereby exhaustively enumerating the members of the vegetable kingdom. [Footnote 1: Nothing more is meant by the Hebrew "_deshe_." The true "grasses" (_graminea_),--cereals, bamboos, &c., are certainly not intended, for these are all conspicuously flowering plants, "herbs yielding seed," and therefore coming under the second plainly defined group. But the general term "sproutage" or "vegetation" is just adapted to signify the mass of cryptogamic plant-life, the mosses, lichens, algae, and then ferns, &c., which evidently formed the first stage of plant-life on the globe.] Now, as a matter of fact, there was no one long (or short) period during which the whole of this command was realized, _before_ the next creative act occurred. At first _algae_ and low forms of vegetable life appeared; and doubtless we have lost myriads upon myriads of such lower forms of plant-life in the early strata, because such forms were ill calculated for fossil-preservation, owing to the absence of woody fibre, silicious casing, or hard fruit or seed vessels. But when we first have a marked accumulation of specialized plant-life in the coal measures (Upper Carboniferous), it is still only of cryptogams--ferns and great club mosses. A beginning of true seed-bearing plants (Gymnosperm exogens) had been made with the _conifers_ of the Devonian strata; but true _grasses_, and the other orders of phanerogamic plants and arboreous vegetation, do not appear till the tertiary rocks were deposited, very long after the age of fish and great reptiles had culminated, and the inauguration of the bird age and the mammalian age had taken place. Looking only to the abundant, prominent, and characteristic life-forms of the several strata, it could certainly be said that the period when the _water_ actually brought forth a vast mass of its life-forms--corals, sertularias, crustaceans, and fish of the lower orders--must have _preceded_ (not followed) the time when the earth produced vegetation of all kinds, and further that it must have come after the appearance of scorpions and some land insects.[1] [Footnote 1: A single wing found little more than a year ago is the sole evidence of insects older than the Devonian; and scorpions (highly-organized crustaceans) have been found in the Upper Silurian in some abundance.] Moreover, as the regular succession in periods of light and darkness on the earth, and the sequence of seasons was not organized (but only a generally diffused light, and, probably, an uniform and moist state of climate without seasons) till _after_ the commands for the formation of the whole of the large classes of plants, both cryptogams and phanerogams, it is obvious that as many of these would require the fuller development of seasonal influences, the whole process could not have been worked out before the fourth day's creative work was begun. This instance alone--and it would be easy to add others--shows that the narrative cannot be meant to indicate what actually happened on earth, i.e., to summarize the _entire realization_ of the Divine command. Such being the plain facts with regard to the _kind of accomplishment_ meant by the terms "it was so," "the earth brought forth," &c., it is quite plain that no violence is done to the text by explaining it as intended to describe what God did in heaven, with the addition, that as each command was formulated, the result on earth surely followed, the thing "was so," and the earth and water respectively no doubt _began_ to "bring forth." More than this cannot be made out on _any_ interpretation that accords with facts. It seems so clear to me that this is so, that I hardly need refer to the use of the terms the "_waters brought forth"_ and the "_earth brought forth"_ and the phrase in chapter ii. 5--the Lord made every plant _before it grew_. If, as we have been long allowed to suppose, God spake and the water and earth were _at once_ fully and finally peopled with animals where before nothing but plants had existed, and so on, I should hardly have expected the use of words which imply a gradual process--a gestation and subsequent birth (so to speak) of life-forms. How the _order_ in which the events are recorded stands in relation to the subsequent history of life-development on earth, and what its significance may be, I will consider later on. First I will conclude the argument for the general interpretation of the narrative. 2. _The Second Genesis Narrative._ I have only one more direct argument to offer; but I think it is a very important one. The first division of Genesis ends with the Divine commands creating man and the day of rest which followed. The narrative ending at chapter ii. verse 3 (the division of chapters here, as elsewhere, is purely arbitrary), we have at verse 4 of chapter ii, what has been loudly proclaimed as _another_ account of _the same_ Creation, which, it is added (arbitrarily enough--but _any_ argument will do if only it is against religion!) is contrary to the first.[1] [Footnote 1: The contradiction is supposed to be in verse 19, as if then the creation of animals was for the first time effected--after the man and his helpmate. But it is quite clear that the text refers to the fact that God had created animals; the command was, "Let the earth bring forth," and the immediate act spoken of was not the formation of animals, but the bringing of them to Adam to see what he would call them.] Now, even if there is a _second_ account of Creation, it would surely be a circumstance somewhat difficult to explain. _Contrary_ in any possible sense, the narrative (from chapter ii. 4, onward) certainly is not. But why should there be a second narrative at all? On the hitherto received supposition that chapter i. intends to tells us the _process_ of creation--what God caused to be done on earth, not merely what He did in heaven--there is apparently no room for a second narrative. Nor have I seen any completely satisfactory explanation. But if we accept the view that the first chapter explains the Divine Design, and its being published (so to speak) and commanded in heaven, then it would be very natural that that narrative should be followed by a second, which should detail not the _whole_ process of all life existence on earth, but (as the Bible is to be henceforth concerned with Man, his fall and his redemption) with an account of _just so much of the_ process as relates to the actual birth on the earth's surface of the particular man Adam, the most important (and possibly not the only) outcome of the _fiat_ recorded in chapter i. vers. 27, 28. In this view, not only _a_ second narrative, but just the particular kind of narrative we actually have, is not only natural, but even necessary. _Before_, we had a general account of how God ordained the scheme of material-form and life-form on the earth; _now_ we have a detailed account of how He actually carried out one portion of it--that one portion we are most concerned to hear about, namely the man Adam, the progenitor of our own race, of whom came JESUS CHRIST, "the son of Adam.[1]" The account is designed to introduce to us the scene of Adam's birthplace--the Garden of Eden.[2] The mention of a garden, and the subsequent important connection of the trees of that garden with the conduct of the man, naturally turn the writer's attention to the general subject of the vegetation on the earth's surface. He prefaces his new account accordingly with a brief summary--which I may paraphrase thus without, I trust, departing from the sense of the original: "Such was the origin of the earth (and all in it) and of the heavenly host, at the time when God made them. He had made every plant _before_ it was in the earth--every herb of the field _before_ it grew" (mark the language as confirming what I have said--God "created" everything before it actually developed and grew into being on the earth). "Rain did not then fall (in the same way as now) on the earth, but the mist that exhaled from the soil re-condensed, and fell and moistened the ground; but there was as yet no MAN to till and cultivate the soil." [Footnote 1: St. Luke iii. 38.] [Footnote 2: Which had a real historic existence. _Vide_ Appendix A.] Then God actually formed or fashioned _a man_. It is not now that He created the ideal form to be produced in due time, but that He actually formed the individual Adam, and placed him in a garden which He had prepared for the purpose. All the words used now imply actual production. The Divine ideal was ready, and the earth-elements (of which we know man's body to consist) were ready at the Divine word to assume the human shape. And that done, God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life" (mark the direct _act_ on the man himself), and the man became a "living soul." There is nothing here of the "earth bringing forth" as in the former narrative. We have the direct act of God, not in the design only, but in the production of the thing itself. If this is not a complete explanation and justification of the second narrative, I do not know what, in common fairness, is entitled to be so called. The language may be rigorously examined, and it will fully bear out the position taken up. I conceive, then, that the cumulation of proof need go no further. The true explanation of Genesis i. also supplies the place for Genesis ii. 4, _et seq._, and overcomes all the difficulty that has hitherto existed on the subject. It will now, I trust, be clear that by such an interpretation of Genesis we at once give (1) a full and natural meaning to all the terms; we reconcile it with other Scripture, and we enhance all the sublime attributes which we have been reverentially accustomed to connect with this ancient passage. (2) We obviate the difficulty regarding the second narrative in chapter ii. 4. And (3) we place the whole above any possible conflict with science, and above any need for "reconciliation." Here, too, is a purpose and meaning assigned to the _whole_ narrative, without being driven into the difficult position of supposing the verses to be the literary outcome of an ignorant imagination which gave expression to its crude ideas only--though enshrining among utterly false details a sublime truth, regarding which one can only wonder why it could not have been stated without the encumbrance of the surroundings. The naturalist and the biologist may continue, unquestioned, to work out more and more of the wondrous story of Life on the globe. They can never disprove, or on any of their own grounds deny, that God is the Author of all things--matter, force, and mind alike; that He designed the form and relations of the earth; that He organized its light, its seasons, and its changes; that He has furnished the types and patterns of all life-forms which matter and force are conformably thereto, developing on the earth. In short, REVELATION tells us that God did all this "in the beginning," how His form-designs were thought out and declared in six days, and how He rested on the seventh day. SCIENCE will tell us how, when, and where the Creative fiats and the designs of heaven were realized and worked out on earth. Here is the separate province of each, without fear of clashing, or room for controversy. CHAPTER XVI. _THE DETAILS OF THE CREATION NARRATIVE._ §1. _The Explanation of the Verses._ It remains only now to go over the narrative, the _general_ bearing of which I have thus endeavoured to vindicate, so that minor matters of detail, in which it is supposed (1) that some contradiction to known physical fact may still lurk, and (2) something that negatives the explanation suggested, may be cleared up. Let us take it seriatim:-- "In the beginning God created the heaven (plural in the original) and the earth." As I have before remarked, we have no real need to discuss whether "bara" means originated (created where nothing previously existed), or whether we should render it "fashioned," i.e., moulded material (thus assumed in terms to be) already in existence. Either will yield perfectly good and consistent sense; but, as a matter of fact, there is a virtual consensus of the best scholars that the word is here used to denote original production of the material. It is also clear that the text is intended to embrace the whole system of planets, suns, stars, and whatever else is in space. So the Psalmist understood it: "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and _all_ the host of them by the breath of his mouth.[1]" Nor is there any reasonable doubt, exegetically, that the subsequent allusion to the sun, moon, and stars, refers (as the sense of the text itself obviously requires) to their _appointment_ or adjustment to certain relations with the earth, and assumes their original material production in space, to have been already stated or understood. "And the earth was (became) without form[2] and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." I have, in another connection, already remarked on this verse, and so shall not repeat those remarks. [Footnote 1: Psa. xxxiii. 6, and so Psa. cii. 25; _cf_. 2 Peter iii. 5.] [Footnote 2: Waste (R.V.).] I will only say that the elemental strife and rushing together of chemical elements under the stress of various forces and the presence of enormous heat, would naturally envelop the globe in dense vapours, a large portion of which would be watery vapour, capable of condensation or of dispersion, under proper conditions, afterwards to be prescribed and realized. As it is beautifully expressed in Job xxxviii., "When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling-band for it" (verse 8). Then commences the serial order of Divine acts with reference to the _Earth_:-- (1) "AND GOD SAID; LET THERE BE LIGHT: AND THERE WAS LIGHT." This verse is commonly taken as indicating a creation of light for the first time in the entire cosmos or universe. And if it be so, there is no objection, on any scientific ground, to the assertion that there was once a time when as yet the vibrations and waves which we connect with the idea of Light, had not yet begun. It is true that nebular matter, as now observed, is believed to be, partially at any rate, self-luminous. But this fact, supposing it to be such, is not inconsistent with a still earlier time when light had not yet begun. From the "wave-theory" of light, which is one of those working hypotheses which are indispensable, and which, in a sense, may be said to be demonstrated by their indispensability, it can clearly be seen that if light is caused by rapid vibrational movement, there must have been--or at any rate there is nothing against an authoritative declaration that there was--a moment of time when the first vibrational impulse was given, when, in fact, God said "Let there be light, and there was light," _before_ which also there was "darkness upon the face of the deep.[1]" [Footnote 1: It also needs only to be remarked, in passing, that we are really in complete ignorance as to the light-medium, the "luminiferous-ether" outside the comparatively thin stratum of our own terrestrial atmosphere. We do not know whether there might not have been a condition of the medium in which, up to the moment of a creative _fiat_, it was incapable of transmitting light-waves.] There is no necessary connection between the creation of light _per se_, and the existence of any particular source (or sources) of light to our planet or to other planets. No justification is now needed for such a remark, and the almost forgotten cavils of one of the "Essays and Reviews" may still survive as a "scientific" curiosity, to warn us against too hastily concluding that (in subjects where so little is really _known_) the Bible must be wrong, and the favourite hypothesis of the day right. But as a matter of fact, the text, especially when read in connection with Job xxxviii., need not be taken to refer to any original creation of light in the universe generally, but merely to the letting in of light on the hitherto dark and "waste" earth. The command "Let there be light" was followed on the next day by the formation of a firmament or expanse. So that all the verse _necessarily_ implies is, that the thick clouds and vapours which surrounded the earth were so dealt with, that light could reach the earth: the light was thus divided from the darkness, and the rotating globe would experience the alternation of day and night. The "day" having thus been created formally (so to speak), the Divine Author proceeds to mark, by His own Procedure, the use of the "days" which He had provided for the earth. On this view, of course, the origin of light as a "force"--the first beginning of its pulsations--is not detailed, any more than the origin of electric force, or heat, or gravitation. Here, too, I may remark that the idea of _creation_, which it has been one of my chief objects to develop, is illustrated. This remark holds good, whether an original creation of light is intended, or only an arrangement whereby light was for the first time introduced to the earth's surface. The idea of creating light not only involves the Divine Conception of the thing, and the marvellous method of its production,[1] but doubtless, also, all those wonderful laws of reflection, refraction, polarization, and a thousand others, which the science of Physical Optics investigates. [Footnote 1: And this is still a mystery to us. _What_ light is we do not know--we can only speak of our own sensation of it. Nor do we know _what_ vibrates to produce light. Hypothetical terms, such as "ether," "luminiferous-medium," and so forth, only conceal our ignorance.] Naturally enough, in this case, the double idea involved in creation--the Divine concept and its realization--will, in the nature of things, fall into one. No process of evolution is required; none is indicated by science. Directly the Divine hand gave the impulse concurrently with the Divine thought--light would be. In the nature of things there is no place for a line between the Divine fiat and its realization, as there is in the production of life-forms on the earth. Or, on the other view, directly the Divine command went forth, the vapours would clear and allow the transmission of light. (2) "AND GOD SAID, LET THERE BE A FIRMAMENT (EXPANSE) IN THE MIDST OF THE WATERS, AND LET IT DIVIDE THE WATERS FROM THE WATERS....AND GOD CALLED THE FIRMAMENT HEAVEN." There has been gathered round this verse what I may call rather an ill-natured controversy, because there is no real ground for it; and the objections taken seem rather of a desire to find out something against the narrative at any price, than to make the best of it. The verse, when duly translated, implies that an "expanse"--the setting of a clear space of atmosphere around the globe--formed one of the special design-thoughts of the Creator, followed by its immediate (or gradual) accomplishment. I think we should have hardly had so much cavilling over this word "expanse" if it had not been for the term subsequently used by the Seventy in their Greek version ([Greek: stereôma]). The ancients, it is said, believed the space above the earth to be "solid." Now I would contend that even if the Hebrew writer had any mistaken or confused notions in his own mind, that would not afford any just ground against revelation itself. But I would point out that many of the expressions which may be quoted to show the idea of solidity, are clearly poetical. And if we go to the poetic or semi-poetic aspect of things, may I not ask whether there is not a certain sense in which the earth-envelope may be said to be solid? The air has a considerable density, its uniform and inexorable pressure on every square inch of the earth's surface is very great. Such a word as [Greek: stereôma] (_firmamentum_) does not imply solidity in the sense in which gold is solid--as if the heavens were a mass of metal, and the stars set in it like jewels; it implies, rather, something fixed and offering resistance. It is obvious that a creative act was necessary for this "expanse." We know of spheres that have no atmosphere; and we are so ignorant of the true nature of what is beyond the utmost reach of our air-stratum, that there is room for almost any consistent conjecture regarding it. Moreover, observe that the atmosphere is not a _chemical_ combination of gases, and one, therefore, that would take place like any other of the metallic, saline, or gaseous combinations, of which no detailed account is given--all being covered by the general phrase, "God created the heaven and the earth." The air is a mechanical mixture, pointing to a special design and a special act of origin. The necessary proportions of each gas and its combined properties could not have originated without guidance. But the main purpose of the expanse, as stated in the text, was to regulate the water supply. That vast masses of watery vapour must at one time have enveloped the globe, seems probable--apart from revelation; and that part of this should condense into seas and fresh-water, and part remain suspended to produce all the phenomena of invisible air-moisture and visible cloud, while an "expanse" was set, so that the earth surface should be free, and that light might freely penetrate, and sound also, and that all the other regular functions of nature dependent on the existing relation of earth and air should proceed--all this was very necessary. And when we recollect what a balanced and complex scheme it is--how very far from being a simple thing; we recognize in the adjustment of earth's atmospheric envelope, a special result worthy of the day's work. Whether the separation between the condensed but ever re-evaporating and re-condensing water on the earth's surface, and the water vapour in the atmosphere, is _all_ that is meant by the division of the "waters that are above the firmament" from those below, it would not be wise to assert. We know so little of the condition of space beyond our own air, and so little of the great stores of hydrogen which have been suggested to exist in space (and might combine to form vast quantities of liquid), that we may well leave the phrase as it stands, content with a partial explanation. (3) "AND GOD SAID, LET THE WATERS UNDER THE HEAVEN BE GATHERED TOGETHER UNTO ONE PLACE, AND LET THE DRY LAND APPEAR: AND IT WAS SO. AND GOD SAID, LET THE EARTH PUT FORTH GRASS (VEGETATION), HERB YIELDING SEED, AND FRUIT TREE BEARING FRUIT AFTER ITS KIND, WHEREIN IS THE SEED THEREOF." The only remarks that the first part of this verse calls for, are, _first_, that it explains how far from mere chance-work the emergence of land from the water was; _second_ how well it illustrates the use of terms relating to creation. The whole scheme of the distribution of the surface of earth into land and water is one which demanded Divine foresight and a complete ideal[1] which was to be attained by the action and reaction of natural forces, just as much as the production of the most specialized form of plant-or animal-life. [Footnote 1: Compare Job xxxviii. 10, 11, and Psa. civ. 9.] This is not the place to go into detail as to how much of the world's life-history and its climatic conditions depend on the distribution of land and water. It is sufficient to recognize the immense importance of that distribution. But, in the second place, it will be observed that while it is natural to suppose (though not logically necessary) that the working out of the Divine plan _commenced_ immediately on the issue of the Divine command and the declared formulation of the Divine scheme, yet we know--few things are better known--that the whole scheme was not completely realized in one day, or one age--certainly not _before_ there was any appearance of plant-life, aquatic, or dry land, or any appearance of animal-life. I believe (though I have lost my reference) it is held by some authorities that the position of the great _oceans_ as they are now (and omitting, of course, all minor coast variations) has been fixed from very early geologic times. But, apart from that, we have ample evidence of whole continents arising and being again submerged; and of continual changes between land and water of the most wide-reaching character again and again happening during the progress of the world's history. So that here we may see clearly an instance where the revelation of the creative act must be held to refer to the great primal design--teaching us that it is a fact that at first all _was_ laid down, foreseen, and designed by the Creator; but not referring to anything like an account of the _results_ upon earth, which, for aught we know to the contrary, may not yet be complete. As to the second part of the text, we are here introduced to the commencement of life-forms on earth. No separation is recorded. Directly the chemical elements of matter have so combined that a solid earth and liquid water (salt and fresh) are formed, and the cooling process has gone on sufficiently long to enable the dense vapours partly to settle down and condense, partly to remain as vapour (dividing the waters above from the waters below)--directly this process is aided by the admission of diffused light and by the adjustment of the atmosphere, and the superficial adjustment of the distribution of water and land surface is provided for, then plant-life is organized. It will be observed that even aquatic plants and algae though growing in or under water, are nevertheless connected with the _earth_; so that the phrase, "Let the _earth_ bring forth," is by no means inappropriate. The earliest rock deposits are able to tell us little about the first beginning of plant-life. Moreover, as animal-life began only with the interval of one day (the fourth), we should expect to find--on the supposition that the heavenly _fiat_ at once received the _commencement_ of its fulfilment on each day--that the first lowly specimens of vegetable and animal life are almost coeval. And this is (apparently) the fact. It is to be remarked that plant and animal always appear in nature as two separate and _parallel_ kingdoms. It is not that the plant is lower than the animal, so that the highest plant takes on it some of the first characters which mark the lowest animal: but both start separately from minute and little specialized forms so similar that it is extremely difficult to say which is plant and which is animal.[1] [Footnote 1: See this well summarized in Nicholson's "Manual of Zoology" (sixth edition, 1880), p. 13, _et seq._] All the beginnings of life in _either_ kingdom would therefore be ill-adapted (most of them, at any rate) for preservation in rock-strata.[1] [Footnote 1: I think this is quite sufficient, without relying on the evidence of the great quantities of _carbon_ in the earliest (Laurentian, Huronian, &c.) strata in the form of graphite. It is possible, or even probable, that this may be due to carbon supplied by masses of little specialized _Thallophyte_ and _Anophyte_ vegetation.] All we know for certain is that vegetable-life was closely coeval with the lowest animal-life, and that it was very long before specialized forms, even of _cryptogams_, made a great show in the world. Probability is entirely in favour of the actual priority being in vegetable forms; and more than that is not required. For the Mosaic narrative, while it places the origin of the vegetable kingdom actually first, lets the _fiat_ for the animal kingdom follow almost immediately. As to the _order_ of appearance of the plants, I will reserve my remarks for the moment. (4) "AND GOD SAID, LET THERE BE LIGHTS IN THE FIRMAMENT OF THE HEAVEN, TO DIVIDE THE DAY FROM THE NIGHT; AND LET THEM BE FOR SIGNS, AND FOR SEASONS, AND FOR DAYS, AND FOR YEARS: AND LET THEM BE FOR LIGHTS IN THE FIRMAMENT TO GIVE LIGHT ON THE EARTH." The sun and the stars, and all the host of heaven, are clearly understood to have been created "in the beginning," under the general statement of fact which forms the first verse of the narrative. The 14th verse has always been understood to refer to the establishment of the _relations_ between the earth and the sun, moon, and stars, which have, as a matter of fact, been recognized by all ages and all people ever since. The writer of the 104th Psalm certainly so understood the passage-- "He appointed the moon for seasons; The sun knoweth his going down.[1]" The writer was instructed to use popularly intelligible language, and so the text speaks of the lights as they _appear_ in the sky or firmament. Even if we suppose that before this act, the sun was already incandescent, and the moon capable of reflecting the light, the whole arrangement of the earth's rotation may have been such that the alternations of light and darkness may have been very different from what they are now, and the seasons also. A moment's reflection regarding the obliquity of the earth's axis, nutation, the precession of the equinoxes, the eccentricity of the orbit and the changes in the position of the orbit, will show us what ample room there was for a special adjustment and adaptation between the earth and its satellite and between both to the solar centre.[2] So that faith which accepts this as a Divine arrangement made among the special and formal acts of Creation, cannot be said to be unreasonable, or to be flying in the face of any known facts. [Footnote 1: Ver. 19, &c. The same word is also used of "making" priests (l Kings xii. 31), and appointing (R.V.)("advancing" A.V.), ("making," as we familiarly say) Moses and Aaron (1 Sam. xii. 6).] [Footnote 2: And the Psalmist justly speaks of God as _preparing_ the light of the sun (Psa. lxxiv. 16).] It is very remarkable, as showing how little we can attribute this narrative, on any basis of probability, to mere fancy or guess-work, that this matter should have been assigned to the fourth day--_after_ the fiat for plant-life had gone forth. But the fact is that the unregulated light, and the vaporous uniform climate that must have continued if the fourth day's command had never issued, though it might have served for a time for the lowest beginnings of life, especially marine or aquatic, would ultimately have rendered any advance in the series of design impossible. Such a fact would never have occurred to an ignorant and uninspired writer. It is here impossible to say whether the whole arrangements indicated were made at once in obedience to the Divine Design, or were produced gradually. It has been suggested that uniformity of climate and temperature continued up till the carboniferous ages, at any rate; and it is only in the later ages that such differences of _fauna_ in different parts of the world appear, as to show differences of climate more like what we have at present. Whether this is so or not, I am not concerned to argue. The narrative tells us that God did, at a certain point in his Creative work, design and ordain the necessary arrangements; and physical science may find out, when it is able, how and when the adjustments spoken of came about. (5) AND GOD SAID-- (i.) Let the waters bring forth the moving creature that hath life, (ii.) Let fowl fly above the earth on the face of the expanse. As to (i.) the "creation" consisted of--great sea-monsters (or water monsters), and every living thing that moveth. Then the animal life received a _blessing_. Animals, even the lowliest, are capable of a new feature in life--happiness in their being, which cannot be predicated of plants. (6) AND GOD SAID-- (i.) Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind ... the beast of the earth _after its kind (Carnivora)_, cattle _after its kind_ (_Ungulata_), and everything that creepeth on the ground _after its kind_.[1] And also-- (ii.) Let us make man.... So God created man in His own image--in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. (7) Then followed the day of rest. [Footnote 1: See page 178.] [Transcriber's Note: Chapter XIV.] § 2. _The Order of Events considered._ It was convenient first to bring these later Creative Acts together before beginning any remarks about any one of them. It will now be desirable to notice what occurred, because here the question of _order_ is concerned. I could not avoid a partial statement on this subject at an earlier page, nor would it be quite sufficient simply to refer the reader back to those pages. At the risk of some repetition, I will therefore consider the subject here. It will be observed that on the older interpretation, which passed over the special act of God in _designing_ and _publishing the design,_ and descended at once to the earth to the process of producing the designed forms, this order was matter of great importance. Granting the supporters of this view that the six days are unequal periods often of vast duration, with or without important subdivisions, they are bound to make out that each creation began, and was at any rate well advanced, _before_ the next began. We ought, in fact, to see a period more or less prolonged when the whole of what is indicated in the _plant_ verse was well advanced, _before_ any marine or fresh-water life appeared at all.[1] [Footnote 1: There was "evening and morning" of the third day, i.e., beginning and _completion_, and also the whole interval of the fourth day, _before_ the command of the fifth.] All attempts to make out that this _was_ so, have proved failures. It is assumed, for instance (and justly so), that life on the globe began with low vegetable forms; these represented the "grass" of the text, and it is suggested that the "fruit tree" is represented by the Devonian and Carboniferous _conifers_. This in itself is a very strained view. It is recollected that the terms used are not scientific, but for the world at large; but without confining "fruit tree" to mean only trees having _edible_ fruit, still the appearance of a few first species of _conifers_ in the Devonian, can hardly be called an adequate fulfilment of the requirements of the passage. But even so, myriads of fish and other animals existed _before_ the Devonian and Carboniferous plant age. The animal forms that so existed, have therefore to be _ignored_, or are assumed to have been created without special notice: and it is said that the Mosaic period of "moving creatures of the deep," fishes and monsters, only began when the rocks begin to show _great abundance_ of shells, of fish, and subsequently of huge reptilians which prepared the way for birds--which gradually make their appearance towards the Trias. But the Devonian "age of fishes" (Devonian including old red sandstone) was far too important a period to be thus got rid of; and it is difficult to understand _why_ the narrative should exclude all the extensive and beautiful (though often little specialized) orders of marine life--all the Corals, the Mollusca and Articulata, which had long abounded--especially some of the Crustaceans, not an unimportant group of which (_Trilobite_[1]) had also culminated and almost passed away before the Devonian; to say nothing of the fact that _land_ "creeping things" (scorpions among _crustacea_, and apparently winged insects) had occurred. [Footnote 1: It is remarkable that the Trilobites rapidly culminated, so that we have the largest and most perfect forms, such as _Paradoxus_, with the lowest (_Agnostus_) in the same beds in Wales (Etheridge's "Phillips' Manual," Part II. p. 32).] It is a special difficulty also, that if _insects_ are included among the "creeping things" of the _earth_ then various families of the "land-creation" (sixth day) became represented _before_ the great reptiles of the "water-creation" (fifth day). The fact is that a glance at the subjoined Tables (which are only generally and approximately correct) will suffice to show how the main features of the progress of life-forms differ from what is required by the older methods of reading Genesis. To reduce the table within limits, I have grouped together all the lower forms of life in the animal table, viz., the sponges, corals, encrinites, and molluscs. It is sufficient to say that these appear in all the rocks except the very oldest--the Caelenterata beginning, and the Molluscoids exhibiting an early order in _brachiopoda_, which seems to be dying out. Crustaceans and insects appeared as early as Silurian times. The idea of successive "kingdoms" or "periods," each of which was _complete_ in its actual fauna upon earth before the next was fully ushered in, can no longer be defended. It is in the _completion_ of one class of life before the other, that the fallacy of the period theory lies--for completion is essential to that theory which supposes "the Mosaic author" to have intended to describe the _process of production on earth_. But it is quite impossible to deny that there _is_ a certain observable movement and gradual procession in the history of life which is exactly consistent with what is most likely to have happened, supposing the Divine designs of life-forms were first declared in successive order at short intervals of time, and then that the processes of nature worked out the designs in the fulness of time and gradually in order, each one _beginning_ before the next, but only beginning. I do not deny that it is perfectly _conceivable_ that the Creator might have designed the forms in one order, and that the actual production or evolution of the corresponding living creatures might not have been (for reasons not understood) exactly, or even at all, coincident with the order. But it is impossible to deny the strong feeling of probability that the commands would _begin_ to be worked out, in the order in which they were uttered. And here it is that the correspondence which undoubtedly exists, gives rise to controversy. From one point of view it is just enough to encourage the "period" holders to try and arrange a scheme; but it is just hot enough to prevent their opponents (justly) taxing them with straining or "torturing" the text and failing fairly to make out their case after all. From another point of view the correspondence is so far established, and so undeniably unprecedented (in human cosmogonies) and noteworthy, as to demand imperatively our careful consideration and compel us to account for it. It will be observed, first of all, that the whole "creation" (omitting all incidental and preparatory works) is stated in _groups_ each having an order within itself. _Group_ 1. God created (both land and water) "vegetation"--plants yielding seed, fruit-trees. _Group_ 2. In water, not necessarily excluding _amphibia_:--Great aquatic monsters; fish and all other creatures that move. In air:--Winged fowl. _Group_ 3. On land generally--for some forms are amphibious:--Beasts (_Carnivora_), cattle (_Ungulata_, &c.), and other things that creep on the ground (the smaller and lower forms of life collectively). The order _within_ the groups is evidently of no consequence, because the writer does not adhere to it in two consecutive verses dealing with the same subject; while the "versions" seem to point to some variations in the text itself as to arrangement, though not as to substance. But as regards the order _of_ the groups themselves, it is, as I said, very natural (but yet not logically inevitable) to expect that when the results came to be existent on earth, those results should exhibit a sequence corresponding to the order in which the groups were created. And it is never denied (in _any_ of the most recent publications[1]) that to this extent nature confirms the belief. [Footnote 1: I have done my best to verify this from the well-known latest Manuals of Etheridge, Seeley, and Alleyne-Nicholson.] I am aware that Professor Huxley's recent articles may at first sight seem to go against this; but that is not so on any grounds of actual fact, but of a particular _interpretation_--which I submit is wholly unwarranted. For instance, it is insisted that the "sea-monsters" of the second group included _sirenia_ and _cetacea_ (dugongs, manatees, and whales, dolphins, &c.), which are mammals. In that case a portion of the command would not have been obeyed--a number of the designed forms would have been kept in abeyance--for a long time. And the same is still more true if bats--a highly placed group of mammals--were included in "winged fowl." But both these interpretations are distinctly arbitrary, incapable of holding good, and also entirely ignore the conditions of a Revelation. The narrative is not discussed or defended as an ordinary secular narrative, which is true according to the _writer's uninspired intention or the state of his personal knowledge_. It is defended as a Revelation. The distinction is as obvious as it is important, directly a moment's consideration is accorded. If we assume, for a moment, that God _did_ (on any theory whatever of Inspiration) instruct, direct, or enable the writer in making the record, then it is obvious that the writer either put down what he saw in a vision, or what was in some other manner borne on his mind. In any case, he could have had no critical knowledge, and no historical knowledge as an eye-witness, of the actual facts; and he may very well therefore have used language the full meaning of which he did not apprehend.[1] What alone is essential is, that the narrative as it stands, on an ordinary critical, linguistic, and grammatical interpretation, should not contain anything which is untrue. Suppose, for example, the word "tannînîm" to be _incapable_ of bearing any other meaning linguistically than "cetacean," then the narrative might be objected to; but if it will bear a meaning which is consistent with fact, then it is no matter that the writer at the time had an erroneous, or (what is more likely) no defined, idea in his own mind of the meaning. And so with "winged fowl"--the objection fails entirely, unless it can be shown, not only that the writer might have thought "bats" to be included, _but_ that linguistically the word _cannot have_ any other meaning than one which would include bats.[2] [Footnote 1: As is constantly the case in prophetic writings. Revelation tells of the remote past sometimes as well as the future, and in neither case could the inspired writer fully understand the meaning that was wrapped up in his sentences.] [Footnote 2: As a matter of fact, in the one case, if the writer's knowledge were of any importance, it is almost certain that he did _not_ mean _cetacean_ or _sirenian_. In the other case it is impossible to say whether he thought "bats" were included or not. It is not in the nature of things that the writer could ever have seen or even heard of a manatee or a dugong; nor is it likely that he had been a sea-farer, or could have seen any Mediterranean cetacean. As far as his own knowledge went, he probably had but a very confused idea. And if we refer to the poetic description in Psalm civ. 25, 26, we find "leviathan," though distinctly a sea creature, still one of which the writer had only a vague traditional idea, certainly not a _known_ Mediterranean dolphin, for in Job xli. the same term is applied to the crocodile.] We have every right, then, to say that the "tannînîm" of the text may be taken to refer to that great and remarkable age of Saurians which is not only of very great importance in itself, but becomes doubly so when we see its connection backward with the fishes, and forward through the Pterodactyles to Odontoformae (_Apatornis_ and _Icthyornis_) and modern winged birds (_Hesperonis_ for the Penguins); and through the Dinosaurs[1] with the Saurornithes, with the _Dinornis_ and the struthious birds; and through the Theriodonts with the mammalian _carnivora_. [Footnote 1: And perhaps the pachydermatous mammals (Nicholson, "Zoology," p. 566).] In that case the sequence of the two groups, plants and aquatic animal-forms, is explained. They come almost together--plants being probably actually the first, and mollusca, fishes, and saurians. There is, further, no real dispute that the Saurians led up to the Aves, and that the third group (of mammals) follows all the members of the second group. The earliest known mammal (_microlestes_) is an isolated forerunner of not very certain location, the real bulk of the mammalian orders beginning in the Eocene. Seeing, too, how very closely one Creative command is recorded to have followed on the other, it is not in any way against the narrative that some land forms of crustaceans and insects (and possibly others) began to appear at an early stage, when the vegetable and water-animal forms had only progressed as far as the Silurian and Devonian ages. Nor should we wonder if mammalian forms had occurred earlier. I mention this because of the evident gap in the geologic record between the Cretaceous and the Eocene, and because in the article of December, 1885 (and elsewhere), Professor Huxley has used language which suggests that mammals may have existed of which the rocks give no sign. E.g. (p. 855): "The organization of the bat, bird, or pterodactyle, presupposes that of a terrestrial quadruped ... and is intelligible only as an extreme modification of the organization of a terrestrial _mammal or_ reptile." The italics are of course mine. And again (p. 855), "I am not aware that any competent judge would hesitate to admit that the organization of these animals (whales, dugongs, &c.) shows the most obvious signs of their descent from terrestrial quadrupeds." I do not quote these words of so great a master as presuming to question them (even if, as a scientific verdict, I had any motive for so doing), but merely to point out as a matter of plain and fair reasoning, that if a Divine Creator had designed certain forms to be gradually attained by the processes of Evolution, it would not be necessary that any actually realized form or tangible creature should have existed as ancestors. Logically, the necessity is _either_ that certain animals should have actually existed whose descendants gradually lost or gained certain features and functions till the forms we are speaking of resulted, _or_ that certain patterns or designs should have been created according to which development proceeded by regular laws till the forms in question resulted. A few words as to the terms used in describing the contents of each group, may be added. It is obvious that the terms are intended to be exhaustive of certain main groups which are described sufficiently, without being cast in a form which would have been incompatible with the use (at the time) of a human agent as the medium of the recorded Revelation. (1) "Vegetation" (of an indefinite character, but not bearing seed), plants bearing seed, trees bearing fruit with the seed in it--certainly exhaust the entire range of plant-life. (2) Moving creatures that live (and fish are afterwards expressly mentioned) and great monsters (tann[i=]n[i=]m), cover the entire field of life up to Reptilia as far as these are aquatic forms. (3) The terms used for the third group are also obviously exhaustive--the separate mention of the _cattle_ and the _beast_ (Carnivora and Ungulates) is a form which is invariably noticed throughout the Old and New Testaments. The "creeping things" would include all minor forms, all land reptiles not described above as the "tann[i=]n[i=]m," and insects. And it is remarkable that the tortoises, the snakes, and, the more modern forms of crocodile and lizard, and the amphibia and higher insects, are all cainozoic--some of them were preceded by more or less transitory representatives, e.g., the Carboniferous _Eosaurus_ and Permian _Protosaurus_ the ancient Labyrinthodons and Urodelas, Chelonians and the amphicaelian crocodiles. Snakes have no palaeozoic representative. Land insects, as might naturally be expected, go back to the times when land vegetation was sufficiently established, and appear gradually all along the line from the Silurian onwards. The modern types, however, are Tertiary. The succession, we observe, may be illustrated by the resemblance of a number of arrows shot rapidly one after the other in so many parallel courses: all would soon be moving nearly together. Plant-life, the subject of the first Divine designing, has, as far as we can reasonably say, the start. According to known laws it appears in elementary and undeveloped forms, and gradually progresses. One group (Cryptogams) reaches a magnificent development and begins to die away in point of grandeur, though still abundantly exemplified. Phanerogamic plants in their lowest groups of gymnosperm exogens then begin to appear in the Devonian conifers, gradually followed by _cycads_. And it is not till Cainozoic times that we have the endogenous grasses and palms and angiospermous exogens. But the command regarding animal life had followed the other after a short interval, so that we soon see this developing _pari passu_ with the other groups--first the lower marine forms and gradually advancing to the Pisces, Amphibia, Reptilia, and then to Aves, as a special division in the second great design group. Lastly the mammals appear and man.[1] But throughout all, we see the rise, culmination, and decay of many transitory and apparently preparatory groups--such as, for example, the Labyrinthodons and Urodelas--preceding the modern types of Amphibia; ancient fish-forms preceding modern ones, and either dying out or leaving but a few and distant representatives; or again, the whole tribes of ancient Saurians, of which something has already been said. All these wonderful under-currents and cross-currents, rises and falls, appearances and disappearances, nevertheless all work together till the whole earth is peopled with the forms, designed in the beginning by the Heavenly Creator. [Footnote 1: Nor should we be surprised to find (should it be so discovered) that some animals appeared after man. (_Cf_. "Nineteenth Century" for Dec. 1885, p. 856.)] No account of Creation can be other than wonderful and mysterious; nor can the mystery of the Divine act be explained in language other than that of analogy. We can speak without mystery of a human architect conceiving a design in his mind; and when he utters it, it is by putting the plans and details upon paper, and handing them over to the builders, who set to work (under the architect's supervision, and in obedience to all the rules he has prescribed as to the methods of work and materials to be used). All this we can transfer by analogy only, to a Divine design. The design is in the Divine mind, and He utters it in no material plans or drawings: the forces of nature and the chemical elements, His obedient builders, have no hands to receive the plans or eyes to scan them; but we can perceive the analogy directly, and that is all that is necessary for Faith. The origin of all we see in the world and in the entire Cosmos is, then, in God; and as regards the adjustments of our globe and its relations, and the actual life-forms in plant and animal, they came into existence pursuant to groups of types or designs, made by the Divine Mind, and declared by Him from His Throne in heaven, in six several days--periods of the rotation of our earth. That is the message of Revelation. It requires no straining of the sacred text: it takes everything as it stands, and the seemingly lengthy explanation it requires is not to manipulate the text, but to clear away the heap of mistaken conceptions that have gathered round it:--to establish the idea, that the terms "God said, Let there be," and so forth, mean Heaven work, in the design and type--not earth work in its realization and building up. Establishing this by illustration and argument, nothing more is required in the way of textual exegesis except to argue for the rejection of perverse and unsustainable meanings long given to "days," to "expanse" or "firmament," and to "great whales" in the narrative. It will be admitted readily that if this account of Creation is the true one, if the meaning assigned to the Genesis narrative is correct, it affords no hindrance to _any_ conclusions that may progressively be demanded by the investigation of life-history on earth. It requires us to believe that the forms which life assumes are not chance forms, nor the _unpremeditated_ results of environment and circumstance. But we are not told positively which forms are transitory, which are final. It is only a matter of probable opinion, which it is quite open to any one to dispute, that there is any indication of finality. I should personally be inclined to think that we have indications that carnivora, ungulates, and birds are final forms; that no evolution will ever modify a bird further into anything that is not a bird; that no transition between the ungulates and the carnivora is possible; that the _proboscideae_ are not a final but a transitory type, dying out gradually--our elephants and similar forms will disappear as the mastodon did. But I admit this is all mere speculation, in which I ask no one to follow me. On one important point only is there a difference; and if the text is ever proved wrong on that, it must be given up. But it is here that all scientific knowledge fails, in _any way whatever,_ to touch the sacred text. There _is_ an unique and exceptional account of one "special creation." A man "Adam" is described as having been actually created, not born as an ultimately modified descendant of ancestors originally far removed from himself. That is not to be denied; not only was his bodily form specially created (conformably to the _type_ created in Genesis i. 26), but a special spiritual and higher life was imparted--for I believe that no one disputes this as the meaning of the expression, "breathed into his nostrils the _breath of lives,_ and man became a living soul." It must be noted again--although I have before alluded to this in some detail--that it is not impossible that, pursuant to the general command "Let us make man," there _may_ have been other human creations, perhaps not endowed with the higher life of Adam. If it is found difficult to realize this because the _image of God_ is connected (from the very first) with the design of Man's life-form, still it is to be remembered as an undeniable fact, that the form, though one assumed by God Himself in the Incarnation, _is connected_ in structure and function with the general animal (Mammalian) type, and that even the Adamic or spiritually endowed man _may_, by neglecting the higher and giving way to the lower nature, develop much of the purely bestial in himself. So that the bare possibility of a pre-Adamite and imperfect man cannot be _à priori_ denied. More than that it is not necessary to say. Nor is it necessary that any origin of man should be limited to six or eight thousand years back. If the state of the text is such that a perfect chronology is possible,[1] then all that the Bible goes back to chronologically is the particular man Adam. And it is quite impossible that any scientific or historical contradiction can arise therefrom. [Footnote 1: It should be borne in mind that just as Revelation is often absolutely silent on many points that mere curiosity would like to see explained, so also, the Divine Author may have allowed parts of the original text of Revelation to be so far lost or obscured as to leave further points that _might_ have been once recorded, now doubtful. All that we may be quite sure of is that the text has been preserved for all that is essential to "life and godliness."] APPENDIX. _PROFESSOR DELITZSCH ON THE GARDEN OF EDEN._ The information here put together is a compilation from papers in "The Nineteenth Century," and other sources. It has no pretentions to originality, but only to give a brief and connected account of the subject, more condensed and freed from surrounding details than that which the original sources afford. Before entering on the subject, I would again call attention to the surpassing importance of these early chapters of Genesis. And, I add, that unbelievers are especially glad to be able to allege anything they can against them, because they are aware that hardly any chapters in the Bible are more constantly alluded to, and made the foundation of practical arguments by our Lord and His Apostles, than these early chapters in the Divine volume. If these chapters can be shown to be mythical, then the divine knowledge of our Lord, as the Son of God, and the inspiration of His Apostles, are put in question. All through the Old Testament, allusions to Adam and to the early history in Genesis occur; and among other passages, I will only here invite attention to the 31st chapter of Ezekiel, where there is, in a most beautiful description of the cedar-tree, an allusion to "Eden, the Garden of God" (see also chapter xxviii. ver. 13), which some have thought to indicate that the site was still known, and existing in the time of the prophet. This at least may be remarked, that in verse 9, where the prophet speaks of the "trees that _were_ in the Garden of God," the word _were_ is not in the original, and the sense of the context would rather denote the present tense--"the trees that _are_ in the Garden of God." But it is in the New Testament that the most repeated and striking allusions to Adam, the temptation of the woman by the Serpent, and the entrance of sin and death into the life-history of mankind, occur.[1] [Footnote 1: See on this subject page 137 _ante_.] [Transcriber's note: Chapter X.] As regards the narrative of Eden itself, there has been, from the very earliest times, some disposition to regard it as mystical or "allegorical," i.e., to regard it as representing spiritual facts of temptation and disobedience, under the guise or story of an actual audible address by a serpent, and the eating of an actual fruit. The earliest translators seem to have glossed the "Gan-'Eden," everywhere in the Old Testament (_except_ in Gen. ii. 8), by the phrase "the paradise of pleasure," or some other similar term. And the Vulgate _always_ uses some phrase, such as "place of delight," "voluptas," "deliciae," &c. It must be admitted that there is some temptation to this course, because of the inveterate tendency of the human mind to reduce things to its own level--to suppose everything to have happened _in ways which are within its present powers to comprehend._ We figure to ourselves the fear and dislike _we_ should ourselves experience, of a large snake; we imagine the amazement with which an intelligible voice would be heard to proceed from such a creature; so far from being _tempted, we_ should at once be moved to hostility or to flight; and thus we are inclined to throw doubt on the narrative as it stands. But this is to do what we justly complain of modern materialists and positivists for doing--reducing everything to terms of present experience and knowledge. It has to be borne in mind, that _under the conditions of the case_, the serpent was neither ugly, dangerous, nor loathsome, but beautiful and attractive; that the residents of the Garden were familiar with the "voice of God"--i.e., they had habitual intelligible communication with heaven: probably, also, free intercourse with angelic messengers (inconceivable as it may now seem to us) was matter of daily experience to them. The woman would then recognize in the voice an Angel communication; and unaware at first that it was an evil angel, it would excite no surprise in her at all. Sensations of terror, surprise, dislike, and so forth, were _ex hypothesi_ unknown. Why then should not the narrative be exact, unless, indeed, we have some _à priori_ ground for supposing that human nature _never could_ have been in a state where the voice of God and angels sounded in its ears, and where innocence and the absence of all evil emotion was the daily condition of life? The unbeliever may sneer at such a state, but _reason_ why it should _not_ have been, he can give none. So, again, with the idea of the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" and the "tree of life." We are no doubt tempted to think that these terms may be symbolic; but a more careful reflection, and a deliberate rejection of the _influence of present experiences_, may lead us to accept the narrative more literally. Even now, we are not unfamiliar with the ideas of medicinal virtues in plants and fruits. I see nothing impossible in the idea that God may have been pleased to impart such virtue to the fruit of a tree standing in the midst of the Garden, that physical health, immunity from all decay, and constant restoration, should have been the result of eating the fruit; and the eating of this fruit, we know, was freely permitted. The late Archbishop Whately suggested, and I think with great probability, that the longevity of the earliest generations of the Adamic race may have been due to the beneficial effects of the eating of this fruit, which only gradually died out. Just as we know at the present time, that peculiarities introduced into human families, often survive from father to son, till they gradually die out after many generations. Again, as regards the "forbidden tree," it will not seem impossible, that as a simple _test of obedience_ in a very primitive state, the rule of abstinence from a particular fruit may have been literally enjoined, and that the consequence of the moral act of _disobedience_ (rather than the physical effect of the fruit eaten) should have been the knowledge of evil, the first sensation of shame, terror, angry dissension, and, worst of all, the alienation from God the source of all good, which followed. All such considerations of the reality of the history must gain greatly in strength, if we can demonstrate that the Garden of Eden, the scene of the temptation, the place where the trees that were the vehicles of such consequences to the occupants of the garden, stood, had a real existence and geographical site. Now I need hardly remark that the Mosaic narrative unquestionably _professes_ a geographical exactness and a literal existence of the garden, as no fabled locality--no Utopia or garden of the Hesperides. I need only refer to the _data_ afforded to us by Gen. ii. 8-14. The Lord, it is said, planted a garden in Eden: it was "eastward;" but that does not directly indicate its site. From Gen. iv. 16, we also learn that the land of Nod where Cain dwelt (after the murder of Abel) was on the east of Eden. A river went out and watered the garden. After passing the limits of Eden, the river is said to have divided itself, or parted, into four heads, i.e., arms or branches. The first branch was called Pison. This branch "compasseth," i.e., forms the boundary along the whole length of, "_the_ Havilah." This country is spoken of as being a tract wherein was produced good gold, "b'dolach" (translated "bdellium") and "shoham" (translated "onyx.") The second branch was Gihon, which is described as similarly compassing the district of K[=u]sh. Here our A.V., by substituting "Ethiopia" for the original "C[=u]sh," has made a gloss rather than a translation; and this gloss has given rise to several errors of commentators in identifying the site of Eden. The Revised Version has corrected the error. The third branch was Hiddekel, the _Diklatu_ of the Arabs, the Tigra of the old Persians, and the _Tigris_ of later writers. This is said to run eastward towards Assyria.[1] The fourth river was the Frat or Euphrates. Observe, in passing, that the author gives no detail about the great river Euphrates, as being well known; while he adds particulars about the Tigris, and describes the Gihon and the Pison in some detail. [Footnote 1: So the margin of the A. and R. Versions more correctly.] Now it will at once strike the reader that two of these rivers are well known to the present day. The others are not. It is in the identification of these two, and of the districts which they "compassed," which form the difficulties of the problem. Up till recent times, it is remarkable what a variety of speculations have been attempted as to the situation of Eden. Dr. Aldis Wright, the learned author of the article "Eden" in Smith's "Biblical Dictionary," remarks: "It would be difficult, in the whole history of opinion, to find any subject which has so invited, and at the same time completely baffled, conjecture, as the Garden of Eden." And in another place he thinks that "the site of Eden will ever rank with the quadrature of the circle, and the interpretation of unfulfilled prophecy among those unsolved, and perhaps insoluble, problems which possess so strange a fascination." It is, however, to be remarked, (1)that all that was written before Professor Delitzsch's researches were made known; and (2)that really a great mass of the conjecture and speculation has been purely in the air--undertaken without any reference to the plain terms of the text to be interpreted. It is the extravagance of commentators, and their insisting on going beyond the narrative itself, that has raised such difficulties, and made the problem look more hopeless than it really is. To what purpose are "the three continents of the old world" "subjected to the most rigorous search," as Dr. Wright puts it--when it is quite plain from the text itself, that the solution is to be sought in the neighbourhood of the Euphrates, or not at all? The whole inquiry seems to have been one in which a vast cloud of learned dust has been raised by speculators, who began their inquiry without clearly determining, to start with, what was the point at issue. Either the description in Gen. ii. 3-14 is meant for allegory, or geographical fact: this question must first be settled; and if the latter is agreed to, then it is quite inconceivable that the words should imply any very extensive region, or any fancied realm extending over a large proportion of one or other quarter of the globe. The problem is then at once narrowed; and it is simply unreasonable to look for Havila in India, or for Pison in the province of Burma, as one learned author does! Yet commentators have forgotten this; and gone--the earlier ones into interpretation of allegory--the later into impossible geographical speculation; while only the most recent have confined themselves to the obvious terms of the problem as laid down in the narrative itself--a narrative which (whether true or false) is clearly meant to be definite and exact, as we have seen. Our A.V. translators are to be held, to some extent, responsible for the freedom which speculation has exercised, by themselves taking the C[=u]sh of the narrative to "Ethiopia," i.e., to the African continent--for which there is no authority whatever. As regards the _allegorical_ interpretations, they are too extravagant for serious notice. Souls, angels, human passions and motives, are supposed to be represented by towns, rivers, and countries. To all this it is enough to reply--What reason can we have for supposing an allegory suddenly to be interpolated at Gen. ii. 8? There is no allegory before it, there is none after. Then as to the early geographical expounders. Josephus and others supposed the allusion was made to the great rivers known to ancient geography, all of which ran into that greatest river of all, which encircled the globe. In this view, the Gihon might be the Nile, and the Pison the Ganges! Here, again, it may be remarked it is impossible to read the narrative and believe that the author meant any such widespread region. Even if the author had the ancient ideas about cosmography generally, that would not prevent his being accurate about a limited region lying to the east of a well-known river in a populous country. In later times Luther avoided the difficult speculation by supposing that the Deluge had swept away all traces of the site! But unfortunately for this convenient theory, it is a plain fact that the Deluge did not sweep any two out of the four rivers named. The reader who is curious on the subject, will find in Dr. A. Wright's article a brief account of the various identifications proposed by all these commentators. It would not be interesting to go into any detail. I shall pass over all those extravagant views which go to places remote from the Euphrates, and come at once to the later attempts to solve the question in connection with the two known rivers, Euphrates and Hiddekel (Tigris); as this is the only kind of solution that any reasonable modern Biblical student will admit. The different explanations adopted maybe grouped into two main attempts: (1) to find the place among the group of rivers that surrounds Mount Ararat in Northern Armenia, _vis._, in the extreme upper course of the Euphrates near its two sources; (2) to find the place below the _present_ junction of the Euphrates and the Tigris, along some part of the united course, which is now more than two hundred miles long, and is called "Shatt-el-'Aráb." But neither of these attempts has been successful: the first must, indeed, be absolutely dismissed; because the Hebrew phrases used in describing the four _branches_ of the river that "went out," and watered the garden, and then parted, cannot be applied to four independent sources or streams--_upstream_ of the Euphrates. It will not, then, satisfy the problem, to find four rivers somewhere in the vicinity of the Euphrates, and which, in a general way, enclose a district in which Eden might be placed. It may, indeed, be doubted whether this first attempt (which I may call the "North Armenian solution") would ever have been seriously entertained, but from the fact that the name Gihon--or something very like it--did attach itself to the Araxes or Phasis, a considerable river of Armenia. Finding a Gihon ready, the commentators next made the Pison, the Acampsis; and then as Pison was near the "Havila land," this country was laid on the extreme north of Armenia; all this without a particle of evidence of any kind.[1] I may here take the opportunity of remarking that a chance _similarity of names_[2] has been, throughout the controversy, a fruitful source of enlarged speculative wandering. Thus this name Gihon (Gaihun, Jíkhún, G[=e][=o]n, &c.) that appears in North Armenia, again appears in connection with the _Nile_; while again the name "Nile" has wandered back to the confines of Persia, and one of the _Euphrates_ branches is still called "Shatt-en-nîl." The ancients, indeed, had very curious ideas about the Nile. Its real sources being so long undiscovered--no Speke or Grant having appeared--imagination ran wild on the subject. Not only so, but it is remarkable that the name _Cush_ should have acquired both a Persian Gulf and an Egyptian employment: and the writer of the able article in "The Nineteenth Century" (October, 1882) points out several other singular instances in which names are common both to the African-Egyptian region, and to this. [Footnote 1: And it is astonishing to find the error generally perpetuated in maps attached to modern Bibles.] [Footnote 2: As distinct from a real philological connection of a modern name with a more ancient one, and so forth.] Turning now to the second of the two theories, the identification of the site on the lower part of the Euphrates after its now existing junction with the Tigris (and which the supporters of the theory have justified by making the Gihon and Pison two rivers coming from Eden) must also be set aside. For the important fact has been overlooked that it is quite certain, that anciently, the joint stream, (Shatt-el-'Aráb), as it now is, did not exist. Though the Genesis narrative tells us of a junction _immediately outside_ the southern boundary of the Garden, the Euphrates channels and the Tigris branch (with part of the Euphrates water in it) flowed separately to the Persian Gulf. It is quite certain that, in the time of Alexander the Great, the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris were a good day's journey apart. For this separate outflow there is the incontestable evidence of Pliny and other authors quoted by Professor Delitzsch. I may here also remark, that anciently the Persian Gulf extended much farther inland than it does now. In the time of Sennacherib, an inland arm of the sea extended so far, that a _naval_ expedition against Elam was possible; more than one hundred miles inland from the present sea-line. The extension was called N[=a]r Marratum. In Alexander's time, the city of Charax (now Mohamra) was founded close to the sea (that was in the fourth century B.C.). It is known from later histories, that shortly before the birth of our Saviour, the city was from fifty to one hundred and twenty Roman miles inland. The change is due to the "Delta," or alluvial formation at the mouth of the rivers. Turning, then, to the recent inquiries (published in 1881[1]) by Professor Fried. Delitzsch, it must be confessed that the results obtained are such as to completely avoid all the difficulties that beset the other explanations: yet we ought not to be too confident that it is a final or absolute explanation. A certain caution and reserve will still be wisely maintained on the subject. At any rate, they show that _an_ explanation, one that answers _all_ the conditions of the problem, _can_ be given; and that is a great thing. [Footnote 1: "Wo lag das Paradies" (Leipzig, 1881) is the title of the book.] [Footnote: Professor Friedrich Delitzsch is Professor of Assyriology in the University of Leipzig.] In placing the site _on_ the Euphrates, and far from the mountain sources, there is no violence done to the Hebrew language used to describe the first river, as one that "went out," and watered the Garden. The words do not require that the river should actually _take_ its _rise_ within the Garden limits; but it is necessary that the river should be so situated, that its waters could be distributed by means of creeks or canals across the Garden, that it could be said the river "went out and watered the Garden." Now it is a remarkable fact, that in the district just above Babylon, the bed of the Euphrates is in level much higher than the bed of the Tigris (Hiddekel) to the east, and that hence there always have been a number of very variable channels leading from the Euphrates eastward to the Tigris. These, it is well known, were often enlarged by the ancients and converted into useful "inundation canals" for irrigation and the passage of boats. Imagine, then, the high level river bed of the Euphrates, and various streams flowing off it down to the valley of the Tigris, and we have a most efficiently irrigated "Garden," and one accurately described by the text--the great river "went out" and watered it. The Euphrates, moreover, is liable to great flushes of water from the melting of the snows in wide tracts of mountain or highlands from which its waters are collected, and these volumes of water found vent from the overcharged mother-channel by escape, not only through the side channels, just spoken of, but also by other important branches on the other side. Every one who has seen one of the great rivers of Northern India will at once realize the changes that take place where a river liable to floods has its bed at a high level. It is almost a matter of certainty that, in the course of years, the branches and channels of rivers so constituted will change, and old ones be left dry and deserted. These essential topographical conditions have always to be remembered in interpreting the narrative of Genesis ii. In fact, they furnish us with points which help us in the problem at the outset. (1) There is a part of the Euphrates, just above Babylon, where the river naturally furnished abundant irrigation for a Garden planted eastward of it, by means of natural irrigation channels flowing from the high level down to the lower valley of the Tigris; and (2) there is also a point from which the Euphrates did branch out, and several important arms anciently existed. Nor is the locality, in point of verdure and fertility, unsuitable. Not only do the ancient histories make frequent mention of the canals and streams flowing from the Euphrates which I have alluded to, but they speak of the palm groves, the vines and the verdure of the Babylonian or Chaldean region. Herodotus, in his first book, has the most glowing description of the scene; and the kings of Babylon had numerous enclosed gardens or parks: these were imitated in Persia, and gave rise to the Persian name "Firdaus," which Xenophon imported into Greek in the form of [Greek: paradeisos] or "paradise"--the term which was adopted by the Seventy translators. The actual locality which Professor Delitzsch proposes as the most probable site of the Garden of Eden is between the present Euphrates and Tigris, just to the north of Babylon. The boundaries would be--roughly and generally speaking--the two rivers for East and West; while for the North and South boundaries we should draw parallel lines through Accad on the North and Babylon on the South. But granted that the general locality and the relations of the river Euphrates and Tigris satisfy the requirements of the text by such a location as this: how about the other two _and_ the countries which they compass? The troubles of the earlier commentators will warn us, that we need not be too ready to force names, and to identify one river, and then, _because_ we have fixed that, make the country which the text requires follow it! It is, however, in this matter that Professor Delitzsch's work is so satisfactory. He has pointed out, that there is historical evidence (and also that the local traces are not wanting in the present day) to prove that, just below Babylon, we _can_ find two prominently important channels or branches of the Euphrates, which will at least supply the place of Pison and Gihon. As to the first, it is known that in historic times a great channel called by the Greeks Pallakopas (navigable for ships) used to carry off the surplus water of the Euphrates when swollen in the summer season by the melting snows of the Armenian mountains. It branched off from the main river at a point somewhat north of Babylon, and flowed into the Persian gulf. There is, indeed, no _direct_ evidence to show that this branch bore a name resembling Pison. _Palgu_ is the Assyrian whence the Greek Pallakopas was derived. It is remarkable, however, that the word Pison closely resembles the cuneiform term "pisána," or "pisánú," which is used for a water-reservoir, a canal or a channel; and as this "Pallakopas" was _the_ channel _par excellence_, it may very possibly have been called "pisána" or Pison, the (great) channel. The identification of the channel called "Pallakopas" will be found mentioned in Colonel Chesney's work, "An Expedition to the Tigris." The name, however, of this channel is not the only means we have of identifying it. The Scripture says that the Pison compasses the land of _Havilah_. Now let us remember, that the Scripture tells of two Havilahs: (1) The second son of Cush[1] and brother of Nimrod, and (2) one of the great great grandsons of Shem (Gen. x. 29). One we may call the Cushite Havilah, the other the Joktanite Havilah. The dwelling-place of the brother of Nimrod is not mentioned, but it is stated that the Joktanite Havilah dwelt in "Mesha." The tenth of Genesis is an important chapter, as showing how the descendants of Noah branched out and spread over the countries all round the Euphrates; some going north to Assyria (Nineveh), others to the east and west, and others south, to Arabia and Egypt. Now it so happens that the whole country west of the great Pallakopas channel, was called by the Assyrians "Mashu." Professor Delitzsch identifies this Mashu of the cuneiform inscriptions, with the "Mesha" mentioned in Scriptures, as the home of Havilah. We have also in Gen. xxv. 8,[2] mention of a land of Havila that is "before"--i.e., eastward of--"Egypt as thou goest toward Assyria," which would answer very well to this locality, west of the Euphrates. It is also known (from sources which it would take too long to detail) that this country did yield gold-dust. Pliny also mentions "Bdellium," if that was the substance known as "B'dolach." It is indeed uncertain what this was, but Gesenius long ago rejected the idea that it was a stone, because there is no prefix to it, as there is to "shoham," which follows, and certainly is a precious stone. The manna in the wilderness is described as being of the "colour of bdellium," and was also like hoar-frost;[3] hence the idea that b'dolach was a crystal. But a fragrant and precious gum-resin seems more likely. The Magi who came to worship the Infant Saviour from near this locality, brought offerings of _gold_, and also fragrant gums and myrrh. Was "bdellium" (as probably being a fragrant gum) one of these offerings? [Footnote 1: See Gen. x. 9.] [Footnote 2: See also 1 Sam. xv. 7.] [Footnote 3: Exod. xvi. 14; Numbers xi. 7: "The appearance (lit. "eye") of it was as the appearance of bdellium" (R.V.).] The "Onyx," or "Shoham," was most probably a pure red cornelian, and this also was found in the Babylonian provinces, and was specially worn by the Babylonian kings. So the country west of the Euphrates answers very well to Havila without any forcing, and without any placing it there _because_ of the river rendering such a plan necessary. As to the fourth river (Gihon), Delitzsch identifies it, still more clearly, with a channel known as the "Shatt-en-níl," which branches off from the Euphrates at Babylon itself, and passing the Scriptural city of Erech, rejoins the main river lower down. A clay tablet has actually been discovered, having the Euphrates, Tigris, and this Shatt-en-níl channel _together_: the name of the latter is given as "K[=a]hán de," or "Gughánde," a name which closely resembles Gihon. The channel is, however, identified independently of the name. For the Gihon is particularized in the narrative, by the fact that it "compasses" the land of Cush. This (as already pointed out) is not the Ethiopian Cush. Delitzsch states, that the whole country bounded by this branch was anciently called Kash-shu, which he identifies with the Cush of Genesis ii. The syllable "Kash" appears throughout this locality. In fact Kash-du or Kal-du is the origin of the familiar name Chaldea. In the Hebrew, Kush (Cush) is the name given to the father of Nimrod, who "began" his kingdom about this very site--Erech, and Calneh, and Accad (Gen. x. 8, 10). Hence it is not surprising that relics of the name should be found all round this neighbourhood. Nor does the evidence end here. The district immediately around Babylon was called "Kár-dunish-i," i.e., the "Garden of the god Dunish." Now Kar is the Turanian form of the Semitic G[=a]n, or Gin[=a] (garden); and what is more likely than that, as the true story was lost in the heathen traditions and mythology that grew up, the "garden" was attributed to the god Dunish--whereas the real original had been not "Gàndunish," but "Gan'Eden?" This, though only a conjecture, is the more probable, as one of the inscription-names of Babylon itself was "Tintira," which, though a little obscure, certainly means _either_ the "_grove_," or the _"fountain," of life._ We thus find, not only that four great branches of the river that "went out," and watered the Garden can be traced, but that the two really do "compass" tracts, that can, with the highest degree of probability, be identified as C[=u]sh or Kash, and Havilah. The importance of Professor Delitzsch's work may now be briefly glanced at. It may be objected, that such a process of reasoning as that put forward, is not convincing to a general reader who has not the means of criticizing or testing Professor Delitzsch's conclusions: he therefore cannot be sure that, in selecting two channels to represent the Pison and the Gihon, and in identifying "Mashu" with Mesha of Havilah, and one of the Babylonian districts with Kush, the Professor has at last hit off a solution of the problem which will not in its turn be disproved, as all earlier solutions have been. There is, however, this important conclusion to be safely drawn, viz., that a complete explanation in exact accord with the Hebrew text is _possible_, and that hence nothing can be urged against the _narrative_, on the ground (hitherto sneeringly taken) that the geography _was impossible_ and so forth. Next let me very briefly sum up what it is that Dr. Delitzsch has done--marshalling the evidence, beginning from the broad end and narrowing down till we arrive at the point. (1) First, then, we are fixed by the narrative to some place between the Euphrates and the Tigris. (2) We find in the ancient inscriptions of the chief city of this locality, constant allusions to a Garden, a primitive pair and a temptation: one of these almost exactly reproduces the Bible story; it is not of the earliest date and is a copy. But discovery is far from being exhausted; all that we know is _consistent_ with the idea of an original story, gradually corrupted by the addition of legends, and introduction of mythological persons and heathen divinities. The true belief in one God, who made Himself known by voice or vision to His true worshippers, seems early to have been confined to a few of the Shemitic families, while the others "invented" gods of their own. (3) We find that the region about Babylon itself was called Kár-dunishi--which easily recalls Kar or Gán-Eden. We also find the name (Tintira) applied, indicating a "grove" or "fountain" of life; in the locality where the direct legends most abound. (4) We find from ancient authors that the district was one of rich verdure--a land of gardens and irrigation. (5) We find that some way above Babylon about Accad, the level of the river bed Euphrates is so much higher than the valley of the Tigris eastward, that numerous streams flow off from it, which would serve admirably to irrigate a garden situated between the two, eastward of the Euphrates. (6) We find that the Persian Gulf once extended more than one hundred miles farther inland than it does now. That there was no joint outflow of Tigris and Euphrates, but, though they did join their streams above, they parted again and had still separate mouths--of the Tigris branch one, of the Euphrates several. (7) Lastly, Professor Delitzsch finds two channels which answer to Pison and Gihon. (8) He proves these two to be the right ones by considering the countries which they "compass:" and actually finds the one that he supposes to be the "Gaihûn," called, in the cuneiform clay tablets, "Kahán or Gaghân-dé." It is really only in (7) and (8) that there is any room for doubt and for further inquiry. At any rate, the credibility of the narrative, and a belief in its purpose, as a topographically exact statement of fact, not an allegory or legend, is established. 
28673	----	Scientific and Religious Journal. VOL. 1. OCTOBER, 1880. NO. 10. LAW AND ATONEMENT. "The soul that sinneth it shall die," and it "shall not die." The first quotation, "The soul that sinneth it shall die," is often produced in support of the scholastic idea that the law of God was inexorable, that is absolute or unconditional, not to be moved or its penalty escaped by reformation or petition. The language of the text is very definite, and, when viewed aside from its context as an inexorable law, it certainly follows that every sinning soul must pay its penalty. Neither can I see how it can be satisfied by punishing an innocent person in the room of the guilty, for the innocent one was not the "soul that sinned." Yet this quality of law is claimed in order to make out the theory of a vicarious punishment endured by the Savior, that is, that He took the sinner's "law place." This idea was necessitated by the theory that we all sinned when Adam transgressed, and lost all ability to do anything for ourselves. So we must be redeemed by satisfaction to justice, rather than by mercy. This old Calvinistic system of error lays the penalty of the inexorable law upon Christ. But Calvinists are not alone in this theory of a "vicarious punishment," in order to a vicarious atonement. Neither are they alone in the abuse of the phrase "the law," for our Sabbatarian friends are constantly asserting that the law of God was, and is, simply the ten commandments given, they say, to Adam in Eden, and authoritatively published on Sinai. They assert that all the balance of the five books of Moses was his law, written by him, but the record justifies us in saying, that the ten precepts were not the tenth part of the words given to Moses upon Sinai; neither were they all the words that were written upon the tables of stone. The tables begin with the sixth verse of the fifth chapter of the book of Deuteronomy, in these words, "I am the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage," and end with the twenty-first verse. But as the sixth verse is fatal to the Sabbatarian theory it is clipped off along with the fifteenth verse, which is cut out of the middle of the matter written upon the tables, and both are gravely divorced from God and handed over to Moses. Both, however, are in perfect harmony with the second and third verses, which read thus: "The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day." That the sixth and fifteenth verses were upon the tables of stone is evident from the reading of the twenty-second verse, which reads thus: "These words the Lord spake unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice. And He wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto you." Many persons who claim that the import of the term die, in the sentence "The soul that sinneth it shall die," was experienced by the Savior upon the cross dying as a substitute in the law-place of sinners, overlook several things of first importance. First, infants were not included in the provisions of a vicarious punishment and atonement unless it can be shown that they sinned--were sinners. Second, no innocent person can justly suffer in the law-place of the guilty. In all such cases justice is dishonored and law violated, for just law limits its penalties to the guilty. Our salvation "is not of the law," but "by grace" or favor. Law had nothing to do with the death of Christ. He, "BY THE GRACE OF GOD, tasted death for every man." "If it be of the law it is not of grace." Again, the simple sentence, "The soul that sinneth it shall die," never was _the law_ of God in any age, but simply a fraction of the law. Did Christ ever sin? No! Then He never honored this law, or satisfied its penalty by dying; for if, as our friends say, the inexorable quality of the law will forever hold the guilty to its claims, it will forever keep the innocent from its penalty. But I aver that the inexorable quality _that is claimed_ for the law of God never belonged to it. No, not even to the simple sentence, "The soul that sinneth it shall die." The Lord authorizes us to supply the condition in every instance where it is not expressed, thus: "When I shall say unto the wicked, thou shalt surely die; if he turn from his sin and do that which is lawful and right; if the wicked restore the pledge, give again that he had robbed, walk in the statutes of life, without committing iniquity, he shall surely live, _he shall not die_." So the prophet gives us the second quotation at the head of this article, "_Shall not die._" It would be just as proper to make this last scrap of the law inexorable as its opposite. Such teachings do violence to the truth by overlooking the merciful provisions that are found in the laws of God, by holding inexorable law before us as a streak of justice clothed with _black vengeance_. The gospel of Jesus Christ knows no law in connection with Christians, or any others, except, first, the laws of nature. Secondly, the laws of the state or government in which we reside. Third, the law of Christ. We are under law to Christ in common with all men, for the Father had put all things under Him. We were never under the law given to Adam. We were not in the garden of Eden. We believe with Paul that the first offense in the history of mankind was the "_offense of one_," that it was "_one that sinned_," that "_by one man's offense_ death reigned," that it was "one man's disobedience." When men talk to me as an individual, and of my relations to law, sin and death, I wish them to recollect that I was never in the garden of Eden. So I claim an alibi. Adam sinned thousands of years before I, as a man, had my existence; and as it is true that, where there is no law there is no transgression, so it is equally true that, where the man is not, he does not transgress. I was not in the garden of Eden, so there I did not sin. But we are told that the Father of mercies, by a decree of law, imputed Adam's offense to all his children, and that he, by the vicarious punishment endured by the Savior, took Adam's offense off from Adam's children. Admit it, and three things follow: First, we did not sin in fact when Adam sinned. Second, from Adam to Christ all the innocents upon earth were sinners by the arbitrary decree of Jehovah. Third, the Father put this _decree-load_ of guilt upon an innocent one, and executed the real penalty upon him. How is this? Suppose a legislative body legislates a man a murderer because his great great grand-father killed a man, should it not also legislate him free from the penalty of murder and never in cruel injustice inflict it upon him or any other innocent one simply as a satisfaction to justice? Law ought to always place us where we are in fact, otherwise it is detestably unjust. Why should any sensible man attribute such dealings to the Father of Spirits? The fallacy of such teaching is seen in the fact that the penalty of the Adamic law was executed _in the day of the transgression_, and not nine hundred nor thousands of years afterwards. The phrase, "Dying thou shalt die" does not help the case, for the phrase "In the day" limits the penalty as respects the time of its fulfillment. Adam lost citizen life in the Garden of Eden in the very day of his offense. The full penalty was executed when he was driven out. Physical death was an after result, growing out of the fact that Adam's posterity was unborn when he was driven from his Eden home. The Lord did not say to Adam, in the day thou eatest thereof you shall die and not live again, if he had the way of redemption would have been forever closed against him. Adam's first sons appear before us with a law of faith, embracing typical and sacrificial duties, through which they were brought into the way of life with reference to an ultimate arrival at the tree of life in the midst of the paradise of God. This law of faith was given to Adam's family outside of the Garden; and the law of Sinai was not given to Adam, nor to his immediate posterity, for in that case Cain would have been put to death for killing his brother Abel. It was given to Abraham's family after the exodus from Egypt. It was a political law, because it pertained to a community. Next in order follows the law of Christ. Beside these we know of no revealed law, excepting those of which we have spoken. So this vicarious punishment system of things, with all its consequences, rests upon a something that men call the inexorable law of God, which a man can not find in the annals of creation, providence or redemption. The prophet, in the language of our quotation, "The soul that sinneth it shall die," is grappling with the system of things which we are endeavoring to overthrow. The children of Israel fell into the sentiments of our modern Calvinists, and claimed that "The fathers had eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth were set on edge." By this proverb they understood that the son was to bear the iniquity of the father. The Lord rebuked them in the language of our topic, and more severely in the context. [See Ezekiel, eighteenth chapter.] The Lord said to them, "Behold, all souls are mine. * * * The soul that sinneth it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son." The prophet also describes a righteous man, and then adds, "If he begets a son that is a robber, a shedder of blood, and that doth the like to any one of these things, and doth none of the duties of a righteous life, he shall surely die." We would naturally conclude that this vile person would transmit moral depravity, if such was possible, but how can moral corruption be transmitted through physical generation? Let some of the wise crack this shell! If I was passing around through the little city of Kokomo to-morrow, and was talking upon this theme, I would hear some one accuse some poor soul of being a natural born thief, without the ability to refrain from it. There is neither morality nor immorality, vice nor virtue in an involuntary act. Are the rushings of the Wild Cat river moral or immoral? If a man could be a natural thief, and therefore could not help but steal, he would be no more a sinner in the sight of God, nor responsible, nor morally corrupt than the horse that breaks into your cornfield and fills himself. In the saying, "If the wicked will turn," etc., "he shall surely live, he shall not die," we discover two important things: First, the death spoken of is not physical, for all die, regardless of character; second, it is not moral, for the poor fellow is already morally dead--dead in trespasses and in sin. The term die being used in the divine law with reference to the government of God, and under such circumstances as already mentioned, must indicate simply the forfeiture of citizen life in the paradise of God, in the world to come, for it is said of the wicked, "They have no inheritance in the kingdom of God and of Christ." But if Christ took their law-place, and was punished in their stead, satisfied justice, of course it was done, and then universal salvation, regardless of character, and upon simple _legal merits, must obtain_, because this theory rests upon the hypothesis that sinners could do nothing for themselves. But is it true that the atonement was completed upon the cross or by the death of Christ only? I answer, he was victim upon the cross and high priest by the power of an endless life. Priest by the word of the oath which was subsequent to the law. He was not a priest while he was a victim in death. In ancient times the victim was slain and its blood was taken into the holy place, then the high priest officiated in the holy place. But the priest never entered without blood. So Christ, by his own blood, entered into Heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us. But all this releases us not in the least from our own obligations to God and our humanity. The Savior came to our earth to give us, first, his life, in order that we might make it our own; second, his divine mind concerning us and our expectations; third to ratify the same by his death; fourth to give us an assurance of a resurrection from the dead, and of a future judgment. For the first it is said "that he consecrated for us a new and living way through the veil, that is to say through his flesh, into the holiest." For the second we have simply the gift of a second will. "He took away the first that he might establish the second, by the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Christ." For the third it is said that "The New Testament was dedicated not without blood." For the fourth it is said that "He hath appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained, whereof he hath given assurance unto all men in that he hath raised him from the dead." So every one of us shall give an account of himself to God, and receive according to his own works and not the works of another. One question, and only one, will be of interest to me in the judgment, and that is this, how have I lived? What are the deeds which were done in my body? The Lord once said of a wicked city: "Though Noah, Job and Daniel were in it they should save none but themselves by their righteousness." But we are told that the righteousness of Christ was the only satisfaction; that he, dying in our law-place, paid the debt. Then I am released. Let the debt be what it may, I can't be held to give satisfaction. But we were always anxious to know what we were released from. Was it physical death? No; we must die. Was it death in sin? No; there is no getting out of that without reformation and pardon. Vicarious punishment! What is it? What was it that Christ suffered in the sinners' law-place? It could not be the everlasting punishment threatened in the Scriptures, for the Savior was only about three hours upon the cross. And if the Savior paid the debt, why is it that sinners are to pay it themselves unless they repent? But there is still another grave objection to the theory. It is this, It declares that there is no forgiveness with God. He can't forgive when Christ paid the debt. Can you forgive a debt that is paid? Is it possible for such a thing to take place? One writer has called this old theory "the Redeemer's glory;" but if it be his glory it is the Father's dishonor. Elder Stockell gives the theory the very imposing title, "The Redeemer's Glory Unveiled." But look at the following from page 157 of his work thus entitled: "In a _strict_ and _proper_ sense the infinite God doth not forgive sin; for it is readily granted by all who are sound in the faith that Jesus Christ hath given full satisfaction to divine justice for all sin, and hath fully paid the debt of his church. And if Christ hath satisfied the justice of God for all the sins of his people, how then can it justly, or with propriety of speech, be said that God pardoneth our sins and transgressions? Sure I am that debt can never be forgiven which is paid." Others, who are not so wise, or, it may be, so frank, refuse to allow the logical consequences of the doctrine of vicarious sufferings. This theory represents mercy as always stultified until Christ satisfied justice. Imagine the Savior upon the cross, innocent, suffering by sheer necessity of justice in the sinners' law-place. Justice is standing off to the right and Mercy is a short distance to the left. Poor Mercy! She says, "I always felt stultified up to this hour, for Justice was always dissatisfied and frowning." Justice responds, "True; but just now I am being satisfied. I have always asked for this. So from this time forward I shall be in a smiling mood. Now we can unite and let the guilty ones go free, for I have wreaked my vengeance upon the innocent one." Just now the poor skeptic with common sense says, "Hold! Does not the law say 'It is the soul that sinneth that shall die?' Did I not hear you say that you had wreaked your vengeance upon the innocent one?" Justice and mercy both draw a veil over their faces and respond through the advocates of this system of things, "Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness." The poor skeptic of common sense retires muttering to himself something like this, "Well, if such is the mystery of godliness, I pray that I may never fall into her hands." Just now he is accosted by a preacher, who says to him, "Look there upon that Roman cross. Don't you see that sinless one? He is spotless, pure and lovely. He never sinned, neither was guile found in His mouth, yet He was accounted guilty of all the sins of the whole human family, at least He suffered the full penalty enacted against all the sins of all the race, and satisfied justice." Common-sense skeptic says: "Who required that? Who counted him guilty of the whole? Who?" The preacher responds, "God and His justice--yes, His justice." Justice, you know, had to be satisfied, for God Himself could not forgive a man until the debt was paid. Do you see? Common-sense skeptic turns away disgusted, and as he walks off he is heard to say, "Farewell, _to all of you_!" Who can blame men who never heard any thing better for being unbelievers? When Jehovah proclaimed His name, He said "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, _forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin_." This must be admitted by all intelligent Christians. Mercy was never stultified. There was in all the dispensations of God's providence free and unstultified mercy. The infinite One was never unable to forgive sins; neither was He laid under the necessity of punishing the innocent in the room of the guilty. No, He never did it. His justice never required it, and it is too mean to ascribe it to Him. His laws in all the dispensations were conditional, contained merciful provisions. Now, let us "fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." The great thought of pardon through the abundant goodness of God runs through all the ages, but substitution, in the sense of vicarious punishment, does not. It is not taught even in connection with dying animals, for the "blood of animals could not take away sins." Again, the soul that sinneth it shall die, but animals were not sinning souls, so that scrap of revealed law could not be honored in the death of a goat. There is nothing in the history of the ages to necessitate the idea that justice could not allow the free exercise of mercy towards the penitent sinner, or that God's wrath must be appeased, or He made propitious by means of blood. He was propitious, and therefore ordered the use of blood for wise and benevolent purposes. The use of blood is related to His mercy as effect is to cause, and not as cause to effect. The mercy and goodness of God was always complete, full and unrestrained by all external causes, except the moral and virtuous qualities of their object. By the grace of God Jesus tasted death for every man. He did not go to the cross because law or justice required it, but because He loved the race. He came from heaven to earth and volunteered the cross as a commendation or demonstration of the divine love for man. The authority of law is never associated with the cross or death of Christ. For this great love for man, manifested even in his death, He gained the throne of Lordship, where He exercises himself as the Savior of men and as Lord over all. Will you obey Him and live? THE SIMPLICITY OF THE SCIENCE OF MIND. Our sphere of research is simplified by dividing its objects into matter and mind, so as to have but two centers of thought. Many have concluded that the address of matter to our senses has made it easy to pursue knowledge respecting bodies, while the invisibility of mind presents insurmountable difficulties, but this conclusion is scarcely supported by facts. If men have erred with reference to their own intellects, they have also made many and egregious blunders concerning matter and its qualities. We think the study of mind is just as easy as the study of matter. Here a man has nothing to do but look into himself. With my mind I think, reason, reflect, remember, hate, love, grieve, rejoice, imagine, contrive, invent and will, and this very mind is conscious of all these operations; so in this study there ought to be no mistake. We lay it down as a truth of first importance, that all minds are alike. As gold is gold, so mind is mind, throughout the universe. My mind is myself, which I carry with me everywhere; it is my own personality from which I can never part. It is the individual Walker. _Individual_ is defined thus: An object which is, in the strict and primary sense, one, and can not be logically divided. An _individual_ is not absolutely indivisible, but that which can not be divided without losing its name and distinctive qualities. Individuality, like personal identity, belongs properly to intelligences. Consciousness reveals it to us that no being can be put in our place nor confounded with us, nor we with others. I am one and indivisible. You can not amputate any of the faculties of the mind. It is a mind which no one dissects or divides. We are assured that we are the offspring of God. Paul says this truth had been promulgated by one of the Athenian poets, and it was so correct that Heaven's seal was placed upon it. Being the offspring of God we are essentially like our Great Father Spirit, for it is one of the laws of God that the child or descendant shall always be like its progenitor; not like him in body, for God is a spirit. A spirit hath not flesh and bone. We are therefore like Him in spirit. Being the offspring of the divine intelligence declares the nature of that intelligence, just as the stream declares the nature of the water in the fountain which feeds it. As the fountain is the antecedent of the stream, so God is the antecedent of life and intelligence, from whom all spirits came, and to whom all spirits must return. Our studies in respect of mind are wonderfully simplified when we recollect that in ourselves we see all other men, spirit or mind being in its essence and attributes essentially the same; but the fountain is always greater than the stream, so God is more wise and powerful than any of his offspring. But as each perfect sunbeam, however small or weak, has all the essential properties of light, and each grain of pure silver all the properties of that metal, so mind, as the living offspring of the divine mind, is in the "likeness and image of God." This branch of study becomes remarkably simple when we reflect that in ourselves we see all men and women, angels and demons, and even God himself. The whole universe of mind is reflected in that inner-man mirror which we call _ourself_. We have guarded this subject by the language, _the essential attributes of mind_. By this qualifier we wish it understood that mind, like body, has its accidental or acquired qualities. Vice, virtue, folly, wisdom, malignity and benevolence are not essential to mind, but like the accidents of matter known as roughness or smoothness, softness, hardness, blackness, etc., are merely qualities or attributes of its conduct. Vice is vicious action and virtue is virtuous action. But action arises from will and will from thought. All minds are free agents, being vicious or virtuous from their own choice. There is as much piety, morality or immorality in the flowing of the Wabash river as there is in involuntary action. So ability to choose is the great factor of morality, virtue, immorality, and vice. In scientific investigations lying in the realm of the physical there are countless objects to engage our thoughts, but here we have but one, and we always carry it about with us and are continually using it. Our _consciousness_ is to all the operations of our spirits what seeing, touching, hearing, tasting and smelling is to surrounding bodies. It enables us to examine all the minds in the universe. Would you like to have an organ which would enable you to see spirits? In your _consciousness_ you have a faculty superior to all the five senses put together. In our consciousness we see and feel ourselves, and in so doing we see not only the minds of others, but our great Father himself. We can not tell what instincts are in the bee, or what sagacity is in a spaniel, because we are neither spaniels nor bees, but we are of a more noble race. We are in possession of minds or spirits, and consequently identified with all minds or spirits, so the science of mind, or psychology, is the knowledge of ourselves. Christianity, as a spiritual system, takes us and all its votaries into this intellectual temple, where we may certainly know God through a correct knowledge of self. In this temple we have a sample of the spirits of men, angels and demons, and over all, an example of the spirit we worship. These invisible intelligences are the wonderful agencies through which good and evil are effected. Natural laws are only the rules by which the great Father Spirit acts. Laws are rules by which agents act, and they always imply agents. Men of olden times are often spoken of as great metaphysicians. Who has not heard of Homer, Herodotus, Pindar, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Plato and many others. But those ancient men, here as in physics, dealt so much in fancy that they were not disposed to enter into the simple examination of their own minds or spirits. Entangled in the doctrines of chance, fate and destiny they robbed the Creator of the sceptre of the universe. They placed Jove, their supreme deity, under a decree that he could not change; confessed that he could not, in many instances, help them when he desired to do so. The greatest hindrances to progress among them were their failures to know the true character of Jove, or their want of a correct knowledge of God, and the distinction between mind and matter. They failed to separate between the two. Their gods were continually in an abominable quarrel about some interest that involved human welfare, and for that very reason their theory of mind was nothing but a confused mass of childish stories. They had no starting point from which to reason. They, failing to separate between mind and matter, were led into endless theories about what they denominated the animal and intellectual soul. The idea of one of their own poets that we are God's offspring was of no avail, in science, to them, because they neither knew themselves nor their gods. We are, therefore, indebted to the Bible for our superior knowledge in the science of mind. If the Gospel had never reached us we would have been as great dreamers in mental science as the mystics of India. The doctrine of one Creator, who is a perfect spirit, and the father of our spirits, and that he presides over all nature for the good of the whole; that matter is inert, and moves not unless as it is moved; that all life and force is in mind or spirit; that all spirits are free agents, and act from choice; that all spirits have the same essential attributes; and that man is of the divine "_genos_" kind or sort, and, as an intellectual being, is therefore in the image of God, has simplified and extended our researches in the science of mind, and based them on reason and common sense as well as revelation. From such considerations the doctrine of universal brotherhood has proceeded along with the equal, civil, political and religious rights of all mankind. The ultimate fruit of all is the abolition of oppression and slavery throughout the world, and the desire to see all men elevated to their proper rank as intellectual and moral beings. Thus our views of God and nature, of mind and matter, are of immense practical value to our race. Do you say mind or spirit does not belong as a real factor to science? Well, we are astonished! Science is correct, or certain knowledge arising from a deep and rational inquiry into the object or subject of investigation. The question therefore comes back again, have we any knowledge of mind? This is to ask, whether consciousness is knowledge! The term comes from the Latin "_con_," which signifies together, and "_scio_," I know, and is used to convey the idea that we know the thing altogether, that is, have perfect or full knowledge. It is the mind's testimony concerning itself. Now, if I can become acquainted with external and material objects through my senses, certainly my consciousness of my own mental operations is, and must be, more certain and self-evident. In judging, reasoning, reflecting, choosing, desiring, remembering, loving, hating and hoping, along with all other operations of mind, I must know the operation intimately, perfectly and altogether. If I am reflecting, I know it, and this consciousness is science, is certain knowledge, is the very thing from which no man can escape so long as he is a rational being. Here is my individuality, my personality, in that which is the indivisible unit of my nature, from which I can not emigrate, and one attribute of which I can not amputate--the _I_! The thief may escape from justice, but he can not escape from the dishonest wretch--_himself_. The murderer in America may flee to England or France, but through conscious memory he is, and will forever be, compelled to keep company with the murderous villain. He has this consciousness and will keep it through eternity, even though he should be pardoned. Here, then, is certain knowledge, more than seeing, hearing, or any other sense belonging to the physical, for it is the conscious knowledge of that which sees and hears, and which reaches out through the senses and connects itself with the objective. It is therefore certain that, in case there is no such thing as mental science, there is no such thing as science at all, in all the realm of the universe; because the mind, in the act of knowing, knows itself or is conscious of its own operations, otherwise it could know nothing whatever, could not be mind. Have we not the most certain evidence of the existence of mind? Is light a certain evidence that there is light, or a source of light? Is not reasoning a proof that there is something which reasons? Can there be light without a cause? Can there be invention without an inventive being? The mind is like a telescope in this respect, that it shows itself in showing that about which it is occupied. The man who is content to believe what he sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels, is only a sensuous believer--an animal, and not a man. Reason's glory is that it perceives the invisible. OUR INDEBTEDNESS TO REVELATION--No. IV. BY P.T. RUSSELL. LANGUAGE AND RELIGION, FROM WHENCE? There are conditions under which circumstantial evidence is the best possible testimony. These conditions are found inseparably connected with our present subject. That men now possess the same powers of body and mind that they always manifested is disputed by no intelligent individual. Those powers have been, through all the ages, precisely the same both in number and kind. Has the history of humanity furnished a single case in which a person, perfectly deaf during all his life, had the ability to speak words? Such is unknown in the history of the past, and also in the records of the present. History is as blank at this point, as a barren oasis. All the other faculties are as perfect with the deaf as they are with those whose hearing is perfect. Their inventive genius is equally vigorous; this being true, why should the defect of the ear deprive them of the power of speech? Will the Deist answer this question? Mr. Skeptic, as you are in the same difficulty with the Deist, you may help him if you choose. If you are, as you pretend, free and fearless thinkers, give us your thoughts upon this question. If you are cowardly, then stand off and sneer at the question which you dare not try to answer. The facts developed at this point ought to be remembered, and the question, why can the deaf, described, never talk? ought to be pressed home to every heart. MATHEMATICS WILL AID US HERE. When we see a constant increase in the number of persons or things in an undeviating ratio, with the aid of mathematics we can pass back to the first of the series, to the first man living at the base of the human series. Ever remember that there can not be a series without a unit lying at its base. Why do the life-long deaf never talk? You answer: All Adam's children learn to talk by hearing others talk, and as those deaf ones never heard, so they never learned to talk. Very well. The first man, at the beginning of the series of humanity, had no powers or faculties which his descendants do not possess, and as they all have been under the necessity of learning to talk by hearing others talk, will you unbelievers and skeptics tell us, if you can, how that first man became a talker? Can the life-long deaf talk as well as those whose ears are perfect? No. Well, then, the difficulty rests upon you. That you may remember it, I will repeat it once more, it is this: who did the first man hear in order to learn the talker's trade? WHERE DID LANGUAGE COME FROM? Do you tell us that society made language? Then society must be older than language, for the maker is always, of necessity, older than the thing made. But without language there could be no interchange of ideas, and without this society could not exist. Where there is no intelligent communication of ideas we never think of society. Society does not exist where there is no intelligent communication of ideas between persons. The trees in the grove are never spoken of as a society. They are not and can not be in the social state. Neither are the brutes around us. Man is the only being upon earth capable of becoming a constituent element or part of society. Mr. Blair says, in his lectures on Belleslettres, "It would be extremely difficult to conceive how society could exist without language." Now, as society can not exist without language, it is certain that society could not be the author of language, for the author must be older than his production. But Mr. Blair springs another difficulty. It is in these words: "It would be equally difficult to conceive how language could exist without society." A moment's reflection will satisfy all reasonable persons that language can not exist without society, and that which can not exist without the other can not be the maker--author--of the other, for the maker must be older than the thing made. Then, as neither of these could exist without the other, neither could be the author of the other. So language and society are both effects, and their cause is outside of or antecedent to both, for every effect has an antecedent cause. WHO, OR WHAT, IS THAT CAUSE? First, it must have existed before man. Second, it must have possessed the powers of speech; and, therefore, must have been an intelligence. We have already seen this in our reflections upon the fact that the life-long deaf, who are deprived of hearing words spoken, are always dumb; so man, if he had never heard words spoken, would have remained dumb. He that created the ear, could He not hear? Did He not know what He was doing? He that arranged the vocal powers of man, could He not speak? Is there no evidence of an intelligent authorship here? He who not only created but also endowed man with all His noble and God-like attributes, would He not delight in visiting man and talking with him and learning him the art of speech? Did man not have the privilege of learning to talk? Did he not hear and learn from the "ancient of days"--from his great author? Is it not unreasonable to suppose that the author of man's being took no delight in him? _Without this_ the first man could never have commanded the use of words. Here we have the "Arriere pensee" clue, that is, the clue in mental reservation; and here we meet the axiom. The clear is the true, and the "Ariadne," the clue that leads us out of the labyrinth. Language at the first must have been specific. This, in the nature of the case, must have been true; that is, each and every word must have been used in such a manner as to convey a certain definite idea. As we have already seen how mathematics aid us in passing back to the first man, so we can easily see how to reach an approximate idea of his mental condition. Physiologically, he might have been a full developed athlete, but in mentality, like the helpless infant. He is at the first uneducated. True, he possesses powers of mind, but they are inactive. No thought has passed through his mind to wake him up. He opens his eyes and immediately he thinks, he hears, and thought is increased. He is connected with the objective world of things by means of the five senses, and his mind goes to work upon these. His thoughts are all his own; he himself thought them; they were within his reach. He saw and heard, but his thoughts, like yours and mine, did not go beyond his perceivings. Yes, he wakes up and hears a rustling sound in the air just above his head; looking up he discovers a pair of the birds of Paradise flying over him; they light on the branch of a tree near by. These were the first things seen; he saw them in the morning of the first day of his life. He looks and looks, and thinks these birds are older than himself, for he remembers having seen them at the moment of the first consciousness. The question possible came up, Whence came they, and all the other things which I now see and hear? Were they always here? No answer is found. His curiosity is aroused; his reason is perplexed; he _would be_ puzzled. He now reaches for thoughts too high for him; neither bird, beast, nor any other part of all creation can give the light he seeks. Whichever way he turns he receives no answer; he is bewildered; he is now anxious for light and ready to receive it. Man has found his extremity, and this is God's opportunity. He visits man and talks to him, and man, hearing the speech of his Creator, learns to talk. He is now able to ask for the solution of the perplexing problem of the ages, From whence came all these beautiful and useful things with which I am surrounded? Did they come of themselves, or did somebody make and arrange them? Here the Lord drives away all his troubles, simply saying: "I created all these things; the earth and the heavens, and all that is in them, the sun, moon and the stars also, and I now place you here in this beautiful Eden, earth, to dress and keep it." Thus man obtained the use of language and the foundation of religion at the same time. Of this I will speak more at length in my next. Tell them farewell. N.B.--Let the determined skeptic answer these essays if he can, and if he can not, let him be an honest man and surrender. MIND AND INSTINCT, OR STRICTURES UPON THE TEACHINGS OF EVOLUTIONISTS. The evolution imagination ventures to affirm that man's intellectual superiority over the brute "is not _qualitative_ but _quantitative_." Then it follows, of necessity, that intellectually considered the brute is the image of man just as much as man is the image of God, the difference being _quantitative_ and not _qualitative_. Evolutionists claim that "man's superiority over the brute results from greater complexity and superior development of the brain." Now if man, as they say, once lived the life of the brute, and his superiority now is simply quantitative, why is it that his inferiors of to-day are not passing into real manhood? They are far superior to any creature which is "not far from the tadpole stage of evolution." If we were once there, and evolutionists say we were, why not take all brutes in as our _kins-folk_. Now, since evolutionists have learned the secret of mind-making by training dogs and other animals to certain habits, and giving time for heredity to transmit those habits, they being "immediately petrified in brain structure," why should we not go to work and bring about a millennial glory, at least by the third or fourth generation? If so much has been overcome as lies between man and the tadpole, with the tadpole capital only to work upon, perhaps we might, with our present capital, bring into existence a race of gods. Why not? We are taught that "instinct is habit petrified in brain structure and transmitted by heredity," that it is, consequently, "organized ancestral experiences that are the source of instinct, but not always." Why this modification in the teachings of evolutionists? Do they not know that the acknowledgment of the existence of an original instinctive endowment breaks down the whole theory of mind-being from environments? And what right have Atheists to claim instinct as an original endowment, in certain cases? The very idea is destructive of their speculation, for in order to an original endowment, as they term it, over and above that which is the result of ancestral experiences petrified in brain structure and transmitted, there must be the endowment, that which endows, and the endowed. These three things stand or fall together. But why should they claim this exception of an original endowment? The answer is easy. Facts that are utterly against them are known to exist in the world of instincts. We have an example in the instinct of the honey bee. Neither the drone nor the queen ever built a cell. So this is conceded to be an original endowment. O, ye evolutionists! will you tell us where this cell-building instinct came from? You claim that it was, or is, an original endowment. _From whom?_ Again you tell us that instinct depends upon brain structure in every instance; then what is the difference between instinct and intellect or mind? You tell us that mind also depends on brain structure, and you say that intelligence is unlike instinct, because it works by experience, not ancestral, but, on the contrary, by individual experience. Then we have it thus: First. Instinct works by ancestral experience, petrified in brain structure, and transmitted. Second. Mind works by individual and not ancestral experience. Third. Instinct is sometimes an original endowment. Now, can we or any others tell how it is that mind depends, just like instinct, wholly upon brain structure, and is, at the same time, unlike instinct in that it is wholly dependent on individual, not ancestral experience? And if mind or intelligence does not depend on ancestral experience, how is its origin to be accounted for on the hypothesis of heredity through evolution of species, starting, without life, instinct or mind, by blind forces operating on dead matter, and the forces themselves simply the forces of dead matter? The capacity for intellectual improvement is a remarkable peculiarity of man's nature. The instinctive habits of the lower animals are limited, are peculiar to each species, and have immediate reference to their bodily wants. Where a particular adaptation of means to ends, of actions to circumstances, is made by an individual the rest do not seem to profit by that experience, so that, although the instincts of particular animals may be modified by the training of man, or by the education of circumstances, so as to show themselves after a few generations under new forms, no elevation of intelligence ever appears to _take place spontaneously_, no physical improvement is manifested in the species at large. On the other hand, we observe in man not merely the capability of profiting by experience, but the determination to do so, which he is enabled to put into action by the power which his will, when properly disciplined, comes to possess, of directing and controlling his current of thought by fixing his attention upon any subject which he desires to keep before his mental vision. This power, so far as we know, is peculiar to man, and the presence or absence of it constitutes the difference between a being possessed of powers to determine his own course of thought and action, and a mere thinking automaton.--_Carpenter's Physiology._ REVIVAL OF LEARNING. TO WHOM ARE WE INDEBTED? Charlemagne, Emperor of Germany, who is known as a Christian prince, and Alfred the Great, of England, lived in the eight and ninth centuries. The darkest period in the dark ages was between the fifth and the eleventh, but they are known as the _earliest_ luminaries of the modern world. They encouraged learning both by example and patronage, but they could not overcome the gross ignorance of their times; nevertheless they shed a strong and living lustre over the age in which they lived. (See _Elements of General Knowledge_, by Henry Kelt, Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford, p. 246.) Where, and under what circumstances, were their schools established? They were confined to churches and monasteries, and the monks presided over them, but they were inadequate to the task of diffusing knowledge in any extensive circle. The reign of heathenism and ignorance continued. The Arabians had introduced the knowledge of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, and the philosophy of Aristotle into Spain. (See Warton on Pope, vol. 1, p. 184.) At the beginning of the eleventh century several enlightened scholars undertook to educate the youth of the cities of Italy, and at a later period those of France, England and Germany. To the stability and prevalence of the education thus begun is the establishment of the universities of Europe attributable. Those of Paris and Oxford carry their claims to antiquity to the times of Alfred and Charlemagne, but it is said that the real claims of Paris stop with Phillip Augustus in the twelfth century. In the year 1264 Merton College was founded by Walter de Merton, Lord Chancellor of England and Bishop of Rochester, but the honorable title, "Mother of Universities of Europe" is due to Bologna. It was in her walls that learning, in the eleventh century, first attempted to raise her head. It is said upon good authority that 10,000 students were assembled here in the next century, that is, somewhere about the beginning of the fourteenth century, and that each country in Europe had its resident regents and professors at Bologna. Here the studies of the civil and canon law constituted the almost exclusive objects of application, but Paris directed the attention of her scholars to theology. Oxford began at this time to acquire fame and to rival the foreign universities in the ability of its professors and the multitude of its members; in the year 1340 they amounted to 30,000. Many other universities were soon established upon the models of Bologna, Paris and Oxford. In these logic and scholastic divinity were for centuries the reigning subjects of pursuit. The works of Aristotle were studied with great eagerness. Upon the logic of Aristotle was founded the cultivation of scholastic theology and casuistry, which is a department of morals; its object is to lay down rules for directing us _how_ to act where there is any room for doubt or hesitation. To this belongs the decision of what are called cases of conscience, that is, cases in which we are under obligation, but which, from certain surroundings, give rise to doubt, or how far the obligation may be dissolved; such as the obligation to keep a promise obtained by fraud or force. To make nice distinctions between one word and another, to separate subjects by infinite divisions, not as the real nature of things, but as fancy directed, and to draw conclusions with no moral end in view, were the pursuits of the schoolmen. The decrees of the councils of the Church of Rome, its edicts and ceremonial and ritual observances, were scrupulously regarded instead of obedience to the pure and practical elements of Christianity. Classical learning was entirely neglected. Here is the feature of Roman church history which infidels have endeavored to use falsely against _even Rome_, to wit: the opposition of the churchmen of those times to _classical learning_. This was considered dangerous to true piety, and calculated to corrupt the pure theology of the gospel, because the orators of Greece and Rome were regarded as blind guides of erring reason and seducers to the paths of sin and destruction. Virgil and Horace were looked upon merely as the advocates of a profane and idolatrous mythology, and Cicero was regarded as a vain declaimer, impiously elated with the talent of Pagan eloquence, but the infidel charge that the church has always been in the way of scientific education, _expressed in unqualified terms_, is simply false in fact. That there was a time when she was opposed to classical learning is a well attested fact, but she, at the same time, taught and operated in universities and monasteries, as stated above. The first dawnings of modern literature are seen in connection with the cultivation of the language of Provence and the productions of the Troubadours. The first great teacher in this connection was William, Count of Poiton, a nobleman, distinguished by his powers in the crusades. Many of the men of note who were in the crusades, were of his character. Their writings upon the topics of war, gallantry, satire and history, first roused Europe from her ignorance and lethargy, first taught her to think and reflect and judge upon subjects of imagination. The Troubadours sustained the middle place between Gothic ignorance and Italian excellence, and literature is indebted to them for rearing the first fruits of European genius and inspiring the moderns with the love of poetry. Their influence and language spread over all the countries of Europe. Their bards were in the courts of kings and the castles of barons. The commencement of the crusades and the beginning of the fifteenth century, mark the limits of their fame. Their romance had its rise in the manners of chivalry, and fell into disrepute when chivalry declined. In the fourteenth century men of intellectual genius in Italy resolved to cultivate their own native language and to combine with its grandeur the charms of imagination and the acquirements of classical learning. The poetry of the Tuscan school, the works of Dante, Ariosto, Boccio and Petrarch, have never yet been excelled by four succeeding centuries of genius and literature. The way was open for the revival of classical learning in the fifteenth century, and for the cultivation of all the arts and sciences connected with its cultivation. The downfall of the Roman Empire in the east and the discovery of the art of printing happened about the same time. Scholars had long trembled in view of the approach of Mahomet the second. Constantinople was captured by the Turks in 1458; then Chrysoloras, Gaza of Thessalonica, Demetrius Chalcondyles, Johannes Lascaris, Callistus, Constantius, Johannes Andronicus, and many other learned Greeks, fled into Italy for protection, where they found, at Florence, several Greek professors who had been persuaded by Cosmo de Medici to settle in that city. They settled in Florence and there interpreted the ancient writings which had been kept in the eastern metropolis. The best Italian scholars fell in with them and soon became enamored with the spirit of poetry, eloquence and history. Here a better philosophy was soon taken up, and the cunning of scholasticism, as known in the empty speculations of metaphysicians, gave place to the more profitable principles of moral philosophy. The study of the Greek language was introduced in England by William Grocyn, a fellow of New College, Oxford, who died about the year 1520. "To the mechanical genius of Holland we must ascribe the discovery of the art of printing, for the original inventor was Laurentius John Coster, of Haerlem, who made his first essay with wooden types about the year 1430. The art was communicated by his servant to John Faust and John Guttenberg, of Mentz. It was carried to perfection by Peter Shoeffer, the son-in-law of Faustus, who invented the modes of casting metal types." Trihemius, in his Chronicle, written A.D. 1514, says he had it from the mouth of Peter Shoeffer that the first book they printed with movable types was the Bible, about the year 1450, in which the expenses were so great that 4,000 florins were expended before they completed twelve sheets. The author of a manuscript, Chronicle of Cologne, compiled in 1499, also says that he was told by Ulric Zell, of Cologne, who himself introduced printing there in 1466, that the Latin Bible was first begun to be printed in the year of Jubilee, 1450, and that it was in large type. Mr. Edwards, of Pall Mall possessed a copy of this curious Bible in three volumes, bound in morocco. In his catalogue it was valued at £126. There, is a beautiful copy of this work in the Bodleian (or Bodleyan) Library in the University at Oxford. The art of printing soon spread over the greater part of Europe, and to-day our world is a world of books, and the love of the Bible was the origin of printing. COUNCILS. UNITY OF ROMAN CHURCH. The Council of Nice assembled in Asia Minor by the direction of Constantine in the year 325. Here we see more than two hundred and fifty bishops, mostly from the east, with presbyters, deacons and others, engaged in an effort to settle the Arian heresy, which consisted in maintaining that Christ was the most exalted of all created things, but inferior to God the Father. This opinion was first ventilated in the year 318. It was publicly condemned by the Council of Alexandria in the year 320, and then by the Council of Nice. This Council maintained the perfect equality of essence of both Father and Son, and could only express their relation by terming it eternal generation, which Dr. Adam Clark calls eternal nonsense. "Arius and his partisans were banished by the Council of Alexandria, but as he had powerful adherents he found means to return at the express command of Constantine. He was on his way to receive the oath of ministerial allegiance when he very suddenly, as some say, died by poison. His death was in the year 336. It is said that Constantine was baptized into the Arian communion in the year 337. The followers of Arius increased greatly after his death. Under Constantius, called _Flavius Julius_, Arianism became the religion of the court, and it even penetrated as far as Rome, which was obliged to receive into its communion Felix, an Arian bishop. But the divisions which grew among the Arians themselves prepared for the Catholic church an easy victory over them and led to their final extinction." It is worthy of being remembered at all times, and under all circumstances, that this whole controversy is unauthorized in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, faith in him as the Son of the living God being the great truth upon which the Church of God is built. What eternal nonsense it is to be quarreling about whether he and his Father are of the same essence. The truths of Christianity and of Protestantism are found in the teachings of the anti-Nicene fathers, but we must remember that these were uninspired men, and therefore displayed no _standard_ of truth. The term fathers, without qualification, includes a vast range, comprising a period of eleven hundred years, from Clemens to Bernard, from the Bishop of Rome to the Monk of Clairvaux. Immediately after the Council of Nice their works took on the infections of popery. Each succeeding writer in each succeeding century added to the gathering mass of error and superstition. The filth and dirt accumulated until the system of delusion was fully developed in the "man of sin." The Fathers, as they are called, are entitled to no more than other men. They should never be resorted to as authoritative or inspired, for they were not. They may be used as witnesses to show the customs of their times. So far as they are concerned as _the standard_ of truth, we may just as well, with safety and without remorse, deliver them to the Vatican to rot with the lumber and legends of the dark ages. The anti-Nicene fathers had many errors, but theirs were not the errors of Romanism. The religious productions of the first three centuries of our era contain, in the main, the principles of Protestantism. The post-Nicene fathers, or popery, may be compared to a field of wheat overrun with weeds. The great work of the Protestant reformers was to eradicate the weeds. Failing to accomplish this in the Roman field, they gathered the pure seed grain and sowed it in the Lord's field, "the world," where it now waves in beauty, tending to a glorious harvest. Once on a time a person was asked where Protestantism was before the Reformation. He answered in turn, It was where your face was this morning before it was washed. The reply was just. Dirt could be no part of the human countenance, and removing the filth by washing could neither change the features of the face nor destroy its identity. By this cleansing operation the face only assumed its normal and natural appearance. In like manner the superstitious traditions of the Roman church were no part of Christianity. It was but proper that the reformers should dismiss the adulterations of the ages and plant their feet away back in the land of Israel with the Christ of God. Arius was regarded as an innovater on the true faith. The great enemy of Arianism was simply Trinitarianism. The council of Nice was presided over by Hosius. The assembled fathers declared the consubstantiality of the son for the establishment of Trinitarianism and the extermination of Arianism. This wonderful term, _consubstantiality_, had been rejected by the synod of Antioch sixty years before, and by Dionysius, of Alexandria, in opposition to Sabellianism. In 359 the Emperor Constantius assembled the council of Rimini, a city of Central Italy. Six hundred bishops and a number of priests now undo all that the council of Nice had done. This council was as accommodating to Arian Constantius as to the Trinitarian Constantine. Constantius, forsaking the Trinitarian system, adopted Arianism, and Greeks and Latins complied with the imperial wishes, and, like dutiful subjects, signed the Arian and semi-Arian confessions of Sirneium, Seleucia, Milan and Ariminum. The western and eastern prelacy subscribed in compliance with their sovereign to the Arian creed, which, as Du Pin has shown, was signed by his infallibility, Pope Liberius. Next in our programme comes Theodosius I., assembling a council of one hundred and fifty bishops at Constantinople in the year 381. Theodosius was a zealous Catholic; he was baptized before the end of the first year of his reign, and immediately published an edict in support of the doctrine of the Trinity, branding all who did not hold it as heretics. His council was presided over by St. Gregory Nazianzen. The chief work of this council was to anathematise the Council of Rimini, which was composed of six hundred bishops and a multitude of priests. This work was done, and so one hundred and fifty bishops curse and denounce as heretical and false six hundred bishops and a multitude of priests; so the voice of the many is not always the voice of God, nor yet the voice of a council the voice of a Pope; neither is the infallibility of a Pope always found in a council, nor is the infallibility of one Pope always found in the voice of another. Theodosius II. convened a council in 431. Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, seems to have been the cause of this convocation, having persecuted all who were not of his opinions; now undergoes persecution for having plead that the Holy Virgin Mary was not the mother of God. He plead that Jesus Christ being the word, _consubstantial_ with the Father, Mary could not, at the same time, be the mother of God the Father and of God the Son. To settle this quarrel Nestorius demands a council and obtains it. This council condemned Nestorius, and one of its committees displaced Cyril. The Emperor, Theodosius II., reversed all that was done, and then permitted it to reassemble. The deputies from Rome, John, Patriarch of Antioch, with twenty-six suffragans, arrived five days after the transaction, and it is on record that his arrival was followed by one of the most distinguished cursing matches of antiquity. The Roman bishops on occasions of this character always had recourse to cursing, and they scarcely ever failed to ease themselves up with an overflow of anathemas and execrations. Cyril and Nestorius exchanged mutual imprecations, even before the sitting of the council. The saint, it is said, had launched twelve anathemas at the heretic in an Alexandrian synod in the year 430, and the heretic Nestorius thanked the saint by returning the same number of inverted blessings. This has been a heavy business among Popes for many centuries. John and Cyril engaged in the same kind of warfare immediately after John's arrival at Ephesus. John and his party congratulated Cyril, Memnon, and their accomplices by deposing and excommunicating them, and now the parties continue, for some time, to give vent to their feelings in mutual anathemas. These benedictions were the only articles of mutual exchange, current and of legal tender value between the parties. At last the Emperor had Nestorius and Cyril arrested, and ordered all the bishops to return each to his church, and so no conclusion was reached. The Greeks called the second assembly at Ephesus a gang of felons, but the first, it is said, excelled it in all the arts of villainy. The contest was finally ended, not by the church, but by the state. The Emperor reinstated Cyril and banished Nestorius, and the western diocese was in the end reduced to submission and the church to unity, not by ecclesiastical authority, but by imperial power. (See Evagrius 1, 5; Liberatus c. 6; Godeau 3, 310.) The Council of Chalcedon met in the year 451. St. Leo, bishop of Rome, took the advantage of the troubles which the quarrel about the two natures occasioned in the empire, and presided at the council by his legates, which was a new feature in councils. But the fathers of the council apprehending that the church of the west would, from this precedent, pretend to the superiority over the eastern church, decided, by their twenty-eighth canon, that the see of Constantinople and the see of Rome should enjoy alike the same advantages and privileges. This was the origin of the long enmity which prevailed and still prevails between the two churches, the eastern and the western. This council endorsed and established the "two natures in one person." The twenty-eighth canon of this council has been rejected and condemned by the Latins, yet Pelagius, Gregory, Pascal and Boniface acknowledged this council, thereby placing the seal of infallibility upon it as much as they ever did upon other councils. In 553 Justinian assembled a council at Constantinople to discuss the three chapters, as they were designated, composed by Ibas, Theodoret and Theodorus. Vigilius, bishop of Rome, with bishops and deacons from Italy, Africa and the east, was in Constantinople during the entire sittings of this council, and refused to attend although invited. But the council went on, all the same. His infallibility, supported by his clique, opposed the emperor and his council, but in vain. He formed his bishops and deacons into a separate council, published a constitution defending, in _modified terms_, the three chapters, and interdicting all further discussion upon the subject by the authority of the Apostolic See; pronounced anathemas against the persons and defenders of the authors of the three chapters. Having now made himself a partisan of the authors, who were condemned by the emperor's council, he was cursed for promoting heresy, and banished in dishonor. This served to bring him to his senses upon several matters, and so he turned about and approved what he had before condemned. And so heresy was converted into orthodoxy by the magical power of an emperor at the expense of the infallibility of Vigilius. The Italians, Tuscans, Ligurians, Istrians, French, Illyrians and Africans, who took a stand against the emperor, were like the pope, the "vicar general of God," converted by the sword of Justinian. The Italian clergy who resisted were banished. "In 681 there was a council at Constantinople, convoked by Constantine, _the bearded_. This council was called by the Latins '_in trullo_,' because it was held in an apartment of the imperial palace. The emperor himself presided. The bishops of Constantinople and Antioch were on his right hand, and the deputies from Jerusalem and Rome were on his left. In this council it was decided that Jesus Christ had two wills." Here "Pope Honorius I. was condemned as a monothelite, that is, as wishing Jesus Christ to have but one will." O, shame! What will come next? Well, we are out at sea in the very darkest periods of the dark ages, and there is no telling how much our senses may be shocked. We find next what is known as the Second Council of Nice. It was assembled by a woman, Mrs. Irene, in the name of her son, whose eyes she had caused to be put out. Her husband, Leo, had abolished the worship of images as leading to idolatry. This woman re-established this worship. During Constantine's minority she executed the imperial power. She was a bold defender and patron of emblematic or image worship. It is said that she had the ambition of Lucifer and the malignity of a demon. She is accused of being connected with the murder of her husband. "She put out the eyes of Nicephorus, and amputated the tongues of Christopher, Nicetas, Athenius and Eudoxas, Constantine's sons, for _suspicion_ of conspiracy. She destroyed the eyes of her own son." "No woman," says Bruys, "was ever less worthy of life than this princess." Her ambition, says Godeau, made her violate all the laws of God and man. Now listen, but first prepare to experience all that the opposite extreme can possibly produce. Is there any place in your nature where life and death, or heaven and hell, can meet in festive joys? No. Then bear with my story the best you can, for it must be told. Here it is: Theodorus and Theophanes extol that vile woman for her VIRTUE AND EXCELLENCE(?). The Greeks placed her among the saints in their menology, and in holy festivity celebrate her anniversary. Hartman and Binius, in more modern times, flatter her prudence and piety(?). Alexander lauds her religion and faith as worthy of immortal honor(?), though the blinding of her son, he admits, exposed her to reprehension. Baronius justifies the assassination of her son. He commends the inhumanity which arose from zeal for religion. Here let the curtain drop till my next on councils makes its appearance. INFIDELS IN EVIDENCE IN FAVOR OF CHRISTIANITY. We should not be surprised when wicked men of every grade of character assail our religion, for its great Author erected a standard of duty too perfect to suit their unruly passions and lusts. Opposition to Christianity is the natural correllate of an unregenerated heart. This fact was the cause of all the sufferings of the primitive Christians, not the only cause, but the _first_ and _leading_ cause. One striking circumstance is worthy of notice, which is, that they have censured Christians for their zeal with an unsparing tongue, and, at the same time, they have shown as much if not more vehemence and obstinacy in their own good-for-nothing opposition. Every kind of opposition has been manifested which the ingenuity of man could dictate. Indeed, there is little urged against Christianity in our day that is original. Almost every cavil and argument may be traced to Voltaire, Porphyry, Celsus and Julian, the old enemies of the Christ. Infidels, who dislike (will you hear it?) the labor and trouble of investigating the question of the claims of the Christian religion upon their intelligence, seize with avidity upon the labors of others and parade them before the public mind. Just now there is no question put so often by men who feign to be unbelievers as, "What do you think of Colonel Ingersoll?" "He stirs you up." The little city of Logansport was favored not a great while in the past with a visit and lecture from the Colonel. After the lecture was over some half a dozen gentlemen were taking a lunch at an eating restaurant, and there was one very talkative creature in the group who had much to say of the Colonel's effort and of the "unscientific and absurd character of the Bible." Finally, one noble-hearted gentleman said to the boasting skeptic, Now you have said a great deal about the Bible, and I venture the assertion that you can't quote one verse that is in it. I challenge you to do it. Just give us one, long or short, from any chapter in all the Bible. The man failed. He couldn't do it. Then, said the Christian gentleman, you fellows are always talking about science and about the "unscientific character of the Bible," so I will now ask you one of the most simple questions known in science, and we will see whether you will answer it. It is this: How many teeth have you got in your mouth; how many does a man have? To the utter astonishment of the company the man failed again, and the company told him laughingly that he must treat to the cigars. Such fellows know comparatively nothing, and yet they are always championing their men, who contain all their knowledge and do their thinking for them. Ask the infidel who his leaders are and he will point you to Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, etc. Are Christians always holding up their great minds? Suppose we test the merits of the case in this manner, then who are your infidels that will compare with Jesus Christ and his apostles? or, with such men, even, as Milton, Clarendon, Hale, Bacon, Boyle, Locke, Newton, Addison, Lyttleton, West, Johnson and Campbell? Where are your persons of such profound understanding? To compare such persons as these with Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon and Thomas Paine, is as silly as to compare manhood with infancy. No infidels try Christianity upon its own merits. If they were candid men they would separate Christianity from all foreign and irrelative circumstances, and test its evidences seriously, as the magnitude of the question deserves. Apply the same unbelief to the common and ancient records of history and you will at once get the credit of being rash and foolish. The scoffs and sarcasms and sophistries of infidels are not from a love of truth. Whatever the cause or causes may be, one thing is certain, and that is, that they do not understand Christianity itself, nor the nature and magnitude of its evidences. They condemn that which they never gave themselves the trouble to investigate. Whoever investigates the religion of Jesus Christ will find that the character of its founder is far superior to any other character, and his apostles far superior to any other fishermen. To believe that his religion is of simple human origin is like believing that a first-class ship of war is the invention of a child. "The majesty of Christ and the divinity of his religion appears in nothing more than this, that in proportion to our acquaintance with the Scriptures of the New Testament does the light of truth shine upon the mind." The seeming successes of infidelity, and the multitude of apostates scattered over our country, makes us naturally more anxious to warn the rising generation against the errors of those who would mislead them. But there is nothing in these fearful signs of the times to shake our faith or excite our fears, because the faithful Bible student finds the condition of our world just such as the Scriptures have foretold. All the surroundings that characterize the conduct of infidels; their expertness in ridicule; their extreme folly and resoluteness; their licentiousness and anxiety for change in laws as well as society; the snares laid out by them to catch the unsteadfast, and their vain professions to free the world from slavery, while they themselves are in bondage to corruption, are drawn by the divine pencil of prophecy with so much exactness that "he who runs may read." By examining the word of God you will find that the _Free-thinkers_ of our country, the _Illuminati_ of Germany, Darwin, Strauss, Huxley, Tyndal, Renan, and the man of our own land who is most noted in our midst for oratorical accomplishments without logic, argument or truthfulness of statements touching the Christian religion, are all present evidences of the divinity of the prophetic words of the New Testament. WOMAN AND HER RANK. I presume that Adam knew nothing of the subject of woman's inferiority. I do not think that he ever said to Eve, Don't soar so high nor dive so deep into philosophy, science and religion, because you are a woman. I don't think he ever said to his wife, Astronomy is beyond your reach, nor Science is too deep for your slender powers. Home is a woman's empire, but this very fact demands that her intellectual powers should not be inferior to her husband's. A vast majority of people have their minds influenced and their characters formed by their mothers. Foolish and silly, as well as lazy women generally, have their counterparts in their offspring. By following the outlines of nature in her facts we have become scientific, and all the wisdom we can get from this source will be still more advantageous. The woman's physical nature should ever teach us that she is not to be taxed with physical labor beyond her strength and sphere of life. Such taxation is barbarism and savageness. This heathenism always _destroys home_. The American Indian has no home; he lives an idle, lazy, good-for-nothing life, while his wife, or woman, as the case may be, does all the drudgery. For this _very reason_ he was never elevated, as a general rule, above a shot-gun and a hound dog, and never had a home superior to Doolittle's birth-place, which, he said, was "at Cape Cod, Nantucket, and all along up and down the shore." It is said that the English is the only language in which the word "home" occurs. What infamous hours many bachelors keep; many of them die of dissipation because they have no mother, sister, or wife to look after them and render their homes pleasant and attractive. What an odd looking thing a house is without a female occupant. "Won't you tarry awhile?" "Can't you stay awhile?" "O, don't be in a hurry." Such is often heard, and the reply is, "No, I am much obliged to you, I must go, for my mother, my sister, or my wife, is expecting me." But for these sentiments he would stay until midnight; so some unmarried men are the most contemptible _bores_. When you get acquainted with them you naturally hate to see them coming. Some married men fall into the same way of _boring_ their neighbors. When I see a man doing this I suspect that he has lost his love of home associations, and ask myself the question, What is the trouble? There is always an adequate cause for every effect. Modern "Freeloveism" looks to the annihilation of home, for the reason that it proposes no definite home for male or female. No people destitute of the light of the Bible ever possessed a home, such an one as ours. One of the great abominations of infidelity is often met within the advocacy of _Freeloveism_, and matrimony binding at the option, simply, of the parties. What is a vagabond on the earth but a man without a home? Slaves have been the same in every age, and a government that does everything for its subjects will always keep them in degradation. A father and mother who would not effectually ruin their children must not raise them in indolence and affluence, doing everything for them and teaching them nothing in a practical way; even so a woman must be elevated until her post is one of honor. You might as well tie a man hand and foot, and command him to run a race, as to deprive women or others of their natural rights, and then expect them to rise or progress the same as those who are in the full possession of all their liberties. Give to all freedom and scope for their talents, and allow them to rise or fall at pleasure, but ever point them upward and onward. Women were slaves in Egypt, in Babylon, in Ninevah, in Persia, in Greece and Rome, and all those nations _sunk_. She is now a slave in China, in India and in Turkey. Adam said: "She is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman for she was taken from man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh." Say what you will of gallantry, and of the flattery of the sex, but here you have the intelligent and affectionate language of the first man, which, for beauty and love, as well as simplicity, has never been surpassed. "She is bone of my bone," and consequently of my own rank. We are one. She is flesh of my flesh and therefore is my equal. "She shall be called woman," that is, a female man. It is authoritatively asserted that the Hebrew term translated woman signifies a female man, just as in Latin "equa" is the feminine of "equus," "Julia" is the feminine of "Julius." But if she was a female man she possessed all the attributes of humanity, and therefore her dignity was and is the same as the other sex. Adam gave to Eve a position, an honorable position, for he took her in as a part of himself. His honor was her honor, his rank was her rank, and she was his helpmeet. My ideal woman is not one who is good for nothing, "bred only and polished to the taste of lustful appetence; to sing, to dance, to dress, to troll the tongue and roll the eye." She should be a helpmeet as termed in the Bible. She should be a creature not too bright and good to labor in her proper sphere, that is, to prepare daily food, serve it up and guide the house. A high legal dignitary placed an epitaph upon the tomb of his wife, that read: "An excellent woman and a good cook." When a stout, able-bodied woman sits herself down and whines out, "I can't work," she gets down very low. What is such a woman good for? It has been said that woman is man's imaginative side. Well, I imagine that there is a great deal of truth in the remark so far as many men are concerned, and this simple fact has ruined many a wife. A woman may operate very well upon a man's imagination, but that will never help him to make a living. Let woman be, to all intents and purposes, the equal of man, trained for the work of every-day life, for this is what the word education means. Then throw open to her all the employments lying within her strength, which are now monopolized by men, and let this new advantage work a reformation in her education. What is her education even now, and in our own country? Instead of being educated for health and long life, they are trained in many instances for disease and a premature death. The history of woman, as woman, is not in our reach; at least I am not prepared to say it has been written. I wish it had, for I am persuaded that woman has been the great redeeming element upon the human side of bliss, without which our world could not exist. * * * * * "And they charge that he (Thomas Paine) was a drunkard. That is another falsehood. He drank liquor in his day, as did the preachers. It was no unusual thing for the preacher going home to stop in a tavern and take a drink of hot rum with a deacon, and it was no unusual thing for the deacon to help the preacher home."--_Ingersoll._ Therefore, if a man stops at a hotel and drinks till he has to be helped home, he is no drunkard? No! Ingersoll is a temperance man (?) and he knows. THE TESTIMONY OF AN INFIDEL IN WHOSE HEART EVERY SPARK OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE WAS NOT EXTINGUISHED. J.J. Rousseau says: The gospel, that divine book, the only one necessary to a Christian, and the most useful of all to the man who may not be one, only requires reflection upon it to impress the mind with love of its author and resolution to fulfill his precepts. Virtue never spoke in gentler terms; the profoundest wisdom was never uttered with greater energy or more simplicity. It is impossible to rise from the reading of it without feeling a moral improvement. Look at the books of the philosophers with all their pomp, how little they are compared with this. Shall we say that the history of the gospel is a pure fiction? This is not the style of fiction, and the history of Socrates, which nobody doubts, rests upon less evidence than that of Jesus Christ; and, after all, this is but shifting the difficulty, not answering it. The supposition that several persons had united to fabricate this book, is more inconceivable than that one person should have supplied the subject of it. The spirit which it breathes, the morality which it inculcates, could never have been the invention of Jewish authors, and the gospel possesses characters of truth so striking, so perfectly inimitable, that the inventor would be a more astonishing object than the hero.--_J.J. Rousseau, vol. 36, pp. 36, 39._ * * * * * Have infidels been martyred on account of their infidelity? Men are not so foolish as to have themselves devoured by wild beasts or perish in slow fires rather than recant from a theory they never espoused, Col. Ingersoll to the contrary, _notwithstanding_. Men do not prefer red-hot iron chains to denying a Lord in whom they never believed. Infidels have nothing to lose by recanting. Colonel Ingersoll says, "I think I would. There is not much of the martyr about me," _so we think of the Colonel_! THE JEWISH RELIGION AND INSTITUTIONS KNOWN AMONG HEATHEN WRITERS. BY HENRY KETT, B.D., _Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford. Published first in 1812._ "The transactions and literature of the ancient Jews were too remarkable to escape the attention of the learned and inquisitive Pagans when Judea became a province of the Roman Empire. Many particulars relative to the eminent character of Joseph as a minister to Pharaoh, and as an inspired prophet, to the emigration of the Jews from Egypt, their miraculous passage through the Red Sea, their settlement in the Holy Land, the institutions and ceremonies of the law, the splendor of Jerusalem in its most flourishing times, the magnificence of the temple, and the supreme, eternal and immutable nature of their worship, are related by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus and Justin." CENTURIES BEFORE CHRIST. The fragments of Sanchoniathon, the most ancient historian of Phenicia, who is supposed to have flourished not long after the death of Moses, confirms the Bible account of the origin of the world and of many men and places mentioned in the Pentateuch. Berosus, the Chaldean, and Manetho, the Egyptian, who lived in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, represent several circumstances known in the accounts given by Moses. They wrote about the time when the Old Testament was translated into Greek. Their evidence, to say the least, shows the honor that was paid by the most learned persons of the East to the records of the Bible. * * * * * I know the Bible is inspired, because it finds me at greater depths of my being than any other book.--_Coleridge._ Transcriber's Note The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. 
15905	----	www.pgdp.net. COLLECTED ESSAYS; VOLUME V SCIENCE AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION BY THOMAS H. HUXLEY NEW YORK, D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 1902 PREFACE "For close upon forty years I have been writing with one purpose; from time to time, I have fought for that which seemed to me the truth, perhaps still more, against that which I have thought error; and, in this way, I have reached, indeed over-stepped, the threshold of old age. There, every earnest man has to listen to the voice within: 'Give an account of thy stewardship, for thou mayest be no longer steward.' "That I have been an unjust steward my conscience does not bear witness. At times blundering, at times negligent, Heaven knows: but, on the whole, I have done that which I felt able and called upon to do; and I have done it without looking to the right or to the left; seeking no man's favor, fearing no man's disfavor. "But what is it that I have been doing? In the end one's conceptions should form a whole, though only parts may have found utterance, as occasion arose; now do these exhibit harmony and mutual connexion? In one's zeal much of the old gets broken to pieces; but has one made ready something new, fit to be set in the place of the old? "That they merely destroy without reconstructing, is the especial charge, with which those who work in this direction are constantly reproached. In a certain sense I do not defend myself against the charge; but I deny that any reproach is deserved. "I have never proposed to myself to begin outward construction; because I do not believe that the time has come for it. Our present business is with inward preparation, especially the preparation of those who have ceased to be content with the old, and find no satisfaction in half measures. I have wished, and I still wish, to disturb no man's peace of mind, no man's beliefs; but only to point out to those in whom they are already shattered, the direction in which, in my conviction, firmer ground lies."[1] So wrote one of the protagonists of the New Reformation--and a well-abused man if ever there was one--a score of years since, in the remarkable book in which he discusses the negative and the positive results of the rigorous application of scientific method to the investigation of the higher problems of human life. Recent experience leads me to imagine that there may be a good many countrymen of my own, even at this time, to whom it may be profitable to read, mark and inwardly digest, the weighty words of the author of that "Leben Jesu," which, half a century ago, stirred the religious world so seriously that it has never settled down again quite on the old foundations; indeed, some think it never will. I have a personal interest in the carrying out of the recommendation I venture to make. It may enable many worthy persons, in whose estimation I should really be glad to stand higher than I do, to become aware of the possibility that my motives in writing the essays, contained in this and the preceding volume, were not exactly those that they ascribe to me. I too have reached the term at which the still, small voice, more audible than any other to the dulled ear of age, makes its demand; and I have found that it is of no sort of use to try to cook the accounts rendered. Nevertheless, I distinctly decline to admit some of the items charged; more particularly that of having "gone out of my way" to attack the Bible; and I as steadfastly deny that "hatred of Christianity" is a feeling with which I have any acquaintance. There are very few things which I find it permissible to hate; and though, it may be, that some of the organisations, which arrogate to themselves the Christian name, have richly earned a place in the category of hateful things, that ought to have nothing to do with one's estimation of the religion, which they have perverted and disfigured out of all likeness to the original. The simple fact is that, as I have already more than once hinted, my story is that of the wolf and the lamb over again. I have never "gone out of my way" to attack the Bible, or anything else: it was the dominant ecclesiasticism of my early days, which, as I believe, without any warrant from the Bible itself, thrust the book in my way. I had set out on a journey, with no other purpose than that of exploring a certain province of natural knowledge; I strayed no hair's breadth from the course which it was my right and my duty to pursue; and yet I found that, whatever route I took, before long, I came to a tall and formidable-looking fence. Confident as I might be in the existence of an ancient and indefeasible right of way, before me stood the thorny barrier with its comminatory notice-board--"No Thoroughfare. By order. Moses." There seemed no way over; nor did the prospect of creeping round, as I saw some do, attract me. True there was no longer any cause to fear the spring guns and man-traps set by former lords of the manor; but one is apt to get very dirty going on all-fours. The only alternatives were either to give up my journey--which I was not minded to do--or to break the fence down and go through it. Now I was and am, by nature, a law-abiding person, ready and willing to submit to all legitimate authority. But I also had and have a rooted conviction, that reasonable assurance of the legitimacy should precede the submission; so I made it my business to look up the manorial title-deeds. The pretensions of the ecclesiastical "Moses" to exercise a control over the operations of the reasoning faculty in the search after truth, thirty centuries after his age, might be justifiable; but, assuredly, the credentials produced in justification of claims so large required careful scrutiny. Singular discoveries rewarded my industry. The ecclesiastical "Moses" proved to be a mere traditional mask, behind which, no doubt, lay the features of the historical Moses--just as many a mediæval fresco has been hidden by the whitewash of Georgian churchwardens. And as the æsthetic rector too often scrapes away the defacement, only to find blurred, parti-coloured patches, in which the original design is no longer to be traced; so, when the successive layers of Jewish and Christian traditional pigment, laid on, at intervals, for near three thousand years, had been removed, by even the tenderest critical operations, there was not much to be discerned of the leader of the Exodus. Only one point became perfectly clear to me, namely, that Moses is not responsible for nine-tenths of the Pentateuch; certainly not for the legends which had been made the bugbears of science. In fact, the fence turned out to be a mere heap of dry sticks and brushwood, and one might walk through it with impunity: the which I did. But I was still young, when I thus ventured to assert my liberty; and young people are apt to be filled with a kind of _sæva indignatio_, when they discover the wide discrepancies between things as they seem and things as they are. It hurts their vanity to feel that they have prepared themselves for a mighty struggle to climb over, or break their way through, a rampart, which turns out, on close approach, to be a mere heap of ruins; venerable, indeed, and archæologically interesting, but of no other moment. And some fragment of the superfluous energy accumulated is apt to find vent in strong language. Such, I suppose, was my case, when I wrote some passages which occur in an essay reprinted among "Darwiniana."[2] But when, not long ago "the voice" put it to me, whether I had better not expunge, or modify, these passages; whether, really, they were not a little too strong; I had to reply, with all deference, that while, from a merely literary point of view, I might admit them to be rather crude, I must stand by the substance of these items of my expenditure. I further ventured to express the conviction that scientific criticism of the Old Testament, since 1860, has justified every word of the estimate of the authority of the ecclesiastical "Moses" written at that time. And, carried away by the heat of self-justification, I even ventured to add, that the desperate attempt now set afoot to force biblical and post-biblical mythology into elementary instruction, renders it useful and necessary to go on making a considerable outlay in the same direction. Not yet, has "the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew" ceased to be the "incubus of the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox;" not yet, has "the zeal of the Bibliolater" ceased from troubling; not yet, are the weaker sort, even of the instructed, at rest from their fruitless toil "to harmonise impossibilities," and "to force the generous new wine of science into the old bottles of Judaism." But I am aware that the head and front of my offending lies not now where it formerly lay. Thirty years ago, criticism of "Moses" was held by most respectable people to be deadly sin; now it has sunk to the rank of a mere peccadillo; at least, if it stops short of the history of Abraham. Destroy the foundation of most forms of dogmatic Christianity contained in the second chapter of Genesis, if you will; the new ecclesiasticism undertakes to underpin the superstructure and make it, at any rate to the eye, as firm as ever: but let him be anathema who applies exactly the same canons of criticism to the opening chapters of "Matthew" or of "Luke." School-children may be told that the world was by no means made in six days, and that implicit belief in the story of Noah's Ark is permissible only, as a matter of business, to their toy-makers; but they are to hold for the certainest of truths, to be doubted only at peril of their salvation, that their Galilean fellow-child Jesus, nineteen centuries ago, had no human father. * * * * * Well, we will pass the item of 1860, said "the voice." But why all this more recent coil about the Gadarene swine and the like? Do you pretend that these poor animals got in your way, years and years after the "Mosaic" fences were down, at any rate so far as you are concerned? Got in my way? Why, my good "voice," they were driven in my way. I had happened to make a statement, than which, so far as I have ever been able to see, nothing can be more modest or inoffensive; to wit, that I am convinced of my own utter ignorance about a great number of things, respecting which the great majority of my neighbours (not only those of adult years, but children repeating their catechisms) affirm themselves to possess full information. I ask any candid and impartial judge, Is that attacking anybody or anything? Yet, if I had made the most wanton and arrogant onslaught on the honest convictions of other people, I could not have been more hardly dealt with. The pentecostal charism, I believe, exhausted itself amongst the earliest disciples. Yet any one who has had to attend, as I have done, to copious objurgations, strewn with such appellations as "infidel" and "coward," must be a hardened sceptic indeed if he doubts the existence of a "gift of tongues" in the Churches of our time; unless, indeed, it should occur to him that some of these outpourings may have taken place after "the third hour of the day." I am far from thinking that it is worth while to give much attention to these inevitable incidents of all controversies, in which one party has acquired the mental peculiarities which are generated by the habit of much talking, with immunity from criticism. But as a rule, they are the sauce of dishes of misrepresentations and inaccuracies which it may be a duty, nay, even an innocent pleasure, to expose. In the particular case of which I am thinking, I felt, as Strauss says, "able and called upon" to undertake the business: and it is no responsibility of mine, if I found the Gospels, with their miraculous stories, of which the Gadarene is a typical example, blocking my way, as heretofore, the Pentateuch had done. I was challenged to question the authority for the theory of "the spiritual world," and the practical consequences deducible from human relations to it, contained in these documents. In my judgment, the actuality of this spiritual world--the value of the evidence for its objective existence and its influence upon the course of things--are matters, which lie as much within the province of science, as any other question about the existence and powers of the varied forms of living and conscious activity. It really is my strong conviction that a man has no more right to say he believes this world is haunted by swarms of evil spirits, without being able to produce satisfactory evidence of the fact, than he has a right to say, without adducing adequate proof, that the circumpolar antarctic ice swarms with sea-serpents. I should not like to assert positively that it does not. I imagine that no cautious biologist would say as much; but while quite open to conviction, he might properly decline to waste time upon the consideration of talk, no better accredited than forecastle "yarns," about such monsters of the deep. And if the interests of ordinary veracity dictate this course, in relation to a matter of so little consequence as this, what must be our obligations in respect of the treatment of a question which is fundamental alike for science and for ethics? For not only does our general theory of the universe and of the nature of the order which pervades it, hang upon the answer; but the rules of practical life must be deeply affected by it. The belief in a demonic world is inculcated throughout the Gospels and the rest of the books of the New Testament; it pervades the whole patristic literature; it colours the theory and the practice of every Christian church down to modern times. Indeed, I doubt if, even now, there is any church which, officially, departs from such a fundamental doctrine of primitive Christianity as the existence, in addition to the Cosmos with which natural knowledge is conversant, of a world of spirits; that is to say, of intelligent agents, not subject to the physical or mental limitations of humanity, but nevertheless competent to interfere, to an undefined extent, with the ordinary course of both physical and mental phenomena. More especially is this conception fundamental for the authors of the Gospels. Without the belief that the present world, and particularly that part of it which is constituted by human society, has been given over, since the Fall, to the influence of wicked and malignant spiritual beings, governed and directed by a supreme devil--the moral antithesis and enemy of the supreme God--their theory of salvation by the Messiah falls to pieces. "To this end was the Son of God manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil."[3] The half-hearted religiosity of latter-day Christianity may choose to ignore the fact; but it remains none the less true, that he who refuses to accept the demonology of the Gospels rejects the revelation of a spiritual world, made in them, as much as if he denied the existence of such a person as Jesus of Nazareth; and deserves, as much as any one can do, to be ear-marked "infidel" by our gentle shepherds. * * * * * Now that which I thought it desirable to make perfectly clear, on my own account, and for the sake of those who find their capacity of belief in the Gospel theory of the universe failing them, is the fact, that, in my judgment, the demonology of primitive Christianity is totally devoid of foundation; and that no man, who is guided by the rules of investigation which are found to lead to the discovery of truth in other matters, not merely of science, but in the everyday affairs of life, will arrive at any other conclusion. To those who profess to be otherwise guided, I have nothing to say; but to beg them to go their own way and leave me to mine. I think it may be as well to repeat what I have said, over and over again, elsewhere, that _a priori_ notions, about the possibility, or the impossibility, of the existence of a world of spirits, such as that presupposed by genuine Christianity, have no influence on my mind. The question for me is purely one of evidence: is the evidence adequate to bear out the theory, or is it not? In my judgment it is not only inadequate, but quite absurdly insufficient. And on that ground, I should feel compelled to reject the theory; even if there were no positive grounds for adopting a totally different conception of the Cosmos. For most people, the question of the evidence of the existence of a demonic world, in the long run, resolves itself into that of the trustworthiness of the Gospels; first, as to the objective truth of that which they narrate on this topic; second, as to the accuracy of the interpretation which their authors put upon these objective facts. For example, with respect to the Gadarene miracle, it is one question whether, at a certain time and place, a raving madman became sane, and a herd of swine rushed into the lake of Tiberias; and quite another, whether the cause of these occurrences was the transmigration of certain devils from the man into the pigs. And again, it is one question whether Jesus made a long oration on a certain occasion, mentioned in the first Gospel; altogether another, whether more or fewer of the propositions contained in the "Sermon on the Mount" were uttered on that occasion. One may give an affirmative answer to one of each of these pairs of questions and a negative to the other: one may affirm all, or deny all. In considering the historical value of any four documents, proof when they were written and who wrote them is, no doubt, highly important. For if proof exists, that A B C and D wrote them, and that they were intelligent persons, writing independently and without prejudice, about facts within their own knowledge--their statements must needs be worthy of the most attentive consideration.[4] But, even ecclesiastical tradition does not assert that either "Mark" or "Luke" wrote from his own knowledge--indeed "Luke" expressly asserts he did not. I cannot discover that any competent authority now maintains that the apostle Matthew wrote the Gospel which passes under his name. And whether the apostle John had, or had not, anything to do with the fourth Gospel; and if he had, what his share amounted to; are, as everybody who has attended to these matters knows, questions still hotly disputed, and with regard to which the extant evidence can hardly carry an impartial judge beyond the admission of a possibility this way or that. Thus, nothing but a balancing of very dubious probabilities is to be attained by approaching the question from this side. It is otherwise if we make the documents tell their own story: if we study them, as we study fossils, to discover internal evidence, of when they arose, and how they have come to be. That really fruitful line of inquiry has led to the statement and the discussion of what is known as the _Synoptic Problem_. In the Essays (VII.--XI.) which deal with the consequences of the application of the agnostic principle to Christian Evidences, contained in this volume, there are several references to the results of the attempts which have been made, during the last hundred years, to solve this problem. And, though it has been clearly stated and discussed, in works accessible to, and intelligible by, every English reader,[5] it may be well that I should here set forth a very brief exposition of the matters of fact out of which the problem has arisen; and of some consequences, which, as I conceive, must be admitted if the facts are accepted. These undisputed and, apparently, indisputable data may be thus stated: I. The three books of which an ancient, but very questionable, ecclesiastical tradition asserts Matthew, Mark, and Luke to be the authors, agree, not only in presenting the same general view, or _Synopsis_, of the nature and the order of the events narrated; but, to a remarkable extent, the very words which they employ coincide. II. Nevertheless, there are many equally marked, and some irreconcilable, differences between them. Narratives, verbally identical in some portions, diverge more or less in others. The order in which they occur in one, or in two, Gospels may be changed in another. In "Matthew" and in "Luke" events of great importance make their appearance, where the story of "Mark" seems to leave no place for them; and, at the beginning and the end of the two former Gospels, there is a great amount of matter of which there is no trace in "Mark." III. Obvious and highly important differences, in style and substance, separate the three "Synoptics," taken together, from the fourth Gospel, connected, by ecclesiastical tradition, with the name of the apostle John. In its philosophical proemium; in the conspicuous absence of exorcistic miracles; in the self-assertive theosophy of the long and diffuse monologues, which are so utterly unlike the brief and pregnant utterances of Jesus recorded in the Synoptics; in the assertion that the crucifixion took place before the Passover, which involves the denial, by implication, of the truth of the Synoptic story--to mention only a few particulars--the "Johannine" Gospel presents a wide divergence from the other three. IV. If the mutual resemblances and differences of the Synoptic Gospels are closely considered, a curious result comes out; namely, that each may be analyzed into four components. The _first_ of these consists of passages, to a greater or less extent verbally identical, which occur in all three Gospels. If this triple tradition is separated from the rest it will be found to comprise: _a_. A narrative, of a somewhat broken and anecdotic aspect, which covers the period from the appearance of John the Baptist to the discovery of the emptiness of the tomb, on the first day of the week, some six-and-thirty hours after the crucifixion. _b_. An apocalyptic address. _c_. Parables and brief discourses, or rather, centos of religious and ethical exhortations and injunctions. The _second_ and the _third_ set of components of each Gospel present equally close resemblances to passages, which are found in only one of the other Gospels; therefore it may be said that, for them, the tradition is double. The _fourth_ component is peculiar to each Gospel; it is a single tradition and has no representative in the others. To put the facts in another way: each Gospel is composed of a _threefold tradition_, two _twofold traditions_, and one _peculiar tradition_. If the Gospels were the work of totally independent writers, it would follow that there are three witnesses for the statements in the first tradition; two for each of those in the second, and only one for those in the third. V. If the reader will now take up that extremely instructive little book, Abbott and Rushbrooke's "Common Tradition" he will easily satisfy himself that "Mark" has the remarkable structure just described. Almost the whole of this Gospel consists of the first component; namely, the _threefold tradition_. But in chap. i. 23-28 he will discover an exorcistic story, not to be found in "Matthew," but repeated, often word for word, in "Luke." This, therefore, belongs to one of the _twofold traditions_. In chap. viii. 1-10, on the other hand, there is a detailed account of the miracle of feeding the four thousand; which is closely repeated in "Matthew" xv. 32-39, but is not to be found in "Luke." This is an example of the other _twofold tradition_, possible in "Mark." Finally, the story of the blind man of Bethsaida, "Mark" viii. 22-26, is _peculiar_ to "Mark." VI. Suppose that, A standing for the _threefold tradition_, or the matter common to all three Gospels; we call the matter common to "Mark" and "Matthew" only--B; that common to "Mark" and "Luke" only--C; that common to "Matthew" and "Luke" only--D; while the peculiar components of "Mark," "Matthew," and "Luke" are severally indicated by E, F, G; then the structure of the Gospels may be represented thus: Components of "Mark" = A + B + C + E. " "Matthew" = A + B + D + F. " "Luke" = A + C + D + G. VII. The analysis of the Synoptic documents need be carried no further than this point, in order to suggest one extremely important, and, apparently unavoidable conclusion; and that is, that their authors were neither three independent witnesses of the things narrated; nor, for the parts of the narrative about which all agree, that is to say, the _threefold tradition_, did they employ independent sources of information. It is simply incredible that each of three independent witnesses of any series of occurrences should tell a story so similar, not only in arrangement and in small details, but in words, to that of each of the others. Hence it follows, either that the Synoptic writers have, mediately or immediately, copied one from the other: or that the three have drawn from a common source; that is to say, from one arrangement of similar traditions (whether oral or written); though that arrangement may have been extant in three or more, somewhat different versions. VIII. The suppositions (_a_) that "Mark" had "Matthew" and "Luke" before him; and (_b_) that either of the two latter was acquainted with the work of the other, would seem to involve some singular consequences. _a_. The second Gospel is saturated with the lowest supernaturalism. Jesus is exhibited as a wonder-worker and exorcist of the first rank. The earliest public recognition of the Messiahship of Jesus comes from an "unclean spirit"; he himself is made to testify to the occurrence of the miraculous feeding twice over. The purpose with which "Mark" sets out is to show forth Jesus as the Son of God, and it is suggested, if not distinctly stated, that he acquired this character at his baptism by John. The absence of any reference to the miraculous events of the infancy, detailed by "Matthew" and "Luke;" or to the appearances after the discovery of the emptiness of the tomb; is unintelligible, if "Mark" knew anything about them, or believed in the miraculous conception. The second Gospel is no summary: "Mark" can find room for the detailed story, irrelevant to his main purpose, of the beheading of John the Baptist, and his miraculous narrations are crowded with minute particulars. Is it to be imagined that, with the supposed apostolic authority of Matthew before him, he could leave out the miraculous conception of Jesus and the ascension? Further, ecclesiastical tradition would have us believe that Mark wrote down his recollections of what Peter taught. Did Peter then omit to mention these matters? Did the fact testified by the oldest authority extant, that the first appearance of the risen Jesus was to himself seem not worth mentioning? Did he really fail to speak of the great position in the Church solemnly assigned to him by Jesus? The alternative would seem to be the impeachment either of Mark's memory, or of his judgment. But Mark's memory, is so good that he can recollect how, on the occasion of the stilling of the waves, Jesus was asleep "on the cushion," he remembers that the woman with the issue had "spent all she had" on her physicians; that there was not room "even about the door" on a certain occasion at Capernaum. And it is surely hard to believe that "Mark" should have failed to recollect occurrences of infinitely greater moment, or that he should have deliberately left them out, as things not worthy of mention. _b_. The supposition that "Matthew" was acquainted with "Luke," or "Luke" with "Matthew" has equally grave implications. If that be so, the one who used the other could have had but a poor opinion of his predecessor's historical veracity. If, as most experts agree, "Luke" is later than "Matthew," it is clear that he does not credit "Matthew's" account of the infancy; does not believe the "Sermon on the Mount" as given by Matthew was preached; does not believe in the two feeding miracles, to which Jesus himself is made to refer; wholly discredits "Matthew's" account of the events after the crucifixion; and thinks it not worth while to notice "Matthew's" grave admission that "some doubted." IX. None of these troublesome consequences pursue the hypothesis that the _threefold tradition_, in one, or more, Greek versions, was extant before either of the canonical Synoptic Gospels; and that it furnished the fundamental framework of their several narratives. Where and when the threefold narrative arose, there is no positive evidence; though it is obviously probable that the traditions it embodies, and perhaps many others, took their rise in Palestine and spread thence to Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt and Italy, in the track of the early missionaries. Nor is it less likely that they formed part of the "didaskalia" of the primitive Nazarene and Christian communities.[6] X. The interest which attaches to "Mark" arises from the fact that it seems to present this early, probably earliest, Greek Gospel narrative, with least addition, or modification. If, as appears likely from some internal evidences, it was compiled for the use of the Christian sodalities in Rome; and that it was accepted by them as an adequate account of the life and work of Jesus, it is evidence of the most valuable kind respecting their beliefs and the limits of dogma, as conceived by them. In such case, a good Roman Christian of that epoch might know nothing of the doctrine of the incarnation, as taught by "Matthew" and "Luke"; still less of the "logos" doctrine of "John"; neither need he have believed anything more than the simple fact of the resurrection. It was open to him to believe it either corporeal or spiritual. He would never have heard of the power of the keys bestowed upon Peter; nor have had brought to his mind so much as a suggestion of trinitarian doctrine. He might be a rigidly monotheistic Judæo-Christian, and consider himself bound by the law: he might be a Gentile Pauline convert, neither knowing of nor caring for such restrictions. In neither case would he find in "Mark" any serious stumbling-block. In fact, persons of all the categories admitted to salvation by Justin, in the middle of the second century,[7] could accept "Mark" from beginning to end. It may well be, that, in this wide adaptability, backed by the authority of the metropolitan church, there lies the reason for the fact of the preservation of "Mark," notwithstanding its limited and dogmatically colourless character, as compared with the Gospels of "Luke" and "Matthew." XI. "Mark," as we have seen, contains a relatively small body of ethical and religious instruction and only a few parables. Were these all that existed in the primitive threefold tradition? Were none others current in the Roman communities, at the time "Mark" wrote, supposing he wrote in Rome? Or, on the other hand, was there extant, as early as the time at which "Mark" composed his Greek edition of the primitive Evangel, one or more collections of parables and teachings, such as those which form the bulk of the twofold tradition, common exclusively to "Matthew" and "Luke," and are also found in their single traditions? Many have assumed this, or these, collections to be identical with, or at any rate based upon, the "logia," of which ecclesiastical tradition says, that they were written in Aramaic by Matthew, and that everybody translated them as he could. Here is the old difficulty again. If such materials were known to "Mark," what imaginable reason could he have for not using them? Surely displacement of the long episode of John the Baptist--even perhaps of the story of the Gadarene swine--by portions of the Sermon on the Mount or by one or two of the beautiful parables in the twofold and single traditions would have been great improvements; and might have been effected, even though "Mark" was as much pressed for space as some have imagined. But there is no ground for that imagination; Mark has actually found room for four or five parables; why should he not have given the best, if he had known of them? Admitting he was the mere _pedissequus et breviator_ of Matthew, that even Augustine supposed him to be, what could induce him to omit the Lord's Prayer? Whether more or less of the materials of the twofold tradition D, and of the peculiar traditions F and G, were or were not current in some of the communities, as early as, or perhaps earlier than, the triple tradition, it is not necessary for me to discuss; nor to consider those solutions of the Synoptic problem which assume that it existed earlier, and was already combined with more or less narrative. Those who are working out the final solution of the Synoptic problem are taking into account, more than hitherto, the possibility that the widely separated Christian communities of Palestine, Asia Minor, Egypt, and Italy, especially after the Jewish war of A.D. 66-70, may have found themselves in possession of very different traditional materials. Many circumstances tend to the conclusion that, in Asia Minor, even the narrative part of the threefold tradition had a formidable rival; and that, around this second narrative, teaching traditions of a totally different order from those in the Synoptics, grouped themselves; and, under the influence of converts imbued more or less with the philosophical speculations of the time, eventually took shape in the fourth Gospel and its associated literature. XII. But it is unnecessary, and it would be out of place, for me to attempt to do more than indicate the existence of these complex and difficult questions. My purpose has been to make it clear that the Synoptic problem must force itself upon every one who studies the Gospels with attention; that the broad facts of the case, and some of the consequences deducible from these facts, are just as plain to the simple English reader as they are to the profoundest scholar. One of these consequences is that the threefold tradition presents us with a narrative believed to be historically true, in all its particulars, by the major part, if not the whole, of the Christian communities. That narrative is penetrated, from beginning to end, by the demonological beliefs of which the Gadarene story is a specimen; and, if the fourth Gospel indicates the existence of another and, in some respects, irreconcilably divergent narrative, in which the demonology retires into the background, it is none the less there. Therefore, the demonology is an integral and inseparable component of primitive Christianity. The farther back the origin of the gospels is dated, the stronger does the certainty of this conclusion grow; and the more difficult it becomes to suppose that Jesus himself may not have shared the superstitious beliefs of his disciples. It further follows that those who accept devils, possession, and exorcism as essential elements of their conception of the spiritual world may consistently consider the testimony of the Gospels to be unimpeachable in respect of the information they give us respecting other matters which appertain to that world. Those who reject the gospel demonology, on the other hand, would seem to be as completely barred, as I feel myself to be, from professing to take the accuracy of that information for granted. If the threefold tradition is wrong about one fundamental topic, it may be wrong about another, while the authority of the single traditions, often mutually contradictory as they are, becomes a vanishing quantity. It really is unreasonable to ask any rejector of the demonology to say more with respect to those other matters, than that the statements regarding them may be true, or may be false; and that the ultimate decision, if it is to be favourable, must depend on the production of testimony of a very different character from that of the writers of the four gospels. Until such evidence is brought forward, that refusal of assent, with willingness to re-open the question, on cause shown, which is what I mean by Agnosticism, is, for me, the only course open. * * * * * A verdict of "not proven" is undoubtedly unsatisfactory and essentially provisional, so far forth as the subject of the trial is capable of being dealt with by due process of reason. Those who are of opinion that the historical realities at the root of Christianity, lie beyond the jurisdiction of science, need not be considered. Those who are convinced that the evidence is, and must always remain, insufficient to support any definite conclusion, are justified in ignoring the subject. They must be content to put up with that reproach of being mere destroyers, of which Strauss speaks. They may say that there are so many problems which are and must remain insoluble, that the "burden of the mystery" "of all this unintelligible world" is not appreciably affected by one more or less. For myself, I must confess that the problem of the origin of such very remarkable historical phenomena as the doctrines, and the social organization, which in their broad features certainly existed, and were in a state of rapid development, within a hundred years of the crucifixion of Jesus; and which have steadily prevailed against all rivals, among the most intelligent and civilized nations in the world ever since, is, and always has been, profoundly interesting; and, considering how recent the really scientific study of that problem, and how great the progress made during the last half century in supplying the conditions for a positive solution of the problem, I cannot doubt that the attainment of such a solution is a mere question of time. I am well aware that it has lain far beyond my powers to take any share in this great undertaking. All that I can hope is to have done somewhat towards "the preparation of those who have ceased to be contented with the old and find no satisfaction in half measures": perhaps, also, something towards the lessening of that great proportion of my countrymen, whose eminent characteristic it is that they find "full satisfaction in half measures." T.H.H. HODESLEA, EASTBOURNE, _December 4th, 1893_. FOOTNOTES: [1] D.F. Strauss, _Der alte und der neue Glaube_ (1872), pp. 9, 10. [2] _Collected Essays_, vol. ii., "On the Origin of Species" (1860). [3] 1 John iii. 8. [4] Not necessarily of more than this. A few centuries ago the twelve most intelligent and impartial men to be found in England, would have independently testified that the sun moves, from east to west, across the heavens every day. [5] Nowhere more concisely and clearly than in Dr. Sutherland Black's article "Gospels" in Chambers's _Encyclopædia_. References are given to the more elaborate discussions of the problem. [6] Those who regard the Apocalyptic discourse as a "vaticination after the event" may draw conclusions therefrom as to the date of the Gospels in which its several forms occur. But the assumption is surely dangerous, from an apologetic point of view, since it begs the question as to the unhistorical character of this solemn prophecy. [7] See p. 287 of this volume. CONTENTS PAGE I. PROLOGUE 1 (_Controverted Questions_, 1892). II. SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM [1887] 59 III. SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE [1887] 90 IV. AN EPISCOPAL TRILOGY [1887] 126 V. THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS [1889] 160 VI. POSSIBILITIES AND IMPOSSIBILITIES [1891] 192 VII. AGNOSTICISM [1889] 209 VIII. AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER [1889] 263 IX. AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY [1889] 309 X. THE KEEPERS OF THE HERD OF SWINE [1890] 366 XI. ILLUSTRATIONS OF MR. GLADSTONE'S CONTROVERSIAL METHODS [1891] 393 I: PROLOGUE [_Controverted Questions_, 1892] Le plus grand service qu'on puisse rendre à la science est d'y faire place nette avant d'y rien construire.--CUVIER. Most of the Essays comprised in the present volume have been written during the last six or seven years, without premeditated purpose or intentional connection, in reply to attacks upon doctrines which I hold to be well founded; or in refutation of allegations respecting matters lying within the province of natural knowledge, which I believe to be erroneous; and they bear the mark of their origin in the controversial tone which pervades them. Of polemical writing, as of other kinds of warfare, I think it may be said, that it is often useful, sometimes necessary, and always more or less of an evil. It is useful, when it attracts attention to topics which might otherwise be neglected; and when, as does sometimes happen, those who come to see a contest remain to think. It is necessary, when the interests of truth and of justice are at stake. It is an evil, in so far as controversy always tends to degenerate into quarrelling, to swerve from the great issue of what is right and what is wrong to the very small question of who is right and who is wrong. I venture to hope that the useful and the necessary were more conspicuous than the evil attributes of literary militancy, when these papers were first published; but I have had some hesitation about reprinting them. If I may judge by my own taste, few literary dishes are less appetising than cold controversy; moreover, there is an air of unfairness about the presentation of only one side of a discussion, and a flavour of unkindness in the reproduction of "winged words," which, however appropriate at the time of their utterance, would find a still more appropriate place in oblivion. Yet, since I could hardly ask those who have honoured me by their polemical attentions to confer lustre on this collection, by permitting me to present their lucubrations along with my own; and since it would be a manifest wrong to them to deprive their, by no means rare, vivacities of language of such justification as they may derive from similar freedoms on my part; I came to the conclusion that my best course was to leave the essays just as they were written;[8] assuring my honourable adversaries that any heat of which signs may remain was generated, in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, by the force of their own blows, and has long since been dissipated into space. But, however the polemical coincomitants of these discussions may be regarded--or better, disregarded--there is no doubt either about the importance of the topics of which they treat, or as to the public interest in the "Controverted Questions" with which they deal. Or rather, the Controverted Question; for disconnected as these pieces may, perhaps, appear to be, they are, in fact, concerned only with different aspects of a single problem, with which thinking men have been occupied, ever since they began seriously to consider the wonderful frame of things in which their lives are set, and to seek for trustworthy guidance among its intricacies. Experience speedily taught them that the shifting scenes of the world's stage have a permanent background; that there is order amidst the seeming confusion, and that many events take place according to unchanging rules. To this region of familiar steadiness and customary regularity they gave the name of Nature. But, at the same time, their infantile and untutored reason, little more, as yet, than the playfellow of the imagination, led them to believe that this tangible, commonplace, orderly world of Nature was surrounded and interpenetrated by another intangible and mysterious world, no more bound by fixed rules than, as they fancied, were the thoughts and passions which coursed through their minds and seemed to exercise an intermittent and capricious rule over their bodies. They attributed to the entities, with which they peopled this dim and dreadful region, an unlimited amount of that power of modifying the course of events of which they themselves possessed a small share, and thus came to regard them as not merely beyond, but above, Nature. Hence arose the conception of a "Supernature" antithetic to "Nature"--the primitive dualism of a natural world "fixed in fate" and a supernatural, left to the free play of volition--which has pervaded all later speculation and, for thousands of years, has exercised a profound influence on practice. For it is obvious that, on this theory of the Universe, the successful conduct of life must demand careful attention to both worlds; and, if either is to be neglected, it may be safer that it should be Nature. In any given contingency, it must doubtless be desirable to know what may be expected to happen in the ordinary course of things; but it must be quite as necessary to have some inkling of the line likely to be taken by supernatural agencies able, and possibly willing, to suspend or reverse that course. Indeed, logically developed, the dualistic theory must needs end in almost exclusive attention to Supernature, and in trust that its overruling strength will be exerted in favour of those who stand well with its denizens. On the other hand, the lessons of the great schoolmaster, experience, have hardly seemed to accord with this conclusion. They have taught, with considerable emphasis, that it does not answer to neglect Nature; and that, on the whole, the more attention paid to her dictates the better men fare. Thus the theoretical antithesis brought about a practical antagonism. From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and people. These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of right action. History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have attained to any agreement about these matters, or that history indicates a widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice, with the onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their adherents delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with criminality, deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity. In singular contrast with natural knowledge, again, the acquaintance of mankind with the supernatural appears the more extensive and the more exact, and the influence of supernatural doctrines upon conduct the greater, the further back we go in time and the lower the stage of civilisation submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed, there would seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural knowledge. As the latter has widened, gained in precision and in trustworthiness, so has the former shrunk, grown vague and questionable; as the one has more and more filled the sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the region of meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal recognition. Whether this difference of the fortunes of Naturalism and of Supernaturalism is an indication of the progress, or of the regress, of humanity; of a fall from, or an advance towards, the higher life; is a matter of opinion. The point to which I wish to direct attention is that the difference exists and is making itself felt. Men are growing to be seriously alive to the fact that the historical evolution of humanity, which is generally, and I venture to think not unreasonably, regarded as progress, has been, and is being, accompanied by a co-ordinate elimination of the supernatural from its originally large occupation of men's thoughts. The question--How far is this process to go?--is, in my apprehension, the Controverted Question of our time. * * * * * Controversy on this matter--prolonged, bitter, and fought out with the weapons of the flesh, as well as with those of the spirit--is no new thing to Englishmen. We have been more or less occupied with it these five hundred years. And, during that time, we have made attempts to establish a _modus vivendi_ between the antagonists, some of which have had a world-wide influence; though, unfortunately, none have proved universally and permanently satisfactory. In the fourteenth century, the controverted question among us was, whether certain portions of the Supernaturalism of mediæval Christianity were well-founded. John Wicliff proposed a solution of the problem which, in the course of the following two hundred years, acquired wide popularity and vast historical importance: Lollards, Hussites, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, Socinians, and Anabaptists, whatever their disagreements, concurred in the proposal to reduce the Supernaturalism of Christianity within the limits sanctioned by the Scriptures. None of the chiefs of Protestantism called in question either the supernatural origin and infallible authority of the Bible, or the exactitude of the account of the supernatural world given in its pages. In fact, they could not afford to entertain any doubt about these points, since the infallible Bible was the fulcrum of the lever with which they were endeavouring to upset the Chair of St. Peter. The "freedom of private judgment" which they proclaimed, meant no more, in practice, than permission to themselves to make free with the public judgment of the Roman Church, in respect of the canon and of the meaning to be attached to the words of the canonical books. Private judgment--that is to say, reason--was (theoretically, at any rate) at liberty to decide what books were and what were not to take the rank of "Scripture"; and to determine the sense of any passage in such books. But this sense, once ascertained to the mind of the sectary, was to be taken for pure truth--for the very word of God. The controversial efficiency of the principle of biblical infallibility lay in the fact that the conservative adversaries of the Reformers were not in a position to contravene it without entangling themselves in serious difficulties; while, since both Papists and Protestants agreed in taking efficient measures to stop the mouths of any more radical critics, these did not count. The impotence of their adversaries, however, did not remove the inherent weakness of the position of the Protestants. The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the Pope. If the former is held by "faith," then the latter may be. If the latter is to be accepted, or rejected, by private judgment, why not the former? Even if the Bible could be proved anywhere to assert its own infallibility, the value of that self-assertion to those who dispute the point is not obvious. On the other hand, if the infallibility of the Bible was rested on that of a "primitive Church," the admission that the "Church" was formerly infallible was awkward in the extreme for those who denied its present infallibility. Moreover, no sooner was the Protestant principle applied to practice, than it became evident that even an infallible text, when manipulated by private judgment, will impartially countenance contradictory deductions; and furnish forth creeds and confessions as diverse as the quality and the information of the intellects which exercise, and the prejudices and passions which sway, such judgments. Every sect, confident in the derivative infallibility of its wire-drawing of infallible materials, was ready to supply its contingent of martyrs; and to enable history, once more, to illustrate the truth, that steadfastness under persecution says much for the sincerity and still more for the tenacity, of the believer, but very little for the objective truth of that which he believes. No martyrs have sealed their faith with their blood more steadfastly than the Anabaptists. Last, but not least, the Protestant principle contained within itself the germs of the destruction of the finality, which the Lutheran, Calvinistic, and other Protestant Churches fondly imagined they had reached. Since their creeds were professedly based on the canonical Scriptures, it followed that, in the long run, whoso settled the canon defined the creed. If the private judgment of Luther might legitimately conclude that the epistle of James was contemptible, while the epistles of Paul contained the very essence of Christianity, it must be permissible for some other private judgment, on as good or as bad grounds, to reverse these conclusions; the critical process which excluded the Apocrypha could not be barred, at any rate by people who rejected the authority of the Church, from extending its operations to Daniel, the Canticles, and Ecclesiastes; nor, having got so far, was it easy to allege any good ground for staying the further progress of criticism. In fact, the logical development of Protestantism could not fail to lay the authority of the Scriptures at the feet of Reason; and, in the hands of latitudinarian and rationalistic theologians, the despotism of the Bible was rapidly converted into an extremely limited monarchy. Treated with as much respect as ever, the sphere of its practical authority was minimised; and its decrees were valid only so far as they were countersigned by common sense, the responsible minister. The champions of Protestantism are much given to glorify the Reformation of the sixteenth century as the emancipation of Reason; but it may be doubted if their contention has any solid ground; while there is a good deal of evidence to show, that aspirations after intellectual freedom had nothing whatever to do with the movement. Dante, who struck the Papacy as hard blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself and Luther himself, when they began their work; were far enough from any intention of meddling with even the most irrational of the dogmas of mediæval Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to Socinus, or even to Münzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being the slave of the Papacy the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible; or, to speak more accurately, of somebody's interpretation of the Bible, which, rapidly shifting its attitude from the humility of a private judgment to the arrogant Cæsaro-papistry of a state-enforced creed, had no more hesitation about forcibly extinguishing opponent private judgments and judges, than had the old-fashioned Pontiff-papistry. It was the iniquities, and not the irrationalities, of the Papal system that lay at the bottom of the revolt of the laity; which was, essentially, an attempt to shake off the intolerable burden of certain practical deductions from a Supernaturalism in which everybody, in principle, acquiesced. What was the gain to intellectual freedom of abolishing transubstantiation, image worship, indulgences, ecclesiastical infallibility; if consubstantiation, real-unreal presence mystifications, the bibliolatry, the "inner-light" pretensions, and the demonology, which are fruits of the same supernaturalistic tree, remained in enjoyment of the spiritual and temporal support of a new infallibility? One does not free a prisoner by merely scraping away the rust from his shackles. It will be asked, perhaps, was not the Reformation one of the products of that great outbreak of many-sided free mental activity included under the general head of the Renascence? Melanchthon, Ulrich von Hutten, Beza, were they not all humanists? Was not the arch-humanist, Erasmus, fautor-in-chief of the Reformation, until he got frightened and basely deserted it? From the language of Protestant historians, it would seem that they often forget that Reformation and Protestantism are by no means convertible terms. There were plenty of sincere and indeed zealous reformers, before, during, and after the birth and growth of Protestantism, who would have nothing to do with it. Assuredly, the rejuvenescence of science and of art; the widening of the field of Nature by geographical and astronomical discovery; the revelation of the noble ideals of antique literature by the revival of classical learning; the stir of thought, throughout all classes of society, by the printers' work, loosened traditional bonds and weakened the hold of mediæval Supernaturalism. In the interests of liberal culture and of national welfare, the humanists were eager to lend a hand to anything which tended to the discomfiture of their sworn enemies, the monks, and they willingly supported every movement in the direction of weakening ecclesiastical interference with civil life. But the bond of a common enemy was the only real tie between the humanist and the protestant; their alliance was bound to be of short duration, and, sooner or later, to be replaced by internecine warfare. The goal of the humanists, whether they were aware of it or not, was the attainment of the complete intellectual freedom of the antique philosopher, than which nothing could be more abhorrent to a Luther, a Calvin, a Beza, or a Zwingli. The key to the comprehension of the conduct of Erasmus, seems to me to lie in the clear apprehension of this fact. That he was a man of many weaknesses may be true; in fact, he was quite aware of them and professed himself no hero. But he never deserted that reformatory movement which he originally contemplated; and it was impossible he should have deserted the specifically Protestant reformation in which he never took part. He was essentially a theological whig, to whom radicalism was as hateful as it is to all whigs; or, to borrow a still more appropriate comparison from modern times, a broad churchman who refused to enlist with either the High Church or the Low Church zealots, and paid the penalty of being called coward, time-server and traitor, by both. Yet really there is a good deal in his pathetic remonstrance that he does not see why he is bound to become a martyr for that in which he does not believe; and a fair consideration of the circumstances and the consequences of the Protestant reformation seems to me to go a long way towards justifying the course he adopted. Few men had better means of being acquainted with the condition of Europe; none could be more competent to gauge the intellectual shallowness and self-contradiction of the Protestant criticism of Catholic doctrine; and to estimate, at its proper value, the fond imagination that the waters let out by the Renascence would come to rest amidst the blind alleys of the new ecclesiasticism. The bastard, whilom poor student and monk, become the familiar of bishops and princes, at home in all grades of society, could not fail to be aware of the gravity of the social position, of the dangers imminent from the profligacy and indifference of the ruling classes, no less than from the anarchical tendencies of the people who groaned under their oppression. The wanderer who had lived in Germany, in France, in England, in Italy, and who counted many of the best and most influential men in each country among his friends, was not likely to estimate wrongly the enormous forces which were still at the command of the Papacy. Bad as the churchmen might be, the statesmen were worse; and a person of far more sanguine temperament than Erasmus might have seen no hope for the future, except in gradually freeing the ubiquitous organisation of the Church from the corruptions which alone, as he imagined, prevented it from being as beneficent as it was powerful. The broad tolerance of the scholar and man of the world might well be revolted by the ruffianism, however genial, of one great light of Protestantism, and the narrow fanaticism, however learned and logical, of others; and to a cautious thinker, by whom, whatever his shortcomings, the ethical ideal of the Christian evangel was sincerely prized, it really was a fair question, whether it was worth while to bring about a political and social deluge, the end of which no mortal could foresee, for the purpose of setting up Lutheran, Zwinglian, and other Peterkins, in the place of the actual claimant to the reversion of the spiritual wealth of the Galilean fisherman. Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the Lutheran and Zwinglian movement, a vision of its immediate consequences had been granted to Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the fierce outbreak of Anabaptist communism, which opened the apocalypse, had succeeded, in shadowy procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in England, with the judicial murders of his friends, More and Fisher; the bitter tyranny of evangelistic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland; the long agony of religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which devastated France and reduced Germany almost to savagery; finishing with the spectacle of Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere dead Erastian formalism, before it was a century old; while Jesuitry triumphed over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, bringing in its train a recrudescence of all the corruptions Erasmus and his friends sought to abolish; might not he have quite honestly thought this a somewhat too heavy price to pay for Protestantism; more especially, since no one was in a better position than himself to know how little the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions was able to bear the light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism would throw upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw, Erasmus was, at heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christianity" as stoutly as Voltaire by his Deism. In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which bore Erasmus along, left Protestantism stranded amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds: while its true course became visible to all men, two centuries later. By this time, those in whom the movement of the Renascence was incarnate became aware what spirit they were of; and they attacked Supernaturalism in its Biblical stronghold, defended by Protestants and Romanists with equal zeal. In the eyes of the "Patriarch," Ultramontanism, Jansenism, and Calvinism were merely three persons of the one "Infâme" which it was the object of his life to crush. If he hated one more than another, it was probably the last; while D'Holbach, and the extreme left of the free-thinking host, were disposed to show no more mercy to Deism and Pantheism. The sceptical insurrection of the eighteenth century made a terrific noise and frightened not a few worthy people out of their wits; but cool judges might have foreseen, at the outset, that the efforts of the later rebels were no more likely than those of the earlier, to furnish permanent resting-places for the spirit of scientific inquiry. However worthy of admiration may be the acuteness, the common sense, the wit, the broad humanity, which abound in the writings of the best of the free-thinkers; there is rarely much to be said for their work as an example of the adequate treatment of a grave and difficult investigation. I do not think any impartial judge will assert that, from this point of view, they are much better than their adversaries. It must be admitted that they share to the full the fatal weakness of _a priori_ philosophising, no less than the moral frivolity common to their age; while a singular want of appreciation of history, as the record of the moral and social evolution of the human race, permitted them to resort to preposterous theories of imposture, in order to account for the religious phenomena which are natural products of that evolution. For the most part, the Romanist and Protestant adversaries of the free-thinkers met them with arguments no better than their own; and with vituperation, so far inferior that it lacked the wit. But one great Christian Apologist fairly captured the guns of the free-thinking array, and turned their batteries upon themselves. Speculative "infidelity" of the eighteenth century type was mortally wounded by the _Analogy_; while the progress of the historical and psychological sciences brought to light the important part played by the mythopoeic faculty; and, by demonstrating the extreme readiness of men to impose upon themselves, rendered the calling in of sacerdotal cooperation, in most cases, a superfluity. Again, as in the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, social and political influences came into play. The free-thinking _philosophes_, who objected to Rousseau's sentimental religiosity almost as much as they did to _L'Infâme_, were credited with the responsibility for all the evil deeds of Rousseau's Jacobin disciples, with about as much justification as Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants' revolt, or Luther for the _Bauern-krieg_. In England, though our _ancien régime_ was not altogether lovely, the social edifice was never in such a bad way as in France; it was still capable of being repaired; and our forefathers, very wisely, preferred to wait until that operation could be safely performed, rather than pull it all down about their ears, in order to build a philosophically planned house on brand-new speculative foundations. Under these circumstances, it is not wonderful that, in this country, practical men preferred the gospel of Wesley and Whitfield to that of Jean Jacques; while enough of the old leaven of Puritanism remained to ensure the favour and support of a large number of religious men to a revival of evangelical supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the free-thinking, or the indifference, prevalent among us in the first half of the eighteenth century, was replaced by a strong supernaturalistic reaction, which submerged the work of the free-thinkers; and even seemed, for a time, to have arrested the naturalistic movement of which that work was an imperfect indication. Yet, like Lollardry, four centuries earlier, free-thought merely took to running underground, safe, sooner or later, to return to the surface. * * * * * My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood had a little abated and the tops of certain mountains were soon to appear, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Oxford; but when nevertheless, bibliolatry was rampant; when church and chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of God, the crude assumptions of the worst informed and, in natural sequence, the most presumptuously bigoted, of all theological schools. In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly without my authorisation, I was very early taken to hear "sermons in the vulgar tongue." And vulgar enough often was the tongue in which some preacher, ignorant alike of literature, of history, of science, and even of theology, outside that patronised by his own narrow school, poured forth, from the safe entrenchment of the pulpit, invectives against those who deviated from his notion of orthodoxy. From dark allusions to "sceptics" and "infidels," I became aware of the existence of people who trusted in carnal reason; who audaciously doubted that the world was made in six natural days, or that the deluge was universal; perhaps even went so far as to question the literal accuracy of the story of Eve's temptation, or of Balaam's ass; and, from the horror of the tones in which they were mentioned, I should have been justified in drawing the conclusion that these rash men belonged to the criminal classes. At the same time, those who were more directly responsible for providing me with the knowledge essential to the right guidance of life (and who sincerely desired to do so), imagined they were discharging that most sacred duty by impressing upon my childish mind the necessity, on pain of reprobation in this world and damnation in the next, of accepting, in the strict and literal sense, every statement contained in the Protestant Bible. I was told to believe, and I did believe, that doubt about any of them was a sin, not less reprehensible than a moral delict. I suppose that, out of a thousand of my contemporaries, nine hundred, at least, had their minds systematically warped and poisoned, in the name of the God of truth, by like discipline. I am sure that, even a score of years later, those who ventured to question the exact historical accuracy of any part of the Old Testament and _a fortiori_ of the Gospels, had to expect a pitiless shower of verbal missiles, to say nothing of the other disagreeable consequences which visit those who, in any way, run counter to that chaos of prejudices called public opinion. My recollections of this time have recently been revived by the perusal of a remarkable document,[9] signed by as many as thirty-eight out of the twenty odd thousand clergymen of the Established Church. It does not appear that the signataries are officially accredited spokesmen of the ecclesiastical corporation to which they belong; but I feel bound to take their word for it, that they are "stewards of the Lord, who have received the Holy Ghost," and, therefore, to accept this memorial as evidence that, though the Evangelicism of my early days may be deposed from its place of power, though so many of the colleagues of the thirty-eight even repudiate the title of Protestants, yet the green bay tree of bibliolatry flourishes as it did sixty years ago. And, as in those good old times, whoso refuses to offer incense to the idol is held to be guilty of "a dishonour to God," imperilling his salvation. It is to the credit of the perspicacity of the memorialists that they discern the real nature of the Controverted Question of the age. They are awake to the unquestionable fact that, if Scripture has been discovered "not to be worthy of unquestioning belief," faith "in the supernatural itself" is, so far, undermined. And I may congratulate myself upon such weighty confirmation of an opinion in which I have had the fortune to anticipate them. But whether it is more to the credit of the courage, than to the intelligence, of the thirty-eight that they should go on to proclaim that the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments "declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records, both of past events and of the delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled," must be left to the coming generation to decide. The interest which attaches to this singular document will, I think, be based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but upon that of which it is a sign. It is an open secret, that the memorial is put forth as a counterblast to a manifestation of opinion of a contrary character, on the part of certain members of the same ecclesiastical body, who therefore have, as I suppose, an equal right to declare themselves "stewards of the Lord and recipients of the Holy Ghost." In fact, the stream of tendency towards Naturalism, the course of which I have briefly traced, has, of late years, flowed so strongly, that even the Churches have begun, I dare not say to drift, but, at any rate, to swing at their moorings. Within the pale of the Anglican establishment, I venture to doubt, whether, at this moment, there are as many thorough-going defenders of "plenary inspiration" as there were timid questioners of that doctrine, half a century ago. Commentaries, sanctioned by the highest authority, give up the "actual historical truth" of the cosmogonical and diluvial narratives. University professors of deservedly high repute accept the critical decision that the Hexateuch is a compilation, in which the share of Moses, either as author or as editor, is not quite so clearly demonstrable as it might be; highly placed Divines tell us that the pre-Abrahamic Scripture narratives may be ignored; that the book of Daniel may be regarded as a patriotic romance of the second century B.C.; that the words of the writer of the fourth Gospel are not always to be distinguished from those which he puts into the mouth of Jesus. Conservative, but conscientious, revisers decide that whole passages, some of dogmatic and some of ethical importance, are interpolations. An uneasy sense of the weakness of the dogma of Biblical infallibility seems to be at the bottom of a prevailing tendency once more to substitute the authority of the "Church" for that of the Bible. In my old age, it has happened to me to be taken to task for regarding Christianity as a "religion of a book" as gravely as, in my youth, I should have been reprehended for doubting that proposition. It is a no less interesting symptom that the State Church seems more and more anxious to repudiate all complicity with the principles of the Protestant Reformation and to call itself "Anglo-Catholic." Inspiration, deprived of its old intelligible sense, is watered down into a mystification. The Scriptures are, indeed, inspired; but they contain a wholly undefined and indefinable "human element"; and this unfortunate intruder is converted into a sort of biblical whipping boy. Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical or physical, proves to be erroneous, the "human element" bears the blame; while the divine inspiration of such statements, as by their nature are out of reach of proof or disproof, is still asserted with all the vigour inspired by conscious safety from attack. Though the proposal to treat the Bible "like any other book" which caused so much scandal, forty years ago, may not yet be generally accepted, and though Bishop Colenso's criticisms may still lie, formally, under ecclesiastical ban, yet the Church has not wholly turned a deaf ear to the voice of the scientific tempter; and many a coy divine, while "crying I will ne'er consent," has consented to the proposals of that scientific criticism which the memorialists renounce and denounce. A humble layman, to whom it would seem the height of presumption to assume even the unconsidered dignity of a "steward of science," may well find this conflict of apparently equal ecclesiastical authorities perplexing--suggestive, indeed, of the wisdom of postponing attention to either, until the question of precedence between them is settled. And this course will probably appear the more advisable, the more closely the fundamental position of the memorialists is examined. "No opinion of the fact or form of Divine Revelation, founded on literary criticism [and I suppose I may add historical, or physical, criticism] of the Scriptures themselves, can be admitted to interfere with the traditionary testimony of the Church, when that has been once ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity."[10] Grant that it is "the traditionary testimony of the Church" which guarantees the canonicity of each and all of the books of the Old and New Testaments. Grant also that canonicity means infallibility; yet, according to the thirty-eight, this "traditionary testimony" has to be "ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity." But "ascertainment and verification" are purely intellectual processes, which must be conducted according to the strict rules of scientific investigation, or be self-convicted of worthlessness. Moreover, before we can set about the appeal to "antiquity," the exact sense of that usefully vague term must be defined by similar means. "Antiquity" may include any number of centuries, great or small; and whether "antiquity" is to comprise the Council of Trent, or to stop a little beyond that of Nicæa, or to come to an end in the time of Irenænus, or in that of Justin Martyr, are knotty questions which can be decided, if at all, only by those critical methods which the signataries treat so cavalierly. And yet the decision of these questions is fundamental, for as the limits of the canonical scriptures vary, so may the dogmas deduced from them require modification. Christianity is one thing, if the fourth Gospel, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the pastoral Epistles, and the Apocalypse are canonical and (by the hypothesis) infallibly true; and another thing, if they are not. As I have already said, whoso defines the canon defines the creed. Now it is quite certain with respect to some of these books, such as the Apocalypse and the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the Eastern and the Western Church differed in opinion for centuries; and yet neither the one branch nor the other can have considered its judgment infallible, since they eventually agreed to a transaction by which each gave up its objection to the book patronised by the other. Moreover, the "fathers" argue (in a more or less rational manner) about the canonicity of this or that book, and are by no means above producing evidence, internal and external, in favour of the opinions they advocate. In fact, imperfect as their conceptions of scientific method may be, they not unfrequently used it to the best of their ability. Thus it would appear that though science, like Nature, may be driven out with a fork, ecclesiastical or other, yet she surely comes back again. The appeal to "antiquity" is, in fact, an appeal to science, first to define what antiquity is; secondly, to determine what "antiquity," so defined, says about canonicity; thirdly, to prove that canonicity means infallibility. And when science, largely in the shape of the abhorred "criticism," has answered this appeal, and has shown that "antiquity" used her own methods, however clumsily and imperfectly, she naturally turns round upon the appellants, and demands that they should show cause why, in these days, science should not resume the work the ancients did so imperfectly, and carry it out efficiently. But no such cause can be shown. If "antiquity" permitted Eusebius, Origen, Tertullian, Irenæus, to argue for the reception of this book into the canon and the rejection of that, upon rational grounds, "antiquity" admitted the whole principle of modern criticism. If Irenæus produces ridiculous reasons for limiting the Gospels to four, it was open to any one else to produce good reasons (if he had them) for cutting them down to three, or increasing them to five. If the Eastern branch of the Church had a right to reject the Apocalypse and accept the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Western an equal right to accept the Apocalypse and reject the Epistle, down to the fourth century, any other branch would have an equal right, on cause shown, to reject both, or, as the Catholic Church afterwards actually did, to accept both. Thus I cannot but think that the thirty-eight are hoist with their own petard. Their "appeal to antiquity" turns out to be nothing but a round-about way of appealing to the tribunal, the jurisdiction of which they affect to deny. Having rested the world of Christian supernaturalism on the elephant of biblical infallibility, and furnished the elephant with standing ground on the tortoise of "antiquity," they, like their famous Hindoo analogue, have been content to look no further; and have thereby been spared the horror of discovering that the tortoise rests on a grievously fragile construction, to a great extent the work of that very intellectual operation which they anathematise and repudiate. Moreover, there is another point to be considered. It is of course true that a Christian Church (whether the Christian Church, or not, depends on the connotation of the definite article) existed before the Christian scriptures; and that the infallibility of these depends upon the infallibility of the judgment of the persons who selected the books of which they are composed, out of the mass of literature current among the early Christians. The logical acumen of Augustine showed him that the authority of the Gospel he preached must rest on that of the Church to which he belonged.[11] But it is no less true that the Hebrew and the Septuagint versions of most, if not all, of the Old Testament books existed before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth; and that their divine authority is presupposed by, and therefore can hardly depend upon, the religious body constituted by his disciples. As everybody knows, the very conception of a "Christ" is purely Jewish. The validity of the argument from the Messianic prophecies vanishes unless their infallible authority is granted; and, as a matter of fact, whether we turn to the Gospels, the Epistles, or the writings of the early Apologists, the Jewish scriptures are recognised as the highest court of appeal of the Christian. The proposal to cite Christian "antiquity" as a witness to the infallibility of the Old Testament, when its own claims to authority vanish, if certain propositions contained in the Old Testament are erroneous, hardly satisfies the requirements of lay logic. It is as if a claimant to be sole legatee, under another kind of testament, should offer his assertion as sufficient evidence of the validity of the will. And, even were not such a circular, or rather rotatory, argument, that the infallibility of the Bible is testified by the infallible Church, whose infallibility is testified by the infallible Bible, too absurd for serious consideration, it remains permissible to ask, Where and when the Church, during the period of its infallibility, as limited by Anglican dogmatic necessities, has officially decreed the "actual historical truth of all records" in the Old Testament? Was Augustine heretical when he denied the actual historical truth of the record of the Creation? Father Suarez, standing on later Roman tradition, may have a right to declare that he was; but it does not lie in the mouth of those who limit their appeal to that early "antiquity," in which Augustine played so great a part, to say so. * * * * * Among the watchers of the course of the world of thought, some view with delight and some with horror, the recrudescence of Supernaturalism which manifests itself among us, in shapes ranged along the whole flight of steps, which, in this case, separates the sublime from the ridiculous--from Neo-Catholicism and Inner-light mysticism, at the top, to unclean things, not worthy of mention in the same breath, at the bottom. In my poor opinion, the importance of these manifestations is often greatly over-estimated. The extant forms of Supernaturalism have deep roots in human nature, and will undoubtedly die hard; but, in these latter days, they have to cope with an enemy whose full strength is only just beginning to be put out, and whose forces, gathering strength year by year, are hemming them round on every side. This enemy is Science, in the acceptation of systematized natural knowledge, which, during the last two centuries, has extended those methods of investigation, the worth of which is confirmed by daily appeal to Nature, to every region in which the Supernatural has hitherto been recognised. When scientific historical criticism reduced the annals of heroic Greece and of regal Rome to the level of fables; when the unity of authorship of the _Iliad_ was successfully assailed by scientific literary criticism; when scientific physical criticism, after exploding the geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar system itself to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks, circling, at unimaginable distances from one another through infinite space, showed the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the earth and of life upon it, to be as inadequate as those of its relative dimensions and importance had been; it needed no prophetic gift to see that, sooner or later, the Jewish and the early Christian records would be treated in the same manner; that the authorship of the Hexateuch and of the Gospels would be as severely tested; and that the evidence in favour of the veracity of many of the statements found in the Scriptures would have to be strong indeed, if they were to be opposed to the conclusions of physical science. In point of fact, so far as I can discover, no one competent to judge of the evidential strength of these conclusions, ventures now to say that the biblical accounts of the creation and of the deluge are true in the natural sense of the words of the narratives. The most modern Reconcilers venture upon is to affirm, that some quite different sense may he put upon the words; and that this non-natural sense may, with a little trouble, be manipulated into some sort of noncontradiction of scientific truth. My purpose, in the essay (XVI.) which treats of the narrative of the Deluge, was to prove, by physical criticism, that no such event as that described ever took place; to exhibit the untrustworthy character of the narrative demonstrated by literary criticism; and, finally, to account for its origin, by producing a form of those ancient legends of pagan Chaldæa, from which the biblical compilation is manifestly derived. I have yet to learn that the main propositions of this essay can be seriously challenged. In the essays (II., III.) on the narrative of the Creation, I have endeavoured to controvert the assertion that modern science supports, either the interpretation put upon it by Mr. Gladstone, or any interpretation which is compatible with the general sense of the narrative, quite apart from particular details. The first chapter of Genesis teaches the supernatural creation of the present forms of life; modern science teaches that they have come about by evolution. The first chapter of Genesis teaches the successive origin--firstly, of all the plants, secondly, of all the aquatic and aerial animals, thirdly, of all the terrestrial animals, which now exist--during distinct intervals of time; modern science teaches that, throughout all the duration of an immensely long past so far as we have any adequate knowledge of it (that is as far back as the Silurian epoch), plants, aquatic, aerial, and terrestrial animals have co-existed; that the earliest known are unlike those which at present exist; and that the modern species have come into existence as the last terms of a series, the members of which have appeared one after another. Thus, far from confirming the account in Genesis, the results of modern science, so far as they go, are in principle, as in detail, hopelessly discordant with it. Yet, if the pretensions to infallibility set up, not by the ancient Hebrew writings themselves, but by the ecclesiastical champions and friends from whom they may well pray to be delivered, thus shatter themselves against the rock of natural knowledge, in respect of the two most important of all events, the origin of things and the palingenesis of terrestrial life, what historical credit dare any serious thinker attach to the narratives of the fabrication of Eve, of the Fall, of the commerce between the _Bene Elohim_ and the daughters of men, which lie between the creational and the diluvial legends? And, if these are to lose all historical worth, what becomes of the infallibility of those who, according to the later scriptures, have accepted them, argued from them, and staked far-reaching dogmatic conclusions upon their historical accuracy? It is the merest ostrich policy for contemporary ecclesiasticism to try to hide its Hexateuchal head--in the hope that the inseparable connection of its body with pre-Abrahamic legends may be overlooked. The question will still be asked, if the first nine chapters of the Pentateuch are unhistorical, how is the historical accuracy of the remainder to be guaranteed? What more intrinsic claim has the story of the Exodus than that of the Deluge, to belief? If God did not walk in the Garden of Eden, how can we be assured that he spoke from Sinai? * * * * * In some other of the following essays (IX., X., XI., XII., XIV., XV.) I have endeavoured to show that sober and well-founded physical and literary criticism plays no less havoc with the doctrine that the canonical scriptures of the New Testament "declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records." We are told that the Gospels contain a true revelation of the spiritual world--a proposition which, in one sense of the word "spiritual," I should not think it necessary to dispute. But, when it is taken to signify that everything we are told about the world of spirits in these books is infallibly true; that we are bound to accept the demonology which constitutes an inseparable part of their teaching; and to profess belief in a Supernaturalism as gross as that of any primitive people--it is at any rate permissible to ask why? Science may be unable to define the limits of possibility, but it cannot escape from the moral obligation to weigh the evidence in favour of any alleged wonderful occurrence; and I have endeavoured to show that the evidence for the Gadarene miracle is altogether worthless. We have simply three, partially discrepant, versions of a story, about the primitive form, the origin, and the authority for which we know absolutely nothing. But the evidence in favour of the Gadarene miracle is as good as that for any other. Elsewhere, I have pointed out that it is utterly beside the mark to declaim against these conclusions on the ground of their asserted tendency to deprive mankind of the consolations of the Christian faith, and to destroy the foundations of morality; still less to brand them with the question-begging vituperative appellation of "infidelity." The point is not whether they are wicked; but, whether, from the point of view of scientific method, they are irrefragably true. If they are, they will be accepted in time, whether they are wicked, or not wicked. Nature, so far as we have been able to attain to any insight into her ways, recks little about consolation and makes for righteousness by very round-about paths. And, at any rate, whatever may be possible for other people, it is becoming less and less possible for the man who puts his faith in scientific methods of ascertaining truth, and is accustomed to have that faith justified by daily experience, to be consciously false to his principle in any matter. But the number of such men, driven into the use of scientific methods of inquiry and taught to trust them, by their education, their daily professional and business needs, is increasing and will continually increase. The phraseology of Supernaturalism may remain on men's lips, but in practice they are Naturalists. The magistrate who listens with devout attention to the precept "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" on Sunday, on Monday, dismisses, as intrinsically absurd, a charge of bewitching a cow brought against some old woman; the superintendent of a lunatic asylum who substituted exorcism for rational modes of treatment would have but a short tenure of office; even parish clerks doubt the utility of prayers for rain, so long as the wind is in the east; and an outbreak of pestilence sends men, not to the churches, but to the drains. In spite of prayers for the success of our arms and _Te Deums_ for victory, our real faith is in big battalions and keeping our powder dry; in knowledge of the science of warfare; in energy, courage, and discipline. In these, as in all other practical affairs, we act on the aphorism "_Laborare est orare_"; we admit that intelligent work is the only acceptable worship; and that, whether there be a Supernature or not, our business is with Nature. * * * * * It is important to note that the principle of the scientific Naturalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century, in which the intellectual movement of the Renascence has culminated, and which was first clearly formulated by Descartes, leads not to the denial of the existence of any Supernature;[12] but simply to the denial of the validity of the evidence adduced in favour of this, or of that, extant form of Supernaturalism. Looking at the matter from the most rigidly scientific point of view, the assumption that, amidst the myriads of worlds scattered through endless space, there can be no intelligence, as much greater than man's as his is greater than a blackbeetle's; no being endowed with powers of influencing the course of nature as much greater than his, as his is greater than a snail's seems to me not merely baseless, but impertinent. Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known, it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. If our intelligence can, in some matters, surely reproduce the past of thousands of years ago and anticipate the future, thousands of years hence, it is clearly within the limits of possibility that some greater intellect, even of the same order, may be able to mirror the whole past and the whole future; if the universe is penetrated by a medium of such a nature that a magnetic needle on the earth answers to a commotion in the sun, an omnipresent agent is also conceivable; if our insignificant knowledge gives us some influence over events, practical omniscience may confer indefinably greater power. Finally, if evidence that a thing may be, were equivalent to proof that it is, analogy might justify the construction of a naturalistic theology and demonology not less wonderful than the current supernatural; just as it might justify the peopling of Mars, or of Jupiter, with living forms to which terrestrial biology offers no parallel. Until human life is longer and the duties of the present press less heavily, I do not think that wise men will occupy themselves with Jovian, or Martian, natural history; and they will probably agree to a verdict of "not proven" in respect of naturalistic theology, taking refuge in that agnostic confession, which appears to me to be the only position for people who object to say that they know what they are quite aware they do not know. As to the interests of morality, I am disposed to think that if mankind could be got to act up to this last principle in every relation of life, a reformation would be effected such as the world has not yet seen; an approximation to the millennium, such as no supernaturalistic religion has ever yet succeeded, or seems likely ever to succeed, in effecting. * * * * * I have hitherto dwelt upon scientific Naturalism chiefly in its critical and destructive aspect. But the present incarnation of the spirit of the Renascence differs from its predecessor in the eighteenth century, in that it builds up, as well as pulls down. That of which it has laid the foundation, of which it is already raising the superstructure, is the doctrine of evolution. But so many strange misconceptions are current about this doctrine--it is attacked on such false grounds by its enemies, and made to cover so much that is disputable by some of its friends, that I think it well to define as clearly as I can, what I do not and what I do understand by the doctrine. I have nothing to say to any "Philosophy of Evolution." Attempts to construct such a philosophy may be as useful, nay, even as admirable, as was the attempt of Descartes to get at a theory of the universe by the same _a priori_ road; but, in my judgment, they are as premature. Nor, for this purpose, have I to do with any theory of the "Origin of Species," much as I value that which is known as the Darwinian theory. That the doctrine of natural selection presupposes evolution is quite true; but it is not true that evolution necessarily implies natural selection. In fact, evolution might conceivably have taken place without the development of groups possessing the characters of species. For me, the doctrine of evolution is no speculation, but a generalisation of certain facts, which may be observed by any one who will take the necessary trouble. These facts are those which are classed by biologists under the heads of Embryology and of Palæontology. Embryology proves that every higher form of individual life becomes what it is by a process of gradual differentiation from an extremely low form; palæontology proves, in some cases, and renders probable in all, that the oldest types of a group are the lowest; and that they have been followed by a gradual succession of more and more differentiated forms. It is simply a fact, that evolution of the individual animal and plant is taking place, as a natural process, in millions and millions of cases every day; it is a fact, that the species which have succeeded one another in the past, do, in many cases, present just those morphological relations, which they must possess, if they had proceeded, one from the other, by an analogous process of evolution. The alternative presented, therefore, is: either the forms of one and the same type--say, _e.g._, that of the Horse tribe[13]--arose successively, but independently of one another, at intervals, during myriads of years; or, the later forms are modified descendants of the earlier. And the latter supposition is so vastly more probable than the former, that rational men will adopt it, unless satisfactory evidence to the contrary can be produced. The objection sometimes put forward, that no one yet professes to have seen one species pass into another, comes oddly from those who believe that mankind are all descended from Adam. Has any one then yet seen the production of negroes from a white stock, or _vice versâ_? Moreover, is it absolutely necessary to have watched every step of the progress of a planet, to be justified in concluding that it really does go round the sun? If so, astronomy is in a bad way. I do not, for a moment, presume to suggest that some one, far better acquainted than I am with astronomy and physics; or that a master of the new chemistry, with its extraordinary revelations; or that a student of the development of human society, of language, and of religions, may not find a sufficient foundation for the doctrine of evolution in these several regions. On the contrary, I rejoice to see that scientific investigation, in all directions, is tending to the same result. And it may well be, that it is only my long occupation with biological matters that leads me to feel safer among them than anywhere else. Be that as it may, I take my stand on the facts of embryology and of palæontology; and I hold that our present knowledge of these facts is sufficiently thorough and extensive to justify the assertion that all future philosophical and theological speculations will have to accommodate themselves to some such common body of established truths as the following:-- 1. Plants and animals have existed on our planet for many hundred thousand, probably millions, of years. During this time, their forms, or species, have undergone a succession of changes, which eventually gave rise to the species which constitute the present living population of the earth. There is no evidence, nor any reason to suspect, that this secular process of evolution is other than a part of the ordinary course of nature; there is no more ground for imagining the occurrence of supernatural intervention, at any moment in the development of species in the past, than there is for supposing such intervention to take place, at any moment in the development of an individual animal or plant, at the present day. 2. At present, every individual animal or plant commences its existence as an organism of extremely simple anatomical structure; and it acquires all the complexity it ultimately possesses by gradual differentiation into parts of various structure and function. When a series of specific forms of the same type, extending over a long period of past time, is examined, the relation between the earlier and the later forms is analogous to that between earlier and later stages of individual development. Therefore, it is a probable conclusion that, if we could follow living beings back to their earlier states, we should find them to present forms similar to those of the individual germ, or, what comes to the same thing, of those lowest known organisms which stand upon the boundary line between plants and animals. At present, our knowledge of the ancient living world stops very far short of this point. 3. It is generally agreed, and there is certainly no evidence to the contrary, that all plants are devoid of consciousness; that they neither feel, desire, nor think. It is conceivable that the evolution of the primordial living substance should have taken place only along the plant line. In that case, the result might have been a wealth of vegetable life, as great, perhaps as varied, as at present, though certainly widely different from the present flora, in the evolution of which animals have played so great a part. But the living world thus constituted would be simply an admirable piece of unconscious machinery, the working out of which lay potentially in its primitive composition; pleasure and pain would have no place in it; it would be a veritable Garden of Eden without any tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The question of the moral government of such a world could no more be asked, than we could reasonably seek for a moral purpose in a kaleidoscope. 4. How far down the scale of animal life the phenomena of consciousness are manifested, it is impossible to say. No one doubts their presence in his fellow-men; and, unless any strict Cartesians are left, no one doubts that mammals and birds are to be reckoned creatures that have feelings analogous to our smell, taste, sight, hearing, touch, pleasure, and pain. For my own part, I should be disposed to extend this analogical judgment a good deal further. On the other hand, if the lowest forms of plants are to be denied consciousness, I do not see on what ground it is to be ascribed to the lowest animals. I find it hard to believe that an infusory animalcule, a foraminifer, or a fresh-water polype is capable of feeling; and, in spite of Shakspere, I have doubts about the great sensitiveness of the "poor beetle that we tread upon." The question is equally perplexing when we turn to the stages of development of the individual. Granted a fowl feels; that the chick just hatched feels; that the chick when it chirps within the egg may possibly feel; what is to be said of it on the fifth day, when the bird is there, but with all its tissues nascent? Still more, on the first day, when it is nothing but a flat cellular disk? I certainly cannot bring myself to believe that this disk feels. Yet if it does not, there must be some time in the three weeks, between the first day and the day of hatching, when, as a concomitant, or a consequence, of the attainment by the brain of the chick of a certain stage of structural evolution, consciousness makes its appearance. I have frequently expressed my incapacity to understand the nature of the relation between consciousness and a certain anatomical tissue, which is thus established by observation. But the fact remains that, so far as observation and experiment go, they teach us that the psychical phenomena are dependent on the physical. In like manner, if fishes, insects, scorpions, and such animals as the pearly nautilus, possess feeling, then undoubtedly consciousness was present in the world as far back as the Silurian epoch. But, if the earliest animals were similar to our rhizopods and monads, there must have been some time, between the much earlier epoch in which they constituted the whole animal population and the Silurian, in which feeling dawned, in consequence of the organism having reached the stage of evolution on which it depends. 5. Consciousness has various forms, which may be manifested independently of one another. The feelings of light and colour, of sound, of touch, though so often associated with those of pleasure and pain, are, by nature, as entirely independent of them as is thinking. An animal devoid of the feelings of pleasure and of pain, may nevertheless exhibit all the effects of sensation and purposive action. Therefore, it would be a justifiable hypothesis that, long after organic evolution had attained to consciousness, pleasure and pain were still absent. Such a world would be without either happiness or misery; no act could be punished and none could be rewarded; and it could have no moral purpose. 6. Suppose, for argument's sake, that all mammals and birds are subjects of pleasure and pain. Then we may be certain that these forms of consciousness were in existence at the beginning of the Mesozoic epoch. From that time forth, pleasure has been distributed without reference to merit, and pain inflicted without reference to demerit, throughout all but a mere fraction of the higher animals. Moreover, the amount and the severity of the pain, no less than the variety and acuteness of the pleasure, have increased with every advance in the scale of evolution. As suffering came into the world, not in consequence of a fall, but of a rise, in the scale of being, so every further rise has brought more suffering. As the evidence stands it would appear that the sort of brain which characterizes the highest mammals and which, so far as we know, is the indispensable condition of the highest sensibility, did not come into existence before the Tertiary epoch. The primordial anthropoid was probably, in this respect, on much the same footing as his pithecoid kin. Like them he stood upon his "natural rights," gratified all his desires to the best of his ability, and was as incapable of either right or wrong doing as they. It would be as absurd as in their case, to regard his pleasures, any more than theirs, as moral rewards, and his pains, any more than theirs, as moral punishments. 7. From the remotest ages of which we have any cognizance, death has been the natural and, apparently, the necessary concomitant of life. In our hypothetical world (3), inhabited by nothing but plants, death must have very early resulted from the struggle for existence: many of the crowd must have jostled one another out of the conditions on which life depends. The occurrence of death, as far back as we have any fossil record of life, however, needs not to be proved by such arguments; for, if there had been no death there would have been no fossil remains, such as the great majority of those we met with. Not only was there death in the world, as far as the record of life takes us; but, ever since mammals and birds have been preyed upon by carnivorous animals, there has been painful death, inflicted by mechanisms specially adapted for inflicting it. 8. Those who are acquainted with the closeness of the structural relations between the human organisation and that of the mammals which come nearest to him, on the one hand; and with the palæontological history of such animals as horses and dogs, on the other; will not be disposed to question the origin of man from forms which stand in the same sort of relation to _Homo sapiens_, as _Hipparion_ does to _Equus_. I think it a conclusion, fully justified by analogy, that, sooner or later, we shall discover the remains of our less specialised primatic ancestors in the strata which have yielded the less specialised equine and canine quadrupeds. At present, fossil remains of men do not take us hack further than the later part of the Quaternary epoch; and, as was to be expected, they do not differ more from existing men, than Quaternary horses differ from existing horses. Still earlier we find traces of man, in implements, such as are used by the ruder savages at the present day. Later, the remains of the palæolithic and neolithic conditions take us gradually from the savage state to the civilizations of Egypt and of Mycenæ; though the true chronological order of the remains actually discovered may be uncertain. 9. Much has yet to be learned, but, at present, natural knowledge affords no support to the notion that men have fallen from a higher to a lower state. On the contrary, everything points to a slow natural evolution; which, favoured by the surrounding conditions in such localities as the valleys of the Yang-tse-kang, the Euphrates, and the Nile, reached a relatively high pitch, five or six thousand years ago; while, in many other regions, the savage condition has persisted down to our day. In all this vast lapse of time there is not a trace of the occurrence of any general destruction of the human race; not the smallest indication that man has been treated on any other principles than the rest of the animal world. 10. The results of the process of evolution in the case of man, and in that of his more nearly allied contemporaries, have been marvellously different. Yet it is easy to see that small primitive differences of a certain order, must, in the long run, bring about a wide divergence of the human stock from the others. It is a reasonable supposition that, in the earliest human organisms, an improved brain, a voice more capable of modulation and articulation, limbs which lent themselves better to gesture, a more perfect hand, capable among other things of imitating form in plastic or other material, were combined with the curiosity, the mimetic tendency, the strong family affection of the next lower group; and that they were accompanied by exceptional length of life and a prolonged minority. The last two peculiarities are obviously calculated to strengthen the family organisation, and to give great weight to its educative influences. The potentiality of language, as the vocal symbol of thought, lay in the faculty of modulating and articulating the voice. The potentiality of writing, as the visual symbol of thought, lay in the hand that could draw; and in the mimetic tendency, which, as we know, was gratified by drawing, as far back as the days of Quaternary man. With speech as the record, in tradition, of the experience of more than one generation; with writing as the record of that of any number of generations; the experience of the race, tested and corrected generation after generation, could be stored up and made the starting point for fresh progress. Having these perfectly natural factors of the evolutionary process in man before us, it seems unnecessary to go further a-field in search of others. 11. That the doctrine of evolution implies a former state of innocence of mankind is quite true; but, as I have remarked, it is the innocence of the ape and of the tiger, whose acts, however they may run counter to the principles of morality, it would be absurd to blame. The lust of the one and the ferocity of the other are as much provided for in their organisation, are as clear evidences of design, as any other features that can be named. Observation and experiment upon the phenomena of society soon taught men that, in order to obtain the advantages of social existence, certain rules must be observed. Morality commenced with society. Society is possible only upon the condition that the members of it shall surrender more or less of their individual freedom of action. In primitive societies, individual selfishness is a centrifugal force of such intensity that it is constantly bringing the social organisation to the verge of destruction. Hence the prominence of the positive rules of obedience to the elders; of standing by the family or the tribe in all emergencies; of fulfilling the religious rites, non-observance of which is conceived to damage it with the supernatural powers, belief in whose existence is one of the earliest products of human thought; and of the negative rules which restrain each from meddling with the life or property of another. 12. The highest conceivable form of human society is that in which the desire to do what is best for the whole dominates and limits the action of every member of that society. The more complex the social organisation the greater the number of acts from which each man must abstain if he desires to do that which is best for all. Thus the progressive evolution of society means increasing restriction of individual freedom in certain directions. With the advance of civilisation, and the growth of cities and of nations by the coalescence of families and of tribes, the rules which constitute the common foundation of morality and of law became more numerous and complicated, and the temptations to break or evade many of them stronger. In the absence of a clear apprehension of the natural sanctions of these rules, a supernatural sanction was assumed; and imagination supplied the motives which reason was supposed to be incompetent to furnish. Religion, at first independent of morality, gradually took morality under its protection; and the supernaturalists have ever since tried to persuade mankind that the existence of ethics is bound up with that of supernaturalism. I am not of that opinion. But, whether it is correct or otherwise, it is very clear to me that, as Beelzebub is not to be cast out by the aid of Beelzebub, so morality is not to be established by immorality. It is, we are told, the special peculiarity of the devil that he was a liar from the beginning. If we set out in life with pretending to know that which we do not know; with professing to accept for proof evidence which we are well aware is inadequate; with wilfully shutting our eyes and our ears to facts which militate against this or that comfortable hypothesis; we are assuredly doing our best to deserve the same character. * * * * * I have not the presumption to imagine that, in spite of all my efforts, errors may not have crept into these propositions. But I am tolerably confident that time will prove them to be substantially correct. And if they are so, I confess I do not see how any extant supernaturalistic system can also claim exactness. That they are irreconcilable with the biblical cosmogony, anthropology, and theodicy is obvious; but they are no less inconsistent with the sentimental Deism of the "Vicaire Savoyard" and his numerous modern progeny. It is as impossible, to my mind, to suppose that the evolutionary process was set going with full foreknowledge of the result and yet with what we should understand by a purely benevolent intention, as it is to imagine that the intention was purely malevolent. And the prevalence of dualistic theories from the earliest times to the present day--whether in the shape of the doctrine of the inherently evil nature of matter; of an Ahriman; of a hard and cruel Demiurge; of a diabolical "prince of this world," show how widely this difficulty has been felt. Many seem to think that, when it is admitted that the ancient literature, contained in our Bibles, has no more claim to infallibility than any other ancient literature; when it is proved that the Israelites and their Christian successors accepted a great many supernaturalistic theories and legends which have no better foundation than those of heathenism, nothing remains to be done but to throw the Bible aside as so much waste paper. I have always opposed this opinion. It appears to me that if there is anybody more objectionable than the orthodox Bibliolater it is the heterodox Philistine, who can discover in a literature which, in some respects, has no superior, nothing but a subject for scoffing and an occasion for the display of his conceited ignorance of the debt he owes to former generations. Twenty-two years ago I pleaded for the use of the Bible as an instrument of popular education, and I venture to repeat what I then said: "Consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national Epic of Britain and is as familiar to gentle and simple, from John o' Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and purest English and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind, who never left his village, to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between the Eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their work?"[14] At the same time, I laid stress upon the necessity of placing such instruction in lay hands; in the hope and belief, that it would thus gradually accommodate itself to the coming changes of opinion; that the theology and the legend would drop more and more out of sight, while the perennially interesting historical, literary, and ethical contents would come more and more into view. I may add yet another claim of the Bible to the respect and the attention of a democratic age. Throughout the history of the western world, the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have been the great instigators of revolt against the worst forms of clerical and political despotism. The Bible has been the _Magna Charta_ of the poor and of the oppressed; down to modern times, no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken into account, in which the duties, so much more than the privileges, of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that the welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness of the citizen so strongly laid down. Assuredly, the Bible talks no trash about the rights of man; but it insists on the equality of duties, on the liberty to bring about that righteousness which is somewhat different from struggling for "rights"; on the fraternity of taking thought for one's neighbour as for one's self. So far as such equality, liberty, and fraternity are included under the democratic principles which assume the same names, the Bible is the most democratic book in the world. As such it began, through the heretical sects, to undermine the clerico-political despotism of the middle ages, almost as soon as it was formed, in the eleventh century; Pope and King had as much as they could do to put down the Albigenses and the Waldenses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the Lollards and the Hussites gave them still more trouble in the fourteenth and fifteenth; from the sixteenth century onward, the Protestant sects have favoured political freedom in proportion to the degree in which they have refused to acknowledge any ultimate authority save that of the Bible. But the enormous influence which has thus been exerted by the Jewish and Christian Scriptures has had no necessary connection with cosmogonies, demonologies, and miraculous interferences. Their strength lies in their appeals, not to the reason, but to the ethical sense. I do not say that even the highest biblical ideal is exclusive of others or needs no supplement. But I do believe that the human race is not yet, possibly may never be, in a position to dispense with it. FOOTNOTES: [8] With a few exceptions, which are duly noted when they amount to more than verbal corrections. [9] _Declaration on the Truth of Holy Scripture._ The _Times_, 18th December, 1891. [10] _Declaration_, Article 10. [11] Ego vero evangelio non crederem, nisi ecclesiæ Catholicæ me commoveret auctoritas.--_Contra Epistolam Manichæi_, cap. v. [12] I employ the words "Supernature" and "Supernatural" in their popular senses. For myself, I am bound to say that the term "Nature" covers the totality of that which is. The world of psychical phenomena appears to me to be as much part of "Nature" as the world of physical phenomena; and I am unable to perceive any justification for cutting the Universe into two halves, one natural and one supernatural. [13] The general reader will find an admirably clear and concise statement of the evidence in this case, in Professor Flower's recently published work _The Horse: a Study in Natural History_. [14] "The School Boards: What they Can do and what they May do," 1870. _Critiques and Addresses_, p. 51. II: SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM [1887] Next to undue precipitation in anticipating the results of pending investigations, the intellectual sin which is commonest and most hurtful to those who devote themselves to the increase of knowledge is the omission to profit by the experience of their predecessors recorded in the history of science and philosophy. It is true that, at the present day, there is more excuse than at any former time for such neglect. No small labour is needed to raise one's self to the level of the acquisitions already made; and able men, who have achieved thus much, know that, if they devote themselves body and soul to the increase of their store, and avoid looking back, with as much care as if the injunction laid on Lot and his family were binding upon them, such devotion is sure to be richly repaid by the joys of the discoverer and the solace of fame, if not by rewards of a less elevated character. So, following the advice of Francis Bacon, we refuse _inter mortuos quærere vivum_; we leave the past to bury its dead, and ignore our intellectual ancestry. Nor are we content with that. We follow the evil example set us, not only by Bacon but by almost all the men of the Renaissance, in pouring scorn upon the work of our immediate spiritual forefathers, the schoolmen of the Middle Ages. It is accepted as a truth which is indisputable, that, for seven or eight centuries, a long succession of able men--some of them of transcendent acuteness and encyclopædic knowledge--devoted laborious lives to the grave discussion of mere frivolities and the arduous pursuit of intellectual will-o'-the-wisps. To say nothing of a little modesty, a little impartial pondering over personal experience might suggest a doubt as to the adequacy of this short and easy method of dealing with a large chapter of the history of the human mind. Even an acquaintance with popular literature which had extended so far as to include that part of the contributions of Sam Slick which contains his weighty aphorism that "there is a great deal of human nature in all mankind," might raise a doubt whether, after all, the men of that epoch, who, take them all round, were endowed with wisdom and folly in much the same proportion as ourselves, were likely to display nothing better than the qualities of energetic idiots, when they devoted their faculties to the elucidation of problems which were to them, and indeed are to us, the most serious which life has to offer. Speaking for myself, the longer I live the more I am disposed to think that there is much less either of pure folly, or of pure wickedness, in the world than is commonly supposed. It may be doubted if any sane man ever said to himself, "Evil, be thou my good," and I have never yet had the good fortune to meet with a perfect fool. When I have brought to the inquiry the patience and long-suffering which become a scientific investigator, the most promising specimens have turned out to have a good deal to say for themselves from their own point of view. And, sometimes, calm reflection has taught the humiliating lesson, that their point of view was not so different from my own as I had fondly imagined. Comprehension is more than half-way to sympathy, here as elsewhere. If we turn our attention to scholastic philosophy in the frame of mind suggested by these prefatory remarks, it assumes a very different character from that which it bears in general estimation. No doubt it is surrounded by a dense thicket of thorny logomachies and obscured by the dust-clouds of a barbarous and perplexing terminology. But suppose that, undeterred by much grime and by many scratches, the explorer has toiled through this jungle, he comes to an open country which is amazingly like his dear native land. The hills which he has to climb, the ravines he has to avoid, look very much the same; there is the same infinite space above, and the same abyss of the unknown below; the means of travelling are the same, and the goal is the same. That goal for the schoolmen, as for us, is the settlement of the question how far the universe is the manifestation of a rational order; in other words, how far logical deduction from indisputable premisses will account for what which has happened and does happen. That was the object of scholasticism, and, so far as I am aware, the object of modern science may be expressed in the same terms. In pursuit of this end, modern science takes into account all the phenomena of the universe which are brought to our knowledge by observation or by experiment. It admits that there are two worlds to be considered, the one physical and the other psychical; and that though there is a most intimate relation and interconnection between the two, the bridge from one to the other has yet to be found; that their phenomena run, not in one series, but along two parallel lines. To the schoolmen the duality of the universe appeared under a different aspect. How this came about will not be intelligible unless we clearly apprehend the fact that they did really believe in dogmatic Christianity as it was formulated by the Roman Church. They did not give a mere dull assent to anything the Church told them on Sundays, and ignore her teachings for the rest of the week; but they lived and moved and had their being in that supersensible theological world which was created, or rather grew up, during the first four centuries of our reckoning, and which occupied their thoughts far more than the sensible world in which their earthly lot was cast. For the most part, we learn history from the colourless compendiums or partisan briefs of mere scholars, who have too little acquaintance with practical life, and too little insight into speculative problems, to understand that about which they write. In historical science, as in all sciences which have to do with concrete phenomena, laboratory practice is indispensable; and the laboratory practice of historical science is afforded, on the one hand, by active social and political life, and, on the other, by the study of those tendencies and operations of the mind which embody themselves in philosophical and theological systems. Thucydides and Tacitus, and, to come nearer our own time, Hume and Grote, were men of affairs, and had acquired, by direct contact with social and political history in the making, the secret of understanding how such history is made. Our notions of the intellectual history of the middle ages are, unfortunately, too often derived from writers who have never seriously grappled with philosophical and theological problems: and hence that strange myth of a millennium of moonshine to which I have adverted. However, no very profound study of the works of contemporary writers who, without devoting themselves specially to theology or philosophy, were learned and enlightened--such men, for example, as Eginhard or Dante--is necessary to convince one's self, that, for them, the world of the theologian was an ever-present and awful reality. From the centre of that world, the Divine Trinity, surrounded by a hierarchy of angels and saints, contemplated and governed the insignificant sensible world in which the inferior spirits of men, burdened with the debasement of their material embodiment and continually solicited to their perdition by a no less numerous and almost as powerful hierarchy of devils, were constantly struggling on the edge of the pit of everlasting damnation.[15] The men of the middle ages believed that through the Scriptures, the traditions of the Fathers, and the authority of the Church, they were in possession of far more, and more trustworthy, information with respect to the nature and order of things in the theological world than they had in regard to the nature and order of things in the sensible world. And, if the two sources of information came into conflict, so much the worse for the sensible world, which, after all, was more or less under the dominion of Satan. Let us suppose that a telescope powerful enough to show us what is going on in the nebula of the sword of Orion, should reveal a world in which stones fell upwards, parallel lines met, and the fourth dimension of space was quite obvious. Men of science would have only two alternatives before them. Either the terrestrial and the nebular facts must be brought into harmony by such feats of subtle sophistry as the human mind is always capable of performing when driven into a corner; or science must throw down its arms in despair, and commit suicide, either by the admission that the universe is, after all, irrational, inasmuch as that which is truth in one corner of it is absurdity in another, or by a declaration of incompetency. In the middle ages, the labours of those great men who endeavoured to reconcile the system of thought which started from the data of pure reason, with that which started from the data of Roman theology, produced the system of thought which is known as scholastic philosophy; the alternative of surrender and suicide is exemplified by Avicenna and his followers when they declared that that which is true in theology may be false in philosophy, and _vice versâ_; and by Sanchez in his famous defence of the thesis "_Quod nil scitur_." To those who deny the validity of one of the primary assumptions of the disputants--who decline, on the ground of the utter insufficiency of the evidence, to put faith in the reality of that other world, the geography and the inhabitants of which are so confidently described in the so-called[16] Christianity of Catholicism--the long and bitter contest, which engaged the best intellects for so many centuries, may seem a terrible illustration of the wasteful way in which the struggle for existence is carried on in the world of thought, no less than in that of matter. But there is a more cheerful mode of looking at the history of scholasticism. It ground and sharpened the dialectic implements of our race as perhaps nothing but discussions, in the result of which men thought their eternal, no less than their temporal, interests were at stake, could have done. When a logical blunder may ensure combustion, not only in the next world but in this, the construction of syllogisms acquires a peculiar interest. Moreover, the schools kept the thinking faculty alive and active, when the disturbed state of civil life, the mephitic atmosphere engendered by the dominant ecclesiasticism, and the almost total neglect of natural knowledge, might well have stifled it. And, finally, it should be remembered that scholasticism really did thresh out pretty effectually certain problems which have presented themselves to mankind ever since they began to think, and which, I suppose, will present themselves so long as they continue to think. Consider, for example, the controversy of the Realists and the Nominalists, which was carried on with varying fortunes, and under various names, from the time of Scotus Erigena to the end of the scholastic period. Has it now a merely antiquarian interest? Has Nominalism, in any of its modifications, so completely won the day that Realism may be regarded as dead and buried without hope of resurrection? Many people seem to think so, but it appears to me that, without taking Catholic philosophy into consideration, one has not to look about far to find evidence that Realism is still to the fore, and indeed extremely lively.[17] * * * * * The other day I happened to meet with a report of a sermon recently preached in St. Paul's Cathedral. From internal evidence I am inclined to think that the report is substantially correct. But as I have not the slightest intention of finding fault with the eminent theologian and eloquent preacher to whom the discourse is attributed, for employment of scientific language in a manner for which he could find only too many scientific precedents, the accuracy of the report in detail is not to the purpose. I may safely take it as the embodiment of views which are thought to be quite in accordance with science by many excellent, instructed, and intelligent people. The preacher further contended that it was yet more difficult to realise that our earthly home would become the scene of a vast physical catastrophe. Imagination recoils from the idea that the course of nature--the phrase helps to disguise the truth--so unvarying and regular, the ordered sequence of movement and life, should suddenly cease. Imagination looks more reasonable when it assumes the air of scientific reason. Physical law, it says, will prevent the occurrence of catastrophes only anticipated by an apostle in an unscientific age. Might not there, however, be a suspension of a lower law by the intervention of a higher? Thus every time we lifted our arms we defied the laws of gravitation, and in railways and steamboats powerful laws were held in check by others. The flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah were brought about by the operation of existing laws, and may it not be that in His illimitable universe there are more important laws than those which surround our puny life--moral and not merely physical forces? Is it inconceivable that the day will come when these royal and ultimate laws shall wreck the natural order of things which seems so stable and so fair? Earthquakes were not things of remote antiquity, as an island off Italy, the Eastern Archipelago, Greece, and Chicago bore witness.... In presence of a great earthquake men feel how powerless they are, and their very knowledge adds to their weakness. The end of human probation, the final dissolution of organised society, and the destruction of man's home on the surface of the globe, were none of them violently contrary to our present experience, but only the extension of present facts. The presentiment of death was common; there were felt to be many things which threatened the existence of society; and as our globe was a ball of fire, at any moment the pent-up forces which surge and boil beneath our feet might be poured out ("Pall Mall Gazette," December 6, 1886). The preacher appears to entertain the notion that the occurrence of a "catastrophe"[18] involves a breach of the present order of nature--that it is an event incompatible with the physical laws which at present obtain. He seems to be of opinion that "scientific reason" lends its authority to the imaginative supposition that physical law will prevent the occurrence of the "catastrophes" anticipated by an unscientific apostle. Scientific reason, like Homer, sometimes nods; but I am not aware that it has ever dreamed dreams of this sort. The fundamental axiom of scientific thought is that there is not, never has been, and never will be, any disorder in nature. The admission of the occurrence of any event which was not the logical consequence of the immediately antecedent events, according to these definite, ascertained, or unascertained rules which we call the "laws of nature," would be an act of self-destruction on the part of science. "Catastrophe" is a relative conception. For ourselves it means an event which brings about very terrible consequences to man, or impresses his mind by its magnitude relatively to him. But events which are quite in the natural order of things to us, may be frightful catastrophes to other sentient beings. Surely no interruption of the order of nature is involved if, in the course of descending through an Alpine pine-wood, I jump upon an anthill and in a moment wreck a whole city and destroy a hundred thousand of its inhabitants. To the ants the catastrophe is worse than the earthquake of Lisbon. To me it is the natural and necessary consequence of the laws of matter in motion. A redistribution of energy has taken place, which is perfectly in accordance with natural order, however unpleasant its effects may be to the ants. Imagination, inspired by scientific reason, and not merely assuming the airs thereof, as it unfortunately too often does in the pulpit, so far from having any right to repudiate catastrophes and deny the possibility of the cessation of motion and life, easily finds justification for the exactly contrary course. Kant in his famous "Theory of the Heavens" declares the end of the world and its reduction to a formless condition to be a necessary consequence of the causes to which it owes its origin and continuance. And, as to catastrophes of prodigious magnitude and frequent occurrence, they were the favourite _asylum ignorantiæ_ of geologists, not a quarter of a century ago. If modern geology is becoming more and more disinclined to call in catastrophes to its aid, it is not because of any _a priori_ difficulty in reconciling the occurrence of such events with the universality of order, but because the _a posteriori_ evidence of the occurrence of events of this character in past times has more or less completely broken down. It is, to say the least, highly probable that this earth is a mass of extremely hot matter, invested by a cooled crust, through which the hot interior still continues to cool, though with extreme slowness. It is no less probable that the faults and dislocations, the foldings and fractures, everywhere visible in the stratified crust, its large and slow movements through miles of elevation and depression, and its small and rapid movements which give rise to the innumerable perceived and unperceived earthquakes which are constantly occurring, are due to the shrinkage of the crust on its cooling and contracting nucleus. Without going beyond the range of fair scientific analogy, conditions are easily conceivable which should render the loss of heat far more rapid than it is at present; and such an occurrence would be just as much in accordance with ascertained laws of nature, as the more rapid cooling of a red-hot bar, when it is thrust into cold water, than when it remains in the air. But much more rapid cooling might entail a shifting and rearrangement of the parts of the crust of the earth on a scale of unprecedented magnitude, and bring about "catastrophes" to which the earthquake of Lisbon is but a trifle. It is conceivable that man and his works and all the higher forms of animal life should be utterly destroyed; that mountain regions should he converted into ocean depths and the floor of oceans raised into mountains; and the earth become a scene of horror which even the lurid fancy of the writer of the Apocalypse would fail to portray. And yet, to the eye of science, there would he no more disorder here than in the sabbatical peace of a summer sea. Not a link in the chain of natural causes and effects would he broken, nowhere would there be the slightest indication of the "suspension of a lower law by a higher." If a sober scientific thinker is inclined to put little faith in the wild vaticinations of universal ruin which, in a less saintly person than the seer of Patmos, might seem to be dictated by the fury of a revengeful fanatic, rather than by the spirit of the teacher who bid men love their enemies, it is not on the ground that they contradict scientific principles; but because the evidence of their scientific value does not fulfil the conditions on which weight is attached to evidence. The imagination which supposes that it does, simply does not "assume the air of scientific reason." I repeat that, if imagination is used within the limits laid down by science, disorder is unimaginable. If a being endowed with perfect intellectual and æsthetic faculties, but devoid of the capacity for suffering pain, either physical or moral, were to devote his utmost powers to the investigation of nature, the universe would seem to him to be a sort of kaleidoscope, in which, at every successive moment of time, a new arrangement of parts of exquisite beauty and symmetry would present itself; and each of them would show itself to be the logical consequence of the preceding arrangement, under the conditions which we call the laws of nature. Such a spectator might well be filled with that _Amor intellectualis Dei_, the beatific vision of the _vita contemplativa_, which some of the greatest thinkers of all ages, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, have regarded as the only conceivable eternal felicity; and the vision of illimitable suffering, as if sensitive beings were unregarded animalcules which had got between the bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, which mars the prospect to us poor mortals, in no wise alters the fact that order is lord of all, and disorder only a name for that part of the order which gives us pain. The other fallacious employment of the names of scientific conceptions which pervades the preacher's utterance, brings me back to the proper topic of the present essay. It is the use of the word "law" as if it denoted a thing--as if a "law of nature," as science understands it, were a being endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which the phenomena expressed by that law are brought about. The preacher asks, "Might not there be a suspension of a lower law by the intervention of a higher?" He tells us that every time we lift our arms we defy the law of gravitation. He asks whether some day certain "royal and ultimate laws" may not come and "wreck" those laws which are at present, it would appear, acting as nature's police. It is evident, from these expressions, that "laws," in the mind of the preacher, are entities having an objective existence in a graduated hierarchy. And it would appear that the "royal laws" are by no means to be regarded as constitutional royalties: at any moment, they may, like Eastern despots, descend in wrath among the middle-class and plebeian laws, which have hitherto done the drudgery of the world's work, and, to use phraseology not unknown in our seats of learning--"make hay" of their belongings. Or perhaps a still more familiar analogy has suggested this singular theory; and it is thought that high laws may "suspend" low laws, as a bishop may suspend a curate. Far be it from me to controvert these views, if any one likes to hold them. All I wish to remark is that such a conception of the nature of "laws" has nothing to do with modern science. It is scholastic realism--realism as intense and unmitigated as that of Scotus Erigena a thousand years ago. The essence of such realism is that it maintains the objective existence of universals, or, as we call them nowadays, general propositions. It affirms, for example, that "man" is a real thing, apart from individual men, having its existence, not in the sensible, but in the intelligible world, and clothing itself with the accidents of sense to make the Jack and Tom and Harry whom we know. Strange as such a notion may appear to modern scientific thought, it really pervades ordinary language. There are few people who would, at once, hesitate to admit that colour, for example, exists apart from the mind which conceives the idea of colour. They hold it to be something which resides in the coloured object; and so far they are as much Realists as if they had sat at Plato's feet. Reflection on the facts of the case must, I imagine, convince every one that "colour" is--not a mere name, which was the extreme Nominalist position--but a name for that group of states of feeling which we call blue, red, yellow, and so on, and which we believe to be caused by luminiferous vibrations which have not the slightest resemblance to colour; while these again are set afoot by states of the body to which we ascribe colour, but which are equally devoid of likeness to colour. In the same way, a law of nature, in the scientific sense, is the product of a mental operation upon the facts of nature which come under our observation, and has no more existence outside the mind than colour has. The law of gravitation is a statement of the manner in which experience shows that bodies, which are free to move, do, in fact, move towards one another. But the other facts of observation, that bodies are not always moving in this fashion, and sometimes move in a contrary direction, are implied in the words "free to move." If it is a law of nature that bodies tend to move towards one another in a certain way; it is another and no less true law of nature that, if bodies are not free to move as they tend to do, either in consequence of an obstacle, or of a contrary impulse from some other source of energy than that to which we give the name of gravitation, they either stop still, or go another way. Scientifically speaking, it is the acme of absurdity to talk of a man defying the law of gravitation when he lifts his arm. The general store of energy in the universe working through terrestrial matter is doubtless tending to bring the man's arm down; but the particular fraction of that energy which is working through certain of his nervous and muscular organs is tending to drive it up, and more energy being expended on the arm in the upward than in the downward direction, the arm goes up accordingly. But the law of gravitation is no more defied, in this case, than when a grocer throws so much sugar into the empty pan of his scales that the one which contains the weight kicks the beam. The tenacity of the wonderful fallacy that the laws of nature are agents, instead of being, as they really are, a mere record of experience, upon which we base our interpretations of that which does happen, and our anticipation of that which will happen, is an interesting psychological fact; and would be unintelligible if the tendency of the human mind towards realism were less strong. Even at the present day, and in the writings of men who would at once repudiate scholastic realism in any form, "law" is often inadvertently employed in the sense of cause, just as, in common life, a man will say that he is compelled by the law to do so and so, when, in point of fact, all he means is that the law orders him to do it, and tells him what will happen if he does not do it. We commonly hear of bodies falling to the ground by reason of the law of gravitation, whereas that law is simply the record of the fact that, according to all experience, they have so fallen (when free to move), and of the grounds of a reasonable expectation that they will so fall. If it should be worth anybody's while to seek for examples of such misuse of language on my own part, I am not at all sure he might not succeed, though I have usually been on my guard against such looseness of expression. If I am guilty, I do penance beforehand, and only hope that I may thereby deter others from committing the like fault. And I venture on this personal observation by way of showing that I have no wish to bear hardly on the preacher for falling into an error for which he might find good precedents. But it is one of those errors which, in the case of a person engaged in scientific pursuits, do little harm, because it is corrected as soon as its consequences become obvious; while those who know physical science only by name are, as has been seen, easily led to build a mighty fabric of unrealities on this fundamental fallacy. In fact, the habitual use of the word "law," in the sense of an active thing, is almost a mark of pseudo-science; it characterises the writings of those who have appropriated the forms of science without knowing anything of its substance. There are two classes of these people: those who are ready to believe in any miracle so long as it is guaranteed by ecclesiastical authority; and those who are ready to believe in any miracle so long as it has some different guarantee. The believers in what are ordinarily called miracles--those who accept the miraculous narratives which they are taught to think are essential elements of religious doctrine--are in the one category; the spirit-rappers, table-turners, and all the other devotees of the occult sciences of our day are in the other: and, if they disagree in most things they agree in this, namely, that they ascribe to science a dictum that is not scientific; and that they endeavour to upset the dictum thus foisted on science by a realistic argument which is equally unscientific. It is asserted, for example, that, on a particular occasion, water was turned into wine; and, on the other hand, it is asserted that a man or a woman "levitated" to the ceiling, floated about there, and finally sailed out by the window. And it is assumed that the pardonable scepticism, with which most scientific men receive these statements, is due to the fact that they feel themselves justified in denying the possibility of any such metamorphosis of water, or of any such levitation, because such events are contrary to the laws of nature. So the question of the preacher is triumphantly put: How do you know that there are not "higher" laws of nature than your chemical and physical laws, and that these higher laws may not intervene and "wreck" the latter? The plain answer to this question is, Why should anybody be called upon to say how he knows that which he does not know? You are assuming that laws are agents--efficient causes of that which happens--and that one law can interfere with another. To us, that assumption is as nonsensical as if you were to talk of a proposition of Euclid being the cause of the diagram which illustrates it, or of the integral calculus interfering with the rule of three. Your question really implies that we pretend to complete knowledge not only of all past and present phenomena, but of all that are possible in the future, and we leave all that sort of thing to the adepts of esoteric Buddhism. Our pretensions are infinitely more modest. We have succeeded in finding out the rules of action of a little bit of the universe; we call these rules "laws of nature," not because anybody knows whether they bind nature or not, but because we find it is obligatory on us to take them into account, both as actors under nature, and as interpreters of nature. We have any quantity of genuine miracles of our own, and if you will furnish us with as good evidence of your miracles as we have of ours, we shall be quite happy to accept them and to amend our expression of the laws of nature in accordance with the new facts. As to the particular cases adduced, we are so perfectly fair-minded as to be willing to help your case as far as we can. You are quite mistaken in supposing that anybody who is acquainted with the possibilities of physical science will undertake categorically to deny that water may be turned into wine. Many very competent judges are already inclined to think that the bodies, which we have hitherto called elementary, are really composite arrangements of the particles of a uniform primitive matter. Supposing that view to be correct, there would be no more theoretical difficulty about turning water into alcohol, ethereal and colouring matters, than there is, at this present moment, any practical difficulty in working other such miracles; as when we turn sugar into alcohol, carbonic acid, glycerine, and succinic acid; or transmute gas-refuse into perfumes rarer than musk and dyes richer than Tyrian purple. If the so-called "elements," oxygen and hydrogen, which compose water, are aggregates of the same ultimate particles, or physical units, as those which enter into the structure of the so-called element "carbon," it is obvious that alcohol and other substances, composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, may be produced by a rearrangement of some of the units of oxygen and hydrogen into the "element" carbon, and their synthesis with the rest of the oxygen and hydrogen. Theoretically, therefore, we can have no sort of objection to your miracle. And our reply to the levitators is just the same. Why should not your friend "levitate"? Fish are said to rise and sink in the water by altering the volume of an internal air-receptacle; and there may be many ways science, as yet, knows nothing of, by which we, who live at the bottom of an ocean of air, may do the same thing. Dialectic gas and wind appear to be by no means wanting among you, and why should not long practice in pneumatic philosophy have resulted in the internal generation of something a thousand times rarer than hydrogen, by which, in accordance with the most ordinary natural laws, you would not only rise to the ceiling and float there in quasi-angelic posture, but perhaps, as one of your feminine adepts is said to have done, flit swifter than train or telegram to "still-vexed Bermoothes," and twit Ariel, if he happens to be there, for a sluggard? We have not the presumption to deny the possibility of anything you affirm; only, as our brethren are particular about evidence, do give us as much to go upon as may save us from being roared down by their inextinguishable laughter. Enough of the realism which clings about "laws." There are plenty of other exemplifications of its vitality in modern science, but I will cite only one of them. This is the conception of "vital force" which comes straight from the philosophy of Aristotle. It is a fundamental proposition of that philosophy that a natural object is composed of two constituents--the one its matter, conceived as inert or even, to a certain extent, opposed to orderly and purposive motion; the other its form, conceived as a quasi-spiritual something, containing or conditioning the actual activities of the body and the potentiality of its possible activities. I am disposed to think that the prominence of this conception in Aristotle's theory of things arose from the circumstance that he was to begin with and throughout his life, devoted to biological studies. In fact it is a notion which must force itself upon the mind of any one who studies biological phenomena, without reference to general physics, as they now stand. Everybody who observes the obvious phenomena of the development of a seed into a tree, or of an egg into an animal, will note that a relatively formless mass of matter gradually grows, takes a definite shape and structure, and, finally, begins to perform actions which contribute towards a certain end, namely, the maintenance of the individual in the first place, and of the species in the second. Starting from the axiom that every event has a cause, we have here the _causa finalis_ manifested in the last set of phenomena, the _causa materialis_ and _formalis_ in the first, while the existence of a _causa efficiens_ within the seed or egg and its product, is a corollary from the phenomena of growth and metamorphosis, which proceed in unbroken succession and make up the life of the animal or plant. Thus, at starting, the egg or seed is matter having a "form" like all other material bodies. But this form has the peculiarity, in contradistinction to lower substantial "forms," that it is a power which constantly works towards an end by means of living organisation. So far as I know, Leibnitz is the only philosopher (at the same time a man of science, in the modern sense, of the first rank) who has noted that the modern conception of Force, as a sort of atmosphere enveloping the particles of bodies, and having potential or actual activity, is simply a new name for the Aristotelian Form.[19] In modern biology, up till within quite recent times, the Aristotelian conception held undisputed sway; living matter was endowed with "vital force," and that accounted for everything. Whosoever was not satisfied with that explanation was treated to that very "plain argument"--"confound you eternally"--wherewith Lord Peter overcomes the doubts of his brothers in the "Tale of a Tub." "Materialist" was the mildest term applied to him--fortunate if he escaped pelting with "infidel" and "atheist." There may be scientific Rip Van Winkles about, who still hold by vital force; but among those biologists who have not been asleep for the last quarter of a century "vital force" no longer figures in the vocabulary of science. It is a patent survival of realism; the generalisation from experience that all living bodies exhibit certain activities of a definite character is made the basis of the notion that every living body contains an entity, "vital force," which is assumed to be the cause of those activities. It is remarkable, in looking back, to notice to what an extent this and other survivals of scholastic realism arrested or, at any rate, impeded the application of sound scientific principles to the investigation of biological phenomena. When I was beginning to think about these matters, the scientific world was occasionally agitated by discussions respecting the nature of the "species" and "genera" of Naturalists, of a different order from the disputes of a later time. I think most were agreed that a "species" was something which existed objectively, somehow or other, and had been created by a Divine fiat. As to the objective reality of genera, there was a good deal of difference of opinion. On the other hand, there were a few who could see no objective reality in anything but individuals, and looked upon both species and genera as hypostatised universals. As for myself, I seem to have unconsciously emulated William of Occam, inasmuch as almost the first public discourse I ever ventured upon, dealt with "Animal Individuality," and its tendency was to fight the Nominalist battle even in that quarter. Realism appeared in still stranger forms at the time to which I refer. The community of plan which is observable in each great group of animals was hypostatised into a Platonic idea with the appropriate name of "archetype," and we were told, as a disciple of Philo-Judæus might have told us, that this realistic figment was "the archetypal light" by which Nature has been guided amidst the "wreck of worlds." So, again, another naturalist, who had no less earned a well-deserved reputation by his contributions to positive knowledge, put forward a theory of the production of living things which, as nearly as the increase of knowledge allowed, was a reproduction of the doctrine inculcated by the Jewish Cabbala. Annexing the archetype notion, and carrying it to its full logical consequence, the author of this theory conceived that the species of animals and plants were so many incarnations of the thoughts of God--material representations of Divine ideas--during the particular period of the world's history at which they existed. But, under the influence of the embryological and palæontological discoveries of modern times, which had already lent some scientific support to the revived ancient theories of cosmical evolution or emanation, the ingenious author of this speculation, while denying and repudiating the ordinary theory of evolution by successive modification of individuals, maintained and endeavoured to prove the occurrence of a progressive modification in the divine ideas of successive epochs. On the foundation of a supposed elevation of organisation in the whole living population of any epoch, as compared with that of its predecessor, and a supposed complete difference in species between the populations of any two epochs (neither of which suppositions has stood the test of further inquiry), the author of this speculation based his conclusion that the Creator had, so to speak, improved upon his thoughts as time went on; and that, as each such amended scheme of creation came up, the embodiment of the earlier divine thoughts was swept away by a universal catastrophe, and an incarnation of the improved ideas took its place. Only after the last such "wreck" thus brought about, did the embodiment of a divine thought, in the shape of the first man, make its appearance as the _ne plus ultra_ of the cosmogonical process. I imagine that Louis Agassiz, the genial backwoodsman of the science of my young days, who did more to open out new tracks in the scientific forest than most men, would have been much surprised to learn that he was preaching the doctrine of the Cabbala, pure and simple. According to this modification of Neoplatonism by contact with Hebrew speculation, the divine essence is unknowable--without form or attribute; but the interval between it and the world of sense is filled by intelligible entities, which are nothing but the familiar hypostatised abstractions of the realists. These have emanated, like immense waves of light, from the divine centre, and, as ten consecutive zones of Sephiroth, form the universe. The farther away from the centre, the more the primitive light wanes, until the periphery ends in those mere negations, darkness and evil, which are the essence of matter. On this, the divine agency transmitted through the Sephiroth operates after the fashion of the Aristotelian forms, and, at first, produces the lowest of a series of worlds. After a certain duration the primitive world is demolished and its fragments used up in making a better; and this process is repeated, until at length a final world, with man for its crown and finish, makes its appearance. It is needless to trace the process of retrogressive metamorphosis by which, through the agency of the Messiah, the steps of the process of evolution here sketched are retraced. Sufficient has been said to prove that the extremist realism current in the philosophy of the thirteenth century can be fully matched by the speculations of our own time. FOOTNOTES: [15] There is no exaggeration in this brief and summary view of the Catholic cosmos. But it would be unfair to leave it to be supposed that the Reformation made any essential alteration, except perhaps for the worse, in that cosmology which called itself "Christian." The protagonist of the Reformation, from whom the whole of the Evangelical sects are lineally descended, states the case with that plainness of speech, not to say brutality, which characterised him. Luther says that man is a beast of burden who only moves as his rider orders; sometimes God rides him, and sometimes Satan. "Sic voluntas humana in medio posita est, ceu jumentum; si insederit Deus, vult et vadit, quo vult Deus.... Si insederit Satan, vult et vadit, quo vult Satan; nec est in ejus arbitrio ad utrum sessorem currere, aut eum quærere, sed ipsi sessores certant ob ipsum obtinendum et possidendum" (_De Servo Arbitrio_, M. Lutheri Opera, ed. 1546, t. ii. p. 468). One may hear substantially the same doctrine preached in the parks and at street-corners by zealous volunteer missionaries of Evangelicism, any Sunday, in modern London. Why these doctrines, which are conspicuous by their absence in the four Gospels, should arrogate to themselves the title of Evangelical, in contradistinction to Catholic, Christianity, may well perplex the impartial inquirer, who, if he were obliged to choose between the two, might naturally prefer that which leaves the poor beast of burden a little freedom of choice. [16] I say "so-called" not by way of offence, but as a protest against the monstrous assumption that Catholic Christianity is explicitly or implicitly contained in any trustworthy record of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. [17] It may be desirable to observe that, in modern times, the term "Realism" has acquired a signification wholly different from that which attached to it in the middle ages. We commonly use it as the contrary of Idealism. The Idealist holds that the phenomenal world has only a subjective existence, the Realist that it has an objective existence. I am not aware that any mediæval philosopher was an Idealist in the sense in which we apply the term to Berkeley. In fact, the cardinal defect of their speculations lies in their oversight of the considerations which lead to Idealism. If many of them regarded the material world as a negation, it was an active negation; not zero, but a minus quantity. [18] At any rate a catastrophe greater than the flood, which, as I observe with interest, is as calmly assumed by the preacher to be an historical event as if science had never had a word to say on that subject! [19] "Les formes des anciens ou Entéléchies ne sont autre chose que les forces" (Leibnitz, _Lettre au Père Bouvet_, 1697). III: SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE [1887] In the opening sentences of a contribution to the last number of this Review,[20] the Duke of Argyll has favoured me with a lecture on the proprieties of controversy, to which I should be disposed to listen with more docility if his Grace's precepts appeared to me to be based upon rational principles, or if his example were more exemplary. With respect to the latter point, the Duke has thought fit to entitle his article "Professor Huxley on Canon Liddon," and thus forces into prominence an element of personality, which those who read the paper which is the object of the Duke's animadversions will observe I have endeavoured, most carefully, to avoid. My criticisms dealt with a report of a sermon, published in a newspaper, and thereby addressed to all the world. Whether that sermon was preached by A or B was not a matter of the smallest consequence; and I went out of my way to absolve the learned divine to whom the discourse was attributed from the responsibility for statements which, for anything I knew to the contrary, might contain imperfect, or inaccurate, representations of his views. The assertion that I had the wish, or was beset, by any "temptation to attack" Canon Liddon is simply contrary to fact. But suppose that if, instead of sedulously avoiding even the appearance of such attack, I had thought fit to take a different course; suppose that, after satisfying myself that the eminent clergyman whose name is paraded by the Duke of Argyll had really uttered the words attributed to him from the pulpit of St. Paul's, what right would any one have to find fault with my action on grounds either of justice, expediency, or good taste? Establishment has its duties as well as its rights. The clergy of a State Church enjoy many advantages over those of unprivileged and unendowed religious persuasions; but they lie under a correlative responsibility to the State, and to every member of the body politic. I am not aware that any sacredness attaches to sermons. If preachers stray beyond the doctrinal limits set by lay lawyers, the Privy Council will see to it; and, if they think fit to use their pulpits for the promulgation of literary, or historical, or scientific errors, it is not only the right, but the duty, of the humblest layman, who may happen to be better informed, to correct the evil effects of such perversion of the opportunities which the State affords them; and such misuse of the authority which its support lends them. Whatever else it may claim to be, in its relations with the State, the Established Church is a branch of the Civil Service; and, for those who repudiate the ecclesiastical authority of the clergy, they are merely civil servants, as much responsible to the English people for the proper performance of their duties as any others. The Duke of Argyll tells us that the "work and calling" of the clergy prevent them from "pursuing disputation as others can." I wonder if his Grace ever reads the so-called "religious" newspapers. It is not an occupation which I should commend to any one who wishes to employ his time profitably; but a very short devotion to this exercise will suffice to convince him that the "pursuit of disputation," carried to a degree of acrimony and vehemence unsurpassed in lay controversies, seems to be found quite compatible with the "work and calling" of a remarkably large number of the clergy. Finally, it appears to me that nothing can be in worse taste than the assumption that a body of English gentlemen can, by any possibility, desire that immunity from criticism which the Duke of Argyll claims for them. Nothing would be more personally offensive to me than the supposition that I shirked criticism, just or unjust, of any lecture I ever gave. I should be utterly ashamed of myself if, when I stood up as an instructor of others, I had not taken every pains to assure myself of the truth of that which I was about to say; and I should feel myself bound to be even more careful with a popular assembly, who would take me more or less on trust, than with an audience of competent and critical experts. I decline to assume that the standard of morality, in these matters, is lower among the clergy than it is among scientific men. I refuse to think that the priest who stands up before a congregation, as the minister and interpreter of the Divinity, is less careful in his utterances, less ready to meet adverse comment, than the layman who comes before his audience, as the minister and interpreter of nature. Yet what should we think of the man of science who, when his ignorance or his carelessness was exposed, whined about the want of delicacy of his critics, or pleaded his "work and calling" as a reason for being let alone? No man, nor any body of men, is good enough, or wise enough, to dispense with the tonic of criticism. Nothing has done more harm to the clergy than the practice, too common among laymen, of regarding them, when in the pulpit, as a sort of chartered libertines, whose divagations are not to be taken seriously. And I am well assured that the distinguished divine, to whom the sermon is attributed, is the last person who would desire to avail himself of the dishonouring protection which has been superfluously thrown over him. So much for the lecture on propriety. But the Duke of Argyll, to whom the hortatory style seems to come naturally, does me the honour to make my sayings the subjects of a series of other admonitions, some on philosophical, some on geological, some on biological topics. I can but rejoice that the Duke's authority in these matters is not always employed to show that I am ignorant of them; on the contrary, I meet with an amount of agreement, even of approbation, for which I proffer such gratitude as may be due, even if that gratitude is sometimes almost overshadowed by surprise. I am unfeignedly astonished to find that the Duke of Argyll, who professes to intervene on behalf of the preacher, does really, like another Balaam, bless me altogether in respect of the main issue. I denied the justice of the preacher's ascription to men of science of the doctrine that miracles are incredible, because they are violations of natural law; and the Duke of Argyll says that he believes my "denial to be well-founded. The preacher was answering an objection which has now been generally abandoned." Either the preacher knew this or he did not know it. It seems to me, as a mere lay teacher, to be a pity that the "great dome of St. Paul's" should have been made to "echo" (if so be that such stentorian effects were really produced) a statement which, admitting the first alternative, was unfair, and, admitting the second, was ignorant.[21] Having thus sacrified one half of the preacher's arguments, the Duke of Argyll proceeds to make equally short work with the other half. It appears that he fully accepts my position that the occurrence of those events, which the preacher speaks of as catastrophes, is no evidence of disorder, inasmuch as such catastrophes may be necessary occasional consequences of uniform changes. Whence I conclude, his Grace agrees with me, that the talk about royal laws "wrecking" ordinary laws may be eloquent metaphor, but is also nonsense. And now comes a further surprise. After having given these superfluous stabs to the slain body of the preacher's argument, my good ally remarks, with magnificent calmness: "So far, then, the preacher and the professor are at one." "Let them smoke the calumet." By all means: smoke would be the most appropriate symbol of this wonderful attempt to cover a retreat. After all, the Duke has come to bury the preacher, not to praise him; only he makes the funeral obsequies look as much like a triumphal procession as possible. So far as the questions between the preacher and myself are concerned, then, I may feel happy. The authority of the Duke of Argyll is ranged on my side. But the Duke has raised a number of other questions, with respect to which I fear I shall have to dispense with his support--nay, even be compelled to differ from him as much, or more, than I have done about his Grace's new rendering of the "benefit of clergy." In discussing catastrophes, the Duke indulges in statements, partly scientific, partly anecdotic, which appear to me to be somewhat misleading. We are told, to begin with, that Sir Charles Lyell's doctrine respecting the proper mode of interpreting the facts of geology (which is commonly called uniformitarianism) "does not hold its head quite so high as it once did." That is great news indeed. But is it true? All I can say is that I am aware of nothing that has happened of late that can in any way justify it; and my opinion is, that the body of Lyell's doctrine, as laid down in that great work, "The Principles of Geology," whatever may have happened to its head, is a chief and permanent constituent of the foundations of geological science. But this question cannot he advantageously discussed, unless we take some pains to discriminate between the essential part of the uniformitarian doctrine and its accessories; and it does not appear that the Duke of Argyll has carried his studies of geological philosophy so far as this point. For he defines uniformitarianism to be the assumption of the "extreme slowness and perfect continuity of all geological changes." What "perfect continuity" may mean in this definition, I am by no means sure; but I can only imagine that it signifies the absence of any break in the course of natural order during the millions of years, the lapse of which is recorded by geological phenomena. Is the Duke of Argyll prepared to say that any geologist of authority, at the present day, believes that there is the slightest evidence of the occurrence of supernatural intervention, during the long ages of which the monuments are preserved to us in the crust of the earth? And if he is not, in what sense has this part of the uniformitarian doctrine, as he defines it, lowered its pretensions to represent scientific truth? As to the "extreme slowness of all geological changes," it is simply a popular error to regard that as, in any wise, a fundamental and necessary dogma of uniformitarianism. It is extremely astonishing to me that any one who has carefully studied Lyell's great work can have so completely failed to appreciate its purport, which yet is "writ large" on the very title-page: "The Principles of Geology, being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation." The essence of Lyell's doctrine is here written so that those who run may read; and it has nothing to do with the quickness or slowness of the past changes of the earth's surface; except in so far as existing analogous changes may go on slowly, and therefore create a presumption in favour of the slowness of past changes. With that epigrammatic force which characterises his style, Buffon wrote, nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, in his famous "Théorie de la Terre": "Pour juger de ce qui est arrivé, et même de ce qui arrivera, nous n'avons qu'à examiner ce qui arrive." The key of the past, as of the future, is to be sought in the present; and, only when known causes of change have been shown to be insufficient, have we any right to have recourse to unknown causes. Geology is as much a historical science as archæology; and I apprehend that all sound historical investigation rests upon this axiom. It underlay all Hutton's work and animated Lyell and Scope in their successful efforts to revolutionise the geology of half a century ago. There is no antagonism whatever, and there never was, between the belief in the views which had their chief and unwearied advocate in Lyell and the belief in the occurrence of catastrophes. The first edition of Lyell's "Principles," published in 1830, lies before me; and a large part of the first volume is occupied by an account of volcanic, seismic, and diluvial catastrophes which have occurred within the historical period. Moreover, the author, over and over again, expressly draws the attention of his readers to the consistency of catastrophes with his doctrine. Notwithstanding, therefore, that we have not witnessed within the last three thousand years the devastation by deluge of a large continent, yet, as we may predict the future occurrence of such catastrophes, we are authorized to regard them as part of the present order of nature, and they may be introduced into geological speculations respecting the past, provided that we do not imagine them to have been more frequent or general than we expect them to be in time to come (vol. i. p. 89). Again:-- If we regard each of the causes separately, which we know to be at present the most instrumental in remodelling the state of the surface, we shall find that we must expect each to be in action for thousands of years, without producing any extensive alterations in the habitable surface, and then to give rise, during a very brief period, to important revolutions (vol. ii. p. 161).[22] Lyell quarrelled with the catastrophists then, by no means because they assumed that catastrophes occur and have occurred, but because they had got into the habit of calling on their god Catastrophe to help them, when they ought to have been putting their shoulders to the wheel of observation of the present course of nature, in order to help themselves out of their difficulties. And geological science has become what it is, chiefly because geologists have gradually accepted Lyell's doctrine and followed his precepts. So far as I know anything about the matter, there is nothing that can be called proof, that the causes of geological phenomena operated more intensely or more rapidly, at any time between the older tertiary and the oldest palæozoic epochs than they have done between the older tertiary epoch and the present day. And if that is so, uniformitarianism, even as limited by Lyell,[23] has no call to lower its crest. But if the facts were otherwise, the position Lyell took up remains impregnable. He did not say that the geological operations of nature were never more rapid, or more vast, than they are now; what he did maintain is the very different proposition that there is no good evidence of anything of the kind. And that proposition has not yet been shown to be incorrect. I owe more than I can tell to the careful study of the "Principles of Geology" in my young days; and, long before the year 1856, my mind was familiar with the truth that "the doctrine of uniformity is not incompatible with great and sudden changes," which, as I have shown, is taught _totidem verbis_ in that work. Even had it been possible for me to shut my eyes to the sense of what I had read in the "Principles," Whewell's "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences," published in 1840, a work with which I was also tolerably familiar, must have opened them. For the always acute, if not always profound, author, in arguing against Lyell's uniformitarianism, expressly points out that it does not in any way contravene the occurrence of catastrophes. With regard to such occurrences [earthquakes, deluges, etc.], terrible as they appear at the time, they may not much affect the average rate of change: there may be a _cycle_, though an irregular one, of rapid and slow change: and if such cycles go on succeeding each other, we may still call the order of nature uniform, notwithstanding the periods of violence which it involves.[24] The reader who has followed me through this brief chapter of the history of geological philosophy will probably find the following passage in the paper of the Duke of Argyll to be not a little remarkable:-- Many years ago, when I had the honor of being President of the British Association,[25] I ventured to point out, in the presence and in the hearing of that most distinguished man [Sir C. Lyell] that the doctrine of uniformity was not incompatible with great and sudden changes, since cycles of these and other cycles of comparative rest might well be constituent parts of that uniformity which he asserted. Lyell did not object to this extended interpretation of his own doctrine, and indeed expressed to me his entire concurrence. I should think he did; for, as I have shown, there was nothing in it that Lyell himself had not said, six-and-twenty years before, and enforced, three years before; and it is almost verbally identical with the view of uniformitarianism taken by Whewell, sixteen years before, in a work with which, one would think, that any one who undertakes to discuss the philosophy of science should be familiar. Thirty years have elapsed since the beginner of 1856 persuaded himself that he enlightened the foremost geologist of his time, and one of the most acute and far-seeing men of science of any time, as to the scope of the doctrines which the veteran philosopher had grown gray in promulgating; and the Duke of Argyll's acquaintance with the literature of geology has not, even now, become sufficiently profound to dissipate that pleasant delusion. If the Duke of Argyll's guidance in that branch of physical science, with which alone he has given evidence of any practical acquaintance, is thus unsafe, I may breathe more freely in setting my opinion against the authoritative deliverances of his Grace about matters which lie outside the province of geology. And here the Duke's paper offers me such a wealth of opportunities that choice becomes embarrassing. I must bear in mind the good old adage, "Non multa sed multum." Tempting as it would be to follow the Duke through his labyrinthine misunderstandings of the ordinary terminology of philosophy and to comment on the curious unintelligibility which hangs about his frequent outpourings of fervid language, limits of space oblige me to restrict myself to those points, the discussion of which may help to enlighten the public in respect of matters of more importance than the competence of my Mentor for the task which he has undertaken. I am not sure when the employment of the word Law, in the sense in which we speak of laws of nature, commenced, but examples of it may be found in the works of Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza. Bacon employs "Law" as the equivalent of "Form," and I am inclined to think that he may be responsible for a good deal of the confusion that has subsequently arisen; but I am not aware that the term is used by other authorities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in any other sense than that of "rule" or "definite order" of the coexistence of things or succession of events in nature. Descartes speaks of "règles, que je nomme les lois de la nature." Leibnitz says "loi ou règle générale," as if he considered the terms interchangeable. The Duke of Argyll, however, affirms that the "law of gravitation" as put forth by Newton was something more than the statement of an observed order. He admits that Kepler's three laws "were an observed order of facts and nothing more." As to the law of gravitation, "it contains an element which Kepler's laws did not contain, even an element of causation, the recognition of which belongs to a higher category of intellectual conceptions than that which is concerned in the mere observation and record of separate and apparently unconnected facts." There is hardly a line in these paragraphs which appears to me to be indisputable. But, to confine myself to the matter in hand, I cannot conceive that any one who had taken ordinary pains to acquaint himself with the real nature of either Kepler's or Newton's work could have written them. That the labours of Kepler, of all men in the world, should be called "mere observation and record," is truly wonderful. And any one who will look into the "Principia," or the "Optics," or the "Letters to Bentley," will see, even if he has no more special knowledge of the topics discussed than I have, that Newton over and over again insisted that he had nothing to do with gravitation as a physical cause, and that when he used the terms attraction, force, and the like, he employed them, as he says, "_mathematicè_" and not "_physicè_." How these attractions [of gravity, magnetism, and electricity] may be performed, I do not here consider. What I call attraction may be performed by impulse or by some other means unknown to me. I use that word here to signify only in a general way any force by which bodies tend towards one another, whatever be the cause.[26] According to my reading of the best authorities upon the history of science, Newton discovered neither gravitation, nor the law of gravitation; nor did he pretend to offer more than a conjecture as to the causation of gravitation. Moreover, his assertion that the notion of a body acting where it is not, is one that no competent thinker could entertain, is antagonistic to the whole current conception of attractive and repulsive forces, and therefore of "the attractive force of gravitation." What, then, was that labour of unsurpassed magnitude and excellence and of immortal influence which Newton did perform? In the first place, Newton defined the laws, rules, or observed order of the phenomena of motion, which come under our daily observation, with greater precision than had been before attained; and, by following out, with marvellous power and subtlety, the mathematical consequences of these rules, he almost created the modern science of pure mechanics. In the second place, applying exactly the same method to the explication of the facts of astronomy as that which was applied a century and a half later to the facts of geology by Lyell, he set himself to solve the following problem. Assuming that all bodies, free to move, tend to approach one another as the earth and the bodies on it do; assuming that the strength of that tendency is directly as the mass and inversely as the squares of the distances; assuming that the laws of motion, determined for terrestrial bodies, hold good throughout the universe; assuming that the planets and their satellites were created and placed at their observed mean distances, and that each received a certain impulse from the Creator; will the form of the orbits, the varying rates of motion of the planets, and the ratio between those rates and their distances from the sun, which must follow by mathematical reasoning from these premisses, agree with the order of facts determined by Kepler and others, or not? Newton, employing mathematical methods which are the admiration of adepts, but which no one but himself appears to have been able to use with ease, not only answered this question in the affirmative, but stayed not his constructive genius before it had founded modern physical astronomy. The historians of mechanical and of astronomical science appear to be agreed that he was the first person who clearly and distinctly put forth the hypothesis that the phenomena comprehended under the general name of "gravity" follow the same order throughout the universe, and that all material bodies exhibit these phenomena; so that, in this sense, the idea of universal gravitation may, doubtless, be properly ascribed to him. Newton proved that the laws of Kepler were particular consequences of the laws of motion and the law of gravitation--in other words, the reason of the first lay in the two latter. But to talk of the law of gravitation alone as the reason of Kepler's laws, and still more as standing in any causal relation to Kepler's laws, is simply a misuse of language. It would really be interesting if the Duke of Argyll would explain how he proposes to set about showing that the elliptical form of the orbits of the planets, the constant area described by the radius vector, and the proportionality of the squares of the periodic times to the cubes of the distances from the sun, are either caused by the "force of gravitation" or deducible from the "law of gravitation." I conceive that it would be about as apposite to say that the various compounds of nitrogen with oxygen are caused by chemical attraction and deducible from the atomic theory. * * * * * Newton assuredly lent no shadow of support to the modern pseudo-scientific philosophy which confounds laws with causes. I have not taken the trouble to trace out this commonest of fallacies to its first beginning; but I was familiar with it in full bloom more than thirty years ago, in a work which had a great vogue in its day--the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation"--of which the first edition was published in 1844. It is full of apt and forcible illustrations of pseudo-scientific realism. Consider, for example, this gem serene. When a boy who has climbed a tree loses his hold of the branch, "the law of gravitation unrelentingly pulls him to the ground, and then he is hurt," whereby the Almighty is quite relieved from any responsibility for the accident. Here is the "law of gravitation" acting as a cause in a way quite in accordance with the Duke of Argyll's conception of it. In fact, in the mind of the author of the "Vestiges," "laws" are existences intermediate between the Creator and His works, like the "ideas" of the Platonisers or the Logos of the Alexandrians.[27] I may cite a passage which is quite in the vein of Philo:-- We have seen powerful evidences that the construction of this globe and its associates; and, inferentially, that of all the other globes in space, was the result, not of any immediate or personal exertion on the part of the Deity, but of natural laws which are the expression of His will. What is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws which are in like manner an expression of His will? (p. 154, 1st edition). And creation "operating by law" is constantly cited as relieving the Creator from trouble about insignificant details. I am perplexed to picture to myself the state of mind which accepts these verbal juggleries. It is intelligible that the Creator should operate according to such rules as he might think fit to lay down for himself (and therefore according to law); but that would leave the operation of his will just as much a direct personal act as it would be under any other circumstances. I can also understand that (as in Leibnitz's caricature of Newton's views) the Creator might have made the cosmical machine, and, after setting it going, have left it to itself till it needed repair. But then, by the supposition, his personal responsibility would have been involved in all that it did; just as much as a dynamiter is responsible for what happens, when he has set his machine going and left it to explode. The only hypothesis which gives a sort of mad consistency to the Vestigiarian's views is the supposition that laws are a kind of angels or demiurgoi, who, being supplied with the Great Architect's plan, were permitted to settle the details among themselves. Accepting this doctrine, the conception of royal laws and plebeian laws, and of those more than Homeric contests in which the big laws "wreck" the little ones, becomes quite intelligible. And, in fact, the honour of the paternity of those remarkable ideas which come into full flower in the preacher's discourse must, so far as my imperfect knowledge goes, be attributed to the author of the "Vestiges." But the author of the "Vestiges" is not the only writer who is responsible for the current pseudo-scientific mystifications which hang about the term "law." When I wrote my paper about "Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific Realism," I had not read a work by the Duke of Argyll, "The Reign of Law," which, I believe, has enjoyed, possibly still enjoys, a widespread popularity. But the vivacity of the Duke's attack led me to think it possible that criticisms directed elsewhere might have come home to him. And, in fact, I find that the second chapter of the work in question, which is entitled "Law; its definitions," is, from my point of view, a sort of "summa" of pseudo-scientific philosophy. It will be worth while to examine it in some detail. In the first place, it is to be noted that the author of the "Reign of Law" admits that "law," in many cases, means nothing more than the statement of the order in which facts occur, or, as he says, "an observed order of facts" (p. 66). But his appreciation of the value of accuracy of expression does not hinder him from adding, almost in the same breath, "In this sense the laws of nature are simply those facts of nature which recur according to rule" (p. 66). Thus "laws," which were rightly said to be the statement of an order of facts in one paragraph, are declared to be the facts themselves in the next. We are next told that, though it may be customary and permissible to use "law" in the sense of a statement of the order of facts, this is a low use of the word; and, indeed, two pages farther on, the writer, flatly contradicting himself, altogether denies its admissibility. An observed order of facts, to be entitled to the rank of a law, must be an order so constant and uniform as to indicate necessity, and necessity can only arise out of the action of some compelling force (p. 68). This is undoubtedly one of the most singular propositions that I have ever met with in a professedly scientific work, and its rarity is embellished by another direct self-contradiction which it implies. For on the preceding page (67), when the Duke of Argyll is speaking of the laws of Kepler, which he admits to be laws, and which are types of that which men of science understand by "laws," he says that they are "simply and purely an order of facts." Moreover, he adds: "A very large proportion of the laws of every science are laws of this kind and in this sense." If, according to the Duke of Argyll's admission, law is understood, in this sense, thus widely and constantly by scientific authorities, where is the justification for his unqualified assertion that such statements of the observed order of facts are not "entitled to the rank" of laws? But let us examine the consequences of the really interesting proposition I have just quoted. I presume that it is a law of nature that "a straight line is the shortest distance between two points." This law affirms the constant association of a certain fact of form with a certain fact of dimension. Whether the notion of necessity which attaches to it has an _a priori_, or an _a posteriori_ origin is a question not relevant to the present discussion. But I would beg to be informed, if it is necessary, where is the "compelling force" out of which the necessity arises; and further, if it is not necessary, whether it loses the character of a law of nature? I take it to be the law of nature, based on unexceptionable evidence, that the mass of matter remains unchanged, whatever chemical or other modifications it may undergo. This law is one of the foundations of chemistry. But it is by no means necessary. It is quite possible to imagine that the mass of matter should vary according to circumstances, as we know its weight does. Moreover, the determination of the "force" which makes mass constant (if there is any intelligibility in that form of words) would not, so far as I can see, confer any more validity on the law than it has now. There is a law of nature, so well vouched by experience, that all mankind, from pure logicians in search of examples to parish sextons in search of fees, confide in it. This is the law that "all men are mortal." It is simply a statement of the observed order of facts that all men sooner or later die. I am not acquainted with any law of nature which is more "constant and uniform" than this. But will any one tell me that death is "necessary"? Certainly there is no _à priori_ necessity in the case, for various men have been imagined to be immortal. And I should be glad to be informed of any "necessity" that can be deduced from biological considerations. It is quite conceivable, as has recently been pointed out, that some of the lowest forms of life may be immortal, after a fashion. However this may be, I would further ask, supposing "all men are mortal" to be a real law of nature, where and what is that to which, with any propriety, the title of "compelling force" of the law can be given? On page 69, the Duke of Argyll asserts that the law of gravitation "is a law in the sense, not merely of a rule, but of a cause." But this revival of the teaching of the "Vestiges" has already been examined and disposed of; and when the Duke of Argyll states that the "observed order" which Kepler had discovered was simply a necessary consequence of the force of "gravitation," I need not recapitulate the evidence which proves such a statement to be wholly fallacious. But it may be useful to say, once more, that, at this present moment, nobody knows anything about the existence of a "force" of gravitation apart from the fact; that Newton declared the ordinary notion of such force to be inconceivable; that various attempts have been made to account for the order of facts we call gravitation, without recourse to the notion of attractive force; that, if such a force exists, it is utterly incompetent to account for Kepler's laws, without taking into the reckoning a great number of other considerations; and, finally, that all we know about the "force" of gravitation, or any other so-called "force," is that it is a name for the hypothetical cause of an observed order of facts. Thus, when the Duke of Argyll says: "Force, ascertained according to some measure of its operation--this is indeed one of the definitions, but only one, of a scientific law" (p. 71) I reply that it is a definition which must be repudiated by every one who possesses an adequate acquaintance with either the facts, or the philosophy, of science, and be relegated to the limbo of pseudo-scientific fallacies. If the human mind has never entertained this notion of "force," nay, if it substituted bare invariable succession for the ordinary notion of causation, the idea of law, as the expression of a constantly-observed order, which generates a corresponding intensity of expectation in our minds, would have exactly the same value, and play its part in real science, exactly as it does now. It is needless to extend further the present excursus on the origin and history of modern pseudo-science. Under such high patronage as it has enjoyed, it has grown and flourished until, nowadays, it is becoming somewhat rampant. It has its weekly "Ephemerides," in which every new pseudo-scientific mare's-nest is hailed and belauded with the unconscious unfairness of ignorance; and an army of "reconcilers," enlisted in its service, whose business seems to be to mix the black of dogma and the white of science into the neutral tint of what they call liberal theology. I remember that, not long after the publication of the "Vestiges," a shrewd and sarcastic countryman of the author defined it as "cauld kail made het again." A cynic might find amusement in the reflection that, at the present time, the principles and the methods of the much-vilified Vestigiarian are being "made het again"; and are not only "echoed by the dome of St. Paul's," but thundered from the castle of Inverary. But my turn of mind is not cynical, and I can but regret the waste of time and energy bestowed on the endeavour to deal with the most difficult problems of science, by those who have neither undergone the discipline, nor possess the information, which are indispensable to the successful issue of such an enterprise. I have already had occasion to remark that the Duke of Argyll's views of the conduct of controversy are different from mine; and this much-to-be lamented discrepancy becomes yet more accentuated when the Duke reaches biological topics. Anything that was good enough for Sir Charles Lyell, in his department of study, is certainly good enough for me in mine; and I by no means demur to being pedagogically instructed about a variety of matters with which it has been the business of my life to try to acquaint myself. But the Duke of Argyll is not content with favouring me with his opinions about my own business; he also answers for mine; and, at that point, really the worm must turn. I am told that "no one knows better than Professor Huxley" a variety of things which I really do not know; and I am said to be a disciple of that "Positive Philosophy" which I have, over and over again, publicly repudiated in language which is certainly not lacking in intelligibility whatever may be its other defects. I am told that I have been amusing myself with a "metaphysical exercitation or logomachy" (may I remark incidentally that these are not quite convertible terms?), when, to the best of my belief, I have been trying to expose a process of mystification, based upon the use of scientific language by writers who exhibit no sign of scientific training, of accurate scientific knowledge, or of clear ideas respecting the philosophy of science, which is doing very serious harm to the public. Naturally enough, they take the lion's skin of scientific phraseology for evidence that the voice which issues from beneath it is the voice of science, and I desire to relieve them from the consequences of their error. The Duke of Argyll asks, apparently with sorrow that it should be his duty to subject me to reproof-- What shall we say of a philosophy which confounds the organic with the inorganic, and, refusing to take note of a difference so profound, assumes to explain under one common abstraction, the movements due to gravitation and the movements due to the mind of man? To which I may fitly reply by another question: What shall we say to a controversialist who attributes to the subject of his attack opinions which are notoriously not his; and expresses himself in such a manner that it is obvious he is unacquainted with even the rudiments of that knowledge which is necessary to the discussion into which he has rushed? What line of my writing can the Duke of Argyll produce which confounds the organic with the inorganic? As to the latter half of the paragraph, I have to confess a doubt whether it has any definite meaning. But I imagine that the Duke is alluding to my assertion that the law of gravitation is nowise "suspended" or "defied" when a man lifts his arm; but that, under such circumstances, part of the store of energy in the universe operates on the arm at a mechanical advantage as against the operation of another part. I was simple enough to think that no one who had as much knowledge of physiology as is to be found in an elementary primer, or who had ever heard of the greatest physical generalisation of modern times--the doctrine of the conservation of energy--would dream of doubting my statement; and I was further simple enough to think that no one who lacked these qualifications would feel tempted to charge me with error. It appears that my simplicity is greater than my powers of imagination. The Duke of Argyll may not be aware of the fact, but it is nevertheless true, that when a man's arm is raised, in sequence to that state of consciousness we call a volition, the volition is not the immediate cause of the elevation of the arm. On the contrary, that operation is effected by a certain change of form, technically known as "contraction" in sundry masses of flesh, technically known as muscles, which are fixed to the bones of the shoulder in such a manner that, if these muscles contract, they must raise the arm. Now each of these muscles is a machine comparable, in a certain sense, to one of the donkey-engines of a steamship, but more complete, inasmuch as the source of its ability to change its form, or contract, lies within itself. Every time that, by contracting, the muscle does work, such as that involved in raising the arm, more or less of the material which it contains is used up, just as more or less of the fuel of a steam-engine is used up, when it does work. And I do not think there is a doubt in the mind of any competent physicist, or physiologist, that the work done in lifting the weight of the arm is the mechanical equivalent of a certain proportion of the energy set free by the molecular changes which take place in the muscle. It is further a tolerably well-based belief that this, and all other forms of energy, are mutually convertible; and, therefore, that they all come under that general law or statement of the order of facts, called the conservation of energy. And, as that certainly is an abstraction, so the view which the Duke of Argyll thinks so extremely absurd is really one of the commonplaces of physiology. But this Review is hardly an appropriate place for giving instruction in the elements of that science, and I content myself with recommending the Duke of Argyll to devote some study to Book II. chap. v. section 4 of my friend Dr. Foster's excellent text-book of Physiology (1st edition, 1877, p. 321), which begins thus:-- Broadly speaking, the animal body is a machine for converting potential into actual energy. The potential energy is supplied by the food; this the metabolism of the body converts into the actual energy of heat and mechanical labour. There is no more difficult problem in the world than that of the relation of the state of consciousness, termed volition, to the mechanical work which frequently follows upon it. But no one can even comprehend the nature of the problem, who has not carefully studied the long series of modes of motion which, without a break, connect the energy which does that work with the general store of energy. The ultimate form of the problem is this: Have we any reason to believe that a feeling, or state of consciousness, is capable of directly affecting the motion of even the smallest conceivable molecule of matter? Is such a thing even conceivable? If we answer these questions in the negative, it follows that volition may be a sign, but cannot be a cause, of bodily motion. If we answer them in the affirmative, then states of consciousness become undistinguishable from material things; for it is the essential nature of matter to be the vehicle or substratum of mechanical energy. There is nothing new in all this. I have merely put into modern language the issue raised by Descartes more than two centuries ago. The philosophies of the Occasionalists, of Spinoza, of Malebranche, of modern idealism and modern materialism, have all grown out of the controversies which Cartesianism evoked. Of all this the pseudo-science of the present time appears to be unconscious; otherwise it would hardly content itself with "making het again" the pseudo-science of the past. In the course of these observations I have already had occasion to express my appreciation of the copious and perfervid eloquence which enriches the Duke of Argyll's pages. I am almost ashamed that a constitutional insensibility to the Sirenian charms of rhetoric has permitted me in wandering through these flowery meads, to be attracted, almost exclusively, to the bare places of fallacy and the stony grounds of deficient information, which are disguised, though not concealed, by these floral decorations. But, in his concluding sentences, the Duke soars into a Tyrtæan strain which roused even my dull soul. It was high time, indeed, that some revolt should be raised against that Reign of Terror which had come to be established in the scientific world under the abuse of a great name. Professor Huxley has not joined this revolt openly, for as yet, indeed, it is only beginning to raise its head. But more than once--and very lately--he has uttered a warning voice against the shallow dogmatism that has provoked it. The time is coming when that revolt will be carried further. Higher interpretations will be established. Unless I am much mistaken, they are already coming in sight (p. 339). I have been living very much out of the world for the last two or three years, and when I read this denunciatory outburst, as of one filled with the spirit of prophecy, I said to myself, "Mercy upon us, what has happened? Can it be that X. and Y. (it would be wrong to mention the names of the vigorous young friends which occurred to me) are playing Danton and Robespierre; and that a guillotine is erected in the courtyard of Burlington House for the benefit of all anti-Darwinian Fellows of the Royal Society? Where are the secret conspirators against this tyranny, whom I am supposed to favour, and yet not have the courage to join openly? And to think of my poor oppressed friend, Mr. Herbert Spencer, 'compelled to speak with bated breath' (p. 338) certainly for the first time in my thirty-odd years' acquaintance with him!" My alarm and horror at the supposition that while I had been fiddling (or at any rate physicking), my beloved Rome had been burning, in this fashion, may be imagined. I am sure the Duke of Argyll will be glad to hear that the anxiety he created was of extremely short duration. It is my privilege to have access to the best sources of information, and nobody in the scientific world can tell me anything about either the "Reign of Terror" or "the Revolt." In fact, the scientific world laughs most indecorously at the notion of the existence of either; and some are so lost to the sense of the scientific dignity, that they descend to the use of transatlantic slang, and call it a "bogus scare." As to my friend Mr. Herbert Spencer, I have every reason to know that, in the "Factors of Organic Evolution," he has said exactly what was in his mind, without any particular deference to the opinions of the person whom he is pleased to regard as his most dangerous critic and Devil's Advocate-General, and still less of any one else. I do not know whether the Duke of Argyll pictures himself as the Tallien of this imaginary revolt against a no less imaginary Reign of Terror. But if so, I most respectfully but firmly decline to join his forces. It is only a few weeks since I happened to read over again the first article which I ever wrote (now twenty-seven years ago) on the "Origin of Species," and I found nothing that I wished to modify in the opinions that are there expressed, though the subsequent vast accumulation of evidence in favour of Mr. Darwin's views would give me much to add. As is the case with all new doctrines, so with that of Evolution, the enthusiasm of advocates has sometimes tended to degenerate into fanaticism; and mere speculation has, at times, threatened to shoot beyond its legitimate bounds. I have occasionally thought it wise to warn the more adventurous spirits among us against these dangers, in sufficiently plain language; and I have sometimes jestingly said that I expected, if I lived long enough, to be looked on as a reactionary by some of my more ardent friends. But nothing short of midsummer madness can account for the fiction that I am waiting till it is safe to join openly a revolt, hatched by some person or persons unknown, against an intellectual movement with which I am in the most entire and hearty sympathy. It is a great many years since, at the outset of my career, I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good, for me, was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction, and have availed myself of the "rara temporum felicitas ubi sentire quæ velis, et quæ sentias dicere licet," which is now enjoyable, to the best of my ability; and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted. My career is at an end. I have Warmed both hands before the fire of life; and nothing is left me, before I depart, but to help, or at any rate to abstain from hindering, the younger generation of men of science in doing better service to the cause we have at heart than I have been able to render. And yet, forsooth, I am supposed to be waiting for the signal of "revolt," which some fiery spirits among these young men are to raise before I dare express my real opinions concerning questions about which we older men had to fight, in the teeth of fierce public opposition and obloquy--of something which might almost justify even the grandiloquent epithet of a Reign of Terror--before our excellent successors had left school. It would appear that the spirit of pseudo-science has impregnated even the imagination of the Duke of Argyll. The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability. FOOTNOTES: [20] _Nineteenth Century_, March, 1887. [21] The Duke of Argyll speaks of the recent date of the demonstration of the fallacy of the doctrine in question. "Recent" is a relative term, but I may mention that the question is fully discussed in my book on _Hume_; which, if I may believe my publishers, has been read by a good many people since it appeared in 1879. Moreover, I observe, from a note at page 89 of _The Reign of Law_, a work to which I shall have occasion to advert by and by, that the Duke of Argyll draws attention to the circumstance that, so long ago as 1866, the views which I hold on this subject were well known. The Duke, in fact, writing about this time, says, after quoting a phrase of mine: "The question of miracles seems now to be admitted on all hands to be simply a question of evidence." In science, we think that a teacher who ignores views which have been discussed _coram populo_ for twenty years, is hardly up to the mark. [22] See also vol. i. p. 460. In the ninth edition (1853), published twenty-three years after the first. Lyell deprives even the most careless reader of any excuse for misunderstanding him: "So in regard to subterranean movements, the theory of the perpetual uniformity of the force which they exert on the earth-crust is quite consistent with the admission of their alternate development and suspension for indefinite periods within limited geographical areas" (p. 187). [23] A great many years ago (Presidential Address to the Geological Society, 1869) I ventured to indicate that which seemed to me to be the weak point, not in the fundamental principles of uniformitarianism, but in uniformitarianism as taught by Lyell. It lay, to my mind, in the refusal by Hutton, and in a less degree by Lyell, to look beyond the limits of the time recorded by the stratified rocks. I said: "This attempt to limit, at a particular point, the progress of inductive and deductive reasoning from the things which are to the things which were--this faithlessness to its own logic, seems to me to have cost uniformitarianism the place as the permanent form of geological speculation which it might otherwise have held" (_Lay Sermons_, p. 260). The context shows that "uniformitarianism" here means that doctrine, as limited in application by Hutton and Lyell, and that what I mean by "evolutionism" is consistent and thorough-going uniformitarianism. [24] _Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences_, vol. i. p. 670. New edition, 1847. [25] At Glasgow in 1856. [26] _Optics_, query 31. [27] The author recognises this in his _Explanations_. IV: AN EPISCOPAL TRILOGY [1887] If there is any truth in the old adage that a burnt child dreads the fire, I ought to be very loath to touch a sermon, while the memory of what befell me on a recent occasion, possibly not yet forgotten by the readers of the _Nineteenth Century_, is uneffaced. But I suppose that even the distinguished censor of that unheard-of audacity to which not even the newspaper report of a sermon is sacred, can hardly regard a man of science as either indelicate or presumptuous, if he ventures to offer some comments upon three discourses, specially addressed to the great assemblage of men of science which recently gathered at Manchester, by three bishops of the State Church. On my return to England not long ago, I found a pamphlet[28] containing a version, which I presume to be authorised, of these sermons, among the huge mass of letters and papers which had accumulated during two months' absence; and I have read them not only with attentive interest, but with a feeling of satisfaction which is quite new to me as a result of hearing, or reading, sermons. These excellent discourses, in fact, appear to me to signalise a new departure in the course adopted by theology towards science, and to indicate the possibility of bringing about an honourable _modus vivendi_ between the two. How far the three bishops speak as accredited representatives of the Church is a question to be considered by and by. Most assuredly, I am not authorised to represent any one but myself. But I suppose that there must be a good many people in the Church of the bishops' way of thinking; and I have reason to believe that, in the ranks of science, there are a good many persons who, more or less, share my views. And it is to these sensible people on both sides, as the bishops and I must needs think those who agree with us, that my present observations are addressed. They will probably be astonished to learn how insignificant, in principle, their differences are. It is impossible to read the discourses of the three prelates without being impressed by the knowledge which they display, and by the spirit of equity, I might say of generosity, towards science which pervades them. There is no trace of that tacit or open assumption that the rejection of theological dogmas, on scientific grounds, is due to moral perversity, which is the ordinary note of ecclesiastical homilies on this subject, and which makes them look so supremely silly to men whose lives have been spent in wrestling with these questions. There is no attempt to hide away real stumbling-blocks under rhetorical stucco; no resort to the _tu quoque_ device of setting scientific blunders against theological errors; no suggestion that an honest man may keep contradictory beliefs in separate pockets of his brain; no question that the method of scientific investigation is valid, whatever the results to which it may lead; and that the search after truth, and truth only, ennobles the searcher and leaves no doubt that his life, at any rate, is worth living. The Bishop of Carlisle declares himself pledged to the belief that "the advancement of science, the progress of human knowledge, is in itself a worthy aim of the greatest effort of the greatest minds." How often was it my fate, a quarter of a century ago, to see the whole artillery of the pulpit brought to bear upon the doctrine of evolution and its supporters! Any one unaccustomed to the amenities of ecclesiastical controversy would have thought we were too wicked to be permitted to live. But let us hear the Bishop of Bedford. After a perfectly frank statement of the doctrine of evolution and some of its obvious consequences, that learned prelate pleads, with all earnestness, against a hasty denunciation of what _may_ be proved to have at least some elements of truth in it, a contemptuous rejection of theories which we _may_ some day learn to accept as freely and with as little sense of inconsistency with God's word as we now accept the theory of the earth's motion round the sun, or the long duration of the geological epochs (p. 28). I do not see that the most convinced evolutionist could ask any one, whether cleric or layman, to say more than this; in fact, I do not think that any one has a right to say more, with respect to any question about which two opinions can he held, than that his mind is perfectly open to the force of evidence. There is another portion of the Bishop of Bedford's sermon which I think will be warmly appreciated by all honest and clear-headed men. He repudiates the views of those who say that theology and science occupy wholly different spheres, and need in no way intermeddle with each other. They revolve, as it were, in different planes, and so never meet. Thus we may pursue scientific studies with the utmost freedom and, at the same time, may pay the most reverent regard to theology, having no fears of collision, because allowing no points of contact (p. 29). Surely every unsophisticated mind will heartily concur with the Bishop's remark upon this convenient refuge for the descendants of Mr. Facing-both-ways. "I have never been able to understand this position though I have often seen it assumed." Nor can any demurrer be sustained when the Bishop proceeds to point out that there are, and must be, various points of contact between theological and natural science, and therefore that it is foolish to ignore or deny the existence of as many dangers of collision. Finally, the Bishop of Manchester freely admits the force of the objections which have been raised, on scientific grounds, to prayer, and attempts to turn them by arguing that the proper objects of prayer are not physical but spiritual. He tells us that natural accidents and moral misfortunes are not to be taken for moral judgments of God; he admits the propriety of the application of scientific methods to the investigation of the origin and growth of religions; and he is as ready to recognise the process of evolution there, as in the physical world. Mark the following striking passage:-- And how utterly all the common objections to Divine revelation vanish away when they are set in the light of this theory of a spiritual progression. Are we reminded that there prevailed, in those earlier days, views of the nature of God and man, of human life and Divine Providence, which we now find to be untenable? _That_, we answer, is precisely what the theory of development presupposes. If early views of religion and morality had not been imperfect, where had been the development? If symbolical visions and mythical creations had found no place in the early Oriental expression of Divine truth, where had been the development? The sufficient answer to ninety-nine out of a hundred of the ordinary objections to the Bible, as the record of a divine education of our race, is asked in that one word--development. And to what are we indebted for that potent word, which, as with the wand of a magician, has at the same moment so completely transformed our knowledge and dispelled our difficulties? To modern science, resolutely pursuing its search for truth in spite of popular obloquy and--alas! that one should have to say it--in spite too often of theological denunciation (p. 53). Apart from its general importance, I read this remarkable statement with the more pleasure, since, however imperfectly I may have endeavoured to illustrate the evolution of theology in a paper published in the _Nineteenth Century_ last year,[29] it seems to me that in principle, at any rate, I may hereafter claim high theological sanction for the views there set forth. If theologians are henceforward prepared to recognise the authority of secular science in the manner and to the extent indicated in the Manchester trilogy; if the distinguished prelates who offer these terms are really plenipotentiaries, then, so far as I may presume to speak on such a matter, there will be no difficulty about concluding a perpetual treaty of peace, and indeed of alliance, between the high contracting powers, whose history has hitherto been little more than a record of continual warfare. But if the great Chancellor's maxim, "Do ut des," is to form the basis of negotiation, I am afraid that secular science will be ruined; for it seems to me that theology, under the generous impulse of a sudden conversion, has given all that she hath; and indeed, on one point, has surrendered more than can reasonably be asked. I suppose I must be prepared to face the reproach which attaches to those who criticise a gift, if I venture to observe that I do not think that the Bishop of Manchester need have been so much alarmed, as he evidently has been, by the objections which have often been raised to prayer, on the ground that a belief in the efficacy of prayer is inconsistent with a belief in the constancy of the order of nature. The Bishop appears to admit that there is an antagonism between the "regular economy of nature" and the "regular economy of prayer" (p. 39), and that "prayers for the interruption of God's natural order" are of "doubtful validity" (p. 42). It appears to me that the Bishop's difficulty simply adds another example to those which I have several times insisted upon in the pages of this Review and elsewhere, of the mischief which has been done, and is being done, by a mistaken apprehension of the real meaning of "natural order" and "law of nature." May I, therefore, be permitted to repeat, once more, that the statements denoted by these terms have no greater value or cogency than such as may attach to generalisations from experience of the past, and to expectations for the future based upon that experience? Nobody can presume to say what the order of nature must be; all that the widest experience (even if it extended over all past time and through all space) that events had happened in a certain way could justify, would be a proportionally strong expectation that events will go on happening, and the demand for a proportional strength of evidence in favour of any assertion that they had happened otherwise. It is this weighty consideration, the truth of which every one who is capable of logical thought must surely admit, which knocks the bottom out of all _à priori_ objections either to ordinary "miracles" or to the efficacy of prayer, in so far as the latter implies the miraculous intervention of a higher power. No one is entitled to say _à priori_ that any given so-called miraculous event is impossible; and no one is entitled to say _à priori_ that prayer for some change in the ordinary course of nature cannot possibly avail. The supposition that there is any inconsistency between the acceptance of the constancy of natural order and a belief in the efficacy of prayer, is the more unaccountable as it is obviously contradicted by analogies furnished by everyday experience. The belief in the efficacy of prayer depends upon the assumption that there is somebody, somewhere, who is strong enough to deal with the earth and its contents as men deal with the things and events which they are strong enough to modify or control; and who is capable of being moved by appeals such as men make to one another. This belief does not even involve theism; for our earth is an insignificant particle of the solar system, while the solar system is hardly worth speaking of in relation to the All; and, for anything that can be proved to the contrary, there may be beings endowed with full powers over our system, yet, practically, as insignificant as ourselves in relation to the universe. If any one pleases, therefore, to give unrestrained liberty to his fancy, he may plead analogy in favour of the dream that there may be, somewhere, a finite being, or beings, who can play with the solar system as a child plays with a toy; and that such being may be willing to do anything which he is properly supplicated to do. For we are not justified in saying that it is impossible for beings having the nature of men, only vastly more powerful, to exist; and if they do exist, they may act as and when we ask them to do so, just as our brother men act. As a matter of fact, the great mass of the human race has believed, and still believes, in such beings, under the various names of fairies, gnomes, angels, and demons. Certainly I do not lack faith in the constancy of natural order. But I am not less convinced that if I were to ask the Bishop of Manchester to do me a kindness which lay within his power, he would do it. And I am unable to see that his action on my request involves any violation of the order of nature. On the contrary, as I have not the honour to know the Bishop personally, my action would be based upon my faith, in that "law of nature," or generalisation from experience, which tells me that, as a rule, men who occupy the Bishop's position are kindly and courteous. How is the case altered if my request is preferred to some imaginary superior being, or to the Most High being, who, by the supposition, is able to arrest disease, or make the sun stand still in the heavens, just as easily as I can stop my watch, or make it indicate any hour that pleases me? I repeat that it is not upon any _à priori_ considerations that objections, either to the supposed efficacy of prayer in modifying the course of events, or to the supposed occurrence of miracles, can be scientifically based. The real objection, and, to my mind, the fatal objection, to both these suppositions, is the inadequacy of the evidence to prove any given case of such occurrences which has been adduced. It is a canon of common sense, to say nothing of science, that the more improbable a supposed occurrence, the more cogent ought to be the evidence in its favour. I have looked somewhat carefully into the subject, and I am unable to find in the records of any miraculous event evidence which even approximates to the fulfilment of this requirement. But, in the case of prayer, the Bishop points out a most just and necessary distinction between its effect on the course of nature, outside ourselves, and its effect within the region of the supplicator's mind. It is a "law of nature," verifiable by everyday experience, that our already formed convictions, our strong desires, our intent occupation with particular ideas, modify our mental operations to a most marvellous extent, and produce enduring changes in the direction and in the intensity of our intellectual and moral activities. Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang, and produce, by dint of intense thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania. Demoniac possession is mythical; but the faculty of being possessed, more or less completely, by an idea is probably the fundamental condition of what is called genius, whether it show itself in the saint, the artist, or the man of science. One calls it faith, another calls it inspiration, a third calls it insight; but the "intending of the mind," to borrow Newton's well-known phrase, the concentration of all the rays of intellectual energy on some one point, until it glows and colours the whole cast of thought with its peculiar light, is common to all. I take it that the Bishop of Manchester has psychological science with him when he insists upon the subjective efficacy of prayer in faith, and on the seemingly miraculous effects which such "intending of the mind" upon religious and moral ideals may have upon character and happiness. Scientific faith, at present, takes it no further than the prayer which Ajax offered; but that petition is continually granted. Whatever points of detail may yet remain open for discussion, however, I repeat the opinion I have already expressed, that the Manchester sermons concede all that science, has an indisputable right, or any pressing need, to ask, and that not grudgingly but generously; and, if the three bishops of 1887 carry the Church with them, I think they will have as good title to the permanent gratitude of posterity as the famous seven who went to the Tower in defence of the Church two hundred years ago. Will their brethren follow their just and prudent guidance? I have no such acquaintance with the currents of ecclesiastical opinion as would justify me in even hazarding a guess on such a difficult topic. But some recent omens are hardly favourable. There seems to be an impression abroad--I do not desire to give any countenance to it--that I am fond of reading sermons. From time to time, unknown correspondents--some apparently animated by the charitable desire to promote my conversion, and others unmistakably anxious to spur me to the expression of wrathful antagonism--favour me with reports or copies of such productions. I found one of the latter category among the accumulated arrears to which I have already referred. It is a full, and apparently accurate, report of a discourse by a person of no less ecclesiastical rank than the three authors of the sermons I have hitherto been considering; but who he is, and where or when the sermon was preached, are secrets which wild horses shall not tear from me, lest I fall again under high censure for attacking a clergyman. Only if the editor of this Review thinks it his duty to have independent evidence that the sermon has a real existence, will I, in the strictest confidence, communicate it to him. The preacher, in this case, is of a very different mind from the three bishops--and this mind is different in quality, different in spirit, and different in contents. He discourses on the _à priori_ objections to miracles, apparently without being aware, in spite of all the discussions of the last seven or eight years, that he is doing battle with a shadow. I trust I do not misrepresent the Bishop of Manchester in saying that the essence of his remarkable discourse is the insistence upon the "supreme importance of the purely spiritual in our faith," and of the relative, if not absolute, insignificance of aught else. He obviously perceives the bearing of his arguments against the alterability of the course of outward nature by prayer, on the question of miracles in general; for he is careful to say that "the possibility of miracles, of a rare and unusual transcendence of the world order is not here in question" (p. 38). It may be permitted me to suppose, however, that, if miracles were in question, the speaker who warns us "that we must look for the heart of the absolute religion in that part of it which prescribes our moral and religious relations" (p. 46) would not be disposed to advise those who had found the heart of Christianity to take much thought about its miraculous integument. My anonymous sermon will have nothing to do with such notions as these, and its preacher is not too polite, to say nothing of charitable, towards those who entertain them. Scientific men, therefore, are perfectly right in asserting that Christianity rests on miracles. If miracles never happened, Christianity, in any sense which is not a mockery, which does not make the term of none effect, has no reality. I dwell on this because there is now an effort making to get up a non-miraculous, invertebrate Christianity, which may escape the ban of science. And I would warn you very distinctly against this new contrivance. Christianity is essentially miraculous, and falls to the ground if miracles be impossible. Well, warning for warning. I venture to warn this preacher and those who, with him, persist in identifying Christianity with the miraculous, that such forms of Christianity are not only doomed to fall to the ground; but that, within the last half century, they have been driving that way with continually accelerated velocity. The so-called religious world is given to a strange delusion. It fondly imagines that it possesses the monopoly of serious and constant reflection upon the terrible problems of existence; and that those who cannot accept its shibboleths are either mere Gallios, caring for none of these things, or libertines desiring to escape from the restraints of morality. It does not appear to have entered the imaginations of these people that, outside their pale and firmly resolved never to enter it, there are thousands of men, certainly not their inferiors in character, capacity, or knowledge of the questions at issue, who estimate those purely spiritual elements of the Christian faith of which the Bishop of Manchester speaks as highly as the Bishop does; but who will have nothing to do with the Christian Churches, because in their apprehension and for them, the profession of belief in the miraculous, on the evidence offered would be simply immoral. So far as my experience goes, men of science are neither better nor worse than the rest of the world. Occupation with the endlessly great parts of the universe does not necessarily involve greatness of character, nor does microscopic study of the infinitely little always produce humility. We have our full share of original sin; need, greed, and vainglory beset us as they do other mortals; and our progress is, for the most part, like that of a tacking ship, the resultant of opposite divergencies from the straight path. But, for all that, there is one moral benefit which the pursuit of science unquestionably bestows. It keeps the estimate of the value of evidence up to the proper mark; and we are constantly receiving lessons, and sometimes very sharp ones, on the nature of proof. Men of science will always act up to their standard of veracity, when mankind in general leave off sinning; but that standard appears to me to be higher among them than in any other class of the community. I do not know any body of scientific men who could be got to listen without the strongest expressions of disgusted repudiation to the exposition of a pretended scientific discovery, which had no better evidence to show for itself than the story of the devils entering a herd of swine, or of the fig-tree that was blasted for bearing no figs when "it was not the season of figs." Whether such events are possible or impossible, no man can say; but scientific ethics can and does declare that the profession of belief in them, on the evidence of documents of unknown date and of unknown authorship, is immoral. Theological apologists who insist that morality will vanish if their dogmas are exploded, would do well to consider the fact that, in the matter of intellectual veracity, science is already a long way ahead of the Churches; and that, in this particular, it is exerting an educational influence on mankind of which the Churches have shown themselves utterly incapable. Undoubtedly that varying compound of some of the best and some of the worst elements of Paganism and Judaism, moulded in practice by the innate character of certain people of the Western world, which, since the second century, has assumed to itself the title of orthodox Christianity, "rests on miracles" and falls to the ground, not "if miracles be impossible," but if those to which it is committed prove themselves unable to fulfil the conditions of honest belief. That this Christianity is doomed to fall is, to my mind, beyond a doubt; but its fall will be neither sudden nor speedy. The Church, with all the aid lent it by the secular arm, took many centuries to extirpate the open practice of pagan idolatry within its own fold; and those who have travelled in southern Europe will be aware that it has not extirpated the essence of such idolatry even yet. _Mutato nomine_, it is probable that there is as much sheer fetichism among the Roman populace now as there was eighteen hundred years ago; and if Marcus Antonius could descend from his horse and ascend the steps of the Ara Coeli church about Twelfth Day, the only thing that need strike him would be the extremely contemptible character of the modern idols as works of art. Science will certainly neither ask for, nor receive, the aid of the secular arm. It will trust to the much better and more powerful help of that education in scientific truth and in the morals of assent, which is rendered as indispensable, as it is inevitable, by the permeation of practical life with the products and ideas of science. But no one who considers the present state of even the most developed countries can doubt that the scientific light that has come into the world will have to shine in the midst of darkness for a long time. The urban populations, driven into contact with science by trade and manufacture, will more and more receive it, while the _pagani_ will lag behind. Let us hope that no Julian may arise among them to head a forlorn hope against the inevitable. Whatever happens, science may bide her time in patience and in confidence. But to return to my "Anonymous." I am afraid that if he represents any great party in the Church, the spirit of justice and reasonableness which animates the three bishops has as slender a chance of being imitated, on a large scale, as their common sense and their courtesy. For, not contented with misrepresenting science on its speculative side, "Anonymous" attacks its morality. For two whole years, investigations and conclusions which would upset the theories of Darwin on the formation of coral islands were actually suppressed, and that by the advice even of those who accepted them, _for fear of upsetting the faith and disturbing the judgment formed by the multitude on the scientific character--the infallibility--of the great master_! So far as I know anything about the matters which are here referred to, the part of this passage which I have italicised is absolutely untrue. I believe that I am intimately acquainted with all Mr. Darwin's immediate scientific friends: and I say that no one of them, nor any other man of science known to me, ever could, or would, have given such advice to any one--if for no other reason than that, with the example of the most candid and patient listener to objections that ever lived fresh in their memories, they could not so grossly have at once violated their highest duty and dishonoured their friend. The charge thus brought by "Anonymous" affects the honour and the probity of men of science; if it is true, we have forfeited all claim to the confidence of the general public. In my belief it is utterly false, and its real effect will be to discredit those who are responsible for it. As is the way with slanders, it has grown by repetition. "Anonymous" is responsible for the peculiarly offensive form which it has taken in his hands; but he is not responsible for originating it. He has evidently been inspired by an article entitled "A Great Lesson," published in the September number of this Review. Truly it is "a great lesson," but not quite in the sense intended by the giver thereof. In the course of his doubtless well-meant admonitions, the Duke of Argyll commits himself to a greater number of statements which are demonstrably incorrect and which any one who ventured to write upon the subject ought to have known to be incorrect, than I have ever seen gathered together in so small a space. I submit a gathering from the rich store for the appreciation of the public. First:-- Mr. Murray's new explanation of the structure of coral-reefs and islands was communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1880, and supported with such a weight of facts and such a close texture of reasoning, that no serious reply has ever been attempted (p. 305). "No serious reply has ever been attempted"! I suppose that the Duke of Argyll may have heard of Professor Dana, whose years of labour devoted to corals and coral-reefs when he was naturalist of the American expedition under Commodore Wilkes, more than forty years ago, have ever since caused him to be recognised as an authority of the first rank on such subjects. Now does his Grace know, or does he not know, that, in the year 1885, Professor Dana published an elaborate paper "On the Origin of Coral-Reefs and Islands," in which, after referring to a Presidential Address by the Director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland delivered in 1883, in which special attention is directed to Mr. Murray's views Professor Dana says:-- The existing state of doubt on the question has led the writer to reconsider the earlier and later facts, and in the following pages he gives his results. Professor Dana then devotes many pages of his very "serious reply" to a most admirable and weighty criticism of the objections which have at various times been raised to Mr. Darwin's doctrine, by Professor Semper, by Dr. Rein, and finally by Mr. Murray, and he states his final judgment as follows:-- With the theory of abrasion and solution incompetent, all the hypotheses of objectors to Darwin's theory are alike weak; for all have made these processes their chief reliance, whether appealing to a calcareous, or a volcanic, or a mountain-peak basement for the structure. The subsidence which the Darwinian theory requires has not been opposed by the mention of any fact at variance with it, nor by setting aside Darwin's arguments in its favour; and it has found new support in the facts from the "Challenger's" soundings off Tahiti, that had been put in array against it, and strong corroboration in the facts from the West Indies. Darwin's theory, therefore, remains as the theory that accounts for the origin of reefs and islands.[30] Be it understood that I express no opinion on the controverted points. I doubt if there are ten living men who, having a practical knowledge of what a coral-reef is, have endeavoured to master the very difficult biological and geological problems involved in their study. I happen to have spent the best part of three years among coral-reefs and to have made that attempt; and, when Mr. Murray's work appeared, I said to myself that until I had two or three months to give to the renewed study of the subject in all its bearings, I must be content to remain in a condition of suspended judgment. In the meanwhile, the man who would be voted by common acclamation as the most competent person now living to act as umpire, has delivered the verdict I have quoted; and, to go no further, has fully justified the hesitation I and others may have felt about expressing an opinion. Under these circumstances, it seems to me to require a good deal of courage to say "no serious reply has ever been attempted"; and to chide the men of science, in lofty tones, for their "reluctance to admit an error" which is not admitted; and for their "slow and sulky acquiescence" in a conclusion which they have the gravest warranty for suspecting. Second:-- Darwin himself had lived to hear of the new solution and, with that splendid candour which was eminent in him his mind, though now grown old in his own early convictions, was at least ready to entertain it, and to confess that serious doubts had been awakened as to the truth of his famous theory (p. 305). I wish that Darwin's splendid candour could be conveyed by some description of spiritual "microbe" to those who write about him. I am not aware that Mr. Darwin ever entertained "serious doubts as to the truth of his famous theory"; and there is tolerably good evidence to the contrary. The second edition of his work, published in 1876, proves that he entertained no such doubts then; a letter to Professor Semper, whose objections, in some respects, forestalled those of Mr. Murray, dated October 2, 1879, expresses his continued adherence to the opinion "that the atolls and barrier reefs in the middle of the Pacific and Indian Oceans indicate subsidence"; and the letter of my friend Professor Judd, printed at the end of this article (which I had perhaps better say Professor Judd had not seen) will prove that this opinion remained unaltered to the end of his life. Third:-- ... Darwin's theory is a dream. It is not only unsound, but it is in many respects the reverse of truth. With all his conscientiousness, with all his caution, with all his powers of observation, Darwin in this matter fell into errors as profound as the abysses of the Pacific (p. 301). Really? It seems to me that, under the circumstances, it is pretty clear that these lines exhibit a lack of the qualities justly ascribed to Mr. Darwin, which plunges their author into a much deeper abyss, and one from which there is no hope of emergence. Fourth:-- All the acclamations with which it was received were as the shouts of an ignorant mob (p. 301). But surely it should be added that the Coryphæus of this ignorant mob, the fugleman of the shouts, was one of the most accomplished naturalists and geologists now living--the American Dana--who, after years of independent study extending over numerous reefs in the Pacific, gave his hearty assent to Darwin's views, and after all that had been said, deliberately reaffirmed that assent in the year 1885. Fifth:-- The overthrow of Darwin's speculation is only beginning to be known. It has been whispered for some time. The cherished dogma has been dropping very slowly out of sight (p. 301). Darwin's speculation may be right or wrong, but I submit that that which has not happened cannot even begin to be known, except by those who have miraculous gifts to which we poor scientific people do not aspire. The overthrow of Darwin's views may have been whispered by those who hoped for it; and they were perhaps wise in not raising their voices above a whisper. Incorrect statements, if made too loudly, are apt to bring about unpleasant consequences. Sixth:-- Mr. Murray's views, published in 1880, are said to have met with "slow and sulky acquiescence" (p. 305). I have proved that they cannot be said to have met with general acquiescence of any sort, whether quick and cheerful, or slow and sulky; and if this assertion is meant to convey the impression that Mr. Murray's views have been ignored, that there has been a conspiracy of silence against them, it is utterly contrary to notorious fact. Professor Geikie's well-known "Textbook of Geology" was published in 1882, and at pages 457-459 of that work there is a careful exposition of Mr. Murray's views. Moreover Professor Geikie has specially advocated them on other occasions,[31] notably in a long article on "The Origin of Coral-Reefs," published in two numbers of "Nature" for 1883, and in a Presidential Address delivered in the same year. If, in so short a time after the publication of his views, Mr. Murray could boast of a convert, so distinguished and influential as the Director of the Geological Survey, it seems to me that this wonderful _conspiration de silence_ (which has about as much real existence as the Duke of Argyll's other bogie, "The Reign of Terror ") must have _ipso facto_ collapsed. I wish that, when I was a young man, my endeavours to upset some prevalent errors had met with as speedy and effectual backing. Seventh:-- ... Mr. John Murray was strongly advised against the publication of his views in derogation of Darwin's long-accepted theory of the coral islands, and was actually induced to delay it for two years. Yet the late Sir Wyville Thomson, who was at the head of the naturalists of the "Challenger" expedition, was himself convinced by Mr. Murray's reasoning (p. 307). Clearly, then, it could not be Mr. Murray's official chief who gave him this advice. Who was it? And what was the exact nature of the advice given? Until we have some precise information on this head, I shall take leave to doubt whether this statement is more accurate than those which I have previously cited. Whether such advice was wise or foolish, just or immoral, depends entirely on the motive of the person who gave it. If he meant to suggest to Mr. Murray that it might be wise for a young and comparatively unknown man to walk warily, when he proposed to attack a generalisation based on many years' labour of one undoubtedly competent person, and fortified by the independent results of the many years' labour of another undoubtedly competent person; and even, if necessary, to take two whole years in fortifying his position, I think that such advice would have been sagacious and kind. I suppose that there are few working men of science who have not kept their ideas to themselves, while gathering and sifting evidence, for a much longer period than two years. If, on the other hand, Mr. Murray was advised to delay the publication of his criticisms, simply to save Mr. Darwin's credit and to preserve some reputation for infallibility, which no one ever heard of, then I have no hesitation in declaring that his adviser was profoundly dishonest, as well as extremely foolish; and that, if he is a man of science, he has disgraced his calling. But, after all, this supposed scientific Achitophel has not yet made good the primary fact of his existence. Until the needful proof is forthcoming, I think I am justified in suspending my judgment as to whether he is much more than an anti-scientific myth. I leave it to the Duke of Argyll to judge of the extent of the obligation under which, for his own sake, he may lie to produce the evidence on which his aspersions of the honour of scientific men are based. I cannot pretend that we are seriously disturbed by charges which every one who is acquainted with the truth of the matter knows to be ridiculous; but mud has a habit of staining if it lies too long, and it is as well to have it brushed off as soon as may be. So much for the "Great Lesson." It is followed by a "Little Lesson," apparently directed against my infallibility--a doctrine about which I should be inclined to paraphrase Wilkes's remark to George the Third, when he declared that he, at any rate, was not a Wilkite. But I really should be glad to think that there are people who need the warning, because then it will be obvious that this raking up of an old story cannot have been suggested by a mere fanatical desire to damage men of science. I can but rejoice, then, that these misguided enthusiasts, whose faith, in me has so far exceeded the bounds of reason, should be set right. But that "want of finish" in the matter of accuracy which so terribly mars the effect of the "Great Lesson," is no less conspicuous in the case of the "Little Lesson," and, instead of setting my too fervent disciples right, it will set them wrong. The Duke of Argyll, in telling the story of _Bathybius_, says that my mind was "caught by this new and grand generalisation of the physical basis of life." I never have been guilty of a reclamation about anything to my credit, and I do not mean to be; but if there is any blame going, I do not choose to be relegated to a subordinate place when I have a claim to the first. The responsibility for the first description and the naming of _Bathybius_ is mine and mine only. The paper on "Some Organisms living at great Depths in the Atlantic Ocean," in which I drew attention to this substance, is to be found by the curious in the eighth volume of the "Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science," and was published in the year 1868. Whatever errors are contained in that paper are my own peculiar property; but neither at the meeting of the British Association in 1868, nor anywhere else, have I gone beyond what is there stated; except in so far that, at a long-subsequent meeting of the Association, being importuned about the subject, I ventured to express, somewhat emphatically, the wish that the thing was at the bottom of the sea. What is meant by my being caught by a generalisation about the physical basis of life I do not know; still less can I understand the assertion that _Bathybius_ was accepted because of its supposed harmony with Darwin's speculations. That which interested me in the matter was the apparent analogy of _Bathybius_ with other well-known forms of lower life, such as the plasmodia of the Myxomycetes and the Rhizopods. Speculative hopes or fears had nothing to do with the matter; and if _Bathybius_ were brought up alive from the bottom of the Atlantic to-morrow, the fact would not have the slightest bearing, that I can discern, upon Mr. Darwin's speculations, or upon any of the disputed problems of biology. It would merely be one elementary organism the more added to the thousands already known. Up to this moment I was not aware of the universal favour with which _Bathybius_ was received.[32] Those simulators of an "ignorant mob" who, according to the Duke of Argyll, welcomed Darwin's theory of coral-reefs, made no demonstration in my favour, unless his Grace includes Sir Wyville Thomson, Dr. Carpenter, Dr. Bessels, and Professor Haeckel under that head. On the contrary, a sagacious friend of mine, than whom there was no more competent judge, the late Mr. George Busk, was not to be converted; while, long before the "Challenger" work, Ehrenberg wrote to me very sceptically; and I fully expected that that eminent man would favour me with pretty sharp criticism. Unfortunately, he died shortly afterwards, and nothing from him, that I know of, appeared. When Sir Wyville Thomson wrote to me a brief account of the results obtained on board the "Challenger" I sent this statement to "Nature," in which journal it appeared the following week, without any further note or comment than was needful to explain the circumstances. In thus allowing judgment to go by default, I am afraid I showed a reckless and ungracious disregard for the feelings of the believers in my infallibility. No doubt I ought to have hedged and fenced and attenuated the effect of Sir Wyville Thomson's brief note in every possible way. Or perhaps I ought to have suppressed the note altogether, on the ground that it was a mere _ex parte_ statement. My excuse is that, notwithstanding a large and abiding faith in human folly, I did not know then, any more than I know now, that there was anybody foolish enough to be unaware that the only people scientific or other, who never make mistakes are those who do nothing; or that anybody, for whose opinion I cared, would not rather see me commit ten blunders than try to hide one. Pending the production of further evidence, I hold that the existence of people who believe in the infallibility of men of science is as purely mythical as that of the evil counsellor who advised the withholding of the truth lest it should conflict with that belief. I venture to think, then, that the Duke of Argyll might have spared his "Little Lesson" as well as his "Great Lesson" with advantage. The paternal authority who whips the child for sins he has not committed does not strengthen his moral influence--rather excites contempt and repugnance. And if, as would seem from this and former monitory allocutions which have been addressed to us, the Duke aspires to the position of censor, or spiritual director, in relation to the men who are doing the work of physical science, he really must get up his facts better. There will be an end to all chance of our kissing the rod if his Grace goes wrong a third time. He must not say again that "no serious reply has been attempted" to a view which was discussed and repudiated, two years before, by one of the highest extant authorities on the subject; he must not say that Darwin accepted that which it can be proved he did not accept; he must not say that a doctrine has dropped into the abyss when it is quite obviously alive and kicking at the surface; he must not assimilate a man like Professor Dana to the components of an "ignorant mob"; he must not say that things are beginning to be known which are not known at all; he must not say that "slow and sulky acquiescence" has been given to that which cannot yet boast of general acquiescence of any kind; he must not suggest that a view which has been publicly advocated by the Director of the Geological Survey and no less publicly discussed by many other authoritative writers has been intentionally and systematically ignored; he must not ascribe ill motives for a course of action which is the only proper one; and finally, if any one but myself were interested, I should say that he had better not waste his time in raking up the errors of those whose lives have been occupied, not in talking about science, but in toiling, sometimes with success and sometimes with failure, to get some real work done. The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses. The Duke of Argyll has now a splendid opportunity for proving to the world in which of these categories it is hereafter to rank him. * * * * * DEAR PROFESSOR HUXLEY,--A short time before Mr. Darwin's death, I had a conversation with, him concerning the observations which had been made by Mr. Murray upon coral-reefs, and the speculations which had been founded upon those observations. I found that Mr. Darwin had very carefully considered the whole subject, and that while, on the one hand, he did not regard the actual facts recorded by Mr. Murray as absolutely inconsistent with his own theory of subsidence, on the other hand, he did not believe that they necessitated or supported the hypothesis advanced by Mr. Murray. Mr. Darwin's attitude, as I understood it, towards Mr. Murray's objections to the theory of subsidence was exactly similar to that maintained by him with respect to Professor Semper's criticism, which was of a very similar character; and his position with regard to the whole question was almost identical with that subsequently so clearly defined by Professor Dana in his well-known articles published in the "American Journal of Science" for 1885. It is difficult to imagine how any one, acquainted with the scientific literature of the last seven years, could possibly suggest that Mr. Murray's memoir published in 1880 had failed to secure a due amount of attention. Mr. Murray, by his position in the "Challenger" office, occupied an exceptionally favourable position for making his views widely known; and he had, moreover, the singular good fortune to secure from the first the advocacy of so able and brilliant a writer as Professor Archibald Geikie, who in a special discourse and in several treatises on geology and physical geology very strongly supported the new theory. It would be an endless task to attempt to give references to the various scientific journals which have discussed the subject, but I may add that every treatise on geology which has been published, since Mr. Murray's views were made known, has dealt with his observations at considerable length. This is true of Professor A.H. Green's "Physical Geology," published in 1882; of Professor Prestwich's "Geology, Chemical and Physical"; and of Professor James Geikie's "Outlines of Geology," published in 1886. Similar prominence is given to the subject in De Lapparent's "Traité de Géologie," published in 1885, and in Credner's "Elemente der Geologie," which has appeared during the present year. If this be a "conspiracy of silence," where, alas! can the geological speculator seek for fame?--Yours very truly, JOHN W. JUDD. _October_ 10, 1887. FOOTNOTES: [28] _The Advance of Science_. Three sermons preached in Manchester Cathedral on Sunday, September 4, 1887, during the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, by the Bishop of Carlisle, the Bishop of Bedford, and the Bishop of Manchester. [29] Reprinted in Vol. IV. of this collection. [30] _American Journal of Science_, 1885, p. 190. [31] Professor Geikie, however, though a strong, is a fair and candid advocate. He says of Darwin's theory, "That it may be possibly true, in some instances, may be readily granted." For Professor Geikie, then, it is not yet over-thrown--still less a dream. [32] I find, moreover, that I specially warned my readers against hasty judgment. After stating the facts of observation, I add, "I have, hitherto, said nothing about their meaning, as, in an inquiry so difficult and fraught with interest as this, it seems to me to be in the highest degree important to keep the questions of fact and the questions of interpretation well apart" (p. 210). V: THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS [1889] Charles, or, more properly, Karl, King of the Franks, consecrated Roman Emperor in St. Peter's on Christmas Day, A.D. 800, and known to posterity as the Great (chiefly by his agglutinative Gallicised denomination, of Charlemagne), was a man great in all ways, physically and mentally. Within a couple of centuries after his death Charlemagne became the centre of innumerable legends; and the myth-making process does not seem to have been sensibly interfered with by the existence of sober and truthful histories of the Emperor and of the times which immediately preceded and followed his reign by a contemporary writer who occupied a high and confidential position in his court, and in that of his successor. This was one Eginhard, or Einhard, who appears to have been born about A.D. 770, and spent his youth at the court, being educated along with Charles's sons. There is excellent contemporary testimony not only to Eginhard's existence, but to his abilities, and to the place which he occupied in the circle of the intimate friends of the great ruler whose life he subsequently wrote. In fact, there is as good evidence of Eginhard's existence, of his official position, and of his being the author of the chief works attributed to him, as can reasonably be expected in the case of a man who lived more than a thousand years ago, and was neither a great king nor a great warrior. The works are--1. "The Life of the Emperor Karl." 2. "The Annals of the Franks." 3. "Letters." 4. "The History of the Translation of the Blessed Martyrs of Christ, SS. Marcellinus and Petrus." It is to the last, as one of the most singular and interesting records of the period during which the Roman world passed into that of the Middle Ages, that I wish to direct attention.[33] It was written in the ninth century, somewhere, apparently, about the year 830, when Eginhard, ailing in health and weary of political life, had withdrawn to the monastery of Seligenstadt, of which he was the founder. A manuscript copy of the work, made in the tenth century, and once the property of the monastery of St. Bavon on the Scheldt, of which Eginhard was Abbot, is still extant, and there is no reason to believe that, in this copy, the original has been in any way interpolated or otherwise tampered with. The main features of the strange story contained in the "Historia Translationis" are set forth in the following pages, in which, in regard to all matters of importance, I shall adhere as closely as possible to Eginhard's own words. While I was still at Court, busied with secular affairs, I often thought of the leisure which I hoped one day to enjoy in a solitary place, far away from the crowd, with which the liberality of Prince Louis, whom I then served, had provided me. This place is situated in that part of Germany which lies between the Neckar and the Maine,[34] and is nowadays called the Odenwald by those who live in and about it. And here having built, according to my capacity and resources, not only houses and permanent dwellings, but also a basilica fitted for the performance of divine service and of no mean style of construction, I began to think to what saint or martyr I could best dedicate it. A good deal of time had passed while my thoughts fluctuated about this matter, when it happened that a certain deacon of the Roman Church, named Deusdona, arrived at the Court for the purpose of seeking the favour of the King in some affairs in which he was interested. He remained some time; and then, having transacted his business, he was about to return to Rome, when one day, moved by courtesy to a stranger, we invited him to a modest refection; and while talking of many things at table, mention was made of the translation of the body of the blessed Sebastian,[35] and of the neglected tombs of the martyrs, of which there is such a prodigious number at Rome; and the conversation having turned towards the dedication of our new basilica, I began to inquire how it might be possible for me to obtain some of the true relics of the saints which rest at Rome. He at first hesitated, and declared that he did not know how that could be done. But observing that I was both anxious and curious about the subject, he promised to give me an answer some other day. When I returned to the question some time afterwards, he immediately drew from his bosom a paper, which he begged me to read when I was alone, and to tell him what I was disposed to think of that which was therein stated. I took the paper and, as he desired, read it alone and in secret. (Cap. i. 2, 3.) I shall have occasion to return to Deacon Deusdona's conditions, and to what happened after Eginhard's acceptance of them. Suffice it, for the present, to say that Eginhard's notary, Ratleicus (Ratleig), was despatched to Rome and succeeded in securing two bodies, supposed to be those of the holy martyrs Marcellinus and Petrus; and when he had got as far on his homeward journey as the Burgundian town of Solothurn, or Soleure,[36] notary Ratleig despatched to his master, at St. Bavon, a letter announcing the success of his mission. As soon as by reading it I was assured of the arrival of the saints, I despatched a confidential messenger to Maestricht to gather together priests, other clerics, and also laymen, to go out to meet the coming saints as speedily as possible. And he and his companions, having lost no time, after a few days met those who had charge of the saints at Solothurn. Joined with them, and with a vast crowd of people who gathered from all parts, singing hymns, and amidst great and universal rejoicings, they travelled quickly to the city of Argentoratum, which is now called Strasburg. Thence embarking on the Rhine, they came to the place called Portus,[37] and landing on the east bank of the river, at the fifth station thence they arrived at Michilinstadt,[38] accompanied by an immense multitude, praising God. This place is in that forest of Germany which in modern times is called the Odenwald, and about six leagues from the Maine. And here, having found a basilica recently built by me, but not yet consecrated, they carried the sacred remains into it and deposited them therein, as if it were to be their final resting-place. As soon as all this was reported to me I travelled thither as quickly as I could. (Cap. ii. 14.) Three days after Eginhard's arrival began the series of wonderful events which he narrates, and for which we have his personal guarantee. The first thing that he notices is the dream of a servant of Ratleig, the notary, who, being set to watch the holy relics in the church after vespers, went to sleep and, during his slumbers, had a vision of two pigeons, one white and one gray and white, which came and sat upon the bier over the relics; while, at the same time, a voice ordered the man to tell his master that the holy martyrs had chosen another resting-place and desired to be transported thither without delay. Unfortunately, the saints seem to have forgotten to mention where they wished to go; and, with the most anxious desire to gratify their smallest wishes, Eginhard was naturally greatly perplexed what to do. While in this state of mind, he was one day contemplating his "great and wonderful treasure, more precious than all the gold in the world," when it struck him that the chest in which the relics were contained was quite unworthy of its contents; and, after vespers, he gave orders to one of the sacristans to take the measure of the chest in order that a more fitting shrine might be constructed. The man, having lighted a wax candle and raised the pall which covered the relics, in order to carry out his master's orders, was astonished and terrified to observe that the chest was covered with a blood-like exudation (_loculum mirum in modum humore sanguineo undique distillantem_), and at once sent a message to Eginhard. Then I and those priests who accompanied me beheld this stupendous miracle, worthy of all admiration. For just as when it is going to rain, pillars and slabs and marble images exude moisture, and, as it were, sweat, so the chest which contained the most sacred relics was found moist with the blood exuding on all sides. (Cap. ii. 16.) Three days' fast was ordained in order that the meaning of the portent might be ascertained. All that happened, however, was that, at the end of that time, the "blood," which had been exuding in drops all the while, dried up. Eginhard is careful to say that the liquid "had a saline taste, something like that of tears, and was thin as water though of the colour of true blood," and he clearly thinks this satisfactory evidence that it was blood. The same night, another servant had a vision, in which still more imperative orders for the removal of the relics were given; and, from that time forth, "not a single night passed without one, two, or even three of our companions receiving revelations in dreams that the bodies of the saints were to be transferred from that place to another." At last a priest, Hildfrid, saw, in a dream, a venerable white-haired man in a priest's vestments, who bitterly reproached Eginhard for not obeying the repeated orders of the saints; and, upon this, the journey was commenced. Why Eginhard delayed obedience to these repeated visions so long does not appear. He does not say so, in so many words, but the general tenor of the narrative leads one to suppose that Mulinheim (afterwards Seligenstadt) is the "solitary place" in which he had built the church which awaited dedication. In that case, all the people about him would know that he desired that the saints should go there. If a glimmering of secular sense led him to be a little suspicious about the real cause of the unanimity of the visionary beings who manifested themselves to his _entourage_, in favour of moving on, he does not say so. At the end of the first day's journey, the precious relics were deposited in the church of St. Martin, in the village of Ostheim. Hither, a paralytic nun (_sanctimonialis quædam paralytica_) of the name of Ruodlang was brought, in a car, by her friends and relatives from a monastery a league off. She spent the night watching and praying by the bier of the saints; "and health returning to all her members, on the morrow she went back to her place whence she came, on her feet, nobody supporting her, or in any way giving her assistance." (Cap. ii. 19.) On the second day, the relics were carried to Upper Mulinheim; and, finally, in accordance with the orders of the martyrs, deposited in the church of that place, which was therefore renamed Seligenstadt. Here, Daniel, a beggar boy of fifteen, and so bent that "he could not look at the sky without lying on his back," collapsed and fell down during the celebration of the Mass. "Thus he lay a long time, as if asleep, and all his limbs straightening and his flesh strengthening (_recepta firmitate nervorum_), he arose before our eyes, quite well." (Cap. ii. 20.) Some time afterwards an old man entered the church on his hands and knees, being unable to use his limbs properly:-- He, in presence of all of us, by the power of God and the merits of the blessed martyrs, in the same hour in which he entered was so perfectly cured that he walked without so much as a stick. And he said that, though he had been deaf for five years, his deafness had ceased along with the palsy. (Cap. iii. 33.) Eginhard was now obliged to return to the Court at Aix-la-Chapelle, where his duties kept him through the winter; and he is careful to point out that the later miracles which he proceeds to speak of are known to him only at second hand. But, as he naturally observes, having seen such wonderful events with his own eyes, why should he doubt similar narrations when they are received from trustworthy sources? Wonderful stories these are indeed, but as they are, for the most part, of the same general character as those already recounted, they may be passed over. There is, however, an account of a possessed maiden which is worth attention. This is set forth in a memoir, the principal contents of which are the speeches of a demon who declared himself to possess the singular appellation of "Wiggo," and revealed himself in the presence of many witnesses, before the altar, close to the relics of the blessed martyrs. It is noteworthy that the revelations appear to have been made in the shape of replies to the questions of the exorcising priest; and there is no means of judging how far the answers are, really, only the questions to which the patient replied yes or no. The possessed girl, about sixteen years of age, was brought by her parents to the basilica of the martyrs. When she approached the tomb containing the sacred bodies, the priest, according to custom, read the formula of exorcism over her head. When he began to ask how and when the demon had entered her, she answered, not in the tongue of the barbarians, which alone the girl knew, but in the Roman tongue. And when the priest was astonished and asked how she came to know Latin, when her parents, who stood by, were wholly ignorant of it, "Thou hast never seen my parents," was the reply. To this the priest, "Whence art thou, then, if these are not thy parents?" And the demon, by the mouth of the girl, "I am a follower and disciple of Satan, and for a long time I was gatekeeper (janitor) in hell; but for some years, along with eleven companions, I have ravaged the kingdom of the Franks." (Cap. v. 49.) He then goes on to tell how they blasted the crops and scattered pestilence among beasts and men, because of the prevalent wickedness of the people.[39] The enumeration of all these iniquities, in oratorical style, takes up a whole octavo page; and at the end it is stated, "All these things the demon spoke in Latin by the mouth of the girl." And when the priest imperatively ordered him to come out, "I shall go," said he, "not in obedience to you, but on account of the power of the saints, who do not allow me to remain any longer." And having said this, he threw the girl down on the floor and there compelled her to lie prostrate for a time, as though she slumbered. After a little while, however, he going away, the girl, by the power of Christ and the merits of the blessed martyrs, as it were awaking from sleep, rose up quite well, to the astonishment of all present; nor after the demon had gone out was she able to speak Latin: so that it was plain enough that it was not she who had spoken in that tongue, but the demon by her mouth. (Cap. v. 51.) If the "Historia Translationis" contained nothing more than has been laid before the reader, up to this time, disbelief in the miracles of which it gives so precise and full a record might well be regarded as hyper-scepticism. It might fairly be said, Here you have a man, whose high character, acute intelligence, and large instruction are certified by eminent contemporaries; a man who stood high in the confidence of one of the greatest rulers of any age, and whose other works prove him to be an accurate and judicious narrator of ordinary events. This man tells you, in language which bears the stamp of sincerity, of things which happened within his own knowledge, or within that of persons in whose veracity he has entire confidence, while he appeals to his sovereign and the court as witnesses of others; what possible ground can there be for disbelieving him? Well, it is hard upon Eginhard to say so, but it is exactly the honesty and sincerity of the man which are his undoing as a witness to the miraculous. He himself makes it quite obvious that when his profound piety comes on the stage, his good sense and even his perception of right and wrong, make their exit. Let us go back to the point at which we left him, secretly perusing the letter of Deacon Deusdona. As he tells us, its contents were that he [the deacon] had many relics of saints at home, and that he would give them to me if I would furnish him with the means of returning to Rome; he had observed that I had two mules, and if I would let him have one of them and would despatch with him a confidential servant to take charge of the relics, he would at once send them to me. This plausibly expressed proposition pleased me, and I made up my mind to test the value of the somewhat ambiguous promise at once;[40] so giving him the mule and money for his journey I ordered my notary Ratleig (who already desired to go to Rome to offer his devotions there) to go with him. Therefore, having left Aix-la-Chapelle (where the Emperor and his Court resided at the time) they came to Soissons. Here they spoke with Hildoin, abbot of the monastery of St. Medardus, because the said deacon had assured him that he had the means of placing in his possession the body of the blessed Tiburtius the Martyr. Attracted by which promises he (Hildoin) sent with them a certain priest, Hunus by name, a sharp man (_hominem callidum_), whom he ordered to receive and bring back the body of the martyr in question. And so, resuming their journey, they proceeded to Rome as fast as they could. (Cap. i. 3.) Unfortunately, a servant of the notary, one Reginbald, fell ill of a tertian fever, and impeded the progress of the party. However, this piece of adversity had its sweet uses; for three days before they reached Rome, Reginbald had a vision. Somebody habited as a deacon appeared to him and asked why his master was in such a hurry to get to Rome; and when Reginbald explained their business, this visionary deacon, who seems to have taken the measure of his brother in the flesh with some accuracy, told him not by any means to expect that Deusdona would fulfil his promises. Moreover, taking the servant by the hand, he led him to the top of a high mountain and, showing him Rome (where the man had never been), pointed out a church, adding "Tell Ratleig the thing he wants is hidden there; let him get it as quickly as he can and go back to his master." By way of a sign that the order was authoritative, the servant was promised that, from that time forth, his fever should disappear. And as the fever did vanish to return no more, the faith of Eginhard's people in Deacon Deusdona naturally vanished with it (_et fidem diaconi promissis non haberent_). Nevertheless, they put up at the deacon's house near St. Peter ad Vincula. But time went on and no relics made their appearance, while the notary and the priest were put off with all sorts of excuses--the brother to whom the relics had been confided was gone to Beneventum and not expected back for some time, and so on--until Ratleig and Hunus began to despair, and were minded to return, _infecto negotio_. But my notary, calling to mind his servant's dream, proposed to his companion that they should go to the cemetery which their host had talked about without him. So, having found and hired a guide, they went in the first place to the basilica of the blessed Tiburtius in the Via Labicana, about three thousand paces fron the town, and cautiously and carefully inspected the tomb of that martyr, in order to discover whether it could be opened without any one being the wiser. Then they descended into the adjoining crypt, in which the bodies of the blessed martyrs of Christ, Marcellinus and Petrus, were buried; and, having made out the nature of their tomb, they went away thinking their host would not know what they had been about. But things fell out differently from what they had imagined. (Cap. i. 7.) In fact, Deacon Deusdona, who doubtless kept an eye on his guests, knew all about their manoeuvres and made haste to offer his services, in order that, "with the help of God" (_si Deus votis eorum favere dignaretur_), they should all work together. The deacon was evidently alarmed lest they should succeed without _his_ help. So, by way of preparation for the contemplated _vol avec effraction_ they fasted three days; and then, at night, without being seen, they betook themselves to the basilica of St. Tiburtius, and tried to break open the altar erected over his remains. But the marble proving too solid, they descended to the crypt, and, "having evoked our Lord Jesus Christ and adored the holy martyrs," they proceeded to prise off the stone which covered the tomb, and thereby exposed the body of the most sacred martyr, Marcellinus, "whose head rested on a marble tablet on which his name was inscribed." The body was taken up with the greatest veneration, wrapped in a rich covering, and given over to the keeping of the deacon and his brother, Lunison, while the stone was replaced with such care that no sign of the theft remained. As sacrilegious proceedings of this kind were punishable with death by the Roman law, it seems not unnatural that Deacon Deusdona should have become uneasy, and have urged Ratleig to be satisfied with what he had got and be off with his spoils. But the notary having thus cleverly captured the blessed Marcellinus, thought it a pity he should be parted from the blessed Petrus, side by side with whom he had rested, for five hundred years and more, in the same sepulchre (as Eginhard pathetically observes); and the pious man could neither eat, drink, nor sleep, until he had compassed his desire to re-unite the saintly colleagues. This time, apparently in consequence of Deusdona's opposition to any further resurrectionist doings, he took counsel with a Greek monk, one Basil, and, accompanied by Hunus, but saying nothing to Deusdona, they committed another sacrilegious burglary, securing this time, not only the body of the blessed Petrus, but a quantity of dust, which they agreed the priest should take, and tell his employer that it was the remains of the blessed Tiburtius. How Deusdona was "squared," and what he got for his not very valuable complicity in these transactions, does not appear. But at last the relics were sent off in charge of Lunison, the brother of Deusdona, and the priest Hunus, as far as Pavia, while Ratleig stopped behind for a week to see if the robbery was discovered, and, presumably, to act as a blind, if any hue and cry was raised. But, as everything remained quiet, the notary betook himself to Pavia, where he found Lunison and Hunus awaiting his arrival. The notary's opinion of the character of his worthy colleagues, however, may be gathered from the fact that, having persuaded them to set out in advance along the road which he told them he was about to take, he immediately adopted another route, and, travelling by way of St. Maurice and the Lake of Geneva, eventually reached Soleure. Eginhard tells all this story with the most naive air of unconsciousness that there is anything remarkable about an abbot, and a high officer of state to boot, being an accessory, both before and after the fact, to a most gross and scandalous act of sacrilegious and burglarious robbery. And an amusing sequel to the story proves that, where relics were concerned, his friend Hildoin, another high ecclesiastical dignitary, was even less scrupulous than himself. On going to the palace early one morning, after the saints were safely bestowed at Seligenstadt, he found Hildoin waiting for an audience in the Emperor's antechamber, and began to talk to him about the miracle of the bloody exudation. In the course of conversation, Eginhard happened to allude to the remarkable fineness of the garment of the blessed Marcellinus. Whereupon Abbot Hildoin observed (to Eginhard's stupefaction) that his observation was quite correct. Much astonished at this remark from a person who was supposed not to have seen the relics, Eginhard asked him how he knew that? Upon this, Hildoin saw that he had better make a clean breast of it, and he told the following story, which he had received from his priestly agent, Hunus. While Hunus and Lunison were at Pavia, waiting for Eginhard's notary, Hunus (according to his own account) had robbed the robbers. The relics were placed in a church; and a number of laymen and clerics, of whom Hunus was one, undertook to keep watch over them. One night, however, all the watchers, save the wide-awake Hunus, went to sleep; and then, according to the story which this "sharp" ecclesiastic foisted upon his patron, it was borne in upon his mind that there must be some great reason why all the people, except himself, had suddenly become somnolent; and, determining to avail himself of the opportunity thus offered (_oblata occasione utendum_), he rose and, having lighted a candle, silently approached the chests. Then, having burnt through the threads of the seals with the flame of the candle, he quickly opened the chests, which had no locks;[41] and taking out portions of each of the bodies which were thus exposed, he closed the chests and connected the burnt ends of the threads with the seals again, so that they appeared not to have been touched; and, no one having seen him, he returned to his place. (Cap. iii. 23.) Hildoin went on to tell Eginhard that Hunus at first declared to him that these purloined relics belonged to St. Tiburtius; but afterwards confessed, as a great secret, how he had come by them, and he wound up his discourse thus: They have a place of honour beside St. Medardus, where they are worshipped with great veneration by all the people; but whether we may keep them or not is for your judgment (Cap. iii. 23.) Poor Eginhard was thrown into a state of great perturbation of mind by this revelation. An acquaintance of his had recently told him of a rumour that was spread about that Hunus had contrived to abstract _all_ the remains of SS. Marcellinus and Petrus while Eginhard's agents were in a drunken sleep; and that, while the real relics were in Abbot Hildoin's hands at St. Medardus, the shrine at Seligenstadt contained nothing but a little dust. Though greatly annoyed by this "execrable rumour, spread everywhere by the subtlety of the devil," Eginhard had doubtless comforted himself by his supposed knowledge of its falsity, and he only now discovered how considerable a foundation there was for the scandal. There was nothing for it but to insist upon the return of the stolen treasures. One would have thought that the holy man, who had admitted himself to be knowingly a receiver of stolen goods, would have made instant restitution and begged only for absolution. But Eginhard intimates that he had very great difficulty in getting his brother abbot to see that even restitution was necessary. Hildoin's proceedings were not of such a nature as to lead any one to place implicit confidence in anything he might say; still less had his agent, priest Hunus, established much claim to confidence; and it is not surprising that Eginhard should have lost no time in summoning his notary and Lunison to his presence, in order that he might hear what they had to say about the business. They, however, at once protested that priest Hunus's story was a parcel of lies, and that after the relics left Rome no one had any opportunity of meddling with them. Moreover, Lunison, throwing himself at Eginhard's feet, confessed with many tears what actually took place. It will be remembered that after the body of St. Marcellinus was abstracted from its tomb, Ratleig deposited it in the house of Deusdona, in charge of the latter's brother, Lunison. But Hunus, being very much disappointed that he could not get hold of the body of St. Tiburtius, and afraid to go back to his abbot empty-handed, bribed Lunison with four pieces of gold and five of silver to give him access to the chest. This Lunison did, and Hunus helped himself to as much as would fill a gallon measure (_vas sextarii mensuram_) of the sacred remains. Eginhard's indignation at the "rapine" of this "nequissimus nebulo" is exquisitely droll. It would appear that the adage about the receiver being as bad as the thief was not current in the ninth century. Let us now briefly sum up the history of the acquisition of the relics. Eginhard makes a contract with Deusdona for the delivery of certain relics which the latter says he possesses. Eginhard makes no inquiry how he came by them; otherwise, the transaction is innocent enough. Deusdona turns out to be a swindler, and has no relics. Thereupon Eginhard's agent, after due fasting and prayer, breaks open the tombs and helps himself. Eginhard discovers by the self-betrayal of his brother abbot, Hildoin, that portions of his relics have been stolen and conveyed to the latter. With much ado he succeeds in getting them back. Hildoin's agent, Hunus, in delivering these stolen goods to him, at first declared they were the relics of St. Tiburtius, which Hildoin desired him to obtain; but afterwards invented a story of their being the product of a theft, which the providential drowsiness of his companions enabled him to perpetrate, from the relics which Hildoin well knew were the property of his friend. Lunison, on the contrary, swears that all his story is false, and that he himself was bribed by Hunus to allow him to steal what he pleased from the property confided to his own and his brother's care by their guest Ratleig. And the honest notary himself seems to have no hesitation about lying and stealing to any extent, where the acquisition of relics is the object in view. For a parallel to these transactions one must read a police report of the doings of a "long firm" or of a set of horse-coupers; yet Eginhard seems to be aware of nothing, but that he has been rather badly used by his friend Hildoin, and the "nequissimus nebulo" Hunus. It is not easy for a modern Protestant, still less for any one who has the least tincture of scientific culture, whether physical or historical, to picture to himself the state of mind of a man of the ninth century, however cultivated, enlightened, and sincere he may have been. His deepest convictions, his most cherished hopes, were bound up with the belief in the miraculous. Life was a constant battle between saints and demons for the possession of the souls of men. The most superstitious among our modern countrymen turn to supernatural agencies only when natural causes seem insufficient; to Eginhard and his friends the supernatural was the rule; and the sufficiency of natural causes was allowed only when there was nothing to suggest others. Moreover, it must be recollected that the possession of miracle-working relics was greatly coveted, not only on high, but on very low grounds. To a man like Eginhard, the mere satisfaction of the religious sentiment was obviously a powerful attraction. But, more than, this, the possession of such a treasure was an immense practical advantage. If the saints were duly flattered and worshipped, there was no telling what benefits might result from their interposition on your behalf. For physical evils, access to the shrine was like the grant of the use of a universal pill and ointment manufactory; and pilgrimages thereto might suffice to cleanse the performers from any amount of sin. A letter to Lupus, subsequently abbot of Ferrara, written while Eginhard was smarting under the grief caused by the loss of his much-loved wife Imma, affords a striking insight into the current view of the relation between the glorified saints and their worshippers. The writer shows that he is anything but satisfied with the way in which he has been treated by the blessed martyrs whose remains he has taken such pains to "convey" to Seligenstadt, and to honour there as they would never have been honoured in their Roman obscurity. It is an aggravation of my grief and a reopening of my wound, that our vows have been of no avail, and that the faith which we placed in the merits and intervention of the martyrs has been utterly disappointed. We may admit, then, without impeachment of Eginhard's sincerity, or of his honour under all ordinary circumstances, that when piety, self-interest, the glory of the Church in general, and that of the church at Seligenstadt in particular, all pulled one way, even the workaday principles of morality were disregarded; and, _a fortiori_, anything like proper investigation of the reality of alleged miracles was thrown to the winds. And if this was the condition of mind of such a man as Eginhard, what is it not legitimate to suppose may have been that of Deacon Deusdona, Lunison, Hunus, and Company, thieves and cheats by their own confession, or of the probably hysterical nun, or of the professional beggars, for whose incapacity to walk and straighten themselves there is no guarantee but their own? Who is to make sure that the exorcist of the demon Wiggo was not just such another priest as Hunus; and is it not at least possible, when Eginhard's servants dreamed, night after night, in such a curiously coincident fashion, that a careful inquirer might have found they were very anxious to please their master. Quite apart from deliberate and conscious fraud (which is a rarer thing than is often supposed), people, whose mythopoeic faculty is once stirred, are capable of saying the thing that is not, and of acting as they should not, to an extent which is hardly imaginable by persons who are not so easily affected by the contagion of blind faith. There is no falsity so gross that honest men and, still more, virtuous women, anxious to promote a good cause, will not lend themselves to it without any clear consciousness of the moral bearings of what they are doing. The cases of miraculously-effected cures of which Eginhard is ocular witness appear to belong to classes of disease in which malingering is possible or hysteria presumable. Without modern means of diagnosis, the names given to them are quite worthless. One "miracle," however, in which the patient, a woman, was cured by the mere sight of the church in which the relics of the blessed martyrs lay, is an unmistakable case of dislocation of the lower jaw; and it is obvious that, as not unfrequently happens in such accidents in weakly subjects, the jaws slipped suddenly back into place, perhaps in consequence of a jolt, as the woman rode towards the church. (Cap. v. 53.)[42] There is also a good deal said about a very questionable blind man--one Albricus (Alberich?)--who, having been cured, not of his blindness, but of another disease under which he laboured, took up his quarters at Seligenstadt, and came out as a prophet, inspired by the Archangel Gabriel. Eginhard intimates that his prophecies were fulfilled; but as he does not state exactly what they were, or how they were accomplished, the statement must be accepted with much caution. It is obvious that he was not the man to hesitate to "ease" a prophecy until it fitted, if the credit of the shrine of his favourite saints could be increased by such a procedure. There is no impeachment of his honour in the supposition. The logic of the matter is quite simple, if somewhat sophistical. The holiness of the church of the martyrs guarantees the reality of the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel there; and what the archangel says must be true. Therefore, if anything seem to be wrong, that must be the mistake of the transmitter; and, in justice to the archangel, it must be suppressed or set right. This sort of "reconciliation" is not unknown in quite modern times, and among people who would be very much shocked to be compared with a "benighted papist" of the ninth century. The readers of this essay are, I imagine, very largely composed of people who would be shocked to be regarded as anything but enlightened Protestants. It is not unlikely that those of them who have accompanied me thus far may be disposed to say, "Well, this is all very amusing as a story, but what is the practical interest of it? We are not likely to believe in the miracles worked by the spolia of SS. Marcellinus and Petrus, or by those of any other saints in the Roman Calendar." The practical interest is this: if you do not believe in these miracles recounted by a witness whose character and competency are firmly established, whose sincerity cannot be doubted, and who appeals to his sovereign and other contemporaries as witnesses of the truth of what he says, in a document of which a MS. copy exists, probably dating within a century of the author's death, why do you profess to believe in stories of a like character, which are found in documents of the dates and of the authorship of which nothing is certainly determined, and no known copies of which come within two or three centuries of the events they record? If it be true that the four Gospels and the Acts were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all that we know of these persons comes to nothing in comparison with our knowledge of Eginhard; and not only is there no proof that the traditional authors of these works wrote them, but very strong reasons to the contrary may be alleged. If, therefore, you refuse to believe that "Wiggo" was cast out of the possessed girl on Eginhard's authority, with what justice can you profess to believe that the legion of devils were cast out of the man among the tombs of the Gadarenes? And if, on the other hand, you accept Eginhard's evidence, why do you laugh at the supposed efficacy of relics and the saint-worship of the modern Romanists? It cannot be pretended, in the face of all evidence, that the Jews of the year 30 A.D., or thereabouts, were less imbued with the belief in the supernatural than were the Franks of the year 800 A.D. The same influences were at work in each case, and it is only reasonable to suppose that the results were the same. If the evidence of Eginhard is insufficient to lead reasonable men to believe in the miracles he relates, _a fortiori_ the evidence afforded by the Gospels and the Acts must be so.[43] But it may be said that no serious critic denies the genuineness of the four great Pauline Epistles--Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, and Romans--and that in three out of these four Paul lays claim to the power of working miracles.[44] Must we suppose, therefore, that the Apostle to the Gentiles has stated that which is false? But to how much does this so-called claim amount? It may mean much or little. Paul nowhere tells us what he did in this direction; and in his sore need to justify his assumption of apostleship against the sneers of his enemies, it is hardly likely that, if he had any very striking cases to bring forward, he would have neglected evidence so well calculated to put them to shame. And, without the slightest impeachment of Paul's veracity, we must further remember that his strongly-marked mental characteristics, displayed in unmistakable fashion by these Epistles, are anything but those which would justify us in regarding him as a critical witness respecting matters of fact, or as a trustworthy interpreter of their significance. When a man testifies to a miracle, he not only states a fact, but he adds an interpretation of the fact. We may admit his evidence as to the former, and yet think his opinion as to the latter worthless. If Eginhard's calm and objective narrative of the historical events of his time is no guarantee for the soundness of his judgment where the supernatural is concerned, the heated rhetoric of the Apostle of the Gentiles, his absolute confidence in the "inner light," and the extraordinary conceptions of the nature and requirements of logical proof which he betrays, in page after page of his Epistles, afford still less security. There is a comparatively modern man who shared to the full Paul's trust in the "inner light," and who, though widely different from the fiery evangelist of Tarsus in various obvious particulars, yet, if I am not mistaken, shares his deepest characteristics. I speak of George Fox, who separated himself from the current Protestantism of England, in the seventeenth century, as Paul separated himself from the Judaism of the first century, at the bidding of the "inner light"; who went through persecutions as serious as those which Paul enumerates; who was beaten, stoned, cast out for dead, imprisoned nine times, sometimes for long periods; who was in perils on land and perils at sea. George Fox was an even more widely-travelled missionary; while his success in founding congregations, and his energy in visiting them, not merely in Great Britain and Ireland and the West India Islands, but on the continent of Europe and that of North America, were no less remarkable. A few years after Fox began to preach, there were reckoned to be a thousand Friends in prison in the various gaols of England; at his death, less than fifty years after the foundation of the sect, there were 70,000 Quakers in the United Kingdom. The cheerfulness with which these people--women as well as men--underwent martyrdom in this country and in the New England States is one of the most remarkable facts in the history of religion. No one who reads the voluminous autobiography of "Honest George" can doubt the man's utter truthfulness; and though, in his multitudinous letters, he but rarely rises for above the incoherent commonplaces of a street preacher, there can be no question of his power as a speaker, nor any doubt as to the dignity and attractiveness of his personality, or of his possession of a large amount of practical good sense and governing faculty. But that George Fox had full faith in his own powers as a miracle-worker, the following passage of his autobiography (to which others might he added) demonstrates:-- Now after I was set at liberty from Nottingham gaol (where I had been kept a prisoner a pretty long time) I travelled as before, in the work of the Lord. And coming to Mansfield Woodhouse, there was a distracted woman, under a doctor's hand, with her hair let loose all about her ears; and he was about to let her blood, she being first bound, and many people being about her, holding her by violence; but he could get no blood from her. And I desired them to unbind her and let her alone; for they could not touch the spirit in her by which she was tormented. So they did unbind her, and I was moved to speak to her, and in the name of the Lord to bid her be quiet and still. And she was so. And the Lord's power settled her mind and she mended; and afterwards received the truth and continued in it to her death. And the Lord's name was honoured; to whom the glory of all His works belongs. Many great and wonderful things were wrought by the heavenly power in those days. For the Lord made bare his omnipotent arm and manifested His power to the astonishment of many; by the healing virtue whereof many have been delivered from great infirmities, and the devils were made subject through his name: of which particular instances might be given beyond what this unbelieving age is able to receive or bear.[45] It needs no long study of Fox's writings, however, to arrive at the conviction that the distinction between subjective and objective verities had not the same place in his mind as it has in that of an ordinary mortal. When an ordinary person would say "I thought so and so," or "I made up my mind to do so and so," George Fox says, "It was opened to me," or "at the command of God I did so and so." "Then at the command of God on the ninth day of the seventh month 1643 (Fox being just nineteen), I left my relations and brake off all familiarity or friendship with young or old." "About the beginning of the year 1647 I was moved of the Lord to go into Darbyshire." Fox hears voices and he sees visions, some of which he brings before the reader with apocalyptic power in the simple and strong English, alike untutored and undefiled, of which, like John Bunyan, his contemporary, he was a master. "And one morning as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over me and a temptation beset me; and I sate still. And it was said, _All things come by Nature_. And the elements and stars came over me; so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it.... And as I sate still under it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me, and a true voice arose in me which said, _There is a living God who made all things_. And immediately the cloud and the temptation vanished away, and life rose over it all, and my heart was glad and I praised the living God" (p. 13). If George Fox could speak, as he proves in this and some other passages he could write, his astounding influence on the contemporaries of Milton and of Cromwell is no mystery. But this modern reproduction of the ancient prophet, with his "Thus saith the Lord," "This is the work of the Lord," steeped in supernaturalism and glorying in blind faith, is the mental antipodes of the philosopher, founded in naturalism and a fanatic for evidence, to whom these affirmations inevitably suggest the previous question: "How do you know that the Lord saith it?" "How do you know that the Lord doeth it?" and who is compelled to demand that rational ground for belief, without which, to the man of science, assent is merely an immoral pretence. And it is this rational ground of belief which the writers of the Gospels, no less than Paul, and Eginhard, and Fox, so little dream of offering that they would regard the demand for it as a kind of blasphemy. FOOTNOTES: [33] My citations are made from Teulet's _Einhardi omnia quæ extant opera_, Paris, 1840-1843, which contains a biography of the author, a history of the text, with translations into French, and many valuable annotations. [34] At present included in the Duchies of Hesse-Darmstadt and Baden. [35] This took place in the year 826 A.D. The relics were brought from Rome and deposited in the Church of St. Medardus at Soissons. [36] Now included in Western Switzerland. [37] Probably, according to Teulet, the present Sandhoferfahrt, a little below the embouchure of the Neckar. [38] The present Michilstadt, thirty miles N.E. of Heidelberg. [39] In the Middle Ages one of the most favourite accusations against witches was that they committed just these enormities. [40] It is pretty clear that Eginhard had his doubts about the deacon, whose pledges he qualifies as _sponsiones incertæ_. But, to be sure, he wrote after events which fully justified scepticism. [41] The words are _scrinia sine clave_, which seems to mean "having no key." But the circumstances forbid the idea of breaking open. [42] Eginhard speaks with lofty contempt of the "vana ac superstitiosa præsumptio" of the poor woman's companions in trying to alleviate her sufferings with "herbs and frivolous incantations." Vain enough, no doubt, but the "mulierculæ" might have returned the epithet "superstitious" with interest. [43] Of course there is nothing new in this argument: but it does not grow weaker by age. And the case of Eginhard is far more instructive than that of Augustine, because the former has so very frankly, though incidentally, revealed to us not only his own mental and moral habits, but those of the people about him. [44] See 1 Cor. xii. 10-28; 2 Cor. vi. 12; Rom. xv. 19. [45] _A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, and Christian Experiences, &c., of George Fox_, Ed. 1694, pp. 27, 28. VI: POSSIBILITIES AND IMPOSSIBILITIES [1891] In the course of a discussion which has been going on during the last two years,[46] it has been maintained by the defenders of ecclesiastical Christianity that the demonology of the books of the New Testament is an essential and integral part of the revelation of the nature of the spiritual world promulgated by Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, if the historical accuracy of the Gospels and of the Acts of the Apostles is to be taken for granted, if the teachings of the Epistles are divinely inspired, and if the universal belief and practice of the primitive Church are the models which all later times must follow, there can be no doubt that those who accept the demonology are in the right. It is as plain as language can make it, that the writers of the Gospels believed in the existence of Satan and the subordinate ministers of evil as strongly as they believed in that of God and the angels, and that they had an unhesitating faith in possession and in exorcism. No reader of the first three Gospels can hesitate to admit that, in the opinion of those persons among whom the traditions out of which they are compiled arose, Jesus held, and constantly acted upon, the same theory of the spiritual world. Nowhere do we find the slightest hint that he doubted the theory, or questioned the efficacy of the curative operations based upon it. Thus, when such a story as that about the Gadarene swine is placed before us, the importance of the decision, whether it is to be accepted or rejected, cannot be over-estimated. If the demonological part of it is to be accepted, the authority of Jesus is unmistakably pledged to the demonological system current in Judæa in the first century. The belief in devils who possess men and can be transferred from men to pigs, becomes as much a part of Christian dogma as any article of the creeds. If it is to be rejected, there are two alternative conclusions. Supposing the Gospels to be historically accurate, it follows that Jesus shared in the errors, respecting the nature of the spiritual world, prevalent in the age in which he lived and among the people of his nation. If, on the other hand, the Gospel traditions gives us only a popular version of the sayings and doings of Jesus, falsely coloured and distorted by the superstitious imaginings of the minds through which it had passed, what guarantee have we that a similar unconscious falsification, in accordance with preconceived ideas, may not have taken place in respect of other reported sayings and doings? What is to prevent a conscientious inquirer from finding himself at last in a purely agnostic position with respect to the teachings of Jesus, and consequently with respect to the fundamentals of Christianity? In dealing with the question whether the Gadarene story was to be believed or not, I confined myself altogether to a discussion of the value of the evidence in its favour. And, as it was easy to prove that this consists of nothing more than three partially discrepant, but often verbally coincident, versions of an original, of the authorship of which nobody knows anything, it appeared to me that it was wholly worthless. Even if the event described had been probable, such evidence would have required corroboration; being grossly improbable, and involving acts questionable in their moral and legal aspect, the three accounts sank to the level of mere tales. Thus far, I am unable, even after the most careful revision, to find any flaw in my argument; and I incline to think none has been found by my critics--at least, if they have, they have kept the discovery to themselves. In another part of my treatment of the case I have been less fortunate. I was careful to say that, for anything I could "absolutely prove to the contrary," there might be in the universe demonic beings who could enter into and possess men, and even be transferred from them to pigs; and that I, for my part, could not venture to declare _à priori_ that the existence of such entities was "impossible." I was, however, no less careful to remark that I thought the evidence hitherto adduced in favour of the existence of such beings "ridiculously insufficient" to warrant the belief in them. To my surprise, this statement of what, after the closest reflection, I still conceive to be the right conclusion, has been hailed as a satisfactory admission by opponents, and lamented as a perilous concession by sympathisers. Indeed, the tone of the comments of some candid friends has been such that I began to suspect that I must be entering upon a process of retrogressive metamorphosis which might eventually give me a place among the respectabilities. The prospect, perhaps, ought to have pleased me; but I confess I felt something of the uneasiness of the tailor who said that, whenever a customer's circumference was either much less, or much more, than at the last measurement, he at once sent in his bill; and I was not consoled until I recollected that, thirteen years ago, in discussing Hume's essay on "Miracles," I had quoted, with entire assent, the following passage from his writings: "Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstrative argument or abstract reasoning _à priori_."[47] Now, it is certain that the existence of demons can be distinctly conceived. In fact, from the earliest times of which we have any record to the present day, the great majority of mankind have had extremely distinct conceptions of them, and their practical life has been more or less shaped by those conceptions. Further, the notion of the existence of such beings "implies no contradiction." No doubt, in our experience, intelligence and volition are always found in connection with a certain material organisation, and never disconnected with it; while, by the hypothesis, demons have no such material substratum. But then, as everybody knows, the exact relation between mental and physical phenomena, even in ourselves, is the subject of endless dispute. We may all have our opinions as to whether mental phenomena have a substratum distinct from that which is assumed to underlie material phenomena, or not; though if any one thinks he has demonstrative evidence of either the existence or the non-existence of a "soul," all I can say is, his notion of demonstration differs from mine. But, if it be impossible to demonstrate the non-existence of a "substance" of mental phenomena--that is, of a soul--independent of material "substance"; if the idea of such a "soul" is "intelligible and can be distinctly conceived," then it follows that it is not justifiable to talk of demons as "impossibilities." The idea of their existence implies no more "contradiction" than does the idea of the existence of pathogenic microbes in the air. Indeed, the microbes constitute a tolerably exact physical analogue of the "powers of the air" of ancient belief. Strictly speaking, I am unaware of any thing that has a right to the title of an "impossibility" except a contradiction in terms. There are impossibilities logical, but none natural. A "round square," a "present past," "two parallel lines that intersect," are impossibilities, because the ideas denoted by the predicates, _round, present, intersect_, are contradictory of the ideas denoted by the subjects, _square, past, parallel_. But walking on water, or turning water into wine, or procreation without male intervention, or raising the dead, are plainly not "impossibilities" in this sense. In the affirmation, that a man walked upon water, the idea of the subject is not contradictory of that in the predicate. Naturalists are familiar with insects which walk on water, and imagination has no more difficulty in putting a man in place of the insect than it has in giving a man some of the attributes of a bird and making an angel of him; or in ascribing to him the ascensive tendencies of a balloon, as the "levitationists" do. Undoubtedly, there are very strong physical and biological arguments for thinking it extremely improbable that a man could be supported on the surface of the water as the insect is; or that his organisation could be compatible with the possession and use of wings; or that he could rise through the air without mechanical aid. Indeed, if we have any reason to believe that our present knowledge of the nature of things exhausts the possibilities of nature, we might properly say that the attributes of men are contradictory of walking on water, or floating in the air, and consequently that these acts are truly "impossible" for him. But it is sufficiently obvious, not only that we are at the beginning of our knowledge of nature, instead of having arrived at the end of it, but that the limitations of our faculties are such that we never can be in a position to set bounds to the possibilities of nature. We have knowledge of what is happening and of what has happened; of what will happen we have and can have no more than expectation, grounded on our more or less correct reading of past experience and prompted by the faith, begotten of that experience, that the order of nature in the future will resemble its order in the past. The same considerations apply to the other examples of supposed miraculous events. The change of water into wine undoubtedly implies a contradiction, and is assuredly "impossible," if we are permitted to assume that the "elementary bodies" of the chemists are, now and for ever, immutable. Not only, however, is a negative proposition of this kind incapable of proof, but modern chemistry is inclining towards the contrary doctrine. And if carbon can be got out of hydrogen or oxygen, the conversion of water into wine comes within range of scientific possibility--it becomes a mere question of molecular arrangement. As for virgin procreation, it is not only clearly imaginable, but modern biology recognises it as an everyday occurrence among some groups of animals. So with restoration to life after death. Certain animals, long as dry as mummies, and, to all appearance, as dead, when placed in proper conditions resume their vitality. It may be said that these creatures are not dead, but merely in a condition of suspended vitality. That, however, is only begging the question by making the incapacity for restoration to life part of the definition of death. In the absence of obvious lesions of some of the more important organs, it is no easy matter, even for experts, to say that an apparently dead man is incapable of restoration to life; and, in the recorded instances of such restoration, the want of any conclusive evidence that the man was dead is even more remarkable than the insufficiency of the testimony as to his coming to life again. It may be urged, however, that there is, at any rate, one miracle certified by all three of the Synoptic Gospels which really does "imply a contradiction," and is, therefore, "impossible" in the strictest sense of the word. This is the well-known story of the feeding of several thousand men, to the complete satisfaction of their hunger, by the distribution of a few loaves and fishes among them; the wondrousness of this already somewhat surprising performance being intensified by the assertion that the quantity of the fragments of the meal, left over, amounted to much more than the original store. Undoubtedly, if the operation is stated in its most general form; if it is to be supposed that a certain quantity, or magnitude, was divided into many more parts than the whole contained; and that, after the subtraction of several thousands of such parts, the magnitude of the remainder amounted to more than the original magnitude, there does seem to be an _à priori_ difficulty about accepting the proposition, seeing that it appears to be contradictory of the senses which we attach to the words "whole" and "parts" respectively. But this difficulty is removed if we reflect that we are not, in this case, dealing with magnitude in the abstract, or with "whole" and "parts" in their mathematical sense, but with concrete things, many of which are known to possess the power of growing, or increasing in magnitude. They thus furnish us with a conception of growth which we may, in imagination, apply to loaves and fishes; just as we may, in imagination, apply the idea of wings to the idea of a man. It must be admitted that a number of sheep might be fed on a pasture, and yet there might be more grass on the pasture, when the sheep left it, than there was at first. We may generalise this and other such facts into a perfectly definite conception of the increase of food in excess of consumption; which thus becomes a possibility, the limitations of which are to be discovered only by experience. Therefore, if it is asserted that cooked food has been made to grow in excess of rapid consumption, that statement cannot logically be rejected as an _à priori_ impossibility, however improbable experience of the capabilities of cooked food may justify us in holding it to be. On the strength of this undeniable improbability, however, we not only have a right to demand, but are morally bound to require, strong evidence in its favour before we even take it into serious consideration. But what is the evidence in this case? It is merely that of those three books,[48] which also concur in testifying to the truth of the monstrous legend of the herd of swine. In these three books, there are five accounts of a "miraculous feeding," which fall into two groups. Three of the stories, obviously derived from some common source, state that five loaves and two fishes sufficed to feed five thousand persons, and that twelve baskets of fragments remained over. In the two others, also obviously derived from a common source, distinct from the preceding, seven loaves and a few small fishes are distributed to four thousand persons, and seven baskets of fragments are left. If we were dealing with secular records, I suppose no candid and competent student of history would entertain much doubt that the originals of the three stories and of the two are themselves merely divergent versions of some primitive story which existed before the three Synoptic gospels were compiled out of the body of traditions current about Jesus. This view of the case, however, is incompatible with a belief in the historical accuracy of the first and second gospels.[49] For these agree in making Jesus himself speak of both the "four thousand" and the "five thousand" miracle. "When I brake the five loaves among the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces took ye up? They say unto him, twelve. And when the seven among the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces took ye up? And they say unto him, seven." Thus we are face to face with a dilemma the way of escape from which is not obvious. Either the "four thousand" and the "five thousand" stories are both historically true, and describe two separate events; or the first and second gospels testify to the very words of a conversation between Jesus and his disciples which cannot have been uttered. My choice between these alternatives is determined by no _à priori_ speculations about the possibility or impossibility of such events as the feeding of the four or of the five thousand. But I ask myself the question, What evidence ought to be produced before I could feel justified in saying that I believed such an event to have occurred? That question is very easily answered. Proof must be given (1) of the weight of the loaves and fishes at starting; (2) of the distribution to 4-5,000 persons, without any additional supply, of this quantity and quality of food; (3) of the satisfaction of these people's appetites; (4) of the weight and quality of the fragments gathered up into the baskets. Whatever my present notions of probability and improbability may be, satisfactory testimony under these four heads would lead me to believe that they were erroneous; and I should accept the so-called miracle as a new and unexpected example of the possibilities of nature. But when, instead of such evidence, nothing is produced but two sets of discrepant stories, originating nobody knows how or when, among persons who could believe as firmly in devils which enter pigs, I confess that my feeling is one of astonishment that any one should expect a reasonable man to take such testimony seriously. I am anxious to bring about a clear understanding of the difference between "impossibilities" and "improbabilities," because mistakes on this point lay us open to the attacks of ecclesiastical apologists of the type of the late Cardinal Newman; acute sophists, who think it fitting to employ their intellects, as burglars employ dark lanterns for the discovery of other people's weak places, while they carefully keep the light away from their own position. When it is rightly stated, the Agnostic view of "miracles" is, in my judgment, unassailable. We are _not_ justifiable in the _à priori_ assertion that the order of nature, as experience has revealed it to us, cannot change. In arguing about the miraculous, the assumption is illegitimate, because it involves the whole point in dispute. Furthermore, it is an assumption which takes us beyond the range of our faculties. Obviously, no amount of past experience can warrant us in anything more than a correspondingly strong expectation for the present and future. We find, practically, that expectations, based upon careful observations of events, are, as a rule, trustworthy. We should be foolish indeed not to follow the only guide we have through life. But, for all that, our highest and surest generalisations remain on the level of justifiable expectations; that is, very high probabilities. For my part, I am unable to conceive of an intelligence shaped on the model of that of man, however superior it might be, which could be any better off than our own in this respect; that is, which could possess logically justifiable grounds for certainty about the constancy of the order of things, and therefore be in a position to declare that such and such events are impossible. Some of the old mythologies recognised this clearly enough. Beyond and above Zeus and Odin, there lay the unknown and inscrutable Fate which, one day or other, would crumple up them and the world they ruled to give place to a new order of things. I sincerely hope that I shall not be accused of Pyrrhonism, or of any desire to weaken the foundations of rational certainty. I have merely desired to point out that rational certainty is one thing, and talk about "impossibilities," or "violation of natural laws," another. Rational certainty rests upon two grounds--the one that the evidence in favour of a given statement is as good as it can be; the other that such evidence is plainly insufficient. In the former case, the statement is to be taken as true, in the latter as untrue; until something arises to modify the verdict, which, however properly reached, may always be more or less wrong, the best information being never complete, and the best reasoning being liable to fallacy. To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs, would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life, with due thought for the morrow, because no man can be sure he will be alive an hour hence. Such are the conditions imposed upon us by nature, and we have to make the best of them. And I think that the greatest mistake those of us who are interested in the progress of free thought can make is to overlook these limitations, and to deck ourselves with the dogmatic feathers which are the traditional adornment of our opponents. Let us be content with rational certainty, leaving irrational certainties to those who like to muddle their minds with them. I cannot see my way to say that demons are impossibilities; but I am not more certain about anything, than I am that the evidence tendered in favour of the demonology, of which the Gadarene story is a typical example, is utterly valueless. I cannot see my way to say that it is "impossible" that the hunger of thousands of men should be satisfied out of the food supplied by half-a-dozen loaves and a fish or two; but it seems to me monstrous that I should be asked to believe it on the faith of the five stories which testify to such an occurrence. It is true that the position that miracles are "impossible" cannot be sustained. But I know of nothing which calls upon me to qualify the grave verdict of Hume: "There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned goodness, education, and learning as to secure us against all delusion in themselves; of such undoubted integrity as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind as to have a great deal to lose in case of their being detected in any falsehood; and at the same time attesting facts performed in such a public manner, and in so celebrated a part of the world, as to render the detection unavoidable: _all which circumstances are requisite to give us a full assurance in the testimony of men_."[50] The preceding paper called forth the following criticism signed "Agnosco," to which I append my reply:-- While agreeing generally with Professor Huxley's remarks respecting miracles, in "The Agnostic Annual for 1892," it has seemed to me that one of his arguments at least requires qualification. The Professor, in maintaining that so-called miraculous events are possible, although the evidence adduced is not sufficient to render them probable, refers to the possibility of changing water into wine by molecular recomposition. He tells us that, "if carbon can be got out of hydrogen or oxygen, the conversion of water into wine comes within range of scientific possibility." But in maintaining that miracles (so-called) have a _prospective_ possibility, Professor Huxley loses sight--at least, so it appears to me--of the question of their _retrospective_ possibility. For, if it requires a certain degree of knowledge and experience, yet far from having been attained, to perform those acts which have been called miraculous, it is not only improbable, but impossible likewise, that they should have been done by men whose knowledge and experience were considerably less than our own. It has seemed to me, in fact, that this question of the retrospective possibility of miracles is more important to us Rationalists, and, for the matter of that, to Christians also, than the question of their prospective possibility, with which Professor Huxley's article mainly deals. Perhaps the Professor himself could help those of us who think so, by giving us his opinion. I am not sure that I fully appreciate the point raised by "Agnosco," nor the distinction between the prospective and the retrospective "possibility" of such a miracle as the conversion of water into wine. If we may contemplate such an event as "possible" in London in the year 1900, it must, in the same sense, have been "possible" in the year 30 (or thereabouts) at Cana in Galilee. If I should live so long, I shall take great interest in the announcement of the performance of this operation, say, nine years hence; and, if there is no objection raised by chemical experts, I shall accept the fact that the feat has been performed, without hesitation. But I shall have no more ground for believing the Cana story than I had before; simply because the evidence in its favour will remain, for me, exactly where it is. Possible or impossible, that evidence is worth nothing. To leave the safe ground of "no evidence" for speculations about impossibilities, consequent upon the want of scientific knowledge of the supposed workers of miracles, appears to me to be a mistake; especially in view of the orthodox contention that they possessed supernatural power and supernatural knowledge. T.H. HUXLEY. FOOTNOTES: [46] 1889-1891. See the next Essay (VII) and those which follow it. [47] _Inquiry Concerning the Human Understanding_, p. 5; 1748. The passage is cited and discussed in my _Hume_, pp. 132, 133. [48] The story in John vi. 5-14 is obviously derived from the "five thousand" narrative of the Synoptics. [49] Matthew xvi. 5-12; Mark viii. 14-21. [50] Hume, _Inquiry_, sec. X., part ii. VII: AGNOSTICISM [1889] Within the last few months, the public has received much and varied information on the subject of agnostics, their tenets, and even their future. Agnosticism exercised the orators of the Church Congress at Manchester.[51] It has been furnished with a set of "articles" fewer, but not less rigid, and certainly not less consistent than the thirty-nine; its nature has been analysed, and its future severely predicted by the most eloquent of that prophetical school whose Samuel is Auguste Comte. It may still be a question, however, whether the public is as much the wiser as might be expected, considering all the trouble that has been taken to enlighten it. Not only are the three accounts of the agnostic position sadly out of harmony with one another, but I propose to show cause for my belief that all three must be seriously questioned by any one who employs the term "agnostic" in the sense in which it was originally used. The learned Principal of King's College, who brought the topic of Agnosticism before the Church Congress, took a short and easy way of settling the business:-- But if this be so, for a man to urge, as an escape from this article of belief, that he has no means of a scientific knowledge of the unseen world, or of the future, is irrelevant. His difference from Christians lies not in the fact that he has no knowledge of these things, but that he does not believe the authority on which they are stated. He may prefer to call himself an Agnostic; but his real name is an older one--he is an infidel; that is to say, an unbeliever. The word infidel, perhaps, carries an unpleasant significance. Perhaps it is right that it should. It is, and it ought to be, an unpleasant thing for a man to have to say plainly that he does not believe in Jesus Christ.[52] So much of Dr. Wace's address either explicitly or implicitly concerns me, that I take upon myself to deal with it; but, in so doing, it must be understood that I speak for myself alone. I am not aware that there is any sect of Agnostics; and if there be, I am not its acknowledged prophet or pope. I desire to leave to the Comtists the entire monopoly of the manufacture of imitation ecclesiasticism. Let us calmly and dispassionately consider Dr. Wace's appreciation of agnosticism. The agnostic, according to his view, is a person who says he has no means of attaining a scientific knowledge of the unseen world or of the future; by which somewhat loose phraseology Dr. Wace presumably means the theological unseen world and future. I cannot think this description happy, either in form or substance, but for the present it may pass. Dr. Wace continues, that it is not "his difference from Christians." Are there then any Christians who say that they know nothing about the unseen world and the future? I was ignorant of the fact, but I am ready to accept it on the authority of a professional theologian, and I proceed to Dr. Wace's next proposition. The real state of the case, then, is that the agnostic "does not believe the authority" on which "these things" are stated, which authority is Jesus Christ. He is simply an old-fashioned "infidel" who is afraid to own to his right name. As "Presbyter is priest writ large," so is "agnostic" the mere Greek equivalent for the Latin "infidel." There is an attractive simplicity about this solution of the problem; and it has that advantage of being somewhat offensive to the persons attacked, which is so dear to the less refined sort of controversialist. The agnostic says, "I cannot find good evidence that so and so is true." "Ah," says his adversary, seizing his opportunity, "then you declare that Jesus Christ was untruthful, for he said so and so;" a very telling method of rousing prejudice. But suppose that the value of the evidence as to what Jesus may have said and done, and as to the exact nature and scope of his authority, is just that which the agnostic finds it most difficult to determine. If I venture to doubt that the Duke of Wellington gave the command "Up, Guards, and at 'em!" at Waterloo, I do not think that even Dr. Wace would accuse me of disbelieving the Duke. Yet it would be just as reasonable to do this as to accuse any one of denying what Jesus said, before the preliminary question as to what he did say is settled. Now, the question as to what Jesus really said and did is strictly a scientific problem, which is capable of solution by no other methods than those practised by the historian and the literary critic. It is a problem of immense difficulty, which has occupied some of the best heads in Europe for the last century; and it is only of late years that their investigations have begun to converge towards one conclusion.[53] That kind of faith which Dr. Wace describes and lauds is of no use here. Indeed, he himself takes pains to destroy its evidential value. "What made the Mahommedan world? Trust and faith in the declarations and assurances of Mahommed. And what made the Christian world? Trust and faith in the declarations and assurances of Jesus Christ and His Apostles" (l.c. p. 253). The triumphant tone of this imaginary catechism leads me to suspect that its author has hardly appreciated its full import. Presumably, Dr. Wace regards Mahommed as an unbeliever, or, to use the term which he prefers, infidel; and considers that his assurances have given rise to a vast delusion which has led, and is leading, millions of men straight to everlasting punishment. And this being so, the "Trust and faith" which have "made the Mahommedan world," in just the same sense as they have "made the Christian world," must be trust and faith in falsehoods. No man who has studied history, or even attended to the occurrences of everyday life, can doubt the enormous practical value of trust and faith; but as little will he be inclined to deny that this practical value has not the least relation to the reality of the objects of that trust and faith. In examples of patient constancy of faith and of unswerving trust, the "Acta Martyrum" do not excel the annals of Babism.[54] * * * * * The discussion upon which we have now entered goes so thoroughly to the root of the whole matter; the question of the day is so completely, as the author of "Robert Elsmere" says, the value of testimony, that I shall offer no apology for following it out somewhat in detail; and, by way of giving substance to the argument, I shall base what I have to say upon a case, the consideration of which lies strictly within the province of natural science, and of that particular part of it known as the physiology and pathology of the nervous system. I find, in the second Gospel (chap. v.), a statement, to all appearance intended to have the same evidential value as any other contained in that history. It is the well-known story of the devils who were cast out of a man, and ordered, or permitted, to enter into a herd of swine, to the great loss and damage of the innocent Gerasene, or Gadarene, pig owners. There can be no doubt that the narrator intends to convey to his readers his own conviction that this casting out and entering in were effected by the agency of Jesus of Nazareth; that, by speech and action, Jesus enforced this conviction; nor does any inkling of the legal and moral difficulties of the case manifest itself. On the other hand, everything that I know of physiological and pathological science leads me to entertain a very strong conviction that the phenomena ascribed to possession are as purely natural as those which constitute small-pox; everything that I know of anthropology leads me to think that the belief in demons and demoniacal possession is a mere survival of a once universal superstition, and that its persistence, at the present time, is pretty much in the inverse ratio of the general instruction, intelligence, and sound judgment of the population among whom it prevails. Everything that I know of law and justice convinces me that the wanton destruction of other people's property is a misdemeanour of evil example. Again, the study of history, and especially of that of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, leaves no shadow of doubt on my mind that the belief in the reality of possession and of witchcraft, justly based, alike by Catholics and Protestants, upon this and innumerable other passages in both the Old and New Testaments, gave rise, through the special influence of Christian ecclesiastics, to the most horrible persecutions and judicial murders of thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women, and children. And when I reflect that the record of a plain and simple declaration upon such an occasion as this, that the belief in witchcraft and possession is wicked nonsense, would have rendered the long agony of mediæval humanity impossible, I am prompted to reject, as dishonouring, the supposition that such declaration was withheld out of condescension to popular error. "Come forth, thou unclean spirit, out of the man" (Mark v. 8),[55] are the words attributed to Jesus. If I declare, as I have no hesitation in doing, that I utterly disbelieve in the existence of "unclean spirits," and, consequently, in the possibility of their "coming forth" out of a man, I suppose that Dr. Wace will tell me I am disregarding the testimony "of our Lord." For, if these words were really used, the most resourceful of reconcilers can hardly venture to affirm that they are compatible with a disbelief "in these things." As the learned and fair-minded, as well as orthodox, Dr. Alexander remarks, in an editorial note to the article "Demoniacs," in the "Biblical Cyclopædia" (vol. i. p. 664, note):-- ... On the lowest grounds on which our Lord and His Apostles can be placed they must, at least, be regarded as _honest_ men. Now, though honest speech does not require that words should be used always and only in their etymological sense, it does require that they should not be used so as to affirm what the speaker knows to be false. Whilst, therefore, our Lord and His Apostles might use the word [Greek: daimonizesthai], or the phrase, [Greek: daimonion echein] as a popular description of certain diseases, without giving in to the belief which lay at the source of such a mode of expression, they could not speak of demons entering into a man, or being cast out of him, without pledging themselves to the belief of an actual possession of the man by the demons. (Campbell, _Prel. Diss._ vi. 1, 10.) If, consequently, they did not hold this belief, they spoke not as honest men. The story which we are considering does not rest on the authority of the second Gospel alone. The third confirms the second, especially in the matter of commanding the unclean spirit to come out of the man (Luke viii. 29); and, although the first Gospel either gives a different version of the same story, or tells another of like kind, the essential point remains: "If thou cast us out, send us away into the herd of swine. And He said unto them: Go!" (Matt. viii. 31, 32). If the concurrent testimony of the three synoptics, then, is really sufficient to do away with all rational doubt as to a matter of fact of the utmost practical and speculative importance--belief or disbelief in which may affect, and has affected, men's lives and their conduct towards other men, in the most serious way--then I am bound to believe that Jesus implicitly affirmed himself to possess a "knowledge of the unseen world," which afforded full confirmation of the belief in demons and possession current among his contemporaries. If the story is true, the mediæval theory of the invisible world may be, and probably is, quite correct; and the witch-finders, from Sprenger to Hopkins and Mather, are much-maligned men. On the other hand, humanity, noting the frightful consequences of this belief; common sense, observing the futility of the evidence on which it is based, in all cases that have been properly investigated; science, more and more seeing its way to inclose all the phenomena of so-called "possession" within the domain of pathology, so far as they are not to be relegated to that of the police--all these powerful influences concur in warning us, at our peril, against accepting the belief without the most careful scrutiny of the authority on which it rests. I can discern no escape from this dilemma: either Jesus said what he is reported to have said, or he did not. In the former case, it is inevitable that his authority on matters connected with the "unseen world" should be roughly shaken; in the latter, the blow falls upon the authority of the synoptic Gospels. If their report on a matter of such stupendous and far-reaching practical import as this is untrustworthy, how can we be sure of its trustworthiness in other cases? The favourite "earth," in which the hard-pressed reconciler takes refuge, that the Bible does not profess to teach science,[56] is stopped in this instance. For the question of the existence of demons and of possession by them, though it lies strictly within the province of science, is also of the deepest moral and religious significance. If physical and mental disorders are caused by demons, Gregory of Tours and his contemporaries rightly considered that relics and exorcists were more useful than doctors; the gravest questions arise as to the legal and moral responsibilities of persons inspired by demoniacal impulses; and our whole conception of the universe and of our relations to it becomes totally different from what it would be on the contrary hypothesis. The theory of life of an average mediæval Christian was as different from that of an average nineteenth-century Englishman as that of a West African negro is now, in these respects. The modern world is slowly, but surely, shaking off these and other monstrous survivals of savage delusions; and, whatever happens, it will not return to that wallowing in the mire. Until the contrary is proved, I venture to doubt whether, at this present moment, any Protestant theologian, who has a reputation to lose, will say that he believes the Gadarene story. The choice then lies between discrediting those who compiled the Gospel biographies and disbelieving the Master, whom they, simple souls, thought to honour by preserving such traditions of the exercise of his authority over Satan's invisible world. This is the dilemma. No deep scholarship, nothing but a knowledge of the revised version (on which it is to be supposed all that mere scholarship can do has been done), with the application thereto of the commonest canons of common sense, is needful to enable us to make a choice between its alternatives. It is hardly doubtful that the story, as told in the first Gospel, is merely a version of that told in the second and third. Nevertheless, the discrepancies are serious and irreconcilable; and, on this ground alone, a suspension of judgment, at the least, is called for. But there is a great deal more to be said. From the dawn of scientific biblical criticism until the present day, the evidence against the long-cherished notion that the three synoptic Gospels are the works of three independent authors, each prompted by Divine inspiration, has steadily accumulated, until, at the present time, there is no visible escape from the conclusion that each of the three is a compilation consisting of a groundwork common to all three--the threefold tradition; and of a superstructure, consisting, firstly, of matter common to it with one of the others, and, secondly, of matter special to each. The use of the terms "groundwork" and "superstructure" by no means implies that the latter must be of later date than the former. On the contrary, some parts of it may be, and probably are, older than some parts of the groundwork.[57] The story of the Gadarene swine belongs to the groundwork; at least, the essential part of it, in which the belief in demoniac possession is expressed, does; and therefore the compilers of the first, second, and third Gospels, whoever they were, certainly accepted that belief (which, indeed, was universal among both Jews and pagans at that time), and attributed it to Jesus. What, then, do we know about the originator, or originators, of this groundwork--of that threefold tradition which all three witnesses (in Paley's phrase) agree upon--that we should allow their mere statements to outweigh the counter arguments of humanity, of common sense, of exact science, and to imperil the respect which all would be glad to be able to render to their Master? Absolutely nothing.[58] There is no proof, nothing more than a fair presumption, that any one of the Gospels existed, in the state in which we find it in the authorised version of the Bible, before the second century, or, in other words, sixty or seventy years after the events recorded. And, between that time and the date of the oldest extant manuscripts of the Gospels, there is no telling what additions and alterations and interpolations may have been made. It may be said that this is all mere speculation, but it is a good deal more. As competent scholars and honest men, our revisers have felt compelled to point out that such things have happened even since the date of the oldest known manuscripts. The oldest two copies of the second Gospel end with the 8th verse of the 16th chapter; the remaining twelve verses are spurious, and it is noteworthy that the maker of the addition has not hesitation to introduce a speech in which Jesus promises his disciples that "in My name shall they cast out devils." The other passage "rejected to the margin" is still more instructive. It is that touching apologue, with its profound ethical sense, of the woman taken in adultery--which, if internal evidence were an infallible guide, might well be affirmed to be a typical example of the teachings of Jesus. Yet, say the revisers, pitilessly, "Most of the ancient authorities emit John vii. 53-viii. 11." Now let any reasonable man ask himself this question. If, after an approximate settlement of the canon of the New Testament, and even later than the fourth and fifth centuries, literary fabricators had the skill and the audacity to make such additions and interpolations as these, what may they have done when no one had thought of a canon; when oral tradition, still unfixed, was regarded as more valuable than such written records as may have existed in the latter portion of the first century? Or, to take the other alternative, if those who gradually settled the canon did not know of the existence of the oldest codices which have come down to us; or if, knowing them, they rejected their authority, what is to be thought of their competency as critics of the text? People who object to free criticism of the Christian Scriptures forget that they are what they are in virtue of very free criticism; unless the advocates of inspiration are prepared to affirm that the majority of influential ecclesiastics during several centuries were safeguarded against error. For, even granting that some books of the period were inspired, they were certainly few amongst many; and those who selected the canonical books, unless they themselves were also inspired, must be regarded in the light of mere critics, and, from the evidence they have left of their intellectual habits, very uncritical critics. When one thinks that such delicate questions as those involved fell into the hands of men like Papias (who believed in the famous millenarian grape story); of Irenæus with his "reasons" for the existence of only four Gospels; and of such calm and dispassionate judges as Tertullian, with his "Credo quia impossibile": the marvel is that the selection which constitutes our New Testament is as free as it is from obviously objectionable matter. The apocryphal Gospels certainly deserve to be apocryphal; but one may suspect that a little more critical discrimination would have enlarged the Apocrypha not inconsiderably. At this point a very obvious objection arises and deserves full and candid consideration. It may be said that critical scepticism carried to the length suggested is historical pyrrhonism; that if we are altogether to discredit an ancient or a modern historian, because he has assumed fabulous matter to be true, it will be as well to give up paying any attention to history. It may be said, and with great justice, that Eginhard's "Life of Charlemagne" is none the less trustworthy because of the astounding revelation of credulity, of lack of judgment, and even of respect for the eighth commandment, which he has unconsciously made in the "History of the Translation of the Blessed Martyrs Marcellinus and Paul." Or, to go no further back than the last number of the _Nineteenth Century_, surely that excellent lady, Miss Strickland, is not to be refused all credence, because of the myth about the second James's remains which she seems to have unconsciously invented. Of course this is perfectly true. I am afraid there is no man alive whose witness could be accepted, if the condition precedent were proof that he had never invented and promulgated a myth. In the minds of all of us there are little places here and there, like the indistinguishable spots on a rock which give foothold to moss or stonecrop; on which, if the germ of a myth fall, it is certain to grow, without in the least degree affecting our accuracy or truthfulness elsewhere. Sir Walter Scott knew that he could not repeat a story without, as he said, "giving it a new hat and stick." Most of us differ from Sir Walter only in not knowing about this tendency of the mythopoeic faculty to break out unnoticed. But it is also perfectly true that the mythopoeic faculty is not equally active in all minds, nor in all regions and under all conditions of the same mind. David Hume was certainly not so liable to temptation as the Venerable Bede, or even as some recent historians who could be mentioned; and the most imaginative of debtors, if he owes five pounds, never makes an obligation to pay a hundred out of it. The rule of common sense is _primâ facie_ to trust a witness in all matters, in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor that love of the marvellous, which is inherent to a greater or less degree in all mankind, are strongly concerned; and, when they are involved, to require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified. Now, in the Gadarene affair, I do not think I am unreasonably sceptical, if I say that the existence of demons who can be transferred from a man to a pig, does thus contravene probability. Let me be perfectly candid. I admit I have no _à priori_ objection to offer. There are physical things, such as _tæniæ_ and _trichinæ_, which can be transferred from men to pigs, and _vice versâ_, and which do undoubtedly produce most diabolical and deadly effects on both. For anything I can absolutely prove to the contrary, there may be spiritual things capable of the same transmigration, with like effects. Moreover I am bound to add that perfectly truthful persons, for whom I have the greatest respect, believe in stories about spirits of the present day, quite as improbable as that we are considering. So I declare, as plainly as I can, that I am unable to show cause why these transferable devils should not exist; nor can I deny that, not merely the whole Roman Church, but many Wacean "infidels" of no mean repute, do honestly and firmly believe that the activity of such like demonic beings is in full swing in this year of grace 1889. Nevertheless, as good Bishop Butler says, "probability is the guide of life;" and it seems to me that this is just one of the cases in which the canon of credibility and testimony, which I have ventured to lay down, has full force. So that, with the most entire respect for many (by no means for all) of our witnesses for the truth of demonology, ancient and modern, I conceive their evidence on this particular matter to be ridiculously insufficient to warrant their conclusion.[59] After what has been said I do not think that any sensible man, unless he happen to be angry, will accuse me of "contradicting the Lord and His Apostles" if I reiterate my total disbelief in the whole Gadarene story. But, if that story is discredited, all the other stories of demoniac possession fall under suspicion. And if the belief in demons and demoniac possession, which forms the sombre background of the whole picture of primitive Christianity, presented to us in the New Testament, is shaken, what is to be said, in any case, of the uncorroborated testimony of the Gospels with respect to "the unseen world"? I am not aware that I have been influenced by any more bias in regard to the Gadarene story than I have been in dealing with other cases of like kind the investigation of which has interested me. I was brought up in the strictest school of evangelical orthodoxy; and when I was old enough to think for myself, I started upon my journey of inquiry with little doubt about the general truth of what I had been taught; and with that feeling of the unpleasantness of being called an "infidel" which we are told, is so right and proper. Near my journey's end, I find myself in a condition of something more than mere doubt about these matters. In the course of other inquiries, I have had to do with fossil remains which looked quite plain at a distance, and became more and more indistinct as I tried to define their outline by close inspection. There was something there--something which, if I could win assurance about it, might mark a new epoch in the history of the earth; but, study as long as I might, certainty eluded my grasp. So had it been with me in my efforts to define the grand figure of Jesus as it lies in the primary strata of Christian literature. Is he the kindly, peaceful Christ depicted in the Catacombs? Or is he the stern Judge who frowns upon the altar of SS. Cosmas and Damianus? Or can he be rightly represented by the bleeding ascetic, broken down by physical pain, of too many mediæval pictures? Are we to accept the Jesus of the second, or the Jesus of the fourth Gospel, as the true Jesus? What did he really say and do; and how much that is attributed to him, in speech and action, is the embroidery of the various parties into which his followers tended to split themselves within twenty years of his death, when even the threefold tradition was only nascent? If any one will answer these questions for me with something more to the point than feeble talk about the "cowardice of agnosticism," I shall be deeply his debtor. Unless and until they are satisfactorily answered, I say of agnosticism in this matter, "_J'y suis, et j'y reste_." But, as we have seen, it is asserted that I have no business to call myself an agnostic; that, if I am not a Christian I am an infidel; and that I ought to call myself by that name of "unpleasant significance." Well, I do not care much what I am called by other people, and if I had at my side all those who, since the Christian era, have been called infidels by other folks, I could not desire better company. If these are my ancestors, I prefer, with the old Frank, to be with them wherever they are. But there are several points in Dr. Wace's contention which must be elucidated before I can even think of undertaking to carry out his wishes. I must, for instance, know what a Christian is. Now what is a Christian? By whose authority is the signification of that term defined? Is there any doubt that the immediate followers of Jesus, the "sect of the Nazarenes," were strictly orthodox Jews differing from other Jews not more than the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes differed from one another; in fact, only in the belief that the Messiah, for whom the rest of their nation waited, had come? Was not their chief, "James, the brother of the Lord," reverenced alike by Sadducee, Pharisee, and Nazarene? At the famous conference which, according to the Acts, took place at Jerusalem, does not James declare that "myriads" of Jews, who, by that time, had become Nazarenes, were "all zealous for the Law"? Was not the name of "Christian" first used to denote the converts to the doctrine promulgated by Paul and Barnabas at Antioch? Does the subsequent history of Christianity leave any doubt that, from this time forth, the "little rift within the lute" caused by the new teaching, developed, if not inaugurated, at Antioch, grew wider and wider, until the two types of doctrines irreconcilably diverged? Did not the primitive Nazarenism, or Ebionism, develop into the Nazarenism, and Ebionism, and Elkasaitism of later ages, and finally die out in obscurity and condemnation, as damnable heresy; while the younger doctrine throve and pushed out its shoots into that endless variety of sects, of which the three strongest survivors are the Roman and Greek Churches and modern Protestantism? Singular state of things! If I were to profess the doctrine which was held by "James, the brother of the Lord," and by every one of the "myriads" of his followers and co-religionists in Jerusalem up to twenty or thirty years after the Crucifixion (and one knows not how much later at Pella), I should be condemned, with unanimity, as an ebionising heretic by the Roman, Greek, and Protestant Churches! And, probably, this hearty and unanimous condemnation of the creed, held by those who were in the closest personal relation with their Lord, is almost the only point upon which they would be cordially of one mind. On the other hand, though I hardly dare imagine such a thing, I very much fear that the "pillars" of the primitive Hierosolymitan Church would have considered Dr. Wace an infidel. No one can read the famous second chapter of Galatians and the book of Revelation without seeing how narrow was even Paul's escape from a similar fate. And, if ecclesiastical history is to be trusted, the thirty-nine articles, be they right or wrong, diverge from the primitive doctrine of the Nazarenes vastly more than even Pauline Christianity did. But, further than this, I have great difficulty in assuring myself that even James, "the brother of the Lord," and his "myriads" of Nazarenes, properly represented the doctrines of their Master. For it is constantly asserted by our modern "pillars" that one of the chief features of the work of Jesus was the instauration of Religion by the abolition of what our sticklers for articles and liturgies, with, unconscious humour, call the narrow restrictions of the Law. Yet, if James knew this, how could the bitter controversy with Paul have arisen; and why did not one or the other side quote any of the various sayings of Jesus, recorded in the Gospels, which directly bear on the question--sometimes, apparently, in opposite directions? So, if I am asked to call myself an "infidel," I reply: To what doctrine do you ask me to be faithful? Is it that contained in the Nicene and the Athanasian Creeds? My firm belief is that the Nazarenes, say of the year 40, headed by James, would have stopped their ears and thought worthy of stoning the audacious man who propounded it to them. Is it contained in the so-called Apostle's Creed? I am pretty sure that even that would have created a recalcitrant commotion at Pella in the year 70, among the Nazarenes of Jerusalem, who had fled from the soldiers of Titus. And yet, if the unadulterated tradition of the teachings of "the Nazarene" were to be found anywhere, it surely should have been amidst those not very aged disciples who may have heard them as they were delivered. Therefore, however sorry I may be to be unable to demonstrate that, if necessary, I should not be afraid to call myself an "infidel," I cannot do it. "Infidel" is a term of reproach, which Christians and Mahommedans, in their modesty, agree to apply to those who differ from them. If he had only thought of it, Dr. Wace might have used the term "miscreant," which, with the same etymological signification, has the advantage of being still more "unpleasant" to the persons to whom it is applied. But why should a man be expected to call himself a "miscreant" or an "infidel"? That St. Patrick "had two birthdays because he was a twin" is a reasonable and intelligible utterance beside that of the man who should declare himself to be an infidel on the ground of denying his own belief. It may be logically, if not ethically, defensible that a Christian should call a Mahommedan an infidel and _vice versâ_; but, on Dr. Wace's principles, both ought to call themselves infidels, because each applies the term to the other. Now I am afraid that all the Mahommedan world would agree in reciprocating that appellation to Dr. Wace himself. I once visited the Hazar Mosque, the great University of Mohammedanism, in Cairo, in ignorance of the fact that I was unprovided with proper authority. A swarm of angry undergraduates, as I suppose I ought to call them, came buzzing about me and my guide; and if I had known Arabic, I suspect that "dog of an infidel" would have been by no means the most "unpleasant" of the epithets showered upon me, before I could explain and apologise for the mistake. If I had had the pleasure of Dr. Wace's company on that occasion, the undiscriminative followers of the Prophet would, I am afraid, have made no difference between us; not even if they had known that he was the head of an orthodox Christian seminary. And I have not the smallest doubt that even one of the learned mollahs, if his grave courtesy would have permitted him to say anything offensive to men of another mode of belief, would have told us that he wondered we did not find it "very unpleasant" to disbelieve in the Prophet of Islam. From what precedes, I think it becomes sufficiently clear that Dr. Wace's account of the origin of the name of "Agnostic" is quite wrong. Indeed, I am bound to add that very slight effort to discover the truth would have convinced him that, as a matter of fact, the term arose otherwise. I am loath to go over an old story once more; but more than one object which I have in view will be served by telling it a little more fully than it has yet been told. Looking back nearly fifty years, I see myself as a boy, whose education has been interrupted, and who, intellectually, was left, for some years, altogether to his own devices. At that time, I was a voracious and omnivorous reader; a dreamer and speculator of the first water, well endowed with that splendid courage in attacking any and every subject, which is the blessed compensation of youth and inexperience. Among the books and essays, on all sorts of topics from metaphysics to heraldry, which I read at this time, two left indelible impressions on my mind. One was Guizot's "History of Civilization," the other was Sir William Hamilton's essay "On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," which I came upon, by chance, in an odd volume of the "Edinburgh Review." The latter was certainly strange reading for a boy, and I could not possibly have understood a great deal of it;[60] nevertheless, I devoured it with avidity, and it stamped upon my mind the strong conviction that, on even the most solemn and important of questions, men are apt to take cunning phrases for answers; and that the limitation of our faculties, in a great number of cases, renders real answers to such questions, not merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable. Philosophy and history having laid hold of me in this eccentric fashion, have never loosened their grip. I have no pretension to be an expert in either subject; but the turn for philosophical and historical reading, which rendered Hamilton and Guizot attractive to me, has not only filled many lawful leisure hours, and still more sleepless ones, with the repose of changed mental occupation, but has not unfrequently disputed my proper work-time with my liege lady, Natural Science. In this way I have found it possible to cover a good deal of ground in the territory of philosophy; and all the more easily that I have never cared much about A's or B's opinions, but have rather sought to know what answer he had to give to the questions I had to put to him--that of the limitation of possible knowledge being the chief. The ordinary examiner, with his "State the views of So-and-so," would have floored me at any time. If he had said what do _you_ think about any given problem, I might have got on fairly well. The reader who has had the patience to follow the enforced, but unwilling, egotism of this veritable history (especially if his studies have led him in the same direction), will now see why my mind steadily gravitated towards the conclusions of Hume and Kant, so well stated by the latter in a sentence, which I have quoted elsewhere. "The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of pure reason is, after all, merely negative, since it serves not as an organon for the enlargement [of knowledge], but as a discipline for its delimitation; and, instead of discovering truth, has only the modest merit of preventing error."[61] When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis,"--had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion. Like Dante, Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, but, unlike Dante, I cannot add, Che la diritta via era smarrita. On the contrary, I had, and have, the firmest conviction that I never left the "verace via"--the straight road; and that this road led nowhere else but into the dark depths of a wild and tangled forest. And though I have found leopards and lions in the path; though I have made abundant acquaintance with the hungry wolf, that "with privy paw devours apace and nothing said," as another great poet says of the ravening beast; and though no friendly spectre has even yet offered his guidance, I was, and am, minded to go straight on, until I either come out on the other side of the wood, or find there is no other side to it, at least, none attainable by me. This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a place among the members of that remarkable confraternity of antagonists, long since deceased, but of green and pious memory, the Metaphysical Society. Every variety of philosophical and theological opinion was represented there, and expressed itself with entire openness; most of my colleagues were _-ists_ of one sort or another; and, however kind and friendly they might be, I, the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with, could not fail to have some of the uneasy feelings which must have beset the historical fox when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes. To my great satisfaction, the term took; and when the _Spectator_ had stood godfather to it, any suspicion in the minds of respectable people, that a knowledge of its parentage might have awakened was, of course, completely lulled. That is the history of the origin of the terms "agnostic" and "agnosticism"; and it will be observed that it does not quite agree with the confident assertion of the reverend Principal of King's College, that "the adoption of the term agnostic is only an attempt to shift the issue, and that it involves a mere evasion" in relation to the Church and Christianity.[62] * * * * * The last objection (I rejoice as much as my readers must do, that it is the last) which I have to take to Dr. Wace's deliverance before the Church Congress arises, I am sorry to say, on a question of morality. "It is, and it ought to be," authoritatively declares this official representative of Christian ethics, "an unpleasant thing for a man to have to say plainly that he does not believe in Jesus Christ" (_l.c._ p. 254). Whether it is so depends, I imagine, a good deal on whether the man was brought up in a Christian household or not. I do not see why it should be "unpleasant" for a Mahommedan or Buddhist to say so. But that "it ought to be" unpleasant for any man to say anything which he sincerely, and after due deliberation, believes, is, to my mind, a proposition of the most profoundly immoral character. I verily believe that the great good which has been effected in the world by Christianity has been largely counteracted by the pestilent doctrine on which all the Churches have insisted, that honest disbelief in their more or less astonishing creeds is a moral offence, indeed a sin of the deepest dye, deserving and involving the same future retribution as murder and robbery. If we could only see, in one view, the torrents of hypocrisy and cruelty, the lies, the slaughter, the violations of every obligation of humanity, which have flowed from this source along the course of the history of Christian nations, our worst imaginations of Hell would pale beside the vision. A thousand times, no! It ought _not_ to be unpleasant to say that which one honestly believes or disbelieves. That it so constantly is painful to do so, is quite enough obstacle to the progress of mankind in that most valuable of all qualities, honesty of word or of deed, without erecting a sad concomitant of human weakness into something to be admired and cherished. The bravest of soldiers often, and very naturally, "feel it unpleasant" to go into action; but a court-martial which did its duty would make short work of the officer who promulgated the doctrine that his men _ought_ to feel their duty unpleasant. I am very well aware, as I suppose most thoughtful people are in these times, that the process of breaking away from old beliefs is extremely unpleasant; and I am much disposed to think that the encouragement, the consolation, and the peace afforded to earnest believers in even the worst forms of Christianity are of great practical advantage to them. What deductions must be made from this gain on the score of the harm done to the citizen by the ascetic other-worldliness of logical Christianity; to the ruler, by the hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness of sectarian bigotry; to the legislator, by the spirit of exclusiveness and domination of those that count themselves pillars of orthodoxy; to the philosopher, by the restraints on the freedom of learning and teaching which every Church exercises, when it is strong enough; to the conscientious soul, by the introspective hunting after sins of the mint and cummin type, the fear of theological error, and the overpowering terror of possible damnation, which have accompanied the Churches like their shadow, I need not now consider; but they are assuredly not small. If agnostics lose heavily on the one side, they gain a good deal on the other. People who talk about the comforts of belief appear to forget its discomforts; they ignore the fact that the Christianity of the Churches is something more than faith in the ideal personality of Jesus, which they create for themselves, _plus_ so much as can be carried into practice, without disorganising civil society, of the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount. Trip in morals or in doctrine (especially in doctrine), without due repentance or retractation, or fail to get properly baptized before you die, and a _plébiscite_ of the Christians of Europe, if they were true to their creeds, would affirm your everlasting damnation by an immense majority. Preachers, orthodox and heterodox, din into our ears that the world cannot get on without faith of some sort. There is a sense in which that is as eminently as obviously true; there is another, in which, in my judgment, it is as eminently as obviously false, and it seems to me that the hortatory, or pulpit, mind is apt to oscillate between the false and the true meanings, without being aware of the fact. It is quite true that the ground of every one of our actions, and the validity of all our reasonings, rest upon the great act of faith, which leads us to take the experience of the past as a safe guide in our dealings with the present and the future. From the nature of ratiocination, it is obvious that the axioms, on which it is based, cannot be demonstrated by ratiocination. It is also a trite observation that, in the business of life, we constantly take the most serious action upon evidence of an utterly insufficient character. But it is surely plain that faith is not necessarily entitled to dispense with ratiocination because ratiocination cannot dispense with faith as a starting-point; and that because we are often obliged, by the pressure of events, to act on very bad evidence, it does not follow that it is proper to act on such evidence when the pressure is absent. The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us that "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen." In the authorised version, "substance" stands for "assurance," and "evidence" for "proving." The question of the exact meaning of the two words, [Greek: hypostasis] and [Greek: elegchos] affords a fine field of discussion for the scholar and the metaphysician. But I fancy we shall be not far from the mark if we take the writer to have had in his mind the profound psychological truth, that men constantly feel certain about things for which they strongly hope, but have no evidence, in the legal or logical sense of the word; and he calls this feeling "faith." I may have the most absolute faith that a friend has not committed the crime of which he is accused. In the early days of English history, if my friend could have obtained a few more compurgators of a like robust faith, he would have been acquitted. At the present day, if I tendered myself as a witness on that score, the judge would tell me to stand down, and the youngest barrister would smile at my simplicity. Miserable indeed is the man who has not such faith in some of his fellow-men--only less miserable than the man who allows himself to forget that such faith is not, strictly speaking, evidence; and when his faith is disappointed, as will happen now and again, turns Timon and blames the universe for his own blunders. And so, if a man can find a friend, the hypostasis of all his hopes, the mirror of his ethical ideal, in the Jesus of any, or all, of the Gospels, let him live by faith in that ideal. Who shall or can forbid him? But let him not delude himself with the notion that his faith is evidence of the objective reality of that in which he trusts. Such evidence is to be obtained only by the use of the methods of science, as applied to history and to literature, and it amounts at present to very little. It appears that Mr. Gladstone some time ago asked Mr. Laing if he could draw up a short summary of the negative creed; a body of negative propositions, which have so far been adopted on the negative side as to be what the Apostles' and other accepted creeds are on the positive; and Mr. Laing at once kindly obliged Mr. Gladstone with the desired articles--eight of them. If any one had preferred this request to me, I should have replied that, if he referred to agnostics, they have no creed; and, by the nature of the case, cannot have any. Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, "Try all things, hold fast by that which is good;" it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him; it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him. The results of the working out of the agnostic principle will vary according to individual knowledge and capacity, and according to the general condition of science. That which is unproven to-day may be proven by the help of new discoveries to-morrow. The only negative fixed points will be those negations which flow from the demonstrable limitation of our faculties. And the only obligation accepted is to have the mind always open to conviction. Agnostics who never fail in carrying out their principles are, I am afraid, as rare as other people of whom the same consistency can be truthfully predicated. But, if you were to meet with such a phoenix and to tell him that you had discovered that two and two make five, he would patiently ask you to state your reasons for that conviction, and express his readiness to agree with you if he found them satisfactory. The apostolic injunction to "suffer fools gladly" should be the rule of life of a true agnostic. I am deeply conscious how far I myself fall short of this ideal, but it is my personal conception of what agnostics ought to be. However, as I began by stating, I speak only for myself; and I do not dream of anathematizing and excommunicating Mr. Laing. But, when I consider his creed and compare it with the Athanasian, I think I have on the whole a clearer conception of the meaning of the latter. "Polarity," in Article VIII, for example, is a word about which I heard a good deal in my youth, when "Naturphilosophie" was in fashion, and greatly did I suffer from it. For many years past, whenever I have met with "polarity" anywhere but in a discussion of some purely physical topic, such as magnetism, I have shut the book. Mr. Laing must excuse me if the force of habit was too much for me when I read his eighth article. And now, what is to be said to Mr. Harrison's remarkable deliverance "On the future of agnosticism "?[63] I would that it were not my business to say anything, for I am afraid I can say nothing which shall manifest my great personal respect for this able writer, and for the zeal and energy with which he ever and anon galvanises the weakly frame of Positivism until it looks, more than ever, like John Bunyan's Pope and Pagan rolled into one. There is a story often repeated, and I am afraid none the less mythical on that account, of a valiant and loud-voiced corporal in command of two full privates who, falling in with a regiment of the enemy in the dark, orders it to surrender under pain of instant annihilation by his force; and the enemy surrenders accordingly. I am always reminded of this tale when I read the positivist commands to the forces of Christianity and of Science; only the enemy show no more signs of intending to obey now than they have done any time these forty years. The allocution under consideration has a certain papal flavour. Mr. Harrison speaks with authority and not as one of the common scribes of the period. He knows not only what agnosticism is and how it has come about, but what will become of it. The agnostic is to content himself with being the precursor of the positivist. In his place, as a sort of navvy levelling the ground and cleansing it of such poor stuff as Christianity, he is a useful creature who deserves patting on the back, on condition that he does not venture beyond his last. But let not these scientific Sanballats presume that they are good enough to take part in the building of the Temple--they are mere Samaritans, doomed to die out in proportion as the Religion of Humanity is accepted by mankind. Well, if that is their fate, they have time to be cheerful. But let us hear Mr. Harrison's pronouncement of their doom. "Agnosticism is a stage in the evolution of religion, an entirely negative stage, the point reached by physicists, a purely mental conclusion, with no relation to things social at all" (p. 154). I am quite dazed by this declaration. Are there, then, any "conclusions" that are not "purely mental"? Is there "no relation to things social" in "mental conclusions" which affect men's whole conception of life? Was that prince of agnostics, David Hume, particularly imbued with physical science? Supposing physical science to be non-existent, would not the agnostic principle, applied by the philologist and the historian, lead to exactly the same results? Is the modern more or less complete suspension of judgment as to the facts of the history of regal Rome, or the real origin of the Homeric poems, anything but agnosticism in history and in literature? And if so, how can agnosticism be the "mere negation of the physicist"? "Agnosticism is a stage in the evolution of religion." No two people agree as to what is meant by the term "religion"; but if it means, as I think it ought to mean, simply the reverence and love for the ethical ideal, and the desire to realise that ideal in life, which every man ought to feel--then I say agnosticism has no more to do with it than it has to do with music or painting. If, on the other hand, Mr. Harrison, like most people, means by "religion" theology, then, in my judgment, agnosticism can be said to be a stage in its evolution, only as death may be said to be the final stage in the evolution of life. When agnostic logic is simply one of the canons of thought, agnosticism, as a distinctive faith, will have spontaneously disappeared (p. 155). I can but marvel that such sentences as this, and those already quoted, should have proceeded from Mr. Harrison's pen. Does he really mean to suggest that agnostics have a logic peculiar to themselves? Will lie kindly help me out of my bewilderment when I try to think of "logic" being anything else than the canon (which, I believe, means rule) of thought? As to agnosticism being a distinctive faith, I have already shown that it cannot possibly be anything of the kind, unless perfect faith in logic is distinctive of agnostics; which, after all, it may be. Agnosticism as a religious philosophy _per se_ rests on an almost total ignoring of history and social evolution (p. 152). But neither _per se_ nor _per aliud_ has agnosticism (if I know anything about it) the least pretension to be a religious philosophy; so far from resting on ignorance of history, and that social evolution of which history is the account, it is and has been the inevitable result of the strict adherence to scientific methods by historical investigators. Our forefathers were quite confident about the existence of Romulus and Remus, of King Arthur, and of Hengist and Horsa. Most of us have become agnostics in regard to the reality of these worthies. It is a matter of notoriety of which Mr. Harrison, who accuses us all so freely of ignoring history, should not be ignorant, that the critical process which has shattered the foundations of orthodox Christian doctrine owes its origin, not to the devotees of physical science, but, before all, to Richard Simon, the learned French Oratorian, just two hundred years ago. I cannot find evidence that either Simon, or any one of the great scholars and critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who have continued Simon's work, had any particular acquaintance with physical science. I have already pointed out that Hume was independent of it. And certainly one of the most potent influences in the same direction, upon history in the present century, that of Grote, did not come from the physical side. Physical science, in fact, has had nothing directly to do with the criticism of the Gospels; it is wholly incompetent to furnish demonstrative evidence that any statement made in these histories is untrue. Indeed, modern physiology can find parallels in nature for events of apparently the most eminently supernatural kind recounted in some of those histories. It is a comfort to hear, upon Mr. Harrison's authority, that the laws of physical nature show no signs of becoming "less definite, less consistent, or less popular as time goes on" (p. 154). How a law of nature is to become indefinite, or "inconsistent," passes my poor powers of imagination. But with universal suffrage and the coach-dog theory of premiership in full view; the theory, I mean, that the whole duty of a political chief is to look sharp for the way the social coach is driving, and then run in front and bark loud--as if being the leading noise-maker and guiding were the same things--it is truly satisfactory to me to know that the laws of nature are increasing in popularity. Looking at recent developments of the policy which is said to express the great heart of the people, I have had my doubts of the fact; and my love for my fellow-countrymen has led me to reflect, with dread, on what will happen to them, if any of the laws of nature ever become so unpopular in their eyes, as to be voted down by the transcendent authority of universal suffrage. If the legion of demons, before they set out on their journey in the swine, had had time to hold a meeting and to resolve unanimously "That the law of gravitation is oppressive and ought to be repealed," I am afraid it would have made no sort of difference to the result, when their two thousand unwilling porters were once launched down the steep slopes of the fatal shore of Gennesaret. The question of the place of religion as an element of human nature, as a force of human society, its origin, analysis, and functions, has never been considered at all from an agnostic point of view (p. 152). I doubt not that Mr. Harrison knows vastly more about history than I do; in fact, he tells the public that some of my friends and I have had no opportunity of occupying ourselves with that subject. I do not like to contradict any statement which Mr. Harrison makes on his own authority; only, if I may be true to my agnostic principles, I humbly ask how he has obtained assurance on this head. I do not profess to know anything about the range of Mr. Harrison's studies; but as he has thought it fitting to start the subject, I may venture to point out that, on evidence adduced, it might be equally permissible to draw the conclusion that Mr. Harrison's other labours have not allowed him to acquire that acquaintance with the methods and results of physical science, or with the history of philosophy, or of philological and historical criticism, which is essential to any one who desires to obtain a right understanding of agnosticism. Incompetence in philosophy, and in all branches of science except mathematics, is the well-known mental characteristic of the founder of positivism. Faithfulness in disciples is an admirable quality in itself; the pity is that it not unfrequently leads to the imitation of the weaknesses as well as of the strength of the master. It is only such over-faithfulness which can account for a "strong mind really saturated with the historical sense" (p. 153) exhibiting the extraordinary forgetfulness of the historical fact of the existence of David Hume implied by the assertion that it would be difficult to name a single known agnostic who has given to history anything like the amount of thought and study which he brings to a knowledge of the physical world (p. 153). Whoso calls to mind what I may venture to term the bright side of Christianity--that ideal of manhood, with its strength and its patience, its justice and its pity for human frailty, its helpfulness to the extremity of self-sacrifice, its ethical purity and nobility, which apostles have pictured, in which armies of martyrs have placed their unshakable faith, and whence obscure men and women, like Catherine of Sienna and John Knox, have derived the courage to rebuke popes and kings--is not likely to underrate the importance of the Christian faith as a factor in human history, or to doubt that if that faith should prove to be incompatible with our knowledge, or necessary want of knowledge, some other hypostasis of men's hopes, genuine enough and worthy enough to replace it, will arise. But that the incongruous mixture of bad science with eviscerated papistry, out of which Comte manufactured the positivist religion, will be the heir of the Christian ages, I have too much respect for the humanity of the future to believe. Charles the Second told his brother, "They will not kill me, James, to make you king." And if critical science is remorselessly destroying the historical foundations of the noblest ideal of humanity which mankind have yet worshipped, it is little likely to permit the pitiful reality to climb into the vacant shrine. That a man should determine to devote himself to the service of humanity--including intellectual and moral self-culture under that name; that this should be, in the proper sense of the word, his religion--is not only an intelligible, but, I think, a laudable resolution. And I am greatly disposed to believe that it is the only religion which will prove itself to be unassailably acceptable so long as the human race endures. But when the Comtist asks me to worship "Humanity"--that is to say, to adore the generalised conception of men as they ever have been and probably ever will be--I must reply that I could just as soon bow down and worship the generalised conception of a "wilderness of apes." Surely we are not going back to the days of Paganism, when individual men were deified, and the hard good sense of a dying Vepasian could prompt the bitter jest, "Ut puto Deus fio." No divinity doth hedge a modern man, be he even a sovereign ruler. Nor is there any one, except a municipal magistrate, who is officially declared worshipful. But if there is no spark of worship-worthy divinity in the individual twigs of humanity, whence comes that godlike splendour which the Moses of Positivism fondly imagines to pervade the whole bush? I know no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle. He attains a certain degree of physical comfort, and develops a more or less workable theory of life, in such favourable situations as the plains of Mesopotamia or of Egypt, and then, for thousands and thousands of years, struggles, with varying fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed, and misery, to maintain himself at this point against the greed and the ambition of his fellow-men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise persecuting all those who first try to get him to move on; and when he has moved on a step, foolishly confers post-mortem deification on his victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want to move a step yet farther. And the best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins. That one should rejoice in the good man, forgive the bad man, and pity and help all men to the best of one's ability, is surely indisputable. It is the glory of Judaism and of Christianity to have proclaimed this truth, through all their aberrations. But the worship of a God who needs forgiveness and help, and deserves pity every hour of his existence, is no better than that of any other voluntarily selected fetish. The Emperor Julian's project was hopeful in comparison with the prospects of the Comtist Anthropolatry. When the historian of religion in the twentieth century is writing about the nineteenth, I foresee he will say something of this kind: The most curious and instructive events in the religious history of the preceding century are the rise and progress of two new sects called Mormons and Positivists. To the student who has carefully considered these remarkable phenomena nothing in the records of religious self-delusion can appear improbable. The Mormons arose in the midst of the great Republic, which, though comparatively insignificant, at that time, in territory as in the number of its citizens, was (as we know from the fragments of the speeches of its orators which have come down to us) no less remarkable for the native intelligence of its population than for the wide extent of their information, owing to the activity of their publishers in diffusing all that they could invent, beg, borrow, or steal. Nor were they less noted for their perfect freedom from all restraints in thought, or speech, or deed; except, to be sure, the beneficent and wise influence of the majority, exerted, in case of need, through an institution known as "tarring and feathering," the exact nature of which is now disputed. There is a complete consensus of testimony that the founder of Mormonism, one Joseph Smith, was a low-minded, ignorant scamp, and that he stole the "Scriptures" which he propounded; not being clever enough to forge even such contemptible stuff as they contain. Nevertheless he must have been a man of some force of character, for a considerable number of disciples soon gathered about him. In spite of repeated outbursts of popular hatred and violence--during one of which persecutions Smith was brutally murdered--the Mormon body steadily increased, and became a flourishing community. But the Mormon practices being objectionable to the majority, they were, more than once, without any pretence of law, but by force of riot, arson, and murder, driven away from the land they had occupied. Harried by these persecutions, the Mormon body eventually committed itself to the tender mercies of a desert as barren as that of Sinai; and after terrible sufferings and privations, reached the Oasis of Utah. Here it grew and flourished, sending out missionaries to, and receiving converts from, all parts of Europe, sometimes to the number of 10,000 in a year; until, in 1880, the rich and flourishing community numbered 110,000 souls in Utah alone, while there were probably 30,000 or 40,000 scattered abroad elsewhere. In the whole history of religions there is no more remarkable example of the power of faith; and, in this case, the founder of that faith was indubitably a most despicable creature. It is interesting to observe that the course taken by the great Republic and its citizens runs exactly parallel with that taken by the Roman Empire and its citizens towards the early Christians, except that the Romans had a certain legal excuse for their acts of violence, inasmuch as the Christian "sodalitia" were not licensed, and consequently were, _ipso facto_, illegal assemblages. Until, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the United States legislature decreed the illegality of polygamy, the Mormons were wholly within the law. Nothing can present a greater contrast to all this than the history of the Postivists. This sect arose much about the same time as that of the Mormons, in the upper and most instructed stratum of the quick-witted, sceptical population of Paris. The founder, Auguste Comte, was a teacher of mathematics, but of no eminence in that department of knowledge, and with nothing but an amateur's acquaintance with physical, chemical, and biological science. His works are repulsive, on account of the dull diffuseness of their style, and a certain air, as of a superior person, which characterises them; but nevertheless they contain good things here and there. It would take too much space to reproduce in detail a system which proposes to regulate all human life by the promulgation of a Gentile Leviticus. Suffice it to say, that M. Comte may be described as a syncretic, who, like the Gnostics of early Church history, attempted to combine the substance of imperfectly comprehended contemporary science with the form of Roman Christianity. It may be that this is the reason why his disciples were so very angry with some obscure people called Agnostics, whose views, if we may judge by the account left in the works of a great Positivist controversial writer, were very absurd. To put the matter briefly, M. Comte, finding Christianity and Science at daggers drawn, seems to have said to Science, "You find Christianity rotten at the core, do you? Well, I will scoop out the inside of it." And to Romanism: "You find Science mere dry light--cold and bare. Well, I will put your shell over it, and so, as schoolboys make a spectre out of a turnip and a tallow candle, behold the new religion of Humanity complete!" Unfortunately neither the Romanists, nor the people who were something more than amateurs in science, could be got to worship M. Comte's new idol properly. In the native country of Positivism, one distinguished man of letters and one of science, for a time, helped to make up a roomful of the faithful, but their love soon grew cold. In England, on the other hand, there appears to be little doubt that, in the ninth decade of the century, the multitude of disciples reached the grand total of several score. They had the advantage of the advocacy of one or two most eloquent and learned apostles, and, at any rate, the sympathy of several persons of light and leading; and, if they were not seen, they were heard, all over the world. On the other hand, as a sect, they laboured under the prodigious disadvantage of being refined, estimable people, living in the midst of the worn-out civilisation of the old world; where any one who had tried to persecute them, as the Mormons were persecuted, would have been instantly hanged. But the majority never dreamed of persecuting them; on the contrary, they were rather given to scold and otherwise try the patience of the majority. The history of these sects in the closing years of the century is highly instructive. Mormonism ... But I find I have suddenly slipped off Mr. Harrison's tripod, which I had borrowed for the occasion. The fact is, I am not equal to the prophetical business, and ought not to have undertaken it. * * * * * [It did not occur to me, while writing the latter part of this essay, that it could be needful to disclaim the intention of putting the religious system of Comte on a level with Mormonism. And I was unaware of the fact that Mr. Harrison rejects the greater part of the Positivist Religion, as taught by Comte. I have, therefore, erased one or two passages, which implied his adherence to the "Religion of Humanity" as developed by Comte, 1893.] FOOTNOTES: [51] See the _Official Report of the Church Congress held at Manchester_, October 1888, pp. 253, 254. [52] In this place and in the eleventh essay, there are references to the late Archbishop of York which are of no importance to my main argument, and which I have expunged because I desire to obliterate the traces of a temporary misunderstanding with a man of rare ability, candour, and wit, for whom I entertained a great liking and no less respect. I rejoice to think now of the (then) Bishop's cordial hail the first time we met after our little skirmish, "Well, is it to be peace or war?" I replied, "A little of both." But there was only peace when we parted, and ever after. [53] Dr. Wace tells us, "It may be asked how far we can rely on the accounts we possess of our Lord's teaching on these subjects." And he seems to think the question appropriately answered by the assertion that it "ought to be regarded as settled by M. Renan's practical surrender of the adverse case." I thought I knew M. Renan's works pretty well, but I have contrived to miss this "practical" (I wish Dr. Wace had defined the scope of that useful adjective) surrender. However, as Dr. Wace can find no difficulty in pointing out the passage of M. Renan's writings, by which he feels justified in making his statement, I shall wait for further enlightenment, contenting myself, for the present, with remarking that if M. Renan were to retract and do penance in Notre-Dame to-morrow for any contributions to Biblical criticism that may be specially his property, the main results of that criticism, as they are set forth in the works of Strauss, Baur, Reuss, and Volkmar, for example, would not be sensibly affected. [54] See De Gobineau, _Les Religions et les Philosophies dans l'Asie Centrale_; and the recently published work of Mr. E.G. Browne, _The Episode of the Bab_. [55] Here, as always, the revised version is cited. [56] Does any one really mean to say that there is any internal or external criterion by which the reader of a biblical statement, in which scientific matter is contained, is enabled to judge whether it is to betaken _au sérieux_ or not? Is the account of the Deluge, accepted as true in the New Testament, less precise and specific than that of the call of Abraham, also accepted as true therein? By what mark does the story of the feeding with manna in the wilderness, which involves some very curious scientific problems, show that it is meant merely for edification, while the story of the inscription of the Law on stone by the hand of Jahveh is literally true? If the story of the Fall is not the true record of an historical occurrence, what becomes of Pauline theology? Yet the story of the Fall as directly conflicts with probability, and is as devoid of trustworthy evidence, as that of the creation or that of the Deluge, with which it forms an harmoniously legendary series. [57] See, for an admirable discussion of the whole subject, Dr. Abbott's article on the Gospels in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_; and the remarkable monograph by Professor Volkmar, _Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit_ (1882). Whether we agree with the conclusions of these writers or not, the method of critical investigation which, they adopt is unimpeachable. [58] Notwithstanding the hard words shot at me from behind the hedge of anonymity by a writer in a recent number of the _Quarterly Review_, I repeat, without the slightest fear of refutation, that the four Gospels, as they have come to us, are the work of unknown writers. [59] Their arguments, in the long run, are always reducible to one form. Otherwise trustworthy witnesses affirm that such and such events took place. These events are inexplicable, except the agency of "spirits" is admitted. Therefore "spirits" were the cause of the phenomena. And the heads of the reply are always the same. Remember Goethe's aphorism: "Alles factische ist schon Theorie." Trustworthy witnesses are constantly deceived, or deceive themselves, in their interpretation of sensible phenomena. No one can prove that the sensible phenomena, in these cases, could be caused only by the agency of spirits: and there is abundant ground for believing that they may be produced in other ways. Therefore, the utmost that can be reasonably asked for, on the evidence as it stands, is suspension of judgment. And, on the necessity for even that suspension, reasonable men may differ, according to their views of probability. [60] Yet I must somehow have laid hold of the pith of the matter, for, many years afterwards, when Dean Mansel's Bampton Lectures were published, it seemed to me I already knew all that this eminently agnostic thinker had to tell me. [61] _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_. Edit. Hartenstein, p. 256. [62] _Report of the Church Congress_, Manchester, 1888, p. 252. [63] _Fortnightly Review_, Jan. 1889. VIII: AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER [1889] Those who passed from Dr. Wace's article in the last number of the "Nineteenth Century" to the anticipatory confutation of it which followed in "The New Reformation," must have enjoyed the pleasure of a dramatic surprise--just as when the fifth act of a new play proves unexpectedly bright and interesting. Mrs. Ward will, I hope, pardon the comparison, if I say that her effective clearing away of antiquated incumbrances from the lists of the controversy, reminds me of nothing so much as of the action of some neat-handed, but strong-wristed, Phyllis, who, gracefully wielding her long-handled "Turk's head," sweeps away the accumulated results of the toil of generations of spiders. I am the more indebted to this luminous sketch of the results of critical investigation, as it is carried out among these theologians who are men of science and not mere counsel for creeds, since it has relieved me from the necessity of dealing with the greater part of Dr. Wace's polemic, and enables me to devote more space to the really important issues which have been raised.[64] Perhaps, however, it may be well for me to observe that approbation of the manner in which a great biblical scholar, for instance, Reuss, does his work does not commit me to the adoption of all, or indeed any of his views; and, further, that the disagreements of a series of investigators do not in any way interfere with the fact that each of them has made important contributions to the body of truth ultimately established. If I cite Buffon, Linnæus, Lamarck, and Cuvier, as having each and all taken a leading share in building up modern biology, the statement that every one of these great naturalists disagreed with, and even more or less contradicted, all the rest is quite true; but the supposition that the latter assertion is in any way inconsistent with the former, would betray a strange ignorance of the manner in which all true science advances. Dr. Wace takes a great deal of trouble to make it appear that I have desired to evade the real questions raised by his attack upon me at the Church Congress. I assure the reverend Principal that in this, as in some other respects, he has entertained a very erroneous conception of my intentions. Things would assume more accurate proportions in Dr. Wace's mind, if he would kindly remember that it is just thirty years since ecclesiastical thunderbolts began to fly about my ears. I have had the "Lion and the Bear" to deal with, and it is long since I got quite used to the threatenings of episcopal Goliaths, whose croziers were like unto a weaver's beam. So that I almost think I might not have noticed Dr. Wace's attack, personal as it was; and although, as he is good enough to tell us, separate copies are to be had for the modest equivalent of twopence, as a matter of fact, it did not come under my notice for a long time after it was made. May I further venture to point out that (reckoning postage) the expenditure of twopence-halfpenny, or, at the most, threepence, would have enabled Dr. Wace so far to comply with ordinary conventions as to direct my attention to the fact that he had attacked me before a meeting at which I was not present? I really am not responsible for the five months' neglect of which Dr. Wace complains. Singularly enough, the Englishry who swarmed about the Engadine, during the three months that I was being brought back to life by the glorious air and perfect comfort of the Maloja, did not, in my hearing, say anything about the important events which had taken place at the Church Congress; and I think I can venture to affirm that there was not a single copy of Dr. Wace's pamphlet in any of the hotel libraries which I rummaged, in search of something more edifying than dull English or questionable French novels. And now, having, as I hope, set myself right with the public as regards the sins of commission and omission with which I have been charged, I feel free to deal with matters to which time and type may be more profitably devoted. I believe that there is not a solitary argument I have used, or that I am about to use, which is original, or has anything to do with the fact that I have been chiefly occupied with natural science. They are all, facts and reasoning alike, either identical with, or consequential upon, propositions which are to be found in the works of scholars and theologians of the highest repute in the only two countries, Holland and Germany,[65] in which, at the present time, professors of theology are to be found, whose tenure of their posts does not depend upon the results to which their inquiries lead them.[66] It is true that, to the best of my ability, I have satisfied myself of the soundness of the foundations on which my arguments are built, and I desire to be held fully responsible for everything I say. But, nevertheless, my position is really no more than that of an expositor; and my justification for undertaking it is simply that conviction of the supremacy of private judgment (indeed, of the impossibility of escaping it) which is the foundation of the Protestant Reformation, and which was the doctrine accepted by the vast majority of the Anglicans of my youth, before that backsliding towards the "beggarly rudiments" of an effete and idolatrous sacerdotalism which has, even now, provided us with the saddest spectacle which has been offered to the eyes of Englishmen in this generation. A high court of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, with a host of great lawyers in battle array, is and, for Heaven knows how long, will be, occupied with these very questions of "washing of cups and pots and brazen vessels," which the Master, whose professed representatives are rending the Church over these squabbles, had in his mind when, as we are told, he uttered the scathing rebuke:-- Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, But their heart is far from me. But in vain do they worship me, Teaching as their doctrines the precepts of men. (Mark vii. 6-7.) Men who can be absorbed in bickerings over miserable disputes of this kind can have but little sympathy with the old evangelical doctrine of the "open Bible," or anything but a grave misgiving of the results of diligent reading of the Bible, without the help of ecclesiastical spectacles, by the mass of the people. Greatly to the surprise of many of my friends, I have always advocated the reading of the Bible, and the diffusion of the study of that most remarkable collection of books among the people. Its teachings are so infinitely superior to those of the sects, who are just as busy now as the Pharisees were eighteen hundred years ago, in smothering them under "the precepts of men"; it is so certain, to my mind, that the Bible contains within itself the refutation of nine-tenths of the mixture of sophistical metaphysics and old-world superstition which has been piled round it by the so-called Christians of later times; it is so clear that the only immediate and ready antidote to the poison which has been mixed with Christianity, to the intoxication and delusion of mankind, lies in copious draughts from the undefiled spring, that I exercise the right and duty of free judgment on the part of every man, mainly for the purpose of inducing other laymen to follow my example. If the New Testament is translated into Zulu by Protestant missionaries, it must be assumed that a Zulu convert is competent to draw from its contents all the truths which it is necessary for him to believe. I trust that I may, without immodesty, claim to be put on the same footing as a Zulu. The most constant reproach which is launched against persons of my way of thinking is that it is all very well for us to talk about the deductions of scientific thought, but what are the poor and the uneducated to do? Has it ever occurred to those who talk in this fashion, that their creeds and the articles of their several confessions, their determination of the exact nature and extent of the teachings of Jesus, their expositions of the real meaning of that which is written in the Epistles (to leave aside all questions concerning the Old Testament), are nothing more than deductions which, at any rate, profess to be the result of strictly scientific thinking, and which are not worth attending to unless they really possess that character? If it is not historically true that such and such things happened in Palestine eighteen centuries ago, what becomes of Christianity? And what is historical truth but that of which the evidence bears strict scientific investigation? I do not call to mind any problem of natural science which has come under my notice which is more difficult, or more curiously interesting as a mere problem, than that of the origin of the Synoptic Gospels and that of the historical value of the narratives which they contain. The Christianity of the Churches stands or falls by the results of the purely scientific investigation of these questions. They were first taken up, in a purely scientific spirit, about a century ago; they have been studied over and over again by men of vast knowledge and critical acumen; but he would be a rash man who should assert that any solution of these problems, as yet formulated, is exhaustive. The most that can be said is that certain prevalent solutions are certainly false, while others are more or less probably true. If I am doing my best to rouse my countrymen out of their dogmatic slumbers, it is not that they may be amused by seeing who gets the best of it in a contest between a "scientist" and a theologian. The serious question is whether theological men of science, or theological special pleaders, are to have the confidence of the general public; it is the question whether a country in which it is possible for a body of excellent clerical and lay gentlemen to discuss, in public meeting assembled, how much it is desirable to let the congregations of the faithful know of the results of biblical criticism, is likely to wake up with anything short of the grasp of a rough lay hand upon its shoulder; it is the question whether the New Testament books, being, as I believe they were, written and compiled by people who, according to their lights, were perfectly sincere, will not, when properly studied as ordinary historical documents, afford us the means of self-criticism. And it must be remembered that the New Testament books are not responsible for the doctrine invented by the Churches that they are anything but ordinary historical documents. The author of the third gospel tells us, as straightforwardly as a man can, that he has no claim to any other character than that of an ordinary compiler and editor, who had before him the works of many and variously qualified predecessors. * * * * * In my former papers, according to Dr. Wace, I have evaded giving an answer to his main proposition, which he states as follows-- Apart from all disputed points of criticism, no one practically doubts that our Lord lived, and that He died on the cross, in the most intense sense of filial relation to His Father in Heaven, and that He bore testimony to that Father's providence, love, and grace towards mankind. The Lord's Prayer affords a sufficient evidence on these points. If the Sermon on the Mount alone be added, the whole unseen world, of which the Agnostic refuses to know anything, stands unveiled before us.... If Jesus Christ preached that Sermon, made those promises, and taught that prayer, then any one who says that we know nothing of God, or of a future life, or of an unseen world, says that he does not believe Jesus Christ (pp. 354-355). Again-- The main question at issue, in a word, is one which Professor Huxley has chosen to leave entirely on one side--whether, namely, allowing for the utmost uncertainty on other points of the criticism to which he appeals, there is any reasonable doubt that the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount afford a true account of our Lord's essential belief and cardinal teaching (p. 355.) I certainly was not aware that I had evaded the questions here stated; indeed I should say that I have indicated my reply to them pretty clearly; but, as Dr. Wace wants a plainer answer, he shall certainly be gratified. If, as Dr. Wace declares it is, his "whole case is involved in" the argument as stated in the latter of these two extracts, so much the worse for his whole case. For I am of opinion that there is the gravest reason for doubting whether the "Sermon on the Mount" was ever preached, and whether the so-called "Lord's Prayer" was ever prayed, by Jesus of Nazareth. My reasons for this opinion are, among others, these:--There is now no doubt that the three Synoptic Gospels, so far from being the work of three independent writers, are closely interdependent,[67] and that in one of two ways. Either all three contain, as their foundation, versions, to a large extent verbally identical, of one and the same tradition; or two of them are thus closely dependent on the third; and the opinion of the majority of the best critics has of late years more and more converged towards the conviction that our canonical second gospel (the so-called "Mark's" Gospel) is that which most closely represents the primitive groundwork of the three.[68] That I take to be one of the most valuable results of New Testament criticism, of immeasurably greater importance than the discussion about dates and authorship. But if, as I believe to be the case, beyond any rational doubt or dispute, the second gospel is the nearest extant representative of the oldest tradition, whether written or oral, how comes it that it contains neither the "Sermon on the Mount" nor the "Lord's Prayer," those typical embodiments, according to Dr. Wace, of the "essential belief and cardinal teaching" of Jesus? Not only does "Mark's" gospel fail to contain the "Sermon on the Mount," or anything but a very few of the sayings contained in that collection; but, at the point of the history of Jesus where the "Sermon" occurs in "Matthew," there is in "Mark" an apparently unbroken narrative from the calling of James and John to the healing of Simon's wife's mother. Thus the oldest tradition not only ignores the "Sermon on the Mount," but, by implication, raises a probability against its being delivered when and where the later "Matthew" inserts it in his compilation. And still more weighty is the fact that the third gospel, the author of which tells us that he wrote after "many" others had "taken in hand" the same enterprise; who should therefore have known the first gospel (if it existed), and was bound to pay to it the deference due to the work of an apostolic eye-witness (if he had any reason for thinking it was so)--this writer, who exhibits far more literary competence than the other two, ignores any "Sermon on the Mount," such as that reported by "Matthew," just as much as the oldest authority does. Yet "Luke" has a great many passages identical, or parallel, with those in "Matthew's" "Sermon on the Mount," which are, for the most part, scattered about in a totally different connection. Interposed, however, between the nomination of the Apostles and a visit to Capernaum; occupying, therefore, a place which answers to that of the "Sermon on the Mount," in the first gospel, there is in the third gospel a discourse which is as closely similar to the "Sermon on the Mount," in some particulars, as it is widely unlike it in others. This discourse is said to have been delivered in a "plain" or "level place" (Luke vi. 17), and by way of distinction we may call it the "Sermon on the Plain." I see no reason to doubt that the two Evangelists are dealing, to a considerable extent, with the same traditional material; and a comparison of the two "Sermons" suggests very strongly that "Luke's" version is the earlier. The correspondences between the two forbid the notion that they are independent. They both begin with a series of blessings, some of which are almost verbally identical. In the middle of each (Luke vi. 27-38, Matt. v. 43-48) there is a striking exposition of the ethical spirit of the command given in Leviticus xix. 18. And each ends with a passage containing the declaration that a tree is to be known by its fruit, and the parable of the house built on the sand. But while there are only 29 verses in the "Sermon on the Plain" there are 107 in the "Sermon on the Mount;" the excess in length of the latter being chiefly due to the long interpolations, one of 30 verses before and one of 34 verses after, the middlemost parallelism with Luke. Under these circumstances it is quite impossible to admit that there is more probability that "Matthew's" version of the Sermon is historically accurate, than there is that Luke's version is so; and they cannot both be accurate. "Luke" either knew the collection of loosely-connected and aphoristic utterances which appear under the name of the "Sermon on the Mount" in "Matthew"; or he did not. If he did not, he must have been ignorant of the existence of such a document as our canonical "Matthew," a fact which does not make for the genuineness, or the authority, of that book. If he did, he has shown that he does not care for its authority on a matter of fact of no small importance; and that does not permit us to conceive that he believed the first gospel to be the work of an authority to whom he ought to defer, let alone that of an apostolic eye-witness. The tradition of the Church about the second gospel, which I believe to be quite worthless, but which is all the evidence there is for "Mark's" authorship, would have us believe that "Mark" was little more than the mouthpiece of the apostle Peter. Consequently, we are to suppose that Peter either did not know, or did not care very much for, that account of the "essential belief and cardinal teaching" of Jesus which is contained in the Sermon on the Mount; and, certainly, he could not have shared Dr. Wace's view of its importance.[69] I thought that all fairly attentive and intelligent students of the gospels, to say nothing of theologians of reputation, knew these things. But how can any one who does know them have the conscience to ask whether there is "any reasonable doubt" that the Sermon on the Mount was preached by Jesus of Nazareth? If conjecture is permissible, where nothing else is possible, the most probable conjecture seems to be that "Matthew," having a _cento_ of sayings attributed--rightly or wrongly it is impossible to say--to Jesus among his materials, thought they were, or might be, records of a continuous discourse, and put them in at the place he thought likeliest. Ancient historians of the highest character saw no harm in composing long speeches which never were spoken, and putting them into the mouths of statesmen and warriors; and I presume that whoever is represented by "Matthew" would have been grievously astonished to find that any one objected to his following the example of the best models accessible to him. So with the "Lord's Prayer." Absent in our representative of the oldest tradition, it appears in both "Matthew" and "Luke." There is reason to believe that every pious Jew, at the commencement of our era, prayed three times a day, according to a formula which is embodied in the present "Schmone-Esre"[70] of the Jewish prayer-book. Jesus, who was assuredly, in all respects, a pious Jew, whatever else he may have been, doubtless did the same. Whether he modified the current formula, or whether the so-called "Lord's Prayer" is the prayer substituted for the "Schmone-Esre" in the congregations of the Gentiles, is a question which can hardly be answered. In a subsequent passage of Dr. Wace's article (p. 356) he adds to the list of the verities which he imagines to be unassailable, "The Story of the Passion." I am not quite sure what he means by this. I am not aware that any one (with the exception of certain ancient heretics) has propounded doubts as to the reality of the crucifixion; and certainly I have no inclination to argue about the precise accuracy of every detail of that pathetic story of suffering and wrong. But, if Dr. Wace means, as I suppose he does, that that which, according to the orthodox view, happened after the crucifixion, and which is, in a dogmatic sense, the most important part of the story, is founded on solid historical proofs, I must beg leave to express a diametrically opposite conviction. What do we find when the accounts of the events in question, contained in the three Synoptic gospels, are compared together? In the oldest, there is a simple, straightforward statement which, for anything that I have to urge to the contrary, may be exactly true. In the other two, there is, round this possible and probable nucleus, a mass of accretions of the most questionable character. The cruelty of death by crucifixion depended very much upon its lingering character. If there were a support for the weight of the body, as not unfrequently was the practice, the pain during the first hours of the infliction was not, necessarily, extreme; nor need any serious physical symptoms, at once, arise from the wounds made by the nails in the hands and feet, supposing they were nailed, which was not invariably the case. When exhaustion set in, and hunger, thirst, and nervous irritation had done their work, the agony of the sufferer must have been terrible; and the more terrible that, in the absence of any effectual disturbance of the machinery of physical life, it might be prolonged for many hours, or even days. Temperate, strong men, such as were the ordinary Galilean peasants, might live for several days on the cross. It is necessary to bear these facts in mind when we read the account contained in the fifteenth chapter of the second gospel. Jesus was crucified at the third hour (xv. 25), and the narrative seems to imply that he died immediately after the ninth hour (_v_. 34). In this case, he would have been crucified only six hours; and the time spent on the cross cannot have been much longer, because Joseph of Arimathæa must have gone to Pilate, made his preparations, and deposited the body in the rock-cut tomb before sunset, which, at that time of the year, was about the twelfth hour. That any one should die after only six hours' crucifixion could not have been at all in accordance with Pilate's large experience of the effects of that method of punishment. It, therefore, quite agrees with what might be expected, that Pilate "marvelled if he were already dead" and required to be satisfied on this point by the testimony of the Roman officer who was in command of the execution party. Those who have paid attention to the extraordinary difficult question, What are the indisputable signs of death?--will be able to estimate the value of the opinion of a rough soldier on such a subject; even if his report to the Procurator were in no wise affected by the fact that the friend of Jesus, who anxiously awaited his answer, was a man of influence and of wealth. The inanimate body, wrapped in linen, was deposited in a spacious,[71] cool rock chamber, the entrance of which was closed, not by a well-fitting door, but by a stone rolled against the opening, which would of course allow free passage of air. A little more than thirty-six hours afterwards (Friday 6 P.M., to Sunday 6 A.M., or a little after) three women visit the tomb and find it empty. And they are told by a young man "arrayed in a white robe" that Jesus is gone to his native country of Galilee, and that the disciples and Peter will find him there. Thus it stands, plainly recorded, in the oldest tradition that, for any evidence to the contrary, the sepulchre may have been emptied at any time during the Friday or Saturday nights. If it is said that no Jew would have violated the Sabbath by taking the former course, it is to be recollected that Joseph of Arimathæa might well be familiar with that wise and liberal interpretation of the fourth commandment, which permitted works of mercy to men--nay, even the drawing of an ox or an ass out of a pit--on the Sabbath. At any rate, the Saturday night was free to the most scrupulous of observers of the Law. These are the facts of the case as stated by the oldest extant narrative of them. I do not see why any one should have a word to say against the inherent probability of that narrative; and, for my part, I am quite ready to accept it as an historical fact, that so much and no more is positively known of the end of Jesus of Nazareth. On what grounds can a reasonable man be asked to believe any more? So far as the narrative in the first gospel, on the one hand, and those in the third gospel and the Acts, on the other, go beyond what is stated in the second gospel, they are hopelessly discrepant with one another. And this is the more significant because the pregnant phrase "some doubted," in the first gospel, is ignored in the third. But it is said that we have the witness Paul speaking to us directly in the Epistles. There is little doubt that we have, and a very singular witness he is. According to his own showing, Paul, in the vigour of his manhood, with every means of becoming acquainted, at first hand, with the evidence of eye-witnesses, not merely refused to credit them, but "persecuted the church of God and made havoc of it." The reasoning of Stephen fell dead upon the acute intellect of this zealot for the traditions of his fathers: his eyes were blind to the ecstatic illumination of the martyr's countenance "as it had been the face of an angel;" and when, at the words "Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God," the murderous mob rushed upon and stoned the rapt disciple of Jesus, Paul ostentatiously made himself their official accomplice. Yet this strange man, because he has a vision, one day, at once, and with equally headlong zeal, flies to the opposite pole of opinion. And he is most careful to tell us that he abstained from any re-examination of the facts. Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood; neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles before me; but I went away into Arabia. (Galatians i. 16, 17.) I do not presume to quarrel with Paul's procedure. If it satisfied him, that was his affair; and, if it satisfies anyone else, I am not called upon to dispute the right of that person to be satisfied. But I certainly have the right to say that it would not satisfy me, in like case; that I should be very much ashamed to pretend that it could, or ought to, satisfy me; and that I can entertain but a very low estimate of the value of the evidence of people who are to be satisfied in this fashion, when questions of objective fact, in which their faith is interested, are concerned. So that when I am called upon to believe a great deal more than the oldest gospel tells me about the final events of the history of Jesus on the authority of Paul (1 Corinthians xv. 5-8) I must pause. Did he think it, at any subsequent time, worth while "to confer with flesh and blood," or, in modern phrase, to re-examine the facts for himself? or was he ready to accept anything that fitted in with his preconceived ideas? Does he mean, when he speaks of all the appearances of Jesus after the crucifixion as if they were of the same kind, that they were all visions, like the manifestation to himself? And, finally, how is this account to be reconciled with those in the first and third gospels--which, as we have seen, disagree with one another? Until these questions are satisfactorily answered, I am afraid that, so far as I am concerned, Paul's testimony cannot be seriously regarded, except as it may afford evidence of the state of traditional opinion at the time at which he wrote, say between 55 and 60 A.D.; that is, more than twenty years after the event; a period much more than sufficient for the development of any amount of mythology about matters of which nothing was really known. A few years later, among the contemporaries and neighbours of the Jews, and, if the most probable interpretation of the Apocalypse can he trusted, among the followers of Jesus also, it was fully believed, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that the Emperor Nero was not really dead, but that he was hidden away somewhere in the East, and would speedily come again at the head of a great army, to be revenged upon his enemies.[72] Thus, I conceive that I have shown cause for the opinion that Dr. Wace's challenge touching the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, and the Passion was more valorous than discreet. After all this discussion, I am still at the agnostic point. Tell me, first, what Jesus can be proved to have been, said, and done, and I will say whether I believe him, or in him,[73] or not. As Dr. Wace admits that I have dissipated his lingering shade of unbelief about the bedevilment of the Gadarene pigs, he might have done something to help mine. Instead of that, he manifests a total want of conception of the nature of the obstacles which impede the conversion of his "infidels." The truth I believe to be, that the difficulties in the way of arriving at a sure conclusion as to these matters, from the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, or any other data offered by the Synoptic gospels (and _a fortiori_ from the fourth gospel), are insuperable. Every one of these records is coloured by the prepossessions of those among whom the primitive traditions arose, and of those by whom they were collected and edited: and the difficulty of making allowance for these prepossessions is enhanced by our ignorance of the exact dates at which the documents were first put together; of the extent to which they have been subsequently worked over and interpolated; and of the historical sense, or want of sense, and the dogmatic tendencies of their compilers and editors. Let us see if there is any other road which will take us into something better than negation. There is a widespread notion that the "primitive Church," while under the guidance of the Apostles and their immediate successors, was a sort of dogmatic dovecot, pervaded by the most loving unity and doctrinal harmony. Protestants, especially, are fond of attributing to themselves the merit of being nearer "the Church of the Apostles" than their neighbours; and they are the less to be excused for their strange delusion because they are great readers of the documents which prove the exact contrary. The fact is that, in the course of the first three centuries of its existence, the Church rapidly underwent a process of evolution of the most remarkable character, the final stage of which is far more different from the first than Anglicanism is from Quakerism. The key to the comprehension of the problem of the origin of that which is now called "Christianity," and its relation to Jesus of Nazareth, lies here. Nor can we arrive at any sound conclusion as to what it is probable that Jesus actually said and did, without being clear on this head. By far the most important and subsequently influential steps in the evolution of Christianity took place in the course of the century, more or less, which followed upon the crucifixion. It is almost the darkest period of Church history, but, most fortunately, the beginning and the end of the period are brightly illuminated by the contemporary evidence of two writers of whose historical existence there is no doubt,[74] and against the genuineness of whose most important works there is no widely-admitted objection. These are Justin, the philosopher and martyr, and Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. I shall call upon these witnesses only to testify to the condition of opinion among those who called themselves disciples of Jesus in their time. Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, which was written somewhere about the middle of the second century, enumerates certain categories of persons who, in his opinion, will, or will not, be saved,[75] These are:-- 1. Orthodox Jews who refuse to believe that those who do observe it to be heretics. _Saved_. 2. Jews who observe the Law; believe Jesus to be the Christ; but who insist on the observance of the Law by Gentile converts. _Not Saved_. 3. Jews who observe the Law; believe Jesus to be the Christ, and hold that Gentile converts need not observe the Law. _Saved_ (in Justin's opinion; but some of his fellow-Christians think the contrary). 4. Gentile converts to the belief in Jesus as the Christ, who observe the Law. _Saved_ (possibly). 5. Gentile believers in Jesus as the Christ, who do not observe the Law themselves (except so far as the refusal of idol sacrifices), but do not consider those who do observe it heretics. _Saved_ (this is Justin's own view). 6. Gentile believers who do not observe the Law, except in refusing idol sacrifices, and hold those who do observe it to be heretics. _Saved_. 7. Gentiles who believe Jesus to be the Christ and call themselves Christians, but who eat meats sacrificed to idols. _Not Saved_. 8. Gentiles who disbelieve in Jesus as the Christ. _Not Saved_. Justin does not consider Christians who believe in the natural birth of Jesus, of whom he implies that there is a respectable minority, to be heretics, though he himself strongly holds the preternatural birth of Jesus and his pre-existence as the "Logos" or "Word." He conceives the Logos to be a second God, inferior to the first, unknowable God, with respect to whom Justin, like Philo, is a complete agnostic. The Holy Spirit is not regarded by Justin as a separate personality, and is often mixed up with the "Logos." The doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul is, for Justin, a heresy; and he is as firm a believer in the resurrection of the body, as in the speedy Second Coming and the establishment of the millennium. The pillar of the Church in the middle of the second century--a much-travelled native of Samaria--was certainly well acquainted with Rome, probably with Alexandria; and it is likely that he knew the state of opinion throughout the length and breadth of the Christian world as well as any man of his time. If the various categories above enumerated are arranged in a series thus:-- _Justin's Christianity_ ________/\__________ / \ _Orthodox_ _Judæo-Christianity_ _Idolothytic_ _Judaism_ ______/\______ _Christianity_ _Paganism_ / \ I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. it is obvious that they form a gradational series from orthodox Judaism, on the extreme left, to Paganism, whether philosophic or popular, on the extreme right; and it will further be observed that, while Justin's conception of Christianity is very broad, he rigorously excludes two classes of persons who, in his time, called themselves Christians; namely, those who insist on circumcision and other observances of the Law on the part of Gentile converts; that is to say, the strict Judæo-Christians (II.); and, on the other hand, those who assert the lawfulness of eating meat offered to idols--whether they are Gnostic or not (VII.). These last I have called "idolothytic" Christians, because I cannot devise a better name, not because it is strictly defensible etymologically. At the present moment, I do not suppose there is an English missionary in any heathen land who would trouble himself whether the materials of his dinner had been previously offered to idols or not. On the other hand, I suppose there is no Protestant sect within the pale of orthodoxy, to say nothing of the Roman and Greek Churches, which would hesitate to declare the practice of circumcision and the observance of the Jewish Sabbath and dietary rules, shockingly heretical. Modern Christianity has, in fact, not only shifted far to the right of Justin's position, but it is of much narrower compass. _Justin_ ___________/\________________ / \ _Judæo-Christianity_ _Modern Christianity_ _Paganism_ _Judaism_ _____/\_____ _______/\_______ / \ / \ I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. For, though it includes VII., and even, in saint and relic worship, cuts a "monstrous cantle" out of paganism, it excludes, not only all Judæo-Christians, but all who doubt that such are heretics. Ever since the thirteenth century, the Inquisition would have cheerfully burned, and in Spain did abundantly burn, all persons who came under the categories II., III., IV., V. And the wolf would play the same havoc now, if it could only get its blood-stained jaws free from the muzzle imposed by the secular arm. Further, there is not a Protestant body except the Unitarian, which would not declare Justin himself a heretic, on account of his doctrine of the inferior godship of the Logos; while I am very much afraid that, in strict logic, Dr. Wace would be under the necessity, so painful to him, of calling him an "infidel," on the same and on other grounds. Now let us turn to our other authority. If there is any result of critical investigations of the sources of Christianity which is certain,[76] it is that Paul of Tarsus wrote the Epistle to the Galatians somewhere between the years 55 and 60 A.D., that is to say, roughly, twenty, or five-and-twenty years after the crucifixion. If this is so, the Epistle to the Galatians is one of the oldest, if not the very oldest, of extant documentary evidences of the state of the primitive Church. And, be it observed, if it is Paul's writing, it unquestionably furnishes us with the evidence of a participator in the transactions narrated. With the exception of two or three of the other Pauline Epistles, there is not one solitary book in the New Testament of the authorship and authority of which we have such good evidence. And what is the state of things we find disclosed? A bitter quarrel, in his account of which Paul by no means minces matters, or hesitates to hurl defiant sarcasms against those who were "reputed to be pillars": James "the brother of the Lord," Peter, the rock on whom Jesus is said to have built his Church, and John, "the beloved disciple." And no deference toward "the rock" withholds Paul from charging Peter to his face with "dissimulation." The subject of the hot dispute was simply this. Were Gentile converts bound to obey the Law or not? Paul answered in the negative; and, acting upon his opinion, he had created at Antioch (and elsewhere) a specifically "Christian" community, the sole qualifications for admission into which were the confession of the belief that Jesus was the Messiah, and baptism upon that confession. In the epistle in question, Paul puts this--his "gospel," as he calls it--in its most extreme form. Not only does he deny the necessity of conformity with the Law, but he declares such conformity to have a negative value. "Behold, I, Paul, say unto you, that if ye receive circumcision, Christ will profit you nothing" (Galatians v. 2). He calls the legal observances "beggarly rudiments," and anathematises every one who preaches to the Galatians any other gospel than his own. That is to say, by direct consequence, he anathematises the Nazarenes of Jerusalem, whose zeal for the Law is testified by James in a passage of the Acts cited further on. In the first Epistle to the Corinthians, dealing with the question of eating meat offered to idols, it is clear that Paul himself thinks it a matter of indifference; but he advises that it should not he done, for the sake of the weaker brethren. On the other hand, the Nazarenes of Jerusalem most strenuously opposed Paul's "gospel," insisting on every convert becoming a regular Jewish proselyte, and consequently on his observance of the whole Law; and this party was led by James and Peter and John (Galatians ii. 9). Paul does not suggest that the question of principle was settled by the discussion referred to in Galatians. All he says is, that it ended in the practical agreement that he and Barnabas should do as they had been doing, in respect to the Gentiles; while James and Peter and John should deal in their own fashion with Jewish converts. Afterwards, he complains bitterly of Peter, because, when on a visit to Antioch, he, at first, inclined to Paul's view and ate with the Gentile converts; but when "certain came from James," "drew back, and separated himself, fearing them that were of the circumcision. And the rest of the Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch as even Barnabas was carried away with their dissimulation" (Galatians ii. 12-13). There is but one conclusion to be drawn from Paul's account of this famous dispute, the settlement of which determined the fortunes of the nascent religion. It is that the disciples at Jerusalem, headed by "James, the Lord's brother," and by the leading apostles, Peter and John, were strict Jews, who had objected to admit any converts into their body, unless these, either by birth, or by becoming proselytes, were also strict Jews. In fact, the sole difference between James and Peter and John, with the body of the disciples whom they led and the Jews by whom they were surrounded, and with whom they, for many years, shared the religious observances of the Temple, was that they believed that the Messiah, whom the leaders of the nation yet looked for, had already come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Acts of the Apostles is hardly a very trustworthy history; it is certainly of later date than the Pauline Epistles, supposing them to be genuine. And the writer's version of the conference of which Paul gives so graphic a description, if that is correct, is unmistakably coloured with all the art of a reconciler, anxious to cover up a scandal. But it is none the less instructive on this account. The judgment of the "council" delivered by James is that the Gentile converts shall merely "abstain from things sacrificed to idols, and from blood and from things strangled, and from fornication." But notwithstanding the accommodation in which the writer of the Acts would have us believe, the Jerusalem Church held to its endeavour to retain the observance of the Law. Long after the conference, some time after the writing of the Epistles to the Galatians and Corinthians, and immediately after the despatch of that to the Romans, Paul makes his last visit to Jerusalem, and presents himself to James and all the elders. And this is what the Acts tells us of the interview:-- And they said unto him, Thou seest, brother, how many thousands [or myriads] there are among the Jews of them which have believed; and they are all zealous for the law; and they have been informed concerning thee, that thou teachest all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs. (Acts xxi. 20, 21.) They therefore request that he should perform a certain public religious act in the Temple, in order that all shall know that there is no truth in the things whereof they have been informed concerning thee; but that thou thyself walkest orderly, keeping the law (_ibid_. 24).[77] How far Paul could do what he is here requested to do, and which the writer of the Acts goes on to say he did, with a clear conscience, if he wrote the Epistles to the Galatians and Corinthians, I may leave any candid reader of these epistles to decide. The point to which I wish to direct attention is the declaration that the Jerusalem Church, led by the brother of Jesus and by his personal disciples and friends, twenty years and more after his death, consisted of strict and zealous Jews. Tertullus, the orator, caring very little about the internal dissensions of the followers of Jesus, speaks of Paul as a "ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes" (Acts xxiv. 5), which must have affected James much in the same way as it would have moved the Archbishop of Canterbury, in George Fox's day, to hear the latter called a "ringleader of the sect of Anglicans." In fact, "Nazarene" was, as is well known, the distinctive appellation applied to Jesus; his immediate followers were known as Nazarenes; while the congregation of the disciples, and, later, of converts at Jerusalem--the Jerusalem Church--was emphatically the "sect of the Nazarenes," no more, in itself, to be regarded as anything outside Judaism than the sect of the Sadducees, or that of the Essenes.[78] In fact, the tenets of both the Sadducees and the Essenes diverged much more widely from the Pharisaic standard of orthodoxy than Nazarenism did. Let us consider the condition of affairs now (A.D. 50-60) in relation to that which obtained in Justin's time, a century later. It is plain that the Nazarenes--presided over by James, "the brother of the Lord," and comprising within their body all the twelve apostles--belonged to Justin's second category of "Jews who observe the Law, believe Jesus to be the Christ, but who insist on the observance of the Law by Gentile converts," up till the time at which the controversy reported by Paul arose. They then, according to Paul, simply allowed him to form his congregations of non-legal Gentile converts at Antioch and elsewhere; and it would seem that it was to these converts, who would come under Justin's fifth category, that the title of "Christian" was first applied. If any of these Christians had acted upon the more than half-permission given by Paul, and had eaten meats offered to idols, they would have belonged to Justin's seventh category. Hence, it appears that, if Justin's opinion, which was probably that of the Church generally in the middle of the second century, was correct, James and Peter and John and their followers could not be saved; neither could Paul, if he carried into practice his views as to the indifference of eating meats offered to idols. Or, to put the matter another way, the centre of gravity of orthodoxy, which is at the extreme right of the series in the nineteenth century, was at the extreme left just before the middle of the first century, when the "sect of the Nazarenes" constituted the whole church founded by Jesus and the apostles; while, in the time of Justin, it lay mid-way between the two. It is therefore a profound mistake to imagine that the Judæo-Christians (Nazarenes and Ebionites) of later times were heretical outgrowths from a primitive universalist "Christianity." On the contrary, the universalist "Christianity" is an outgrowth from the primitive, purely Jewish, Nazarenism; which, gradually eliminating all the ceremonial and dietary parts of the Jewish law, has thrust aside its parent, and all the intermediate stages of its development, into the position of damnable heresies. Such being the case, we are in a position to form a safe judgment of the limits within which the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth must have been confined. Ecclesiastical authority would have us believe that the words which are given at the end of the first Gospel, "Go ye, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," are part of the last commands of Jesus, issued at the moment of his parting with the eleven. If so, Peter and John must have heard these words; they are too plain to be misunderstood; and the occasion is too solemn for them ever to be forgotten. Yet the "Acts" tells us that Peter needed a vision to enable him so much as to baptize Cornelius; and Paul, in the Galatians, knows nothing of words which would have completely borne him out as against those who, though they heard, must be supposed to have either forgotten, or ignored them. On the other hand, Peter and John, who are supposed to have heard the "Sermon on the Mount," know nothing of the saying that Jesus had not come to destroy the Law, but that every jot and tittle of the Law must be fulfilled, which surely would have been pretty good evidence for their view of the question. We are sometimes told that the personal friends and daily companions of Jesus remained zealous Jews and opposed Paul's innovations, because they were hard of heart and dull of comprehension. This hypothesis is hardly in accordance with the concomitant faith of those who adopt it, in the miraculous insight and superhuman sagacity of their Master; nor do I see any way of getting it to harmonise with the orthodox postulate; namely, that Matthew was the author of the first gospel and John of the fourth. If that is so, then, most assuredly, Matthew was no dullard; and as for the fourth gospel--a theosophic romance of the first order--it could have been written by none but a man of remarkable literary capacity, who had drunk deep of Alexandrian philosophy. Moreover, the doctrine of the writer of the fourth gospel is more remote from that of the "sect of the Nazarenes" than is that of Paul himself. I am quite aware that orthodox critics have been capable of maintaining that John, the Nazarene, who was probably well past fifty years of age, when he is supposed to have written the most thoroughly Judaising book in the New Testament--the Apocalypse--in the roughest of Greek, underwent an astounding metamorphosis of both doctrine and style by the time he reached the ripe age of ninety or so, and provided the world with a history in which the acutest critic cannot [always] make out where the speeches of Jesus end and the text of the narrative begins; while that narrative is utterly irreconcilable, in regard to matters of fact, with that of his fellow-apostle, Matthew. The end of the whole matter is this:--The "sect of the Nazarenes," the brother and the immediate followers of Jesus, commissioned by him as apostles, and those who were taught by them up to the year 50 A.D., were not "Christians" in the sense in which that term has been understood ever since its asserted origin at Antioch, but Jews--strict orthodox Jews--whose belief in the Messiahship of Jesus never led to their exclusion from the Temple services, nor would have shut them out from the wide embrace of Judaism.[79] The open proclamation of their special view about the Messiah was doubtless offensive to the Pharisees, just as rampant Low Churchism is offensive to bigoted High Churchism in our own country; or as any kind of dissent is offensive to fervid religionists of all creeds. To the Sadducees, no doubt, the political danger of any Messianic movement was serious; and they would have been glad to put down Nazarenism, lest it should end in useless rebellion against their Roman masters, like that other Galilean movement headed by Judas, a generation earlier. Galilee was always a hotbed of seditious enthusiasm against the rule of Rome; and high priest and procurator alike had need to keep a sharp eye upon natives of that district. On the whole, however, the Nazarenes were but little troubled for the first twenty years of their existence; and the undying hatred of the Jews against those later converts, whom they regarded as apostates and fautors of a sham Judaism, was awakened by Paul. From their point of view, he was a mere renegade Jew, opposed alike to orthodox Judaism and to orthodox Nazarenism; and whose teachings threatened Judaism with destruction. And, from their point of view, they were quite right. In the course of a century, Pauline influences had a large share in driving primitive Nazarenism from being the very heart of the new faith into the position of scouted error; and the spirit of Paul's doctrine continued its work of driving Christianity farther and farther away from Judaism, until "meats offered to idols" might be eaten without scruple, while the Nazarene methods of observing even the Sabbath, or the Passover, were branded with the mark of Judaising heresy. But if the primitive Nazarenes of whom the Acts speak were orthodox Jews, what sort of probability can there be that Jesus was anything else? How can he have founded the universal religion which was not heard of till twenty years after his death?[80] That Jesus possessed, in a rare degree, the gift of attaching men to his person and to his fortunes; that he was the author of many a striking saying, and the advocate of equity, of love, and of humility; that he may have disregarded the subtleties of the bigots for legal observance, and appealed rather to those noble conceptions of religion which constituted the pith and kernel of the teaching of the great prophets of his nation seven hundred years earlier; and that, in the last scenes of his career, he may have embodied the ideal sufferer of Isaiah, may be, as I think it is, extremely probable. But all this involves not a step beyond the borders of orthodox Judaism. Again, who is to say whether Jesus proclaimed himself the veritable Messiah, expected by his nation since the appearance of the pseudoprophetic work of Daniel, a century and a half before his time; or whether the enthusiasm of his followers gradually forced him to assume that position? But one thing is quite certain: if that belief in the speedy second coming of the Messiah which was shared by all parties in the primitive Church, whether Nazarene or Pauline; which Jesus is made to prophesy, over and over again, in the Synoptic gospels; and which dominated the life of Christians during the first century after the crucifixion;--if he believed and taught that, then assuredly he was under an illusion, and he is responsible for that which the mere effluxion of time has demonstrated to be a prodigious error. When I ventured to doubt "whether any Protestant theologian who has a reputation to lose will say that he believes the Gadarene story," it appears that I reckoned without Dr. Wace, who, referring to this passage in my paper, says:-- He will judge whether I fall under his description; but I repeat that I believe it, and that he has removed the only objection to my believing it (p. 363). Far be it from me to set myself up as a judge of any such delicate question as that put before me; but I think I may venture to express the conviction that, in the matter of courage, Dr. Wace has raised for himself a monument _ære perennius._ For really, in my poor judgment, a certain splendid intrepidity, such as one admires in the leader of a forlorn hope, is manifested by Dr. Wace when he solemnly affirms that he believes the Gadarene story on the evidence offered. I feel less complimented perhaps than I ought to do, when I am told that I have been an accomplice in extinguishing in Dr. Wace's mind the last glimmer of doubt which common sense may have suggested. In fact, I must disclaim all responsibility for the use to which the information I supplied has been put. I formally decline to admit that the expression of my ignorance whether devils, in the existence of which I do not believe, if they did exist, might or might not be made to go out of men into pigs, can, as a matter of logic, have been of any use whatever to a person who already believed in devils and in the historical accuracy of the gospels. Of the Gadarene story, Dr. Wace, with all solemnity and twice over, affirms that he "believes it." I am sorry to trouble him further, but what does he mean by "it"? Because there are two stories, one in "Mark" and "Luke," and the other in "Matthew." In the former, which I quoted in my previous paper, there is one possessed man; in the latter there are two. The story is told fully, with the vigorous homely diction and the picturesque details of a piece of folklore, in the second gospel. The immediately antecedent event is the storm on the Lake of Gennesaret. The immediately consequent events are the message from the ruler of the synagogue and the healing of the woman with an issue of blood. In the third gospel, the order of events is exactly the same, and there is an extremely close general and verbal correspondence between the narratives of the miracle. Both agree in stating that there was only one possessed man, and that he was the residence of many devils, whose name was "Legion." In the first gospel, the event which immediately precedes the Gadarene affair is, as before, the storm; the message from the ruler and the healing of the issue are separated from it by the accounts of the healing of a paralytic, of the calling of Matthew, and of a discussion with some Pharisees. Again, while the second gospel speaks of the country of the "Gerasenes" as the locality of the event, the third gospel has "Gerasenes," "Gergesenes," and "Gadarenes" in different ancient MSS.; while the first has "Gadarenes." The really important points to be noticed, however, in the narrative of the first gospel, are these--that there are two possessed men instead of one; and that while the story is abbreviated by omissions, what there is of it is often verbally identical with the corresponding passages in the other two gospels. The most unabashed of reconcilers cannot well say that one man is the same as two, or two as one; and, though the suggestion really has been made, that two different miracles, agreeing in all essential particulars, except the number of the possessed, were effected immediately after the storm on the lake, I should be sorry to accuse any one of seriously adopting it. Nor will it he pretended that the allegory refuge is accessible in this particular case. So, when Dr. Wace says that he believes in the synoptic evangelists' account of the miraculous bedevilment of swine, I may fairly ask which of them does he believe? Does he hold by the one evangelist's story, or by that of the two evangelists? And having made his election, what reasons has he to give for his choice? If it is suggested that the witness of two is to be taken against that of one, not only is the testimony dealt with in that common-sense fashion against which the theologians of his school protest so warmly; not only is all question of inspiration at an end, but the further inquiry arises, After all, is it the testimony of two against one? Are the authors of the versions in the second and third gospels really independent witnesses? In order to answer this question, it is only needful to place the English versions of the two side by side, and compare them carefully. It will then be seen that the coincidences between them, not merely in substance, but in arrangement, and in the use of identical words in the same order, are such, that only two alternatives are conceivable: either one evangelist freely copied from the other, or both based themselves upon a common source, which may either have been a written document, or a definite oral tradition learned by heart. Assuredly, these two testimonies are not those of independent witnesses. Further, when the narrative in the first gospel is compared with that in the other two, the same fact comes out. Supposing, then, that Dr. Wace is right in his assumption that Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote the works which we find attributed to them by tradition, what is the value of their agreement, even that something more or less like this particular miracle occurred, since it is demonstrable, either that all depend on some antecedent statement, of the authorship of which nothing is known, or that two are dependent upon the third? Dr. Wace says he believes the Gadarene story; whichever version of it he accepts, therefore, he believes that Jesus said what he is stated in all the versions to have said, and thereby virtually declared that the theory of the nature of the spiritual world involved in the story is true. Now I hold that this theory is false, that it is a monstrous and mischievous fiction; and I unhesitatingly express my disbelief in any assertion that it is true, by whomsoever made. So that, if Dr. Wace is right in his belief, he is also quite right in classing me among the people he calls "infidels"; and although I cannot fulfil the eccentric expectation that I shall glory in a title which, from my point of view, it would be simply silly to adopt, I certainly shall rejoice not to be reckoned among "Christians" so long as the profession of belief in such stories as the Gadarene pig affair, on the strength of a tradition of unknown origin, of which two discrepant reports, also of unknown origin, alone remain, forms any part of the Christian faith. And, although I have, more than once, repudiated the gift of prophecy, yet I think I may venture to express the anticipation, that if "Christians" generally are going to follow the line taken by Dr. Wace, it will not be long before all men of common sense qualify for a place among the "infidels." FOOTNOTES: [64] I may perhaps return to the question of the authorship of the Gospels. For the present I must content myself with warning my readers against any reliance upon Dr. Wace's statements as to the results arrived at by modern criticism. They are as gravely as surprisingly erroneous. [65] The United States ought, perhaps, to be added, but I am not sure. [66] Imagine that all our chairs of astronomy had been founded in the fourteenth century, and that their incumbents were bound to sign Ptolemaic articles. In that case, with every respect for the efforts of persons thus hampered to attain and expound the truth, I think men of common sense would go elsewhere to learn astronomy. Zeller's _Vorträge und Abhandlungen_ were published and came into my hands a quarter of a century ago. The writer's rank, as a theologian to begin with, and subsequently as a historian of Greek philosophy, is of the highest. Among these essays are two--_Das Urchirstenthum_ and _Die Tübinger historische Schule_--which are likely to be of more use to those who wish to know the real state of the case than all that the official "apologists," with their one eye on truth and the other on the tenets of their sect, have written. For the opinion of a scientific theologian about theologians of this stamp see pp. 225 and 227 of the _Vorträge_. [67] I suppose this is what Dr. Wace is thinking about when he says that I allege that there "is no visible escape" from the supposition of an _Ur-Marcus_ (p. 367). That a "theologian of repute" should confound an indisputable fact with one of the modes of explaining that fact is not so singular as those who are unaccustomed to the ways of theologians might imagine. [68] Any examiner whose duty it has been to examine into a case of "copying" will be particularly well prepared to appreciate the force of the case stated in that most excellent little book, _The Common Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels_, by Dr. Abbott and Mr. Rushbrooke (Macmillan, 1884). To those who have not passed through such painful experiences I may recommend the brief discussion of the genuineness of the "Casket Letters" in my friend Mr. Skelton's interesting book, _Maitland of Lethington_. The second edition of Holtzmann's _Lehrbuch_, published in 1886, gives a remarkably fair and full account of the present results of criticism. At p. 366 he writes that the present burning question is whether the "relatively primitive narrative and the root of the other synoptic texts is contained in Matthew or in Mark. It is only on this point that properly-informed (_sachkundige_) critics differ," and he decides in favour of Mark. [69] Holtzmann (_Die synoptischen Evangelien_, 1863, p. 75), following Ewald, argues that the "Source A" (= the threefold tradition, more or less) contained something that answered to the "Sermon on the Plain" immediately after the words of our present Mark, "And he cometh into a house" (iii. 19). But what conceivable motive could "Mark" have for omitting it? Holtzmann has no doubt, however, that the "Sermon on the Mount" is a compilation, or, as he calls it in his recently-published _Lehrbuch_ (p. 372), "an artificial mosaic work." [70] See Schürer, _Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes_, Zweiter Thiel, p. 384. [71] Spacious, because a young man could sit in it "on the right side" (xv. 5), and therefore with plenty of room to spare. [72] King Herod had not the least difficulty in supposing the resurrection of John the Baptist--"John, whom I beheaded, he is risen" (Mark vi. 16). [73] I am very sorry for the interpolated "in," because citation ought to be accurate in small things as in great. But what difference it makes whether one "believes Jesus" or "believes in Jesus" much thought has not enabled me to discover. If you "believe him" you must believe him to be what he professed to be--that is, "believe in him;" and if you "believe in him" you must necessarily "believe him." [74] True for Justin: but there is a school of theological critics, who more or less question the historical reality of Paul, and the genuineness of even the four cardinal epistles. [75] See _Dial. cum Tryphone_, §47 and §35. It is to be understood that Justin does not arrange these categories in order, as I have done. [76] I guard myself against being supposed to affirm that even the four cardinal epistles of Paul may not have been seriously tampered with. See note 1, p. 287 above. [77] Paul, in fact, is required to commit in Jerusalem, an act of the same character as that which he brands as "dissimulation" on the part of Peter in Antioch. [78] All this was quite clearly pointed out by Ritschl nearly forty years ago. See _Die Entstchung der alt-katholischen Kirche_ (1850), p. 108. [79] "If every one was baptized as soon as he acknowledged Jesus to be the Messiah, the first Christians can have been aware of no other essential differences from the Jews."--Zeller, _Vorträge_ (1865), p. 26. [80] Dr. Harnack, in the lately-published second edition of his _Dogmengeschichte_, says (p. 39), "Jesus Christ brought forward no new doctrine;" and again (p. 65), "It is not difficult to set against every portion of the utterances of Jesus an observation which deprives him of originality." See also Zusatz 4, on the same page. IX: AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY [1889] Nemo ergo ex me scire quærat, quod me nescire scio, nisi forte ut nescire discat.--AUGUSTINUS, _De Civ. Dei_, xii. 7. [81] The present discussion has arisen out of the use, which has become general in the last few years, of the terms "Agnostic" and "Agnosticism." The people who call themselves "Agnostics" have been charged with doing so because they have not the courage to declare themselves "Infidels." It has been insinuated that they have adopted a new name in order to escape the unpleasantness which attaches to their proper denomination. To this wholly erroneous imputation, I have replied by showing that the term "Agnostic" did, as a matter of fact, arise in a manner which negatives it; and my statement has not been, and cannot be, refuted. Moreover, speaking for myself, and without impugning the right of any other person to use the term in another sense, I further say that Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions. The justification of the Agnostic principle lies in the success which follows upon its application, whether in the field of natural, or in that of civil, history; and in the fact that, so far as these topics are concerned, no sane man thinks of denying its validity. Still speaking for myself, I add, that though Agnosticism is not, and cannot be, a creed, except in so far as its general principle is concerned; yet that the application of that principle results in the denial of, or the suspension of judgment concerning, a number of propositions respecting which our contemporary ecclesiastical "gnostics" profess entire certainty. And, in so far as these ecclesiastical persons can be justified in their old-established custom (which many nowadays think more honoured in the breach than the observance) of using opprobrious names to those who differ from them, I fully admit their right to call me and those who think with me "Infidels"; all I have ventured to urge is that they must not expect us to speak of ourselves by that title. The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual Agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as "unknowable."[82] What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing; and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. But whether these things are knowable by any one else is exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case. Relatively to myself, I am quite sure that the region of uncertainty--the nebulous country in which words play the part of realities--is far more extensive than I could wish. Materialism and Idealism; Theism and Atheism; the doctrine of the soul and its mortality or immortality--appear in the history of philosophy like the shades of Scandinavian heroes, eternally slaying one another and eternally coming to life again in a metaphysical "Nifelheim." It is getting on for twenty-five centuries, at least, since mankind began seriously to give their minds to these topics. Generation after generation, philosophy has been doomed to roll the stone uphill; and, just as all the world swore it was at the top, down it has rolled to the bottom again. All this is written in innumerable books; and he who will toil through them will discover that the stone is just where it was when the work began. Hume saw this; Kant saw it; since their time, more and more eyes have been cleansed of the films which prevented them from seeing it; until now the weight and number of those who refuse to be the prey of verbal mystifications has begun to tell in practical life. It was inevitable that a conflict should arise between Agnosticism and Theology; or rather, I ought to say, between Agnosticism and Ecclesiasticism. For Theology, the science, is one thing; and Ecclesiasticism, the championship of a foregone conclusion[83] as to the truth of a particular form of Theology, is another. With scientific Theology, Agnosticism has no quarrel. On the contrary, the Agnostic, knowing too well the influence of prejudice and idiosyncrasy, even on those who desire most earnestly to be impartial, can wish for nothing more urgently than that the scientific theologian should not only be at perfect liberty to thresh out the matter in his own fashion; but that he should, if he can, find flaws in the Agnostic position; and, even if demonstration is not to be had, that he should put, in their full force, the grounds of the conclusions he thinks probable. The scientific theologian admits the Agnostic principle, however widely his results may differ from those reached by the majority of Agnostics. But, as between Agnosticism and Ecclesiasticism, or, as our neighbours across the Channel call it, Clericalism, there can be neither peace nor truce. The Cleric asserts that it is morally wrong not to believe certain propositions, whatever the results of a strict scientific investigation of the evidence of these propositions. He tells us "that religious error is, in itself, of an immoral nature."[84] He declares that he has prejudged certain conclusions, and looks upon those who show cause for arrest of judgment as emissaries of Satan. It necessarily follows that, for him, the attainment of faith, not the ascertainment of truth, is the highest aim of mental life. And, on careful analysis of the nature of this faith, it will too often be found to be, not the mystic process of unity with the Divine, understood by the religious enthusiast; but that which the candid simplicity of a Sunday scholar once defined it to be. "Faith," said this unconscious plagiarist of Tertullian, "is the power of saying you believe things which are incredible." Now I, and many other Agnostics, believe that faith, in this sense, is an abomination; and though we do not indulge in the luxury of self-righteousness so far as to call those who are not of our way of thinking hard names, we do not feel that the disagreement between ourselves and those who hold this doctrine is even more moral than intellectual. It is desirable there should be an end of any mistakes on this topic. If our clerical opponents were clearly aware of the real state of the case, there would be an end of the curious delusion, which often appears between the lines of their writings, that those whom they are so fond of calling "Infidels" are people who not only ought to be, but in their hearts are, ashamed of themselves. It would be discourteous to do more than hint the antipodal opposition of this pleasant dream of theirs to facts. The clerics and their lay allies commonly tell us, that if we refuse to admit that there is good ground for expressing definite convictions about certain topics, the bonds of human society will dissolve and mankind lapse into savagery. There are several answers to this assertion. One is that the bonds of human society were formed without the aid of their theology; and, in the opinion of not a few competent judges, have been weakened rather than strengthened by a good deal of it. Greek science, Greek art, the ethics of old Israel, the social organisation of old Rome, contrived to come into being, without the help of any one who believed in a single distinctive article of the simplest of the Christian creeds. The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of those of Greece and Rome--not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world, were alike despicable. Again, all that is best in the ethics of the modern world, in so far as it has not grown out of Greek thought, or Barbarian manhood, is the direct development of the ethics of old Israel. There is no code of legislation, ancient or modern, at once so just and so merciful, so tender to the weak and poor, as the Jewish law; and, if the Gospels are to be trusted, Jesus of Nazareth himself declared that he taught nothing but that which lay implicitly, or explicitly, in the religious and ethical system of his people. And the scribe said unto him, Of a truth, Teacher, thou hast well said that he is one; and there is none other but he, and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. (Mark xii. 32, 33.) Here is the briefest of summaries of the teaching of the prophets of Israel of the eighth century; does the Teacher, whose doctrine is thus set forth in his presence, repudiate the exposition? Nay; we are told, on the contrary, that Jesus saw that he "answered discreetly," and replied, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." So that I think that even if the creeds, from the so-called "Apostles," to the so-called "Athanasian," were swept into oblivion; and even if the human race should arrive at the conclusion that, whether a bishop washes a cup or leaves it unwashed, is not a matter of the least consequence, it will get on very well. The causes which have led to the development of morality in mankind, which have guided or impelled us all the way from the savage to the civilised state, will not cease to operate because a number of ecclesiastical hypotheses turn out to be baseless. And, even if the absurd notion that morality is more the child of speculation than of practical necessity and inherited instinct, had any foundation; if all the world is going to thieve, murder, and otherwise misconduct itself as soon as it discovers that certain portions of ancient history are mythical, what is the relevance of such arguments to any one who holds by the Agnostic principle? Surely, the attempt to cast out Beelzebub by the aid of Beelzebub is a hopeful procedure as compared to that of preserving morality by the aid of immorality. For I suppose it is admitted that an Agnostic may be perfectly sincere, may be competent, and may have studied the question at issue with as much care as his clerical opponents. But, if the Agnostic really believes what he says, the "dreadful consequence" argufier (consistently, I admit, with his own principles) virtually asks him to abstain from telling the truth, or to say what he believes to be untrue, because of the supposed injurious consequences to morality. "Beloved brethren, that we may be spotlessly moral, before all things let us lie," is the sum total of many an exhortation addressed to the "Infidel." Now, as I have already pointed out, we cannot oblige our exhorters. We leave the practical application of the convenient doctrines of "Reserve" and "Non-natural interpretation" to those who invented them. I trust that I have now made amends for any ambiguity, or want of fulness, in my previous exposition of that which I hold to be the essence of the Agnostic doctrine. Henceforward, I might hope to hear no more of the assertion that we are necessarily Materialists, Idealists, Atheists, Theists, or any other _ists_, if experience had led me to think that the proved falsity of a statement was any guarantee against its repetition. And those who appreciate the nature of our position will see, at once, that when Ecclesiasticism declares that we ought to believe this, that, and the other, and are very wicked if we don't, it is impossible for us to give any answer but this: We have not the slightest objection to believe anything you like, if you will give us good grounds for belief; but, if you cannot, we must respectfully refuse, even if that refusal should wreck mortality and insure our own damnation several times over. We are quite content to leave that to the decision of the future. The course of the past has impressed us with the firm conviction that no good ever comes of falsehood, and we feel warranted in refusing even to experiment in that direction. * * * * * In the course of the present discussion it has been asserted that the "Sermon on the Mount" and the "Lord's Prayer" furnish a summary and condensed view of the essentials of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, set forth by himself. Now this supposed _Summa_ of Nazarene theology distinctly affirms the existence of a spiritual world, of a Heaven, and of a Hell of fire; it teaches the Fatherhood of God and the malignity of the Devil; it declares the superintending providence of the former and our need of deliverance from the machinations of the latter; it affirms the fact of demoniac possession and the power of casting out devils by the faithful. And from these premises, the conclusion is drawn, that those Agnostics who deny that there is any evidence of such a character as to justify certainty, respecting the existence and the nature of the spiritual world, contradict the express declarations of Jesus. I have replied to this argumentation by showing that there is strong reason to doubt the historical accuracy of the attribution to Jesus of either the "Sermon on the Mount" or the "Lord's Prayer"; and, therefore, that the conclusion in question is not warranted, at any rate, on the grounds set forth. But, whether the Gospels contain trustworthy statements about this and other alleged historical facts or not, it is quite certain that from them, taken together with the other books of the New Testament, we may collect a pretty complete exposition of that theory of the spiritual world which was held by both Nazarenes and Christians; and which was undoubtedly supposed by them to be fully sanctioned by Jesus, though it is just as clear that they did not imagine it contained any revelation by him of something heretofore unknown. If the pneumatological doctrine which pervades the whole New Testament is nowhere systematically stated, it is everywhere assumed. The writers of the Gospels and of the Acts take it for granted, as a matter of common knowledge; and it is easy to gather from these sources a series of propositions, which only need arrangement to form a complete system. In this system, Man is considered to be a duality formed of a spiritual element, the soul; and a corporeal[85] element, the body. And this duality is repeated in the Universe, which consists of a corporeal world embraced and interpenetrated by a spiritual world. The former consists of the earth, as its principal and central constituent, with the subsidiary sun, planets, and stars. Above the earth is the air, and below is the watery abyss. Whether the heaven, which is conceived to be above the air, and the hell in, or below, the subterranean deeps, are to be taken as corporeal or incorporeal is not clear. However this may be, the heaven and the air, the earth and the abyss, are peopled by innumerable beings analogous in nature to the spiritual element in man, and these spirits are of two kinds, good and bad. The chief of the good spirits, infinitely superior to all the others, and their creator, as well as the creator of the corporeal world and of the bad spirits, is God. His residence is heaven, where he is surrounded by the ordered hosts of good spirits; his angels, or messengers, and the executors of his will throughout the universe. On the other hand, the chief of the bad spirits is Satan, _the_ devil _par excellence_. He and his company of demons are free to roam through all parts of the universe, except the heaven. These bad spirits are far superior to man in power and subtlety; and their whole energies are devoted to bringing physical and moral evils upon him, and to thwarting, so far as his power goes, the benevolent intentions of the Supreme Being. In fact, the souls and bodies of men form both the theatre and the prize of an incessant warfare between the good and the evil spirits--the powers of light and the powers of darkness. By leading Eve astray, Satan brought sin and death upon mankind. As the gods of the heathen, the demons are the founders and maintainers of idolatry; as the "powers of the air" they afflict mankind with pestilence and famine; as "unclean spirits" they cause disease of mind and body. The significance of the appearance of Jesus, in the capacity of the Messiah, or Christ, is the reversal of the satanic work by putting an end to both sin and death. He announces that the kingdom of God is at hand, when the "Prince of this world" shall be finally "cast out" (John xii. 31) from the cosmos, as Jesus, during his earthly career, cast him out from individuals. Then will Satan and all his devilry, along with the wicked whom they have seduced to their destruction, be hurled into the abyss of unquenchable fire--there to endure continual torture, without a hope of winning pardon from the merciful God, their Father; or of moving the glorified Messiah to one more act of pitiful intercession; or even of interrupting, by a momentary sympathy with their wretchedness, the harmonious psalmody of their brother angels and men, eternally lapped in bliss unspeakable. The straitest Protestant, who refuses to admit the existence of any source of Divine truth, except the Bible, will not deny that every point of the pneumatological theory here set forth has ample scriptural warranty. The Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse assert the existence of the devil, of his demons and of Hell, as plainly as they do that of God and his angels and Heaven. It is plain that the Messianic and the Satanic conceptions of the writers of these books are the obverse and the reverse of the same intellectual coinage. If we turn from Scripture to the traditions of the Fathers and the confessions of the Churches, it will appear that, in this one particular, at any rate, time has brought about no important deviation from primitive belief. From Justin onwards, it may often be a fair question whether God, or the devil, occupies a larger share of the attention of the Fathers. It is the devil who instigates the Roman authorities to persecute; the gods and goddesses of paganism are devils, and idolatry itself is an invention of Satan; if a saint falls away from grace, it is by the seduction of the demon; if heresy arises, the devil has suggested it; and some of the Fathers[86] go so far as to challenge the pagans to a sort of exorcising match, by way of testing the truth of Christianity. Mediæval Christianity is at one with patristic, on this head. The masses, the clergy, the theologians, and the philosophers alike, live and move and have their being in a world full of demons, in which sorcery and possession are everyday occurrences. Nor did the Reformation make any difference. Whatever else Luther assailed, he left the traditional demonology untouched; nor could any one have entertained a more hearty and uncompromising belief in the devil, than he and, at a later period, the Calvinistic fanatics of New England did. Finally, in these last years of the nineteenth century, the demonological hypotheses of the first century are, explicitly or implicitly, held and occasionally acted upon by the immense majority of Christians of all confessions. Only here and there has the progress of scientific thought, outside the ecclesiastical world, so far affected Christians, that they and their teachers fight shy of the demonology of their creed. They are fain to conceal their real disbelief in one half of Christian doctrine by judicious silence about it; or by flight to those refuges for the logically destitute, accommodation or allegory. But the faithful who fly to allegory in order to escape absurdity resemble nothing so much as the sheep in the fable who--to save their lives--jumped into the pit. The allegory pit is too commodious, is ready to swallow up so much more than one wants to put into it. If the story of the temptation is an allegory; if the early recognition of Jesus as the Son of God by the demons is an allegory; if the plain declaration of the writer of the first Epistle of John (iii. 8), "To this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil," is allegorical, then the Pauline version of the Fall may be allegorical, and still more the words of consecration of the Eucharist, or the promise of the second coming; in fact, there is not a dogma of ecclesiastical Christianity the scriptural basis of which may not be whittled away by a similar process. As to accommodation, let any honest man who can read the New Testament ask himself whether Jesus and his immediate friends and disciples can be dishonoured more grossly than by the supposition that they said and did that which is attributed to them; while, in reality, they disbelieved in Satan and his demons, in possession and in exorcism?[87] An eminent theologian has justly observed that we have no right to look at the propositions of the Christian faith with one eye open and the other shut. (Tract 85, p. 29.) It really is not permissible to see, with one eye, that Jesus is affirmed to declare the personality and the Fatherhood of God, His loving providence and His accessibility to prayer; and to shut the other to the no less definite teaching ascribed to Jesus, in regard to the personality and the misanthropy of the devil, his malignant watchfulness, and his subjection to exorcistic formula and rites. Jesus is made to say that the devil "was a murderer from the beginning" (John viii. 44) by the same authority as that upon which we depend for his asserted declaration that "God is a spirit" (John iv. 24). To those who admit the authority of the famous Vincentian dictum that the doctrine which has been held "always, everywhere, and by all" is to be received as authoritative, the demonology must possess a higher sanction than any other Christian dogma, except, perhaps, those of the Resurrection and of the Messiahship of Jesus; for it would be difficult to name any other points of doctrine on which the Nazarene does not differ from the Christian, and the different historical stages and contemporary subdivisions of Christianity from one another. And, if the demonology is accepted, there can be no reason for rejecting all those miracles in which demons play a part. The Gadarene story fits into the general scheme of Christianity; and the evidence for "Legion" and their doings is just as good as any other in the New Testament for the doctrine which the story illustrates. It was with the purpose of bringing this great fact into prominence; of getting people to open both their eyes when they look at Ecclesiasticism; that I devoted so much space to that miraculous story which happens to be one of the best types of its class. And I could not wish for a better justification of the course I have adopted, than the fact that my heroically consistent adversary has declared his implicit belief in the Gadarene story and (by necessary consequence) in the Christian demonology as a whole. It must be obvious, by this time, that, if the account of the spiritual world given in the New Testament, professedly on the authority of Jesus, is true, then the demonological half of that account must be just as true as the other half. And, therefore, those who question the demonology, or try to explain it away, deny the truth of what Jesus said, and are, in ecclesiastical terminology, "Infidels" just as much as those who deny the spirituality of God. This is as plain as anything can well be, and the dilemma for my opponent was either to assert that the Gadarene pig-bedevilment actually occurred, or to write himself down an "Infidel." As was to be expected, he chose the former alternative; and I may express my great satisfaction at finding that there is one spot of common ground on which both he and I stand. So far as I can judge, we are agreed to state one of the broad issues between the consequences of agnostic principles (as I draw them), and the consequences of ecclesiastical dogmatism (as he accepts it), as follows. Ecclesiasticism says: The demonology of the Gospels is an essential part of that account of that spiritual world, the truth of which it declares to be certified by Jesus. Agnosticism (_me judice_) says: There is no good evidence of the existence of a demoniac spiritual world, and much reason for doubting it. Hereupon the ecclesiastic may observe: Your doubt means that you disbelieve Jesus; therefore you are an "Infidel" instead of an "Agnostic." To which the agnostic may reply: No; for two reasons: first, because your evidence that Jesus said what you say he said is worth very little; and secondly, because a man may be an agnostic, in the sense of admitting he has no positive knowledge, and yet consider that he has more or less probable ground for accepting any given hypothesis about the spiritual world. Just as a man may frankly declare that he has no means of knowing whether the planets generally are inhabited or not, and yet may think one of the two possible hypotheses more likely that the other, so he may admit that he has no means of knowing anything about the spiritual world, and yet may think one or other of the current views on the subject, to some extent, probable. The second answer is so obviously valid that it needs no discussion. I draw attention to it simply in justice to those agnostics who may attach greater value that I do to any sort of pneumatological speculations; and not because I wish to escape the responsibility of declaring that, whether Jesus sanctioned the demonological part of Christianity or not, I unhesitatingly reject it. The first answer, on the other hand, opens up the whole question of the claim of the biblical and other sources, from which hypotheses concerning the spiritual world are derived, to be regarded as unimpeachable historical evidence as to matters of fact. Now, in respect of the trustworthiness of the Gospel narratives, I was anxious to get rid of the common assumption that the determination of the authorship and of the dates of these works is a matter of fundamental importance. That assumption is based upon the notion that what contemporary witnesses say must be true, or, at least, has always a _primâ facie_ claim to be so regarded; so that if the writers of any of the Gospels were contemporaries of the events (and still more if they were in the position of eye-witnesses) the miracles they narrate must be historically true, and, consequently, the demonology which they involve must be accepted. But the story of the "Translation of the blessed martyrs Marcellinus and Petrus," and the other considerations (to which endless additions might have been made from the Fathers and the mediæval writers) set forth in a preceding essay, yield, in my judgment, satisfactory proof that, where the miraculous is concerned, neither considerable intellectual ability, nor undoubted honesty, nor knowledge of the world, nor proved faithfulness as civil historians, nor profound piety, on the part of eye-witnesses and contemporaries, affords any guarantee of the objective truth of their statements, when we know that a firm belief in the miraculous was ingrained in their minds, and was the pre-supposition of their observations and reasonings. Therefore, although it be, as I believe, demonstrable that we have no real knowledge of the authorship, or of the date of composition of the Gospels, as they have come down to us, and that nothing better than more or less probable guesses can be arrived at on that subject, I have not cared to expend any space on the question. It will be admitted, I suppose; that the authors of the works attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, whoever they may be, are personages whose capacity and judgment in the narration of ordinary events are not quite so well certified as those of Eginhard; and we have seen what the value of Eginhard's evidence is when the miraculous is in question. * * * * * I have been careful to explain that the arguments which I have used in the course of this discussion are not new; that they are historical and have nothing to do with what is commonly called science; and that they are all, to the best of my belief, to be found in the works of theologians of repute. The position which I have taken up, that the evidence in favour of such miracles as those recorded by Eginhard, and consequently of mediæval demonology, is quite as good as that in favour of such miracles as the Gadarene, and consequently of Nazarene demonology, is none of my discovery. Its strength was, wittingly or unwittingly, suggested, a century and a half ago, by a theological scholar of eminence; and it has been, if not exactly occupied, yet so fortified with bastions and redoubts by a living ecclesiastical Vauban, that, in my judgment, it has been rendered impregnable. In the early part of the last century, the ecclesiastical mind in this country was much exercised by the question, not exactly of miracles, the occurrence of which in biblical times was axiomatic, but by the problem: When did miracles cease? Anglican divines were quite sure that no miracles had happened in their day, nor for some time past; they were equally sure that they happened sixteen or seventeen centuries earlier. And it was a vital question for them to determine at what point of time, between this _terminus a quo_ and that _terminus ad quem_, miracles came to an end. The Anglicans and the Romanists agreed in the assumption that the possession of the gift of miracle-working was _primâ facie_ evidence of the soundness of the faith of the miracle-workers. The supposition that miraculous powers might be wielded by heretics (though it might be supported by high authority) led to consequences too frightful to be entertained by people who were busied in building their dogmatic house on the sands of early Church history. If, as the Romanists maintained, an unbroken series of genuine miracles adorned the records of their Church, throughout the whole of its existence, no Anglican could lightly venture to accuse them of doctrinal corruption. Hence, the Anglicans, who indulged in such accusations, were bound to prove the modern, the mediæval Roman, and the later Patristic miracles false; and to shut off the wonder-working power from the Church at the exact point of time when Anglican doctrine ceased and Roman doctrine began. With a little adjustment--a squeeze here and a pull there--the Christianity of the first three or four centuries might be made to fit, or seem to fit, pretty well into the Anglican scheme. So the miracles, from Justin say to Jerome, might be recognised; while, in later times, the Church having become "corrupt"--that is to say, having pursued one and the same line of development further than was pleasing to Anglicans--its alleged miracles must needs be shams and impostures. Under these circumstances, it may be imagined that the establishment of a scientific frontier between the earlier realm of supposed fact and the later of asserted delusion, had its difficulties; and torrents of theological special pleading about the subject flowed from clerical pens; until that learned and acute Anglican divine, Conyers Middleton, in his "Free Inquiry," tore the sophistical web they had laboriously woven to pieces, and demonstrated that the miracles of the patristic age, early and late, must stand or fall together, inasmuch as the evidence for the later is just as good as the evidence for the earlier wonders. If the one set are certified by contemporaneous witnesses of high repute, so are the other; and, in point of probability, there is not a pin to choose between the two. That is the solid and irrefragable, result of Middleton's contribution to the subject. But the Free Inquirer's freedom had its limits; and he draws a sharp line of demarcation between the patristic and the New Testament miracles--on the professed ground that the accounts of the latter, being inspired, are out of the reach of criticism. A century later, the question was taken up by another divine, Middleton's equal in learning and acuteness, and far his superior in subtlety and dialectic skill; who, though an Anglican, scorned the name of Protestant; and, while yet a Churchman, made it his business to parade, with infinite skill, the utter hollowness of the arguments of those of his brother Churchmen who dreamed that they could be both Anglicans and Protestants. The argument of the "Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of the Early Ages"[88] by the present [1889] Roman Cardinal, but then Anglican Doctor, John Henry Newman, is compendiously stated by himself in the following passage:-- If the miracles of Church history cannot be defended by the arguments of Leslie, Lyttleton, Paley, or Douglas, how many of the Scripture miracles satisfy their conditions? (p. cvii). And, although the answer is not given in so many words, little doubt is left on the mind of the reader, that, in the mind of the writer, it is: None. In fact, this conclusion is one which cannot be resisted, if the argument in favour of the Scripture miracles is based upon that which laymen, whether lawyers, or men of science, or historians, or ordinary men of affairs, call evidence. But there is something really impressive in the magnificent contempt with which, at times, Dr. Newman sweeps aside alike those who offer and those who demand such evidence. Some infidel authors advise us to accept no miracles which would not have a verdict in their favour in a court of justice; that is, they employ against Scripture a weapon which Protestants would confine to attacks upon the Church; as if moral and religious questions required legal proof, and evidence were the test of truth[89] (p. cvii). "As if evidence were the test of truth"!--although the truth in question is the occurrence, or the non-occurrence, of certain phenomena at a certain time and in a certain place. This sudden revelation of the great gulf fixed between the ecclesiastical and the scientific mind is enough to take away the breath of any one unfamiliar with the clerical organon. As if, one may retort, the assumption that miracles may, or have, served a moral or a religious end, in any way alters the fact that they profess to be historical events, things that actually happened; and, as such, must needs be exactly those subjects about which evidence is appropriate and legal proofs (which are such merely because they afford adequate evidence) may be justly demanded. The Gadarene miracle either happened, or it did not. Whether the Gadarene "question" is moral or religious, or not, has nothing to do with the fact that it is a purely historical question whether the demons said what they are declared to have said, and the devil-possessed pigs did, or did not, rush over the heights bounding the Lake of Gennesaret on a certain day of a certain year, after A.D. 26 and before A.D. 36; for vague and uncertain as New Testament chronology is, I suppose it may be assumed that the event in question, if it happened at all, took place during the procuratorship of Pilate. If that is not a matter about which evidence ought to be required, and not only legal, but strict scientific proof demanded by sane men who are asked to believe the story--what is? Is a reasonable being to be seriously asked to credit statements which, to put the case gently, are not exactly probable, and on the acceptance or rejection of which his whole view of life may depend, without asking for as much "legal" proof as would send an alleged pickpocket to gaol, or as would suffice to prove the validity of a disputed will? "Infidel authors" (if, as I am assured, I may answer for them) will decline to waste time on mere darkenings of counsel of this sort; but to those Anglicans who accept his premises, Dr. Newman is a truly formidable antagonist. What, indeed, are they to reply when he puts the very pertinent question:-- whether persons who not merely question, but prejudge the Ecclesiastical miracles on the ground of their want of resemblance, whatever that be, to those contained in Scripture--as if the Almighty could not do in the Christian Church what He had not already done at the time of its foundation, or under the Mosaic Covenant--whether such reasoners are not siding with the sceptic, and whether it is not a happy inconsistency by which they continue to believe the Scriptures while they reject the Church[90] (p. liii). Again, I invite Anglican orthodoxy to consider this passage:-- the narrative of the combats of St. Anthony with evil spirits, is a development rather than a contradiction of revelation, viz. of such texts as speak of Satan being cast out by prayer and fasting. To be shocked, then, at the miracles of Ecclesiastical history, or to ridicule them for their strangeness, is no part of a scriptural philosophy (pp. liii-liv). Further on, Dr. Newman declares that it has been admitted that a distinct line can be drawn in point of character and circumstance between the miracles of Scripture and of Church history; but this is by no means the case (p. lv) ... specimens are not wanting in the history of the Church, of miracles as awful in their character and as momentous in their effects as those which are recorded in Scripture. The fire interrupting the rebuilding of the Jewish temple, and the death of Arius, are instances, in Ecclesiastical history, of such solemn events. On the other hand, difficult instances in the Scripture history are such as these: the serpent in Eden, the Ark, Jacob's vision for the multiplication of his cattle, the speaking of Balaam's ass, the axe swimming at Elisha's word, the miracle on the swine, and various instances of prayers or prophecies, in which, as in that of Noah's blessing and curse, words which seem the result of private feeling are expressly or virtually ascribed to a Divine suggestion (p. lvi). Who is to gainsay our ecclesiastical authority here? "Infidel authors" might be accused of a wish to ridicule the Scripture miracles by putting them on a level with the remarkable story about the fire which stopped the rebuilding of the Temple, or that about the death of Arius--but Dr. Newman is above suspicion. The pity is that his list of what he delicately terms "difficult" instances is so short. Why omit the manufacture of Eve out of Adam's rib, on the strict historical accuracy of which the chief argument of the defenders of an iniquitous portion of our present law depends? Why leave out the account of the "Bene Elohim" and their gallantries, on which a large part of the worst practices of the mediæval inquisitors into witchcraft was based? Why forget the angel who wrestled with Jacob, and, as the account suggests, somewhat over-stepped the bounds of fair play, at the end of the struggle? Surely, we must agree with Dr. Newman that, if all these camels have gone down, it savours of affectation to strain at such gnats as the sudden ailment of Arius in the midst of his deadly, if prayerful,[91] enemies; and the fiery explosion which stopped the Julian building operations. Though the _words_ of the "Conclusion" of the "Essay on Miracles" may, perhaps, be quoted against me, I may express my satisfaction at finding myself in substantial accordance with a theologian above all suspicion of heterodoxy. With all my heart, I can declare my belief that there is just as good reason for believing in the miraculous slaying of the man who fell short of the Athanasian power of affirming contradictories, with respect to the nature of the Godhead, as there is for believing in the stories of the serpent and the ark told in Genesis, the speaking of Balaam's ass in Numbers, or the floating of the axe, at Elisha's order, in the second book of Kings. * * * * * It is one of the peculiarities of a really sound argument that it is susceptible of the fullest development; and that it sometimes leads to conclusions unexpected by those who employ it. To my mind, it is impossible to refuse to follow Dr. Newman when he extends his reasoning, from the miracles of the patristic and mediæval ages backward in time, as far as miracles are recorded. But, if the rules of logic are valid, I feel compelled to extend the argument forwards to the alleged Roman miracles of the present day, which Dr. Newman might not have admitted, but which Cardinal Newman may hardly reject. Beyond question, there is as good, or perhaps better, evidence for the miracles worked by our Lady of Lourdes, as there is for the floating of Elisha's axe, or the speaking of Balaam's ass. But we must go still further; there is a modern system of thaumaturgy and demonology which is just as well certified as the ancient.[92] Veracious, excellent, sometimes learned and acute persons, even philosophers of no mean pretensions, testify to the "levitation" of bodies much heavier than Elisha's axe; to the existence of "spirits" who, to the mere tactile sense, have been indistinguishable from flesh and blood; and, occasionally, have wrested with all the vigour of Jacob's opponent; yet, further, to the speech, in the language of raps, of spiritual beings, whose discourses, in point of coherence and value, are far inferior to that of Balaam's humble but sagacious steed. I have not the smallest doubt that, if these were persecuting times, there is many a worthy "spiritualist" who would cheerfully go to the stake in support of his pneumatological faith; and furnish evidence, after Paley's own heart, in proof of the truth of his doctrines. Not a few modern divines, doubtless struck by the impossibility of refusing the spiritualist evidence, if the ecclesiastical evidence is accepted, and deprived of any _à priori_ objection by their implicit belief in Christian Demonology, show themselves ready to take poor Sludge seriously, and to believe that he is possessed by other devils than those of need, greed, and vainglory. Under these circumstances, it was to be expected, though it is none the less interesting to note the fact, that the arguments of the latest school of "spiritualists" present a wonderful family likeness to those which adorn the subtle disquisitions of the advocate of ecclesiastical miracles of forty years ago. It is unfortunate for the "spiritualists" that, over and over again, celebrated and trusted media, who really, in some respects, call to mind the Montanist[93] and gnostic seers of the second century, are either proved in courts of law to be fraudulent impostors; or, in sheer weariness, as it would seem, of the honest dupes who swear by them, spontaneously confess their long-continued iniquities, as the Fox women did the other day in New York.[94] But, whenever a catastrophe of this kind takes place, the believers are no wise dismayed by it. They freely admit that not only the media, but the spirits whom they summon, are sadly apt to lose sight of the elementary principles of right and wrong; and they triumphantly ask: How does the occurrence of occasional impostures disprove the genuine manifestations (that is to say, all those which have not yet been proved to be impostures or delusions)? And, in this, they unconsciously plagiarise from the churchman, who just as freely admits that many ecclesiastical miracles may have been forged; and asks, with calm contempt, not only of legal proofs, but of common-sense probability, Why does it follow that none are to be supposed genuine? I must say, however, that the spiritualists, so far as I know, do not venture to outrage right reason so boldly as the ecclesiastics. They do not sneer at "evidence"; nor repudiate the requirement of legal proofs. In fact, there can be no doubt that the spiritualists produce better evidence for their manifestations than can be shown either for the miraculous death of Arius, or for the Invention of the Cross.[95] From the "levitation" of the axe at one end of a period of near three thousand years to the "levitation" of Sludge & Co. at the other end, there is a complete continuity of the miraculous, with every gradation, from the childish to the stupendous, from the gratification of a caprice to the illustration of sublime truth. There is no drawing a line in the series that might be set out of plausibly attested cases of spiritual intervention. If one is true, all may be true; if one is false, all may be false. * * * * * This is, to my mind, the inevitable result of that method of reasoning which is applied to the confutation of Protestantism, with so much success, by one of the acutest and subtlest disputants who have ever championed Ecclesiasticism--and one cannot put his claims to acuteness and subtlety higher. ... the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth it is this.... "To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant."[96] I have not a shadow of doubt that these anti-Protestant epigrams are profoundly true. But I have as little that, in the same sense, the "Christianity of history is not" Romanism; and that to be deeper in history is to cease to be a Romanist. The reasons which compel my doubts about the compatibility of the Roman doctrine, or any other form of Catholicism, with history, arise out of exactly the same line of argument as that adopted by Dr. Newman in the famous essay which I have just cited. If, with one hand, Dr. Newman has destroyed Protestantism, he has annihilated Romanism with the other; and the total result of his ambidextral efforts is to shake Christianity to its foundations. Nor was any one better aware that this must be the inevitable result of his arguments--if the world should refuse to accept Roman doctrines and Roman miracles--than the writer of Tract 85. Dr. Newman made his choice and passed over to the Roman Church half a century ago. Some of those who were essentially in harmony with his views preceded, and many followed him. But many remained; and, as the quondam Puseyite and present Ritualistic party, they are continuing that work of sapping and mining the Protestantism of the Anglican Church which he and his friends so ably commenced. At the present time, they have no little claim to be considered victorious all along the line. I am old enough to recollect the small beginnings of the Tractarian party; and I am amazed when I consider the present position of their heirs. Their little leaven has leavened if not the whole, yet a very large lump of the Anglican Church; which is now pretty much of a preparatory school for Papistry. So that it really behoves Englishmen (who, as I have been informed by high authority, are all legally, members of the State Church, if they profess to belong to no other sect) to wake up to what that powerful organization is about, and whither it is tending. On this point, the writings of Dr. Newman, while he still remained within the Anglican fold, are a vast store of the best and the most authoritative information. His doctrines on Ecclesiastical miracles and on Development are the corner-stones of the Tractarian fabric. He believed that his arguments led either Romeward, or to what ecclesiastics call "Infidelity," and I call Agnosticism. I believe that he was quite right in this conviction; but while he chooses the one alternative, I choose the other; as he rejects Protestantism on the ground of its incompatibility with history, so, _a fortiori_, I conceive that Romanism ought to be rejected; and that an impartial consideration of the evidence must refuse the authority of Jesus to anything more than the Nazarenism of James and Peter and John. And let it not be supposed that this is a mere "infidel" perversion of the facts. No one has more openly and clearly admitted the possibility that they may be fairly interpreted in this way than Dr. Newman. If, he says, there are texts which seem to show that Jesus contemplated the evangelisation of the heathen: ... Did not the Apostles hear our Lord? and what was _their_ impression from what they heard? Is it not certain that the Apostles did not gather this truth from His teaching? (Tract 85, p. 63). He said, "Preach the Gospel to every creature." These words _need_ have only meant "Bring all men to Christianity through Judaism." Make them Jews, that they may enjoy Christ's privileges, which are lodged in Judaism; teach them those rites and ceremonies, circumcision and the like, which hitherto have been dead ordinances, and now are living; and so the Apostles seem to have understood them (_ibid_. p. 65). So far as Nazarenism differentiated itself from contemporary orthodox Judaism, it seems to have tended towards a revival of the ethical and religious spirit of the prophetic age, accompanied by the belief in Jesus as the Messiah, and by various accretions which had grown round Judaism subsequently to the exile. To these belong the doctrines of the Resurrection, of the Last Judgment, of Heaven and Hell; of the hierarchy of good angels; of Satan and the hierarchy of evil spirits. And there is very strong ground for believing that all these doctrines, at least in the shapes in which they were held by the post-exilic Jews, were derived from Persian and Babylonian[97] sources, and are essentially of heathen origin. How far Jesus positively sanctioned all these indrainings of circumjacent Paganism into Judaism; how far any one has a right to declare, that the refusal to accept one or other of these doctrines, as ascertained verities, comes to the same thing as contradicting Jesus, it appears to me not easy to say. But it is hardly less difficult to conceive that he could have distinctly negatived any of them; and, more especially, that demonology which has been accepted by the Christian Churches, in every age and under all their mutual antagonisms. But, I repeat my conviction that, whether Jesus sanctioned the demonology of his time and nation or not, it is doomed. The future of Christianity, as a dogmatic system and apart from the old Israelitish ethics which it has appropriated and developed, lies in the answer which mankind will eventually give to the question, whether they are prepared to believe such stories as the Gadarene and the pneumatological hypotheses which go with it, or not. My belief is they will decline to do anything of the sort, whenever and wherever their minds have been disciplined by science. And that discipline must, and will, at once follow and lead the footsteps of advancing civilisation. The preceding pages were written before I became acquainted with the contents of the May number of the "Nineteenth Century," wherein I discover many things which are decidedly not to my advantage. It would appear that "evasion" is my chief resource, "incapacity for strict argument" and "rottenness of ratiocination" my main mental characteristics, and that it is "barely credible" that a statement which I profess to make of my own knowledge is true. All which things I notice, merely to illustrate the great truth, forced on me by long experience, that it is only from those who enjoy the blessing of a firm hold of the Christian faith that such manifestations of meekness, patience, and charity are to be expected. I had imagined that no one who had read my preceding papers, could entertain a doubt as to my position in respect of the main issue, as it has been stated and restated by my opponent: an Agnosticism which knows nothing of the relation of man to God must not only refuse belief to our Lord's most undoubted teaching, but must deny the reality of the spiritual convictions in which He lived.[98] That is said to be "the simple question which is at issue between us," and the three testimonies to that teaching and those convictions selected are the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, and the Story of the Passion. My answer, reduced to its briefest form, has been: In the first place, the evidence is such that the exact nature of the teachings and the convictions of Jesus is extremely uncertain; so that what ecclesiastics are pleased to call a denial of them may be nothing of the kind. And, in the second place, if Jesus taught the demonological system involved in the Gadarene story--if a belief in that system formed a part of the spiritual convictions in which he lived and died--then I, for my part, unhesitatingly refuse belief in that teaching, and deny the reality of those spiritual convictions. And I go further and add, that, exactly in so far as it can be proved that Jesus sanctioned the essentially pagan demonological theories current among the Jews of his age, exactly in so far, for me, will his authority in any matter touching the spiritual world be weakened. With respect to the first half of my answer, I have pointed out that the Sermon on the Mount, as given in the first Gospel, is, in the opinion of the best critics, a "mosaic work" of materials derived from different sources, and I do not understand that this statement is challenged. The only other Gospel--the third--which contains something like it, makes, not only the discourse, but the circumstances under which it was delivered, very different. Now, it is one thing to say that there was something real at the bottom of the two discourses--which is quite possible; and another to affirm that we have any right to say what that something was, or to fix upon any particular phrase and declare it to be a genuine utterance. Those who pursue theology as a science, and bring to the study an adequate knowledge of the ways of ancient historians, will find no difficulty in providing illustrations of my meaning. I may supply one which has come within range of my own limited vision. In Josephus's "History of the Wars of the Jews" (chap, xix.), that writer reports a speech which he says Herod made at the opening of a war with the Arabians. It is in the first person, and would naturally be supposed by the reader to be intended for a true version of what Herod said. In the "Antiquities," written some seventeen years later, the same writer gives another report, also in the first person, of Herod's speech on the same occasion. This second oration is twice as long as the first and, though the general tenor of the two speeches is pretty much the same, there is hardly any verbal identity, and a good deal of matter is introduced into the one, which is absent from the other. Josephus prides himself on his accuracy; people whose fathers might have heard Herod's oration were his contemporaries; and yet his historical sense is so curiously undeveloped that he can, quite innocently, perpetrate an obvious literary fabrication; for one of the two accounts must be incorrect. Now, if I am asked whether I believe that Herod made some particular statement on this occasion; whether, for example, he uttered the pious aphorism, "Where God is, there is both multitude and courage," which is given in the "Antiquities," but not in the "Wars," I am compelled to say I do not know. One of the two reports must be erroneous, possibly both are: at any rate, I cannot tell how much of either is true. And, if some fervent admirer of the Idumean should build up a theory of Herod's piety upon Josephus's evidence that he propounded the aphorism, it is a "mere evasion" to say, in reply, that the evidence that he did utter it is worthless? It appears again that, adopting the tactics of Conachar when brought face to face with Hal o' the Wynd, I have been trying to get my simple-minded adversary to follow me on a wild-goose chase through the early history of Christianity, in the hope of escaping impending defeat on the main issue. But I may be permitted to point out that there is an alternative hypothesis which equally fits the facts; and that, after all, there may have been method in the madness of my supposed panic. For suppose it to be established that Gentile Christianity was a totally different thing from the Nazarenism of Jesus and his immediate disciples; suppose it to be demonstrable that, as early as the sixth decade of our era at least, there were violent divergencies of opinion among the followers of Jesus; suppose it to be hardly doubtful that the Gospels and the Acts took their present shapes under the influence of those divergencies; suppose that their authors, and those through whose hands they passed, had notions of historical veracity not more eccentric than those which Josephus occasionally displays: surely the chances that the Gospels are altogether trustworthy records of the teachings of Jesus become very slender. And, since the whole of the case of the other side is based on the supposition that they are accurate records (especially of speeches, about which ancient historians are so curiously loose), I really do venture to submit that this part of my argument bears very seriously on the main issue; and, as ratiocination, is sound to the core. Again, when I passed by the topic of the speeches of Jesus on the Cross, it appears that I could have had no other motive than the dictates of my native evasiveness. An ecclesiastical dignitary may have respectable reasons for declining a fencing match "in sight of Gethsemane and Calvary"; but an ecclesiastical "Infidel"! Never. It is obviously impossible that in the belief that "the greater includes the less," I, having declared the Gospel evidence in general, as to the sayings of Jesus, to be of questionable value, thought it needless to select for illustration of my views, those particular instances which were likely to be most offensive to persons of another way of thinking. But any supposition that may have been entertained that the old familiar tones of the ecclesiastical war-drum will tempt me to engage in such needless discussion had better be renounced. I shall do nothing of the kind. Let it suffice that I ask my readers to turn to the twenty-third chapter of Luke (revised version), verse thirty-four, and he will find in the margin Some ancient authorities omit: And Jesus said "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." So that, even as late as the fourth century, there were ancient authorities, indeed some of the most ancient and weightiest, who either did not know of this utterance, so often quoted as characteristic of Jesus, or did not believe it had been uttered. Many years ago, I received an anonymous letter, which abused me heartily for my want of moral courage in not speaking out. I thought that one of the oddest charges an anonymous letter-writer could bring. But I am not sure that the plentiful sowing of the pages of the article with which I am dealing with accusations of evasion, may not seem odder to those who consider that the main strength of the answers with which I have been favoured (in this review and elsewhere) is devoted not to anything in the text of my first paper, but to a note which occurs at p. 212. In this I say: Dr. Wace tells us: "It may be asked how far we can rely on the accounts we possess of our Lord's teaching on these subjects." And he seems to think the question appropriately answered by the assertion that it "ought to be regarded as settled by M. Renan's practical surrender of the adverse case." I requested Dr. Wace to point out the passages of M. Renan's works in which, as he affirms, this "practical surrender" (not merely as to the age and authorship of the Gospels, be it observed, but as to their historical value) is made, and he has been so good as to do so. Now let us consider the parts of Dr. Wace's citation from Renan which are relevant to the issue:-- The author of this Gospel [Luke] is certainly the same as the author of the Acts of the Apostles. Now the author of the Acts seems to be a companion of St. Paul--a character which accords completely with St. Luke. I know that more than one objection may be opposed to this reasoning: but one thing, at all events, is beyond doubt, namely, that the author of the third Gospel and of the Acts is a man who belonged to the second apostolic generation; and this suffices for our purpose. This is a curious "practical surrender of the adverse case." M. Renan thinks that there is no doubt that the author of the third Gospel is the author of the Acts--a conclusion in which I suppose critics generally agree. He goes on to remark that this person _seems_ to be a companion of St. Paul, and adds that Luke was a companion of St. Paul. Then, somewhat needlessly, M. Renan points out that there is more than one objection to jumping, from such data as these, to the conclusion that "Luke" is the writer of the third Gospel. And, finally, M. Renan is content to reduce that which is "beyond doubt" to the fact that the author of the two books is a man of the second apostolic generation. Well, it seems to me that I could agree with all that M. Renan considers "beyond doubt" here, without surrendering anything, either "practically" or theoretically. Dr. Wace ("Nineteenth Century," March, p. 363) states that he derives the above citation from the preface to the 15th edition of the "Vie de Jésus." My copy of "Les Évangiles," dated 1877, contains a list of Renan's "Oeuvres Complètes," at the head of which I find "Vie de Jésus," 15^e édition. It is, therefore, a later work than the edition of the "Vie de Jésus" which Dr. Wace quotes. Now "Les Évangiles," as its name implies, treats fully of the questions respecting the date and authorship of the Gospels; and any one who desired, not merely to use M. Renan's expressions for controversial purposes, but to give a fair account of his views in their full significance, would, I think, refer to the later source. If this course had been taken, Dr. Wace might have found some as decided expressions of opinion, in favour of Luke's authorship of the third Gospel, as he has discovered in "The Apostles." I mention this circumstance, because I desire to point out that, taking even the strongest of Renan's statements, I am still at a loss to see how it justifies that large-sounding phrase, "practical surrender of the adverse case." For, on p. 438 of "Les Évangiles," Renan speaks of the way in which Luke's "excellent intentions" have led him to torture history in the Acts; he declares Luke to be the founder of that "eternal fiction which is called ecclesiastical history"; and, on the preceding page, he talks of the "myth" of the Ascension--with its "_mise en scène voulue_." At p. 435, I find "Luc, ou l'auteur quel qu'il soit du troisième Évangile"; at p. 280, the accounts of the Passion, the death and the resurrection of Jesus, are said to be "peu historiques"; at p. 283, "La valeur historique du troisième Évangile est sûrement moindre que celles des deux premiers." A Pyrrhic sort of victory for orthodoxy, this "surrender"! And, all the while, the scientific student of theology knows that, the more reason there may be to believe that Luke was the companion of Paul, the more doubtful becomes his credibility if he really wrote the Acts. For, in that case, he could not fail to have been acquainted with Paul's account of the Jerusalem conference and he must have consciously misrepresented it. We may next turn to the essential part of Dr. Wace's citation ("Nineteenth Century," p. 365) touching the first Gospel:-- St. Matthew evidently deserves peculiar confidence for the discourses. Here are the "oracles"--the very notes taken while the memory of the instruction of Jesus was living and definite. M. Renan here expresses the very general opinion as to the existence of a collection of "logia," having a different origin from the text in which they are embedded, in Matthew. "Notes" are somewhat suggestive of a shorthand writer, but the suggestion is unintentional, for M. Renan assumes that these "notes" were taken, not at the time of the delivery of the "logia" but subsequently, while (as he assumes) the memory of them was living and definite; so that, in this very citation, M. Renan leaves open the question of the general historical value of the first Gospel; while it is obvious that the accuracy of "Notes" taken, not at the time of delivery, but from memory, is a matter about which more than one opinion may be fairly held. Moreover, Renan expressly calls attention to the difficulty of distinguishing the authentic "logia" from later additions of the same kind ("Les Évangiles," p. 201). The fact is, there is no contradiction here to that opinion about the first Gospel which is expressed in "Les Évangiles" (p. 175). The text of the so-called Matthew supposes the pre-existence of that of Mark, and does little more than complete it. He completes it in two fashions--first, by the insertion of those long discourses which gave their chief value to the Hebrew Gospels; then by adding traditions of a more modern formation, results of successive developments of the legend, and to which the Christian consciousness already attached infinite value. M. Renan goes on to suggest that besides "Mark," "pseudo-Matthew" used an Aramaic version of the Gospel, originally set forth in that dialect. Finally, as to the second Gospel ("Nineteenth Century," p. 365):-- He [Mark] is full of minute observations, proceeding, beyond doubt, from an eye-witness. There is nothing to conflict with the supposition that this eye-witness ... was the Apostle Peter himself, as Papias has it. Let us consider this citation by the light of "Les Évangiles":-- This work, although composed after the death of Peter, was, in a sense, the work of Peter; it represents the way in which Peter was accustomed to relate the life of Jesus (p. 116). M. Renan goes on to say that, as an historical document, the Gospel of Mark has a great superiority (p. 116); but Mark has a motive for omitting the discourses, and he attaches a "puerile importance" to miracles (p. 117). The Gospel of Mark is less a legend, than a biography written with credulity (p. 118). It would be rash to say that Mark has not been interpolated and retouched (p. 120). If any one thinks that I have not been warranted in drawing a sharp distinction between "scientific theologians" and "counsels for creeds"; or that my warning against the too ready acceptance of certain declarations as to the state of biblical criticism was needless; or that my anxiety as to the sense of the word "practical" was superfluous; let him compare the statement that M. Renan has made a "practical surrender of the adverse case" with the facts just set forth. For what is the adverse case? The question, as Dr. Wace puts it, is, "It may be asked how far can we rely on the accounts we possess of our Lord's teaching on these subjects." It will be obvious that M. Renan's statements amount to an adverse answer--to a "practical" denial that any great reliance can be placed on these accounts. He does not believe that Matthew, the apostle, wrote the first Gospel; he does not profess to know who is responsible for the collection of "logia," or how many of them are authentic; though he calls the second Gospel the most historical, he points out that it is written with credulity, and may have been interpolated and retouched; and, as to the author, "quel qu'il soit," of the third Gospel, who is to "rely on the accounts" of a writer, who deserves the cavalier treatment which "Luke" meets with at M. Renan's hands. I repeat what I have already more than once said, that the question of the age and the authorship of the Gospels has not, in my judgment, the importance which is so commonly assigned to it; for the simple reason that the reports, even of eye-witnesses, would not suffice to justify belief in a large and essential part of their contents; on the contrary, these reports would discredit the witnesses. The Gadarene miracle, for example, is so extremely improbable, that the fact of its being reported by three, even independent, authorities could not justify belief in it, unless we had the clearest evidence as to their capacity as observers and as interpreters of their observations. But it is evident that the three authorities are not independent; that they have simply adopted a legend, of which there were two versions; and instead of their proving its truth, it suggests their superstitious credulity: so that if "Matthew," "Mark," and "Luke" are really responsible for the Gospels, it is not the better for the Gadarene story, but the worse for them. A wonderful amount of controversial capital has been made out of my assertion in the note to which I have referred, as an _obiter dictum_ of no consequence to my argument, that if Renan's work[99] were non-extant, the main results of biblical criticism, as set forth in the works of Strauss, Baur, Reuss, and Volkmar, for example, would not be sensibly affected. I thought I had explained it satisfactorily already, but it seems that my explanation has only exhibited still more of my native perversity, so I ask for one more chance. In the course of the historical development of any branch of science, what is universally observed is this: that the men who make epochs, and are the real architects of the fabric of exact knowledge, are those who introduce fruitful ideas or methods. As a rule, the man who does this pushes his idea, or his method, too far; or, if he does not, his school is sure to do so; and those who follow have to reduce his work to its proper value, and assign it its place in the whole. Not unfrequently, they, in their turn, overdo the critical process, and, in trying to eliminate error, throw away truth. Thus, as I said, Linnæus, Buffon, Cuvier, Lamarck, really "set forth the results" of a developing science, although they often heartily contradict one another. Notwithstanding this circumstance, modern classificatory method and nomenclature have largely grown out of the work of Linnæus; the modern conception of biology, as a science, and of its relation to climatology, geography, and geology, are, as largely, rooted in the results of the labours of Buffon; comparative anatomy and palæontology owe a vast debt to Cuvier's results; while invertebrate zoology and the revival of the idea of evolution are intimately dependent on the results of the work of Lamarck. In other words, the main results of biology up to the early years of this century are to be found in, or spring out of, the works of these men. So, if I mistake not, Strauss, if he did not originate the idea of taking the mythopoeic faculty into account in the development of the Gospel narratives, and though he may have exaggerated the influence of that faculty, obliged scientific theology, hereafter, to take that element into serious consideration; so Baur, in giving prominence to the cardinal fact of the divergence of the Nazarene and Pauline tendencies in the primitive Church; so Reuss, in setting a marvellous example of the cool and dispassionate application of the principles of scientific criticism over the whole field of Scripture; so Volkmar, in his clear and forcible statement of the Nazarene limitations of Jesus, contributed results of permanent value in scientific theology. I took these names as they occurred to me. Undoubtedly, I might have advantageously added to them; perhaps, I might have made a better selection. But it really is absurd to try to make out that I did not know that these writers widely disagree; and I believe that no scientific theologian will deny that, in principle, what I have said is perfectly correct. Ecclesiastical advocates, of course, cannot be expected to take this view of the matter. To them, these mere seekers after truth, in so far as their results are unfavourable to the creed the clerics have to support, are more or less "infidels," or favourers of "infidelity"; and the only thing they care to see, or probably can see, is the fact that, in a great many matters, the truth-seekers differ from one another, and therefore can easily be exhibited to the public, as if they did nothing else; as if any one who referred to their having, each and all, contributed his share to the results of theological science, was merely showing his ignorance; and as if a charge of inconsistency could be based on the fact that he himself often disagrees with what they say. I have never lent a shadow of foundation to the assumption that I am a follower of either Strauss, or Baur, or Reuss, or Volkmar, or Renan; my debts to these eminent men--so far my superiors in theological knowledge--is, indeed, great; yet it is not for their opinions, but for those I have been able to form for myself, by their help. In _Agnosticism: a Rejoinder_ (p. 266), I have referred to the difficulties under which those professors of the science of theology, whose tenure of their posts depends on the results of their investigations, must labour; and, in a note, I add-- Imagine that all our chairs of Astronomy had been founded in the fourteenth century, and that their incumbents were bound to sign Ptolemaic articles. In that case, with every respect for the efforts of persons thus hampered to attain and expound the truth, I think men of common sense would go elsewhere to learn astronomy. I did not write this paragraph without a knowledge that its sense would be open to the kind of perversion which it has suffered; but, if that was clear, the necessity for the statement was still clearer. It is my deliberate opinion: I reiterate it; and I say that, in my judgment, it is extremely inexpedient that any subject which calls itself a science should be intrusted to teachers who are debarred from freely following out scientific methods to their legitimate conclusions, whatever those conclusions may be. If I may borrow a phrase paraded at the Church Congress, I think it "ought to be unpleasant" for any man of science to find himself in the position of such a teacher. Human nature is not altered by seating it in a professorial chair, even of theology. I have very little doubt that if, in the year 1859, the tenure of my office had depended upon my adherence to the doctrines of Cuvier, the objections to them set forth in the "Origin of Species" would have had a halo of gravity about them that, being free to teach what I pleased, I failed to discover. And, in making that statement, it does not appear to me that I am confessing that I should have been debarred by "selfish interests" from making candid inquiry, or that I should have been biassed by "sordid motives." I hope that even such a fragment of moral sense as may remain in an ecclesiastical "infidel" might have got me through the difficulty; but it would be unworthy to deny, or disguise, the fact that a very serious difficulty must have been created for me by the nature of my tenure. And let it be observed that the temptation, in my case, would have been far slighter than in that of a professor of theology; whatever biological doctrine I had repudiated, nobody I cared for would have thought the worse of me for so doing. No scientific journals would have howled me down, as the religious newspapers howled down my too honest friend, the late Bishop of Natal; nor would my colleagues of the Royal Society have turned their backs upon me, as his episcopal colleagues boycotted him. I say these facts are obvious, and that it is wholesome and needful that they should be stated. It is in the interests of theology, if it be a science, and it is in the interests of those teachers of theology who desire to be something better than counsel for creeds, that it should be taken to heart. The seeker after theological truth and that only, will no more suppose that I have insulted him, than the prisoner who works in fetters will try to pick a quarrel with me, if I suggest that he would get on better if the fetters were knocked off: unless indeed, as it is said does happen in the course of long captivities, that the victim at length ceases to feel the weight of his chains, or even takes to hugging them, as if they were honourable ornaments.[100] FOOTNOTES: [81] The substance of a paragraph which precedes this has been transferred to the Prologue. [82] I confess that, long ago, I once or twice made this mistake; even to the waste of a capital 'U.' 1893. [83] "Let us maintain, before we have proved. This seeming paradox is the secret of happiness" (Dr. Newman: Tract 85, p. 85). [84] Dr. Newman, _Essay on Development_, p. 357. [85] It is by no means to be assumed that "spiritual" and "corporeal" are exact equivalents of "immaterial" and "material" in the minds of ancient speculators on these topics. The "spiritual body" of the risen dead (1 Cor. xv.) is not the "natural" "flesh and blood" body. Paul does not teach the resurrection of the body in the ordinary sense of the word "body"; a fact, often overlooked, but pregnant with many consequences. [86] Tertullian (_Apolog. Adv. Gentes_, cap. xxiii) thus challenges the Roman authorities: let them bring a possessed person into the presence of a Christian before their tribunal, and if the demon does not confess himself to be such, on the order of the Christian, let the Christian be executed out of hand. [87] See the expression of orthodox opinion upon the "accommodation" subterfuge already cited above, p. 217. [88] I quote the first edition (1843). A second edition appeared in 1870. Tract 85 of the _Tracts for the Times_ should be read with this _Essay_. If I were called upon to compile a Primer of "Infidelity," I think I should save myself trouble by making a selection from these works, and from the _Essay on Development_ by the same author. [89] Yet, when it suits his purpose, as in the Introduction to the _Essay on Development_, Dr. Newman can demand strict evidence in religious questions as sharply as any "infidel author;" and he can even profess to yield to its force (_Essay on Miracles_, 1870; note, p. 391). [90] Compare Tract 85, p. 110; "I am persuaded that were men but consistent who oppose the Church doctrines as being unscriptural, they would vindicate the Jews for rejecting the Gospel." [91] According to Dr. Newman, "This prayer [that of Bishop Alexander, who begged God to 'take Arius away'] is said to have been offered about 3 P.M. on the Saturday; that same evening Arius was in the great square of Constantine, when he was suddenly seized with indisposition" (p. clxx). The "infidel" Gibbon seems to have dared to suggest that "an option between poison and miracle" is presented by this case; and it must be admitted, that, if the Bishop had been within the reach of a modern police magistrate, things might have gone hardly with him. Modern "Infidels," possessed of a slight knowledge of chemistry, are not unlikely, with no less audacity, to suggest an "option between fire-damp and miracle" in seeking for the cause of the fiery outburst at Jerusalem. [92] A writer in a spiritualist journal takes me roundly to task for venturing to doubt the historical and literal truth of the Gadarene story. The following passage in his letter is worth quotation: "Now to the materialistic and scientific mind, to the uninitiated in spiritual verities, certainly this story of the Gadarene or Gergesene swine presents insurmountable difficulties; it seems grotesque and nonsensical. To the experienced, trained, and cultivated Spiritualist this miracle is, as I am prepared to show, one of the most instructive, the most profoundly useful, and the most beneficent which Jesus ever wrought in the whole course of His pilgrimage of redemption on earth." Just so. And the first page of this same journal presents the following advertisement, among others of the same kidney: "To WEALTHY SPIRITUALISTS--A Lady Medium of tried power wishes to meet with an elderly gentleman who would be willing to give her a comfortable home and maintenance in Exchange for her Spiritualistic services, as her guides consider her health is too delicate for public sittings: London preferred.--Address 'Mary,' Office of _Light_." Are we going back to the days of the Judges, when wealthy Micah set up his private ephod, teraphim, and Levite? [93] Consider Tertullian's "sister" ("hodie apud nos"), who conversed with angels, saw and heard mysteries, knew men's thoughts, and prescribed medicine for their bodies (_De Anima_, cap. 9). Tertullian tells us that this woman saw the soul as corporeal, and described its colour and shape. The "infidel" will probably be unable to refrain from insulting the memory of the ecstatic saint by the remark, that Tertullian's known views about the corporeality of the soul may have had something to do with the remarkable perceptive powers of the Montanist medium, in whose revelations of the spiritual world he took such profound interest. [94] See the New York _World_ for Sunday, 21st October, 1888; and the _Report of the Seybert Commission_, Philadelphia, 1887. [95] Dr. Newman's observation that the miraculous multiplication of the pieces of the true cross (with which "the whole world is filled," according to Cyril of Jerusalem; and of which some say there are enough extant to build a man-of-war) is no more wonderful than that of the loaves and fishes, is one that I do not see my way to contradict. See _Essay on Miracles_. 2d ed. p. 163. [96] _An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine_, by J.H. Newman, D.D., pp. 7 and 8. (1878.) [97] Dr. Newman faces this question with his customary ability. "Now, I own, I am not at all solicitous to deny that this doctrine of an apostate Angel and his hosts was gained from Babylon: it might still be Divine nevertheless. God who made the prophet's ass speak, and thereby instructed the prophet, might instruct His Church by means of heathen Babylon" (Tract 85, p. 83). There seems to be no end to the apologetic burden that Balaam's ass may carry. [98] _Nineteenth Century_, May 1889 (p. 701). [99] I trust it may not be supposed that I undervalue M. Renan's labours, or intended to speak slightingly of them. [100] To-day's _Times_ contains a report of a remarkable speech by Prince Bismarck, in which he tells the Reichstag that he has long given up investing in foreign stock, lest so doing should mislead his judgment in his transactions with foreign states. Does this declaration prove that the Chancellor accuses himself of being "sordid" and "selfish"; or does it not rather show that, even in dealing with himself, he remains the man of realities? X: THE KEEPERS OF THE HERD OF SWINE [1890] I had fondly hoped that Mr. Gladstone and I had come to an end of disputation, and that the hatchet of war was finally superseded by the calumet, which, as Mr. Gladstone, I believe, objects to tobacco, I was quite willing to smoke for both. But I have had, once again, to discover that the adage that whoso seeks peace will ensue it, is a somewhat hasty generalisation. The renowned warrior with whom it is my misfortune to be opposed in most things has dug up the axe and is on the war-path once more. The weapon has been wielded with all the dexterity which long practice has conferred on a past master in craft, whether of wood or state. And I have reason to believe that the simpler sort of the great tribe which he heads, imagine that my scalp is already on its way to adorn their big chief's wigwam. I am glad therefore to be able to relieve any anxieties which my friends may entertain without delay. I assure them that my skull retains its normal covering, and that though, naturally, I may have felt alarmed, nothing serious has happened. My doughty adversary has merely performed a war dance, and his blows have for the most part cut the air. I regret to add, however, that by misadventure, and I am afraid I must say carelessness, he has inflicted one or two severe contusions on himself. When the noise of approaching battle roused me from the dreams of peace which occupy my retirement, I was glad to observe (since I must fight) that the campaign was to be opened upon a new field. When the contest raged over the Pentateuchal myth of the creation, Mr. Gladstone's manifest want of acquaintance with the facts and principles involved in the discussion, no less than with the best literature on his own side of the subject, gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I had my adversary at a disadvantage. The sun of science, at my back, was in his eyes. But, on the present occasion, we are happily on an equality. History and Biblical criticism are as much, or as little, my vocation as they are that of Mr. Gladstone; the blinding from too much light, or the blindness from too little, may be presumed to be equally shared by both of us. Mr. Gladstone takes up his new position in the country of the Gadarenes. His strategic sense justly leads him to see that the authority of the teachings of the synoptic Gospels, touching the nature of the spiritual world, turns upon the acceptance, or the rejection, of the Gadarene and other like stories. As we accept, or repudiate, such histories as that of the possessed pigs, so shall we accept, or reject, the witness of the synoptics to such miraculous interventions. It is exactly because these stories constitute the key-stone of the orthodox arch, that I originally drew attention to them; and, in spite of my longing for peace, I am truly obliged to Mr. Gladstone for compelling me to place my case before the public once more. It may be thought that this is a work of supererogation by those who are aware that my essay is the subject of attack in a work so largely circulated as the "Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture"; and who may possibly, in their simplicity, assume that it must be truthfully set forth in that work. But the warmest admirers of Mr. Gladstone will hardly be prepared to maintain that mathematical accuracy in stating the opinions of an opponent is the most prominent feature of his controversial method. And what follows will show that, in the present case, the desire to be fair and accurate, the existence of which I am bound to assume, has not borne as much fruit as might have been expected. In referring to the statement of the narrators, that the herd of swine perished in consequence of the entrance into them of the demons by the permission, or order, of Jesus of Nazareth, I said: "Everything that I know of law and justice convinces me that the wanton destruction of other people's property is a misdemeanour of evil example" ("Nineteenth Century," February, 1889, p. 172). Mr. Gladstone has not found it convenient to cite this passage; and, in view of various considerations, I dare not assume that he would assent to it, without sundry subtle modifications which, for me, might possibly rob it of its argumentative value. But, until the proposition is seriously controverted, I shall assume it to be true, and content myself with warning the reader that neither he nor I have any grounds for assuming Mr. Gladstone's concurrence. With this caution, I proceed to remark that I think it may be granted that the people whose herd of 2000 swine (more or fewer) was suddenly destroyed suffered great loss and damage. And it is quite certain that the narrators of the Gadarene story do not, in any way, refer to the point of morality and legality thus raised; as I said, they show no inkling of the moral and legal difficulties which arise. Such being the facts of the case, I submit that for those who admit the principle laid down, the conclusion which I have drawn necessarily follows; though I repeat that, since Mr. Gladstone does not explicitly admit the principle, I am far from suggesting that he is bound by its logical consequences. However, I distinctly reiterate the opinion that any one who acted in the way described in the story would, in my judgment, be guilty of "a misdemeanour of evil example." About that point I desire to leave no ambiguity whatever; and it follows that, if I believed the story, I should have no hesitation in applying this judgment to the chief actor in it. But, if any one will do me the favour to turn to the paper in which these passages occur, he will find that a considerable part of it is devoted to the exposure of the familiar trick of the "counsel for creeds," who, when they wish to profit by the easily stirred _odium theologicum_, are careful to confuse disbelief in a narrative of a man's act, or disapproval of the acts as narrated, with disbelieving and vilipending the man himself. If I say that "according to paragraphs in several newspapers, my valued Separatist friend A.B. has houghed a lot of cattle, which he considered to be unlawfully in the possession of an Irish land-grabber; that, in my opinion, any such act is a misdemeanour of evil example; but, that I utterly disbelieve the whole story and have no doubt that it is a mere fabrication:" it really appears to me that, if any one charges me with calling A.B. an immoral misdemeanant I should be justified in using very strong language respecting either his sanity or his veracity. And, if an analogous charge has been brought in reference to the Gadarene story, there is certainly no excuse producible, on account of any lack of plain speech on my part. Surely no language can be more explicit than that which follows: "I can discern no escape from this dilemma; either Jesus said what he is reported to have said, or he did not. In the former case, it is inevitable that his authority on matters connected with the 'unseen world' should be roughly shaken; in the latter, the blow falls upon the authority of the synoptic Gospels" (p. 173). "The choice then lies between discrediting those who compiled the Gospel biographies and disbelieving the Master, whom they, simple souls, thought to honour by preserving such traditions of the exercise of his authority over Satan's invisible world" (p. 174). And I leave no shadow of doubt as to my own choice: "After what has been said, I do not think that any sensible man, unless he happen to be angry, will accuse me of 'contradicting the Lord and his Apostles' if I reiterate my total disbelief in the whole Gadarene story" (p. 178). I am afraid, therefore, that Mr. Gladstone must have been exceedingly angry when he committed himself to such a statement as follows: So, then, after eighteen centuries of worship offered to our Lord by the most cultivated, the most developed, and the most progressive portion of the human race, it has been reserved to a scientific inquirer to discover that He was no better than a law-breaker and an evil-doer.... How, in such a matter, came the honours of originality to be reserved to our time and to Professor Huxley? (Pp. 269, 270.) Truly, the hatchet is hardly a weapon of precision, but would seem to have rather more the character of the boomerang, which returns to damage the reckless thrower. Doubtless such incidents are somewhat ludicrous. But they have a very serious side; and, if I rated the opinion of those who blindly follow Mr. Gladstone's leading, but not light, in these matters, much higher than the great Duke of Wellington's famous standard of minimum value, I think I might fairly beg them to reflect upon the general bearings of this particular example of his controversial method. I imagine it can hardly commend itself to their cool judgment. After this tragi-comical ending to what an old historian calls a "robustious and rough coming on"; and after some praises of the provisions of the Mosaic law in the matter of not eating pork--in which, as pork disagrees with me and for some other reasons, I am much disposed to concur, though I do not see what they have to do with the matter in hand--comes the serious onslaught. Mr. Huxley, exercising his rapid judgment on the text, does not appear to have encumbered himself with the labour of inquiring what anybody else had known or said about it. He has thus missed a point which might have been set up in support of his accusation against our Lord. (P. 273.) Unhappily for my conduct, I have been much exercised in controversy during the past thirty years; and the only compensation for the loss of time and the trials of temper which it has inflicted upon me, is that I have come to regard it as a branch of the fine arts, and to take an impartial and æsthetic interest in the way in which it is conducted, even by those whose efforts are directed against myself. Now, from the purely artistic point of view (which, as we are all being told, has nothing to do with morals), I consider it an axiom, that one should never appear to doubt that the other side has performed the elementary duty of acquiring proper elementary information, unless there is demonstrative evidence to the contrary. And I think, though I admit that this may be a purely subjective appreciation, that (unless you are quite certain) there is a "want of finish," as a great master of disputation once put it, about the suggestion that your opponent has missed a point on his own side. Because it may happen that he has not missed it at all, but only thought it unworthy of serious notice. And if he proves that, the suggestion looks foolish. Merely noting the careful repetition of a charge, the absurdity of which has been sufficiently exposed above, I now ask my readers to accompany me on a little voyage of discovery in search of the side on which the rapid judgment and the ignorance of the literature of the subject lie. I think I may promise them very little trouble, and a good deal of entertainment. Mr. Gladstone is of opinion that the Gadarene swinefolk were "Hebrews bound by the Mosaic law" (p. 274); and he conceives that it has not occurred to me to learn what may be said in favour of and against this view. He tells us that Some commentators have alleged the authority of Josephus for stating that Gadara was a city of Greeks rather than of Jews, from whence it might be inferred that to keep swine was innocent and lawful. (P. 273.) Mr. Gladstone then goes on to inform his readers that in his painstaking search after truth he has submitted to the labour of personally examining the writings of Josephus. Moreover, in a note, he positively exhibits an acquaintance, in addition, with the works of Bishop Wordsworth and of Archbishop Trench; and even shows that he has read Hudson's commentary on Josephus. And yet people say that our Biblical critics do not equal the Germans in research! But Mr. Gladstone's citation of Cuvier and Sir John Herschel about the Creation myth, and his ignorance of all the best modern writings on his own side, produced a great impression on my mind. I have had the audacity to suspect that his acquaintance with what has been done in Biblical history might stand at no higher level than his information about the natural sciences. However unwillingly, I have felt bound to consider the possibility that Mr. Gladstone's labours in this matter may have carried him no further than Josephus and the worthy, but somewhat antique, episcopal and other authorities to whom he refers; that even his reading of Josephus may have been of the most cursory nature, directed not to the understanding of his author, but to the discovery of useful controversial matter; and that, in view of the not inconsiderable misrepresentation of my statements to which I have drawn attention, it might be that Mr. Gladstone's exposition of the evidence of Josephus was not more trustworthy. I proceed to show that my previsions have been fully justified. I doubt if controversial literature contains anything more _piquant_ than the story I have to unfold. That I should be reproved for rapidity of judgment is very just; however quaint the situation of Mr. Gladstone, as the reprover, may seem to people blessed with a sense of humour. But it is a quality, the defects of which have been painfully obvious to me all my life; and I try to keep my Pegasus--at best, a poor Shetland variety of that species of quadruped--at a respectable jog-trot, by loading him heavily with bales of reading. Those who took the trouble to study my paper in good faith and not for mere controversial purposes, have a right to know, that something more than a hasty glimpse of two or three passages of Josephus (even with as many episcopal works thrown in) lay at the back of the few paragraphs I devoted to the Gadarene story. I proceed to set forth, as briefly as I can, some results of that preparatory work. My artistic principles do not permit me, at present, to express a doubt that Mr. Gladstone was acquainted with the facts I am about to mention when he undertook to write. But, if he did know them, then both what he has said and what he has not said, his assertions and his omissions alike, will require a paragraph to themselves. The common consent of the synoptic Gospels affirms that the miraculous transference of devils from a man, or men, to sundry pigs, took place somewhere on the eastern shore of the Lake of Tiberias; "on the other side of the sea over against Galilee," the western shore being, without doubt, included in the latter province. But there is no such concord when we come to the name of the part of the eastern shore, on which, according to the story, Jesus and his disciples landed. In the revised version, Matthew calls it the "country of the Gadarenes:" Luke and Mark have "Gerasenes." In sundry very ancient manuscripts "Gergesenes" occurs. The existence of any place called Gergesa, however, is declared by the weightiest authorities whom I have consulted to be very questionable; and no such town is mentioned in the list of the cities of the Decapolis, in the territory of which (as it would seem from Mark v. 20) the transaction was supposed to take place. About Gerasa, on the other hand, there hangs no such doubt. It was a large and important member of the group of the Decapolitan cities. But Gerasa is more than thirty miles distant from the nearest part of the Lake of Tiberias, while the city mentioned in the narrative could not have been very far off the scene of the event. However, as Gerasa was a very important Hellenic city, not much more than a score of miles from Gadara, it is easily imaginable that a locality which was part of Decapolitan territory may have been spoken of as belonging to one of the two cities, when it really appertained to the other. After weighing all the arguments, no doubt remains on my mind that "Gadarene" is the proper reading. At the period under consideration, Gadara appears to have been a good-sized fortified town, about two miles in circumference. It was a place of considerable strategic importance, inasmuch as it lay on a high ridge at the point of intersection of the roads from Tiberias, Scythopolis, Damascus, and Gerasa. Three miles north from it, where the Tiberias road descended into the valley of the Hieromices, lay the famous hot springs and the fashionable baths of Amatha. On the north-east side, the remains of the extensive necropolis of Gadara are still to be seen. Innumerable sepulchral chambers are excavated in the limestone cliffs, and many of them still contain sarcophaguses of basalt; while not a few are converted into dwellings by the inhabitants of the present village of Um Keis. The distance of Gadara from the south-eastern shore of the Lake of Tiberias is less than seven miles. The nearest of the other cities of the Decapolis, to the north, is Hippos, which also lay some seven miles off, in the south-eastern corner of the shore of the lake. In accordance with the ancient Hellenic practice, that each city should be surrounded by a certain amount of territory amenable to its jurisdiction,[101] and on other grounds, it may be taken for certain that the intermediate country was divided between Gadara and Hippos; and that the citizens of Gadara had free access to a port on the lake. Hence the title of "country of the Gadarenes" applied to the locality of the porcine catastrophe becomes easily intelligible. The swine may well be imagined to have been feeding (as they do now in the adjacent region) on the hillsides, which slope somewhat steeply down to the lake from the northern boundary wall of the valley of the Hieromices (_Nahr Yarmuk_), about half-way between the city and the shore, and doubtless lay well within the territory of the _polis_ of Gadara. The proof that Gadara was, to all intents and purposes, a Gentile, and not a Jewish, city is complete. The date and the occasion of its foundation are unknown; but it certainly existed in the third century B.C. Antiochus the Great annexed it to his dominions in B.C. 198. After this, during the brief revival of Jewish autonomy, Alexander Jannæus took it; and for the first time, so far as the records go, it fell under Jewish rule.[102] From this it was rescued by Pompey (B.C. 63), who rebuilt the city and incorporated it with the province of Syria. In gratitude to the Romans for the dissolution of a hated union, the Gadarenes adopted the Pompeian era of their coinage. Gadara was a commercial centre of some importance, and therefore, it may be assumed, Jews settled in it, as they settled in almost all considerable Gentile cities. But a wholly mistaken estimate of the magnitude of the Jewish colony has been based upon the notion that Gabinius, proconsul of Syria in 57-55 B.C., seated one of the five sanhedrins in Gadara. Schürer has pointed out that what he really did was to lodge one of them in Gadara, far away on the other side of the Jordan. This is one of the many errors which have arisen out of the confusion of the names Ga_d_ara, Ga_z_ara, and Ga_b_ara. Augustus made a present of Gadara to Herod the Great, as an appanage personal to himself; and, upon Herod's death, recognising it to be a "Grecian city" like Hippos and Gaza,[103] he transferred it back to its former place in the province of Syria. That Herod made no effort to judaise his temporary possession, but rather the contrary, is obvious from the fact that the coins of Gadara, while under his rule, bear the image of Augustus with the superscription [Greek: Sebastos]--a flying in the face of Jewish prejudices which, even he, did not dare to venture upon in Judæa. And I may remark that, if my co-trustee of the British Museum had taken the trouble to visit the splendid numismatic collection under our charge, he might have seen two coins of Gadara, one of the time of Tiberius and the other of that of Titus, each bearing the effigies of the emperor on the obverse: while the personified genius of the city is on the reverse of the former. Further, the well-known works of De Saulcy and of Ekhel would have supplied the information that, from the time of Augustus to that of Gordian, the Gadarene coinage had the same thoroughly Gentile character. Curious that a city of "Hebrews bound by the Mosaic law" should tolerate such a mint! Whatever increase in population the Ghetto of Gadara may have undergone, between B.C. 4 and A.D. 66, it nowise affected the gentile and anti-judaic character of the city at the outbreak of the great war; for Josephus tells us that, immediately after the great massacre of Cæsarea, the revolted Jews "laid waste the villages of the Syrians and their neighbouring cities, Philadelphia and Sebonitis and Gerasa and Pella and Scythopolis, and after them Gadara and Hippos" ("Wars," II. xviii. 1). I submit that, if Gadara had been a city of "Hebrews bound by the Mosaic law," the ravaging of their territory by their brother Jews, in revenge for the massacre of the Cæsarean Jews by the Gentile population of that place, would surely have been a somewhat unaccountable proceeding. But when we proceed a little further, to the fifth section of the chapter in which this statement occurs, the whole affair becomes intelligible enough. Besides this murder at Scythopolis, the other cities rose up against the Jews that were among them: those of Askelon slew two thousand five hundred, and those of Ptolemais two thousand, and put not a few into bonds; those of Tyre also put a great number to death, but kept a great number in prison; moreover, those of Hippos and those of Gadara did the like, while they put to death the boldest of the Jews, but kept those of whom they were most afraid in custody; as did the rest of the cities of Syria according as they every one either hated them or were afraid of them. Josephus is not always trustworthy, but he has no conceivable motive for altering facts here; he speaks of contemporary events, in which he himself took an active part, and he characterises the cities in the way familiar to him. For Josephus, Gadara is just as much a Gentile city as Ptolemais; it was reserved for his latest commentator, either ignoring, or ignorant of, all this, to tell us that Gadara had a Hebrew population, bound by the Mosaic law. In the face of all this evidence, most of which has been put before serious students, with full reference to the needful authorities and in a thoroughly judicial manner, by Schürer in his classical work,[104] one reads with stupefaction the statement which Mr. Gladstone has thought fit to put before the uninstructed public: Some commentators have alleged the authority of Josephus for stating that Gadara was a city of Greeks rather than of Jews, from whence it might be inferred that to keep swine was innocent and lawful. This is not quite the place for a critical examination of the matter; but I have examined it, and have satisfied myself that Josephus gives no reason whatever to suppose that the population of Gadara, and still less (if less may be) the population of the neighbourhood, and least of all the swine-herding or lower portion of that population, were other than Hebrews bound by the Mosaic law. (Pp. 373-4.) Even "rapid judgment" cannot be pleaded in excuse for this surprising statement, because a "Note on the Gadarene miracle" is added (in a special appendix), in which the references are given to the passages of Josephus, by the improved interpretation of which, Mr. Gladstone has thus contrived to satisfy himself of the thing which is not. One of these is "Antiquities" XVII. xiii. 4, in which section, I regret to say, I can find no mention of Gadara. In "Antiquities," XVII. xi. 4, however, there is a passage which would appear to be that Mr. Gladstone means; and I will give it in full, although I have already cited part of it: There were also certain of the cities which paid tribute to Archelaus; Strato's tower, and Sebaste, with Joppa and Jerusalem; for, as to Gaza, Gadara, and Hippos, they were Grecian cities, which Cæsar separated from his government, and added them to the province of Syria. That is to say, Augustus simply restored the state of things which existed before he gave Gadara, then certainly a Gentile city, lying outside Judæa, to Herod as a mark of great personal favour. Yet Mr. Gladstone can gravely tell those who are not in a position to check his statements: The sense seems to be, not that these cities were inhabited by a Greek population, but that they had politically been taken out of Judæa and added to Syria, which I presume was classified as simply Hellenic, a portion of the great Greek empire erected by Alexander. (Pp. 295-6.) Mr. Gladstone's next reference is to the "Wars," III. vii. 1: So Vespasian marched to the city Gadara, and took it upon the first onset, because he found it destitute of a considerable number of men grown up for war. He then came into it, and slew all the youth, the Romans having no mercy on any age whatsoever; and this was done out of the hatred they bore the nation, and because of the iniquity they had been guilty of in the affair of Cestius. Obviously, then, Gadara was an ultra-Jewish city. Q.E.D. But a student trained in the use of weapons of precision, rather than in that of rhetorical tomahawks, has had many and painful warnings to look well about him, before trusting an argument to the mercies of a passage, the context of which he has not carefully considered. If Mr. Gladstone had not been too much in a hurry to turn his imaginary prize to account--if he had paused just to look at the preceding chapter of Josephus--he would have discovered that his much haste meant very little speed. He would have found ("Wars," III. vi. 2) that Vespasian marched from his base, the port of Ptolemais (Acre), on the shores of the Mediterranean, into Galilee; and, having dealt with the so-called "Gadara," was minded to finish with Jotapata, a strong place about fourteen miles south-east of Ptolemais, into which Josephus, who at first had fled to Tiberias, eventually threw himself--Vespasian arriving before Jotapata "the very next day." Now, if any one will take a decent map of Ancient Palestine in hand, he will see that Jotapata, as I have said, lies about fourteen miles in a straight line east-south-east of Ptolemais, while a certain town, "Gabara" (which was also held by the Jews), is situated, about the same distance, to the east of that port. Nothing can be more obvious than that Vespasian, wishing to advance from Ptolemais into Galilee, could not afford to leave these strongholds in the possession of the enemy; and, as Gabara would lie on his left flank when he moved to Jotapata, he took that city, whence his communications with his base could easily be threatened, first. It might really have been fair evidence of demoniac possession, if the best general of Rome had marched forty odd miles, as the crow flies, through hostile Galilee, to take a city (which, moreover, had just tried to abolish its Jewish population) on the other side of the Jordan; and then marched back again to a place fourteen miles off his starting-point.[105] One would think that the most careless of readers must be startled by this incongruity into inquiring whether there might not be something wrong with the text; and, if he had done so, he would have easily discovered that since the time of Reland, a century and a half ago, careful scholars have read Ga_b_ara for Ga_d_ara.[106] Once more, I venture to point out that training in the use of the weapons of precision of science may have its value in historical studies, if only in preventing the occurrence of droll blunders in geography. In the third citation ("Wars," IV. vii.) Josephus tells us that Vespasian marched against "Gadara," which he calls the metropolis of Peræa (it was possibly the seat of a common festival of the Decapolitan cities), and entered it, without opposition, the wealthy and powerful citizens having opened negotiations with him without the knowledge of an opposite party, who, "as being inferior in number to their enemies, who were within the city, and seeing the Romans very near the city," resolved to fly. Before doing so, however, they, after a fashion unfortunately too common among the Zealots, murdered and shockingly mutilated Dolesus, a man of the first rank, who had promoted the embassy to Vespasian; and then "ran out of the city." Hereupon, "the people of Gadara" (surely not this time "Hebrews bound by the Mosaic law") received Vespasian with joyful acclamations, voluntarily pulled down their wall, so that the city could not in future be used as a fortress by the Jews, and accepted a Roman garrison for their future protection. Granting that this Gadara really is the city of the Gadarenes, the reference, without citation, to the passage, in support of Mr. Gladstone's contention seems rather remarkable. Taken in conjunction with the shortly antecedent ravaging of the Gadarene territory by the Jews, in fact, better proof could hardly be expected of the real state of the case; namely, that the population of Gadara (and notably the wealthy and respectable part of it) was thoroughly Hellenic; though, as in Cæsarea and elsewhere among the Palestinian cities, the rabble contained a considerable body of fanatical Jews, whose reckless ferocity made them, even though a mere minority of the population, a standing danger to the city. Thus Mr. Gladstone's conclusion from his study of Josephus, that the population of Gadara were "Hebrews bound by the Mosaic law," turns out to depend upon nothing better than the marvellously complete misinterpretation of what that author says, combined with equally marvellous geographical misunderstandings, long since exposed and rectified; while the positive evidence that Gadara, like other cities of the Decapolis, was thoroughly Hellenic in organisation, and essentially Gentile in population, is overwhelming. And, that being the fact of the matter, patent to all who will take the trouble to enquire about what has been said about it, however obscure to those who merely talk of so doing, the thesis that the Gadarene swineherds, or owners, were Jews violating the Mosaic law shows itself to be an empty and most unfortunate guess. But really, whether they that kept the swine were Jews, or whether they were Gentiles, is a consideration which has no relevance whatever to my case. The legal provisions, which alone had authority over an inhabitant of the country of the Gadarenes, were the Gentile laws sanctioned by the Roman suzerain of the province of Syria, just as the only law, which has authority in England, is that recognised by the sovereign Legislature. Jewish communities in England may have their private code, as they doubtless had in Gadara. But an English magistrate, if called upon to enforce their peculiar laws, would dismiss the complainants from the judgment seat, let us hope with more politeness than Gallio did in a like case, but quite as firmly. Moreover, in the matter of keeping pigs, we may be quite certain that Gadarene law left everybody free to do as he pleased, indeed encouraged the practice rather than otherwise. Not only was pork one of the commonest and one of the most favourite articles of Roman diet; but, to both Greeks and Romans, the pig was a sacrificial animal of high importance. Sucking pigs played an important part in Hellenic purificatory rites; and everybody knows the significance of the Roman suovetaurilia, depicted on so many bas-reliefs. Under these circumstances, only the extreme need of a despairing "reconciler" drowning in a sea of adverse facts, can explain the catching at such a poor straw as the reckless guess that the swineherds of the "country of the Gadarenes" were erring Jews, doing a little clandestine business on their own account. The endeavour to justify the asserted destruction of the swine by the analogy of breaking open a cask of smuggled spirits, and wasting their contents on the ground, is curiously unfortunate. Does Mr. Gladstone mean to suggest that a Frenchman landing at Dover, and coming upon a cask of smuggled brandy in the course of a stroll along the cliffs, has the right to break it open and waste its contents on the ground? Yet the party of Galileans who, according to the narrative, landed and took a walk on the Gadarene territory, were as much foreigners in the Decapolis as Frenchmen would be at Dover. Herod Antipas, their sovereign, had no jurisdiction in the Decapolis--they were strangers and aliens, with no more right to interfere with a pig-keeping Hebrew, than I have a right to interfere with an English professor of the Israelitic faith, if I see a slice of ham on his plate. According to the law of the country in which these Galilean foreigners found themselves, men might keep pigs if they pleased. If the men who kept them were Jews, it might be permissible for the strangers to inform the religious authority acknowledged by the Jews of Gadara; but to interfere themselves, in such a matter, was a step devoid of either moral or legal justification. Suppose a modern English Sabbatarian fanatic, who believes, on the strength of his interpretation of the fourth commandment, that it is a deadly sin to work on the "Lord's Day," sees a fellow Puritan yielding to the temptation of getting in his harvest on a fine Sunday morning--is the former justified in setting fire to the latter's corn? Would not an English court of justice speedily teach him better? In truth, the government which permits private persons, on any pretext (especially pious and patriotic pretexts), to take the law into their own hands, fails in the performance of the primary duties of all governments; while those who set the example of such acts, or who approve them, or who fail to disapprove them, are doing their best to dissolve civil society; they are compassers of illegality and fautors of immorality. I fully understand that Mr. Gladstone may not see the matter in this light. He may possibly consider that the union of Gadara with the Decapolis, by Augustus, was a "blackguard" transaction, which deprived Hellenic Gadarene law of all moral force; and that it was quite proper for a Jewish Galilean, going back to the time when the land of the Girgashites was given to his ancestors, some 1500 years before, to act, as if the state of things which ought to obtain, in territory which traditionally, at any rate, belonged to his forefathers, did really exist. And, that being so, I can only say I do not agree with him, but leave the matter to the appreciation of those of our countrymen, happily not yet the minority, who believe that the first condition of enduring liberty is obedience to the law of the land. * * * * * The end of the month drawing nigh, I thought it well to send away the manuscript of the foregoing pages yesterday, leaving open, in my own mind, the possibility of adding a succinct characterisation of Mr. Gladstone's controversial methods as illustrated therein. This morning, however, I had the pleasure of reading a speech which I think must satisfy the requirements of the most fastidious of controversial artists; and there occurs in it so concise, yet so complete, a delineation of Mr. Gladstone's way of dealing with disputed questions of another kind, that no poor effort of mine could better it as a description of the aspect which his treatment of scientific, historical, and critical questions presents to me. The smallest examination would have told a man of his capacity and of his experience that he was uttering the grossest exaggerations, that he was basing arguments upon the slightest hypotheses, and that his discussions only had to be critically examined by the most careless critic in order to show their intrinsic hollowness. Those who have followed me through this paper will hardly dispute the justice of this judgment, severe as it is. But the Chief Secretary for Ireland has science in the blood; and has the advantage of a natural, as well as a highly cultivated, aptitude for the use of methods of precision in investigation, and for the exact enunciation of the results thereby obtained. FOOTNOTES: [101] Thus Josephus (lib. ix.) says that his rival, Justus, persuaded the citizens of Tiberias to "set the villages that belonged to Gadara and Hippos on fire; which villages were situated on the borders of Tiberias and of the region of Scythopolis." [102] It is said to have been destroyed by its captors. [103] "But as to the Grecian cities, Gaza and Gadara and Hippos, he cut them off from the kingdom and added them to Syria."--Josephus, _Wars_, II. vi. 3. See also _Antiquities_, XVII. xi. 4. [104] _Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Christi_, 1886-90. [105] If William the Conqueror, after fighting the battle of Hastings, had marched to capture Chichester and then returned to assault Rye, being all the while anxious to reach London, his proceedings would not have been more eccentric than Mr. Gladstone must imagine those of Vespasian were. [106] See Reland, _Palestina_ (1714), t. ii. p. 771. Also Robinson, _Later Biblical Researches_ (1856), p. 87 _note_. XI: ILLUSTRATIONS OF MR. GLADSTONE'S CONTROVERSIAL METHODS [1891] The series of essays, in defence of the historical accuracy of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, contributed by Mr. Gladstone to "Good Words," having been revised and enlarged by their author, appeared last year as a separate volume, under the somewhat defiant title of "The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture." The last of these Essays, entitled "Conclusion," contains an attack, or rather several attacks, couched in language which certainly does not err upon the side of moderation or of courtesy, upon statements and opinions of mine. One of these assaults is a deliberately devised attempt, not merely to rouse the theological prejudices ingrained in the majority of Mr. Gladstone's readers, but to hold me up as a person who has endeavoured to besmirch the personal character of the object of their veneration. For Mr. Gladstone asserts that I have undertaken to try "the character of our Lord" (p. 268); and he tells the many who are, as I think unfortunately, predisposed to place implicit credit in his assertions, that it has been reserved for me to discover that Jesus "was no better than a law-breaker and an evil-doer!" (p. 269). It was extremely easy for me to prove, as I did in the pages of this Review last December, that, under the most favourable interpretation, this amazing declaration must be ascribed to extreme confusion of thought. And, by bringing an abundance of good-will to the consideration of the subject, I have now convinced myself that it is right for me to admit that a person of Mr. Gladstone's intellectual acuteness really did mistake the reprobation of the course of conduct ascribed to Jesus, in a story of which I expressly say I do not believe a word, for an attack on his character and a declaration that he was "no better than a law-breaker, and an evil-doer." At any rate, so far as I can see, this is what Mr. Gladstone wished to be believed when he wrote the following passage:-- I must, however, in passing, make the confession that I did not state with accuracy, as I ought to have done, the precise form of the accusation. I treated it as an imputation on the action of our Lord; he replies that it is only an imputation on the narrative of three evangelists respecting Him. The difference, from his point of view, is probably material, and I therefore regret that I overlooked it.[107] Considering the gravity of the error which is here admitted, the fashion of the withdrawal appears more singular than admirable. From my "point of view"--not from Mr. Gladstone's apparently--the little discrepancy between the facts and Mr. Gladstone's carefully offensive travesty of them is "probably" (only "probably") material. However, as Mr. Gladstone concludes with an official expression of regret for his error, it is my business to return an equally official expression of gratitude for the attenuated reparation with which I am favoured. Having cleared this specimen of Mr. Gladstone's controversial method out of the way, I may proceed to the next assault, that on a passage in an article on Agnosticism ("Nineteenth Century," February 1889), published two years ago. I there said, in referring to the Gadarene story, "Everything I know of law and justice convinces me that the wanton destruction of other people's property is a misdemeanour of evil example." On this, Mr. Gladstone, continuing his candid and urbane observations, remarks ("Impregnable Rock," p. 273) that, "Exercising his rapid judgment on the text," and "not inquiring what anybody else had known or said about it," I had missed a point in support of that "accusation against our Lord" which he has now been constrained to admit I never made. The "point" in question is that "Gadara was a city of Greeks rather than of Jews, from whence it might be inferred that to keep swine was innocent and lawful." I conceive that I have abundantly proved that Gadara answered exactly to the description here given of it; and I shall show, by and by, that Mr. Gladstone has used language which, to my mind, involves the admission that the authorities of the city were not Jews. But I have also taken a good deal of pains to show that the question thus raised is of no importance in relation to the main issue.[108] If Gadara was, as I maintain it was, a city of the Decapolis, Hellenistic in constitution and containing a predominantly Gentile population, my case is superabundantly fortified. On the other hand, if the hypothesis that Gadara was under Jewish government, which Mr. Gladstone seems sometimes to defend and sometimes to give up, were accepted, my case would be nowise weakened. At any rate, Gadara was not included within the jurisdiction of the tetrach of Galilee; if it had been, the Galileans who crossed over the lake to Gadara had no official status; and they had no more civil right to punish law-breakers than any other strangers. In my turn, however, I may remark that there is a "point" which appears to have escaped Mr. Gladstone's notice. And that is somewhat unfortunate, because his whole argument turns upon it. Mr. Gladstone assumes, as a matter of course, that pig-keeping was an offence against the "Law of Moses"; and, therefore, that Jews who kept pigs were as much liable to legal pains and penalties as Englishmen who smuggle brandy ("Impregnable Rock," p. 274). There can be no doubt that, according to the Law, as it is defined in the Pentateuch, the pig was an "unclean" animal, and that pork was a forbidden article of diet. Moreover, since pigs are hardly likely to be kept for the mere love of those unsavoury animals, pig-owning, or swine-herding, must have been, and evidently was, regarded as a suspicious and degrading occupation by strict Jews, in the first century A.D. But I should like to know on what provision of the Mosaic Law, as it is laid down in the Pentateuch, Mr. Gladstone bases the assumption, which is essential to his case, that the possession of pigs and the calling of a swineherd were actually illegal. The inquiry was put to me the other day; and, as I could not answer it, I turned up the article "Schwein" in Riehm's standard "Handwörterbuch," for help out of my difficulty; but unfortunately without success. After speaking of the martyrdom which the Jews, under Antiochus Epiphanes, preferred to eating pork, the writer proceeds:-- It may be, nevertheless, that the practice of keeping pigs may have found its way into Palestine in the Græco-Roman time, in consequence of the great increase of the non-Jewish population; yet there is no evidence of it in the New Testament; the great herd of swine, 2,000 in number, mentioned in the narrative of the possessed, was feeding in the territory of Gadara, which belonged to the Decapolis; and the prodigal son became a swineherd with the native of a far country into which he had wandered; in neither of these cases is there reason for thinking that the possessors of these herds were Jews.[109] Having failed in my search, so far, I took up the next book of reference at hand, Kitto's "Cyclopædia" (vol. iii. 1876). There, under "Swine," the writer, Colonel Hamilton Smith, seemed at first to give me what I wanted, as he says that swine "appear to have been repeatedly introduced and reared by the Hebrew people,[110] notwithstanding the strong prohibition in the Law of Moses (Is. lxv. 4)." But, in the first place, Isaiah's writings form no part of the "Law of Moses"; and, in the second place, the people denounced by the prophet in this passage are neither the possessors of pigs, nor swineherds, but these "which eat swine's flesh and broth of abominable things is in their vessels." And when, in despair, I turned to the provisions of the Law itself, my difficulty was not cleared up. Leviticus xi. 8 (Revised Version) says, in reference to the pig and other unclean animals: "Of their flesh ye shall not eat, and their carcasses ye shall not touch." In the revised version of Deuteronomy, xiv. 8, the words of the prohibition are identical, and a skilful refiner might possibly satisfy himself, even if he satisfied nobody else, that "carcase" means the body of a live animal as well as a dead one; and that, since swineherds could hardly avoid contact with their charges, their calling was implicitly forbidden.[111] Unfortunately, the authorised version expressly says "dead carcase"; and thus the most rabbinically minded of reconcilers might find his casuistry foiled by that great source of surprises, the "original Hebrew." That such check is at any rate possible, is clear from the fact that the legal uncleanness of some animals, as food, did not interfere with their being lawfully possessed, cared for, and sold by Jews. The provisions for the ransoming of unclean beasts (Lev. xxvii. 27) and for the redemption of their sucklings (Numbers xviii. 15) sufficiently prove this. As the late Dr. Kalisch has observed in his "Commentary" on Leviticus, part ii. p. 129, note:-- Though asses and horses, camels and dogs, were kept by the Israelites, they were, to a certain extent, associated with the notion of impurity; they might be turned to profitable account by their labour or otherwise, but in respect to food they were an abomination. The same learned commentator (_loc. cit._ p. 88) proves that the Talmudists forbade the rearing of pigs by Jews, unconditionally and everywhere; and even included it under the same ban as the study of Greek philosophy, "since both alike were considered to lead to the desertion of the Jewish faith." It is very possible, indeed probable, that the Pharisees of the fourth decade of our first century took as strong a view of pig-keeping as did their spiritual descendants. But, for all that, it does not follow that the practice was illegal. The stricter Jews could not have despised and hated swineherds more than they did publicans; but, so far as I know, there is no provision in the Law against the practice of the calling of a tax-gatherer by a Jew. The publican was in fact very much in the position of an Irish process-server at the present day--more, rather than less, despised and hated on account of the perfect legality of his occupation. Except for certain sacrificial purposes, pigs were held in such abhorrence by the ancient Egyptians, that swineherds were not permitted to enter a temple, or to intermarry with other castes; and any one who had touched a pig, even accidentally, was unclean. But these very regulations prove that pig-keeping was not illegal; it merely involved certain civil and religious disabilities. For the Jews, dogs were typically "unclean animals"; but when that eminently pious Hebrew, Tobit, "went forth" with the angel "the young man's dog" went "with them" (Tobit v. 16) without apparent remonstrance from the celestial guide. I really do not see how an appeal to the Law could have justified any one in drowning Tobit's dog, on the ground that his master was keeping and feeding an animal quite as "unclean" as any pig. Certainly the excellent Raguel must have failed to see the harm of dog-keeping, for we are told that, on the traveller's return homewards, "the dog went after them" (xi. 4). Until better light than I have been able to obtain is thrown upon the subject, therefore, it is obvious that Mr. Gladstone's argumentative house has been built upon an extremely slippery quick-sand; perhaps even has no foundation at all. Yet another "point" does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Gladstone, who is so much shocked that I attach no overwhelming weight to the assertions contained in the synoptic Gospels, even when all three concur. These Gospels agree in stating, in the most express, and to some extent verbally identical, terms, that the devils entered the pigs at their own request,[112] and the third Gospel (viii. 31) tells us what the motive of the demons was in asking the singular boon: "They intreated him that he would not command them to depart into the abyss." From this, it would seem that the devils thought to exchange the heavy punishment of transportation to the abyss for the lighter penalty of imprisonment in swine. And some commentators, more ingenious than respectful to the supposed chief actor in this extraordinary fable, have dwelt, with satisfaction, upon the very unpleasant quarter of an hour which the evil spirits must have had, when the headlong rush of their maddened tenements convinced them how completely they were taken in. In the whole story, there is not one solitary hint that the destruction of the pigs was intended as a punishment of their owners, or of the swineherds. On the contrary, the concurrent testimony of the three narratives is to the effect that the catastrophe was the consequence of diabolic suggestion. And, indeed, no source could be more appropriate for an act of such manifest injustice and illegality. I can but marvel that modern defenders of the faith should not be glad of any reasonable excuse for getting rid of a story which, if it had been invented by Voltaire, would have justly let loose floods of orthodox indignation. * * * * * Thus, the hypothesis, to which Mr. Gladstone so fondly clings, finds no support in the provisions of the "Law of Moses" as that law is defined in the Pentateuch; while it is wholly inconsistent with the concurrent testimony of the synoptic Gospels, to which Mr. Gladstone attaches so much weight. In my judgment, it is directly contrary to everything which profane history tells us about the constitution and the population of the city of Gadara; and it commits those who accept it to a story which, if it were true, would implicate the founder of Christianity in an illegal and inequitable act. Such being the case, I consider myself excused from following Mr. Gladstone through all the meanderings of his late attempt to extricate himself from the maze of historical and exegetical difficulties in which he is entangled. I content myself with assuring those who, with my paper (not Mr. Gladstone's version of my arguments) in hand, consult the original authorities, that they will find full justification for every statement I have made. But in order to dispose those who cannot, or will not, take that trouble, to believe that the proverbial blindness of one that judges his own cause plays no part in inducing me to speak thus decidedly, I beg their attention to the following examination, which shall be as brief as I can make it, of the seven propositions in which Mr. Gladstone professes to give a faithful summary of my "errors." When, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Holy See declared that certain propositions contained in the work of Bishop Jansen were heretical, the Jansenists of Port Royal replied that, while they were ready to defer to the Papal authority about questions of faith and morals, they must be permitted to judge about questions of fact for themselves; and that, really, the condemned propositions were not to be found in Jansen's writings. As everybody knows, His Holiness and the Grand Monarque replied to this, surely not unreasonable, plea after the manner of Lord Peter in the "Tale of a Tub." It is, therefore, not without some apprehension of meeting with a similar fate, that I put in a like plea against Mr. Gladstone's Bull. The seven propositions declared to be false and condemnable, in that kindly and gentle way which so pleasantly compares with the authoritative style of the Vatican (No. 5 more particularly), may or may not be true. But they are not to be found in anything I have written. And some of them diametrically contravene that which I have written. I proceed to prove my assertions. PROP. 1. _Throughout the paper he confounds together what I had distinguished, namely, the city of Gadara and the vicinage attached to it, not as a mere pomoerium, but as a rural district_. In my judgment, this statement is devoid of foundation. In my paper on "The Keepers of the Herd of Swine" I point out, at some length, that, "in accordance with the ancient Hellenic practice," each city of the Decapolis must have been "surrounded by a certain amount of territory amenable to its jurisdiction": and, to enforce this conclusion, I quote what Josephus says about the "villages that belonged to Gadara and Hippos." As I understand the term _pomerium_ or _pomoerium_,[113] it means the space which, according to Roman custom, was kept free from buildings, immediately within and without the walls of a city; and which defined the range of the _auspicia urbana_. The conception of a _pomoerium_ as a "vicinage attached to" a city, appears to be something quite novel and original. But then, to be sure, I do not know how many senses Mr. Gladstone may attach to the word "vicinage." Whether Gadara had a _pomoerium_, in the proper technical sense, or not, is a point on which I offer no opinion. But that the city had a very considerable "rural district" attached to it and notwithstanding its distinctness, amenable to the jurisdiction of the Gentile municipal authorities, is one of the main points of my case. PROP. 2. _He more fatally confounds the local civil government and its following, including, perhaps, the whole wealthy class and those attached to it, with the ethnical character of a general population._ Having survived confusion No. 1, which turns out not to be on my side, I am now confronted in No. 2 with a "more fatal" error--and so it is, if there be degrees of fatality; but, again, it is Mr. Gladstone's and not mine. It would appear, from this proposition (about the grammatical interpretation of which, however, I admit there are difficulties), that Mr. Gladstone holds that the "local civil government and its following among the wealthy," were ethnically different from the "general population." On p. 348, he further admits that the "wealthy and the local governing power" were friendly to the Romans. Are we then to suppose that it was the persons of Jewish "ethnical character" who favoured the Romans, while those of Gentile "ethnical character" were opposed to them? But, if that supposition is absurd, the only alternative is that the local civil government was ethnically Gentile. This is exactly my contention. At pp. 379 to 391 of the essay on "The Keepers of the Herd of Swine" I have fully discussed the question of the ethnical character of the general population. I have shown that, according to Josephus, who surely ought to have known, Gadara was as much a Gentile city as Ptolemais; I have proved that he includes Gadara amongst the cities "that rose up against the Jews that were amongst them," which is a pretty definite expression of his belief that the "ethnical character of the general population" was Gentile. There is no question here of Jews of the Roman party fighting with Jews of the Zealot party, as Mr. Gladstone suggests. It is the non-Jewish and anti-Jewish general population which rises up against the Jews who had settled "among them." PROP. 3. _His one item of direct evidence as to the Gentile character of the city refers only to the former and not to the latter_. More fatal still. But, once more, not to me. I adduce not one, but a variety of "items" in proof of the non-Judaic character of the population of Gadara: the evidence of history; that of the coinage of the city; the direct testimony of Josephus, just cited--to mention no others. I repeat, if the wealthy people and those connected with them--the "classes" and the "hangers on" of Mr. Gladstone's well-known taxonomy--were, as he appears to admit they were, Gentiles; if the "civil government" of the city was in their hands, as the coinage proves it was; what becomes of Mr. Gladstone's original proposition in "The Impregnable Rock of Scripture" that "the population of Gadara, and still less (if less may be) the population of the neighbourhood," were "Hebrews bound by the Mosaic law"? And what is the importance of estimating the precise proportion of Hebrews who may have resided, either in the city of Gadara or in its independent territory, when, as Mr. Gladstone now seems to admit (I am careful to say "seems"), the government, and consequently the law, which ruled in that territory and defined civil right and wrong was Gentile and not Judaic? But perhaps Mr. Gladstone is prepared to maintain that the Gentile "local civil government" of a city of the Decapolis administered Jewish law; and showed their respect for it, more particularly, by stamping their coinage with effigies of the Emperors. In point of fact, in his haste to attribute to me errors which I have not committed, Mr. Gladstone has given away his case. PROP. 4. _He fatally confounds the question of political party with those of nationality and of religion, and assumes that those who took the side of Rome in the factions that prevailed could not be subject to the Mosaic Law_. It would seem that I have a feline tenacity of life; once more, a "fatal error." But Mr. Gladstone has forgotten an excellent rule of controversy; say what is true, of course, but mind that it is decently probable. Now it is not decently probable, hardly indeed conceivable, that any one who has read Josephus, or any other historian of the Jewish war, should be unaware that there were Jews (of whom Josephus himself was one) who "Romanised" and, more or less openly, opposed the war party. But, however that may be, I assert that Mr. Gladstone neither has produced, nor can produce, a passage of my writing which affords the slightest foundation for this particular article of his indictment. PROP. 5. _His examination of the text of Josephus is alike one-sided, inadequate, and erroneous._ Easy to say, hard to prove. So long as the authorities whom I have cited are on my side, I do not know why this singularly temperate and convincing dictum should trouble me. I have yet to become acquainted with Mr. Gladstone's claims to speak with an authority equal to that of scholars of the rank of Schürer, whose obviously just and necessary emendations he so unceremoniously pooh-poohs. PROP. 6. _Finally, he sets aside, on grounds not critical or historical, but partly subjective, the primary historical testimony on the subject, namely, that of the three Synoptic Evangelists, who write as contemporaries and deal directly with the subject, neither of which is done by any other authority_. Really this is too much! The fact is, as anybody can see who will turn to my article of February 1889 [VII. _supra_], out of which all this discussion has arisen, that the arguments upon which I rest the strength of my case touching the swine-miracle, are exactly "historical" and "critical." Expressly, and in words that cannot be misunderstood, I refuse to rest on what Mr. Gladstone calls "subjective" evidence. I abstain from denying the possibility of the Gadarene occurrence, and I even go so far as to speak of some physical analogies to possession. In fact, my quondam opponent, Dr. Wace, shrewdly, but quite fairly, made the most of these admissions; and stated that I had removed the only "consideration which would have been a serious obstacle" in the way of his belief in the Gadarene story.[114] So far from setting aside the authority of the synoptics on "subjective" grounds, I have taken a great deal of trouble to show that my non-belief in the story is based upon what appears to me to be evident; firstly, that the accounts of the three synoptic Gospels are not independent, but are founded upon a common source; secondly, that, even if the story of the common tradition proceeded from a contemporary, it would still be worthy of very little credit, seeing the manner in which the legends about mediæval miracles have been propounded by contemporaries. And in illustration of this position I wrote a special essay about the miracles reported by Eginhard.[115] In truth, one need go no further than Mr. Gladstone's sixth proposition to be convinced that contemporary testimony, even of well-known and distinguished persons, may be but a very frail reed for the support of the historian, when theological prepossession blinds the witness.[116] PROP. 7. _And he treats the entire question, in the narrowed form in which it arises upon secular testimony, as if it were capable of a solution so clear and summary as to warrant the use of the extremest weapons of controversy against those who presume to differ from him._ The six heretical propositions which have gone before are enunciated with sufficient clearness to enable me to prove, without any difficulty, that, whosesoever they are, they are not mine. But number seven, I confess, is too hard for me. I cannot undertake to contradict that which I do not understand. What is the "entire question" which "arises" in a "narrowed form" upon "secular testimony"? After much guessing, I am fain to give up the conundrum. The "question" may be the ownership of the pigs; or the ethnological character of the Gadarenes; or the propriety of meddling with other people's property without legal warrant. And each of these questions might be so "narrowed" when it arose on "secular testimony" that I should not know where I was. So I am silent on this part of the proposition. But I do dimly discern, in the latter moiety of this mysterious paragraph, a reproof of that use of "the extremest weapons of controversy" which is attributed to me. Upon which I have to observe that I guide myself, in such matters, very much by the maxim of a great statesman, "Do ut des." If Mr. Gladstone objects to the employment of such weapons of defence, he would do well to abstain from them in attack. He should not frame charges which he has, afterwards, to admit are erroneous, in language of carefully calculated offensiveness ("Impregnable Rock," pp. 269-70); he should not assume that persons with whom he disagrees are so recklessly unconscientious as to evade the trouble of inquiring what has been said or known about a grave question ("Impregnable Rock," p. 273); he should not qualify the results of careful thought as "hand-over-head reasoning" ("Impregnable Rock," p. 274); he should not, as in the extraordinary propositions which I have just analysed, make assertions respecting his opponent's position and arguments which are contradicted by the plainest facts. Persons who, like myself, have spent their lives outside the political world, yet take a mild and philosophical concern in what goes on in it, often find it difficult to understand what our neighbours call the psychological moment of this or that party leader, and are, occasionally, loth to believe in the seeming conditions of certain kinds of success. And when some chieftain, famous in political warfare, adventures into the region of letters or of science, in full confidence that the methods which have brought fame and honour in his own province will answer there, he is apt to forget that he will be judged by these people, on whom rhetorical artifices have long ceased to take effect; and to whom mere dexterity in putting together cleverly ambiguous phrases, and even the great art of offensive misrepresentation, are unspeakably wearisome. And, if that weariness finds its expression in sarcasm, the offender really has no right to cry out. Assuredly ridicule is no test of truth, but it is the righteous meed of some kinds of error. Nor ought the attempt to confound the expression of a revolted sense of fair dealing with arrogant impatience of contradiction, to restrain those to whom "the extreme weapons of controversy" come handy from using them. The function of police in the intellectual, if not in the civil, economy may sometimes be legitimately discharged by volunteers. * * * * * Some time ago in one of the many criticisms with which I am favoured, I met with the remark that, at our time of life, Mr. Gladstone and I might be better occupied than in fighting over the Gadarene pigs. And, if these too famous swine were the only parties to the suit, I, for my part, should fully admit the justice of the rebuke. But, under the beneficent rule of the Court of Chancery, in former times, it was not uncommon, that a quarrel about a few perches of worthless land, ended in the ruin of ancient families and the engulfing of great estates; and I think that our admonisher failed to observe the analogy--to note the momentous consequences of the judgment which may be awarded in the present apparently insignificant action _in re_ the swineherds of Gadara. The immediate effect of such judgment will be the decision of the question, whether the men of the nineteenth century are to adopt the demonology of the men of the first century, as divinely revealed truth, or to reject it, as degrading falsity. The reverend Principal of King's College has delivered his judgment in perfectly clear and candid terms. Two years since, Dr. Wace said that he believed the story as it stands; and consequently he holds, as a part of divine revelation, that the spiritual world comprises devils, who, under certain circumstances, may enter men and be transferred from them to four-footed beasts. For the distinguished Anglican Divine and Biblical scholar, that is part and parcel of the teachings respecting the spiritual world which we owe to the founder of Christianity. It is an inseparable part of that Christian orthodoxy which, if a man rejects, he is to be considered and called an "infidel." According to the ordinary rules of interpretation of language, Mr. Gladstone must hold the same view. If antiquity and universality are valid tests of the truth of any belief, no doubt this is one of the beliefs so certified. There are no known savages, nor people sunk in the ignorance of partial civilisation, who do not hold them. The great majority of Christians have held them and still hold them. Moreover the oldest records we possess of the early conceptions of mankind in Egypt and in Mesopotamia prove that exactly such demonology, as is implied in the Gadarene story, formed the substratum, and, among the early Accadians, apparently the greater part, of their supposed knowledge of the spiritual world. M. Lenormant's profoundly interesting work on Babylonian magic and the magical texts given in the Appendix to Professor Sayce's "Hibbert Lectures" leave no doubt on this head. They prove that the doctrine of possession, and even the particular case of pig, possession,[117] were firmly believed in by the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians before the tribes of Israel invaded Palestine. And it is evident that these beliefs, from some time after the exile and probably much earlier, completely interpenetrated the Jewish mind, and thus became inseparably interwoven with the fabric of the synoptic Gospels. Therefore, behind the question of the acceptance of the doctrines of the oldest heathen demonology as part of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity, there lies the question of the credibility of the Gospels, and of their claim to act as our instructors, outside that ethical province in which they appeal to the consciousness of all thoughtful men. And still, behind this problem, there lies another--how far do these ancient records give a sure foundation to the prodigious fabric of Christian dogma, which has been built upon them by the continuous labours of speculative theologians, during eighteen centuries? I submit that there are few questions before the men of the rising generation, on the answer to which the future hangs more fatally, than this. We are at the parting of the ways. Whether the twentieth century shall see a recrudescence of the superstitions of mediæval papistry, or whether it shall witness the severance of the living body of the ethical ideal of prophetic Israel from the carcase, foul with savage superstitions and cankered with false philosophy, to which the theologians have bound it, turns upon their final judgment of the Gadarene tale. The gravity of the problems ultimately involved in the discussion of the legend of Gadara will, I hope, excuse a persistence in returning to the subject, to which I should not have been moved by merely personal considerations. With respect to the diluvial invective which overflowed thirty-three pages of the "Nineteenth Century" last January, I doubt not that it has a catastrophic importance in the estimation of its author. I, on the other hand, may be permitted to regard it as a mere spate; noisy and threatening while it lasted, but forgotten almost as soon as it was over. Without my help, it will be judged by every instructed and clear-headed reader; and that is fortunate, because, were aid necessary, I have cogent reasons for withholding it. In an article characterised by the same qualities of thought and diction, entitled "A Great Lesson," which appeared in the "Nineteenth Century" for September 1887, the Duke of Argyll, firstly, charged the whole body of men of science, interested in the question, with having conspired to ignore certain criticisms of Mr. Darwin's theory of the origin of coral reefs; and, secondly, he asserted that some person unnamed had "actually induced" Mr. John Murray to delay the publication of his views on that subject "for two years." It was easy for me and for others to prove that the first statement was not only, to use the Duke of Argyll's favourite expression, "contrary to fact," but that it was without any foundation whatever. The second statement rested on the Duke of Argyll's personal authority. All I could do was to demand the production of the evidence for it. Up to the present time, so far as I know, that evidence has not made its appearance; nor has there been any withdrawal of, or apology for, the erroneous charge. Under these circumstances most people will understand why the Duke of Argyll may feel quite secure of having the battle all to himself, whenever it pleases him to attack me. [See the note at the end of "Hasisadra's Adventure" (vol iv. p. 283). The discussion on coral reefs, at the meeting of the British Association this year, proves that Mr. Darwin's views are defended now, as strongly as in 1891, by highly competent authorities. October 25, 1893.] FOOTNOTES: [107] _Nineteenth Century_, February 1891, pp. 339-40. [108] Neither is it of any consequence whether the locality of the supposed miracle was Gadara, or Gerasa, or Gergesa. But I may say that I was well acquainted with Origen's opinion respecting Gergesa. It is fully discussed and rejected in Riehm's _Handwörterbuch_. In Kitto's _Biblical Cyclopædia_ (ii. p. 51) Professor Porter remarks that Origen merely "_conjectures_" that Gergesa was indicated: and he adds, "Now, in a question of this kind conjectures cannot be admitted. We must implicitly follow the most ancient and creditable testimony, which clearly pronounces in favour of Gadarênhôn. This reading is adopted by Tischendorf, Alford, and Tregelles." [109] I may call attention, in passing, to the fact that this authority, at any rate, has no sort of doubt of the fact that Jewish Law did not rule in Gadara (indeed, under the head of "Gadara," in the same work, it is expressly stated that the population of the place consisted "predominantly of heathens"), and that he scouts the notion that the Gadarene swineherds were Jews. [110] The evidence adduced, so far as post-exile times are concerned, appears to me insufficient to prove this assertion. [111] Even Leviticus xi. 26, cited without reference to the context, will not serve the purpose; because the swine _is_ "cloven-footed" (Lev. xi. 7). [112] 1st Gospel: "And the devils _besought him_, saying, If Thou cast us out send us away _into_ the herd of swine." 2d Gospel: "They _besought him_, saying, Send us _into_ the swine." 3d Gospel: "They _intreated him_ that he would give them leave to enter _into_ them." [113] See Marquardt, _Römische Staatsverwaltung_, Bd. III. p. 408. [114] _Nineteenth Century_, March 1889 (p. 362). [115] "The Value of Witness to the Miraculous." _Nineteenth Century_, March 1889. [116] I cannot ask the Editor of this Review to reprint pages of an old article,--but the following passages sufficiently illustrate the extent and the character of the discrepancy between the facts of the case and Mr. Gladstone's account of them:-- "Now, in the Gadarene affair, I do not think I am unreasonably sceptical if I say that the existence of demons who can be transferred from a man to a pig does thus contravene probability. Let me be perfectly candid. I admit I have no _à priori_ objection to offer.... I declare, as plainly as I can, that I am unable to show cause why these transferable devils should not exist." ... ("Agnosticism," _Nineteenth Century_, 1889, p. 177). "What then do we know about the originator, or originators, of this groundwork--of that threefold tradition which all three witnesses (in Paley's phrase) agree upon--that we should allow their mere statements to outweigh the counter arguments of humanity, of common sense, of exact science, and to imperil the respect which all would be glad to be able to render to their Master?" (_ibid._ p. 175). I then go on through a couple of pages to discuss the value of the evidence of the synoptics on critical and historical grounds. Mr. Gladstone cites the essay from which these passages are taken, whence I suppose he has read it; though it may be that he shares the impatience of Cardinal Manning where my writings are concerned. Such impatience will account for, though it will not excuse, his sixth proposition. [117] The wicked, before being annihilated, returned to the world to disturb men; they entered into the body of unclean animals, "often that of a pig, as on the Sarcophagus of Seti I. in the Soane Museum."--Lenormant, _Chaldean Magic,_ p. 88, Editorial Note. END OF VOL. V * * * * * THOMAS H. HUXLEY'S WORKS. Collected. Essays, 12mo, cloth, $1.25 per volume. Vol. 1. Method and Results. " 2. Darwiniana. " 3. Science and Education. " 4. Science and Hebrew Tradition. " 5. Science and Christian Tradition. " 6. Hume. " 7. Man's Place in Nature. " 8. Discourses, Biological and Geological. " 9. Evolution and Ethics, and Other Essays. The Crayfish: An Introduction to the Study of Zoölogy. With 82 Illustrations. 12mo, cloth, $1.75. Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals. Illustrated. 12mo, cloth, $2.50. Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals. Illustrated. 12mo, cloth, $2.50. Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature. 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"A literary event of prime importance is the appearance of 'A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.'"--_Philadelphia Press_. "Such an honest and thorough treatment of the subject in all its bearings that it will carry weight and be accepted as an authority in tracing the process by which the scientific method has come to be supreme in modern thought and life."--_Boston Herald_. "A great work of a great man upon great subjects, and will always be a religio-scientific classic."--_Chicago Evening Post_. "It is graphic, lucid, even-tempered--never bitter nor vindictive. No student of human progress should fail to read these volumes. While they have about them the fascination of a well-told tale, they are also crowded with the facts of history that have had a tremendous bearing upon the development of the race."--_Brooklyn Eagle_. 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Able, scholarly, critical, impartial in tone and exhaustive in treatment."--_Boston Advertiser_. New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue. * * * * * A NEW BOOK BY PROF. GROOS. THE PLAY OF MAN. By KARL GROOS, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Basel, and author of "The Play of Animals." Translated, with the author's cooperation, by Elizabeth L. Baldwin, and edited, with a Preface and Appendix, by Prof. J. Mark Baldwin, of Princeton University. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50 net; postage, 12 cents additional. The results of Professor Groos's original and acute investigations are of peculiar value to those who are interested in psychology and sociology, and they are of great importance to educators. He presents the anthropological aspects of the subject treated in his psychological study of the Play of Animals, which has already become a classic. Professor Groos, who agrees with the followers of Weismann, develops the great importance of the child's play as tending to strengthen his inheritance in the acquisition of adaptations to his environment. The influence of play on character, and its relation to education, are suggestively indicated. The playful manifestations affecting the child himself and those affecting his relations to others have been carefully classified, and the reader is led from the simpler exercises of the sensory apparatus through a variety of divisions to inner imitations and social play. The biological, æsthetic, ethical, and pedagogical standpoints receive much attention from the investigator. While this book is an illuminating contribution to scientific literature, it is of eminently practical value. Its illustrations and lessons will be studied and applied by educators, and the importance of this original presentation of a most fertile subject will be appreciated by parents as well as by those who are interested as general students of sociological and psychological themes. D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK. 
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28668	----	Scientific and Religious Journal. VOL. I. JULY, 1880. NO. 7. THE FOUNTAIN OF HAPPINESS. The source and fullness of created good is the knowledge and enjoyment of God. "Give what thou wilt, without thee we are poor; and with thee rich, take what thou wilt away." The wicked are like a ship's crew at sea, carried by the winds upon unknown waters, without peace or safety until they can renew communications with the shore. A man alienated from his God is without his proper relations, and separated from the fountain of happiness, is like a child unconscious of his father--an orphan, forced along, the sport of accident, with no hope for the future, but darkness that may overshadow his pathway to the tomb. If we were at once deprived of all knowledge of God where would we find hopes for support in the gloomy hours of adversity? What sadness would reign over the world! What black despair! O, what a chasm it would make to strike the Infinite One out of existence! "The angels might retire in silence and weep, or fly through infinite space seeking some token of the Father they had lost. With unbounded grief and despair they might wing their way farther and farther, with their harps all unstrung, and every song silent, and the soul-harrowing words, 'We have no Father, no God, a blind chance rules,' might be all that would break the awful silence of heaven. Let the glorious words once more be heard, 'God reigns, he lives, he reigns,' and what joy would fill the heavens and the earth." The child of sorrow would lift up his head and say, "Our Father who art in heaven." The heavenly songsters would string anew their harps, and send the good news far and wide, "He lives, he reigns, God over all, blessed forever." "We are not able to estimate the effect it would produce to blot the knowledge of God from the universe. We can not appreciate the state of that mind which labors under the impression that God is retiring. Perhaps we have one momentary example of the sad gloom that takes possession of the man under such circumstances. It is seen in the Savior's dying words, 'My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?'" In our nature and condition there are two sources of misery--the mind, or conscience, disturbed by sin, and the body affected by disease and death. Sinful emotions cause disquietude, uneasiness, sorrow and misery, bitterness, recrimination, reciprocated treachery, infuriated rage, malignant and stormy passions; envy, jealousy, suspicion and unlawful desires distract the mind and quench its joys. Who can be happy in such a condition? Disquieted and corrupted affections cause the greater part of the unhappiness or misery of the race. The angels of light could not be happy in such a murky sea. Our great ancestors were doomed to toil in a world of disappointment and sorrow for yielding to such a guide. Haman occupied a high position at the court of Persia, yet he made himself miserable because "Mordecai the Jew sat at the king's gate." And Ahab, on the throne of Israel, "refused to eat bread" because he could not get possession of the vineyard of Naboth. Men can not be happy with such passions reigning in the mind, and yet they are found in almost every bosom, unless it has been purified by the influence of the gospel of Jesus the Christ. The great idols of this world are fame, pleasure and wealth, and the love of these is the strong passion of the heart. But it is the most prolific source of individual, social and public misfortune, the most mischievous, contentious and demoralizing passion. The ambitious, the voluptuous, the rich and the great are not necessarily happy. Alexander wept upon the throne of the world because there was not another world for him to conquer. In the midst of seminal pleasures and corrupt passions men are always miserable. The influence of the Gospel of Christ is the only remedy for such diseases. It saves men from aggravating selfishness and holds in check their fierce passions until they are extinguished. Virtuous affections are invariably the great sources of human happiness. They are fountains of living waters, which purify the mind and make their possessors happy. They are as rivers of water in a thirsty land. In the teachings of Christ we learn all that pertains to true happiness, in what it consists and how to obtain it. There we are admonished of mere worldly blessings, because the desire for them is generally so intense that it becomes a source of corruption, and in our successes we often forget our highest interests. The Savior left in the background the commonly received notions of men touching the sources of true happiness. He said: "Blessed are the poor in spirit," referring not to those who are temporally poor. The wicked are poor as well as the righteous. O, how dreadfully miserable are the wicked poor! a miserable life here, followed by a miserable hereafter. Many poor persons are haughty, ungodly, dishonest, profligate and unhappy. Neither does it mean voluntary poverty, or to turn mendicant monks and friars. It means the humble, those who are deeply sensible of their spiritual or mental and moral wants; in other words, those who feel that there is a place in their spiritual nature for the blessings of the Gospel of Christ. It is opposed to self-righteousness. The poor in spirit come to God through Christ, and, putting all their trust in him, submit to the divine will under all the trying dispensations of his providence. The poor in spirit are always sensible of their need of salvation, but the proud in spirit are "clean in their own eyes." Their goodness is like the morning cloud and the early dew, yet they say, Stand by thyself; I am holier than thou. "Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." What a sublime rebuke to the spirit of this world! It is a grand contrast to the uneasy desires of greedy covetousness; to the disposition of the gay; to the degradation of the impure; to the senseless pleasures of the ambitious, when new fires ignite their hopes only to plunge them into deeper darkness. The Bible's happiest soul is he who has most of its peculiar mind and character. Not on account of earthly riches, for he may be one of the Lord's poor, who, like his blessed Master, has "no place to lay his head." Not because he has sought and obtained honor from men, but because he sought and "seeks the honor which cometh from God only." Not because he has much of this world, but because he is a Christian. He may not have the greatest capacity, but he has a state of mind that prepares him to rightly estimate and enjoy all that is worth enjoying. "To the upright there ariseth light in the darkness." They are wisely guided, comforted and encouraged in the most gloomy wilderness. They are not oppressed with doubts; sorrow does not crush them. Darkness gives place to light, and the seeming evil turns to good. They often sip honey from the most bitter flowers. They yield not to fear, for they believe in God, and are assured, by a thousand contrasts, that "all things work together for good to those who love God." One of the never-failing sources of happiness for which we are under obligations to Jesus the Christ is the mind and character which he requires of us. "A good man shall be satisfied from himself." "Man was created for an active life. Effort is the true element of a well regulated mind. Undisturbed soil becomes hard and unproductive. Its bosom is shut up against the dews and the rains, and also against the warm rays of the sun. So it is with the mind when it is closed up and deprived of healthy action; this man lives for himself alone, and only the baser passions spring up in his breast. His soul is too narrow for Christian benevolence; sympathy and emotion are disabled and all his nobler faculties languish. Action, from intelligent and benevolent principles, is a great fountain of happiness. Few streams of bliss equal those which flow from charitable exertions. Benevolence and well-doing are great inducements to future exertions, because of the fact that they are their own reward in a thousand different ways. The seed thus sown brings back an hundred fold, and a rich harvest to others, which adds to the abundance of our own happiness. But where shall we go for those principles of action? Shall we search for them in nature? Can reason alone discover them? Are they found in the teachings of philosophy? Are they gathered from observation? Does not our world need Revelation to make known the true aim and end of our being?" Cicero said, "Those who do not agree in stating what is the chief end, or good, must of course differ in the whole system of precepts for the conduct of human life." He also says there was so great a dissention among the philosophers, upon this subject, that it was almost impossible to enumerate their different sentiments. So it came to pass that exertions for benevolent ends were seldom, if ever, put forth by pagans in pagan lands--they knew nothing of the happiness springing from such a source. Great efforts from great motives are the glory and blessedness of our nature. In the Bible only men have learned what great motives and efforts are. There we find food to sustain them and wisdom to guide them. Nowhere in the pages of infidel philosophy can we find such an injunction as this: "Whether, therefore, ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God." Where else do we find this Christian maxim: "None of us liveth to himself, and none of us dieth to himself; but whether we live, we live unto the Lord, and whether we die, we die unto the Lord." He or she alone is the happy one who is taught to consider the nature and tendencies of human conduct, and whether it will stand the test before God, and advance the ends of his truth and love in the world; who makes the Lord's will the ends of his or her life and lives to please God and show forth his praise. Such a life is necessarily a happy one, because it is one _full_ of goodness. There is daily joy in such daily activity. No man can be wretched while acting from the principle of communicative goodness. Such are happy whatever their sphere or occupation may be. Their aims are high. Their objects sustain them and their impulses encourage or strengthen them. Their anticipations are joyous and their reflections are tranquil. They look backward with delight and forward with hope. Their conscience approves them. They have not buried their talents. They are not encumberers of the ground. They live to bless the children of men. When they die they will to them their counsel, their example and prayers. Benevolent habits are a great source of happiness, for which we are indebted to the religion of Christ. It is vain to attempt to persuade ourselves that human misery does not exist. We can not get away from it by arming ourselves with stoical insensibility. Evils lie all about us; we ourselves are made to feel them. If we open our eyes upon the pages of time we see a continuous series of beings who appear for a short time and then pass away. Their beds are bedewed with tears, and soon the emblems of death are hung about their doors. O, what wonderful scenes lie between the cradle and the grave! What hours of sadness and gloom! Here, in the midst of life, we realize disappointments, losses, painful diseases and heart-rending discouragements, defeated hopes and withered honors. Here are good reasons for the interposition of redeeming love. Does the God who loves us sympathize with us in our woes? We are liable at every step in life to great individual and domestic calamities. No hour can be free from the fear that what we value the most on the earth may be snatched away to-morrow. Trees and flowers grow to their full stature, fill up their measure of time, and pass away. Beasts and birds are more rarely cut off with disease. Their lives are not embittered with the expectation of death; the knowledge of the past and the present is all they have; they have no knowledge of the morrow; they live contented in their ignorance and indifference, and, at last, sink into the deep, unending night, "being made to be taken and destroyed." But this is not the history of man. He perishes from the cradle to the tomb--"suffers a hundred deaths in fearing one." He is conscious of the dangers that beset him. He is hedged in on every side. Death is constantly destroying his fondest hopes and causing him the sorest grief. It bursts the ties that bind heart to heart, and the dearest fellowships are severed, and the joys of a blessed life are wrapped in the gloom of death. All there was of earthly bliss in the bygone now makes up his anguish. Is it possible that life and death walk "arm-in-arm?" Yes; even while we are happy in the enjoyment of one, the other comes and casts the fearful mantle over all our earthly prospects. Seal up this blessed volume of life, and I know not from whence the light is to spring which would cheer this gloomy picture. Without this, man would be in a grade of blessedness beneath the brutes that perish. It would be better to be anything than rational without the religion of Jesus Christ and the intelligence of the Bible. The Scriptures inform us that these things have a cause, that they come from God's dealings with his creatures, that the unseen hand which permits these trials is benevolent and wise. Sorrow has its design, and it is neither unkind nor malignant. These things have a moral cause; they are the great rebuke of God for sin. They are also a part of the discipline of a Heavenly Father, designed to co-operate with the Gospel in bringing back all those who are intelligently exercised thereby to their forsaken God. The antidote for all these ills culminating in death was the tree of life. When man sinned against his God he was put away from the tree of life. If he had remained with it he would have been beyond the reach of the motive of life, and beyond the restraining power of the fear of death. He would have lived forever, subject, like fallen angels, to mental suffering during the ages to come. But being placed beyond the reach of the tree of life he may be redeemed by the love of life to a higher state. When the rebellious see and realize this great truth, being exercised by the chastening hand of God, they are often subdued to submission, to peace, and under the heaviest calamities they often look upward and say, "It is the Lord, let his will be done." And this, of itself, is a source of unbounded bliss. We often submit to present pain when counseled to do so by those in whose wisdom and goodness we trust. As Christians we extend this principle to all the sufferings of this life. Doing so, we have that feeling of quiet submission growing out of permanent confidence in God which supports us under all the trials to which we have been subjected by an all-wise Father. This principle is wonderfully fruitful in consolations to the bereaved and mourning--it is the joy of all Christian hearts. "The Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice." What shall we say of the hopes and prospects of bereaved souls? Is it blind conjecture that there is an existence beyond the shadows? Is there no life to come? No great resurrection? No comforter to arrest the current of mourning and lamentation? How natural it is, when reminded of our loss, to exclaim, Shall we not meet them again? Is this parting to last forever? Is there a God? Has he not answered this agonizing inquiry? When we sit down upon the brink of those waters which have swallowed up our living treasures and weep and call upon the waves of eternity to give back our dear ones, when, from the shores of time, we look and gaze and listen, does no voice reach us? _Yes!_ To the ear of faith there is a voice. It is the voice of our God. We listen. The words come ringing in our hearts, "For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him." _Our grief is allayed._ We believe and are comforted. We look forward to a happy meeting. A reunion for eternity hovers before us like a bright star, lights up our pathway, and leads us forward in a living hope. Nowhere in the Bible is human sorrow clothed with cold indifference. The counsels of that book and its promises are so adapted to the sorrowing that those who have passed through the furnace of affliction know best their value. There is no such relief from sorrow found away from the faith of God and the Bible. There is an hour when we _ourselves_ must die? Shall we trifle with the will of God till then? Can we trifle with death when it comes? "The sting of death is sin." Death never fails to bring along with it a keen sense of guilt to the guilty unless they are cut off in a moment, and then who knows the anguish that may be experienced just beyond? What is there to soothe the sorrow of the dying sinner?--of that wicked soul who never obeyed his God nor did anything to make the world better for his existence? Let none of us live at a distance from our God. Let none of us approach death without the necessary preparation for mutual association with him. Let none of us bear the burden of a guilty conscience in that hour. May none of us be so cruel as to leave the hearts that love us in doubt respecting our condition in death. May we never tread its dark waters without the light of the glorious promises and facts of the religion of Jesus the Christ. Let us keep our souls pure in obeying the truth through the Spirit. Let us live with and obey God, do good and be happy. INDEBTEDNESS TO REVELATION--No. II. BY P. T. RUSSELL. Thought, Thinkers, Things--realities with their qualities or attributes. These are all connected. If the first and second are present the others are not far away. We only think when we perceive, and only perceive realities. Nonentities are not perceivable, and therefore not thinkable. Thoughts may be, and are, transferable from one to another by words, or signs equivalent to words, yet we are only able to impart to another ideas already in our possession. We have no thoughts of our own but those which are the result of our perceiving. We have no thought of color without the eye, nor of sound without the ear, etc. Now, if we have in our possession thoughts of persons or things beyond the reach of our powers of observation, _i.e._, beyond the reach of the five senses--seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling--then those thoughts can not be ours; we could not be the first to think them; they were too high for us; they were out of our reach. Who, then, could and did reach them and give them to us? This ought to be the question of questions with us. Thoughts of foreign countries have been given to us by the men who have seen those countries. But they could only give us ideas of what they had seen or others had told them. A man visiting England only could give us no thought of Russia, unless instructed by some one who has seen that land; then, and not till then, could he give us thoughts of Russia. I am now ready for the statement of this proposition, viz: The following trio of thoughts are beyond our reach. They are not our thoughts; we did not think them, but we have them; then, some being who could see higher and look farther than we must have given them to us. Those thoughts are the following: First, the existence of God; second, the use of words; third, the origin of religion. These I will examine in the order given above. THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. Whence came the idea? This is now _the question_. In answering it I shall assume no ground but that which all parties say is true. The Christian, the Deist and Atheist will admit that we have learned all we know, and that we have learned only through the aid of the five senses: seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling are the porters of the mind. One or another of these bring to the mind every thought that it receives. We obtain thoughts of odor _only_ by the sense of smell; of flavor only by the taste; of color by the eye alone. In these matters we have no intuition. We brought no ideas into the world with us. In all these things we are creatures of education. Simple or single ideas, like simple words, represent simple thoughts or realities, and compound ideas represent compound thoughts or realities. Therefore it follows that every thought comes from a corresponding reality. To deny this is equal to the affirmation that we can clearly see objects in a vacuum, that we can see something where there is nothing. Having stated premises in which all are agreed, I now state my first proposition: THERE IS A TRUE AND LIVING GOD. In sustaining this proposition I shall introduce no witnesses but those whose perfect reliability is vouched for by the Atheist himself; so we shall have no dispute concerning the credibility and perfect reliability of witnesses. For the Atheist, claiming to be a votary of reason, as well as a boasted free and fearless thinker, certainly can not impeach the testimony of his own mind. And, being a free and fearless thinker, he will not try to conceal or prevent the witness, when on the stand, from telling the whole truth. I am now ready for the evidence. The scene changes; Christian is alone in his studio, and a rap is heard at the door. It is opened, and Mr. Atheist is invited to enter, and being seated, Christian addresses him thus: Mr. Atheist, I am glad you have called, and if you have the leisure time and are perfectly free to do so, I would like to talk with you on the evidence of the existence of God. _Atheist_--I am not only willing, but as anxious as you can be to examine this question. _Christian_--Very well. I suppose you have examined the evidence in the premises, and from all the testimony, carefully analyzed, made your decision. _Atheist_--You do me justice in thus supposing, for I claim to be a reasonable being, and to follow fearlessly the lamp of reason; and, doing this on scientific and philosophic principles, I have become satisfied that there is no God. _Christian_--Will you allow me to state my analysis of the mind and ask you if it is correct? _Atheist_--You, Mr. C., are approaching from a singular yet a pleasing stand-point; will you please give me your analysis? If it is good, I will say so; if defective, I will point out its errors. _Christian_--It is this: The mind of man may be divided into ten parts or powers; five external, or the five senses; and five internal. The external I need not name. The internal may be presented thus: First, perception; second, reflection; third, memory; fourth, reason; fifth, judgment, or decision; each of these entirely dependent upon its immediate predecessor for support and action. We can not judge of that upon which we have not reasoned, nor reason where we have not remembered, nor remember that of which we have not first thought; neither can we think of that which we have not perceived, nor perceive without the action of some one of the five senses. _Atheist_--I admire your analysis--it is scientific; but, Mr. C., I should not think that you, with your present belief in the existence of God, would adopt this system of mental philosophy. _Christian_--Why? _Atheist_--_Did you ever see a God?_ _Christian_--If you please, I will test the question with you, and, in order to do so, I will personify these powers. I will suppose them to represent ten men, all of whom are Atheists, and we will rely upon their testimony. _Atheist_--That is an honorable offer; I will accept it most cordially. _Christian_--Then, we are to consider the powers of the mind as so many men, and hear their testimony? _Atheist_--Yes. _Christian_--Will you examine the witnesses? _Atheist_--You would more properly do that; I wish to hear you. _Christian_--Very well; I will, then, call on Mr. Judgment, and ask, Have you given a decision on the question of the existence of God, and if so, what is your decision? _Judgment_--There is no such being. _Christian_--Tell us whether you created the idea of a God, or brought it into the world with you, and how you obtained the material from which you manufactured your verdict? _Judgment_--"Did I bring the idea into the world with me, or create it?" _What a question!_ Had anybody but a Christian asked it I would have thought it an insult; but, then, Christians are never thinkers. You ought to have known that the thought could not have been created by me. To say I created it would be an endorsement of your foolish idea that _something_ was made of _nothing_. I have no creative power, much less the power _to make something out of nothing_; neither did I bring it into the world with me. _We have no innate ideas._ _Christian_--Then where did you get the material from which you made your decision that there is no God? _Judgment_--"_Where!_" I have but one porter, Mr. Reason. He gives all the material upon which I ever act. If you doubt this try and judge of anything upon which you have never reasoned. If you can not do this you must agree with me that judgment can only act and decide by the aid of reason. _Christian_--Your argument is conclusive. Now, as you have decided that there is no God, and also claim that your only aid, Mr. Reason, gave you the material out of which you made your decision, will you call him and allow me to ask him a few questions? _Judgment_--Most willingly. We all are free thinkers, and delight in investigation. Brother Reason, please call in; Christian is here and wishes a little information of you. _Reason_--Mr. Christian, Brother Judgment informs me that you wish some information from me. Please state your question. _Christian_--Did you present the idea of the existence of God to your brother Judgment, and if so, where and how did you come by it? _Reason_--I received it from Brother Memory, and opened it out and held it up so that Brother Judgment could scan it thoroughly, and he decided there was no such being, and I agree with him. _Christian_--Will you call Memory, that I may learn where and how he obtained the idea? (_Memory enters._) _Christian_--Mr. Memory, are you an Atheist, and did you give Reason the idea of a God? If you did, how did you get it? Did you bring it into the world with you? _Memory_--"Bring it into the world with me." _What an absurd question!_ I never had an idea only as it was given me by Brother Reflection. If you doubt this, try and remember something you have never thought of, or think of something you never perceived. This, then, is the truth: Reflection received the idea from Perception and gave it to you, and you gave it to Memory, and he held it up to the eye of Reason, who, with your aid, spread it out before the mind of your brother Judgment, and he gave the decision, that there is no God; so we are all Atheists. Have you any more questions? _Christian_--Yes, one more at least; I wish _now_ to know how your brother Perception obtained the idea of a God--will you tell me, or call him? _Memory_--Oh, I can tell you; he has five porters who bring him all he ever gets, and they, with us, are all Atheists. But one or another of these must have brought him the idea. _Christian_--Will you ask them which one gave it to your brother Perception? _Memory_--You, for some reason, are very particular. I will, however, to gratify you, call them, or at least some of them. Brother Eye, Christian wishes to know if you gave the idea of a God to Mr. Perception? _Eye_--_What a foolish question!_ You, an Atheist, ask me, another Atheist, if I have ever seen a living God where there is none to look at--you have let Christian lead you out until he has almost drawn from you the proof that David told the truth about us when he called all Atheists fools. I have seen all visible things, but _nothing_ is too small a mark for me to discover! _Christian_--Mr. Eye, don't be in a hurry; just let me ask, do Free Thinkers get scared and refuse to think? _Eye_--I will leave you now, and tell the other porters what a fix your philosophy has led us into. _Christian_--Good-bye; I will call one month hence and hear your conclusion. DO WE NEED THE BIBLE? The only creed consistent with the rejection of the Gospel of Christ is an eternal tomb, with the heart-shivering inscription, "Death is an eternal sleep." Americans who reject the Scriptures are as uncertain about the future as the poor heathen of other lands. Some of our unbelievers have gathered the information from heathen oracles that the future consists in being a poor, empty, shivering, table-rapping spirit, flying to and fro over the country in response to the sigh of some silly waiting-girl, or at the bidding of some brazen-faced, unscrupulous "free lover." And this, "O, ye gods!" is all that ever shall be of the noblest spirits that ever left human flesh! Others, to gain rest from this horrible and unsatisfying fate, fly to the theory of everlasting silence, as a result of the idea that mind is simply brain action, and ceases to exist when the brain ceases to act. Their appropriate motto is, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." It has been said that even this brute philosophy is reasonable compared with the dogma of a large portion of unbelievers, to wit., that blasphemers, thieves, profane swearers, murderers and adulterers, will all go straight to heaven when they die; that men with their hearts steeped in blood will sit down with Abraham and Isaac in the kingdom of God. But Spiritualists, Pantheists, Atheists, and Deists inform us that an external revelation is useless. Their common exposition of the sentiment is too well known to need comment. We hear them saying, "You need say nothing about the Bible to me; I know my duty well enough without it; and as for miracles, they will never prove anything to me. Can thunder, repeated daily through centuries, make God's laws and his wisdom and goodness more God-like? No! I am grown, perchance, to manhood, and do not need the thunder and terror. I am not to be scared. It is not _fear_, but _reverence_, that shall lead me! _Revelation!_ Inspiration! And thy own God-like spirit; is not that a revelation?" See Carlyle's "Past and Present," page 307. Now, if Mr. Carlyle was in no need of the fear of God, somebody else may be in a different mental and moral condition. There is nothing in which men differ more. If one man is above the weakness of fearing God (?) all men are not. Say what we may of fear, it is nevertheless true that we are greatly influenced by fear. We are greatly indebted to the fear of sickness for health, to the fear of poverty for wealth, and to the fear of death for life. Fear is to caution what knowledge is to a wise choice. Where there is no fear there is no caution. The love of life and bliss is natural, therefore we fear sickness, poverty and death. Why say with your lips, "I am above fear," while away down in your heart you know it to be a lie? Love and fear, like the Siamese twins, live and perish together. Do we not _need_ "revelation?" Where is the shadow, and where is the sunshine? May we not contrast them? The very wisest of heathen legislators approved of vice in some of its most heinous forms. The Carthaginian law required human sacrifices. When Agathoclas besieged Carthage two hundred children of the most noted families were put to death by command of the Senate, and three hundred citizens sacrificed themselves to Saturn. See Diodorus Siculus, b. 20, ch. 14. The laws of Sparta required theft and the death of unhealthy children. The laws of Rome allowed parents to kill their child, if they pleased to do it. At the headquarters of heathen literature it was recommended that maimed infants should be killed or exposed to death. Aristotle's Political Library, 7, chapter 17. In Plato's Republic we discover an advance of society, but a community of wives continues, and what was termed woman's rights was maintained upon the condition that the women were trained to war. In war times the children were led out to look upon the struggle, and become accustomed and hardened to blood. The teachings of the best minds were immoral. "He may lie," says Plato, "who knows how to do it." Profane swearing was enjoined by the example of their best writers. Oaths are of common occurrence in the writings of Seneca and Plato. Aristippus taught that adultery and theft were commendable in a wise man, and Cicero plead for the last dreadful tragedy--_suicide_. Such immoralities are eulogised in the writings of Virgil, Horace and Ovid. When Rome was in her glory and greatness, Trajan had ten thousand men to hew each other to pieces to amuse the Romans. In the face of all these facts, modern Spiritualists advance along with Deists, Atheists and Pantheists, and gravely inform us that we have no need of any external revelation--that men are wise enough without it. They argue, that as we have physical senses to take hold of earth's material blessings and appropriate them; so we have intellectual faculties to take hold of all else that is necessary to supply our mental and moral wants. It is most certainly true that we have physical senses and intellectual faculties. I can not tell how it is with all the infidels of our country, but I do know persons having physical senses who are in great need of some of the substantials of life. I have also known persons who have destroyed their physical senses to such an extent as to be miserable objects of pity and compassion, needing some external help as well an internal. Now, if, in spite of physical senses, men and women do starve in this world on account of want, it is certainly allowable that persons may fail of the enjoyment of needed mental and moral culture in spite of intellectual faculties. And if it is a matter of charity for men to put forth their hands and assist their fellow men when they are in want of material blessings, surely it is a matter of love, the love of God, to present to weary, burthened souls mental and spiritual blessings which correlate with man's spiritual wants. Do you deny the existence of such wants? Tyndal said there is a place in man's soul-nature for religion. This fact is acknowledged by all leading writers in unbelief. He who calls it in question experiences the fact. Why say it is not true against the testimony of your own conscience? "Tell me," said a rich Hindoo who had given all his wealth to the Brahmans surrounding his dying bed that they might obtain pardon for his sins, "tell me what will become of my soul when I die?" "Your soul will go into the body of a holy cow." "And after that?" "It will pass into the body of a divine peacock." "And after that?" "It will pass into a flower." "Tell me, oh! tell me," cried the dying man, "where will it go last of all?" "Where will it go last of all? Aye, that is the question reason can not answer," said the poor Brahmans. Where there is no vision the people perish. "Life and immortality was brought to light through the Gospel." Without a revelation from God, men know neither how to live or die. Our ancestors trusted to the powers of magic, to incantations, for health, for success in tilling the ground, for finding lost articles, for preventing accidents, etc. They superstitiously regarded certain days of the week. If an infant was born upon a certain day it would live; if upon another it would live, but be sickly. Do you unceremoniously reject the Gospel of the Christ? "Yes," you say, "if it depends on Jesus it is not eternally true, and therefore is not true at all." But, I ask in all candor, is eternally true and sufficiently revealed _one_ and the _same_? Are we under no obligations to the man who first informed us of vaccination as a preventive of small-pox, simply because it would always have prevented it? Are we under no obligations to men on account of scientific discoveries, just because the truths discovered are eternal truths? _Nonsense!_ You know it is nonsense. Then we may be under lasting obligations to the Christ for the revelation of the Gospel, with its sublime precepts and principles, consolations and promises, which fill up the human spirit with undying love and the hope of eternal glory. Let parents look well to this question. Let infidels set themselves to work and get up some law of man capable of regenerating the hearts of those men who, at their bidding, renounce the law of God and his authority, and also with it all human authority. Will they do it? Can they do it? Oh! There are no means outside of the sanctions of religion by which the heart may be reached and purified from the love and practice of sin. What right, says the Pantheist, the Atheist, the Deist, and Spiritualist, have you to command me? The rejectors of the Bible made an experiment, an attempt, in trying to govern France without religion. Shall the scenes of Paris and Lyons be repeated, re-enacted in our own beloved America? No, we don't want it, and we do not think we shall experience it, for the framers of our Declaration of Independence laid the rights of God in the bed-rock of our republic, believing that the rights of God are the basis of human rights. "All men are born free and equal, and are endowed by their CREATOR WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS, AMONG WHICH IS LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, ETC." Nations destitute of the Bible ever were, and are, ignorant and wicked. There are peoples in the world decently clad, well fed, and living in comfortable mansions, with well tilled lands, who make powerful streams turn powerful wheels and run great machinery; who yoke the iron horse to the market train and drive their floating palaces against the floods; who erect churches in every village, and make their children more learned than the priests of Egypt, or the philosophers of Greece; even many of their criminals are more decent and upright than were the sages, philosophers and heroes of lands destitute of the Bible. These peoples have that wonderful book; and they claim that it contains a revelation from God to man; and that it teaches us how to live, and how to die. "EVERY TREE IS KNOWN BY ITS OWN FRUITS." * * * * * "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God." He claims, however, that something without life or intelligence produced organic nature. That BLIND, DEAD, SOMETHING IS THE FOOL'S GOD. THE WAY INFIDELS TREAT THE LANGUAGE OF THE BIBLE. The unreasonableness and unfairness of infidels, or otherwise their ignorance, is manifested in their unwillingness to interpret the literature of religion as they do the language of the sciences. In scientific literature we speak of the earth as a sphere, and infidels never think of objecting that it is "pitted with hollows deep as ocean's bottom," and "crusted with protuberances high as the Himalaya," in every imaginable form. "There is not an acre of absolutely level ground" known on the face of the earth, and yet when we speak of land, saying it is level, no infidel demurs. The waters pile themselves in waves and dash in breakers, yet we say, "Level as the ocean," and none object. The smallest formations present the same regular irregularities of form. Crystals approach the nearest to mathematical figures, but they break with compound irregular fractures at their bases of attachment. Nature gives no perfect mathematical figures; they only approximate mathematical perfection. Infidels do not trouble themselves with science on this account. "The utter absence of any regularity or assimilation to the spheroidal figure, either in meridianal, equatorial or parallel lines, mountain ranges, sea beaches or courses of rivers, is fatal to mathematical accuracy in the more extended measurements. It is only by taking the mean of a great many measurements that an approximate accuracy can be obtained. Where this is not possible, as in the measurement of high mountains, the truth remains undetermined by hundreds of feet; or as in the case of the earth's spheroidal axis, Bessel's measurement differs from Newton's by fully eleven miles." See Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. 1, p. 7, 156. "The smaller measures are proportionally inaccurate." All these irregularities and imperfections in science are overlooked, considered not in the least objections to the use of language which would, upon the most rigid application, cut them out as fables on the one hand or destroy science upon the other; but no sensible man thinks of either as a matter allowable. On the other side, Infidels are "eternally" mouthing about irregularities in the lives of the ancient men of the Bible, which are exceptions to the general rule, just as though religious persons could live lives of absolute perfection. The language, also, of the Bible, which, like the language of science, takes no notice of irregularities that must be expected in the lives of the very best men upon the earth, is by them abused. For instance, "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," is construed to mean that God is a man God, clothed with human imperfections, or, otherwise, man is imperatively required to be absolutely perfect. All such abuse of language is contemptible. Many other examples might be adduced--such as the irregularities in the words employed by the witnesses of the resurrection of Christ, which do not affect the evidence of the fact to be established in the least degree, and which are just such irregularities as are witnessed in evidence given in court rooms almost daily, and passed without so much as being noticed. For example, one witness says Mary Magdalene "came very early to the sepulchre," and another says she came "about sunrise." If all Christians were to treat the literature of science, and science itself, as these would-be wise Infidels treat the literature of religion, and religion itself, it would be surprising to run over the absurdities as well as irregularities of scientific history. There are irregularities in nature, and their name is legion; they all belong to that wonderfully boasted harmony of nature so much talked of in our day. As for the mistakes made in religion since the days of the apostles of the Christ, they are many; but what have they to do with the _genuine_? How many mistakes have scientists made in the same period of time? I shall not try to ape the infidel, but I must be permitted to call attention to a few of the many scientific blunders. Perhaps the greatest blunder of the present day, upon the part of scientists, is their attempt to bring into disrepute the cosmogony given in the Bible by a scientific cosmogony, which leaves off as "unknown" the only active world-forming force. They arrogantly assume to be acquainted with the entire history of our planet from the atoms to the globe. Yet they acknowledge that the "force which was and is in operation was and is unknown; that unknown force had its influence in framing the world," and its omission is always fatal to the theory which knows nothing about it or neglects it. There are laws also far-reaching, whose omission must be equally fatal. Infidels, being sensible of this truth, have endeavored to simplify matters to the level of our ignorance, by reducing all primordial elements to one, or at most two, simple elements, and all forces to the form of one universal and irrational law; but the progress of science utterly blasts the effort. No scientific man now dreams of one primordial element. Chemistry reveals a great many different elements, which can not be reduced or changed from their simple forms, much less identified as one and the self-same "substance." The idea of "one substance" _only_ is a very great error, which grew out of an abuse of language in confounding the two words, matter and substance. The latter word is equally applicable to _matter_, or _spirit_, but the former always contrasts with spirit; so to confound the two is to ignore a distinction upon which everything depends in any, except the materialistic, philosophy. When the term substance is used in the currency of the term matter it admits of the plural form as well as the singular. Indeed, all the primordial elements known in chemistry are known as so many different substances. It is unscientific and absurd to confound all these elements by claiming the one-substance theory. It has been called "the hog philosophy," on account of its swallowing down so many _different_ substances in the single form of the word. "Eighty theories, hostile to Christianity, developed in the course of forty or fifty years, were brought before the Institute of France in 1806, all of which are repudiated"--dead. It is useless to go further into details. Science has been as much abused as religion. What benefit would accrue to the human family from an effort upon our part to bring to the foreground all the blunders made in scientific researches which are to-day numbered with the old effete errors in religion? And where is the propriety of infidels making a set of asses of themselves by playing upon the little irregularities of language and character in religion, as they _themselves_ allow no man to do in science and morality. "EQUAL HANDED JUSTICE" TO ALL, IS OUR MOTTO. GEOLOGY IN ITS STRUGGLES AND GROWTH AS A SCIENCE. The science of Geology in its early history is like all other sciences, an infant. It was not a Hercules at its birth. On the contrary, it was childlike and rather crooked in many of its ways; but chastisement and criticism have brought it very far toward real manhood. Its early nurses were standing continually on the dark line separating the comprehensible from the incomprehensible, without any guides. They were out upon an unexplored sea in the mere twilight of the morning. They were opposed at every step by the combative tendencies of human nature, which are ever seeking too much for their own gratification to admit any strange, startling propositions as intruders among old and long cherished ideas. In its history it appears before us, first as an enemy to religion, and then as an unobjectionable science, a neutral. But since the publication of "The Footprints of the Creator," by the lamented Hugh Miller, it appears in front as a fast friend and abettor. And now, since it has approached so near to its manhood, we do not see how we did without its aid so long. Its first grand position touching the immense masses of the rock formations as results of second causes, in operation away back yonder before organic life appeared upon our planet, was looked upon by intelligent Biblical scholars of those times with suspicion, as a system at variance with the records of the Bible. This, along with difference of sentiment among its friends, has been the means of a very rapid growth towards perfection. Curiosity was aroused and observations multiplied, errors corrected and the untenable removed, until the science now stands before us with its bases settled in unquestionable facts. Let us all learn from this circumstance the bearings of the times in which we live, for a double process of elimination is now going on under the providence of God, by means of which both Christianity and science will have more beauty and strength of manhood to command the respect of our children. Geology is exercising a wonderful influence on the side of religion in the minds of those who are acquainted with its facts. In the hands of Miller it gives a very decisive answer against the evolution hypothesis, which is by no means a new speculation. It was, in its general form, a very prominent doctrine of the Epicurean philosophy. "The author of the 'Vestiges,' with Professor Oken, regarded the experiment of the formation of cells in albumen by electric currents as the leading fact of the system." They claimed that currents of electricity in the earth's surface generated and vitalized the cells, and that all organic life thus originated. There is nothing to save this speculation, when it is undressed, from contempt. "The only patronage it ever received grew out of the fact that there is a species of superstition which causes people to take upon credit whatever assumes the name of science, and is opposed to the old superstition of faith in witches and ghosts." With this speculation before us, seemingly plausible, yet false, being fraught with error, we are reminded of the fact that it has been eagerly embraced by many who seem to think that it has a firm foundation in the science of Geology, which they regard as presenting the order in which created beings appeared. The author of the "Vestiges" claims that the first step in the creation of life upon our earth was a _chemico-electric_ operation, forming simple germinal vesicles. Page 155. This is an item wholly unknown in the geological record and lies before the beginning of any kind of similitude alluded to in this article. "The idea which I form of the progress of organic life upon our earth," says the author of the Vestiges, "is that the simplest and most primitive type gave birth to the type next above it, and this again produced the next higher, and so on to the very highest." Page 170. On account of the mere similitude existing between the doctrine of progressive creation, as it is set forth in the geological record, and the idea of progressive evolutions, as claimed by the advocates of the speculation, we deem it our duty to scrutinize severely the teachings of geology. But in doing this we do not concede that there is no other ground upon which such authors may be successfully met. There is no one point in their system which is not hypothetical. It is a system of _ifs_. There is no proof, in any single instance, that a higher has been developed from a lower species; but the question, in proper shape, is this: Has there been a succession of improvements from one geological period to another in the several divisions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms amounting to a change of species? Species are very similar in structure and capable of some improvement, but this is no evidence of the higher being developed from the lower. It is well known that the lowest forms are those found lowest in the geological series. Commencing at the bottom and running up we find, first, mollusks, then fishes, reptiles, birds, quadrupeds, monkeys, and at last man. But this does not, by any means, settle the issue. The question naturally arises whether one of those divisions, on its first appearance, was of the lowest organization of its class and reached the highest by a gradual development through successive geological periods. The geological testimony is this: First, there were no animals having any structural resemblance to the fishes prior to their creation, and when they appear they are already in possession of the highest organization and the largest cerebral development. During the long periods of geological history there has been no advance in this class of animals. The science testifies to no successive steps here. "They stood at the head of the icthyic division at the outset; but there has been, during these periods, a progressive _degeneracy_, so that though all possessed a high organization at first, there is found in the after creations a _succession of lapses_ until the division of fishes now contains species ranking little above the earth-worm." "A single well defined placoid fossil in the Bala limestone as fully proves the existence of placoid fishes, during the period of its deposition, as if the rock were made up of placoid fossils, for it is not a question of numbers, but of rank." The question, now, comes home to us with all its force, how did fishes of this high order come to exist before any of the inferior class? Let some of our evolution savans answer. The same thing may be said of other organic divisions. It has gone to record that the shell-fish of the Silurian system are the lowest division of the molluscous animals. While the statement is received as true, it must be remembered that there is some diversity of structure in this lower division, and that the earliest molluscs are not the lowest, but the highest in the division. The most important point, however, is, that while Brachiopoda were most abundant, the highest molluscs existed also, their remains being found in the Bala limestone, which is the lowest bed of molluscous fossils. (See Silurian System, p. 308.) The number of these higher species is not important. They existed, few or many, as early as any other of the mollusca. If the lower had not an anterior existence, the higher were not developed from them. It is also a conclusive argument against the system, that while the intermediate mollusca are very numerous, the cephalopoda, which were so early introduced, and are the higher forms that were so numerous at certain times, are now narrowed down to a few species. Lyell was the first to drop a word of caution against "inferring too hastily from the absence of mammalian fossils in the older rocks that the higher class of vertebrata did not exist in those remote times." "The remains of vertebrate animals are already found in the lowest fossiliferous rocks, and, in addition to that, the highest forms of each class appear first." There is nothing so well evinced in all the realms of scientific investigation as the utter impossibility of getting, by the light of nature, away from the idea of the Christian's God. _Everywhere_ we trace his footsteps. Traveling through the ages to the beginning, in thought, our first view is that of "an unlimited expanse of unoccupied space," or, if aught exists, it lies hidden in the invisible state. But all at once, as if by magic, and in obedience to the will of the Eternal Intelligence, the invisible becomes visible, worlds exist and become obedient to law. The divine perfections are to be displayed through future ages. And now, if we look out upon the surging billows of the ocean, our mind swells with the thought that God is there in all his majesty. With our thoughts confined to our earth we pass from age to age tracing the divine power from the laws of motion to chemical action and crystallization, until we behold a wonderful change upon the face of nature. And now, for the first time, a new principle is manifested, a new order springs into being--it is vegetable life and being in all its lovely grandeur. It matters not to us whether it came about gradually or all at once, for wisdom is there. All nature seems to turn to this new principle. "The elements of the inorganic world are subserving the purposes of organic life." The Creator has bound them to organic life. Every plant selects its food from the elements of earth by a chemistry of its own. The atmosphere around us is no less to the vegetable kingdom than a great pasture field. Every leaf is feasting, and every fiber is touched by the light. What wonderful correlations meet us at every turn! What adaptation of means to ends! Above all the beauty and grandeur of the vegetable kingdom we find the glorious animal, with man at the head, as lord over all below him. With man the moral government of God begins; physical creation is over. The subsequent manifestations of the divine glory are to be realized in the training and discipline of men and women as moral beings; and their mutual association with him, in the eternal world, is the ultimate. C. R. PANTHEISM IS DECEPTION AND HYPOCRISY. "Understand, ye brutish among the people; and ye fools, when will ye be wise? He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? He that chastiseth the heathen, shall he be not correct? He that teacheth man knowledge, shall he not know?"--Psalm xciv, 8, 9. Pantheism, personified, is a hypocrite, a deceiver. The name God, as a proper name in the English language, means the Divine Being, Jehovah, the Eternal and Infinite Spirit, the Creator and Lord of the universe. Pantheists say they believe in God, but they tell you, when pressed, they mean by that name "everything"--_God is everything._ The term "Pantheist" is from _pan_, all, and _theos_, God. Webster defines the term thus: "One that believes the universe to be God; a name given to the followers of Spinoza." Has any man the right to pervert language, fixing new meanings to words in common use which are in direct opposition to established usage? The man who knows the meaning of a word and uses it in a contrary sense is guilty of an abuse of language; and if he fails to make known the fact that he is using the term in a sense differing from established usage, he is, then, a deceiver. Pantheists are simply Atheists in disguise, the only difference being in their professions. The Pantheist says, "I believe in a God;" but this saying is only a distinction without a difference. The atheist is the frank, outspoken man of the two. What must we think of the man who says, "I believe in God," and then explains himself to mean, by the name God, heat, steam, electricity, force, animal life, the soul of man, magnetism, mesmeric force, and, in one word, the sum of all the intelligences and forces in the universe, at the same time denying the proper currency of the term God by denying the existence of a personal God. All Christians should demand that Christian terms be used in their own proper currency. But infidels will always do as they have hitherto, will often get out of their own "ruts," by the most perfect abuse of language. They can not, it seems, leave off the use of language which is only appropriate to the Christian idea. Their divinity, by their own confession, differs essentially from God, and let them use a different word to describe it. Let them do like their heathen brethren in India, call it Brahma, or whatever else they please, and cease "stealing Heaven's livery to serve the devil." Let them cease to profane religion and offend common sense by giving the name of the glorious Father of Spirits to their million-headed nondescript. Pantheism dethrones Jehovah and places no other intelligence in his place as Creator and Ruler of the universe; and, being conscious of the odium that necessarily attaches itself to Atheism, on account of its everlasting foolishness, they steal the name of God to cloak their Atheism. _Pantheism is demoralizing._ It cuts a man loose from all the sanctions of moral law, by denying the resurrection, the judgment and the future retribution. It annihilates from the mind of its votary the idea of God's moral government. If man, as it avows, be the highest intelligence in the universe of worlds, to whom will he render an account? Who will call upon him to answer? If men and women are simply developments of God, will God be offended with himself? "Evil is good," we are told, "in another way, we are not skilled in." See the author of "Representative Men," Festus, page 48. "Evil" was held by some of the old heathen philosophers to be "good in the making." They argued that it was the carrion in the sunshine, converting into grass and flower. And then, to apply their figure, man in the brothel, jail, or on gibbets, is in the way to all that is lovely and true. Such reminds us of the ravings of lunatics. It is the climax of profanation of the moral government of God. Let those who fear no God, but have wives and children and property to lose, reflect upon the propriety of lending their influence to a system fraught with such consequences. The system positively denies the distinction between good and evil. It declares that we can not sin; that we are God, and God can not offend against himself; that sin is all simply an old lie; that impiety, immorality and vice of frightful mien are wedded in eternal decrees, and that man can not sever them. _Pantheism is veiled Atheism._ It is not necessary to argue this proposition at length. Pantheists often speak of the great being, which, according to Pantheism, is composed of all the intelligences of the universe. Can any man conceive of such a being? Can intelligences be piled one upon another, like brick and mortar, and thus be compounded? And if my spirit be the highest intelligence in the universe, did it create itself? Does it govern itself? Did it create the universe? Does it govern it? Some Pantheists have gone to this length! M. Comte says: "At this present time, for minds properly familiarized with true astronomical philosophy, the heavens display no other glory than that of Hipparchus, or Kepler, or Newton, and of all who have helped to establish these laws." "Establish these laws!" They were laws governing the planets thousands of years before these astronomers were born. Pantheists often express very high respect for the Christian religion. Some of the more vulgar sort, however, speak of it as a superstition. But the wiser ones have reached the perfection of Jesuitism, that is to say, they indulge in hypocrisy and deception to effect a purpose. They grant that the Christian religion is the highest development of humanity yet attained by a majority of the race. The heathen of every grade of character, and the Christian, with all others who may not be classified by us with either, are all, in their scheme, so many successive developments of humanity. It is a trick of their trade to clothe their abominations in Bible language by wresting the Scriptures. They speak of the "beauty of holiness in the mind, that surmounted every idea of a personal God;" and of "God dwelling in us, and his love perfected in us," when they maintain that he dwells in every creature and thing. They say they can accept the Bible--that is their phrase--notwithstanding it pronounces death upon the fools who, "professing to be wise, change the truth of God into a lie, and worship and serve the creature more than the Creator," as a mystic revelation of the Pantheism which leaves us to "erect everything into a God," provided it is none, inasmuch as "every product of the human mind is a development of Deity." So the Bible, in the conclusion of their system, is on a level with Thomas Paine's writings as respects inspiration and origin. The great Pantheistic divinity is spoken of by Pantheists as the great soul of the universe, while the more materialistic look upon it as the universe itself, body and soul. With them the soul is the fountain of all the imponderable forces, vegetable and animal life, the mesmeric influences, galvanism, magnetism, electricity, light and heat; and the body the sum of all the ponderable substances; in one word, "God is everything, and everything is God." This system is called "Monotheistic Pantheism." It is a vast generalization of everything into a higher unity, which exalts men and paving stones, and cats, dogs and reptiles, and monkeys, to the same level of God-head, or divinity. Man, the soul of men, as the system would term it, is the greatest manifestation of the divine essence. Yes! DIVINE ESSENCE! for, with Pantheists, there is no _personal_ hereafter. This system of Pantheism is an old, worn-out theory; it has putrefied and rotted with the worshippers of cats, monkeys, and holy cows and bulls, and pieces of sticks and stones on the Ganges more than two thousand years ago. It is now dragged up from the dung-hill and presented as a new discovery of modern philosophy, sufficient to supplant the Ruler of the universe. How strange it is that men of ordinary intelligence will embrace the idea, rather than submit to the dictates of conscience and the Bible! This world of ours is not an abstraction in philosophy that consists of one simple substance called matter, nor yet of one substance, for there are many different material substances, such as oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, sulphur, aluminum and iron, and more than fifty others already discovered. Now, let us suppose that all these elements or substances existed as a cloud of atoms millions of ages in the past; are we, then, any nearer the solution of the great problem of world making than we were before? The atoms must be material, for a material world is to be made of them; and they must have extension; each one of them must have length, breadth and thickness; and, as inertia is a property of each and every atom, the Pantheist has only multiplied the difficulty by millions, for matter can not begin, _of itself_, to move. Did the dead atoms dance about and jumble themselves together as we now find them? Is the one substance theory correct? Monotheistic Pantheism _is scientifically false in fact_. Some of these men who tell us of a world without an intelligence in the past, who have such implicit confidence in the powers of matter, tell us, that "millions of ages" in the past the world existed as a great cloud of fire mist, which, after a long time cooled down into granite; and this, by dint of earthquakes, broke up on the surface, and washed with rain until, after ages upon ages had passed, clays and soil were formed, from which plants, of their own accord, sprang up without a germ; in other words, germs came into being spontaneously and grew up, as we see them, developed in all their grandeur. This chance life, somehow, chanced to assume animal form and fashion until, in the multitude of its changes it reached the fashion of the monkey; and then, at last, the fashion of man, both male and female. Truly, the Atheists and Pantheists of our country need not complain of any want of power to believe while such is their basis of faith upon the subject of world making. But they, to avoid the difficulty that nothing made something, tell us "the fire mist was eternal," that it did not make itself. Very well, let us have it that way; then we must be allowed to ask, how an eternal red hot mist cooled off? And also what there was to cool it, when it was all there was, and it was red hot, and always had been? In other words, how could an eternal red hot cool down without something else in existence to cool it? Why should it cool at all? And why did it begin to cool just when it did? The utmost that any scientist can do is to show that such a change took place, but he can not tell you why it took place. Change _it did_! But change is an effect, and requires a cause. And, according to their theory, there could be no cause outside of the fire mist; for they say there was nothing else in the universe. Then the cause was inside of the fire mist. But how can red hot cool when all there is, is red hot? Had this first mist, to say nothing of organic life, a mind? Did it become sensible and resolve to cool off a little, and settle itself into orderly worlds? What became of its mind? Did it divide, and a part go to each planet? Has each planet a great "soul of the world," as well as our earth? If so, had we not as well build an altar to each planet and go back to the religion of our banana-fed ancestors, who burned their children alive in sun worship? The Christian religion is so fearfully demoralizing (?) that it is a great pity that these Godless, Christless souls called Pantheists and Atheists can't get some solution of the great problem of world-making that would dispense with the Bible. How well they could get along if--if--if--they only had this great question settled. "IN GOD WE TRUST." SUBSTANCE OR SUBSTANCES--WHICH? OR, THE ORIGIN OF LIFE AND MIND. "_Substance_ is that which is and abides;" "that which subsists of or by itself; that which lies under qualities; that which truly is--or _essence_." "It is opposed to _accident_." "In its logical and metaphysical sense it is that nature of a thing which may be conceived to remain when every other nature is removed or abstracted from it; the ultimate point in analyzing the complex idea of any object. _Accident_ denotes all those ideas which the analysis excludes as not belonging to the mere being or nature of the object." It is said that our first idea of _substance_ is, possibly, derived from the consciousness of self, the conviction that, while our sensations, thought and purposes are changing, we continue the same. "We see bodies also remaining the same as to quantity or extension, while their color and figure, their state of motion or rest may be changed." It has also been said that _substances_ are either primary, that is singular, individual _substances_; or secondary, that is genera, and species of _substance_. Substances have been divided into complete and incomplete, finite and infinite. But it is to be remembered that these are merely divisions of being. Substance is properly divided into matter and spirit, or that which is extended and that which thinks. "The foundation principle of substance is that law of the human mind by which every quality or mode of being is referred to a substance," or the consciousness of a cause for every effect. "In everything which we perceive or can imagine as existing, we distinguish two parts, qualities variable and multiplied; and a being one and identical; and these two are so united in thought that we can not separate them in our intelligence, nor think of qualities without a _substance_." So it is a self-evident or first truth, that there is a subjective or inner man which thinks, reflects and reasons, for memory recalls to us the many modes of our mind; its many qualities and conditions. What variety of mental conditions have we not experienced? These are all so many evidences of an internal _substance_ that we call spirit. That spirit is to be distinguished from thought as cause is from effect is evident; and also from matter lying in the accident or quality of body, is certain, from the fact of its being subject to such rapid and instantaneous changes of condition. Amidst all the different modes, qualities, or accidents of mind, we believe ourselves to be the same individual being; and this conviction is the result of that law of thought which always associates qualities with things. In the world around us phenomena, qualities or accidents are continually changing, but we believe that these, all, are produced by causes which _remain, as substances, the same_. And as we know ourselves to be the causes of our own acts, and to be able to change, within a moment, the modes of our own mind, so we believe the changes of matter, which take place _more slowly_, to be produced by causes which belong to the _substances of matter_. And underlying all causes, whether of the qualities of matter or mind, we conceive of one absolute cause, one substance, in itself persistent and upholding all things in nature. This substance we are pleased to call spirit; and this spirit we call God. To deny this is to strike down a grand law of thought, the foundation principle of substance, and make the testimony of our own consciousness A LIE! The inorganic forces, about which "unbelievers" have so much to say are altogether operative in the realm of _substance_; that is to say, they belong to the _invisible_. Organic and inorganic are the same as visible and invisible. We know matter by its qualities, and we know mind by its qualities. These two, in qualities or attributes, contrast with each other like life and death. One is extenuated and the other extended; one is invisible the other is visible. Of the existence of these substances and their laws we have evidence in conscious knowledge, in that we know that we have no control over the involuntary or sympathetic nervous system, and have the most perfect control over the voluntary nerves. The forces controlling are as different as these qualities themselves. If man is simply a material organism, why this contrast? We are told that _life itself_ is a group of co-ordinated functions. But what correllates that force? It is very common for the advocates of the evolution hypothesis to measure the period between this and the origin of life by the phrase, "Millions and millions of years." The only object that such writers have in view in so doing is to bridge the gulf between the _assumed_ origin of life and mind and the evidence necessary to its establishment as a fact in science. They tell us that "life is a property which certain elements of matter exhibit when united in a special form under special conditions." But when we ask them to give us those certain elements of matter, they immediately inform us that "matter has about sixty-three elements; that each element has special properties, and that these elements admit of an _infinite variety of combinations_, each combination having peculiar properties." This, as a fort, is a stand behind the dark, impenetrable curtain of an _infinite variety of combinations_. It is just as dark and as destitute of proof as any pope's assumed infallibility. Mr. Hæckel says: "As a matter of course, to the _infinite varieties_ presented by the organic forms and vital phenomena in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, correspond an equally _infinite variety_ of chemical composition in the protoplasm. The most minute homogeneous constituents of this life substance, the protoplasm molecules, must in their chemical composition present an _infinite number_ of extremely delicate gradations and variations. According to the plastic theory recently advanced (?) the great variety of vital phenomena is the consequence of the _infinitely delicate_ chemical difference in the composition of protoplasm, the sole active life substance." What a multitude of infinities. But then, an _infinite number_, and an _infinite variety_ of _infinitely delicate_ gradations and variations, with millions and millions of years, do not remove further from sight life in its origin than does the materialistic philosophy of one substance. They constitute the _web_ and _filling_ of the _blanket of oblivion_ used by materialistic doctors to cover up their ignorance of life and its origin. A half dozen "INFINITIES," and "MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF YEARS!" What! should I care if my ancestors were "tadpoles," when they are HID AWAY IN THE CENTER OF INFINITIES, and laid _away back yonder_, so far off as "MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF YEARS?" When we ask our friends for the proof necessary to establish this speculation as a fact among facts, they find it very convenient to betake themselves to _infinities_, and _millions_ and _millions of years_. But we Christians do not ask them to give us an _infinite variety_, etc., but to give us the "certain elements" of which "life is a property," and the "special form in which these certain elements were united," and the "special conditions" that existed when life first made its appearance by spontaneous generation. When we do this we are immediately carried away into the _infinities_. The result is that the solution of the problem of the origin of life by spontaneous generation, as a property of "certain elements of matter, united in a special form, under special conditions," is buried forever out of sight. This same definition of life is found on page 69 of a work entitled, "The System of Nature," published by D. Holbach, a French Atheist, in 1774, in these words: "Experience proves to us that the matter which we regard as inert and dead assumes action, intelligence and life when it is combined in a certain way." Voltaire answered: "This is precisely the difficulty. How does a germ come to life? Is not this definition very easy--very common? Is not life organization with feeling? But," says Voltaire, "that you have these two properties from the motion of matter alone: it is impossible to give any proof, and if it can not be proved why affirm it? Why say aloud, 'I know,' while you say to yourself, 'I know not?'" Our Atheistic friends say: "The forms of life vary because of the difference in their molecular construction, resulting from different physical conditions to which the various forms have been subjected." Wonderful discovery! Does it explain the evidence of design which is presented in pairing off male and female in the same form of life? Dr. Parvin is often referred to as "frankly admitting that the doctrine of the evolution of species is accepted by three-fourths of the scientific men," and that this doctrine has, in their minds, "rendered nugatory the hypothesis of a vital immaterial principle as a causal factor in the phenomena of life and mind." Allowing this statement its full force, it is still true that none but Atheists can possibly be included in the "three-fourths." So much the worse for them. But it is an Atheistic trick to try to succeed by a misrepresentation of facts. One of their number recently said, "It is now almost universally believed by those who have investigated the subject that life originated from natural agencies without the aid of a creative intelligence. Then those who have investigated the subject are almost universally _Atheists_?" It is said that "vital activity, whether of body or mind, is a mode of motion, the correllate of antecedent motion." But what correllated the force? According to this logic life came from the antecedent motion; that is, from the motion of dead atoms. But motion itself is the manifestation of energy, and there must of necessity be something behind it to which it belongs as an attribute. Do you say it was dead atoms, or matter without life? Then dead atoms set dead atoms into motion and produced life! Can you believe this? If you can, you need find no trouble in believing in the most orthodox hell. Can you get more out of a thing than there is in it? We don't think so. But we do think that there is credulity enough, even blind credulity, in the advocates of spontaneous generation to enable them to believe anything they may happen to wish true. We are told that "life in its higher forms is not an immaterial entity, _nor the result_ of a special form of _force termed vital_, but, that it is a group of co-ordinated functions." Then what correllated the force? If it was not vitality what was it? But this is just equivalent to saying that life does not proceed from life. So, in the realm of inertia or death, without a God and without life, some kind of a mechanical operation among dead atoms took place which produced "a certain chemico-physical constitution of amorphous matter--on that albuminous substance called sarcode or protoplasm," which evolved more than was involved, or brought organic life out of dead inorganic matter. But life is simply a "mode," or "degree of motion?" But we are curious to know just here whether the advocates of this system of things do not believe that there always was a degree of motion. Perchance they do, but then they certainly can't believe that this particular degree or mode of motion which they called _life_ was eternal. So, then, a degree of motion is life, and a degree of motion is not life. This thing of confounding life with motion I'm thinking leads to difficulty. I can see how motion may be the result of life, but just how it is _life itself_ I can't see quite so well. Is cause and effect the same? We have a most remarkable, and yet a natural, concession made in the way in which men who feel the weakness of their cause generally make concessions. It is a statement said to be made by Baron Liebig; it is this: "Geological investigations have established the fact of a beginning of life (?) upon the earth, which leaves no doubt that it can only have arisen naturally and from inorganic forces, and _it is perfectly indifferent whether or not we observe such a process now_." This statement is untrue as respects geological facts. But the concession is, that spontaneous generation is not to be an observed fact. "Perfectly indifferent whether or not we observe such a process now?" Well, it never was observed. Mr. Liebig's statement doubtless proceeds from the conviction that the system is never to be established by observation. It is simple imagination. Virchow says: "We can _only imagine_ that at certain periods of the development of the earth unusual conditions existed, under which the elements entering into new combinations acquired in statu nascente vital motions, so that the usual mechanical conditions were transformed into vital conditions." In this statement it is well for us to remember that it is not only simple imagination, but also that vital motions were the cause, bringing about vital conditions, that is to say, life, before life was, transformed mechanical conditions into vital conditions. So, in this very singular imaginary hypothesis touching the origin of life we have the usual circle suicide of the system. "Vital motions transform mechanical conditions into vital conditions," and vital conditions fill the world with "vital motions," and life itself is only a degree "or mode of motion." _Such_ is their travel around the circle. * * * * * Can you believe that _vital motion_ transformed mechanical conditions into _vital conditions_, without _life_ being the cause of those _vital motions_? DIFFICULTY WITH FIRE. La Place, in his solution of how our planet was made, supposed that the cooling, and consequently contracting rings of the fire cloud planet, earth, did not break up into pieces, but retained their continuity; but, in opposition to all experience and reason, he supposed that the cooling rings kept contracting and widening out at the same time. According to the nebular hypothesis--_or guess_--the fire mist was cooling and shrinking up, while the rings of the same heat and material were cooling _faster_ and widening out from it: a piece of disorder equal to a miracle, for it can not be duplicated among solids or fluids in heaven or earth, or under the earth; for everything narrows down upon cooling--_contracts_! * * * * * THE INFIDEL'S OFFSET.--An unbeliever once said to a man who advocated the doctrine of total depravity: "The ground for my rejection of all responsibility for belief is the acknowledged necessitated nature of belief. Show me," said he, "that it is not necessitated, and I am answered. When you show me that it is controlled by a will, equally necessitated, I am not answered. If a necessitated faculty or operation can not be responsible, then neither will nor volition can be responsible. You," said the infidel, "go through the whole circle of mental faculties, and find necessity everywhere and responsibility nowhere." * * * * * Through the kindness of Brother J. M. Mathes we are in possession of a copy of the life of Brother Elijah Goodwin. It has the merit of being mainly Brother Goodwin's own production. His many friends will regard it as a grand "keepsake." It is neatly bound in cloth, contains 314 pages, and is in beautiful type. Send $1.50 by postoffice order to Elder J. M. Mathes, Bedford, Lawrence county, Indiana, and receive a copy in return. Transcriber's Note The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. 
28678	----	Scientific and Religious Journal. VOL. I. DECEMBER, 1880. NO. 12. IS THE SINNER A MORAL AGENT IN HIS CONVERSION? There are a great many questions asked upon the subject of conversion, and as many answers given as there are theories of religion, and many persons listening to men's theories upon this subject are left in doubt and darkness in reference to what is and is not conversion. You ask the Mormons, who fully believe their theory of conversion, and they will refer you to their own experience and the experience of the loyal, self-sacrificing devotees of their faith. Ask the Roman Catholic and he will give you an answer corresponding with his theory of religion. All Protestant parties give you their experience, and refer you to their loyal and self-sacrificing brethren for the truthfulness of their theories of conversion. In the midst of this conflict and medley of contradictions what are we to do? Shall we accept their experience as the infallible rule by which to determine the right from the wrong in matters pertaining to our present and eternal salvation? A strange rule, in view of the great contrariety of opinions and our liability to be misled. It would justify Mother Eve, she being deceived. But "she was found in the transgression." We may be deceived and found in transgression. This strange rule would justify Saul; for he verily thought he ought to do many things contrary to Jesus, which things he did, and did them in all good conscience towards God and man, yet he was a blasphemer and injurious. The Master, in view of our liability to be deceived, gave us a rule of conduct in reference to our communications in these words: "Let your communications be yea, yea, and nay, nay." It requires heroism and manhood, which is the highest degree of moral courage, to say nay where questions of personal interest are involved. The rule in reference to God's word is different, being based upon his immutability and perfections. He is not deceived, not misled, not mistaken. Paul says in reference to the word of God, which was preached by himself, Sylvanus and Timotheus: "Our word toward you was not yea and nay, but in him was yea, for all the promises of God in Christ are yea, and in him amen unto the glory of God by us." 2 Cor. 1, 18-20. "Let God be true though every man be a liar," was in the times of the Apostles and first Christians a rule which they had no hesitancy in affirming. A moral agent is one who, with a knowledge of the right and wrong, exercises the power of action. In conversion it is the exercise of the power that begins conversion. If the sinner has not this power, then he is not a moral agent in his conversion. All the differences among men upon the subject of conversion grew out of their different notions of God and of men. It is a matter of the greatest consequence to have correct notions of God and of self. As conversion relates to both, wrong notions of one will create wrong notions of the other. Those who have been taught to debase themselves under the pretext of giving glory to God, consider meanness and wrong as natural and inherent imperfections of their being, and attributable to Father Adam and Mother Eve, and neglect to exercise the powers at their command. Being taught that they are unable to do anything to help themselves, they are left to throw the work all back upon God or give it up in despair. If they throw it back upon God, and regard themselves as passive recipients of the work of conversion, then they must wrestle with God, for there is no use in wrestling with the powerless one. With this view of the subject the world's condition is incomprehensible, and in direct conflict with the revealed character of God. We would naturally suppose when we read that "God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance," that none would be allowed to perish on account of any neglect upon the divine side. But thousands do die in their sins. Do you say it is because of their great wickedness? In what does wickedness consist? Is it the neglect of that which is not in their power? Does not the system that God interposes in the conversion of the sinner rest upon the idea that the sinner is helpless in respect to his conversion? It certainly does. Then why should the sinner he blamed? This view of the sinner's moral condition necessitates a view of God utterly at variance with his character, viz: that he is _now_ and _then_ on the giving hand, that he consents to pour out his Spirit occasionally, and does this only where the good people wrestle with him and give him no rest day nor night. One would think that "he who spared not his own son, but gave him up for us all," would send that Almighty Spirit everywhere, and at once bring about the millennial glory. What is the trouble? "_God is love!_" "Tell them, as I live, saith the Lord God, I have _no pleasure_ in the death of him who dieth, but rather that he would repent and live." This theory of the sinner's helplessness is the foundation of the entire system of mystical conversion through mystical operations of the Spirit of God. And as for plain and easy conditions of pardon and peace that we know all sinners can comply with, this system of mystical conversion sets them all _aside_. So you see that difficulties are multiplying on our hands, and unless we can start off upon another foot, we must be lost in the mystical and incomprehensible. As reformers, our greatest work is to clear away mystical and false notions of men in reference to themselves and their God; to make men sensible of their dignity and responsibility, as beings endowed with God-like attributes. We have succeeded, in most communities, in killing the _tap-root_ of the mystical tree of conversion--_i.e._, the tenet of total hereditary depravity, but the tree still stands erect, and men claim that a wonderful outpouring of the Spirit of God has, in many days and nights, resulted in 100 or 200 or 300 conversions. But what is conversion? It is lexically defined "_to turn upon, to turn towards_." In a moral sense, "_to turn upon or to, to convert unto, to convert from error, to turn to the service and worship of the true God_." "And all who dwelt at Lydda and Saron saw him and _turned_ to the Lord." Acts ix, 35. The word _turned_, in the above text, is a translation of the Greek term that is nine times rendered _convert_ in its forms and thirty-eight times _turn_ in its forms. They, the people of Lydda and Saron, _turned, converted to the Lord_. Did they do it? Then they were active and not passive. It was an act of their own. "Repent and turn yourselves."--Eze. xviii, 30. Here the Lord commanded sinners to _convert themselves_. "Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed, and make you a new heart and a new spirit; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?" Eze. xviii, 31. "If the wicked will turn, convert, from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die." Eze. xviii, 31. Here we discover that the burden of conversion and the entire responsibility of an unconverted state is thrown upon the sinner. The Apostles taught men to convert themselves. See Acts xiv, 15. "We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you, that ye should turn, _convert_, from these vanities to the living God." Paul says, "He showed first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem and throughout all the coasts of Judea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should turn, _convert_, to God, and do works meet for, worthy of, repentance." Acts xxvi, 20. Speaking of the unbelieving Jews he said, "But their minds were blinded; for until this day remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the Old Testament, which vail is done away in Christ. But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the vail is upon their heart. Nevertheless, when it shall _turn_, _convert_, to the Lord, the vail shall be taken away." 2d Corinthians, iii, 14-16. Here we find that the heart must do its own _turning_, _converting_. _Poor Jews!_ Could they help themselves? Yes, it all depended upon their own actions. The INFINITE ONE did as much for them as for any others. They closed their eyes and stopped their ears, lest at _any time_ they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and be converted and healed. Why did the Master not say, "And I should _convert_ and heal them?" _Ans._ Conversion is a commandment of God, and sinners must obey it or perish. The above quotation is made from Isaiah vi, 10, where it reads: "Lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and _convert_, and I should heal them." Paul, speaking of the disciples in Macedonia and Achaia, says: "They themselves show of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned, _converted_, to God from idols to serve the living and true God." 1 Thess., i, 8, 9. "Repent ye therefore and be converted," is passive in our translation, but imperative active in the original. In the Geneva text it reads: "_Amend_ your lives and turn. So conversion is a commandment of God. If there is anything necessary to conversion that is not in the power of the sinner, why should he be commanded to convert? If the trouble is in his corruption, through inborn depravity, why are _some converted_ and _others not_? If there is anything in conversion that is not in the power of the sinner, then he must of necessity be saved without it, or remain unavoidably in sin--_doomed to misery_." Webster defines the term _convert_ "to change from one state to another, as to convert a barren waste into a fruitful field; to convert a wilderness into a garden; to convert rude savages into civilized men; to change or turn from one party or sect to another--as to convert Pagans to Christianity, to turn from a bad life to a good one, to change the heart and moral character from enmity to God and from vicious habits to the love of God and to a holy life." Hence the ancient commandment: "Make you a new heart and a new spirit, for why will you die." Eze. xviii, 32. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength." Is this out of your power? Then who is to blame? Does the blessed Father command you to do what you can not? Are you thus lost without remedy? Does the Lord mock you with commandments that you can not obey? The importance of conversion is in the fact that it is the turning point or dividing line between those who serve God and those who serve him not. I. The Lord commands sinners to convert. II. The Lord's commandments are duties that sinners owe to God. Therefore, conversion is a duty that the sinner owes to God. It is the sinner's duty; then he must perform it. We have seen that the Lord commands it, and that sinners did perform it. Do you say it is a work begun upon them and accomplished by them? Then sinners must be passive in the beginning of this work, and the beginning is most essential, for unless the thing is begun it will never be accomplished. Is this beginning the work of God wrought upon the sinner by a special operation of the Holy Spirit? If this be so it follows that the entire Christian life is of necessity, and not of choice, for the root always bears the tree, and not the tree the root. If the cause is the unconditioned power of God, the effects growing out of that cause are the fruits of necessity; and so the Christian is a necessitated creature, and entitled to neither praise or reward, for it was not he that did it, _but God_. And in this case the sinner is not a moral agent, for in moral agency the sinner, with a knowledge of the right and the wrong, begins the work _himself_ and does it himself. This does not exclude the instrumentality of Christ, the Apostles, prophets and Christians, who, by the words of the Holy Spirit, have placed before sinners all the knowledge necessary to give them correct ideas of duty, and also the motives to be accepted. An agent is one who has power to begin action, and moral agency in conversion is the exercise of that power, with a knowledge of the right and the wrong, and so it comes to pass that conversion to God always makes a Christian, provided, however, that the man, knowing what to turn from and what to turn to, honestly turned from the wrong to the right, which is the same as to say that he was a moral agent in his conversion. A man may _turn_ without a knowledge of the right and the wrong, but it is turning _round_ and _round_ and remaining in the same place, _i.e._ in ignorance of God's will, and so remaining in disobedience. Such may be and often is. In all such cases the person has been the creature of passion, wrought upon by excitement, and left in ignorance of duty in disobedience to the gospel of Christ. A good rule by which to determine when such is the case, and it is the Master's rule, is the unwillingness of the person to do the commandments of God, and to receive for instruction upon the subject of duty, his word, an unteachable disposition, which not only refuses to obey when the commandments are presented, but absolutely persists in opposing them. A man in this condition is worse than ignorant, his heart is irreconciled to the government of God, and he may turn around and around and die in sin and transgression. Do you object that God controls in conversion, and, therefore, the man is illuminated in a mysterious manner, and necessitated aright--that he is a necessitated moral agent? Necessitated moral agency and free slavery are identical. There is no such thing as necessitated moral agency. What I am compelled to do is not mine, but his who compelled me. All that we call moral or immoral, virtuous or vicious, praiseworthy or blameworthy, in our conduct, depends wholly upon the will. It begins in us and is done by us. It is ours and we will answer for it. No man is to be blamed or praised for that which he neither had power to do or avoid. This, in harmony with the words _agent_ and _action_, is saying no more than that a man is to be praised or blamed for actions done by himself and not by another. It is the gospel rule, "that every man shall receive according to that which he bath done; that every man shall give account of _himself_ to God." If the sinner is to blame for remaining in an unconverted state, then of necessity conversion is his own voluntary act; a duty imperatively enjoined upon him, in the performance of which he needs to be guided by the knowledge of the right and the wrong, as much as in any other duty. On the other hand, if it is a work wrought upon the man by a special effort of the Holy Spirit, then the man is free from all responsibility in the premises, for he will answer only for his _own work_. "Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life." Prov. iv, 23. "He taught me also, and said unto me: Let thine heart retain my words; keep my commandments and live." Prov. iv, 4. "Hear thou, my son, and be wise, and guide thine heart in the way." Prov. xxiii, 19. "Man, with naught in charge, could betray no trust, And if he fell, would fall because he must. If love reward him, or vengeance strike, His recompense in both would be unjust _alike_." If the sinner is passive in his conversion he can claim no reward, for it is the act of another. All action is the work of an agent, of a being who acts. And every being who acts is the beginner of the motion which constitutes the action. The bullet that kills the man, the explosion that makes it fly, the sparkles from the cap which produce the explosion, are not agents, all being equally passive; nor is it the finger operating upon the trigger that begins the motion; that also is a passive instrument; it is the mind giving to the finger direction and energy which is the mover in this business, and as such, is, properly speaking, the agent. But if we were super-naturally informed that the mind thus exerted was made to do so by the mysterious and irresistible impulse of a superior being, we should instantly declare _that being_ the agent, and the mind irresistibly influenced only a passive instrument, and no more to blame than the gunpowder. Now, if the sinner is passive he is no more to blame or praise than the passive instruments employed by the murderer. And if he is not passive, but active, then the thing is begun and done by himself _as the real agent_. Action implies motion, and where there is no power to begin motion there can not be action, _but rest_. If the sinner has power to begin that action called conversion, then he is a moral agent in his conversion, provided that he begins it with a knowledge of the right and the wrong in their relations to the subject, for action without knowledge of duty is not conversion to the service of God. In this case the moral element is wanting, the man acts blindly from impulse or passion; which is no more than saying that men must know what to _convert from_, and what to _convert to_, before they can act intelligently as rational moral agents. As such, the thing of first importance is to teach men the will of God upon the subject of conversion, that they may know what to do. Anciently men were told what to do. And the gospel of Christ tells men the same story yet. If the sinner is the agent in his conversion then he should give himself no rest until he learns his duty and does it. But if he is not, then he might just as well rest contented, for the passive stone that has no power to change its place _must rest_. To say that the sinner has the power to change is giving up the question. And when this is once given up all good people will go to work upon sinners to teach them their duty, and persuade them to turn, convert, to God. And the Lord will no longer be regarded by sensible skeptics as a very changeable being. The ancient Christians did not wrestle with God in the work of saving sinners. He was always willing that men should be saved, and is yet willing. If we were to wrestle with him in solemn prayer all our days he would not be more willing than he is at this moment. Why is it that _all men_ are not _saved_? Ans.--The Lord commands men to convert, turn and live. Turn from what? Ans.--From the will of the flesh and from the will of man. To what? Ans.--To the gospel of Christ. And they refuse to do it. To say the sinner has not the power is to relieve him, forever, of all responsibility for his continuance in an unconverted state, and throw it, forever, upon God. To say the sinner has not the power, and in the next breath tell him that he has, is a square contradiction and a self-evident falsehood, only equaled by the statement that a thing is a round square, or that ice is red hot. Let whatever fall that may, it is true that a thing can not _be_, _exist_, and _not_ be, not _exist_, at the same time. The sinner is either passive or active in his conversion. He can not be both. If he has not the power to begin and _convert_, it follows that all who have died in sin were fated to ruin without remedy. Philosophers have said, "that the will is determined by motives, purposes, intentions, or reasons." Granting this to be true, we _can not_ admit that the will is _necessarily_ determined by motives and purposes; for it is the self-determining power of the mind that gives a motive, or reason, that weight and influence whereby our course is determined. In other words, it depends on ourselves whether we will act from one motive or another. Action from motive always begins in ourselves. And if conversion is the result of motive power, it begins in ourselves and by ourselves. Let a man be tempted to steal, his motive is the love of money. But _if he_ refrains from the deed, his motive is a regard for duty. If he suffers himself to be governed by the first, he is a thief and deserves punishment, but if he allows himself to be governed by the second, he has done well. The laws of every country suppose that men have it in their power to give to either motive that regard which will determine their conduct. The divine laws allow the same, placing motives high as heaven before sinners for their acceptance, and warning them with restraining threats deep as hell. And if sinners will not receive these threats and act accordingly, they are without excuse. The scriptures allow that men convert from God. How is this? Have men power to cross the chasm backwards, and are not able, at the same time to cross it in a forward movement? Strange logic, this! It is the same old philosophy that sinners have the power to go to hell, but none to get to heaven; that they are free, like the slave, to do the tyrant's bidding; that they are free like the water that stands in the pool; that they are mechanically free, are simply active when wrought upon, the same as any machinery. If this be so, why is it that so many are left in an unconverted state? Is it because the good Spirit prefers the existence of iniquity and crime? If the Lord brings about the salvation of some, through a mighty outpouring of his Spirit, then we shall never comprehend his ways. Why is it that he does not give us one general outpouring, one grand revival all over our country, and bring about the long prayed for millennial day? Answer.--Conversion is a commandment of God. It must be obeyed or the country lie, in direct opposition to the will of God, in sin. His will is expressed in the words, "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return, _reconvert_, unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." "To Israel he saith, all the day long have I stretched forth my hands unto a gainsaying and disobedient people." Ro. x, 21. "The Lord strove with them by his Spirit in the prophets, and bore with them many years, yet they would not hear." Nehe. ix, 30. "They made their hearts as an adamant stone lest they should hear the law, and the words which the Lord of hosts hath sent in his spirit by the former prophets." Zech. vii, 12. Jesus wept over them when he stood upon Mount Olivet and expressed the greatness of his great heart in these words: "How often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not." Lu. xiii, 34. Their failure was not because the Spirit did not strive with them as it did with others who were saved. "God is no respecter of persons." Neither was it on account of inborn depravity. For if any were corrupted in their moral nature by Adam's sin, all were corrupted alike. So that each one would be in this respect equally hard to overcome. But why bring up inborn corruption and helplessness? Is not the Spirit of God able for any task which is in its own line of work? Jesus gave the true solution of the question. He said: "Their hearts have waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest at _any time_ they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts and be converted, and I should heal them." The words "at any time" deserve particular attention, for the Lord's time is _all the time_. He is unchangeable. "He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." 2 Pet. iii, 9. Many people talk and act as though the Lord was the most changeable being in the universe. They seem to think that the unchangeableness of the Lord is in the idea that he is everlastingly changing. Let us imagine a perfect circle with a stone permanently fixed in the center and a man walking within, and every move he makes from side to side affecting his relations to the center. So it is with God and the children of men. He is immutable. He is the center of the circle. In the right hand side of this circle are the innocent and the obedient, in the enjoyment of all its riches, peace, pardon and all spiritual blessings. These blessings were provided for all men, and presented in the gospel of peace; and in the left side of this circle are all the threatenings of God and all the wickedness and miseries of men. The wicked at the left are able to _convert_ around to the right. In doing this they leave their sins and miseries and come around where all the blessings of the great salvation have always been, are, and will be until time is no more. In all the work of human redemption there is no place for change in God. The center has never changed. Man _alone_ changes. God has not bestowed _special_ pardoning grace. Such phraseology is unknown in the gospel. "His grace was given us in Jesus Christ before the world began." 2 Tim. i, 9. All that we or any others have to do is to live on the Christ side of this circle--the right hand. If we are sinners it is our duty to convert around to the right into new relations containing all that is grand, glorious and desirable. The sinner, led by the motives of the gospel, changes sides; leaving the kingdom of darkness upon the left, and crossing the line drawn through the center of the circle, he passes into the kingdom of light. It seems strange that intelligent men and women should be constantly throwing mystery around a matter that is so plain and simple. But we are aware that, by long dwelling on an idea, and from the excited and abnormal sensitiveness of the mind, we sometimes lose ourselves to truth amidst our own creations, which become in the imagination stern realities, producing a species of monomania or religious insanity. Long dwelling upon the idea that conversion is a special work of God destroys all disposition _to convert_, and causes men to be at ease in disobedience. We will to do those things, and those only, which we believe to be in our power. We are not so destitute of common sense as to undertake that which we know to be out of our power. I never attempt to fly, or raise a weight that I know to be far above my strength. So it is in the question of conversion. If I believe it to be a work that is beyond my power, there will be a corresponding indifference upon my part. As long as men are made to believe that God must convert them by a special interposition of his Spirit, so long their minds will be directed, beyond the plain duties of the gospel, to the realm of the mysterious and incomprehensible. In ancient times, when men were plainly told to convert--_turn_--to God and do works worthy of repentance, when the mists and mysticles of the schoolmen and dogmatists of all sects and parties had not, as yet, beclouded the minds of men, nor corrupted the simplicity of the Gospel, thousands were converted in a day. Christianity overran the inhabited earth in the space of a few years. Judaism and Paganism trembled and crumbled before its mighty power. But now the religious world is contending with sin and crime, under the great disadvantages of a perverted mind and a Gospel beclouded with the smoke of Babylon, and the result is that three-score souls brought into the church is a great success for the labors of weeks, and even months. Why should this be so? It need not be. It would not be but for the wrong teaching consequent upon creeds. It is said, "That many of the Corinthians hearing, believed and were baptized." Their minds were clear upon the great subjects of human duty and the goodness, love and mercy of God. They had no long sessions, in which they were wrestling with God as though he was insensitive and indifferent upon the subject of the sinner's salvation. They were told the story of God's love, and made acquainted with the great fact that all things were ready for their reception; "that Christ had finished the work which the Father had given him to do," and that it only remained for them to believe and obey the Gospel and all would be well. They were commanded _to convert_ to the service of God. This work was not given into the hands of Christ to perform. It is the sinner's own work. Christ will not believe for you. He will not repent for you. He will not convert for you. Conversion is the overt action of the will carried out in "breaking off from sins by righteousness." It begins in the heart, but it does not end there. Murder begins in the heart, but its consummation is the action of the will carried out. The man first yielded to the temptation by saying, in his heart, I will. The next thing in the order was carrying out the will in the deed. Nothing short of the deed done would have met the statement in the heart, _I will_. So it is in conversion. The man first says in his heart, _I will_, I will forsake my former course of life and be a Christian, I will obey God, I will do his will. And nothing short of doing the will of God as it is addressed to him in the Gospel will carry out the action of the will, and meet the demands of the statement, _I will_. "Whosoever will let him come and take the water of life freely." So the "tree is known by its fruits." "He that saith I know him, acknowledge him, and keepeth not his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him." 1 Jno. ii, 4. As regards the instrumentalities employed in persuading men, I have only to say, that men were always free as moral agents, to convert--_turn_, under the weakest instrumentality, or refuse under the most powerful. The Lord himself "strove with the ancient Jews by his Spirit in his prophets, and they would not hear but resisted the Spirit." Stephen, after he had made one grand effort to instruct his hearers, said, "Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did so do ye." Acts vii, 51. Was the condition of those fellows unavoidable? If it was, they were not to blame. But there was nothing in their condition that was not in their power. If there was, why should we find these words in their law, "circumcise the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiff-necked." Deut. x, 16. The Lord has made the salvation of all men possible, otherwise those remaining in an unconverted state, and dying in their sins, are unavoidably lost. And who is to blame? The Father "so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to die for every man. He sent him to be the Savior of the world. The Gospel is the ministration of the Spirit. The Apostles preached it with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven. They received grace and Apostleship, for the obedience of faith among all nations, for Christ's name." Rom. i, 5. A great and grand law governed them. In obeying it they did all that they ever did for the world or for the church. There were just three duties prescribed in that law. The first is in the word "teach," or, the _better rendering_, disciple. The second is in the word "baptizing;" and the third is in the phrase "teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." The whole is beautifully rendered thus, "Going therefore, disciple all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." And the whole is rested upon a declaration of kingly authority, viz: "All power in heaven and upon earth is given into my hands," going _therefore_,--you see the connection. Go to the Acts of the Apostles and read for yourselves and see how they turned men to God. Paul says, "That he showed first to them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn, convert, to God, and do works meet for repentance." Some disobeyed under the preaching and teaching of the Apostles. Some under the teachings of Christ. And many "rejected the council of God against themselves in not being baptized of John's baptism." Jesus said, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature; he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned." Paul was preaching at Corinth; many of the Corinthians hearing, believed, and were baptized, and Jesus appeared unto him in a vision by night, and said, "Speak boldly and hold not thy peace, and I will let no man set on thee to hurt thee." Christ gave the commission and Paul was carrying it out. The Savior's visit to Corinth, in vision, was to encourage Paul to go on. Would all the preachers in this country encourage such a work by speaking well of it? Would they say, Go on? If I was preaching in a great city under the same circumstances that surrounded Paul in Corinth, and the days of miracles were not past, I might rationally conclude that Jesus would encourage me in the same manner. Be that as it may, one thing is doubtless true, viz., the same work is the Lord's work yet, and his visit to Corinth to encourage Paul is a great source of encouragement to us. The primitive Christians were all baptized believers; all converted to the service of God; none of them on probation, but all in the fellowship. All were "sanctified unto obedience," all had "purified their souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit." Many reverse the order thus: "Get your souls purified and then obey the truth." But Christ has become the "Author of eternal salvation unto all those who obey him." Heb. v, 9. Jesus said, "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he can not enter into the kingdom of God." Whatever this language may mean _it_ is accomplished when the sinner is begotten in Christ Jesus through the gospel and baptized into Christ. Paul said of the Corinthians: "In Christ Jesus have I begotten you through the Gospel." And they, "Hearing, believed and were baptized." And James said: "Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth." Consequently, the entire meaning is in the power of all sinners who have access to the Gospel of Christ. Otherwise, the sinner is unavoidably lost for his unavoidable unbelief. But we are told in John's Record, i, 12, "That as many as received him to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." So the power of the sinner to become a son of God depends upon his belief on the name of the Son of God, and if he can not believe it is no fault of his. _Poor fellow!_ Is he thus doomed? If he can believe on the name of Christ he is able to reach the relation of a son. For the divine law grants the privilege, liberty or power to as many as believe on the name of Christ. The primitive Christians were the "children of God by faith in Jesus Christ, for as many as were baptized into Christ put on Christ." Gal. iii, 26, 27. John said: "Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous." 1 John iii, 7. "If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that doth righteousness is born of him." 1 John ii, 29. The great appeal to man as a moral agent is in these words: "Know ye not that to whom ye _yield yourselves_ servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness." Rom. vi, 16. Do you not know this? Do you not know that you will receive, in the great day, according to that which you have done, whether it be good or bad? Then why not obey the Gospel and enjoy its promises? OUR INDEBTEDNESS TO REVELATION--No. VI. BY P.T. RUSSELL. THE NATURE OF MAN NECESSITATED REVELATION. The above proposition rests upon and is in harmony with all the relations existing between natural wants and supplies, being itself a supply. Does the power of vision make light a necessity? Yes; without it the eye would be useless. Could man create his own light? It has taken ages upon ages to invent the limited artificial light which we now have. Man is endowed with the powers of locomotion. Could he create an earth to move upon? Could he create the air for breathing? Were these and all such matters necessities? And was man entirely unable to provide for his own natural wants? The faculties with which man is endowed call for these supplies, and they are necessities on account of the existence of these faculties. Think of a being, if you can, with the powers of vision in the entire absence of light, with no air to breathe nor earth to move upon. Do you say such would be a grand failure? So it would. But the Creator has not given powers to man for which he has no use, having nothing to meet their demands. The existence of a faculty or power leads logically to the conclusion which all candid, intelligent people have reached, viz: that the Creator has made a supply for the use of every faculty, or power which was designed and provided. Do you ask, what of all this? I answer, man has the power to become religious, but he had no more power to invent a supply for this faculty than he had to create light for the eye or air to breathe. So the necessity for this must be met with a supply from the Creator as well as all other natural demands or powers. Now, as we have a desire for the knowledge that we are approved of God, and as religion consists in this knowledge, and in the knowledge of our relations, dependence and obligations to God; and, as we have but one means of obtaining this knowledge, and that is the means of his will concerning us, then by knowing through that will that our actions are such as he desires and approves, the one question remains to be answered, How can man obtain the knowledge of the will of another concerning himself? Ans.--Only by a revelation of the will of the one to the other. I know not the will of the reader of this essay concerning myself. My style of writing may not please him, but if he would tell me just how he wishes me to write, then, by following his directions, I should obtain the knowledge of his approbation as a necessary result experienced in my own mental nature. This is plain, but no more plain than God's revelation to man and its results experienced in conscious knowledge. AN IMPORTANT THOUGHT. In order to man's highest happiness, all his powers must be so called into activity by education that each faculty may act with energy, but at the same time in exact harmony with all of its kindred powers. There must be no clash, no jar nor friction. No one power must be highly exercised and cultivated at the expense of the rest, but each must be brought out by its own appropriate food. Material food is for the body--it can not feed upon thought, nor mind upon bread. "Man should not live upon bread alone." This is an axiomatic truth endorsed by man's two-fold nature. If you feed and exercise the body only you may acquire the strength of an Ajax, but your countenance will be as stolid and your eye as dull as the Hottentot's. Such a fellow would be of almost no use whatever. Add to the education of the body the cultivation of the intellect only; now the prospect is fearful, for the intellect always works for its master, and in this case, the man being without moral and religious training, the master Will be his animal desires. Can you imagine the depth of infamy and pollution that is possible in this case? The entire motive power that moves his intellect is carnal, sensual and devilish. He now needs the sanction of a higher authority. The man is but half educated. There are two groups of faculties in his nature that are lying dormant. His moral and religious powers have not as yet been brought into action--they have had no food nor exercise, and without this there can be no development. These, as well as the intellect and the body, must have their own appropriate food, which must be in kind with their nature. Moral truth is for the moral powers. This directs us in our moral relations and obligations to our fellows with whom we may be associated. Religious truth is for our religious faculties. Now add to all this the sanction of the authority of God, which is like the balance-wheel in a watch, regulating and controlling every movement. Man, thus educated, is prepared to act in harmony with his entire nature. He can now reach a position of moral, religious, social and intellectual grandeur worthy of his nature. Reader, is all of this demanded by the elements of our nature? Then a revelation of God to man of the knowledge of his being, wisdom, goodness, power, authority and law was and is a necessity, without which man must have remained in part uneducated, not perfectly developed. Is the development of man's religious nature necessary in order to a full, perfect and harmonious growth? Yes. There neither is, nor can be, a harmonious growth while any one power is dwarfed by starvation. Without the knowledge of God man's religious powers must remain dwarfed, and these can not be fed without a revelation. Are these powers so many empty buckets, never filled and never to be filled? No. Hence my conclusion, that man's nature made revelation a necessity, rests upon the bed-rock of truth. Let him who feels able try to shake my position. REVELATION PROBABLE. Our series of essays are such that this requires no argument here. There are certain analogies that we may, nevertheless, speak of, which will not _down_ at the bidding of David's fool. The facts stand thus: a supply for each and every one of our other faculties, sufficient in quantity for all their necessities, is placed within our reach for their use. Now let us look at the analogy. I have food to eat, good water to drink, light for the eye, air to breathe, and a good earth to walk upon and space in which to move, beauties of nature to admire, its music to listen to with rapture, and things with their combinations to perceive and think of. Now, Mr. Skeptic, you know that man has religious faculties, otherwise he could never become religious, no more than he could see without eyes and hear without ears. Now, what say you? Did the author of all things make a mistake here by conferring upon us a power that would be of no use? Is this the reason of your rejection of religion? Do you say it is of no use? Or do you say that the Great Creator and wise and merciful Provider forgot to give a supply just here? Come! You boast of reason. Give us your _reason_. Will you? To one or the other of these conclusions you are irresistibly driven. No other retreat is open. Take either, and, if true, the harmony of the universe is destroyed. Take either, and your folly is so plain that it needs no words of mine to point it out. This is the true conclusion; all analogy points directly and clearly to the probability and fact of a revelation. A REVELATION OF THAT WHICH WAS NECESSARY? To answer this question we must keep in mind the nature of man's religious powers, and from this deduce the nature of the supply that is called for. Would the simple idea of the existence of a first cause, or creator of all things, be sufficient? This idea, by itself, could not quicken reverence and adoration and a desire to worship, and without these there is no religion. Would a knowledge, by revelation, of the power, intelligence, wisdom and goodness of God be sufficient in the absence of anything more? No. What more? Would it not be enough, in addition to what you have named, to have a knowledge of our relation to and dependence upon him for all we enjoy? No; we must have one thing more shown to us or the whole will be imperfect and unworthy of God as its author. Religion can not be without something to do, and that something must be done upon or by the authority of its author. Add this to all the other items and the system is complete, meeting perfectly the necessities of man's nature. THE NECESSARY ORDER OF REVELATION. The proper arrangement of the various parts of any communication designed to convey knowledge from one to others, is an important factor in this subject of _revelation_. Remember "the clear is the true." This is the case in all methodic arrangements; to this rule there are no exceptions. The fundamental truth must first be developed. A child must first be instructed in the rudiments of numbers in order to learn the science of mathematics, otherwise no sensible progress can be made. Intricate problems in Euclid are not to be presented to beginners for solution. So, in religion, the primary thought of the existence of God is the first great truth made known. Second, we are taught that he possesses power, wisdom and goodness. This instruction must also be adapted to the capacity of those who are to be taught. We know that the very young mind needs more simple instruction than the adult. As, of necessity, there was a first man, and a time when that first man began to be, so, of necessity, in the beginning of the life of that man, however perfectly developed his body might have been, his mind was infantile--destitute of the first principles of an education. Object lessons were called for. Here they come in hills and dales, dry lands and running waters, in trees and vines, in shrubs and grass, flowers and fruits, beasts, birds and winged insects and creeping things, and higher up in the sun with his brilliant light, and in the moon with her paler rays, and in all her attending, sparkling stars. Here are the objects for man's first lesson. Just now the wise man of this world, a skeptic, asks the question, Could not the first man, with all these objects before him, learn by the use of reason the fact that all these objects originated from a creator? And if he could he certainly needed no revelation, for, reasoning from nature up to nature's God, he might then, from the order, beauty and harmony of all, reach the idea of his character, and from this deduce a knowledge of his will, and if so a revelation was not necessary. This seems to me very clear, and you often say "the clear is the true." This is my reason for rejecting the idea that a revelation was ever made. Will you, Mr. Christian, grapple with this? I would with pleasure if there was anything in it to grapple with, but you will see nothing real in your premises, for objects teach nothing without an instructor. There lies a brick, pick it up and examine its surface closely; do you, from it, reach the idea of its maker? No. Yet I know it must have been made, for I have seen other bricks made, and this resembles them. Very well. Did you ever see worlds made, and, if so, does our earth resemble them? But when you saw those bricks made were there not several men engaged in their manufacture, as well as horses? There is no analogy in your premises; you beg the question entirely; you take the whole foundation for granted; your argument is "as clear as mud." Had you seen others made by only one maker, then and only then could you by analogy have reached even the idea that ours was made also. Also, the makers of those bricks may have been of the most base and malignant disposition, for you can learn nothing of their disposition from the bricks; they only testify of the skill of their makers--this is all. Do you not see that you give me nothing to grapple with? The truth is this, nature gives you no sufficient foundation for religion. Revelation must of necessity furnish us with that. Without revelation no one can learn of the existence and character of God. The knowledge of his existence, power and wisdom might excite reverence, but this alone could not bring man's religious powers into activity. To this must be added the knowledge of his goodness and kindness towards, and his love of, those who are required to worship him. And in addition to all this, there must be a revelation of the divine will concerning human action, for the term _worship_ indicates submission and obedience; without this, very important elements would be wanting, and the system show great imperfection and want of wisdom--as man could not learn his relation nor obligation to that great Creator and Preserver of all. But give in addition the knowledge of man's relation to and dependence upon God, with a knowledge of his will in the form of law or commands, with promises of good annexed, resting upon the condition of obedience. Such a system of revelation would be perfect, fitted to the necessities of human nature. And you, Mr. Skeptic, have agreed with me, that the nature of man was true and right. Now, when we find a perfectly straight edge, and then find another edge that fits it, we know that the last is also perfectly straight, for straight and crooked edges do not match. Having already found the kind of a revelation that human nature made necessary, in my next I shall show that such a revelation is contained in the Bible. Then as human nature is true, and as the Bible's revelation is exactly fitted to it, the inevitable conclusion will follow that the Bible does contain a revelation from God to man. WHERE SHALL WE TAKE INFIDELS TO GET THEM OUT OF UNBELIEF? Goethe says it is a law of the demons that they must get out at the same place where they sneaked in. This is a very suggestive expression. If a mathematician makes a mistake in the solution of a problem his only chance to get out of the difficulty lies just at the point where the mistake was made. He must remain in perplexity until he finds the mistake and corrects it. This law holds good in all our intellectual operations. Many men are professedly in unbelief. How shall we get them out? This is an important question and needs to be well studied by all Christian ministers. If we can find out just how they got in, then it will be easy to get the honest ones out. But it is well to remember that many professed infidels are _only skeptics_ in heart. They are unbelievers at will. The most effectual remedy for such unbelief, as yet known, is an attack of cramp colic, or some other fearful affliction. Under such circumstances they always surrender. There is not much chance for Gospel means as long as a man's unbelief is simply a profession. His disease is not one of the head, but of the heart; yet our law holds good here. The man himself may repent; may make to himself a new heart and a new spirit. This is his way out. If a man gets into unbelief through a misunderstanding of Bible facts he will never get out short of a better understanding of those same facts. If he gets in through the impression that science and the Bible are in conflict, there is no way to get him out short of a removal of the impression. Hence the importance of ministers being scientists. Many unbelievers claim that the Bible and science conflict, who have never investigated them, and know comparatively nothing of either. This class, too, is in the majority. They are men who ape certain leaders, being under their influence. Many of them love to have us know that they know something about such men as Strauss, notwithstanding their ignorance of _even the man_. To have such a mind do their thinking is the highest of their ambition. There is a good deal of heart disease about these fellows. They really glory in the names of such men as Strauss. He was so far away that they never learned the fact that "he was divorced from his wife, the former actress, Agnese Schebest, and spent his days going about from place to place. His pseudo-theology or mythology ended in a theatrical comedy, and the comedy in a tragedy." "In 1839 this famous Dr. Strauss--who resolved the gospel history of salvation into an incoherent and self-contradictory mythological poem, and denied the existence of a personal God and the immortality of the soul--was duly elected professor of Christian dogmatics and ethics in the University of Zurich, by the party then in power, which consisted mostly of demagogues and frivolous infidels." But the free Swiss would not submit, so the people of the Canton of Zurich rose in their republican majesty and marched to the city under the lead of an energetic pastor, and with the weapons which they hastily collected scared the Strauss clique away; they very courageously took to their heels; then the people of the Canton of Zurich placed the government into the hands of conservative, trustworthy Christian men, and quietly retired to their mountain homes without shedding a drop of blood. The new government elected Mr. Lange in the place claimed, but never occupied, by Strauss; but Mr. Strauss claimed half the salary, and it is said that he enjoyed it, up to 1857 at least. How much influence could such a man in our own country exert over the American mind? For these facts touching the life of Strauss, see "Germany; Its Universities, Theology and Religion," by Phillip Schaff, pages 101, 386. The reader may rely upon the quotations given above. I have taken them with the book referred to open before me. Infidels who investigate the Bible honestly, with reference to an understanding of its contents, are unknown to us. The master spirits in unbelief give abundant evidence of their ignorance of the scriptures of the Bible. Not one in a thousand ever investigated the scriptures of the Bible with pure and honest motives. Many have never investigated it at all. To read a chapter here and there for the sole purpose of finding fault and getting up a difficulty, is not investigation. An honest investigation requires a very different course. All the evidence must be brought into the court and presented in such a manner as to be understood, just as it was given, otherwise the court is not qualified to decide righteously in the case. That all such men as Col. Ingersoll have failed to thus investigate the Bible is evident from the fact that they, to be like him, must be infidels in all their history. It is published to the world that the Colonel was born an infidel. He has been hacking away at religion and the Bible ever since he was a small boy. So his infidelity is not the result of an intelligent investigation of either science or religion. I will not undertake to say what the Colonel's trouble is, but if he was born an infidel it is possible, according to our law, that he will die an unbeliever. Many infidels, governed by a spirit of fanaticism, undoubtedly, have labored with as much earnestness as if the world's salvation depended upon their efforts, without the least hope of bettering its condition, for the false philosophy of materialism which they advocate gives to a man nothing to live for except his own animal nature. This philosophy says all is well as long as you dodge the sharp corners of the laws of your country. If the materialist can avoid paying fines, along with all other penalties of the laws of his country, what need he care for one course of life in preference to another? Do you say he has a conscience? Well, it may be that it is not seared so that he is past feeling. Very few men, I know, ever reach such a depraved condition. And this is doubtless the greatest reason why all infidels, as a general rule, get into mental distress during great bodily afflictions. Many of them are converted by disease of the body, for two reasons: first, they were unbelievers at will, just because it suited their desires, and, second, because they are in possession of a religious nature or conscience. But men who are converted by disease of the body are liable to go back to the old wallow as soon as prosperity and health crown them again. Many men are driven to irreligion through its abuses. I have often thought it a misfortune that we Americans are under the necessity of meeting the infidel literature of the old world, for the simple reason that it is evolved out of the circumstances peculiar to state churches. In America our religion is heroic; that is, it rests upon the merits of its own evidence, and is supported by the voluntary contributions of the people. But in Europe, where the mass of our infidel literature comes from, Christianity is not free and independent, but entangled with the affairs of state, and supported by the secular arm. The result is that difficulties are continually arising out of the unholy alliance which are disgusting to the independent scientific mind. The natural result is to drive such persons into irreligion. Where men are educated in both science and religion, and have not been all their lives called upon to look upon religion in a secular light, tangled up in the interests of politics and law, there should be no fears on account of any literature that infidels may pass around. The misfortune that I speak of is not with such men, but with the uneducated in religion and science, who are more than anxious to find an excuse for irreligion. Christianity fears nothing in the light. * * * * * The desires that have only a bodily end and aim, that are unconnected with the high, holy, and noble purposes of a pure, true, and good life, are false desires, and should be cast off. COUNCILS--No. II. UNITY OF THE ROMAN CHURCH. In our October article on Councils we closed with the council that was assembled by Mrs. Irene in the year 787. The Franks, having heard that a council at Constantinople had ordained the adoration of images, assembled, in the year 794, by order of Charles, son of Pepin, afterwards named Charlemagne, a very numerous council. In this council the second council of Nice is spoken of as an impertinent and arrogant synod held in Greece for the promotion of the worship of pictures. This council, held at Frankfort, was composed of three hundred clergymen from England, Italy, France and Germany. Aventin, Hinemar and Regina say the Frankfortians rescinded the decisions of the false Grecian synod in favor of image worship. In 842 a grand council was held at Constantinople, convened by the Empress Theodora. Here the worship of images was solemnly established. The Greeks still have a feast in honor of this council called "_Orthodoxia_." Theodora did not preside at this council. "In 861 a council was held at Constantinople consisting of three hundred and eighteen bishops, assembled by the Emperor Michael. St. Ignatius, patriarch of Constantinople, was deposed and Photius elected. "In 866 another council was held at Constantinople, in which Pope Nicholas III. was deposed for contumacy and excommunicated. "In 869 was another council at Constantinople; in this Photius, in turn, was deposed and excommunicated and St. Ignatius restored. "In 879 another council was held in Constantinople, in which Photius, already restored, was acknowledged as true patriarch by the legates of Pope John VIII., who declares all those to be Judases who say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. "In 1122-3 a council was held at Rome, in the church of St. John of Lateran, by Pope Calixtus II. This was the first general council assembled by the popes. The emperors of the west had now scarcely any authority, and the emperors of the east, pressed by the Mahometans and by the crusaders, held none but little wretched councils. In this council the bishops complained heavily of the monks. 'They possess,' said they, 'the churches, the lands, the castles, the tithes, the offerings of the living and the dead; they have only to take from us the ring and the crosier.' _The monks remained in possession._" "In 1139 was another council of Lateran, by Pope Innocent II. It is said a thousand bishops were present. Here the ecclesiastical tithes are declared to be of _divine right_, and all laymen possessing any of them are excommunicated. "In 1215 was the last general council of Lateran, by Pope Innocent III. Four hundred and twelve bishops and eight hundred abbots were here. This was in the time of the Crusades, and the popes have established a Latin patriarch at Jerusalem and one at Constantinople. These patriarchs attend this council. This council declares, among other things, that 'no one can be saved out of the Catholic church.' The word transubstantiation was not known until after this council. It forbade the establishment of new religious orders; but, since that time, no less than eighty have been instituted. It was in this council that Raimond, Count of Toulouse, was stripped of all his lands. "In 1245 a council assembled at the city of Lyons. Innocent IV. brings thither the Emperor of Constantinople, John Puleologus, and makes him sit beside him. He deposes the Emperor Frederick as a felon, and gives the cardinals a red but, as a sign of hostility to Frederick, and the source of thirty years of civil war. "In 1274 another council is held at the city of Lyons. Five hundred bishops are present, seventy great and a thousand lesser abbots. The Greek emperor, Michael Paleologus, that he may have the protection of the Pope, sends his Greek patriarch, Theophanes, to unite, in his name, with the Latin church; but the Greek church disowns these bishops. "In 1311 Pope Clement V. assembled a general council in the small town of Vienne, in Dauphiny, in which he abolishes the order of the Templars. It is here ordained that the Begares, Beguins and Beguines shall be burned. These were a species of heretics '_to whom was imputed all that had formerly been imputed to the primitive Christians_.'" So says Voltaire. He does not, like the pitiful blaspheming infidels of to-day, try to heap all this corruption of the dark ages upon primitive Christianity. No! The hull of Voltaire's soul was too great for such a deed. "In 1414 the great council of Constance was assembled by an emperor who resumes his rights, viz: by Sigismund. Here Pope John XXIII., convicted of numerous crimes, is deposed, and John Huss and Jerome of Sprague convicted of _obstinacy and burned_. "In 1431 a council was held at Basle, where they in vain depose Pope Eugene IV., who is too clever for the council. This was a stormy council, and it is said that Eugene regretted in _his_ old age that he ever left his monastery. "In 1438 a council assembled at Ferrara, transferred to Florence, where the excommunicated pope excommunicates the council, and declares it guilty of high treason. Here a feigned union is made with the Greek church, crushed by the Turkish synods held sword in hand. "Pope Julius II. would have had his council of Lateran in 1512 pass for an ecumenical council. In it that pope solemnly excommunicated Louis XII., King of France, laid France under an interdict, summoned the whole Parliament of Provence to appear before him, and excommunicated all the philosophers because most of them had taken part with Louis XII. Yet this council was not like that of Ephesus, called the council of robbers. "In 1537 the council of Trent was first assembled at Mantua, by Paul III., afterwards at Trent, in 1543, and terminated in Dec., 1561, under Pius VI." See vol. Phil. Dic. "Pope Pius IX. convened a council in 1869, which in July, 1870, decreed the _personal infallability of the Pope_ in matters of faith and morals, to be a dogma of the church." Reader, if you will digest this little piece of history, you will doubtless discover good reasons for asserting the right of private judgment and the liberty of conscience. _Truth stands true to her god; men alone vascillate._ FREE-THOUGHT IN GERMANY, FRANCE AND RUSSIA, OR RUSSIAN NIHILISM. BY FITZ CUNLIFFE OWEN. LIBRARY MAG. VOL. 3. Rationalism and radicalism exist to a certain extent in every country of Europe. But the Social Democrats of Germany and Austria and the Communists of France and Spain turn with horror from Russian revolutionists, who consider the programme of the Paris commune of 1871 condemnably weak, and Felix Pyat, Cluseret and their companions as little better than conservatives. The Social Democrats and even the Communists of the rest of Europe have in view aims which, no matter how fantastic, are always of a sufficiently defined nature. They look forward to an entirely democratic form of government, and hope for a recognization of the social world, under which all capital and property would be held either by the State or Commune for the equal benefit of everybody. They are levellers, but they are not destroyers. Take the right of property from the citizens of a government and the greatest motive to industry and prosperity is gone. The revolutionary party in Russia has no definite aims of either reorganization or improvement. In its sight everything as it now exists is rotten, and before anything new and good can be created all existing institutions must be utterly destroyed. Religion, the state, the family, laws, property, morality, are all equally odious, and must be rooted out and abolished. It is because "nothing," as it exists at present, finds favor in their eyes that they have been called "Nihilists." They maintain that no one should be bound by laws or even moral obligations of any kind, but that every body should be allowed to do exactly as he pleases. They desire to break up the actual social organization into mere individualism, with entire independence for each separate person. Their object is anarchy in the very truest sense of the word. They are only modest enough to decline the attempt to create a new order of things in the place of what they propose to destroy. That they intend to leave for a better and more enlightened generation. The following, from a Nihilist paper, Narodnia Volya (The Will of the People), which is published at St. Petersburg by means of secret presses, will set them forth in their true inwardness: "The Russian press is bent almost double by the imperial government. Notwithstanding its disagreeable position it does its utmost to curry favor of its oppressors. Whenever thefts, murders, or incendiarisms take place in Russia the press invariably attributes them to the Nihilists. There is an old proverb which says, 'Slander, slander; some result will always be obtained.' Judging from the tone of the press some result has been obtained. According to its statements the Nihilists are little better than wild beasts. We do not venture to assert that there are no bad men in our ranks, but are yours entirely free from them? The number of bad persons among the Nihilists is so very small that we need hardly enumerate them. Since 1862 over 17,000 persons have been exiled to Siberia for political offenses. "You accuse us of adopting means of action which are unjustifiable in every way. But what can we do? We are reduced to silence. We only adopt questionable means of action very rarely, and then only in self-defense; whereas you use them daily. "The money obtained from private individuals by means of theft and blackmail has not been levied by order of the 'committee,' but by certain unscrupulous Nihilists acting on their own behalf. However, we are all the more ready to admit that such things have been done when we remember that only five such cases are known to have taken place. "Do not accuse us of being murderers, because of our attempts to take the life of His Most Sacred Majesty? Why, we would most gladly accomplish his destruction, and he has only escaped until now in consequence of the many cowards in our ranks! It has been stated that Solowjew's attempt in April last has disturbed the rest and peace of mind of many harmless and respectable citizens. Some of the Liberal papers even go so far as to say that it will have the effect of producing a reaction in favor of the government. Why, what idle and stupid talk! These good newspaper proprietors, who love their ease and their books, must have been asleep not to have perceived that the reaction began sixteen years ago, not in favor of the government, but against it. "We are quite persuaded that if Solowjew's attempt had succeeded, everybody would talk in a different manner, even the slaves and asses who surrounded the throne would have rejoiced. "Do not be surprised at these political assassinations, but rather be astonished that they are not more frequent. Unfortunately for our cause, the Nihilists are too humanitarian, and hence are incapable of carrying out many necessary measures. Perhaps in time they will acquire the aptitude necessary in critical moments; perhaps it will be your conduct which will effect this change in them. Then in that case the responsibility of terrorism and assassination will rest with you, and not with us." * * * * * How many amusing and ridiculous scenes should we witness if each pair of men that secretly laugh at each other were to do it openly! AXIOMS LYING AT THE FOUNDATION OF ALL PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. Out of nothing, nothing comes. Into nothing, nothing goes. These are foundation axioms underlying the entire system of Christian theology. The first looks backward, and the second looks forward. The first correllates with the saying, "So things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." The converse of this is the following: Things which are seen were made of unseen things; that is, the visible universe is the manifestation of the invisible. The real universe is the invisible. There is nothing that can not be thrown into the invisible. Even the diamond has been thrown into solution, and all solutions may be thrown into the invisible by heat. The question, What is matter? has puzzled the best minds of earth, and puzzled all, both infidels and Christians, as much as any other question. The visible, organic universe was created, but it was created out of the invisible. The invisible is eternal. There is an eternal world, and that is the invisible and real universe, without which the visible would not be, for of nothing, nothing comes. All matter is to be referred to antecedent substance--that which lies under and causes it to be. Substance, strictly speaking, lies in the invisible. Matter, properly speaking, is an effect, which is the visible manifestation of an unseen substance, and this is eternal. God created the universe by means of eternal substance. He is the king eternal. The time never was when he was the king of nothing. It is said of Leibnitz that he thought inert matter insufficient to explain the phenomena of body, and had recourse to the entelechies of Aristotle, or the _substantial forms_ of scholastic philosophy, conceiving of them as primitive forces, constituting the substance of matter, atoms of substance, but not of matter _imperishable_, but subject to transformation. This view of the atomic theory is two-fold: First, the atomic invisible, as the very term _atom_ indicates, for it is from "ha temno," which means _not cut_--literally _indivisible_. You can't cut an atom chemically or otherwise, unless you are working upon that which is an atom in the loose and more modern sense of the term. You may reduce matter chemically to the invisible or underlying substance, but beyond this you can not cut? Can you run it into nothing? No. Into nothing nothing goes. Physicists are indebted to the oldest philosophers, who lived prior to Democrites, for the use of the term atom. Those oldest philosophers used the term to indicate something that was not matter, viz: immaterial substance. The term in its primary sense is applicable nowhere else. The invisible world of substance is undoubtedly eternal. But those men who try to make this fact an argument against the existence of God are guilty of the most stupid nonsense and impudence, for, having allowed eternity not only to substance, but to _material_ substance, they have no right in logic to deny eternity to life and mind; because it is as easy, and as rational, to conceive of the eternity of one thing known to exist as of another. But the idea that the visible world is eternal is in direct conflict with the facts of science, which establish beyond contradiction the mutable nature of all organized bodies. Aristotle, though a believer in the existence of God, did affirm the world's eternity, and therefore held that there never was any first male or female in the history of any animals whatsoever, but affirmed, on the contrary that one begat another infinitely, without any beginning. This thought was so repugnant to common sense that Aristotle himself seemed to be skeptical about it, admitting it to be a disputable thing. After affirming his notion he added, "If the world had a beginning, and if men were once earth-born, then must they have been, in all probability, either generated as worms, out of putrefaction, or else out of eggs." But the question comes up for an answer, From whence came the eggs? Old Epicurus, after Aristotle, fancied that the first men and animals were formed in certain wombs or bags growing out of the earth, by a fortuitous concourse of dead atoms. Here we have the last _home stretch_ of all physicists in their efforts to get rid of the Christian idea of creation; beyond it no modern infidel has traveled in his speculations, nor ever will. But if men were formed from eggs growing out of the earth, or from bags, or from wombs created by a fortuitous concourse of dead atoms, by chance, why, the motion of atoms being as brisk and vigorous as ever, should we not expect the same thing to occur occasionally throughout all the ages? Anaximander, however, concluded that men, because they require longer time than other animals to be hatched up, were at first generated in the bellies of fishes, and there nourished till they were able to defend and shift for themselves, and were then disgorged and cast upon dry land. So we are driven to the conclusion that there is nothing in the world too absurd for those men, both ancient and modern, to swallow down in their efforts to get rid of the notion of an intelligent creation by the hand of an intelligent creator. ESTOPPELS; OR, FOSSILIZATION. In our religion we find no law requiring uniformity of thought. Think the same things. Be of the same opinion. These and like statements are no part of our religion. Faith and opinion are not the same. All Christians have one faith, "the faith of Christ." "Be of the same mind and of the same judgment." "Speak the same things." These are to be taken in their proper relations. The made up judgment is the result of faith in the judgment of Christ. "I judge nothing by myself; he that judgeth me is the Lord." The one great mind enjoined is the result of thought upon the one great subject of the life of Christ, which is given as the light of men. These imperatives are summed up in the beautiful expression, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." Uniformity of thoughts or opinions is a very different thing. A man would be considered worse than a knave who would throw chains around the human intellect, so as to put an end to progress in thought; it would be the stagnation of all in which we are most interested. Christians are not to be charged with any such wickedness, for they are using all their powers to produce thought; money and talent are freely bestowed in many ways to get men to think, and then decide, not in reference to opinions but facts; not in reference to things which are matters of opinion only, but of the living object of faith, Christ and Christian duty. There is no system of things in which investigation, liberty of thought and action, upon all matters of interest to our humanity, both as respects this world and the world to come, is more encouraged and insisted upon. Wicked and unholy thoughts only are prohibited. Who would paint every flower of the same hue? Who would trim all the trees of the forest into one and the same shape? Or, who is so foolish as to want all faces cast into one mould? Who would chain human thought or mould the opinions of men so that they should not only be one in Christ, the greatest living fact in history, but one in every other being known in the world's history--one in opinions? The freeist thing in the universe is thought. The liberties of thought are charter liberties from the King of Kings. The spirit of man is free in its normal state. You can not chain it in slavery against its will. No. It knows no servitude but the voluntary. But, then, its wanderings are many. In the field of search after beauty, rectitude and truth, many minds may come into collision. But greater evils would result from chaining them all to one spot, and thus ending progress in many things of interest lying in the realm of thought. Of all the varieties known among men those of thought are the most sublime and useful. This variety causes the investigation of every interest; it brings every truth and every error to the surface. Men have made many attempts to check the onward march of intellect. But every attempt in that direction is marked by some great dread. Men are not anxious to put on the brakes unless they are in fear of being wrecked. Nothing is more dangerous in any government than perfect indifference to public interests. Men in places of public trust always need watching. Irresponsible power, it is said, would corrupt an archangel, and is, doubtless, unknown among the inhabitants of the better land. Among men there is great liability. Every political candidate has his accusations, his promises, and scheme, with which he confronts his rival and agitates the minds of the people. So we have been saved from that stagnation of thought which has retarded progress among other nations. Many men, seeking office, have been wise enough to see the danger to their interests of an expose of corruption. So they have been perfectly willing that mechanics, artisans and farmers should investigate and expose to public view all the questions of interest belonging to our government, but good Christians, "and especially preachers, entering the field of political investigation, at once forfeit their right to the crown of life.(?)" But just how it is that lawyers, doctors and politicians will all reach heaven in spite of political action, and preachers will sink to perdition on account of the same, is a problem among problems that has never yet been satisfactorily solved. Are we to conclude that such men as Generals Hancock and Garfield, along with a great many more, had, and have, no religion to be disturbed? Or is there a double portion of sacrifice, the sacrifice of principle and liberty, demanded at the hands of ministers of the Gospel of Christ? How is this? We are anxious to know. Are the politicians of the country the voluntary scapegoats of the nation, who risk their own salvation for political toil, which, from its character, would, according to a very common opinion, kill out the religion of all the saints in America? Surely we ought to feel grateful to the political sinners who so willingly take all the risk of being shut out of Paradise that they may have the exclusive right of controlling the offices of the government. They seem to say to us Christians, Hear us, ye hard-thinking toilers and aspirants to the realms of bliss while we proclaim to you the perils of our position; we warn you against the crime of accustoming yourselves to the investigation of the political and civil interests of the day, and let not your devout meditations be disturbed by secular pursuits. Read your Bibles and other pious books; attend to all your prayer meetings and all your philanthropic societies. What is the object of all this pious policy? Is it to keep the national mind as far as possible in a state of political stagnation, or, otherwise, to ostracise politically the preachers of the land with reference to party success? How is this? Are the preachers of the United States a dangerous element in our land? If they are, then the fewer we have of them the better we are off. Do any but infidels take that view of the subject? It correllates with infidelity, but not with Christianity. TO KEEP A ROOM PURE. To keep a room purified it is only necessary to keep a pitcher or some other vessel full of water in it. The water will absorb all the respired gases. The colder the water is the greater is its capacity to hold the gases. At ordinary temperature a pail of water will absorb a pint of carbonic acid gas and several pints of ammonia. The capacity is nearly doubled by reducing the water to the temperature of ice. Water kept awhile in a room is unfit for use. The pump should always be emptied before catching water for use. Impure water is more injurious than impure air. * * * * * Man, being essentially active, must find in activity his joy, as well as his beauty and glory, and labor, like everything else that is good, is its own reward. INTERESTING FACTS. Glass windows were used for lights in 1180. Chimneys first put up to houses in 1236. Tallow candles for lights in 1290. Spectacles invented by an Italian in 1240. Paper made from linen in 1302. Woolen cloth made in England in 1341. Art of printing from movable types in 1440. The first book printed with movable types in 1450. Watches first made in Germany in 1447. Telescopes invented by Porta and Janson in 1590. Tea first brought from China to Europe in 1501. Circulation of blood discovered by Hervey in 1610. Newspaper first established in 1629. Pendulum clocks first invented in 1639. Barometer invented by Torricelli in 1535. Steam engine invented in 1649. Bread made with yeast in 1650. Cotton planted in the United States in 1759. Fire engine invented in 1685. Telegraph invented by Morse in 1832. * * * * * CURE FOR A FELON.--"Take common salt, dry it in the oven, then pound it fine and mix it with turpentine, equal parts. Put it on a rag and wrap it around the finger, and as soon as it gets dry put on some more, and in twenty-four hours the felon will be as dead as a door nail."--_Old Mr. Mix._ Transcriber's Note The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. 
28710	----	THE Christian Foundation; OR, Scientific and Religious Journal. DEVOTED TO THE INTERESTS OF CIVILIZATION, LITERATURE AND CHRISTIANITY. BY AARON WALKER. _Office, No. 1 Howard Block, N.W. Cor. Main and Mulberry Streets,_ KOKOMO, IND. Science, properly understood, and the Bible rightly interpreted, harmonize. INDIANAPOLIS: CARLON & HOLLENBECK, PRINTERS. 1880. INDEX TO VOL. I. The conflict between Christianity and unbelief during all the centuries, or what Christianity has encountered, 1-5 The Bible--the background and the picture, 5-16 The origin of dating from the Christian era, 16 The cardinal virtues, 16 A funeral oration by Col. G. De Veveue, and a reply to the same, 17-20 The motive that led men to adopt Darwinism, 20-23 Shall we abandon our religion, 23-26 The domain or province of science, 26-30 Blind force or intelligence, which, 30-33 Species or units of nature, 33-38 The common sin of the church, 38 Mouth glue, 38 Miscellaneous, 39 Man and the Chimpanzee, 40 Spontaneous generation is against axiomatic truth, 40 What stone implements point to, 40 Professor Huxley on the word soul, 40 The influence of the Bible upon civil and religious liberty, 41-50 The orthodoxy of Atheism and Ingersolism, by S.L. Tyrrell, 50-53 The Shasters and Vedas, and the Chinese government, religion, etc., 54-58 Ancient cosmogonies, 58-65 Question relative to force, 65 Question relative to the production of life by dead atoms, 65 Harmonies among unbelievers, Voltaire, Needham, Maillet, Holbach and Spinoza, 66-69 Is God the author of deception and falsehood, or Ahab's prophets, 69-72 Darwinism weighed in the balances, 72-78 Did the sun stand still--was it possible, 79-80 The influence of the Bible upon moral and social institutions, 81-91 Law, cause and effect, 91-93 The inconsistency of unbelievers, the unknown, or incomprehensible; we know the incomprehensible, but no man knows the unknown, 96-98 Was it right for the Israelites to engage in war and slay men, 98-101 It only needs to be seen to be hated, or the speech of a radical infidel; art liberty, and political free discussions, who may indulge in them; self-government and the ballot-box; Calvan Blanchard's Thomas Paine, 101-105 Did the race ascend from a low state of barbarism, 105-108 The flood viewed from a scientific and Biblical standpoint and Dr. Hale's calculation as respects the capacity of the ark, 108-111 The Mosaic law in Greece, in Rome and in the common law of England, 111-115 Did Adam fall or rise, 116-118 Did they dream it, or was it so? Was it mythical? Could the witnesses be mistaken, 118-119 Three important questions which infidels can not answer, 119 Many questions that can not be answered by unbelievers, 120 Is there a counterfeit without a genuine, or Christianity not mythical in its origin, 121-130 Professor Owen upon the line between savage and civilized people, 130 Origen Bachelor on design in nature, 131-138 Blunder on and blunder on, or blunders in science; the extinct animals, 138-143 Draper's conflict between religion and science does not involve Protestant religion, 143-146 What Christianity has done for cannibals, 146-148 Are we simply animals? And the lexicographers on the term translated _Spirit_; its currency in ancient and modern times, 149-154 What are our relations to the ancient law, and the ancient prophetic teachings, 155-158 The funeral services of the National Liberal League, 158-159 Huxley's Paradox, 159 The triumphing reign of light--_Winchell_, 160 Voltaire and an atheist at loggerheads upon the origin of life, 160 Only a perhaps--_Voltaire_, 160 The Sabbath, the Law, the Commonwealth of Israel, and the Christ; the law of Christ bound upon the world, 161-174 Infidels live in doubting castle--by _Alexander Campbell_, in 1835, true to-day, 174-177 Infidelity, or the French and American revolutions in their relations to Thomas Paine, 178-184 Shall we unchain the tiger, or the fruits of infidelity?--by _A.G. Maynard_, 184-187 The struggle--shall we have an intellectual religion, or a religion of passion at the expense of truth, 188-195 The records respecting the death of Thomas Paine, 195-198 Theodore Parker on the Bible, 198 The last words of Voltaire, 198 Three reasons for repudiating infidelity--by _Bishop Whipple_, 199 Ingersoll's contradiction, and an old poem, 199-200 The work of the Holy Spirit; What is it? What are its relations and uses?, 201-211 Credibility of the evidence of the resurrection of the Christ, 211-215 Broad-gauge religion--shall the conflict cease?, 215-221 Papal authority in the bygone; the infidel's amusing attitude, 221-229 "Even now are there many anti-Christs in the world", 229-232 What is to be the religion of the future?, 232-235 Bill of indictments against Protestants--eight in number, 235-238 A summary of grand truths, 238 A crazy pope, 238 Ethan Allen, the infidel, and his dying daughter--a poem, 239 Truth is immortal--_Bancroft_, 240 The fountain of happiness, 241-249 Indebtedness to revelation--colloquial--by _P.T. Russell_ No. 1, 249-254 No. 2, 289-293 No. 3, 331-334 No. 4, the divine origin of language and religion, 375-379 No. 5, language and religion, 408-412 No. 6, the nature of man necessitated revelation, 457-464 Do we need the Bible?, 255-259 The unfair treatment of Bible language by infidels, 260-263 Geology in its struggles and growth as a science, 263-267 Pantheism is deception and hypocrisy, 268-273 The origin of life and mind, 273-279 A hard question for infidels to answer, 279 Difficulty in the fire cloud theory, 280 The infidel's offset to the doctrine of Calvinism, 280 The importance and nature of reformation from sin--a sermon, 281-289 Thomas Paine was not an infidel when he wrote his work entitled "Common Sense", 293-295 A cluster of thoughts from Jenning's internal evidences, with modifications and additions, 295-300 The resurrection of the Christ, 300-304 Public notoriety of the Scriptures, 304-305 What people have been and done without the Bible, 306-310 The latest evolutionary conflict, _from the Cincinnati Gazette_, 310-314 Books of the New Testament, Porphyry, Julian, Hierocles and Celsus, with a tabular view of the ancient persecutions, dated and located with Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, 315-318 Testimony of Tacitus, Juvenal and Seneca, 316-317 Diocletian's coin blotting out the very name Christian, 317 Strauss--who wrote them, 317 When the books of the New Testament were written, along with contemporary landmarks, tabulated, 318 Carlyle's estimate of the book of Job in his own words, 319 What I live for, 319 The Molecule God, _Punch's_ poem, 320 The divinity of our religion as it is conceded by its enemies, 321-331 Infidels in a logical tornado, 334-338 Religious hysteria, or instantaneous conversion, by George Herbert Curteis, M.A., and how John Wesley got to be a "faith alone man," convulsionists, etc., 338-345 Things hard to believe, by D.H. Patterson, 345-348 The result of ignorance viewed from the skeptic's standpoint, or Duke of Somerset and Huxley quotations, or the contrast, 348-349 What do evolutionists teach? Dedicated to C.T., of Danville, Indiana. Origin of germs, 349-355 When should children become church members, 355-356 Our indebtedness to the Jews, 357-358 The second five points in Calvinism, with two other fives, 358-359 Benjamin Franklin's epitaph as an exponent of his faith; honesty, or the inner-self, 360 Law and atonement, 361-370 The simplicity of the science of mind, individual, what does it mean, 370-375 Mind and instinct, or strictures on the teachings of evolutionists, 379-382 Revival of learning--to whom are we indebted? The art of printing originated with the love of the Bible, 382-386 The Councils, or unity of the Roman Church, 386-392 Infidels in evidence in favor of Christianity, Logansport, 392-395 Woman and her rank, 395-398 Ingersoll's estimation of a drunkard, logical deduction, 398 The infidel Rousseau on the books of the New Testament, 399 The religion of the Jews known among heathen writers, 400 Centuries before Christ--Berosus, Manetho and Sanchoniathon confirm the facts of the Bible, 400 Coleridge on the Bible, 400 The life and character of our religion, 401-408 Carlyle's estimate of the Bible, 412 Force and life, _Dr. J.L. Parsons_, 413-418 Alleged contradictions answered, _by request from Logansport_, 418-421 Some things that need thought, 421-423 The religion and society of Greece, 424-427 The relation of Christianity to human greatness, 427-431 Col. Ingersoll's truth telling business, logical deduction, 431 The theory of the original Freethinkers as given by themselves, with remarks upon their advancement, 432-435 What a man may be and be a Christian, or Col. Ingersoll _tied up_, 435-437 Life and force are not the same, 438 Macaulay on Sunday, 438 Napoleon Bonaparte's estimate of the Christ, 439-440 Little Myrtie Bogg, 440 Is the sinner a moral agent in his conversion, 441 Where shall we take infidels to get them out of unbelief, 464 Councils--No. II, 468 Free thought in Germany, France and Russia; or, Russian Nihilism, 471 Axioms lying at the foundation of all philosophy and religion, 474 Estoppels; or, fossilization, 476 To keep a room pure, 479 Interesting facts, 480 Transcriber's Note The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. 
25931	----	SCIENCE AND THE INFINITE Or Through a Window in the Blank Wall by SYDNEY T. KLEIN [Illustration: "THE MYSTERY OF THE APEX" VIEW NO. 3] Second Impression London William Rider & Son, Limited Cathedral House, Paternoster Row, E.C. 1917 First Published November 1912 Reprinted September 1917 TO THE RIGHT HON. ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR PREFACE In venturing to prepare this little volume for the eyes of the reading public, I am fully aware of the difficulties of the subject and the inadequacy of the expressions I have been able to employ, but I have made the attempt at the request of those who have found consolation in some of the thoughts herein embodied; and the messages left by others before they passed away, embolden me to hope that many others may find in this volume some points of interest which will help them to appreciate better the "joys" which this life has for those who know how to look for them, and that perhaps others may even gain a clearer conception of that which awaits us beyond the Veil. Many of us allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the small worries and vexations of everyday life, clothing them with a reality quite disproportionate to their importance; we are too apt to look at them, as it were, through a powerful microscope, piling power upon power of magnification, until we have made mountains out of mole-hills, whereas if we treated them at their true value we should look at them through a telescope, in the reverse direction, when they would appear not only trivial, but would be seen to be too remote to have any material effect on our lives. The sub-title of this volume, and indeed its inception, arose from my lately coming in contact with one of those establishments which are doing for humanity what a mother's arms do for the child who is "sick unto death"--a beautiful home with cheerful rooms and cheerful nurses, where patients are tenderly cared for after severe operations, carried through by our most famous surgeons, some cases, alas, almost hopeless from the first. At the head of this establishment was one of those kindly self-abnegating personalities, whose loving sympathy and encouragement have comforted the dying and smoothed the path for many a weary pilgrim passing from this life to the next. With immense responsibilities on her shoulders, and after a day full of strenuous work, the head of this establishment would often sit through the night for hours by the couch of those whose lives could not possibly be prolonged for more than a few days. It was a few simple answers elicited by the questions brought to me from those poor sufferers, and the way such answers seemed to calm anxieties connected with the fear of death and to render the impenetrable Veil more transparent, which suggested the title, "Through a Window in the Blank Wall." I do not wish to lay claim to having made any startling discovery; similar thoughts, especially those concerning the non-reality of Time and Space, have no doubt occurred to others, but the whole problem "What is the Reality?" has been insistently pressing on me ever since I can remember, and I have tried to give here in simple colloquial language, without any attempt at rhetoric, the conclusions I have personally come to as to what is the Truth. The study of ancient and modern philosophic theories is useful as showing how impossible it is, for even the greatest thinkers of any age, to grasp the Absolute with our understanding or to measure the Infinite with our finite units. The propounders of all these theories seem to me to be, without exception, looking in the wrong direction for the "Reality of Being"; they are all arguing from the standpoint of "Intellectualism" in a similar manner to that of the "Theologians" referred to in View Three. Our latest expositor of this, M. Henri Bergson, bases his theory upon "Life" being the Reality; this he postulates is a "flowing" in Time, and _Movement_ therefore becomes for him the Reality; and yet we know that Motion is but the product of Time and Space, and these are only the two modes or _limitations_ under which our senses act and upon which our very consciousness of living depends. Surely the Absolute cannot be localised, must be Omnipresent, and therefore independent of Space--cannot have a beginning or end, must be Omniscient, and therefore independent of Time; these two unrealities can therefore have no existence in "Reality of Being." If, then, there is any truth in "Intuition," we have, in this theory, the Reality, "Life," not only limited by the unreal but actually dependent for its very existence upon those limitations! In these Views I have attempted, on the contrary, to show that Time and Space have no existence apart from our Physical Senses; they are the modes only under which we appreciate motion, or what we call physical phenomena, and as our conceptional knowledge is based upon our perceptional knowledge, our very consciousness of living is limited by Time and Space, and we must surely therefore look behind consciousness itself, beyond the conditioning in Time and Space for the Reality of Being, otherwise _physical motion_, the product of these two limitations, would become the Reality of Being. I have also suggested reasons for looking upon physical life as a mode of frequency, akin to Light, Electricity, Magnetism, Chemical Action, the Vibration of a Tuning Fork, or the Swing of a Pendulum, and therefore a transient phenomenon having to do only with the Race; Life can under these conditions only be looked upon as a reality in the same sense in which all other forms of energy or matter appear real to our finite senses--namely, as the shadows or manifestations of the Absolute on our limited plane of Consciousness. However strongly I may be convinced--as I am--of the truth of my arguments, and however sure I may be that many others will not only agree with my conclusions, but will see that in "Introspection" rather than in "Intellectualism" lies the key to the Mystery, I do not wish to appear dogmatic in any of the suggestions contained in this volume; I am stating my own convictions, but at the same time I fully recognise that the presentation of the Absolute, with its infinite variety of aspects, must necessarily be different to every individual; we are all of the same genus, but each individual Ego is, as it were, a different species, and I do not therefore expect that my attempt to solve the Riddle of the Universe will appeal to all alike. It is, however, a true saying that "there is something to be learnt from every human being," and if I have by these suggestions succeeded in augmenting the number of those who have already started on the true "Quest," and have helped, however imperfectly, to enrich some lives with the "joy" of knowing their oneness with the All-loving, my aim has indeed been attained. SYDNEY T. KLEIN. "HATHERLOW," REIGATE, _1st June 1912._ CONTENTS PAGE VIEW ONE CLEARING THE APPROACH 1 VIEW TWO THE VISION 19 VIEW THREE MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 36 VIEW FOUR LOVE IN ACTION 71 VIEW FIVE THE PHYSICAL FILM 100 VIEW SIX SPACE 122 VIEW SEVEN TIME 141 VIEW EIGHT CREATION 165 SCIENCE AND THE INFINITE VIEW ONE CLEARING THE APPROACH The proof that the Human Race is still in its infancy may be seen in the fact that we still require Symbolism to help us to maintain and carry forward abstract thought to higher levels, even as children require picture books for that purpose. The Glamour of Symbolism, Rapture of Music, and Ideal of Art, which come to us in later years, had their beginnings when to the child every blade of grass was a fairy tale and a grass plot a marvellous fairy forest. The great aspiration of the Human Race is to gain a knowledge of the Reality, the Noumenon behind the phenomenon; but the fact that from infancy we have been accustomed to confine our attention wholly to the objective, believing that to be the reality, has surrounded us with a concrete boundary wall through which we can only at times, with difficulty, get transient glimpses of that which is beyond. It is only in recent years that we have been able to realise that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow or its manifestation in the Physical Universe, and that Time and Space have no existence apart from our physical senses, in short, that they are only the modes or limits under which those senses act or receive their impressions and by which they are necessarily rendered finite. The difficulty is that our physical senses only perceive the surface of our surroundings, and that we have hitherto been looking at the Woof of Nature as though it were the glass of a window covered with patterns, smudges, flies, &c., comprising all that we call physical phenomena and which, when analysed in terms of Time and Space, produce the appearance of succession and motion. It requires a keener perception, unbounded by these limitations, to look through the glass at the Reality which is beyond. I propose then in a series of short views, through a window not hitherto unshuttered and in a direction which I believe has not before been attempted, to lead those of my readers who have the necessary aspiration, patience, and, above all, strenuous persistence, to a watch-tower, situated well above the mists and illusions of our ordinary everyday thoughts, whence they will find it possible to get a glimpse of a strange new country, and where those who have by practice once attained to its clear perception, will be able to continue the study by themselves and thus get further insight into that wonderful region of Thought which I have called "True Occultism"--the knowledge of the Invisible which is the Real in place of the Visible which is only its shadow. Let us first try and understand the conditions under which phenomena are presented to us. In our perception of sight, we find the greater the light, the greater the shadow; a light placed over a table throws a shadow on the floor, though not sufficient to prevent our seeing the pattern of the carpet; increase the light and the shadow appears now so dark that no pattern or carpet can be seen; not that there is now less light under the table but the light above has to our sense of sight created or made manifest a greater darkness. Thus, throughout the Universe, as interpreted by our Physical Ego, we find phenomena ranging themselves under the form of positive and negative, the apparently Real and the Unreal. The Good making manifest its negative Evil. The Beautiful " " " " Ugly. The True " " " " False. Knowledge " " " " Ignorance. Light " " " " Darkness. Heat " " " " Cold. But the negatives have no real existence. As in the case of light we see that the shadow is only the absence of light, so the negative of Goodness, _i.e._ Evil, may in reality be looked upon as folly or wasting of opportunity for exercising the Good. Owing to their limitations our thoughts are based upon _relativity_, and it is hardly thinkable that we could, under our present conditions, have any cognisance of the positive without its negative; we shall in fact see later on that it is by examining the Physical, the negative or shadow, that we can best gain a knowledge of the Spiritual, the positive or real. The first step to a clear understanding of this, is to recognise that it is not we who are looking out upon Nature but that it is the Reality which is ever trying to enter and come into touch with us through our senses, and is persistently trying to waken within us a knowledge of the sublimest truths. It is difficult to realise this, as from infancy we have been accustomed to confine our attention wholly to the objective, believing that to be the reality. Let us try and grasp this fact. If we analyse our sense of sight, we find that the only impression made on our bodies by external objects is the image formed upon the retina; we have no cognisance of the separate electro-magnetic rills forming that image, which, reflected from all parts of an object, fall upon the eye at different angles, constituting form, and with different frequencies giving colour to that image; that image is only formed when we turn our eyes in the right direction to allow those rills to enter; and, whereas those rills are incessantly beating on the outside of our sense organ when the eyelid is closed, they can make no impression unless we allow them to enter by raising that shutter. It is not then any volition from within that goes out to seize upon and grasp the truths from Nature, but the phenomena are as it were forcing their way into our consciousness. This is more difficult to realise when the object is near to us, as we are apt to confound it with our sense of touch, which requires us to stretch out our hand to the object, but it is clearer when we take an object far away. In our telescopes we catch the rills of light which started from a star a thousand years ago and the image is still formed on the retina _now_ although those rills are in fact a thousand years old and, invisible to our unaided eye, have been falling upon mankind from the beginning of life on this globe, trying to get an entrance to consciousness. It was, however, only when, by evolution of thought, the knowledge of optics had produced the telescope that it became possible not only for that star to make itself known to us but to declare to us its distance, its size, and conditions of existence, and even the different elemental substances of which it was composed a thousand years ago. Yet, when we now allow its image to form on the retina, our consciousness insists on fixing its attention upon that star as an outside object, refusing to allow that it is only an image inside the eye and making it difficult to realise that that star may have disappeared and had no existence for the past 999 years, although in ordinary parlance we are looking at and seeing it there now. I have referred above to the sense of touch; it is, I think, clear that the first impression a child can have of sight must take the form of feeling the image on its retina, as though the object were actually inside the head, and it could have no idea that it was outside until, by touching with the hand, it would gradually learn by experience that the tangible outside object corresponded with the image located in the head; this is fully borne out by the testimony of men who, born blind, have, by an operation, received their sight late in life; in each case their first experience of seeing gave the impression that the object was touching the eye, and they were quite unable to recognise by sight an object such as a cup or plate or a round ball which they had commonly handled and knew perfectly well by touch; in fact, the idea of an object formed by the sense of touch is so absolutely different to that formed by the sense of sight that it would be impossible without past experience to conclude that the two sensations referred to one and the same object. The image formed on the retina has nothing in common with the sense of hardness, coldness, and weight experienced by touch, the only impression on the retina being that of colour or shade, and an outline; it is, however, hardly conceivable that even the outline of form would be recognised by the eye until touch had proved that form comprised also solidity and that the two ideas had certain motions in common both in duration in Time and extension in Space. Again, our senses of sight and hearing are alike based on the appreciation of frequencies of different rapidity; brightness and colour in light are equivalent to loudness and pitch in sound, but in sound we have no equivalent to perception of form or situation in space; it gives us no knowledge of the existence of objects when situated at great distances, nor can movements be followed even at short distances without having material contact, by means of the air, with the object; sight indeed appears to have to do with Space- and sound with Time-perception. In examining Nature by means of our senses we find we are so hemmed in by what we have always taken for granted and so bound down by modes of reasoning derived from what we have seen, heard, or felt in our daily life, that we are sadly hampered in our search after the truth. It is difficult to sweep the erroneous concepts aside and make a fresh start. In fact the great difficulty in studying the Reality underlying Nature is analogous to our inability to isolate and study the different sounds themselves which fall upon the ear, if our own language is being uttered, without being forced to consider the meaning we have always attached to those sounds. Let us now go back to the contention that it is not we who are looking out upon Nature but that our senses are being bombarded from without; we are living in a world of continuous and multitudinous changes, and as our senses require change or motion for their excitation, without those changes we could have no cognisance of our surroundings, we should have no consciousness of living; but if we base our thought entirely on sense perception, taking for granted that Time and Space have reality instead of recognising that they are only modes or limits under which those senses act, the Wall will ever remain opaque to us. Let us try and make this clearer. If we analyse the impression we receive from Motion, we find it is made up of the product of our two limitations, it is the time that an object takes to go over a certain space. We must come therefore to the conclusion also that Motion itself has no existence in reality apart from our senses. The result of not being able to appreciate this, is that the finiteness of our sense, caused by its dependence on Motion for excitation, surrounds us with illusions; one of these illusions is what we call solidity or continuity of sensation. If you hold a cannon-ball in your hand, perception by the sense of touch tells you that it is continuous, or what is called solid and hard; but it is not so in reality except as a concept limited by our finite senses. A fair analogy would be to liken it to a swarm of bees, for we know that it is composed of an immense number of independent atoms or molecules which are darting about, and circling round each other at an enormous speed but never touching; they are also pulsating at a definite enormous rate; we can at will increase their motion by heat or reduce by cold; if our touch perception were sensitive enough we should feel those motions and should not have the sensation of a solid. We have a similar case of limitation in our other senses, which we shall grasp better in another View through our Window. We can hear beats only up to fifteen in a second, beyond that number they give the sensation of a musical or continuous sound. In our sense of sight we can see pulsations or intermittent flashes up to only six in a second, beyond that number they give the sensation of a continuous light; a gas jet, if extinguished and relit six times in a second, can be seen to flicker, but beyond that rate is to our sense of sight a steady flame. The effect may also be shown by making the top of a match red-hot; when stationary or moving slowly, it is a point of light, but, moved quickly, it becomes a continuous line of light. Even apart from our senses we find Motion giving the characteristics of solidity: a wheel with only a few spokes, if rotated quickly enough, becomes quite impermeable to any substance, however small, thrown at it; a thin jet of water only half an inch in diameter, if discharged at great pressure equivalent to a column of water of 500 metres, cannot be cut even with an axe, it resists as though it were made of the hardest steel; a thin cord, hanging from a vertical axis, and being revolved very quickly, becomes rigid, and if struck with a hammer it resists and resounds like a rod of wood; a thin chain and even a loop of string, if revolved at great speed over a vertical pulley, becomes rigid and, if allowed to escape from the pulley, will run along the ground as a hoop. Now with regard to this limit of time perception, which gives us the phenomenon of Solidity, I have lately been able to devise an arrangement which, acting as a microscope for Time, gives the sensation of an increase in sight perception up to several thousand units per second; it is based on the fact that though the eye can only see six times per second it can see for the one-millionth part of a second. An example of this is the well-known experiment of seeing a bullet in its flight; the bullet makes electrical connection resulting in a spark which illuminates the bullet when opposite the eye. The electrical spark exists only for the millionth of a second, and as the bullet in that time has no perceptible movement it is seen standing absolutely still with all marks upon it quite visible to the eye. When Sight perception is increased up to the rate at which time may be said to flow for any particular object we apparently get into the reality, the permanent _now_ where motion ceases to exist as a sensation. A tuning-fork, kept vibrating, by means of an electro-magnet, at 2000 times per second, may to our sense of sight be gradually slowed down and, optically, brought absolutely to a standstill, for as long as desired, and the smallest irregularity of its surface may be minutely examined, though it continues to be heard and felt vibrating at that enormous rate. I have made several experiments in this direction, and some very curious facts connected with the sensation of Motion are brought to light by means of this increase in perceptive power. If the sense of sight is increased to 125 units per second, motion at the rate of one inch per second is barely visible; taking the common house-fly, whose wings vibrate about 400 times per second, its units of perception would appear to be about two-thirds of those beats, as I found it had no cognisance of Motion below two inches per second; you can put your finger on any fly provided you do not approach it faster than the above rate, it turns its head up to look at your finger but can see no motion in it; if you approach at over three inches per second it will always fly away before you are within a foot. I found that a dragon-fly, whose wings vibrate about 200 times per second, had only half the number of unit perceptions of the fly and could apparently see motion at about one inch per second but not under. In the converse of the above we have then the principle of a Microscope for Time, somewhat similar to the Microscope for Space of our laboratories. If our perception were increased sufficiently we could slow down any motion for examination, however rapid; there would be no difficulty in following a lightning flash or even arresting its visible motion for purposes of investigation without interfering with the natural sequence of cause and effect. If, on the other hand, our perception were decreased below six times per second, all motion would be accelerated, until with perception reduced to one unit in twenty-four hours the sun would appear only as a band across the sky, and we could not follow its motion any more than, as we have seen, we could follow the point of a red-hot match. If perception were reduced far enough, plants and trees would grow up visibly before our eyes. But we must leave this subject now, as this and the Time Microscope will be treated in a later View. Let us try and appreciate the fact that, under our present conditions, our conceptions of the immense and minute--namely, extension in Space, and that of quick and slow or duration in Time--are purely relative, and that from this arise those pseudo-conceptions which we call the infinitely extended and the infinitely lasting. Under our present limitations it is impossible for us to grasp the whole of any Truth, if we could do that, there would be no such mystery of Infinity to puzzle us; we could, as it were, see all around it, but that is again looking through another window. We are now considering _relativity_. If we cut off the very end of the point of the finest needle, we get so minute a particle of steel that it is hardly visible to the naked eye, and yet we know that that small speck contains not only millions but millions of millions of what are called atoms, all in intense motion and never touching each other. Try and conceive how small each of these atoms must be, and then try and grasp the fact, only lately proved by the discovery of Radio-activity, that each of these atoms is a great family made up of bodies analogous to the planets of our solar system and whose rate of motion is comparable only to that of Light. This is not theory, it is fact clearly demonstrated to us by the study of Radio-activity. Curiously enough, we know more about these bodies than we do of the atom itself; we actually know their size and weight and the speed with which they move. We do not yet know what is at the centre of this system, but we do know that each of these bodies is as far away from the centre as our planet is from the sun (93,000,000 miles), and as far from its neighbours as our planet is, _relatively to its size_. And now, for the purpose of grasping this subject of relativity, I want you to ask yourself whether it is conceivable that a world, so small as those bodies are, could possibly be inhabited by sentient beings. Leaving you to form your own conclusion upon this point, I will ask you to follow me down another path leading to the elucidation of the same subject. If at this moment we and all our surroundings were reduced to half their size and everything were moving twice as quickly, we should absolutely have no cognisance of any change, neither could we possibly note any difference if everything were reduced to a hundredth part of the original size and were going a hundred times quicker; and even when reduced a thousand or a million times, or to such minuteness that the whole of our solar system with its revolving planets became no larger than one of those atoms in the needle point, and the whole of the starry universe therefore reduced to the size of the needle point, its millions of suns coinciding with the millions of planetary systems in that steel particle--our earth would still revolve round the sun, though no larger than one of those minute planetary particles and travelling at the rate of light, but we should still have no knowledge of any change, in fact, our life would go on as usual, though it was difficult a few minutes ago to think it conceivable that so small a globe could be inhabited by sentient beings. Once more let us consider that the change is made in the direction of expansion in space and slowing down of Time; let all our surroundings be so enormously increased that each of the atoms in the steel point became as large as our solar system and the steel point as large as the visible universe, each atom therefore taking the place of a star, and motion being reduced in proportion; it is still absolutely inconceivable that we could know of any change having taken place, though the length of our needle, which was at first, say, one inch, would now be so great that light, travelling 186,000 miles per second, would take 500,000 years to traverse its length, and the stature of each one of us would be so great that light would require over 36,000,000 years to travel from head to foot, and that 36,000,000 years would have to be multiplied 163,000,000 times, making 5860 millions of millions of years to represent the time that an ordinary _sneeze_ would take under such conditions. And yet we have only gone towards the infinitely great exactly as far as we at first went towards the infinitely small, and it is still absolutely inconceivable that we could be conscious of any change, our everyday life would go on as usual, we should be quite oblivious to the fact that every second of time, with all its incidents and thoughts, had been lengthened to 5860 millions of millions of years. Do we not now begin to grasp the fact that immensity and minuteness in extension, and motion in duration, are figments only of our finite minds, that Time and Space have no objective reality apart from our physical senses, that they are only the modes under which we receive impressions of our surroundings? With perfect perception we should know that the only Reality is the Spiritual, the Here comprising all Space and the Now all Time. One more look through the window before we part, and we may see what I consider the greatest miracle in our everyday life: The Inner-self of each one of us, being part of the Reality or Spiritual, is independent of Space limitations and must therefore be _Omnipresent_, is independent of Time and therefore _Omniscient_. This inevitable deduction will be explained more fully in another View. It is from this store of knowledge that our Physical Ego is ever trying to win fresh forms of thought, and, in response to our persistent endeavours, that Inner-self, from time to time, buds out a new thought; the Physical Ego has already prepared the clothing with which that bud must be clad before it can come into conscious thought, because, as Max Müller has shown us, we have to form words before we can think; so does the Physical Ego clothe that ethereal thought in physical language, and by means of its organ of speech it sends that thought forth into the air in the form of hundreds of thousands of vibrations of different shapes and sizes, some large, some small, some quick, some slow, travelling in all directions and filling the surrounding space; there is nothing in those vibrations but physical movement, but each separate movement is an integral part or thread of that clothing. Another Physical Ego receives these multitudinous vibrations by means of its sense organ, weaves them together into the same physical garment, and actually becomes possessed of that ethereal thought--an unexplained marvel, and probably the most wonderful occurrence in our daily existence, especially as it often enables the second Physical Ego to gain fresh knowledge from its own Real Personality. Now, in connection with this, consider the fact, already emphasized, that it is not we who are looking out upon Nature, but that it is the Reality which is ever trying to make itself known to us by bombarding our sense organs with the particular physical impulses to which those organs can respond, and, if we aspire to gain a knowledge of what is behind the physical, it is clear that all our endeavours must be towards weaving these impulses into garments and then learning from them the sublime Truths which the Reality is ever trying to divulge to us. VIEW TWO THE VISION "Thy Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven," is in true consonance with the old philosophic dictum that "Everything in heaven must have its counterpart on earth"; in other words, the Reality has all Its multitudinous manifestations, every noumenon its phenomenon, in the physical universe. If we now examine those traits of our surroundings which affect us most, and best help us to reach the highest level of abstract thought of which our nature is capable, we find that it is the recognition of the Beauty (comprising also the Good and the True) in everything, which constitutes the power held over our minds by what we may call the Glamour of Symbolism, the Rapture of Music, and the Ideal of Art. But this influence is still only _sensuous_, it does not carry us beyond the extension of that Wonderment and Enchantment which had their birth with our first visit to Fairyland. This is, I think, evident, as Beauty is not the Reality; it is only what may be called the sensuous expression of the Reality or Spiritual on the physical plane. Although we have no words to express, nor indeed minds to grasp, the wonders and glories of that which is behind the Veil, it is possible for some of us to get a glimpse of it through our Window, and to those the following pages may be helpful, but to others the Wall will remain blank; and, here at the commencement, I should like to warn those who have not been through a certain experience, to which I shall refer, that no words of mine will open the Window for them; at the same time it is probable that many of my readers, who think at this stage that they have no knowledge of the subject of this View, will, as we proceed, recognise in the view through the Window something they have experienced more than once in their lifetime, and to these I address myself. Let us first try to understand what we know concerning ourselves. The longer one lives and the more one studies the mystery of "Being," the more one is forced to the conclusion that in every Human Being there are two Personalities, call them what you like--"the _Real_ and its Image," "the _Spiritual_ and its Material Shadow," or "the _Transcendental_ and its Physical Ego." The former in each of these duads is, as referred to in our first View, not conditioned in Time and Space, is independent of Extension and Duration, and must therefore be Omnipresent and Omniscient, whereas the latter, being subservient to Time and Space, can only think in finite words, requires succession of ideas to accumulate knowledge, is dependent on perception of movements for forming concepts of its surroundings, and, without this perception, it would have no knowledge of existence. Let us go back into the far distant past, before the frame and brain of what we now call the genus Homo was fully developed: he was then an animal pure and simple, conscious of living but knowing neither good nor evil; there was nothing in his thoughts more perfect than himself; it was the golden age of innocency; he was a being enjoying himself in a perfect state of nature with absolute freedom from responsibility of action. But, as ages rolled on, under the great law of evolution, his brain was enlarging and gradually being prepared for a great and wonderful event, which was to make an enormous change in his mode of living and his outlook on the future. As seeds may fall continually for thousands of years upon hard rock without being able to germinate, until gradually, by the disintegration of the rock, soil is formed, enabling the seed at last to take root; so for countless ages was the mind of that noble animal being prepared until, in the fulfilment of time, the Spiritual took root and he became a living soul. The change was marvellous; he was now aware of something higher and more perfect than himself, he found that he was able to form ideals above his ability to attain to, resulting in a sense of inferiority, akin to a "Fall"; he was conscious of the difference of Right and Wrong, and felt happy and blessed when he followed the Good, but ashamed and accursed when he chose the Evil; he became upright in stature, and able to communicate his thoughts and wishes to his fellows by means of language; and by feeling his freedom to choose between the Good, Beautiful, and True on one hand, and the Evil, Ugly, and False on the other, he became aware that he was responsible and answerable to a mysterious higher Being for his actions. This at once raised him far above other animals, and he gradually began to feel the presence within him of a wonderful power, the nucleus of that Transcendental Self which had taken root, and which, from that age to this, has urged Man ever forward first to form, and then struggle to attain, higher Ideals of Perfection. As a mountaineer who, with stern persistence, struggles upward from height to height, gaining at each step a clearer and broader view, so do we, as we progress in our struggle upwards, toward the understanding of Perfection, ever see more and more clearly that the Invisible is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow, that our Spiritual Personality is akin to that Great Reality, that we cannot search out and know that Personality; it is not an idea, it cannot be perceived by our senses, any more than we can see a sound by our sense of sight or measure an Infinity by our finite units; all we can so far do is to feel and mark its effect in guiding our Physical Ego to choose the real from the shadow, the plus from the minus, receiving back in some marvellous mode of reflex action the power to draw further nourishment from the Infinite. As that Inner Personality becomes more and more firmly established, higher ideals and knowledge of the Reality bud out, and, as these require the clothing of finite expressions before they can become part of our consciousness, so are they clothed by our Physical Ego and become forms of thought; and, although the Physical Ego is only the shadow or image, projected on the physical screen, of the Real Personality, we are able, by examining these emanations and marking their affinity to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, to attain at times to more than transient glimpses of the loveliness of that which is behind the veil. As in a river flowing down to the sea, a small eddy, however small, once started with power to increase, may, if it continues in midstream, instead of getting entangled with the weeds and pebbles near the bank, gather to itself so large a volume of water, that, when it reaches the sea, it has become a great independent force; so is each of us endowed, as we come into this life, with a spark of the Great Reality, with potential force to draw from the Infinite in proportion to our conscientious endeavours to keep ourselves free from the deadening effects of mundane frivolities and enticements, turning our faces ever towards the light rather than to the shadow, until our personality becomes a permanent entity, commanding an individual existence when the physical clothing of this life is worn out, and for us all shadows disappear. If man became a conscious being on some such analogous lines as indicated, it is clear that he is, as it were, the offspring of two distinct natures, and subject to two widely separated influences; the Spiritual ever urging him towards improvement in the direction of the Real or Perfect, and the Physical or Animal instincts inviting him in the opposite direction. These latter instincts are not wrong in themselves, in a purely animal nature, but are made manifest as urging him in the direction of the shadow or Imperfect when they come in contact, and therefore in competition, with the Spiritual. Neither the Spiritual nor the Physical can be said to possess Free-will; they must work in opposite directions, but this competition for influence over our actions provides the basis for the exercise of man's Free-will--the choice between progression and stagnation. The Spiritual influence must conquer in the long run, as every step under that influence is a step towards the Real and can never be lost; the apparent steps in the other direction are only negative or retarding, and can have no real existence, except as a drag on the wheel which is always moving in the direction of Perfection, thus hindering the process of growth of the Personality. The stages in development of the Physical Ego and its final absorption in the Transcendental may perhaps be stated as follows-- The Physical Ego loquitur: "I become aware of being surrounded by phenomena, I will to see--I perceive and wonder what is the meaning of everything--I begin to think--I reflect by combining former experiences--I am conscious that I am, and that I am free to choose between Right and Wrong, but that I am responsible for my actions to a Higher Power; that what I call 'I am' is itself only the shadow, or in some incomprehensible sense the breathing organ, of a wonderful divine Afflatus or Power which is growing up within, or in intimate connection with me, and which itself is akin to the Reality. Owing to my senses being finite I cannot with my utmost thought form a direct concept of that power, although I feel that it comprises all that is good and real in me, and is in fact my true personality; I am conscious of it ever urging me forward towards the Good, Beautiful, and True, and that each step I take in that direction (especially when taken in opposition to the dictates of physical instincts) results in a further growth of that Transcendental Self. With that growth I recognise that it is steadily gaining power over my thoughts and aspirations. I learn that the whole physical Universe is a manifestation of the Will of the Spiritual, that every phenomenon is as it were a sublime thought, that it should be my greatest individual aspiration to try to interpret those thoughts, or when, as it seems at present, our stage in the evolution of thought is not far enough advanced, I should during my short term of life do my best to help forward the knowledge of the Good, Beautiful, and True for those who come after. As I grow old the Real Ego in me seems to be taking my place, the central activity of my life is being shifted, as I feel I am growing in some way independent of earthly desires and aspirations, and, when the term of my temporary sojourn here draws to a close, I feel myself slackening my hold of the physical until at last I leave go entirely, and my physical clothing, having fulfilled its use, drops off and passes away, carrying with it all limitations of Time and Space. I awake as from a dream to find my true heritage in the Spiritual Universe." If we try to form a conception of the stages of growth of the Transcendental Self it would, I think, be somewhat as follows: The first consciousness} of the Spiritual } I know that Love is the Summum Bonum. entity would be.... } As it became nourished } I love. it would be.... } Then.... I love with my whole being. Then.... I know that I am part of God and God is Love. And lastly.... I am perfected in Loving and Knowing. And the above is the best description I have been able to formulate of the development of the Mystical Sense by means of which we can get a view of the Reality through our Window. I will try to give my own experience of this, which will, I know, wake an echo in other hearts, as I have met those who have felt the same. From a child I always had an intense feeling that Love was the one thing above all worth having in life, and, as I grew older and became aware that my real self was akin to the Great Spirit, at certain times of elation or what might be called a kind of ecstasy, I had an overpowering sense of longing for union with the Reality, an intense love and craving to become one with the All-loving. When analysed later in life this was recognised as similar in kind, though different in degree, to the feeling which, when in the country, surrounded by charming scenery, wild flowers, the depths of a forest glade, or even the gentle splash of a mountain stream, makes one always want to open one's arms wide to embrace and hold fast the beautiful in Nature, as though one's Physical Ego, wooed by the Beautiful which is the sensuous (not sensual) expression of the Spiritual, longed to become one with the Physical, as the Personality or Transcendental Ego craves to become one with the Reality. It is the same intense feeling which makes a lover, looking into the eyes of his beloved, long to become united in the perfection of loving and knowing, to be one with that being in whom he has discovered a likeness akin to the highest ideal of which he himself is capable of forming a conception. As in heaven, so on earth the Physical Ego, though only a shadow, has in its sphere the same fundamental characteristic craving as the Transcendental Personality has for that which is akin to it, and it is this wonderful love that, as the old adage says, makes the world go round. It is the most powerful incentive on earth, and is implanted in our natures for the good and furtherance of the race; it is, in fact, the manifestation on the material plane of that craving of the Inner self for union with, and being perfected in loving and knowing, that Infinite Love of which it is itself the likeness. If we can realise that everything on the physical plane is a shadow, symbol, or manifestation of that which is in the Transcendental, the Mystical Sense, through contemplating these as symbols, enables us at certain times, alas! too seldom and fleeting in character, to get beyond the Physical; but those of my readers who have been _there_ will know how impossible it is to describe, in direct words, which would carry any meaning, either the path by which the experience is gained or a true account of the experience itself. I will try, however, and I think I may be able to lead my readers, by indirect inductive suggestion, to a view of even these difficult subjects, by using the knowledge we have already gained in our first view through this Window. If an artist were required to draw a representation of the Omniscient Transcendental Self, budding out new forms of thought in response to the conscientious efforts of, and the providing of suitable clothing by, the Physical Ego, as referred to in View No. 1, he would be obliged to make use of symbolic forms, and I want to make it quite clear that the description I am attempting must necessarily be clothed in symbolic language and reasoning, and must not be taken as in any way the key by which the door of "the sanctuary" may be opened; it is only possible by it to help the mind to grasp the fact that there is a Window through which such things may be seen, the rest depends upon the personality of the seer. Now bear in mind that it is not we who are looking out upon Nature, but that it is the Reality, which, by means of the physical, is persistently striving to enter into our consciousness, to tell us what? [Greek: Theos agapê estin] (God is Love). As in Thompson's suggestive poem, "The Hound of Heaven"--the Hidden which desires to be found--the Reality is ever hunting us, and will never leave us till He has taught us to know and therefore to love Him, and, as seen in our first view, the first step is to try to see through the woof of nature to the Reality beyond. To this may also be added the attempt to hear the "silence" beyond the audible. Try now to look upon the whole "visible" as a background comprising landscape, sea, and sky--we shall get help in this direction in a later View--and then bring that background nearer and nearer to your consciousness. It requires practice, but it can be done; it may help you if you remember the fact that the whole of that visible scene is actually depicted on the _surface_ of your retina and _has no other existence for you_. The nearer you can get the background to approach, the more clearly you can see that the whole physical world of our senses is but a thin veil, a mere soap film, which at death is pricked and parts asunder, leaving us in the presence of the Reality underlying all phenomena. The same may be accomplished with the "audible," which is indeed part of the same physical film, though this is not at first easy to recognise. As pointed out in View No. 1, there is little in common between our sense of sight and hearing; but the chirp of birds, the hum of bees, the rustle of wind in the leaves, the ripple of a stream, the distant sound of sheep bells, and lowing of cattle form a background of sound which may be coaxed to approach you; the only knowledge you have of such sounds is their impression or image on the flat tympanum of your ear; they have _no other existence for you_; and again you may recognise that the physical is but a thin transient film. With the approach of the physical film all material sensation becomes as it were blurred, as near objects become when the eye looks at the horizon, and gradually escapes from consciousness. I have tried in the foregoing to suggest a method by which our Window may be unshuttered; it has necessarily been only an oblique view and clothed in symbolic phraseology, but those who have been able to grasp its meaning will now have attained to what may be called a state of _self-forgetting_, the silencing or quieting down of the Physical Ego; sight and sound perceptions have been put in the background of consciousness, and it becomes possible to worship or love the very essence of beauty without the distraction of sense analysis and synthesis or temptation to form intellectual conceptions. We are now prepared to attempt the last aspect of our view--namely, the description of what is experienced when the physical mists have been evaporated by the Mystical Sense. Again we find that no direct description is possible, language is absolutely inadequate to describe the unspeakable, communications have to be physically transmitted in words to which finite physical meanings have been allocated. The still small voice which may at times of Rapture be momentarily experienced in Music, is something much more wonderful than can be formed by sounds, and this perhaps comes nearest to the expression necessary for depicting the vision of the soul; but it cannot be held or described, it is quickly drowned by the physical sense of audition. As the Glamour of Symbolism can only be transmitted to one who has passed the portal of Symbolic Thought, the Rapture of Music can only be truly understood by one who has already experienced it, and the Ideal of Art requires a true artistic temperament to comprehend it, so it is, I believe, impossible to describe, with any chance of success, this wonderful experience to any but those whom Mr. A. C. Benson, in his _Secret of the Thread of Gold_, very aptly describes as having already entered "the Shrine." Those who have been _there_ will know that it is not at all equivalent to a vision, it is not anything which can be seen or heard or felt by touch; it is entirely independent of the physical senses; it is not Giving or Receiving, it is not even a receiving of some new knowledge from the Reality; it has nothing to do with thought or intellectual gymnastics; all such are seen to be but mist. The nearest description I can formulate is:--A wondrous feeling of perfect peace;--absolute rest from physical interference;--perfect contentment;--the sense of Being-one-with-the-Reality, carrying with it a knowledge that the Reality or Spiritual is nearer to us and has much more to do with us than the Physical has, if we could only see the truth and recognise its presence;--that there is no real death;--no finiteness and yet no Infinity;--that the Great Spirit cannot be localised or said to be anywhere, but that everywhere is God;--that the whole of what we call Creation is an instantaneous Thought of the Reality;--that it is only by the process of analysing in Time and Space that we imagine there is such a thing as succession of events;--that the only Reality is the _Spiritual_, the _Here_ embracing all Space and the _Now_ embracing all Time. How few of us who are now drawing towards the end of our sojourn here, have not, at certain times during our lives, experienced something akin to what I have tried to put before you in the above! Does not a particular scent, a beautiful country scene, a phrase in music, the beauty or pathos in a picture, symbolic sculpture in a grand cathedral, or even a chance word spoken in our hearing, every now and then waken in our innermost consciousness an enchanting memory of some wonderful happy moment of the past when the sun seemed to have been shining more brightly, the birds singing more merrily, when everything in nature seemed more alive, and our very beings seemed wrapped up in an intense love of our surroundings? On those occasions we were not far from seeing behind the veil, though we did not recognise it at the time; but when we now look back, with experience gained by advancing years, and consider those visions of the past, we cannot help seeing that the physical film was to our eyes more transparent at those times, and the very joy of their remembrance seems to be giving us a prescience of that which we shall experience, when for each one of us the physical film is pricked and passes away like a scroll. VIEW THREE MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM "Who can doubt that the Mystics know more than the Theologians, and that the Poets know more than the Scientists? for this inner apprehension is surely the highest and truest kind of Knowledge." Such were the words written to me lately by a clergyman of great learning and of unimpeachable orthodoxy, whose mature knowledge of the Higher Mysteries has been gained by a life-long study of the Divine. In View No. 1 we saw that the first step towards opening our Window, was to grasp the fact that it is not we who are _looking out_ upon Nature, but that it is the Reality which is ever trying to enter and to _come into_ touch with us, through our senses, and is persistently trying to wake within us a knowledge of the sublimest truths: but this has not yet been appreciated by the Theologian; he is looking _outwards_ instead of _inwards_, and asks the question, based on _intellectual_ conception, in the form "Can I find out the Absolute so that I may possess Him?" and the answer ever comes back, "_No_, because I am trying to storm the _Sanctuary_ of the Unthinkable, the Infinite, by means of a Ladder which cannot reach beyond our finite conceptions, and can deal therefore only with the shadows, cast by the outlying ramparts, upon our physical plane." An example of this is surely seen in the lecture lately delivered by the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Gore) to the University of Oxford (13th February 1912, reported in the _Guardian_ of 16th February), when he made the statement that the greatest difficulty we have is to recognise that the Absolute is a God of Love. His exact words were: "I believe that there are a great many of us who know, perhaps from bitter experience, that whatever difficulties there are about religious belief are difficulties about believing in a God of Love; whatever is our experience, and however sunny is our disposition, any steady thinking will make it apparent that thought, apart from the Christian revelation, presumed and accepted, or reflected unconsciously, has never got at it, and even after it has been in the world, thought is continually finding it hard to retain the idea of God the Creator, or the truth that God is Love, partly owing to the limitations of human thinking, partly, and even more, owing to the experience of man and of nature." On the other hand the Mystic, with _introspection_, asks the question in the form "Can the Absolute find me out and possess me and thus make me feel that that which is within me is akin to, is, in fact, a part of Him and that I am possessed thereby?" and the answer ever comes back from those who are on the true Quest:--"_Yes_; because the Unthinkable, the Hidden which desires to be found, is ever trying to come into our Consciousness to waken the knowledge that His _Sanctuary_, or what is called the Kingdom of Heaven, is within us, that we are not an external but an internal creation of the All-loving." Such a realisation is, as pointed out in "The Vision," far above Analysis and Synthesis or Intellectual gymnastics, which can deal only with the finite and are seen to be but Mist. How many valuable thoughts are wrecked and lost from our inability to formulate and describe them intellectually, even in our own consciousness. We are too apt to lay the blame upon, and to doubt, the Truth of those conceptions, because we are unable to find words to express them; the very act of attempting to analyse such thoughts in Time and Space destroys our power of carrying them to higher levels. Those who have once realised that the knowledge of the Absolute is the true Divine Life within us, can, as we have seen, at certain times and under certain conditions, experience that wonderful joy of perception by means of what I have called the Eye of the Soul; but that is missed by those who are always asking questions, and arguing, about what that knowledge consists in; the command "Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you, ask and it shall be given you," was not meant for the intellect but for the Heart, not for logical controversy but for inward discernment, not for physical enjoyment but for the nourishment of the Transcendental Ego. All things _may_ be possible to him that believeth, but how much more is this true of him who, as referred to in View No. 2, is perfected in "Loving and Knowing." The nearer we get to that consciousness of Being-one-with-the-Reality, the more we see and can meditate upon the wonderful "joy" which permeates all creation; but without that consciousness it is invisible, and the world is dark and evil and unloving, and to many, alas! appears more the handiwork of a Devil than of a God of Love. Mysticism is not, as the man in the street generally thinks, the study of the "Mysterious," but is the attempt to gain a knowledge of the Reality, the ultimate Truth in everything, especially the perception of that wonderful Transcendental Power which is growing up within, or in close connection with, each one of us. The study of the Physical Sciences, as also of the various forms of Religion around us, is useful and fascinating in the domain of "Intellectualism," but does not take us far towards the goal of our aspirations. I shall, however, attempt to show, in my next View, that by examining the phenomena of Nature and realising that they are symbols only of the Noumenon, the Reality, which is behind them, it is possible to reach a point where we may even feel that we are thinking, or having divulged to us, what may be called the very thoughts of the Absolute. We shall see that this can only be accomplished by first recognising that the Invisible is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow, that all our surroundings are but the images, or outlines, of the Reality cast on the Physical plane of our Senses; to accomplish this, we have to understand the use of _Symbolic_ Thought for sustaining and carrying conceptions to a higher level; because, as already explained, we can only express and, indeed, think of the Invisible or Infinite under terms of the Visible or Finite. Let me give you a glimpse at what may be called the "Glamour of Symbolism"; it is difficult to explain to those who have not yet thought of or felt it, but the following may be helpful: Think of the loveliest story or poem you have ever read, the most entrancing music you have ever heard, or the most beautiful paintings you have ever seen, and think how, at the end, you experienced a wonderful glow of enchantment with the concept as a whole, apart from specialising any particular character or event in the story, phrase in the music, or subject in the pictures; then do the same with one of those wonderful cathedrals of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, the epoch of that beautiful Gothic style which I shall show was founded upon the highest mystical form of Symbolism possible to those who lived at the then zenith of Mystical Thought in the history of the world. The number of cathedrals built during those three centuries was so prodigious that, without the documentary evidence which we have, it would be absolutely incredible. Every part of those buildings, even to the smallest decorations, was, as shown by any of the old writers on Religious Symbolism, such as Durandus, planned to symbolise some beautiful thought, aspiration, tradition, or religious belief. The highest Thinkers, Artists, Poets, Philosophers, and Mystics in those centuries became Architects, and, in pure contemplation of and love for the Divine, helped to beautify design by giving up their lives and energies to the work without reward. It was, in fact, at that period the surest means by which they could record their ideals and aspirations. Before the advent of the printing press, with its facilities for spreading knowledge broadcast, they appreciated that Tectonic Art and Iconography were the means by which they could best permanently record and teach their aspirations to the masses. Every beautiful thought found its expression in some symbol of artistic design. Each Cathedral was, in fact, a beautiful complete _story_, and, when this has been fully grasped, the enchantment of the whole, the thread of gold running through the whole of that wonderful pile, is what may be called the Glamour of Symbolism. For the last 400 years, Archæologists, Architects, and others interested in the history of Tectonic art, have been trying without avail to discover what is called "the lost secret of Gothic Architecture"; even Sir Christopher Wren had a try and expressed his opinion that it was lost for ever. They were all looking in the wrong direction, confining themselves to the mists of physical intellectual perception, and could not get beyond that limited range of thought. I propose now, in illustration of this View, to show what this secret was. It has the making of a fascinating Romance; it is the most wonderful example of what I will call "the Evolution of Thought as depicted by Human strivings after the Transcendental in Mediæval Mysticism." I shall give it in a brief form, touching only on those essential points which require a very slight knowledge of Geometry, but those interested in the subject may refer to _Ars Quatuor Coronatorum_ (vol. xxiii., 1910), where I have given the whole subject, _in extenso_, under the title "Magister Mathesios." To understand the subject it is necessary to recognise fully the place Geometry held, not only among Mediæval Builders, but also in Classical times; it was recognised in those early times as the head of all the Sciences, and was the A, B, C of Hellenic Philosophy. Come back with me 2300 years, to the time when the "Greek Age of Reason" was at its zenith, and Plato, the greatest of the philosophers, was teaching at Athens, working thus, let it be known to his honour, solely for the love he bore to science, for he always taught gratuitously. What qualification was required of those who attended his Academy? Look up over the porch, and you will see written in large capitals these words: [Greek: M�DEIS AGE�METR�TOS EISIT� MOU T�N STEG�N.] "Let no one who is ignorant of Geometry enter my doors." At the root of Socratic teaching was the idea that wisdom is the attribute of the Godhead, and Plato, for twenty years the companion and most favoured pupil of Socrates, was imbued with that doctrine, and, having arrived at the conclusion that the impulse to find out TRUTH was the necessity of intellectual man, he saw in Geometry the keystone of all Knowledge, because, among all other channels of thought, it alone was the exponent of absolute and undeniable truth. He tells us that "Geometry rightly treated is the Knowledge of the Eternal"; and Plutarch gives us yet another instance of Plato's teaching concerning this subject, in which he looks upon God as the Great Architect, when he says, "Plato says that God is always geometrising." Holding, therefore, as Plato did, that God was a great Geometer, and that the aim of philosophy was the acquisition of a knowledge of the Eternal, it is natural that he should make a knowledge of Geometry imperative on those wishing to study philosophy. This was continued also by those philosophers who succeeded Plato in the management of the Academy, as we are told that Zenocrates turned away an applicant for admission, who knew no geometry, with the words: [Greek: poreuou, labas gar ouk echeis tês philosophias.] "Depart, for thou hast not the _grip_ of philosophy." In connection with the idea that God was a Geometer, must be taken the contention held by the Egyptians, and after them the Greeks and Arabs, that the Right-Angled Triangle symbolised the nature of the Universe; it was called the law of the three squares, because in every Right-Angled Triangle, as expounded by the Pythagorean Theorem, the squares, formed on the two sides containing the Right Angle, must together be exactly equal to the square on the third side, whatever the shape of the triangle may be. The Right Angle at an early date gave its name to the odd numbers, which were called, by the Greeks, gnomonic numbers, as personifying the male sex, and the Right-Angled Triangle was also called the Nuptial Figure, or Marriage, the Pythagorean Theorem receiving the name, [Greek: to theôrêma tês nymphês] (the Theorem of the Bride). Plutarch, in his _Osiris and Isis_, tells us in explanation of this, "The Egyptians imagined the nature of the Universe like this most beautiful triangle, as Plato also seems to have done in his work on the _State_, when he sketches the picture of Matrimony under the form of a Right-Angled Triangle. That triangle contains one of the perpendiculars of three, the base of four, and the hypotenuse of five parts, the square of which is equal to the squares of those sides containing the right angle. The perpendicular (three) is the Male, Osiris, the originating principle ([Greek: archê]); the base (four) is the Female, Isis, the receptive principle ([Greek: hypodochê]); and the Hypotenuse (five) is the offspring of both, Horus, the product ([Greek: apotelesma])." The central feature of this triangle, upon which its property is based, is the Right Angle. The Greeks gave to this Right Angle the name of _Gnomon_ (meaning Knowledge), and it has ever since been, under the form of a carpenter's "square," the emblem or symbol of an Architect, the Master Mason, as personifying the Great Architect of the Universe--namely, He who has the knowledge of Geometry; and, as the Right-Angled Triangle represented the Universe, it was upon the _perfection_ of this Gnomon, or knowledge, that the very existence of the Universe depended, because the law of the three squares only holds good when that angle is perfect. The Secret handed down in the Craft, from Architect to Architect, was how to form a perfect right angle, or, as it was called, the "Square," without possibility of Error, and this I have called "the Knowledge of the Square." Vitruvius, who, at the beginning of our Era, wrote his thesis on Tectonic art, which is still the text-book of Architecture for Ancient buildings, says Pythagoras taught his followers to form a gnomon, or square, as follows: "Take three rods, of three lengths, four lengths, and five lengths long; with these form a triangle, and, if each rod be squared, you have 9, 16, and 25, and the areas of the two former will be equal to the latter." Now let us come to the closing years of the tenth century. What a strange condition of the building craft was to be seen all over Europe; not a church was being built, nor had been built, for the last twenty years; the thousand years after Christ was drawing to its close, everybody was waiting for, and expecting, the world to come to an end; no new undertakings were begun. How much money went into the hands of the Monasteries and other Religious Houses, as peace offerings for the future welfare of the givers, nobody can say; it was probably enormous. When, however, the eleventh century was well started and the crisis was over, churches were built on a large scale, as shown by the numerous remains we have of Norman buildings of the last half eleventh century, and building was probably at its height about A.D. 1140 to 1150; but at this period an extraordinary thing happened. Hitherto the arches in the Norman style were round-headed and their columns enormously thick to carry them; but suddenly the style changed into the beautiful Gothic all over Europe. No single country can claim precedence, it was almost simultaneous; churches half finished in the round style were not only completed in the pointed, but had parts already built altered to the new style. What, then, determined this sudden change, resulting in a wonderful accession of beauty to Architectural design? We must go to the Monasteries and Religious Houses to find the explanation. These Houses had become the Patrons of Masonry, the providers of the funds for building Cathedrals, &c.; it naturally followed that, growing up alongside the Operative Science, there was a Religious symbolism being gradually formed which attached itself specially to the tools used by Masons, and thus formed the basis of Moral teaching--"to act on the Square," "to keep within the bounds of the Compasses," "to be Level in all your dealings," &c., &c. A wonderful, new, and Mystical form of Symbolism was opened to them with the advent of Geometry. The text-book of Geometry was unknown throughout the whole of Europe, omitting Spain, from the sixth to the beginning of the twelfth century; it was, as I have pointed out, well known in Greece before our Era, and continued to be so up to about the sixth century A.D. In the fourth century lived the Greek, Theon of Alexandria, so well known for his edition of Euclid's Elements, with notes, from which all Greek MSS. which first came to light in the sixteenth century were taken, being entitled [Greek: ek tôn Theônos synousiôn], "from Theon's Lectures," and which he probably used as a text-book in his classes; but these MSS. had all been lost before the seventh century, and were not recovered again until the sixteenth century, when Simon Grynæus, the greatest Greek scholar on the Continent, and companion of Melancthon and Luther, discovered a copy in Constantinople. Meanwhile, Theon's edition had been translated into Arabic, and thus preserved by the Mohammedans, and it was only at the beginning of the twelfth century that Athelard of Bath, who had been travelling in the East, came to study at Cordova, in Spain, and there found the Arabic MSS. of Euclid; these he translated into Latin, and this translation must have come into the hands of the patrons of the building craft at the very time when the Gothic style had its origin; it was the only Latin translation known in Europe, and was, some centuries later, the text-book of the first printed edition of Euclid. The Operative Masons had always formed their Right-Angled Triangles by means of mundane measures of 3, 4, and 5 units to each side respectively, as was done by the Harpedonaptæ of Egypt 5000 years ago, and 2500 years later by Pythagoras, and this same method continues to be used to this day; but to those of a religious turn of mind, who had only lately become conversant with Euclid, and looked upon Geometry not only as the height of all learning, but, as they progressed in the knowledge of its bearing on the Science of building, actually made it synonymous with Tectonic Art (the old MSS. which have come down to us from that time _invariably_ state that "at the head of all the Sciences stands _Geometry which is Masonry_"), there must have come a wave of wonderful enthusiasm when they first discovered that the Geometrical way of creating a Right Angle, as given in Euclid I. ii., was by means of an Equilateral Triangle, by joining the Apex with the centre of the base. This Equilateral Triangle was the earliest symbol we know of the Divine _Logos_ in connection with that wonderful figure the Vesica Piscis; and as the Bible declared that the Universe was created by the Logos (the Word), so the Square which represented the Universe was naturally created by means of the Equilateral Triangle. A great mystery this must have appeared to those who, like the Hellenic philosophers, postulated that everything on Earth has its counterpart in Heaven, and who, in their religious mysticism, were always looking for signs of the transcendental in their temporal surroundings. But in what awe and reverence must they have held Geometry, when they further found that the Equilateral Triangle, representing the Logos, was itself generated, as shown in the _first_ Problem of Euclid, upon which the whole Science of Geometry was therefore based, by the intersection of two Circles! These two Circles were held by the Greeks, at the beginning of our Era, to represent the Past and Future Eternities generating the Logos; but the whole figure (Euclid I. i.) was at the time we are now dealing with looked upon by Mediæval Architects as representing the Three Divine _personæ_, and that part, or _cavity_, of the figure which is bounded by the Arcs of the two circles, and which takes to itself one-third of each of the two generating circles (making its perifera exactly equal with that remaining to each of the two circles, all three therefore being _co-equal_), and in which the Equilateral Triangle is formed (_vide_ frontispiece), was naturally held by the Mediæval Architects, and indeed from earliest times, as the most sacred Christian Emblem--namely, that of _Regeneration_ or "New Birth." The Cavity is evidently referred to in the Mystical Gospel of St. John (iii. 16), in the question by and answer to Nicodemus, and it was the eye of the needle referred to in St. Mark x. 25, in answer to the question in verse 17, and again in St. Luke xviii. 25. In later ages this symbol was extensively used by the Christian Church to surround the "Soul of a Saint" after death (illustrated in _Magister Mathesios_). The date of the birth of a Saint was always given as the date on which he or she died and had been born again in the Spiritual Life, and the Saint was depicted in a Vesica Piscis, the vulva of the _Ruach_ or Holy Spirit, representing this new birth. To show the extraordinary reverence and high value attached to this symbol, it is only necessary to remember that, from the fourth century, when Theon of Alexandria lectured on Geometry, and onwards, all Seals of Colleges, Abbeys, Monasteries, and other religious communities, as well as of ecclesiastical persons, have been made invariably of this form, and they continue to be made so to this day. It was also in allusion to this most sacred ancient emblem that Tertullian, and other early Fathers, spoke of Christians as "Pisciculi." It was called the "Vesica Piscis" (Fish's Bladder), and named, no doubt, by the Greeks at the beginning of our Era, for the purpose of misleading the ignorant from the true meaning of the Figure. One can well understand the object which led the learned Rabbi Maimonides, the greatest savant of the Middle Ages, when addressing his pupils in the twelfth century, to command his hearers: "When you have discovered the meaning thereof, do not divulge it, because the people cannot philosophise nor understand that to the Infinite there is no such thing as Sex;" but later on the noted writer on Symbolism, Durandus, in the introduction to his book, is more explicit, and gives the real meaning as follows: "The Mystical Vesica Piscis ... wherein the Divinity and, more rarely, the Blessed Virgin are represented, has no reference, except in name, to a fish, but represents the Almond, the symbol of Virginity and self-production." The Vesica Piscis, and its name, is intimately connected with the discovery, by Augustus Cæsar in the century preceding our Era, as narrated by Baronius, of a prophecy in one of the Sibylline books, foretelling "a great event coming to pass in the birth of One who should prove to be the true 'King of Kings,' and Augustus Cæsar therefore dedicated an altar in his palace to this unknown God." Eusebius and St. Augustine inform us that the first letter of each line of the verses from the Erythrean Sibyl containing this prophecy, formed the word [Greek: ICHTHYS] (a fish), and were taken as representing the sentence: [Greek: Iêsous Christos Theou Huios Sôtêr]("Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour"). Based upon this discovery arose that extraordinary enthusiasm, during the second, third, and fourth centuries, for hunting up further prophecies in Pagan sources, resulting in a great number of Sibylline verses being invented, giving the minutest details in the Life of our Lord. These fabrications seem to have been at that time generally accepted by the masses as true prophecies, though we know now that they were written some centuries after the events they were supposed to foretell. Let us now return to the Vesica Piscis. In the paintings and sculptures of the Middle Ages, we find it constantly used to circumscribe the figure of the Saviour, especially whenever He is represented as judging the world and in His glorified state. Many beautiful examples of this in Anglo-Saxon work of the tenth century may be seen in King Edgar's Book of Grants to Winchester Cathedral and the famous Breviary of St. Ethelwolfe. Numerous illustrations of these and other pictures of the Middle Ages, as also diagrams of the properties of the Vesica Piscis, can be seen in the volume I have already referred to dealing fully with this subject. The building fraternity was a purely Christian community; the First Crusade raised a great enthusiasm for building Christian Churches, and brought in large gifts of money for that purpose. Up to 1140 Norman Architecture held sway, having the "Square" for its unit, its greatest symbol being the _Gnomon_, representing knowledge; but about that time, as we have seen, arose from the study of Geometry, the head of all learning, a Mystical form having the mysterious figure of the Vesica Piscis, the true Gothic Arch, with the Equilateral Triangle enclosed as its unit, and symbolising the Trinity in Unity. The recognition of the import of the Trinity was paramount throughout those early days; all important documents began with an Invocation of the _Tres Personæ_, or were garnished with symbolic illustrations thereof; all the old MSS., already referred to, which have come down to us from that period, invariably commence with "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." It can therefore be readily understood what determined the sudden change between 1140-1150, resulting in that wonderful accession of beauty to architectural design which we find in the Gothic. The incentive had to be a strong one, and of an eminently religious character, to accomplish the radical change of throwing over so absolutely the Norman, and commencing to build entirely on what are called Gothic lines. A careful examination of the proportions of the structures themselves, and the character of the decorations found in the finest examples of buildings representing that style, at once shows us that the incentive was the symbolism attached to the mysterious figure called the Vesica Piscis, which appears to be not only the principal feature upon which the whole style rests, but is also employed, as a symbol of the Divine, wherever we have Gothic Architecture, either in painted windows or mural decorations. Every Cathedral has its Vesica Piscis, often of enormous dimensions. Geometry was synonymous with Masonry, and the very _foundation_ of the Science of Geometry, as expounded by Euclid, was his _first_ proposition. _Every single problem_ in the whole of his books necessitates for its construction the use of this one foundation--namely, "how to form an Equilateral Triangle," and this is the Mystical form of "the Knowledge of the Square." This triangle, symbolising the Logos, is therefore not only the _beginning_ of the Science of Geometry, and therefore of Masonry, the Head of all the Sciences, but it is by that triangle that all Geometrical forms, and therefore forms of knowledge, are _made_, and it became the most mysterious and secret symbol of the Logos, for is it not written by St. John that "In the beginning was the Logos, and by it were all things made"; so the Vesica Piscis, the cradle of the Logos, became the great _secret_ of Masonry, the foundation as we find it upon which Gothic Architecture was evolved, the means by which its wonderful plans were laid down, and the most reverenced figure in Religious Symbolism, as shown by its use in seals, engravings, sculptures, pictures, &c., throughout the Middle Ages. Let me make this clearer. The more one examines the typical points in the Saxon, Norman, and Gothic styles of Architecture, the more clearly one sees that the Architects of the two former used circles and squares on their tracing-boards, as units for their proportions, in drawing up both ground plans and elevations, with here and there suggestions only of the Equilateral Triangle having been made use of in some of the smaller details; whereas the Gothic Architects seem to have used the Vesica Piscis almost entirely. This explains the reason why true Gothic buildings have always been said to be built mainly on the basis of the Equilateral Triangle; this naturally follows, because the use of the Vesica creates, and therefore necessitates, the appearance of the Equilateral Triangle in every conceivable situation. The following quotation is typical of the leading essay writers on this subject: "The Equilateral Triangle enters largely into, if it does not entirely control, all mediæval proportions, particularly in the ground plans. In Chartres Cathedral the apices of two Equilateral Triangles (_vide_ frontispiece to these Views), whose common base is the internal length of the transept, measured through the two western piers of the intersection, will give the interior length, one apex extending to the east end of the chevet within the aisles, the other to the original termination of the Nave westward, and the present extent of the side aisles in that direction. With slight deviation, most, if not all, the ground plans of the French Cathedrals are measurable in this manner, and their choirs may be so measured almost without exception. Troyes Cathedral is in exact proportion with that of Chartres, and the choirs of Rheims, Beauvais, St. Ouen at Rouen, and others are equally so. Bourges Cathedral, which has no transept, is exactly three Equilateral Triangles in length inside, from the East end of the outer aisle to the Eastern columns supporting the West Towers. Most English Cathedrals appear to have been constructed in their original plans upon similar rules." White's Classical Essay on Architecture compares the Norman with the Gothic, where he says: "In what is usually called the Norman period, the general proportions and outlines of the Churches are reducible to certain rules of setting out by the plain Square. As Architecture progressed the Square gradually disappeared, and the proportion of general outline, as well as of detail, fell in more and more with applications of the Equilateral Triangle, till the art, having arrived at its culminating point, or that which is generally acknowledged to be its period of greatest beauty and perfection in the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, again began to decline. With this decline the Equilateral Triangle was almost lost sight of, and then a mode of setting out work by diagonal squares was taken up, for such is the basis found exactly applicable to the work of the fifteenth century, since which time mathematical proportions have been generally employed." And after referring to numerous scale drawings of Churches, windows, doors, and arches, he points out that every student of Church architecture must pronounce those of the untraceried and traceried first point to be the most beautiful of all, those of the Norman to be a degree less so, and those of the perpendicular and debased to be far inferior to either, and in that analysis we find that the Equilateral Triangle was used almost exclusively for determining one order (the Gothic), the Square for another (the Norman), and the Square diagonally divided for the other (the debased). Now let me try to describe the wonderful properties of the Vesica Piscis, so that you may understand the mystery which shrouded it in the minds of those Mediæval builders. The rectangle formed by the length and breadth of this figure, in the simplest form, has several extraordinary properties; it may be cut into three equal parts by straight lines parallel to the shorter side, and these parts will all be precisely and geometrically similar to each other and to the whole figure,--strangely applicable to the symbolism attached at that time to the Trinity in Unity,--and the subdivision may be proceeded with indefinitely without making any change in form. However often the operation is performed, the parts remain identical with the original figure, having all its extraordinary properties, the Equilateral Triangle appearing everywhere, whereas no other rectangle can have this curious property. It may also be cut into four equal parts by straight lines parallel to its sides, and again each of these parts will be true Vesicas, exactly similar to each other, and to the whole, and of course the Equilateral Triangle is again everywhere. Again, if two out of the tri-subdivisions mentioned above be taken, the form of these together is exactly similar, geometrically, to half the original figure, and again the Equilateral Triangle is ubiquitous on every base line. Again, the diagonal of the rectangle is exactly double the length of its shorter side, which characteristic is absolutely _unique_, and greatly increases its usefulness for plotting out designs; and this property of course holds good for all the rectangles formed by the original figure and for the other species of subdivision. But perhaps its most mysterious property (though not of any practical use) to those who had studied Geometry, and to whom this figure was the symbol of the Divine Trinity in Unity, so dear to them, was the fact that it actually put into their hands the means of _trisecting_ the Right Angle. Now, the three great problems of antiquity which engaged the attention and wonderment of geometricians throughout the Middle Ages, were "the Squaring of the Circle," "the Duplication of the Cube," and lastly, "the Trisection of an Angle," even Euclid being unable to show how to do it; and yet it will be seen that the diagonal of one of the subsidiary figures in the tri-subdivision, together with the diagonal of the whole figure, actually trisect the angle at the corner of the rectangle. It is true that it only showed them how to trisect one kind of angle, but it was that particular angle which was so dear to them as symbolising their craft, and which was created by the Equilateral Triangle. All these unique properties place the figure far above that of a square for practical work, because even when the diagonal of a square is given, it is impossible to find the exact length of any of its sides or _vice versa_; whereas in the Vesica rectangle the diagonal is exactly double its shorter side, and upon any length of line which may be taken on the tracing-board as a base for elevation, an Equilateral Triangle will be found whose sides are of course all equal and therefore known, as they are equal to the base, and whose line joining apex to centre of base is a true Plumb line, forming at its foot the perfect right angle, so important in the laying of every stone of a building. In the volume referred to I have given a skeleton plan upon such a scale of subdivision that a tracing-board, of 5 feet by 8 feet, would be divided up into over one million parts, and, as all these subdivisions are perfect representations of the original Vesica figure with all its properties, the design of the largest building, with the minutest detail, could be drafted with absolute accuracy. There are many other curious properties of this Figure, but they are difficult to explain without diagrams. I will, however, give one more example of its creative power. The problem of describing a Pentagon must have puzzled architects considerably in those early times, but this was again easily accomplished by means of the Vesica. Albrecht Dürer, the great designer and engraver, who lived at the end of the fifteenth century, refers to the Vesica in his works (_Dureri Institutune Geometricarum_, lib. ii. p. 56) in a way which shows that it was as commonly known in his time as the Circle, Square, and Triangle. His instructions for forming a Pentagon are: "Designa circino invariato tres piscium vesicas" (describe with unchanged compasses three vesicæ piscium). Three similar circles are described with centres at the angles of an Equilateral Triangle, forming the three Vesicæ, by means of which the Pentagon is drawn, and from which also we get a beautiful form of arch very common in the thirteenth century (_vide_ illustrations in _Magister Mathesios_). This is also the method used in that old manuscript of the fifteenth century named "Geometria deutsch." In this old MS. it is also shown that the easiest method for finding the centre of a circle, however large, or any segment of a circle, is by means of the Vesica Piscis. And just as we see so many Cathedrals of the Middle Ages are stated by antiquarians to have been planned on the Equilateral Triangle, so do we find the Pentagon appearing as the basis of Architectural designs of buildings of a later date, such as Liverpool Castle, Chester Castle, and other similar structures; but the true means by which each were laid down, as in the case of the Equilateral Triangle, was again the Vesica Piscis. A beautiful example of decoration, on the basis of the Vesica, is seen in the tomb of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. I will conclude this subject by quoting from the summing up by Prof. Kerrich (Principal Librarian to the University of Cambridge in 1820), in his masterly Essay on Architecture, where he gives the different forms of what he calls the "Mysterious Figure," used in the most noted Gothic buildings: he says, "I would in nowise indulge in conjectures as to the reference these figures might possibly have to the most sacred mysteries of religion; independently of any such allusion, their properties are of themselves sufficiently extraordinary to have struck all who have observed them." From earliest Christian times the principal _doctrine_ based upon the Mysticism of the Neo-platonists and the Kabalists was what was called the [Greek: Gnôsis], the Knowledge of the All, and the fundamental basis of this, as of all esoteric teaching from the beginning of History, was _Procreation_. From the first dawn of civilisation the "Great One" always had an enemy with whom he had to fight; having conquered, he married that enemy, and their offspring was Life or Duration. In the oldest forms, as in Persia and ancient Egypt, it was Light and Darkness, "Ormuz and Ahriman," "Osiris and Isis," the Light conquering Darkness, the Day conquering Night, resulting in Time and duration. In the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the "Sun and Earth" producing Vegetable Life, and in the [Greek: Gnôsis] it was the "Ainsoph and Ignorance," resulting in True Knowledge or Everlasting Life. In the Vesica Piscis (_vide_ frontispiece) we see two Equilateral Triangles formed on the same base, similar to what we found in the ground-plan of Chartres and other Gothic Cathedrals; these two triangles symbolised to the Mediæval Builders the Divine and Human Natures of the Logos, the Word, the Creator; they are both procreated and enclosed in the Vesica; the one having the Apex pointed upwards, represented Divine or Spiritual Life, and in that I have placed the "Tetragrammaton," the Word or name of God (Jehovah), which, throughout the Jewish race for thousands of years, was held to be so sacred that they did not dare to utter it aloud. It was, at this time, depicted in the Equilateral Triangle, the symbol of the Logos, becoming thus the Masonic Word of the Middle Ages, and was probably used, exoterically, for purposes of recognition among members of the Great Building Societies, with the introduction of Gothic Architecture; but the _esoteric_ teaching, which was known only to the élite of the Craft and not by the Ordinary Operatives, was the mystical _procreation_ of that triangle, the doctrine of Spiritual or New Birth, symbolised by that mysterious figure which we have seen was the very foundation stone of Geometry, and therefore of Tectonic Art, the Head of all learning, and the great Secret of Gothic Architecture, called for esoteric purposes "Vesica Piscis." The Triangle, having the Apex pointing downwards, represented Human or Physical Life, and I have placed therein a representation of _sacrificial_ death, which we shall see was introduced, as a necessity, for the good of the Race. As "everything in Heaven has its counterpart on Earth," so may we see, by introspection, that the _reflecting_ surface, the thin, physical film between the Human and Divine, is represented by that Base, and Human Life then becomes truly, as it should be, the reflection of the Divine. One more glance through the Window at what I will call-- "The Mystery of the Apex." The earliest forms of Life, the unicellular "Beings," whether animal or vegetable--for both divisions, if they can be said to be divided, have the same protoplasmic cell as basis of life--were, and are still, immortal except for accidents; they are not subject to natural death as we know it; they multiply by fission and not by "budding." It was only with the building up of cell upon cell into communities, and the advent of polycellular beings of greater and greater complexity of structure, that the "Wisdom" behind natural laws introduced death as an _adaptation_, to prevent monstrosities in the shape of mutilated specimens being perpetuated on the earth. Life is purely physical and, in conformity with the modes under which our physical senses act, has the appearance of tri-unity. As white light is seen to be composed of but three primary colours, as Music is based on the Triad, as Space is known to us in three dimensions only, and Geometry, "the Head of all Learning," is based upon the Circle, Square, and Triangle, so may we see life in its three primary aspects: the Animal, Vegetable, and Material. The last-mentioned aspect, though long suspected, from the investigation of Crystallography, to have in some mysterious way a common basis with the animal and vegetable, was not fully grasped until, in the last few years, we have been able to study in our laboratories the actual evolution, or more correctly devolution, of matter from one form to another; and as all plants and animals are found to be built up of the same identical protoplasmic cells, so are we now able to break down and analyse not only these cells but even the very structure of matter, and find that all substances are built up of exactly the same bricks, the different forms known to us as Elements being the _designs_ of the great Architect upon which each structure has been built; and these completed designs again are used and become the "ashlars" of the higher forms of plant and animal structure. As Evolution in the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms has given us Species, so in the Material it has developed Elements. The structures of animal and vegetable life are of comparatively recent formation, and are still apparently progressing in the direction of complexity, whereas the structures of matter appear to have long passed the stage of highest complexity, and the elements are now undergoing the retrograde process of being transformed, by radio-activity, from the more complex into simpler elements of lower atomic denominations--namely, having fewer bricks in each atom. All these material designs are more or less radio-active--namely, changing into other elements, but some, like radium, polonium, &c., are active to an extraordinary extent. Each molecule or atom may be looked upon as an _aperture_, more or less open, through which we have flowing the equivalent of what may be called a leak from the Infinite, the changing of one element into another being represented by the change of shape or activity of that aperture. Countless ages ago these apertures were, by evolution, growing more and more complex in shape, but when the limit of complexity was reached and the _Apex_ was passed, an adaptation, somewhat analogous to death in the animal and vegetable, must have come into play, with the result that these apertures are now becoming more and more simple in their shape and activity. The Infinite referred to above may be diagnosed by some as being in the fourth dimension of space, or it may even be comprised within the Ether of our known three dimensions, for the discovery of radio-activity has enabled us to see that Ether is not only as dense as iron, but millions of times denser than that metal, every cubic foot, or probably cubic inch, being capable of supplying millions of horse-power if it could only be tapped. A homely simile of this leak from the Infinite may be seen in a glass of aerated water, where an irregularity of surface, a crumb of bread, or a grain of sand becomes the means by which carbonic-dioxide escapes from the interstices of the water. Radio-active substances then are really forges for forming new structures of matter or forms of energy, rather than quarries from which they are cut, and we seem to get a glimpse of the origin of life, perhaps itself the cause of "retrogression" in the material, coming through from the Reality, the Infinite beyond the physical Universe. Life and its processes are well symbolised by a triangle, the base of which is the "Divide" between the Real and its reflections or shadows on the Material plane, and through which all energy percolates. One side of the triangle represents anabolism, or the process of building up, and the other katabolism, the process of breaking down, and at the Apex is the Mystical "Terror of the Threshold," the "Ainsoph" (_vide_ frontispiece), which introduced _sacrificial_ death to the Physical, as an adaptation in the evolution of, and for the good of, the Human race. With the death of the Physical, the rending of the Veil, as we have seen in View Two, all Shadows and Reflections disappear, and, in place of "seeing as through a glass darkly," the Soul has its true birth, and at last enters upon its heritage in the Divine Life, face to face with the Reality, the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. VIEW FOUR LOVE IN ACTION In the preceding Views we have seen that Time and Space have no real existence apart from our physical senses; they are only modes or conditions under which those senses act, and by which we gain a very limited and illusory knowledge of our surroundings. Our very consciousness of living depends upon our perception of multitudinous changes in our surroundings, and our very thoughts are therefore also limited by Time and Space, because _change_ is dependent on those two limits, the very basis of perceived motion being the time that an object takes to go over a certain space; we must therefore look behind consciousness itself, beyond the conditioning in Time and Space, for the true reality of Being. We have seen that man is the offspring of two distinct natures--the Spiritual or Transcendental and the Material or Physical; the former is the Real, the latter is only a shadow. If we now try to consider the connection between these two natures, we have to recognise that, with all our advance in Knowledge during the last hundred years, we are indeed still as children playing with pebbles on the sea-shore, knowing neither why we are placed there, nor what those pebbles are, or whence they came. Though we seem ever to be discovering fresh truths concerning their relations one with another, when arranged in different patterns, built up into new forms, or split up into smaller fragments, we have to acknowledge (substituting thoughts for pebbles) that we are still only learning our alphabet and the simple rules of multiplication, addition, and division, which must be mastered before we can hope to take the real step towards understanding. We are surrounded by mysteries; we are indeed a mystery to ourselves, we do not even know how the Physical Ego is connected with the physical world; how the sense organs, receiving the impression of multitudinous and diverse frequencies of different intensities, transmit them to the brain, and how the mind is able to combine all these impressions and form concepts. But by examining the Physical Universe, we seem to see clearly that the only Reality is the Spiritual, the Here, and the Now, that our real _Personality_ being Spiritual is independent of Space and Time limitations, and is therefore Omnipresent and Omniscient; it may indeed be not only connected with the Physical Ego of this World, but be in close working connection with other Physical Egos in the Universe, and may, in some wonderful process, through its affinity with the Great Spirit, be helping them to progress in other directions possibly quite beyond our power to conceive under the conditions we are accustomed to here. A great forest tree forms each year a multitude of separate buds; each of these buds is an independent plant which has only a temporary existence and has no present knowledge of the other buds, but it is by means of all these buds and the leaves they develop, that the tree is nourished and increases from year to year. Still more wonderful is the fact that it is these temporary existences which, in accordance with the general law of life-production, form special "ovules," which we call seeds, each of which has the potentiality for growing up into a great forest tree, which, in its turn, is capable of pushing forth temporary existences in countless directions. We have, in the above process of creating a forest tree, a likeness on the Physical Plane to what I would suggest is the process not only of the creation of the Race, but, on the Transcendental Plane, the multiplication of permanent personalities by means of, or in connection with, the temporary and Space-limited Human Physical Ego. Again, as the human mind forms a thought, clothes it in physical language, and sends it forth in such a form as not only affects our material sense of hearing, but conveys to the hearer the very thought itself, so the whole Physical Universe is a temporary and Space-limited representation of the Reality which is behind, is in fact the materialisation of the Will or Thought of the Great Spirit. The "taking root" or advent of the Spiritual to the genus homo, made it possible for man to interpret the Good, Beautiful, and True in the phenomena of nature, and, as we, by studying these materialisations, gain knowledge of the Reality, and our personalities become real powers, so may we at length approach the point where we may feel that we are thinking, or having divulged to us, the very thoughts of God; and, though it may never be possible in this life to form a full conception of the Reality, we may, I think, even with our present state of knowledge, aspire to understand the messages conveyed to us in some of the multitudinous forms, under which these thoughts are presented to us, and I propose giving an example of this later on in this View. Once more, in the case of a picture, it is possible, by examining and comparing a number of certain short lines in perspective, to discover not only the position occupied by the Artist, but also the point to which all those lines converge; so by examining and combining certain lines of Thought on the Physical Plane, and following them as far as we can with our present knowledge towards the point where our Ideals of the Good, Beautiful, and True intersect, we may reach the position from which we may be able to form, although through a glass darkly, even a conception of the Great Reality, and therefore of Its Offspring the Transcendental Ego, and its connection with the Universe. As the whole of Nature is the temporary and Space-limited manifestation of the Reality, so the individual Physical Ego is the manifestation in Time and Space of the Transcendental Ego or true Personality. The Physical Ego is its transient expression and has no other use beyond this life. Each Physical Ego helps, or should help forward, the general improvement of the Race towards perfection. Each generation should come into being a step nearer to the Spiritual, until it can be pictured that at the final consummation, there will be nothing imperfect, no shadow left; the full complement of Spiritual Personalities being complete in the Great All-Father. Do we not then see clearly that the Physical Ego, comprised in what we call "I am," "I perceive," "I think," "I conceive," "I remember," is transient, and has only to do with the progress of the Race? It is the Shadow or Image in the Physical Universe of that Personality which Transcends Time and Space. Take away a small portion of the Brain, the organ of the Mind, and Memory is wiped out, remove the greater part of it and the manifestation of the Physical Ego is destroyed; though the body is as much alive as before, there is apparently nothing left but the physical life, which it has in common with all animals, plants, and probably, as strongly suggested by late discoveries in Radio-activity, even with what is called inorganic matter. The Brain, and therefore the Ego, is not a necessity for Physical life; this is clearly seen in the lower forms of life--it would be difficult to point out the brain of a Cabbage or an Oak Tree. In the last forty years we have entered upon a new era of religion and philosophy; we hear no more of the old belief that the study of scientific facts leads to atheism or irreligion; we begin to see that Religion and Science must go hand in hand towards elucidating the Riddle of the Universe, and such a change enables us even to aspire to show, as I now propose to do, that it is possible, by examining certain phenomena in Nature, to reach that point where we may feel that we are listening to and understanding, though through a glass darkly, what may be called the very Thoughts of the Great Reality. I will take for examination the subject most intimately connected with the title of this View--namely, the nature of the growth of the Transcendental Personality, upon what that growth depends, and how we may understand that the attainment to Everlasting Life is dependent upon that growth. I have already pointed out in View Two that the Transcendental Personality, being Spiritual, and therefore akin to the Great Reality, may be said to have no free-will of itself. Its will or influence must always be working towards perfection in the form "Let Thy Will, which is also my will, be done"; the efficacy of its influence with the Great Reality depends on its growth or nourishment by the knowledge of the Good, Beautiful, and True ever bringing it more and more nearly into perfect touch or sympathy with the All-loving. The power of prayer therefore depends upon two conditions; it must be in the form of "Let thy Will be done," and that which prays must be capable of making its petition felt, by having already gained a knowledge of what that Will is. I am, of course, not referring to that form of prayer which, alas with so many, seems to be the attempt to get as much out of the Absolute as is possible, with the least amount of trouble. If now we carefully examine the Phenomena around us, we make the extraordinary discovery that this power to influence is the very basis of survival and of progress throughout the universe. In the organic world all Nature seems to be praying in one form or another, and only those that pray with efficacy, based upon the above two conditions, survive in the struggle for existence. The economy of Nature is founded upon that inexorable law the "Survival of the Fittest"; every organism that is not in sympathy with its environment, and cannot therefore derive help and nourishment from its surroundings, perishes. Darwin tells us that the colours of flowering plants have been developed by the necessity of attracting the bees, on whose visits depends the power of plants to reproduce their species; those families of plants which do not as it were pray to the bees with efficacy, fail to attract, are not therefore fertilised, and disappear without leaving successors. Flowers may also be said to be praying to us by their beauty, or usefulness, and in some cases, as with orchids, by their marvellous shapes. We answer their prayer by building hot houses and tending them with care, because they please us, and therefore we help them to live; while, on the contrary, those plants that have not developed these qualities are not only neglected, but, in some cases, as with weeds, we take special trouble to exterminate them, because their existence is distasteful to us. Charles Darwin also tells us that Heredity and Environment are the prime influences under which the whole Organic World is sustained; in other words, every organism has implanted in it by heredity the principle of life, but the conditions under which it will be possible for that life to expand and come to perfection, rest entirely upon its power to bring itself into harmony with its environment. This principle of life does not come naked into the world, it is fortified by heredity, with power gained by its parents in their struggle for existence, and in their persistence to get into sympathy with their environment. The knowledge they gained, by this struggle, they have handed down to their offspring, and given it thereby the possibility of also gaining for itself that knowledge of, and power to get into sympathy with, its environment, upon which its future existence will depend. So may we not see that in the Spiritual World, these two conditions dominate, and that it is only by the clear comprehension of their reality that we can understand how all-important it is for the soul to bring itself nearer and nearer into harmony with its environment, the Spiritual, and how the efficacy of prayer depends upon the Knowledge of what is the Will of God? We have received from our Spiritual Father the principle of Everlasting Life, and the aspirations which, if followed, will enable that life to expand and come to perfection; but, as in the case of physical organism, the gift is useless unless we elect to use those aspirations aright, and gain thereby a knowledge of our Spiritual Environment, which alone can bring us into sympathy with the Great Reality. Without this "Knowledge of God," we can see by analogy on the Organic Plane that Everlasting Life is impossible--we are as weeds and shall be rooted out. This is no figment of the imagination, it seems to be the only conclusion we can come to if Nature is the work of Nature's God, and Man is made in the image (spiritual) of that God. Herbert Spencer came to the same conclusion when defining everlasting existence. He says: "Perfect correspondence would be perfect life; were there no changes in the environment but such as the organism had adapted changes to meet, and were it never to fail in the efficiency with which it met them, there would be Eternal Existence and Eternal Knowledge" (_Principles of Biology_). The power of influence, by sympathetic action, may also be seen in another direction; consider the fact that if we are in a room with a piano and we sing a certain note, say E flat, we not only hear that note coming back from the piano, but, if we examine the strings, we find that all the E flats are actually vibrating in sympathy, because they are in perfect harmony with the note given out by the voice; but none of the other strings are responding because they are out of harmony. With this simile in mind, let us consider the curious fact that a moth always lays its eggs on that particular plant upon which the caterpillars, when they hatch out of these eggs, must feed. The study of the Life History of Insects has always been of great interest to me, as I firmly believe that we are on the verge of a great discovery, and that the first indications are being revealed to us through the investigation of the Biology of Insects. Some of you may, perhaps, have watched this progress of ovipositing, as I have done, and noticed how the female moth will hover in a peculiar way over different plants, but does not alight until she comes to a plant near akin to the one she is seeking. She then alights, but remains, on tip-toe as it were, with legs outstretched and wings quivering, and soon mounts again into the air; it is only when she alights on the proper food plant that she shows unmistakably that she knows her quest is ended and her eggs are laid. This particular plant has no other attractions for her, she takes her food irrespectively from any other flower which secretes honey, and yet, when she is ready to fulfil her destiny, she is unerringly drawn towards that particular plant which must be the food of her offspring. What is this wonderful sense? We call it instinct, a name which is made to cover all other senses in the lower animals, of which we have no cognisance ourselves. Let us take our own senses as a guide: we find that they are all based on the appreciation of frequencies, of greater or less rapidity, by means of organs specially adapted to vibrate in sympathy with those pulsations, and thus we gain knowledge of external things. Two tuning forks or two organ pipes when vibrating close to each other, give out a pure musical note when they are in perfect harmony, and they then have, as it were, "rest" together; but when one is put even slightly out of harmony, there is, in place of a pure musical note, a rise and fall of sound in heavy throbs, strangely characteristic of "quarrelling"; in fact, discord and "unrest." In our sense of hearing we can only appreciate up to 40,000 vibrations in a second as a musical sound, whereas, with Light and other electrical phenomena, as we shall see in a later View, we can appreciate sympathetic frequencies of not only many millions, but indeed millions of millions in a second, and yet it is possible that, in the sense (of insects) we are now examining of life appreciating life, we may be in the presence of frequencies as far removed from light as light is from sound. If, then, we may follow the analogy from our highest senses, we seem to get a clear explanation of the mystery of insect discrimination. The insect, in her then state, could have no pleasure in the presence of certain plants, their modes of frequency being out of sympathy with that particular Insect Life, and, it may be conceived that, not only is there no inducement for the insect to alight on that plant, but that even in its near proximity that insect would feel discomfort or restlessness; when, however, a plant is reached which is near akin to the one required, less antipathy or unrest would be felt, and, when the true species of plant is reached, all would be harmony, pleasure, and rest, the functions of Insect Life would be vivified, and its life-work accomplished under the influences of sympathetic action. I have made several other investigations on this subject, but I must only give one more to illustrate the higher form of Animal Life appreciating Animal Life. There is a large class of insects, called Ichneumonidæ, which lay their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars, and, as in the case of a moth laying its egg on the special food plant upon which its caterpillar can feed, so does each species of these insects unerringly lay its eggs in the body of a particular kind of caterpillar. It must be a wonderful sense which can enable an Ichneumon Fly to do this; it has never seen that caterpillar before, as the egg, from which its own caterpillar was hatched, was laid inside the body of one of those caterpillars, and the caterpillar upon which it fed had been eaten up and disappeared at least six months before the Ichneumon Fly had even made its way out of its own cocoon; and yet this insect is not only forced, by some mysterious power, to lay its egg in the body of a caterpillar, but there is only one species which will serve its purpose, and it has to hunt up this particular caterpillar from among thousands of other different species. Let me put before you what is, perhaps, the most mysterious illustration which we have under this heading, wherein the Ichneumon Fly cannot even get sight of its prey, nor employ any sense similar to our own for its detection. There are several species of moths whose caterpillars live in the very heart of trees. We will take the case of the caterpillar of Zeuzera Aesculi, the Leopard Moth; the egg of this Moth is laid in a crevice of the bark, and, when first hatched, the small larva penetrates through the bark into the centre of an apple, pear, or plum tree, and then commences to eat its way upwards, forming at first a very small tunnel, but gradually increasing it, as the caterpillar grows larger, into a passage of about half an inch in diameter. In such a position, surrounded as it is by solid wood, the thickness of which would probably not be less than one and a half or two inches, we might suppose that the caterpillar would be safe from its enemies, but it is not: there is a large Ichneumon Fly which cannot propagate its species unless it can lay its eggs in the body of this particular caterpillar. This Ichneumon Fly can, from outside, not only tell that inside the stem of that tree there is a caterpillar, but can locate the exact spot, and, still more wonderful, is able to determine whether or not that caterpillar is the particular species it is in search of. There are numerous other species of moths whose caterpillars feed in the centre of trees, and yet this female Ichneumon is able to mark down as her prey, although far out of reach of any sense known to us, that one species which alone can serve her purpose. As soon as she has located the exact position of the caterpillar, she unsheathes a long delicate ovipositor, with which she is provided, and drills it right through the intervening solid wood until it pierces the body of the caterpillar; she then lays an egg down that long tube into its body and repeats the process two or three times. The caterpillar itself does not appear to feel any inconvenience from this process and continues to feed and grow larger; but it has the seeds of death within itself, and the two or three little caterpillars, which hatch out of the eggs of the Ichneumon, are also growing rapidly inside it. At last, when the time comes that the large caterpillar should have been full fed, and it has eaten its way outwards until it rests close under the bark, preparatory to turning into a chrysalis, its enemies finish their destructive work, and, if the tree is then opened, the empty skin and cartilage skeleton of the large caterpillar is found, together with two or three large cocoons. These cocoons, if kept, will produce in due time specimens of the Ichneumon Fly, and these will in their turn go about their murderous work as soon as their proper hunting season comes round again. This is only an isolated case out of thousands of similar occurrences in every locality; in fact, if you walk along any palings in the country in the early summer, you will see at every few steps the evidence of similar tragedies. Those of you who live in the country must often have seen on palings little heaps containing a dozen or more of the small yellow Microgaster Cocoons, and if these are examined carefully they will be found to be surrounding the skin of a caterpillar. These minute cocoons may be kept under a wine glass and, from each a minute Ichneumon Fly, with (if a female) its sharp ovipositor, will emerge in due time. It is curious what mistakes can be made even by intelligent persons. I have had the skin of the caterpillar and this little heap of yellow Microgaster Cocoons sent me to examine, and have been seriously asked whether this was not a true case of Parthenogenesis; the suggestion being that the caterpillar had actually laid eggs, instead of waiting until it had become a moth, and that its efforts, to alter the course of nature, had been too much for its constitution and it had died in the act! There are other illustrations I should have liked to give but space will not permit, the most remarkable being, perhaps, the knowledge a Queen Bee possesses of the proximity of another Queen, even when that other is still in the pupa state, sealed up in a waxen cell. I have made numerous experiments with Queens of the common black English Bee (_Apis mellifica_), and also the yellow-striped Italian Bee (_Apis ligustica_), which belong to the same order (_Hymenoptera_) as the Ichneumon Flies, and the same marvellous sense of life appreciating life at a distance, and through solid matter, is experienced. If we now follow the same Thought by examining the Inorganic, we make the extraordinary discovery that this power to influence, based on sympathetic action, is the very mainspring by which physical work can be sustained, and upon it depends entirely the very action of our physical senses. Our senses are based upon the appreciation of Vibration, in the Air and Ether, of greater or less rapidity, according to the presence in our organs of processes capable of acting in sympathy with those frequencies. The limits within which our senses can thus be affected are very small; the ear can only appreciate thirteen or fourteen octaves in sound, and the eye less than one octave in light; beyond these limits, owing to the absence of processes which can be affected sympathetically, all is silent and dark to us. This capacity for responding to vibration under sympathetic action is not confined to Organic Senses; the physical forces, and even inert matter, are also sensitive to its influences, as I will now demonstrate to you. In wireless telegraphy it is absolutely necessary that the transmitter of the electro-magnetic waves should be brought into perfect harmony with the receiver--without that condition it is impossible to communicate at a distance; again, a heavy pendulum or swing can, by a certain force, be pushed, say an inch, from its position of rest, and each successive push will augment the swing, but only on one condition, namely, that the force is applied in sympathy with the pendulum's mode of swing; if the length of the pendulum is 52 feet, the force must be applied only at the end of each eight seconds, as, although the pendulum at first is only moving one inch, it will take four seconds to traverse that one inch, the same as it would take to traverse 10 feet or more, and will not be back at the original position till the end of eight seconds; if the force is applied before that time the swing of the pendulum would be hindered instead of augmented. Even a steam engine must work under this influence if it is to be effective; there may be enough force in a boiler to do the work of a thousand horse-power, but, unless the slide valve is arranged so that the steam enters the cylinder at exactly the right moment, namely, in sympathy with the thrust of the piston, no work is possible. To understand the next example I want you first to recognise that, apart from its physical qualities, every material body has certain, what may be called, traits of character, which belong to it alone; there is generally one special trait or "partial," namely, the characteristic which it is easiest for the particular body to manifest, but I shall show you that by sympathetic action others can be developed. I have several pieces of ordinary wood, used for lighting fires, each of which, according to its size and density, has its special characteristic; if you examined each by itself you would hardly see that they are different from one another except slightly in length, but if I throw them down on the table, you would hear that each of them gives out a clear characteristic note of the musical scale: to carry this a step forward, I have a long, heavy, iron bar, about 4 feet long and 2 inches thick, so rigid that no ordinary manual force can move it out of the straight, and, from mere handling, you would find it difficult to imagine that it would be amenable to soft influences. But I have studied this inert mass, and, as each person has special characteristics, some being more partial than others to, say, Literary pursuits, Athletics, Music, Poetry, Engineering, Science, or Metaphysics, so I am able to show that this iron mass has not only a number of these "partials," some of which are extraordinarily beautiful and powerful, audible over long distances, but that by the lightest touch of certain small generating rubbers, not more than an ounce in weight and tipped with cork or leather, each of which has been put into perfect sympathy with one of those traits, I can make that mass demonstrate them both optically and audibly; but, without those special sympathetic touches, it is silent and remains an inert mass. This result is obtained by physical contact between the instrument and the mass, but we will now carry this another step forward and deal with the subject of the action of Influence at a distance, or what may be called Prayer, between two of these rigid masses. From what we have already seen, it is clear that the Soul of man could not possibly pray with efficacy to a graven image; there is nothing in sympathy between them, and, without sympathetic action, influence is impossible; but it is quite possible for Matter to pray with efficacy to Matter, provided the material soul, if we may use the analogy, is brought into perfect sympathy with the material god, and I can now put before you an experiment showing this taking place. I have another heavy bar of iron, not so long but of the same thickness as the one already described, and have found its strongest characteristic; I have another small rubber, fashioned so that its characteristic is in perfect sympathy with that of the bar, namely, that the number of vibrations, in a second, of the instrument are exactly equal to those of the iron mass, and it is, therefore, as we saw in the last experiment, able by contact to influence the bar sympathetically. The slightest touch throws the bar into such violent vibration that a great volume of sound is produced, which can be heard a quarter of a mile away. The result of this sympathetic touch is far from being transient, in fact, the bar will continue to move, audibly, for a long time. This movement in the mass of iron was started by physical contact, but having once started the bar praying, willing, or thinking, whichever you like to call it, that bar now has the power to affect, without contact, another rigid bar of iron even when removed to great distances, provided the second bar possesses a similar characteristic, and that that characteristic has been brought into perfect _sympathy_ with that of the first bar. I have a second bar which fulfils these conditions, and, although, at the outset, it had no power whatever to respond, it has been gradually, as it were, educated, namely, brought nearer and nearer into sympathy with the first bar, until it is now able to respond across long distances; it has acted across the whole length of one of the largest halls in London so strongly that it could be heard by all present. We will now reverse the process of bringing these bars into sympathy, and I will throw the first out of harmony by slightly changing its characteristic; the change is extremely small, quite inappreciable to the human ear, the bar giving out as full and pure a note as it did before the alteration was made; in fact, the change is so slight that it can still, with a little force, be stimulated by the same generator, and yet the whole power to influence has been lost; the first bar, although it is praying with great force, gets no response from the second bar, and, even if the bars are now brought on to the same table and put within a few inches of each other, there is still no reply, there is no sympathetic action, the efficacy of prayer between the two has been completely destroyed. Do we not then see the principle upon which the efficacy of Prayer depends, that the whole object of a Human Soul, when using the words "Thy Will be done," is to bring itself closer and closer into perfect sympathy with the Absolute? When that is accomplished, we may understand, from our simile, that not only shall we and our aspirations be influenced by the Will of the Deity, but that then our wishes, in their turn, must have great power with God, and it becomes possible for even "Mountains to be removed and cast into the midst of the sea." How truly the Philosopher Paul at the beginning of our Era recognised that the knowledge of God, which Christ Himself tells us is Everlasting Life, may be gained by the study of the material creation; His words were sadly overlooked by many who, half a century ago, were afraid that the discoveries of Science were dangerous to belief in the Divine. He says: the unrighteous shall be without excuse because "The invisible things of Him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity" (Romans i. 18 to 20, R.V.). We have seen the truth of this wonderful statement, we have traced the reflection of the greatest attribute of the Deity, Divine Love, on the material plane. What has been the result of our investigation? We find that throughout the whole of Nature the one great universal power is Sympathy. 'Tis verily "love that makes the world go round." What a marvellous conclusion to our investigation! Let us see where it leads us. The whole of creation is the materialisation of the Thoughts of the Deity; we have, therefore, in the forces of Nature, the impress of the very Essence of God. Our Innermost Self is an emanation from Him, and Prayer, which, at the beginning, is only a striving to bring ourselves into harmony with the Deity, must, as the Soul grows in strength and knowledge, become a great power working under the wonderful principle of Sympathy. True prayer, indeed, becomes "_Love in Action_," and, under certain conditions, Prayer may actually be looked upon as the greatest physical force in Nature. But let us carry this one step further: can we, by our analogy of Matter praying, understand why "the knowledge of God is Everlasting Life"? Look at the first iron bar, and watch how, as long as it keeps on vibrating, the second bar, _because it is in sympathy_, will be kept in motion. If it were possible for the first bar to vibrate for ever, the second bar would, speaking materially, have everlasting life, through its being in perfect sympathy with the first bar; without this connection the bar would be lifeless. Now apply this to our Transcendental Personality; it is being nourished, the knowledge of God is increasing, it is at last pulsating in perfect harmony with the Deity, and when, for it, the Material Universe disappears, its _affinity_ to Infinite Love must give it Everlasting Life. Everything that has not that connection is but a shadow which will cease to be manifest when the Great Thought is completed, the volition of the Deity is withdrawn, and the Physical Universe ceases to exist; nothing can then exist except that which is perfected, that which is of the essence of God--namely, the Spiritual. Perfect harmony will then reign supreme, such happiness as cannot be described in earthly language nor even imagined by our corporeal senses; hence, in the many passages referring to that wondrous Life hereafter, we are not told what Heaven is like but only what is not to be found there: "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, Neither have entered into the heart of man The things that God hath prepared for them that love Him."--1 COR. ii. 9. There are several other phenomena which I might have examined, but I chose this particular aspect of the Reality, as best illustrating the subject I am trying to elucidate in these Views, though it was probably the most difficult one to bring home to the general reading public. There are, I know, from personal knowledge, many of my readers who will have been able to follow and appreciate what I have attempted to demonstrate, but to those who have not grasped the connection between the Infinite and Finite, the Transcendental and the Physical Ego, the Real and its Shadow, a few more words of explanation may be helpful. It is easy to see that the negatives, Cold, Ignorance, Falsehood, Ugliness are manifestations of their positives, as given in my list in View One, and it is also not difficult to show that Evil or Sin is dependent upon Good in the same way as the Shadow depends upon Light for its manifestation. Do not let me be misunderstood; I have never suggested that these negatives or negations have not the appearance of realities to us, under our present conditions of existence; they indeed have to be dealt with by us as realities, but they are only manifested as phenomena on the physical plane, because our Senses, and therefore Thoughts, are limited by Time and Space and therefore dependent upon _relativity_. Let me put the case of Good and Evil before you, as analogous to, say, Light and Shadow. Moral laws and responsibility thereto are dependent upon the existence of Goodness; the purely animal Homo was, as I have pointed out, free from sin or responsibility until the advent of the Spiritual made manifest, in that animal, the physical Ego and raised him far above all other animals. Man thus became a responsible moral being, a living soul, aware of Right, and therefore of Wrong, and certain acts then became for him sin that were not sin before. Thus the advent of Christ, and, in a less degree, the coming into the world of every good man, so raised, and is raising, the level of moral rectitude that things become sin that were not sin before; St. Paul himself specially recognises this when he says that without law there is no sin. The Goodness, then, brought into the world by Christ, did not create sin but made it manifest, and gave it the appearance of reality under our present conditions of life and thought. How well the Mystic Paul understood that the Invisible is the Real, and that the Visible--namely, the phenomena of nature--is only dependent upon Time for its manifestation. His words are: "For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are Eternal." I have tried in these Views to use only simple everyday language, and am fully aware how inadequate are the words I have employed; but my readers will have, I hope, recognised how difficult, and in many cases impossible, it is, in treating these metaphysical subjects, to find words to express the exact meaning; we have to describe the Infinite in terms of the finite, and by use of imperfect finite analogies to get a glimpse of the otherwise unthinkable, and even then it requires a mystical sense, or what St. Paul called spiritual discernment, to see beyond the physical mists. If the whole of the phenomena of Nature must be looked upon as the manifestation of the Divine Noumenon, it follows that Matter is as divine as the Spiritual, though not as real; it is His shadow, or the outline of His very image, thrown upon the material plane of our sensations; and the principle of sympathetic action, upon which, as we have seen, the whole power to influence depends throughout the Universe, becomes surely the best symbol we can use for understanding the efficacy of prayer and the connection between our Transcendental Self and the All-loving. Realise that the Transcendental Ego is a Spirit, and therefore akin to the Great Spirit, not only in essence, but in "loving and knowing communion," then look at my last experiment, where we saw two material bodies (remember they are shadow manifestations of the Reality) which could influence each other from the fact that they were akin, not only in substance, but in perfect sympathetic communion. If now we watch the shadows of two human beings thrown upon a wall, and see those shadows shaking hands and embracing each other, are we not justified in concluding that those images give us a true explanation of what is really taking place? and is not that exactly what I have done? have I not shown, as I proposed to do, that it is possible by examining the phenomena of Nature (the shadows of the Reality) to reach that point where we may even feel that we are listening to, or having divulged to us, some of what may be called the very thoughts of the Great Reality? VIEW FIVE THE PHYSICAL FILM We have seen in former Views that the whole Phenomenal Universe, as perceived by our senses, and all intellectual thoughts or concepts based on those perceptions, are, in reality, only mists or shadows; they have no existence apart from our physical senses, and may be likened to a thin film, which at death is pricked and passes away like a scroll, leaving us face to face with the Reality. We thus seemed to grasp that all phenomena, including our Physical Egos, are but the shadows or outline of the Reality, as depicted on our limited plane of consciousness; but these phenomena, having Motion for their basis, are none the less real to us under our present outlook, limited as it is by conditioning in Time and Space, and we have to deal with them as realities in our everyday life. I want to make this distinction clear in the present View. Those of us who were youngsters in the 'sixties, and were fortunate enough to be taken to that land of wonders for children, the London Polytechnic, will remember seeing what were called Professor Pepper's Ghosts. By means of a large sheet of glass on the stage, the _reflection_ of a human being (otherwise invisible), which we will call the "_unreal_," was, by the audience, seen walking alongside the people on the stage, and it was impossible to say which was the real and which the unreal. When the unreal was made to appear further back on the stage, it was apparently seen through the real figures and they appeared as ghosts, for they were seen to be transparent. If now we fix, perpendicularly on a table, a small pane of glass, and place, say, an orange in front and another orange behind it, we can arrange so that an observer, looking through the glass, sees two oranges alongside each other, one being the real and the other the unreal, and, with proper lighting and dark background, it is impossible to determine which is which, as they are both apparently real oranges. We will call the real, A, and the unreal, B; we now also introduce a human hand on both sides of the glass, and again we have apparently two real hands close to the oranges; if the real hand is now seen to try to touch the B orange, it passes through it, but it can take up the A; and the same result is seen when the unreal hand tries to grasp them, except that it can grasp the B but not the A; it is, in fact, only the unreal that can apprehend the unreal, and the real the real. The above simile may help some of my readers to understand how the phenomena of Nature, though having no real existence apart from our senses, have the appearance of reality to us, because both we and the whole Phenomenal Universe are the unreal of our analogy, namely, the reflection or shadow of the Real on the physical plane. If we run against a stone wall, which is also part, with us, of the shadow, we hurt ourselves and acknowledge its existence, but to the Real it would not be an obstruction at all, it is not there. We know that this wall is not really solid, it is made up of Atoms revolving round each other but never touching, but the man in the street would give as the reason why it hurt, that it was dense, or what is called hard; if the wall were made of hay, or cotton wool, or of sunbeams, we should not suffer by running against it; in fact, the denser anything becomes, the more it shows its character of being real to our senses. If we take this as the true explanation for the Physical Universe, we are met with something quite beyond our powers of comprehension, when we try to form a conception of the all-pervading Ether; unless we may look upon it as actually a _presentation_ of the Reality itself. If we wave our hand, we can feel the obstruction of the air, but we cannot feel the Ether. We think our earth very solid, and we know it is rushing round the sun at the enormous rate of 60,000 miles per hour, but it finds no obstruction in the Ether, there is no retardation of its velocity; and yet the study of Radio-Activity has quite lately shown us that that Ether is not only as dense as iron, or a hundred or a thousand times denser, but millions of times denser than that metal; and yet it permeates all matter like a sieve. In Sir Oliver Lodge's words, "the Ether is so dense that matter by comparison is like a gossamer or a filmy imperceptible mist." We can, therefore, by again using our "Ghost" analogy, understand why matter cannot obstruct the Ether, or vice versa; there is no perceivable friction between them, unless, as I shall presently suggest, we may find something akin to obstruction by Matter, not to Ether itself, but to its pressure, in the phenomenon of Gravitation. The evidence we are gradually winning from Radio-Activity seems to be leading us to the conclusion that all forms of matter are but different motions or strains in the Ether (perhaps, as Lord Kelvin thought, in the form of vortices), that the different atoms of which matter is composed are, as suggested in View Three, _apertures_ of different complexity of outline--namely, those points at which Ether is absent or its density attenuated. Have we not apparently here another example of Positive and Negative, the Invisible the Ether, as the Real, and the Visible, the Material Universe, as its Negative the Unreal, similar to our list of Positives and Negatives in View One? Ether itself cannot be explained by any of the known dynamical laws, though it is probably the very root and cause of all of them; it is absolutely beyond our plane of perception or conception. We can only perceive certain effects of its presence when it comes into our limited world of consciousness, under the aspects of Time and Space--namely, in its movements, which we classify as forms of matter and modes of energy. It is only lately that we have been able to see clearly that the effects known to us as Light, Heat, Electricity, and Magnetism are caused by pulsations or rills of different rapidity in the Ether (this will be referred to in a later View); it is also probably the cause of what we call Gravitation, and we shall see that the action of Gravitation may, after all, be not in the direction of a pull but must be looked upon as a pushing force. Gravitation is common to all matter; in common language, every particle attracts every other particle with a force directly proportional to its mass, and inversely to the square of its distance; it is a very weak force compared with others we know, and difficult to measure except when a large mass of matter is involved. Perhaps this will be clearer, and not far from the truth, if I say that the force of Gravitation exerted between two masses of matter compared with that which we find acting between the constituents of matter--namely, in chemical affinity, is comparable to the difference existing between the density of matter and the density of Ether. The latest calculation of the pressure of the Ether is almost inconceivable--namely, about 25,000 tons on the square inch, or 3,600,000 tons on the square foot; it may well therefore be that, in the degree of permeability of matter by the Ether, when we can calculate it, will be found the explanation of what we call Gravitation between two masses; they are each shielding the other from Ether pressure, in its own direction, with an obstructive force equal to its mass. The reason why the earth appears to attract us, is that it is shielding us from a certain amount of pressure in its direction; and we know that we are also apparently attracting every particle of the earth with a force proportionate to our mass, because we are, however slightly, shielding the earth from pressure in our direction; if this is the true explanation, Gravitation is a phenomenon of the Ether; it will be seen to be a movement of matter in the line of least pressure, and is therefore a push and not a pull. Let us now come down to what we understand better concerning the subject of this View. The question, "What is Truth?" "What is the Reality?" goes to the very root of the Riddle of the Universe. We are all trying in one direction or another to answer this question. As knowledge increases, old theories become untenable and have to be discarded, and, in their place, fresh ones are formulated to account for new phases of phenomena. There seems a general impression, among even thinking people, that scientists are wedded to, and always trying to find proofs for, their last theories, but this is not the case. The endeavour of the true seeker after truth is not so much to discover fresh facts which coincide with existing theories, as to find phenomena which cannot be explained thereby; there is indeed more joy over one fact which does not agree with preconceived theory, than over ninety-nine facts which are found to fall under that heading. In our everyday life we have become so accustomed to take for granted that what we see, hear, or feel by touch must be real, that it is difficult for the man in the street to realise that our senses woefully deceive us; that perception without knowledge often leads us astray into false concepts, and these false concepts lead us into difficulties which require fresh concepts to be formed, and these again demand further and more exact knowledge to be applied to perceived phenomena. This necessity for overcoming difficulties is the greatest incentive we have for gaining fresh knowledge of our surroundings. Owing to the fact, as already pointed out, that our sense perceptions are based upon the appreciation of change or motion, and must therefore be limited in Time and Space, and that the trueness of our conceptions of the Reality is dependent upon the knowledge which can be brought to bear upon those perceptions, we are forced to postulate two aspects of the Universe; one of these is what may be called the Visible, Finite, or Physical, which indeed carries the appearance of Reality to our limited senses, though it has no real existence for us apart from those senses, and the other is that which transcends our utmost conception, which we call the Invisible, the Infinite, or Spiritual. At the outset of all investigation, we are forced to recognise that the only way we can approach conception of the Infinite is necessarily in the form of a negative, the negative applying to those things of which we have cognisance; we carry our thought to the utmost limit possible with our present knowledge, and, when we have come to a standstill, we conceive the Infinite to be not that but something further on. As our knowledge increases by small steps, that something further on seems ever to be flying from our grasp by mighty strides, until we are forced to bow our heads and recognise that we are in the presence of, though still not in sight of, the Reality. A divine impulse is ever urging us forward to greater conceptions but shattering our hopes, and giving us a feeling akin to despair, if we arrogate to ourselves a greater power of conception than we have knowledge to sustain; we have to approach the study with, indeed, that feeling of elation which the consciousness of our origin and destiny wakes within us, giving us a feeling of certainty that we are capable, in the hereafter, of attaining to the highest summit of knowledge, but with that humility, in the present, which makes us acknowledge that he who knows most knows most how little he knows. In this frame of mind let us now examine our surroundings. We are living in a world of continuous and multitudinous changes; in fact, without change, we could have no cognisance of our surroundings, we should have no consciousness of living. We have become so accustomed to certain sensations that we are apt to take them, as facts, and scoff at the suggestion that they are non-realities. I propose, however, to show that what we perceive are not Realities, and true conception of our surroundings depends upon the knowledge which we can bring to bear to interpret the meaning of these sensations. It is only in response to our conscientious endeavours to form new concepts that knowledge is being daily revealed to us; the more we progress in Knowledge the more we see that Perception alone without Knowledge leads to false concepts, and these in their turn create fatal obstacles and difficulties to our progress towards the true appreciation of the Universe. Let me give a few examples. In early times the Sun and the Stars were seen to revolve round the Earth once every day, and, without Knowledge of Astronomy, this was taken for granted as an absolute fact, and was looked upon as a reality; later on, however, it was noted that the Stars never changed their relative positions; this necessitated a new concept, namely, that they were fixed on the inner surface of a huge globe, which was also revolving. This false concept brought other difficulties into play, the question arose as to what was beyond the globe, and also the difficulty that, when the Stars as well as the Sun were found to be at such enormous distances from the Earth, their rates of motion were quite inconceivable. Even in the case of the Sun the motion represents over twenty-five million miles per hour, and the apparent motion of the Stars is thousands of times faster than Light travels. These insuperable difficulties were not swept away until, by the advance of Knowledge, the falsity of Conception, based only upon appearance, was made manifest, and it was seen that it was the Earth which revolved and not the Stars. Even then, owing to its supposed antagonism to what was stated in the Bible, the new Conception was opposed with great bitterness, it being long looked upon and denounced as a sacrilegious invention, and anybody daring to promulgate such a doctrine was threatened with death. Our present Conception, that the Earth turns round on its axis once every day, and rolls in its orbit round the Sun once in every year, may be called a Reality to our finite Senses; but I shall show later on that, except for the finiteness of our senses and the imperfection of our Knowledge, the Concept is not a true one. With perfect Perception and perfect Knowledge we shall see that, apart from the two limitations or modes under which our physical senses act, there can be no such thing as Motion, because the very essence of Motion is but the product of those limitations, namely, Time and Space. We are so accustomed to take everything for granted, that it may perhaps seem strange to question whether it can even be asserted that we have ever seen matter. Let us turn towards a common object in this room. We catch in our eyes the multitudinous impulses which are reflected from its surface under circumstances somewhat similar to those in which a cricketer "fields" a ball; he puts his hand in the way of the moving ball and catches it, and, knowing the distance of the batsman, he perhaps recognises, by the hard impact of the ball, that the batsman has strong muscles, but he cannot be said to _see_ the batsman by that impact, nor can he gain thereby any idea as to his character. So it is with objective intuition; we direct our eyes towards an object, and catch thereby rays of light reflected from that object at different angles, and, by combining all these directions, we recognise _form_, and come to the conclusion that we are looking at, say, a chair. The eye also tells us that rays are coming in greater quantity from some parts of it, and we know that those parts are _polished_; the eye again catches rays giving higher or lower frequencies of vibration, and we call that _colour_; our eyes also tell us that it intercepts certain rays reflected from other objects in the room, and we know that it is not _transparent_ to light; and those are our sight perceptions of a wooden chair. We may go a little further by "pushing," when we know, by the amount of resistance compared with the power exerted, what force of gravity is being exerted by and on that chair, and we declare it heavy or light, but by these means we get no nearer to the knowledge of what matter is. By tests and reagents we can resolve wood into other forms which we call Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, &c., which, because we cannot divide them into any other known substances, we call "Elements," but we can only look at these in the same way as we are looking at the chair. Chemists, however, carry us a little further, and show us that the Elementary substances have not only their likes and dislikes, but their passionate desires and lukewarmness to others of their ilk, and, when opportunity offers, they break up with great violence any ordinary friendship existing between them and their neighbours, and seize on their coveted prey with a strength of will surpassing anything experienced in the Organic World; and this new association they maintain, until they, in their turn, are dispossessed, or they encounter another substance of still greater attraction, when they leave their first love and take up new connections. I shall touch upon the subject of what matter is later on; meanwhile let us consider how, owing to our senses being limited by the considerations of Time and Space, we are surrounded by inconceivables, and yet it is those very inadequate conceptions which force us to acquire Knowledge; the greatest incentive we have to pursue our investigation is, as we have seen, the fact that Perception without sufficient Knowledge leads us into difficulties. Let me give you two instances of these inconceivables. Infinite Space is inconceivable by us, but it is also quite as inconceivable, or perhaps even more so, to think of Space being limited, and yet we are forced to declare that one of these two must be true. Again, Matter is either composed of ultimate bodies, of a certain size which cannot be divided, or is infinitely divisible; both of these are inconceivable, the latter for the same reason as that of the Infinity of Space, and the former because it is inconceivable that the ultimate body could not be divided into two parts by a sharp edge forced between its two sides, or by a stronger force than at present holds it together; it has indeed been suggested as an explanation that, if an atom could be divided, it might cease to be matter, that its parts would have no existence, but it is difficult to conceive how two nothings can form one something. Another example of Perception leading to a false Concept is our Sense of Pain; we apply a red-hot coal to the tip of one of our fingers and our Perception would have us believe that we feel intense pain at the point of contact, but we know this to be a false Concept, as it can be shown that the pain is only felt at the brain: there are in communication with different parts of our body small microscopical nerve threads, any of which may be severed with a pen-knife close to the base of the skull, with the result that no pain can then be felt, although the fingertip is just as much alive and is seen to be burning away. Another example is our Sense of Hearing. A musical sound is made up of a certain number of pushes in a second, but each push is silent. It is only, as we have seen, a musical sound to our Sense when the pushes recur at intervals of not more than the sixteenth part of a second. The prongs of a tuning-fork, vibrating 500 times per second, seem to be travelling very quickly, but are really only moving at the rate of 10 inches per second, or not much over half a mile per hour, when the amplitude is the hundredth part of an inch, which gives quite a loud sound. Light is also composed of rills in the Ether, but the rill itself is not Light, it is only Light when these rills strike, with a certain enormous frequency, on a special organ adapted for, we might say, counting these frequencies, and if these frequencies fall below that certain number, or above twice that number per second, there is no Sense of Sight. How few people have ever realised what a wonderful Counting Machine they possess in their organ of Sight! I think the best method I can adopt, to bring this clearly before you, is to take our tuning-fork, vibrating 500 times per second, a rapidity which to some will be even difficult to comprehend, and then ask you to consider how long that fork must continue to vibrate before it has accomplished the full number of frequencies, which must necessarily impinge upon the eye in one second of time, before the phenomenon of sight becomes possible. That tuning-fork would have not only to continue its vibrations without diminution for seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months, years, or hundreds of years, but for 30,000 years before it has accomplished the full number of pulsations which, as Ether waves, must strike the eye in one second of time, to give the impression of Light; the calculation is easy, the rills of Red Light are so small that 40,000 of these only cover one inch of length, and light travels 186,000 miles per second. If therefore the number of inches in 186,000 miles are multiplied by the 40,000, and the product is divided by the 500 times which the tuning-fork vibrates in one second, you have the number of seconds that tuning-fork must vibrate, before it has completed the number of impacts which, in one second of time, must fall on our retina to give us the impression of red light; and that tuning-fork would have to vibrate nearly twice as long, say 50,000 years, to reach the number of impulses which strike the eye in one second of time and give the impression of violet light; and between these two limits are situated the colours--Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Indigo. What a marvellous sense then is Sight, when we find that, not only can it grasp these innumerable vibrations, but can actually differentiate colours, appreciating as a different colour each increase of about one-tenth in these multitudinous frequencies; and it is principally by means of this Sense of Sight that we gain a knowledge of what is happening around us. And yet what strides we have made in the last two hundred years to improve upon that instrument! With all its wonderful capabilities, we shall see later on that the eye is a very imperfect instrument for seeing very small objects, or even large objects when at a great distance. With the present compound Microscope, only developed in the last hundred years, and its apochromatic lenses, invented only in the last forty years, we are able to see and photograph objects of a minuteness immeasurably beyond the power of the human eye, and, with our telescopes, we can see and photograph stars far beyond the possibility of vision by the unaided eye; and yet, by the stellar spectroscope, we are actually able to examine and identify the very atoms of which that distant star is composed, or rather was composed hundreds of thousands of years ago; we can compare those atoms with the same atoms in our laboratories, and we find that, though the former are hundreds of thousands of years older than the latter, they show absolutely no signs of wear or loss of energy, though they have been for that enormous time, and are still, pulsating at the rate of not only millions but billions of times per second; and though the pulsations they emit have travelled across such a vast depth of space that the mind cannot even imagine the distance, there has not been any diminution in the numbers of pulsations per second, nor the slightest slowing down of the rate of flight at which they started on their journey from that far-off world. If there had been the _slightest_ change we could detect it at once by means of the Spectroscope. With another instrument we are able, not only to hear but to converse audibly, as long as we like, with another human being a thousand miles away, who is also sitting comfortably in his own arm-chair and speaking to us with as much freedom as though we were both in the same room. With another instrument we can go further, and exchange thoughts, in a few seconds, with a being on the other side of the world, by means of a thin wire that is itself fixed, and does not move, and we have lately invented another means by which we can do the same, over several thousands of miles, without even a connecting wire. With another instrument we have gone far beyond the facility with which the Printing press enabled us to communicate our thoughts to our fellow human beings, we can actually imprint our very words and laughter upon a wax cylinder and send it to the antipodes, and our friends there, with a similar instrument, can not only hear and recognise our very voice, but can make that voice repeat our thoughts audibly, to a thousand others at the same time, and can repeat that process for hundreds of times without exhausting that voice. With another instrument we can depict on a film, not only the images of our friends but their very actions, which may also be sent to any distance, and the persons, thereon depicted, may be seen by their relatives alive and going about their everyday employments, with every movement exact to life. We can cross the Ocean against the wind and waves by means of harnessed sunbeams, without any exertion of our own, at the rate of an express train, which train, by the by, is also moved by the same means; we can dive to the bottom of the sea and journey there for hours, in perfect safety, without coming to the surface, and we are even developing wings, or their equivalent, which from immemorial tradition we were not to possess before we had finished doing our duty properly in this world and had gained admission to the next. We can do all these things, but how ignorant we still are in the commonest doings of Nature! By giving up our whole lifetime, and spending millions of pounds, we could never make a grain of wheat or an acorn, and wherever we turn we find ourselves confronted with mysteries beyond our power to explain from a finite material standpoint; even in material vibrations we meet a mystery almost beyond our power to comprehend. Take for instance those small insects, of the family of Grasshoppers, which make the primæval woods of Central America give out a noise like the roaring of the sea, a wondrous sound never to be forgotten by those who have heard it. By means of a kind of rasp one of these insects creates a sound which Darwin states can be heard to the distance of one mile: these insects weigh less than the hundredth part of an ounce, and the instrument by which the noise is made, weighs much less than one-tenth of the total insect; it is less therefore than one thousandth part of an ounce in weight, and yet it is found, by calculation, that this small instrument is actually able to move at the enormous rate of a thousand vibrations per second and keep in motion for hours, from five to ten million tons of matter, and it does this so powerfully that every particle of that enormous bulk of matter gives out a sound audible to our ears. But even these millions of tons are not its limit of action, for we know that these vibrations must go on until, in the end, every particle of matter connected with this earth has been affected by each of those vibrations. All our difficulties of understanding the true meaning of these and other phenomena around us are, as I have already pointed out, caused by our inability to recognise that vibration or motion has no reality, it is a pseudo-conception arising from the fact that our senses are entirely dependent upon the two modes or limitations, Time and Space, for their very action, and that, as conceptional knowledge is based upon perceptional knowledge, our very consciousness of living is also dependent upon these same limitations. We have seen that Motion is nothing but the product of these two modes of perceptions, and, in my next Views, I shall examine these elusive limitations, these two mysteries of Time and Space, the forever and the never-ending; I shall trace them to the utmost limit of our conception, and try to gain thereby a clearer insight into the fact, not only that the whole Physical Universe is but a transient and Space-limited phenomenon, a thin film which our senses have erected and which divides us from the Reality, but that, if our power of _introspection_ were fully developed, we should know that the Reality is nearer and dearer to us, and has much more to do with us, even in this life, than has the physical. VIEW SIX SPACE We have seen that our very thoughts, and therefore consciousness of living, are limited by Time and Space, but we cannot with the utmost endeavour conceive a limit to Time and Space; they are two twin sisters, alike in many respects but different in others, and we shall realise later on that they are readily interchangeable. The sensuous aspect of Motion is, as we have seen, the time that an object takes to go over a certain space--namely, what is called the rate at which it passes from one point to another, and we cannot imagine Motion unless it contains both of these modes in however small a quantity; we may have the greatest imaginable space traversed in a moment of time, or the smallest imaginable space covered in what may be called, for want of a better word, an eternity, but we still have to postulate what we call Motion; this, of course, follows from the fact that our thoughts require both these modes for forming concepts. If we compare our conception of Matter with that of Time and Space, we see that the two latter are not separately the object of any sense, but are the modes or conditions under which all our senses act, to a greater or less degree, and these conditions cannot therefore carry the same impression of objectivity to our senses as Matter does, except perhaps in the sense that all physical phenomena are simply motion, and motion is the product of both of these limitations but not of either of them separately. If we analyse our conceptions of Time and Space we seem forced to postulate that they are both infinitely divisible and infinitely extensible; they are both what is called continuous and not discrete, we cannot conceive any minimum in their division; both duration in Time and extension in Space can be reduced, as it were, to a mathematical point; nor can we conceive any maximum in either duration or extension. They are both therefore comprised in every conception possible to our consciousness; all parts of Time are time and all parts of Space are space; there are no holes, as it were, in Space which are not space, nor intervals in Time which are not time, they are both complete units; Space cannot be limited except by space, and Time cannot be limited except by time. So far they are alike, but, on the other hand, Space is comprised of three dimensions--namely, length, breadth, and depth, whereas Time has the appearance to us of comprising one dimension only--namely, length. Under our present conditions we can only think of one finite subject at a time, and, at that moment, all other subjects are cancelled. We can therefore only think of points in Time and Space as situated beyond, or in front of, other fixed points, which again must be followed by other points; we cannot fix a point in either so as to exclude the thought of a point beyond; we can only in fact examine them in a form of finite sequences. The Idea of Infinity, which we shall refer to in a later View and show to be a false conception, is therefore a necessary result of the limitation of our thoughts; our physical Ego cannot conceive beyond the Finite as long as we are conscious of living under present conditions. With every act of perception by our senses, we have therefore not only intuition of the Visible or Finite, but we become at the same moment aware of an Invisible Infinite beyond. Time appears to us as an inconceivable, intangible something, which gives us the impression of movement without anything that moves it. Space is an omnipresent, intangible, inconceivable nothing, outside of which nothing which has existence can be even thought to exist. Let us now try and get an insight into what we mean by perception of distance in space. The appreciation of distance depends upon what is called _parallax_, or the apparent displacement of projectment of an object when seen by our two eyes separately. If you hold up a finger and look at it, with each eye separately, you will see that the finger is projected by each eye on to a different part of the background; the angle which the lines of sight, from each eye, make when they meet at the object, is called the angle of parallax, and the further the object is away the smaller that angle becomes; it is, in fact, the angle subtended, at the object, by the distance between the two eyes. As the object is brought nearer the eyes have to be inclined inwards to impinge on that object; the appreciation of distance then, in our sense of sight, is dependent upon our perception of the amount of inclination of those two lines of sight, and is therefore an acquired knowledge. The distance between the eyes is about 2-1/2 inches, and this is a very short base line upon which to estimate distance; in fact, without the help of perspective and known dimensions of surrounding objects, it is doubtful if anyone could by its means estimate distance beyond a few hundred yards. The object would, of course, also have to be an unknown one, as, otherwise, the converse of the above comes into play, and the distance could be estimated by the angle which the known diameter of the object subtends at the eye; but this necessitates the size of the object being known beforehand and the employment of perspective. We can extend our perception of distances by, ourselves, moving from one place to another, gaining thereby a longer base line, and noting the displacement of projection of the object on a distant background; by that means, distance up to several miles can probably be appreciated. But, when we try to determine the distance of, say, the Moon (240,000 miles away), we are helpless, especially as we have no marked background, except in the case of occultations of the Sun or Stars. But the Astronomer at once comes to our aid; a distance of several miles is carefully measured on a level plane, and, by placing telescopes at the extremities of that known line, we can mark the inclination of those telescopes to each other when focussed upon a particular mountain peak on the moon; by this means we know the angle of parallax (180° less the sum of the two angles of inclination), and, from this and our known length of base line, we can calculate the distance. When however we go a step further and attempt to calculate the distance of the Sun (93,000,000 miles), we find our last base line again absolutely inadequate. But the astronomer helps us again; we now separate our two telescopic eyes by the whole diameter of the earth (7900 miles); this is accomplished by taking from the Equator two simultaneous observations of the Sun, at its rising and setting; for when the Sun is setting, at say the Equinox, it is at that moment rising at exactly the other side of the earth; the inclination of the two telescopes, directed to a certain point on the Sun, will now give the distance approximately, though even this base line is too short for exactitude. When however we attempt to go still further and try to ascertain the distance of stars, which are a million times further off than the Sun, such a base line is quite out of the question. How then can we get a base line for our telescopes longer than the whole width of the earth? The Astronomer again provides the means. The earth takes one year to complete its vast orbit round the sun, and the diameter of that path is 186,000,000 miles. This is made our new base line for separating our telescopes; an observation of a star is taken, say, to-day, and after waiting six months, to enable the earth to reach the other extremity of its vast orbit, another observation is taken, and yet it is found, as we shall see later on, that the distance of the nearest fixed star is so _stupendous_ that even this base line, of 186,000,000 miles, shows absolutely no inclination between the two telescopes except in about a dozen cases, and even in those the angle of parallax, perceivable, is so minute that no reliable distance can be calculated; we can only say that the star is at least as far away as a certain distance, but it may be much farther. Let us now try by other means to get a clearer insight into the subject of this View, by tracing Space to the utmost limit of human conception. I think the best method I can adopt will be to take you, in imagination, for a journey as far as is possible by means of the best instruments at our disposal. We will start outwards from the Sun, and glance on our way at the worlds involved in the Solar System. Let us first understand what are the dimensions of our central Luminary. The distance of the Moon from the Earth is 240,000 miles, but the dimensions of the Sun are so great that, were the centre of the Sun placed where the centre of the Earth is, the surface of the Sun would not only extend as far as the Moon, but as far again on the other side, and that would give the radius only of the enormous circumference of the Sun; another way to understand its size is, to remember that, light travelling 186,000 miles per second, would actually take five seconds to go across its disc. Let us now start outward from this vast mass. The first world we meet is the little planet Mercury, only 3000 miles in diameter, revolving round the Sun at a distance of 36 million miles. We next come upon Venus, at a distance of 67 million miles. She is only 400 miles smaller in diameter than our Earth, and, with the dense atmosphere with which she is surrounded, animal and vegetable life similar to that on our Earth would be possible. Continuing our course, we arrive at our Earth, situated 93 million miles away from the Sun. Still speeding on, a further 50 million miles brings us to Mars, with a diameter of nearly 5000 miles, and accompanied by two miniature moons. The sight of this planet in a good instrument is most interesting. Ocean beds and continents are visible, and the telescope shows large tracts of snow, though not necessarily formed from water (perhaps carbonic dioxide), surrounding its polar regions, which increase considerably during the winter, and decrease during the summer seasons on that planet; but there are no canals! The fact that our largest and best telescopes failed to show these imaginary canals, was an insurmountable barrier to the advocates of these markings, but the "Canalites" made their contention ridiculous when they actually suggested that the reason for this failure to perceive them was that our telescopes were too large to see such small markings! How such a statement could have been made is incomprehensible on any supposition, as everybody knows that the whole use of size, or what is called aperture, in a telescope, is to help us to see more clearly small and faint markings. The distances we now have to travel become so great that I shall not attempt to give them; you can, however, form an idea of the tremendous spaces we are traversing when you consider that each successive planet is nearly double as far from the Sun as the preceding one. In the place where, by Bode's law, we should expect to have found the next world, we find a group of small planets, ranging in size from about 200 miles in diameter down to only a few hundred yards. They pass through nearly the same point once in each of their periods of revolution round the Sun, and it has been suggested that they are fragments of a great globe rent asunder by some mighty catastrophe; over 400 of these little worlds have been discovered and have received names, or are known under certain numbers. We now continue our voyage over the next huge space and arrive at Jupiter, the largest and grandest of the planets. This world is more than 1000 times larger than our Earth, its circumference being actually greater than the distance from the Earth to the Moon. It has seven moons, and its year is about twelve times as long as ours. Pursuing our journey, we next come to Saturn. It is nearly as large as Jupiter, and has a huge ring of planetary matter revolving round it in addition to seven moons. Further and further we go, and the planets behind us are disappearing, and even the Sun is dwindling down to a mere speck; still we hurry on, and at last alight on another planet, Uranus, about sixty times larger than our Earth; we see moons in attendance, but they have scarcely any light to reflect; the Sun is only a star now; but we must hasten on deeper and deeper into space. We shall again, as formerly, have to go nearly as far beyond the last planet as that planet is from the Sun. The mind cannot grasp these huge distances. Still we travel on to the last planet, Neptune, revolving on its lonely orbit; sunk so deep into space that, though it rushes round the Sun at the rate of 22,000 miles per hour, it takes 164 of our years to complete one revolution. Now let us look back from this remote point. What do we see? One planet only, Uranus, is visible to the unaided eye; the giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, have disappeared, and the Sun itself is now only a star; practically no heat, no light, all is darkness in this solitary world; the Sun is 1000 times smaller than we see it from the earth, and gives, therefore, only one-thousandth part of its heat and light. Thus far have we gone, and, standing there at the enormous distance of 3,000,000,000 miles from our starting-point, we can begin to comprehend the vast limits of the solar system; we can begin to understand the ways of this mighty family of planets and satellites. But let us not set up too small a standard whereby to measure the Infinity of Space. We shall find, as we go on, that this stupendous system is but an infinitesimal part of the whole universe. Let us now look forward along the path we are to take. We are standing on the outermost part of our Solar System, and there is no other planet towards which we can wing our flight; but all around are multitudes of stars, some shining with a brightness almost equal to what our Sun appears to give forth at that great distance, others hardly visible, but the smallest telescope increases their number enormously, and presents to our mind the appalling phantom of _immensity_ in all its terror, standing there to withstand our next great step. How are we to continue on our journey when our very senses seem paralysed by this obstruction, and even imagination is powerless from utter loneliness? One guide only is there to help us, the messenger which flits from star to star, universe to universe; Light it is which will help us to appreciate even these bottomless depths. Now, Light travels 186,000 miles per second, or 12 million miles every minute of time. It therefore takes only about four hours to traverse the huge distance between our Sun and Neptune, where we are now supposed to be standing; but to leap across the space separating us from the nearest star, it would require many years for Light, travelling at 186,000 miles every second of that time, to span the distance. There are, in fact, only fifteen stars in the whole heaven that could be reached, on the wings of Light, in sixteen years! Let us use this to continue our voyage. On a clear night the human eye can perceive thousands of stars, in all directions, scattered without any apparent order or design; but in one locality, forming a huge ring round the heavens, there is a misty zone called the Milky Way. Let us turn a telescope with a low aperture on this, and what a sight presents itself! Instead of mist, myriads of stars are now seen surrounded by nebulous haze. We put a higher aperture on, and thus pierce further and further into space; the haze is resolved into myriads more stars, and more haze comes up from the deep beyond, showing that the visual ray was not yet strong enough to fathom the mighty distance; but let the full aperture be applied and mark the result. Mist and haze have disappeared; the telescope has pierced right through the stupendous distance, and only the vast abyss of space, boundless and unfathomable, is seen beyond. Let us pause here for a moment to think what we have done. Light, travelling with its enormous velocity, requires on an average considerably over ten years to traverse the distance between our Solar System and Stars of the first magnitude, but the dimensions of the Milky Way are built up on such a huge scale that to traverse the whole stratum would require us to pass about 500 stars, separated from each other by this same tremendous interval; 10,000 years may therefore be computed as the shortest time which light, travelling with its enormous velocity, would take to sweep across the whole cluster, it being borne in mind that the Solar System is supposed to be located not far from the centre of this great star cluster, and that the cluster comprises all stars visible arrayed in a flat zone, the edges of which, where the stratum is deepest, being the locality of the Milky Way. Let us once more continue our journey. We have traversed a distance which even on the wings of light we could only accomplish in many thousands of years, and now stand on the outskirts of our great star cluster, in the same way, and I hope with the same aspirations, as when we paused the last time on the confines of our Solar System. Behind us are myriads of shining orbs, in such countless numbers that human thought cannot even suggest a limit, and yet each of these is a mighty globe like our Sun, the centre of a planetary system, dispensing light and heat under conditions similar to what we are accustomed to here. Let us, however, turn our face away from these clusterings of mighty suns, and look steadfastly forward into the unbroken darkness, and once more brace our nerves to face that terrible phantom--_Immensity_. We require now the most powerful instruments that science can put into our hands, and by their aid we will again essay to make another stride towards the appreciation of our subject. In what, to the unaided eye, was unbroken darkness, the telescope now enables us to discern a number of luminous points of haze, and towards one of these we continue our journey. The myriads of suns in our great star cluster are soon being left far behind; they shrink together, resolve themselves into haze, until the once glorious universe of countless millions of suns has dwindled down to a mere point of light, almost invisible to the naked eye. But look forward: the luminous cloud to which we are urging our flight has expanded, until what, at one time, was a mere patch of brightness, has now swelled into a mighty star cluster; myriads of suns burst into sight--we have traversed a distance which even on the wings of light would take hundreds of thousands of years, and have reached the confines of another Milky Way as glorious and mighty as the one we have left; whose limits light would require 10,000 years to traverse; and yet, in whatever direction the telescope is placed, star clusters are to be seen strewn over the surface of the heavens. Let us take now the utmost limit of telescopic power in all directions. Where are we after all but in the centre of a sphere whose circumference is 100,000 times as far from us as one of the nearest fixed stars, a distance that light would take over a million years to traverse, and beyond whose circuit, infinity, boundless infinity, still stretches unfathomed as ever? We have made a step, indeed, but perhaps only towards acquaintance with a new order of infinitesimals. Once the distances of our Solar System seemed almost infinite quantities; compare them with the intervals between the fixed stars, and they become no quantities at all. And now when the spaces between the stars are contrasted with the gulfs of dark spaces separating firmaments, they absolutely vanish away. Can the whole firmamental creation in its turn be nothing but a corner of some mightier scheme? But let us not go on to bewilderment: we have passed from planet to planet, star to star, universe to universe, and still infinite space extends for ever beyond our grasp. We have gone as far towards the infinite as our sight, aided by the most powerful telescope, can hope to go. Is there no way then by which we can continue our journey further towards the appreciation of this infinity? A few years ago we should probably have denied that it was possible for man to go further; but quite lately a new method of observation has been developed, and we will try and use this to continue our flight. The reason why, to our sight, an object becomes apparently smaller and smaller as it is withdrawn from the eye, until it at last disappears entirely, is that the eye is a very imperfect instrument for viewing objects at a great distance; it can only form an image of an object when that object is near enough to subtend a certain angle, or, in popular language, to show itself a certain size--the rays of light must converge--in fact, the eye cannot single out and appreciate parallel rays: could it do this, objects would not appear to grow smaller as they are removed. A pencil might be removed to the Moon, 240,000 miles away, and would still appear to the eye the same size as it does here close to you; with perfect vision there would be no such thing as perspective, but, with our present conditions of sight, the result would be inconvenient. We should never be able to see, at one and the same time, anything larger than the pupil of our eye. The beauties of the landscape would be gone, and our dearest friends would pass us unheeded and unseen; everyday life would resolve itself into a task similar to that of attempting to read our newspaper every morning by means of a powerful microscope; we should commence by getting on to a big black blotch, and, after wandering about for half an hour, we might perhaps then begin to find out that we were looking at the little letter "e," but anything like reading would be quite out of the question. We may, therefore, with our limited aperture of sight, be thankful that our eyes have the imperfection of not appreciating parallel rays. But we will now consider how this imperfection may be remedied by science. There are two different ways of doing this--viz., first, by increasing the amount of light received, by means of telescopes of great aperture; and secondly, by employing an artificial retina a thousand times more sensitive than the human. Now, the human retina receives the impression of what it looks at in a very minute fraction of a second, provided of course that the eye is properly focussed, and no further impression will be made by keeping the eye fixed on that object; but in celestial photography, when the telescope is turned into a camera, the sensitive plate, having received the impression in the first second, may be exposed not only for many seconds, or minutes, or hours, but for an aggregate of even days by re-exposure, every second of which time details on that plate new objects, sunk so deep in the vast depths of space as to be immeasurably beyond the power of the human eye, even through telescopes hundreds of times more powerful than the largest instruments that science has enabled us to construct; and yet here is laid before us a faithful chart, by means of which we may once more continue our journey through space. A short exposure will show us firmaments and nebulæ just outside the range of our greatest telescopes, and every additional second extends our vision by such vast increases of distances that the brain reels at the thought; and yet, as we have seen, exposures of these sensitive plates may be, and have been, made not only for seconds, but for thousands and even hundreds of thousands of seconds! And still there is no end, no end where the weary mind can rest and contemplate; the finite mind of man can only cry out that there is no limit. In spite of all its strivings and groping by aid of speculative philosophy, the finite cannot attain to the Infinite, nor get any nearer to where the mighty sea of time breaks in noiseless waves on the dim shore of eternity. In this journey through space we have apparently exhausted our power of conception of the _extension_ of this View. Although we have travelled in one direction only, our flight was applicable to every possible known direction _outwards_ into the vast abyss of Infinite space. But there is another path, by which we can also travel with profit to our understanding of this subject, running in the opposite direction--namely, _inwards_. Just as the outward journey seemed to take us towards the appreciation of what our finite senses call the infinitely great, so does this other path appear to intend to infinity, in the opposite direction, leading us to appreciate what is called the infinitely small. We have already considered this direction in View One, under the heading of "Relativity," and by combining these two experiences, we may see still more clearly that our very conception of Space is one of the modes only under which motion or physical phenomena are presented to our consciousness. VIEW SEVEN TIME In the last View I referred to the mysteries of Time and Space as twin-sisters; they have, as we saw, many aspects in common, and are the two modes or conditions under which all our senses act and by which our thoughts are limited. We arbitrarily divide each of these two mysteries into two parts, which parts are separated from each other, in either case, by a point which has, apparently, as its centre, our very consciousness of living. In the case of Space we call this point the HERE, and on one side of it, as we saw in our last View, we have extension towards the infinitely great, and, on the other, intension towards the infinitely small. In the case of Time we call the middle point the NOW, and on one side of this we place the duration of Time towards the future, and, on the other, we place what we call the duration of Time towards the past. In the case of Space we have the here and the _overthere_, equivalent in Time to the present and the _future_, but, though Time and Space are, as it were, twin-sisters, upon whose combined action depends our very consciousness of living, we do not treat them both equally. It is a remarkable fact that the human race on this particular world has, in some inexplicable way, come to look upon the future as non-existent until we arrive at, and are able to perceive, with our senses, what is happening there; this is all the more inexplicable when we realise that in traversing Space we certainly have to _move_ to get anywhere, but in traversing Time we have nothing equivalent to movement. This curious way of looking upon the future as non-existent, may be another sign that our race is still in its infancy, but is more probably caused by human beings having always hitherto looked upon Time not only as a reality but as actually moving or extending along a line from past to future eternity; whereas, under our present outlook, we have no consciousness of the existence of Time except by intervals between successive thoughts; our consciousness of the very existence of Time is based upon our Physical Ego repeating the _present_, by saying to itself the words, Now--Now--Now; but there is nothing that can be called movement in this, any more than if you are standing still and saying, Here--Here--Here--relating to Space. Time is, as it were, "marking time," and as the present in time is common to all space, Time is "marking time" everywhere, and the Now therefore includes the whole of the past and the whole of future eternity everywhere. We shall get a clearer understanding of this later on; meanwhile, we are face to face with the fact that we look upon the future as non-existent. This curious state of things is probably only accidental to the present stage of development of the human mind, and may, at any time, be rectified by perhaps either a slight rearrangement of that slender network of nerves upon which depends our faculty of thinking, or the joining together of a few microscopical filaments attached to the cells in the grey cortical layer, or even a single bridge thrown across from one convolution to another of the brain; a very slight alteration would open up to our consciousness the present existence of the future. The prime perceivable difference between our brains and those of the Apes and lower animals is the larger number of enfoldments, or convolutions, that are developed by the Human. Each new line of thought, or sequence of thoughts, requires, and is provided with, a new wrinkle or small convolution, and it probably only requires the attention of the human race to be fixed, for a time, on the consideration of this subject, to evolve the slight alteration, or bridge, necessary to enable us to see that the future, as also the past, does actually exist and is included in the Now. It may make this a little clearer to consider that if you maintain that, in traversing the duration of time, the future does not exist until you arrive there, you should also in fairness insist that, in travelling through the extension of Space, your destination, say Rome, does not exist until you get there and can see it with your senses. As we have, in the former six Views, been gradually mounting above the mists and illusions of our everyday thoughts, and can look through our Window with, I hope, a clearer vision, I shall venture in this present View to carry the subject of the _Future_ still further, and show that, just as we have now before us and can read the papyri which were written 5000 years ago, so it is possible to conceive that books, written and being written and printed 5000 years hence, are _at present_ in existence, and that it is even possible the human race has actually already read them; whether we shall be able to see them and read them in our own lifetime may be open to question; that may again depend upon the development of special cross-circuiting of brain filaments. Meanwhile, in order to carry our present View to the utmost limit of our conception, in a manner somewhat similar to what we did for Space, I will again ask you to join me in a thought-flight towards the appreciation of this second great Mystery. With this object in view we will first consider the human senses of sight and hearing, commencing with sound, or the vibrations which affect the tympanum of the human ear. Sound travels in air at about 1130 feet per second, and if the vibrating body, giving out the sound, oscillates sixteen times in one second, it follows that, spreading over this 1130 feet, there will be sixteen waves, giving a length of about 70 feet to each wave. This is the lowest sound that the human ear can appreciate as a musical note, and is, what may be called, the fourth Octave above one vibration in one second. When the number of vibrations in a second sinks below sixteen, the ear no longer appreciates them as a musical sound, but is able to hear them as separate vibrations or beats. The easiest way of illustrating this is by means of a revolving disc, with sixteen holes pierced at regular intervals round the edge, and a jet of high-pressure air, which is forced through each of the holes successively as they revolve. When the disc does not quite complete one revolution in a second, only fifteen puffs come to the ear in a second of time, and they are heard as puffs; but when the rate reaches one revolution in a second, the sound, as if by magic, changes into the lowest musical sound. The same result may be obtained in a more pronounced form by means of explosions or pistol shots; when these are slow and heard separately, they are painful and almost unbearable to the ear, but, as soon as their rapidity, namely, at sixteen per second, gets beyond the power of the ear to differentiate between the explosions, the impression, as if by magic, changes into a continuous or musical sound, like a thirty-foot pipe note of an organ. To go back to our disc. The octave above this lowest musical note is obtained by doubling the rate of puffs, namely, by revolving the disc twice in one second, and the next octave by revolving four times in a second, and so on, doubling each time, until, at about the thirteenth octave, the sound has become so high that the majority of listeners cannot hear it, and fancy it must have stopped, whereas a few will still be saying: "How shrill it is!" At last, at about the fourteenth octave, when there are 20,000 beats to the second and each wave is about half an inch long, it passes beyond human audition, and, although we can show that the air is still vibrating, all is silent, the human ear being incapable of hearing so many beats in a second even as a continuous sound, though I have evidence to show that many insects can hear probably considerably beyond this limit. It is, however, possible to make these higher vibrations perceptible to our senses by means of what are called sensitive flames: we can actually, by these, measure the length of these silent waves, and as we know the rate at which they travel, we can at once compute the number which occur in a second of time, and thus ascertain their pitch. By this means we can follow for about three more octaves above the audible limit, namely, up to 160,000 pulsations per second, with a length of wave of one-twelfth of an inch. Two and a half octaves above these numerically, _i.e._ at about the twentieth octave, we reach the frequency of Electro-Magnetic Rills, used by the Marconi System of wireless telegraphy, which pulsate at about 950,000 per second, and have a wave-length of something like 1000 feet. The reason for this great increase in length of wave is caused by these frequencies being propagated in the Ether at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, instead of, as with sound waves, in the air, at only 1130 feet per second. We can trace these particular frequencies, called, after their discoverer, Hertzian waves, for about fifteen octaves, when we arrive at the frequency of 32,000,000,000 in a second, with a wave-length decreased to a quarter of an inch; we can render the effect of these waves visible, but have no physical organ by which we can feel these pulsations. After this, however, we get into the region of frequencies which, though still of exactly the same kind, we know and can feel as Radiant heat; these are situated in the next fourteen octaves, and bring us up to those subtle frequencies which affect another of our sense organs, and which we appreciate as light; these we have already seen have the enormous frequency of 530,000,000,000,000 pulsations per second for red light, up to 930,000,000,000,000 per second for violet, and having wave-lengths so small that it takes 40,000 and 70,000 of them respectively to cover one inch in length. There is only a little over half an octave that the eye can appreciate as light, and then all is darkness; but we can still go on further by the help of Science: beyond the violet we have the actinic or chemical rays, which are used in photography, and which enable us to trace the frequencies for a further two octaves. Beyond this we cannot pierce with our present knowledge; but there may be, and probably are, latent in our nature, senses which, properly developed, will be able to appreciate still more subtle vibrations, and organs which, perhaps, even now are being prepared for the reception of these influences. We have no organs yet developed for receiving and appreciating what are called Wireless waves, but we have already been able to devise physical Receivers, of wonderful sensitiveness, for them and other waves of the same nature, such as those of Radiant heat. In the case of Radiant heat, the Bolometer invented by Professor Langley has been able to receive and record a change of temperature of the one millionth of a degree Centigrade, and can easily make visible the heat of a candle at a distance of one and a half miles. In wireless telegraphy also the Receiver, perfected by Marconi, is affected by rills, made by a splash of electric discharge, over 3000 miles away. If our eyes were sensitive to these frequencies, both of which are composed, as is also light, of electro-magnetic rills, we could see anything that was happening anywhere in the world, for they go through matter as though it did not exist, as light passes through glass; indeed, if our region of Sight waves was only put an octave lower we could not use glass in our windows, it would be too opaque, we should be obliged to have our windows made of thin slabs of carbon or other substances permeable to Radiant heat waves. Science indeed steadily points to electricity and magnetism being a form of motion, and it may be that in these invisible rays we may some day discover the nature of those mysterious forces; and, even far beyond those, as suggested in View Four, we may in the not far distant future be able to appreciate Physical Life itself as a mode of frequency. We want, as it were, a special "Time Microscope," which I have already referred to, to examine these vibrations, and a method similar to that already mentioned in "Space," under Celestial Photography, by which we may traverse and examine hundreds or thousands of octaves by each second of exposure; for, although the path extends to infinity, we have already arrived at the utmost limits of our finite senses, and find that after all we can only appreciate fifty-one octaves, a few inches only, as it were, along the line of Infinite extent, reaching from the finite up to the Reality; and even so it must be borne in mind that we have only travelled in one direction, whereas the path we have taken extends in the opposite direction also to infinity. We started with sixteen vibrations in a second, as the lowest number of beats we human beings can appreciate as a musical sound; let us now descend by octaves. The octave below is eight vibrations in a second, and there are probably many animals that can only hear these as a musical sound; the next octave is four, then two, and then one vibration in a second. But we do not stop there; the octave below this is one vibration in two seconds, then in four seconds, eight seconds, sixteen seconds, and so on, until it is possible to conceive that even one frequency in a million years might be appreciated as a musical sound, or even as one of the colours of the spectrum, by a being whose time sensations were enormously extended in both directions, but still finite. Once more we must call a halt. Our finite minds become bewildered in attempting even to glance at these infinities of time. We measure space by miles, yards, feet, and inches; we measure time by years, hours, minutes, and seconds; and by these finite units we try to fathom these two marvellous infinities. With our greatest efforts of thought we find, however, that we can get relatively no distance whatever from the HERE of Space and the NOW of Time. It is true that the present, as a mathematical point, appears to be hurrying and bearing us with it along the line stretching from the past to future eternity, but in reality we get no further from the one nor nearer to the other. Let us change our view and examine this subject under a different aspect. First of all, look round a room and note the different objects to be seen. Even in a small room we do not see the objects as they really _are_ at this instant, but only as they _were_ at a certain fixed length of time ago. The present time is common to every point in space and each person is in the present, but only to his own perception; to everyone else in the room, each individual is, at this moment, being seen acting in the past; those objects which are further away are being seen further behind in point of time than those that are nearer; in fact, however near we are to an object, we can never see it as it is but only as it was. We are dealing with very minute differences here, they being based upon the rate at which light travels; but they are differences which are known with a wonderful degree of accuracy. We have here another example of how perception without knowledge leads to false concepts. When anyone views an extended landscape, he thinks that his sight shows him that the same point of Time, which he is experiencing, is common to every man, animal, plant, or material visible there, but we know now that he is seeing every part of that scene in the past compared with himself. Just as all objects therein are situated at separate distinct points of space, so to our vision the objects of that scene are acting or existing in different epochs of time. An Artist gives us on a flat surface a picture of that landscape, and his representations of all objects in that scene appear therefore to us as being in the same moment of Time, but to get that effect he has to draw objects at a distance smaller than those close at hand; a fly in the foreground has to be drawn larger than a horse supposed to be in the distance, though both are on the same flat surface; they have the same parallax and are therefore the same distance from the observer, and as this produces a similar image on our retina, we accept it though we know it is only a make-believe; it serves its purpose by giving us an impression on our retina which we have learnt to interpret as representing that landscape, but such a picture would indeed be a marvel of absurdity to a being who had perfect sight, such as we have already referred to, and who could appreciate parallel rays; in such a vision there would be no perspective, no vanishing point in perception. Now let us take a wider landscape. The Moon is 240,000 miles distant. We do not, therefore, ever see her as she is but as she was 1-1/4 seconds ago. In the same way we see the Sun as he was eight minutes ago, and we see Jupiter as he was nearly an hour ago. Let us look still further to one of the nearest fixed stars. We at this moment only see that star as it was more than ten years ago; that star may therefore have exploded or disappeared ten long years ago, and yet we still see it shining, and shall continue to see it _there_ until the long line of light has run itself out; all around us, in fact, we see the appearance of blazing suns not as they are now but as they were thousands of years ago, and, by the aid of the telescope and of our sensitive plate, we are only now recording the light which started from clusters and firmaments probably millions of years ago. Now let us take the converse of this. To anybody on the moon at this moment the earth would be seen from there not as it is, but as it was 1-1/4 seconds ago, and from the sun as it was eight minutes ago, and if we were in Jupiter, and were looking back, we should, at this particular moment, be viewing what was happening on this earth, and seeing what each of us was doing an hour ago. Now let us go in imagination to one of the nearest fixed stars, and looking back we should see what was happening ten years ago; going still further to a far-off cluster, the light would only just now be arriving there, which started from the earth at the time when man first appeared; or we might go to so remote a distance that the scene of the formation of the Solar System would be only now arriving there, and all the events which have taken place from that remote time to the present would, as time rolled on, reach there in exactly the same succession as they have happened on this earth; and remember that we should be looking, from that great distance, at all these past events with the same intuitional advantage as though we were actually present here in time, for however near we are to an object, we never see it as it is but only as it was in the past. Let us but turn to any point of space and we shall find at each point, according to its remoteness, the actual scenes of the past being enacted, in fact it may be said that throughout infinite space every event in past eternity is now indelibly recorded. A murder committed hundreds of years ago, in a country house, may never have been found out, the criminal and his victim have alike turned to dust, the blood has been washed from the floor, the very house and its surroundings have crumbled and disappeared, and in their place a waving corn field is all that can be seen, but at this very moment if we were at a certain point in space, we should now be witnessing there, the whole actual living scene from beginning to end, as though we were present _here_ hundreds of years ago: the murderer standing over his victim, the knife driven in and the blood gushing out. If we went further away we should at this same moment be seeing the criminal just arriving and knocking at the door of that house, then going upstairs into the room, and the same terrible scene with all its minutiæ would again be enacted. From a point still further removed, we should now see him, say, having lunch at a country inn some miles away, concocting his villainy, then he would be seen walking across the fields towards the house, again knocking at the door, mounting the staircase, and once more would that murderous scene be enacted before our eyes, and so on for ever; the scene, with the house and its surroundings, have indeed been completely swept away from the present _here_, but the whole tragedy will always be acting in the future _there_ in the presence of the Reality. Let us now come, in imagination, towards the earth, from some far-off cluster of stars. If we traverse the distance in one year, the whole of the events from the formation of this world would appear before us, only thousands of times quicker. Make the journey in a month, a day, an hour, a second, or a moment of time, and all past events, from the grandest to the most trivial, would be acted in an infinitesimal portion of time. When we have fully grasped this we recognise that Omniscience is synonymous with Omnipresence, and some may find, in this thought, a glimpse of that Great Book wherein are said to be registered every thought, word, and deed, which, in the direction of the Reality, has helped to nourish, or, in the direction of the shadow, has tended to starve the personality of each one of us; for we know that every word we utter, or that has been uttered from the beginning of the world, and every motion of our brain connected with thought is indelibly imprinted upon every atom of matter. If our sense of perception were greatly increased we need not go to Palestine to see on the rocks there the impressions of the image of Christ and His disciples, or of the words they uttered as they passed by, but any stone by the wayside _here_ would show His every action and resound with every word He uttered. In fact, every particle of matter on this earth is a witness to that which has happened, every point in space and every moment of time contains the history of the past in the smallest minutiæ. The _Here_, embracing all space, and the _Now_, embracing all time, are the only realities to the Omniscient. Let us once more change the scene and we may grasp even more clearly that Time and Space are not realities but are only modes or conditions under which our material senses act. A tune may be played either a thousand times slower or a thousand times quicker, but it still remains the same tune, it contains the same sequence of notes and proportion in time, the only characteristics by which we recognise a tune. And so in the same way with our sense of sight, an event may be drawn out to a thousand times its length or acted a thousand times quicker, it is still the same scene. An insect vibrates its wings several thousands of times in a second and must be cognisant of each beat, whereas we have seen that we, with our Senses of Sight and Hearing, can only appreciate respectively at the most seven and sixteen vibrations in a second as separate beats. That insect must therefore be able to follow a flash of lightning under the conditions of a Time microscope magnifying a thousand times compared with our vision. The whole life of some of these insects extends over a few hours only, but owing to their quick unit of perception it is to them as full of detail as our life of seventy years; but to them there is no day and night, the Sun is always stationary in the Heavens, they can have no cognisance of Seasons. I have already referred in View One to the curious results of increasing our unit of perception by a Time Microscope, and I will now carry the investigation of this subject a step further. As conceptional knowledge is based on perceptional knowledge, and we can only perceive about six times per second, and as the principal forms of knowledge are gained through the eye, we are conceiving progress in phenomena under a very restricted outlook; we cannot recognise such slow motions as, for instance, the hour-hand of a watch, the growth of a tree, or rise of the tide, except by noting the change that has occurred after a long interval; there is therefore a whole world of events which we cannot see. Owing to this limit, in our unit of time perception, we also cannot perceive events which are taking place beyond a certain quickness, they become blurred and give the impression of continuity, and constitute another world of events lost to us. For the same reason there is a whole world of sensation lost to us by our limited unit of sound perception; we cannot follow separate sound-events if they occur quicker than sixteen in a second, beyond that they become blurred and give the impression of continuity. If, on the other hand, our units of perception were increased a thousandfold, as is probably the case with some insects, our conscious lives would contain a thousand more events than they do at present, and, as the consciousness of length of life is dependent upon the number of events that have been perceived, we should under these conditions have passed on this earth a life equivalent to, say, 70,000 years under our present restricted unit; every second of that long period would have been as full of events for us as is a second in our present life of seventy years. If, on the other hand, our unit of perception were decreased a thousandfold, our length of life, based upon perception of events, would be no longer than 25-1/2 of our present days; if our life were actually reduced to that period (so as to regain our present units of perception) we should be old and grey-headed before the sun had risen for the twenty-fifth time since our birth. If our unit of perception, with our length of life, were again reduced a thousandfold, the whole of our life of seventy years would now only be equal to forty-three minutes, and, in the whole of that life, we could only see the sun move ten degrees, namely, twenty of its own diameters in the heaven; if we were born, say, at noon on midsummer's day, we could never have any idea of anything but daytime, and neither our fathers, nor grandfathers, nor great-grandfathers for fifteen generations before them could have seen the sun rise; but there would have been a tradition, handed down from a far distant past generation, that a long time ago, beyond the memory of man, there was no sun at all, everything was pitch dark, and that time was called the "Great Shadow." If their records could have gone still further back for the same length of time they would have heard that, before the "Great Shadow," the sun was always shining in the heavens, and that that great "Sun" day lasted twice as long as the great shadow. To understand more clearly this subject of Time perception let me put another aspect before you; we are looking, say, at an insect whose wings are beating several thousand times per second, and, with our vision limited to six times per second, it would be impossible to count the number of hairs on that wing, or to see which of those hairs were split, or were bent from the straight, but, if we travelled away from that insect into space at the rate of light, and were looking back, the present would then always be with us; the wing, although still vibrating at that enormous rate, would appear to be stationary, and so would every other moving thing on the earth, however quick its movement, and everything would continue in that motionless state for a million years, provided we continued our flight with the rays of light. If we travelled a little slower than light, say one minute less in a thousand years, the same scene would be presented to us, but, that which was acted upon this earth during one minute of Time, would now take a thousand years to accomplish; the swiftest railway train would appear standing still, it would take 5-3/4 days and nights to cover each inch of ground. It is thus possible to again understand how the flight of a bird or the lightning flash might be examined under conditions of time which would lead to the discovery and tracing of even the principle of life itself. But let us go one step further and increase our flight beyond the rate at which light travels: scenes would now progress in the opposite direction to that which we are accustomed to; men would get out of bed and dress themselves at night and go to bed in the morning; old men would grow young again; tall trees would grow backwards and enter the earth, embedding themselves in the seed, and the seed would rise upwards to the branch that nourished it; the blood would turn into chyle, into food in the stomach, into the piece of meat, which would be transferred from the mouth to the plate, and would then be cut on to the joint, the joint would go down to the kitchen and be uncooked, would be carried to the butcher to be cut on to the carcase, and the animal would come to life and go out into the fields. Human bodies would be formed in the ground from the dust of the Earth, passing through what we call corruption to incorruption, the dead would be taken from their graves, brought back to their homes and put to bed; the Doctor would arrive, a miracle would happen, the patient would come to life; though this would hardly be a feather in the cap of the Doctor, as it would be seen that the medicine came out from the mouth of the patient, would be put into bottles to be thrown away, and it would be the Doctor who had to pay the Fee, and the bigger the Doctor the bigger the Fee he would have to pay. The future would in fact change places with the past, the effect would give birth to the cause as presented to our finite senses, and, though it is difficult to realise, it is indeed just as true, or untrue, that we come into this world through the grave, instead of in the way we are accustomed to, because to the Reality there is no change, the Here and the Now comprising all beginnings and ends, all causes and effects. In this flight on the wings of light we did not in reality depart in the least from the Here, because there is no such thing as space, it is all included in a mathematical point, the Here; and as the whole of time is included in the Now, the Future, however remote with all events therein, is existent in the present; the writers of books 5000 years hence are therefore writing them now, and the Human Race has read and is reading them _now_; we have always hitherto maintained that these things are only "going to happen" 5000 years hence, but in reality all events in the future are events in the same Now in which we are living at the present moment, and, as it is just as true, that time is flowing from the Future to the Present and on to the Past, as in the contrary direction (of our present outlook), so it is quite conceivable that we may some day, in the not far distant future, not only realise that the future exists already, but that we may even be able to handle and read the books written 5000 years hence, in a similar manner to that which enables us now to handle and read those which were written 5000 years ago. VIEW EIGHT CREATION In our first View we saw the necessity of clearing away the weeds, the moss, and the lichen from the stem of our Real Personality before that Transcendental Self could send forth fresh buds for the advancement of _conscious_ thought to higher levels; we found that the first step towards this clearing the approach to our window, was to recognise that a knowledge of the Truth was to be gained by the use of "Introspection" rather than by Intellectualism--to realise, in fact, that it is not we, with our intellects, who are looking out upon Nature, but that it is the Absolute looking into us and ever trying to teach us divine truths concerning the "Reality of Being." We saw that the phenomena, which our senses would have us believe to be the reality or solidity of our material surroundings, are illusions created by the fact that those senses are limited in their perception to that which is conditioned in Time and Space, necessitating _motion_ as the basis of our perceptions, and that, when the rate of motion exceeds our units of perception, we have the impression of continuity of events, which we accept as the objective existence of matter; we also saw that the duration of Time and extension of Space had no existence for us apart from those senses, our very consciousness of these two non-realities depending upon "relativity"--they could, in fact, be increased or diminished indefinitely, without our knowing that any change had been made. In our second View I attempted to take another step forward by showing how, by means of this "Introspection," it was even possible to understand that these two limitations might be eliminated from consciousness; we then realised that the whole Physical Universe is but a thin film, set up by our finite Senses, between our Consciousness and the "Reality of Being"; we saw that this could only be understood when, by the Mystical Sense, we realised that physical phenomena were but symbols or shadows of the Reality or Noumenon underlying them. In our next View I gave an example of the use of Mystical and Symbolical thought, leading, in the fourth View, to the subject of Everlasting Life and the Efficacy of Prayer, wherein I tried to show that by examining the phenomena of Nature, as depicted on the Physical Film, it is possible to reach a point where we may even feel that we are actually listening to, or having divulged to us, the very thoughts of the Absolute. This led to the next View, where we examined the Physical Film itself, and this we analysed in the next two Views into those component parts, by means of which this Film presents to our senses the impression of the whole Physical Universe as an objective reality. We have seen that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow; that the Invisible, as distinguished from the Visible, is not in a place apart from the Physical, but is the Reality of which the visible constitutes the boundary lines or planes in our consciousness, as lines and planes are the visible boundaries of solids. The Kingdom of Heaven is not a locality but a _state_ of Divine "loving and knowing communion"; it is within us in the sense that we are interior and not exterior entities of the "Reality of Being." We have now arrived at a point where we can better realise that the Absolute cannot be localised or bounded by space, and must be Omnipresent--cannot be conditioned in Time, and must therefore be Omniscient--the Here comprising all Space, and the Now all Time in the "Reality of Being." With these conclusions before us I will ask you to form a new conception of Creation. All creation around us is the materialisation of the Thought of the Deity. He does not require time to think as we do--the whole of the Universe is therefore one instantaneous Thought of the Great Reality; the forming of this world and its destruction, the appearance of man, the birth and death of each one of us are absolutely at the same instant; it is only our finite minds which necessitate drawing this Thought out into a long line, and our want of knowledge and inability to grasp the whole, which force us to conceive that one event happened before or after another. In our finite way we examine and strive to understand this wondrous Thought, and at last, a Darwin, after a life spent in accumulating facts on this little isolated spot of the Universe, discovers what appears to be a law of sequence, and calls it the evolution theory; but this is probably only one of countless other modes by which the _intent_ of that Thought is working towards completion, the apparent direction of certain lines on that great tracing board of the Creator, whereon is depicted the whole plan of His work. Let me give a simple example of Creation by a "word," which even our finite minds can grasp. When I utter the word _Cat_, it starts a practically instantaneous thought in your minds, the power of that thought being dependent upon the knowledge you have gained. If you analyse it you will find that, though practically instantaneous, it comprises all the sensations you have ever felt on that subject throughout your life. It commenced, perhaps, when you were only a year old, and, sitting on your mother's knee, your hand was made to stroke a kitten, and you felt it was soft and it gave you pleasure. Later on, when you were older, you had it in your arms, and you felt the first intimation of that wonderful "[Greek: storgê]," which manifests itself in most children in their love for dolls; you found it delightful to cuddle and that it purred. Later on, you found that it played with a reel of cotton, and that it could scratch, make horrid noises, and countless other things, which not only make up the life of a cat, but connect it with the world around us. All these thousand and one facts are now drawn out, by analysis in Time and Space, into a long line, and are placed one in front of the other; but the thought started by the word Cat was a fair example of an instantaneous creation. One other example of an instantaneous thought. Let us suppose a large room fitted with, say, a hundred thousand volumes, comprising all the knowledge gained by every Specialist in every Science concerning the plan of Creation. In our finite minds, under the limits of Time and Space, the word representing the contents of that library would start, when uttered, an instantaneous thought analogous to that of our last example, according to the knowledge that each individual had already acquired of the contents of those books; but this knowledge had only been gained by taking down each volume separately and reading one book at a time, beginning at the beginning and taking each page and each word in succession, and a lifetime would not suffice to enable us to read them all; whereas, if our knowledge were _complete_, the word representing the contents of that room would start an instantaneous thought, comprising not only every book, but every chapter, page, word, letter, and punctuation contained in that library, or in one which comprised all knowledge from the beginning to the end of Time. It is a well-known fact that at the approach of death, when the perceptive senses are completely, or almost completely, in abeyance, as in the "self-forgetting" referred to in "The Vision," the duration of Time appears to have no reality; in numerous cases of drowning, where the person has been no more than one or two minutes under water, the whole of a long life, with every forgotten trivial occurrence and the multitude of thoughts attached thereto, have been brought vividly before the mind, as it were, instantaneously; those also who have been put under nitrous-oxide gas, though the life of the body is not affected, know how, with departure of sense perception, the sense of Time is completely annihilated. I have myself experimented under such conditions, and attempted to realise the duration of time by counting steadily, one, two, three, four, &c., and had no knowledge whatever that between, say, "four" and "five" there was a complete hiatus of several minutes when, for me, time had vanished; I was still counting steadily when the anæsthetic had passed away, and it was quite impossible to realise that such time had elapsed, as I had not reached more than the twelfth count, whereas, according to the time expired, I should have reached the fiftieth or sixtieth. A number of examples of what may be called instantaneous thoughts created in the mind of a sleeper have been collected, and many of us have had similar experiences. I give one as an example: "Maury was ill in bed and dreamed of the French Revolution. Bloody scenes passed before him. He held long conversations with Robespierre, Marat, and other monsters of that time, was dragged before the tribunal, was condemned to death, and carried through a great crowd of people, bound to a plank. The guillotine severed his head from his shoulders. He woke with terror to find that a rail over the bed had got unfastened and had fallen upon his neck like a guillotine, and, as his mother who was sitting by him declared, at that very moment." In the above case the whole scene was started instantaneously in his brain, but in waking his mind analysed it in Time and Space and spread it out into a long historical record. The opposite process to this, namely, the building up a thought-picture, is what we do every day when we form and combine our conceptions under the dominion of Time and Space, until we have accumulated in our minds a multitude of concepts which form as it were a single subject, somewhat analogous to a painter when he has completed his picture, a writer his book, an architect his house, or even a mechanic his machine. An interesting example of a musician constructing a thought-picture is given by Mozart himself: "When I am all right and in good spirits, either in a carriage or walking, and at night when I cannot sleep, thoughts come streaming in and at their best. Whence and how I know not, I cannot make out. The things which occur to me I keep in my head, and hum them also to myself--at least others have told me so. If I stick to it, there soon come, one after another, useful crumbs for the pie, according to counterpoint, harmony of the different instruments, &c. This now inflames my soul, that is if I am not disturbed. Then it keeps on growing, and I keep on expanding it more distinctly, and the thing, however long it be, becomes indeed almost finished in my head, so that I can always survey it in spirit like a beautiful picture or a fine person, and also hear in imagination, not indeed successively, as by and by it must come out, but all together. That is a delight! All the invention and construction go on in me as in a fine strong dream, but the overhearing it all at once is still the best." With these illustrations before us may we not carry the analogy even further, and see that, as our conception of a Cat was made up of numberless small acquisitions of knowledge, some of which had to be discarded, or eliminated as errors, from our minds as our knowledge grew, and as each true fact became confirmed and impressed upon our brain it made itself a _permanent_ record and became a centre to be used for gaining further knowledge; so in this wonderful Thought of the Great Reality, whose mind may be said to be omnipresent, each individual soul is a working unit in the plan of Creation; each unit as it gains a knowledge of the Will of the Deity forms for itself a _personality_ helping forward the work towards its fulfilment; without that knowledge there can be no personality, no unit in the great completed thought, no life hereafter. The True Life is fulfilled by him who has progressed so far in the knowledge of the Divine as to realise that he is the offspring of the Absolute, and therefore stands face to face with his Transcendental Personality, his [Greek: Christos], of which the Physical Ego is only the outline or boundary form visible in the physical universe. Each individual has free will to define his own boundaries, his own limitations; he builds up the walls of the house in which he lives, and he has power to brick up or open out the windows through which he may see the Truth; happy are those whose windows are open, but many, alas, choose to make the wall opaque by confining their attention to the physical shadows, or by strangling their spiritual intuition and preventing all advance in thought by blind subservience to obsolete dogmas. We are instruments of Divine purpose in the scheme of Creation. Each individual Physical Ego seems to be a Micro-Cosmos, imaging the Universe, the Macro-Cosmos. As the phagocytes, the policemen of the blood, flock to a breach in the human body to overcome any invasion of the enemy, whether poisons or bacteria, which would otherwise detract from that progress of cell formation upon which the scheme of human life depends, so do the true lovers of the Divine meet, by active resistance, any attempt of the enemies of the Good, Beautiful and True to retard the advancement of the scheme of Creation to its ultimate goal of perfection. The human body is composed of innumerable cells and several special colonies of cells, which we call organs, each of which has its special work to do, and secretes and discharges special fluids necessary for the welfare of the whole body. All of these cells are alive, and myriads of them are moving on their own account, apparently quite independent of, and in complete ignorance of, the feeling and perception of the whole body; they are, however, microscopical units of that body, and its welfare depends upon their contribution of work; it is, in fact, only through their ceaseless activities that the life in that body is maintained--a phenomenon analogous to that described in the simile of a Forest Tree in View Four. So are we integral parts of the scheme of Creation, and each act, either in accordance with the Divine purpose or the reverse, is helping forward or retarding the completion of that Thought, though like the cells we are ignorant of the end which Creation has in view. In this life we seem indeed to be only, as it were, in embryo! The study of embryology has lately shown us clearly how the clothing of our Physical Ego has been formed, during the past millions of years, from the lowest forms of life. Each one of us has, during what may be called his lifetime, gone through all the different stages of evolutionary development which, since the beginning of life on this planet, have been employed to build up the human body in its present form. Embryology has shown us that, during gestation, each human embryo is a _replica_ of the past; it passes through the different Imago stages from protoplasm to man, being unrecognisable at certain stages from a monad, an amoeba, a fish with gills, a lizard, and a monkey with a tail and dense clothing of hair over the whole body. The human embryo has also, at an early stage, the thirteenth pair of ribs, which is found in lower animals and is still seen in a rudimentary form in anthropoid apes, but which disappears from the human embryo before birth. Each generation, under evolutionary development, will witness a further advancement in the clothing of the Physical Ego, until it may be conceived that a hundred thousand years hence our present stage of development will be seen only as one of the stages through which the embryo has to pass before birth at that distant time. May we not even glimpse at the future to which evolution is carrying us? For in any of these stages we see organs forming whose use only comes into play long after that stage has been passed; so also, in the new rudimentary forms of thought which are started by every fresh discovery may we not some day be able to descry the heights which we are destined to attain if we earnestly seek after Truth? Radio-Activity has shown us that all forms of matter are but different combinations of one primal brick; by synthesis thousands of new forms of matter, unknown in Nature, are actually now being built up in our laboratories, and the number of such combinations cannot conceivably be limited; so do we also see that all the known forms of energy in nature are interchangeable, one with another, with exactly known equivalents and ratios, pointing to their being only different combinations of one unit of energy. If such is the case, it would seem to follow that there are countless other forces of which we at present have no cognisance, but which may at any time come within our field of investigation. In our life here we are steadily progressing from the lower to the higher form of being, from the purely Physical towards the Transcendental, each generation starting from a higher level; the boundary line between the Physical and Transcendental is being continually advanced towards the latter, and it may well be, as I have already suggested in View IV, that we are even now on the eve of discovering a new force, or aspect of Creation, which will open a wider view and give us a clearer knowledge of the goal which we are destined to reach hereafter. Each generation will, according to the teaching of Embryology, gradually come into the world at a higher stage of development than its predecessors, until the last Physical Ego, at its birth, will coincide with the final stage of development, when there will be no more physical clothing, the disintegration of Matter being completed, and, it can be pictured that at the final consummation, there will be nothing imperfect, no shadow left, that all will be spiritual. The object of Creation would therefore appear to be the population of the Real Universe with spiritual entities, until the whole Spiritual Universe will be taken up by Transcendental Personalities, which will be one with the Reality, and the Great Thought completed. Once more let us recognise that we are dependent for knowledge of surroundings upon our perception of movements, and that as our conceptional knowledge is based on perceptional knowledge, our thoughts are limited by Time and Space and can only deal with finite subjects. From this arises all our difficulty of understanding the Infinite; we cannot under our present conditions know the whole Truth; if we could do that we should be able, as it were, to look all round the subject, and Infinity would then be seen to be a pseudo-conception of our finite thoughts. We can only think of one finite subject at a time, and, at that moment, all other subjects are cancelled; we can, in fact, only think in sequences, and, taking the particular Infinities of duration and extension which we have been examining, we can only think of points in Time and Space as existing beyond or before other fixed points, which again must be followed by other points. We cannot fix a point in Time or Space so as to exclude the thought of a point beyond; the idea of an Infinite is therefore a necessary result of the limitation of our thoughts. The whole Truth is there before us, but we can only examine it in a form of finite sequences. A book contains a complete story, but we can only know that story by taking each word in succession and insisting that one word comes in front of another, and yet the story is lying before us complete. So with Creation; we are forced to look upon it as a long line going back to past eternity, and another long line going on to future eternity, and, with our limitations, we can only think of all events therein as happening in sequence; but eliminate Time and we become Omniscient, the whole of Creation would be before us as an Instantaneous Thought of God. Accordingly under the dominion of Time we appear to be in a similar position to that of a being whose senses are limited to one-dimensional space--namely, to a line; we can only have cognisance of what is in front and behind, we have no knowledge of what is to the right or left, we appear to be limited to looking lengthwise in Time, whereas an Omniscient and Omnipresent Being looks at Time crosswise and sees it as a whole. A small light, when at rest, appears as a point of light, but when we apply quick motion, the product of Time and Space, to it, we get the appearance of a line of light, and this continuous line, formed by motion of a point, is, I think, analogous to the Physical Universe appearing to our finite senses as continuous in Time duration and Space extension, though really comprised in the Now and the Here, the whole of Creation being therefore an Instantaneous Thought. A consideration of our limitation in Space may also be useful to show how impossible it is for us to hope to see by our senses the Reality or by our thoughts to know the Spiritual. Our senses and thoughts are limited to a Space of three dimensions, and we can therefore only see or know that part of the Absolute which is or can be represented to us in three dimensions; a being whose senses were limited to a Universe of one dimension--namely, a _line_, could have no real knowledge of another being who was in a Universe of two dimensions--namely, a _flat surface_, except so far as the two-dimensional being could be represented within his line of sensation; so also the two-dimensional being, on a _plane_, could have no true knowledge of a being like ourselves in a Universe of three dimensions. To his thoughts, limited within two dimensions, a being like ourselves would be unthinkable, except so far as our nature could be made manifest on his plane; so can it be seen that we, limited by our finite senses to Time and Space, and our consciousness dependent upon that limited basis of thought, can only know that aspect of the Reality which can be manifested within that range of thought--namely, as Motion, or what we call physical phenomena. Let me attempt just one more view before we part, which may make this conception of Creation, as an Instantaneous Thought, even clearer to our finite senses. Imagine a Spectator endowed with the same sense of vision that we have--namely, limited to six units of perception per second, but able to look on, as it were, from outside the Universe, without himself being affected by any alteration that takes place in what may be called the flow of time. Consider some of the changes he would witness if Time were gradually eliminated from phenomena. The inhabitants, who at first were seen walking by slow, successive steps, would soon be seen gliding from place to place, the movement of their legs having passed beyond the sense of vision; the next stage would see the inhabitants unrecognisable as human beings when walking, although they would still be visible if they stood still, they would be moving too fast for sight, they would be seen only as lines or bands extended between their points of departure and destination; then day and night would be following each other so quickly that soon the day would only be a flicker of light, till, when the week became equal to one second of the Spectator's time, day and night would disappear as separate phenomena; then the week, the month, and the year would in turn flicker, solidify, or become continuous, and disappear with all the multitudinous events contained therein; human life would then be affected, would flicker, and follow the same course; to the Spectator the birth of each individual would become coincident with his death, and Nations would be seen to rise and progress towards their destination without any evidence of individual existence; the Human Race itself would next succumb, then the whole of planetary life, then the formation and destruction of Solar Systems, then the gathering together and dissemination of firmaments, and, finally, the beginning and end of the very Universe would coincide. Motion, or Physical phenomena, and therefore Matter, would vanish, and the Great instantaneous Thought be complete. We seem to have been able to glimpse from our Watch Tower, though through a glass darkly, the whole Truth, and to see that the Infinity of Time is a figment of our finite senses and is comprised in the Now. The same treatment, followed by the same result, may be applied to the Infinity of Space, and we again see that all Space is comprised in the Here; it is only by the conditions of our existence in this physical universe, _insisting_ on our analysing everything in Time and Space that Motion or Change become the very basis of our Consciousness. We have seen that the Idea of Infinity is a necessary result of our finite senses, that the only Reality is the Spiritual, the Here and the Now; that the Riddle of the Universe is not to be solved by the _Intellect_ but by that method which is employed by those who are earnestly following the "Quest of the Grail"--namely, by realising that our True Personality or Transcendental Ego is an emanation from the Absolute; that we are one-with Him, and that it is by following the old Hellenic command "[Greek: Gnôthi seauton]" (Know thyself)--namely, by _Introspection_, that we can hope to attain to the understanding of what is the Reality of Being. FINIS * * * * * PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY NEILL AND CO., LTD., EDINBURGH. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes Page 27: Braces } on multiple lines represent one large brace encompassing those lines. Page 53: Huios or Hyios. The Rule doesn't seem to address the possibility of upsilon coming first in a diphthong: upsilon iota is not common, but "Hui" looks more plausible than "Hyi". Page 176: The word amoeba had an oe ligature in the original book. Page 184: Typo Gnôthe changed to Gnôthi. 
30709	----	This is one of a series of evidential books drawn up at the instance of the _Christian Evidence Society_. GOD AND THE WORLD A SURVEY OF THOUGHT BY ARTHUR W. ROBINSON, D.D., Warden of the College of Allhallows Barking With a Prefatory Note by SIR OLIVER LODGE LONDON: SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C., 43 QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C. BRIGHTON: 129 NORTH STREET NEW YORK: E. S. GORHAM 1913 CONTENTS PAGE PREFATORY NOTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 I. THE OLDER ORTHODOXY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 II. THE PROGRESS OF DISCOVERY . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 III. THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 IV. THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 V. THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS (_continued_) . . . . . . . . 46 VI. THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS (_continued_) . . . . . . . . 53 VII. LATER SCIENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 VIII. LATER SCIENCE (_continued_) . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 IX. LATER SCIENCE (_continued_) . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 {5} PREFATORY NOTE I have read what Dr. Arthur Robinson has written, and find it a most interesting, singularly fair, and I may add, within its limits, able and comprehensive survey of the thoughts of the past and passing age. I commend it to the coming generation as a useful means of acquiring some notion of the main puzzles and controversies of the strenuous time through which their fathers have lived. Fossil remains of these occasionally fierce discussions they will find embedded in literature; and although we are emerging from that conflict, it can only be to find fresh opportunities for discovery, fresh fields of interest, in the newer age. Towards a wise reception of these discoveries, as they are gradually arrived at in the future, this little book will give some help. OLIVER LODGE. {7} GOD AND THE WORLD INTRODUCTION A man, so it has been said, is distinguished from the creatures beneath him by his power to ask a question. To which we may add that one man is distinguished from another by the kind of question that he asks. A man is to be measured by the size of his question. Small men ask small questions: of here and now; of to-day and to-morrow and the next day; of how they may quickest fill their pockets, or gain another step upon the social ladder. Great men are concerned with great questions: of life, of man, of history, of God. So again, the size of an age can be determined by the size of its questions. It has been claimed that the age through which we have passed was a great age, and tried by this test we need not hesitate to admit the claim. It was full of questions, and they were great questions. As never before, the eyes of men strained upwards and backwards into the dim {8} recesses of the past to discover something, if it might be, of the beginnings of things: of matter and life; of the earth and its contents; of the solar system and the universe. We know with what interest inquiries of this sort were regarded, and how ready the people were to read the books that dealt with them; to attend lectures and discussions about them, and to give their money for the purposes of such research. It was a great age that could devote itself so eagerly to questions of this importance and magnitude. But as men cannot live upon appetite, so neither can they be for ever satisfied with questions. Hence it follows that a period of questioning is ordinarily followed by another, in which the accumulated information is sorted and digested and turned to practical account; a time in which constructive work is attempted, and some understanding is arrived at as to the relation that exists between the old knowledge and the new. It looks as if we were nearing such a time, when, for a while at all events, there will be a pause for reconsideration and reconstruction, and the human spirit will gather strength and confidence before again setting out upon its quest of the Infinite. Already we are asked to give attention to statements that are intended to review the whole situation and to summarise, provisionally at {9} all events, the results that have been attained. Each of these attempts will, in its turn, be superseded by something that is wider in its outlook and wiser in its verdicts. This little book is an effort of this nature, and it is offered in the hope that it may serve some such useful and temporary purpose. Much more competent writers than its author might well apologise for consenting to enter upon the task which he has been invited to undertake. All that he can say, by way of excuse for his boldness in complying, is that for many years he has endeavoured to follow the trend of modern thinking, and that the growing interest with which he has done this encourages him to hope that he may be able to make what he has to tell about it both intelligible and interesting to others. He does not imagine that he can escape mistakes, and he will most gladly submit himself to the correction of others who know better and see more clearly than he does. He only begs that those who disagree with his judgments will try to give him credit for a sincere desire to be true to facts, and to welcome the light, from whatever quarter it may have come. When we speak of the age that is passing, we shall have in mind what may roughly be reckoned as the last hundred years. That space includes, for those of us who are not in our first youth, the time of our {10} parents, and even, it may be, of our grandparents. The period has a certain distinctiveness of character in spite of superficial diversities. It was marked, as we have said, by the intelligence and vigour of its questionings. It was a time of intellectual movement and turmoil. It witnessed a succession of wonderful discoveries leading on to ever bolder investigations. Rapid generalisations were advanced, to be often as quickly abandoned. Only by degrees was it possible to see the new facts in their proper proportion and significance. Nor was it at all easy for men to keep their discussions free from heat and bitterness, when the most deeply-rooted convictions appeared to be assailed, and the most sacred associations to be regarded as of little account. Looking back, as we can, it is possible to see that in spite of the eddies and backwaters a steady progress was made. And it is of that progress that it will now be our endeavour to speak. We know how it has happened to us over and over again in our own individual experiences to have been made conscious of a gradual modification of our opinions as new evidence has reached us, and we have had time to relate it to our previous understanding and knowledge. We have had our first thoughts, and our second thoughts, and then there have come third thoughts, which were the ripest {11} and soundest of all. Just such a process of which we can mark the stages in ourselves is to be seen on a larger scale--in bigger print, as it were--in the thought movements of an age. In the case of the period which we are to review, the three stages have been more than commonly clear, as we shall aim to shew in the survey we are to make. We shall begin with the First thoughts, which were those of what may be termed the older orthodoxy. These were very generally accepted; indeed, they were regarded as for the most part beyond the reach of serious contradiction. Then we shall pass to the Second thoughts, which were forced upon an astonished and bewildered generation by the onslaughts upon traditional views that were made from the side of physical science. For fifty years or more the debate went on, with challenge and counter-challenge, and much noise and dust of controversy. They were great days, and in them great men fought with great courage in great issues. We shall seek to do justice to both sides, to those who dared to proclaim and suffer for the new, and to those who shewed an equal courage in their resolute determination to be loyal to what they held to be the truth of the old. Then, finally, it will be our difficult task to discriminate between the surging thoughts of that {12} second period and those of the Third stage, through which we are advancing, and to shew what can already be made out of a common ground of agreement and co-operation, now much more likely to be reached than could at one time have been foreseen by the most optimistic imagination. {13} CHAPTER I THE OLDER ORTHODOXY Never had there been greater unanimity of opinion in England in regard to the religious interpretation of the world than that which prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The excesses on the Continent which had accompanied the advocacy of free thought had disposed men's mind to fall back upon authority, and most of all in matters that affected the basis on which the continuance of social order and moral conduct depended. The general position was clearly apprehended, and was accepted as if beyond dispute. Men spoke and thought of the Order of Nature. The world was a Cosmos, a regulated system. Order implied an Orderer. It was regarded by them as obvious that there must have been a First Cause, a great Architect and Maker of the Universe. They agreed with Aquinas that "things which have no perception can only tend toward an end if directed by a conscious and intelligent being. Therefore there is an {14} Intelligence by which all natural things are ordered to an end."[1] They were fully prepared to endorse the indignant protest of Bacon: "I had rather believe all the folly of the 'Legend,' and the 'Talmud,' and the 'Alcoran,' than that this universal frame is without a mind."[2] In fact no other hypothesis seemed to them thinkable. If at any time they felt a need for a more elaborate justification of their conviction, they had it ready to their hand in the familiar argument from design. Paley, when he set this out in his famous _Natural Theology_ (1802), was only expressing with conspicuous ability the view that was then accepted in all circles from the highest to the lowest. He was preaching to those who were already in the fullest accord with his doctrine. They followed with eager approbation his reasoning about the watch that he supposed himself to have found on the heath. According to his assumption he had never seen a watch made, nor known of anyone capable of making such a thing. He concludes, nevertheless, that it must have been made by someone. "There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for {15} the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its structure, and designed its use." "Neither would it invalidate our conclusion that the watch sometimes went wrong, or that it seldom went exactly right. The purpose of the machinery, the design and the designer, might be evident in whatever way we accounted for the irregularity of the movement, or whether we could account for it at all." "Nor would it bring any uncertainty into the argument if there were a few parts of the watch concerning which we could not discover, or had not yet discovered, in what manner they conducted to the general effect; or even some parts concerning which we could not ascertain whether they conducted to that effect in any manner whatever." Least of all could it be sufficient to explain that the watch was "nothing more than the result of the laws of metallic nature." "It is a perversion of language to assign any law as the efficient operative cause of any thing. A law presupposes an agent, for it is only the mode according to which our agent proceeds: it implies a power, for it is the order according to which that power acts. Without this agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself, the law does nothing, is nothing." From the watch we are led on to the eye, which exhibits a skill of design not less, but far greater, {16} than that of the man who gave us the telescope. Then follows a detailed examination of the use of the various bodily organs, the contrivances to be met with in vegetables and animals, the marvellous adaptations of anatomical structure, the provisions for the flight of birds, and for the movements of fishes; with instances of arrangements to suit particular conditions--the long neck of the swan, the minute eye of the mole, the beak of the parrot, the sting of the bee--all furnishing an ever accumulating body of irrefutable evidence to attest the existence and operation of an intelligent Author of Nature. That these arrangements had been expressly intended to meet the circumstances of each particular case was assumed as necessarily involved in the acceptance of any design at all. It is interesting to observe that Paley did not think it improbable that the Deity may have committed to another being--"nay, there may be many such agents and many ranks of them"--the task of "drawing forth" special creations out of the materials He had made and in subordination to His rules. This, he thought, might in some degree account for the fact that contrivances are not always perfected at once, and that many instruments and methods are employed. {17} Of the goodness of the Creator no manner of doubt was entertained. For proof of it attention was called to the fact that "in a vast plurality of instances in which contrivance is perceived, the design of the contrivance is beneficial," and to the further fact that "the Deity has superadded pleasure to animal sensations beyond what was necessary for any other purposes or when the purpose, so far as it was necessary, might have been effected by the function of pain." Venomous animals there were, no doubt, but the fang and the sting "may be no less merciful to the victim, than salutary to the devourer"; and it was to be noted "that whilst only a few species possess the venomous property, that property guards the whole tribe." Then again, before we condemn the ordering whereby animals devour one another we must consider what would happen if they did not. "Is it to see the world filled with drooping, superannuated, half-starved, helpless and unhelped animals, that you would alter the present system of pursuit and prey?" "A hare, notwithstanding the number of its dangers and its enemies, is as playful an animal as any other." "It is a happy world after all. The air, the earth, the water teem with delighted existence. In a spring noon, or a summer evening, on whichever side I turn my eyes myriads of happy beings crowd upon my {18} view. 'The insect youth are on the wing.' Swarms of new-born flies are trying their pinions in the air. Their sportive motions, their wanton mazes, their gratuitous activity, their continual change of place without use or purpose, testify their joy, and the exultation which they feel in their lately discovered faculties.... The whole winged insect tribe, it is probable, are equally intent upon their proper employments, and under every variety of constitution, gratified, and perhaps equally gratified, by the offices which the Author of their nature has assigned to them." Where it might have been imagined that there were to be seen miscarriages of the Creator's intentions, these were to be attributed to the presence and influence of mysterious forces of evil. Such attempts to hinder or frustrate the workings of good might be part of a purpose of good because they only afforded fresh opportunities for a display of the Divine wisdom, whose ordinary interventions were accepted as Providences, whilst Miracles supplied the rarer exhibitions of its power. For the rest, it was our duty to remember that such difficulties as might still be felt must be largely the result of our ignorance. With patience we should learn to know more. A day was coming when much that is now hidden would be made clear, and when the greatness and wisdom and justice {19} of the Almighty Ruler would be wonderfully and fearfully revealed. It is not intended to suggest that there were no dissentients ready to bring forward objections to these almost unanimously accepted doctrines. We know that there were such, if only because it was deemed worth while to argue against them. Kepler and Newton had stirred men's minds by their account of the prodigious scale upon which the mechanism of the Universe was constructed, and Laplace had already enunciated the theory according to which the cosmic bodies were originally formed in obedience to the law of gravitation by the condensation of rotating nebulous spheres. And there were those who used these discoveries of astronomy to cast doubts upon the likelihood that the Divine attention would be concentrated upon the concerns of so tiny a speck as this planet of ours. There were others who maintained that the unbroken persistency of the order of Nature was evidence enough to shew that it had no beginning and could have no end. Against both these objectors the irony and the oratory of a Chalmers was directed with what was held to be overwhelming effect. If the telescope had shewn us wonderful things, there was another instrument, he said, which had been given to us {20} about the same time. If by the telescope we had been led to see "a system in every star," it was no less true that the microscope had disclosed "a world in every atom," thus proving to us that "no minuteness, however shrunk from the notice of the human eye, is beneath the notice of His regard." So again, in an oration upon "The constancy of Nature," the thesis is most eloquently defended that "the strict order of the goodly universe which we inhabit" is nothing else than "a noble attestation to the wisdom and beneficence of its great Architect."[3] Little did men dream at that time of the wealth of other discoveries that was soon to increase enormously the complexity of their problems; or of the inferences that would be drawn from them with an ingenuity and an assurance that would task to the utmost the ability and the patience of the defenders of the old beliefs. It is of the new facts disclosed and of the further thoughts suggested by them that we must next proceed to tell. [1] _Summa_, I., ii. 3. [2] Essay on "Atheism and Superstition." [3] _Astronomical Discourses_ (1817), pp. 80, 211. {21} CHAPTER II THE PROGRESS OF DISCOVERY We find it hard to realise that not so very long ago the steam-engine and the electric telegraph were unknown; and we are right when we say that life must have worn a very different aspect in those days. It is scarcely less difficult for us to realise the change that has been wrought in men's thoughts since the time when the biological cell was unrecognised, and the theory of evolution had not yet been formulated. The rapidity with which advances of knowledge were made in the physical sphere was astonishing, and it was only to be expected that they should have seemed not a little bewildering. We must try to note the main steps of the movement, giving the names of some of the representative workers and thinkers. It is generally agreed that the foundations of modern chemistry were laid by Dalton (1808). He it was who revived the old atomic theory, and determined the weights of the atoms and the {22} proportions in which they are combined into molecules--the smallest particles which could exist in a free condition. By so doing he prepared the way for the subsequent researches of Faraday and Clerk-Maxwell into the properties of electricity and magnetism, and for the investigations by Helmholtz and others into the connexion between electric attraction and chemical affinities. The forerunner of the wonderful advances of modern biology was the French naturalist Lamarck (1809), who, in opposition to the accepted doctrine of separate creations, suggested that all the species of living creatures, not excepting the human, have arisen from older species in the course of long periods of time. The common parent forms he held to have been simple and lowly organisms, and he accounted for the gradual differentiation of types by the hypothesis that they were the results of the inheritance of characteristics which had been acquired by continued use--as, for example, in the case of the giraffe who was supposed to have owed the length of its neck to the efforts of its ancestors to browse upon trees that were just beyond their reach. He maintained that the changes produced in the parents by temperature, nutrition, repeated use or disuse, were inherited so that they reappeared in their offspring. But the evidence adduced was {23} judged to be insufficient, and the balance of scientific opinion was decidedly against his views. Lyell (1830) gave a new direction to the science of geology by accumulating evidence to prove the certainty of a natural and continuous development in the formation of the crust of the earth, thus opposing the catastrophic idea which had previously prevailed. One outcome of his researches was to make it plain that the history of this development must have extended over enormous tracts of time. More revolutionary still in its effects was the epoch-making discovery of the protoplasmic cell as the common element of life in the plant and animal world, made by the Germans Schleiden and Schwann (1838). It was this that first bridged over what were held to be the fundamental distinctions of animate nature, and made possible the conception of a vital physical continuity which has since been accepted as an axiom of biological science. By Joule's great discovery (1840) that the same amount of work, whether mechanical or electrical, and however expended, always produced exactly the same amount of heat--that, in effect, heat and work were equivalent and interchangeable--the way was opened to the conclusion that the total energy of the material universe is constant in amount through all its changes. {24} A theory to account for the black lines crossing the coloured band of light, or spectrum, which is obtained by passing sunlight through a glass prism, originally suggested by Sir George Stokes, and subsequently reintroduced and verified by the German chemists, Bunsen and Kirchhoff, led to the important discovery that the sun and the stars are constituted of the very same elements as those of the earth beneath our feet. Spectrum analysis, moreover, soon detected new elements, _e.g._, helium, so-called because first observed as existing in the sun. But great and stimulating as these discoveries were, their effect upon the thought of the age was not to be compared with that which was to be exercised by a theory which, starting in the domain of biological science, soon passed on to far more extended applications. The theory took its rise from a suggestion made in two papers, by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, which were read before the Linnean Society on July 1st, 1858. The Darwinian theory--for so it was soon named--undertook to explain the formation of species by the principle of natural selection through the survival of the fittest in the struggle for life.[1] {25} Darwin started from the admitted achievements of artificial selection; from the results attained by nurserymen and cattle breeders, who, by selecting the kinds they wished to perpetuate, had been able to vary and improve their stocks. He conceived that a like process had been carried on by Nature through vast spaces of time, and that it was this picking, choosing, continuing and abandoning of traits and qualities which had resulted in the preservation of the types which it had been best to retain--the reason in all cases being the fitness to correspond effectively to the conditions prescribed by environment. It is important to remember that Darwin never claimed that his doctrine of evolution could account for the occurrence of variations. That it could do so he expressly denied. "Some," he said, in his great work, _The Origin of Species_ (1859) "have, even imagined that natural selection induces variability, whereas it implies only the preservation of such variations as arise.... Unless such occur, natural selection can do nothing." What he saw, and proved by an amazing wealth of illustrative facts, was that any variation in structure or character which gave to an organism ever so slight an advantage might determine whether or not it would survive amid the fierce competition around it, and whether {26} it would obtain a mate and produce offspring. He shewed that all innate variations (which are to be distinguished from the acquired characteristics upon the inheritance of which Lamarck had depended) tend to be transmitted, so that in this manner a favourable variation might be perpetuated, and in time a new species be developed. Simple as this account of the matter sounds when once it has been clearly stated, the discovery--for such it was--opened an entirely new chapter in the history of science, inasmuch as it completely revolutionised the conceptions which had previously been entertained with regard to the relationships and the progress of all living things. It was Darwinism, accordingly, that provided the principal subject of the controversy which was waged between the upholders and the assailants of the older opinions during the latter half of the nineteenth century. [1] The actual phrase "Survival of the fittest" was Herbert Spencer's. Darwin had spoken of "The preservation of favoured races." {27} CHAPTER III THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES We shall not exaggerate if we say that the chief interest aroused by these discoveries was a theological interest. Of course the men of science were keenly concerned to understand the new facts and the new interpretations, and among them there were divided camps and serious contentions. Sir Richard Owen, for instance, was a vigorous opponent of Darwin's views. But we cannot think it surprising that the men of religion should feel that their positions were not only being attacked, but undermined; and that issues were being raised which were more vital for them than for any other students of the problems of existence. When we thus speak of men of science and men of religion we do not mean to imply that there were two distinct classes which could be sharply divided. By no means. It was not so much that there were two camps as that there were two positions, with much passing to and fro between them, and the {28} keenest interest and anxiety felt on both sides as to what the future might have to bring of widening divergence or ultimate reconciliation. There could be no doubt at all that most formidable questions had to be faced and answered. These were the chief of them:-- Is it any longer necessary, or even possible, to insist upon a First Cause for all that exists? Can the argument from Design be said to retain its validity as a proof of the working of a controlling Mind? If we admit the evidence for the existence of a Creator, can we know anything about Him? Can we, in particular, still assert with any confidence that He is good? Let us take the questions in order and give the replies that were made to them from the different sides. And, first of all, from the side of negation. The number of those who directly denied that there must have been a First Cause were very few. But there were many who did their utmost to discredit the idea as due to what they held to be an illegitimate deduction from our limited human experiences. Others were disposed to quarrel with the word "Cause" altogether, and to dispute the propriety of its employment. They wished to banish it altogether from the scientific vocabulary, and to substitute for the terms {29} cause and effect, antecedent and consequent, reducing causation to conjunction. But it was generally admitted that, where we have to deal with an invariable antecedent followed by an invariable consequent, nothing was to be gained by a change in the common phraseology. John Stuart Mill refused to abandon the word. Speaking of one who had done so, he said, "I consider him to be entirely wrong." "The beginning of a phenomenon is what implies a Cause."[1] There were, he allowed, "permanent causes," but, he added, "we can give no account of the origin of the permanent causes"--which was virtually to abandon the subject as being beyond the domain of science. In regard to the second question, it very soon became evident that the old views of Design would be subjected to the most incisive criticism. To many it appeared as if the new doctrine of evolution had supplied an explanation which left no room for the recognition of the particular contrivances upon which Paley had constructed his argument. No one asserted this more strongly than Haeckel, the German biologist. To quote his words, "The development of the universe is a monistic mechanical process, in which we discover no aim or purpose {30} whatever; what we call design in the organic world is a special result of biological agencies; neither in the evolution of the heavenly bodies, nor in that of the crust of our earth, do we find any trace of controlling purpose." "Nowhere in the evolution of animals and plants do we find any trace of design, but merely the inevitable outcome of the struggle for existence, the blind controller." "All is the result of chance." We ought to add that he somewhat qualified this last statement by explaining that "chance" itself must be considered as coming under "the universal sovereignty of nature's supreme law."[2] It is not to be supposed that anyone was to be found who denied the general intelligibility of Nature. To have done this would have been to reduce science to an absurdity. Science is bound to proceed upon the assumption that there are "reasons" for things. Moreover, there is mind in man, who is part of the order of Nature. It follows that what is in the part cannot be denied to the whole. All this could be freely admitted. But then the question arose, Is mind the originating source of the movements of matter, or is it not rather itself the product of them? {31} There were those who did not shrink from affirming that matter produces thought, even as the liver secretes bile. Others preferred to take what seemed to be an intermediate course. They were not prepared to give priority to either mind or matter. Thus Haeckel maintained that matter and thought are only two different aspects, or two fundamental attributes of an underlying something which he defined as "substance." It was to the action of this universal substance that he imagined the "monistic mechanical process" to be due. He went so far as to state his conviction that not even the atom is without "a rudimentary form of sensation and will."[3] In like manner Tyndall had claimed a two-sidedness for matter, and traced all higher developments back to the side which held in it the element of spirit and thought; while admitting that "the production of consciousness by molecular action is quite as inconceivable on mechanical principles as the production of molecular action by consciousness."[4] The bearing of all this upon the question of Design was plain, for, if thought and intention are the outcome and result of the mechanical operations of Nature, it might well seem to follow that mind {32} had been removed from its high place as the dominant and directing power. But these difficulties with which the theologian was thus confronted in respect of a First Cause and the recognition of Design, were even less formidable than those which were arrayed under the other heads that we have enumerated. It was Huxley who invented the term Agnosticism to describe the position of such of his contemporaries as were not inclined to deny that there was a great Power at work behind the phenomena of the Universe, but were not prepared to admit that this Power could be any degree comprehensible by us. The most systematic exponent of this view was Herbert Spencer. He allowed that we are obliged to refer the phenomenal world and its law and order to a First Cause. "And the First Cause," he said, "must be in every sense perfect, complete, total--including within itself all power, and transcending all law." But he insisted that, "it cannot in any manner or degree be known, in the strict sense of knowing."[5] Elsewhere he suggested that it may belong to "a mode of being as much transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion." "Our only conception of what we know as Mind in ourselves is the {33} conception of a series of states of consciousness." "How," he asked, "is the 'originating Mind' to be thought of as having states produced by things objective to it, as discriminating among these states, and classing them as like and unlike; and as preferring one objective result to another."[6] It was by a similar line of reasoning that Romanes reached the like conclusions.[7] "In my opinion," he said, "no explanation of natural order can either be conceived or named other than that of intelligence as the supreme directing cause." But "this cause must be widely different from anything that we know of Mind in ourselves." "If such a Mind exists, it is not conceivable as existing, and we are precluded from assigning to it any attributes." It was obvious that, if no satisfactory reply were forthcoming to such a contention, the very word Theology must be discarded, since there would be no longer any need for it, or justification of its use. But there was yet a further criticism that was supposed by not a few to complete the discomfiture of those who still clung to the traditional beliefs. We can find it forcibly expressed in one of the earlier writings of Romanes, who in this case was endorsing the verdict of Mill. "Supposing the Deity to be {34} omnipotent, there can be no inference more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of beneficence in the divine character than that which we know in any, the very worst, of human characters. For let us pause for one moment to think of what suffering in Nature means. Some hundreds of millions of years ago, some millions of millions of animals must be supposed to have become sentient. Since that time till the present there must have been millions and millions of generations of millions and millions of individuals. And throughout all this period of incalculable duration, this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have been in a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the outcome, we find that more than one-half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment--everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of cruel torture!"[8] {35} Huxley, arguing to the same effect, concluded that "since thousands of times a minute, were our ears sharp enough, we should hear sighs and groans of pain like those heard by Dante at the gate of hell, the world cannot be governed by what we call benevolence."[9] Haeckel went so far as to propose to describe by the term "dysteleology" that part of the science of Biology which collected the facts that gave direct contradiction to the idea of beneficial "purposive arrangement." Such were the difficulties which loomed largest before the minds of vast numbers of thinking men and women, and did much to shake the general confidence in religion, in the years that followed the discoveries which culminated in the Darwinian theory of evolution. It must not be supposed that these thoughts were lightly entertained, nor may we imagine that they gave no distress to those who sincerely believed that they were bound to accept what seemed to be their inevitable consequences. To quote again from the _Candid Examination_ of Romanes, we may take it that he was speaking for many others when he said, "Forasmuch as I am far from being able to agree with those who affirm {36} that the twilight doctrine of the new faith is a desirable substitute for the waning splendour of 'the old,' I am not ashamed to confess that, with this virtual negation of God, the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness; and although, from henceforth the precept 'to work while it is day' will doubtless but gain an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words 'that the night cometh when no man can work,' yet when at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it--at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible." [1] _Logic_, Chap. V. [2] _The Riddle of the Universe_, Chaps. XIV, XV. [3] Chap. XII. [4] _Fragments of Science_, p. 222. [5] _First Principles_, i., pp. 33-39. [6] _Essays_, Vol. III., pp. 246, f. [7] In an essay written before 1889. [8] _A Candid Examination of Theism_ (1876), pp. 171, f. [9] _Nineteenth Century_, February, 1888. {37} CHAPTER IV THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS It must not be imagined that all the arguments were on one side. Far from it. The defenders of the old faith were many, and not the least able of them were drawn from the ranks of the men of science. The list of scientific leaders who avowedly ranged themselves on the Christian side, if it were made out, would be a long one. It would include distinguished names such as those of Faraday, Joule, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Kelvin, Stokes, Tait, Adams, Clerk Maxwell, Salmon, Cayley, and Pasteur. And others would have to be added who, after contending for a while as materialists or agnostics, ultimately changed their attitude and joined the supporters of Theism. Haeckel frankly admitted that there were such defaulters from his cause in Germany, giving the names of "two of the most famous of living scientists, R. Virchow and E. Du Bois Raymond," amongst others. On the other hand he recommended his readers to study "the profound work of Romanes," {38} without, it would seem, being aware of the transformation that took place in that thinker's opinions towards the end of his life. We have now to indicate the nature of the replies that were made to the difficulties of which we spoke in our last chapter. Let us follow the order in which they were presented. About the necessity for a First Cause not much had to be said. Even if the whole course of organic development could be proved to have been continuous without a break from the first movements of matter, through all the changes of physical life, up to the highest exhibition of human powers--and no one ventured to say that this had been proved--there would still be the necessity for an initial impulse to set the process in action. Spencer, as we have seen, declared that there must have been a First Cause, and Tyndall agreed that "the hypothesis" of Evolution "does nothing more than transport the conception of life's origin to an indefinitely distant past."[1] Darwin himself never hesitated on this point. "The theory of evolution," he insisted, "is quite compatible with the belief in God."[2] The words which he expressly added to the conclusion of the {39} _Origin of Species_ are well known. After describing once again the production of the innumerable forms of being as the result of natural selection, he said: "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one." It is well also to keep on record the striking dictum of Lord Kelvin, addressed to the students of University College.[3] "Science," he told them, "positively affirmed creative power." It will be remembered that we quoted Mill as speaking of "permanent causes." We may be grateful to him for the suggestion. We could not readily think of a better term than the great "Permanent Cause" by which to describe, in modern language, the "I AM" of the Biblical Theology.[4] But, if on this point there was no serious conflict of opinion, it was otherwise in regard to the next. Here it did look as if the new discoveries might have {40} changed the whole situation. Huxley acknowledged that what struck him most forcibly on his first perusal of the Origin of Species, was that "teleology, as commonly understood, had received its death-blow at Mr. Darwin's hands."[5] But Huxley was a born fighter, and he could turn his weapons with facility and effect against his friends when he thought they had overstated their case. It is interesting to find him, in 1867, criticising Haeckel for his repudiation of the principle of Design. "The Doctrine of Evolution," he says, "is the most formidable opponent of the commoner and coarser forms of teleology." "The teleology which supposes that the eye such as we see it in man, or one of the higher vertebrata, was made with the precise structure it exhibits, for the purpose of enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution." Then, referring to the appeal which had been made to the existence of rudimentary organs as discrediting teleology, he says in his {41} characteristic way: "Either these rudiments are of no use to the animals, in which case they ought to have disappeared; or they are of some use to the animal, in which case they are of no use as an argument against teleology."[6] Darwin himself felt the grave difficulty in which the ordinary arguments had become involved; but he was most unwilling to abandon his belief in Design. "The old argument from design in nature as given by Paley," he wrote, "which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by a man." On the other hand, he could not shut his eyes to the fact that there are "endless beautiful adaptations which we everywhere meet with,"[7] and to the further fact that "the mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, without having been designed."[8] A few years later, when Dr. Asa Gray had sent him from America a review in which he had written of "Mr. Darwin's great service to natural science {42} in bringing back teleology," on the ground that in Darwinism usefulness and purpose come to the front again as working principles of the first order, Darwin replied, "What you say about teleology pleases me especially."[9] Later still, in 1878, Romanes sent him a copy of his _Candid Examination_. Darwin in his letter of acknowledgment wrote more than half seriously, in the person as it were of an imaginary correspondent, to this effect: "I should like to hear what you would say if a theologian addressed you as follows: "'I grant you the attraction of gravity, persistence of force (or conservation of energy), and one kind of matter, though the latter is an immense addition, but I maintain that God must have given such attributes to this force, independently of its persistence, that under certain conditions it develops or changes into light, heat, electricity, galvanism, perhaps into life. "'You cannot prove that force (which physicists define as that which causes motion) would invariably thus change its character under the above conditions. Again, I maintain that matter, though it may be in the future eternal, was created by God with the most marvellous affinities, leading to {43} complex definite compounds, and with polarities leading to beautiful crystals, etc., etc. You cannot prove that matter would necessarily possess these attributes. Therefore you have no right to say that you have "demonstrated" that all natural laws necessarily follow from gravity, the persistence of force, and existence of matter. If you say that nebulous matter existed aboriginally and from eternity, with all its present complex powers in a potential state, you seem to me to beg the whole question.' "Please observe it is not I, but a theologian, who has thus addressed you, but I could not answer him."[10] The alternatives to Design, _i.e._, to the recognition of directive activity, would be Necessity or Chance. From both of these the deepest instincts of humanity--which in such matters are as fully to be relied on as its logical faculty--strongly recoil. No one has spoken out more strongly about the first than Huxley did. "What is the dire necessity and 'iron' law under which you groan?" he asks. "Truly, most gratuitously invented bugbears. I suppose if there be an 'iron' law, it is that of gravitation; and if {44} there be a physical necessity, it is that a stone, unsupported, must fall to the ground.... But when, as commonly happens, we change _will_ into _must_, we introduce an idea of necessity which most assuredly does not lie in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I can discover. For my part, I utterly repudiate and anathematise the intruder.... The notion of necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the perfectly legitimate conception of law; the materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the most baseless of theological dogmas."[11] But a dogma of Necessity would be more tolerable than a doctrine of Chance. In Lord Kelvin's address, to which reference has been made, he declared his conviction that "directive power" was "an article of belief which science compelled him to accept." There was nothing, he said, between such a belief and the acceptance of the theory of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. And, in a letter to the _Times_ justifying this assertion, he told how forty years before he had asked Liebig, when walking with him in the country, whether he believed that the grass {45} and flowers they saw around them "grew by mere chemical forces." "No," he answered, "no more than I could believe that a book of botany describing them could grow by mere chemical forces." Discussions may continue as to whether what Huxley called "the wider teleology," or some other form of the doctrine of Design is to be preferred; but thoughtful men are likely to agree with the judgment given by Sir George Stokes--that recognised master of masters--when he said: "We meet with such overwhelming evidence of design, of purpose, especially in the study of living things, that we are compelled to think of mind as being involved in the constitution of the universe."[12] [1] _Fragments of Science_, p. 166. [2] _Life and Letters_, I., p. 307. [3] May 2nd, 1903. [4] The debate as to the accuracy of the Mosaic account of Creation does not come directly within the scope of our survey; but, nevertheless, it may be worth while to recall the following statement in view of the very confident assertions that have often been made, by no less an authority than Romanes. "The order in which the flora and fauna are said by the Mosaic account to have appeared upon the earth corresponds with that which the theory of evolution requires and the evidence of geology proves."--(_Nature_, August 11th, 1881.) [5] _Lay Sermons_. [6] _Critiques and Addresses_, pp. 305, 308. [7] _Life and Letters_, I., p. 309. [8] I., p. 314. [9] _Life and Letters_, III., p. 189. [10] _Life and Letters_ of Romanes, pp. 88. [11] Essay on "The Physical Basis of Life" (1868). [12] _Gifford Lectures_ (1891), p. 196. {46} CHAPTER V THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS (_continued_) But though Materialism had to go, there was a time when it seemed to many by no means unlikely that Agnosticism might have to be accepted as its substitute. And if that had been so the case would have been scarcely less desperate. We might have been left with a philosophy of a kind, but we should have been deprived of any object which could evoke within our hearts the trust and affection that are needed to sustain a religion. However, as it proved, there was no great cause for fear. Agnosticism was subjected in its turn to the ordeal of criticism, and the result proved that it had not in it the substance and force that could give it any permanent hold upon the best intelligence of the age. If Agnosticism could have been content to confine itself to positive assertions, there might have been less cause to find fault with it. But its name stood for negation, and its temper was in accord with its name. The exponents of Agnosticism were not {47} satisfied with affirming that the Power behind phenomena is beyond all thought mysterious. They insisted that it is unknowable, and that not merely in the sense that it is incomprehensible, not to be fully grasped, but unknowable in the sense that nothing at all can be known about it. And then, having laid down this as their fundamental principle, they proceeded at once, with a strange inconsistency, to assert that we can know what it is _not_. This above all else, they said, it is not: it is not personal. True, Herbert Spencer maintained that it is as far raised above personality as personality is raised above unconsciousness; but the stress was laid not upon the affirmation of super-personality, but upon the denial and rejection of anything like personality as we understand it. The position was really untenable. Possibly, if we could detect no more in Nature than power, we might be content, intellectually, to stop at the affirmation of inscrutable force. But if there is also design, then we are bound to go a step further. Bishop Harvey Goodwin expressed this exactly when he said: "Purpose means person." No doubt personality in the Creator must be something far higher and fuller than personality in the creature. The German philosopher Lotze was speaking the truth when he declared that "to all finite minds {48} there is allotted but a pale copy" of personality; "the finiteness of the finite," being "not a producing condition of personality," as has often been maintained, "but a limit and hindrance of its development." "Perfect personality," he said, "is in God alone."[1] To most of us it may sound paradoxical to urge that the full Christian doctrine of the Three Persons in the Godhead is really less difficult intellectually than the doctrine that the Divine Being consists of an isolated unit. This was the contention of the Greek Fathers of the Church, whose acute and subtle minds anticipated not a few of the objections which we have had to encounter in our days. We cannot elaborate the statement here,[2] but it is to the point to observe that the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity removes from the Christian believer that which to Spencer was one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the acceptance of the idea of a Divine Personality; for it relieves him from the necessity of imagining a subject without an object, since in the Christian view the highest life in the universe is a social life, {49} in which thought is for ever communicated with unbroken harmony of feeling and will. But the inadequacy of Agnosticism was to be seen not only on the intellectual side. Its practical effects were necessarily determined by its negations. Since we could know nothing of the ultimate power, it was plainly our wisdom to turn our attention elsewhere. It followed that, if morality was to be upheld, it must be based upon other than the familiar sanctions. For awhile it was enthusiastically promised that this could and should be done. But the event proved otherwise. Towards the end of his life, Herbert Spencer was constrained to admit this. "Now that ... I have succeeded in completing the second volume of _The Principles of Ethics_ ... my satisfaction is somewhat dashed by the thought that these new parts fall short of expectation. The doctrine of Evolution has not furnished guidance to the extent that I had hoped."[3] And this moral failure of the system pointed yet deeper to its essential weakness. It deliberately ignored the profoundest needs and capacities of our nature. The need is the need for God, and for One who, though greatly above us, is yet within our reach, and ready to give us His friendship. "Thou {50} hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee." That cry of St. Augustine has found its echo in unnumbered souls, and our humanity will never be satisfied while it is offered no more than an impalpable abstraction for the contentment of its craving. Allusion has been made to the fact that Romanes in his latter days was led to abandon the negative attitude which he had taken in his earlier life. The story of the change is to be found as told by himself in the volume of _Life and Letters_ edited by his widow, and in the _Notes_ which he left behind him. These he had written in preparation for a book which was to have been entitled: _A Candid Examination of Religion_.[4] It is evident that no consideration weighed more with him than this witness of the deeper needs of the soul. We have seen with what sorrow he had accepted as a young man the conclusions to which he had found himself driven when Theism seemed no longer a possible belief. After his change he admitted that he had failed to recognise an important element in his treatment of the problem. "When I wrote the preceding treatise I {51} did not sufficiently appreciate the immense importance of _human_ nature in any enquiry touching Theism. But since then I have seriously studied anthropology (including the science of comparative religions), psychology, and metaphysics, with the result of clearly seeing that human nature is the most important part of nature as a whole whereby to investigate the theory of Theism."[5] The outcome of his study was to convince him of two things. The first was that, "if the religious instincts of the human race point to no reality as their object, they are out of analogy with all other instinctive endowments. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom we never meet with such a thing as an instinct pointing aimlessly."[6] And this first conviction was only the preparation for a second. Speaking again of his _Candid Examination of Theism_, he says: "In that treatise I have since come to see that I was wrong touching what I constituted the basal argument for my negative conclusion ... Reason is not the only attribute of man, nor is it the only faculty which he habitually employs for the ascertainment of truth. Moral and spiritual faculties are of no less importance in their respective spheres, even of everyday life; faith, trust, taste, etc., are {52} as needful in ascertaining truth as to character, beauty, etc., as is reason."[7] He put the same thing with even more of the note of personal experience when he wrote to Dean Paget of Christ Church within three months of his death: "Strangely enough for my time of life, I have begun to discover the truth of what you once wrote about logical processes not being the only means of research in regions transcendental."[8] In all this he was following, as he knew, in the steps of Pascal, who had devoted the whole of the first part of his treatise to the argument from the condition of man's nature without God, and then had appealed to that nature for its positive testimony to the reality of the spiritual. "The heart has its reasons that the reason does not know." Agnosticism appeared dressed in the garb of an exceeding reverence, but, on closer acquaintance, it became evident that its acceptance would mean the cheapening of life by banishing from it the Divine personality, and robbing the human of the qualities that give it its greatest worth. Happily the disaster has been averted, and there are not many now who would seriously undertake its defence. [1] _Microcosmus_ (E.T.), II., p. 688. [2] Those who may desire to see the matter clearly and ably handled would do well to read the Essay on "The Being of God," in _Lux Mundi_, by Aubrey Moore. [3] Preface, Vol. II. (1893). [4] These notes were sent by Mr. Romanes' desire after his death, in 1894, to Bishop Gore, and have been published by him in a sixpenny volume under the title of _Thoughts on Religion_. [5] P. 154. [6] P. 82. [7] Pp. 111, f. [8] Life and Letters, p. 375. {53} CHAPTER VI. THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS (_continued_) We have still to see how the last of the difficulties of which we have spoken was treated. It was a difficulty which could not be regarded with indifference. For what would it avail to shew that men had a right to cherish the belief in Power, and Purpose, and Personality, unless they could also be assured that the Orderer of the world is good? Nay, might they not feel, if there were no such assurance, that it would be better to be altogether without His presence and influence? On a matter so vital to happiness and well-being the mere possibility of a doubt was torment enough. What was there to be said to bring relief to the mind and heart when charges were made against the benevolence and beneficence of Nature's ways? What satisfactory account could be given of the waste and cruelty which were seen to abound on every hand? The more clear the certainty that there is design in the Universe, the more urgent became {54} the question as to the character of that design, and of the motives that prompt it. So long as the difficulty remained unrelieved, the thoughts of many of the most sensitive minds in regard to Theism were held in suspense. The shadow of misgiving was felt to be creeping over the mind of the age, like the gloom of an approaching eclipse, even before the arrival of the Darwinian hypothesis. In words too well known to need repeating, Tennyson had given utterance to the half-realised anxiety of his contemporaries in the stanzas of his _In Memoriam_, published in 1850. What the finer spirits were already beginning to feel was soon to be proclaimed, in terms which could not fail to be understood by the multitude, as an inevitable truth brought to light by scientific enquiry. We have seen how it was stated with the passion of eloquence by Huxley and Romanes. And Darwin, with all his detachment and philosophic calm, was at times deeply affected by the seriousness of the problem which he had done so much to bring into prominence. It is plain that he did his very utmost to retain the hopeful view, and to put the most consoling interpretation he could upon the disquieting facts. He had no difficulty in shewing that the wholesale destruction of living organisms was imperatively {55} necessary. "There is no exception to the rule," he said, "that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair."[1] The truth of this has been demonstrated again and again. A pair of rabbits, for example, would in the most favourable circumstances increase in four or five years to a million. The roe of a cod may contain eight or nine millions of eggs. More appalling still, the female of the common flesh fly will at one time deposit 20,000 eggs. At this rate of increase it has been calculated that, in less than a year, a single pair would produce enough flies, if these were not devoured by their natural foes, to cover the whole surface of the globe to the depth of a mile and a quarter! But all this does not, of course, make it clear why in a beneficently ordered world such a necessity of slaughter should ever have been allowed to arise. Darwin, as we have said, tried hard to take the most favourable view of the whole process. He thus concluded his chapter on the struggle for existence; "When we reflect on the struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that {56} the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply." And these are the words with which he concluded the _Origin of Species_: "Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows." But a year or two later he shewed that his mind was by no means at rest on the matter, by writing in this strain to his friend Asa Gray: "I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.... I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion _at all_ satisfies me.... Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical."[2] {57} Happily there were others who were able to see their way somewhat further than this. Romanes, in a paper which he read before the Aristotelian Society in 1889, shewed that he was reconsidering his position. He questioned whether the assertion, made by a speaker in a previous discussion, that "the fair order of Nature is only acquired by a wholesale waste and sacrifice," could be accepted as strictly true, for "how can it be said that, in point of fact, there _has_ been a waste, or _has_ been a sacrifice? Clearly such things can only be said when our point of view is restricted to the means (_i.e._, the wholesale destruction of the less fit); not when we extend our view to what, even within the limits of human observation, is unquestionably the _end_ (_i.e._, the causal result in an ever improving world of types)."[3] He had intended to write more fully on the subject, but did not live to do so. We only know that on the Sunday before his death he did express to Bishop Gore his entire agreement with a statement that had been made a short time before by Professor Knight, in his _Aspects of Theism_, to the effect that "A larger good is evolved through the winnowing process by which physical nature casts its weaker products {58} aside, etc."[4] We cannot suppose that, if he had lived, he would have been content to have left the argument thus. That the end justifies the means, is scarcely a doctrine which can be accepted as the last word of an ethical defence of the constitution of the world. No doubt there were further pleas to be put in, and we shall do well to give them their full value. There is the contention that the pleasures of life as a whole outweigh the sum of its evils. This was maintained, and we need not hesitate to say successfully maintained, by Lord Avebury, and not by him alone. Indeed Darwin had emphatically said, "According to my judgment happiness decidedly prevails."[5] Then there has always been urged the undoubted fact that pain, if an evil, is yet the minister of good. Browning's optimism may have carried him too far when he laid it down that "when pain ends gain ends," but it is not to be questioned that men have profited by sufferings, and that they have had to thank their pains, if only because these have served to protect them from yet greater misfortunes. There is a true wisdom in the moral of the old fable of the blacksmith, who prayed to heaven that the fire might not burn his fingers, to discover that as {59} a result it had charred his hand to the bone. Medical science has had much to say with regard to the salutary office of pain. It has gone so far as to assert that, "the symptoms of disease are marked by purpose, and the purpose is beneficent." Nay more, "the processes of disease aim not at the destruction of life, but at the saving of it."[6] None the less, with what might seem a splendid inconsistency, the medical profession devotes itself untiringly to the alleviation of the symptoms and to the eradication of disease. Again, we may be thankful to be assured that, whatever be the case with man, the lower organisms feel pain less than he does, and much less than he is often wont to imagine that they feel it. This has been argued again and again by the veteran naturalist Wallace, whose right to speak on the subject no one is likely to dispute. In his recently published book, _The World of Life_, he has devoted a whole chapter to answering the question, "Is Nature cruel?" and it is due to him, as well as to the importance of the problem, that we should carefully note what he has said. The following quotations may be taken as sufficiently indicating his position. "The widespread idea of the cruelty of Nature is {60} almost wholly imaginary."[7] "Our whole tendency to transfer _our_ sensations of pain to the other animals is grossly misleading."[8] "No other animal _needs_ the pain-sensations that we need; it is therefore absolutely certain--on principles of evolution--that no other possesses such sensations in more than a fractional degree of ours."[9] "In the category of painless or almost painless animals, I think we may place almost all aquatic animals up to fishes, all the vast hordes of insects, probably all mollusca and worms; thus reducing the sphere of pain to a minimum throughout all the earlier geological ages, and very largely even now."[10] "The purpose and use of all parasitic diseases is to seize upon the less adapted and less healthy individuals--those which are slowly dying and no longer of value in the preservation of the species, and therefore to a certain extent injurious to the race by requiring food and occupying space needed by the more fit."[11] Speaking of "the vicious-looking teeth and claws of the cat tribe, the hooked beak and prehensile talons of birds of prey, the poison fangs of serpents, the stings of wasps and many others," Dr. Wallace {61} writes; "The idea that all these weapons exist for the _purpose_ of shedding blood or giving pain is wholly illusory. As a matter of fact, their effect is wholly beneficent even to the sufferers, inasmuch as they tend to the diminution of pain. Their actual purpose is always to prevent the escape of captured food--of a wounded animal, which would then, indeed, suffer _useless_ pain, since it would certainly very soon be captured again and be devoured." "All conclusions derived from the house-fed cat and mouse are fallacious."[12] Finally he concludes by inveighing against "the ludicrously exaggerated view adopted by men of such eminence and usually of such calm judgment as Huxley--a view almost as far removed from fact or science as the purely imaginary and humanitarian dogma of the poet: 'The poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies.' Whatever the giant may feel, if the theory of Evolution is true, the 'poor beetle' certainly {62} feels an almost irreducible minimum of pain, probably none at all."[13] We may add to all these considerations the further fact that we are constantly finding out that things have their use which had been too hastily assumed to be mere blots upon Nature. The desert and the volcano, for instance, have often been regarded in that light. But we have lately been assured that both are needed for the supply of atmospheric dust, which is a necessary condition of the rain-fall; so that they are really essential to life upon the planet. Beyond question, then, there is very much to be said in mitigation of the terrible difficulty occasioned by what appear to be the havoc and the prodigality of Nature. And yet--when all has been said--a residuum does remain of inexplicable misery and distress, and there are times when we are all of us constrained to cry out with Darwin that it is "too much," and to ask whether there is not some further clue to the mystery. And then it may well be that there comes to our mind an answer that has been given from the very first moment at which human beings have thought at all. It is an answer which has seemed inevitable alike to the simplest and the wisest. {63} Carlyle once told of two Scottish peasants who found themselves for the first time at Ailsa Crag. They stared in astonishment at the great sea-precipices. At last one said to the other: "Eh, Jock, Nature's deevilish!"[14] That was the view taken by the primitive races of the world, as their worships and incantations bore witness. It is a view which cannot be lightly dismissed as having nothing at all in its support. We may minimise the evil that is at work around and within us as we will, but, when we have done our utmost, we shall be unlike the vast majority of our race if we are not compelled to admit that there is that in the world which it is quite impossible to ascribe to the immediate action of an entirely good and beneficent God. Is it then to be thought incredible that the order of the world should have been interfered with, at an early stage in its development, in such a way that the disarrangement was left to work out its fatal mischief by means of the very constancy of the great system of laws which make for a regular development? How this might conceivably have occurred has been set out by an anonymous writer in a remarkable book which ought to be better known than it is. {64} It was published some years ago,[15] and bears the suggestive title of _Evil and Evolution_. The author maintains that the original motive in all living things was self-preservation for self-realisation; and that this elementary law was in itself necessary and good, the essential condition of progress. But just as we to-day know well how hard it is to draw the line which distinguishes a right self-seeking from the wrong, so it has been from the outset. The distinction is a fine one, and the balance is easily upset. We have but to suppose that this perversion of the right and lawful happened at an early stage, to see that nothing more would have been required to account for the subsequent heritage of woe.[16] After speaking of the innocent "kind of comparative strife that we see in the fields and forests around us," in which "there may be nothing that we cannot reconcile with the perfect beneficence of the Great {65} Designer and Creator," this writer goes on to say: "But the moment that evolution has attained that point at which the struggle begins to involve pain and unhappiness, it becomes quite another matter. The moment that rudimentary but happy and congenial life begins to be overshadowed by fear, or debased by conscious cruelty, the moment that process of evolution begins to evolve not only cruel selfishness in its most odious forms, but deceit and artifice and treacherous cunning in the warfare which one animal wages with another, then I think you may be certain of one of two things--either the Creator is not all-benevolent, or that that scheme is somehow working out as He never intended it should: there must have been some disturbing and hostile influence."[17] This is well put, but the interest of the book chiefly consists in its attempts to show in detailed instances how things that are evil may have been made so. The author boldly argues that, if the normal course had been followed, "birds and beasts of prey and venomous reptiles would never have been evolved." "Evolutionists," he says, "are agreed that it is just the fierce struggle of created things that has produced these birds and beasts of prey, and that there can be {66} little doubt that it is the malignity of the struggle that has produced the venom of so many reptiles."[18] Instances are given in which such venom may now be developed as the result of rage or terror in an otherwise harmless animal. "A few years ago it was reported that the late M. Pasteur 'cultivated' the poison of human saliva to such a point that he was able to produce with it many of the effects of the most virulent snake poisons."[19] Had they not been inflamed by the terror of the struggle for existence, "tigers and hyaenas, vultures and sharks, ferrets and polecats, wasps and spiders, puff-adders and skunks" might have turned their undoubted abilities in other more desirable directions.[20] Again, "it is the perpetual effort, generation after generation, through long ages, to repair the mischief inflicted by enemies," that accounts for "the fecundity of the codfish and other creatures. The more prolific it becomes, the more enemies it can feed; and the more they multiply, the more prolific it grows." A vicious circle indeed! Even "earthquakes, storms, droughts, deluges," are explained as due to a certain want of balance and failure in adjustment.[21] Certainly, if we had to choose between the idea {67} of a careless or indifferent God, and the belief in a God who has given us ample proofs of a generally beneficent purpose, but who has, for reasons of the meaning of which we as yet can have only the vaguest conceptions, allowed Himself to be hindered and thwarted on the way to His goal, with results of suffering to Himself even greater than those endured by His creatures; if these were the alternatives before us, there can scarcely be one of us who would hesitate to say towards which of them his reason and conscience would confidently point him. [1] _Origin of Species_, Chap. III. [2] _Life and Letters_. [3] _Thoughts on Religion_, pp. 92, f. [4] p. 94. [5] _Life and Letters_, I., p. 309. [6] Address by Sir Frederick Treves at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, October, 1905. [7] p. 380. [8] p. 377. [9] p. 381. [10] p. 375. [11] p. 383. [12] p. 377. Among the illustrations that have been adduced of the insensibility of the lower organisms, none perhaps is more extraordinary than this: "A crab will continue to eat, and apparently relish, a smaller crab while being itself slowly devoured by a larger one!"--(Transactions of Victoria Institute, Vol. XXV., p. 257). [13] p. 384. [14] William Allingham's _Diary_, p. 226. [15] In 1896, by Messrs. Macmillan. [16] In one instance, at least, Darwin had pictured in his imagination the steps by which a "strange and odious instinct" may have been developed from comparatively innocent beginnings. He was referring to the ejection by the young cuckoo of its companions from the nest. "I can see no special difficulty in its having gradually acquired, during successive generations, the blind desire, the strength and structure necessary for the work of ejection." "The first step towards the acquisition of the proper instinct might have been mere unintentional restlessness on the part of the young bird."--_Origin of Species_, p. 200. [17] Pp. 135, f. [18] P. 142. [19] P. 143. [20] P. 144. [21] P. 232. {68} CHAPTER VII LATER SCIENCE The position, as we have described it, was that which may be said to have existed up to about twenty years ago. Since then much new light has come. Indeed, Lord Kelvin, speaking at Clerkenwell on February 26th, 1904, is reported in _The Times_ to have said, referring to the extraordinary progress of scientific research, that it "had, perhaps, been even more remarkable and striking at the beginning of the twentieth century than during the whole of the nineteenth." Let us take first that which he had more particularly in mind, the advance in the knowledge of the constitution of Matter. In an address delivered before the British Association at Bradford in 1873, Clerk Maxwell had stated the conclusions to which science had, up to that time, been led in its investigations of matter. Throughout the natural universe it had been shewn, by Spectrum Analysis, that matter is built up of {69} molecules. These molecules, according to the most competent judgment, were incapable of sub-division without change of substance, and were absolutely fixed for each substance. "A molecule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius, or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time." The relations of the parts and movements of the planetary systems may and do change, but "the molecules--the foundation-stones of the natural universe--remain unbroken and unworn." As a result of this, it was maintained that "the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of being a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent." "Not that science is debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces ... but, in tracing back the history of matter, science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and on the other that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural." So the case had stood for some while until science, through its indefatigable inquirers, shewed that it was in very deed "not debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule," nor, perhaps, from taking it to pieces. In 1895 came the {70} discovery of the X-rays by Röntgen in Germany, to be followed in a year by Becquerel's discovery of spontaneous radio-activity, and in a couple of years by the remarkable further discovery, made by Madame Curie, of what was termed "radium," a substance that went on producing heat _de novo_, keeping itself permanently at a higher temperature than its surroundings, and spontaneously producing electricity. This in itself was a new fact of extraordinary interest. For long, discussion had been waged between two departments of scientific inquirers. The geologists and biologists had demanded hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of millions of years to allow for the developments with which they were concerned. The physicists, led by Lord Kelvin, refused to admit the demand, claiming that it could be proved mathematically that it was impossible that the sun could have been giving out heat at its present rate for more than a hundred million years, at the very outside. The appearance of radium robbed this argument of its cogency. It is true that an examination of the sun's spectrum has not, as yet, revealed any radium lines, but it is well known that helium, a transformation product of radium, is present in it. And this modification of our views as to the {71} probable age of our solar system was far from being the only result of this latest discovery. Investigations which followed into radio-activity led the Cambridge professors, Larmor and Thomson, to conclude that electricity existed in small particles, which were called "electrons."[1] These seem to be the ingredients of which atoms are made. A molecule is composed of two or more atoms. That of hydrogen, for example, has two; that of water three; and so on up to a thousand or more. Molecules are very small. If a drop of water were magnified to the size of the globe, the molecules would be seen to be less than the size of a cricket ball! Atoms are much smaller. "The atoms in a drop of water outnumber the drops in an Atlantic Ocean." Electrons are much smaller still--about "a thousand-million-million times smaller than atoms."[2] Within the atom thousands or tens of thousands of these electrons are moving in orderly arrangement, at terrific speed, round and about one another. The amount of energy required to build up a molecule of any degree of complexity is very great, and it is {72} by the breaking down of complex molecules into simple ones that all our mechanical work is done. And this is not all, for not only can the molecule be thus broken in pieces, but the atom itself is capable of disintegration. "Although we do not know how to break atoms up, they are liable every now and then themselves to explode, and so resolve themselves into simpler forms." "Atoms of matter are not the indestructible and immutable things they were once thought."[3] The idea of the amount of energy thus revealed as available for all kinds of active work is so vast as to baffle calculation and even imagination. It has been said that there is energy enough in fifteen grains of radium, if it could all be set free at once, to blow the whole British Navy a mile high into the air. The thought that we are thus encompassed on every side by pent up potentialities of force, which if uncontrolled might at any moment work our destruction, may well deepen in us the sense of the need, not only for an originating, but for a continually directing mind to superintend the conduct of the universe. We have referred to more than one change of view to which the new discoveries have led. We shall doubtless find that there are other scientific theories {73} which will have ere long to be modified. Already it is recognised that the arguments of Lord Kelvin (he was then Sir William Thomson) and of Clerk Maxwell, which were based upon calculations as to the "dissipation of energy," can scarcely remain unaffected by what we now know, and suspect, of the crumbling and re-forming of atoms. And there are hints abroad of even more revolutionary suggestions. If there has been one principle more imperatively and unanimously insisted upon than another, it has been the uniformity of Nature's laws. What then are we to make of a remark like the following, made by Professor J. J. Thomson, perhaps only half-seriously, to the British Association at Cambridge, in 1904? "There was one law," he said, "which he felt convinced nobody who had worked on this question"--the radio-activity of matter--"would ever suggest, and that was the constancy of Nature." Not less startling is it to be told that a question may yet be raised which will challenge "the conception of a luminiferous aether, which for half a century has dominated physical science. It is possible," so we are informed, "that the field of electro-magnetic energy surrounding an electric charge in motion moves with it, and that the vibrations of light travel through this moving {74} field, instead of through an ocean of stagnant aether."[4] One further quotation of singular interest may be added. It is taken from an address to students by the President of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy.[5] "Twenty years ago," he said, "the idea held that inorganic chemistry was almost a dead science--dead in the sense of being apparently completed in many of its aspects, and that its records could be safely confided to the encyclopaedia.... A modified conception of life is now becoming co-extensive with the whole range of our experience. Even a simple inorganic crystal does not spring ready formed from its solvent, but first passes through phases of granulation and striation comparable with those which characterise the beginnings of vital growth. Metals exhibit in some respects phenomena similar to those possessed by organised beings. Thus, they show fatigue under long continued stress, and they recover their strength with rest. They are also susceptible to certain of the poisons which destroy organic life. Matter, broadly, is no longer merely dead masonry from which the edifice to shelter life {75} is constructed, but also appears to be the reservoir of that energy which is developed, altered and drawn into vitality itself.... The indestructibility of matter bids fair to become relegated to the museum of outworn theories; and with it will probably go our present conceptions as to the conservation of energy." It is clear, then, that the tasks awaiting the students of physical science are likely to be as arduous, and we may hope as full of reward, as they have been at any time in the past. Meanwhile, it does look as if there were truth in Mr. Balfour's remark that "Matter is not merely explained, but is explained away."[6] [1] The weighing and measuring of the electron were first announced by Professor Thomson to the British Association meeting at Dover, in 1899. [2] Sir Oliver Lodge. [3] Sir Oliver Lodge. _Life and Matter_, p. 28. [4] Whetham. _The Foundations of Science_, p. 50. [5] H. L. Sulman, at the Sir John Cass Institute, November 29th, 1911. [6] Presidential Address to British Association, 1904. {76} CHAPTER VIII LATER SCIENCE (_continued_) We have spoken of what science has recently been doing in the investigation of the constitution of matter; we have now to talk of its researches into the nature of Life. The discovery that all plant and animal life is developed from living cells was made, as we have already stated, more than seventy years ago. Since then our knowledge of the formation and history of these cells has been continually growing. The size of cells varies, but as a rule they are very minute. They consist of what is termed protoplasm. At one time it was supposed that protoplasm was structureless. Now it is known that the protoplasmic cell contains a nucleus and a surrounding body. Moreover, the nucleus, or small spot in the centre, has within it a spiral structure of a very complicated kind. Every cell is derived from a pre-existing cell by a process of division, the two resulting cells being apparently identical with the parent cell. {77} The cells possess the power of assimilating other cells or fragments of cells. As they grow they move and go in search of food and light and air and moisture. They exhibit feeling, and shrink as if in pain. Spots specially sensitive to vibrations become eyes and ears; and thus the various organs and faculties are evolved under the stimulating influence of environment. The progress, so far as it is physical, can be traced from the lowest blue-green algae right up to man. And all throughout, in so far as their chemical composition is concerned, the constituent elements of the living structure are the same. It is said to be practically impossible to distinguish between the cells of a toadstool and those of a human being. But when all this has been explained, we have still left one great question unanswered. How is the protoplasm made? Is there any connexion of development to be traced whereby life can be shewn to have arisen from inorganic matter? Protoplasm, under analysis, is found to consist of some of the commonest elements on the earth's surface, such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Apart from its very complicated structure, its contents are not hard to provide. And we know that there was a time when it must of necessity have been formed out of that which was not living, {78} for there was a time when our globe was in a state of incandescent heat in which no life that we know could possibly have existed. More than this we cannot say. Sir William Thomson, as President of the British Association in 1871, suggested that a germ of life might have been wafted to our world on a meteorite; but to say that is obviously only to banish the problem to a greater distance.[1] Huxley had, in 1868, invented the name "Bathybius" to describe the deep-sea slime which he held to be the progenitor of life on the planet. But later on he frankly confessed that his suggestion was fruitless, acknowledging that the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living. And so the problem remains. Sir Edward Schäfer, indeed, has laid it down that "we are compelled to believe that living matter must have owed its origin to causes similar in character to those which have been instrumental in producing all other forms of matter in the universe; in other words, to {79} a process of gradual evolution,"[2] but he can throw no further light on the process and its stages. Sir Oliver Lodge is but speaking the admitted truth when he says that "Science, in chagrin, has to confess that hitherto in this direction it has failed. It has not yet witnessed the origin of the smallest trace of life from dead matter."[3] No doubt there are many who are hopeful that it may yet be possible to discover a way by which a cell, discharging all the essential functions of life, can be constructed out of inorganic material; or, at least, that it may be possible to frame an intelligible hypothesis as to how this might have been done under conditions which long ago may have been more favourable than our own. But, on the other hand, there are not a few who have quite deliberately abandoned any expectation of the kind. This was made plain by some of the expressions of adverse opinion which were elicited by Sir Edward Schäfer's address. Of these the following may be given as specimens: "The more they saw of the lower forms of life, the more remote seemed to become the possibility of conceiving how life arose."[4] {80} "He could not imagine anything happening in the laboratory, according to our present knowledge, which would bring us any nearer to life."[5] "Living protoplasm has never been chemically produced. The assertion that life is due to chemical and mechanical processes alone is quite unjustified. Neither the probability of such an origin, nor even its possibility, has been supported by anything which can be termed scientific fact or logical reasoning."[6] "The phenomena of life are of a character wholly different from those which are presented by matter viewed under any other aspect, mechanical, electrical, chemical, or what not. It is beside the question to point to the fact that in Nature 'new elements are making their appearance and old elements disappearing,' for though we may speculate as to the manner of formation of uranium and thorium, and though the production of radio-active matters in Nature at the present time and always seems to be a well-established fact, such phenomena have not even an analogy with those of a living being, however humble."[7] It cannot be surprising that those who believe {81} the door to be shut, so to speak, in the direction of any theory of development through mechanical and chemical agencies alone, should look elsewhere for the solution of a problem which science is bound to do its very utmost to solve. This is what, as a matter of fact, is happening; and it is of the very deepest interest to observe the nature of the suggested explanation. It is no other than a revived form of the ancient doctrine of a "vital force," which we had imagined to have been finally discarded. There is this difference, however, and it is all-important. The force is not, as formerly supposed, some unique kind of energy; is not, indeed, energy at all. But we shall do best to state the new doctrine in the words of its leading exponents. Professor Anton Kerner, one of the most distinguished German writers on Botany, in his _Natural History of Plants_, speaking of the chemical explanation, says: "It does not explain the purposeful sequence of different operations in the same protoplasm without any change in the external stimuli; the thorough use made of external advantages; the resistance to injurious influences; the avoidance or encompassing of insuperable obstacles; the punctuality with which all the functions are performed; the periodicity which occurs with the greatest regularity under constant conditions of environment; {82} nor, above all, the fact that the power of discharging all the operations requisite for growth, nutrition, renovation and multiplication is liable to be lost." And then he gives his opinion thus: "I do not hesitate again to designate as vital force this natural agency, not to be identified with any other, whose immediate instrument is the protoplasm, and whose peculiar effects we call life." Sir Oliver Lodge is, perhaps, the most uncompromising advocate of the newer vitalism in England. The following striking quotations will set forth his views: Life, he maintains, is no more a function of matter "than the wind is a function of the leaves which dance under its influence."[8] "If it were true that vital energy turned into, or was anyhow convertible into, inorganic energy, if it were true that a dead body had more inorganic energy than a live one, if it were true that 'these inorganic energies' always, or ever, 'reappear on the dissolution of life,' then, undoubtedly, _cadit quaestio_, life would immediately be proved to be a form of energy, and would enter into the scheme of physics. But, inasmuch as all this is untrue--the direct contrary of the truth--I maintain that life is not a form of {83} energy, that it is not included in our present physical categories, that its explanation is still to seek." "It appears to me to belong to a separate order of existence, which interacts with this material frame of things, and, while there, exerts guidance and control on the energy which already exists."[9] "Life does not add to the stock of any human form of energy, nor does death affect the sum of energy in any known way."[10] "Life can generate no trace of energy, it can only guide its transmutations."[11] "My contention then is--and in this contention I am practically speaking for my brother physicists--that whereas life or mind can neither generate energy nor directly exert force, yet it can cause matter to exercise force on matter, and so can exercise guidance and control; it can so prepare any scene of activity, by arranging the position of existing material, and timing the liberation of existing energy, as to produce results concordant with an idea or scheme or intention; it can, in short, 'aim' and 'fire.'"[12] "It is impossible to explain all this fully by the laws of mechanics alone."[13] "On a stagnant and inactive world life would be {84} powerless: it could only make dry bones stir in such a world if it were itself a form of energy. It is only potent where inorganic energy is mechanically 'available'--to use Lord Kelvin's term--that is to say, is either potentially or actually in process of transfer and transformation. In other words, life can generate no trace of energy, it can only guide its transformation."[14] "Life possesses the power of vitalising the complex material aggregates which exist on this planet, and of utilising their energies for a time to display itself amid terrestrial surroundings; and then it seems to disappear or evaporate whence it came."[15] To these voices from Germany or England we can add that of M. Bergson from France. In many respects, as he says, he is at one with Sir Oliver Lodge. If he goes beyond him, it is mainly in these ways. He emphasises the element of Freedom, the power of choice as shewn by every living thing. It appears, he says, "from the top to the bottom of the animal scale," "although the lower we go, the more vaguely it is seen." "In very truth, I believe no living organism is absolutely without the faculty of performing actions and moving spontaneously; for we see that even in the vegetable world, where {85} the organism is for the most part fixed to the ground, the faculty of motion is asleep rather than absent altogether. Sometimes it wakes up, just when it is likely to be useful." And this is not all. What is specially characteristic of M. Bergson is the insistence that this power of choice is an evidence of Consciousness. "Life," he declares, "is nothing but consciousness using matter for its purposes." "There is behind life an impulse, an immense impulse to climb higher and higher, to run greater and greater risks in order to arrive at greater and greater efficiency." "Obviously there is a vital impulse."[16] "Life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, speeds outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped"--that is, as he explains, by matter--"and converted into oscillation; at one point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has poured freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. Everywhere but in man consciousness has had to come to a stand; in man alone it has kept on its way. Man continues the vital movement indefinitely, although he does not draw along with him all that life carries in itself. On other {86} lines of evolution there have travelled other tendencies which life implied"--the reference is more especially to powers of instinct as distinguished from those of intelligence--"and of which, since everything interpenetrates, man has doubtless kept something, but of which he has kept only a little."[17] Perhaps the most astonishing thing about M. Bergson's philosophy is his unreadiness to allow that the consciousness, which he says is everywhere at work, has any deliberate purpose in its working. Mr. Balfour has called attention to the unsatisfactoriness of what he described as "too hesitating and uncertain a treatment."[18] But, in spite of so serious an omission, we may be glad to believe, with our acute statesman-critic, that "there is permanent value in his theories." If they indicate at all the direction in which scientific thinking is to move, we shall soon have travelled a very long distance from the days in which it was imagined that all vital phenomena might be accounted for on merely materialistic and mechanical lines. [1] "To this 'meteorite' theory the apparently fatal objection was raised that it would take some sixty million years for a meteorite to travel from the nearest stellar system to our earth, and it is inconceivable that any kind of life could be maintained during such a period."--Schäfer. [2] Presidential Address to British Association, at Edinburgh (1912). [3] _Man and the Universe_, p. 24. [4] Prof. Wager. [5] Dr. J. S. Haldane. [6] Dr. A. R. Wallace. Article in _Everyman_, October 18th, 1912. [7] Sir William Tilden. Letter to _The Times_, September 9th,1912. [8] _Life and Matter_, p. 106. [9] Pp. 132, f. [10] P. 158. [11] P. 160. [12] Pp. 164, f. [13] P. 166. [14] P. 160. [15] P. 198. [16] Lecture at Birmingham, May, 1911. [17] _Creative Evolution_, p. 280. [18] _Hibbert Journal_, October, 1911. {87} CHAPTER IX LATER SCIENCE (_continued_) The leaders of the scientific thought of last century would have been vastly surprised if they could have foreseen the results of the investigations which were to be made into the constitution of matter and the nature of life; but not even these would have amazed them so much as would other investigations that were to be carried out in a yet deeper and more mysterious region of experience. Perhaps it was because science had been so busy about the more external things, that it had seemed to have no time to spare for the thorough consideration of that which is more truly vital to man than the matter which obeys or opposes him, or even than the physical life which enables him to act, in so far as he can, as its master. It was strange that the last thing to be thought of should be his own personality, himself; the innermost workings of his soul. But if this profoundest problem has been neglected, it is to be neglected no longer. Psychology has {88} already made good its claim to be respectfully regarded as one of the sciences. It is too early to speak with any great certainty of the results that it has achieved, though these are probably more substantial than is commonly supposed. Anyhow, it will be best that, as before, we should give some characteristic statements of the investigators themselves, rather than attempt to make unauthorised summaries of our own. And, first of all, Sir Oliver Lodge shall tell us what he understands by the Soul. "The soul is that controlling and guiding principle which is responsible for our personal expression and for the construction of the body, under the restrictions of physical condition and ancestry. In its higher developments it includes also feeling and intelligence and will, and is the storehouse of mental experience. The body is its instrument and organ, enabling it to receive and to convey physical impressions, and to affect and be affected by matter and energy."[1] How the soul acts by means of the body is thus explained. "The brain is the link between the psychical and the physical, which in themselves belong to different orders of being."[2] {89} "A portion of brain substance is consumed in every act of mentation."[3] "Destroy certain parts of brain completely, and connexion between the psychic and the material regions is for us severed. True; but cutting off or damaging communication is not the same as destroying or damaging the communicator; nor is smashing an organ equivalent to killing the organist."[4] M. Bergson does not differ from this when he says that, "the soul--essentially action, will, liberty--is the creative force _par excellence_, the productive agent of novelty in the world." He goes on to speak of the way by which souls have been differentiated and raised to self-conscious existence. "The history of this great effort is the very history of the evolution of life on our planet. Certain lines of evolution seem to have failed. But on the line of evolution which leads to man the liberation has been accomplished and thus personalities have been able to constitute themselves."[5] Like many another, M. Bergson cannot bring himself to believe that death is to be the end of all that has been thus painfully achieved during this process of attainment. "When we see that consciousness is also memory, {90} that one of its essential functions is to accumulate and preserve the past, that very probably the brain is an instrument of forgetfulness as much as one of remembrance, and that in pure consciousness nothing of the past is lost, the whole life of a conscious personality being an indivisible continuity; are we not led to suppose that the effect continues beyond, and that in this passage of consciousness through matter (the passage which at the tunnel's exit gives distinct personalities) consciousness is tempered like steel, and tests itself by clearly constituting personalities and preparing them, by the very effort which each of them is called upon to make, for a higher form of existence?"[6] But the psychologist has yet more to tell us about the nature of personality. Although helped to distinctiveness of self-conscious expression by means of its experience of the struggle under present material conditions, it is not the whole of it that can be thus expressed. In fact its present physical embodiment is but partially adequate to the task. In other words, "cerebral life represents only a small part of the mental life." "One of the rôles of the brain is to limit the vision of the mind, to render {91} its action more efficacious"[7]--more efficacious, that is to say, for such uses as are of value for survival and success under our existing conditions. It is to Frederick Myers that we have chiefly owed the conception of the subliminal or subconscious mind. The full report of his researches is given in the two volumes of his work on "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death" (1901). He it was who invented the word "telepathy" to express the fact that mental action can be exerted at a distance. And it was he who brought for the first time the phenomena of clairvoyance and apparitions under thorough examination by the employment of the most exacting tests. Along such lines he was led to the conclusion, now largely accepted, that the conscious self is only a fraction of the entire personality, the fraction being greater or less according to the magnitude of the individual. By means of this subconscious part of our being we are, he held, brought into touch with one another and are capable of attaining a knowledge which may greatly transcend that which comes to us through our ordinary channels of communication. In the case of genius we watch the emergence of exceptional {92} potentialities, which may serve as the promise and pledge of what the future has in store for us all. One day like some winged insect we shall pass to a condition beyond that of the life we now know, and then we may hope that what we "can regard as larval characters of special service in the present stage of existence," will prove to have been "destined to be discarded, or modified almost out of recognition, in proportion as a higher state is attained."[8] This recognition of the existence within human nature of such capacities and powers, however imperfectly developed and understood, would greatly help us to deal with many mysteries of experience that have hitherto seemed completely beyond the purview of a strict scientific research. The American psychologist, William James, has done good service to this highest department of critical inquiry in his well-known work on "Varieties of Religious Experience." A single extract may suffice to illustrate his position, and to shew what may yet lie before those who are prepared to press on in the direction in which he was able to point. "The further limits of our being plunge ... into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' {93} world.... So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account) we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world... When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men... I call this higher part of the universe by the name of God."[9] [1] _Man and the Universe_, p. 78. [2] P. 91. [3] _Life and Matter_, p. 107. [4] _Man and the Universe_, p. 93. [5] Lecture at University College, October, 1911. [6] Birmingham Lecture, May, 1911. [7] Bergson. Presidential Address to Society for Psychical Research, May, 1913. [8] _Op. cit._, I., p. 97. [9] Pp. 515, f. {94} NOTE Since the preceding chapters were written, the meeting of the British Association has been held at Birmingham (September, 1913). Its interest was unusually great inasmuch as the President's address and the principal discussions were occupied with the most critical and debatable scientific questions of the present moment. The following extracts will give a general idea of the line taken at the outset by the President, Sir Oliver Lodge. "Theological controversy is practically in abeyance just now." "It is the scientific allies, now, who are waging a more or less invigorating conflict among themselves, with philosophers joining in." "Ancient postulates are being pulled up by the roots." "The modern tendency is to emphasise the discontinuous or atomic character of everything." "The physical discovery of the twentieth century, so far, is the electrical theory of matter." "So far from Nature not making jumps, it becomes doubtful if she does anything else." "The corpuscular theory of radiation is by no means so dead as in my youth we thought it was." "But I myself am an upholder of _ultimate_ continuity, and a fervent believer in the aether of space." {95} "I have been called a vitalist, and in a sense I am; but I am not a vitalist if vitalism means an appeal to an undefined 'vital force' (an objectionable term I have never thought of using) as against the laws of chemistry and physics." "There is plenty of physics and chemistry and mechanics about every vital action, but for a complete understanding of it something beyond physics and chemistry is needed." "No mathematics could calculate the orbit of a common house-fly." "I will risk the assertion that life introduces something incalculable and purposeful amid the laws of physics; it thus distinctly supplements those laws, though it leaves them otherwise precisely as they were and obeys them all." "The Loom of Time is complicated by a multitude of free agents who can modify the web, making the product more beautiful or more ugly according as they are in harmony or disharmony with the general scheme. I venture to maintain that manifest imperfections are thus accounted for, and that freedom could be given on no other terms, nor at any less cost." "I will not shrink from a personal note summarising the result on my own mind of thirty years of experience of psychical research, begun without predilection--indeed, with the usual hostile prejudice." "The facts so examined have convinced me that memory and affection are not limited to that association with matter by which alone they can manifest themselves here and now, and that personality persists beyond bodily death." {96} Of the debates on the subsequent days those on "Radiation" and "The Origin of Life" were, perhaps, the most remarkable. At the former the point at issue was the amount of truth contained in Planck's "famous hypothesis that energy was transferred by jumps instead of in a continuous stream." Sir Joseph Larmor evidently expressed the prevailing opinion when he said that "some advance in that direction had become necessary, and old-fashioned physicists like himself had either to take part in it or run the risk of becoming obsolete." For the discussion about "Life," the three sections of Physiology, Zoology, and Botany were combined. Professor Moore stood stoutly for the older views, and "believed that he could demonstrate a step which connected inorganic with organic creation." Then he gave an abstruse and highly technical account of a process by which in "solutions of colloidal ferric hydroxide, exposed to strong sunlight," compounds could be formed similar to those to be found in the green plant. With a proper grouping of molecules it might be imagined how "colloidal aggregates appeared," and eventually "organic colloids" which "acquired the property of transforming light energy into chemical activity." The speakers who followed seemed to be agreed that, even were such "potentially living matter" to be produced, we should have reached, not the discovery of the secret of life, but only the construction of "its physical vehicle." Professor Hartog strongly protested against the notion that there was "a consensus {97} of opinion among biologists that life was only one form of chemical and physical actions which could be reduced in the laboratory." He wished it to be understood that "the preponderance of weight among scientific men" was opposed to such a position. {98} CONCLUSION It is dangerous to generalise; and, when as in this survey we are attempting to indicate broadly the trend of the thought of an age, we have more than ordinary need to be on our guard lest we should sacrifice truth to the desire for a seeming completeness of logical presentation. For fear, then, of misunderstanding, let it be clearly remembered that in what has been said we have had no wish to suggest that all minds have moved at the same pace, or even in the same direction; but only that certain strong tendencies were observable, which gave colour and character to the mental stream at the particular stages in its course. It is with a full sense of the possibility of exaggeration, and of the necessity of holding the balance even, that we shall now make our final attempt to sum up as concisely as possible what we have been able to gather in regard to the thought-movement of the period we have had under review. There can be no danger of misstatement in saying that, all throughout, the chief thoughts of the time were intensely occupied with {99} the greatest of all questions, those about GOD AND THE WORLD. And, further, it has not been difficult to perceive that there have been three distinct stages in the sequence of these thoughts. In the _first stage_ we can see, as we look back, that the Religious feeling was dominant, while the scientific temper could scarcely have been said to exist; certainly it did not exist upon any extended scale. But, though the desire to be reverent was widespread, we are bound to allow that the ideas about God were somewhat crudely conceived. As a legacy, no doubt, from the Deistic controversies of the preceding century, the general thought did not rise above the notion of a Supreme Mechanist and all-powerful Ruler of all things. The Divine Being was regarded as having originated the universe by a fiat of His will, fashioning its several contents one after another as He pleased, and appointing that each and all should be subjected to the laws He had ordained; always reserving to Himself the right to intervene by some signal display of wisdom and power, when such intervention was required, either to remedy a defect, or yet further to set forth His glory. Men were very ready to admit the idea of the Supernatural, but it was in the merely superficial and popular sense of _power working without means_, rather than what we now {100} feel to be the far truer sense of _superhuman knowledge of means, and power to use them_.[1] It followed, and this was the weakest point in the Paleyan system of Natural Theology, that God's action was looked for not in the normal, but in the exceptional processes of Nature. The need of the Divine was only felt when no other explanation was forthcoming; with the result, of course, that as other explanations were found, the necessity for recognising its operation grew ever less and less. And, even apart from such a consequence, the effects of the conception could not be otherwise than injurious to religious faith; for, as it has been truly and reverently observed, "a theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence."[2] As to knowledge of the World, there was scarcely any at all, according in our present understanding of such knowledge. Not everybody, of course, accounted for the existence of fossils by supposing that they were the casts from which the Almighty had designed His creatures, or possibly the Devil's {101} attempts to imitate His works; but the prevailing ideas were of the most primitive kind. Even Paley could give us no better explanation of certain rudimentary anatomical organs, than by suggesting that the creature in whom they were found had been so far constructed before it was decided what its sex should be! We can see that if any real progress in knowledge was to be made, a change of a very radical order had to come. And it did come. The _second stage_ was Scientific rather than religious. The thought of God occupied a less prominent place in proportion as men's minds were yielded to the attraction of the new studies. This was partly due, as we have already explained, to the fact that causes were found to account for the phenomena which had previously, for the lack of the understanding of such causes, been attributed to the immediate exercise of supernatural power. Partly, also, it was due to a growing distrust of human ability, which resulted from the belief that this was nothing more than a recent development from a lower animal ancestry. A mind thus originated was supposed to be debarred from forming any trustworthy notion of the nature of a First Cause which had operated, if at all, at some point infinitely distant in the long succession of ages. The main work of this stage was to prosecute {102} research into the elaborated mechanism, or as men soon came to prefer to think of it, the developing growth of the world. And wonderful, beyond all anticipation, was the success which rewarded the pains that were lavishly bestowed upon the inquiry. Small marvel was it that some men's heads were well-nigh turned, and that to many it seemed little less than certain that science had dispensed with the supernatural altogether; and that it only required time, and no great length of time, to secure universal acceptance for the materialistic explanations which were destined, as they supposed, to leave no mysteries of life unsolved. But such persons had reckoned with a too hasty and superficial knowledge of the data involved. Little by little the counter-criticisms produced their effect. The idea of a First and Permanent Cause was shewn to be as indispensable as ever; not, indeed, as an influence to be pushed far back, and to be thought of as acting either once or occasionally. A truer reading of the meaning of what had been discovered led to the grateful acknowledgment that "Darwinism has conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit by shewing us that we must choose between two alternatives: either God is everywhere present in Nature, or He is nowhere."[3] {103} So, again, with Design. The earlier notion of the separate manufacture of species and of special adaptations to particular ends had to give way to a larger conception of the growth and gradual correlation of the parts and functions of a stupendous whole. But for the attainment of this mighty result direction and superintendence are even more imperatively needed. As it was often urged with good reason, to make a world right off would not have been so marvellous an achievement as to make that world make itself. The problem of Beneficence had, as we saw, come to be so entangled with difficulties as to render it the most serious of all the problems which pressed upon the minds and hearts of the men of this second stage of thinking. But here, also, the fears which were at first aroused were found to have been exaggerated; and perhaps it is true to say that before the end of the century there was a general disposition to conclude that with larger knowledge we should get to understand the utility of much that to uninstructed eyes appears to be lavish waste and needless suffering. The obvious fact that science could not go forward without a loyal belief in the rational intelligibility of nature gave justification to a corresponding belief in its ethical intelligibility, even though in this case, as in the other, the {104} complete proofs might not be immediately forthcoming. And there was, further, the possibility--to some it was more than a possibility--that much in the world which looks contrary to goodness is really to be accounted for as the result of a misuse of liberty on the part of powers and forces whose action has most mysteriously been allowed to thwart and to complicate the task of the beneficent Maker of all. About the _third stage_ it is fitting that we should speak with more hesitation. We are living in it, and are as yet only at its beginning. But we may hazard the prognostication that it will be both Religious and Scientific; and that, "as knowledge grows from more to more," there will be found the "more of reverence" of which our modern poet sings. There is reason to hope that the bitterness of old controversies will not be revived, and that we have before us a time in which Theology and Science will co-operate and no longer conflict. With deepening insight it is becoming plainer than ever that the phenomena of life, and even of matter, are the expressions of a more than physical force. Evolution is a law under which a forward process is moving on, and moving up. There is an impulse of consciousness working from within, and there is a spiritual, as well as a material, environment inviting {105} to correspondence with itself. Freedom and power of choice are admitted to be present in regions where their existence was for long most strenuously denied. Even matter may have its own power of insistence and resistance--how much more mind and will. This consideration may give us a yet clearer clue to the mysteries of failure, miscarriage, and waste. A world that was to produce self-conscious, self-determining personalities needed to have freedom through the whole of its development; and the consequent risk and possible cost were inevitable. Shall we not be led to admire and revere increasingly the wonder of it all, as there grows upon us the sense of the quietness and gentleness, the foresight, and the infinite patience of the Being of beings, who will never obtrude His presence and action upon us, just because He would help us to be our own, not dead but living, selves, and would have us rise with Him to the highest things? We are far from the end of our learning. There are many enigmas yet to be made plain. We could not wish it otherwise. It has ever been through the narrow gate of difficulty that we have passed into the wider court of truth. We have good cause to be humble, but we have full right to be hopeful. We must not be afraid to face the problems that await {106} us, whatever they may be. We may be confident that we are not to be deceived; but that, under a Guidance that has never failed, we shall at length be brought to see the dawning of the longed-for day, "When that in us which thinks with that which feels Shall everlastingly be reconciled, And that which questioneth with that which kneels." [1] This important distinction was carefully drawn by the Duke of Argyll in his _Reign of Law_ (pp. 14, 25), published in 1866. [2] Aubrey Moore, in one of a series of remarkable articles contributed to the _Guardian_ (January 18th, 25th, February 1st, 1888). [3] Aubrey Moore, _Lux Mundi_. {107} INDEX AETHER, 73, 94. Agnosticism, 32, 46-52. Aquinas, St. Thomas, 13. Argyle, George Douglas, Duke of, 37, 100. Atoms, 21, 71, 72. Augustine, St., 50. Avebury, Lord, 58. BACON, LORD, 14. Balfour, A. J., 75, 86. "Bathybius," 78. Becquerel, A. C., 70. Beneficence, Divine, 17, 18, 53-67, 103. Bergson, Henri, 84-86, 89, 90. Brain, 88, 89, 90. Bunsen, R. W., 24. CARLYLE, THOMAS, 63. Cause, 29. Cells, The growth of, 77. Chalmers, Thomas, 19, 20. Chance, 30, 44, 56. Consciousness, 85, 89, 90. Creation, Mosaic account of 39. Creative power, affirmed by Science, 39. Cruelty in Nature, 34, 35, 54-67. Curie, Mme., 70. DALTON, JOHN, 21. Darwin, Charles, 24-26, 41-43, 54, 58, 64. Deserts, Use of, 62. Design, Argument from, 14-16, 29, 40-45, 103. Directive power, 44, 83, 106. Du Bois Raymond, E., 37. Dysteleology, 35. EARTHQUAKES, 66. Electrons, 71. Energy: Conservation of, 23, 42, 75. Dissipation of, 73. _Evil and Evolution_, 64-66. Evil in Nature, 18, 63-67. Evolution, Doctrine of, 24, 25, 40, 104. FARADAY, MICHAEL, 22, 37. "First Cause," 13, 28, 32, 38, 39, 101, 102. Freedom, 84, 95, 104, 105. Future life, 89-92, 95. GEOLOGY, 23, 39, 70. Goodwin, Bishop Harvey, 47. Gore, Bishop, 50, 57. Gray, Asa, 41, 56. HAECKEL, E., 29, 30, 31, 35, 40. Haldane, J. S., 80. Hartog, Professor, 96. Heat, Mechanical equivalent of, 23. Helium, 70. Helmholtz, H. von, 22. Herschel, Sir John, 69. Huxley, T. H., 32, 35, 40, 43, 61, 78. ICHNEUMONIDAE, 56. Insensibility of animals, 60, 61. JAMES, WILLIAM, 92, 93. Joule, J. P., 23, 37. KELVIN, LORD, 37, 39, 44, 68, 70, 78. Kepler, J., 19. Kerner, Anton, 81, 82. Kirchhoff, Professor, 24. Knight, Professor W., 57. LAMARCK, J. B., 22, 26. Laplace, P. S., 19. Larmor, Sir J., 71, 96. Liebig, J. F. von, 44. Life: failure to produce out of matter, 79, 80, 96, 97. Meteorite theory of, 78, not a form of energy, 82, 83. Lodge, Sir Oliver, 71, 79, 82-85, 88, 89, 94, 95. Lotze, Hermann, 47. Lyell, Sir Charles, 23. MATERIALISM, 44, 46. Matter, Disintegration of, 72. Maxwell, James Clerk, 22, 37, 68. Metals, 74. Mill, J. Stuart, 29, 33, 39. Molecules, 69, 71, 72. Monism, 31. Moore, Aubrey, 48, 100, 102. Moore, Professor B., 96. Myers, Frederick W. H., 91. NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS, 19. Necessity, 43. Newton, Sir Isaac, 19. ORGANS, RUDIMENTARY, 40, 41, 101. _Origin of Species_, 25, 39, 40, 55, 56. Owen, Sir Richard, 27. PAGET, BISHOP FRANCIS, 52. Pain, Use of, 58, 59. Paley, William, 14-19, 100, 101. Pascal, Blaise, 52. Pasteur, Louis, 37, 66. Personality: Divine, 48, 52. Human, 87, 90. Protoplasm, 23, 76, 77. Psychical Research, 91, 95. Psychology, 87, 90-92. RADIUM, 70, 72. Religious instinct, 51. Romanes, G. J., 33-36, 37. 39, 42, 50-52, 57. Röntgen rays, 70. SCHAFER, SIR EDWARD, 78. Schleiden, M. J., 23. Schwann, T., 23. Snake poison, 60, 66. Soul, 87, 88, 89. Spectrum analysis, 24, 68. Spencer, Herbert, 32, 33, 47, 49. Spiritual environment, 93, 104. Stokes, Sir G. G., 24, 37, 45. Subconsciousness, 91, 92. Suffering, Divinely shared, 67, 105. Sulman, H. L., 74, 75. Supernatural, The, 99, 100. Survival: after death, 89-92, 95. of the fittest, 24, 25. TELEOLOGY, THE WIDER, 40, 45. Telepathy, 91. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 54. Thomson, Sir J. J., 71, 73. Tilden, Sir William, 80. Treves, Sir Frederick, 59. Tyndall, John, 31, 38. UNBELIEF, DISTRESS CAUSED BY, 35, 36, 50. VARIATIONS, 25, 26. Venomous animals, 17, 65, 66. Virchow, R., 37. Vitalism, 81-85, 95. Volcanoes, Use of, 62. WAGER, PROFESSOR, 79. Wallace, Alfred Russel, 59-61, 80. Whetham, W. C. D., 74. _Wyman & Sons Ltd., Printers, London and Reading._ Publications of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Modern Substitutes for Traditional Christianity. By the Rev. Canon E. MCCLURE. Crown 8vo. Cloth boards. 2s. net. Modern Rationalism. As seen at work in its Biographies. By Canon HENRY LEWIS, M.A. Large Crown 8vo. Cloth boards. 4s. net. God and the Universe. A Physical Basis for Religion and Ethics. By G. W. DE TUNZELMANN, B.Sc., M.I.E.E. Crown 8vo. Cloth boards. 4s. net. Christianity and Agnosticism. 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22150	----	public domain works from the University of Michigan Digital Libraries.) Transcriber's note: A few typographical errors have been corrected: they are listed at the end of the text. THE THEORIES OF DARWIN. HALL, STUTTGART, April 5, 1880. We hereby authorize the Rev. Dr. G. A. Zimmermann to translate into English the book entitled _Die Darwin'schen Theorien und ihre Stellung zur Philosophie, Religion und Moral von Rudolf Schmid_. We declare that we know of no other translation of the said book and that Dr. Zimmermann's translation will be the only one authorized by us for the United States as well as for the British Empire and its Dominions. (_The Author_) RUDOLF SCHMID. (_The Publisher_) PAUL MOSER. * * * * * THE THEORIES OF DARWIN AND THEIR RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION AND MORALITY. By RUDOLF SCHMID, President of the Theological Seminary at Schönthal, Würtemberg. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY G. A. ZIMMERMANN, PH.D. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE DUKE OF ARGYLL CHICAGO: JANSEN McCLURG. & COMPANY 1883. * * * * * COPYRIGHT BY JANSEN, MCCLURG & CO. A.D. 1882. R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS, PRINTERS. * * * * * {1} AUTHOR'S PREFACE * * * * * The movement which received its impulse as well as its name from Darwin, seems to have recently passed its distinctest phase; but the more prominent points of opposition, religious, ethical, and scientific, which have been revealed through it, remain as sharply contrasted as before. The author of this book desires, in the first place, to be of service to such readers as feel the need of setting themselves right upon these questions, which touch the highest interests of mankind, but who lack time and opportunity to investigate independently a realm in which so many and so heterogeneous sciences come into mutual contact. The illogical and confused manner in which some noisy leaders confound these sciences and their problems and consequences, renders it still more difficult to arrive at a satisfactory result; and thus perhaps many readers will look with interest upon an investigation designed to simplify the different problems and the different attempts at their solution, and to treat them not only in their relations to each other, but also separately. But with this primary object, the author combines another: to render a service to some among the many who perceive the harmony between their scientific conviction and their religious need threatened or shaken by the results of science, and who are unwilling to lose this harmony, or, having lost it, desire to regain it. Those voices are indeed becoming louder, and more generally and willingly heard, which proclaim an irreconcilability between faith and {2} knowledge, between the religious and the scientific views of the world; which declare that peace between the two can only be had at the price either of permitting the religious impulses of the heart to be stifled in favor of science, of satisfying the religious need of the mind with a nourishment which in the light of science proves to be an illusion, or, as sceptics in theory and eclectics in practice, of renouncing with resignation a logical connection and foundation to their former view of the world. The most striking proof of the extent to which these voices are heard, is the fact that it has been possible for a one-sided pessimism to become the fashionable system of philosophy in a Christian nation. The most effective means for opposing such discordant voices, and for making amends for the disagreements which they have occasioned, undoubtedly consists in the actual proof of the contrary of their theories, in the clear presentation of a standpoint from which not only the most unrestricted freedom of investigation and the most unreserved acknowledgment of its results shall be in perfect harmony with the undiminished care of our entire religious possession, but in which this peace is preserved and forever established by the very fact that one function of the mind directly requires the other, one possession directly guarantees the other. This is the standpoint of the author, and from it he has endeavored to treat all the questions which are to be taken into consideration. Should he, by his exposition of this standpoint, succeed in helping even a few readers in reaching the conviction of the actual harmony between the scientific, religious, and ethical acquisitions of mankind, or in confirming them anew in such conviction, he would find himself amply rewarded for this first extended venture before the public. R. S. {3} AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO AMERICAN EDITION. Six years have elapsed since I wrote the book which is now going forth in English dress. The great leader of the theories in question has passed away; the waves of thought he set in motion are assuming smoother shape; and I can only add to what I have already written, that not only have I had no occasion to retract any of the statements or views laid down in the book, but I perceive the religious as well as the scientific world growing more and more into accord with the views I have maintained, and which were at first so vehemently opposed. I owe so much to the literary men of the English tongue on both sides of the Atlantic, that I shall be glad if, through the devoted labors of the translator, I am enabled to pay them a tribute of gratitude by aiding them in clearing the way for thought in these much disputed fields, or in reconciling in their minds the conflict between faith and science. R. S. SCHÖNTHAL, WÜRTEMBERG, _September_, 1882. * * * * * {5} INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION, BY THE DUKE OF ARGYLL. * * * * * It is well known that Mr. Darwin's theory on the Origin of Species has been accepted in Germany more widely, with more absolute faith, and with more vehement enthusiasm, than in the country of its birth. In Germany, more conspicuously than elsewhere, it has itself become the subject of developments as strange and as aberrant as any which it assumes in the history of Organic Life. The most extravagant conclusions have been drawn from it--invading every branch of human thought, in Science, in Philosophy, and in Religion. These conclusions have been preached, too, with a dogmatism as angry and as intolerant as any of the old theologies. It is the fate of every idea which is new and fruitful, that it is ridden to the death by excited novices. We can not be surprised if this fate has overtaken the idea that all existing animal forms have had their ancestry in other forms which exist no longer, and have been derived from these by ordinary generation through countless stages of descent. Although this is an idea which, whether true or not, is entirely subordinate to the larger idea of creation, it usurps in many minds the character of a substitute. This is natural enough. The theory, or at least the language, of Evolutionists, puts forward a visible order of phenomena as a complete and all-sufficient account of its own origin and cause. However unsatisfactory this may be to the higher faculties of the mind, it is eminently {6} satisfactory to those other faculties which are lower in the scale. It dismisses as needless, or it postpones indefinitely, all thought of the agencies which are ultimate and unseen. Just as in the physical world, some trivial object which is very near us may shut out the whole of a wide horizon, so in the intellectual world, some coarse mechanical conception may shut out all the kingdom of Nature and the glory of it. Two great subjects of investigation lie before us. The first is to ascertain how far the Theory of Evolution represents an universal fact, or only one very partial and fragmentary aspect of a great variety of facts connected with the origin and development of Organic Life. The second and by far the most important inquiry, is to estimate aright, or as nearly as we can, the relative place and importance of these facts in the Philosophy of Nature. Subjects of investigation so rich and manifold as these may well attract all the most varied gifts of the human mind. This they have already done, and there is every indication that they will continue to do so for generations yet to be. Already an immense literature is devoted to them; and every fresh effort of observation and of reasoning seems to open out new and fruitful avenues of thought. The work which is here introduced to the English reader contains an excellent review of this literature, so far as it is represented in the English and German languages. Knowing the author personally, as I have done for many years, I recognize with pleasure in his work all the carefulness of inquiry, and all the conscientiousness of reasoning, which belong to a singularly candid and patient mind. ARGYLL. INVERARY CASTLE, SCOTLAND, _September, 1882._ * * * * * {7} NOTE BY THE TRANSLATOR. The consideration which this work has received from the leaders of religious and philosophic thought in Germany, and, indeed, wherever it has been read in its original form, has led the translator to believe that an English version of it would be acceptable. Especially in America, where religious problems and religious thought are so intimately connected with the processes of scientific and philosophic investigation, and where the agitation of these problems is so peculiarly active and violent, it has seemed that a work marked by so much scholarship, profundity, and comprehensiveness and originality of treatment, must serve an important purpose to the cause of religious no less than of scientific truth. It may be explained here, that the author resided for some years in the family of the Duke of Argyll, and there breathed, to a certain extent, the scientific air of Darwinism in its very origin; and thus his familiarity with all the results of modern scientific research, added to his theological and philosophical acquirements, enable him, with a most admirable blending of the spirit of fairness and toleration with logical severity of treatment, to bring these different domains into their proper relation with each other and to establish between them that essential harmony in which consists the solution of these most profound and vital problems of man's welfare. Of the translation it may properly be said that, while the aim has been to give the work the clearest possible form consistent with that strict fidelity to the original which is {8} especially demanded by the character of its material, the translator has not hoped to make the work altogether "easy" reading. Peculiarities of the author's style have been, it is believed, largely preserved; and occasional difficulties of apprehension are no doubt to be expected, both from the method of treatment and from the profound and abstruse character of the topics treated. The translator will be well satisfied if it shall be found that he has succeeded in performing his task without adding unduly to the seeming obscurities of certain passages--obscurities which, however, will no doubt vanish before that degree of mental application without which such works may not be read at all intelligibly. Acknowledgments are properly due and are gladly rendered to George C. Dawson, Esq., of Chicago, and to Mr. Francis F. Browne, editor of _The Dial_, for valuable assistance in revising and perfecting this version. G. A. Z. CHICAGO, _October_, 1882. * * * * * {9} CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION ... 17 _PART FIRST:_ _THE DARWINIAN THEORIES_. BOOK I. THE PURELY SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. The Scientific Problem, ... 23 CHAPTER I. RISE OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. §1. Direct Predecessors, ... 30 §2. Indirect Preparations, ... 33 CHAPTER II. HISTORY OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. §1. Darwin, ... 38 §2. The Followers of Darwin.--Ernst Häckel, ... 45 §3. Modifications of the Theory.--Moriz Wagner. Wigand, ... 52 CHAPTER III. PRESENT STATE OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. §1. The Theory of Descent, ... 61 §2. The Theory of Evolution.--Archæology, Ethnography, Philology, ... 77 §3. The Theory of Selection, ... 100 {10} BOOK II. THE PHILOSOPHIC COMPLETIONS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. The Philosophic Problems, ... 108 CHAPTER I. THE NATURO-PHILOSOPHIC SUPPLEMENTS OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. §1. The Origin of Self-Consciousness and of Free Moral Self-Determination, ... 115 §2. The Origin of Sensation and of Consciousness, ... 127 §3. The Origin of Life, ... 132 §4. The Elements of the World; the Theory of Atoms, and the Mechanical View of the World, ... 140 CHAPTER II. METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSIONS DRAWN FROM THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. §1. Elimination of the Idea of Design in the World.--Monism, ... 158 {11} _PART SECOND:_ _THE POSITION OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES IN REFERENCE TO RELIGION AND MORALITY._ BOOK I. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. Plan of Treatment, ... 185 _A. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND RELIGION._ CHAPTER I. MORE OR LESS NEGATIVE POSITION IN REFERENCE TO RELIGION. §1. Extreme Negation: L. Büchner and Consistent Materialism, ... 188 §2. Replacement of Religion Through a Religious Worship of the Universe.--Strauss. Oskar Schmidt. Häckel, ... 190 §3. Pious Renunciation of the Knowability of God. Wilhelm Bleek. Albert Lange. Herbert Spencer, ... 193 §4. Spinoza and Hegel in the Garb of Darwin.--Carneri, Ed. von Hartmann, ... 203 §5. Reëcho of Negation on the Side of the Christian View of the World, ... 206 CHAPTER II. REFORM OF RELIGION, OR AT LEAST OF THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION, THROUGH DARWINISM. §1. Heinrich Lang. Friedrich Vischer. Gustav Jäger, ... 210 CHAPTER III. PEACE BETWEEN RELIGION AND DARWINISM. §1. Darwin. Wallace. Owen. Asa Gray. Mivart. McCosh. Anderson. K. E. von Baer. Alexander Braun. Braubach, and others, ... 217 {12} _B. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND MORALITY_. Preliminary View, ... 228 CHAPTER IV. ANTAGONISM BETWEEN DARWINISM AND MORALITY. §1. Objections to Darwinism from an Ethical Standpoint, ... 230 CHAPTER V. REFORM OF MORALITY THROUGH DARWINISM. §1. The Materialists and Monists. Darwin and the English Utilitarians. Gustav Jäger, ... 233 CHAPTER VI. NEUTRALITY AND PEACE BETWEEN DARWINISM AND MORALITY. §1. Mivart. Alexander Braun, and others, ... 245 BOOK II. ANALYTICAL. Preliminary View, ... 249 _A. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND RELIGION_. CHAPTER I. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND THE THEISTIC VIEW OF THE WORLD. _a. The Position of Purely Scientific Darwinism in Reference to Theism_. §1. Scientific Investigation and Theism.--The Idea of Creation, ... 252 {13} §2. The Descent Theory and Theism, ... 259 §3. The Evolution Theory and Theism, ... 263 §4. The Selection Theory and Theism, ... 270 _b. The Darwinistic Philosophies in their Position Regarding Theism_. §5. The Naturo-Philosophic Supplements of Darwinism and Theism, ... 273 §6. Elimination of the Idea of Design, or its Acknowledgment and Theism, ... 284 CHAPTER II. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND POSITIVE CHRISTIANITY. §1. The Creation of the World, ... 290 §2. The Creation of Man, ... 314 §3. The Primitive Condition of Man.--Paradise, the Fall of Man, and Primitive History, ... 321 §4. Providence, Hearing of Prayer, and Miracles, ... 345 §5. The Redeemer and the Redemption, the Kingdom of God, and the Receiving of Salvation, ... 373 §6. Eschatology, ... 375 _B. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND MORALITY_. CHAPTER III. DARWINISM AND MORAL PRINCIPLES. §1. Darwinistic Naturalism and Moral Principles, ... 379 §2. Scientific Darwinism and Moral Principles, ... 386 CHAPTER IV. DARWINISM AND MORAL LIFE. §1. Darwinistic Naturalism and Moral Life, ... 391 §2. Scientific Naturalism and Moral Life, ... 396 CONCLUSION, ... 399 * * * * * {14} AUTHORS CITED. * * * * * Agassiz, Louis, 35, 37, 50, 320. Anderson, 225. Anonymus, "the Unconscious," etc., 128, 129, 131, 134, 159. Anonymus, "Vestiges," etc., 33. Argyll, Duke of, 50, 91, 92, 135, 172, 202, 288. Ausland, 159, 240, 281. Baer, Karl Ernst von, 36, 54, 56, 71, 74, 81, 83, 106, 132, 149, 160, 177, 226, 259, 281, 288, 320. Barrande, 54. Baumgärtner, Heinrich, 57, 176. Blanchard, Emil, 54, 106. Bleek, Wilhelm, 17, 96, 97, 194, 197, 234, 236. Boerhave, 36. Braubach, 226. Braun, Alexander, 55, 176, 226, 246, 397. Braun, Julius, 17. Buch, Leopold von, 52. Buckle, 17. Büchner, Ludwig, 42, 118, 141, 158, 188, 205, 219, 233, 396. Buffon, 31. Carneri, 203, 238. Carns, 36. Christy, 90. Condillac, 96. Cotta, Bernhard von, 51. Curtius, 96. Cuvier, 31, 32, 34, 37, 320. Darwin, 17, 18, 25, 27, 38, 118, 171, 177, 217, 240, 320, 389. Descartes, 127. Dillman, 295, 301. Dohrn, 84. DuBois-Reymond, Emil, 124, 125, 127, 130, 134, 149. Ebrard, 159, 209. Ecker, 56. Escher, von der Linth, 54. Farrar, 96. Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 135, 146. Fichte, Immanuel Hermann, 142, 175. Fraas, Oskar, 55, 90. Frohschammer, 175. Gegenbaur, 56. Geiger, Lazar, 17, 96. Geoffrey St. Hilaire, Etienne, 32, 34. Gerhard, 197. Giebel, 54. Göppert, 54. Göthe, 33, 34, 35, 320. Gray, Asa, 222. Grusebach, 55. Grimm, Jacob, 17, 95. Häckel, 35, 42, 43, 45, 75, 78, 106, 123, 130, 133, 149, 159, 160, 166, 170, 204, 219, 234, 237, 281, 395. Hartmann, Eduard von, 56, 60, 106, 131, 142, 168, 176, 191, 205, 334, 376. Heer, Oswald, 56, 176. Hegel, 126, 136, 204. Helmholtz, 136, 159. Heyse, 96. Hilgendorf, 82. His, Wilhelm, 56, 81, 106. Huber, 175. Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 17, 95. Huxley, Thomas, 42, 50, 177, 198, 222, 279. Jäger, Gustav, 51, 124, 214, 243. Jellinghaus, 94. {15} Kant, 195, 282. Keim, 18, 337. Kölliker, 56, 81, 176. Köstlin, Julius, 175, 187. Köstlin, Otto. 149. Kowalewsky, A., 42. Kowalewsky, W., 83. Kurz, Johann Heinrich, 306. Lamarck, 27, 30, 31, 33, 320. Lang, Heinrich, 197, 210. Lange, Friedrich Albert, 112, 168, 173, 176, 194, 196. Lartet, 96. Leibnitz, 127, 217. Leidy, 83. Lessing, 405, 407. Linnaeus, 30. Livingstone, 93. Lotze, 142, 145, 149. Lubbock, Sir John, 18, 91, 93, 242. Lyell, Sir Charles, 18, 36, 55, 89, 90, 222. Mädler, 177, 252. Malthus, 39. Marsh, 83. Martensen, 187. Mayer, Robert von, 37, 129, 149, 155. McCosh, 224. Mill, John Stuart, 242. Mivart, 55, 106, 223, 245. Moleschott, 42. Müller, Fritz, 79. Müller, Max, 18, 96, 98. Murchison, Sir Roderick, 54. Nägeli, 56. Nitzsch, Karl Immanuel, 361. Noiré, Ludwig, 281. Oken, 34, 320. Owen, Richard, 35, 56, 164, 176, 221, 223, 320. Peschel, Oskar, 279. Pfaff, 54. Pfleiderer, Otto, 187. Planck, Carl Ch., 105, 110. Preyer, 136, 146, 153. Rathke, Heinrich, 81. Reichenbach, 42. Renan, 18. Réville, Albert, 334. Ritschl, 364. Rütimeyer, 56, 83. Sandberger, 55, 82. Schaaffhausen, 56, 85, 177. Schelling, 109. Schiller, 180. Schleicher, 17, 96. Schleiden, 42, 51. Schleiermacher, 190. Schmidt, Oskar, 33, 35, 51, 75, 124, 159, 164, 191, 234. Schopenhauer, 128, 190. Schrader, Eberhard, 345. Seidlitz, 51, 159, 238. Semper, Karl, 84, 131. Snell, Karl, 42, 262. Spencer, Herbert, 128, 139, 194, 242, 279. Spinoza, 204. Stael, Madame de, 234. Steffens, 109. Steinthal, 17, 96. Strauss, David Friedrich, 18, 112, 125, 128, 159, 163, 174, 175, 190, 213, 234, 337, 376, 394. Swammerdam, 36. Tait, 138. Thomson, Sir William, 138. Trümpelmann, 209. Tübingen School, 18. Tylor, 91. Ulrici, 142, 144, 149, 175, 235. Virchow, 56, 85. Vischer, Friedrich, 175, 176, 213, 264. Vogt, Karl, 42, 56. Volkmann, A. W., 56, 105, 177. Wagner, Moriz, 52, 56. Wallace, Alfred Russell, 37, 101, 177, 221, 262. Wedgewood, 96. Weismann, 56. Wigand, Albert, 26, 52, 56, 57, 106, 135, 149, 170, 226. Wundt, 142. Würtemberger, 82. Zittel, 56. Zöllner, 128, 129, 131, 138, 139. * * * * * {17} THE THEORIES OF DARWIN, AND THEIR RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, AND MORALITY. * * * * * INTRODUCTION. With the appearance of Darwin's "Origin of Species," on the 24th of November, 1859, a new impulse began in the intellectual movement of our generation. It is true, the whole theory advocated and inaugurated by Darwin is, in the first place, only one of the many links in the long chain of phenomena in the realm of the intellectual development of our century, all of which have the same character, and give their stamp to the entire mental work of the last decades. This stamp consists in the tendency of science, which has nearly become universal, not only to consider all phenomena, both of the physical and the mental life, in connection with their preceding conditions in space and time, but to trace them back more or less exclusively to these conditions, and to explain them exclusively by means of the same. What a Wilhelm von Humboldt, and, still more, a Jacob Grimm, prepared the way for in the realm of philology, a Lazar Geiger and a Steinthal, and (under direct influence of Darwin) a Schleicher and a Wilhelm Bleek further developed; what Julius Braun did in the realm of the history of art; what a Buckle and a Sir {18} John Lubbock tried to do in the realm of the history of civilization; what a Max Müller did in the realm of the history of religion; what the Tübingen School began and its disciples carried out in the realm of the exegesis of the Bible; what a Strauss and a Renan, and in a certain sense also a Keim, did in the realm of christology; what, finally--without being so closely connected with individual names--was also done in the realm of the world's history: this, Darwin did in the realm of the history of the organic kingdoms, seconded by the geological principles of Sir Charles Lyell and by the investigations in biology and comparative anatomy of a number of scientists. From this point of view, the movement which was inaugurated by Darwin seems to us but the reflex of the universal spirit of the present time upon a particular realm; namely, that of natural science. But since, soon after the appearance of the before-mentioned work and long before the publication of Darwin's "Descent of Man," man also was included in the consequences of the evolution theory, and his existence was explained as a wholly natural development out of lower animal forms; since Darwin himself unreservedly adopted this theory of the descent of man from the animal world as an entirely natural consequence of his doctrine of the origin of species, the evolution question has gone far beyond the proportionately narrow and limited bounds of natural philosophy and of merely theoretical scientific interest--has surpassed in interest all the before-mentioned investigations, however lively this interest was and is to-day, and has stirred up the minds of all most thoroughly, not only in their scientific but also in their religious and ethical depths, some in {19} acknowledgment and admiration, others in aversion and repugnance, and only a few in sober and unprejudiced judgment. While some see in Darwinism the flambeau which now lights mankind to entirely new paths of truth, and also to spiritual and moral perfection, others see in it only an unproved hypothesis, threatening to become the torch which might change the noblest and greatest acquirements of the culture of past centuries into a heap of ashes; while some date from it a new period of culture, others see in it a deep descent of the present from the scientific, religious, and moral height which mankind has ascended. Under these circumstances, it has become an impossibility for religion and the moral interest as guardians of the highest and most sacred acquisitions of mankind, and still more for theology and ethics as the scientific representations of religion and morality, to remain idle spectators. It would certainly be more agreeable to them, and more profitable, if they could delay their judgment until the question became better cleared up. For the whole question presented by Darwin has not yet passed beyond the stage of problems and attempts at solution; and there is always something unsatisfactory in being compelled to deal with theories which in their fundamentals are still hypotheses. But since all tendencies of the present which are hostile to Christianity and to the theistic view of the world, from the most extreme materialism up to the most sublime monism (as pantheism and materialism of to-day have begun to call themselves), seemingly with the confidence of complete victory, take possession of Darwinism as the solid ground from which they hope to destroy all and every belief {20} connected with faith in a living creator and master of the world, it has also become impossible for those to whom the religious and ethical acquisitions of mankind are a sacred sanctuary to take any longer a reserved and expectant position. Silence now would be looked upon only as an inglorious retreat; and thus nothing remains but openly to face the question: What position must religion and morality take in reference to the Darwinian theories? In order to treat of the question with that objectivity which it requires, we have to begin with a synopsis of the theories themselves. In this representation we have to discriminate strictly between the merely scientific theories and the naturo-philosophical and metaphysical supplements and conclusions which have been brought into connection with them. For precisely in the mixing of the most different problems which are to be considered here, lies the main cause of the confused and superficial judgment which is so often heard upon these questions. * * * * * {21} PART I. * * * * * THE THEORIES OF DARWIN. * * * * * {23} BOOK I. THE PURELY SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. * * * * * THE SCIENTIFIC PROBLEM. The interesting problem which underlies Mr. Darwin's theories is the answer to the question: _How did the different species of organic beings on the earth originate?_ We find ourselves in the midst of an endless variety of organic beings, animals and plants; we see ourselves, so far as regards the entire physical part of our being, in relationship with this organic world--especially with the organization and physical functions of the animal body. The organic individuals come and go. They originate by being begotten by and born of individuals of the same kind, or they spring up through the formation of germs and buds; and they produce in the same way new individuals, that resemble them in all essential characteristics. Like always begets like, so far as our observations go. But not only the individuals, but even the species to which they belong, must have originated at some definite period of time--and, indeed, as geology tells us, not all at once, but in a long series, which stretched through immeasurable epochs of the earth's history. Thus we come face to face with the question, already put, which we can now formulate more {24} precisely: _How did the first individuals of each organic species come into existence?_ No human being ever has observed, nor ever could observe, the origination of a new species, because man, as it seems, did not appear on the earth until all the other organisms were in existence. For this reason, the scientists for a long time thought it unprofitable to occupy themselves with this question; and even in our time a great many of them declare the question to be absolutely insolvable, and every attempt at answering it to be an unjustifiable use of hypotheses. But the impulse toward investigation admits of no limitation so long as there is any probability of extending its field of action. Especially in the province of nature, so many things which could not be discovered by mere observation have been traced indirectly, and so many important and established facts have been added to our stores of knowledge, by first starting from hypothetical premises, that man has again and again endeavored to approximate an answer to the question of the origin of species by taking the indirect course of hypothesis and induction, whenever the direct way of observation did not lead to any result. Religion of course gives a solution to the problem by stating that the species have been originated by the creative act of God. It is wrong to say that this solution is opposed to the above-mentioned impulse toward investigation; for this solution suffices for religion, whether a natural progress in the origination of species be established or not. For, to the believer in religion, the whole universe, with all its objective phenomena and growth, is the work of God as well as the individuals of the already existing species; and a {25} closer acquaintance with the manner of their origin is not only no disturbance to his ground of belief, but, on the contrary, an addition to his knowledge of the method of God's action. In every man of sound mind, the religious faith is not antagonistic or even indifferent to the scientific impulse toward investigation, but stands upon a most intimate footing with it. Hence the human intellect again and again makes the attempt to find an answer to the problem of the origin of species in a scientific way, and each endeavor of this kind necessarily ends with the dilemma that either the first individuals of a species, no matter whether it be the highest or the lowest, have been evolved out of inorganic matter, or they originated by descent from the most closely related species of their predecessors. The denial of the first part of our dilemma, and the affirmation of the second, is the "Theory of Descent." But this theory of descent leads us at once into another dilemma. If the species originated by descent from the most closely related lower species, and under certain circumstances also from species of the same rank, and even by degeneration from the next higher, it must have occurred in one of two ways: either by leaps--called by naturalists "metamorphosis of germs" or "heterogenetic conception"--or by a succession of imperceptibly small alterations of the individuals from generation to generation. Each of these changes would have been no greater than the differences we observe to-day between the individuals of the very same species, but became in the course of time so massed and strengthened in one direction that new species have been evolved. This hypothesis is called the "Theory of Development," {26} or "Evolution." We retain this name, although well aware of the fact that the authors do not agree in their use of the term "evolution." Professor Wigand, who adopts only the theory of a descent from one primordial cell to another, and who positively rejects the idea of a progress from one fully developed species to another, claims among other things that one value of his own theory is that he secures for the idea of evolution its full meaning. The expression still has a meaning for those who reject the real descent of the species or their primordial germs one from another, and acknowledge only the ideal bond of a common plan in their successive manifestations. But as soon as we examine more closely the literal and logical meaning of the word, we shall find it of most weight when we understand by it the before-mentioned gradual evolution in opposition to the theory of progress by leaps or new creations. Moreover, it is well known that long before this no other term than evolution was used to designate the growth of a single organic individual from the primordial cell and egg to its fully developed form and vital function. Besides, we find ourselves also in harmony with most of the authors, so far as they have distinct conceptions of the different scientific problems, if we use the term "theory of evolution" for the gradual development of one species from another, in opposition to the hypothesis of a metamorphosis of germs, or even of a genealogy of primordial cells. But each evolution theory leads again to new theories, as soon as it has to be proved in a scientific way. For it can claim a scientific worth only when sustained by earnest attempts to find and prove the {27} productive power, agencies and laws of such an evolution of species. Those attempts can be made in various ways. As a philosophical question, many attempts at solution have been made, both in ancient and modern times; but being mainly in the realm of metaphysics, they do not come within the limits of our scientific essay. As a question for investigators of natural phenomena, only two attempts of sufficient importance to be mentioned have been made. The first one was made by Lamarck, who, taking the really different ideas of descent and evolution as one, made use of the hypothesis of transmutation; thus becoming the pioneer of Darwinism. The other attempt was made by Darwin in his theory of natural selection, or struggle, for existence, and is called the "Theory of Selection." In defining our problem, therefore, we find ourselves under the influence of a scientific law of development. The simple problem which we started from has developed into a trinity of problems and attempts at solution. The simple question of the origin of species led us into the dilemma of a _generatio æquivoca_, or a descent; the hypothesis of a descent led to the dilemma of a heterogenetic conception, or an evolution; and the hypothesis of an evolution rendered necessary the attempt at explaining this evolution, and showed Darwin's method of explaining it by his selection theory. It will be well for the reader to keep distinctly in mind the difference between these problems and theories, in following our investigations, even if we cannot arrange our historical sketch according to the natural principle of division arising from these differences. For it lies in the nature of the question itself, that {28} these theories, in their historical progress, did not appear singly, but together. Those who inclined to the theory of a descent of species could claim for it the attention of scientific investigators only after having also made the attempt at conceiving this descent in a concrete way, and according to certain analogies of observation. The only analogy of the kind appeared in the sphere of individual development and individual differences on the one hand, and in that of closely related characters of allied species on the other; and thus led of itself to the evolution theory. As soon as the naturalists thought they had found the causes of such an evolution of the species, they naturally placed these causes in the foreground of their demonstrations, and erected upon them the structure of their entire theory; thus treating descent, evolution and selection as one single and indissolubly connected theory. But this manner of treating the question had also its dangers, which have already caused a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding, as well as much unprofitable controversy. Often friends and enemies of the theories placed that which was in favor of the theory of descent to the credit of the evolution or selection theory; and, on the other hand, that which seemed opposed to the selection theory was often held to be a weakening of the evolution and descent theory; and this was done, not only by amateurs, but often enough by the highest authorities also. In reality, however, it is quite conceivable that the idea of a descent may prove correct, and possibly the idea of an evolution of the species will have to be replaced by that of a heterogenetic generation, or by the theory that certain groups in the organic system are originated {29} by heterogenetic generation, and others by evolution; and so the evolution theory must share with the theory of heterogenetic generation, or of a metamorphosis of germs. On the other hand, it is conceivable that even where the evolution theory is confirmed, the evolution can be accounted for wholly or partly by other reasons than those derived from the selection theory. And even this result of present investigations is not inconceivable: that the reasons for and against the different theories will be found to balance one another to such a degree that they will sooner or later lead science, in answering the question of the origin of species, to the old confession of Socrates--"_Ignoramus_." We shall, therefore, have to arrange our historical sketch according to the historical order of the appearance of the theories, and treat the problems more or less as an undivided whole. But we shall keep in mind, during our historical sketch, not only the logical separation of the problems in question, in order not to lose clearness of judgment, but we shall also at the end of our review, if we consider the present condition of the problems, have to examine the same once more in detail, so far as regards the above mentioned separation. * * * * * {30} CHAPTER I. RISE OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. § 1. _Direct Predecessors.--Lamarck._ The first man who gave direct expression to the idea of a successive generation of the species through transmutation, and who attempted to follow it up in a scientific way, was the French naturalist and philosopher, Jean Lamarck, born 1744. In the year 1801, and subsequently, he published his views, first in smaller essays and afterward more in detail in his "_Philosophie Zoologique_," which appeared in 1809, and in the first volume of his "_Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertèbres_," published in 1815. In these works Lamarck upholds fully the descent and evolution theory, and maintains that the simplest organisms are generated through a _generatio spontanea_, which is still taking place; but that all the more developed organisms, including man, are descended through a gradual change from other species. With this theory, he put himself in direct and conscious opposition to the old doctrine of the immutability of species and their characteristics, which had been ably maintained by Linnæus, and also made some attempts at explanation which approach very nearly the selection theory. A change in the physical conditions of life, especially the force of habit in the use or disuse of the organs, the inheritance of physical and psychical {31} qualities thus attained, and the extension of the process of transmutation into extraordinarily long periods of time with very slight changes, are also, in his view, the probable causes of the variation and development of the species. He only lacks the idea of a natural selection in the struggle for existence, and the comparison of the processes in nature with the methodical selection of man in the breeding of domestic animals and plants, to identify his views with those of Darwin. At first, Lamarck met only with violent opposition; but after a little while his views ceased to attract attention. The time had not yet come to make such an attempt at observing nature from the standpoint of evolution. The sciences which favor such a mode of observation, and even demand it--such as comparative anatomy and physiology and the history of the development of the different plants and animals--were only in their infancy, or were--like palæontology and the comparative geography of plants and animals--not yet in existence. The influence of Linnæus, whose views diametrically opposed those of Lamarck, predominated over all the investigations of natural science; Buffon, who favored the ideas of Lamarck, and loved to trace a unity in natural phenomena, was too instable in his investigations and views to arrive at a comprehensive principle; and even the eminent naturalist, Cuvier, of Montpellier, showed in his observation of nature a predilection for analysis rather than synthesis, and although his comprehensive mind inclined to generalize and explain, he placed himself in decided opposition to a theory which was founded only on a few decisive facts. This last mentioned deficiency seems to have been {32} the main cause of Lamarck's views soon being lost sight of. They nowhere found a support in facts; the force of habit played in them an exaggerated and unnatural _rôle_; the different illustrations of them--such as the long neck of the giraffe explained by the permanent and inherited habit of browsing on the branches of high trees, or the web on the toes of frogs, swimming-birds, etc., explained by the habit of swimming--were talked about and laughed at more as curiosities than as worthy of serious consideration. Only twice after this did the question put by Lamarck attract wider attention from the learned world. The first time was when, in 1830, the bitter contest arose at the Academy of Paris, between Cuvier and Etienne Geoffrey St. Hilaire, the father of Isidor G. St. Hilaire. Geoffrey St. Hilaire had views similar to Lamarck's, but reached them from quite a different standpoint--from the observation of the analogy and homology of the organs; and accounted for the variation of species, not by the use or disuse of the organs, but on the one hand by the common original type of the organs, and on the other by the varied influence of the surroundings--the _monde ambiant_. Lamarck himself seems not to have been mentioned in this contest. The controversy turned much more on the question whether in observing nature we can proceed by synthesis and find in the analogies of the organisms the principles for explaining the real connection between the different organic forms, or whether the analytical process is the only correct one, and the synthetical should be discarded. The solution of it will probably be, that the one process must be supplemented by the {33} other, as Goethe has already shown in his account of this controversy; but at that time it was decided in favor of the analytical principle, and the question was for the time dropped. It came up for a second time, but created little excitement, in 1844, when an anonymous work, "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," directed the attention and the interest of scientists again to Lamarck and his doctrine. But this interest also soon came to an end, until through Darwin's first publication the half-forgotten man again suddenly attained great honor. Those who wish to form a closer acquaintance with the different advocates of the evolution theory before Darwin's appearance, will find them carefully arranged in the historical sketch which Darwin gives in the introduction to his work on "The Origin of Species"; and the most important extracts of Lamarck's "_Philosophie Zoologique_" are to be found in Oscar Schmidt's "Descent and Darwinism."[1] § 2. _Indirect Preparations._ While thus the ideas of Lamarck gradually fell into partial oblivion, yet contemporaneous with and following them arose several other series of thoughts, views, and investigations, which, although they only indirectly prepared for the revival of the evolution theory, yet exercised a deeper and more lasting influence on the minds of scientists. We refer to the ideas in regard to natural phenomena held during the first decades of our century; further, to the principles of comparative anatomy which, up to the present time, partly dependent {34} and partly independent of natural philosophy, have been expressed, valued, and admired as leading thoughts; and, lastly, to the empiric results of comparative anatomical and biological investigations in palæontology and geology, as attained by the help of those very principles. And even physics and astronomy had to coöperate in preparing the way for the idea of evolution. The philosophical ideas referred to, together with the points of view and results of comparative anatomy, led more and more decisively to the idea of an _original form_, or _type_, which retains its identity in all the modifications of form in plants and animals; and of a _ground-plan_, which is realized in the systems of the plant and animal world in higher and higher differentiations and in more and more developed modifications, diverging farther and farther from the prototype until it reaches its highest form, still reducible to the prototypes, in the most highly organized dicotyledons in plants, and in the animal world in the mammalia, and lastly in man. Men like Cuvier and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, who otherwise stand diametrically opposed to each other, unite in these and kindred ideas. The naturalist Oken attains the same result, tinged with the views of Schelling; the poet Goethe, from an intuitive knowledge of nature, arrived at the same conclusion. The former, during a journey in the Hartz Mountains, at the sight of a bleached deer's skull, and the latter, upon picking up a sheep's skull in the Jewish cemetery at Venice, were struck by the same thought: the skull is only a modified vertebra. Oken founded upon this idea and kindred analogies his profound philosophy of the system of animals and plants which comes very near to the evolution {35} theory, and in his cosmogony traces all organisms to a protoplasm in such a way as to bring him in this respect also very near to Darwinism. Goethe, in his metamorphosis of plants, develops ideas in which, in all seriousness, he makes a concrete application of his thought of a prototype to the leaf of a plant; and proved for zoölogy the fruitfulness of his idea of a type by his well known discovery of the mid-jaw bone in man. Although Oscar Schmidt seems to be decidedly right in supposing, in opposition to Ernst Häckel, that Goethe did not intend to have his idea of unity and development taken in a real but in an ideal sense, and hence could not be called a direct representative of the evolution theory, still he is all the more decidedly a predecessor of that theory in directing attention to the unity in plan and metamorphosis of plants and animals. Louis Agassiz, who, on the other hand, continued up to his death in opposition to the entire doctrine of descent, made the idea of _types_ the principle of his whole classification, and said: "Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal creation tends from the first appearance of the first paleozoic fish." Richard Owen, who rejected the selection theory and favored that of descent, published, long before Darwin's appearance, some most interesting results of his anatomical and palæontological investigations from the point of view of the prototype and its modifications. "Man, from the beginning of organisms, was ideally present upon the earth," is a sentence which we quote from Owen's works. In short, this ideal momentum in the observation of the organic kingdoms is not only the most beautiful blossom and the ripest fruit of the union between {36} laborious and comprehensive detailed investigations and a generalizing philosophic penetration, but it was also a very efficient preparation of the mind for the evolution problem, so far as the summing up of the organisms under a type and plan is only the ideal reverse of its realistic reduction to a common pedigree. We have yet to add the investigations in regard to the history of evolution of the single organisms, as well as those in comparative anatomy, which in former centuries were begun by scientists like Swammerdam and Boerhave and carried more nearly to completion by K. E. von Baer, Carus, and others. In reducing all the tissues of plants and animals to one cell, and tracing back also their individual developments to the first differentiation of the simplest cell, they followed out the unity of the plan of the organic kingdoms--which hitherto had been maintained only ideally and proclaimed as a philosophic postulate--farther and deeper into the sphere of empiric reality. We must mention, moreover, the great palæontological discoveries which, from the first foraminifera of the Cambrian formations up to the historical period of man, showed a great progressive scale in the appearance of the organisms and a very wide relationship between this scale and the natural systems of botany and zoölogy; and, finally, the principles of geology, which, under the leadership of Sir Charles Lyell, starting from the idea of an identity of the powers which were active in former times with those of the present, attempted to explain the most violent of the changes in the earth's crust in former times by causes active to-day. This often explains prodigious effects--such as the elevation and settling of entire mountains {37} and continents--by the constant and related action of the slightest causes and most gradual steps; it opens the perspective into vast epochs of long and numerous geological periods; and sometimes, where scientists like Cuvier and Agassiz have supposed the most complete cataclysms and the most universal revolutions of the globe, there prove to have been only gradual changes with revolutions very partially and locally limited. Finally, if we take into consideration the grand discoveries which strikingly illustrate the connection in extent and quality between the universe and all its agencies and powers--such as Robert von Mayer's discovery of the conservation of force and of the mechanical equivalent of heat, or the spectrum analysis and the information which it gives us by ever-increasing evidences of the identity of the cosmic and telluric substances--we may venture to say that the scientific and intellectual ground was well prepared for a theory which takes the origin of organisms into this common relationship of the essential unity and development of the universe. Only one thing more remained to complete the hypothesis offered by Lamarck, of the _fact_ of a development of species by a new and more satisfactory answer to the question as to the _manner_ of their development. The task of answering in a more comprehensive and scientific way the question as to the manner of development has been undertaken by Darwin in his selection theory. Alfred Russell Wallace, who arrived at the same results contemporaneously with and independently of Darwin, has, with praiseworthy modesty, renounced his claim to priority of the discovery, as Darwin had been longer engaged in working out his theories and had begun to collect materials for proof. * * * * * {38} CHAPTER II. HISTORY OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. § 1. _Darwin._ In order to explain the development of higher species from lower ones in a natural way, Darwin starts from two facts. The first fact is, that all individuals of the same species show, besides their specific similarity, individual differences: a fact which we call the _law of individual variability_. The other fact is, that each individual inclines to transmit to his offspring all his qualities--not only the characteristics of the species, but also those of the individual: a fact which we call the _law of heredity_. To show how the whole basis of explanation of the evolution of one species from another is given in these two facts, Darwin calls attention to the rules according to which the often extraordinarily great varieties of domestic animals and cultivated plants are obtained and preserved; namely, the rules of _artificial breeding_. The breeder simply selects from a species those individuals having such individual qualities as he wishes to preserve and to increase, and refrains from breeding those individuals which do not possess the characteristics he wants or which possess them only in a small degree. He continues the same process with the next generation; and by the constant and effectual agency of the two {39} before-mentioned laws, he will, after the lapse of a few generations, have breeded a variety in which the characteristics originally belonging only to a single individual have become common and permanent. It is now important to consider whether nature, in _natural selection_ (whence the name "Selection Theory") does not act unconsciously according to the same rules, and attain the same results, as man with his artificial and intentional selection; and, furthermore, whether she does not reach results which, according to that principle of natural selection, finally explain the origin of all, even of the highest and most complicated organisms, from one single original form or a few original and simplest forms. Darwin finds these questions answered in the affirmative; and arrives at this answer through the following conclusions. The English political economist Malthus (1766-1834), in his "Essay on the Principles of Population," established a law in regard to the growth of the human race, which may be applied just as well to all the species of the entire organic world: that population tends to increase in a geometrical ratio, although the conditions of life for the individual remain the same or at most increase in an arithmetical ratio. The consequence is that if the species is to be preserved and the individuals of future generations are to continue to find sufficient food and other means for sustaining life, a great many individuals of each generation must perish very early, and even as germ and seed, and only a minority will be preserved and reproduced. This exuberant prodigality of life-germs, of which proportionately only a few are preserved and reproduced, takes place in the plant and {40} animal world in a very marked degree. There a continual _struggle for existence_ prevails; each individual has to get access to his conditions of life by wresting them from a whole series of other individuals of his own or other species; and now the question arises: which individuals will survive in this struggle? which will more probably be preserved and procreate offspring? Evidently, the answer is, those individuals which possess individual characteristics more favorable to the preservation of the individual than those possessed by other individuals. These individual characteristics are transmitted to the next generation. In this there will be again individuals that have in a still higher degree the characteristics thus transmitted and favorable for the preservation of the individual, or that add to these favorable characteristics new characteristics favorable in another direction to the survival of the individual in the struggle for existence. While these individuals, with more probability than the others, are thus preserved and reproduced, they transmit to their offspring not only the old favorable characteristics increased, but also those newly added. Among the favorable individual qualities, Darwin reckons the divergence of character, the perfection of organization, and the law of correlation; the latter, however, can not be explained by natural selection, since according to this law a variation in an organ brings about a corresponding variation in entirely different organs (_e.g._, cats with white fur and blue eyes are also deaf). This is _natural selection by means of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence_. Changes in the conditions and surroundings of life, and more or less {41} perfect adaptation of the organisms to the new conditions of form, color, food and habit, are the main causes of those individual variations, the accumulation of which through many generations produces so great effects. If we only have behind us periods long enough to permit us to imagine each step in the development as an extremely small and hardly appreciable one, natural selection offers us not the exclusive but the main means of explaining the evolution of the whole animal and plant world out of one or a few simple organized original forms. This is the outline of the selection theory, as given by Darwin in 1859, and still retained in all its essentials. It is true, in his work on the origin of man he added as supplemental the _sexual_ to the common natural selection, and made it of special importance for the presentation of the _beautiful_ in nature--for the production of beautiful forms, colors, and tones, and for the development of power and intelligence. And in the same work he said that there are many circumstances of structure which seem to be neither beneficial nor detrimental to the individual, and that to have overlooked this fact was one of his greatest mistakes in his former publications. But for the rest, he maintains the selection theory unchanged, with the single modification that it explains, if not the whole development of the species through descent, at least that which is of most importance in it. That it was only one step in the course of reasoning to extend the selection theory to the descent of man, was seen by many as soon as Darwin's work on the origin of species was published and began to attract {42} attention; although not a syllable upon this question was presented in this work. Various persons manifested their presentiment or perception according to their point of view--partly by the most violent opposition to the new doctrine, partly by scientific development or modification of their anthropogonic views, partly also by revelling in imagination in the consequences hostile to religious faith which they thought could be drawn from this doctrine. We remind the reader of the itinerant lectures of Karl Vogt about the ape-pedigree of man, and of the echo they found by assent or dissent in press and public; also of Huxley in England, Karl Snell, Schleiden, Reichenbach, and others; of the materialists, L. Büchuer and Moleschott, and of the publications of Ernst Häckel. Finally, Darwin himself made us fully certain of the importance which from the beginning he had attributed to his theory, by publishing his work on the "Descent of Man," in the year 1870. In this work he explained the descent of man fully from the before-named principles of the descent, evolution, and selection theories, of which we have given all the essentials in the foregoing presentation. He carefully enumerates everything in the structure of the human body that reminds us of our relationship with the animals--especially those embryonic phenomena and rudimentary organs in man which are still to be found in use and in a more developed state in different animal species, and which led him to imagine our ancestors now with a tail, then with sharp ears, now living in the water, then being hermaphrodites. He reviews the spiritual qualities of man, and finds for them all analogous qualities in the animal world. He finds in his work on {43} "Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," published in 1872, new confirmation of the genealogical relationship of both. He looks over the whole course of the zoölogical system and of palæontological discoveries, and searches for the points where the branches and twigs of the animal pedigree of man must have diverged. To begin with the lowest branches, he thinks the most important divergence took place where the series of vertebrates may have been developed out of the invertebrates. Here he adopts the investigations of A. Kowalewsky, and the deductions of Häckel founded upon them, concerning the larva of the ascidiæ, a genus of marine mollusca of the order tunicata, and sees in a cord, to be found in this larva, most decided relationship to the spine of the lancelet fish or amphioxus, the lowest of all the vertebrates, it being yet doubtful whether it belongs at all to the vertebrates. In the transition that once took place from one species of ascidian larva to a form similar to the lancelet fish, he sees the new branch diverging in the series of vertebrates. Out of the fish he concludes that the amphibia were developed, and out of those the reptilia, out of one of them the marsupialia, and from them the lemurs or half-apes, the representatives of which yet live in Madagascar and the southern part of Asia. From these there branched off on the one side the platyrrhini, or apes with a flat nose, on the new continent; on the other, the catarrhini, or apes with a narrow nose, on the old. Among the ancestor of the last, he searches for the common progenitors, from which again two branches started--on the one hand the ignoble branches of the catarrhine species of apes, always remaining lower in {44} development, to which also belong the anthropomorphous apes, like the orang outang and gibbon in Asia, the gorilla and chimpanzee in Africa; on the other hand, that branch which represents the ascent of animals to man. The refining agencies which finally raise the animal up to the man are essentially the same that on the lowest scales of the pedigree have caused the development of the lower organisms into the higher, namely: favorable individual variations, inheritance, acclimatization, survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, natural, and especially, sexual selection. These are, if not the exclusive, still the main agencies which finally led the primate of the earthly creation upon the stage and furnished him with his superior faculties. But it is particularly by means of his social life, and of the forces which determine, transmit, increase and ennoble the various impulses and instincts promoting it, that man has become what he is. Through the need and faculty of reciprocal help, through sexual selection--which of course is a very essential factor of social life--there originated language, and reflection, and all the intellectual qualities; and through these again originated the moral qualities, which are most important in constituting the specific worth of man, and which were finally developed into self-consciousness and free moral responsibility. But with the description of this attempt to explain more in detail these specific characteristics of man, we leave the ground of pure natural science and enter the region of philosophy, in which we have to take up the {45} question again (in Book II, Ch. I) at the same point where we here leave it. § 2. _The Followers of Darwin.--Ernst Häckel._ Darwin's theory soon found an enthusiastic corps of followers--on the continent, and especially in Germany, almost more than in his own country. The outlook into an entirely new explanation of the origin of man, and the probable use of this theory for attacks upon faith in a Creator and Master of the world, called wide-spread attention to it; and the theory opened to natural science itself entirely new impulses and paths, and promised the solution of many problems before which it had hitherto been compelled to stand in silence. To be sure, it threatened likewise to allure the mind from the slow but sure ways of solid study to the entertaining but insecure and aimless paths of imagination and hypothesis. Among all the German followers of Darwin who adopted not only the idea of an origin of species through descent and evolution, but also the explanation of evolution by natural selection, and extended it so as to make the principle of selection of exclusive value, Ernst Häckel occupies the most prominent rank. In his "General Morphology," published in 1866, and in his "Natural History of the Creation," the first edition of which appeared in 1868, and finally in his "Anthropogeny"[2] (why he does not say Anthropogony, we are nowhere informed), 1874, this scientist brought the new theory, which had been presented by Darwin in an almost bewildering flood of details, into connection and order, and, analyzing the powers active in natural selection, combined them into an entire system of laws. He {46} at once drew the origin of man also into the course of reasoning on the new theory, and sustained the theory by the discovery of the _monera_ and other low organisms of one cell, as well as by special investigations of the calcareous sponges. For these labors, he was rewarded by the warm and unreserved acknowledgment which Darwin made to him in his work upon the origin of man, which was published subsequently to the "Natural History of the Creation." There Darwin says: "If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived, I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine." Häckel's labors rendered still greater service to the Darwinian theory by dividing the organic world into three kingdoms: the protista kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, and the animal kingdom,--a division which solves in a most simple way the difficulty that was felt more and more of securing for the lowest organisms a place among the animals or plants. He further aided the theory by leaving the choice open to adopt either a uniform or multiform pedigree of the organisms and their kingdoms and classes, and by treating each class under both points of view; and finally, by fascinating experiments to bring before us in detail the hypothetical pedigrees of all classes of organisms from the protista kingdom up to man. We will try to reproduce briefly the pedigree which is of most interest--the hypothetical _pedigree of man_. Häckel divides it into twenty-two stages, eight of them belonging to the series of the invertebrates, and fourteen to that of the vertebrates. On this ladder of {47} twenty-two rounds, he leads us from the lowest form of the living being, in slight and mostly plausible transitions, continually higher and higher, up to man; and makes our steps easy by mentioning at each stage, on the one hand the corresponding state in the embryonic development, on the other the still living creature through which, in his opinion, the former organisms of the corresponding round of the ladder are still represented, and which accordingly has been a creature that remained on its round, while other members of its family have been developed up to man and to many other genera and species. He begins with the monera, the organisms of the lowest form, discovered by himself, which have not so much as the organic rank of a cell, but are only corpuscules of mucus, without kernel or external covering, called by him cytod, and arising from an organic carbon formation. The lowest and most formless moneron is the bathybius, discovered by Thomas Huxley, a network of recticular mucus, which in the greatest depths of the sea, as far down as 7,000 metres, covers stone fragments and other objects, but are also found in less depths, in the Mediterranean Sea, for instance. From the moneron he proceeds to the amoeba--a simple cell, with a kernel, which still corresponds to the egg of man in its first state. The third stage is formed by the communities of amoebæ (synamoebæ), corresponding to the mulberry-yolk in the first development of the fecundated egg, and to some still living heaps of amoebæ. To the fourth stage he assigns the planæa, corresponding to the embryonic development of an albumen and the planula or ciliated {48} larva. When these ciliated larvæ are developed, they contract themselves so as to form a cavity; and this fifth stage--especially important for his theory--he calls gastræa. In this form, he says, the progaster is already developed, and its wall is differentiated for the first time into an animal or dermal layer (ectoblast), and into a vegetative or intestinal layer (hypoblast). At the sixth stage, there branched off the prothelmis, or worms, with the first formations of a nervous system, the simplest organs of sense, the simplest organs for secretion (kidneys) and generation (sexual organs), represented to-day by the gliding worms or turbellaria; as the seventh stage, the soft worms, as he called them at first--the blood worms, or coelomati, as he describes them in his "Anthropogeny"--a purely hypothetical stage, on which a true body-cavity and blood were formed; the eighth stage are the chorda-animals with the beginning of a spinal rod, corresponding to the larva of the ascidiæ. At the ninth stage, called the skull-less animals (acrania), and corresponding to the still living lancelet, we enter the series of the vertebrates. The importance of the eighth and ninth stages for the theory, we have already pointed out in our remarks upon Darwin, p. 43. The tenth stage is formed by those low fishes in which the spinal rod is differentiated into the skull--and the vertebral-column, called the single-nostriled animals (monorrhini), and represented by the cyclostoma of today (hag and lampreys). The eleventh stage is formed by the primæval fish or selachii (sharks); the twelfth by the mud fish, of which there still live the protopterus in Africa, the lepidosiren in the tributaries of the Amazon, and the ceratodus in the swamps of Southern {49} Australia. On the thirteenth stage, there are the gilled amphibians (sozobranchia), proteus and axolotl; on the fourteenth, the tailed amphibians (sozura), newt and salamander; on the fifteenth, the purely hypothetical primæval amniota or protamnia (amnion is the name given to the chorion which surrounds the germ-water and embryo of the three higher classes of vertebrates) on the sixteenth, the primary mammals (promammalia), to which the present monotremes (ornithorhynchus and echidna) stand nearest; on the seventeenth, the pouched animals or marsupialia; on the eighteenth, the semi-apes or prosimiæ (loris and maki); on the nineteenth, the tailed apes, or menocerca (nose-apes and slender-apes, or semnopithecus); on the twentieth, the man-like apes (anthropoides) or tail-less catarrhini (gorilla, chimpanzee, orang outang and gibbon). And now we come to twenty-one--ape-like men or speechless primæval men (alali)--of whom we are reminded to-day by the deaf, and dumb, the cretins and the microcephali; and number twenty-two is _homo sapiens_, the man. The Australians and the Papuans are supposed to be the only remaining representatives of his first stage-development. In like manner, Häckel also gives us the stem-branches of all the types, classes and orders of the organisms, and forms from them a very acceptable hypothetical pedigree; or--if we prefer to suppose a polyphyletic rather than a monophyletic origin of species--hypothetical pedigrees of the whole organic world. The perspicuity and clearness of Häckel's deductions, the extent of his knowledge, and the singleness of his aim, to which he makes them all subservient, lend {50} to his works a great charm. But on the other hand we dare not conceal that, even on the ground of explanations belonging purely to natural history, the character of hypothesis is often lost in that of arbitrariness and of the undemonstrable. Even the unlearned in natural science often enough get this impression when reading his works, and will find it confirmed by scientists who not only contradict his assertions in many cases, but disclose plain errors in his drawings--errors, indeed, exclusively in favor of the unity-hypothesis; and in other cases they show that drawings which are given as pictures of the real, represent merely hypothetical opinions. There is especially evident in his works an extremely strong tendency to impress on his hypotheses the character of an established and proved fact, by giving them the alluring name of laws. Entire systems of laws of the selection theory are produced, and all imaginable assertions are also immediately called laws. For example, Huxley, in his anatomical investigations of apes and men, arrives at the conclusion that the differences between the highest and the lowest apes are greater than the differences between the highest apes and man. This purely anatomical comparison, Häckel calls repeatedly "Huxley's Law." We are well aware that the idea of law is capable of great extension in meaning, and in that respect we can refer to nothing more instructive than the well-meditated inquiry upon this idea in the "Reign of Law" of the Duke of Argyll (London, Strahan & Co.). But if we may venture to call purely anatomical comparisons of this nature _laws_, such a use of language destroys all logical reasoning; and this mistake appears again in Häckel's philosophic {51} discussions, of which we shall have to speak hereafter. We shall have to refer also hereafter to an additional embellishment, which Häckel thinks himself obliged to give to his works--namely, that he makes on every occasion the strongest attacks upon faith in a personal God, a Creator and Lord of the world; that he traces all the motives of human action to self-interest; that he denies the liberty of man and the moral system of the world; that he makes consent to his view of things the criterion of the intellectual development of a man; and that he thinks to render a service to civilization by such a view of the world and of ethics. In the consequent carrying out of the selection principle as the satisfactory key in explaining the origin of all species and also of man, Häckel is indeed, in spite of the approval of his works by the British master, more Darwinian than Darwin himself, who expressly refuses to give exclusive value to this theory of explanation. Hence there are among scientists only a few who go with him to this extent. In Germany, aside from the materialists, we only know of Seidlitz and Oskar Schmidt--who in the thirteenth volume of the "International Scientific Series" treats of "The Theory of Descent and Darwinism," and advocates not only the autocracy of the selection theory, but also all the monistic and atheistic consequences which are deduced from it. Perhaps Gustav Jäger, Schleiden, Bernhard Cotta--at least judging from their earlier publications--should be mentioned as followers of the pure selection theory; although they do not all draw from it the before-mentioned philosophic consequences. On the other hand, the number of those is very great who, although inspired {52} by Darwin to adopt the idea of an origin of species through descent and evolution, yet have more or less modified, laid aside, or entirely refused the very doctrine which is especially new in Darwin's theory--the selection theory. In the following section we shall briefly give an account of them. § 3. _Modifications of the Theory--Moriz Wagner. Wigand._ One of the most prominent objections to the selection theory, which strikes us at once from the standpoint of natural history, is the following: The varieties of a domesticated species, obtained by artificial breeding, are lost, and return to the original wild form of the species as soon as they are crossed long enough with other varieties or are left to themselves and to the crossing with individuals of the original form of their species; and hence we can not see how individual characteristics, even if favorable to the individual, will not be lost again by the crossing which is inevitable in a state of nature, with such individuals as do not possess those characteristics. Besides, it is an established fact, confirmed by all our observations stretching over thousands of years, that the characteristics of species are preserved in spite of all individual modifications, and that this preservation of the characteristics of species has its cause essentially in the free crossing of individuals. This objection induced Moriz Wagner to take up again an idea already expressed by Leopold von Buch, and to complete the principle of a selection through natural breeding by another, and partly, indeed, to supplant it by the principle of _isolation by migration_. Isolated individuals, who, from any reason naturally to {53} be accounted for, leave the mass of their fellows, can from the very consequence of this isolation transmit to their offspring common individual characteristics which are not destroyed again by the crossing with other individuals. They will especially fix and transmit these individual characteristics, when they are favorable to them for the conditions of existence in their new place of living, and these individual characteristics will so much the more be increased and developed in a direction favorable to the subsistence of the individuals in their new place of living, as there are more closely connected with this isolation variations in the conditions of existence, in climate, geographical surroundings, food, and so on. He very attractively applies this theory also to the explanation of the origin of man. According to his opinion, even the nearest animal progenitors of man were isolated, and the isolating power was the rise of the great mountains of the Old World, which took place previous to the glacial period. One pair, or perhaps a few pairs, of those progenitors were driven away from the luxurious climate of the torrid zone to the northern half of the globe, and found their return cut off by glaciers and high mountains; in place of a comfortable life on the trees, necessity urged them to gain support from conditions less favorable to existence, and necessity, this mother of so many virtues and achievements, finally made man what he is. In following out these ideas, Moriz Wagner has gradually and more and more decidedly given up the selection theory, and opposed it by sharp criticisms. This _migration_ or _isolation theory_ also found a degree of favor, but subordinate in its nature. For it {54} can not and will not pretend to solve the main problems. It only tries to explain how the individual variations, already in existence, might have been preserved and perhaps increased, and how new conditions of existence could have roused latent powers; but not how these variations and these powers originated. Just as little is the selection theory able to explain this; but it pretends to do it, and hence we can easily comprehend how during the last few years a constantly increasing number of voices, and more important ones, have been raised against the selection theory. This opposition came not only from those who--like Agassiz, Barrande, Emil Blanchard, Escher von der Linth, Göppert, Giebel, Sir Roderick Murchison, Pfaff, and others--directly reject each and every idea of descent on account of the difficulty in defending the selection theory; or who--like Karl Ernst von Baer,[3] (the {55} pioneer in the region of the history of individual development), like Oskar Fraas, Griesebach, Sandberger, and others--generally take a more reserved and neutral position, because of the uncertainty of the facts and the inaccessibility of the problems; but it comes especially from those scientists who are inclined to adopt an origin of species through descent and even through development, yet refuse to explain it by the selection principle, and look for the essential cause of the development in the organisms themselves, without claiming to have themselves found these causes. Among the most prominent advocates of this view, we may name the late Sir Charles Lyell, Mivart, and {56} Richard Owen, in England; and in Germany, Alexander Braun, Ecker, Gegenbaur, Oswald Heer, W. His, Nägeli, Rütimeyer, Schaaffhausen, Virchow, Karl Vogt, A. W. Volkmann, Weismann, Zittel, and here also Moriz Wagner, and among the philosophers, Eduard von Hartmann. Many of these men are but little aware of the difference between the two questions: whether, on the one hand, the adoption of the origin of species through descent does not of itself involve the idea of a gradual development of one species from another, almost unobservable in its single steps; or, on the other hand, whether a descent of species through heterogenetic generation in leaps and through a metamorphosis of the germs, could be imagined. They consider descent and evolution as identical; and this identification is explainable so long as we are not in a condition to come nearer to the eventual causes of the supposed variation of species. But men are not wanting who put these questions clearly and plainly, and separate them distinctly from one another. Among them we may mention K. E. von Baer, Ed. von Hartmann and Wigand; of the latter we will have occasion to speak more in detail hereafter. Among them we find also scientists who answer the question in the sense of a new-modeling of the species, of a heterogenetic generation, and of a metamorphosis of germs. To this class belong especially Oswald Heer--"Urwelt der Schweitz" ("Antediluvian World in Switzerland"), Zürich, 1865, p. 590-604; Kölliker--"Ueber die Darwin'sche Schöpfungstheorie," ("Darwin's Theory of Creation"), Leipzig, 1864; "Morphologie und Entwicklungeschichte des Pennatulidenstammes nebst allgemeinen Betrachtungen zur Descendenzlehre," {57} ("Morphology and History of the Development of the Stem of the Pennatulidæ, together with General Remarks on the Descent Theory"), Frankfurt, 1872; and Heinrich Baumgärtner--"Natur und Gott" ("Nature and God"), Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1870. Heer has introduced into scientific language the term "new-modeling of the species," Kölliker that of a "heterogenetic generation," and Baumgärtner that of a "transmutation of the types through a metamorphosis of germs." Baer also is not averse to adopting the latter. The botanist, Albert Wigand, of Marburg, takes a peculiar position. On one hand, the observation of the relationship of organic beings with one another leads him to adopt a common genealogy, a descent; on the other, the objections to adopting a descent of the species one from another appear to him insurmountable. In the first place, he sees all the species everywhere strictly limited--although in the second volume of his work, which appeared after the preceding lines were written, he again warns against a one-sided emphasizing of the invariability of species. In the second place, he sees so clearly, through the whole organic world, the differences, nay, the contrasts, of the species, in their building plan, in the numbers and conditions and positions of their parts, and in their mode of development, that it appears to him impossible to assume in the perfected organism a production of germs which in a course of generations, by a process even as gradual as possible, would grow into such an entirely new phenomenon as a new, even closely related, species would be. But if we adopt the theory of a heterogenetic generation, we explain by it the variety but not the similarity of species; {58} for a heterogenetic generation would in the new species make everything different from the old one--a conclusion, the necessity of which it would be difficult to show. For these reasons, he refers the descent of the organic beings, not to the series of the species, with their individuals already specified and defined, but to the series of _primordial cells_ living free in the water. The earliest primordial cells represented only the common character of the _whole organic world_, and out of them the primordial cells of the _animal_ and those of the _vegetable kingdom_ were produced by dividing the cells; so that the first ones embraced only the general and primitive characteristics of the whole animal, the last ones those of the whole vegetable kingdom. Out of these primordial cells of the two kingdoms, those of the _main types_ proceeded--(for instance, the primordial cells of the radiated animals, the vertebrates, etc., the gymnosperms, the angiosperms, etc.); out of them those of the _classes_--(for instance, the mammalia, the dicotyledons); out of them those of the _orders_--(for instance, the beasts of prey, rosifloræ); out of them those of the _families_ (canina, rosaceæ); out of them those of the _genus_ (canis, rosa); and out of them those of the _species_ (canis lupus, rosa canina). Only when the primordial cells of the species had been produced, were they developed into finished representatives of the species; and when once these primordial cells of the species had been developed into finished and full-grown individuals of the species, their transmission took place in the manner well known to us. Wigand published his criticism of the Darwinian Theories in his larger work, "Der Darwinismus und die Naturforschung Newtons und Cuviers," ("Darwinism {59} and the Natural Science of Newton and Cuvier"), Braunschweig, Vieweg, Vol. I, 1874, Vol. II, 1876, and his own attempt at explanation in a smaller book, published at the same place in 1872: "Die Genealogie der Urzellen als Lösung des Descendenzproblems oder die Entstehung der Arten ohne natürliche Zuchtwahl" ("Genealogy of the Primordial Cells as a Solution of the Problem of Descent; or the Origin of Species without Natural Selection"). Whether this _genealogy of the primordial cells_ found any followers, we do not know. None of the hypotheses thus far mentioned are so very far from having analogies in experience. The idea of a first development of the higher organisms out of their specific primordial cell, through all kinds of conditions of larvæ up to the finished form, demands of us the acceptance of monstrous improbabilities--(think, for example, of the first men, who, originating from a human primordial cell, grow in different metamorphoses of larvæ, first in the water and then on the land, until they appear as finished men). Moreover, the hypothesis, in claiming that a heterogenetic generation of one species from another must necessarily nullify all similarity between the organism of the child and that of the mother, is so little convincing, and shows--in the necessity of conceiving the universal type of organisms, the type of kingdoms, of main types, of classes, of orders, of families, of genera, and of species, as but individual existences which, in the form of cells and before the existence of the developed species, partly through many thousands of years, lead a real empiric and concrete life--such an abstract synthetical construction of nature, that {60} we are not astonished that the theory of the genealogy of primordial cells stands almost alone. On the other hand, Wigand's larger critical work rendered great service in clearing up the problems. It is true, his judgment appears in many single cases not at all convincing, since he often enough fights his adversaries with sophisms and deduces from the views of Darwin and Häckel conclusions to which they certainly do not lead. But in the majority of cases, his work is full of real convincing power, and with the breadth of its philosophical view and with the sharpness of its definitions, as well as with its abundance of philosophic and especially botanical teachings and their ingenious application, it is directly destructive to the use of the selection theory as the principal key to the solution of the problems. Eduard von Hartmann describes the work in his publication, "Wahrheit und Irrthum im Darwinismus," ("Truth and Error in Darwinism"), as a mile-stone which marks the limits where Darwinism as such passed the summit of its influence in Germany. * * * * * {61} CHAPTER III. PRESENT STATE OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. § 1. _The Theory of Descent._ The historical retrospect of the Darwinian theories, from their purely scientific side, leads us of itself to a critical review of their present state. We can briefly indicate in advance the result to which it will lead us, viz.: that the descent theory has gained, the selection theory has lost ground, the theory of development oscillates between both; but that all three theories have not yet passed beyond the rank of hypotheses, although they have very unequal hypothetical value. We can best arrange our review by beginning with that theory which is the most common, and which perhaps may still have value when both the others find their value diminished or lost: _the theory of descent_. From that we proceed to the _theory of evolution_, and from this to that of _selection_. The theory of descent is indeed at first sight exceedingly plausible, and will probably always be the _directive_ for all future investigations as to the origin of species. The organic species show, besides the great variety of their characteristics and the unchangeable nature of these characteristics, many other qualities which are common to them; and these common characteristics are precisely those which are most essential. {62} Moreover the higher the structure of the organisms which are differentiated, the more numerous and more valuable will become the evidences of similarity, and the greater also will be their distance from the inorganic and from the lowest organisms of their class, their type, or their kingdom. For instance, rose and apple-tree, elder and ash, wolf and dog, goat and sheep, ape and man, are not only a great deal farther removed from the mode of existence of inorganic bodies than the algæ, the monera, and other low organisms, but they have also, in spite of the great interval which separates them from one another and especially which separates man from every animal, much more numerous and important points of contact than, for instance, two families or genera of algæ or of mosses, of polyps or of infusoria, have among one another. Now our imagination refuses to accept the theory that the Creator, or nature, or whatever we wish to call the principle generating the species, in producing the new species, laid aside all those points of contact which are continually becoming more numerous and more important, and produced instead, by ever widening leaps, the new and higher species from the inorganic, which lies farther and farther from them. On the other hand, the theory appears to us all the more plausible, that every new species came into existence on that stage which is the most nearly related to it, and which was already in existence. If we add further, that the two old maxims of the natural scientists, _omne vivum ex ovo_ and _omne ovum ex ovario_, have not been invalidated, in spite of all the searching for a _generatio æquivoca_, and that, even if the origination of the lowest organisms out of the inorganic could in future be {63} proved, yet the truth of these maxims for all the higher organized individuals is established as a fact without exception. Moreover, if we take into consideration the fact that we can not at all imagine either the origin or the first development of a higher animal or a human organism without the protecting integument and the nourishing help of a mother's womb, we may venture to say that each and every attempt to render the origin of the first individuals of the higher species conceivable, leads of necessity to the descent theory. We have either to reject, once for all, such an attempt, as an unscientific playing with impossibilities, or to accept the idea of descent. It is certainly the lasting merit of Darwin, even if his whole structure of proofs should in the course of time show itself weak, that he not only had the courage (as others had before him), but also inspired scientists with the courage to trace the idea of a descent of species in a scientific way. To be sure, so long as we have no other proof of the descent theory than the circumstance that we can imagine it, it will continue to be nothing more than an ingenious hypothesis. We have, therefore, to look to the realm of nature for more direct proofs; and we are there furnished with them. They are presented to us by geology in connection with the botanical and zoölogical systems, by geology in connection with vegetable and animal geography, by comparative anatomy, and by the history of the embryonic development of animals. _Geology_ finds in the strata of the crust of the globe a large number of extinct plants and animals of extraordinary variety; but all of them, however much they {64} may differ from the organisms of to-day, are completely in harmony with the _botanical_ and _zoölogical systems_ in which we divide the still living organisms. Not only have by far the most of the now extinct genera and species their family and stem-companions, and many even their genera and species companions, in the living world, but also those genera whose nearer relations are now extinct--as, for instance, the club-moss-trees, the trilobites, the ammonites, the belemnites, the sauria, the nummulites,--show still a very perceptible relationship with living genera, and can be quite accurately included in the botanical and zoölogical systems; nay, they even fill up gaps in it. The anatomical, morphological, and, so far as we can judge, the physiological and biological relationship of the fossil with living organisms, is so great and comprehensive that in the present state of science a systematic botany or zoölogy, that should only treat of the fossils or of living organisms alone, would be imperfect. But the relationship of the fossil organisms with the natural systems of botany and zoölogy is apparent not only in this respect, but also in the fact that the single species during the long periods of time which are shown by geology to have elapsed, came into existence in a series, which again pretty closely corresponds to the natural system of the organic kingdoms; and that the fossil representatives of all classes and families, the nearer they come to the present world, appear the more nearly related to the living organisms, so that the fauna and flora of the ante-human time are lost in those of the human period by transitions gliding from the one to the other. For instance, in the Miocene formation of the tertiary epoch {65} we find thirty per cent. of species still living to-day; in the Pliocene, even sixty to eighty per cent., and toward its end even about ninety-six per cent. of species which are identical with those now living. A brief glance may still more closely illustrate this analogy between the geological series and the organic systems. Plants and animals seem to have appeared nearly at the same time, and at first in the form of the very lowest organisms. The earliest plants found by geology belong also to the lowest stage of the vegetable kingdom; they are the algæ. They are followed again by higher cryptogamous plants, especially ferns and club-mosses. Only at a later period flowering plants appear, among them being first the plants with naked seeds standing lower in the systems, as the cycad-trees and pine-forests; later, those with enclosed seeds, among them being again first the monocotyledons, last the dicotyledons,--all of them precisely corresponding to the botanical system. The same thing is true in the animal kingdom. If the eozoon Canadense, found in the laurentian slate of the Cambrian formation in North America, is really an organism and not an inorganic form, the earliest vestiges of animal life we can find are the rhizopodes or foraminifera; and these organisms belong to the lowest stage of life--to that stage which forms a kind of undeveloped intermediate member between the vegetable and animal kingdom, Häckel's kingdom of the protista. The next oldest animal organisms found in the Cambrian formation are the zoöphytes, and immediately above them the mollusca and the crustacea. In the following Silurian period we find corals, radiata, worms, mollusca, and crustacea, in {66} great number, also all the main-types of the invertebrates; and in the highest Silurian strata there are also to be found representatives of the lowest class of vertebrates, of fish, but still of very low organization and little differentiated. That the five main-types of the invertebrates seem to have appeared quite contemporaneously, yet that the zoöphytes really appeared first, does not contradict the before-mentioned law of a progress in the appearance of the organisms from the lower to the higher. For in the zoölogical system also these main-types of the invertebrates do not stand one above the other, but by the side of each other: at most, the radiata, the worms, the mollusca, and the articulata, take their places above the zoöphytes. Only within the main-types, in the classes, orders, etc., do differences in rank take effect; and even here, not without exception. What difference in rank, for instance, is there between an oyster and a cuttle-fish? between a cochineal and a bee or ant? and yet the first two belong to one and the same type--the type of mollusca; and the last three to one and the same class--the class of insects. The vertebrates rank decidedly above the invertebrates; and in a manner wholly corresponding to this, the vertebrates also appear after the invertebrates. Just as decidedly as to their rank, the main classes of the vertebrates do not stand beside, but above one another: above the fish stand the amphibia, above them the reptiles, next the birds, and above them the mammalia. To this series of succession also the geological facts seem to correspond pretty closely; only long after the fish do the first amphibia and reptilia appear--although it can not yet be decided which of these {67} two classes has left its earliest traces. If the interpretation of the gigantic foot-steps in the colored sandstone of North America, as belonging to the cursorial birds, is correct, the first appearance of birds falls in the time between the reptilia and mammalia; otherwise the first mammalia would have appeared before the first birds. For if we find the first real bones of birds only in the Jura and in the Chalk-formation, they are birds with tail-spines and with teeth in the beak--hence still related to the reptilia or the sauria. The first traces of mammalia to be found in the Upper Keuper formation, and in the Jura, belong to the order of opossums or marsupialia; _i.e._, to that order which (excepting the echidna and the ornithorhynchus that, as so-called monotremeta, stand the very lowest in the class of the mammalia, but are very scarce) occupies the lowest stage among the multitude of mammalia. Only after them do the higher orders of mammalia appear; and last of all organisms, man. If we follow more in detail the appearance of the single organisms, some remarkable modifications show themselves in the course of their appearance and growth. We have heretofore mentioned the possibility of the appearance of the mammalia before the bird. Another fact which deserves attention is, that frequently the lowest representatives of a class or an order do not at first appear where the highest representatives of the next lower class or order are in existence, but with lower representatives of a preceding class or order, viz.: such representatives of the same as are still less differentiated and unite in themselves comparatively still more generic and less specific characteristics--as for instance, the lowest and {68} earliest amphibia, which do not appear at the same time and place with the most highly organized fishes, but with fishes of still lower organization. Moreover many groups of organisms show in earlier geological periods a richness of development from which they have now fallen far away. For instance, among the mammalia the pachydermata, among the reptilia the salamander and newt, among the articulata the cephalopoda, are at present remarkably reduced;--compare with the legions of ammonites and belemnites of the secondary period the small number of nautilus and cuttle-fish of the seas at the present day. A similar fortune was experienced by the ferns and club-mosses which formed whole forests in the carboniferous period. Other groups which once played a great _rôle_, are now wholly extinct; for instance, the trilobites of the primary, the sauria of the secondary, the nummulites of the tertiary periods. Now, all these modifications of geological progress would entirely correspond to the idea of a pedigree to which the descent theory traces back the whole abundance of forms of organisms. As soon as we seriously accept the idea of a pedigree, each of the two organic kingdoms would throughout form for its classes and species not only one single straight line of descent, but a tree, the branches of which are again ramified in a manifold way; a tree on which single branches--as perhaps that of the class of birds--may leave the main-stem or a main-branch, possibly being a branch destined to a higher development, and on that account held back in the process of development; a tree, finally, on which also branches and twigs can wholly or partly die off, as those of the extinct or reduced groups of organisms. {69} From the point where the geological formations approach the present time, _plant_ and _animal geography_ also assists _geology_ in increasing the weight of the reasons for an origin of organisms through descent. With the tertiary period, the fauna and flora of the globe, which in former periods had a nearly uniform character all over the earth and showed no climatic differences, begin to separate according to climate, zones, and greater continents. This separation becomes distinctly evident in the middle tertiary formations, the Miocene, and much more distinctly in the higher tertiary formations, the Pliocene. The animals, especially the higher vertebrates, of the Pliocene formation on each continent or each larger group of islands, correspond very closely to the now living animals of the same geographical limit, with the exception of being generally of a much larger size. The Pliocene animal world of mammalia of the three old continents, for instance, corresponds exactly, through all its orders, to the present fauna of Europe, Asia and Africa; and that on an average it was built up more stupendously than that of to-day, we can see from the cave-bear and the mammoth. South America is the home of a peculiar order of mammalia--of the edentata, to which belong the sloth, the armadillo, and the like. All its predecessors are to be found also in the Pliocene strata of South America, and only there; and mostly in gigantic, but otherwise completely related, forms. New Zealand has no indigenous mammalia, but in their place great cursorial birds with but rudimentary wings. Exactly the same thing is found by geology in its tertiary and post-tertiary strata: nowhere a mammal, but gigantic birds with rudimentary {70} wings, down to the dinornis, which probably died out in man's time. New Holland has merely marsupial and some monotrematous, but no placental, mammalia; even its tertiary strata give no placental mammalia, but marsupialia, in analogy with all living genera, herbivorous, and carnivorous. Indeed, the analogy goes so far that the same line which through the Indian Archipelago separates the present Australian animal and plant world from the Asiatic, forms also the separating line for the geological zones of the Pliocene epoch. All these are facts which render quite inevitable the idea of an origin of the higher organic species of to-day through descent. But still, from another side, animal geography, though it does not yet speak for a common pedigree of the whole animal world, as the facts just mentioned also do not, still at least speaks for a descent of related, though at present separated, genera and species from common forefathers. The continents of the Old and New World are so constructed that toward the North Pole they approach one another very closely, and toward the South Pole they withdraw from one another. Without doubt there existed in the North, through long periods of time, a land-connection of America with Asia and with Europe. Now, both continents have their more or less characteristic animal world, and these characteristics are distributed over the two halves of the globe in the following extremely remarkable way: The fauna of the Old and the New World, in those groups of animal genera which live only in the warmer or tropic zones or only south of the equator, and have no associates of genera or families in the higher North, is in each hemisphere entirely characteristic, and differs in a {71} marked way from the fauna of the other half of the globe. For instance, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the antelope with undivided horns, the hedgehog, the mole proper, are only inhabitants of the Old World, whence also the horse originally came, the striped ones in Africa and the non-striped in Asia; on the other hand, the lemur, the ant-eater, the armadillo, and others, are limited to South America. The apes of the Old World have five molar teeth on each side of the jaw, narrow noses, tails usually short and never prehensile, and fleshy protuberances for sitting; the apes of the New World have six molar teeth, flat noses, and long prehensile tails. And on the contrary, where closely related species are found on both parts of the globe, they belong only to genera of which single species live or have lived in the far North; as, for instance, the rein-deer, still common to the Old and the New World in this very North which once formed a bridge between the two halves of the earth. The same is true in regard to cattle, the deer, the cat, the dog, the hare. Similar facts can also be shown of other animal classes. The farther the different species of these genera withdraw from the North Pole, the greater become the differences between the species on the one half of the globe and the analogous species of the other. Compare on this point K. E. von Baer's "Studien aus dem Gebiete der Naturwissenchaften, über Darwin's Lehre," ("Studies from the Realm of Natural Science upon Darwin's Teachings"), p. 356 f. If we add, further, the before mentioned fact, that those genera which are exclusively peculiar to one or the other continent, have their related predecessors in the tertiary strata of these continents, {72} the hypothesis of a separate origin for each single species, without genealogical connection with the anatomically and physiologically related species, becomes neither more nor less than a scientific impossibility. Moreover, there are several facts of _comparative anatomy_ which have long been the joy of all zoölogists and have rewarded the toilsome labors of detailed investigations by a delightful view over the whole realm of the organic world, but which find a scientific explanation only in the descent theory. They are the _homology of the organs_, and to a certain degree also the so-called _rudimentary organs_. By homology of organs we mean the fact that within one and the same class-group of organisms all the organs, and especially the organs in their most solid constituents, in the skeleton, are built after one and the same fundamental plan, and therefore are even in their most widely separated modifications varied after this one and the same plan. This is especially true of the vertebræ and the limbs. This homology goes so far within one class, particularly within the class of mammalia, that, for instance, the hands and feet of man, the hands of the ape, the paws of the beast of prey, the hoof of the horse and of the ox, the paws of the mole, the fins of the seal and of the whale, the wing-membranes of the flying-squirrel, correspond to one another in their smallest parts and ossicles, and can all be registered with the same numbers and letters; _i.e._, they are homologous to one another even to the minutest detail. The _ideal_ plan and connection in the organisms, disclosed by these facts, and long ago acknowledged and admired, receives at the same time its simple _material_ basis through the acceptance of a common descent. {73} A similar relation is observed in _rudimentary organs_. Many of them, as the nipples of males, point, if not to a common descent from a lower form, at least to a common plan of the sexes. But when the embryo of the whale still has its teeth in the jaw, the grown up whale its hip-bones, when the eye of man still has its winking membrane, the ear and many portions of the skin their rudimentary muscles of motion, the end of the vertebral column its rudimentary tail, the intestinal canal its blind intestine; when sightless animals, living in the dark, still have their rudimentary eyes, blind worms their shoulder-blades; when in like manner the plants, especially in their parts of fecundation, show in great number such rudimentary organs as are entirely useless for the functions of life, but which are never misleading in determining their relationship with other plants:--how simply are all these facts explained by the descent theory, how not at all without it! Finally, if we now mention the _history of the development of animals_, we shall have to postpone to the next section the consideration of the most essential facts furnished by this science; for the individual development of animals is a process which could speak not only for a descent of the species, but also for a descent of them through gradual development. But where, as in the present section, we treat the descent theory apart from the evolution theory, we have also to think of the possibility that the species or groups of species are not originated through gradual development, but nevertheless do originate through descent--namely, in leaps through metamorphosis of germs or a heterogenetic generation; and for such an idea we find confirmation in the {74} observation of the history of development of animals, which we call _change of generation_ or _metagenesis_.[4] By this is meant the following phenomenon: Certain animals, as the salpa and doliolum of the order of the tunicata, as well as certain mites and many tape-worms, produce offspring which are wholly dissimilar to the mother stock. These offspring have the capacity of reproducing themselves--if not by sexual means, as at the first generation, still by the formation of sprouts; and it is only the animals originated by the second generation (with many species, even those by the third) which return again to the form of the first generation. The plant-lice transmit themselves through six, seven, even ten generations by means of sprouts, until a generation appears which lays eggs. Now it is indeed true that the change of generation forms a circle in which the form of the last generation always returns to that of the first, and therefore leaves the species, as species, wholly unchanged. But it is nevertheless a process which shows that the natural law of an identity between generator and product, observed in other relations, is not without exception; and if we once have reason to suppose that the generation of new species took place in past periods of the globe, but has ceased in the present, such processes in the single period open to our direct observation--namely, the present (in which, however, according to our knowledge, the species remain constant)--are {75} nevertheless hints worthy of notice. For they refer us to ways in which in those former times, when certainly new species did originate, this formation of species might possibly have taken place. This consideration leads us to treat of the main objection raised to every descent theory: namely, that never yet has the origin of one species from another been observed, but that, on the contrary, _all species_--so far as our experience goes, stretching over thousands of years--_remain constant_. We will give no weight to the fact that the constancy of species seems by no means to be absolutely without exception; for on the whole, they certainly remain constant. The only example which goes to prove such an evolution of species as taking place to-day--viz: the natural history of sponges--seems not to have this bearing. The transitions of form, proven by O. Schmidt in the siliceous sponges and by Häckel in the chalk-sponges, seem to show, not the genetic coming forth of a new species out of another, and especially not the evolution of a higher species out of a lower, but rather the uncertainty of the idea of species in general and the worthlessness of the skeleton-forms, for this idea, in such low organizations as the sponges. But that objection already loses its chief force from the consideration that we have not only never observed the origin of one species from another, but never even the origin of a species itself; and that nevertheless all species have successively originated in time. If we, therefore, are not able to observe directly their origination, we have a right to make all possible attempts at approaching the knowledge of it in an indirect way. But we see this objection invalidated by still another {76} fact. From all observations, it seems to be evident that those agencies which originated the species in general have ceased since man appeared. Now this fact is inconvenient for all those who, on metaphysical grounds, reject aim and purpose in the world and accept an aimless motion in the universe, a circle in which only identical powers are ever active to all eternity. From this standpoint, the scientists cannot, except by very artificial hypotheses, escape the conclusion that, if new species once originated through descent, new species ought still to originate through descent. In like manner, it is true, they are also obliged to accept the other conclusion: that if new species once originated through primitive generation, new species ought still to originate through primitive generation. On the other hand, those scientists who recognize aims in the world for which the world and each part of it is destined, and which are attained in the world through the processes of coming into existence, have to expect in advance that the organic kingdoms are also planned with reference to those aims. They naturally see the aim of the origin of species attained, where in the organic world beings appear who combine with the highest physical organization a self-conscious and responsible spiritual life, and who are capable of conceiving the ideal, even the idea of God. For, with the appearance of these beings, there enter upon the theatre of the world beings who go beyond the value of a purely physical organism and of a purely somato-psychical life, and in like manner represent again a higher order of beings; just as the first appearance of organic life on earth once introduced a new and higher stage of {77} existence in contrast to the inorganic world. Scientists who take this standpoint can readily adopt the fact that we do not now observe the origination of new species; for it is in full harmony with their metaphysical doctrines, without the same being on that account essentially dependent upon the confirmation or rejection of the hypothesis of the present constancy of species. With this very fact, the maxim that if new species once originated through descent, new species must still originate through descent, has lost for them its truth, and therefore its power of demonstration. So we see even here, while in the midst of the discussion of a purely scientific problem, in what close correlation metaphysics and natural science stand, and moreover--since the metaphysical view is most closely connected with the religious--in what close relationship religion and natural science stand. At the same time we also see how little the metaphysical interest, and much more how little the religious interest, has reason to avoid the investigation of facts in nature. § 4. _The Theory of Evolution--Archæology, Ethnography, Philology._ The evolution theory teaches that the species have developed themselves one from another in gradual transitions, each of which was as small as the individual differences still observed to-day among the individuals of the same species. It is not without support, especially in the _history of the development of plants and animals_. Each organic being becomes what it is by means of organic development. Each plant, even the highest organized, begins in its seed-germ with a simple cell, {78} and is differentiated in constant development up to the fully perfected individual. Each animal, even the most highly organized (man included), begins the course of its existence as an egg; and each egg has no greater value of form than that of a single cell. This egg-cell is differentiated, after fecundation, in gradual and imperceptible transitions, farther and farther, higher and higher, until the individual has reached its perfect organization. No organ, no function of the body, no power or function of the soul or of the mind, appears suddenly, but all in gradual development. Since we see all individuals thus originating by means of gradual development, the possibility lies very near that the different organic formations of all the organic kingdoms could also have been originated by the same means. In still another direction does the history of the development of single plants and animals make this possibility plausible to us. In the animal world, and partly also in the plant world, the single individuals of higher species in their embryonic development pass through states of development, in the former stages of which not only the individuals of the most different species look confusingly similar to one another, but also the embryos in their organization remind us of the perfected state of much lower classes of beings. In order to give a clear idea of the first mentioned facts, Häckel, for instance, in his "Natural History of Creation" and in his "Anthropogeny," represents by engravings the embryos of different vertebrates and also of man; representations which--although, according to the judgment of competent scientists, unfortunately not exact, but modified, after the manner of stencil plates, in favor of {79} greater similarity--yet make it quite clear that the similarity of the different embryos must be very great. We see, for instance, on one table the embryos of a fish, a salamander, a turtle, a fowl; on a second, those of a pig, an ox, a rabbit, a man; on a third, those of a turtle, a fowl, a man; and we find the similarity really great. Examples of the second fact--that individuals of higher classes or orders in former states of their embryonic development represent an organization which corresponds to the full-grown individuals of the lower classes--are: the tail of the human embryo, the gill-arches of the embryos of reptilia, of birds, of mammalia, and of man. Now Häckel here takes up again an idea first suggested by Fritz Müller, and derives from these observations the "biogenetic maxim," as he calls it: "The history of the germ is an epitome of the history of the descent; or, in other words, ontogeny (the history of the germs or the individuals) is a recapitulation of phylogeny (the history of the tribe); or, somewhat more explicitly: that the series of forms through which the individual organism passes during its progress from the egg-cell to its fully developed state, is a brief, compressed reproduction of the long series of forms through which the animal ancestors of that organism (or the ancestral forms of its species) have passed from the earliest periods of so-called organic creation down to the present time." In his latest publication, "Ziele und Wege der heutigen Entwicklungsgeschichte," ("Aims and Methods of the Present History of Evolution"), he admits into the formulation of his biogenetic maxim also the consideration of those phenomena in the ontogenetic development which are no recapitulation of the history {80} of the stem, but originated by adapting the embryo to its surroundings. In the description and explanation of this theory, he uses a term which throws upon nature a peculiar reproach, never before made, namely: cenogeny, or history of falsifications, in contrast to palingeny, or history of abridgments. This amended formula now reads: The development of germs is an abridgment of the development of stems, and is the more complete according as the development of the abridgment is continued by inheritance, the less complete according as the development of the false is introduced by adaptation. Now, we ask: Is this biogenetic maxim correct? and moreover, from the fact of the organic individuals originating through development, are we entitled to draw the conclusion that even the species must have originated through development? To this question we can no longer get an answer from the life-processes of living organisms; for we have already mentioned the fact that, according to the present state of our knowledge, we can no longer observe the origination of a new species. Moreover, the embryonic states of development show also, in all their similarity, even in the very first stages, and with especial distinctness in these first stages, many differences between the single species; and this is true especially of those species which, according to the followers of this so-called biogenetic maxim, should lie in the same stem-line,--so that the direct scientific value of the embryological results to the palæontological investigation, or of the latter to the former, is so far very slight. Such a problem, however, as the one contained in that biogenetic maxim, which only gives to investigators the _direction_ in which possibly an {81} interesting and profitable path can be opened, does not at all deserve the name of a "_law_." K. E. von Baer, the founder of the whole present science of the history of development, has certainly a most competent judgment of the correctness of this so-called biogenetic maxim; and he convincingly shows, in his essay on "Darwin's Doctrine," that the embryos never represent a former animalic form, but that their development follows the principle of representing first the common characteristics of the class, then those of the order, etc., until finally the individual characteristics appear in the formation. Those who wish more information about embryology can find it in Heinrich Rathke's "Entwicklungsgeschichte der Wirbelthiere" ("History of the Development of Vertebrates"), edited by A. Kölliker, Leipzig, Engelmann, 1861; and those who wish to inform themselves as to the influence of the ontogenetic results of the solution of the phylogenetic problems, will find, besides the before-mentioned work of Wigand, rich and clearly elaborated material in the publication of Wilhelm His--"Unsere Körperform und das physiologische Problem ihrer Entstehung, Briefe an einen befreundeten Naturforscher" ("The Form of our Body and the Physiological Problem of its Origin; Letters to an Associate Scientist"), Leipzig, Vogel, 1875. The latter writer, although he advocates the descent theory, rejects the hasty assertions of Häckel with direct and convincing arguments. Thus embryology, having from the simple fact of an origin of single plants and animals through descent at least confirmed the idea of the _possibility_ of an origin also of species through development, forsakes us in the {82} inquiry as to the _reality_ of such a genealogy of development, and refers us to other sciences. Such a science, from which we certainly are entitled to expect a decided answer, is _geology_. For if the evolution theory is right, those periods of the history of our globe in which new species originated--namely, the periods of geology--_must_ show us also the _forms of transition_ between the different species. And, indeed, geology gives us an answer; but it reads contradictorily: It says yes, and it says no. Geology does show us forms of transition, and, indeed, most frequently in the lower classes of animals. Who that has once studied petrifactions, does not know the mass of forms of the terebratulæ, the belemnites, and the ammonites, in the Jura formation? Würtemberger has brought light into the perplexing division of species of the ammonites by simply showing their temporary and systematic transitions into one another. In the fresh water chalk formation of Steinheim, near Heidenheim, in Würtemberg, scientists have found, on the same place, in an uninterrupted series of strata, the snail valvata or paludina multiformis in all imaginable transitions--from the flat winding, showing the form of a chess-board, up to the sharp form of a tower. And it was not, as Hilgendorf thought, in a series which can be traced in the strata according to time, but, as Sandberger says, in quite a varied mixture, yet in all imaginable modifications. But even among the higher and the highest classes of animals, we can trace the transitions. The flying sauria, if not in their organs of flying, which remind us more of the bat, at least in head, neck, and toes, are closely connected with the {83} birds--the oldest birds of the Jura and chalk formations, with their tail-spines similar to the reptilia and their teeth in the beak to the sauria. The tertiary formations especially show the primitive history of many vertebrates in very instructive forms of transitions--which, for instance, Rütimeyer, a scientist who is very cautious in his conclusions, very distinctly traced to the horse, to the ruminating animals, and lately also to the turtles. Still more in detail, W. Kowalewsky has lately shown us the primitive history of the horse, and Leidy and Marsh have further completed it by the addition of American forms, the former having at the same time described the forms which have led to the tapir. But to such facts there are, on the other hand, experiences directly contradictory. Many lower and higher forms of animals and plants appear in the geological strata, so far as they have been explored, in a wholly independent way. We have mentioned, in the foregoing section, that the main types of the invertebrates appear somewhat contemporaneously and without any traceable intermediate form. The trilobites, a quite highly organized order of crustacea, appear in the strata of the silurian epoch almost suddenly, in very many and very distinctly marked species. The uncertainty of our knowledge shows itself most clearly when we ask for the geneologic relationship of the vertebrates. In Chap. II, § 1 and § 2 we have already referred to the value which Darwin, and more especially Häckel, lays on the relationship of the larva of the ascidia to the lancelet fish. Now the important testimony of K. E. von Baer, in his "Mémoires de l'Académie de St. Pétersbourg," Ser. vii, Vol. 19, No. 2, tells us that the nerve-ganglion {84} of the ascidia lies on the side of the stomach, and on that account can not be homologous with the spine of the vertebrates, but that the cord in the larva of the ascidia is nothing more than a support for the tail in swimming, which afterwards disappears, as with many other larvæ. As to the course of reasoning in reaching these genealogical conclusions, he says: "The hypothesis is indeed flexible. According to common reasoning, that which shows itself early in the development is an inheritance of the first progenitors. Therefore the ascidæ ought to descend from the vertebrates, and not the reverse. But it was necessary to show the descent of the vertebrates from the lower forms. In order to respond to such a necessity, men sometimes reverse their conclusions. Although favorably disposed to the doctrine of the transmutation of the animalic forms, I want a complete proof before I can believe in a transformation of the vertebrate type into that of the mollusca." Moreover, the zoölogists Semper and Dohrn find in the embryonic development of the sharks, the scates, and other cartilaginous fishes, organs which would bring them rather into a nearer relationship with the ringed worms than with the crustacea. When, on the other hand, we look around in palæontology, the oldest fossil fishes remind us neither of the crustacea nor of the ringed worms, but of the crabs: a class of animals which lies entirely outside of Häckel's stem-line of vertebrates. Also the first appearance of mammalia does not show transitions. Thus far we have not found in the geological strata any vestiges of the half-apes, which, according to the hypothesis of the evolutionists, as a common stem-line for the lines of ape and man development, once played such an {85} important _rôle_, and which have quite numerous representatives. But the answer which geology gives to our questions as to the probable confirmation of the evolution theory, naturally becomes most interesting where the _origin of man_ is treated of. Our attention is, therefore, especially directed to the most recent formations of the globe which show us the oldest remains of man. The most instructive are those parts of the skeleton which allow us to draw the most convincing conclusions as to the degree of mental development of an individual, namely: the parts of the skull. Although human bones seem to have been less easily preserved than those of animals, and are, comparatively speaking, very scarce, especially more so than prehistoric implements, still there are not wanting such remains, which go back far beyond historical time. The oldest known skull is the celebrated one of the Neander cave near Düsseldorf, with its large vault of the forehead, and its low height. Although Virchow finds on it evidences of rachitis in youth and of gout in old age, as well as of injuries, it nevertheless can not have been changed in its _fundamental form_ by any sickness, even according to Virchow. This very skull now indisputably shows a still lower formation, which, although quite essentially different from the type of the ape, stands nearer to it than is the case with the skulls of men in later times. Of a later date, and of a correspondingly higher form, are the skull of Engis, of Cannstatt, the skulls of the Belgian caves (especially Chauvaux), of France, and of Gibraltar. According to the weighty authority of Schaaffhausen (note his opening address at the Wiesbaden Congress of the {86} Anthropological Society, 1873), the skulls and the remaining parts of the skeleton show more indications of a lower formation the older they are. He especially calls attention to a certain bone of the roof of the skull--the _Os interparietale_ or the so-called _Os Incæ_--which has only recently been recognized as a characteristic of a lower formation of skulls, standing nearer to that of animals. As late as the summer of 1873, two human skeletons were found at Coblenz in a volcanic sand, of which Schaaffhausen says: "No less than eight anatomic marks of a lower formation, which probably have not heretofore been found together, indicate the great age of these remains." With all these traces of a difference between the former and the present state of the physical condition of man, the differences between the type of man and that of the animal are still great enough to leave wide open the possibility of the origin of man through some other means than that of gradual development. On the other hand, it is more or less in favor of the evolution idea, that so far such old remains of man have been found in places which certainly can not have been the cradle of mankind, and that those parts of the earth which we would naturally suppose to be the first dwelling place of the earliest human genera have been little or not at all investigated. And also the hypothesis of Häckel, that the cradle of mankind was a land between Africa and Asia, now sunk in the sea, and called Lemuria, can be neither proved nor denied. Such vague possibilities have indeed not the least scientific value. In considering these contradictory results of geological investigation, we dare not overlook three points: First, our knowledge of the crust of the globe is still {87} very fragmentary, and does not yet extend over the whole globe. Further, it lies in the nature of the case that the strata in mountain formations can only give a very incomplete picture of the whole variety of the real organic life which may have populated the earth and the sea. What a poor picture of the present plant and animal life would be offered, for instance, by the soil of our continents, the slime, sand, and pebbles of our coasts and of the bottoms of our lakes and seas, if we had to construct from them alone the fauna and flora of the present! A third, but purely hypothetical, consideration is rendered of importance particularly by Darwin and Häckel; namely, that the forms of transition without doubt existed for a shorter period than those forms whose organization has established itself in fully developed species. Thus far we have directed our attention to inquiring how the organic individuals were originated--and have throughout observed a successive development; next, we have questioned geology--and here also have observed a progress in the appearance of the species, but have received at the same time contradictory answers to the question whether this progress presents itself as a gradual development of one species from another or as a sudden appearance. So the reasons for and against the evolution theory almost balance one another; and it is not improbable that the hypothesis of an origin of species through development will have to share its authority with the hypothesis of a descent of species through heterogenetic generation, as well as with the hypothesis of a primitive generation of lower organisms, still repeating itself at a later time. Thus for the origination of {88} groups lying nearer together, we have the evolution theory; for the other groups, and especially for the origination of types where no transitions to other types can be traced, the theory of the heterogenetic or primitive generation recommends itself; and both theories thus far are of a purely hypothetical nature. But there is still a third realm, which is just as open to our observation as the history of the development of organisms and as geology, and of which we can also ask, whether it does not open for us an indirect way to the knowledge of the origin of species, and especially of man--a knowledge which we can no longer approach in the direct way of observation. This realm is _natural history_ and the _history of the development of the human race_. For mankind also is engaged in a process of development, and its present members do not stand on the same height. Now the question is, to what beginning can we trace backward the development of mankind, and to what succeeding stages of development from this present condition? And do we find in these earliest periods, and on these lowest stages, points that are connected with still earlier conditions and organizations, and especially points which could genealogically join together mankind and the animal kingdom? Three sciences, still young, favorite children of the present generation, participate in investigating this realm, namely, _archæology_, _comparative ethnology_, and _comparative philology_. _Archæology_ leads us back to far-off times. It is a fact that, chronologically speaking, man lived in the glacial period--according to French scientists, even before it; and that, palæontologically speaking, man and {89} mammoth lived at the same time, and, according to a discovery made some thirty years ago at Denise in Middle France, probably even man and another older and defunct form of pachydermata, the elephas meridionalis, in North America man and the mastodon. The reader may compare the discoveries regarding the age of mankind, as they are described most recently by Sir Charles Lyell in his work upon this subject, in the publications of the Anthropological Congress at Brussels in the year 1873, and in those of the fourth General Assembly of the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Primitive History, at Wiesbaden, in the year 1873. Now, to be sure, from the oldest human _tools_ and _utensils_ that are found, we can expect still less than from the oldest human bones that they will throw direct light upon the answer to the question of the _origin_ of man. For where man not only uses tools, but _manufactures_ the same for use, a wide breach already exists between man and animal. Manufactured articles, therefore, can only throw some light on the history of the development of the already existing human race. And even this light is less clear than we perhaps expected in view of the first interesting prehistorical discoveries. It is true, all these discoveries show us an ascent from the simplest and roughest forms to the more perfect; from the split but unpolished stone to the polished, and from stone to bronze and iron. But a progress of the human races in manufacturing and using articles, from the simple and rough form to the more artificial, lies so much in the nature of the case, and is so taken for granted with every conception of the origin of man, even with that contradictory to Darwinism, that from this simplicity of {90} the earliest tools we can not at all conclude that there was a condition of mankind lying near that of animals; and especially we can draw only general and uncertain conclusions as to that which makes man _man_, as to the spiritual and moral qualities of those prehistoric men. Moreover, in discoveries belonging to the very oldest, we come upon drawings and engravings from which we recognize the man of those primitive times as a creature whose life was not entirely taken up in the animalic struggle for existence, but was already adorned with those ideal pursuits and enjoyments which we are accustomed to ascribe to the height of civilization. Examine, for instance, the drawing of a mammoth on a mammoth tooth of Dordogne, which the French scientists Lartet and Christy have reprinted in their Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ (1868), and which Sir Charles Lyell has copied in his "Age of the Human Race." How much spirit and life in this primitive work of art! Or read what Fraas, in the "Journal of the German Society for Anthropology," March, 1874, reports about the picture of a grazing reindeer, engraved on a knife handle made of the horns of a reindeer, which was lately found in the cave of Thayngen near Schaffhausen, and which surpasses in beauty all rough drawings thus far found. The whole bearing of the animal--the muscles of the legs and the head, the form of the many-branched antlers, with the wide-spread eyes, the representation of the hair upon the body and under-jaw--all disclose a real artist among those savages. This is also to be taken into consideration: that those men, whose traces we find, could possibly have been the descendants of more noble predecessors, driven {91} off and degenerated, just as well as they could have been representatives of the whole former condition of culture of mankind. In England, where the questions of the first condition of culture of mankind are very warmly discussed, the Duke of Argyll particularly, in his "Primeval Man," advocates these views, and very forcibly calls attention to the fact that thus far the places of the discovery of the earliest traces of man undoubtedly lie very far from the original home of the human race; while Sir John Lubbock, in his "Origin of Civilization" and in his "Prehistoric Times," and also Tylor in his "Beginning of Culture" and in his "Early History of Mankind," take the opposite view of a progress of mankind from the most uncultivated beginnings. Archæology, as a whole, seems to do no more than admit that its results can be incorporated into the theory of an origin of the human race through gradual development, _if_ this theory can be shown to be correct in some other way, and that its results can just as well be brought into harmony with a contradictory theory. _Comparative ethnology_ gives us quite a similar result. It is true, there are races of mankind in the lowest grades of human existence. It is well known how Darwin, in his voyage on board the "Beagle," got one of his first vivid impressions of the possibility of an evolution of man from the animal world, by seeing the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego; and it is remarkable that the arms, tools, and furniture, used by the lowest savages, are very similar to the earliest remains of civilized races found on earth. The conclusion lies extremely near, that the savages simply remained in earlier stages of human culture; and an ethnographic picture of mankind {92} at present would in a similar way give an approximately correct view of its former development, as the natural zoölogical and botanical system of the present fauna and flora must give us at the same time the key to their pedigree; supposing the Darwinian theory to be correct. If it were so, ethnology would be an altogether inestimable help for the exploration of the descent and development of the human race. For the extremely few and rare fossil remains of man--which, moreover, do not give us any answer to the most important questions in regard to the mental and moral quality of the primitive man--would be rendered complete by living examples of the kind, which remained at the old stages of development. But much is still wanting, before the followers of an evolution theory dare to use ethnology directly as a primitive history of the development of mankind, prepared and preserved for them. Especially the before-mentioned objection of the Duke of Argyll--that the lowest savages of our time can just as well be depraved as be men who remained stationary in the process of development--has here increased weight. Moreover, even with the savages of to-day, a rude state of their tools and a low condition of their mental and moral life are not so nearly parallel as to allow unrestricted conclusions to be drawn. Finally, we still know too little about the state of culture of the savages; and the deeper and higher the intellectual and ethical possessions of mankind are, the presence of which among the savages is in question, the more uncertain is our knowledge. This is especially true of the most important question in this connection--the question as to the existence {93} or absence of an idea of God, and the different stages of development of religious ideas. While some assume as an established fact, that there are savage tribes without any idea of God or any religion, and even give the names of these tribes, especially of some from the interior of South America; while Sir John Lubbock systematically enumerates seven stages of religious development, from atheism to the connection of religious with moral conceptions, and lets each single race run through these stages in an identical series until it either remains on one of the seven stages or arrives at the highest: yet, on the contrary, other equally trustworthy scientists assert that there is not a single human race without some idea of religion and of a God--indeed, not a single race without a monotheistic presentiment--and that all heathenism, down to its most degenerate stages, consists not so much in a non-recognition of a God as in ignoring him. They call especial attention to the difficulty of getting acquainted with the ideas of a savage tribe without living with it through many years and being intimate with its language and customs, and especially without enjoying the unrestricted confidence of the tribe. Mutual misunderstandings, a suspicious reserve, evasive and untrue answers to questions, are entirely unavoidable without those conditions. At any rate, the fact deserves attention, that those who have been longest and most active among savages, and who enjoyed their confidence to the fullest extent, all reached this result: they found them not only not without religion, but also not without a presentiment of the monotheistic idea of God. Livingstone, for instance, expressed this idea decidedly of all the African tribes {94} with which he became acquainted; and Jellinghaus gives the same evidence in regard to the Kols in South Asia. The _anatomic_ results of ethnology are more favorable to the descent theory, although they too lead no farther than to the conclusion that the skull-forms of the lowest tribes represent a lower stage of formation than those of the higher, and that these lower skull-forms are relatively nearer to the ape-form than the higher, but that they are still separated from it by a wide interval. It appears, then, that even ethnology does not lead us essentially nearer the solution of the question than archæology and geological anthropology. The relatively strongest support to the evolution theory is given by _comparative philology_; and since language is the most important and most decisive of all the distinctive characteristics which separate man and animal[5], this science deserves especial consideration. In the realm of the natural sciences, the enormous progress of palæontology on the one hand and of systematic zoölogy and botany on the other took place step by step together, and thus prepared the way for Darwin's idea--which, from the rich material of analytical investigations, only tries to draw the simple synthesis, and to show at the same time in the zoölogical and botanical _system_ a representation of the zoölogical and botanical _history of development_. In quite an analogous way, a process took place in the linguistic realm which in independent investigations prepared the way for Darwinism, and now, since Darwin's theory has sought {95} acknowledgment in the realm of natural history, brings again Darwin's ideas to the support of philology. Linguistic and ethnographic investigations, especially the linguistic works of the missionaries, long ago resulted in gathering rich material from the storehouse of the language of races now living, and the latest works in the realm of historical, etymological, and comparative philology had traced the branches and twigs of the better known languages to stems and roots lying far back. The result of the comparison soon became the same as in the realm of the organic world: what presented itself in the system of the living languages as a lower form, seemed to represent itself as the older and more original form also in the history of languages. Therefore, all the prominent linguistic investigators found themselves more and more urged to accept a theory which declares language, this entirely specific characteristic of man, to be subject to the same laws of development from the simpler and most simple forms as the world of the organic. Long ago so celebrated a man as Jacob Grimm,--"Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache" ("The Origin of Language"), Berlin, Dümmler--following the footsteps of Wilhelm von Humboldt, had established a theory, according to which language is "not created, but produced by the liberty of the human will;" and judging from many of his Darwinistic utterances concerning the origin and development of language, he had traced its development in such a way as to arrive at the conclusion that artless simplicity in the unfolding of the senses is the first period of its appearance. The scientists divide all the languages of the earth into three great groups: first, the monosyllabic, {96} isolating, radical, or asynthetic languages; second, the agglutinant, terminational, or polysynthetic languages; third, the inflectional languages. They are of the opinion that even the languages of highest rank--the inflectional--very probably took a starting-point from the asynthetic languages, and a course of development through the agglutinants, and that in like manner the agglutinants have behind them an asynthetic period. Thus they trace all the languages back to certain _roots_, which are more or less common to the different groups of languages. To the question that now arises--_How did these roots originate?_--the linguists give us three different answers. The onomatopoetic theory, called by Max Müller the Wow-Wow Theory, traces them to imitations of the sound (W. Bleek, G. Curtius, Schleicher, Wedgewood, Farrar); the interjectional theory, called by Max Müller the Pooh-Pooh, or Pah-Pah Theory, traces them to expressions of the senses (Condillac); a third theory declares the roots to be phonetic types (Max Müller, Lazar Geiger, Heyse, Steinthal); while it is still an open question, whether the attempts at explanation of these types must here come to a stand-still for the present, as Max Müller thinks, or whether, according to Lazar Geiger, we can trace the first root-expressions especially to impressions of light and color. The reasons from which Max Müller, in his "Lectures on the Science of Languages" (Vol. I, Lect. IX), rejects the first two theories and proves the third, are quite convincing. Even if, in a purely hypothetical way, a language could be thought of _in abstracto_, the roots of which only consist in imitations of sounds or interjections, still in the _really existing_ languages, {97} so far as we can trace back and uncover their roots, the roots imitating sounds and the interjectional roots form only a small and entirely isolated minority, which neither shares in, nor is capable of development; they stand like "dead sticks in a live hedge." By far the greater number of roots, and all which are capable of development, express abstractions from visible objects, conditions and activities, and therefore presume a human intelligence, reflecting with self-consciousness, which formed and used the roots. Now Max Müller sees, back of this period, still open to science, in which the root-elements of the human languages were fixed, a long period of exuberant and unhindered growth of the elements of language, in which the roots were separated from the multitude of nascent tones by elimination or natural selection in the struggle for existence. In this realm, which is no longer open to investigation, the naturalistic and the linguistic friends of the evolution theory are now in entire accord. Wilhelm Bleek, in his small, but very noteworthy essay, "Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache" ("Origin of Language"), Weimar, Böhlau, 1868, p. 11, uses this ingenious figure: what the animal world possesses analogous to language, takes about the same position as, in the art of printing, the block-print does in relation to printing with movable types. On page 12, he sees in the communication of the emotions among animals the sources from which under favorable conditions (in consequence of which the separation of language into articulated parts became possible) human language might have originated. This idea, which is closely joined to the interjectional theory, Darwin meets {98} with a related idea, depending upon the onomatopoetical theory, when he says, in his "Descent of Man": "Since monkeys certainly understand much that is said to them by man, and when wild, utter signal-cries of danger to their fellows, may not some unusually wise ape-like animal have imitated the growl of a beast of prey, and thus told his fellow-monkeys the nature of the expected danger? This would have been a first step in the formation of language." But philology, from the point where it goes farther back in search of the roots of language, leaves the safe ground of knowledge and commits itself to the fluctuating ocean of conjectures; and since also the scientific evolution theory has only a hypothetical value, the support of a hypothesis in the one science by a hypothesis in the other naturally adds no weight to its probability, either for the one or the other. Besides, we must not overlook the fact that the very point in the history of the development of languages on which the investigation, as it looks backwards, must at present pause--namely, the existence of linguistic roots--presumes a faculty of abstraction which can not be thought of without self-consciousness. Therefore archæology, comparative ethnography, and comparative philology, show us quite clearly a _development_, but not an _origin_ of mankind through development. Yet they do show an already existing development of mankind; for all three sciences lead back to starting-points, where mankind already existed with all the essential attributes of mankind, and leave us without answer to our questions as to the conditions lying still farther back. Their results we can {99} without difficulty harmonize with a theory which supposes mankind to have originated by evolution, provided such a theory could be confirmed from another side; but they agree just as well with a contrary theory, which excludes the origin of mankind by gradual development. Taking, thus, everything into consideration, we come to the conclusion that the evolution theory, like the descent theory, is so far only a hypothesis--and, indeed, a hypothesis which as such has a much more problematical character than the descent theory. For while in regard to the latter we had to say that we have either this explanation or none of the origin of the higher species, with the evolution theory there is not even room for this alternative. For even in case of its failure, a descent of one species from another through heterogenetic generation is certainly very possible. Besides, it is not only possible, but even probable, that both theories--that of heterogenetic generation and that of gradual development--may have to share with one another in the explanation of the origin of species; and even that, especially for the lowest species and for the beginnings of the main types, primitive generation also has its share in the establishment of the paternity. The evolution theory could only pass beyond the rank of a hypothesis, if we should succeed in showing the impelling forces of such an origin of species through development. Such an attempt can be made in two ways--the metaphysical and the scientific-empirical. The first, the metaphysical, although it may be justified in its general principles, will always, from the point at which it attempts to approach the concrete questions as {100} to the origin of single species, expose itself to the fate of being _a priori_ rejected by science as unjustified, and of being _a posteriori_ confuted by facts--a fate which it has richly and clearly experienced in the first half of our century. But the discussion of the metaphysical way does not belong to the present purely scientific part of our investigation; it will, however, be shortly taken up again in Book II. The other way, the scientific-empirical, will have to be looked upon as correct when it can show the impelling forces of development in such powers and laws as are either still active to-day or at least have their points of connection in powers and laws active to-day. Such an attempt is the selection theory. We have already in Chap. II, § 1 and 2, given an outline of this theory, and have only yet to discuss its present state of tenability. § 3. _The Theory of Selection._ The selection theory also is not entirely without support in the realm of observed facts. How simply it explains the fixedness of the differences of closely related species arising from their geographical and climatical home! how simply the similarity of the color of many animals from the color of their abode, through which they have protection against persecution! how simply the so-called _mimicry_--_i.e._, the similarity of certain species in form and color with form and color of entirely different species in the midst of which they live, a similarity which often gives them protection against persecution! The best known examples of this, in our regions, are the spinning caterpillars, which in a state of rest look strikingly like a twig of a tree or a shrub on which {101} they live. In other regions there is a multitude of the most striking freaks of nature of this kind--for instance, butterflies and other insects, which at rest look like the leaves of plants under which they live; butterflies living among other butterflies which, by an offensive odor, are protected against persecution, and although they are themselves a favorite food for birds, carrying the form and color of that badly-smelling family of butterflies. We can also add the orchideæ, and their resemblance to bees, flies, butterflies, spiders, etc. A. R. Wallace and Darwin themselves recur often to these striking appearances. But herewith we have mentioned nearly every support which the selection theory has on the ground of observed facts. More numerous and more weighty are the objections to it. First of all, we have to state that the selection theory no longer enjoys that protection which the descent and evolution theories can justly claim, against the main objection, mentioned in Chap. III, § 1, to all the ideas of descent, development and selection. That main objection is the permanence of species, observed through thousands of years; and the defense with which the descent and evolution theories successfully weaken it, is the statement of the fact that, since man appeared, no new species has originated, and that therefore the principle of the generation of species seems to have come to a stand-still. Now this fact is no longer in favor of the selection theory, but directly repugnant to it. For the selection theory expressly declares the origin of species through agencies that are all active still, and, therefore, if they really suffice to explain the origin of species, would not only have to generate new species, {102} but also to develop _all_ the existing species. All those circumstances which, according to the selection theory, have led to change of species, are just as active to-day as they are supposed to have been from the beginning of organic life; and the effect which we observe is not change but permanence of species. The individuals still have individual qualities; they still have the tendency to inherit, in addition to the qualities of the species, those of the individual; the individuals still change their abode, and therewith also their conditions of life; a natural selection still takes place in the struggle for existence; and what is the result? From an observation stretching over thousands of years, we find nowhere an effect of natural selection going farther than alterations in growth and color and purely external changes in form. All the dispositions of organisms and their reciprocal action aim not at increasing the individual differences, but at reducing them to the average character of the species. When the species change their abode or their conditions of life, they either perish or remain constant; at least, with the exception of the slight modifications before mentioned. Even those alterations which artificial breeding produces, have a tendency to return to the original species: as soon as cultivated plants and domestic animals are left to themselves, they run wild, _i.e._, they reassume their original qualities. Even the bastard-formations either cease to be fertile, or, remaining fertile, finally return to one or the other stem-form of the originally crossed species. Nor can we oppose to these facts the consideration that the period of time during which mankind has observed the organisms is too short. For the permanence of very many {103} species can be traced through thousands of years, and the shortness of the period of our observations is amply counterbalanced on the one hand by the multitude of species from all parts of the organic systems which come under our notice, on the other by the immense alterations in the conditions of existence to which man submits plants and animals. How great, for instance, are the alterations in the conditions of existence which tropical plants undergo in our hot-houses and gardens! And the only alteration they show is that they are stunted and only bear blossoms with difficulty and fruits with still greater difficulty.[6] Now, if the ever-active selection principle does not produce in thousands of years even minimum alterations which can be observed, science certainly is justified in doubting for the present the asserted effect of that principle. Thus not only are the _facts_ directly opposed to the autocracy of the selection principle; but _logic_ is also none the less so. For, under the most favorable circumstances, selection would only explain the _preservation_ and perhaps also the _increase_ of useful qualities and organs, _if_ the same are already in existence and have shown themselves useful to the individual; but would not explain their _origination_. This would rather most emphatically be left to _chance_. According to the strict selection theory, it would be _pure chance_ that among the thousands and thousands of individual qualities of the individuals of a species, such qualities are always existing as offer advantages to the individual in his struggle for existence. And it would be a second series of chances, which from generation to generation would {104} have to coincide with the first, that among the individual qualities advantageous to the individual and making it victorious in the struggle for existence, there should be found always just those qualities which develop the species and raise it to a higher rank and order in the zoölogical and botanical systems. But the total of improbabilities which would have to be overcome continually in this theatre of chance, would in the course of generations necessarily amount to infinity. Thus, in the very beginning, insuperable doubts arise as to how we can explain from two causes the world of organisms which is so richly, beautifully, and systematically arranged. The first of these causes is the inclination to individual alteration, inherited indeed in the organisms, but in itself absolutely indifferent, for the systematical idea in the framework of the organic systems and for the progressive element in the development. The other is the struggle for existence and natural selection, which approaches the organisms purely from without like individual variability, must as a whole appear a necessity, but in each single case in the concrete mixture of coinciding circumstances, would seem a work of chance for the individual which is to be changed. Moreover, it is a demonstrable impossibility to explain the origin of just those organs and members in the structure of organisms which are systematically the most significant and functionally the most important, by means of natural selection. It is true that many of these organs and members, in their perfected state, offer to the organism an immense advantage over lower organisms; but if they had been originated through gradual development, they would have been in their first {105} beginnings and earlier stages of development at least quite indifferent, often directly obstructive to the individual in its struggle for existence, and therefore would have been called into existence and developed by agencies which had an effect directly counteracting natural selection. How high, for instance, stand the vertebrates above the invertebrates! Yet how could the first deviation from the ganglionic system of the nerves of the invertebrates to the cerebro-spinal system of the vertebrates have occurred?--and, especially, how could the first deposit of the vertebral column have procured any benefit to the individual in the struggle for existence? We quote this objection from Karl Planck's "Wahrheit und Flachheit des Darwinismus," ("Truth and Platitude of Darwinism"), Nördlingen, Beck, 1872. Still more striking is the insufficiency of the selection theory for the explanation of the origin of the organs of motion in the higher classes of vertebrates. A. W. Volkman says of it, in his instructive lecture, "Zur Entwickelung der Organismen," ("Development of the Organisms") Halle, Schmidt, 1875, p. 3 ff.: "Without doubt, animals with extremities will come from animals which lacked extremities. Now if the metamorphosis originated in the course of one generation, the animals with extremities would have an advantage over the rest, which ought to show itself in the natural selection; but if the development of an extremity needs 10,000 generations, the individual in which the process of the development begins produces 1/10000 of the extremity and the advantage, resulting therefrom is reduced to zero. For an organ can only be of advantage when it performs its functions; and on {106} the first of the 10,000 stages of development the extremity can not perform its functions. Just think of the cetacea! Of the hind extremity, only its carrier, the pelvis, has been developed; and even this is only represented by the two hip-bones, hanging in the flesh. As to the python, the hind extremities are more complete, but they lie hidden under the skin, and therefore are of no use for local movement. Such examples show that in the history of the development of an organ thousands of years may pass, and numerous generations may arise and disappear, until it reaches that grade of perfection where it is of use to its owner. How therefore, can we look upon such an organ, when finally it is perfect, as a product of selection in the sense of Darwin?" We find the scientific objections to the selection theory collected in detail in the before-mentioned works of Wigand, Blanchard, His, von Baer, and especially in Mivart's "Genesis of Species," (London, MacMillan, 1871); and it is a praiseworthy testimony of Darwin's love of truth, that lately he himself, the originator of the selection theory, willingly admits these weak points in his theory,[7] while Häckel and many of his followers {107} in Germany still stoutly reject every doubt of the autocracy of the selection principle. In summing up all we have said thus far about the theories of descent, of evolution, and of selection, we still find all three solutions of the scientific problems to be hypotheses, but hypotheses of very different value. The idea of descent has the most scientific ground; it will, as a permanent presupposition, govern all scientific investigations as to the origin of species, even if it does not exclude the idea of an often-repeated primitive generation of organisms--especially of those that stand still lower in development. More uncertain and less comprehensive is the position of the evolution theory; in all likelihood, the idea of an origin through development will have to share the sovereignty with the idea of origin by leaps through metamorphosis of germs. Still more unfavorable is the state of the selection theory. It possesses the merit of having started the whole question as to the origin of species; it may explain subordinary developments; natural selection may have coöperated as a regulator in the whole progress and the whole preservation of organic life. Ed. von Hartmann, in his essay, "Truth and Error of Darwinism," (Berlin, Duncker, 1875), on page 111, compares its functions with those of the bolt and coupling in a machine; but that the driving principle which called new species into existence lay or originated _in_ the organisms, and did not approach them from without, seems to be confirmed more and more decidedly with every new step of exact investigation as well as of reflection. * * * * * {108} BOOK II. THE PHILOSOPHIC SUPPLEMENTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. * * * * * THE PHILOSOPHIC PROBLEMS. Although, in accordance with the requirements of the task before us, we have to restrict ourselves to giving the results of natural science only in their general outlines, still we believe that we have not overlooked any essential result which is of importance to the question of the origin of species and of man. We have now finished our scientific review; and the conclusion to which we see ourselves brought is that natural science, in its investigation of the origin of species, has arrived at nothing but problems which it is not able to solve. There is a very great probability of an origin of species, at least of the higher organized species, through descent; but whether through descent by means of gradual development or of metamorphosis of germs, or whether with one group of organisms it is in this way, with another in that, is not yet decided. The attempt to explain their entire origin exclusively by the selection theory, must be regarded as a failure; all indications rather show that, supposing the descent principle correct, the deciding agencies which formed new species did not approach the old species out of which the new ones originated from {109} without, but that they originated or were already in existence within them. But what these agencies were, natural science is at present unable to state; and not only those scientists who reject every idea of a descent, but also those who are favorable to the ideas of descent and of evolution, rejecting only the selection theory, are at one in silent or open acknowledgment of this limit of our knowledge, be it permanent or temporary. But now the question arises: does the search after these agencies henceforth remain the exclusive task of natural science, and have we therefore simply to wait and see whether it will succeed in finding them? or have we to look for the answer to these questions, which natural science can no longer give, in another science--namely, philosophy? The first question we will have to answer in the affirmative, the second in the negative. It is certainly understood that _metaphysical_ principles must underlie all _physical_ appearances; and the right to define these principles, so far as they can be known, is willingly conceded to philosophy by the scientists, with the exception of those of materialistic and naturalistic tendencies. This mutual re-approaching of philosophy and natural science is one of the most gratifying, and, to both, most fruitful evidences of the intellectual work of the present generation. But these metaphysical principles themselves become cognizable only when the physical effects, whose cause they are, become accessible to our knowledge; and every attempt to find them _a priori_, or only to extend them _a priori_, will always fail through the opposition of empirical facts; or even if this attempt accommodates itself to the existing state of knowledge at a given time, it will always be overcome by the {110} progress of the empirical sciences. In the most favorable case, it can claim the value of a hypothesis which has to be put to the proof, whether it can be empirically confirmed and whether we can successfully operate with it in knowing the world of realities. But herewith it leaves the realm of pure philosophy, and makes the question of its right to exist dependent upon the decision of natural science. Since the decline of the doctrines of nature held by Schelling, Steffens, and Hegel, there has come to our knowledge, from the domain of philosophy, but one earnest attempt to explain the origin and development of organisms down to the concrete differences between single types, classes, and even orders and families, from one single metaphysical principle; and this attempt has been made by an antagonist of the descent doctrine. K. Ch. Planck, in "Seele und Geist, oder Ursprung, Wesen und Thätigkeitsform der physischen und geistigen Organisation von den naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen aus allgemein fasslich entwickelt" ("Soul and Spirit, or Origin, Nature, and Form of Activity of Physical and Intellectual Organization, Clearly Developed from a Scientific Basis"), Leipzig, Fues, 1871, and in "Wahrheit und Flachheit des Darwinismus" ("Truth and Platitude of Darwinism"), Nördlingen, Beck, 1872, makes the "inner concentration" the moving principle of the whole development of the world. He thinks that what belongs to the organism and to the soul has originated and developed up to man and his spiritual nature thus: that the creating centrum of the earth produces individual centra on its periphery, which tend more and more to bring into view the principle of {111} centralization, in its contrast to the purely peripheral form of existence, until it reaches its goal in man, with his centralizing spirit. We have no reason to reject the idea of a principle of concentration in the world and its parts; it is confirmed by observation, and shows itself fruitful in many respects. But in spite of the many ingenious and often suggestive ideas in the works of Planck, we have some doubt about a system which tries to explain the whole concrete abundance of the richness of formations and life-forms in the world, rising higher and higher up to spiritual existence and moral action, from the single idea of concentration, and makes this principle the mystical and mysteriously acting cause of a whole world and its contents. We doubt at the outset the success of this argument. We have especially the strongest objections to a philosophical system which submits all the contending physical theories of the present to the measure of that concentration principle, and from these purely metaphysical reasons takes side exclusively with the one or the other of the theories, or establishes new theories--from the theories of atoms and ether, of light and heat, down to geological questions as to whether universal revolutions of the world or a continual development took place. The solution of all these questions, in their full extent, we do not attribute to philosophy, but to natural science; although to a natural science which permits philosophy to define the ideas with which it operates and the general principles to which it comes. For this renunciation--which philosophy, however, can not at all escape--it will be the more richly rewarded in this, that it obtains the more certainly for its own work sure and sifted material. But all attempts which can not {112} submit to this renunciation, give only an apparent right to that view which Albert Lange, in his "History of Materialism," defends, when he banishes speculative philosophy to the realm of imagination. But in rejecting philosophy in the question of the causes of the development and organization of the organic kingdoms, we did not reach the end of the philosophic problems with which we are confronted. This whole question is itself only a segment of the problems before which we stand, and leads of necessity to other questions. Already within the series of development of the organic world, so far as it is investigated by natural science, we have found and named a point (at the end of § 1, Chap. II, Book I), where the competency of pure natural science comes to an end, and the question arises whether another source of knowledge--_i.e._, even philosophy--can not take up the investigation where natural science completes its task. This point was the _origin of self-consciousness_ and of _free moral self-determination_; consequently, the origin of that which makes man _man_. Going still farther back on the temporal and ideal scale of organic beings, we arrive at another point, which natural science no longer can explain, and that is the _origin of sensation_ and of _consciousness_. With the appearance of sensation and consciousness, the _animal world_ came into existence. Moreover, the whole scientific question as to the origin and development of species, so far as we have hitherto treated it, started from initial points where the organic and life already existed; it, therefore, leads of necessity to the further question as to _the origin of the organic and of life itself_. D. F. Strauss, {113} in his "Postscript as Preface," thus clearly and simply characterizes these still unfilled blanks in the evolution theory: "There are, as is well known, three points in the rising development of nature, to which the appearance of incomprehensibility especially adheres (to speak more categorically: which have not been explained thus far by anybody). The three questions are: How has the living sprung from that which is without life? the sentient (and conscious) being from that which is without sensation? that which possesses reason (self-consciousness and free will) from that which is without reason?--questions equally embarrassing to thought." But even the question as to the origin of the organic and of life can not be discussed without an investigation, leading us farther back to the question as to _the elements of the world_ in general. The _doctrine of atoms_, and the _mechanical view of the world_, are the scientific evidences of the efforts in this direction. So far as the attempts to solve these four questions start from the results of natural science and, from this starting-point of the known, try to solve the unknown, we will have to assign them in the encyclopædic classification of the sciences, to that department of philosophy which treats the doctrines of nature; and since our whole investigation starts from the Darwinian theories, and only tries to treat of what is properly connected with them, the attempts to solve these four questions offer themselves as the _naturo-philosophic supplements of the Darwinian-theories_. After concluding our treatment of them, we shall have to speak of still another view, which presupposes all these attempts at solution to be wholly or nearly {114} successful, and draws an inference from them which no longer belongs to the realm of natural science, but is a purely _metaphysical_ hypothesis; it is the _abolition of the idea of design in nature_. In connection with this, finally, we shall have to discuss the name which this view has lately assumed, viz: "_Monism_." Whatever further questions may arise, belong either to the special subdivisions of natural science and philosophy, or to theological and ethical problems. * * * * * {115} CHAPTER I. THE NATURO-PHILOSOPHIC SUPPLEMENTS OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. § 1. _The Origin of Self-Consciousness and of Free Moral Self-Determination._ If sensation, and its most developed form, consciousness, is a reflex of the material in something immaterial, which feels itself a unit in contrast to the material, and, where sensation rises into consciousness, is opposed as a unit to the material--self-consciousness again is the reflex of this sentient and conscious subject in a new and still higher immaterial unity; and this again makes this sentient and conscious subject, together with the sum of its feelings and ideas, its object, changing it from a sentient and conscious subject into a felt and presented object. Therefore it is clear, and will be the result of all thought upon these concepts, that as with sensation and consciousness, so also with self-consciousness, something new always comes into existence--a higher category of being, different from the merely material. The first is the form of being of the animal world; the latter that of mankind. It is exactly the same with the first appearance of voluntary movement, and again with that of free moral self-determination. The reaction of the sentient subject upon his sensations is something qualitatively different from the purely mechanical and physical action and {116} reaction of pure matter; although, in order to understand the possibility of a sensation as well as of a voluntary movement, we must admit that the physical qualities of matter must be such as to afford a basis and condition for sentient and reacting beings. That reaction is the reaction of something immaterial upon the material, even if it is entirely caused by the material and bound to the material. Now, with free moral self-determination a new subject comes into existence and activity in the individual, which makes that subject, reacting upon mere sensations and ideas, its object, and, as a new immaterial subjective unity, acts determiningly upon that subject which has just become object. This new subject, considered from the side of its receptivity, we call _self-consciousness_; from the side of its spontaneity, _free moral self-determination_. Whether we consider this freedom predetermined or not, does not at all alter the described fact and the qualitative difference between the form of human moral agency and that of purely animal spontaneity. For even those advocating determination must admit that the morally acting subject distinguishes itself from its object, and does not take its motives to action from the material and from the instinctive life which is bound to the sensual and dependent on it. Now it is true that all these circumstances in organized individuals which serve self-consciousness and free moral self-determination as their condition, presupposition, and basis, all the dispositions of the soul and the manifestations of life found in the animal world, will be worthy of the closest attention even on this account: because they form the basis, the condition, and (if self-consciousness and freedom are once present) an essential {117} part of the contents and object of self-consciousness and moral self-determination. But where the origin of man is discussed, the central point of the investigation is no longer the enumeration of those activities of the soul of man whose analogies we also find in the animal world, but rather in the answer to the question as to how that entirely new manifestation, self-consciousness and moral self-determination, came into existence or could have originated. This question is the more decidedly the central point of the investigation, since this new form, when once in existence, has for its object not only what already appears in the life of the soul of animals, but also receives a new object, which can only be an object of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination, and not of mere consciousness and instinctive life. These new objects are the ideas leading up to the conception of God and moral ideals. Now this very question as to the origin of self-consciousness and of free moral self-determination is wholly misjudged as to its importance, and given remarkably little attention by those evolutionists who are well versed in the realm of natural science. The question as to the origin of self-consciousness is either entirely ignored--as if self-consciousness must originate wholly by itself, if only those first steps of an intellectual and social life which the animal world also shows, are once present and properly developed--or the solution is put aside with the most superficial analogies. The question regarding free moral self-determination, on the other hand, is either likewise ignored, and for the same reasons, or it is supposed that it must fail of itself, if {118} only this self-determination is explained in a deterministic way. It is true, Darwin devotes several chapters of his work, "Descent of Man," to a comparison of the intellectual powers of man with those of animals, and these chapters are full of the most interesting facts and comparisons; but although his work comprises two volumes, he devotes to the origin of self-consciousness, individuality, abstraction, general ideas, etc., only a single page, and justifies his brief treatment with the assertion that the attempt at discussing these higher faculties is useless, because hardly two authors agree in their definitions of these terms. What he says about self-consciousness is really contained in two sentences, namely: "But how can we feel sure that an old dog with an excellent memory and some power of imagination, as shown by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures or pains in the chase? This would be a form of self-consciousness." On the other hand, as Büchner has remarked in his "Lectures about Darwin's Theory": "How little can the hard-working wife of a degraded Australian savage, who hardly ever uses abstract words, and can not count above four, how little can such a woman exert her self-consciousness, or reflect on the nature of her own existence!" And in Darwin's _resumé_ of his chapters on the intellectual powers of man and animals, he says, on page 126: "If it could be proved that certain high mental powers, such as the formation of general concepts, self-consciousness, etc., were absolutely peculiar to man, which seems extremely doubtful, it is not improbable that these qualities are merely the incidental results of other highly-advanced intellectual faculties: {119} and these again mainly the result of the continued use of a perfect language." If Darwin is thus not able to show us in the animal world a single real analogy which at all approaches self-consciousness, and, in order to supply this want, must have recourse to the purely hypothetical _possibility_ that it is not certain whether an old hunting-dog does not reflect upon the past joys of the chase; if by the uncertainty of the expression that self-consciousness might be an "_accompanying_" result of other faculties, he nevertheless gives us to understand that he can not find the _sufficient_ cause of the origin of self-consciousness in those other faculties; and, finally, if he closes the last mentioned quotation with a sentence which has for its premise the wholly illogical thought that language might have been able to reach "a high state of development" before the origin of self-consciousness and without its assistance: then, indeed, the result of all this certainly is that he has given no adequate consideration to the specific nature of self-consciousness. It is only under this supposition that it is possible for him to say: "Nevertheless, the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it certainly is, is one of degree and not of quality." The authors may possibly not agree in the definitions of the idea of self-consciousness--we ourselves perhaps are only an additional example in confirmation of this fact--; but whatever the definition may be, the fact itself remains, that self-consciousness does not stand as one of the intellectual faculties beside the others and coördinate with them, but, as an entirely new form of being, introduces a qualitatively new and valuable factor into the subject. That which precedes the {120} origin of self-consciousness--the purely conscious and not yet self-conscious life of the soul, as it shows itself with higher animals, especially with mammals--_may_ have been the necessary condition and requirement for the origin of self-consciousness. It certainly _has_ been so; and from this point of view, all these psychological studies of animals and psycho-physical investigations which are a favorite object of modern science, have a high value; but what has been called into existence by _means_ of conditions is not on that account the _product_ of those conditions. This very fact is one of the greatest mistakes of most of the modern evolution theories: that very often--and especially where they wish to draw metaphysical conclusions from their scientific results or hypotheses--they confound condition and basis with cause. Now it appears to us that, in quite an analogous way, Darwin overlooks or contests the fact that with _free moral self-determination_ something specifically new comes into existence. He certainly discusses the origin of the moral qualities of man more in detail than he does the origin of his intellectual qualities. He derives them, in their first beginnings, from the fixity, transmission and increase of the _social_ impulses and instincts. These, being the basis of the whole moral development, and leading in their more mature form to love and to sympathy, originated by natural selection; and the other moral qualities, such as moral sense and conscience, progressed more by the effect of custom, by the power of reflection, instruction, and religion, than by natural selection. Higher and lower, common and special, permanent and transitory instincts come into collision {121} with one another. The dissatisfaction of man when any of the lower, special, and transitory instincts have overcome the higher, common and permanent, and the resolution to act differently for the future, is _conscience_. Darwin considers that one a _moral being_ who is capable of comparing with one another his past and future actions and motives, of approving some of them and of disapproving others; and the fact that man is the only creature who can with certainty be ranked as a moral being is, according to Darwin, the greatest of all differences between man and animals. Here, again, the whole central point of the investigation as to the origin of man does not lie in the question of the origin of the instincts between which the moral subject, acting in moral self-determination, has to choose. For it is clear that the beginnings of these instincts are also present in the animal world. But the main question is, how did this faculty and necessity of choosing, this conscience and responsibility, this "moral sense," as Darwin calls it, originate? Now to this question we have a plain answer in the before-mentioned utterances of Darwin: It originated not as a _product_ of the social instincts--it only has these instincts for its preceding condition, object and instrument; but it originated as a product of other agencies, which act upon these impulses and instincts, operate with them, choose between them; and as these other agencies Darwin mentions the high development of the intellectual powers. That this is his opinion, we can clearly see from an expression with which he introduces his essay on the origin of "moral sense": "The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable--namely, that {122} any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, _as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man_." These intellectual powers which moral feeling and conscience require at their birth, are certainly, according to Darwin the power to distinguish oneself as subject from one's impulses and instincts, and to choose between them; _i.e._, self-consciousness. We shall have to admit fully this intimate connection between moral self-determination and self-consciousness; but we must admit, at the same time, that moral self-determination--this new form of activity in which moral activity distinguishes itself from all _merely_ instinctive activity--finds its sufficient explanation in the previous stage of the animal world as little as self-consciousness; and that moral self-determination has the condition and presupposition, but not the cause, of its existence in that which is also found in the previous stage of the animal world. The proof that the origin of moral self-determination finds its sufficient explanation in that which the previous stage of the animal world also has, would appear to have been given by Darwin only when he had succeeded in explaining the origin of self-consciousness from animal intelligence; but that he did not succeed in it, we think we have clearly shown. On the other hand, we willingly admit that the study of the social and all other instincts and impulses which are common to man and animals, and which in man form the object and instrument of his moral activity, has for us the highest interest, inasmuch as the only problem is to explain the conditions and prerequisites of moral self-determination--or, historically speaking, the conditions {123} and prerequisites of the origin of morally acting beings. Furthermore we have to say here also that condition and prerequisite are not identical with cause, and it is precisely the _cause_ of moral responsibility and of the origin of such morally responsible beings, which has not yet been discovered by the Darwinian theory. The followers of Darwin enter still less into the discussion of the question as to the origin of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination. Häckel--who, in his "Natural History of Creation" and in his "Anthropogeny," expounds his whole evolution theory in all its antecedent conditions and consequences--has, indeed, much to say of the different faculties of the soul of man and animals. He traces these faculties in the case of man down to the lowest state of the most degraded races, and in the case of animals from the kermes up to the bee, from the lancelet-fish to the dog, ape, elephant and horse; and he also treats of the so-called _a priori_ knowledge which "arose only by long-enduring transmission, by inheritance of acquired adaptations of the brain, out of originally empiric or experiential knowledge _a posteriori_," (Vol. II, 345). But we look in vain in his works for a treatment of the question as to the origin of the Ego--of self-consciousness. Nowhere does he enter into the analysis of the psychological ideas; he only compares the psychical utterances of different creatures, and thinks the whole problem solved when he says: "The mental differences between the most stupid placental animals (for instance, sloths and armadillos) and the most intelligent animals of the same group (for instance dogs and apes) are, at any rate, much more considerable than the differences in the {124} intellectual life of dogs, apes, and men." Or: "If these brutish parasites are compared with the mentally active and sensitive ants, it will certainly be admitted that the psychical differences between the two are much greater than those between the highest and lowest mammals--between beaked animals, pouched animals and armadillos, on the one hand, and dogs, apes, men, on the other." The fact that in the human individual consciousness and self-consciousness are gradually developed, is to him a proof that in the organic kingdom also consciousness and self-consciousness came into existence gradually, and, indeed, hand-in-hand with the development of the nervous system; and with this result he thinks that he has relieved himself from the task of showing the "how" of the origin of self-consciousness. This becomes clearly evident from a remark about the origin of consciousness, in his "Anthropogeny," where he says that, if DuBois-Reymond had thought that consciousness is developed, he would no longer have held its origin to be a thing beyond the limits of human capacity. Häckel likewise seems to regard the question of the origin of moral self-determination as solved or rejected, if only freedom is denied--which, indeed, is repeatedly done by him. A similar defect in the treatment of this question by evolutionists we find in the works of Oscar Schmidt, Gustav Jäger, and others. Even Emil DuBois-Reymond, who, in his celebrated and eloquent lecture on "The Limits of the Knowledge of Nature," given before the assembly of scientists at Leipzig, 1872, asserts so energetically that the origin of sensation and consciousness is inexplicable (see next section), seems to {125} take the origin of self-consciousness for granted, and as needing no further explanation, if only consciousness is once present. Since, then, the scientists leave us without a sufficient answer to the question respecting the origin of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination, we shall have to turn to the philosophers. Here, indeed, we find rich definitions and genetic analyses, but none that lead us any farther than to the information that consciousness is the necessary condition of self-consciousness; that animal instinct is the necessary antecedent condition of moral self-determination. Yet in the works of these very philosophers who are inclined to a mechanical and "monistic" view of the world, we find that they directly avoid the question as to the origin of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination. As soon as they are led near it, in the course of reasoning in their works, they suddenly turn aside again to the quite different questions of the connection between brain and soul, between physical and psychical, external and internal processes, etc. Evidently they feel that with this question they have arrived at the weak point of their system. That here is a weak point, we clearly see in the case of D. F. Strauss, a leading advocate of modern naturalism, and the greatest philosophic scholar of that school. It is true, in his "Postscript as Preface," as we saw before, he mentions the origin of self-consciousness as one of the points which need special explanation; but he seems to have made this acknowledgment more with the purpose of showing that DuBois-Reymond, in admitting the origin of self-consciousness to be explainable, has no longer any reason to contest the explicability of the {126} origin of sensation and consciousness; for in his work on "The Old Faith and the New," he did not enter into that question at all. On the other hand, he makes in his last-mentioned work a remarkable confession. In answering the question--how do we determine our rule of life?--he comes to speak of the position of man in nature, traces a law of progress in nature, and says: "In this cumulative progression of life, man is also comprised, and, moreover, in such wise that the organic plasticity of our planet (provisionally, say some naturalists, but that we may fairly leave an open question) culminates in him. _As nature can not go higher, she would go inwards._ 'To be reflected within itself,' was a very good expression of Hegel's. Nature felt herself already in the animal, but she wished to know herself also." But still stronger is the following expression: "_In man, nature endeavored not merely to exalt, but to transcend herself._" In § 1, Chap. II, we shall have to speak of this important acknowledgment of teleology in nature, which such an antagonist of teleology as Strauss makes in the above-quoted remarks about a progress in nature and a will of nature; but here we are more interested in the equally remarkable acknowledgment of the fact that man can not be explained from nature alone--that he is something which transcends nature. For that (according to Strauss) nature, in originating man, not only _intended_ to transcend herself, but really did transcend herself and, that she succeeded in her intention, we can infer from the moral precept which Strauss gives: "Do not forget for a moment, that thou art human; not merely a natural production." The result of our investigation, therefore, is that {127} with self-consciousness and free moral self-determination something specifically new came into existence which had its antecedent condition in a previous state of existence, but has not yet found its sufficient explanation in this antecedent state. § 2. _The Origin of Sensation and of Consciousness._ The limits of our knowledge show themselves still more clearly in the attempts to explain the origin of consciousness and its lowest form--sensation. Self-consciousness is without doubt ideally nearer to consciousness in this, that both are an immaterial activity; and yet we found no demonstrable bridge which leads from consciousness to self-consciousness. Still broader is the gulf between the material and the immaterial, between the unconscious and the conscious,--or, to describe the two realms with names which bring them nearest together, between that which is without sensation and that which has sensation: a gulf to bridge which philosophy also has vainly exerted its utmost efforts, as has been well known since the "supernatural assistance" of Descartes and the "preëstablished harmony" of Leibnitz. Wherein lies the real necessity that there should be sensation? How does the material become something that is felt? What is the demonstrable cause (not the condition, but the cause) of a sentient subject? To these questions, every science up to the present day lacks an answer. As is well known, DuBois-Reymond, in his previously-mentioned lecture upon "The Limits of our Knowledge of Nature," declares the origin of sensation and of consciousness to be one of two limits, beyond {128} which we have not only to say "_ignoramus_," but "_ignorabimus_." _In abstracto_, we might think of two attempts at bridging over this gulf: the first one is that we try to transform sensation itself into something material, and the other is that we attribute sensation also to that which, according to our observation, seems to be without sensation; namely, to matter and its elements, the atoms. Both of these attempts have been made--the former by D. F. Strauss in his "The Old Faith and the New," and by the English philosopher, Herbert Spencer, in his "First Principles of Philosophy;" the latter, first pointed out by Schopenhauer, was taken up and farther developed by Zöllner in his work, "Ueber die Natur der Kometen" ("Nature of the Comets"), Leipzig, Engelmann, 1872, and with special acuteness by an "Anonymus" in the work: "Das Unbewusste von Standpunkt der Physiologie und Descendenztheorie" ("The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Physiology and Descent Theory"), Berlin, Duncker, 1872. Strauss says, in the previously-mentioned work: "If, under certain conditions, motion is transformed into heat, why may it not, under other conditions, be transformed into sensation?" And Herbert Spencer says, in his "First Principles of Philosophy," (page 217): "Various classes of facts thus unite to prove that the law of metamorphosis, which holds among the physical forces, holds equally between them and the mental forces. Those modes of the unknowable which we call motion, heat, light, chemical affinity, etc., are alike transformable into each other, and into those modes of the unknowable which we distinguish as sensation, {129} emotion, thought: these, in their turns, being directly or indirectly retransformable into the original shapes." But motion--even the finest material motion, that of ether, (which, in consequence of the very important discovery of the conservation of force and of the mechanical equivalent of heat, made by Robert von Mayer, at present is taken to be heat)--is so decidedly a material process, the sensation of motion is so decidedly a reflex of the material in something immaterial, that the assertion of a transformation of motion into sensation seems to us only to change the point of view, and not to explain the difference, but to efface it. And we think that the appeal of Strauss from his contemporaries, who do not understand him, to posterity, who would understand him better and esteem him, has but little prospect of being operative. If that which has sensation and that which has it not, are to be brought genetically near one another, and hence the difference between the two at the point where the lowest sentient being has found its first existence, is to be made void or at least bridged over, then it is much more reasonable, and also in the line of Strauss's solution, to deny the difference between that which has sensation and that which has it not, and to do this in the sense in which we also declare that to be sentient which we have hitherto been accustomed to regard as without sensation; and we should likewise attribute sensation to the original elements of the world, be they called atoms or whatever one may wish. This is done by Zöllner and by the before mentioned "Anonymus." This conclusion is logical; it is even the only possible conclusion, if we once start from the axiom that the new, which comes {130} into existence, must necessarily be explainable from agencies previously active, and known to or imagined by us through abstractions and hypotheses. Zöllner is certainly right when, in his work which appeared before the lecture of DuBois-Reymond, he puts the alternative, "either to renounce forever the conceivableness of the phenomena of sensation, or hypothetically to add to the common qualities of matter one more, which places the simplest and most elementary transactions of nature under a process of sensation, legitimately connected with it;" as also when he says (page 327): "We may regard the intensity of these sensations (of matter) as little and unimportant as we wish; but the hypothesis of their existence is, according to my conviction, a necessary condition, in order to comprehend the really existing phenomena of sensation in nature." Only we shall do well to choose the first alternative for the present, and, with DuBois-Reymond, answer the question as to the explanation of the origin of sensation with an "_ignoramus_"; indeed, we shall take a surer road with his "_ignorabimus_" than by a plunge into that bottomless ocean of hypotheses--in spite of the protest of Häckel, who (Anthrop., page XXI) sees that scientist who has the courage to admit the limits of our knowledge, on account of this "_ignorabimus_", walking in the army of the "black International", and "marshalled under the black flag of the hierarchy," together with "spiritual servitude and falsehood, want of reason and barbarism, superstition and retrogression", and fighting, "spiritual freedom and truth, reason and culture, evolution and progress." For a solution of the question which simply denies all sharply-marked differences in the world, and explains {131} the new, which comes into existence with sensation, by the assertion that this new element is not new, but was already present, and that it exists everywhere, only we do not see it everywhere,--such a solution seems to us not to be the true way to interpret the problem of the sphinx. Even Ed. von Hartmann seems to infringe the impartiality of the true observer, when, in his "Philosophy of the Unconscious," he attributes sensation to plants. But when Zöllner says (p. 326): "_All the labors of natural beings_ [and, as the connection indicates, of all, even of inorganic natural beings] are determined by like and dislike;" and when "Anonymus" attributes sensation to all atoms and to all complexities composed of them, even to stone, then all reasonable conception of natural things and processes certainly vanishes into thin air. It will be remembered, however, that in treating the question of the origin of self-consciousness, although we were not able to solve the problem, nevertheless we had to ascribe high value to the investigation of all psychical processes on the low stage of sensation and consciousness, since they show us not the cause, but the condition and basis, of self-consciousness. Likewise, in the question as to the origin of sensation and of consciousness, although we are not able to solve it, we will willingly admit that we observe, even in that which has no sensation, qualities and processes which furnish the absolutely necessary condition and basis for sensation. For the same reason, we will also admit the manifold analogies of sensation which we observe in that which is without sensation. The whole system of symbols in nature which fills our treasury of words and penetrates, in a {132} thousandfold way, our scientific and popular, our poetical and prosaic speech, our thoughts and feelings, bears witness to the fact that that which is without sensation is also a preparatory step to sensation, and feeling both active and passive springs from it. However, a preparatory step, as such, is not necessarily the cause; and the fact and the acknowledgment of a correlation is not on that account an explanation. § 3. _The Origin of Life._ The third problem to be solved is the origin of life. As is well known, Darwin himself makes no attempt at explaining this problem, but is satisfied with the idea that life was infused into one or a few forms by the Creator ("Origin of Species," 6 ed., p. 429). His investigations and theories only begin where organic life, in its first and lowest forms, is already in existence. But lately there have been made, in the realm of the organic, discoveries of beings which take the lowest conceivable round on the ladder of organisms, and which in their form and structure are so simple that from them to the inorganic there seems to be but a short step. We can no longer mention as belonging to the bridges which are said to lead from the organic world to the inorganic, the often-named _bathybius_, discovered by Huxley, and so strongly relied upon for the mechanical explanation of life--a slimy net-like growth, which covers the rocks in the great depths of the ocean. For after scientists like K. E. von Baer and others had already declared it probable that this bathybius is only a precipitate of organic relics, no less a person than the discoverer of the bathybius, in the "Annals of Natural History," 1875, {133} and in the "Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science," 1875, has suggested that the whole discovery is but gypsum, which was precipitated in a gelatinous condition. Likewise the utterances concerning the simplicity and lack of structure of the lowest organisms, are to be accepted only with great reservation; for most of these organisms show very differently and very distinctly stamped structures; of this fact, anyone may easily convince himself, who has had the opportunity of observing with the microscope low and lowest organisms, and to admire their striking and manifold forms. Nevertheless, there are monera whose structure seems to be nothing but a living clod without kernel and cover, and which in that respect represent the lowest conceivable form of organic being and life. Now, relying on these discoveries, as well as upon the successful demonstration, by inorganic means, of organic acids in chemistry, and starting from the supposition that the first appearance of life must necessarily be explained by those agencies which are already active in the inorganic nature, many scientists have attempted the so-called _mechanical explanation of life_. This attempt has been made most logically and systematically by Häckel. He says that organic _matter_, organic _form_, and organic _motion_, in the lowest stages of the organic, which are almost the only ones to be taken into consideration when the problem of the origin of life is discussed, contain nothing at all which does not also pertain to the inorganic. In his opinion, organic _matter_ is an albuminous carbon combination, of which we have to presuppose that, like all chemical combinations, under certain physical and chemical conditions it can also arise in the realm {134} of the inorganic in a purely chemical and mechanical way. Organic _form_ which, in its lowest stages, is so simple, like the moneron and the bathybius, and which stands still lower than a cell, is, moreover, something which there is no difficulty in explaining from inorganic matter. Finally, organic _motion_ which alone is the last and lowest characteristic of the organic in its lowest stage--in which the process of life properly consists, and in which, therefore, we have to recognize the _punctum saliens_ of the whole question--is only an increase and complication of the merely mechanical motion of the inorganic, likewise explainable by mechanical causes. This view Häckel expounds in the thirteenth and partly also in the first chapter of his "Natural History of Creation," and explains the origin of the first and most simple organic individuals either through what he calls _autogony_ in an inorganic fluid, or through _plasmogony_ in an organic fluid--a plasma or protoplasma. In fact, according to him, the only correct idea is that all matter is provided with a soul, that inorganic and organic nature is one, that all natural bodies known to us are equally animated, and that the contrast commonly drawn between the living and the dead world does not exist. This is but a repetition, in a more rhetorical way, of the same idea which "Anonymus" expressed in discussing the question as to the origin of sensation. DuBois-Reymond--who, in his lecture at Leipzig, pronounced the origin of _sensation_ and of _consciousness_ a problem of natural science, never to be solved--is also of the opinion that the explanation of _life_ from mere mechanism of atoms is very probable, and only a question of time. It is well known that the experimental {135} attempts at originating the organic through chemistry are at present pursued with an eagerness that can have its stimulus only in the hope of success. It is clear that the main point of the question does not lie in organic matter or in organic form, but in organic _motion_, for even the specific of the organic _form_ originates only first through _organic motion of life_. If, therefore, life is to be explained from mechanical causes, it must also be shown that the merely mechanical motion of inorganic matter produces that motion which we know as organic motion, and _how_ it produces it. The idea of "increase and complication of the inorganic, merely mechanical motion," with which Häckel throws a bridge from the living to the lifeless or from the organic to the inorganic, does not yet give us that proof; it seems rather to be one of those pompous phrases with which people hide their ignorance and make the uncritical multitude believe that the explanation is found: a manipulation against which, among others, Wigand, in his great work, repeatedly protests, as also does the Duke of Argyll in his lecture on "Anthropomorphism in Theology," having especially in his mind the deductions of Spencer. For we may review the whole known series of mechanical motions and their mechanical causes, and imagine their mechanical increase and their mechanical complication the largest possible; and still the life-motion of the organic will never result therefrom. If such a keen psychical and physiological investigator and thinker, and such an authority in the realm of the motions of atoms and molecules, as Gustav Theodor Fechner--"Einige Ideen zur Schöpfungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen" ("Some Ideas about the History of the {136} Creation and Development of Organisms"), Leipzig, 1873, p. 1, f.--can find the whole lasting and effectual difference between the organic and inorganic in nothing else than in the way and manner of _motion_--namely, that the motion of the _organic_ molecules is different from that of the _inorganic_ molecules--and when he traces this difference with mathematical exactness, then an assertion which simply denies that difference, without attempting to show the identity of the two motions, to say nothing of proving this identity, is nothing more than a clear evidence that the mechanical theory has not yet succeeded in explaining the origin of life, and that those scientists who so haughtily look down upon the abuse of "_vital power_," to the efficacy of which their antagonists began to resort when their knowledge came to an end, make exactly the same abuse with their "_mechanism_." That organic motion, even the organic motion of molecules, _once present_, comes into dependence on the well known laws of mechanism, we naturally will not deny; any more than that the human body, when serving the will of the mind, follows in its motions the laws of physiology and mechanism. Preyer seems to make a mistake similar to that of those who efface sensation and motion, when, in an essay on the hypothesis of the origin of life, in the "Deutsche Rundschau," Vol. I, 7, he even effaces the difference between life and sensation, and simply identifies life and motion. "Self-motion, called life, and inorganic movement of bodies by agencies outside of themselves, are but quantitatively, intensively, or gradually different forms of motion; not in their innermost being different.... Our will changes many kinds of motion into heat, makes {137} cold metal to be red-hot simply by hammering.... Likewise inversely, as the law of the conservation of force must require, a part of the eternal heat of the metal can be now and forever transposed into the living motion of our soul." This whole manner of investigation and proof is one of those numerous unconscious logical fallacies which, introduced by Hegel, have gradually attained a certain title by possession. From the observation of a process, they abstract a characteristic, as general as possible,--as, for instance, from the observation of life the characteristic of motion; then they find that the process has the characteristic in common with still other processes--as, for instance, the self-motion of the living has the general characteristic of motion in common with the objective motion of the lifeless; and then they persuade themselves that the process which they try to explain is really explained by having found a quality of this process as comprehensive as possible. And in order to hide the falsity of the conclusion, they also give to the general idea, which they have found to be a characteristic of that process, the same name which the special process has,--as, for instance, they call motion life, no matter whether it is a motion of itself or a being moved, no matter whether it is performed from within or in consequence of an impulse from without; and then they say: "Behold, life is explained; life is nothing but motion." But it can be readily seen that life is also motion, and has therefore this characteristic in common with everything which is moved; but that the specific of that motion called life--namely, self-motion in consequence of an impulse renewing itself from within, and, as Fechner shows, {138} self-motion in a rotatory direction of the molecules, precisely the same thing which in distinction from other motions we call life,--is not explained, but simply ignored. There is still another bold hypothesis which we have to mention--namely, _that the organic germs were once thrown from other spheres upon the earth by ærolites_. Years ago this idea was declared by Helmholtz to be scientifically conceivable; then it was formally asserted and brought into general notice by Sir William Thompson, in his opening address before the annual assembly of the British Association at Edinburgh, in 1871, but rejected as formally and materially unscientific by Zöllner, in the preface to his work, "Nature of Comets," and again defended by Helmholtz in his preface to the second volume of a translation of Thompson and Tait's Theoretical Physics. However, this hypothesis also only defers the solution of the question, and, supposing its scientific possibility, leads either to the remoter question, how life did originate in those other spheres, or to the metaphysical assertion of the eternity of life and of the eternal continuity of the living in the world, and shows therewith very clearly the impossibility of its explanation. This inexplicability would still exist, if what is quite improbable should happen, namely, that the experimental attempts at _artificially producing organic life_ should be successful, and if thus the question as to the _generatio æquivoca_, which during the past decades so much alarmed the minds of scientists and theologians, should be experimentally solved and answered in the affirmative. For in view of the hopes of a possible explanation of life, which is expected to be the reward for the success of {139} these attempts, Zöllner is fully right in saying: "That the scientists to-day set such an extremely high value on the inductive proof of the _generatio æquivoca_, is the most significant symptom of how little they have made themselves acquainted with the first principles of the theory of knowledge. For, suppose they should really succeed in observing the origin of organic germs under conditions entirely free from objection to any imaginable communication with the atmosphere, what could they answer to the assertion that the organic germs, in reference to their extension, are of the order of ether-atoms, and, with these, press through the intervals of the material molecules which form the sides of our apparatus?" How little life is explained, at least according to the present state of our knowledge, also follows from the _insufficiency of all attempts_ at _defining it_. The latest and most thorough attempt at such a definition of life, with which we are familiar, is that made by Herbert Spencer in his "First Principles", § 25, and in his "Principles of Biology," Vol. I, Part I, Chap. 4 and 5. Having made thorough investigations, he arrives at the general formula: "Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." To this definition we will not make the objection that it is nothing but a logical abstraction from the common quality of all processes and phenomena of life; for it certainly lies in the nature of a definition that it can be nothing else but that. Nevertheless, we will state that such a definition of life not only does not lead us any nearer to the comprehension of its processes, and especially of the richness and the organization of its forms and functions, but that it {140} clearly shows us how little the origin of life is explained. For this very definition necessarily and obviously leads us to the questions: Whence do those internal relations originate, whence their adjustment to external relations, and whence the continuity of this adjustment? The answer to these questions this definition still owes us. Therefore, not only self-consciousness and freedom, not only sensation and consciousness, but also life and the organic, remain a phenomenon which--at least, according to the present state of our knowledge and reasoning--enters into the realm of the world of phenomena as _something new_ that can not be explained from the foregoing, although it presupposes the foregoing as the _condition_, not the cause, of its appearance; and no matter whether we have to think of the modality of its origin as a sudden or as a gradual one. § 4. _The Elements of the World, the Theory of Atoms, and the Mechanical View of the World._ The investigating and thinking mind, when it attempts to explain the appearances and forms of that which exists, finds itself led further and further back, until it finally arrives at the last elements of the world and of matter. Whether we take the problem of life as solved or unsolved, the living has matter and its subordination to the efficiency of all its chemical and mechanical powers in common with the lifeless; and the organic, in its first beginnings, stands extraordinarily near to, and is grown on the ground of, the inorganic,--if not according to the category of cause and effect, still according to that of condition and consequence, of basis and structure. Therefore we stand at last before the {141} question of the final elements of matter, which, indeed, constitutes organic as well as inorganic bodies. The answer to this question is attempted by the theory of atoms: the doctrine which teaches that the whole material world is composed of simple particles which are no farther divisible, and from whose juxtaposition the chemical elements--and, in respect to their other forms of existence and combination, the whole world of bodies, with all their forms, states, and changes,--are composed. This theory has not only the practical value that the physical (and especially the chemical) sciences can make and use their formulas most easily under the supposition of such simple primitive elements; but it also has the great theoretical merit that it has broken down the old barriers between _matter_ and _force_, and has thus promoted considerably our method of regarding the world of material substances. Toward this result, scientists and philosophers--and, among the latter, the thinkers and investigators of both views of the world, the theistic and the pantheistic, the ideal and the materialistic,--have worked with equal merit, and have equally enjoyed its fruits, with perhaps the single exception of so pure a materialist as Ludwig Büchner, who, it seems, does not like to give up his old doctrine of force _and_ matter as the two inseparable, equivalent, and equally eternal elements of the universe. That matter itself, even when looked upon from a purely physical standpoint, has an incorporeal principle; that the whole world of bodies, as such, has but a phenomenal character; that not force _and_ matter are the two empirico-physical principles of the world, but that matter itself must be a product of elementary {142} force active in the atoms; these doctrines have now be pretty nearly common property of natural science and philosophy. Investigators who like Wilhelm Wundt, rise from natural science to philosophy, or such as take their starting-point from philosophy--whether they be theists, like Lotze, I. H. Fichte, Ulrici, or occupy the ground of a pessimistic pantheism, as does Eduard von Hartmann,--all share this view and its fruits. But in spite of all these preferences for the theory of atoms, we should not forget that it still has but hypothetical value--that it is but an idea of limits, which indicates, where the scientifically perceptible ceases, and that every attempt at moving this limit still farther on must either fail and lead into unsolvable contradictions, or, if successful, only leads to new difficulties and unsolved problems. Already within that realm in which the theory of atoms is a supplemental hypothesis directly indispensable at present--_i.e._, within their application in physical sciences--we meet suppositions which raise great doubts and difficulties. Such a scientific difficulty occurs when the atomism of the natural philosophers supposes a double complexity of atoms, material atoms and atoms of ether: complexities which both penetrate one another, and are supposed to follow partly totally different, partly the same, elementary laws of force. Material atoms are subordinate to the law of gravitation, while atoms of ether are not; and yet both act legitimately upon one another,--as, for instance, when heat passes into motion and motion into heat, which certainly presupposes a law of power acting in common for both. Another difficulty lies in the atomism of the chemists; and still another {143} in the divergency of the aims at which the physical theory of atoms on the one hand and the chemical theory of atoms on the other seem to point. Chemistry is inclined to explain the difference of its numerous elements from the original difference of the atoms; and yet it is not at all certain that the elements of chemistry themselves are not composed of still more simple and less numerous primary elements. Many indications seem to point to such primary elements which are more simple in number and quality, and investigators even mention an element--hydrogen--in the direction of which we have to look for the way that will lead us to those primitive elements of matter. The divergency of aims, finally, consists in the fact that physical atomism prevailingly points to a conformity of the atoms of bodies; chemical atomism, on the contrary,--at least, according to its present state,--points to a dissimilarity among these. The hypothetical and problematical nature of the theory of atoms strikes us still more clearly when we try to analyze it philosophically. First, we meet that antinomy which we always find where we try to pass beyond the limits of our empirical knowledge by means of conception. For, if the atoms still occupy space, we can not understand why they should not be further divisible, and if they do not occupy space, we can not understand how any sum of that which does not occupy space, can finally succeed in filling space. It is true, this very antinomy has led to the overcoming of that dualism of force and matter which so long enchained science, and the overcoming of which we greet as a progress of our theoretical knowledge of nature. We no {144} longer look upon the atoms as material elements, but as centres of force. The antinomy has the further merit that, in the realm of the knowledge of nature, it brings to our consciousness the great advantage of a concrete perception and reasoning over purely logical abstractions. For Ulrici, in his "God and Nature," is right in calling our attention to the fact that we must think about the atoms, not in an _abstractly_ logical and an _abstractly_ mathematical way, but concretely; that we have to consider them, not as mere quantities, but as qualities; and that we can then easily arrive at the perception of something which occupies space, and which therefore, according to abstract conclusions of logic and mathematics, could still be thought of as divisible _in abstracto_, but which, even as a consequence of its _quality_, of its concrete natural form, is no longer divisible in reality. Nevertheless, in spite of all these remarkable attempts at overcoming the difficulties of the theory of atoms, that antinomy returns as often as we undertake to make that clearly perceptible which we have at last gained a partial conception of; and thus shows us, from this side also, that even with the theory of atoms we have arrived at the limit where not only our observation, but also the preciseness and certainty of our conceptions, ceases. By the atomic theory, we do not gain anything for the ultimate explanation of the world and its contents, not even if its present hypothetical value should be changed into a complete demonstration. For the whole theory but removes the question as to the origin of things from their sensible appearance to the elements of that appearance, and leaves us standing just as helpless before the elements as before the appearances. For {145} whence does the whole richness of the appearances in the world come? If the atoms are all alike, and their laws of force the simplest we can imagine, then their grouping into all the developments and formations of which we observe such an infinite and regularly arranged abundance, is not less unexplained than if we had not gone back to the theory of atoms at all. But if the atoms and their laws of force are different, the difficulty is not simplified, but doubled. For, first, the theory then owes us an answer to the questions wherein the difference of the atoms consists and whence it comes; and, second, the question we have to consider in supposing a uniformity of the atoms, is not disposed of or answered--the question, namely, as to the causes which bring these different atoms together to form precisely those complexities of atoms which we observe as the world of phenomena. This insufficiency of the theory of atoms in explaining the world and its contents, is another proof to us that, however great the practical value of this theory may be for the operations of physics and chemistry, its theoretical value consists essentially in the fact that it formulates more accurately the perception of the limits of our exact knowledge. Even the idea of Lotze, that the atoms (in themselves different) are not really the final elements of matter, but consist of still more simple but likewise different elements, seems to us more a decoration than an extension of the limits at which our perception has arrived; we stand before a double door, but find both doors locked. We agree with DuBois-Reymond, when he declares, in his before-mentioned lecture, the impossibility of perceiving the last elements of the {146} world, matter and force, to be the other limit of our knowledge of nature which, together with the impossibility of the explanation of the origin of sensation and consciousness, remains forever fixed. Likewise, the peculiar modification which G. Th. Fechner gives to the theory of the last elements of the world, cannot escape the charge of leaving the problem of the world scientifically just as unsolved as before. Fechner not only finds, as we have already mentioned, the difference between the organic and the inorganic in the difference of the mutual motions, but he also finds that the character of organic motions is exactly the same as that which the bodies of the universe have among themselves in their motions. Thus he distinguishes the _cosmorganic_ motion, which is performed in the whole of the universe, and the _molecular-organic_ motion, which we observe in the single organisms of the earth; he makes God the personal, self-conscious soul of this cosmical organism; and, in using the law of the tendency to stability, with which he completes the Darwinian selection theory, asserts that the organic in the whole of the universe, as well as in the narrow sphere of single bodies on the earth, is the first thing from which the inorganic was separated and became gradually fixed. Thus, in his opinion, the problem which up to the present has occupied investigators,--namely, how did the organic originate from the inorganic?--would have to be reversed to, how did the inorganic originate from the organic? Preyer would also reach a similar result with his above-mentioned theory of the identity of life and motion. For according to this theory, the living would {147} be as old and common as motion, and the organic but the dregs of life. We may, therefore, say that, without regard to the fact that neither pantheism nor theism will ever harmonize with Fechner's solution of this contrast which gives to God exactly the same position in the world as the soul has in the body, natural science will certainly treat with great reserve a cosmo-metaphysical system which so fully upsets all results of exact investigations into the history of origin and development, and has no other proof for itself than the identity, or at least the similarity, of the abstract formula according to which the molecular motions of organisms and the cosmical motions are performed. Although we thus have to deny to the proof of this identity or similarity the weight which Fechner gives to it, nevertheless it has still no small merit, since it throws new and clearer light upon the old thought, always attractive and yet so difficult to present,--of a macrocosmus and a microcosmus, which has been often enough treated with so much natural mysticism. Thus, in our inquiry into the development of things, we have successively arrived at four points, each of which urged us to make the confession that here something new came into existence, which can not be explained from the preceding conditions of its being; these four points were: the origin of self-consciousness, the origin of sensation and consciousness, the origin of life, and finally the elements of the universe. Arrived at the last problem, we see the confession of our ignorance increased to the still more comprehensive confession that we are really not able _fully_ to explain anything in the world. We are able to perceive a uniformity of law in the states and {148} changes of things, and to abstract therefrom common laws of nature; we can observe single objects, and perceive their states and changes in their connection with one another and in their dependence on those laws. But we are not able to explain scientifically either the origin of these laws or the last physical causes of the qualities of things, which follow these laws. We should reach the same result if we had not started from the objective world of the existing, as we were induced to do by our subject, but from theoretical investigations. Here also we should immediately find ourselves in a world of relations between subject and object, of a regularly arranged abundance of subjective and objective qualities, states and processes, of which the objective only come to our knowledge through the medium of the subjective, and of regularly arranged laws to which both the subjective and the objective are commonly subordinate. But why just these and no other qualities of the subject and of objects exist, why just these and no other laws reign, why just this and no other relation takes place between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, would remain unanswered as before. Amidst a generation which is so fond of reveling in the thought of an extension of all the limits of our knowledge, and is inclined to proclaim as true that which it wishes and hopes, investigators are not wholly wanting who very decidedly express their consciousness of these limits of our knowledge, and at the same time combine it with the most logical scientific reasoning and investigation. Even when in detail they reach these limits from the most varying points of view, and draw {149} them in different directions, they all agree in confirming the principle that it is one of the first and most indispensable conditions of successful investigation always to be conscious of the limits of its perception. Voices which remind mankind of these limits, are perhaps less popular, for man prefers to be reminded of the advances rather than of the limitations of his knowledge; but they are on that account the more worthy of our gratitude, for they keep us on the solid ground of the attainable from which alone sure progress in knowledge is possible. Among such philosophers we name Ulrici, and especially Lotze; among scientists, in the first place, two pioneers in their departments--namely, in the department of the mechanism of heat, Robert von Mayer--compare his "Bemerkungen über das mechanische Aequivalent der Wärme" ("Remarks on the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat"), and "Ueber nothwendige Consequenzen und Inconsequenzen der Wärmemechanik" ("Necessary Consequences and Inconsequences of the Mechanism of Heat"), Stuttgart, Cotta;--and in the realm of the development of organisms, K. E. von Baer--compare his "Reden und kleinere Aufsätze" ("Addresses and Essays"), 2 vols., St. Petersburg, 1864 and 1876. In this connection we have already mentioned the name of DuBois-Reymond. Otto Köstlin published two remarkable dissertations in this direction--"Ueber die Grenzen der Naturwissenschaft" ("Limits of Natural Science"), Tübingen, Fues, 2d ed., 1874, and "Ueber natürliche Entwicklung" ("Natural Development"), ib., 1875. In the latter he especially cautions against hastily confounding the laws of development of planets, development of the organic kingdom, and development {150} of the individual organisms. Recently, Wigand, in the second volume of his work already frequently mentioned, attempts, with an extreme energy which does too little justice to the representation and investigation of the still unsolved problems, to formulate the limits of the knowable. A contrary extreme, and of its kind a still more one-sided corrective of this too great stability, we have in those investigators who, by reason of the great progress which has been made in the realm of the theoretical knowledge of nature, allow themselves to be drawn on to the hope of still explaining all states and processes in the world--the spiritual and the ethic processes as well as the physical--from the pure mechanism of atoms; and who see in that which thus far has been mechanically explained, the only and the infallible way of explaining all that is still obscure. They call this view the _mechanical view of the world_; and, as "monism," put it in opposition to the "vitalistic, teleological, and dualistic view of the world." In order to obtain a correct view of this standpoint, we quote from Häckel's "Natural History of Creation", Vol. I, page 23, the following passage: "By the theory of descent we are for the first time enabled to conceive of the unity of nature in such a manner that a mechanico-causal explanation of even the most intricate organic phenomena, for example, the origin and structure of the organs of sense, is no more difficult (in a general way) than is the mechanical explanation of any physical process; as, for example, earthquakes, the courses of the wind, or the currents of the ocean. We thus arrive at the extremely important conviction that _all natural bodies_ which are known to us are _equally {151} animated_, that the distinction which has been made between animate and inanimate bodies does _not_ exist. When a stone is thrown into the air, and falls to earth according to definite laws, or when in a solution of salt a crystal is formed, the phenomenon is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life than the growth and flowering of plants, than the propagation of animals or the activity of their senses, than the perception or the formation of thought in man." Here crystallization, organic life, sensation, and formation of thought, are expressly put in one line of mechanism with the falling of a stone. In the following section we will have occasion to discuss this view as a _view of the world_; but we believe that the presentation of this idea, and the exclusive vindication of it as a complete view of the world, needs just here, where we still stand on the ground of the philosophy of natural perception, some critical sifting. In the realm of material nature, _mechanical_ explanation and general explanation is directly identical; _i.e._, a process of nature remains obscure so long and so far as its mechanism is not yet perceived, and in the same degree as its mechanism is perceived, the process also is explained. The uniformity of law in the occurrence of events according to the causal principle in the realm of material nature, can be approached by us in no other form than in that of mechanism, provided we understand by mechanism an activity according to law and which can be mathematically estimated as to size and number. So far, therefore, every scientific investigator in the knowledge of material nature takes his place on the standpoint of a mechanical view of the world. {152} But here we have gone to the full extent to which we are justified in taking a mechanical view of the world, and have fixed its limits in its own proper realm--the realm of the scientific perception of the material world; even if we do not join with Wigand in resigning scientific inquiry in that direction, and express the expectation that these limits are not fixed and not to be designated in advance, but will be moved farther and farther, and that not only in regard to the knowledge of the quantity of phenomena (which even Wigand, as a scientific investigator, naturally admits), but also in regard to their quality. In our researches hitherto we have often met such limits. We have found that in the realm of the material world such important phenomena and processes as life are at present not yet fully explained. By the mechanical view of the world, we have been led back to the last elements and to the most elementary forces of matter, but have been convinced that we are no longer able to find them with scientific certainty, and that consequently not a single quality of material existence is really explained and traced back to its last material causes, to say nothing of the transcendental causes which are entirely inaccessible to our exact scientific knowledge. Now there is another realm of existence, just as large as and, according to its value, still larger than, that of the material world, which, not on account of its scientific inaccessibility, but in conformity with its own peculiar nature, entirely withdraws itself from the mechanical view. It is the realm of _psychical life_; and, still more decidedly and more evidently, the _realm of mind_. As far as our observations go, the law of {153} causality reigns here also, and here also nothing takes place without a cause. But as here the _realm_ in which the causal law reigns is no longer material nature, so even the _form_ in which it is active is no longer that of mechanism. For we certainly cannot understand mechanical effect to be anything else than an effect of something material upon something material, whose uniformity of law can be exactly estimated mathematically as to size and number. Now if the application of mechanism to the psychical and spiritual realm does not express anything except the certainly quite insidious idea that here also causality reigns, it is nothing else but the substitution of another idea for the word mechanism--an idea which it never had in the entire use of language up to this time, and by the substitution of which the proof for a mechanism of the mind is not given, but surreptitiously obtained in a manner similar to the before-mentioned attempt of Preyer, surreptitiously to obtain the proof for the origin of life. But if the mechanical explanation of the functions of the mind really means that they also consist in an effect of the material upon something material, and that this effect can be mathematically estimated as to size and number, it is an assertion which has first to be proven, but which cannot be proven and cannot be allowed even as an hypothesis, as a problem for investigation, because it contradicts our whole experience. And it contradicts not only the conclusions drawn from most natural appearances, which, as is well known, are deceitful and even tell us that the sun goes around the earth, but it contradicts the philosophical analysis just as much and even still more directly and decidedly than {154} the direct impression--as became clear to us at the lowest point of contact between the material and the psychical, viz., at sensation, when we showed the impossibility of scientifically explaining the origin of sensation. It is easy to see what facts made it altogether possible to produce such a materialistic psychology and to give it at the first superficial view a certain appearance of truth; but it will not be difficult to detect its want of truth. According to our whole experience, the human mind is bound to the body; its proper activity, its whole communication with the material and immaterial world outside of it, even its whole mutual intercourse with the minds of fellow-beings, is performed by means of bodily functions which, as such, are subordinate to mechanism. Therefore "physiological psychology" certainly belongs to the most interesting of the branches of science which at present enjoy special care, and works in this realm, like those of Wundt, are worthy of the greatest attention. Now if these points of contact once exist between the material and the psychical and spiritual processes, so that material functions causally influence psychical and spiritual ones, and psychical and spiritual functions similarly influence material ones, there must also exist between the laws of material processes and those of psychical and spiritual functions a relation which makes possible such a mutual effect, and we must be able to abstract from it the existence of a common higher law of which on the one side the material laws, and on the other the psychical and spiritual, are but partial laws. Precisely here lie the indications which appear to favor materialism in psychology. But it is only an appearance. For, from the acknowledgment {155} and scientific investigation of a reciprocal action, to an identification of the two factors which act upon one another, is still an infinite step. If science is not even able to identify material motion and sensation, still less can it identify material motion and the spiritual and ethic activities. When this is done, it is done only in consequence of the same confounding of condition and cause which we had to expose on the occasion of the assertion of the possibility of explaining the origin of life or of sensation, and of consciousness or of self-consciousness. But we here also willingly admit that the realm in which causality reigns in the form of mechanism, aims at being the support, foundation, and instrument of another realm where causality still reigns, but mechanism ceases. How far investigation may still proceed in the direction of those interesting points and lines where both realms touch one another in causal reciprocal action, we do not know. We are hardly able to indicate the direction in which the investigation must proceed, and this direction seems to be assigned to it by the idea of _Auslösung_.[8] The idea of _Auslösung_, which plays such an {156} important _rôle_ in physics, seems to be still fruitful for the knowledge of psycho-physical life: bodily functions _lösen aus_ spiritual ones, spiritual functions bodily ones. But so much the more clearly does this theory show the limits of mechanism: mechanism reigns in the world of bodies from the _Auslösungen_ and to the _Auslösungen_, with which the mind induces the body to activity, and the body the mind; beyond these limits causality still reigns, but no longer mechanism. Now if thus the mechanical view of the world has within its own most proper realm--the realm of material phenomena--its limits, even if they are capable of being moved farther; and if it is without any scientific acceptance in the realm of soul and mind: its usurpations reach the highest possible degree when it pretends to {157} explain the last causes of things. For from its very nature it follows that it is only able to explain the reciprocal action of material things among themselves, when these things in their finalities, or the causes of their qualities and conditions, are already present, and the laws which they follow are already active. As to the origin of those qualities or their causes, and of these laws, this view leaves us entirely in the dark. * * * * * {158} CHAPTER II. METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSIONS DRAWN FROM THE DARWINIAN THEORIES. § 1. _Elimination of the Idea of Design in the World.--Monism._ From this mechanical view of the world, quite a peculiar conclusion has been recently drawn--not by Darwin, who does not give any opinion at all about the mechanical view of the world, as such, or about its extension and influence, nor, indeed, by Darwinians, not even by all followers of a mechanical view of the world, but only by a part of them; namely, by those who have in a high degree attracted to themselves the attention of reading people. This conclusion is nothing less than the _elimination of the idea of design in nature_. This phenomenon demands our attention. Heretofore, the proof of plan, design, and end in nature, at large and in detail, was looked upon as the most beautiful blossom and fruit of a thoughtful contemplation of nature; it was the great and beautiful common property, in the enjoyment of which the direct, the scientific, and the religious contemplation of nature peacefully participated. Now this view is to be given up forever, in consequence of nothing else than Darwin's selection theory. With an energy--we may say with a passionateness and confidence of victory--such as we were accustomed to see only in the most advanced advocates of materialism, Ludwig {159} Büchner, D. F. Strauss, Häckel, Oskar Schmidt, Helmholtz, the editor of the "Ausland" and some of his associates, and our often-mentioned "Anonymus,"--in a common attack, assail every idea of a _conformity to an end_ in nature, every idea of a goal toward which the development at large and individually strives; in a word, the whole category of _teleology_.[9] In order to be just in our judgment, we shall have to let the advocates of this view speak for themselves;--the advocates of _Dysteleology_, as Häckel, who is so extremely productive in forming new exotic words, calls it; or of _Aposkopiology_, as Ebrard, in his "Apologetik" ("Apologetics"), correcting the etymology, {160} somewhat pedantically calls it; or of _Teleophoby_, as it is called by K. E. von Baer, in humorous irony. The anonymous author of the book called "The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Physiology and Descent Theory", asserts that, while the descent theory but puts the teleological principle in question by withdrawing the ground for a positive proof--an assertion which we certainly have to reject most decidedly (compare Part II, Book II, Chap. I, § 2-§ 6)--the selection theory directly rejects it. Natural selection, he says, solves the seemingly unsolvable problem of explaining the conformity to the end in view, as result, without taking it as an aiding principle. And Helmholtz says: "Darwin's theory shows how conformity to the end in the formation of organisms can also originate without any intermingling of an intelligence by the blind administration of a law of nature." Häckel really revels in these ideas. He says (Nat. Hist. of Creat., Vol. I, p. 19): "These optimistic views [of the much-talked-of purposiveness of nature or of the much-talked-of beneficence of the Creator] have, unfortunately, as little real foundation as the favorite phrase, 'the moral order of the universe,' which is illustrated in an ironical way by the history of all nations.... If we contemplate the common life and the mutual relations between plants and animals (man included), we shall find everywhere, and at all times, the very opposite of that kindly and peaceful social life which the goodness of the Creator ought to have prepared for his creatures--we shall rather find everywhere a pitiless, most embittered _Struggle of All against All_. Nowhere in nature, no matter where we turn our eyes, does that {161} idyllic peace, celebrated by the poets, exist; we find everywhere a struggle and a striving to annihilate neighbors and competitors. Passion and selfishness--conscious or unconscious--is everywhere the motive force of life.... Man in this respect certainly forms no exception to the rest of the animal world." And on page 33: "In the usual dualistic or teleological (vital) conception of the universe, organic nature is regarded as the purposely executed production of a Creator working according to a definite plan. Its adherents see in every individual species of animal and plant an 'embodied creative thought,' the material expression of a _definite first cause_ (causa finalis), acting for a set purpose. They must necessarily assume supernatural (not mechanical) processes of the origin of organisms.... On the other hand, the theory of development carried out by Darwin, must, if carried out logically, lead to the monistic or mechanical (causal) conception of the universe. In opposition to the dualistic or teleological conception of nature, our theory considers organic as well as inorganic bodies to be the necessary products of natural forces. It does not see in every individual species of animal and plant the embodied thought of a personal Creator, but the expression for the time being of a mechanical process of development of matter, the expression of a necessarily active cause, that is, of a mechanical cause (causa efficiens). Where teleological Dualism seeks the arbitrary thoughts of a capricious Creator in miracles of creation, causal Monism finds in the process of development the necessary effects of eternal immutable laws of nature." Häckel's "Anthropogeny" also is replete with attacks upon a teleological {162} view of nature, which leave nothing wanting in distinctness and coarseness. On page 111, Vol. I, we read: "The rudimentary organs clearly prove that the mechanical, or monistic conception of the nature of organisms is alone correct, and that the prevailing teleological, or dualistic method of accounting for them is entirely false. The very ancient fable of the all-wise plan according to which 'the Creator's hand has ordained all things with wisdom and understanding,' the empty phrase about the purposive 'plan of structure' of organisms is in this way completely disproved. Stronger arguments can hardly be furnished against the customary teleology, or Doctrine of Design, than the fact that all more highly developed organisms possess such rudimentary organs." (Compare also Vol. II, p. 439: "The rudimentary organs are among the most overwhelming proofs against the prevailing teleological ideas of creation.") According to his opinion (Vol. I. p. 245), comparative anatomy may no longer look for a "pre-arranged plan of construction by the Creator." Besides, he calls it an anthropocentric error to look upon man as a preconceived aim of creation and a true final purpose of terrestrial life; and on page 17, of Vol. II, he supports this judgment by comparing the relative shortness of the existence of mankind with the length of the preceding geological periods: "Since the awakening of the human consciousness, human vanity and human arrogance have delighted in regarding Man as the real main-purpose and end of all earthly life, and as the centre of terrestrial Nature, for whose use and service all the activities of the rest of creation were from the first defined or predestined by a 'wise providence.' How utterly baseless these {163} presumptuous anthropocentric conceptions are, nothing could evince more strikingly than a comparison of the duration of the Anthropozoic or Quaternary Epoch with that of the preceding Epochs." And on page 234, Vol. II: "Hence it is that, in accordance with the received teleological view, it has been customary to admire the so-called 'wisdom of the Creator' and the 'purposive contrivances of His Creation' especially in this matter. But on more mature consideration it will be observed that the Creator, according to this conception, does after all but play the part of an ingenious mechanic or of a skillful watchmaker; just, indeed, as all these cherished teleological conceptions of the Creator and His Creation are based on childish anthropomorphism.... But it is exactly on this point that the history of evolution proves most clearly that this received conception is radically false. The history of evolution convinces us that the highly purposive and admirably constituted sense organs, like all other organs, have developed _without premeditated aim_." Strauss, in his "The Old Faith and the New," gives to this idea its philosophic and universalistic finish. In § 67-§ 70, he eliminates not only the idea of design in individual cases, but also the idea of a design in the world as a whole; allows us to speak of design in the world only in a subjective sense, so far as we understand it to be what we think we perceive as the common final aim of the concert of the powers, active in the world; and finds, when in such a sense it is spoken of as design in the world, that the universe reaches its end in every instance. Only the parts develop themselves, driven by the mechanical laws of causality, and after having lived {164} their period of life, sink back again into the universe, in order to make place for new developments and to prepare them in their turn. For the view of the world which the antagonists of teleology construct out of this "mechanical" and "causal" view, they, as we have repeatedly seen, have invented the name "_monism_." In contrast to all dualism in reasoning about the relation of body and soul, God and universe, time and eternity, and especially in contrast to the dualism with which the theistic view of the world is said to be loaded, monism claims that what was formerly divided into God and universe, force and matter, matter and spirit, body and soul, is but one; and it thus exhibits a reconciliation, a higher unity, of materialism and idealism, of pantheism and atheism, which unity in the scientific and the practical ethic realm has no antagonist to fight more energetically, and none which it is better able to fight successfully, than _dualism_, which the monistic view of the world, by a queer mistake as to the theistic position of God in nature, especially considers the whole theistic view of the world. The scientific antagonists of teleology show such a scientific intolerance against their own associates, that one of the latest exhibitors of Darwinism, Oskar Schmidt, in his "Theory of Descent and Darwinism," bluntly classes one of the greatest and most deserving investigators in the realm of comparative anatomy and palæontology, Richard Owen, of London, with the "'Halves' who, fearing the conclusions, with one word come to terms with the scientific conscience." And why?--because Owen still sees ends in nature, and by his inclination to the acceptance of a descent, does not allow himself to {165} be prevented from giving adhesion to a teleological view of the world. And this invention of monism is proclaimed to the world in such a full consciousness of its great importance in the history of culture, that Häckel closes his "Nat. Hist. of Creat." with the following words: "Future centuries will celebrate our age, which was occupied with laying the foundations of the Doctrine of Descent, as the new era in which began a period of human development, rich in blessings,--a period which was characterized by the victory of free inquiry over the despotism of authority, and by the powerful ennobling influence of the Monistic Philosophy." At the end of the lecture, next to the last, in the same Vol. II, page 332, he pays the following compliment to the antagonists of monism: "The recognition of the theory of development and the Monistic Philosophy based upon it, forms the best criterion for the degree of man's mental development." In his "Generic Morphology," and in the first edition of his "Nat. Hist. of Creat.," he, in a geological scala, which closes with the human period, even divides the whole past, present, and future history of mankind into two halves: first part, dualistic period of culture; second part, monistic period of culture. Still, we will not omit to mention, with credit, that this anticipatory historiography has discreetly disappeared from the geological scala of the following editions of his "Natural History of Creation." As to the further scientific consequences to which this anti-teleological monism leads, the advocates of it are in tolerable accord; although they are subject to the most incomprehensible illusions regarding the practical consequences of it, as we have seen in the above-quoted {166} concluding words of Häckel's "Natural History of Creation." As to the scientific consequences, they express themselves plainly enough: the belief in a living Creator and Lord of the world no longer find any place; everything, even all the rich treasures of human life and history, become a result of blindly acting forces; the history of the world, ethics, and all spiritual sciences, are in the progress of perception dissolved into physiology, and physiology into chemistry, physics and mechanism. In his "Natural History of Creation," Vol. I, page 170, Häckel frankly calls the whole history of the world a physico-chemical process. Whoever refers to a view of another person, is in duty bound to enter into that view, if possible objectively, even if he does not agree with it. The author of this book tries to comply with this obligation in all his representations, but must confess that in regard to the just described view of the world, he does not succeed in making it conceivable to himself in a manner to be justified even from a relatively scientific standpoint; a want for which, it is true, we have beforehand the explanatory cause in the quotation from Häckel's "Natural History of Creation," Vol. II, p. 332, given above. Perhaps it appears relatively conceivable, when it is asserted that the observation of an order, a connection, a development, a plan, in the world, leads to the perception of such a quality of the laws, primitive elements, and forces of the world, that something like it _had to_ result from them; but that it does not lead to the acknowledgment of a personal author of the world. We call such a view relatively conceivable, not because we agree with it--for we find a logic which, in {167} contemplating the universe, starts from an intelligent author of the world, infinitely less surrounded by difficulties than one contrary to it--but because the acknowledgment or denial of a living God is in the last instance not the result of any scientific investigation or logical chain of reasoning, but the moral act of the morally and religiously inclined individual, and because, if the individual has once refused the strongest factor of faith in God,--namely, his self-testimony in the conscience,--it is no longer impossible for the individual to ignore his other testimonies as such, or to declare them deficient. Now we certainly can say that we see order and many results in the world, which are conformable to the object in view, and in consequence of this observation must admit that no imaginable quality of primitive beginnings, elements, and forces of the world had caused this result, but that this result must have already been in the plan. But there certainly are imaginable, _in abstracto_, infinitely many possibilities of other elements and primitive beginnings of the world,--perhaps of some whose result would have been but an eternal chaos, or of others whose result would have been but an eternal rigidness, or of still others whose result would also have been a certain order and variety of phenomena and processes, but less beautiful than that of the really existing world. Thus, then, this world now exists as a _special chance_ of infinitely many chances; and who knows whether, in the course of thousands of millions of terrestrial years in the struggle for existence, it did not obtain its existence among infinitely many possibilities of worlds through a natural world-selection, and thus, by the result of its existence, fully legitimate its conformity to {168} the end in view? With this deduction, we do not make, as it may seem, an awkward attempt at rendering the whole standpoint ridiculous by a wild phantasy; but we quote it from a celebrated and otherwise very meritorious book, namely the "Geschichte des Materialismus" ("History of Materialism"), by the too early deceased Friedrich Albert Lange. The reader will find it, in the second part, page 275, simply a little shorter and, as it seems to us, less clear, but as the only "correct teleology" which Lange professes. This whole view, like all world-theories and cosmogonies of pantheism, naturalism, or atheism, and even like the latest of Eduard von Hartmann, is to us but a proof that the rejection of the reality of a living Creator and Lord of the world requires of its advocates mysteries and mysticisms of atheism compared to which the greatest difficulties of the Christian view of the world are but the merest trifles. Therefore, if that first and second step in the rejection of the highest intelligence and omnipotence as the final cause of the world, are once made, it is easy for us to comprehend still other supports which this view of the world draws to itself. However large the number of things in the world for whose existence we can give a reason, or of which we can show that that, which preceded, aimed at their appearance, still the number of those to which we can not ascribe aim and design is just as large. There are even phenomena enough which in their main effects appear to us directly irrational; as, for instance, those which operate destructively,--all the tortures which animals inflict on one another, etc. Besides, we can also find imperfections in the degree of the {169} conformity to the end in view in all those phenomena which appear to us as properly planned; for instance, the organic appears to us higher than the inorganic, and yet it is in its existence not only dependent on the inorganic, but is often destroyed prematurely by it. Of course, all these limits and barriers of our teleological perception are abundantly used by all antagonists of a teleological view of the world for the basis of their position. Furthermore, the way and manner in which man fixes his ends and reaches them, is essentially different from the way and manner in which nature acts. Man seeks to attain his ends with less expenditure of power and means, the more he acts conformably to the end in view; while nature, it often enough appears to us, when we have reason to imagine an effect of its processes also as the probable end of them, reaches this end only by an immense squandering of means--for instance, the preservation of organic species simply by the production of thousands of germs and eggs, most of which perish, and but very few of which are developed, and still less are transmitted. This is a difference to which Lange points, in order to reject a theory which recognizes a striving toward an end (Zielstrebigkeit) in nature, or at most to allow it a little place as the lowest form of teleology, and to reject every attempt to regard it as analogous to human striving toward an end, as _anthropomorphism_. Nature, he says, acts, as if a man, in order to shoot a hare, should in a large field discharge millions of guns in all possible directions; as if he, in order to get into a locked room, should buy ten thousand different keys and try them all; as if, in order to have a house, he should build up a town and {170} leave the superfluous houses to wind and weather. Nobody should call such actions conformable to an end in view, and still less should we suppose behind this action any higher wisdom, hidden reasons, or superior sagacity. It is true, Wigand is right in replying to this, that when we observe such things in nature, we have to draw the conclusion that the very end supposed by the observing man--in this case, the preservation of the species--is not the only end, but that it has other ends besides; as, for instance, richness of life, inexhaustible abundance, preservation of other organisms, etc. Besides, this is but a single side of the comparison between the action of man and that of nature; and from this side action of man, conformable to an end in view, appears as a higher form of teleology, that of nature as a lower. But there are other sides of comparison, which just as clearly strike the eye; nature builds from within in full sovereignty of its process over matter and form. Man approaches his materials from without; nature works with never-erring certainty (Häckel's latest theory, that nature _falsifies_ its laws and processes, can surely not be meant in earnest!); man often enough with error, false calculation, awkwardness, failure and capricious arbitrariness. In these directions, teleology of nature is infinitely superior to that of man. We must be very careful in using anthropomorphism as a term of reproach. It may be used as a reproach in warning against careless reasoning and hasty comparison, but the idea of anthropomorphism is so extensible that it can be extended over all human reasoning and conception. Are not the reasons on account of which the so-called anthropomorphism is to be rejected, often {171} enough just as anthropomorphistic as the ideas which are attacked? For instance, when the idea of the personality of God is attacked as an anthropomorphistic one, are not the reasons with which it is assailed exactly as anthropomorphistic as the conceptions which are to be assailed? Do we not derive all our reasoning, logic, our views, and in fact everything, at first from our human nature, and do we not in our most abstract reasoning always operate simply with the laws, as they inhere in our human nature? Is there even a single scientific description conceivable without its being full of anthropomorphisms? Even the works of Darwin which, according to the opinion of these opponents of anthropomorphism, destroy anthropomorphism and teleology, are the most striking proof in favor of it. The discovery of the general reign of the law of causality invalidates, as they say, the reign of the category of teleology; for the one category contradicts the other. Suppose it were so (we will, however, immediately see that the contrary is true) whence do we know that the category of causality has the preference over that of finality or teleology? The one, as well as the other, is anthropomorphistic, and is an undoubtedly necessary form of our human reasoning. We _believe_ in their objective validity, because we cannot believe that the sum of existences and the relations between the perceiving subject and the perceived object aim at deceiving man; we do not want to be robbed of either the one or the other category; but if the question is as to the preference of the one category over the other (which we contest), who knows whether the category of finality has not more reasons for its superiority than causality? Compare, in reference {172} to this whole question, also the clear analyses in the second volume of the work of Wigand, and the instructive lecture of the Duke of Argyll upon anthropomorphism in theology. Nevertheless, all the points against teleology thus far quoted can be understood by us as attempts at rejecting the _necessity_ of acknowledging a teleologically acting principle of the world--or, to express ourselves more clearly, of a living God--after having once rejected the deepest motive for this acknowledgment, namely: the self-testimony of God in the human conscience and mind. But it is one thing to declare that we are not obliged to accept a certain conclusion, and quite another to declare that we are obliged to accept directly the opposite of such a conclusion. It is one thing to declare that the phenomena in the world do not yet oblige us to suppose an author with a preconceived plan, and still another to declare that because I have found or still hope to find the causal connexion of phenomena conformable to the end in view, no author with a preconceived plan exists. This last assertion is one which the author of this work confesses not to understand, and in whose conclusion he cannot agree. Knowledge of the _origin_ of something certainly does not exclude the question _wherefore_ it exists, and does not even take its place, and when I have answered both questions satisfactorily, then I may and must justly ask whether both that for which something exists and that by which something exists, is intended or not, whether that which in the language of causality I call cause and effect, also belongs to the category of finality, according to which that very cause is at the same time called means, and that very effect also design. {173} The one way of viewing postulates the other as its necessary completion; and the teleological point of view is so little an impediment for the causal, that we are much more fully convinced scientifically of the correctness of the teleological way of viewing, when first the causal chain of causes and effects lies plain before our perception without any wanting links. We still have to mention two monstrosities which, as it seems to us, necessarily result from the rejection of teleology, although the opponents of teleology contest the fact. The one is the reduction to _chance_ of all single formations in the world. It is true, necessity reigns in laws and their effect; but if the degree and the sum of all qualities in the world are not based the one upon the other, if especially the single organizations originate by the way of natural selection, every coincidence of each single causal chain in the world with any other causal chain is something accidental for the one as well as for the other. Now, an explanation of that in the world which is conformable to the end in view, by chance, is a scientifically illogical idea. An accidental coincidence of many circumstances can in a single case produce something which is conformable to an end in view; but the probability that the formation conformable to the end in view is again nullified by the next throw of the dice of chance, is so great, and with every following throw grows so decidedly in geometrical progression, that this probability after a few terms becomes a certainty, and we can directly demonstrate mathematically that the world without a teleological plan would be and remain a chaos. As we have seen, even Lange finds himself obliged to {174} admit this plan, with the exception that he makes this plan itself chance--special chance among infinitely many possibilities. The other consequence of that elimination of the idea of design is that it forbids every difference between _higher_ and _lower_, and changes everything into an indifferent and equivalent continual stream of coming and going. For the whole idea of higher and lower belongs to the category of teleology. If the new which originates is _but_ a product of that which was already in existence, and if the latter does not aim at the production of the new, then the new is equivalent to the preceding; and it is but an illusion of man, preconceiving an end, when in the products of nature he discriminates between higher and lower. A beginning of the acknowledgment of this consequence is made, when Häckel, in his Anthropogeny, so violently attacks the idea that man is end and design of the terrestrial creation. But generally the antagonists of teleology are guilty of the inconsequence which, although from the principles of their system to be rejected, is indelibly impressed on our thinking mind and especially on our moral consciousness, that they still discriminate between higher and lower, and particularly that they willingly assign to the moral disposition and demand, and to the morally planned individual, the priority among existences. This fact is pronounced in a very striking way in the concessions of Strauss, which we have quoted on page 126, according to which nature, where it can no longer go beyond itself, wishes to go into itself, and in man has wished to go not only upwards but even beyond itself. Therefore, not only theology, but also philosophy, {175} and even natural science, in their most prominent advocates, have in a uniform chorus protested against this destruction of the idea of design. That it was unanimously done on the part of _theology_, is quite natural, and needs no further proofs. When we, nevertheless, mention expressly a single essay on these questions, it is done on account of the fact that in its energetic defense of the teleological point of view it is especially effective by frankly and impartially admitting the strongest positions of the opponent's standpoint--a thing which rarely happens on the part of theologians. It is the essay of Julius Köstlin "Ueber die Beweise für das Dasein Gottes" ("Proofs of the Existence of God"), in the "Theologische Studien und Kritiken," 1875, IV and 1876, I; especially 1876, I, p. 42 ff. On the part of philosophy, we have to mention Ulrici, Fichte, Huber and Frohschammer, who have rejected the attack against teleology with inflexible criticism. Even Friedrich Vischer in the sixth part of his "Kritische Gänge" ("Critical Walks"), has forcibly maintained the right of teleology, especially of its highest revelation, the moral order of the world--in contrast to his friend D. F. Strauss, whose "The Old Faith and the New" he criticises; but it is true, in consequence of his pantheism, he reaches the wholly imaginary conclusion of supposing a moral order of the world without a regulator. And, to be able to make the systematized order and beauty of nature conceivable to himself without a Creator, to be able to make conceivable to himself a design in nature, an ideal, according to which nature works as an unconscious artist, he gives to philosophy the certainly unsolvable problem of finding the idea of {176} timeless time, to which the "afterward" can just as well be a "beforehand"; he prefers to do this rather than to find the equally clear and deep solution of that teleological difficulty in the simple idea of a Creator, who, as such, also stands above time. One of the most remarkable philosophic testimonies for the right of teleology is the philosophic system of Eduard von Hartmann who, although he calls his absolute the unconscious, ascribes to it an unconscious intelligence and an unconscious will, and makes the observation and acknowledgment of designs and ends, which he sees in the whole realm of the world of phenomena, an essential part of his entire system. All attempts of this kind, as those of Vischer and Hartmann, fully and correctly to understand the language of facts on the one side and to reject on the other the necessary conclusion to which it leads--namely, the acknowledgment of a creative intelligence _above_ the facts, and having an end in view--only increase in like manner as the above-quoted cosmogonic idea of Lange by the monstrosities of reasoning to which they lead, the power of demonstration for that which they undertake to contest. Natural scientists, finally, even Darwinians, have not only in _casual_ utterances often spoken a weighty word in favor of teleology--as, for instance, those who, like Oswald Heer, Kölliker, Baumgärtner, believe in a metamorphosis of germs, but also men who are quite favorable to the idea of an origin of the species through descent--as, for instance, Richard Owen, at the end of his "Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates," separately published as "Derivative Hypothesis of Life and Species"; Alexander Braun, in his lecture "Ueber die Bedeutung der Entwicklung in der Naturgeschichte" {177} ("On the Importance of Development in Nature"), Berlin, 1872; A. W. Volkmann "Ueber die Entwicklung der Organismen" ("On the Development of Organisms"), Halle, 1875; Schaaffhausen, in his opening address to the Wiesbaden Anthr. Versammlung, Braunschweig, 1874, and others; but they have also given to teleology entire treatises. Besides a more popular treatise of the astronomer Mädler in "Westermann's Monatshefte," October, 1872, there belong to them the frequently mentioned work of Wigand, and especially three essays of great importance from the pen of a man who in questions of development and its extent has among all contemporaries the first right to speak, namely, Karl Ernst von Baer. They are the essays on the conformity to the end in view in general, on the conformity to the end in view in organic bodies, and on Darwin's doctrine, published together with two other essays in the already mentioned "Studien aus dem Gebiete der Naturwissenschaften," (Reden und Kleinere Aufsätze, 2ter Theil), Petersburg, 1876. Nay, even the two founders of Darwinism, Darwin himself and A. R. Wallace, as we shall see in defining their position in reference to religion, express themselves decidedly teleologically; this is especially true of Wallace, and likewise of their active and able second, Huxley. Only a single utterance of Darwin in a later publication seems to take a sceptical position in regard to teleology; compare below Part Second, Book I, Chapt. III, § 1. Finally, we have to say a word concerning the _name_ which the anti-teleological view of the world gives to itself: the name "_monism_." The view of the world which monism gives us, seems hardly comprehensible; and {178} just as little does the name which it gives itself, seem justifiable. If this name is to indicate only a maxim of _investigation_--the directive which scientific investigation has to take, in order to reach more general points of view--we could declare ourselves in full accord with it. All investigation strives after a unity of principle; this impulse is a scientific leading motive of our nature. Besides the absolute limits of our knowledge, there are still enough relative and provisory limits to it; and there also are enough low points of view, mistakes, and imperfections in science, to justify us when we expressly form and establish monism as a maxim of scientific investigation. All those theories and points of view need such a spur and corrective, which are hastily satisfied with a dualistic or a still farther expanded limit of our knowledge. Among them we rank in theology the antique heathenish dualism which separates God and the world in such a way that God is but the architect of the eternal matter, existing independently of God; and also the modern deistic dualism which considers only the elements, principles, and beginning of the world, as dependent on God, but not the entire course of their developments as a whole and in detail. In philosophy, taken in a narrower sense, we reckon with them the one-sided atomism which can no longer find the connecting link between the single elements of the world, or the one-sided assertion of realism or idealism, since at this time all views of the world which win acceptance from the present generation claim the praise of showing the reconciliation and higher unity of realism and idealism. In anthropology, there belongs to them {179} such a treatment of psychology and physiology, that the one science does not trouble itself about the other, and the investigation does not seek or keep in mind that which is common to both, or that which is higher and superior to them; and in all natural sciences, every mode of investigation belongs to them, where the single science retains no sympathy with all other sciences and with the principles of all scientific investigation. In regard to these low points of view, mistakes, or imperfections, monism certainly is a correct and necessary maxim of investigation; but this maxim ought not to lead us so far that we--as very often happens from the _unity_ or the possibility of grouping several forms of existence under general conceptions--make an _identity_, that we efface the differences instead of explaining them, and then think the effacement is an explanation; that we set forth the _assumed_ form of unity as if one we had found, and in this manner falsify the method of knowing. For as certainly and as much as man is subject to the dangers of error and falsification, just so certainly and so little is nature subject to falsification. But if the name "monism" is to designate a certain _view of the world_, it is for such a designation either too comprehensive and quite applicable to _all_ views which have a right to the name of view of the world; or it is misleading, and not applicable to any. For the name, as if it were properly called henism, either expresses only the _unity_ of the principle of the world, and designates a quality which is the characteristic of every view of the world, and which especially belongs to theism in a clearer and more perfect way than to any other standpoint; or the name is used to attest that the world _alone_ {180} exists, and that monism knows of but _one_ existence,--namely, that of the world; while the contrary view of the world--that of theism, which in a manner wholly incompetent, and historically wholly unjustified, is called dualism--supposes _two_ existences, God and the world. But then this name does not correctly represent either itself or theism. It does not correctly represent itself: for the so-called monism does not, indeed, suppose that that which _appears_ in the world is the really existing, or that the processes which come into appearance have again their _final_ cause only in the appearance, but it seeks the final causes of the phenomena in laws and principles which can no longer be observed by our senses, and of those it again seeks the common, highest, and very last principle, the perception of which it either, with Häckel, renounces or finds it, with other theories, now in atomism, and in attraction and repulsion, then in the law of causality. Thus it has not only a single existence and mode of existence, but it does exactly the same thing that theism does: it seeks the final principles of the world. And it does not correctly represent theism: for theism also does not know of two existences to which the idea of existing is applicable in fully the same way--namely, the world _and_ God---but in seeking a cause for the existence of the world, it finds it in God; the world, according to its view, only exists by the fact that it exists in and through God. So theism in this sense also contests with monism for the right of the name. Therefore, when teleology allows the opponent's view of the world to appropriate the name monism exclusively to itself, it can do this only in the same {181} sense as that in which, in order to avoid disputes, we are satisfied with many irrational names which have forced themselves upon us; as, for instance, we can perhaps call the clerical party in Bavaria the patriotic, because it calls itself so, or as we accept the title of the ultramontane paper "Germania," at Berlin, without conceding to the bearers of those names the care of patriotism and of the interests of the German empire in a higher degree than to parties and papers of a different standpoint. In fact, this linguistic arbitrariness does not particularly tend to clearness of conception and to the avoidance of obscure phrases. * * * * * {183} PART II THE POSITION OF THE DARWINIAN THEORIES IN REFERENCE TO RELIGION AND MORALITY. * * * * * {185} BOOK I. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. * * * * * PLAN OF TREATMENT. In discussing the conclusions which have been drawn by Darwinism in reference to religion and morality, it would seem appropriate to treat of the two realms together. For the grouping which we have to give to the different conclusions of Darwinian tendencies, in their position in reference to religion, is nearly the same which they also receive in their position in reference to ethical questions. But, nevertheless, we prefer to separate the two questions; not only because in fact one author has laid more stress upon the religious realm, another more upon the ethical, but because in reality, and also in the solution which we shall try to give to the problems presented by them, both realms, although closely interwoven, and limited by one another, still are theoretically to be treated apart. In order not to exceed too much the limits of our task, we must avoid going more into the details of the relations between religion and morality in general, than is absolutely necessary for the solution of our main problem. This restriction we can easily put on ourselves. For, first, every one who reflects at all on human life and action, and on his own religious and {186} moral conduct, generally has a very correct, instinctive, and direct conception and perception as to the realm of the religious as well as of the moral--as to their mutual differences, as well as to their reciprocal relations--even if he has not yet tried to bring this conception into ideas and formulas; and, secondly, it will not be difficult to present a short formula as to the ideal relation between the religious and the moral, sufficient for the wants of science as well as for the practical needs of a more detailed investigation. The _religious_ is the relation of our personality to God; the _moral_, the relation of it to the world, comprehensively taken, ourselves included. We purposely call it a relation of our personality, and not merely a relation of man, because in the religious the ethical moment of self-determination which is included in the idea of personality, is an essential factor; and because we gladly make it conspicuous, partly in opposition to the one-sidedness of Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence, partly to prevent a contrary misunderstanding of our own view, as if we found the seat of religion in the activity of knowledge. For when, in our representation of the Darwinian conclusions and in our own investigation, we proceed as objectively as possible, and try to avoid all systematization which is unfruitful for our task, in discussing the Darwinian theories in reference to religion, we shall have to take chiefly into consideration their relation to religion in an objective sense, and chiefly also their relation to the contents of religion; but this would make it appear that we supposed religion in a subjective sense, religiousness, to be in the first place an activity and a possession of knowledge. Nothing lies farther from us {187} than this thought; although religiousness certainly has and asks for solid, objectively true, and really possessed salvation, and however little we would overlook the word of the Lord: "And this is life eternal, that they might _know_ thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." (John xvii, 3.) Those who wish to inform themselves in regard to the relation of religion and morality, will find the necessary information in Martensen's "Ethik" ("Ethics"), in Otto Pfleiderer's monograph, which partly assumes a contrary point of view, and in a thorough essay of Julius Köstlin (Theol. Studien und Kritiken, 1870, I), which appeared before the "Ethics" of Martensen. In undertaking now to represent the conclusions which have been drawn from Darwinism, we treat of the religious realm as the higher, a realm demanding a sound morality prior to the moral realm; and we begin with those conclusions which take a hostile position in reference to religion, in order to proceed from them to the moderate and friendly relations. * * * * * {188} _A. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND RELIGION._ CHAPTER I. MORE OR LESS NEGATIVE POSITION IN REFERENCE TO RELIGION. § 1. _Extreme Negation. L. Büchner and Consistent Materialism._ The common point of beginning and attack of all those who take a negative position against religion, is the rejection of teleology. The most advanced of all materialists, Ludwig Büchner, in his self-criticism, which he gives in his "Natur und Wissenschaft" ("Nature and Science"), on page 465, openly declares, and quite correctly, that with the success or failure of the attacks upon teleology materialism itself stands or falls. Now while many, as we shall immediately see, although opposed to a teleological view of the world, still are inclined to give a more or less lasting value to certain psychical processes which may be called by the name religion, Büchner, on the contrary, makes a direct attack upon everything which is thus called. He does not render it difficult for us to review his position. For, after having given it openly, but still with certain relative modifications, in different publications (especially in his book "Force and Matter," which appeared in 1855 in the first edition, and in 1872 in the twelfth) he gives it in cynical nakedness in the lectures with which he travelled through America and {189} Germany in 1872-1874, and the contents of which he has made public in his pamphlet: "Der Gottesbegriff und dessen Bedeutung in der Gegenwart" ("The Idea of God, and its Importance at the Present Time"), Leipzig, 1874, Theo. Thomas. As is said in the preface, the design of the lecture is "to give a renewed impulse to the final and definitive elimination of an idea which, according to the opinion of the author, obstructs our whole spiritual, social, and political development, as no other idea does." He means the idea of God; not merely the theistic idea of a personal God, but the idea of God in general. For even the pantheistic idea of God, which he had formerly treated with a certain polite reserve, finds in his eyes even less favor than the theistic. He says: "If the absurdity is already great enough in theism, it is possibly still greater in pantheism, which moreover has always played a great _rôle_ in philosophy;" and, "Christianity has but injured the spiritual and material progress of mankind." In agreement with Strauss, he sees the earliest origin of the idea of God only in ignorance and fear. "Every creating, preserving, or reigning principle in the world is done away with, and there remains as highest spiritual power present in the world only human reason. Atheism or philosophic monism alone leads to freedom, to reason, progress, acknowledgment of true humanity,--in short to humanism." This materialistic opposition to everything which is called religion, is certainly independent of Darwinism, and originated before its time; but since Büchner himself sees in Darwinism but a grand confirmation of his view of the world, and believes that he has found in it {190} that principle which, with urgent necessity, banishes teleology from the contemplation of nature--teleology, with the defeat or victory of which materialism stands or falls,--we are entitled and obliged to rank even this view of the world among the conclusions which in reference to religion have been drawn from the theories of Darwin. And, indeed, it is a most extreme conclusion, and simply puts itself in the category of negation to the contents of religion, as well as to religion in a subjective sense, to religious and pious conduct. It can be clearly seen how firmly a view of the world which makes war against religion and the idea of God its special life-task, is connected with all those destructive elements which lie in human nature, and especially in the social circumstances of the present, and which have their only and final ethical limit in the consciousness of God which, as a power never wholly to be effaced, lies in the depth of the soul of even those who wander farthest from a moral and spiritual life. § 2. _Replacement of Religion through a Religious Worship of the Universe. Strauss, Oskar Schmidt, Häckel._ Strauss, in that testament of his scientific life and activity, "The Old Faith and the New," takes a somewhat different position in reference to religion. Even for him, the whole idea of God is abolished and replaced by the idea of the cosmos; but he makes this cosmos the object of religious worship, and has exactly the same feeling of absolute dependence in regard to it, which, according to Schleiermacher, constitutes the nature of religion. When Arthur Schopenhauer or {191} Eduard von Hartmann bring forth their pessimistic accusations against the universe, his religious sensation reacts against it in the same manner as the organism against the prick of a needle. This pessimism, he says, acts upon reason as an absurdity, but upon sensation as blasphemy. "We demand the same piety for our cosmos that the devout of old demanded for his God. If wounded, our feeling for the cosmos simply reacts in a religious manner." While, therefore, Strauss, to the question, "Are we still Christians?" gives an emphatic "No," he answers the question, "Have we still a religion?" with "Yes or No, according to the spirit of the inquiry." Among men of science who wrote about Darwinism, Oskar Schmidt, in his before-quoted publication, "The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism," seems to take exactly the same position in reference to religion. At least, he unreservedly professes monism, rejects all teleological conceptions as imperfections, speaks of the caprice of a personal God, and sees the conception that the idea of God is immanent in human nature invalidated by the fact "that many millions in the most cultivated nations, and among them the most eminent and lucid thinkers, have not the consciousness of a personal God; those millions of whom the heroic Strauss became the spokesman." Häckel, it is true, mentions Strauss only in the preface of the fourth edition of his "Natural History of Creation," but here he greets "The Old Faith and the New" as the confession which he also makes, and thus gives us an express right to place him in this class, although he calls his worship of the universe religion; {192} it is, however, a classification which his whole position compelled us to give him. It is true, he speaks very warmly of his own religion, which is founded on the clear knowledge of nature and its inexhaustible abundance of manifestations, and which, as "simple religion of nature," will in the future act upon the course of development of mankind, ennobling and perfecting it in a far higher degree than the various ecclesiastic religions of the different nations, "resting on a blind belief in the vague secrets and mythical revelations of a sacerdotal caste." (Nat. Hist. of Cr., Vol. II, p. 369.) He also repeatedly speaks of "manifestations of nature," and even of a "divine Spirit which is everywhere active in nature." In that respect he seems to take in reference to religion, without regard to the historical form in which it appeared as Christian religion, a still more friendly and less problematic position than Strauss. Moreover, he demands for every individual the full right of forming his own religion; among the more highly developed species of men, he says, every independent and highly developed individual, every original person, has his own religion, his own God; and it would certainly, therefore, not be arrogant if he should also claim the right of forming his own conception of God, his own religion. But when we try to form a more complete idea of his position in reference to religion, we really do not find any essential difference between it and that of Strauss. According to repeated utterances, he can not imagine the personal Creator without caprice and arbitrariness; again and again he advocates monism with great warmth, and also identifies, in express words, God and the universe, God and nature. {193} "Corresponding to our progressive perception of nature and our immovable conviction of the truth of the evolution theory, our religion can be only a _religion of nature_." "In rejecting the dualistic conception of nature and the herewith connected amphitheistic conception of God, ... we certainly lose the hypothesis of a personal Creator; but we gain in its place the undoubtedly more worthy and more perfect conception of a divine Spirit which penetrates and fills the universe." Furthermore, the faith in a personal Creator is called a low dualistic conception of God, which corresponds to a low animal stage of development of the human organism. The more highly developed man of the present, he says, is capable of and intended for an infinitely nobler and sublimer monistic idea of God, to which belongs the future, and through which we attain a more sublime conception of the unity of God and nature. According to his Anthropogeny, the belief that the hand of a Creator has arranged all things with wisdom and intelligence is an ancient story and an empty phrase. § 3. _Pious Renunciation of the Knowability of God. Wilhelm Bleek, Albert Lange, Herbert Spencer._ A more friendly position in reference to religion is taken by those who hold, not directly negative, but only decidedly sceptical views of the existence of God; who reduce the relative unsearchableness of God, which every religious standpoint admits, to an absolute unknowability; and who find the nature of religion either in a pious acknowledgment of this unknowability, or in a poetical substitute for the knowledge of God, _i.e._, comprehending the unknowable in a figure. The most prominent {194} advocates of this position are, on the side of exact investigation, Wilhelm Bleek; and on that of philosophy, Albert Lange in Germany and Herbert Spencer in England. Since all three use the Darwinian theories for their systems, they also belong to the ranks of our historico-critical essay. Wilhelm Bleek, in the preface to his "Ursprung der Sprache" ("Origin of Language"), rejects all claims of a positively revealed religion to an objective truth--not in such a way as to substitute the universe in place of God, but so that he remains sceptical in reference to every attempt at forming an idea of God, demands a pious and modest confession of this non-understanding by man, and sees in this reverential modesty the certainly not very significant nature of his religion. In the preface he says that all worship originates in reverence for ancestors, and that even the doctrine of the atonement of modern theology has its origin there. The next step after reverence for ancestors was the worship of nature. But the grand turning-point at which the mythological mode of view gives way--in which mode of view he also reckons Christianity--is the giving up of the idea of the necessity of an atonement; for this whole idea is but anthropomorphism. It is when man has recognized the impossibility of a being, similar to man, as the final cause of all existences, and in reverential modesty has admitted his ignorance in reference to the nature of the origin of things, that he learns to understand how narrow a view he has of God when he thinks that he understands him. On the side of philosophy, Albert Lange and Herbert Spencer reach similar results. Albert Lange, in his {195} "History of Materialism," starting especially from premises of Kant, reaches the conclusion that the "thing _per se_," the "intelligible world," is absolutely hidden to us. What we perceive is but the world of appearances; and the fact that we perceive it, and perceive it as we do, is originally founded in the human organization. By virtue of this organization we are bound, in all our knowledge of the world of appearances, to the law of causality. Science does not get beyond this causal chain of finite and relative causes and effects; to the "thing _per se_" there is nowhere to be found a bridge, not even as Kant supposes, in the categoric imperative, nor in ideas. Inasmuch as science does not get beyond this chain, it is materialistic; inasmuch as it must nevertheless perceive the existence, or at least the possibility of the existence, of a "thing _per se_," even if it does not see any way to its perception, it is idealistic. But man also has ideal impulses, and he has to follow them just as much as the impulse of perception. By virtue of these ideal impulses, he makes in imagination a picture of the "thing _per se_" in the activity of philosophic speculation, art, and religion. Philosophic speculation is but imaginative conceptions. It has always a value in the history of culture, as a summing-up of the elements of culture and of the spiritual impulses and treasures of a certain time; but it errs as soon as it claims to be more than imaginative conceptions--namely, an adequate representation of the final cause of all things--for it lacks the necessary basis of experience. Art does not claim this, and therefore is not exposed to that danger of deception. Religion satisfies a need of the heart, to have a home of the spirit in the "thing _per se_"; but {196} since the "thing _per se_" is not accessible for us, religion creates in mind that home, in order to rise above the common reality to it. Lange finds the highest realization of a perfect satisfaction of that impulse in the philosophic poems of Schiller. He sees the quintessence of religion expressly "in the elevation of minds above the real, and in the creation of a home of the spirit." Religion remains untouched in its full vital power, as long as it retains that as its quintessence; but it is exposed to all the dangers of a destructive criticism as soon as it seeks its quintessence in something else--for instance, in certain doctrines of God, the human soul, creation of the world, etc. Herbert Spencer is in full accord with Lange in regard to the theory of an absolute indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things; but he reaches this result in a somewhat different way, and from his premises infers a different modification of the nature of religion. In his "First Principles" he appears to be a true scholar of the English and Scotch schools of philosophy, from which he takes his start in conscious and express opposition to the German modes of speculation, and begins with an empiric comparison of all actual contrasts existing in the world and in human life. He follows the axiom that a particle of truth lies at the basis of every error, and that each contrast becomes a contrast only by the fact that the two poles of the contrast have something in common. Now, in comparing with one another all contrasts between religion and science, and all forms of religiousness and irreligiousness, from fetishism up to monotheism, pantheism, and atheism, all imaginable cosmogonies, he finds, as the last truth common to all, and therefore {197} alone absolutely certain, the _absolute indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things_. On page 44 he says, that religions diametrically opposed in their overt dogmas, are yet perfectly at one in the tacit conviction that there is a problem to be solved, that the existence of the world with all it contains is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation; and on page 45, that the omnipresence of something which passes comprehension, is that which remains unquestionable. And on page 46 he concludes: "If Religion and Science are to be reconciled, the basis of reconciliation must be this deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts--that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." The acknowledgment of this fact is religiousness; the contrary of it is irreligiousness and anthropomorphistic arrogance, even if it appears in the name of religiousness. "Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious" (p. 110). A comparison of the two philosophers is interesting. In one direction, Lange does more justice to the religious need than Spencer does. While he sees in religion the metaphorical realization of the needs of the heart, of a "creation of a home of the spirit," he gives to the heart full play to satisfy its need, and to create and arrange for itself a spiritual home entirely according to its need. He especially acknowledges repeatedly the need of the heart for _atonement_, and vigorously defends this need and its satisfaction against Liberal Theologians (Reformtheologen), like Heinrich Lang; he also stands, as we see, in satisfactory contrast to Wilhelm Bleek. Without reserve, he admits into the hymn-book of his religion of the future hymns like that of Gerhard: "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" ("O Sacred Head, {198} now wounded"). To be sure, all the concessions he makes to religion sink again to the value of a beautiful illusion, from the fact that for him they are but metaphorical approaches to the cause of all things, which after all still remains inaccessible. But nevertheless, in consequence of that idea of religion, religious life, and especially also religious service, has infinitely more room for rich development in Lange than in Spencer. For, according to the view of the latter, religiousness consists in nothing else but the perception and acknowledgment of this indiscernibleness of the final cause. All other things which may be still connected with religious life and reasoning, are but a misty veil. The acknowledgment of the indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things alone is the quintessence of religion. But such a religiousness, which expressly forbids imagining any quality or any state of the highest being, certainly would be, as Prof. Huxley correctly says in his "Lay Sermons," for the most part of the silent sort. While thus Lange's conception of religion is superior to that of Spencer in admitting a richer development of religious life, a more various satisfaction of the religious need, in another direction Spencer is superior. He comes considerably nearer to a correct and full _conception of God_ than Lange. His idea of the final cause of all things does not lie entirely in the conception that it is the absolute indiscernible; but Spencer is fully in earnest with the idea that this indiscernible is the real cause of the world and of all single existences in it. He accordingly forbids giving certain attributes to the absolute--not because it would be doubtful whether it has attributes or not, but because it stands _above_ all these {199} imaginable attributes as their real cause. Therefore he forbids, for instance, attributing personality, intelligence, will, to the highest being--not because it could also be impersonal, and in want of intelligence and will, but because it stands _above_ all these attributes as their highest real cause, and because we can think of all these attributes only in human analogy, and therefore, when attributed to the highest being, can think of them only in rejectable anthropomorphism. He says, on page 109: "Those who espouse this position [personality of God], make the erroneous assumption that the choice is between personality and something lower than personality; whereas the choice is rather between personality and something higher. Is it not just possible that there is a mode of being as much transcending Intelligence and Will, as these transcend mechanical motion? It is true that we are totally unable to conceive any such higher mode of being. But this is not a reason for questioning its existence; it is rather the reverse.... The Ultimate Cause cannot in any respect be conceived by us because it is in every respect greater than can be conceived." Thus we find in Lange a fuller and richer conception of the subject of religion; but this conception is in want of one thing--without which it is in want of everything--namely, of nothing less than of the objective reality. Spencer's religiousness has a much more meagre and less varied character: the acknowledgment and veneration of the indiscernible; but he nevertheless gives us with this content and object a _real_ object, even an object of veneration, in which the abundance of all reality is hidden, with the only conception that the indiscernible {200} does not let us look into its cornucopia, but only lets us judge of the abundance of its contents by the richness of that which it pours over us in the world of the relatively perceptible. It will not be difficult to show the points at which each of these writers would have been able, had he so wished, to lead his conception of religion, the one to a real, the other to a full content. Lange finds the last principle of perception which is accessible to us, in our _organization_. Now from our organization originate not only all modes of the perception of the empirical world, but just as well all our ideal impulses, especially the ethical. Which one of all those dispositions, impulses, and activities has the precedence, mainly depends upon the value which man places upon them. Now, when man attributes to the ideal and ethical a higher value than to the empirical, when in reflecting about himself he finds that even in the normal individual the empirical, sensual, and material is subordinate and subject to the ideal and especially to the ethical, then from the standpoint of Lange he is right, and obliged to estimate the truth of that ideal and ethical as higher than the truth of the empirical world, and to look at the whole empirical world only as being in the service of that ideal world. When, at the same time, we observe an inner harmony in our organization, this observation gives us the right and the duty of controlling the truth of our empirical perception by the truth of the results of our ideal and our ethical activity, and the latter again by the former. For if we do not wish to suppose that the human organization aims at a grand deception of mankind, we have, in spite of {201} the superiority of the ideal and ethical activities, to establish the axiom that the empirical and the ideal and ethical cannot remain in lasting contradiction. Besides, if we should add to this that a religion like Christianity offers to man that which it gives to him on the ground of historical facts, then the reports of these facts will certainly be subject to historical criticism just as surely as all historical reports; but if they are confirmed, the ideal and ethical convincing power which lies in this religion, unites for us with the whole weight of the convincing power of the historical and empirical facts, although the reproduction and systematization of its contents is still deficient and capable of further development. In Spencer's system, there are two points by which his own course of reasoning is able to bridge over the poverty of his conception of religion. The first point, given on pages 107-108 of his "First Principles," and also elsewhere in his works, is the acknowledgment that the final cause of all things is _higher_ than all that we know, and is of such a nature that it really can be the real cause of everything, even the real cause of the spiritual and ethical. Thus he forbids us to think of qualities of the highest being, but he himself thinks of them; for this conception of the highest being as an _impersonal_ is certainly something else and something much more valuable than the mere negation of personality. The other point which might be able to lead him out of the vacuum of his idea of God, lies in the method of his own investigation. When he seeks the truth by collecting what is common in all the contrasts, he also must seek and find something common between the highest cause {202} of all things on one side and of the world as a whole and in detail on the other; and this something will consist of the necessity of the highest cause of all things being so qualified that _it is able_ to bring into existence the world as a whole and in detail. If such ideas are also rejected as anthropomorphisms, then all reasoning and investigating is anthropomorphistic; and in that respect we refer to what we had to say above, when treating of teleology (p. 170 ff.). The same Duke of Argyll whom we there had occasion to quote, in an article in the "Contemporary Review" (May, 1871), upon "Variety as an Aim in Nature," has admirably shown that it is the mind of man from which we may draw conclusions as to the nature of the Creator, and that the picture which we thus get of him, can at the same time be seen true and yet dim, at the same time real and yet from a distance; for the human mind does not feel anything so much as its own limitations, and therefore can easily imagine each of his powers and talents as being present in the highest being in infinite perfection. If Spencer had made this comparison, and drawn the conclusions which follow from it for the nature of the final cause of all things, the indiscernibleness of God would for him be reduced to an unsearchableness, the unknowable be changed into an unsearchable, and we could willingly acknowledge the humble modesty in regard to the infinity of the deity, which his philosophy requires, as a factor of all true religiousness. But we have to present to him as an expression, not only of true religiousness, but also of true science, that passage of the Psalms: "He that planted the ear, shall he {203} not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?" (Psalm XCIV, 9.) § 4. _Spinoza and Hegel in the Garb of Darwin: Carneri. Eduard von Hartmann._ To the Austrian philosopher Carneri in his "Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus" ("Morality and Darwinism"), three books of Ethics, Vienna, Braumüller, 1871, we shall have to give a place of his own. Inasmuch as religion and the beautiful are to him but a preliminary stage of truth which has to dissolve itself into philosophy--a philosophy which, inclined to monism, prefers to call itself pantheism--he takes a position in reference to religion similar to that toward materialism, namely: a negative position. But inasmuch as he still grants to religion in a subjective sense, to "religion in the form of piety," a lasting position and truth (religion, he says, has truth, but the positive God of religion has no reality, page 114), and inasmuch as he ascribes to it not only a transitory pedagogical value for the masses, which are not yet elevated to the height of philosophic reasoning, but a value also for the philosopher--namely, the value of religiousness and of piety--he rather belongs to the second and third of the before-mentioned groups. Carneri, in his "Three Books of Ethics," gives us a whole philosophic encyclopedia. In thoughts sometimes rich, but without regularly arranged and quiet reasoning, and in full command and employment of modern terms which he uses sometimes like a genius, but often superficially and unjustly, he develops a view of the world which, although it appears in an independent way {204} in all its fundamentals, as regards its contents takes its origin from Spinoza, and as regards form and dialectics from Hegel, but sometimes, it is true, sinks into weaknesses of which these philosophers would hardly have been guilty. So, for instance, when he simply identifies religious faith with conjecture, he takes a superficial view which he has in common with Häckel who, among other things, repeatedly says that faith begins where knowledge ceases. Dialectical motion is everything to him. In pursuing this dialectical motion, he gives us a multitude of outlooks into all imaginable realms of knowledge and life, but he always follows at the same time the formula of dialectical motion, and, where the difficulties of the real world are most invincibly opposed to this dialectics, knows, like his master, with almost chivalric ease, to mingle and confound abstract formalistic reasoning and thoughts naturally following from the given thought. Want of clearness in general makes the reading of this otherwise not unimportant book very difficult. On a Darwinian foundation in his conception of nature and its development, he puts a Hegelian structure into his conception of human spiritual life, but finally lets mankind, although it is the highest form of appearance in this development, sink back into death and destruction. The God of this view of the world is the causal law; the conception of this causal law is the worship of the philosopher--a God, of course, so incapable of filling and quieting a mind longing for God--a worship so leathern that Carneri himself cannot get rid of the opinion that, with such religious ideas of reform, he will finally lose the last reader of his book. The aim of the {205} development, also, does not promise to the mind any substitute for the rigidness of God, for the aim of the development is death--the death of the individual as well as of the universe. "He who has learned to get comfort in the deepest affliction from the absolute impartiality of the causal law, is on so good terms with death, whose inflexibility he comprehends, that without reluctance he gives to it the universe into the bargain." (p. 353.) We give these glimpses into the dreary waste of the very latest advocate of pessimism which, as it seems, has fully and formally become the fashion, in order to show what monstrosities are demanded from thought, what revolting hardness from feeling, what nonentities of ethical striving, are offered as valuable wares, if man has once begun to break the bond between himself and his living Creator and Master. For this reason, not only the anti-teleological monists meet the fate of Nihilism, whether they appear in the plebeian roughness of Büchner or in the aristocratic gentility of Strauss, but also such a brilliant advocate of teleology as Eduard von Hartmann does not know of any other final end to offer to the world and mankind than nothingness, because he did not wish to be driven from his perception of ends in the world to the only conclusion to which it leads--namely: to the perception of an absolute intelligent and ethical personality that directs these ends. He prefers, rather, to suppose an unconsciously seeing substance of the world, which, after having once in the dark impulse of its unconscious will, made the mistake of creating a world, leads the same by the instinct of unconscious teleology in sad, melancholy, and yet relatively {206} best development, until it is ripe to sink back into nothingness, and thereby to bring the absolute to rest. Although we pity the individuals who came under the ban of such a pessimism, we nevertheless can be glad of the fact that the consequences of such a separation from God are at least exposed so clearly, and return from wandering through such barren steppes with renewed thankfulness to our Christian view of the world, with its divine plan and aim. We have, next, however to review the representatives of theism and of the Christian view of the world--which review will show us that the song of triumph which monism began to raise before its expected victory, came very near disturbing the composure of persons here and there. § 5. _Re-echo of Negation on the Side of the Christian View of the World._ In this condition of affairs, it certainly could not happen otherwise than that, even on the part of the theistic and positive Christian view of the world, some advocates were drawn into the contest who thought themselves obliged to see two irreconcilable antagonists in Darwinism and Christianity. Science and religion had both been so much accustomed to see the origin of species, and especially the appearance of man on the stage of earth, hidden in impenetrable and unapproachable secrecy, that every attempt at clearing up this darkness very naturally appeared to both as an attack upon the creative activity of God. The mode of reasoning to which mankind, in its scientific as well as in its religious meditations, had {207} accustomed itself for hundreds of years, was used to exclude from the idea of creation the conception of intervening agencies; and this was true not only in regard to the idea of the first creation of the universe, where the idea of intervening agencies naturally is left out, but also in regard to the idea of the creation of single beings. Moreover, mankind was so accustomed to see a contrast between origination and creation, that in the same degree in which man tried or was able to perceive the modalities of the origin of species, the divine causality, or at least the idea of creation, seemed to disappear; and for the word of the Bible, that God created creatures _each after its kind_, a place could no longer be found. To this was added the fact that not only all materialism took possession of Darwinism as the irresistible battering-ram which, as they said, forever demolishes the whole fortress of theism and buries under its ruins all those who take refuge in this decaying castle, but that even _naturalists_ let themselves be carried away without opposition by this anti-theistic current, and even submitted to be heralds and prophets of this new anti-theistic wisdom of monism. Let the reader think of Häckel's "Natural History of Creation" and "Anthropogeny," where he will find the most interesting reports from all realms of exact natural science, together with a wholly unsolved entanglement of descent, selection, and mechanical view of the world, and this mode of contemplation of the world, with eloquent and enthusiastic proclamation of monism and with unconcealed derision of the capricious arbitrariness of a personal Creator, all thrown together as one great entire system, formed at one stroke. {208} Is it, then, to be wondered at, that not only the uncritical among believers, but also those who thoughtfully examined the movements of the mind, believed in the loudly-proclaimed connection of Darwinism with the whole anti-Christian view of the world, and therefore protested immediately against everything which is called Darwinism? Can we reproach theologians for not immediately becoming scientists themselves, in order to form an independent judgment in the question, when even the most eminent scientists declared that amalgamation of the most heterogenetic as an inevitable consequence of Darwinism, and as much as possible diminished or concealed their want of harmony with a few other investigators who, although small in number, yet by their weight counterbalanced dozens of names of the second and third rank? Thus we could read, in the journals of specialists, in pamphlets, in religious and political journals, even in local newspapers, a great many articles which were guilty of exactly the same confounding of the scientific and the religious, and again of the scientific and the philosophic, as those who had caused this confounding, and who, under the supposition of this solidarity of wholly distinct things, attacked and contested in the interest of religion, not only the anti-religious conclusions of Darwinian philosophers, but also Darwinism as a merely scientific theory, and rendered the contrast as strong as possible by adhering to that above censured, unmotived, indefensible, and one-sided conception of creation. And although on the part of positive Christian theology there was a gradually increasing number of voices {209} of those who in the idea of an origin of species through _descent_ do not yet see an injury to the theistic and Christian conception of God and creation, still as a rule this concession was made only to the idea of descent, and not to that of selection and to that which is properly called Darwinism. As a rule, in most of the theological works which treat in general of the _Darwinian_ questions, Darwinism and opposition to the Christian conception of God and creation were and are still taken as identical. For instance, Ebrard, in the first part of his "Apologetik" ("Apologetics"), Gütersloh, Bertelsmann, 1874, enumerates among the systems which are opposed to Christianity, in the same line with the doubtless anti-theistic and anti-Christian _aposkopiology_ or negation of the idea of design, also the mechanistic system, or the negation of the organic vital force, and the Darwinian theory of descent. Besides, in reading his "Apologetics," we had earnestly wished, in the interest of science as well as of religion, that a theologian who writes a work which claims to be scientific and to advocate the Christian standpoint, had abstained from that coarse and disgusting contempt and derision of adversaries which we meet so often in his book, and which only causes friend and foe to take a position contrary to that which the author intended. Trümpelmann who, in an essay upon Darwinism, monistic philosophy, and Christianity (Jahrbücher für protestantische Theologie, 1876, I) gives a similar conception of the relation between Darwinism and religion, but defends his whole position with much more scientific acuteness and depth, has also not taken the tone which worthily treats an opposite opinion and its advocates. * * * * * {210} CHAPTER II. REFORM OF RELIGION, OR AT LEAST OF THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION, THROUGH DARWINISM. § 1. _Heinrich Lang, Friedrich Vischer, Gustav Jäger._ In passing on to those who in Darwinism do not see a negation but a reformation of religion, or at least of theology, we first meet Heinrich Lang, the late spiritual leader of the "Reformtheologie" in Switzerland. He treats of "Die Religion im Zeitalter Darwins" ("Religion in the Age of Darwin") in Holtzendorff's and Oncken's "Deutsche Zeit- und Streitfragen," Jahrg. II, Heft 31, Berlin, Lüderitz, 1873. With a very correct estimate of the lasting value of religion as well as of natural science, and with a warm apology for the religious realm, he regulates the boundaries of each by asking religion not to hinder modern knowledge of the world and nature, and by asking knowledge of nature to leave the realm of religion untouched in its self-certainty. But when he, evidently still dependent on the old rationalistic supernaturalistic conception of miracle and providence, claims to find that as the result of modern knowledge of the world and nature a special providence is no longer conceivable, and no other hearing of prayer is possible than a subjective psychological one; that the processes in the world, in their entire final causal connection of causes and effects, nowhere leave a place for {211} the freely acting hand of a divine Lord of the world, and that even a moral order of the world can only prove itself so far as guilt and punishment stand in a natural causal connection with one another: then his religiousness makes concessions to the modern view of the world which it is not at all obliged to make or justified in making, and forces upon religion a reform against the necessity and usefulness of which not only religious feeling and need, but also deeper and more consequent reflection on God and the world, just as strongly strives. What remains to him as an independent realm for religion is nevertheless worthy of recognition. As faith of the human mind in a transcendental unity which manifests itself in the manifold and sensible, and carries through a moral order of the world--although one which, by the before-mentioned limitation of the natural connection of guilt and punishment, is very much reduced--religion gives to the mind warmth and worship; as confidence of the heart in an infinite possession in the anguish of the finite, it creates confidence in God, gratitude, devotion, energy, courage of life; as reverence for a holiness which stands unimpeachable above the fluctuating inclinations of our will, awakens the consciousness of guilt, and abolishes the guilt, it remains the basis of all moral action. Lang also sharply and correctly points out the insufficiency of Strauss's "The Old Faith and the New," as well as the conflict between his metaphysical naturalism which only leads to the struggle for existence, and his demand of self-submission to the universe, and of the moral and spiritual self-determination of man as of a being which goes beyond nature. Nevertheless we can not follow Lang in his {212} ways of reform. First--his conception of God is amazingly meagre, and of more than a Spencerian unapproachableness. God is to him, according to his "Dogmatics," nothing but the eternal, in itself perfect cause of all being, exempted from all changes of the world's process. When he gives the name of father to this primeval cause, as he does in his sermons and elsewhere, without being able to admit relation of mutual love of person to person, he only makes it glaringly evident how little his abstract metaphysics can satisfy religious need. Second--that which is claimed to be gained by this modern view of the world (namely, extension of the supremacy of religion to everything, even to the affairs of daily life), is not at all new, but is the effect of long-existing sound religiousness, and is the essence of all sound religious doctrine; and we therefore can not see how a view of the world, which, for instance, denies divine providence, and limits the hearing of prayer to its psychological effects, shall have greater force to leaven the whole daily life religiously, than our Christian faith in the Father without whose will no sparrow falls to the ground, and who says to his children: "Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me." Third--exactly that which Lang declares a purification of religion (namely, the before-mentioned elimination of divine providence and of all that which is connected therewith), appears to us not at all as a reform, but as an immense impoverishment and desolation of religion, which is so far from being required by natural science, that it turns out to be but a concession to the most superficial metaphysicians who, of course, have become very popular. {213} Friedrich Vischer is also to be ranked in this group. In the sixth part of his "Kritische Gänge" ("Critical Walks"), he speaks of Strauss' "The Old Faith and the New," and takes his determined position in reference to the religious question, quite essentially differing from Strauss. In regard to the aversion to miracles, he stands on the same ground with Strauss and Lang; in protesting against Strauss' elimination of the idea of design, and especially in demanding a moral order of the world, he is still more energetic than Lang. He particularly does not, like Lang, limit the moral order of the world to the simple empiric causal connection between human action and its consequences. But on the other hand, by his opposition to the idea of a personality of God, he again deviates more than Lang from the true meaning of Christian religiousness. On page 219 he says: "How, in spite of the infinite crossings of human action, is inner conformity to the end in view in general so established through that which we call chance, or rather by means of these crossings, that we can speak of a moral order of the world? Men, individuals as well as communities, follow their aims. Hereby there always results something quite different from that which they intended and wished. Sublime laws govern above us, between us, full of mystery in the midst of life; one of them in reference to guilt, punishment of guilt, is called nemesis. Faith in that meaning of the word, which we regard as a low one [he means the faith which has its dogmas beyond which the man of the most recent culture has passed, not knowing that he also carries around with him his dogmas, his "new faith"] is in need of a person who founds, carries out, and executes {214} these laws. But the faith of the monists has no such need. Why not? That needs more sufficient demonstration." Certainly it needs more sufficient demonstration. But this demonstration will never be possible, so long as we acknowledge the government of a moral order of the world. For this leads of necessity to faith in a living God, and this faith demands from our conception less pretensions than the faith in a kind of system of spiritual machinery by which chance and the wished-for are woven together, without this system proceeding from a highly spiritual and ethical intelligence. It nevertheless must be acknowledged that Vischer, from the standpoint of _ethical_ need, vindicates the position and truth of religion, as he also beautifully and correctly defines its position in reference to morality, in saying that morality makes the demand, religion gives the strength to meet it. From another side, Gustav Jäger makes a compromise between Darwinism and religion in his five lectures on "Die Darwinsche Theorie und ihre Stellung zu Moral und Religion" ("The Darwinian Theory and its Position in Reference to Morality and Religion"), Stuttgart, J. Hoffmann, 1869. He makes still more valid concessions to religion and Christianity than Lang and Vischer; directly opposes materialistic monism; leaves to faith in a personal God, in the divinity of Christ, in individual immortality, in the answer to prayer beyond the psychological effect, in miracles, in short, to the full contents of Christian religiousness, their weight and truth; and in that respect we would have to rank him in the following group, if he {215} did not by his manner of proving these concessions exclude himself from it, and rank himself in that group of which we treat in the present section. According to his opinion, Darwinism gives to religion, if not new contents (although these contents are entirely subject to revision according to Darwinism), still a wholly new foundation, and, indeed, a foundation of subjective religiousness, as well as of the objective contents of religion, only from the standpoint of its practical usefulness in the struggle for existence. The faith in a personal God, in immortality, in redemption by the God-Man Jesus Christ, in the hearing of prayer, in help in danger even to the extent of miracles, strengthens man, gives to him a superiority to those who do not have that faith and who do not have the habit of prayer, and therefore is so far the best weapon in the struggle for existence; and herein lies the truth of religion, especially of the Christian religion, as the most successful weapon in the struggle for existence which takes place through the whole creation, from the lowest organisms up to the highest spiritual life of mankind. We willingly admit that Christianity has certainly proved itself by far the strongest and most successful means of education to mankind, and that, if we must once express this experience in the Darwinian mode of speaking, we can express it as above. But with the attempt to make the _truth_ of religion and the truth of its contents, even if only subjective, dependent only and solely upon the proof of its _usefulness_, nobody, either friend or foe, will be satisfied. The adversaries of religion and Christianity, perhaps with the exception of Büchner, will admit that Christianity has for some {216} time been a quite useful weapon to mankind in the struggle for existence; but they will say that they are just about to replace it by a still more useful weapon; and the advocates of religion and Christianity likewise can not agree upon a mere grounding of their religion upon need which puts upon them every day the possibility of changing it for something still more useful. Both friend and foe will join in the conviction that objective truth is always the best guarantee for subjective success; and thus both will pass beyond the purely utilitarian apologetics or polemics to the questions as to the objective reality of the contents of Christian religiousness. * * * * * {217} CHAPTER III. PEACE BETWEEN RELIGION AND DARWINISM. § 1. _Darwin, Wallace, R. Owen, Asa Gray, Mivart, McCosh, Anderson, K. E. v. Baer, Alex. Braun, Braubach, etc._ It still remains for us to take a glance at those who think religion and Darwinism, and Christianity and Darwinism, hold toward one another reciprocally amicable relations. In the first place, we have to mention Darwin himself. In his earliest work, "Origin of Species," he repeatedly gives this opinion, as on page 421: "I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz 'as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.' A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he 'has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.'" On page 428, he speaks of the laws which God has impressed on matter; and at the end of his work, on page 429, he says: "There is grandeur in this {218} view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one." In his "Descent of Man," he also protests against the reproach that his views are irreligious, and says: "The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance." In treating of the question as to the development of the moral instincts, he says: "If he [man] breaks through the fixed habits of his life, he will assuredly feel dissatisfaction. He must likewise avoid the reprobation of _the one_ God or gods in whom, _according to his knowledge_ or superstition, he may believe." And furthermore he remarks: "The question whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe, has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed." It is true, all these expressions about religion are very general; but since in his works we do not find any utterance contrary to them and hostile to religion, we have a right to rank the celebrated originator of the whole agitation among those naturalists who are conscious of the limits of the realms of the natural and the religious, and are convinced of the possibility of a harmony between the two. For his casual utterances against a "creation" of single species always combine with the word creation the idea of that direct creation out of nothing, without intervening agencies, which is entirely correct for the idea of the first, origin of the universe, but which for the origin of the single formations within the universe is neither asked for by the religious view of the world, nor established by the Holy {219} Scriptures, nor by a cautiously reasoning theology, although it very often controls the conceptions of naturalists as well as of theologians. Now, while Darwin rejects the idea of a sudden appearance of a new species out of nothing--or, as he once expressed himself in his "Origin of Species," the idea "that at innumerable periods in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues,"--and he is no doubt right in rejecting it,--still at the same time he does not deny the dependence of the successive origin of a new species on a divine author. But in calling that process creation and this one not, he gives the appearance of an opposition to the religious idea of creation--an appearance of which the greater part of the guilt is borne by those theologians who define the idea of the creation, even of a single form, in a manner which is only proper for the idea of the first origin of the universe. It is true, we could rank Darwin still more readily among the scientists who are at peace with all the claims of religion, did he not in his "Descent of Man," when enumerating the "excellent naturalists and philosophers" who with him reduce the pedigree of man to lower forms, mention names of men who in their works firmly unite Darwinism and monistic naturalism or even materialism, and expressly protest against a separation of their naturo-historical results and their philosophic points of view. We mean Büchner and Häckel. The latter's "Natural History of Creation," he especially praises: "If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have {220} arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist," etc. The entire silence in regard to the anti-Christian results which these two authors derive from their naturo-historical premises, makes Darwin's own position in reference to religion again very uncertain. It seems that Darwin in his theology is not only inclined to theism, but, following the traditions of his countrymen of the last century, to a quite cool and superficial deism, and that he permits himself to be too much impressed by the anti-teleological deductions of many of his followers, and to be induced to separate in his later publications the Creator and his work more widely than he has done in the beginning. For while in his "Origin of the Species," and in his "Descent of Man" he nowhere contests a teleological view of nature, and rejects the idea of single creations only under the erroneous supposition that the idea of the creation of the single also excludes the action of intervening agencies, we find, on the other hand, in "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" a passage which, though in a reserved way, seems to give just as much support to the adversaries of teleology as to its advocates, if, indeed, not more. He says (page 338): "The belief that blushing was _specially_ designed by the Creator is opposed to the general theory of evolution, which is now so largely accepted; but it forms no part of my duty here to argue on the general question. Those who believe in design will find it difficult to account for shyness being the most frequent and efficient of all the causes of blushing," etc. This inconsistency in his utterances has its origin in the fact that the strength of this naturalist does not seem to lie in logical philosophic thought. {221} A. R. Wallace, the independent and contemporaneous co-originator of the Darwinian theory, still more evidently and more decidedly expresses himself favorably as to the position of this theory in reference to religion. In his "Natural Selection," he says on page 368: "It does not seem an improbable conclusion that all force may be will-force; and thus, that the whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actually is, the WILL of higher intelligences or of one Supreme Intelligence." He pronounces the belief that God created the new species in "continual interference" with the regular process of things, a lower conception, "a limitation of the Creator's power" (page 280), hence something which he makes objection to directly in the interest of religion. Moreover, he sees, especially in those stages which caused the physical development of man, and which became the material basis of his spiritual productions, moments of development which cannot be explained by natural selection or by a coincidence of material circumstances, but only by the preformation of the body after a certain design and for a certain purpose. Richard Owen, the celebrated anatomist, and palæontologist of England, who, after having for a long time resisted the Darwinian theories, lately accepted the idea of development and rejected that of selection, takes a similar position. In the last part of his "Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates," which was issued separately in 1863 under the title "Derivative Hypothesis of Life and Species," he sees in the causes which produced the new species only the servants of a predestinating {222} intelligent will--for instance, the horse predestinated and prepared for man; and on page 90 of vol. V. of "Transactions of the Zoölogical Society," he says, "that natural evolution, through secondary causes, by means of slow physical and organic operations through long ages, is not the less clearly recognizable as the act of all-adaptive Mind, because we have abandoned the old error of supposing it the result of a primary, direct and sudden act of creational construction.... The succession of species by continuously operating law is not necessarily a 'blind operation.' Such law, however designed in the properties and successions of natural objects, intimates, nevertheless, a preconceived progress. Organisms may be evolved in orderly succession, stage after stage, towards a foreseen goal, and the broad features of the course may still show the unmistakable impress of Divine volition." Professor Huxley, of London, the zealous and oft-mentioned advocate of the descent of man from the ape, says--what is so energetically contested by his warmest friends in Germany, by Büchner, Häckel, O. Schmidt, and others--that the teleological and the mechanical mode of viewing nature by no means exclude one another. He does this, of course, without going into any details of the religious question. Asa Gray, an eminent and highly esteemed American botanist, who is particularly respected by Darwin, and is supported also by Sir Charles Lyell in "The Antiquity of Man," says in his essay on "Natural Selection not Incompatible with Natural Theology, a Free Examination of Darwin's Treatise" (London, Trübner, 1861), on page 29: "Agreeing that plants and animals {223} were produced by Omnipotent _fiat_ does not exclude the idea of natural order and what we call secondary causes. The record of the _fiat_--'Let the earth bring forth grass,' etc., 'the living creature,' etc.,--seems even to imply them, and leads to the conclusion that the different species were produced through natural agencies." And on page 38: "Darwin's hypothesis concerns the _order_ and not the _cause_, the _how_ and not the _why_ of the phenomena, and so leaves the question of design just where it was before." And finally, in a passage which is adopted by Sir Charles Lyell (ib. page 505): "We may imagine that events and operations in general go on in virtue simply of forces communicated at the first, and without any subsequent interference, or we may hold that now and then, and only now and then, there is a direct interposition of the Deity; or, lastly, we may suppose that all the changes are carried on by the immediate orderly and constant, however infinitely diversified, action of the intelligent efficient Cause." Mivart, an English Catholic, most decidedly advocates a reconcilability of Darwinian views, and especially of the evolution theory, as he establishes it with the full contents of Christian orthodoxy, in his remarkable book "On the Genesis of Species" (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 2d. ed. 1871), in which we find a great many independent naturo-historical investigations. He assigns to the selection theory only a subordinate position, but on the other hand accepts an _evolution_, and, in close connection with R. Owen, explains it from inner and innate impulses of development of the organisms, which act now more slowly and gradually, now more by impulses; he places man as to {224} his _physical_ part entirely among the effects of the evolution principle, although, taking into consideration some utterances of Wallace, he thinks it possible, but not probable, that the creation and the preceding stage of his physical nature is also different from that of animals. But, on the other hand, in fully adopting the old scholastic creationism, he supposes a special creation of the _soul_, a separation of body and soul, which in this form is very contestable, and might better have been replaced by a separation of natural and rational or of physico-psychical and pneumatical parts of his being. With such a view of nature, he finds the fullest harmony between the evolution theory and religion, reconciles the plausible antagonism of creation and development by dividing the idea of creation into a primary creation (creation of the beginning out of nothing) and into a secondary creation (creation through intervening agencies, although that which is produced through them is still a creation and a work of the Creator), and declares his conviction that what is acting according to law in nature also stands under the causation and government of God like the first beginning of the universe--a postulate of our primary views without which the whole universe and our existence in it would harden into a cold mechanism without consolation or ideality. Finally, at the assembly of the Evangelical Alliance in New York (October, 1873), there were heard many voices of eminent advocates of a theistic and Christian view of the world, which maintained the full consistency of an evolution theory with religion and Christianity. McCosh, for instance, as referee in the philosophic section as to the relation of the evolution theory and {225} religion, said[10]: "I am not sure that religion is entitled to insist that every species of insects has been created by a special _fiat_ of God, with no secondary agent employed." And still more plainly and more courageously, President Anderson, of the University of Rochester, in his very remarkable address, speaks about the unnecessary and unworthy fear of many Christian men, when they see the appearance of hypotheses with which science operates. At the end of his address, he says: "The evidence for the existence of a personal Creator cannot be affected by any considerations drawn from the mode, relative rapidity, or the nature of the proximate antecedents and consequences in the creative process." From German sources, we can note fewer utterances of a friendly or at least neutral position between Darwinism and religion. For this fact there are many reasons. One may be, that on the continent in general there is a smaller number of those who, without being specialists in both realms, unite active religious interest and reasoning with a thorough study of those naturo-historical questions, while in Great Britain physico-theological studies have been for generations traditional and the object of interest for the majority of educated men. A second reason, indeed, is that some of the warmest scientific advocates of Darwinism at once attacked also theism and Christianity; hence with all those who did not have time and incitement enough to study the questions for themselves, they necessarily created the opinion that Darwinism really attacks even the fundamentals of {226} religion, and their whole tendency had but a repelling influence even on scientists of deeper spiritual and ethical disposition and need. Finally, in Germany as well as on the whole continent, the number of those who do not care for religious questions in general, and who therefore interest themselves in the scientific questions brought up by Darwin, but do not trouble themselves farther for their position in reference to religion and Christianity, is unfortunately larger than in Great Britain. Nevertheless, such friendly voices are not entirely wanting in our country. The botanist Alex Braun says, in his beautiful and significant lecture on the importance of development in natural history, p. 48: "Some said that the descent theory denies creation, and it is true, the Darwinians themselves caused this opinion by contrasting creation and development as irreconcilable ideas. But this contrast does not actually exist, for as soon as we look upon creation as a divine effect, not merely belonging to the past, or appearing in single abrupt movements, but connected and universally present in time, we can seek and find it nowhere else but in the natural history of development itself.... Theologians themselves, according to the Mosaic documents, acknowledge a _history_ of creation; natural history, looked upon from its inner side, is nothing else but the farther carrying out of the history of creation." Even K. E. von Baer, who expressly contests the idea of selection, thinks it only scientifically indefensible, but not anti-religious; an opinion also held by Wigand. A similar friendly relation between Darwinism and religion is advocated by Braubach, in his publication, {227} "Religion, Moral und Philosophie der Darwin'schen Artlehre nach ihrer Natur and ihrem Character als kleine Parallele menschlich-geistiger Entwicklung" ("Religion, Morality, and Philosophy of the Darwinian Doctrine of Species, as to its Nature and Character; a Small Parallel of Human Intellectual Development"), Neuwied, Hansen, 1869, a publication to which we pay special attention, since Darwin, in his "Descent of Man," twice paid it the honor of a quotation. It is true, the essay, through its peculiar dependence on an original and quite arbitrarily grouped scheme, gives the impression of something very singular, and is not very agreeably and easily read; but it shows such an energetic union of respect for science and its work and results, with adhesion to all the fundamentals of Christian truth, that it has to be mentioned as one of the rare voices which, even in regard to the realm of nature, pronounce the fullest harmony between religion and science. Braubach finds in the animal kingdom the _elements_ of all the spiritual life of mankind, even of _religion_ and _morality_; but everything is still wrapped in the lowest stage of sensuality. Nevertheless, he assigns to mankind, by its possession of the idea of _infinity_, something absolutely new, absolutely superior to the animal world, and sees the Darwinian ideas, even in the religious and moral possession of mankind, confirmed by the fact that they develop themselves on the way from the sensual stage to the rational exactly according to the principles of Darwin--namely, through transmission with individual variability in the struggle for existence, through selection of the fittest. With special earnestness, he pronounces the indissoluble unity of religion and morality, {228} and says that religion, as it presents itself upon Darwinian grounds, is a moral religion. We find here and there in periodicals many more voices which pronounce the conviction that, out of the present contest of minds, peace between religion and science will result. * * * * * _B. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND MORALITY._ PRELIMINARY VIEW. We can treat much more briefly of this portion of our task than of the position of the Darwinians in reference to the religious question, for the reason that the contrasts in the ethical realm are far less sharply drawn than in the religious realm, although in principle they are not less widely apart. For while there are a great many men who think that it belongs to good society and to the indispensable characteristics of high modern education to show either cold indifference or direct hostility in reference to religion and to the whole religious question; while a great many of the much-read works of _belle lettres_ never tire of teaching the reading public that the religious question really no longer exists for the educated man, on the other hand, nobody, not even the extremest atheist and enemy of religion, wishes to renounce the reputation of having moral principles. Thus it happens that the positions taken by the Darwinians in reference to the ethical question are less varied than those taken by them in reference to the religious question. And we may also be brief for another reason, {229} namely, that by reviewing the position of the Darwinians in reference to the religious question, we have essentially prepared the way for the principal questions which will have to be treated. We shall group the utterances upon the relation of the Darwinian theories to morality as we did those in regard to the relation of Darwinism to religion; and shall first let the advocates of an irreconcilableness between the two speak, then those advocating a reformative influence of Darwinism upon morality, and finally those striving for neutrality and peace between the two. We shall have no occasion, except incidentally, to discriminate between the different fundamental principles and parts of ethics, but shall in the last part of our work treat of the question independently. In making subdivisions for them here, we should but cause infinite repetitions, unnecessarily complicate our review, and render it more difficult. * * * * * {230} CHAPTER IV. ANTAGONISM BETWEEN DARWINISM AND MORALITY. § 1. _Objections to Darwinism from an Ethical Standpoint._ From what we said at the beginning of the preceding preliminary view, it is evident that we have to look for the advocates of an irreconcilableness between morality and Darwinism, not in the camp of the followers of the latter, but only in that of its adversaries. It is true, such advocates were never wanting. In pamphlets and journals, it has been often enough said that Darwinism cuts through the nerve of life, not only of religion, but also of morality. It was demonstrated that in making man a mere product of nature, and degrading him to a being that is nothing else but a more highly developed animal, Darwinism takes from human personality its value, from the realms of morality its dignity, and from its demands their autonomy. In making the struggle for existence the principle of all development and, by extending it to the development and social relations of man, at the same time the human social principle, it puts in place of self-denial and love the principle of egoism and boorishness and the right of the stronger, gives full course to the unchaining of all animal passions, and coquettes with all the emotions which, flattering the animal part of man, {231} aims at the subversion of all that exists and at the destruction of the ideal acquisitions of mankind. In tracing everything which constitutes the higher position and dignity of man back to his own work, and permitting it to be worked out of physical, spiritual, and ethical brutishness, in slow development and effort, closely related to the animal kingdom, it fosters and nourishes haughtiness in an intolerable way. And finally, in breaking off and denying the dependence of man upon God, and leading to mechanical determinism, it destroys the deepest and most effective motive to moral action--the tracing of the moral law to the authority of the divine Law-giver, and the consciousness of an individual moral responsibility. It cannot be denied that many of the most zealous Darwinians gave too much cause for such a conception and representation of the ethical consequences of their system. In view of the fact that they applied the selection principle, with its most radical consequences, to the origin and development of mankind, and that they elevated the same to the ethical and social principle of mankind and did not permit the acceptance of any new and higher agencies in mankind except those already active in the animal and the organic world, and that they gladly treated this selection principle also in the social and ethical realm as a struggle for existence, it was simply an entirely logical conclusion that the advocates of the moral nobility of mankind reproached such a reproduced Darwinism with degrading the moral dignity of man and with replacing love by egoism. Besides, in view of the fact that they declared materialistic monism, even the most naked atheism, the only conclusion of {232} Darwinism, and extended their mechanistic explanation of the world to a determinism in the highest degree mechanistic, and, carried to its utmost limit, to a denial of human freedom, it was not to be wondered at that those who recognize in theism the basis of all life worthy of man, and in the freedom of man one of the most precious pearls in the crown of his human dignity and of his creation in the image of God, complained of Darwinism's taking from morality its strongest motive and from moral action its responsibility. And, finally, in view of the fact that those who thus express themselves in their works showed but rarely, or not at all, some of the noblest fruits of moral education, such as respectful treatment of adversaries, humbleness and tact, they could not themselves reasonably complain that there was ascribed to their doctrine an influence detrimental to moral education. All this we find abundantly confirmed in the publications of Büchner and Häckel, and in many articles of the "Ausland." But the question is, whether those Darwinians who drew these conclusions were by their scientific investigations obliged to draw them, or whether they did not rather reach their religious and ethical view of the world by quite other ways, and whether they did not in a wholly arbitrary and irresponsible manner make extensive use of Darwinism in this anti-religious and ethically objectional direction--a fact which we shall try to prove in the last part of our investigation. Of course the Darwinians who spoke thus, did not intend to injure the moral principle, but only to purify and reform it; and therefore we shall have to speak of them in the following section. * * * * * {233} CHAPTER V. REFORM OF MORALITY THROUGH DARWINISM. § 1. _The Materialists and Monists. Darwin and the English Utilitarians. Gustav Jäger._ Among those who ascribe to Darwinism a morally reforming influence, we have to mention in the first place the _materialists_. It is true that even before the appearance of Darwinism they established their own moral principle of naturalistic determinism and of the education of man only by science and enlightenment, in opposition to a morality which rests on the principle of the eternal value of the individual, of full moral responsibility, of the holiness of the moral law, and of a divine author of it; they stigmatized the ethical requirement of aiming at the eternal welfare of the soul as a lower stage of morality in comparison with their own, which carries in itself the reward of virtue; and they declared Christianity and humanity, Christian morality and the morality of humanity, two things irreconcilably opposed to one another. But in having taken possession of Darwinism as their monopoly, they have made it the basis of new attacks upon the present moral principle of Christendom; and therefore we have here to mention them with their moral system. Büchner, in his lecture on "Gottesbegriff und dessen {234} Bedeutung" ("The Idea of God and its Importance"), replaces the moral principle (which in his opinion is nothing innate but something acquired) by education, learning, freedom and well-being; says that only atheism or philosophic monism leads to freedom, reason, progress, acknowledgment of true humanity--to humanism; that this humanism seeks the motives of its morality not in the external relations to an extramundane God, but in itself and in the welfare of mankind; and that infidels often, even as a rule, have excelled by moral conduct, while Christianity has originated many more crimes than it has hindered, and it would no longer be possible to establish with real Christians a vital community as at present understood. He declares the utterance of Madame de Staël, that "to comprehend everything means to forgive everything," the truest word ever spoken; and concludes his lecture with the remarks that the more man renounces his faith and confides in his own power, his own reason, his own reflexion, the happier he will be and the more successful in his struggle for existence. Strauss in "The Old Faith and the New," a publication which certainly has to be ranked here, for the reason that in it he founds on Darwinism his whole knowledge of the world, on the ground of which he wishes to arrange life, appears to be much more decent, and in the practical consequences much more conservative, than Büchner; but essentially stands upon quite the same ground. Häckel, Oskar Schmidt, and (as to his linguistic Darwinism) W. Bleek, group themselves around Strauss, partly with, partly without express reference to his deductions. {235} Strauss arrives at a peculiar inconsequence, but one well worthy of notice, when, in place of the struggle for existence which, according to the conclusions of those who also reduce morality to Darwinism, is still the _spiritus rector_ of moral development in mankind, and yet cannot of itself possibly lead to the morally indispensable requirements and virtues of self-sacrifice and of mere subordination under the moral idea, he suddenly substitutes a going of man beyond mere nature, and herewith a moral principle, which can never be deduced from Darwinism alone, and which is directly opposed to monism and pankosmism, which is to be the basis of his ethics. The reader may compare the manner in which he metaphysically supports his moral principle when he says: "As nature cannot go higher, she would go inwards. Nature felt herself already in the animal, but she _wished to know herself also_.... In man, nature endeavored not merely to exalt, but _to transcend herself_." Ulrici, the philosopher, in his reply to Strauss, has pointed out in sharp terms this inconsequence, as well as the other, that from the ground of a blind necessity which does not know anything of a higher and a lower, the difference of higher and lower, good and bad, rational and irrational, cannot at all be maintained; and that the requirement of a progress cannot at all be made, and its idea not at all be given. In this very perceptible inconsistency, Strauss calls that morality which he requires, "_the relation of man to the idea of his kind_." To realize the latter in himself, is the summary of his duties toward himself; actually to recognize and promote the equality of the kind in all the others, is the {236} summary of his duties towards others. He opposes the internal satisfaction which originates therein, to the "rough" idea of a reward of virtue and piety, coming from _without_, which, in order to connect both, is in need of a God. And he again reaches that inconsequence which from his metaphysical standpoint is entirely without motive, but as to itself only worthy to be recognized, when in another formula of his moral imperative he says: "Ever remember that thou art human, not _merely a natural production_." It is also this representation and realization of the _idea of the kind_, which those who combine with their Darwinism a negation of theism have mostly established before the appearance of the work of Strauss as the highest moral principle, and to which they are also led most naturally by Darwin's deduction of morality from the social instincts. Thus, Wilhelm Bleek, in the preface to his "Ursprung der Sprache" ("Origin of Language"), says (page XIII): "To aim at the inner and outer harmony of his genus in one or the other way, and to promote the correct relations of the different parts to one another in their reciprocal connections and in the greater parts of the whole organism (family, community, nation), are the highest visible designs of human existence, which must by themselves incite man to noble actions and to virtuous deeds. In the performance of this task lies the highest happiness which seems to be given to our species, a happiness accessible by everyone in his own way. Neither the fruit of eternal punishment nor the hope of an individual happiness, is really capable as a truly saving idea to elevate man to a higher existence; even if we take no account of the fact that {237} each of these two fundamental dogmas of the vulgar dogmatism makes but refined egoism the lever of its ethics." Häckel alone, in his "Natural History of Creation," with his utterances as to Christianity, morality, and the history of the world, again sinks down to the level of the coarseness of Büchner, and even below it. On page 19, vol. I, he entirely contests the reality of the moral order of the world, and continues: "If we contemplate the common life, and the mutual relations between plants and animals (man included), we shall find _everywhere_ and _at all times_, the very opposite of that kindly and peaceful social life, which the goodness of the Creator ought to have prepared for his creatures--we shall rather find _everywhere_ a pitiless, most embittered _struggle of all against all_. Nowhere in nature, no matter where we turn our eyes, does that idyllic peace, celebrated by the poets, exist; we find everywhere a _struggle_ and a _striving to annihilate_ neighbors and competitors. _Passion and selfishness, conscious or unconscious, is everywhere the motive force of life._ Man in this respect certainly forms no exception to the rest of the animal world." On page 237, vol. I, he professes the most extreme naturalistic determinism: "The will of the animal, _as well as that of man_, is never free. The widely spread dogma of the freedom of the will is, from a scientific point of view, altogether untenable." And on page 170, vol. I, he even says: "If, as we maintain, natural selection is the great active cause which has produced the whole wonderful variety of organic life on the earth, all the interesting phenomena of _human life_ must also be explicable from the same cause. For man is after all {238} only a most highly-developed vertebrate animal, and all aspects of human life have their parallels, or, more correctly, their lower stages of development, in the animal kingdom. The _whole history of nations_, or what is called _universal history, must therefore be explicable by means of natural selection,--must be a physico-chemical process_, depending upon the interaction of adaptation and inheritance in the struggle for life. And this is actually the case." That in his ethical naturalism he sees a real reform of morality, he expressly declares on the page next to the last of his "Natural History of Creation": "Just as this new monistic philosophy first opens up to us a true understanding of the real universe, so its application to practical human life must open up _a new road towards moral perfection_." (Vol. II, p. 367.) In the low conception of morality and its principle, Häckel is perhaps seconded only by Seidlitz who says in his "Die Darwin'she Theorie" ("Darwin's Theory"), p. 198: "Rational and moral life consist in the satisfaction of all physical functions, in correct proportion and relation to one another. Man is immoral through excessive satisfaction of one function and through neglect of the others." As in the religious question, so in the ethical, Carneri also takes a peculiar position. In reducing all the phenomena of existence, together with the whole spiritual life of mankind, to a close development of nature according to the causal law, in expressly grouping also the utterances of the will of man under this law of an absolute necessity, in fully adopting Darwin's doctrine as the wholly satisfactory key for the comprehension of the entire development of nature up to the history of {239} mankind, in advocating an absolutely monistic determinism and a nearly exclusive dependence of the efficacy of moral principles on the theoretic cultivation of the mind, on reasoning and education, he, as before mentioned, stands on exactly the same ground with materialists and monists among whom he expressly ranks himself; in the inconsequence with which he makes concessions to the power of the idea and the ideal over man--concessions which could never be concluded from a mere immanent process of nature--he is closely related to Strauss. But it is peculiar that, although entirely dependent in his reasoning on that monistic view of the world, and that Darwinian view of nature, he defines his ethical developments and his reflections on the organizations of human life in a relative independence, which again separates him as moralist from these before-mentioned monists and materialists, and rather ranks him, as we have seen in Chap. I, § 4, in the line of the disciples of Spinoza and Hegel. From this it can also be explained, how it could happen that in criticisms and reviews of Darwinism and its literature the standpoint which he takes could find such different and diametrically opposed expositions. While, for instance, the "Beweis des Glaubens," in the March number of 1873, thinks that Carneri wishes to seek on Darwinian ground a new and better basis for morality than we had heretofore; while Häckel in the preface to the third edition of his "Natural History of Creation," page XXIX, mentions the publication of Carneri with the greatest praise, earnestly recommends all theologians and philosophers to read it, and greets it as the first successful attempt at applying fruitfully the monistic view {240} of the world, as established by Darwinism, to the realm of practical philosophy and at showing that the immense progress of our knowledge of the world caused by the descent theory has only the most beneficial effect upon the further progressing development of mankind in practical life;--a criticism in the "Ausland" (8 April, 1872, No. 15), calls the same publication "an attempt at harmonizing Darwin's hypothesis with the current views of ethics, and at showing that those doctrines cannot be sustained which result as strictly logical conclusions from Darwin's theory, and which are opposed to the present views of morality." In returning from this digression to Darwinism in its purest form, to Darwin himself, we have in the first place to resume the discussion entered upon as to the way and manner in which, according to Darwin, self-determination is originated. Love and sympathy, moral feeling (with this definition he seems to point at the consciousness of moral freedom of will and of responsibility), and conscience, are to him very important elements of morality; and in the moral disposition of man he sees the greatest of all differences between man and animal. He also willingly acknowledges the powerful impulse which morality has from religion, when he says ("Descent of Man," Vol. II, page 347): "With the more civilized races, the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality." From these and all his other deductions, we see that Darwin in no way intends to modify the maxims of moral action; and if under the expression "reform of morality," with which we have headed the present chapter, we should understand but {241} a reform of moral action itself, we should without hesitation have to rank Darwin with the next group, and not with that of which we now treat; just as in our review of the position of Darwinism in reference to the religious question, we had to rank him with those who take a neutral and peaceful position in reference to religion. But if he does not touch upon morality in the maxims, he nevertheless comes forth in the _theory_ of moral action, in the science of morality with reformatory claims,--namely, with the fact that reduces the whole moral life to those agencies which are already active in the preceding animalic stage. It is true, he makes, as we have seen, a distinction in the genetic derivation of morality. He wholly reduces love and sympathy to social instincts which man has in common with the animal; and he lets the formal motives of moral action, sense of duty and conscience, originate through the high development of intelligence and other spiritual forces, and to be increased and transmitted by custom and inheritance, if those are present. But, on the other hand, development of intelligence is to him an exclusive product of the preceding stage on which it was developed, and thus, in his opinion, entire morality, notwithstanding that double derivation, certainly has purely and exclusively the natural basis as its origin. If that is once the standpoint to which man sees himself led, he has, in order to reason logically, but a double choice. He must either say that a development out of a natural basis can possibly be consistent with the appearance of a new and higher principle, or must give up the autonomy of the moral law, and leave the moral action of {242} man, even in his maxims, to the unsteady flowing of development, or even of arbitrariness, and to the degree of education and intelligence of subjectivity. Neither the one nor the other is done by Darwin. It is true, on the one hand he shows that modesty, so often exhibited by him, of the investigator who does not wish to express any opinion on questions regarding which he has not yet attained a mature judgment; but on the other hand he also manifests the same aversion to going beyond purely naturo-historical speculations which, as we have seen in Part I, Book II, Chapter I, § 1, hindered him from obtaining a clear conception of the importance of the question as to the origin of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination, and the same want of sequence in reasoning, which, as we have found in Chap. III, prevented him from giving an affirmative or negative decision in such an important question, as whether a divine end is to be observed in the processes of the world. In this naturalization of ethical principles, he is closely related to that peculiar moral-philosophic tendency in England, which long before Darwin's appearance, took its origin in John Stuart Mill, but which now, in the closest connection with Darwin's principles, has its main advocate in Herbert Spencer, and is commonly called the _utilitarian_ tendency. We understand by this that conception of the moral motive which allows the moral good, however it may be ideally separated from the useful in the developed condition of mankind at the present time, in its origin to be developed at the outset from the same origin as the useful,--namely, from the sensation of like and dislike; a theory of utility which Sir John Lubbock still tried to complete and deepen by {243} the theory of an inheritance of the sensation of authority. Activities which originally proved to be only useful, were inherited as traditional instinct by the offspring, and were thus freed from the sensation of the useful, and acted as _authority_; this is the origin of _duty_, according to the history of development. Inasmuch as this philosophic system aims at taking from ethics the absoluteness of its demands, and at drawing down these demands into the activities of originating and developing, it is also to be treated of in this place. As in the religious question, so in the ethical, Gustav Jäger also stands nearer to a neutral relation between Darwinism and the hitherto valid principles. He puts the moral principles the same as the religious, into the balance of utility to man in his struggle for existence, and finds it thus easy and to be taken for granted, that the principles of morality, as they became the common property of mankind as influenced by Christianity, really prove themselves also the most serviceable to mankind. Social life is of more benefit to man than hermit life; this reflection leads him to the moral principle of charity. And as, according to Darwinism, rising development shows itself in an increasing differentiation and more richly organized physical development, so the organization of society according to the principle of the division of work is that form of social life which proves itself the most practical to man; and this reflection leads him to the full acknowledgment of the entire ethical organization of human life and its tasks. But, as we saw, in treating of the religious question, that nobody, neither friend nor foe, could possibly be {244} satisfied with the substitution of the category of utility for that of truth, we are compelled to say in reference to the ethical question, that a moral principle which, on such a foundation, has its basis and authority only in its utility, is really no authority, and loses its value with every individual who is unwilling to acknowledge its utility and thinks another ground of action may be more useful than the moral. * * * * * {245} CHAPTER VI. NEUTRALITY AND PEACE BETWEEN DARWINISM AND MORALITY. § 1. _Mivart, Alex. Braun, and Others._ Evidently a real neutrality between the Darwinian theories of development and the hitherto valid and absolute authority of the moral principle is possible only, when we deny that the ethical demand is simply a natural process--although we may perceive its origin within the limits of a natural process--and when we fail to identify that demand with this process, and do not deduce it from the latter as its sufficient ground of explanation; but harmony between the two theories, in spite of all traces of Darwinism in the scientific parts of anthropology, is possible when we acknowledge the moral demand, if once present and valid, in its entire and, so to speak, its metaphysical independence in its full value, far exceeding all natural necessity. It is shown by Mivart that such an absolute authority of the ethical demands, and such an independence of the whole science of morality, may be brought into accord with the scientific theories of development. In his book on "The Genesis of Species," he devotes a whole chapter to ethical questions. He discriminates, in the moral good, between the formal good (good with consciousness and will of the good) and the {246} material good (good without consciousness and design), ascribes only the latter to the animal world in its moral features, and the former exclusively to mankind, and thus takes ground quite analogous to that held by him on the religious question, where he includes in the theory of development the physical part of man, but excludes the intellectual part, with the single qualification that in the religious question he unnecessarily renders his position more difficult by designating this intellectual or spiritual part by the term "soul." German authorities, who see in Darwinism only a scientific question which can be solved by means of natural investigation, and who therefore, think the religious and ethical questions but little affected by it, have expressed themselves in regard to this neutral position toward morality still more rarely than as to its neutrality toward religion. The reason for this is probably that the independence of moral principles and the absoluteness of their authority entirely result from themselves, as soon as we have once admitted theism and left room in general for a freedom standing above natural causality--and perhaps it is due to the further fact that the realm of the moral is more palpably urged as a reality and necessity upon even the most indifferent mind than the realm of religion. On the other hand, we find frequent utterances which _indirectly_ refer to the ethical realm--for instance, expressions in reference to the ethical importance of an animal descent of man. Alex. Braun says: "Man _assents_ to the idea of being appointed _lord_ of the creatures, but then he may also acknowledge that he is not placed over his subjects as a stranger, but originated from the {247} beings whose lord he wishes to be. It is not an unworthy idea, but rather an elevating one, that man constitutes the last and highest member in the ancient and infinitely rich development of organic nature on our planet, being connected by the most intimate bonds of relationship with the other members, as the latter are connected among themselves with one another: not a pernicious parasite on the tree of natural life, but the true son of the blissful mother Nature." In reducing descent, which he accepts, to a development from an _inner_ force, and in ascribing to the Darwinian selection, with its struggle for existence, the value only of a regulator (he adopts this term of Wallace as a very striking one), Braun, in his concluding appeal to young students, calls especial attention to the ethical importance of a development proceeding from within, saying: "Life has its outer and its inner side; all its works and ways must follow mechanical laws, but its tasks and aims belong to a higher realm. We are permitted to take a glance into this realm through the all-embracing history of the development of nature, which leads up into our own inmost being, up to our highest end. Truly progressive development is the best wish for every youth," etc. Inasmuch as that in which Alex. Braun finds a satisfaction for the fulfillment of the ethical tasks--namely, a deeper knowledge of man's connection with lower nature, and the pointing to the proper tasks of the development of mankind,--has thus far been the substance of all sound systems of morality, we did not mention these and similar utterances, of which we could gather many more from other writers, in the preceding part of our {248} work--_i.e._, in describing those who ascribe to Darwinism a reformatory influence upon morality; but we rank these utterances with those which predict from the descent theory neither injury to morality nor any especial enlightenment regarding it. We have now reached the end of that part of our work which considers and treats of the views of others. To our regret, we have been compelled to restrict ourselves, in this review, to the countries of the English and German tongues; the former being the home of Darwin, the latter our own. We should have preferred to take into our review also the literature of France and Belgium, Holland and Italy; but we feared being able to give only an incomplete report. Besides, it is in Germany and Great Britain--and partly also in North America, related to both in language and origin--where the Darwinian agitation has taken deepest hold of the mind; and, in restricting our report to these countries, we are not likely to have omitted any view essential to the consideration of the present question. It is true that in the other countries named the Darwinian literature is also rich, and we are well aware of the incompleteness of our report in that respect. But we believe that we have not omitted any essential views and evidences, even if the names of many of their advocates have not been mentioned. It still remains to us to investigate independently the position of the Darwinian theories, with their philosophic supplements, in reference to religion and morality: a task for which we hope to have essentially prepared the way through the preceding representations and investigations. * * * * * {249} BOOK II. ANALYTICAL. * * * * * PRELIMINARY VIEW. In treating the _religious_ question, we proceed from the supposition that religion is concerned not only in this subjective truth of religious impulse and sensation, but also in the objective truth and reality of its faith, although it attains these in a different way from natural science. A religion which should have the authorization of its existence only in psychology, and which was not allowed to ask whether the object of its faith also has objective reality, would stand on a weak basis, and its end would only be a question of time; for an impulse which can only be psychologically established, and to which no real objective necessity could correspond, must sooner or later either be proven a psychological error or be eliminated by progressing culture. On the other hand, if we find a reconcilableness or an irreconcilableness of Darwin's views with the objective substance of religion, the possible question as to its reconcilableness or irreconcilableness with subjective religiousness on the ground of those results wholly answers itself. In no way, not even in the most indirect, can we approve that method of book-keeping by which something can be true in regard to religion and false in regard to science, or vice-versa; on the contrary, we see {250} in all attempts at healing in such a way the rupture which at present exists in the minds of so many, only a more emphatic avowal of that rupture. In treating of the religious question as it affects the position of Darwinism in reference to the substance and the objective truth of the religious faith, without going into a detailed treatment of the question of the reconcilableness of a purely subjective religiousness with the Darwinian views, it will be of advantage to speak first of the position of the Darwinian theories in reference to the basis of all true and sound religion and religiousness--the _theistic view of the world_. In doing this, we shall discriminate the purely scientific theories of Darwin from the philosophic supplements and conclusions which have been given to and drawn from them, and shall have to consider each of them separately in connection with the theistic view of the world. If thereby we shall discover Darwinian views which can be brought into accord with a theistic view of the world, we shall also, in order to close our investigation, have to consider them with those parts of the theology of _positive Christianity_ which can be affected by the Darwinian questions. In treating the question of the relation of Darwinism to morality, our investigation can be somewhat abridged, because many of the principal questions which have to be considered have found their solution in what has been previously said, and partly also because they will present themselves in it different form. The principal division in our discussion we shall most appropriately assign to ethics, and thus treat first of the position of Darwinism in reference to the moral principles, and then treat of this in reference to the concrete {251} moral life. Where the question as to the position of Darwinism in reference to morality occurs, we shall no longer have to treat of it separately as to the different aspects of its problems--we should otherwise get lost in too many repetitions; but we shall only have to separate an ethical naturalism which supports itself upon Darwinian grounds, from pure Darwinism, and to treat of each in turn as to its position in reference to morality. * * * * * {252} _A. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND RELIGION._ CHAPTER I. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND THE THEISTIC VIEW OF THE WORLD. A. THE POSITION OF PURELY SCIENTIFIC DARWINISM IN REFERENCE TO THEISM. § 1. _Scientific Investigation and Theism. The Idea of Creation._ At the very beginning of our investigation, we have to state that the absolute freedom of scientific investigation lies not only in the interest of natural science, but just as clearly in the direct interest of religion; and that every attempt at limiting the freedom of scientific investigation in a pretended religious interest, can only have its cause in the fullest misapprehension of that which the religious interest requires. For the religious view of the world consists in this: that it sees in the universe, with all its inhabitants and processes, the work of an almighty Creator and Ruler of the world; and therefore it cannot be unimportant to it, whether we also have a knowledge of this work, to a certain extent, whether we make use of the means which lead to the knowledge of the world, {253} and whether we make progress in the knowledge, or not. The religious view of the world sees in every correction and enrichment of our scientific knowledge only a correction and enrichment of our knowledge of the way and manner of the divine creation and action; and every such correction and enrichment acts directly as an incitement to religiousness--although, fortunately for the universal destination of religion, the degree of our religiousness is not dependent upon the degree of our knowledge of nature. Therefore, the religious view of the world does not throw any barriers in the way of scientific investigation; it does not prescribe the route by which the latter is to reach its aim, and it does not forbid it any scientific auxiliary means, nor, indeed, any scientific auxiliary hypothesis, nor does it, so far as the communication of scientific knowledge is concerned, inquire after the religious or the irreligious standpoint of those who offer it such knowledge. In all these directions, it knows of but one requirement: that of exact and correct presentation; in a word, of but one requirement of _truth_. Real, well-founded, and certain results of natural science can never come into antagonism with religion; for precisely the same thing which in the language of natural science is called natural causal connection, is in that of religion called the way and manner of divine action and government. Where man has adopted any view, the proving of which, according to its nature, belongs to natural science, and natural science should show an error in such a view, he must simply give it up and surrender the erroneous opinion, that such a view is to form a constituent part of our religious perception. Just as decidedly, on the other hand, religion can ask of {254} natural science that it should not use speculative views of religious character, the proving of which belongs to the science of religion, for the purpose of scientific generalizations, in case the science of religion should prove that such views are antagonistic to the nature and the principles of religion. Those who, on religious grounds, look with suspicion upon scientific investigation, are frequently influenced by two erroneous notions, closely related to one another, without regard to the well-grounded aversion to the atheistic beauty with which so many scientific works are adorned. One of these errors is the notion that any object is remote from divine causality in the degree in which it has the cause of its origin in the natural connection, and that it would be easier for us to trace the origin of an object to the authorship of God, if we could not find any natural cause of its origin, than if we had knowledge of such a natural cause. The other error is the notion that the idea of "creation" excludes the idea of the action of secondary causes. If the first mentioned opinion were correct, those certainly would be right who identify the progress of sciences with the progress of atheism; and ignorance would then be the most effective protection of piety. But this opinion is in direct conflict with all sound religious and scientific reasoning. It is in conflict with sound religious reasoning: for the religious view of the world sees in nature itself, with its whole association of causes and effects, a work of God; and as certainly as, according to the religious view of nature, a thousand years in the sight of God are but as yesterday when it is past, just so certainly is an object a work of {255} God, whether its origin is due to milliards of _well-known_ secondary causes, which all together are works of God--as well with reference to the laws which they obey as to the materials and forces in which these laws are active--or whether, when treating the question as to the immediate cause of its existence, we see ourselves led to an agency _unknown_ to us. And that opinion is also in conflict with all sound scientific reasoning: for the fact that we do not have any knowledge of the immediate cause of a phenomenon, is by no means a proof that this immediate cause is the direct action of God who does not use any secondary causes; the phenomena may just as well have still more material or immaterial secondary causes, unknown to us. We will illustrate the error, referred to, by an example which will also reveal its relationship to the other error of which we shall have to speak immediately. It is certainly no evidence of an especially intensive piety, if we build the conviction that God is the Creator of man, among other things, on the obscurity in which for us the origin of mankind is wrapped. For from this obscurity no other conclusion can be drawn than increased proofs of the limitation of our knowledge; that piety which traces those phenomena whose natural causes we know, just as decidedly to the causality of God, is much more--we shall not say, intensive, but correctly guided--than that piety which traces back those whose natural causes are hidden to us. And, on the other hand, it is also no evidence of especial religious coolness or indifference, when we pursue with interest and the desire of success the attempts at bringing light into the history of the origin of mankind. He who does the latter can, according to his religious or {256} irreligious standpoint, just as easily connect his interest with the hope of an enrichment of his knowledge of the ways and works of God, as with the hope of a confirmation in his atheistic view of the world. The reverence with which we stand before the action of God in those works whose existence is in a higher degree a mystery to us than the existence of others (for in reality everything is a mystery to us), is perhaps a little differently modified from the reverence with which we stand before the action of God in those of his works in the mode of whose origin we are permitted to get a deeper glance; but each is reverence, and we can get from both nutriment for our religious nature. Those who favor the second error--namely, that the idea of creation excludes the idea of secondary causes--overlook the facts that the idea of the creation of the universe is essentially different from the idea of the creation of the single elements of the universe, as, for instance, of the earth, of the organisms, of man; that the idea of a creation without secondary causes can only be applied to the origin of the universe in its elements, forces, and laws, and that the first origin of the single elements in the world--as of the single planets, organisms, man--not only admits the action of secondary causes, but even requires and presupposes the action of conditions. For all single species of beings which have originated within the already existing world, have also certain elements, even the whole basis and condition of their existence, in common with that which was already before in existence; the planet has its elements in common with the elements of other planets, the organic has the same material substances as the inorganic, man has {257} the elements and the organization of his body as well as a great part of his psychical activity in common with animals. Nothing urges us to suppose--and the analogy of all that we know even forbids us to suppose--that with the appearance of a new species of beings, the same matter and the same quality of matter which the last appearance has in common with the already existing, has each time been called anew into existence out of nothing. Only that which in the new species is really new, comes into existence anew with its first appearance. But we do not even know whether the proximate cause of this new does really come into existence for the first time, or whether it was not before in existence in a real, perhaps latent, condition, and is now set free for the first time. In the one case as in the other, we shall call the new, which comes into existence, a new creation. And if man thinks that the new only deserves the name of creation, when it occurs suddenly and at once, where before only other things were present, like a _deus ex machina_, certainly such an opinion is only a childlike conception, which becomes childish as soon as we scientifically reason about the process. It cannot be doubtful that religious minds which are not accustomed to scientific reasoning, have such a conception; whether theologians also favor it, we do not know, although it is possible. Certainly those scientists who intend to attack the faith in a living Creator and Lord of the world, take it as the wholly natural, even as the only possible, conception of a Creator and his creation; and of course it is to them a great and cheap pleasure to become victorious knights in such a puppet-show view of the conception of creation. But the source whence Christians derive their {258} religious knowledge tells them precisely the contrary. The Holy Scripture, it is true, sees in the entire universe a work of God. But where it describes the creation of the single elements of the world, it describes at the same time their creation as the product of natural causes, brought about by natural conditions. The reader may see, for instance, the words: "And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, etc. And _the earth brought forth_ grass and herb," etc. "And God said, Let _the earth bring forth the living creature_." Even the creation of man is thus related: "And the Lord God _formed_ man of the dust of the ground." Certainly the forming presupposes a matter out of which man is formed. And, on the other hand, where the Bible speaks of single beings in the kingdoms long before created and perfected, of the individual man who is originated by generation and birth, of single plants and animals--in general, of single processes and phenomena in the world long before perfected, of wind and waves, of rain and flames, which altogether have their natural causes of origin--it speaks of them all precisely in the same way as when describing their first creation as works of God. The expressions "create, make, form, cause to appear," are applied to the single individuals of the kingdoms long before created, precisely in the same way as they are to the first origin of the first individuals of those kingdoms. Thus, by the full freedom which religious interest gives to scientific investigation, we are well prepared to treat with entire impartiality the question as to the position of each of the Darwinian theories in reference to theism. {259} § 2. _The Descent Theory and Theism._ In the first part of our investigation, we found that the idea of the origin of the species, especially of the higher organized species, through descent from the next related lower ones, has a high degree of probability, although it is still not proven in a strictly scientific sense, and although especially the supposition of an often-separated primitive generation of single types is not excluded by that idea, and we can hardly suppose that the main types of the animal kingdom are developed out of one another. Now we are far from asking of _religion_ to decide for itself in favor of the one or the other mode of conception, or to place its influence in the one or the other balance-scale of scientific investigations. It leaves the answering of these questions exclusively to natural science, knowing beforehand that it will be able to come to an understanding with the one as well as with the other result of its investigations. But we confess frankly that it is incomparably _easier_ for us to bring the origin of the higher groups of organisms in accord with a theistic and teleological view of the world through descent than the origin of each single species of organisms through a primitive generation; and we reach this result especially by the attempt at teleologically perceiving the palæontological remains of organic life on earth. Theism and teleology see in the origin of things a striving towards a goal, a rising from the lower to the higher, a development--it is true a development really taken only in the ideal sense of an ideal connection, of a plan; or, as K. E. v. Baer, in 1834, in his lecture on the most common law of nature in all development, expresses {260} himself, of a progressive victory of mind over matter. Such a plan and its realization we can much more easily conceive when, in the past genera which geological formations show us, a genealogical connection takes place between the preceding species and the now living species, than when each species perished and beside or after it the newly appearing species always originated out of the inorganic through primitive generation. In the first case, we see in the preceding a _real_ preparation for the following, and also easily perceive, the apparent waste of enormous periods of time for the successive processes of creation. In the second case, the coming and going of genera in innumerable thousands of years, without any exterior connection, becomes an incomprehensible problem, and the striving towards an end according to a regular plan, which we observe in the development, of the organic kingdoms on earth, disappears completely in metaphysical darkness. Precisely because so many advocates of a theistic view of the world have thought that for the sake of the theistic idea of creation they were obliged to suppose a primitive origin of all the organic species, and because, nevertheless, the fact is patent that in the course of the pre-historic thousands of years myriads of species came and perished, not to return again, they became liable to the reproach on the part of the adversaries of theism, that the Creator, as they supposed him, makes unsuccessful attempts, which he has to throw away, as the potter a defective vessel, until he finally succeeds in making something durable and useful; and this objection was and is still made, not only to these superficial theists and their unhappily-selected and indefensible position, but to {261} the whole view of the world of theism itself and to the faith in God and the Creator in general. For all these reasons, we can from the religious point of view but welcome the idea of a descent of species. Philologists have, if we are correctly informed, the canon that as a rule the more difficult text is the more correct one; but we doubt whether those should adopt this canon who try to read in the book of nature, whether with the eye of science or with that of religion--unless the faculty of reasoning is given to us in order to conceal the truth. But, we have also to look for a manner of reconciling theism with all the different possibilities under which a descent is at all reasonable and conceivable. One of these possibilities is that of an entirely successive development of species out of one another by imperceptibly small transitions; and of this we shall soon speak. Another is the possibility of a descent by leaps, through a metamorphosis of germs or a heterogenetic generation. The real causes of such a heterogenetic generation, if it took place at all, have not yet been found; therefore we have to treat only of the abstract possibilities of its conceivableness. There are two such possibilities. The birth of a new species took place in one of two ways: Either to those materials and forces which formed the germ of the new species, were added entirely new metaphysical agencies which did not exist before, and only the basis and the frame within which the new appeared, or that which the new species has in common with the old mother-species had the cause of its existence in the preceding. Likewise even the original productions {262} of man are always composed of two factors--of the given pre-suppositions and conditions, and of the new which on their basis and within their frame comes into existence. Otherwise the causes of the new which was to originate already lay in all former stages, but were still latent and still hindered in their activity, and only at the time of the birth the new impulse came which set them free for their activity. This new impulse may very well belong to the causal connection of the universe, and be caused by something analogous to natural selection. In the first case, which in its application to the origin of man is adopted by A. R. Wallace and Karl Snell, the reconciliation between descent and theism has not the least difficulty; for if the agency which in the new-appearing species produces that which is specifically new in it, came only into existence with the first formation of the germs of the new species in the mother-species, this new certainly cannot have its origin anywhere else than in the supermundane _prima causa_ in the Creator and Lord of the world. In the second case also, theism is in no way threatened. For if we have to refer the cause of a new phenomenon in the world so far back as even to the beginning and the first elements of all things, we nevertheless have to arrive at last at the cause of all causes; and this is the living God, the Creator and Lord of the world. Thus the new form of existence would anyhow have the cause of its existence in God; and the value, the importance, and the substance of its existence, would only commence from where it really made its appearance, and not from where its still latent causes existed. As little as we attribute to the just fecundated {263} egg of man the value of man, although we know that under the right conditions the full man is to be developed out of it, just so little in accordance with that view would the differences of value within the created world be dissolved in a mass of atoms or potencies of a similar value. Neither should we have to fear that from such a theory cold deism would be substituted for our theism, full of life. For as certainly as theism does not exclude, but includes, all that is relative truth in deism, so certainly the supposition that the Creator had laid the latent causes of all following creatures in the first germs of the created, would also not exclude the idea of a constant and omnipotent presence of the Creator in the world. Undoubtedly it belongs to our most elementary conceptions of God, that we have to conceive his lofty position above time, not as an abstract distance from finite development, but, as an absolute domination over it; so that for God himself, who creates time and developments in time, there is no dependence on the temporal succession of created things, and it is quite the same to him whether he instantly calls a creature into existence, or whether he prepares it in a short space of time, or years, or in millions of years. In this idea we also find the only possible and simple solution of the before-mentioned problem of a timeless time which Fr. Vischer wishes to propose to philosophy. § 3. _The Evolution Theory and Theism._ In speaking of an evolution theory, in distinction from the descent theory, we mean, as is evident from the first part of our work, that way and mode of {264} constructing the doctrine of the descent of species which permit this descent to take place, not by the leaps of a metamorphosis of germs, but by transitions so imperceptably small that the difference of two generations which lie in the same line of descent, is never greater than those differences which always take place between parents and children of the same species--transitions so gradual that only the continuation of these individual changes in a single direction produces an increase and, finally and gradually, the new species. The treatment of the question as to what position this _evolution theory_ takes regarding theism, is even more simple than answering the question as to the position of the descent idea in reference to theism. For now we have no longer to discuss the different possibilities of a development, as heretofore we have discussed those of a descent, but only the idea of a gradual development or of an evolution in general. Of such possibilities, it is true, we find several. In the first place, we can look for the inciting principle of the development of species either in the interior of organisms, or we can see it approaching the latter from without. The only scientific system which has made any attempt at mentioning and elaborating the inciting principle of development is that of Darwin; a system that chooses the second of the alternatives just stated and sees the essential principle that makes the transmission of individuals a progress beyond one species, approaching the individuals from without. But while we shall have to treat of this specific Darwinian theory--the selection theory--still more in detail in the following section, we shall also there have to point, out {265} everything that theism has to say in reference to a principle of development which approaches the organisms from without. Another possible explanation of the origin of species through development is to be found in the fact that we look for the inciting principle of development in the interior of organisms. This is done, so far as we know, by all those scientists who, although inclined to an evolution theory, are adversaries of the selection theory; but none of them claim to have found the inciting agencies of development. Thus, as in the preceding section, we are again referred only to the wholly abstract possibility of conceiving these inciting agencies either as coming into existence anew in the organism with each smallest individual modification which leads to a development of the species, or as being before present in the organisms, but still latent, and only coming into activity when they are set free. But the question whether theism could accept the one or the other possibility had to be treated of in the preceding section, and was there answered in the affirmative. Thus it only remains to treat in general of the question as to the reconcilableness of the idea of the origin of species through evolution, through gradual development, _in general_ with a theistic view of the world. In the first place, we wish to render evident the fact which is so often overlooked by the friends of monism and still more by theistic adversaries of the idea of evolution, that the idea of a development of species, and also of man, does not offer to theistic reasoning any new or any other difficulties than those which have been long present, and which had found their solution in the religious consciousness long before any idea of evolution disturbed the {266} mind. It is true, the question as to the origin of _mankind_ is, to speak in the language of natural history, a still unsolved _problem_; and the supposition of its gradual development out of the animal kingdom is still an _hypothesis_--one of all those attempts at solving this problem which still wait for confirmation or refutation. But there is another quite analogous question whose position has long ceased to be a mere problem, and whose solution is no longer a mere hypothesis; namely, the question as to the origin of the perfect human or any other organic _individual_. To speak again in the language of natural history, this origin is no longer a problem--that is, without regard to the obscurity in which the existence and origin of every creature, as to its last causes, is always and will always be veiled for us. We know that the human, and, in general, every organic individual, becomes that which it is through _development_. It begins the course of its being with the existence of a single cell, the egg, and goes through all stages of this development by wholly gradual and imperceptible transitions, so that the precise moment cannot exactly be fixed when any organ, any physical or psychical function, comes into existence, until perfect man is _developed_. Man has this mode of coming into existence in common with all organized beings, down to the lowest organisms which stand above the value and rank of a single cell. At this place, and with the design of our present discussion in view, we ought not to render the importance of this fact obscure by a teleological comparison of the different eggs and germs with one another. If we look upon that which is to _come out_ of the germs, and which certainly if prepared and present in the first vital functions of the {267} germ, although we are not able to observe, prove, and estimate it by means of the microscope and the retort, then of course the difference in the value of the germs must be immense; and from this point of view we certainly look upon the germ of man differently than upon the germ of an oyster. But here the question is not as to the differences of value of organisms: no scientist who remains within the limits of his realm, will ever deny them; but we treat of the question whether such valuable objects come into existence suddenly or gradually--whether it is possible, or even a fact which repeats itself before our eyes, that a form of being of higher value comes forth from a form of being of a lower value in gradual development. And here it is an undisputed fact that all qualities of man, the physical as well as the spiritual, come into existence in such a gradual development that not in a single one of them can be fixed any moment of which it may be said: on the other side of this moment it did not exist, but on this side it did exist. All differentiations of his body, from the first differentiation of the egg-cell into a complexity of cells up to the last formation of his organs, take place in the same gliding development. All his psychical and spiritual functions and forces come into existence in this form of gradual development. Where, in the development of the human individual, is the moment in which consciousness, language, self-consciousness, memory, will, the perception of God, moral responsibility, the perception of the idea and the ideal, or whatever else we may mention, came into existence? Nowhere; all this, and all the rest, is developed in a gradual process. The only marked time in this development is the time of birth: {268} it brings a great change into physical life, and is perhaps the beginning epoch of the spiritual development of man. But even the birth is not absolutely bound to a certain time; the child may be born too early, by weeks or even months, and its development nevertheless takes place; and even after birth, how slowly and gradually spiritual development begins and continues! With this gradual process of individual development which we have long known, we have never found any difficulty in bringing two things into harmony. First, we always judged the value of the single qualities of man only in the proportion in which they were really present and came into existence, and in such a way that we entirely followed the flowing development of the individual. Therefore we looked upon the suckling, for instance, not at all as a morally responsible individual; upon the child of two years as more responsible, but to a far less degree than the child of school-age, and the latter again to a less degree than the man; and thus we have been long accustomed to reason, when looking upon all single qualities of man. Second, we did not find any difficulty in bringing into perfect harmony the idea of a gradual process of individual development and of the dependence of the latter on a complex totality of natural causes: with the idea of the absolute dependence on God, the Creator, of that which arose through development. Every religiously reasoning man has always looked upon himself as the child of his parents, gradually developed under the activity of complex natural causes, as well as the creature of God, that owes the existence of all its forces and parts of body and soul to God. Should it then, be so difficult, or is it only {269} something new, to bring into harmony, when looking upon the entire species and genus, that which we were long ago able to bring into harmony when looking upon the individual--it being presupposed that the investigation leads us to a development of the entire species and genus similar to that of the individual development? Or have we here again to ask, as in § 1: is it more religious to make no attempt at removing the veil which covers the natural process of the origin of mankind, than to make it? It is true, the not knowing anything can, under certain circumstances, create and increase the sensation of reverence for the depth of divine power and wisdom; but a perception of the ways of God is also certainly able to create the same. On that account, we need not at all fear that by such an attempt and its eventual success we might get into the shallows of superficiality, to which nothing seems any longer to be hidden, only because it has no presentiment of the depths which are to be sounded. There will always remain enough of the mysterious and the uninvestigated, and each new step forward will only lead to new views, to new secrets, to new wonders. But does not a development, like that which we here for the moment assume hypothetically, efface and destroy the specific value of man and mankind from still another side? Would not a _beginning_ of mankind be really lost, in case that theory of evolution should gain authority? and would not there still lie between that which is decidedly called animal world and that which is decidedly called mankind an innumerable series of generations of beings which were neither animal nor man? We do not believe it. What makes man _man_, {270} we can exactly point out: it is self-consciousness and moral self-determination. Now, in case development took place in the above sense, it may have passed ever so gradually; the epochs of preparation between that which we know as highest animal development and that which constitutes the substance of man, may have stretched over ever so many generations, and, if the friends of evolution desire it, we say over ever so many thousands of generations; yet that which makes man _man_--self-consciousness and moral self-determination--must have always come into actual reality in _individuals_. Those individuals in which self-consciousness came into existence and activity, for the first time, and with it the entire possibility of the world of ideas--the consciousness of moral responsibility, and with it also the entire dignity of moral self-determination--were the first men. The individuals which preceded the latter may have been ever so interesting and promising as objects of observation, if we imagine ourselves spectators of these once supposed processes; yet, they were not men. § 4. _The Selection Theory and Theism._ The last scientific theory whose position in reference to theism we have to discuss, is the selection theory. We have found but little reason for sympathizing with this theory. But since we believed that we were obliged to suspect it, not for religious but for scientific reasons, so the completeness of our investigation requires us to assume hypothetically that the selection principle really manifests itself as the only and exclusive principle of the origin of species, and to ask now what position it would in such a case take in reference to theism. {271} The only answer we are able to give is decidedly favorable to theism. It is true, development would in such a case approach the organisms merely from without. For the principle lying within the organisms, which would then be the indispensable condition of all development, would be first the principle in itself, wholly without plan or end, of individual variability; second, the principle of inheritance which for itself and without that first principle is indeed no principle of development, but the contrary. The causes from which the single individuals vary in such or such a way, would then be the outer conditions of life and adaptation to them: _i.e._, something coming from without. And the causes from which one individual, varying in such or such a way, is preserved in the struggle for existence, and another, varying differently, perishes, would be approaching the individuals also from without; hence they are a larger or smaller useful variation for the existence of the individual. Now if, through these influencing causes of development, approaching the most simple organisms from without, a rising line of higher and higher organized beings comes finally into existence (a line in which sensation and consciousness, finally self-consciousness and free-will, appear) we again reach the teleological dilemma: all this has either happened by chance, or it has not. No man who claims to treat this question earnestly and in a manner worthy of respect, will assert that it happened by chance, but by necessity. But with this word the materialist only hides or avoids the necessity of supposing a plan and end in place of chance, as we have convinced ourselves in Part I, Book II, Chap. II, § 1. {272} The only exception in this case is, that the bearer and agent of this plan would not be the single organism (as is easily possible when we accept a descent theory which is more independent from the selection theory), but the collection of all forces and conditions, acting upon the organism from without. And for the question, whence this plan and its realization comes, we had again but the one answer: from a highest intelligence and omnipotence, from the personal God of theism. The _locus_ of creation and the _locus_ of providence would now, as ever, retain their value in the theological system, with the sole exception that most of that which so far belonged to the _locus_ of creation would now belong, in a higher degree than in the hitherto naturo-historical view, to the _locus_ of providence and of the government of the world. When looked upon from the theocentric point of view, the new forms which we had to suppose as called into existence only by selection, would remain products of divine creation: the "God said, and it was so," would retain its undiminished importance; but looked upon from the cosmic point of view, they would present themselves as products of the divine providence and government of the world, still more exclusively than in every principal of explanation which finds the causes of development in the organisms themselves or in an immaterial cause acting upon the organisms from within. The first as well as the second point of view is in full harmony with the religious view of things. We do not conceal that on the ground of all other analogies we sympathize more with those who look for the determining influences of the origin of new species rather within than without nature, and who, while {273} looking at that which the higher species have in common with the lower, do not forget or neglect the new, the original, which they possess. But we are indeed neither obliged nor entitled, in the name of religion, to take beforehand in the realm of scientific investigation the side of the one or the other direction of investigation, or even of the one or the other result of investigation, before it is arrived at. Let us unreservedly allow scientists free investigation in their realm, so long as they do not meddle with ethical or religious principles, and quietly await their results. These results, when once reached, may correspond ever so closely with our present view and our speculative expectations, or in both relations be ever so surprising and new; the one case as well as the other has already happened: at any rate they will not affect our religious principles, but only enrich our perception of the way and manner of divine activity in the world, and thereby give new food and refreshment, to our religious life. * * * * * A. THE DARWINISTIC PHILOSOPHEMES IN THEIR POSITION REGARDING THEISM. § 5. _The Naturo-Philosophic Supplements of Darwinism and Theism._ We still have to discuss the position of theism in reference to the _philosophic_ problems to which a Darwinistic view of nature sees itself led, and in the first place its position in reference to the naturo-philosophic theories with which the descent idea tries to complete itself. In the first part of our book, we have found that not {274} a single one of the naturo-philosophic problems before which the descent idea places us, is really solved: neither the origin of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination, nor the origin of consciousness and of sensation, nor the origin of life; and even the theory of atoms, although it is quite important and indispensable for the natural philosopher and chemist according to the present state of his knowledge and investigation, has not yet been able to divest itself of its hypothetical character. Religion might, therefore, refuse to define its position in reference to theories which are still of a quite problematic and hypothetical nature. But by giving such a refusal, religion would not act in its own interest. The reproach is often made that it has an open or hidden aversion to the freedom of scientific investigation--a reproach which, it is true, is often enough provoked by its own advocates; often the assertion is made by advocates of free investigation, that free science has led, or can lead at any moment, to results which shake or even destroy theism and with it the objective and scientifically established truth of a religious view of the world. The consequence of this assertion is exactly, as before-mentioned, that minds whose religious possession is to them an inviolable sanctuary, and who lack time and occasion, inclination and ability, to examine scientifically these asserted results of science, really suspect free science and contest the right of its existence. Another consequence of this state of war between religion and science is the fact that so many minds in both camps fall into a servile dependence upon battle-cries: they confound freedom of investigation with license; science with apathy or {275} hostility to faith; faith with lack of scientific perception, blind unreasoning belief, etc. Such a state of affairs does not, indeed, serve the interests of peace and truth; only a correct treatment of philosophy as well as of religion can lead to them. Such a way of peace and truth from the side of religion and its scientific treatment is entered upon, when religion sets itself right, not only with all real, but also with all _conceivable_, _possible_ results of the other sciences, not only of the exact, but also of the philosophic sciences. If it finds, in such an investigation, that such conceivable results are reconcilable with the theistic view of the world which is the basis of religion, it has already shown its relationship to the freedom of investigation. But if it finds anywhere a possible result which is in conflict with its theistic view of the world, it is obliged to examine the mutual grounds of dissent, as to the degree of their truth and their power of demonstration; and in case its own position is the stronger, better founded, and more convincing, to prove this fact. If it does this, it again acts according to the principle of free investigation--with the single difference that in such a case it not only makes this allowance to the opponent, but also uses this principle for itself in its own realm and especially in the border land between itself and its opponent; but at the same time it shows in this case (what, indeed, so many are inclined to deny), that religion also has its science, and that theology itself is this science, and has the same rights as the sciences which are built up in the realm of material things or of abstract reasoning. We therefore assume hypothetically, that the origin {276} of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination is fully explained by consciousness; the origin of consciousness and sensation by that which has no sensation; the origin of the living and organic by the lifeless and inorganic; and that atomism also is scientifically established and proven: how, then, would such a theory of the world and theism stand in respect to each other? By this assumption, we think we should simply stand again at the point, the basis of which we had to discuss in Part I, Book II, Chap. II, § 1, when treating of teleology. We should always see something new, something harmoniously arranged: a process of objects of value, continually rising higher and higher, coming forth out of one another in direct causal connection; and should have a choice of one of two ways of explaining this process. We should either have to be satisfied with this final causal connection, and perceive in this process itself its highest and last cause, in doing which we should be obliged again to deny order and plan in this process, to reject the category of lower and higher and the acknowledgment of a striving towards an end in these developments, and after having climbed to that Faust-height of investigation and knowledge, to throw ourselves in spiritual suicide back into the night and barbarism of chaos, or of a rigid mechanism to which all development, all life, all spiritual and ethical tasks, are but appearance; or we should have to treat the idea of development seriously and recognize a plan and a striving towards an end in this world-process, and should then find ourselves referred to a higher intelligence and a creative will as the highest and last cause which appoints the end and conditions of this process. This would be the case still more, as we actually {277} see that at present the single beings which stand on a lower stage of existence no longer produce beings of a higher stage, although, according to that theory whose correctness we now assume hypothetically, the elements and factors for the production of those higher forms of existence are fully present in the lower ones. Inorganic matter no longer produces organisms; the lower species of plants or animals no longer develop higher ones; the animal no longer becomes man; and yet there were periods, lying widely apart, in which, according to that theory, such things took place. What else set free those active causes, at the right time and in the right place? What else closed again at the precise place and moment the valves of the proceeding development, and brought to rest again the inciting force of the rising development?--what else but the highest end-appointing intelligence and omnipotence? Even the inherent qualities of the elements, and the products of all the higher forms of existence which in the future shall arise out of them, the whole striving toward an end of the processes in the world, would present itself to us much more vividly than now, where we are still in the dark as to all these questions. We should see in _atoms_ the _real_ inherent qualities of all things and processes which are to be developed out of them; in the inorganic the _real_ inherent qualities for the organic and living; in that which has no consciousness and sensation the _real_ inherent qualities for self-consciousness. Instead of being now obliged to recur to the ideal and metaphysical, we should see the threads of the world's plan uncovered before us in empirical reality; and far from bearing with it an impoverishment of our {278} consciousness of God, all this would bring us only an immense enrichment of its contents; for with such an enlargement of our knowledge, we should only be permitted to take glances into the way and manner of divine creation and action--glances of a depth which at present we are far from being permitted to take. Even very concrete parts of a theistic view of the world, as they present themselves to us--_e.g._, in the Holy Scripture, from its most developed points of view--would now find only richer illustrations than heretofore. St. Paul, for instance, in Rom. viii, speaks of the earnest expectation of the creature that waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. As to the present state of our knowledge of nature, those who adopt this view are only entitled to see in the sensation of pain of the _animal world_ a sensation of this longing, unconscious of the end; but as to all soulless and lifeless beings and elements in the world, they can see in these words of a sighing and longing creation only a strong figurative expression used because of its suitableness to denote suffering of the animal world, as well as of men,--for the destination of the world to another and higher existence in which the law of perishableness and suffering no longer governs. On the other hand, if, as we assume hypothetically, all higher forms of existence in the world could be explained out of the preceding lower ones, and if the before-mentioned theorem of a sensation of atoms should form a needed and correct link in that chain of explanation, those words of sighing and longing would have to be literally taken in a still more comprehensive sense than now and in their directly literal meaning {279} would refer not only to the animal world but indeed to everything in the world. Therefore, so long as attempts at explaining the different forms of existence in the world wholly from one another keep within their own limits, and do not of themselves undermine theism; and so long as there are men who on the one hand favor such a mode of explanation and on the other hand still adhere firmly to a faith in God, whether it be the deeper theism or the more shallow and superficial deism--so long religion has no reason for opposing those attempts at explanation. And there are such men; we need only to mention Huxley, whose position in reference to religion we have already discussed; or Oskar Peschel, who, in his "Völkerkunde" ("Ethnology"), says: "It is not quite clear how pious minds can be disturbed by this theory; for creation obtains more dignity and importance if it has in itself the power of renewal and development of the perfect." Even Herbert Spencer, with his idea of the imperceptibility of the super-personal, of the final cause of all things, is still a living proof of the fact that man can trace the mechanism of causality back to its last consequences and, as Spencer does, even derive consciousness and sensation from that which is without sensation, and yet not necessarily proceed so far as _negation_ of a living God, even if he persists in his refusal to perceive in general the ultimate cause of things. To meet those attempts, religion would have to take only two precautionary measures on two closely related points; and in doing this it would indeed make use of that before-mentioned right to defend freedom of {280} investigation both in its own realm and in the border-territory. One precaution would consist in the requirement of the acknowledgment that even in that purely immanent mode of explanation the _idea of value is fixed_, but that the value of the new appears only when the new itself really comes into existence; that we therefore do not call, _e.g._, the inorganic _living_, because according to that mode of explanation life develops itself out of it; and that we do not ascribe to the animal the value of man, because according to that mode of explanation it also includes the causes of the development of man. Such a discrimination of ideas is indeed a _scientific postulate_, as we have had occasion to show at many points of our investigation; and we also complied with this requirement long ago in that realm of knowledge which is related to these questions as to the origin of things, but is more accessible and open to us, namely, in the realm of the development of the individual. We have spoken of this at length in § 3. But in the interest of _religion_ also we have to request that the _differences of value_ of things be retained, even when man thinks he is able to explain their origin merely out of one another. For without this, all things would finally merge simply into existences of like value; man would stand in no other relation to God than would any other creature, irrational or lifeless; and the quintessence of religious life--the relation of mutual personal love between God and man, the certainty of being a child of God--would be illusory when there should no longer be a difference of value between man and animal, animal and plant, plant and stone. {281} Many a reader thinks, perhaps, that with this precaution we make a restriction which is wholly a matter of course, and that nobody would think of denying these differences of value. Häckel, in his "Anthropogeny," repeatedly reproaches man with the "arrogant anthropocentric imagination" which leads him to look upon himself as the aim of earthly life and the centre of earthly nature; this, he says, is nothing but vanity and haughtiness. Several writers in the "Ausland" faithfully second him in this debasement of the value of man. Its editor ("Ausland," 1874, No. 48, p. 957), for instance, reproaches Ludwig Noiré, although he otherwise sympathizes with him, that in his book "Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes" ("The World as Development of Mind"), Leipzig, Veit & Co., 1874, he still takes this anthropocentric standpoint and can say: "The anthropocentric view recognizes in man's mind the highest bloom of matter, which has attained to the possession of a soul." This, Häckel says, is nothing else but the former conception, not yet overcome, that man is the crown of creation. This pleasure in debasing the value of man is also a characteristic sign of the times. K. E. von Baer is right, when, in his "Studies" (page 463), he says: "In our days, men like to ridicule as arrogant the looking upon man as the end of the history of earth. But it is certainly not man's merit that he has the most highly developed organic form. He also must not overlook the fact that with this his task of developing more and more his spiritual gifts has only begun.... Is it not more worthy of man to think highly of himself and his destination, than, fixing his attention only upon the low, to {282} acknowledge only the animalic basis in himself? I am sorry to say that the new doctrine is very much tainted in this direction of striving after the low. I should rather prefer to be haughty than base, and I well recollect the expression of Kant, 'Man cannot think highly enough of man.' By this expression the profound thinker especially meant that mankind has to set itself great tasks. But the modern views are more a palliation of all animal emotions in man." The other precautionary measure referred to would be, that the _realm of mind_, and especially the _ethical realm_, is not dissolved into a _natural mechanism_. This precaution is also connected with the first one, the latter being its condition; for only where it is acknowledged that causes, so long as they are still latent, do not fall under the same category of value as their effects, when these are once realized, it can also be acknowledged that the realm of mind and morality, although it has grown out of the ground of the mechanism of nature, can still have brought something new and higher into the world. Besides, this precaution is also a postulate of anthropologic science. For spiritual and ethical facts have at least the same truth and reality as the material, and a still higher value, and can therefore not permit any injury to their full recognition. But religion also must require this acknowledgment. For if the specific _activity_ of mind in man is endangered, we also lose his specific _value_, and thus get into the before-mentioned dilemma; and if the moral responsibility of man is endangered, the relation of man to God loses its ethical character. Of the consequences in reference to morality, we shall have to speak hereafter. {283} Moreover, religion does not require this acknowledgment without a rich compensation. For if that naturo-philosophic mode of explanation, whose correctness we hypothetically assume in this present section, prove to be right, and if the higher which comes anew into existence in the world, is to have the full cause of its origin in the preceding lower, such an admission, in accordance with the laws of logic, by which _causa æquat effectum_, is only possible when we either similarly, as above, invalidate all difference between higher and lower, all difference of value of creatures, and contest the possibility that that which appears anew can also follow new laws of existence and activity; or when, in the highest cause of all final causes in the world, we see the full abundance of all those possibilities present as real cause, which afterwards appear in succession in the world. This highest cause, then, lodges in material things the final causes of all which is to come, as still latent causes, waiting to be set free; and such a highest cause as the fullness of all that which is successively to be developed in the world, is offered to science by religion itself in the idea of a living God. We say expressly, that religion offers this idea to science, and not that science creates this idea; for the acknowledgment of God, as we have before had occasion to point out, is in the last instance not a result of science, but an ethical action of mind,--although from this acknowledgment the brightest light falls upon science and the whole series of its conclusions, and although science owes to precisely this idea of God the highest points of view to which it sees itself led and from which alone it is able to survey its entire realm. {284} § 6. _Elimination of the Idea of Design or its Acknowledgment and Theism._ In the whole preceding course of our investigation as to the position of religion and theism regarding the different scientific and naturo-philosophic theories, theism could quietly keep the position of a friendly and peaceful spectator. The degrees of our sympathy with the theories which have successively passed before our eyes, were on scientific grounds very unequal; but on religious grounds, and in the interest of a theistic view of the world, we found ourselves nowhere induced to take sides for or against a theory. But the position of religion and theism becomes quite different in reference to the assertion that the existence of ends and designs in nature is refuted by the evolution theory or by any other hypothetical or real results of science. With this assertion, the existence of a living and personal God, of a Creator and Lord of the world, is denied; and every religion which claims objective truth for its basis is eliminated. It is true, man can under this supposition still speak of a religion in the sense of subjective religiousness; but the life-nerve is also cut off from this subjective religiousness. We have repeatedly had occasion to prove this in our historical review, and also in the section in which we pointed out the plan of our own analysis. But still, where we have had to represent this anti-teleological view of the world, we have happily convinced ourselves of the fact that an existence of ends and designs in nature is not only _reconcilable_ with the conformity to law and the causal mechanism of its processes, but is {285} also _postulated_ by scientific contemplation of nature, as soon as the latter observes that in these processes, acting with lawful necessity, something in general is attained, and, moreover, when out of them comes forth something so infinitely rich and beautifully arranged, such a rising series of higher and higher developments, as the world. On the other hand, combatting the striving towards an end in nature leads to such scientific monstrosities, destroys so thoroughly the idea of God and also all ideas of value in the world, even all spiritual and ethical acquisitions of mankind, that we can explain the origin of such a doctrine only by the determined purpose of getting rid, at any cost, of the dependence on a living God: again a proof of the fact that faith, or want of faith, in its final causes, is not the product of reflecting intelligence, but an ethical action of that centre of human personality from which the spiritual process of life in the individual comes forth--an ethical action of mind. Herewith the position of theism in reference to the elimination of the idea of design is also soon characterized: it is _the position of irreconcilable antagonism_. In rejecting the position of its opponent, theism perceives that it is in harmony not only with every correctly understood religious need, but equally so with every scientific interest--with the interest of a correct knowledge of nature, as well as with the interest of those sciences which have to take care of and try to understand the spiritual and ethical endowments of mankind. If we now turn our attention to the _position of theism in reference to the idea of design in general_, theism on its part also gives an equally firm support to that intimate connection, proven by natural science, between causality {286} and striving toward an end--between actiology and teleology, as they are called in the language of the philosophical school. While a contemplation of nature perceives in nature a mechanism governed by laws and necessities, it finds results reached through this chain of causality in which it must acknowledge ends toward which the preceding has striven. Now, theism, on its part, proceeds from the highest end-appointing cause of things and processes, and finds that the reaching of these ends postulates a mechanism of natural conformity to law. In order to prove this, we certainly must take a course which is prohibited by many as anthropomorphism, _i.e._, we must try to study the connection of ends and designs, and the possibility of such a connection where we are able to observe in general not only the _accomplishment_ of purposes, but also the _forming_ of purposes; and the only realm of this kind which we know of, is the realm of human action. He who, merely through fear of anthropomorphism, shrinks from this only possible comparison, may consider that for those who assume a highest end-appointing cause (and we, too, proceed from this standpoint) man also, who forms his designs and strives toward his ends, is a product of that highest end-appointing cause; and that, therefore, in the human striving toward an end, a certain analogue of the divine striving toward an end must occur. We are, indeed, not obliged on this account to identify the two, and to close our eyes against the immense differences which exist between them, and which, wholly of themselves, intrude upon our observation. What we mean by that analogy may thus be stated. Man forms for himself designs and ends, and pursues {287} and reaches them by using the objects and forces of nature as means. He can do this only because the forces in nature act from necessity, strictly conformable to law. Because, and so far as man knows the action of forces, conformable to law, and the inviolable necessity of the connection between certain causes and their effects, he can select and make use of such causes as means, by virtue of which he reaches those effects as designs intended by him. If he could not depend on this conformity to law, on this causal connection taking place according to simple necessities, he could not select, make, and use, with certainty, any tool, from the club with which he defends himself against his enemies or cracks the shells of fruit, up to the finest instruments of optics and chemistry, and even to the telegraph and steam engine. The conformity to law, with which the forces of nature act, far from being an impediment to his appointing and reaching his ends is much more the indispensable means by which he is enabled in general to reach them. Now, if we thus find, in the only action striving towards an end which we are able to observe to the extent of the appointing of ends and the selection of means--namely, man's end appointing action--such a strong dependence of finality on causality that the reaching of ends is not possible at all unless the means act of necessity conformably to law, then we are certainly obliged to draw the conclusion that the highest author of things has prepared the world so, that the reaching of ends requires the action of means, and that the category of finality and the category of causality are mutually prepared for each other. For, according to the theistic and teleological view of the world, the {288} laws of nature, acting with causality and necessity, are certainly not laws which the Creator found in some way, and with which he had to calculate as with factors given to him from somewhere else, in order to make use of them, so far as he was permitted, for the accomplishment of his designs--this would be the way and manner of _human_ teleological action, and transferring it to _divine_ action would be an anthropomorphism which we should have to reject. On the contrary, these laws themselves are the work of the teleologically acting Creator--he, indeed, will have given to them such a quality that with them he is able to reach his ends as a whole and in detail. The inviolability of the laws of nature also results from this idea. For means which would have to be supplemented, sometimes set aside, occasionally replaced by others, would be less perfect than such means as by virtue of their quality are able with certainty to serve the designs which are to be reached by them. How theism can reconcile with this view the indispensable idea of divine freedom, we shall have occasion to show in Chap. II, § 4. Among the writers who defend teleology, we can mention two who, starting from the analogy of human teleological action, have pointed out the idea that teleology itself requires a necessity, conformable to law, in the activity of the forces of nature. One of the two is K. E. von Baer, in his oft-quoted essays on striving towards end; and the other is the Duke of Argyll. At a time when the assault against teleology had just begun, this noble author perceived the whole importance and weight of these attacks, and most energetically defended teleology. The expression of the just-mentioned ideas, {289} among others, forms one of the fundamentals of his work, "The Reign of Law" (London, Strahan & Co., first edition published in 1866, and since then in frequently repeated editions); a work which is well fitted to instruct us, in the most interesting manner, regarding the present state of the related questions as they are treated of in Great Britain. * * * * * {290} CHAPTER II. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND POSITIVE CHRISTIANITY. § 1. _The Creation of the World._ Now that we have come to a clear understanding of the position of the Darwinian theories in reference to the basis of all religion and of all living religiousness, to theism in general, it remains to be seen what position those of the theories which are reconcilable with theism take in reference to the positive Christian view of the world. We naturally omit all those objects and parts of Christian dogmatics which have no points of contact, or are very indirectly connected with the Darwinian ideas, or which--as, _e.g._, their position in reference to the idea of God in general--have found their principal illustration in our investigation just finished. We shall nevertheless have now to take into consideration once more, although from another side, some objects which we have discussed in treating of the relation of the Darwinian ideas to theism, on account of the specific part which theism has in Christianity. This is especially the case with those Christian facts which belong to the first article of the Apostolic Creed, and immediately also with the doctrine of the creation of the world. {291} At first sight it seems that the evolution theory and Christianity are in no other place more sharply opposed to each other than in that of the history of creation. Darwinism claims for its theory immense periods of time; and geology seems to furnish them according to its demand. The Holy Scripture, on the other hand, teaches a creation of the world in six days. With the attempt to find the right way to end this conflict, we enter upon that part of the border-land between theology and natural science, which, among all others, is most contested, and which has offered to the most luxuriant fancy the widest field of action and the one most profitably taken advantage of. We confess at the outset that we sympathize with those who try to keep the peculiar realms of religion and natural science apart in such a way that a collision between the two is impossible. We quietly leave the investigation of the temporal succession in creation--especially the investigation of all that belongs in the finite causal connection of natural processes--to natural science; we also do not look to the source of our Christian religion, to the Holy Scripture, for a scientific manual, least of all for the communication of a knowledge of nature, supernaturally manifested and claiming divine authority, the acquisition of which is especially the task of scientific labor. But we bestow just as decidedly upon religion the specific task of showing man the way to communion with God, especially the way of salvation; a task in which it can as little permit itself to be hindered by natural science, as the latter in the pursuit of its peculiar tasks can allow an objection from any source. On the side of religion, the bond of unity which brings {292} into harmony the two activities of the human mind--the religious and the investigating--in the realm of nature, and, in general, in the whole realm of exact science, consists in the fact that in all which exact science offers to religion as the result of its investigation, the latter perceives and shows the works and ways of God; and on the side of the exact sciences, the bond consists in the fact that they bring within the reach of their scientific, historical, literary, culturo-historical, and exegetical investigations all that which in the religious realm appears, or in the written word is fixed, as historical fact. Religion, therefore, concedes to exact sciences the full right of examining the biblical records as to all the relations of their historical and literary connections; it even makes these investigations a quite essential and, at present, very much favored branch of its own science of theology. On the other hand, religion reserves just as decidedly to itself the full right of drawing from them, of maintaining, and of realizing, the whole full _religious_ basis and significance of those records. We know very well that such a proposition is very simple in principle, but much more difficult in practice. For the quintessence of that which constitutes the basis of the Christian religion--namely, the leading back of mankind to communion with God by means of salvation--is not only a philosopheme, a theoretical or mystic doctrine, but a _fact_: it comes into the world as a series of divine _facts_; it is interwoven by innumerable threads into creation and the course of nature and history; and, as to this whole aspect of its appearance in the world of phenomena, it falls under the cognition of the exact sciences. But as soon as any given fact excites the {293} interest of religion as well as that of exact science, collisions are possible from both sides. Some advocates of religion, through mistaken zeal for religious interests, may think it necessary to assert and to represent as indispensable to religion facts whose cognition as to reality belongs only to exact science and which are contested by exact science; as, _e.g._, the creation of the world in six literal days, or the creation of the single elements of the world without the action of secondary causes. And some advocates of exact science, from reasons of a superficial analogy, may erroneously think it necessary to dispute the reality of facts, otherwise well attested, but wanting analogy, in which religion has a central interest; as, _e.g._, the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, or the reality of his miracles. Or they may unjustifiably try, from our experiences in this world, to forbid glances which religion permits us to throw beyond the present course of the world; _e.g._, the eschatological hope of Christians is often enough contested, or as the laws of nature are called eternal in the absolute sense of the word, although natural science is only led to a recognition of the duration of the same, which is congruent with the circumstances and duration of this present course of the world. We are perfectly aware of all these possibilities of a collision, and of all the difficulties of their prevention and reconciliation; but we nevertheless know of no other way for their avoidance than that simple principle of agreement which, on account of its simplicity and clearness, seems to us to be perfectly able to maintain the peace between the two parties interested, or where it is disturbed, to restore it. {294} Thus, we wholly agree that in the question of creation the investigation of the succession and of all modalities in the appearance of the single elements of the world, is entirely left to natural science, and that the biblical records should on the one hand be investigated wholly, and even to their remotest consequences, from a literary, historical, and exegetical point of view, and on the other hand be tested with equal fullness and completeness as to their religious contents. The literary and exegetical examination of the Mosaic account of creation will reveal that its conceptions of that which in the creation of the world belongs entirely to the natural process, do not go beyond that which otherwise belongs to the sphere of knowledge and views of antiquity, as well as of immediate perception of nature in general; and that we cannot expect any scientific explanation from it, because man really came last on the stage of earth, and is therefore not able to say anything, founded upon autopsy, about the origin of all the other creatures which preceded his appearance. Just as little could the first men possess and deliver to their offspring a remembrance of the first beginnings of their own existence. Moreover, the literary and exegetical interpretation of the Bible will also refer to other passages of the Holy Scripture which entirely differ from the succession of creations, as they are related in Genesis I; so, _e.g._, besides Job XXXVIII, 4-11, the second account of creation in Genesis II, 4-25: again a proof that what we read in the Biblical record of creation about the succession in the appearance of creatures is not binding upon us. Religion can have nothing to say against these results; it will not reject the information of man as to the {295} succession and the modalities in the appearance of the single elements of the world, which it receives from natural science, and will not expect it by means of a special supernatural manifestation; it will willingly accept it from natural science, and simply make use of it in such a way that in nature and its processes it also perceives a manifestation of God. Now, when it examines the different Biblical accounts of creation as _to their religious substance_, it will find in them such a pure and correct idea of divine nature and divine action--such a pure conception, equally satisfying to mind and to science, of the nature of man, of his position in nature, of the nature and destination of the two sexes, of the ethical nature and the ethical primitive history of man,--it will especially have to acknowledge in the Biblical account of creation, in spite of all points of collision with the cosmogonies of paganism, such an elevation above them, such an exemption from all _theogony_, with which heathen cosmogonies are always mixed up, that we are perfectly right in perceiving in these records the full and unmistakable elements of a pure and genuine stream of manifestation, which pours into mankind. So far we find ourselves in full harmony with a theology which, in the manner indicated, reconciles the religious interest with the historical and critical interest. We find the points of view to which this perception leads, represented with special clearness and attractiveness in Dillmann's Revision of Knobel's "Commentar zur Genesis" ("Commentary on Genesis"), Leipzig, Hirzel, 1875. But it seems to us that a readiness to be just to historical criticism and impartial exegesis has hindered {296} theologians occupying this standpoint from being just also to _the religious element_, in its full meaning, in reference to a very important part of the Mosaic account of creation, in which the author of it shows quite a decided religious interest. We mean the _six days of creation_, together with the _seventh day_, the divine Sabbath. Theologians became too quickly satisfied with the exegetical perception of these seven days, as creative, earthly days, of twenty-four hours; and this hindered them from assigning to the religious meaning the full importance which these days have in that record. That the idea and the number of the days in that account have a high religious meaning to the author, is clear from the following: The account in Genesis I, 1-24, belongs to that series of parts of the Pentateuch which we call the original, and which has the Sinaitical Law as the centre of its belief. The division of the days into weeks, each having six working days and one day of rest, which possibly existed before, but which received obligatory importance to Israel first by the Sinaitical legislation, so far controls that account of the creation of the world that, next to the sublime perception of the dignity and position of man, it forms its very quintessence. The account makes that divine week of creation, with its six working days and its divine day of rest, the divine prototype and model for the human division of time; and the Decalogue also, in the conception which it has in Exodus XX, directly bases the commandment of the Sabbath on the divine week of creation. Now, if we suppose that the author took these days as earthly days of twenty-four hours, we are first of all obliged to reject as a child-like error the idea on which from _religious_ {297} reasons--not from reasons of a mystical idea of God, but from direct practical religious reasons--he puts great importance; an idea with which he establishes an institution of human life which has been preserved through many thousands of years and is still preserved as the exceedingly blissful basis of all social life. For that the creation of the world, from the beginning of things up to the appearance of man, demanded more than six times twenty-four hours, is beyond any doubt. Moreover, we should be obliged to reject the arguments of such a central religious custom as Sabbath-rest in a record in which we have to assign an absolute and lasting religious value to all other religious elements of it, as to the ideas of the unity, omnipotence, and wisdom of God, of his creation through the creative word, of the perfection of his works, of man bearing the image of God. We should even see that idea of God which presents itself to us out of all other characteristics of that record in such spotless purity and sublime magnitude, sink down to a decided insignificance through the identification of the divine days of creation with our earthly days of twenty-four hours. All this certainly brings near to us the question: do we make a correct exegesis, do we correctly _read_ that record, when we think that the author, because he speaks of days, must necessarily have understood earthly days, such as we know now? We readily perceive how interpreters have arrived at this view. The divine sections of creation in the Mosaic account show themselves too decidedly as days to make possible any other interpretation than to take them as days. Now from experience we do not know of any other days than of earthly days of twenty-four hours; {298} and therefore the conclusion naturally follows, that the author also took the divine days of creation as such earthly days of twenty-four hours. A simple reference of the same to periods, so that we should again think of fixed periods of the earth or of the world, would especially pervert the literal sense--would entirely remove from the account the idea of "day" which is so essential to the author of the record, and thereby render obscure the archetype of the divine week of creation for the human divisions of time; and the looked-for harmony between the Biblical days and the geological periods of the earth would by no means be established by such an identification of the days of creation with the periods of the world: for the geological or even the cosmic and astronomical periods are nowhere in congruity with the Biblical days of creation. But the question, however, is: are there not evidences in the Biblical account itself which show that the author did _not_ take these days as creative earthly days of twenty-four hours? We have to answer this question decidedly in the affirmative. In the first place, it is an established fact that these days of the week of creation were also, according to the meaning of the author, _days of God_. Now that such days of God, even with the most childish and simple worldly knowledge of that early period of mankind, so soon as such a pure _idea of God_, as appears from the whole account, is at the bottom of the conception, can no longer be _identical_ with the days of the creature, is to be inferred beforehand with the greatest probability from the purity of that idea of God, and is even expressly {299} confirmed by special evidences in the record itself. We have to mention no less than four of them. The days of creation present themselves _as days of God_, which as such _differ from the creative days of earth_ by the fact that with them the _day_ and the _work of the day_ are absolutely identical. In the creative days, the day and the work of the day are always different from one another; the days come and go as temporal frames which include everything that happens during these days, whether we know it or not. Now we may turn our attention to and mention ever so many works of an earthly day: there always happen innumerable other things which also belong within the frame of that day and which are only not observed by us. It is quite another thing with those Biblical days of creation: here the day _begins_ with the beginning of the day's work; it _exists_ and _passes on_ single and alone in the course of the work of the day, and it comes to an end when the day's work is completed, and the work of the following day begins: it comes to an end with "evening and morning." We also lay some stress, though not very much, upon the fact that, in the account, that which makes and regulates the _earthly_ day is created not before the fourth day of creation, Genesis I, 14: "And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven _to divide the day from the night_; and let them be for signs and for seasons, and _for days_ and years." We admit that if we were obliged for other reasons to suppose that the author of the account took the days of creation as common earthly days of twenty-four hours, we must and should find it possible that the author had been able to {300} suppose the existence and the course of such earthly days even _before_ the creation of sun, moon, and stars; for he certainly could not yet have the scientific perception that the sun with its light and the rotation of the earth were the only cause of an earthly day. But it is easier and more natural for us to bring that passage, Genesis I, 14, into accord with the conception that the days of creation are divine days which, as such, are different from creative days, and on one of which God also created that which originates creative days. Another evidence in the account is of still greater importance for our conception of days. These days of creation in the Biblical record _have no night_. The account closes the work of each day with the words: "_And the evening and the morning were the first day_," "_the second day_," etc. Now, if we have to suppose that the author took these days as common earthly days, it would be quite impossible to understand why, after having mentioned at the close of the day's work that it now became evening, he omits the long night of twelve hours, and, although not having said anything of the night, makes the morning which follows the latter, the end of the preceding day; and why he does not say, "and it became evening" and "it became _night_, the first day," etc. We then could not avoid the question: what, according to the conception of the author, did God do in these six nights of his week of creation? But if we suppose that the author took the days as days of God, and therefore, in his conception of the days of creation, elevated the same above the common earthly days of the creature, and so represented them to himself as he alone, through his idea of God, thought he might {301} venture to do, then that mode of expression, so exceedingly strange under all other suppositions, appears very simple and natural to us. For the author did not mention a night, because these days simply had no night; and they had none, because as days of God they _could_ have none--because with God there is no night; because the rest of God, as the seventh day shows, is only a day of rest and not a night of rest. And the author saw the morning immediately following the evening of his divine day of creation, and recognized in this morning together with the evening immediately preceding it, the close of the day, because the accomplishment of the day's work (evening) already contained in itself the preparation of the following day's work, or at least pointed to the coming of the latter. Finally, the fact that, according to the Biblical account, _the seventh day still has no end_, is just as decisive for us. The end of each of the six days is mentioned by the solemn repetition of the words: "And the evening and the morning were the first day," etc.; but it is not mentioned in regard to the seventh day. Now if, according to the meaning of the author, the seventh day had also had its end like any of the six preceding days, he would at the seventh and _last_ day have had _double reason_ for mentioning its end; and the omission of that concluding word would indeed be inconceivable. When Dillman says: "The formula 'and (it became) the evening' is wanting, because the account is here at an end, and is no longer to be carried over to another day, and because for that reason its designation as seventh day is presupposed in v. 2," we have to reply that, under the supposition of the days of creation having {302} been common earthly days, a carrying over of the account to further days was certainly to be expected, even if from nothing else than the formula: "And the evening and the morning were the first day," etc. For then the human weeks could have followed the week of God, in which man, following the divine example, would have had to work six days and to rest one. The same commentator says (p. 24): "The author could not even have dared make a statement about the life-duration of the first men, if to him the day in which he was created had been an indefinitely long period of time." But, according to the conception of the Biblical author supposed by us, only the "day of God," in which he was created, would have been an indefinitely long period of time (although we are not willing to identify the days of God with certain earthly periods of time); the earthly days and the earthly years, on the other hand, would have their existence after the fourth day of creation, and thus, according to that view, we could estimate and name the earthly years and days of all that which happened before the fourth day of creation, under the condition that we have, or believe we have, the means of estimating them. When Dillmann continues: "On the contrary, the author took these days as nothing else than days," we wholly agree with him; but add to it: "not days of the creature, but days of God." By this long duration of the seventh day, we are obliged to draw still another conclusion; namely, that according to the conception of the author the six preceding days also must have far exceeded the duration of earthly days. This leads us to another Biblical analogy, whose direct power of demonstration for a long {303} duration of the Biblical days of creation is, it is true, justly contested, but which, as soon as we have to assume for other reasons that according to the author the days of creation far exceed the earthly days as to duration, becomes a strong support of this view. For it is certainly not unimportant that in the 90th Psalm, the psalm of Moses, the mediator of the Sinaitical legislation, to the circle of ideas of which that account of the creation so entirely belongs, the thought is expressed which is also taken up in the second letter of St. Peter, with its developed cosmological conceptions: namely, the thought "that one day _is_ with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." With that exegesis of the seventh day as one still remaining up to the present, we are in clear accord with the more developed theology of the New Testament, and with the interpretation which it itself gives of that divine day of rest. Jesus himself, in St. John, V. 17, puts aside a reproach of the Pharisees in reference to a healing on the Sabbath, with the words: "My father worketh hitherto, and I work." This answer only has a meaning in the sense: my father worketh hitherto, although, since the accomplishment of the days of creation, he enjoys the Sabbath-rest; and thus I also work on the Sabbath as on a work-day. And the Letter to the Hebrews, in its fourth chapter, looks through the medium of the ninety-fifth Psalm back to this Sabbath of creation which, as a day of rest of God, exists to-day, and the entering into which is given and promised to the people of God. By this whole conception of the Biblical week of creation, which appears to us _exegetically_ much more {304} natural and unconstrained than any other, we alone reach that conception which the author of that record _intends to_ reach; namely, a conception really worthy of God, of his temporal relation to the world, and of the relation of human days to the divine days of creation; we get a foundation for the commandment to keep the Sabbath, the idea of which can be completed without disturbing the idea of God. The relation of God to the whole temporal course of this present world, from its beginning to its end, for the religious mode of contemplation of man who, as the image of God, looks to the creative activity of God for a prototype and an example for his own activity, can be comprised in one single, great, divine week, whose first six days last to the completion of the creation of man, and whose seventh day still lasts and will last to the completion of the course of the world--till the latter itself, and mankind with it, can enter into the divine rest. From this religious interpretation, which we have to ascribe to that Biblical idea of the divine week of creation, it by no means follows that religion has to demand of natural science that it shall reach in its cosmogonic investigations the same succession in the appearance of things as we find in the Biblical account. This would be nothing else but an actual carrying of a pretended religious interest over beyond the limits of a realm in which the deciding vote belongs to natural science. However incomplete the cosmogonic knowledge of the latter may be, it nevertheless is at present established clearly enough to reject forever such a demand. Astronomy convinces us that it is entirely inconceivable that all which belongs to the work of the fourth Biblical day of creation, even {305} the whole formation of stars and of our system of planets, _succeeded_ the work of the third day, the formation of earthly continents and plants. And geology in its strata, which exhibit petrifactions, shows us that the relative Biblical days' works in reality did not succeed one another alternately in such a way that the one began where the other ceased, but that from the beginning of organic life the works of the third and the fifth days from the carboniferous period, also the works of the third, fifth, and sixth days, developed themselves perfectly by the side of each other. It would be an excess of refinement to identify any Biblical day of creation with any period or any complex of periods in the development of the earth or of the world. On the other hand, for a Christianity founded upon the Holy Scripture, it is still not entirely without interest to compare _the results of natural science and the extent and succession of the Biblical days' works with one another_. For a declaration which undertakes to trace something which has so deep a hold on human life as the Sabbath-rest, back to the prototype of directly divine action, is certainly worthy of attention. Now if we wish to make such a comparison, we can only do it in exact analogy with the way and manner in which we compare the predictions of the prophetical word with their fulfilment. For in so far as the declarations of that Biblical record about the circumstances of creation have religious value of which we are to take notice, they as declarations concerning events of which man certainly cannot have historical knowledge of his own, come entirely under the point of view of the _prophetical word_; with the exception that they do not contain a forward-looking but a {306} _backward-looking prophecy_. This is one of the most correct and fruitful thoughts which Johann Heinrich Kurz, in his "Bibel und Astronomie" ("Bible and Astronomy"), Berlin, Wohlgemuth, 1st edition, 1842, has expressed, but has fantastically misused, in that work, in general so prolific of indefensible positions; a fate which, as is well known, the forward-looking prophecy has had also often enough to undergo. In the same manner as we have to explain the forward-looking prophecy from two factors--on the one hand, from the circumstances of time, the knowledge, the dispositions, and the characters of prophets; on the other, from the receptivity of their mind for the mind of God and the last purposes of his actions--we also have explained that record of creation from two factors: on the one hand, from the view and the knowledge of its time, and on the other from the receptivity of its author for a pure and living idea of God and of the religious relations of human life. And we shall also have to do likewise when interpreting it. For the interpretation of the forward-looking prophecy, we have behind us the experience of thousands of years, from which the following principles, of treatment and interpretation have resulted. As long as such a prophetic word is not yet fulfilled, so long, indeed, its meaning is and remains the object of Christian faith and Christian hope; but it is difficult and almost impossible to distinguish in it, what is lasting substance, and what is transient form. Perhaps many a thing is looked upon as substance, which in the fulfilment appears to be only an image and form; and perhaps many a thing as form, which in the fulfilment shows itself as a more concrete reality than we had supposed. {307} And it would even be psychologically a violent assumption, if we should presuppose in the mind of the prophet a still greater knowledge of the future course of things, than that which he expresses; or if we should separate him in his worldly knowledge, and even in the form of his prophetic utterances, from the views and limits of his time. But by far the most fruitless effort of all would be to construct beforehand out of his words the particulars of the historical course of the future. Attempts of this kind have been defeated whenever they have been made. But if the fulfilment of such a prophetic word has once taken place, it is a joy and a strengthening of faith to all following generations, and even after the final fulfilment of all prophecy, it will still be a joy to the children of God in their perfection, to compare prophecy and fulfilment and to allow the prophecy to be illumined by the light of fulfilment, the fulfilment by that of prophecy. All this finds its full application to the Biblical narrative of creation. That which in the forward-looking prophecy is the historical fulfilment, is in the backward-looking the scientific investigation. So long as the latter was not directed at all to the prehistoric history of the earth, it was an audacious undertaking to separate in the Biblical six days' work substance and form from one another; it was and is still an unpsychological violence to suppose in the human author of the narrative all possible knowledge of psychical and scientific secrets, and to lift him above the child-like views of his time concerning the things of this world. But it was by far the most fruitless undertaking to construct in detail from his words a picture of the real {308} circumstances of the creation and development of the world. Attempts of this kind have been often made; but they have produced nothing but dreams. And certainly the attempt to control and correct natural investigation by means of such dreams would be like trying to correct well-established facts of history by the prophecies of a still earlier period, or even to prove them false. But from the time when natural science, as it is at present, began to pay attention to the prehistoric history of the earth and even of the universe, such a comparison has been possible. It tells us, it is true, that the Biblical days' works did not follow each other in the course of earthly and cosmic developments in such a way, that the one began where the other ceased, but that they passed on in the long lines of their course, beside one another, and above one another. But looking upon their _meridian altitudes_, they nevertheless, where we are able to undertake certain geological comparisons, follow one another exactly in the same order in which the days follow one another in that Biblical record. The meridian altitude of the _third day_ (for here the certainty of geological knowledge first begins for us) has to be looked for where the continents are formed and the vegetable life preponderates on earth: and that is the _carboniferous period_. The meridian altitude of the _fourth day_ must have been reached where for the first time the covering of vapor and clouds of the earthly atmosphere permanently parted, and sun, moon, and stars became visible: and geology finds this time in the period which lies between the carboniferous period and the trias--in the _Permian period_, as it is called in England, in the _dyas_ of the {309} fossiliferous and of cupriferous slate and _Zechstein_, as we call it in Germany. The meridian altitude of the _fifth day_ has to be looked for where ocean-life, with its sauria and innumerable animals, gave its impress to organic life on earth, and the air was filled with inhabitants: geology calls such a time the _secondary period_ of trias, Iura, and chalk. That ocean-life preponderated in this period, is beyond any doubt; while in general geology gives us more meagre information about the inhabitants of the air than of the animals of the ocean and land. The flying sauria of Iura are still characteristic enough to leave at least the possibility that the winged world, which in value still stands below the mammalia, assisted in giving to that secondary period its proper type. Finally, the meridian altitude of the _sixth day_ cannot be anywhere else than where the animals of the land became the most characteristic inhabitants of the globe, and where man appeared: and that is the tertiary period of geology, in which mammalia appeared in great numbers and variety, and at the end of which we find the first traces of the appearance of man. We nevertheless do not assign special weight to the establishment of such a correspondence. The religious value of the idea of a divine week of creation is rendered perfectly certain to us, if we only find that it is reconcilable with a pure idea of God. That would not be the case, if we had to look upon the week of creation as an earthly week; but it is perfectly so, if the divine week stretches over the whole temporality of the course of the world. Therewith we can be satisfied. For we have neither theological nor philosophical nor {310} scientific evidences enough to draw from these Biblical utterances any _metaphysical conclusions_ in reference to the relations of God to the temporal development of the world. We should not dare to contest directly such metaphysical relations: for the human week, with its day of rest, is such an eminently fortunate and blissful invitation, the observance of this command is accompanied by such a striking prosperity in all life-relations of a people, its non-observance by such an evident curse, and, moreover, the idea of man bearing the image of God is such a fruitful idea, satisfying equally spirit and mind, that we have to remember the possibility that the institution of the human week, with its day of rest, is certainly founded on the real relations of the life-process of that creature which bears the image of God to the activity of its divine prototype upon the earth. But nevertheless, we just as little dare to attempt or to challenge the establishment of such metaphysical relations: for a theosophistic treatment of numbers seems to us no fruitful field for the promotion of religion--neither for the promotion of religious knowledge nor for that of religious life. Still, however, the result of our comparison between Biblical and scientific interpretation seems to us worth mentioning for a special reason. It is true, we have found a succession of the _meridian altitudes_ of the Biblical days in the same order in which, according to the Biblical relation, the days' works followed one another; but we have found in the _total course_ of the Biblical days that their works in reality passed on in long lines contemporaneously with one another. Now, since that first part of our result--the succession of _meridian {311} altitudes_--is the least we have to expect, if the counting of the days shall at all have an objectively real ground in the world's process, on the other hand, the second part of our result--the far-reaching contemporary existence of the different Biblical days--has an exact analogy with those prophecies whose partial or entire fulfilment permits us a more certain judgment of the character of prophecy and a more certain comparison between prophecy and fulfilment. Even the prophetic world knows of a divine day, which in the prophecies occupies an eminent and central position: it is the day of the Lord as the day of judgment and salvation. This day of the Lord also stands before the eye of the prophet, certainly not as a common earthly day of twenty-four hours, but as a day of God rising above earthly days and embracing an infinite number of them, although it also has its very distinct meaning which comes into the earthly temporality. But in the historic fulfilment, there happen along with it a thousand things which do not belong to it; for two-thirds of mankind that day did not dawn at all; and as to its temporal course, it had its dawn in the beginnings of mankind,--its sunrise took place eighteen hundred years ago, and its meridian altitude is still impending. Finally, that even the piety of those who composed the Biblical records, and of all those who see in them the manifested evidences of their faith, assigns no religious weight to the succession of the days' works, becomes clear from the before-mentioned fact, that the second account of creation, which makes man and his ethical primitive history its centre, relates the creation of the inhabitants of the earth in quite a different order from {312} the first one. We shall treat of this point again, and more in detail, for another reason, in the following section. We still have to treat of the question as to what position the Holy Scripture and Biblical Christianity take regarding a _development in general_: and here also we have only to say that they are very favorable to such an idea. The works of the six days themselves are in their succession nothing else but a development, a permanent differentiation of that which was not separated before, a continuous unfolding of the more simple into the more complex, an always progressing preparation of the globe for newer and higher forms of existence, until finally man appeared. In the Biblical account of creation, the idea which forms the basis of every evolution theory, (namely, that the new which appears has its conditions and suppositions, its creative secondary reasons, in the preceding), is pronounced with special clearness. When it says: "Let the Earth bring forth grass and herb,... and the earth brought forth," etc.; "And God said: Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life," etc.; "Let the earth bring forth the living creature; and it was so;" and "God made the beast of the earth,"--the creative causality also is mentioned in the clearest words by the side of and under the causality of the Creator, by means of which the latter had made creatures. The friendly relation between the Biblical account and the evolution theory even goes so far that the Holy Scripture, like that theory, does not permit animals to come forth from plants, although the latter represent the lower, the former the higher, and that, plants are a {313} necessary condition for animals, but that even according to the Bible both kingdoms come forth from the inorganic of the earth. When treating of the creation of plants, it says, "Let the earth bring forth grass," etc.; and when treating of that of animals, it says, "Let the earth bring forth the living creature." At last, if science should once succeed in perceiving more clearly than now the origin of the organic from the inorganic, it would have in those words the means for a harmony with the Biblical conception. Now, just as evidently as the Holy Scripture is favorable, in general and as a whole, to the idea of evolution, so certainly it seems to reject it precisely at that point where the whole interest of our question lies; namely, in reference to the origin of the single species. For here, when treating of the creation of plants as well us of animals, it is said in most distinct words: "_after his kind_." But the contradiction is only apparent. As to the way and manner in which God created every species, whether he used secondary causes or not, nothing else is said than that God created every species, that the creatures exist in distinctly marked species, and that these species are not chance, but lie in the plan of God--that they are his work. This fact, that it was God who wished to create each species as species, and in reality created it, is just as firmly established, if the species came forth from one another and were developed in gradual transitions, as if they received their existence in some other way. As, in the fifth day's work, we find simply the words: "And God said, _Let the earth bring forth_ the living creature: and it was so;" and "_God made_ the beast of the earth,"--in precisely the same way {314} God could indeed _create_ single plants and animals _after their kind_, in such a way that one should come forth from another, that they should be developed from one another. § 2. _The Creation of Man._ The most important facts which we have to mention, as bearing upon the position of the Christian doctrine of the creation of man in reference to the evolution theory, have been treated of in Chapter I, _A_. We have especially convinced ourselves of the fact, that the new, even if it has its secondary causes, and comes into existence in gradual development, is no less a creation of God, and has no less the full value of the new, than if it were created instantaneously. Likewise man also stands before us untouched in the full newness and dignity of his being, in the full qualitative and not simply quantitative superiority of the highest gifts of his mind, and especially of his personality, his ego, his liberty,--in one word, in his full image of God,--whether we have to look upon him as created in gradual development or as created suddenly. There are two circumstances in the Biblical account from which we see that, although it is naturally silent as to the descent problem, it not only knows and acknowledges the connection of man with the lower creatures of the earth, but also expressly directs attention to it. One of these circumstances is connecting man's creation with that of land-animals, in a single day's work. We do not lay more stress on this union than that of the Holy Scripture, although it emphasizes so strongly the dignity of man in his likeness to God and in his having entire {315} supremacy over the whole earth, and although it could have found therein reasons enough for assigning a proper day to the creation of man, to which the whole preceding creation pointed, and whom the whole creation on earth should serve, yet in its account of the creation it evidently desires man to be looked upon in his connection as a creature with the animal world. Moreover, we should not overlook, in the Biblical account, that the benediction which God gives to the animals of the water and the air, at the end of the fifth day, is in the sixth day not pronounced over the land-animals--although they certainly are as much entitled to it as fish and birds--but over man. Of course, it is presupposed that the land-animals naturally partake of the benediction of man, so far as it can be due to them; the benediction, namely, of fertility and of increase. According to these indications and to the Biblical conception, man stands in still another and closer connection with the animal world than in that of mere supremacy over it. The second circumstance to which we have to call attention, is the declaration (Genesis II, 7), that God created man out of earth; or rather, as the literal translation says: "_And the Lord God formed man (of) dust of the ground._" It is of no importance whether the accusative "dust of the ground" is, as some say, a mere appositive, or, as others explain it, the accusative of matter. When the account calls man dust of the ground, or a being formed of dust, the difference is infinitely insignificant, whether the earthly matter out of which God formed man who is dust of the earth, was an animal organism or not; whether man was formed {316} directly or indirectly out of the earth, and whether the forming demanded a longer or a shorter time. For that it did demand time, and that it was not an instantaneous creation, is implied in the expression "to form." We call attention to this passage for still another reason. The second account of creation, as it begins Genesis II, 4, and goes on to the end of the third chapter, is strikingly different from the first account, Genesis I-Genesis II, 4. It has its origin in that author whose book is called that of the Jehovist, or, more lately, the judaico-prophetic book; and who, among all those that have contributed stones to the building of the Pentateuch, gives the deepest insight into the nature of sin and grace, and into the divine plan of salvation. Now in this book, from the religious point of view so extremely worthy of attention, the account of the creation is given quite differently. Man is the centre of the account; that which does not directly refer to him is entirely omitted. The order in which the inhabitants of the earth were created, is not only not divided into the six day's works of the first account, and in verse 4 is not only directly taken as the work of a single day, in the expression [Hebrew: BAYWOM] (in the day, in which = when), without especial stress being put upon the expression "one day," for [Hebrew: BAYWOM] has become a particle; but this order is entirely different from the other. In the second account, the succession is the following: "first, man; then, the paradise into which man is placed; next, the trees (the question at what time the rest of the vegetable world was created is left entirely without answer); then, the determination to create also an assistant to man; next, the creation of animals; finally, the creation of the woman out {317} of a rib of man." Now, although it is wholly beyond doubt that the two accounts had different authors, the question will nevertheless arise, how it was possible that those who inserted these two accounts in the Holy Scripture, one after the other, could so harmlessly put side by side and read one after the other these two accounts, so entirely contradictory, without being obliged to think that the truth of the one would refute the other. They certainly must have had in some way the conviction that the one account was consistent with the other. But such an agreement between the two accounts is only possible when we either see in them only ideal truths, or when one of the two shall represent the actual reality of the circumstances of creation, and the other rather their ideal character. In case we should have to make such a distinction, it cannot be doubtful which of the two accounts has more of the real, and which more of the ideal character. In the first account nothing is related which does not give direct points of connection in the real process, as we can imagine it. In the second account, we find many points which hardly permit a direct literal conception, even on the part of the first readers of the account and of the editors of the canon of the Old Testament: for instance, besides the different order in which the first account is given, the creation of the woman out of the rib of man: this account, when ideally taken, is so inexpressibly comprehensive, pregnant, and deep--when taken really, so perfectly improbable. It will be likewise difficult to believe that even the old readers of the account--at least those of them who looked deeper and were more enlightened--took with extreme {318} literalness the expression, that God breathed into the nostrils of man who is dust of the ground, the breath of life. The third chapter has still other features from which we have at least to assume that the author did not at all intend to give importance to an extremely literal conception of it. Now, if the second account is the more ideal one, the meaning of it is: that man, his being, his aim, his primitive history, is made the centre of the entire description, and around him all the rest is grouped; while in the first account he appears to be more the end of the whole creation--as he presents himself to natural investigation in the real process of creation, as the last member in the chain, not as the centre in a circle or a star. Now if that is the case, if the second account of creation, having man as its centre, is the more ideal, then we certainly must not overlook the fact that in the ideal account man is called dust of the ground. Then the nature of dust also belongs, from the ideal point of view, so necessarily to the nature of man that the question, whether the connection of this man who is dust of the ground, with this ground, is brought about through the form of a preceding animal organism, or not, is no longer of importance. Therefore, if we oppose the animal ancestry of man for the general reasons that we do not wish to descend from something lower, that lower nevertheless is present as dust of the ground. And if we oppose such a pedigree on account of the ugliness and wickedness which exist in the animal world, we have to point to the fact that, on the one hand, mankind also has stains which are uglier than those which disfigure the wildest beast of prey, and that, on the other hand, the animal world shows features which {319} are so noble that no man need be ashamed of them. It is certainly a right feeling to which Darwin, in his "Descent of Man," gives expression, when he says: "For my own part, I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs, as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions." We have but to add:--if only the coming forth from the creative hand of God, the creation in his own image, the communion with Him and being a child of His, are preserved. And that all this can be preserved, even when adopting descent and evolution, we have seen from repeated considerations. But we have to draw still another conclusion from the difference between the two accounts of creation. If the succession, in which the inhabitants of the earth appear in the first account, is so entirely different from that in the second, as it evidently is, we have necessarily either to give up the historical reality of the one or of the other account, or of both, or to suppose that the creation of the inhabitants of the earth took place in a way and manner which makes it possible to perceive a _real_ connection of the succession in the first account, _as well as_ in that of the second, with the real processes of creation. Now we do not at all intend to argue with those who choose the first part of the dilemma; we ourselves join with them, and believe that salvation does {320} not depend upon the objective reality of that succession, nor the possession of salvation on the faith of such reality. But we leave to the consideration of those who, in their religious convictions, think themselves bound to the objective reality of both accounts, the following thoughts: If not only ideal depth, but also a connection with the empirical and historical reality of the process of creation, is to be assigned to the succession of the first account as well as to that of the second, it is only possible by assuming a descent--namely, that man, _e.g._, may be called in one sense the first of creatures, inasmuch as with the first organism that was already given which was afterwards developed into man, and inasmuch as all which was otherwise created and developed as aspecial species, was only present on account of that aim; and that man in another, in the merely empirico-historical sense, is still also the last of creatures. Thus, then, the advocates of descent would find themselves in the unaccustomed position, equally surprising to friend and foe, of being in a much more friendly relation to the Biblical belief in revealed religion than their opponents. We should see the apparent discords not only between Scripture and nature, but also between account and account, dissolved into harmony, and above the double relation of the two accounts we should see the morphological ideas of Oken and Göthe, the ideas of types of Cuvier, Agassiz, and Owen, the laws of development of K. E. von Baer, and finally the ideas of descent of Lamarck and Darwin, reach a friendly hand to one another. And even the old joys of a teleological view of nature, adorned indeed with queue and wig, but at present rejected with too much disdain, even if they {321} are called ichthyo-teleological and insecto-teleological, would attain in this reconciliation their modest, subordinate place. Moreover, we should then have the satisfaction of seeing again that a religiousness which in its own realm gives absolutely free play to natural investigation, and does not find it beneath its dignity to learn from natural science, can on that account retain its own autonomy in its own realm much more uncontestedly; and that, as it seems to us in the present case, it can go much farther in the use which it makes of its autonomy and in the extension of the revealed character of its religious records to physical processes and circumstances, than is either necessary or safe, and that it nevertheless is rewarded for keeping peace with natural science by more rich, more living, and more correct glimpses into the harmony between the word of God and the work of God, than would be the case with a religiousness which, without regard to natural science, weaves its cosmogonies from the Holy Scripture alone. § 3. _The Primitive Condition of Man: Paradise, the Fall of Man, and Primitive History._ After the Holy Scripture has narrated the creation of man in two accounts, the second of them gives us a continuation in the well-known account of Paradise and of the fall of man, with its consequences; and the further development, of the Biblical doctrine, as well as of Christian theology, has also taken the substance and quintessence of these narratives into its representation of the Christian truths of salvation. We shall not throw any obstacles in the way of bringing about an understanding between the Darwinian views {322} and the Biblical primitive history, by acknowledging the justice of the view that Christian piety might in some way contain in itself the demand that also the form in which the facts of truth in Genesis III are given to us, has historical reality. He who makes this demand has only his own short-sightedness and imprudence to blame, if he also loses the substance with the form, the figurative nature of which can be shown to him only too certainly. We acknowledge it as a real providence of God, which intends faithfully to guard believing man against a senseless and slavish adherence to the letter, and against grounding his means of salvation upon insecure foundations, that at the grand and venerable portal of Holy Scripture two accounts stand peacefully beside one another, which, if we penetrate through the form into their substance, complete one another in magnificent and profound harmony, but which, if we look upon the form as their substance, so diametrically contradict each other that we cannot do anything else but reject the one or the other, or, still more logically, both. We think that this hint is strong enough to be understood, and bears, like all bowing before truth and its power of conviction, rich fruit not only for our knowledge, but also for the purity, certainty, and richness of our religiousness. We shall not lose by this acknowledgment the character of revelation and the impression of the truth of these Biblical records, but shall be able through them, and through them alone, to gain and perceive it. It is true, the first account, and still more the second--the account of the creation and of the primitive history of man--has in its external form an exceedingly close relationship to the poetical myths of the ancient nations of the Orient; but {323} its difference does not consist essentially in the form--although this too, being the form of a true and correct substance, shows differences enough from these heathen myths--but consists in the substance itself. These heathen myths certainly contain many beautiful, deep, and true factors, but always, besides, fundamental ideas which we have to reject as half-true or wholly erroneous: sometimes a dualistic conception of God and the world, sometimes a materialization of the divine, the spiritual, and the ethical, sometimes fatalistic and sometimes magic elements in great number. These Biblical representations, on the other hand, certainly appear to us still in a picturesque form which is analogous to that formation of myth; for it really seems to be the only form in which the mind of man, in his first epoch of life, was able to perceive and represent supernatural and ethical truth, as we are to-day able to represent the highest relations of our mind to the supernatural and the ethical only in pictures and parables; but the Biblical representations offer us, under this plastic covering, a substance which, in view of the most extensive criticism, of the deepest speculation, and of the most enlightened and practically most successful piety, is still established as the purest, the most correct, and the most fruitful representation of the nature of God, and of the ethical nature and the ethical history of man. Moreover, we shall not make it difficult to bring about an understanding between the Darwinian theories and the Biblical doctrine, by supporting the other view taught by the Holy Scripture--that death came into the animal world first through the fall of man, and that the fall of man first brought the character of perishableness {324} into the condition of the earth or even of the universe. There are essentially three Biblical passages to which those refer who think that they find such a view in the Holy Scripture; namely, Romans V, 12; Romans VIII, 19-23, and Genesis III; but they are wrong. That the Apostle Paul, in Romans V, 12, by the world, into which death came through sin, did not mean the universe or the globe, but mankind, is plain enough from the connection, and is only demanded by the difference of meaning which in the Greek, as well as in the German language, the word "world" has according to its connection. And in Romans VIII, 19-23, where he speaks of the subjection of the creature to vanity, he does not mention a certain time in which it happened, nor an historical occasion, as the fall of man, which should have given the impulse to this subjection; but he only says, in general, that it was God who "hath subjected the creature to vanity," and that he hath "subjected the same _in hope_." He who reads this passage without prepossession, can be led to no other idea than to this: that God has subjected the creature to the law of vanity from the very beginning of creation--not forever, but from the very beginning--with the intention that he shall also celebrate his transfiguration and deliverance from the yoke of perishableness, together with the perfection of mankind, and with the manifestation and transfiguration of the children of God. And even the curse of the ground (Genesis III, 17) is no cursing of the universe, or of the globe and its creatures, but only a cursing of _the ground_; and of this not on its own account, but only in its relation, as a means of subsistence, to man, and in opposition to the {325} exemption from labor which his life hitherto had, and to the agreeableness of his means of support in paradise. After having thus rejected these two perversions of the Biblical doctrine, there remains to us as an established substance of the latter, and as an essential part of Christian dogmatics, so far as it may come into contact with the _Darwinian_ views, at least the following: Man was originally created by God, good and happy. To his goodness there also belonged the possibility of having a sinless development, as he ought to have had; and to his happiness there also belonged a life amid surroundings wholly corresponding to him, and the possibility of obtaining exemption from death and all evils by way of a self-controlling submission to God, which resists temptation. We purposely express ourselves thus. For the Biblical primitive history does not say that man was _created_ with exemption from the law of death, but that the latter must have been _granted_ to him as a reward for his submission: the tree of life stood _by the side of_ the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and only the eating of the fruit of the tree of life, by avoiding the eating of the forbidden fruit, should have given to man that immortality which he forfeited by disobedience. Man became disobedient, and, in consequence of it, subject to death; the harmony between man and his surroundings disappeared; the earth became to him a place of labor and of death; and now began for man his historical development as a web of guilt, of punishment, and of education and redeeming mercy. Now, in the presence of this Biblical view, the question comes up first of all: is a view according to which man should have been able and obliged to take a sinless {326} development, and, in case he had taken it, should have been exempt from the fate of death and of the ills preceding it, and endowed with immortality as to body and soul--is such a view in any way reconcilable with the Darwinian ideas of development, according to which man came forth from the series of lower organisms, subject to death? We could avoid answering this question by a deduction similar to that which we drew in Chap. I, § 3, when treating of the question of the reconcilableness of the idea of evolution with theism, but of which we likewise made no use. We could show that in this question no other difficulties present themselves to the religious consciousness, than such as existed long before the appearance of the Darwinian theories and were overcome by pious consciousness and religious reasoning. For a difficulty entirely similar to that which here appears to us, when looking upon the whole human _species_ and its origin, stood before us heretofore, when looking upon the human _individual_ and his origin. From the standpoint of Biblical Christianity, we ascribe to the human individual an immortality of the soul and a coming resurrection of the body; but we do not to the human embryo at the beginning of its development in the womb. Now we know that the development of man from that embryo to perfect man is wholly gradual; that we cannot observe and predicate of any organ, of any quality, of any activity of body, soul, or mind, exactly the moment when it comes into existence; and that therefore we cannot give the moment when we could assume that something so decidedly great and new as the immortality of the soul and the prospect of a {327} resurrection of the body, begins for the human individual. Although we know all this, nevertheless in all discussions of the question whether we have to hope for an immortality of the soul and a resurrection of the body, the gradual development has hardly ever been, so far as we know, a weight--in any case, never the decisive weight--in the balance _against_ the supposition of an immortality. If we can look upon the idea of an immortality of the soul and of a resurrection of the body as reconcilable with the fact, that the human individual was only developed gradually out of something which was still soulless and perishable, we also have to look upon the other fact as reconcilable with the gradual development of the whole _species_; namely, that man, if he should have developed himself without sin, would have reached an immortality of body and soul. But we shall not enter this path which would lead us around the whole question. For the objection might be made, that the scientific and philosophic impossibility of assuming an eternal duration of an individual that originated in time, has, indeed, always been pointed out, and only the _assertion_, not the _proof_, of the contrary has been opposed to it; but that Darwinism puts this impossibility into new and full light. Therefore, if we wish to reach a certain basis for our conviction, nothing else remains to us but to enter upon that question wholly and exclusively from Darwinian premises. Now these premises, indeed, indicate to us a _development_ of things, but a development of such a kind that there appears to us something new, and always new in a rising line. The rising of this line of development consists in the fact that the spiritual comes forth from the {328} natural in permanent progress and in always higher development: that mind vanquishes matter. The first new thing which meets us in the development of the globe, is the organic and life; the second, sensation and consciousness; the third, self-consciousness and free-will. Now let us once suppose imaginary human spectators of every first appearance of these phenomena. Would he who thus far had only known inorganic phenomena and processes, have dared, before the appearance of life, to utter the proposition: matter can also become living and live? And who would have dared to suggest the further doctrine: matter can also feel and get a consciousness of things? Finally, who would have dared even to say: matter can also become a self-conscious and free personality? To every person who would have pronounced such dreams of the future, there would have been opposed, apparently with full right, the inviolable mechanism of the inorganic world. But all this nevertheless took place. If something material can be led so far that a personality lives in it, that, with the assistance of this material basis, is able to perceive the ideas and the eternal, that can act in accordance with aims and designs and can set itself the highest aims, and that may even enter upon a loving and child-like relation to the highest primitive cause of all things, then we are no longer permitted to say that the material, of which the body of such a personality consists, could not have been subjected to the service of such a personality so far, that the latter could have vanquished the elements of the destruction of life in an eternal process of spontaneous renewal. It is true, with such a concession alone we have not {329} gained anything directly. For _in abstracto_ everything is finally conceivable which does not contradict the logical laws of reasoning--even the basilisk and the mountain of diamonds in stories and fairy tales. But such an _abstract_ conceivableness has not the least value for the knowledge of the _real_, nor even for the knowledge of the _really possible_. For in the world of being and becoming, everything in its last elements, forces, qualities, and laws, as well as in the last causes of its development, is something so absolutely _given_, that only afterward are we able to analyze that which is present, from our observations, or to follow from the given factors that which can be, or which under other conditions would have become different, and that we are not able to synthetically construct the one or the other in advance, independently from the factors of reality. If, therefore, that concession shall attain a scientific value, and if the conditional sentence: Man would not have been subject to death if he had not sinned, is to become an admitted and unassailable part of Christian theology, we have to look in the realm of phenomena, and in the course of that which took place, for _facts_ which _prove_ that man, if he had not committed sin, would not have died, and which thus change that merely abstract, possibility into a real one. Now we have such a fact in the _resurrection of the Lord_. If it really took place, then it is the last earthly stage in the course of the Lord's work of Redemption, and then it permits us to draw conclusions backwards as to what would have become of man, if he had not been in need of this redemption, if he had had a sinless development instead of one with sin. {330} We know very well that in mentioning this fact we meet not only the opposition of those who contest a teleological, theistic, and especially a Christian view of the world, but also the natural doubts of those who defend with warm interest teleology and the ethical fundamentals and productive forces of Christianity, but who think it more advisable to pass over the whole question of the resurrection in cautious silence. The main consideration which hinders them from believing in the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is not the want of historical attestation, but rather the absolute want of any attested analogy in the other events which have taken place on the earth. What we commonly see and witness in the dead, is without exception precisely the opposite of that which is related about the further fate of Jesus crucified. Now we have repeatedly had occasion to point out that the want of analogy cannot at all be a proof of a fact's not having taken place, supposing it otherwise well established. Especially if a _development_ of events follows aims, it lies in the nature of this development that in its course in all the places where we really and actually can speak of a development, of a process, things appear and must appear which were not present before, and which, even if they once appeared, nevertheless need not necessarily be repeated, except at certain times which correspond to the plan of development; namely, when "their time has come." All these are events which are wanting in analogy, but which cannot be doubted at all on that account. That was the case with the first appearance of organic life, also with the first appearance of beings having sensation and consciousness; moreover, it was the case with the first appearance of each of the thousands {331} of species of organic beings: all these things, at the time when they first appeared, lacked every analogy in the past, and were perhaps repeated for some time, in primitive generations, perhaps not; at any rate, they have all ceased to have analogies within the memory of man. In an eminent degree does the first appearance of man want every analogy with what we observe elsewhere. We never see men appear on the stage of the earth, who were not originated by men; yet this event, so contrary to all analogy, did once take place, and stands without parallel and analogy in the midst of the series of events, so far as our knowledge can reach. Thus the resurrection of the Lord must also necessarily want analogy, in case it is an event which really marks a station of progress in the development of earthly creatures and their history, and in case also its nature and its importance tend not to bring mankind, or at least those who believe in him who has been raised, at once under the influence of its physical consequences, but only so far to prepare the way for these consequences in intellectual and moral life-forces. And precisely such an event is the resurrection of Jesus, according to the announcement of the Lord as to himself and his work, and according to the development of this personal testimony in the minds of his first disciples, and also according to what Jesus actually became for mankind, and especially for Christianity. According to this testimony of Jesus and his apostles, and to this actual experience, Jesus is the Redeemer, whose work is to make amends for the destruction caused by sin, and thus to originate and establish a new creation in mankind which, from inner, mental, and spiritual beginnings, {332} renews mankind, and becomes the leaven which, in long periods of labor, leads it to the goal of perfection; a perfection in which the whole creation shall participate--with which, indeed, mankind is inseparably connected on the whole natural side of its existence. But then it also lies in the nature of the resurrection of Jesus to be single in its kind, and without analogy, until that time shall have come in the development of mankind when the last enemy, death, shall be forever removed and overcome. We quite fail to conceive how those who acknowledge design in the world, can avoid the acknowledgment of the resurrection of Jesus--supposing the fact to be historically established: whereof we shall have to speak hereafter. It is, indeed, quite impossible to speak of a goal of mankind, if annihilation--annihilation of single personalities as well as of mankind as a whole--is its certain destiny. Where and what is this end of mankind, if the last generation of the globe is to perish with the destruction of this globe, or languish and die even before that destruction, and if nothing will be left of mankind beyond the soulless material for new formations in their putrifying corpses and desolate homes and works of art? Where and what is this goal, if all which once set human minds and hearts in motion, and which stimulated the intellectual and moral work of the human races, simply ceases to exist, no longer finds anywhere even a place of remembrance, and nowhere has a fruit to exhibit, except perhaps in the mind of a God who once set the cruel play in motion, and now permits it to cease, in order to procure for himself a change in the entertainment? A mere immortality of human {333} souls, without resurrection and without the perfection and transfiguration of the universe, is not afforded us by this goal, which we certainly need, if we are to think at all of a goal for mankind. For if all departing souls should be carried into another world whose only relation to the further course of the earthly history of mankind was in the fact, that the dead are always gathered in it; into another world whose only relation to the past of the earthly history of mankind should be in the fact, that it is divided into a heaven and a hell for those who reach it; if in this world everything should move on, without end, in eternal coming and going; and if nothing could be said of that other world than that everything there is different from ours--even that we should there have no possible points of contact with this world: then we should have nothing else but a gloomy dualism of the world for which neither our intellectual, nor our psychical, and least of all our physical, organization is in any way prepared, we should have in it no satisfaction of our noblest instincts, no goal to which we would be led by any of the guides who show us the paths which we have to follow on earth. Only a resurrection and transfiguration of the earth and the universe, as well as of a glorified mankind, show us such a goal. For this aim, for such a _real_ continuation of life of the single personality, and of all mankind, after the long work of moral and intellectual development, all noble and worthy instincts of mankind are prepared--from the instinct of self-preservation up to the instinct of self-sacrifice for ideal purposes and the instinct of moral perfection and community with God. We find that in all the rest of creation, instincts and inherent powers {334} are present to be satisfied. The naturalistic tendencies which at present control so many minds, are very much inclined to found their whole view of the world upon this correlation of instinct, function, and satisfaction. Should, then, the highest instincts of the highest creature on earth alone make an exception? Have they originated from illusions, and do they lead to illusions? We cannot refrain from quoting a word which Alb. Réville, of Rotterdam, has written in the first part of the October issue of the "Revue des Deux Mondes," 1874, on the occasion of a criticism of E. v. Hartmann's "Philosophy of the Unconscious"; though it was written only in defence of theism in general. We quote from a report of E. P., in the _Augsburger Allgem. Zeitung_, Oct. 27, 1874, which is all at present at our command: "When the young bird, fluttering its wings on the edge of its mother's nest, launches forth for the first time, it finds the air which carries it, while a passage is opened for it. Instinct deceived the bird just as little as it deceives the multitude of large and small beings which only live in following its incitations. And should man alone, whom spiritual perfection attracts--man whose characteristic instinct it is to raise himself mentally toward the real-ideal, the superiority of which he cannot sufficiently describe, should man, who obeys his nature, dash his head against the wall built of unhewn stones of unconscious, blind, and deaf force? Nature, indeed, has too much spirit--according to Hartmann himself--to indulge in such an absurdity; and the philosophy of the 'unconscious Unconscious' will never permit it." It is true, there is actually present in mankind, and in it alone, such a discord between {335} instinct and satisfaction: man has in himself instincts which are opposed to sin and death, and nevertheless sin and death exist. But the redemption through Christ, and especially the knowledge of his resurrection, announces to us that this discord is removed. Therefore, he who in general acknowledges that mankind in its development has had given to it goals which correspond to its gifts and instincts, has every reason to look about and see whether, in the course of human history, certain things have happened which point at such aims--indications which prophetically assure mankind, that it advances toward a spiritual and moral perfection, and toward an undiminished participation of all members of mankind in this perfection. Such an assurance is offered us in the resurrection of Jesus; and therefore, all who have not abandoned a teleological view of the world, have reason for _examining it with reference to the degree of its historical truth_. This degree is the highest which we can in general claim of any historical event. In order to show this with such brevity as is necessary in the present book, and at the same time to guard ourselves against every danger of prejudice in the investigation, we shall for this occasion assume hypothetically that all, even the most extreme, assertions of Biblical criticism as to the authenticity and inauthenticity of the books of the New Testament, and as to the difference of their component parts and the time of their composition, are correct and proven; and see what then remains established. In the first place, it is an acknowledged fact, that Peter first, then the eleven apostles at different times, and between these more than five hundred "brethren" (_i.e._, nearly or fully all who had preserved their {336} attachment to the Lord till his death), saw the appearances of the risen one, a few days after his death; and, indeed, under the most different circumstances, and under mental conditions in which they did not at all expect any such second appearance. We have, in regard to this, the most authentic written evidence of the apostle Paul, in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians: a letter whose authenticity no criticism has dared to doubt. This letter was written in the spring of 58: and Paul himself had already been changed from a persecutor into a believer in Christ in the year 36--_i.e._, one year after the death of Jesus, which took place in 35; he went to Jerusalem in 39, and here everything was related to him by Peter, as we know from his letter (likewise not contested) to the Galatians. Thus the authentic information of the man, who in 58 collected the historical proofs of the reality of the resurrection of Jesus for his Corinthian Christians, goes back to four years after the death of Jesus, and to the personal witnesses of the appearances; as in that letter he also refers to the fact that "many of these five hundred brethren are still living." Moreover, it is an established fact, that the first written evidences of the evangelical history from which our canonical gospels subsequently originated, likewise contained accounts of the appearance of the risen one. Finally, it is an established fact that, from the very beginning, the whole meaning of evangelical preaching turned on the two facts of the death and of the resurrection of Jesus, as on the two cardinal points of all preaching of salvation; also that all the faith of those who embraced the Gospel was founded upon these two facts, as upon the historical fundamentals of the {337} salvation which comes from Jesus; and that thus Christianity, with all its effects, which have unhinged the old world and diffused streams of blessing over mankind, has its historical basis in faith in the death of Jesus and his resurrection. This is our historical chain of proof. And that evidence which gives certainty to its most important link, on which everything depends--the _appearance_ of the risen one--is the entire failure of all the attempts at explaining that appearance from a seeming death, from an intended deception, from a self-delusion, from a vision and an ecstasy, from a poetic myth; in short, from any other cause than, that the Lord really appeared to his disciples as the man who was dead, but who is risen and lives. We cannot follow Keim in all his methods of reconstructing the life of Jesus, and we believe that he is much too timid regarding the consequences which follow from an objective, real appearance of Jesus after his death; but we acknowledge it as a high merit of his christological works, that although he is willing to use criticism to the utmost, he has so thoroughly and strikingly shown the impossibility of explaining the appearance of Jesus after his death differently from the real manifestations of his still living person. It is well that Strauss, in his "The Old Faith and the New," declares the history of the resurrection of Jesus a _historical humbug_; for it may open the eyes of many, if the tendency, of which Strauss is leader, is no longer able to explain Christianity--the noblest, purest, and most successful religion which has come into existence in the whole history of mankind--otherwise than by calling it a humbug. With him who is pleased with this manner of explaining the most perfect blossom and fruit of {338} the tree of mankind, we certainly can find no common ground of mutual understanding. We have been led to all these discussions, by looking for something actual which should be able to throw its light back upon the earliest primitive history of mankind--a history which can no longer be historically investigated. We have found this reality in the resurrection of Jesus; and the light which it throws upon the primitive history of man, we have perceived in the conclusion to which it leads us: that man, if he had taken a sinless development, would also have been exempt from death. The resurrection of Jesus throws its light upon still another side of the Biblical doctrine of the primitive condition of man: namely, upon that which is the religious quintessence of the Biblical doctrine of _Paradise_. As now the resurrection of the Lord is the beginning and the prophecy of a new creation on the basis of the old, and as we now hope, with St. Paul, that this beginning shall manifest its comprehensive cosmic effects, when the Lord shall manifest them in the resurrection of the "children of God:" so, in case of a sinless development of man, the beginning of this new and glorified stage of creation would certainly have been perceptible at the beginning of the history of mankind and in the relation of man to his earthly surroundings. But we are of course not permitted to make or to pursue such a suggestion at present, since a sinful development of mankind, with its consequences, actually took place. We have no reason to enter into the discussion of another often and much debated question, which is connected with the primitive history of man; namely, {339} _whether mankind is descended from one or more pairs of men_. We pass it by; because it has no connection whatever with the acceptance or rejection of the Darwinian ideas, and since it is not yet archæologically and scientifically solvable. There are Darwinians who think monogenetically, and others who think polygenetically; and there is still a third class--and they speak most correctly--who acknowledge that they know nothing about it. Besides, we can also pass by this question, for the reason that in spite of the important place which it occupies in the theological system of St. Paul, we have no right to assign to it, in the form in which we put it, the decisive dogmatic importance which it still occupies in many conceptions of Christian theology. For we cannot question the right of the natural sciences to enter into the discussion of this question, and to look for a solution of it. As soon as we make this concession, it necessarily and naturally follows from it, that we must no longer make the substance and truth of our religious possession, even in a subordinate manner, dependent on the results of exact investigations: for our religious possessions have too deep a basis of truth, to permit us to ground them on the results of investigations in a realm so dark for science and so far removed from religious interest. As to this question, we may hope for a future solution in the monogenetic sense: we may rejoice over the fact that, according to the present state of knowledge, the needle of the scale rather inclines in favor of a oneness of origin of mankind; but we must also be prepared to accept the possibility of a contrary result, without being afraid that in such a case we should have to abandon at once that religious factor {340} for whose sake the advocates of a monogenetic descent might defend their view. This religious (and, we may add, quite as strong ethic) factor consists in the idea of the intimate unity and brotherhood of mankind. We must absolutely adhere to this idea; for it is in opposition to the particularism which, quite without exception, governed the entire old world, even its most highly developed nations, and which was only penetrated by some beams of hope and prediction in the prophecy of Israel--one of the most beautiful and blissful gifts of Christianity to mankind. This idea still contains, as ethical motive, one of the strongest, most indispensable, and most promising forces in the world. If this idea shall be a real and lastingly effective one, it certainly must also have its real basis in the history of the origin of mankind. But, we must ask, is the only conceivable reality of this basis a monogenetic pedigree, and do we lose this reality if science should once find that mankind came into existence not only in one single pair, but in several pairs, even in different places, and at different times? Even in such a case, the idea of the unity of mankind would only lose its real basis, if at the same time we were permitted to think also anti-teleologically--if we were permitted to suppose that that which came into existence, repeatedly, and in different places, had each time entirely different causes without a common aim and a common plan. If we think teleologically, we see the unity of mankind, also in case of a polygenetic origin, in the unity of the metaphysical and teleological cause which called mankind into existence; and to rational beings, endowed with mind, as men are, the metaphysical bond is certainly stronger than the physical. {341} Precisely the Darwinian ideas of the origin of species through descent would show us in such a case the real bond which unites mankind. For then we should only have to go back from the different points on the stem-lines of the prehistoric generators of these primitive men, at which men originated otherwise than by generation, in order to arrive finally at a common root of all these stem-lines: the members of mankind would even then remain consanguineous among one another, not only in an ideal, but in a real sense. Now that the idea of the unity of mankind was holy and important to St. Paul, is to be inferred in advance from such a universal mind. And when in Acts XVII, 26, he expresses this idea before the Athenians, so proud of their autochthony, with the words that "of one blood all nations of men dwell on all the face of the earth"; or when, in Romans V, and 1 Corinthians XV, he makes use of the idea in order to explain and to glorify the universal power of redemption of Christ by putting Adam and Christ in opposition to one another, as the first and the second Adam, so that he sees sin and death coming forth from Adam, grace and justice and life from Christ and extending over mankind; then we find this idea quite convincing and natural, and adhere firmly to the quintessence of these truths, even if we acknowledge neither in these passages, nor in Genesis I and II, the intention of God to give us a supernatural manifestation of the exterior process of the creation of man. Paul himself gives us a hint not to follow slavishly a literal interpretation, when he says, in Romans V, "as by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin," and calls this man Adam, although he knows that according to the {342} Biblical relation, Eve was the one who was first seduced, and although he expressly points out and makes use of this priority of the sin of Eve in another connection, and for another reason. Finally, we may here also take into consideration the contradictions which have come up by reason of more recent investigations, in reference to the _prehistoric conditions of man_, and which, especially in England, have been designated as the contradiction between the _elevation theory_ and the _depravation theory_. In general, this contradiction is looked upon as if a conception of the primitive history of man, remaining conformable to the Bible, could only be brought into harmony with a depravation theory, and not with an elevation theory; but certainly without reason. The Biblical and Christian conception of the primitive history of man does not at all demand the conception of a gradual sinking down of mankind from a supernatural height--of a gradual depravation of our species--which many representations seem to assume. For, according to it, the fall of man had already taken place with the first pair of mankind; they were driven from Paradise, to long hard labor and development; and Paradise was taken from earth. Even the paradisaical condition, with its short duration, was deficient in all the various gifts of life which are a product of human inventive faculty and skill, and which can leave behind vestiges and remains. But what the Holy Scripture relates or indicates of the after-paradisaical primitive history of man, wholly corresponds to the idea of a gradual development out of the more simple and rough, which is demanded by the evolution theory in its {343} application to history. That, even according to the Biblical conception, goodness and progress in outer culture, sin and intellectual stagnation, are not identical, we see from the fact, that by the Holy Scripture the most successful inventions of man are not assigned to the more pious Sethites, but to the Titan-like, rebellious Kainites. Likewise, the evolution theory does not at all require a constant, general, and exclusive progress of mankind in all its members. As in the realm of irrational organisms, so in the history of mankind; it has to assume the most various ramifications with progress, stand-still, and retrogradation. It is true, it sees in the nations of culture progress in an upward rising line; but besides, stand-still and retrogradations in great variety. It also sees in mankind in general a labor of upward rising development; but it also sees many hindrances of development, and many shavings which the work throws to one side. But exactly the same thing was also seen in every religious or profane contemplation of history, long before the evolution theory was born. Therefore, the different views of the earliest primitive history of man, the theory of depravation and that of elevation, do not stand so opposed to one another--the former representing the Biblical and religious, the latter the anti-religious, view of the history--but the question as to the primitive history is not yet solved in that respect; the depravation theory, as well as the elevation theory, indicates rather the _directions_ in which investigation has to put its questions to the archæological sources. Investigation, on the other hand, has free scope in both directions; and the primitive history of man shows itself to be a realm in which religious and scientific interest, {344} opponents and advocates of the descent theory, can peacefully join hands for common labor. Up to the present, the investigations reach results which seem to fall now more into one, now more into the other, scale of the balance. On the one hand, the older the products of human skill are, the more simple they are; on the other hand, even the oldest remains show man in full possession of that which distinguishes him from the animal, and attests a spiritual life. The reader may think of the before mentioned sketches of the reindeer and mammoth (page 90). If we finally come down to historic times, and to the present, in order to try to draw conclusions from the comparisons of the remotest times of which we have historic knowledge, with the present, as to prehistoric times, we likewise find on the one side vestiges of the lowest barbarism in the past and present; but on the other side we find that the oldest written monuments afford a glance into a perfection of intellectual reflection and into a nobility of moral and religious views which permits us to draw the highest conclusions as to the intellectual worth of earliest mankind. The very oldest records of the Holy Scripture give evidence of this intellectual height; and even the royal programmes of Assyrian monarchs, which the wonderful diligence and ingenuity of recent investigators have deciphered from the cuneiform inscriptions, not only relatively correspond to the height of culture which we find in the ruins of Assyrian palaces, but even, when looked upon absolutely and aside from the morality of conquest which they indulge, are inspired by a nobility of mind, and permeated by a religiousness, which no potentate of recent times would need to be ashamed of. They have {345} been made accessible to the public by the work of Eberhard Schrader: "Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament" ("Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament"), Giessen, 1872. § 4. _Providence, Hearing of Prayer, and Miracles._ Before we enter into the special christological realm, we have yet to glance at the realm of the more common relations between God and the creature, as they have found, in faith in a divine providence, in hearing of prayer, and in divine miracles, their reflection in Christian consciousness. It is true, we had to discuss the chief basis of an understanding in this matter when treating of the position of the Darwinian theories in reference to theism in general; but we have a double reason for entering again into the consideration of the concrete form which this faith has obtained in Christianity. One reason is the fact, that faith in a special providence of God, in a hearing of prayer, and in a connection of the human history of salvation with miracles, forms a very essential part of the Christian view of the world and of Christian religiousness. All Holy Scripture is interwoven with assurances of a providence of God, going even into details; with the most distinct and solemn promises of the hearing of our prayers; and with the most emphatic reference to the miracles which it relates. The Lord himself not only found all these doctrines, and left them untouched, but he developed them in the most pregnant way, and brought them into the most intimate connection with the quintessence and centre of his doctrine. According to his teaching, {346} "a sparrow shall not fall to the ground without the will of your heavenly Father; but the very hairs of your head are all numbered." He encourages us to pray, with the words: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you;" and he proves himself to be the Redeemer, through signs and wonders, and refers to the greatest sign which was to be manifested in him--the sign of the resurrection. The other reason for entering upon the discussion of these questions, lies in the incredible thoughtlessness with which a great part of modern educated people, even of such men as do not at all wish to abandon faith in a living God, permit themselves to be governed by the leaders of religious infidelity, and to be defiled and robbed of everything, which belongs to the nature of a living God. By many, it is considered as good taste, and as an indispensable sign of deep scientific learning and high education, and it forms a seldom contested part of correspondence in newspapers, which have for their public a wide circle of educated people, that in referring to the inviolableness of the laws of nature they declare faith in a special providence of God to be a view long ago rejected, and which is only consistent with half-civilized individuals; that they look down with a compassionate and self-conscious smile upon the egoistic implicit faith of congregations who still pray for good harvest-weather, and see in the damage done by a hailstorm a divine affliction; that they criticise it as a sad token of ecclesiastical darkness, when even church-authorities order such prayers in case of wide-spread calamities; that they fall into a passion over the {347} narrowness and the dulling influence of pedagogues who see in the histories which they relate to their pupils or put into their hands for reading, the government of an ethical order of the world which goes a little farther than the rule that he who deceives injures his good name, and he who gets intoxicated injures his health; that they give a man who still believes in the resurrection of Jesus, to understand that he has not yet learned the first elements of the theory of putrefaction and perishableness. That the adversaries of faith in a God thus express themselves, and try to conquer as much ground as possible for their frosty doctrine, is certainly quite natural; but that even advocates of theism should permit such stuff to be presented to them, and can keep silent in regard to it--nay, that even preachers offer it to their congregations as ordinary Sabbath edification, and that their hearers can gratefully accept it--is certainly a suggestive and alarming evidence of the rapidity with which, in many men who still do not wish consciously and certainly to be thought godless (_i.e._, to be separated from God), their connection with the source of light and life is decreasing, and of how strongly the fear that they may be looked upon as unscientific and imperfectly educated, overbalances the fear of losing the living God and Father, and therewith the support of both mind and life. Now, that this faith in a _special providence_, in a _hearing of prayer_, and in _divine miracles_, forms an essential part of Christian religiousness, we do not need to show more in detail; it is an established historical fact, and an object of direct Christian knowledge. On the other hand, we have still to say a word concerning {348} that which, on the part of those just described, is so strongly contested; namely, about the scientific worth of such a faith, and also about its reconcilableness with the Darwinism theories. In the first place, as to the faith in a _special providence of God_, and, in connection with it, as to the possibility of _a hearing of human prayer_, such a faith is by itself the inevitable consequence of all theism; nay, it is precisely identical with theism; it is that which makes theism _theism_, and distinguishes it from mere deism--_i.e._, from an idea of God, which merely makes God the author of the world, and lets the world, after it was once created, go its own way. Now, the theistic idea of God, which sees the Creator in an uninterrupted connection with his creation, is in itself the more scientific one: for a God who, although the author of the world, would not know how to find, nor intend to find, a way of communication with his creation, would certainly be an idea theologically inconceivable. We should, therefore, still have to adhere to the idea of a special providence of God, even if in our discursive reasoning and exact investigation of the processes in the world we should not find a single guide referring us to the scientific possibility of such a direct and uninterrupted dependence of the world on its author. We should then have simply to declare a conviction of the providence of God to be a postulate of our reasoning, which is given with the idea of God itself; and would just as little call this conviction unscientific on account of the fact, that we are not able to show the modalities of divine providence, as in reference to the exact sciences we should contest the character of their {349} scientific value on account of the fact that they are no longer able to give us an answer exactly where our questions become most important and interesting. But the ways in which we are able to realize scientifically the idea of a divine providence are, indeed, not entirely closed for us. We have several of them; one starts from the idea of God, others from the empiric created world. It belongs to the _idea of God_, that we have to think of the sublimity of God over time and space, of his eternity and omnipresence, in such a way that God, in his being, life, and activity, does not stand _in_ time nor within any limits or differences of space, but absolutely above time and above all limits and differences of space; that he is _present_ in his world everywhere and at any time. He who objects to this, can only do it with weapons to which we have to oppose the objection which the adversaries of the Christian idea of God so often raise against it--namely, the objection of a rejectable _anthropomorphism_. In contesting the possibility of the idea of an uninterrupted presence of a personal and living God in the entire realm of the universe, the adversaries seem to permit themselves to be daunted by the difficulty which is offered to man in controlling the realms of his own activity. The greater such a realm, the more difficult becomes a comprehensive survey, the more the human influence has to restrict itself to the greater and more common and to neglect the little and single. The more removed is the past which helps to constitute the circumstances of the present, the greater is the human ignorance and oblivion; the more removed is the future, the greater is the human incapability of {350} influencing it decisively. Such measures ought to disappear, even in their last traces, when we reflect on God and divine activity. If once the idea is established for us of a living God, who is always present in the world created by him, and in whose "sight a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night," the final causal chain of causes and effects may be ever so long, and stretching over this course of the world from its beginning to its end; the single phenomena may be woven together of ever so many thousands and thousands of millions of different causal chains: we nevertheless see above them all the regulating hand of God from whom they all come, and who not only surveys and controls their texture in all its threads, but who himself arranged, wove, and made it. Such a view is not only more satisfactory to the religious need of man, but it also seems to us more scientific, than a view which traces everything back to a blind and dead cause, or even to no ultimate cause at all, and thinks it has entirely removed the last veil, if it pronounces the great word "causal law." Now, while our _idea of God_ thus tells us that God has in his hand all causal chains in the world, and its million-threaded web in constant omni-surveying presence and in all-controlling omnipotence, our reflection on the _world_ and its substance and course also leads us from the _a posteriori_ starting-point of analytical investigation precisely to the same result; it even leads us to a still more concrete conception of this idea--namely, to the result, that not only the _causal chains, in their totality and in their web_, but also _all single links_ of these chains, {351} have their force and existence only by virtue of a transcendental, or what is the same, of a _metaphysical_, cause. For if we analyze the single phenomena in the world, we certainly observe in the activity of their qualities and forces such a conformity to law, that, in our reflection on these phenomena, we can go from one phenomenon to the necessity of another as its cause or its effect, and thus form those particular causal chains and causal nets in whose arranged representation natural science consists. But that those qualities and forces exist and act precisely thus, and not otherwise, and why, we are no longer able to explain. We can only say: the material and the apparent is no longer their cause, but their effect; therefore, the cause of that which comes into existence lies beyond the phenomenon--_i.e._, in the transcendental, in the metaphysical. This becomes evident in the _inorganic world_ and in those qualities which are common to all matter. Such common qualities of the latter are, for instance, cohesion and gravitation. That all matter has the quality of cohesion, we can only say because we observe it; but that it must be so, and why, we are not able to say. This becomes still more evident in gravitation. Gravitation is so decidedly an action in space, that it appears to us, together with cohesion, as precisely the bond which binds the entire material world together. Each single material atom is subject to its force; but how and why, and especially how and why matter acts upon the matter _in space_, physics can no longer tell us, but refers us to a metaphysical cause. This dependence of each single being, and of all its qualities and forces, on a transcendental and {352} metaphysical cause of its existence, becomes most clear to us in the world of the _organic_, and especially in the transmission and development of organisms. _That_ individuals originate new individuals of their species; _that_ the fecundated germs, if the necessary conditions are present, develop themselves out of the first germ and egg-cell in continually progressive and distinct differentiations, each after its kind, into the full-grown condition, so that individuals endowed with a soul and intellectual life are also developed out of such beginnings;--these are facts which are continually repeated before our eyes, and men of science have not yet reached the end in pursuing the actual in these processes into its finest ramifications. But how it is that individuals _must_ transmit themselves--that the seeds and eggs _must_ have this force of germination and development--they have not yet been able to explain, and will never be able to do so. The word "inheritance," which is to solve the problem, is only a _name_ for the _fact_ which we observe, and for the regularity of its repetition; but for this fact of inheritance itself, we seek in vain a _physical_ explanation: we are referred to a _metaphysical_ cause. Thus, not only the _first_ origin of life on earth is an enigma to us (as we have seen in Part I, Book II, Chapter I, § 3), but organic life itself, in its whole existence and course, is a process which, at every step, and in every place of its course, remains to us in its last causes physically unexplained, and refers us to metaphysical causes. If we finally see in all these inorganic and organic processes a striving towards ends--and we must see it, as soon as we in general observe order, the category of higher and lower, and the appearance of the higher on {353} the basis of the lower--we are, with all our teleological observations, again referred to the metaphysical, and still more decidedly to the goal-setting metaphysical; and a metaphysical which sets and reaches goals is nothing else than that in philosophic language which in the language of religion we call a living _Creator_ and _Ruler of the world_ and the activity of his _providence_. From still another side, the knowledge of the world, even in a scientific way, leads us to the acknowledgment of a divine providence which controls with absolute freedom every process in every place and in every moment of the world's course. We see continually, in the midst of nature, and in its causal course conformable to law, something supernatural, transcendental, and metaphysical, acting decisively upon the course of nature; and that is the _free activity of man_. Every man carries in the freedom of the determinations of his will something transcendental and metaphysical in himself, which we can call natural only when we mean by nature the summary of all that which exists, but which we have to call supernatural when we mean by nature the summary of that which belongs to the world of phenomena in its traceable causes as well as in its traceable effects. The scale of life-activities, from the lowest arbitrary motions, from the impulses and instincts of the animal up to the highest moral action of the will of man, shows us in indistinct transitions all stages which lead from the natural to the supernatural, until, in the ethical and religious motives of man, we arrive at superphysical (_i.e._, supernatural) motives which daily and hourly invade the natural, and in this invasion consciously and unconsciously use the forces of nature {354} and their activity, conformable to law, and in spite of their metaphysical and transcendental origin, from the moment of their activity, join the natural causal connection of the world's course. This observation of an invasion of the physical by the supernatural, as it continually takes place in the free action of man, leads us in a triple way to the acknowledgment of an action of divine providence upon the course of the world. In the first place, this observation shows us, in a very direct way, points where the free disposition of God acts determinatingly upon the course of things, and where this action becomes accessible to our observation. These points are the human personalities, in so far and inasmuch as they permit themselves to be influenced and determined by the will of God in the ethical and religious motives of their action, and, when these motives become actions, determinately act upon the course of things. In the second place, this observation further leads, by way of two conclusions, to the acknowledgment of a divine providence. One conclusion is the following: If there exist in the world free and intelligent beings which, through their free determinations, guided by reflection, decisively act upon the course of nature, and if these beings, on account of these very qualities of freedom and intelligence, occupy the highest stage among the creatures which we know, the last metaphysical cause of their existence must also have qualities which are able to produce such free and intelligent beings--at least the qualities of freedom and intelligence in the highest degree. And this highest metaphysical cause which produces free and intelligent personalities in the world, can at least be no {355} more dependent upon the entire world, whose author it is, than those personalities are dependent upon that realm in the world in which they have their existence. We call such a metaphysical cause, to which we have to ascribe freedom and intelligence in the highest degree, God; and we call its free position in reference to the world, the government of the world, or providence. The other conclusion leads us to the acknowledgment of a connection of providence with conformability to law in the actions of all forces and qualities in the world. It is the same conclusion to which we had to refer in Chap. I, § 6, but which now, as we draw from theism the conclusion of the acknowledgment of a special divine providence, falls with increased weight into the scale. It is the following: On the one hand, we observe in the processes of the world a striving towards ends; on the other, we know in the world itself only one single creature which acts according to aims, which sets itself its ends and reaches them with freely chosen means. This one creature is man. Now man can, as we pointed out in Chap. I, § 6, choose and use the means with which he wishes to reach his ends, only because he can rely on the conformity to the end in view and the regularity in the effect of all the qualities and forces of things. If he could not rely on them, he certainly could set himself ends; but the reaching of them he would have to leave to the play of chance. Now if we see, on the one side, that the only creature known to us which sets itself ends is able to reach these ends by virtue of inviolable conformity to law in the forces and effects of its means, and if we see, on the other, that in the course of the world ends are also reached, and that at the same time {356} all secondary causes which lead to these ends act with a necessity conformable to law, we certainly are right in drawing the conclusion that the highest metaphysical cause of all things--we now say, the living God--has so prepared the whole universe that his free but regular and systematic goal-setting and end-reaching action upon the course of all things rests, as a whole as well as in detail, directly upon the conformity to law of all forces and their effects. The observation of a free action of the human personality upon the course of things, once more leads us back to a reflection on the _idea of God_. For if we have reason to acknowledge a _freedom_ of the determinations of human will--and the consciousness of ethical responsibility will be a proof of this freedom which cannot be invalidated by any contrary reflection--the question comes up: _how is this freedom of a creature reconcilable with the idea of God?_ Far be it from us to claim to have found a solution of these last and most important problems of the human mind. For all meditations on them but lead to antinomies in the presence of which we dare not churn to remove all difficulties of reflection still less to solve the difficulties by pursuing only one chain of reasoning and ignoring the other. The way of science leads rather to mere _compromises_, and these compromises consist in the fact, that on every side of our observations or arguments we look for and adhere to that which results for us in incontestable fact or indispensable postulate, and that we adhere to all results or postulates thus found even when we are no longer able to trace their unity and harmony back to their last sources. Now if, on the one hand, our idea of {357} God is established as a self-testimony of God to our ethical consciousness and as a result of our teleological reasoning, and if, on the other, is established the fact of the world and of its processes going on conformably to law, and likewise the fact of human freedom and its actions upon the course of things, and finally the fact of the admission of the human will and action into a higher teleology which is superior to human will, and which, in the history of mankind, of individuals, and nations, reaches its higher ends, now by affirming, now by denying, human will; then we have simply to account for all these facts as mere _facts_, and the scientific attempt at pursuing them into their inner connection is nothing else but a more or less successful compromise. We have to be satisfied with these indications, for the further discussion of them would lead us far beyond the task of the present publication. We shall only point out the fact, that precisely the knowledge of the image of God in man shows us the way to the knowledge of how it is conceivable that God can create personalities through whose freedom of will he relatively limits the absoluteness of his own will. In all our discussions hitherto, the scientific basis of a faith in the possibility of an _answer to prayer_ has been evident. All reasons for a divine providence, also speak with the same force of persuasion for the hearing of our prayers, as soon as the _idea of being a child of God_ has become an integral part of our idea of God. And this idea--the idea of God as the father, and of a relationship of love between the divine and the human personalities--is so much a part of the Christian idea of God, that it belongs to its very essence. Only one {358} consideration might offer scientific difficulties to our faith in the hearing of prayer: namely, if God hears the prayers of his children, in the course of time new motives for his action present themselves to him; now, is it reconcilable with the idea of God, that God makes himself in any such way dependent on that which first appeared in time, and on the changing moods of the creature? But this difficulty is precisely the same which we met, when acknowledging human freedom and its reconcilableness with a divine providence; and we have tried to indicate above the path which leads to its solution. It is the principal idea which penetrates all our reasoning about the relation of God and the world--namely, the idea of a _teleology in the world_--which is to lead us to a correct conception of the _miracles_ and their reconcilableness with a mechanism of nature and with the Darwinistic ideas of development. In the much discussed contest about the problem of miracles, clearer results would certainly have been attained, if one had questioned more closely what the record of the Christian religion means by miracles, and what position, according to it, these miracles have to take in the order of the world and in the divine plan of salvation; and after having satisfied himself as to this position, had further asked what position they take in reference to our exact science and our theistic view of the world. Instead of doing this, we have often enough seen friend and foe of the idea of miracles, as soon as the question was even touched upon, at once set to work with the insufficient conceptions of old rationalism and supernaturalism, and thus raising objections and attempting solutions which could satisfy nobody. Especially every inadequate idea {359} which was put forth by the advocates of faith in miracles, was gladly accepted by its adversaries; for thereby they were furnished with a caricature of the idea of miracles, the tearing to pieces of which was an easy and agreeable sport to them. The very ideas of the _natural_ and the _supernatural_ are a category which is to be treated with caution. When discussing the question of divine providence, we have seen that, with every free act of the will of man springing from an ethical motive, something supernatural invades the natural, so that in every normal human life we always see supernatural and natural by the side of and in one another. The distinction between the _direct_ and the _indirect action or invasion of God_ is also to be used with great caution and restriction. For where we are no longer able to find secondary causes, who can assert that God no longer uses any? Where the realm of visible causes ceases and that of the invisible begins, who can exclude secondary causes? And on the other hand, where God acts directly, who can deny the concurrence of his direct presence and his direct action, or reduce the value of that which was indirectly produced? Moreover, the often-returning conceptions of a _breaking of the laws of nature_, or the compromises which were made between a breaking and a non-breaking of the laws of nature by assuming a "supernatural acceleration of the process of nature," were still more misleading. In the whole world, infinitely many higher and lower forces act according to laws and order. In every process, a part of the forces which in the single case surround it, become active, and thereby hinder {360} another part from its activity. But the laws of this other part of forces are not thereby invalidated or broken. When a man acts with moral freedom, from mere moral motives, the highest of the conceivable forces over which we have control comes into direct action upon the natural. But therewith those forces, with their laws, which would have been active if another motive had determined him, are not yet overcome, but only hindered from their activity in exactly the same way as one part of forces can be active and another not, where mere mechanical actions take place. Thus, in miracles, no law of nature is overcome, but only a force which otherwise would have been active according to the law of its activity, is for the time hindered from action by another force becoming active. Moreover, through the conscious and unconscious connection of the idea of irregularity and lack of plan with the idea of miracles, not only the idea of a God who works miracles, but also that of a personal Creator and Ruler of the world, in general, has come into discredit. For that reason, Häckel, for instance, when he attacks the Christian idea of creation, never fails to speak of the "capricious arbitrariness" of the Creator; and Oskar Schmidt also speaks of the "caprice" of the God of Christians. With these criticisms, which we have made in reference to the treatment of the question of miracles, we certainly have undertaken only to characterize the superficial skirmishing which took place between the two opposing views of the world, but not the labors of more recent theological science. But that skirmish has made, like all superficiality, the most noise in the world; and since the adversaries of the faith in {361} miracles endeavored almost exclusively to reflect in this manner, and almost ignored the deeper deductions of theological science, they succeeded in making the idea of miracles almost the most dreaded object of antipathy to modern education, and many of those who feel that the conceptions of traditional dogmatics are in need of revision, and religion and science of a reconciliation, endeavor to find that revision and reconciliation especially in the fact, that religion gives up miracles. On the other hand, _theology as science_, in its main advocates, long ago gave up these insufficient and misleading categories and conceptions, and established a conception of miracles which can easily be received into the science of the processes of nature, as well as into our reasoning about God and the divine. The first who adopted this mode of treatment, is one of the pioneers of more recent positive theology, and of a theology still uninfluenced by science--Karl Immanuel Nitzsch. It is certainly interesting to read what this man, as early as 1829, said, in the first edition of his "System der Christlichen Lehre" ("System of Christian Doctrine"), and also in the succeeding edition printed without alteration. He says, on page 64: "The miracles of revelation are, in spite of all objective supernaturalness, derived from their central origin, _something really conformable to law_: partly in relation to the higher order of things to which they belong and which is also a world, a nature in its kind, and acts upon the lower in its way; partly in reference to the similarity to common nature which they retain in any way; partly on account of their teleological perfection; and they must not only be expected as the homogeneous phenomenon from the inner miracle of {362} redemption, from the standpoint of perfect Christian faith, but also by virtue of the union between spirit and nature, be looked upon _as the natural in its kind_." In these words we find the fruitful germs of a sound dogmatic development which the idea of miracles has found on the part of more recent theology. Let us, in the first place, try to keep free from all preconceived, correct or incorrect, opinions, and ask how the miracles appear to us, when they present themselves with a claim to acknowledgment as integral parts of a divine revelation of salvation, namely, in the religion of redemption and its record. In regard to their name, they appear to us in the Holy Scriptures as amazing bright processes, as great deeds and signs; and in regard to their nature, as signs which are destined to call the attention of man to the government in grace and in judgment of a living God, to the salvation of redemption which God gives to man, and to the human instruments which he uses for that purpose. Now, in a view of the world which, like the Biblical, so decidedly sees a revelation of God in all that which takes place, in a view of the world to which everything natural has also, as a work of God, its supernatural cause, and everything supernatural, at present, or in the future, is transposed again into nature and history, not only all those above rejected conceptions of miracles lose their significance, but all remaining conceptions with which one otherwise tries to distinguish the miracles from all that is not miraculous, or to classify the different species of miracles, also diminish in importance, as do also all those distinctions of direct and indirect actions of God--the distinctions of relative and absolute, of subjective and objective miracles: and there {363} remains hut a single inviolable kernel and central point of the Biblical conception of miracles, and that is the above mentioned _teleological character_ of miracles. Indeed, we are not willing to reject all these logical distinctions and investigations as worthless: they have helped to render clear our conceptions and ideas, and they still help. But a deeper investigation of the idea of miracles and its relation to a scientific knowledge of the world may perhaps finally lead our more developed reflection back to the fact that we find the quintessence and the nature of miracles only where the pious people of the Bible found it. And this quintessence of miracles consists precisely in their _teleological nature_, and not at all in the fact that they cannot be explained physically: it consists in the fact that miracles are _signs_ through which God manifests himself and his government over man, and actually shows the latter that _he_ wishes to bring him to the pursuit of perfection by the way of redemption. Ritschl, in an essay which appeared in the "Jahrbücher für Deutsche Theologie," as early as 1861, pointed out this decidedly teleological character of Biblical miracles and the indifference shown by pious men in the Bible as to the question whether these deeds and signs can be explained naturally or not. The profit which we derive from this reverting to the Biblical conception of the idea of miracles is by no means small. In the first place, we help to establish the full recognition of that direct religious consciousness and sensation which is not only characteristic of the pious men of Scripture, but which yet characterizes all genuine religiousness; and this consists in the fact that the religious man sees {364} _miracles of God in all that turns his attention to God's government_,--in the sea of stars, in rock and bush, in sunshine and storm, in flower and worm, just as certainly as in the guidance of his own life and in the facts and processes of the history of salvation and of the kingdom of the Lord. In this idea of miracles, the essential thing is not that the phenomena and processes are inconceivable to him--although certainly in all that comes into appearance there is still an incomprehensible and uncomprehended remainder. For a form of nature, _e.g._, which turns his attention to a creator, is of course a miracle, even if he is able to look upon it with none other eye than that of the unlearned: but it even then remains a miracle,--nay, it is increased to a still greater miracle, if he has learned to contemplate and investigate it with all the auxiliary means of science. A hearing of his prayers remains a miracle, whether or not he is able to perceive the natural connection of the process in which he sees his prayers answered, or even to trace it back to the remotest times which preceded his prayers. The events and facts of the history of salvation remain miracles to him, whether the history of nature and the world offers to him auxiliary means of explaining them or not. The pious man, therefore, does not find the essential characteristic of miracles in their relative inconceivableness, but in the fact that they refer him to a living God who stands above this process, whether perceived or unperceived in its relative causal connection, and unites it with the course of things in order to reach his ends and to manifest himself to man. Now, in our attempt at a scientific reproduction of the idea of miracles, if we return to that Biblical conception, we see no longer in this just {365} mentioned religious conception of miracles a pious sophistry which avoids the difficulty of the idea, or a child-like _naïveté_ worthy of being partly envied and partly pitied, which does not at all see the difficulties and remains on the child-stage of Biblical conceptions; but we only perceive in it a confirmation and fulfilment of that profound and beneficent word of our Lord: "Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein." Of course, piety as well as science makes _distinctions_ among miracles. The former separates the _mere products and processes of nature_ which, through what is explicable as well as what is inexplicable in their qualities and processes, point to an almighty and all-wise Creator, and thereby become miracles to the religious view of the world, from the _historical events_ which, by their newness and uniqueness, and by their pointing toward divine ends, manifest God and his teleological government to man, and calls them miracles in a still more specific sense than science does. And among historical events, piety as well as science assigns the name miracle, in the most pregnant sense, to those events which belong to the _history of salvation_, and, by their newness and uniqueness, introduce new stages into it, render legitimate its new instruments, or bring new features of redemption to our knowledge. Our religiousness has the greatest and deepest interest in this history: for it is the history of the leading back of man into communion with God by the way of redemption; and therefore the events of this history are precisely those miracles upon which our deepest religious interest is concentrated. But in spite of all these distinctions in degree, that natural relationship and that {366} common character of the miraculous between the miracles of nature, the miracles of the history of man, and the miracles of the history of salvation, remain established; and we render a service to religious consciousness, as well as to the scientific conception of the idea of miracles, if by returning to the Biblical idea of miracles, as we propose, we make a more comprehensive definition of miracles possible. Another advantage which we derive from returning to the Biblical idea of miracles consists in the fact that it preserves us from the _magical_ and necromantic in our conceptions of miracles; that it allows us a _grouping of miracles according to value_, which corresponds with the idea of God and of the divine government as well as with the idea of miracles itself; and that in the presence of all single relations of miracles it summons us to _criticise_ and _investigate the real state of the case_. For the nature of miracles does not consist in the inconceivable--at least not in the planless and arbitrary,--but in the fact that they call the attention of man to God and his government; and this leads to the reverse of all that is magical and necromantic, because the magical is unworthy of the idea of God and contradicts all the other self-testimony of God. Now if the nature of miracles consists in the fact that they call my attention to God and his government, an event will become a miracle to me, and increase its value, in the degree in which it refers me to God and his government, and especially in the degree in which it refers me to that government of God which is the most important to me--namely, to the action of God in me and mankind, with which he is bringing about his ends in salvation; {367} but in the degree in which an event loses this character, it becomes to me an event without miraculous or religious significance. This gives a quite definite grouping of miracles according to value, from those which belong to the central manifestations of the divine plan of salvation and way of redemption, to those which lie in the extreme periphery of religious interest. It is a grouping which corresponds with the idea of God just as much as with the idea of miracles; while all other divisions or groupings of miracles according to value, which might take their principle of division and their weight from the greater or smaller conceivableness of the causal connection, from the greater or smaller difference of a miraculous event from all other events, are indifferent in reference to the idea of God, and change the centre of gravity in the idea of miracles. Besides, if these miracles are to be real signs to me which refer me to God, his government, and his ways of salvation, they must, in the first place, in order to secure my conviction, be real events and facts and not mere falsifications and fictions; and this point leads us to the duty and right of criticising and investigating actual circumstances. In presence of all Biblical and non-Biblical miracles, we have the full right and the full duty of using criticism in reference to the confirmation of actual circumstances, and where the latter cannot be established with certainty, the question is in order whether the related event is really of such a character as to legitimate itself as a sign of God and his government. In the preceding section, we have had occasion to use this principle in reference to the investigation of that event which, next to the coming of the Redeemer, offers itself to us as the {368} central miracle of the history of salvation and redemption: namely, in reference to the history of the resurrection of the Lord. We have by no means the wish to avoid _difficulties_ which meet us, when trying to bring miracles, and especially the specific and pregnant miracles of the history of salvation, into harmony with our scientific knowledge of the world: only we can no longer admit that these difficulties consist in the inconceivableness or in the supernaturalism of miracles. For to the religious view of the world--which traces equally the explicable as well as the inexplicable back to God, which even derives the natural from the supernatural causality of God--neither the occasional inexplicability nor the supposed supernaturalness of an event can be that which makes the event a miracle. But an event in the history of salvation becomes a miracle from the fact that something _extraordinary_, something _new_, happens in it, which by its newness and its extraordinary character presents itself to man as the manifestation of certain divine _ends in salvation_, and can be explained _at first sight_, but only at first sight, from nothing else than from the service which it renders to the plan of redemption. Whether afterwards these extraordinary and new features can or cannot be perceived in their natural connection, or explained out of it, does not at all change anything in the miraculous character of the event, as soon as it has _once_ had the before-mentioned effect. The only task and the only difficulty which meets us in the question of miracles, is to show that such extraordinary and new things really happen, and to bring the reality and possibility of such new things into our perception of the {369} causal connection of the course of the world, conformable to law. But it ceases to be a difficulty, so soon as we acknowledge a teleology in the course of the world and a teleology in the history of mankind, and especially as soon as we acknowledge that teleology in the history of mankind which, by the way of the divine means of redemption, leads man back to God. Where there are no ends, nothing can happen which calls the attention of men to these ends; nor, indeed, can anything new happen; for nothing prevails in more absolute sovereignty to all eternity than the maxims _causa æquat effectum_ and _effectus æquat causam_. But where ends are appointed and reached, something new also happens; and every new thing refers to its end. For each step leading nearer such an end is something new, and refers, as soon as we compare it with preceding steps, to the end towards which it strives. All ends to which the course of things refers us, are to the religious view of the world ends which are appointed by God; all means which serve to reach the ends, are means which God created and chose; and every phenomenon and every event which manifests this teleological government of God to our mind, is a miracle to us. Now this whole course of the world is interwoven with such new things, in events which manifest to us, now more clearly, now more dimly, the striving of the course of the world towards an end, because the latter is really striving towards an end. Even prehistoric times show us new things which, from a scientific and historical point of view, we have to place in the line of the course of the world; and from a religious point of view, in the line of miracles. The first appearance of organic life on earth was new, and indicated new ends; the first {370} appearance of each single species of animals and plants was new; new, also, and indicating the highest end of creative life, was the first appearance of man. All these things we call _miracles_ of creation; and we especially place the creative miracle of the appearance of man on a level with the greatest miracles of which we have knowledge, and use the name miracle for all before mentioned newly appearing formations, whether or not we are able to explain those originations from the preceding connection of the course of nature and its forces. Now, in the history of mankind, where the intellectual and ethical motives of that which happens become active, where also the greatest ends which come up for consideration are spiritual and ethical ends, where man himself acts freely according to ends, and where, therefore, human and divine teleology come alternately into play, the manifestation of a striving toward an end, in which religious consciousness immediately sees also ends and means of God, is repeated in an eminent degree. Every event which brings about a progress in the history of mankind as well as of individuals, is as to this side something new, extraordinary, teleological: _i.e._, a miracle to the religious mode of contemplation; and this miracle is the greater as is more important the end under consideration, and the greater and the more decisive the step towards this end which the event accomplishes. Now, if we recognize the return of mankind into a communion with God as the highest goal of the general and individual history of mankind, and if we find in the latter facts which lead to this goal, then these facts are the great central miracles of history. As such, the facts of redemption present {371} themselves with all that for which it once prepared the way; and, now that it has come, leads to full and complete perfection--and among them all, the coming, the person, and the history of Jesus Christ, stands as central fact and central miracle in the midst of all events in the history of salvation, and forms the central point of all religious interest. We see how unjust it is when one urges, as an objection to a belief in miracles, that it assigns to God arbitrary and capricious actions. We call the manifestations of divine teleology miracles. But striving towards an end and conformity to a regular plan is not arbitrariness or caprice, but the contrary; and the greater our estimate of the highest cause of all things, the greater will appear to us the conformity to a plan and to law of all which presents itself as miracles in the course of events. There is perhaps one objection which is about as equally unjust as the objection of caprice; and that is the objection that faith in miracles, in teaching a belief in supernatural things, lends to introduce into the course of events something which is against nature. But since miracles, as a sign of divine teleology, manifest ends for which nature also is prepared, and through which the fallen nature of man, fallen by sin, is again restored; and since to the religious view of the world all natural phenomena and processes expressly rank among miracles, the faith in miracles teaches the contrary of an opposition to nature. It is incontestible--and will become still clearer and more certain to us through all farther investigation of the subject--that the acknowledgment of the idea of miracles as a necessary and a justified part of religiousness {372} stands and falls with the acknowledgment of a teleological view of the world. We certainly do not indulge in the foolish hope that with the deductions of this section we should be able suddenly to win over any of the decided adversaries of faith in providence and miracles. For, as we have had occasion to remind the reader, the acknowledgment or the non-acknowledgment of God and his living government in the world is not the result of this or that reflection and chain of conclusions, but rather an ethical action of the centre of human personality in which God discovers himself in his self-manifestation. Now, if this centre, in the freedom of its decision, has once denied the acknowledgment of God and his government, then the intellectual actions of the soul offer themselves to this atheistic and anti-theistic standpoint, and build up atheistic systems in which the ideas of providence and miracles naturally find no place. Thus system is opposed to system, although the one is not able to overcome the other. For the last and deepest power of conviction lies, neither for one nor the other system, in its chains of conclusions, in its superstructure, but in its foundation, its standpoint, and its principles; and the choosing of one or the other standpoint, the theistic or atheistic, is an ethical action which precedes methodical reasoning--or if it takes place at the same time or precedes it, has still deeper motives than those of more or less clear forms of mere reasoning. But we believe, and we wish and hope in our modest way to have shown by our present investigation, that the standpoint of faith also has its logical and justified science, and that it is able to appreciate the {373} world of the real more universally and candidly, and offers to logical reasoning fewer and less important difficulties, than the systems of atheism. We have now discussed all the essential and direct points of contacts between Christianity and the theory of evolution. But a remaining part, still more closely related to the centre of the Christian view of the world, yet offers some indirect points of contact which demand treatment. § 5. _The Redeemer and the Redemption. The Kingdom of God and the Acceptance of Salvation._ As soon as it is once an established fact that an evolution theory of the origin of man as a merely scientific theory permits all the valuable qualities of man, when they have once come into existence, to show themselves undiminished in their entire greatness and importance, and must so permit them, then the whole Christian view of the world, of the Redeemer, his person, his course of redemption, and his work, remains entirely untouched by all these scientific theories of evolution. Yet the Biblical representation, the orthodox perception, and the actual history of the Redeemer and his work, present us with some evidences which are rather in sympathy than in antipathy with these scientific theories. First, the long preparation for his birth, which began immediately after the fall of man and stretched over at least four thousand years, perhaps over a much longer period, the special preparation of his human genealogy, the selection, separation, and guidance of the ancestor and of the people of Israel, of the tribe, the family, and finally of the mother of Jesus--all these are manifestly {374} just as favorable to the idea of evolution as they would have been to the idea of a sudden creation of man out of nothing, if Christ, the second Adam, had come into existence by a sudden creation. Moreover, the Redeemer himself was wholly subject to the ordinary laws of development of the human individual, and was, from his annunciation and conception, developed entirely like man in the long process of evolution from the egg and its still absolutely indifferent spiritual worth through all the imperceptible stages of development before and after the birth up to the full age of man. Likewise the result of his course of salvation, redemption, and entrance into the kingdom of God, underwent the same process of gradual development. It began with a few disciples, and was slowly propagated; it has to-day reached but a small part of mankind, and even where it took root, it sees infinitely many things by its side which it has not yet been able to penetrate with its leaven:--facts which have much more elective affinity with the scientific ideas of development than with those of sudden creations. Finally, precisely the same analogy forces itself upon us in the Christian doctrine of the way of salvation. The work of the Holy Spirit in the human individual is nothing less than a new birth; its aim is the revival of the entire man, in mind, soul, and body. In most men, this work takes place by a slow process, advancing step by step. This gradual course is even the rule in Christianized nations; although a decisive change of mind often enough, though by no means always, takes place in marked epochs of the inner history of life. And in all Christians--even in those whose conversion takes place by a sudden awakening, like that of Paul--the {375} transformation of the entire man into the similarity of Christ, and the full restoration of the image of God, is certainly a process of development, and must await its completion in the resurrection. This view is also confirmed by the Lord's parable of the seed, growing up imperceptibly. Every believing Christian knows these facts, and judges and acts according to them: therefore, when in the realm of nature, which God certainly submitted to the free investigation of the human mind, he meets similar views, what right has he to protest against them as being hostile to religion? § 6. _Eschatology._ In our discussion of the preceding questions, we have seen that an entirely neutral, not to say friendly, relationship is taking place between religion and the theories of development, which will continue so long as the latter keep within the limits of their proper realm, the perception of nature; and that a hostile relation takes place, and anti-religious attacks are to be guarded against, only when a disbelieving system of metaphysics, which has grown on other ground, in an uncalled-for way, tries to connect itself closely with the theory of descent. This is in an eminent degree the case with the great eschatological hopes of Christianity. The evolution theory so exclusively contents itself with the attempts at perceiving the causal circumstances of organisms in the _present_ world, that it does not at all wish to, and cannot, express itself concerning the _end_ and _goal_ of the world and the laws and circumstances which may reign in a _future æon_, and that it gives free scope to every perception of the ultimate which might come from another source. {376} On the other hand, Christian eschatology is alone able to do most essential service to the evolution theory, in case it should be verified, by giving an answer to questions to which the evolution theory tends more decidedly than any other scientific theory--namely, to the questions as to _the end of the world and mankind_, with such distinctions as no philosophy which treats of the doctrines of nature, is able to give, although natural science itself demands the answer to these questions the more peremptorily, the higher the points of view are to which it leads us. The world shows to every investigating eye a development, whether we have to take this development as descent or as successive new creation; and therefore we shall take, in the following discussion, the idea of development in this broad sense which comprises all conceivable attempts at explanation. All nature--its most comprehensive cosmic realms as well as the realms of its smallest organisms--together with the corporeal, psychical, and spiritual nature of man, shows a _harmony_, a _conformity to the end in view_, and a _striving toward an end_ of its development, the denial of which will certainly not add to the laurels which transmit the scientific fame of our present generation to posterity. Now, what is this end? The answer which we receive from those who reject Christian eschatology, may be given by two scientific antipodes: by Strauss and Eduard von Hartmann. Strauss takes sides with those who reject all striving toward an end in nature; and his answer to the question (which still asserts itself in his system of the world), is: eternal circular motion of the universe, death of all individuals and of all complexes of individuals, even of {377} mankind. Eduard von Hartmann, on the other hand, is filled by the knowledge of the teleological, but he rejects the hope of Christians and the end which offers itself to him in the place of the rejected end of Christian hope, is destruction--destruction of all individuals and destruction of the world. In view of such ends, is not the Christian's hope _the_ answer which not only satisfies the deepest ethical and religious need, but also all heights and depths of the most faithful, most devoted, and most enlightened investigation of nature? Finally, we have still another eschatological conclusion to mention and reject; a conclusion which is drawn from this theory by the advocates of the evolution theory. It opens the perspective into a future development of still higher beings out of man. _In abstracto_, we can naturally make no objection to the possibility of such a development, as soon as we once accept the evolution theory; but we have to object to the supposition of such a process _in infinitum_. For such a process would certainly be interrupted by the final destruction of the globe; and in case the mechanico-naturalistic view of the world should be right, this destruction would be only the more cruel as would be more highly organized the beings which should find their destruction in this inevitable catastrophe. Moreover, as we have repeatedly seen, a development _in infinitum_ suffers from a self-contradiction: for development involves an end, and this end must certainly have been once reached. Now, if we have reason to assume that this end has been reached in the development of the inhabitants of the globe, by the creature being in the image of God and his child, and that it is also reached in fallen man through redemption {378} and its perfection, then the idea of development, it is true, allows and postulates a relative development of mankind, so long as this takes place within the limits of the now valid laws of the universe,--a development towards the perfection of this likeness to God and filial relationship; but that idea of development has no longer an influence that would lead to the production of new beings which should be more than man. With the foregoing, we believe that we have discussed all essential points of the relation between religion and Darwinism; and we now proceed to the last part of our investigation. * * * * * {379} _B. THE DARWINIAN THEORIES AND MORALITY._ CHAPTER III. DARWINISM AND MORAL PRINCIPLES. § 1. _Darwinistic Naturalism and Moral Principles._ If we consider the ethical consequences of a view of the world which, proceeding from Darwinism, permits the universe, man included, to be taken up into a mechanism of atoms--a mechanism in which everything, even the ethical action of man, finds its sufficient explanation--we certainly cannot perceive how such a view of the world is able to arrive at firm moral principles. If man, even in his spiritual life and moral action, is a mere product of nature, originated through descent, and if his whole spiritual life is fully consumed by these merely mechanical factors, then all moral principles are also nothing else than inherited customs founded upon those instincts which in the struggle for existence have proven to be the most beneficial to man. Then their influence is subject to continual change, always corresponding to the existing state of human development. As these moral instincts have displaced the former instincts of the animal predecessors of man--say, _e.g._, of sharks, of marsupialia, of lemurides--so they must {380} also expect it any time to be displaced in turn by new and still more useful instincts. And even in the same period of the development of mankind, the moral or immoral principles which have actual authority in each nation or tribe, have their full right of existence as long as they are not displaced by still more advantageous instincts. Moral principles in which infanticide, prostitution, and cannibalism have a place, are inferior to the highest form of Christian morality only so far as they do not hold their own in the struggle for existence, when nations having those low views come into collision with nations of higher moral culture; but in themselves they have full value and full right, so long as they attain the end of all instincts, and so far as we can speak of ends at all; in such naturalism, apart from human activity, the end consists only in the preservation of the individual and the species in the struggle for existence. Under these suppositions, moral principles not only lose their objective and solid consistency in the mass of mankind, but they also become irrevocably subject to the arbitrariness of the single individual. An individual who either has not, or asserts that he has not, a determined moral instinct, or who allows it to be smothered by some other instinct which in a normal individual is subordinate, but in him stronger, is fully justified in his immoral action so long as he is successful with it. Every individual is entirely his own master and his own judge. If man is morally good, it may be the consequence of an especially happy individual disposition, or of an especially clear perception, or of happy circumstances and influences; but it is not the consequence of a free subordination under the authority {381} of a moral law; for there is neither freedom nor an objective moral authority. The single man is but the product of a certain sum and mixture of powers of nature, acting of necessity, which may with him turn out fortunately or unfortunately. If, on the other hand, man is morally perverted, society may defend itself against his perversity; wisdom may try to convince him of the bad consequences of his perversity for himself and society; the effect of his perversity may make him sensible of the bad consequences of his actions: but there is no other objectively valid corrective of his perversity. If he is successful in his immoral action, and if he silences his conscience, this voice of the unobserved higher instinct in favor of the preferred lower--which unfortunately, as is well known, succeeds oftenest and most easily in the case of those whose perversity has become the most habitual, and in whom another grouping of instincts would be most desirable--then the whole affair is settled, and he is absolved. Let us be understood correctly. We do not say that all advocates of mechanical or monistic ethics draw these conclusions in reality; we know very well that many a man is better than his system; but it seems to us inevitable that the logical pursuit of that naturalistic principle leads to this dissolution of all solid fundamentals of moral principles, and that it is but an inconsequence, certainly worthy of honor and of notice, if all the advocates of naturalism do not profess this dissolution of all moral principles with the same cynic frankness that is shown by many of their partisans. We do not say too much, when we charge ethical naturalism with dissolution of _all_ moral principles. Let {382} us examine them, for a moment, according to the old but still fundamental division into duty, virtue, and highest good. According to the principles of that ethical naturalism, there can be no _duty_ at all, no objective moral law, binding absolutely and in general. The motives of action are either the strongest and most durable instincts, or, in case of high culture, conventional agreement of that which benefits society. In the one as well as in the other case, when the duty is neglected, the appeal is not made to something absolutely objective and binding, but either to the highest instinct (and to this every individual has the right to answer with a _Quod nego_), or to agreement and custom; and as to this, every individual has the right to make his reformatory or revolutionary attempt at change--of course only upon the condition that his attempt is successful, and that it stands proof. Relatively it is easiest for ethical naturalism to establish a principle of _virtue_, inasmuch as we have to look upon virtue as the principle of individual perfection, and inasmuch as even naturalism, by means of the indestructible impulse of man to attain moral ideas, can postulate an ideal of human action. But on closer examination even the naturalistic idea of virtue vanishes under our hands. Virtue, as individual morality, is constituted of the factors of duty and of the highest good, which form the motives of virtuous action. Now a system of morality which, as we have seen, is entirely wanting in an objective solid principle of duty as the motive of action, and which likewise, as we shall see immediately, is wanting in an objectively established highest good as the end of action, cannot possibly {383} produce any other idea of virtue than an abstract formal one. In ethical naturalism, even this form is subject to change. For, according to this system, not only the motive and end but also the form of moral action depend on that which in every circle of society and at every time proves to be the most successful form. It is the proof of success or failure which gives this form a certain traditional authority and a relative solidity--but only a relative one, and only until it is displaced by a still more successful form. That, finally, ethical naturalism is also wanting in an objective end of moral action, in the idea and meaning of the _highest good_, is indeed not denied by naturalism itself. It is true it speaks with predilection of the idea of species, which man is to represent and to realize, and in that respect we can say that the highest good of naturalistic ethologists is the species or the idea of species.[11] But the idea of species is only the empty vessel which first becomes valuable by reason of its contents. Now, if we ask ethical naturalism the properties with which that idea of species is to be endowed, it certainly mentions properties, but those which are too rich; namely, it mentions the idea of all that is good in human life and the forms of human life, _in concreto_, the whole sum of all the conditions and acquisitions of the culture of mankind, art, nature, and science: the comprehensive idea of these acquisitions, the enjoyment of them, the work at them, is the highest good. Now, since no human individual can enjoy them all and work at them all at the same time, every individual, as {384} to disposition, inclination, and circumstances, has to enjoy a part of them, to work at a part of them, and to renounce a part of them. And since each single one of these good things, however valuable to the individual, may be refused to or taken away from him, he has again to learn to be satisfied with that idea of species, however little it is able to offer him, when separated from the empiric possessions of this earthly life. Thus with naturalism the highest good is either mentioned in an abstraction which does not offer us anything, or which, if we ask the meaning of that abstraction, is instantly drawn down into the low sphere and the varied multiformity of empirical and individual life, left to the chance of individual taste, and confounded with that which is connected with the highest good only in the second line and in a derived manner--namely, with the formations and actions of life which strive at and serve the realization of the highest good. Ethical naturalism is not able to produce out of itself an objective highest good which is for each individual alike attractive, rich, and comprehensive. Moreover, since ethical naturalism proves itself insufficient for the principles of any and all morality, it is but a natural conclusion that it is still less able to produce those principles which are characteristic of the highest representation of human morality known to mankind, namely: _Christian morality_. Ethical monism has no room for three ethical fundamental views, whose full possession morality owes to Christianity, and which gives to Christian morality its highest motive power. One of these is a deeper conception of evil as a sin, as a positive rebellion against the good; another is faith in a future {385} absolute realization of the highest good in an end sometime to be reached by mankind and the individual and by means of a moral order of the world; and the third is the acknowledgment of the full worth of personality. Evil--to which of course no objective valid moral law, but only one conventionally established, stands opposed--is to ethical naturalism nothing but the action of an instinct which in this given case is not beneficial to man in his struggle for existence; the category of good and evil is entirely replaced by the category of the useful and detrimental. With the disappearance of the idea of sin as a transgression of the divine law, the correlated idea of holiness also disappears from the system of ethical naturalism. Besides, blessedness, complete harmony of the outer and inner man with the ideal in the state of mankind as well as of every individual, complete realization of the highest good for the whole as well as for the single through the means of moral work and perfection on the part of man and of holy and loving guidance and endowment on the part of God, is an aim which naturalism is not able to acknowledge, since, according to it, mankind and individuals continue in the ever-flowing stream of earthly incompletion until both reach their destiny in annihilation. A moral order of the world is an impossibility to it, since no holy and loving Ruler and Governor of the world, but only a blind mechanism, causes the course of things. Finally, the personality of man can be only perceived in its worth and in its full importance, when, in the first place, it is in the possession of freedom, of full moral responsibility; and when, in the second place, it lives beyond the span of its short earthly existence and may hope for a full realization of {386} all its ideals of virtue and the highest good for itself as well as for mankind. Both these points must be contested by monism and naturalism. The place of freedom is taken by absolute determinism; even man is only a natural product, the highest which naturalism knows, but still no more than a product of nature; his personality and his life, bound to the material body, cease with the death of this body, and therefore never reach the ideal of either morality or blessedness. All ideals are and must forever remain objective illusions which came forth out of the power of the corresponding noble impulse, imaginative objective conceptions of the moral impulses. § 2. _Scientific Darwinism and Moral Principles._ Whilst Darwinistic naturalism surely injures the moral principles, the Darwinistic theories are friendly to them, if they, as mere scientific theories, restrain themselves within the limits of natural science. But in no other point of the entire realm of contact between the natural and intellectual sciences is it more difficult to observe the boundary-line than in reflecting upon the moral self-determination of man; here natural science is always in danger of going beyond its limits. In the question as to the relation of the evolution theories to religion, the boundary-line can everywhere be easily drawn in theory and easily observed in practice. For it is entirely natural for man to look upon the phenomena of the visible world on the one hand, with a religious mind, as works and actions of an almighty Creator and Ruler of the world, on the other, with his observing and reflecting mind, as products of natural causes. With this double view, man by no means feels {387} himself dragged hither and thither between two conflicting views; he is able in his logical contemplation of the world scientifically to establish and arrange each for itself and both in their harmony, and has the full consciousness that the one, like the other, has subjective as well as objective truth. Or, if a single individual does not have this consciousness, he must at least admit that it is not Darwinism primarily which created the difficulty of this combined view of the world, but that the latter existed for man in the past as well as in the present. But the relation of the _Darwinian_ theories to ethical problems is quite a different thing. Here, in the first place, it is not the same process which is to be explained as well in regard to its natural conditions as to its moral cause. It is true that this double view deserves attention in so far as we can look upon every action which results from a moral determination also in reference to its natural side. If I have to raise my arm in consequence of a moral determination, then physiology and mechanism can demonstrate with it the whole theory of the motion of members. But this is not the question, when we treat of the relation between the natural and the ethical. In this example, the moralist examines the motives of my action, the scientist describes and explains the activity of the nerves and muscles of my arm, and as long as the scientist is not guilty of going beyond the boundary to which he is tempted, and which even now we are endeavoring to make clear, as long as he does not include the ethical motives in his physiological attempts at explanation, the one keeps himself neutral with reference to the other; each of them knows that he is {388} operating in a field which at first has nothing in common with that of the other. In a moral action, _as such_, the question is no longer as to a process which is to be explained as well in regard to its natural conditions as to its ethical cause, but of a process which _either_ has its ethical cause, and then in its ethical value _no_ natural cause, _or_ which even in its ethical motives belongs to the causal connection of empirical nature with its indestructible chain of natural causes and natural effects. Now at this point the scientist, as such, is always exposed to the danger of denying the first part of our dilemma and affirming the second. For, in moral action, something which is elevated above nature and its causal connection always makes its way into this causal connection of nature, and with its action and the effects of this action wholly enters into this connection: and natural science which has to deal particularly with this causal connection of nature and with it alone, is on that account nevertheless always tempted to explain everything that it sees coming into this connection, in _all_ its causes (even in those which no longer belong to this natural causal connection), out of it. It is therefore always tempted to trace even ethical action which, with its deeds, makes its way and enters into this causal connection, but which with its motives stands above it, as to its motives, back to a natural causal connection; and thus to contest the independence of ethical motives and their principles--which independence is not dependent on nature, but, on the contrary, frequently contradicts it. Ethics must adhere to the fact that the ethical determination of the will has its origin not in a natural condition, but in the ethical centre of personality; although all the conditions under which the ethical motive {389} originates and acts, belong completely to the causal connection of natural life, in which man himself stands as to the whole natural part of his being. The ethical realm stands above the natural realm, and shows its superiority partly by the category of moral demands whose imperativeness cannot have grown out of the mechanical necessity of the natural law, because it often enough contradicts the latter and carries out its demands in opposition to it, partly by the consciousness of individual responsibility which cannot be got rid of even by him who mentally establishes a system of determinism that denies responsibility, partly by the voice of the injured conscience which cannot merely be the dislike of a dissatisfied higher natural impulse, when it can speak of the same action for years, even for an entire human life, and even, where man has counterbalanced that once felt dissatisfaction of the higher impulse, by an oft-repeated satisfaction of it. In Book I, Chapter V, § 1, we tried to show that even Darwin seems not to have entirely avoided this danger of explaining the moral from physical causes; while at the same time we acknowledge that he otherwise esteems the realm of the moral, and that he even finds the lofty position of man above the animal world still more decidedly expressed in his moral than in his intellectual qualities. But such an intrusion of the physical into the ethical is by no means a necessary consequence of scientific Darwinism--only an ever-present temptation of it. He who once admits that even by means of development something new can originate, that even under the full influence of the evolution theory there appeared in the series of creation entirely new phenomena with the {390} appearance of life and the organic, and of sensation and consciousness, and still more with the appearance of self-consciousness and freedom, which phenomena no evolution theory is able to explain; and he who takes into consideration the weight of that other obvious fact that, in the origin and the growth of each single man, a time in which he acts with moral responsibility follows in gradual development a time in which he had but the value and the life of a cell,--such an one can explain the whole origin of mankind according to the evolution theory, and yet see something absolutely new coming forth with the appearance of moral determination. All conditions of the moral determinations of the will may be and are naturally conditioned, as, indeed, in this world the entire spiritual life of man is certainly bound to the conditions of his corporeal life; all preliminary stages of moral types which preceded the temporal appearance of moral beings, and which surround us still, those stages which appear in the animal world, may have preceded and prepared the way for the introduction of morally responsible beings into the world: the moral determination of the will itself nevertheless remains something new and independent--something which transcends nature. If this fact is once admitted, then ethics also has free play to establish independently and render valid its principles. And then we have no longer any reason to treat of the relation of the different ethical principles to naturo-historical Darwinism; for this relation is that of absolute mutual peace. * * * * * {391} CHAPTER IV. DARWINISM AND MORAL LIFE. § 1. _Darwinistic Naturalism and Moral Life._ Precisely the same relationship between Darwinism and morality, which we found in treating of moral principles, presents itself when we ask about the relationship of Darwinistic ideas and moral life in its concrete reality. He who builds a system of monistic naturalism upon his Darwinism, if he is logical, and not better than his system, comes into inevitable collision with concrete moral life; while he who limits his Darwinism to the realm of natural science, remains in concrete life in peace with morality. That Darwinistic ethical naturalism also comes into conflict with concrete moral life, becomes evident from the joy with which the advocates of subversion and negation greet the new principle of the "struggle for existence," and make it the principle of their own actions and social theories. This is not chance sympathy, but is founded upon the nature of ethical naturalism. Of him who learns to look upon himself only as a product of nature, though highly ennobled, we cannot expect any other principle than that of following his nature: not, indeed, the ideal nature of man--for this is an abstraction which man reaches only by means of a long {392} process of reflection--but his own empirical nature, as he finds it present in himself; for this is indeed that natural product as which man has to consider himself according to that theory. Where this leads to, everybody knows who knows human nature. If these consequences are not to be found in all ethical naturalists, and if they are perhaps the least evident in the system and life of the very ones who otherwise teach naturalism the most logically (Strauss, for example), we again most cheerfully admit that many men are better than their systems, and that in making objection to a system, even an ethical system, we in the first place do not say anything at all about the advocates of this system and their moral value. Often enough some noble and fruitful truth has been advocated by men who are personally contemptible, and often enough some dangerous error is propagated by men who are personally very amiable and moral, although the damage which such an error carries with it, must become evident in their lives, on closer observation. Besides, we must not overlook the fact, that what in a perverse system is still relatively true, and the thing which gives it a relative vitality, is borrowed from truth and from the correct system; and that all those who oppose the present fundamentals of morality, and especially of Christian morality, in a thousand ways live upon and consume the possessions which they owe to the same influences against which they contend. But to whatever relative height the moral nobility of single advocates of ethical naturalism may rise, it is not able, at least not from its own principles, to produce thoroughly moral and truly cultivated characters; such are only produced where that which forms the character, {393} flows out of a spring of life whose origin is _above_ nature and its series of causes. From this we see that for the most part a very low idea of personality, a very low derivation of the motives of human action, is found in the works of Darwinistic moralists--as, _e.g._, we have seen in the works of Häckel that to him the idea of a personality of God is inseparably connected with the idea of capricious arbitrariness, and that he derives all actions of all men from the motives of egoism. But we also see, from still more common evidences, the fact that some of the very highest blossoms and noblest fruits of human virtue, as they ripen on the ground of Christian morality, are not even acknowledged, much less required, by ethical naturalism. We think particularly of the virtues of _love_, of _self-denial_, and of _humility_. Certainly, we do not deny that men who are inclined toward naturalism can and do possess love to a certain degree, but the highest exemplification of love, the love of enemies in the fullest sense of the word--not only compassion on the battle-field, but the full, forgiving, blessing love which renders good for evil, and even intercedes for a personal enemy, although he may be the intentional and successful destroyer of our whole earthly happiness--such a love may perhaps be demanded and admired by a naturalistic moralist under the imposing influence of the presence of such a love and in unconscious dependence on the motives of Christianity which surround him; but he will never be able to show from what point of his system it is to be deduced. On the other hand, it is easy to show him more than one point of his system which, far from requiring such love, {394} stigmatizes it as simple foolishness. Such a fruit only ripens under the care of him who gave his life for us while we still were enemies, and under the influence of the remission of our sin by our Heavenly Father. Moreover, an ethical naturalist can also accomplish much in _self-denial_: he can make many great sacrifices, if he can thereby reach a desirable end that cannot be reached without acts of self-denial; he can show great strength and patience in a resigned endurance of the inevitable; and if we take into consideration the possibility of its being logically at variance with his system, he may perform all that which the highest morality requires. But a renunciation which is more than silent resignation, and which under certain circumstances can also become a joyful renunciation of all that was beloved and dear to man on earth, does not grow out of the soil of naturalism, and is possible only there where man carries in himself a possession which would render him still more fortunate and happy than the idea of species, and where he knows the cross of Jesus, and understands the word of the Lord: "He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake, shall find it." Strauss is a striking proof that naturalism is not able to estimate the tasks of self-denial at their full importance. In his "The Old Faith and the New," although he speaks with great earnestness of moral demands, yet he deeply degrades that which is connected with a Christian renunciation of self and the world, when he reproaches Christianity with "a thorough cult of poverty and _mendicity_" (!) and, regarding its demand for self-denial, he denies that it has any comprehension of the tasks of {395} industry, of the virtues of home and family life, of patriotism and civil virtue. Finally, we may make a similar statement in regard to _humility_. There certainly are ethical naturalists also who are modest. But when the prophets of ethical naturalism again and again announce that the great aim of all the discoveries of the evolution theory is to show us how far mankind has fortunately progressed; when their spirit of devotion is nourished by Göthe's Promethean word: "Hast thou not thyself accomplished all, thou holy glowing heart?"--and even when Häckel prints as the leading motto of his "Anthropogeny" Göthe's poem "Prometheus"; when the struggle of selection is also elevated to a moral principle, and the life-task of an individual is limited to creating elbow-room for himself: then humility, indeed, is a virtue which a naturalist may acquire, not through his naturalism, but in spite of it; and the great _naïveté_ with which, in books of that tendency, haughtiness and passion for glory are treated as something necessarily understood, and their own ego is glorified, is a much more logical result. "We are proud of having so immensely out-stripped our lower animal ancestors, and derive from it the consoling assurance that in future also, mankind, as a whole, will follow the _glorious_ career of progressive development, and attain a still higher degree of mental perfection." (Häckel, "Hist. of Creat.") This is the theme which is repeated in many variations in all books of similar tendency. In the same book already referred to, we read: "Each free and highly developed individual, each _original_ person, has his own religion, his own God; _so it is certainly not arrogance_ when we also claim the {396} right of forming our own idea of God." Or, "The recognition of the theory of development and the monistic philosophy based upon it forms the best criterion for the degree of man's mental development." L. Büchner, in his collection of essays, "Aus Natur und Welt" ("From Nature and the World"), dedicates a long chapter to self-glorification, and finds confirmed in himself the word of the poet, "Great destinies are always preceded by spirit messengers"; and he, still living, prefaces his own biography in the latest edition of "Kraft und Stoff" ("Force and Matter"), and on the first page of the same publishes the testimonial which he received, when leaving the gymnasium: "The bearer of this testimonial excelled in the thorough study of literature, philosophy, and poetry, and as regards style in his productions showed an excellent talent." In view of these things, we certainly do no injustice to this tendency when we deny to it the conception of the idea and the practice of humility. § 2. _Scientific Darwinism and Moral Life._ It is evident from the peace-relation between mere scientific Darwinism and moral principles, that naturo-historical Darwinism also remains in peace with moral life. We therefore have no longer to treat of any question of competency in the realm of concrete moral life, but only to mention the points of contact in which both realms, fully acknowledging their mutual independence, yet in an inferior way exercise some beneficial influence upon each other. {397} Moral life influences Darwinism in so far as, by its mere existence, it cautions the advocate of the scientific evolution theory against effacing the differences between the moral and the natural, and against degrading man to the level of animals on account of his connection with the animal world. The naturo-historical idea of evolution, in case it should turn out to be correct, would exercise an influence upon moral life in a three-fold direction: First, it would add to all the motives of the humane treatment of the animal world--which certainly without it already has moral demands--a new one, and establish them all more firmly. Man would then recognize in the animal world which surrounds him branches of his own natural pedigree, and exercise his right of mastery only in the sense which Alex. Braun expresses, when he says: "Man consents to the idea of being appointed master of animals; but then he must also acknowledge that he is not placed over his subjects as a stranger, but proceeded from the people itself, whose master he wishes to be." A second service which the idea of evolution would have to render to the forming of moral life, would consist in the fact that it would favor all those ethical modes of contemplation and those maxims which regard the gradual process of development and the growth of character as the relative power of influences and conditions, and that it would give them hints for the perception of moral growth, in like manner as, in the before-mentioned parable, the Lord illustrates the imperceptible and continual growth of the kingdom of God with the growth of a plant. A third service which the evolution theory might be able {398} to render to moral life, would consist in the fact that it would give to the motive of perfection and progress, which is always and everywhere a moral lever, a new illustration and a new weight by pointing at the progress which development has to show in the life of nature. * * * * * {399} CONCLUSION. If now, having reached our goal, we look back upon the way which we have traversed, we find a justification of the regret expressed at the beginning, that a scientific treatment of religion and morality is compelled to take a position in regard to theories which are not yet established. We found the most different problems--scientific, naturo-philosophical, metaphysical, religious and ethical--inextricably mixed, and were obliged, as one of our first tasks, to make an attempt at finding the clew and at examining and testing each single problem, together with attempts at its solution, separately, although keeping constantly in mind its connection with all other problems and their attempts at solution. We found ourselves led into the presence of a series of the most interesting problems, but not a single solution finished. That very attempt at solution which brought up this whole question, and which was repeatedly announced as the infallible key to the solution of all scientific problems--the selection theory--we found a decided failure, at least in the direction of the extension and importance which was given to this theory. And yet in spite of the hypothetical nature of all attempts at solution, we see investigators in all the realms of natural science strongly attracted by the very promising character of these problems and busily engaged in making attempts at solution; {400} and we see even philosophy strongly attracted by its interest in these works. Such a diligent work can certainly not be without gain; but wherein will this gain consist? Will it, as its antagonists prophecy, be like that which in former times alchemy brought to science, which, indeed, enriched chemistry by an entire series of new discoveries, but did not find what it sought, the one fundamental element from which all the rest are derived, which only confirmed, with a power acknowledged even to-day, the old doctrine of the elementary difference of the elements? Will the Darwinian investigations thus also make all possible discoveries _by the way_, but in place of that which they look for, in place of a common pedigree or of a few pedigrees for all organisms, finally only give additional strength to the permanence of species and the unapproachableness of the secret of their origin? Or can we derive from the reasons which the investigators urge in favor of the idea of an origin of species through descent and evolution, the hope that that mysterious darkness of prehistoric times upon which the works of our century have shed so much light, will still be illuminated even to the sources from which organic species came, and from which mankind also originated? We must leave the decision of these questions to the future and to scientists. But we have to note _one_ gain, which is so great that on its account, we willingly cease our regret in regard to the unfinished condition of these theories; for we owe the full enjoyment of this gain to that very unfinished condition. It is the gain which _religion and morality_ get from these investigations, and which consists in the new and comprehensive confirmation of the conviction, {401} which, indeed, was established before, that religion and morality--Christian religion and Christian morality--rest on foundations which can no longer be shaken by any result of exact investigation. The triumph with which the Darwinian theories were greeted by many as the new sun before whose rising all that mankind had thus far called light and sun turns pale, and the antipathy with which, on that very account, many to whom their religious and ethical acquisitions are a sacred sanctuary, turn away from these theories, urged us to investigate their position in reference to religion and morality. Now, if these theories had produced a certain undoubted result, we should unquestionably have been satisfied with the examination of the position of religion and morality in reference to this certain result. But since not a single result of those investigations is really established, we have found ourselves obliged to give our investigation a much greater extension and to discuss even all imaginable _possibilities_. The beneficial result of this comparison was, that religion and morality not only remain at peace with all imaginable possibilities of _scientific_ theories, but can also, in the realm of the _philosophy of the doctrines of nature_, be passive spectators of all investigations and attempts, even of all possible excursions into the realm of fancy, without being obliged to interfere. It is in the realm of _mere metaphysics_ that we first perceive an antagonist whose victory would indeed be fatal to the religious and ethical acquisitions of mankind: this antagonist is called elimination from nature of the idea of design. Fortunately, this metaphysical idea is in such striking opposition not only to the whole world of facts but also to all logical {402} reasoning, it has everywhere, where man perceives organization and a difference between lower and higher, especially in the contemplation of the world, of this _cosmos_ of wonderful order and beauty, so decidedly all philosophical as well as all exact sciences as its adversaries, it lays its hands so rudely and so destructively not only upon the religious and ethical acquisitions but also upon all ideal remaining acquisitions of mankind, that religion and morality know, when fighting this adversary, they are in firm accord with all the spiritual interests of mankind. This, in its most essential features, is the pleasing result of our critical examination; and such a demonstration of the immovably solid foundation, secure from all the change of opinions and all the progress of discoveries on which morality and religion rest, has still an entire series of further pleasing consequences in its train. In the first place, it is a living and actual proof of the fact that religion and morality give to all sciences _the full freedom of investigation_. The religious and ethical interest itself not only gives, but even _requires_, this freedom of investigation. It requires it in consequence of that _impulse of truth_ which religion has in common with every impulse of knowledge, and which in itself is an ethical impulse. In consequence of this impulse, religion must found its possession on nothing else than subjective and objective truth, and can look upon all the paths which lead through even the remotest realm of knowledge to the establishment of truth, only with sympathetic interest. Precisely those who see in religion more than a mere expression of emotion, and all those who require that their religious life and the object of {403} their religious faith shall possess truth, subjective and objective, cannot commit any greater folly than treating search for truth in any other realm with suspicion, or even ignoring it. They only injure that which they meant to defend, by rendering the purity of their own religious interest suspected, and by establishing more firmly the breach between religious life and faith and the other acquisitions of culture and interests of their time, of which neither religion nor science, but only a misguided tendency of their minds and hearts, is guilty. How much unfriendly and unjust judgment has already found utterance by means of the pen and voice, in reference to honest and meritorious workers, on the part of religious zealots who fail to recognize that close relationship of the religious with the scientific impulse of truth! How often and how much does such a judgment gain great consideration from a public of which but a few are able to form an independent opinion of the men and works which are thus abused before their eyes and ears, and how much of the aversion to the form in which the religious life of the present offers itself, on the part of those men who are thus suspected, is in the last instance to be attributed neither to be irreligiousness of these men nor to the deficiency of the present form of our religious life, but to the repelling effect of that unjust treatment! Another gain of our discussion, correlated to that just mentioned, consists in the proof _that religion and morality have their autonomous principle and realm_ which is not at all obliged to borrow the proof of its truth from the present condition and degree of our knowledge, but carries it in itself, although it stands in {404} fruitful reciprocal action with all the other realms of knowledge and life. Just as decidedly as we had to caution the advocates of religion against keeping themselves indifferent, suspicious, or even hostile, regarding the advances into the realm of secular knowledge, so decidedly do we like to see the workers in the realm of the knowledge of nature cautioned against confusing points of view, in thinking that they can through their scientific knowledge purify and reform the religious and ethical realms. They may purify and reform as much as they please, but only in their own realm. The only thing they are able to reform is our knowledge of nature, and in our religious and ethical life and perception only that which belongs to this natural part; but this is only the outer part of religious and ethical life: the source of our religion and morality springs from quite another ground than that which they cultivate. A third gain from our discussion is the actual proof of _the harmony between faith and knowledge, between the religious and the scientific views of the world_. In our investigation we had no occasion for psychological or theoretical investigations as to faith and knowledge and their mutual relation; but if our discussion is not an entire failure, perhaps the actual exposition of a standpoint on which faith and knowledge may live at peace with one another, which is not bought by a sacrifice on either side, and which does not consist in a compromise of the two, but which has its reason in the deepest and most active interest of the one, in the full and unconstrained freedom of the other, a stronger proof for the intimate relationship of these brothers, between whom the present generation wishes too often to sow discord, than if we {405} had undertaken long religio-philosophical and theoretical investigations. Finally, the results of our analysis have given us still another gain: they have led us beyond Lessing's "Nathan" and his parable of the "Three Rings." We call this a gain, without the least intention of discrediting by it the motives of tolerance and the points of view for the judgment of the character and religiousness of human individuals, which lay in that parable, or suspecting the motives of so many of our contemporaries whose religio-philosophical judgment is entirely expressed in that parable. We saw ourselves compelled to make a choice either of accepting or of rejecting ends in the world, and found that the world resolves itself into a senseless game at dice, and that the phenomena become more unintelligible the more important they are, if we ignore or even reject teleology. The acknowledgment of the latter prevented us from seeing in the world and its events merely the eternal stream of planless coming and going; it prevented us from accepting such an endless stream of appearance and disappearance, and therefore also an endless stream of the appearance and disappearance of new forms of religion in that creature for whose appearance we see all other creatures are only a preparation, and are even obliged to look upon them as a preparation in accordance with no other theory more than that of evolution. It also urged us to inquire as to the ends and designs of mankind, and we found this end in the disposition of man for a communion with God, for the state of bearing his image and of being his child. Now we have fully to acknowledge that Christianity, like all religions which claim truth and universal acceptance, {406} is to be analyzed with the very same means of science as all phenomena in the world of facts, and that therefore it is especially subject to all investigations of religio-philosophical, religio-historical, and historical criticism, to its fullest extent. But precisely such an analysis of Christianity leads us to a result which elevates Christian religion high above all other forms. It also confirms by means of science what, indeed, is established to a Christian mind as certainty from his own direct experience, that the quintessence of that which Christianity offers us, is truth and gives full satisfaction to soul and mind. For that analysis establishes, in the first place, that Christianity shows us the idea of God and the nature and destiny of man in a purity such as no other religion does, and in such a life-creating power that it is able to satisfy most completely all the nobler desires and impulses of soul and mind, and to overcome most successfully all ignoble ones. Furthermore, it shows us that these gifts of Christianity offered themselves, and still offer themselves, not only in philosophemes and doctrines, in parables and myths, in postulates and prophecies, but what, indeed, is not the case in any other religion, in an arranged course of deeds and facts which, in everything that is necessary and essential for the acquisition of that idea of God and for the realization of that ideal of mankind, legitimate themselves to criticism as historical facts, and which legitimate themselves as actions of divine manifestation by the fact, that they and their consequences also are really able to fulfill what they promise, and to bring mankind nearer to the accomplishment of that goal which they set up for it. Finally, it shows us, when it reviews and compares the development of {407} culture among all mankind, that the Christian nations have really borne the richest blossom and fruit which has appeared hitherto on the tree of mankind, and that Christianity, for the life of nations, has not only, like other religions, powers of preservation, but also powers of renovation and renewal which other religions are wanting. Even all the errors of superstition and immorality, of intolerance and lust of power, of so many of its advocates and confessors, at which the adversaries of the Christian view of the world so willingly point, are but a confirmation of its value. For they show us how divine and heavenly the gift must be, if even such errors were not able to smother its fruits. If we do not wish to suppose that mankind has foundations and ends which up to the present it is not yet allowed to know, we certainly must look for these foundations and ends where we find the best which has so far been given to mankind and which has been accomplished by it. This acknowledgment of Christianity as the only true and only really universal religion leads us beyond another sentiment of Lessing, which has found an equally strong or perhaps still stronger echo in the mind. We mean the expression that, if he had to choose, he would prefer the continual search for truth to the possession of truth itself. We emphatically acknowledge the holy right and the high nobility of this impulse of investigation and activity, but we need not buy its acknowledgment and satisfaction at the price of being obliged to renounce a consciousness or the hope of a consciousness which is equally indispensable to our inner happiness as that impulse of investigation, and which first gives to this impulse its overwhelming power--namely, the {408} consciousness and the hope of really possessing the truth. For, in fact, we are not required to make this choice. There is a possession of truth which does not exclude, but requires, the search for truth: that is the possession of truth in the answer to the questions as to the starting point and the goal of our life, the possession of truth in the fundamentals of our religious view of the world. It is the certainty about the starting-point and goal of our life, which lastingly and effectively invites us also to look for and perceive all the ways which, in theory as well as in practice, lead from a firm starting-point to a certain end, and only the possession of truth in the fundamentals of our religious view of the world gives value and satisfaction to investigation in a world which, without this possession, contains for us only transitory and fleeting, and therefore only unsatisfactory, things, but which stands before us as the work and the theatre of revelation of a God and Father, and therefore gives to investigation inexhaustible joy and satisfaction when we look upon it from those stand-points. In like manner as, at the outset of our investigation, we perceived in organic species creations of God, and in spite of this, or rather on account of it, looked upon the attempts at exploring their origin with so much deeper interest, we also see ourselves, in the still more direct religious realm, not at all condemned to stagnation when we acknowledge Christianity as absolute religion. This very acknowledgment alone makes a real progress possible for us. For every progress, in order to be a real progress, needs a firm starting-point and a certain goal; hence that which is shown and offered to mankind in Christianity. From this {409} starting-point and toward this end there are tasks enough for religious progress. The ever more definite investigation of the facts and doctrines of Christianity, the improvement and ever more complete reproduction of the scientific image in which these facts and doctrines are reflected in the mind of man the progressing adaptation of ecclesiastical life in divine service, and organization to the substance and the need of Christian religiousness, the harmonizing of our possession of faith with all other elements of culture of each period, the working up of that which is given to us in Christianity into the spiritual and ethical acquisition of a single personality and its ever more complete representation and realization in the individual and the common life, the progressing penetration of generations by the transfiguring light of religion and morality, and the progressive overcoming of the likewise progressingly developing kingdom of evil--in short, all that which the language of religion calls the growth of the kingdom of God, is work and progress enough, but certainly work and progress on the ground of a certain basis as the starting-point given to us by God, and work and progress toward a certain goal set for us by God. It is only from this basis of a possession of truth as it is offered to us by Christian theism, and by the facts of redemption and of a reconciliation of man with God, that the breach between faith and knowledge, between religion and the life of culture, which at present takes place in so many a heart and mind, can be healed; and, far from seeking to cripple or hinder those who stand on this basis, it alone gives to their theoretical and practical activity its joyous strength and certain end, to {410} their sphere of knowledge its universal breadth. The Apostle Paul, at the end of 1 Corinthians, XV, when he takes a comprehensive view from the highest points of Christian hope to which he found himself led from those fundamentals, knows of no fitter words to conclude with and to give it a practical application than these: "Wherefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not vain in the Lord." * * * * * Notes [1] "The International Scientific Series." No. XIII. [2] "Evolution of Man." [3] It was only when the manuscript of this work was nearly finished and the first part of it had gone to the press, that the author received the second part of K. E. von Baer's "_Studien aus dem Gebiete der Naturwissenschaften_" (Studies in the Realm of Natural Sciences). It contains another essay on teleology, "_Ueber Zielstrebigkeit in den organischen Körpern insbesondere_," and a treatise on Darwin's doctrine, "_Ueber Darwin's Lehre_," which Baer had promised long ago and which the public had anxiously awaited. It is no little satisfaction to find that I, from my modest premises, reached results regarding the naturo-philosophical problems and their weight in the religious realm which so fully harmonize with the views of this first authority in the realm of the history of development. I shall still have occasion here and there to avail myself of a study of this latest and most important publication upon the question of Darwinism, and shall confine myself here to the remark that von Baer, although he rejects the selection theory and the superficial treatment of the principle of evolution on the part of materialists, is by no means disinclined to the idea of the origin of species through descent, whether in gradual development or in leaps; and that in this respect he could no longer be counted among the advocates of the group above referred to, but among those which we mention farther on, had he not repeatedly and forcibly confessed, with a modesty worthy of acknowledgment, his total ignorance concerning the manner in which certain forms of life, especially the higher ones, originated. The origin of higher species without the supposition of a descent is to him unexplainable, because the individuals of these species are, in their first development of life, so dependent on the mother. Furthermore, he points out the fact that in early periods of the earth the organic forming power which ruled, must have been a higher one than it is at the present time; in like manner as the first period in the embryonic development of individuals is to-day the most productive. This higher power of organization, he says, could consist in a higher power of changing organisms into new species, as well as in a higher power of producing new species through primitive generation; or it could consist in both. In general, there is no reason to suppose that primitive generations which took place at the first origination of life on earth, could not have been repeated later and oftener. The nearer a generation was to these individuals originated through primitive generation, the greater was undoubtedly its flexibility and changeableness; the farther, the greater the fixity of type. [4] After the completion this manuscript, the author found that K. E. von Baer, in his treatise upon Darwin's doctrine, pays especial attention to the change of generation and also to the metamorphosis of plants and animals in exactly the same sense and reaches the same conclusion. [5] Compare Max Müller, "Lectures on the Science of Language," 6th ed., London, 1871, vol. I, p. 403. [6] Compare v. Baer, "Studies, etc.," p. 294 ff. [7] Darwin says, on page 146, Eng. Ed., of his "Descent of Man": "In the earlier editions of my 'Origin of Species', I perhaps attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest.... I did not formerly sufficiently consider the existence of structures which, as far as we can at present judge, are neither beneficial nor injurious; and this I believe to be one of the greatest oversights as yet detected in my work.... An unexplained residuum of change, perhaps a large one, must be left to the assumed uniform action of those unknown agencies, which occasionally induce strongly-marked and abrupt deviations of structure in our domestic productions." [8] This word, which is of recent coinage in Germany, has been found so incapable of being rendered by an exact English equivalent, that it has been thought best to retain it and to give the author's own explanation of the meaning which he desired it to express. He says, in a note to the translator: "I was led to this idea [of _Auslosung_] in a small essay of Robert von Mayer ("Ueber Auslösung," 1876). Afterwards Mayer personally stated to me that he heartily approved the emphasis I had given to this idea, and said that he had only thought of the fact that psychical processes, like the action of the will, _losen aus_ (release) physiological processes, like the action of the muscles, and that I had carried the idea farther, in saying that psychical processes are _ausgelost_ (released) by physiological processes, and that this is a very important step farther on the way of investigation. Mayer himself thought it would be necessary to call the attention to this, when he further developed the ideas he had given in the before-mentioned essay; his intention to do so was prevented by his death. "_Auslosung_ is a word originated by modern mechanical science, and means: (1.) Slight mechanical operations of detaching and the like, by which another and more important action, whose forces were heretofore restrained, can be set into activity: _e.g._, the pressure which sets in motion a machine, previously at rest, is _Auslosung_; the pressure on the trigger of a gun is _Auslosung_; the friction of a match which is the beginning of a great fire is _Auslosung_. (2.) This idea may now be applied to chemical processes: _e.g._, a glass of sugar-water will remain sweet unless some foreign element is introduced into it, but the moment it receives a fermenting substance either by chance, from the air, or with intention, then the sugar water is brought into a process of chemical decomposition, and from this there results _Auslosung;_ but the introduction of the fermenting agent into the sugar-water is _Auslosung_. (3.) Von Mayer applies this idea to psycho-physical relations of life, and says: when the will acting through the agency of the motor nerves sets in motion the muscles, this is _Auslosung_."--[TRANS.] [9] For the use of readers who do not understand Greek, we may state that the word _teleology_ is derived from the Greek word _telos_, Gen. _teleos_: end, purpose, aim; and means the "doctrine of design or a conformity to the end in view," or, as K. E. von Baer prefers and wishes to have introduced into scientific language, "the doctrine of the striving toward an end" (_Zielstrebigkeit_). It seems to be quite a superficial treatment of an idea on whose reception or rejection no less a thing than an entire view of the world with all its most important and deepest questions depends, when Dr. G. Seidlitz, in an essay on the success of Darwinism ("Ausland," 1874, No. 37), states incidentally that teleology is derived from the Greek [Greek: teleos] _perfect_. It is true that the Greek adjective for perfect is also derived from that noun, [Greek: telos], which has the same root as the German word _Ziel_, and there is even an Ionic form for that adjective which is [Greek: teleos], but the Attic form is [Greek: teleios]; and since modern languages, when a choice is allowed, do not derive their Greek foreign words from the Ionic, but from the Attic dialect, that word--were it really derived from that adjective and did it express "doctrine of perfection"--would have to be teleiology, or, in Latinized form, teliology. As far as we know, the word, since it was introduced into scientific language, has never been derived from any other root than from [Greek: telos], Gen. [Greek: teleos], _end_, and has never been used in any other sense than to express the doctrine of a purpose and end in the world. [10] Compare "History, Essays, and Orations of the 6th General Conference of the Evangelical Alliance," New York, Harper Bros., 1874, p. 264-271. [11] Compare D. F. Strauss, the most celebrated moral philosopher of Monism, in § 74 of his "The Old Faith and the New." * * * * * Corrections made to printed original. p. 43. "the whole course of the zoölogical system" - "zoloogical" in original. p. 65. "corals, radiata, worms, mollusca, and crustacea" - "radita" in original. p. 73. "many portions of the skin" - "the the" (across line break) in original. p. 86. "forsakes us in the inquiry" - "inqury" in original. p. 112. "even philosophy can not take up the investigation" - "phi-osophy" (across line break) in original. p. 147. "the origin of self-consciousness" - "conciousness" in original. p. 265. "the origin of species through development" - "developement" in original. p. 297. "any other interpretation than to take them" - "then" in original. p. 343. "the Titan-like, rebellious Kainites" - "Titian" in original. Note 3. "The nearer a generation was" - "a a" (across line break) in original. 
16474	----	Lectures and Essays BY THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1910 THE WORKS OF THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY. THE LIFE AND WORKS OF THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, F.R.S. _Eversley Series_. Twelve vols. Globe 8vo, 4s. net each. VOL. I. METHOD AND RESULTS. II. DARWINIANA. III. SCIENCE AND EDUCATION. IV. SCIENCE AND HEBREW TRADITION. V. SCIENCE AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. VI. HUME, WITH HELPS TO THE STUDY OF BERKELEY. VII. MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. VIII. DISCOURSES, BIOLOGICAL AND GEOLOGICAL. IX. EVOLUTION AND ETHICS, AND OTHER ESSAYS. X. } XI. } THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY. XII. } * * * * * APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS FROM THE WORKS OF T.H. HUXLEY. Selected by HENRIETTA A. HUXLEY. With Portrait. Pott 8vo, _2s. 6d._ net. Also cloth elegant, _2s. 6d._ net. Limp Leather, _3s. 6d._ net. _Golden Treasury Series_. AMERICAN ADDRESSES. 8vo, _6s. 6d._ CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. 8vo, _10s. 6d._ LESSONS IN ELEMENTARY PHYSIOLOGY. F'cap 8vo, _4s. 6d._ QUESTIONS. 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PAGE AUTOBIOGRAPHY 5 LECTURES ON EVOLUTION 11 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 45 NATURALISM AND SUPERNATURALISM 57 THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS 71 AGNOSTICISM 83 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION IN RELATION TO JUDAIC CHRISTIANITY 96 AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY 108 _First Edition, February_ 1902. _Reprinted, December_ 1902, 1903, 1904, 1910. AUTOBIOGRAPHY I was born about eight o'clock in the morning on the 4th of May, 1825, at Ealing, which was, at that time, as quiet a little country village as could be found within half-a-dozen miles of Hyde Park Corner. Now it is a suburb of London with, I believe, 30,000 inhabitants. My father was one of the masters in a large semi-public school which at one time had a high reputation. I am not aware that any portents preceded my arrival in this world, but, in my childhood, I remember hearing a traditional account of the manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great practical value. The windows of my mother's room were open, in consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the same reason, probably, a neighbouring beehive had swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the window-sill, was making its way into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. If that well-meaning woman had only abstained from her ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth, capacity, or honest work, to the highest places in Church and State. But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement. Why I was christened Thomas Henry I do not know; but it is a curious chance that my parents should have fixed for my usual denomination upon the name of that particular Apostle with whom I have always felt most sympathy. Physically and mentally I am the son of my mother so completely--even down to peculiar movements of the hands, which made their appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed them--that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing, which unfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated, a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy. My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I ever saw in a woman's head. With no more education than other women of the middle classes in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought. If one ventured to suggest she had not taken much time to arrive at any conclusion, she would say, "I cannot help it, things flash across me." That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength; it has often stood me in good stead; it has sometimes played me sad tricks, and it has always been a danger. But, after all, if my time were to come over again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my inheritance of mother wit. I have next to nothing to say about my childhood. In later years my mother, looking at me almost reproachfully, would sometimes say, "Ah! you were such a pretty boy!" whence I had no difficulty in concluding that I had not fulfilled my early promise in the matter of looks. In fact, I have a distinct recollection of certain curls of which I was vain, and of a conviction that I closely resembled that handsome, courtly gentleman, Sir Herbert Oakley, who was vicar of our parish, and who was as a god to us country folk, because he was occasionally visited by the then Prince George of Cambridge. I remember turning my pinafore wrong side forwards in order to represent a surplice, and preaching to my mother's maids in the kitchen as nearly as possible in Sir Herbert's manner one Sunday morning when the rest of the family were at church. That is the earliest indication I can call to mind of the strong clerical affinities which my friend Mr. Herbert Spencer has always ascribed to me, though I fancy they have for the most part remained in a latent state. My regular school training was of the briefest, perhaps fortunately, for though my way of life has made me acquainted with all sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the lowest, I deliberately affirm that the society I fell into at school was the worst I have ever known. We boys were average lads, with much the same inherent capacity for good and evil as any others; but the people who were set over us cared about as much for our intellectual and moral welfare as if they were baby-farmers. We were left to the operation of the struggle for existence among ourselves, and bullying was the least of the ill practices current among us. Almost the only cheerful reminiscence in connection with the place which arises in my mind is that of a battle I had with one of my classmates, who had bullied me until I could stand it no longer. I was a very slight lad, but there was a wild-cat element in me which, when roused, made up for lack of weight, and I licked my adversary effectually. However, one of my first experiences of the extremely rough-and-ready nature of justice, as exhibited by the course of things in general, arose out of the fact that I--the victor--had a black eye, while he--the vanquished--had none, so that I got into disgrace and he did not. We made it up, and thereafter I was unmolested. One of the greatest shocks I ever received in my life was to be told a dozen years afterwards by the groom who brought me my horse in a stable-yard in Sydney that he was my quondam antagonist. He had a long story of family misfortune to account for his position, but at that time it was necessary to deal very cautiously with mysterious strangers in New South Wales, and on inquiry I found that the unfortunate young man had not only been "sent out," but had undergone more than one colonial conviction. As I grew older, my great desire was to be a mechanical engineer, but the fates were against this, and, while very young, I commenced the study of medicine under a medical brother-in-law. But, though the Institute of Mechanical Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I have not all along been a sort of mechanical engineer _in partibus infidelium_. I am now occasionally horrified to think how very little I ever knew or cared about medicine as the art of healing. The only part of my professional course which really and deeply interested me was physiology, which is the mechanical engineering of living machines; and, notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper business, I am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me. I never collected anything, and species work was always a burden to me; what I cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business, the working out the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse living constructions, and the modifications of similar apparatuses to serve diverse ends. The extraordinary attraction I felt towards the study of the intricacies of living structure nearly proved fatal to me at the outset. I was a mere boy--I think between thirteen and fourteen years of age--when I was taken by some older student friends of mine to the first _post-mortem_ examination I ever attended. All my life I have been most unfortunately sensitive to the disagreeables which attend anatomical pursuits, but on this occasion my curiosity overpowered all other feelings, and I spent two or three hours in gratifying it. I did not cut myself, and none of the ordinary symptoms of dissection-poison supervened, but poisoned I was somehow, and I remember sinking into a strange state of apathy. By way of a last chance, I was sent to the care of some good, kind people, friends of my father's, who lived in a farmhouse in the heart of Warwickshire. I remember staggering from my bed to the window on the bright spring morning after my arrival, and throwing open the casement. Life seemed to come back on the wings of the breeze, and to this day the faint odour of wood-smoke, like that which floated across the farm-yard in the early morning, is as good to me as the "sweet south upon a bed of violets." I soon recovered, but for years I suffered from occasional paroxysms of internal pain, and from that time my constant friend, hypochondriacal dyspepsia, commenced his half century of co-tenancy of my fleshly tabernacle. Looking back on my "Lehrjahre," I am sorry to say that I do not think that any account of my doings as a student would tend to edification. In fact, I should distinctly warn ingenuous youth to avoid imitating my example. I worked extremely hard when it pleased me, and when it did not--which was a very frequent case--I was extremely idle (unless making caricatures of one's pastors and masters is to be called a branch of industry), or else wasted my energies in wrong directions. I read everything I could lay hands upon, including novels, and took up all sorts of pursuits to drop them again quite as speedily. No doubt it was very largely my own fault, but the only instruction from which I ever obtained the proper effect of education was that which I received from Mr. Wharton Jones, who was the lecturer on physiology at the Charing Cross School of Medicine. The extent and precision of his knowledge impressed me greatly, and the severe exactness of his method of lecturing was quite to my taste. I do not know that I have ever felt so much respect for anybody as a teacher before or since. I worked hard to obtain his approbation, and he was extremely kind and helpful to the youngster who, I am afraid, took up more of his time than he had any right to do. It was he who suggested the publication of my first scientific paper--a very little one--in the _Medical Gazette_ of 1845, and most kindly corrected the literary faults which abounded in it, short as it was; for at that time, and for many years afterwards, I detested the trouble of writing, and would take no pains over it. It was in the early spring of 1846, that having finished my obligatory medical studies and passed the first M.B. examination at the London University--though I was still too young to qualify at the College of Surgeons--I was talking to a fellow-student (the present eminent physician, Sir Joseph Fayrer), and wondering what I should do to meet the imperative necessity for earning my own bread, when my friend suggested that I should write to Sir William Burnett, at that time Director-General for the Medical Service of the Navy, for an appointment. I thought this rather a strong thing to do, as Sir William was personally unknown to me, but my cheery friend would not listen to my scruples, so I went to my lodgings and wrote the best letter I could devise. A few days afterwards I received the usual official circular of acknowledgment, but at the bottom there was written an instruction to call at Somerset House on such a day. I thought that looked like business, so at the appointed time I called and sent in my card, while I waited in Sir William's ante-room. He was a tall, shrewd-looking old gentleman, with a broad Scotch accent--and I think I see him now as he entered with my card in his hand. The first thing he did was to return it, with the frugal reminder that I should probably find it useful on some other occasion. The second was to ask whether I was an Irishman. I suppose the air of modesty about my appeal must have struck him. I satisfied the Director-General that I was English to the backbone, and he made some inquiries as to my student career, finally desiring me to hold myself ready for examination. Having passed this, I was in Her Majesty's Service, and entered on the books of Nelson's old ship, the _Victory_, for duty at Haslar Hospital, about a couple of months after I made my application. My official chief at Haslar was a very remarkable person, the late Sir John Richardson, an excellent naturalist, and far-famed as an indomitable Arctic traveller. He was a silent, reserved man, outside the circle of his family and intimates; and, having a full share of youthful vanity, I was extremely disgusted to find that "Old John," as we irreverent youngsters called him, took not the slightest notice of my worshipful self either the first time I attended him, as it was my duty to do, or for some weeks afterwards. I am afraid to think of the lengths to which my tongue may have run on the subject of the churlishness of the chief, who was, in truth, one of the kindest-hearted and most considerate of men. But one day, as I was crossing the hospital square, Sir John stopped me, and heaped coals of fire on my head by telling me that he had tried to get me one of the resident appointments, much coveted by the assistant-surgeons, but that the Admiralty had put in another man. "However," said he, "I mean to keep you here till I can get you something you will like," and turned upon his heel without waiting for the thanks I stammered out. That explained how it was I had not been packed off to the West Coast of Africa like some of my juniors, and why, eventually, I remained altogether seven months at Haslar. After a long interval, during which "Old John" ignored my existence almost as completely as before, he stopped me again as we met in a casual way, and describing the service on which the _Rattlesnake_ was likely to be employed, said that Captain Owen Stanley, who was to command the ship, had asked him to recommend an assistant surgeon who knew something of science; would I like that? Of course I jumped at the offer. "Very well, I give you leave; go to London at once and see Captain Stanley." I went, saw my future commander, who was very civil to me, and promised to ask that I should be appointed to his ship, as in due time I was. It is a singular thing that, during the few months of my stay at Haslar, I had among my messmates two future Directors-General of the Medical Service of the Navy (Sir Alexander Armstrong and Sir John Watt-Reid), with the present President of the College of Physicians and my kindest of doctors, Sir Andrew Clark. Life on board Her Majesty's ships in those days was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours was exceptionally rough, as we were often many months without receiving letters or seeing any civilised people but ourselves. In exchange, we had the interest of being about the last voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be possible to meet with people who knew nothing of fire-arms--as we did on the south Coast of New Guinea--and of making acquaintance with a variety of interesting savage and semi-civilised people. But, apart from experience of this kind and the opportunities offered for scientific work, to me, personally, the cruise was extremely valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline; to be down on the realities of existence by living on bare necessaries; to find out how extremely well worth living life seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank, with the sky for canopy and cocoa and weevilly biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast; and, more especially, to learn to work for the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the bottom and I along with it. My brother officers were as good fellows as sailors ought to be and generally are, but, naturally, they neither knew nor cared anything about my pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which my friends, the middies, christened "Buffons," after the title conspicuous on a volume of the "Suites à Buffon," which stood on my shelf in the chart room. During the four years of our absence, I sent home communication after communication to the "Linnean Society;" with the same result as that obtained by Noah when he sent the raven out of his ark. Tired at last of hearing nothing about them, I determined to do or die, and in 1849 I drew up a more elaborate paper and forwarded it to the Royal Society. This was my dove, if I had only known it. But owing to the movements of the ship, I heard nothing of that either until my return to England in the latter end of the year 1850, when I found that it was printed and published, and that a huge packet of separate copies awaited me. When I hear some of my young friends complain of want of sympathy and encouragement, I am inclined to think that my naval life was not the least valuable part of my education. Three years after my return were occupied by a battle between my scientific friends on the one hand and the Admiralty on the other, as to whether the latter ought, or ought not, to act up to the spirit of a pledge they had given to encourage officers who had done scientific work by contributing to the expense of publishing mine. At last the Admiralty, getting tired, I suppose, cut short the discussion by ordering me to join a ship, which thing I declined to do, and as Rastignac, in the "Père Goriot," says to Paris, I said to London, "_à nous deux_." I desired to obtain a Professorship of either Physiology or Comparative Anatomy, and as vacancies occurred I applied, but in vain. My friend, Professor Tyndall, and I were candidates at the same time, he for the Chair of Physics and I for that of Natural History in the University of Toronto, which, fortunately, as it turned out, would not look at either of us. I say fortunately, not from any lack of respect for Toronto, but because I soon made up my mind that London was the place for me, and hence I have steadily declined the inducements to leave it, which have at various times been offered. At last, in 1854, on the translation of my warm friend Edward Forbes, to Edinburgh, Sir Henry De la Beche, the Director-General of the Geological Survey, offered me the post Forbes vacated of Paleontologist and Lecturer on Natural History. I refused the former point blank, and accepted the latter only provisionally, telling Sir Henry that I did not care for fossils, and that I should give up Natural History as soon as I could get a physiological post. But I held the office for thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has been paleontological. At that time I disliked public speaking, and had a firm conviction that I should break down every time I opened my mouth. I believe I had every fault a speaker could have (except talking at random or indulging in rhetoric), when I spoke to the first important audience I ever addressed, on a Friday evening: at the Royal Institution, in 1852. Yet, I must confess to having been guilty, _malgré moi_, of as much public speaking as most of my contemporaries, and for the last ten years it ceased to be so much of a bugbear to me. I used to pity myself for having to go through this training, but I am now more disposed to compassionate the unfortunate audiences, especially my ever-friendly hearers at the Royal Institution, who were the subjects of my oratorical experiments. The last thing that it would be proper for me to do would be to speak of the work of my life, or to say at the end of the day whether I think I have earned my wages or not. Men are said to be partial judges of themselves. Young men may be; I doubt if old men are. Life seems terribly foreshortened as they look back, and the mountain they set themselves to climb in youth turns out to be a mere spur of immeasurably higher ranges when, with failing breath, they reach the top. But if I may speak of the objects I have had more or less definitely in view since I began the ascent of my hillock, they are briefly these: To promote the increase of natural knowledge and to forward the application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems of life to the best of my ability, in the conviction which has grown with my growth and strengthened with my strength, that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off. It is with this intent that I have subordinated any reasonable, or unreasonable, ambition for scientific fame which I may have permitted myself to entertain to other ends; to the popularisation of science; to the development and organisation of scientific education; to the endless series of battles and skirmishes over evolution; and to untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit, that clericalism, which in England, as everywhere else, and to whatever denomination it may belong, is the deadly enemy of science. In striving for the attainment of these objects, I have been but one among many, and I shall be well content to be remembered, or even not remembered, as such. Circumstances, among which I am proud to reckon the devoted kindness of many friends, have led to my occupation of various prominent positions, among which the Presidency of the Royal Society is the highest. It would be mock modesty on my part, with these and other scientific honours which have been bestowed upon me, to pretend that I have not succeeded in the career which I have followed, rather because I was driven into it than of my own free will; but I am afraid I should not count even these things as marks of success if I could not hope that I had somewhat helped that movement of opinion which has been called the New Reformation. LECTURES AND ESSAYS LECTURES ON EVOLUTION [NEW YORK; 1876] I THE THREE HYPOTHESES RESPECTING THE HISTORY OF NATURE We live in and form part of a system of things of immense diversity and perplexity, which we call Nature; and it is a matter of the deepest interest to all of us that we should form just conceptions of the constitution of that system and of its past history. With relation to this universe, man is, in extent, little more than a mathematical point; in duration but a fleeting shadow; he is a mere reed shaken in the winds of force. But as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is a thinking reed; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he has the power of framing for himself a symbolic conception of the universe, which, although doubtless highly imperfect and inadequate as a picture of the great whole, is yet sufficient to serve him as a chart for the guidance of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labour to enable man to look steadily at the shifting scenes of the phantasmagoria of Nature, to notice what is fixed among her fluctuations, and what is regular among her apparent irregularities; and it is only comparatively lately, within the last few centuries, that the conception of a universal order and of a definite course of things, which we term the course of Nature, has emerged. But, once originated, the conception of the constancy of the order of Nature has become the dominant idea of modern thought. To any person who is familiar with the facts upon which that conception is based, and is competent to estimate their significance, it has ceased to be conceivable that chance should have any place in the universe, or that events should depend upon any but the natural sequence of cause and effect. We have come to look upon the present as the child of the past and as the parent of the future; and, as we have excluded chance from a place in the universe, so we ignore, even as a possibility, the notion of any interference with the order of Nature. Whatever may be men's speculative doctrines, it is quite certain that every intelligent person guides his life and risks his fortune upon the belief that the order of Nature is constant, and that the chain of natural causation is never broken. In fact, no belief which we entertain has so complete a logical basis as that to which I have just referred. It tacitly underlies every process of reasoning; it is the foundation of every act of the will. It is based upon the broadest induction, and it is verified by the most constant, regular, and universal of deductive processes. But we must recollect that any human belief, however broad its basis, however defensible it may seem, is, after all, only a probable belief, and that our widest and safest generalisations are simply statements of the highest degree of probability. Though we are quite clear about the constancy of the order of Nature, at the present time, and in the present state of things, it by no means necessarily follows that we are justified in expanding this generalisation into the infinite past, and in denying, absolutely, that there may have been a time when Nature did not follow a fixed order, when the relations of cause and effect were not definite, and when extra-natural agencies interfered with the general course of Nature. Cautious men will allow that a universe so different from that which we know may have existed; just as a very candid thinker may admit that a world in which two and two do not make four, and in which two straight lines do inclose a space, may exist. But the same caution which forces the admission of such possibilities demands a great deal of evidence before it recognises them to be anything more substantial. And when it is asserted that, so many thousand years ago, events occurred in a manner utterly foreign to and inconsistent with the existing laws of Nature, men who without being particularly cautious are simply honest thinkers, unwilling to deceive themselves or delude others, ask for trustworthy evidence of the fact. Did things so happen or did they not? This is a historical question, and one the answer to which must be sought in the same way as the solution of any other historical problem. * * * * * So far as I know, there are only three hypotheses which ever have been entertained, or which well can be entertained, respecting the past history of Nature. I will, in the first place, state the hypotheses, and then I will consider what evidence bearing upon them is in our possession, and by what light of criticism that evidence is to be interpreted. Upon the first hypothesis, the assumption is, that phenomena of Nature similar to those exhibited by the present world have always existed; in other words, that the universe has existed, from all eternity, in what may be broadly termed its present condition. The second hypothesis is that the present state of things has had only a limited duration; and that, at some period in the past, a condition of the world, essentially similar to that which we now know, came into existence, without any precedent condition from which it could have naturally proceeded. The assumption that successive states of Nature have arisen, each without any relation of natural causation to an antecedent state, is a mere modification of this second hypothesis. The third hypothesis also assumes that the present state of things has had but a limited duration; but it supposes that this state has been evolved by a natural process from an antecedent state, and that from another, and so on; and, on this hypothesis, the attempt to assign any limit to the series of past changes is, usually, given up. It is so needful to form clear and distinct notions of what is really meant by each of these hypotheses that I will ask you to imagine what, according to each, would have been visible to a spectator of the events which constitute the history of the earth. On the first hypothesis, however far back in time that spectator might be placed, he would see a world essentially, though perhaps not in all its details, similar to that which now exists. The animals which existed would be the ancestors of those which now live, and similar to them; the plants, in like manner, would be such as we know; and the mountains, plains, and waters would foreshadow the salient features of our present land and water. This view was held more or less distinctly, sometimes combined with the notion of recurrent cycles of change, in ancient times; and its influence has been felt down to the present day. It is worthy of remark that it is a hypothesis which is not inconsistent with the doctrine of Uniformitarianism, with which geologists are familiar. That doctrine was held by Hutton, and in his earlier days by Lyell. Hutton was struck by the demonstration of astronomers that the perturbations of the planetary bodies, however great they may be, yet sooner or later right themselves; and that the solar system possesses a self-adjusting power by which these aberrations are all brought back to a mean condition. Hutton imagined that the like might be true of terrestrial changes; although no one recognised more clearly than he the fact that the dry land is being constantly washed down by rain and rivers and deposited in the sea; and that thus, in a longer or shorter time, the inequalities of the earth's surface must be levelled, and its high lands brought down to the ocean. But, taking into account the internal forces of the earth, which, upheaving the sea bottom, give rise to new land, he thought that these operations of degradation and elevation might compensate each other; and that thus, for any assignable time, the general features of our planet might remain what they are. And inasmuch as, under these circumstances, there need be no limit to the propagation of animals and plants, it is clear that the consistent working-out of the uniformitarian idea might lead to the conception of the eternity of the world. Not that I mean to say that either Hutton or Lyell held this conception--assuredly not; they would have been the first to repudiate it. Nevertheless, the logical development of some of their arguments tends directly towards this hypothesis. The second hypothesis supposes that the present order of things, at some no very remote time, had a sudden origin, and that the world, such as it now is, had chaos for its phenomenal antecedent. That is the doctrine which you will find stated most fully and clearly in the immortal poem of John Milton--the English _Divina Commedia_--"Paradise Lost." I believe it is largely to the influence of that remarkable work, combined with the daily teachings to which we have all listened in our childhood, that this hypothesis owes its general wide diffusion as one of the current beliefs of English-speaking people. If you turn to the seventh book of "Paradise Lost," you will find there stated the hypothesis to which I refer, which is briefly this: That this visible universe of ours came into existence at no great distance of time from the present; and that the parts of which it is composed made their appearance, in a certain definite order, in the space of six natural days, in such a manner that, on the first of these days, light appeared; that, on the second, the firmament, or sky, separated the waters above, from the waters beneath, the firmament; that, on the third day, the waters drew away from the dry land, and upon it a varied vegetable life, similar to that which now exists, made its appearance; that the fourth day was signalised by the apparition of the sun, the stars, the moon, and the planets; that, on the fifth day, aquatic animals originated within the waters; that, on the sixth day, the earth gave rise to our four-footed terrestrial creatures, and to all varieties of terrestrial animals except birds, which had appeared on the preceding day; and, finally, that man appeared upon the earth, and the emergence of the universe from chaos was finished. Milton tells us, without the least ambiguity, what a spectator of these marvellous occurrences would have witnessed. I doubt not that his poem is familiar to all of you, but I should like to recall one passage to your minds, in order that I may be justified in what I have said regarding the perfectly concrete, definite, picture of the origin of the animal world which Milton draws. He says:-- "The sixth, and of creation last, arose With evening harps and matin, when God said, 'Let the earth bring forth soul living in her kind, Cattle and creeping things, and beast of the earth, Each in their kind!' The earth obeyed, and, straight Opening her fertile womb, teemed at a birth Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms, Limbed and full-grown. Out of the ground uprose, As from his lair, the wild beast, where he wons In forest wild, in thicket, brake, or den; Among the trees in pairs they rose, they walked; The cattle in the fields and meadows green; Those rare and solitary; these in flocks Pasturing at once, and in broad herds upsprung. The grassy clods now calved; now half appears The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts--then springs, as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded mane; the ounce, The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw In hillocks; the swift stag from underground Bore up his branching head; scarce from his mould Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved His vastness; fleeced the flocks and bleating rose As plants; ambiguous between sea and land, The river-horse and scaly crocodile. At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect or worm. There is no doubt as to the meaning of this statement, nor as to what a man of Milton's genius expected would have been actually visible to an eye-witness of this mode of origination of living things. The third hypothesis, or the hypothesis of evolution, supposes that, at any comparatively late period of past time, our imaginary spectator would meet with a state of things very similar to that which now obtains; but that the likeness of the past to the present would gradually become less and less, in proportion to the remoteness of his period of observation from the present day; that the existing distribution of mountains and plains, of rivers and seas, would show itself to be the product of a slow process of natural change operating upon more and more widely different antecedent conditions of the mineral framework of the earth; until, at length, in place of that framework, he would behold only a vast nebulous mass, representing the constituents of the sun and of the planetary bodies. Preceding the forms of life which now exist, our observer would see animals and plants, not identical with them, but like them, increasing their differences with their antiquity and, at the same time, becoming simpler and simpler; until, finally, the world of life would present nothing but that undifferentiated protoplasmic matter which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation of all vital activity. The hypothesis of evolution supposes that in all this vast progression there would be no breach of continuity, no point at which we could say "This is a natural process," and "This is not a natural process;" but that the whole might be compared to that wonderful operation of development which may be seen going on every day under our eyes, in virtue of which there arises, out of the semi-fluid comparatively homogeneous substance which we call an egg, the complicated organisation of one of the higher animals. That, in a few words, is what is meant by the hypothesis of evolution. I have already suggested that, in dealing with these three hypotheses, in endeavouring to form a judgment as to which of them is the more worthy of belief, or whether none is worthy of belief--in which case our condition of mind should be that suspension of judgment which is so difficult to all but trained intellects--we should be indifferent to all _a priori_ considerations. The question is a question of historical fact. The universe has come into existence somehow or other, and the problem is, whether it came into existence in one fashion, or whether it came into existence in another; and, as an essential preliminary to further discussion, permit me to say two or three words as to the nature and the kinds of historical evidence. The evidence as to the occurrence of any event in past time may be ranged under two heads which, for convenience' sake, I will speak of as testimonial evidence and as circumstantial evidence. By testimonial evidence I mean human testimony; and by circumstantial evidence I mean evidence which is not human testimony. Let me illustrate by a familiar example what I understand by these two kinds of evidence, and what is to be said respecting their value. Suppose that a man tells you that he saw a person strike another and kill him; that is testimonial evidence of the fact of murder. But it is possible to have circumstantial evidence of the fact of murder; that is to say, you may find a man dying with a wound upon his head having exactly the form and character of the wound which is made by an axe, and, with due care in taking surrounding circumstances into account, you may conclude with the utmost certainty that the man has been murdered; that his death is the consequence of a blow inflicted by another man with that implement. We are very much in the habit of considering circumstantial evidence as of less value than testimonial evidence, and it may be that, where the circumstances are not perfectly clear and intelligible, it is a dangerous and unsafe kind of evidence; but it must not be forgotten that, in many cases, circumstantial is quite as conclusive as testimonial evidence, and that, not unfrequently, it is a great deal weightier than testimonial evidence. For example, take the case to which I referred just now. The circumstantial evidence may be better and more convincing than the testimonial evidence; for it may be impossible, under the conditions that I have defined, to suppose that the man met his death from any cause but the violent blow of an axe wielded by another man. The circumstantial evidence in favour of a murder having been committed, in that case, is as complete and as convincing as evidence can be. It is evidence which is open to no doubt and to no falsification. But the testimony of a witness is open to multitudinous doubts. He may have been mistaken. He may have been actuated by malice. It has constantly happened that even an accurate man has declared that a thing has happened in this, that, or the other way, when a careful analysis of the circumstantial evidence has shown that it did not happen in that way, but in some other way. We may now consider the evidence in favour of or against the three hypotheses. Let me first direct your attention to what is to be said about the hypothesis of the eternity of the state of things in which we now live. What will first strike you is, that it is a hypothesis which, whether true or false, is not capable of verification by any evidence. For, in order to observe either circumstantial or testimonial evidence sufficient to prove the eternity of duration of the present state of nature, you must have an eternity of witnesses or an infinity of circumstances, and neither of these is attainable. It is utterly impossible that such evidence should be carried beyond a certain point of time; and all that could be said, at most, would be, that so far as the evidence could be traced, there was nothing to contradict the hypothesis. But when you look, not to the testimonial evidence--which, considering the relative insignificance of the antiquity of human records, might not be good for much in this case--but to the circumstantial evidence, then you find that this hypothesis is absolutely incompatible with such evidence as we have; which is of so plain and simple a character that it is impossible in any way to escape from the conclusions which it forces upon us. [Illustration: FIG. 1.--IDEAL SECTION OF THE CRUST OF THE EARTH.] You are, doubtless, all aware that the outer substance of the earth, which alone is accessible to direct observation, is not of a homogeneous character, but that it is made up of a number of layers or strata, the titles of the principal groups of which are placed upon the accompanying diagram. Each of these groups represents a number of beds of sand, of stone, of clay, of slate, and of various other materials. On careful examination, it is found that the materials of which each of these layers of more or less hard rock are composed are, for the most part, of the same nature as those which are at present being formed under known conditions on the surface of the earth. For example, the chalk, which constitutes a great part of the Cretaceous formation in some parts of the world, is practically identical in its physical and chemical characters with a substance which is now being formed at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and covers an enormous area; other beds of rock are comparable with the sands which are being formed upon sea-shores, packed together, and so on. Thus, omitting rocks of igneous origin, it is demonstrable that all these beds of stone, of which a total of not less than seventy thousand feet is known, have been formed by natural agencies, either out of the waste and washing of the dry land, or else by the accumulation of the exuviæ of plants and animals. Many of these strata are full of such exuviæ--the so-called "fossils." Remains of thousands of species of animals and plants, as perfectly recognisable as those of existing forms of life which you meet with in museums, or as the shells which you pick up upon the sea-beach, have been imbedded in the ancient sands, or muds, or limestones, just as they are being imbedded now, in sandy, or clayey, or calcareous subaqueous deposits. They furnish us with a record, the general nature of which cannot be misinterpreted, of the kinds of things that have lived upon the surface of the earth during the time that is registered by this great thickness of stratified rocks. But even a superficial study of these fossils shows us that the animals and plants which live at the present time have had only a temporary duration; for the remains of such modern forms of life are met with, for the most part, only in the uppermost or latest tertiaries, and their number rapidly diminishes in the lower deposits of that epoch. In the older tertiaries, the places of existing animals and plants are taken by other forms, as numerous and diversified as those which live now in the same localities, but more or less different from them; in the mesozoic rocks, these are replaced by others yet more divergent from modern types; and, in the palæozoic formations the contrast is still more marked. Thus the circumstantial evidence absolutely negatives the conception of the eternity of the present condition of things. We can say, with certainty, that the present condition of things has existed for a comparatively short period; and that, so far as animal and vegetable nature are concerned, it has been preceded by a different condition. We can pursue this evidence until we reach the lowest of the stratified rocks, in which we lose the indications of life altogether. The hypothesis of the eternity of the present state of nature may therefore be put out of court. We now come to what I will term Milton's hypothesis--the hypothesis that the present condition of things has endured for a comparatively short time; and, at the commencement of that time, came into existence within the course of six days. I doubt not that it may have excited some surprise in your minds that I should have spoken of this as Milton's hypothesis, rather than that I should have chosen the terms which are more customary, such as "the doctrine of creation," or "the Biblical doctrine," or "the doctrine of Moses," all of which denominations, as applied to the hypothesis to which I have just referred, are certainly much more familiar to you than the title of the Miltonic hypothesis. But I have had what I cannot but think are very weighty reasons for taking the course which I have pursued. In the first place, I have discarded the title of the "doctrine of creation," because my present business is not with the question why the objects which constitute Nature came into existence, but when they came into existence, and in what order. This is as strictly a historical question as the question when the Angles and the Jutes invaded England, and whether they preceded or followed the Romans. But the question about creation is a philosophical problem, and one which cannot be solved, or even approached, by the historical method. What we want to learn is, whether the facts, so far as they are known, afford evidence that things arose in the way described by Milton, or whether they do not; and, when that question is settled, it will be time enough to inquire into the causes of their origination. In the second place, I have not spoken of this doctrine as the Biblical doctrine. It is quite true that persons as diverse in their general views as Milton the Protestant and the celebrated Jesuit Father Suarez, each put upon the first chapter of Genesis the interpretation embodied in Milton's poem. It is quite true that this interpretation is that which has been instilled into every one of us in our childhood; but I do not for one moment venture to say that it can properly be called the Biblical doctrine. It is not my business, and does not lie within my competency, to say what the Hebrew text does, and what it does not signify; moreover, were I to affirm that this is the Biblical doctrine, I should be met by the authority of many eminent scholars, to say nothing of men of science, who, at various times, have absolutely denied that any such doctrine is to be found in Genesis. If we are to listen to many expositors of no mean authority, we must believe that what seems so clearly defined in Genesis--as if very great pains had been taken that there should be no possibility of mistake--is not the meaning of the text at all. The account is divided into periods that we may make just as long or as short as convenience requires. We are also to understand that it is consistent with the original text to believe that the most complex plants and animals may have been evolved by natural processes, lasting for millions of years, out of structureless rudiments. A person who is not a Hebrew scholar can only stand aside and admire the marvellous flexibility of a language which admits of such diverse interpretations. But assuredly, in the face of such contradictions of authority upon matters respecting which he is incompetent to form any judgment, he will abstain, as I do, from giving any opinion. In the third place, I have carefully abstained from speaking of this as the Mosaic doctrine, because we are now assured upon the authority of the highest critics, and even of dignitaries of the Church, that there is no evidence that Moses wrote the Book of Genesis, or knew anything about it. You will understand that I give no judgment--it would be an impertinence upon my part to volunteer even a suggestion--upon such a subject. But, that being the state of opinion among the scholars and the clergy, it is well for the unlearned in Hebrew lore, and for the laity, to avoid entangling themselves in such a vexed question. Happily, Milton leaves us no excuse for doubting what he means, and I shall therefore be safe in speaking of the opinion in question as the Miltonic hypothesis. Now we have to test that hypothesis. For my part, I have no prejudice one way or the other. If there is evidence in favour of this view, I am burdened by no theoretical difficulties in the way of accepting it; but there must be evidence. Scientific men get an awkward habit--no, I won't call it that, for it is a valuable habit--of believing nothing unless there is evidence for it; and they have a way of looking upon belief which is not based upon evidence, not only as illogical, but as immoral. We will, if you please, test this view by the circumstantial evidence alone; for, from what I have said, you will understand that I do not propose to discuss the question of what testimonial evidence is to be adduced in favour of it. If those whose business it is to judge are not at one as to the authenticity of the only evidence of that kind which is offered, nor as to the facts to which it bears witness, the discussion of such evidence is superfluous. But I may be permitted to regret this necessity of rejecting the testimonial evidence the less, because the examination of the circumstantial evidence leads to the conclusion, not only that it is incompetent to justify the hypothesis, but that, so far as it goes, it is contrary to the hypothesis. The considerations upon which I base this conclusion are of the simplest possible character. The Miltonic hypothesis contains assertions of a very definite character relating to the succession of living forms. It is stated that plants, for example, made their appearance upon the third day, and not before. And you will understand that what the poet means by plants are such plants as now live, the ancestors, in the ordinary way of propagation of like by like, of the trees and shrubs which flourish in the present world. It must needs be so; for, if they were different, either the existing plants have been the result of a separate origination since that described by Milton, of which we have no record, nor any ground for supposition that such an occurrence has taken place; or else they have arisen by a process of evolution from the original stocks. In the second place, it is clear that there was no animal life before the fifth day, and that, on the fifth day, aquatic animals and birds appeared. And it is further clear that terrestrial living things, other than birds, made their appearance upon the sixth day and not before. Hence, it follows that, if, in the large mass of circumstantial evidence as to what really has happened in the past history of the globe we find indications of the existence of terrestrial animals, other than birds, at a certain period, it is perfectly certain that all that has taken place, since that time, must be referred to the sixth day. In the great Carboniferous formation, whence America derives so vast a proportion of her actual and potential wealth, in the beds of coal which have been formed from the vegetation of that period, we find abundant evidence of the existence of terrestrial animals. They have been described, not only by European but by your own naturalists. There are to be found numerous insects allied to our cockroaches. There are to be found spiders and scorpions of large size, the latter so similar to existing scorpions that it requires the practised eye of the naturalist to distinguish them. Inasmuch as these animals can be proved to have been alive in the Carboniferous epoch, it is perfectly clear that, if the Miltonic account is to be accepted, the huge mass of rocks extending from the middle of the Palæozoic formations to the uppermost members of the series, must belong to the day which is termed by Milton the sixth. But, further, it is expressly stated that aquatic animals took their origin on the fifth day, and not before; hence, all formations in which remains of aquatic animals can be proved to exist, and which therefore testify that such animals lived at the time when these formations were in course of deposition, must have been deposited during or since the period which Milton speaks of as the fifth day. But there is absolutely no fossiliferous formation in which the remains of aquatic animals are absent. The oldest fossils in the Silurian rocks are exuviæ of marine animals; and if the view which is entertained by Principal Dawson and Dr. Carpenter respecting the nature of the _Eozoön_ be well-founded, aquatic animals existed at a period as far antecedent to the deposition of the coal as the coal is from us; inasmuch as the _Eozoön_ is met with in those Laurentian strata which lie at the bottom of the series of stratified rocks. Hence it follows, plainly enough, that the whole series of stratified rocks, if they are to be brought into harmony with Milton, must be referred to the fifth and sixth days, and that we cannot hope to find the slightest trace of the products of the earlier days in the geological record. When we consider these simple facts, we see how absolutely futile are the attempts that have been made to draw a parallel between the story told by so much of the crust of the earth as is known to us and the story which Milton tells. The whole series of fossiliferous stratified rocks must be referred to the last two days; and neither the Carboniferous, nor any other, formation can afford evidence of the work of the third day. Not only is there this objection to any attempt to establish a harmony between the Miltonic account and the facts recorded in the fossiliferous rocks, but there is a further difficulty. According to the Miltonic account, the order in which animals should have made their appearance in the stratified rocks would be this: Fishes, including the great whales, and birds; after them, all varieties of terrestrial animals except birds. Nothing could be further from the facts as we find them; we know of not the slightest evidence of the existence of birds before the Jurassic, or perhaps the Triassic, formation; while terrestrial animals, as we have just seen, occur in the Carboniferous rocks. If there were any harmony between the Miltonic account and the circumstantial evidence, we ought to have abundant evidence of the existence of birds in the Carboniferous, the Devonian, and the Silurian rocks. I need hardly say that this is not the case, and that not a trace of birds makes its appearance until the far later period which I have mentioned. And again, if it be true that all varieties of fishes and the great whales, and the like, made their appearance on the fifth day, we ought to find the remains of these animals in the older rocks--in those which were deposited before the Carboniferous epoch. Fishes we do find, in considerable number and variety; but the great whales are absent, and the fishes are not such as now live. Not one solitary species of fish now in existence is to be found in the Devonian or Silurian formations. Hence we are introduced afresh to the dilemma which I have already placed before you: either the animals which came into existence on the fifth day were not such as those which are found at present, are not the direct and immediate ancestors of those which now exist; in which case, either fresh creations of which nothing is said, or a process of evolution, must have occurred; or else the whole story must be given up, as not only devoid of any circumstantial evidence, but contrary to such evidence as exists. I placed before you in a few words, some little time ago, a statement of the sum and substance of Milton's hypothesis. Let me now try to state, as briefly, the effect of the circumstantial evidence bearing upon the past history of the earth which is furnished, without the possibility of mistake, with no chance of error as to its chief features, by the stratified rocks. What we find is, that the great series of formations represents a period of time of which our human chronologies hardly afford us a unit of measure. I will not pretend to say how we ought to estimate this time, in millions or in billions of years. For my purpose, the determination of its absolute duration is wholly unessential. But that the time was enormous there can be no question. It results from the simplest methods of interpretation, that leaving out of view certain patches of metamorphosed rocks, and certain volcanic products, all that is now dry land has once been at the bottom of the waters. It is perfectly certain that, at a comparatively recent period of the world's history--the Cretaceous epoch--none of the great physical features which at present mark the surface of the globe existed. It is certain that the Rocky Mountains were not. It is certain that the Himalaya Mountains were not. It is certain that the Alps and the Pyrenees had no existence. The evidence is of the plainest possible character, and is simply this:--We find raised up on the flanks of these mountains, elevated by the forces of upheaval which have given rise to them, masses of Cretaceous rock which formed the bottom of the sea before those mountains existed. It is therefore clear that the elevatory forces which gave rise to the mountains operated subsequently to the Cretaceous epoch; and that the mountains themselves are largely made up of the materials deposited in the sea which once occupied their place. As we go back in time, we meet with constant alternations of sea and land, of estuary and open ocean; and, in correspondence with these alternations, we observe the changes in the fauna and flora to which I have referred. But the inspection of these changes give us no right to believe that there has been any discontinuity in natural processes. There is no trace of general cataclysms, of universal deluges, or sudden destructions of a whole fauna or flora. The appearances which were formerly interpreted in that way have all been shown to be delusive, as our knowledge has increased and as the blanks which formerly appeared to exist between the different formations have been filled up. That there is no absolute break between formation and formation, that there has been no sudden disappearance of all the forms of life and replacement of them by others, but that changes have gone on slowly and gradually, that one type has died out and another has taken its place, and that thus, by insensible degrees, one fauna has been replaced by another, are conclusions strengthened by constantly increasing evidence. So that within the whole of the immense period indicated by the fossiliferous stratified rocks, there is assuredly not the slightest proof of any break in the uniformity of Nature's operations, no indication that events have followed other than a clear and orderly sequence. That, I say, is the natural and obvious teaching of the circumstantial evidence contained in the stratified rocks. I leave you to consider how far, by any ingenuity of interpretation, by any stretching of the meaning of language, it can be brought into harmony with the Miltonic hypothesis. There remains the third hypothesis, that of which I have spoken as the hypothesis of evolution; and I purpose that, in lectures to come, we should discuss it as carefully as we have considered the other two hypotheses. I need not say that it is quite hopeless to look for testimonial evidence of evolution. The very nature of the case precludes the possibility of such evidence, for the human race can no more be expected to testify to its own origin, than a child can be tendered as a witness of its own birth. Our sole inquiry is, what foundation circumstantial evidence lends to the hypothesis, or whether it lends none, or whether it controverts the hypothesis. I shall deal with the matter entirely as a question of history. I shall not indulge in the discussion of any speculative probabilities. I shall not attempt to show that Nature is unintelligible unless we adopt some such hypothesis. For anything I know about the matter, it may be the way of Nature to be unintelligible; she is often puzzling, and I have no reason to suppose that she is bound to fit herself to our notions. I shall place before you three kinds of evidence entirely based upon what is known of the forms of animal life which are contained in the series of stratified rocks. I shall endeavour to show you that there is one kind of evidence which is neutral, which neither helps evolution nor is inconsistent with it. I shall then bring forward a second kind of evidence which indicates a strong probability in favour of evolution, but does not prove it; and, lastly, I shall adduce a third kind of evidence which, being as complete as any evidence which we can hope to obtain upon such a subject, and being wholly and strikingly in favour of evolution, may fairly be called demonstrative evidence of its occurrence. II THE HYPOTHESIS OF EVOLUTION. THE NEUTRAL AND THE FAVOURABLE EVIDENCE In the preceding lecture I pointed out that there are three hypotheses which may be entertained, and which have been entertained, respecting the past history of life upon the globe. According to the first of these hypotheses, living beings, such as now exist, have existed from all eternity upon this earth. We tested that hypothesis by the circumstantial evidence, as I called it, which is furnished by the fossil remains contained in the earth's crust, and we found that it was obviously untenable. I then proceeded to consider the second hypothesis, which I termed the Miltonic hypothesis, not because it is of any particular consequence whether John Milton seriously entertained it or not, but because it is stated in a clear and unmistakable manner in his great poem. I pointed out to you that the evidence at our command as completely and fully negatives that hypothesis as it did the preceding one. And I confess that I had too much respect for your intelligence to think it necessary to add that the negation was equally clear and equally valid, whatever the source from which that hypothesis might be derived, or whatever the authority by which it might be supported. I further stated that, according to the third hypothesis, or that of evolution, the existing state of things is the last term of a long series of states, which, when traced back, would be found to show no interruption and no breach in the continuity of natural causation. I propose, in the present and the following lecture, to test this hypothesis rigorously by the evidence at command, and to inquire how far that evidence can be said to be indifferent to it, how far it can be said to be favourable to it, and, finally, how far it can be said to be demonstrative. From almost the origin of the discussions about the existing condition of the animal and vegetable worlds and the causes which have determined that condition, an argument has been put forward as an objection to evolution, which we shall have to consider very seriously. It is an argument which was first clearly stated by Cuvier in his criticism of the doctrines propounded by his great contemporary, Lamarck. The French expedition to Egypt had called the attention of learned men to the wonderful store of antiquities in that country, and there had been brought back to France numerous mummified corpses of the animals which the ancient Egyptians revered and preserved, and which, at a reasonable computation, must have lived not less than three or four thousand years before the time at which they were thus brought to light. Cuvier endeavoured to test the hypothesis that animals have undergone gradual and progressive modifications of structure, by comparing the skeletons and such other parts of the mummies as were in a fitting state of preservation, with the corresponding parts of the representatives of the same species now living in Egypt. He arrived at the conviction that no appreciable change had taken place in these animals in the course of this considerable lapse of time, and the justice of his conclusion is not disputed. It is obvious that, if it can be proved that animals have endured, without undergoing any demonstrable change of structure, for so long a period as four thousand years, no form of the hypothesis of evolution which assumes that animals undergo a constant and necessary progressive change can be tenable; unless, indeed, it be further assumed that four thousand years is too short a time for the production of a change sufficiently great to be detected. But it is no less plain that if the process of evolution of animals is not independent of surrounding conditions; if it may be indefinitely hastened or retarded by variations in these conditions; or if evolution is simply a process of accommodation to varying conditions; the argument against the hypothesis of evolution based on the unchanged character of the Egyptian fauna is worthless. For the monuments which are coeval with the mummies testify as strongly to the absence of change in the physical geography and the general conditions of the land of Egypt, for the time in question, as the mummies do to the unvarying characters of its living population. The progress of research since Cuvier's time has supplied far more striking examples of the long duration of specific forms of life than those which are furnished by the mummified Ibises and Crocodiles of Egypt. A remarkable case is to be found in your own country, in the neighbourhood of the falls of Niagara. In the immediate vicinity of the whirlpool, and again upon Goat Island, in the superficial deposits which cover the surface of the rocky subsoil in those regions, there are found remains of animals in perfect preservation, and among them, shells belonging to exactly the same species as those which at present inhabit the still waters of Lake Erie. It is evident, from the structure of the country, that these animal remains were deposited in the beds in which they occur at a time when the lake extended over the region in which they are found. This involves the conclusion that they lived and died before the falls had cut their way back through the gorge of Niagara; and, indeed, it has been determined that, when these animals lived, the falls of Niagara must have been at least six miles further down the river than they are at present. Many computations have been made of the rate at which the falls are thus cutting their way back. Those computations have varied greatly, but I believe I am speaking within the bounds of prudence, if I assume that the falls of Niagara have not retreated at a greater pace than about a foot a year. Six miles, speaking roughly, are 30,000 feet; 30,000 feet, at a foot a year, gives 30,000 years; and thus we are fairly justified in concluding that no less a period than this has passed since the shell-fish, whose remains are left in the beds to which I have referred, were living creatures. But there is still stronger evidence of the long duration of certain types. I have already stated that, as we work our way through the great series of the Tertiary formations, we find many species of animals identical with those which live at the present day, diminishing in numbers, it is true, but still existing, in a certain proportion, in the oldest of the Tertiary rocks. Furthermore, when we examine the rocks of the Cretaceous epoch, we find the remains of some animals which the closest scrutiny cannot show to be, in any important respect, different from those which live at the present time. That is the case with one of the cretaceous lamp-shells (_Terebratula_) which has continued to exist unchanged, or with insignificant variations, down to the present day. Such is the case with the _Globigerinæ_, the skeletons of which, aggregated together, form a large proportion of our English chalk. Those _Globigerinæ_ can be traced down to the _Globigerinæ_ which live at the surface of the present great oceans, and the remains of which, falling to the bottom of the sea give rise to a chalky mud. Hence it must be admitted that certain existing species of animals show no distinct sign of modification, or transformation, in the course of a lapse of time as great as that which carries us back to the Cretaceous period; and which, whatever its absolute measure, is certainly vastly greater than thirty thousand years. There are groups of species so closely allied together, that it needs the eye of a naturalist to distinguish them one from another. If we disregard the small differences which separate these forms, and consider all the species of such groups as modifications of one type, we shall find that, even among the higher animals, some types have had a marvellous duration. In the chalk, for example, there is found a fish belonging to the highest and the most differentiated group of osseous fishes, which goes by the name of _Beryx_. The remains of that fish are among the most beautiful and well-preserved of the fossils found in our English chalk. It can be studied anatomically, so far as the hard parts are concerned, almost as well as if it were a recent fish. But the genus _Beryx_ is represented, at the present day, by very closely allied species which are living in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. We may go still farther back. I have already referred to the fact, that the Carboniferous formations, in Europe and in America, contain the remains of scorpions in an admirable state of preservation and, that those scorpions are hardly distinguishable from such as now live. I do not mean to say that they are not different, but close scrutiny is needed in order to distinguish them from modern scorpions. More than this. At the very bottom Of the Silurian series, in beds which are by some authorities referred to the Cambrian formation, where the signs of life begin to fail us--even there, among the few and scanty animal remains which are discoverable, we find species of molluscous animals which are so closely allied to existing forms that, at one time, they were grouped under the same generic name. I refer to the well known _Lingula_ of the _Lingula_ flags, lately, in consequence of some slight differences, placed in the new genus _Lingulella_. Practically, it belongs to the same great generic group as the _Lingula_, which is to be found at the present day upon your own shores and those of many other parts of the world. The same truth is exemplified if we turn to certain great periods of the earth's history--as, for example, the Mesozoic epoch. There are groups of reptiles, such as the _Ichthyosauria_ and the _Plesiosauria_, which appear shortly after the commencement of this epoch, and they occur in vast numbers. They disappear with the chalk and, throughout the whole of the great series of Mesozoic rocks, they present no such modifications as can safely be considered evidence of progressive modification. Facts of this kind are undoubtedly fatal to any form of the doctrine of evolution which postulates the supposition that there is an intrinsic necessity, on the part of animal forms which have once come into existence, to undergo continual modification; and they are as distinctly opposed to any view which involves the belief, that such modification as may occur, must take place, at the same rate, in all the different types of animal or vegetable life. The facts, as I have placed them before you obviously directly contradict any form of the hypothesis of evolution which stands in need of these two postulates. But, one great service that has been rendered by Mr. Darwin to the doctrine of evolution in general is this: he has shown that there are two chief factors in the process of evolution: one of them is the tendency to vary, the existence of which in all living forms may be proved by observation; the other is the influence of surrounding conditions upon what I may call the parent form and the variations which are thus evolved from it. The cause of the production of variations is a matter not at all properly understood at present. Whether variation depends upon some intricate machinery--if I may use the phrase--of the living organism itself, or whether it arises through the influence of conditions upon that form, is not certain, and the question may, for the present, be left open. But the important point is that granting the existence of the tendency to the production of variations; then, whether the variations which are produced shall survive and supplant the parent, or whether the parent form shall survive and supplant the variations, is a matter which depends entirely on those conditions which give rise to the struggle for existence. If the surrounding conditions are such that the parent form is more competent to deal with them, and flourish in them than the derived forms, then, in the struggle for existence, the parent form will maintain itself and the derived forms will be exterminated. But if, on the contrary, the conditions are such as to be more favourable to a derived than to the parent form, the parent form will be extirpated and the derived form will take its place. In the first case, there will be no progression, no change of structure, through any imaginable series of ages; in the second place there will be modification of change and form. Thus the existence of these persistent types, as I have termed them, is no real obstacle in the way of the theory of evolution. Take the case of the scorpions to which I have just referred. No doubt, since the Carboniferous epoch, conditions have always obtained, such as existed when the scorpions of that epoch flourished; conditions in which scorpions find themselves better off, more competent to deal with the difficulties in their way, than any variation from the scorpion type which they may have produced; and, for that reason, the scorpion type has persisted, and has not been supplanted by any other form. And there is no reason, in the nature of things, why, as long as this world exists, if there be conditions more favourable to scorpions than to any variation which may arise from them, these forms of life should not persist. Therefore, the stock objection to the hypothesis of evolution, based on the long duration of certain animal and vegetable types, is no objection at all. The facts of this character--and they are numerous--belong to that class of evidence which I have called indifferent. That is to say, they may afford no direct support to the doctrine of evolution, but they are capable of being interpreted in perfect consistency with it. There is another order of facts belonging to the class of negative or indifferent evidence. The great group of Lizards, which abound in the present world, extends through the whole series of formations as far back as the Permian, or latest Palæozoic, epoch. These Permian lizards differ astonishingly little from the lizards which exist at the present day. Comparing the amount of the differences between them and modern lizards, with the prodigious lapse of time between the Permian epoch and the present age, it may be said that the amount of change is insignificant. But, when we carry our researches farther back in time, we find no trace of lizards, nor of any true reptile whatever, in the whole mass of formations beneath the Permian. Now, it is perfectly clear that if our palæontological collections are to be taken, even approximately, as an adequate representation of all the forms of animals and plants that have ever lived; and if the record furnished by the known series of beds of stratified rock covers the whole series of events which constitute the history of life on the globe, such a fact as this directly contravenes the hypothesis of evolution; because this hypothesis postulates that the existence of every form must have been preceded by that of some form little different from it. Here, however, we have to take into consideration that important truth so well insisted upon by Lyell and by Darwin--the imperfection of the geological record. It can be demonstrated that the geological record must be incomplete, that it can only preserve remains found in certain favourable localities and under particular conditions; that it must be destroyed by processes of denudation, and obliterated by processes of metamorphosis. Beds of rock of any thickness, crammed full of organic remains, may yet, either by the percolation of water through them, or by the influence of subterranean heat, lose all trace of these remains, and present the appearance of beds of rock formed under conditions in which living forms were absent. Such metamorphic rocks occur in formations of all ages; and, in various cases, there are very good grounds for the belief that they have contained organic remains, and that those remains have been absolutely obliterated. I insist upon the defects of the geological record the more because those who have not attended to these matters are apt to say, "It is all very well, but, when you get into a difficulty with your theory of evolution, you appeal to the incompleteness and the imperfection of the geological record;" and I want to make it perfectly clear to you that this imperfection is a great fact, which must be taken into account in all our speculations, or we shall constantly be going wrong. You see the singular series of footmarks, drawn of its natural size in the large diagram hanging up here (Fig. 2), which I owe to the kindness of my friend Professor Marsh, with whom I had the opportunity recently of visiting the precise locality in Massachusetts in which these tracks occur. I am, therefore, able to give you my own testimony, if needed, that the diagram accurately represents what we saw. The valley of the Connecticut is classical ground for the geologist. It contains great beds of sandstone, covering many square miles, which have evidently formed a part of an ancient sea-shore, or, it may be, lake-shore. For a certain period of time after their deposition, these beds have remained sufficiently soft to receive the impressions of the feet of whatever animals walked over them, and to preserve them afterwards, in exactly the same way as such impressions are at this hour preserved on the shores of the Bay of Fundy and elsewhere. The diagram represents the track of some gigantic animal, which walked on its hind legs. You see the series of marks made alternately by the right and by the left foot; so that, from one impression to the other of the three-toed foot on the same side, is one stride, and that stride, as we measured it, is six feet nine inches. I leave you, therefore, to form an impression of the magnitude of the creature which, as it walked along the ancient shore, made these impressions. [Illustration: FIG. 2.--TRACKS OF BRONTOZOUM.] Of such impressions there are untold thousands upon these sandstones. Fifty or sixty different kinds have been discovered, and they cover vast areas. But, up to this present time, not a bone, not a fragment, of any one of the animals which left these great footmarks has been found; in fact, the only animal remains which have been met with in all these deposits, from the time of their discovery to the present day--though they have been carefully hunted over--is a fragmentary skeleton of one of the smaller forms. What has become of the bones of all these animals? You see we are not dealing with little creatures, but with animals that make a step of six feet nine inches; and their remains must have been left somewhere. The probability is, that they have been dissolved away, and completely lost. I have had occasion to work out the nature of fossil remains, of which there was nothing left except casts of the bones, the solid material of the skeleton having been dissolved out by percolating water. It was a chance, in this case, that the sandstone happened to be of such a constitution as to set, and to allow the bones to be afterward dissolved out, leaving cavities of the exact shape of the bones. Had that constitution been other than what it was, the bones would have been dissolved, the layers of sandstone would have fallen together into one mass, and not the slightest indication that the animal had existed would have been discoverable. I know of no more striking evidence than these facts afford, of the caution which should be used in drawing the conclusion, from the absence of organic remains in a deposit, that animals or plants did not exist at the time it was formed. I believe that, with a right understanding of the doctrine of evolution on the one hand, and a just estimation of the importance of the imperfection of the geological record on the other, all difficulty is removed from the kind of evidence to which I have adverted; and that we are justified in believing that all such cases are examples of what I have designated negative or indifferent evidence--that is to say, they in no way directly advance the hypothesis of evolution, but they are not to be regarded as obstacles in the way of our belief in that doctrine. I now pass on to the consideration of those cases which, for reasons which I will point out to you by and by, are not to be regarded as demonstrative of the truth of evolution, but which are such as must exist if evolution be true, and which therefore are, upon the whole, evidence in favour of the doctrine. If the doctrine of evolution be true, it follows, that, however diverse the different groups of animals and of plants may be, they must all, at one time or other, have been connected by gradational forms; so that, from the highest animals, whatever they may be, down to the lowest speck of protoplasmic matter in which life can be manifested, a series of gradations, leading from one end of the series to the other, either exists or has existed. Undoubtedly that is a necessary postulate of the doctrine of evolution. But when we look upon living Nature as it is, we find a totally different state of things. We find that animals and plants fall into groups, the different members of which are pretty closely allied together, but which are separated by definite, larger or smaller, breaks, from other groups. In other words, no intermediate forms which bridge over these gaps or intervals are, at present, to be met with. To illustrate what I mean: Let me call your attention to those vertebrate animals which are most familiar to you, such as mammals, birds, and reptiles. At the present day, these groups of animals are perfectly well-defined from one another. We know of no animal now living which, in any sense, is intermediate between the mammal and the bird, or between the bird and the reptile; but, on the contrary, there are many very distinct anatomical peculiarities, well-defined marks, by which the mammal is separated from the bird, and the bird from the reptile. The distinctions are obvious and striking if you compare the definitions of these great groups as they now exist. The same may be said of many of the subordinate groups, or orders, into which these great classes are divided. At the present time, for example, there are numerous forms of non-ruminant pachyderms, or what we may call broadly, the pig tribe, and many varieties of ruminants. These latter have their definite characteristics, and the former have their distinguishing peculiarities. But there is nothing that fills up the gap between the ruminants and the pig tribe. The two are distinct. Such also is the case in respect of the minor groups of the class of reptiles. The existing fauna shows us crocodiles, lizards, snakes, and tortoises; but no connecting link between the crocodile and lizard, nor between the lizard and snake, nor between the snake and the crocodile, nor between any two of these groups. They are separated by absolute breaks. If, then, it could be shown that this state of things had always existed, the fact would be fatal to the doctrine of evolution. If the intermediate gradations, which the doctrine of evolution requires to have existed between these groups, are not to be found anywhere in the records of the past history of the globe, their absence is a strong and weighty negative argument against evolution; while, on the other hand, if such intermediate forms are to be found, that is so much to the good of evolution; although for reasons which I will lay before you by and by, we must be cautious in our estimate of the evidential cogency of facts of this kind. It is a very remarkable circumstance that, from the commencement of the serious study of fossil remains, in fact from the time when Cuvier began his brilliant researches upon those found in the quarries of Montmartre, palæontology has shown what she was going to do in this matter, and what kind of evidence it lay in her power to produce. I said just now that, in the existing Fauna, the group of pig-like animals and the group of ruminants are entirely distinct; but one of the first of Cuvier's discoveries was an animal which he called the _Anoplotherium_, and which proved to be, in a great many important respects, intermediate in character between the pigs on the one hand, and the ruminants on the other Thus, research into the history of the past did, to a certain extent, tend to fill up the breach between the group of ruminants and the group of pigs. Another remarkable animal restored by the great French palæontologist, the _Palæotherium_, similarly tended to connect together animals to all appearance so different as the rhinoceros, the horse, and the tapir. Subsequent research has brought to light multitudes of facts of the same order; and, at the present day, the investigations of such anatomists as Rütimeyer and Gaudry have tended to fill up, more and more, the gaps in our existing series of mammals, and to connect groups formerly thought to be distinct. But I think it may have an especial interest if, instead of dealing with these examples, which would require a great deal of tedious osteological detail, I take the case of birds and reptiles; groups which, at the present day, are so clearly distinguished from one another that there are perhaps no classes of animals which, in popular apprehension, are more completely separated. Existing birds, as you are aware, are covered with feathers; their anterior extremities, specially and peculiarly modified, are converted into wings, by the aid of which most of them are able to fly; they walk upright upon two legs; and these limbs, when they are considered anatomically, present a great number of exceedingly remarkable peculiarities, to which I may have occasion to advert incidentally as I go on, and which are not met with, even approximately, in any existing forms of reptiles. On the other hand, existing reptiles have no feathers. They may have naked skins, or be covered with horny scales, or bony plates, or with both. They possess no wings; they neither fly by means of their fore-limbs, nor habitually walk upright upon their hind-limbs; and the bones of their legs present no such modifications as we find in birds. It is impossible to imagine any two groups more definitely and distinctly separated, notwithstanding certain characters which they possess in common. As we trace the history of birds back in time, we find their remains, sometimes in great abundance, throughout the whole extent of the tertiary rocks; but, so far as our present knowledge goes, the birds of the tertiary rocks retain the same essential characters as the birds of the present day. In other words, the tertiary birds come within the definition of the class constituted by existing birds, and are as much separated from reptiles as existing birds are. Not very long ago no remains of birds had been found below the tertiary rocks, and I am not sure but that some persons were prepared to demonstrate that they could not have existed at an earlier period. But, in the course of the last few years, such remains have been discovered in England; though, unfortunately, in so imperfect and fragmentary a condition, that it is impossible to say whether they differed from existing birds in any essential character or not. In your country the development of the cretaceous series of rocks is enormous; the conditions under which the later cretaceous strata have been deposited are highly favourable to the preservation of organic remains; and the researches, full of labour and risk, which have been carried on by Professor Marsh in these cretaceous rocks of Western America, have rewarded him with the discovery of forms of birds of which we had hitherto no conception. By his kindness, I am enabled to place before you a restoration of one of these extraordinary birds, every part of which can be thoroughly justified by the more or less complete skeletons, in a very perfect state of preservation, which he has discovered. This _Hesperornis_ (Fig. 3), which measured between five and six feet in length, is astonishingly like our existing divers or grebes in a great many respects; so like them indeed that, had the skeleton of _Hesperornis_ been found in a museum without its skull, improbably would have been placed in the same group of birds as the divers and grebes of the present day.[1] But _Hesperornis_ differs from all existing birds, and so far resembles reptiles, in one important particular--it is provided with teeth. The long jaws are armed with teeth which have curved crowns and thick roots (Fig. 4), and are not set in distinct sockets, but are lodged in a groove. In possessing true teeth, the _Hesperornis_ differs from every existing bird, and from every bird yet discovered in the tertiary formations, the tooth-like serrations of the jaws in the _Odontopteryx_ of the London clay being mere processes of the bony substance of the jaws, and not teeth in the proper sense of the word. In view of the characteristics of this bird we are therefore obliged to modify the definitions of the classes of birds and reptiles. Before the discovery of _Hesperornis_, the definition of the class Aves based upon our knowledge of existing birds might have been extended to all birds; it might have been said that the absence of teeth was characteristic of the class of birds; but the discovery of an animal which, in every part of its skeleton, closely agrees with existing birds, and yet possesses teeth, shows that there were ancient birds, which, in respect of possessing teeth, approached reptiles more nearly than any existing bird does, and, to that extent, diminishes the _hiatus_ between the two classes. [Illustration: FIG. 3--HESPERORNIS REGALIS (Marsh).] The same formation has yielded another bird _Ichthyornis_ (Fig. 5), which also possesses teeth; but the teeth are situated in distinct sockets, while those of _Hesperornis_ are not so lodged. The latter also has such very small, almost rudimentary wings, that it must have been chiefly a swimmer and a diver like a Penguin; while _Ichthyornis_ has strong wings and no doubt possessed corresponding powers of flight. _Ichthyornis_ also differed in the fact that its vertebræ have not the peculiar characters of the vertebræ of existing and of all known tertiary birds, but were concave at each end. This discovery leads us to make a further modification in the definition of the group of birds, and to part with another of the characters by which almost all existing birds are distinguished from reptiles. [Illustration: FIG. 4.--HESPERORNIS REGALIS (Marsh). Side and upper views of half the lower jaw; side and end views of a vertebra and a separate tooth.] Apart from the few fragmentary remains from the English greensand, to which I have referred, the Mesozoic rocks, older than those in which _Hesperornis_ and _Ichthyornis_ have been discovered have afforded no certain evidence of birds, with the remarkable exception of the Solenhofen slates. These so-called slates are composed of a fine grained calcareous mud which has hardened into lithographic stone, and in which organic remains are almost as well preserved as they would be if they had been imbedded in so much plaster of Paris. They have yielded the _Archæopteryx_, the existence of which was first made known by the finding of a fossil feather, or rather of the impression of one. It is wonderful enough that such a perishable thing as a feather, and nothing more, should be discovered; yet for a long time, nothing was known of this bird except its feather. But by and by a solitary skeleton was discovered which is now in the British Museum. The skull of this solitary specimen is unfortunately wanting, and it is therefore uncertain whether the _Archæopteryx_ possessed teeth or not.[2] But the remainder of the skeleton is so well preserved as to leave no doubt respecting the main features of the animal, which are very singular. The feet are not only altogether bird-like, but have the special characters of the feet of perching birds, while the body had a clothing of true feathers. Nevertheless, in some other respects, _Archæopteryx_ is unlike a bird and like a reptile. There is a long tail composed of many vertebræ. The structure of the wing differs in some very remarkable respects from that which it presents in a true bird. In the latter, the end of the wing answers to the thumb and two fingers of my hand; but the metacarpal bones, or those which answer to the bones of the fingers which lie in the palm of the hand, are fused together into one mass; and the whole apparatus, except the last joints of the thumb, is bound up in a sheath of integument, while the edge of the hand carries the principal quill feathers. In the _Archæopteryx_, the upper-arm bone is like that of a bird; and the two bones of the fore-arm are more or less like those of a bird, but the fingers are not bound together--they are free. What their number may have been is uncertain; but several, if not all, of them were terminated by strong curved claws, not like such as are sometimes found in birds, but such as reptiles possess; so that, in the _Archæopteryx_, we have an animal which, to a certain extent, occupies a midway place between a bird and a reptile. It is a bird so far as its foot and sundry other parts of its skeleton are concerned; it is essentially and thoroughly a bird by its feathers; but it is much more properly a reptile in the fact that the region which represents the hand has separate bones, with claws resembling those which terminate the fore-limb of a reptile. Moreover, it had a long reptile-like tail with a fringe of feathers on each side; while, in all true birds hitherto known, the tail is relatively short, and the vertebræ which constitute its skeleton are generally peculiarly modified. [Illustration: FIG. 5.--ICHTHYORNIS DISPAR (Marsh). (Side and upper views of half the lower jaw; and side and end views of a vertebra.)] Like the _Anoplotherium_ and the _Palæotherium_, therefore, _Archaopteryx_ tends to fill up the interval between groups which, in the existing world, are widely separated, and to destroy the value of the definitions of zoological groups based upon our knowledge of existing forms. And such cases as these constitute evidence in favour of evolution, in so far as they prove that, in former periods of the world's history, there were animals which overstepped the bounds of existing groups, and tended to merge them into larger assemblages. They show that animal organisation is more flexible than our knowledge of recent forms might have led us to believe; and that many structural permutations and combinations, of which the present world gives us no indication, may nevertheless have existed. But it by no means follows, because the _Palæotherium_ has much in common with the horse, on the one hand, and with the rhinoceros on the other, that it is the intermediate form through which rhinoceroses have passed to become horses, or _vice versa_; on the contrary, any such supposition would certainly be erroneous. Nor do I think it likely that the transition from the reptile to the bird has been effected by such a form as _Archæopteryx_. And it is convenient to distinguish these intermediate forms between two groups, which do not represent the actual passage from the one group to the other, as _intercalary_ types, from those _linear_ types which, more or less approximately, indicate the nature of the steps by which the transition from one group to the other was effected. I conceive that such linear forms, constituting a series of natural gradations between the reptile and the bird, and enabling us to understand the manner in which the reptilian has been metamorphosed into the bird type, are really to be found among a group of ancient and extinct terrestrial reptiles known as the _Ornithoscelida_. The remains of these animals occur throughout the series of Mesozoic formations, from the Trias to the Chalk, and there are indications of their existence even in the later Palæozoic strata. Most of these reptiles, at present known, are of great size, some having attained a length of forty feet or perhaps more. The majority resembled lizards and crocodiles in their general form, and many of them were, like crocodiles, protected by an armour of heavy bony plates. But, in others, the hind-limbs elongate and the fore-limbs shorten, until their relative proportions approach those which are observed in the short-winged, flightless, ostrich tribe among birds. The skull is relatively light, and in some cases the jaws, though bearing teeth, are beak-like at their extremities and appear to have been enveloped in a horny sheath. In the part of the vertebral column which lies between the haunch bones and is called the sacrum, a number of vertebræ may unite together into one whole, and in this respect, as in some details of its structure, the sacrum of these reptiles approaches that of birds. But it is in the structure of the pelvis and of the hind limb that some of these ancient reptiles present the most remarkable approximation to birds, and clearly indicate the way by which the most specialised and characteristic features of the bird may have been evolved from the corresponding parts in the reptile. In Fig. 6, the pelvis and hind-limbs of a crocodile, a three-toed bird, and an ornithoscelidan are represented side by side; and, for facility of comparison, in corresponding positions; but it must be recollected that, while the position of the bird's limb is natural, that of the crocodile is not so. In the bird, the thigh-bone lies close to the body, and the metatarsal bones of the foot (ii., iii., iv., Fig. 6) are, ordinarily, raised into a more or less vertical position; in the crocodile, the thigh-bone stands out at an angle from the body, and the metatarsal bones (i., ii., iii., iv., Fig. 6) lie flat on the ground. Hence, in the crocodile, the body usually lies squat between the legs, while, in the bird, it is raised upon the hind legs, as upon pillars. In the crocodile, the pelvis is obviously composed of three bones on each side: the ilium (_Il._), the pubis (_Pb._), and the ischium (_Is._). In the adult bird there appears to be but one bone on each side. The examination of the pelvis of a chick, however, shows that each half is made up of three bones, which answer to those which remain distinct throughout life in the crocodile. There is, therefore, a fundamental identity of plan in the construction of the pelvis of both bird and reptile; though the difference in form, relative size, and direction of the corresponding bones in the two cases are very great. [Illustration: FIG. 6.--BIRD. ORNITHOSCELIDAN. CROCODILE. (The letters have the same signification in all the figures. _Il._, Ilium; _a_, anterior end; _b_, posterior end _Is._, ischium; _Pb._, pubis; _T_, tibia; _F_, fibula; _As._, astragalus; _Ca._, calcaneum; _i_, distal portion of the tarsus; i., ii., iii., iv., metatarsal bones.)] But the most striking contrast between the two lies in the bones of the leg and of that part of the foot termed the tarsus, which follows upon the leg. In the crocodile, the fibula _(F)_ is relatively large and its lower end is complete. The tibia _(T)_ has no marked crest at its upper end, and its lower end is narrow and not pulley-shaped. There are two rows of separate tarsal bones _(As., Ca., &c.)_ and four distinct metatarsal bones, with a rudiment of a fifth. In the bird the fibula is small and its lower end diminishes to a point. The tibia has a strong crest at its upper end and its lower extremity passes into a broad pulley. There seem at first to be no tarsal bones; and only one bone, divided at the end into three heads for the three toes which are attached to it, appears in the place of the metatarsus. In a young bird, however, the pulley-shaped apparent end of the tibia is a distinct bone, which represents the bones marked _As., Ca._, in the crocodile; while the apparently single metatarsal bone consists of three bones, which early unite with one another and with an additional bone, which represents the lower row of bones in the tarsus of the crocodile. In other words it can be shown by the study of development that the bird's pelvis and hind limb are simply extreme modifications of the same fundamental plan as that upon which these parts are modelled in reptiles. On comparing the pelvis and hind limb of the ornithoscelidan with that of the crocodile, on the one side, and that of the bird, on the other (Fig. 6), it is obvious that it represents a middle term between the two. The pelvic bones approach the form of those of the birds, and the direction of the pubis and ischium is nearly that which is characteristic of birds; the thigh bone, from the direction of its head, must have lain close to the body; the tibia has a great crest; and, immovably fitted on to its lower end, there is a pulley-shaped bone, like that of the bird, but remaining distinct. The lower end of the fibula is much more slender, proportionally, than in the crocodile. The metatarsal bones have such a form that they fit together immovably, though they do not enter into bony union; the third toe is, as in the bird, longest and strongest. In fact, the ornithoscelidan limb is comparable to that of an unhatched chick. [Illustration: FIG. 7.--RESTORATION OF COMPSOGNATHUS LONGIPES.] Taking all these facts together, it is obvious that the view, which was entertained by Mantell and the probability of which was demonstrated by your own distinguished anatomist, Leidy, while much additional evidence in the same direction has been furnished by Professor Cope, that some of these animals may have walked upon their hind legs, as birds do, acquires great weight. In fact, there can be no reasonable doubt that one of the smaller forms of the _Ornithoscelida, Compsognathus_, the almost entire skeleton of which has been discovered in the Solenhofen slates, was a bipedal animal. The parts of this skeleton are somewhat twisted out of their natural relations, but the accompanying figure gives a just view of the general form of _Compsognathus_ and of the proportions of its limbs; which, in some respects, are more completely bird-like than those of other _Ornithoscelida_. We have had to stretch the definition of the class of birds so as to include birds with teeth and birds with paw-like fore-limbs and long tails. There is no evidence that _Compsognathus_ possessed feathers; but, if it did, it would be hard indeed to say whether it should be called a reptilian bird or an avian reptile. As _Compsognathus_ walked upon its hind legs, it must have made tracks like those of birds. And as the structure of the limbs of several of the gigantic _Ornithoscelida_, such as _Iguandon_, leads to the conclusion that they also may have constantly, or occasionally, assumed the same attitude, a peculiar interest attaches to the fact that, in the Wealden strata of England, there are to be found gigantic footsteps, arranged in order like those of the _Brontozoum_, and which there can be no reasonable doubt were made by some of the _Ornithoscelida_, the remains of which are found in the same rocks. And, knowing that reptiles that walked upon their hind legs and shared many of the anatomical characters of birds did once exist, it becomes a very important question whether the tracks in the Trias of Massachusetts, to which I referred some time ago, and which formerly used to be unhesitatingly ascribed to birds may not all have been made by Ornithoscelidan reptiles; and whether, if we could obtain the skeletons of the animals which made these tracks, we should not find in them the actual steps of the evolutional process by which reptiles gave rise to birds. The evidential value of the facts I have brought forward in this Lecture must be neither over nor under estimated. It is not historical proof of the occurrence of the evolution of birds from reptiles, for we have no safe ground for assuming that true birds had not made their appearance at the commencement of the Mesozoic epoch. It is in fact, quite possible that all these more or less aviform reptiles of the Mesozoic epoch are not terms in the series of progression from birds to reptiles at all, but simply the more or less modified descendants of Palæozoic forms through which that transition was actually effected. [Illustration: FIG. 8.--PTERODACTYLUS SPECTABILIS (Von Meyer).] We are not in a position to say that the known _Ornithoscelida_ are intermediate in the order of their appearance on the earth between reptiles and birds. All that can be said is that, if independent evidence of the actual occurrence of evolution is producible, then these intercalary forms remove every difficulty in the way of understanding what the actual steps of the process, in the case of birds, may have been. That intercalary forms should have existed in ancient times is a necessary consequence of the truth of the hypothesis of evolution; and, hence, the evidence I have laid before you in proof of the existence of such forms, is, so far as it goes, in favour of that hypothesis. There is another series of extinct reptiles which may be said to be intercalary between reptiles and birds, in so far as they combine some of the characters of these groups; and which, as they possessed the power of flight, may seem, at first sight, to be nearer representatives of the forms by which the transition from the reptile to the bird was effected, than the _Ornithoscelida_. These are the _Pterosauria_, or Pterodactyles, the remains of which are met with throughout the series of Mesozoic rocks, from the lias to the chalk, and some of which attain a great size, their wings having a span of eighteen or twenty feet. These animals, in the form and proportions of the head and neck relatively to the body, and in the fact that the ends of the jaws were often, if not always, more or less extensively ensheathed in horny beaks, remind us of birds. Moreover, their bones contained air cavities, rendering them specifically lighter, as is the case in most birds. The breast-bone was large and keeled, as in most birds and in bats, and the shoulder girdle is strikingly similar to that of ordinary birds. But it seems to me that the special resemblance of pterodactyles to birds ends here, unless I may add the entire absence of teeth which characterises the great pterodactyles (_Pteranodon_) discovered by Professor Marsh. All other known pterodactyles have teeth lodged in sockets. In the vertebral column and the hind-limbs there are no special resemblances to birds, and when we turn to the wings they are found to be constructed on a totally different principle from those of birds. There are four fingers. These four fingers are large, and three of them, those which answer to the thumb and two following fingers in my hand--are terminated by claws, while the fourth is enormously prolonged and converted into a great jointed style. You see at once, from what I have stated about a bird's wing, that there could be nothing less like a bird's wing than this is. It was concluded by general reasoning that this finger had the office of supporting a web which extended between it and the body. An existing specimen proves that such was really the case, and that the pterodactyles were devoid of feathers, but that the fingers supported a vast web like that of a bat's wing; in fact, there can be no doubt that this ancient reptile flew after the fashion of a bat. Thus, though the pterodactyle is a reptile which has become modified in such a manner as to enable it to fly, and therefore, as might be expected, presents some points of resemblance to other animals which fly; it has, so to speak, gone off the line which leads directly from reptiles to birds, and has become disqualified for the changes which lead to the characteristic organisation of the latter class. Therefore, viewed in relation to the classes of reptiles and birds, the pterodactyles appear to me to be, in a limited sense, intercalary forms; but they are not even approximately linear, in the sense of exemplifying those modifications of structure through which the passage from the reptile to the bird took place. III THE DEMONSTRATIVE EVIDENCE OF EVOLUTION The occurrence of historical facts is said to be demonstrated, when the evidence that they happened is of such a character as to render the assumption that they did not happen in the highest degree improbable; and the question I now have to deal with is, whether evidence in favour of the evolution of animals of this degree of cogency is, or is not, obtainable from the record of the succession of living forms which is presented to us by fossil remains. Those who have attended to the progress of palæontology are aware that evidence of the character which I have defined has been produced in considerable and continually-increasing quantity during the last few years. Indeed, the amount and the satisfactory nature of that evidence are somewhat surprising, when we consider the conditions under which alone we can hope to obtain it. It is obviously useless to seek for such evidence except in localities in which the physical conditions have been such as to permit of the deposit of an unbroken, or but rarely interrupted, series of strata through a long period of time in which the group of animals to be investigated has existed in such abundance as to furnish the requisite supply of remains; and in which, finally, the materials composing the strata are such as to ensure the preservation of these remains in a tolerably perfect and undisturbed state. It so happens that the case which, at present, most nearly fulfils all these conditions is that of the series of extinct animals which culminates in the horses, by which term I mean to denote not merely the domestic animals with which we are all so well acquainted, but their allies, the ass, zebra, quagga, and the like. In short, I use "horses" as the equivalent of the technical name _Equidæ_, which is applied to the whole group of existing equine animals. The horse is in many ways a remarkable animal; not least so in the fact that it presents us with an example of one of the most perfect pieces of machinery in the living world. In truth, among the works of human ingenuity it cannot be said that there is any locomotive so perfectly adapted to its purposes, doing so much work with so small a quantity of fuel, as this machine of Nature's manufacture--the horse. And, as a necessary consequence of any sort of perfection, of mechanical perfection as of others, you find that the horse is a beautiful creature, one of the most beautiful of all land animals. Look at the perfect balance of its form, and the rhythm and force of its action. The locomotive machinery is, as you are aware, resident in its slender fore and hind limbs; they are flexible and elastic levers, capable of being moved by very powerful muscles; and, in order to supply the engines which work these levers with the force which they expend, the horse is provided with a very perfect apparatus for grinding its food and extracting therefrom the requisite fuel. Without attempting to take you very far into the region of osteological detail, I must nevertheless trouble you with some statements respecting the anatomical structure of the horse; and, more especially, will it be needful to obtain a general conception of the structure of its fore and hind limbs, and of its teeth. But I shall only touch upon those points which are absolutely essential to our inquiry. Let us turn in the first place to the fore-limb. In most quadrupeds, as in ourselves, the fore-arm contains distinct bones called the radius and the ulna. The corresponding region in the horse seems at first to possess but one bone. Careful observation, however, enables us to distinguish in this bone a part which clearly answers to the upper end of the ulna. This is closely united with the chief mass of the bone which represents the radius, and runs out into a slender shaft which may be traced for some distance downwards upon the back of the radius, and then in most cases thins out and vanishes. It takes still more trouble to make sure of what is nevertheless the fact, that a small part of the lower end of the bone of the horse's fore-arm, which is only distinct in a very young foal, is really the lower extremity of the ulna. What is commonly called the knee of a horse is its wrist. The "cannon bone" answers to the middle bone of the five metacarpal bones, which support the palm of the hand in ourselves. The "pastern," "coronary," and "coffin" bones of veterinarians answer to the joints of our middle fingers, while the hoof is simply a greatly enlarged and thickened nail. But if what lies below the horse's "knee" thus corresponds to the middle finger in ourselves, what has become of the four other fingers or digits? We find in the places of the second and fourth digits only two slender splint-like bones, about two-thirds as long as the cannon-bone, which gradually taper to their lower ends and bear no finger joints, or, as they are termed, phalanges. Sometimes, small bony or gristly nodules are to be found at the bases of these two metacarpal splints, and it is probable that these represent rudiments of the first and fifth toes. Thus, the part of the horse's skeleton which corresponds with that of the human hand contains one overgrown middle digit, and at least two imperfect lateral digits; and these answer, respectively, to the third, the second, and the fourth fingers in man. Corresponding modifications are found in the hind limb. In ourselves, and in most quadrupeds, the leg contains two distinct bones, a large bone, the tibia, and a smaller and more slender bone, the fibula. But in the horse, the fibula seems, at first, to be reduced to its upper end; a short slender bone united with the tibia, and ending in a point below, occupying its place. Examination of the lower end of a young foal's shin-bone, however, shows a distinct portion of osseous matter, which is the lower end of the fibula; so that the apparently single lower end of the shin-bone is really made up of the coalesced ends of the tibia and fibula, just as the apparently single lower end of the fore-arm bone is composed of the coalesced radius and ulna. The heel of the horse is the part commonly known as the hock. The hinder cannon-bone answers to the middle metatarsal bone of the human foot, the pastern, coronary, and coffin bones, to the middle toe bones; the hind hoof to the nail, as in the fore-foot. And, as in the fore-foot, there are merely two splints to represent the second and the fourth toes. Sometimes a rudiment of a fifth toe appears to be traceable. The teeth of a horse are not less peculiar than its limbs. The living engine, like all others, must be well stoked if it is to do its work; and the horse, if it is to make good its wear and tear, and to exert the enormous amount of force required for its propulsion, must be well and rapidly fed. To this end, good cutting instruments and powerful and lasting crushers are needful. Accordingly, the twelve cutting teeth of a horse are close-set and concentrated in the fore-part of its mouth, like so many adzes or chisels. The grinders or molars are large, and have an extremely complicated structure, being composed of a number of different substances of unequal hardness. The consequence of this is that they wear away at different rates; and, hence, the surface of each grinder is always as uneven as that of a good millstone. I have said that the structure of the grinding teeth is very complicated, the harder and the softer parts being, as it were, interlaced with one another. The result of this is that, as the tooth wears, the crown presents a peculiar pattern, the nature of which is not very easily deciphered at first; but which it is important we should understand clearly. Each grinding tooth of the upper jaw has an _outer wall_ so shaped that, on the worn crown, it exhibits the form of two crescents, one in front and one behind, with their concave sides turned outwards. From the inner side of the front crescent, a crescentic _front ridge_ passes inwards and backwards, and its inner face enlarges into a strong longitudinal fold or _pillar_. From the front part of the hinder crescent, a _back ridge_ takes a like direction, and also has its _pillar_. The deep interspaces or _valleys_ between these ridges and the outer wall are filled by bony substance, which is called _cement_, and coats the whole tooth. The pattern of the worn face of each grinding tooth of the lower jaw is quite different. It appears to be formed of two crescent-shaped ridges, the convexities of which are turned outwards. The free extremity of each crescent has a _pillar_, and there is a large double _pillar_ where the two crescents meet; The whole structure is, as it were, imbedded in cement, which fills up the valleys, as in the upper grinders. If the grinding faces of an upper and of a lower molar of the same side are applied together, it will be seen that the apposed ridges are nowhere parallel, but that they frequently cross; and that thus, in the act of mastication, a hard surface in the one is constantly applied to a soft surface in the other, and _vice versa_. They thus constitute a grinding apparatus of great efficiency, and one which is repaired as fast as it wears, owing to the long-continued growth of the teeth. Some other peculiarities of the dentition of the horse must be noticed, as they bear upon what I shall have to say by and by. Thus the crowns of the cutting teeth have a peculiar deep pit, which gives rise to the well-known "mark" of the horse. There is a large space between the outer incisors and the front grinder. In this space the adult male horse presents, near the incisors on each side, above and below, a canine or "tush," which is commonly absent in mares. In a young horse, moreover, there is not unfrequently to be seen in front of the first grinder, a very small tooth, which soon falls out. If this small tooth be counted as one, it will be found that there are seven teeth behind the canine on each side; namely, the small tooth in question, and the six great grinders, among which, by an unusual peculiarity, the foremost tooth is rather larger than those which follow it. I have now enumerated those characteristic structures of the horse which are of most importance for the purpose we have in view. To any one who is acquainted with the morphology of vertebrated animals, they show that the horse deviates widely from the general structure of mammals; and that the horse type is, in many respects, an extreme modification of the general mammalian plan. The least modified mammals, in fact, have the radius and ulna, the tibia and fibula, distinct and separate. They have five distinct and complete digits on each foot, and no one of these digits is very much larger than the rest. Moreover, in the least modified mammals, the total number of the teeth is very generally forty-four, while in horses, the usual number is forty, and in the absence of the canines, it may be reduced to thirty-six; the incisor teeth are devoid of the fold seen in those of the horse: the grinders regularly diminish in size from the middle of the series to its front end; while their crowns are short, early attain their full length, and exhibit simple ridges or tubercles, in place of the complex foldings of the horse's grinders. Hence the general principles of the hypothesis of evolution lead to the conclusion that the horse must have been derived from some quadruped which possessed five complete digits on each foot; which had the bones of the fore-arm and of the leg complete and separate; and which possessed forty-four teeth, among which the crowns of the incisors and grinders had a simple structure; while the latter gradually increased in size from before backwards, at any rate in the anterior part of the series, and had short crowns. And if the horse has been thus evolved, and the remains of the different stages of its evolution have been preserved, they ought to present us with a series of forms in which the number of the digits becomes reduced; the bones of the fore-arm and leg gradually take on the equine condition; and the form and arrangement of the teeth successively approximate to those which obtain in existing horses. Let us turn to the facts, and see how far they fulfil these requirements of the doctrine of evolution. In Europe abundant remains of horses are found in the Quaternary and later Tertiary strata as far as the Pliocene formation. But these horses, which are so common in the cave-deposits and in the gravels of Europe, are in all essential respects like existing horses. And that is true of all the horses of the latter part of the Pliocene epoch. But, in deposits which belong to the earlier Pliocene and later Miocene epochs, and which occur in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Greece, in India, we find animals which are extremely like horses--which, in fact, are so similar to horses, that you may follow descriptions given in works upon the anatomy of the horse upon the skeletons of these animals--but which differ in some important particulars. For example, the structure of their fore and hind limbs is somewhat different. The bones which, in the horse, are represented by two splints, imperfect below, are as long as the middle metacarpal and metatarsal bones; and, attached to the extremity of each, is a digit with three joints of the same general character as those of the middle digit, only very much smaller. These small digits are so disposed that they could have had but very little functional importance, and they must have been rather of the nature of the dew-claws, such as are to be found in many ruminant animals. The _Hipparion_, as the extinct European three-toed horse is called, in fact, presents a foot similar to that of the American _Protohippus_ (Fig. 9), except that, in the _Hipparion_, the smaller digits are situated farther back, and are of smaller proportional size, than in the _Protohippus_. The ulna is slightly more distinct than in the horse; and the whole length of it, as a very slender shaft, intimately united with the radius, is completely traceable. The fibula appears to be in the same condition as in the horse. The teeth of the _Hipparion_ are essentially similar to those of the horse, but the pattern of the grinders is in some respects a little more complex, and there is a depression on the face of the skull in front of the orbit, which is not seen in existing horses. In the earlier Miocene, and perhaps the later Eocene deposits of some parts of Europe, another extinct animal has been discovered, which Cuvier, who first described some fragments of it, considered to be a _Palæotherium_. But as further discoveries threw new light upon its structure, it was recognised as a distinct genus, under the name of _Anchitherium_. In its general characters, the skeleton of _Anchitherium_ is very similar to that of the horse. In fact, Lartet and De Blainville called it _Palæotherium equinum_ or _hippoides_; and De Christol, in 1847, said that it differed from _Hipparion_ in little more than the characters of its teeth, and gave it the name of _Hipparitherium_. Each foot possesses three complete toes; while the lateral toes are much larger in proportion to the middle toe than in _Hipparion_, and doubtless rested on the ground in ordinary locomotion. The ulna is complete and quite distinct from the radius, though firmly united with the latter. The fibula seems also to have been complete. Its lower end, though intimately united with that of the tibia, is clearly marked off from the latter bone. There are forty-four teeth. The incisors have no strong pit. The canines seem to have been well developed in both sexes. The first of the seven grinders, which, as I have said, is frequently absent, and, when it does exist, is small in the horse, is a good-sized and permanent tooth, while the grinder which follows it is but little larger than the hinder ones. The crowns of the grinders are short, and though the fundamental pattern of the horse-tooth is discernible, the front and back ridges are less curved, the accessory pillars are wanting, and the valleys, much shallower, are not filled up with cement. Seven years ago, when I happened to be looking critically into the bearing of palæontological facts upon the doctrine of evolution, it appeared to me that the _Anchitherium_, the _Hipparion_, and the modern horses, constitute a series in which the modifications of structure coincide with the order of chronological occurrence, in the manner in which they must coincide, if the modern horses really are the result of the gradual metamorphosis, in the course of the Tertiary epoch, of a less specialised ancestral form. And I found by correspondence with the late eminent French anatomist and palæontologist, M. Lartet, that he had arrived at the same conclusion from the same data. That the _Anchitherium_ type had become metamorphosed into the _Hipparion_ type, and the latter into the _Equine_ type, in the course of that period of time which is represented by the latter half of the Tertiary deposits, seemed to me to be the only explanation of the facts for which there was even a shadow of probability.[3] And, hence, I have ever since held that these facts afford evidence of the occurrence of evolution, which, in the sense already defined, may be termed demonstrative. All who have occupied themselves with the structure of _Anchitherium_, from Cuvier onwards, have acknowledged its many points of likeness to a well-known genus of extinct Eocene mammals, _Palæotherium_. Indeed, as we have seen, Cuvier regarded his remains of _Anchitherium_ as those of a species of _Palæotherium_. Hence, in attempting to trace the pedigree of the horse beyond the Miocene epoch and the Anchitheroid form, I naturally sought among the various species of Palæotheroid animals for its nearest ally, and I was led to conclude that the _Palæotherium minus_ (_Plagiolophus_) represented the next step more nearly than any form then known. I think that this opinion was fully justifiable; but the progress of investigation has thrown an unexpected light on the question, and has brought us much nearer than could have been anticipated to a knowledge of the true series of the progenitors of the horse. You are all aware that, when your country was first discovered by Europeans, there were no traces of the existence of the horse in any part of the American continent. The accounts of the conquest of Mexico dwell upon the astonishment of the natives of that country when they first became acquainted with that astounding phenomenon--a man seated upon a horse. Nevertheless, the investigations of American geologists have proved that the remains of horses occur in the most superficial deposits of both North and South America, just as they do in Europe. Therefore, for some reason or other--no feasible suggestion on that subject, so far as I know, has been made--the horse must have died out on this continent at some period preceding the discovery of America. Of late years there has been discovered in your Western Territories that marvellous accumulation of deposits, admirably adapted for the preservation of organic remains, to which I referred the other evening, and which furnishes us with a consecutive series of records of the fauna of the older half of the Tertiary epoch, for which we have no parallel in Europe. They have yielded fossils in an excellent state of conservation and in unexampled number and variety. The researches of Leidy and others have shown that forms allied to the _Hipparion_ and the _Anchitherium_ are to be found among these remains. But it is only recently that the admirably conceived and most thoroughly and patiently worked-out investigations of Professor Marsh have given us a just idea of the vast fossil wealth, and of the scientific importance, of these deposits. I have had the advantage of glancing over the collections in Yale Museum; and I can truly say that, so far as my knowledge extends, there is no collection from any one region and series of strata comparable, for extent, or for the care with which the remains have been got together, or for their scientific importance, to the series of fossils which he has deposited there. This vast collection has yielded evidence bearing upon the question of the pedigree of the horse of the most striking character. It tends to show that we must look to America, rather than to Europe, for the original seat of the equine series; and that the archaic forms and successive modifications of the horse's ancestry are far better preserved here than in Europe. Professor Marsh's kindness has enabled me to put before you a diagram, every figure in which is an actual representation of some specimen which is to be seen at Yale at this present time (Fig. 9). The succession of forms which he has brought together carries us from the top to the bottom of the Tertiaries. Firstly, there is the true horse. Next we have the American Pliocene form of the horse (_Pliohippus_); in the conformation of its limbs it presents some very slight deviations from the ordinary horse, and the crowns of the grinding teeth are shorter. Then comes the _Protohippus_, which represents the European _Hipparion_, having one large digit and two small ones on each foot, and the general characters of the fore-arm and leg to which I have referred. But it is more valuable than the European _Hipparion_, for the reason that it is devoid of some of the peculiarities of that form--peculiarities which tend to show that the European _Hipparion_ is rather a member of a collateral branch, than a form in the direct line of succession. Next, in the backward order in time, is the _Miohippus_, which corresponds pretty nearly with the _Anchitherium_ of Europe. It presents three complete toes--one large median and two smaller lateral ones; and there is a rudiment of that digit, which answers to the little finger of the human hand. [Illustration: FIG. 9.] The European record of the pedigree of the horse stops here; in the American Tertiaries, on the contrary, the series of ancestral equine forms is continued into the Eocene formations. An older Miocene form, termed _Mesohippus_, has three toes in front, with a large splint-like rudiment representing the little finger; and three toes behind. The radius and ulna, the tibia and the fibula, are distinct, and the short crowned molar teeth are anchitherold in pattern. But the most important discovery of all is the _Orohippus_, which comes from the Eocene formation, and is the oldest member of the equine series as yet known. Here we find four complete toes on the front limb, three toes on the hind-limb, a well-developed ulna, a well-developed fibula, and short-crowned grinders of simple pattern. Thus, thanks to these important researches, it has become evident that, so far as our present knowledge extends, the history of the horse-type is exactly and precisely that which could have been predicted from a knowledge of the principles of evolution. And the knowledge we now possess justifies us completely in the anticipation, that when the still lower Eocene deposits, and those which belong to the cretaceous epoch, have yielded up their remains of ancestral equine animals, we shall find, first, a form with four complete toes and a rudiment of the innermost or first digit in front, with probably a rudiment of the fifth digit in the hind foot;[4] while, in still older forms, the series of the digits will be more and more complete, until we come to the five-toed animals, in which, if the doctrine of evolution is well founded, the whole series must have taken its orgin. That is what I mean by demonstrative evidence of evolution. An inductive hypothesis is said to be demonstrated when the facts are shown to be in entire accordance with it. If that is not scientific proof, there are no merely inductive conclusions which can be said to be proved. And the doctrine of evolution, at the present time, rests upon exactly as secure a foundation as the Copernican theory of the motions of the heavenly bodies did at the time of its promulgation. Its logical basis is precisely of the same character--the coincidence of the observed facts with theoretical requirements. The only way of escape, if it be a way of escape, from the conclusions which I have just indicated, is the supposition that all these different equine forms have been created separately at separate epochs of time; and, I repeat, that of such an hypothesis as this there neither is, nor can be, any scientific evidence; and, assuredly so far as I know, there is none which is supported, or pretends to be supported, by evidence or authority of any other kind. I can but think that the time will come when such suggestions as these, such obvious attempts to escape the force of demonstration, will be put upon the same footing as the supposition made by some writers, who are I believe not completely extinct at present, that fossils are mere simulacra, are no indications of the former existence of the animals to which they seem to belong; but that they are either sports of Nature, or special creations, intended--as I heard suggested the other day--to test our faith. In fact, the whole evidence is in favour of evolution, and there is none against it. And I say this, although perfectly well aware of the seeming difficulties which have been built up upon what appears to the uninformed to be a solid foundation. I meet constantly with the argument that the doctrine of evolution cannot be well founded, because it requires the lapse of a very vast period of time; while the duration of life upon the earth thus implied is inconsistent with the conclusions arrived at by the astronomer and the physicist. I may venture to say that I am familiar with those conclusions, inasmuch as some years ago, when President of the Geological Society of London, I took the liberty of criticising them, and of showing in what respects, as it appeared to me, they lacked complete and thorough demonstration. But, putting that point aside, suppose that, as the astronomers, or some of them, and some physical philosophers, tell us, it is impossible that life could have endured upon the earth for as long a period as is required by the doctrine of evolution--supposing that to be proved--I desire to be informed, what is the foundation for the statement that evolution does require so great a time? The biologist knows nothing whatever of the amount of time which may be required for the process of evolution. It is a matter of fact that the equine forms which I have described to you occur, in the order stated, in the Tertiary formations. But I have not the slightest means of guessing whether it took a million of years, or ten millions, or a hundred millions, or a thousand millions of years, to give rise to that series of changes. A biologist has no means of arriving at any conclusion as to the amount of time which may be needed for a certain quantity of organic change. He takes his time from the geologist. The geologist, considering the rate at which deposits are formed and the rate at which denudation goes on upon the surface of the earth, arrives at more or less justifiable conclusions as to the time which is required for the deposit of a certain thickness of rocks; and if he tells me that the Tertiary formations required 500,000,000 years for their deposit, I suppose he has good ground for what he says, and I take that as a measure of the duration of the evolution of the horse from the _Orohippus_ up to its present condition. And, if he is right, undoubtedly evolution is a very slow process and requires a great deal of time. But suppose, now, that an astronomer or a physicist--for instance, my friend Sir William Thomson--tells me that my geological authority is quite wrong; and that he has weighty evidence to show that life could not possibly have existed upon the surface of the earth 500,000,000 years ago, because the earth would have then been too hot to allow of life, my reply is: "That is not my affair; settle that with the geologist, and when you have come to an agreement among yourselves I will adopt your conclusion." We take our time from the geologists and physicists; and it is monstrous that having taken our time from the physical philosopher's clock, the physical philosopher should turn round upon us, and say we are too fast or too slow. What we desire to know is, is it a fact that evolution took place? As to the amount of time which evolution may have occupied, we are in the hands of the physicist and the astronomer, whose business it is to deal with those questions. I have now, ladies and gentlemen, arrived at the conclusion of the task which I set before myself when I undertook to deliver these lectures. My purpose has been, not to enable those among you who have paid no attention to these subjects before, to leave this room in a condition to decide upon the validity or the invalidity of the hypothesis of evolution; but I have desired to put before you the principles upon which all hypotheses respecting the history of Nature must be judged; and furthermore, to make apparent the nature of the evidence and the amount of cogency which is to be expected and may be obtained from it. To this end, I have not hesitated to regard you as genuine students and persons desirous of knowing the truth. I have not shrunk from taking you through long discussions, that I fear may have sometimed tried your patience; and I have inflicted upon you details which were indispensable, but which may well have been wearisome. But I shall rejoice--I shall consider that I have done you the greatest service which it was in my power to do--if I have thus convinced you that the great question which we have been discussing is not one to be dealt with by rhetorical flourishes, or by loose and superficial talk; but that it requires the keen attention of the trained intellect and the patience of the accurate observer. ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE [1868] In order to make the title of this discourse generally intelligible, I have translated the term "Protoplasm," which is the scientific name of the substance of which I am about to speak, by the words "the physical basis of life." I suppose that, to many, the idea that there is such a thing as a physical basis, or matter, of life may be novel--so widely spread is the conception of life as a something which works through matter, but is independent of it; and even those who are aware that matter and life are inseparably connected, may not be prepared for the conclusion plainly suggested by the phrase, "_the_ physical basis or matter of life," that there is some one kind of matter which is common to all living beings, and that their endless diversities are bound together by a physical, as well as an ideal, unity. In fact, when first apprehended, such a doctrine as this appears almost shocking to common sense. What, truly, can seem to be more obviously different from one another, in faculty, in form, and in substance, than the various kinds of living beings? What community of faculty can there be between the brightly-coloured lichen, which so nearly resembles a mere mineral incrustation of the bare rock on which it grows, and the painter, to whom it is instinct with beauty, or the botanist, whom it feeds with knowledge? Again, think of the microscopic fungus--a mere infinitesimal ovoid particle, which finds space and duration enough to multiply into countless millions in the body of a living fly; and then of the wealth of foliage, the luxuriance of flower and fruit, which lies between this bald sketch of a plant and the giant pine of California, towering to the dimensions of a cathedral spire, or the Indian fig, which covers acres with its profound shadow, and endures while nations and empires come and go around its vast circumference. Or, turning to the other half of the world of life, picture to yourselves the great Finner whale, hugest of beasts that live, or have lived, disporting his eighty or ninety feet of bone, muscle, and blubber, with easy roll, among waves in which the stoutest ship that ever left dockyard would flounder hopelessly; and contrast him with the invisible animalcules--mere gelatinous specks, multitudes of which could, in fact, dance upon the point of a needle with the same ease as the angels of the Schoolmen could, in imagination. With these images before your minds, you may well ask, what community of form, or structure, is there between the animalcule and the whale; or between the fungus and the fig-tree? And, _a fortiori_, between all four? Finally, if we regard substance, or material composition, what hidden bond can connect the flower which a girl wears in her hair and the blood which courses through her youthful veins; or, what is there in common between the dense and resisting mass of the oak, or the strong fabric of the tortoise, and those broad disks of glassy jelly which may be seen pulsating through the waters of a calm sea, but which drain away to mere films in the hand which raises them out of their element? Such objections as these must, I think, arise in the mind of every one who ponders, for the first time, upon the conception of a single physical basis of life underlying all the diversities of vital existence; but I propose to demonstrate to you that, notwithstanding these apparent difficulties, a threefold unity--namely, a unity of power or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substantial composition--does pervade the whole living world. No very abstruse argumentation is needed, in the first place, to prove that the powers, or faculties, of all kinds of living matter, diverse as they may be in degree, are substantially similar in kind. Goethe has condensed a survey of all powers of mankind into the well-known epigram:-- "Warum treibt sich das Volk so und schreit? Es will sich ernähren Kinder zeugen, und die nähren so gut es vermag. * * * * * Weiter bringt es kein Mensch, stell' er sich wie er auch will." In physiological language this means, that all the multifarious and complicated activities of man are comprehensible under three categories. Either they are immediately directed towards the maintenance and development of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body, or they tend towards the continuance of the species. Even those manifestations of intellect, of feeling, and of will, which we rightly name the higher faculties, are not excluded from this classification, inasmuch as to every one but the subject of them, they are known only as transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body. Speech, gesture, and every other form of human action are, in the long run, resolvable into muscular contraction, and muscular contraction is but a transitory change in the relative positions of the parts of a muscle. But the scheme which is large enough to embrace the activities of the highest form of life, covers all those of the lower creatures. The lowest plant, or animalcule, feeds, grows, and reproduces its kind. In addition, all animals manifest those transitory changes of form which we class under irritability and contractility; and, it is more than probable, that when the vegetable world is thoroughly explored, we shall find all plants in possession of the same powers, at one time or other of their existence. I am not now alluding to such phænomena, at once rare and conspicuous, as those exhibited by the leaflets of the sensitive plants, or the stamens of the barberry, but to much more widely spread, and at the same time, more subtle and hidden, manifestations of vegetable contractility. You are doubtless aware that the common nettle owes its stinging property to the innumerable stiff and needle-like, though exquisitely delicate, hairs which cover its surface. Each stinging-needle tapers from a broad base to a slender summit, which, though rounded at the end, is of such microscopic fineness that it readily penetrates, and breaks off in, the skin. The whole hair consists of a very delicate outer case of wood, closely applied to the inner surface of which is a layer of semi-fluid matter, full of innumerable granules of extreme minuteness. This semi-fluid lining is protoplasm, which thus constitutes a kind of bag, full of a limpid liquid, and roughly corresponding in form with the interior of the hair which it fills. When viewed with a sufficiently high magnifying power, the protoplasmic layer of the nettle hair is seen to be in a condition of unceasing activity. Local contractions of the whole thickness of its substance pass slowly and gradually from point to point, and give rise to the appearance of progressive waves, just as the bending of successive stalks of corn by a breeze produces the apparent billows of a cornfield. But, in addition to these movements, and independently of them, the granules are driven, in relatively rapid streams, through channels in the protoplasm which seem to have a considerable amount of persistence. Most commonly, the currents in adjacent parts of the protoplasm take similar directions; and, thus, there is a general stream up one side of the hair and down the other. But this does not prevent the existence of partial currents which take different routes; and sometimes trains of granules may be seen coursing swiftly in opposite directions within a twenty-thousandth of an inch of one another; while, occasionally, opposite streams come into direct collision, and, after a longer or shorter struggle, one predominates. The cause of these currents seems to lie in contractions of the protoplasm which bounds the channels in which they flow, but which are so minute that the best microscopes show only their effects, and not themselves. The spectacle afforded by the wonderful energies prisoned within the compass of the microscopic hair of a plant, which we commonly regard as a merely passive organism, is not easily forgotten by one who has watched its display, continued hour after hour, without pause or sign of weakening. The possible complexity of many other organic forms, seemingly as simple as the protoplasm of the nettle, dawns upon one; and the comparison of such a protoplasm to a body with an internal circulation, which has been put forward by an eminent physiologist, loses much of its startling character. Currents similar to those of the hairs of the nettle have been observed in a great multitude of very different plants, and weighty authorities have suggested that they probably occur, in more or less perfection, in all young vegetable cells. If such be the case, the wonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest is, after all, due only to the dulness of our hearing; and could our ears catch the murmur of these tiny Maelstroms, as they whirl in the innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city. Among the lower plants, it is the rule rather than the exception, that contractility should be still more openly manifested at some periods of their existence. The protoplasm of _Algæ_ and _Fungi_ becomes, under many circumstances, partially, or completely, freed from its woody case, and exhibits movements of its whole mass, or is propelled by the contractility of one, or more, hair-like prolongations of its body, which are called vibratile cilia. And, so far as the conditions of the manifestation of the phænomena of contractility have yet been studied, they are the same for the plant as for the animal. Heat and electric shocks influence both, and in the same way, though it may be in different degrees. It is by no means my intention to suggest that there is no difference in faculty between the lowest plant and the highest, or between plants and animals. But the difference between the powers of the lowest plant, or animal, and those of the highest, is one of degree, not of kind, and depends, as Milne-Edwards long ago so well pointed out, upon the extent to which the principle of the division of labour is carried out in the living economy. In the lowest organism all parts are competent to perform all functions, and one and the same portion of protoplasm may successfully take on the function of feeding, moving, or reproducing apparatus. In the highest, on the contrary, a great number of parts combine to perform each function, each part doing its allotted share of the work with great accuracy and efficiency, but being useless for any other purpose. On the other hand, notwithstanding all the fundamental resemblances which exist between the powers of the protoplasm in plants and in animals, they present a striking difference (to which I shall advert more at length presently), in the fact that plants can manufacture fresh protoplasm out of mineral compounds, whereas animals are obliged to procure it ready made, and hence, in the long run, depend upon plants. Upon what condition this difference in the powers of the two great divisions of the world of life depends, nothing is at present known. With such qualification as arises out of the last-mentioned fact, it may be truly said that the acts of all living things are fundamentally one. Is any such unity predicable of their forms? Let us seek in easily verified facts for a reply to this question. If a drop of blood be drawn by pricking one's finger, and viewed with proper precautions, and under a sufficiently high microscopic power, there will be seen, among the innumerable multitude of little, circular, discoidal bodies, or corpuscles, which float in it and give it its colour, a comparatively small number of colourless corpuscles, of somewhat larger size and very irregular shape. If the drop of blood be kept at the temperature of the body, these colourless corpuscles will be seen to exhibit a marvellous activity, changing their forms with great rapidity, drawing in and thrusting out prolongations of their substance, and creeping about as if they were independent organisms. The substance which is thus active is a mass of protoplasm, and its activity differs in detail, rather than in principle, from that of the protoplasm of the nettle. Under sundry circumstances the corpuscle dies and becomes distended into a round mass, in the midst of which is seen a smaller spherical body, which existed, but was more or less hidden, in the living corpuscle, and is called its _nucleus_. Corpuscles of essentially similar structure are to be found in the skin, in the lining of the mouth, and scattered through the whole framework of the body. Nay, more; in the earliest condition of the human organism, in that state in which it has but just become distinguishable from the egg in which it arises, it is nothing but an aggregation of such corpuscles, and every organ of the body was, once, no more than such an aggregation. Thus a nucleated mass of protoplasm turns out to be what may be termed the structural unit of the human body. As a matter of fact, the body, in its earliest state, is a mere multiple of such units; and in its perfect condition, it is a multiple of such units, variously modified. But does the formula which expresses the essential structural character of the highest animal cover all the rest, as the statement of its powers and faculties covered that of all others? Very nearly. Beast and fowl, reptile and fish, mollusk, worm, and polype, are all composed of structural units of the same character, namely, masses of protoplasm with a nucleus. There are sundry very low animals, each of which, structurally, is a mere colourless blood-corpuscle, leading an independent life. But at the very bottom of the animal scale, even this simplicity becomes simplified, and all the phænomena of life are manifested by a particle of protoplasm without a nucleus. Nor are such organisms insignificant by reason of their want of complexity. It is a fair question whether the protoplasm of those simplest forms of life, which people an immense extent of the bottom of the sea, would not outweigh that of all the higher living beings which inhabit the land put together. And in ancient times, no less than at the present day, such living beings as these have been the greatest of rock builders. What has been said of the animal world is no less true of plants. Embedded in the protoplasm at the broad, or attached, end of the nettle hair, there lies a spheroidal nucleus. Careful examination further proves that the whole substance of the nettle is made up of a repetition of such masses of nucleated protoplasm, each contained in a wooden case, which is modified in form, sometimes into a woody fibre, sometimes into a duct or spiral vessel, sometimes into a pollen grain, or an ovule. Traced back to its earliest state, the nettle arises as the man does, in a particle of nucleated protoplasm. And in the lowest plants, as in the lowest animals, a single mass of such protoplasm may constitute the whole plant, or the protoplasm may exist without a nucleus. Under these circumstances it may well be asked, how is one mass of non-nucleated protoplasm to be distinguished from another? why call one "plant" and the other "animal"? The only reply is that, so far as form is concerned, plants and animals are not separable, and that, in many cases, it is a mere matter of convention whether we call a given organism an animal or a plant. There is a living body called _�thalium septicum_, which appears upon decaying vegetable substances, and, in one of its forms, is common upon the surfaces of tan-pits. In this condition it is, to all intents and purposes, a fungus, and formerly was always regarded as such; but the remarkable investigations of De Bary have shown that, in another condition, the _�thalium_ is an actively locomotive creature, and takes in solid matters, upon which, apparently, it feeds, thus exhibiting the most characteristic feature of animality. Is this a plant; or is it an animal? Is it both; or is it neither? Some decide in favour of the last supposition, and establish an intermediate kingdom, a sort of biological No Man's Land for all these questionable forms. But, as it is admittedly impossible to draw any distinct boundary line between this no man's land and the vegetable world, on the one hand, or the animal, on the other, it appears to me that this proceeding merely doubles the difficulty which, before, was single. Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod. Thus it becomes clear that all living powers are cognate, and that all living forms are fundamentally of one character. The researches of the chemist have revealed a no less striking uniformity of material composition in living matter. In perfect strictness, it is true that chemical investigation can tell us little or nothing, directly, of the composition of living matter, inasmuch as such matter must needs die in the act of analysis,--and upon this very obvious ground, objections, which I confess seem to me to be somewhat frivolous, have been raised to the drawing of any conclusions whatever respecting the composition of actually living matter, from that of the dead matter of life, which alone is accessible to us. But objectors of this class do not seem to reflect that it is also, in strictness, true that we know nothing about the composition of any body whatever, as it is. The statement that a crystal of calc-spar consists of carbonate of lime, is quite true, if we only mean that, by appropriate processes, it may be resolved into carbonic acid and quicklime. If you pass the same carbonic acid over the very quicklime thus obtained, you will obtain carbonate of lime again; but it will not be calc-spar, nor anything like it. Can it, therefore, be said that chemical analysis teaches nothing about the chemical composition of calc-spar? Such a statement would be absurd; but it is hardly more so than the talk one occasionally hears about the uselessness of applying the results of chemical analysis to the living bodies which have yielded them. One fact, at any rate, is out of reach of such refinements, and this is, that all the forms of protoplasm which have yet been examined contain the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in very complex union, and that they behave similarly towards several reagents. To this complex combination, the nature of which has never been determined with exactness, the name of Protein has been applied. And if we use this term with such caution as may properly arise out of our comparative ignorance of the things for which it stands, it may be truly said, that all protoplasm is proteinaceous, or, as the white, or albumen, of an egg is one of the commonest examples of a nearly pure proteine matter, we may say that all living matter is more or less albuminoid. Perhaps it would not yet be safe to say that all forms of protoplasm are affected by the direct action of electric shocks; and yet the number of cases in which the contraction of protoplasm is shown to be affected by this agency increases every day. Nor can it be affirmed with perfect confidence, that all forms of protoplasm are liable to undergo that peculiar coagulation at a temperature of 40°-50° centigrade, which has been called "heat-stiffening," though Kühne's beautiful researches have proved this occurrence to take place in so many and such diverse living beings, that it is hardly rash to expect that the law holds good for all. * * * * * Enough has, perhaps, been said to prove the existence of a general uniformity in the character of the protoplasm, or physical basis, of life, in whatever group of living beings it may be studied. But it will be understood that this general uniformity by no means excludes any amount of special modifications of the fundamental substance. The mineral, carbonate of lime, assumes an immense diversity of characters, though no one doubts that, under all these Protean changes, it is one and the same thing. And now, what is the ultimate fate, and what the origin, of the matter of life? Is it, as some of the older naturalists supposed, diffused throughout the universe in molecules, which are indestructible and unchangeable in themselves; but, in endless transmigration, unite in innumerable permutations, into the diversified forms of life we know? Or, is the matter of life composed of ordinary matter, differing from it only in the manner in which its atoms are aggregated? Is it built up of ordinary matter, and again resolved into ordinary matter when its work is done? Modern science does not hesitate a moment between these alternatives. Physiology writes, over the portals of life-- "Debemur morti nos nostraque," with a profounder meaning than the Roman poet attached to that melancholy line. Under whatever disguise it takes refuge, whether fungus or oak; worm or man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless it died. In the wonderful story of the "Peau de Chagrin," the hero becomes possessed of a magical wild ass' skin, which yields him the means of gratifying all his wishes. But its surface represents the duration of the proprietor's life; and for every satisfied desire the skin shrinks in proportion to the intensity of fruition, until at length life and the last hand-breadth of the _peau de chagrin_, disappear with the gratification of a last wish. Balzac's studies had led him over a wide range of thought and speculation, and his shadowing forth of physiological truth in this strange story may have been intentional. At any rate, the matter of life is a veritable _peau de chagrin_, and for every vital act it is somewhat the smaller. All work implies waste, and the work of life results, directly or indirectly, in the waste of protoplasm. Every word uttered by a speaker costs him some physical loss; and, in the strictest sense, he burns that others may have light--so much eloquence, so much of his body resolved into carbonic acid, water, and urea. It is clear that this process of expenditure cannot go on for ever. But, happily, the protoplasmic _peau de chagrin_ differs from Balzac's in its capacity of being repaired, and brought back to its full size, after every exertion. For example, this present lecture, whatever its intellectual worth to you, has a certain physical value to me, which is, conceivably, expressible by the number of grains of protoplasm and other bodily substance wasted in maintaining my vital processes during its delivery. My _peau de chagrin_ will be distinctly smaller at the end of the discourse than it was at the beginning. By and by, I shall probably have recourse to the substance commonly called mutton, for the purpose of stretching it back to its original size. Now this mutton was once the living protoplasm, more or less modified, of another animal--a sheep. As I shall eat it, it is the same matter altered, not only by death, but by exposure to sundry artificial operations in the process of cooking. But these changes, whatever be their extent, have not rendered it incompetent to resume its old functions as matter of life. A singular inward laboratory, which I possess, will dissolve a certain portion of the modified protoplasm; the solution so formed will pass into my veins; and the subtle influences to which it will then be subjected will convert the dead protoplasm into living protoplasm, and transubstantiate sheep into man. Nor is this all. If digestion were a thing to be trifled with, I might sup upon lobster, and the matter of life of the crustacean would undergo the same wonderful metamorphosis into humanity. And were I to return to my own place by sea, and undergo shipwreck, the crustacean might, and probably would, return the compliment, and demonstrate our common nature by turning my protoplasm into living lobster. Or, if nothing better were to be had, I might supply my wants with mere bread, and I should find the protoplasm of the wheat-plant to be convertible into man, with no more trouble than that of the sheep, and with far less, I fancy, than that of the lobster. Hence it appears to be a matter of no great moment what animal, or what plant, I lay under contribution for protoplasm, and the fact speaks volumes for the general identity of that substance in all living beings. I share this catholicity of assimilation with other animals, all of which, so far as we know, could thrive equally well on the protoplasm of any of their fellows, or of any plant; but here the assimilative powers of the animal world cease. A solution of smelling-salts in water, with an infinitesimal proportion of some other saline matters, contains all the elementary bodies which enter into the composition of protoplasm; but, as I need hardly say, a hogshead of that fluid would not keep a hungry man from starving, nor would it save any animal whatever from a like fate. An animal cannot make protoplasm, but must take it ready-made from some other animal, or some plant--the animal's highest feat of constructive chemistry being to convert dead protoplasm into that living matter of life which is appropriate to itself. Therefore, in seeking for the origin of protoplasm, we must eventually turn to the vegetable world. A fluid containing carbonic acid, water, and nitrogenous salts, which offers such a Barmecide feast to the animal, is a table richly spread to multitudes of plants; and, with a due supply of only such materials, many a plant will not only maintain itself in vigour, but grow and multiply until it has increased a million-fold, or a million million-fold, the quantity of protoplasm which it originally possessed; in this way building up the matter of life, to an indefinite extent, from the common matter of the universe. Thus, the animal can only raise the complex substance of dead protoplasm to the higher power, as one may say, of living protoplasm; while the plant can raise the less complex substances--carbonic acid, water, and nitrogenous salts--to the same stage of living protoplasm, if not to the same level. But the plant also has its limitations. Some of the fungi, for example, appear to need higher compounds to start with; and no known plant can live upon the uncompounded elements of protoplasm. A plant supplied with pure carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, and the like, would as infallibly die as the animal in his bath of smelling-salts, though it would be surrounded by all the constituents of protoplasm. Nor, indeed, need the process of simplification of vegetable food be carried so far as this, in order to arrive at the limit of the plant's thaumaturgy. Let water, carbonic acid, and all the other needful constituents be supplied except nitrogenous salts, and an ordinary plant will still be unable to manufacture protoplasm. Thus the matter of life, so far as we know it (and we have no right to speculate on any other), breaks up, in consequence of that continual death which is the condition of its manifesting vitality, into carbonic acid, water, and nitrogenous compounds, which certainly possess no properties but those of ordinary matter. And out of these same forms of ordinary matter, and from none which are simpler, the vegetable world builds up all the protoplasm which keeps the animal world a-going. Plants are the accumulators of the power which animals distribute and disperse. But it will be observed, that the existence of the matter of life depends on the pre-existence of certain compounds; namely, carbonic acid, water, and certain nitrogenous bodies. Withdraw any one of these three from the world, and all vital phænomena come to an end. They are as necessary to the protoplasm of the plant as the protoplasm of the plant is to that of the animal. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are all lifeless bodies. Of these, carbon and oxygen unite in certain proportions and under certain conditions, to give rise to carbonic acid; hydrogen and oxygen produce water; nitrogen and other elements give rise to nitrogenous salts. These new compounds, like the elementary bodies of which they are composed, are lifeless. But when they are brought together, under certain conditions, they give rise to the still more complex body, protoplasm, and this protoplasm exhibits the phænomena of life. I see no break in this series of steps in molecular complication, and I am unable to understand why the language which is applicable to any one term of the series may not be used to any of the others. We think fit to call different kinds of matter carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and to speak of the various powers and activities of these substances as the properties of the matter of which they are composed. When hydrogen and oxygen are mixed in a certain proportion, and an electric spark is passed through them, they disappear, and a quantity of water, equal in weight to the sum of their weights, appears in their place. There is not the slightest parity between the passive and active powers of the water and those of the oxygen and hydrogen which have given rise to it. At 32° Fahrenheit, and far below that temperature, oxygen and hydrogen are elastic gaseous bodies, whose particles tend to rush away from one another with great force. Water, at the same temperature, is a strong though brittle solid, whose particles tend to cohere into definite geometrical shapes, and sometimes build up frosty imitations of the most complex forms of vegetable foliage. Nevertheless we call these, and many other strange phænomena, the properties of the water, and we do not hesitate to believe that, in some way or another, they result from the properties of the component elements of the water. We do not assume that a something called "aquosity" entered into and took possession of the oxidated hydrogen as soon as it was formed, and then guided the aqueous particles to their places in the facets of the crystal, or amongst the leaflets of the hoarfrost. On the contrary, we live in the hope and in the faith that, by the advance of molecular physics, we shall by and by be able to see our way as clearly from the constituents of water to the properties of water, as we are now able to deduce the operations of a watch from the form of its parts and the manner in which they are put together. Is the case in any way changed when carbonic acid, water, and nitrogenous salts disappear, and in their place, under the influence of pre-existing living protoplasm, an equivalent weight of the matter of life makes its appearance? It is true that there is no sort of parity between the properties of the components and the properties of the resultant, but neither was there in the case of the water. It is also true that what I have spoken of as the influence of pre-existing living matter is something quite unintelligible; but does anybody quite comprehend the _modus operandi_ of an electric spark, which traverses a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen? What justification is there, then, for the assumption of the existence in the living matter of a something which has no representative, or correlative, in the not living matter which gave rise to it? What better philosophical status has "vitality" than "aquosity"? And why should "vitality" hope for a better fate than the other "itys" which have disappeared since Martinus Scriblerus accounted for the operation of the meat-jack by its inherent "meat-roasting quality," and scorned the "materialism" of those who explained the turning of the spit by a certain mechanism worked by the draught of the chimney. If scientific language is to possess a definite and constant signification whenever it is employed, it seems to me that we are logically bound to apply to the protoplasm, or physical basis of life, the same conceptions as those which are held to be legitimate elsewhere. If the phenomena exhibited by water are its properties, so are those presented by protoplasm, living or dead, its properties. If the properties of water may be properly said to result from the nature and disposition of its component molecules, I can find no intelligible ground for refusing to say that the properties of protoplasm result from the nature and disposition of its molecules. But I bid you beware that, in accepting these conclusions, you are placing your feet on the first rung of a ladder which, in most people's estimation, is the reverse of Jacob's, and leads to the antipodes of heaven. It may seem a small thing to admit that the dull vital actions of a fungus, or a foraminifer, are the properties of their protoplasm, and are the direct results of the nature of the matter of which they are composed. But if, as I have endeavoured to prove to you, their protoplasm is essentially identical with, and most readily converted into, that of any animal, I can discover no logical halting-place between the admission that such is the case, and the further concession that all vital action may, with equal propriety, be said to be the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it. And if so, it must be true, in the same sense and to the same extent, that the thoughts to which I am now giving utterance, and your thoughts regarding them, are the expression of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phænomena. Past experience leads me to be tolerably certain that, when the propositions I have just placed before you are accessible to public comment and criticism, they will be condemned by many zealous persons, and perhaps by some few of the wise and thoughtful. I should not wonder if "gross and brutal materialism" were the mildest phrase applied to them in certain quarters. And, most undoubtedly, the terms of the propositions are distinctly materialistic. Nevertheless two things are certain; the one, that I hold the statements to be substantially true; the other, that I, individually, am no materialist, but, on the contrary, believe materialism to involve grave philosophical error. This union of materialistic terminology with the repudiation of materialistic philosophy I share with some of the most thoughtful men with whom I am acquainted. And, when I first undertook to deliver the present discourse, it appeared to me to be a fitting opportunity to explain how such a union is not only consistent with, but necessitated by, sound logic. I purposed to lead you through the territory of vital phænomena to the materialistic slough in which you find yourselves now plunged, and then to point out to you the sole path by which, in my judgment, extrication is possible. An occurrence of which I was unaware until my arrival here last night renders this line of argument singularly opportune. I found in your papers the eloquent address "On the Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," which a distinguished prelate of the English Church delivered before the members of the Philosophical Institution on the previous day. My argument, also, turns upon this very point of the limits of philosophical inquiry; and I cannot bring out my own views better than by contrasting them with those so plainly and, in the main, fairly stated by the Archbishop of York. But I may be permitted to make a preliminary comment upon an occurrence that greatly astonished me. Applying the name of the "New Philosophy" to that estimate of the limits of philosophical inquiry which I, in common with many other men of science, hold to be just, the Archbishop opens his address by identifying this "New Philosophy" with the Positive Philosophy of M. Comte (of whom he speaks as its "founder"); and then proceeds to attack that philosopher and his doctrines vigorously. Now, so far as I am concerned, the most reverend prelate might dialectically hew M. Comte in pieces, as a modern Agag, and I should not attempt to stay his hand. In so far as my study of what specially characterises the Positive Philosophy has led me, I find therein little or nothing of any scientific value, and a great deal which is as thoroughly antagonistic to the very essence of science as anything in ultramontane Catholicism. In fact, M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as Catholicism _minus_ Christianity. But what has Comtism to do with the "New Philosophy," as the Archbishop, defines it in the following passage? "Let me briefly remind you of the leading principles of this new philosophy. "All knowledge is experience of facts acquired by the senses. The traditions of older philosophies have obscured our experience by mixing with it much that the senses cannot observe, and until these additions are discarded our knowledge is impure. Thus metaphysics tell us that one fact which we observe is a cause, and another is the effect of that cause; but, upon a rigid analysis, we find that our senses observe nothing of cause or effect: they observe, first, that one fact succeeds another, and, after some opportunity, that this fact has never failed to follow--that for cause and effect we should substitute invariable succession. An older philosophy teaches us to define an object by distinguishing its essential from its accidental qualities: but experience knows nothing of essential and accidental; she sees only that, certain marks attach to an object, and, after many observations, that some of them attach invariably, whilst others may at times be absent.... As all knowledge is relative, the notion of anything being necessary must be banished with other traditions." [5] There is much here that expresses the spirit of the "New Philosophy," if by that term be meant the spirit of modern science; but I cannot but marvel that the assembled wisdom and learning of Edinburgh should have uttered no sign of dissent, when Comte was declared to be the founder of these doctrines. No one will accuse Scotchmen of habitually forgetting their great countrymen; but it was enough to make David Hume turn in his grave, that here, almost within ear-shot of his house, an instructed audience should have listened, without a murmur, while his most characteristic doctrines were attributed to a French writer of fifty years later date, in whose dreary and verbose pages we miss alike the vigour of thought and the exquisite clearness of style of the man whom I make bold to term the most acute thinker of the eighteenth century--even though that century produced Kant. But I did not come to Scotland to vindicate the honour of one of the neatest men she has ever produced. My business is to point out to you that the only way of escape out of the "crass materialism" in which we just now landed, is the adoption and strict working out of the very principles which the Archbishop holds up to reprobation. Let us suppose that knowledge is absolute, and not relative, and therefore, that our conception of matter represents that which it really is. Let us suppose, further, that we do know more of cause and effect than a certain definite order of succession among facts, and that we have a knowledge of the necessity of that succession--and hence, of necessary laws--and I, for my part, do not see what escape there is from utter materialism and necessarianism. For it is obvious that our knowledge of what we call the material world is, to begin with, at least as certain and definite as that of the spiritual world, and that our acquaintance with law is of as old a date as our knowledge of spontaneity. Further, I take it to be demonstrable that it is utterly impossible to prove that anything whatever may not be the effect of a material and necessary cause, and that human logic is equally incompetent to prove that any act is really spontaneous. A really spontaneous act is one which, by the assumption, has no cause; and the attempt to prove such a negative as this is, on the face of the matter, absurd. And while it is thus a philosophical impossibility to demonstrate that any given phænomenon is not the effect of a material cause, any one who is acquainted with the history of science will admit, that its progress has, in all ages, meant, and now, more than ever, means, the extension of the province of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity. I have endeavoured, in the first part of this discourse, to give you a conception of the direction towards which modern physiology is tending; and I ask you, what is the difference between the conception of life as the product of a certain disposition of material molecules, and the old notion of an Archæus governing and directing blind matter within each living body, except this--that here, as elsewhere, matter and law have devoured spirit and spontaneity? And as surely as every future grows out of past and present, so will the physiology of the future gradually extend the realm of matter and law until it is co-extensive with knowledge, with feeling, and with action. The consciousness of this great truth weighs like a nightmare, I believe, upon many of the best minds of these days. They watch what they conceive to be the progress of materialism, in such fear and powerless anger as a savage feels, when, during an eclipse, the great shadow creeps over the face of the sun. The advancing tide of matter threatens to drown their souls; the tightening grasp of law impedes their freedom; they are alarmed lest man's moral nature be debased by the increase of his wisdom. If the "New Philosophy" be worthy of the reprobation with which it is visited, I confess their fears seem to me to be well founded. While, on the contrary, could David Hume be consulted, I think he would smile at their perplexities, and chide them for doing even as the heathen, and falling down in terror before the hideous idols their own hands have raised. For, after all, what do we know of this terrible "matter," except as a name for the unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness? And what do we know of that "spirit" over whose threatened extinction by matter a great lamentation is arising, like that which was heard at the death of Pan, except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause, or condition, of states of consciousness? In other words, matter and spirit are but names for the imaginary substrata of groups of natural phænomena. And what is the dire necessity and "iron" law under which men groan? Truly, most gratuitously invented bugbears. I suppose if there be an "iron" law, it is that of gravitation; and if there be a physical necessity, it is that a stone, unsupported, must fall to the ground. But what is all we really know, and can know, about the latter phænomena? Simply, that, in all human experience, stones have fallen to the ground under these conditions; that we have not the smallest reason for believing that any stone so circumstanced will not fall to the ground; and that we have, on the contrary, every reason to believe that it will so fall. It is very convenient to indicate that all the conditions of belief have been fulfilled in this case, by calling the statement that unsupported stones will fall to the ground, "a law of Nature." But when, as commonly happens, we change _will_ into _must_, we introduce an idea of necessity which most assuredly does not lie in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I can discover elsewhere. For my part, I utterly repudiate and anathematise the intruder. Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing? But, if it is certain that we can have no knowledge of the nature of either matter or spirit, and that the notion of necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the perfectly legitimate conception of law, the materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the most baseless of theological dogmas. The fundamental doctrines of materialism, like those of spiritualism, and most other "isms," lie outside "the limits of philosophical inquiry," and David Hume's great service to humanity is his irrefragable demonstration of what these limits are. Hume called himself a sceptic and therefore others cannot be blamed if they apply the same title to him; but that does not alter the fact that the name, with its existing implications, does him gross injustice. If a man asks me what the politics of the inhabitants of the moon are, and I reply that I do not know; that neither I, nor any one else, has any means of knowing; and that, under these circumstances, I decline to trouble myself about the subject at all, I do not think he has any right to call me a sceptic. On the contrary, in replying thus, I conceive that I am simply honest and truthful, and show a proper regard for the economy of time. So Hume's strong and subtle intellect takes up a great many problems about which we are naturally curious, and shows us that they are essentially questions of lunar politics, in their essence incapable of being answered, and therefore not worth the attention of men who have work to do in the world. And he thus ends one of his essays:-- "If we take in hand any volume of Divinity, or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, _Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?_ No. _Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?_ No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." [6] Permit me to enforce this most wise advice. Why trouble ourselves about matters of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing, and can know nothing? We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it. To do this effectually it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs: the first, that the order of Nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition[7] counts for something as a condition of the course of events. Each of these beliefs can be verified experimentally, as often as we like to try. Each, therefore, stands upon the strongest foundation upon which any belief can rest, and forms one of our highest truths. If we find that the ascertainment of the order of nature is facilitated by using one terminology, or one set of symbols, rather than another, it is our clear duty to use the former; and no harm can accrue, so long as we bear in mind, that we are dealing merely with terms and symbols. In itself it is of little moment whether we express the phænomena of matter in terms of spirit; or the phænomena of spirit in terms of matter: matter may be regarded as a form of thought, thought may be regarded as a property of matter--each statement has a certain relative truth. But with a view to the progress of science, the materialistic terminology is in every way to be preferred. For it connects thought with the other phænomena of the universe, and suggests inquiry into the nature of those physical conditions, or concomitants of thought, which are more or less accessible to us, and a knowledge of which may, in future, help us to exercise the same kind of control over the world of thought, as we already possess in respect of the material world; whereas, the alternative, or spiritualistic, terminology is utterly barren, and leads to nothing but obscurity and confusion of ideas. Thus there can be little doubt, that the further science advances, the more extensively and consistently will all the phænomena of Nature be represented by materialistic formulæ and symbols. But the man of science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry, slides from these formulæ and symbols into what is commonly understood by materialism, seems to me to place himself on a level with the mathematician, who should mistake the _x_'s and _y_'s with which he works his problems, for real entities--and with this further disadvantage, as compared with the mathematician, that the blunders of the latter are of no practical consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism may paralyse the energies and destroy the beauty of a life. NATURALISM AND SUPERNATURALISM [FROM PROLOGUE TO CONTROVERTED QUESTIONS, 1892.] There is a single problem with different aspects of which thinking men have been occupied, ever since they began seriously to consider the wonderful frame of things in which their lives are set, and to seek for trustworthy guidance among its intricacies. Experience speedily taught them that the shifting scenes of the world's stage have a permanent background; that there is order amidst the seeming contusion, and that many events take place according to unchanging rules. To this region of familiar steadiness and customary regularity they gave the name of Nature. But at the same time, their infantile and untutored reason, little more, as yet, than the playfellow of the imagination, led them to believe that this tangible, commonplace, orderly world of Nature was surrounded and interpenetrated by another intangible and mysterious world, no more bound by fixed rules than, as they fancied, were the thoughts and passions which coursed through their minds and seemed to exercise an intermittent and capricious rule over their bodies. They attributed to the entities, with which they peopled this dim and dreadful region, an unlimited amount of that power of modifying the course of events of which they themselves possessed a small share, and thus came to regard them as not merely beyond, but above, Nature. Hence arose the conception of a "Supernature" antithetic to "Nature"--the primitive dualism of a natural world "fixed in fate" and a supernatural, left to the free play of volition--which has pervaded all later speculation, and, for thousands of years, has exercised a profound influence on practice. For it is obvious that, on this theory of the Universe, the successful conduct of life must demand careful attention to both worlds; and, if either is to be neglected, it may be safer that it should be Nature. In any given contingency, it must doubtless be desirable to know what may be expected to happen in the ordinary course of things; but it must be quite as necessary to have some inkling of the line likely to be taken by supernatural agencies able, and possibly willing, to suspend or reverse that course. Indeed, logically developed, the dualistic theory must needs end in almost exclusive attention to Supernature, and in trust that its over-ruling strength will be exerted in favour of those who stand well with its denizens. On the other hand, the lessons of the great school-master, experience, have hardly seemed to accord with this conclusion. They have taught, with considerable emphasis, that it does not answer to neglect Nature; and that, on the whole, the more attention paid to her dictates the better men fare. Thus the theoretical antithesis brought about a practical antagonism. From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation from those of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and people. These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality, and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of right action. History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have attained to any agreement about these matters or that history indicates a widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice, with the onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their adherents delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with criminality, deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity. In singular contrast with natural knowledge, again, the acquaintance of mankind with the supernatural appears the more extensive and the more exact, and the influence of supernatural doctrines upon conduct the greater, the further back we go in time and the lower the stage of civilisation submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed, there would seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural knowledge. As the latter has widened, gained in precision and in trustworthiness, so has the former shrunk, grown vague and questionable; as the one has more and more filled the sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the region of meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal recognition. Whether this difference of the fortunes of Naturalism and of Supernaturalism is an indication of the progress, or of the regress, of humanity; of a fall from, or an advance towards, the higher life; is a matter of opinion. The point to which I wish to direct attention is that the difference exists and is making itself felt. Men are growing to be seriously alive to the fact that the historical evolution of humanity which is generally, and I venture to think not unreasonably, regarded as progress, has been, and is being, accompanied by a co-ordinate elimination of the supernatural from its originally large occupation of men's thoughts. The question--How far is this process to go?--is in my apprehension, the Controverted Question of our time. Controversy on this matter--prolonged, bitter, and fought out with the weapons of the flesh, as well as with those of the spirit--is no new thing to Englishmen. We have been more or less occupied with it these five hundred years. And, during that time, we have made attempts to establish a _modus vivendi_ between the antagonists, some of which have had a world-wide influence; though, unfortunately, none have proved universally and permanently satisfactory. In the fourteenth century, the controverted question among us was, whether certain portions of the Supernaturalism of mediæval Christianity were well-founded. John Wicliff proposed a solution of the problem which, in the course of the following two hundred years, acquired wide popularity and vast historical importance: Lollards, Hussites, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, Socinians, and Anabaptists, whatever their disagreements, concurred in the proposal to reduce the Supernaturalism of Christianity within the limits sanctioned by the Scriptures. None of the chiefs of Protestantism called in question either the supernatural origin and infallible authority of the Bible, or the exactitude of the account of the supernatural world given in its pages. In fact, they could not afford to entertain any doubt about these points, since the infallible Bible was the fulcrum of the lever with which they were endeavouring to upset the Chair of St. Peter. The "freedom of private judgment" which they proclaimed, meant no more, in practice, than permission to themselves to make free with the public judgment of the Roman Church, in respect of the canon and of the meaning to be attached to the words of the canonical books. Private judgment--that is to say, reason--was (theoretically, at any rate) at liberty to decide what books were and what were not to take the rank of "Scripture"; and to determine the sense of any passage in such books. But this sense, once ascertained to the mind of the sectary, was to be taken for pure truth--for the very word of God. The controversial efficiency of the principle of biblical infallibility lay in the fact that the conservative adversaries of the Reformers were not in a position to contravene it without entangling themselves in serious difficulties; while, since both Papists and Protestants agreed in taking efficient measures to stop the mouths of any more radical critics, these did not count. The impotence of their adversaries, however, did not remove the inherent weakness of the position of the Protestants. The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the Pope. If the former is held by "faith," then the latter may be. If the latter is to be accepted, or rejected, by private judgment, why not the former? Even if the Bible could be proved anywhere to assert its own infallibility, the value of that self-assertion to those who dispute the point is not obvious. On the other hand, if the infallibility of the Bible was rested on that of a "primitive Church," the admission that the "Church" was formerly infallible was awkward in the extreme for those who denied its present infallibility. Moreover, no sooner was the Protestant principle applied to practice, than it became evident that even an infallible text, when manipulated by private judgment, will impartially countenance contradictory deductions; and furnish forth creeds and confessions as diverse as the quality and the information of the intellects which exercise, and the prejudices and passions which sway, such judgments. Every sect, confident in the derivative infallibility of its wire-drawing of infallible materials, was ready to supply its contingent of martyrs; and to enable history, once more, to illustrate the truth, that steadfastness under persecution says much for the sincerity and still more for the tenacity, of the believer, but very little for the objective truth of that which he believes. No martyrs have sealed their faith with their blood more steadfastly than the Anabaptists. Last, but not least, the Protestant principle contained within itself the germs of the destruction of the finality, which the Lutheran, Calvinistic, and other Protestant Churches fondly imagined they had reached. Since their creeds were professedly based on the canonical Scriptures, it followed that, in the long run, whoso settled the canon defined the creed. If the private judgment of Luther might legitimately conclude that the epistle of James was contemptible, while the epistles of Paul contained the very essence of Christianity, it must be permissible for some other private judgment, on as good or as bad grounds, to reverse these conclusions; the critical process which excluded the Apocrypha could not be barred, at any rate by people who rejected the authority of the Church, from extending its operations to Daniel, the Canticles, and Ecclesiastes; nor, having got so far, was it easy to allege any good ground for staying the further progress of criticism. In fact, the logical development of Protestantism could not fail to lay the authority of the Scriptures at the feet of Reason; and in the hands of latitudinarian and rationalistic theologians, the despotism of the Bible was rapidly converted into an extremely limited monarchy. Treated with as much respect as ever, the sphere of its practical authority was minimised; and its decrees were valid only so far as they were countersigned by common sense, the responsible minister. The champions of Protestantism are much given to glorify the Reformation of the sixteenth century as the emancipation of Reason; but it may be doubted if their contention has any solid ground; while there is a good deal of evidence to show, that aspirations after intellectual freedom had nothing whatever to do with the movement. Dante, who struck the Papacy as hard blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself and Luther himself, when they began their work; were far enough from any intention of meddling with even the most irrational of the dogmas of mediæval Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to Socinus, or even to Münzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being the slave of the Papacy the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible; or, to speak more accurately, of somebody's interpretation of the Bible, which, rapidly shifting its attitude from the humility of a private judgment to the arrogant Cæsaro-papistry of a state-enforced creed had no more hesitation about forcibly extinguishing opponent private judgments and judges, than had the old-fashioned Pontiff-papistry. It was the iniquities, and not the irrationalities, of the Papal system that lay at the bottom of the revolt of the laity; which was, essentially, an attempt to shake off the intolerable burden of certain practical deductions from a Supernaturalism in which everybody, in principle, acquiesced. What was the gain to intellectual freedom of abolishing transubstantiation, image worship, indulgences, ecclesiastical infallibility; if consubstantiation, real-unreal presence mystifications, the bibliolatry, the "inner-light" pretensions, and the demonology, which are fruits of the same supernaturalistic tree, remained in enjoyment of the spiritual and temporal support of a new infallibility? One does not free a prisoner by merely scraping away the rust from his shackles. It will be asked, perhaps, was not the Reformation one of the products of that great outbreak of many-sided free mental activity included under the general head of the Renascence? Melanchthon, Ulrich von Hutten, Beza, were they not all humanists? Was not the arch-humanist, Erasmus, fautor-in-chief of the Reformation, until he got frightened and basely deserted it? From the language of Protestant historians, it would seem that they often forget that Reformation and Protestantism are by no means convertible terms. There were plenty of sincere and indeed zealous reformers, before, during, and after the birth and growth of Protestantism, who would have nothing to do with it. Assuredly, the rejuvenescence of science and of art; the widening of the field of Nature by geographical and astronomical discovery; the revelation of the noble ideals of antique literature by the revival of classical learning; the stir of thought, throughout all classes of society, by the printers' work, loosened traditional bonds and weakened the hold of mediæval Supernaturalism. In the interests of liberal culture and of national welfare, the humanists were eager to lend a hand to anything which tended to the discomfiture of their sworn enemies, the monks, and they willingly supported every movement in the direction of weakening ecclesiastical interference with civil life. But the bond of a common enemy was the only real tie between the humanist and the protestant; their alliance was bound to be of short duration, and, sooner or later, to be replaced by internecine warfare. The goal of the humanists, whether they were aware of it or not, was the attainment of the complete intellectual freedom of the antique philosopher, than which nothing could be more abhorrent to a Luther, a Calvin, a Beza, or a Zwingli. The key to the comprehension of the conduct of Erasmus, seems to me to lie in the clear apprehension of this fact. That he was a man of many weaknesses may be true; in fact, he was quite aware of them and professed himself no hero. But he never deserted that reformatory movement which he originally contemplated; and it was impossible he should have deserted the specifically Protestant reformation in which he never took part. He was essentially a theological whig, to whom radicalism was as hateful as it is to all whigs; or to borrow a still more appropriate comparison from modern times, a broad churchman who refused to enlist with either the High Church or the Low Church zealots, and paid the penalty of being called coward, time-server and traitor, by both. Yet really there is a good deal in his pathetic remonstrance that he does not see why he is bound to become a martyr for that in which he does not believe; and a fair consideration of the circumstances and the consequences of the Protestant reformation seems to me to go a long way towards justifying the course he adopted. Few men had better means of being acquainted with the condition of Europe; none could be more competent to gauge the intellectual shallowness and self-contradiction of the Protestant criticism of Catholic doctrine; and to estimate, at its proper value, the fond imagination that the waters let out by the Renascence would come to rest amidst the blind alleys of the new ecclesiasticism. The bastard, whilom poor student and monk, become the familiar of bishops and princes, at home in all grades of society, could not fail to be aware of the gravity of the social position, of the dangers imminent from the profligacy and indifference of the ruling classes, no less than from the anarchical tendencies of the people who groaned under their oppression. The wanderer who had lived in Germany, in France, in England, in Italy, and who counted many of the best and most influential men in each country among his friends, was not likely to estimate wrongly the enormous forces which were still at the command of the Papacy. Bad as the churchmen might be, the statesmen were worse; and a person of far more sanguine temperament than Erasmus might have seen no hope for the future, except in gradually freeing the ubiquitous organisation of the Church from the corruptions which alone, as he imagined, prevented it from being as beneficent as it was powerful. The broad tolerance of the scholar and man of the world might well be revolted by the ruffianism, however genial, of one great light of Protestantism, and the narrow fanaticism, however learned and logical, of others, and to a cautious thinker, by whom, whatever his short-comings, the ethical ideal of the Christian evangel was sincerely prized, it really was a fair question whether it was worth while to bring about a political and social deluge, the end of which no mortal could foresee, for the purpose of setting up Lutheran, Zwinglian, and other Peterkins, in the place of the actual claimant to the reversion of the spiritual wealth of the Galilean fisherman. Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the Lutheran and Zwinglian movement, a vision of its immediate consequences had been granted to Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the fierce outbreak of Anabaptist communism which opened the apocalypse had succeeded, in shadowy procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in England, with the judicial murders of his friends, More and Fisher; the bitter tyranny of evangelistic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland; the long agony of religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which devastated France and reduced Germany almost to savagery; finishing with the spectacle of Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere dead Erastian formalism, before it was a century old; while Jesuitry triumphed over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, bringing in its train a recrudescence of all the corruptions Erasmus and his friends sought to abolish; might not he have quite honestly thought this a somewhat too heavy price to pay for Protestantism; more especially, since no one was in a better position than himself to know how little the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions was able to bear the light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism would throw upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw, Erasmus was, at heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christianity" as stoutly as Voltaire by his Deism. In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which bore Erasmus along, left Protestanism stranded amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds: while its true course became visible to all men, two centuries later. By this time, those in whom the movement of the Renascence was incarnate became aware what spirit they were of; and they attacked Supernaturalism in its Biblical stronghold, defended by Protestants and Romanists with equal zeal. In the eyes of the "Patriarch," Ultramontanism, Jansenism, and Calvinism were merely three persons of the one "Infâme" which it was the object of his life to crush. If he hated one more than another, it was probably the last; while D'Holbach, and the extreme left of the free-thinking best, were disposed to show no more mercy to Deism and Pantheism. The sceptical insurrection of the eighteenth century made a terrific noise and frightened not a few worthy people out of their wits; but cool judges might have foreseen, at the outset, that the efforts of the later rebels were no more likely than those of the earlier, to furnish permanent resting-places for the spirit of scientific inquiry. However worthy of admiration may be the acuteness, the common sense, the wit, the broad humanity, which abound in the writings of the best of the free-thinkers; there is rarely much to be said for their work as an example of the adequate treatment of a grave and difficult investigation. I do not think any impartial judge will assert that, from this point of view, they are much better than their adversaries. It must be admitted that they share to the full the fatal weakness of _a priori_ philosophising, no less than the moral frivolity common to their age; while a singular want of appreciation of history, as the record of the moral and social evolution of the human race, permitted them to resort to preposterous theories of imposture, in order to account for the religious phenomena which are natural products of that evolution. For the most part, the Romanist and Protestant adversaries of the free-thinkers met them with arguments no better than their own; and with vituperation, so far inferior that it lacked the wit. But one great Christian Apologist fairly captured the guns of the free-thinking array, and turned their batteries upon themselves. Speculative "infidelity" of the eighteenth century type was mortally wounded by the _Analogy_; while the progress of the historical and psychological sciences brought to light the important part played by the mythopoeic faculty; and, by demonstrating the extreme readiness of men to impose upon themselves, rendered the calling in of sacerdotal co-operation, in most cases, a superfluity. Again, as in the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, social and political influences came into play. The free-thinking _philosophes_, who objected to Rousseau's sentimental religiosity almost as much as they did to _L'Infâme_, were credited with the responsibility for all the evil deeds of Rousseau's Jacobin disciples, with about as much justification as Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants' revolt, or Luther for the _Bauern-krieg_. In England, though our _ancien régime_ was not altogether lovely, the social edifice was never in such a bad way as in France; it was still capable of being repaired; and our forefathers, very wisely, preferred to wait until that operation could be safely performed, rather than pull it all down about their ears, in order to build a philosophically planned house on brand-new speculative foundations. Under these circumstances, it is not wonderful that, in this country, practical men preferred the Gospel of Wesley and Whitfield to that of Jean Jacques; while enough of the old leaven of Puritanism remained to ensure the favour and support of a large number of religious men to a revival of evangelical supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the free-thinking, or the indifference, prevalent among us in the first half of the eighteenth century, was replaced by a strong supernaturalistic reaction, which submerged the work of the free-thinkers; and even seemed, for a time, to have arrested the naturalistic movement of which that work was an imperfect indication. Yet, like Lollardry, four centuries earlier, free-thought merely took to running underground, safe, sooner or later, to return to the surface. My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood had a little abated and the tops of certain mountains were soon to appear, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Oxford; but when, nevertheless, bibliolatry was rampant; when church and chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of God, the crude assumptions of the worst informed and, in natural sequence, the most presumptuously bigoted, of all theological schools. In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly without my authorisation, I was very early taken to hear "sermons in the vulgar tongue." And vulgar enough often was the tongue in which some preacher, ignorant alike of literature, of history, of science, and even of theology, outside that patronised by his own narrow school, poured forth, from the safe entrenchment of the pulpit, invectives against those who deviated from his notion of orthodoxy. From dark allusions to "sceptics" and "infidels," I became aware of the existence of people who trusted in carnal reason; who audaciously doubted that the world was made in six natural days, or that the deluge was universal; perhaps even went so far as to question the literal accuracy of the story of Eve's temptation, or of Balaam's ass; and, from the horror of the tones in which they were mentioned, I should have been justified in drawing the conclusion that these rash men belonged to the criminal classes. At the same time, those who were more directly responsible for providing me with the knowledge essential to the right guidance of life (and who sincerely desired to do so), imagined they were discharging that most sacred duty by impressing upon my childish mind the necessity, on pain of reprobation in this world and damnation in the next, of accepting, in the strict and literal sense, every statement contained in the Protestant Bible. I was told to believe, and I did believe, that doubt about any of them was a sin, not less reprehensible than a moral delict. I suppose that, out of a thousand of my contemporaries, nine hundred, at least, had their minds systematically warped and poisoned, in the name of the God of truth, by like discipline. I am sure that, even a score of years later, those who ventured to question the exact historical accuracy of any part of the Old Testament and _a fortiori_ of the Gospels, had to expect a pitiless shower of verbal missiles, to say nothing of the other disagreeable consequences which visit those who, in any way, run counter to that chaos of prejudices called public opinion. My recollections of this time have recently been revived by the perusal of a remarkable document,[8] signed by as many as thirty-eight out of the twenty odd thousand clergymen of the Established Church. It does not appear that the signatories are officially accredited spokesmen of the ecclesiastical corporation to which they belong; but I feel bound to take their word for it that they are "stewards of the Lord who have received the Holy Ghost," and, therefore, to accept this memorial as evidence that, though the Evangelicism of my early days may be deposed from its place of power, though so many of the colleagues of the thirty-eight even repudiate the title of Protestants, yet the green bay tree of bibliolatry flourishes as it did sixty years ago. And, as in those good old times, whoso refuses to offer incense to the idol is held to be guilty of "a dishonour to God," imperilling his salvation. It is to the credit of the perspicacity of the memorialists that they discern the real nature of the Controverted Question of the age. They are awake to the unquestionable fact that, if Scripture has been discovered "not to be worthy of unquestioning belief," faith "in the supernatural itself" is, so far, undermined. And I may congratulate myself upon such weighty confirmation of opinion in which I have had the fortune to anticipate them. But whether it is more to the credit of the courage, than to the intelligence, of the thirty-eight that they should go on to proclaim that the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments "declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records, both of past events and of the delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled," must be left to the coming generation to decide. The interest which attaches to this singular document will, I think, be based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but upon that of which it is a sign. It is an open secret, that the memorial is put forth as a counterblast to a manifestation of opinion of a contrary character, on the part of certain members of the same ecclesiastical body, who therefore have, as I suppose, an equal right to declare themselves "stewards of the Lord and recipients of the Holy Ghost." In fact, the stream of tendency towards Naturalism, the course of which I have briefly traced, has, of late years, flowed so strongly, that even the Churches have begun, I dare not say to drift, but, at any rate, to swing at their moorings. Within the pale of the Anglican establishment, I venture to doubt, whether, at this moment, there are as many thorough-going defenders of "plenary inspiration" as there were timid questioners of that doctrine, half a century ago. Commentaries, sanctioned by the highest authority, give up the "actual historical truth" of the cosmogonical and diluvial narratives. University professors of deservedly high repute accept the critical decision that the Hexateuch is a compilation, in which the share of Moses, either as author or as editor, is not quite so clearly demonstrable as it might be; highly placed Divines tell us that the pre-Abrahamic Scripture narratives may be ignored; that the book of Daniel may be regarded as a patriotic romance of the second century B.C.; that the words of the writer of the fourth Gospel are not always to be distinguished from those which he puts into the mouth of Jesus. Conservative, but conscientious, revisers decide that whole passages, some of dogmatic and some of ethical importance, are interpolations. An uneasy sense of the weakness of the dogma of Biblical infallibility seems to be at the bottom of a prevailing tendency once more to substitute the authority of the "Church" for that of the Bible. In my old age, it has happened to me to be taken to task for regarding Christianity as a "religion of a book" as gravely as, in my youth, I should have been reprehended for doubting that proposition. It is a no less interesting symptom that the State Church seems more and more anxious to repudiate all complicity with the principles of the Protestant Reformation and to call itself "Anglo-Catholic." Inspiration, deprived of its old intelligible sense, is watered down into a mystification. The Scriptures are, indeed, inspired; but they contain a wholly undefined and indefinable "human element"; and this unfortunate intruder is converted into a sort of biblical whipping-boy. Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical or physical, proves to be erroneous, the "human element" bears the blame: while the divine inspiration of such statements, as by their nature are out of reach of proof or disproof, is still asserted with all the vigour inspired by conscious safety from attack. Though the proposal to treat the Bible "like any other book" which caused so much scandal, forty years ago, may not yet be generally accepted, and though Bishop Colenso's criticisms may still lie, formally, under ecclesiastical ban, yet the Church has not wholly turned a deaf ear to the voice of the scientific tempter; and many a coy divine, while "crying I will ne'er consent," has consented to the proposals of that scientific criticism which the memorialists renounce and denounce. A humble layman, to whom it would seem the height of presumption to assume even the unconsidered dignity of a "steward of science," may well find this conflict of apparently equal ecclesiastical authorities perplexing--suggestive, indeed, of the wisdom of postponing attention to either, until the question of precedence between them is settled. And this course will probably appear the more advisable, the more closely the fundamental position of the memorialists is examined. "No opinion of the fact or form of Divine Revelation, founded on literary criticism [and I suppose I may add historical, or physical, criticism] of the Scriptures themselves, can be admitted to interfere with the traditionary testimony of the Church, when that has been once ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity." [9] Grant that it is "the traditionary testimony of the Church" which guarantees the canonicity of each and all of the books of the Old and New Testaments. Grant also that canonicity means infallibility; yet, according to the thirty-eight, this "traditionary testimony" has to be "ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity". But "ascertainment and verification" are purely intellectual processes, which must be conducted according to the strict rules of scientific investigation, or be self-convicted of worthlessness. Moreover, before we can set about the appeal to "antiquity," the exact sense of that usefully vague term must be defined by similar means. "Antiquity" may include any number of centuries, great or small; and whether "antiquity" is to comprise the Council of Trent, or to stop a little beyond that of Nicæa, or to come to an end in the time of Irenæus, or in that of Justin Martyr, are knotty questions which can be decided, if at all, only by those critical methods which the signatories treat so cavalierly. And yet the decision of these questions is fundamental, for as the limits of the canonical scriptures vary, so may the dogmas deduced from them require modification. Christianity is one thing, if the fourth Gospel, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the pastoral Epistles, and the Apocalypse are canonical and (by the hypothesis) infallibly true; and another thing, if they are not. As I have already said, whoso defines the canon defines the creed. Now it is quite certain with respect to some of these books, such as the Apocalypse and the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the Eastern and the Western Church differed in opinion for centuries; and yet neither the one branch nor the other can have considered its judgment infallible, since they eventually agreed to a transaction by which each gave up its objection to the book patronised by the other. Moreover, the "fathers" argue (in a more or less rational manner) about the canonicity of this or that book, and are by no means above producing evidence, internal and external, in favour of the opinions they advocate. In fact, imperfect as their conceptions of scientific method may be, they not unfrequently used it to the best of their ability. Thus it would appear that though science, like Nature, may be driven out with a fork, ecclesiastical or other, yet she surely comes back again. The appeal to "antiquity" is, in fact, an appeal to science, first to define what antiquity is; secondly, to determine what "antiquity," so defined, says about canonicity; thirdly, to prove that canonicity means infallibility. And when science, largely in the shape of the abhorred "criticism," has answered this appeal, and has shown that "antiquity" used her own methods, however clumsily and imperfectly, she naturally turns round upon the appellants, and demands that they should show cause why, in these days, science should not resume the work the ancients did so imperfectly, and carry it out efficiently. But no such cause can be shown. If "antiquity" permitted Eusebius, Origen, Tertullian, Irenæus, to argue for the reception of this book into the canon and the rejection of that, upon rational grounds, "antiquity" admitted the whole principal of modern criticism. If Irenæus produces ridiculous reasons for limiting the Gospels to four, it was open to any one else to produce good reasons (if he had them) for cutting them down to three, or increasing them to five. If the Eastern branch of the Church had a right to reject the Apocalypse and accept the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Western an equal right to accept the Apocalypse and reject the Epistle, down to the fourth century, any other branch would have an equal right, on cause shown, to reject both, or as the Catholic Church afterwards actually did, to accept both. Thus I cannot but think that the thirty-eight are hoist with their own petard. Their "appeal to antiquity" turns out to be nothing but a round-about way of appealing to the tribunal the jurisdiction of which they affect to deny. Having rested the world of Christian supernaturalism on the elephant of biblical infallibility, and furnished the elephant with standing ground on the tortoise of "antiquity," they, like their famous Hindoo analogue, have been content to look no further; and have thereby been spared the horror of discovering that the tortoise rests on a grievously fragile construction, to a great extent the work of that very intellectual operation which they anathematise and repudiate. Moreover, there is another point to be considered. It is of course true that a Christian Church (whether the Christian Church, or not, depends on the connotation of the definite article) existed before the Christian scriptures; and that infallibility of these depends upon infallibility of the judgment of the persons who selected the books of which they are composed, out of the mass of literature current among the early Christians. The logical acumen of Augustine showed him that the authority of the Gospel he preached must rest on that of the Church to which he belonged.[10] But it is no less true that the Hebrew and the Septuagint versions of most, if not all, of the Old Testament books existed before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth; and that their divine authority is presupposed by, and therefore can hardly depend upon, the religious body constituted by his disciples. As everybody knows, the very conception of a "Christ" is purely Jewish. The validity of the argument from the Messianic prophecies vanishes unless their infallible authority is granted; and, as a matter of fact, whether we turn to the Gospels, the Epistles, or the writings of the early Apologists, the Jewish scriptures are recognised as the highest court of appeal of the Christian. The proposal to cite Christian "antiquity" as a witness to the infallibility of the Old Testament, when its own claims to authority vanish, if certain propositions contained in the Old Testament are erroneous, hardly satisfies the requirements of lay logic. It is as if a claimant to be sole legatee, under another kind of testament, should offer his assertion as sufficient evidence of the validity of the will. And, even were not such a circular, or rather rotatory argument, that the infallibility of the Bible is testified by the infallible Church, whose infallibility is testified by the infallible Bible, too absurd for serious consideration, it remains permissible to ask, Where and when the Church, during the period of its infallibility, as limited by Anglican dogmatic necessities, has officially decreed the "actual historical truth of all records" in the Old Testament? Was Augustine heretical when he denied the actual historical truth of the record of the Creation? Father Suarez, standing on later Roman tradition, may have a right to declare that he was; but it does not lie in the mouth of those who limit their appeal to that early "antiquity," in which Augustine played so great a part, to say so. Among the watchers of the course of the world of thought, some view with delight and some with horror, the recrudescence of Supernaturalism which manifests itself among us, in shapes ranged along the whole flight of steps, which, in this case, separates the sublime from the ridiculous--from Neo-Catholicism and Inner-light mysticism, at the top, to unclean things, not worthy of mention in the same breath, at the bottom. In my poor opinion, the importance of these manifestations is often greatly over-estimated. The extant forms of Supernaturalism have deep roots in human nature, and will undoubtedly die hard; but, in these latter days, they have to cope with an enemy whose full strength is only just beginning to be put out, and whose forces, gathering strength year by year, are hemming them round on every side. This enemy is Science, in the acceptation of systematised natural knowledge, which, during the last two centuries, has extended those methods of investigation, the worth of which is confirmed by daily appeal to Nature, to every region in which the Supernatural has hitherto been recognised. When scientific historical criticism reduced the annals of heroic Greece and of regal Rome to the level of fables; when the unity of authorship of the _Iliad_ was successfully assailed by scientific literary criticism; when scientific physical criticism, after exploding the geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar system itself to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks, circling at unimaginable distances from one another through infinite space, showed the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the earth and of life upon it to be as inadequate as those of its relative dimensions and importance had been; it needed no prophetic gift to see that, sooner or later, the Jewish and the early Christian records would be treated in the same manner; that the authorship of the Hexateuch and of the Gospels would be as severely tested; and that the evidence in favour of the veracity of many of the statements found in the Scriptures would have to be strong indeed if they were to be opposed to the conclusions of physical science. In point of fact, so far as I can discover, no one competent to judge of the evidential strength of these conclusions ventures now to say that the biblical accounts of the Creation and of the Deluge are true in the natural sense of the words of the narratives. The most modern Reconcilers venture upon is to affirm, that some quite different sense may be put upon the words; and that this non-natural sense may, with a little trouble, be manipulated into some sort of non-contradiction of scientific truth. My purpose, in an essay[11] which treats of the narrative of the Deluge, was to prove, by physical criticism, that no such event as that described ever took place; to exhibit the untrustworthy character of the narrative demonstrated by literary criticism; and, finally, to account for its origin by producing a form of those ancient legends of pagan Chaldaea, from which the biblical compilation is manifestly derived. I have yet to learn that the main proposition of this essay can be seriously challenged. In two essays[12] on the narrative of the Creation, I have endeavoured to controvert the assertion that modern science supports, either the interpretation put upon it by Mr. Gladstone, or any interpretation which is compatible with the general sense of the narrative, quite apart from particular details. The first chapter of Genesis teaches the supernatural creation of the present forms of life; modern science teaches that they have come about by evolution. The first chapter of Genesis teaches the successive origin--firstly, of all the plants; secondly, of all the aquatic and aerial animals; thirdly, of all the terrestrial animals, which now exist--during distinct intervals of time; modern science teaches that, throughout all the duration of an immensely long past, so far as we have any adequate knowledge of it (that is far back as the Silurian epoch), plants, aquatic, aerial, and terrestrial animals have co-existed; that the earliest known are unlike those which at present exist; and that the modern species have come into existence as the last terms of a series, the members of which have appeared one after another. Thus, far from confirming the account in Genesis, the results of modern science, so far as they go, are in principle, as in detail, hopelessly discordant with it. Yet, if the pretensions to infallibility set up, not by the ancient Hebrew writings themselves, but by the ecclesiastical champions and friends from whom they may well pray to be delivered, thus shatter themselves against the rock of natural knowledge, in respect of the two most important of all events, the origin of things and the palingenesis of terrestrial life, what historical credit dare any serious thinker attach to the narratives of the fabrication of Eve, of the Fall, of the commerce between the _Bene Elohim_ and the daughters of men, which lie between the creational and the diluvial legends? And, if these are to lose all historical worth, what becomes of the infallibility of those who, according to the later scriptures, have accepted them, argued from them, and staked far-reaching dogmatic conclusions upon their historical accuracy? It is the merest ostrich policy for contemporary ecclesiasticism to try to bide its Hexateuchal head--in the hope that the inseparable connection of its body with pre-Abrahamic legends may be overlooked. The question will still be asked, If the first nine chapters of the Pentateuch are unhistorical, how is the historical accuracy of the remainder to be guaranteed? What more intrinsic claim has the story of the Exodus than of the Deluge, to belief? If God not walk in the Garden of Eden, how we be assured that he spoke from Sinai? In other essays[13] I have endeavoured to show that sober and well-founded physical and literary criticism plays no less havoc with the doctrine that the canonical scriptures of the New Testament "declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records." We are told that the Gospels contain a true revelation of the spiritual world--a proposition which, in one sense of the word "spiritual," I should not think it necessary to dispute. But, when it is taken to signify that everything we are told about the world of spirits in these books is infallibly true; that we are bound to accept the demonology which constitutes an inseparable part of their teaching; and to profess belief in a Supernaturalism as gross as that of any primitive people--it is at any rate permissible to ask why? Science may be unable to define the limits of possibility, but it cannot escape from the moral obligation to weigh the evidence in favour of any alleged wonderful occurrence; and I have endeavoured to show that the evidence for the Gadarene miracle is altogether worthless. We have simply three, partially discrepant, versions of a story, about the primitive form, the origin, and the authority for which we know absolutely nothing. But the evidence in favour of the Gadarene miracle is as good as that for any other. Elsewhere I have pointed out that it is utterly beside the mark to declaim against these conclusions on the ground of their asserted tendency to deprive mankind of the consolations of the Christian faith, and to destroy the foundations of morality: still less to brand them with the question-begging vituperative appellation of "infidelity." The point is not whether they are wicked; but, whether, from the point of view of scientific method, they are irrefragably true. If they are they will be accepted in time, whether they are wicked or not wicked. Nature, so far as we have been able to attain to any insight into her ways, recks little about consolation and makes for righteousness by very round-about paths. And, at any rate, whatever may be possible for other people, it is becoming less and less possible for the man who puts his faith in scientific methods of ascertaining truth, and is accustomed to have that faith justified by daily experience, to be consciously false to his principle in any matter. But the number of such men, driven into the use of scientific methods of inquiry and taught to trust them, by their education, their daily professional and business needs, is increasing and will continually increase. The phraseology of Supernaturalism may remain on men's lips, but in practice they are Naturalists. The magistrate who listens with devout attention to the precept "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" on Sunday, on Monday dismisses, as intrinsically absurd, a charge of bewitching a cow brought against some old woman; the superintendent of a lunatic asylum who substituted exorcism for rational modes of treatment would have but a short tenure of office; even parish clerks doubt the utility of prayers for rain, so long as the wind is in the east; and an outbreak of pestilence sends men, not to the churches, but to the drains. In spite of prayers for the success of our arms and _Te Deums_ for victory, our real faith is in big battalions and keeping our powder dry; in knowledge of the science of warfare; in energy, courage, and discipline. In these, as in all other practical affairs, we act on the aphorism "_Laborare est orare_"; we admit that intelligent work is the only acceptable worship; and that, whether there be a Supernature or not, our business is with Nature. * * * * * It is important to note that the principle of the scientific Naturalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century, in which the intellectual movement of the Renascence has culminated, and which was first clearly formulated by Descartes, leads not to the denial of the existence of any Supernature;[14] but simply to the denial of the validity of the evidence adduced in favour of this, or of that, extant form of Supernaturalism. Looking at the matter from the most rigidly scientific point of view, the assumption that, amidst the myriads of worlds scattered through endless space, there can be no intelligence as much greater than man's as his is greater than a blackbeetle's; no being endowed with powers of influencing the course of Nature as much greater than his as his is greater than a snail's, seems to me not merely baseless, but impertinent. Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known, it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable from omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience. If our intelligence can, in some matters, surely reproduce the past of thousands of years ago and anticipate the future thousands of years hence, it is clearly within the limits of possibility that some greater intellect, even of the same order, may be able to mirror the whole past and the whole future; if the universe is penetrated by a medium of such a nature that a magnetic needle on the earth answers to a commotion in the sun, an omnipresent agent is also conceivable; if our insignificant knowledge gives us some influence over events, practical omniscience may confer indefinably greater power. Finally, if evidence that a thing may be were equivalent to proof that it is, analogy might justify the construction of a naturalistic theology and demonology not less wonderful than the current supernatural; just as it might justify the peopling of Mars, or of Jupiter, with living forms to which terrestrial biology offers no parallel. Until human life is longer and the duties of the present press less heavily, I do not think that wise men will occupy themselves with Jovian, or Martian, natural history; and they will probably agree to a verdict of "not proven" in respect of naturalistic theology, taking refuge in that agnostic confession, which appears to me to be the only position for people who object to say that they know what they are quite aware they do not know. As to the interests of morality, I am disposed to think that if mankind could be got to act up to this last principle in every relation of life, a reformation would be effected such as the world has not yet seen; an approximation to the millennium, such as no supernaturalistic religion has ever yet succeeded, or seems likely ever to succeed, in effecting. THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS [1889] Charles, or more properly, Karl, King of the Franks, consecrated Roman Emperor in St. Peter's on Christmas Day, A.D. 800, and known to posterity as the Great (chiefly by his agglutinative Gallicised denomination of Charlemagne), was a man great in all ways, physically and mentally. Within a couple of centuries after his death Charlemagne became the centre of innumerable legends; and the myth-making process does not seem to have been sensibly interfered with by the existence of sober and truthful histories of the Emperor and of the times which immediately preceded and followed his reign, by a contemporary writer who occupied a high and confidential position in his court, and in that of his successor. This was one Eginhard, or Einhard, who appears to have been born about A.D. 770, and spent his youth at the court, being educated along with Charles's sons. There is excellent contemporary testimony not only to Eginhard's existence, but to his abilities, and to the place which he occupied in the circle of the intimate friends of the great ruler whose life he subsequently wrote. In fact, there is as good evidence of Eginhard's existence, of his official position, and of his being the author of the chief works attributed to him, as can reasonably be expected in the case of a man who lived more than a thousand years ago, and was neither a great king nor a great warrior. The works are--1. "The Life of the Emperor Karl." 2. "The Annals of the Franks." 3. "Letters." 4. "The History of the Translation of the Blessed Martyrs of Christ, SS. Marcellinus and Petrus." It is to the last, as one of the most singular and interesting records of the period during which the Roman world passed into that of the Middle Ages, that I wish to direct attention.[15] It was written in the ninth century, somewhere, apparently, about the year 830, when Eginhard, ailing in health and weary of political life, had withdrawn to the monastery of Seligenstadt, of which he was the founder. A manuscript copy of the work, made in the tenth century, and once the property of the monastery of St. Bavon on the Scheldt, of which Eginhard was abbot, is still extant, and there is no reason to believe that, in this copy, the original has been in any way interpolated or otherwise tampered with. The main features of the strange story contained in the "Historia Translations" are set forth in the following pages, in which, in regard to all matters of importance, I shall adhere as closely as possible to Eginhard's own words. While I was still at Court, busied with secular affairs, I often thought of the leisure which I hoped one day to enjoy in a solitary place, far away from the crowd, with which the liberality of Prince Louis, whom I then served, had provided me. This place is situated in that part of Germany which lies between the Neckar and the Maine,[16] and is nowadays called the Odenwald by those who live in and about it. And here having built, according to my capacity and resources, not only houses and permanent dwellings, but also a basilica fitted for the performance of divine service and of no mean style of construction, I began to think to what saint or martyr I could best dedicate it. A good deal of time had passed while my thoughts fluctuated about this matter, when it happened that a certain deacon of the Roman Church, named Deusdona, arrived at the Court for the purpose of seeking the favour of the King in some affairs in which he was interested. He remained some time; and then, having transacted his business, he was about to return to Rome, when one day, moved by courtesy to a stranger, we invited him to a modest refection; and while talking of many things at table, mention was made of the translation of the body of the blessed Sebastian,[17] and of the neglected tombs of the martyrs, of which there is such a prodigious number at Rome; and the conversation having turned towards the dedication of our new basilica, I began to inquire how it might be possible for me to obtain some of the true relics of the saints which rest at Rome. He at first hesitated, and declared that he did not know how that could be done. But observing that I was both anxious and curious about the subject, he promised to give me an answer some other day. When I returned to the question some time afterwards, he immediately drew from his bosom a paper, which he begged me to read when I was alone, and to tell him what I was disposed to think of that which was therein stated. I took the paper and, as he desired, read it alone and in secret. (Cap. 1, 2, 3.) I shall have occasion to return to Deacon Deusdona's conditions, and to what happened after Eginhard's acceptance of them. Suffice it, for the present, to say that Eginhard's notary, Ratleicus (Ratleig), was despatched to Rome and succeeded in securing two bodies, supposed to be those of the holy martyrs Marcellinus and Petrus; and when he had got as far on his homeward journey as the Burgundian town of Solothurn, or Soleure,[18] notary Ratleig despatched to his master, at St. Bavon, a letter announcing the success of his mission. As soon as by reading it I was assured of the arrival of the saints, I despatched a confidential messenger to Maestricht to gather together priests, other clerics, and also laymen, to go out to meet the coming saints as speedily as possible. And he and his companions, having lost no time, after a few days met those who had charge of the saints at Solothurn. Joined with them, and with a vast crowd of people who gathered from all parts, singing hymns, and amidst great and universal rejoicings, they travelled quickly to the city of Argentoratum, which is now called Strasburg. Thence embarking on the Rhine, they came to the place called Portus,[19] and landing on the east bank of the river, at the fifth station thence they arrived at Michilinstadt,[20] accompanied by an immense multitude, praising God. This place is in that forest of Germany which in modern times is called the Odenwald, and about six leagues from the Maine. And here, having found a basilica recently built by me, but not yet consecrated, they carried the sacred remains into it and deposited them therein, as if it were to be their final resting-place. As soon as all this was reported to me I travelled thither as quickly as I could. (Cap. ii. 14.) Three days after Eginhard's arrival began the series of wonderful events which he narrates, and for which we have his personal guarantee. The first thing that he notices is the dream of a servant of Ratleig, the notary, who, being set to watch the holy relics in the church after vespers, went to sleep and, during his slumbers, had a vision of two pigeons, one white and one gray and white, which came and sat upon the bier over the relics; while, at the same time, a voice ordered the man to tell his master that the holy martyrs had chosen another resting-place and desired to be transported thither without delay. Unfortunately, the saints seem to have forgotten to mention where they wished to go; and, with the most anxious desire to gratify their smallest wishes, Eginhard was naturally greatly perplexed what to do. While in this state of mind, he was one day contemplating his "great and wonderful treasure, more precious than all the gold in the world," when it struck him that the chest in which the relics were contained was quite unworthy of its contents; and, after vespers, he gave orders to one of the sacristans to the measure of the chest in order a more fitting shrine might be constructed. The man, having lighted a candle and raised the pall which covered the relics, in order to carry out his master's orders, was astonished and terrified to observe that the chest was covered with a blood-like exudation (_loculum mirum in modum humore sanguineo undique distillantem_), and at once sent a message to Eginhard. Then I and those priests who accompanied me beheld this stupendous miracle, worthy of all admiration. For just as when it is going to rain, pillars and slabs and marble images exude moisture, and, as it were, sweat, so the chest which contained the most sacred relics was found moist with the blood exuding on all sides. (Cap. ii. 16.) Three days' fast was ordained in order that the meaning of the portent might be ascertained. All that happened, however, was that, at the end of that time, the "blood," which had been exuding in drops all the while, dried up. Eginhard is careful to say that the liquid "had a saline taste, something like that of tears, and was thin as water, though of the colour of true blood," and he clearly thinks this satisfactory evidence that it was blood. The same night, another servant had a vision, in which still more imperative orders for the removal of the relics were given; and, from that time forth, "not a single night passed without one, two, or even three of our companions receiving revelations in dreams that the bodies of the saints were to be transferred from that place to another." At last a priest, Hildfrid, saw, in a dream, a venerable white-haired man in a priest's vestments, who bitterly reproached Eginhard for not obeying the repeated orders of the saints; and, upon this, the journey was commenced. Why Eginhard delayed obedience to these repeated visions so long does not appear. He does not say so, in so many words, but the general tenor of the narrative leads one to suppose that Mulinheim (afterwards Seligenstadt) is the "solitary place" in which he had built the church which awaited dedication. In that case, all the people about him would know that he desired that the saints should go there. If a glimmering of secular sense led him to be a little suspicious about the real cause of the unanimity of the visionary beings who manifested themselves to his _entourage_ in favour of moving on, he does not say so. At the end of the first day's journey, the precious relics were deposited in the church of St. Martin, in the village of Ostheim. Hither, a paralytic nun (_sanctimonialis quædam paralytica_) of the name of Ruodlang was brought, in a car, by her friends and relatives from a monastery a league off. She spent the night watching and praying by the bier of the saints; "and health returning to all her members, on the morrow she went back to her place whence she came, on her feet, nobody supporting her, or in any way giving her assistance." (Cap. ii. 19.) On the second day, the relics were carried to Upper Mulinheim; and, finally, in accordance with the orders of the martyrs, deposited in the church of that place, which was therefore renamed Seligenstadt. Here, Daniel, a beggar boy of fifteen, and so bent that "he could not look at the sky without lying on his back," collapsed and fell down during the celebration of the Mass. "Thus he lay a long time, as if asleep, and all his limbs straightening and his flesh strengthening (_recepta firmitate nervorum_), he arose before our eyes, quite well." (Cap. ii. 20.) Some time afterwards an old man entered the church on his hands and knees, being unable to use his limbs properly:-- He, in presence of all of us, by the power of God and the merits of the blessed martyrs, in the same hour in which he entered was so perfectly cured that he walked without so much as a stick. And he said that, though he had been deaf for five years, his deafness had ceased along with the palsy. (Cap. iii. 33.) Eginhard was now obliged to return to the Court at Aix-la-Chapelle, where his duties kept him through the winter; and he is careful to point out that the later miracles which he proceeds to speak of are known to him only at second hand. But, as he naturally observes, having seen such wonderful events with his own eyes, why should he doubt similar narrations when they are received from trustworthy sources? Wonderful stories these are indeed, but as they are, for the most part, of the same general character as those already recounted, they may be passed over. There is, however, an account of a possessed maiden which is worth attention. This is set forth in a memoir, the principal contents of which are the speeches of a demon who declared himself to possess the singular appellation of "Wiggo," and revealed himself in the presence of many witnesses, before the altar, close to the relics of the blessed martyrs. It is noteworthy that the revelations appear to have been made in the shape of replies to the questions of the exorcising priest; and there is no means of judging how far the answers are, really, only the questions to which the patient replied yes or no. The possessed girl, about sixteen years of age, was brought by her parents to the basilica of the martyrs. When she approached the tomb containing the sacred bodies, the priest, according to custom, read the formula of exorcism over her head. When he began to ask how and when the demon had entered her, she answered, not in the tongue of the barbarians, which alone the girl knew, but in the Roman tongue. And when the priest was astonished and asked how she came to know Latin, when her parents, who stood by, were wholly ignorant of it, "Thou hast never seen my parents," was the reply. To this the priest, "Whence art thou, then, if these are not thy parents?" And the demon, by the mouth of the girl, "I am a follower and disciple of Satan, and for a long time I was gatekeeper (janitor) in hell; but, for some years, along with eleven companions, I have ravaged the kingdom of the Franks." (Cap. v. 49.) He then goes on to tell how they blasted the crops and scattered pestilence among beasts and men, because of the prevalent wickedness of the people.[21] The enumeration of all these iniquities, in oratorical style, takes up a whole octavo page; and at the end it is stated, "All these things the demon spoke in Latin by the mouth of the girl." And when the priest imperatively ordered him to come out, "I shall go," said he, "not in obedience to you, but on account of the power of the saints, who do not allow me to remain any longer." And, having said this, he threw the girl down on the floor and there compelled her to lie prostrate for a time, as though she slumbered. After a little while, however, he going away, the girl, by the power of Christ and the merits of the blessed martyrs, as it were awaking from sleep, rose up quite well, to the astonishment of all present; nor after the demon had gone out was she able to speak Latin: so that it was plain enough that it was not she who had spoken in that tongue, but the demon by her mouth. (Cap. v. 51.) If the "Historia Translations" contained nothing more than has been laid before the reader, up to this time, disbelief in the miracles of which it gives so precise and full a record might well be regarded as hyper-scepticism. It might fairly be said, Here you have a man, whose high character, acute intelligence, and large instruction are certified by eminent contemporaries; a man who stood high in the confidence of one of the greatest rulers of any age, and whose other works prove him to be an accurate and judicious narrator of ordinary events. This man tells you, in language which bears the stamp of sincerity, of things which happened within his own knowledge, or within that of persons in whose veracity he has entire confidence, while he appeals to his sovereign and the court as witnesses of others; what possible ground can there be for disbelieving him? Well, it is hard upon Eginhard to say so, but it is exactly the honesty and sincerity of the man which are his undoing as a witness to the miraculous. He himself makes it quite obvious that when his profound piety comes on the stage, his good sense and even his perception of right and wrong, make their exit. Let us go back to the point at which we left him, secretly perusing the letter of Deacon Deusdona. As he tells us, its contents were that he [the deacon] had many relics of saints at home, and that he would give them to me if I would furnish him with the means of returning to Rome; he had observed that I had two mules, and if I would let him have one of them and would despatch with him a confidential servant to take charge of the relics, he would at once send them to me. This plausibly expressed proposition pleased me, and I made up my mind to test the value of the somewhat ambiguous promise at once;[22] so giving him the mule and money for his journey I ordered my notary Ratleig (who already desired to go to Rome to offer his devotions there) to go with him. Therefore, having left Aix-la-Chapelle (where the Emperor and his Court resided at the time) they came to Soissons. Here they spoke with Hildoin, abbot of the monastery of St. Medardus, because the said deacon had assured him that he had the means of placing in his possession the body of the blessed Tiburtius the Martyr. Attracted by which promises he (Hildoin) sent with them a certain priest, Hunus by name, a sharp man (_hominem callidum_), whom he ordered to receive and bring back the body of the martyr in question. And so, resuming their journey, they proceeded to Rome as fast as they could. (Cap. i. 3.) Unfortunately, a servant of the notary, one Reginbald, fell ill of a tertian fever, and impeded the progress of the party. However, this piece of adversity had its sweet uses; for three days before they reached Rome, Reginbald had a vision. Somebody habited as a deacon appeared to him and asked why his master was in such a hurry to get to Rome; and when Reginbald explained their business, this visionary deacon, who seems to have taken the measure of his brother in the flesh with some accuracy, told him not by any means to expect that Deusdona would fulfil his promises. Moreover, taking the servant by the hand, he led him to the top of a high mountain and, showing him Rome (where the man had never been), pointed out a church, adding "Tell Ratleig the thing he wants is hidden there; let him get it as quickly as he can and go back to his master." By way of a sign that the order was authoritative, the servant was promised that, from that time forth, his fever should disappear. And as the fever did vanish to return no more, the faith of Eginhard's people in Deacon Deusdona naturally vanished with it (_et fidem diaconi promissis non haberent_). Nevertheless, they put up at the deacon's house near St. Peter ad Vincula. But time went on and no relics made their appearance, while the notary and the priest were put off with all sorts of excuses--the brother to whom the relics had been confided was gone to Beneventum and not expected back for some time, and so on--until Ratleig and Hunus began to despair, and were minded to return, _infecto negotio_. But my notary, calling to mind his servant's dream, proposed to his companion that they should go to the cemetery which their host had talked about without him. So, having found and hired a guide, they went in the first place to the basilica of the blessed Tiburtius in the Via Labicana, about three thousand paces from the town, and cautiously and carefully inspected the tomb of that martyr, in order to discover whether it could be opened without any one being the wiser. Then they descended into the adjoining crypt, in which the bodies of the blessed martyrs of Christ, Marcellinus and Petrus, were buried; and, having made out the nature of their tomb, they went away thinking their host would not know what they had been about. But things fell out differently from what they had imagined. (Cap. i. 7.) In fact, Deacon Deusdona, who doubtless kept an eye on his guests, knew all about their manoeuvres and made haste to offer his services, in order that, "with the help of God" (_si Deus votis eorum favere dignaretur_), they should all work together. The deacon was evidently alarmed less they should succeed without _his_ help. So, by way of preparation for the contemplated _vol avec affraction_ they fasted three days; and then, at night, without being seen, they betook themselves to the basilica of St. Tiburtius, and tried to break open the altar erected over his remains. But the marble proving too solid, they descended to the crypt, and, "having evoked our Lord Jesus Christ and adored the holy martyrs," they proceeded to prise off the stone which covered the tomb, and thereby exposed the body of the most sacred martyr, Marcellinus, "whose head rested on a marble tablet on which his name was inscribed." The body was taken up with the greatest veneration, wrapped in a rich covering, and given over to the keeping of the deacon and his brother, Lunison, while the stone was replaced with such care that no sign of the theft remained. As sacrilegious proceedings of this kind were punishable with death by the Roman law, it seems not unnatural that Deacon Deusdona should have become uneasy, and have urged Ratleig to be satisfied with what he had got and be off with his spoils. But the notary having thus cleverly captured the blessed Marcellinus, thought it a pity he should be parted from the blessed Petrus, side by side with whom he had rested, for five hundred years and more, in the same sepulchre (as Eginhard pathetically observes); and the pious man could neither eat, drink, nor sleep, until he had compassed his desire to re-unite the saintly colleagues. This time, apparently in consequence of Deusdona's opposition to any further resurrectionist doings, he took counsel with a Greek monk, one Basil, and, accompanied by Hunus, but saying nothing to Deusdona, they committed another sacrilegious burglary, securing this time, not only the body of the blessed Petrus, but a quantity of dust, which they agreed the priest should take, and tell his employer that it was the remains of the blessed Tiburtius. How Deusdona was "squared," and what he got for his not very valuable complicity in these transactions, does not appear. But at last the relics were sent off in charge of Lunison, the brother of Deusdona, and the priest Hunus, as far as Pavia, while Ratleig stopped behind for a week to see if the robbery was discovered, and, presumably, to act as a blind, if any hue and cry was raised. But, as everything remained quiet, the notary betook himself to Pavia, where he found Lunison and Hunus awaiting his arrival. The notary's opinion of the character of his worthy colleagues, however, may be gathered from the fact that having persuaded them to set out in advance along a road which he told them he was about to take, he immediately adopted another route, and, travelling by way of St. Maurice and the Lake of Geneva, eventually reached Soleure. Eginhard tells all this story with the most naive air of unconsciousness that there is anything remarkable about an abbot, and a high officer of state to boot, being an accessory, both before and after the fact, to a most gross and scandalous act of sacrilegious and burglarious robbery. And an amusing sequel to the story proves that, where relics were concerned, his friend Hildoin, another high ecclesiastical dignitary, was even less scrupulous than himself. On going to the palace early one morning, after the saints were safely bestowed at Seligenstadt, he found Hildoin waiting for an audience in the Emperor's antechamber, and began to talk to him about the miracle of the bloody exudation. In the course of conversation, Eginhard happened to allude to the remarkable fineness of the garment of the blessed Marcellinus. Whereupon Abbot Hildoin observed (to Eginhard's stupefaction) that his observation was quite correct. Much astonished at this remark from a person was supposed not to have seen the relics, Eginhard asked him how he knew that? Upon this, Hildoin saw he had better make a clean breast of it, and he told the following story, which he had received from his priestly agent, Hunus. While Hunus and Lunison were at Pavia, waiting for Eginhard's notary, Hunus (according to his own account) had robbed the robbers. The relics were placed in a church; and a number of laymen and clerics, of whom Hunus was one, undertook to keep watch over them. One night, however, all the watchers, save wide-awake Hunus, went to sleep; and then, according to the story which this "sharp" ecclesiastic foisted upon his patron, it was borne in upon his mind that there must be some great reason why all the people, except himself, had suddenly become somnolent; and, determining to avail himself of the opportunity thus offered (_oblata occasione utendum_), he rose and, having lighted a candle, silently approached the chests. Then, having burnt through the threads of the seals with the flame of the candle, he quickly opened the chests, which had no locks;[23] and, taking out portions of each of the bodies which were thus exposed, he closed the chests and connected the burnt ends of the threads with the seals again, so that they appeared not to have been touched; and, no one having seen him, he returned to his place. (Cap. iii. 23.) Hildoin went on to tell Eginhard that Hunus at first declared to him that these purloined relics belonged to St. Tiburtius but afterwards confessed, as a great secret, how he had come by them, and he wound up his discourse thus: They have a place of honour beside St. Medardus, where they are worshipped with great veneration by all the people; but whether we may keep them or not is for your judgment. (Cap. iii. 23.) Poor Eginhard was thrown into a state of great perturbation of mind by this revelation. An acquaintance of his had recently told him of a rumour that was spread about that Hunus had contrived to abstract _all_ the remains of SS. Marcellinus and Petrus while Eginhard's agents were in a drunken sleep; and that, while the real relics were in Abbot Hildoin's hands at St. Medardus, the Shrine at Seligenstadt contained nothing but a little dust. Though greatly annoyed by this "execrable rumour, spread everywhere by the subtlety of the devil," Eginhard had doubtless comforted himself by his supposed knowledge of its falsity, and he only now discovered how considerable a foundation there was for the scandal. There was nothing for it but to insist upon the return of the stolen treasures. One would have thought that the holy man, who had admitted himself to be knowingly a receiver of stolen goods, would have made instant restitution and begged only for absolution. But Eginhard intimates that he had very great difficulty in getting his brother abbot to see that even restitution was necessary. Hildoin's proceedings were not of such a nature as to lead any one to place implicit confidence in anything he might say; still less had his agent, priest Hunus, established much claim to confidence; and it is not surprising that Eginhard should have lost no time in summoning his notary and Lunison to his presence, in order that he might hear what they had to say about the business. They, however, at once protested that priest Hunus's story was a parcel of lies, and that after the relics left Rome no one had any opportunity of meddling with them. Moreover, Lunison, throwing himself at Eginhard's feet, confessed with many tears what actually took place. It will be remembered that after the body of St. Marcellinus was abstracted from its tomb, Ratleig deposited it in the house of Deusdona, in charge of the latter's brother, Lunison. But Hunus being very much disappointed that he could not get hold of the body of St. Tiburtius, and afraid to go back to his abbot empty-handed, bribed Lunison with four pieces of gold and five of silver to give him access to the chest. This Lunison did, and Hunus helped himself to as much as would fill a gallon-measure (_vas sextarii mensuram_) of the sacred remains. Eginhard's indignation at the "rapine" of this "nequissimus nebulo" is exquisitely droll. It would appear that the adage about the receiver being as bad as the thief was not current in the ninth century. Let us now briefly sum up the history of the acquisition of the relics. Eginhard makes a contract with Deusdona for the delivery of certain relics which the latter says he possesses. Eginhard makes no inquiry how he came by them; otherwise, the transaction is innocent enough. Deusdona turns out to be a swindler, and has no relics. Thereupon Eginhard's agent, after due fasting and prayer, breaks open the tombs and helps himself. Eginhard discovers by the self-betrayal of his brother abbot, Hildoin, that portions of his relics have been stolen and conveyed to the latter. With much ado he succeeds in getting them back. Hildoin's agent, Hunus, in delivering these stolen goods to him, at first declared they were the relics of St. Tiburtius, which Hildoin desired him to obtain; but afterwards invented a story of their being the product of a theft, which the providential drowsiness of his companions enabled him to perpetrate, from the relics which Hildoin well knew were the property of his friend. Lunison, on the contrary, swears that all this story is false, and that he himself was bribed by Hunus to allow him to steal what he pleased from the property confided to his own and his brother's care by their guest Ratleig. And the honest notary himself seems to have no hesitation about lying and stealing to any extent, where the acquisition of relics is the object in view. For a parallel to these transactions one must read a police report of the doings of a "long firm" or of a set of horse-coupers; yet Eginhard seems to be aware of nothing, but that he has been rather badly used by his friend Hildoin, and the "nequissimus nebulo" Hunus. It is not easy for a modern Protestant, still less for any one who has the least tincture of scientific culture, whether physical or historical, to picture to himself the state of mind of a man of the ninth century, however cultivated, enlightened, and sincere he may have been. His deepest convictions, his most cherished hopes, were bound up with the belief in the miraculous. Life was a constant battle between saints and demons for the possession of the souls of men. The most superstitious among our modern countrymen turn to supernatural agencies only when natural causes seem insufficient; to Eginhard and his friends the supernatural was the rule: and the sufficiency of natural causes was allowed only when there was nothing to suggest others. Moreover, it must be recollected that the possession of miracle-working relics was greatly coveted, not only on high, but on very low grounds. To a man like Eginhard, the mere satisfaction of the religious sentiment was obviously a powerful attraction. But, more than this, the possession of such a treasure was an immense practical advantage. If the saints were duly flattered and worshipped, there was no telling what benefits might result from their interposition on your behalf. For physical evils, access to the shrine was like the grant of the use of a universal pill and ointment manufactory; and pilgrimages thereto might suffice to cleanse the performers from any amount of sin. A letter to Lupus, subsequently Abbot of Ferrara, written while Eginhard was smarting under the grief caused by the loss of his much-loved wife Imma, affords a striking insight into the current view of the relation between the glorified saints and their worshippers. The writer shows that he is anything but satisfied with the way in which he has been treated by the blessed martyrs whose remains he has taken such pains to "convey" to Seligenstadt, and to honour there as they would never have been honoured in their Roman obscurity. It is an aggravation of my grief and a reopening of my wound, that our vows have been of no avail, and that the faith which we placed in the merits and intervention of the martyrs has been utterly disappointed. We may admit, then, without impeachment of Eginhard's sincerity, or of his honour under all ordinary circumstances, that when piety, self-interest, the glory of the Church in general, and that of the church at Seligenstadt in particular, all pulled one way, even the workaday principles of morality were disregarded; and, _a fortiori_, anything like proper investigation of the reality of alleged miracles was thrown to the winds. And if this was the condition of mind of such a man as Eginhard, what is it not legitimate to suppose may have been that of Deacon Deusdona, Lunison, Hunus, and company, thieves and cheats by their own confession, or of the probably hysterical nun, or of the professional beggars, for whose incapacity to walk and straighten themselves there is no guarantee but their own? Who is to make sure that the exorcist of the demon Wiggo was not just such another priest as Hunus; and is it not at least possible, when Eginhard's servants dreamed, night after night, in such a curiously coincident fashion, that a careful inquirer might have found they were very anxious to please their master? Quite apart from deliberate and conscious fraud (which is a rarer thing than is often supposed), people whose mythopoeic faculty is once stirred, are capable of saying the thing that is not, and of acting as they should not, to an extent which is hardly imaginable by persons who are not so easily affected by the contagion of blind faith. There is no falsity so gross that honest men and, still more, virtuous women, anxious to promote a good cause, will not lend themselves to it without any clear consciousness of the moral bearings of what they are doing. The cases of miraculously-effected cures of which Eginhard is ocular witness appear to belong to classes of disease in which malingering is possible or hysteria presumable. Without modern means of diagnosis, the names given to them are quite worthless. One "miracle," however, in which the patient, a woman, was cured by the mere sight of the church in which the relics of the blessed martyrs lay, is an unmistakable case of dislocation of the lower jaw; and it is obvious that, as not unfrequently happens in such accidents in weakly subjects, the jaw slipped suddenly back into place, perhaps in consequence of a jolt, as the woman rode towards the church. (Cap. v. 53.)[24] There is also a good deal said about a very questionable blind man--one Albricus (Alberich?)--who having been cured, not of his blindness, but of another disease under which he laboured, took up his quarters at Seligenstadt, and came out as a prophet, inspired by the Archangel Gabriel. Eginhard intimates that his prophecies were fulfilled; but as he does not state exactly what they were, or how they were accomplished, the statement must be accepted with much caution. It is obvious that he was not the man to hesitate to "ease" a prophecy until it fitted, if the credit of the shrine of his favourite saints could be increased by such a procedure. There is no impeachment of his honour in the supposition. The logic of the matter is quite simple, if somewhat sophistical. The holiness of the Church of the martyrs guarantees the reality of the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel there; and what the archangel says must be true. Therefore if anything seem to be wrong, that must be the mistake of the transmitter; and, in justice to the archangel, it must be suppressed or set right. This sort of "reconciliation" is not unknown in quite modern times, and among people who would be very much shocked to be compared with a "benighted papist" of the ninth century. The readers of this essay are, I imagine, very largely composed of people who would be shocked to be regarded as anything but enlightened Protestants. It is not unlikely that those of them who have accompanied me thus far may be disposed to say, "Well, this is all very amusing as a story, but what is the practical interest of it? We are not likely to believe in the miracles worked by the spolia of SS. Marcellinus and Petrus, or by those of any other saints in the Roman Calendar." The practical interest is this: if you do not believe in these miracles recounted by a witness whose character and competency are firmly established, whose sincerity cannot be doubted, and who appeals to his sovereign and other comtemporaries as witnesses of the truth of what he says in a document of which a MS. copy exists, probably dating within a century of the author's death, why do you profess to believe in stories of a like character, which are found in documents of the dates and of the authorship of which nothing is certainly determined, and no known copies of which come within two or three centuries of the events they record? If it be true that the four Gospels and the Acts were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all that we know of these persons comes to nothing in comparison with our knowledge of Eginhard; and not only is there no proof that the traditional authors of these works wrote them, but very strong reasons to the contrary may be alleged. If, therefore, you refuse to believe that "Wiggo" was cast out of the possessed girl on Eginhard's authority, with what justice can you profess to believe that the legion of devils were cast out of the man among the tombs of the Gadarenes? And if, on the other hand, you accept Eginhard's evidence, why do you laugh at the supposed efficacy of relics and the saint-worship of the modern Romanists? It cannot be pretended, in the face of all evidence, that the Jews of the year 30 A.D. or thereabouts, were less imbued with the belief in the supernatural than were the Franks of the year 800 A.D. The same influences were at work in each case, and it is only reasonable to suppose that the results were the same. If the evidence of Eginhard is insufficient to lead reasonable men to believe in the miracles he relates, _a fortiori_ the evidence afforded by the Gospels and the Acts must be so.[25] But it may be said that no serious critic denies the genuineness of the four great Pauline Epistles--Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, and Romans--and that in three out of these four Paul lays claim to the power of working miracles.[26] Must we suppose, therefore, that the Apostle to the Gentiles has stated that which is false? But to how much does this so-called claim amount? It may mean much or little. Paul nowhere tells us what he did in this direction; and in his sore need to justify his assumption of apostleship against the sneers of his enemies, it is hardly likely that, if he had any very striking cases to bring forward, he would have neglected evidence so well calculated to put them to shame. And, without the slightest impeachment of Paul's veracity, we must further remember that his strongly-marked mental characteristics, displayed in unmistakable fashion in these Epistles, are anything but those which would justify us in regarding him as a critical witness respecting matters of fact, or as a trustworthy interpreter of their significance. When a man testifies to a miracle, he not only states a fact, but he adds an interpretation of the fact. We may admit his evidence as to the former, and yet think his opinion as to the latter worthless. If Eginhard's calm and objective narrative of the historical events of his time is no guarantee for the soundness of his judgment where the supernatural is concerned, the heated rhetoric of the Apostle of the Gentiles, his absolute confidence in the "inner light," and the extraordinary conceptions of the nature and requirements of logical proof which he betrays, in page after page of his Epistles, afford still less security. There is a comparatively modern man who shared to the full Paul's trust in the "inner light," and who, though widely different from the fiery evangelist of Tarsus in various obvious particulars, yet, if I am not mistaken, shares his deepest characteristics. I speak of George Fox, who separated himself from the current Protestantism of England, in the seventeenth century, as Paul separated himself from the Judaism of the first century, at the bidding of the "inner light"; who went through persecutions as serious as those which Paul enumerates; who was beaten, stoned, cast out for dead, imprisoned nine times, sometimes for long periods, who was in perils on land and perils at sea. George Fox was an even more widely-travelled missionary; while his success in founding congregations, and his energy in visiting them, not merely in Great Britain and Ireland and the West India Islands, but on the continent of Europe and that of North America, were no less remarkable. A few years after Fox began to preach, there were reckoned to be a thousand Friends in prison in the various gaols of England; at his death, less than fifty years after the foundation of the sect, there were 70,000 Quakers in the United Kingdom. The cheerfulness with which these people--women as well as men--underwent martyrdom in this country and in the New England States is one of the most remarkable facts in the history of religion. No one who reads the voluminous autobiography of "Honest George" can doubt the man's utter truthfulness; and though, in his multitudinous letters, he but rarely rises far above the incoherent commonplaces of a street preacher, there can be no question of his power as a speaker, nor any doubt as to the dignity and attractiveness of his personality, or of his possession of a large amount of practical good sense and governing faculty. But that George Fox had full faith in his own powers as a miracle-worker, the following passage of his autobiography (to which others might be added) demonstrates:-- Now after I was set at liberty from Nottingham gaol (where I had been kept a prisoner a pretty long time) I travelled as before, in the work of the Lord. And coming to Mansfield Woodhouse, there was a distracted woman, under a doctor's hand, with her hair let loose all about her ears; and he was about to let her blood, she being first bound, and many people being about her, holding her by violence; but he could get no blood from her. And I desired them to unbind her and let her alone; for they could not touch the spirit in her by which she was tormented. So they did unbind her, and I was moved to speak to her, and in the name of the Lord to bid her be quiet and still. And she was so. And the Lord's power settled her mind and she mended; and afterwards received the truth and continued in it to her death. And the Lord's name was honoured; to whom the glory of all His works belongs. Many great and wonderful things were wrought by the heavenly power in those days. For the Lord made bare His omnipotent arm and manifested His power to the astonishment of many; by the healing virtue whereof many have been delivered from great infirmities, and the devils were made subject through His name: of which particular instances might be given beyond what this unbelieving age is able to receive or bear.[27] It needs no long study of Fox's writings, however, to arrive at the conviction that the distinction between subjective and objective verities had not the same place in his mind as it has in that of an ordinary mortal. When an ordinary person would say "I thought so and so," or "I made up my mind to do so and so," George Fox says, "It was opened to me," or "at the command of God I did so and so." "Then at the command of God on the ninth day of the seventh month 1643 (Fox being just nineteen), I left my relations and brake off all familiarity or friendship with young or old." "About the beginning of the year 1647 I was moved of the Lord to go into Darbyshire." Fox hears voices and he sees visions, some of which he brings before the reader with apocalyptic power in the simple and strong English, alike untutored and undefiled, of which, like John Bunyan, his contemporary, he was a master. "And one morning, as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over me and a temptation beset me; and I sate still. And it was said, _All things come by Nature_. And the elements and stars came over me; so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it.... And as I sate still under it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me and a true voice arose in me which said, _There is a living God who made all things_. And immediately the cloud and the temptation vanished away, and life rose over it all, and my heart was glad and I praised the living God" (p. 13). If George Fox could speak, as he proves in this and some other passages he could write, his astounding influence on the contemporaries of Milton and of Cromwell is no mystery. But this modern reproduction of the ancient prophet, with his "Thus saith the Lord," "This is the work of the Lord," steeped in supernaturalism and glorying in blind faith, is the mental antipodes of the philosopher, founded in naturalism and a fanatic for evidence, to whom these affirmations inevitably suggest the previous question: "How do you know that the Lord saith it?" "How do you know that the Lord doeth it?" and who is compelled to demand that rational ground for belief, without which, to the man of science, assent is merely an immoral pretence. And it is this rational ground of belief which the writers of the Gospels, no less than Paul, and Eginhard, and Fox, so little dream of offering that they would regard the demand for it as a kind of blasphemy. AGNOSTICISM [1889] Within the last few months [1889] the public has received much and varied information on the subject of Agnostics, their tenets, and even their future. Agnosticism exercised the orators of the Church Congress at Manchester.[28] It has been furnished with a set of "articles," fewer, but not less rigid, and certainly not less consistent than the thirty-nine; its nature has been analysed, and its future severely predicted by the most eloquent of that prophetical school whose Samuel is Auguste Comte. It may still be a question, however, whether the public is as much the wiser as might be expected, considering all the trouble that has been taken to enlighten it. Not only are the three accounts of the agnostic position sadly out of harmony with one another, but I propose to show cause for my belief that all three must be seriously questioned by any one who employs the term "agnostic" in the sense in which it was originally used. The learned Principal of King's College, who brought the topic of Agnosticism before the Church Congress, took a short and easy way of settling the business:-- But if this be so, for a man to urge, as an escape from this article of belief, that he has no means of a scientific knowledge of the unseen world, or of the future, is irrelevant. His difference from Christians lies not in the fact that he has no knowledge of these things, but that he does not believe the authority on which they are stated. He may prefer to call himself an agnostic; but his real name is an older one--he is an infidel; that is to say, an unbeliever. The word infidel, perhaps, carries an unpleasant significance. Perhaps it is right that it should. It is, and it ought to be, an unpleasant thing for a man to have to say plainly that he does not believe in Jesus Christ.[29] So much of Dr. Wace's address either explicitly or implicitly concerns me, that I take upon myself to deal with it; but, in doing so, it must be understood that I speak for myself alone. I am not aware that there is any sect of Agnostics; and if there be, I am not its acknowledged prophet or pope. I desire to leave to the Comtists the entire monopoly of the manufacture of imitation ecclesiasticism. Let us calmly and dispassionately consider Dr. Wace's appreciation of agnosticism. The agnostic, according to his view, is a person who says he has no means of attaining a scientific knowledge of the unseen world or of the future; by which somewhat loose phraseology Dr. Wace presumably means the theological unseen world and future. I cannot think this description happy, either in form or substance; but for the present it may pass. Dr. Wace continues that is not "his difference from Christians." Are there then any Christians who say that they know nothing about the unseen world and the future? I was ignorant of the fact, but I am ready to accept it on the authority of a professional theologian, and I proceed to Dr. Wace's next proposition. The real state of the case, then, is that the agnostic "does not believe the authority" on which "these things" are stated, which authority is Jesus Christ. He is simply an old-fashioned "infidel" who is afraid to own to his right name. As "presbyter is priest writ large," so is "agnostic" the mere Greek equivalent for the Latin "infidel." There is an attractive simplicity about this solution of the problem; and it has that advantage of being somewhat offensive to the persons attacked, which is so dear to the less refined sort of controversialist. The agnostic says, "I cannot find good evidence that so and so is true." "Ah," says his adversary, seizing his opportunity, "then you declare that Jesus Christ was untruthful, for he said so and so;" a very telling method of rousing prejudice. But suppose that the value of the evidence as to what Jesus may have said and done, and as to the exact nature and scope of his authority, is just that which the agnostic finds it most difficult to determine. If I venture to doubt that the Duke of Wellington gave the command "Up, Guards, and at 'em!" at Waterloo, I do not think that even Dr. Wace would accuse me of disbelieving the Duke. Yet it would be just as reasonable to do this as to accuse any one of denying what Jesus said, before the preliminary question as to what he did say is settled. Now, the question as to what Jesus really said and did is strictly a scientific problem, which is capable of solution by no other methods than those practised; by the historian and the literary critic. It is a problem of immense difficulty, which has occupied some of the best heads in Europe for the last century; and it is only of late years that their investigations have begun to converge towards one conclusion.[30] That kind of faith which Dr. Wace describes and lauds is of no use here. Indeed, he himself takes pains to destroy its evidential value. "What made the Mahommedan world? Trust and faith in the declarations and assurances of Mahommed. And what made the Christian world? Trust and faith in the declarations and assurances of Jesus Christ and His Apostles" (_l.c._ p. 253). The triumphant tone of this imaginary catechism leads me to suspect that its author has hardly appreciated its full import. Presumably, Dr. Wace regards Mahommed as an unbeliever, or, to use the term which he prefers, infidel; and considers that his assurances have given rise to a vast delusion which has led, and is leading, millions of men straight to everlasting punishment. And this being so, the "Trust and faith" which have "made the Mahommedan world," in just the same sense as they have "made the Christian world," must be trust and faith in falsehood. No man who has studied history, or even attended to the occurrences of everyday life, can doubt the enormous practical value of trust and faith; but as little will he be inclined to deny that this practical value has not the least relation to the reality of the objects of that trust and faith. In examples of patient constancy of faith and of unswerving trust, the "Acta Martyrum" do not excel the annals of Babism.[31] The discussion upon which we have entered goes so thoroughly to the root of the whole matter; the question of the day is so completely, as the author of "Robert Elsmere" says, the value of testimony, that I shall offer no apology for following it out somewhat in detail; and, by way of giving substance to the argument, I shall base what I have to say upon a case, the consideration of which lies strictly within the province of natural science, and of that particular part of it known as the physiology and pathology of the nervous system. I find, in the second Gospel (chap. v.), a statement, to all appearance intended to have the same evidential value as any other contained in that history. It is the well-known story of the devils who were cast out of a man, and ordered, or permitted, to enter into a herd of swine, to the great loss and damage of the innocent Gerasene, or Gadarene, pig owners. There can be no doubt that the narrator intends to convey to his readers his own conviction that this casting out and entering in were effected by the agency of Jesus of Nazareth; that, by speech and action, Jesus enforced this conviction; nor does any inkling of the legal and moral difficulties of the case manifest itself. On the other hand, everything that I know of physiological and pathological science leads me to entertain a very strong conviction that the phenomena ascribed to possession are as purely natural as those which constitute smallpox; everything that I know of anthropology leads me to think that the belief in demons and demoniacal possession is a mere survival of a once universal superstition, and that its persistence, at the present time, is pretty much in the inverse ratio of the general instruction, intelligence, and sound judgment of the population among whom it prevails. Everything that I know of law and justice convinces me that the wanton destruction of other people's property is a misdemeanour of evil example. Again, the study of history, and especially of that of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, leaves no shadow of doubt on my mind that the belief in the reality of possession and of witchcraft, justly based, alike by Catholics and Protestants, upon this and innumerable other passages in both the Old and New Testaments, gave rise, through the special influence of Christian ecclesiastics, to the most horrible persecutions and judicial murders of thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women, and children. And when I reflect that the record of a plain and simple declaration upon such an occasion as this, that the belief in witchcraft and possession is wicked nonsense, would have rendered the long agony of mediæval humanity impossible, I am prompted to reject, as dishonouring, the supposition that such declaration was withheld out of condescension to popular error. "Come forth, thou unclean spirit, out of the man" (Mark v. 8)[32] are the words attributed to Jesus. If I declare, as I have no hesitation in doing, that I utterly disbelieve in the existence of "unclean spirits," and, consequently, in the possibility of their "coming forth" out of a man, I suppose that Dr. Wace will tell me I am disregarding the testimony "of our Lord." For, if these words were really used, the most resourceful of reconcilers can hardly venture to affirm that they are compatible with a disbelief "in these things." As the learned and fair-minded, as well as orthodox, Dr. Alexander remarks, in an editorial note to the article "Demoniacs" in the "Biblical Cyclopædia" (vol. i. p. 664, note):-- ... On the lowest grounds on which our Lord and His Apostles can be placed they must, at least, be regarded as _honest_ men. Now, though honest speech does not require that words should be used always and only in their etymological sense, it does require that they should not be used so as to affirm what the speaker knows to be false. Whilst, therefore, our Lord and His Apostles might use the word [Greek: daimonizesthai], or the phrase, [Greek: daimonion echein], as a popular description of certain diseases, without giving in to the belief which lay at the source of such a mode of expression, they could not speak of demons entering into a man, or being cast out of him, without pledging themselves to the belief of an actual possession of the man by the demons. (Campbell, _Prel. Diss._ vi. 1, 10.) If, consequently, they did not hold this belief, they spoke not as honest men. The story which we are considering does not rest on the authority of the second Gospel alone. The third confirms the second, especially in the matter of commanding the unclean spirit to come out of the man (Luke viii. 29); and, although the first Gospel either gives a different version of the same story, or tells another of like kind, the essential point remains: "If thou cast us out, send us away into the herd of swine. And He said unto them: Go!" (Matt. viii. 31, 32). If the concurrent testimony of the three synoptics, then, is really sufficient to do away with all rational doubt as to the matter of fact of the utmost practical and speculative importance--belief or disbelief in which may affect, and has affected, men's lives and their conduct towards other men, in the most serious way--then I am bound to believe that Jesus implicitly affirmed himself to possess a "knowledge of the unseen world," which afforded full confirmation of the belief in demons and possession current among his contemporaries. If the story is true, the mediæval theory of the invisible world may be, and probably is, quite correct; and the witch-finders, from Sprenger to Hopkins and Mather, are much-maligned men. On the other hand, humanity, noting the frightful consequences of this belief; common sense, observing the futility of the evidence on which it is based, in all cases that have been properly investigated; science, more and more seeing its way to inclose all the phenomena of so-called "possession" within the domain of pathology, so far as they are not to be relegated to that of the police--all these powerful influences concur in warning us, at our peril, against accepting the belief without the most careful scrutiny of the authority on which it rests. I can discern no escape from this dilemma: either Jesus said what he is reported to have said, or he did not. In the former case, it is inevitable that his authority on matters connected with the "unseen world" should be roughly shaken; in the latter, the blow falls upon the authority of the synoptic Gospels. If their report on a matter of such stupendous and far-reaching practical import as this is untrustworthy, how can we be sure of its trustworthiness in other cases? The favourite "earth" in which the hard-pressed reconciler takes refuge, that the Bible does not profess to teach science,[33] is stopped in this instance. For the question of the existence of demon: and of possession by them, though it lies strictly within the province of science is also of the deepest moral and religious significance. If physical and mental disorders are caused by demons, Gregory of Tours and his contemporaries rightly considered that relics and exorcists were more useful than doctors; the gravest questions arise as to the legal and moral responsibilities of persons inspired by demoniacal impulses; and our whole conception of the universe and of our relations to it becomes totally different from what it would be on the contrary hypothesis. The theory of life of an average mediæval Christian was as different from that of an average nineteenth-century Englishman as that of a West African negro is now, in these respects. The modern world is slowly, but surely, shaking off these and other monstrous survivals of savage delusions; and, whatever happens, it will not return to that wallowing in the mire. Until the contrary is proved, I venture to doubt whether, at this present moment, any Protestant theologian, who has a reputation to lose, will say that he believes the Gadarene story. The choice then lies between discrediting those who compiled the Gospel biographies and disbelieving the Master, whom they, simple souls, thought to honour by preserving such traditions of the exercise of his authority over Satan's invisible world. This is the dilemma. No deep scholarship, nothing but a knowledge of the revised version (on which it is to be supposed all that mere scholarship can do has been done), with the application thereto of the commonest canons of common sense, is needful to enable us to make a choice between its alternatives. It is hardly doubtful that the story, as told in the first Gospel, is merely a version of that told in the second and third. Nevertheless, the discrepancies are serious and irreconcilable; and, on this ground alone, a suspension of judgment at the least, is called for. But there is a great deal more to be said. From the dawn of scientific biblical criticism until the present day, the evidence against the long-cherished notion that the three synoptic Gospels are the works of three independent authors, each prompted by Divine inspiration, has steadily accumulated, until at the present time there is no visible escape from the conclusion that each of the three is a compilation consisting of a groundwork common to all three--the threefold tradition; and of a superstructure, consisting, firstly, of matter common to it with one of the others, and, secondly, of matter special to each. The use of the terms "groundwork" and "superstructure" by no means implies that the latter must be of later date than the former. On the contrary, some parts of it may be, and probably are, older than some parts of the groundwork.[34] The story of the Gadarene swine belongs to the groundwork; at least, the essential part of it, in which the belief in demoniac possession is expressed, does; and therefore the compilers of the first, second, and third Gospels, whoever they were, certainly accepted that belief (which, indeed, was universal among both Jews and pagans at that time), and attributed it to Jesus. What, then, do we know about the originator, or originators, of this groundwork--of that threefold tradition which all three witnesses (in Paley's phrase) agree upon--that we should allow their mere statements to outweigh the counter arguments of humanity, of common sense, of exact science, and to imperil the respect which all would be glad to be able to render to their Master? Absolutely nothing.[35] There is no proof, nothing more than a fair presumption, that any one of the Gospels existed, in the state in which we find it in the authorised version of the Bible, before the second century, or in other words, sixty or seventy years after the events recorded. And between that time and the date of the oldest extant manuscripts, of the Gospels, there is no telling what additions and alterations and interpolations may have been made. It may be said that this is all mere speculation, but it is a good deal more. As competent scholars and honest men, our revisers have felt compelled to point out that such things have happened even since the date of the oldest known manuscripts. The oldest two copies of the second Gospel end with the 8th verse of the 16th chapter; the remaining twelve verses are spurious, and it is noteworthy that the maker of the addition has not hesitated to introduce a speech in which Jesus promises his disciples that "in My name shall they cast out devils." The other passage "rejected to the margin" is still more instructive. It is that touching apologue, with its profound ethical sense, of the woman taken in adultery--which, if internal evidence were an infallible guide, might well be affirmed to be a typical example of the teachings of Jesus. Yet, say the revisers, pitilessly, "Most of the ancient authorities omit John vii. 53-viii. 11." Now let any reasonable man ask himself this question: If, after an approximate settlement of the canon of the New Testament, and even later than the fourth and fifth centuries, literary fabricators had the skill and the audacity to make such additions and interpolations as these, what may they have done when no one had thought of a canon; when oral tradition, still unfixed, was regarded as more valuable than such written records as may have existed in the latter portion of the first century? Or, to take the other alternative, if those who gradually settled the canon did not know of the existence of the oldest codices which have come down to us; or if, knowing them, they rejected their authority, what is to be thought of their competency as critics of the text? People who object to free criticism of the Christian Scriptures forget that they are what they are in virtue of very free criticism; unless the advocates of inspiration are prepared to affirm that the majority of influential ecclesiastics during several centuries were safeguarded against error. For, even granting that some books of the period were inspired, they were certainly few amongst many, and those who selected the canonical books, unless they themselves were also inspired, must be regarded in the light of mere critics, and, from the evidence they have left of their intellectual habits, very uncritical critics. When one thinks that such delicate questions as those involved fell into the hands of men like Papias (who believed in the famous millenarian grape story); of Irenæus with his "reasons" for the existence of only four Gospels; and of such calm and dispassionate judges as Tertullian, with his "Credo quia impossibile": the marvel is that the selection which constitutes our New Testament is as free as it is from obviously objectionable matter. The apocryphal Gospels certainly deserve to be apocryphal; but one may suspect that a little more critical discrimination would have enlarged the Apocrypha not inconsiderably. At this point a very obvious objection arises and deserves full and candid consideration. It may be said that critical scepticism carried to the length suggested is historical pyrrhonism; that if we are altogether to discredit an ancient or a modern historian, because he has assumed fabulous matter to be true, it will be as well to give up paying any attention to history. It may be said, and with great justice, that Eginhard's "Life of Charlemagne" is none the less trustworthy because of the astounding revelation of credulity, of lack of judgment, and even of respect for the eighth commandment, which he has unconsciously made in the "History of the Translation of the Blessed Martyrs Marcellinus and Paul." Or, to go no further back than the last number of the _Nineteenth Century_, surely that excellent lady, Miss Strickland, is not to be refused all credence, because of the myth about the second James's remains, which she seems to have unconsciously invented. Of course this is perfectly true. I am afraid there is no man alive whose witness could be accepted, if the condition precedent were proof that he had never invented and promulgated a myth. In the minds of all of us there are little places here and there, like the indistinguishable spots on a rock which give foothold to moss or stonecrop; on which, if the germ of a myth fall, it is certain to grow, without in the least degree affecting our accuracy or truthfulness elsewhere. Sir Walter Scott knew that he could not repeat a story without, as he said, "giving it a new hat and stick." Most of us differ from Sir Walter only in not knowing about this tendency of the mythopoeic faculty to break out unnoticed. But it is also perfectly true that the mythopoeic faculty is not equally active in all minds, nor in all regions and under all conditions of the same mind. David Hume was certainly not so liable to temptation as the Venerable Bede, or even as some recent historians who could be mentioned; and the most imaginative of debtors, if he owes five pounds, never makes an obligation to pay a hundred out of it. The rule of common sense is _prima facie_ to trust a witness in all matters, in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor that love of the marvellous, which is inherent to a greater or less degree in all mankind, are strongly concerned; and, when they are involved, to require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified. Now, in the Gadarene affair, I do not think I am unreasonably sceptical, if I say that the existence of demons who can be transferred from a man to a pig, does thus contravene probability. Let me be perfectly candid. I admit I have no _a priori_ objection to offer. There are physical things, such as _læniæ_ and _trichinæ_ which can be transferred from men to pigs, and _vice versa_, and which do undoubtedly produce most diabolical and deadly effects on both. For anything I can absolutely prove to the contrary, there may be spiritual things capable of the same transmigration, with like effects. Moreover I am bound to add that perfectly truthful persons, for I have the greatest respect, believe in stories about spirits of the present day, quite as improbable as that we are considering. So I declare, as plainly as I can, that I am unable to show cause why these transferable devils should not exist; nor can I deny that, not merely the whole Roman Church, but many Wacean "infidels" of no mean repute, do honestly and firmly believe that the activity of such like demonic beings is in full swing in this year of grace 1889. Nevertheless, as good Bishop Butler says, "probability is the guide of life"; and it seems to me that this is just one of the cases in which the canon of credibility and testimony, which I have ventured to lay down, has full force. So that, with the most entire respect for many (by no means for all) of our witnesses for the truth of demonology, ancient and modern, I conceive their evidence on this particular matter to be ridiculously insufficient to warrant their conclusion.[36] After what has been said, I do not think that any sensible man, unless he happen to be angry, will accuse me of "contradicting the Lord and His Apostles" if I reiterate my total disbelief in the whole Gadarene story. But, if that story is discredited, all the other stories of demoniac possession fall under suspicion. And if the belief in demons and demoniac possession, which forms the sombre background of the whole picture of primitive Christianity, presented to us in the New Testament, is shaken, what is to be said, in any case, of the uncorroborated testimony of the Gospels with respect to "the unseen world"? I am not aware that I have been influenced by any more bias in regard to the Gadarene story than I have been in dealing with other cases of like kind the investigation of which has interested me. I was brought up in the strictest school of evangelical orthodoxy; and when I was old enough to think for myself I started upon my journey of inquiry with little doubt about the general truth of what I had been taught; and with that feeling of the unpleasantness of being called an "infidel" which, we are told, is so right and proper. Near my journey's end, I find myself in a condition of something more than mere doubt about these matters. In the course of other inquiries, I have had to do with fossil remains which looked quite plain at a distance, and became more and more indistinct as I tried to define their outline by close inspection. There was something there--something which, if I could win assurance about it, might mark a new epoch in the history of the earth; but, study as long as I might, certainty eluded my grasp. So has it been with me in my efforts to define the grand figure of Jesus as it lies in the primary strata of Christian literature. Is he the kindly, peaceful Christ depicted in the Catacombs? Or is he the stern Judge who frowns above the altar of SS. Cosmas and Damianus? Or can he be rightly represented by the bleeding ascetic, broken down by physical pain, of too many mediæval pictures? Are we to accept the Jesus of the second, or the Jesus of the fourth Gospel, as the true Jesus? What did he really say and do; and how much that is attributed to him, in speech and action, is the embroidery of the various parties into which his followers tended to split themselves within twenty years of his death, when even the threefold tradition was only nascent? If any one will answer these questions for me with something more to the point than feeble talk about the "cowardice of agnosticism," I shall be deeply his debtor. Unless and until they are satifactorily answered, I say of agnosticism in this matter, "_J'y suis, et j'y reste._" But, as we have seen, it is asserted that I have no business to call myself an agnostic; that, if I am not a Christian I am an infidel; and that I ought to call myself by that name of "unpleasant significance." Well, I do not care much what I am called by other people, and if I had at my side all those who, since the Christian era, have been called infidels by other folks, I could not desire better company. If these are my ancestors, I prefer, with the old Frank to be with them wherever they are. But there are several points in Dr. Wace's contention which must be elucidated before I can even think of undertaking to carry out his wishes. I must, for instance, know what a Christian is. Now what is a Christian? By whose authority is the signification of that term defined? Is there any doubt that the immediate followers of Jesus, the "sect of the Nazarenes," were strictly orthodox Jews differing from other Jews not more than the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes differed from one another, in fact, only in the belief that the Messiah, for whom the rest of their nation waited, had come? Was not their chief, "James, the brother of the Lord," reverenced alike by Sadducee, Pharisee, and Nazarene? At the famous conference which, according to the Acts, took place at Jerusalem, does not James declare that "myriads" of Jews, who by that time, had become Nazarenes, were "all zealous for the Law"? Was not the name of "Christian" first used to denote the converts to the doctrine promulgated by Paul and Barnabas at Antioch? Does the subsequent history of Christianity leave any doubt that, from this time forth, the "little rift within the lute" caused by the new teaching, developed, if not inaugurated, at Antioch, grew wider and wider, until the two types of doctrine irreconcilably diverged? Did not the primitive Nazarenism, or Ebionism, develop into the Nazarenism, and Ebionism, and Elkasaitism of later ages, and finally die out in obscurity and condemnation, as damnable heresy; while the younger doctrine throve and pushed out its shoots into that endless variety of sects, of which the three strongest survivors are the Roman and Greek Churches and modern Protestantism? Singular state of things! If I were to profess the doctrine which was held by "James, the brother of the Lord," and by every one of the "myriads" of his followers and co-religionists in Jerusalem up to twenty or thirty years after the Crucifixion (and one knows not how much later at Pella), I should be condemned with unanimity, as an ebionising heretic by the Roman, Greek, and Protestant Churches! And, probably, this hearty and unanimous condemnation of the creed, held by those who were in the closest personal relation with their Lord, is almost the only point upon which they would be cordially of one mind. On the other hand, though I hardly dare imagine such a thing, I very much fear that the "pillars" of the primitive Hierosolymitan Church would have considered Dr. Wace an infidel. No one can read the famous second chapter of Galatians and the book of Revelation without seeing how narrow was even Paul's escape from a similar fate. And, if ecclesiastical history is to be trusted, the thirty-nine articles, be they right or wrong, diverge from the primitive doctrine of the Nazarenes vastly more than even Pauline Christianity did. But, further than this, I have great difficulty in assuring myself that even James, "the brother of the Lord," and his "myriads" of Nazarenes, properly represented the doctrines of their Master. For it is constantly asserted by our modern "pillars" that one of the chief features of the work of Jesus was the instauration of Religion by the abolition of what our sticklers for articles and liturgies, with unconscious humour, call the narrow restrictions of the Law. Yet, if James knew this, how could the bitter controversy with Paul have arisen; and why did not one or the other side quote any of the various sayings of Jesus, recorded in the Gospels, which directly bear on the question--sometimes, apparently, in opposite directions. So, if I am asked to call myself an "infidel," I reply: To what doctrine do you ask me to be faithful? Is it that contained in the Nicene and the Athanasian Creeds? My firm belief is that the Nazarenes, say of the year 40, headed by James, would have stopped their ears and thought worthy of stoning the audacious man who propounded it to them. Is it contained in the so-called Apostles' Creed! I am pretty sure that even that would have created a recalcitrant commotion at Pella in the year 70, among the Nazarenes of Jerusalem, who had fled from the soldiers of Titus. And yet, if the unadulterated tradition of the teachings of "the Nazarene" were to be found anywhere, it surely should have been amidst those not very aged disciples who may have heard them as they were delivered. Therefore, however sorry I may be to be unable to demonstrate that, if necessary, I should not be afraid to call myself an "infidel," I cannot do it. "Infidel" is a term of reproach, which Christians and Mahommedans, in their modesty, agree to apply to those who differ from them. If he had only thought of it, Dr. Wace might have used the term "miscreant," which, with the same etymological signification, has the advantage of being still more "unpleasant" to the persons to whom it is applied. But why should a man be expected to call himself a "miscreant" or an "infidel"? That St. Patrick "had two birthdays because he was a twin" is a reasonable and intelligible utterance beside that of the man who should declare himself to be an infidel, on the ground of denying his own belief. It may be logically, if not ethically, defensible that a Christian should call a Mahommedan an infidel and _vice versa_; but, on Dr. Wace's principles, both ought to call themselves infidels, because each applies the term to the other. Now I am afraid that all the Mahommedan world would agree in reciprocating that appellation to Dr. Wace himself. I once visited the Hazar Mosque, the great University of Mahommedanism, in Cairo, in ignorance of the fact that I was unprovided with proper authority. A swarm of angry under-graduates, as I suppose I ought to call them, came buzzing about me and my guide; and if I had known Arabic, I suspect that "dog of an infidel" would have been by no means the most "unpleasant" of the epithets showered upon me, before I could explain and apologise for the mistake. If I had had the pleasure of Dr. Wace's company on that occasion, the undiscriminative followers of the Prophet would, I am afraid, have made no difference between us; not even if they had known that he was the head of an orthodox Christian seminary. And I have not the smallest doubt that even one of the learned mollahs, if his grave courtesy would have permitted him to say anything offensive to men of another mode of belief, would have told us that he wondered we did not find it "very unpleasant" to disbelieve in the Prophet of Islam. From what precedes, I think it becomes sufficiently clear that Dr. Wace's account of the origin of the name of "Agnostic" is quite wrong. Indeed, I am bound to add that very slight effort to discover the truth would have convinced him that, as a matter of fact, the term arose otherwise. I am loath to go over an old story once more; but more than one object which I have in view will be served by telling it a little more fully than it has yet been told. Looking back nearly fifty years, I see myself as a boy, whose education has been interrupted, and who intellectually was left, for some years, altogether to his own devices. At that time I was a voracious and omnivorous reader; a dreamer and speculator of the first water, well endowed with that splendid courage in attacking any and every subject, which is the blessed compensation of youth and inexperience. Among the books and essays, on all sorts of topics from metaphysics to heraldry, which I read at this time, two left indelible impressions on my mind. One was Guizot's "History of Civilisation, the other was Sir William Hamilton's essay "On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," which I came upon, by chance, in an odd volume of the _Edinburgh Review_. The latter was certainly strange reading for a boy, and I could not possibly have understood a great deal of it;[37] nevertheless I devoured it with avidity, and it stamped upon my mind the strong conviction that, on even the most solemn and important of questions, men are apt to take cunning phrases for answers; and that the limitation of our faculties, in a great number of cases, renders real answers to such questions, not merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable. Philosophy and history having laid hold of me in this eccentric fashion, have never loosened their grip. I have no pretension to be an expert in either subject; but the turn for philosophical and historical reading, which rendered Hamilton and Guizot attractive to me, has not only filled many lawful leisure hours, and still more sleepless ones, with the repose of changed mental occupation, but has not unfrequently disputed my proper work-time with my liege lady, Natural Science. In this way I have found it possible to cover a good deal of ground in the territory of philosophy; and all the more easily that I have never cared much about A's or B's opinions, but have rather sought to know what answer he had to give to the questions I had to put to him--that of the limitation of possible knowledge the chief. The ordinary examiner, his "State the views of So-and-so," would have floored me at any time. If he had said what do _you_ think about any given problem, I might have got on fairly well. The reader who has had the patience to follow the enforced, but unwilling, egotism of this veritable history (especially if his studies have led him in the same direction), will now see why my mind steadily gravitated towards the conclusions of Hume and Kant, so well stated by the latter in a sentence, which I have quoted elsewhere. "The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of pure reason is, after all, merely negative, since it serves not as an organon for the enlargement [of knowledge], but as a discipline for its delimitation; and, instead of discovering truth, has only the modest merit of preventing error." [38] When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis,"--had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion. Like Dante, Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, but, unlike Dante, I cannot add, Che la diritta via era smarrita. On the contrary, I had, and have, the firmest conviction that I never left the "verace via"--the straight road; and that this road led nowhere else but into the dark depths of a wild and tangled forest. And though I have found leopards and lions in the path; though I have made abundant acquaintance with the hungry wolf, that "with privy paw devours apace and nothing said," as another great poet says of the ravening beast; and though no friendly spectre has even yet offered his guidance, I was, and am, minded to go straight on, until I either come out on the other side of the wood, or find there is no other side to it, at least, none attainable by me. This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a place among the members of that remarkable confraternity of antagonists, long since deceased, but of green and pious memory, the Metaphysical Society. Every variety of philosophical and theological opinion was represented there, and expressed itself with entire openness; most of my colleagues were _-ists_ of one sort or another; and, however kind and friendly they might be, I, the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with, could not fail to have some of the uneasy feelings which must have beset the historical fox when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes. To my great satisfaction, the term took; and when the _Spectator_ had stood godfather to it, any suspicion in the minds of respectable people that a knowledge of its parentage might have awakened was, of course, completely lulled. That is the history of the origin of the terms "agnostic" and "agnosticism"; and it will be observed that it does not quite agree with the confident assertion of the reverend Principal of King's College, that "the adoption of the term agnostic is only an attempt to shift the issue, and that it involves a mere evasion" in relation to the Church and Christianity.[39] * * * * * The last objection (I rejoice as much as my readers must do, that it is the last) which I have to take to Dr. Wace's deliverance before the Church Congress arises, I am sorry to say, on a question of morality. "It is, and it ought to be," authoritatively declares this official representative of Christian ethics, "an unpleasant thing for a man to have to say plainly that he does not believe in Jesus Christ" (_l.c._ p. 254). Whether it is so depends, I imagine, a good deal on whether the man was brought up in a Christian household or not. I do not see why it should be "unpleasant" for a Mahommedan or Buddhist to say so. But that "it ought to be" unpleasant for any man to say anything which he sincerely, and after due deliberation, believes, is, to my mind, a proposition of the most profoundly immoral character. I verily believe that the great good which has been effected in the world by Christianity has been largely counteracted by the pestilent doctrine on which all the Churches have insisted, that honest disbelief in their more or less astonishing creeds is a moral offence, indeed a sin of the deepest dye, deserving and involving the same future retribution as murder and robbery. If we could only see, in one view, the torrents of hypocrisy and cruelty, the lies, the slaughter, the violations of every obligation of humanity, which have flowed from this source along the course of the history of Christian nations, our worst imaginations of Hell would pale beside the vision. A thousand times, no! It ought _not_ to be unpleasant to say that which one honestly believes or disbelieves. That it so constantly is painful to do so, is quite enough obstacle to the progress of mankind in that most valuable of all qualities, honesty of word or of deed, without erecting a sad concomitant of human weakness into something to be admired and cherished. The bravest of soldiers often, and very naturally, "feel it unpleasant" to go into action; but a court-martial which did its duty would make short work of the officer who promulgated the doctrine that his men _ought_ to feel their duty unpleasant. I am very well aware, as I suppose most thoughtful people are in these times, that the process of breaking away from old beliefs is extremely unpleasant; and I am much disposed to think that the encouragement, the consolation, and the peace afforded to earnest believers in even the worst forms of Christianity are of great practical advantage to them. What deductions must be made from this gain on this score of the harm done to the citizen by the ascetic other-worldliness of logical Christianity; to the ruler, by the hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness of sectarian bigotry; to the legislator, by the spirit of exclusiveness and domination of those that count themselves pillars of orthodoxy; to the philosopher, by the restraints on the freedom of learning and teaching which every Church exercises, when it is strong enough; to the conscientious soul, by the introspective hunting after sins of the mint and cummin type, the fear of theological error, and the overpowering terror of possible damnation, which have accompanied the Churches like their shadow, I need not now consider; but they are assuredly not small. If agnostics lose heavily on the one side, they gain a good deal on the other. People who talk about the comforts of belief appear to forget its discomforts; they ignore the fact that the Christianity of the Churches is something more than faith in the ideal personality of Jesus, which they create for themselves, _plus_ so much as can be carried into practice, without disorganising civil society, of the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount. Trip in morals or in doctrine (especially in doctrine), without due repentance or retractation, or fail to get properly baptized before you die, and a _plébiscite_ of the Christians of Europe, if they were true to their creeds, would affirm your everlasting damnation by an immense majority. Preachers, orthodox and heterodox, din into our ears that the world cannot get on without faith of some sort. There is a sense in which that is as eminently as obviously true; there is another, in which, in my judgment, it is as eminently as obviously false, and it seems to me that the hortatory, or pulpit, mind is apt to oscillate between the false and the true meanings, without being aware of the fact. It is quite true that the ground of every one of our actions, and the validity of all our reasonings, rest upon the great act of faith, which leads us to take the experience of the past as a safe guide in our dealings with the present and the future. From the nature of ratiocination, it is obvious that the axioms, on which it is based, cannot be demonstrated by ratiocination. It is also a trite observation that, in the business of life, we constantly take the most serious action upon evidence of an utterly insufficient character. But it is surely plain that faith is not necessarily entitled to dispense with ratiocination because ratiocination cannot dispense with faith as a starting-point; and that because we are often obliged, by the pressure of events, to act on very bad evidence, it does not follow that it is proper to act on such evidence when the pressure is absent. The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us that "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen." In the authorised version, "substance" stands for "assurance," and "evidence" for "proving." The question of the exact meaning of the two words, [Greek: hypostasis] and [Greek: elenchos], affords a fine field of discussion for the scholar and the metaphysician. But I fancy we shall be not far from the mark if we take the writer to have had in his mind the profound psychological truth, that men constantly feel certain about things for which they strongly hope, but have no evidence, in the legal or logical sense of the word; and he calls this feeling "faith." I may have the most absolute faith that a friend has not committed the crime of which he is accused. In the early days of English history, if my friend could have obtained a few more compurgators of a like robust faith, he would have been acquitted. At the present day, if I tendered myself as a witness on that score, the judge would tell me to stand down, and the youngest barrister would smile at my simplicity. Miserable indeed is the man who has not such faith in some of his fellow-men--only less miserable than the man who allows himself to forget that such faith is not, strictly speaking, evidence; and when his faith is disappointed, as will happen now and again, turns Timon and blames the universe for his own blunders. And so, if a man can find a friend, the hypostasis of all his hopes, the mirror of his ethical ideal, in the Jesus of any, or all, of the Gospels, let him live by faith in that ideal. Who shall or can forbid him? But let him not delude himself with the notion that his faith is evidence of the objective reality of that in which he trusts. Such evidence is to be obtained only by the use of the methods of science, as applied to history and to literature, and it amounts at present to very little. THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION IN RELATION TO JUDAIC CHRISTIANITY [FROM "AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER," 1889] The most constant reproach which is launched against persons of my way of thinking is that it is all very well for us to talk about the deductions of scientific thought, but what are the poor and the uneducated to do? Has it ever occurred to those who talk in this fashion, that their creeds and the articles of their several confessions, their determination of the exact nature and extent of the teachings of Jesus, their expositions of the real meaning of that which is written in the Epistles (to leave aside all questions concerning the Old Testament), are nothing more than deductions which, at any rate, profess to be the result of strictly scientific thinking, and which are not worth attending to unless they really possess that character? If it is not historically true that such and such things happened in Palestine eighteen centuries ago, what becomes of Christianity? And what is historical truth but that of which the evidence bears strict scientific investigation? I do not call to mind any problem of natural science which has come under my notice which is more difficult, or more curiously interesting as a mere problem, than that of the origin of the Synoptic Gospels and that of the historical value of the narratives which they contain. The Christianity of the Churches stands or falls by the results of the purely scientific investigation of these questions. They were first taken up, in a purely scientific spirit, about a century ago; they have been studied over and over again by men of vast knowledge and critical acumen; but he would be a rash man who should assert that any solution of these problems, as yet formulated, is exhaustive. The most that can be said is that certain prevalent solutions are certainly false, while others are more or less probably true. If I am doing my best to rouse any countrymen out of their dogmatic slumbers, it is not that they may be amused by seeing who gets the best of it in a contest between a "scientist" and a theologian. The serious question is whether theological men of science, or theological special pleaders, are to have the confidence of the general public; it is the question whether a country in which it is possible for a body of excellent clerical and lay gentlemen to discuss in public meeting assembled, how much it is desirable to let the congregations of the faithful know of the results of biblical criticism, is likely to wake up with anything short of the grasp of a rough lay hand upon its shoulder; it is the question whether the New Testament books, being as I believe they were, written and compiled by people who, according to their lights, were perfectly sincere, will not, when properly studied as ordinary historical documents, afford us the means of self-criticism. And it must be remembered that the New Testament books are not responsible for the doctrine invented by the Churches that they are anything but ordinary historical documents. The author of the third gospel tells us, as straightforwardly as a man can, that he has no claim to any other character than that of an ordinary compiler and editor, who had before him the works of many and variously qualified predecessors. In my former papers, according to Dr. Wace, I have evaded giving an answer to his main proposition, which he states as follows-- Apart from all disputed points of criticism, no one practically doubts that our Lord lived, and that He died on the cross, in the most intense sense of filial relation to His Father in Heaven, and that He bore testimony to that Father's providence, love, and grace towards mankind. The Lord's Prayer affords a sufficient evidence on these points. If the Sermon on the Mount alone be added, the whole unseen world, of which the Agnostic refuses to know anything, stands unveiled before us.... If Jesus Christ preached that Sermon, made those promises, and taught that prayer, then any one who says that we know nothing of God, or of a future life, or of an unseen world, says that he does not believe Jesus Christ (pp. 354-355). Again-- The main question at issue, in a word, is one which Professor Huxley has chosen to leave entirely on one side--whether, namely, allowing for the utmost uncertainty on other points of the criticism to which he appeals, there is any reasonable doubt that the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount afford a true account of our Lord's essential belief and cardinal teaching (p. 355). I certainly was not aware that I had evaded the questions here stated; indeed I should say that I have indicated my reply to them pretty clearly; but, as Dr. Wace wants a plainer answer, he shall certainly be gratified. If, as Dr. Wace declares it is, his "whole case is involved in" the argument as stated in the latter of these two extracts, so much the worse for his whole case. For I am of opinion that there is the gravest reason for doubting whether the "Sermon on the Mount" was ever preached, and whether the so-called "Lord's Prayer" was ever prayed, by Jesus of Nazareth. My reasons for this opinion are, among Others, these:--There is now no doubt that the three Synoptic Gospels, so far from being the work of three independent writers, are closely inter-dependent,[40] and that in one of two ways. Either all three contain, as their foundation, versions, to a large extent verbally identical, of one and the same tradition; or two of them are thus closely dependent on the third; and the opinion of the majority of the best critics has of late years more and more converged towards the conviction that our canonical second gospel (the so-called "Mark's" Gospel) is that which most closely represents the primitive groundwork of the three.[41] That I take to be one of the most valuable results of New Testament criticism, of immeasurably greater importance than the discussion about dates and authorship. But if, as I believe to be the case, beyond any rational doubt or dispute, the second gospel is the nearest extant representative of the oldest tradition, whether written or oral, how comes it that it contains neither the "Sermon on the Mount" nor the "Lord's Prayer," those typical embodiments, according to Dr. Wace, of the "essential belief and cardinal teaching" of Jesus? Not only does "Mark's" gospel fail to contain the "Sermon on the Mount," or anything but a very few of the sayings contained in that collection; but, at the point of the history of Jesus where the "Sermon" occurs in "Matthew," there is in "Mark" an apparently unbroken narrative from the calling of James and John to the healing of Simon's wife's mother. Thus the oldest tradition not only ignores the "Sermon on the Mount," but, by implication, raises a probability against its being delivered when and where the later "Matthew" inserts it in his compilation. And still more weighty is the fact that the third gospel, the author of which tells us that he wrote after "many" others had "taken in hand" the same enterprise; who should therefore have known the first gospel (if it existed), and was bound to pay to it the deference due to the work of an apostolic eye-witness (if he had any reason for thinking it was so)--this writer, who exhibits far more literary competence than the other two, ignores any "Sermon on the Mount," such as that reported by "Matthew," just as much as the oldest authority does. Yet "Luke" has a great many passages identical, or parallel, with those in "Matthew's" "Sermon on the Mount," which are, for the most part, scattered about in a totally different connection. Interposed, however, between the nomination of the Apostles and a visit to Capernaum; occupying, therefore, a place which answers to that of the "Sermon on the Mount," in the first gospel, there is, in the third gospel a discourse which is as closely similar to the "Sermon on the Mount," in some particulars, as it is widely unlike it in others. This discourse is said to have been delivered in a "plain" or "level place" (Luke vi. 17), and by way of distinction we may call it the "Sermon on the Plain." I see no reason to doubt that the two Evangelists are dealing, to a considerable extent, with the same traditional material; and a comparison of the two "Sermons" suggests very strongly that "Luke's" version is the earlier. The correspondences between the two forbid the notion that they are independent. They both begin with a series of blessings, some of which are almost verbally identical. In the middle of each (Luke vi. 27-38, Matt. v. 43-48) there is a striking exposition of the ethical spirit of the command given in Leviticus xix. 18. And each ends with a passage containing the declaration that a tree is to be known by its fruit, and the parable of the house built on the sand. But while there are only 29 verses in the "Sermon on the Plain," there are 107 in the "Sermon on the Mount"; the excess in length of the latter being chiefly due to the long interpolations, one of 30 verses before, and one of 34 verses after, the middlemost parallelism with Luke. Under these circumstances it is quite impossible to admit that there is more probability that "Matthew's" version of the Sermon is historically accurate, than there is that Luke's version is so; and they cannot both be accurate. "Luke" either knew the collection of loosely-connected and aphoristic utterances which appear under the name of the "Sermon on the Mount" in "Matthew"; or he did not. If he did not, he must have been ignorant of the existence of such a document as our canonical "Matthew," a fact which does not make for the genuineness, or the authority, of that book. If he did, he has shown that he does not care for its authority on a matter of fact of no small importance; and that does not permit us to conceive that he believes the first gospel to be the work of an authority to whom he ought to defer, let alone that of an apostolic eye-witness. The tradition of the Church about the second gospel, which I believe to be quite worthless, but which is all the evidence there is for "Mark's" authorship, would have us believe that "Mark" was little more than the mouthpiece of the apostle Peter. Consequently, we are to suppose that Peter either did not know, or did not care very much for, that account of the "essential belief and cardinal teaching" of Jesus which is contained in the Sermon on the Mount: and, certainly, he could not have shared Dr. Wace's view of its importance[42] I thought that all fairly attentive and intelligent students of the gospels, to say nothing of theologians of reputation, knew these things. But how can any one who does know them have the conscience to ask whether there is "any reasonable doubt" that the Sermon on the Mount was preached by Jesus of Nazareth? If conjecture is permissible, where nothing else is possible, the most probable conjecture seems to be that "Matthew," having a _cento_ of sayings attributed--rightly or wrongly it is impossible to say--to Jesus among his materials, thought they were, or might be, records of a continuous discourse, and put them in at the place he thought likeliest. Ancient historians of the highest character saw no harm in composing long speeches which never were spoken, and putting them into the mouths of statesmen and warriors; and I presume that whoever is represented by "Matthew" would have been grievously astonished to find that any one objected to his following the example of the best models accessible to him. So with the "Lord's Prayer." Absent in our representative of the oldest tradition appears in both "Matthew" and "Luke." There is reason to believe that every pious Jew, at the commencement of our era, prayed three times a day, according to a formula which is embodied in the present "Schmone-Esre" [43] of the Jewish prayer-book. Jesus, who was assuredly, in all respects, a pious Jew, whatever else he may have been, doubtless did the same. Whether he modified the current formula, or whether the so-called "Lord's Prayer" is the prayer substituted for the "Schmone-Esre" in the congregations of the Gentiles, is a question which can hardly be answered. In a subsequent passage of Dr. Wace's article (p. 356) he adds to the list of the verities which he imagines to be unassailable, "The Story of the Passion." I am not quite sure what he means by this. I am not aware that any one (with the exception of certain ancient heretics) has propounded doubts as to the reality of the crucifixion; and certainly I have no inclination to argue about the precise accuracy of every detail of that pathetic story of suffering and wrong. But, if Dr. Wace means, as I suppose he does, that that which, according to the orthodox view, happened after the crucifixion, and which is, in a dogmatic sense, the most important part of the story, is founded on solid historical proofs, I must beg leave to express a diametrically opposite conviction. What do we find when the accounts of the events in question, contained in the three Synoptic gospels, are compared together? In the oldest, there is a simple, straightforward statement which, for anything that I have to urge to the contrary, may be exactly true. In the other two, there is, round this possible and probable nucleus, a mass of accretions of the most questionable character. The cruelty of death by crucifixion depended very much upon its lingering character. If there were a support for the weight of the body, as not unfrequently was the practice, the pain during the first hours of the infliction was not, necessarily, extreme; nor need any serious physical symptoms, at once, arise from the wounds made by the nails in the hands and feet, supposing they were nailed, which was not invariably the case. When exhaustion set in, and hunger, thirst, and nervous irritation had done their work, the agony of the sufferer must have been terrible; and the more terrible that, in the absence of any effectual disturbance of the machinery of physical life, it might be prolonged for many hours, or even days. Temperate, strong men, such as were the ordinary Galilean peasants, might live for several days on the cross. It is necessary to bear these facts in mind when we read the account contained in the fifteenth chapter of the second gospel. Jesus was crucified at the third hour (xv. 25), and the narrative seems to imply that he died immediately after the ninth hour (_v._ 34). In this case, he would have been crucified only six hours; and the time spent on the cross cannot have been much longer, because Joseph of Arimathæa must have gone to Pilate, made his preparations, and deposited the body in the rock-cut tomb before sunset, which, at that time of the year, was about the twelfth hour. That any one should die after only six hours' crucifixion could not have been at all in accordance with Pilate's large experience of the effects of that method of punishment. It, therefore, quite agrees with what might be expected, that Pilate "marvelled if he were already dead" and required to be satisfied on this point by the testimony of the Roman officer who was in command of the execution party. Those who have paid attention to the extraordinarily difficult question, What are the indisputable signs of death?--will be able to estimate the value of the opinion of a rough soldier on such a subject, even if his report to the Procurator were in no wise affected by the fact that the friend of Jesus, who anxiously awaited his answer, was a man of influence and of wealth. The inanimate body, wrapped in linen, was deposited in a spacious,[44] cool rock chamber, the entrance of which was closed, not by a well-fitting door, but by a stone rolled against the opening, which would of course allow free passage of air. A little more than thirty-six hours afterwards (Friday, 6 P.M., to Sunday, 6 A.M., or a little after) three women visit the tomb and find it empty. And they are told by a young man "arrayed in a white robe" that Jesus is gone to his native country of Galilee, and that the disciples and Peter will find him there. Thus it stands, plainly recorded, in the oldest tradition that, for any evidence to the contrary, the sepulchre may have been emptied at any time during the Friday or Saturday nights. If it is said that no Jew would have violated the Sabbath by taking the former course, it is to be recollected that Joseph of Arimathæa might well be familiar with that wise and liberal interpretation of the fourth commandment, which permitted works of mercy to men--nay, even the drawing of an ox or an ass out of a pit--on the Sabbath. At any rate, the Saturday night was free to the most scrupulous of observers of the Law. These are the facts of the case as stated by the oldest extant narrative of them. I do not see why any one should have a word to say against the inherent probability of that narrative; and, for my part, I am quite ready to accept it as an historical fact, that so much and no more is positively known of the end of Jesus of Nazareth. On what grounds can a reasonable man be asked to believe any more? So far as the narrative in the first gospel, on the one hand, and those in the third gospel and the Acts, on the other, go beyond what is stated in the second gospel, they are hopelessly discrepant with one another. And this is the more significant because the pregnant phrase "some doubted," in the first gospel, is ignored in the third. But it is said that we have the witness Paul speaking to us directly in the Epistles. There is little doubt that we have, and a very singular witness he is. According to his own showing, Paul, in the vigour of his manhood, with every means of becoming acquainted, at first hand, with the evidence of eye-witnesses, not merely refused to credit them, but "persecuted the Church of God and made havoc of it." The reasoning of Stephen fell dead upon the acute intellect of this zealot for the traditions of his fathers: his eyes were blind to the ecstatic illumination of the martyr's countenance "as it had been the face of an angel;" and when, at the words "Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God," the murderous mob rushed upon and stoned the rapt disciple of Jesus, Paul ostentatiously made himself their official accomplice. Yet this strange man, because he has a vision one day, at once, and with equally headlong zeal, flies to the opposite pole of opinion. And he is most careful to tell us that he abstained from any re-examination of the facts. Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood; neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles before me; but I went away into Arabia. (Galatians i. 16, 17.) I do not presume to quarrel with Paul's procedure. If it satisfied him, that was his affair; and, if it satisfies any one else, I am not called upon to dispute the right of that person to be satisfied. But I certainly have the right to say that it would not satisfy me in like case; that I should be very much ashamed to pretend that it could, or ought to, satisfy me; and that I can entertain but a very low estimate of the value of the evidence of people who are to be satisfied in this fashion, when questions of objective fact, in which their faith is interested, are concerned. So that when I am called upon to believe a great deal more than the oldest gospel tells me about the final events of the history of Jesus on the authority of Paul (1 Corinthians xv. 5-8) I must pause. Did he think it, at any subsequent time, worth while "To confer with flesh and blood," or, in modern phrase, to re-examine the facts for himself? or was he ready to accept anything that fitted in with his preconceived ideas? Does he mean, when he speaks of all the appearances of Jesus after the crucifixion as if they were of the same kind, that they were all visions, like the manifestation to himself? And, finally, how is this account to be reconciled with those in the first and third gospels--which, as we have seen, disagree with one another? Until these questions are satisfactorily answered, I am afraid that, so far as I am concerned, Paul's testimony cannot be seriously regarded, except as it may afford evidence of the state of traditional opinion at the time at which he wrote, say between 55 and 60 A.D.; that is, more than twenty years after the event; a period much more than sufficient for the development of any amount of mythology about matters of which nothing was really known. A few years later, among the contemporaries and neighbours of the Jews, and, if the most probable interpretation of the Apocalypse can be trusted, among the followers of Jesus also, it was fully believed, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that the Emperor Nero was not really dead, but that he was hidden away somewhere in the East, and would speedily come again at the head of a great army, to be revenged upon his enemies.[45] Thus, I conceive that I have shown cause for the opinion that Dr. Wace's challenge touching the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, and the Passion was more valorous than discreet. After all this discussion, I am still at the agnostic point. Tell me, first, what Jesus can be proved to have been, said, and done, and I will say whether I believe him, or in him,[46] or not. As Dr. Wace admits that I have dissipated his lingering shade of unbelief about the bedevilment of the Gadarene pigs, he might have done something to help mine. Instead of that, he manifests a total want of conception of the nature of the obstacles which impede the conversion of his "infidels." The truth I believe to be, that the difficulties in the way of arriving at a sure conclusion as to these matters, from the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, or any other data offered by the Synoptic gospels (and _a fortiori_ from the fourth gospel), are insuperable. Every one of these records is coloured by the prepossessions of those among whom the primitive traditions arose, and of those by whom they were collected and edited: and the difficulty of making allowance for these prepossessions is enhanced by our ignorance of the exact dates at which the documents were first put together; of the extent to which they have been subsequently worked over and interpolated; and of the historical sense, or want of sense, and the dogmatic tendencies of their compilers and editors. Let us see if there is any other road which will take us into something better than negation. There is a widespread notion that the "primitive Church," while under the guidance of the Apostles and their immediate successors, was a sort of dogmatic dovecot, pervaded by the most loving unity and doctrinal harmony. Protestants, especially, are fond of attributing to themselves the merit of being nearer "the Church of the Apostles" than their neighbours; and they are the less to be excused for their strange delusion because they are great readers of the documents which prove the exact contrary. The fact is that, in the course of the first three centuries of its existence, the Church rapidly underwent a process of evolution of the most remarkable character, the final stage of which is far more different from the first than Anglicanism is from Quakerism. The key to the comprehension of the problem of the origin of that which is now called "Christianity," and its relation to Jesus of Nazareth, lies here. Nor can we arrive at any sound conclusion as to what it is probable that Jesus actually said and did, without being clear on this head. By far the most important and subsequently influential steps in the evolution of Christianity took place in the course of the century, more or less, which followed upon the crucifixion. It is almost the darkest period of Church history, but, most fortunately, the beginning and the end of the period are brightly illuminated by the contemporary evidence of two writers of whose historical existence there is no doubt,[47] and against the genuineness of whose most important works there is no widely admitted objection. These are Justin, the philosopher and martyr, and Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. I shall call upon these witnesses only to testify to the condition of opinion among those who called themselves disciples of Jesus in their time. Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, which was written somewhere about the middle of the second century, enumerates certain categories of persons who, in his opinion, will, or will not, be saved.[48] These are:-- 1. Orthodox Jews who refuse to believe that Jesus is the Christ. _Not Saved._ 2. Jews who observe the Law; believe Jesus to be the Christ; but who insist on the observance of the Law by Gentile converts. _Not Saved._ 3. Jews who observe the Law; believe Jesus to be the Christ, and hold that Gentile converts need not observe the Law. _Saved_ (in Justin's opinion; but some of his fellow-Christians think the contrary). 4. Gentile converts to the belief in Jesus as the Christ, who observe the Law. _Saved_ (possibly). 5. Gentile believers in Jesus as the Christ, who do not observe the Law themselves (except so far as the refusal of idol sacrifices), but do not consider those who do observe it heretics. _Saved_ (this is Justin's own view). 6. Gentile believers who do not observe the Law, except in refusing idol sacrifices, and hold those who do observe it to be heretics. _Saved._ 7. Gentiles who believe Jesus to be the Christ and call themselves Christians, but who eat meats sacrificed to idols. _Not Saved._ 8. Gentiles who disbelieve in Jesus as the Christ. _Not Saved._ Justin does not consider Christians who believe in the natural birth of Jesus, of whom he implies that there is a respectable minority, to be heretics, though he himself strongly holds the preternatural birth of Jesus and his pre-existence as the "Logos" or "Word." He conceives the Logos to be a second God, inferior to the first, unknowable God, with respect to whom Justin, like Philo, is a complete agnostic. The Holy Spirit is not regarded by Justin as a separate personality, and is often mixed up with the "Logos." The doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul is, for Justin, a heresy; and he is as a believer in the resurrection of the body, as in the speedy Second Coming establishment of the millennium. This pillar of the Church in the middle of the second century--a much-travelled native of Samaria--was certainly well acquainted with Rome, probably with Alexandria; and it is likely that he knew the state of opinion throughout the length and breadth of the Christian world as well as any man of his time. If the various categories above enumerated are arranged in a series thus:-- _Justin's Christianity_ _______________|_______________ | | _Orthodox_ _Judæo-_ _Idolothytic_ _Paganism_ _Judaism_ _Christianity_ _Christianity_ _____|_______ | | I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. it is obvious that they form a gradational series from orthodox Judaism, on the extreme left, to Paganism, whether philosophic or popular, on the extreme right; and it will further be observed that, while Justin's conception of Christianity is very broad, he rigorously excludes two classes of persons who, in his time, called themselves Christians; namely, those who insist on circumcision and other observances of the Law on the part of Gentile converts: that is to say, the strict Judæo-Christians (II.): and, on the other hand, those who assert the lawfulness of eating meat offered to idols--whether they are Gnostic or not (VII.). These last I have called "idolothytic" Christians, because I cannot devise a better name, not because it is strictly defensible etymologically. At the present moment, I do not suppose there is an English missionary in any heathen land who would trouble himself whether the materials of his dinner had been previously offered to idols or not. On the other hand I suppose there is no Protestant sect within the pale of orthodoxy, to say nothing of the Roman and Greek Churches, which would hesitate to declare the practice of circumcision and the observance of the Jewish Sabbath and dietary rules, shockingly heretical. Modern Christianity has, in fact, not only shifted far to the right of Justin's position, but it is of much narrower compass. _Justin_ _____________|___________________ | | _Judæo-_ _Modern_ _Paganism_ _Christianity_ _Christianity_ _Judaism_ _____|______ _____|__________ | | | | I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. For, though it includes VII., and even, in saint and relic worship, cuts a "monstrous cantle" out of paganism, it excludes, not only all Judæo-Christians, but all who doubt that such are heretics. Ever since the thirteenth century, the Inquisition would have cheerfully burned, and in Spain did abundantly burn, all persons who came under the categories II., III. IV., V. And the wolf would play the same havoc now, if it could only get its blood-stained jaws free from the muzzle imposed by the secular arm. Further, there is not a Protestant body except the Unitarian, which would not declare Justin himself a heretic, on account of his doctrine of the inferior godship of the Logos; while I am very much afraid that, in strict logic, Dr. Wace would be under the necessity, so painful to him, of calling him an "infidel," on the same and on other grounds. Now let us turn to our other authority. If there is any result of critical investigations of the sources of Christianity which is certain,[49] it is that Paul of Tarsus wrote the Epistle to the Galatians somewhere between the years 55 and 60 A.D., that is to say, roughly, twenty, or five-and-twenty years after the crucifixion. If this is so, the Epistle to the Galatians is one of the oldest, if not the very oldest, of extant documentary evidences of the state of the primitive Church. And, be it observed, if it is Paul's writing, it unquestionably furnishes us with the evidence of a participator in the transactions narrated. With the exception of two or three of the other Pauline Epistles, there is not one solitary book in the New Testament of the authorship and authority of which we have such good evidence. And what is the state of things we find disclosed? A bitter quarrel, in his account of which Paul by no means minces matters, or hesitates to hurl defiant sarcasms against those who were "reputed to be pillars": James, "the brother of the Lord," Peter, the rock on whom Jesus is said to have built his Church, and John, "the beloved disciple." And no deference toward "the rock" withholds Paul from charging Peter to his face with "dissimulation." The subject of the hot dispute was simply this. Were Gentile converts bound to obey the Law or not? Paul answered in the negative; and, acting upon his opinion, he had created at Antioch (and elsewhere) a specifically "Christian" community, the sole qualifications for admission into which were the confession of the belief that Jesus was the Messiah, and baptism upon that confession. In the epistle in question, Paul puts this--his "gospel," as he calls it--in its most extreme form. Not only does he deny the necessity of conformity with the Law, but he declares such conformity to have a negative value, "Behold, I, Paul, say unto you, that if ye receive circumcision, Christ will profit you nothing" (Galatians v. 2). He calls the legal observances "beggarly rudiments," and anathematises every one who preaches to the Galatians any other gospel than his own. That is to say, by direct consequence, he anathematises the Nazarenes of Jerusalem, whose zeal for the Law is testified by James in a passage of the Acts cited further on. In the first Epistle to the Corinthians, dealing with the question of eating meat offered to idols, it is clear that Paul himself thinks it a matter of indifference; but he advises that it should not be done, for the sake of the weaker brethren. On the other hand, the Nazarenes of Jerusalem most strenuously opposed Paul's "gospel," insisting on every convert becoming a regular Jewish proselyte, and consequently on his observance of the whole Law; and this party was led by James and Peter and John (Galatians ii. 9). Paul does not suggest that the question of principle was settled by the discussion referred to in Galatians. All he says is, that it ended in the practical agreement that he and Barnabas should do as they had been doing, in respect to the Gentiles: while James and Peter and John should deal in their own fashion with Jewish converts. Afterwards, he complains bitterly of Peter, because, when on a visit to Antioch, he, at first, inclined to Paul's view and ate with the Gentile converts; but when "certain came from James," "drew back, and separated himself, fearing them that were of the circumcision. And the rest of the Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that even Barnabas was carried away with their dissimulation" (Galatians ii. 12-13). There is but one conclusion to be drawn from Paul's account of this famous dispute, the settlement of which determined the fortunes of the nascent religion. It is that the disciples at Jerusalem, headed by "James, the Lord's brother," and by the leading apostles, Peter and John, were strict Jews, who had objected to admit any converts into their body, unless these, either by birth, or by becoming proselytes, were also strict Jews. In fact, the sole difference between James and Peter and John, with the body of the disciples whom they led and the Jews by whom they were surrounded, and with whom they, for many years, shared the religous observances of the Temple, was that they believed that the Messiah, whom the leaders of the nation yet looked for, had already come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Acts of the Apostles is hardly a very trustworthy history; it is certainly of later date than the Pauline Epistles, supposing them to be genuine. And the writer's version of the conference of which Paul gives so graphic a description, if that is correct, is unmistakably coloured with all the art of a reconciler, anxious to cover up a scandal. But it is none the less instructive on this account. The judgment of the "council" delivered by James is that the Gentile converts shall merely "abstain from things sacrificed to idols, and from blood and from things strangled, and from fornication." But notwithstanding the accommodation in which the writer of the Acts would have us believe, the Jerusalem Church held to its endeavour to retain the observance of the Law. Long after the conference, some time after the writing of the Epistles to the Galatians and Corinthians, and immediately after the despatch of that to the Romans, Paul makes his last visit to Jerusalem, and presents himself to James and all the elders. And this is what the Acts tells us of the interview:-- And they said unto him, Thou seest, brother, how many thousands [or myriads] there are among the Jews of them which have believed; and they are all zealous for the law; and they have been informed concerning thee, that thou teachest all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs. (Acts xxi. 20, 21.) They therefore request that he should perform a certain public religious act in the Temple, in order that all shall know that there is no truth in the things whereof they have been informed concerning thee; but that thou thyself walkest orderly, keeping the law (_ibid._ 24).[50] How far Paul could do what he is here requested to do, and which the writer of the Acts goes on to say he did, with a clear conscience, if he wrote the Epistles to the Galatians and Corinthians I may leave any candid reader of these epistles to decide. The point to which I wish to direct attention is the declaration that the Jerusalem Church, led by the brother of Jesus and by his personal disciples and friends, twenty years and more after his death, consisted of strict and zealous Jews. Tertullus, the orator, caring very little about the internal dissensions of the followers of Jesus, speaks of Paul as a "ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes" (Acts xxiv. 5), which must have affected James much in the same way as it would have moved the Archbishop of Canterbury, in George Fox's day, to hear the latter called a "ringleader of the sect of Anglicans." In fact, "Nazarene" was, as is well known, the distinctive appellation applied to Jesus; his immediate followers were known as Nazarenes; while the congregation of the disciples, and, later, of converts at Jerusalem--the Jerusalem Church--was emphatically the "sect of the Nazarenes," no more, in itself, to be regarded as anything outside Judaism than the sect of the Sadducees, or that of the Essenes[51]. In fact, the tenets of both the Sadducees and the Essenes diverged much more widely from the Pharisaic standard of orthodoxy than Nazarenism did. Let us consider the position of affairs now (A.D. 50-60) in relation to that which obtained in Justin's time, a century later. It is plain that the Nazarenes--presided over by James, "the brother of the Lord," and comprising within their body all the twelve apostles--belonged to Justin's second category of "Jews who observe the Law, believe Jesus to be the Christ, but who insist on the observance of the Law by Gentile converts," up till the time at which the controversy reported by Paul arose. They then, according to Paul, simply allowed him to form his congregations of non-legal Gentile converts at Antioch and elsewhere; and it would seem that it was to these converts, who would come under Justin's fifth category, that the title of "Christian" was first applied. If any of these Christians had acted upon the more than half-permission given by Paul, and had eaten meats offered to idols, they would have belonged to Justin's seventh category. Hence, it appears that, if Justin's opinion, which was probably that of the Church generally in the middle of the second century, was correct, James and Peter and John and their followers could not be saved; neither could Paul, if he carried into practice his views as to the indifference of eating meats offered to idols. Or, to put the matter another way, the centre of gravity of orthodoxy, which is at the extreme right of the series in the nineteenth century, was at the extreme left, just before the middle of the first century, when the "sect of the Nazarenes" constituted the whole church founded by Jesus and the apostles; while, in the time of Justin, it lay midway between the two. It is therefore a profound mistake to imagine that the Judæo-Christians (Nazarenes and Ebionites) of later times were heretical outgrowths from a primitive universalist "Christianity." On the contrary, the universalist "Christianity" is an outgrowth from the primitive, purely Jewish, Nazarenism; which, gradually eliminating all the ceremonial and dietary parts of the Jewish law, has thrust aside its parent, and all the intermediate stages of its development, into the position of damnable heresies. Such being the case, we are in a position to form a safe judgment of the limits within which the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth must have been confined. Ecclesiastical authority would have us believe that the words which are given at the end of the first Gospel, "Go ye, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," are part of the last commands of Jesus, issued at the moment of his parting with the eleven. If so, Peter and John must have heard these words; they are too plain to be misunderstood; and the occasion is too solemn for them ever to be forgotten. Yet the "Acts" tells us that Peter needed a vision to enable him so much as to baptize Cornelius; and Paul, in the Galatians, knows nothing of words which would have completely borne him out as against those who, though they heard, must be supposed to have either forgotten, or ignored them. On the other hand, Peter and John, who are supposed to have heard the "Sermon on the Mount," know nothing of the saying that Jesus had not come to destroy the Law, but that every jot and tittle of the Law must be fulfilled, which surely would have been pretty good evidence for their view of the question. We are sometimes told that the personal friends and daily companions of Jesus remained zealous Jews and opposed Paul's innovations, because they were hard of heart and dull of comprehension. This hypothesis is hardly in accordance with the concomitant faith of those who adopt it, in the miraculous insight and superhuman sagacity of their Master; nor do I see any way of getting it to harmonise with the orthodox postulate; namely, that Matthew was the author of the first gospel and John of the fourth. If that is so, then, most assuredly, Matthew was no dullard; and as for the fourth gospel--a theosophic romance of the first order--it could have been written by none but a man of remarkable literary capacity, who had deep of Alexandrian philosophy. Moreover, the doctrine of the writer of the fourth gospel is more remote from that of the "sect of the Nazarenes" than is that of Paul himself. I am quite aware that orthodox critics have been capable of maintaining that John, the Nazarene, who was probably well past fifty years of age, when he is supposed to have written the most thoroughly Judaising book in the New Testament--the Apocalypse--in the roughest of Greek, underwent an astounding metamorphosis of both doctrine and style by the time he reached the ripe age of ninety or so, and provided the world with a history in which the acutest critic cannot [always] make out where the speeches of Jesus end and the text of the narrative begins; while that narrative, is utterly irreconcilable, in regard to matters of fact, with that of his fellow-apostle, Matthew. The end of the whole matter is this:--The "sect of the Nazarenes," the brother and the immediate followers of Jesus, commissioned by him as apostles, and those were taught by them up to the year 50A.D., were not "Christians" in the sense in which that term has been understood ever since its asserted origin at Antioch, but Jews--strict orthodox Jews--whose belief in the Messiahship of Jesus never led to their exclusion from the Temple services, nor would have shut them out from the wide embrace of Judaism.[52] The open proclamation of their special view about the Messiah was doubtless offensive to the Pharisees, just as rampant Low Churchism is offensive to bigoted High Churchism in our own country; or as any kind of dissent is offensive to fervid religionists of all creeds. To the Sadducees, no doubt, the political danger of any Messianic movement was serious; and they would have been glad to put down Nazarenism, lest it should end in useless rebellion against their Roman masters, like that other Galilean movement headed by Judas, a generation earlier. Galilee was always a hotbed of seditious enthusiasm against the rule of Rome; and high priest and procurator alike had need to keep a sharp eye upon natives of that district. On the whole, however, the Nazarenes were but little troubled for the first twenty years of their existence; and the undying hatred of the Jews against those later converts, whom they regarded as apostates and fautors of a sham Judaism, was awakened by Paul. From their point of view, he was a mere renegade Jew, opposed alike to orthodox Judaism and to orthodox Nazarenism; and whose teachings threatened Judaism with destruction. And, from their point of view, they were quite right. In the course of a century, Pauline influences had a large share in driving primitive Nazarenism from being the very heart of the new faith into the position of scouted error; and the spirit of Paul's doctrine continued its work of driving Christianity farther and farther away from Judaism, until "meats offered to idols" might be eaten without scruple, while the Nazarene methods of observing even the Sabbath, or the Passover, were branded with the mark of Judaising heresy. But if the primitive Nazarenes of whom the Acts speaks were orthodox Jews, what sort of probability can there be that Jesus was anything else? How can he have founded the universal religion which was not heard of till twenty years after his death?[53] That Jesus possessed, in a rare degree, the gift of attaching men to his person and to his fortunes; that he was the author of many a striking saying, and the advocate of equity, of love, and of humility; that he may have disregarded the subtleties of the bigots for legal observance, and appealed rather to those noble conceptions of religion which constituted the pith and kernel of the teaching of the great prophets of his nation seven hundred years earlier; and that, in the last scenes of his career, he may have embodied the ideal sufferer of Isaiah, may be, as I think it is, extremely probable. But all this involves not a step beyond the borders of orthodox Judaism. Again, who is to say whether Jesus proclaimed himself the veritable Messiah, expected by his nation since the appearance of the pseudo-prophetic work of Daniel, a century and a half before his time; or whether the enthusiasm of his followers gradually forced him to assume that position? But one thing is quite certain: if that belief in the speedy second coming of the Messiah which was shared by all parties in the primitive Church, whether Nazarene or Pauline; which Jesus is made to prophesy, over and over again in the Synoptic gospels; and which dominated the life of Christians during the first century after the crucifixion;--if he believed and taught that, then assuredly he was under an illusion, and he is responsible for that which the mere effluxion of time has demonstrated to be a prodigious error. AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY Nemo ergo ex me scire quærat, quod me nescire scio, nisi forte ut nescire discat.--AUGUSTINUS. _De Civ. Dei_, xii. 7. The people who call themselves "Agnostics" have been charged with doing so because they have not the courage to declare themselves "Infidels." It has been insinuated that they have adopted a new name in order to escape the unpleasantness which attaches to their proper denomination. To this wholly erroneous imputation, I have replied by showing that the term "Agnostic" did, as a matter of fact, arise in a manner which negatives it; and my statement has not been, and cannot be, refuted. Moreover, speaking for myself, and without impugning the right of any other person to use the term in another sense, I further say that Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions. The justification of the Agnostic principle lies in the success which follows upon its application, whether in the field of natural, or in that of civil, history; and in the fact that, so far as these topics are concerned, no sane man thinks of denying its validity. Still speaking for myself, I add, that though Agnosticism is not, and cannot be, a creed, except in so far as its general principle is concerned; yet that the application of that principle results in the denial of, or the suspension of judgment concerning, a number of propositions respecting which our contemporary ecclesiastical "gnostics" profess entire certainty. And, in so far as these ecclesiastical persons can be justified in their old-established custom (which many nowadays think more honoured in the breach than the observance) of using opprobrious names to those who differ from them, I fully admit their right to call me and those who think with me "Infidels"; all I have ventured to urge is that they must not expect us to speak of ourselves by that title. The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual Agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as "unknowable." [54] What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing; and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. But whether these things are knowable by any one else is exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case. Relatively to myself, I am quite sure that the region of uncertainty--the nebulous country in which words play the part of realities--is far more extensive than I could wish. Materialism and Idealism; Theism and Atheism; the doctrine of the soul and its mortality or immortality--appear in the history of philosophy like the shades of Scandinavian heroes, eternally slaying one another and eternally coming to life again in a metaphysical "Nifelheim." It is getting on for twenty-five centuries, at least, since mankind began seriously to give their minds to these topics. Generation after generation, philosophy has been doomed to roll the stone uphill; and, just as all the world swore it was at the top, down it has rolled to the bottom again. All this is written in innumerable books; and he who will toil through them will discover that the stone is just where it was when the work began. Hume saw this; Kant saw it; since their time, more and more eyes have been cleansed of the films which prevented them from seeing it; until now the weight and number of those who refuse to be the prey of verbal mystifications has begun to tell in practical life. It was inevitable that a conflict should arise between Agnosticism and Theology; or, rather, I ought to say, between Agnosticism and Ecclesiasticism. For Theology, the science, is one thing; and Ecclesiasticism, the championship of a foregone conclusion[55] as to the truth of a particular form of Theology, is another. With scientific Theology, Agnosticism has no quarrel. On the contrary, the Agnostic, knowing too well the influence of prejudice and idiosyncrasy, even on those who desire most earnestly to be impartial, can wish for nothing more urgently than that the scientific theologian should not only be at perfect liberty to thresh out the matter in his own fashion; but that he should, if he can, find flaws in the Agnostic position; and, even if demonstration is not to be had, that he should put, in their full force, the grounds of the conclusions he thinks probable. The scientific theologian admits the Agnostic principle, however widely his results may differ from those reached by the majority of Agnostics. But, as between Agnosticism and Ecclesiasticism, or, as our neighbours across the Channel call it, Clericalism, there can be neither peace nor truce. The Cleric asserts that it is morally wrong not to believe certain propositions, whatever the results of a strict scientific investigation of the evidence of these propositions. He tells us "that religious error is, in itself, of an immoral nature." [56] He declares that he has prejudged certain conclusions, and looks upon those who show cause for arrest of judgment as emissaries of Satan. It necessarily follows that, for him, the attainment of faith, not the ascertainment of truth, is the highest aim of mental life. And, on careful analysis of the nature of this faith, it will too often be found to be, not the mystic process of unity with the Divine, understood by the religious enthusiast; but that which the candid simplicity of a Sunday scholar once defined it to be. "Faith," said this unconscious plagiarist of Tertullian, "is the power of saying you believe things which are incredible." Now I, and many other Agnostics, believe that faith, in this sense, is an abomination; and though we do not indulge in the luxury of self-righteousness so far as to call those who are not of our way of thinking hard names, we do feel that the disagreement between ourselves and those who hold this doctrine is even more moral than intellectual. It is desirable there should be an end of any mistakes on this topic. If our clerical opponents were clearly aware of the real state of the case, there would be an end of the curious delusion, which often appears between the lines of their writings, that those whom they are so fond of calling "Infidels" are people who not only ought to be, but in their hearts are, ashamed of themselves. It would be discourteous to do more than hint the antipodal opposition of this pleasant dream of theirs to facts. The clerics and their lay allies commonly tell us, that if we refuse to admit that there is good ground for expressing definite convictions about certain topics, the bonds of human society will dissolve and mankind lapse into savagery. There are several answers to this assertion. One is that the bonds of human society were formed without the aid of their theology; and, in the opinion of not a few competent judges, have been weakened rather than strengthened by a good deal of it. Greek science, Greek art, the ethics of old Israel, the social organisation of old Rome, contrived to come into being, without the help of any on who believed in a single distinctive article of the simplest of the Christian creeds. The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of those of Greece and Rome--not by favour of, but in the teeth of the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world, were alike despicable. Again, all that is best in the ethics of the modern world, in so far as it has not grown out of Greek thought, or Barbarian manhood, is the direct development of the ethics of old Israel. There is no code of legislation, ancient or modern, at once so just and so merciful, so tender to the weak and poor, as the Jewish law; and, if the Gospels are to be trusted, Jesus of Nazareth himself declared that he taught nothing but that which lay implicitly, or explicitly, in the religious and ethical system of his people. And the scribe said unto him, Of a truth, Teacher, thou hast well said that he is one; and there is none other but he, and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. (Mark xii. 32, 33.) Here is the briefest of summaries of the teaching of the prophets of Israel of the eighth century; does the Teacher, whose doctrine is thus set forth in his presence, repudiate the exposition? Nay; we are told, on the contrary, that Jesus saw that he "answered discreetly," and replied, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." So that I think that even if the creeds, from the so-called "Apostles" to the so-called "Athanasian," were swept into oblivion; and even if the human race should arrive at the conclusion that, whether a bishop washes a cup or leaves it unwashed, is not a matter of the least consequence, it will get on very well. The causes which have led to the development of morality in mankind, which have guided or impelled us all the way from the savage to the civilised state, will not cease to operate because a number of ecclesiastical hypotheses turn out to be baseless. And, even if the absurd notion that morality is more the child of speculation than of practical necessity and inherited instinct, had any foundation; if all the world is going to thieve, murder, and otherwise misconduct itself as soon as it discovers that certain portions of ancient history are mythical; what is the relevance of such arguments to any one who holds by the Agnostic principle? Surely, the attempt to cast out Beelzebub by the aid of Beelzebub is a hopeful procedure as compared to that of preserving morality by the aid of immorality. For I suppose it is admitted that an Agnostic may be perfectly sincere, may be competent, and have studied the question at issue with as much care as his clerical opponents. But, if the Agnostic really believes what he says, the "dreadful consequence" argufier (consistently, I admit, with his own principles) virtually asks him to abstain from telling the truth, or to say what he believes to be untrue, because of the supposed injurious consequences to morality. "Beloved brethren, that we may be spotlessly moral, before all things let us lie," is the sum total of many an exhortation addressed to the "Infidel." Now, as I have already pointed out, we cannot oblige our exhorters. We leave the practical application of the convenient doctrines of "Reserve" and "Non-natural interpretation" to those who invented them. I trust that I have now made amends for any ambiguity, or want of fulness, in my previous exposition of that which I hold to be the essence of the Agnostic doctrine. Henceforward, I might hope to hear no more of the assertion that we are necessarily Materialists, Idealists, Atheists, Theists, or any other _ists_, if experience had led me to think that the proved falsity of a statement was any guarantee against its repetition. And those who appreciate the nature of our position will see, at once, that when Ecclesiasticism declares that we ought to believe this, that, and the other, and are very wicked if we don't, it is impossible for us to give any answer but this: We have not the slightest objection to believe anything you like, if you will give us good grounds for belief; but, if you cannot, we must respectfully refuse, even if that refusal should wreck morality and insure our own damnation several times over. We are quite content to leave that to the decision of the future. The course of the past has impressed us with the firm conviction that no good ever comes of falsehood, and we feel warranted in refusing even to experiment in that direction. In the course of the present discussion it has been asserted that the "Sermon on the Mount" and the "Lord's Prayer" furnish a summary and condensed view of the essentials of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, set forth by himself. Now this supposed _Summa_ of Nazarene theology distinctly affirms the existence of a spiritual world, of a Heaven, and of a Hell of fire; it teaches the Fatherhood of God and the malignity of the Devil; it declares the superintending providence of the former and our need of deliverance from the machinations of the latter; it affirms the fact of demoniac possession and the power of casting out devils by the faithful. And, from these premises, the conclusion is drawn, that those Agnostics who deny that there is any evidence of such a character as to justify certainty, respecting the existence and the nature of the spiritual world, contradict the express declarations of Jesus. I have replied to this argumentation by showing that there is strong reason to doubt the historical accuracy of the attribution to Jesus of either the "Sermon on the Mount" or the "Lord's Prayer "; and, therefore, that the conclusion in question is not warranted, at any rate, on the grounds set forth. But, whether the Gospels contain trustworthy statements about this and other alleged historical facts or not, it is quite certain that from them, taken together with the other books of the New Testament, we may collect a pretty complete exposition of that theory of the spiritual world which was held by both Nazarenes and Christians; and which was undoubtedly supposed by them to be fully sanctioned by Jesus, though it is just as clear that they did not imagine it contained any revelation by him of something heretofore unknown. If the pneumatological doctrine which pervades the whole New Testament is nowhere systematically stated, it is everywhere assumed. The writers of the Gospels and of the Acts take it for granted, as a matter of common knowledge; and it is easy to gather from these sources a series of propositions, which only need arrangement to form a complete system. In this system, Man is considered to be a duality formed of a spiritual element, the soul; and a corporeal[57] element, the body. And this duality is repeated in the Universe, which consists of a corporeal world embraced and interpenetrated by a spiritual world. The former consists of the earth, as its principal and central constituent, with the subsidiary sun, planets, and stars. Above the earth is the air, and below is the watery abyss. Whether the heaven, which is conceived to be above the air, and the hell in, or below, the subterranean deeps, are to be taken as corporeal or incorporeal is not clear. However this may be, the heaven and the air, the earth and the abyss, are peopled by innumerable beings analogous in nature to the spiritual element in man, and these spirits are of two kinds, good and bad. The chief of the good spirits, infinitely superior to all the others, and their creator, as well as the creator of the corporeal world and of the bad spirits, is God. His residence is heaven, where he is surrounded by the ordered hosts of good spirits; his angels, or messengers, and the executors of his will throughout the universe. On the other hand, the chief of the bad spirits is Satan, _the_ devil _par excellence_. He and his company of demons are free to roam through all parts of the universe, except the heaven. These bad spirits are far superior to man in power and subtlety; and their whole energies are devoted to bringing physical and moral evils upon him, and to thwarting, so far as their power goes, the benevolent intentions of the Supreme Being. In fact, the souls and bodies of men form both the theatre and the prize of an incessant warfare between the good and the evil spirits--the powers of light and the powers of darkness. By leading Eve astray, Satan brought sin and death upon mankind. As the gods of the heathen, the demons are the founders and maintainers of idolatry; as the "powers of the air" they afflict mankind with pestilence and famine; as "unclean spirits" they cause disease of mind and body. The significance of the appearance of Jesus, in the capacity of the Messiah, or Christ, is the reversal of the satanic work by putting an end to both sin and death. He announces that the kingdom of God is at hand, when the "Prince of this world" shall be finally "cast out" (John xii, 31) from the cosmos, as Jesus, during his earthly career, cast him out from individuals. Then will Satan and all his devilry, along with the wicked whom they have seduced to their destruction, be hurled into the abyss of unquenchable fire--there to endure continual torture, without a hope of winning pardon from the merciful God, their Father; or of moving the glorified Messiah to one more act of pitiful intercession; or even of interrupting, by a momentary sympathy with their wretchedness, the harmonious psalmody of their brother angels and men, eternally lapped in bliss unspeakable. The straitest Protestant, who refuses to admit the existence of any source of Divine truth, except the Bible, will not deny that every point of the pneumatological theory here set forth has ample scriptural warranty. The Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse assert the existence of the devil, of his demons and of Hell, as plainly as they do that of God and his angels and Heaven. It is plain that the Messianic and the Satanic conceptions of the writers of these books are the obverse and the reverse of the same intellectual coinage. If we turn from Scripture to the traditions of the Fathers and the confessions of the Churches, it will appear that, in this one particular, at any rate, time has brought about no important deviation from primitive belief. From Justin onwards, it may often be a fair question whether God, or the devil, occupies a larger share of the attention of the Fathers. It is the devil who instigates the Roman authorities to persecute; the gods and goddesses of paganism are devils, and idolatry itself is an invention of Satan; if a saint falls away from grace, it is by the seduction of the demon; if heresy arises, the devil has suggested it; and some of the Fathers[58] go so far as to challenge the pagans to a sort of exorcising match, by way of testing the truth of Christianity. Mediæval Christianity is at one with patristic, on this head. The masses, the clergy, the theologians, and the philosophers alike, live and move and have their being in a world full of demons, in which sorcery and possession are everyday occurrences. Nor did the Reformation make any difference. Whatever else Luther assailed, he left the traditional demonology untouched; nor could any one have entertained a more hearty and uncompromising belief in the devil, than he and, at a later period, the Calvinistic fanatics of New England did. Finally, in these last years of the nineteenth century, the demonological hypotheses of the first century are, explicitly or implicitly, held and occasionally acted upon by the immense majority of Christians of all confessions. Only here and there has the progress of scientific thought, outside the ecclesiastical world, so far affected Christians, that they and their teachers fight shy of the demonology of their creed. They are fain to conceal their real disbelief in one half of Christian doctrine by judicious silence about it; or by flight to those refuges for the logically destitute, accommodation or allegory. But the faithful who fly to allegory in order to escape absurdity resemble nothing so much as the sheep in the fable who--to save their lives--jumped into the pit. The allegory pit is too commodious, is ready to swallow up so much more than one wants to put into it. If the story of the temptation is an allegory; if the early recognition of Jesus as the Son of God by the demons is an allegory; if the plain declaration of the writer of the first Epistle of John (iii. 8), "To this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil," is allegorical, then the Pauline version of the Fall may be allegorical, and still more the words of consecration of the Eucharist, or the promise of the second coming; in fact, there is not a dogma of ecclesiastical Christianity the scriptural basis of which may not be whittled away by a similar process. As to accommodation, let any honest man who can read the New Testament ask himself whether Jesus and his immediate friends and disciples can be dishonoured more grossly than by the supposition that they said and did that which is attributed to them; while, in reality, they disbelieved in Satan and his demons, in possession and in exorcism?[59] An eminent theologian has justly observed that we have no right to look at the propositions of the Christian faith with one eye open and the other shut. (Tract 85, p. 29.) It really is not permissible to see, with one eye, that Jesus is affirmed to declare the personality and the Fatherhood of God, His loving providence and His accessibility to prayer; and to shut the other to the no less definite teaching ascribed to Jesus, in regard to the personality and the misanthropy of the devil, his malignant watchfulness, and his subjection to exorcistic formulæ and rites. Jesus is made to say that the devil "was a murderer from the beginning" (John viii. 44) by the same authority as that upon which we depend for his asserted declaration that God is a spirit" (John iv. 24). To those who admit the authority of the famous Vincentian dictum that the doctrine which has been held "always, everywhere, and by all" is to be received as authoritative, the demonology must possess a higher sanction than any other Christian dogma, except, perhaps, those of the Resurrection and of the Messiahship of Jesus; for it would be difficult to name any other points of doctrine on which the Nazarene does not differ from the Christian, and the different historical stages and contemporary subdivisions of Christianity from one another. And, if the demonology is accepted, there can be no reason for rejecting all those miracles in which demons play a part. The Gadarene story fits into the general scheme of Christianity; and the evidence for "Legion" and their doings is just as good as any other in the New Testament for the doctrine which the story illustrates. It was with the purpose of bringing this great fact into prominence; of getting people to open both their eyes when they look at Ecclesiasticism; that I devoted so much space to that miraculous story which happens to be one of the best types of its class. And I could not wish for a better justification of the course I have adopted, than the fact that my heroically consistent adversary has declared his implicit belief in the Gadarene story and (by necessary consequence) in the Christian demonology as a whole. It must be obvious, by this time, that, if the account of the spiritual world given in the New Testament, professedly on the authority of Jesus, is true, then the demonological half of that account must be just as true as the other half. And, therefore, those who question the demonology, or try to explain it away, deny the truth of what Jesus said, and are, in ecclesiastical terminology, "Infidels" just as much as those who deny the spirituality of God. This is as plain as anything can well be, and the dilemma for my opponent was either to assert that the Gadarene pig-bedevilment actually occurred, or to write himself down an "Infidel." As was to be expected, he chose the former alternative; and I may express my great satisfaction at finding that there is one spot of common ground on which both he and I stand. So far as I can judge, we are agreed to state one of the broad issues between the consequences of agnostic principles (as I draw them), and the consequences of ecclesiastical dogmatism (as he accepts it), as follows. Ecclesiasticism says: The demonology of the Gospels is an essential part of that account of that spiritual world, the truth of which it declares to be certified by Jesus. Agnosticism (_me judice_) says: There is no good evidence of the existence of a demoniac spiritual world, and much reason for doubting it. Here upon the ecclesiastic may observe: Your doubt means that you disbelieve Jesus; therefore you are an "Infidel" instead of an "Agnostic." To which the agnostic may reply: No; for two reasons: first, because your evidence that Jesus said what you say he said is worth very little; and secondly, because a man may be an agnostic, in the sense of admitting he has no positive knowledge, and yet consider that he has more or less probable ground for accepting any given hypothesis about the spiritual world. Just as a man may frankly declare that he has no means of knowing whether the planets generally are inhabited or not, and yet may think one of the two possible hypotheses more likely than the other, so he may admit he has no means of knowing anything about the spiritual world, and yet may think one or other of the current views on the subject, to some extent, probable. The second answer is so obviously valid that it needs no discussion. I draw attention to it simply in justice to those agnostics who may attach greater value than I do to any sort of pneumatological speculations; and not because I wish to escape the responsibility of declaring that, whether Jesus sanctioned the demonological part of Christianity or not, I unhesitatingly reject it. The first answer, on the other hand, opens up the whole question of the claim of the biblical and other sources, from which hypotheses concerning the spiritual world are derived, to be regarded as unimpeachable historical evidence as to matters of fact. Now, in respect of the trustworthiness of the Gospel narratives, I was anxious to get rid of the common assumption that the determination of the authorship and of the dates of these works is a matter of fundamental importance. That assumption is based upon the notion that what contemporary witnesses say must be true, or, at least, has always a _prima facie_ claim to be so regarded; so that if the writers of any of the Gospels were contemporaries of the events (and still more if they were in the position of eye-witnesses) the miracles they narrate must be historically true, and, consequently, the demonology which they involve must be accepted. But the story of the "Translation of the blessed martyrs Marcellinus and Petrus," and the other considerations (to which endless additions might have been made from the Fathers and the mediæval writers) set forth in a preceding essay, yield, in my judgment, satisfactory proof that, where the miraculous is concerned, neither considerable intellectual ability, nor undoubted honesty, nor knowledge of the world, nor proved faithfulness as civil historians, nor profound piety, on the part of eye-witnesses and contemporaries, affords any guarantee of the objective truth of their statements, when we know that a firm belief in the miraculous was ingrained in their minds, and was the presupposition of their observations and reasonings. Therefore, although it be, as I believe, demonstrable that we have no real knowledge of the authorship, or of the date of composition of the Gospels, as they have come down to us, and that nothing better than more or less probable guesses can be arrived at on that subject, I have not cared to expend any space on the question. It will be admitted, I suppose, that the authors of the works attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, whoever they may be, are personages whose capacity and judgment in the narration of ordinary events are not quite so well certified as those of Eginhard; and we have seen what the value of Eginhard's evidence is when the miraculous is in question. I have been careful to explain that the arguments which I have used in the course of this discussion are not new; that they are historical and have nothing to do with what is commonly called science; and that they are all, to the best of my belief, to be found in the works of theologians of repute. The position which I have taken up, that the evidence in favour of such miracles as those recorded by Eginhard, and consequently of mediæval demonology, is quite as good as that in favour of such miracles as the Gadarene, and consequently of Nazarene demonology, is none of my discovery. Its strength was, wittingly or unwittingly, suggested, a century and a half ago, by a theological scholar of eminence; and it has been, if not exactly occupied, yet so fortified with bastions and redoubts by a living ecclesiastical Vauban, that, in my judgment, it has been rendered impregnable. In the early part of the last century, the ecclesiastical mind in this country was much exercised by the question, not exactly of miracles, the occurrence of which in biblical times was axiomatic, but by the problem: When did miracles cease? Anglican divines were quite sure that no miracles had happened in their day, nor for some time past; they were equally sure that they happened sixteen or seventeen centuries earlier. And it was a vital question for them to determine at what point of time, between this _terminus a quo_ and that _terminus ad quem_ miracles came to an end. The Anglicans and the Romanists agreed in the assumption that the possession of the gift of miracle-working was _prima facie_ evidence of the soundness of the faith of the miracle-workers. The supposition that miraculous powers might be wielded by heretics (though it might be supported by high authority) led to consequences too frightful to be entertained by people who were busied in building their dogmatic house on the sands of early Church history. If, as the Romanists maintained, an unbroken series of genuine miracles adorned the records of their Church, throughout the whole of its existence, no Anglican could lightly venture to accuse them of doctrinal corruption. Hence, the Anglicans, who indulged in such accusations, were bound to prove the modern, the mediæval Roman, and the later Patristic, miracles false; and to shut off the wonder-working power from the Church at the exact point of time when Anglican doctrine ceased and Roman doctrine began. With a little adjustment--a squeeze here and a pull there--the Christianity of the first three or four centuries might be made to fit, or seem to fit, pretty well into the Anglican scheme. So the miracles, from Justin say to Jerome, might be recognised; while, in later times, the Church having become "corrupt"--that is to say, having pursued one and the same line of development further than was pleasing to Anglicans--its alleged miracles must needs be shams and impostures. Under these circumstances, it may be imagined that the establishment of a scientific frontier between the earlier realm of supposed fact and the later of asserted delusion, had its difficulties; and torrents of theological special pleading about the subject flowed from clerical pens; until that learned and acute Anglican divine, Conyers Middleton, in his "Free Inquiry," tore the sophistical web they had laboriously woven to pieces, and demonstrated that the miracles of the patristic age, early and late, must stand or fall together, inasmuch as the evidence for the later is just as good as the evidence for the earlier wonders. If the one set are certified by contemporaneous witnesses of high repute, so are the other; and, in point of probability, there is not a pin to choose between the two. That is the solid and irrefragable result of Middleton's contribution to the subject. But the Free Inquirer's freedom had its limits; and he draws a sharp line of demarcation between the patristic and the New Testament miracles--on the professed ground that the accounts of the latter, being inspired, are out of the reach of criticism. A century later, the question was taken up by another divine, Middleton's equal in learning and acuteness, and far his superior in subtlety and dialectic skill; who, though an Anglican, scorned the name of Protestant; and, while yet a Churchman, made it his business, to parade, with infinite skill, the utter hollowness of the arguments of those of his brother Churchmen who dreamed that they could be both Anglicans and Protestants. The argument of the "Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of the Early Ages" [60] by the present [1889] Roman Cardinal, but then Anglican Doctor, John Henry Newman, is compendiously stated by himself in the following passage:-- If the miracles of Church history cannot be defended by the arguments of Leslie, Lyttelton, Paley, or Douglas, how many of the Scripture miracles satisfy their conditions? (P. cvii.) And, although the answer is not given in so many words, little doubt is left on the mind of the reader, that in the mind of the writer, it is: None. In fact, this conclusion is one which cannot be resisted, if the argument in favour of the Scripture miracles is based upon that which laymen, whether lawyers, or men of science, or historians, or ordinary men of affairs, call evidence. But there is something really impressive in the magnificent contempt with which, at times, Dr. Newman sweeps aside alike those who offer and those who demand such evidence. Some infidel authors advise us to accept no miracles which would not have a verdict in their favour in a court of justice; that is, they employ against Scripture a weapon which Protestants would confine to attacks upon the Church; as if moral and religious questions required legal proof, and evidence were the test of truth[61] (p. cvii). "As if evidence were the test of truth!"--although the truth in question is the occurrence, or the non-occurrence, of certain phenomena at a certain time and in a certain place. This sudden revelation of the great gulf fixed between the ecclesiastical and the scientific mind is enough to take away the breath of any one unfamiliar with the clerical organon. As if, one may retort, the assumption that miracles may, or have, served a moral or a religious end, in any way alters the fact that they profess to be historical events, things that actually happened; and, as such, must needs be exactly those subjects about which evidence is appropriate and legal proofs (which are such merely because they afford adequate evidence) may be justly demanded. The Gadarene miracle either happened, or it did not. Whether the Gadarene "question" is moral or religious, or not, has nothing to do with the fact that it is a purely historical question whether the demons said what they are declared to have said, and the devil-possessed pigs did, or did not, rush over the heights bounding the Lake of Gennesaret on a certain day of a certain year, after A.D. 26 and before A.D. 36: for vague and uncertain as New Testament chronology is, I suppose it may be assumed that the event in question, if it happened at all, took place during the procuratorship of Pilate. If that is not a matter about which evidence ought to be required, and not only legal, but strict scientific proof demanded by sane men who are asked to believe the story--what is? Is a reasonable being to be seriously asked to credit statements, which, to put the case gently, are not exactly probable, and on the acceptance or rejection of which his whole view of life may depend, without asking for as much "legal" proof as would send an alleged pickpocket to gaol, or as would suffice to prove the validity of a disputed will? "Infidel authors" (if, as I am assured, I may answer for them) will decline to waste time on mere darkenings of counsel of this sort; but to those Anglicans who accept his premises, Dr. Newman is a truly formidable antagonist. What, indeed, are they to reply when he puts the very pertinent question:-- whether persons who not merely question, but prejudge the Ecclesiastical miracles on the ground of their want of resemblance, whatever that be, to those contained in Scripture--as if the Almighty could not do in the Christian Church what He had not already done at the time of its foundation, or under the Mosaic Covenant--whether such reasoners are not siding with the sceptic, and whether it is not a happy inconsistency by which they continue to believe the Scriptures while they reject the Church[62] (p. liii). Again, I invite Anglican orthodoxy to consider this passage:-- the narrative of the combats of St. Antony with evil spirits, is a development rather than a contradiction of revelation, viz. of such texts as speak of Satan being cast out by prayer and fasting. To be shocked, then, at the miracles of Ecclesiastical history, or to ridicule them for their strangeness, is no part of a scriptural philosophy (pp. liii-liv). Further on, Dr. Newman declares that it has been admitted that a distinct line can lie drawn in point of character and circumstance between the miracles of Scripture and of Church history; but this is by no means the case (p. lv) ... specimens are not wanting in the history of the Church, of miracles as awful in their character and as momentous in their effects as those which are recorded in Scripture. The fire interrupting the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple, and the death of Arius, are instances, in Ecclesiastical history, of such solemn events. On the other hand, difficult instances in the Scripture history are such as these: the serpent in Eden, the Ark, Jacob's vision for the multiplication of his cattle, the speaking of Balaam's ass, the axe swimming at Elisha's word, the miracle on the swine, and various instances of prayers or prophecies, in which, as in that of Noah's blessing and curse, words which seem the result of private feeling are expressly or virtually ascribed to a Divine suggestion (p. lvi). Who is to gainsay our ecclesiastical authority here? "Infidel authors" might be accused of a wish to ridicule the Scripture miracles by putting them on a level with the remarkable story about the fire which stopped the rebuilding of the Temple, or that about the death of Arius--but Dr. Newman is above suspicion. The pity is that his list of what he delicately terms "difficult" instances is so short. Why omit the manufacture of Eve out of Adam's rib, on the strict historical accuracy of which the chief argument of the defenders of an iniquitous portion of our present marriage law depends? Why leave out the account of the "Bene Elohim" and their gallantries, on which a large part of the worst practices of the mediæval inquisitors into witchcraft was based? Why forget the angel who wrestled with Jacob, and, as the account suggests, somewhat over-stepped the bound of fair play, at the end of the struggle? Surely, we must agree with Dr. Newman that, if all these camels have gone down, it savours of affectation to strain at such gnats as the sudden ailment of Arius in the midst of his deadly, if prayerful,[63] enemies; and the fiery explosion which stopped the Julian building operations. Though the _words_ of the "Conclusion" of the "Essay on Miracles" may, perhaps, be quoted against me, I may express my satisfaction at finding myself in substantial accordance with a theologian above all suspicion of heterodoxy. With all my heart, I can declare my belief that there is just as good reason for believing in the miraculous slaying of the man who fell short of the Athanasian power of affirming contradictories, with respect to the nature of the Godhead, as there is for believing in the stories of the serpent and the ark told in Genesis, the speaking of Balaam's ass in Numbers, or the floating of the axe, at Elisha's order, in the second book of Kings. It is one of the peculiarities of a really sound argument that it is susceptible of the fullest development; and that it sometimes leads to conclusions unexpected by those who employ it. To my mind, it is impossible to refuse to follow Dr. Newman when he extends his reasoning, from the miracles of the patristic and mediæval ages backward in time, as far as miracles are recorded. But, if the rules of logic are valid, I feel compelled to extend the argument forwards to the alleged Roman miracles of the present day, which Dr. Newman might not have admitted, but which Cardinal Newman may hardly reject. Beyond question, there is as good, or perhaps better, evidence of the miracles worked by our Lady of Lourdes, as there is for the floating of Elisha's axe, or the speaking of Balaam's ass. But we must go still further; there is a modern system of thaumaturgy and demonology which is just as well certified as the ancient.[64] Veracious, excellent, sometimes learned and acute persons, even philosophers of no mean pretensions, testify to the "levitation" of bodies much heavier than Elisha's axe; to the existence of "spirits" who, to the mere tactile sense, have been indistinguishable from flesh and blood; and, occasionally, have wrestled with all the vigour of Jacob's opponent; yet, further, to the speech, in the language of raps, of spiritual beings, whose discourses, in point of coherence and value, are far inferior to that of Balaam's humble but sagacious steed. I have not the smallest doubt that, if these were persecuting times, there is many a worthy "spiritualist" who would cheerfully go to the stake in support of his pneumatological faith; and furnish evidence, after Paley's own heart, in proof of the truth of his doctrines. Not a few modern divines, doubtless struck by the impossibility of refusing the spiritualist evidence, if the ecclesiastical evidence is accepted, and deprived of any _a priori_ objection by their implicit belief in Christian Demonology, show themselves ready to take poor Sludge seriously, and to believe that he is possessed by other devils than those of need, greed, and vainglory. Under these, circumstances, it was to be expected, though it is none the less interesting to note the fact, that the arguments of the latest school of "spiritualists" present a wonderful family likeness to those which adorn the subtle disquisitions of the advocate of ecclesiastical miracles of forty years ago. It is unfortunate for the "spiritualists" that, over and over again, celebrated and trusted media, who really, in some respects, call to mind the Montanist[65] and gnostic seers of the second century, are either proved in courts of law to be fraudulent impostors; or, in sheer weariness, as it would seem, of the honest dupes who swear by them, spontaneously confess their long-continued iniquities, as the Fox women did the other day in New York.[66] But, whenever a catastrophe of this kind takes place, the believers are no wise dismayed by it. They freely admit that not only the media, but the spirits whom they summon, are sadly apt to lose sight of the elementary principles of right and wrong; and they triumphantly ask: How does the occurrence of occasional impostures disprove the genuine manifestations (that is to say, all those which have not yet been proved to be impostures or delusions)? And, in this, they unconsciously plagiarise from the churchman, who just as freely admits that many ecclesiastical miracles may have been forged; and asks, with calm contempt, not only of legal proofs, but of common-sense probability, Why does it follow that none are to be supposed genuine? I must say, however, that the spiritualists, so far as I know, do not venture to outrage right reason so boldly as the ecclesiastics. They do not sneer at "evidence"; nor repudiate the requirement of legal proofs. In fact, there can be no doubt that the spiritualists produce better evidence for their manifestations than can be shown either for the miraculous death of Arius, or for the Invention of the Cross.[67] From the "levitation" of the axe at one end of a period of near three thousand years to the "levitation" of Sludge & Co. at the other end, there is a complete continuity of the miraculous, with every gradation, from the childish to the stupendous, from the gratification of a caprice to the illustration of sublime truth. There is no drawing a line in the series that might be set out of plausibly attested cases of spiritual intervention. If one is true, all may be true; if one is false, all may be false. This is, to my mind, the inevitable result of that method of reasoning which is applied to the confutation of Protestantism, with so much success, by one of the acutest and subtlest disputants who have ever championed Ecclesiasticism--and one cannot put his claims to acuteness and subtlety higher. ... the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth it is this ... "To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant." [68] I have not a shadow of doubt that these anti-Protestant epigrams are profoundly true. But I have as little that, in the same sense, the "Christianity of history is not" Romanism; and that to be deeper in history is to cease to be a Romanist. The reasons which compel my doubts about the compatibility of the Roman doctrine, or any other form of Catholicism, with history, arise out of exactly the same line of argument as that adopted by Dr. Newman in the famous essay which I have just cited. If, with one hand, Dr. Newman has destroyed Protestantism, he has annihilated Romanism with the other; and the total result of his ambidextral efforts is to shake Christianity to its foundations. Nor was any one better aware that this must be he inevitable result of his arguments--if the world should refuse to accept Roman doctrines and Roman miracles--than the writer of Tract 85. Dr. Newman made his choice and passed over to the Roman Church half a century ago. Some of those who were essentially in harmony with his views preceded, and many followed him. But many remained; and, as the quondam Puseyite and present Ritualistic party, they are continuing that work of sapping and mining the Protestantism of the Anglican Church which he and his friends so ably commenced. At the present time, they have no little claim to be considered victorious all along the line. I am old enough to recollect the small beginnings of the Tractarian party; and I am amazed when I consider the present position of their heirs. Their little leaven has leavened, if not the whole, yet a very large lump of the Anglican Church; which is now pretty much of a preparatory school for Papistry. So that it really behoves Englishmen (who, as I have been informed by high authority, are all legally members of the State Church, if they profess to belong to no other sect) to wake up to what that powerful organisation is about, and whither it is tending. On this point, the writings of Dr. Newman, while he still remained within the Anglican fold, are a vast store of the best and the most authoritative information. His doctrines on Ecclesiastical miracles and on Development are the Corner-stones of the Tractarian fabric. He believed that his arguments led either Romeward, or to what ecclesiastics call "Infidelity," and I call Agnosticism. I believe that he was quite right in this conviction; but while he chooses the one alternative, I choose the other; as he rejects Protestantism on the ground of its incompatibility with history, so, _a fortiori_, I conceive that Romanism ought to be rejected; and that an impartial consideration of the evidence must refuse the authority of Jesus to anything more than the Nazarenism of James and Peter and John. And let it not be supposed that this is a mere "infidel" perversion of the facts. No one has more openly and clearly admitted the possibility that they may be fairly interpreted in this way than Dr. Newman. If, he says, there are texts which seem to show that Jesus contemplated the evangelisation of the heathen: ... Did not the Apostles hear our Lord? and what was _their_ impression from what they heard? Is it not certain that the Apostles did not gather this truth from His teaching? (Tract 85, p. 63.) He said, "Preach the Gospel to every creature," These words _need_ have only meant "Bring all men to Christianity through Judaism." Make them Jews, that they may enjoy Christ's privileges, which are lodged in Judaism; teach them those rites and ceremonies, circumcision and the like, which hitherto have been dead ordinances, and now are living: and so the Apostles seem to have understood them (_ibid._ p. 65). So far as Nazarenism differentiated itself from contemporary orthodox Judaism, it seems to have tended towards a revival of the ethical and religious spirit of the prophetic age, accompanied by the belief in Jesus as the Messiah, and by various accretions which had grown round Judaism subsequently to the exile. To these belong the doctrines of the Resurrection, of the Last Judgment, of Heaven and Hell; of the hierarchy of good angels; of Satan and the hierarchy of evil spirits. And there is very strong ground for believing that all these doctrines, at least in the shapes in which they were held by the post-exilic Jews, were derived from Persian and Babylonian[69] sources, and are essentially of heathen origin. How far Jesus positively sanctioned all these indrainings of circumjacent Paganism into Judaism; how far any one has a right to declare that the refusal to accept one or other of these doctrines, as ascertained verities, comes to the same thing as contradicting Jesus, it appears to me not easy to say. But it is hardly less difficult to conceive that he could have distinctly negatived any of them; and, more especially, that demonology which has been accepted by the Christian Churches, in every age and under all their mutual antagonisms. But I repeat my conviction that, whether Jesus sanctioned the demonology of his time and nation or not, it is doomed. The future of Christianity, as a dogmatic system and apart from the old Israelitish ethics which it has appropriated and developed, lies in the answer which mankind will eventually give to the question, whether they are prepared to believe such stories as the Gadarene and the pneumatological hypotheses which go with it, or not. My belief is they will decline to do anything of the sort, whenever and wherever their minds have been disciplined by science. And that discipline must, and will, at once follow and lead the footsteps of advancing civilisation. The preceding pages were written before I became acquainted with the contents of the May number of the _Nineteenth Century_, wherein I discover many things which are decidedly not to my advantage. It would appear that "evasion" is my chief resource, "incapacity for strict argument" and "rottenness of ratiocination" my main mental characteristics, and that it is "barely credible" that a statement which I profess to make of my own knowledge is true. All which things I notice, merely to illustrate the great truth, forced on me by long experience, that it is only from those who enjoy the blessing of a firm hold of the Christian faith that such manifestations of meekness, patience, and charity are to be expected. I had imagined that no one who had read my preceding papers, could entertain a doubt as to my position in respect of the main issue, as it has been stated and restated by my opponent: an Agnosticism which knows nothing of the relation of man to God must not only refuse belief to our Lord's most undoubted teaching, but must deny the reality of the spiritual convictions in which He lived.[70] That is said to be "the simple question which is at issue between us," and the three testimonies to that teaching and those convictions selected are the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, and the Story of the Passion. My answer, reduced to its briefest form, has been: In the first place, the evidence is such that the exact nature of the teachings and the convictions of Jesus is extremely uncertain; so that what ecclesiastics are pleased to call a denial of them may be nothing of the kind. And, in the second place, if Jesus taught the demonological system involved in the Gadarene story--if a belief in that system formed a part of the spiritual convictions in which he lived and died--then I, for my part, unhesitatingly refuse belief in that teaching, and deny the reality of those spiritual convictions. And I go further and add, that, exactly in so far as it can be proved that Jesus sanctioned the essentially pagan demonological theories current among the Jews of his age, exactly in so far, for me, will his authority in any matter touching the spiritual world be weakened. With respect to the first half of my answer, I have pointed out that the Sermon on the Mount, as given in the first Gospel, is, in the opinion of the best critics, a "mosaic work" of materials derived from different sources, and I do not understand that this statement is challenged. The only other Gospel--the third--which contains something like it, makes, not only the discourse, but the circumstances under which it was delivered, very different. Now, it is one thing to say that there was something real at the bottom of the two discourses--which is quite possible; and another to affirm that we have any right to say what that something was, or to fix upon any particular phrase and declare it to be a genuine utterance. Those who pursue theology as a science, and bring to the study an adequate knowledge of the ways of ancient historians, will find no difficulty in providing illustrations of my meaning. I may supply one which has come within range of my own limited vision. In Josephus's "History of the Wars of the Jews" (chap, xix.), that writer reports a speech which he says Herod made at the opening of a war with the Arabians. It is in the first person, and could naturally be supposed by the reader to be intended for a true version of what Herod said. In the "Antiquities," written some seventeen years later, the same writer gives another report, also in the first person, of Herod's speech on the same occasion. This second oration is twice as long as the first and, though the general tenor of the two speeches is pretty much the same, there is hardly any verbal identity, and a good deal of matter is introduced into the one, which is absent from the other. Josephus prides himself on his accuracy; people whose fathers might have heard Herod's oration were his Contemporaries; and yet his historical sense is so curiously undeveloped that he can, quite innocently, perpetrate an obvious literary fabrication; for one of the two accounts must be incorrect. Now, if I am asked whether I believe that Herod made some particular statement on this occasion; whether, for example, he uttered the pious aphorism, "Where God is, there is both multitude and courage," which is given in the "Antiquities," but not in the "Wars," I am compelled to say I do not know. One of the two reports must be erroneous, possibly both are: at any rate, I cannot tell how much of either is true. And, if some fervent admirer of the Idumean should build up a theory of Herod's piety upon Josephus's evidence that he propounded the aphorism, is it a "mere evasion" to say, in reply, that the evidence that he did utter it is worthless? It appears again that, adopting the tactics of Conachar when brought face to face with Hal o' the Wynd, I have been trying to get my simple-minded adversary to follow me on a wild-goose chase through the early history of Christianity, in the hope of escaping impending defeat on the main issue. But I may be permitted to point out that there is an alternative hypothesis which equally fits the facts; and that, after all, there may have been method in the madness of my supposed panic. For suppose it to be established that Gentile Christianity was a totally different thing from the Nazarenism of Jesus and his immediate disciples; suppose it to be demonstrable that, as early as the sixth decade of our era at least, there were violent divergencies of opinion among the followers of Jesus; suppose it to be hardly doubtful that the Gospels and the Acts took their present shapes under the influence of those divergencies; suppose that their authors, and those through whose hands they passed, had notions of historical veracity not more eccentric than those which Josephus occasionally displays: surely the chances that the Gospels are altogether trustworthy records of the teachings of Jesus become very slender. And, since the whole of the case of the other side is based on the supposition that they are accurate records (especially of speeches, about which ancient historians are so curiously loose), I really do venture to submit that this part of my argument bears very seriously on the main issue; and, as ratiocination, is sound to the core. Again, when I passed by the topic of the speeches of Jesus on the Cross, it appears that I could have had no other motive than the dictates of my native evasiveness. An ecclesiastical dignitary may have respectable reasons for declining a fencing match "in sight of Gethsemane and Calvary"; but an ecclesiastical "Infidel"! Never. It is obviously impossible that, in the belief that "the greater includes the less," I, having declared the Gospel evidence in general, as to the sayings of Jesus, to be of questionable value, thought it needless to select for illustration of my views, those particular instances which were likely to be most offensive to persons of another way of thinking. But any supposition that may have been entertained that the old familiar tones of the ecclesiastical war-drum will tempt me to engage in such needless discussion had better be renounced. I shall do nothing of the kind. Let it suffice that I ask my readers to turn to the twenty-third chapter of Luke (revised version), verse thirty-four, and he will find in the margin Some ancient authorities omit: And Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." So that, even as late as the fourth century, there were ancient authorities, indeed some of the most ancient and weightiest, who either did not know of this utterance, so often quoted as characteristic of Jesus, or did not believe it had been uttered. Many years ago, I received an anonymous letter, which abused me heartily for my want of moral courage in not speaking out. I thought that one of the oddest charges an anonymous letter-writer could bring. But I am not sure that the plentiful sowing of the pages of the article with which I am dealing with accusations of evasion, may not seem odder to those who consider that the main strength of the answers with which I have been favoured (in this review and elsewhere) is devoted, not to anything in the text of my first paper, but to a note which occurs at p. 84. In this I say: Dr. Wace tells us: "It may be asked how far we can rely on the accounts we possess of our Lord's teaching on these subjects." And he seems to think the question appropriately answered by the assertion that it "ought to be regarded as settled by M. Renan's practical surrender of the adverse case." I requested Dr. Wace to point out the passages of M. Renan's works in which, as he affirms, this "practical surrender" (not merely as to the age and authorship of the Gospels, be it observed, but as to their historical value) is made, and he has been so good as to do so. Now let us consider the parts of Dr. Wace's citation from Renan which are relevant to the issue:-- The author of this Gospel [Luke] is certainly the same as the author of the Acts of the Apostles. Now the author of the Acts seems to be a companion of St. Paul--a character which accords completely with St. Luke. I know that more than one objection may be opposed to this reasoning: but one thing, at all events, is beyond doubt, namely, that the author of the third Gospel and of the Acts is a man who belonged to the second apostolic generation; and this suffices for our purpose. This is a curious "practical surrender of the adverse case." M. Renan thinks that there is no doubt that the author of the third Gospel is the author of the Acts--a conclusion in which I suppose critics generally agree. He goes on to remark that this person _seems_ to be a companion of St. Paul, and adds that Luke was a companion of St. Paul. Then, somewhat needlessly, M. Renan points out that there is more than one objection to jumping, from such data as these, to the conclusion that "Luke" is the writer of the third Gospel. And, finally, M. Renan is content to reduce that which is "beyond doubt" to the fact that the author of the two books is a man of the second apostolic generation. Well, it seems to me that I could agree with all that M. Renan considers "beyond doubt" here, without surrendering anything, either "practically" or theoretically. Dr. Wace (_Nineteenth Century_, March, p. 363) states that he derives the above citation from the preface to the 15th edition of the "Vie de Jésus." My copy of "Les �vangiles," dated 1877, contains a list of Renan's "Oeuvres Complètes," at the head of which I find "Vie de Jésus," 15° edition. It is, therefore, a later work than the edition of the "Vie de Jésus" which Dr. Wace quotes. Now "Les �vangiles," as its name implies, treats fully of the questions respecting the date and authorship of the Gospels; and any one who desired, not merely to use M. Renan's expressions for controversial purposes, but to give a fair account of his views in their full significance, would, I think, refer to the later source. If this course had been taken, Dr. Wace might have found some as decided expressions of opinion, in favour of Luke's authorship of the third Gospel, as he has discovered in "The Apostles." I mention this circumstance, because I desire to point out that, taking even the strongest of Renan's statements, I am still at a loss to see how it justifies that large sounding phrase, "practical surrender of the adverse case." For, on p. 438 of "Les �vangiles," Renan speaks of the way in which Luke's "excellent intentions" have led him to torture history in the Acts; he declares Luke to be the founder of that "eternal fiction which is called ecclesiastical history"; and, on the preceding page, he talks of the "myth" of the Ascension--with its "_mise en scène voulue_." At p. 435, I find "Luc, ou Fauteur quel qu'il soit du troisième �vangile"; at p. 280, the accounts of the Passion, the death and the resurrection of Jesus, are said to be "peu historiques"; at p. 283, "La valeur historique du troisième �vangile est sûrement moindre que celles des deux premiers." A Pyrrhic sort of victory for orthodoxy, this "surrender"! And, all the while, the scientific student of theology knows that, the more reason there may be to believe that Luke was the companion of Paul, the more doubtful becomes his credibility, if he really wrote the Acts. For, in that case, he could not fail to have been acquainted with Paul's account of the Jerusalem conference, and he must have consciously misrepresented it. We may next turn to the essential part of Dr. Wace's citation (_Nineteenth Century_, p. 365) touching the first Gospel:-- St. Matthew evidently deserves peculiar confidence for the discourses. Here are the "oracles"--the very notes taken while the memory of the instruction of Jesus was living and definite. M. Renan here expresses the very general opinion as to the existence of a collection of "logia," having a different origin from the text in which they are embedded, in Matthew. "Notes" are somewhat suggestive of a shorthand writer, but the suggestion is unintentional, for M. Renan assumes that these "notes" were taken, not at the time of the delivery of the "logia" but subsequently, while (as he assumes) the memory of them was living and definite; so that, in this very citation, M. Renan leaves open the question of the general historical value of the first Gospel; while it is obvious that the accuracy of "notes" taken, not at the time of delivery, but from memory, is a matter about which more than one opinion may be fairly held. Moreover, Renan expressly calls attention to the difficulty of distinguishing the authentic "logia" from later additions of the same kind ("Les �vangiles," p. 201). The fact is, there is no contradiction here to that opinion about the first Gospel which is expressed in "Les �vangiles" (p. 175). The text of the so-called Matthew supposes the pre-existence of that of Mark, and does little more than complete it. He completes it in two fashions--first, by the insertion of those long discourses which gave their chief value to the Hebrew Gospels; then by adding traditions of a more modern formation, results of successive developments of the legend, and to which the Christian consciousness already attached infinite value. M. Renan goes on to suggest that besides "Mark," "Pseudo-Matthew" used an Aramaic version of the Gospel, originally set forth in that dialect. Finally, as to the second Gospel (_Nineteenth Century_, p. 365):-- He [Mark] is full of minute observations, proceeding, beyond doubt, from an eye-witness. There is nothing to conflict with the supposition that this eye-witness ... was the Apostle Peter himself, as Papias has it. Let us consider this citation by the light of "Les �vangiles":-- This work, although composed after the death of Peter, was, in a sense, the work of Peter; it represents the way in which Peter was accustomed to relate the life of Jesus (p. 116). M. Renan goes on to say that, as an historical document, the Gospel of Mark has a great superiority (p. 116); but Mark has a motive for omitting the discourses, and he attaches a "puerile importance" to miracles (p, 117). The Gospel of Mark is less a legend, than a biography written with credulity (p. 118). It would be rash to say that Mark has not been interpolated and retouched (p. 120). If any one thinks that I have not been warranted in drawing a sharp distinction between "scientific theologians" and "counsels for creeds"; or that my warning against the too ready acceptance of certain declarations as to the state of biblical criticism was needless; or that my anxiety as to the sense of the word "practical" was superfluous; let him compare the statement that M. Renan has made a "practical surrender of the adverse case" with the facts just set forth. For what is the adverse case? The question, as Dr. Wace puts it, is "It may be asked how far can we rely on the accounts we possess of our Lord's teaching on these subjects." It will be obvious that M. Renan's statements amount to an adverse answer--to a "practical" denial that any great reliance can be placed on these accounts. He does not believe that Matthew, the apostle, wrote the first Gospel; he does not profess to know who is responsible for the collection of "logia," or how many of them are authentic; though he calls the second Gospel the most historical, he points out that it is written with credulity, and may have been interpolated and retouched; and as to the author, "quid qu'il soit," of the third Gospel, who is to "rely on the accounts" of a writer, who deserves the cavalier treatment which "Luke" meets with at M. Renan's hands? I repeat what I have already more than once said, that the question of the age and the authorship of the Gospels has not, in my judgment, the importance which is so commonly assigned to it for the simple reason that the reports even of eye-witnesses, would not suffice to justify belief in a large and essential part of their contents; on the contrary, these reports would discredit the witnesses. The Gadarene miracle, for example, is so extremely improbable that the fact of its being reported by three even independent, authorities could not justify belief in it, unless we had the clearest evidence as to their capacity as observers and as interpreters of their observations. But it is evident that the three authorities are not independent; that they have simply adopted a legend of which there were two versions; and instead of their proving its truth, it suggests their superstitious credulity; so that if "Matthew," "Mark," and "Luke" are really responsible for the Gospels, it is not the better for the Gadarene story, but the worse for them. A wonderful amount of controversial capital has been made out of my assertion in the note to which I have referred, as an _obiter dictum_ of no consequence to my argument, that if Renan's work[71] were non-extant, the main results of biblical criticism, as set forth in the works of Strauss, Baur, Reuss, and Volkmar, for example, would not be sensibly affected. I thought I had explained it satisfactorily already, but it seems that my explanation has only exhibited still more of my native perversity, so I ask for one more chance. In the course of the historical development of any branch of science, what is universally observed is this: that the men who make epochs, and are the real architects of the fabric of exact knowledge, are those who introduce fruitful ideas or methods. As a rule, the man who does this pushes his idea, or his method, too far; or, if he does not, his school is sure to do so; and those who follow have to reduce his work to its proper value, and assign it its place in the whole. Not unfrequently, they, in their turn, overdo the critical process, and, in trying to eliminate error, throw away truth. Thus, as I said, Linnæus, Buffon, Cuvier, Lamarck, really "set forth the results" of a developing science, although they often heartily contradict one another. Notwithstanding this circumstance, modern classificatory method and nomenclature have largely grown out of the work of Linnæus: the modern conception of biology, as a science, and of its relation to climatology, geography, and geology, are, as largely, rooted in the results of the labours of Buffon; comparative anatomy and palæontology owe a vast debt to Cuvier's results; while invertebrate zoology and the revival of the idea of evolution are intimately dependent on the results of the work of Lamarck. In other words, the main results of biology up to the early years of this century are to be found in, or spring out of, the works of these men. So, if I mistake not, Strauss, if he did not originate the idea of taking the mythopoeic faculty into account in the development of the Gospel narratives, and though he may have exaggerated the influence of that faculty, obliged scientific theology, hereafter, to take that element into serious consideration; so Baur, in giving prominence to the cardinal fact of the divergence of the Nazarene and Pauline tendencies in the primitive Church; so Reuss, in setting a marvellous example of the cool and dispassionate application of the principles of scientific criticism over the whole field of Scripture; so Volkmar, in his clear and forcible statement of the Nazarene limitations of Jesus, contributed results of permanent value in scientific theology. I took these names as they occurred to me. Undoubtedly, I might have advantageously added to them; perhaps, I might have made a better selection. But it really is absurd to try to make out that I did not know that these writers widely disagree; and I believe that no scientific theologian will deny that, in principle, what I have said is perfectly correct. Ecclesiastical advocates, of course, cannot be expected to take this view of the matter. To them, these mere seekers after truth, in so far as their results are unfavourable to the creed the clerics have to support, are more or less "infidels," or favourers of "infidelity"; and the only thing they care to see, or probably can see, is the fact that, in a great many matters, the truth-seekers differ from one another, and therefore can easily be exhibited to the public, as if they did nothing else; as if any one who referred to their having, each and all, contributed his share to the results of theological science, was merely showing his ignorance; and as if a charge of inconsistency could be based on the fact that he himself often disagrees with what they say. I have never lent a shadow of foundation to the assumption that I am a follower of either Strauss, or Baur, or Reuss, or Volkmar, or Renan; my debt to these eminent men--so far my superiors in theological knowledge--is, indeed, great; yet it is not for their opinions, but for those I have been able to form for myself, by their help. In _Agnosticism: a Rejoinder_, I have referred to the difficulties under which those professors of the science of theology, whose tenure of their posts depends on the results of their investigations, must labour; and, in a note, I add-- Imagine that all our chairs of Astronomy had been founded in the fourteenth century, and that their incumbents were bound to sign Ptolemaic articles. In that case, with every respect for the efforts of persons thus hampered to attain and expound the truth, I think men of common sense would go elsewhere to learn astronomy. I did not write this paragraph without a knowledge that its sense would be open to the kind of perversion which it has suffered; but, if that was clear, the necessity for the statement was still clearer. It is my deliberate opinion: I reiterate it; and I say that, in my judgment, it is extremely inexpedient that any subject which calls itself a science should be entrusted to teachers who are debarred from freely following out scientific methods to their legitimate conclusions, whatever those conclusions may be. If I may borrow a phrase paraded at the Church Congress, I think it "ought to be unpleasant" for any man of science to find himself in the position of such a teacher. Human nature is not altered by seating it in a professorial chair, even of theology. I have very little doubt that if, in the year 1859, the tenure of my office had depended upon my adherence to the doctrines of Cuvier, the objections to them set forth in the "Origin of Species" would have had a halo of gravity about them that, being free to teach what I pleased, I failed to discover. And, in making that statement, it does not appear to me that I am confessing that I should have been debarred by "selfish interests" from making candid inquiry, or that I should have been biassed by "sordid motives." I hope that even such a fragment of moral sense as may remain in an ecclesiastical "infidel" might have got me through the difficulty; but it would be unworthy to deny, or disguise, the fact that a very serious difficulty must have been created for me by the nature of my tenure. And let it be observed that the temptation, in my case, would have been far slighter than in that of a professor of theology; whatever biological doctrine I had repudiated, nobody I cared for would have thought the worse of me for so doing. No scientific journals would have howled me down, as the religious newspapers howled down my too honest friend, the late Bishop of Natal; nor would my colleagues of the Royal Society have turned their backs upon me, as his episcopal colleagues boycotted him. I say these facts are obvious, and, that it is wholesome and needful that they should be stated. It is in the interests of theology, if it be a science, and it is in the interests of those teachers of theology who desire to be something better than counsel for creeds, that it should be taken to heart. The seeker after theological truth and that only, will no more suppose that I have insulted him, than the prisoner who works in fetters will try to pick a quarrel with me, if I suggest that he would get on better if the fetters were knocked off; unless indeed, as it is said does happen in the course of long captivities, that the victim at length ceases to feel the weight of his chains, or even takes to hugging them, as if they were honourable ornaments. R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BREAD ST. HILL, E.C., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. * * * * * [Footnote 1: The absence of any keel on the breast-bone and some other osteological peculiarities, observed by Professor Marsh, however, suggest that _Hesperornis_ may be a modification of a less specialised group of birds than that to which these existing aquatic birds belong.] [Footnote 2: A second specimen, discovered in 1877, and at present in the Berlin museum, shows an excellently preserved skull with teeth: and three digits, all terminated by claws, in the fore-limb. 1893.] [Footnote 3: I use the word "type" because it is highly probable that many forms of _Anchitherium_-like and _Hipparion_-like animals existed in the Miocene and Pliocene epochs, just as many species of the horse tribe exist now; and it is highly improbable that the particular species of _Anchitherium_ or _Hipparion_, which happen to have been discovered, should be precisely those which have formed part of the direct line of the horse's pedigree.] [Footnote 4: Since this lecture was delivered, Professor Marsh has discovered a new genus of equine mammals (_Eohippus_) from the lowest Eocene deposits of the West, which corresponds very nearly to this description.--_American Journal of Science_, November, 1876.] [Footnote 5: _The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry_, pp. 4 and 5.] [Footnote 6: Hume's Essay, "Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy," in the _Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding_.--[Many critics of this passage seem to forget that the subject-matter of Ethics and �sthetics consists of, matters of fact and existence.--1892.]] [Footnote 7: Or, to speak more accurately, the physical state of which volition is the expression.--[1892.]] [Footnote 8: _Declaration on the Truth of Holy Scripture_, _The Times_, 18th December, 1891.] [Footnote 9: _Declaration_, Article 10.] [Footnote 10: Ego vero evangelio non crederem, nisi ecclesiæ Catholicæ me commoveret auctoritas.--_Contra Epistolam Manichæi_ cap. v.] [Footnote 11: _Hasisadra's Adventure._] [Footnote 12: _The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature_ and _Mr. Gladstone and Genesis._] [Footnote 13: _Agnosticism; The Value of Witness to the Miraculous; Agnosticism: a Rejoinder; Agnosticism and Christianity; The Keepers of the Herd of Swine_; and _Illustrations of Mr. Gladstone's Controversial Methods_.] [Footnote 14: I employ the words "Supernature" and "Supernatural" in their popular senses. For myself, I am bound to say that the term "Nature" covers the totality of that which is. The world of psychical phenomena appears to me to be as much part of "Nature" as the world of physical phenomena; and I am unable to perceive any justification for cutting the Universe into two halves, one natural and one supernatural.] [Footnote 15: My citations are made from Teulet's _Einhardi omnia quæ extant opera_, Paris, 1840-1843, which contains a biography of the author, a history of the text, with translations into French, and many valuable annotations.] [Footnote 16: At present included in the Duchies of Hesse-Darmstadt and Baden.] [Footnote 17: This took place in the year 826 A.D. The relics were brought from Rome and deposited in the Church of St. Medardus at Soissons.] [Footnote 18: Now included in Western Switzerland.] [Footnote 19: Probably, according to Teulet, the present Sandhofer-fahrt, a little below the embouchure of the Neckar.] [Footnote 20: The present Michilstadt, thirty miles N.E. of Heidelberg.] [Footnote 21: In the Middle Ages one of the most favourite accusations against witches was that they committed just these enormities.] [Footnote 22: It is pretty clear that Eginhard had his doubts about the deacon, whose pledges he qualifies as _sponsiones incertæ_. But, to be sure, he wrote after events which fully justified scepticism.] [Footnote 23: The words are _scrinia sine clave_, which seems to mean "having no key." But the circumstances forbid the idea of breaking open.] [Footnote 24: Eginhard speaks with lofty contempt of the "vana ac superstitiosa præsumptio" of the poor woman's companions in trying to alleviate her sufferings with "herbs and frivolous incantations." Vain enough, no doubt, but the "mulierculæ" might have returned the epithet "superstitious" with interest.] [Footnote 25: Of course there is nothing new in this argument; but it does not grow weaker by age. And the case of Eginhard is far more instructive than that of Augustine, because the former has so very frankly, though incidentally, revealed to us not only his own mental and moral habits, but those of the people about him.] [Footnote 26: See 1 Cor. xii. 10-28; 2 Cor. vi. 12 Rom. xv, 19.] [Footnote 27: _A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, and Christian Experiences, &c., of George Fox._ Ed. 1694, pp. 27, 28.] [Footnote 28: See the _Official Report of the Church Congress held at Manchester_, October 1888, pp. 253, 254.] [Footnote 29: In this place and in _Illustrations of Mr. Gladstone's Controversial Methods_, there are references to the late Archbishop of York which are of no importance to my main argument, and which I have expunged because I desire to obliterate the traces of a temporary misunderstanding with a man of rare ability, candour, and wit, for whom I entertained a great liking and no less respect. I rejoice to think now of the (then) Bishop's cordial hail the first time we met after our little skirmish, "Well, is it to be peace or war?" I replied, "A little of both." But there was only peace when we parted, and ever after.] [Footnote 30: Dr. Wace tells us, "It may be asked how far we can rely on the accounts we possess of our Lord's teaching on these subjects." And he seems to think the question appropriately answered by the assertion that it "ought to be regarded as settled by M. Renan's practical surrender of the adverse case." I thought I knew M. Renan's works pretty well, but I have contrived to miss this "practical" (I wish Dr. Wace had defined the scope of that useful adjective) surrender. However, as Dr. Wace can find no difficulty in pointing out the passage of M. Renan's writings, by which he feels justified in making his statement, I shall wait for further enlightenment, contenting myself, for the present, with remarking that if M. Renan were to retract and do penance in Notre-Dame to-morrow for any contributions to Biblical criticism that may be specially his property, the main results of that criticism, as they are set forth in the works of Strauss, Baur, Reuss, and Volkmar, for example, could not be sensibly affected.] [Footnote 31: See De Gobineau, _Les Religions et les Philosophies dans l'Asie Centrale_; and the recently published work of Mr. E.G. Browne, _The Episode of the Bab_.] [Footnote 32: Here, as always, the revised version is cited.] [Footnote 33: Does any one really mean to say that there is any internal or external criterion by which the reader of a biblical statement, in which scientific matter is contained, is enabled to judge whether it is to be taken _au sérieux_ or not? Is the account of the Deluge, accepted as true in the New Testament, less precise and specific than that of the call of Abraham, also accepted as true therein? By what mark does the story of the feeding with manna in the wilderness, which involves some very curious scientific problems, show that it is meant merely for edification, while the story of the inscription of the Law on stone by the hand of Jahveh is literally true? If the story of the Fall is not the true record or an historical occurrence, what becomes of Pauline theology? Yet the story of the Fall as directly conflicts with probability, and is as devoid of trustworthy evidence, as that of the Creation or that of the Deluge, with which it forms an harmoniously legendary series.] [Footnote 34: See, for an admirable discussion of the whole subject, Dr. Abbott's article on the Gospels in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_; and the remarkable monograph by Professor Volkmar, _Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit_ (1882). Whether we agree with the conclusions of these writers or not, the method of critical investigation which they adopt is unimpeachable.] [Footnote 35: Notwithstanding the hard words shot at me from behind the hedge of anonymity by a writer in a recent number of the _Quarterly Review_, I repeat, without the slightest fear of refutation, that the four Gospels, as they have come to us, are the work of unknown writers.] [Footnote 36: Their arguments, in the long run, are always reducible to one form. Otherwise trustworthy witnesses affirm that such and such events took place. These events are inexplicable, except the agency of "spirits" is admitted. Therefore "spirits" were the cause of the phenomena. And the heads of the reply are always the same. Remember Goethe's aphorism: "Alles factische ist schon Theorie." Trustworthy witnesses are constantly deceived, or deceive themselves, in their interpretation of sensible phenomena. No one can prove that the sensible phenomena, in these cases, could be caused only by the agency of spirits: and there is abundant ground for believing that they may be produced in other ways. Therefore, the utmost that can be reasonably asked for, on the evidence as it stands, is suspension of judgment. And, on the necessity for even that suspension, reasonable men may differ, according to their views of probability.] [Footnote 37: Yet I must somehow have laid hold of the pith of the matter, for, many years afterwards, when Dean Mansel's Bampton Lectures were published, it seemed to me I already knew all that this eminently agnostic thinker had to tell me.] [Footnote 38: _Kritik der reinen Vernunft._ Edit. Hartenstein p. 256.] [Footnote 39: _Report of the Church Congress_, Manchester, 1888, p. 252.] [Footnote 40: I suppose this is what Dr. Wace is thinking about when he says that I allege that there "is no visible escape" from the supposition of an _Ur-Marcus_ (p. 367). That a "theologian of repute should confound an indisputable fact with one of the modes of explaining that fact is not so singular as those who are unaccustomed to the ways of theologians might imagine.] [Footnote 41: Any examiner whose duty it has been to examine into a case of "copying" will be particularly well prepared to appreciate the force of the case stated in that most excellent little book, _The Common Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels,_ by Dr. Abbott and Mr. Rushbrooke (Macmillan, 1884). To those who have not passed through such painful experiences I may recommend the brief discussion of the genuineness of the "Casket Letters" in my friend Mr. Skelton's interesting book, _Maitland of Lethington_. The second edition of Holtzmann's _Lehrbuch_, published in 1886, gives a remarkably fair and full account of the present results of criticism. At p. 366 he writes that the present burning question is whether the "relatively primitive narrative and the root of the other synoptic texts is contained in Matthew or in Mark. It is only on this point that properly-informed (_sachkundige_) critics differ," and he decides in favour of Mark.] [Footnote 42: Holtzmann (_Die synoptischen Evangelien_ 1863, p. 75), following Ewald, argues that the "Source A" (= the threefold tradition, more or less) contained something that answered to the "Sermon on the Plain" immediately after the words of our present "Mark," "And he cometh into a house" (iii 19). But what conceivable motive could "Mark" have for omitting it? Holtzmann has no doubt, however, that the "Sermon on the Mount" is a compilation, or as he calls it in his recently-published _Lehrbuch_ (p. 372), "an artificial mosaic work."] [Footnote 43: See Schürer, _Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes_, Zweiter Theil, p. 384.] [Footnote 44: Spacious, because a young man could sit in it "on the right side" (xv. 5), and therefore with plenty of room to spare.] [Footnote 45: King Herod had not the least difficulty in supposing the resurrection of John the Baptist--"John, whom I beheaded, he is risen" (Mark vi. 16).] [Footnote 46: I am very sorry for the interpolated "in," because citation ought to be accurate in small things as in great. But what difference it makes whether one "believes Jesus" or "believes in Jesus" much thought has not enabled me to discover. If you "believe him" you must believe him to be what he professed to be--that is "believe in him;" and if you "believe in him" you must necessarily "believe him."] [Footnote 47: True for Justin: but there is a school of theological critics, who more or less question the historical reality of Paul, and the genuineness of even the four cardinal epistles.] [Footnote 48: See _Dial. cum Tryphone_, § 47 and § 35. It is to be understood that Justin does not arrange these categories in order, as I have done.] [Footnote 49: I guard myself against being supposed to affirm that even the four cardinal epistles of Paul may not have been seriously tampered with. See note 47 above.] [Footnote 50: Paul, in fact, is required to commit in Jerusalem, an act of the same character as that which he brands as "dissimulation" on the part of Peter in Antioch.] [Footnote 51: All this was quite clearly pointed out by Ritschl nearly forty years ago. See _Die Entstehung der alt-katholischen Kirche_ (1850), p. 108.] [Footnote 52: "If every one was baptized as soon as he acknowledged Jesus to be the Messiah, the first Christians can have been aware of no other essential differences from the Jews."--Zeller, _Vorträge_ (1865), p. 26.] [Footnote 53: Dr. Harnack, in the lately-published second edition of His _Dogmengeschichte_, says (p. 39), "Jesus Christ brought forward no new doctrine"; and again, (p. 65), "It is not difficult to set against every portion of the utterances of Jesus an observation which deprives him of originality." See also Zusatz 4, on the same page.] [Footnote 54: I confess that, long ago, I once or twice made this mistake; even to the waste of a capital 'U.' 1893.] [Footnote 55: "Let us maintain, before we have proved. This seeming paradox is the secret of happiness" (Dr. Newman: Tract 85, p. 85).] [Footnote 56: Dr, Newman, _Essay on Development_, p. 357.] [Footnote 57: It is by no means to be assumed that "spiritual" and "corporeal" are exact equivalents of "immaterial" and "material" in the minds of ancient speculators on these topics. The "spiritual body" of the risen dead (1 Cor. xv.) is not the "natural" "flesh and blood" body. Paul does not teach the resurrection of the body in the ordinary sense of the word "body"; a fact, often overlooked, but pregnant with many consequences.] [Footnote 58: Tertullian (_Apolog. adv. Gentes_, cap. xxiii.) thus challenges the Roman authorities: let them bring a possessed person into the presence of a Christian before their tribunal; and if the demon does not confess himself to be such, on the order of the Christian, let the Christian be executed out of hand.] [Footnote 59: See the expression of orthodox opinion upon the "accommodation" subterfuge already cited above, pp. 85 and 86.] [Footnote 60: I quote the first edition (1843). A second edition appeared in 1870. Tract 85 of the _Tracts for the Times_ should be read with this _Essay_. If I were called upon to compile a Primer of "Infidelity," I think I should save myself trouble by making a selection from these works, and from the _Essay on Development_ by the same author.] [Footnote 61: Yet, when it suits his purpose, as in the Introduction to the _Essay on Development_, Dr. Newman can demand strict evidence in religious questions as sharply as any "infidel author"; and he can even profess to yield to its force (_Essay on Miracles_, 1870; note, p. 391).] [Footnote 62: According to Dr. Newman, "This prayer [that of Bishop Alexander, who begged God to 'take Arius away'] is said to have been offered about 3 P.M. on the Saturday; that same evening Arius was in the great square of Constantine, when he was suddenly seized with indisposition" (p. clxx). The "infidel" Gibbon seems to have dared to suggest that "an option between poison and miracle" is presented by this case; and, it must be admitted, that, if the Bishop had been within the reach of a modern police magistrate, things might have gone hardly with him. Modern "Infidels," possessed of a slight knowledge of chemistry, are not unlikely, with no less audacity, to suggest an "option between fire-damp and miracle" in seeking for the cause of the fiery outburst at Jerusalem.] [Footnote 63: Compare Tract 85, p. 110; "I am persuaded that were men but consistent who oppose the Church doctrines as being unscriptural, they would vindicate the Jews for rejecting the Gospel."] [Footnote 64: A writer in a spiritualist journal takes me soundly to task for venturing to doubt the historical and literal truth of the Gadarene story. The following passage in his letter is worth quotation: "Now to the materialistic and scientific mind, to the uninitiated in spiritual verities, certainly this story of the Gadarene or Gergesene swine, presents insurmountable difficulties; it seems grotesque and nonsensical. To the experienced, trained, and cultivated Spiritualist this miracle is, as I am prepared to show, one of the most instructive, the most profoundly useful, and the most beneficent which Jesus ever wrought in the whole course of His pilgrimage of redemption on earth." Just so. And the first page of this same journal presents the following advertisement, among others of the same kidney:-- "TO WEALTHY SPIRITUALISTS.--A Lady Medium of tried power wishes to meet with an elderly gentleman who would be willing to give her a comfortable home and maintenance in Exchange for her Spiritualistic services, as her guides consider her health is too delicate for public sittings: London preferred.--Address 'Mary,' Office of _Light_." Are we going back to the days of the Judges, when wealthy Micah set up his private ephod, teraphim, and Levite?] [Footnote 65: Consider Tertullian's "sister" ("hodie apud nos"), who conversed with angels, saw and heard mysteries, knew men's thoughts, and prescribed medicine for their bodies (_De Anima._ cap. 9). Tertullian tells us that this woman saw the soul as corporeal, and described its colour and shape. The "infidel" will probably be unable to refrain from insulting the memory of the ecstatic saint by the remark, that Tertullian's known views about the corporeality of the soul may have had something to do with the remarkable perceptive powers of the Montanist medium, in whose revelations of the spiritual world he took such profound interest.] [Footnote 66: See the New York _World_ for Sunday, 21st October, 1888; and the _Report of the Stybert Commission_ Philadelphia, 1887.] [Footnote 67: Dr. Newman's observation that the miraculous multiplication of the pieces of the true cross (with which "the whole world is filled," according to Cyril of Jerusalem; and of which some say there are enough extant to build a man-of-war) is no more wonderful than that of the loaves and fishes, is one that I do not see my way to contradict. See _Essay on Miracles_, 2d ed. p. 163.] [Footnote 68: _An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine_, by J.H. Newman, D.D., pp. 7 and 8. (1878.)] [Footnote 69: Dr. Newman faces this question with his customary ability. "Now, I own, I am not at all solicitous to deny that this doctrine of an apostate Angel and his hosts was gained from Babylon: it might still be Divine nevertheless. God who made the prophet's ass speak, and thereby instructed the prophet, might instruct His Church by means of heathen Babylon" (Tract 85, p. 83). There seems to be no end to the apologetic burden that Balaam's ass can carry.] [Footnote 70: _Nineteenth Century_, May 1889 (p. 701).] [Footnote 71: I trust it may not be supposed that I undervalue M. Renan's labours, or intended to speak slightingly of them.] 
1185	----	HISTORY OF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE By John William Draper, M. D., LL. D. PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, AUTHOR OF A TREATISE ON HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY, HISTORY OF THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE, HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, AND OF MANY EXPERIMENTAL MEMOIRS ON CHEMICAL AND OTHER SCIENTIFIC SUBJECTS PREFACE. WHOEVER has had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the mental condition of the intelligent classes in Europe and America, must have perceived that there is a great and rapidly-increasing departure from the public religious faith, and that, while among the more frank this divergence is not concealed, there is a far more extensive and far more dangerous secession, private and unacknowledged. So wide-spread and so powerful is this secession, that it can neither be treated with contempt nor with punishment. It cannot be extinguished by derision, by vituperation, or by force. The time is rapidly approaching when it will give rise to serious political results. Ecclesiastical spirit no longer inspires the policy of the world. Military fervor in behalf of faith has disappeared. Its only souvenirs are the marble effigies of crusading knights, reposing in the silent crypts of churches on their tombs. That a crisis is impending is shown by the attitude of the great powers toward the papacy. The papacy represents the ideas and aspirations of two-thirds of the population of Europe. It insists on a political supremacy in accordance with its claims to a divine origin and mission, and a restoration of the mediaeval order of things, loudly declaring that it will accept no reconciliation with modern civilization. The antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science is the continuation of a struggle that commenced when Christianity began to attain political power. A divine revelation must necessarily be intolerant of contradiction; it must repudiate all improvement in itself, and view with disdain that arising from the progressive intellectual development of man. But our opinions on every subject are continually liable to modification, from the irresistible advance of human knowledge. Can we exaggerate the importance of a contention in which every thoughtful person must take part whether he will or not? In a matter so solemn as that of religion, all men, whose temporal interests are not involved in existing institutions, earnestly desire to find the truth. They seek information as to the subjects in dispute, and as to the conduct of the disputants. The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other. No one has hitherto treated the subject from this point of view. Yet from this point it presents itself to us as a living issue--in fact, as the most important of all living issues. A few years ago, it was the politic and therefore the proper course to abstain from all allusion to this controversy, and to keep it as far as possible in the background. The tranquillity of society depends so much on the stability of its religious convictions, that no one can be justified in wantonly disturbing them. But faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them, impossible to conceal, must take place. It then becomes the duty of those whose lives have made them familiar with both modes of thought, to present modestly, but firmly, their views; to compare the antagonistic pretensions calmly, impartially, philosophically. History shows that, if this be not done, social misfortunes, disastrous and enduring, will ensue. When the old mythological religion of Europe broke down under the weight of its own inconsistencies, neither the Roman emperors nor the philosophers of those times did any thing adequate for the guidance of public opinion. They left religious affairs to take their chance, and accordingly those affairs fell into the hands of ignorant and infuriated ecclesiastics, parasites, eunuchs, and slaves. The intellectual night which settled on Europe, in consequence of that great neglect of duty, is passing away; we live in the daybreak of better things. Society is anxiously expecting light, to see in what direction it is drifting. It plainly discerns that the track along which the voyage of civilization has thus far been made, has been left; and that a new departure, on all unknown sea, has been taken. Though deeply impressed with such thoughts, I should not have presumed to write this book, or to intrude on the public the ideas it presents, had I not made the facts with which it deals a subject of long and earnest meditation. And I have gathered a strong incentive to undertake this duty from the circumstance that a "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," published by me several years ago, which has passed through many editions in America, and has been reprinted in numerous European languages, English, French, German, Russian, Polish, Servian, etc., is everywhere received with favor. In collecting and arranging the materials for the volumes I published under the title of "A History of the American Civil War," a work of very great labor, I had become accustomed to the comparison of conflicting statements, the adjustment of conflicting claims. The approval with which that book has been received by the American public, a critical judge of the events considered, has inspired me with additional confidence. I had also devoted much attention to the experimental investigation of natural phenomena, and had published many well-known memoirs on such subjects. And perhaps no one can give himself to these pursuits, and spend a large part of his life in the public teaching of science, without partaking of that love of impartiality and truth which Philosophy incites. She inspires us with a desire to dedicate our days to the good of our race, so that in the fading light of life's evening we may not, on looking back, be forced to acknowledge how unsubstantial and useless are the objects that we have pursued. Though I have spared no pains in the composition of this book, I am very sensible how unequal it is to the subject, to do justice to which a knowledge of science, history, theology, politics, is required; every page should be alive with intelligence and glistening with facts. But then I have remembered that this is only as it were the preface, or forerunner, of a body of literature, which the events and wants of our times will call forth. We have come to the brink of a great intellectual change. Much of the frivolous reading of the present will be supplanted by a thoughtful and austere literature, vivified by endangered interests, and made fervid by ecclesiastical passion. What I have sought to do is, to present a clear and impartial statement of the views and acts of the two contending parties. In one sense I have tried to identify myself with each, so as to comprehend thoroughly their motives; but in another and higher sense I have endeavored to stand aloof, and relate with impartiality their actions. I therefore trust that those, who may be disposed to criticise this book, will bear in mind that its object is not to advocate the views and pretensions of either party, but to explain clearly, and without shrinking those of both. In the management of each chapter I have usually set forth the orthodox view first, and then followed it with that of its opponents. In thus treating the subject it has not been necessary to pay much regard to more moderate or intermediate opinions, for, though they may be intrinsically of great value, in conflicts of this kind it is not with the moderates but with the extremists that the impartial reader is mainly concerned. Their movements determine the issue. For this reason I have had little to say respecting the two great Christian confessions, the Protestant and Greek Churches. As to the latter, it has never, since the restoration of science, arrayed itself in opposition to the advancement of knowledge. On the contrary, it has always met it with welcome. It has observed a reverential attitude to truth, from whatever quarter it might come. Recognizing the apparent discrepancies between its interpretations of revealed truth and the discoveries of science, it has always expected that satisfactory explanations and reconciliations would ensue, and in this it has not been disappointed. It would have been well for modern civilization if the Roman Church had done the same. In speaking of Christianity, reference is generally made to the Roman Church, partly because its adherents compose the majority of Christendom, partly because its demands are the most pretentious, and partly because it has commonly sought to enforce those demands by the civil power. None of the Protestant Churches has ever occupied a position so imperious--none has ever had such wide-spread political influence. For the most part they have been averse to constraint, and except in very few instances their opposition has not passed beyond the exciting of theological odium. As to Science, she has never sought to ally herself to civil power. She has never attempted to throw odium or inflict social ruin on any human being. She has never subjected any one to mental torment, physical torture, least of all to death, for the purpose of upholding or promoting her ideas. She presents herself unstained by cruelties and crimes. But in the Vatican--we have only to recall the Inquisition--the hands that are now raised in appeals to the Most Merciful are crimsoned. They have been steeped in blood! There are two modes of historical composition, the artistic and the scientific. The former implies that men give origin to events; it therefore selects some prominent individual, pictures him under a fanciful form, and makes him the hero of a romance. The latter, insisting that human affairs present an unbroken chain, in which each fact is the offspring of some preceding fact, and the parent of some subsequent fact, declares that men do not control events, but that events control men. The former gives origin to compositions, which, however much they may interest or delight us, are but a grade above novels; the latter is austere, perhaps even repulsive, for it sternly impresses us with a conviction of the irresistible dominion of law, and the insignificance of human exertions. In a subject so solemn as that to which this book is devoted, the romantic and the popular are altogether out of place. He who presumes to treat of it must fix his eyes steadfastly on that chain of destiny which universal history displays; he must turn with disdain from the phantom impostures of pontiffs and statesmen and kings. If any thing were needed to show us the untrustworthiness of artistic historical compositions, our personal experience would furnish it. How often do our most intimate friends fail to perceive the real motives of our every-day actions; how frequently they misinterpret our intentions! If this be the case in what is passing before our eyes, may we not be satisfied that it is impossible to comprehend justly the doings of persons who lived many years ago, and whom we have never seen. In selecting and arranging the topics now to be presented, I have been guided in part by "the Confession" of the late Vatican Council, and in part by the order of events in history. Not without interest will the reader remark that the subjects offer themselves to us now as they did to the old philosophers of Greece. We still deal with the same questions about which they disputed. What is God? What is the soul? What is the world? How is it governed? Have we any standard or criterion of truth? And the thoughtful reader will earnestly ask, "Are our solutions of these problems any better than theirs?" The general argument of this book, then, is as follows: I first direct attention to the origin of modern science as distinguished from ancient, by depending on observation, experiment, and mathematical discussion, instead of mere speculation, and shall show that it was a consequence of the Macedonian campaigns, which brought Asia and Europe into contact. A brief sketch of those campaigns, and of the Museum of Alexandria, illustrates its character. Then with brevity I recall the well-known origin of Christianity, and show its advance to the attainment of imperial power, the transformation it underwent by its incorporation with paganism, the existing religion of the Roman Empire. A clear conception of its incompatibility with science caused it to suppress forcibly the Schools of Alexandria. It was constrained to this by the political necessities of its position. The parties to the conflict thus placed, I next relate the story of their first open struggle; it is the first or Southern Reformation. The point in dispute had respect to the nature of God. It involved the rise of Mohammedanism. Its result was, that much of Asia and Africa, with the historic cities Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Carthage, were wrenched from Christendom, and the doctrine of the Unity of God established in the larger portion of what had been the Roman Empire. This political event was followed by the restoration of science, the establishment of colleges, schools, libraries, throughout the dominions of the Arabians. Those conquerors, pressing forward rapidly in their intellectual development, rejected the anthropomorphic ideas of the nature of God remaining in their popular belief, and accepted other more philosophical ones, akin to those that had long previously been attained to in India. The result of this was a second conflict, that respecting the nature of the soul. Under the designation of Averroism, there came into prominence the theories of Emanation and Absorption. At the close of the middle ages the Inquisition succeeded in excluding those doctrines from Europe, and now the Vatican Council has formally and solemnly anathematized them. Meantime, through the cultivation of astronomy, geography, and other sciences, correct views had been gained as to the position and relations of the earth, and as to the structure of the world; and since Religion, resting itself on what was assumed to be the proper interpretation of the Scriptures, insisted that the earth is the central and most important part of the universe, a third conflict broke out. In this Galileo led the way on the part of Science. Its issue was the overthrow of the Church on the question in dispute. Subsequently a subordinate controversy arose respecting the age of the world, the Church insisting that it is only about six thousand years old. In this she was again overthrown The light of history and of science had been gradually spreading over Europe. In the sixteenth century the prestige of Roman Christianity was greatly diminished by the intellectual reverses it had experienced, and also by its political and moral condition. It was clearly seen by many pious men that Religion was not accountable for the false position in which she was found, but that the misfortune was directly traceable to the alliance she had of old contracted with Roman paganism. The obvious remedy, therefore, was a return to primitive purity. Thus arose the fourth conflict, known to us as the Reformation--the second or Northern Reformation. The special form it assumed was a contest respecting the standard or criterion of truth, whether it is to be found in the Church or in the Bible. The determination of this involved a settlement of the rights of reason, or intellectual freedom. Luther, who is the conspicuous man of the epoch, carried into effect his intention with no inconsiderable success; and at the close of the struggle it was found that Northern Europe was lost to Roman Christianity. We are now in the midst of a controversy respecting the mode of government of the world, whether it be by incessant divine intervention, or by the operation of primordial and unchangeable law. The intellectual movement of Christendom has reached that point which Arabism had attained to in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and doctrines which were then discussed are presenting themselves again for review; such are those of Evolution, Creation, Development. Offered under these general titles, I think it will be found that all the essential points of this great controversy are included. By grouping under these comprehensive heads the facts to be considered, and dealing with each group separately, we shall doubtless acquire clear views of their inter-connection and their historical succession. I have treated of these conflicts as nearly as I conveniently could in their proper chronological order, and, for the sake of completeness, have added chapters on-- An examination of what Latin Christianity has done for modern civilization. A corresponding examination of what Science has done. The attitude of Roman Christianity in the impending conflict, as defined by the Vatican Council. The attention of many truth-seeking persons has been so exclusively given to the details of sectarian dissensions, that the long strife, to the history of which these pages are devoted, is popularly but little known. Having tried to keep steadfastly in view the determination to write this work in an impartial spirit, to speak with respect of the contending parties, but never to conceal the truth, I commit it to the considerate judgment of the thoughtful reader. JOHN WILLIAM DRAPER UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, December, 1873. HISTORY OF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE. CHAPTER I. THE ORIGIN OF SCIENCE. Religious condition of the Greeks in the fourth century before Christ.--Their invasion of the Persian Empire brings them in contact with new aspects of Nature, and familiarizes them with new religious systems.--The military, engineering, and scientific activity, stimulated by the Macedonian campaigns, leads to the establishment in Alexandria of an institute, the Museum, for the cultivation of knowledge by experiment, observation, and mathematical discussion.--It is the origin of Science. GREEK MYTHOLOGY. No spectacle can be presented to the thoughtful mind more solemn, more mournful, than that of the dying of an ancient religion, which in its day has given consolation to many generations of men. Four centuries before the birth of Christ, Greece was fast outgrowing her ancient faith. Her philosophers, in their studies of the world, had been profoundly impressed with the contrast between the majesty of the operations of Nature and the worthlessness of the divinities of Olympus. Her historians, considering the orderly course of political affairs, the manifest uniformity in the acts of men, and that there was no event occurring before their eyes for which they could not find an obvious cause in some preceding event, began to suspect that the miracles and celestial interventions, with which the old annals were filled, were only fictions. They demanded, when the age of the supernatural had ceased, why oracles had become mute, and why there were now no more prodigies in the world. Traditions, descending from immemorial antiquity, and formerly accepted by pious men as unquestionable truths, had filled the islands of the Mediterranean and the conterminous countries with supernatural wonders--enchantresses, sorcerers, giants, ogres, harpies, gorgons, centaurs, cyclops. The azure vault was the floor of heaven; there Zeus, surrounded by the gods with their wives and mistresses, held his court, engaged in pursuits like those of men, and not refraining from acts of human passion and crime. A sea-coast broken by numerous indentations, an archipelago with some of the most lovely islands in the world, inspired the Greeks with a taste for maritime life, for geographical discovery, and colonization. Their ships wandered all over the Black and Mediterranean Seas. The time-honored wonders that had been glorified in the "Odyssey," and sacred in public faith, were found to have no existence. As a better knowledge of Nature was obtained, the sky was shown to be an illusion; it was discovered that there is no Olympus, nothing above but space and stars. With the vanishing of their habitation, the gods disappeared, both those of the Ionian type of Homer and those of the Doric of Hesiod. EFFECTS OF DISCOVERY AND CRITICISM. But this did not take place without resistance. At first, the public, and particularly its religious portion, denounced the rising doubts as atheism. They despoiled some of the offenders of their goods, exiled others; some they put to death. They asserted that what had been believed by pious men in the old times, and had stood the test of ages, must necessarily be true. Then, as the opposing evidence became irresistible, they were content to admit that these marvels were allegories under which the wisdom of the ancients had concealed many sacred and mysterious things. They tried to reconcile, what now in their misgivings they feared might be myths, with their advancing intellectual state. But their efforts were in vain, for there are predestined phases through which on such an occasion public opinion must pass. What it has received with veneration it begins to doubt, then it offers new interpretations, then subsides into dissent, and ends with a rejection of the whole as a mere fable. In their secession the philosophers and historians were followed by the poets. Euripides incurred the odium of heresy. Aeschylus narrowly escaped being stoned to death for blasphemy. But the frantic efforts of those who are interested in supporting delusions must always end in defeat. The demoralization resistlessly extended through every branch of literature, until at length it reached the common people. THE PERSIAN EMPIRE. Greek philosophical criticism had lent its aid to Greek philosophical discovery in this destruction of the national faith. It sustained by many arguments the wide-spreading unbelief. It compared the doctrines of the different schools with each other, and showed from their contradictions that man has no criterion of truth; that, since his ideas of what is good and what is evil differ according to the country in which he lives, they can have no foundation in Nature, but must be altogether the result of education; that right and wrong are nothing more than fictions created by society for its own purposes. In Athens, some of the more advanced classes had reached such a pass that they not only denied the unseen, the supernatural, they even affirmed that the world is only a day-dream, a phantasm, and that nothing at all exists. The topographical configuration of Greece gave an impress to her political condition. It divided her people into distinct communities having conflicting interests, and made them incapable of centralization. Incessant domestic wars between the rival states checked her advancement. She was poor, her leading men had become corrupt. They were ever ready to barter patriotic considerations for foreign gold, to sell themselves for Persian bribes. Possessing a perception of the beautiful as manifested in sculpture and architecture to a degree never attained elsewhere either before or since, Greece had lost a practical appreciation of the Good and the True. While European Greece, full of ideas of liberty and independence, rejected the sovereignty of Persia, Asiatic Greece acknowledged it without reluctance. At that time the Persian Empire in territorial extent was equal to half of modern Europe. It touched the waters of the Mediterranean, the Aegean, the Black, the Caspian, the Indian, the Persian, the Red Seas. Through its territories there flowed six of the grandest rivers in the world--the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Indus, the Jaxartes, the Oxus, the Nile, each more than a thousand miles in length. Its surface reached from thirteen hundred feet below the sea-level to twenty thousand feet above. It yielded, therefore, every agricultural product. Its mineral wealth was boundless. It inherited the prestige of the Median, the Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Chaldean Empires, whose annals reached back through more than twenty centuries. THE PERSIAN EMPIRE. Persia had always looked upon European Greece as politically insignificant, for it had scarcely half the territorial extent of one of her satrapies. Her expeditions for compelling its obedience had, however, taught her the military qualities of its people. In her forces were incorporated Greek mercenaries, esteemed the very best of her troops. She did not hesitate sometimes to give the command of her armies to Greek generals, of her fleets to Greek captains. In the political convulsions through which she had passed, Greek soldiers had often been used by her contending chiefs. These military operations were attended by a momentous result. They revealed, to the quick eye of these warlike mercenaries, the political weakness of the empire and the possibility of reaching its centre. After the death of Cyrus on the battle-field of Cunaxa, it was demonstrated, by the immortal retreat of the ten thousand under Xenophon, that a Greek army could force its way to and from the heart of Persia. That reverence for the military abilities of Asiatic generals, so profoundly impressed on the Greeks by such engineering exploits as the bridging of the Hellespont, and the cutting of the isthmus at Mount Athos by Xerxes, had been obliterated at Salamis, Platea, Mycale. To plunder rich Persian provinces had become an irresistible temptation. Such was the expedition of Agesilaus, the Spartan king, whose brilliant successes were, however, checked by the Persian government resorting to its time-proved policy of bribing the neighbors of Sparta to attack her. "I have been conquered by thirty thousand Persian archers," bitterly exclaimed Agesilaus, as he re-embarked, alluding to the Persian coin, the Daric, which was stamped with the image of an archer. THE INVASION OF PERSIA BY GREECE. At length Philip, the King of Macedon, projected a renewal of these attempts, under a far more formidable organization, and with a grander object. He managed to have himself appointed captain-general of all Greece not for the purpose of a mere foray into the Asiatic satrapies, but for the overthrow of the Persian dynasty in the very centre of its power. Assassinated while his preparations were incomplete, he was succeeded by his son Alexander, then a youth. A general assembly of Greeks at Corinth had unanimously elected him in his father's stead. There were some disturbances in Illyria; Alexander had to march his army as far north as the Danube to quell them. During his absence the Thebans with some others conspired against him. On his return he took Thebes by assault. He massacred six thousand of its inhabitants, sold thirty thousand for slaves, and utterly demolished the city. The military wisdom of this severity was apparent in his Asiatic campaign. He was not troubled by any revolt in his rear. THE MACEDONIAN CAMPAIGN. In the spring B.C. 334 Alexander crossed the Hellespont into Asia. His army consisted of thirty-four thousand foot and four thousand horse. He had with him only seventy talents in money. He marched directly on the Persian army, which, vastly exceeding him in strength, was holding the line of the Granicus. He forced the passage of the river, routed the enemy, and the possession of all Asia Minor, with its treasures, was the fruit of the victory. The remainder of that year he spent in the military organization of the conquered provinces. Meantime Darius, the Persian king, had advanced an army of six hundred thousand men to prevent the passage of the Macedonians into Syria. In a battle that ensued among the mountain-defiles at Issus, the Persians were again overthrown. So great was the slaughter that Alexander, and Ptolemy, one of his generals, crossed over a ravine choked with dead bodies. It was estimated that the Persian loss was not less than ninety thousand foot and ten thousand horse. The royal pavilion fell into the conqueror's hands, and with it the wife and several of the children of Darius. Syria was thus added to the Greek conquests. In Damascus were found many of the concubines of Darius and his chief officers, together with a vast treasure. Before venturing into the plains of Mesopotamia for the final struggle, Alexander, to secure his rear and preserve his communications with the sea, marched southward down the Mediterranean coast, reducing the cities in his way. In his speech before the council of war after Issus, he told his generals that they must not pursue Darius with Tyre unsubdued, and Persia in possession of Egypt and Cyprus, for, if Persia should regain her seaports, she would transfer the war into Greece, and that it was absolutely necessary for him to be sovereign at sea. With Cyprus and Egypt in his possession he felt no solicitude about Greece. The siege of Tyre cost him more than half a year. In revenge for this delay, he crucified, it is said, two thousand of his prisoners. Jerusalem voluntarily surrendered, and therefore was treated leniently: but the passage of the Macedonian army into Egypt being obstructed at Gaza, the Persian governor of which, Betis, made a most obstinate defense, that place, after a siege of two months, was carried by assault, ten thousand of its men were massacred, and the rest, with their wives and children, sold into slavery. Betis himself was dragged alive round the city at the chariot-wheels of the conqueror. There was now no further obstacle. The Egyptians, who detested the Persian rule, received their invader with open arms. He organized the country in his own interest, intrusting all its military commands to Macedonian officers, and leaving the civil government in the hands of native Egyptians. CONQUEST OF EGYPT. While preparations for the final campaign were being made, he undertook a journey to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, which was situated in an oasis of the Libyan Desert, at a distance of two hundred miles. The oracle declared him to be a son of that god who, under the form of a serpent, had beguiled Olympias, his mother. Immaculate conceptions and celestial descents were so currently received in those days, that whoever had greatly distinguished himself in the affairs of men was thought to be of supernatural lineage. Even in Rome, centuries later, no one could with safety have denied that the city owed its founder, Romulus, to an accidental meeting of the god Mars with the virgin Rhea Sylvia, as she went with her pitcher for water to the spring. The Egyptian disciples of Plato would have looked with anger on those who rejected the legend that Perictione, the mother of that great philosopher, a pure virgin, had suffered an immaculate conception through the influences of Apollo, and that the god had declared to Ariston, to whom she was betrothed, the parentage of the child. When Alexander issued his letters, orders, and decrees, styling himself "King Alexander, the son of Jupiter Ammon," they came to the inhabitants of Egypt and Syria with an authority that now can hardly be realized. The free-thinking Greeks, however, put on such a supernatural pedigree its proper value. Olympias, who, of course, better than all others knew the facts of the case, used jestingly to say, that "she wished Alexander would cease from incessantly embroiling her with Jupiter's wife." Arrian, the historian of the Macedonian expedition, observes, "I cannot condemn him for endeavoring to draw his subjects into the belief of his divine origin, nor can I be induced to think it any great crime, for it is very reasonable to imagine that he intended no more by it than merely to procure the greater authority among his soldiers." GREEK CONQUEST OF PERSIA. All things being thus secured in his rear, Alexander, having returned into Syria, directed the march of his army, now consisting of fifty thousand veterans, eastward. After crossing the Euphrates, he kept close to the Masian hills, to avoid the intense heat of the more southerly Mesopotamian plains; more abundant forage could also thus be procured for the cavalry. On the left bank of the Tigris, near Arbela, he encountered the great army of eleven hundred thousand men brought up by Darius from Babylon. The death of the Persian monarch, which soon followed the defeat he suffered, left the Macedonian general master of all the countries from the Danube to the Indus. Eventually he extended his conquest to the Ganges. The treasures he seized are almost beyond belief. At Susa alone he found--so Arrian says--fifty thousand talents in money. EVENTS OF THE CAMPAIGNS. The modern military student cannot look upon these wonderful campaigns without admiration. The passage of the Hellespont; the forcing of the Granicus; the winter spent in a political organization of conquered Asia Minor; the march of the right wing and centre of the army along the Syrian Mediterranean coast; the engineering difficulties overcome at the siege of Tyre; the storming of Gaza; the isolation of Persia from Greece; the absolute exclusion of her navy from the Mediterranean; the check on all her attempts at intriguing with or bribing Athenians or Spartans, heretofore so often resorted to with success; the submission of Egypt; another winter spent in the political organization of that venerable country; the convergence of the whole army from the Black and Red Seas toward the nitre-covered plains of Mesopotamia in the ensuing spring; the passage of the Euphrates fringed with its weeping-willows at the broken bridge of Thapsacus; the crossing of the Tigris; the nocturnal reconnaissance before the great and memorable battle of Arbela; the oblique movement on the field; the piercing of the enemy's centre--a manoeuvre destined to be repeated many centuries subsequently at Austerlitz; the energetic pursuit of the Persian monarch; these are exploits not surpassed by any soldier of later times. A prodigious stimulus was thus given to Greek intellectual activity. There were men who had marched with the Macedonian army from the Danube to the Nile, from the Nile to the Ganges. They had felt the hyperborean blasts of the countries beyond the Black Sea, the simooms and sand-tempests of the Egyptian deserts. They had seen the Pyramids which had already stood for twenty centuries, the hieroglyph-covered obelisks of Luxor, avenues of silent and mysterious sphinxes, colossi of monarchs who reigned in the morning of the world. In the halls of Esar-haddon they had stood before the thrones of grim old Assyrian kings, guarded by winged bulls. In Babylon there still remained its walls, once more than sixty miles in compass, and, after the ravages of three centuries and three conquerors, still more than eighty feet in height; there were still the ruins of the temple of cloud encompassed Bel, on its top was planted the observatory wherein the weird Chaldean astronomers had held nocturnal communion with the stars; still there were vestiges of the two palaces with their hanging gardens in which were great trees growing in mid-air, and the wreck of the hydraulic machinery that had supplied them with water from the river. Into the artificial lake with its vast apparatus of aqueducts and sluices the melted snows of the Armenian mountains found their way, and were confined in their course through the city by the embankments of the Euphrates. Most wonderful of all, perhaps, was the tunnel under the river-bed. EFFECT ON THE GREEK ARMY. If Chaldea, Assyria, Babylon, presented stupendous and venerable antiquities reaching far back into the night of time, Persia was not without her wonders of a later date. The pillared halls of Persepolis were filled with miracles of art--carvings, sculptures, enamels, alabaster libraries, obelisks, sphinxes, colossal bulls. Ecbatana, the cool summer retreat of the Persian kings, was defended by seven encircling walls of hewn and polished blocks, the interior ones in succession of increasing height, and of different colors, in astrological accordance with the seven planets. The palace was roofed with silver tiles, its beams were plated with gold. At midnight, in its halls the sunlight was rivaled by many a row of naphtha cressets. A paradise--that luxury of the monarchs of the East--was planted in the midst of the city. The Persian Empire, from the Hellespont to the Indus, was truly the garden of the world. EFFECTS ON THE GREEK ARMY. I have devoted a few pages to the story of these marvelous campaigns, for the military talent they fostered led to the establishment of the mathematical and practical schools of Alexandria, the true origin of science. We trace back all our exact knowledge to the Macedonian campaigns. Humboldt has well observed that an introduction to new and grand objects of Nature enlarges the human mind. The soldiers of Alexander and the hosts of his camp-followers encountered at every march unexpected and picturesque scenery. Of all men, the Greeks were the most observant, the most readily and profoundly impressed. Here there were interminable sandy plains, there mountains whose peaks were lost above the clouds. In the deserts were mirages, on the hill-sides shadows of fleeting clouds sweeping over the forests. They were in a land of amber-colored date-palms and cypresses, of tamarisks, green myrtles, and oleanders. At Arbela they had fought against Indian elephants; in the thickets of the Caspian they had roused from his lair the lurking royal tiger. They had seen animals which, compared with those of Europe, were not only strange, but colossal--the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the camel, the crocodiles of the Nile and the Ganges. They had encountered men of many complexions and many costumes: the swarthy Syrian, the olive-colored Persian, the black African. Even of Alexander himself it is related that on his death-bed he caused his admiral, Nearchus, to sit by his side, and found consolation in listening to the adventures of that sailor--the story of his voyage from the Indus up the Persian Gulf. The conqueror had seen with astonishment the ebbing and flowing of the tides. He had built ships for the exploration of the Caspian, supposing that it and the Black Sea might be gulfs of a great ocean, such as Nearchus had discovered the Persian and Red Seas to be. He had formed a resolution that his fleet should attempt the circumnavigation of Africa, and come into the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules--a feat which, it was affirmed, had once been accomplished by the Pharaohs. INTELLECTUAL CONDITION OF PERSIA. Not only her greatest soldiers, but also her greatest philosophers, found in the conquered empire much that might excite the admiration of Greece. Callisthenes obtained in Babylon a series of Chaldean astronomical observations ranging back through 1,903 years; these he sent to Aristotle. Perhaps, since they were on burnt bricks, duplicates of them may be recovered by modern research in the clay libraries of the Assyrian kings. Ptolemy, the Egyptian astronomer, possessed a Babylonian record of eclipses, going back 747 years before our era. Long-continued and close observations were necessary, before some of these astronomical results that have reached our times could have been ascertained. Thus the Babylonians had fixed the length of a tropical year within twenty-five seconds of the truth; their estimate of the sidereal year was barely two minutes in excess. They had detected the precession of the equinoxes. They knew the causes of eclipses, and, by the aid of their cycle called Saros, could predict them. Their estimate of the value of that cycle, which is more than 6,585 days, was within nineteen and a half minutes of the truth. INTELLECTUAL CONDITION OF PERSIA. Such facts furnish incontrovertible proof of the patience and skill with which astronomy had been cultivated in Mesopotamia, and that, with very inadequate instrumental means, it had reached no inconsiderable perfection. These old observers had made a catalogue of the stars, had divided the zodiac into twelve signs; they had parted the day into twelve hours, the night into twelve. They had, as Aristotle says, for a long time devoted themselves to observations of star-occultations by the moon. They had correct views of the structure of the solar system, and knew the order of the emplacement of the planets. They constructed sundials, clepsydras, astrolabes, gnomons. Not without interest do we still look on specimens of their method of printing. Upon a revolving roller they engraved, in cuneiform letters, their records, and, running this over plastic clay formed into blocks, produced ineffaceable proofs. From their tile-libraries we are still to reap a literary and historical harvest. They were not without some knowledge of optics. The convex lens found at Nimroud shows that they were not unacquainted with magnifying instruments. In arithmetic they had detected the value of position in the digits, though they missed the grand Indian invention of the cipher. What a spectacle for the conquering Greeks, who, up to this time, had neither experimented nor observed! They had contented themselves with mere meditation and useless speculation. ITS RELIGIOUS CONDITION. But Greek intellectual development, due thus in part to a more extended view of Nature, was powerfully aided by the knowledge then acquired of the religion of the conquered country. The idolatry of Greece had always been a horror to Persia, who, in her invasions, had never failed to destroy the temples and insult the fanes of the bestial gods. The impunity with which these sacrileges had been perpetrated had made a profound impression, and did no little to undermine Hellenic faith. But now the worshiper of the vile Olympian divinities, whose obscene lives must have been shocking to every pious man, was brought in contact with a grand, a solemn, a consistent religious system having its foundation on a philosophical basis. Persia, as is the case with all empires of long duration, had passed through many changes of religion. She had followed the Monotheism of Zoroaster; had then accepted Dualism, and exchanged that for Magianism. At the time of the Macedonian expedition, she recognized one universal Intelligence, the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of all things, the most holy essence of truth, the giver of all good. He was not to be represented by any image, or any graven form. And, since, in every thing here below, we see the resultant of two opposing forces, under him were two coequal and coeternal principles, represented by the imagery of Light and Darkness. These principles are in never-ending conflict. The world is their battle-ground, man is their prize. In the old legends of Dualism, the Evil Spirit was said to have sent a serpent to ruin the paradise which the Good Spirit had made. These legends became known to the Jews during their Babylonian captivity. The existence of a principle of evil is the necessary incident of the existence of a principle of good, as a shadow is the necessary incident of the presence of light. In this manner could be explained the occurrence of evil in a world, the maker and ruler of which is supremely good. Each of the personified principles of light and darkness, Ormuzd and Ahriman, had his subordinate angels, his counselors, his armies. It is the duty of a good man to cultivate truth, purity, and industry. He may look forward, when this life is over, to a life in another world, and trust to a resurrection of the body, the immortality of the soul, and a conscious future existence. In the later years of the empire, the principles of Magianism had gradually prevailed more and more over those of Zoroaster. Magianism was essentially a worship of the elements. Of these, fire was considered as the most worthy representative of the Supreme Being. On altars erected, not in temples, but under the blue canopy of the sky, perpetual fires were kept burning, and the rising sun was regarded as the noblest object of human adoration. In the society of Asia, nothing is visible but the monarch; in the expanse of heaven, all objects vanish in presence of the sun. DEATH OF ALEXANDER. Prematurely cut off in the midst of many great projects Alexander died at Babylon before he had completed his thirty-third year (B.C. 323). There was a suspicion that he had been poisoned. His temper had become so unbridled, his passion so ferocious, that his generals and even his intimate friends lived in continual dread. Clitus, one of the latter, he in a moment of fury had stabbed to the heart. Callisthenes, the intermedium between himself and Aristotle, he had caused to be hanged, or, as was positively asserted by some who knew the facts, had had him put upon the rack and then crucified. It may have been in self-defense that the conspirators resolved on his assassination. But surely it was a calumny to associate the name of Aristotle with this transaction. He would have rather borne the worst that Alexander could inflict, than have joined in the perpetration of so great a crime. A scene of confusion and bloodshed lasting many years ensued, nor did it cease even after the Macedonian generals had divided the empire. Among its vicissitudes one incident mainly claims our attention. Ptolemy, who was a son of King Philip by Arsinoe, a beautiful concubine, and who in his boyhood had been driven into exile with Alexander, when they incurred their father's displeasure, who had been Alexander's comrade in many of his battles and all his campaigns, became governor and eventually king of Egypt. FOUNDATION OF ALEXANDER. At the siege of Rhodes, Ptolemy had been of such signal service to its citizens that in gratitude they paid divine honors to him, and saluted him with the title of Soter (the Savior). By that designation--Ptolemy Soter--he is distinguished from succeeding kings of the Macedonian dynasty in Egypt. He established his seat of government not in any of the old capitals of the country, but in Alexandria. At the time of the expedition to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, the Macedonian conqueror had caused the foundations of that city to be laid, foreseeing that it might be made the commercial entrepot between Asia and Europe. It is to be particularly remarked that not only did Alexander himself deport many Jews from Palestine to people the city, and not only did Ptolemy Soter bring one hundred thousand more after his siege of Jerusalem, but Philadelphus, his successor, redeemed from slavery one hundred and ninety-eight thousand of that people, paying their Egyptian owners a just money equivalent for each. To all these Jews the same privileges were accorded as to the Macedonians. In consequence of this considerate treatment, vast numbers of their compatriots and many Syrians voluntarily came into Egypt. To them the designation of Hellenistical Jews was given. In like manner, tempted by the benign government of Soter, multitudes of Greeks sought refuge in the country, and the invasions of Perdiccas and Antigonus showed that Greek soldiers would desert from other Macedonian generals to join is armies. The population of Alexandria was therefore of three distinct nationalities: 1. Native Egyptians 2. Greeks; 3. Jews--a fact that has left an impress on the religious faith of modern Europe. Greek architects and Greek engineers had made Alexandria the most beautiful city of the ancient world. They had filled it with magnificent palaces, temples, theatres. In its centre, at the intersection of its two grand avenues, which crossed each other at right angles, and in the midst of gardens, fountains, obelisks, stood the mausoleum, in which, embalmed after the manner of the Egyptians, rested the body of Alexander. In a funereal journey of two years it had been brought with great pomp from Babylon. At first the coffin was of pure gold, but this having led to a violation of the tomb, it was replaced by one of alabaster. But not these, not even the great light-house, Pharos, built of blocks of white marble and so high that the fire continually burning on its top could be seen many miles off at sea--the Pharos counted as one of the seven wonders of the world--it is not these magnificent achievements of architecture that arrest our attention; the true, the most glorious monument of the Macedonian kings of Egypt is the Museum. Its influences will last when even the Pyramids have passed away. THE ALEXANDRIAN MUSEUM. The Alexandrian Museum was commenced by Ptolemy Soter, and was completed by his son Ptolemy Philadelphus. It was situated in the Bruchion, the aristocratic quarter of the city, adjoining the king's palace. Built of marble, it was surrounded with a piazza, in which the residents might walk and converse together. Its sculptured apartments contained the Philadelphian library, and were crowded with the choicest statues and pictures. This library eventually comprised four hundred thousand volumes. In the course of time, probably on account of inadequate accommodation for so many books, an additional library was established in the adjacent quarter Rhacotis, and placed in the Serapion or temple of Serapis. The number of volumes in this library, which was called the Daughter of that in the Museum, was eventually three hundred thousand. There were, therefore, seven hundred thousand volumes in these royal collections. Alexandria was not merely the capital of Egypt, it was the intellectual metropolis of the world. Here it was truly said the Genius of the East met the Genius of the West, and this Paris of antiquity became a focus of fashionable dissipation and universal skepticism. In the allurements of its bewitching society even the Jews forgot their patriotism. They abandoned the language of their forefathers, and adopted Greek. In the establishment of the Museum, Ptolemy Soter and his son Philadelphus had three objects in view: 1. The perpetuation of such knowledge as was then in the world; 2. Its increase; 3. Its diffusion. 1. For the perpetuation of knowledge. Orders were given to the chief librarian to buy at the king's expense whatever books he could. A body of transcribers was maintained in the Museum, whose duty it was to make correct copies of such works as their owners were not disposed to sell. Any books brought by foreigners into Egypt were taken at once to the Museum, and, when correct copies had been made, the transcript was given to the owner, and the original placed in the library. Often a very large pecuniary indemnity was paid. Thus it is said of Ptolemy Euergetes that, having obtained from Athens the works of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, he sent to their owners transcripts, together with about fifteen thousand dollars, as an indemnity. On his return from the Syrian expedition he carried back in triumph all the Egyptian monuments from Ecbatana and Susa, which Cambyses and other invaders had removed from Egypt. These he replaced in their original seats, or added as adornments to his museums. When works were translated as well as transcribed, sums which we should consider as almost incredible were paid, as was the case with the Septuagint translation of the Bible, ordered by Ptolemy Philadelphus. 2. For the increase of knowledge. One of the chief objects of the Museum was that of serving as the home of a body of men who devoted themselves to study, and were lodged and maintained at the king's expense. Occasionally he himself sat at their table. Anecdotes connected with those festive occasions have descended to our times. In the original organization of the Museum the residents were divided into four faculties--literature; mathematics, astronomy, medicine. Minor branches were appropriately classified under one of these general heads; thus natural history was considered to be a branch of medicine. An officer of very great distinction presided over the establishment, and had general charge of its interests. Demetrius Phalareus, perhaps the most learned man of his age, who had been governor of Athens for many years, was the first so appointed. Under him was the librarian, an office sometimes held by men whose names have descended to our times, as Eratosthenes, and Apollonius Rhodius. ORGANIZATION OF THE MUSEUM. In connection with the Museum were a botanical and a zoological garden. These gardens, as their names import, were for the purpose of facilitating the study of plants and animals. There was also an astronomical observatory containing armillary spheres, globes, solstitial and equatorial armils, astrolabes, parallactic rules, and other apparatus then in use, the graduation on the divided instruments being into degrees and sixths. On the floor of this observatory a meridian line was drawn. The want of correct means of measuring time and temperature was severely felt; the clepsydra of Ctesibius answered very imperfectly for the former, the hydrometer floating in a cup of water for the latter; it measured variations of temperature by variations of density. Philadelphus, who toward the close of his life was haunted with an intolerable dread of death, devoted much of his time to the discovery of an elixir. For such pursuits the Museum was provided with a chemical laboratory. In spite of the prejudices of the age, and especially in spite of Egyptian prejudices, there was in connection with the medical department an anatomical room for the dissection, not only of the dead, but actually of the living, who for crimes had been condemned. 3. For the diffusion of knowledge. In the Museum was given, by lectures, conversation, or other appropriate methods instruction in all the various departments of human knowledge. There flocked to this great intellectual centre, students from all countries. It is said that at one time not fewer than fourteen thousand were in attendance. Subsequently even the Christian church received from it some of the most eminent of its Fathers, as Clemens Alexandrinus, Origen, Athanasius. The library in the Museum was burnt during the siege of Alexandria by Julius Caesar. To make amends for this great loss, that collected by Eumenes, King of Pergamus, was presented by Mark Antony to Queen Cleopatra. Originally it was founded as a rival to that of the Ptolemies. It was added to the collection in the Serapion. SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL OF THE MUSEUM. It remains now to describe briefly the philosophical basis of the Museum, and some of its contributions to the stock of human knowledge. In memory of the illustrious founder of this most noble institution--an institution which antiquity delighted to call "The divine school of Alexandria"--we must mention in the first rank his "History of the Campaigns of Alexander." Great as a soldier and as a sovereign, Ptolemy Soter added to his glory by being an author. Time, which has not been able to destroy the memory of our obligations to him, has dealt unjustly by his work. It is not now extant. As might be expected from the friendship that existed between Alexander, Ptolemy, and Aristotle, the Aristotelian philosophy was the intellectual corner-stone on which the Museum rested. King Philip had committed the education of Alexander to Aristotle, and during the Persian campaigns the conqueror contributed materially, not only in money, but otherwise, toward the "Natural History" then in preparation. The essential principle of the Aristotelian philosophy was, to rise from the study of particulars to a knowledge of general principles or universals, advancing to them by induction. The induction is the more certain as the facts on which it is based are more numerous; its correctness is established if it should enable us to predict other facts until then unknown. This system implies endless toil in the collection of facts, both by experiment and observation; it implies also a close meditation on them. It is, therefore, essentially a method of labor and of reason, not a method of imagination. The failures that Aristotle himself so often exhibits are no proof of its unreliability, but rather of its trustworthiness. They are failures arising from want of a sufficiency of facts. ETHICAL SCHOOL OF THE MUSEUM. Some of the general results at which Aristotle arrived are very grand. Thus, he concluded that every thing is ready to burst into life, and that the various organic forms presented to us by Nature are those which existing conditions permit. Should the conditions change, the forms will also change. Hence there is an unbroken chain from the simple element through plants and animals up to man, the different groups merging by insensible shades into each other. The inductive philosophy thus established by Aristotle is a method of great power. To it all the modern advances in science are due. In its most improved form it rises by inductions from phenomena to their causes, and then, imitating the method of the Academy, it descends by deductions from those causes to the detail of phenomena. While thus the Scientific School of Alexandria was founded on the maxims of one great Athenian philosopher, the Ethical School was founded on the maxims of another, for Zeno, though a Cypriote or Phoenician, had for many years been established at Athens. His disciples took the name of Stoics. His doctrines long survived him, and, in times when there was no other consolation for man, offered a support in the hour of trial, and an unwavering guide in the vicissitudes of life, not only to illustrious Greeks, but also to many of the great philosophers, statesmen, generals, and emperors of Rome. THE PRINCIPLES OF STOICISM. The aim of Zeno was, to furnish a guide for the daily practice of life, to make men virtuous. He insisted that education is the true foundation of virtue, for, if we know what is good, we shall incline to do it. We must trust to sense, to furnish the data of knowledge, and reason will suitably combine them. In this the affinity of Zeno to Aristotle is plainly seen. Every appetite, lust, desire, springs from imperfect knowledge. Our nature is imposed upon us by Fate, but we must learn to control our passions, and live free, intelligent, virtuous, in all things in accordance with reason. Our existence should be intellectual, we should survey with equanimity all pleasures and all pains. We should never forget that we are freemen, not the slaves of society. "I possess," said the Stoic, "a treasure which not all the world can rob me of--no one can deprive me of death." We should remember that Nature in her operations aims at the universal, and never spares individuals, but uses them as means for the accomplishment of her ends. It is, therefore, for us to submit to Destiny, cultivating, as the things necessary to virtue, knowledge, temperance, fortitude, justice. We must remember that every thing around us is in mutation; decay follows reproduction, and reproduction decay, and that it is useless to repine at death in a world where every thing is dying. As a cataract shows from year to year an invariable shape, though the water composing it is perpetually changing, so the aspect of Nature is nothing more than a flow of matter presenting an impermanent form. The universe, considered as a whole, is unchangeable. Nothing is eternal but space, atoms, force. The forms of Nature that we see are essentially transitory, they must all pass away. STOICISM IN THE MUSEUM. We must bear in mind that the majority of men are imperfectly educated, and hence we must not needlessly offend the religious ideas of our age. It is enough for us ourselves to know that, though there is a Supreme Power, there is no Supreme Being. There is an invisible principle, but not a personal God, to whom it would be not so much blasphemy as absurdity to impute the form, the sentiments, the passions of man. All revelation is, necessarily, a mere fiction. That which men call chance is only the effect of an unknown cause. Even of chances there is a law. There is no such thing as Providence, for Nature proceeds under irresistible laws, and in this respect the universe is only a vast automatic engine. The vital force which pervades the world is what the illiterate call God. The modifications through which all things are running take place in an irresistible way, and hence it may be said that the progress of the world is, under Destiny, like a seed, it can evolve only in a predetermined mode. The soul of man is a spark of the vital flame, the general vital principle. Like heat, it passes from one to another, and is finally reabsorbed or reunited in the universal principle from which it came. Hence we must not expect annihilation, but reunion; and, as the tired man looks forward to the insensibility of sleep, so the philosopher, weary of the world, should look forward to the tranquillity of extinction. Of these things, however, we should think doubtingly, since the mind can produce no certain knowledge from its internal resources alone. It is unphilosophical to inquire into first causes; we must deal only with phenomena. Above all, we must never forget that man cannot ascertain absolute truth, and that the final result of human inquiry into the matter is, that we are incapable of perfect knowledge; that, even if the truth be in our possession, we cannot be sure of it. What, then, remains for us? Is it not this--the acquisition of knowledge, the cultivation of virtue and of friendship, the observance of faith and truth, an unrepining submission to whatever befalls us, a life led in accordance with reason? PLATONISM IN THE MUSEUM. But, though the Alexandrian Museum was especially intended for the cultivation of the Aristotelian philosophy, it must not be supposed that other systems were excluded. Platonism was not only carried to its full development, but in the end it supplanted Peripateticism, and through the New Academy left a permanent impress on Christianity. The philosophical method of Plato was the inverse of that of Aristotle. Its starting-point was universals, the very existence of which was a matter of faith, and from these it descended to particulars, or details. Aristotle, on the contrary, rose from particulars to universals, advancing to them by inductions. Plato, therefore, trusted to the imagination, Aristotle to reason. The former descended from the decomposition of a primitive idea into particulars, the latter united particulars into a general conception. Hence the method of Plato was capable of quickly producing what seemed to be splendid, though in reality unsubstantial results; that of Aristotle was more tardy in its operation, but much more solid. It implied endless labor in the collection of facts, a tedious resort to experiment and observation, the application of demonstration. The philosophy of Plato is a gorgeous castle in the air; that of Aristotle a solid structure, laboriously, and with many failures, founded on the solid rock. An appeal to the imagination is much more alluring than the employment of reason. In the intellectual decline of Alexandria, indolent methods were preferred to laborious observation and severe mental exercise. The schools of Neo-Platonism were crowded with speculative mystics, such as Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus. These took the place of the severe geometers of the old Museum. PHYSICAL SCIENCE IN THE MUSEUM. The Alexandrian school offers the first example of that system which, in the hands of modern physicists, has led to such wonderful results. It rejected imagination, and made its theories the expression of facts obtained by experiment and observation, aided by mathematical discussion. It enforced the principle that the true method of studying Nature is by experimental interrogation. The researches of Archimedes in specific gravity, and the works of Ptolemy on optics, resemble our present investigations in experimental philosophy, and stand in striking contrast with the speculative vagaries of the older writers. Laplace says that the only observation which the history of astronomy offers us, made by the Greeks before the school of Alexandria, is that of the summer solstice of the year B.C. 432. by Meton and Euctemon. We have, for the first time, in that school, a combined system of observations made with instruments for the measurement of angles, and calculated by trigonometrical methods. Astronomy then took a form which subsequent ages could only perfect. It does not accord with the compass or the intention of this work to give a detailed account of the contributions of the Alexandrian Museum to the stock of human knowledge. It is sufficient that the reader should obtain a general impression of their character. For particulars, I may refer him to the sixth chapter of my "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe." EUCLID--ARCHIMEDES. It has just been remarked that the Stoical philosophy doubted whether the mind can ascertain absolute truth. While Zeno was indulging in such doubts, Euclid was preparing his great work, destined to challenge contradiction from the whole human race. After more than twenty-two centuries it still survives, a model of accuracy, perspicuity, and a standard of exact demonstration. This great geometer not only wrote on other mathematical topics, such as Conic Sections and Prisms, but there are imputed to him treatises on Harmonics and Optics, the latter subject being discussed on the hypothesis of rays issuing from the eye to the object. With the Alexandrian mathematicians and physicists must be classed Archimedes, though he eventually resided in Sicily. Among his mathematical works were two books on the Sphere and Cylinder, in which he gave the demonstration that the solid content of a sphere is two-thirds that of its circumscribing cylinder. So highly did he esteem this, that he directed the diagram to be engraved on his tombstone. He also treated of the quadrature of the circle and of the parabola; he wrote on Conoids and Spheroids, and on the spiral that bears his name, the genesis of which was suggested to him by his friend Conon the Alexandrian. As a mathematician, Europe produced no equal to him for nearly two thousand years. In physical science he laid the foundation of hydrostatics; invented a method for the determination of specific gravities; discussed the equilibrium of floating bodies; discovered the true theory of the lever, and invented a screw, which still bears his name, for raising the water of the Nile. To him also are to be attributed the endless screw, and a peculiar form of burning-mirror, by which, at the siege of Syracuse, it is said that he set the Roman fleet on fire. ERATOSTHENES--APOLLONIUS--HIPPARCHUS. Eratosthenes, who at one time had charge of the library, was the author of many important works. Among them may be mentioned his determination of the interval between the tropics, and an attempt to ascertain the size of the earth. He considered the articulation and expansion of continents, the position of mountain-chains, the action of clouds, the geological submersion of lands, the elevation of ancient sea-beds, the opening of the Dardanelles and the straits of Gibraltar, and the relations of the Euxine Sea. He composed a complete system of the earth, in three books--physical, mathematical, historical--accompanied by a map of all the parts then known. It is only of late years that the fragments remaining of his "Chronicles of the Theban Kings" have been justly appreciated. For many centuries they were thrown into discredit by the authority of our existing absurd theological chronology. It is unnecessary to adduce the arguments relied upon by the Alexandrians to prove the globular form of the earth. They had correct ideas respecting the doctrine of the sphere, its poles, axis, equator, arctic and antarctic circles, equinoctial points, solstices, the distribution of climates, etc. I cannot do more than merely allude to the treatises on Conic Sections and on Maxima and Minima by Apollonius, who is said to have been the first to introduce the words ellipse and hyperbola. In like manner I must pass the astronomical observations of Alistyllus and Timocharis. It was to those of the latter on Spica Virginis that Hipparchus was indebted for his great discovery of the precession of the eqninoxes. Hipparchus also determined the first inequality of the moon, the equation of the centre. He adopted the theory of epicycles and eccentrics, a geometrical conception for the purpose of resolving the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies on the principle of circular movement. He also undertook to make a catalogue of the stars by the method of alineations--that is, by indicating those that are in the same apparent straight line. The number of stars so catalogued was 1,080. If he thus attempted to depict the aspect of the sky, he endeavored to do the same for the surface of the earth, by marking the position of towns and other places by lines of latitude and longitude. He was the first to construct tables of the sun and moon. THE SYNTAXIS OF PTOLEMY. In the midst of such a brilliant constellation of geometers, astronomers, physicists, conspicuously shines forth Ptolemy, the author of the great work, "Syntaxis," "a Treatise on the Mathematical Construction of the Heavens." It maintained its ground for nearly fifteen hundred years, and indeed was only displaced by the immortal "Principia" of Newton. It commences with the doctrine that the earth is globular and fixed in space, it describes the construction of a table of chords, and instruments for observing the solstices, it deduces the obliquity of the ecliptic, it finds terrestrial latitudes by the gnomon, describes climates, shows how ordinary may be converted into sidereal time, gives reasons for preferring the tropical to the sidereal year, furnishes the solar theory on the principle of the sun's orbit being a simple eccentric, explains the equation of time, advances to the discussion of the motions of the moon, treats of the first inequality, of her eclipses, and the motion of her nodes. It then gives Ptolemy's own great discovery--that which has made his name immortal--the discovery of the moon's evection or second inequality, reducing it to the epicyclic theory. It attempts the determination of the distances of the sun and moon from the earth--with, however, only partial success. It considers the precession of the equinoxes, the discovery of Hipparchus, the full period of which is twenty-five thousand years. It gives a catalogue of 1,022 stars, treats of the nature of the milky-way, and discusses in the most masterly manner the motions of the planets. This point constitutes another of Ptolemy's claims to scientific fame. His determination of the planetary orbits was accomplished by comparing his own observations with those of former astronomers, among them the observations of Timocharis on the planet Venus. INVENTION OF THE STEAM-ENGINE. In the Museum of Alexandria, Ctesibius invented the fire-engine. His pupil, Hero, improved it by giving it two cylinders. There, too, the first steam-engine worked. This also was the invention of Hero, and was a reaction engine, on the principle of the eolipile. The silence of the halls of Serapis was broken by the water-clocks of Ctesibius and Apollonius, which drop by drop measured time. When the Roman calendar had fallen into such confusion that it had become absolutely necessary to rectify it, Julius Caesar brought Sosigenes the astronomer from Alexandria. By his advice the lunar year was abolished, the civil year regulated entirely by the sun, and the Julian calendar introduced. The Macedonian rulers of Egypt have been blamed for the manner in which they dealt with the religious sentiment of their time. They prostituted it to the purpose of state-craft, finding in it a means of governing their lower classes. To the intelligent they gave philosophy. POLICY OF THE PTOLEMIES. But doubtless they defended this policy by the experience gathered in those great campaigns which had made the Greeks the foremost nation of the world. They had seen the mythological conceptions of their ancestral country dwindle into fables; the wonders with which the old poets adorned the Mediterranean had been discovered to be baseless illusions. From Olympus its divinities had disappeared; indeed, Olympus itself had proved to be a phantom of the imagination. Hades had lost its terrors; no place could be found for it. From the woods and grottoes and rivers of Asia Minor the local gods and goddesses had departed; even their devotees began to doubt whether they had ever been there. If still the Syrian damsels lamented, in their amorous ditties, the fate of Adonis, it was only as a recollection, not as a reality. Again and again had Persia changed her national faith. For the revelation of Zoroaster she had substituted Dualism; then under new political influences she had adopted Magianism. She had worshiped fire, and kept her altars burning on mountain-tops. She had adored the sun. When Alexander came, she was fast falling into pantheism. On a country to which in its political extremity the indigenous gods have been found unable to give any protection, a change of faith is impending. The venerable divinities of Egypt, to whose glory obelisks had been raised and temples dedicated, had again and again submitted to the sword of a foreign conqueror. In the land of the Pyramids, the Colossi, the Sphinx, the images of the gods had ceased to represent living realities. They had ceased to be objects of faith. Others of more recent birth were needful, and Serapis confronted Osiris. In the shops and streets of Alexandria there were thousands of Jews who had forgotten the God that had made his habitation behind the veil of the temple. Tradition, revelation, time, all had lost their influence. The traditions of European mythology, the revelations of Asia, the time-consecrated dogmas of Egypt, all had passed or were fast passing away. And the Ptolemies recognized how ephemeral are forms of faith. But the Ptolemies also recognized that there is something more durable than forms of faith, which, like the organic forms of geological ages, once gone, are clean gone forever, and have no restoration, no return. They recognized that within this world of transient delusions and unrealities there is a world of eternal truth. That world is not to be discovered through the vain traditions that have brought down to us the opinions of men who lived in the morning of civilization, nor in the dreams of mystics who thought that they were inspired. It is to be discovered by the investigations of geometry, and by the practical interrogation of Nature. These confer on humanity solid, and innumerable, and inestimable blessings. The day will never come when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied; no one henceforth will call in question the globular shape of the earth, as recognized by Eratosthenes; the world will not permit the great physical inventions and discoveries made in Alexandria and Syracuse to be forgotten. The names of Hipparchus, of Apollonius, of Ptolemy, of Archimedes, will be mentioned with reverence by men of every religious profession, as long as there are men to speak. THE MUSEUM AND MODERN SCIENCE. The Museum of Alexandria was thus the birthplace of modern science. It is true that, long before its establishment, astronomical observations had been made in China and Mesopotamia; the mathematics also had been cultivated with a certain degree of success in India. But in none of these countries had investigation assumed a connected and consistent form; in none was physical experimentation resorted to. The characteristic feature of Alexandrian, as of modern science, is, that it did not restrict itself to observation, but relied on a practical interrogation of Nature. CHAPTER II. THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY.--ITS TRANSFORMATION ON ATTAINING IMPERIAL POWER.--ITS RELATIONS TO SCIENCE. Religious condition of the Roman Republic.--The adoption of imperialism leads to monotheism.--Christianity spreads over the Roman Empire.--The circumstances under which it attained imperial power make its union with Paganism a political necessity.--Tertullian's description of its doctrines and practices.--Debasing effect of the policy of Constantine on it.--Its alliance with the civil power.--Its incompatibility with science.--Destruction of the Alexandrian Library and prohibition of philosophy.-- Exposition of the Augustinian philosophy and Patristic science generally.--The Scriptures made the standard of science. IN a political sense, Christianity is the bequest of the Roman Empire to the world. At the epoch of the transition of Rome from the republican to the imperial form of government, all the independent nationalities around the Mediterranean Sea had been brought under the control of that central power. The conquest that had befallen them in succession had been by no means a disaster. The perpetual wars they had maintained with each other came to an end; the miseries their conflicts had engendered were exchanged for universal peace. Not only as a token of the conquest she had made but also as a gratification to her pride, the conquering republic brought the gods of the vanquished peoples to Rome. With disdainful toleration, she permitted the worship of them all. That paramount authority exercised by each divinity in his original seat disappeared at once in the crowd of gods and goddesses among whom he had been brought. Already, as we have seen, through geographical discoveries and philosophical criticism, faith in the religion of the old days had been profoundly shaken. It was, by this policy of Rome, brought to an end. MONOTHEISM IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE. The kings of all the conquered provinces had vanished; in their stead one emperor had come. The gods also had disappeared. Considering the connection which in all ages has existed between political and religious ideas, it was then not at all strange that polytheism should manifest a tendency to pass into monotheism. Accordingly, divine honors were paid at first to the deceased and at length to the living emperor. The facility with which gods were thus called into existence had a powerful moral effect. The manufacture of a new one cast ridicule on the origin of the old Incarnation in the East and apotheosis in the West were fast filling Olympus with divinities. In the East, gods descended from heaven, and were made incarnate in men; in the West, men ascended from earth, and took their seat among the gods. It was not the importation of Greek skepticism that made Rome skeptical. The excesses of religion itself sapped the foundations of faith. Not with equal rapidity did all classes of the population adopt monotheistic views. The merchants and lawyers and soldiers, who by the nature of their pursuits are more familiar with the vicissitudes of life, and have larger intellectual views, were the first to be affected, the land laborers and farmers the last. THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY When the empire in a military and political sense had reached its culmination, in a religious and social aspect it had attained its height of immorality. It had become thoroughly epicurean; its maxim was, that life should be made a feast, that virtue is only the seasoning of pleasure, and temperance the means of prolonging it. Dining-rooms glittering with gold and incrusted with gems, slaves in superb apparel, the fascinations of female society where all the women were dissolute, magnificent baths, theatres, gladiators, such were the objects of Roman desire. The conquerors of the world had discovered that the only thing worth worshiping is Force. By it all things might be secured, all that toil and trade had laboriously obtained. The confiscation of goods and lands, the taxation of provinces, were the reward of successful warfare; and the emperor was the symbol of force. There was a social splendor, but it was the phosphorescent corruption of the ancient Mediterranean world. In one of the Eastern provinces, Syria, some persons in very humble life had associated themselves together for benevolent and religious purposes. The doctrines they held were in harmony with that sentiment of universal brotherhood arising from the coalescence of the conquered kingdoms. They were doctrines inculcated by Jesus. The Jewish people at that time entertained a belief, founded on old traditions, that a deliverer would arise among them, who would restore them to their ancient splendor. The disciples of Jesus regarded him as this long-expected Messiah. But the priesthood, believing that the doctrines he taught were prejudicial to their interests, denounced him to the Roman governor, who, to satisfy their clamors, reluctantly delivered him over to death. His doctrines of benevolence and human brotherhood outlasted that event. The disciples, instead of scattering, organized. They associated themselves on a principle of communism, each throwing into the common stock whatever property he possessed, and all his gains. The widows and orphans of the community were thus supported, the poor and the sick sustained. From this germ was developed a new, and as the events proved, all-powerful society--the Church; new, for nothing of the kind had existed in antiquity; powerful, for the local churches, at first isolated, soon began to confederate for their common interest. Through this organization Christianity achieved all her political triumphs. As we have said, the military domination of Rome had brought about universal peace, and had generated a sentiment of brotherhood among the vanquished nations. Things were, therefore, propitious for the rapid diffusion of the newly-established--the Christian--principle throughout the empire. It spread from Syria through all Asia Minor, and successively reached Cyprus, Greece, Italy, eventually extending westward as far as Gaul and Britain. Its propagation was hastened by missionaries who made it known in all directions. None of the ancient classical philosophies had ever taken advantage of such a means. Political conditions determined the boundaries of the new religion. Its limits were eventually those of the Roman Empire; Rome, doubtfully the place of death of Peter, not Jerusalem, indisputably the place of the death of our Savior, became the religious capital. It was better to have possession of the imperial seven hilled city, than of Gethsemane and Calvary with all their holy souvenirs. IT GATHERS POLITICAL POWER. For many years Christianity manifested itself as a system enjoining three things--toward God veneration, in personal life purity, in social life benevolence. In its early days of feebleness it made proselytes only by persuasion, but, as it increased in numbers and influence, it began to exhibit political tendencies, a disposition to form a government within the government, an empire within the empire. These tendencies it has never since lost. They are, in truth, the logical result of its development. The Roman emperors, discovering that it was absolutely incompatible with the imperial system, tried to put it down by force. This was in accordance with the spirit of their military maxims, which had no other means but force for the establishment of conformity. In the winter A.D. 302-'3, the Christian soldiers in some of the legions refused to join in the time-honored solemnities for propitiating the gods. The mutiny spread so quickly, the emergency became so pressing, that the Emperor Diocletian was compelled to hold a council for the purpose of determining what should be done. The difficulty of the position may perhaps be appreciated when it is understood that the wife and the daughter of Diocletian himself were Christians. He was a man of great capacity and large political views; he recognized in the opposition that must be made to the new party a political necessity, yet he expressly enjoined that there should be no bloodshed. But who can control an infuriated civil commotion? The church of Nicomedia was razed to the ground; in retaliation the imperial palace was set on fire, an edict was openly insulted and torn down. The Christian officers in the army were cashiered; in all directions, martyrdoms and massacres were taking place. So resistless was the march of events, that not even the emperor himself could stop the persecution. THE FIRST CHRISTIAN EMPEROR. It had now become evident that the Christians constituted a powerful party in the state, animated with indignation at the atrocities they had suffered, and determined to endure them no longer. After the abdication of Diocletian (A.D. 305), Constantine, one of the competitors for the purple, perceiving the advantages that would accrue to him from such a policy, put himself forth as the head of the Christian party. This gave him, in every part of the empire, men and women ready to encounter fire and sword in his behalf; it gave him unwavering adherents in every legion of the armies. In a decisive battle, near the Milvian bridge, victory crowned his schemes. The death of Maximin, and subsequently that of Licinius, removed all obstacles. He ascended the throne of the Caesars--the first Christian emperor. Place, profit, power--these were in view of whoever now joined the conquering sect. Crowds of worldly persons, who cared nothing about its religious ideas, became its warmest supporters. Pagans at heart, their influence was soon manifested in the paganization of Christianity that forthwith ensued. The emperor, no better than they, did nothing to check their proceedings. But he did not personally conform to the ceremonial requirements of the Church until the close of his evil life, A.D. 337. TERTULLIAN'S EXPOSITION OF CHRISTIANITY. That we may clearly appreciate the modifications now impressed on Christianity--modifications which eventually brought it in conflict with science--we must have, as a means of comparison, a statement of what it was in its purer days. Such, fortunately, we find in the "Apology or Defense of the Christians against the Accusations of the Gentiles," written by Tertullian, at Rome, during the persecution of Severus. He addressed it, not to the emperor, but to the magistrates who sat in judgment on the accused. It is a solemn and most earnest expostulation, setting forth all that could be said in explanation of the subject, a representation of the belief and cause of the Christians made in the imperial city in the face of the whole world, not a querulous or passionate ecclesiastical appeal, but a grave historical document. It has ever been looked upon as one of the ablest of the early Christian works. Its date is about A.D. 200. With no inconsiderable skill Tertullian opens his argument. He tells the magistrates that Christianity is a stranger upon earth, and that she expects to meet with enemies in a country which is not her own. She only asks that she may not be condemned unheard, and that Roman magistrates will permit her to defend herself; that the laws of the empire will gather lustre, if judgment be passed upon her after she has been tried but not if she is sentenced without a hearing of her cause; that it is unjust to hate a thing of which we are ignorant, even though it may be a thing worthy of hate; that the laws of Rome deal with actions, not with mere names; but that, notwithstanding this, persons have been punished because they were called Christians, and that without any accusation of crime. He then advances to an exposition of the origin, the nature, and the effects of Christianity, stating that it is founded on the Hebrew Scriptures, which are the most venerable of all books. He says to the magistrates: "The books of Moses, in which God has inclosed, as in a treasure, all the religion of the Jews, and consequently all the Christian religion, reach far beyond the oldest you have, even beyond all your public monuments, the establishment of your state, the foundation of many great cities--all that is most advanced by you in all ages of history, and memory of times; the invention of letters, which are the interpreters of sciences and the guardians of all excellent things. I think I may say more--beyond your gods, your temples, your oracles and sacrifices. The author of those books lived a thousand years before the siege of Troy, and more than fifteen hundred before Homer." Time is the ally of truth, and wise men believe nothing but what is certain, and what has been verified by time. The principal authority of these Scriptures is derived from their venerable antiquity. The most learned of the Ptolemies, who was surnamed Philadelphus, an accomplished prince, by the advice of Demetrius Phalareus, obtained a copy of these holy books. It may be found at this day in his library. The divinity of these Scriptures is proved by this, that all that is done in our days may be found predicted in them; they contain all that has since passed in the view of men. Is not the accomplishment of a prophecy a testimony to its truth? Seeing that events which are past have vindicated these prophecies, shall we be blamed for trusting them in events that are to come? Now, as we believe things that have been prophesied and have come to pass, so we believe things that have been told us, but not yet come to pass, because they have all been foretold by the same Scriptures, as well those that are verified every day as those that still remain to be fulfilled. These Holy Scriptures teach us that there is one God, who made the world out of nothing, who, though daily seen, is invisible; his infiniteness is known only to himself; his immensity conceals, but at the same time discovers him. He has ordained for men, according to their lives, rewards and punishments; he will raise all the dead that have ever lived from the creation of the world, will command them to reassume their bodies, and thereupon adjudge them to felicity that has so end, or to eternal flames. The fires of hell are those hidden flames which the earth shuts up in her bosom. He has in past times sent into the world preachers or prophets. The prophets of those old times were Jews; they addressed their oracles, for such they were, to the Jews, who have stored them up in the Scriptures. On them, as has been said, Christianity is founded, though the Christian differs in his ceremonies from the Jew. We are accused of worshiping a man, and not the God of the Jews. Not so. The honor we bear to Christ does not derogate from the honor we bear to God. On account of the merit of these ancient patriarchs, the Jews were the only beloved people of God; he delighted to be in communication with them by his own mouth. By him they were raised to admirable greatness. But with perversity they wickedly ceased to regard him; they changed his laws into a profane worship. He warned them that he would take to himself servants more faithful than they, and, for their crime, punished them by driving them forth from their country. They are now spread all over the world; they wander in all parts; they cannot enjoy the air they breathed at their birth; they have neither man nor God for their king. As he threatened them, so he has done. He has taken, in all nations and countries of the earth, people more faithful than they. Through his prophets he had declared that these should have greater favors, and that a Messiah should come, to publish a new law among them. This Messiah was Jesus, who is also God. For God may be derived from God, as the light of a candle may be derived from the light of another candle. God and his Son are the self-same God--a light is the same light as that from which it was taken. The Scriptures make known two comings of the Son of God; the first in humility, the second at the day of judgment, in power. The Jews might have known all this from the prophets, but their sins have so blinded them that they did not recognize him at his first coming, and are still vainly expecting him. They believed that all the miracles wrought by him were the work of magic. The doctors of the law and the chief priests were envious of him; they denounced him to Pilate. He was crucified, died, was buried, and after three days rose again. For forty days he remained among his disciples. Then he was environed in a cloud, and rose up to heaven--a truth far more certain than any human testimonies touching the ascension of Romulus or of any other Roman prince mounting up to the same place. Tertullian then describes the origin and nature of devils, who, under Satan, their prince, produce diseases, irregularities of the air, plagues, and the blighting of the blossoms of the earth, who seduce men to offer sacrifices, that they may have the blood of the victims, which is their food. They are as nimble as the birds, and hence know every thing that is passing upon earth; they live in the air, and hence can spy what is going on in heaven; for this reason they can impose on men reigned prophecies, and deliver oracles. Thus they announced in Rome that a victory would be obtained over King Perseus, when in truth they knew that the battle was already won. They falsely cure diseases; for, taking possession of the body of a man, they produce in him a distemper, and then ordaining some remedy to be used, they cease to afflict him, and men think that a cure has taken place. Though Christians deny that the emperor is a god, they nevertheless pray for his prosperity, because the general dissolution that threatens the universe, the conflagration of the world, is retarded so long as the glorious majesty of the triumphant Roman Empire shall last. They desire not to be present at the subversion of all Nature. They acknowledge only one republic, but it is the whole world; they constitute one body, worship one God, and all look forward to eternal happiness. Not only do they pray for the emperor and the magistrates, but also for peace. They read the Scriptures to nourish their faith, lift up their hope, and strengthen the confidence they have in God. They assemble to exhort one another; they remove sinners from their societies; they have bishops who preside over them, approved by the suffrages of those whom they are to conduct. At the end of each month every one contributes if he will, but no one is constrained to give; the money gathered in this manner is the pledge of piety; it is not consumed in eating and drinking, but in feeding the poor, and burying them, in comforting children that are destitute of parents and goods, in helping old men who have spent the best of their days in the service of the faithful, in assisting those who have lost by shipwreck what they had, and those who are condemned to the mines, or have been banished to islands, or shut up in prisons, because they professed the religion of the true God. There is but one thing that Christians have not in common, and that one thing is their wives. They do not feast as if they should die to-morrow, nor build as if they should never die. The objects of their life are innocence, justice, patience, temperance, chastity. To this noble exposition of Christian belief and life in his day, Tertullian does not hesitate to add an ominous warning to the magistrates he is addressing--ominous, for it was a forecast of a great event soon to come to pass: "Our origin is but recent, yet already we fill all that your power acknowledges--cities, fortresses, islands, provinces, the assemblies of the people, the wards of Rome, the palace, the senate, the public places, and especially the armies. We have left you nothing but your temples. Reflect what wars we are able to undertake! With what promptitude might we not arm ourselves were we not restrained by our religion, which teaches us that it is better to be killed than to kill!" Before he closes his defense, Tertullian renews an assertion which, carried into practice, as it subsequently was, affected the intellectual development of all Europe. He declares that the Holy Scriptures are a treasure from which all the true wisdom in the world has been drawn; that every philosopher and every poet is indebted to them. He labors to show that they are the standard and measure of all truth, and that whatever is inconsistent with them must necessarily be false. From Tertullian's able work we see what Christianity was while it was suffering persecution and struggling for existence. We have now to see what it became when in possession of imperial power. Great is the difference between Christianity under Severus and Christianity after Constantine. Many of the doctrines which at the latter period were preeminent, in the former were unknown. PAGANIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY. Two causes led to the amalgamation of Christianity with paganism: 1. The political necessities of the new dynasty; 2. The policy adopted by the new religion to insure its spread. 1. Though the Christian party had proved itself sufficiently strong to give a master to the empire, it was never sufficiently strong to destroy its antagonist, paganism. The issue of the struggle between them was an amalgamation of the principles of both. In this, Christianity differed from Mohammedanism, which absolutely annihilated its antagonist, and spread its own doctrines without adulteration. Constantine continually showed by his acts that he felt he must be the impartial sovereign of all his people, not merely the representative of a successful faction. Hence, if he built Christian churches, he also restored pagan temples; if he listened to the clergy, he also consulted the haruspices; if he summoned the Council of Nicea, he also honored the statue of Fortune; if he accepted the rite of baptism, he also struck a medal bearing his title of "God." His statue, on the top of the great porphyry pillar at Constantinople, consisted of an ancient image of Apollo, whose features were replaced by those of the emperor, and its head surrounded by the nails feigned to have been used at the crucifixion of Christ, arranged so as to form a crown of glory. Feeling that there must be concessions to the defeated pagan party, in accordance with its ideas, he looked with favor on the idolatrous movements of his court. In fact, the leaders of these movements were persons of his own family. CHRISTIANITY UNDER CONSTANTINE. 2. To the emperor--a mere worldling--a man without any religious convictions, doubtless it appeared best for himself, best for the empire, and best for the contending parties, Christian and pagan, to promote their union or amalgamation as much as possible. Even sincere Christians do not seem to have been averse to this; perhaps they believed that the new doctrines would diffuse most thoroughly by incorporating in themselves ideas borrowed from the old, that Truth would assert her self in the end, and the impurity be cast off. In accomplishing this amalgamation, Helena, the empress-mother, aided by the court ladies, led the way. For her gratification there were discovered, in a cavern at Jerusalem, wherein they had lain buried for more than three centuries, the Savior's cross, and those of the two thieves, the inscription, and the nails that had been used. They were identified by miracle. A true relic-worship set in. The superstition of the old Greek times reappeared; the times when the tools with which the Trojan horse was made might still be seen at Metapontum, the sceptre of Pelops at Chaeroneia, the spear of Achilles at Phaselis, the sword of Memnon at Nicomedia, when the Tegeates could show the hide of the Calydonian boar and very many cities boasted their possession of the true palladium of Troy; when there were statues of Minerva that could brandish spears, paintings that could blush, images that could sweat, and endless shrines and sanctuaries at which miracle-cures could be performed. As years passed on, the faith described by Tertullian was transmuted into one more fashionable and more debased. It was incorporated with the old Greek mythology. Olympus was restored, but the divinities passed under other names. The more powerful provinces insisted on the adoption of their time-honored conceptions. Views of the Trinity, in accordance with Egyptian traditions, were established. Not only was the adoration of Isis under a new name restored, but even her image, standing on the crescent moon, reappeared. The well-known effigy of that goddess, with the infant Horus in her arms, has descended to our days in the beautiful, artistic creations of the Madonna and Child. Such restorations of old conceptions under novel forms were everywhere received with delight. When it was announced to the Ephesians that the Council of that place, headed by Cyril, had decreed that the Virgin should be called "the Mother of God," with tears of joy they embraced the knees of their bishop; it was the old instinct peeping out; their ancestors would have done the same for Diana. This attempt to conciliate worldly converts, by adopting their ideas and practices, did not pass without remonstrance from those whose intelligence discerned the motive. "You have," says Faustus to Augustine, "substituted your agapae for the sacrifices of the pagans; for their idols your martyrs, whom you serve with the very same honors. You appease the shades of the dead with wine and feasts; you celebrate the solemn festivities of the Gentiles, their calends, and their solstices; and, as to their manners, those you have retained without any alteration. Nothing distinguishes you from the pagans, except that you hold your assemblies apart from them." Pagan observances were everywhere introduced. At weddings it was the custom to sing hymns to Venus. INTRODUCTION OF ROMAN RITES. Let us pause here a moment, and see, in anticipation, to what a depth of intellectual degradation this policy of paganization eventually led. Heathen rites were adopted, a pompous and splendid ritual, gorgeous robes, mitres, tiaras, wax-tapers, processional services, lustrations, gold and silver vases, were introduced. The Roman lituus, the chief ensign of the augurs, became the crozier. Churches were built over the tombs of martyrs, and consecrated with rites borrowed from the ancient laws of the Roman pontiffs. Festivals and commemorations of martyrs multiplied with the numberless fictitious discoveries of their remains. Fasting became the grand means of repelling the devil and appeasing God; celibacy the greatest of the virtues. Pilgrimages were made to Palestine and the tombs of the martyrs. Quantities of dust and earth were brought from the Holy Land and sold at enormous prices, as antidotes against devils. The virtues of consecrated water were upheld. Images and relics were introduced into the churches, and worshiped after the fashion of the heathen gods. It was given out that prodigies and miracles were to be seen in certain places, as in the heathen times. The happy souls of departed Christians were invoked; it was believed that they were wandering about the world, or haunting their graves. There was a multiplication of temples, altars, and penitential garments. The festival of the purification of the Virgin was invented to remove the uneasiness of heathen converts on account of the loss of their Lupercalia, or feasts of Pan. The worship of images, of fragments of the cross, or bones, nails, and other relics, a true fetich worship, was cultivated. Two arguments were relied on for the authenticity of these objects--the authority of the Church, and the working of miracles. Even the worn-out clothing of the saints and the earth of their graves were venerated. From Palestine were brought what were affirmed to be the skeletons of St. Mark and St. James, and other ancient worthies. The apotheosis of the old Roman times was replaced by canonization; tutelary saints succeed to local mythological divinities. Then came the mystery of transubstantiation, or the conversion of bread and wine by the priest into the flesh and blood of Christ. As centuries passed, the paganization became more and more complete. Festivals sacred to the memory of the lance with which the Savior's side was pierced, the nails that fastened him to the cross, and the crown of thorns, were instituted. Though there were several abbeys that possessed this last peerless relic, no one dared to say that it was impossible they could all be authentic. We may read with advantage the remarks made by Bishop Newton on this paganization of Christianity. He asks: "Is not the worship of saints and angels now in all respects the same that the worship of demons was in former times? The name only is different, the thing is identically the same,... the deified men of the Christians are substituted for the deified men of the heathens. The promoters of this worship were sensible that it was the same, and that the one succeeded to the other; and, as the worship is the same, so likewise it is performed with the same ceremonies. The burning of incense or perfumes on several altars at one and the same time; the sprinkling of holy water, or a mixture of salt and common water, at going into and coming out of places of public worship; the lighting up of a great number of lamps and wax-candles in broad daylight before altars and statues of these deities; the hanging up of votive offerings and rich presents as attestations of so many miraculous cures and deliverances from diseases and dangers; the canonization or deification of deceased worthies; the assigning of distinct provinces or prefectures to departed heroes and saints; the worshiping and adoring of the dead in their sepulchres, shrines, and relics; the consecrating and bowing down to images; the attributing of miraculous powers and virtues to idols; the setting up of little oratories, altars, and statues in the streets and highways, and on the tops of mountains; the carrying of images and relics in pompous procession, with numerous lights and with music and singing; flagellations at solemn seasons under the notion of penance; a great variety of religious orders and fraternities of priests; the shaving of priests, or the tonsure as it is called, on the crown of their heads; the imposing of celibacy and vows of chastity on the religious of both sexes--all these and many more rites and ceremonies are equally parts of pagan and popish superstition. Nay, the very same temples, the very same images, which were once consecrated to Jupiter and the other demons, are now consecrated to the Virgin Mary and the other saints. The very same rites and inscriptions are ascribed to both, the very same prodigies and miracles are related of these as of those. In short, almost the whole of paganism is converted and applied to popery; the one is manifestly formed upon the same plan and principles as the other; so that there is not only a conformity, but even a uniformity, in the worship of ancient and modern, of heathen and Christian Rome." DEBASEMENT OF CHRISTIANITY. Thus far Bishop Newton; but to return to the times of Constantine: though these concessions to old and popular ideas were permitted and even encouraged, the dominant religious party never for a moment hesitated to enforce its decisions by the aid of the civil power--an aid which was freely given. Constantine thus carried into effect the acts of the Council of Nicea. In the affair of Arius, he even ordered that whoever should find a book of that heretic, and not burn it, should be put to death. In like manner Nestor was by Theodosius the Younger banished to an Egyptian oasis. The pagan party included many of the old aristocratic families of the empire; it counted among its adherents all the disciples of the old philosophical schools. It looked down on its antagonist with contempt. It asserted that knowledge is to be obtained only by the laborious exercise of human observation and human reason. The Christian party asserted that all knowledge is to be found in the Scriptures and in the traditions of the Church; that, in the written revelation, God had not only given a criterion of truth, but had furnished us all that he intended us to know. The Scriptures, therefore, contain the sum, the end of all knowledge. The clergy, with the emperor at their back, would endure no intellectual competition. Thus came into prominence what were termed sacred and profane knowledge; thus came into presence of each other two opposing parties, one relying on human reason as its guide, the other on revelation. Paganism leaned for support on the learning of its philosophers, Christianity on the inspiration of its Fathers. The Church thus set herself forth as the depository and arbiter of knowledge; she was ever ready to resort to the civil power to compel obedience to her decisions. She thus took a course which determined her whole future career: she became a stumbling-block in the intellectual advancement of Europe for more than a thousand years. The reign of Constantine marks the epoch of the transformation of Christianity from a religion into a political system; and though, in one sense, that system was degraded into an idolatry, in another it had risen into a development of the old Greek mythology. The maxim holds good in the social as well as in the mechanical world, that, when two bodies strike, the form of both is changed. Paganism was modified by Christianity; Christianity by Paganism. THE TRINITARIAN DISPUTE. In the Trinitarian controversy, which first broke out in Egypt--Egypt, the land of Trinities--the chief point in discussion was to define the position of "the Son." There lived in Alexandria a presbyter of the name of Arius, a disappointed candidate for the office of bishop. He took the ground that there was a time when, from the very nature of sonship, the Son did not exist, and a time at which he commenced to be, asserting that it is the necessary condition of the filial relation that a father must be older than his son. But this assertion evidently denied the coeternity of the three persons of the Trinity; it suggested a subordination or inequality among them, and indeed implied a time when the Trinity did not exist. Hereupon, the bishop, who had been the successful competitor against Arius, displayed his rhetorical powers in public debates on the question, and, the strife spreading, the Jews and pagans, who formed a very large portion of the population of Alexandria, amused themselves with theatrical representations of the contest on the stage--the point of their burlesques being the equality of age of the Father and his Son. Such was the violence the controversy at length assumed, that the matter had to be referred to the emperor. At first he looked upon the dispute as altogether frivolous, and perhaps in truth inclined to the assertion of Arius, that in the very nature of the thing a father must be older than his son. So great, however, was the pressure laid upon him, that he was eventually compelled to summon the Council of Nicea, which, to dispose of the conflict, set forth a formulary or creed, and attached to it this anathema: "The Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes those who say that there was a time when the Son of God was not, and that, before he was begotten, he was not, and that he was made out of nothing, or out of another substance or essence, and is created, or changeable, or alterable." Constantine at once enforced the decision of the council by the civil power. A few years subsequently the Emperor Theodosius prohibited sacrifices, made the inspection of the entrails of animals a capital offense, and forbade any one entering a temple. He instituted Inquisitors of Faith, and ordained that all who did not accord with the belief of Damasus, the Bishop of Rome, and Peter, the Bishop of Alexandria, should be driven into exile, and deprived of civil rights. Those who presumed to celebrate Easter on the same day as the Jews, he condemned to death. The Greek language was now ceasing to be known in the West, and true learning was becoming extinct. At this time the bishopric of Alexandria was held by one Theophilus. An ancient temple of Osiris having been given to the Christians of the city for the site of a church, it happened that, in digging the foundation for the new edifice, the obscene symbols of the former worship chanced to be found. These, with more zeal than modesty, Theophilus exhibited in the market-place to public derision. With less forbearance than the Christian party showed when it was insulted in the theatre during the Trinitarian dispute, the pagans resorted to violence, and a riot ensued. They held the Serapion as their headquarters. Such were the disorder and bloodshed that the emperor had to interfere. He dispatched a rescript to Alexandria, enjoining the bishop, Theophilus, to destroy the Serapion; and the great library, which had been collected by the Ptolemies, and had escaped the fire of Julius Caesar, was by that fanatic dispersed. THE MURDER OF HYPATIA. The bishopric thus held by Theophilus was in due time occupied by his nephew St. Cyril, who had commended himself to the approval of the Alexandrian congregations as a successful and fashionable preacher. It was he who had so much to do with the introduction of the worship of the Virgin Mary. His hold upon the audiences of the giddy city was, however, much weakened by Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, the mathematician, who not only distinguished herself by her expositions of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, but also by her comments on the writings of Apollonius and other geometers. Each day before her academy stood a long train of chariots; her lecture-room was crowded with the wealth and fashion of Alexandria. They came to listen to her discourses on those questions which man in all ages has asked, but which never yet have been answered: "What am I? Where am I? What can I know?" Hypatia and Cyril! Philosophy and bigotry. They cannot exist together. So Cyril felt, and on that feeling he acted. As Hypatia repaired to her academy, she was assaulted by Cyril's mob--a mob of many monks. Stripped naked in the street, she was dragged into a church, and there killed by the club of Peter the Reader. The corpse was cut to pieces, the flesh was scraped from the bones with shells, and the remnants cast into a fire. For this frightful crime Cyril was never called to account. It seemed to be admitted that the end sanctified the means. So ended Greek philosophy in Alexandria, so came to an untimely close the learning that the Ptolemies had done so much to promote. The "Daughter Library," that of the Serapion, had been dispersed. The fate of Hypatia was a warning to all who would cultivate profane knowledge. Henceforth there was to be no freedom for human thought. Every one must think as the ecclesiastical authority ordered him, A.D. 414. In Athens itself philosophy awaited its doom. Justinian at length prohibited its teaching, and caused all its schools in that city to be closed. PELAGIUS. While these events were transpiring in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, the spirit that had produced them was displaying itself in the West. A British monk, who had assumed the name of Pelagius, passed through Western Europe and Northern Africa, teaching that death was not introduced into the world by the sin of Adam; that on the contrary he was necessarily and by nature mortal, and had he not sinned he would nevertheless have died; that the consequences of his sins were confined to himself, and did not affect his posterity. From these premises Pelagius drew certain important theological conclusions. At Rome, Pelagius had been received with favor; at Carthage, at the instigation of St. Augustine, he was denounced. By a synod, held at Diospolis, he was acquitted of heresy, but, on referring the matter to the Bishop of Rome, Innocent I., he was, on the contrary, condemned. It happened that at this moment Innocent died, and his successor, Zosimus, annulled his judgment and declared the opinions of Pelagius to be orthodox. These contradictory decisions are still often referred to by the opponents of papal infallibility. Things were in this state of confusion, when the wily African bishops, through the influence of Count Valerius, procured from the emperor an edict denouncing Pelagins as a heretic; he and his accomplices were condemned to exile and the forfeiture of their goods. To affirm that death was in the world before the fall of Adam, was a state crime. CONDEMNATION OF PELAGIUS. It is very instructive to consider the principles on which this strange decision was founded. Since the question was purely philosophical, one might suppose that it would have been discussed on natural principles; instead of that, theological considerations alone were adduced. The attentive reader will have remarked, in Tertullian's statement of the principles of Christianity, a complete absence of the doctrines of original sin, total depravity, predestination, grace, and atonement. The intention of Christianity, as set forth by him, has nothing in common with the plan of salvation upheld two centuries subsequently. It is to St. Augustine, a Carthaginian, that we are indebted for the precision of our views on these important points. In deciding whether death had been in the world before the fall of Adam, or whether it was the penalty inflicted on the world for his sin, the course taken was to ascertain whether the views of Pelagius were accordant or discordant not with Nature but with the theological doctrines of St. Augustine. And the result has been such as might be expected. The doctrine declared to be orthodox by ecclesiastical authority is overthrown by the unquestionable discoveries of modern science. Long before a human being had appeared upon earth, millions of individuals--nay, more, thousands of species and even genera--had died; those which remain with us are an insignificant fraction of the vast hosts that have passed away. A consequence of great importance issued from the decision of the Pelagian controversy. The book of Genesis had been made the basis of Christianity. If, in a theological point of view, to its account of the sin in the garden of Eden, and the transgression and punishment of Adam, so much weight had been attached, it also in a philosophical point of view became the grand authority of Patristic science. Astronomy, geology, geography, anthropology, chronology, and indeed all the various departments of human knowledge, were made to conform to it. ST. AUGUSTINE. As the doctrines of St. Augustine have had the effect of thus placing theology in antagonism with science, it may be interesting to examine briefly some of the more purely philosophical views of that great man. For this purpose, we may appropriately select portions of his study of the first chapter of Genesis, as contained in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth books of his "Confessions." These consist of philosophical discussions, largely interspersed with rhapsodies. He prays that God will give him to understand the Scriptures, and will open their meaning to him; he declares that in them there is nothing superfluous, but that the words have a manifold meaning. The face of creation testifies that there has been a Creator; but at once arises the question, "How and when did he make heaven and earth? They could not have been made IN heaven and earth, the world could not have been made IN the world, nor could they have been made when there was nothing to make them of." The solution of this fundamental inquiry St. Augustine finds in saying, "Thou spakest, and they were made." But the difficulty does not end here. St. Augustine goes on to remark that the syllables thus uttered by God came forth in succession, and there must have been some created thing to express the words. This created thing must, therefore, have existed before heaven and earth, and yet there could have been no corporeal thing before heaven and earth. It must have been a creature, because the words passed away and came to an end but we know that "the word of the Lord endureth forever." Moreover, it is plain that the words thus spoken could not have been spoken successively, but simultaneously, else there would have been time and change--succession in its nature implying time; whereas there was then nothing but eternity and immortality. God knows and says eternally what takes place in time. CRITICISM OF ST. AUGUSTINE. St. Augustine then defines, not without much mysticism, what is meant by the opening words of Genesis: "In the beginning." He is guided to his conclusion by another scriptural passage: "How wonderful are thy works, O Lord! in wisdom hast thou made them all." This "wisdom" is "the beginning," and in that beginning the Lord created the heaven and the earth. "But," he adds, "some one may ask, 'What was God doing before he made the heaven and the earth? for, if at any particular moment he began to employ himself, that means time, not eternity. In eternity nothing transpires--the whole is present.'" In answering this question, he cannot forbear one of those touches of rhetoric for which he was so celebrated: "I will not answer this question by saying that he was preparing hell for priers into his mysteries. I say that, before God made heaven and earth, he did not make any thing, for no creature could be made before any creature was made. Time itself is a creature, and hence it could not possibly exist before creation. "What, then, is time? The past is not, the future is not, the present--who can tell what it is, unless it be that which has no duration between two nonentities? There is no such thing as 'a long time,' or 'a short time,' for there are no such things as the past and the future. They have no existence, except in the soul." The style in which St. Augustine conveyed his ideas is that of a rhapsodical conversation with God. His works are an incoherent dream. That the reader may appreciate this remark, I might copy almost at random any of his paragraphs. The following is from the twelfth book: "This then, is what I conceive, O my God, when I hear thy Scripture saying, In the beginning God made heaven and earth: and the earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep, and not mentioning what day thou createdst them; this is what I conceive, that because of the heaven of heavens--that intellectual heaven, whose intelligences know all at once, not in part, not darkly, not through a glass, but as a whole, in manifestation, face to face; not this thing now, and that thing anon; but (as I said) know all at once, without any succession of times; and because of the earth, invisible and without form, without any succession of times, which succession presents 'this thing now, that thing anon;' because, where there is no form, there is no distinction of things; it is, then, on account of these two, a primitive formed, and a primitive formless; the one, heaven, but the heaven of heavens; the other, earth, but the earth movable and without form; because of these two do I conceive, did thy Scripture say without mention of days, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. For, forthwith it subjoined what earth it spake of; and also in that the firmament is recorded to be created the second day, and called heaven, it conveys to us of which heaven he before spake, without mention of days. "Wondrous depth of thy words! whose surface behold! is before us, inviting to little ones; yet are they a wondrous depth, O my God, a wondrous depth! It is awful to look therein; an awfulness of honor, and a trembling of love. The enemies thereof I hate vehemently; O that thou wouldst slay them with thy two-edged sword, that they might no longer be enemies to it: for so do I love to have them slain unto themselves, that they may live unto thee." As an example of the hermeneutical manner in which St. Augustine unfolded the concealed facts of the Scriptures, I may cite the following from the thirteenth book of the "Confessions;" his object is to show that the doctrine of the Trinity is contained in the Mosaic narrative of the creation: "Lo, now the Trinity appears unto me in a glass darkly, which is thou my God, because thou, O Father, in him who is the beginning of our wisdom, which is thy wisdom, born of thyself, equal unto thee and coeternal, that is, in thy Son, createdst heaven and earth. Much now have we said of the heaven of heavens, and of the earth invisible and without form, and of the darksome deep, in reference to the wandering instability of its spiritual deformity, unless it had been converted unto him, from whom it had its then degree of life, and by his enlightening became a beauteous life, and the heaven of that heaven, which was afterward set between water and water. And under the name of God, I now held the Father, who made these things; and under the name of the beginning, the Son, in whom he made these things; and believing, as I did, my God as the Trinity, I searched further in his holy words, and lo! thy Spirit moved upon the waters. Behold the Trinity, my God!--Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost Creator of all creation." That I might convey to my reader a just impression of the character of St. Augustine's philosophical writings, I have, in the two quotations here given, substituted for my own translation that of the Rev. Dr. Pusey, as contained in Vol. I. of the "Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church," published at Oxford, 1840. Considering the eminent authority which has been attributed to the writings of St. Augustine by the religious world for nearly fifteen centuries, it is proper to speak of them with respect. And indeed it is not necessary to do otherwise. The paragraphs here quoted criticise themselves. No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the great Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance. A divine revelation of science admits of no improvement, no change, no advance. It discourages as needless, and indeed as presumptuous, all new discovery, considering it as an unlawful prying into things which it was the intention of God to conceal. What, then, is that sacred, that revealed science, declared by the Fathers to be the sum of all knowledge? It likened all phenomena, natural and spiritual, to human acts. It saw in the Almighty, the Eternal, only a gigantic man. THE PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY. As to the earth, it affirmed that it is a flat surface, over which the sky is spread like a dome, or, as St. Augustine tells us, is stretched like a skin. In this the sun and moon and stars move, so that they may give light by day and by night to man. The earth was made of matter created by God out of nothing, and, with all the tribes of animals and plants inhabiting it, was finished in six days. Above the sky or firmament is heaven; in the dark and fiery space beneath the earth is hell. The earth is the central and most important body of the universe, all other things being intended for and subservient to it. As to man, he was made out of the dust of the earth. At first he was alone, but subsequently woman was formed from one of his ribs. He is the greatest and choicest of the works of God. He was placed in a paradise near the banks of the Euphrates, and was very wise and very pure; but, having tasted of the forbidden fruit, and thereby broken the commandment given to him, he was condemned to labor and to death. The descendants of the first man, undeterred by his punishment, pursued such a career of wickedness that it became necessary to destroy them. A deluge, therefore, flooded the face of the earth, and rose over the tops of the mountains. Having accomplished its purpose, the water was dried up by a wind. From this catastrophe Noah and his three sons, with their wives, were saved in an ark. Of these sons, Shem remained in Asia and repeopled it. Ham peopled Africa; Japhet, Europe. As the Fathers were not acquainted with the existence of America, they did not provide an ancestor for its people. Let us listen to what some of these authorities say in support of their assertions. Thus Lactantius, referring to the heretical doctrine of the globular form of the earth, remarks: "Is it possible that men can be so absurd as to believe that the crops and the trees on the other side of the earth hang downward, and that men have their feet higher than their heads? If you ask them how they defend these monstrosities, how things do not fall away from the earth on that side, they reply that the nature of things is such that heavy bodies tend toward the centre, like the spokes of a wheel, while light bodies, as clouds, smoke, fire, tend from the centre to the heavens on all sides. Now, I am really at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once gone wrong, steadily persevere in their folly, and defend one absurd opinion by another." On the question of the antipodes, St. Augustine asserts that "it is impossible there should be inhabitants on the opposite side of the earth, since no such race is recorded by Scripture among the descendants of Adam." Perhaps, however, the most unanswerable argument against the sphericity of the earth was this, that "in the day of judgment, men on the other side of a globe could not see the Lord descending through the air." It is unnecessary for me to say any thing respecting the introduction of death into the world, the continual interventions of spiritual agencies in the course of events, the offices of angels and devils, the expected conflagration of the earth, the tower of Babel, the confusion of tongues, the dispersion of mankind, the interpretation of natural phenomena, as eclipses, the rainbow, etc. Above all, I abstain from commenting on the Patristic conceptions of the Almighty; they are too anthropomorphic, and wanting in sublimity. Perhaps, however, I may quote from Cosmas Indicopleustes the views that were entertained in the sixth century. He wrote a work entitled "Christian Topography," the chief intent of which was to confute the heretical opinion of the globular form of the earth, and the pagan assertion that there is a temperate zone on the southern side of the torrid. He affirms that, according to the true orthodox system of geography, the earth is a quadrangular plane, extending four hundred days' journey east and west, and exactly half as much north and south; that it is inclosed by mountains, on which the sky rests; that one on the north side, huger than the others, by intercepting the rays of the sun, produces night; and that the plane of the earth is not set exactly horizontally, but with a little inclination from the north: hence the Euphrates, Tigris, and other rivers, running southward, are rapid; but the Nile, having to run up-hill, has necessarily a very slow current. The Venerable Bede, writing in the seventh century, tells us that "the creation was accomplished in six days, and that the earth is its centre and its primary object. The heaven is of a fiery and subtile nature, round, and equidistant in every part, as a canopy from the centre of the earth. It turns round every day with ineffable rapidity, only moderated by the resistance of the seven planets, three above the sun--Saturn, Jupiter, Mars--then the sun; three below--Venus, Mercury, the moon. The stars go round in their fixed courses, the northern perform the shortest circle. The highest heaven has its proper limit; it contains the angelic virtues who descend upon earth, assume ethereal bodies, perform human functions, and return. The heaven is tempered with glacial waters, lest it should be set on fire. The inferior heaven is called the firmament, because it separates the superincumbent waters from the waters below. The firmamental waters are lower than the spiritual heaven, higher than all corporeal beings, reserved, some say, for a second deluge; others, more truly, to temper the fire of the fixed stars." Was it for this preposterous scheme--this product of ignorance and audacity--that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt. Of this presumptuous system, the strangest part was its logic, the nature of its proofs. It relied upon miracle-evidence. A fact was supposed to be demonstrated by an astounding illustration of something else! An Arabian writer, referring to this, says: "If a conjurer should say to me, 'Three are more than ten, and in proof of it I will change this stick into a serpent,' I might be surprised at his legerdemain, but I certainly should not admit his assertion." Yet, for more than a thousand years, such was the accepted logic, and all over Europe propositions equally absurd were accepted on equally ridiculous proof. Since the party that had become dominant in the empire could not furnish works capable of intellectual competition with those of the great pagan authors, and since it was impossible for it to accept a position of inferiority, there arose a political necessity for the discouragement, and even persecution, of profane learning. The persecution of the Platonists under Valentinian was due to that necessity. They were accused of magic, and many of them were put to death. The profession of philosophy had become dangerous--it was a state crime. In its stead there arose a passion for the marvelous, a spirit of superstition. Egypt exchanged the great men, who had made her Museum immortal, for bands of solitary monks and sequestered virgins, with which she was overrun. CHAPTER III. CONFLICT RESPECTING THE DOCTRINE OF THE UNITY OF GOD.--THE FIRST OR SOUTHERN REFORMATION. The Egyptians insist on the introduction of the worship of the Virgin Mary--They are resisted by Nestor, the Patriarch of Constantinople, but eventually, through their influence with the emperor, cause Nestor's exile and the dispersion of his followers. Prelude to the Southern Reformation--The Persian attack; its moral effects. The Arabian Reformation.--Mohammed is brought in contact with the Nestorians--He adopts and extends their principles, rejecting the worship of the Virgin, the doctrine of the Trinity, and every thing in opposition to the unity of God.-- He extinguishes idolatry in Arabia, by force, and prepares to make war on the Roman Empire.--His successors conquer Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, and invade France. As the result of this conflict, the doctrine of the unity of God was established in the greater part of the Roman Empire-- The cultivation of science was restored, and Christendom lost many of her most illustrious capitals, as Alexandria, Carthage, and, above all, Jerusalem. THE policy of the Byzantine court had given to primitive Christianity a paganized form, which it had spread over all the idolatrous populations constituting the empire. There had been an amalgamation of the two parties. Christianity had modified paganism, paganism had modified Christianity. The limits of this adulterated religion were the confines of the Roman Empire. With this great extension there had come to the Christian party political influence and wealth. No insignificant portion of the vast public revenues found their way into the treasuries of the Church. As under such circumstances must ever be the case, there were many competitors for the spoils--men who, under the mask of zeal for the predominant faith, sought only the enjoyment of its emoluments. ECCLESIASTICAL DISPUTES. Under the early emperors, conquest had reached its culmination; the empire was completed; there remained no adequate objects for military life; the days of war-peculation, and the plundering of provinces, were over. For the ambitious, however, another path was open; other objects presented. A successful career in the Church led to results not unworthy of comparison with those that in former days had been attained by a successful career in the army. The ecclesiastical, and indeed, it may be said, much of the political history of that time, turns on the struggles of the bishops of the three great metropolitan cities--Constantinople, Alexandria, Rome--for supremacy: Constantinople based her claims on the fact that she was the existing imperial city; Alexandria pointed to her commercial and literary position; Rome, to her souvenirs. But the Patriarch of Constantinople labored under the disadvantage that he was too closely under the eye, and, as he found to his cost, too often under the hand, of the emperor. Distance gave security to the episcopates of Alexandria and Rome. ECCLESIASTICAL DISPUTES. Religious disputations in the East have generally turned on diversities of opinion respecting the nature and attributes of God; in the West, on the relations and life of man. This peculiarity has been strikingly manifested in the transformations that Christianity has undergone in Asia and Europe respectively. Accordingly, at the time of which we are speaking, all the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire exhibited an intellectual anarchy. There were fierce quarrels respecting the Trinity, the essence of God, the position of the Son, the nature of the Holy Spirit, the influences of the Virgin Mary. The triumphant clamor first of one then of another sect was confirmed, sometimes by miracle-proof, sometimes by bloodshed. No attempt was ever made to submit the rival opinions to logical examination. All parties, however, agreed in this, that the imposture of the old classical pagan forms of faith was demonstrated by the facility with which they had been overthrown. The triumphant ecclesiastics proclaimed that the images of the gods had failed to defend themselves when the time of trial came. Polytheistic ideas have always been held in repute by the southern European races, the Semitic have maintained the unity of God. Perhaps this is due to the fact, as a recent author has suggested, that a diversified landscape of mountains and valleys, islands, and rivers, and gulfs, predisposes man to a belief in a multitude of divinities. A vast sandy desert, the illimitable ocean, impresses him with an idea of the oneness of God. Political reasons had led the emperors to look with favor on the admixture of Christianity and paganism, and doubtless by this means the bitterness of the rivalry between those antagonists was somewhat abated. The heaven of the popular, the fashionable Christianity was the old Olympus, from which the venerable Greek divinities had been removed. There, on a great white throne, sat God the Father, on his right the Son, and then the blessed Virgin, clad in a golden robe, and "covered with various female adornments;" on the left sat God the Holy Ghost. Surrounding these thrones were hosts of angels with their harps. The vast expanse beyond was filled with tables, seated at which the happy spirits of the just enjoyed a perpetual banquet. If, satisfied with this picture of happiness, illiterate persons never inquired how the details of such a heaven were carried out, or how much pleasure there could be in the ennui of such an eternally unchanging, unmoving scene, it was not so with the intelligent. As we are soon to see, there were among the higher ecclesiastics those who rejected with sentiments of horror these carnal, these materialistic conceptions, and raised their protesting voices in vindication of the attributes of the Omnipresent, the Almighty God. EGYPTIAN DOCTRINES. In the paganization of religion, now in all directions taking place, it became the interest of every bishop to procure an adoption of the ideas which, time out of mind, had been current in the community under his charge. The Egyptians had already thus forced on the Church their peculiar Trinitarian views; and now they were resolved that, under the form of the adoration of the Virgin Mary, the worship of Isis should be restored. THE NESTORIANS. It so happened that Nestor, the Bishop of Antioch, who entertained the philosophical views of Theodore of Mopsuestia, had been called by the Emperor Theodosius the Younger to the Episcopate of Constantinople (A.D. 427). Nestor rejected the base popular anthropomorphism, looking upon it as little better than blasphemous, and pictured to himself an awful eternal Divinity, who pervaded the universe, and had none of the aspects or attributes of man. Nestor was deeply imbued with the doctrines of Aristotle, and attempted to coordinate them with what he considered to be orthodox Christian tenets. Between him and Cyril, the Bishop or Patriarch of Alexandria, a quarrel accordingly arose. Cyril represented the paganizing, Nestor the philosophizing party of the Church. This was that Cyril who had murdered Hypatia. Cyril was determined that the worship of the Virgin as the Mother of God should be recognized, Nestor was determined that it should not. In a sermon delivered in the metropolitan church at Constantinople, he vindicated the attributes of the Eternal, the Almighty God. "And can this God have a mother?" he exclaimed. In other sermons and writings, he set forth with more precision his ideas that the Virgin should be considered not as the Mother of God, but as the mother of the human portion of Christ, that portion being as essentially distinct from the divine as is a temple from its contained deity. PERSECUTION AND DEATH OF NESTOR. Instigated by the monks of Alexandria, the monks of Constantinople took up arms in behalf of "the Mother of God." The quarrel rose to such a pitch that the emperor was constrained to summon a council to meet at Ephesus. In the mean time Cyril had given a bribe of many pounds of gold to the chief eunuch of the imperial court, and had thereby obtained the influence of the emperor's sister. "The holy virgin of the court of heaven thus found an ally of her own sex in the holy virgin of the emperor's court." Cyril hastened to the council, attended by a mob of men and women of the baser sort. He at once assumed the presidency, and in the midst of a tumult had the emperor's rescript read before the Syrian bishops could arrive. A single day served to complete his triumph. All offers of accommodation on the part of Nestor were refused, his explanations were not read, he was condemned unheard. On the arrival of the Syrian ecclesiastics, a meeting of protest was held by them. A riot, with much bloodshed, ensued in the cathedral of St. John. Nestor was abandoned by the court, and eventually exiled to an Egyptian oasis. His persecutors tormented him as long as he lived, by every means in their power, and at his death gave out that "his blasphemous tongue had been devoured by worms, and that from the heats of an Egyptian desert he had escaped only into the hotter torments of hell!" The overthrow and punishment of Nestor, however, by no means destroyed his opinions. He and his followers, insisting on the plain inference of the last verse of the first chapter of St. Matthew, together with the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth verses of the thirteenth of the same gospel, could never be brought to an acknowledgment of the perpetual virginity of the new queen of heaven. Their philosophical tendencies were soon indicated by their actions. While their leader was tormented in an African oasis, many of them emigrated to the Euphrates, and established the Chaldean Church. Under their auspices the college of Edessa was founded. From the college of Nisibis issued those doctors who spread Nestor's tenets through Syria, Arabia, India, Tartary, China, Egypt. The Nestorians, of course, adopted the philosophy of Aristotle, and translated the works of that great writer into Syriac and Persian. They also made similar translations of later works, such as those of Pliny. In connection with the Jews they founded the medical college of Djondesabour. Their missionaries disseminated the Nestorian form of Christianity to such an extent over Asia, that its worshipers eventually outnumbered all the European Christians of the Greek and Roman Churches combined. It may be particularly remarked that in Arabia they had a bishop. THE PERSIAN CAMPAIGN. The dissensions between Constantinople and Alexandria had thus filled all Western Asia with sectaries, ferocious in their contests with each other, and many of them burning with hatred against the imperial power for the persecutions it had inflicted on them. A religious revolution, the consequences of which are felt in our own times, was the result. It affected the whole world. We shall gain a clear view of this great event, if we consider separately the two acts into which it may be decomposed: 1. The temporary overthrow of Asiatic Christianity by the Persians; 2. The decisive and final reformation under the Arabians. 1. It happened (A.D. 590) that, by one of those revolutions so frequent in Oriental courts, Chosroes, the lawful heir to the Persian throne, was compelled to seek refuge in the Byzantine Empire, and implore the aid of the Emperor Maurice. That aid was cheerfully given. A brief and successful campaign restored Chosroes to the throne of his ancestors. But the glories of this generous campaign could not preserve Maurice himself. A mutiny broke out in the Roman army, headed by Phocas, a centurion. The statues of the emperor were overthrown. The Patriarch of Constantinople, having declared that he had assured himself of the orthodoxy of Phocas, consecrated him emperor. The unfortunate Maurice was dragged from a sanctuary, in which he had sought refuge; his five sons were beheaded before his eyes, and then he was put to death. His empress was inveigled from the church of St. Sophia, tortured, and with her three young daughters beheaded. The adherents of the massacred family were pursued with ferocious vindictiveness; of some the eyes were blinded, of others the tongues were torn out, or the feet and hands cut off, some were whipped to death, others were burnt. When the news reached Rome, Pope Gregory received it with exultation, praying that the hands of Phocas might be strengthened against all his enemies. As an equivalent for this subserviency, he was greeted with the title of "Universal Bishop." The cause of his action, as well as of that of the Patriarch of Constantinople, was doubtless the fact that Maurice was suspected of Magrian tendencies, into which he had been lured by the Persians. The mob of Constantinople had hooted after him in the streets, branding him as a Marcionite, a sect which believed in the Magian doctrine of two conflicting principles. With very different sentiments Chosroes heard of the murder of his friend. Phocas had sent him the heads of Maurice and his sons. The Persian king turned from the ghastly spectacle with horror, and at once made ready to avenge the wrongs of his benefactor by war. THE EXPEDITION OF HERACLIUS. The Exarch of Africa, Heraclius, one of the chief officers of the state, also received the shocking tidings with indignation. He was determined that the imperial purple should not be usurped by an obscure centurion of disgusting aspect. "The person of this Phocas was diminutive and deformed; the closeness of his shaggy eyebrows, his red hair, his beardless chin, were in keeping with his cheek, disfigured and discolored by a formidable scar. Ignorant of letters, of laws, and even of arms, he indulged in an ample privilege of lust and drunkenness." At first Heraclius refused tribute and obedience to him; then, admonished by age and infirmities, he committed the dangerous enterprise of resistance to his son of the same name. A prosperous voyage from Carthage soon brought the younger Heraclius in front of Constantinople. The inconstant clergy, senate, and people of the city joined him, the usurper was seized in his palace and beheaded. INVASION OF CHOSROES. But the revolution that had taken place in Constantinople did not arrest the movements of the Persian king. His Magian priests had warned him to act independently of the Greeks, whose superstition, they declared, was devoid of all truth and justice. Chosroes, therefore, crossed the Euphrates; his army was received with transport by the Syrian sectaries, insurrections in his favor everywhere breaking out. In succession, Antioch, Caesarea, Damascus fell; Jerusalem itself was taken by storm; the sepulchre of Christ, the churches of Constantine and of Helena were given to the flames; the Savior's cross was sent as a trophy to Persia; the churches were rifled of their riches; the sacred relics, collected by superstition, were dispersed. Egypt was invaded, conquered, and annexed to the Persian Empire; the Patriarch of Alexandria escaped by flight to Cyprus; the African coast to Tripoli was seized. On the north, Asia Minor was subdued, and for ten years the Persian forces encamped on the shores of the Bosporus, in front of Constantinople. In his extremity Heraclius begged for peace. "I will never give peace to the Emperor of Rome," replied the proud Persian, "till he has abjured his crucified God, and embraced the worship of the sun." After a long delay terms were, however, secured, and the Roman Empire was ransomed at the price of "a thousand talents of gold, a thousand talents of silver, a thousand silk robes, a thousand horses, and a thousand virgins." But Heraclius submitted only for a moment. He found means not only to restore his affairs but to retaliate on the Persian Empire. The operations by which he achieved this result were worthy of the most brilliant days of Rome. INVASION OF CHOSROES Though her military renown was thus recovered, though her territory was regained, there was something that the Roman Empire had irrecoverably lost. Religious faith could never be restored. In face of the world Magianism had insulted Christianity, by profaning her most sacred places--Bethlehem, Gethsemane, Calvary--by burning the sepulchre of Christ, by rifling and destroying the churches, by scattering to the winds priceless relics, by carrying off, with shouts of laughter, the cross. Miracles had once abounded in Syria, in Egypt, in Asia Minor; there was not a church which had not its long catalogue of them. Very often they were displayed on unimportant occasions and in insignificant cases. In this supreme moment, when such aid was most urgently demanded, not a miracle was worked. Amazement filled the Christian populations of the East when they witnessed these Persian sacrileges perpetrated with impunity. The heavens should have rolled asunder, the earth should have opened her abysses, the sword of the Almighty should have flashed in the sky, the fate of Sennacherib should have been repeated. But it was not so. In the land of miracles, amazement was followed by consternation--consternation died out in disbelief. 2. But, dreadful as it was, the Persian conquest was but a prelude to the great event, the story of which we have now to relate--the Southern revolt against Christianity. Its issue was the loss of nine-tenths of her geographical possessions--Asia, Africa, and part of Europe. MOHAMMED. In the summer of 581 of the Christian era, there came to Bozrah, a town on the confines of Syria, south of Damascus, a caravan of camels. It was from Mecca, and was laden with the costly products of South Arabia--Arabia the Happy. The conductor of the caravan, one Abou Taleb, and his nephew, a lad of twelve years, were hospitably received and entertained at the Nestorian convent of the town. The monks of this convent soon found that their young visitor, Halibi or Mohammed, was the nephew of the guardian of the Caaba, the sacred temple of the Arabs. One of them, by name Bahira, spared no pains to secure his conversion from the idolatry in which he had been brought up. He found the boy not only precociously intelligent, but eagerly desirous of information, especially on matters relating to religion. In Mohammed's own country the chief object of Meccan worship was a black meteoric stone, kept in the Caaba, with three hundred and sixty subordinate idols, representing the days of the year, as the year was then counted. At this time, as we have seen, the Christian Church, through the ambition and wickedness of its clergy, had been brought into a condition of anarchy. Councils had been held on various pretenses, while the real motives were concealed. Too often they were scenes of violence, bribery, corruption. In the West, such were the temptations of riches, luxury, and power, presented by the episcopates, that the election of a bishop was often disgraced by frightful murders. In the East, in consequence of the policy of the court of Constantinople, the Church had been torn in pieces by contentions and schisms. Among a countless host of disputants may be mentioned Arians, Basilidians, Carpocratians, Collyridians, Eutychians, Gnostics, Jacobites, Marcionites, Marionites, Nestorians, Sabellians, Valentinians. Of these, the Marionites regarded the Trinity as consisting of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Virgin Mary; the Collyridians worshiped the Virgin as a divinity, offering her sacrifices of cakes; the Nestorians, as we have seen, denied that God had "a mother." They prided themselves on being the inheritors, the possessors of the science of old Greece. But, though they were irreconcilable in matters of faith, there was one point in which all these sects agreed--ferocious hatred and persecution of each other. Arabia, an unconquered land of liberty, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Desert of Syria, gave them all, as the tide of fortune successively turned, a refuge. It had been so from the old times. Thither, after the Roman conquest of Palestine, vast numbers of Jews escaped; thither, immediately after his conversion, St. Paul tells the Galatians that he retired. The deserts were now filled with Christian anchorites, and among the chief tribes of the Arabs many proselytes had been made. Here and there churches had been built. The Christian princes of Abyssinia, who were Nestorians, held the southern province of Arabia--Yemen--in possession. By the monk Bahira, in the convent at Bozrah, Mohammed was taught the tenets of the Nestorians; from them the young Arab learned the story of their persecutions. It was these interviews which engendered in him a hatred of the idolatrous practices of the Eastern Church, and indeed of all idolatry; that taught him, in his wonderful career, never to speak of Jesus as the Son of God, but always as "Jesus, the son of Mary." His untutored but active mind could not fail to be profoundly impressed not only with the religious but also with the philosophical ideas of his instructors, who gloried in being the living representatives of Aristotelian science. His subsequent career shows how completely their religious thoughts had taken possession of him, and repeated acts manifest his affectionate regard for them. His own life was devoted to the expansion and extension of their theological doctrine, and, that once effectually established, his successors energetically adopted and diffused their scientific, their Aristotelian opinions. As Mohammed grew to manhood, he made other expeditions to Syria. Perhaps, we may suppose, that on these occasions the convent and its hospitable in mates were not forgotten. He had a mysterious reverence for that country. A wealthy Meccan widow Chadizah, had intrusted him with the care of her Syrian trade. She was charmed with his capacity and fidelity, and (since he is said to have been characterized by the possession of singular manly beauty and a most courteous demeanor) charmed with his person. The female heart in all ages and countries is the same. She caused a slave to intimate to him what was passing in her mind, and, for the remaining twenty-four years of her life, Mohammed was her faithful husband. In a land of polygamy, he never insulted her by the presence of a rival. Many years subsequently, in the height of his power, Ayesha, who was one of the most beautiful women in Arabia, said to him: "Was she not old? Did not God give you in me a better wife in her place?" "No, by God!" exclaimed Mohammed, and with a burst of honest gratitude, "there never can be a better. She believed in me when men despised me, she relieved me when I was poor and persecuted by the world." His marriage with Chadizah placed him in circumstances of ease, and gave him an opportunity of indulging his inclination to religious meditation. It so happened that her cousin Waraka, who was a Jew, had turned Christian. He was the first to translate the Bible into Arabic. By his conversation Mohammed's detestation of idolatry was confirmed. After the example of the Christian anchorites in their hermitages in the desert, Mohammed retired to a grotto in Mount Hera, a few miles from Mecca, giving himself up to meditation and prayer. In this seclusion, contemplating the awful attributes of the Omnipotent and Eternal God, he addressed to his conscience the solemn inquiry, whether he could adopt the dogmas then held in Asiatic Christendom respecting the Trinity, the sonship of Jesus as begotten by the Almighty, the character of Mary as at once a virgin, a mother, and the queen of heaven, without incurring the guilt and the peril of blasphemy. By his solitary meditations in the grotto Mohammed was drawn to the conclusion that, through the cloud of dogmas and disputations around him, one great truth might be discerned--the unity of God. Leaning against the stem of a palm-tree, he unfolded his views on this subject to his neighbors and friends, and announced to them that he should dedicate his life to the preaching of that truth. Again and again, in his sermons and in the Koran, he declared: "I am nothing but a public preacher.... I preach the oneness of God." Such was his own conception of his so-called apostleship. Henceforth, to the day of his death, he wore on his finger a seal-ring on which was engraved, "Mohammed, the messenger of God." VICTORIES OF MOHAMMED. It is well known among physicians that prolonged fasting and mental anxiety inevitably give rise to hallucination. Perhaps there never has been any religious system introduced by self-denying, earnest men that did not offer examples of supernatural temptations and supernatural commands. Mysterious voices encouraged the Arabian preacher to persist in his determination; shadows of strange forms passed before him. He heard sounds in the air like those of a distant bell. In a nocturnal dream he was carried by Gabriel from Mecca to Jerusalem, and thence in succession through the six heavens. Into the seventh the angel feared to intrude and Mohammed alone passed into the dread cloud that forever enshrouds the Almighty. "A shiver thrilled his heart as he felt upon his shoulder the touch of the cold hand of God." His public ministrations met with much resistance and little success at first. Expelled from Mecca by the upholders of the prevalent idolatry, he sought refuge in Medina, a town in which there were many Jews and Nestorians; the latter at once became proselytes to his faith. He had already been compelled to send his daughter and others of his disciples to Abyssinia, the king of which was a Nestorian Christian. At the end of six years he had made only fifteen hundred converts. But in three little skirmishes, magnified in subsequent times by the designation of the battles of Beder, of Ohud, and of the Nations, Mohammed discovered that his most convincing argument was his sword. Afterward, with Oriental eloquence, he said, "Paradise will be found in the shadow of the crossing of swords." By a series of well-conducted military operations, his enemies were completely overthrown. Arabian idolatry was absolutely exterminated; the doctrine he proclaimed, that "there is but one God," was universally adopted by his countrymen, and his own apostleship accepted. DEATH OF MOHAMMED. Let us pass over his stormy life, and hear what he says when, on the pinnacle of earthly power and glory, he was approaching its close. Steadfast in his declaration of the unity of God, he departed from Medina on his last pilgrimage to Mecca, at the head of one hundred and fourteen thousand devotees, with camels decorated with garlands of flowers and fluttering streamers. When he approached the holy city, he uttered the solemn invocation: "Here am I in thy service, O God! Thou hast no companion. To thee alone belongeth worship. Thine alone is the kingdom. There is none to share it with thee." With his own hand he offered up the camels in sacrifice. He considered that primeval institution to be equally sacred as prayer, and that no reason can be alleged in support of the one which is not equally strong in support of the other. From the pulpit of the Caaba he reiterated, "O my hearers, I am only a man like yourselves." They remembered that he had once said to one who approached him with timid steps: "Of what dost thou stand in awe? I am no king. I am nothing but the son of an Arab woman, who ate flesh dried in the sun." He returned to Medina to die. In his farewell to his congregation, he said: "Every thing happens according to the will of God, and has its appointed time, which can neither be hastened nor avoided. I return to him who sent me, and my last command to you is, that ye love, honor, and uphold each other, that ye exhort each other to faith and constancy in belief, and to the performance of pious deeds. My life has been for your good, and so will be my death." In his dying agony, his head was reclined on the lap of Ayesha. From time to time he had dipped his hand in a vase of water, and moistened his face. At last he ceased, and, gazing steadfastly upward, said, in broken accents: "O God--forgive my sins--be it so. I come." Shall we speak of this man with disrespect? His precepts are, at this day, the religious guide of one-third of the human race. DOCTRINES OF MOHAMMED. In Mohammed, who had already broken away from the ancient idolatrous worship of his native country, preparation had been made for the rejection of those tenets which his Nestorian teachers had communicated to him, inconsistent with reason and conscience. And, though, in the first pages of the Koran, he declares his belief in what was delivered to Moses and Jesus, and his reverence for them personally, his veneration for the Almighty is perpetually displayed. He is horror-stricken at the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus, the Worship of Mary as the mother of God, the adoration of images and paintings, in his eyes a base idolatry. He absolutely rejects the Trinity, of which he seems to have entertained the idea that it could not be interpreted otherwise than as presenting three distinct Gods. His first and ruling idea was simply religious reform--to overthrow Arabian idolatry, and put an end to the wild sectarianism of Christianity. That he proposed to set up a new religion was a calumny invented against him in Constantinople, where he was looked upon with detestation, like that with which in after ages Luther was regarded in Rome. But, though he rejected with indignation whatever might seem to disparage the doctrine of the unity of God, he was not able to emancipate himself from anthropomorphic conceptions. The God of the Koran is altogether human, both corporeally and mentally, if such expressions may with propriety be used. Very soon, however, the followers of Mohammed divested themselves of these base ideas and rose to nobler ones. The view here presented of the primitive character of Mohammedanism has long been adopted by many competent authorities. Sir William Jones, following Locke, regards the main point in the divergence of Mohammedanism from Christianity to consist "in denying vehemently the character of our Savior as the Son, and his equality as God with the Father, of whose unity and attributes the Mohammedans entertain and express the most awful ideas." This opinion has been largely entertained in Italy. Dante regarded Mohammed only as the author of a schism, and saw in Islamism only an Arian sect. In England, Whately views it as a corruption of Christianity. It was an offshoot of Nestorianism, and not until it had overthrown Greek Christianity in many great battles, was spreading rapidly over Asia and Africa, and had become intoxicated with its wonderful successes, did it repudiate its primitive limited intentions, and assert itself to be founded on a separate and distinct revelation. THE FIRST KHALIF. Mohammed's life had been almost entirely consumed in the conversion or conquest of his native country. Toward its close, however, he felt himself strong enough to threaten the invasion of Syria and Persia. He had made no provision for the perpetuation of his own dominion, and hence it was not without a struggle that a successor was appointed. At length Abubeker, the father of Ayesha, was selected. He was proclaimed the first khalif, or successor of the Prophet. There is a very important difference between the spread of Mohammedanism and the spread of Christianity. The latter was never sufficiently strong to over throw and extirpate idolatry in the Roman Empire. As it advanced, there was an amalgamation, a union. The old forms of the one were vivified by the new spirit of the other, and that paganization to which reference has already been made was the result. THE MOHAMMEDAN HEAVEN. But, in Arabia, Mohammed overthrew and absolutely annihilated the old idolatry. No trace of it is found in the doctrines preached by him and his successors. The black stone that had fallen from heaven--the meteorite of the Caaba--and its encircling idols, passed totally out of view. The essential dogma of the new faith--"There is but one God"--spread without any adulteration. Military successes had, in a worldly sense made the religion of the Koran profitable; and, no matter what dogmas may be, when that is the case, there will be plenty of converts. As to the popular doctrines of Mohammedanism, I shall here have nothing to say. The reader who is interested in that matter will find an account of them in a review of the Koran in the eleventh chapter of my "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe." It is enough now to remark that their heaven was arranged in seven stories, and was only a palace of Oriental carnal delight. It was filled with black-eyed concubines and servants. The form of God was, perhaps, more awful than that of paganized Christianity. Anthropomorphism will, however, never be obliterated from the ideas of the unintellectual. Their God, at the best, will never be any thing more than the gigantic shadow of a man--a vast phantom of humanity--like one of those Alpine spectres seen in the midst of the clouds by him who turns his back on the sun. Abubeker had scarcely seated himself in the khalifate, when he put forth the following proclamation: In the name of the most merciful God! Abubeker to the rest of the true believers, health and happiness. The mercy and blessing of God be upon you. I praise the most high God. I pray for his prophet Mohammed. INVASION OF SYRIA. "This is to inform you that I intend to send the true believers into Syria, to take it out of the hands of the infidels. And I would have you know that the fighting for religion is an act of obedience to God." On the first encounter, Khaled, the Saracen general, hard pressed, lifted up his hands in the midst of his army and said: "O God! these vile wretches pray with idolatrous expressions and take to themselves another God besides thee, but we acknowledge thy unity and affirm that there is no other God but thee alone. Help us, we beseech thee, for the sake of thy prophet Mohammed, against these idolaters." On the part of the Saracens the conquest of Syria was conducted with ferocious piety. The belief of the Syrian Christians aroused in their antagonists sentiments of horror and indignation. "I will cleave the skull of any blaspheming idolater who says that the Most Holy God, the Almighty and Eternal, has begotten a son." The Khalif Omar, who took Jerusalem, commences a letter to Heraclius, the Roman emperor: "In the name of the most merciful God! Praise be to God, the Lord of this and of the other world, who has neither female consort nor son." The Saracens nicknamed the Christians "Associators," because they joined Mary and Jesus as partners with the Almighty and Most Holy God. It was not the intention of the khalif to command his army; that duty was devolved on Abou Obeidah nominally, on Khaled in reality. In a parting review the khalif enjoined on his troops justice, mercy, and the observance of fidelity in their engagements he commanded them to abstain from all frivolous conversation and from wine, and rigorously to observe the hours of prayer; to be kind to the common people among whom they passed, but to show no mercy to their priests. FALL OF BOZRAH. Eastward of the river Jordan is Bozrah, a strong town where Mohammed had first met his Nestorian Christian instructors. It was one of the Roman forts with which the country was dotted over. Before this place the Saracen army encamped. The garrison was strong, the ramparts were covered with holy crosses and consecrated banners. It might have made a long defense. But its governor, Romanus, betrayed his trust, and stealthily opened its gates to the besiegers. His conduct shows to what a deplorable condition the population of Syria had come. After the surrender, in a speech he made to the people he had betrayed, he said: "I renounce your society, both in this world and that to come. And I deny him that was crucified, and whosoever worships him. And I choose God for my Lord, Islam for my faith, Mecca for my temple, the Moslems for my brethren, Mohammed for my prophet, who was sent to lead us in the right way, and to exalt the true religion in spite of those who join partners with God." Since the Persian invasion, Asia Minor, Syria, and even Palestine, were full of traitors and apostates, ready to join the Saracens. Romanus was but one of many thousands who had fallen into disbelief through the victories of the Persians. FALL OF DAMASCUS. From Bozrah it was only seventy miles northward to Damascus, the capital of Syria. Thither, without delay, the Saracen army marched. The city was at once summoned to take its option--conversion, tribute, or the sword. In his palace at Antioch, barely one hundred and fifty miles still farther north, the Emperor Heraclius received tidings of the alarming advance of his assailants. He at once dispatched an army of seventy thousand men. The Saracens were compelled to raise the siege. A battle took place in the plains of Aiznadin, the Roman army was overthrown and dispersed. Khaled reappeared before Damascus with his standard of the black eagle, and after a renewed investment of seventy days Damascus surrendered. From the Arabian historians of these events we may gather that thus far the Saracen armies were little better than a fanatic mob. Many of the men fought naked. It was not unusual for a warrior to stand forth in front and challenge an antagonist to mortal duel. Nay, more, even the women engaged in the combats. Picturesque narratives have been handed down to us relating the gallant manner in which they acquitted themselves. FALL OF JERUSALEM. From Damascus the Saracen army advanced northward, guided by the snow-clad peaks of Libanus and the beautiful river Orontes. It captured on its way Baalbec, the capital of the Syrian valley, and Emesa, the chief city of the eastern plain. To resist its further progress, Heraclius collected an army of one hundred and forty thousand men. A battle took place at Yermuck; the right wing of the Saracens was broken, but the soldiers were driven back to the field by the fanatic expostulations of their women. The conflict ended in the complete overthrow of the Roman army. Forty thousand were taken prisoners, and a vast number killed. The whole country now lay open to the victors. The advance of their army had been east of the Jordan. It was clear that, before Asia Minor could be touched, the strong and important cities of Palestine, which was now in their rear, must be secured. There was a difference of opinion among the generals in the field as to whether Caesarea or Jerusalem should be assailed first. The matter was referred to the khalif, who, rightly preferring the moral advantages of the capture of Jerusalem to the military advantages of the capture of Caesarea, ordered the Holy City to be taken, and that at any cost. Close siege was therefore laid to it. The inhabitants, remembering the atrocities inflicted by the Persians, and the indignities that had been offered to the Savior's sepulchre, prepared now for a vigorous defense. But, after an investment of four months, the Patriarch Sophronius appeared on the wall, asking terms of capitulation. There had been misunderstandings among the generals at the capture of Damascus, followed by a massacre of the fleeing inhabitants. Sophronius, therefore, stipulated that the surrender of Jerusalem should take place in presence of the khalif himself Accordingly, Omar, the khalif, came from Medina for that purpose. He journeyed on a red camel, carrying a bag of corn and one of dates, a wooden dish, and a leathern water-bottle. The Arab conqueror entered the Holy City riding by the side of the Christian patriarch and the transference of the capital of Christianity to the representative of Mohammedanism was effected without tumult or outrage. Having ordered that a mosque should be built on the site of the temple of Solomon, the khalif returned to the tomb of the Prophet at Medina. Heraclius saw plainly that the disasters which were fast settling on Christianity were due to the dissensions of its conflicting sects; and hence, while he endeavored to defend the empire with his armies, he sedulously tried to compose those differences. With this view he pressed for acceptance the Monothelite doctrine of the nature of Christ. But it was now too late. Aleppo and Antioch were taken. Nothing could prevent the Saracens from overrunning Asia Minor. Heraclius himself had to seek safety in flight. Syria, which had been added by Pompey the Great, the rival of Caesar, to the provinces of Rome, seven hundred years previously--Syria, the birthplace of Christianity, the scene of its most sacred and precious souvenirs, the land from which Heraclius himself had once expelled the Persian intruder--was irretrievably lost. Apostates and traitors had wrought this calamity. We are told that, as the ship which bore him to Constantinople parted from the shore, Heraclius gazed intently on the receding hills, and in the bitterness of anguish exclaimed, "Farewell, Syria, forever farewell!" It is needless to dwell on the remaining details of the Saracen conquest: how Tripoli and Tyre were betrayed; how Caesarea was captured; how with the trees of Libanus and the sailors of Phoenicia a Saracen fleet was equipped, which drove the Roman navy into the Hellespont; how Cyprus, Rhodes, and the Cyclades, were ravaged, and the Colossus, which was counted as one of the wonders of the world, sold to a Jew, who loaded nine hundred camels with its brass; how the armies of the khalif advanced to the Black Sea, and even lay in front of Constantinople--all this was as nothing after the fall of Jerusalem. OVERTHROW OF THE PERSIANS. The fall of Jerusalem! the loss of the metropolis of Christianity! In the ideas of that age the two antagonistic forms of faith had submitted themselves to the ordeal of the judgment of God. Victory had awarded the prize of battle, Jerusalem, to the Mohammedan; and, notwithstanding the temporary successes of the Crusaders, after much more than a thousand years in his hands it remains to this day. The Byzantine historians are not without excuse for the course they are condemned for taking: "They have wholly neglected the great topic of the ruin of the Eastern Church." And as for the Western Church, even the debased popes of the middle ages--the ages of the Crusades--could not see without indignation that they were compelled to rest the claims of Rome as the metropolis of Christendom on a false legendary story of a visit of St. Peter to that city; while the true metropolis, the grand, the sacred place of the birth, the life, the death of Christ himself, was in the hands of the infidels! It has not been the Byzantine historians alone who have tried to conceal this great catastrophe. The Christian writers of Europe on all manner of subjects, whether of history, religion, or science, have followed a similar course against their conquering antagonists. It has been their constant practice to hide what they could not depreciate, and depreciate what they could not hide. INVASION OF EGYPT. I have not space, nor indeed does it comport with the intention of this work, to relate, in such detail as I have given to the fall of Jerusalem, other conquests of the Saracens--conquests which eventually established a Mohammedan empire far exceeding in geographical extent that of Alexander, and even that of Rome. But, devoting a few words to this subject, it may be said that Magianism received a worse blow than that which had been inflicted on Christianity; The fate of Persia was settled at the battle of Cadesia. At the sack of Ctesiphon, the treasury, the royal arms, and an unlimited spoil, fell into the hands of the Saracens. Not without reason do they call the battle of Nehavend the "victory of victories." In one direction they advanced to the Caspian, in the other southward along the Tigris to Persepolis. The Persian king fled for his life over the great Salt Desert, from the columns and statues of that city which had lain in ruins since the night of the riotous banquet of Alexander. One division of the Arabian army forced the Persian monarch over the Oxus. He was assassinated by the Turks. His son was driven into China, and became a captain in the Chinese emperor's guards. The country beyond the Oxus was reduced. It paid a tribute of two million pieces of gold. While the emperor at Peking was demanding the friendship of the khalif at Medina, the standard of the Prophet was displayed on the banks of the Indus. Among the generals who had greatly distinguished themselves in the Syrian wars was Amrou, destined to be the conqueror of Egypt; for the khalifs, not content with their victories on the North and East, now turned their eyes to the West, and prepared for the annexation of Africa. As in the former cases, so in this, sectarian treason assisted them. The Saracen army was hailed as the deliverer of the Jacobite Church; the Monophysite Christians of Egypt, that is, they who, in the language of the Athanasian Creed, confounded the substance of the Son, proclaimed, through their leader, Mokaukas, that they desired no communion with the Greeks, either in this world or the next, that they abjured forever the Byzantine tyrant and his synod of Chalcedon. They hastened to pay tribute to the khalif, to repair the roads and bridges, and to supply provisions and intelligence to the invading army. FALL OF ALEXANDRIA. Memphis, one of the old Pharaonic capitals, soon fell, and Alexandria was invested. The open sea behind gave opportunity to Heraclius to reenforce the garrison continually. On his part, Omar, who was now khalif sent to the succor of the besieging army the veteran troops of Syria. There were many assaults and many sallies. In one Amrou himself was taken prisoner by the besieged, but, through the dexterity of a slave, made his escape. After a siege of fourteen months, and a loss of twenty-three thousand men, the Saracens captured the city. In his dispatch to the Khalif, Amrou enumerated the splendors of the great city of the West "its four thousand palaces, four thousand baths, four hundred theatres, twelve thousand shops for the sale of vegetable food, and forty thousand tributary Jews." So fell the second great city of Christendom--the fate of Jerusalem had fallen on Alexandria, the city of Athanasius, and Arius, and Cyril; the city that had imposed Trinitarian ideas and Mariolatry on the Church. In his palace at Constantinople Heraclius received the fatal tidings. He was overwhelmed with grief. It seemed as if his reign was to be disgraced by the downfall of Christianity. He lived scarcely a month after the loss of the town. But if Alexandria had been essential to Constantinople in the supply of orthodox faith, she was also essential in the supply of daily food. Egypt was the granary of the Byzantines. For this reason two attempts were made by powerful fleets and armies for the recovery of the place, and twice had Amrou to renew his conquest. He saw with what facility these attacks could be made, the place being open to the sea; he saw that there was but one and that a fatal remedy. "By the living God, if this thing be repeated a third time I will make Alexandria as open to anybody as is the house of a prostitute!" He was better than his word, for he forthwith dismantled its fortifications, and made it an untenable place. FALL OF CARTHAGE. It was not the intention of the khalifs to limit their conquest to Egypt. Othman contemplated the annexation of the entire North-African coast. His general, Abdallah, set out from Memphis with forty thousand men, passed through the desert of Barca, and besieged Tripoli. But, the plague breaking out in his army, he was compelled to retreat to Egypt. All attempts were now suspended for more than twenty years. Then Akbah forced his way from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean. In front of the Canary Islands he rode his horse into the sea, exclaiming: "Great God! if my course were not stopped by this sea, I would still go on to the unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of thy holy name, and putting to the sword the rebellious nations who worship any other gods than thee." These Saracen expeditions had been through the interior of the country, for the Byzantine emperors, controlling for the time the Mediterranean, had retained possession of the cities on the coast. The Khalif Abdalmalek at length resolved on the reduction of Carthage, the most important of those cities, and indeed the capital of North Africa. His general, Hassan, carried it by escalade; but reenforcements from Constantinople, aided by some Sicilian and Gothic troops, compelled him to retreat. The relief was, however, only temporary. Hassan, in the course of a few months renewed his attack. It proved successful, and he delivered Carthage to the flames. Jerusalem, Alexandria, Carthage, three out of the five great Christian capitals, were lost. The fall of Constantinople was only a question of time. After its fall, Rome alone remained. In the development of Christianity, Carthage had played no insignificant part. It had given to Europe its Latin form of faith, and some of its greatest theologians. It was the home of St. Augustine. Never in the history of the world had there been so rapid and extensive a propagation of any religion as Mohammedanism. It was now dominating from the Altai Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean, from the centre of Asia to the western verge of Africa. CONQUEST OF SPAIN. The Khalif Alwalid next authorized the invasion of Europe, the conquest of Andalusia, or the Region of the Evening. Musa, his general, found, as had so often been the case elsewhere, two effective allies sectarianism and treason--the Archbishop of Toledo and Count Julian the Gothic general. Under their lead, in the very crisis of the battle of Xeres, a large portion of the army went over to the invaders; the Spanish king was compelled to flee from the field, and in the pursuit he was drowned in the waters of the Guadalquivir. With great rapidity Tarik, the lieutenant of Musa, pushed forward from the battle-field to Toledo, and thence northward. On the arrival of Musa the reduction of the Spanish peninsula was completed, and the wreck of the Gothic army driven beyond the Pyrenees into France. Considering the conquest of Spain as only the first step in his victories, he announced his intention of forcing his way into Italy, and preaching the unity of God in the Vatican. Thence he would march to Constantinople, and, having put all end to the Roman Empire and Christianity, would pass into Asia and lay his victorious sword on the footstool of the khalif at Damascus. But this was not to be. Musa, envious of his lieutenant, Tarik, had treated him with great indignity. The friends of Tarik at the court of the khalif found means of retaliation. An envoy from Damascus arrested Musa in his camp; he was carried before his sovereign, disgraced by a public whipping, and died of a broken heart. INVASION OF FRANCE. Under other leaders, however, the Saracen conquest of France was attempted. In a preliminary campaign the country from the mouth of the Garonne to that of the Loire was secured. Then Abderahman, the Saracen commander, dividing his forces into two columns, with one on the east passed the Rhone, and laid siege to Arles. A Christian army, attempting the relief of the place, was defeated with heavy loss. His western column, equally successful, passed the Dordogne, defeated another Christian army, inflicting on it such dreadful loss that, according to its own fugitives, "God alone could number the slain." All Central France was now overrun; the banks of the Loire were reached; the churches and monasteries were despoiled of their treasures; and the tutelar saints, who had worked so many miracles when there was no necessity, were found to want the requisite power when it was so greatly needed. The progress of the invaders was at length stopped by Charles Martel (A.D. 732). Between Tours and Poictiers, a great battle, which lasted seven days, was fought. Abderahman was killed, the Saracens retreated, and soon afterward were compelled to recross the Pyrenees. The banks of the Loire, therefore, mark the boundary of the Mohammedan advance in Western Europe. Gibbon, in his narrative of these great events, makes this remark: "A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire--a repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland." INSULT TO ROME. It is not necessary for me to add to this sketch of the military diffusion of Mohammedanism, the operations of the Saracens on the Mediterranean Sea, their conquest of Crete and Sicily, their insult to Rome. It will be found, however, that their presence in Sicily and the south of Italy exerted a marked influence on the intellectual development of Europe. Their insult to Rome! What could be more humiliating than the circumstances under which it took place (A.D. 846)? An insignificant Saracen expedition entered the Tiber and appeared before the walls of the city. Too weak to force an entrance, it insulted and plundered the precincts, sacrilegiously violating the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul. Had the city itself been sacked, the moral effect could not have been greater. From the church of St. Peter its altar of silver was torn away and sent to Africa--St. Peter's altar, the very emblem of Roman Christianity! Constantinople had already been besieged by the Saracens more than once; its fall was predestined, and only postponed. Rome had received the direst insult, the greatest loss that could be inflicted upon it; the venerable churches of Asia Minor had passed out of existence; no Christian could set his foot in Jerusalem without permission; the Mosque of Omar stood on the site of the Temple of Solomon. Among the ruins of Alexandria the Mosque of Mercy marked the spot where a Saracen general, satiated with massacre, had, in contemptuous compassion, spared the fugitive relics of the enemies of Mohammed; nothing remained of Carthage but her blackened ruins. The most powerful religious empire that the world had ever seen had suddenly come into existence. It stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Chinese Wall, from the shores of the Caspian to those of the Indian Ocean, and yet, in one sense, it had not reached its culmination. The day was to come when it was to expel the successors of the Caesars from their capital, and hold the peninsula of Greece in subjection, to dispute with Christianity the empire of Europe in the very centre of that continent, and in Africa to extend its dogmas and faith across burning deserts and through pestilential forests from the Mediterranean to regions southward far beyond the equinoctial line. DISSENSIONS OF THE ARABS. But, though Mohammedanism had not reached its culmination, the dominion of the khalifs had. Not the sword of Charles Martel, but the internal dissension of the vast Arabian Empire, was the salvation of Europe. Though the Ommiade Khalifs were popular in Syria, elsewhere they were looked upon as intruders or usurpers; the kindred of the apostle was considered to be the rightful representative of his faith. Three parties, distinguished by their colors, tore the khalifate asunder with their disputes, and disgraced it by their atrocities. The color of the Ommiades was white, that of the Fatimites green, that of the Abassides black; the last represented the party of Abbas, the uncle of Mohammed. The result of these discords was a tripartite division of the Mohammedan Empire in the tenth century into the khalifates of Bagdad, of Cairoan, and of Cordova. Unity in Mohammedan political action was at an end, and Christendom found its safeguard, not in supernatural help, but in the quarrels of the rival potentates. To internal animosities foreign pressures were eventually added and Arabism, which had done so much for the intellectual advancement of the world, came to an end when the Turks and the Berbers attained to power. The Saracens had become totally regardless of European opposition--they were wholly taken up with their domestic quarrels. Ockley says with truth, in his history: "The Saracens had scarce a deputy lieutenant or general that would not have thought it the greatest affront, and such as ought to stigmatize him with indelible disgrace, if he should have suffered himself to have been insulted by the united forces of all Europe. And if any one asks why the Greeks did not exert themselves more, in order to the extirpation of these insolent invaders, it is a sufficient answer to any person that is acquainted with the characters of those men to say that Amrou kept his residence at Alexandria, and Moawyah at Damascus." As to their contempt, this instance may suffice: Nicephorus, the Roman emperor, had sent to the Khalif Haroun-al-Raschid a threatening letter, and this was the reply: "In the name of the most merciful God, Haroun-al-Raschid, commander of the faithful, to Nicephorus, the Roman dog! I have read thy letter, O thou son of an unbelieving mother. Thou shalt not hear, thou shalt behold my reply!" It was written in letters of blood and fire on the plains of Phrygia. POLITICAL EFFECT OF POLYGAMY. A nation may recover the confiscation of its provinces, the confiscation of its wealth; it may survive the imposition of enormous war-fines; but it never can recover from that most frightful of all war-acts, the confiscation of its women. When Abou Obeidah sent to Omar news of his capture of Antioch, Omar gently upbraided him that he had not let the troops have the women. "If they want to marry in Syria, let them; and let them have as many female slaves as they have occasion for." It was the institution of polygamy, based upon the confiscation of the women in the vanquished countries, that secured forever the Mohammedan rule. The children of these unions gloried in their descent from their conquering fathers. No better proof can be given of the efficacy of this policy than that which is furnished by North Africa. The irresistible effect of polygamy in consolidating the new order of things was very striking. In little more than a single generation, the Khalif was informed by his officers that the tribute must cease, for all the children born in that region were Mohammedans, and all spoke Arabic. MOHAMMEDANISM. Mohammedanism, as left by its founder, was an anthropomorphic religion. Its God was only a gigantic man, its heaven a mansion of carnal pleasures. From these imperfect ideas its more intelligent classes very soon freed themselves, substituting for them others more philosophical, more correct. Eventually they attained to an accordance with those that have been pronounced in our own times by the Vatican Council as orthodox. Thus Al-Gazzali says: "A knowledge of God cannot be obtained by means of the knowledge a man has of himself, or of his own soul. The attributes of God cannot be determined from the attributes of man. His sovereignty and government can neither be compared nor measured." CHAPTER IV. THE RESTORATION OF SCIENCE IN THE SOUTH. By the influence of the Nestorians and Jews, the Arabians are turned to the cultivation of Science.--They modify their views as to the destiny of man, and obtain true conceptions respecting the structure of the world.--They ascertain the size of the earth, and determine its shape.-- Their khalifs collect great libraries, patronize every department of science and literature, establish astronomical observatories.--They develop the mathematical sciences, invent algebra, and improve geometry and trigonometry.--They collect and translate the old Greek mathematical and astronomical works, and adopt the inductive method of Aristotle.--They establish many colleges, and, with the aid of the Nestorians, organize a public-school system.--They introduce the Arabic numerals and arithmetic, and catalogue and give names to the stars.--They lay the foundation of modern astronomy, chemistry, and physics, and introduce great improvements in agriculture and manufactures. "IN the course of my long life," said the Khalif Ali, "I have often observed that men are more like the times they live in than they are like their fathers." This profoundly philosophical remark of the son-in-law of Mohammed is strictly true; for, though the personal, the bodily lineaments of a man may indicate his parentage, the constitution of his mind, and therefore the direction of his thoughts, is determined by the environment in which he lives. When Amrou, the lieutenant of the Khalif Omar, conquered Egypt, and annexed it to the Saracenic Empire, he found in Alexandria a Greek grammarian, John surnamed Philoponus, or the Labor-lover. Presuming on the friendship which had arisen between them, the Greek solicited as a gift the remnant of the great library--a remnant which war and time and bigotry had spared. Amrou, therefore, sent to the khalif to ascertain his pleasure. "If," replied the khalif, "the books agree with the Koran, the Word of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree with it, they are pernicious. Let them be destroyed." Accordingly, they were distributed among the baths of Alexandria, and it is said that six months were barely sufficient to consume them. Although the fact has been denied, there can be little doubt that Omar gave this order. The khalif was an illiterate man; his environment was an environment of fanaticism and ignorance. Omar's act was an illustration of Ali's remark. THE ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY BURNT. But it must not be supposed that the books which John the Labor-lover coveted were those which constituted the great library of the Ptolemies, and that of Eumenes, King of Pergamus. Nearly a thousand years had elapsed since Philadelphus began his collection. Julius Caesar had burnt more than half; the Patriarchs of Alexandria had not only permitted but superintended the dispersion of almost all the rest. Orosius expressly states that he saw the empty cases or shelves of the library twenty years after Theophilus, the uncle of St. Cyril, had procured from the Emperor Theodosius a rescript for its destruction. Even had this once noble collection never endured such acts of violence, the mere wear and tear, and perhaps, I may add, the pilfering of a thousand years, would have diminished it sadly. Though John, as the surname he received indicates, might rejoice in a superfluity of occupation, we may be certain that the care of a library of half a million books would transcend even his well-tried powers; and the cost of preserving and supporting it, that had demanded the ample resources of the Ptolemies and the Caesars, was beyond the means of a grammarian. Nor is the time required for its combustion or destruction any indication of the extent of the collection. Of all articles of fuel, parchment is, perhaps, the most wretched. Paper and papyrus do excellently well as kindling-materials, but we may be sure that the bath-men of Alexandria did not resort to parchment so long as they could find any thing else, and of parchment a very large portion of these books was composed. There can, then, be no more doubt that Omar did order the destruction of this library, under an impression of its uselessness or its irreligious tendency, than that the Crusaders burnt the library of Tripoli, fancifully said to have consisted of three million volumes. The first apartment entered being found to contain nothing but the Koran, all the other books were supposed to be the works of the Arabian impostor, and were consequently committed to the flames. In both cases the story contains some truth and much exaggeration. Bigotry, however, has often distinguished itself by such exploits. The Spaniards burnt in Mexico vast piles of American picture-writings, an irretrievable loss; and Cardinal Ximenes delivered to the flames, in the squares of Granada, eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts, many of them translations of classical authors. We have seen how engineering talent, stimulated by Alexander's Persian campaign, led to a wonderful development of pure science under the Ptolemies; a similar effect may be noted as the result of the Saracenic military operations. The friendship contracted by Amrou, the conqueror of Egypt, with John the Grammarian, indicates how much the Arabian mind was predisposed to liberal ideas. Its step from the idolatry of the Caaba to the monotheism of Mohammed prepared it to expatiate in the wide and pleasing fields of literature and philosophy. There were two influences to which it was continually exposed. They conspired in determining its path. These were--1. That of the Nestorians in Syria; 2. That of the Jews in Egypt. INFLUENCE OF THE NESTORIANS AND JEWS. In the last chapter I have briefly related the persecution of Nestor and his disciples. They bore testimony to the oneness of God, through many sufferings and martyrdoms. They utterly repudiated an Olympus filled with gods and goddesses. "Away from us a queen of heaven!" Such being their special views, the Nestorians found no difficulty in affiliating with their Saracen conquerors, by whom they were treated not only with the highest respect, but intrusted with some of the most important offices of the state. Mohammed, in the strongest manner, prohibited his followers from committing any injuries against them. Jesuiabbas, their pontiff, concluded treaties both with the Prophet and with Omar, and subsequently the Khalif Haroun-al-Raschid placed all his public schools under the superintendence of John Masue, a Nestorian. To the influence of the Nestorians that of the Jews was added. When Christianity displayed a tendency to unite itself with paganism, the conversion of the Jews was arrested; it totally ceased when Trinitarian ideas were introduced. The cities of Syria and Egypt were full of Jews. In Alexandria alone, at the time of its capture by Amrou, there were forty thousand who paid tribute. Centuries of misfortune and persecution had served only to confirm them in their monotheism, and to strengthen that implacable hatred of idolatry which they had cherished ever since the Babylonian captivity. Associated with the Nestorians, they translated into Syriac many Greek and Latin philosophical works, which were retranslated into Arabic. While the Nestorian was occupied with the education of the children of the great Mohammedan families, the Jew found his way into them in the character of a physician. FATALISM OF THE ARABIANS. Under these influences the ferocious fanaticism of the Saracens abated, their manners were polished, their thoughts elevated. They overran the realms of Philosophy and Science as quickly as they had overrun the provinces of the Roman Empire. They abandoned the fallacies of vulgar Mohammedanism, accepting in their stead scientific truth. In a world devoted to idolatry, the sword of the Saracen had vindicated the majesty of God. The doctrine of fatalism, inculcated by the Koran, had powerfully contributed to that result. "No man can anticipate or postpone his predetermined end. Death will overtake us even in lofty towers. From the beginning God hath settled the place in which each man shall die." In his figurative language the Arab said: "No man can by flight escape his fate. The Destinies ride their horses by night.... Whether asleep in bed or in the storm of battle, the angel of death will find thee." "I am convinced," said Ali, to whose wisdom we have already referred--"I am convinced that the affairs of men go by divine decree, and not by our administration." The Mussulmen are those who submissively resign themselves to the will of God. They reconciled fate and free-will by saying, "The outline is given us, we color the picture of life as we will." They said that, if we would overcome the laws of Nature, we must not resist, we must balance them against each other. This dark doctrine prepared its devotees for the accomplishment of great things--things such as the Saracens did accomplish. It converted despair into resignation, and taught men to disdain hope. There was a proverb among them that "Despair is a freeman, Hope is a slave." But many of the incidents of war showed plainly that medicines may assuage pain, that skill may close wounds, that those who are incontestably dying may be snatched from the grave. The Jewish physician became a living, an accepted protest against the fatalism of the Koran. By degrees the sternness of predestination was mitigated, and it was admitted that in individual life there is an effect due to free-will; that by his voluntary acts man may within certain limits determine his own course. But, so far as nations are concerned, since they can yield no personal accountability to God, they are placed under the control of immutable law. In this respect the contrast between the Christian and the Mohammedan nations was very striking: The Christian was convinced of incessant providential interventions; he believed that there was no such thing as law in the government of the world. By prayers and entreaties he might prevail with God to change the current of affairs, or, if that failed, he might succeed with Christ, or perhaps with the Virgin Mary, or through the intercession of the saints, or by the influence of their relics or bones. If his own supplications were unavailing, he might obtain his desire through the intervention of his priest, or through that of the holy men of the Church, and especially if oblations or gifts of money were added. Christendom believed that she could change the course of affairs by influencing the conduct of superior beings. Islam rested in a pious resignation to the unchangeable will of God. The prayer of the Christian was mainly an earnest intercession for benefits hoped for, that of the Saracen a devout expression of gratitude for the past. Both substituted prayer for the ecstatic meditation of India. To the Christian the progress of the world was an exhibition of disconnected impulses, of sudden surprises. To the Mohammedan that progress presented a very different aspect. Every corporeal motion was due to some preceding motion; every thought to some preceding thought; every historical event was the offspring of some preceding event; every human action was the result of some foregone and accomplished action. In the long annals of our race, nothing has ever been abruptly introduced. There has been an orderly, an inevitable sequence from event to event. There is an iron chain of destiny, of which the links are facts; each stands in its preordained place--not one has ever been disturbed, not one has ever been removed. Every man came into the world without his own knowledge, he is to depart from it perhaps against his own wishes. Then let him calmly fold his hands, and expect the issues of fate. Coincidently with this change of opinion as to the government of individual life, there came a change as respects the mechanical construction of the world. According to the Koran, the earth is a square plane, edged with vast mountains, which serve the double purpose of balancing it in its seat, and of sustaining the dome of the sky. Our devout admiration of the power and wisdom of God should be excited by the spectacle of this vast crystalline brittle expanse, which has been safely set in its position without so much as a crack or any other injury. Above the sky, and resting on it, is heaven, built in seven stories, the uppermost being the habitation of God, who, under the form of a gigantic man, sits on a throne, having on either side winged bulls, like those in the palaces of old Assyrian kings. THEY MEASURE THE EARTH. These ideas, which indeed are not peculiar to Mohammedanism, but are entertained by all men in a certain stage of their intellectual development as religious revelations, were very quickly exchanged by the more advanced Mohammedans for others scientifically correct. Yet, as has been the case in Christian countries, the advance was not made without resistance on the part of the defenders of revealed truth. Thus when Al-Mamun, having become acquainted with the globular form of the earth, gave orders to his mathematicians and astronomers to measure a degree of a great circle upon it, Takyuddin, one of the most celebrated doctors of divinity of that time, denounced the wicked khalif, declaring that God would assuredly punish him for presumptuously interrupting the devotions of the faithful by encouraging and diffusing a false and atheistical philosophy among them. Al-Mamun, however, persisted. On the shores of the Red Sea, in the plains of Shinar, by the aid of an astrolabe, the elevation of the pole above the horizon was determined at two stations on the same meridian, exactly one degree apart. The distance between the two stations was then measured, and found to be two hundred thousand Hashemite cubits; this gave for the entire circumference of the earth about twenty-four thousand of our miles, a determination not far from the truth. But, since the spherical form could not be positively asserted from one such measurement, the khalif caused another to be made near Cufa in Mesopotamia. His astronomers divided themselves into two parties, and, starting from a given point, each party measured an arc of one degree, the one northward, the other southward. Their result is given in cubits. If the cubit employed was that known as the royal cubit, the length of a degree was ascertained within one-third of a mile of its true value. From these measures the khalif concluded that the globular form was established. THEIR PASSION FOR SCIENCE. It is remarkable how quickly the ferocious fanaticism of the Saracens was transformed into a passion for intellectual pursuits. At first the Koran was an obstacle to literature and science. Mohammed had extolled it as the grandest of all compositions, and had adduced its unapproachable excellence as a proof of his divine mission. But, in little more than twenty years after his death, the experience that had been acquired in Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, Egypt, had produced a striking effect, and Ali the khalif reigning at that time, avowedly encouraged all kinds of literary pursuits. Moawyah, the founder of the Ommiade dynasty, who followed in 661, revolutionized the government. It had been elective, he made it hereditary. He removed its seat from Medina to a more central position at Damascus, and entered on a career of luxury and magnificence. He broke the bonds of a stern fanaticism, and put himself forth as a cultivator and patron of letters. Thirty years had wrought a wonderful change. A Persian satrap who had occasion to pay homage to Omar, the second khalif, found him asleep among the beggars on the steps of the Mosque of Medina; but foreign envoys who had occasion to seek Moawyah, the sixth khalif, were presented to him in a magnificent palace, decorated with exquisite arabesques, and adorned with flower-gardens and fountains. THEIR LITERATURE. In less than a century after the death of Mohammed, translations of the chief Greek philosophical authors had been made into Arabic; poems such as the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," being considered to have an irreligious tendency from their mythological allusions, were rendered into Syriac, to gratify the curiosity of the learned. Almansor, during his khalifate (A.D. 753-775), transferred the seat of government to Bagdad, which he converted into a splendid metropolis; he gave much of his time to the study and promotion of astronomy, and established schools of medicine and law. His grandson, Haroun-al-Raschid (A.D. 786), followed his example, and ordered that to every mosque in his dominions a school should be attached. But the Augustan age of Asiatic learning was during the khalifate of Al-Mamun (A.D. 813-832). He made Bagdad the centre of science, collected great libraries, and surrounded himself with learned men. The elevated taste thus cultivated continued after the division of the Saracen Empire by internal dissensions into three parts. The Abasside dynasty in Asia, the Fatimite in Egypt, and the Ommiade in Spain, became rivals not merely in politics, but also in letters and science. THEY ORIGINATE CHEMISTRY. In letters the Saracens embraced every topic that can amuse or edify the mind. In later times, it was their boast that they had produced more poets than all other nations combined. In science their great merit consists in this, that they cultivated it after the manner of the Alexandrian Greeks, not after the manner of the European Greeks. They perceived that it can never be advanced by mere speculation; its only sure progress is by the practical interrogation of Nature. The essential characteristics of their method are experiment and observation. Geometry and the mathematical sciences they looked upon as instruments of reasoning. In their numerous writings on mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, it is interesting to remark that the solution of a problem is always obtained by performing an experiment, or by an instrumental observation. It was this that made them the originators of chemistry, that led them to the invention of all kinds of apparatus for distillation, sublimation, fusion, filtration, etc.; that in astronomy caused them to appeal to divided instruments, as quadrants and astrolabes; in chemistry, to employ the balance, the theory of which they were perfectly familiar with; to construct tables of specific gravities and astronomical tables, as those of Bagdad, Spain, Samarcand; that produced their great improvements in geometry, trigonometry, the invention of algebra, and the adoption of the Indian numeration in arithmetic. Such were the results of their preference of the inductive method of Aristotle, their declining the reveries of Plato. THEIR GREAT LIBRARIES. For the establishment and extension of the public libraries, books were sedulously collected. Thus the khalif Al-Mamun is reported to have brought into Bagdad hundreds of camel-loads of manuscripts. In a treaty he made with the Greek emperor, Michael III., he stipulated that one of the Constantinople libraries should be given up to him. Among the treasures he thus acquired was the treatise of Ptolemy on the mathematical construction of the heavens. He had it forthwith translated into Arabic, under the title of "Al-magest." The collections thus acquired sometimes became very large; thus the Fatimite Library at Cairo contained one hundred thousand volumes, elegantly transcribed and bound. Among these, there were six thousand five hundred manuscripts on astronomy and medicine alone. The rules of this library permitted the lending out of books to students resident at Cairo. It also contained two globes, one of massive silver and one of brass; the latter was said to have been constructed by Ptolemy, the former cost three thousand golden crowns. The great library of the Spanish khalifs eventually numbered six hundred thousand volumes; its catalogue alone occupied forty-four. Besides this, there were seventy public libraries in Andalusia. The collections in the possession of individuals were sometimes very extensive. A private doctor refused the invitation of a Sultan of Bokhara because the carriage of his books would have required four hundred camels. There was in every great library a department for the copying or manufacture of translations. Such manufactures were also often an affair of private enterprise. Honian, a Nestorian physician, had an establishment of the kind at Bagdad (A.D. 850). He issued versions of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Galen, etc. As to original works, it was the custom of the authorities of colleges to require their professors to prepare treatises on prescribed topics. Every khalif had his own historian. Books of romances and tales, such as "The Thousand and One Arabian Nights' Entertainments," bear testimony to the creative fancy of the Saracens. Besides these, there were works on all kinds of subjects--history, jurisprudence, politics, philosophy, biographies not only of illustrious men, but also of celebrated horses and camels. These were issued without any censorship or restraint, though, in later times, works on theology required a license for publication. Books of reference abounded, geographical, statistical, medical, historical dictionaries, and even abridgments or condensations of them, as the "Encyclopedic Dictionary of all the Sciences," by Mohammed Abu Abdallah. Much pride was taken in the purity and whiteness of the paper, in the skillful intermixture of variously-colored inks, and in the illumination of titles by gilding and other adornments. The Saracen Empire was dotted all over with colleges. They were established in Mongolia, Tartary, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Morocco, Fez, Spain. At one extremity of this vast region, which far exceeded the Roman Empire in geographical extent, were the college and astronomical observatory of Samarcand, at the other the Giralda in Spain. Gibbon, referring to this patronage of learning, says: "The same royal prerogative was claimed by the independent emirs of the provinces, and their emulation diffused the taste and the rewards of science from Samarcand and Bokhara to Fez and Cordova. The vizier of a sultan consecrated a sum of two hundred thousand pieces of gold to the foundation of a college at Bagdad, which he endowed with an annual revenue of fifteen thousand dinars. The fruits of instruction were communicated, perhaps, at different times, to six thousand disciples of every degree, from the son of the noble to that of the mechanic; a sufficient allowance was provided for the indigent scholars, and the merit or industry of the professors was repaid with adequate stipends. In every city the productions of Arabic literature were copied and collected, by the curiosity of the studious and the vanity of the rich." The superintendence of these schools was committed with noble liberality sometimes to Nestorians, sometimes to Jews. It mattered not in what country a man was born, nor what were his religious opinions; his attainment in learning was the only thing to be considered. The great Khalif Al-Mamun had declared that "they are the elect of God, his best and most useful servants, whose lives are devoted to the improvement of their rational faculties; that the teachers of wisdom are the true luminaries and legislators of this world, which, without their aid, would again sink into ignorance and barbarism." After the example of the medical college of Cairo, other medical colleges required their students to pass a rigid examination. The candidate then received authority to enter on the practice of his profession. The first medical college established in Europe was that founded by the Saracens at Salerno, in Italy. The first astronomical observatory was that erected by them at Seville, in Spain. THE ARABIAN SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT. It would far transcend the limits of this book to give an adequate statement of the results of this imposing scientific movement. The ancient sciences were greatly extended--new ones were brought into existence. The Indian method of arithmetic was introduced, a beautiful invention, which expresses all numbers by ten characters, giving them an absolute value, and a value by position, and furnishing simple rules for the easy performance of all kinds of calculations. Algebra, or universal arithmetic--the method of calculating indeterminate quantities, or investigating the relations that subsist among quantities of all kinds, whether arithmetical or geometrical--was developed from the germ that Diophantus had left. Mohammed Ben Musa furnished the solution of quadratic equations, Omar Ben Ibra him that of cubic equations. The Saracens also gave to trigonometry its modern form, substituting sines for chords, which had been previously used; they elevated it into a separate science. Musa, above mentioned, was the author of a "Treatise on Spherical Trigonometry." Al-Baghadadi left one on land-surveying, so excellent, that by some it has been declared to be a copy of Euclid's lost work on that subject. ARABIAN ASTRONOMY. In astronomy, they not only made catalogues, but maps of the stars visible in their skies, giving to those of the larger magnitudes the Arabic names they still bear on our celestial globes. They ascertained, as we have seen, the size of the earth by the measurement of a degree on her surface, determined the obliquity of the ecliptic, published corrected tables of the sun and moon fixed the length of the year, verified the precession of the equinoxes. The treatise of Albategnius on "The Science of the Stars" is spoken of by Laplace with respect; he also draws attention to an important fragment of Ibn-Junis, the astronomer of Hakem, the Khalif of Egypt, A.D. 1000, as containing a long series of observations from the time of Almansor, of eclipses, equinoxes, solstices, conjunctions of planets, occultations of stars--observations which have cast much light on the great variations of the system of the world. The Arabian astronomers also devoted themselves to the construction and perfection of astronomical instruments, to the measurement of time by clocks of various kinds, by clepsydras and sun-dials. They were the first to introduce, for this purpose, the use of the pendulum. In the experimental sciences, they originated chemistry; they discovered some of its most important reagents--sulphuric acid, nitric acid, alcohol. They applied that science in the practice of medicine, being the first to publish pharmacopoeias or dispensatories, and to include in them mineral preparations. In mechanics, they had determined the laws of falling bodies, had ideas, by no means indistinct, of the nature of gravity; they were familiar with the theory of the mechanical powers. In hydrostatics they constructed the first tables of the specific gravities of bodies, and wrote treatises on the flotation and sinking of bodies in water. In optics, they corrected the Greek misconception, that a ray proceeds from the eye, and touches the object seen, introducing the hypothesis that the ray passes from the object to the eye. They understood the phenomena of the reflection and refraction of light. Alhazen made the great discovery of the curvilinear path of a ray of light through the atmosphere, and proved that we see the sun and moon before they have risen, and after they have set. AGRICULTURE AND MANUFACTURE. The effects of this scientific activity are plainly perceived in the great improvements that took place in many of the industrial arts. Agriculture shows it in better methods of irrigation, the skillful employment of manures, the raising of improved breeds of cattle, the enactment of wise codes of rural laws, the introduction of the culture of rice, and that of sugar and coffee. The manufactures show it in the great extension of the industries of silk, cotton, wool; in the fabrication of cordova and morocco leather, and paper; in mining, casting, and various metallurgic operations; in the making of Toledo blades. Passionate lovers of poetry and music, they dedicated much of their leisure time to those elegant pursuits. They taught Europe the game of chess; they gave it its taste for works of fiction--romances and novels. In the graver domains of literature they took delight: they had many admirable compositions on such subjects as the instability of human greatness; the consequences of irreligion; the reverses of fortune; the origin, duration, and end of the world. Sometimes, not without surprise, we meet with ideas which we flatter ourselves have originated in our own times. Thus our modern doctrines of evolution and development were taught in their schools. In fact, they carried them much farther than we are disposed to do, extending them even to inorganic or mineral things. The fundamental principle of alchemy was the natural process of development of metalline bodies. "When common people," says Al-Khazini, writing in the twelfth century, "hear from natural philosophers that gold is a body which has attained to perfection of maturity, to the goal of completeness, they firmly believe that it is something which has gradually come to that perfection by passing through the forms of all other metallic bodies, so that its gold nature was originally lead, afterward it became tin, then brass, then silver, and finally reached the development of gold; not knowing that the natural philosophers mean, in saying this, only something like what they mean when they speak of man, and attribute to him a completeness and equilibrium in nature and constitution--not that man was once a bull, and was changed into an ass, and afterward into a horse, and after that into an ape, and finally became a man." CHAPTER V. CONFLICT RESPECTING THE NATURE OF THE SOUL.--DOCTRINE OF EMANATION AND ABSORPTION. European ideas respecting the soul.--It resembles the form of the body. Philosophical views of the Orientals.--The Vedic theology and Buddhism assert the doctrine of emanation and absorption.--It is advocated by Aristotle, who is followed by the Alexandrian school, and subsequently by the Jews and Arabians.--It is found in the writings of Erigena. Connection of this doctrine with the theory of conservation and correlation of force.--Parallel between the origin and destiny of the body and the soul.--The necessity of founding human on comparative psychology. Averroism, which is based on these facts, is brought into Christendom through Spain and Sicily. History of the repression of Averroism.--Revolt of Islam against it.--Antagonism of the Jewish synagogues.--Its destruction undertaken by the papacy.--Institution of the Inquisition in Spain.--Frightful persecutions and their results.--Expulsion of the Jews and Moors.--Overthrow of Averroism in Europe.--Decisive action of the late Vatican Council. THE pagan Greeks and Romans believed that the spirit of man resembles his bodily form, varying its appearance with his variations, and growing with his growth. Heroes, to whom it had been permitted to descend into Hades, had therefore without difficulty recognized their former friends. Not only had the corporeal aspect been retained, but even the customary raiment. THE SOUL. The primitive Christians, whose conceptions of a future life and of heaven and hell, the abodes of the blessed and the sinful, were far more vivid than those of their pagan predecessors, accepted and intensified these ancient ideas. They did not doubt that in the world to come they should meet their friends, and hold converse with them, as they had done here upon earth--an expectation that gives consolation to the human heart, reconciling it to the most sorrowful bereavements, and restoring to it its dead. In the uncertainty as to what becomes of the soul in the interval between its separation from the body and the judgment-day, many different opinions were held. Some thought that it hovered over the grave, some that it wandered disconsolate through the air. In the popular belief, St. Peter sat as a door-keeper at the gate of heaven. To him it had been given to bind or to loose. He admitted or excluded the Spirits of men at his pleasure. Many persons, however, were disposed to deny him this power, since his decisions would be anticipatory of the judgment-day, which would thus be rendered needless. After the time of Gregory the Great, the doctrine of purgatory met with general acceptance. A resting-place was provided for departed spirits. That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. A pleasing terror gathers round the winter's-evening fireside at the stories of apparitions, goblins, ghosts. In the old times the Romans had their lares, or spirits of those who had led virtuous lives; their larvae or lemures, the spirits of the wicked; their manes, the spirits of those of whom the merits were doubtful. If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of any thing whatever, that these shades of the dead congregate near tombstones, or take up their secret abode in the gloomy chambers of dilapidated castles, or walk by moonlight in moody solitude. ASIATIC PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEWS. While these opinions have universally found popular acceptance in Europe, others of a very different nature have prevailed extensively in Asia, and indeed very generally in the higher regions of thought. Ecclesiastical authority succeeded in repressing them in the sixteenth century, but they never altogether disappeared. In our own times so silently and extensively have they been diffused in Europe, that it was found expedient in the papal Syllabus to draw them in a very conspicuous manner into the open light; and the Vatican Council, agreeing in that view of their obnoxious tendency and secret spread, has in an equally prominent and signal manner among its first canons anathematized all persons who hold them. "Let him be anathema who says that spiritual things are emanations of the divine substance, or that the divine essence by manifestation or development becomes all things." In view of this authoritative action, it is necessary now to consider the character and history of these opinions. Ideas respecting the nature of God necessarily influence ideas respecting the nature of the soul. The eastern Asiatics had adopted the conception of an impersonal God, and, as regards the soul, its necessary consequence, the doctrine of emanation and absorption. EMANATION AND ABSORPTION. Thus the Vedic theology is based on the acknowledgment of a universal spirit pervading all things. "There is in truth but one Deity, the supreme Spirit; he is of the same nature as the soul of man." Both the Vedas and the Institutes of Menu affirm that the soul is an emanation of the all-pervading Intellect, and that it is necessarily destined to be reabsorbed. They consider it to be without form, and that visible Nature, with all its beauties and harmonies, is only the shadow of God. Vedaism developed itself into Buddhism, which has become the faith of a majority of the human race. This system acknowledges that there is a supreme Power, but denies that there is a supreme Being. It contemplates the existence of Force, giving rise as its manifestation to matter. It adopts the theory of emanation and absorption. In a burning taper it sees an effigy of man--an embodiment of matter, and an evolution of force. If we interrogate it respecting the destiny of the soul, it demands of us what has become of the flame when it is blown out, and in what condition it was before the taper was lighted. Was it a nonentity? Has it been annihilated? It admits that the idea of personality which has deluded us through life may not be instantaneously extinguished at death, but may be lost by slow degrees. On this is founded the doctrine of transmigration. But at length reunion with the universal Intellect takes place, Nirwana is reached, oblivion is attained, a state that has no relation to matter, space, or time, the state into which the departed flame of the extinguished taper has gone, the state in which we were before we were born. This is the end that we ought to hope for; it is reabsorption in the universal Force--supreme bliss, eternal rest. Through Aristotle these doctrines were first introduced into Eastern Europe; indeed, eventually, as we shall see, he was regarded as the author of them. They exerted a dominating influence in the later period of the Alexandrian school. Philo, the Jew, who lived in the time of Caligula, based his philosophy on the theory of emanation. Plotinus not only accepted that theory as applicable to the soul of man, but as affording an illustration of the nature of the Trinity. For, as a beam of light emanates from the sun, and as warmth emanates from the beam when it touches material bodies, so from the Father the Son emanates, and thence the Holy Ghost. From these views Plotinus derived a practical religious system, teaching the devout how to pass into a condition of ecstasy, a foretaste of absorption into the universal mundane soul. In that condition the soul loses its individual consciousness. In like manner Porphyry sought absorption in or union with God. He was a Tyrian by birth, established a school at Rome, and wrote against Christianity; his treatise on that subject was answered by Eusebius and St. Jerome, but the Emperor Theodosius silenced it more effectually by causing all the copies to be burnt. Porphyry bewails his own unworthiness, saying that he had been united to God in ecstasy but once in eighty-six years, whereas his master Plotinus had been so united six times in sixty years. A complete system of theology, based on the theory of emanation, was constructed by Proclus, who speculated on the manner in which absorption takes place: whether the soul is instantly reabsorbed and reunited in the moment of death, or whether it retains the sentiment of personality for a time, and subsides into complete reunion by successive steps. ARABIC PSYCHOLOGY. From the Alexandrian Greeks these ideas passed to the Saracen philosophers, who very soon after the capture of the great Egyptian city abandoned to the lower orders their anthropomorphic notions of the nature of God and the simulachral form of the spirit of man. As Arabism developed itself into a distinct scientific system, the theories of emanation and absorption were among its characteristic features. In this abandonment of vulgar Mohammedanism, the example of the Jews greatly assisted. They, too, had given up the anthropomorphism of their ancestors; they had exchanged the God who of old lived behind the veil of the temple for an infinite Intelligence pervading the universe, and, avowing their inability to conceive that any thing which had on a sudden been called into existence should be capable of immortality, they affirmed that the soul of man is connected with a past of which there was no beginning, and with a future to which there is no end. In the intellectual history of Arabism the Jew and the Saracen are continually seen together. It was the same in their political history, whether we consider it in Syria, in Egypt, or in Spain. From them conjointly Western Europe derived its philosophical ideas, which in the course of time culminated in Averroism; Averroism is philosophical Islamism. Europeans generally regarded Averroes as the author of these heresies, and the orthodox branded him accordingly, but he was nothing more than their collector and commentator. His works invaded Christendom by two routes: from Spain through Southern France they reached Upper Italy, engendering numerous heresies on their way; from Sicily they passed to Naples and South Italy, under the auspices of Frederick II. But, long before Europe suffered this great intellectual invasion, there were what might, perhaps, be termed sporadic instances of Orientalism. As an example I may quote the views of John Erigena (A.D. 800) He had adopted and taught the philosophy of Aristotle had made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of that philosopher, and indulged a hope of uniting philosophy and religion in the manner proposed by the Christian ecclesiastics who were then studying in the Mohammedan universities of Spain. He was a native of Britain. In a letter to Charles the Bald, Anastasius expresses his astonishment "how such a barbarian man, coming from the very ends of the earth, and remote from human conversation, could comprehend things so clearly, and transfer them into another language so well." The general intention of his writings was, as we have said, to unite philosophy with religion, but his treatment of these subjects brought him under ecclesiastical censure, and some of his works were adjudged to the flames. His most important book is entitled "De Divisione Nature." Erigena's philosophy rests upon the observed and admitted fact that every living thing comes from something that had previously lived. The visible world, being a world of life, has therefore emanated necessarily from some primordial existence, and that existence is God, who is thus the originator and conservator of all. Whatever we see maintains itself as a visible thing through force derived from him, and, were that force withdrawn, it must necessarily disappear. Erigena thus conceives of the Deity as an unceasing participator in Nature, being its preserver, maintainer, upholder, and in that respect answering to the soul of the world of the Greeks. The particular life of individuals is therefore a part of general existence, that is, of the mundane soul. If ever there were a withdrawal of the maintaining power, all things must return to the source from which they issued--that is, they must return to God, and be absorbed in him. All visible Nature must thus pass back into "the Intellect" at last. "The death of the flesh is the auspices of the restitution of things, and of a return to their ancient conservation. So sounds revert back to the air in which they were born, and by which they were maintained, and they are heard no more; no man knows what has become of them. In that final absorption which, after a lapse of time, must necessarily come, God will be all in all, and nothing exist but him alone." "I contemplate him as the beginning and cause of all things; all things that are and those that have been, but now are not, were created from him, and by him, and in him. I also view him as the end and intransgressible term of all things.... There is a fourfold conception of universal Nature--two views of divine Nature, as origin and end; two also of framed Nature, causes and effects. There is nothing eternal but God." The return of the soul to the universal Intellect is designated by Erigena as Theosis, or Deification. In that final absorption all remembrance of its past experiences is lost. The soul reverts to the condition in which it was before it animated the body. Necessarily, therefore, Erigena fell under the displeasure of the Church. It was in India that men first recognized the fact that force is indestructible and eternal. This implies ideas more or less distinct of that which we now term its "correlation and conservation." Considerations connected with the stability of the universe give strength to this view, since it is clear that, were there either an increase or a diminution, the order of the world must cease. The definite and invariable amount of energy in the universe must therefore be accepted as a scientific fact. The changes we witness are in its distribution. But, since the soul must be regarded as an active principle, to call a new one into existence out of nothing is necessarily to add to the force previously in the world. And, if this has been done in the case of every individual who has been born, and is to be repeated for every individual hereafter, the totality of force must be continually increasing. Moreover, to many devout persons there is something very revolting in the suggestion that the Almighty is a servitor to the caprices and lusts of man, and that, at a certain term after its origin, it is necessary for him to create for the embryo a soul. Considering man as composed of two portions, a soul and a body, the obvious relations of the latter may cast much light on the mysterious, the obscure relations of the former. Now, the substance of which the body consists is obtained from the general mass of matter around us, and after death to that general mass it is restored. Has Nature, then, displayed before our eyes in the origin, mutations, and destiny of the material part, the body, a revelation that may guide us to a knowledge of the origin and destiny of the companion, the spiritual part, the soul? Let us listen for a moment to one of the most powerful of Mohammedan writers: "God has created the spirit of man out of a drop of his own light; its destiny is to return to him. Do not deceive yourself with the vain imagination that it will die when the body dies. The form you had on your entrance into this world, and your present form, are not the same; hence there is no necessity of your perishing, on account of the perishing of your body. Your spirit came into this world a stranger, it is only sojourning, in a temporary home. From the trials and tempests of this troublesome life, our refuge is in God. In reunion with him we shall find eternal rest--a rest without sorrow, a joy without pain, a strength without infirmity, a knowledge without doubt, a tranquil and yet an ecstatic vision of the source of life and light and glory, the source from which we came." So says the Saracen philosopher, Al-Gazzali (A.D. 1010). In a stone the material particles are in a state of stable equilibrium; it may, therefore, endure forever. An animal is in reality only a form through which a stream of matter is incessantly flowing. It receives its supplies, and dismisses its wastes. In this it resembles a cataract, a river, a flame. The particles that compose it at one instant have departed from it the next. It depends for its continuance on exterior supplies. It has a definite duration in time, and an inevitable moment comes in which it must die. In the great problem of psychology we cannot expect to reach a scientific result, if we persist in restricting ourselves to the contemplation of one fact. We must avail ourselves of all accessible facts. Human psychology can never be completely resolved except through comparative psychology. With Descartes, we must inquire whether the souls of animals be relations of the human soul, less perfect members in the same series of development. We must take account of what we discover in the intelligent principle of the ant, as well as what we discern in the intelligent principle of man. Where would human physiology be, if it were not illuminated by the bright irradiations of comparative physiology? Brodie, after an exhaustive consideration of the facts, affirms that the mind of animals is essentially the same as that of man. Every one familiar with the dog will admit that that creature knows right from wrong, and is conscious when he has committed a fault. Many domestic animals have reasoning powers, and employ proper means for the attainment of ends. How numerous are the anecdotes related of the intentional actions of the elephant and the ape! Nor is this apparent intelligence due to imitation, to their association with man, for wild animals that have no such relation exhibit similar properties. In different species, the capacity and character greatly vary. Thus the dog is not only more intelligent, but has social and moral qualities that the cat does not possess; the former loves his master, the latter her home. Du Bois-Reymond makes this striking remark: "With awe and wonder must the student of Nature regard that microscopic molecule of nervous substance which is the seat of the laborious, constructive, orderly, loyal, dauntless soul of the ant. It has developed itself to its present state through a countless series of generations." What an impressive inference we may draw from the statement of Huber, who has written so well on this subject: "If you will watch a single ant at work, you can tell what he will next do!" He is considering the matter, and reasoning as you are doing. Listen to one of the many anecdotes which Huber, at once truthful and artless, relates: "On the visit of an overseer ant to the works, when the laborers had begun the roof too soon, he examined it and had it taken down, the wall raised to the proper height, and a new ceiling constructed with the fragments of the old one." Surely these insects are not automata, they show intention. They recognize their old companions, who have been shut up from them for many months, and exhibit sentiments of joy at their return. Their antennal language is capable of manifold expression; it suits the interior of the nest, where all is dark. While solitary insects do not live to raise their young, social insects have a longer term, they exhibit moral affections and educate their offspring. Patterns of patience and industry, some of these insignificant creatures will work sixteen or eighteen hours a day. Few men are capable of sustained mental application more than four or five hours. Similarity of effects indicates similarity of causes; similarity of actions demands similarity of organs. I would ask the reader of these paragraphs, who is familiar with the habits of animals, and especially with the social relations of that wonderful insect to which reference has been made, to turn to the nineteenth chapter of my work on the "Intellectual Development of Europe," in which he will find a description of the social system of the Incas of Peru. Perhaps, then, in view of the similarity of the social institutions and personal conduct of the insect, and the social institutions and personal conduct of the civilized Indian--the one an insignificant speck, the other a man--he will not be disposed to disagree with me in the opinion that "from bees, and wasps, and ants, and birds, from all that low animal life on which he looks with supercilious contempt, man is destined one day to learn what in truth he really is." The views of Descartes, who regarded all insects as automata, can scarcely be accepted without modification. Insects are automata only so far as the action of their ventral cord, and that portion of their cephalic ganglia which deals with contemporaneous impressions, is concerned. It is one of the functions of vesicular-nervous material to retain traces or relics of impressions brought to it by the organs of sense; hence, nervous ganglia, being composed of that material, may be considered as registering apparatus. They also introduce the element of time into the action of the nervous mechanism. An impression, which without them might have forthwith ended in reflex action, is delayed, and with this duration come all those important effects arising through the interaction of many impressions, old and new, upon each other. There is no such thing as a spontaneous, or self-originated, thought. Every intellectual act is the consequence of some preceding act. It comes into existence in virtue of something that has gone before. Two minds constituted precisely alike, and placed under the influence of precisely the same environment, must give rise to precisely the same thought. To such sameness of action we allude in the popular expression "common-sense"--a term full of meaning. In the origination of a thought there are two distinct conditions: the state of the organism as dependent on antecedent impressions, and on the existing physical circumstances. In the cephalic ganglia of insects are stored up the relics of impressions that have been made upon the common peripheral nerves, and in them are kept those which are brought in by the organs of special sense--the visual, olfactive, auditory. The interaction of these raises insects above mere mechanical automata, in which the reaction instantly follows the impression. In all cases the action of every nerve-centre, no matter what its stage of development may be, high or low, depends upon an essential chemical condition--oxidation. Even in man, if the supply of arterial blood be stopped but for a moment, the nerve-mechanism loses its power; if diminished, it correspondingly declines; if, on the contrary, it be increased--as when nitrogen monoxide is breathed--there is more energetic action. Hence there arises a need of repair, a necessity for rest and sleep. Two fundamental ideas are essentially attached to all our perceptions of external things: they are SPACE and TIME, and for these provision is made in the nervous mechanism while it is yet in an almost rudimentary state. The eye is the organ of space, the ear of time; the perceptions of which by the elaborate mechanism of these structures become infinitely more precise than would be possible if the sense of touch alone were resorted to. There are some simple experiments which illustrate the vestiges of ganglionic impressions. If on a cold, polished metal, as a new razor, any object, such as a wafer, be laid, and the metal be then breathed upon, and, when the moisture has had time to disappear, the wafer be thrown off, though now the most critical inspection of the polished surface can discover no trace of any form, if we breathe once more upon it, a spectral image of the wafer comes plainly into view; and this may be done again and again. Nay, more, if the polished metal be carefully put aside where nothing can deteriorate its surface, and be so kept for many months, on breathing again upon it the shadowy form emerges. Such an illustration shows how trivial an impression may be thus registered and preserved. But, if, on such an inorganic surface, an impression may thus be indelibly marked, how much more likely in the purposely-constructed ganglion! A shadow never falls upon a wall without leaving thereupon a permanent trace, a trace which might be made visible by resorting to proper processes. Photographic operations are cases in point. The portraits of our friends, or landscape views, may be hidden on the sensitive surface from the eye, but they are ready to make their appearance as soon as proper developers are resorted to. A spectre is concealed on a silver or glassy surface until, by our necromancy, we make it come forth into the visible world. Upon the walls of our most private apartments, where we think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out and our retirement can never be profaned, there exist the vestiges of all our acts, silhouettes of whatever we have done. If, after the eyelids have been closed for some time, as when we first awake in the morning, we suddenly and steadfastly gaze at a brightly-illuminated object and then quickly close the lids again, a phantom image is perceived in the indefinite darkness beyond us. We may satisfy ourselves that this is not a fiction, but a reality, for many details that we had not time to identify in the momentary glance may be contemplated at our leisure in the phantom. We may thus make out the pattern of such an object as a lace curtain hanging in the window, or the branches of a tree beyond. By degrees the image becomes less and less distinct; in a minute or two it has disappeared. It seems to have a tendency to float away in the vacancy before us. If we attempt to follow it by moving the eyeball, it suddenly vanishes. Such a duration of impressions on the retina proves that the effect of external influences on nerve-vesicles is not necessarily transitory. In this there is a correspondence to the duration, the emergence, the extinction, of impressions on photographic preparations. Thus, I have seen landscapes and architectural views taken in Mexico developed, as artists say, months subsequently in New York--the images coming out, after the long voyage, in all their proper forms and in all their proper contrast of light and shade. The photograph had forgotten nothing. It had equally preserved the contour of the everlasting mountains and the passing smoke of a bandit-fire. Are there, then, contained in the brain more permanently, as in the retina more transiently, the vestiges of impressions that have been gathered by the sensory organs? Is this the explanation of memory--the Mind contemplating such pictures of past things and events as have been committed to her custody. In her silent galleries are there hung micrographs of the living and the dead, of scenes that we have visited, of incidents in which we have borne a part? Are these abiding impressions mere signal-marks, like the letters of a book, which impart ideas to the mind? or are they actual picture-images, inconceivably smaller than those made for us by artists, in which, by the aid of a microscope, we can see, in a space not bigger than a pinhole, a whole family group at a glance? The phantom images of the retina are not perceptible in the light of the day. Those that exist in the sensorium in like manner do not attract our attention so long as the sensory organs are in vigorous operation, and occupied in bringing new impressions in. But, when those organs become weary or dull, or when we experience hours of great anxiety, or are in twilight reveries, or are asleep, the latent apparitions have their vividness increased by the contrast, and obtrude themselves on the mind. For the same reason they occupy us in the delirium of fevers, and doubtless also in the solemn moments of death. During a third part of our life, in sleep, we are withdrawn from external influences; hearing and sight and the other senses are inactive, but the never-sleeping Mind, that pensive, that veiled enchantress, in her mysterious retirement, looks over the ambrotypes she has collected--ambrotypes, for they are truly unfading impressions--and, combining them together, as they chance to occur, constructs from them the panorama of a dream. Nature has thus implanted in the organization of every man means which impressively suggest to him the immortality of the soul and a future life. Even the benighted savage thus sees in his visions the fading forms of landscapes, which are, perhaps, connected with some of his most pleasant recollections; and what other conclusion can be possibly extract from those unreal pictures than that they are the foreshadowings of another land beyond that in which his lot is cast? At intervals he is visited in his dreams by the resemblances of those whom he has loved or hated while they were alive; and these manifestations are to him incontrovertible proofs of the existence and immortality of the soul. In our most refined social conditions we are never able to shake off the impressions of these occurrences, and are perpetually drawing from them the same conclusions that our uncivilized ancestors did. Our more elevated condition of life in no respect relieves us from the inevitable operation of our own organization, any more than it relieves us from infirmities and disease. In these respects, all over the globe men are on an equality. Savage or civilized, we carry within us a mechanism which presents us with mementoes of the most solemn facts with which we can be concerned. It wants only moments of repose or sickness, when the influence of external things is diminished, to come into full play, and these are precisely the moments when we are best prepared for the truths it is going to suggest. That mechanism is no respecter of persons. It neither permits the haughtiest to be free from the monitions, nor leaves the humblest without the consolation of a knowledge of another life. Open to no opportunities of being tampered with by the designing or interested, requiring no extraneous human agency for its effect, out always present with every man wherever he may go, it marvelously extracts from vestiges of the impressions of the past overwhelming proofs of the realities of the future, and, gathering its power from what would seem to be a most unlikely source, it insensibly leads us, no matter who or where we may be, to a profound belief in the immortal and imperishable, from phantoms which have scarcely made their appearance before they are ready to vanish away. The insect differs from a mere automaton in this, that it is influenced by old, by registered impressions. In the higher forms of animated life that registration becomes more and more complete, memory becomes more perfect. There is not any necessary resemblance between an external form and its ganglionic impression, any more than there is between the words of a message delivered in a telegraphic office and the signals which the telegraph may give to the distant station; any more than there is between the letters of a printed page and the acts or scenes they describe, but the letters call up with clearness to the mind of the reader the events and scenes. An animal without any apparatus for the retention of impressions must be a pure automaton--it cannot have memory. From insignificant and uncertain beginnings, such an apparatus is gradually evolved, and, as its development advances, the intellectual capacity increases. In man, this retention or registration reaches perfection; he guides, himself by past as well as by present impressions; he is influenced by experience; his conduct is determined by reason. A most important advance is made when the capability is acquired by any animal of imparting a knowledge of the impressions stored up in its own nerve-centres to another of the same kind. This marks the extension of individual into social life, and indeed is essential thereto. In the higher insects it is accomplished by antennal contacts, in man by speech. Humanity, in its earlier, its savage stages, was limited to this: the knowledge of one person could be transmitted to another by conversation. The acts and thoughts of one generation could be imparted to another, and influence its acts and thoughts. But tradition has its limit. The faculty of speech makes society possible--nothing more. Not without interest do we remark the progress of development of this function. The invention of the art of writing gave extension and durability to the registration or record of impressions. These, which had hitherto been stored up in the brain of one man, might now be imparted to the whole human race, and be made to endure forever. Civilization became possible--for civilization cannot exist without writing, or the means of record in some shape. From this psychological point of view we perceive the real significance of the invention of printing--a development of writing which, by increasing the rapidity of the diffusion of ideas, and insuring their permanence, tends to promote civilization and to unify the human race. In the foregoing paragraphs, relating to nervous impressions, their registry, and the consequences, that spring from them, I have given an abstract of views presented in my work on "Human Physiology," published in 1856, and may, therefore, refer the reader to the chapter on "Inverse Vision, or Cerebral Sight;" to Chapter XIV., Book I.; and to Chapter VIII., Book II.; of that work, for other particulars. The only path to scientific human psychology is through comparative psychology. It is a long and wearisome path, but it leads to truth. Is there, then, a vast spiritual existence pervading the universe, even as there is a vast existence of matter pervading it--a spirit which, as a great German author tells us, "sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, awakes in man?" Does the soul arise from the one as the body arises from the other? Do they in like manner return, each to the source from which it has come? If so, we can interpret human existence, and our ideas may still be in unison with scientific truth, and in accord with our conception of the stability, the unchangeability of the universe. To this spiritual existence the Saracens, following Eastern nations, gave the designation "the Active Intellect." They believed that the soul of man emanated from it, as a rain-drop comes from the sea, and, after a season, returns. So arose among them the imposing doctrines of emanation and absorption. The active intellect is God. In one of its forms, as we have seen, this idea was developed by Chakia Mouni, in India, in a most masterly manner, and embodied in the vast practical system of Buddhism; in another, it was with less power presented among the Saracens by Averroes. But, perhaps we ought rather to say that Europeans hold Averroes as the author of this doctrine, because they saw him isolated from his antecedents. But Mohammedans gave him little credit for originality. He stood to them in the light of a commentator on Aristotle, and as presenting the opinions of the Alexandrian and other philosophical schools up to his time. The following excerpts from the "Historical Essay on Averroism," by M. Renan, will show how closely the Sarscenic ideas approached those presented above: This system supposes that, at the death of an individual, his intelligent principle or soul no longer possesses a separate existence, but returns to or is absorbed in the universal mind, the active intelligence, the mundane soul, which is God; from whom, indeed, it had originally emanated or issued forth. The universal, or active, or objective intellect, is uncreated, impassible, incorruptible, has neither beginning nor end; nor does it increase as the number of individual souls increases. It is altogether separate from matter. It is, as it were, a cosmic principle. This oneness of the active intellect, or reason, is the essential principle of the Averroistic theory, and is in harmony with the cardinal doctrine of Mohammedanism--the unity of God. The individual, or passive, or subjective intellect, is an emanation from the universal, and constitutes what is termed the soul of man. In one sense it is perishable and ends with the body, but in a higher sense it endures; for, after death, it returns to or is absorbed in the universal soul, and thus of all human souls there remains at last but one--the aggregate of them all, life is not the property of the individual, it belongs to Nature. The end of, man is to enter into union more and more complete with the active intellect--reason. In that the happiness of the soul consists. Our destiny is quietude. It was the opinion of Averroes that the transition from the individual to the universal is instantaneous at death, but the Buddhists maintain that human personality continues in a declining manner for a certain term before nonentity, or Nirwana, is attained. Philosophy has never proposed but two hypotheses to explain the system of the world: first, a personal God existing apart, and a human soul called into existence or created, and thenceforth immortal; second, an impersonal intelligence, or indeterminate God, and a soul emerging from and returning to him. As to the origin of beings, there are two opposite opinions: first, that they are created from nothing; second, that they come by development from pre-existing forms. The theory of creation belongs to the first of the above hypotheses, that of evolution to the last. Philosophy among the Arabs thus took the same direction that it had taken in China, in India, and indeed throughout the East. Its whole spirit depended on the admission of the indestructibility of matter and force. It saw an analogy between the gathering of the material of which the body of man consists from the vast store of matter in Nature, and its final restoration to that store, and the emanation of the spirit of man from the universal Intellect, the Divinity, and its final reabsorption. Having thus indicated in sufficient detail the philosophical characteristics of the doctrine of emanation and absorption, I have in the next place to relate its history. It was introduced into Europe by the Spanish Arabs. Spain was the focal point from which, issuing forth, it affected the ranks of intelligence and fashion all over Europe, and in Spain it had a melancholy end. The Spanish khalifs had surrounded themselves with all the luxuries of Oriental life. They had magnificent palaces, enchanting gardens, seraglios filled with beautiful women. Europe at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement, more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of which we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs. Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. The houses were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by underground pipes from flower-beds. They had baths, and libraries, and dining-halls, fountains of quicksilver and water. City and country were full of conviviality, and of dancing to the lute and mandolin. Instead of the drunken and gluttonous wassail orgies of their Northern neighbors, the feasts of the Saracens were marked by sobriety. Wine was prohibited. The enchanting moonlight evenings of Andalusia were spent by the Moors in sequestered, fairy-like gardens or in orange-groves, listening to the romances of the story-teller, or engaged in philosophical discourse; consoling themselves for the disappointments of this life by such reflections as that, if virtue were rewarded in this world, we should be without expectations in the life to come; and reconciling themselves to their daily toil by the expectation that rest will be found after death--a rest never to be succeeded by labor. In the tenth century the Khalif Hakein II. had made beautiful Andalusia the paradise of the world. Christians, Mussulmen, Jews, mixed together without restraint. There, among many celebrated names that have descended to our times, was Gerbert, destined subsequently to become pope. There, too, was Peter the Venerable, and many Christian ecclesiastics. Peter says that he found learned men even from Britain pursuing astronomy. All learned men, no matter from what country they came, or what their religious views, were welcomed. The khalif had in his palace a manufactory of books, and copyists, binders, illuminators. He kept book-buyers in all the great cities of Asia and Africa. His library contained four hundred thousand volumes, superbly bound and illuminated. Throughout the Mohammedan dominions in Asia, in Africa, and in Spain, the lower order of Mussulmen entertained a fanatical hatred against learning. Among the more devout--those who claimed to be orthodox--there were painful doubts as to the salvation of the great Khalif Al-Mamun--the wicked khalif, as they called him--for he had not only disturbed the people by introducing the writings of Aristotle and other Greek heathens, but had even struck at the existence of heaven and hell by saying that the earth is a globe, and pretending that he could measure its size. These persons, from their numbers, constituted a political power. Almansor, who usurped the khalifate to the prejudice of Hakem's son, thought that his usurpation would be sustained if he put himself at the head of the orthodox party. He therefore had the library of Hakem searched, and all works of a scientific or philosophical nature carried into the public places and burnt, or thrown into the cisterns of the palace. By a similar court revolution Averroes, in his old age--he died A.D. 1193--was expelled from Spain; the religious party had triumphed over the philosophical. He was denounced as a traitor to religion. An opposition to philosophy had been organized all over the Mussulman world. There was hardly a philosopher who was not punished. Some were put to death, and the consequence was, that Islam was full of hypocrites. Into Italy, Germany, England, Averroism had silently made its way. It found favor in the eyes of the Franciscans, and a focus in the University of Paris. By very many of the leading minds it had been accepted. But at length the Dominicans, the rivals of the Franciscans, sounded an alarm. They said it destroys all personality, conducts to fatalism, and renders inexplicable the difference and progress of individual intelligences. The declaration that there is but one intellect is an error subversive of the merits of the saints, it is an assertion that there is no difference among men. What! is there no difference between the holy soul of Peter and the damned soul of Judas? are they identical? Averroes in this his blasphemous doctrine denies creation, providence, revelation, the Trinity, the efficacy of prayers, of alms, and of litanies; he disbelieves in the resurrection and immortality; he places the summum bonum in mere pleasure. So, too, among the Jews who were then the leading intellects of the world, Averroism had been largely propagated. Their great writer Maimonides had thoroughly accepted it; his school was spreading it in all directions. A furious persecution arose on the part of the orthodox Jews. Of Maimonides it had been formerly their delight to declare that he was "the Eagle of the Doctors, the Great Sage, the Glory of the West, the Light of the East, second only to Moses." Now, they proclaimed that he had abandoned the faith of Abraham; had denied the possibility of creation, believed in the eternity of the world; had given himself up to the manufacture of atheists; had deprived God of his attributes; made a vacuum of him; had declared him inaccessible to prayer, and a stranger to the government of the world. The works of Maimonides were committed to the flames by the synagogues of Montpellier, Barcelona, and Toledo. Scarcely had the conquering arms of Ferdinand and Isabella overthrown the Arabian dominion in Spain, when measures were taken by the papacy to extinguish these opinions, which, it was believed, were undermining European Christianity. Until Innocent IV. (1243), there was no special tribunal against heretics, distinct from those of the bishops. The Inquisition, then introduced, in accordance with the centralization of the times, was a general and papal tribunal, which displaced the old local ones. The bishops, therefore, viewed the innovation with great dislike, considering it as an intrusion on their rights. It was established in Italy, Spain, Germany, and the southern provinces of France. The temporal sovereigns were only too desirous to make use of this powerful engine for their own political purposes. Against this the popes strongly protested. They were not willing that its use should pass out of the ecclesiastical hand. The Inquisition, having already been tried in the south of France, had there proved to be very effective for the suppression of heresy. It had been introduced into Aragon. Now was assigned to it the duty of dealing with the Jews. In the old times under Visigothic rule these people had greatly prospered, but the leniency that had been shown to them was succeeded by atrocious persecution, when the Visigoths abandoned their Arianism and became orthodox. The most inhuman ordinances were issued against them--a law was enacted condemning them all to be slaves. It was not to be wondered at that, when the Saracen invasion took place, the Jews did whatever they could to promote its success. They, like the Arabs, were an Oriental people, both traced their lineage to Abraham, their common ancestor; both were believers in the unity of God. It was their defense of that doctrine that had brought upon them the hatred of their Visigothic masters. Under the Saracen rule they were treated with the highest consideration. They became distinguished for their wealth and their learning. For the most part they were Aristotelians. They founded many schools and colleges. Their mercantile interests led them to travel all over the world. They particularly studied the science of medicine. Throughout the middle ages they were the physicians and bankers of Europe. Of all men they saw the course of human affairs from the most elevated point of view. Among the special sciences they became proficient in mathematics and astronomy; they composed the tables of Alfonso, and were the cause of the voyage of De Gama. They distinguished themselves greatly in light literature. From the tenth to the fourteenth century their literature was the first in Europe. They were to be found in the courts of princes as physicians, or as treasurers managing the public finances. The orthodox clergy in Navarre had excited popular prejudices against them. To escape the persecutions that arose, many of them feigned to turn Christians, and of these many apostatized to their former faith. The papal nuncio at the court of Castile raised a cry for the establishment of the Inquisition. The poorer Jews were accused of sacrificing Christian children at the Passover, in mockery of the crucifixion; the richer were denounced as Averroists. Under the influence of Torquemada, a Dominican monk, the confessor of Queen Isabella, that princess solicited a bull from the pope for the establishment of the Holy Office. A bull was accordingly issued in November, 1478, for the detection and suppression of heresy. In the first year of the operation of the Inquisition, 1481, two thousand victims were burnt in Andalusia; besides these, many thousands were dug up from their graves and burnt; seventeen thousand were fined or imprisoned for life. Whoever of the persecuted race could flee, escaped for his life. Torquemada, now appointed inquisitor-general for Castile and Leon, illustrated his office by his ferocity. Anonymous accusations were received, the accused was not confronted by witnesses, torture was relied upon for conviction; it was inflicted in vaults where no one could hear the cries of the tormented. As, in pretended mercy, it was forbidden to inflict torture a second time, with horrible duplicity it was affirmed that the torment had not been completed at first, but had only been suspended out of charity until the following day! The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burnt at the stake ten thousand two hundred and twenty persons, six thousand eight hundred and sixty in effigy, and otherwise punished ninety-seven thousand three hundred and twenty-one. This frantic priest destroyed Hebrew Bibles wherever he could find them, And burnt six thousand volumes of Oriental literature at Salamanca, under an imputation that they inculcated Judaism. With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition. But all these frightful atrocities proved failures. The conversions were few. Torquemada, therefore, insisted on the immediate banishment of every unbaptized Jew. On March 30, 1492, the edict of expulsion was signed. All unbaptized Jews, of whatever age, sex, or condition, were ordered to leave the realm by the end of the following July. If they revisited it, they should suffer death. They might sell their effects and take the proceeds in merchandise or bills of exchange, but not in gold or silver. Exiled thus suddenly from the land of their birth, the land of their ancestors for hundreds of years, they could not in the glutted market that arose sell what they possessed. Nobody would purchase what could be got for nothing after July. The Spanish clergy occupied themselves by preaching in the public squares sermons filled with denunciations against their victims, who, when the time for expatriation came, swarmed in the roads and filled the air with their cries of despair. Even the Spanish onlookers wept at the scene of agony. Torquemada, however, enforced the ordinance that no one should afford them any help. Of the banished persons some made their way into Africa, some into Italy; the latter carried with them to Naples ship-fever, which destroyed not fewer than twenty thousand in that city, and devastated that peninsula; some reached Turkey, a few England. Thousands, especially mothers with nursing children, infants, and old people, died by the way; many of them in the agonies of thirst. This action against the Jews was soon followed by one against the Moors. A pragmatica was issued at Seville, February, 1502, setting forth the obligations of the Castilians to drive the enemies of God from the land, and ordering that all unbaptized Moors in the kingdoms of Castile and Leon above the age of infancy should leave the country by the end of April. They might sell their property, but not take away any gold or silver; they were forbidden to emigrate to the Mohammedan dominions; the penalty of disobedience was death. Their condition was thus worse than that of the Jews, who had been permitted to go where they chose. Such was the fiendish intolerance of the Spaniards, that they asserted the government would be justified in taking the lives of all the Moors for their shameless infidelity. What an ungrateful return for the toleration that the Moors in their day of power had given to the Christians! No faith was kept with the victims. Granada had surrendered under the solemn guarantee of the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty. At the instigation of Cardinal Ximenes that pledge was broken, and, after a residence of eight centuries, the Mohammedans were driven out of the land. The coexistence of three religions in Andalusia--the Christian, the Mohammedan, the Mosaic--had given opportunity for the development of Averroism or philosophical Arabism. This was a repetition of what had occurred at Rome, when the gods of all the conquered countries were confronted in that capital, and universal disbelief in them all ensued. Averroes himself was accused of having been first a Mussulman, then a Christian, then a Jew, and finally a misbeliever. It was affirmed that he was the author of the mysterious book "De Tribus Impostoribus." In the middle ages there were two celebrated heretical books, "The Everlasting Gospel," and the "De Tribus Impostoribus." The latter was variously imputed to Pope Gerbert, to Frederick II., and to Averroes. In their unrelenting hatred the Dominicans fastened all the blasphemies current in those times on Averroes; they never tired of recalling the celebrated and outrageous one respecting the eucharist. His writings had first been generally made known to Christian Europe by the translation of Michael Scot in the beginning of the thirteenth century, but long before his time the literature of the West, like that of Asia, was full of these ideas. We have seen how broadly they were set forth by Erigena. The Arabians, from their first cultivation of philosophy, had been infected by them; they were current in all the colleges of the three khalifates. Considered not as a mode of thought, that will spontaneously occur to all men at a certain stage of intellectual development, but as having originated with Aristotle, they continually found favor with men of the highest culture. We see them in Robert Grostete, in Roger Bacon, and eventually in Spinoza. Averroes was not their inventor, he merely gave them clearness and expression. Among the Jews of the thirteenth century, he had completely supplanted his imputed master. Aristotle had passed away from their eyes; his great commentator, Averroes, stood in his place. So numerous were the converts to the doctrine of emanation in Christendom, that Pope Alexander IV. (1255) found it necessary to interfere. By his order, Albertus Magnus composed a work against the "Unity of the Intellect." Treating of the origin and nature of the soul, he attempted to prove that the theory of "a separate intellect, enlightening man by irradiation anterior to the individual and surviving the individual, is a detestable error." But the most illustrious antagonist of the great commentator was St. Thomas Aquinas, the destroyer of all such heresies as the unity of the intellect, the denial of Providence, the impossibility of creation; the victories of "the Angelic Doctor" were celebrated not only in the disputations of the Dominicans, but also in the works of art of the painters of Florence and Pisa. The indignation of that saint knew no bounds when Christians became the disciples of an infidel, who was worse than a Mohammedan. The wrath of the Dominicans, the order to which St. Thomas belonged, was sharpened by the fact that their rivals, the Franciscans, inclined to Averroistic views; and Dante, who leaned to the Dominicans, denounced Averroes as the author of a most dangerous system. The theological odium of all three dominant religions was put upon him; he was pointed out as the originator of the atrocious maxim that "all religions are false, although all are probably useful." An attempt was made at the Council of Vienne to have his writings absolutely suppressed, and to forbid all Christians reading them. The Dominicans, armed with the weapons of the Inquisition, terrified Christian Europe with their unrelenting persecutions. They imputed all the infidelity of the times to the Arabian philosopher. But he was not without support. In Paris and in the cities of Northern Italy the Franciscans sustained his views, and all Christendom was agitated with these disputes. Under the inspiration of the Dominicans, Averroes became to the Italian painters the emblem of unbelief. Many of the Italian towns had pictures or frescoes of the Day of Judgment and of Hell. In these Averroes not unfrequently appears. Thus, in one at Pisa, he figures with Arius, Mohammed, and Antichrist. In another he is represented as overthrown by St. Thomas. He had become an essential element in the triumphs of the great Dominican doctor. He continued thus to be familiar to the Italian painters until the sixteenth century. His doctrines were maintained in the University of Padua until the seventeenth. Such is, in brief, the history of Averroism as it invaded Europe from Spain. Under the auspices of Frederick II., it, in a less imposing manner, issued from Sicily. That sovereign bad adopted it fully. In his "Sicilian Questions" he had demanded light on the eternity of the world, and on the nature of the soul, and supposed he had found it in the replies of Ibn Sabin, an upholder of these doctrines. But in his conflict with the papacy be was overthrown, and with him these heresies were destroyed. In Upper Italy, Averroism long maintained its ground. It was so fashionable in high Venetian society that every gentleman felt constrained to profess it. At length the Church took decisive action against it. The Lateran Council, A.D. 1512, condemned the abettors of these detestable doctrines to be held as heretics and infidels. As we have seen, the late Vatican Council has anathematized them. Notwithstanding that stigma, it is to be borne in mind that these opinions are held to be true by a majority of the human race. CHAPTER VI. CONFLICT RESPECTING THE NATURE OF THE WORLD. Scriptural view of the world: the earth a flat surface; location of heaven and hell. Scientific view: the earth a globe; its size determined; its position in and relations to the solar system.--The three great voyages.--Columbus, De Gama, Magellan.-- Circumnavigation of the earth.--Determination of its curvature by the measurement of a degree and by the pendulum. The discoveries of Copernicus.--Invention of the telescope.-- Galileo brought before the Inquisition.--His punishment.-- Victory over the Church. Attempts to ascertain the dimensions of the solar system.-- Determination of the sun's parallax by the transits of Venus.--Insignificance, of the earth and man. Ideas respecting the dimensions of the universe.--Parallax of the stars.--The plurality of worlds asserted by Bruno.-- He is seized and murdered by the Inquisition. I HAVE now to present the discussions that arose respecting the third great philosophical problem--the nature of the world. An uncritical observation of the aspect of Nature persuades us that the earth is an extended level surface which sustains the dome of the sky, a firmament dividing the waters above from the waters beneath; that the heavenly bodies--the sun, the moon, the stars--pursue their way, moving from east to west, their insignificant size and motion round the motionless earth proclaiming their inferiority. Of the various organic forms surrounding man none rival him in dignity, and hence he seems justified in concluding that every thing has been created for his use--the sun for the purpose of giving him light by day, the moon and stars by night. Comparative theology shows us that this is the conception of Nature universally adopted in the early phase of intellectual life. It is the belief of all nations in all parts of the world in the beginning of their civilization: geocentric, for it makes the earth the centre of the universe; anthropocentric, for it makes man the central object of the earth. And not only is this the conclusion spontaneously come to from inconsiderate glimpses of the world, it is also the philosophical basis of various religious revelations, vouchsafed to man from time to time. These revelations, moreover, declare to him that above the crystalline dome of the sky is a region of eternal light and happiness--heaven--the abode of God and the angelic hosts, perhaps also his own abode after death; and beneath the earth a region of eternal darkness and misery, the habitation of those that are evil. In the visible world is thus seen a picture of the invisible. On the basis of this view of the structure of the world great religious systems have been founded, and hence powerful material interests have been engaged in its support. These have resisted, sometimes by resorting to bloodshed, attempts that have been made to correct its incontestable errors--a resistance grounded on the suspicion that the localization of heaven and hell and the supreme value of man in the universe might be affected. That such attempts would be made was inevitable. As soon as men began to reason on the subject at all, they could not fail to discredit the assertion that the earth is an indefinite plane. No one can doubt that the sun we see to-day is the self-same sun that we saw yesterday. His reappearance each morning irresistibly suggests that he has passed on the underside of the earth. But this is incompatible with the reign of night in those regions. It presents more or less distinctly the idea of the globular form of the earth. The earth cannot extend indefinitely downward; for the sun cannot go through it, nor through any crevice or passage in it, Since he rises and sets in different positions at different seasons of the year. The stars also move under it in countless courses. There must, therefore, be a clear way beneath. To reconcile revelation with these innovating facts, schemes, such as that of Cosmas Indicopleustes in his Christian Topography, were doubtless often adopted. To this in particular we have had occasion on a former page to refer. It asserted that in the northern parts of the flat earth there is an immense mountain, behind which the sun passes, and thus produces night. At a very remote historical period the mechanism of eclipses had been discovered. Those of the moon demonstrated that the shadow of the earth is always circular. The form of the earth must therefore be globular. A body which in all positions casts a circular shadow must itself be spherical. Other considerations, with which every one is now familiar, could not fail to establish that such is her figure. But the determination of the shape of the earth by no means deposed her from her position of superiority. Apparently vastly larger than all other things, it was fitting that she should be considered not merely as the centre of the world, but, in truth, as--the world. All other objects in their aggregate seemed utterly unimportant in comparison with her. Though the consequences flowing from an admission of the globular figure of the earth affected very profoundly existing theological ideas, they were of much less moment than those depending on a determination of her size. It needed but an elementary knowledge of geometry to perceive that correct ideas on this point could be readily obtained by measuring a degree on her surface. Probably there were early attempts to accomplish this object, the results of which have been lost. But Eratosthenes executed one between Syene and Alexandria, in Egypt, Syene being supposed to be exactly under the tropic of Cancer. The two places are, however, not on the same meridian, and the distance between them was estimated, not measured. Two centuries later, Posidonius made another attempt between Alexandria and Rhodes; the bright star Canopus just grazed the horizon at the latter place, at Alexandria it rose 7 1/2 degrees. In this instance, also, since the direction lay across the sea, the distance was estimated, not measured. Finally, as we have already related, the Khalif Al-Mamun made two sets of measures, one on the shore of the Red Sea, the other near Cufa, in Mesopotamia. The general result of these various observations gave for the earth's diameter between seven and eight thousand miles. This approximate determination of the size of the earth tended to depose her from her dominating position, and gave rise to very serious theological results. In this the ancient investigations of Aristarchus of Samos, one of the Alexandrian school, 280 B.C., powerfully aided. In his treatise on the magnitudes and distances of the sun and moon, he explains the ingenious though imperfect method to which he had resorted for the solution of that problem. Many ages previously a speculation had been brought from India to Europe by Pythagoras. It presented the sun as the centre of the system. Around him the planets revolved in circular orbits, their order of position being Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, each of them being supposed to rotate on its axis as it revolved round the sun. According to Cicero, Nicetas suggested that, if it were admitted that the earth revolves on her axis, the difficulty presented by the inconceivable velocity of the heavens would be avoided. There is reason to believe that the works of Aristarchus, in the Alexandrian Library, were burnt at the time of the fire of Caesar. The only treatise of his that has come down to us is that above mentioned, on the size and distance of the sun and moon. Aristarchus adopted the Pythagorean system as representing the actual facts. This was the result of a recognition of the sun's amazing distance, and therefore of his enormous size. The heliocentric system, thus regarding the sun as the central orb, degraded the earth to a very subordinate rank, making her only one of a company of six revolving bodies. But this is not the only contribution conferred on astronomy by Aristarchus, for, considering that the movement of the earth does not sensibly affect the apparent position of the stars, he inferred that they are incomparably more distant from us than the sun. He, therefore, of all the ancients, as Laplace remarks, had the most correct ideas of the grandeur of the universe. He saw that the earth is of absolutely insignificant size, when compared with the stellar distances. He saw, too, that there is nothing above us but space and stars. But the views of Aristarchus, as respects the emplacement of the planetary bodies, were not accepted by antiquity; the system proposed by Ptolemy, and incorporated in his "Syntaxis," was universally preferred. The physical philosophy of those times was very imperfect--one of Ptolemy's objections to the Pythagorean system being that, if the earth were in motion, it would leave the air and other light bodies behind it. He therefore placed the earth in the central position, and in succession revolved round her the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; beyond the orbit of Saturn came the firmament of the fixed stars. As to the solid crystalline spheres, one moving from east to west, the other from north to south, these were a fancy of Eudoxus, to which Ptolemy does not allude. The Ptolemaic system is, therefore, essentially a geocentric system. It left the earth in her position of superiority, and hence gave no cause of umbrage to religious opinions, Christian or Mohammedan. The immense reputation of its author, the signal ability of his great work on the mechanism of the heavens, sustained it for almost fourteen hundred years--that is, from the second to the sixteenth century. In Christendom, the greater part of this long period was consumed in disputes respecting the nature of God, and in struggles for ecclesiastical power. The authority of the Fathers, and the prevailing belief that the Scriptures contain the sum, of all knowledge, discouraged any investigation of Nature. If by chance a passing interest was taken in some astronomical question, it was at once settled by a reference to such authorities as the writings of Augustine or Lactantius, not by an appeal to the phenomena of the heavens. So great was the preference given to sacred over profane learning that Christianity had been in existence fifteen hundred years, and had not produced a single astronomer. The Mohammedan nations did much better. Their cultivation of science dates from the capture of Alexandria, A.D. 638. This was only six years after the death of the Prophet. In less than two centuries they had not only become acquainted with, but correctly appreciated, the Greek scientific writers. As we have already mentioned, by his treaty with Michael III., the khalif Al-Mamun had obtained a copy of the "Syntaxis" of Ptolemy. He had it forthwith translated into Arabic. It became at once the great authority of Saracen astronomy. From this basis the Saracens had advanced to the solution of some of the most important scientific problems. They had ascertained the dimensions of the earth; they had registered or catalogued all the stars visible in their heavens, giving to those of the larger magnitudes the names they still bear on our maps and globes; they determined the true length of the year, discovered astronomical refraction, invented the pendulum-clock, improved the photometry of the stars, ascertained the curvilinear path of a ray of light through the air, explained the phenomena of the horizontal sun and moon, and why we see those bodies before they have risen and after they have set; measured the height of the atmosphere, determining it to be fifty-eight miles; given the true theory of the twilight, and of the twinkling of the stars. They had built the first observatory in Europe. So accurate were they in their observations, that the ablest modern mathematicians have made use of their results. Thus Laplace, in his "Systeme du Monde," adduces the observations of Al-Batagni as affording incontestable proof of the diminution of the eccentricity of the earth's orbit. He uses those of Ibn-Junis in his discussion of the obliquity of the ecliptic, and also in the case of the problems of the greater inequalities of Jupiter and Saturn. These represent but a part, and indeed but a small part, of the services rendered by the Arabian astronomers, in the solution of the problem of the nature of the world. Meanwhile, such was the benighted condition of Christendom, such its deplorable ignorance, that it cared nothing about the matter. Its attention was engrossed by image-worship, transubstantiation, the merits of the saints, miracles, shrine-cures. This indifference continued until the close of the fifteenth century. Even then there was no scientific inducement. The inciting motives were altogether of a different kind. They originated in commercial rivalries, and the question of the shape of the earth was finally settled by three sailors, Columbus, De Gama, and, above all, by Ferdinand Magellan. The trade of Eastern Asia has always been a source of immense wealth to the Western nations who in succession have obtained it. In the middle ages it had centred in Upper Italy. It was conducted along two lines--a northern, by way of the Black and Caspian Seas, and camel-caravans beyond--the headquarters of this were at Genoa; and a southern, through the Syrian and Egyptian ports, and by the Arabian Sea, the headquarters of this being at Venice. The merchants engaged in the latter traffic had also made great gains in the transport service of the Crusade-wars. The Venetians had managed to maintain amicable relations with the Mohammedan powers of Syria and Egypt; they were permitted to have consulates at Alexandria and Damascus, and, notwithstanding the military commotions of which those countries had been the scene, the trade was still maintained in a comparatively flourishing condition. But the northern or Genoese line had been completely broken up by the irruptions of the Tartars and the Turks, and the military and political disturbances of the countries through which it passed. The Eastern trade of Genoa was not merely in a precarious condition--it was on the brink of destruction. The circular visible horizon and its dip at sea, the gradual appearance and disappearance of ships in the offing, cannot fail to incline intelligent sailors to a belief in the globular figure of the earth. The writings of the Mohammedan astronomers and philosophers had given currency to that doctrine throughout Western Europe, but, as might be expected, it was received with disfavor by theologians. When Genoa was thus on the very brink of ruin, it occurred to some of her mariners that, if this view were correct, her affairs might be re-established. A ship sailing through the straits of Gibraltar westward, across the Atlantic, would not fail to reach the East Indies. There were apparently other great advantages. Heavy cargoes might be transported without tedious and expensive land-carriage, and without breaking bulk. Among the Genoese sailors who entertained these views was Christopher Columbus. He tells us that his attention was drawn to this subject by the writings of Averroes, but among his friends he numbered Toscanelli, a Florentine, who had turned his attention to astronomy, and had become a strong advocate of the globular form. In Genoa itself Columbus met with but little encouragement. He then spent many years in trying to interest different princes in his proposed attempt. Its irreligious tendency was pointed out by the Spanish ecclesiastics, and condemned by the Council of Salamanca; its orthodoxy was confuted from the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Prophecies, the Gospels, the Epistles, and the writings of the Fathers--St. Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, St. Basil, St Ambrose. At length, however, encouraged by the Spanish Queen Isabella, and substantially aided by a wealthy seafaring family, the Pinzons of Palos, some of whom joined him personally, he sailed on August 3, 1492, with three small ships, from Palos, carrying with him a letter from King Ferdinand to the Grand-Khan of Tartary, and also a chart, or map, constructed on the basis of that of Toscanelli. A little before midnight, October 11, 1492, he saw from the forecastle of his ship a moving light at a distance. Two hours subsequently a signal-gun from another of the ships announced that they had descried land. At sunrise Columbus landed in the New World. On his return to Europe it was universally supposed that he had reached the eastern parts of Asia, and that therefore his voyage had been theoretically successful. Columbus himself died in that belief. But numerous voyages which were soon undertaken made known the general contour of the American coast-line, and the discovery of the Great South Sea by Balboa revealed at length the true facts of the case, and the mistake into which both Toscanelli and Columbus had fallen, that in a voyage to the West the distance from Europe to Asia could not exceed the distance passed over in a voyage from Italy to the Gulf of Guinea--a voyage that Columbus had repeatedly made. In his first voyage, at nightfall on September 13, 1492, being then two and a half degrees east of Corvo, one of the Azores, Columbus observed that the compass needles of the ships no longer pointed a little to the east of north, but were varying to the west. The deviation became more and more marked as the expedition advanced. He was not the first to detect the fact of variation, but he was incontestably the first to discover the line of no variation. On the return-voyage the reverse was observed; the variation westward diminished until the meridian in question was reached, when the needles again pointed due north. Thence, as the coast of Europe was approached, the variation was to the east. Columbus, therefore, came to the conclusion that the line of no variation was a fixed geographical line, or boundary, between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. In the bull of May, 1493, Pope Alexander VI. accordingly adopted this line as the perpetual boundary between the possessions of Spain and Portugal, in his settlement of the disputes of those nations. Subsequently, however, it was discovered that the line was moving eastward. It coincided with the meridian of London in 1662. By the papal bull the Portuguese possessions were limited to the east of the line of no variation. Information derived from certain Egyptian Jews had reached that government, that it was possible to sail round the continent of Africa, there being at its extreme south a cape which could be easily doubled. An expedition of three ships under Vasco de Gama set sail, July 9, 1497; it doubled the cape on November 20th, and reached Calicut, on the coast of India, May 19, 1498. Under the bull, this voyage to the East gave to the Portuguese the right to the India trade. Until the cape was doubled, the course of De Gama's ships was in a general manner southward. Very soon, it was noticed that the elevation of the pole-star above the horizon was diminishing, and, soon after the equator was reached, that star had ceased to be visible. Meantime other stars, some of them forming magnificent constellations, had come into view--the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. All this was in conformity to theoretical expectations founded on the admission of the globular form of the earth. The political consequences that at once ensued placed the Papal Government in a position of great embarrassment. Its traditions and policy forbade it to admit any other than the flat figure of the earth, as revealed in the Scriptures. Concealment of the facts was impossible, sophistry was unavailing. Commercial prosperity now left Venice as well as Genoa. The front of Europe was changed. Maritime power had departed from the Mediterranean countries, and passed to those upon the Atlantic coast. But the Spanish Government did not submit to the advantage thus gained by its commercial rival without an effort. It listened to the representations of one Ferdinand Magellan, that India and the Spice Islands could be reached by sailing to the west, if only a strait or passage through what had now been recognized as "the American Continent" could be discovered; and, if this should be accomplished, Spain, under the papal bull, would have as good a right to the India trade as Portugal. Under the command of Magellan, an expedition of five ships, carrying two hundred and thirty-seven men, was dispatched from Seville, August 10, 1519. Magellan at once struck boldly for the South American coast, hoping to find some cleft or passage through the continent by which he might reach the great South Sea. For seventy days he was becalmed on the line; his sailors were appalled by the apprehension that they had drifted into a region where the winds never blew, and that it was impossible for them to escape. Calms, tempests, mutiny, desertion, could not shake his resolution. After more than a year he discovered the strait which now bears his name, and, as Pigafetti, an Italian, who was with him, relates, he shed fears of joy when he found that it had pleased God at length to bring him where he might grapple with the unknown dangers of the South Sea, "the Great and Pacific Ocean." Driven by famine to eat scraps of skin and leather with which his rigging was here and there bound, to drink water that had gone putrid, his crew dying of hunger and scurvy, this man, firm in his belief of the globular figure of the earth, steered steadily to the northwest, and for nearly four months never saw inhabited land. He estimated that he had sailed over the Pacific not less than twelve thousand miles. He crossed the equator, saw once more the pole-star, and at length made land--the Ladrones. Here he met with adventurers from Sumatra. Among these islands he was killed, either by the savages or by his own men. His lieutenant, Sebastian d'Elcano, now took command of the ship, directing her course for the Cape of Good Hope, and encountering frightful hardships. He doubled the cape at last, and then for the fourth time crossed the equator. On September 7, 1522, after a voyage of more than three years, he brought his ship, the San Vittoria, to anchor in the port of St. Lucar, near Seville. She had accomplished the greatest achievement in the history of the human race. She had circumnavigated the earth. The San Vittoria, sailing westward, had come back to her starting-point. Henceforth the theological doctrine of the flatness of the earth was irretrievably overthrown. Five years after the completion of the voyage of Magellan, was made the first attempt in Christendom to ascertain the size of the earth. This was by Fernel, a French physician, who, having observed the height of the pole at Paris, went thence northward until he came to a place where the height of the pole was exactly one degree more than at that city. He measured the distance between the two stations by the number of revolutions of one of the wheels of his carriage, to which a proper indicator bad been attached, and came to the conclusion that the earth's circumference is about twenty-four thousand four hundred and eighty Italian miles. Measures executed more and more carefully were made in many countries: by Snell in Holland; by Norwood between London and York in England; by Picard, under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences, in France. Picard's plan was to connect two points by a series of triangles, and, thus ascertaining the length of the arc of a meridian intercepted between them, to compare it with the difference of latitudes found from celestial observations. The stations were Malvoisine in the vicinity of Paris, and Sourdon near Amiens. The difference of latitudes was determined by observing the zenith-distances, of delta Cassiopeia. There are two points of interest connected with Picard's operation: it was the first in which instruments furnished with telescopes were employed; and its result, as we shall shortly see, was to Newton the first confirmation of the theory of universal gravitation. At this time it had become clear from mechanical considerations, more especially such as had been deduced by Newton, that, since the earth is a rotating body, her form cannot be that of a perfect sphere, but must be that of a spheroid, oblate or flattened at the poles. It would follow, from this, that the length of a degree must be greater near the poles than at the equator. The French Academy resolved to extend Picard's operation, by prolonging the measures in each direction, and making the result the basis of a more accurate map of France. Delays, however, took place, and it was not until 1718 that the measures, from Dunkirk on the north to the southern extremity of France, were completed. A discussion arose as to the interpretation of these measures, some affirming that they indicated a prolate, others an oblate spheroid; the former figure may be popularly represented by a lemon, the latter by an orange. To settle this, the French Government, aided by the Academy, sent out two expeditions to measure degrees of the meridian--one under the equator, the other as far north as possible; the former went to Peru, the latter to Swedish Lapland. Very great difficulties were encountered by both parties. The Lapland commission, however, completed its observations long before the Peruvian, which consumed not less than nine years. The results of the measures thus obtained confirmed the theoretical expectation of the oblate form. Since that time many extensive and exact repetitions of the observation have been made, among which may be mentioned those of the English in England and in India, and particularly that of the French on the occasion of the introduction of the metric system of weights and measures. It was begun by Delambre and Mechain, from Dunkirk to Barcelona, and thence extended, by Biot and Arago, to the island of Formentera near Minorea. Its length was nearly twelve and a half degrees. Besides this method of direct measurement, the figure of the earth may be determined from the observed number of oscillations made by a pendulum of invariable length in different latitudes. These, though they confirm the foregoing results, give a somewhat greater ellipticity to the earth than that found by the measurement of degrees. Pendulums vibrate more slowly the nearer they are to the equator. It follows, therefore, that they are there farther from the centre of the earth. From the most reliable measures that have been made, the dimensions of the earth may be thus stated: Greater or equatorial diameter..............7,925 miles. Less or polar diameter......................7,899 " Difference or polar compression............. 26 " Such was the result of the discussion respecting the figure and size of the earth. While it was yet undetermined, another controversy arose, fraught with even more serious consequences. This was the conflict respecting the earth's position with regard to the sun and the planetary bodies. Copernicus, a Prussian, about the year 1507, had completed a book "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies." He had journeyed to Italy in his youth, had devoted his attention to astronomy, and had taught mathematics at Rome. From a profound study of the Ptolemaic and Pythagorean systems, he had come to a conclusion in favor of the latter, the object of his book being to sustain it. Aware that his doctrines were totally opposed to revealed truth, and foreseeing that they would bring upon him the punishments of the Church, he expressed himself in a cautious and apologetic manner, saying that he had only taken the liberty of trying whether, on the supposition of the earth's motion, it was possible to find better explanations than the ancient ones of the revolutions of the celestial orbs; that in doing this he had only taken the privilege that had been allowed to others, of feigning what hypothesis they chose. The preface was addressed to Pope Paul III. Full of misgivings as to what might be the result, he refrained from publishing his book for thirty-six years, thinking that "perhaps it might be better to follow the examples of the Pythagoreans and others, who delivered their doctrine only by tradition and to friends." At the entreaty of Cardinal Schomberg he at length published it in 1543. A copy of it was brought to him on his death-bed. Its fate was such as he had anticipated. The Inquisition condemned it as heretical. In their decree, prohibiting it, the Congregation of the Index denounced his system as "that false Pythagorean doctrine utterly contrary to the Holy Scriptures." Astronomers justly affirm that the book of Copernicus, "De Revolutionibus," changed the face of their science. It incontestably established the heliocentric theory. It showed that the distance of the fixed stars is infinitely great, and that the earth is a mere point in the heavens. Anticipating Newton, Copernicus imputed gravity to the sun, the moon, and heavenly bodies, but he was led astray by assuming that the celestial motions must be circular. Observations on the orbit of Mars, and his different diameters at different times, had led Copernicus to his theory. In thus denouncing the Copernican system as being in contradiction to revelation, the ecclesiastical authorities were doubtless deeply moved by inferential considerations. To dethrone the earth from her central dominating position, to give her many equals and not a few superiors, seemed to diminish her claims upon the Divine regard. If each of the countless myriads of stars was a sun, surrounded by revolving globes, peopled with responsible beings like ourselves, if we had fallen so easily and had been redeemed at so stupendous a price as the death of the Son of God, how was it with them? Of them were there none who had fallen or might fall like us? Where, then, for them could a Savior be found? During the year 1608 one Lippershey, a Hollander, discovered that, by looking through two glass lenses, combined in a certain manner together, distant objects were magnified and rendered very plain. He had invented the telescope. In the following year Galileo, a Florentine, greatly distinguished by his mathematical and scientific writings, hearing of the circumstance, but without knowing the particulars of the construction, invented a form of the instrument for himself. Improving it gradually, he succeeded in making one that could magnify thirty times. Examining the moon, he found that she had valleys like those of the earth, and mountains casting shadows. It had been said in the old times that in the Pleiades there were formerly seven stars, but a legend related that one of them had mysteriously disappeared. On turning his telescope toward them, Galileo found that he could easily count not fewer than forty. In whatever direction he looked, he discovered stars that were totally invisible to the naked eye. On the night of January 7, 1610, he perceived three small stars in a straight line, adjacent to the planet Jupiter, and, a few evenings later, a fourth. He found that these were revolving in orbits round the body of the planet, and, with transport, recognized that they presented a miniature representation of the Copernican system. The announcement of these wonders at once attracted universal attention. The spiritual authorities were not slow to detect their tendency, as endangering the doctrine that the universe was made for man. In the creation of myriads of stars, hitherto invisible, there must surely have been some other motive than that of illuminating the nights for him. It had been objected to the Copernican theory that, if the planets Mercury and Venus move round the sun in orbits interior to that of the earth, they ought to show phases like those of the moon; and that in the case of Venus, which is so brilliant and conspicuous, these phases should be very obvious. Copernicus himself had admitted the force of the objection, and had vainly tried to find an explanation. Galileo, on turning his telescope to the planet, discovered that the expected phases actually exist; now she was a crescent, then half-moon, then gibbous, then full. Previously to Copernicus, it was supposed that the planets shine by their own light, but the phases of Venus and Mars proved that their light is reflected. The Aristotelian notion, that celestial differ from terrestrial bodies in being incorruptible, received a rude shock from the discoveries of Galileo, that there are mountains and valleys in the moon like those of the earth, that the sun is not perfect, but has spots on his face, and that he turns on his axis instead of being in a state of majestic rest. The apparition of new stars had already thrown serious doubts on this theory of incorruptibility. These and many other beautiful telescopic discoveries tended to the establishment of the truth of the Copernican theory and gave unbounded alarm to the Church. By the low and ignorant ecclesiastics they were denounced as deceptions or frauds. Some affirmed that the telescope might be relied on well enough for terrestrial objects, but with the heavenly bodies it was altogether a different affair. Others declared that its invention was a mere application of Aristotle's remark that stars could be seen in the daytime from the bottom of a deep well. Galileo was accused of imposture, heresy, blasphemy, atheism. With a view of defending himself, he addressed a letter to the Abbe Castelli, suggesting that the Scriptures were never intended to be a scientific authority, but only a moral guide. This made matters worse. He was summoned before the Holy Inquisition, under an accusation of having taught that the earth moves round the sun, a doctrine "utterly contrary to the Scriptures." He was ordered to renounce that heresy, on pain of being imprisoned. He was directed to desist from teaching and advocating the Copernican theory, and pledge himself that he would neither publish nor defend it for the future. Knowing well that Truth has no need of martyrs, he assented to the required recantation, and gave the promise demanded. For sixteen years the Church had rest. But in 1632 Galileo ventured on the publication of his work entitled "The System of the World," its object being the vindication of the Copernican doctrine. He was again summoned before the Inquisition at Rome, accused of having asserted that the earth moves round the sun. He was declared to have brought upon himself the penalties of heresy. On his knees, with his hand on the Bible, he was compelled to abjure and curse the doctrine of the movement of the earth. What a spectacle! This venerable man, the most illustrious of his age, forced by the threat of death to deny facts which his judges as well as himself knew to be true! He was then committed to prison, treated with remorseless severity during the remaining ten years of his life, and was denied burial in consecrated ground. Must not that be false which requires for its support so much imposture, so much barbarity? The opinions thus defended by the Inquisition are now objects of derision to the whole civilized world. One of the greatest of modern mathematicians, referring to this subject, says that the point here contested was one which is for mankind of the highest interest, because of the rank it assigns to the globe that we inhabit. If the earth be immovable in the midst of the universe, man has a right to regard himself as the principal object of the care of Nature. But if the earth be only one of the planets revolving round the sun, an insignificant body in the solar system, she will disappear entirely in the immensity of the heavens, in which this system, vast as it may appear to us, is nothing but an insensible point. The triumphant establishment of the Copernican doctrine dates from the invention of the telescope. Soon there was not to be found in all Europe an astronomer who had not accepted the heliocentric theory with its essential postulate, the double motion of the earth--movement of rotation on her axis, and a movement of revolution round the sun. If additional proof of the latter were needed, it was furnished by Bradley's great discovery of the aberration of the fixed stars, an aberration depending partly on the progressive motion of light, and partly on the revolution of the earth. Bradley's discovery ranked in importance with that of the precession of the equinoxes. Roemer's discovery of the progressive motion of light, though denounced by Fontenelle as a seductive error, and not admitted by Cassini, at length forced its way to universal acceptance. Next it was necessary to obtain correct ideas of the dimensions of the solar system, or, putting the problem under a more limited form, to determine the distance of the earth from the sun. In the time of Copernicus it was supposed that the sun's distance could not exceed five million miles, and indeed there were many who thought that estimate very extravagant. From a review of the observations of Tycho Brahe, Kepler, however, concluded that the error was actually in the opposite direction, and that the estimate must be raised to at least thirteen million. In 1670 Cassini showed that these numbers were altogether inconsistent with the facts, and gave as his conclusion eighty-five million. The transit of Venus over the face of the sun, June 3, 1769, had been foreseen, and its great value in the solution of this fundamental problem in astronomy appreciated. With commendable alacrity various governments contributed their assistance in making observations, so that in Europe there were fifty stations, in Asia six, in America seventeen. It was for this purpose that the English Government dispatched Captain Cook on his celebrated first voyage. He went to Otaheite. His voyage was crowned with success. The sun rose without a cloud, and the sky continued equally clear throughout the day. The transit at Cook's station lasted from about half-past nine in the morning until about half-past three in the afternoon, and all the observations were made in a satisfactory manner. But, on the discussion of the observations made at the different stations, it was found that there was not the accordance that could have been desired--the result varying from eighty-eight to one hundred and nine million. The celebrated mathematician, Encke, therefore reviewed them in 1822-'24, and came to the conclusion that the sun's horizontal parallax, that is, the angle under which the semi-diameter of the earth is seen from the sun, is 8 576/1000 seconds; this gave as the distance 95,274,000 miles. Subsequently the observations were reconsidered by Hansen, who gave as their result 91,659,000 miles. Still later, Leverrier made it 91,759,000. Airy and Stone, by another method, made it 91,400,000; Stone alone, by a revision of the old observations, 91,730,000; and finally, Foucault and Fizeau, from physical experiments, determining the velocity of light, and therefore in their nature altogether differing from transit observations, 91,400,000. Until the results of the transit of next year (1874) are ascertained, it must therefore be admitted that the distance of the earth from the sun is somewhat less than ninety-two million miles. This distance once determined, the dimensions of the solar system may be ascertained with ease and precision. It is enough to mention that the distance of Neptune from the sun, the most remote of the planets at present known, is about thirty times that of the earth. By the aid of these numbers we may begin to gain a just appreciation of the doctrine of the human destiny of the universe--the doctrine that all things were made for man. Seen from the sun, the earth dwindles away to a mere speck, a mere dust-mote glistening in his beams. If the reader wishes a more precise valuation, let him hold a page of this book a couple of feet from his eye; then let him consider one of its dots or full stops; that dot is several hundred times larger in surface than is the earth as seen from the sun! Of what consequence, then, can such an almost imperceptible particle be? One might think that it could be removed or even annihilated, and yet never be missed. Of what consequence is one of those human monads, of whom more than a thousand millions swarm on the surface of this all but invisible speck, and of a million of whom scarcely one will leave a trace that he has ever existed? Of what consequence is man, his pleasures or his pains? Among the arguments brought forward against the Copernican system at the time of its promulgation, was one by the great Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, originally urged by Aristarchus against the Pythagorean system, to the effect that, if, as was alleged, the earth moves round the sun, there ought to be a change of the direction in which the fixed stars appear. At one time we are nearer to a particular region of the heavens by a distance equal to the whole diameter of the earth's orbit than we were six months previously, and hence there ought to be a change in the relative position of the stars; they should seem to separate as we approach them, and to close together as we recede from them; or, to use the astronomical expression, these stars should have a yearly parallax. The parallax of a star is the angle contained between two lines drawn from it--one to the sun, the other to the earth. At that time, the earth's distance from the sun was greatly under-estimated. Had it been known, as it is now, that that distance exceeds ninety million miles, or that the diameter of the orbit is more than one hundred and eighty million, that argument would doubtless have had very great weight. In reply to Tycho, it was said that, since the parallax of a body diminishes as its distance increases, a star may be so far off that its parallax may be imperceptible. This answer proved to be correct. The detection of the parallax of the stars depended on the improvement of instruments for the measurement of angles. The parallax of alpha Centauri, a fine double star of the Southern Hemisphere, at present considered to be the nearest of the fixed stars, was first determined by Henderson and Maclear at the Cape of Good Hope in 1832-'33. It is about nine-tenths of a second. Hence this star is almost two hundred and thirty thousand times as far from us as the sun. Seen from it, if the sun were even large enough to fill the whole orbit of the earth, or one hundred and eighty million miles in diameter, he would be a mere point. With its companion, it revolves round their common centre of gravity in eighty-one years, and hence it would seem that their conjoint mass is less than that of the sun. The star 61 Cygni is of the sixth magnitude. Its parallax was first found by Bessel in 1838, and is about one-third of a second. The distance from us is, therefore, much more than five hundred thousand times that of the sun. With its companion, it revolves round their common centre of gravity in five hundred and twenty years. Their conjoint weight is about one-third that of the sun. There is reason to believe that the great star Sirius, the brightest in the heavens, is about six times as far off as alpha Centauri. His probable diameter is twelve million miles, and the light he emits two hundred times more brilliant than that of the sun. Yet, even through the telescope, he has no measurable diameter; he looks merely like a very bright spark. The stars, then, differ not merely in visible magnitude, but also in actual size. As the spectroscope shows, they differ greatly in chemical and physical constitution. That instrument is also revealing to us the duration of the life of a star, through changes in the refrangibility of the emitted light. Though, as we have seen, the nearest to us is at an enormous and all but immeasurable distance, this is but the first step--there are others the rays of which have taken thousands, perhaps millions, of years to reach us! The limits of our own system are far beyond the range of our greatest telescopes; what, then, shall we say of other systems beyond? Worlds are scattered like dust in the abysses in space. Have these gigantic bodies--myriads of which are placed at so vast a distance that our unassisted eyes cannot perceive them--have these no other purpose than that assigned by theologians, to give light to us? Does not their enormous size demonstrate that, as they are centres of force, so they must be centres of motion--suns for other systems of worlds? While yet these facts were very imperfectly known--indeed, were rather speculations than facts--Giordano Bruno, an Italian, born seven years after the death of Copernicus, published a work on the "Infinity of the Universe and of Worlds;" he was also the author of "Evening Conversations on Ash-Wednesday," an apology for the Copernican system, and of "The One Sole Cause of Things." To these may be added an allegory published in 1584, "The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast." He had also collected, for the use of future astronomers, all the observations he could find respecting the new star that suddenly appeared in Cassiopeia, A.D. 1572, and increased in brilliancy, until it surpassed all the other stars. It could be plainly seen in the daytime. On a sudden, November 11th, it was as bright as Venus at her brightest. In the following March it was of the first magnitude. It exhibited various hues of color in a few months, and disappeared in March, 1574. The star that suddenly appeared in Serpentarius, in Kepler's time (1604), was at first brighter than Venus. It lasted more than a year, and, passing through various tints of purple, yellow, red, became extinguished. Originally, Bruno was intended for the Church. He had become a Dominican, but was led into doubt by his meditations on the subjects of transubstantiation and the immaculate conception. Not caring to conceal his opinions, he soon fell under the censure of the spiritual authorities, and found it necessary to seek refuge successively in Switzerland, France, England, Germany. The cold-scented sleuth-hounds of the Inquisition followed his track remorselessly, and eventually hunted him back to Italy. He was arrested in Venice, and confined in the Piombi for six years, without books, or paper, or friends. In England he had given lectures on the plurality of worlds, and in that country had written, in Italian, his most important works. It added not a little to the exasperation against him, that he was perpetually declaiming against the insincerity; the impostures, of his persecutors--that wherever he went he found skepticism varnished over and concealed by hypocrisy; and that it was not against the belief of men, but against their pretended belief, that he was fighting; that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor faith. In his "Evening Conversations" he had insisted that the Scriptures were never intended to teach science, but morals only; and that they cannot be received as of any authority on astronomical and physical subjects. Especially must we reject the view they reveal to us of the constitution of the world, that the earth is a flat surface, supported on pillars; that the sky is a firmament--the floor of heaven. On the contrary, we must believe that the universe is infinite, and that it is filled with self-luminous and opaque worlds, many of them inhabited; that there is nothing above and around us but space and stars. His meditations on these subjects had brought him to the conclusion that the views of Averroes are not far from the truth--that there is an Intellect which animates the universe, and of this Intellect the visible world is only an emanation or manifestation, originated and sustained by force derived from it, and, were that force withdrawn, all things would disappear. This ever-present, all-pervading Intellect is God, who lives in all things, even such as seem not to live; that every thing is ready to become organized, to burst into life. God is, therefore, "the One Sole Cause of Things," "the All in All." Bruno may hence be considered among philosophical writers as intermediate between Averroes and Spinoza. The latter held that God and the Universe are the same, that all events happen by an immutable law of Nature, by an unconquerable necessity; that God is the Universe, producing a series of necessary movements or acts, in consequence of intrinsic, unchangeable, and irresistible energy. On the demand of the spiritual authorities, Bruno was removed from Venice to Rome, and confined in the prison of the Inquisition, accused not only of being a heretic, but also a heresiarch, who had written things unseemly concerning religion; the special charge against him being that he had taught the plurality of worlds, a doctrine repugnant to the whole tenor of Scripture and inimical to revealed religion, especially as regards the plan of salvation. After an imprisonment of two years he was brought before his judges, declared guilty of the acts alleged, excommunicated, and, on his nobly refusing to recant, was delivered over to the secular authorities to be punished "as mercifully as possible, and without the shedding of his blood," the horrible formula for burning a prisoner at the stake. Knowing well that though his tormentors might destroy his body, his thoughts would still live among men, he said to his judges, "Perhaps it is with greater fear that you pass the sentence upon me than I receive it." The sentence was carried into effect, and he was burnt at Rome, February 16th, A.D. 1600. No one can recall without sentiments of pity the sufferings of those countless martyrs, who first by one party, and then by another, have been brought for their religious opinions to the stake. But each of these had in his supreme moment a powerful and unfailing support. The passage from this life to the next, though through a hard trial, was the passage from a transient trouble to eternal happiness, an escape from the cruelty of earth to the charity of heaven. On his way through the dark valley the martyr believed that there was an invisible hand that would lead him, a friend that would guide him all the more gently and firmly because of the terrors of the flames. For Bruno there was no such support. The philosophical opinions, for the sake of which he surrendered his life, could give him no consolation. He must fight the last fight alone. Is there not something very grand in the attitude of this solitary man, something which human nature cannot help admiring, as he stands in the gloomy hall before his inexorable judges? No accuser, no witness, no advocate is present, but the familiars of the Holy Office, clad in black, are stealthily moving about. The tormentors and the rack are in the vaults below. He is simply told that he has brought upon himself strong suspicions of heresy, since he has said that there are other worlds than ours. He is asked if he will recant and abjure his error. He cannot and will not deny what he knows to be true, and perhaps--for he had often done so before--he tells his judges that they, too, in their hearts are of the same belief. What a contrast between this scene of manly honor, of unshaken firmness, of inflexible adherence to the truth, and that other scene which took place more than fifteen centuries previously by the fireside in the hall of Caiaphas the high-priest, when the cock crew, and "the Lord turned and looked upon Peter" (Luke xxii. 61)! And yet it is upon Peter that the Church has grounded her right to act as she did to Bruno. But perhaps the day approaches when posterity will offer an expiation for this great ecclesiastical crime, and a statue of Bruno be unveiled under the dome of St. Peter's at Rome. CHAPTER VII. CONTROVERSY RESPECTING THE AGE OF THE EARTH. Scriptural view that the Earth is only six thousand years old, and that it was made in a week.--Patristic chronology founded on the ages of the patriarchs.--Difficulties arising from different estimates in different versions of the Bible. Legend of the Deluge.--The repeopling.--The Tower of Babel; the confusion of tongues.--The primitive language. Discovery by Cassini of the oblateness of the planet Jupiter.--Discovery by Newton of the oblateness of the Earth.--Deduction that she has been modeled by mechanical causes.--Confirmation of this by geological discoveries respecting aqueous rocks; corroboration by organic remains.-- The necessity of admitting enormously long periods of time.--Displacement of the doctrine of Creation by that of Evolution--Discoveries respecting the Antiquity of Man. The time-scale and space-scale of the world are infinite.-- Moderation with which the discussion of the Age of the World has been conducted. THE true position of the earth in the universe was established only after a long and severe conflict. The Church used whatever power she had, even to the infliction of death, for sustaining her ideas. But it was in vain. The evidence in behalf of the Copernican theory became irresistible. It was at length universally admitted that the sun is the central, the ruling body of our system; the earth only one, and by no means the largest, of a family of encircling planets. Taught by the issue of that dispute, when the question of the age of the world presented itself for consideration, the Church did not exhibit the active resistance she had displayed on the former occasion. For, though her traditions were again put in jeopardy, they were not, in her judgment, so vitally assailed. To dethrone the Earth from her dominating position was, so the spiritual authorities declared, to undermine the very foundation of revealed truth; but discussions respecting the date of creation might within certain limits be permitted. Those limits were, however, very quickly overpassed, and thus the controversy became as dangerous as the former one had been. It was not possible to adopt the advice given by Plato in his "Timaeus," when treating of this subject--the origin of the universe: "It is proper that both I who speak and you who judge should remember that we are but men, and therefore, receiving the probable mythological tradition, it is meet that we inquire no further into it." Since the time of St. Augustine the Scriptures had been made the great and final authority in all matters of science, and theologians had deduced from them schemes of chronology and cosmogony which had proved to be stumbling-blocks to the advance of real knowledge. It is not necessary for us to do more than to allude to some of the leading features of these schemes; their peculiarities will be easily discerned with sufficient clearness. Thus, from the six days of creation and the Sabbath-day of rest, since we are told that a day is with the Lord as a thousand years, it was inferred that the duration of the world will be through six thousand years of suffering, and an additional thousand, a millennium of rest. It was generally admitted that the earth was about four thousand years old at the birth of Christ, but, so careless had Europe been in the study of its annals, that not Until A.D. 627 had it a proper chronology of its own. A Roman abbot, Dionysius Exiguus, or Dennis the Less, then fixed the vulgar era, and gave Europe its present Christian chronology. The method followed in obtaining the earliest chronological dates was by computations, mainly founded on the lives of the patriarchs. Much difficulty was encountered in reconciling numerical discrepancies. Even if, as was taken for granted in those uncritical ages, Moses was the author of the books imputed to him, due weight was not given to the fact that he related events, many of which took place more than two thousand years before he was born. It scarcely seemed necessary to regard the Pentateuch as of plenary inspiration, since no means had been provided to perpetuate its correctness. The different copies which had escaped the chances of time varied very much; thus the Samaritan made thirteen hundred and seven years from the Creation to the Deluge, the Hebrew sixteen hundred and fifty-six, the Septuagint twenty-two hundred and sixty-three. The Septuagint counted fifteen hundred years more from the Creation to Abraham than the Hebrew. In general, however, there was an inclination to the supposition that the Deluge took place about two thousand years after the Creation, and, after another interval of two thousand years, Christ was born. Persons who had given much attention to the subject affirmed that there were not less than one hundred and thirty-two different opinions as to the year in which the Messiah appeared, and hence they declared that it was inexpedient to press for acceptance the Scriptural numbers too closely, since it was plain, from the great differences in different copies, that there had been no providential intervention to perpetuate a correct reading, nor was there any mark by which men could be guided to the only authentic version. Even those held in the highest esteem contained undeniable errors. Thus the Septuagint made Methuselah live until after the Deluge. It was thought that, in the antediluvian world, the year consisted of three hundred and sixty days. Some even affirmed that this was the origin of the division of the circle into three hundred and sixty degrees. At the time of the Deluge, so many theologians declared, the motion of the sun was altered, and the year became five days and six hours longer. There was a prevalent opinion that that stupendous event occurred on November 2d, in the year of the world 1656. Dr. Whiston, however, disposed to greater precision, inclined to postpone it to November 28th. Some thought that the rainbow was not seen until after the flood; others, apparently with better reason, inferred that it was then first established as a sign. On coming forth from the ark, men received permission to use flesh as food, the antediluvians having been herbivorous! It would seem that the Deluge had not occasioned any great geographical changes, for Noah, relying on his antediluvian knowledge, proceeded to divide the earth among his three sons, giving to Japhet Europe, to Shem Asia, to Ham Africa. No provision was made for America, as he did not know of its existence. These patriarchs, undeterred by the terrible solitudes to which they were going, by the undrained swamps and untracked forests, journeyed to their allotted possessions, and commenced the settlement of the continents. In seventy years the Asiatic family had increased to several hundred. They had found their way to the plains of Mesopotamia, and there, for some motive that we cannot divine, began building a tower "whose top might reach to heaven." Eusebius informs us that the work continued for forty years. They did not abandon it until a miraculous confusion of their language took place and dispersed them all over the earth. St. Ambrose shows that this confusion could not have been brought about by men. Origen believes that not even the angels accomplished it. The confusion of tongues has given rise to many curious speculations among divines as to the primitive speech of man. Some have thought that the language of Adam consisted altogether of nouns, that they were monosyllables, and that the confusion was occasioned by the introduction of polysyllables. But these learned men must surely have overlooked the numerous conversations reported in Genesis, such as those between the Almighty and Adam, the serpent and Eve, etc. In these all the various parts of speech occur. There was, however, a coincidence of opinion that the primitive language was Hebrew. On the general principles of patristicism, it was fitting that this should be the case. The Greek Fathers computed that, at the time of the dispersion, seventy-two nations were formed, and in this conclusion St. Augustine coincides. But difficulties seem to have been recognized in these computations; thus the learned Dr. Shuckford, who has treated very elaborately on all the foregoing points in his excellent work "On the Sacred and Profane History of the World connected," demonstrates that there could not have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two men, women, and children, in each of those kingdoms. A very vital point in this system of chronological computation, based upon the ages of the patriarchs, was the great length of life to which those worthies attained. It was generally supposed that before the Flood "there was a perpetual equinox," and no vicissitudes in Nature. After that event the standard of life diminished one-half, and in the time of the Psalmist it had sunk to seventy years, at which it still remains. Austerities of climate were affirmed to have arisen through the shifting of the earth's axis at the Flood, and to this ill effect were added the noxious influences of that universal catastrophe, which, "converting the surface of the earth into a vast swamp, gave rise to fermentations of the blood and a weakening of the fibres." With a view of avoiding difficulties arising from the extraordinary length of the patriarchal lives, certain divines suggested that the years spoken of by the sacred penman were not ordinary but lunar years. This, though it might bring the age of those venerable men within the recent term of life, introduced, however, another insuperable difficulty, since it made them have children when only five or six years old. Sacred science, as interpreted by the Fathers of the Church, demonstrated these facts: 1. That the date of Creation was comparatively recent, not more than four or five thousand years before Christ; 2. That the act of Creation occupied the space of six ordinary days; 3. That the Deluge was universal, and that the animals which survived it were preserved in an ark; 4. That Adam was created perfect in morality and intelligence, that he fell, and that his descendants have shared in his sin and his fall. Of these points and others that might be mentioned there were two on which ecclesiastical authority felt that it must insist. These were: 1. The recent date of Creation; for, the remoter that event, the more urgent the necessity of vindicating the justice of God, who apparently had left the majority of our race to its fate, and had reserved salvation for the few who were living in the closing ages of the world; 2. The perfect condition of Adam at his creation, since this was necessary to the theory of the fall, and the plan of salvation. Theological authorities were therefore constrained to look with disfavor on any attempt to carry back the origin of the earth, to an epoch indefinitely remote, and on the Mohammedan theory of the evolution of man from lower forms, or his gradual development to his present condition in the long lapse of time. From the puerilities, absurdities, and contradictions of the foregoing statement, we may gather how very unsatisfactory this so-called sacred science was. And perhaps we may be brought to the conclusion to which Dr. Shuckford, above quoted, was constrained to come, after his wearisome and unavailing attempt to coordinate its various parts: "As to the Fathers of the first ages of the Church, they were good men, but not men of universal learning." Sacred cosmogony regards the formation and modeling of the earth as the direct act of God; it rejects the intervention of secondary causes in those events. Scientific cosmogony dates from the telescopic discovery made by Cassini--an Italian astronomer, under whose care Louis XIV. placed the Observatory of Paris--that the planet Jupiter is not a sphere, but an oblate spheroid, flattened at the poles. Mechanical philosophy demonstrated that such a figure is the necessary result of the rotation of a yielding mass, and that the more rapid the rotation the greater the flattening, or, what comes to the same thing, the greater the equatorial bulging must be. From considerations--purely of a mechanical kind--Newton had foreseen that such likewise, though to a less striking extent, must be the figure of the earth. To the protuberant mass is due the precession of the equinoxes, which requires twenty-five thousand eight hundred and sixty-eight years for its completion, and also the nutation of the earth's axis, discovered by Bradley. We have already had occasion to remark that the earth's equatorial diameter exceeds the polar by about twenty-six miles. Two facts are revealed by the oblateness of the earth: 1. That she has formerly been in a yielding or plastic condition; 2. That she has been modeled by a mechanical and therefore a secondary cause. But this influence of mechanical causes is manifested not only in the exterior configuration of the globe of the earth as a spheroid of revolution, it also plainly appears on an examination of the arrangement of her substance. If we consider the aqueous rocks, their aggregate is many miles in thickness; yet they undeniably have been of slow deposit. The material of which they consist has been obtained by the disintegration of ancient lands; it has found its way into the water-courses, and by them been distributed anew. Effects of this kind, taking place before our eyes, require a very considerable lapse of time to produce a well-marked result--a water deposit may in this manner measure in thickness a few inches in a century--what, then, shall we say as to the time consumed in the formation of deposits of many thousand yards? The position of the coast-line of Egypt has been known for much more than two thousand years. In that time it has made, by reason of the detritus brought down by the Nile, a distinctly-marked encroachment on the Mediterranean. But all Lower Egypt has had a similar origin. The coast-line near the mouth of the Mississippi has been well known for three hundred years, and during that time has scarcely made a perceptible advance on the Gulf of Mexico; but there was a time when the delta of that river was at St. Louis, more than seven hundred miles from its present position. In Egypt and in America--in fact, in all countries--the rivers have been inch by inch prolonging the land into the sea; the slowness of their work and the vastness of its extent satisfy us that we must concede for the operation enormous periods of time. To the same conclusion we are brought if we consider the filling of lakes, the deposit of travertines, the denudation of hills, the cutting action of the sea on its shores, the undermining of cliffs, the weathering of rocks by atmospheric water and carbonic acid. Sedimentary strata must have been originally deposited in planes nearly horizontal. Vast numbers of them have been forced, either by paroxysms at intervals or by gradual movement, into all manner of angular inclinations. Whatever explanations we may offer of these innumerable and immense tilts and fractures, they would seem to demand for their completion an inconceivable length of time. The coal-bearing strata in Wales, by their gradual submergence, have attained a thickness of 12,000 feet; in Nova Scotia of 14,570 feet. So slow and so steady was this submergence, that erect trees stand one above another on successive levels; seventeen such repetitions may be counted in a thickness of 4,515 feet. The age of the trees is proved by their size, some being four feet in diameter. Round them, as they gradually went down with the subsiding soil, calamites grew, at one level after another. In the Sydney coal-field fifty-nine fossil forests occur in superposition. Marine shells, found on mountain-tops far in the interior of continents, were regarded by theological writers as an indisputable illustration of the Deluge. But when, as geological studies became more exact, it was proved that in the crust of the earth vast fresh-water formations are repeatedly intercalated with vast marine ones, like the leaves of a book, it became evident that no single cataclysm was sufficient to account for such results; that the same region, through gradual variations of its level and changes in its topographical surroundings, had sometimes been dry land, sometimes covered with fresh and sometimes with sea water. It became evident also that, for the completion of these changes, tens of thousands of years were required. To this evidence of a remote origin of the earth, derived from the vast superficial extent, the enormous thickness, and the varied characters of its strata, was added an imposing body of proof depending on its fossil remains. The relative ages of formations having been ascertained, it was shown that there has been an advancing physiological progression of organic forms, both vegetable and animal, from the oldest to the most recent; that those which inhabit the surface in our times are but an insignificant fraction of the prodigious multitude that have inhabited it heretofore; that for each species now living there are thousands that have become extinct. Though special formations are so strikingly characterized by some predominating type of life as to justify such expressions as the age of mollusks, the age of reptiles, the age of mammals, the introduction of the new-comers did not take place abruptly. as by sudden creation. They gradually emerged in an antecedent age, reached their culmination in the one which they characterize, and then gradually died out in a succeeding. There is no such thing as a sudden creation, a sudden strange appearance--but there is a slow metamorphosis, a slow development from a preexisting form. Here again we encounter the necessity of admitting for such results long periods of time. Within the range of history no well-marked instance of such development has been witnessed, and we speak with hesitation of doubtful instances of extinction. Yet in geological times myriads of evolutions and extinctions have occurred. Since thus, within the experience of man, no case of metamorphosis or development has been observed, some have been disposed to deny its possibility altogether, affirming that all the different species have come into existence by separate creative acts. But surely it is less unphilosophical to suppose that each species has been evolved from a predecessor by a modification of its parts, than that it has suddenly started into existence out of nothing. Nor is there much weight in the remark that no man has ever witnessed such a transformation taking place. Let it be remembered that no man has ever witnessed an act of creation, the sudden appearance of an organic form, without any progenitor. Abrupt, arbitrary, disconnected creative acts may serve to illustrate the Divine power; but that continuous unbroken chain of organisms which extends from palaeozoic formations to the formations of recent times, a chain in which each link hangs on a preceding and sustains a succeeding one, demonstrates to us not only that the production of animated beings is governed by law, but that it is by law that has undergone no change. In its operation, through myriads of ages, there has been no variation, no suspension. The foregoing paragraphs may serve to indicate the character of a portion of the evidence with which we must deal in considering the problem of the age of the earth. Through the unintermitting labors of geologists, so immense a mass has been accumulated, that many volumes would be required to contain the details. It is drawn from the phenomena presented by all kinds of rocks, aqueous, igneous, metamorphic. Of aqueous rocks it investigates the thickness, the inclined positions, and how they rest unconformably on one another; how those that are of fresh-water origin are intercalated with those that are marine; how vast masses of material have been removed by slow-acting causes of denudation, and extensive geographical surfaces have been remodeled; how continents have undergone movements of elevation and depression, their shores sunk under the ocean, or sea-beaches and sea-cliffs carried far into the interior. It considers the zoological and botanical facts, the fauna and flora of the successive ages, and how in an orderly manner the chain of organic forms, plants, and animals, has been extended, from its dim and doubtful beginnings to our own times. From facts presented by the deposits of coal-coal which, in all its varieties, has originated from the decay of plants--it not only demon strates the changes that have taken place in the earth's atmosphere, but also universal changes of climate. From other facts it proves that there have been oscillations of temperature, periods in which the mean heat has risen, and periods in which the polar ices and snows have covered large portions of the existing continents--glacial periods, as they are termed. One school of geologists, resting its argument on very imposing evidence, teaches that the whole mass of the earth, from being in a molten, or perhaps a vaporous condition, has cooled by radiation in the lapse of millions of ages, until it has reached its present equilibrium of temperature. Astronomical observations give great weight to this interpretation, especially so far as the planetary bodies of the solar system are concerned. It is also supported by such facts as the small mean density of the earth, the increasing temperature at increasing depths, the phenomena of volcanoes and injected veins, and those of igneous and metamorphic rocks. To satisfy the physical changes which this school of geologists contemplates, myriads of centuries are required. But, with the views that the adoption of the Copernican system has given us, it is plain that we cannot consider the origin and biography of the earth in an isolated way; we must include with her all the other members of the system or family to which she belongs. Nay, more, we cannot restrict ourselves to the solar system; we must embrace in our discussions the starry worlds. And, since we have become familiarized with their almost immeasurable distances from one another, we are prepared to accept for their origin an immeasurably remote time. There are stars so far off that their light, fast as it travels, has taken thousands of years to reach us, and hence they must have been in existence many thousands of years ago. Geologists having unanimously agreed--for perhaps there is not a single dissenting voice--that the chronology of the earth must be greatly extended, attempts have been made to give precision to it. Some of these have been based on astronomical, some on physical principles. Thus calculations founded on the known changes of the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, with a view of determining the lapse of time since the beginning of the last glacial period, have given two hundred and forty thousand years. Though the general postulate of the immensity of geological times may be conceded, such calculations are on too uncertain a theoretical basis to furnish incontestable results. But, considering the whole subject from the present scientific stand-point, it is very clear that the views presented by theological writers, as derived from the Mosaic record, cannot be admitted. Attempts have been repeatedly made to reconcile the revealed with the discovered facts, but they have proved to be unsatisfactory. The Mosaic time is too short, the order of creation incorrect, the divine interventions too anthropomorphic; and, though the presentment of the subject is in harmony with the ideas that men have entertained, when first their minds were turned to the acquisition of natural knowledge, it is not in accordance with their present conceptions of the insignificance of the earth and the grandeur of the universe. Among late geological discoveries is one of special interest; it is the detection of human remains and human works in formations which, though geologically recent, are historically very remote. The fossil remains of men, with rude implements of rough or chipped flint, of polished stone, of bone, of bronze, are found in Europe in caves, in drifts, in peat-beds. They indicate a savage life, spent in hunting and fishing. Recent researches give reason to believe that, under low and base grades, the existence of man can be traced back into the tertiary times. He was contemporary with the southern elephant, the rhinoceros leptorhinus, the great hippopotamus, perhaps even in the miocene contemporary with the mastodon. At the close of the Tertiary period, from causes not yet determined, the Northern Hemisphere underwent a great depression of temperature. From a torrid it passed to a glacial condition. After a period of prodigious length, the temperature again rose, and the glaciers that had so extensively covered the surface receded. Once more there was a decline in the heat, and the glaciers again advanced, but this time not so far as formerly. This ushered in the Quaternary period, during which very slowly the temperature came to its present degree. The water deposits that were being made required thousands of centuries for their completion. At the beginning of the Quaternary period there were alive the cave-bear, the cave-lion, the amphibious hippopotamus, the rhinoceros with chambered nostrils, the mammoth. In fact, the mammoth swarmed. He delighted in a boreal climate. By degrees the reindeer, the horse, the ox, the bison, multiplied, and disputed with him his food. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the increasing heat, he became extinct. From middle Europe, also, the reindeer retired. His departure marks the end of the Quaternary period. Since the advent of man on the earth, we have, therefore, to deal with periods of incalculable length. Vast changes in the climate and fauna were produced by the slow operation of causes such as are in action at the present day. Figures cannot enable us to appreciate these enormous lapses of time. It seems to be satisfactorily established, that a race allied to the Basques may be traced back to the Neolithic age. At that time the British Islands were undergoing a change of level, like that at present occurring in the Scandinavian Peninsula. Scotland was rising, England was sinking. In the Pleistocene age there existed in Central Europe a rude race of hunters and fishers closely allied to the Esquimaux. In the old glacial drift of Scotland the relics of man are found along with those of the fossil elephant. This carries us back to that time above referred to, when a large portion of Europe was covered with ice, which had edged down from the polar regions to southerly latitudes, and, as glaciers, descended from the summits of the mountain-chains into the plains. Countless species of animals perished in this cataclysm of ice and snow, but man survived. In his primitive savage condition, living for the most part on fruits, roots, shell-fish, man was in possession of a fact which was certain eventually to insure his civilization. He knew how to make a fire. In peat-beds, under the remains of trees that in those localities have long ago become extinct, his relics are still found, the implements that accompany him indicating a distinct chronological order. Near the surface are those of bronze, lower down those of bone or horn, still lower those of polished stone, and beneath all those of chipped or rough stone. The date of the origin of some of these beds cannot be estimated at less than forty or fifty thousand years. The caves that have been examined in France and elsewhere have furnished for the Stone age axes, knives, lance and arrow points, scrapers, hammers. The change from what may be termed the chipped to the polished stone period is very gradual. It coincides with the domestication of the dog, an epoch in hunting-life. It embraces thousands of centuries. The appearance of arrow-heads indicates the invention of the bow, and the rise of man from a defensive to an offensive mode of life. The introduction of barbed arrows shows how inventive talent was displaying itself; bone and horn tips, that the huntsman was including smaller animals, and perhaps birds, in his chase; bone whistles, his companionship with other huntsmen or with his dog. The scraping-knives of flint indicate the use of skin for clothing, and rude bodkins and needles its manufacture. Shells perforated for bracelets and necklaces prove how soon a taste for personal adornment was acquired; the implements necessary for the preparation of pigments suggest the painting of the body, and perhaps tattooing; and batons of rank bear witness to the beginning of a social organization. With the utmost interest we look upon the first germs of art among these primitive men. They have left its rude sketches on pieces of ivory and flakes of bone, and carvings, of the animals contemporary with them. In these prehistoric delineations, sometimes not without spirit, we have mammoths, combats of reindeer. One presents us with a man harpooning a fish, another a hunting-scene of naked men armed with the dart. Man is the only animal who has the propensity of depicting external forms, and of availing himself of the use of fire. Shell-mounds, consisting of bones and shells, some of which may be justly described as of vast extent, and of a date anterior to the Bronze age, and full of stone implements, bear in all their parts indications of the use of fire. These are often adjacent to the existing coasts sometimes, however, they are far inland, in certain instances as far as fifty miles. Their contents and position indicate for them a date posterior to that of the great extinct mammals, but prior to the domesticated. Some of these, it is said, cannot be less than one hundred thousand years old. The lake-dwellings in Switzerland--huts built on piles or logs, wattled with boughs--were, as may be inferred from the accompanying implements, begun in the Stone age, and continued into that of Bronze. In the latter period the evidences become numerous of the adoption of an agricultural life. It must not be supposed that the periods into which geologists have found it convenient to divide the progress of man in civilization are abrupt epochs, which hold good simultaneously for the whole human race. Thus the wandering Indians of America are only at the present moment emerging from the Stone age. They are still to be seen in many places armed with arrows, tipped with flakes of flint. It is but as yesterday that some have obtained, from the white man, iron, fire-arms, and the horse. So far as investigations have gone, they indisputably refer the existence of man to a date remote from us by many hundreds of thousands of years. It must be borne in mind that these investigations are quite recent, and confined to a very limited geographical space. No researches have yet been made in those regions which might reasonably be regarded as the primitive habitat of man. We are thus carried back immeasurably beyond the six thousand years of Patristic chronology. It is difficult to assign a shorter date for the last glaciation of Europe than a quarter of a million of years, and human existence antedates that. But not only is it this grand fact that confronts us, we have to admit also a primitive animalized state, and a slow, a gradual development. But this forlorn, this savage condition of humanity is in strong contrast to the paradisiacal happiness of the garden of Eden, and, what is far more serious, it is inconsistent with the theory of the Fall. I have been induced to place the subject of this chapter out of its proper chronological order, for the sake of presenting what I had to say respecting the nature of the world more completely by itself. The discussions that arose as to the age of the earth were long after the conflict as to the criterion of truth--that is, after the Reformation; indeed, they were substantially included in the present century. They have been conducted with so much moderation as to justify the term I have used in the title of this chapter, "Controversy," rather than "Conflict." Geology has not had to encounter the vindictive opposition with which astronomy was assailed, and, though, on her part, she has insisted on a concession of great antiquity for the earth, she has herself pointed out the unreliability of all numerical estimates thus far offered. The attentive reader of this chapter cannot have failed to observe inconsistencies in the numbers quoted. Though wanting the merit of exactness, those numbers, however, justify the claim of vast antiquity, and draw us to the conclusion that the time-scale of the world answers to the space-scale in magnitude. CHAPTER VIII. CONFLICT RESPECTING THE CRITERION OF TRUTH. Ancient philosophy declares that man has no means of ascertaining the truth. Differences of belief arise among the early Christians--An ineffectual attempt is made to remedy them by Councils.-- Miracle and ordeal proof introduced. The papacy resorts to auricular confession and the Inquisition.--It perpetrates frightful atrocities for the suppression of differences of opinion. Effect of the discovery of the Pandects of Justinian and development of the canon law on the nature of evidence.--It becomes more scientific. The Reformation establishes the rights of individual reason.--Catholicism asserts that the criterion of truth is in the Church. It restrains the reading of books by the Index Expurgatorius, and combats dissent by such means as the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve. Examination of the authenticity of the Pentateuch as the Protestant criterion.--Spurious character of those books. For Science the criterion of truth is to be found in the revelations of Nature: for the Protestant, it is in the Scriptures; for the Catholic, in an infallible Pope. "WHAT is truth?" was the passionate demand of a Roman procurator on one of the most momentous occasions in history. And the Divine Person who stood before him, to whom the interrogation was addressed, made no reply--unless, indeed, silence contained the reply. Often and vainly had that demand been made before--often and vainly has it been made since. No one has yet given a satisfactory answer. When, at the dawn of science in Greece, the ancient religion was disappearing like a mist at sunrise, the pious and thoughtful men of that country were thrown into a condition of intellectual despair. Anaxagoras plaintively exclaims, "Nothing can be known, nothing can be learned, nothing can be certain, sense is limited, intellect is weak, life is short." Xenophanes tells us that it is impossible for us to be certain even when we utter the truth. Parmenides declares that the very constitution of man prevents him from ascertaining absolute truth. Empedocles affirms that all philosophical and religious systems must be unreliable, because we have no criterion by which to test them. Democritus asserts that even things that are true cannot impart certainty to us; that the final result of human inquiry is the discovery that man is incapable of absolute knowledge; that, even if the truth be in his possession, he cannot be certain of it. Pyrrho bids us reflect on the necessity of suspending our judgment of things, since we have no criterion of truth; so deep a distrust did he impart to his followers, that they were in the habit of saying, "We assert nothing; no, not even that we assert nothing." Epicurus taught his disciples that truth can never be determined by reason. Arcesilaus, denying both intellectual and sensuous knowledge, publicly avowed that he knew nothing, not even his own ignorance! The general conclusion to which Greek philosophy came was this--that, in view of the contradiction of the evidence of the senses, we cannot distinguish the true from the false; and such is the imperfection of reason, that we cannot affirm the correctness of any philosophical deduction. It might be supposed that a revelation from God to man would come with such force and clearness as to settle all uncertainties and overwhelm all opposition. A Greek philosopher, less despairing than others, had ventured to affirm that the coexistence of two forms of faith, both claiming to be revealed by the omnipotent God, proves that neither of them is true. But let us remember that it is difficult for men to come to the same conclusion as regards even material and visible things, unless they stand at the same point of view. If discord and distrust were the condition of philosophy three hundred years before the birth of Christ, discord and distrust were the condition of religion three hundred years after his death. This is what Hilary, the Bishop of Poictiers, in his well-known passage written about the time of the Nicene Council, says: "It is a thing equally deplorable and dangerous that there are, as many creeds as opinions among men, as many doctrines as inclinations, and as many sources of blasphemy as there are faults among us, because we make creeds arbitrarily and explain them as arbitrarily. Every year, nay, every moon, we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries; we repent of what we have done; we defend those who repent; we anathematize those whom we defend; we condemn either the doctrines of others in ourselves, or our own in that of others; and, reciprocally tearing each other to pieces, we have been the cause of each other's ruin." These are not mere words; but the import of this self-accusation can be realized fully only by such as are familiar with the ecclesiastical history of those times. As soon as the first fervor of Christianity as a system of benevolence had declined, dissensions appeared. Ecclesiastical historians assert that "as early as the second century began the contest between faith and reason, religion and philosophy, piety and genius." To compose these dissensions, to obtain some authoritative expression, some criterion of truth, assemblies for consultation were resorted to, which eventually took the form of councils. For a long time they had nothing more than an advisory authority; but, when, in the fourth century, Christianity had attained to imperial rule, their dictates became compulsory, being enforced by the civil power. By this the whole face of the Church was changed. Oecumenical councils--parliaments of Christianity--consisting of delegates from all the churches in the world, were summoned by the authority of the emperor; he presided either personally or nominally in them--composed all differences, and was, in fact, the Pope of Christendom. Mosheim, the historian, to whom I have more particularly referred above, speaking of these times, remarks that "there was nothing to exclude the ignorant from ecclesiastical preferment; the savage and illiterate party, who looked on all kinds of learning, particularly philosophy, as pernicious to piety, was increasing;" and, accordingly, "the disputes carried on in the Council of Nicea offered a remarkable example of the greatest ignorance and utter confusion of ideas, particularly in the language and explanations of those who approved of the decisions of that council." Vast as its influence has been, "the ancient critics are neither agreed concerning the time nor place in which it was assembled, the number of those who sat in it, nor the bishop who presided. No authentic acts of its famous sentence have been committed to writing, or, at least, none have been transmitted to our times." The Church had now become what, in the language of modern politicians, would be called "a confederated republic." The will of the council was determined by a majority vote, and, to secure that, all manner of intrigues and impositions were resorted to; the influence of court females, bribery, and violence, were not spared. The Council of Nicea had scarcely adjourned,--when it was plain to all impartial men that, as a method of establishing a criterion of truth in religious matters, such councils were a total failure. The minority had no rights which the majority need respect. The protest of many good men, that a mere majority vote given by delegates, whose right to vote had never been examined and authorized, could not be received as ascertaining absolute truth, was passed over with contempt, and the consequence was, that council was assembled against council, and their jarring and contradictory decrees spread perplexity and confusion throughout the Christian world. In the fourth century alone there were thirteen councils adverse to Arius, fifteen in his favor, and seventeen for the semi-Arians--in all, forty-five. Minorities were perpetually attempting to use the weapon which majorities had abused. The impartial ecclesiastical historian above quoted, moreover, says that "two monstrous and calamitous errors were adopted in this fourth century: 1. That it was an act of virtue to deceive and lie when, by that means, the interests of the Church might be promoted. 2. That errors in religion, when maintained and adhered to after proper admonition, were punishable with civil penalties and corporal tortures." Not without astonishment can we look back at what, in those times, were popularly regarded as criteria of truth. Doctrines were considered as established by the number of martyrs who had professed them, by miracles, by the confession of demons, of lunatics, or of persons possessed of evil spirits: thus, St. Ambrose, in his disputes with the Arians, produced men possessed by devils, who, on the approach of the relics of certain martyrs, acknowledged, with loud cries, that the Nicean doctrine of the three persons of the Godhead was true. But the Arians charged him with suborning these infernal witnesses with a weighty bribe. Already, ordeal tribunals were making their appearance. During the following six centuries they were held as a final resort for establishing guilt or innocence, under the forms of trial by cold water, by duel, by the fire, by the cross. What an utter ignorance of the nature of evidence and its laws have we here! An accused man sinks or swims when thrown into a pond of water; he is burnt or escapes unharmed when he holds a piece of red-hot iron in his hand; a champion whom he has hired is vanquished or vanquishes in single fight; he can keep his arms outstretched like a cross, or fails to do so longer than his accuser, and his innocence or guilt of some imputed crime is established! Are these criteria of truth? Is it surprising that all Europe was filled with imposture miracles during those ages?--miracles that are a disgrace to the common-sense of man! But the inevitable day came at length. Assertions and doctrines based upon such preposterous evidence were involved in the discredit that fell upon the evidence itself. As the thirteenth century is approached, we find unbelief in all directions setting in. First, it is plainly seen among the monastic orders, then it spreads rapidly among the common people. Books, such as "The Everlasting Gospel," appear among the former; sects, such as the Catharists, Waldenses, Petrobrussians, arise among the latter. They agreed in this, "that the public and established religion was a motley system of errors and superstitions, and that the dominion which the pope had usurped over Christians was unlawful and tyrannical; that the claim put forth by Rome, that the Bishop of Rome is the supreme lord of the universe, and that neither princes nor bishops, civil governors nor ecclesiastical rulers, have any lawful power in church or state but what they receive from him, is utterly without foundation, and a usurpation of the rights of man." To withstand this flood of impiety, the papal government established two institutions: 1. The Inquisition; 2. Auricular confession--the latter as a means of detection, the former as a tribunal for punishment. In general terms, the commission of the Inquisition was, to extirpate religious dissent by terrorism, and surround heresy with the most horrible associations; this necessarily implied the power of determining what constitutes heresy. The criterion of truth was thus in possession of this tribunal, which was charged "to discover and bring to judgment heretics lurking in towns, houses, cellars, woods, caves, and fields." With such savage alacrity did it carry out its object of protecting the interests of religion, that between 1481 and 1808 it had punished three hundred and forty thousand persons, and of these nearly thirty-two thousand had been burnt! In its earlier days, when public opinion could find no means of protesting against its atrocities, "it often put to death, without appeal, on the very day that they were accused, nobles, clerks, monks, hermits, and lay persons of every rank." In whatever direction thoughtful men looked, the air was full of fearful shadows. No one could indulge in freedom of thought without expecting punishment. So dreadful were the proceedings of the Inquisition, that the exclamation of Pagliarici was the exclamation of thousands: "It is hardly possible for a man to be a Christian, and die in his bed." The Inquisition destroyed the sectaries of Southern France in the thirteenth century. Its unscrupulous atrocities extirpated Protestantism in Italy and Spain. Nor did it confine itself to religious affairs; it engaged in the suppression of political discontent. Nicolas Eymeric, who was inquisitor-general of the kingdom of Aragon for nearly fifty years, and who died in 1399, has left a frightful statement of its conduct and appalling cruelties in his "Directorium Inquisitorum." This disgrace of Christianity, and indeed of the human race, had different constitutions in different countries. The papal Inquisition continued the tyranny, and eventually superseded the old episcopal inquisitions. The authority of the bishops was unceremoniously put aside by the officers of the pope. By the action of the fourth Lateran Council, A.D. 1215, the power of the Inquisition was frightfully increased, the necessity of private confession to a priest--auricular confession--being at that time formally established. This, so far as domestic life was concerned, gave omnipresence and omniscience to the Inquisition. Not a man was safe. In the hands of the priest, who, at the confessional, could extract or extort from them their most secret thoughts, his wife and his servants were turned into spies. Summoned before the dread tribunal, he was simply informed that he lay under strong suspicions of heresy. No accuser was named; but the thumb-screw, the stretching-rope, the boot and wedge, or other enginery of torture, soon supplied that defect, and, innocent or guilty, he accused himself! Notwithstanding all this power, the Inquisition failed of its purpose. When the heretic could no longer confront it, he evaded it. A dismal disbelief stealthily pervaded all Europe,--a denial of Providence, of the immortality of the soul, of human free-will, and that man can possibly resist the absolute necessity, the destiny which envelops him. Ideas such as these were cherished in silence by multitudes of persons driven to them by the tyrannical acts of ecclesiasticism. In spite of persecution, the Waldenses still survived to propagate their declaration that the Roman Church, since Constantine, had degenerated from its purity and sanctity; to protest against the sale of indulgences, which they said had nearly abolished prayer, fasting, alms; to affirm that it was utterly useless to pray for the souls of the dead, since they must already have gone either to heaven or hell. Though it was generally believed that philosophy or science was pernicious to the interests of Christianity or true piety, the Mohammedan literature then prevailing in Spain was making converts among all classes of society. We see very plainly its influence in many of the sects that then arose; thus, "the Brethren and Sisters of the Free. Spirit" held that "the universe came by emanation from God, and would finally return to him by absorption; that rational souls are so many portions of the Supreme Deity; and that the universe, considered as one great whole, is God." These are ideas that can only be entertained in an advanced intellectual condition. Of this sect it is said that many suffered burning with unclouded serenity, with triumphant feelings of cheerfulness and joy. Their orthodox enemies accused them of gratifying their passions at midnight assemblages in darkened rooms, to which both sexes in a condition of nudity repaired. A similar accusation, as is well known, was brought against the primitive Christians by the fashionable society of Rome. The influences of the Averroistic philosophy were apparent in many of these sects. That Mohammedan system, considered from a Christian point of view, led to the heretical belief that the end of the precepts of Christianity is the union of the soul with the Supreme Being; that God and Nature have the same relations to each other as the soul and the body; that there is but one individual intelligence; and that one soul performs all the spiritual and rational functions in all the human race. When, subsequently, toward the time of the Reformation, the Italian Averroists were required by the Inquisition to give an account of themselves, they attempted to show that there is a wide distinction between philosophical and religious truth; that things may be philosophically true, and yet theologically false--an exculpatory device condemned at length by the Lateran Council in the time of Leo X. But, in spite of auricular confession, and the Inquisition, these heretical tendencies survived. It has been truly said that, at the epoch of the Reformation, there lay concealed, in many parts of Europe, persons who entertained the most virulent enmity against Christianity. In this pernicious class were many Aristotelians, such as Pomponatius; many philosophers and wits, such as Bodin, Rabelais, Montaigne; many Italians, as Leo X., Bembo, Bruno. Miracle-evidence began to fall into discredit during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The sarcasms of the Hispano-Moorish philosophers had forcibly drawn the attention of many of the more enlightened ecclesiastics to its illusory nature. The discovery of the Pandects of Justinian, at Amalfi, in 1130, doubtless exerted a very powerful influence in promoting the study of Roman jurisprudence, and disseminating better notions as to the character of legal or philosophical evidence. Hallam has cast some doubt on the well-known story of this discovery, but he admits that the celebrated copy in the Laurentian library, at Florence, is the only one containing the entire fifty books. Twenty years subsequently, the monk Gratian collected together the various papal edicts, the canons of councils, the declarations of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, in a volume called "The Decretum," considered as the earliest authority in canon law. In the next century Gregory IX. published five books of Decretals, and Boniface VIII. subsequently added a sixth. To these followed the Clementine Constitutions, a seventh book of Decretals, and "A Book of Institutes," published together, by Gregory XIII., in 1580, under the title of "Corpus Juris Canonici." The canon law had gradually gained enormous power through the control it had obtained over wills, the guardianship of orphans, marriages, and divorces. The rejection of miracle-evidence, and the substitution of legal evidence in its stead, accelerated the approach of the Reformation. No longer was it possible to admit the requirement which, in former days, Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his treatise, "Cur Deus Homo," had enforced, that we must first believe without examination, and may afterward endeavor to understand what we have thus believed. When Cajetan said to Luther, "Thou must believe that one single drop of Christ's blood is sufficient to redeem the whole human race, and the remaining quantity that was shed in the garden and on the cross was left as a legacy to the pope, to be a treasure from which indulgences were to be drawn," the soul of the sturdy German monk revolted against such a monstrous assertion, nor would he have believed it though a thousand miracles had been worked in its support. This shameful practice of selling indulgences for the commission of sin originated among the bishops, who, when they had need of money for their private pleasures, obtained it in that way. Abbots and monks, to whom this gainful commerce was denied, raised funds by carrying about relics in solemn procession, and charging a fee for touching them. The popes, in their pecuniary straits, perceiving how lucrative the practice might become, deprived the bishops of the right of making such sales, and appropriated it to themselves, establishing agencies, chiefly among the mendicant orders, for the traffic. Among these orders there was a sharp competition, each boasting of the superior value of its indulgences through its greater influence at the court of heaven, its familiar connection with the Virgin Mary and the saints in glory. Even against Luther himself, who had been an Augustinian monk, a calumny was circulated that he was first alienated from the Church by a traffic of this kind having been conferred on the Dominicans, instead of on his own order, at the time when Leo X. was raising funds by this means for building St. Peter's, at Rome, A.D. 1517. and there is reason to think that Leo himself, in the earlier stages of the Reformation, attached weight to that allegation. Indulgences were thus the immediate inciting cause of the Reformation, but very soon there came into light the real principle that was animating the controversy. It lay in the question, Does the Bible owe its authenticity to the Church? or does the Church owe her authenticity to the Bible? Where is the criterion of truth? It is not necessary for me here to relate the well known particulars of that controversy, the desolating wars and scenes of blood to which it gave rise: how Luther posted on the door of the cathedral of Wittemberg ninety-five theses, and was summoned to Rome to answer for his offense; how he appealed from the pope, ill-informed at the time, to the pope when he should have been better instructed; how he was condemned as a heretic, and thereupon appealed to a general council; how, through the disputes about purgatory, transubstantiation, auricular confession, absolution, the fundamental idea which lay at the bottom of the whole movement came into relief, the right of individual judgment; how Luther was now excommunicated, A.D. 1520, and in defiance burnt the bull of excommunication and the volumes of the canon law, which he denounced as aiming at the subversion of all civil government, and the exaltation of the papacy; how by this skillful manoeuvre he brought over many of the German princes to his views; how, summoned before the Imperial Diet at Worms, he refused to retract, and, while he was bidden in the castle of Wartburg, his doctrines were spreading, and a reformation under Zwingli broke out in Switzerland; how the principle of sectarian decomposition embedded in the movement gave rise to rivalries and dissensions between the Germans and the Swiss, and even divided the latter among themselves under the leadership of Zwingli and of Calvin; how the Conference of Marburg, the Diet of Spires, and that at Augsburg, failed to compose the troubles, and eventually the German Reformation assumed a political organization at Smalcalde. The quarrels between the Lutherans and the Calvinists gave hopes to Rome that she might recover her losses. Leo was not slow to discern that the Lutheran Reformation was something more serious than a squabble among some monks about the profits of indulgence-sales, and the papacy set itself seriously at work to overcome the revolters. It instigated the frightful wars that for so many years desolated Europe, and left animosities which neither the Treaty of Westphalia, nor the Council of Trent after eighteen years of debate, could compose. No one can read without a shudder the attempts that were made to extend the Inquisition in foreign countries. All Europe, Catholic and Protestant, was horror-stricken at the Huguenot massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve (A.D. 1572). For perfidy and atrocity it has no equal in the annals of the world. The desperate attempt in which the papacy had been engaged to put down its opponents by instigating civil wars, massacres, and assassinations, proved to be altogether abortive. Nor had the Council of Trent any better result. Ostensibly summoned to correct, illustrate, and fix with perspicacity the doctrine of the Church, to restore the vigor of its discipline, and to reform the lives of its ministers, it was so manipulated that a large majority of its members were Italians, and under the influence of the pope. Hence the Protestants could not possibly accept its decisions. The issue of the Reformation was the acceptance by all the Protestant Churches of the dogma that the Bible is a sufficient guide for every Christian man. Tradition was rejected, and the right of private interpretation assured. It was thought that the criterion of truth had at length been obtained. The authority thus imputed to the Scriptures was not restricted to matters of a purely religious or moral kind; it extended over philosophical facts and to the interpretation of Nature. Many went as far as in the old times Epiphanius had done: he believed that the Bible contained a complete system of mineralogy! The Reformers would tolerate no science that was not in accordance with Genesis. Among them there were many who maintained that religion and piety could never flourish unless separated from learning and science. The fatal maxim that the Bible contained the sum and substance of all knowledge, useful or possible to man--a maxim employed with such pernicious effect of old by Tertullian and by St. Augustine, and which had so often been enforced by papal authority--was still strictly insisted upon. The leaders of the Reformation, Luther and Melanchthon, were determined to banish philosophy from the Church. Luther declared that the study of Aristotle is wholly useless; his vilification of that Greek philosopher knew no bounds. He is, says Luther, "truly a devil, a horrid calumniator, a wicked sycophant, a prince of darkness, a real Apollyon, a beast, a most horrid impostor on mankind, one in whom there is scarcely any philosophy, a public and professed liar, a goat, a complete epicure, this twice execrable Aristotle." The schoolmen were, so Luther said, "locusts, caterpillars, frogs, lice." He entertained an abhorrence for them. These opinions, though not so emphatically expressed, were entertained by Calvin. So far as science is concerned, nothing is owed to the Reformation. The Procrustean bed of the Pentateuch was still before her. In the annals of Christianity the most ill-omened day is that in which she separated herself from science. She compelled Origen, at that time (A.D. 231) its chief representative and supporter in the Church, to abandon his charge in Alexandria, and retire to Caesarea. In vain through many subsequent centuries did her leading men spend themselves in--as the phrase then went--"drawing forth the internal juice and marrow of the Scriptures for the explaining of things." Universal history from the third to the sixteenth century shows with what result. The dark ages owe their darkness to this fatal policy. Here and there, it is true, there were great men, such as Frederick II. and Alphonso X., who, standing at a very elevated and general point of view, had detected the value of learning to civilization, and, in the midst of the dreary prospect that ecclesiasticism had created around them, had recognized that science alone can improve the social condition of man. The infliction of the death-punishment for difference of opinion was still resorted to. When Calvin caused Servetus to be burnt at Geneva, it was obvious to every one that the spirit of persecution was unimpaired. The offense of that philosopher lay in his belief. This was, that the genuine doctrines of Christianity had been lost even before the time of the Council of Nicea; that the Holy Ghost animates the whole system of Nature, like a soul of the world, and that, with the Christ, it will be absorbed, at the end of all things, into the substance of the Deity, from which they had emanated. For this he was roasted to death over a slow fire. Was there any distinction between this Protestant auto-da-fe and the Catholic one of Vanini, who was burnt at Toulouse, by the Inquisition, in 1629, for his "Dialogues concerning Nature?" The invention of printing, the dissemination of books, had introduced a class of dangers which the persecution of the Inquisition could not reach. In 1559, Pope Paul IV. instituted the Congregation of the Index Expurgatorius. "Its duty is to examine books and manuscripts intended for publication, and to decide whether the people may be permitted to read them; to correct those books of which the errors are not numerous, and which contain certain useful and salutary truths, so as to bring them into harmony with the doctrines of the Church; to condemn those of which the principles are heretical and pernicious; and to grant the peculiar privilege of perusing heretical books to certain persons. This congregation, which is sometimes held in presence of the pope, but generally in the palace of the Cardinal-president, has a more extensive jurisdiction than that of the Inquisition, as it not only takes cognizance of those books that contain doctrines contrary to the Roman Catholic faith, but of those that concern the duties of morality, the discipline of the Church, the interests of society. Its name is derived from the alphabetical tables or indexes of heretical books and authors composed by its appointment." The Index Expurgatorius of prohibited books at first indicated those works which it was unlawful to read; but, on this being found insufficient, whatever was not permitted was prohibited--an audacious attempt to prevent all knowledge, except such as suited the purposes of the Church, from reaching the people. The two rival divisions of the Christian Church--Protestant and Catholic--were thus in accord on one point: to tolerate no science except such as they considered to be agreeable to the Scriptures. The Catholic, being in possession of centralized power, could make its decisions respected wherever its sway was acknowledged, and enforce the monitions of the Index Expurgatorius; the Protestant, whose influence was diffused among many foci in different nations, could not act in such a direct and resolute manner. Its mode of procedure was, by raising a theological odium against an offender, to put him under a social ban--a course perhaps not less effectual than the other. As we have seen in former chapters, an antagonism between religion and science had existed from the earliest days of Christianity. On every occasion permitting its display it may be detected through successive centuries. We witness it in the downfall of the Alexandrian Museum, in the cases of Erigena and Wiclif, in the contemptuous rejection by the heretics of the thirteenth century of the Scriptural account of the Creation; but it was not until the epoch of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, that the efforts of Science to burst from the thraldom in which she was fettered became uncontrollable. In all countries the political power of the Church had greatly declined; her leading men perceived that the cloudy foundation on which she had stood was dissolving away. Repressive measures against her antagonists, in old times resorted to with effect, could be no longer advantageously employed. To her interests the burning of a philosopher here and there did more harm than good. In her great conflict with astronomy, a conflict in which Galileo stands as the central figure, she received an utter overthrow; and, as we have seen, when the immortal work of Newton was printed, she could offer no resistance, though Leibnitz affirmed, in the face of Europe, that "Newton had robbed the Deity of some of his most excellent attributes, and had sapped the foundation of natural religion." From the time of Newton to our own time, the divergence of science from the dogmas of the Church has continually increased. The Church declared that the earth is the central and most important body in the universe; that the sun and moon and stars are tributary to it. On these points she was worsted by astronomy. She affirmed that a universal deluge had covered the earth; that the only surviving animals were such as had been saved in an ark. In this her error was established by geology. She taught that there was a first man, who, some six or eight thousand years ago, was suddenly created or called into existence in a condition of physical and moral perfection, and from that condition he fell. But anthropology has shown that human beings existed far back in geological time, and in a savage state but little better than that of the brute. Many good and well-meaning men have attempted to reconcile the statements of Genesis with the discoveries of science, but it is in vain. The divergence has increased so much, that it has become an absolute opposition. One of the antagonists must give way. May we not, then, be permitted to examine the authenticity of this book, which, since the second century, has been put forth as the criterion of scientific truth? To maintain itself in a position so exalted, it must challenge human criticism. In the early Christian ages, many of the most eminent Fathers of the Church had serious doubts respecting the authorship of the entire Pentateuch. I have not space, in the limited compass of these pages, to present in detail the facts and arguments that were then and have since been adduced. The literature of the subject is now very extensive. I may, however, refer the reader to the work of the pious and learned Dean Prideaux, on "The Old and New Testament connected," a work which is one of the literary ornaments of the last century. He will also find the subject more recently and exhaustively discussed by Bishop Colenso. The following paragraphs will convey a sufficiently distinct impression of the present state of the controversy: The Pentateuch is affirmed to have been written by Moses, under the influence of divine inspiration. Considered thus, as a record vouchsafed and dictated by the Almighty, it commands not only scientific but universal consent. But here, in the first place, it may be demanded, Who or what is it that has put forth this great claim in its behalf? Not the work itself. It nowhere claims the authorship of one man, or makes the impious declaration that it is the writing of Almighty God. Not until after the second century was there any such extravagant demand on human credulity. It originated, not among the higher ranks of Christian philosophers, but among the more fervid Fathers of the Church, whose own writings prove them to have been unlearned and uncritical persons. Every age, from the second century to our times, has offered men of great ability, both Christian and Jewish, who have altogether repudiated these claims. Their decision has been founded upon the intrinsic evidence of the books themselves. These furnish plain indications of at least two distinct authors, who have been respectively termed Elohistic and Jehovistic. Hupfeld maintains that the Jehovistic narrative bears marks of having been a second original record, wholly independent of the Elohistic. The two sources from which the narratives have been derived are, in many respects, contradictory of each other. Moreover, it is asserted that the books of the Pentateuch are never ascribed to Moses in the inscriptions of Hebrew manuscripts, or in printed copies of the Hebrew Bible, nor are they styled "Books of Moses" in the Septuagint or Vulgate, but only in modern translations. It is clear that they cannot be imputed to the sole authorship of Moses, since they record his death. It is clear that they were not written until many hundred years after that event, since they contain references to facts which did not occur until after the establishment of the government of kings among the Jews. No man may dare to impute them to the inspiration of Almighty God--their inconsistencies, incongruities, contradictions, and impossibilities, as exposed by many learned and pious moderns, both German and English, are so great. It is the decision of these critics that Genesis is a narrative based upon legends; that Exodus is not historically true; that the whole Pentateuch is unhistoric and non-Mosaic; it contains the most extraordinary contradictions and impossibilities, sufficient to involve the credibility of the whole--imperfections so many and so conspicuous that they would destroy the authenticity of any modern historical work. Hengstenberg, in his "Dissertations on the Genuineness of the Pentateuch," says: "It is the unavoidable fate of a spurious historical work of any length to be involved in contradictions. This must be the case to a very great extent with the Pentateuch, if it be not genuine. If the Pentateuch is spurious, its histories and laws have been fabricated in successive portions, and were committed to writing in the course of many centuries by different individuals. From such a mode of origination, a mass of contradictions is inseparable, and the improving hand of a later editor could never be capable of entirely obliterating them." To the above conclusions I may add that we are expressly told by Ezra (Esdras ii. 14) that he himself, aided by five other persons, wrote these books in the space of forty days. He says that at the time of the Babylonian captivity the ancient sacred writings of the Jews were burnt, and gives a particular detail of the circumstances under which these were composed. He sets forth that he undertook to write all that had been done in the world since the beginning. It may be said that the books of Esdras are apocryphal, but in return it may be demanded, Has that conclusion been reached on evidence that will withstand modern criticism? In the early ages of Christianity, when the story of the fall of man was not considered as essential to the Christian system, and the doctrine of the atonement had not attained that precision which Anselm eventually gave it, it was very generally admitted by the Fathers of the Church that Ezra probably did so compose the Pentateuch. Thus St. Jerome says, "Sive Mosem dicere volueris auctorem Pentateuchi, sive Esdram ejusdem instauratorem operis, non recuso." Clemens Alexandrinus says that when these books had been destroyed in the captivity of Nebuchadnezzar, Esdras, having become inspired prophetically, reproduced them. Irenaeus says the same. The incidents contained in Genesis, from the first to the tenth chapters inclusive (chapters which, in their bearing upon science, are of more importance than other portions of the Pentateuch), have been obviously compiled from short, fragmentary legends of various authorship. To the critical eye they all, however, present peculiarities which demonstrate that they were written on the banks of the Euphrates, and not in the Desert of Arabia. They contain many Chaldaisms. An Egyptian would not speak of the Mediterranean Sea as being west of him, an Assyrian would. Their scenery and machinery, if such expressions may with propriety be used, are altogether Assyrian, not Egyptian. They were such records as one might expect to meet with in the cuneiform impressions of the tile libraries of the Mesopotamian kings. It is affirmed that one such legend, that of the Deluge, has already been exhumed, and it is not beyond the bounds of probability that the remainder may in like manner be obtained. From such Assyrian sources, the legends of the creation of the earth and heaven, the garden of Eden, the making of man from clay, and of woman from one of his ribs, the temptation by the serpent, the naming of animals, the cherubim and flaming sword, the Deluge and the ark, the drying up of the waters by the wind, the building of the Tower of Babel, and the confusion of tongues, were obtained by Ezra. He commences abruptly the proper history of the Jews in the eleventh chapter. At that point his universal history ceases; he occupies himself with the story of one family, the descendants of Shem. It is of this restriction that the Duke of Argyll, in his book on "Primeval Man," very graphically says: In the genealogy of the family of Shem we have a list of names which are names, and nothing more to us. It is a genealogy which neither does, nor pretends to do, more than to trace the order of succession among a few families only, out of the millions then already existing in the world. Nothing but this order of succession is given, nor is it at all certain that this order is consecutive or complete. Nothing is told us of all that lay behind that curtain of thick darkness, in front of which these names are made to pass; and yet there are, as it were, momentary liftings, through which we have glimpses of great movements which were going on, and had been long going on beyond. No shapes are distinctly seen. Even the direction of those movements can only be guessed. But voices are heard which are "as the voices of many waters." I agree in the opinion of Hupfeld, that "the discovery that the Pentateuch is put together out of various sources, or original documents, is beyond all doubt not only one of the most important and most pregnant with consequences for the interpretation of the historical books of the Old Testament, or rather for the whole of theology and history, but it is also one of the most certain discoveries which have been made in the domain of criticism and the history of literature. Whatever the anticritical party may bring forward to the contrary, it will maintain itself, and not retrograde again through any thing, so long as there exists such a thing as criticism; and it will not be easy for a reader upon the stage of culture on which we stand in the present day, if he goes to the examination unprejudiced, and with an uncorrupted power of appreciating the truth, to be able to ward off its influence." What then? shall we give up these books? Does not the admission that the narrative of the fall in Eden is legendary carry with it the surrender of that most solemn and sacred of Christian doctrines, the atonement? Let us reflect on this! Christianity, in its earliest days, when it was converting and conquering the world, knew little or nothing about that doctrine. We have seen that, in his "Apology," Tertullian did not think it worth his while to mention it. It originated among the Gnostic heretics. It was not admitted by the Alexandrian theological school. It was never prominently advanced by the Fathers. It was not brought into its present commanding position until the time of Anselm Philo Judaeus speaks of the story of the fall as symbolical; Origen regarded it as an allegory. Perhaps some of the Protestant churches may, with reason, be accused of inconsistency, since in part they consider it as mythical, in part real. But, if, with them, we admit that the serpent is symbolical of Satan, does not that cast an air of allegory over the whole narrative? It is to be regretted that the Christian Church has burdened itself with the defense of these books, and voluntarily made itself answerable for their manifest contradictions and errors. Their vindication, if it were possible, should have been resigned to the Jews, among whom they originated, and by whom they have been transmitted to us. Still more, it is to be deeply regretted that the Pentateuch, a production so imperfect as to be unable to stand the touch of modern criticism, should be put forth as the arbiter of science. Let it be remembered that the exposure of the true character of these books has been made, not by captious enemies, but by pious and learned churchmen, some of them of the highest dignity. While thus the Protestant churches have insisted on the acknowledgment of the Scriptures as the criterion of truth, the Catholic has, in our own times, declared the infallibility of the pope. It may be said that this infallibility applies only to moral or religious things; but where shall the line of separation be drawn? Onmiscience cannot be limited to a restricted group of questions; in its very nature it implies the knowledge of all, and infallibility means omniscience. Doubtless, if the fundamental principles of Italian Christianity be admitted, their logical issue is an infallible pope. There is no need to dwell on the unphilosophical nature of this conception; it is destroyed by an examination of the political history of the papacy, and the biography of the popes. The former exhibits all the errors and mistakes to which institutions of a confessedly human character have been found liable; the latter is only too frequently a story of sin and shame. It was not possible that the authoritative promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility should meet among enlightened Catholics universal acceptance. Serious and wide-spread dissent has been produced. A doctrine so revolting to common-sense could not find any other result. There are many who affirm that, if infallibility exists anywhere, it is in oecumenical councils, and yet such councils have not always agreed with each other. There are also many who remember that councils have deposed popes, and have passed judgment on their clamors and contentions. Not without reason do Protestants demand, What proof can be given that infallibility exists in the Church at all? what proof is there that the Church has ever been fairly or justly represented in any council? and why should the truth be ascertained by the vote of a majority rather than by that of a minority? How often it has happened that one man, standing at the right point of view, has descried the truth, and, after having been denounced and persecuted by all others, they have eventually been constrained to adopt his declarations! Of many great discoveries, has not this been the history? It is not for Science to compose these contesting claims; it is not for her to determine whether the criterion of truth for the religious man shall be found in the Bible, or in the oecumenical council, or in the pope. She only asks the right, which she so willingly accords to others, of adopting a criterion of her own. If she regards unhistorical legends with disdain; if she considers the vote of a majority in the ascertainment of truth with supreme indifference; if she leaves the claim of infallibility in any human being to be vindicated by the stern logic of coming events--the cold impassiveness which in these matters she maintains is what she displays toward her own doctrines. Without hesitation she would give up the theories of gravitation or undulations, if she found that they were irreconcilable with facts. For her the volume of inspiration is the book of Nature, of which the open scroll is ever spread forth before the eyes of every man. Confronting all, it needs no societies for its dissemination. Infinite in extent, eternal in duration, human ambition and human fanaticism have never been able to tamper with it. On the earth it is illustrated by all that is magnificent and beautiful, on the heavens its letters are suns and worlds. CHAPTER IX. CONTROVERSY RESPECTING THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNIVERSE. There are two conceptions of the government of the world: 1. By Providence; 2. By Law.--The former maintained by the priesthood.--Sketch of the introduction of the latter. Kepler discovers the laws that preside over the solar system.--His works are denounced by papal authority.--The foundations of mechanical philosophy are laid by Da Vinci.-- Galileo discovers the fundamental laws of Dynamics.--Newton applies them to the movements of the celestial bodies, and shows that the solar system is governed by mathematical necessity.--Herschel extends that conclusion to the universe.--The nebular hypothesis.--Theological exceptions to it. Evidences of the control of law in the construction of the earth, and in the development of the animal and plant series.--They arose by Evolution, not by Creation. The reign of law is exhibited by the historic career of human societies, and in the case of individual man. Partial adoption of this view by some of the Reformed Churches. Two interpretations may be given of the mode of government of the world. It may be by incessant divine interventions, or by the operation of unvarying law. To the adoption of the former a priesthood will always incline, since it must desire to be considered as standing between the prayer of the votary and the providential act. Its importance is magnified by the power it claims of determining what that act shall be. In the pre Christian (Roman) religion, the grand office of the priesthood was the discovery of future events by oracles, omens, or an inspection of the entrails of animals, and by the offering of sacrifices to propitiate the gods. In the later, the Christian times, a higher power was claimed; the clergy asserting that, by their intercessions, they could regulate the course of affairs, avert dangers, secure benefits, work miracles, and even change the order of Nature. Not without reason, therefore, did they look upon the doctrine of government by unvarying law with disfavor. It seemed to depreciate their dignity, to lessen their importance. To them there was something shocking in a God who cannot be swayed by human entreaty, a cold, passionless divinity--something frightful in fatalism, destiny. But the orderly movement of the heavens could not fail in all ages to make a deep impression on thoughtful observers--the rising and setting of the sun; the increasing or diminishing light of the day; the waxing and waning of the moon; the return of the seasons in their proper courses; the measured march of the wandering planets in the sky--what are all these, and a thousand such, but manifestations of an orderly and unchanging procession of events? The faith of early observers in this interpretation may perhaps have been shaken by the occurrence of such a phenomenon as an eclipse, a sudden and mysterious breach of the ordinary course of natural events; but it would be resumed in tenfold strength as soon as the discovery was made that eclipses themselves recur, and may be predicted. Astronomical predictions of all kinds depend upon the admission of this fact--that there never has been and never will be any intervention in the operation of natural laws. The scientific philosopher affirms that the condition of the world at any given moment is the direct result of its condition in the preceding moment, and the direct cause of its condition in the subsequent moment. Law and chance are only different names for mechanical necessity. About fifty years after the death of Copernicus, John Kepler, a native of Wurtemberg, who had adopted the heliocentric theory, and who was deeply impressed with the belief that relationships exist in the revolutions of the planetary bodies round the sun, and that these if correctly examined would reveal the laws under which those movements take place, devoted himself to the study of the distances, times, and velocities of the planets, and the form of their orbits. His method was, to submit the observations to which he had access, such as those of Tycho Brahe, to computations based first on one and then on another hypothesis, rejecting the hypothesis if he found that the calculations did not accord with the observations. The incredible labor he had undergone (he says, "I considered, and I computed, until I almost went mad") was at length rewarded, and in 1609 he published his book, "On the Motions of the Planet Mars." In this he had attempted to reconcile the movements of that planet to the hypothesis of eccentrics and epicycles, but eventually discovered that the orbit of a planet is not a circle but an ellipse, the sun being in one of the foci, and that the areas swept over by a line drawn from the planet to the sun are proportional to the times. These constitute what are now known as the first and second laws of Kepler. Eight years subsequently, he was rewarded by the discovery of a third law, defining the relation between the mean distances of the planets from the sun and the times of their revolutions; "the squares of the periodic times are proportional to the cubes of the distances." In "An Epitome of the Copernican System," published in 1618, he announced this law, and showed that it holds good for the satellites of Jupiter as regards their primary. Hence it was inferred that the laws which preside over the grand movements of the solar system preside also over the less movements of its constituent parts. The conception of law which is unmistakably conveyed by Kepler's discoveries, and the evidence they gave in support of the heliocentric as against the geocentric theory, could not fail to incur the reprehension of the Roman authorities. The congregation of the Index, therefore, when they denounced the Copernican system as utterly contrary to the Holy Scriptures, prohibited Kepler's "Epitome" of that system. It was on this occasion that Kepler submitted his celebrated remonstrance: "Eighty years have elapsed during which the doctrines of Copernicus regarding the movement of the earth and the immobility of the sun have been promulgated without hinderance, because it was deemed allowable to dispute concerning natural things, and to elucidate the works of God, and now that new testimony is discovered in proof of the truth of those doctrines--testimony which was not known to the spiritual judges--ye would prohibit the promulgation of the true system of the structure of the universe." None of Kepler's contemporaries believed the law of the areas, nor was it accepted until the publication of the "Principia" of Newton. In fact, no one in those times understood the philosophical meaning of Kepler's laws. He himself did not foresee what they must inevitably lead to. His mistakes showed how far he was from perceiving their result. Thus he thought that each planet is the seat of an intelligent principle, and that there is a relation between the magnitudes of the orbits of the five principal planets and the five regular solids of geometry. At first he inclined to believe that the orbit of Mars is oval, nor was it until after a wearisome study that he detected the grand truth, its elliptical form. An idea of the incorruptibility of the celestial objects had led to the adoption of the Aristotelian doctrine of the perfection of circular motions, and to the belief that there were none but circular motions in the heavens. He bitterly complains of this as having been a fatal "thief of his time." His philosophical daring is illustrated in his breaking through this time-honored tradition. In some most important particulars Kepler anticipated Newton. He was the first to give clear ideas respecting gravity. He says every particle of matter will rest until it is disturbed by some other particle--that the earth attracts a stone more than the stone attracts the earth, and that bodies move to each other in proportion to their masses; that the earth would ascend to the moon one-fifty-fourth of the distance, and the moon would move toward the earth the other fifty-three. He affirms that the moon's attraction causes the tides, and that the planets must impress irregularities on the moon's motions. The progress of astronomy is obviously divisible into three periods: 1. The period of observation of the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies. 2. The period of discovery of their real motions, and particularly of the laws of the planetary revolutions; this was signally illustrated by Copernicus and Kepler. 3. The period of the ascertainment of the causes of those laws. It was the epoch of Newton. The passage of the second into the third period depended on the development of the Dynamical branch of mechanics, which had been in a stagnant condition from the time of Archimedes or the Alexandrian School. In Christian Europe there had not been a cultivator of mechanical philosophy until Leonardo da Vinci, who was born A.D. 1452. To him, and not to Lord Bacon, must be attributed the renaissance of science. Bacon was not only ignorant of mathematics, but depreciated its application to physical inquiries. He contemptuously rejected the Copernican system, alleging absurd objections to it. While Galileo was on the brink of his great telescopic discoveries, Bacon was publishing doubts as to the utility of instruments in scientific investigations. To ascribe the inductive method to him is to ignore history. His fanciful philosophical suggestions have never been of the slightest practical use. No one has ever thought of employing them. Except among English readers, his name is almost unknown. To Da Vinci I shall have occasion to allude more particularly on a subsequent page. Of his works still remaining in manuscript, two volumes are at Milan, and one in Paris, carried there by Napoleon. After an interval of about seventy years, Da Vinci was followed by the Dutch engineer, Stevinus, whose work on the principles of equilibrium was published in 1586. Six years afterward appeared Galileo's treatise on mechanics. To this great Italian is due the establishment of the three fundamental laws of dynamics, known as the Laws of Motion. The consequences of the establishment of these laws were very important. It had been supposed that continuous movements, such, for instance, as those of the celestial bodies, could only be maintained by a perpetual consumption and perpetual application of force, but the first of Galileo's laws declared that every body will persevere in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, until it is compelled to change that state by disturbing forces. A clear perception of this fundamental principle is essential to a comprehension of the elementary facts of physical astronomy. Since all the motions that we witness taking place on the surface of the earth soon come to an end, we are led to infer that rest is the natural condition of things. We have made, then, a very great advance when we have become satisfied that a body is equally indifferent to rest as to motion, and that it equally perseveres in either state until disturbing forces are applied. Such disturbing forces in the case of common movements are friction and the resistance of the air. When no such resistances exist, movement must be perpetual, as is the case with the heavenly bodies, which are moving in a void. Forces, no matter what their difference of magnitude may be, will exert their full influence conjointly, each as though the other did not exist. Thus, when a ball is suffered to drop from the mouth of a cannon, it falls to the ground in a certain interval of time through the influence of gravity upon it. If, then, it be fired from the cannon, though now it may be projected some thousands of feet in a second, the effect of gravity upon it will be precisely the same as before. In the intermingling of forces there is no deterioration; each produces its own specific effect. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, through the works of Borelli, Hooke, and Huyghens, it had become plain that circular motions could be accounted for by the laws of Galileo. Borelli, treating of the motions of Jupiter's satellites, shows how a circular movement may arise under the influence of a central force. Hooke exhibited the inflection of a direct motion into a circular by a supervening central attraction. The year 1687 presents, not only an epoch in European science, but also in the intellectual development of man. It is marked by the publication of the "Principia" of Newton, an incomparable, an immortal work. On the principle that all bodies attract each other with forces directly as their masses, and inversely as the squares of their distances, Newton showed that all the movements of the celestial bodies may be accounted for, and that Kepler's laws might all have been predicted--the elliptic motions--the described areas the relation of the times and distances. As we have seen, Newton's contemporaries had perceived how circular motions could be explained; that was a special case, but Newton furnished the solution of the general problem, containing all special cases of motion in circles, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas--that is, in all the conic sections. The Alexandrian mathematicians had shown that the direction of movement of falling bodies is toward the centre of the earth. Newton proved that this must necessarily be the case, the general effect of the attraction of all the particles of a sphere being the same as if they were all concentrated in its centre. To this central force, thus determining the fall of bodies, the designation of gravity was given. Up to this time, no one, except Kepler, had considered how far its influence reached. It seemed to Newton possible that it might extend as far as the moon, and be the force that deflects her from a rectilinear path, and makes her revolve in her orbit round the earth. It was easy to compute, on the principle of the law of inverse squares, whether the earth's attraction was sufficient to produce the observed effect. Employing the measures of the size of the earth accessible at the time, Newton found that the moon's deflection was only thirteen feet in a minute; whereas, if his hypothesis of gravitation were true, it should be fifteen feet. But in 1669 Picard, as we have seen, executed the measurement of a degree more carefully than had previously been done; this changed the estimate of the magnitude of the earth, and, therefore, of the distance of the moon; and, Newton's attention having been directed to it by some discussions that took place at the Royal Society in 1679, he obtained Picard's results, went home, took out his old papers, and resumed his calculations. As they drew to a close, he became so much agitated that he was obliged to desire a friend to finish them. The expected coincidence was established. It was proved that the moon is retained in her orbit and made to revolve round the earth by the force of terrestrial gravity. The genii of Kepler had given place to the vortices of Descartes, and these in their turn to the central force of Newton. In like manner the earth, and each of the planets, are made to move in an elliptic orbit round the sun by his attractive force, and perturbations arise by reason of the disturbing action of the planetary masses on one another. Knowing the masses and the distances, these disturbances may be computed. Later astronomers have even succeeded with the inverse problem, that is, knowing the perturbations or disturbances, to find the place and the mass of the disturbing body. Thus, from the deviations of Uranus from his theoretical position, the discovery of Neptune was accomplished. Newton's merit consisted in this, that he applied the laws of dynamics to the movements of the celestial bodies, and insisted that scientific theories must be substantiated by the agreement of observations with calculations. When Kepler announced his three laws, they were received with condemnation by the spiritual authorities, not because of any error they were supposed to present or to contain, but partly because they gave support to the Copernican system, and partly because it was judged inexpedient to admit the prevalence of law of any kind as opposed to providential intervention. The world was regarded as the theatre in which the divine will was daily displayed; it was considered derogatory to the majesty of God that that will should be fettered in any way. The power of the clergy was chiefly manifested in the influence the were alleged to possess in changing his arbitrary determinations. It was thus that they could abate the baleful action of comets, secure fine weather or rain, prevent eclipses, and, arresting the course of Nature, work all manner of miracles; it was thus that the shadow had been made to go back on the dial, and the sun and the moon stopped in mid-career. In the century preceding the epoch of Newton, a great religious and political revolution had taken place--the Reformation. Though its effect had not been the securing of complete liberty for thought, it had weakened many of the old ecclesiastical bonds. In the reformed countries there was no power to express a condemnation of Newton's works, and among the clergy there was no disposition to give themselves any concern about the matter. At first the attention of the Protestant was engrossed by the movements of his great enemy the Catholic, and when that source of disquietude ceased, and the inevitable partitions of the Reformation arose, that attention was fastened upon the rival and antagonistic Churches. The Lutheran, the Calvinist, the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, had something more urgent on hand than Newton's mathematical demonstrations. So, uncondemned, and indeed unobserved, in this clamor of fighting sects, Newton's grand theory solidly established itself. Its philosophical significance was infinitely more momentous than the dogmas that these persons were quarreling about. It not only accepted the heliocentric theory and the laws discovered by Kepler, but it proved that, no matter what might be the weight of opposing ecclesiastical authority, the sun MUST be the centre of our system, and that Kepler's laws are the result of a mathematical necessity. It is impossible that they should be other than they are. But what is the meaning of all this? Plainly that the solar system is not interrupted by providential interventions, but is under the government of irreversible law--law that is itself the issue of mathematical necessity. The telescopic observations of Herschel I. satisfied him that there are very many double stars--double not merely because they are accidentally in the same line of view, but because they are connected physically, revolving round each other. These observations were continued and greatly extended by Herschel II. The elements of the elliptic orbit of the double star zeta of the Great Bear were determined by Savary, its period being fifty-eight and one-quarter years; those of another, sigma Coronae, were determined by Hind, its period being more than seven hundred and thirty-six years. The orbital movement of these double suns in ellipses compels us to admit that the law of gravitation holds good far beyond the boundaries of the solar system; indeed, as far as the telescope can reach, it demonstrates the reign of law. D'Alembert, in the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia, says: "The universe is but a single fact; it is only one great truth." Shall we, then, conclude that the solar and the starry systems have been called into existence by God, and that he has then imposed upon them by his arbitrary will laws under the control of which it was his pleasure that their movements should be made? Or are there reasons for believing that these several systems came into existence not by such an arbitrary fiat, but through the operation of law? The following are some peculiarities displayed by the solar system as enumerated by Laplace. All the planets and their satellites move in ellipses of such small eccentricity that they are nearly circles. All the planets move in the same direction and nearly in the same plane. The movements of the satellites are in the same direction as those of the planets. The movements of rotation of the sun, of the planets, and the satellites, are in the same direction as their orbital motions, and in planes little different. It is impossible that so many coincidences could be the result of chance! Is it not plain that there must have been a common tie among all these bodies, that they are only parts of what must once have been a single mass? But if we admit that the substance of which the solar system consists once existed in a nebulous condition, and was in rotation, all the above peculiarities follow as necessary mechanical consequences. Nay, more, the formation of planets, the formation of satellites and of asteroids, is accounted for. We see why the outer planets and satellites are larger than the interior ones; why the larger planets rotate rapidly, and the small ones slowly; why of the satellites the outer planets have more, the inner fewer. We are furnished with indications of the time of revolution of the planets in their orbits, and of the satellites in theirs; we perceive the mode of formation of Saturn's rings. We find an explanation of the physical condition of the sun, and the transitions of condition through which the earth and moon have passed, as indicated by their geology. But two exceptions to the above peculiarities have been noted; they are in the cases of Uranus and Neptune. The existence of such a nebulous mass once admitted, all the rest follows as a matter of necessity. Is there not, however, a most serious objection in the way? Is not this to exclude Almighty God from the worlds he has made? First, we must be satisfied whether there is any solid evidence for admitting the existence of such a nebulous mass. The nebular hypothesis rests primarily on the telescopic discovery made by Herschel I., that there are scattered here and there in the heavens pale, gleaming patches of light, a few of which are large enough to be visible to the naked eye. Of these, many may be resolved by a sufficient telescopic power into a congeries of stars, but some, such as the great nebula in Orion, have resisted the best instruments hitherto made. It was asserted by those who were indisposed to accept the nebular hypothesis, that the non-resolution was due to imperfection in the telescopes used. In these instruments two distinct functions may be observed: their light-gathering power depends on the diameter of their object mirror or lens, their defining power depends on the exquisite correctness of their optical surfaces. Grand instruments may possess the former quality in perfection by reason of their size, but the latter very imperfectly, either through want of original configuration, or distortion arising from flexure through their own weight. But, unless an instrument be perfect in this respect, as well as adequate in the other, it may fail to decompose a nebula into discrete points. Fortunately, however, other means for the settlement of this question are available. In 1846, it was discovered by the author of this book that the spectrum of an ignited solid is continuous--that is, has neither dark nor bright lines. Fraunhofer had previously made known that the spectrum of ignited gases is discontinuous. Here, then, is the means of determining whether the light emitted by a given nebula comes from an incandescent gas, or from a congeries of ignited solids, stars, or suns. If its spectrum be discontinuous, it is a true nebula or gas; if continuous, a congeries of stars. In 1864, Mr. Huggins made this examination in the case of a nebula in the constellation Draco. It proved to be gaseous. Subsequent observations have shown that, of sixty nebulae examined, nineteen give discontinuous or gaseous spectra--the remainder continuous ones. It may, therefore, be admitted that physical evidence has at length been obtained, demonstrating the existence of vast masses of matter in a gaseous condition, and at a temperature of incandescence. The hypothesis of Laplace has thus a firm basis. In such a nebular mass, cooling by radiation is a necessary incident, and condensation and rotation the inevitable results. There must be a separation of rings all lying in one plane, a generation of planets and satellites all rotating alike, a central sun and engirdling globes. From a chaotic mass, through the operation of natural laws, an organized system has been produced. An integration of matter into worlds has taken place through a decline of heat. If such be the cosmogony of the solar system, such the genesis of the planetary worlds, we are constrained to extend our views of the dominion of law, and to recognize its agency in the creation as well as in the conservation of the innumerable orbs that throng the universe. But, again, it may be asked: "Is there not something profoundly impious in this? Are we not excluding Almighty God from the world he has made?" We have often witnessed the formation of a cloud in a serene sky. A hazy point, barely perceptible--a little wreath of mist--increases in volume, and becomes darker and denser, until it obscures a large portion of the heavens. It throws itself into fantastic shapes, it gathers a glory from the sun, is borne onward by the wind, and, perhaps, as it gradually came, so it gradually disappears, melting away in the untroubled air. Now, we say that the little vesicles of which this cloud was composed arose from the condensation of water-vapor preexisting in the atmosphere, through reduction of temperature; we show how they assumed the form they present. We assign optical reasons for the brightness or blackness of the cloud; we explain, on mechanical principles, its drifting before the wind; for its disappearance we account on the principles of chemistry. It never occurs to us to invoke the interposition of the Almighty in the production and fashioning of this fugitive form. We explain all the facts connected with it by physical laws, and perhaps should reverentially hesitate to call into operation the finger of God. But the universe is nothing more than such a cloud--a cloud of suns and worlds. Supremely grand though it may seem to us, to the Infinite and Eternal Intellect it is no more than a fleeting mist. If there be a multiplicity of worlds in infinite space, there is also a succession of worlds in infinite time. As one after another cloud replaces cloud in the skies, so this starry system, the universe, is the successor of countless others that have preceded it--the predecessor of countless others that will follow. There is an unceasing metamorphosis, a sequence of events, without beginning or end. If, on physical principles, we account for minor meteorological incidents, mists and clouds, is it not permissible for us to appeal to the same principle in the origin of world-systems and universes, which are only clouds on a space-scale somewhat larger, mists on a time-scale somewhat less transient? Can any man place the line which bounds the physical on one side, the supernatural on the other? Do not our estimates of the extent and the duration of things depend altogether on our point of view? Were we set in the midst of the great nebula of Orion, how transcendently magnificent the scene! The vast transformations, the condensations of a fiery mist into worlds, might seem worthy of the immediate presence, the supervision of God; here, at our distant station, where millions of miles are inappreciable to our eyes, and suns seem no bigger than motes in the air, that nebula is more insignificant than the faintest cloud. Galileo, in his description of the constellation of Orion, did not think it worth while so much as to mention it. The most rigorous theologian of those days would have seen nothing to blame in imputing its origin to secondary causes, nothing irreligious in failing to invoke the arbitrary interference of God in its metamorphoses. If such be the conclusion to which we come respecting it, what would be the conclusion to which an Intelligence seated in it might come respecting us? It occupies an extent of space millions of times greater than that of our solar system; we are invisible from it, and therefore absolutely insignificant. Would such an Intelligence think it necessary to require for our origin and maintenance the immediate intervention of God? From the solar system let us descend to what is still more insignificant--a little portion of it; let us descend to our own earth. In the lapse of time it has experienced great changes. Have these been due to incessant divine interventions, or to the continuous operation of unfailing law? The aspect of Nature perpetually varies under our eyes, still more grandly and strikingly has it altered in geological times. But the laws guiding those changes never exhibit the slightest variation. In the midst of immense vicissitudes they are immutable. The present order of things is only a link in a vast connected chain reaching back to an incalculable past, and forward to an infinite future. There is evidence, geological and astronomical, that the temperature of the earth and her satellite was in the remote past very much higher than it is now. A decline so slow as to be imperceptible at short intervals, but manifest enough in the course of many ages, has occurred. The heat has been lost by radiation into space. The cooling of a mass of any kind, no matter whether large or small, is not discontinuous; it does not go on by fits and starts; it takes place under the operation of a mathematical law, though for such mighty changes as are here contemplated neither the formula of Newton, nor that of Dulong and Petit, may apply. It signifies nothing that periods of partial decline, glacial periods, or others of temporary elevation, have been intercalated; it signifies nothing whether these variations may have arisen from topographical variations, as those of level, or from periodicities in the radiation of the sun. A periodical sun would act as a mere perturbation in the gradual decline of heat. The perturbations of the planetary motions are a confirmation, not a disproof, of gravity. Now, such a decline of temperature must have been attended by innumerable changes of a physical character in our globe. Her dimensions must have diminished through contraction, the length of her day must have lessened, her surface must have collapsed, and fractures taken place along the lines of least resistance; the density of the sea must have increased, its volume must have become less; the constitution of the atmosphere must have varied, especially in the amount of water-vapor and carbonic acid that it contained; the barometric pressure must have declined. These changes, and very many more that might be mentioned, must have taken place not in a discontinuous but in an orderly manner, since the master-fact, the decline of heat, that was causing them, was itself following a mathematical law. But not alone did lifeless Nature submit to these inevitable mutations; living Nature was also simultaneously affected. An organic form of any kind, vegetable or animal, will remain unchanged only so long as the environment in which it is placed remains unchanged. Should an alteration in the environment occur, the organism will either be modified or destroyed. Destruction is more likely to happen as the change in the environment is more sudden; modification or transformation is more possible as that change is more gradual. Since it is demonstrably certain that lifeless Nature has in the lapse of ages undergone vast modifications; since the crust of the earth, and the sea, and the atmosphere, are no longer such as they once were; since the distribution of the land and the ocean and all manner of physical conditions have varied; since there have been such grand changes in the environment of living things on the surface of our planet--it necessarily follows that organic Nature must have passed through destructions and transformations in correspondence thereto. That such extinctions, such modifications, have taken place, how copious, how convincing, is the evidence! Here, again, we must observe that, since the disturbing agency was itself following a mathematical law, these its results must be considered as following that law too. Such considerations, then, plainly force upon us the conclusion that the organic progress of the world has been guided by the operation of immutable law--not determined by discontinuous, disconnected, arbitrary interventions of God. They incline us to view favorably the idea of transmutations of one form into another, rather than that of sudden creations. Creation implies an abrupt appearance, transformation a gradual change. In this manner is presented to our contemplation the great theory of Evolution. Every organic being has a place in a chain of events. It is not an isolated, a capricious fact, but an unavoidable phenomenon. It has its place in that vast, orderly concourse which has successively risen in the past, has introduced the present, and is preparing the way for a predestined future. From point to point in this vast progression there has been a gradual, a definite, a continuous unfolding, a resistless order of evolution. But in the midst of these mighty changes stand forth immutable the laws that are dominating over all. If we examine the introduction of any type of life in the animal series, we find that it is in accordance with transformation, not with creation. Its beginning is under an imperfect form in the midst of other forms, of which the time is nearly complete, and which are passing into extinction. By degrees, one species after another in succession more and more perfect arises, until, after many ages, a culmination is reached. From that there is, in like manner, a long, a gradual decline. Thus, though the mammal type of life is the characteristic of the Tertiary and post-Tertiary periods, it does not suddenly make its appearance without premonition in those periods. Far back, in the Secondary, we find it under imperfect forms, struggling, as it were, to make good a foothold. At length it gains a predominance under higher and better models. So, too, of reptiles, the characteristic type of life of the Secondary period. As we see in a dissolving view, out of the fading outlines of a scene that is passing away, the dim form of a new one emerging, which gradually gains strength, reaches its culmination, and then melts away in some other that is displacing it, so reptile-life doubtfully, appears, reaches its culmination, and gradually declines. In all this there is nothing abrupt; the changes shade into each other by insensible degrees. How could it be otherwise? The hot-blooded animals could not exist in an atmosphere so laden with carbonic acid as was that of the primitive times. But the removal of that noxious ingredient from the air by the leaves of plants under the influence of sunlight, the enveloping of its carbon in the earth under the form of coal, the disengagement of its oxygen, permitted their life. As the atmosphere was thus modified, the sea was involved in the change; it surrendered a large part of its carbonic acid, and the limestone hitherto held in solution by it was deposited in the solid form. For every equivalent of carbon buried in the earth, there was an equivalent of carbonate of lime separated from the sea--not necessarily in an amorphous condition, most frequently under an organic form. The sunshine kept up its work day by day, but there were demanded myriads of days for the work to be completed. It was a slow passage from a noxious to a purified atmosphere, and an equally slow passage from a cold-blooded to a hot-blooded type of life. But the physical changes were taking place under the control of law, and the organic transformations were not sudden or arbitrary providential acts. They were the immediate, the inevitable consequences of the physical changes, and therefore, like them, the necessary issue of law. For a more detailed consideration of this subject, I may refer the reader to Chapters I, II., VII, of the second book of my "Treatise on Human Physiology," published in 1856. Is the world, then, governed by law or by providential interventions, abruptly breaking the proper sequence of events? To complete our view of this question, we turn finally to what, in one sense, is the most insignificant, in another the most important, case that can be considered. Do human societies, in their historic career, exhibit the marks of a predetermined progress in an unavoidable track? Is there any evidence that the life of nations is under the control of immutable law? May we conclude that, in society, as in the individual man, parts never spring from nothing, but are evolved or developed from parts that are already in existence? If any one should object to or deride the doctrine of the evolution or successive development of the animated forms which constitute that unbroken organic chain reaching from the beginning of life on the globe to the present times, let him reflect that he has himself passed through modifications the counterpart of those he disputes. For nine months his type of life was aquatic, and during that time he assumed, in succession, many distinct but correlated forms. At birth his type of life became aerial; he began respiring the atmospheric air; new elements of food were supplied to him; the mode of his nutrition changed; but as yet he could see nothing, hear nothing, notice nothing. By degrees conscious existence was assumed; he became aware that there is an external world. In due time organs adapted to another change of food, the teeth, appeared, and a change of food ensued. He then passed through the stages of childhood and youth, his bodily form developing, and with it his intellectual powers. At about fifteen years, in consequence of the evolution which special parts of his system had attained, his moral character changed. New ideas, new passions, influenced him. And that that was the cause, and this the effect, is demonstrated when, by the skill of the surgeon, those parts have been interfered with. Nor does the development, the metamorphosis, end here; it requires many years for the body to reach its full perfection, many years for the mind. A culmination is at length reached, and then there is a decline. I need not picture its mournful incidents--the corporeal, the intellectual enfeeblement. Perhaps there is little exaggeration in saying that in less than a century every human being on the face of the globe, if not cut off in an untimely manner, has passed through all these changes. Is there for each of us a providential intervention as we thus pass from stage to stage of life? or shall we not rather believe that the countless myriads of human beings who have peopled the earth have been under the guidance of an unchanging, a universal law? But individuals are the elementary constituents of communities--nations. They maintain therein a relation like that which the particles of the body maintain to the body itself. These, introduced into it, commence and complete their function; they die, and are dismissed. Like the individual, the nation comes into existence without its own knowledge, and dies without its own consent, often against its own will. National life differs in no particular from individual, except in this, that it is spread over a longer span, but no nation can escape its inevitable term. Each, if its history be well considered, shows its time of infancy, its time of youth, its time of maturity, its time of decline, if its phases of life be completed. In the phases of existence of all, so far as those phases are completed, there are common characteristics, and, as like accordances in individuals point out that all are living under a reign of law, we are justified in inferring that the course of nations, and indeed the progress of humanity, does not take place in a chance or random way, that supernatural interventions never break the chain of historic acts, that every historic event has its warrant in some preceding event, and gives warrant to others that are to follow.. But this conclusion is the essential principle of Stoicism--that Grecian philosophical system which, as I have already said, offered a support in their hour of trial and an unwavering guide in the vicissitudes of life, not only to many illustrious Greeks, but also to some of the great philosophers, statesmen, generals, and emperors of Rome; a system which excluded chance from every thing, and asserted the direction of all events by irresistible necessity, to the promotion of perfect good; a system of earnestness, sternness, austerity, virtue--a protest in favor of the common-sense of mankind. And perhaps we shall not dissent from the remark of Montesquieu, who affirms that the destruction of the Stoics was a great calamity to the human race; for they alone made great citizens, great men. To the principle of government by law, Latin Christianity, in its papal form, is in absolute contradiction. The history of this branch of the Christian Church is almost a diary of miracles and supernatural interventions. These show that the supplications of holy men have often arrested the course of Nature--if, indeed, there be any such course; that images and pictures have worked wonders; that bones, hairs, and other sacred relics, have wrought miracles. The criterion or proof of the authenticity of many of these objects is, not an unchallengeable record of their origin and history, but an exhibition of their miracle-working powers. Is not that a strange logic which finds proof of an asserted fact in an inexplicable illustration of something else? Even in the darkest ages intelligent Christian men must have had misgivings as to these alleged providential or miraculous interventions. There is a solemn grandeur in the orderly progress of Nature which profoundly impresses us; and such is the character of continuity in the events of our individual life that we instinctively doubt the occurrence of the supernatural in that of our neighbor. The intelligent man knows well that, for his personal behoof, the course of Nature has never been checked; for him no miracle has ever been worked; he attributes justly every event of his life to some antecedent event; this he looks upon as the cause, that as the consequence. When it is affirmed that, in his neighbor's behalf, such grand interventions have been vouchsafed, he cannot do otherwise than believe that his neighbor is either deceived, or practising deception. As might, then, have been anticipated, the Catholic doctrine of miraculous intervention received a rude shock at the time of the Reformation, when predestination and election were upheld by some of the greatest theologians, and accepted by some of the greatest Protestant Churches. With stoical austerity Calvin declares: "We were elected from eternity, before the foundation of the world, from no merit of our own, but according to the purpose of the divine pleasure." In affirming this, Calvin was resting on the belief that God has from all eternity decreed whatever comes to pass. Thus, after the lapse of many ages, were again emerging into prominence the ideas of the Basilidians wad Valentinians, Christian sects of the second century, whose Gnostical views led to the engraftment of the great doctrine of the Trinity upon Christianity. They asserted that all the actions of men are necessary, that even faith is a natural gift, to which men are forcibly determined, and must therefore be saved, though their lives be ever so irregular. From the Supreme God all things proceeded. Thus, also, came into prominence the views which were developed by Augustine in his work, "De dono perseverantiae." These were: that God, by his arbitrary will, has selected certain persons without respect to foreseen faith or good works, and has infallibly ordained to bestow upon them eternal happiness; other persons, in like manner, he has condemned to eternal reprobation. The Sublapsarians believed that "God permitted the fall of Adam;" the Supralapsarians that "he predestinated it, with all its pernicious consequences, from all eternity, and that our first parents had no liberty from the beginning." In this, these sectarians disregarded the remark of St. Augustine: "Nefas est dicere Deum aliquid nisi bonum predestinare." Is it true, then, that "predestination to eternal happiness is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby, before the foundations of the world were laid, he hath constantly decreed by his council, secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen out of mankind?" Is it true that of the human family there are some who, in view of no fault of their own, Almighty God has condemned to unending torture, eternal misery? In 1595 the Lambeth Articles asserted that "God from eternity hath predestinated certain men unto life; certain he hath reprobated." In 1618 the Synod of Dort decided in favor of this view. It condemned the remonstrants against it, and treated them with such severity, that many of them had to flee to foreign countries. Even in the Church of England, as is manifested by its seventeenth Article of Faith, these doctrines have found favor. Probably there was no point which brought down from the Catholics on the Protestants severer condemnation than this, their partial acceptance of the government of the world by law. In all Reformed Europe miracles ceased. But, with the cessation of shrine-cure, relic-cure, great pecuniary profits ended. Indeed, as is well known, it was the sale of indulgences that provoked the Reformation--indulgences which are essentially a permit from God for the practice of sin, conditioned on the payment of a certain sum of money to the priest. Philosophically, the Reformation implied a protest against the Catholic doctrine of incessant divine intervention in human affairs, invoked by sacerdotal agency; but this protest was far from being fully made by all the Reforming Churches. The evidence in behalf of government by law, which has of late years been offered by science, is received by many of them with suspicion, perhaps with dislike; sentiments which, however, must eventually give way before the hourly-increasing weight of evidence. Shall we not, then, conclude with Cicero, who, quoted by Lactantius, says: "One eternal and immutable law embraces all things and all times?" CHAPTER X. LATIN CHRISTIANITY IN RELATION TO MODERN CIVILIZATION. For more than a thousand years Latin Christianity controlled the intelligence of Europe, and is responsible for the result. That result is manifested by the condition of the city of Rome at the Reformation, and by the condition of the Continent of Europe in domestic and social life.--European nations suffered under the coexistence of a dual government, a spiritual and a temporal.--They were immersed in ignorance, superstition, discomfort.--Explanation of the failure of Catholicism--Political history of the papacy: it was transmuted from a spiritual confederacy into an absolute monarchy.--Action of the College of Cardinals and the Curia-- Demoralization that ensued from the necessity of raising large revenues. The advantages accruing to Europe during the Catholic rule arose not from direct intention, but were incidental. The general result is, that the political influence of Catholicism was prejudicial to modern civilization. LATIN Christianity is responsible for the condition and progress of Europe from the fourth to the sixteenth century. We have now to examine how it discharged its trust. It will be convenient to limit to the case of Europe what has here to be presented, though, from the claim of the papacy to superhuman origin, and its demand for universal obedience, it should strictly be held to account for the condition of all mankind. Its inefficacy against the great and venerable religions of Southern and Eastern Asia would furnish an important and instructive theme for consideration, and lead us to the conclusion that it has impressed itself only where Roman imperial influences have prevailed; a political conclusion which, however, it contemptuously rejects. Doubtless at the inception of the Reformation there were many persons who compared the existing social condition with what it had been in ancient times. Morals had not changed, intelligence had not advanced, society had little improved. From the Eternal City itself its splendors had vanished. The marble streets, of which Augustus had once boasted, had disappeared. Temples, broken columns, and the long, arcaded vistas of gigantic aqueducts bestriding the desolate Campagna, presented a mournful scene. From the uses to which they had been respectively put, the Capitol had been known as Goats' Hill, and the site of the Roman Forum, whence laws had been issued to the world, as Cows' Field. The palace of the Caesars was hidden by mounds of earth, crested with flowering shrubs. The baths of Caracalla, with their porticoes, gardens, reservoirs, had long ago become useless through the destruction of their supplying aqueducts. On the ruins of that grand edifice, "flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous trees extended in ever-winding labyrinths upon immense platforms, and dizzy arches suspended in the air." Of the Coliseum, the most colossal of Roman ruins, only about one-third remained. Once capable of accommodating nearly ninety thousand spectators, it had, in succession, been turned into a fortress in the middle ages, and then into a stone-quarry to furnish material for the palaces of degenerate Roman princes. Some of the popes had occupied it as a woollen-mill, some as a saltpetre factory; some had planned the conversion of its magnificent arcades into shops for tradesmen. The iron clamps which bound its stones together had been stolen. The walls were fissured and falling. Even in our own times botanical works have been composed on the plants which have made this noble wreck their home. "The Flora of the Coliseum" contains four hundred and twenty species. Among the ruins of classical buildings might be seen broken columns, cypresses, and mouldy frescoes, dropping from the walls. Even the vegetable world participated in the melancholy change: the myrtle, which once flourished on the Aventine, had nearly become extinct; the laurel, which once gave its leaves to encircle the brows of emperors, had been replaced by ivy--the companion of death. But perhaps it may be said the popes were not responsible for all this. Let it be remembered that in less than one hundred and forty years the city had been successively taken by Alaric, Genseric, Rieimer, Vitiges, Totila; that many of its great edifices had been converted into defensive works. The aqueducts were destroyed by Vitiges, who ruined the Campagna; the palace of the Caesars was ravaged by Totila; then there had been the Lombard sieges; then Robert Guiscard and his Normans had burnt the city from the Antonine Column to the Flaminian Gate, from the Lateran to the Capitol; then it was sacked and mutilated by the Constable Bourbon; again and again it was flooded by inundations of the Tiber and shattered by earthquakes. We must, however, bear in mind the accusation of Machiavelli, who says, in his "History of Florence," that nearly all the barbarian invasions of Italy were by the invitations of the pontiffs, who called in those hordes! It was not the Goth, nor the Vandal, nor the Norman, nor the Saracen, but the popes and their nephews, who produced the dilapidation of Rome! Lime-kilns had been fed from the ruins, classical buildings had become stone-quarries for the palaces of Italian princes, and churches were decorated from the old temples. Churches decorated from the temples! It is for this and such as this that the popes must be held responsible. Superb Corinthian columns bad been chiseled into images of the saints. Magnificent Egyptian obelisks had been dishonored by papal inscriptions. The Septizonium of Severus had been demolished to furnish materials for the building of St. Peter's; the bronze roof of the Pantheon had been melted into columns to ornament the apostle's tomb. The great bell of Viterbo, in the tower of the Capitol, had announced the death of many a pope, and still desecration of the buildings and demoralization of the people went on. Papal Rome manifested no consideration, but rather hatred, for classical Rome, The pontiffs had been subordinates of the Byzantine sovereigns, then lieutenants of the Frankish kings, then arbiters of Europe; their government had changed as much as those of any of the surrounding nations; there had been complete metamorphoses in its maxims, objects, claims. In one point only it had never changed--intolerance. Claiming to be the centre of the religious life of Europe, it steadfastly refused to recognize any religious existence outside of itself, yet both in a political and theological sense it was rotten to the core. Erasmus and Luther heard with amazement the blasphemies and witnessed with a shudder the atheism of the city. The historian Ranke, to whom I am indebted for many of these facts, has depicted in a very graphic manner the demoralization of the great metropolis. The popes were, for the most part, at their election, aged men. Power was, therefore, incessantly passing into new hands. Every election was a revolution in prospects and expectations. In a community where all might rise, where all might aspire to all, it necessarily followed that every man was occupied in thrusting some other into the background. Though the population of the city at the inception of the Reformation had sunk to eighty thousand, there were vast crowds of placemen, and still greater ones of aspirants for place. The successful occupant of the pontificate had thousands of offices to give away--offices from many of which the incumbents had been remorselessly ejected; many had been created for the purpose of sale. The integrity and capacity of an applicant were never inquired into; the points considered were, what services has he rendered or can he render to the party? how much can he pay for the preferment? An American reader can thoroughly realize this state of things. At every presidential election he witnesses similar acts. The election of a pope by the Conclave is not unlike the nomination of an American president by a convention. In both cases there are many offices to give away. William of Malmesbury says that in his day the Romans made a sale of whatever was righteous and sacred for gold. After his time there was no improvement; the Church degenerated into an instrument for the exploitation of money. Vast sums were collected in Italy; vast sums were drawn under all manner of pretenses from surrounding and reluctant countries. Of these the most nefarious was the sale of indulgences for the perpetration of sin. Italian religion had become the art of plundering the people. For more than a thousand years the sovereign pontiffs had been rulers of the city. True, it had witnessed many scenes of devastation for which they were not responsible; but they were responsible for this, that they had never made any vigorous, any persistent effort for its material, its moral improvement. Instead of being in these respects an exemplar for the imitation of the world, it became an exemplar of a condition that ought to be shunned. Things steadily went on from bad to worse, until at the epoch of the Reformation no pious stranger could visit it without being shocked. The papacy, repudiating science as absolutely incompatible with its pretensions, had in later years addressed itself to the encouragement of art. But music and painting, though they may be exquisite adornments of life, contain no living force that can develop a weak nation into a strong one; nothing that can permanently assure the material well-being or happiness of communities; and hence at the time of the Reformation, to one who thoughtfully considered her condition, Rome had lost all living energy. She was no longer the arbiter of the physical or the religious progress of the world. For the progressive maxims of the republic and the empire, she had substituted the stationary maxims of the papacy. She had the appearance of piety and the possession of art. In this she resembled one of those friar-corpses which we still see in their brown cowls in the vaults of the Cappuccini, with a breviary or some withered flowers in its hands. From this view of the Eternal City, this survey of what Latin Christianity had done for Rome itself, let us turn to the whole European Continent. Let us try to determine the true value of the system that was guiding society; let us judge it by its fruits. The condition of nations as to their well-being is most precisely represented by the variations of their population. Forms of government have very little influence on population, but policy may control it completely. It has been very satisfactorily shown by authors who have given attention to the subject, that the variations of population depend upon the interbalancing of the generative force of society and the resistances to life. By the generative force of society is meant that instinct which manifests itself in the multiplication of the race. To some extent it depends on climate; but, since the climate of Europe did not sensibly change between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries, we may regard this force as having been, on that continent, during the period under consideration, invariable. By the resistances to life is meant whatever tends to make individual existence more difficult of support. Among such may be enumerated insufficient food, inadequate clothing, imperfect shelter. It is also known that, if the resistances become inappreciable, the generative force will double a population in twenty-five years. The resistances operate in two modes: 1. Physically; since they diminish the number of births, and shorten the term of the life of all. 2. Intellectually; since, in a moral, and particularly in a religious community, they postpone marriage, by causing individuals to decline its responsibilities until they feel that they are competent to meet the charges and cares of a family. Hence the explanation of a long-recognized fact, that the number of marriages during a given period has a connection with the price of food. The increase of population keeps pace with the increase of food; and, indeed, such being the power of the generative force, it overpasses the means of subsistence, establishing a constant pressure upon them. Under these circumstances, it necessarily happens that a certain amount of destitution must occur. Individuals have come into existence who must be starved. As illustrations of the variations that have occurred in the population of different countries, may be mentioned the immense diminution of that of Italy in consequence of the wars of Justinian; the depopulation of North Africa in consequence of theological quarrels; its restoration through the establishment of Mohammedanism; the increase of that of all Europe through the feudal system, when estates became more valuable in proportion to the number of retainers they could supply. The crusades caused a sensible diminution, not only through the enormous army losses, but also by reason of the withdrawal of so many able-bodied men from marriage-life. Similar variations have occurred on the American Continent. The population of Mexico was very quickly diminished by two million through the rapacity and atrocious cruelty of the Spaniards, who drove the civilized Indians to despair. The same happened in Peru. The population of England at the Norman conquest was about two million. In five hundred years it had scarcely doubled. It may be supposed that this stationary condition was to some extent induced by the papal policy of the enforcement of celibacy in the clergy. The "legal generative force" was doubtless affected by that policy, the "actual generative force" was not. For those who have made this subject their study have long ago been satisfied that public celibacy is private wickedness. This mainly determined the laity, as well as the government in England, to suppress the monasteries. It was openly asserted that there were one hundred thousand women in England made dissolute by the clergy. In my history of the "American Civil War," I have presented some reflections on this point, which I will take the liberty of quoting here: "What, then, does this stationary condition of the population mean? It means, food obtained with hardship, insufficient clothing, personal uncleanness, cabins that could not keep out the weather, the destructive effects of cold and heat, miasm, want of sanitary provisions, absence of physicians, uselessness of shrine-cure, the deceptiveness of miracles, in which society was putting its trust; or, to sum up a long catalogue of sorrows, wants, and sufferings, in one term--it means a high death-rate. "But more; it means deficient births. And what does that point out? Marriage postponed, licentious life, private wickedness, demoralized society. "To an American, who lives in a country that was yesterday an interminable and impenetrable desert, but which to-day is filling with a population doubling itself every twenty-five years at the prescribed rate, this awful waste of actual and contingent life cannot but be a most surprising fact. His curiosity will lead him to inquire what kind of system that could have been which was pretending to guide and develop society, but which must be held responsible for this prodigious destruction, excelling, in its insidious result, war, pestilence, and famine combined; insidious, for men were actually believing that it secured their highest temporal interests. How different now! In England, the same geographical surface is sustaining ten times the population of that day, and sending forth its emigrating swarms. Let him, who looks back, with veneration on the past, settle in his own mind what such a system could have been worth." These variations in the population of Europe have been attended with changes in distribution. The centre of population has passed northward since the establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire. It has since passed westward, in consequence of the development of manufacturing industry. We may now examine somewhat more minutely the character of the resistances which thus, for a thousand years, kept the population of Europe stationary. The surface of the Continent was for the most part covered with pathless forests; here and there it was dotted with monasteries and towns. In the lowlands and along the river-courses were fens, sometimes hundreds of miles in extent, exhaling their pestiferous miasms, and spreading agues far and wide. In Paris and London, the houses were of wood daubed with clay, and thatched with straw or reeds. They had no windows, and, until the invention of the saw-mill, very few had wooden floors. The luxury of a carpet was unknown; some straw, scattered in the room, supplied its place. There were no chimneys; the smoke of the ill-fed, cheerless fire escaped through a hole in the roof. In such habitations there was scarcely any protection from the weather. No attempt was made at drainage, but the putrefying garbage and rubbish were simply thrown out of the door. Men, women, and children, slept in the same apartment; not unfrequently, domestic animals were their companions; in such a confusion of the family, it was impossible that modesty or morality could be maintained. The bed was usually a bag of straw, a wooden log served as a pillow. Personal cleanliness was utterly unknown; great officers of state, even dignitaries so high as the Archbishop of Canterbury, swarmed with vermin; such, it is related, was the condition of Thomas a Becket, the antagonist of an English king. To conceal personal impurity, perfumes were necessarily and profusely used. The citizen clothed himself in leather, a garment which, with its ever-accumulating impurity, might last for many years. He was considered to be in circumstances of ease, if he could procure fresh meat once a week for his dinner. The streets had no sewers; they were without pavement or lamps. After nightfall, the chamber-shatters were thrown open, and slops unceremoniously emptied down, to the discomfiture of the wayfarer tracking his path through the narrow streets, with his dismal lantern in his hand. Aeneas Sylvius, who afterward became Pope Pius II., and was therefore a very competent and impartial writer, has left us a graphic account of a journey he made to the British Islands, about 1430. He describes the houses of the peasantry as constructed of stones put together without mortar; the roofs were of turf, a stiffened bull's-hide served for a door. The food consisted of coarse vegetable products, such as peas, and even the bark of trees. In some places they were unacquainted with bread. Cabins of reeds plastered with mud, houses of wattled stakes, chimneyless peat-fires from which there was scarcely an escape for the smoke, dens of physical and moral pollution swarming with vermin, wisps of straw twisted round the limbs to keep off the cold, the ague-stricken peasant, with no help except shrine-cure! How was it possible that the population could increase? Shall we, then, wonder that, in the famine of 1030, human flesh was cooked and sold; or that, in that of 1258, fifteen thousand persons died of hunger in London? Shall we wonder that, in some of the invasions of the plague, the deaths were so frightfully numerous that the living could hardly bury the dead? By that of 1348, which came from the East along the lines of commercial travel, and spread all over Europe, one-third of the population of France was destroyed. Such was the condition of the peasantry, and of the common inhabitants of cities. Not much better was that of the nobles. William of Malmesbury, speaking of the degraded manners of the Anglo-Saxons, says: "Their nobles, devoted to gluttony and voluptuousness, never visited the church, but the matins and the mass were read over to them by a hurrying priest in their bedchambers, before they rose, themselves not listening. The common people were a prey to the more powerful; their property was seized, their bodies dragged away to distant countries; their maidens were either thrown into a brothel, or sold for slaves. Drinking day and night was the general pursuit; vices, the companions of inebriety, followed, effeminating the manly mind." The baronial castles were dens of robbers. The Saxon chronicler records how men and women were caught and dragged into those strongholds, hung up by their thumbs or feet, fire applied to them, knotted strings twisted round their heads, and many other torments inflicted to extort ransom. All over Europe, the great and profitable political offices were filled by ecclesiastics. In every country there was a dual government: 1. That of a local kind, represented by a temporal sovereign; 2. That of a foreign kind, acknowledging the authority of the pope, This Roman influence was, in the nature of things, superior to the local; it expressed the sovereign will of one man over all the nations of the continent conjointly, and gathered overwhelming power from its compactness and unity. The local influence was necessarily of a feeble nature, since it was commonly weakened by the rivalries of conterminous states, and the dissensions dexterously provoked by its competitor. On not a single occasion could the various European states form a coalition against their common antagonist. Whenever a question arose, they were skillfully taken in detail, and commonly mastered. The ostensible object of papal intrusion was to secure for the different peoples moral well-being; the real object was to obtain large revenues, and give support to vast bodies of ecclesiastics. The revenues thus abstracted were not infrequently many times greater than those passing into the treasury of the local power. Thus, on the occasion of Innocent IV. demanding provision to be made for three hundred additional Italian clergy by the Church of England, and that one of his nephews--a mere boy--should have a stall in Lincoln Cathedral, it was found that the sum already annually abstracted by foreign ecclesiastics from England was thrice that which went into the coffers of the king. While thus the higher clergy secured every political appointment worth having, and abbots vied with counts in the herds of slaves they possessed--some, it is said, owned not fewer than twenty thousand--begging friars pervaded society in all directions, picking up a share of what still remained to the poor. There was a vast body of non-producers, living in idleness and owning a foreign allegiance, who were subsisting on the fruits of the toil of the laborers. It could not be otherwise than that small farms should be unceasingly merged into the larger estates; that the poor should steadily become poorer; that society, far from improving, should exhibit a continually increasing demoralization. Outside the monastic institutions no attempt at intellectual advancement was made; indeed, so far as the laity were concerned, the influence of the Church was directed to an opposite result, for the maxim universally received was, that "ignorance is the mother of devotion." The settled practice of republican and imperial Rome was to have swift communication with all her outlying provinces, by means of substantial bridges and roads. One of the prime duties of the legions was to construct them and keep them in repair. By this, her military authority was assured. But the dominion of papal Rome, depending upon a different principle, had no exigencies of that kind, and this duty accordingly was left for the local powers to neglect. And so, in all directions, the roads were almost impassable for a large part of the year. A common means of transportation was in clumsy carts drawn by oxen, going at the most but three or four miles an hour. Where boat-conveyance along rivers could not be had, pack-horses and mules were resorted to for the transportation of merchandise, an adequate means for the slender commerce of the times. When large bodies of men had to be moved, the difficulties became almost insuperable. Of this, perhaps, one of the best illustrations may be found in the story of the march of the first Crusaders. These restraints upon intercommunication tended powerfully to promote the general benighted condition. Journeys by individuals could not be undertaken without much risk, for there was scarcely a moor or a forest that had not its highwaymen. An illiterate condition everywhere prevailing, gave opportunity for the development of superstition. Europe was full of disgraceful miracles. On all the roads pilgrims were wending their way to the shrines of saints, renowned for the cures they had wrought. It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his art; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines. Time has brought this once lucrative imposture to its proper value. How many shrines are there now in successful operation in Europe? For patients too sick to move or be moved, there were no remedies except those of a ghostly kind--the Pater-noster or the Ave. For the prevention of diseases, prayers were put up in the churches, but no sanitary measures were resorted to. From cities reeking with putrefying filth it was thought that the plague might be stayed by the prayers of the priests, by them rain and dry weather might be secured, and deliverance obtained from the baleful influences of eclipses and comets. But when Halley's comet came, in 1456, so tremendous was its apparition that it was necessary for the pope himself to interfere. He exorcised and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of space, terror-stricken by the maledictions of Calixtus III., and did not venture back for seventy-five years! The physical value of shrine-cures and ghostly remedies is measured by the death-rate. In those days it was, probably, about one in twenty-three, under the present more material practice it is about one in forty. The moral condition of Europe was signally illustrated when syphilis was introduced from the West Indies by the companions of Columbus. It spread with wonderful rapidity; all ranks of persons, from the Holy Father Leo X. to the beggar by the wayside, contracting the shameful disease. Many excused their misfortune by declaring that it was an epidemic proceeding from a certain malignity in the constitution of the air, but in truth its spread was due to a certain infirmity in the constitution of man--an infirmity which had not been removed by the spiritual guidance under which he had been living. To the medical efficacy of shrines must be added that of special relics. These were sometimes of the most extraordinary kind. There were several abbeys that possessed our Savior's crown of thorns. Eleven had the lance that had pierced his side. If any person was adventurous enough to suggest that these could not all be authentic, he would have been denounced as an atheist. During the holy wars the Templar-Knights had driven a profitable commerce by bringing from Jerusalem to the Crusading armies bottles of the milk of the Blessed Virgin, which they sold for enormous sums; these bottles were preserved with pious care in many of the great religious establishments. But perhaps none of these impostures surpassed in audacity that offered by a monastery in Jerusalem, which presented to the beholder one of the fingers of the Holy Ghost! Modern society has silently rendered its verdict on these scandalous objects. Though they once nourished the piety of thousands of earnest people, they are now considered too vile to have a place in any public museum. How shall we account for the great failure we thus detect in the guardianship of the Church over Europe? This is not the result that must have occurred had there been in Rome an unremitting care for the spiritual and material prosperity of the continent, had the universal pastor, the successor of Peter, occupied himself with singleness of purpose for the holiness and happiness of his flock. The explanation is not difficult to find. It is contained in a story of sin and shame. I prefer, therefore, in the following paragraphs, to offer explanatory facts derived from Catholic authors, and, indeed, to present them as nearly as I can in the words of those writers. The story I am about to relate is a narrative of the transformation of a confederacy into an absolute monarchy. In the early times every church, without prejudice to its agreement with the Church universal in all essential points, managed its own affairs with perfect freedom and independence, maintaining its own traditional usages and discipline, all questions not concerning the whole Church, or of primary importance, being settled on the spot. Until the beginning of the ninth century, there was no change in the constitution of the Roman Church. But about 845 the Isidorian Decretals were fabricated in the west of Gaul--a forgery containing about one hundred pretended decrees of the early popes, together with certain spurious writings of other church dignitaries and acts of synods. This forgery produced an immense extension of the papal power, it displaced the old system of church government, divesting it of the republican attributes it had possessed, and transforming it into an absolute monarchy. It brought the bishops into subjection to Rome, and made the pontiff the supreme judge of the clergy of the whole Christian world. It prepared the way for the great attempt, subsequently made by Hildebrand, to convert the states of Europe into a theocratic priest-kingdom, with the pope at its head. Gregory VII., the author of this great attempt, saw that his plans would be best carried out through the agency of synods. He, therefore, restricted the right of holding them to the popes and their legates. To aid in the matter, a new system of church law was devised by Anselm of Lucca, partly from the old Isidorian forgeries, and partly from new inventions. To establish the supremacy of Rome, not only had a new civil and a new canon law to be produced, a new history had also to be invented. This furnished needful instances of the deposition and excommunication of kings, and proved that they had always been subordinate to the popes. The decretal letters of the popes were put on a par with Scripture. At length it came to be received, throughout the West, that the popes had been, from the beginning of Christianity, legislators for the whole Church. As absolute sovereigns in later times cannot endure representative assemblies, so the papacy, when it wished to become absolute, found that the synods of particular national churches must be put an end to, and those only under the immediate control of the pontiff permitted. This, in itself, constituted a great revolution. Another fiction concocted in Rome in the eighth century led to important consequences. It feigned that the Emperor Constantine, in gratitude for his cure from leprosy, and baptism by Pope Sylvester, had bestowed Italy and the Western provinces on the pope, and that, in token of his subordination, he had served the pope as his groom, and led his horse some distance. This forgery was intended to work on the Frankish kings, to impress them with a correct idea of their inferiority, and to show that, in the territorial concessions they made to the Church, they were not giving but only restoring what rightfully belonged to it. The most potent instrument of the new papal system was Gratian's Decretum, which was issued about the middle of the twelfth century. It was a mass of fabrications. It made the whole Christian world, through the papacy, the domain of the Italian clergy. It inculcated that it is lawful to constrain men to goodness, to torture and execute heretics, and to confiscate their property; that to kill an excommunicated person is not murder; that the pope, in his unlimited superiority to all law, stands on an equality with the Son of God! As the new system of centralization developed, maxims, that in the olden times would have been held to be shocking, were boldly avowed--the whole Church is the property of the pope to do with as he will; what is simony in others is not simony in him; he is above all law, and can be called to account by none; whoever disobeys him must be put to death; every baptized man is his subject, and must for life remain so, whether he will or not. Up to the end of the twelfth century, the popes were the vicars of Peter; after Innocent III. they were the vicars of Christ. But an absolute sovereign has need of revenues, and to this the popes were no exception. The institution of legates was brought in from Hildebrand's time. Sometimes their duty was to visit churches, sometimes they were sent on special business, but always invested with unlimited powers to bring back money over the Alps. And since the pope could not only make laws, but could suspend their operation, a legislation was introduced in view to the purchase of dispensations. Monasteries were exempted from episcopal jurisdiction on payment of a tribute to Rome. The pope had now become "the universal bishop;" he had a concurrent jurisdiction in all the dioceses, and could bring any cases before his own courts. His relation to the bishops was that of an absolute sovereign to his officials. A bishop could resign only by his permission, and sees vacated by resignation lapsed to him. Appeals to him were encouraged in every way for the sake of the dispensations; thousands of processes came before the Curia, bringing a rich harvest to Rome. Often when there were disputing claimants to benefices, the pope would oust them all, and appoint a creature of his own. Often the candidates had to waste years in Rome, and either died there, or carried back a vivid impression of the dominant corruption. Germany suffered more than other countries from these appeals and processes, and hence of all countries was best prepared for the Reformation. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the popes made gigantic strides in the acquisition of power. Instead of recommending their favorites for benefices, now they issued mandates. Their Italian partisans must be rewarded; nothing could be done to satisfy their clamors, but to provide for them in foreign countries. Shoals of contesting claimants died in Rome; and, when death took place in that city, the Pope claimed the right of giving away the benefices. At length it was affirmed that he had the right of disposing of all church-offices without distinction, and that the oath of obedience of a bishop to him implied political as well as ecclesiastical subjection. In countries having a dual government this increased the power of the spiritual element prodigiously. Rights of every kind were remorselessly overthrown to complete this centralization. In this the mendicant orders were most efficient aids. It was the pope and those orders on one side, the bishops and the parochial clergy on the other. The Roman court had seized the rights of synods, metropolitans, bishops, national churches. Incessantly interfered with by the legates, the bishops lost all desire to discipline their dioceses; incessantly interfered with by the begging monks, the parish priest had become powerless in his own village; his pastoral influence was utterly destroyed by the papal indulgences and absolutions they sold. The money was carried off to Rome. Pecuniary necessities urged many of the popes to resort to such petty expedients as to require from a prince, a bishop, or a grand-master, who had a cause pending in the court, a present of a golden cup filled with ducats. Such necessities also gave origin to jubilees. Sixtus IV. established whole colleges, and sold the places at three or four hundred ducats. Innocent VIII. pawned the papal tiara. Of Leo X. it was said that he squandered the revenues of three popes, he wasted the savings of his predecessor, he spent his own income, he anticipated that of his successor, he created twenty-one hundred and fifty new offices and sold them; they were considered to be a good investment, as they produced twelve per cent. The interest was extorted from Catholic countries. Nowhere in Europe could capital be so well invested as at Rome. Large sums were raised by the foreclosing of mortgages, and not only by the sale but the resale of offices. Men were promoted, for the purpose of selling their offices again. Though against the papal theory, which denounced usurious practices, an immense papal banking system had sprung up, in connection with the Curia, and sums at usurious interest were advanced to prelates, place-hunters, and litigants. The papal bankers were privileged; all others were under the ban. The Curia had discovered that it was for their interest to have ecclesiastics all over Europe in their debt. They could make them pliant, and excommunicate them for non-payment of interest. In 1327 it was reckoned that half the Christian world was under excommunication: bishops were excommunicated because they could not meet the extortions of legates; and persons were excommunicated, under various pretenses, to compel them to purchase absolution at an exorbitant price. The ecclesiastical revenues of all Europe were flowing into Rome, a sink of corruption, simony, usury, bribery, extortion. The popes, since 1066, when the great centralizing movement began, had no time to pay attention to the internal affairs of their own special flock in the city of Rome. There were thousands of foreign cases, each bringing in money. "Whenever," says the Bishop Alvaro Pelayo, "I entered the apartments of the Roman court clergy, I found them occupied in counting up the gold-coin, which lay about the rooms in heaps." Every opportunity of extending the jurisdiction of the Curia was welcome. Exemptions were so managed that fresh grants were constantly necessary. Bishops were privileged against cathedral chapters, chapters against their bishops; bishops, convents, and individuals, against the extortions of legates. The two pillars on which the papal system now rested were the College of Cardinals and the Curia. The cardinals, in 1059, had become electors of the popes. Up to that time elections were made by the whole body of the Roman clergy, and the concurrence of the magistrates and citizens was necessary. But Nicolas II. restricted elections to the College of Cardinals by a two-thirds vote, and gave to the German emperor the right of confirmation. For almost two centuries there was a struggle for mastery between the cardinal oligarchy and papal absolutism. The cardinals were willing enough that the pope should be absolute in his foreign rule, but they never failed to attempt, before giving him their votes, to bind him to accord to them a recognized share in the government. After his election, and before his consecration, he swore to observe certain capitulations, such as a participation of revenues between himself and the cardinals; an obligation that he would not remove them, but would permit them to assemble twice a year to discuss whether he had kept his oath. Repeatedly the popes broke their oath. On one side, the cardinals wanted a larger share in the church government and emoluments; on the other, the popes refused to surrender revenues or power. The cardinals wanted to be conspicuous in pomp and extravagance, and for this vast sums were requisite. In one instance, not fewer than five hundred benefices were held by one of them; their friends and retainers must be supplied, their families enriched. It was affirmed that the whole revenues of France were insufficient to meet their expenditures. In their rivalries it sometimes happened that no pope was elected for several years. It seemed as if they wanted to show how easily the Church could get on without the Vicar of Christ. Toward the close of the eleventh century the Roman Church became the Roman court. In place of the Christian sheep gently following their shepherd in the holy precincts of the city, there had arisen a chancery of writers, notaries, tax-gatherers, where transactions about privileges, dispensations, exemptions, were carried on; and suitors went with petitions from door to door. Rome was a rallying-point for place-hunters of every nation. In presence of the enormous mass of business-processes, graces, indulgences, absolutions, commands, and decisions, addressed to all parts of Europe and Asia, the functions of the local church sank into insignificance. Several hundred persons, whose home was the Curia, were required. Their aim was to rise in it by enlarging the profits of the papal treasury. The whole Christian world had become tributary to it. Here every vestige of religion had disappeared; its members were busy with politics, litigations, and processes; not a word could be heard about spiritual concerns. Every stroke of the pen had its price. Benefices, dispensations, licenses, absolutions, indulgences, privileges, were bought and sold like merchandise. The suitor had to bribe every one, from the doorkeeper to the pope, or his case was lost. Poor men could neither attain preferment, nor hope for it; and the result was, that every cleric felt he had a right to follow the example he had seen at Rome, and that he might make profits out of his spiritual ministries and sacraments, having bought the right to do so at Rome, and having no other way to pay off his debt. The transference of power from Italians to Frenchmen, through the removal of the Curia to Avignon, produced no change--only the Italians felt that the enrichment of Italian families had slipped out of their grasp. They had learned to consider the papacy as their appanage, and that they, under the Christian dispensation, were God's chosen people, as the Jews had been under the Mosaic. At the end of the thirteenth century a new kingdom was discovered, capable of yielding immense revenues. This was Purgatory. It was shown that the pope could empty it by his indulgences. In this there was no need of hypocrisy. Things were done openly. The original germ of the apostolic primacy had now expanded into a colossal monarchy. NEED OF A GENERAL COUNCIL. The Inquisition had made the papal system irresistible. All opposition must be punished with death by fire. A mere thought, without having betrayed itself by outward sign, was considered as guilt. As time went on, this practice of the Inquisition became more and more atrocious. Torture was resorted to on mere suspicion. The accused was not allowed to know the name of his accuser. He was not permitted to have any legal adviser. There was no appeal. The Inquisition was ordered not to lean to pity. No recantation was of avail. The innocent family of the accused was deprived of its property by confiscation; half went to the papal treasury, half to the inquisitors. Life only, said Innocent III., was to be left to the sons of misbelievers, and that merely as an act of mercy. The consequence was, that popes, such as Nicolas III., enriched their families through plunder acquired by this tribunal. Inquisitors did the same habitually. The struggle between the French and Italians for the possession of the papacy inevitably led to the schism of the fourteenth century. For more than forty years two rival popes were now anathematizing each other, two rival Curias were squeezing the nations for money. Eventually, there were three obediences, and triple revenues to be extorted. Nobody, now, could guarantee the validity of the sacraments, for nobody could be sure which was the true pope. Men were thus compelled to think for themselves. They could not find who was the legitimate thinker for them. They began to see that the Church must rid herself of the curialistic chains, and resort to a General Council. That attempt was again and again made, the intention being to raise the Council into a Parliament of Christendom, and make the pope its chief executive officer. But the vast interests that had grown out of the corruption of ages could not so easily be overcome; the Curia again recovered its ascendency, and ecclesiastical trading was resumed. The Germans, who had never been permitted to share in the Curia, took the leading part in these attempts at reform. As things went on from bad to worse, even they at last found out that all hope of reforming the Church by means of councils was delusive. Erasmus exclaimed, "If Christ does not deliver his people from this multiform ecclesiastical tyranny, the tyranny of the Turk will become less intolerable." Cardinals' hats were now sold, and under Leo X. ecclesiastical and religious offices were actually put up to auction. The maxim of life had become, interest first, honor afterward. Among the officials, there was not one who could be honest in the dark, and virtuous without a witness. The violet-colored velvet cloaks and white ermine capes of the cardinals were truly a cover for wickedness. The unity of the Church, and therefore its power, required the use of Latin as a sacred language. Through this, Rome had stood in an attitude strictly European, and was enabled to maintain a general international relation. It gave her far more power than her asserted celestial authority, and, much as she claims to have done, she is open to condemnation that, with such a signal advantage in her hands, never again to be enjoyed by any successor, she did not accomplish much more. Had not the sovereign pontiffs been so completely occupied with maintaining their emoluments and temporalities in Italy, they might have made the whole continent advance like one man. Their officials could pass without difficulty into every nation, and communicate without embarrassment with each other, from Ireland to Bohemia, from Italy to Scotland. The possession of a common tongue gave them the administration of international affairs with intelligent allies everywhere, speaking the same language. Not without cause was the hatred manifested by Rome to the restoration of Greek and introduction of Hebrew, and the alarm with which she perceived the modern languages forming out of the vulgar dialects. Not without reason did the Faculty of Theology in Paris re-echo the sentiment that, was prevalent in the time of Ximenes, "What will become of religion if the study of Greek and Hebrew be permitted?" The prevalence of Latin was the condition of her power; its deterioration, the measure of her decay; its disuse, the signal of her limitation to a little principality in Italy. In fact, the development of European languages was the instrument of her overthrow. They formed an effectual communication between the mendicant friars and the illiterate populace, and there was not one of them that did not display in its earliest productions a sovereign contempt for her. The rise of the many-tongued European literature was therefore coincident with the decline of papal Christianity; European literature was impossible under Catholic rule. A grand, a solemn, an imposing religious unity enforced the literary unity which is implied in the use of a single tongue. While thus the possession of a universal language so signally secured her power, the real secret of much of the influence of the Church lay in the control she had so skillfully obtained over domestic life. Her influence diminished as that declined. Coincident with this was her displacement in the guidance of international relations by diplomacy. CATHOLICITY AND CIVILIZATION. In the old times of Roman domination the encampments of the legions in the provinces had always proved to be foci of civilization. The industry and order exhibited in them presented an example not lost on the surrounding barbarians of Britain, Gaul, and Germany. And, though it was no part of their duty to occupy themselves actively in the betterment of the conquered tribes, but rather to keep them in a depressed condition that aided in maintaining subjection, a steady improvement both in the individual and social condition took place. Under the ecclesiastical domination of Rome similar effects occurred. In the open country the monastery replaced the legionary encampment; in the village or town, the church was a centre of light. A powerful effect was produced by the elegant luxury of the former, and by the sacred and solemn monitions of the latter. In extolling the papal system for what it did in the organization of the family, the definition of civil policy, the construction of the states of Europe, our praise must be limited by the recollection that the chief object of ecclesiastical policy was the aggrandizement of the Church, not the promotion of civilization. The benefit obtained by the laity was not through any special intention, but incidental or collateral. There was no far-reaching, no persistent plan to ameliorate the physical condition of the nations. Nothing was done to favor their intellectual development; indeed, on the contrary, it was the settled policy to keep them not merely illiterate, but ignorant. Century after century passed away, and left the peasantry but little better than the cattle in the fields. Intercommunication and locomotion, which tend so powerfully to expand the ideas, received no encouragement; the majority of men died without ever having ventured out of the neighborhood in which they were born. For them there was no hope of personal improvement, none of the bettering of their lot; there were no comprehensive schemes for the avoidance of individual want, none for the resistance of famines. Pestilences were permitted to stalk forth unchecked, or at best opposed only by mummeries. Bad food, wretched clothing, inadequate shelter, were suffered to produce their result, and at the end of a thousand years the population of Europe had not doubled. If policy may be held accountable as much for the births it prevents as for the deaths it occasions, what a great responsibility there is here! In this investigation of the influence of Catholicism, we must carefully keep separate what it did for the people and what it did for itself. When we think of the stately monastery, an embodiment of luxury, with its closely-mown lawns, its gardens and bowers, its fountains and many murmuring streams, we must connect it not with the ague-stricken peasant dying without help in the fens, but with the abbot, his ambling palfrey, his hawk and hounds, his well-stocked cellar and larder. He is part of a system that has its centre of authority in Italy.. To that his allegiance is due. For its behoof are all his acts. When we survey, as still we may, the magnificent churches and cathedrals of those times, miracles of architectural skill--the only real miracles of Catholicism--when in imagination we restore the transcendently imposing, the noble services of which they were once the scene, the dim, religious-light streaming in through the many-colored windows, the sounds of voices not inferior in their melody to those of heaven, the priests in their sacred vestments, and above all the prostrate worshipers listening to litanies and prayers in a foreign and unknown tongue, shall we not ask ourselves, Was all this for the sake of those worshipers, or for the glory of the great, the overshadowing authority at Rome? But perhaps some one may say, Are there not limits to human exertion--things which no political system, no human power, no matter how excellent its intention, can accomplish? Men cannot be raised from barbarism, a continent cannot be civilized, in a day! The Catholic power is not, however, to be tried by any such standard. It scornfully rejected and still rejects a human origin. It claims to be accredited supernaturally. The sovereign pontiff is the Vicar of God upon earth. Infallible in judgment, it is given to him to accomplish all things by miracle if need be. He had exercised an autocratic tyranny over the intellect of Europe for more than a thousand years; and, though on some occasions he had encountered the resistances of disobedient princes, these, in the aggregate, were of so little moment, that the physical, the political power of the continent may be affirmed to have been at his disposal. Such facts as have been presented in this chapter were, doubtless, well weighed by the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century, and brought them to the conclusion that Catholicism had altogether failed in its mission; that it had become a vast system of delusion and imposture, and that a restoration of true Christianity could only be accomplished by returning to the faith and practices of the primitive times. This was no decision suddenly arrived at; it had long been the opinion of many religious and learned men. The pious Fratricelli in the middle ages had loudly expressed their belief that the fatal gift of a Roman emperor had been the doom of true religion. It wanted nothing more than the voice of Luther to bring men throughout the north of Europe to the determination that the worship of the Virgin Mary, the invocation of saints, the working of miracles, supernatural cures of the sick, the purchase of indulgences for the perpetration of sin, and all other evil practices, lucrative to their abettors, which had been fastened on Christianity, but which were no part of it, should come to an end. Catholicism, as a system for promoting the well-being of man, had plainly failed in justifying its alleged origin; its performance had not corresponded to its great pretensions; and, after an opportunity of more than a thousand years' duration, it had left the masses of men submitted to its influences, both as regards physical well-being and intellectual culture, in a condition far lower than what it ought to have been. CHAPTER XI. SCIENCE IN RELATION TO MODERN CIVILIZATION. Illustration of the general influences of Science from the history of America. THE INTRODUCTION OF SCIENCE INTO EUROPE.--It passed from Moorish Spain to Upper Italy, and was favored by the absence of the popes at Avignon.--The effects of printing, of maritime adventure, and of the Reformation--Establishment of the Italian scientific societies. THE INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE.--It changed the mode and the direction of thought in Europe.--The transactions of the Royal Society of London, and other scientific societies, furnish an illustration of this. THE ECONOMICAL INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE is illustrated by the numerous mechanical and physical inventions, made since the fourteenth century.--Their influence on health and domestic life, on the arts of peace and of war. Answer to the question, What has Science done for humanity? EUROPE, at the epoch of the Reformation, furnishes us with the result of the influences of Roman Christianity in the promotion of civilization. America, examined in like manner at the present time, furnishes us with an illustration of the influences of science. SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION. In the course of the seventeenth century a sparse European population had settled along the western Atlantic coast. Attracted by the cod-fishery of Newfoundland, the French had a little colony north of the St. Lawrence; the English, Dutch, and Swedes, occupied the shore of New England and the Middle States; some Huguenots were living in the Carolinas. Rumors of a spring that could confer perpetual youth--a fountain of life--had brought a few Spaniards into Florida. Behind the fringe of villages which these adventurers had built, lay a vast and unknown country, inhabited by wandering Indians, whose numbers from the Gulf of Mexico to the St. Lawrence did not exceed one hundred and eighty thousand. From them the European strangers had learned that in those solitary regions there were fresh-water seas, and a great river which they called the Mississippi. Some said that it flowed through Virginia into the Atlantic, some that it passed through Florida, some that it emptied into the Pacific, and some that it reached the Gulf of Mexico. Parted from their native countries by the stormy Atlantic, to cross which implied a voyage of many months, these refugees seemed lost to the world. But before the close of the nineteenth century the descendants of this feeble people had become one of the great powers of the earth. They had established a republic whose sway extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific. With an army of more than a million men, not on paper, but actually in the field, they had overthrown a domestic assailant. They had maintained at sea a war-fleet of nearly seven hundred ships, carrying five thousand guns, some of them the heaviest in the world. The tonnage of this navy amounted to half a million. In the defense of their national life they had expended in less than five years more than four thousand million dollars. Their census, periodically taken, showed that the population was doubling itself every twenty-five years; it justified the expectation that at the close of that century it would number nearly one hundred million souls. KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. A silent continent had been changed into a scene of industry; it was full of the din of machinery and the restless moving of men. Where there had been an unbroken forest, there were hundreds of cities and towns. To commerce were furnished in profusion some of the most important staples, as cotton, tobacco, breadstuffs. The mines yielded incredible quantities of gold, iron, coal. Countless churches, colleges, and public schools, testified that a moral influence vivified this material activity. Locomotion was effectually provided for. The railways exceeded in aggregate length those of all Europe combined. In 1873 the aggregate length of the European railways was sixty-three thousand three hundred and sixty miles, that of the American was seventy thousand six hundred and fifty miles. One of them, built across the continent, connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But not alone are these material results worthy of notice. Others of a moral and social kind force themselves on our attention. Four million negro slaves had been set free. Legislation, if it inclined to the advantage of any class, inclined to that of the poor. Its intention was to raise them from poverty, and better their lot. A career was open to talent, and that without any restraint. Every thing was possible to intelligence and industry. Many of the most important public offices were filled by men who had risen from the humblest walks of life. If there was not social equality, as there never can be in rich and prosperous communities, there was civil equality, rigorously maintained. It may perhaps be said that much of this material prosperity arose from special conditions, such as had never occurred in the case of any people before, There was a vast, an open theatre of action, a whole continent ready for any who chose to take possession of it. Nothing more than courage and industry was needed to overcome Nature, and to seize the abounding advantages she offered. ILLUSTRATIONS FROM AMERICAN HISTORY. But must not men be animated by a great principle who successfully transform the primeval solitudes into an abode of civilization, who are not dismayed by gloomy forests, or rivers, mountains, or frightful deserts, who push their conquering way in the course of a century across a continent, and hold it in subjection? Let us contrast with this the results of the invasion of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards, who in those countries overthrew a wonderful civilization, in many respects superior to their own--a civilization that had been accomplished without iron and gunpowder--a civilization resting on an agriculture that had neither horse, nor ox, nor plough. The Spaniards had a clear base to start from, and no obstruction whatever in their advance. They ruined all that the aboriginal children of America had accomplished. Millions of those unfortunates were destroyed by their cruelty. Nations that for many centuries had been living in contentment and prosperity, under institutions shown by their history to be suitable to them, were plunged into anarchy; the people fell into a baneful superstition, and a greater part of their landed and other property found its way into the possession of the Roman Church. I have selected the foregoing illustration, drawn from American history, in preference to many others that might have been taken from European, because it furnishes an instance of the operation of the acting principle least interfered with by extraneous conditions. European political progress is less simple than American. QUARREL BETWEEN FRANCE AND THE PAPACY. Before considering its manner of action, and its results, I will briefly relate how the scientific principle found an introduction into Europe. INTRODUCTION OF SCIENCE INTO EUROPE. Not only had the Crusades, for many years, brought vast sums to Rome, extorted from the fears or the piety of every Christian nation; they had also increased the papal power to a most dangerous extent. In the dual governments everywhere prevailing in Europe, the spiritual had obtained the mastery; the temporal was little better than its servant. From all quarters, and under all kinds of pretenses, streams of money were steadily flowing into Italy. The temporal princes found that there were left for them inadequate and impoverished revenues. Philip the Fair, King of France (A.D. 1300), not only determined to check this drain from his dominions, by prohibiting the export of gold and silver without his license; he also resolved that the clergy and the ecclesiastical estates should pay their share of taxes to him. This brought on a mortal contest with the papacy. The king was excommunicated, and, in retaliation, he accused the pope, Boniface VIII., of atheism; demanding that he should be tried by a general council. He sent some trusty persons into Italy, who seized Boniface in his palace at Anagni, and treated him with so much severity, that in a few days he died. The succeeding pontiff, Benedict XI., was poisoned. The French king was determined that the papacy should be purified and reformed; that it should no longer be the appanage of a few Italian families, who were dexterously transmuting the credulity of Europe into coin--that French influence should prevail in it. He Therefore came to an understanding with the cardinals; a French archbishop was elevated to the pontificate; he took the name of Clement V. The papal court was removed to Avignon, in France, and Rome was abandoned as the metropolis of Christianity. MOORISH SCIENCE INTRODUCED THROUGH FRANCE. Seventy years elapsed before the papacy was restored to the Eternal City (A.D. 1376). The diminution of its influence in the peninsula, that had thus occurred, gave opportunity for the memorable intellectual movement which soon manifested itself in the great commercial cities of Upper Italy. Contemporaneously, also, there were other propitious events. The result of the Crusades had shaken the faith of all Christendom. In an age when the test of the ordeal of battle was universally accepted, those wars had ended in leaving the Holy Land in the hands of the Saracens; the many thousand Christian warriors who had returned from them did not hesitate to declare that they had found their antagonists not such as had been pictured by the Church, but valiant, courteous, just. Through the gay cities of the South of France a love of romantic literature had been spreading; the wandering troubadours had been singing their songs--songs far from being restricted to ladye-love and feats of war; often their burden was the awful atrocities that had been perpetrated by papal authority--the religious massacres of Languedoc; often their burden was the illicit amours of the clergy. From Moorish Spain the gentle and gallant idea of chivalry had been brought, and with it the noble sentiment of "personal honor," destined in the course of time to give a code of its own to Europe. EFFECT OF THE GREAT SCHISM. The return of the papacy to Rome was far from restoring the influence of the popes over the Italian Peninsula. More than two generations had passed away since their departure, and, had they come back even in their original strength, they could not have resisted the intellectual progress that had been made during their absence. The papacy, however, came back not to rule, but to be divided against itself, to encounter the Great Schism. Out of its dissensions emerged two rival popes; eventually there were three, each pressing his claims upon the religious, each cursing his rival. A sentiment of indignation soon spread all over Europe, a determination that the shameful scenes which were then enacting should be ended. How could the dogma of a Vicar of God upon earth, the dogma of an infallible pope, be sustained in presence of such scandals? Herein lay the cause of that resolution of the ablest ecclesiastics of those times (which, alas for Europe! could not be carried into effect), that a general council should be made the permanent religious parliament of the whole continent, with the pope as its chief executive officer. Had that intention been accomplished, there would have been at this day no conflict between science and religion; the convulsion of the Reformation would have been avoided; there would have been no jarring Protestant sects. But the Councils of Constance and Basle failed to shake off the Italian yoke, failed to attain that noble result. Catholicism was thus weakening; as its leaden pressure lifted, the intellect of man expanded. The Saracens had invented the method of making paper from linen rags and from cotton. The Venetians had brought from China to Europe the art of printing. The former of these inventions was essential to the latter. Hence forth, without the possibility of a check, there was intellectual intercommunication among all men. INVENTION OF PRINTING. The invention of printing was a severe blow to Catholicism, which had, previously, enjoyed the inappreciable advantage of a monopoly of intercommunication. From its central seat, orders could be disseminated through all the ecclesiastical ranks, and fulminated through the pulpits. This monopoly and the amazing power it conferred were destroyed by the press. In modern times, the influence of the pulpit has become insignificant. The pulpit has been thoroughly supplanted by the newspaper. Yet, Catholicism did not yield its ancient advantage without a struggle. As soon as the inevitable tendency of the new art was detected, a restraint upon it, under the form of a censorship, was attempted. It was made necessary to have a permit, in order to print a book. For this, it was needful that the work should have been read, examined, and approved by the clergy. There must be a certificate that it was a godly and orthodox book. A bull of excommunication was issued in 1501, by Alexander VI., against printers who should publish pernicious doctrines. In 1515 the Lateran Council ordered that no books should be printed but such as had been inspected by the ecclesiastical censors, under pain of excommunication and fine; the censors being directed "to take the utmost care that nothing should be printed contrary to the orthodox faith." There was thus a dread of religious discussion; a terror lest truth should emerge. But these frantic struggles of the powers of ignorance were unavailing. Intellectual intercommunication among men was secured. It culminated in the modern newspaper, which daily gives its contemporaneous intelligence from all parts of the world. Reading became a common occupation. In ancient society that art was possessed by comparatively few persons. Modern society owes some of its most striking characteristics to this change. EFFECTS OF MARITIME ENTERPRISE. Such was the result of bringing into Europe the manufacture of paper and the printing-press. In like manner the introduction of the mariner's compass was followed by imposing material and moral effects. These were--the discovery of America in consequence of the rivalry of the Venetians and Genoese about the India trade; the doubling of Africa by De Gama; and the circumnavigation of the earth by Magellan. With respect to the last, the grandest of all human undertakings, it is to be remembered that Catholicism had irrevocably committed itself to the dogma of a flat earth, with the sky as the floor of heaven, and hell in the under-world. Some of the Fathers, whose authority was held to be paramount, had, as we have previously said, furnished philosophical and religious arguments against the globular form. The controversy had now suddenly come to an end--the Church was found to be in error. The correction of that geographical error was by no means the only important result that followed the three great voyages. The spirit of Columbus, De Gama, Magellan, diffused itself among all the enterprising men of Western Europe. Society had been hitherto living under the dogma of "loyalty to the king, obedience to the Church." It had therefore been living for others, not for itself. The political effect of that dogma had culminated in the Crusades. Countless thousands had perished in wars that could bring them no reward, and of which the result had been conspicuous failure. Experience had revealed the fact that the only gainers were the pontiffs, cardinals, and other ecclesiastics in Rome, and the shipmasters of Venice. But, when it became known that the wealth of Mexico, Peru, and India, might be shared by any one who had enterprise and courage, the motives that had animated the restless populations of Europe suddenly changed. The story of Cortez and Pizarro found enthusiastic listeners everywhere. Maritime adventure supplanted religious enthusiasm. If we attempt to isolate the principle that lay at the basis of the wonderful social changes that now took place, we may recognize it without difficulty. Heretofore each man had dedicated his services to his superior--feudal or ecclesiastical; now he had resolved to gather the fruits of his exertions himself. Individualism was becoming predominant, loyalty was declining into a sentiment. We shall now see how it was with the Church. INDIVIDUALISM. Individualism rests on the principle that a man shall be his own master, that he shall have liberty to form his own opinions, freedom to carry into effect his resolves. He is, therefore, ever brought into competition with his fellow-men. His life is a display of energy. To remove the stagnation of centuries front European life, to vivify suddenly what had hitherto been an inert mass, to impart to it individualism, was to bring it into conflict with the influences that had been oppressing it. All through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries uneasy strugglings gave a premonition of what was coming. In the early part of the sixteenth (1517), the battle was joined. Individualism found its embodiment in a sturdy German monk, and therefore, perhaps necessarily, asserted its rights under theological forms. There were some preliminary skirmishes about indulgences and other minor matters, but very soon the real cause of dispute came plainly into view. Martin Luther refused to think as he was ordered to do by his ecclesiastical superiors at Rome; he asserted that he had an inalienable right to interpret the Bible for himself. At her first glance, Rome saw nothing in Martin Luther but a vulgar, insubordinate, quarrelsome monk. Could the Inquisition have laid hold of him, it would have speedily disposed of his affair; but, as the conflict went on, it was discovered that Martin was not standing alone. Many thousands of men, as resolute as himself, were coming up to his support; and, while he carried on the combat with writings and words, they made good his propositions with the sword. THE REFORMATION. The vilification which was poured on Luther and his doings was so bitter as to be ludicrous. It was declared that his father was not his mother's husband, but an impish incubus, who had deluded her; that, after ten years' struggling with his conscience, he had become an atheist; that he denied the immortality of the soul; that he had composed hymns in honor of drunkenness, a vice to which he was unceasingly addicted; that he blasphemed the Holy Scriptures, and particularly Moses; that he did not believe a word of what he preached; that he had called the Epistle of St. James a thing of straw; and, above all, that the Reformation was no work of his, but, in reality, was due to a certain astrological position of the stars. It was, however, a vulgar saying among the Roman ecclesiastics that Erasmus laid the egg of the Reformation, and Luther hatched it. Rome at first made the mistake of supposing that this was nothing more than a casual outbreak; she failed to discern that it was, in fact, the culmination of an internal movement which for two centuries had been going on in Europe, and which had been hourly gathering force; that, had there been nothing else, the existence of three popes--three obediences--would have compelled men to think, to deliberate, to conclude for themselves. The Councils of Constance and Basle taught them that there was a higher power than the popes. The long and bloody wars that ensued were closed by the Peace of Westphalia; and then it was found that Central and Northern Europe had cast off the intellectual tyranny of Rome, that individualism had carried its point, and had established the right of every man to think for himself. DECOMPOSITION OF PROTESTANTISM. But it was impossible that the establishment of this right of private judgment should end with the rejection of Catholicism. Early in the movement some of the most distinguished men, such as Erasmus, who had been among its first promoters, abandoned it. They perceived that many of the Reformers entertained a bitter dislike of learning, and they were afraid of being brought under bigoted caprice. The Protestant party, having thus established its existence by dissent and separation, must, in its turn, submit to the operation of the same principles. A decomposition into many subordinate sects was inevitable. And these, now that they had no longer any thing to fear from their great Italian adversary, commenced partisan warfares on each other. As, in different countries, first one and then another sect rose to power, it stained itself with cruelties perpetrated upon its competitors. The mortal retaliations that had ensued, when, in the chances of the times, the oppressed got the better of their oppressors, convinced the contending sectarians that they must concede to their competitors what they claimed for themselves; and thus, from their broils and their crimes, the great principle of toleration extricated itself. But toleration is only an intermediate stage; and, as the intellectual decomposition of Protestantism keeps going on, that transitional condition will lead to a higher and nobler state--the hope of philosophy in all past ages of the world--a social state in which there shall be unfettered freedom for thought. Toleration, except when extorted by fear, can only come from those who are capable of entertaining and respecting other opinions than their own. It can therefore only come from philosophy. History teaches us only too plainly that fanaticism is stimulated by religion, and neutralized or eradicated by philosophy. TOLERATION. The avowed object of the Reformation was, to remove from Christianity the pagan ideas and pagan rites engrafted upon it by Constantine and his successors, in their attempt to reconcile the Roman Empire to it. The Protestants designed to bring it back to its primitive purity; and hence, while restoring the ancient doctrines, they cast out of it all such practices as the adoration of the Virgin Mary and the invocation of saints. The Virgin Mary, we are assured by the Evangelists, had accepted the duties of married life, and borne to her husband several children. In the prevailing idolatry, she had ceased to be regarded as the carpenter's wife; she had become the queen of heaven, and the mother of God. DA VINCI. The science of the Arabians followed the invading track of their literature, which had come into Christendom by two routes--the south of France, and Sicily. Favored by the exile of the popes to Avignon, and by the Great Schism, it made good its foothold in Upper Italy. The Aristotelian or Inductive philosophy, clad in the Saracenic costume that Averroes had given it, made many secret and not a few open friends. It found many minds eager to receive and able to appreciate it. Among these were Leonardo da Vinci, who proclaimed the fundamental principle that experiment and observation are the only reliable foundations of reasoning in science, that experiment is the only trustworthy interpreter of Nature, and is essential to the ascertainment of laws. He showed that the action of two perpendicular forces upon a point is the same as that denoted by the diagonal of a rectangle, of which they represent the sides. From this the passage to the proposition of oblique forces was very easy. This proposition was rediscovered by Stevinus, a century later, and applied by him to the explanation of the mechanical powers. Da Vinci gave a clear exposition of the theory of forces applied obliquely on a lever, discovered the laws of friction subsequently demonstrated by Amontons, and understood the principle of virtual velocities. He treated of the conditions of descent of bodies along inclined planes and circular arcs, invented the camera-obscura, discussed correctly several physiological problems, and foreshadowed some of the great conclusions of modern geology, such as the nature of fossil remains, and the elevation of continents. He explained the earth-light reflected by the moon. With surprising versatility of genius he excelled as a sculptor, architect, engineer; was thoroughly versed in the astronomy, anatomy, and chemistry of his times. In painting, he was the rival of Michel Angelo; in a competition between them, he was considered to have established his superiority. His "Last Supper," on the wall of the refectory of the Dominican convent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, is well known, from the numerous engravings and copies that have been made of it. ITALIAN SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES. Once firmly established in the north of Italy, Science soon extended her sway over the entire peninsula. The increasing number of her devotees is indicated by the rise and rapid multiplication of learned societies. These were reproductions of the Moorish ones that had formerly existed in Granada and Cordova. As if to mark by a monument the track through which civilizing influences had come, the Academy of Toulouse, founded in 1345, has survived to our own times. It represented, however, the gay literature of the south of France, and was known under the fanciful title of "the Academy of Floral Games." The first society for the promotion of physical science, the Academia Secretorum Naturae, was founded at Naples, by Baptista Porta. It was, as Tiraboschi relates, dissolved by the ecclesiastical authorities. The Lyncean was founded by Prince Frederic Cesi at Rome; its device plainly indicated its intention: a lynx, with its eyes turned upward toward heaven, tearing a triple-headed Cerberus with its claws. The Accademia del Cimento, established at Florence, 1657, held its meetings in the ducal palace. It lasted ten years, and was then suppressed at the instance of the papal government; as an equivalent, the brother of the grand-duke was made a cardinal. It numbered many great men, such as Torricelli and Castelli, among its members. The condition of admission into it was an abjuration of all faith, and a resolution to inquire into the truth. These societies extricated the cultivators of science from the isolation in which they had hitherto lived, and, by promoting their intercommunication and union, imparted activity and strength to them all. Returning now from this digression, this historical sketch of the circumstances under which science was introduced into Europe, I pass to the consideration of its manner of action and its results. INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE. The influence of science on modern civilization has been twofold: 1. Intellectual; 2. Economical. Under these titles we may conveniently consider it. Intellectually it overthrew the authority of tradition. It refused to accept, unless accompanied by proof, the dicta of any master, no matter how eminent or honored his name. The conditions of admission into the Italian Accademia del Cimento, and the motto adopted by the Royal Society of London, illustrate the position it took in this respect. It rejected the supernatural and miraculous as evidence in physical discussions. It abandoned sign-proof such as the Jews in old days required, and denied that a demonstration can be given through an illustration of something else, thus casting aside the logic that had been in vogue for many centuries. In physical inquiries, its mode of procedure was, to test the value of any proposed hypothesis, by executing computations in any special case on the basis or principle of that hypothesis, and then, by performing an experiment or making an observation, to ascertain whether the result of these agreed with the result of the computation. If it did not, the hypothesis was to be rejected. We may here introduce an illustration or two of this mode of procedure: THEORIES OF GRAVITATION AND PHLOGISTON. Newton, suspecting that the influence of the earth's attraction, gravity, may extend as far as the moon, and be the force that causes her to revolve in her orbit round the earth, calculated that, by her motion in her orbit, she was deflected from the tangent thirteen feet every minute; but, by ascertaining the space through which bodies would fall in one minute at the earth's surface, and supposing it to be diminished in the ratio of the inverse square, it appeared that the attraction at the moon's orbit would draw a body through more than fifteen feet. He, therefore, for the time, considered his hypothesis as unsustained. But it so happened that Picard shortly afterward executed more correctly a new measurement of a degree; this changed the estimated magnitude of the earth, and the distance of the moon, which was measured in earth-semidiameters. Newton now renewed his computation, and, as I have related on a previous page, as it drew to a close, foreseeing that a coincidence was about to be established, was so much agitated that he was obliged to ask a friend to complete it. The hypothesis was sustained. A second instance will sufficiently illustrate the method under consideration. It is presented by the chemical theory of phlogiston. Stahl, the author of this theory, asserted that there is a principle of inflammability, to which he gave the name phlogiston, having the quality of uniting with substances. Thus, when what we now term a metallic oxide was united to it, a metal was produced; and, if the phlogiston were withdrawn, the metal passed back into its earthy or oxidized state. On this principle, then, the metals were compound bodies, earths combined with phlogiston. SCIENCE AND ECCLESIASTICISM. But during the eighteenth century the balance was introduced as an instrument of chemical research. Now, if the phlogistic hypothesis be true, it would follow that a metal should be the heavier, its oxide the lighter body, for the former contains something--phlogiston--that has been added to the latter. But, on weighing a portion of any metal, and also the oxide producible from it, the latter proves to be the heavier, and here the phlogistic hypothesis fails. Still further, on continuing the investigation, it may be shown that the oxide or calx, as it used to be called, has become heavier by combining with one of the ingredients of the air. To Lavoisier is usually attributed this test experiment; but the fact that the weight of a metal increases by calcination was established by earlier European experimenters, and, indeed, was well known to the Arabian chemists. Lavoisier, however, was the first to recognize its great importance. In his hands it produced a revolution in chemistry. The abandonment of the phlogistic theory is an illustration of the readiness with which scientific hypotheses are surrendered, when found to be wanting in accordance with facts. Authority and tradition pass for nothing. Every thing is settled by an appeal to Nature. It is assumed that the answers she gives to a practical interrogation will ever be true. Comparing now the philosophical principles on which science was proceeding, with the principles on which ecclesiasticism rested, we see that, while the former repudiated tradition, to the latter it was the main support while the former insisted on the agreement of calculation and observation, or the correspondence of reasoning and fact, the latter leaned upon mysteries; while the former summarily rejected its own theories, if it saw that they could not be coordinated with Nature, the latter found merit in a faith that blindly accepted the inexplicable, a satisfied contemplation of "things above reason." The alienation between the two continually increased. On one side there was a sentiment of disdain, on the other a sentiment of hatred. Impartial witnesses on all hands perceived that science was rapidly undermining ecclesiasticism. MATHEMATICS. Mathematics had thus become the great instrument of scientific research, it had become the instrument of scientific reasoning. In one respect it may be said that it reduced the operations of the mind to a mechanical process, for its symbols often saved the labor of thinking. The habit of mental exactness it encouraged extended to other branches of thought, and produced an intellectual revolution. No longer was it possible to be satisfied with miracle-proof, or the logic that had been relied upon throughout the middle ages. Not only did it thus influence the manner of thinking, it also changed the direction of thought. Of this we may be satisfied by comparing the subjects considered in the transactions of the various learned societies with the discussions that had occupied the attention of the middle ages. But the use of mathematics was not limited to the verification of theories; as above indicated, it also furnished a means of predicting what had hitherto been unobserved. In this it offered a counterpart to the prophecies of ecclesiasticism. The discovery of Neptune is an instance of the kind furnished by astronomy, and that of conical refraction by the optical theory of undulations. But, while this great instrument led to such a wonderful development in natural science, it was itself undergoing development--improvement. Let us in a few lines recall its progress. The germ of algebra may be discerned in the works of Diophantus of Alexandria, who is supposed to have lived in the second century of our era. In that Egyptian school Euclid had formerly collected the great truths of geometry, and arranged them in logical sequence. Archimedes, in Syracuse, had attempted the solution of the higher problems by the method of exhaustions. Such was the tendency of things that, had the patronage of science been continued, algebra would inevitably have been invented. To the Arabians we owe our knowledge of the rudiments of algebra; we owe to them the very name under which this branch of mathematics passes. They had carefully added, to the remains of the Alexandrian School, improvements obtained in India, and had communicated to the subject a certain consistency and form. The knowledge of algebra, as they possessed it, was first brought into Italy about the beginning of the thirteenth century. It attracted so little attention, that nearly three hundred years elapsed before any European work on the subject appeared. In 1496 Paccioli published his book entitled "Arte Maggiore," or "Alghebra." In 1501, Cardan, of Milan, gave a method for the solution of cubic equations; other improvements were contributed by Scipio Ferreo, 1508, by Tartalea, by Vieta. The Germans now took up the subject. At this time the notation was in an imperfect state. The publication of the Geometry of Descartes, which contains the application of algebra to the definition and investigation of curve lines (1637), constitutes an epoch in the history of the mathematical sciences. Two years previously, Cavalieri's work on Indivisibles had appeared. This method was improved by Torricelli and others. The way was now open, for the development of the Infinitesimal Calculus, the method of Fluxions of Newton, and the Differential and Integral Calculus of Leibnitz. Though in his possession many years previously, Newton published nothing on Fluxions until 1704; the imperfect notation he employed retarded very much the application of his method. Meantime, on the Continent, very largely through the brilliant solutions of some of the higher problems, accomplished by the Bernouillis, the Calculus of Leibnitz was universally accepted, and improved by many mathematicians. An extraordinary development of the science now took place, and continued throughout the century. To the Binomial theorem, previously discovered by Newton, Taylor now added, in his "Method of Increments," the celebrated theorem that bears his name. This was in 1715. The Calculus of Partial Differences was introduced by Euler in 1734. It was extended by D'Alembert, and was followed by that of Variations, by Euler and Lagrange, and by the method of Derivative Functions, by Lagrange, in 1772. But it was not only in Italy, in Germany, in England, in France, that this great movement in mathematics was witnessed; Scotland had added a new gem to the intellectual diadem with which her brow is encircled, by the grand invention of Logarithms, by Napier of Merchiston. It is impossible to give any adequate conception of the scientific importance of this incomparable invention. The modern physicist and astronomer will most cordially agree with Briggs, the Professor of Mathematics in Gresham College, in his exclamation: "I never saw a book that pleased me better, and that made I me more wonder!" Not without reason did the immortal Kepler regard Napier "to be the greatest man of his age, in the department to which he had applied his abilities." Napier died in 1617. It is no exaggeration to say that this invention, by shortening the labors, doubled the life of the astronomer. But here I must check myself. I must remember that my present purpose is not to give the history of mathematics, but to consider what science has done for the advancement of human civilization. And now, at once, recurs the question, How is it that the Church produced no geometer in her autocratic reign of twelve hundred years? With respect to pure mathematics this remark may be made: Its cultivation does not demand appliances that are beyond the reach of most individuals. Astronomy must have its observatory, chemistry its laboratory; but mathematics asks only personal disposition and a few books. No great expenditures are called for, nor the services of assistants. One would think that nothing could be more congenial, nothing more delightful, even in the retirement of monastic life. Shall we answer with Eusebius, "It is through contempt of such useless labor that we think so little of these matters; we turn our souls to the exercise of better things?" Better things! What can be better than absolute truth? Are mysteries, miracles, lying impostures, better? It was these that stood in the way! The ecclesiastical authorities had recognized, from the outset of this scientific invasion, that the principles it was disseminating were absolutely irreconcilable with the current theology. Directly and indirectly, they struggled against it. So great was their detestation of experimental science, that they thought they had gained a great advantage when the Accademia del Cimento was suppressed. Nor was the sentiment restricted to Catholicism. When the Royal Society of London was founded, theological odium was directed against it with so much rancor that, doubtless, it would have been extinguished, had not King Charles II. given it his open and avowed support. It was accused of an intention of "destroying the established religion, of injuring the universities, and of upsetting ancient and solid learning." THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. We have only to turn over the pages of its Transactions to discern how much this society has done for the progress of humanity. It was incorporated in 1662, and has interested itself in all the great scientific movements and discoveries that have since been made. It published Newton's "Principia;" it promoted Halley's voyage, the first scientific expedition undertaken by any government; it made experiments on the transfusion of blood, and accepted Harvey's discovery of the circulation. The encouragement it gave to inoculation led Queen Caroline to beg six condemned criminals for experiment, and then to submit her own children to that operation. Through its encouragement Bradley accomplished his great discovery, the aberration of the fixed stars, and that of the nutation of the earth's axis; to these two discoveries, Delambre says, we owe the exactness of modern astronomy. It promoted the improvement of the thermometer, the measure of temperature, and in Harrison's watch, the chronometer, the measure of time. Through it the Gregorian Calendar was introduced into England, in 1752, against a violent religious opposition. Some of its Fellows were pursued through the streets by an ignorant and infuriated mob, who believed it had robbed them of eleven days of their lives; it was found necessary to conceal the name of Father Walmesley, a learned Jesuit, who had taken deep interest in the matter; and, Bradley happening to die during the commotion, it was declared that he had suffered a judgment from Heaven for his crime! THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. If I were to attempt to do justice to the merits of this great society, I should have to devote many pages, to such subjects as the achromatic telescope of Dollond; the dividing engine of Ramsden, which first gave precision to astronomical observations, the measurement of a degree on the earth's surface by Mason and Dixon; the expeditions of Cook in connection with the transit of Venus; his circumnavigation of the earth; his proof that scurvy, the curse of long sea-voyages, may be avoided by the use of vegetable substances; the polar expeditions; the determination of the density of the earth by Maskelyne's experiments at Scheliallion, and by those of Cavendish; the discovery of the planet Uranus by Herschel; the composition of water by Cavendish and Watt; the determination of the difference of longitude between London and Paris; the invention of the voltaic pile; the surveys of the heavens by the Herschels; the development of the principle of interference by Young, and his establishment of the undulatory theory of light; the ventilation of jails and other buildings; the introduction of gas for city illumination; the ascertainment of the length of the seconds-pendulum; the measurement of the variations of gravity in different latitudes; the operations to ascertain the curvature of the earth; the polar expedition of Ross; the invention of the safety-lamp by Davy, and his decomposition of the alkalies and earths; the electro-magnetic discoveries of Oersted and Faraday; the calculating-engines of Babbage; the measures taken at the instance of Humboldt for the establishment of many magnetic observatories; the verification of contemporaneous magnetic disturbances over the earth's surface. But it is impossible, in the limited space at my disposal, to give even so little as a catalogue of its Transactions. Its spirit was identical with that which animated the Accademia del Cimento, and its motto accordingly was "Nullius in Verba." It proscribed superstition, and permitted only calculation, observation, and experiment. INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE. Not for a moment must it be supposed that in these great attempts, these great Successes, the Royal Society stood alone. In all the capitals of Europe there were Academies, Institutes, or Societies, equal in distinction, and equally successful in promoting human knowledge and modern civilization. THE ECONOMICAL INFLUENCES OF SCIENCE. The scientific study of Nature tends not only to correct and ennoble the intellectual conceptions of man; it serves also to ameliorate his physical condition. It perpetually suggests to him the inquiry, how he may make, by their economical application, ascertained facts subservient to his use. The investigation of principles is quickly followed by practical inventions. This, indeed, is the characteristic feature of our times. It has produced a great revolution in national policy. In former ages wars were made for the procuring of slaves. A conqueror transported entire populations, and extorted from them forced labor, for it was only by human labor that human labor could be relieved. But when it was discovered that physical agents and mechanical combinations could be employed to incomparably greater advantage, public policy underwent a change; when it was recognized that the application of a new principle, or the invention of a new machine, was better than the acquisition of an additional slave, peace became preferable to war. And not only so, but nations possessing great slave or serf populations, as was the care in America and Russia, found that considerations of humanity were supported by considerations of interest, and set their bondmen free. SCIENTIFIC INVENTIONS. Thus we live in a period of which a characteristic is the supplanting of human and animal labor by machines. Its mechanical inventions have wrought a social revolution. We appeal to the natural, not to the supernatural, for the accomplishment of our ends. It is with the "modern civilization" thus arising that Catholicism refuses to be reconciled. The papacy loudly proclaims its inflexible repudiation of this state of affairs, and insists on a restoration of the medieval condition of things. That a piece of amber, when rubbed, will attract and then repel light bodies, was a fact known six hundred years before Christ. It remained an isolated, uncultivated fact, a mere trifle, until sixteen hundred years after Christ. Then dealt with by the scientific methods of mathematical discussion and experiment, and practical application made of the result, it has permitted men to communicate instantaneously with each other across continents and under oceans. It has centralized the world. By enabling the sovereign authority to transmit its mandates without regard to distance or to time, it has revolutionized statesmanship and condensed political power. In the Museum of Alexandria there was a machine invented by Hero, the mathematician, a little more than one hundred years before Christ. It revolved by the agency of steam, and was of the form that we should now call a reaction-engine. This, the germ of one of the most important inventions ever made, was remembered as a mere curiosity for seventeen hundred years. Chance had nothing to do with the invention of the modern steam-engine. It was the product of meditation and experiment. In the middle of the seventeenth century several mechanical engineers attempted to utilize the properties of steam; their labors were brought to perfection by Watt in the middle of the eighteenth. The steam-engine quickly became the drudge of civilization. It performed the work of many millions of men. It gave, to those who would have been condemned to a life of brutal toil, the opportunity of better pursuits. He who formerly labored might now think. Its earliest application was in such operations as pumping, wherein mere force is required. Soon, however, it vindicated its delicacy of touch in the industrial arts of spinning and weaving. It created vast manufacturing establishments, and supplied clothing for the world. It changed the industry of nations. In its application, first to the navigation of rivers, and then to the navigation of the ocean, it more than quadrupled the speed that had heretofore been attained. Instead of forty days being requisite for the passage, the Atlantic might now be crossed in eight. But, in land transportation, its power was most strikingly displayed. The admirable invention of the locomotive enabled men to travel farther in less than an hour than they formerly could have done in more than a day. The locomotive has not only enlarged the field of human activity, but, by diminishing space, it has increased the capabilities of human life. In the swift transportation of manufactured goods and agricultural products, it has become a most efficient incentive to human industry The perfection of ocean steam-navigation was greatly promoted by the invention of the chronometer, which rendered it possible to find with accuracy the place of a ship at sea. The great drawback on the advancement of science in the Alexandrian School was the want of an instrument for the measurement of time, and one for the measurement of temperature--the chronometer and the thermometer; indeed, the invention of the latter is essential to that of the former. Clepsydras, or water-clocks, had been tried, but they were deficient in accuracy. Of one of them, ornamented with the signs of the zodiac, and destroyed by certain primitive Christians, St. Polycarp significantly remarked, "In all these monstrous demons is seen an art hostile to God." Not until about 1680 did the chronometer begin to approach accuracy. Hooke, the contemporary of Newton, gave it the balance-wheel, with the spiral spring, and various escapements in succession were devised, such as the anchor, the dead-beat, the duplex, the remontoir. Provisions for the variation of temperature were introduced. It was brought to perfection eventually by Harrison and Arnold, in their hands becoming an accurate measure of the flight of time. To the invention of the chronometer must be added that of the reflecting sextant by Godfrey. This permitted astronomical observations to be made, notwithstanding the motion of a ship. Improvements in ocean navigation are exercising a powerful influence on the distribution of mankind. They are increasing the amount and altering the character of colonization. DOMESTIC IMPROVEMENT. But not alone have these great discoveries and inventions, the offspring of scientific investigation, changed the lot of the human race; very many minor ones, perhaps individually insignificant, have in their aggregate accomplished surprising effects. The commencing cultivation of science in the fourteenth century gave a wonderful stimulus to inventive talent, directed mainly to useful practical results; and this, subsequently, was greatly encouraged by the system of patents, which secure to the originator a reasonable portion of the benefits of his skill. It is sufficient to refer in the most cursory manner to a few of these improvements; we appreciate at once how much they have done. The introduction of the saw-mill gave wooden floors to houses, banishing those of gypsum, tile, or stone; improvements cheapening the manufacture of glass gave windows, making possible the warming of apartments. However, it was not until the sixteenth century that glazing could be well done. The cutting of glass by the diamond was then introduced. The addition of chimneys purified the atmosphere of dwellings, smoky and sooty as the huts of savages; it gave that indescribable blessing of northern homes--a cheerful fireside. Hitherto a hole in the roof for the escape of the smoke, a pit in the midst of the floor to contain the fuel, and to be covered with a lid when the curfew-bell sounded or night came, such had been the cheerless and inadequate means of warming. MUNICIPAL IMPROVEMENTS. Though not without a bitter resistance on the part of the clergy, men began to think that pestilences are not punishments inflicted by God on society for its religious shortcomings, but the physical consequences of filth and wretchedness; that the proper mode of avoiding them is not by praying to the saints, but by insuring personal and municipal cleanliness. In the twelfth century it was found necessary to pave the streets of Paris, the stench in them was so dreadful At once dysenteries and spotted fever diminished; a sanitary condition approaching that of the Moorish cities of Spain, which had been paved for centuries, was attained. In that now beautiful metropolis it was forbidden to keep swine, an ordinance resented by the monks of the abbey of St. Anthony, who demanded that the pigs of that saint should go where they chose; the government was obliged to compromise the matter by requiring that bells should be fastened to the animals' necks. King Philip, the son of Louis the Fat, had been killed by his horse stumbling over a sow. Prohibitions were published against throwing slops out of the windows. In 1870 an eye-witness, the author of this book, at the close of the pontifical rule in Rome, found that, in walking the ordure-defiled streets of that city, it was more necessary to inspect the earth than to contemplate the heavens, in order to preserve personal purity. Until the beginning of the seventeenth century, the streets of Berlin were never swept. There was a law that every countryman, who came to market with a cart, should carry back a load of dirt! Paving was followed by attempts, often of an imperfect kind, at the construction of drains and sewers. It had become obvious to all reflecting men that these were necessary to the preservation of health, not only in towns, but in isolated houses. Then followed the lighting of the public thoroughfares. At first houses facing the streets were compelled to have candles or lamps in their windows; next the system that had been followed with so much advantage in Cordova and Granada--of having public lamps--was tried, but this was not brought to perfection until the present century, when lighting by gas was invented. Contemporaneously with public lamps were improved organizations for night-watchmen and police. By the sixteenth century, mechanical inventions and manufacturing improvements were exercising a conspicuous influence on domestic and social life. There were looking-glasses and clocks on the walls, mantels over the fireplaces. Though in many districts the kitchen-fire was still supplied with turf, the use of coal began to prevail. The table in the dining-room offered new delicacies; commerce was bringing to it foreign products; the coarse drinks of the North were supplanted by the delicate wines of the South. Ice-houses were constructed. The bolting of flour, introduced at the windmills, had given whiter and finer bread. By degrees things that had been rarities became common--Indian-corn, the potato, the turkey, and, conspicuous in the long list, tobacco. Forks, an Italian invention, displaced the filthy use of the fingers. It may be said that the diet of civilized men now underwent a radical change. Tea came from China, coffee from Arabia, the use of sugar from India, and these to no insignificant degree supplanted fermented liquors. Carpets replaced on the floors the layer of straw; in the chambers there appeared better beds, in the wardrobes cleaner and more frequently-changed clothing. In many towns the aqueduct was substituted for the public fountain and the street-pump. Ceilings which in the old days would have been dingy with soot and dirt, were now decorated with ornamental frescoes. Baths were more commonly resorted to; there was less need to use perfumery for the concealment of personal odors. An increasing taste for the innocent pleasures of horticulture was manifested, by the introduction of many foreign flowers in the gardens--the tuberose, the auricula, the crown imperial, the Persian lily, the ranunculus, and African marigolds. In the streets there appeared sedans, then close carriages, and at length hackney-coaches. Among the dull rustics mechanical improvements forced their way, and gradually attained, in the implements for ploughing, sowing, mowing, reaping, thrashing, the perfection of our own times. MERCANTILE INVENTIONS. It began to be recognized, in spite of the preaching of the mendicant orders, that poverty is the source of crime, the obstruction to knowledge; that the pursuit of riches by commerce is far better than the acquisition of power by war. For, though it may be true, as Montesquieu says, that, while commerce unites nations, it antagonizes individuals, and makes a traffic of morality, it alone can give unity to the world; its dream, its hope, is universal peace. MEDICAL IMPROVEMENTS. Though, instead of a few pages, it would require volumes to record adequately the ameliorations that took place in domestic and social life after science began to exert its beneficent influences, and inventive talent came to the aid of industry, there are some things which cannot be passed in silence. From the port of Barcelona the Spanish khalifs had carried on an enormous commerce, and they with their coadjutors--Jewish merchants--had adopted or originated many commercial inventions, which, with matters of pure science, they had transmitted to the trading communities of Europe. The art of book-keeping by double entry was thus brought into Upper Italy. The different kinds of insurance were adopted, though strenuously resisted by the clergy. They opposed fire and marine insurance, on the ground that it is a tempting of Providence. Life insurance was regarded as an act of interference with the consequences of God's will. Houses for lending money on interest and on pledges, that is, banking and pawnbroking establishments, were bitterly denounced, and especially was indignation excited against the taking of high rates of interest, which was stigmatized as usury--a feeling existing in some backward communities up to the present day. Bills of exchange in the present form and terms were adopted, the office of the public notary established, and protests for dishonored obligations resorted to. Indeed, it may be said, with but little exaggeration, that the commercial machinery now used was thus introduced. I have already remarked that, in consequence of the discovery of America, the front of Europe had been changed. Many rich Italian merchants and many enterprising Jews, had settled in Holland England, France, and brought into those countries various mercantile devices. The Jews, who cared nothing about papal maledictions, were enriched by the pontifical action in relation to the lending of money at high interest; but Pius II., perceiving the mistake that had been made, withdrew his opposition. Pawnbroking establishments were finally authorized by Leo X., who threatened excommunication of those who wrote against them. In their turn the Protestants now exhibited a dislike against establishments thus authorized by Rome. As the theological dogma, that the plague, like the earthquake, is an unavoidable visitation from God for the sins of men, began to be doubted, attempts were made to resist its progress by the establishment of quarantines. When the Mohammedan discovery of inoculation was brought from Constantinople in 1721, by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, it was so strenuously resisted by the clergy, that nothing short of its adoption by the royal family of England brought it into use. A similar resistance was exhibited when Jenner introduced his great improvement, vaccination; yet a century ago it was the exception to see a face unpitted by smallpox--now it is the exception to see one so disfigured. In like manner, when the great American discovery of anaesthetics was applied in obstetrical cases, it was discouraged, not so much for physiological reasons, as under the pretense that it was an impious attempt to escape from the curse denounced against all women in Genesis iii. 16. MAGIC AND MIRACLES. Inventive ingenuity did not restrict itself to the production of useful contrivances, it added amusing ones. Soon after the introduction of science into Italy, the houses of the virtuosi began to abound in all kinds of curious mechanical surprises, and, as they were termed, magical effects. In the latter the invention of the magic-lantern greatly assisted. Not without reason did the ecclesiastics detest experimental philosophy, for a result of no little importance ensued--the juggler became a successful rival to the miracle-worker. The pious frauds enacted in the churches lost their wonder when brought into competition with the tricks of the conjurer in the market-place: he breathed flame, walked on burning coals, held red-hot iron in his teeth, drew basketfuls of eggs out of his mouth, worked miracles by marionettes. Yet the old idea of the supernatural was with difficulty destroyed. A horse, whose master had taught him many tricks, was tried at Lisbon in 1601, found guilty of being, possessed by the devil, and was burnt. Still later than that many witches were brought to the stake. DISCOVERIES IN ASTRONOMY AND CHEMISTRY. Once fairly introduced, discovery and invention have unceasingly advanced at an accelerated pace. Each continually reacted on the other, continually they sapped supernaturalism. De Dominis commenced, and Newton completed, the explanation of the rainbow; they showed that it was not the weapon of warfare of God, but the accident of rays of light in drops of water. De Dominis was decoyed to Rome through the promise of an archbishopric, and the hope of a cardinal's hat. He was lodged in a fine residence, but carefully watched. Accused of having suggested a concord between Rome and England, he was imprisoned in the castle of St Angelo, and there died. He was brought in his coffin before an ecclesiastical tribunal, adjudged guilty of heresy, and his body, with a heap of heretical books, was cast into the flames. Franklin, by demonstrating the identity of lightning and electricity, deprived Jupiter of his thunder-bolt. The marvels of superstition were displaced by the wonders of truth. The two telescopes, the reflector and the achromatic, inventions of the last century, permitted man to penetrate into the infinite grandeurs of the universe, to recognize, as far as such a thing is possible, its illimitable spaces, its measureless times; and a little later the achromatic microscope placed before his eyes the world of the infinitely small. The air-balloon carried him above the clouds, the diving-bell to the bottom of the sea. The thermometer gave him true measures of the variations of heat; the barometer, of the pressure of the air. The introduction of the balance imparted exactness to chemistry, it proved the indestructibility of matter. The discovery of oxygen, hydrogen, and many other gases, the isolation of aluminum, calcium, and other metals, showed that earth and air and water are not elements. With an enterprise that can never be too much commended, advantage was taken of the transits of Venus, and, by sending expeditions to different regions, the distance of the earth from the sun was determined. The step that European intellect had made between 1456 and 1759 was illustrated by Halley's comet. When it appeared in the former year, it was considered as the harbinger of the vengeance of God, the dispenser of the most dreadful of his retributions, war, pestilence, famine. By order of the pope, all the church-bells in Europe were rung to scare it away, the faithful were commanded to add each day another prayer; and, as their prayers had often in so marked a manner been answered in eclipses and droughts and rains, so on this occasion it was declared that a victory over the comet had been vouchsafed to the pope. But, in the mean time, Halley, guided by the revelations of Kepler and Newton, had discovered that its motions, so far from being controlled by the supplications of Christendom, were guided in an elliptic orbit by destiny. Knowing that Nature bad denied to him an opportunity of witnessing the fulfillment of his daring prophecy, he besought the astronomers of the succeeding generation to watch for its return in 1759, and in that year it came. INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERIES. Whoever will in a spirit of impartiality examine what had been done by Catholicism for the intellectual and material advancement of Europe, during her long reign, and what has been done by science in its brief period of action, can, I am persuaded, come to no other conclusion than this, that, in instituting a comparison, he has established a contrast. And yet, how imperfect, how inadequate is the catalogue of facts I have furnished in the foregoing pages! I have said nothing of the spread of instruction by the diffusion of the arts of reading and writing, through public schools, and the consequent creation of a reading community; the modes of manufacturing public opinion by newspapers and reviews, the power of journalism, the diffusion of information public and private by the post-office and cheap mails, the individual and social advantages of newspaper advertisements. I have said nothing of the establishment of hospitals, the first exemplar of which was the Invalides of Paris; nothing of the improved prisons, reformatories, penitentiaries, asylums, the treatment of lunatics, paupers, criminals; nothing of the construction of canals, of sanitary engineering, or of census reports; nothing of the invention of stereotyping, bleaching by chlorine, the cotton-gin, or of the marvelous contrivances with which cotton-mills are filled--contrivances which have given us cheap clothing, and therefore added to cleanliness, comfort, health; nothing of the grand advancement of medicine and surgery, or of the discoveries in physiology, the cultivation of the fine arts, the improvement of agriculture and rural economy, the introduction of chemical manures and farm-machinery. I have not referred to the manufacture of iron and its vast affiliated industries; to those of textile fabrics; to the collection of museums of natural history, antiquities, curiosities. I have passed unnoticed the great subject of the manufacture of machinery by itself--the invention of the slide-rest, the planing-machine, and many other contrivances by which engines can be constructed with almost mathematical correctness. I have said nothing adequate about the railway system, or the electric telegraph, nor about the calculus, or lithography, the airpump, or the voltaic battery; the discovery of Uranus or Neptune, and more than a hundred asteroids; the relation of meteoric streams to comets; nothing of the expeditions by land and sea that have been sent forth by various governments for the determination of important astronomical or geographical questions; nothing of the costly and accurate experiments they have caused to be made for the ascertainment of fundamental physical data. I have been so unjust to our own century that I have made no allusion to some of its greatest scientific triumphs: its grand conceptions in natural history; its discoveries in magnetism and electricity; its invention of the beautiful art of photography; its applications of spectrum analysis; its attempts to bring chemistry under the three laws of Avogadro, of Boyle and Mariotte, and of Charles; its artificial production of organic substances from inorganic material, of which the philosophical consequences are of the utmost importance; its reconstruction of physiology by laying the foundation of that science on chemistry; its improvements and advances in topographical surveying and in the correct representation of the surface of the globe. I have said nothing about rifled-guns and armored ships, nor of the revolution that has been made in the art of war; nothing of that gift to women, the sewing-machine; nothing of the noble contentions and triumphs of the arts of peace--the industrial exhibitions and world's fairs. What a catalogue have we here, and yet how imperfect! It gives merely a random glimpse at an ever-increasing intellectual commotion--a mention of things as they casually present themselves to view. How striking the contrast between this literary, this scientific activity, and the stagnation of the middle ages! The intellectual enlightenment that surrounds this activity has imparted unnumbered blessings to the human race. In Russia it has emancipated a vast serf-population; in America it has given freedom to four million negro slaves. In place of the sparse dole of the monastery-gate, it has organized charity and directed legislation to the poor. It has shown medicine its true function, to prevent rather than to cure disease. In statesmanship it has introduced scientific methods, displacing random and empirical legislation by a laborious ascertainment of social facts previous to the application of legal remedies. So conspicuous, so impressive is the manner in which it is elevating men, that the hoary nations of Asia seek to participate in the boon. Let us not forget that our action on them must be attended by their reaction on us. If the destruction of paganism was completed when all the gods were brought to Rome and confronted there, now, when by our wonderful facilities of locomotion strange nations and conflicting religions are brought into common presence--the Mohammedan, the Buddhist, the Brahman-modifications of them all must ensue. In that conflict science alone will stand secure; for it has given us grander views of the universe, more awful views of God. AMERICAN AND FRENCH REVOLUTIONS. The spirit that has imparted life to this movement, that has animated these discoveries and inventions, is Individualism; in some minds the hope of gain, in other and nobler ones the expectation of honor. It is, then, not to be wondered at that this principle found a political embodiment, and that, during the last century, on two occasions, it gave rise to social convulsions--the American and the French Revolutions. The former has ended in the dedication of a continent to Individualism--there, under republican forms, before the close of the present century, one hundred million people, with no more restraint than their common security requires, will be pursuing an unfettered career. The latter, though it has modified the political aspect of all Europe, and though illustrated by surprising military successes, has, thus far, not consummated its intentions; again and again it has brought upon France fearful disasters. Her dual form of government--her allegiance to her two sovereigns, the political and the spiritual--has made her at once the leader and the antagonist of modern progress. With one hand she has enthroned Reason, with the other she has re-established and sustained the pope. Nor will this anomaly in her conduct cease until she bestows a true education on all her children, even on those of the humblest rustic. SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION. The intellectual attack made on existing opinions by the French Revolution was not of a scientific, but of a literary character; it was critical and aggressive. But Science has never been an aggressor. She has always acted on the defensive, and left to her antagonist the making of wanton attacks. Nevertheless, literary dissent is not of such ominous import as scientific; for literature is, in its nature, local--science is cosmopolitan. If, now, we demand, What has science done for the promotion of modern civilization; what has it done for the happiness, the well-being of society? we shall find our answer in the same manner that we reached a just estimate of what Latin Christianity had done. The reader of the foregoing paragraphs would undoubtedly infer that there must have been an amelioration in the lot of our race; but, when we apply the touchstone of statistics, that inference gathers precision. Systems of philosophy and forms of religion find a measure of their influence on humanity in census-returns. Latin Christianity, in a thousand years, could not double the population of Europe; it did not add perceptibly to the term of individual life. But, as Dr. Jarvis, in his report to the Massachusetts Board of Health, has stated, at the epoch of the Reformation "the average longevity in Geneva was 21.21 years, between 1814 and 1833 it was 40.68; as large a number of persons now live to seventy years as lived to forty, three hundred years ago. In 1693 the British Government borrowed money by selling annuities on lives from infancy upward, on the basis of the average longevity. The contract was profitable. Ninety-seven years later another tontine, or scale of annuities, on the basis of the same expectation of life as in the previous century, was issued. These latter annuitants, however, lived so much longer than their predecessors, that it proved to be a very costly loan for the government. It was found that, while ten thousand of each sex in the first tontine died under the age of twenty-eight, only five thousand seven hundred and seventy-two males and six thousand four hundred and sixteen females in the second tontine died at the same age, one hundred years later." We have been comparing the spiritual with the practical, the imaginary with the real. The maxims that have been followed in the earlier and the later period produced their inevitable result. In the former that maxim was, "Ignorance is the mother of Devotion in the latter, Knowledge is Power." CHAPTER XII. THE IMPENDING CRISIS. INDICATIONS OF THE APPROACH OF A RELIGIOUS CRISIS.--THE PREDOMINATING CHRISTIAN CHURCH, THE ROMAN, PERCEIVES THIS, AND MAKES PREPARATION FOR IT.--PIUS IX CONVOKES AN OECUMENICAL COUNCIL--RELATIONS OF THE DIFFERENT EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS TO THE PAPACY.--RELATIONS OF THE CHURCH TO SCIENCE, AS INDICATED BY THE ENCYCLICAL LETTER AND THE SYLLABUS. Acts of the Vatican Council in relation to the infallibility of the pope, and to Science.--Abstract of decisions arrived at. Controversy between the Prussian Government and the papacy.-- It is a contest between the State and the Church for supremacy--Effect of dual government in Europe--Declaration by the Vatican Council of its position as to Science--The dogmatic constitution of the Catholic faith.--Its definitions respecting God, Revelation, Faith, Reason.--The anathemas it pronounces.--Its denunciation of modern civilization. The Protestant Evangelical Alliance and its acts. General review of the foregoing definitions, and acts.-- Present condition of the controversy, and its future prospects. PREDOMINANCE OF CATHOLICITY. No one who is acquainted with the present tone of thought in Christendom can hide from himself the fact that an intellectual, a religious crisis is impending. In all directions we see the lowering skies, we hear the mutterings of the coming storm. In Germany, the national party is arraying itself against the ultramontane; in France, the men of progress are struggling against the unprogressive, and in their contest the political supremacy of that great country is wellnigh neutralized or lost. In Italy, Rome has passed into the hands of an excommunicated king. The sovereign pontiff, feigning that he is a prisoner, is fulminating from the Vatican his anathemas, and, in the midst of the most convincing proofs of his manifold errors, asserting his own infallibility. A Catholic archbishop with truth declares that the whole civil society of Europe seems to be withdrawing itself in its public life from Christianity. In England and America, religious persons perceive with dismay that the intellectual basis of faith has been undermined by the spirit of the age. They prepare for the approaching disaster in the best manner they can. The most serious trial through which society can pass is encountered in the exuviation of its religious restraints. The history of Greece and the history of Rome exhibit to us in an impressive manner how great are the perils. But it is not given to religions to endure forever. They necessarily undergo transformation with the intellectual development of man. How many countries are there professing the same religion now that they did at the birth of Christ? It is estimated that the entire population of Europe is about three hundred and one million. Of these, one hundred and eighty-five million are Roman Catholics, thirty-three million are Greek Catholics. Of Protestants there are seventy-one million, separated into many sects. Of Jews, five million; of Mohammedans, seven million. Of the religious subdivisions of America an accurate numerical statement cannot be given. The whole of Christian South America is Roman Catholic, the same may be said of Central America and of Mexico, as also of the Spanish and French West India possessions. In the United States and Canada the Protestant population predominates. To Australia the same remark applies. In India the sparse Christian population sinks into insignificance in presence of two hundred million Mohammedans and other Oriental denominations. The Roman Catholic Church is the most widely diffused and the most powerfully organized of all modern societies. It is far more a political than a religious combination. Its principle is that all power is in the clergy, and that for laymen there is only the privilege of obedience. The republican forms under which the Churches existed in primitive Christianity have gradually merged into an absolute centralization, with a man as vice-God at its head. This Church asserts that the divine commission under which it acts comprises civil government; that it has a right to use the state for its own purposes, but that the state has no right to intermeddle with it; that even in Protestant countries it is not merely a coordinate government, but the sovereign power. It insists that the state has no rights over any thing which it declares to be in its domain, and that Protestantism, being a mere rebellion, has no rights at all; that even in Protestant communities the Catholic bishop is the only lawful spiritual pastor. It is plain, therefore, that of professing Christians the vast majority are Catholic; and such is the authoritative demand of the papacy for supremacy, that, in any survey of the present religious condition of Christendom, regard must be mainly had to its acts. Its movements are guided by the highest intelligence and skill. Catholicism obeys the orders of one man, and has therefore a unity, a compactness, a power, which Protestant denominations do not possess. Moreover, it derives inestimable strength from the souvenirs of the great name of Rome. Unembarrassed by any hesitating sentiment, the papacy has contemplated the coming intellectual crisis. It has pronounced its decision, and occupied what seems to it to be the most advantageous ground. This definition of position we find in the acts of the late Vatican Council. THE OECUMENICAL COUNCIL. Pius IX., by a bull dated June 29, 1868, convoked an Oecumenical Council, to meet in Rome, on December 8, 1869. Its sessions ended in July, 1870. Among other matters submitted to its consideration, two stand forth in conspicuous prominence--they are the assertion of the infallibility of the Roman pontiff, and the definition of the relations of religion to science. But the convocation of the Council was far from meeting with general approval. The views of the Oriental Churches were, for the most part, unfavorable. They affirmed that they saw a desire in the Roman pontiff to set himself up as the head of Christianity, whereas they recognized the Lord Jesus Christ alone as the head of the Church. They believed that the Council would only lead to new quarrels and scandals. The sentiment of these venerable Churches is well shown by the incident that, when, in 1867, the Nestorian Patriarch Simeon had been invited by the Chaldean Patriarch to return to Roman Catholic unity, he, in his reply, showed that there was no prospect for harmonious action between the East and the West: "You invite me to kiss humbly the slipper of the Bishop of Rome; but is he not, in every respect, a man like yourself--is his dignity superior to yours? We will never permit to be introduced into our holy temples of worship images and statues, which are nothing but abominable and impure idols. What! shall we attribute to Almighty God a mother, as you dare to do? Away from us, such blasphemy!" EXPECTATIONS OF THE PAPACY. Eventually, the patriarchs, archbishops, and bishops, from all regions of the world, who took part in this Council, were seven hundred and four. Rome had seen very plainly that Science was not only rapidly undermining the dogmas of the papacy, but was gathering great political power. She recognized that all over Europe there was a fast-spreading secession among persons of education, and that its true focus was North Germany. She looked, therefore, with deep interest on the Prusso-Austrian War, giving to Austria whatever encouragement she could. The battle of Sadowa was a bitter disappointment to her. With satisfaction again she looked upon the breaking out of the Franco-Prussian War, not doubting that its issue would be favorable to France, and therefore favorable to her. Here, again, she was doomed to disappointment at Sedan. Having now no further hope, for many years to come, from external war, she resolved to see what could be done by internal insurrection, and the present movement in the German Empire is the result of her machinations. Had Austria or had France succeeded, Protestantism would have been overthrown along with Prussia. But, while these military movements were being carried on, a movement of a different, an intellectual kind, was engaged in. Its principle was, to restore the worn-out mediaeval doctrines and practices, carrying them to an extreme, no matter what the consequences might be. ENCYCLICAL LETTER AND SYLLABUS. Not only was it asserted that the papacy has a divine right to participate in the government of all countries, coordinately with their temporal authorities, but that the supremacy of Rome in this matter must be recognized; and that in any question between them the temporal authority must conform itself to her order. And, since the endangering of her position had been mainly brought about by the progress of science, she presumed to define its boundaries, and prescribe limits to its authority. Still more, she undertook to denounce modern civilization. These measures were contemplated soon after the return of his Holiness from Gaeta in 1848, and were undertaken by the advice of the Jesuits, who, lingering in the hope that God would work the impossible, supposed that the papacy, in its old age, might be reinvigorated. The organ of the Curia proclaimed the absolute independence of the Church as regards the state; the dependence of the bishops on the pope; of the diocesan clergy on the bishops; the obligation of the Protestants to abandon their atheism, and return to the fold; the absolute condemnation of all kinds of toleration. In December, 1854, in an assembly of bishops, the pope had proclaimed the dogma of the immaculate conception. Ten years subsequently he put forth the celebrated Encyclical Letter and the Syllabus. The Encyclical Letter is dated December 8, 1864. It was drawn up by learned ecclesiastics, and subsequently debated at the Congregation of the Holy Office, then forwarded to prelates, and finally gone over by the pope and cardinals. ENCYCLICAL LETTER AND SYLLABUS. Many of the clergy objected to its condemnation of modern civilization. Some of the cardinals were reluctant to concur in it. The Catholic press accepted it, not, however, without misgivings and regrets. The Protestant governments put no obstacle in its way; the Catholic were embarrassed by it. France allowed the publication only of that portion proclaiming the jubilee; Austria and Italy permitted its introduction, but withheld their approval. The political press and legislatures of Catholic countries gave it an unfavorable reception. Many deplored it as likely to widen the breach between the Church and modern society. The Italian press regarded it as determining a war, without truce or armistice, between the papacy and modern civilization. Even in Spain there were journals that regretted "the obstinacy and blindness of the court of Rome, in branding and condemning modern civilization." It denounces that "most pernicious and insane opinion, that liberty of conscience and of worship is the right of every man, and that this right ought, in every well-governed state, to be proclaimed and asserted by law; and that the will of the people, manifested by public opinion (as it is called), or by other means, constitutes a supreme law, independent of all divine and human rights." It denies the right of parents to educate their children outside the Catholic Church. It denounces "the impudence" of those who presume to subordinate the authority of the Church and of the Apostolic See, "conferred upon it by Christ our Lord, to the judgment of the civil authority." His Holiness commends, to the venerable brothers to whom the Encyclical is addressed, incessant prayer, and, "in order that God may accede the more easily to our and your prayers, let us employ in all confidence, as our mediatrix with him, the Virgin Mary, mother of God, who sits as a queen upon the right hand of her only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, in a golden vestment, clothed around with various adornments. There is nothing she cannot obtain from him." CONVOCATION OF THE COUNCIL. Plainly, the principle now avowed by the papacy must bring it into collision even with governments which had heretofore maintained amicable relations with it. Great dissatisfaction was manifested by Russia, and the incidents that ensued drew forth from his Holiness an allocution (November, 1866) condemnatory of the course of that government. To this, Russia replied, by declaring the Concordat of 1867 abrogated. Undeterred by the result of the battle of Sadowa (July, 1866), though it was plain that the political condition of Europe was now profoundly affected, and especially the relations of the papacy, the pope delivered an allocution (June 27, 1867), confirming the Encyclical and Syllabus. He announced his intention of convoking an Oecumenical Council. Accordingly, as we have already mentioned, in the following year (June 29, 1868), a bull was issued convoking that Council. Misunderstandings, however, had now sprung up with Austria. The Austrian Reichsrath had adopted laws introducing equality of civil rights for all the inhabitants of the empire, and restricting the influence of the Church. This produced on the part of the papal government an expostulation. Acting as Russia had done, the Austrian Government found it necessary to abrogate the Concordat of 1855. In France, as above stated, the publication of the entire Syllabus was not permitted; but Prussia, desirous of keeping on good terms with the papacy, did not disallow it. The exacting disposition of the papacy increased. It was openly declared that the faithful must now sacrifice to the Church, property, life, and even their intellectual convictions. The Protestants and the Greeks were invited to tender their submission. THE VATICAN COUNCIL. On the appointed day, the Council opened. Its objects were, to translate the Syllabus into practice, to establish the dogma of papal infallibility, and define the relations of religion to science. Every preparation had been made that the points determined on should be carried. The bishops were informed that they were coming to Rome not to deliberate, but to sanction decrees previously made by an infallible pope. No idea was entertained of any such thing as free discussion. The minutes of the meetings were not permitted to be inspected; the prelates of the opposition were hardly allowed to speak. On January 22, 1870, a petition, requesting that the infallibility of the pope should be defined, was presented; an opposition petition of the minority was offered. Hereupon, the deliberations of the minority were forbidden, and their publications prohibited. And, though the Curia had provided a compact majority, it was found expedient to issue an order that to carry any proposition it was not necessary that the vote should be near unanimity, a simple majority sufficed. The remonstrances of the minority were altogether unheeded. As the Council pressed forward to its object, foreign authorities became alarmed at its reckless determination. A petition drawn up by the Archbishop of Vienna, and signed by several cardinals and archbishops, entreated his Holiness not to submit the dogma of infallibility for consideration, "because the Church has to sustain at present a struggle unknown in former times, against men who oppose religion itself as an institution baneful to human nature, and that it is inopportune to impose upon Catholic nations, led into temptation by so many machinations, more dogmas than the Council of Trent proclaimed." It added that "the definition demanded would furnish fresh arms to the enemies of religion, to excite against the Catholic Church the resentment of men avowedly the best." The Austrian prime-minister addressed a protest to the papal government, warning it against any steps that might lead to encroachments on the rights of Austria. The French Government also addressed a note, suggesting that a French bishop should explain to the Council the condition and the rights of France. To this the papal government replied that a bishop could not reconcile the double duties of an ambassador and a Father of the Council. Hereupon, the French Government, in a very respectful note, remarked that, to prevent ultra opinions from becoming dogmas, it reckoned on the moderation of the bishops, and the prudence of the Holy Father; and, to defend its civil and political laws against the encroachments of the theocracy, it had counted on public reason and the patriotism of French Catholics. In these remonstrances the North-German Confederation joined, seriously pressing them on the consideration of the papal government. On April 23d, Von Arnim, the Prussian embassador, united with Daru, the French minister, in suggesting to the Curia the inexpediency of reviving mediaeval ideas. The minority bishops, thus encouraged, demanded now that the relations of the spiritual to the secular power should be determined before the pope's infallibility was discussed, and that it should be settled whether Christ had conferred on St. Peter and his successors a power over kings and emperors. INFALLIBILITY OF THE POPE. No regard was paid to this, not even delay was consented to. The Jesuits, who were at the bottom of the movement, carried their measures through the packed assembly with a high hand. The Council omitted no device to screen itself from popular criticism. Its proceedings were conducted with the utmost secrecy; all who took part in them were bound by a solemn oath to observe silence. On July 13th, the votes were taken. Of 601 votes, 451 were affirmative. Under the majority rule, the measure was pronounced carried, and, five days subsequently, the pope proclaimed the dogma of his infallibility. It has often been remarked that this was the day on which the French declared war against Prussia. Eight days afterward the French troops were withdrawn from Rome. Perhaps both the statesman and the philosopher will admit that an infallible pope would be a great harmonizing element, if only common-sense could acknowledge him. Hereupon, the King of Italy addressed an autograph letter to the pope, setting forth in very respectful terms the necessity that his troops should advance and occupy positions "indispensable to the security of his Holiness, and the maintenance of order;" that, while satisfying the national aspirations, the chief of Catholicity, surrounded by the devotion of the Italian populations, "might preserve on the banks of the Tiber a glorious seat, independent of all human sovereignty." To this his Holiness replied in a brief and caustic letter: "I give thanks to God, who has permitted your majesty to fill the last days of my life with bitterness. For the rest, I cannot grant certain requests, nor conform with certain principles contained in your letter. Again, I call upon God, and into his hands commit my cause, which is his cause. I pray God to grant your majesty many graces, to free you from dangers, and to dispense to you his mercy which you so much need." THE ITALIAN GOVERNMENT. The Italian troops met with but little resistance. They occupied Rome on September 20, 1870. A manifesto was issued, setting forth the details of a plebiscitum, the vote to be by ballot, the question, "the unification of Italy." Its result showed how completely the popular mind in Italy is emancipated from theology. In the Roman provinces the number of votes on the lists was 167,548; the number who voted, 135,291; the number who voted for annexation, 133,681; the number who voted against it, 1,507; votes annulled, 103. The Parliament of Italy ratified the vote of the Roman people for annexation by a vote of 239 to 20. A royal decree now announced the annexation of the Papal States to the kingdom of Italy, and a manifesto was issued indicating the details of the arrangement. It declared that "by these concessions the Italian Government seeks to prove to Europe that Italy respects the sovereignty of the pope in conformity with the principle of a free Church in a free state." AFFAIRS IN PRUSSIA. In the Prusso-Austrian War it had been the hope of the papacy, to restore the German Empire under Austria, and make Germany a Catholic nation. In the Franco-German War the French expected ultramontane sympathies in Germany. No means were spared to excite Catholic sentiment against the Protestants. No vilification was spared. They were spoken of as atheists; they were declared incapable of being honest men; their sects were pointed out as indicating that their secession was in a state of dissolution. "The followers of Luther are the most abandoned men in all Europe." Even the pope himself, presuming that the whole world had forgotten all history, did not hesitate to say, "Let the German people understand that no other Church but that of Rome is the Church of freedom and progress." Meantime, among the clergy of Germany a party was organized to remonstrate against, and even resist, the papal usurpation. It protested against "a man being placed on the throne of God," against a vice-God of any kind, nor would it yield its scientific convictions to ecclesiastical authority. Some did not hesitate to accuse the pope himself of being a heretic. Against these insubordinates excommunications began to be fulminated, and at length it was demanded that certain professors and teachers should be removed from their offices, and infallibilists substituted. With this demand the Prussian Government declined to comply. The Prussian Government had earnestly desired to remain on amicable terms with the papacy; it had no wish to enter on a theological quarrel; but gradually the conviction was forced upon it that the question was not a religious but a political one--whether the power of the state should be used against the state. A teacher in a gymnasium had been excommunicated; the government, on being required to dismiss him, refused. The Church authorities denounced this as an attack upon faith. The emperor sustained his minister. The organ of the infallible party threatened the emperor with the opposition of all good Catholics, and told him that, in a contention with the pope, systems of government can and must change. It was now plain to every one that the question had become, "Who is to be master in the state, the government or the Roman Church? It is plainly impossible for men to live under two governments, one of which declares to be wrong what the other commands. If the government will not submit to the Roman Church, the two are enemies." A conflict was thus forced upon Prussia by Rome--a conflict in which the latter, impelled by her antagonism to modern civilization, is clearly the aggressor. ACTION OF THE PRUSSIAN GOVERNMENT. The government, now recognizing its antagonist, defended itself by abolishing the Catholic department in the ministry of Public Worship. This was about midsummer, 1871. In the following November the Imperial Parliament passed a law that ecclesiastics abusing their office, to the disturbance of the public peace, should be criminally punished. And, guided by the principle that the future belongs to him to whom the school belongs, a movement arose for the purpose of separating the schools from the Church. THE CHURCH A POLITICAL POWER. The Jesuit party was extending and strengthening an organization all over Germany, based on the principle that state legislation in ecclesiastical matters is not binding. Here was an act of open insurrection. Could the government allow itself to be intimidated? The Bishop of Ermeland declared that he would not obey the laws of the state if they touched the Church. The government stopped the payment of his salary; and, perceiving that there could be no peace so long as the Jesuits were permitted to remain in the country, their expulsion was resolved on, and carried into effect. At the close of 1872 his Holiness delivered an allocution, in which he touched on the "persecution of the Church in the German Empire," and asserted that the Church alone has a right to fix the limits between its domain and that of the state--a dangerous and inadmissible principle, since under the term morals the Church comprises all the relations of men to each other, and asserts that whatever does not assist her oppresses her. Hereupon, a few days subsequently (January 9, 1873), four laws were brought forward by the government: 1. Regulating the means by which a person might sever his connection with the Church; 2. Restricting the Church in the exercise of ecclesiastical punishments; 3. Regulating the ecclesiastical power of discipline, forbidding bodily chastisement, regulating fines and banishments granting the privilege of an appeal to the Royal Court of Justice for Ecclesiastical Affairs, the decision of which is final; 4. Ordaining the preliminary education and appointment of priests. They must have had a satisfactory education, passed a public examination conducted by the state, and have a knowledge of philosophy, history, and German literature. Institutions refusing to be superintended by the state are to be closed. These laws demonstrate that Germany is resolved that she will no longer be dictated to nor embarrassed by a few Italian noble families; that she will be master of her own house. She sees in the conflict, not an affair of religion or of conscience, but a struggle between the sovereignty of state legislation and the sovereignty of the Church. She treats the papacy not in the aspect of a religious, but of a political power, and is resolved that the declaration of the Prussian Constitution shall be maintained, that "the exercise of religious freedom must not interfere with the duties of a citizen toward the community and the state." DUAL GOVERNMENT IN EUROPE. With truth it is affirmed that the papacy is administered not oecumenically, not as a universal Church, for all the nations, but for the benefit of some Italian families. Look at its composition! It consists of pope, cardinal bishops, cardinal deacons, who at the present moment are all Italians; cardinal priests, nearly all Italians; ministers and secretaries of the Sacred Congregation in Rome, all Italians. France has not given a pope since the middle ages. It is the same with Austria, Portugal, Spain. In spite of all attempts to change this system of exclusion, to open the dignities of the Church to all Catholicism, no foreigner can reach the holy chair. It is recognized that the Church is a domain given by God to the princely Italian families. Of fifty-five members of the present College of Cardinals, forty are Italians--that is, thirty-two beyond their proper share. The stumbling-block to the progress of Europe has been its dual system of government. So long as every nation had two sovereigns, a temporal one at home and a spiritual one in a foreign land--there being different temporal masters in different nations, but only one foreign master for all, the pontiff at Rome--how was it possible that history should present us with any thing more than a narrative of the strifes of these rival powers? Whoever will reflect on this state of things will see how it is that those nations which have shaken off the dual form of government are those which have made the greatest advance. He will discern what is the cause of the paralysis which has befallen France. On one hand she wishes to be the leader of Europe, on the other she clings to a dead past. For the sake of propitiating her ignorant classes, she enters upon lines of policy which her intelligence must condemn. So evenly balanced are the two sovereignties under which she lives, that sometimes one, sometimes the other, prevails; and not unfrequently the one uses the other as an engine for the accomplishment of its ends. INTENTIONS OF THE POPE. But this dual system approaches its close. To the northern nations, less imaginative and less superstitious, it had long ago become intolerable; they rejected it summarily at the epoch of the Reformation, notwithstanding the protestations and pretensions of Rome, Russia, happier than the rest, has never acknowledged the influence of any foreign spiritual power. She gloried in her attachment to the ancient Greek rite, and saw in the papacy nothing more than a troublesome dissenter from the primitive faith. In America the temporal and the spiritual have been absolutely divorced--the latter is not permitted to have any thing to do with affairs of state, though in all other respects liberty is conceded to it. The condition of the New World also satisfies us that both forms of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, have lost their expansive power; neither can pass beyond its long-established boundary-line--the Catholic republics remain Catholic, the Protestant Protestant. And among the latter the disposition to sectarian isolation is disappearing; persons of different denominations consort without hesitation together. They gather their current opinions from newspapers, not from the Church. Pius IX., in the movements we have been considering, has had two objects in view: 1. The more thorough centralization of the papacy, with a spiritual autocrat assuming the prerogatives of God at its head; 2. Control over the intellectual development of the nations professing Christianity. The logical consequence of the former of these is political intervention. He insists that in all cases the temporal must subordinate itself to the spiritual power; all laws inconsistent with the interests of the Church must be repealed. They are not binding on the faithful. In the preceding pages I have briefly related some of the complications that have already occurred in the attempt to maintain this policy. THE SYLLABUS. I now come to the consideration of the manner in which the papacy proposes to establish its intellectual control; how it defines its relation to its antagonist, Science, and, seeking a restoration of the mediaeval condition, opposes modern civilization, and denounces modern society. The Encyclical and Syllabus present the principles which it was the object of the Vatican Council to carry into practical effect. The Syllabus stigmatizes pantheism, naturalism, and absolute rationalism, denouncing such opinions as that God is the world; that there is no God other than Nature; that theological matters must be treated in the same manner as philosophical ones, that the methods and principles by which the old scholastic doctors cultivated theology are no longer suitable to the demands of the age and the progress of science; that every man is free to embrace and profess the religion he may believe to be true, guided by the light of his reason; that it appertains to the civil power to define what are the rights and limits in which the Church may exercise authority; that the Church has not the right of availing herself of force or any direct or indirect temporal power; that the Church ought to be separated from the state and the state from the Church; that it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion shall be held as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other modes of worship; that persons coming to reside in Catholic countries have a right to the public exercise of their own worship; that the Roman pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, the progress of modern civilization. The Syllabus claims the right of the Church to control public schools, and denies the right of the state in that respect; it claims the control over marriage and divorce. Such of these principles as the Council found expedient at present to formularize, were set forth by it in "The Dogmatic Constitution of the Catholic Faith." The essential points of this constitution, more especially as regards the relations of religion to science, we have now to examine. It will be understood that the following does not present the entire document, but only an abstract of what appear to be its more important parts. CONSTITUTION OF CATHOLIC FAITH. This definition opens with a severe review of the principles and consequences of the Protestant Reformation: "The rejection of the divine authority of the Church to teach, and the subjection of all things belonging to religion to the judgment of each individual, have led to the production of many sects, and, as these differed and disputed with each other, all belief in Christ was overthrown in the minds of not a few, and the Holy Scriptures began to be counted as myths and fables. Christianity has been rejected, and the reign of mere Reason as they call it, or Nature, substituted; many falling into the abyss of pantheism, materialism, and atheism, and, repudiating the reasoning nature of man, and every rule of right and wrong, they are laboring to overthrow the very foundations of human society. As this impious heresy is spreading everywhere, not a few Catholics have been inveigled by it. They have confounded human science and divine faith. "But the Church, the Mother and Mistress of nations, is ever ready to strengthen the weak, to take to her bosom those that return, and carry them on to better things. And, now the bishops of the whole world being gathered together in this Oecumenical Council, and the Holy Ghost sitting therein, and judging with us, we have determined to declare from this chair of St. Peter the saving doctrine of Christ, and proscribe and condemn the opposing errors. "OF GOD, THE CREATOR OF ALL THINGS.--The Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church believes that there is one true and living God, Creator and Lord of Heaven and Earth, Almighty, Eternal, Immense, Incomprehensible, Infinite in understanding and will, and in all perfection. He is distinct from the world. Of his own most free counsel he made alike out of nothing two created creatures, a spiritual and a temporal, angelic and earthly. Afterward he made the human nature, composed of both. Moreover, God by his providence protects and governs all things, reaching from end to end mightily, and ordering all things harmoniously. Every thing is open to his eyes, even things that come to pass by the free action of his creatures." "OF REVELATION.--The Holy Mother Church holds that God can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason, but that it has also pleased him to reveal himself and the eternal decrees of his will in a supernatural way. This supernatural revelation, as declared by the Holy Council of Trent, is contained in the books of the Old and New Testament, as enumerated in the decrees of that Council, and as are to be had in the old Vulgate Latin edition. These are sacred because they were written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. They have God for their author, and as such have been delivered to the Church. "And, in order to restrain restless spirits, who may give erroneous explanations, it is decreed--renewing the decision of the Council of Trent--that no one may interpret the sacred Scriptures contrary to the sense in which they are interpreted by Holy Mother Church, to whom such interpretation belongs." "OF FAITH.--Inasmuch as man depends on God as his Lord, and created reason is wholly subject to uncreated truth, he is bound when God makes a revelation to obey it by faith. This faith is a supernatural virtue, and the beginning of man's salvation who believes revealed things to be true, not for their intrinsic truth as seen by the natural light of reason, but for the authority of God in revealing them. But, nevertheless that faith might be agreeable to reason, God willed to join miracles and prophecies, which, showing forth his omnipotence and knowledge, are proofs suited to the understanding of all. Such we have in Moses and the prophets, and above all in Christ. Now, all those things are to be believed which are written in the word of God, or handed down by tradition, which the Church by her teaching has proposed for belief. "No one can be justified without this faith, nor shall any one, unless he persevere therein to the end, attain everlasting life. Hence God, through his only-begotten Son, has established the Church as the guardian and teacher of his revealed word. For only to the Catholic Church do all those signs belong which make evident the credibility of the Christian faith. Nay, more, the very Church herself, in view of her wonderful propagation, her eminent holiness, her exhaustless fruitfulness in all that is good, her Catholic unity, her unshaken stability, offers a great and evident claim to belief, and an undeniable proof of her divine mission. Thus the Church shows to her children that the faith they hold rests on a most solid foundation. Wherefore, totally unlike is the condition of those who, by the heavenly gift of faith, have embraced the Catholic truth, and of those who, led by human opinions, are following, a false religion." "OF FAITH AND REASON.--Moreover, the Catholic Church has ever held and now holds that there exists a twofold order of knowledge, each of which is distinct from the other, both as to its principle and its object. As to its principle, because in the one we know by natural reason, in the other by divine faith; as to the object, because, besides those things which our natural reason can attain, there are proposed to our belief mysteries hidden in God, which, unless by him revealed, cannot come to our knowledge. "Reason, indeed, enlightened by faith, and seeking, with diligence and godly sobriety, may, by God's gift, come to some understanding, limited in degree, but most wholesome in its effects, of mysteries, both from the analogy of things which are naturally known and from the connection of the mysteries themselves with one another and with man's last end. But never can reason be rendered capable of thoroughly understanding mysteries as it does those truths which form its proper object. For God's mysteries, in their very nature, so far surpass the reach of created intellect, that, even when taught by revelation and received by faith, they remain covered by faith itself, as by a veil, and shrouded, as it were, in darkness as long as in this mortal life. "But, although faith be above reason, there never can be a real disagreement between them, since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has given man's soul the light of reason, and God cannot deny himself, nor can one truth ever contradict another. Wherefore the empty shadow of such contradiction arises chiefly from this, that either the doctrines of faith are not understood and set forth as the Church really holds them, or that the vain devices and opinions of men are mistaken for the dictates of reason. We therefore pronounce false every assertion which is contrary to the enlightened truth of faith. Moreover, the Church, which, together with her apostolic office of teaching, is charged also with the guardianship of the deposits of faith, holds likewise from God the right and the duty to condemn 'knowledge, falsely so called,' 'lest any man be cheated by philosophy and vain deceit.' Hence all the Christian faithful are not only forbidden to defend, as legitimate conclusions of science, those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith, especially when condemned by the Church, but are rather absolutely bound to hold them for errors wearing the deceitful appearance of truth." THE VATICAN ANATHEMAS. "Not only is it impossible for faith and reason ever to contradict each other, but they rather afford each other mutual assistance. For right reason establishes the foundation of faith, and, by the aid of its light, cultivates the science of divine things; and faith, on the other hand, frees and preserves reason from errors, and enriches it with knowledge of many kinds. So far, then, is the Church from opposing the culture of human arts and sciences, that she rather aids and promotes it in many ways. For she is not ignorant of nor does she despise the advantages which flow from them to the life of man; on the contrary, she acknowledges that, as they sprang from God, the Lord of knowledge, so, if they be rightly pursued, they will, through the aid of his grace, lead to God. Nor does she forbid any of those sciences the use of its own principles and its own method within its own proper sphere; but, recognizing this reasonable freedom, she takes care that they may not, by contradicting God's teaching, fall into errors, or, overstepping the due limits, invade or throw into confusion the domain of faith. "For the doctrine of faith revealed by God has not been proposed, like some philosophical discovery, to be made perfect by human ingenuity, but it has been delivered to the spouse of Christ as a divine deposit, to be faithfully guarded and unerringly set forth. Hence, all tenets of holy faith are to be explained always according to the sense and meaning of the Church; nor is it ever lawful to depart therefrom under pretense or color of a more enlightened explanation. Therefore, as generations and centuries roll on, let the understanding, knowledge, and wisdom of each and every one, of individuals and of the whole Church, grow apace and increase exceedingly, yet only in its kind; that is to say retaining pure and inviolate the sense and meaning and belief of the same doctrine." Among other canons the following were promulgated. "Let him be anathema-- "Who denies the one true God, Creator and Lord of all things, visible and invisible. "Who unblushingly affirms that, besides matter, nothing else exists. "Who says that the substance or essence of God, and of all things, is one and the same. "Who says that finite things, both corporeal and spiritual, or at least spiritual things, are emanations of the divine substance; or that the divine essence, by manifestation or development of itself, becomes all things. "Who does not acknowledge that the world and all things which it contains were produced by God out of nothing. "Who shall say that man can and ought to, of his own efforts, by means of, constant progress, arrive, at last, at the possession of all truth and goodness. "Who shall refuse to receive, for sacred and canonical, the books of Holy Scripture in their integrity, with all their parts, according as they were enumerated by the holy Council of Trent, or shall deny that they are Inspired by God. "Who shall say that human reason is in such wise independent, that faith cannot be demanded of it by God. "Who shall say that divine revelation cannot be rendered credible by external evidences. "Who shall say that no miracles can be wrought, or that they can never be known with certainty, and that the divine origin of Christianity cannot be proved by them. "Who shall say that divine revelation includes no mysteries, but that all the dogmas of faith may be understood and demonstrated by reason duly cultivated. "Who shall say that human sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions, even when opposed to revealed doctrine. "Who shall say that it may at any time come to pass, in the progress of science, that the doctrines set forth by the Church must be taken in another sense than that in which the Church has ever received and yet receives them." THE EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE. The extraordinary and, indeed, it may be said, arrogant assumptions contained in these decisions were far from being received with satisfaction by educated Catholics. On the part of the German universities there was resistance; and, when, at the close of the year, the decrees of the Vatican Council were generally acquiesced in, it was not through conviction of their truth, but through a disciplinary sense of obedience. By many of the most pious Catholics the entire movement and the results to which it had led were looked upon with the sincerest sorrow. Pere Hyacinthe, in a letter to the superior of his order, says: "I protest against the divorce, as impious as it is insensate, sought to be effected between the Church, which is our eternal mother, and the society of the nineteenth century, of which we are the temporal children, and toward which we have also duties and regards. It is my most profound conviction that, if France in particular, and the Latin race in general, are given up to social, moral, and religious anarchy, the principal cause undoubtedly is not Catholicism itself, but the manner in which Catholicism has for a long time been understood and practised." Notwithstanding his infallibility, which implies omniscience, his Holiness did not foresee the issue of the Franco-Prussian War. Had the prophetical talent been vouchsafed to him, he would have detected the inopportuneness of the acts of his Council. His request to the King of Prussia for military aid to support his temporal power was denied. The excommunicated King of Italy, as we have seen, took possession of Rome. A bitter papal encyclical, strangely contrasting with the courteous politeness of modern state-papers, was issued, November 1, 1870, denouncing the acts of the Piedmontese court, "which had followed the counsel of the sects of perdition." In this his Holiness declares that he is in captivity, and that he will have no agreement with Belial. He pronounces the greater excommunication, with censures and penalties, against his antagonists, and prays for "the intercession of the immaculate Virgin Mary, mother of God, and that of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul." Of the various Protestant denominations, several had associated themselves, for the purposes of consultation, under the designation of the Evangelical Alliance. Their last meeting was held in New York, in the autumn of 1873. Though, in this meeting, were gathered together many pious representatives of the Reformed Churches, European and American, it had not the prestige nor the authority of the Great Council that had just previously closed its sessions in St. Peters, at Rome. It could not appeal to an unbroken ancestry of far more than a thousand years; it could not speak with the authority of an equal and, indeed, of a superior to emperors and kings. While profound intelligence and a statesmanlike, worldly wisdom gleamed in every thing that the Vatican Council had done, the Evangelical Alliance met without a clear and precise view of its objects, without any definitely-marked intentions. Its wish was to draw into closer union the various Protestant Churches, but it had no well-grounded hope of accomplishing that desirable result. It illustrated the necessary working, of the principle on which those Churches originated. They were founded on dissent and exist by separation. Yet in the action of the Evangelical Alliance may be discerned certain very impressive facts. It averted its eyes from its ancient antagonist--that antagonist which had so recently loaded the Reformation with contumely and denunciation--it fastened them, as the Vatican Council had done, on Science. Under that dreaded name there stood before it what seemed to be a spectre of uncertain form, of hourly-dilating proportions, of threatening aspect. Sometimes the Alliance addressed this stupendous apparition in words of courtesy, sometimes in tones of denunciation. THE VATICAN CONSTITUTION CRITICISED. The Alliance failed to perceive that modern Science is the legitimate sister--indeed, it is the twin-sister--of the Reformation. They were begotten together and were born together. It failed to perceive that, though there is an impossibility of bringing into coalition the many conflicting sects, they may all find in science a point of connection; and that, not a distrustful attitude toward it, but a cordial union with it, is their true policy. It remains now to offer some reflections on this "Constitution of the Catholic Faith," as defined by the Vatican Council. For objects to present themselves under identical relations to different persons, they must be seen from the same point of view. In the instance we are now considering, the religious man has his own especial station; the scientific man another, a very different one. It is not for either to demand that his co-observer shall admit that the panorama of facts spread before them is actually such as it appears to him to be. The Dogmatic Constitution insists on the admission of this postulate, that the Roman Church acts under a divine commission, specially and exclusively delivered to it. In virtue of that great authority, it requires of all men the surrender of their intellectual convictions, and of all nations the subordination of their civil power. But a claim so imposing must be substantiated by the most decisive and unimpeachable credentials; proofs, not only of an implied and indirect kind, but clear, emphatic, and to the point; proofs that it would be impossible to call in question. The Church, however, declares, that she will not submit her claim to the arbitrament of human reason; she demands that it shall be at once conceded as an article of faith. If this be admitted, all bar requirements must necessarily be assented to, no matter how exorbitant they may be. With strange inconsistency the Dogmatic Constitution deprecates reason, affirming that it cannot determine the points under consideration, and yet submits to it arguments for adjudication. In truth, it might be said that the whole composition is a passionate plea to Reason to stultify itself in favor of Roman Christianity. With points of view so widely asunder, it is impossible that Religion and Science should accord in their representation of things. Nor can any conclusion in common be reached, except by an appeal to Reason as a supreme and final judge. There are many religions in the world, some of them of more venerable antiquity, some having far more numerous adherents, than the Roman. How can a selection be made among them, except by such an appeal to Reason? Religion and Science must both submit their claims and their dissensions to its arbitrament. Against this the Vatican Council protests. It exalts faith to a superiority over reason; it says that they constitute two separate orders of knowledge, having respectively for their objects mysteries and facts. Faith deals with mysteries, reason with facts. Asserting the dominating superiority of faith, it tries to satisfy the reluctant mind with miracles and prophecies. On the other hand, Science turns away from the incomprehensible, and rests herself on the maxim of Wiclif: "God forceth not a man to believe that which he cannot understand." In the absence of an exhibition of satisfactory credentials on the part of her opponent, she considers whether there be in the history of the papacy, and in the biography of the popes, any thing that can adequately sustain a divine commission, any thing that can justify pontifical infallibility, or extort that unhesitating obedience which is due to the vice-God. One of the most striking and yet contradictory features of the Dogmatic Constitution is, the reluctant homage it pays to the intelligence of man. It presents a definition of the philosophical basis of Catholicism, but it veils from view the repulsive features of the vulgar faith. It sets forth the attributes of God, the Creator of all things, in words fitly designating its sublime conception, but it abstains from affirming that this most awful and eternal Being was born of an earthly mother, the wife of a Jewish carpenter, who has since become the queen of heaven. The God it depicts is not the God of the middle ages, seated on his golden throne, surrounded by choirs of angels, but the God of Philosophy. The Constitution has nothing to say about the Trinity, nothing of the worship due to the Virgin--on the contrary, that is by implication sternly condemned; nothing about transubstantiation, or the making of the flesh and blood of God by the priest; nothing of the invocation of the saints. It bears on its face subordination to the thought of the age, the impress of the intellectual progress of man. THE PASSAGE OF EUROPE TO LLAMAISM. Such being the exposition rendered to us respecting the attributes of God, it next instructs us as to his mode of government of the world. The Church asserts that she possesses a supernatural control over all material and moral events. The priesthood, in its various grades, can determine issues of the future, either by the exercise of its inherent attributes, or by its influential invocation of the celestial powers. To the sovereign pontiff it has been given to bind or loose at his pleasure. It is unlawful to appeal from his judgments to an Oecumenical Council, as if to an earthly arbiter superior to him. Powers such as these are consistent with arbitrary rule, but they are inconsistent with the government of the world by immutable law. Hence the Dogmatic Constitution plants itself firmly in behalf of incessant providential interventions; it will not for a moment admit that in natural things there is an irresistible sequence of events, or in the affairs of men an unavoidable course of acts. But has not the order of civilization in all parts of the world been the same? Does not the growth of society resemble individual growth? Do not both exhibit to us phases of youth, of maturity, of decrepitude? To a person who has carefully considered the progressive civilization of groups of men in regions of the earth far apart, who has observed the identical forms under which that advancing civilization has manifested itself, is it not clear that the procedure is determined by law? The religious ideas of the Incas of Peru and the emperors of Mexico, and the ceremonials of their court-life, were the same as those in Europe--the same as those in Asia. The current of thought had been the same. A swarm of bees carried to some distant land will build its combs and regulate its social institutions as other unknown swarms would do, and so with separated and disconnected swarms of men. So invariable is this sequence of thought and act, that there are philosophers who, transferring the past example offered by Asiatic history to the case of Europe, would not hesitate to sustain the proposition--given a bishop of Rome and some centuries, and you will have an infallible pope: given an infallible pope and a little more time, and you will have Llamaism--Llamaism to which Asia has long, ago attained. As to the origin of corporeal and spiritual things, the Dogmatic Constitution adds a solemn emphasis to its declarations, by anathematizing all those who hold the doctrine of emanation, or who believe that visible Nature is only a manifestation of the Divine Essence. In this its authors had a task of no ordinary difficulty before them. They must encounter those formidable ideas, whether old or new, which in our times are so strongly forcing themselves on thoughtful men. The doctrine of the conservation and correlation of Force yields as its logical issue the time-worn Oriental emanation theory; the doctrines of Evolution and Development strike at that of successive creative acts. The former rests on the fundamental principle that the quantity of force in the universe is invariable. Though that quantity can neither be increased nor diminished, the forms under which Force expresses itself may be transmuted into each other. As yet this doctrine has not received complete scientific demonstration, but so numerous and so cogent are the arguments adduced in its behalf, that it stands in an imposing, almost in an authoritative attitude. Now, the Asiatic theory of emanation and absorption is seen to be in harmony with this grand idea. It does not hold that, at the conception of a human being, a soul is created by God out of nothing and given to it, but that a portion of the already existing, the divine, the universal intelligence, is imparted, and, when life is over, this returns to and is absorbed in the general source from which it originally came. The authors of the Constitution forbid these ideas to be held, under pain of eternal punishment. In like manner they dispose of the doctrines of Evolution and Development, bluntly insisting that the Church believes in distinct creative acts. The doctrine that every living form is derived from some preceding form is scientifically in a much more advanced position than that concerning Force, and probably may be considered as established, whatever may become of the additions with which it has recently been overlaid. In her condemnation of the Reformation, the Church carries into effect her ideas of the subordination of reason to faith. In her eyes the Reformation is an impious heresy, leading to the abyss of pantheism, materialism, and atheism, and tending to overthrow the very foundations of human society. She therefore would restrain those "restless spirits" who, following Luther, have upheld the "right of every man to interpret the Scriptures for himself." She asserts that it is a wicked error to admit Protestants to equal political privileges with Catholics, and that to coerce them and suppress them is a sacred duty; that it is abominable to permit them to establish educational institutions. Gregory XVI. denounced freedom of conscience as an insane folly, and the freedom of the press a pestilent error, which cannot be sufficiently detested. But how is it possible to recognize an inspired and infallible oracle on the Tiber, when it is remembered that again and again successive popes have contradicted each other; that popes have denounced councils, and councils have denounced popes; that the Bible of Sixtus V. had so many admitted errors--nearly two thousand--that its own authors had to recall it? How is it possible for the children of the Church to regard as "delusive errors" the globular form of the earth, her position as a planet in the solar system, her rotation on her axis, her movement round the sun? How can they deny that there are antipodes, and other worlds than ours? How can they believe that the world was made out of nothing, completed in a week, finished just as we see it now; that it has undergone no change, but that its parts have worked so indifferently as to require incessant interventions? THE ERRORS OF ECCLESIASTICISM. When Science is thus commanded to surrender her intellectual convictions, may she not ask the ecclesiastic to remember the past? The contest respecting the figure of the earth, and the location of heaven and hell, ended adversely to him. He affirmed that the earth is an extended plane, and that the sky is a firmament, the floor of heaven, through which again and again persons have been seen to ascend. The globular form demonstrated beyond any possibility of contradiction by astronomical facts, and by the voyage of Magellan's ship, he then maintained that it is the central body of the universe, all others being in subordination to it, and it the grand object of God's regard. Forced from this position, he next affirmed that it is motionless, the sun and the stars actually revolving, as they apparently do, around it. The invention of the telescope proved that here again he was in error. Then he maintained that all the motions of the solar system are regulated by providential intervention; the "Principia" of Newton demonstrated that they are due to irresistible law. He then affirmed that the earth and all the celestial bodies were created about six thousand years ago, and that in six days the order of Nature was settled, and plants and animals in their various tribes introduced. Constrained by the accumulating mass of adverse evidence, he enlarged his days into periods of indefinite length--only, however, to find that even this device was inadequate. The six ages, with their six special creations, could no longer be maintained, when it was discovered that species, slowly emerged in one age, reached a culmination in a second, and gradually died out in a third: this overlapping from age to age would not only have demanded creations, but re-creations also. He affirmed that there had been a deluge, which covered the whole earth above the tops of the highest mountains, and that the waters of this flood were removed by a wind. Correct ideas respecting the dimensions of the atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the operation of evaporation, proved how untenable these statements are. Of the progenitors of the human race, he declared that they had come from their Maker's hand perfect, both in body and mind, and had subsequently experienced a fall. He is now considering how best to dispose of the evidence continually accumulating respecting the savage condition of prehistoric man. Is it at all surprising that the number of those who hold the opinions of the Church in light esteem should so rapidly increase? How can that be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible? How can that give confidence in the moral, the spiritual, which has so signally failed in the physical? It is not possible to dispose of these conflicting facts as "empty shadows," "vain devices," "fictions coming from knowledge falsely so called," "errors wearing the deceitful appearance of truth," as the Church stigmatizes them. On the contrary, they are stern witnesses, bearing emphatic and unimpeachable testimony against the ecclesiastical claim to infallibility, and fastening a conviction of ignorance and blindness upon her. Convicted of so many errors, the papacy makes no attempt at explanation. It ignores the whole matter Nay, more, relying on the efficacy of audacity, though confronted by these facts, it lays claim to infallibility. SEPARATION OF CATHOLICISM AND CIVILIZATION. But, to the pontiff, no other rights can be conceded than those he can establish at the bar of Reason. He cannot claim infallibility in religious affairs, and decline it in scientific. Infallibility embraces all things. It implies omniscience. If it holds good for theology, it necessarily holds good for science. How is it possible to coordinate the infallibility of the papacy with the well-known errors into which it has fallen? Does it not, then, become needful to reject the claim of the papacy to the employment of coercion in the maintenance of its opinions; to repudiate utterly the declaration that "the Inquisition is an urgent necessity in view of the unbelief of the present age," and in the name of human nature to protest loudly against the ferocity and terrorism of that institution? Has not conscience inalienable rights? An impassable and hourly-widening gulf intervenes between Catholicism and the spirit of the age. Catholicism insists that blind faith is superior to reason; that mysteries are of more importance than facts. She claims to be the sole interpreter of Nature and revelation, the supreme arbiter of knowledge; she summarily rejects all modern criticism of the Scriptures, and orders the Bible to be accepted in accordance with the views of the theologians of Trent; she openly avows her hatred of free institutions and constitutional systems, and declares that those are in damnable error who regard the reconciliation of the pope with modern civilization as either possible or desirable. SCIENCE AND PROTESTANTISM. But the spirit of the age demands--is the human intellect to be subordinated to the Tridentine Fathers, or to the fancy of illiterate and uncritical persons who wrote in the earlier ages of the Church? It sees no merit in blind faith, but rather distrusts it. It looks forward to an improvement in the popular canon of credibility for a decision between fact and fiction. It does not consider itself bound to believe fables and falsehoods that have been invented for ecclesiastical ends. It finds no argument in behalf of their truth, that traditions and legends have been long-lived; in this respect, those of the Church are greatly inferior to the fables of paganism. The longevity of the Church itself is not due to divine protection or intervention, but to the skill with which it has adapted its policy to existing circumstances. If antiquity be the criterion of authenticity, the claims of Buddhism must be respected; it has the superior warrant of many centuries. There can be no defense of those deliberate falsifications of history, that concealment of historical facts, of which the Church has so often taken advantage. In these things the end does not justify the means. Then has it in truth come to this, that Roman Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being absolutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice--it cannot have both. SCIENCE AND FAITH. While such is, perhaps, the issue as regards Catholicism, a reconciliation of the Reformation with Science is not only possible, but would easily take place, if the Protestant Churches would only live up to the maxim taught by Luther, and established by so many years of war. That maxim is, the right of private interpretation of the Scriptures. It was the foundation of intellectual liberty. But, if a personal interpretation of the book of Revelation is permissible, how can it be denied in the case of the book of Nature? In the misunderstandings that have taken place, we must ever bear in mind the infirmities of men. The generations that immediately followed the Reformation may perhaps be excused for not comprehending the full significance of their cardinal principle, and for not on all occasions carrying it into effect. When Calvin caused Servetus, to be burnt, he was animated, not by the principles of the Reformation, but by those of Catholicism, from which he had not been able to emancipate himself completely. And when the clergy of influential Protestant confessions have stigmatized the investigators of Nature as infidels and atheists, the same may be said. For Catholicism to reconcile itself to Science, there are formidable, perhaps insuperable obstacles in the way. For Protestantism to achieve that great result there are not. In the one case there is a bitter, a mortal animosity to be overcome; in the other, a friendship, that misunderstandings have alienated, to be restored. CIVILIZATION AND RELIGION. But, whatever may be the preparatory incidents of that great impending intellectual crisis which Christendom must soon inevitably witness, of this we may rest assured, that the silent secession from the public faith, which in so ominous a manner characterizes the present generation, will find at length political expression. It is not without significance that France reenforces the ultramontane tendencies of her lower population, by the promotion of pilgrimages, the perpetration of miracles, the exhibition of celestial apparitions. Constrained to do this by her destiny, she does it with a blush. It is not without significance that Germany resolves to rid herself of the incubus of a dual government, by the exclusion of the Italian element, and to carry to its completion that Reformation which three centuries ago she left unfinished. The time approaches when men must take their choice between quiescent, immobile faith and ever-advancing Science--faith, with its mediaeval consolations, Science, which is incessantly scattering its material blessings in the pathway of life, elevating the lot of man in this world, and unifying the human race. Its triumphs are solid and enduring. But the glory which Catholicism might gain from a conflict with material ideas is at the best only like that of other celestial meteors when they touch the atmosphere of the earth--transitory and useless. Though Guizot's affirmation that the Church has always sided with despotism is only too true, it must be remembered that in the policy she follows there is much of political necessity. She is urged on by the pressure of nineteen centuries. But, if the irresistible indicates itself in her action, the inevitable manifests itself in her life. For it is with the papacy as with a man. It has passed through the struggles of infancy, it has displayed the energies of maturity, and, its work completed, it must sink into the feebleness and querulousness of old age. Its youth can never be renewed. The influence of its souvenirs alone will remain. As pagan Rome threw her departing shadow over the empire and tinctured all its thoughts, so Christian Rome casts her parting shadow over Europe. INADMISSIBLE CLAIMS OF CATHOLICISM. Will modern civilization consent to abandon the career of advancement which has given it so much power and happiness? Will it consent to retrace its steps to the semi-barbarian ignorance and superstition of the middle ages? Will it submit to the dictation of a power, which, claiming divine authority, can present no adequate credentials of its office; a power which kept Europe in a stagnant condition for many centuries, ferociously suppressing by the stake and the sword every attempt at progress; a power that is founded in a cloud of mysteries; that sets itself above reason and common-sense; that loudly proclaims the hatred it entertains against liberty of thought and freedom in civil institutions; that professes its intention of repressing the one and destroying the other whenever it can find the opportunity; that denounces as most pernicious and insane the opinion that liberty of conscience and of worship is the right of every man; that protests against that right being proclaimed and asserted by law in every well-governed state; that contemptuously repudiates the principle that the will of the people, manifested by public opinion (as it is called) or by other means, shall constitute law; that refuses to every man any title to opinion in matters of religion, but holds that it is simply his duty to believe what he is told by the Church, and to obey her commands; that will not permit any temporal government to define the rights and prescribe limits to the authority of the Church; that declares it not only may but will resort to force to discipline disobedient individuals; that invades the sanctify of private life, by making, at the confessional, the wife and daughters and servants of one suspected, spies and informers against him; that tries him without an accuser, and by torture makes him bear witness against himself; that denies the right of parents to educate their children outside of its own Church, and insists that to it alone belongs the supervision of domestic life and the control of marriages and divorces; that denounces "the impudence" of those who presume to subordinate the authority of the Church to the civil authority, or who advocate the separation of the Church from the state; that absolutely repudiates all toleration, and affirms that the Catholic religion is entitled to be held as the only religion in every country, to the exclusion of all other modes of worship; that requires all laws standing in the way of its interests to be repealed, and, if that be refused, orders all its followers to disobey them? ISSUE OF THE CONFLICT. This power, conscious that it can work no miracle to serve itself, does not hesitate to disturb society by its intrigues against governments, and seeks to accomplish its ends by alliances with despotism. Claims such as these mean a revolt against modern civilization, an intention of destroying it, no matter at what social cost. To submit to them without resistance, men must be slaves indeed! As to the issue of the coming conflict, can any one doubt? Whatever is resting on fiction and fraud will be overthrown. Institutions that organize impostures and spread delusions must show what right they have to exist. Faith must render an account of herself to Reason. Mysteries must give place to facts. Religion must relinquish that imperious, that domineering position which she has so long maintained against Science. There must be absolute freedom for thought. The ecclesiastic must learn to keep himself within the domain he has chosen, and cease to tyrannize over the philosopher, who, conscious of his own strength and the purity of his motives, will bear such interference no longer. What was written by Esdras near the willow-fringed rivers of Babylon, more than twenty-three centuries ago, still holds good: "As for Truth it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth for evermore." 
30126	----	Transcriber's note: Text enclosed between underscores was in italics in the original (_italics_). Text enclosed between equal sings was in bold face in the original (=bold=). A list of changes made to the text is at the end of the e-book. THE CHURCH THE SCHOOLS and EVOLUTION by J. E. CONANT, D.D. Bible Teacher and Evangelist Author of _Why the Pastor Failed_, _Is it Scholarly to Be Orthodox?_ _Is Atonement by Substitution Reasonable?_ _Divine Dynamite_, etc. Chicago The Bible Institute Colportage Ass'n 826 North La Salle Street Copyright, 1922 by J. E. Conant FOREWORD The following pages have grown out of a paper, following the same outline more briefly, which was read before the Pastors' Conference of the San Juaquin Valley Baptist Association, the largest association in the Northern California Baptist Convention. At the close of the reading a request for its publication was enthusiastically and unanimously voted. The author has since divided the paper into two chapters; in the first chapter has added to and classified the quotations concerning evolution, has enlarged the remarks on the influence of evolution on Scripture doctrine, and has both enlarged upon and entirely rearranged the matter of the second chapter, in an attempt to make it both more obvious and more conclusive to the reader than it was felt to be to the hearers. The term "Church" in the following pages is intended to cover that fellowship, of every name, which includes all who have been really born again. When organized church fellowship is referred to, the whole evangelical Protestant fellowship in general is meant, as distinguished from Roman Catholic, Greek church, or any other non-evangelical faith, although true Christians are to be found within every fellowship. The term "Schools," in its larger meaning, includes all institutions of learning maintained at private, denominational, or public expense; more specifically, those dominated by the present evolutionary philosophy are meant. With notable exceptions in a few schools that refuse to be so dominated, the whole educational system in general, especially in the Northern States, has practically capitulated to the evolutionists, and the schools that have so surrendered are particularly in mind in the following discussion. It is but a humble effort to point out what is obviously the only possible solution for the present distressing and destructive controversy between the Church and the Schools, but the author fondly hopes that it will prove to be a real, even though small, contribution toward the ending of that controversy. It is sent out with the prayer that He who is Truth incarnate may lead those in both the Church and the Schools who really want to know the truth at all cost to a common attitude toward Himself, to a common, because truly scientific, method of investigating truth in both the natural and the spiritual realms, and therefore to a common goal which will unite them against all those forces that seek to capture both the Church and the Schools for the enemy. J. E. Conant. CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY--THE CAUSE Page I. =The Theory of Evolution is Unproven= 11 1. The Testimony =for= Evolution 12 2. The Testimony =Against= Evolution a. In the Biological Realm; (i) The Doctrine of Natural Selection; (ii) The Doctrine of Acquired Characters; (iii) The Biogenetic "Law" 14 b. In the Geological Realm 19 c. The Whole Theory in General 20 II. =The Logic of Evolution is Destructive= 23 1. Evolution and =Inspiration= 23 2. Evolution and the =Fall of Man= 26 3. Evolution and the =Nature of Sin= 29 4. Evolution and the =Nature of Christ= 32 5. Evolution and the =Atonement= 34 6. Evolution and the =New Birth= 35 7. Evolution and the =Holiness of God= 40 CHAPTER II THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY--THE CURE I. =Truth Must be Classified Scientifically= 46 1. The =Realms of Truth= Must be Classified 46 2. The =Faculties of Investigation= Must be Distinguished 47 3. The =Different Kinds of Truth= Must be Separated 52 4. The =Primacy of Primary Truth= Must be Maintained 52 II. =Truth Must be Investigated Scientifically= 55 1. =Faith= Must be Given Precedence Over =Reason= 55 a. The Method of the Rationalist 56 b. The Method of the Believer 61 2. The =Spiritual Realm= Must be Given Primacy Over the =Natural= 68 a. By Surrendering the Heart to God 70 b. By Interpreting Natural Truth in the Light of the Bible 76 The Church, the Schools and Evolution CHAPTER I The Present Controversy--the Cause It must be so self-evident as to be axiomatic that there are two distinct realms in God's universe. One is the realm that contains the Creator, and the other that which contains His creation. Of course, if we are pantheists, we will not admit that classification; but those who believe and accept the Word of God are not pantheists. It is inevitable, therefore, that the facts, the verities, the truths of the universe should be classified according to their realms; those having to do with the Person and relationships of the Creator being separable into one realm, and those having to do with His creation into another. That this classification is universally recognized, is a matter of common knowledge. That class of truth which has to do with God we call supernatural, or spiritual, truth, and that which relates to His creation we call natural, or scientific, truth. It is precisely because of this classification that there are two separate institutions in the world, each of which is working in one of these realms. The =Church= accepts it as her function to receive and propagate spiritual truth, as God has revealed Himself in His character; while the =Schools= accept it as their function to study and teach scientific truth, as God has revealed Himself in His works. This is the entire logic of the existence in the world of these two separate institutions, both of which are engaged in the investigation and propagation of truth. But although the Church and the Schools are entirely separate institutions, and although they are engaged, one in the spread of spiritual truth and the other in the diffusion of scientific truth, yet =truth is an eternal unity=. This must be so, in the nature of things, for all truth proceeds from and reveals the one and only God Who is its Source and of Whom it is the consistent and perfect expression. Conflict between these two realms of truth is, therefore, eternally impossible. Men talk of a conflict between science and the Bible, but no such conflict exists. If there is any contradiction, it is not between the statements of Scripture and the facts of science, but between the false interpretations of Scripture and the immature conclusions of science. Herbert Spencer was right when he said: It is incredible that there should be two orders of truth in absolute and everlasting opposition. Not until God begins to contradict Himself will these two realms of truth ever be in conflict with each other. The Church and the Schools, then, can never be in conflict until some abnormal condition creeps into the one or the other; for, although working in different realms of truth, each is yet receiving revelations of the one God who can never be in conflict with Himself. When these two institutions are in normal condition, each will not only not destroy the work of the other, but each will make every possible contribution to the success of the other, and antagonism between them will be impossible. When conflict occurs, therefore, it is because the teachers in one realm or in both have not arrived at the truth in their respective realms. And so when the Church denies the =facts=--not the unproven theories, notice, but the clearly demonstrated =facts=--of science, something is wrong with the Church. And when the Schools put forth =theories= that undermine the very foundations of the Church and her work, there is something wrong with the Schools. Now it is no secret that the Church and the Schools, broadly speaking, are in serious conflict with each other today. Where lies the cause? If the Church is denying and fighting the demonstrated =facts= of science, then the Church is clearly at fault and ought to get right at once. But this is not so, for the conflict is altogether over unproven theories, and has nothing to do with demonstrated scientific facts. And so this takes us at once and completely out of the realm of science and lands us in that of speculative philosophy--a fact that shows how unreasonable and even foolish the conflict is. For the thing that has set the Church and the Schools into battle array against each other is that speculative guess concerning origins called the =Theory of Evolution=. This lies at the heart of the opposition that each of these great institutions feels toward the other. It is true that a certain amount of the trouble arises from misunderstanding, because the term "evolution" is used in so many loose, illogical, and unscientific ways; but back of all misuse of the term there is a fundamental cause on which this antagonism rests, and that cause is found in the nature of the theory and its effects on those who consistently believe it. The technical meaning of the term may be said to be a structural change in the direction of development into higher forms of existence, brought about by internal force without external aid. There is also a scientific classification of the subject, into sub-organic, organic, and super-organic evolution. Sub-organic evolution applies to the development of non-living matter; organic, to the development of vegetable and animal life; and super-organic, to the development of intellectual, moral, and spiritual life. But while the subject is thus classified for convenience, it is all one doctrine, and is meant to describe one process of development from the non-living realm to the spiritual. There is also one theory which is called causal, and another which is called modal, evolution. According to the former, evolution is the first cause of all life, which, of course, excludes God as the First Cause; and according to the latter, evolution is the mode, or method, used by God in creation. Now, the Church has vital reasons for fighting this philosophical guess. One reason is, that it is entirely unsupported by =facts=, and is therefore altogether unproven. But if this were the only reason, the Church could be convicted of the supreme folly of her entire history, for turning aside to fight an unproven guess. A more vital reason is that the theory does not stop with the natural realm, but goes right on up into the realm of spiritual truth, and assumes to pronounce on the most vital spiritual realities in such a way that the logic of the theory, if consistently accepted, utterly destroys both the foundations of the Church and the content of the Gospel. Indeed, evolution has been proclaimed to the world as the ally of a philosophy which boasts of its capacity to drive Christianity out of existence. For the Church, therefore, to fail to fight a theory that strikes at her very vitals would be to become a traitor to the Lord who bought her and sent her into the world to preach His gospel. And so she is compelled to choose between submitting to an unproven and destructive theory, which has never saved =any= one who has believed it, and preaching the gospel of God's grace, which has infallibly saved =every= one who has believed it. The true Church is fighting the theory of evolution in order that the message she is commissioned to preach may not be rendered of no effect by a non-belligerent attitude toward it being mistaken for approval of it. Not only the fact that the theory is entirely unproven, but also and more particularly the nature of its influence on faith in the Bible compels the Church to reckon with it. We will go into these two reasons for antagonizing this speculative guess. I. =The Theory of Evolution is Unproven.= The reason we reflect on this for a few moments lies in what has already been said. If evolution is a fact, then for the Church to refuse it and fight against it would be to fight against God, which ought to bring her to swift judgment for her mad folly. But if it is only an unproven theory, then she is justified if she has good reasons for fighting its propagation. We will therefore note what the scientists themselves have to say regarding the theory. 1. Testimony =for= Evolution. There are teachers of science who do not hesitate to assure us that the doctrine of evolution is now no longer a theory but an assured fact. A few representative quotations from that class will suffice. Dr. P. C. Mitchell says, in a late edition of the "Encyclopedia Britannica": The vast bulk of botanical and biological work on living and extinct forms published during the last quarter of the nineteenth century increased almost beyond all expectation the evidence for the =fact= of evolution. Prof. S. C. Schmucker, of the West Chester, Pennsylvania, State Normal School, in his book, "The Meaning of Evolution," says: Among students of animals and plants there is no longer any question as to the =truth= of evolution. That the animals of the present are the altered animals of the past, that the plants of today are the modified plants of yesterday, that civilized man of today is the savage of yesterday and the tree dweller of the day before, is no longer debatable to the mass of biologists. Professor Fish, then of Denison University, Granville, Ohio, not long ago dictated to his class, of which the writer's daughter was a member, the following statement: Organic evolution is the key to all biological thinking of today. It is not a =theory= but a =fact=, because the main facts are true. Man is the off-spring of the lower animals, and the ancestry can be traced back to the simplest forms of animals known. All medical research takes that fact into account. Prof. S. W. Williston, department of paleontology, University of Chicago, says: I know of no biologist, whether of high or low degree, master or tyro, who ventures to suggest a doubt as to the fundamental truths of organic evolution. Prof. William Patten, department of biology and zoology, Dartmouth College, says: Evolution is the accepted doctrine of the natural sciences to the extent that it has long ceased to be a subject of debate in standard scientific journals or in organized conferences of men of science. Prof. Charles B. Davenport, department of experimental evolution, Carnegie Institute, Washington, D. C., says: I do not know of a single modern scientific man who does not believe in evolution. And Prof. Frank R. Lillie, department of embryology, University of Chicago, says: I feel pretty impatient over the statements of certain religious teachers that evolution has collapsed. These statements are sufficiently representative to indicate the attitude toward the theory of evolution of a great section of the scientific world today, including many science teachers in schools founded and endowed by the Church for the giving of Christian education. But it is not true that the theory is universally accepted or even scientifically proved to be a fact. Let a few scientists of at least equal eminence with those quoted above bear their testimony. 2. Testimony =Against= Evolution. But before we quote this testimony it may be well to pause a moment for a little information that may make it more intelligible to us. The so-called proofs of evolution are derived from both the biological and the geological realms of natural science. =a.= We will consider, first, the so-called proofs taken from the =biological= realm. Darwin's theory was arrived at from data taken from the biological realm, and consists of two doctrines. One is the doctrine of =natural selection=, which was his own personal contribution to the discussion, and the other is that of =the inheritance of acquired characters=, which he borrowed from Lamarck. The former is the doctrine meant when pure Darwinism is referred to. (i). The Doctrine of Natural Selection. Darwin himself said: We cannot prove that a single species has changed, and, also, Many of the objections to the hypothesis of evolution are so serious I can hardly reflect on them without being staggered. Dr. N. S. Shaler, department of geology, Harvard, says: It begins to be evident that the Darwinian hypothesis is still essentially unverified.... It is not yet proven that a single species of the two or three million now inhabiting the earth had been established solely or mainly by the operation of natural selection. Professor Fleischmann, of Erlangen, has said: The Darwinian theory of descent has in the realms of nature not a single fact to confirm it. It is not the result of scientific research, but purely the product of the imagination. And John Burroughs, although an evolutionist up to his recent death, said of Darwin, in the August, 1920, "Atlantic Monthly": He has already been as completely shorn of his selection doctrines as Samson was shorn of his locks. If these statements from scientific men mean anything at all, they mean, at least, that pure Darwinism is altogether unproven, if not that it is dead. (ii). The Doctrine of Acquired Characters. Spencer made this doctrine the fundamental one in his evolutionary philosophy. Its importance was so vital to him that he said: Close contemplation of the facts impresses me more strongly than ever with the two alternatives--either there has been inheritance of acquired characters, or there has been no evolution. It is of great interest, therefore, to note what competent scientists have said about this doctrine. Dr. Thomas Hunt Morgan, department of science, Columbia University, says: Today the theory has few followers among trained investigators, but it still has a popular vogue that is wide-spread and vociferous. Alfred Russell Wallace, in his "Autobiography," said: All the available evidence is opposed to the doctrine of acquired characters. Prof. William Bateson, in his 1914 Presidential Address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, said: We have done with the notion that Darwin came latterly to favor, that large differences can arise by the accumulation of small differences. He also remarks that the new knowledge of heredity shows that whatever evolution there is occurs by loss of factors and not by gain, and that in this way the progress of science is destroying much that till lately passed for gospel. And commenting on these remarks of Bateson, Prof. S. C. Holmes, of the University of California, says they are an illustration of the bankruptcy of the present evolutionary theory. Then Prof. George McCready Price, department of geology, Pacific Union College, Helena, California, has said very recently: It has long since been definitely settled that acquired characters are not transmitted in heredity. And in another place he exclaims: If cells did not maintain their ancestral character in a very remarkable way, what would be the use of grafting a good kind of fruit on to a stock of poorer quality? The very permanency of the graft thus produced is proof of the persistency with which the cells reproduce only "after their kind." Then in speaking of Mendel's discoveries in the realm of heredity, and which have now become scientifically demonstrated laws, he says that the whole foundation of biological evolution has been completely undermined by these new discoveries. And he sums up the conclusions to which present-day scientists are coming, in the words: The principles of heredity, as now understood, have brought us back to that great truth which is given in the first chapter of our Bible, that each form of plant or animal was designed by the Creator to reproduce only "after its kind." The one who accepts this testimony, therefore, is compelled to conclude that the doctrine of acquired characters is also dead. (iii). The Biogenetic "Law." In addition to the two forms of the theory above noted, Haeckel added emphasis to these so-called biological proofs by putting forth a doctrine that came to be called the biogenetic "law," even though it was nothing but a hypothesis. It was called the recapitulation theory, because it was imagined that the developing human embryo recapitulates or passes through successive stages of the more mature forms of some of the lower animals. Concerning this theory Dr. A. Weber, University of Geneva, Switzerland, said in the "Scientific American Monthly" for February, 1921: The critical comments of such men as O. Hertwig, Kiebel, and Vialleton, indeed, have practically torn to shreds the aforesaid fundamental biogenetic law. Its almost universal abandonment has left considerably at a loss those investigators who sought in the structures of organisms the key to their remote origins or to their relationships. So it would seem that if this form of the theory is utterly destitute of proof, the whole biological foundation of the theory is gone. It is perfectly in harmony with scientific testimony, therefore, that Professor Price says concerning this phase of the theory: The science of twenty or thirty years ago was in high glee at the thought of having almost proved the theory of biological evolution. Today, for every careful, candid inquirer, these hopes are crushed; and with weary, reluctant sadness does modern biology now confess that the Church has probably been right all the time. If these men have borne faithful testimony to the situation as it now exists in the biological realm, the only conclusion possible is that the borrowed portion of Darwin's theory has also utterly collapsed. It is passing strange, in view of these facts, that competent and scholarly men of science should still cling to a theory so utterly discredited by eminent scientists. Is it because they are determined to believe in evolution in spite of such evidence to the contrary, or is it because there is still left a foundation for the doctrine lying back of all this which has not yet been disturbed, even though "the biological clues have all run out," as Professor Price says they have? The supposed evidence of geology, with its theories of uniformity and successive ages, forms precisely such a foundation. =b.= We will consider, therefore, in the next place, the so-called proofs taken from the =geological= realm. Dr. T. H. Morgan, who was quoted above as against the theory of the inheritance of acquired characters, rests his faith in the theory of evolution on a geological foundation. He says: The direct evidence furnished by fossil remains is by all odds the strongest evidence we have in favor of organic evolution. Has present-day science anything to say about this? In spite of the collapse of the supposed biological proofs, are there any tangible and scientifically established proofs in the geological realm? Professor Price, who, as noted above, is a geologist, and therefore speaks according to first-hand knowledge, shows that fossil remains are deposited over many thousands of square miles in widely separated sections of the earth, not only in the opposite order from that required to prove the theory of evolution, but in a great variety of orders, demonstrating, as he says, that they cannot be arranged off into ages, but that they simply indicate different forms of life that existed side by side. He then exclaims: =How much of the earth's crust would we have to find= in this upside down order of the fossils, before we would be convinced that there must be something hopelessly wrong with the theory of Successive Ages which drives otherwise competent observers to throw away their common sense and cling desperately to a fantastic theory in the very teeth of such facts? Then he tells us that the theory of Successive Ages, with the forms of life appearing on earth in a precise and invariable order, is dead for all coming time for every man who has had a chance to examine the evidence and has enough training in logic and scientific methods to know when a thing is really proved. And he concludes that the work of strict inductive science has destroyed this "fantastic scheme" forever, and thus =leaves the way open= to say that life must have originated by just such a literal creation as is recorded in the first chapters of the Bible. If these statements have any meaning at all, they can mean only that the geological foundation for the theory of evolution has also collapsed. =c.= It remains for us to listen to the testimony of a few more men of science concerning the =whole theory= of evolution in general. Professor Virchow, the greatest German authority on physiology, and once a strong advocate of the theory, has said: It is all nonsense. It cannot be proved by science that man descends from the ape or from any other animal. Since the announcement of the theory, all real scientific knowledge has proceeded in the opposite direction. Professor Tyndall, in an article in the "Fortnightly Review," said: There ought to be a clear distinction made between science in a state of hypothesis and science in a state of fact. And inasmuch as it is still in its hypothetical stage, the ban of exclusion ought to fall upon the theory of evolution. I agree with Virchow that the proofs of it are still wanting, that the failures have been lamentable, and that the doctrine has been utterly discredited. Prof. L. S. Beal, physiologist and professor of anatomy in King's College, London, says: The idea of any relation having been established between the non-living and the living by a gradual advance from lifeless matter to the lowest forms of life, and so onward to the higher and more complex, has not the slightest evidence from the facts of any section of living nature of which anything is known. Professor Zoeckler, of the University of Greifswald, says: The claim that the hypothesis of descent is scientifically secured must most decidedly be denied. DeCyon, the Russian scientist, says: Evolution is pure assumption. Prof. George McCready Price says: In almost every one of the separate sciences the arguments upon which the theory of evolution gained its popularity a generation or so ago are now known by the various specialists to have been blunders, or mistakes, or hasty conclusions of one kind or another. And Sir J. William Dawson says: "The evolution doctrine itself is one of the strangest phenomena of humanity." It is "a system destitute of any shadow of proof, and supported merely by vague analogies and figures of speech, and by the arbitrary and artificial coherence of its parts." And he concludes that it is "surpassingly strange" that such a theory should find adherents. To this list might be added such names as those of Professor Henslow, former President of the British Association; Prof. C. C. Everett, of Harvard; Dr. E. Dennert; Dr. Goette; Prof. Edward Hoppe, the "Hamburg Savant"; Professor Paulson, of Berlin; Professor Rutemeyer, of Basel; and Prof. Max Wundt, of Leipsic. After all this contrary testimony on the part of such unquestioned authorities, we are forced to conclude not only that the testimony for evolution is far from unanimous, but also that the theory is altogether unproven, and that it is therefore utterly unscientific to teach it as a fact, especially when those who do so furnish us with no direct evidence whatever. So long, therefore, as there is an unbridged gulf in the sub-organic realm between nothing and matter, in the organic realm between the non-living and the living, and in the super-organic realm between animals and man, the Church cannot be blamed for being scientific enough to refuse to accept such an unproven and discredited theory, at least until a few =facts= are forthcoming. Until then we must conclude that all the proofs the scientists can furnish rest altogether on inferences and assumptions. When evolutionists can produce =matter= from nothing or increase =energy= by any natural means known to man, or bring forth the =living= from the non-living, or bring into existence even one new and distinct =species=, then they will be in a position to compel the Church to listen to proofs; but until then the Church is forced to reject evolution. The most serious aspect of the controversy, however, lies in the second objection mentioned above. =II. The Logic of Evolution Is Destructive.= It is destructive of all the fundamental doctrines the Church was sent into the world to preach. 1. It destroys the doctrine of the =inspiration of the Bible=, by denying its inerrancy and infallible and final authority. Over and again in the early verses of Genesis we are told that God created the various species to reproduce =after their kind=. But evolution says that this is not true, for as a matter of fact, the various species have continuously evolved from one to another all the way to man. To a mind that is working normally, these two propositions are mutually exclusive. And so those who retain their intellectual integrity and consistency, and who therefore cannot accept two contradictory propositions at the same time, are compelled to =make a choice= between them. Huxley saw this when he said: The doctrine of evolution is directly antagonistic to that of creation. Evolution, if consistently accepted, makes it impossible to believe the Bible. When Professor Schmucker; therefore, speaks of the creation story as the poetical account of Genesis; when Dr. S. B. Meeser, of Crozer Theological Seminary, describes the Scriptures as the survivals of the fittest of those communion experiences which men, who have lived intensely in the moral interest, have had with God; when Dr. H. C. Vedder, of the same seminary, says the Scriptures "grew in ... accuracy" as they were written; when Dr. W. H. P. Faunce, President of Brown University, can say: Mr. Gladstone's last book is called "The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture." The very title shows a conception of the Bible at the farthest removed from the present Biblical scholarship, to which the Bible is a growth, not a rock; when Dr. Ernest D. Burton, of the University of Chicago, says: Some among us have been constrained to admit that the books [of the Bible] are not infallible in history or in matters of science, and not wholly consistent and therefore not ultimately and as a whole inerrant in the field of morals and religion; and when Dr. Shailer Mathews, of the same University, urges us to think the gospel in terms of evolution, and then shows us what that means to him when he says: For in the New Testament there are conceptions which the modern world under the dominance of science [at the heart of which lies the evolutionary philosophy] finds it impossible to understand, much less to believe; these men are simply demonstrating the fact that they still retain their intellectual integrity and consistency, and that they are therefore entirely unable to accept the doctrine of evolution and believe in an inerrant Bible at the same time. That is, the logic of the doctrine of evolution destroys for them the faith that, in its original manuscripts, the Bible as it came from God to man was "truth unmixed with error," with the resulting confidence that He who gave it has preserved it to us by His providence essentially as it was given. This means that these men and all who agree with them have rejected that Word which is forever settled in heaven, in order to accept a hypothesis which is never settled on earth; that they have given up the Book which has stood unchanged through the centuries against every conceivable form of assault, and taken in its place a set of scientific speculations that have either to be revised or discarded for new speculations every few years; that they have turned from an inspired, inerrant and authoritative revelation of God, and turned to an unproven theory which makes the Bible a human document, of supreme value, so they say, as unfolding the religious evolution of the race, but full of errors because of the human element in it. The result of this is the so-called "scientific" or "historical" method of interpreting the Bible, which means, to quote Dr. Meeser, that while the Scriptures have the wisdom of experts in religion, [yet] "authority" is scarcely the term to describe their value, and may, when applied to them, obscure their real character. "But why make all this ado about it," say the evolutionists; "it is all simply a question of interpretation." That is absolutely right. It is the interpretation of the evolutionists set in opposition to that of the Holy Spirit; and the true Church, compelled to make a choice, takes that of the Holy Spirit. 2. The logic of evolution destroys the doctrine of the =fall of man= and its result in total depravity. After an address somewhat along these lines in one of the largest normal schools in the world, the science professor said to the writer, "Yes, but you know there is evolution and =evolution=." That is indeed true. We are all aware of the fact that there are various kinds, shapes, and colors of evolution, from theistic to atheistic; but the fact still remains that =every= theory is =still evolution=, and that =any= theory of evolution whatsoever, if it means anything at all, means steady =progress= from lower to higher. Progress is certainly the one thought that is vital to any definition of evolution, and progress =downward= is excluded by the very meaning of the word, and so evolution under =any= theory can mean nothing but progress =upward=. But the Word of God says that man has gone =down= from a condition of purity and innocence into a condition of such sinful enmity against God, that he is not only not subject to the law of God, but is utterly incapable of bringing himself into subjection to it. And the experience of every Christian gives sorrowful but certain evidence to that fact. This condition the Bible describes as being =dead= in sin. And since death is not death at all until it is total, man, therefore, being dead, is totally dead--and this is total depravity. This means that the only progress possible to man in his natural state is =progress in corruption=. For total depravity, which is total spiritual death, does not mean that the last limit of corruption has been reached, but that while death is total, corruption may have just begun. The reality of the natural man's spiritual death is abundantly illustrated in human history. After man fell into sin, and died, he was given fullest opportunity to recover himself and to demonstrate thereby that he was still spiritually alive. But the corruption of spiritual death worked until man was so far down in the filth of his moral putrefaction that the only way God could save the race from extinction was to save the one family that had accepted spiritual life from Him, and blot the rest of the race out in the flood. Then, starting out again under more favorable circumstances than before, man went from bad to worse until, in one great universal brotherhood, he rose up and defied God at the Tower of Babel, and God had to smash the brotherhood into fragments by the confusion of languages. Time after time God tried man and found his progress downward always, no matter how favorable the circumstances that surrounded him, until finally he came to earth Himself in the Person of His Son. This brought both the reality and the completeness of man's spiritual death to a demonstration that can never be refuted, for at the cross man displayed, to its eternal uncovering, the awful corruption of that spiritual condition that could not tolerate in its presence incarnate purity and holiness, even though he had to become the murderer of God manifest in the flesh to get away from it. Even in his worship man's progress is steadily downward. Beginning with God, he progresses downward until he is worshipping birds, then beasts, and then creeping things. But evolution says that man is =coming up= from primitive conditions into fuller life. And so the evolutionist cannot tolerate such doctrines as these which the Word of God sets forth. To a consistent evolutionist, man is not spiritually dead, for that would make progress out of the question. And if progress upward is denied--if the only progress possible to the natural man is progress in corruption, then the whole doctrine of evolution is gone. This is why it becomes necessary for Canon E. W. Barnes, of Westminster Abbey, when he accepts evolution, to reject the Bible. He says: The inevitable acceptance of evolution means giving up belief in the fall and in all the theology built upon it by the theologians from St. Paul onward. Man was not made perfect and then marred; his evolution is still proceeding. So here again it is utterly impossible for the consistent evolutionist to accept the Bible doctrine of the fall of man. 3. The logic of evolution destroys the doctrine of =sin=. The Bible makes man's fall deliberate and wilful, and his continued attitude of sinful enmity against God, in spite of all God's offered power to change it into love, one of excuseless lawlessness and rebellion. This makes man entirely responsible for his sin and accountable to God for everything sin does in his life. And so the Bible says: Every one shall give account of himself to God. And those who go out of this life in the unconfessed and therefore unforgiven sin of rejecting God's mercy in Christ shall "go away into everlasting punishment," where there will be "weeping and gnashing of teeth." But to the evolutionary philosophy, sin cannot be "exceeding sinful," for it is either inherent in the process of evolution, or, at worst, but an unfortunate slip in the working out of that process, if, indeed, it is not even a mark of budding virtue. John Fiske says: Theology has much to say about original sin. This original sin is neither more nor less than the brute inheritance that every man carries with him. Rev. Dwight Bradley, a Cleveland, Ohio, pastor, says: There is no escape for intelligent people today from the acceptance of the law of evolution.... It follows that what we call evil [sin] is the remains of a lower form of life.... We are in the midst of the slow process of ridding ourselves of our animal inheritance. And Dr. Shailer Mathews follows the evolutionary philosophy to its logical and necessary end when he says: But for men who think of God as dynamically imminent in an infinite universe, who think of man's relation to Him as determined not by statutory but by cosmic law, who regard sin and righteousness alike as the working out of the fundamental forces of life itself, the conception of God as King and of man as condemned or acquitted subject is but a figure of speech. Such a doctrine as this absolutely and forever destroys man's responsibility for sin. For if sin is what Dr. Mathews suggests it is,--"the working out of the fundamental forces of life itself,"--then it is inherent in man's natural constitution as a process of his evolution. And if this is so, man is in no way responsible for his sin. This altogether removes man's accountability to God, for he cannot be brought to account for that which is the working out of the fundamental forces of life itself, and which is therefore inevitable in the very workings of his nature. And even if sin is an unfortunate slip in the process of evolution, man cannot be held accountable for an accident. This doctrine also puts a high premium on the whole beastly, selfish, lustful, murderous history of the race, for it makes sin a ladder up which man is climbing to his high destiny. Punishment for sin is therefore absolutely out of the question. For if man is not responsible for his sin, and if God punishes him for it, as the Bible says He will, even by the law of cause and effect, that would make God an infinite tyrant and an unspeakable fiend. And so if God is not a monster, and if evolution is true, there is no punishment for sin, and the Bible lies. Thinking men see that this is the inevitable logic of the doctrine of evolution. Sir J. William Dawson, speaking of the evolutionary doctrines as speculations, says: They seek to revolutionize the religious beliefs of the world, and if accepted would destroy much of the existing theology and philosophy.... With one class of minds they constitute a sort of religion.... With another and perhaps larger class, they are accepted as affording a welcome deliverance from all scruples of conscience and fears of a hereafter. The theory of evolution cannot be consistently held and the statements of the Bible concerning sin and its consequences be accepted at the same time. And so the evolutionist will come, sooner or later, to refuse any meaning to Scripture statements concerning sin, as did Dr. W. N. Clarke, when he said: We have no historical narrative of the beginning of sin, and theology receives from the Scriptures no record of that beginning. That is, the perfectly plain and easily understood statements of Scripture concerning the beginning of sin are altogether unhistorical and utterly unworthy of credence to the man who looks at the Bible from the "scientific" or "historical" standpoint, which is the evolutionist's method of handling the Word of God. To accept evolution, therefore, is to discredit the Bible. 4. The logic of evolution destroys the doctrines of the =Deity= and the =virgin birth= of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Bible makes Christ the Seed of the woman, not of the man, as all other human beings are; it makes His conception to have been that of the Holy Spirit; it declares His virgin birth in language that cannot be misunderstood; it makes Him the Son of God, not the son of Joseph. It also makes Him God tabernacling in the flesh; it makes Him the Second Person of the Triune =God=; it declares in so many words that He =is= God. But evolution cannot accept such a doctrine, and so the evolutionist juggles the Scripture statements of His Deity and denies His virgin birth, making Him a Jewish bastard, born out of wedlock, and stained forever with the shame of His mother's immorality. Dr. A. C. McGiffert says of Christ, that He is no more divine than we are, or than nature is. A magazine article on "The Cosmic Coming of the Christ" says: First the little scum on the warm, stagnant water, then the little colonies of cells, the organisms, the green moss and lichen, the beauty of vegetation, the movement of shell fish, sponges, jelly fish, worms, crabs, trilobites, centipedes, insects, fish, frogs, lizards, dinosaurs, reptile birds, birds, kangaroos, mastodons, deer, apes, primitive man, cave man, man of the stone age, of earliest history, Abraham's migration, the Exodus, the development of the Jewish religious life and the climax in that purest of maidens, Mary of Nazareth. The hour had come for the dawn of a new day, and the light of that new day was the birth of Jesus. The eternal purpose of the ages was now to be made clear, and the long, long aeons of creation explained. It is no wonder that after quoting these words the "Sunday School Times" exclaims: In other words, without moss we could not have had Mary; without an ape we could not have had Abraham; and--shocking blasphemy--without a centipede we could not have had Christ! Praise God, we may turn from this to the words of God; "For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will bring to naught." And so here once more the consistent evolutionist is compelled to reject the Bible by denying the doctrines of the Deity and the virgin birth of Christ. 5. The logic of evolution destroys the doctrine of =atonement by substitution=. The Bible says: Without the shedding of blood there is no remission [of sin]. Him who knew no sin He hath made to be sin for us. The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree. We "were redeemed ... with the precious blood of Christ." We are "justified by His blood." The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. These and many other statements make Christ's death one of atonement by substitution for our sins. But evolution cannot tolerate such a doctrine. To the evolutionist this is a "doctrine of the shambles," a "slaughter house religion," a "gospel of gore." Christ's death is rather a revelation of the evolutionist's conception of divine love, and an example of sacrificial service set before struggling man to help him climb. Let those who believe in the evolutionist's "historical" method of interpreting Scripture speak for themselves. Dr. Gerald Birney Smith, of the University of Chicago, says: To insist dogmatically, as an _à priori_ principle, that "without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin," is both foolish and futile in an age that has abandoned the conception of bloody sacrifice and which is loudly demanding the abolition of capital punishment. Dr. Walter Rauschenbusch said: What the death of Jesus now does for us, the death of the prophets did for him. Dr. H. C. Vedder says: Jesus never taught and never authorized anybody to teach in his name that he suffered in our stead and bore the penalty of our sins; and also: The "one crowning absurdity of theology" is "that the penalty of an evil deed can be vicariously borne by another while he goes scot free," which he describes in another place as taking an immunity bath in the "fountain filled with blood." And Dr. J. H. Coffin, of Earlham College, Earlham, Indiana, says: The sacrificial life of Jesus is the essential factor in His atonement. His principles and example are the way of the individual and society to God. Such statements make it perfectly evident that those who accept evolution utterly reject God's provision for salvation through the shed blood of Christ as an atonement by substitution for our sins. 6. The logic of evolution destroys the doctrine of =regeneration=. The Bible describes man as dead to God and running away from Him; as having a nature so full of corruption that "From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it, but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores"; and as having a character in the grip of such enmity against God that by nature he "loves darkness rather than light." This indicates that man is =past improvement= in his natural state, for no improvement is possible in the dead. The Bible therefore speaks, not of the improvement, but of the burial, of the old life, and of resurrection, by the power of a new nature, to newness of life. Hear what it says: We were buried with Christ by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. There is a large section of the Church that understand this passage to refer to immersion in water in confession of faith in Christ. Not that they believe that immersion has anything to do with saving us, for they do not, but that it is the divinely appointed symbol or picture of the salvation that has already become a reality in the life. To an immersionist, therefore, when a believer is buried with Christ in symbol in his baptism, and raised again in symbol of resurrection, he confesses, among other things, that by his first birth he is so completely dead that there is nothing left to do with him but to bury him, and his willingness to be buried in the grave of Christ has been met by God with the gift of the risen and incorruptible life which is in His Son, and by which he is now enabled to walk in newness of life. And so an immersionist cannot be a consistent evolutionist. For when an evolutionist is immersed, he is either perpetrating a meaningless travesty on immersion, or else he is denying the whole doctrine of evolution. For immersion certainly does not picture a step in the progress of the living, but rather the burial of the totally dead. Immersing churches that have gone over to the evolutionary position should therefore be consistent and nail up their baptistries. But another large portion of the Church believe that the above passage does not refer to immersion in water, but rather to the statement: For by one Spirit have we all been baptized into one body. They regard it as referring to the inward, spiritual union with Christ which takes place in the new birth, rather than to an outward act. For in the moment of regeneration, every believer is baptized by the Holy Spirit into the Body of Christ. But even so, the word "buried" still stands in the first passage above, and a burial has to do with the dead, not with the living. Being "buried," therefore, when the Holy Spirit baptizes us into Christ, it is "into death," not into an enlarging life, because we are so completely dead that the baptizing Spirit sets the "old man" forever aside as utterly unimprovable, in order that He may make us "partakers of the divine nature" by which we become a "new creation" in Christ. All this, however, is utterly intolerable to the consistent evolutionist. For if man is dead and therefore unimprovable, that makes progress upward impossible, and, if that is impossible, the whole doctrine of evolution is at an end. And so the evolutionist assumes the presence of life, and conceives the race to be progressing upward out of crude forms and unethical conceptions toward God. It is perfectly consistent, therefore, that he should seek to stir man's noble aspirations and should present high ideals for him to strive after. For it is not life man needs, they say, it is simply conversion to higher ideals and aspirations in life. Hence Dr. E. D. Burton is in perfect harmony with this evolutionary conception when he says: Jesus was a teacher of great principles, which it is incumbent upon us to apply to the multitudinous phases and experiences of life, and the embodiment of an ideal, which it is ours to endeavor, as best we can, to achieve. Dr. Herbert L. Willett, of the University of Chicago, was also in harmony with all this when he said in an address heard by the writer: It is the task of the Church to interpret to the world the ideals of Jesus for men to strive after. And Dr. J. H. Coffin also voiced the evolutionary position when, in speaking of conversion, he said: It is conversion =to= something, namely, the =principles= of Jesus. Now when the logic of this conception is followed out, it turns evangelism into religious education. And so it is easy to see why the advocates of evolution are stressing religious education with increasing insistence. For it is through the methods of religious education, according to Dr. Burton, that the lost are being led to adopt the principles of Jesus and to accept his leadership quietly and gradually. This makes regeneration simply an added impulse in the direction in which men are imagined already to be going. It also has the effect of altogether reversing the emphasis in the work of the Church with the lost. According to Dr. Burton, it transfers it from the salvation of the individual, with emphasis upon rescue from future woe, to the creation of a human society dominated by the spirit of Jesus. And Dr. Gerald Birney Smith, speaking of present-day missionary methods, says: Humanly determined programs are being substituted for dogmatic decrees in the work of the churches. This is genuine democracy. The missionary enterprise is rapidly being conceived as a democratic social program rather than as the rescue of a few individuals from the divine wrath.... Education is coming to be a primary means of accomplishing the missionary task. Such a mission to the lost would be altogether unthinkable if men were believed to be spiritually dead. For dead men are helpless to adopt principles and strive after ideals. Dead men do not need education, they need life. Any one of average intelligence can see at a glance that these two programs of salvation are headed in opposite directions. By one we strive after an ideal; by the other we quit all striving and surrender to a Person. One is salvation by a human resolution to press toward the pattern set before us by the "Flower of the Race"; the other is salvation by a divine rescue from that natural hatred of purity and holiness which made possible the murder of the Son of God. By one program we adopt the principles and follow the spirit of the life of Christ; by the other we trust in the merits of the shed blood and substitutionary death of Christ. These two programs are mutually exclusive. Thus the evolutionary philosophy utterly destroys the doctrine of the new birth. 7. The logic of evolution destroys the doctrine of the =holiness of God=, for it makes God the =author of sin=. Le Conte says: If evolution be true, and especially if man be indeed a product of evolution, then what we call evil is not a unique phenomenon confined to man and the result of an accident [the fall], but must be a great fact pervading all nature and a part of its very constitution. No thinking man can get away from that conclusion. For if evolution in any form is a fact, then the thing the Bible calls sin was either somehow embedded, by a competent and responsible Creator, in man's very constitution as a necessary process of his evolution, or else it slipped into the race through the bungling and unwatchful incompetence of an impotent Creator. Thus in either case God becomes the author of sin! This puts evolution almost, if not altogether, on the ground of blasphemy! God responsible for the unspeakable woe and the unmeasured suffering of man? God the author of that inherent force in man's nature which has filled the earth with hatred, violence, bloodshed, and death? Let him think so who can! After these doctrines of the Word are set beside the evolutionary philosophy, and after it begins to dawn on the thinking mind how utterly irreconcilable they are, the absolute impossibility of a consistent evolutionist believing in an inspired, inerrant, and infallible Bible becomes well nigh an axiom. It is no wonder that Dr. W. B. Riley exclaims: What thinking man fails to see the infinity of space between Modernism and Orthodoxy, or to apprehend the fact that daily they are drawing farther apart! Time holds no promise of even a patched-up peace. Lord Kelvin was astonished at the preachers and teachers who are trying to apply the doctrine of evolution to the fundamentals of the faith. He said: I marvel at the undue haste with which teachers in our Universities and preachers in our pulpits are restating the truth in the terms of evolution, while evolution itself remains an unproven hypothesis in the laboratories of science. And well might he marvel. And well might the Church become aroused and alarmed as the logical workings of these false doctrines produce more and more fearful results within her ranks. The whole Church is being moved away from the foundations of the faith, and this false philosophy is at the bottom of it all. The group announcements of the Sunday services of the Los Angeles liberal churches show where all consistent evolutionists are headed. Standing at the head of these announcements are these words, the capital letters being theirs: We found our faith on the thought of EVOLUTION rather than Special Creation; on revelation through NORMAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE rather than the supernatural; on salvation through GROWTH rather than a miraculous rebirth. And when it comes to the awful harvest that is being gathered from our churches for the forces of spiritual destruction through our colleges and universities, William Jennings Bryan has had some information given to him that will give us a hint of what is going on. He says: Having had opportunity to make a personal investigation, I feel it my duty to warn the lovers of the Bible of the insidious attacks which are being made upon every vital part of the Word of God. A father tells me of a daughter educated at Wellesley who calmly informs him that no one believes in the Bible now; a teacher in Columbia University begins his lessons in geology by asking students to lay aside all that they have learned in Sunday-school; a professor of the University of Wisconsin tells his class that the Bible is a collection of myths; a professor of philosophy at Ann Arbor occupies a Sunday evening explaining to an audience that Christianity is a state of mind and that there are only two books in the Bible with any literary merit; another professor in the same institution informs students that he once taught a Sunday-school class and was active in the Young Men's Christian Association, but that no thinking man can believe in God or the Bible; a woman teacher in a public school in Indiana rebukes a boy for answering that Adam was the first man, explaining to him and the class that the "tree man" was the first man; a young man in South Carolina traces his atheism back to two teachers in a Christian college; a senior in an Illinois high school writes that he became skeptical during his sophomore year but has been brought back by influences outside of school while others of his class are agnostics; a professor in Yale has the reputation of making atheists of all who come under his influence--this information was given by a boy whose brother has come under the influence of this teacher; a professor in Bryn Mawr combats Christianity for a session and then puts to his class the question whether or not there is a God, and is happy to find that a majority of the class vote that there is no God; a professor in a Christian college writes a book in which the virgin birth of Christ is disputed; one professor declares that life is merely a by-product and will ultimately be produced in the laboratory; another says that the ingredients necessary to create life have already been brought together and that life will be developed from these ingredients, adding, however, that it will require a million years to do it. These are a few of the illustrations furnished by informants whom I have reason to believe. These facts certainly furnish sufficient reason why the Church cannot compromise with the evolutionary philosophy. To do so would be to head herself toward destruction. She must stand uncompromised and unflinching against that unproven and discredited theory, the acceptance of which destroys faith in that infallible and inerrant Word on which she was founded, and on whose "thus saith the Lord" she must rest her message to a lost world. =There is no middle ground. To compromise would be to commit suicide.= If the Church and the Schools are ever to come into harmony, it cannot be because the Church gives up an infallible Book and accepts a discredited theory in its place, and so it must be because the Schools give up this unscientific, because unproven, theory and get back to faith in the inerrant Word of God. That this is the only basis on which the Church and the Schools can ever come into harmony is strenuously denied by the evolutionists in both Schools and Church. But their denial is meaningless when it is remembered that they are working night and day to capture the Church, as they have already almost done with the Schools, before we wake up to what is going on. But it can never be done. The true Church will never surrender to those who would remove her foundations and wreck her message. CHAPTER II The Present Controversy--the Cure In the previous pages we went back to the cause of the present controversy between the Church and the Schools. We found that the unproven and discredited theory of evolution lies at the bottom of it. We also concluded that no compromise that permits entrance to this theory in any form is possible, for the truth which is at once both the life and the message of the Church, and the theory of evolution, are mutually exclusive. In this chapter we will seek to find the cure for this distressing controversy. That there is a cure is beyond all possible question. And if it is not found and applied, the controversy cannot fail to intensify until it may force a re-alignment in the Church--a thing a great company of the most earnest in the Church are fighting to prevent. Now the only possible basis on which both the Church and the Schools can take their stand, if this controversy is to be settled without final disunion in the Church, was laid down by Christ in that scientific formula: If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or whether I speak from Myself. To follow this formula in our search for common ground is to be utterly scientific, for it is the laboratory method of experiment. The true Church has always believed and received the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, not because, in blind credulity, she has followed some irrational and unscientific impulse, but precisely because she has been =scientific enough= to work by this formula and carry the laboratory test to its =final analysis=. And for the Schools to follow this same formula with scientific accuracy would be for them to arrive at the same place at which the true Church has arrived. For when the Church and the Schools start out in search of truth and do not arrive together, it is either because they did not start together, or because one or both of them did not proceed all the way with scientific exactness. Truth is an eternal unity, and conclusions regarding it that are mutually exclusive and therefore the cause of controversy prove to a demonstration that somebody's methods of investigation were unscientific. If we really intend to be scientific, therefore, when we start out to investigate truth of any sort and in any realm, the first thing we will do will be to classify. We can neither start nor proceed together unless we do. Indeed, if we are to be scientific enough to follow the formula laid down by Christ, we will be compelled to classify before we can even begin our investigation. Therefore-- I. =Truth Must Be Classified Scientifically.= 1. The =Realms of Truth= Must Be Classified. The first thing the true scientist does is to classify truth into realms. This we have already done by classifying the realm in which God reveals His moral character to the hearts of all moral beings as the =spiritual= realm, and that in which He reveals His creative power to the minds of all intelligent beings as the =natural= realm. If we do not distinguish these realms to start with, we invite confusion; and if we should reach right conclusions without this classification, it would be due to accident, rather than to scientific accuracy. But that this classification is universally recognized is proved by the fact that the moment science reaches the line where the natural ends and the spiritual begins, it pursues its investigations no farther, on the ground that it has neither the implements nor the capacities with which to investigate in that realm. This proves as conclusively as anything could that the distinction between these two realms is so sharp, as well as so self-evident, that science is compelled to accept it and act accordingly. 2. The =Faculties of Investigation= Must be Distinguished. The scientific man will next distinguish the faculties with which the investigating is to be done, according to the respective realms. That this classification is required by the fundamental difference in the nature of the truths in these two realms is so self-evident that it ought to be axiomatic to all who think with any degree of scientific accuracy. For in the nature of things, =natural= truth requires investigation by =intellectual= faculties, and =spiritual= truth by =spiritual= faculties. Indeed, this distinction is fully recognized when science halts its pursuit of truth at the boundary line of the spiritual realm. Yet, although this classification is theoretically recognized by science, and although it is absolutely demanded if we are to proceed scientifically in our researches in the spiritual realm, it is little less than amazing how many there are who utterly fail to distinguish these faculties when they start out to investigate spiritual truth. Indeed, this is the first place where the Church and the Schools part company. For the whole attitude of our Schools today, including most of the institutions founded and fostered by the Church, seems to be one that entirely misses the scientific necessity of distinguishing between these essentially different faculties when working in these two utterly divergent realms of truth. And so it comes to pass that while the Church is using one sort of faculties, the Schools are using another kind on the same class of truth. It needs scarcely to be argued that the =intellect=, with its capacity to =reason=, is the proper faculty of apprehension in the scientific realm. But it is equally true that the =heart=, with its capacity to =believe=, is the one faculty of apprehension in the spiritual realm. That is, the inquirer reasons his way to knowledge in the natural realm, and believes his way to knowledge in the spiritual realm. He uses his mind in order to understand what God has done in His creation, and he exercises faith in order to come into the knowledge of what He is in His character. In natural things he believes because he understands, and in spiritual things he understands because he believes. In drawing this contrast between mind and heart, however, it is fully recognized that the term "heart," in much if not all of Scripture, stands for the whole personality, including intellect, emotion and will. But it is also a fact that this term stands for that certain =attitude= of the whole personality toward God through His Word in which one believes and receives His Word without question, even though it may not be understood, rather than insisting on understanding it in order to believe it. Paul says by inspiration in First Corinthians 1:17 to 2:16 that =mental= capacity, even of the highest excellence, when exercised by itself, is utterly incapable of apprehending spiritual truth in any degree whatever. And Christ says that it is with the =heart= that man believes unto righteousness. This defines that attitude of the whole personality which accepts the Word of God on faith without necessarily understanding it, and which gives evidence of acceptance by such a whole-hearted surrender to it as will eventuate in a life of righteousness. Then in other Scriptures we find that a life of righteousness, according to the divine standard, is based on right relations with God in Christ through faith in His shed blood, through whose incoming and indwelling life, in response to such a faith, the one who receives it will normally live in right relations with his fellow men. That is, it is a righteousness that is obtained by =believing=, not attained by =working=. It is received, not achieved. The use of the term "heart," therefore, in Scripture, means that certain attitude of the whole personality toward God through His Word which the exercise of the intellect apart from, and unfounded on, faith makes impossible. It is precisely this distinction in faculties that Christ's formula requires. For it was =spiritual= truth, not natural, of which He spoke when He said, "=If= any man wills to do, he shall =know=." To work by this formula requires the exercise of faith. For faith is that attitude of the heart toward the doing of God's will which is evidenced in =willing to do= that will, no matter what it costs nor where it leads. This is the first step of faith. For faith is both an attitude and an act, the genuineness of which is proven by an activity. That is, it is an attitude of willingness toward the will of God, an act of surrender to the will of God, eventuating in an activity in continuing in the will of God. Therefore complete surrender of the heart and life to God's will as revealed in the Word, trusting the outcome to Him, is where faith begins. And so let no man imagine that he has any real faith either in God or His Word who has not begun by willing to do, that he may enter upon the doing of, the will of God. Indeed, this is not simply the place where faith begins, it is also the only place where the presence of faith can be demonstrated. For this is the only possible way of distinguishing that intellectual attitude which simply assents to the truthfulness of the Word, from that genuine heart faith which actively reckons the Word to be true by surrendering the life to its requirements. This formula of Christ's, therefore, not only requires that the spiritual and natural faculties be distinguished, but it is the one scientific test by which they =can= be distinguished. Then there is Paul's classification of these faculties just referred to. It is passing strange that so many even in our denominational schools have missed it. He devotes a whole section of First Corinthians, from 1:17 to 2:16, as noted above, to a scientific statement of the natural and total incapacity of the intellect to discern spiritual truth. Consider it a little more in detail. He says that natural human wisdom, "_sophia_," which Aristotle defines as "mental excellence in its highest and fullest sense," is utterly incapable of operating in the realm of spiritual investigation. For after "the world by mental excellence knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness (to the natural mental capacities) of the thing preached to save those that =believe=." Not those that =understand=, for "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God (that is, spiritual things), for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know (or understand) them, for they are =spiritually= discerned (or understood)." The essential difference between natural and spiritual faculties, as well as the utter incapacity of the natural faculties in the spiritual realm, are so clearly brought out in this passage that it is impossible to miss it. By this it is not at all meant, however, that mental training and intellectual capacity have no place in certain branches of Bible study. Every believer in the Book welcomes the keenest minds and the most expert scholarship in that branch of Bible study, for example, which seeks, by the investigation of the manuscripts and the variant readings, to arrive at the very words that were written by the inspired writers; or, for example, in that other branch of study which seeks to discover the history and origins of the various books of the Bible. But it =is= meant that when men seek to know the =spiritual truths= of the Bible, they are utterly unscientific if they fail to use that faculty in their investigation which the Textbook itself prescribes. To sum it up, faith opens the way for God to quicken into activity a spiritual capacity through which =He= educates a man in spiritual things entirely independently of the schools. The man who really intends to be scientific, then, will approach the Bible in that attitude of =faith= which will lead him to =will to do God's will= as the Bible reveals it. He will then be where he can =believe= his way to an understanding of spiritual truth. 3. The =Different Kinds of Truth= Must Be Separated. Another classification which the scientific man makes is to distinguish between the two kinds of truth in each respective realm, and to separate that kind which may be demonstrated to the =experience= from that which must be taken on =hearsay=. That is, in the natural realm, in the department of chemistry, for example, the laws of chemical action can be put to the laboratory test of experiment, while the history of the science of chemistry must always be taken on hearsay. And, in the spiritual realm, those truths stated in the spiritual Textbook which have to do with our spiritual relations with God can be put to the laboratory test of the experiment of faith, while all the rest must be taken on hearsay. 4. The =Primacy of Primary Truth= Must Be Maintained. One thing more which the scientific man does is to accord primacy to that realm of truth which is primary in importance. In order to do this, the scientific spirit compels the one possessed by it to meet two requirements. Recognizing that truth is an eternal unity, he will first determine to deal with the facts in any given realm in such a way as to preserve harmony at all times between them and all the known facts of all the other realms. For only thus can he avoid destroying the unity of truth and heading himself toward error and confusion. He will then determine to maintain the primacy of primary truth by =interpreting in its light the facts of all other realms=. That is, he will make that realm whose truths are of transcendent importance the norm, or standard, by which to interpret the facts of other realms, withholding interpretations until the facts of any other given realm can be interpreted in harmony with those primary truths which have been made forever secure by being scientifically verified. These requirements would seem so axiomatic as to need no emphasis, and yet, strange as it may seem, right here is another place where the Church and the Schools part company. For the Church is according primacy to one realm of truth, and the Schools to another, making unity of final conclusions out of the question. If we are to be possessed by the scientific spirit and proceed with scientific accuracy, however, we will be compelled, in the terms of our present study, to accord that primacy to the =spiritual= realm over the =natural= which its transcendent importance demands. For by as much as truth about =God= is of more eternal value to sinful man than truth about His =creation=, and by as much as truth by which we are =saved= is of more transcendent importance than truth by which we are =informed=, by just that much will the scientific spirit compel us to interpret every bit of information that comes to us from the natural realm in harmony with, and in the light of, the truths of the spiritual realm, for by this method alone can we maintain the primacy of the spiritual realm over the natural. This means that the man who is truly scientific will never interpret discoveries in the natural realm in such a way as to deny or even throw doubt upon those fundamental truths in the spiritual realm which have been forever secured by scientific demonstration. In other words, he will not seek to bring the Bible into harmony with man's interpretation of scientific facts, but he will seek to bring every scientific discovery into harmony with the Bible, withholding final conclusions from all discoveries that will not so harmonize until he has light enough so they will. We have now reached the point where we can sum up all the requirements which the really scientific man will meet in order that he may be able to proceed with scientific accuracy in his researches in the realms of truth. He will separate the natural and the spiritual realms of truth from each other. He will investigate natural truth with the intellect and spiritual truth with faith. He will distinguish truth that can be demonstrated to the experience from that which must be accepted on testimony alone. And he will accord primacy to the spiritual realm over the natural. It only remains to be said that the man who will not meet these requirements is a total stranger to the scientific spirit. "The Standard Dictionary" says that science is "knowledge gained and verified by exact observation and correct thinking," and the man who will not meet requirements that are absolutely necessary for exact observation and correct thinking in the gaining and verifying of knowledge does not have the first qualification of the scientific investigator. For he is really not open to truth at all, and is therefore in no position to maintain either the unity between the realms of truth or the primacy of primary truth, and exact observation and correct thinking are out of the question under such conditions. He cannot verify anything with scientific accuracy when he will not even classify the different realms of truth and the faculties of investigation, or give the realms their respective places in the sphere of truth. And so it is futile for one who refuses to do this to talk about being in harmony with the scientific spirit. When an investigator meets these requirements, on the other hand, he is then ready to meet the next demand made upon the scientific inquirer, which is-- II. =Truth Must Be Investigated Scientifically.= Accepting the self-evident accuracy of the classification we have just outlined, we will now give attention to what the scientific spirit will require of us at those two places where the Church and the Schools have parted company. For if we can get together here, we can both proceed and arrive together in our investigation of truth, and that will end the controversy. 1. =Faith= Must Be Given Precedence over =Reason=. Let us see what it will mean to give precedence to faith over reason when we are working in the realm of spiritual truth. It will mean that =believing= will precede =reasoning= in our approach to the Word of God, and this defines the vital distinction between the true Christian and the rationalist. =a.= The Method of the Rationalist. Faith and rationalism are mutually exclusive in the spiritual realm. Rationalizing and doubting are first cousins when the Word of God is involved. Satan was the first rationalist on earth, and Eve fell when she accepted his reasonings about the Word of God in the place of simple faith in that Word. For Satan raised a question about the Word,--"Yea, hath God said?"--and thereby opened the way for incipient doubt, and then he reasoned Eve into accepting a "common sense" interpretation of what God had said, which proved to be an outright denial of His Word. And look at the consequences--indescribably terrible--of rationalizing about God's Word instead of believing it! But rationalism did not stop there, for ever since that day all men without exception have been natural-born rationalists. For it is perfectly natural to all men to =rationalize= about God's Word, but it takes a miracle of Divine power to make any one willing to =believe= it. These two attitudes toward Scripture are forever irreconcilable. In the nature of things, they can never be harmonized. The believer in the Word and the rationalist take two utterly divergent paths that cannot possibly reach the same goal. The program of the rationalist is to arrive at an understanding of spiritual truth over the pathway of reasoning that is apart from faith. That of the believer is to arrive at it over the pathway of reasoning that is founded on faith. The program of the rationalist is to harmonize the Word of God with his conclusions. That of the believer is to harmonize his conclusions with the Word. The program of the rationalist is to become a critic of the Word and sit in judgment on it. That of the believer is to let the Word become his critic and sit in judgment on him. These are certainly reasons enough why the believer and the rationalist can never travel together. For the believer is walking by God's estimate of him, while the rationalist is walking by his estimate of God, and these paths go in opposite directions. If you sit in judgment on some portion of God's Word and determine that it is reasonable, and that since it commends itself to your judgment it is therefore acceptable and you will believe it, =that= is not faith in the =Word= but in =your own reason=. You have surrendered your =intellect= to your own conclusions but your =heart= is far from God. Faith in the Word is surrender to it without passing judgment on it. And yet surrendering one's mind to one's own conclusions about God is precisely the thing that passes for faith in God on the part of those who have lost their old-fashioned, evangelical faith while they were in the Schools, and yet come out with what they describe as a more intelligent and rational faith in God and the Bible. In their desperate attempt to survive the wreck of their orthodox faith, they have =reasoned= their way to conclusions about God that harmonized with what they were taught in the Schools; but the God they arrived at was the god of rationalism and not the God of Revelation. They will say to the orthodox man, "You and I go by different pathways, but we both arrive at the same God." But this is eternally impossible! For there is only one pathway leading to the true God, and that is not followed by =reasoning= one's way out of a shattered faith, but first by =believing= one's way out of darkness into light, and then by believing steadily on in that divinely imparted faith which always shatters the reasonings and conclusions of the rationalists. To be a believer in the Word puts rationalism out of business, for no one can reason himself into the acceptance of truth he already believes. And on the other hand, to be a rationalist regarding the Word puts faith out of business, for faith is the acceptance of the bare Word of God without further evidence, and the rationalizer is compelled to reject that attitude toward the Word so that he may have the way left open to reason his way to what he is willing to accept as evidence. This is why so many of those students who sit in the classes of the rationalists in our colleges and seminaries lose their faith. Rationalism makes Scriptural faith impossible. Rationalizing and believing, when the Bible is in question, are mutually exclusive. The reason for this is not that the facts of Scripture contradict each other, and certainly not that these facts are one thing to faith and another thing to reason. The antagonism does not arise over the =facts= of the Word but over the =interpretation= of them. The rationalist, accepting no interpretation except that furnished by his own puny and incompetent reason unillumined by faith, reaches conclusions absolutely contradicted by those arrived at by the man of faith. The fact is, he could not hope to arrive anywhere else. For how can finite man relate and interpret the few and scattered facts he discovers in the realm of infinite truth? How can a man by searching find out God? "By whose interpretation, yours or mine?" is a favorite question which the rationalist asks the believer when the meaning of some Scripture passage is in question. By =no one's= interpretation except the =Holy Spirit's=! He alone can interpret the Bible, for He alone knows what He meant by what He wrote. And even the Holy Spirit is able to interpret the Bible to =no one= but the =believer=. For the rationalist, the unbeliever, rejects faith, and thereby completely closes "the eyes of the heart" to the illumination of the Spirit; while the faith of the believer is the very thing that opens the heart to an understanding of the Word. Spiritual apprehension begins only at the point where faith begins. This is why it is that when the rationalist tries his hand at interpretation he is sure, sooner or later, to bring perfectly harmonious facts into confusion and contradiction. Take, for example, the facts regarding the development of the human embryo. The rationalist notes that as it develops it bears a striking resemblance, successively, to the more mature forms of some of the lower animals, in an imagined orderly progress from lower to higher. That this resemblance is a fact no one disputes. There is no controversy over the fact. But when the rationalist attempts to explain this fact, he interprets it to mean that man is the product of evolution, rather than a special creation, as the Bible says he is, and thus he thrusts such confusion and contradiction before us that we are compelled to make a choice between his interpretation and the statements of the Bible. The controversy that results is caused altogether by the rationalist thrusting himself into that place that belongs to the Holy Spirit alone. "=He= shall lead you into all the truth," said Christ, and it is presumptuous in the extreme to seek to do the Holy Spirit's work for Him. We are forewarned of the methods of the modern rationalist in his approach to the Bible by what Christ said to the Jews who were finding fault with what He taught: "For had ye believed Moses," He said, "ye would have believed Me; for he wrote of Me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?" This is precisely the pathway modern rationalism has followed. It began by discrediting what Moses wrote, and it has now gone to the length of denying final authority to what Christ said. Rationalism is both irreverent and destructive when it seeks to do anything with the Word of God. For that Book is to be handled as =no= other book is. Behind the historical, and the literary, and the textual, and the philosophical criticism must be a spiritual discernment, born of faith alone, which both dominates and regulates all the rest. For just as a blind man may turn the eyes of his head to the sun and see no physical light, so the rationalist may turn the eyes of his mind to the Bible and see no spiritual truth. It takes the eyes of the heart to see spiritual truth, and they can function only through faith. =b.= The Method of the Believer. In order clearly to understand the method of faith, we need right here to guard against another extreme. By the contrasts we have drawn in the last few pages, it is not at all meant that there is no place in the exercise of faith for the exercise also of the intellect at the same time and toward the same object. For, in the nature of things, the intellect =must= be exercised in a mental apprehension of that which is to be believed before the way is even open for faith to begin. Neither is it meant that reasoning is so out of harmony with and destructive of faith that its exercise in connection with faith is impossible. For faith is not blind credulity; it is not jumping in the dark; it is not an irrational impulse; it is not swallowing something with the eyes shut. It is rather an open-eyed stepping out on to the spiritual foundations of the universe. But notice--it is stepping out on to =spiritual= foundations. It =is= meant, however, by the contrasts above, that the moment an intellectual apprehension of what is to be believed, followed by a conclusion to accept or reject it according to whether it is reasonable or not--the moment such an attitude is =substituted= for the heart acceptance of the bare Word of God, even though it may be beyond understanding and reason, that moment the normal exercise of mind and reason has degenerated into a rationalism that makes faith impossible. Notice an emphasis above. Faith is stepping out upon =spiritual= foundations. Then recall that to all except the man of presumption, foundations must be seen before they will be stepped upon. The normal man demands to see where he is going. Now spiritual foundations can be seen only by spiritual eyes. The natural vision cannot see past the natural realm. And spiritual realities will never be stepped out upon until they are seen. For faith is not an abstract and aimless emotion. It requires an object that can be seen, and one that can be trusted. It is therefore the one main purpose of the Bible to set before men the one saving Object of faith. This purpose lies behind the multiplied revelations of God all through the Old Testament, and the gathering together of all those revelations into Christ in the New Testament in such fullness and finality that He could say: "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." But God and Christ must be seen before they can be trusted. Not intellectually or historically, but spiritually seen. And they can be seen only by spiritual eyes. And spiritual vision is possible only through the divine touch. And the divine touch is given only to those who consent; it is not forced on any one. And the attitude of consent is precisely the attitude set forth in Christ's formula: "If any man wills to do, he shall know." Only by coming into this attitude can any man see God. "The pure in =heart=," said Christ, "shall see God." It is a heart attitude. And the meaning of the purity of heart that opens the vision to God is brought out when Christ is asked the question, "How is it that Thou wilt manifest Thyself unto us and not unto the world?" His answer is of the utmost significance. He says, "If a man love Me, he will =keep My words=." Keeping His words, willing to do His will--this is the attitude that opens the vision to Him. He and the Father can manifest themselves to and be seen by those only who are in the attitude of consent toward the keeping of His words. This is the only attitude that can bring the anointing of the eyes with that eye-salve which opens them to spiritual vision. But when the eyes, in response to this attitude of willingness toward the will of God, are once opened to spiritual things, then God, in all the perfections of His divine character, is seen both in the Bible, the written Word, and in Christ, the living Word, and this two-fold revelation of Him is seen to be as perfect and flawless as the God who is thus revealed. Those who think they see imperfections either in the Bible or in Christ are spiritually blind. For when one thinks he sees flaws where there are only infinite perfections, he advertises to all that he is attempting the impossible task of examining spiritual realities with his natural vision, and is therefore passing judgment on what he has never seen. But when the spiritual vision has once been opened, and God is really seen, in the Bible and in Christ, in all the perfections of His infinitely holy and loving character, the =reason= at once leads to the conclusion from the facts seen that such a Being is to be trusted, and active faith thereby becomes the outgrowth of =that= kind of reasoning. That is, the faith that begins as an attitude of willingness toward the will of God, through which attitude the eyes are touched into a vision of the character of God, such a faith comes into and continues in an active submission to that will through the normal functioning of reason. This shows the vital difference between reasoning and rationalizing, and the relation of each to faith. The effect of reasoning on faith is constructive, while that of rationalizing is destructive. And the heart of the difference between the two traces back, in the last analysis, to those two kinds of vision. The rationalist, unyielding to the touch of God on his vision, sees only natural facts, and even then he sees them only partially and wholly out of relation to the spiritual revelation of God in the Bible and in Christ; and thinking that he sees discrepancies between the facts in the natural realm and the statements of Scripture, his =reason= leads him to reject the Bible as infallible and inerrant, thereby making faith in the God of the Bible utterly impossible. His reasoning powers are simply functioning normally when he concludes to reject the statements about the facts that to him are entirely unseen which do not seem to agree with what he sees. His trouble is not with his reasoning powers but with his vision. Refusing to see what he is passing judgment on, his method of inquiry is rationalizing. But the believer, utterly yielded to God and therefore seeing Him through anointed eyes in both the written and the living Word, thus seeing the infinite perfections of His character, is led by the normal functioning of the =same reason= to accept and act on the bare Word of God without further evidence, because the evidence he sees is all the evidence he needs. It is perfectly reasonable, therefore, for Him to accept all that such an One says in His Word, waiting for the partial and apparently contradictory knowledge in the natural realm to be corrected into harmony with the Bible. And his reasoning powers are simply functioning normally when he accepts the Bible as infallible and inerrant, for this attitude is based on what he sees. The entire difference between the rationalist and the believer is a matter of vision. The reasoning powers of each simply act in view of what each sees. This is why reasoning is never out of harmony with faith, while rationalizing always is. For true reasoning in spiritual things is =based= on an attitude of faith, while rationalizing rejects that attitude as an essential preliminary to correct conclusions, and therefore reasons either entirely apart from or in order to faith. Such an attitude as opens the vision does not precede the action of reason, and the conclusions cannot help being destructive of faith, for they are pronouncements on things utterly unseen and unknown, and which the Bible says are "foolishness" to the man who sees only through his natural vision. But the attitude of willingness toward the will of God so opens the vision to the whole spiritual realm that the real foolishness is seen to be even the least attempt to pronounce upon or repudiate that which is utterly unseen and unknown. This is the fundamental reason why there is such divergence, even to the point of mutual exclusion, between the different "interpretations" of Scripture given forth by the believer and the rationalist. The rationalist, with heart and vision closed to spiritual truth, can give no interpretation except that which seems reasonable in view of what he sees; while the believer, in the attitude of faith toward God, =sees= the interpretation of Scripture through the illumination of the Holy Spirit. The interpretation of the Word is the very work for which the Holy Spirit has come into the world. That is not all of His work, but a very essential part of it. He is God's official Interpreter of His truth to the believer. Not to the rationalizer, but to the believer. And His work is so divinely perfect and absolutely final that all human attempts at interpretation, which are devoid of faith, are an insult to Him. He is the One who wrote the Word, and so He knows the meaning, not only of what He said, but even of what He left unsaid, and therefore none but He can interpret either the words or the silences of Scripture. For example, when Melchizedek flashes, meteor-like, across the page of Old Testament history, and then disappears without a word as to beginning of life or end of days, who but the Holy Spirit could interpret those silences into spiritual meanings of unfathomable richness? Who but He who was responsible for those omissions could interpret them into some of the richest revelations of all Scripture concerning the eternal Priesthood of the slain and risen Son of God? And if the Holy Spirit can thus seize upon the very silences of Scripture in showing us the things of Christ, who will deny Him the power to interpret to those who will receive it what He meant by what He wrote? And who but the rationalist and the unbeliever can ever refuse to let Him reveal the perfect harmony between the facts of nature and the scientific references of Scripture? It is the divine prerogative to =cause= us to understand the Book. When the risen Christ appeared suddenly among the disciples, first frightened and then scarcely believing for joy, He first convinced them that it was really He to whom they had already given their hearts, thus quickening their =faith= into renewed activity, "Then opened =He= their =mind= that they might =understand= the Scriptures." First faith and then knowledge of the truth; this is the scientific order. Luther saw this when he wrote to Spalatin: Above all things it is quite true that one cannot search into the Holy Scriptures by means of study, nor by means of the intellect. Therefore begin with prayer that the Lord grant unto you the true understanding of His Word. Even Spencer had a glimpse of this scientific principle toward the end of his life. In his essay on "Feeling Versus Intellect" he showed that he had lost faith in his former estimate of the place of the intellect in the moral realm when he said: Everywhere the cry is educate--educate--educate! Everywhere the belief is that by such culture as schools furnish, children, and therefore adults, can be molded into the desired shapes. It is assumed that when men are taught what is right, they will do what is right--that a proposition intellectually accepted becomes morally operative. And this conviction, contradicted by everyday experience, is at variance with an everyday axiom--the axiom that each faculty is strengthened by the exercise of it--intellectual power by intellectual action, and moral power by moral action. What can this mean but that Spencer saw, at least dimly, the radical difference between the intellectual and the spiritual faculties? The logic of all these facts and principles makes only one conclusion possible. When the man of scientific spirit approaches the Book which can reveal its truths to =faith alone=, he will not be unscientific enough to refuse faith to its statements and use his =intellect= alone. For he will see that the one who refuses the attitude of faith toward the Scriptures will be "ever learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth," while the one who accepts the Word in humble dependence on the Holy Spirit's interpretation of its meaning is on the one solitary highway by which a knowledge of the truth can be reached. When the Church and the Schools, therefore, agree on using this method of approach to the Word of God, they will at least have started toward the same goal. 2. The =Spiritual= Realm Must Be Given Primacy over the =Natural=. Let us now see what it will mean to accord primacy to the spiritual realm over the natural. There is only one possible method of doing this, and that is to interpret in the light of spiritual truth all the facts of the natural realm. The man of scientific mind will therefore see clearly that he will be utterly incapable of giving such an interpretation to natural facts until he first =knows what spiritual truth is=, and this will mean the laboratory method of the experiment of faith. But right here you may say that science has nothing to do with the spiritual realm; that scientific investigation stops the moment it reaches that realm; and that therefore to demand the use of these scientific methods in that realm is not only foolish but impossible. But stop and think a minute. It is both foolish and futile to demand that either the =implements= or the =faculties= used in the scientific realm shall be brought over and used in the pursuit of spiritual truth. This is precisely the thing we are seeking to show. But that does not mean for a moment that the inquirer must therefore give up the =scientific attitude of mind= and cease to work according to the demands of the =scientific spirit= the moment he begins inquiry in the spiritual realm. For that spirit is simply an honest and accurate method of investigation, and because science is compelled to stop at the border of the spiritual realm is no reason why we should cease being honest and accurate when we investigate in that realm. It is perfectly true that the scientist, as such, has absolutely no pronouncement to make concerning spiritual truth; but it is equally true that the inquirer in the spiritual realm, if he does not pursue his inquiries by scientific methods and according to the demands of the scientific spirit, will have no pronouncement to make either. The man who intends, therefore, to be scientific enough in his spirit to give primary truth its place of primacy by interpreting in its light the truths of other realms, and who, with the instincts of the true scientist, recognizes spiritual truth as primary in its relation to the natural, will be actuated sufficiently by his scientific attitude to determine to know what spiritual truth is, in order that he may be able to interpret natural truth in its light. This will bring him face to face with Christ's formula for entering upon the knowledge of spiritual truth. Being honestly desirous of knowing what spiritual truth is, he will determine to do God's will in order that he may find out. =a.= This Will Mean Surrendering the Heart to God. This is the only thing it can mean. For spiritual truth is primarily heart truth, not intellectual truth, and the only way to know heart truth is to surrender the heart to that Holy Spirit of truth who "searcheth the deep things of God," and who was sent into the world to "lead us into all the truth." The grammarian, the philologist, the historian, the naturalist, the philosopher, therefore, have no service they can perform here. They cannot carry their apparatus over into the spiritual realm and weigh and measure, estimate and judge, illumine and interpret spiritual truth for us. When we stand here we are on that holy ground where we must lay off our sandals of scientific paraphernalia and stand before God with open heart ready to hear what He has to say. The moment we get to this realm, the whole apparatus by which truth is received changes from reason to faith. But do you see where this brings us? Straight back to Christ's formula! This is precisely what His formula involves, for when a man wills to do God's will, he takes the first step in faith. Then when a man comes into this attitude toward God's will, he will next inquire where he is to commence in the doing of that will, what the first step is in the will of God. The Textbook tells us that the first step is to "repent and believe the Gospel." That this is the first step is self-evident, because the heart must be opened to Him who alone can give the knowledge of spiritual truth before that knowledge is possible, and repentance and faith are the opening of the heart to Him. For repentance is a coming into that attitude of heart toward God in which the whole life is laid bare before Him exactly as it is, thereby opening the way for faith; and believing the Gospel is an entering upon that faith which accepts the Gospel--the Good News--of Christ's finished work of atonement for sin through His shed blood on the cross, and reckons pardon for sin and new life in Christ to be now ours according to the Word of God. For faith, you remember, is both an attitude and an act; an attitude of surrender to God, and an act of receiving what God has for us; and this is precisely what it means to repent and believe the Gospel. This means that the man of genuine scientific spirit will begin his pursuit of spiritual truth by sincere "repentance toward God" and "faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ" for salvation through His shed blood, which, according to the Textbook, are the first steps in willing to do the will of God, followed by a moment-by-moment dependence on Christ, Who is now his life, to reveal truth to him as he continues, by faith, in the attitude of an open heart. This is the only possible way of ever knowing that truth which alone can make us free. It is true that it is quite the fashion these days for every unbeliever, agnostic, modernist, and unitarian to quote those words of Christ "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" in justification of the claim that something which he is pleased to call truth has given him what he fancies is freedom. But Scripture could not be more grossly perverted than by such a wresting of its plain meaning. The whole statement reads: Then said Jesus unto =those= Jews that =believed= on =Him=, if =ye continue= in =My Word=, =then= are ye My disciples indeed; and =ye= shall =know= the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Only the spiritually blind can fail to see the meaning of such a statement. It plainly means that the first step toward freedom is =faith in Christ=, the genuineness of which is evidenced by =continuance in His Word=; and that it is only in this attitude of =faith= that it is possible to =know= the truth that makes us free. The truth is, therefore, that to be free one must believe on Christ. This does not mean to give intellectual assent to this or that fact about Him, but utterly to commit the life to Him, sin and all, past, present, and future. For the Gospel tells us not so much what to believe as Whom to believe, and Paul tells us what faith in Christ means when he exclaims: "I know =Whom= I have believed," and then further unfolds what this involves by adding, "and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have =committed unto Him= against that day." Faith is not simply giving mental assent to facts, it is primarily surrendering to a Person. This is what it means to believe on Christ, and anything short of this will neither give us knowledge of the truth nor make us free. Then following this attitude toward Christ, the believer evidences his faith by continuing in His Word, by which he comes into experiential knowledge of its truth and its meaning. Then coming to know the truth by experiencing it through faith, he is where the Son of God Himself becomes his freedom. And there is no other freedom. It is in the experience of =Himself=, not in an intellectual assent to facts about Him, that He makes us free by becoming the =way= to God for us, the =truth= about God to us, and the =life= of God in us. It is therefore only he whom the Son sets free who is free indeed, for freedom from the curse of sin by the experience of Christ as Saviour, and freedom from the blindness of error by the experience of Christ as Truth incarnate, is the only freedom there is. When the Word says, therefore, "Whatsoever is not of =faith= is =sin=," it contemplates both the object of faith and the cause of forfeited freedom. For the Holy Spirit came to convict men of =sin= because they =believe not on Christ=. Unfaith in Christ is therefore the essence of sin. And sin is bondage, not freedom. Scripture describes the unbeliever in Christ as the bondslave of sin, held in chains of darkness and error. This is why it is impossible either to know even natural truth in any adequate way, or to be able to untangle it from error, without becoming a believer on Christ as the first step. So let no one who has not surrendered his heart to Christ in faith boast that he either knows the truth or is free. But suppose a man should seek to know spiritual truth and yet refuse to surrender his heart to Christ in faith, then what? It could only be because he was so devoid of the scientific spirit that he did not want to =know the truth= at =any cost=. And no man who is in this frame of mind can ever come to know the truth. Haeckel defines the scientific attitude of mind when he says of the scientific inquirer that his sole and only task is to seek to know the truth, and to teach what he has discovered to be the truth, indifferent as to ... consequences. This means, in the terms of our present discussion, that in order to know spiritual truth, the man of scientific mind will be willing to work by Christ's formula no matter what it costs him, for that alone will give him the knowledge of eternal things which will make it possible adequately to interpret natural truth. But suppose the inquirer doubts the possibility of entering into a scientific knowledge of spiritual truth by following this formula, what then? It can only be because he is so unscholarly as to make the blunder in logic of assuming as untrue or impossible that which =remains to be proved=. No matter on which ground he refuses to surrender to Christ, therefore, no inquirer after spiritual truth can be either scientific or scholarly who makes this refusal; for he thereby renders himself not only utterly incompetent to know spiritual truth, but also entirely unable to accord primacy to the spiritual realm by interpreting natural truth in its light. Suppose a man should take this attitude of indifference or unbelief toward natural truth. Suppose that after refusing to make the first experiment in the study of chemistry he should attempt researches in a realm whose facts required interpretation in the light of the chemical laws he had refused to learn in the laboratory. Then suppose he should dogmatically announce such interpretations of his discoveries in that realm as were altogether out of harmony with the most fundamental laws in the chemical realm. And then suppose that in order to maintain his unfounded and arbitrary interpretations he should so twist the statements of the textbook on chemistry into harmony with his theories as to destroy their essential integrity. He would win nothing but contempt from experienced chemists. He would certainly find no place in the ranks of scientists. This is precisely why evolutionists and rationalists, using this method exactly, can win no response from experienced Christians, and why they ought to be outside the membership of our churches as long as they pursue this method. Believers can not listen for one moment to such interpretations of scientific facts by unbelievers as destroy the essential doctrines of the Christian faith and deny the inerrancy and final authority of the Word of God. For unbelievers have not only not secured a scientific knowledge of what they are talking about, but they have not even acquired the right to =pass an opinion= on the fundamental doctrines of the Bible. How can they announce dogmatically so-called scientific interpretations of the facts of nature which give the lie to the unmistakable doctrines of the spiritual Textbook whose truthfulness they have refused to put to the laboratory test of experience, and yet at the same time claim to be actuated by the scientific spirit? Those who do such things know nothing about the scientific spirit! Canon Dyson Hague was scientifically correct when he said that the rationalists are being opposed, not on the ground of their scholarship, but because the biblical criticism of rationalists and unbelievers can be neither expert nor scientific. There is but one conclusion possible. The man who intends to accord primacy to the spiritual realm will first acquire a verified knowledge of spiritual truth by the laboratory method of experience, according to the formula of the Textbook. For when he does this he will then be qualified to take the next step and make the primacy of spiritual truth an actual reality. =b.= This will Mean Interpreting Natural Truth in the Light of the Bible. We have now arrived at that point where we can sum up the logic of the scientific method of the laboratory as it applies to the investigation of the theory of evolution. The man who is honest enough to want to know the truth at all cost, and accurate enough to insist on coming into a knowledge of the truth both by scientific methods and in the scientific order of primacy, will first acquire an adequate knowledge by experience, as we have already decided, of those statements of the Bible that can be verified to the experience, and then he will for the first time be qualified to arrive at an adequate estimate of the statements that cannot be so verified. Then recognizing that all the scientific references of the Bible, including those relating to origins, are in that class that can not be verified to the experience, he will decide to come to no conclusions concerning them except such as will maintain both the primacy of primary truth and the unity of all the realms of truth. He will do this because it is the only thing he can do and still maintain a truly scientific attitude of mind. This will mean that he will interpret all the non-experimental statements of the Bible, including the scientific references, in harmony with and in the light of those spiritual and experiential truths which he has already had verified to him through his own personal relations with God through faith in Christ. In other words, he will maintain the primacy of spiritual truth by allowing no interpretation of scientific facts that will cast either denial or doubt on those fundamental doctrines which he now =knows= are true, because they have been =supernaturally verified= to him through the laboratory test of faith. Take an illustration. Suppose an author on chemistry, who was also a historian, should include in his textbook a history of the science of chemistry. Now if a man puts his statements of chemical laws to an accurate laboratory test and finds them true, he has the presumption established that the history, which cannot be so tested, is also true. Yes, that illustration breaks down, but only at the point of =human fallibility= and =imperfection=. If that author were omniscient and infallible the illustration would be perfect. Now apply it to the Word. When a man, through the unfailing laboratory test of honest faith, finds that the statements that can be put to the test of experience are infallible truth, he has not simply the presumption but also the =absolute certainty= established that all its other statements are true, because the infallible and omniscient Author has given it to us as His Word. It comes to us with a "Thus saith the Lord" ringing in our ears from beginning to end, and not with the multiplied repetitions of "We may well suppose" of the scientific guessers. The man of scientific mind, therefore, will accept all the non-experiential statements of the Bible as infallible truth, including scientific and historical references and prophetic utterances. He will then accord the place of primacy to all understood scientific references of the Bible over all discoveries in the natural realm. He will do this by interpreting the few and fragmentary discoveries of finite and fallible man in the light of the statements that come to us as the Word of an infallible God, concluding that if there is any apparent inharmony, it lies in the partial discoveries or premature conclusions of scientists, rather than in any error of statement in the Bible. In other words, he will interpret science in the light of the Bible, and not the Bible in the light of science. And if at any time a harmonizing of scientific discoveries with the Bible seems impossible, he will withhold final conclusions until he has further scientific light, realizing that when he knows enough science he will then be able to understand the scientific references of the Bible, and the apparent inharmony will vanish. Multiplied illustrations of this are so familiar that it is scarcely necessary to elaborate on it, as many will occur to the reader who is at all familiar with the essential harmony between the Bible and all real scientific knowledge, and with the fact that a multitude of scientific discoveries have been made, only to find that the Bible made reference to them in the most accurate scientific terms many centuries before their discovery. A conclusion is now possible as to what attitude a man who has faith in an inerrant Bible will be compelled to take toward the theory of evolution. When he sees that the logic of evolution destroys every fundamental Scripture doctrine which he has already had verified to him by the Holy Spirit; when he learns that evolution is not only entirely unproven but even discredited by many competent men of science; and when he turns to the Bible and reads the statement repeated over and again that each species was created to reproduce only "after his kind"; he will be compelled to make a choice between evolution and an inerrant Bible, and, believing the Bible, he will reject evolution. Then when he recalls that to Eve, Satan advanced an unproven theory which assumed to interpret, but had the effect of denying, the Word of God, and then reflects that the theory of evolution does precisely the same thing, he will become suspicious that the "father of lies" is behind the whole evolutionary propaganda. Other theories that are unproven and discredited fall by their own weight. The persistence of this theory must be accounted for on the ground that it can be used to destroy faith in the infallibility of the Bible. It is quite true that there are many who say they believe the Bible and accept evolution also. But how those who are mentally sound and capable of logical consistency can accept two mutually exclusive propositions at the same time, it is impossible to understand. We will be compelled to let those who say they accept both the Bible and evolution explain how they do it--if they can! But meantime, if we take pains to make careful inquiry of such people, we shall find that in =every case= where logical and consistent thinking has any meaning whatever, a =choice= has been made between the Bible as an inerrant and infallible Book and the theory of evolution. It is quite possible for a man to hold the "scientific" or "historical" attitude toward the Bible, which makes it a human book marred by many errors, and believe in evolution at the same time; but the man who holds that attitude toward the Bible =does not believe it at all=! No one can accept the theory of evolution and the doctrine of an inerrant Bible at the same time. And yet the attempt is being very skilfully made by many leaders in the Schools today to camouflage this impossibility. A very recent article by Dr. Shailer Mathews on "Christ and Education" is a typical illustration. In the midst of the article Dr. Mathews frankly indicates his acceptance of evolution, because of which, he says, "the meaning of religion was enlarged" for him. Then he leaves the impression with the reader that the conclusions of modern science are to be taken without question, and also that our faith in Christ and the Bible are to be brought into harmony with these conclusions. That is, our faith must combine an acceptance of evolution with whatever attitude toward Christ and the Scriptures the evolutionary philosophy makes possible. This puts reason above Revelation and makes the scientific realm primary in its relation to the spiritual. The reader can judge, in the light of our previous thinking, whether this procedure is scientific or not. Then in speaking of the fact that the educated man as truly as the ignorant man needs the saving power of Christ, he says: But he must be saved as an educated man and not as an ignorant man. He cannot be forced to give up what he knows to be real. If he be told that Christian loyalty involves the abandonment of the assured results and methods of scientific investigation, he will refuse such loyalty. This implied charge is later on in the article made specific when he says that some schools "are refusing to let their students know the results of scientific investigation for fear lest such knowledge will ruin certain theological beliefs for which the schools stand"--a method he describes as putting a premium upon ignorance as a prerequisite for faith. The reader knows as well as the writer that the whole attitude of the Christian Church, and therefore of true Christian education, challenges those words and hurls them back at their author for proof. Both the implied and the direct accusations are utterly without foundation. Indeed, the thing Dr. Mathews charges is the one thing true Christian education does =not= do. When did the Church ever try to force a man, educated or ignorant, to give up what he knows to be facts in order to become a Christian? When was a man ever asked by Christian schools to choose between the assured results and methods of scientific investigation and loyalty to Christ? When has that institution which, above all others, has fought ignorance and fostered true scientific investigation used a method that put a premium on ignorance as a prerequisite for faith? It is not =facts= that the Church either fears or refuses to accept, but such an =interpretation= of them by evolutionists and rationalists as to deny the scientific accuracy and therefore the inerrancy of the Word of God. It is altogether beside the truth to intimate that the Church is fostering an education that has to withhold assured scientific facts for fear their knowledge would ruin faith in any theological beliefs whatever "for which the schools stand." It is not the =knowledge= of scientific facts that true Christian schools ever withhold, but such =theories= and =speculations= concerning their meaning as would destroy the schools as Christian institutions if the logic of them were followed to the end. And as for the Church ever abandoning the assured results and methods of scientific investigation, this is precisely the thing the Church is =fighting to maintain= against the efforts of evolutionists and rationalists. It is rather the =Schools= that have been abandoning scientific methods of investigation, thereby reaching "assured results" that invalidate not only the doctrine of an inerrant Bible, but every other fundamental doctrine of the Scriptures. Indeed, this is the very reason why the controversy between the Church and the Schools is now on, and Dr. Mathews' article is typical of the attempts that are being made to make it appear that faith in evolution and the Bible can be combined--an attempt toward which all believers in an infallible Book will always be irreconcilable. And this irreconcilable attitude is not without reason, but for the perfectly valid reason that the one who accepts evolution as a fact is utterly unscientific. For in the first place he accepts unproven assumptions and rationalistic speculations as demonstrated facts. And, in the next place, he thereby forces human interpretations of scientific facts to contradict the divinely verified doctrines of the Bible, thus thrusting confusion and contradiction between realms of truth which are in perfect harmony. And, still further, he interprets the Bible in the light(?) not simply of science but even of a false science, and thus compels unproven hypotheses to deny the truthfulness of the scientific and historical references of the Bible, thereby forcing into primacy a realm of truth that is not primary. And all of this because he refuses to follow the formula of the spiritual Textbook and put faith above reason and the Bible above science in his approach to truth. How can a man follow such methods and yet imagine that he is scientific? One more thing remains to be said before this argument is completed. We started out with an unproven, though self-evident premise. Turn back to the very first paragraph in the book and you will find that the falsity of the pantheistic theory was assumed but not proved. Its falsity was assumed on grounds that have come to light as the argument has proceeded, and that might easily be turned to account now as conclusive proofs. For example, to refer to one of them, the self-evident distinction between the realm which contains the Creator and that which contains His creation science proves to be a real divergence in kind by being compelled to cease investigation with scientific apparatus the moment the boundary line of the spiritual realm is reached. And if there is as real a distinction between God and His creation as this indicates, the doctrines of pantheism are impossible. But the theory of evolution fosters a doctrine of the "immanence of God" which is nothing but a modern form of pantheism. For example, Prof. Josiah Royce, of Harvard, has said: God is the spirit animating nature, the universal force which takes the myriad forms, heat, light, gravitation, electricity, and the like. And Prof. George B. Foster said: God is a symbol to designate the universe in its ideal achieving capacity. This is pantheism, pure and simple, for God and His created universe are not distinguished from each other. And this blots out the distinction between the natural and the spiritual realms. Realizing, therefore, that no matter how perfect a course of reasoning may be or how inevitable the conclusions resulting it all falls like a house of cards if the premise is false, it becomes necessary to determine whether pantheism is false or true, in order that we may know whether we started with a valid premise. Is pantheism true? One thing we know is true. The Bible clearly and sharply distinguishes between God and His creation. No one who reads the Bible can dissent from that statement. And pantheism absolutely denies that Bible distinction. It therefore immediately resolves itself into a question as to whether the Bible is true. This brings us straight back to Christ's formula--"If any man wills to do, he shall know." He who accepts the challenge of this formula will come to know, beyond all possibility of disproof, that neither pantheism, evolution, nor any other doctrine that denies or casts doubt on the infallibility of the Bible is true. He will know it because it is supernaturally verified to him in answer to his faith. This formula is the divine challenge to every form of unbelief in an inerrant Bible. There never has been an hour since Pentecost when the aggressive hurling of this challenge at defiant and destructive unbelief was more needed. And the whole Christian Church, backed by the Word of God, is hurling this challenge back into the teeth of the whole evolutionary camp today. Either be fair enough, be scientific enough, be honest enough, challenges the Church, to act upon Christ's formula and gain for yourselves that supernaturally verified knowledge which will make further faith in the evolutionary theory impossible, or else do not assume to pronounce any further on those truths of which you know nothing because you have been unwilling to take the means to find out what they are. Go and join the ranks of the other unbelievers and Bible-rejectors, taking your doubt-born theories with you as a reinforcement to their warfare against the Bible, and then the Church can fight you in the open and drive you to defeat with the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. If you are determined to destroy faith in the inerrancy of the Bible, at least be fair enough to come out from under the cover of "Christian education," and stop assuming to interpret in the light of evolution--a light that is darkness--those sublime doctrines which are at once the foundation and the message of the Church. Get out of the Christian schools, which were founded to strengthen, not to destroy, the faith of young people from Christian homes, and give place to those who believe the Book. Increasing hosts of Christian parents are too heart-broken over the invasion of their own homes by this destroying wolf in sheep's clothing to tolerate this situation much longer. They are asking, in the words of a Chicago newspaper editorial concerning the destructive teachings of Prof. George B. Foster, in the Chicago University Divinity School: Is there no place to assail Christianity but a divinity school? Is there no one to write infidel books except the professors of Christian theology? Is a theological seminary an appropriate place for a general massacre of Christian doctrine? And then the sentiment that follows in the next sentence is shared increasingly by multitudes in the Church in proportion as these destroyers become increasingly aggressive in their work of destruction. The editor continues: Mr. Mangasarian delivers infidel lectures every Sunday in Orchestra Hall and no one is shocked, but when the professed defenders of Christianity jump on it and assassinate it, the public--even the agnostic public, cannot but despise them. Either be scientific enough, cry believers to the evolutionists, to accept the challenge of Christ's formula with all its implications, or be honest enough to cease destroying the faith in an inerrant Bible you have sworn to defend but refuse to accept! The Church is also hurling the challenge of Christ's formula at every other form of aggressive unbelief. No unbeliever, from destructive Higher Critic to agnostic and infidel, has the shadow of a right to make contrary pronouncement on the inerrancy and infallible authority of the Bible, for he has refused to put Christ's word to the test,--his unbelief proves it,--and he is therefore utterly incapacitated for passing any judgment whatever on that Book which unfolds its meaning to faith alone. And as to the controversy between the Church and the Schools, the evolutionists must quit either evolution or the Christian schools, or the controversy can in no way be cured. For how can faith in an inerrant Bible and unbelief in its inerrancy abide in harmony in the same house? In the very nature of things, two groups who hold such absolutely antagonistic positions must either part company or continue the controversy born of the antagonism. The true Church always has believed, and always will believe, in an inerrant Word of God, and she cannot harbor within her ranks any group of people, no matter by what name they go, who do not take their stand without equivocation on that same ground. If reason for this intolerance is asked, it will appear in the light of some questions asked by Dr. Joseph Parker. These questions are: If the Bible is wrong in history, what guarantee is there that it is right in morals? If the Bible is not a reliable guide in facts, how do we know that it is a trustworthy guide in doctrine? However he may have arrived at his conclusions, it is extremely significant, in the light of these questions, that Dr. E. D. Burton, being willing to admit that the Bible is not infallible in history or in matters of science, has also concluded that it is not wholly consistent and therefore not ultimately and as a whole inerrant in the field of morals and religion. What reason more can the Church want to justify her for intolerance of a theory that will do this to a man's faith? Is it not correct reasoning to conclude that if one man suffers such a collapse of faith after accepting evolution, others are likely to suffer the same thing? And when the Church observes this collapse taking place in every quarter, and then discovers that back of it lies the theory of evolution, is she not justified for being intolerant of that thing which is gnawing at the vitals of her faith? What can she say else than that the teachers of evolution, at least in the Christian schools, must either give up evolution and come back to faith in an infallible Bible, or part company with the Church? It may be that one reason why the evolutionists are so loth to get out of company they do not belong in is because they fear that thereby they may lose their coveted reputation for scholarship. Prof. Howard W. Kellogg, formerly of Occidental College, hints as much when he says: Science has again and again set aside as untrustworthy the so-called discoveries of evolution, has compelled the great German evolutionist, Haeckel, to confess that his drawings of missing links were from imagination rather than from objects found, has driven him from his university chair, and has compelled him to admit that "Most modern investigators of science have come to the conclusion that the doctrine of evolution, and particularly of Darwinism, is in error and cannot be maintained,"--and yet in spite of such admissions from men recognized as authorities in their respective lines, the doctrine of evolution appears to rule as absolutely in the educational world as if it were not a moribund hypothesis, already discarded by many, and to be discarded by others when scientific evidence rather than reputation for scholarship is allowed the deciding voice. But whatever the actuating motive may be that has kept the evolutionists from giving up their unscholarly and unscientific theory, true believers in the Word long to see them do what Henry Drummond, that brilliant scientist, did before he died. On his deathbed he said to Sir William Dawson, as reported in this country in the writer's hearing by Dr. John Robertson directly from the lips of Dawson: I am going away back to the Book to believe it and receive it as I did at the first. I can live no longer on uncertainties. I am going back to the faith of the Word of God. When both the Church and the Schools consistently and sincerely take this attitude toward the Bible, the controversy will be ended in the one way in which the Church longs to see it end. _Printed in the United States of America_ =DIVINE DYNAMITE= =By J. E. CONANT, D.D.= A stirring address to the Church, pleading the need, the source, and the operation of power from on High, which she needs above the power of eloquence, of music, of sociability, of organization, and of money. =A REPRESENTATIVE TESTIMONIAL= "This order confirms my wire of even date, 'Please mail to-day fifty _Divine Dynamite_,' and best expresses what I think of the book since reading it." F.D.S., _Davenport, Iowa_ _Art Stock Covers, 20 cents, postpaid_ ------ "I have been sending this book around to people who, I thought, ought to read it."--_William Jennings Bryan_. The Other Side of Evolution _Its Effects and Fallacy_ =By Alexander Patterson, D.D.= With an introduction by the late George Frederick Wright, the eminent geologist of Oberlin. =CONTENTS= page Preface. Claims and Influence of Evolution vii Introduction. The Meaning of Evolution xix Chapter I Evolution Is an Unproved Theory 5 Chapter II Evolution of the Universe and Earth 17 Chapter III Evolution of Species 26 Chapter IV Evolution of Man 60 Chapter V Evolution Unscientific and Unphilosophical 112 Chapter VI Evolution and the Bible 120 Chapter VII Spiritual Effect of Evolution 137 _12mo, cloth binding, $1.06, postpaid_ "There is more happiness in bringing souls back to God than in three presidential nominations."--_William Jennings Bryan_ =THE BIBLE AND ITS ENEMIES= By WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN Written that the people shall not be robbed of their faith in God. "_For he that cometh to God must believe that He IS._"--_Heb. 11:6._ There is a great stir in the camp of the =Atheist=, the =Agnostic=, the =Higher Critic= and particularly the =Evolutionist=, because of this modern David--America's Gladstone--William Jennings Bryan! The heart of every true Christian rejoices because the enemies of our country and of our God and Saviour are so plainly pointed out by this bold and mighty champion of the Book. =Read--Distribute--Recommend= this attractive and compelling booklet. =Pastors, Educators, Students, Parents=--you cannot ignore this great message! _Art Stock Covers, 12mo, 25 cents, postpaid._ =WHAT ABOUT EVOLUTION?= By W. H. GRIFFITH THOMAS, D.D. Some thoughts on the relation of Evolution to the Bible and Christianity, by a former fellow of Oxford and Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto. _A neatly printed pamphlet, 10 cents, postpaid_ =THE BIBLE INSTITUTE COLPORTAGE ASS'N= 826 North La Salle Street, Chicago * * * * * Transcriber's note: Page 11 The word "none" has been changed to "no" in "none effect by a non-belligerent". Page 32 Duplicate "of" removed from "the doctrines of of the Deity". Page 88 Added a period to the end of the quote finishing with "... morals and religion". Page 91 The printer's name and adress were removed. They appear at the end of the advertisments. 
42466	----	FACTS AND FANCIES IN MODERN SCIENCE: STUDIES OF THE RELATIONS OF SCIENCE TO PREVALENT SPECULATIONS AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. _BEING THE LECTURES ON THE SAMUEL A. CROZER FOUNDATION IN CONNECTION WITH THE CROZER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, FOR 1881._ BY J. W. DAWSON, LL.D., F.R.S. ETC. PHILADELPHIA: AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 1420 CHESTNUT STREET. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1882, by the AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. WESTCOTT & THOMSON, _Stereotypers and Electrotypers, Philada_. PREFACE. The object before the mind of the author in preparing these Lectures was to present a distinct and rational view of the present relation of scientific thought to the religious beliefs of men, and especially to the Christian revelation. The attempt to make science, or speculations based on science, supersede religion is one of the prevalent fancies of our time, and pervades much of the popular literature of the day. That such attempts can succeed the author does not believe. They have hitherto given birth only to such abortions as Positivism, Nihilism, and Pessimism. There is, however, a necessary relation and parallelism of all truths, physical and spiritual; and it is useful to clear away the apparent antagonisms which proceed from partial and imperfect views, and to point out the harmony which exists between the natural and the spiritual--between what man can learn from the physical creation, and what has been revealed to him by the Spirit of God. To do this with as much fairness as possible, and with due regard to the present state of knowledge and to the most important difficulties that are likely to be met with by honest inquirers, is the purpose of the following pages. It is proper to add that, in order to give completeness to the discussion, it has been necessary to introduce, in some of the lectures, topics previously treated of by the author, in a similar manner, in publications bearing his name. J. W. D. APRIL, 1882. CONTENTS. PAGE LECTURE I. GENERAL RELATIONS OF SCIENCE AND AGNOSTIC SPECULATION 9 LECTURE II. THE SCIENCE OF LIFE AND MONISTIC EVOLUTION 47 LECTURE III. EVOLUTION AS TESTED BY THE RECORDS OF THE ROCKS 103 LECTURE IV. THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN 137 LECTURE V. NATURE AS A MANIFESTATION OF MIND 175 LECTURE VI. SCIENCE AND REVELATION 219 LECTURE I. GENERAL RELATIONS OF SCIENCE AND AGNOSTIC SPECULATION. The infidelity and the contempt for sacred and spiritual things which pervade so much of our modern literature are largely attributable to the prevalence of that form of philosophy which may be designated as Agnostic Evolution, and this in its turn is popularly regarded as a result of the pursuit of physical and natural science. The last conclusion is obviously only in part, if at all, correct, since it is well known that atheistic philosophical speculations were pursued, quite as boldly and ably as now, long before the rise of modern science. Still, it must be admitted that scientific discoveries and principles have been largely employed in our time to give form and consistency to ideas otherwise very dim and shadowy, and thus to rehabilitate for our benefit the philosophical dreams of antiquity in a more substantial shape. In this respect the natural sciences--or, rather, the facts and laws with which they are conversant--merely share the fate of other things. Nothing, however indifferent in itself, can come into human hands without acquiring thereby an ethical, social, political, or even religious, significance. An ounce of lead or a dynamite cartridge may be in itself a thing altogether destitute of any higher significance than that depending on physical properties; but let it pass into the power of man, and at once infinite possibilities of good and of evil cluster round it according to the use to which it may be applied. This depends on essential powers and attributes of man himself, of which he can no more be deprived than matter can be denuded of its inherent properties; and if the evils arising from misuse of these powers trouble us, we may at least console ourselves with the reflection that the possibility of such evils shows man to be a free agent, and not an automaton. All this is eminently applicable to science in its relation to agnostic speculations. The material of the physical and natural sciences consists of facts ascertained by the evidence of our senses, and for which we depend on the truthfulness of those senses and the stability of external nature. Science proceeds, by comparison of these facts and by inductive reasoning, to arrange them under certain general expressions or laws. So far all is merely physical, and need have no connection with our origin or destiny or relation to higher powers. But we ourselves are a part of the nature which we study; and we cannot study it without more or less thinking our own thoughts into it. Thus we naturally begin to inquire as to origins and first causes, and as to the source of the energy and order which we perceive; and to these questions the human mind demands some answer, either actual or speculative. But here we enter into the domain of religious thought, or that which relates to a power or powers beyond and above nature. Whatever forms our thoughts on such subjects may take, these depend, not directly on the facts of science, but on the reaction of our minds on these facts. They are truly anthropomorphic. It has been well said that it is as idle to inquire as to the origin of such religious ideas as to inquire as to the origin of hunger and thirst. Given the man, they must necessarily exist. Now, whatever form these philosophical or religious ideas may take--whether that of Agnosticism or Pantheism or Theism--science, properly so called, has no right to be either praised or blamed. Its material may be used, but the structure is the work of the artificer himself. It is well, however, to carry with us the truth that this border-land between science and religion is one which men cannot be prevented from entering; but what they may find therein depends very much on themselves. Under wise guidance it may prove to us an Eden, the very gate of heaven, and we may acquire in it larger and more harmonious views of both the seen and the unseen, of science and of religion. But, on the other hand, it may be found to be a battle-field or a bedlam, a place of confused cries and incoherent ravings, and strewn with the wrecks of human hopes and aspirations. There can be no question that the more unpleasant aspect of the matter is somewhat prevalent in our time, and that we should, if possible, understand the causes of the conflict and the confusion that prevail, and the way out of them. To do this it will be necessary first to notice some of the incidental or extraneous causes of difficulty and strife, and then to inquire more in detail as to the actual bearing of the scientific knowledge of nature on Agnosticism. One fruitful cause of difficulty in the relations of science and religion is to be found in the narrowness and incapacity of well-meaning Christians who unnecessarily bring the doctrines of natural and revealed religion into conflict, by misunderstanding the one or the other, or by attaching obsolete scientific ideas to Holy Scripture, and identifying them with it in points where it is quite non-committal. Much mischief is also done by a prevalent habit of speaking of all, or nearly all, the votaries of science as if they were irreligious. A second cause is to be found in the extravagant speculations indulged in by the adherents of certain philosophical systems. Such speculations often far overpass the limits of actual scientific knowledge, and are yet paraded before the ignorant as if they were legitimate results of science, and so become irretrievably confounded with it in the popular mind. A third influence, more closely connected with science itself, arises from the rapidity of the progress of discovery and of the practical applications of scientific facts and principles. This has unsettled the minds of men, and has given them the idea that nothing is beyond their reach. There is thus a vague notion that science has overcome so many difficulties, and explained so many mysteries, that it may ultimately satisfy all the wants of man and leave no scope for religious belief. Those who know the limitations of our knowledge of material things may not share this delusion; but there is reason to fear that many, even of scientific men, are carried away by it, and it widely affects the minds of general readers. Again, science has in the course of its growth become divided into a great number of small specialties, each pursued ardently by its own votaries. This is beneficial in one respect; for much more can be gained by men digging downward, each on his own vein of valuable ore, than by all merely scraping the surface. But the specialist, as he descends fathom after fathom into his mine, however rich and rare the gems and metals he may discover, becomes more and more removed from the ordinary ways of men, and more and more regardless of the products of other veins as valuable as his own. The specialist, however profound he may become in the knowledge of his own limited subject, is on that very account less fitted to guide his fellow-men in the pursuit of general truth. When he ventures to the boundaries between his own and other domains of truth, or when he conceives the idea that his own little mine is the sole deposit of all that requires to be known, he sometimes makes grave mistakes; and these pass current for a time as the dicta of high scientific authority. Lastly, the lowest influence of all is that which sometimes regulates what may be termed the commercial side of science. Here the demand is very apt to control the supply. New facts and legitimate conclusions cannot be produced with sufficient rapidity to satisfy the popular craving, or they are not sufficiently exciting to compete with other attractions. Science has then to enter the domain of imagination, and the last new generalization--showy and specious, but perhaps baseless as the plot of the last new novel--brings grist to the mill of the "scientist" and his publisher. Only one permanent and final remedy is possible for these evils, and that is a higher moral tone and more thorough scientific education on the part of the general public. Until this can be secured, true science is sure to be surrounded with a mental haze of vague hypotheses clothed in ill-defined language, and which is mistaken by the multitude for science itself. Yet true science should not be held responsible for this, except in so far as its material is used to constitute the substance of the pseudo-gnosis which surrounds it. Science is in this relation the honest householder whose goods may be taken by thieves and applied to bad uses, or the careful amasser of wealth which may be dissipated by spendthrifts. It may be said that if these statements are true, the ordinary reader is helpless. How can he separate the true from the false? Must he resign himself to the condition of one who either believes on mere authority or refuses to believe anything? or must he adopt the attitude of the Pyrrhonist who thinks that anything may be either true or false? But it is true, nevertheless, that common sense may suffice to deliver us from much of the pseudo-science of our time, and to enable us to understand how little reason there is for the conflicts promoted by mere speculation between science and other departments of legitimate thought and inquiry. In illustrating this, we may in the present lecture consider that form of sceptical philosophy which in our time is the most prevalent, and which has the most specious air of dependence on science. This is the system of Agnosticism combined with evolution of which Mr. Herbert Spencer is the most conspicuous advocate in the English-speaking world. This philosophy deals with two subjects--the cause or origin of the universe and of things therein, and the method of the progress of all from the beginning until now. Spencer sees nothing in the first of these but mere force or energy, nothing in the second but a spontaneous evolution. All beyond these is not only unknown, but unknowable. The theological and philosophical shortcomings of this doctrine have been laid bare by a multitude of critics, and I do not propose to consider it in these relations so much as in relation to science, which has much to say with respect to both force and evolution. An agnostic is literally one who does not know; and, were the word used in its true and literal sense, Agnosticism would of necessity be opposed to science, since science is knowledge and quite incompatible with the want of it. But the modern agnostic does not pretend to be ignorant of the facts and principles of science. What he professes not to know is the existence of any power above and beyond material nature. He goes a little farther, however, than mere absence of knowledge. He holds that of God nothing can be known; or he may put it a little more strongly, in the phrase of his peculiar philosophy, by saying that the existence of a God or of creation by divine power is "unthinkable." It is in this that he differs from the old-fashioned and now extinct atheist, who bluntly denied the existence of a God. The modern agnostic assumes an attitude of greater humility and disclaims the actual denial of God. Yet he practically goes farther, in asserting the impossibility of knowing the existence of a Divine Being; and in taking this farther step Agnosticism does more to degrade the human reason and to cut it off from all communion with anything beyond mere matter and force, than does any other form of philosophy, ancient or modern. Yet in this Agnosticism there is in one point an approximation to truth. If there is a God, he cannot be known directly and fully, and his plans and procedure must always be more or less incomprehensible. The writer of the book of Job puts this as plainly as any modern agnostic in the passage beginning "Canst thou by searching find out God?"--literally, "Canst thou sound the depths of God?"--and a still higher authority informs us that "no man hath seen God"--that is, known him as we know material things. In short, absolutely and essentially God is incomprehensible; but this is no new discovery, and the mistake of the agnostic lies in failing to perceive that the same difficulty stands in the way of our perfectly knowing anything whatever. We say that we know things when we mean that we know them in their properties, relations, or effects. In this sense the knowledge of God is perfectly possible. It is impossible only in that other sense of the word "know"--if it can have such a sense--in which we are required to know things in their absolute essence and thoroughly. Thus the term "agnostic" contains an initial fallacy in itself; and this philosophy, like many others, rests, in the first instance, on a mere jugglery of words. The real question is, "Is there a God who manifests himself to us mediately and practically?" and this is a question which we cannot afford to set aside by a mere play on the meanings of the verb "to know." If, however, any man takes this position and professes to be incapable of knowing whether or not there is any power above and behind material things, it will be necessary to begin with the very elements of knowledge, and to inquire if there is anything whatever that he really knows and believes. Let us ask him if he can subscribe to the simple creed expressed in the words "I am, I feel, I think." Should he deny these propositions, then there is no basis left on which to argue. Should he admit this much of belief, he has abandoned somewhat of his agnostic position; for it would be easy to show that in even uttering the pronoun "I" he has committed himself to the belief in the unknowable. What is the _ego_ which he admits? Is it the material organism or any one of its organs or parts? or is it something distinct, of which the organism is merely the garment, or outward manifestation? or is the organism itself anything more than a bundle of appearances partially known and scarcely understood by that which calls itself "I"? Who knows? And if our own personality is thus inscrutable, if we can conceive of it neither as identical with the whole or any part of the organism nor as existing independently of the organism, we should begin our Agnosticism here, and decline to utter the pronoun "I" as implying what we cannot know. Still, as a matter of faith, we must hold fast to the proposition "I exist" as the only standpoint for science, philosophy, or common life. If we are asked for evidence of this faith, we can appeal only to our consciousness of effects which imply the existence of the _ego_, which we thus have to admit or suppose before we can begin to prove even its existence. This fact of the mystery of our own existence is full of material for thought. It is in itself startling--even appalling. We feel that it is a solemn, a dreadful, thing to exist, and to exist in that limitless space and that eternal time which we can no more understand than we can our own constitution, though our belief in their existence is inevitable. Nor can we divest ourselves of anxious thoughts as to the source, tendencies, and end of our own being. Here, in short, we already reach the threshold of that dread unknown future and its possibilities, the realization of which by hope, fear, and imagination constitutes, perhaps, our first introduction to the unseen world as distinguished from the present world of sense. The agnostic may smile if he pleases at religion as a puerile fancy, but he knows, like other men, that the mere consciousness of existence necessarily links itself with a future--nay, unending--existence, and that any being with this consciousness of futurity must have at least a religion of hope and fear. In this we find an intelligible reason for the universality of religious ideas in relation to a future life. Even where this leads to beliefs that may be called superstitious, it is more reasonable than Agnosticism; for it is surely natural that a being inscrutable by himself should be led to believe in the existence of other things equally inscrutable, but apparently related to himself. But the thinking "I" dwells in the midst of what we term external objects. In a certain sense it treats the parts of its own bodily organism as if they were things external to it, speaking of "my hand," "my head," as if they were its property. But there are things practically infinite beyond the organism itself. We call them objects or things, but they are only appearances; and we know only their relations to ourselves and to each other. Their essence, if they have any, is inscrutable. We say that the appearances indicate matter and energy, but what these are essentially we know not. We reduce matter to atoms, but it is impossible for us to have any conception of an atom or of the supposed ether, whether itself in some sense atomic or not, including such atoms. Our attempts to form rational conceptions of atoms resolve themselves into complex conjectures as to vortices of ethers and the like, of which no one pretends to have any distinct mental picture; yet on this basis of the incomprehensible rests all our physical science, the first truths in which are really matters of pure faith in the existence of that which we cannot understand. Yet all men would scoff at the agnostic who on this account should express unbelief in physical science. Let us observe here, further, that since the mysterious and inscrutable "I" is surrounded with an equally mysterious and inscrutable universe, and since the _ego_ and the external world are linked together by indissoluble relations, we are introduced to certain alternatives as to origins. Either the universe or "nature" is a mere phantom conjured up by the _ego_, or the _ego_ is a product of the universe, or both are the result of some equally mysterious power beyond us and the material world. Neither of these suppositions is absurd or unthinkable; and, whichever of them we adopt, we are again introduced to what may be termed a religion as well as a philosophy. On one view, man becomes a god to himself; on another, nature becomes his god; on the third, a Supreme Being, the Creator of both. All three religions exist in the world in a vast variety of forms, and it is questionable if any human being does not more or less give credence to one or the other. Scientific men, even when they think proper to call themselves idealists, must reject the first of the above alternatives, since they cannot doubt the objective existence of external nature, and they know that its existence dates from a time anterior to our possible existence as human beings. They may hold to either of the others; and, practically, the minds of students of science are divided between the idea of a spontaneous evolution of all things from self-existent matter and force, and that of the creation of all by a self-existent, omnipotent, and all-wise Creator. From certain points of view, it may be of no consequence whether a scientific man holds one or other of these views. Self-existent force or power, capable of spontaneous inception of change, and of orderly and infallible development according to laws of its own imposition or enactment, which is demanded on the one hypothesis, scarcely differs from the conception of an intelligent Creator demanded on the other, while it is, to say the least, equally incomprehensible. It is, besides, objectionable to science, on the ground that it requires us to assume properties in matter and energy quite at variance with the results of experience. The remarkable alternative presented by Tyndall in his Belfast Address well expresses this: "Either let us open our doors freely to the conception of creative acts, or, abandoning them, let us radically change our notions of matter." The expression "creative acts" here is a loose and not very accurate one for the operation of creative power. The radical change in "our notions of matter" involves an entire reversal of all that science knows of its essential properties. This being understood, the sentence is a fair expression of the dilemma in which the agnostic and the materialist find themselves. Between the two hypotheses above stated there is, however, one material and vital difference, depending on the nature of man himself. The universe does not consist merely of insensate matter and force and automatic vitality; there happens to be in it the rational and consciously responsible being man. To attribute to him an origin from mere matter and force is not merely to attach to them a fictitious power and significance: it is also to reject the rational probability that the original cause must be at least equal to the effects produced, and to deprive ourselves of all communion and sympathy with nature. Further, wherever the "presence and potency" of human reason resides, there seems no reason to prevent our searching for and finding it in the only way in which we can know anything, in its properties and effects. The dogma of Agnosticism, it is true, refuses to permit this search after God, but it does so with as little reason as any of those self-constituted authorities that demand belief without questioning. Nay, it has the offensive peculiarity that in the very terms in which it issues its prohibition it contradicts itself. The same oracle which asserts that "the power which the universe manifests to us is wholly inscrutable" affirms also that "we must inevitably commit ourselves to the hypothesis of a first cause." Thus we are told that a power which is "manifest" is also "inscrutable," and that we must "commit ourselves" to a belief in a "first cause" which on the hypothesis cannot be known to exist. This may be philosophy of a certain sort, but it certainly should not claim kinship with science. Perhaps it may be well here to place in comparison with each other the doctrine of the agnostic philosophy as expounded by Herbert Spencer, and that of Paul of Tarsus--an older, but certainly a not less acute, thinker--and we may refer to their utterances respecting the origin of the universe. Spencer says: "The verbally intelligent suppositions respecting the origin of the universe are three: (1) It is self-existent; (2) It is self-created; (3) It is created by an external agency." On these it may be remarked that the second is scarcely even "verbally intelligent;" it seems to be a contradiction in terms. The third admits of an important modification, which was manifest to Spinosa if not to Spencer--namely, that the Creator may--nay, must--be not merely "external," but within the universe as well. If there is a God, he must be _in_ the universe as a pervading power, and in every part of it, and must not be shut out from his own work. This mistaken conception of God as building himself out of his own universe and acting on it by external force is both irrational and unscientific, being, for example, quite at variance with the analogy of force and life. Rightly understood, therefore, Spencer's alternatives resolve themselves into two--either the universe is self-existent, or it is the work of a self-existent Creator pervading all things with his power. Of these, Spencer prefers the first. Paul, on the other hand, referring to the mental condition of the civilized heathens of his time, affirms that rationally they could believe only in the hypothesis of creation. He says of God: "His invisible things, even his eternal power and divinity, can be perceived (by the reason), being understood by the things that are made." Let us look at these rival propositions. Is the universe self-existent, or does it show evidence of creative power and divinity? The doctrine that the universe is self-existent may be understood in different ways. It may mean either an endless succession of such changes as we now see in progress, or an eternity of successive cycles proceeding through the course of geological ages and ever returning into themselves. The first is directly contrary to known facts in the geological history of the earth, and cannot be maintained by any one. The second would imply that the known geological history is merely a part of one great cycle of an endless series, and of which an infinite number have already passed away. It is evident that this infinite succession of cycles is quite as incomprehensible as any other infinite succession of things or events. But, waiving this objection, we have the alternative either that all the successive cycles are exactly alike--which could not be, in accordance with evolution, nor with the analogy of other natural cycles--or there must have been a progression in the successive cycles. But this last supposition would involve an uncaused beginning somewhere, and this of such a character as to determine all the successive cycles and their progress; which would again be contrary to the hypothesis of self-existence. It is useless, however, to follow such questions farther, since it is evident that this hypothesis accounts for nothing and would involve us in absolute confusion. Let us turn now to Paul's statement. This has the merit, in the first place, of expressing a known fact--namely, that men do infer power and divinity from nature. But is this a mere superstition, or have they reason for it? If the universe be considered as a vast machine exceeding all our powers of calculation in its magnitude and complexity, it seems in the last degree absurd to deny that it presents evidence of "power." Dr. Carpenter, in a recent lecture, illustrates the position of the agnostic in this respect by supposing him to examine the machinery of a great mill, and, having found that this is all set in motion by a huge iron shaft proceeding from a brick wall, to suppose that this shaft is self-acting, and that there is no cause of motion beyond. But when we consider the variety and the intricacy of nature, the unity and the harmony of its parts, and the adaptation of these to an incalculable number of uses, we find something more than power. There is a fitting together of things in a manner not only above our imitation, but above our comprehension. To refer this to mere chance or to innate tendencies or potencies of things we feel to be but an empty form of words; consequently, we are forced to admit superhuman contrivance in nature, or what Paul terms "divinity." Further, since the history of the universe goes back farther than we can calculate, and as we can know nothing beyond the First Cause, we infer that the Power and Divinity which we have ascertained in nature must be "eternal." Again, since the creative power must at some point in past time have spontaneously begun to act, we regard it as a "living" power, which is the term elsewhere used by Paul in expressing the idea of "personality" as held by theologians. Lastly, if everything that we know thus testifies to an eternal power and divinity, to maintain that we can know nothing of this First Cause must be simply nonsense, unless we are content to fall back on absolute nihilism, and hold that we know nothing whatever, either relatively or absolutely; but in this case not only is science dethroned, but reason herself is driven from her seat, and there is nothing left for us to discuss. Paul's idea is thus perfectly clear and consistent, and it is not difficult to see that common sense must accept this doctrine of an Eternal Living Power and Divinity in preference to the hypothesis of Spencer. So far we have considered the general bearing of agnostic and theistic theories on our relations to nature; but if we are to test these theories fully by scientific considerations, we must look a little more into details. The existences experimentally or inductively known to science may be grouped under three heads--matter, energy, and law; and each of these has an independent testimony to give with reference to its origin and its connection with a higher creative power. Matter, it is true, occupies a somewhat equivocal place in the agnostic philosophy. According to Spencer, it is "built up or extracted from experiences of force," and it is only by force that it "demonstrates itself to us as existing." This is true; but that which "demonstrates itself to us as existing" must exist, in whatever way the demonstration is made, and Spencer does not, in consequence of the lack of direct evidence, extend his Agnosticism to matter, though he might quite consistently do so. In any case, science postulates the existence of matter. Further, science is obliged to conceive of matter as composed of atoms, and of atoms of different kinds; for atoms differ in weight and in chemical properties, and these differences are to us ultimate, for they cannot be changed. Thus science and practical life are tied down to certain predetermined properties of matter. We may, it is true, in future be able to reduce the number of kinds of matter, by finding that some bodies believed to be simple are really compound; but this does not affect the question in hand. As to the origin of the diverse properties of atoms, only two suppositions seem possible: either in some past period they agreed to differ and to divide themselves into different kinds suitable in quantity and properties to make up the universe, or else matter in its various kinds has been skilfully manufactured by a creative power. But there is a scientific way in which matter may be resolved into force. An iron knife passed through a powerful magnetic current is felt to be resisted, as if passing through a solid substance, and this resistance is produced merely by magnetic attraction. Why may it not be so with resistance in general? To give effect to such a supposition, and to reconcile it with the facts of chemistry and of physics, it is necessary to suppose that the atoms of matter are merely minute vortices or whirlwinds set up in an ethereal medium, which in itself, and when at rest, does not possess any of the properties of matter. That such an ethereal medium exists we have reason to believe from the propagation of light and heat through space, though we know little, except negatively, of its properties. Admitting, however, its existence, the setting up in it of the various kinds of vortices constituting the atoms of different kinds of matter is just as much in need of a creative power to initiate it as the creation of matter out of nothing would be. Besides this, we now have to account for the existence of the ether itself; and here we have the disadvantage that this substance possesses none of the properties of ordinary matter except mere extension; that, in so far as we know, it is continuous, and not molecular; and that, while of the most inconceivable tenuity, it transmits vibrations in a manner similar to that of a body of the extremest solidity. It would seem, also, to be indefinite in extent and beyond the control of the ordinary natural forces. In short, ether is as incomprehensible as Deity; and if we suppose it to have instituted spontaneously the different kinds of matter, we have really constituted it a god, which is what, in a loose way, some ancient mythologies actually did. We may, however, truly say that this modern scientific conception of the practically infinite and all-pervading ether, the primary seat of force, brings us nearer than ever before to some realization of the Spiritual Creator. But to ether both science and Agnosticism must superadd energy--the entirely immaterial something which moves ether itself. The rather crude scientific notion that certain forces are "modes of motion" perhaps blinds us somewhat to the mystery of energy. Even if we knew no other form of force than heat, which moves masses of matter or atoms, it would be in many respects an inscrutable thing. But as traversing the subtle ether in such forms as radiant heat, light, chemical force, and electricity, energy becomes still more mysterious. Perhaps it is even more so in what seems to be one of its primitive forms--that of gravitation, where it connects distant bodies apparently without any intervening medium. Facts of this kind appear to bring us still nearer to the conception of an all-pervading immaterial creative power. But perhaps what may be termed the determinations of force exhibit this still more clearly, as a very familiar instance may show. Our sun--one of a countless number of similar suns--is to us the great centre of light and heat, sustaining all processes, whether merely physical or vital, on our planet. It was a grand conception of certain old religions to make the sun the emblem of God, though sun-worship was a substitution of the creature for the Creator, and would have been dispelled by modern discovery. But our sun is not merely one of countless suns, some of them of greater magnitude, but it is only a temporary depository of a limited quantity of energy, ever dissipating itself into space, calculable as to its amount and duration, and known to depend for its existence on gravitative force. We may imagine the beginning of such a luminary in the collision of great masses of matter rushing together under the influence of gravitation, and causing by their impact a conflagration capable of enduring for millions of years. Yet our imagining such a rude process for the kindling of the sun will go a very little way in accounting for all the mechanism of the solar system and things therein. Further, it raises new questions as to the original condition of matter. If it was originally in one mass, whence came the incalculable power by which it was rent into innumerable suns and systems? If it was once universally diffused in boundless space, when and how was the force of gravity turned on, and what determined its action in such a way as to construct the existing universe? This is only one of the simplest and baldest possible views of the intricate determinations of force displayed in the universe, yet it may suffice to indicate the necessity of a living and determining First Cause. The fact that all the manifestations of force are regulated by law by no means favors the agnostic view. The laws of nature are merely mental generalizations of our own, and, so far as they go, show a remarkable harmony between our mental nature and that manifested in the universe. They are not themselves powers capable of producing effects, but merely express what we can ascertain of uniformity of action in nature. The law of gravitation, for example, gives no clew to the origin of that force, but merely expresses its constant mode of action, in whatever way that may have been determined at first. Nor are natural laws decrees of necessity. They might have been otherwise--nay, many of them may be otherwise in parts of the universe inaccessible to us, or they may change in process of time; for the period over which our knowledge extends may be to the plans of the Creator like the lifetime of some minute insect which might imagine human arrangements of no great permanence to be of eternal duration. Unless the laws of nature were constant, in so far as our experience extends, we could have no certain basis either for science or for practical life. All would be capricious and uncertain, and we could calculate on nothing. Law thus adapts the universe to be the residence of rational beings, and nothing else could. Viewed in this way, we see that natural laws must be, in their relation to a Creator, voluntary limitations of his power in certain directions for the benefit of his creatures. To secure this end, nature must be a perfect machine, all the parts of which are adjusted for permanent and harmonious action. It may perhaps rather be compared to a vast series of machines, each running independently like the trains on a railway, but all connected and regulated by an invisible guidance which determines the time and the distance of each, and the manner in which the less urgent and less important shall give place to others. Even this does not express the whole truth; for the harmony of nature must be connected with constant change and progress toward higher perfection. Does this conception of natural law give us any warrant for the idea that the universe is a product of chance? Is it not the highest realization of all that we can conceive of the plans of superhuman intelligence? The stupid notion--still lingering in certain quarters--that when anything has been referred to a natural law or to a secondary cause under law, God may be dispensed with in relation to that thing, is merely a survival of the superstition that divine action must be of the nature of a capricious interference. The true theistic conception of law is that already stated, of a voluntary limitation of divine power in the interest of a material cosmos and its intelligent inhabitants. Nor is the permanence of law dependent on necessity or on mere mechanical routine, but on the unchanging will of the Legislator; while the countless varieties and vicissitudes of nature depend, not on caprice or on accidental interference, but on the interactions and adjustments of laws of different grades, and so numerous and varied in their scope and application and in the combinations of which they are capable that it is often impossible for finite minds to calculate their results. If, now, in conclusion, we are asked to sum up the hypotheses as to the origin of natural laws and of the properties and determinations of matter and force, we may do this under the following heads: 1. Absolute creation by the will of a Supreme Intelligence, self-existent and omnipotent. This may be the ultimate fact lying behind all materials, forces, and laws known to science. 2. Mediate creation, or the making of new complex products with material already created and under laws previously existing. This is applicable not so much to the primary origin of things as to their subsequent determinations and modifications. 3. Both of the above may be included under the expression "creation by law," implying the institution from the first of fixed laws or modes of action not to be subsequently deviated from. 4. Theistic evolution, or the gradual development of the divine plans by the apparently spontaneous interaction of things made. This is universally admitted to occur in the minor modifications of created things, though of course it can have no place as a mode of explaining actual origins, and it must be limited within the laws of nature established by the Creator. Practically, it might be difficult to make any sharp distinctions between such evolution and mediate creation. 5. Agnostic and monistic evolution, which hold the spontaneous origination and differentiation of things out of primitive matter and force, self-existent or fortuitous. The monistic form of this hypothesis assumes one primary substance or existence potentially embracing all subsequent developments. These theories are, of course, not all antagonistic to one another. They resolve themselves into two groups, a theistic and an atheistic. The former includes the first four; the latter, the fifth. Any one who believes in God may suppose a primary creation of matter and energy, a subsequent moulding and fashioning of them mediately and under natural law, and also a gradual evolution of many new things by the interaction of things previously made. This complex idea of the origin of things seems, indeed, to be the rational outcome of Theism. It is also the idea which underlies the old record in the book of Genesis, where we have first an absolute creation, and then a series of "makings" and "placings," and of things "bringing forth" other things, in the course of the creative periods. On the other hand, Agnosticism postulates primary force or forces self-existent and including potentially all that is subsequently evolved from them. The only way in which it approximates to theism is in its extreme monistic form, where the one force or power supposed to underlie all existence is a sort of God shorn of personality, will, and reason. The actual relations of these opposing theories to science cannot be better explained than by a reference to the words of a leading monist, whose views we shall have to notice in the next lecture. "If," says Haeckel, "anybody feels the necessity of representing the origin of matter as the work of a supernatural creative force independent of matter itself, I would remind him that the idea of an immaterial force creating matter in the first instance is an article of faith which has nothing to do with science. Where faith begins, science ends." Precisely so, if only we invert the last sentence and say, "Where science ends, faith begins." It is only by faith that we know of any force, or even of the atoms of matter themselves, and in like manner it is "by faith we know that the creative ages have been constituted by the word of God."[1] The only difference is that the monist has faith in the potency of nothing to produce something, or of something material to exist for ever and to acquire at some point of time the power spontaneously to enter on the process of development; while the theist has faith in a primary intelligent Will as the Author of all things. The latter has this to confirm his faith--that it accords with what we know of the inertia of matter, of the constancy of forces, and of the permanence of natural law, and is in harmony with the powers of the one free energy we know--that of the human will. FOOTNOTE: [1] Epistle to Hebrews, xi. 3. LECTURE II. THE SCIENCE OF LIFE AND MONISTIC EVOLUTION. In the last lecture we have noticed the general relations of agnostic speculations with natural science, and have exposed their failure to account for natural facts and laws. We may now inquire into their mode of dealing with the phenomena of life, with regard to the supposed spontaneous evolution of which, and its development up to man himself, so many confident generalizations have been put forth by the agnostic and monistic philosophy. In the earlier history of modern natural science, the tendency was to take nature as we find it, without speculation as to the origin of living things, which men were content to regard as direct products of creative power. But at a very early period--and especially after the revelations of geology had disclosed a succession of ascending dynasties of life--such speculations, which, independently of science, had commended themselves to the poetical and philosophical minds of antiquity, were revived. In France more particularly, the theories of Buffon, Lamarck, and Geoffroy St. Hilaire opened up these exciting themes, and they might even then have attained to the importance they have since acquired but for the great and judicial intellect of Cuvier, which perceived their futility and guided the researches of naturalists into other and more profitable fields. The next stimulus to such hypotheses was given by the progress of physiology, and especially by researches into the embryonic development of animals and plants. Here it was seen that there are homologies and likenesses of plan linking organisms with each other, and that in the course of their development the more complex creatures pass through stages corresponding to the adult condition of lower forms. The questions raised by the geographical distribution of animals, as ascertained by the numerous expeditions and scientific travellers of modern times, tended in the same direction. The way was thus prepared for the broad generalizations of Darwin, who, seizing on the idea of artificial selection as practised by breeders of animals and plants, and imagining that something similar takes place in the natural struggle for existence, saw in this a plausible solution for the question of the progress and the variety of organized beings. The original Darwinian theory was soon found to be altogether insufficient to account for the observed facts, because of the tendency of the bare struggle for existence to produce degradation rather than elevation; because of the testimony of geology to the fact that introduction of new species takes place in times of expansion rather than of struggle; because of the manifest tendency of the breeds produced by artificial selection to become infertile and die out in proportion to their deviation from the original types; and because of the difficulty of preventing such breeds from reverting to the original forms, which seem in all cases to be perfectly equilibrated in their own parts and adapted to external nature, so that varieties tend, as if by gravitative law, to fall back into the original moulds. A great variety of other considerations--as those of sexual selection, reproductive acceleration and retardation, periods of more and less rapid evolution, innate tendency to vary at particular times and in particular circumstances--have been imported into the original doctrine. Thus the original Darwinism is a thing of the past, even in the mind of its great author, though it has proved the fruitful parent of a manifold progeny of allied ideas which continue to bear its name. In this respect Darwinism is itself amenable to the law of evolution, and has been continually changing its form under the influence of the controversial struggles which have risen around it. Darwinism was not necessarily atheistic or agnostic. Its author was content to assume a few living beings or independent forms to begin with, and did not propose to obtain them by any spontaneous action of dead matter, nor to account for the primary origin of life, still less of all material things. In this he was sufficiently humble and honest; but the logical weakness of his position was at once apparent. If creation was needed to give a few initial types, it might have produced others also. The followers of Darwin, therefore, more especially in Germany, at once pushed the doctrine back into Agnosticism and Monism, giving to it a greater logical consistency, but bringing it into violent conflict with theism and with common sense. Darwin himself early perceived that his doctrine, if true, must apply to man--in so far, at least, as his bodily frame is concerned. Man is in this an animal, and closely related to other animals. To have claimed for him a distinct origin would have altogether discredited the theory, though it might be admitted that, man having appeared, his free volition and his moral and social instincts would at once profoundly modify the course of the evolution. On the other hand, the gulf which separates the reason and the conscience of man from instinct and the animal intelligence of lower creatures opposed an almost impassable barrier to the union of man with lower animals; and the attempt to bridge this gulf threatened to bring the theory into a deadly struggle with the moral, social, and religious instincts of mankind. In face of this difficulty, Darwin and most of his followers adopted the more daring course of maintaining the evolution of the whole man from lower forms, and thereby entered into a warfare, which still rages, with psychology, ethics, philology, and theology. It is easy for shallow evolutionists unaware of the tendencies of their doctrine, or for latitudinarian churchmen careless as to the maintenance of truth if only outward forms are preserved and comprehension secured, to overlook or make light of these antagonisms, but science and common sense alike demand a severe adherence to truth. It becomes, therefore, very important to ascertain to what extent we are justified in adopting the agnostic evolution in its relation to life and man on scientific grounds. Perhaps this may best be done by reviewing the argument of Haeckel in his work on the evolution of man--one of the ablest, and at the same time most thorough, expositions of monistic evolution as applied to lower animals and to men. Ernst Haeckel is an eminent comparative anatomist and physiologist, who has earned a wide and deserved reputation by his able and laborious studies of the calcareous sponges, the radiolarians, and other low forms of life. In his work on _The Evolution of Man_ he applies this knowledge to the solution of the problem of the origin of humanity, and sets himself not only to illustrate, but to "prove," the descent of our species from the simplest animal types, and even to overwhelm with scorn every other explanation of the appearance of man except that of spontaneous evolution. He is not merely an evolutionist, but what he terms a "monist," and the monistic philosophy, as defined by him, includes certain negations and certain positive principles of a most comprehensive and important character. It implies the denial of all spiritual or immaterial existence. Man is to the monist merely a physiological machine, and nature is only a greater self-existing and spontaneously-moving aggregate of forces. Monism can thus altogether dispense with a Creative Will as originating nature, and adopts the other alternative of self-existence or causelessness for the universe and all its phenomena. Again, the monistic doctrine necessarily implies that man, the animal, the plant, and the mineral are only successive stages of the evolution of the same primordial matter, constituting thus a connected chain of being, all the parts of which sprang spontaneously from each other. Lastly, as the admixture of primitive matter and force would itself be a sort of dualism, Haeckel regards these as ultimately one, and apparently resolves the origin of the universe into the operation of a self-existing energy having in itself the potency of all things. After all, this may be said to be an approximation to the idea of a Creator, but not a living and willing Creator. Monism is thus not identical with pantheism, but is rather a sort of atheistic monotheism, if such a thing is imaginable; and vindicates the assertion attributed to a late lamented physical philosopher--that he had found no atheistic philosophy which had not a God somewhere. Haeckel's own statement of this aspect of his philosophy is somewhat interesting. He says: "The opponents of the doctrine of evolution are very fond of branding the monistic philosophy grounded upon it as 'materialism' by comparing _philosophical_ materialism with the wholly different and censurable _moral_ materialism. Strictly, however, our 'monism' might as accurately or as inaccurately be called spiritualism as materialism. The real materialistic philosophy asserts that the phenomena of vital motion, like all other phenomena of motion, are effects or products of matter. The other opposite extreme, spiritualistic philosophy, asserts, on the contrary, that matter is the product of motive force, and that all material forms are produced by free forces entirely independent of the matter itself. Thus, according to the materialistic conception of the universe, matter precedes motion or active force; according to the spiritualistic conception of the universe, on the contrary, active force or motion precedes matter. Both views are dualistic, and we hold them both to be equally false. A contrast to both is presented in the _monistic_ philosophy, which can as little believe in force without matter as in matter without force." It is evident that if Haeckel limits himself and his opponents to matter and force as the sole possible explanations of the universe, he may truly say that matter is inconceivable without force and force inconceivable without matter. But the question arises, What is the monistic power beyond these--the "power behind nature"? and as to the true nature of this the Jena philosopher gives us only vague generalities, though it is quite plain that he cannot admit a Spiritual Creator. Further, as to the absence of any spiritual element from the nature of man, he does not leave us in doubt as to what he means; for immediately after the above paragraph he informs us that "the 'spirit' and the 'mind' of man are but forces which are inseparably connected with the material substance of our bodies. Just as the motive-power of our flesh is involved in the muscular form-element, so is the thinking force of our spirit involved in the form-element of the brain." In a note appended to the passage, he says that monism "conceives nature as one whole, and nowhere recognizes any but mechanical causes." These assumptions as to man and nature pervade the whole book, and of course greatly simplify the task of the writer, as he does not require to account for the primary origin of nature, or for anything in man except his physical frame; and even this he can regard as a thing altogether mechanical. It is plain that we might here enter our dissent from Haeckel's method, for he requires us, before we can proceed a single step in the evolution of man, to assume many things which he cannot prove. What evidence is there, for example, of the possibility of the development of the rational and moral nature of man from the intelligence and the instinct of the lower animals, or of the necessary dependence of the phenomena of mind on the structure of brain-cells? The evidence, so far as it goes, seems to tend the other way. What proof is there of the spontaneous evolution of living forms from inorganic matter? Experiment so far negatives the possibility of this. Even if we give Haeckel, to begin with, a single living cell or granule of protoplasm, we know that this protoplasm must have been produced by the agency of a living vegetable cell previously existing; and we have no proof that it can be produced in any other way. Again, what particle of evidence have we that the atoms or the energy of an incandescent fire-mist have in them anything of the power or potency of life? We must grant the monist all these postulates as pure matters of faith, before he can begin his demonstration; and, as none of them are axiomatic truths, it is evident that so far he is simply a believer in the dogmas of a philosophic creed, and in this respect weak as other men whom he affects to despise. We may here place over against his authority that of another eminent physiologist, of more philosophic mind, Dr. Carpenter, who has recently said: "As a physiologist I must fully recognize the fact that the physical force exerted by the body of man is not generated _de novo_ by his will, but is derived directly from the oxidation of the constituents of his food. But, holding it as equally certain--because the fact is capable of verification by every one as often as he chooses to make the experiment--that in the performance of every volitional movement physical force is put in action, directed, and controlled by the individual personality or _ego_, I deem it as absurd and illogical to affirm that there is no place for a God in nature, originating, directing, and controlling its forces by his will, as it would be to assert that there is no place in man's body for his conscious mind." Taking Haeckel on his own ground, as above defined, we may next inquire as to the method which he employs in working out his argument. This may be referred to three leading modes of treatment, which, as they are somewhat diverse from those ordinarily familiar to logicians and are extensively used by evolutionists, deserve some illustration, more especially as Haeckel is a master in their use. An eminent French professor of the art of sleight-of-hand has defined the leading principle of jugglers to be that of "appearing and disappearing things;" and this is the best definition that occurs to me of one method of reasoning largely used by Haeckel, and of which we need to be on our guard when we find him employing, as he does in almost every page, such phrases as "it cannot be doubted," "we may therefore assume," "we may readily suppose," "this afterward assumes or becomes," "we may confidently assert," "this developed directly," and the like, which in his usage are equivalent to the "_Presto!_" of the conjurer, and which, while we are looking at one structure or animal, enable him to persuade us that it has been suddenly transformed into something else. In tracing the genealogy of man he constantly employs this kind of sleight-of-hand in the most adroit manner. He is perhaps describing to us the embryo of a fish or an amphibian, and, as we become interested in the curious details, it is suddenly by some clever phrase transformed into a reptile or a bird; and yet, without rubbing our eyes and reflecting on the differences and difficulties which he neglects to state, we can scarcely doubt that it is the same animal, after all. The little lancelet, or _Amphioxus_ (see Fig. 1), of the European seas--a creature which was at one time thought to be a sea-snail, but is really more akin to fishes--forms his link of connection between our "fish-ancestors" and the invertebrate animals. So important is it in this respect that our author Waxes eloquent in exhorting us to regard it "with special veneration" as representing our "earliest Silurian vertebrate ancestors," as being of "our own flesh and blood," and as better worthy of being an object of "devoutest reverence" than the "worthless rabble of so-called 'saints.'" In describing this animal he takes pains to inform us that it is more different from an ordinary fish than a fish is from a man. Yet, as he illustrates its curious and unique structure, before we are aware, the lancelet is gone and a fish is in its place, and this fish with the potency to become a man in due time. Thus a creature intermediate in some respects between fishes and mollusks, or between fishes and worms, but so far apart from either that it seems but to mark the width of the gap between them, becomes an easy stepping-stone from one to the other. [Illustration: FIG. 1. The Lancelet (_Amphioxus_), the supposed earliest type of vertebrate animal, and, according to Haeckel, the ancestor of man. The figure is a section enlarged to twice the natural size. _a_, mouth; _b_, anus; _c_, gill-opening; _d_, gill; _e_, stomach; _f_, liver; _g_, intestine; _h_, gill-cavity; _i_, notochord, or rudimentary back-bone; _k_, _l_, _m_, _n_, _o_, arteries and veins.] In like manner, the ascidians, or sea-squirts--mollusks of low grade, or, as Haeckel prefers to regard them, allied to worms--are most remote in almost every respect from the vertebrates. But in the young state of some of these creatures, and in the adult condition of one animal referred to this group (_Appendicularia_), they have a sort of swimming tail, which is stiffened by a rod of cartilage to enable it to perform its function, and which for a time gives them a certain resemblance to the lancelet or to embryo fishes; and this usually temporary contrivance--curious as an imitative adaptation, but of no other significance--becomes, by the art of "appearing and disappearing," a rudimentary backbone, and enables us at once to recognize in the young ascidian an embryo man. A second method characteristic of the book, and furnishing, indeed, the main basis of its argument, is that of considering analogous processes as identical, without regard to the difference of the conditions under which they may be carried on. The great leading use of this argument is in inducing us to regard the development of the individual animal as the precise equivalent of the series of changes by which the species was developed in the course of geological time. These two kinds of development are distinguished by appropriate names. _Ontogenesis_ is the embryonic development of the individual animal, and is, of course, a short process, depending on the production of a germ by a parent animal or parent pair, and the further growth of this germ in connection more or less with the parent or with provision made by it. This is, of course, a fact open to observation and study, though some of its processes are mysterious and yet involved in doubt and uncertainty. _Phylogenesis_ is the supposed development of a species in the course of geological time and by the intervention of long series of species, each in its time distinct and composed of individuals each going regularly through a genetic circle of its own. The latter is a process not open to observation within the time at our command--purely hypothetical, therefore, and of which the possibility remains to be proved; while the causes on which it must depend are necessarily altogether different from those at work in ontogenesis, and the conditions of a long series of different kinds of animals, each perfect in its kind, are equally dissimilar from those of an animal passing through the regular stages from infancy to maturity. The similarity, in some important respects, of ontogenesis to phylogenesis was inevitable, provided that animals were to be of different grades of complexity, since the development of the individual must necessarily be from a more simple to a more complex condition. On any hypothesis, the parallelism between embryological facts and the history of animals in geological time affords many interesting and important coincidences. Yet it is perfectly obvious that the causes and the conditions of these two successions cannot have been the same. Further, when we consider that the embryo-cell which develops into one animal must necessarily be originally distinct in its properties from that which develops into another kind of animal, even though no obvious difference appears to us, we have no ground for supposing that the early stages of all animals are alike; and when we rigorously compare the development of any animal whatever with the successive appearance of animals of the same or similar groups in geological time, we find many things which do not correspond--not merely in the want of links which we might expect to find, but in the more significant appearance, prematurely or inopportunely, of forms which we would not anticipate. Yet the main argument of Haeckel's book is the quiet assumption that anything found to occur in ontogenetic development must also have occurred in phylogenesis, while manifest difficulties are got rid of by assuming atavisms and abnormalities. A third characteristic of the method of the book is the use of certain terms in peculiar senses, and as implying certain causes which are taken for granted, though their efficacy and their mode of operation are unknown. The chief of the terms so employed are "heredity" and "adaptation." "Heredity" is usually understood as expressing the power of permanent transmission of characters from parents to offspring, and in this aspect it expresses the constancy of specific forms; but, as used by Haeckel, it means the transmission by a parent of any exceptional characters which the individual may have accidentally assumed. "Adaptation" has usually been supposed to mean the fitting of animals for their place in nature, however that came about; as used by Haeckel, it imports the power of the individual animal to adapt itself to changed conditions and to transmit these changes to its offspring. Thus in this philosophy the rule is made the exception and the exception the rule by a skilful use of familiar terms in new senses; and heredity and adaptation are constantly paraded as if they were two potent divinities employed in constantly changing and improving the face of nature. It is scarcely too much to say that the conclusions of the book are reached almost solely by the application of the above-mentioned peculiar modes of reasoning to the vast store of facts at command of the author, and that the reader who would test these conclusions by the ordinary methods of judgment must be constantly on his guard. Still, it is not necessary to believe that Haeckel is an intentional deceiver. Such fallacies are those which are especially fitted to mislead enthusiastic specialists, to be identified by them with proved results of science, and to be held in an intolerant and dogmatic spirit. Having thus noticed Haeckel's assumptions and his methods, we may next shortly consider the manner in which he proceeds to work out the phylogeny of man. Here he pursues a purely physiological method, only occasionally and slightly referring to geological facts. He takes as a first principle the law long ago formulated by Hunter, _Omne vivum ex ovo_--a law which modern research has amply confirmed, showing that every animal, however complex, can be traced back to an egg, which in its simplest state is no more than a single cell, though this cell requires to be fertilized by the addition of the contents of another dissimilar cell, produced either in another organ of the same individual or in a distinct individual. This process of fertilization Haeckel seems to regard as unnecessary in the lowest forms of life; but, though there are some simple animals in which it has not been recognized, analogy would lead us to believe that in some form it is necessary in all. Haekel's monistic view, however, requires that in the lowest forms it should be absent and should have originated spontaneously, though how does not seem to be very clear, as the explanation given of it by him amounts to little more than the statement that it must have occurred. Still, as a "dualistic" process it is very significant with reference to the monistic theory. Much space is, of course, devoted to the tracing of the special development or ontogenesis of man, and to the illustration of the fact that in the earlier stages of this development the human embryo is scarcely distinguishable from that of lower animals. We may, indeed, affirm that all animals start from cells which, in so far as we can see, are similar to each other, yet which must include potentially the various properties of the animals which spring from them. As we trace them onward in their development, we see these differences manifesting themselves. At first all pass, according to Haeckel, through a stage which he calls the "gastrula," in which the whole body is represented by a sort of sac, the cavity of which is the stomach and the walls of which consist of two layers of cells. It should be stated, however, that many eminent naturalists dissent from this view, and maintain that even in the earliest stages material differences can be observed. In this they are probably right, as even Haeckel has to admit some degree of divergence from this all-embracing "gastræa" theory. Admitting, however, that such early similarity exists within certain limits, we find that, as the embryo advances, it speedily begins to indicate whether it is to be a coral-animal, a snail, a worm, or a fish. Consequently, the physiologist who wishes to trace the resemblances leading to mammals and to man has to lop off one by one the several branches which lead in other directions, and to follow that which conducts by the most direct course to the type which he has in view. In this way Haeckel can show that the embryo _Homo sapiens_ is in successive stages so like to the young of the fish, the reptile, the bird, and the ordinary quadruped that he can produce for comparison figures in which the cursory observer can detect scarcely any difference. All this has long been known, and has been regarded as a wonderful evidence of the homology or unity of plan which pervades nature, and as constituting man the archetype of the animal kingdom--the highest realization of a plan previously sketched by the Creator in many ruder and humbler forms. It also teaches that it is not so much in the mere bodily organism that we are to look for the distinguishing characters of humanity as in the higher rational and moral nature. But Haeckel, like other evolutionists of the monistic and agnostic schools, goes far beyond this. The ontogeny, on the evidence of analogy, as already explained, is nothing less than a miniature representation of the phylogeny. Man must in the long ages of geological time have arisen from a monad, just as the individual man has in his life-history arisen from an embryo-cell, and the several stages through which the individual passes must be parallel to those in the history of the race. True, the supposed monad must have been wanting in all the conditions of origin, sexual fertilization, parental influence, and surroundings. There is no perceptible relation of cause and effect, any more than between the rotation of a carriage-wheel and that of the earth on its axis. The analogy might prompt to inquiries as to common laws and similarities of operation, but it proves nothing as to causation. In default of such proof, Haeckel favors us with another analogy, derived from the science of language. All the Indo-European languages are believed to be descended from a common ancestral tongue, and this is analogous to the descent of all animals from one primitive species. But unfortunately the languages in question are the expressions of the voice and the thought of one and the same species. The individuals using them are known historically to have descended by ordinary generation from a common source, and the connecting-links of the various dialects are unbroken. The analogy fails altogether in the case of species succeeding each other in geological time, unless the very thing to be proved is taken for granted in the outset. The actual proof that a basis exists in nature for the doctrine of evolution founded on these analogies, might be threefold. _First._ There might be changes of the nature of phylogenesis going on under our own observation, and even a very few of these would be sufficient to give some show of probability. Elaborate attempts have been made to show that variations, as existing in the more variable of our domesticated species, lead in the direction of such changes; but the results have been unsatisfactory, and our author scarcely condescends to notice this line of proof. He evidently regards the time over which human history has extended as too short to admit of this kind of demonstration. _Secondly._ There might be in the existing system of nature such a close connection or continuous chain of species as might at least strengthen the argument from analogy; and undoubtedly there are many groups of closely allied species, or of races confounded with true specific types, which it might not be unreasonable to suppose of common origin. These are, however, scattered widely apart; and the contrary fact of extensive gaps in the series is so frequent, that Haeckel is constantly under the necessity of supposing that multitudes of species, and even of larger groups, have perished just where it is most important to his conclusion that they should have remained. This is, of course, unfortunate for the theory; but then, as Haeckel often remarks, "we must suppose" that the missing links once existed. But, _thirdly_, these gaps which now unhappily exist may be filled up by fossil animals; and if in the successive geological periods we could trace the actual phylogeny of even a few groups of living creatures, we might have the demonstration desired. But here again the gaps are so frequent and so serious that Haeckel scarcely attempts to use this argument further than by giving a short and somewhat imperfect summary of the geological succession in the beginning of his second volume. In this he attempts to give a continuous series of the ancestors of man as developed in geological time; but, of twenty-one groups which he arranges in order from the beginning of the Laurentian to the modern period, at least ten are not known at all as fossils, and others do not belong, so far as known, to the ages to which he assigns them. This necessity of manufacturing facts does not speak well for the testimony of geology to the supposed phylogeny of man. In point of fact, it cannot be disguised that, though it is possible to pick out some series of animal forms, like the horses and camels referred to by some palæontologists, which simulate a genetic order, the general testimony of palæontology is, on the whole, adverse to the ordinary theories of evolution, whether applied to the vegetable or to the animal kingdom. This the writer has elsewhere endeavored to show; but he may refer here to the labors of Barrande, perhaps unrivalled in extent and accuracy, which show that in the leading forms of life in the older geological formations the succession is not such as to correspond with any of the received theories of derivation.[2] Even evolutionists, when sufficiently candid, admit their case not proven by geological evidence. Gaudry, one of the best authorities on the Tertiary mammalia, admits the impossibility of suggesting any possible derivation for some of the leading groups, and Saporta, Mivart, and Le Conte fall back on periods of rapid or paroxysmal evolution scarcely differing from the idea of creation by law, or mediate creation, as it has been termed. Thus the utmost value which can be attached to Haeckel's argument from analogy would be that it suggests a possibility that the processes which we see carried on in the evolution of the individual may, in the laws which regulate them, be connected in some way more or less close with those creative processes which on the wider field of geological time have been concerned in the production of the multitudinous forms of animal life. That Haeckel's philosophy goes but a very little way toward any understanding of such relations, and that our present information, even within the more limited scope of biological science, is too meagre to permit of safe generalization, will appear from the consideration of a few facts taken here and there from the multitude employed by him to illustrate the monistic theory. When we are told that a moner or an embryo-cell is the early stage of all animals alike, we naturally ask, Is it meant that all these cells are really similar, or is it only that they appear similar to us, and may actually be as profoundly unlike as the animals which they are destined to produce? To make this question more plain, let us take the case as formally stated: "From the weighty fact that the egg of the human being, like the egg of all other animals, is a simple cell, it may be quite certainly inferred that a one-celled parent-form once existed, from which all the many-celled animals, man included, developed." Now, let us suppose that we have under our microscope a one-celled animalcule quite as simple in structure as our supposed ancestor. Along with this we may have on the same slide another cell, which is the embryo of a worm, and a third, which is the embryo of a man. All these, according to the hypothesis, are similar in appearance; so that we can by no means guess which is destined to continue always an animalcule, or which will become a worm or may develop into a poet or a philosopher. Is it meant that the things are actually alike or only apparently so? If they are really alike, then their destinies must depend on external circumstances. Put either of them into a pond, and it will remain a monad. Put either of them into the ovary of a complex animal, and it will develop into the likeness of that animal. But such similarity is altogether improbable, and it would destroy the argument of the evolutionist. In this case he would be hopelessly shut up to the conclusion that "hens were before eggs;" and Haeckel elsewhere informs us that the exactly opposite view is necessarily that of the monistic evolutionist. Thus, though it may often be convenient to speak of these three kinds of cells as if they were perfectly similar, the method of "disappearance" has immediately to be resorted to, and they are shown to be, in fact, quite dissimilar. There is, indeed, the best ground to suppose that the one-celled animals and the embryo-cells referred to, have little in common except their general form. We know that the most minute cell must include a sufficient number of molecules of protoplasm to admit of great varieties of possible arrangement, and that these may be connected with most varied possibilities as to the action of forces. Further, the embryo-cell which is produced by a particular kind of animal, and whose development results in the reproduction of a similar animal, must contain potentially the parts and structures which are evolved from it; and fact shows that this may be affirmed of both the embryo and the sperm-cells where there are two sexes. Therefore it is in the highest degree probable that the eggs of a worm and those of man, though possibly alike to our coarse methods of investigation, are as dissimilar as the animals that result from them. If so, the "egg may be before the hen;" but it is as difficult to imagine the spontaneous production of the egg which is potentially the hen as of the hen itself. Thus the similarity of the eggs and early embryos of animals of different grades is apparent only; and this fact, which embodies a great, and perhaps insoluble, mystery, invalidates the whole of Haeckel's reasoning on the alleged resemblances of different kinds of animals in their early stages. A second difficulty arises from the fact that the simple embryo-cell of any of the higher animals rapidly produces various kinds of specialized cells different in structure and appearance and capable of performing different functions, whereas in the lower forms of life such cells may remain simple or may merely produce several similar cells little or not at all differentiated. This objection, whenever it occurs, Haeckel endeavors to turn by the assertion that a complex animal is merely an aggregate of independent cells, each of which is a sort of individual. He thus tries to break up the integrity of the complex organism and to reduce it to a mere swarm of monads. He compares the cells of an organism to the "individuals of a savage community," who, at first separate and all alike in their habits and occupations, at length organize themselves into a community and assume different avocations. Single cells, he says, at first were alike, and each performed the same simple offices of all the others. "At a later period isolated cells gathered into communities; groups of simple cells which had arisen from the continued division of a single cell remained together, and now began gradually to perform different offices of life." But this is a mere vague analogy. It does not represent anything actually occurring in nature, except in the case of an embryo produced by some animal which already shows all the tissues which its embryo is destined to reproduce. Thus it establishes no probability of the evolution of complex tissues from simple cells, and leaves altogether unexplained that wonderful process by which the embryo-cell not only divides into many cells, but becomes developed into all the variety of dissimilar tissues evolved from the homogeneous egg; but evolved from it, as we naturally suppose, because of the fact that the egg represents potentially all these tissues as existing previously in the parent organism. But if we are content to waive these objections or to accept the solutions given of them by the "appearance-and-disappearance" argument, we still find that the phylogeny, unlike the ontogenesis, is full of wide gaps only to be passed _per saltum_ or to be accounted for by the disappearance of a vast number of connecting-links. Of course, it is easy to suppose that these intermediate forms have been lost through time and accident, but why this has happened to some rather than to others cannot be explained. In the phylogeny of man, for example, what a vast hiatus yawns between the ascidian and the lancelet, and another between the lancelet and the lamprey! It is true that the missing links may have consisted of animals little likely to be preserved as fossils; but why, if they ever existed, do not some of them remain in the modern seas? Again, when we have so many species of apes and so many races of men, why can we find no trace, recent or fossil, of that "missing link" which we are told must have existed, the "ape-like men," known to Haeckel as the "Alali," or speechless men? A further question which should receive consideration from the monist school is that very serious one, Why, if all is "mechanical" in the development and actions of living beings, should there be any progress whatever? Ordinary people fail to understand why a world of mere dead matter should not go on to all eternity obeying physical and chemical laws without developing life; or why, if some low form of life were introduced capable of reproducing simple one-celled organisms, it should not go on doing so. Further, even if some chance deviations should occur, we fail to perceive why these should go on in a definite manner producing not only the most complex machines, but many kinds of such machines--on different plans, but each perfect in its way. Haeckel is never weary of telling us that to monists organisms are mere machines. Even his own mental work is merely the grinding of a cerebral machine. But he seems not to perceive that to such a philosophy the homely argument which Paley derived from the structure of a watch would be fatal: "The question is whether machines (which monists consider all animals to be, including themselves) infinitely more complicated than watches could come into existence without design somewhere"[3]--that is, by mere chance. Common sense is not likely to admit that this is possible. [Illustration: FIG. 2. Impression of five fingers and five toes of an Amphibian of the Lower Carboniferous Age, from the lowest Carboniferous beds in Nova Scotia--an evidence of the fact that the number five was already selected for the hands and feet of the earliest known land vertebrates, and that the decimal system of notation, with all that it involves to man, was determined in the Palæozoic Age. The upper figure natural size, the lower reduced.] The difficulties above referred to relate to the introduction of life and of new species on the monistic view. Others might be referred to in connection with the production of new organs. An illustration is afforded, among others, by the discussion of the introduction of the five fingers and toes of man, which appear to descend to us unchanged from the amphibians or batrachians of the Carboniferous period. In this ancient age of the earth's geological history, feet with five toes appear in numerous species of reptilians of various grades (Fig. 2). They are preceded by no other vertebrates than fishes, and these have numerous fin-rays instead of toes. There are no properly transitional forms either fossil or recent. How were the five-fingered limbs acquired in this abrupt way? Why were they five rather than any other number? Why, when once introduced, have they continued unchanged up to the present day? Haeckel's answer is a curious example of his method: "The great significance of the five digits depends on the fact that this number has been transmitted from the Amphibia to all higher vertebrates. It would be impossible to discover any reason why in the lowest Amphibia, as well as in reptiles and in higher vertebrates up to man, there should always originally be five digits on each of the anterior and posterior limbs, if we denied that heredity from a common five-fingered parent-form is the efficient cause of this phenomenon; heredity can alone account for it. In many Amphibia certainly, as well as in many higher vertebrates, we find less than five digits. But in all these cases it can be shown that separate digits have retrograded, and have finally been completely lost. The causes which affected the development of the five-fingered foot of the higher vertebrates in this amphibian form from the many-fingered foot (or properly fin), must certainly be found in the adaptation to the totally altered functions which the limbs had to discharge during the transition from an exclusively aquatic life to one which was partially terrestrial. While the many-fingered fins of the fish had previously served almost exclusively to propel the body through the water, they had now also to afford support to the animal when creeping on the land. This effected a modification both of the skeleton and of the muscles of the limbs. The number of fin-rays was gradually lessened, and was finally reduced to five. These five remaining rays were, however, developed more vigorously. The soft cartilaginous rays became hard bones. The rest of the skeleton also became considerably more firm. The movements of the body became not only more vigorous, but also more varied;" and the paragraph proceeds to state other ameliorations of muscular and nervous system supposed to be related to or caused by the improvement of the limbs. It will be observed that in the above extract, under the formula "the causes which affected the development of the five-fingered foot ... must certainly be found," all that other men would regard as demanding proof is quietly assumed, and the animal grows before our eyes from a fish to a reptile as under the wand of a conjurer. Further, the transmission of the five toes is attributed to heredity or unchanged reproduction, but this, of course, gives no explanation of the original formation of the structure, nor of the causes which prevented heredity from applying to the fishes which became amphibians and acquired five toes, or to the amphibians which faithfully transmitted their five toes, but not their other characteristics. It is perhaps scarcely profitable to follow further the criticism of this extraordinary book. It may be necessary, however, to repeat that it contains clear, and in the main accurate, sketches of the embryology of a number of animals, only slightly colored by the tendency to minimize differences. It may also be necessary to say that in criticising Haeckel we take him on his own ground--that of a monist--and have no special reference to those many phases which the philosophy of evolution assumes in the minds of other naturalists, many of whom accept it only partially or as a form of mediate creation more or less reconcilable with theism. To these more moderate views no reference has been made, though there can be no doubt that many of them are quite as assailable as the position of Haeckel in point of argument. It may also be observed that Haeckel's argument is almost exclusively biological and confined to the animal kingdom, and to the special line of descent attributed to man. The monistic hypothesis becomes, as already stated, still less tenable when tested by the facts of palæontology. Hence most of the palæontologists who favor evolution appear to shrink from the extreme position of Haeckel. Gaudry, one of the ablest of this school, in his recent work on the development of the Mammalia, candidly admits the multitude of facts for which derivation will not account, and perceives in the grand succession of animals in time the evidence of a wise and far-reaching creative plan, concluding with the words: "We may still leave out of the question the processes by which the Author of the world has produced the changes of which palæontology presents the picture." In like manner, the Count de Saporta in his _World of Plants_ closes his summary of the periods of vegetation with the words: "But if we ascend from one phenomenon to another, beyond the sphere of contingent and changeable appearance, we find ourselves arrested by a Being unchangeable and supreme, the first expression and absolute cause of all existence, in whom diversity unites with unity, an eternal problem, insoluble to science, but ever present to the human consciousness. Here we reach the true source of the idea of religion, and there presents itself distinctly to the mind that conception to which we apply instinctively the name of God." Thus these evolutionists, like many others in this country and in England, find a _modus vivendi_ between evolution and theism. They have committed themselves to an interpretation of nature which may prove fanciful and evanescent, and which certainly up to this time remains an hypothesis, ingenious and captivating, but not fortified by the evidence of facts. But in doing so they are not prepared to accept the purely mechanical creed of the monist, or to separate themselves from those ideas of morality, of religion, and of sonship to God which have hitherto been the brightest gems in the crown of man as the lord of this lower world. Whether they can maintain this position against the monists, and whether they will be able in the end to retain any practical form of religion along with the doctrine of the derivation of man from the lower animals, remains to be seen. Possibly before these questions come to a final issue the philosophy of evolution may itself have been "modified" or have given place to some new phase of thought. One curious point in this connection, to which little attention has been given by evolutionists, is that to which Herbert Spencer has given the name of "direct equilibration," though he is sufficiently wise not to invite too much attention to it. This is the balance of parts and forces within the organism itself. The organism is a complex machine; and if its parts have been put together by chance and are drifting onward in the path of evolution, there must of necessity be a continual struggle going on between the different organs and functions, each tending to swallow up the others and each struggling for its own existence. This resolution of the body of each animal into a house divided against itself is at first sight so revolting to common sense and right feeling that few like to contemplate it. Roux and other recent writers, however, especially in Germany, have brought it into prominence, and it is no doubt a necessary consequence of the evolutionary idea, though altogether at variance with the theory of intelligent design, which supposes the animal machine put together with care and for a purpose, and properly adjusted in all its parts. On the hypothesis of evolution, the animal thus ceases to be, in the proper sense of the term, even a machine, and becomes a mere mass of conflicting parts depending for any constancy they may have on a chance balancing of hostile forces, without any compelling power to bring them together at first, or any means to bind them to joint action in the system. The more such a doctrine is considered, the more difficult does it seem to believe in the possibility of its truth. Evolution has already reduced the cosmos into chaos, the harmony of the universe into discord; but it seems past belief to introduce this into the microcosm itself, and to see nothing in its exquisite adjustments except the momentary equilibrium of a well-balanced fight. Geological history also adds to the absurdity of such a view by showing the marvellous permanence of many forms of life which have continued to perpetuate themselves through almost immeasurable ages without material changes, thus proving unanswerably the perfect adjustment of their parts. Viewed rightly, this direct equilibration of the parts of the animal seems to throw the greatest possible doubt on the capacity of any form of evolution to produce new species. It is certain, from the facts collected by Mr. Darwin himself in his work on animals under domestication, that when man disturbs the balance of any organism by changing in any way the relations of its parts, he introduces elements of instability and weakness, which, despite the efforts of nature to correct the evils resulting, speedily lead to degeneracy, infertility, and extinction. Mr. T. Warren O'Neil of Philadelphia has recently argued this point with much ability,[4] and has shown, on the testimony of Darwin's facts, that unless "natural selection" is a much more skilful breeder than man, and possesses some secrets not yet discovered by us, the effects of this imaginary power would lead, not to the production of new species, but merely to the extinction of those already existing. In short, all the evidence goes to show that--so beautifully balanced are the parts of the organism--any excess or deficiency in any of them, when artificially or accidentally introduced, brings in elements not only of instability, but of decay and destruction. This subject is deserving of a more full treatment than it can receive here, but enough has been said to show that in this evolutionists have unwittingly furnished us with a new confirmation of the theory of intelligent design. In some places there are in Haeckel's book touches of a grim humor which are not without interest, as showing the subjective side of the monistic theory and illustrating the attitude of its professors to things held sacred by other men. For example, the following is the introduction to the chapter headed "From the Primitive Worm to the Skulled Animal," and which has for its motto the lines of Goethe beginning: "Not like the gods am I! full well I know; But like the worms which in the dust must go." "Both in prose and poetry man is very often compared to a worm; 'a miserable worm,' 'a poor worm,' are common and almost compassionate phrases. If we cannot detect any deep phylogenetic reference in this zoological metaphor, we might at least safely assert that it contains an unconscious comparison with a low condition of animal development which is interesting in its bearing on the pedigree of the human race." If Haeckel were well read in Scripture, he might have quoted here the melancholy confession of the man of Uz: "I have said to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister." But, though Job, like the German professor, could humbly say to the worm, "Thou art my mother," he could still hold fast his integrity and believe in the fatherhood of God. The moral bearing of monism is further illustrated by the following extract, which refers to a more advanced step of the evolution--that from the ape to man--and which shows the honest pride of the worthy professor in his humble parentage: "Just as most people prefer to trace their pedigree from a decayed baron, or if possible from a celebrated prince, rather than from an unknown humble peasant, so they prefer seeing the progenitor of the human race in an Adam degraded by the fall, rather than in an ape capable of higher development and progress. It is a matter of taste, and such genealogical preferences do not, therefore, admit of discussion. It is more to my individual taste to be the more highly-developed descendant of an ape, who in the struggle for existence had developed progressively from lower mammals as they from still lower vertebrates, than the degraded descendant of an Adam, Godlike but debased by the fall, who was formed from a clod of earth, and of an Eve created from a rib of Adam. As regards the celebrated 'rib,' I must here expressly add, as a supplement to the history of the development of the skeleton, that the number of ribs is the same in man and in woman.[5] In the latter as well as in the former the ribs originate from the skin-fibrous layer, and are to be regarded phylogenetically as lower or ventral vertebræ."[6] There is no accounting for tastes, yet we may be pardoned for retaining some preference for the first link of the old Jewish genealogical table: "Which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God." As to the "debasement" of the fall, it is to be feared that the aboriginal ape would object to bearing the blame of existing human iniquities as having arisen from any improvement in his nature and habits; and it is scarcely fair to speak of Adam as "formed from a _clod_ of earth," which is not precisely in accordance with the record. As to the "rib," which seems so offensive to Haeckel, one would have thought that he would, as an evolutionist, have had some fellow-feeling in this with the writer of Genesis. The origin of sexes is one of the acknowledged difficulties of the hypothesis, and, using his method, we might surely "assume," or even "confidently assert," the possibility that, in some early stage of the development, the unfinished vertebral arches of the "skin-fibrous layer" might have produced a new individual by a process of budding or gemmation. Quite as remarkable suppositions are contained in some parts of his own volumes, without any special divine power for rendering them practicable. Further, if only an individual man originated in the first instance, and if he were not provided with a suitable spouse, he might have intermarried with the unimproved anthropoids, and the results of the evolution would have been lost. Such considerations should have weighed with Haeckel in inducing him to speak more respectfully of Adam's rib, especially in view of the fact that in dealing with the hard question of human origin the author of Genesis had not the benefit of the researches of Baer and Haeckel. He had, no doubt, the advantage of a firm faith in the reality of that Creative Will which the monistic prophets of the nineteenth century have banished from their calculations. Were Haeckel not a monist, he might also be reminded of that grand doctrine of the lordship and superiority of man based on the fact that there was no "help meet for him;" and the foundation of the most sacred bond of human society on the saying of the first man: "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh." But monists probably attach little value to such ideas. It may be proper to add here that in his references to Adam, Haeckel betrays a weakness not unusual with his school, in putting a false gloss on the old record of Genesis. The statement that man was formed from the dust of the ground implies no more than the production of his body from the common materials employed in the construction of other animals; this also in contradistinction from the higher nature derived from the inbreathing or inspiration of God. The precise nature of the method by which man was made or created is not stated by the author of Genesis. Further, it would have been as easy for Divine Power to create a pair as an individual. If this was not done, and if after the lesson of superiority taught by the inspection of lower animals, and the lesson of language taught by naming them, the first man in his "deep sleep" is conscious of the removal of a portion of his own flesh, and then on awaking has the woman "brought" to him, all this is to teach a lesson not to be otherwise learned. The Mosaic record is thus perfectly consistent with itself and with its own doctrine of creation by Almighty Power. I have quoted the above passages as examples of the more jocose vein of the Jena physiologist; but they constitute also a serious revelation of the influence of his philosophy on his own mind and heart, in lowering both to a cold, mechanical, and unsympathetic view of man and nature. This is especially serious when we remember how earnestly in a recent address he advocated the teaching of the methods and results of this book, as those which, in the present state of knowledge, should supersede the Bible in our schools. We may well say, with his great opponent on that occasion, that if such doctrines should be proved to be true, the teaching of them might become a necessity, but one that would bring us face to face with the darkest and most dangerous moral problem that has ever beset humanity; and that so long as they remain unproved it is both unwise and criminal to propagate them among the mass of men as conclusions which have been demonstrated by science. In conclusion, we may notice shortly a few of the consequences of the monistic evolution as held by Haeckel and others. Doctrines are perhaps not to be judged by the consequences--at least, by the immediate consequences--of their acceptance. Yet if their logical consequences are such as to introduce confusion into our higher ideas and sentiments, we have reason to hesitate as to their adoption--if on no other ground, because we ourselves are a part of nature and should be in harmony with any true explanation of it. We may affirm in this connection that agnostic evolution reduces all our science to mere evanescent anthropomorphic fancies; so that, like a parasite, it first supports itself on the strength and substance of science, and then strangles it to death. Physical science is a product of our thinking as to external things. If, therefore, the thinking brain and the external nature which it studies are both of them the fortuitous products of blind tendencies in a process of continuous flux and vicissitude, our science can embody no elements of eternal truth nor any conceptions as to the plans of a higher creative reason. In that case it is absolutely worthless, and a pure waste of time and energy, except in so far as it may yield any temporary material advantages. Further, the agnostic evolution thus leaves us as orphans in the midst of a cold and insensate nature. We are no longer dwellers in our Father's house, beautiful and fitted for us, but are thrown into the midst of a hideous conflict of dead forces, in which we must finally perish and be annihilated. In a struggle so hopeless it is a mere mockery to tell us that in millions of years something better may come out of it, for we know that this will be of no avail to us, and we feel that it is impossible. Thus the agnostic philosophy, if it be once accepted as true, seriously raises the question whether life is worth living. But if worth living, then it must be for the immediate and selfish gratification of our desires and passions; and since we are deprived of God and conscience, and right and wrong, and future reward or punishment, and all men are alike in this position, there can be nothing left for us but to rend and fight with our fellows for such share of good as may fall to us in the deadly struggle, that we may reach such happiness as may be possible for us in such an existence, ere we drift into nonentity. Here, again, we are told that the struggle will some time lead to the survival of the fittest, and that the fittest may inaugurate a new and better reign of peace. But the world has already lasted countless ages without arriving at this result. It cannot concern me individually, any more than what happens to-day concerns the extinct ichthyosaur or the megatherium. All that is left for me is to "eat and drink, for to-morrow I die." If any one thinks that this is an exaggerated picture of the effects of agnostic evolution as applied to man, I may refer him to the study of Herbert Spencer's recent work _The Data of Ethics_, which has contributed very much to open the eyes of thoughtful men to the depth of spiritual, moral, and even social and political, ruin into which we shall drift under the guidance of this philosophy. In this work the data of ethics are reduced to the one consideration of what is "pleasurable" to ourselves and others, and it is admitted that our ideas of conscience, duty, and even of social obligation, are merely fictions of temporary use until the time shall come when what is pleasurable to ourselves shall coincide with what is pleasurable to others; and this is to come, not out of the love of God and the influence of his Spirit, but out of the blind struggle of opposing interests. It has been well said that this system of morals--if it can be dignified with such a name--is inferior, logically and practically, not only to the "supernatural ethics" which it boastfully professes to replace, but to the ethics of Aristotle and Cicero, and that "it will not supersede revelation, nor is it likely to displace the old data of ethics, whether Greek, Roman, or English." Independently of its antagonism to theism and Christianity, it is foredoomed by the common sense and the right feeling of even imperfect human nature. FOOTNOTES: [2] Those who wish to understand the real bearings of palæontology on evolution should study Barrande's _Memoirs on the Silurian Trilobites, Cephalopods, and Brachiopods_. [3] Beckett, _Origin of the Laws of Nature_. [4] _Refutation of Darwinism_, Philadelphia, 1880. [5] It was scarcely necessary to refer to this childish objection unless the individual skeleton of Adam had been in question. [6] Rather, "vertebral arches." LECTURE III. EVOLUTION AS TESTED BY THE RECORDS OF THE ROCKS. Having discussed those vague analogies and fanciful pedigrees by which it has been attempted to drag the science of Biology into the service of Agnostic Evolution, we may now turn to another science--that of the earth--and inquire how far it justifies us in affirming the spontaneous evolution of plants and animals in the progress of geological time. This subject is one which would require a lengthy treatise for its full development, and it cannot be pursued in the most satisfactory way without much previous knowledge of geological facts and principles, and of the classification of animals and plants. On the present occasion it must therefore be treated in the most general possible manner, and with reference merely to the results which have been reached. There is the more excuse for this mode of treatment that, in works already published and widely circulated,[7] I have endeavored to present its details in a popular form to general readers. Geological investigation has disclosed a great series of stratified rocks composing the crust of the earth, and formed at successive times, chiefly by the agency of water. These can be arranged in chronological order; and, so arranged, they constitute the physical monuments of the earth's history. We must here take for granted, on the testimony of geology, that the accumulation of this series of deposits has extended over a vast lapse of time, and that the successive formations contain remains of animals and plants from which we can learn much as to the succession of life on the earth. Without entering into geological details, it may be sufficient to present in tabular form (see p. 107) the grand series of formations, with the general history of life as ascertained from them. TABULAR VIEW OF GEOLOGICAL PERIODS AND OF LIFE-EPOCHS. +---------------------------------------+---------------+--------------+ | | ANIMAL | VEGETABLE | | GEOLOGICAL PERIODS. | LIFE. | LIFE. | +---------------------------------------+---------------+--------------+ | | | | | CAINOZOIC or NEOZOIC. | | | | | Age of _Man_ | | | { _Post- { Recent. | and _Modern | | | { Tertiary_ { Post-Glacial. | Mammals_. | | | { or _Modern_ | | Age of | | { |Age of _Extinct|_Angiosperms_ | | { { Pleistocene, or | Mammals_. | and _Palms_. | | { _Tertiary_ { Pliocene. | (Earliest | | | { { Miocene. | Placental | | | { { Eocene. | Mammals.) | | | | | | +---------------------------------------+---------------+--------------+ | | | | | MESOZOIC. | | | | { { Upper, | | (Earliest | | { _Cretaceous_ { Lower, or Neocomian. | | Modern | | { | Age of | Trees.) | | { | _Reptiles_ | | | { { Oolite. | and _Birds_. | | | { _Jurassic_ { Lias. | | Age of | | { | | _Cycads_ and | | { { Upper, | (Earliest | _Pines_. | | { _Triassic_ { Middle, or | Marsupial | | | { { Muschelkalk. | Mammals.) | | | { { Lower. | | | | | | | +---------------------------------------+---------------+--------------+ | | | | | PAL�OZOIC. | | | | { { Upper, | | | | { { Middle, or Magnesian | | | | { _Permian_ { Limestone. |(Earliest True | | | { { Lower. | Reptiles.) | | | { | | | | { { Upper Coal-Formation.| | | | { _Carboni- { Coal-Formation. | | | | { ferous_ { Carboniferous | | | | { { Limestone. | | | | { { Lower Coal-Formation.| Age of | Age of | | { | _Amphibians_ |_Acrogens_ and| | { _Erian_ { Upper. | and _Fishes_. |_Gymnosperms_.| | { or { Middle. | | | | { _Devonian_ { Lower. | | | | { | | | | { { Upper, | | | | { _Silurian_ { Lower, or | Age of | | | { { Siluro-Cambrian. | _Mollusks_, | (Earliest | | { | _Corals_ and |Land Plants.) | | { { Upper. |_Crustaceans_. |Age of _Algæ_.| | { _Cambrian_ { Middle. | | | | { { Lower. | | | | | | | +---------------------------------------+---------------+--------------+ | | | | | EOZOIC. | | | | { _Huronian_ { Upper. | | | | { { Lower. | Age of | Indications | | { | _Protozoa_. | of Plants | | { { Upper, or Norian. | (First Animal | not | | { _Laurentian_ { Middle, | Remains.) | determinable.| | { { Lower, or Bojian. | | | | | | | +---------------------------------------+---------------+--------------+ In the oldest rocks known to geologists--those of the Eozoic time--some indications of the presence of life are found. Great beds of limestone are contained in these formations, vast quantities of carbon in the form of graphite, and thick beds of iron-ore. All these are known, from their mode of occurrence in later deposits, to be results, direct or indirect, of the agency of life; and if they afforded no traces of organic forms, still their chemical character would convey a presumption of their organic origin. But additional evidence has been obtained in the presence of certain remarkable laminated forms penetrated by microscopic tubes and canals, and which are supposed to be the remains of the calcareous skeletons of humbly-organized animals akin to the simplest of those now living in the sea. Such animals--little more than masses of living animal jelly--now abound in the waters, and protect themselves by secreting calcareous skeletons, often complex and beautiful, and penetrated by pores, through which the soft animal within can send forth minute thread-like extensions of its body, which serve instead of limbs. The Laurentian fossil known as _Eozoon Canadense_ (see Fig. 3) may have been the skeleton of such a lowly-organized animal; and if so, it is the oldest living thing that we know. But if really the skeleton or covering of such an animal, _Eozoon_ is larger than any of its successors, and quite as complex as any of them. There is nothing to show that it could have originated from dead matter by any spontaneous action, any more than its modern representatives could do so. There is no evidence of its progress by evolution into any higher form, and the group of animals to which it belongs has continued to inhabit the ocean throughout geological time without any perceptible advance in rank or complexity of structure. If, then, we admit the animal nature of this earliest fossil, we can derive from it no evidence of monistic evolution; and if we deny its animal nature, we are confronted with a still graver difficulty in the next succeeding formations. [Illustration: FIG. 3. 1. Small specimen of _Eozoon Canadense_, weathered out from the containing rock, and showing its laminated structure. 2. Casts of irregular or acervaline chambers of upper part (magnified). 3. Surface of a cast of a flat chamber, showing its constituent chamberlets (magnified). 4. Section of casts of flat chambers (magnified). From the Laurentian of Canada.] Between the rocks which contain _Eozoon_ and the next in which we find any abundant remains of life, there is a gap in geological history, either destitute of evidence of life or showing nothing materially in advance of _Eozoon_. In the Cambrian Age, however, we obtain a vast and varied accession of life. Here we find evidence that the sea swarmed with living creatures near akin to those which still inhabit it, and nearly as varied. Referring merely to leading groups, we have here the soft shellfishes and the worms, the ordinary shellfishes, the sea-stars, and the corals, with the sponges. In short, had we been able to drop our dredge into the Cambrian or Lower Silurian ocean, we should have brought up representatives of all the leading types of invertebrate life that exist in the modern seas--different, it is true, in details of structure from those now existing, but constructed on the same principles and filling the same places in nature. If we inquire as to the history of this swarming marine life of the early Palæozoic, we find that its several species, after enduring for a longer or a shorter time, one by one became extinct and were replaced by others belonging to the same groups. Thus there is in each great group a succession of new forms, distinct as species, but not perceptibly elevated in the scale of being. In many cases, indeed, the reverse seems to be the case; for it is not unusual to find the successive dynasties of life in any one family manifesting degradation rather than elevation. New, and sometimes higher, forms, it is true, appear in the progress of time, but it is impossible, except by violent suppositions, to connect them genetically with any predecessors. The succession throughout the Palæozoic presents the appearance rather of the unchanged persistence of each group under a succession of specific forms, and the introduction from time to time of new groups, as if to replace others which were in process of decay and disappearance. In the later half of the Palæozoic we find a number of higher forms breaking upon us with the same apparent suddenness as in the case of the early Cambrian animals. Fishes appear, and soon abound in a great variety of species, representing types of no mean rank, but, singularly enough, belonging, in many cases, to groups now very rare; while the commoner tribes of modern fish do not appear. On the land, batrachian reptiles now abound, some of them very high in the sub-class to which they belong. Scorpions, spiders, insects, and millipedes appear, as well as land-snails, and this not in one locality only, but over the whole northern hemisphere. At the same time, the land appears clothed with an exuberant vegetation--not of the lowest types nor of the highest, but of intermediate forms, such as those of the pines, the club-mosses, and the ferns, all of which attained in those days to magnitudes and numbers of species unsurpassed, and in some cases unequalled, in the modern world. Nor do they show any signs of an unformed or imperfect state. Their seeds and spores, their fruits and spore-cases, are as elaborately constructed, the tissues and forms of their stems and leaves as delicate and beautiful, as in any modern plants. So with the compound eyes and filmy wings of insects, the teeth, bones, and scales of batrachians and fishes; all are as perfectly finished, and many quite as complex and elegant, as in the animals of the present day (Figure 4). [Illustration: FIG. 4. Restoration (by _G. F. Matthew_) of a Trilobite (_Paradoxides_) from the Lower Cambrian, as an evidence of the existence of crustacean animals of high type and great complexity in this early age. If such animals were evolved from Protozoa by slow and gradual changes, the time required would be greater than that which intervened between the Cambrian period and the present time.] This wonderful Palæozoic Age was, however, but a temporary state of the earth. It passed away, and was replaced by the Mesozoic, emphatically the reign of reptiles, when animals of that type attained to colossal magnitude, to variety of function and structure, to diversity of habitat in sea and on land, altogether unexampled in their degraded descendants of modern times. Sea-lizards of gigantic size swarmed everywhere in the waters. On land, huge quadrupeds, like Atlantosaurus and Iguanodon and Megalosaurus, greatly exceeded the elephants of later times; while winged reptiles--some of them of small size, others with wings twenty feet in expanse--flitted in the air. Strangely enough, with these reptilian lords appeared a few small and lowly mammals, forerunners of the coming age. Birds also make their appearance, and at the close of the period forests of broad-leaved trees altogether different from those of the Palæozoic Age, and resembling those of our modern woods, appear for the first time over great portions of the northern hemisphere. The Cainozoic, or Tertiary, is the age of mammals and of man. In it the great reptilian tyrants of the Mesozoic disappear, and are replaced on land and sea by mammals or beasts of the same orders with those now living, though differing as to genera and species (see Fig. 5). So greatly, indeed, did mammalian life abound in this period that in the middle part of the Tertiary most of the leading groups were represented by more numerous species than at present; while many groups then existing have now no representatives. At the close of this great and wonderful procession of living beings comes man himself--the last and crowning triumph of creation; the head, thus far, of life on the earth. I have merely glanced at the leading events of this wonderful history, because its details may be found in so many manuals and popular works on geology. But if we imagine this great chain of life extending over periods of enormous duration in comparison with the short span of human history, presenting to the naturalist hosts of strange forms which he could scarcely have imagined in his dreams, we may understand how exciting have been these discoveries crowded within the lives of two generations of geologists. Further, when we consider that the general course of this great development of life, beginning with Protozoa and ending with man, is from below upward--from the more simple to the more complex--and that there is of necessity, in this grand growth of life through the ages, a likeness or parallelism to the growth of the individual animal from its more simple to its more complex state, we can understand how naturalists should fancy that here they have been introduced to the workshop of Nature, and that they can discover how one creature may have been developed from another by spontaneous evolution. [Illustration: FIG. 5. Skeleton of the American Mastodon, illustrating the number and wide distribution of elephantine animals of the three genera _Dinotherium_, _Mastodon_, and _Elephas_ in the later Tertiary Age. Gaudry, the most eminent modern authority on these animals, remarks that the facts at present known do not "permit us to indicate any relation of descent between the elephantine animals and those of other orders known to us at present."] Many naturalists like Darwin and Haeckel, as well as philosophers like Herbert Spencer, are quite carried away by this analogy, and appear unable to perceive that it is merely a general resemblance between processes altogether different in their nature, and therefore in their causes. The greater part, however, of the more experienced palæontologists, or students of fossils, have long ago seen that in the larger field of the earth's history there is very much that cannot be found in the narrower field of the development of the individual animal; and they have endeavored to reduce the succession of life to such general expressions as shall render it more comprehensible and may at length enable us to arrive at explanations of its complex phenomena. Of these general expressions or conclusions I may state a few here, as apposite to our present subject, and as showing how little of real support the facts of the earth's history give to the pseudo-gnosis of monistic evolution. 1. The chain of life in geological time presents a wonderful testimony to the reality of a beginning. Just as we know that any individual animal must have had its birth, its infancy, its maturity, and will reach an end of life, so we trace species and groups of species to their beginning, watch their culmination, and perhaps follow them to their extinction. It is true that there is a sense in which geology shows "no sign of a beginning, no prospect of an end;" but this is manifestly because it has reached only a little way back toward the beginning of the earth as a whole, and can see in its present state no indication of the time or manner of the end. But its revelation of the fact that nearly all the animals and plants of the present day had a very recent beginning in geological time, and its disclosure of the disappearance of one form of life after another as we go back in time, till we reach the comparatively few forms of life of the Lower Cambrian, and finally have to rest over the solitary grandeur of _Eozoon_, oblige it to say that nothing known to it is self-existent and eternal. 2. The geological record informs us that the general laws of nature have continued unchanged from the earliest periods to which it relates until the present day. This is the true "uniformitarianism" of geology which holds to the dominion of existing causes from the first. But it does not refuse to admit variations in the intensity of these causes from time to time, and cycles of activity and repose, like those that we see on a small scale in the seasons, the occurrence of storms, or the paroxysms of volcanoes. When we find that the eyes of the old trilobites have had lenses and tubes similar to those in the eyes of modern crustaceans, we have evidence of the persistence of the laws of light. When we see the structures of Palæozoic leaves identical with those of our modern forests, we know that the arrangements of the soil, the atmosphere, and the rain were the same at that ancient time as at present. Yet, with all this, we also find evidence that long-continued periods of physical quiescence were followed by great crumplings and foldings of the earth's crust, and we know that this also is consistent with the operation of law; for it often happens that causes long and quietly operating prepare for changes which may be regarded as sudden and cataclysmic. 3. Throughout the geological history there is progress toward greater complexity and higher grade, along with degradation and extinction. Though experience shows that it may be quite possible that new discoveries may enable us to trace some of the higher forms of life farther back than we now find them, yet there can be no question that in the progress of geological time lower types have given place to higher, less specialized to more specialized. Curiously enough, no evidence proves this more clearly than that which relates to the degradation of old forms. When, for example, the reptiles of the Mesozoic Age were the lords of creation, there was apparently no place for the larger Mammalia which appear at the close of the reptile dynasty. So in the Palæozoic, when trees of the cryptogamous type predominated, there seems to have been no room in nature for the forests of modern type which succeeded them. Thus the earth at every period was fully peopled with living beings--at first with low and generalized structures which attained their maxima at early stages and then declined, and afterward with higher forms which took the places of those that were passing away. These latter, again, though their dominion was taken from them, were continued in lower positions under the new dynasties. Thus none of the lower types of life introduced was finally abandoned, but, after culminating in the highest forms of which it was capable, each was still continued, though with fewer species and a lower place. Examples of this abound in the history of all the leading groups of animals and plants. 4. There is thus a continued plan and order in the history of life which cannot be fortuitous. The chance interaction of organisms and their environment, even if we assume the organisms and environment as given to us, could never produce an orderly continuous progress of the utmost complexity in its detail, and extending through an enormous lapse of time. It has been well said that if a pair of dice were to turn up aces a hundred times in succession, any reasonable spectator would conclude that they were loaded dice; so if countless millions of atoms and thousands of species, each including within itself most complex arrangement of parts, turn up in geological time in perfectly regular order and a continued gradation of progress, something more than chance must be implied. It is to be observed here that every species of animal or plant, of however low grade, consists of many co-ordinated parts in a condition of the nicest equilibrium. Any change occurring which produces unequal or disproportionate development, as the experience of breeders of abnormal varieties of animals and plants abundantly proves, imperils the continued existence of the species. Changes must, therefore, in order to be profitable, affect the parts of the organism simultaneously and symmetrically. The chances of this may well be compared to the casting of aces a hundred times in succession, and are so infinitely small as to be incredible under any other supposition than that of intelligent design. [Illustration: FIG. 6. Group of Plants (restored) from the Devonian period, illustrating the complexity and beauty of the earliest known land vegetation, though many of the leading forms of modern plants are unknown in this very ancient period.] 5. The progress of life in geological time. Just as the growth of trees is promoted or arrested by the vicissitudes of summer and winter, so in the course of the geological history there have been periods of pause and acceleration in the work of advancement. This is in accordance with the general analogy of the operations of nature, and is in no way at variance with the doctrine of uniformity already referred to. Nor has it anything in common with the unfounded idea, at one time entertained, of successive periods of entire destruction and restoration of life. Prolific periods of this kind appear in the marine invertebrates of the early Cambrian, the plants (Figure 6) and fishes of the Devonian, the batrachians of the Carboniferous, the reptiles of the Trias, the broad-leaved trees of the Cretaceous, and the mammals of the early Tertiary. A remarkable contrast is afforded by the later Tertiary and modern time, in which, with the exception of man himself, and perhaps a very few other species, no new forms of life have been introduced, while many old forms have perished. This is somewhat unfortunate, since, in such a period of stagnation as that in which we live, we can scarcely hope to witness either the creation or the evolution of a new species. Evolutionists themselves--those, at least, who are willing to allow their theory to be at all modified by facts--now perceive this; and hence we have the doctrine, advanced by Mivart, Le Conte, and others, of "critical periods," or periods of rapid evolution alternating with others of greater quiescence. It is further to be observed here that in a limited way and with reference to certain forms of life we can see a reason for these intermittent creations. The greater part of the marine fossils known to us are from rocks now raised up in our continents, and they lived at periods when the continents were submerged. Now, in geological time these periods of submergence alternated with others of elevation; and it is manifest that each period of continental submergence gave scope for the introduction of numbers of new marine species, while each continental elevation, on the other hand, gave opportunity for the increase of land-life. Further, periods when a warm climate prevailed in the arctic regions--periods when plants such as now live in temperate regions could enjoy six months of continuous sunshine--were eminently favorable to the development of such plants, and were utilized for the introduction of new floras, which subsequently spread to the southward. Thus we see physical changes occurring in an orderly succession and made subservient to the progress of life. 6. There is no direct evidence that in the course of geological time one species has been gradually or suddenly changed into another. Of the latter we could scarcely expect to find any evidence in fossils; but of the former, if it had occurred, we might expect to find indications in the history of some of the numerous species which have been traced through successive geological formations. Species which thus continue for a great length of time usually present numerous varietal forms which have sometimes been described as new species; but when carefully scrutinized they are found to be merely local and temporary, and to pass into each other. On the other hand, we constantly find species replaced by others entirely new, and this without any transition. The two classes of facts are essentially different; and though it is possible to point out in the newer geological formations some genera and species allied to others which have preceded them, and to suppose that the later forms proceeded from the earlier, still, when the connecting-links cannot be found, this is mere supposition, not scientific certainty. Further, it proceeds on the principle of arbitrary choice of certain forms out of many without any evidence of genetic connection. The worthlessness of such derivation is well shown in a case which has often been paraded as an illustration of evolution--the supposed genealogy of the horse. In America a series of horse-like animals has been selected, beginning with the _Orohippus_ of the Eocene, and these have been marshalled as the ancestors of the fossil horses of America; for there are no native horses in America in the modern period. Yet this is purely arbitrary, and dependent merely on a succession of genera more and more closely resembling the modern horse being procurable from successive Tertiary deposits, often widely separated in time and place. In Europe, on the other hand, the ancestry of the horse has been traced back to _Palæotherium_--an entirely different form--by just as likely indications. Both genealogies can scarcely be true, and there is no actual proof of either. The existing American horses, which are of European parentage, are, according to the theory, descendants of _Palæotherium_, not of _Orohippus_; but if we had not known this on historical evidence, there would have been nothing to prevent us from tracing them to the latter animal. This simple consideration alone is sufficient to show that such genealogies are not of the nature of scientific evidence. It is further to be observed that some of the ablest palæontologists, and those who have enjoyed the largest opportunities of observation and comparison, attach no value whatever to theories of evolution as accounting for the origin of species. One of these is Joachim Barrande, the palæontologist of Bohemia, and the first authority in Europe on the fossils of the older formations. Barrande, like some other eminent palæontologists, has the misfortune to be an unbeliever in the modern gospel of evolution, but he has certainly labored to overcome his doubts with greater assiduity than even many of the apostles of the new doctrine; and if he is not convinced, the stubbornness of the facts he has had to deal with must bear the blame. In connection with his great and classical work on the Silurian fossils of Bohemia, it has been necessary for him to study the similar remains of every other country; and he has used this immense mass of material in preparing statistics of the population of the Palæozoic world more perfect than any other naturalist has been able to produce. In successive memoirs he has applied these statistical results to the elucidation of the history of the oldest group of crustaceans--the trilobites--and the highest group of the mollusks--the cephalopods. In his latest memoir of this kind he takes up the brachiopods, or lamp-shells, a group of bivalve shellfishes very ancient and very abundantly represented in all the older formations of every part of the world, and which thus affords the most ample material for tracing its evolution, with the least possible difficulty in the nature of "imperfection of the record." Barrande, in the publication before us, discusses the brachiopods with reference, first, to the variations observed within the limits of the species, eliminating in this way mere synonyms and varieties mistaken for species. He also arrives at various important conclusions with reference to the origin of species and varietal forms, which apply to the cephalopods and trilobites as well as to the brachiopods, and some of which, as the writer has elsewhere shown, apply very generally to fossil animals and plants. One of these is that different contemporaneous species, living under the same conditions, exhibit very different degrees of vitality and variability. Another is the sudden appearance at certain horizons of a great number of species, each manifesting its complete specific characters. With very rare exceptions, also, varietal forms are contemporaneous with the normal form of their specific type, and occur in the same localities. Only in a very few cases do they survive it. This and the previous results, as well as the fact that parallel changes go on in groups having no direct reaction on each other, prove that variation is not a progressive influence, and that specific distinctions are not dependent on it, but on the "sovereign action of one and the same creative cause," as Barrande expresses it. These conclusions, it may be observed, are not arrived at by that "slap-dash" method of mere assertion so often followed on the other side of these questions, but by the most severe and painstaking induction, and with careful elaboration of a few apparent exceptions and doubtful cases. His second heading relates to the distribution in time of the genera and species of brachiopods. This he illustrates with a series of elaborate tables, accompanied by explanation. He then proceeds to consider the animal population of each formation, in so far as brachiopods, cephalopods, and trilobites are concerned, with reference to the following questions: (1) How many species are continued from the previous formation unchanged? (2) How many may be regarded as modifications of previous species? (3) How many are migrants from other regions where they have been known to exist previously? (4) How many are absolutely new species? These questions are applied to each of fourteen successive formations included in the Silurian of Bohemia. The total number of species of brachiopods in these formations is six hundred and forty, giving an average of 45.71 to each, and the results of accurate study of each species in its characters, its varieties, its geographical and geological range, are expressed in the following short statement, which should somewhat astonish those gentlemen who are so fond of asserting that derivation is "demonstrated" by geological facts: 1. Species continued unchanged 28 per cent. 2. Species migrated from abroad 7 " 3. Species continued with modification 0 " 4. New species without known ancestors 65 " ------------- 100 per cent. He shows that the same or very similar proportions hold with respect to the cephalopods and trilobites, and, in fact, that the proportion of species in the successive Silurian faunæ which can be attributed to descent with modification is absolutely _nil_. He may well remark that in the face of such facts the origin of species is not explained by what he terms _les élans poétiques de l'imagination_. The third part of Barrande's memoir, relating to the comparison of the Silurian brachiopods of Bohemia with those of other countries, though of great scientific interest, and important in extending the conclusions of his previous chapters, does not so nearly concern our present subject. I have thought it well to direct attention to these memoirs of Barrande, because they form a specimen of conscientious work with the view of ascertaining if there is any basis in nature for the doctrine of spontaneous evolution of species, and, I am sorry to say, a striking contrast to the mixture of fact and fancy on this subject which too often passes current for science in England, America, and Germany. Barrande's studies are also well deserving the attention of our younger men of science, as they have before them, more especially in the widely-spread Palæozoic formations of America, an admirable field for similar work. In an appendix to his first chapter Barrande mentions that the three men who in their respective countries are the highest authorities on Palæozoic brachiopods, Hall, Davidson, and De Koninck, agree with him in the main in his conclusions, and he refers to an able memoir by D'Archiac in the same sense, on the cretaceous brachiopods. It should be especially satisfactory to those naturalists who, like the writer, had failed to see in the palæontological record any good evidence for the production of species by those simple and ready methods in vogue with most evolutionists, to note the extension of actual facts with respect to the geological dates and precise conditions of the introduction of new forms, and to find that these are more and more tending to prove the existence of highly complex creative laws in connection with the great plan of the Creator as carried out in geological time. These new facts should also warn the ordinary reader of the danger of receiving without due caution those general and often boastful assertions respecting these great and intricate questions made by persons not acquainted with their actual difficulty, or by enthusiastic speculators disposed to overlook everything not in accordance with their preconceived ideas. It may be asked, Is there, then, no place in the geological record even for theistic evolution? This it would be rash to affirm. We can only say that up to this time there is no proof of it. If nature has followed this method, she seems carefully to have concealed the process. If such changes have occurred as to evolve from a species, say of mollusk or coral, belonging to one geological period some form found in another period, and recognized as a distinct species, we have to suppose that the capacity for such change was in some way implanted in the species on its creation, and ready to be developed under favorable conditions or in the lapse of time. For example, we may suppose that a plant originating in the long arctic summers of a warm period might, on migrating southward into the alternations of day and night, undergo material changes. A marine animal long confined to a limited sea-basin might, on being permitted to expand over a wide submerged continent, be greatly modified in its structure and habits. Up to a certain point we know that such changes have occurred, and Barrande himself has largely illustrated them. As an example which I have myself studied, I may refer to the common shells known on our coasts as sand-clams (_Mya truncata and Mya arenaria_). The former species, in the cold waters of the Glacial Age, assumed a short form which it still retains in the arctic regions, and occasionally in the colder waters of the more temperate regions, though there a more elongated form prevails. Evidently the two forms are interchangeable according to the temperature of the water. Still, if we could imagine a permanent refrigeration over all the area occupied by the animal, the short form only might survive, and might be supposed to be a distinct species. This did not occur, however, even in the Glacial Age, and is not likely to occur. Further, the allied, though quite distinct, species _Mya arenaria_ has lived with the other through all the long duration of the Post-Pliocene and modern periods, and, though having its own range of varietal forms, has preserved its distinctness. Cases of this kind are obviously of the nature of varietal, not specific, change. In conclusion, the whole of the facts and laws above detailed point to a predetermined plan and to an intelligent Creator, of whose laws and modes of procedure we may learn much by patient and careful study. This surely gives a great additional interest to that marvellous story of the earth which in these last days has been revealed to us by the study of the rocks. We may also infer that not one method only but many have been employed in replenishing the earth at first with living beings, and in adding to these from time to time. To what extent we may be able to understand these, time and future discoveries will show. In the mean time, we can only suggest such general theories as those referred to in the first of these lectures, but can affirm that Agnostic Evolution is altogether abortive in its attempts to solve the problem of the chain of life in geological time. FOOTNOTE: [7] _Story of the Earth_, _Origin of the World_, _Chain of Life in Geological Time_. LECTURE IV. THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN. Man, when regarded merely as an organism, is closely related to the lower animals. His body is constructed on the same general plan with theirs. More especially, he is near akin to the other members of the class Mammalia. But we must not forget that even as an animal man is somewhat widely separated from his humbler relations (see Fig. 7). It is easy to say that every bone, every muscle, every convolution of his brain, has its counterpart in the corresponding parts of an orang or a gorilla. But, admitting this, it is also true that every one of these parts is different, and that the aggregate of all the differences mounts up to an enormous sum-total, more especially in relation to habits and to capacities for action. Those remarkable homologies or likenesses of plan which obtain in the animal kingdom are very wonderful, and the study of them greatly enlarges our conceptions of the unity of nature; but we must never forget that such general agreements in plan cover the most profound differences in detail and in adaptation to use, and that, while they indicate a common type, this may rather point to a unity of design than to a mere accidental unity of descent. [Illustration: FIG. 7. Man and his "poor relation," the gorilla. (_After Huxley._) The head of the gorilla, with immense jaws and small brain-case, its huge spines on the neck, its long arms, its elongated pelvis, and its hand-like feet, with its incapacity to assume the erect position, indicate its ordinal difference from man, and the necessity of many intermediate forms, still unknown, to connect the two species.] There is a method, well known to natural science, for measuring and indicating the divergence of man from his nearest allies. This is the application of those principles of classification which, though of essential importance in science, are by some modern students of nature strangely overlooked or misunderstood. Perhaps in nothing has the progress of ideas of evolution made a more injurious impress on the advance of knowledge than in the manner in which it has caused many eminent and able naturalists to diverge from all logical propriety in their ideas of classification. Still, in so far as man is concerned, there are some facts of this kind which are indisputable. He certainly constitutes a distinct species, including many races, which all, however, have common specific characters. On the other hand, no one pretends that he is _conspecific_ with any lower animal. All naturalists would now deride the stories, at one time current, that gorillas and chimpanzees are degraded races of men. On the other hand, even Haeckel admits that there is a wide gap, unfilled by any recent or any fossil creature, between man and the highest apes. Again, no _generic_ relationship can be claimed as between man and the lower animals. He presents such structural differences as entitle him to rank by himself in the genus _Homo_. Still further, the ablest naturalists, before the rise of Darwinism, held that man was entitled to be placed in a separate family or order from the apes. Modern evolutionists prefer to fall back on the old arrangement of Linnæus, and to place man and apes together in the group of Primates, which, however, Linnæus would not have regarded as precisely of the same value with an order as now held. In this those of them who have sufficient ability to comprehend the facts of the case are undoubtedly warped in judgment by the tendency of their philosophy to magnify resemblances and to minimize differences; while the herd of feebler men have their ideas of classification thoroughly confused by the doctrine which they have received as a creed dictated by authority, and to which they adhere under the influence of fear. In point of fact, the differences between man and any other animal are so wide that they warrant a distinction, not merely specific and generic, but of a family and an ordinal character. Perhaps the best way to appreciate this will be to suppose that man has become extinct, and that in some future geological period his fossil remains are studied by some new race of intelligent beings, and compared with those of the lower animals his contemporaries. Let us suppose that they have disinterred a human skull or the bones of a human foot. From the foot they would learn that man is not an arboreal animal, but intended to walk erect on the ground. They could infer from this certain structures and uses of the vertebral column and of the anterior limbs different from those found in apes, and which would certainly induce them to conclude that they had obtained remains indicating a new order of mammals. If they had found the foot alone, they might doubt whether the possessor of this strange and highly-specialized organ had been carnivorous or herbivorous, more nearly allied to the bears or to the monkeys. Should they now find the skull, these doubts would be solved, and they would know that the new animal was somewhat nearer to the apes than to the bears, but still at a very remote distance from them, and this indicated by peculiarities of brain-case, jaws, and teeth, proving divergences in function still wider than those apparent in the structures. They would also plainly perceive that to link man with his nearest mammalian allies would require the discovery of several missing links. When we consider the psychological endowments of man, his divergence from lower animals becomes immensely greater. In his external senses and in the perceptions derived through them it is true he resembles the brutes. There is also much in common with them in his appetites and emotions, and in some of the lower manifestations of intelligence. But he adds to this a higher reason, which causes his actions to be differently determined from theirs; and this higher reason, or spiritual nature, leads him to abstract ideas, to consciousness, to notions of right and of wrong, to ideas of higher spiritual beings and of futurity altogether unknown to lower animals. This divine reason, in connection with special vocal contrivances, also bestows on him the gift of speech. Nor can speech be reduced to a mere imitation of natural sounds; for, granting that these sounds may be the raw material of speech, yet man is enabled to apply this to the expression of ideas in a manner altogether peculiar to himself. Scientific precision obliges us to recognize these differences, and to admit that they place man on an entirely different plane from the lower animals. Perhaps the expression "a different plane" is scarcely correct, for man can exist on many different planes--a fact which has produced some confusion in the minds of naturalists not versed in psychological questions, though, when rightly considered, it marks very strongly the distinction between the man and the mere animal. The lower animals are tied up by invariable instincts to certain lines of action which keep all the individuals of any species on nearly the same level, except where some little disturbance may be caused by man in his processes of domestication. But with man it is quite different. He is emancipated from the bond of instinct, and left free to follow the guidance of his own will, determined by his own reason. It follows that the habits and the actions of a man depend on what he knows and believes, and on the deductions of his reason from these premises. Without knowledge, culture, and training, man is more helpless than any brute. With the noblest and highest capacities, he may devise and follow habits of life more base than those of any mere animal. Thus there is an almost immeasurable difference between the Godlike height to which man can attain by the right use of his powers and the depth to which ignorance and depravity may degrade him. It follows that the degradation of the lower races of men is as strong a proof of the difference between man and the lower animals as is the elevation of the higher races. Both are characteristic of a being emancipated from the control of instinct, knowing good and evil, free to choose, and differing in these respects from every other creature on earth. Such is man as we find him; and we may well ask by what process animal instinct could ever spontaneously develop human freedom and human reason. But we might have evidence of such a process, however strange and improbable it might at first sight appear. We might be able to trace man back in history or by prehistoric remains to greater and greater approximation to the lower animals, and might thus bridge over the great chasm now existing between man and beast. It may be instructive, therefore, to glance at what geology discloses as to the origin of man and his first appearance on the earth. In the older geological formations no remains of man or of his works have been found. Nor do we expect to find them, for none of the animals more nearly related to man then existed, and the condition of the earth was probably not suited to them. Nor do we find human remains even in the earlier Tertiary. Here also we do not expect them, for the Mammalia of those times were all specifically distinct from those of the modern world. It is only in the Pliocene period that we begin to find modern species of mammals. Here, therefore, we may look for human remains; but we do not find them as yet, and it is only at the close of the Pliocene, or even after the succeeding Glacial period, that we find undoubted traces of man. Let us glance at the significance of this. Mammalian life probably culminated or attained to its maximum in the Miocene and the early Pliocene periods. Then there were more numerous, larger, and better-developed quadrupeds on our continents than we now find. For example, the elephants, the noblest of the mammals, are at present represented by two species confined to India and parts of Africa.[8] In the Middle Tertiary there were, in addition to the ordinary elephants, two other genera, Mastodon and Dinotherium, and there were many species which were distributed over the whole northern hemisphere. The sub-Himalayan deposits of India alone have, I believe, afforded seven species, some of them of grander dimensions than either of those now existing. We have no trustworthy evidence as yet that man lived at this period. If he had, he either would have required the protection of a special Eden, or would have needed superhuman strength and sagacity. But the grand mammalian life of the Middle Tertiary was destined to die out. At the close of the Pliocene came an age of refrigeration, when arctic cold crept down over our continents far to the south, and when most of the animals suited to temperate climates were either frozen out or driven southward. During, or closing, this period was also a great submergence of the continents, which must have been equally destructive to mammalian life, and which extended over both Eurasia and America till the summits of some of the highest hills were under water. Attempts have been made to show that man existed before or during the Glacial Age, but this is very unlikely, and, as I have elsewhere argued, the evidence adduced to prove so great antiquity of man, whether in America or Europe, has altogether broken down.[9] At the close of the Glacial period the continents re-emerged and became more extensive than at present. Survivors of the Pliocene species, as well as other species not previously known, spread themselves over this new land. It would appear that it was in this "Post-Glacial" period that man made his appearance, and that he was then contemporary with many large animals now extinct, and was the possessor of wider continental areas than his descendants now enjoy. To this age belong those human bones and implements found in the older cave and gravel deposits of Europe, and which are referred to those palæolithic or palæocosmic ages which preceded the dawn of history in Europe and the arrival therein of the present European races. The occupation of Europe, and probably of Western Asia, by these oldest tribes of men was closed by a subsidence or submergence at the end of that "second continental period," as it has been called by Lyell,[10] in which they lived. When the land was restored to its present condition, they were replaced by the ancestors of the present European races. It may be well here to tabulate that later portion of the earth's geological history in which man appeared, more especially as it is sometimes arranged in a manner not suited to convey a correct impression of the actual succession. It will be seen by the general table given in the last lecture that the latest of the Tertiary ages is that known as the Pleistocene or Post-Pliocene, and this, with the succeeding modern period, may be best arranged as follows: I. PLEISTOCENE, including-- (_a_) _Early Pleistocene_, or First Continental Period. Land very extensive, moderate climate. (_b_) _Later Pleistocene_, or Glacial (including Dawkins' "Mid-Pleistocene"). In this there was a great prevalence of cold and glacial conditions, and a great submergence of the northern land. II. MODERN, or Period of Man and Modern Mammals, including-- (_a_) _Post-Glacial_, or Second Continental Period, in which the land was again very extensive, and palæocosmic man was contemporary with some great mammals--as the mammoth, now extinct--and the area of land in the northern hemisphere was greater than at present. (This represents the Late Pleistocene of Dawkins.) It was terminated by a great and very general subsidence, accompanied by the disappearance of palæocosmic man and some large Mammalia, and which may be identical with the historical deluge.[11] (_b_) _Recent_, when the continents attained their present levels, existing races of men colonized Europe, and living species of mammals. This includes both the Prehistoric and the Historic Period. The palæocosmic men of the above table are the oldest certainly known to us, and it has been truly said of them that they are so closely related to modern races that, on any hypothesis of gradual evolution, we must look for the transition from apes to men not merely in the Eocene Tertiary, but even in the Mesozoic--that is, in formations vastly older than any containing any remains so far as known either of man or of apes. That these most ancient men were in truth most truly human, and that they presented no transition to lower animals, will appear from the following notices, which I condense from a work of my own in which these subjects are more fully treated: The beautiful work of Lartet and Christy has vividly portrayed to us the antiquities of the limestone plateau of the Dordogne--the ancient Aquitania--remains which recall to us a population of Horites, or cave-dwellers, of a time anterior to the dawn of history in France, living much like the modern hunter-tribes of America, and, as already stated, possibly contemporary--in their early history, at least--with the mammoth and its extinct companions of the later Post-Pliocene forests. We have already noticed the arts and implements of these people, but what manner of people were they in themselves? The answer is given to us by the skeletons found in the cave of Cro-magnon. This cavern is a shelter or hollow under an overhanging ledge of limestone, and excavated originally by the action of the weather on a softer bed. It fronts the south-west and the little river Vezère; and, having originally been about eight feet high and nearly twenty deep, must have formed a cosey shelter from rain or cold or summer sun, and with a pleasant outlook from its front. All rude races have much sagacity in making selections of this sort. Being nearly fifty feet wide, it was capacious enough to accommodate several families, and when in use it no doubt had trees or shrubs in front, and may have been further completed by stones, poles, or bark placed across the opening. It seems, however, in the first instance to have been used only at intervals, and to have been left vacant for considerable portions of time. Perhaps it was visited only by hunting-or war-parties. But subsequently it was permanently occupied, and this for so long a time that in some places ashes and carbonaceous matter a foot and a half deep, with bones, implements, etc., were accumulated. By this time the height of the cavern had been much diminished, and, instead of clearing it out for future use, it was made a place of burial, in which four or five individuals were interred. Of these, two were men, one of great age, the other probably in the prime of life. A third was a woman of about thirty or forty years of age. The other remains were too fragmentary to give very certain results. These bones, with others to be mentioned in connection with them, unquestionably belong to the oldest human inhabitants known in Western Europe. They have been most carefully examined by several competent anatomists and archæologists, and the results have been published with excellent figures in the _Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ_. They are, therefore, of the utmost interest for our present purpose, and I shall try so to divest the descriptions of anatomical details as to give a clear notion of their character. The 'Old Man of Cro-magnon' was of great stature, being nearly six feet high. More than this, his bones show that he was of the strongest and most athletic muscular development--a Samson in strength; and the bones of the limbs have the peculiar form which is characteristic of athletic men habituated to rough walking, climbing, and running, for this is, I believe, the real meaning of the enormous strength of the thigh-bone and the flattened condition of the leg in this and other old skeletons. It occurs to some extent, though much less than in this old man, in American skeletons. His skull presents all the characters of advanced age, though the teeth had been worn down to the sockets without being lost; which, again, is the character of some, though not of all, aged Indian skulls. The skull proper, or brain-case, is very long--more so than in ordinary modern skulls--and this length is accompanied with a great breadth; so that the brain was of greater size than in average modern men, and the frontal region was largely and well developed. In this respect this most ancient skull fails utterly to vindicate the expectations of those who would regard prehistoric men as approaching to the apes. It is at the opposite extreme. The face, however, presented very peculiar characters. It was extremely broad, with projecting cheek-bones and heavy jaw, in this resembling the coarse types of the American face, and the eye-orbits were square and elongated laterally. The nose was large and prominent, and the jaws projected somewhat forward. This man, therefore, had, as to his features, some resemblance to the harsher type of American physiognomy, with overhanging brows, small and transverse eyes, high cheek-bones, and coarse mouth. He had not lived to so great an age without some rubs, for his thigh-bone showed a depression which must have resulted from a severe wound--perhaps from the horn of some wild animal or the spear of an enemy. The woman presented similar characters of stature and cranial form modified by her sex, and must in form and visage have been a veritable squaw, who, if her hair and complexion were suitable, would have passed at once for an American Indian woman, of unusual size and development. Her head bears sad testimony to the violence of her age and people. She died from the effects of a blow from a stone-headed pogamogan or spear, which has penetrated the right side of the forehead with so clean a fracture as to indicate the extreme rapidity and force of its blow. It is inferred from the condition of the edges of this wound that she may have survived its infliction for two weeks or more. If, as is most likely, the wound was received in some sudden attack by a hostile tribe, they must have been driven off or have retired, leaving the wounded woman in the hands of her friends to be tended for a time, and then buried, either with other members of her family or with others who had perished in the same skirmish. Unless the wound was inflicted in sleep, during a night-attack, she must have fallen, not in flight, but with her face to the foe, perhaps aiding the resistance of her friends or shielding her little ones from destruction. With the people of Cro-magnon, as with the American Indians, the care of the wounded was probably a sacred duty, not to be neglected without incurring the greatest disgrace and the vengeance of the guardian spirits of the sufferers. The skulls of these people have been compared to those of the modern Esthonians or Lithuanians; but on the authority of M. Quatrefages it is stated that, while this applies to the probably later race of small men found in some of the Belgian caves, it does not apply so well to the people of Cro-magnon. Are, then, these people the types of any ancient, or of the most ancient, European race? One answer is given by the remarkable skeleton of Mentone, in the South of France, found under circumstances equally suggestive of great antiquity (Figure 8). Dr. Rivière, in a memoir on this skeleton illustrated by two beautiful photographs, shows that the characters of the skull and of the bones of the limbs are precisely similar to those of the Cro-magnon skeleton, indicating a perfect identity of race, while the objects found with the skeleton are similar in character. The ornaments of Cro-magnon were perforated shells from the Atlantic and pieces of ivory. Those at Mentone were perforated Neritinæ from the Mediterranean and canine-teeth of the deer. In both cases there was evidence that these ancient people painted themselves with red oxide of iron; and, as if to complete the similarity, the Mentone man had an old healed-up fracture of the radius of the left arm, the effect of a violent blow or of a fall. Skulls found at Clichy and Grenelle in 1868 and 1869 are described by Professor Broca and Mr. Fleurens as of the same general type, and the remains found at Gibraltar and in the cave of Paviland, in England, seem also to have belonged to the same race. The celebrated Engis skull, believed to have belonged to a contemporary of the mammoth, is also precisely of the same type, though less massive than that of Cro-magnon; and, lastly, even the somewhat degraded Neanderthal skull, found in a cave near Dusseldorf, though, like that of Clichy, inferior in frontal development, is referable to the same peculiar long-headed style of man, in so far as can be judged from the portion that remains. [Illustration: FIG. 8. Portion of the skeleton of the fossil man of Mentone. This skeleton was discovered by Dr. Rivière under about twenty feet of accumulated débris. It belongs to the palæocosmic age, and illustrates the high type, physically, of the man of that period. The skeleton, like others of that age, indicates a man of great stature and muscular vigor, and with brain above the average size. (_After Rivière._)] Let it be observed, then, that these skulls are probably the oldest known in the world, and they are all referable to one race of men; and let us ask what they tell as to the position and character of palæolithic man. The testimony is here fortunately wellnigh unanimous. Huxley, who well compares some of the peculiar features of these ancient skulls and skeletons to those of Australians and other rude tribes, and of the ancient Danes of Borroby--a people not improbably allied to the Esthonians and Fins--remarks that the manner in which the individual heads of the most homogeneous rude races differ from each other "in the same characters, though perhaps not to the same extent with the Engis and Neanderthal skulls, seems to prohibit any cautious reasoner from affirming the latter to have necessarily been of distinct races." My own experience in American skulls, and the still larger experience of Dr. Wilson, fully confirm the wisdom of this caution.... He adds: "Finally, the comparatively large cranial capacity of the Neanderthal skull, overlaid though it may be by pithecoid, bony walls, and the completely human proportions of the accompanying limb-bones, together with the very fair development of the Engis skull, clearly indicate that the first traces of the primordial stock whence man has been derived need no longer be sought by those who entertain any form of the doctrine of progressive development in the newest Tertiaries, but that they may be looked for in an epoch more distant from that of the _Elephas primigenius_ than that is from us." If he had possessed the Cro-magnon and Mentone skulls at the time when this was written, he might well have said immeasurably distant from the time of the _Elephas primigenius_. Professor Broca, who seems by no means disinclined to favor a simian origin for men, has the following general conclusions, which refer to the Cro-magnon skulls: "The great volume of the brain, the development of the frontal region, the fine elliptical profile of the anterior portion of the skull, and the orthognathous form of the upper facial region, are incontestably evidence of superiority which are met with usually only in the civilized races. On the other hand, the great breadth of face, the alveolar prognathism, the enormous development of the ascending ramus of the lower jaw, the extent and roughness of the muscular insertions, especially of the masticatory muscles, give rise to the idea of a violent and brutal race." [Illustration: FIG. 9. Three bone harpoons. The upper is from Kent's Cavern, Torquay, and perhaps the oldest known, being of the mammoth age. The second is from Denmark, and is neocosmic, though prehistoric. The third is modern, from Tierra del Fuego. They show the similarity of bone implements in all ages of the world. The earliest had already attained as much perfection as the material permitted with reference to the use intended.] He adds that this apparent antithesis, seen also in the limbs as well as in the skull, accords with the evidence furnished by the associated weapons and implements of a rude hunter-life, and at the same time of no mean degree of taste and skill in carving and other arts (see Fig. 9). He might have added that this is precisely the antithesis seen in the American tribes, among whom art and taste of various kinds, and much that is high and spiritual even in thought, coexisted with barbarous modes of life and intense ferocity and cruelty. The god and the devil were combined in these races, but there was nothing of the mere brute. Rivière remarks, with expressions of surprise, the same contradictory points in the Mentone skeleton. Its grand development of brain-case and high facial angle--even higher, apparently, than in most of these ancient skulls--combined with other characters which indicate a low type and barbarous modes of life. Another point which strikes us in reading the descriptions, and which deserves the attention of those who have access to the skeletons, is the indication which they seem to present of an extreme longevity. The massive proportions of the body, the great development of the muscular processes, the extreme wearing of the teeth among a people who predominantly lived on flesh and not on grain, the obliteration of the sutures of the skull, along with indications of slow ossification of the ends of the long bones, point in this direction, and seem to indicate a slow maturity and great length of life in this most primitive race. The picture would be incomplete did we not add that in France and Belgium, in the immediately succeeding or reindeer age, these gigantic and magnificent men seem to have been superseded by a feebler race of smaller stature and with shorter heads; so that we have, even in these oldest days, the same contrasts so plainly perceptible in the races of the North of Europe and the North of America in historical times (Figure 10). [Illustration: FIG. 10. Section of the cave of Frontal, in Belgium. (_After Dupont._) _a_, limestone; _b_, deposit of mud of the mammoth age, on which rests a bed of gravel, _c_, and above this there was, in modern times, a mass of fallen débris, _d_, up to the dotted line. On removing this, a hearth was found at _e_, on which were numerous bones of modern animals, the remains of funeral feasts. The cave was closed with a flat stone, and within were skeletons, stone implements, ornaments, and pottery of the "neolithic" age. Under these was undisturbed earth of the palæolithic, or mammoth age. The facts show the succession, in Belgium, of palæocosmic or antediluvian men and of neocosmic men allied to the Basques or to the Laps, and all this previous to the advent of the modern races.] It is further significant that there are some indications to show that the larger and nobler race was that which inhabited Europe at the time of its greatest elevation above the sea and greatest horizontal extent, and when its fauna included many large quadrupeds now extinct. This race of giants was thus in the possession of a greater continental area than that now existing, and had to contend with gigantic brute rivals for the possession of the world. It is also not improbable that this early race became extinct in Europe in consequence of the physical changes which occurred in connection with the subsidence which reduced the land to its present limits, and that the dwarfish race which succeeded came in as the appropriate accompaniment of a diminished land-surface and a less genial climate in the early modern period. Both of these races are properly palæolithic, and are supposed to antedate the period of polished stone; but this may, to a great extent, be a prejudice of collectors, who have arrived at a foregone conclusion as to the distinctness of these periods (Figure 11). Judging from the great cranial capacity of the older race and the small number of their skeletons found, it would be fair to suppose that they represent rude outlying tribes belonging to races which elsewhere had attained to greater culture. [Illustration: FIG. 11. Flint arrow-heads found together in a modern Indian deposit in Canada, and showing the coincidence in time of rude and finished flint weapons, or that among all savages using chipped flint, the palæolithic and neolithic ages are contemporaneous.] Lastly, both of these old European races were Turanian, Mongolian, or American in their head-forms and features, as well as in their habits, implements, and arts. To illustrate this, in so far as the older of the two races is concerned, I have carefully compared collections of American Indian skulls with casts and figures representing the form and dimensions of some of the oldest European crania above referred to. Some of the American skulls may fairly be compared in their characters with the Mentone skull, and others with those of Cro-magnon, Engis, and Neanderthal; and so like are some of the Huron, Iroquois, and other northern American skulls to these ancient European relics and others of their type, that it would be difficult to affirm that they might not have belonged to near relatives. On the other hand, the smaller and shorter heads of the race of the reindeer age in Europe may be compared with the Laps, and with some of the more delicately formed Algonquin and Chippewayan skulls in America. If, therefore, the reader desires to realize the probable aspect of the men of Cro-magnon, of Mentone, or of Engis, I may refer him to modern American heads. So permanent is this great Turanian race, out of which all the other races now extant seem to have been developed, in the milder and more hospitable regions of the Old World, while in northern Asia and in America it has retained to this day its primitive characters. The reader, reflecting on what he has learned from history, may be disposed here to ask, Must we suppose Adam to have been one of these Turanian men, like old men of Cro-magnon? In answer, I would say that there is no good reason to regard the first man as having resembled a Greek Apollo or an Adonis. He was probably of sterner and more muscular mould. But the gigantic palæolithic men of the European caves are more probably representatives of that fearful and powerful race who filled the antediluvian world with violence, and who reappear in postdiluvian times as the Anakim and traditional giants, who constitute a feature in the early history of so many countries. Perhaps nothing is more curious in the revelations as to the most ancient cave-men than that they confirm the old belief that there were 'giants in those days.' And now let us pause for a moment to picture these so-called palæolithic men. What could the old man of Cro-magnon have told us had we been able to sit by his hearth and listen understandingly to his speech?--which, if we may judge from the form of his palate-bones, must have resembled more that of the Americans or Mongolians than of any modern European people. He had, no doubt, travelled far, for to his stalwart limbs a long journey through forests and over plains and mountains would be a mere pastime. He may have bestridden the wild horse, which seems to have abounded at the time in France, and he may have launched his canoe on the waters of the Atlantic. His experience and memory might extend back a century or more, and his traditional lore might go back to the times of the first mother of our race. Did he live in that wide Post-Pliocene continent which extended westward through Ireland? Did he know and had he visited the nations that lived in the valley of the great Gihon, that ran down the Mediterranean Valley, or on that nameless river which flowed through the Dover Straits? Had he visited or seen from afar the great island Atlantis, whose inhabitants could almost see in the sunset sky the islands of the blest? Or did he live at a later time, after the Post-Pliocene subsidence, and when the land had assumed its present form? In that case he could have told us of the great deluge, of the huge animals of the antediluvian World--known to him only by tradition--and of the diminished strength and longevity of men in his comparatively modern days. We can but conjecture all this. But, mute though they may be as to the details of their lives, the man of Cro-magnon and his contemporaries are eloquent of one great truth, in which they coincide with the Americans and with the primitive men of all the early ages. They tell us that primitive man had the same high cerebral organization which he possesses now, and, we may infer, the same high intellectual and moral nature, fitting him for communion with God and headship over the lower world. They indicate, also, like the Mound-builders, who preceded the North American Indian, that man's earlier state was the best--that he had been a high and noble creature before he became a savage. It is not conceivable that their high development of brain and mind could have spontaneously engrafted itself on a mere brutal and savage life. These gifts must be remnants of a noble organization degraded by moral evil. They thus justify the tradition of a Golden and Edenic Age, and mutely protest against the philosophy of progressive development as applied to man, while they bear witness to the identity in all important characters of the oldest prehistoric men with that variety of our species which is at the present day at once the most widely extended and the most primitive in its manners and usages. Thus it would appear that these earliest known men are not specifically distinct from ourselves, but are a distinct race, most nearly allied to that great Turanian stock which is at the present day, and has apparently from the earliest historic times been, the most widely spread of all. Though rude and uncultured, they were not either physically or mentally inferior to the average men of to-day, and were indeed in several respects men of high type, whose great cranial capacity might lead us to suppose that their ancestors had recently been in a higher state of civilization than themselves. It is, however, possible that this characteristic was rather connected with great energy and physical development than with high mental activity. To the hypothesis of evolution, as applied to man, these facts evidently oppose great difficulties. They show that such modern degraded races as the Fuegians or the Tasmanians cannot present to us the types of our earlier ancestors, since the latter were men of a different and higher style. Nor do these oldest known men present any approximation in physical characters to the lower animals. Further, we may infer from their works, and from what we know of their beliefs and habits, that they were not creatures of instinct, but of thought like ourselves, and that materialistic doctrines of automatism and brain-force without mind would be quite as absurd in their application to them as to their modern representatives. It is not too much to say that, in presence of these facts, the spontaneous origin of man from inferior animals cannot be held as a scientific conclusion. It may be an article of faith in authority, or a superstition or an hypothesis, but is in no respect a result of scientific investigation into the fossil remains of man. But if man is not such a product of spontaneous evolution, he must have been created by a Being having a higher reason and a greater power than his own; and the ancestry of the agnostic, and the rational powers which he exercises, constitute the best refutation of his own doctrine. FOOTNOTES: [8] The Ceylon elephant is by some believed to be distinct, but is probably a variety of the Indian species. [9] _Fossil Men_ (London, 1880), Appendix. [10] The first continental period was that of the earlier Pliocene. [11] The precise date in years assignable to this event geology cannot determine; but I have elsewhere shown that the actual antiquity of the palæocosmic or antediluvian man has been greatly exaggerated. LECTURE V. NATURE AS A MANIFESTATION OF MIND. The subjects already discussed should have prepared us to regard nature as not a merely fortuitous congeries of matter and forces, but as embodying plan, design, and contrivance; and we may now inquire as to the character of these, considered as possible manifestations of mind in nature. The idea that nature is a manifestation of mind, is ancient, and probably universal. It proceeds naturally from the analogy between the operations of nature and those which originate in our own will and contrivance. When men begin to think more accurately, this idea acquires a deeper foundation in the conclusion that nature, in all its varied manifestations, is one vast machine too great and complex for us to comprehend, and implying a primary energy infinitely beyond that of man; and thus the unity of nature points to one Creative Mind. Even to savage peoples, in whose minds the idea of unity has not germinated, or from whose traditions it has been lost, a spiritual essence appears to underlie all natural phenomena, though they may regard this as consisting of a separate spirit or manitou for every material thing. In all the more cultivated races the ideas of natural religion have taken more definite forms in their theology and philosophy. Dugald Stewart has well expressed the more scientific form of this idea in two short statements: "1. Every effect implies a cause. "2. Every combination of means to an end implies intelligence." The theistic aspect of the doctrine had, as we have seen in a previous lecture, been already admirably expressed by Paul in his Epistle to the Romans. Writing of what every heathen must know of mind in nature, he says: "The invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his eternal power and divinity." The two things which, according to him, every intelligent man must perceive in nature are, first, power above and beyond that of man, and, secondly, superhuman intelligence. Even Agnostic Evolution cannot wholly divest itself of the idea of mind in nature. Its advocates continually use terms implying contrivance and plan when speaking of nature; and Spencer appears explicitly to admit that we cannot divest ourselves of the notion of a First Cause. Even those writers who seek to shelter themselves under such vague and unmeaning statements as that human intelligence must be potentially present in atoms or in the solar energy, are merely attributing superhuman power and divinity to atoms and forces. Nor can they escape by the magisterial denunciation of such ideas as "anthropomorphic" fancies. All science must in this sense be anthropomorphic, for it consists of what nature appears to us to be when viewed through the medium of our senses, and of what we think of nature as so presented to us. The only difference is this--that if Agnostic Evolution is true, Science itself only represents a certain stage of the development, and can have no actual or permanent truth; while, if the theistic view is correct, then the fact that man himself belongs to the unity of nature and is in harmony with its other parts gives us some guarantee for the absolute truth of scientific facts and principles. We may now consider more in detail some of the aspects under which mind presents itself in nature. 1. It may be maintained that nature is an exhibition of regulated and determined power. The first impression of nature presented to a mind uninitiated in its mysteries is that it is a mere conflict of opposing forces; but so soon as we study any natural phenomena in detail, we see that this is an error, and that everything is balanced in the nicest way by the most subtle interactions of matter and force. We find also that, while forces are mutually convertible and atoms susceptible of vast varieties of arrangement, all this is determined by fixed law and carried out with invariable regularity and constancy. The vapor of water, for example, diffused in the atmosphere, is condensed by extreme cold and falls to the ground in snowflakes. In these, particles of water previously kept asunder by heat are united by cohesive force; and the heat has gone on other missions. But these particles do not merely unite: they geometrize. Like well-drilled soldiers arranging themselves in ranks, they form themselves, according to regular axes of attraction, in lines diverging at an angle of sixty degrees; and thus the snowflakes are hexagonal plates and six-rayed stars, the latter often growing into very complex shapes, but all based on the law of attraction under angles of sixty degrees (see Fig. 12). The frost on the window-panes observes the same law, and so does every crystallization of water where it has scope to arrange itself in accordance with its own geometry. But this law of crystallization gives to snow and ice their mechanical properties, and is connected with a multitude of adjustments of water in the solid state to its place in nature. The same law, varied in a vast number of ways in every distinct substance, builds up crystals of all kinds and crystalline rocks, and is connected with countless adaptations of different kinds of matter to mechanical and chemical uses in the arts. It is easy to see that all this might have been otherwise--nay, that it must have been otherwise--but for the institution of many and complex laws. [Illustration: FIG. 12. Snowflakes copied from nature under the microscope, and serving to illustrate the geometrical arrangement of molecules of water in crystallizing. _a_, _b_, simple stars; _c_, _d_, hexagonal plates; _e_, _f_, rays of large and complex star-shaped flakes. The law of arrangement of the molecules is that of attraction in the lines of three axes at angles of sixty degrees, and the varieties are produced by differences in temperature and rate of supply of material.] A lump of coal at first suggests little to excite interest or imagination; but the student of its composition and microscopic structure finds that it is an accumulation of vegetable matter representing the action of the solar light on the leaves of trees of the Palæozoic Age. It thus calls up images of these perished forests and of the causes concerned in their production and growth, and in the accumulation and preservation of their buried remains. It further suggests the many ways in which this solar energy, so long sealed up, can be recalled to activity in heat, gaslight, steam, and electric light, and how remarkably these things have been related to the wealth and the civilization of modern nations. An able writer of the agnostic school, in a popular lecture on coal, has his imagination so stimulated by these thoughts that he apostrophizes "Nature" as the cunning contriver who stored up this buried sunlight by her strange and mysterious alchemy, kept it quietly to herself through all the long geological periods when reptiles and brute mammals were lords of creation, and through those centuries of barbarism when savage men roamed over the productive coal-districts in ignorance of their treasures, and then revealed her long-hidden stores of wealth and comfort to the admiring study of science and civilization, and for the benefit of the millions belonging to densely-peopled and progressive nations; It is plain that "Nature" in such a connection represents either a poetical fiction, a superstitious fancy, or an intelligent Creative Mind. It is further evident that such Creative Mind must be in harmony with that of man, though vastly greater in its scope and grasp in time and space. Even the numerical relations observed in nature teach the same lesson. The leaves of plants are not arranged at random, but in a series of curiously-related spirals, differing in different plants, but always the same in the same species and regulated by definite laws. Similar definiteness regulates the ramification of plants, which depends primarily on the arrangement of the leaves. The angle of ramification of the veins of the leaf is settled for each species of plant; so are the numbers of parts in the flower and the angular arrangement of these parts. It is the same in the animal kingdom, such numbers as 5, 6, 8, 10 being selected to determine the parts in particular animals and portions of animals. Once settled, these numbers are wonderfully permanent in geological time. The first known land reptiles appear in the Carboniferous period, and they have normally five toes; these appear in the earliest known species in the lowest beds of the Carboniferous. Their predecessors, the fishes, had numerous fin-rays; but when limbs for locomotion on land were contrived, the number five was adopted as the typical one. It still persists in the five toes and fingers of man himself. From these, as is well known, our decimal notation is derived. It did not originate in any special fitness of the number ten, but in the fact that men began to reckon by counting their ten fingers. Thus the decimal system of arithmetic, with all that follows from it, was settled millions of years ago, in the Carboniferous period, either by certain low-browed and unintelligent batrachians or by their Maker. 2. Nature presents to us very remarkable revelations of dissimilar and widely-separated matters and forces. I have referred to the numerical arrangement of the leaves of plants; but the leaf itself, in its structure and functions, is one of the most remarkable things in nature. Composed of layers of loosely-placed living cells with air-spaces between them; enclosed above and below with a transparent epidermis, the spaces between the cells communicating with the atmosphere without by means of microscopic pores guarded by cunningly-contrived valves opening or closing according to the hygrometric state of the air; connected with the stem of the plant by a system of tubes strengthened with spiral fibres within,--the structure of the leaf is, mechanically considered, of extreme beauty and complexity. But its living functions are still more wonderful. Receiving the water from the soil with such materials as it brings thence in solution, and absorbing carbonic dioxide and ammonia from the air, the living protoplasm of the leaf-cells has the power of chemically changing all these substances, and of producing from them those complicated and otherwise inimitable organic compounds of which the tissues of the plant are built up. The force by which this is done is that of the solar heat and light, both admitted freely into the interior of the leaf through the transparent epidermis, and therein imprisoned, so as to constitute a powerful storehouse of evaporation and chemical energy. In this way all the materials available for the maintenance of life, whether vegetable or animal, are produced, and no other structure than the living vegetable cell, as it exists in the leaf, has the power to effect these miracles of transmutation. Here, let it be observed, we have the vegetable cell placed in relation with the system of the plant, with the soil, with the atmosphere and its waters, with the distant sun itself and the properties of its emitted energies. Let it further be observed that, on the one hand, the chemistry involved in this is of a character altogether different from that which applies to inorganic matter, and, on the other, the products derived from a very few elements embrace all that vast variety of compounds which we observe in plants and animals, and which constitute the material of one of the most complex of sciences--that of organic chemistry. Finally, these complicated structures were produced and all their relations set up at a very early geological period. In so far as we can judge from their remains and the results effected, the leaves of the Palæozoic period were functionally as perfect as their modern successors (see Figs. 13, 14). Of course, the agnostic evolutionist may, if he pleases, attribute all this to fortuitous interactions of the sun, the atmosphere, and the earth, and may provide for what these fail to explain by the assumption of potentialities equivalent to the things produced. But the probability of such an hypothesis becomes infinitely small when we consider the variety and the diversity of things and forces which must have conspired to produce the results observed, and to maintain them so constantly, and yet with so much difference in circumstances and details. It is a relief to turn from such bewildering and gratuitous suppositions to the theory which supposes a designing Creative Mind. [Illustration: FIG. 13. Section of the leaf of a Cycad, being one of the most ancient styles of leaf of which the structure is known. _a_, upper epidermis; _b_, upper layer of cells, with grains of chlorophyll; _c_, lower layer of cells, with chlorophyll; _d_, lower epidermis; _e_, stomata, or breathing-pores, with contractile cells for opening and closing.] [Illustration: FIG. 14. Foliage from the coal-formation, showing some of the forms of leaves instrumental in accumulating the carbon of our coal-beds, by their action on the atmosphere under the influence of sunlight.] From the boundless variety of illustrations which the animal kingdom presents I may select one--the contrivances by means of which marine animals are enabled to float or balance themselves in the waters. The _Pearly Nautilus_ (see Fig. 15) is one of the most familiar, and also one of the most curious. Its coiled shell is divided by partitions into air-chambers so proportioned that the buoyancy of the air is sufficient to counterpoise in sea-water the weight of the animal. There are also contrivances by which the density of the contained air and of the body of the animal can be so modified as slightly to disturb this equilibrium, and to enable the creature to rise or sink in the waters. It would be tedious to describe, without adequate illustrations, all the machinery connected with these adjustments. It is sufficient for our purpose to know that they are provided in such a manner that the animal is practically exempted from the operation of the force of gravity. In the modern seas these provisions are enjoyed by only a few species of the genera _Nautilus_ and _Spirula_; but in former geological ages, more numerous, as well as larger and more complex, forms existed. Further, this contrivance is very old. We find in the _Orthoceratites_ and their allies of the earliest Silurian formations these arrangements in their full perfection, and in some forms[12] even more complex than in later types. [Illustration: FIG. 15. Section of the Pearly Nautilus and its shell, showing that the animal occupies only the outer chamber, the others being filled with air and acting as a float whose buoyancy can be modified by the action of the tube, or siphuncle, passing through the chambers.] The peculiar contrivances observed in the nautilus and its allies are possessed by no other mollusks, but there is another group of somewhat lower grade, that of the _Ianthinæ_, or violet snails, in which flotation is provided for in another way (see Fig. 16). In these animals the shell is perfectly simple, though light, and the floating apparatus consists in a series of horny air-vesicles attached to what is termed the "foot" of the animal, and which are increased in number to suit its increasing weight as it grows in size. There are some reasons to believe that this entirely different contrivance is as old in geological time as the chambered shell of the nautiloid animals. It was, indeed, in all probability, more common and adapted to larger animals in the Silurian period than at present. [Illustration: FIG. 16. _Ianthina_, or Violet Snail, attached to a float composed of horny hollow vesicles, to the under side of which its eggs are attached. When hatched, each young animal develops a small float similar to that of the parent.] Another curious instance--not, so far as yet known, existing at all in the modern world--is that of the remarkable stalked star-fish described by Professor Hall under the name _Camerocrinus_, and whose remains are found in the Upper Silurian rocks. The Crinoids, or feather-stars, are well-known inhabitants of the seas, in both ancient and modern times; but previous to Professor Hall's discovery they were known only as animals attached by flexible stems to the sea-bottom or creeping slowly by means of their radiating arms. It was not suspected that any of them had committed themselves to the mercy of the currents, suspended from floats. It appears, however, that this was actually realized in the Upper Silurian period, when certain animals of this group developed a hollow calcareous vesicle forming a balloon-shaped float, from which they could hang suspended in the water and float freely (see Fig. 17). So far as known, this remarkable contrivance was temporary, and probably adapted to some peculiarities of the habits and food of these animals occurring only in the geological period in which they existed. [Illustration: FIG. 17. _Camerocrinus_, reduced in size (as restored by Hall). This is a crinoid, or feather-star, of the Upper Silurian period, floating by means of a hollow balloon-shaped structure divided into chambers and formed of calcareous plates.] Examples of this sort of adjustment are found in other types of animal life. In the beautiful Portuguese man-of-war (_Physalia_) and its allies flotation is provided for by membranous or cartilaginous sacs or vesicles filled with air, and which are the common support of numerous individuals which hang from them (see Fig. 18). In some allied creatures the buoyancy required is secured by little vesicles filled with oil secreted by the animals themselves. In each of these cases we have a skilful adaptation of means to ends. The float is so constructed as to avail itself of the properties of gases and liquids, and the apparatus is framed on the most scientific principles and in the most artistic manner. That this apparatus grows and is not mechanically put together, and that in each case the instincts and the habits of the animal have been correlated with it, can scarcely be held by the most obtuse intellect to invalidate the evidence of intelligent design. [Illustration: FIG. 18. The _Physalia_, or "Portuguese man-of-war" of the Atlantic, being a colony of animals provided with long tentacles used as fishing-lines, and hanging from a membranous float with a crest, or "sail," on the top, and a pointed end which, being turned from side to side, serves as a rudder.] 3. Structures apparently the most simple, and often heedlessly spoken of as if they involved no complexity, prove, on examination, to be intricate and complex almost beyond conception. In nothing, perhaps, is this better seen than in that much-abused protoplasm which has been made to do duty for God in the origination of life, but which is itself a most laboriously manufactured material. Albumen, or white of egg--which is otherwise named "protoplasm"--is a very complicated substance both chemically and in its molecular arrangements, and when endowed with life it presents properties altogether inscrutable. It is easy to say that the protoplasm of an egg or of some humble animalcule or microscopic embryo is little more than a mass of structureless jelly; yet, in the case of the embryo, a microscopic dot of this apparently structureless jelly must contain all the parts of the future animal, however complex; but how we may never know, and certainly cannot yet comprehend. There are minute animalcules belonging to the group of flagellate Infusoria, some of which, under ordinary microscopic powers, appear merely as moving specks, and show their actual structures only under powers of two thousand diameters, or more; yet these animals can be seen to have an outer skin and an inner mass, to have pulsating sacs and reproductive organs, and threadlike flagella wherewith to swim. Their eggs are, of course, much smaller than themselves--so much so that some of them are probably invisible under the highest powers yet employed. Each of them, however, is potentially an animal, with all its parts represented structurally in some way. Nor need we wonder at this. It has been calculated that a speck scarcely visible under the most powerful microscope may contain two million four hundred thousand molecules of protoplasm.[13] If each of these molecules were a brick, there would be enough of them to build a terrace of twenty-five good dwelling-houses. But this is supposing them to be all alike; whereas we know that the molecules of albumen are capable of being of very various kinds. Each of these molecules really contains eight hundred and eighty-two ultimate atoms--namely, four hundred of carbon, three hundred and ten of hydrogen, one hundred and twenty of oxygen, fifty of nitrogen, and two of sulphur and phosphorus. Now, we know that these atoms may be differently arranged in different molecules, producing considerable difference of properties. Let us try, then, to calculate of how many differences of arrangement the atoms of one molecule of protoplasm are susceptible, and then to calculate of how many changes these different assemblages are capable in a microscopic dot composed of two million four hundred thousand of them. It is scarcely necessary to say that such a calculation, in the multitudes of possibilities involved, transcends human powers of imagination; yet it answers questions of mechanical and chemical grouping merely, without any reference to the additional mystery of life. Let it be observed that this vastly complex material is assumed as if there were nothing remarkable in it, by many of those theorists who plausibly explain to us the spontaneous origin of living things. But nature, in arranging all the parts of a complicated animal beforehand in an apparently structureless microscopic ovum, has all these vast numbers to deal with in working out the exact result; and this not in one case merely, but in multitudes of cases involving the most varied combinations. We can scarcely suppose the atoms themselves to have the power of thus unerringly marshalling themselves to work out the structures of organisms infinitely varied, yet all alike after their kinds. If not, then "Nature" must be a goddess gifted with superhuman powers of calculation and marvellous deftness in arranging invisible atoms. 4. The beauty of form, proportion, and coloring that abounds in nature affords evidence of mind. Herculean efforts have been made by modern evolutionists to eliminate altogether the idea of beauty from nature, by theories of sexual selection and the like, and to persuade us that beauty is merely utility in disguise, and even then only an accidental coincidence between our perceptions and certain external things. But in no part of their argument have they more signally failed in accounting for the observed facts, and in no part have they more seriously outraged the common sense and natural taste of men. In point of fact, we have here one of those great correlations belonging to the unity of nature--that indissoluble connection which has been established between the senses and the æsthetic sentiments of man and certain things in the external world. But there is more in beauty than this merely anthropological relation. Certain forms, for example, adopted in the skeletons of the lower animals are necessarily beautiful because of their geometrical proportions. Certain styles of coloring are necessarily beautiful because of harmonies and contrasts which depend on the essential properties of the waves of light. Beauty is thus in a great measure independent of the taste of the spectator. It is also independent of mere utility, since, even if we admit that all these combinations of forms, motions, and colors which we call beautiful are also useful, it is easy to perceive that the end could often be attained without the beauty. It is a curious fact that some of the simplest animals--as, for example, sponges and Foraminifera,--are furnished with the most beautiful skeletons. Nothing can exceed the beauty of form and proportions in the shells of some Foraminifera and Polycistina, or in the skeletons of some silicious sponges (see Fig. 19), while it is obvious that these humble creatures, without brains and external senses, can neither contrive nor appreciate the beauty with which they are clothed. Further, some of these structures are very old geologically. The sponge whose skeleton his known as "Venus's flower-basket" produces a structure of interwoven silicious threads exquisite in its beauty and perfect in its mechanical arrangements for strength (Figure 20). Even in the old Cambrian rocks there are remains of sponges which seem already to have practically solved the geometrical problems involved in the production of these wonderful skeletons; and with a Chinese-like persistency, having attained to perfection, they have adhered to it throughout geological time. Nor is there anything of mere inorganic crystallization in this. The silica of which the skeletons are made is colloidal, not crystalline, and the forms themselves have no relations to the crystalline axes of silica. Such illustrations might be multiplied to any extent, and apply to all the beauties of form, structure, and coloring which abound around us and far excel our artificial imitations of them. [Illustration: FIG. 19. Magnified portion of a silicious sponge, showing the principle of construction of the hexactinellid sponges, with six-rayed spicules joined together and strengthened with diagonal braces. (_After Zittel._)] [Illustration: FIG. 20. _Euplectella_, or "Venus's flower-basket," a silicious sponge, showing its general form. (Reduced, from _Am. Naturalist_, vol. iv.)] 5. The instincts of the lower animals imply a Higher Intelligence. Instinct, in the theistic view of nature, can be nothing less than a divine inspiration placing the animal in relation with other things and processes, often of the most complex character, and which it could by no means have devised for itself. Further, instinct is in its very essence a thing unimprovable. Like the laws of nature, it operates invariably; and if diminished or changed, it would prove useless for its purpose. It is not, like human inventions, slowly perfected under the influence of thought and imagination, and laboriously taught by each generation to its successors: it is inherited by each generation in all its perfection, and from the first goes directly to its end as if it were a merely physical cause. The favorite explanation of instinct from the side of Agnostic Evolution is that it originated in the struggle for existence of some previous generation, and was then perpetuated as an inheritance. But, like most of the other explanations of this school, this quietly takes for granted what should be proved. That instinct is hereditary is evident; but the question is, How did it begin? and to say simply that it did begin at some former period is to tell us nothing. From a scientific point of view, the invariable operation of any natural law affords no evidence of any gradual or sudden origination of it at any point of past time; and when such law is connected with a complicated organism and various other laws and processes of the external world, the supposition of its slowly arising from nothing through many generations of animals becomes too intricate to be credible. Instinct must have originated in a perfect condition, and with the organism and its environment already established. I may borrow here an apposite illustration from recent papers on the unity of nature by the Duke of Argyll, which deserve careful study by any one who values common-sense views of this subject. The example which I select is that of the action of a young merganser in its effort to elude pursuit: "On a secluded lake in one of the Hebrides, I observed a dun-diver, or female of the red-breasted merganser (_Mergus serrator_), with her brood of young ducklings. On giving chase in the boat we soon found that the young, although not above a fortnight old, had such extraordinary powers of swimming and diving that it was almost impossible to capture them. The distance they went under water, and the unexpected places in which they emerged, baffled all our efforts for a considerable time. At last one of the brood made for the shore, with the object of hiding among the grass and heather which fringed the margin of the lake. We pursued it as closely as we could; but when the little bird gained the shore, our boat was still about twenty yards off. Long drought had left a broad margin of small flat stones and mud between the water and the usual bank. I saw the little bird run up about a couple of yards from the water, and then suddenly disappear. Knowing what was likely to be enacted, I kept my eye fixed on the spot; and when the boat was run upon the beach, I proceeded to find and pick up the chick. But, on reaching the place of disappearance, no sign of the young merganser was to be seen. The closest scrutiny, with the certain knowledge that it was there, failed to enable me to detect it. Proceeding cautiously forward, I soon became convinced that I had already overshot the mark; and, on turning round, it was only to see the bird rise like an apparition from the stones and, dashing past the stranded boat, regain the lake, where, having now recovered its wind, it instantly dived and disappeared. The tactical skill of the whole of this manoeuvre, and the success with which it was executed, were greeted with loud cheers from the whole party; and our admiration was not diminished when we remembered that, some two weeks before that time, the little performer had been coiled up inside the shell of an egg, and that about a month before it was apparently nothing but a mass of albumen and of fatty oils." On this the duke very properly remarks that any idea of training and experience is absolutely excluded, because it "assumes the pre-existence of the very powers for which it professes to account." He then turns to the idea that animals are merely automata or "machines." Here it is to be observed that the essential idea of a machine is twofold. First, it is a merely mechanical structure put together to do certain things; secondly, it must be related to a contriver and constructor. If we think proper to call the young merganser a machine, we must admit both of these characters, more especially as the bird is in every way a more marvellous machine than any of human construction. He concludes his notice of this case with the following suggestive words: "This is a method of escape which cannot be resorted to successfully except by birds whose coloring is adapted to the purpose by a close assimilation with the coloring of surrounding objects. The old bird would not have been concealed on the same ground, and would never itself resort to the same method of escape. The young, therefore, cannot have been instructed in it by the method of example. But the small size of the chick, together with its obscure and curiously-mottled coloring, are specially adapted to this mode of concealment. The young of all birds which breed upon the ground are provided with a garment in such perfect harmony with surrounding effects of light as to render this manoeuvre easy. It depends, however, wholly for its success upon absolute stillness. The slightest motion at once attracts the eye of any enemy which is searching for the young. And this absolute stillness must be preserved amidst all the emotions of fear and terror which the close approach of the object of alarm must, and obviously does, inspire. Whence comes this splendid, even if it be unconscious, faith in the sufficiency of a defence which it must require such nerve and strength of will to practise? No movement, not even the slightest, though the enemy should seem about to trample on it,--such is the terrible requirement of nature, and by the child of nature implicitly obeyed. Here, again, beyond all question, we have an instinct as much born with the creature as the harmonious tinting of its plumage, the external furnishing being inseparably united with the internal furnishing of mind which enables the little creature in very truth to 'walk by faith, and not by sight.' Is this automatism? Is this machinery? Yes, undoubtedly, in the sense explained before--that the instinct has been given to the bird in precisely the same sense in which its structure has been given to it; so that anterior to all experience, and without the aid of instruction or of example, it is inspired to act in this manner on the appropriate occasion arising." Lastly, the reason of man himself is an actual illustration of mind in nature. Here we raise a question which should perhaps have been considered earlier: Is man himself actually a part of what we call nature? We are so accustomed to the distinction between things natural and things artificial that we are liable to overlook this essential question. Is nature the universe outside of us, containing the things that we study and which constitute our environment? Are we elevated on a pedestal, so to speak, above nature? or, on the other hand, does nature include man himself? In that haze or fog of ideas which environs modern evolutionism, it is not wonderful that this question escapes notice, and that the most contradictory utterances are given forth. Tyndall--by no means the most foggy of the agnostics--may afford an instance. He remarks respecting the philosophers of antiquity:[14] "The experiences which formed the weft and woof of their theories were drawn, not from the study of nature, but from that which lay much closer to them-the observation of man.... Their theories accordingly took an anthropomorphic form." Here we see that in the view of the writer man is distinct from and outside of nature, and so much out of harmony with it that the observation of him leads to false conclusions, stigmatized, accordingly, as "anthropomorphic." In this case man must be supernatural, and preternatural as well. But it is Tyndall's precise object to show us that there is nothing supernatural either in man or elsewhere. The contradiction is an instructive example of the delusions which sometimes pass for science. If, with Tyndall, we are to place man outside of nature, then the human mind at once becomes to us a supernatural intelligence. But truth forbids such a conclusion. The reason of man, however beyond the intelligence of lower animals, so harmonizes with natural laws that it is evidently a part of the great unity of nature, and we can no more dissociate the mind of man from nature than from his own animal body. If we could do so, we might have ground to distrust the validity of all our conclusions as to nature, and thus to cut away the foundations of science; and what remained of philosophy and religion would be preternatural, in the bad sense of destroying the unity of nature and imperilling our confidence in the unity of the Creator himself. In connection with this we have cause to consider the true meaning and use of two terms often hurled at theists as weapons of attack. The word "anthropomorphic" is a term of reproach for our interpreting nature in harmony with our own thoughts or our own constitution. But if man is a part of nature, he must be a competent interpreter of it. If he is not a part of nature, then, whether we make him godlike or a demon, we have, in him, to deal with something supernatural. It is true that in a certain sense he is above nature, but not in any sense which so dissociates him from it as to prevent him from rationally thinking of it in his own thoughts and speaking of it in his own form of words. So true is this that no writers are more anthropomorphic in their modes of speaking of nature than those who most strongly denounce anthropomorphism. Even the celebrated definition of life by Herbert Spencer cannot escape this tincture. "Life," he says, "is the continuous adjustment of internal to external conditions." Now, the essence of this definition lies in the word "adjustment." But to adjust is to arrange, adapt, or fit--all purely human and intelligent actions. Nothing, therefore, could be more anthropomorphic than such a statement. As theists we need not complain of this, but surely as agnostics we should decidedly object to it. The other word whose meaning it is necessary to consider is "supernatural," which it might be well, perhaps, to follow the example of the New Testament in avoiding altogether as a misleading term. If by supernatural we mean something outside of and above nature and natural law, there is really no such thing in the universe. There may be that which is "spiritual," as distinguished from that which is natural in the material sense; but the spiritual has its own laws, which are not in conflict with those of the natural. Even God cannot in this sense be said to be supernatural, since his will is necessarily in conformity with natural law. Yet this absurd sense of the term "supernatural" is constantly forced upon us by so-called advanced thinkers, and employed as an argument against theism. The only true sense in which any being or any thing can be said to be supernatural is that in which we use it with reference to the original creation of matter and force and the institution of natural law. The power which can do these things is above nature, but not outside of it; for matter, energy, and law must be included in, and in harmony with, the Creative Will. To return from this digression. If man is a part of nature, we can see how it is that he conforms to natural law, not merely in his bodily organization and capabilities, but in his mind and habits of thought, so that he can comprehend nature and employ it for his purposes. Even his moral and his religious ideas must in this case be conformed to his conditions of existence as a part of nature. We have here also the surest guarantee of the correctness of our conclusions respecting the laws of nature. In like manner, there is here a sense in which man is above nature, because he is placed at the head of it. In another sense he is inferior to the aggregate of nature, because, as Agassiz well puts it, there is in the universe a "wealth of endowment of the most comprehensive mental manifestations which man can never fully comprehend." Still further, if the universe has been created, then, just as its laws must be in harmony with the will of the Creator, so must our mental constitution; and man, as a reasoning and conscious being, must be made in the image of his Maker. If we discard the idea of an intelligent Creator, then mind and all its powers must be potentially in the atoms of matter or in the forces which move them; but this is a mere form of words signifying nothing, or, if it has any significance, this is contrary to science, since it bestows on matter properties which experiment does not show it to possess. Thus the existence of man is not only a positive proof of the presence of mind in nature, but affords the strongest possible proof of a higher Creative Mind, from which that of man emanates. The power which originated and sustains the universe must be at least as much greater and more intelligent than man as the universe is greater than man in the power and the contrivance which it indicates. Thus we return to the Pauline idea--that the power and the divinity of the Creator are shown by the things he has made. Legitimate science can say nothing more, and can say nothing less. FOOTNOTES: [12] As _Piloceras_, for example. [13] I am indebted for these figures to my friend Dr. S. P. Robins of Montreal. [14] Belfast Address. LECTURE VI. SCIENCE AND REVELATION. Thus far we have proceeded solely on scientific grounds, and have seen that Monism and Agnosticism fail to account for nature. We may therefore feel ourselves justified in assuming, as the only promising solution of the enigma of existence, the being of a Divine Creator. But this does not wholly exhaust the relations of science to religion. When Science has led us into the presence of the Creator, she has brought us to the threshold of religion, and there she suggests the possibility that the spirit of man may have other relations with God beyond those established by merely physical law. Science may venture to say: "If all nature expresses the will of the Creator as carried out in his laws, if the instinct of lower animals is an inspiration of God, should we not expect that there will be laws of a higher order regulating the free moral nature of man, and that there will be possibilities of the reason of man communicating with, or receiving aid from, the Supreme Intelligence?" Science undoubtedly suggests this much to our reason, and the suggestion has commended itself to most of the greater and clearer minds that have studied nature, whatever their religious beliefs or their want of them. It may thus be allowable for us, without encroaching on the domain of theology, to inquire to what extent scientific principles and scientific habits of thought agree with or diverge from the religious beliefs of men. I do not propose to enter here into the inquiry as to the accordance of the Bible with the earth's geological history, or that of its representations of nature with the facts as held by science. These subjects I have fully discussed in other works, which are sufficiently accessible.[15] I shall merely refer to certain general relations of science to the probability of a divine revelation, and to the character of such revelation. As to what is termed natural religion, enough has already been said. If nature testifies to the being of God, and if the reason and the conscience implanted in man, "accusing and excusing" one another, constitute a law of God within him, regulating in some degree his relations to God and to his fellow-men, we have a sufficient basis for the natural religion which more or less actuates the conduct of every human being. The case is different with revealed religion. Here we have an apparent interference on the part of the Creator with his own work, an additional intervention in one department to effect results which elsewhere are worked out by the ordinary operation of natural law. In revelation, therefore, we may have something, quite out of the ordinary course of nature. On the other hand, it is possible that even here we may have something more in harmony with natural laws than at first sight appears. It cannot truly be said that a revelation from God to man is improbable from the point of view of science. Physical laws and brute instincts are in their nature unvarying, and neither require nor admit of intervention. But the reason and the will of free agents are in this respect different. Though necessarily under law, they can judge and decide between one law and another, and can even evade or counteract one law by employing another, or can resolve to be disobedient. Rational free agents may thus enter into courses not in harmony with their own interests or their relations to their surroundings. Hence, so soon as it pleased God to introduce in any part of the universe a free rational will gifted with certain powers over lower nature, only two courses were possible: either God must leave such free agent wholly to his own devices, making him a god on a small scale, and so far practically abdicating in his favor, or he must place him under some law, and this not of the nature of mere physical compulsion--which, on the hypothesis, would be inadmissible--but in the nature of requirements addressed to his reason and his conscience. Hence we might infer _a priori_ the probability of some sort of communication between God and man. Further, did we find such rational creature beginning, on his introduction into the world, to mar the face of nature, to inflict unnecessary suffering or injury on lower creatures or on members of his own species, to disregard the moral instincts implanted in him, or to disown the God who had created him, we should still more distinctly perceive the need of revelation. This would in such case be no more at variance with science or with natural law than the education given by wise parents to their children, or the laws promulgated by a wise government for the guidance of its subjects, both of which are, and are intended to be, interventions affecting the ordinary course of affairs. Of necessity, all this proceeds on the supposition that there is a God. But in certain discussions now prevalent as to the "origin of religion," it is customary quietly to assume that there is no God to be known, and consequently that religion must be a mere gratuitous invention of man. It is not too much to say, however, that any scientific conception of the unity of nature and of man's place in it must forbid our making atheistic assumptions. If man were a mere product of blind, unintelligent chance, the idea of a God was not likely ever to have occurred to him, still less to have become the common property of all races of men. In like manner, there is no scientific basis for the assumption that man originated in a low and bestial type, and that his religion developed itself by degrees from the instincts of lower animals, from which man is supposed to have originated. Such suppositions are unscientific (1) because no ancient remains of such low forms of man are known; (2) because the lowest types of man now extant can be proved to be degraded descendants of higher types; (3) because, if man had originated in a low condition, this would not have diminished the probability of a divine revelation being given to promote his elevation. On the other hand, it is a sad reality that man tends to sink from high ideal morality and reason into debasing vices and gross superstitions that are not natural, but which, on the contrary, place him at variance with natural as well as with moral law. Thus the actual and the possible debasement of man, instead of proving his bestial origin, only increases the need of a divine revelation for his improvement. But, supposing the need of a revelation to be admitted, other questions might arise as to its mode. Here the anticipations of science would be guided by the analogy of nature. We should suppose that the revelation would be made through the medium of the beings it was intended to affect. It would be a revelation impressed on human minds and expressed in human language. It might be in the form of laws with penalties attached, or in that of persuasions addressed to the reason and the sentiments. It would probably be gradual and progressive--at first simple, and later more complex and complete. It would thus become historical, and would be related to the stages of that progress which it was intended to promote. It would necessarily be incomplete, more especially in its earlier portions, and it would always be under the necessity of more or less rudely representing divine and heavenly things by earthly figures. Being human in its medium, it would have the characteristics and the idiosyncrasies of man to a certain extent, except in so far as it might please God to communicate it directly through a perfect humanity identified with divinity, or through higher and more perfect intelligences than man. We should further expect that such revelation would not conflict with what is good in natural religion or in the natural emotions and sentiments of man; that it would not contradict natural facts or laws; and that it would take advantage of the familiar knowledge of mankind in order to illustrate such higher spiritual truths as cannot be expressed in human language. Such a revelation would of necessity require that we should receive it in faith, but faith resting on evidence derived from things known, and from the analogy of the revelation itself with what God reveals in nature. It would be no valid objection to such a revelation to say that it is anthropomorphic, since, in the nature of the case, it must come through man and be suited to man; nor would it be any valid objection that it is figurative, for truth as to spiritual realities must always be expressed in terms of known phenomena of the natural world. It has been objected, though not on behalf of science, that such a revelation, if it related to things discoverable by man, would be useless, while, if it related to things not discoverable, it could not be understood. This is, however, a mere play upon words, and reminds one of the doctrine attributed to the Arabian caliph with reference to the Alexandrian Library: If its books contain what is written in the Koran, they are useless; if anything different, they are injurious; therefore let them be destroyed. It would indeed be subversive of all education, human as well as divine; for the essence of this is to take advantage of what the pupil knows, and to build on it acquirements which, unaided, he could not have attained. But, though all may agree as to the possibility, or even the probability, of a revelation, many may dissent from particular dogmas contained in or implied by the particular form of revelation in which Christians believe. It is true that this dissent is based, not so much on science as on alleged opposition to human sentiments; but it is more or less supposed to be reinforced by scientific facts and laws. Of doctrines supposed to be objectionable from these points of view, I may name the reality of miracles and of prophecy; the efficacy of prayer and of atonement or sacrifice; and the permanence of the consequences of sin. Admitting that these doctrines are not original discoveries of man, but revealed to him, and that they are not founded on science, it may nevertheless be easily shown that they are in harmony with the analogy of nature in a greater degree than either their friends or their opponents usually suppose. Miracles--or "signs," as they are more properly called in the New Testament--are sometimes stated to imply suspension of natural law. If they were such, and were alleged to be produced by any power short of that of the Lawmaker himself, they would be incredible; and if asserted to be by his power, they would be so far incredible as implying changeableness, and therefore imperfection. It may be affirmed, however, of the miracles recorded in Scripture, that they do not require suspension of natural laws, but merely modifications of the operation and peculiar interactions of these. Many of them, indeed, profess to be merely unusual natural effects arranged for special purposes, and depending for their miraculous character on their appositeness in time to certain circumstances. This is the case, for instance, with the plagues of Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the supply of quails to the Israelites. Miracles, whether performed as attestations of revelation or as works of mercy or of judgment, belong to the domain of natural law, but to those operations of it which are beyond human control or foresight. Their nature in this respect we can understand by considering the many operations possible to civilized men which may appear miraculous to a savage, and which, from his point of view, may be amply sufficient as evidence of the superior knowledge and power of him who performs them. That one man should be able instantaneously to transmit his thoughts to another situated a thousand miles away was, until the invention of the electric telegraph, impossible. The actual performance of such an operation would have been as much a miracle as the communication of thought from one planet to another would be now. But if man can thus work miracles, why should not the Almighty do so, when higher moral ends are to be served by apparent interference with the ordinary course of matter and force? Admitting the existence of God, physical science can have nothing to say against miracles. On the contrary, it can assure us of the probability that if God reveals himself to us at all by natural means, such revelation will probably be miraculous. If the possibility of God communicating with his rational creatures be conceded, then the objections taken to prophecy lose all value. If anything known to God and unknown to man can be revealed, things past and future may be revealed as well as things present. Science abounds in prophecy. All through the geological history there have been prophetic types, mute witnesses to coming facts. Minute disturbances of heavenly bodies, altogether inappreciable by the ordinary observer, enable the astronomer to predict the discovery of new planets. A line in a spectrum, without significance to the uninitiated, foretells a new element. The merest fragment, sufficient only for microscopic examination, enables the palæontologist to describe to incredulous auditors some organism altogether unknown in its entire structures. What possible reason can there be for excluding such indications of the past and the future from a revelation made by him who knows perfectly the end from the beginning, and to whom the future results of human actions to the end of time must be as evident as the simplest train of causes and effects is to us? It is Huxley, I think, who says that if the laws affecting human conduct were fully known to us, it would have been possible to calculate a thousand years ago the exact state of affairs in Britain at this moment. Probably such a calculation might be too complicated for us, even if the data were given; but it cannot be too complicated for the Divine Mind, and possibly might even be mastered by some intelligences in the universe subject to God, but higher than man. That there should be suffering at all in the universe is, no doubt, a mysterious thing; but the fact is evident, and certain benefits which flow from it are also evident. Indeed, we fail to see how a world of sentient beings could continue to exist, unless the penalty of suffering were attached to natural law. Further, all such penalties are, in consequence of the permanence of matter and the conservation of force, necessarily permanent, unless in cases where some reaction sets in under the influence of some other law or force than that which brings the penalty. Even in this case, the effect of any violation of any natural law is eternal and infinite. No sane man doubts this in the case of what may be called sins against natural laws; but many, with strange inconsistency, doubt and disbelieve it in the higher domain of morals. If we were for a moment to admit the materialist's doctrine that appetites, passions, and sentiments are merely effects of physical changes in nerve-cells, then we should be shut up to the conclusion that the effects of any derangement of these must be perpetual and coextensive with the universe. Why should it be otherwise in things belonging to the domains of reason and conscience? Further, if natural laws are the expression of the will of the Creator, and if these unfailingly assert themselves, and must do so, in order to the permanence of the material universe, would not analogy teach that, unless the Supreme Being is wholly bound up in material processes, and is altogether indifferent to moral considerations, the same regularity and constancy must prevail in the spiritual world? This question is closely connected with the ideas of sacrifice and atonement. Nothing is more certain in physics than that action and reaction are equal, and that no effect can be produced without an adequate cause. It results from this that every action must involve a corresponding expenditure of matter and force. Anything else would be pure magic; which, we know, is nonsense. Thus every intervention on behalf of others must imply a corresponding sacrifice. We cannot raise a fallen child or aid the poor or the hungry without a sacrifice of power or means proportioned to the result. So, in the moral world, degradation cannot be remedied nor punishment averted without corresponding sacrifice; and this, it may be, on the part of those who are in no degree blameworthy. If men have fallen into moral evil and God proposes to elevate them from this condition, this must be done by some corresponding expenditure of force, else we have one of those miracles which would imply a subversion of law of the most portentous kind. The moral stimulus given by the sacrifice itself is a secondary consideration to this great law of equivalency of cause and effect. There is, therefore, a perfect conformity to natural analogy in the Christian idea of the substitution of the pure and perfect Man for the sinner, as well as in that of the putting forth of the divine power manifested in him to raise and restore the fallen. The efficacy of prayer is one of the last things that a scientific naturalist should question, if he is at the same time a theist. Prayer is itself one of the laws of nature, and one of those that show in the finest way how higher laws override and modify those that are lower. The young ravens, we are told, cry to God; and so they literally do; and their cry is answered, for the parent-ravens, cruel and voracious, under the impulse of a God-given instinct range over land and water and exhaust every energy that they may satisfy that cry. The bleat of the lamb will not only meet with response from the mother-ewe, but will even exercise a physiological effect in promoting the secretion of milk in her udder. The mother who hears the cry of her child, crushed under some weighty thing which has fallen on it, will never pause to consider that it is the law of gravitation which has caused the accident; she will defy the law of gravitation, and if necessary will pray any one who is near to help her. Prayer, in short, is a natural power so important that without it the young of most of the higher animals would have little chance of life; and it triumphs over almost every other natural law which may stand in its way. If, then, irrational animals can overcome the forces of dead nature in answer to prayer; if man himself, in answer to the cry of distress, can do things in ordinary circumstances almost impossible,--how foolish is it to suppose that this link of connection cannot subsist between God and his rational offspring! One wonders that any man of science should for a moment entertain such an idea, if, indeed, he has any belief whatever in the existence of a God. There is another aspect of prayer insisted on in revelation on which the observation of nature throws some light. In the case of animals, there must be a certain relation between the one that prays and the one that answers--a filial relation, perhaps--and in any case there must be a correspondence between the language of prayer and the emotions of the creature appealed to. Except in a few cases where human training has modified instinct, the cry of one species of animal awakes no response in another of a different kind. So prayer to God must be in the Spirit of God. It must also be the cry of real need, and with reference to needs which have his sympathy. There is a prayer which never reaches God, or which is even an abomination to him; and there is prayer prompted by the indwelling Spirit of God, which cannot be uttered in human words, yet will surely be answered. All this is so perfectly in accordance with natural analogies, that it strikes one acquainted with nature as almost a matter of course. In tracing these analogies, I do not desire to imply that natural science can itself teach us religion, or that it is to afford the test of what is true in spiritual things. I have merely wished to direct attention to obvious analogies between things natural and things spiritual, which show that there is no such antagonism between science and revelation as many suppose, and that, in grand essential laws and principles, it may be true that earth is "But the shadow of heaven, and things therein Each to the other like more than on earth is thought." FOOTNOTE: [15] More especially in _The Origin of the World_ (London and New York, 1877). THE END. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious typographical errors were repaired. Hyphenation variants used equally were retained (back-bone and backbone, thread-like and threadlike). Original had chapter title pages before the start of each chapter, resulting in duplication of chapter titles. Those duplications have been removed. Original contents erroneously indicated Lecture VI began on page 217. This has been corrected to page 219. 
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16942	----	_Thoughts on Religion_ BY THE LATE GEORGE JOHN ROMANES M.A., LL.D., F.R.S. EDITED BY CHARLES GORE, D.D. BISHOP OF WORCESTER Twelfth Impression LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON AND BOMBAY 1904 CONTENTS PAGE EDITOR'S PREFACE 5 PART I. THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE UPON RELIGION. ESSAY I 37 ESSAY II 56 PART II. NOTES FOR A WORK ON A CANDID EXAMINATION OF RELIGION. INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY THE EDITOR 91 § 1. INTRODUCTORY 98 § 2. DEFINITION OF TERMS AND PURPOSE OF THIS TREATISE 104 § 3. CAUSALITY 116 § 4. FAITH 131 § 5. FAITH IN CHRISTIANITY 154 CONCLUDING NOTE BY THE EDITOR 184 PUBLISHER'S NOTE The present edition of Romanes' _Thoughts on Religion_ is issued in response to a request which has been made with some frequency of late for very cheap reprints of standard religious and theological works. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, _January, 1904._ EDITOR'S PREFACE The late Mr. George John Romanes--the author within the last few years of _Darwin and After Darwin_, and of the _Examination of Weismannism_--occupied a distinguished place in contemporary biology. But his mind was also continuously and increasingly active on the problems of metaphysics and theology. And at his death in the early summer of this year (1894), he left among his papers some notes, made mostly in the previous winter, for a work which he was intending to write on the fundamental questions of religion. He had desired that these notes should be given to me and that I should do with them as I thought best. His literary executors accordingly handed them over to me, in company with some unpublished essays, two of which form the first part of the present volume. After reading the notes myself, and obtaining the judgement of others in whom I feel confidence upon them, I have no hesitation either in publishing by far the greater part of them, or in publishing them with the author's name in spite of the fact that the book as originally projected was to have been anonymous. From the few words which George Romanes said to me on the subject, I have no doubt that he realized that the notes if published after his death must be published with his name. I have said that after reading these notes I feel no doubt that they ought to be published. They claim it both by their intrinsic value and by the light they throw on the religious thought of a scientific man who was not only remarkably able and clear-headed, but also many-sided, as few men are, in his capacities, and singularly candid and open-hearted. To all these qualities the notes which are now offered to the public will bear unmistakeable witness. With more hesitation it has been decided to print also the unpublished essays already referred to. These, as representing an earlier stage of thought than is represented in the notes, naturally appear first. Both Essays and Notes however represent the same tendency of a mind from a position of unbelief in the Christian Revelation toward one of belief in it. They represent, I say, a tendency of one 'seeking after God if haply he might feel after Him and find Him,' and not a position of settled orthodoxy. Even the Notes contain in fact many things which could not come from a settled believer. This being so it is natural that I should say a word as to the way in which I have understood my function as an editor. I have decided the question of publishing each Note solely by the consideration whether or no it was sufficiently finished to be intelligible. I have rigidly excluded any question of my own agreement or disagreement with it. In the case of one Note in particular, I doubt whether I should have published it, had it not been that my decided disagreement with its contents made me fear that I might be prejudiced in withholding it. The Notes, with the papers which precede them, will, I think, be better understood if I give some preliminary account of their antecedents, that is of Romanes' previous publications on the subject of religion. In 1873 an essay of George Romanes gained the Burney Prize at Cambridge, the subject being _Christian Prayer considered in relation to the belief that the Almighty governs the world by general laws_. This was published in 1874, with an appendix on _The Physical Efficacy of Prayer_. In this essay, written when he was twenty-five years old, Romanes shows the characteristic qualities of his mind and style already developed. The sympathy with the scientific point of view is there, as might be expected perhaps in a Cambridge 'Scholar in Natural Science': the logical acumen and love of exact distinctions is there: there too the natural piety and spiritual appreciation of the nature of Christian prayer--a piety and appreciation which later intellectual habits of thought could never eradicate. The essay, as judged by the standard of prize compositions, is of remarkable ability, and strictly proceeds within the limits of the thesis. On the one side, for the purpose of the argument, the existence of a Personal God is assumed[1], and also the reality of the Christian Revelation which assures us that we have reason to expect real answers, even though conditionally and within restricted limits, to prayers for _physical_ goods[2]. On the other side, there is taken for granted the belief that general laws pervade the observable domain of physical nature. Then the question is considered--how is the physical efficacy of prayer which the Christian accepts on the authority of revelation compatible with the scientifically known fact that God governs the world by general laws? The answer is mainly found in emphasizing the limited sphere within which scientific inquiry can be conducted and scientific knowledge can obtain. Special divine acts of response to prayer, even in the physical sphere, _may_ occur--force _may_ be even originated in response to prayer--and still not produce any phenomenon such as science must take cognizance of and regard as miraculous or contrary to the known order. On one occasion the Notes refer back to this essay[3], and more frequently, as we shall have occasion to notice, they reproduce thoughts which had already been expressed in the earlier work but had been obscured or repudiated in the interval. I have no grounds for knowing whether in the main Romanes remained satisfied with the reasoning and conclusion of his earliest essay, granted the theistic hypothesis on which it rests[4]. But this hypothesis itself, very shortly after publishing this essay, he was led to repudiate. In other words, his mind moved rapidly and sharply into a position of reasoned scepticism about the existence of God at all. The Burney Essay was published in 1874. Already in 1876 at least he had written an anonymous work with a wholly sceptical conclusion, entitled 'A Candid Examination of Theism' by _Physicus_[5]. As the Notes were written with direct reference to this work, some detailed account of its argument seems necessary; and this is to be found in the last chapter of the work itself, where the author summarizes his arguments and draws his conclusions. I venture therefore to reproduce this chapter at length[6]. '§ 1. Our analysis is now at an end, and a very few words will here suffice to convey an epitomized recollection of the numerous facts and conclusions which we have found it necessary to contemplate. We first disposed of the conspicuously absurd supposition that the origin of things, or the mystery of existence [i.e. the fact that anything exists at all], admits of being explained by the theory of Theism in any further degree than by the theory of Atheism. Next it was shown that the argument "Our heart requires a God" is invalid, seeing that such a subjective necessity, even if made out, could not be sufficient to prove--or even to render probable--an objective existence. And with regard to the further argument that the fact of our theistic aspirations points to God as to their explanatory cause, it became necessary to observe that the argument could only be admissible after the possibility of the operation of natural causes [in the production of our theistic aspirations] had been excluded. Similarly the argument from the supposed intuitive necessity of individual thought [i.e. the alleged fact that men find it impossible to rid themselves of the persuasion that God exists] was found to be untenable, first, because, even if the supposed necessity were a real one, it would only possess an individual applicability; and second, that, as a matter of fact, it is extremely improbable that the supposed necessity is a real necessity even for the individual who asserts it, while it is absolutely certain that it is not such to the vast majority of the race. The argument from the general consent of mankind, being so obviously fallacious both as to facts and principles, was passed over without comment; while the argument from a first cause was found to involve a logical suicide. Lastly, the argument that, as human volition is a cause in nature, therefore all causation is probably volitional in character, was shown to consist in a stretch of inference so outrageous that the argument had to be pronounced worthless. '§ 2. Proceeding next to examine the less superficial arguments in favour of Theism, it was first shown that the syllogism, All known minds are caused by an unknown mind; our mind is a known mind; therefore our mind is caused by an unknown mind,--is a syllogism that is inadmissible for two reasons. In the first place, it does not account for mind (in the abstract) to refer it to a prior mind for its origin; and therefore, although the hypothesis, if admitted, would be _an_ explanation of _known_ mind, it is useless as an argument for the existence of the unknown mind, the assumption of which forms the basis of that explanation. Again, in the next place, if it be said that mind is so far an entity _sui generis_ that it must be either self-existing or caused by another mind, there is no assignable warrant for the assertion. And this is the second objection to the above syllogism; for anything within the whole range of the possible may, for aught that we can tell, be competent to produce a self-conscious intelligence. Thus an objector to the above syllogism need not hold any theory of things at all; but even as opposed to the definite theory of materialism, the above syllogism has not so valid an argumentative basis to stand upon. We know that what we call matter and force are to all appearance eternal, while we have no corresponding evidence of a mind that is even apparently eternal. Further, within experience mind is invariably associated with highly differentiated collocations of matter and distributions of force, and many facts go to prove, and none to negative, the conclusion that the grade of intelligence invariably depends upon, or at least is associated with, a corresponding grade of cerebral development. There is thus both a qualitative and a quantitative relation between intelligence and cerebral organisation. And if it is said that matter and motion cannot produce consciousness because it is inconceivable that they should, we have seen at some length that this is no conclusive consideration as applied to a subject of a confessedly transcendental nature, and that in the present case it is particularly inconclusive, because, as it is speculatively certain that the substance of mind must be unknowable, it seems _à priori_ probable that, whatever is the cause of the unknowable reality, this cause should be more difficult to render into thought in that relation than would some other hypothetical substance which is imagined as more akin to mind. And if it is said that the _more_ conceivable cause is the _more_ probable cause, we have seen that it is in this case impossible to estimate the validity of the remark. Lastly, the statement that the cause must contain actually all that its effects can contain, was seen to be inadmissible in logic and contradicted by everyday experience; while the argument from the supposed freedom of the will and the existence of the moral sense was negatived both deductively by the theory of evolution, and inductively by the doctrine of utilitarianism.' The theory of the freedom of the will is indeed at this stage of thought utterly untenable[7]; the evidence is overwhelming that the moral sense is the result of a purely natural evolution[8], and this result, arrived at on general grounds, is confirmed with irresistible force by the account of our human conscience which is supplied by the theory of utilitarianism, a theory based on the widest and most unexceptionable of inductions[9]. 'On the whole, then, with regard to the argument from the existence of the human mind, we were compelled to decide that it is destitute of any assignable weight, there being nothing more to lead to the conclusion that our mind has been caused by another mind, than to the conclusion that it has been caused by anything else whatsoever. '§ 3. With regard to the argument from Design, it was observed that Mill's presentation of it [in his _Essay on Theism_] is merely a resuscitation of the argument as presented by Paley, Bell, and Chalmers. And indeed we saw that the first-named writer treated this whole subject with a feebleness and inaccuracy very surprising in him; for while he has failed to assign anything like due weight to the inductive evidence of organic evolution, he did not hesitate to rush into a supernatural explanation of biological phenomena. Moreover, he has failed signally in his _analysis_ of the Design argument, seeing that, in common with all previous writers, he failed to observe that it is utterly impossible for us to know the relations in which the supposed Designer stands to the Designed,--much less to argue from the fact that the Supreme Mind, even supposing it to exist, caused the observable products by any particular intellectual _process_. In other words, all advocates of the Design argument have failed to perceive that, even if we grant nature to be due to a creating Mind, still we have no shadow of a right to conclude that this Mind can only have exerted its creative power by means of such and such cogitative operations. How absurd, therefore, must it be to raise the supposed evidence of such cogitative operations into evidences of the existence of a creating Mind! If a theist retorts that it is, after all, of very little importance whether or not we are able to divine the _methods_ of creation, so long as the _facts_ are there to attest that, _in some way or other_, the observable phenomena of nature must be due to Intelligence of some kind as their ultimate cause, then I am the first to endorse this remark. It has always appeared to me one of the most unaccountable things in the history of speculation that so many competent writers can have insisted upon _Design_ as an argument for Theism, when they must all have known perfectly well that they have no means of ascertaining the subjective psychology of that Supreme Mind whose existence the argument is adduced to demonstrate. The truth is, that the argument from teleology must, and can only, rest upon the observable _facts_ of nature, without reference to the intellectual _processes_ by which these facts may be supposed to have been accomplished. But, looking to the "present state of our knowledge," this is merely to change the teleological argument in its gross Paleyian form, into the argument from the ubiquitous operation of general laws.' '§ 4. This argument was thus[10] stated in contrast with the argument from design. 'The argument from design says, there must be a God, because such and such an organic structure must have been due to such and such an intellectual _process_. The argument from general laws says, There must be a God, because such and such an organic structure must _in some way or other have been ultimately due to_ intelligence.' Every structure exhibits with more or less of complexity the principle of order; it is related to all other things in a universal order. This universality of order renders irrational the hypothesis of chance in accounting for the universe. 'Let us think of the supreme causality as we may, the fact remains that from it there emanates a directive influence of uninterrupted consistency, on a scale of stupendous magnitude and exact precision worthy of our highest conceptions of deity[11].' The argument was developed in the words of Professor Baden Powell. 'That which requires reason and thought to understand must be itself thought and reason. That which mind alone can investigate or express must be itself mind. And if the highest conception attained is but partial, then the mind and reason studied is greater than the mind and reason of the student. If the more it is studied the more vast and complex is the necessary connection in reason disclosed, then the more evident is the vast extent and compass of the reason thus partially manifested and its reality _as existing in the immutably connected order of objects examined_, independently of the mind of the investigator.' This argument from the universal _Kosmos_ has the advantage of being wholly independent of the method by which things came to be what they are. It is unaffected by the acceptance of evolution. Till quite recently it seemed irrefutable[12]. 'But nevertheless we are constrained to acknowledge that its apparent power dwindles to nothing in view of the indisputable fact that, if force and matter have been eternal, all and every natural law must have resulted by way of necessary consequence.... It does not admit of one moment's questioning that it is as certainly true that all the exquisite beauty and melodious harmony of nature follows necessarily as inevitably from the persistence of force and the primary qualities of matter as it is certainly true that force is persistent or that matter is extended or impenetrable[13].... It will be remembered that I dwelt at considerable length and with much earnestness upon this truth, not only because of its enormous importance in its bearing upon our subject, but also because no one has hitherto considered it in that relation.' It was also pointed out that the coherence and correspondence of the macrocosm of the universe with the microcosm of the human mind can be accounted for by the fact that the human mind is only one of the products of general evolution, its subjective relations necessarily reflecting those external relations of which they themselves are the product[14]. '§ 5. The next step, however, was to mitigate the severity of the conclusion that was liable to be formed upon the utter and hopeless collapse of all the possible arguments in favour of Theism. Having fully demonstrated that there is no shadow of a positive argument in support of the theistic theory, there arose the danger that some persons might erroneously conclude that for this reason the theistic theory must be untrue. It therefore became necessary to point out, that although, as far as we can see, nature does not require an Intelligent Cause to account for any of her phenomena, yet it is possible that, if we could see farther, we should see that nature could not be what she is unless she had owed her existence to an Intelligent Cause. Or, in other words, the probability there is that an Intelligent Cause is unnecessary to explain any of the phenomena of nature, is only equal to the probability there is that the doctrine of the persistence of force is everywhere and eternally true. 'As a final step in our analysis, therefore, we altogether quitted the region of experience, and ignoring even the very foundations of science, and so all the most certain of relative truths, we carried the discussion into the transcendental region of purely formal considerations. And here we laid down the canon, "that the value of any probability, in its last analysis, is determined by the number, the importance, and the definiteness of the relations known, as compared with those of the relations unknown;" and, consequently, that in cases where the unknown relations are more numerous, more important, or more indefinite than are the known relations, the value of our inference varies inversely as the difference in these respects between the relations compared. From which canon it followed, that as the problem of Theism is the most ultimate of all problems, and so contains in its unknown relations all that is to man unknown and unknowable, these relations must be pronounced the most indefinite of all relations that it is possible for man to contemplate; and, consequently, that although we have here the entire range of experience from which to argue, we are unable to estimate the real value of any argument whatsoever. The unknown relations in our attempted induction being wholly indefinite, both in respect of their number and importance, as compared with the known relations, it is impossible for us to determine any definite probability either for or against the being of a God. Therefore, although it is true that, so far as human science can penetrate or human thought infer, we can perceive no evidence of God, yet we have no right on this account to conclude that there is no God. The probability, therefore, that nature is devoid of Deity, while it is of the strongest kind if regarded scientifically--amounting, in fact, to a scientific demonstration,--is nevertheless wholly worthless if regarded logically. Although it is as true as is the fundamental basis of all science and of all experience that, if there is a God, His existence, considered as a cause of the universe, is superfluous, it may nevertheless be true that, if there had never been a God, the universe could never have existed. 'Hence these formal considerations proved conclusively that, no matter how great the probability of Atheism might appear to be in a relative sense, we have no means of estimating such probability in an absolute sense. From which position there emerged the possibility of another argument in favour of Theism--or rather let us say, of a reappearance of the teleological argument in another form. For it may be said, seeing that these formal considerations exclude legitimate reasoning either for or against Deity in an absolute sense, while they do not exclude such reasoning in a relative sense, if there yet remain any theistic deductions which may properly be drawn from experience, these may now be adduced to balance the atheistic deductions from the persistence of force. For although the latter deductions have clearly shown the existence of Deity to be superfluous in a scientific sense, the formal considerations in question have no less clearly opened up beyond the sphere of science a possible _locus_ for the existence of Deity; so that if there are any facts supplied by experience for which the atheistic deductions appear insufficient to account, we are still free to account for them in a relative sense by the hypothesis of Theism. And, it may be urged, we do find such an unexplained residuum in the correlation of general laws in the production of cosmic harmony. It signifies nothing, the argument may run, that we are unable to conceive the methods whereby the supposed Mind operates in producing cosmic harmony; nor does it signify that its operation must now be relegated to a super-scientific province. What does signify is that, taking a general view of nature, we find it impossible to conceive of the extent and variety of her harmonious processes as other than products of intelligent causation. Now this sublimated form of the teleological argument, it will be remembered, I denoted a metaphysical teleology, in order sharply to distinguish it from all previous forms of that argument, which, in contradistinction I denoted scientific teleologies. And the distinction, it will be remembered, consisted in this--that while all previous forms of teleology, by resting on a basis which was not beyond the possible reach of science, laid themselves open to the possibility of scientific refutation, the metaphysical system of teleology, by resting on a basis which is clearly beyond the possible reach of science, can never be susceptible of scientific refutation. And that this metaphysical system of teleology does rest on such a basis is indisputable; for while it accepts the most ultimate truths of which science can ever be cognizant--viz. the persistence of force and the consequently necessary genesis of natural law,--it nevertheless maintains that the necessity of regarding Mind as the ultimate cause of things is not on this account removed; and, therefore, that if science now requires the operation of a Supreme Mind to be posited in a super-scientific sphere, then in a super-scientific sphere it ought to be posited. No doubt this hypothesis at first sight seems gratuitous, seeing that, so far as science can penetrate, there is no need of any such hypothesis at all--cosmic harmony resulting as a physically necessary consequence from the combined action of natural laws, which in turn result as a physically necessary consequence of the persistence of force and the primary qualities of matter. But although it is thus indisputably true that metaphysical teleology is wholly gratuitous if considered scientifically, it may not be true that it is wholly gratuitous if considered psychologically. In other words, if it is more conceivable that Mind should be the ultimate cause of cosmic harmony than that the persistence of force should be so, then it is not irrational to accept the more conceivable hypothesis in preference to the less conceivable one, provided that the choice is made with the diffidence which is required by the considerations adduced in Chapter V [especially the _Canon of probability_ laid down in the second paragraph of this section, § 5]. 'I conclude, therefore, that the hypothesis of metaphysical teleology, although in a physical sense gratuitous, may be in a psychological sense legitimate. But as against the fundamental position on which alone this argument can rest--viz. the position that the fundamental postulate of Atheism is more _inconceivable_ than is the fundamental postulate of Theism--we have seen two important objections to lie. 'For, in the first place, the sense in which the word "inconceivable" is here used is that of the impossibility of framing _realizable_ relations in the thought; not that of the impossibility of framing _abstract_ relations in thought. In the same sense, though in a lower degree, it is true that the complexity of the human organization and its functions is inconceivable; but in this sense the word "inconceivable" has much less weight in an argument than it has in its true sense. And, without waiting again to dispute (as we did in the case of the speculative standing of Materialism) how far even the genuine test of inconceivability ought to be allowed to make against an inference which there is a body of scientific evidence to substantiate, we went on to the second objection against this fundamental position of metaphysical teleology. This objection, it will be remembered, was, that it is as impossible to conceive of cosmic harmony as an effect of Mind [i.e. Mind being what we know it in experience to be], as it is to conceive of it as an effect of mindless evolution. The argument from inconceivability, therefore, admits of being turned with quite as terrible an effect on Theism, as it can possibly be made to exert on Atheism. 'Hence this more refined form of teleology which we are considering, and which we saw to be the last of the possible arguments in favour of Theism, is met on its own ground by a very crushing opposition: by its metaphysical character it has escaped the opposition of physical science, only to encounter a new opposition in the region of pure psychology to which it fled. As a conclusion to our whole inquiry, therefore, it devolved on us to determine the relative magnitudes of these opposing forces. And in doing this we first observed that, if the supporters of metaphysical teleology objected _à priori_ to the method whereby the genesis of natural law was deduced from the datum of the persistence of force, in that this method involved an unrestricted use of illegitimate symbolic conceptions; then it is no less open to an atheist to object _à priori_ to the method whereby a directing Mind was inferred from the datum of cosmic harmony, in that this method involved the postulation of an unknowable cause,--and this of a character which the whole history of human thought has proved the human mind to exhibit an overweening tendency to postulate as the cause of natural phenomena. On these grounds, therefore, I concluded that, so far as their respective standing _à priori_ is concerned, both theories may be regarded as about equally suspicious. And similarly with regard to their standing _à posteriori_; for as both theories require to embody at least one infinite term, they must each alike be pronounced absolutely inconceivable. But, finally, if the question were put to me which of the two theories I regarded as the more rational, I observed that this is a question which no one man can answer for another. For as the test of absolute inconceivability is equally destructive of both theories, if a man wishes to choose between them, his choice can only be determined by what I have designated relative inconceivability--i.e. in accordance with the verdict given by his individual sense of probability as determined by his previous habit of thought. And forasmuch as the test of relative inconceivability may be held in this matter legitimately to vary with the character of the mind which applies it, the strictly rational probability of the question to which it is applied varies in like manner. Or otherwise presented, the only alternative for any man in this matter is either to discipline himself into an attitude of pure scepticism, and thus to refuse in thought to entertain either a probability or an improbability concerning the existence of a God; or else to incline in thought towards an affirmation or a negation of God, according as his previous habits of thought have rendered such an inclination more facile in the one direction than in the other. And although, under such circumstances, I should consider that man the more rational who carefully suspended his judgement, I conclude that if this course is departed from, neither the metaphysical teleologist nor the scientific atheist has any perceptible advantage over the other in respect of rationality. For as the formal conditions of a metaphysical teleology are undoubtedly present on the one hand, and the formal conditions of a speculative atheism are as undoubtedly present on the other, there is thus in both cases a logical vacuum supplied wherein the pendulum of thought is free to swing in whichever direction it may be made to swing by the momentum of preconceived ideas. '§ 6. Such is the outcome of our investigation, and considering the abstract nature of the subject, the immense divergence of opinion which at the present time is manifested with regard to it, as well as the confusing amount of good, bad and indifferent literature on both sides of the controversy which is extant;--considering these things, I do not think that the result of our inquiry can be justly complained of on the score of its lacking precision. At a time like the present, when traditional beliefs respecting Theism are so generally accepted, and so commonly concluded as a matter of course to have a large and valid basis of induction whereon to rest, I cannot but feel that a perusal of this short essay, by showing how very concise the scientific _status_ of the subject really is, will do more to settle the minds of most readers as to the exact standing at the present time of all the probabilities of the question, than could a perusal of all the rest of the literature upon this subject. And, looking to the present condition of speculative philosophy, I regard it as of the utmost importance to have clearly shown that the advance of science has now entitled us to assert, without the least hesitation, that the hypothesis of Mind in nature is as certainly superfluous to account for any of the phenomena of nature, as the scientific doctrine of the persistence of force and the indestructibility of matter is certainly true. 'On the other hand, if any one is inclined to complain that the logical aspect of the question has not proved itself so unequivocally definite as has the scientific, I must ask him to consider that, in any matter which does not admit of actual demonstration, some margin must of necessity be left for variations of individual opinion. And, if he bears this consideration in mind, I feel sure that he cannot properly complain of my not having done my utmost in this case to define as sharply as possible the character and the limits of this margin. '§ 7. And now, in conclusion, I feel it is desirable to state that any antecedent bias with regard to Theism which I individually possess is unquestionably on the side of traditional beliefs. It is therefore with the utmost sorrow that I find myself compelled to accept the conclusions here worked out; and nothing would have induced me to publish them, save the strength of my conviction that it is the duty of every member of society to give his fellows the benefit of his labours for whatever they may be worth. Just as I am confident that truth must in the end be the most profitable for the race, so I am persuaded that every individual endeavour to attain it, provided only that such endeavour is unbiassed and sincere, ought without hesitation to be made the common property of all men, no matter in what direction the results of its promulgation may appear to tend. And so far as the ruination of individual happiness is concerned, no one can have a more lively perception than myself of the possibly disastrous tendency of my work. So far as I am individually concerned, the result of this analysis has been to show that, whether I regard the problem of Theism on the lower plane of strictly relative probability, or on the higher plane of purely formal considerations, it equally becomes my obvious duty to stifle all belief of the kind which I conceive to be the noblest, and to discipline my intellect with regard to this matter into an attitude of the purest scepticism. And forasmuch as I am far from being able to agree with those who affirm that the twilight doctrine of the "new faith" is a desirable substitute for the waning splendour of "the old," I am not ashamed to confess that with this virtual negation of God the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness; and although from henceforth the precept to "work while it is day" will doubtless but gain an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words that "the night cometh when no man can work," yet when at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it,--at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible. For whether it be due to my intelligence not being sufficiently advanced to meet the requirements of the age, or whether it be due to the memory of those sacred associations which to me at least were the sweetest that life has given, I cannot but feel that for me, and for others who think as I do, there is a dreadful truth in those words of Hamilton,--Philosophy having become a meditation, not merely of death, but of annihilation, the precept _know thyself_ has become transformed into the terrific oracle to OEdipus-- "Mayest thou ne'er know the truth of what thou art."' This analysis will have been at least sufficient to give a clear idea of the general argument of the _Candid Examination_ and of its melancholy conclusions. What will most strike a somewhat critical reader is perhaps (1) the tone of certainty, and (2) the belief in the almost exclusive right of the scientific method in the court of reason. As evidence of (1) I would adduce the following brief quotations:-- P. xi. 'Possible errors in reasoning apart, the rational position of Theism as here defined must remain without material modification as long as our intelligence remains human.' P. 24. 'I am quite unable to understand how any one at the present day, and with the most moderate powers of abstract thinking, can possibly bring himself to embrace the theory of Free-will.' P. 64. 'Undoubtedly we have no alternative but to conclude that the hypothesis of mind in nature is now logically proved to be as certainly superfluous as the very basis of all science is certainly true. There can no longer be any more doubt that the existence of a God is wholly unnecessary to explain any of the phenomena of the universe, than there is doubt that if I leave go of my pen it will fall upon the table.' As evidence of (2) I would adduce from the preface-- 'To my mind, therefore, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that, looking to this undoubted pre-eminence of the scientific methods as ways to truth, whether or not there is a God, the question as to his existence is both more morally and more reverently contemplated if we regard it purely as a problem for methodical analysis to solve, than if we regard it in any other light.' It is in respect both of (1) and (2) that the change in Romanes' thought as exhibited in his later Notes is most conspicuous[15]. At what date George Romanes' mind began to react from the conclusions of the _Candid Examination_ I cannot say. But after a period of ten years--in his Rede lecture of 1885[16]--we find his frame of mind very much changed. This lecture, on _Mind and Motion_, consists of a severe criticism of the materialistic account of mind. On the other hand 'spiritualism'--or the theory which would suppose that mind is the cause of motion--is pronounced from the point of view of science not impossible indeed but 'unsatisfactory,' and the more probable conclusion is found in a 'monism' like Bruno's--according to which mind and motion are co-ordinate and probably co-extensive aspects of the same universal fact--a monism which may be called Pantheism, but may also be regarded as an extension of contracted views of Theism[17]. The position represented by this lecture may be seen sufficiently from its conclusion:-- 'If the advance of natural science is now steadily leading us to the conclusion that there is no motion without mind, must we not see how the independent conclusion of mental science is thus independently confirmed--the conclusion, I mean, that there is no being without knowing? To me, at least, it does appear that the time has come when we may begin, as it were in a dawning light, to see that the study of Nature and the study of Mind are meeting upon this greatest of possible truths. And if this is the case--if there is no motion without mind, no being without knowing--shall we infer, with Clifford, that universal being is mindless, or answer with a dogmatic negative that most stupendous of questions,--Is there knowledge with the Most High? If there is no motion without mind, no being without knowing, may we not rather infer, with Bruno, that it is in the medium of mind, and in the medium of knowledge, we live, and move, and have our being? 'This, I think, is the direction in which the inference points, if we are careful to set out the logical conditions with complete impartiality. But the ulterior question remains, whether, so far as science is concerned, it is here possible to point any inference at all: the whole orbit of human knowledge may be too narrow to afford a parallax for measurements so vast. Yet even here, if it be true that the voice of science must thus of necessity speak the language of agnosticism, at least let us see to it that the language is pure[18]; let us not tolerate any barbarisms introduced from the side of aggressive dogma. So shall we find that this new grammar of thought does not admit of any constructions radically opposed to more venerable ways of thinking; even if we do not find that the often-quoted words of its earliest formulator apply with special force to its latest dialects--that if a little knowledge of physiology and a little knowledge of psychology dispose men to atheism, a deeper knowledge of both, and, still more, a deeper thought upon their relations to one another, will lead men back to some form of religion, which if it be more vague, may also be more worthy than that of earlier days.' Some time before 1889 three articles were written for the _Nineteenth Century_ on the _Influence of Science upon Religion_. They were never published, for what reason I am not able to ascertain. But I have thought it worth while to print the first two of them as a 'first part' of this volume, both because they contain--written in George Romanes' own name--an important criticism upon the _Candid Examination_ which he had published anonymously, and also because, with their entirely sceptical result, they exhibit very clearly a stage in the mental history of their author. The antecedents of these papers those who have read this Introduction will now be in a position to understand. What remains to be said by way of further introduction to the Notes had better be reserved till later. C.G. FOOTNOTES: [1] p. 7. [2] p. 173. [3] See p. 110. [4] But see an interesting note in Romanes' _Mind and Motion and Monism_ (Longmans, 1895) p. 111. [5] Published in Trübner's _English and Foreign Philosophical Library_ in 1878, but written 'several years ago' (preface). 'I have refrained from publishing it,' the author explains, 'lest, after having done so, I should find that more mature thought had modified the conclusions which the author sets forth.' [6] At times I have sought to make the argument of the chapter more intelligible by introducing references to earlier parts of the book or explanations in my own words. These latter I have inserted in square brackets. [7] p. 24. [8] p. 28. [9] p. 28. [10] p. 45. [11] p. 47. [12] p. 50. [13] p. 63. [14] pp. 58 ff. [15] With reference to the views and arguments of the _Candid Examination_, it may be interesting to notice here in detail that George Romanes (1) came to attach much more importance to the subjective religious needs and intuitions of the human spirit (pp. 131 ff.); (2) perceived that the subjective religious consciousness can be regarded objectively as a broad human phenomenon (pp. 147 f.); (3) criticized his earlier theory of causation and returned _towards_ the theory that all causation is volitional (pp. 102, 118); (4) definitely repudiated the materialistic account of the origin of mind (pp. 30, 31); (5) returned to the use of the expression 'the argument from design,' and therefore presumably abandoned his strong objection to it; (6) 'saw through' Herbert Spencer's refutation of the wider teleology expressed by Baden Powell, and felt the force of the teleology again (p. 72); (7) recognized that the scientific objections to the doctrine of the freedom of the will are not finally valid (p. 128). [16] See _Mind and Motion and Monism_, pp. 36 ff. [17] In some 'Notes' of the Summer of 1893 I find the statement, 'The result (of philosophical inquiry) has been that in his millennial contemplation and experience man has attained certainty with regard to certain aspects of the world problem, no less secure than that which he has gained in the domain of physical science, e.g. Logical priority of mind over matter. Consequent untenability of materialism. Relativity of knowledge. The order of nature, conservation of energy and indestructibility of matter within human experience, the principle of evolution and survival of the fittest.' [18] For the meaning of 'pure' agnosticism see below, pp. 107 ff. PART I. THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE UPON RELIGION. I. I propose to consider, in a series of three papers, the influence of Science upon Religion. In doing this I shall seek to confine myself to the strictly rational aspect of the subject, without travelling into any matters of sentiment. Moreover, I shall aim at estimating in the first instance the kind and degree of influence which has been exerted by Science upon Religion in the past, and then go on to estimate the probable extent of this influence in the future. The first two papers will be devoted to the past and prospective influence of Science upon Natural Religion, while the third will be devoted to the past and prospective influence of Science upon Revealed Religion[19]. Few subjects have excited so much interest of late years as that which I thus mark out for discussion. This can scarcely be considered a matter of surprise, seeing that the influence in question is not only very direct, but also extremely important from every point of view. For generations and for centuries in succession Religion maintained an undisputed sway over men's minds--if not always as a practical guide in matters of conduct, at least as a regulator of belief. Even among the comparatively few who in previous centuries professedly rejected Christianity, there can be no doubt that their intellectual conceptions were largely determined by it: for Christianity being then the only court of appeal with reference to all these conceptions, even the few minds which were professedly without its jurisdiction could scarcely escape its indirect influence through the minds of others. But as side by side with the venerable institution a new court of appeal was gradually formed, we cannot wonder that it should have come to be regarded in the light of a rival to the old--more especially as the searching methods of its inquiry and the certain character of its judgements were much more in consonance with the requirements of an age disposed to scepticism. And this spirit of rivalry is still further fostered by the fact that Science has unquestionably exerted upon Religion what Mr. Fiske terms a 'purifying influence.' That is to say, not only are the scientific methods of inquiry after truth more congenial to sceptical minds than are the religious methods (which may broadly be defined as accepting truth on authority), but the results of the former have more than once directly contradicted those of the latter: science has in several cases incontestably demonstrated that religious teaching has been wrong as to matters of fact. Further still, the great advance of natural knowledge which has characterized the present century, has caused our ideas upon many subjects connected with philosophy to undergo a complete metamorphosis. A well-educated man of the present day is absolutely precluded from regarding some of the Christian dogmas from the same intellectual standpoint as his forefathers, even though he may still continue to accept them in some other sense. In short, our whole key of thinking or tone of thought having been in certain respects changed, we can no longer anticipate that in these respects it should continue to harmonize with the unalterable system of theology. Such I conceive to be the ways in which Science has exerted her influence upon Religion, and it is needless to dwell upon the potency of their united effect. No one can read even a newspaper without perceiving how great this effect has been. On the one hand, sceptics are triumphantly confident that the light of dawning knowledge has begun finally to dispel the darkness of superstition, while religious persons, on the other hand, tremble to think what the future, if judged by the past, is likely to bring forth. On both sides we have free discussion, strong language, and earnest canvassing. Year by year stock is taken, and year by year the balance is found to preponderate in favour of Science. This being the state of things of the present time, I think that with the experience of the kind and degree of influence which Science has exerted upon Religion in the past, we have material enough whereby to estimate the probable extent of such influence in the future. This, therefore, I shall endeavour to do by seeking to define, on general principles, the limits within which it is antecedently possible that the influence in question can be exercised. But in order to do this, it is necessary to begin by estimating the kind and degree of the influence which has been exerted by Science upon Religion in the past. Thus much premised, we have in the first place to define the essential nature both of Science and of Religion: for this is clearly the first step in an analysis which has for its object an estimation of the actual and possible effects of one of these departments of thought upon the other. Science, then, is essentially a department of thought having exclusive reference to the Proximate. More particularly, it is a department of thought having for its object the explanation of natural phenomena by the discovery of natural (or proximate) causes. In so far as Science ventures to trespass beyond this her only legitimate domain, and seeks to interpret natural phenomena by the immediate agency of supernatural or ultimate causes, in that degree has she ceased to be physical science, and become ontological speculation. The truth of this statement has now been practically recognized by all scientific workers; and terms describing final causes have been banished from their vocabulary in astronomy, chemistry, geology, biology, and even in psychology. Religion, on the other hand, is a department of thought having no less exclusive reference to the Ultimate. More particularly, it is a department of thought having for its object a self-conscious and intelligent Being, which it regards as a Personal God, and the fountain-head of all causation. I am, of course, aware that the term Religion has been of late years frequently used in senses which this definition would not cover; but I conceive that this only shows how frequently the term in question has been abused. To call any theory of things a Religion which does not present any belief in any form of Deity, is to apply the word to the very opposite of that which it has hitherto been used to denote. To speak of the Religion of the Unknowable, the Religion of Cosmism, the Religion of Humanity, and so forth, where the personality of the First Cause is not recognized, is as unmeaning as it would be to speak of the love of a triangle, or the rationality of the equator. That is to say, if any meaning is to be extracted from the terms at all, it is only to be so by using them in some metaphorical sense. We may, for instance, say that there is such a thing as a Religion of Humanity, because we may begin by deifying Humanity in our own estimation, and then go on to worship our ideal. But by thus giving Humanity the name of Deity we are not really creating a new religion: we are merely using a metaphor, which may or may not be successful as a matter of poetic diction, but which most assuredly presents no shred of value as a matter of philosophical statement. Indeed, in this relation it is worse than valueless: it is misleading. Variations or reversals in the meanings of words are not of uncommon occurrence in the ordinary growth of languages; but it is not often that we find, as in this case, the whole meaning of a term intentionally and gratuitously changed by the leaders of philosophical thought. Humanity, for example, is an abstract idea of our own making: it is not an object any more than the equator is an object. Therefore, if it were possible to construct a religion by this curious device of metaphorically ascribing to Humanity the attributes of Deity, it ought to be as logically possible to construct, let us say, a theory of brotherly regard towards the equator, by metaphorically ascribing to it the attributes of man. The distinguishing features of any theory which can properly be termed a Religion, is that it should refer to the ultimate source, or sources, of things: and that it should suppose this source to be of an objective, intelligent, and personal nature. To apply the term Religion to any other theory is merely to abuse it. From these definitions, then, it appears that the aims and methods of Science are exclusively concerned with the ascertaining and the proof of the proximate How of things and processes physical: her problem is, as Mill states it, to discover what are the fewest number of (phenomenal) data which, being granted, will explain the phenomena of experience. On the other hand, Religion is not in any way concerned with causation, further than to assume that all things and all processes are ultimately due to intelligent personality. Religion is thus, as Mr. Spencer says, 'an _à priori_ theory of the universe'--to which, however, we must add, 'and a theory which assumes intelligent personality as the originating source of the universe.' Without this needful addition, a religion would be in no way logically distinguished from a philosophy. From these definitions, then, it clearly follows that in their purest forms, Science and Religion really have no point of logical contact. Only if Science could transcend the conditions of space and time, of phenomenal relativity, and of all human limitations, only then could Science be in a position to touch the supernatural theory of Religion. But obviously, if Science could do this, she would cease to be Science. In soaring above the region of phenomena and entering the tenuous aether of noumena, her present wings, which we call her methods, would in such an atmosphere be no longer of any service for movement. Out of time, out of place, and out of phenomenal relation, Science could no longer exist as such. On the other hand, Religion in its purest form is equally incompetent to affect Science. For, as we have already seen, Religion as such is not concerned with the phenomenal sphere: her theory of ontology cannot have any reference to the How of phenomenal causation. Hence it is evident that, as in their purest or most ideal forms they move in different mental planes, Science and Religion cannot exhibit interference. Thus far the remarks which I have made apply equally to all forms of Religion, as such, whether actual or possible, and in so far as the Religion is _pure_. But it is notorious that until quite recently Religion did exercise upon Science, not only an influence, but an overpowering influence. Belief in divine agency being all but universal, while the methods of scientific research had not as yet been distinctly formulated, it was in previous generations the usual habit of mind to refer any natural phenomenon, the physical causation of which had not been ascertained, to the more or less immediate causal action of the Deity. But we now see that this habit of mind arose from a failure to distinguish between the essentially distinct characters of Science and Religion as departments of thought, and therefore that it was only so far as the Religion of former times was impure--or mixed with the ingredients of thought which belong to Science--that the baleful influence in question was exerted. The gradual, successive, and now all but total abolition of final causes from the thoughts of scientific men, to which allusion has already been made, is merely an expression of the fact that scientific men as a body have come fully to recognize the fundamental distinction between Science and Religion which I have stated. Or, to put the matter in another way, scientific men as a body--and, indeed, all persons whose ideas on such matters are abreast of the times--perceive plainly enough that a religious explanation of any natural phenomenon is, from a scientific point of view, no explanation at all. For a religious explanation consists in referring the observed phenomenon to the First Cause--i.e. to merge that particular phenomenon in the general or final mystery of things. A scientific explanation, on the other hand, consists in referring the observed phenomenon to its physical causes, and in no case can such an explanation entertain the hypothesis of a final cause without abandoning its character as a scientific explanation. For example, if a child brings me a flower and asks why it has such a curious form, bright colour, sweet perfume, and so on, and if I answer, Because God made it so, I am not really answering the child's question: I am merely concealing my ignorance of Nature under a guise of piety, and excusing my indolence in the study of botany. It was the appreciation of this fact that led Mr. Darwin to observe in his _Origin of Species_ that the theory of creation does not serve to explain any of the facts with which it is concerned, but merely re-states these facts as they are observed to occur. That is to say, by thus merging the facts as observed into the final mystery of things, we are not even attempting to explain them in any scientific sense: for it would be obviously possible to get rid of the necessity of thus explaining any natural phenomenon whatsoever by referring it to the immediate causal action of the Deity. If any phenomenon were actually to occur which did proceed from the immediate causal action of the Deity, then _ex hypothesi_, there would be no physical causes to investigate, and the occupation of Othello, in the person of a man of science, would be gone. Such a phenomenon would be miraculous, and therefore from its very nature beyond the reach of scientific investigation. Properly speaking, then, the religious theory of final causes does not explain any of the phenomena of Nature: it merely re-states the phenomena as observed--or, if we prefer so to say, it is itself an ultimate and universal explanation of all possible phenomena taken collectively. For it must be admitted that behind all possible explanations of a scientific kind, there lies a great inexplicable, which just because of its ultimate character, cannot be merged into anything further--that is to say, cannot be explained. 'It is what it is,' is all that we can say of it: 'I am that I am' is all that it could say of itself. And it is in referring phenomena to this inexplicable source of physical causation that the theory of Religion essentially consists. The theory of Science, on the other hand, consists in the assumption that there is always a practically endless chain of physical causation to investigate--i.e. an endless series of phenomena to be explained. So that, if we define the process of explanation as the process of referring observed phenomena to their adequate causes, we may say that Religion, by the aid of a general theory of things in the postulation of an intelligent First Cause, furnishes to her own satisfaction an ultimate explanation of the universe as a whole, and therefore is not concerned with any of those proximate explanations or discovery of second causes, which form the exclusive subject-matter of Science. In other words, we recur to the definitions already stated, to the effect that Religion is a department of thought having, as such, exclusive reference to the Ultimate, while Science is a department of thought having, as such, no less exclusive reference to the Proximate. When these two departments of thought overlap, interference results, and we find confusion. Therefore it was that when the religious theory of final causes intruded upon the field of scientific inquiry, it was passing beyond its logical domain; and seeking to arrogate the function of explaining this or that phenomenon _in detail_, it ceased to be a purely religious theory, while at the same time and for the same reason it blocked the way of scientific progress[20]. This remark serves to introduce one of the chief topics with which I have to deal--viz. the doctrine of Design in Nature, and thus the whole question of Natural Religion in its relation to Natural Science. In handling this topic I shall endeavour to take as broad and deep a view as I can of the present standing of Natural Religion, without waiting to show step by step the ways and means by which it has been brought into this position, by the influence of Science. In the earliest dawn of recorded thought, teleology in some form or another has been the most generally accepted theory whereby the order of Nature is explained. It is not, however, my object in this paper to trace the history of this theory from its first rude beginnings in Fetishism to its final development in Theism. I intend to devote myself exclusively to the question as to the present standing of this theory, and I allude to its past history only in order to examine the statement which is frequently made, to the effect that its general prevalence in all ages and among all peoples of the world lends to it a certain degree of 'antecedent credibility.' With reference to this point, I should say, that, whether or not the order of Nature is due to a disposing Mind, the hypothesis of mental agency in Nature--or, as the Duke of Argyll terms it, the hypothesis of 'anthropopsychism'--must necessarily have been the earliest hypothesis. What we find in Nature is the universal prevalence of causation, and long before the no less universal equivalency between causes and effects--i.e. the universal prevalence of natural law--became a matter of even the [vaguest] appreciation, the general fact that nothing happens without a cause of some kind was fully recognized. Indeed, the recognition of this fact is not only presented by the lowest races of the present day, but, as I have myself given evidence to show, likewise by animals and infants[21]. And therefore, it appears to me probable that those psychologists are right who argue that the idea of cause is intuitive, in the same sense that the ideas of space and time are intuitive--i.e. the instinctive or [inherited] effect of ancestral experience. Now if it is thus a matter of certainty that the recognition of causality in Nature is co-extensive with, and even anterior to, the human mind, it appears to me no less certain that the first attempt at assigning a cause of this or that observed event in Nature--i.e. the first attempts at a rational explanation of the phenomena of Nature--must have been of an anthropopsychic kind. No other explanation was, as it were, so ready to hand as that of projecting into external Nature the agency of volition, which was known to each individual as the apparent fountain-head of causal activity so far as he and his neighbours were concerned. To reach this most obvious explanation of causality in Nature, it did not require that primitive man should know, as we know, that the very conception of causality arises out of our sense of effort in voluntary action; it only required that this should be the fact, and then it must needs follow that when any natural phenomenon was thought about at all with reference to its causality, the cause inferred should be one of a psychical kind. I need not wait to trace the gradual integration of this anthropopsychic hypothesis from its earliest and most diffused form of what we may term polypsychism (wherein the causes inferred were almost as personally numerous as the effects contemplated), through polytheism (wherein many effects of a like kind were referred to one deity, who, as it were, took special charge over that class), up to monotheism (wherein all causation is gathered up into the monopsychism of a single personality): it is enough thus briefly to show that from first to last the hypothesis of anthropopsychism is a necessary phase of mental evolution under existing conditions, and this whether or not the hypothesis is true. Thus viewed, I do not think that 'the general consent of mankind' is a fact of any argumentative weight in favour of the anthropopsychic theory--so far, I mean, as the matter of causation is concerned--whether this be in fetishism or in the teleology of our own day: the general consent of mankind in the larger question of theism (where sundry other matters besides causation fail to be considered) does not here concern us. Indeed, it appears to me that if we are to go back to the savages for any guarantee of our anthropopsychic theory, the pledge which we receive is of worse than no value. As well might we conclude that a match is a living organism, because this is to the mind of a savage the most obvious explanation of its movements, as conclude on precisely similar grounds that our belief in teleology derives any real support from any of the more primitive phases of anthropopsychism. It seems to me, therefore, that in seeking to estimate the evidence of design in Nature, we must as it were start _de novo_, without reference to anterior beliefs upon the subject. The question is essentially one to be considered in the light of all the latest knowledge that we possess, and by the best faculties of thinking that we (the heirs of all the ages) are able to bring to bear upon it. I shall, therefore, only allude to the history of anthropopsychism in so far as I may find it necessary to do so for the sake of elucidating my argument. And here it is needful to consider first what Paley called 'the state of the argument' before the Darwinian epoch. This is clearly and tersely presented by Paley in his classical illustration of finding a watch upon a heath--an illustration so well known that I need not here re-state it. I will merely observe, therefore, that it conveys, as it were in one's watch-pocket, the whole of the argument from design; and that it is not in my opinion open to the stricture which was passed upon it by Mill where he says,--'The inference would not be from marks of design, but because I already know by direct experience that watches are made by men.' This appears to me to miss the whole point of Paley's meaning, for there would be obviously no argument at all unless he be understood to mean that the evidence of design which is supposed to be afforded by examination of the watch, is supposed to be afforded by this examination only, and not from any of the direct knowledge alluded to by Mill. For the purposes of the illustration, it must clearly be assumed that the finder of the watch has no previous or direct knowledge touching the manufacture of watches. Apart from this curious misunderstanding, Mill was at one with Paley upon the whole subject. Again, it is no real objection to the argument or illustration to say, as we often have said, that it does not account for the watchmaker. The object of the argument from design is to _prove_ the existence of a designer: not to _explain_ that existence. Indeed, it would be suicidal to the whole argument in its relation to Theism, if the possibility of any such explanation were entertained; for such a possibility could only be entertained on the supposition that the being of the Deity admits of being explained--i.e. that the Deity is not ultimate. Lastly, the argument is precisely the same as that which occurs in numerous passages of Scripture and in theological writings all over the world down to the present time. That is to say, everywhere in organic nature we meet with innumerable adaptations of means to ends, which in very many cases present a degree of refinement and complexity in comparison with which the adaptations of means to ends in a watch are but miserable and rudimentary attempts at mechanism. No one can know so well as the modern biologist in what an immeasurable degree the mechanisms which occur in such profusion in nature surpass, in every form of excellence, the highest triumphs of human invention. Hence at first sight it does unquestionably appear that we could have no stronger or better evidence of purpose than is thus afforded. In the words of Paley: 'arrangement, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to an end, relation of instruments to a use, imply the presence of intelligence and mind.' But next the question arises, Although such things certainly [may][22] imply the presence of mind as their explanatory cause, are we entitled to assume that there can be in nature no other cause competent to produce these effects? This is a question which never seems to have occurred to Paley, Bell, Chalmers, or indeed to any of the natural theologians up to the time of Darwin. This, I think, is a remarkable fact, because the question is one which, as a mere matter of logical form, appears to lie so much upon the surface. But nevertheless the fact remains that natural theologians, so far as I know without exception, were satisfied to assume as an axiom that mechanism could have no cause other than that of a designing mind; and therefore their work was restricted to tracing out in detail the number and the excellency of the mechanisms which were to be met with in nature. It is, however, obvious that the mere accumulation of such cases can have no real, or logical, effect upon the argument. The mechanisms which we encounter in nature are so amazing in their perfections, that the attentive study of any one of them would (as Paley in his illustration virtually, though not expressly, contends) be sufficient to carry the whole position, if the assumption be conceded that mechanism can only be due to mind. Therefore the argument is not really, or logically, strengthened by the mere accumulation of any number of special cases of mechanism in nature, all as mechanisms similar in kind. Let us now consider this argument. If we are disposed to wonder why natural theologians prior to the days of Darwin were content to assume that mind is the only possible cause of mechanism, I think we have a ready answer in the universal prevalence of their belief in special creation. For I think it is unquestionable that, upon the basis of this belief, the assumption is legitimate. That is to say, if we start with the belief that all species of plants and animals were originally introduced to the complex conditions of their several environments suddenly and ready made (in some such manner as watches are turned out from a manufactory), then I think we are reasonably entitled to assume that no conceivable cause, other than that of intelligent purpose, could possibly be assigned in explanation of the effects. It is, of course, needless to observe that in so far as this previous belief in special creation was thus allowed to affect the argument from design, that argument became an instance of circular reasoning. And it is, perhaps, equally needless to observe that the mere fact of evolution, as distinguished from special creation--or of the gradual development of living mechanisms, as distinguished from their sudden and ready-made apparition--would not in any way affect the argument from design, unless it could be shown that the process of evolution admits the possibility of some other cause which is not admitted by the hypothesis of special creation. But this is precisely what is shown by the theory of evolution as propounded by Darwin. That is to say, the theory of the gradual development of living mechanisms propounded by Darwin, is something more than a theory of gradual development as distinguished from sudden creation. It is this, but it is also a theory of a purely scientific kind which seeks to explain the purely physical causes of that development. And this is the point where natural science begins to exert her influence upon natural theology--or the point where the theory of evolution begins to affect the theory of design. As this is a most important part of our subject, and one upon which an extraordinary amount of confusion at the present time prevails, I shall in my next paper carefully consider it in all its bearings. FOOTNOTES: [19] [The third paper is not published because Romanes' views on the relation between science and faith in Revealed Religion are better and more maturely expressed in the Notes.--ED.] [20] To avoid misunderstanding I may observe that in the above definitions I am considering Religion and Science under the conditions in which they actually exist. It is conceivable that under other conditions these two departments of thought might not be so sharply separated. Thus, for instance, if a Religion were to appear carrying a revelation to Science upon matters of physical causation, such a Religion (supposing the revelation were found by experiment to be true) ought to be held to exercise upon Science a strictly legitimate influence. [21] _Mental Evolution in Animals_, pp. 155-8. [22] [I have put 'may' in place of 'do' for the sake of argument.--ED.] II. Suppose the man who found the watch upon a heath to continue his walk till he comes down to the sea-shore, and suppose further that he is as ignorant of physical geography as he is of watch-making. He soon begins to observe a number of adaptations of means to ends, which, if less refined and delicate than those that formed the object of his study in the watch, are on the other hand much more impressive from the greatly larger scale on which they are displayed. First, he observes that there is a beautiful basin hollowed out in the land for the reception of a bay; that the sides of this basin, which from being near its opening are most exposed to the action of large rolling billows, are composed of rocky cliffs, evidently in order to prevent the further encroachment of the sea, and the consequent destruction of the entire bay; that the sides of the basin, which from being successively situated more inland are successively less and less exposed to the action of large waves, are constituted successively of smaller rocks, passing into shingle, and eventually into the finest sand: that as the tides rise and fall with as great a regularity as was exhibited by the movements of the watch, the stones are carefully separated out from the sand to be arranged in sloping layers by themselves, and this always with a most beautiful reference to the places round the margin of the basin which are most in danger of being damaged by the action of the waves. He would further observe, upon closer inspection, that this process of selective arrangement goes into matters of the most minute detail. Here, for instance, he would observe a mile or two of a particular kind of seaweed artistically arranged in one long sinuous line upon the beach; there he would see a wonderful deposit of shells; in another place a lovely little purple heap of garnet sand, the minute particles of which have all been carefully picked out from the surrounding acres of yellow sand. Again, he would notice that the streams which come down to the bay are all flowing in channels admirably dug out for the purpose; and, being led by curiosity to investigate the teleology of these various streams, he would find that they serve to supply the water which the sea loses by evaporation, and also, by a wonderful piece of adjustment, to furnish fresh water to those animals and plants which thrive best in fresh water, and yet by their combined action to carry down sufficient mineral constituents to give that precise degree of saltness to the sea as a whole which is required for the maintenance of pelagic life. Lastly, continuing his investigations along this line of inquiry, he would find that a thousand different habitats were all thoughtfully adapted to the needs of a hundred thousand different forms of life, none of which could survive if these habitats were reversed. Now, I think that our imaginary inquirer would be a dull man if, as the result of all this study, he failed to conclude that the evidence of Design furnished by the marine bay was at least as cogent as that which he had previously found in his study of the watch. But there is this great difference between the two cases. Whereas by subsequent inquiry he could ascertain as a matter of fact that the watch was due to intelligent contrivance, he could make no such discovery with reference to the marine bay: in the one case intelligent contrivance as a cause is independently demonstrable, while in the other case it can only be inferred. What, then, is the value of the inference? If, after the studies of our imaginary teleologist had been completed, he were introduced to the library of the Royal Society, and if he were then to spend a year or two in making himself acquainted with the leading results of modern science, I fancy that he would end by being both a wiser and a sadder man. At least I am certain that in learning more he would feel that he is understanding less--that the archaic simplicity of his earlier explanations must give place to a matured perplexity upon the whole subject. To begin with, he would now find that every one of the adjustments of means to ends which excited his admiration on the sea-coast were due to physical causes which are perfectly well understood. The cliffs stood at the opening of the bay because the sea in past ages had encroached upon the coast-line until it met with these cliffs, which then opposed its further progress; the bay was a depression in the land which happened to be there when the sea arrived, and into which the sea consequently flowed; the successive occurrence of rocks, shingle, and sand was due to the actions of the waves themselves; the segregation of sea-weeds, shells, pebbles, and different kinds of sand, was due to their different degrees of specific gravity; the fresh-water streams ran in channels because they had themselves been the means of excavating them; and the multitudinous forms of life were all adapted to their several habitats simply because the unsuited forms were not able to live in them. In all these cases, therefore, our teleologist in the light of fuller knowledge would be compelled to conclude at least this much--that the adaptations which he had so greatly admired when he supposed that they were all due to contrivance in anticipation of the existing phenomena, cease to furnish the same evidence of intelligent design when it is found that no one of them was prepared beforehand by any independent or external cause. He would therefore be led to conclude that if the teleological interpretation of the facts were to be saved at all, it could only be so by taking a much wider view of the subject than was afforded by the particular cases of apparent design which at first appeared so cogent. That is to say, he would feel that he must abandon the supposition of any _special_ design in the construction of that particular bay, and fall back upon the theory of a much more _general_ design in the construction of one great scheme of Nature as a whole. In short he would require to dislodge his argument from the special adjustments which in the first instance appeared to him so suggestive, to those general laws of Nature which by their united operation give rise to a cosmos as distinguished from a chaos. Now I have been careful thus to present in all its more important details an imaginary argument drawn from inorganic nature, because it furnishes a complete analogy to the actual argument which is drawn from organic nature. Without any question, the instances of apparent design, or of the apparently intentional adaptation of means to ends, which we meet with in organic nature, are incomparably more numerous and suggestive than anything with which we meet in inorganic nature. But if once we find good reason to conclude that the former, like the latter, are all due, not to the immediate, special and prospective action of a contriving intelligence (as in watch-making or creation), but to the agency of secondary or physical causes acting under the influence of what we call general laws, then it seems to me that no matter how numerous or how wonderful the adaptations of means to ends in organic nature may be, they furnish one no other or better evidence of design than is furnished by any of the facts of inorganic nature. For the sake of clearness let us take any special case. Paley says, 'I know of no better method of introducing so large a subject than that of comparing a single thing with a single thing; an eye, for example, with a telescope.' He then goes on to point out the analogies between these two pieces of apparatus, and ends by asking, 'How is it possible, under circumstances of such close affinity, and under the operation of equal evidence, to exclude contrivance in the case of the eye, yet to acknowledge the proof of contrivance having been employed, as the plainest and clearest of all propositions in the case of the telescope?' Well, the answer to be made is that only upon the hypothesis of special creation can this analogy hold: on the hypothesis of evolution by physical causes the evidence in the two cases is _not_ equal. For, upon this hypothesis we have the eye beginning, not as a ready-made structure prepared beforehand for the purposes of seeing, but as a mere differentiation of the ends of nerves in the skin, probably in the first instance to enable them better to discriminate changes of temperature. Pigment having been laid down in these places the better to secure this purpose (I use teleological terms for the sake of brevity), the nerve-ending begins to distinguish between light and darkness. The better to secure this further purpose, the simplest conceivable form of lens begins to appear in the shape of small refractive bodies. Behind these sensory cells are developed, forming the earliest indication of a retina presenting a single layer. And so on, step by step, till we reach the eye of an eagle. Of course the teleologist will here answer--'The fact of such a gradual building up is no argument against design: whether the structure appeared on a sudden or was the result of a slow elaboration, the marks of design in either case occur in the structure as it stands.' All of which is very true; but I am not maintaining that the fact of a gradual development _in itself_ does affect the argument from design. I am maintaining that it only does so because it reveals the possibility (excluded by the hypothesis of sudden or special creation) of the structure having been proximately due to the operation of physical causes. Thus, for the value of argument, let us assume that natural selection has been satisfactorily established as a cause adequate to account for all these effects. Given the facts of heredity, variation, struggle for existence, and the consequent survival of the fittest, what follows? Why that each step in the prolonged and gradual development of the eye was brought about by the elimination of all the less adapted structures in any given generation, i.e. the selection of all the better adapted to perpetuate the improvement by heredity. Will the teleologist maintain that this selective process is itself indicative of special design? If so, it appears to me that he is logically bound to maintain that the long line of seaweed, the shells, the stones and the little heap of garnet sand upon the sea-coast are all equally indicative of special design. The general laws relating to specific gravity are at least of as much importance in the economy of nature as are the general laws relating to specific differentiation; and in each illustration alike we find the result of the operation of known physical causes to be that of selection. If it should be argued in reply that the selection in the one case is obviously purposeless, while in the other it is as obviously purposive, I answer that this is pure assumption. It is perhaps not too much to say that every geological formation on the face of the globe is either wholly or in part due to the selective influence of specific gravity, and who shall say that the construction of the earth's crust is a less important matter in the general scheme of things (if there is such a scheme) than is the evolution of an eye? Or who shall say that because we see an apparently intentional adaptation of means to ends as the result of selection in the case of the eye, there is no intention served by the result of selection in the case of the sea-weeds, stones, sand, mud? For anything that we can know to the contrary, the supposed intelligence may take a greater delight in the latter than in the former process. For the sake of clearness I have assumed that the physical causes with which we are already acquainted are sufficient to explain the observed phenomena of organic nature. But it clearly makes no difference whether or not this assumption is conceded, provided we allow that the observed phenomena are all due to physical causes of some kind, be they known or unknown. That is to say, in whatever measure we exclude the hypothesis of the direct or immediate intervention of the Deity in organic nature (miracle), in that measure we are reducing the evidence of design in organic nature to precisely the same logical position as that which is occupied by the evidence of design in inorganic nature. Hence I conceive that Mill has shown a singular want of penetration where, after observing with reference to natural selection, 'creative forethought is not absolutely the only link by which the origin of the wonderful mechanism of the eye may be connected with the fact of sight,' he goes on to say, 'leaving this remarkable speculation (i.e. that of natural selection) to whatever fate the progress of discovery may have in store for it, in the present state of knowledge the adaptations in nature afford a large balance of probability in favour of creation by intelligence.' I say this passage seems to me to show a singular want of penetration, and I say so because it appears to argue that the issue lies between the hypothesis of special design and the hypothesis of natural selection. But it does not do so. The issue really lies between special design and natural causes. Survival of the fittest is one of these causes which has been suggested, and shown by a large accumulation of evidence to be probably a true cause. But even if it were to be disproved as a cause, the real argumentative position of teleology would not thereby be effected, unless we were to conclude that there can be no other causes of a secondary or physical kind concerned in the production of the observed adaptations. I trust that I have now made it sufficiently clear why I hold that if we believe the reign of natural law, or the operation of physical causes, to extend throughout organic nature in the same universal manner as we believe this in the case of inorganic nature, then we can find no better evidence of design in the one province than in the other. The mere fact that we meet with more numerous and apparently more complete instances of design in the one province than in the other is, _ex hypothesi_, merely due to our ignorance of the natural causation in the more intricate province. In studying biological phenomena we are all at present in the intellectual position of our imaginary teleologist when studying the marine bay: we do not know the natural causes which have produced the observed results. But if, after having obtained a partial key in the theory of natural selection, we trust to the large analogy which is afforded by the simpler provinces of Nature, and conclude that physical causes are everywhere concerned in the production of organic structures, then we have concluded that any evidence of design which these structures present is of just the same logical value as that which we may attach to the evidence of design in inorganic nature. If it should still be urged that the adaptations met with in organic nature are from their number and unity much more suggestive of design than anything met with in inorganic nature, I must protest that this is to change the ground of argument and to evade the only point in dispute. No one denies the obvious fact stated: the only question is whether any number and any quantity of adaptations in any one department of nature afford other or better evidence of design than is afforded by adaptations in other departments, when all departments alike are supposed to be equally the outcome of physical causation. And this question I answer in the negative, because we have no means of ascertaining the extent to which the process of natural selection, or any other physical cause, is competent to produce adaptations of the kind observed. Thus, to take another instance of apparent design from inorganic nature, it has been argued that the constitution of the atmosphere is clearly designed for the support of vegetable and animal life. But before this conclusion can be established upon the facts, it must be shown that life could exist under no other material conditions than those which are furnished to it by the elementary constituents of the atmosphere. This, however, it is clearly impossible to show. For anything that we can know to the contrary, life may actually be existing upon some of the other heavenly bodies under totally different conditions as to atmosphere; and the fact that on this planet all life has come to be dependent upon the gases which occur in our atmosphere, may be due simply to the fact that it was only the forms of life which were able to adapt themselves (through natural selection or other physical causes) to these particular gases which could possibly be expected to occur--just as in matters of still smaller detail, it was only those forms of life that were suited to their several habitats in the marine bay, which could possibly be expected to be found in these several situations. Now, if a set of adjustments so numerous and so delicate as those on which the relations of every known form of life to the constituent gases of the atmosphere are seen to depend, can thus be shown not necessarily to imply the action of any disposing intelligence, how is it possible to conclude that any less general exhibitions of adjustment imply this, so long as every case of adjustment, whether or not ultimately due to design, is regarded as proximately due to physical causes? In view of these considerations, therefore, I think it is perfectly clear that if the argument from teleology is to be saved at all, it can only be so by shifting it from the narrow basis of special adaptations, to the broad area of Nature as a whole. And here I confess that to my mind the argument does acquire a weight which, if long and attentively considered, deserves to be regarded as enormous. For, although this and that particular adjustment in Nature may be seen to be proximately due to physical causes, and although we are prepared on the grounds of the largest possible analogy to infer that all other such particular cases are likewise due to physical causes, the more ultimate question arises, How is it that all physical causes conspire, by their united action, to the production of a general order of Nature? It is against all analogy to suppose that such an end as this can be accomplished by such means as those, in the way of mere chance or 'the fortuitous concourse of atoms.' We are led by the most fundamental dictates of our reason to conclude that there must be some cause for this co-operation of causes. I know that from Lucretius' time this has been denied; but it has been denied only on grounds of _feeling_. No possible _reason_ can be given for the denial which does not run counter to the law of causation itself. I am therefore perfectly clear that the only question which, from a purely rational point of view, here stands to be answered is this--Of what nature are we to suppose the _causa causarum_ to be? On this point only two hypotheses have ever been advanced, and I think it is impossible to conceive that any third one is open. Of these two hypotheses the earliest, and of course the most obvious, is that of mental purpose. The other hypothesis is one which we owe to the far-reaching thought of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In Chapter VII of his _First Principles_ he argues that all causation arises immediately out of existence as such, or, as he states it, that 'uniformity of law inevitably follows from the persistence of force.' For 'if in any two cases there is exact likeness not only between those most conspicuous antecedents which we distinguish as the causes, but also between those accompanying antecedents which we call the conditions, we cannot affirm that the effects will differ, without affirming either that some force has come into existence or that some force has ceased to exist. If the co-operative forces in the one case are equal to those in the other, each to each, in distribution and amount; then it is impossible to conceive the product of their joint action in the one case as unlike that in the other, without conceiving one or more of the forces to have increased or diminished in quantity; and this is conceiving that force is not persistent.' Now this interpretation of causality as the immediate outcome of existence must be considered first as a theory of causation, and next as a theory in relation to Theism. As a theory of causation it has not met with the approval of mathematicians, physicists, or logicians, leading representatives of all these departments of thought having expressly opposed it, while, so far as I am aware, no representative of any one of them has spoken in its favour[23]. But with this point I am not at present concerned, for even if the theory were admitted to furnish a full and complete explanation of causality, it would still fail to account for the harmonious relation of causes, or the fact with which we are now alone concerned. This distinction is not perceived by the anonymous author 'Physicus,' who, in his _Candid Examination of Theism_, lays great stress upon Mr. Spencer's theory of causation as subversive of Theism, or at least as superseding the necessity of theistic hypothesis by furnishing a full explanation of the order of Nature on purely physical grounds. But he fails to perceive that even if Mr. Spencer's theory were conceded fully to explain all the facts of causality, it would in no wise tend to explain the cosmos in which these facts occur. It may be true that causation depends upon the 'persistence of force': it does not follow that all manifestations of force should on this account have been directed to occur as they do occur. For, if we follow back any sequence of physical causation, we soon find that it spreads out on all sides into a network of physical relations which are literally infinite both in space (conditions) and in time (antecedent causes). Now, even if we suppose that the persistence of force is a sufficient explanation of the occurrence of the particular sequence contemplated so far as the exhibition of force is there concerned, we are thus as far as ever from explaining the _determination_ of this force into the particular channel through which it flows. It may be quite true that the resultant is determined as to magnitude and direction by the components; but what about the magnitude and direction of the components? If it is said that they in turn were determined by the outcome of previous systems, how about these systems? And so on till we spread away into the infinite network already mentioned. Only if we knew the origin of all series of all such systems could we be in a position to say that an adequate intelligence might determine beforehand by calculation the state of any one part of the universe at any given instant of time. But, as the series are infinite both in number and extent, this knowledge is clearly out of the question. Moreover, even if it could be imagined as possible, it could only be so imagined at the expense of supposing an origin of physical causation in time; and this amounts to supposing a state of things prior to such causation, and out of which it arose. But to suppose this is to suppose some extra-physical source of physical causation; and whether this supposition is made with reference to a physical event occurring under immediate observation (miracle), or to a physical event in past time, or to the origin of all physical events, it is alike incompatible with any theory that seeks to give a purely physical explanation of the physical universe as a whole. It is, in short, the old story about a stream not being able to rise above its source. Physical causation cannot be made to supply its own explanation, and the mere persistence of force, even if it were conceded to account for particular cases of physical sequence, can give no account of the ubiquitous and eternal direction of force in the construction and maintenance of universal order. We are thus, as it were, driven upon the theory of Theism as furnishing the only nameable explanation of this universal order. That is to say, by no logical artifice can we escape from the conclusion that, as far as we can see, this universal order must be regarded as due to some one integrating principle; and that this, so far as we can see, is most probably of the nature of mind. At least it must be allowed that we can conceive of it under no other aspect; and that if any particular adaptation in organic nature is held to be suggestive of such an agency, the sum total of all adaptations in the universe must be held to be incomparably more so. I shall not, however, dwell upon this theme since it has been well treated by several modern writers, and with special cogency by the Rev. Baden Powell. I will merely observe that I do not consider it necessary to the display of this argument in favour of Theism that we should speak of 'natural laws.' It is enough to take our stand upon the [broadest] general fact that Nature is a system, and that the order observable in this system is absolutely universal, eternally enduring, and infinitely exact; while only upon the supposition of its being such is our experience conceived as possible, or our knowledge conceived as attainable. Having thus stated as emphatically as I can that in my opinion no explanation of natural order can be either conceived or named other than that of intelligence as the supreme directing cause, I shall proceed to two other questions which arise immediately out of this conclusion. The first of these questions is as to the presumable character of this supreme Intelligence so far as any data of inference upon this point are supplied by our observation of Nature; and the other question is as to the strictly formal cogency of any conclusions either with reference to the existence or the character of such an intelligence[24]. I shall consider these two points separately. No sooner have we reached the conclusion that the only hypothesis whereby the general order of Nature admits of being in any degree accounted for is that it is due to a cause of a mental kind, than we confront the fact that this cause must be widely different from anything that we know of Mind in ourselves. And we soon discover that this difference must be conceived as not merely of degree, however great, but of kind. In other words, although we may conclude that the nearest analogue of the _causa causarum_ given in experience is the human mind, we are bound to acknowledge that in all fundamental points the analogy is so remote that it becomes a question whether we are really very much nearer the truth by entertaining it. Thus, for instance, as Mr. Spencer has pointed out, our only conception of that which we know as Mind in ourselves is the conception of a series of states of consciousness. But, he continues, 'Put a series of states of consciousness as cause and the evolving universe as effect, and then endeavour to see the last as flowing from the first. I find it possible to imagine in some dim way a series of states of consciousness serving as antecedent to any one of the movements I see going on; for my own states of consciousness are often indirectly the antecedents to such movements. But how if I attempt to think of such a series as antecedent to _all_ actions throughout the universe ...? If to account for this infinitude of physical changes everywhere going on, "Mind must be conceived as there," "under the guise of simple-dynamics," then the reply is, that, to be so conceived, Mind must be divested of all attributes by which it is distinguished; and that, when thus divested of its distinguishing attributes the conception disappears--the word Mind stands for a blank.' Moreover, 'How is the "originating Mind" to be thought of as having states produced by things objective to it, as discriminating among these states, and classing them as like and unlike; and as preferring one objective result to another?'[25] Hence, without continuing this line of argument, which it would not be difficult to trace through every constituent branch of human psychology, we may take it as unquestionable that, if there is a Divine Mind, it must differ so essentially from the human mind, that it becomes illogical to designate the two by the same name: the attributes of eternity and ubiquity are in themselves enough to place such a Mind in a category _sui generis_, wholly different from anything which the analogy furnished by our own mind enables us even dimly to conceive. And this, of course, is no more than theologians admit. God's thoughts are above our thoughts, and a God who would be comprehensible to our intelligence would be no God at all, they say. Which may be true enough, only we must remember that in whatever measure we are thus precluded from understanding the Divine Mind, in that measure are we precluded from founding any conclusions as to its nature upon analogies furnished by the human mind. The theory ceases to be anthropomorphic: it ceases to be even 'anthropopsychic': it is affiliated with the conception of mind only in virtue of the one fact that it serves to give the best provisional account of the order of Nature, by supposing an infinite extension of some of the faculties of the human mind, with a concurrent obliteration of all the essential conditions under which alone these faculties are known to exist. Obviously of such a Mind as this no predication is logically possible. If such a Mind exists, it is not conceivable as existing, and we are precluded from assigning to it any attributes. Thus much on general grounds. Descending now to matters of more detail, let us assume with the natural theologians that such a Mind does exist, that it so far resembles the human mind as to be a conscious, personal intelligence, and that the care of such a Mind is over all its works. Even upon the grounds of this supposition we meet with a number of large and general facts which indicate that this Mind ought still to be regarded as apparently very unlike its 'image' in the mind of man. I will not here dwell upon the argument of seeming waste and purposeless action in Nature, because I think that this may be fairly met by the ulterior argument already drawn from Nature as a whole--viz. that as a whole, Nature is a cosmos, and therefore that what to us appears wasteful and purposeless in matters of detail may not be so in relation to the scheme of things as a whole. But I am doubtful whether this ulterior argument can fairly be adduced to meet the apparent absence in Nature of that which in man we term morality. For in the human mind the sense of right and wrong--with all its accompanying or constituting emotions of love, sympathy, justice, &c.--is so important a factor, that however greatly we may imagine the intellectual side of the human mind to be extended, we can scarcely imagine that the moral side could ever become so apparently eclipsed as to end in the authorship of such a work as we find in terrestrial nature. It is useless to hide our eyes to the state of matters which meets us here. Most of the instances of special design which are relied upon by the natural theologian to prove the intelligent nature of the First Cause, have as their end or object the infliction of painful death or the escape from remorseless enemies; and so far the argument in favour of the intelligent nature of the First Cause is an argument against its morality. Again, even if we quit the narrower basis on which teleological argument has rested in the past, and stand that argument upon the broader ground of Nature as a whole, it scarcely becomes less incompatible with any inference to the morality of that Cause, seeing that the facts to which I have alluded are not merely occasional and, as it were, outweighed by contrary facts of a more general kind, but manifestly constitute the leading feature of the scheme of organic nature as a whole: or, if this were held to be questionable, it could only follow that we are not entitled to infer that there is any such scheme at all. Nature, as red in tooth and claw with ravin, is thus without question a large and general fact that must be considered by any theory of teleology which can be propounded. I do not think that this aspect of the matter could be conveyed in stronger terms than it is by 'Physicus[26],' whom I shall therefore quote:-- 'Supposing the Deity to be, what Professor Flint maintains that he is--viz. omnipotent, and there can be no inference more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of beneficence in the divine character than that which we know in any, the very worst, of human characters. For let us pause for one moment to think of what suffering in Nature means. Some hundreds of millions of years ago some millions of millions of animals must be supposed to have become sentient. Since that time till the present, there must have been millions and millions of generations of millions and millions of individuals. And throughout all this period of incalculable duration, this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have been in a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the outcome, we find that more than one half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment--everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of cruel torture! Is it said that there are compensating enjoyments? I care not to strike the balance; the enjoyments I plainly perceive to be as physically necessary as the pains, and this whether or not evolution is due to design.... Am I told that I am not competent to judge the purposes of the Almighty? I answer that if there are _purposes_, I _am_ able to judge of them so far as I can see; and if I am expected to judge of His purposes when they appear to be beneficent, I am in consistency obliged also to judge of them when they appear to be malevolent. And it can be no possible extenuation of the latter to point to the "final result" as "order and beauty," so long as the means adopted by the "_Omnipotent Designer_" are known to have been so [terrible]. All that we could legitimately assert in this case would be that, so far as observation can extend, "He cares for animal perfection" _to the exclusion of_ "animal enjoyment," and even to the _total disregard_ of animal suffering. But to assert this would merely be to deny beneficence as an attribute of God[27].' The reasoning here appears as unassailable as it is obvious. If, as the writer goes on to say, we see a rabbit panting in the iron jaws of a spring trap, and in consequence abhor the devilish nature of the being who, with full powers of realizing what pain means, can deliberately employ his whole faculties of invention in contriving a thing so hideously cruel; what are we to think of a Being who, with yet higher faculties of thought and knowledge, and with an unlimited choice of means to secure His ends, has contrived untold thousands of mechanisms no less diabolical? In short, so far as Nature can teach us, or 'observation can extend,' it does appear that the scheme, if it is a scheme, is the product of a Mind which differs from the more highly evolved type of human mind in that it is immensely more intellectual without being nearly so moral. And the same thing is indicated by the rough and indiscriminate manner in which justice is allotted--even if it can be said to be allotted at all. When we contrast the certainty and rigour with which any offence against 'physical law' is punished by Nature (no matter though the sin be but one of ignorance), with the extreme uncertainty and laxity with which she meets any offence against 'moral law,' we are constrained to feel that the system of legislation (if we may so term it) is conspicuously different from that which would have been devised by any intelligence which in any sense could be called 'anthropopsychic.' The only answer to these difficulties open to the natural theologian is that which is drawn from the constitution of the human mind. It is argued that the fact of this mind having so large an ingredient of morality in its constitution may be taken as proof that its originating source is likewise of a moral character. This argument, however, appears to me of a questionable character, seeing that, for anything we can tell to the contrary, the moral sense may have been given to, or developed in, man simply on account of its utility to the species--just in the same way as teeth in the shark or poison in the snake. If so, the occurrence of the moral sense in man would merely furnish one other instance of the intellectual, as distinguished from the moral, nature of God; and there seems to be in itself no reason why we should take any other view. The mere fact that to _us_ the moral sense seems such a great and holy thing, is doubtless (under any view) owing to its importance to the well-being of our species. In itself, or as it appears to other possible beings intellectual like ourselves, but existing under unlike conditions, the moral sense of man may be regarded as of no more significance than the social instincts of bees. More particularly may this consideration apply to the case of a Mind existing, according to the theological theory of things, wholly beyond the pale of anything analogous to those social relations out of which, according to the scientific theory of evolution, the moral sense has been developed in ourselves[28]. The truth is that in this matter natural theologians begin by assuming that the First Cause, if intelligent, _must_ be moral; and then they are blinded to the strictly logical weakness of the argument whereby they endeavour to sustain their assumption. For aught that we can tell to the contrary, it may be quite as 'anthropomorphic' a notion to attribute morality to God as it would be to attribute those capacities for sensuous enjoyment with which the Greeks endowed their divinities. The Deity may be as high above the one as the other--or rather perhaps we may say as much external to the one as to the other. Without being supra-moral, and still less immoral, He may be un-moral: our ideas of morality may have no meaning as applied to Him. But if we go thus far in one direction, I think, _per contra_, it must in consistency be allowed that the argument from the constitution of the human mind acquires more weight when it is shifted from the moral sense to the religious instincts. For, on the one hand, these instincts are not of such obvious use to the species as are those of morality; and, on the other hand, while they are unquestionably very general, very persistent, and very powerful, they do not appear to serve any 'end' or 'purpose' in the scheme of things, unless we accept the theory which is given of them by those in whom they are most strongly developed. Here I think we have an argument of legitimate force, although it does not appear that such was the opinion entertained of it by Mill. I think the argument is of legitimate force, because if the religious instincts of the human race point to no reality as their object, they are out of analogy with all other instinctive endowments. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom we never meet with such a thing as an instinct pointing aimlessly, and therefore the fact of man being, as it is said, 'a religious animal'--i.e. presenting a class of feelings of a peculiar nature directed to particular ends, and most akin to, if not identical with, true instinct--is so far, in my opinion, a legitimate argument in favour of the reality of some object towards which the religious side of this animal's nature is directed. And I do not think that this argument is invalidated by such facts as that widely different intellectual conceptions touching the character of this object are entertained by different races of mankind; that the force of the religious instincts differs greatly in different individuals even of the same race; that these instincts admit of being greatly modified by education; that they would probably fail to be developed in any individual without at least so much education as is required to furnish the needful intellectual conceptions on which they are founded; or that we may not improbably trace their origin, as Mr. Spencer traces it, to a primitive mode of interpreting dreams. For even in view of all these considerations the fact remains that these instincts _exist_, and therefore, like all other instincts, may be supposed to have a _definite_ meaning, even though, like all other instincts, they may be supposed to have had a _natural cause_, which both in the individual and in the race requires, as in the natural development of all other instincts, the natural conditions for its occurrence to be supplied. In a word, if animal instincts generally, like organic structures or inorganic systems, are held to betoken purpose, the religious nature of man would stand out as an anomaly in the general scheme of things if it alone were purposeless. Hence we have here what seems to me a valid inference, so far as it goes, to the effect that, if the general order of Nature is due to Mind, the character of that Mind is such as it is conceived to be by the most highly developed form of religion. A conclusion which is no doubt the opposite of that which we reached by contemplating the phenomena of biology; and a contradiction which can only be overcome by supposing, either that Nature conceals God, while man reveals Him, or that Nature reveals God while man misrepresents Him. There is still one other fact of a very wide and general kind presented by Nature, which, if the order of Nature is taken to be the expression of intelligent purpose, ought in my opinion to be regarded as of great weight in furnishing evidence upon the ethical quality of that purpose. It is a fact which, so far as I know, has not been considered by any other writer; but from its being one of the most general of all the facts relating to the sentient creation, and from its admitting of no one single exception, I feel that I am not able too strongly to emphasize its argumentative importance. This fact is, as I have stated it on a former occasion, 'that amid all the millions of mechanisms and instincts in the animal kingdom, there is no one instance of a mechanism or instinct occurring in one species for the exclusive benefit of another species, although there are a few cases in which a mechanism or instinct that is of benefit to its possessor has come also to be utilized by other species. Now, on the beneficent design theory it is impossible to explain why, when all the mechanisms in the same species are invariably correlated for the benefit of that species, there should never be any such correlation between mechanisms in different species, or why the same remark should apply to instincts. For how magnificent a display of Divine beneficence would organic nature have afforded, if all, or even some, species had been so inter-related as to minister to each other's necessities. Organic species might then have been likened to a countless multitude of voices all singing in one harmonious psalm of praise. But, as it is, we see no vestige of such co-ordination; every species is for itself, and for itself alone--an outcome of the always and everywhere fiercely raging struggle for life[29].' The large and general fact thus stated constitutes, in my opinion, the strongest of all arguments in favour of Mr. Darwin's theory of natural selection, and therefore we can see the probable reason why it is what it is, so far as the question of its physical causation is concerned. But where the question is, Supposing the physical causation ultimately due to Mind, what are we to infer concerning the character of the Mind which has adopted this method of causation?--then we again reach the answer that, so far as we can judge from a conscientious examination of these facts, this Mind does not show that it is of a nature which in man we should call moral. Of course behind the physical appearances there may be a moral justification, so that from these appearances we are not entitled to say more than that from the fact of its having chosen a method of physical causation leading to these results, it has presented to us the appearance, as before observed, of caring for animal perfection to the exclusion of animal enjoyment, and even to the total disregard of animal suffering. In conclusion, it is of importance to insist upon a truth which in discussions of this kind is too often disregarded--viz. that all our reasonings being of a character relative to our knowledge, our inferences are uncertain in a degree proportionate to the extent of our ignorance; and that as with reference to the topics which we have been considering our ignorance is of immeasurable extent, any conclusions that we may have formed are, as Bishop Butler would say, 'infinitely precarious.' Or, as I have previously presented this formal aspect of the matter while discussing the teleological argument with Professor Asa Gray,--'I suppose it will be admitted that the validity of an inference depends upon the number, the importance, and the definiteness of the things or ratios known, as compared with the number, importance, and definiteness of the things or ratios unknown, but inferred. If so, we should be logically cautious in drawing inferences from the natural to the supernatural: for although we have the entire sphere of experience from which to draw an inference, we are unable to gauge the probability of the inference when drawn--the unknown ratios being confessedly of unknown number, importance, and degree of definiteness: the whole orbit of human knowledge is insufficient to obtain a parallax whereby to institute the required measurements or to determine the proportion between the terms known and the terms unknown. Otherwise phrased, we may say--as our knowledge of a part is to our knowledge of a whole, so is our inference from that part to the reality of that whole. Who, therefore, can say, even upon the hypothesis of Theism, that our inferences or "idea of design" would have any meaning if applied to the "All-Upholder," whose thoughts are not as our thoughts?'[30] And of course, _mutatis mutandis_, the same remarks apply to all inferences having a negative tendency. As an outcome of the whole of this discussion, then, I think it appears that the influence of Science upon Natural Religion has been uniformly of a destructive character. Step by step it has driven back the apparent evidence of direct or special design in Nature, until now this evidence resides exclusively in the one great and general fact that Nature as a whole is a Cosmos. Further than this it is obviously impossible that the destructive influence of Science can extend, because Science can only exist upon the basis of this fact. But when we allow that this great and universal fact--which but for the effects of unremitting familiarity could scarcely fail to be intellectually overwhelming--does betoken mental agency in Nature, we immediately find it impossible to determine the probable character of such a mind, even supposing that it exists. We cannot conceive of it as presenting any one of the qualities which essentially characterize what we know as mind in ourselves; and therefore the word Mind, as applied to the supposed agency, stands for a blank. Further, even if we disregard this difficulty, and assume that in some way or other incomprehensible to us a Mind does exist as far transcending the human mind as the human mind transcends mechanical motion; still we are met by some very large and general facts in Nature which seem strongly to indicate that this Mind, if it exists, is either deficient in, or wholly destitute of, that class of feelings which in man we term moral; while, on the other hand, the religious aspirations of man himself may be taken to indicate the opposite conclusion. And, lastly, with reference to the whole course of such reasonings, we have seen that any degree of measurable probability, as attaching to the conclusions, is unattainable. From all which it appears that Natural Religion at the present time can only be regarded as a system full of intellectual contradictions and moral perplexities; so that if we go to her with these greatest of all questions: 'Is there knowledge with the Most High?' 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' the only clear answer which we receive is the one that comes back to us from the depths of our own heart--'When I thought upon this it was too painful for me.' FOOTNOTES: [23] A note (of 1893) contains the following: 'Being, considered in the abstract, is logically equivalent to Not-Being or Nothing. For if by successive stages of abstraction, we divest the conception of Being of attribute and relation we reach the conception of that which cannot be, i.e. a logical contradiction, or the logical correlative of Being which is Nothing. (All this is well expressed in Caird's _Evolution of Religion_.) The failure to perceive this fact constitutes a ground fallacy in my _Candid Examination of Theism_, where I represent Being as being a sufficient explanation of the Order of Nature or the law of Causation.' [24] This promise is only partially fulfilled in the penultimate paragraph of the essay.--ED. [25] _Essays_, vol. iii. p. 246 et seq. The whole passage ought to be consulted, being too long to quote here. [26] In an essay on Prof. Flint's _Theism_, appended to the _Candid Examination_. [27] _A Candid Examination of Theism_, pp. 171-2. [28] [I have, as Editor, resisted a temptation to intervene in the above argument. But I think I may intervene on a matter of fact, and point out that 'according to the theological theory of things,' i.e. according to the Trinitarian doctrine, God's Nature consists in what is strictly 'analogous to social relations,' and He not merely exhibits in His creation, but Himself _is_ Love. See, on the subject, especially, R.H. Hutton's essay on the Incarnation, in his _Theological Essays_ (Macmillan).--ED.] [29] _Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution_, pp. 76-7. [30] _Nature_, April 5, 1883. PART II. +Introductory Note by the Editor+. Little more requires to be said by way of introduction to the Notes which are all that George Romanes was able to write of a work that was to have been entitled _A Candid Examination of Religion_. What little does require to be said must be by way of bridging the interval of thought which exists between the Essays which have just preceded and the Notes which represent more nearly his final phase of mind. The most anti-theistic feature in the Essays is the stress laid in them on the evidence which Nature supplies, or is supposed to supply, antagonistic to the belief in the goodness of God. On this mysterious and perplexing subject George Romanes appears to have had more to say but did not live to say it[31]. We may notice however that in 1889, in a paper read before the Aristotelian Society, on 'the Evidence of Design in Nature[32],' he appears to allow more weight than before to the argument that the method of physical development must be judged in the light of its result. This paper was part of a _Symposium_. Mr. S. Alexander has argued in a previous paper against the hypothesis of 'design' in Nature on the ground that 'the fair order of Nature is only acquired by a wholesale waste and sacrifice.' This argument was developed by pointing to the obvious 'mal-adjustments,' 'aimless destructions,' &c., which characterize the processes of Nature. But these, Romanes replies, necessarily belong to the process considered as one of 'natural selection.' The question is only: Is such a process _per se_ incompatible with the hypothesis of design? And he replies in the negative. '"The fair order of Nature is only acquired by a wholesale waste and sacrifice." Granted. But if the "wholesale waste and sacrifice," as antecedent, leads to a "fair order of Nature" as its consequent, how can it be said that the "wholesale waste and sacrifice" has been a failure? Or how can it be said that, in point of fact, there _has_ been a waste, or _has_ been a sacrifice? Clearly such things can only be said when our point of view is restricted to the means (i.e. the wholesale destruction of the less fit); not when we extend our view to what, even within the limits of human observation, is unquestionably the _end_ (i.e. the causal result in an ever improving world of types). A candidate who is plucked in a Civil Service examination because he happens to be one of the less fitted to pass, is no doubt an instance of failure so far as his own career is concerned; but it does not therefore follow that the system of examination is a failure in its final end of securing the best men for the Civil Service. And the fact that the general outcome of all the individual failures in Nature is that of securing what Mr. Alexander calls "the fair order of Nature," is assuredly evidence that the _modus operandi_ has not been a failure in relation to what, if there be any Design in Nature at all, must be regarded as the higher purpose of such Design. Therefore, cases of individual or otherwise relative failure cannot be quoted as evidence against the hypothesis of there being such Design. The fact that the general system of natural causation has for its eventual result "a fair order of Nature," cannot of itself be a fact inimical to the hypothesis of Design in Nature, even though it be true that such causation entails the continual elimination of the less efficient types. 'To the best of my judgement, then, this argument from failure, random trial, blind blundering, or in whatever other terminology the argument may be presented, is only valid as against the theory of what Mr. Alexander alludes to as a "Carpenter-God," i.e. that if there be Design in Nature at all, it must everywhere be _special_ Design; so that the evidence of it may as well be tested by any given minute fragment of Nature--such as one individual organism or class of organisms--as by having regard to the whole Cosmos. The evidence of Design in this sense I fully allow has been totally destroyed by the proof of natural selection. But such destruction has only brought into clearer relief the much larger question that rises behind, viz. as before phrased, Is there anything about the method of natural causation, considered as a whole, that is inimical to the theory of Design in Nature, considered as a whole?' It is true that this argument does not bear directly upon the _character_ of the God whose 'design' Nature exhibits: but indirectly it does[33]. For instance, such an argument as that found above (on p. 79: 'we see a rabbit, &c.') seems to be only valid on the postulate here described as that of the 'Carpenter-God.' It is also probable that Romanes felt the difficulty arising from the cruelty of nature less, as he was led to dwell more on humanity as the most important part of nature, and perceived the function of suffering in the economy of human life (pp. 142, 154): and also as he became more impressed with the positive evidences for Christianity as at once the religion of sorrow and the revelation of God as Love (pp. 163, ff.). The Christian Faith supplies believers not only with an argument against pessimism from general results, but also with such an insight into the Divine character and method as enables them at least to bear hopefully the awful perplexities which arise from the spectacle of individuals suffering. In the last year or two of his life he read very attentively a great number of books on 'Christian Evidences,' from Pascal's _Pensées_ downwards, and studied carefully the appearance of 'plan' in the Biblical Revelation considered as a whole. The _fact_ of this study appears in fragmentary remarks, indices and references, which George Romanes left behind him in note-books. The _results_ of it will not be unapparent in the following Notes, which, I need to remind my readers, are, in spite of their small bulk, the sole reason for the existence of this volume. In reading these I can hardly conceive any one not being possessed with a profound regret that the author was not allowed to complete his work. And it is only fair to ask every reader of the following pages to remember that he is reading, in the main, incomplete notes and not finished work. This will account for a great deal that may seem sketchy and unsatisfactory in the treatment of different points, and also for repetitions and traces of inconsistency. But I can hardly think any one can read these notes to the end without agreeing with me that if I had withheld them from publication, the world would have lost the witness of a mind, both able and profoundly sincere, feeling after God and finding Him. C.G. FOOTNOTES: [31] See below p. 142, and note. I find also the following note of a date subsequent to 1889. 'It is a fact that pessimism is illogical, simply because we are inadequate judges of the world, and pessimism would therefore be opposed to agnosticism. We may know that there is something out of joint between the world and ourselves; but we cannot know how far this is the fault of the world or of ourselves.' [32] _Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society_ (Williams & Norgate), vol. i. no. 3, pp. 72, 73. [33] I ought also to mention that Romanes on the Sunday before his death expressed to me verbally his entire agreement with the argument of Professor Knight's _Aspects of Theism_ (Macmillan, 1893); in which on this subject see pp. 184-186, 'A larger good is evolved through the winnowing process by which physical nature casts its weaker products aside,' &c. NOTES FOR A WORK ON A CANDID EXAMINATION OF RELIGION. BY METAPHYSICUS. _Proposed Mottoes_. 'I quite admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of the soul which, when by other pursuits lost and dimmed, is by this purified and re-illumined; and is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by this alone is truth seen. Now there are two classes of persons, one class who will agree with you and will take your words as a revelation; another class who have no understanding of them and to whom they will naturally be as idle tales. 'And you had better decide at once with which of the two you are arguing; or, perhaps, you will say with neither, and that your chief aim in carrying on the argument is your own improvement; at the same time not grudging to either any benefit which they may derive.'--PLATO. 'If we would reprove with success, and show another his mistake, we must see from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is generally true: and, admitting this truth, show him the side on which it is false.'--PASCAL. § 1. INTRODUCTORY. Many years ago I published in Messrs. Trübner's 'Philosophical Series,' a short treatise entitled _A Candid Examination of Theism_ by 'Physicus.' Although the book made some stir at the time, and has since exhibited a vitality never anticipated by its author, the secret of its authorship has been well preserved[34]. This secret it is my intention, if possible, still to preserve; but as it is desirable (on several accounts which will become apparent in the following pages) to avow identity of authorship, the present essay appears under the same pseudonym[35] as its predecessor. The reason why the first essay appeared anonymously is truthfully stated in the preface thereof, viz. in order that the reasoning should be judged on its own merits, without the bias which is apt to arise on the part of a reader from a knowledge of the authority--or absence of authority--on the part of a writer. This reason, in my opinion, still holds good as regards _A Candid Examination of Theism_, and applies in equal measure to the present sequel in _A Candid Examination of Religion_. It will be shown that in many respects the negative conclusions reached in the former essay have been greatly modified by the results of maturer thought as now presented in the second. Therefore it seems desirable to state at the outset that, as far as I am capable of judging, the modifications in question have not been due in any measure to influence from without. They appear to have been due exclusively to the results of my own further thought, as briefly set out in the following pages, with no indebtedness to private friends and but little to published utterances in the form of books, &c. Nevertheless, no very original ideas are here presented. Indeed, I suppose it would nowadays be impossible to present any idea touching religion, which has not at some time or another been presented previously. Still much may be done in the furthering of one's thought by changing points of view, selecting and arranging ideas already more or less familiar, so that they may be built into new combinations; and this, I think, I have in no small degree accomplished as regards the microcosm of my own mind. But I state this much only for the sake of adding a confession that, as far as introspection can carry one, it does not appear to me that the modifications which my views have undergone since the publication of my previous _Candid Examination_ are due so much to purely logical processes of the intellect, as to the sub-conscious (and therefore more or less unanalyzable) influences due to the ripening experience of life. The extent to which this is true [i.e. the extent to which experience modifies logic][36] is seldom, if ever, realized, although it is practically exemplified every day by the sobering caution which advancing age exercises upon the mind. Not so much by any above-board play of syllogism as by some underhand cheating of consciousness, do the accumulating experiences of life and of thought slowly enrich the judgement. And this, one need hardly say, is especially true in such regions of thought as present the most tenuous media for the progress of thought by the comparatively clumsy means of syllogistic locomotion. For the further we ascend from the solid ground of verification, the less confidence should we place in our wings of speculation, while the more do we find the practical wisdom of such intellectual caution, or distrust of ratiocination, as can be given only by experience. Therefore, most of all is this the case in those departments of thought which are furthest from the region of our sensuous life--viz. metaphysics and religion. And, as a matter of fact, it is just in these departments of thought that we find the rashness of youth most amenable to the discipline in question by the experience of age. However, in spite of this confession, I have no doubt that even in the matter of pure and conscious reason further thought has enabled me to detect serious errors, or rather oversights, in the very foundations of my _Candid Examination of Theism_. I still think, indeed, that from the premises there laid down the conclusions result in due logical sequence, so that, as a matter of mere ratiocination, I am not likely ever to detect any serious flaws, especially as this has not been done by anybody else during the many years of its existence. But I now clearly perceive two wellnigh fatal oversights which I then committed. The first was undue confidence in merely syllogistic conclusions, even when derived from sound premises, in regions of such high abstraction. The second was, in not being sufficiently careful in examining the foundations of my criticism, i.e. the validity of its premises. I will here briefly consider these two points separately. As regards the first point, never was any one more arrogant in his claims for pure reason than I was--more arrogant in spirit though not in letter, this being due to contact with science; without ever considering how opposed to reason itself is the unexpressed assumption of my earlier argument as to God Himself, as if His existence were a merely physical problem to be solved by man's reason alone, without reference to his other and higher faculties[37]. The second point is of still more importance, because so seldom, if ever, recognized. At the time of writing the _Candid Examination_ I perceived clearly how the whole question of Theism from the side of reason turned on the question as to the nature of natural causation. My theory of natural causation obeyed the Law of Parsimony, resolving all into Being as such; but, on the other hand, it erred in not considering whether 'higher causes' are not 'necessary' to account for spiritual facts--i.e. whether the ultimate Being must not be at least as high as the intellectual and spiritual nature of man, i.e. higher than anything merely physical or mechanical. The supposition that it must does not violate the Law of Parsimony. Pure agnostics ought to investigate the religious consciousness of Christians as a phenomenon which may possibly be what Christians themselves believe it to be, i.e. of Divine origin. And this may be done without entering into any question as to the objective validity of Christian dogmas. The metaphysics of Christianity may be all false in fact, and yet the spirit of Christianity may be true in substance--i.e. it may be the highest 'good gift from above' as yet given to man. My present object, then, like that of Socrates, is not to impart any philosophical system, or even positive knowledge, but a frame of mind, what I may term, pure agnosticism, as distinguished from what is commonly so called. FOOTNOTES: [34] The first edition, which was published in 1878, was rapidly exhausted, but, as my object in publishing was solely that of soliciting criticism for my own benefit, I arranged with the publishers not to issue any further edition. The work has therefore been out of print for many years. [This 'arrangement' was however not actually made, or at least was unknown to the present publishing firm of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Thus a new edition of the book was published in 1892, to the author's surprise.--ED.] [35] [Or rather it was intended that it should appear under the pseudonym of 'Metaphysicus.'--ED.] [36] [Words in square brackets have been added by me. But I have not introduced the brackets when I have simply inserted single unimportant words obviously necessary for the sense.--ED.] [37] [See p. 29, quotation from Preface of 'Physicus.' The state of mind expressed in the above Note is a return to the earlier frame of mind of the Burney Essay, e.g. p. 20. That essay was full of the thought that Christian evidences are very manifold and largely 'extra-scientific.'--ED.] § 2. DEFINITION OF TERMS AND PURPOSE OF THIS TREATISE. [To understand George Romanes' mind close attention must be paid to the following section. Also to the fact, not explicitly noticed by him, that he uses the word 'reason' (see p. 112) in a sense closely resembling that in which Mr. Kidd has recently used it in his _Social Evolution_. He uses it, that is, in a restricted sense as equivalent to _the process of scientific ratiocination_. His main position is therefore this: Scientific ratiocination cannot find adequate grounds for belief in God. But the pure agnostic must recognize that God may have revealed Himself by other means than that of scientific ratiocination. As religion is for the whole man, so all human faculties may be required to seek after God and find Him--emotions and experiences of an extra-'rational' kind. The 'pure agnostic' must be prepared to welcome evidence of all sorts.--ED.] It is desirable to be clear at the outset as to the meaning which I shall throughout attach to certain terms and phrases. _Theism._ It will frequently be said, 'on the theory of Theism,' 'supposing Theism true,' &c. By such phrase my meaning will always be equivalent to--'supposing, for the sake of argument, that the nearest approach which the human mind can make to a true notion of the _ens realissimum_, is that of an inconceivably magnified image of itself at its best.' _Christianity._ Similarly, when it is said, 'supposing Christianity true,' what will be meant is--'supposing for the sake of argument, that the Christian system as a whole, from its earliest dawn in Judaism, to the phase of its development at the present time, is the highest revelation of Himself which a personal Deity has vouchsafed to mankind.' This I intend to signify an attitude of pure agnosticism as regards any particular dogma of Christianity--even that of the Incarnation. Should it be said that by holding in suspense any distinctive dogma of Christianity, I am not considering Christianity at all, I reply, Not so; I am not writing a theological, but a philosophical treatise, and shall consider Christianity merely as one of many religions, though, of course, the latest, &c. Thus considered, Christianity takes its place as the highest manifestation of evolution in this department of the human mind; but I am not concerned even with so important an ecclesiastical dogma as that of the Incarnation of God in Christ. As far as this treatise has to go, that dogma may or may not be true. The important question for us is, Has God spoken through the medium of our religious instincts? And although this will necessarily involve the question whether or how far in the case of Christianity there is objective evidence of His having spoken by the mouth of holy men [of the Old Testament] which have been since the world began, such will be the case only because it is a question of objective evidence whether or how far the religious instincts of these men, or this race of men, have been so much superior to those of other men, or races of men, as to have enabled them to predict future events of a religious character. And whether or not in these latter days God has spoken by His own Son is not a question for us, further than to investigate the higher class of religious phenomena which unquestionably have been present in the advent and person of Jesus. The question whether Jesus was the Son of God, is, logically speaking, a question of ontology, which, _quâ_ pure agnostics, we are logically forbidden to touch. But elsewhere I ought to show that, from my point of view as to the fundamental question being whether God has spoken at all through the religious instincts of mankind, it may very well be that Christ was not God, and yet that He gave the highest revelation of God. If the 'first Man' was allegorical, why not the 'second'? It is, indeed, an historical fact that the 'second Man' existed, but so likewise may the 'first.' And, as regards the 'personal claims' of Christ, all that He said is not incompatible with His having been Gabriel, and His Holy Ghost, Michael[38]. Or He may have been a man deceived as to His own personality, and yet the vehicle of highest inspiration. _Religion._ By the term 'religion,' I shall mean any theory of personal agency in the universe, belief in which is strong enough in any degree to influence conduct. No term has been used more loosely of late years, or in a greater variety of meanings. Of course anybody may use it in any sense he pleases, provided he defines exactly in what sense he does so. The above seems to be most in accordance with traditional usage. _Agnosticism 'pure' and 'impure'._ The modern and highly convenient term 'Agnosticism,' is used in two very different senses. By its originator, Professor Huxley, it was coined to signify an attitude of reasoned ignorance touching everything that lies beyond the sphere of sense-perception--a professed inability to found valid belief on any other basis. It is in this its original sense--and also, in my opinion, its only philosophically justifiable sense--that I shall understand the term. But the other, and perhaps more popular sense in which the word is now employed, is as the correlative of Mr. H. Spencer's doctrine of the Unknowable. This latter term is philosophically erroneous, implying important negative knowledge that if there be a God we know this much about Him--that He _cannot_ reveal Himself to man[39]. _Pure_ agnosticism is as defined by Huxley. Of all the many scientific men whom I have known, the most pure in his agnosticism--not only in profession but in spirit and conduct--was Darwin. (What he says in his autobiography about Christianity[40] shows no profundity of thought in the direction of philosophy or religion. His mind was too purely inductive for this. But, on this very account, it is the more remarkable that his rejection of Christianity was due, not to any _a priori_ bias against the creed on grounds of reason as absurd, but solely on the ground of an apparent moral objection _a posteriori_[41].) Faraday and many other first-rate originators in science were like Darwin. As an illustration of impure agnosticism take Hume's _a priori_ argument against miracles, leading on to the analogous case of the attitude of scientific men towards modern spiritualism. Notwithstanding that they have the close analogy of mesmerism as an object-lesson to warn them, scientific men as a class are here quite as dogmatic as the straightest sect of theologians. I may give examples which can cause no offence, inasmuch as the men in question have themselves made the facts public, viz. ---- refusing to go to [a famous spiritualist]; ---- refusing to try ---- in thought-reading[42]. These men all _professed_ to be agnostics at the very time when thus so egregiously violating their philosophy by their conduct. Of course I do not mean to say that, even to a pure agnostic, reason should not be guided in part by antecedent presumption--e.g. in ordinary life, the _prima facie_ case, motive, &c., counts for evidence in a court of law--and where there is a strong antecedent improbability a proportionately greater weight of evidence _a posteriori_ is needed to counterbalance it: so that, e.g. better evidence would be needed to convict the Archbishop of Canterbury than a vagabond of pocket-picking. And so it is with speculative philosophy. But in both cases our only guide is known analogy; therefore, the further we are removed from possible experience--i.e. the more remote from experience the sphere contemplated--the less value attaches to antecedent presumptions[43]. _Maximum_ remoteness from possible experience is reached in the sphere of the final mystery of things with which religion has to do; so that here all presumption has faded away into a vanishing point, and pure agnosticism is our only rational attitude. In other words, here we should all alike be pure agnostics as far as reason is concerned; and, if any of us are to attain to any information, it can only be by means of some super-added faculty of our minds. The questions as to whether there are any such super-added faculties; if so, whether they ever appear to have been acted upon from without; if they have, in what manner they have; what is their report; how far they are trustworthy in that report, and so on--these are the questions with which this treatise is to be mainly concerned. My own attitude may be here stated. I do not claim any [religious] certainty of an intuitive kind myself; but am nevertheless able to investigate the abstract logic of the matter. And, although this may seem but barren dialectic, it may, I hope, be of practical service if it secures a fair hearing to the reports given by the vast majority of mankind who unquestionably believe them to emanate from some such super-added faculties--numerous and diverse though their religions be. Besides, in my youth I published an essay (the _Candid Examination_) which excited a good deal of interest at the time, and has been long out of print. In that treatise I have since come to see that I was wrong touching what I constituted the basal argument for my negative conclusion. Therefore I now feel it obligatory on me to publish the following results of my maturer thought, from the same stand-point of pure reason. Even though I have obtained no further light from the side of intuition, I have from that of intellect. So that, if there be in truth any such intuition, I occupy with regard to the organ of it the same position as that of the blind lecturer on optics. But on this very account I cannot be accused of partiality towards it. It is generally assumed that when a man has clearly perceived agnosticism to be the only legitimate attitude of reason to rest in with regard to religion (as I will subsequently show that it is), he has thereby finished with the matter; he can go no further. The main object of this treatise is to show that such is by no means the case. He has then only begun his enquiry into the grounds and justification of religious belief. For reason is not the only attribute of man, nor is it the only faculty which he habitually employs for the ascertainment of truth. Moral and spiritual faculties are of no less importance in their respective spheres even of everyday life; faith, trust, taste, &c., are as needful in ascertaining truth as to character, beauty, &c., as is reason. Indeed we may take it that reason is concerned in ascertaining truth only where _causation_ is concerned; the appropriate organs for its ascertainment where anything else is concerned belong to the moral and spiritual region. As Herbert Spencer says, 'men of science may be divided into two classes, of which the one, well exemplified by Faraday, keeping their religion and their science absolutely separate, are unperplexed by any incongruities between them, and the other of which, occupying themselves exclusively with the facts of science, never ask what implications they have. Be it trilobite or be it double star, their thought about it is much like the thought of Peter Bell about the primrose[44].' Now, both these classes are logical, since both, as to their religion, adopt an attitude of pure agnosticism, not only in theory, but also in practice. What, however, have we to say of the third class, which Spencer does not mention, although it is, I think, the largest, viz. of those scientific men who expressly abstain from drawing a line of division between science and religion [and then judge of religion purely on the principles and by the method of science[45]]? There are two opposite casts of mind--the mechanical (scientific, &c.) and the spiritual (artistic, religious, &c.). These may alternate even in the same individual. An 'agnostic' has no hesitation--even though he himself keenly experience the latter--that the former only is worthy of trust. But a _pure_ agnostic must know better, as he will perceive that there is nothing to choose between the two in point of trustworthiness. Indeed, if choice has to be made the mystic might claim higher authority for his direct intuitions. Mr. Herbert Spencer has well said, in the opening section of his Synthetic Philosophy, that wherever human thought appears to be radically divided, [there must be truth on both sides and that the] 'reconciliation' of opposing views is to be found by emphasizing that ultimate element of truth which on each side underlies manifold differences. More than is generally supposed depends on points of view, especially where first principles of a subject are in dispute. Opposite sides of the same shield may present wholly different aspects[46]. Spencer alludes to this with special reference to the conflict between science and religion; and it is in this same connexion that I also allude to it. For it seems to me, after many years of thought upon the subject, that the 'reconciliation' admits of being carried much further than it has been by him. For he effects this reconciliation only to the extent of showing that religion arises from the recognition of fundamental mystery--which it may be proved that science also recognizes in all her fundamental ideas. This, however, is after all little more than a platitude. That our ultimate scientific ideas (i.e. ultimate grounds of experience) are inexplicable, is a proposition which is self-evident since the dawn of human thought. My aim is to carry the 'reconciliation' into much more detail and yet without quitting the grounds of pure reason. I intend to take science and religion in their present highly developed states as such, and show that on a systematic examination of the latter by the methods of the former, the 'conflict' between the two may be not merely 'reconciled' as regards the highest generalities of each, but entirely abolished in all matters of detail which can be regarded as of any great importance. In any methodical enquiry the first object should be to ascertain the fundamental principles with which the enquiry is concerned. In actual research, however, it is by no means always the case that the enquirer knows, or is able at first to ascertain what those principles are. In fact, it is often only at the end of a research, that they are discovered to be the fundamental principles. Such has been my own experience with regard to the subject of the present enquiry. Although all my thinking life has been concerned, off and on, in contemplating the problem of our religious instincts, the sundry attempts which have been made by mankind for securing their gratification, and the important question as to their objective justification, it is only in advanced years that I have clearly perceived wherein the first principles of such a research must consist. And I doubt whether any one has hitherto clearly defined this point. The principles in question are the nature of causation and the nature of faith. My objects then in this treatise are, mainly, three: 1st, to purify agnosticism; 2nd, to consider more fully than heretofore, and from the stand-point of pure agnosticism, the nature of natural causation, or, more correctly, the relation of what we know on the subject of such causation to the question of Theism; and, 3rd, again starting from the same stand-point, to consider the religious consciousnesses of men as phenomena of experience (i.e. as regarded by us from without), and especially in their highest phase of development as exhibited in Christianity. FOOTNOTES: [38] [I.e. supernatural but not strictly Divine Persons. Surely, however, the proposition is not maintainable.--ED.] [39] [This is another instance of recurrence to an earlier thought; see Burney Essay, p. 25, and cf. _Mind and Motion and Monism_, p. 117, note 1.--ED.] [40] _Life and Letters of Charles Darwin_, i. 308. [41] [See further, p. 182.--ED.] [42] [On the whole I have thought it best to omit the names.--ED.] [43] [The MS. note here continues: 'Here introduce all that I say on the subject in my Burney Prize.' I have not, however, introduced any quotation into the text because (1) I think Romanes makes his meaning plain in the text as it stands; (2) I cannot find in the essay in question any exactly appropriate passage of reasonable length to quote. The greater part of the essay is, however, directed to meet the scientific objection to the doctrine that prayer is answered in the physical region, by showing that this objection consists in an argument from the known to the unknown, i.e. from the known sphere of invariable physical laws to the unknown sphere of God's relation to all such laws; and is, therefore, weak in proportion as the unknown sphere is remote from possible experience of a scientific kind, and admits of an indefinite number of possibilities, more or less conceivable to our imagination, which would or might prevent the scientific argument from having legitimate application to the question in hand.--ED.] [44] _Fortnightly Review_, Feb. 1894. [45] [Some such phrase is necessary to complete the sentence.--ED.] [46] _First Principles_, Part I, ch. 1. § 3. CAUSALITY. Only because we are so familiar with the great phenomenon of causality do we take it for granted, and think that we reach an ultimate explanation of anything when we have succeeded in finding the 'cause' thereof: when, in point of fact, we have only succeeded in merging it in the mystery of mysteries. I often wish we could have come into the world, like the young of some other mammals, with all the powers of intellect that we shall ever subsequently attain already developed, but without any individual experience, and so without any of the blunting effects of custom. Could we have done so, surely nothing in the world would more acutely excite our intelligent astonishment than the one universal fact of causation. That everything which happens should have a cause, that this should invariably be proportioned to its effect, so that, no matter how complex the interaction of causes, the same interaction should always produce the same result; that this rigidly exact system of energizing should be found to present all the appearances of universality and of eternity, so that, e.g., the motion of the solar system in space is being determined by some causes beyond human ken, and that we are indebted to billions of cellular unions, each involving billions of separate causes, for our hereditary passage from an invertebrate ancestry,--that such things should be, would surely strike us as the most wonderful fact in this wonderful universe. Now, although familiarity with this fact has made us forget its wonder to the extent of virtually assuming that we know all about it, philosophical enquiry shows that, besides empirically knowing it to be a fact, we only know one other thing about it, viz.--that our knowledge of it is derived from our own activity when we ourselves are causes. No result of psychological analysis seems to me more certain than this[47]. If it were not for our own volitions, we should be ignorant of what we can now not doubt, on pain of suicidal scepticism, to be the most general fact of nature. Such, at least, seems to me by far the most reasonable theory of our idea of causality, and is the one now most generally entertained by philosophers of every school. Now, to the plain man it will always seem that if our very notion of causality is derived from our own volition--as our very notion of energy is derived from our sense of effort in overcoming resistance by our volition--presumably the truest notion we can form of that in which causation objectively consists is the notion derived from that known mode of existence which alone gives us the notion of causality at all. Hence the plain man will always infer that all energy is of the nature of will-energy, and all objective causation of the nature of subjective. Nor is this inference confined to the plain man; the deepest philosophical thinkers have arrived at substantially the same opinion, e.g. Hegel, Schopenhauer. So that the direct and most natural interpretation of causality in external nature which is drawn by primitive thought in savages and young children, seems destined to become also the ultimate deliverance of human thought in the highest levels of its culture[48]. But, be this as it may, we are not concerned with any such questions of abstract philosophical speculation. As pure agnostics they lie beyond our sphere. Therefore, I allude to them only for the sake of showing that there is nothing either in the science or philosophy of mankind inimical to the theory of natural causation being the energizing of a will objective to us. And we can plainly see that if such be the case, and if that will be self-consistent, its operations, as revealed in natural causation, must appear to us when considered _en bloc_ (or not piece-meal as by savages), non-volitional, or mechanical. Of all philosophical theories of causality the most repugnant to reason must be those of Hume, Kant and Mill, which while differing from one another agree in this--that they attribute the principle of causality to a creation of our own minds, or in other words deny that there is anything objective in the relation of cause and effect--i.e. in the very thing which all physical science is engaged in discovering in particular cases of it. The conflict of Science and Religion has always arisen from one common ground of agreement, or fundamental postulate of both parties--without which, indeed, it would plainly have been impossible that any conflict could have arisen, inasmuch as there would then have been no field for battle. Every thesis must rest on some hypothesis; therefore, in cases where two or more rival theses rest on a common hypothesis, the disputes must needs collapse so soon as the common hypothesis is proved erroneous. And proportionably, in whatever degree the previously common hypothesis is shown to be dubious, in that degree are the disputations shown to be possibly unreal. Now, it is one of the main objects of this treatise to show that the common hypothesis on which all the disputes between Science and Religion have arisen, is highly dubious. And not only so, but that quite apart from modern science all the difficulties on the side of intellect (or reason) which religious belief has ever encountered in the past, or can ever encounter in the future, whether in the individual or the race, arise, and arise exclusively, from the self-same ground of this highly dubious hypothesis. The hypothesis, or fundamental postulate, in question is, _If there be a personal God, He is not immediately concerned with natural causation_. It is assumed that _qua_ 'first cause,' He can in no way be concerned with 'second causes,' further than by having started them in the first instance as a great machinery of 'natural causation,' working under 'general laws.' True the theory of Deism, which entertains more or less expressly this hypothesis of 'Deus ex machina,' has during the present century been more and more superseded by that of Theism, which entertains also in some indefinable measure the doctrine of 'immanence'; as well as by that of Pantheism, which expressly holds this doctrine to the exclusion _in toto_ of its rival. But Theism has never yet entertained it sufficiently or up to the degree required by the pure logic of the case, while Pantheism has but rarely considered the rival doctrine of personality--or the possible union of immanence with personality.[49] Now it is the object of this book to go much further than any one has hitherto gone in proving the possibility of this union. For I purpose to show that, provided only we lay aside all prejudice, sentiment, &c., and follow to its logical termination the guidance of pure reason, there are no other conclusions to be reached than these. Namely, (_A_) That if there be a personal God, no reason can be assigned why He should not be immanent in nature, or why all causation should not be the immediate expression of His will. (_B_) That every available reason points to the inference that He probably is so. (_C_) That if He is so, and if His will is self-consistent, all natural causation must needs appear to us 'mechanical.' Therefore (_D_) that it is no argument against the divine origin of a thing, event, &c., to prove it due to natural causation. After having dealt briefly with (_A_), (_B_) and (_C_), I would show that (_D_) is the most practically important of these four conclusions. For the fundamental hypothesis which I began by mentioning is just the opposite of this. Whether tacitly or expressly, it has always been assumed by both sides in the controversy between Science and Religion, that as soon as this that and the other phenomenon has been explained by means of natural causation, it has thereupon ceased to be ascribable [directly] to God. The distinction between the natural and the supernatural has always been regarded by both sides as indisputably sound, and this fundamental agreement as to ground of battle has furnished the only possible condition to fighting. It has also furnished the condition of all the past, and may possibly furnish the condition of all the future, discomfitures of religion. True religion is indeed learning her lesson that something is wrong in her method of fighting, and many of her soldiers are now waking up to the fact that it is here that her error lies--as in past times they woke up to see the error of denying the movement of the earth, the antiquity of the earth, the origin of species by evolution, &c. But no one, even of her captains and generals, has so far followed up their advantage to its ultimate consequences. And this is what I want to do. The logical advantage is clearly on their side; and it is their own fault if they do not gain the ultimate victory,--not only as against science, but as against intellectual dogmatism in every form. This can be routed all along the line. For science is only the organized study of natural causation, and the experience of every human being, in so far as it leads to dogmatism on purely intellectual grounds, does so on account of entertaining the fundamental postulate in question. The influence of custom and want of imagination is here very great. But the answer always should be to move the ulterior question--what is the nature of natural causation? Now I propose to push to its full logical conclusion the consequence of this answer. For no one, even the most orthodox, has as yet learnt this lesson of religion to anything like fullness. God is still grudged His own universe, so to speak, as far and as often as He can possibly be. As examples we may take the natural growth of Christianity out of previous religions; the natural spread of it; the natural conversion of St. Paul, or of anybody else. It is still assumed on both sides that there must be something inexplicable or miraculous about a phenomenon in order to its being divine. What else have science and religion ever had to fight about save on the basis of this common hypothesis, and hence as to whether the causation of such and such a phenomenon has been 'natural' or 'super-natural.' For even the disputes as to science contradicting scripture, ultimately turn on the assumption of inspiration (supposing it genuine) being 'super-natural' as to its causation. Once grant that it is 'natural' and all possible ground of dispute is removed. I can well understand why infidelity should make the basal assumption in question, because its whole case must rest thereon. But surely it is time for theists to abandon this assumption. The assumed distinction between causation as natural and super-natural no doubt began in superstition in prehistoric time, and throughout the historical period has continued from a vague feeling that the action of God must be mysterious, and hence that the province of religion must be within the super-sensuous. Now, it is true enough that the finite cannot comprehend the infinite, and hence the feeling in question is logically sound. But under the influence of this feeling, men have always committed the fallacy of concluding that if a phenomenon has been explained in terms of natural causation, it has thereby been explained _in toto_--forgetting that it has only been explained up to the point where such causation is concerned, and that the real question of ultimate causation has merely been thus postponed. And assuredly beyond this point there is an infinitude of mystery sufficient to satisfy the most exacting mystic. For even Herbert Spencer allows that in ultimate analysis all natural causation is inexplicable. Logically regarded the advance of science, far from having weakened religion, has immeasurably strengthened it. For it has proved the uniformity of natural causation. The so-called natural sphere has increased at the expense of the 'super-natural.' Unquestionably. But although to lower grades of culture this always seems a fact inimical to religion, we may now perceive it is quite the reverse, since it merely goes to abolish the primitive or uncultured distinction in question. It is indeed most extraordinary how long this distinction has held sway, or how it is the ablest men of all generations have quietly assumed that when once we know the natural causation of any phenomenon, we therefore know all about it--or, as it were, have removed it from the sphere of mystery altogether, when, in point of fact, we have only merged it in a much greater mystery than ever. But the answer to our astonishment how this distinction has managed to survive so long lies in the extraordinary effect of custom, which here seems to slay reason altogether; and the more a man busies himself with natural causes (e.g. in scientific research) the greater does this slavery to custom become, till at last he seems positively unable to perceive the real state of the case--regarding any rational thinking thereon as chimerical, so that the term 'meta-physical,' even in its etymological sense as super-sensuous or beyond physical causation, becomes a term of rational reproach. Obviously such a man has written himself down, if not an ass, at all events a creature wholly incapable of rationally treating any of the highest problems presented either by nature or by man. On any logical theory of Theism there can be no such distinction between 'natural' and 'supernatural' as is usually drawn, since on that theory all causation is but the action of the Divine Will. And if we draw any distinction between such action as 'immediate' or 'mediate,' we can only mean this as valid in relation to mankind--i.e. in relation to our experience. For, obviously, it would be wholly incompatible with pure agnosticism to suppose that we are capable of drawing any such distinction in relation to the Divine activity itself. Even apart from the theory of Theism, pure agnosticism must take it that the real distinction is not between natural and supernatural, but between the explicable and the inexplicable--meaning by those terms that which is and that which is not accountable by such causes as fall within the range of human observation. Or, in other words, the distinction is really between the observable and the unobservable causal processes of the universe. Although science is essentially engaged in explaining, her work is necessarily confined to the sphere of natural causation; beyond that sphere (i.e. the sensuous) she can explain nothing. In other words, even if she were able to explain the natural causation of everything, she would be unable to assign the ultimate _raison d'être_ of anything. It is not my intention to write an essay on the nature of causality, or even to attempt a survey of the sundry theories which have been propounded on this subject by philosophers. Indeed, to attempt this would be little less than to write a history of philosophy itself. Nevertheless it is necessary for my purpose to make a few remarks touching the main branches of thought upon the matter[50]. _The remarkable nature of the facts._ These are remarkable, since they are common to all human experience. Everything that _happens_ has a cause. The same happening has always the same cause--or the same consequent the same antecedent. It is only familiarity with this great fact that prevents universal wonder at it, for, notwithstanding all the theories upon it, no one has ever really shown why it is so. That the same causes always produce the same effects is a proposition which expresses a fundamental fact of our knowledge, but the knowledge of this fact is purely empirical; we can show no reason why it should be a fact. Doubtless, if it were not a fact, there could be no so-called 'Order of Nature,' and consequently no science, no philosophy, or perhaps (if the irregularity were sufficiently frequent) no possibility of human experience. But although this is easy enough to show, it in no wise tends to show why the same causes should always produce the same effects. So manifest is it that our knowledge of the fact in question is only empirical, that some of our ablest thinkers, such as Hume and Mill, have failed to perceive even so much as the intellectual necessity of looking beyond our empirical knowledge of the fact to gain any explanation of the fact itself. Therefore they give to the world the wholly vacuous, or merely tautological theory of causation--viz. that of constancy of sequence within human observation[51]. If it be said of my argument touching causality, that it is naturalizing or materializing the super-natural or spiritual (as most orthodox persons will feel), my reply is that deeper thought will show it to be at least as susceptible of the opposite view--viz. that it is subsuming the natural into the super-natural, or spiritualizing the material: and a pure agnostic, least of all, should have anything to say as against either of these alternative points of view. Or we may state the matter thus: in as far as pure reason can have anything to say in the matter, she ought to incline towards the view of my doctrine spiritualizing the material, because it is pretty certain that we could know nothing about natural causation--even so much as its existence--but for our own volitions. _Free Will_[52]. Having read all that is said to be worth reading on the Free Will controversy, it appears to me that the main issues and their logical conclusions admit of being summed up in a very few words, thus:-- 1. A writer, before he undertakes to deal with this subject at all, should be conscious of fully perceiving the fundamental distinction between responsibility as merely legal and as also moral; otherwise he cannot but miss the very essence of the question in debate. No one questions the patent fact of responsibility as legal; the only question is touching responsibility as moral. Yet the principal bulk of literature on Free Will and Necessity arises from disputants on both sides failing to perceive this basal distinction. Even such able writers as Spencer, Huxley and Clifford are in this position. 2. The root question is as to whether the will is caused or un-caused. For however much this root-question may be obscured by its own abundant foliage, the latter can have no existence but that which it derives from the former. 3. Consequently, if libertarians grant causality as appertaining to the will, however much they may beat about the bush, they are surrendering their position all along the line, unless they fall back upon the more ultimate question as to the nature of natural causation. Now it can be proved that this more ultimate question is [scientifically] unanswerable. Therefore both sides may denominate natural causation _x_--an unknown quantity. 4. Hence the whole controversy ought to be seen by both sides to resolve itself into this--is or is not the will determined by _x_? And, if this seems but a barren question to debate, I do not undertake to deny the fact. At the same time there is clearly this real issue remaining--viz. Is the will self-determining, or is it determined--i.e. _from without_? 5. If determined from without, is there any room for freedom, in the sense required for saving the doctrine of moral responsibility? And I think the answer to this must be an unconditional negative. 6. But, observe, it is not one and the same thing to ask, Is the will entirely determined from without? and Is the will entirely determined by natural causation (_x_)? For the unknown quantity _x_ may very well include _x'_, if by _x'_ we understand all the unknown ingredients of personality. 7. Hence, determinists gain no advantage over their adversaries by any possible proof (at present impossible) that all acts of will are due to natural causation, unless they can show the nature of the latter, and that it is of such a nature as supports their conclusion. For aught we at present know, the will may very well be free in the sense required, even though all its acts are due to _x_. 8. In particular, for aught we know to the contrary, all may be due to _x'_, i.e. all causation may be of the nature of will (as, indeed, many systems of philosophy maintain), with the result that every human will is of the nature of a First Cause. In support of which possibility it may be remarked that most philosophies are led to the theory of a _causa causarum_ as regards _x_. 9. To the obvious objection that with a plurality of first causes--each the _fons et origo_ of a new and never-ending stream of causality--the cosmos must sooner or later become a chaos by cumulative intersection of the streams, the answer is to be found in the theory of monism[53]. 10. Nevertheless, the ultimate difficulty remains which is depicted in my essay on the 'World as an Eject[54].' But this, again, is merged in the mystery of Personality, which is only known as an inexplicable, and seemingly ultimate, fact. 11. So that the general conclusion of the whole matter must be--pure agnosticism. FOOTNOTES: [47] [Here it was intended to insert further explanation 'showing that mere observation of causality in external nature would not have yielded idea of anything further than time and space relations.'--ED.] [48] [This theory was suggested in the Burney Essay, p. 136, and ridiculed in the _Candid Examination_; see above, p. 11. Romanes intended at this point to consider at greater length his old views 'on causation as due to being _qua_ being.'--ED.] [49] See, however, Aubrey Moore in _Lux Mundi_, pp. 94-96, and Le Conte, _Evolution in its Relation to Religious Thought_, pp. 335, ff. [N.B. The references not enclosed in brackets are the author's, not mine.--ED.] [50] [Nothing more however was written than what follows immediately.--ED.] [51] [The author intended further to show the vacuity of this theory and point out how Mill himself appears to perceive it by his introduction after the term 'invariably' of the term 'unconditionally'; he refers also to Martineau, _Study of Religion_, i. pp. 152, 3.--ED.] [52] [Romanes' thoughts about Free Will are more lucidly expressed in an essay published subsequently to these Notes in _Mind and Motion and Monism_, pp. 129 ff.--ED.] [53] [See above, p. 31.--ED.] [54] _Contemporary Review_, July 1886. [But the 'ultimate difficulty' referred to above would seem to be the relation of manifold dependent human wills to the One Ultimate and All-embracing Will.--ED.] § 4. FAITH. Faith in its religious sense is distinguished not only from opinion (or belief founded on reason alone), in that it contains a spiritual element: it is further distinguished from belief founded on the affections, by needing an active co-operation of the will. Thus all parts of the human mind have to be involved in faith--intellect, emotions, will. We 'believe' in the theory of evolution on grounds of reason alone; we 'believe' in the affection of our parents, children, &c., almost (or it may be exclusively) on what I have called spiritual grounds--i.e. on grounds of spiritual experience; for this we need no exercise either of reason or of will. But no one can 'believe' in God, or _a fortiori_ in Christ, without also a severe effort of will. This I hold to be a matter of fact, whether or not there be a God or a Christ. Observe will is to be distinguished from desire. It matters not what psychologists may have to say upon this subject. Whether desire differs from will in kind or only in degree--whether will is desire in action, so to speak, and desire but incipient will--are questions with which we need not trouble ourselves. For it is certain that there are agnostics who would greatly prefer being theists, and theists who would give all they possess to be Christians, if they could thus secure promotion by purchase--i.e. by one single act of will. But yet the desire is not strong enough to sustain the will in perpetual action, so as to make the continual sacrifices which Christianity entails. Perhaps the hardest of these sacrifices to an intelligent man is that of his own intellect. At least I am certain that this is so in my own case. I have been so long accustomed to constitute my reason my sole judge of truth, that even while reason itself tells me it is not unreasonable to expect that the heart and the will should be required to join with reason in seeking God (for religion is for the _whole_ man), I am too jealous of my reason to exercise my will in the direction of my most heart-felt desires. For assuredly the strongest desire of my nature is to find that that nature is not deceived in its highest aspirations. Yet I cannot bring myself so much as to make a venture in the direction of faith. For instance, regarded from one point of view it seems reasonable enough that Christianity should have enjoined the _doing_ of the doctrine as a necessary condition to ascertaining (i.e. 'believing') its truth. But from another, and my more habitual point of view, it seems almost an affront to reason to make any such 'fool's experiment'--just as to some scientific men it seems absurd and childish to expect them to investigate the 'superstitious' follies of modern spiritualism. Even the simplest act of will in regard to religion--that of prayer--has not been performed by me for at least a quarter of a century, simply because it has seemed so impossible to pray, as it were, hypothetically, that much as I have always desired to be able to pray, I cannot will the attempt. To justify myself for what my better judgement has often seen to be essentially irrational, I have ever made sundry excuses. The chief of them has run thus. Even supposing Christianity true, and even supposing that after having so far sacrificed my reason to my desire as to have satisfied the supposed conditions to obtaining 'grace,' or direct illumination from God,--even then would not my reason turn round and revenge herself upon me? For surely even then my habitual scepticism would make me say to myself--'this is all very sublime and very comforting; but what evidence have you to give me that the whole business is anything more than self-delusion? The wish was probably father to the thought, and you might much better have performed your "act of will" by going in for a course of Indian hemp.' Of course a Christian would answer to this that the internal light would not admit of such doubt, any more than seeing the sun does--that God knows us well enough to prevent that, &c., and also that it is unreasonable not to try an experiment lest the result should prove too good to be credible, and so on. And I do not dispute that the Christian would be justified in so answering, but I only adduce the matter as an illustration of the difficulty which is experienced in conforming to all the conditions of attaining to Christian faith--even supposing it to be sound. Others have doubtless other difficulties, but mine is chiefly, I think, that of an undue regard to reason, as against heart and will--undue, I mean, if so it be that Christianity is true, and the conditions to faith in it have been of divine ordination. This influence of will on belief, even in matters secular, is the more pronounced the further removed these matters may be from demonstration (as already remarked); but this is most of all the case where our personal interests are affected--whether these be material or intellectual, such as credit for consistency, &c. See, for example, how closely, in the respects we are considering, political beliefs resemble religious. Unless the points of difference are such that truth is virtually demonstrable on one side, so that adhesion to the opposite is due to _conscious_ sacrifice of integrity to expediency, we always find that party-spectacles so colour the view as to leave reason at the mercy of will, custom, interest, and all the other circumstances which similarly operate on religious beliefs. It seems to make but little difference in either case what level of general education, mental power, special training, &c., is brought to bear upon the question under judgement. From the Premier to the peasant we find the same difference of opinion in politics as we do in religion. And in each case the explanation is the same. Beliefs are so little dependent on reason alone that in such regions of thought--i.e. where personal interests are affected and the evidences of truth are not in their nature demonstrable--it really seems as if reason ceases to be a judge of evidence or guide to truth, and becomes a mere advocate of opinion already formed on quite other grounds. Now these other grounds are, as we have seen, mainly the accidents of habit or custom, wish being father to the thought, &c. Now this may be all deplorable enough in politics, and in all other beliefs secular; but who shall say it is not exactly as it ought to be in the matter of beliefs religious? For, unless we beg the question of a future life in the negative, we must entertain at least the possibility of our being in a state of probation in respect of an honest use not only of our reason, but probably still more of those other ingredients of human nature which go to determine our beliefs touching this most important of all matters. It is remarkable how even in politics it is the moral and spiritual elements of character which lead to success in the long run, even more than intellectual ability--supposing, of course, that the latter is not below the somewhat high level of our Parliamentary assemblies. As regards the part that is played by will in the determining of belief, one can show how unconsciously large this is even in matters of secular interest. Reason is very far indeed from being the sole guide of judgement that it is usually taken to be--so far, indeed, that, save in matters approaching down-right demonstration (where of course there is no room for any other ingredient) it is usually hampered by custom, prejudice, dislike, &c., to a degree that would astonish the most sober philosopher could he lay bare to himself all the mental processes whereby the complex act of assent or dissent is eventually determined[55]. As showing how little reason alone has to do with the determining of religious belief, let us take the case of mathematicians. This I think is the fairest case we can take, seeing that of all intellectual pursuits that of mathematical research is the most exact, as well as the most exclusive in its demand upon the powers of reason, and hence that, as a class, the men who have achieved highest eminence in that pursuit may be fairly taken as the fittest representatives of our species in respect of the faculty of pure reason. Yet whenever they have turned their exceptional powers in this respect upon the problems of religion, how suggestively well balanced are their opposite conclusions--so much so indeed that we can only conclude that reason counts for very little in the complex of mental processes which here determine judgement. Thus, if we look to the greatest mathematicians in the world's history, we find Kepler and Newton as Christians; La Place, on the other hand, an infidel. Or, coming to our own times, and confining our attention to the principal seat of mathematical study:--when I was at Cambridge, there was a galaxy of genius in that department emanating from that place such as had never before been equalled. And the curious thing in our present connexion is that all the most illustrious names were ranged on the side of orthodoxy. Sir W. Thomson, Sir George Stokes, Professors Tait, Adams, Clerk-Maxwell, and Cayley--not to mention a number of lesser lights, such as Routh, Todhunter, Ferrers, &c.--were all avowed Christians. Clifford had only just moved at a bound from the extreme of asceticism to that of infidelity--an individual instance which I deem of particular interest in the present connexion, as showing the dominating influence of a forcedly emotional character even on so powerful an intellectual one, for the _rationality_ of the whole structure of Christian belief cannot have so reversed its poles within a few months. Now it would doubtless be easy to find elsewhere than in Cambridge mathematicians of the first order who in our own generation are, or have been, professedly anti-Christian in their beliefs,--although certainly not so great an array of such extraordinary powers. But, be this as it may, the case of Cambridge in my own time seems to me of itself enough to prove that Christian belief is neither made nor marred by the highest powers of reasoning, apart from other and still more potent factors. _Faith and Superstition._ Whether or not Christianity is true, there is a great distinction between these two things. For while the main ingredient of Christian faith is the moral element, this has no part in superstition. In point of fact, the only point of resemblance is that both present the mental state called _belief_. It is on this account they are so often confounded by anti-Christians, and even by non-Christians; the much more important point of difference is not noted, viz. that belief in the one case is purely intellectual, while in the other it is chiefly moral. _Qua_ purely intellectual, belief may indicate nothing but sheer credulity in absence of evidence; but where a moral basis is added, the case is clearly different; for even if it appears to be sheer credulity to an outsider, that may be because he does not take into account the additional evidence supplied by the moral facts. Faith and superstition are often confounded, or even identified. And, unquestionably, they are identical up to a certain point--viz. they both present the mental state of _belief_. All people can see this; but not all people can see further, or define the _differentiae_. These are as follows: First, supposing Christianity true, there is the spiritual verification. Second, supposing Christianity false, there is still the moral ingredient, which _ex hypothesi_ is absent in superstition. In other words, both faith and superstition rest on an intellectual basis (which may be pure credulity); but faith rests also on a moral, even if not likewise on a spiritual. Even in human relations there is a wide difference between 'belief' in a scientific theory and 'faith' in a personal character. And the difference is in the latter comprising a moral element. 'Faith-healing,' therefore, has no real point of resemblance with 'thy faith hath saved thee' of the New Testament, unless we sink the personal differences between a modern faith-healer and Jesus Christ as objects of faith. Belief is not exclusively founded on objective evidence appealing to reason (opinion), but mainly on subjective evidence appealing to some altogether different faculty (faith). Now, whether Christians are right or wrong in what they believe, I hold it as certain as anything can be that the distinction which I have just drawn, and which they all implicitly draw for themselves, is logically valid. For no one is entitled to deny the possibility of what may be termed an organ of spiritual discernment. In fact to do so would be to vacate the position of pure agnosticism _in toto_--and this even if there were no objective, or strictly scientific, evidences in favour of such an organ, such as we have in the lives of the saints, and, in a lower degree, in the universality of the religious sentiment. Now, if there be such an organ, it follows from preceding paragraphs, that not only will the main evidences for Christianity be subjective, but that they ought to be so: they ought to be so, I mean, on the Christian supposition of the object of Christianity being moral probation, and 'faith' both the test and the reward. From this many practical considerations ensue. E.g. the duty of parents to educate their children in what they _believe_ as distinguished from what they _know_. This would be unjustifiable if faith were the same as opinion. But it is fully justifiable if a man not only knows that he believes (opinion) but believes that he knows (faith). Whether or not the Christian differs from the 'natural man' in having a spiritual organ of cognition, provided he honestly believes such is the case, it would be immoral in him not to proceed in accordance with what he thus believes to be his knowledge. This obligation is recognized in education in every other case. He is morally right even if mentally deluded. Huxley, in _Lay Sermons_, says that faith has been proved a 'cardinal sin' by science. Now, this is true enough of credulity, superstition, &c., and science has done no end of good in developing our ideas of method, evidence, &c. But this is all on the side of intellect. 'Faith' is not touched by such facts or considerations. And what a terrible hell science would have made of the world, if she had abolished the 'spirit of faith' even in human relations. The fact is, Huxley falls into the common error of identifying 'faith' with opinion. Supposing Christianity true, it is very reasonable that faith in the sense already explained should be constituted the test of divine acceptance. If there be such a thing as Christ's winnowing fan, the quality of sterling weight for the discovery of which it is adapted cannot be conceived as anything other than this moral quality. No one could suppose a revelation appealing to the mere intellect of man, since acceptance would thus become a mere matter of prudence in subscribing to a demonstration made by higher intellects. It is also a matter of fact that if Christianity is truthful in representing this world as a school of moral probation, we cannot conceive a system better adapted to this end than is the world, or a better schoolmaster than Christianity. This is proved not only by general reasoning, but also by the work of Christianity in the world, its adaptation to individual needs, &c. Consider also the extraordinary diversity of human characters in respect both of morality and spirituality though all are living in the same world. Out of the same external material or environment such astonishingly diverse products arise according to the use made of it. Even human suffering in its worst forms can be welcome if justified by faith in such an object. 'Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness,' but are rather to be 'gloried in[56].' It is a further fact that only by means of this theory of probation is it possible to give any meaning to the world, i.e. any _raison d'être_ of human existence. Supposing Christianity true, every man must stand or fall by the results of his own conduct, as developed through his own moral character. (This could not be so if the test were intellectual ability.) Yet this does not hinder that the exercise of will in the direction of religion should need help in order to attain belief. Nor does it hinder that some men should need more help and others less. Indeed, it may well be that some men are intentionally precluded from receiving any help, so as not to increase their responsibility, or receive but little, so as to constitute intellectual difficulties a moral trial. But clearly, if such things are so, we are inadequate judges. It is a fact that we all feel the intellectual part of man to be 'higher' than the animal, whatever our theory of his origin. It is a fact that we all feel the moral part of man to be 'higher' than the intellectual, whatever our theory of either may be. It is also a fact that we all similarly feel the spiritual to be 'higher' than the moral, whatever our theory of religion may be. It is what we understand by man's moral, and still more his spiritual, qualities that go to constitute 'character.' And it is astonishing how in all walks of life it is character that tells in the long run. It is a fact that these distinctions are all well marked and universally recognized--viz. {Animality. {Intellectuality. Human {Morality. {Spirituality. Morality and spirituality are to be distinguished as two very different things. A man may be highly moral in his conduct without being in any degree spiritual in his nature, and, though to a lesser extent, vice versa. And, objectively, we see the same distinction between morals and religion. By spirituality I mean the religious temperament, whether or not associated with any particular creed or dogma. There is no doubt that intellectual pleasures are more satisfying and enduring than sensual--or even sensuous. And, to those who have experienced them, so it is with spiritual over intellectual, artistic, &c. This is an objective fact, abundantly testified to by every one who has had experience: and it seems to indicate that the spiritual nature of man is the highest part of man--the [culminating] point of his being. It is probably true, as Renan says in his posthumous work, that there will always be materialists and spiritualists, inasmuch as it will always be observable on the one hand that there is no thought without brain, while, on the other hand, instincts of man will always aspire to higher beliefs. But this is just what ought to be if religion is true, and we are in a state of probation. And is it not probable that the materialistic position (discredited even by philosophy) is due simply to custom and want of imagination? Else why the inextinguishable instincts? It is much more easy to disbelieve than to believe. This is obvious on the side of reason, but it is also true on that of spirit, for to disbelieve is in accordance with environment or custom, while to believe necessitates a spiritual use of the imagination. For both these reasons, very few unbelievers have any justification, either intellectual or spiritual, for their own unbelief. Unbelief is usually due to indolence, often to prejudice, and never a thing to be proud of. 'Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead?' Clearly no answer can be given by the pure agnostic. But he will naturally say in reply, 'the question rather is, why should it be thought credible with you that there is a God, or, if there is, that he should raise the dead?' And I think the wise Christian will answer, 'I believe in the resurrection of the dead, partly on grounds of reason, partly on those of intuition, but chiefly on both combined; so to speak, it is my whole character which accepts the whole system of which the doctrine of personal immortality forms an essential part.' And to this it may be fairly added that the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of our bodily form cannot have been arrived at for the purpose of meeting modern materialistic objections to the doctrine of personal immortality; hence it is certainly a strange doctrine to have been propounded at that time, together with its companion, and scarcely less distinctive, doctrine of the vileness of the body. Why was it not said that the 'soul' alone should survive as a disembodied 'spirit'? Or if form were supposed necessary for man as distinguished from God, that he was to be an angel? But, be this as it may, the doctrine of the resurrection seems to have fully met beforehand the materialistic objection to a future life, and so to have raised the ulterior question with which this paragraph opens. We have seen in the Introduction that all first principles even of scientific facts are known by intuition and not by reason. No one can deny this. Now, if there be a God, the fact is certainly of the nature of a first principle; for it must be the first of all first principles. No one can dispute this. No one can therefore dispute the necessary conclusion, that, if there be a God, He is knowable, (if knowable at all) by intuition and not by reason. Indeed a little thought is enough to show that from its very nature as such, reason must be incapable of adjudicating on the subject, for it is a process of inferring from the known to the unknown. Or thus. It would be against reason itself to suppose that God, even if He exists, can be known by reason; He must be known, if knowable at all, by intuition[57]. Observe, although God might give an objective revelation of Himself, e.g. as Christians believe He has, even this would not give knowledge of Him save to those who believe the revelations genuine; and I doubt whether it is logically possible for any form of objective revelation of itself to compel belief in it. Assuredly one rising from the dead to testify thereto would not, nor would letters of fire across the sky do so. But, even if it were logically possible, we need not consider the abstract possibility, seeing that, as a matter of fact, no such demonstrative revelation has been given. Hence, the only legitimate attitude of pure reason is pure agnosticism. No one can deny this. But, it will be said, there is this vast difference between our intuitive knowledge of all other first principles and that alleged of the 'first of all first principles,' viz. that the latter is confessedly _not_ known to all men. Now, assuredly, there is here a vast difference. But so there ought to be, if we are here in a state of probation, as before explained. And that we are in such a state is not only the hypothesis of religion, but the sole rational explanation as well as moral justification of our existence as rational beings and moral agents[58]. It is not necessarily true, as J.S. Mill and all other agnostics think, that even if internal intuition be of divine origin, the illumination thus furnished can only be of evidential value to the individual subject thereof. On the contrary, it may be studied objectively, even if not experienced subjectively; and ought to be so studied by a pure agnostic desirous of light from any quarter. Even if he does not know it as a noumenon he can investigate it as a phenomenon. And, supposing it to be of divine origin, as its subjects believe and he has no reason to doubt, he may gain much evidence against its being a mere psychological illusion from identical reports of it in all ages. Thus, if any large section of the race were to see flames issuing from magnets, there would be no doubt as to their objective reality. The testimony given by Socrates to the occurrence in himself of an internal Voice, having all the definiteness of an auditory hallucination, has given rise to much speculation by subsequent philosophers. Many explanations are suggested, but if we remember the critical nature of Socrates' own mind, the literal nature of his mode of teaching, and the high authority which attaches to Plato's opinion on the subject, the probability seems to incline towards the 'Demon' having been, in Socrates' own consciousness, an actual auditory sensation. Be this however as it may, I suppose there is no question that we may adopt this view of the matter at least to the extent of classifying Socrates with Luther, Pascal, &c., not to mention all the line of Hebrew and other prophets, who agree in speaking of a Divine Voice. If so, the further question arises whether we are to classify all these with lunatics in whom the phenomena of auditory hallucination are habitual. Without doubt this hypothesis is most in accordance with the temper of our age, partly because it obeys the law of parsimony, and partly because it [negatives] _a priori_ the possibility of revelation. But if we look at the matter from the point of view of pure agnosticism, we are not entitled to adopt so rough and ready an interpretation. Suppose then that not only Socrates and all great religious reformers and founders of religious systems both before and after him were similarly stricken with mental disease, but that similar phenomena had occurred in the case of all scientific discoverers such as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, &c.--supposing all these men to have declared that their main ideas had been communicated by subjective sensations as of spoken language, so that all the progress of the world's scientific thought had resembled that of the world's religious thought, and had been attributed by the promoters thereof to direct inspirations of this kind--would it be possible to deny that the testimony thus afforded to the fact of subjective revelation would have been overwhelming? Or could it any longer have been maintained that supposing a revelation to be communicated subjectively the fact thereof could only be of any evidential value to the recipient himself? To this it will no doubt be answered, 'No, but in the case supposed the evidence arises not from the fact of their subjective intuition but from that of its objective verification in the results of science.' Quite so; but this is exactly the test appealed to by the Hebrew prophets--the test of true and lying prophets being in the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of their prophecies and 'By their fruits ye shall know them.' Therefore it is as absurd to say that the religious consciousness of minds other than our own can be barred antecedently as evidence, as it is to say that testimony to the miraculous is similarly barred. The pure agnostic must always carefully avoid the 'high _priori_ road.' But, on the other hand, he must be all the more assiduous in estimating fairly the character, both as to quantity and quality, of evidence _a posteriori_. Now this evidence in the present case is twofold, positive and negative. It will be convenient to consider the negative first. The negative evidence is furnished by the nature of man without God. It is thoroughly miserable, as is well shown by Pascal, who has devoted the whole of the first part of his treatise to this subject. I need not go over the ground which he has already so well traversed. Some men are not conscious of the cause of this misery: this, however, does not prevent the fact of their being miserable. For the most part they conceal the fact as well as possible from themselves, by occupying their minds with society, sport, frivolity of all kinds, or, if intellectually disposed, with science, art, literature, business, &c. This however is but to fill the starving belly with husks. I know from experience the intellectual distractions of scientific research, philosophical speculation, and artistic pleasures; but am also well aware that even when all are taken together and well sweetened to taste, in respect of consequent reputation, means, social position, &c., the whole concoction is but as high confectionery to a starving man. He may cheat himself for a time--especially if he be a strong man--into the belief that he is nourishing himself by denying his natural appetite; but soon finds he was made for some altogether different kind of food, even though of much less tastefulness as far as the palate is concerned. Some men indeed never acknowledge this articulately or distinctly even to themselves, yet always show it plainly enough to others. Take, e.g., 'that last infirmity of noble minds.' I suppose the most exalted and least 'carnal' of worldly joys consists in the adequate recognition by the world of high achievement by ourselves. Yet it is notorious that-- "It is by God decreed Fame shall not satisfy the highest need." It has been my lot to know not a few of the famous men of our generation, and I have always observed that this is profoundly true. Like all other 'moral' satisfactions, this soon palls by custom, and as soon as one end of distinction is reached, another is pined for. There is no finality to rest in, while disease and death are always standing in the background. Custom may even blind men to their own misery, so far as not to make them realize what is wanting; yet the want is there. I take it then as unquestionably true that this whole negative side of the subject proves a vacuum in the soul of man which nothing can fill save faith in God. Now take the positive side. Consider the happiness of religious--and chiefly of the highest religious, i.e. Christian--belief. It is a matter of fact that besides being most intense, it is most enduring, growing, and never staled by custom. In short, according to the universal testimony of those who have it, it differs from all other happiness not only in degree but in kind. Those who have it can usually testify to what they used to be without it. It has no relation to intellectual status. It is a thing by itself and supreme. So much for the individual. But positive evidence does not end here. Look at the effects of Christian belief as exercised on human society--1st, by individual Christians on the family, &c.; and, 2nd, by the Christian Church on the world. All this may lead on to an argument from the adaptation of Christianity to human higher needs. All men must feel these needs more or less in proportion as their higher natures, moral and spiritual, are developed. Now Christianity is the only religion which is adapted to meet them, and, according to those who are alone able to testify, does so most abundantly. All these men, of every sect, nationality, &c., agree in their account of their subjective experience; so as to this there can be no question. The only question is as to whether they are all deceived. PEU DE CHOSE. 'La vie est vaine: Un peu d'amour, Un peu de haine ... Et puis--bon jour! La vie est brève: Un peu d'espoir, Un peu de rêve ... Et puis--bon soir!' The above is a terse and true criticism of this life without hope of a future one. Is it satisfactory? But Christian faith, as a matter of fact, changes it entirely. 'The night has a thousand eyes, And the day but one; Yet the light of a whole world dies With the setting sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one; Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done.' Love is known to be all this. How great, then, is Christianity, as being the religion of love, and causing men to believe both in the cause of love's supremacy and the infinity of God's love to man. FOOTNOTES: [55] Cf. Pascal, _Pensées_. 'For we must not mistake ourselves, we have as much that is automatic in us as intellectual, and hence it comes that the instrument by which persuasion is brought about is not demonstration alone. How few things are demonstrated! Proofs can only convince the mind; custom makes our strongest proofs and those which we hold most firmly, it sways the automaton, which draws the unconscious intellect after it.... It is then custom that makes so many men Christians, custom that makes them Turks, heathen, artisans, soldiers, &c. Lastly, we must resort to custom when once the mind has seen where truth is, in order to slake our thirst and steep ourselves in that belief which escapes us at every hour, for to have proofs always at hand were too onerous. We must acquire a more easy belief, that of custom, which without violence, without art, without argument, causes our assent and inclines all our powers to this belief, so that our soul naturally falls into it.... 'It is not enough to believe only by force of conviction if the automaton is inclined to believe the contrary. Both parts of us then must be obliged to believe, the intellect by arguments which it is enough to have admitted once in our lives, the automaton by custom, and by not allowing it to incline in the contrary direction. _Inclina cor meum Deus_.' See also Newman's _Grammar of Assent_, chap. vi. and Church's _Human Life and its Conditions_, pp. 67-9. [56] [The author has added, "For suffering in brutes see further on," but nothing further on the subject appears to have been written.--ED.] [57] [In this connexion I may again notice that two days before his death George Romanes expressed his cordial approval of Professor Knight's _Aspects of Theism_--a work in which great stress is laid on the argument from intuition in different forms.--ED.] [58] On this subject see Pascal, _Pensées_ (Kegan Paul's trans.) p. 103. § 5. FAITH IN CHRISTIANITY. Christianity comes up for serious investigation in the present treatise, because this _Examination of Religion_ [i.e. of the validity of the religious consciousness] has to do with the evidences of Theism presented by man, and not only by nature _minus_ man. Now of the religious consciousness Christianity is unquestionably the highest product. When I wrote the preceding treatise [the _Candid Examination_], I did not sufficiently appreciate the immense importance of _human_ nature, as distinguished from physical nature, in any enquiry touching Theism. But since then I have seriously studied anthropology (including the science of comparative religions), psychology and metaphysics, with the result of clearly seeing that human nature is the most important part of nature as a whole whereby to investigate the theory of Theism. This I ought to have anticipated on merely _a priori_ grounds, and no doubt should have perceived, had I not been too much immersed in merely physical research. Moreover, in those days, I took it for granted that Christianity was played out, and never considered it at all as having any rational bearing on the question of Theism. And, though this was doubtless inexcusable, I still think that the rational standing of Christianity has materially improved since then. For then it seemed that Christianity was destined to succumb as a rational system before the double assault of Darwin from without and the negative school of criticism from within. Not only the book of organic nature, but likewise its own sacred documents, seemed to be declaring against it. But now all this has been very materially changed. We have all more or less grown to see that Darwinism is like Copernicanism, &c., in this respect[59]; while the outcome of the great textual battle[60] is impartially considered a signal victory for Christianity. Prior to the new [Biblical] science, there was really no rational basis in thoughtful minds, either for the date of any one of the New Testament books, or, consequently, for the historical truth of any one of the events narrated in them. Gospels, Acts and Epistles were all alike shrouded in this uncertainty. Hence the validity of the eighteenth-century scepticism. But now all this kind of scepticism has been rendered obsolete, and for ever impossible; while the certainty of enough of St. Paul's writings for the practical purpose of displaying the belief of the apostles has been established, as well as the certainty of the publication of the Synoptics within the first century. An enormous gain has thus accrued to the objective evidences of Christianity. It is most important that the expert investigator should be exact, and, as in any other science, the lay public must take on authority as trustworthy only what both sides are agreed upon. But, as in any other science, experts are apt to lose sight of the importance of the main results agreed upon, in their fighting over lesser points still in dispute. Now it is enough for us that the Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, and Corinthians, have been agreed upon as genuine, and that the same is true of the Synoptics so far as concerns the main doctrine of Christ Himself. The extraordinary candour of Christ's biographers must not be forgotten[61]. Notice also such sentences as 'but some doubted,' and (in the account of Pentecost) 'these men are full of new wine[62].' Such observations are wonderfully true to human nature; but no less wonderfully opposed to any 'accretion' theory. Observe, when we become honestly pure agnostics the whole scene changes by the change in our point of view. We may then read the records impartially, or on their own merits, without any antecedent conviction that they must be false. It is then an open question whether they are not true as history. There is so much to be said in objective evidence for Christianity that were the central doctrines thus testified to anything short of miraculous, no one would doubt. But we are not competent judges _a priori_ of what a revelation should be. If our agnosticism be _pure_, we have no right to pre-judge the case on _prima facie_ grounds. One of the strongest pieces of objective evidence in favour of Christianity is not sufficiently enforced by apologists. Indeed, I am not aware that I have ever seen it mentioned. It is the absence from the biography of Christ of any doctrines which the subsequent growth of human knowledge--whether in natural science, ethics, political economy, or elsewhere--has had to discount. This negative argument is really almost as strong as is the positive one from what Christ did teach. For when we consider what a large number of sayings are recorded of--or at least attributed to--Him, it becomes most remarkable that in literal truth there is no reason why any of His words should ever pass away in the sense of becoming obsolete. 'Not even now could it be easy,' says John Stuart Mill, 'even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life[63].' Contrast Jesus Christ in this respect with other thinkers of like antiquity. Even Plato, who, though some 400 years B.C. in point of time, was greatly in advance of Him in respect of philosophic thought--not only because Athens then presented the extraordinary phenomenon which it did of genius in all directions never since equalled, but also because he, following Socrates, was, so to speak, the greatest representative of human reason in the direction of spirituality--even Plato, I say, is nowhere in this respect as compared with Christ. Read the dialogues, and see how enormous is the contrast with the Gospels in respect of errors of all kinds--reaching even to absurdity in respect of reason, and to sayings shocking to the moral sense. Yet this is confessedly the highest level of human reason on the lines of spirituality, when unaided by alleged revelation. Two things may be said in reply. First, that the Jews (Rabbis) of Christ's period had enunciated most of Christ's ethical sayings. But, even so far as this is true, the sayings were confessedly extracted or deduced from the Old Testament, and so _ex hypothesi_ due to original inspiration. Again, it is not very far true, because, as _Ecce Homo_ says, the ethical sayings of Christ, even when anticipated by Rabbis and the Old Testament, were _selected_ by Him. It is a general, if not a universal, rule that those who reject Christianity with contempt are those who care not for religion of any kind. 'Depart from us' has always been the sentiment of such. On the other hand, those in whom the religious sentiment is intact, but who have rejected Christianity on intellectual grounds, still almost deify Christ. These facts are remarkable. If we estimate the greatness of a man by the influence which he has exerted on mankind, there can be no question, even from the secular point of view, that Christ is much the greatest man who has ever lived. It is on all sides worth considering (blatant ignorance or base vulgarity alone excepted) that the revolution effected by Christianity in human life is immeasurable and unparalleled by any other movement in history; though most nearly approached by that of the Jewish religion, of which, however, it is a development, so that it may be regarded as of a piece with it. If thus regarded, this whole system of religion is so immeasurably in advance of all others, that it may fairly be said, if it had not been for the Jews, the human race would not have had any religion worth our serious attention as such. The whole of that side of human nature would never have been developed in civilized life. And although there are numberless individuals who are not conscious of its development in themselves, yet even these have been influenced to an enormous extent by the atmosphere of religion around them. But not only is Christianity thus so immeasurably in advance of all other religions. It is no less so of every other system of thought that has ever been promulgated in regard to all that is moral and spiritual. Whether it be true or false, it is certain that neither philosophy, science, nor poetry has ever produced results in thought, conduct, or beauty in any degree to be compared with it. This I think will be on all hands allowed as regards conduct. As regards thought and beauty it may be disputed. But, consider, what has all the science or all the philosophy of the world done for the thought of mankind to be compared with the one doctrine, 'God is love'? Whether or not true, conceive what belief in it has been to thousands of millions of our race--i.e. its influence on human thought, and thence on human conduct. Thus to admit its incomparable influence in conduct is indirectly to admit it as regards thought. Again, as regards beauty, the man who fails to see its incomparable excellence in this respect merely shows his own deficiency in the appreciation of all that is noblest in man. True or not true, the entire Story of the Cross, from its commencement in prophetic aspiration to its culmination in the Gospel, is by far the most magnificent [presentation] in literature. And surely the fact of its having all been lived does not detract from its poetic value. Nor does the fact of its being capable of appropriation by the individual Christian of to-day as still a vital religion detract from its sublimity. Only to a man wholly destitute of spiritual perception can it be that Christianity should fail to appear the greatest exhibition of the beautiful, the sublime, and of all else that appeals to our spiritual nature, which has ever been known upon our earth. Yet this side of its adaptation is turned only towards men of highest culture. The most remarkable thing about Christianity is its adaptation to all sorts and conditions of men. Are you highly intellectual? There is in its problems, historical and philosophical, such worlds of material as you may spend your life upon with the same interminable interest as is open to the students of natural science. Or are you but a peasant in your parish church, with knowledge of little else than your Bible? Still are you ...[64] _Regeneration_. How remarkable is the doctrine of Regeneration _per se_, as it is stated in the New Testament[65], and how completely it fits in with the non-demonstrative character of Revelation to reason alone, with the hypothesis of moral probation, &c. Now this doctrine is one of the distinctive notes of Christianity. That is, Christ foretold repeatedly and distinctly--as did also His apostles after Him--that while those who received the Holy Ghost, who came to the Father through faith in the Son, who were born again of the Spirit, (and many other synonymous phrases,) would be absolutely certain of Christian truth as it were by direct vision or intuition, the carnally minded on the other hand would not be affected by any amount of direct evidence, even though one rose from the dead--as indeed Christ shortly afterwards did, with fulfilment of this prediction. Thus scepticism may be taken by Christians as corroborating Christianity. By all means let us retain our independence of judgement; but this is pre-eminently a matter in which pure agnostics must abstain from arrogance and consider the facts impartially as unquestionable phenomena of experience. Shortly after the death of Christ, this phenomenon which had been foretold by Him occurred, and appears to have done so for the first time. It has certainly continued to manifest itself ever since, and has been attributed by professed historians to that particular moment in time called Pentecost, producing much popular excitement and a large number of Christian believers. But, whether or not we accept this account, it is unquestionable that the apostles were filled with faith in the person and office of their Master, which is enough to justify His doctrine of regeneration. _Conversions._ St. Augustine after thirty years of age, and other Fathers, bear testimony to a sudden, enduring and extraordinary change in themselves, called _conversion_[66]. Now this experience has been repeated and testified to by countless millions of civilized men and women in all nations and all degrees of culture. It signifies not whether the conversion be sudden or gradual, though, as a psychological phenomenon, it is more remarkable when sudden and there is no symptom of mental aberration otherwise. But even as a gradual growth in mature age, its evidential value is not less. (Cf. Bunyan, &c.) In all cases it is not a mere change of belief or opinion; this is by no means the point; the point is that it is a modification of character, more or less profound. Seeing what a complex thing is character, this change therefore cannot be simple. That it may all be due to so-called natural causes is no evidence against its so-called supernatural source, unless we beg the whole question of the Divine in Nature. To pure agnostics the evidence from conversions and regeneration lies in the bulk of these psychological phenomena, shortly after the death of Christ, with their continuance ever since, their general similarity all over the world, &c., &c. _Christianity and Pain_. Christianity, from its foundation in Judaism, has throughout been a religion of sacrifice and sorrow. It has been a religion of blood and tears, and yet of profoundest happiness to its votaries. The apparent paradox is due to its depth, and to the union of these seemingly diverse roots in Love. It has been throughout and growingly a religion--or rather let us say _the_ religion--of Love, with these apparently opposite qualities. Probably it is only those whose characters have been deepened by experiences gained in this religion itself who are so much as capable of intelligently resolving this paradox. Fakirs hang on hooks, Pagans cut themselves and even their children, sacrifice captives, &c., for the sake of propitiating diabolical deities. The Jewish and Christian idea of sacrifice is doubtless a survival of this idea of God by way of natural causation, yet this is no evidence against the completed idea of the Godhead being [such as the Christian belief represents it], for supposing the completed idea to be true, the earlier ideals would have been due to the earlier inspirations, in accordance with the developmental method of Revelation hereafter to be discussed[67]. But Christianity, with its roots in Judaism, is, as I have said, _par excellence_ the religion of sorrow, because it reaches to truer and deeper levels of our spiritual nature, and therefore has capabilities both of sorrow and joy which are presumably non-existent except in civilized man. I mean the sorrows and the joys of a fully evolved spiritual life--such as were attained wonderfully early, historically speaking, in the case of the Jews, and are now universally diffused throughout Christendom. In short, the sorrows and the joys in question are those which arise from the fully developed consciousness of sin against a God of Love, as distinguished from propitiation of malignant spirits. These joys and sorrows are wholly spiritual, not merely physical, and culminate in the cry,'Thou desirest no sacrifice.... The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit[68].' I agree with Pascal[69] that there is virtually nothing to be gained by being a theist as distinguished from a Christian. Unitarianism is only an affair of the reason--a merely abstract theory of the mind, having nothing to do with the heart, or the real needs of mankind. It is only when it takes the New Testament, tears out a few of its leaves relating to the divinity of Christ, and appropriates all the rest, that its system becomes in any degree possible as a basis for personal religion. If there is a Deity it seems to be in some indefinite degree more probable that He should impart a Revelation than that He should not. Women, as a class, are in all countries much more disposed to Christianity than men. I think the scientific explanation of this is to be found in the causes assigned in my essay on _Mental differences between Men and Women_[70]. But, if Christianity be supposed true, there would, of course, be a more ultimate explanation of a religious kind--as in all other cases where causation is concerned. And, in that case I have no doubt that the largest part of the explanation would consist in the passions of women being less ardent than those of men, and also much more kept under restraint by social conditions of life. This applies not only to purity, but likewise to most of the other psychological _differentiae_ between the sexes, such as ambition, selfishness, pride of power, and so forth. In short, the whole ideal of Christian ethics is of a feminine as distinguished from a masculine type[71]. Now nothing is so inimical to Christian belief as un-Christian conduct. This is especially the case as regards impurity; for whether the fact be explained on religious or non-religious grounds, it has more to do with unbelief than has the speculative reason. Consequently, woman is, for all these reasons, the 'fitter' type for receiving and retaining Christian belief. Modern agnosticism is performing this great service to Christian faith; it is silencing all rational scepticism of the _a priori_ kind. And this it is bound to do more and more the purer it becomes. In every generation it must henceforth become more and more recognized by logical thinking, that all antecedent objections to Christianity founded on reason alone are _ipso facto_ nugatory. Now, all the strongest objections to Christianity have ever been those of the antecedent kind; hence the effect of modern thinking is that of more and more diminishing the purely speculative difficulties, such as that of the Incarnation, &c. In other words the force of Butler's argument about our being incompetent judges[72] is being more and more increased. And the logical development of this lies in the view already stated about natural causation. For, just as pure agnosticism must allow that reason is incompetent to adjudicate _a priori_ for or against Christian miracles, including the Incarnation, so it must further allow that, if they ever took place, reason can have nothing to say against their being all of one piece with causation in general. Hence, so far as reason is concerned, pure agnosticism must allow that it is only the event which can ultimately prove whether Christianity is true or false. 'If it be of God we cannot overthrow it, lest haply we be found even to fight against God.' But the individual cannot wait for this empirical determination. What then is he to do? The unbiassed answer of pure agnosticism ought reasonably to be, in the words of John Hunter, 'Do not think; try.' That is, in this case, try the only experiment available--the experiment of faith. Do the doctrine, and if Christianity be true, the verification will come, not indeed mediately through any course of speculative reason, but immediately by spiritual intuition. Only if a man has faith enough to make this venture honestly, will he be in a just position for deciding the issue. Thus viewed it would seem that the experiment of faith is not a 'fool's experiment'; but, on the contrary, so that there is enough _prima facie_ evidence to arrest serious attention, such an experimental trial would seem to be the rational duty of a pure agnostic. It is a fact that Christian belief is much more due to doing than to thinking, as prognosticated by the New Testament. 'If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God' (St. John vii. 17). And surely, even on grounds of reason itself, it should be allowed that, supposing Christianity to be 'of God,' it _ought_ to appeal to the spiritual rather than to the rational side of our nature. Even within the region of pure reason (or the '_prima facie_ case') modern science, as directed on the New Testament criticism, has surely done more for Christianity than against it. For, after half a century of battle over the text by the best scholars, the dates of the Gospels have been fixed within the first century, and at least four of St. Paul's epistles have had their authenticity proved beyond doubt. Now this is enough to destroy all eighteenth-century criticism as to the doubtfulness of the historical existence of Christ and His apostles, 'inventions of priests,' &c., which was the most formidable kind of criticism of all. There is no longer any question as to historical facts, save the miraculous, which, however, are ruled out by negative criticism on merely _a priori_ grounds. This remaining--and, _ex hypothesi_, necessary--doubt is of very different importance from the other. Again, the Pauline epistles of proved authenticity are enough for all that is wanted to show the belief of Christ's contemporaries. These are facts of the first order of importance to have proved. Old Testament criticism is as yet too immature to consider. _Plan in Revelation_. The views which I entertained on this subject when an undergraduate [i.e. the ordinary orthodox views] were abandoned in presence of the theory of Evolution--i.e. the theory of natural causation as probably furnishing a scientific explanation [of the religious phenomena of Judaism] or, which is the same thing, an explanation in terms of ascertainable causes up to some certain point; which however in this particular case cannot be determined within wide limits, so that the history of Israel will always embody an element of 'mystery' much more than any other history. It was not until twenty-five years later that I saw clearly the full implications of my present views on natural causation. As applied to this particular case these views show that to a theist, at all events (i.e. to any one who on independent grounds has accepted the theory of Theism), it ought not to make much difference to the evidential value of the Divine Plan of Revelation as exhibited in the Old and New Testaments, even if it be granted that the whole has been due to so-called natural causes only. I say, 'not much difference,' for that it ought to make some difference I do not deny. Take a precisely analogous case. The theory of evolution by natural causes is often said to make no logical difference in the evidence of plan or design manifested in organic nature--it being only a question of _modus operandi_ whether all pieces of organic machinery were produced suddenly or by degrees; the evidence of design is equally there in either case. Now I have shown elsewhere that this is wrong[73]. It may not make much difference to a man who is already a theist, for then it is but a question of _modus_, but it makes a great difference to the evidence of Theism. So it is in evidence of plan in proof of a revelation. If there had been no alleged revelation up to the present time, and if Christ were now to appear suddenly in His first advent in all the power and glory which Christians expect for His second, the proof of His revelation would be demonstrative. So that, as a mere matter of evidence, a sudden revelation might be much more convincing than a gradual one. But it would be quite out of analogy with causation in nature[74]. Besides, even a gradual revelation might be given easily, which would be of demonstrative value--as by making prophecies of historical events, scientific discoveries, &c., so clear as to be unmistakeable. But, as before shown, a demonstrative revelation has not been made, and there may well be good reasons why it should not. Now, if there are such reasons (e.g. our state of probation), we can well see that the gradual unfolding of a plan of revelation, from earliest dawn of history to the end of the world ('I speak as a fool') is much preferable to a sudden manifestation sufficiently late in the world's history to be historically attested for all subsequent time. For 1st. Gradual evolution is in analogy with God's other work. 2nd. It does not leave Him without witness at any time during the historical period. 3rd. It gives ample scope for persevering research at all times--i.e. a moral test, and not merely an intellectual assent to some one _(ex hypothesi)_ unequivocally attested event in history. The _appearance_ of plan in revelation is, in fact, certainly remarkable enough to arrest serious attention. If revelation has been of a progressive character, then it follows that it must have been so, not only historically, but likewise intellectually, morally, and spiritually. For thus only could it be always adapted to the advancing conditions of the human race. This reflection destroys all those numerous objections against Scripture on account of the absurdity or immorality of its statements or precepts, unless it can be shown that the modifications suggested by criticism as requisite to bring the statements or precepts into harmony with modern advancement would have been as well adapted to the requirements of the world at the date in question, as were the actual statements or precepts before us. Supposing Christianity true, it is certain that the revelation which it conveys has been predetermined at least since the dawn of the historical period. This is certain because the objective evidences of Christianity as a revelation have their origin in that dawn. And these objective evidences are throughout [evidence] of a scheme, in which the end can be seen from the beginning. And the very methods whereby this scheme is itself revealed are such (still supposing that it is a scheme) as present remarkable evidences of design. These methods are, broadly speaking, miracles, prophecy and the results of the teaching, &c., upon mankind. Now one may show that no better methods could conceivably have been designed for the purpose of latter-day evidence, combined with moral and religious teaching throughout. The mere fact of it being so largely incorporated with secular history renders the Christian religion unique: so to speak, the world, throughout its entire historical period, has been constituted the canvas on which this divine revelation has been painted--and painted so gradually that not until the process had been going on for a couple of thousand years was it possible to perceive the subject thereof. _Christian Dogmas_. Whether or not Christ was Himself divine would make no difference so far as the consideration of Christianity as the highest phase of evolution is concerned, or from the purely secular [scientific] point of view. From the religious point of view, or that touching the relation of God to man, it would of course make a great difference; but the difference belongs to the same region of thought as that which applies to all the previous moments of evolution. Thus the passage from the non-moral to the moral appears, from the secular or scientific point of view, to be due, as far as we can see, to mechanical causes in natural selection or what not. But, just as in the case of the passage from the non-mental to the mental, &c., this passage may have been _ultimately_ due to divine volition, and _must have been so due_ on the theory of Theism. Therefore, I say, it makes no difference from a secular or scientific point of view whether or not Christ was Himself divine; since, in either case, the movement which He inaugurated was the proximate or phenomenal cause of the observable results. Thus, even the question of the divinity of Christ ultimately resolves itself into the question of all questions--viz. is or is not mechanical causation 'the outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace'? Is it phenomenal or ontological; ultimate or derivative? Similarly as regards the redemption. Whether or not Christ was really divine, in as far as a belief in His divinity has been a necessary cause of the moral and religious evolution which has resulted from His life on earth, it has equally and so far 'saved His people from their sins'; that is, of course, it has saved them from their own sense of sin as an abiding curse. Whether or not He has effected any corresponding change of an objective character in the ontological sphere, again depends on the 'question of questions' just stated. _Reasonableness of the Doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity._ Pure agnostics and those who search for God in Christianity should have nothing to do with metaphysical theology. _That_ is a department of enquiry which, _ex hypothesi_, is transcendental, and is only to be considered after Christianity has been accepted. The doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity seemed to me most absurd in my agnostic days. But now, as a _pure_ agnostic, I see in them no rational difficulty at all. As to the Trinity, the plurality of persons is necessarily implied in the companion doctrine of the Incarnation. So that at best there is here but one difficulty, since, duality being postulated in the doctrine of the Incarnation, there is no further difficulty for pure agnosticism in the doctrine of plurality. Now at one time it seemed to me impossible that any proposition, verbally intelligible as such, could be more violently absurd than that of the doctrine [of the Incarnation]. Now I see that this standpoint is wholly irrational, due only to the blindness of reason itself promoted by [purely] scientific habits of thought. 'But it is opposed to common sense.' No doubt, utterly so; but so it _ought_ to be if true. Common sense is merely a [rough] register of common experience; but the Incarnation, if it ever took place, whatever else it may have been, at all events cannot have been a common event. 'But it is derogatory to God to become man.' How do you know? Besides, Christ was not an ordinary man. Both negative criticism and the historical effects of His life prove this; while, if we for a moment adopt the Christian point of view for the sake of argument, the whole _raison d'être_ of mankind is bound up in Him. Lastly, there are considerations _per contra_, rendering an incarnation antecedently probable[75]. On antecedent grounds there _must_ be mysteries unintelligible to reason as to the nature of God, &c., supposing a revelation to be made at all. Therefore their occurrence in Christianity _is_ no proper objection to Christianity. Why, again, stumble _a priori_ over the doctrine of the Trinity--especially as man himself is a triune being, of body, mind (i.e. reason), and spirit (i.e. moral, aesthetic, religious faculties)? The unquestionable union of these no less unquestionably distinct orders of being in man is known immediately as a fact of experience, but is as unintelligible by any process of logic or reason as is the alleged triunity of God. _Adam, the Fall, the Origin of Evil_. These, all taken together as Christian dogmas, are undoubtedly hard hit by the scientific proof of evolution (but are the _only_ dogmas which can fairly be said to be so), and, as constituting the logical basis of the whole plan, they certainly do appear at first sight necessarily to involve in their destruction that of the entire superstructure. But the question is whether, after all, they have been destroyed for a pure agnostic. In other words, whether my principles are not as applicable in turning the flank of infidelity here as everywhere else. First, as regards Adam and Eve, observe, to begin with, that long before Darwin the story of man in Paradise was recognized by thoughtful theologians as allegorical. Indeed, read with unprejudiced eyes, the first chapters of Genesis ought always to have been seen to be a poem as distinguished from a history: nor could it ever have been mistaken for a history, but for preconceived ideas on the matter of inspiration. But to pure agnostics there should be no such preconceived ideas; so that nowadays no presumption should be raised against it as inspired, merely because it has been proved not to be a history--and this even though we cannot see of what it is allegorical. For, supposing it inspired, it has certainly done good service in the past and can do so likewise in the present, by giving an allegorical, though not a literal, starting-point for the Divine Plan of Redemption. _The evidence of Natural and Revealed Religion compared_. It is often said that evolution of organic forms gives as good evidence of design as would their special creation, inasmuch as all the facts of adaptation, in which the evidence consists, are there in either case. But here it is overlooked that the very question at issue is thus begged. The question is, Are these facts of adaptation _per se_ sufficient evidence of design as their cause? But if it be allowed, as it must be, that under hypothesis of evolution by natural causes the facts of adaptation belong to the same category as all the other facts of nature, no more special argument for design can be founded on these facts than on any others in nature. So that the facts of adaptation, like all other facts, are only available as arguments for design when it is assumed that all natural causation is of a mental character: which assumption merely begs the question of design anywhere. Or, in other words, on the supposition of their having been due to natural causes, the facts of adaptation are only then available as _per se_ good evidence of design, when it has already been assumed that, _qua_ due to natural causes, they are due to design. Natural religion resembles Revealed religion in this. Supposing both divine, both have been arranged so that, as far as reason can lead us, there is only enough evidence of design to arouse serious attention to the question of it. In other words, as regards both, the attitude of pure reason ought to be that of pure agnosticism. (Observe that the inadequacy of teleology, or design in nature, to prove Theism has been expressly recognized by all the more intellectual Christians of all ages, although such recognition has become more general since Darwin. On this point I may refer to Pascal especially[76], and many other authors.) This is another striking analogy between Nature and Revelation, supposing both to have emanated from the same author--i.e. quite as much so as identity of developmental method in both. _Supposing the hypothesis of design in both to be true_, it follows that in both this hypothesis can be alike verified only by the organ of immediate intuition--i.e. that other mode of human apprehension which is supplementary to the rational. Here again we note the analogy. And if a man has this supplementary mode of apprehending the highest truth (by hypothesis such), it will be his duty to exercise his spiritual eyesight in searching for God in nature as in revelation, when (still on our present hypothesis that 'God is, and is the rewarder of them who seek Him diligently') he will find that his subjective evidence of God in Nature and in Revelation will mutually corroborate one another--so yielding additional evidence to his reason. The teleology of Revelation supplements that of Nature, and so, to the spiritually minded man, they logically and mutually corroborate one another. Paley's writings form an excellent illustration of the identity of the teleological argument from Nature and from Revelation; though a very imperfect illustration of the latter taken by itself, inasmuch as he treats only of the New Testament, and even of that very partially--ignoring all that went before Christ, and much of what happened after the apostles. Yet Paley himself does not seem to have observed the similarity of the argument, as developed in his _Natural Theology_ and _Evidences of Christianity_ respectively. But no one has developed the argument better in both cases. His great defect was in not perceiving that this teleological argument, _per se_, is not in either case enough to convince, but only to arouse serious attention. Paley everywhere represents that such an appeal to reason alone ought to be sufficient. He fails to see that if it were, there could be no room for faith. In other words, he fails to recognize the spiritual organ in man, and its complementary object, grace in God. So far he fails to be a Christian. And, whether Theism and Christianity be true or false, it is certain that the teleological argument alone _ought_ to result, not in conviction, but in agnosticism. The antecedent improbability against a miracle being wrought by a man without a moral object is apt to be confused with that of its being done by God with an adequate moral object. The former is immeasurably great; the latter is only equal to that of the theory of Theism--i.e. _nil_. _Christian Demonology_[77]. It will be said, 'However you may seek to explain away _a priori_ objections to miracles on _a priori_ grounds, there remains the fact that Christ accepted the current superstition in regard to diabolic possession. Now the devils damn the doctrine. For you must choose the horn of your dilemma, either the current theory was true or it was not. If you say true, you must allow that the same theory is true for all similar stages of culture, [but not for the later stages,] and therefore that the most successful exorcist is Science, albeit Science works not by faith in the theory, but by rejection of it. Observe, the diseases are so well described by the record, that there is no possibility of mistaking them. Hence you must suppose that they were due to devils in A.D. 30, and to nervous disorders in A.D. 1894. On the other hand, if you choose the other horn, you must accept either the hypothesis of the ignorance or that of the mendacity of Christ.' The answer is, that either hypothesis may be accepted by Christianity. For the sake of argument we may exclude the question whether the acceptance of the devil theory by Christ was really historical, or merely attributed to Him by His biographers after His death. If Christ knew that the facts were not due to devils, He may also have known it was best to fall in with current theory, rather than to puzzle the people with a lecture on pathology. If He did not know, why should He, if He had previously 'emptied Himself' of omniscience? In either case, if He had denied the current theory, He would have been giving evidence of scientific knowledge or of scientific intuition beyond the culture of His time, and this, as in countless other cases, was not in accordance with His method, which, whether we suppose it divine or human, has nowhere proved His divine mission by foreknowledge of natural science. The particular question of Christ and demonology is but part of a much larger one. _Darwin's Difficulty_[78]. The answer to Darwin's objection about so small a proportion of mankind having ever heard of Christ, is manifold:-- 1. Supposing Christianity true, it is the highest and final revelation; i.e. the scheme of revelation has been developmental. Therefore, it follows from the very method that the larger proportion of mankind should never hear of Christ, i.e. all who live before His advent. 2. But these were not left 'without witness.' They all had their religion and their moral sense, each at its appropriate stage of development. Therefore 'the times of ignorance God winked at' (Acts xvii. 30). 3. Moreover these men were not devoid of benefit from Christ, because it is represented that He died for all men--i.e. but for Him [i.e. apart from the knowledge of what was to come] God would not have 'winked at the times of ignorance.' The efficacy of atonement is represented as transcendental, and not dependent on the accident of hearing about the Atoner. 4. It is remarkable that of all men Darwin should have been worsted by this fallacious argument. For it has received its death-blow from the theory of evolution: i.e. if it be true that evolution has been the method of natural causation, and if it be true that the method of natural causation is due to a Divinity, then it follows that the lateness of Christ's appearance on earth must have been designed. For it is certain that He could not have appeared at any earlier date without having violated the method of evolution. Therefore, on the theory of Theism, He _ought_ to have appeared when He did--i.e. at the earliest possible moment in history. So as to the suitability of the moment of Christ's appearance in other respects. Even secular historians are agreed as to the suitability of the combinations, and deduce the success of His system of morals and religion from this fact. So with students of comparative religions. FOOTNOTES: [59] [I.e. a theory which comes at first as a shock to the current teaching of Christianity, but is finally seen to be in no antagonism to its necessary principles.--ED.] [60] [I.e. the battle in regard to the Christian texts or documents.--ED.] [61] See Gore's _Bampton Lectures_, pp. 74 ff. [62] Matt, xxviii. 17; Acts ii. 13. [63] _Three Essays on Theism_, p. 255. [64] [Note unfinished.--ED.] [65] [George Romanes began to make a collection of N.T. texts bearing on the subject.--ED.] [66] See Pascal, _Pensées_, p. 245. [67] [The notes on this subject were often too fragmentary for publication.--ED.] [68] Ps. li. [69] _Pensées_, pp. 91-93. [70] See _Nineteenth Century_, May 1887. [71] [The essay mentioned above should be read in explanation of this expression. George Romanes' meaning would be more accurately expressed, I think, had he said: 'The ideal of Christian character holds in prominence the elements which we regard as characteristically feminine, e.g. development of affections, readiness of trust, love of service, readiness to suffer, &c.'--ED.] [72] See _Analogy_, part i. ch. 7; part ii. ch. 3, 4, &c. [73] See Conclusion of _Darwin and After Darwin_, part I. [74] I should somewhere show how much better a treatise Butler might have written had he known about evolution as the general law of nature. [75] See Gore's _Bampton Lectures_, lect. ii. [76] _Pensées_, pp. 205 ff. [77] [Romanes' line of argument in this note seems to me impossible to maintain. The emphasis which Jesus Christ lays on diabolic agency is so great that, if it is not a reality, He must be regarded either as seriously misled about realities which concern the spiritual life, or else as seriously misleading others. And in neither case could He be even the perfect Prophet. I think I am justified in explaining my disagreement with Romanes' argument at this point particularly.--ED.] [78] [There is nothing in Darwin's _writings_ which seems to me to justify Romanes in attributing this difficulty to him specially. But he knew Darwin so intimately and reverenced him so profoundly that he is not likely to have been in error on the subject.--ED.] +Concluding Note by the Editor:--+ The intellectual attitude towards Christianity expressed in these notes may be described as--(1) 'pure agnosticism' in the region of the scientific 'reason,' coupled with (2) a vivid recognition of the spiritual necessity of faith and of the legitimacy and value of its intuitions; (3) a perception of the positive strength of the historical and spiritual evidences of Christianity. George Romanes came to recognize, as in these written notes so also in conversation, that it was 'reasonable to be a Christian believer' before the activity or habit of faith had been recovered. 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It is hoped that the Series, while primarily intended for those who are already face to face with the duties and problems of the ministerial office, may be of interest and assistance also to others who are considering the question of entering into Holy Orders. THIRD IMPRESSION. +THE PERSONAL LIFE OF THE CLERGY+. By the EDITOR. 'It is a short book, but it covers a wide, field. Every line of it tells, and it is excellent reading. Not the least valuable part of the book are the extremely apt and striking quotations from various writers of eminence, which are placed in the form of notes at the end of the chapters. It is emphatically a book for both clergy and laity to buy and study.'--_Church Times_. 'We are grateful for a little book which will be of service to many priests, young and old. We need more priests, and such a book may well increase their number by explaining the nature of the life to which a vocation to Holy Orders calls men; but we need still more that priests should realise the life to which they are called and pledged; and this they can hardly fail to do if they listen to Mr. Robinson's prudent and tender counsels.'--_Church Quarterly Review_. SECOND EDITION. +PATRISTIC STUDY+. By the Rev. H.B. SWETE, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. 'The whole of the work which this little volume contains is most admirably done. Sufficient is told about the personal history of the Fathers to make the study of their writings profitable.' --_Church Quarterly Review_. 'This is an admirable little guide-book to wide study by one who well knows how to guide. It is sound and learned, and crammed full of information, yet pleasant in style and easy to understand.' --_Pall Mall Gazette_. SECOND IMPRESSION. +THE MINISTRY OF CONVERSION+. By the Rev. A.J. MASON, D.D., Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Canon of Canterbury. 'It will be found most valuable and interesting.'--_Guardian_. 'Canon Mason has given a manual that should be carefully studied by all, whether clergy or laity, who have in any way to share in the "Ministry of Conversion" by preaching, by parochial organisation, or by personal influence.'--_Scottish Guardian._ THIRD IMPRESSION. +FOREIGN MISSIONS+. By the Right Rev. H.H. MONTGOMERY, D.D., formerly Bishop of Tasmania, Secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. 'Bishop Montgomery's admirable little book.... Into a limited compass he has compressed the very kind of information which gives one an adequate impression of the spirit which pervades a religion, of what is its strength and weakness, what its relation to Christianity, what, the side upon which it must be approached.' _Church Quarterly Review_. THIRD IMPRESSION. +THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS+. By the Very Rev. J. ARMITAGE ROBINSON, D.D., Dean of Westminster. 'Nothing could be more desirable than that the Anglican clergy should be equipped with knowledge of the kind to which this little volume will introduce them, and should regard the questions with which Biblical study abounds in the candid spirit, and with the breadth of view which they see here exemplified.'--_Spectator_. 'The little book on the Gospels, which the new Dean of Westminster has recently published, is one to be warmly commended alike to clergy and laity. Any intelligent person who takes the trouble to work through this little volume of 150 pages will be rewarded by gaining from it as clear a view of the synoptic problem as is possible without prolonged and independent study of the sources.'--_The Pilot_. +A CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC+. By the Very Rev. WILFORD L. ROBBINS, Dean of the General Theological Seminary, New York; Author of _An Essay toward Faith_. 'We commend this handbook with confidence as a helpful guide to those clergy and teachers who have thoughtful doubters to deal with, and who wish to build safely if they build at all.'--_Church of Ireland Gazette._ +PASTORAL VISITATION+. By the Rev. H.E. SAVAGE, M.A., Vicar of South Shields, and Hon. Canon of Durham. 'This is an excellent book.'--_Spectator_. +AUTHORITY IN THE CHURCH+. By the Very Rev. T.B. STRONG, D.D., Dean of Christ Church. 'This is a valuable and timely book, small in bulk, but weighty both in style and substance.... The Dean's essay is an admirable one, and is well calculated to clear men's minds in regard to questions of very far-reaching importance. Its calm tone, and its clear and penetrating thought, are alike characteristic of the author, and give a peculiar distinction to everything he writes.'--_Guardian_. +THE STUDY OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY+. By the Right Rev. W.E. COLLINS, D.D., Bishop of Gibraltar. 'A book which displays the master-mind on every page, and has what many master-minds lack, a sober, practical, common-sense strain about it, which is hardly ever found in those who set out to instruct us in Church History, or Canon Law, or Catholic use.' --_Church Bells_. +LAY WORK AND THE OFFICE OF READER+. By the Right Rev. HUYSHE YEATMAN-BIGGS, D.D., Lord Bishop of Southwark. +RELIGION AND SCIENCE+. By the Rev. P.N. WAGGETT, M.A., of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, Cowley. +CHURCH MUSIC+. By A. MADELEY RICHARDSON, Mus. Doc., Organist of St. Saviour's Collegiate Church, Southwark. +INTEMPERANCE+. By the Right Rev. H.H. PEREIRA, D.D., Bishop of Croydon. [_In preparation_. +SCHOOLS+. By the Rev. W. FOXLEY NORRIS, M.A., Rector of Barnsley, and Hon. Canon of Wakefield. [_In preparation_. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. LONDON, NEW YORK, AND BOMBAY 
9199	----	MONISM AS CONNECTING RELIGION AND SCIENCE _A MAN OF SCIENCE_ By Ernst Haeckel Translated From The German By J. Gilchrist, M.A., B.Sc., Ph.D. PREFACE The following lecture on Monism is an informal address delivered extemporaneously on October 9, 1892, at Altenburg, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the "Naturforschende Gesellschaft des Osterlandes." The immediate occasion of it was a previous address delivered by Professor Schlesinger of Vienna on "Scientific Articles of Faith." This philosophical discourse contained, with reference to the weightiest and most important problems of scientific investigation, much that was indisputable; but it also contained some assertions that challenged immediate rejoinder and a statement of the opposite view. As I had for thirty years been very closely occupied with these problems of the philosophy of nature, and had set forth my convictions with respect to them in a number of writings, a wish was expressed by several members of the Congress that on this occasion I should give a summary account of these. It was in compliance with this wish that the following "Scientific Confession of Faith" was uttered. The substance of it, as written from recollection on the day after its delivery, first appeared in the _Altenburger Zeitung of_ 19th October 1892. This was reproduced, with one or two philosophical additions, in the November number _of_ the _Freie Bühne für den Entwickelungskampf der Zeit_ (Berlin). In its present form the Altenburg address is considerably enlarged, and some parts have been more fully worked out. In the notes (p. 9 I) several burning questions of the present day _have_ been dealt with from the monistic point of view. The purpose of this candid confession of monistic faith is twofold. First, it is my desire to give expression to that rational view of the world which is being forced upon us with such logical rigour by the modern advancements in our knowledge of nature as a unity, a view in reality held by almost all unprejudiced and thinking men of science, although but few have the courage (or the need) to declare it openly. Secondly, I would fain establish thereby a bond between religion and science, and thus contribute to the adjustment of the antithesis so needlessly maintained between these, the two highest spheres in which the mind of man can exercise itself; in monism the ethical demands of the soul are satisfied, as well as the logical necessities of the understanding. The rising flood of pamphlets and books published on this subject, demonstrates that such a natural union of faith and knowledge, such a reasonable reconciliation of the feelings and the reason, are daily becoming a more pressing necessity for the educated classes. In North America (in Chicago), there has been published for several years a weekly journal devoted to this purpose: _The Open Court: A Weekly Journal devoted to the Work of Conciliating Religion and Science_. Its worthy editor, Dr. Paul Carus (author of _The Soul of Man_, 1891), devotes also to the same task a quarterly journal under the title _The Monist_. It is in the highest degree desirable that so worthy endeavours to draw together the empirical and speculative views of nature, realism and idealism, should have more attention and encouragement than they have hitherto received, for it is only through a natural union of the two that we can approach a realisation of the highest aim of mental activity-the blending of religion and science in monism. ERNST HAECKEL. JENA, _October_ 31, 1892 MONISM A society for investigating nature and ascertaining truth cannot celebrate its commemoration day more fittingly than by a discussion of its highest general problems. It must be regarded, therefore, with satisfaction that the speaker on such an august occasion as this--the seventy-fifth anniversary of your Society--has selected as the subject of his address a theme of the highest general importance. Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more the custom on such occasions, and even at the general meetings of the great "Association of German Naturalists and Physicians," to take the subject of address from a narrow and specialised territory of restricted interest. If this growing custom is to be excused on the grounds of increasing division of labour and of diverging specialisation in all departments of work, it becomes all the more necessary that, on such anniversaries as the present, the attention of the audience should be invited to larger matters of common interest. Such a topic, supreme in its importance, is that concerning "Scientific Articles of Faith," upon which Professor Schlesinger has already expounded his views.[1] I am glad to be able to agree with him in many important points, but as to others I should like to express some hesitation, and to ask consideration for some views which do not coincide with his. At the outset, I am entirely at one with him as to that unifying conception of nature as a whole which we designate in a single word as Monism. By this we unambiguously express our conviction that there lives "one spirit in all things," and that the whole cognisable world is constituted, and has been developed, in accordance with one common fundamental law. We emphasise by it, in particular, the essential unity of inorganic and organic nature, the latter having been evolved from the former only at a relatively late period.[2] We cannot draw a sharp line of distinction between these two great divisions of nature, any more than we can recognise an absolute distinction between the animal and the vegetable kingdom, or between the lower animals and man. Similarly, we regard the whole of human knowledge as a structural unity; in this sphere we refuse to accept the distinction usually drawn between the natural and the spiritual. The latter is only a part of the former (or _vice versa_); both are one. Our monistic view of the world belongs, therefore, to that group of philosophical systems which from other points of view have been designated also as mechanical or as pantheistic. However differently expressed in the philosophical systems of an Empedocles or a Lucretius, a Spinoza or a Giordano Bruno, a Lamarck or a David Strauss, the fundamental thought common to them all is ever that of the oneness of the cosmos, of the indissoluble connection between energy and matter, between mind and embodiment--or, as we may also say, between God and the world--to which Goethe, Germany's greatest poet and thinker, has given poetical expression in his _Faust_ and in the wonderful series of poems entitled _Gott und Welt_. That we may rightly appreciate what this Monism is, let us now, from a philosophico-historical point of view cast a comprehensive glance over the development in time of man's knowledge of nature. A long series of varied conceptions and stages of human culture here passes before our mental vision. At the lowest stage, the rude--we may say animal--phase of prehistoric primitive man, is the "ape-man," who, in the course of the tertiary period, has only to a limited degree raised himself above his immediate pithecoid ancestors, the anthropoid apes. Next come successive stages of the lowest and simplest kind of culture, such as only the rudest of still existing primitive peoples enable us in some measure to conceive. These "savages" are succeeded by peoples of a low civilisation, and from these again, by a long series of intermediate steps, we rise little by little to the more highly civilised nations. To these alone--of the twelve races of mankind only to the Mediterranean and Mongolian--are we indebted for what is usually called "universal history." This last, extending over somewhat less than six thousand years, represents a period of infinitesimal duration in the long millions of years of the organic world's development. Neither of the primitive men we have spoken of, nor of those who immediately succeeded them, can we rightly predicate any knowledge of nature. The rude primitive child of nature at this lowest stage of development is as yet far from being the restless _Ursachenthier_ (cause-seeking animal) of Lichtenberg; his demand for causes has not yet risen above that of apes and dogs; his curiosity has not yet mounted to pure desire of knowledge. If we must speak of "reason" in connection with pithecoid primitive man, it can only be in the same sense as that in which we use the expression with reference to those other most highly developed Mammals, and the same remark holds true of the first beginnings of religion.[3] It is indeed still not infrequently the custom to deny absolutely to the lower animals reason and religion. An unprejudiced comparison, however, convinces us that this is wrong. The slow and gradual process towards completeness which, in the course of thousands of years, civilised life has been working in the soul of man, has not passed away without leaving some trace on the soul of our highest domestic animals also (above all, of dogs and horses). Constant association with man, and the steady influence of his training, have gradually, and by heredity, developed in their brain higher associations of ideas and a more perfect judgment. Drill has become instinct, an undeniable example of "the transmission of acquired characters."[4] Comparative psychology teaches us to recognise a very long series of successive steps in the development of soul in the animal kingdom. But it is only in the most highly developed vertebrates-birds and mammals--that we discern the first beginnings of reason, the first traces of religious and ethical conduct. In them we find not only the social virtues common to all the higher socially-living animals,--neighbourly love, friendship, fidelity, self-sacrifice, etc.,--but also consciousness, sense of duty, and conscience; in relation to man their lord, the same obedience, the same submissiveness, and the same craving for protection, which primitive man in his turn shows towards his "gods." But in him, as in them, there is yet wanting that higher degree of consciousness and of reason, which strives after a _knowledge_ of the surrounding world, and which marks the first beginning of philosophy or "wisdom." This last is the much later attainment of civilised races; slowly and gradually has it been built up from lower religious conceptions. At all stages of primitive religion and early philosophy, man is as yet far removed from monistic ideas. In searching out the causes of phenomena, and exercising his understanding thereon, he is in the first instance prone in every case to regard personal beings--in fact, anthropomorphic deities--as the agents at work. In thunder and lightning, in storm and earthquake, in the circling of sun and moon, in every striking meteorological and geological occurrence, he sees the direct activity of a personal god or spirit, who is usually thought of in a more or less anthropomorphic way. Gods are distinguished as good and bad, friendly and hostile, preserving and destroying, angels and devils. This becomes true in a yet higher degree when the advancing pursuit of knowledge begins to take into consideration the more complicated phenomena of organic life also, the appearance and disappearance of plants and animals, the life and death of man. The constitution of organised life, so suggestive as it is of art and purpose, leads one at once to compare it with the deliberately designed works of man, and thus the vague conception of a personal god becomes transformed into that of a creator working according to plan. As we know, this conception of organic creation as the artistic work of an anthropomorphic god--of a divine mechanic--generally maintained its ground almost everywhere, down even to the middle of our own century, in spite of the fact that eminent thinkers had demonstrated its untenability more than two thousand years ago. The last noteworthy scientist to defend and apply this idea was Louis Agassiz (died 1873). His notable _Essay on Classification_, 1857, developed that theosophy with logical vigour, and thereby reduced it to an absurdity.[5] All these older religious and teleological conceptions, as well as the philosophical systems (such as those of Plato and of the Church fathers) which sprang from them, are antimonistic; they stand in direct antithesis to our monistic philosophy of nature. Most of them are dualistic, regarding God and the world, creator and creature, spirit and matter, as two completely separated substances. We find this express dualism also in most of the purer church-religions, especially in the three most important forms of monotheism which the three most renowned prophets of the eastern Mediterranean--Moses, Christ, and Mohammed--founded. But soon, in a number of impure varieties of these three religions, and yet more in the lower forms of paganism, the place of this dualism is taken by a philosophical pluralism, and over against the good and world-sustaining deity (Osiris, Ormuzd, Vishnu), there is placed a wicked and destroying god (Typhon, Ahriman, Siva). Numerous demi-gods or saints, good and bad, sons and daughters of the gods, are associated with these two chief deities, and take part with them in the administration and government of the cosmos. In all these dualistic and pluralistic systems the fundamental idea is that of anthropomorphism, or the humanising of God; man himself, as godlike (or directly descended from God), occupies a special position in the world, and is separated by a great gulf from the rest of nature. Conjoined with this, for the most part, is the anthropocentric idea, the conviction that man is the central point of the universe, the last and highest final cause of creation, and that the rest of nature was created merely for the purpose of serving man. In the Middle Ages there was associated at the same time with this last conception the geocentric idea, according to which the earth as the abode of man was taken for the fixed middle point of the universe, round which sun, moon, and stars revolve. As Copernicus (1543) gave the death-blow to the geocentric dogma, so did Darwin (1859) to the anthropocentric one closely associated with it.[6] A broad historical and critical comparison of religious and philosophical systems, as a whole, leads as a main result to the conclusion that every great advance in the direction of profounder knowledge has meant a breaking away from the traditional dualism (or pluralism) and an approach to monism. Ever more clearly are we compelled by reflection to recognise that God is not to be placed over against the material world as an external being, but must be placed as a "divine power" or "moving spirit" within the cosmos itself. Ever clearer does it become that all the wonderful phenomena of nature around us, organic as well as inorganic, are only various products of one and the same original force, various combinations of one and the same primitive matter. Ever more irresistibly is it borne in upon us that even the human soul is but an insignificant part of the all-embracing "world-soul"; just as the human body is only a small individual fraction of the great organised physical world. The great general principles of theoretical physics and chemistry are now in a position to afford to this unifying conception of nature an exact, to a certain extent, indeed, a mathematical confirmation. In establishing the law of the "conservation of energy," Robert Mayer and Helmholtz showed that the energy of the universe is a constant unchangeable magnitude; if any energy whatever seems to vanish or to come anew into play, this is only due to the transformation of one form of energy into another. In the same way Lavoisier's law of the "conservation of matter" shows us that the material of the cosmos is a constant unchangeable magnitude; if any body seems to vanish (as, for example, by burning), or to come anew into being (as, for example, by crystallisation), this also is simply due to change of form or of combination. Both these great laws--in physics, the fundamental law of the conservation of energy, and in chemistry, of the conservation of matter--may be brought under one philosophical conception as the law of the conservation of substance; for, according to our monistic conception, energy and matter are inseparable, being only different inalienable manifestations of one single universal being-substance.[7] In a certain sense we can regard the conception of "animated atoms" as essentially partaking of the nature of this pure monism--a very ancient idea which more than two thousand years ago Empedocles enunciated in his doctrine of "hate and love of the elements." Modern physics and chemistry have indeed in the main accepted the atomic hypothesis first enunciated by Democritus, in so far as they regard all bodies as built up of atoms, and reduce all changes to movements of these minutest-discrete particles. All these changes, however, in organic as well as in inorganic nature, become truly intelligible to us only if we conceive these atoms not as dead masses, but as living elementary particles endowed with the power of attraction and repulsion. "Pleasure" and "pain," and "love" and "hate," as predicates of atoms are only other expressions for this power of attraction and repulsion. Although, however, monism is on the one hand for us an indispensable and fundamental conception in science, and although, on the other hand, it strives to carry back all phenomena, without exception, to the mechanism of the atom, we must nevertheless still admit that as yet we are by no means in a position to form any satisfactory conception of the exact nature of these atoms, and their relation to the general space-filling, universal ether. Chemistry long ago succeeded in reducing all the various natural substances to combinations of a relatively small number of elements; and the most recent advances of that science have now made it in the highest degree probable that these elements or the (as yet) irreducible primitive materials are themselves in turn only different combinations of a varying number of atoms of one single original element. But in all this we have not as yet obtained any further light as to the real nature of these original atoms or their primal energies. A number of the acutest thinkers have, so far in vain, endeavoured to grapple more closely with this fundamental problem of the philosophy of nature, and to determine more exactly the nature of atoms as well as their relation to the space-filling ether. And the idea steadily gains ground that no such thing as empty space exists, and that everywhere the primitive atoms of ponderable matter or heavy "mass" are separated from each other by the homogeneous ether which extends throughout all space. This extremely light and attenuated (if not imponderable) ether causes, by its vibrations, all the phenomena of light and heat, electricity and magnetism. We can imagine it either as a continuous substance occupying the space between the mass-atoms, or as composed of separate particles; in the latter case we might perhaps attribute to these ether-atoms an inherent power of repulsion in contrast to the immanent attracting power of the heavy mass-atoms, and the whole mechanism of cosmic life would then be reducible to the attraction of the latter and the repulsion of the former. We might also place the "vibrations of the cosmic ether" alongside of the "operation of space in general," in the sense in which these words are used by Professor Schlesinger. At any rate, theoretical physics has in recent years made an advance of fundamental importance and widest reach in our knowledge of nature, in that it has come nearer to a knowledge of this cosmic ether, and has forced the question of its essence, its structure, and its motion into the foreground of monistic nature-philosophy. Only a few years ago the cosmic ether was to the majority of scientists an imponderable something, of which, strictly speaking, absolutely nothing was known, and which could be admitted provisionally only as a precarious working hypothesis. All this was changed when Heinrich Hertz (1888) demonstrated the nature of electrical energy, by his beautiful experiments establishing the conjecture of Faraday that light and heat, electricity and magnetism, are closely related phenomena of one single set of forces, and depend on transverse vibrations of the ether. Light itself--whatever else it be--is always and everywhere an electrical phenomenon. The ether itself is no longer hypothetical; its existence can at any moment be demonstrated by electrical and optical experiment. We know the length of the light wave and the electric wave. Indeed, some physicists believe that they can even determine approximately the density of ether. If by means of the airpump we remove from a bell-jar the atmospheric air (except an insignificant residue), the quantity of light within it remains unchanged; it is the vibrating ether we see.[9] These advances in our knowledge of the ether mean an immense gain for monistic philosophy. For they do away with the erroneous ideas of empty space and _actio in distans_; the whole of infinite space, in so far as it is not occupied by mass-atoms ("ponderable matter"), is filled by the ether. Our ideas of space and time are quite other than those taught by Kant a hundred years ago; the "critical" system of the great Koenigsberg philosopher exhibits in this respect, as well as in his teleological view of the organic world and in his metaphysics, dogmatic weaknesses of the most pronounced kind.[8] And religion itself, in its reasonable forms, can take over the ether theory as an article of faith, bringing into contradistinction the mobile cosmic ether as creating divinity, and the inert heavy mass as material of creation.[11] From this successfully scaled height of monistic knowledge there open up before our joyously quickened spirit of research and discovery new and surprising prospects, which promise to bring us still nearer to the solution of the one great riddle of the world. What is the relation of this light mobile cosmic ether to the heavy inert "mass," to the ponderable matter which we chemically investigate, and which we can only think of as constituted of atoms? Our modern analytical chemistry remains for the present at a standstill, in presence of some seventy irreducible elements, or so-called primary substances. But the reciprocal relation of these elements, the affinity of their combinations, their spectroscopic behaviour, and so forth, make it in the highest degree probable that they are all merely historical products of an evolutionary process, having their origin in various dispositions and combinations of a varying number of original atoms. To these original or mass-atoms--the ultimate discrete particles of inert "ponderable matter"--we can with more or less probability ascribe a number of eternal and inalienable fundamental attributes; they are probably everywhere in space, of like magnitude and constitution. Although possessing a definite finite magnitude, they are, by virtue of their very nature, indivisible. Their shape we may take to be spherical; they are inert (in the physical sense), unchangeable, inelastic, and impenetrable by the ether. Apart from the attribute of inertia, the most important characteristic of these ultimate atoms is their chemical affinity--their tendency to apply themselves to one another and combine into small groups in an orderly fashion. These fixed groups (fixed, that is to say, under the present physical conditions of existence of the earth) of primitive atoms are the atoms of the elements--the well-known "indivisible" atoms of chemistry. The qualitative, and, so far as our present empirical knowledge goes, unchangeable distinctions of our chemical elements are therefore solely conditioned by the varying number and disposition of the similar primitive atoms of which they are composed. Thus, for example, the atom of carbon (the real "maker" of the organic world) is in all probability a tetrahedron made up of four primitive atoms. After Mendelejeff and Lothar Meyer had discovered (1869) the "periodic law" of the chemical elements, and founded on it a "natural system" of these elements, this important advance in theoretical chemistry was subsequently put to profitable use by Gustav Wendt from an evolutionary point of view. He endeavoured to show that the various elements are products of evolution or of historically originating combinations of seven primary elements, and that these last again are historical products of one single primitive element This hypothetical original matter had been already designated by Crookes, in his _Genesis of the Elements_, as primary material or protyl.[10] The empirical proof of the existence of this original matter lying at the foundation of all ponderable material is perhaps only a question of time. Its discovery would probably realise the alchemists' hope of being able to produce gold and silver artificially out of other elements. But then arises the other great question: "How is this primary mass related to the cosmic ether? Do these two original substances stand in fundamental and eternal antithesis to one another? Or was it the mobile ether itself, perhaps, that originally engendered the heavy mass?"[11] In answer to this great and fundamental question, various physical hypotheses have been put forward. But, like the various atomic theories of chemistry, they have not as yet been clearly established, and the same appears to me to be the case also with the ingenious hypothesis which the lecturer has unfolded to us with reference to the Influence of Space. As he himself rightly says, in all these endeavours after a philosophy of nature we are still, for the present, dealing with "scientific articles of faith," concerning the validity of which different persons, according to their subjective judgment and stage of culture, may have widely divergent views. I believe that the solution of these fundamental questions still lies as yet beyond the limits of our knowledge of nature, and that we shall be obliged, for a long time yet to come, to content ourselves with an "Ignoramus"--if not even with an "Ignorabimus." The case is very different, however, if we turn from these atomistic element hypotheses and direct our attention to the historical conditions of the evolution of the world, as these have been revealed to us by the magnificent advances in our knowledge of nature which have been made within the last thirty years. An immense new territory has here been opened up to us in the realms of knowledge--a territory in which a series of most important problems, formerly held to be insoluble, has been answered in the most surprising manner.[12] Among the triumphs of the human mind the modern doctrine of evolution takes a foremost place. Guessed at by Goethe a hundred years ago, but not expressed in definite form until formulated by Lamarck in the beginning of the present century, it was at last, thirty years ago, decisively established by Charles Darwin, his theory of selection filling up the gap which Lamarck in his doctrine of the reciprocal influence of heredity and adaptation had left open. We now definitely know that the organic world on our earth has been as continuously developed, "in accordance with eternal iron laws," as Lyell had in 1830 shown to be the case for the inorganic frame of the earth itself; we know that the innumerable varieties of animals and plants which during the course of millions of years have peopled our planet are all simply branches of one single genealogical tree; we know that the human race itself forms only one of the newest, highest, and most perfect offshoots from the race of the Vertebrates. An unbroken series of natural events, following an orderly course of evolution according to fixed laws, now leads the reflecting human spirit through long aeons from a primeval chaos to the present "order of the cosmos." At the outset there is nothing in infinite space but mobile elastic ether, and innumerable similar separate particles--the primitive atoms--scattered throughout it in the form of dust; perhaps these are themselves originally "points of condensation" of the vibrating "substance," the remainder of which constitutes the ether. The atoms of our elements arise from the grouping together in definite numbers of the primitive atoms or atoms of mass. As the Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis has it, the rotating heavenly bodies separate themselves out from that vibrating primeval cloud. A single unit among many thousands of celestial bodies is our sun, with its planets, which originated by being centrifugally thrown off from it. Our insignificant earth is a single planet of our solar system; its entire individual life is a product of the sunlight. After the glowing sphere of the earth has cooled down to a certain degree, drops of fluid water precipitate themselves on the hardened crust of its surface--the first preliminary condition of organic life. Carbon atoms begin their organism-engendering activity, and unite with the other elements into plasma-combinations capable of growing. One small plasma-group oversteps the limits of cohesion and individual growth; it falls asunder into two similar halves. With this first moneron begins organic life and its most distinctive function, heredity. In the homogeneous plasma of the monera, a firmer central nucleus is separated from a softer outer mass; through this differentiation of nucleus and protoplasm arises the first organic cell. For a long time our planet was inhabited solely by such Protista or single-celled primitive creatures. From coenobia or social unions of these afterwards arose the lowest histones, multicellular plants and animals. By the sure help of the three great empirical "records of creation," palaeontology, comparative anatomy, and ontogeny, the history of descent now leads us on step by step from the oldest Metazoa, the simplest pluricellular animals, up to man.[13] At the lowest root of the common genealogy of the Metazoa stand the Gastraeadae and Spongidae; their whole body consists, in the simplest case, solely of a round digestive sac, the thin wall of which is formed by two layers of cells--the two primitive germinal layers. A corresponding germinal condition, the two-layered gastrula, occurs transitorily in the embryological history of all the other Metazoa, from the lowest Cnidaria and Vermes up to man. From the common stock of the Helminthes, or simple worms, there develop as independent main branches the four separate stems of the Molluscs, Star-fishes, Arthropods, and Vertebrates. It is only these last whose bodily structure and development in all essential respects coincide with those of man. A long series of lower aquatic Vertebrates (lancelets, lampreys, fishes) precedes the lungbreathing Amphibians, which appear for the first time in the Carboniferous period. The Amphibians are followed in the Permian period by the first Amniota, the oldest reptiles; from these develop later, in the Triassic period, the Birds on the one hand, and the Mammals on the other. That man in his whole bodily frame is a true mammal, becomes obvious as soon as the natural unity of this highest class of animals is recognised. The simplest comparison must have convinced the unprejudiced observer of the close constitutional relationship between man and the ape, which of all the Mammals comes nearest him. Comparative anatomy, with its deeper vision, showed that all differences in bodily structure between man and the Anthropoidea (gorilla, chimpanzee, orang) are less important than the corresponding differences in bodily structure between these anthropoid apes and the lower apes. The phylogenetic significance of this fact, first emphasised by Huxley, is quite clear. The great question of the origin of the human race, or of "man's place in Nature," the "question of all questions," was then scientifically answered: "Man is descended from a series of ape-like Mammals." The descent of man (anthropogeny) discloses the long series of vertebrate ancestors, which preceded the late origin of this, its most highly developed offshoot.[13] The incalculable importance of the light cast over the whole field of human knowledge of nature by these results is patent to everyone. They are destined every year increasingly to manifest their transforming influence in all departments of knowledge, the more the conviction of their irrefragable truth forces its way. And it is only the ignorant or narrow-minded who can now doubt their truth. If, indeed, here and there, one of the older naturalists still disputes, the foundation on which they rest, or demands proofs which are wanting (as happened a few weeks ago on the part of a famous German pathologist at the Anthropological Congress in Moscow), he only shows by this that he has remained a stranger to the stupendous advances of recent biology, and above all of anthropogeny. The whole literature of modern biology, the whole of our present zoology and botany, morphology and physiology, anthropology and psychology, are pervaded and fertilised by the theory of descent.[14] Just as the natural doctrine of development on a monistic basis has cleared up and elucidated the whole field of natural phenomena in their physical aspect, it has also modified that of the phenomena of mind, which is inseparably connected with the other. Our human body has been built up slowly and by degrees from a long series of vertebrate ancestors, and this is also true of our soul; as a function of our brain it has gradually been developed in reciprocal action and re-action with this its bodily organ. What we briefly designate as the "human soul," is only the sum of our feeling, willing, and thinking--the sum of those physiological functions whose elementary organs are constituted by the microscopic ganglion-cells of our brain. Comparative anatomy and ontogeny show us how the wonderful structure of this last, the organ of our human soul, has in the course of millions of years been gradually built up from the brains of higher and lower vertebrates. Comparative psychology teaches us how, hand in hand therewith, the soul itself, as function of the brain, has been developed. The last-named science teaches us also that a primitive form of soul-activity is already present even in the lowest animals, the single-celled primitive animals, Infusoria and Rhizopoda. Every scientific man who has long observed the life-activity of these single-celled Protista, is positively convinced that they also possess a soul; that this "cell-soul" also consists of a sum of sensations, perceptions, and volitions; the feeling, thinking, and willing of our human soul differ from these only in degree. In like manner there is present in the egg-cell (as potential energy) a hereditary cell-soul, out of which man, like every other animal, is developed.[15] The first task of a truly scientific psychology will therefore be, not, as hitherto, idle speculation about an independent immaterial soul-existence and its puzzling temporary connection with the animal body, but rather the comparative investigation of the organs of the soul and the experimental examination of their psychical functions. For scientific psychology is a part of physiology, the doctrine of the functions and the life-activities of organisms. The psychology and psychiatry of the future, like the physiology and pathology of to-day, must take the form of a cellular study, and in the first instance investigate the soul-functions of the cells. Max Verworn, in his fine _Psycho-physiological Protistastudies_, has lately shown us what important disclosures such a cellular psychology can make, even in dealing with the lowest grades of organic life, in the single-celled Protista (especially Rhizopoda and Infusoria). These same main divisions of soul-activity, which are to be met with in the single-celled organism,--the phenomena of irritability, sensation, and motion,--can be shown to exist in all multicellular organisms as functions of the cells of which their bodies are composed. In the lowest Metazoa, the invertebrate sponges and polyps, there are, just as in plants, no special soul-organs developed, and all the cells of the body participate more or less in the "soul-life." It is only in the higher animals that the soul-life is found to be localised and connected with special organs. As a consequence of division of labour, there have here been developed various sense-organs as organs of specific sensibility, muscles as organs of motion and volition, nerve-centres or ganglia as central co-ordinating and regulating organs. In the most highly developed families of the animal kingdom, these last come more and more into the foreground as independent soul-organs. In correspondence with the extraordinarily complicated structure of their central nervous system (the brain with its wonderful complex of ganglion-cells and nerve-fibres), the many-sided activity of such animals attains a wonderful degree of development. It is only in these most highly-developed groups of the animal kingdom that we can with certainty establish the existence of those most perfect operations of the central nervous system, which we designate as consciousness. As we know, it is precisely this highest brain-function that still continues to be looked upon as a completely enigmatical phenomenon, and as the best proof for the immaterial existence of an immortal soul. It is usual at the same time to appeal to Du Bois-Reymond's well-known "Ignorabimus address on the Boundaries of Natural Knowledge" (1872). It was by a peculiar irony of fate that the famous lecturer of the Berlin Academy of Science, in this much-discussed address of twenty years ago, should be representing consciousness as an incomprehensible marvel, and as presenting an insuperable barrier to further advances of knowledge, at the very moment that David Friedrich Strauss, the greatest theologian of our century, was showing it to be the opposite. The clear-sighted author of _The Old Faith and the New_ had already clearly perceived that the soul-activities of man, and therefore also his consciousness, as functions of the central nervous system, all spring from a common source, and, from a monistic point of view, come under the same category. The "exact" Berlin physiologist shut this knowledge out from his mind, and, with a short-sightedness almost inconceivable, placed this special neurological question alongside of the one great "world-riddle," the fundamental question of substance, the general question of the connection between matter and energy.[16] As I long ago pointed out, these two great questions are not two separate "world-riddles." The neurological problem of consciousness is only a special case of the all comprehending cosmological problem, the question of substance. "If we understood the nature of matter and energy, we should also understand how the substance underlying them can under certain conditions feel, desire, and think." Consciousness, like feeling and willing, among the higher animals is a mechanical work of the ganglion-cells, and as such must be carried back to chemical and physical events in the plasma of these. And by the employment of the genetic and comparative method we reach the conviction that consciousness, and consequently reason also, is not a brain-function exclusively peculiar to man; it occurs also in many of the higher animals, not in Vertebrates only, but even in Articulates. Only in degree, through a higher stage of cultivation, does the consciousness of man differ from that of the more perfect lower animals, and the same is true of all other activities of the human soul. By these and other results of comparative physiology our whole psychology is placed on a new and firm monistic basis. The older mystical conception of the soul, as we find it amongst primitive peoples, but also in the systems of the dualistic philosophers of to-day, is refuted by them. According to these systems, the soul of man (and of the higher animals) is a separate entity, which inhabits and rules the body only during its individual life, but leaves it at death. The widespread "piano-theory" (_Claviertheorie_) compares the "immortal soul" to a pianist who executes an interesting piece--the individual life--on the instrument of the mortal body, but at death withdraws into the other world. This "immortal soul" is usually represented as an immaterial being; but in fact it is really thought of as quite material, only as a finer invisible being, aerial or gaseous, or as resembling the mobile, light, and thin substance of the ether, as conceived by modern physics. The same is true also for most of the conceptions which rude primitive peoples and the uneducated classes among the civilised races have, for thousands of years, cherished as to spectral "ghosts" and "gods." Serious reflection on the matter shows that here--as in modern spiritualism--it is not with really immaterial beings, but with gaseous, invisible bodies, that we are dealing. And further, we are utterly incapable of imagining a truly immaterial being. As Goethe clearly said, "matter can never exist or act apart from spirit, neither can spirit apart from matter." As regards immortality, it is well known that this important idea is interpreted and applied in a great variety of ways. It is often made a reproach against our Monism that it altogether denies immortality; this, however, is erroneous. Rather do we hold it, in a strictly scientific sense, as an indispensable fundamental conception of our monistic philosophy of nature. Immortality in a scientific sense is conservation of substance, therefore the same as conservation of energy as defined by physics, or conservation of matter as defined by chemistry. The cosmos as a whole is immortal. It is just as inconceivable that any of the atoms of our brain or of the energies of our spirit should vanish out of the world, as that any other particle of matter or energy could do so. At our death there disappears only the individual form in which the nerve-substance was fashioned, and the personal "soul" which represented the work performed by this. The complicated chemical combinations of that nervous mass pass over into other combinations by decomposition, and the kinetic energy produced by them is transformed into other forms of motion. "Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. O that that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw." On the other hand, the conception of a personal immortality cannot be maintained. If this idea is still widely held, the fact is to be explained by the physical law of inertia; for the property of persistence in a state of rest exercises its influence in the region of the ganglion-cells of the brain, as well as in all other natural bodies. Traditional ideas handed down through many generations are maintained with the greatest tenacity by the human brain, especially if, in early youth, they have been instilled into the childish understanding as indisputable dogmas. Such hereditary articles of faith take root all the more firmly, the further they are removed from a rational knowledge of nature, and enveloped in the mysterious mantle of mythological poesy. In the case of the dogma of personal immortality, there comes into play also the interest which man fancies himself to have in his individual future existence after death, and the vain hope that in a blessed world to come there is treasured up for him a compensation for the disappointed hopes and the many sorrows of his earthly life. It is often asserted by the numerous advocates of personal immortality that this dogma is an innate one, common to all rational men, and that it is taught in all the more perfect forms of religion. But this is not correct. Neither Buddhism nor the religion of Moses originally contained the dogma of personal immortality, and just as little did the majority of educated people of classical antiquity believe it, at any rate during the highest period of Greek culture. The monistic philosophy of that time, which, five hundred years before our era, had reached speculative heights so remarkable, knew nothing of any such dogma. It was through Plato and Christ that it received its further elaboration, until, in the Middle Ages, it was so universally accepted, that only now and then did some bold thinker dare openly to gainsay it. The idea that a conviction of personal immortality has a specially ennobling influence on the moral nature of man, is not confirmed by the gruesome history of mediaeval morals, and as little by the psychology of primitive peoples.[17] If any antiquated school of purely speculative psychology still continues to uphold this irrational dogma, the fact can only be regarded as a deplorable anachronism. Sixty years ago such a doctrine was excusable, for then nothing was accurately known either of the finer structure of the brain, or of the physiological functions of its separate parts; its elementary organs, the microscopic ganglion-cells, were almost unknown, as was also the cell-soul of the Protista; very imperfect ideas were held as to ontogenetic development, and as to phylogenetic there were none at all. This has all been completely changed in the course of the last half-century. Modern physiology has already to a great extent demonstrated the localisation of the various activities of mind, and their connection with definite parts of the brain; psychiatry has shown that those psychical processes are disturbed or destroyed if these parts of the brain become diseased or degenerate. Histology has revealed to us the extremely complicated structure and arrangement of the ganglion-cells. But, for the settlement of this momentous question, the discoveries of the last ten years with regard to the more minute occurrences in the process of fertilisation are of decisive importance. We now know that this process essentially consists simply in the copulation or fusion of two microscopical cells, the female egg-cell and the male sperm-cell. The fusion of the nuclei of these two sexual cells indicates with the utmost precision the exact moment at which the new human individual arises. The newly-formed parent-cell, or fertilised egg-cell, contains potentially, in their rudiments, all the bodily and mental characteristics which the child inherits from both parents. It is clearly against reason to assume an eternal and unending life for an individual phenomenon whose beginning in time we can determine to a hair's breadth, by direct observation. Judging of human spiritual life from a rational point of view, we can as little think of our individual soul as separated from our brain, as we can conceive the voluntary motion of our arm apart from the contraction of its muscles, or the circulation of our blood apart from the action of the heart. Against this strictly physiological conception, as against our whole monistic view of the relations of energy and matter, of soul and substance, the reproach of "materialism" continues to be raised. I have repeatedly before now pointed out that this is an ambiguous party word which conveys absolutely nothing; its apparent opposite, "spiritualism," could quite easily be substituted for it. Every critical thinker, who is familiar with the history of philosophy, knows that, as systems change, such words assume the most varied meanings, In addition to this, the word "materialism" has the disadvantage of being liable to continual confusion between its theoretical and practical meanings, which two are totally distinct. Our conception of Monism, or the unity-philosophy, on the contrary, is clear and unambiguous; for it an immaterial living spirit is just as unthinkable as a dead, spiritless material; the two are inseparably combined in every atom. The opposed conception of dualism (or even pluralism in other anti-monistic systems) regards spirit and material, energy and matter, as two essentially different substances; but not a single empirical proof can be adduced to show that either of these can exist or become perceptible to us by itself alone. In thus shortly indicating the far-reaching psychological consequences of the monistic doctrine of evolution, I trench at the same time upon a most important field, to which our lecturer in his address has more than once alluded--that of religion and the belief in God connected therewith. I am at one with him in the conviction that the formation of clear philosophical conceptions upon these fundamental matters of belief is of the highest importance, and I would therefore crave the permission of this assembly briefly to lay before it on this occasion a frank confession of faith. This monistic confession has the greater claim to an unprejudiced consideration, in that it is shared, I am firmly convinced, by at least nine-tenths of the men of science now living; indeed, I believe, by all men of science in whom the following four conditions are realised: (1) Sufficient acquaintance with the various departments of natural science, and in particular with the modern doctrine of evolution; (2) Sufficient acuteness and clearness of judgment to draw, by induction and deduction, the necessary logical consequences that flow from such empirical knowledge; (3) Sufficient moral courage to maintain the monistic knowledge, so gained, against the attacks of hostile dualistic and pluralistic systems; and (4) Sufficient strength of mind to free himself, by sound, independent reasoning, from dominant religious prejudices, and especially from those irrational dogmas which have been firmly lodged in our minds from earliest youth as indisputable revelations. If from this unprejudiced point of view of the thinker, we compare the numerous religions of the various races of mankind, we shall be compelled, in the first instance, to put aside as untenable all those conceptions which stand in irreconcilable contradiction to those principles of our empirical knowledge of nature which are now clearly discerned and established by critical reasoning. We can thus at once set aside all mythological stories, all "miracles," and so-called "revelations," for which it is claimed that they have come to us in some supernatural way. All such mystical teachings are irrational, inasmuch as they are confirmed by no actual experience, but, on the contrary, are irreconcilable with the known facts which have been confirmed to us by a rational investigation of nature. This is true alike of Christian and Mosaic, of Mohammedan and Indian legends. If now we thus lay aside the whole mass of mystical dogmas and transcendental revelations, there is left behind, as the precious and priceless kernel of true religion, the purified ethic that rests on rational anthropology.[18] Among the numerous and varied forms of religion which, in the course of the past ten thousand years and more, have been evolved from the crudest prehistoric beginnings, the foremost rank undoubtedly belongs to those two forms which still continue to be the most widely accepted among civilised races--the older Buddhism and the younger Christianity. The two have very many features in common, alike in their mythology and in their ethics; indeed, a considerable part of Christianity has come directly from Indian Buddhism, just as another part is drawn from the Mosaic and Platonic systems. But, looked at from the point of view of our present stage of culture, the ethic of Christianity appears to us much more perfect and pure than that of any other religion. We must, it is true, hasten to add that it is exactly the weightiest and noblest principles of Christian ethic--brotherly love, fidelity to duty, love of truth, obedience to law--that are by no means peculiar to the Christian faith as such, but are of much older origin. Comparative psychology proves that these ethical principles were more or less recognised and practised by much older civilised races thousands of years before Christ. Love remains the supreme moral law of rational religion, the love, that is to say, that holds the balance between egoism and altruism, between self-love and love of others. "Do to others as you would they should do to you." This natural and highest command had been taught and followed thousands of years before Christ said: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." In the human family this maxim has always been accepted as self-evident; as ethical instinct it was an inheritance derived from our animal ancestors. It had already found a place among the herds of Apes and other social Mammals; in a similar manner, but with a wider scope, it was already present in the most primitive communities and among the hordes of the least advanced savages. Brotherly love--mutual support, succour, protection, and the like---had already made its appearance among gregarious animals as a social duty; for without it the continued existence of such societies is impossible. Although at a later period, in the case of man, these moral foundations of society came to be much more highly developed, their oldest prehistoric source, as Darwin has shown, is to be sought in the social instincts of animals. Among the higher Vertebrates (dogs, horses, elephants, etc.), as among the higher Articulates (ants, bees, termites, etc.) also, the development of social relations and duties is the indispensable condition of their living together in orderly societies. Such societies have for man also been the most important instrument of intellectual and moral progress. Beyond all doubt the present degree of human culture owes in great part its perfection to the propagation of the Christian system of morals and its ennobling influence, although the great value of this has been impaired, often in the most deplorable manner, by its association with untenable myths and so-called "revelations." How little these last contribute to the perfection of the first, can be seen from the acknowledged historical fact that it is just orthodoxy and the hierarchical system based on it (especially that of the Papacy) that has least of all striven to fulfil the precepts of Christian morality; the more loudly they preach it in theory, the less do they themselves fulfil its commands in practice. It is, moreover, to be borne in mind that another and very considerable portion of our modern culture and morality has been developed quite independently of Christianity, mainly through continual study of the highly-elaborated mental treasures of classical antiquity. The thorough study of Greek and Roman classics has at least contributed much more to it than that of the Christian Church fathers. To this we must now add, in our own century (rightly called the "century of the natural sciences"), the immense advance in the higher culture which we owe to a purified knowledge of nature and to the monistic philosophy founded upon this. That these must also exercise an advancing and ennobling influence cannot be doubted, and has already been shown by many eminent authors (Spencer, Carneri, and others) in the course of the last thirty years.[18] Against this monistic ethic founded on a rational knowledge of nature, it has been objected that it is fitted to undermine existing civilisation, and especially that it encourages the subversive aims of social democracy. This reproach is wholly unjustified. The application of philosophical principles to the practical conditions of life, and in particular to social and political questions, can be made in the most various ways. Political "free-thinking," so called, has nothing whatever to do with the "freedom of thought" of our monistic natural religion. Moreover, I am convinced that the rational morality of monistic religion is in no way contrary to the good and truly valuable elements of the Christian ethic, but is destined in conjunction with these to promote the true progress of humanity in the future. With Christian mythology and the special form of theistic belief associated with it the case is different. In so far as that belief involves the notion of a "personal God," it has been rendered quite untenable by the recent advances of monistic science. But, more than this, it was shown more than two thousand years ago, by eminent exponents of the monistic philosophy, that the conception of a personal God, creator and ruler of the world, does not give the slightest help toward a truly rational view of the world. For even if the question of "creation," in the ordinary and trivial sense of the term, be answered by referring it to the miraculous agency of a creator working according to plan apart from the world, there immediately arises upon that the new inquiry: "Whence comes this personal God? What was He doing before creation? And whence did He derive the material for it?" and such like questions. The antiquated conception of an anthropomorphic personal God is destined, before the present century is ended, to drop out of currency throughout the entire domain of truly scientific philosophy; the corresponding conception of a personal devil--even as late as last century connected with the former and very generally accepted--has already been given up once for all by all persons of education. Let it be noted, however, in passing, that the amphitheism which believes in God and devil alike is much more compatible with a rational explanation of the world than pure monotheism. The purest form of this is perhaps the amphitheism of the Zend religion of Persia, which Zoroaster (or Zarathustra, the "Golden Star") founded two thousand years before Christ. Here Ormuzd, the god of light and goodness, stands everywhere in conflict with Ahriman, the god of darkness and evil. The continual conflict between a good and an evil principle was personified in a similar manner in the mythology of many other amphitheistic religions: in the old Egyptian, the good Osiris was at war with the evil Typhon; in the old Indian, Vishnu the sustainer with Siva the destroyer, and so forth. If we really must retain the conception of a personal God as the key to our view of the universe, then this amphitheism can explain the sorrows and defects of this world very simply, as being the work of the evil principle or devil. Pure monotheism, on the contrary, as represented in the religions of Moses and Mohammed in their original form, has no rational explanation of these to offer. If their "one God" is really the absolutely good, perfect being they proclaim, then the world which he has created must also be perfect. An organic world so imperfect and full of sorrows as exists on this earth he could not possibly have contrived. These considerations gain in force when we advance to the deeper knowledge of nature acquired by modern biology; here it was Darwin, especially, who thirty-three years ago opened our eyes by his doctrine of the struggle for existence, and his theory of selection founded upon it. We now know that the whole of organic nature on our planet exists only by a relentless war of all against all. Thousands of animals and plants must daily perish in every part of the earth, in order that a few chosen individuals may continue to subsist and to enjoy life. But even the existence of these favoured few is a continual conflict with threatening dangers of every kind. Thousands of hopeful germs perish uselessly every minute. The raging war of interests in human society is only a feeble picture of the unceasing and terrible war of existence which reigns throughout the whole of the living world. The beautiful dream of God's goodness and wisdom in nature, to which as children we listened so devoutly fifty years ago, no longer finds credit now--at least among educated people who think. It has disappeared before our deeper acquaintance with the mutual relations of organisms, the advancement of oecology and sociology, and our knowledge of parasite life and pathology. All these sad but insuperable facts--truly the dark side of nature--are made intelligible to religious faith by amphitheism; they are the "works of the devil," who opposes and disturbs the perfect moral order in the world of the "good God." For pure monotheism which knows only one God, one perfect highest being, they remain unintelligible. If, with a monotheistic creed, any one still continues to talk of the moral order of the world, he in so doing shuts his eyes to the undeniable facts of history, both natural and civil. In view of these considerations, it is hard to understand how the large majority of the so-called educated classes can persevere, on the one hand, in declaring belief in a personal God to be an indispensable principle of religion, and, on the other hand, in at the same time rejecting the belief in a personal devil as an exploded superstition of the Middle Ages. This inconsistency on the part of educated Christians is all the more incomprehensible and censurable, inasmuch as both dogmas in equal degree form an integral part of the Christian creed. The personal devil, as "Satan," "the Tempter," "the Destroyer," and so forth, undeniably plays a most important part in the New Testament, though not met with in the earlier portions of the Old. Our great reformer, Martin Luther himself, who "sent to the devil" so many antiquated dogmas, was unable to rid himself of the conviction of the real existence and personal enmity of Beelzebub; we have only to think of the historical ink-spot at Wartburg! Moreover, our Christian art, in many thousands of paintings and other representations, has exhibited Satan in corporeal form just as realistically as it has the three "Divine Persons," about whose "hypostatical union" human reason has for eighteen hundred years been tormenting itself in vain. The deep impression made by such concrete representations, a million times repeated, especially on childish understandings, is usually under-estimated as to its tremendous influence; to it certainly is in large measure to be attributed the fact that irrational myths of such a kind, under the mask of "doctrines of faith," continue to hold their ground in spite of all protests of reason. Liberal-minded Christian theologians have, it is true, often sought to eliminate the personal devil from Christian teaching, representing him as merely the personification of falsehood, the spirit of evil. But with equal right we must in that case substitute for a personal God the personified idea of truth, the Spirit of Goodness. To such a representation no objection can be made; rather do we recognise in it a bridge connecting the dim wonderland of religious poesy with the luminous realms of clear scientific knowledge. The monistic idea of God, which alone is compatible with our present knowledge of nature, recognises the divine spirit in all things. It can never recognise in God a "personal being," or, in other words, an individual of limited extension in space, or even of human form. God is everywhere. As Giordano Bruno has it: "There is one spirit in all things, and nobody is so small that it does not contain a part of the divine substance whereby it is animated." Every atom is thus animated, and so is the ether; we might, therefore, represent God as the infinite sum of all natural forces, the sum of all atomic forces and all ether-vibrations. It comes virtually to the same thing when (as was done here by a speaker on a former occasion) God is defined as "the supreme law of the universe," and the latter is represented as the "working of universal space." In this most important article of belief it matters not as to the name but as to the unity of the underlying idea; the unity of God and the world; of spirit and nature. On the other hand, "homotheism," the anthropomorphic representation of God, degrades this loftiest cosmic idea to that of a "gaseous vertebrate."[19] Of the various systems of pantheism which for long have given expression more or less clearly to the monistic conception of God, the most perfect is certainly that of Spinoza. To this system, as is well known, Goethe also paid the tribute of his highest admiration and approval. Of other, eminent men who have given a similar pantheistic form to their natural religion, we shall here mention only two of the greatest poets and students of man, Shakespeare and Lessing; two of the greatest German rulers, Frederick II. of Hohenstaufen and Frederick II. of Hohenzollern; two of the greatest scientists, Laplace and Darwin. In adding our own pantheistic confession to that of these great and untrammelled spirits, let it only be noted further, that it has received an empirical confirmation, never before imagined, through the wonderful advances of natural knowledge within the last thirty years. The charge of atheism which still continues to be levelled against our pantheism, and against the monism which lies at its root, no longer finds a response among the really educated classes of the present day. It is true that not so very long ago the German Imperial Chancellor, in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies, found it in him to put forward such an alternative as this: "Either the Christian or the atheistic view of the world"; this in the defence of a most objectionable law, designed to hand over our school training, tied hand and foot, to the papal hierarchy. The vast distance which separates the last-named degenerate outgrowth of the Christian religion from pure primitive Christianity is not greater than that which separates those mediaeval alternatives from the cultured religious consciousness of the present day. To one who regards as true exercises of Christian religion the adoration of old clothes and wax dolls, or the thoughtless repetition of masses or rosaries, who believes in wonder-working relics, and purchases pardon for his sins by means of indulgence-money or Peter's pence, we willingly concede the claim to possess the "only saving religion"; but with such fetish-worshippers we will willingly submit to be ranked as "atheists." In like case with the charge of atheism and irreligion are those so often heard against monism, that it destroys the poetry of life and fails to satisfy the spiritual wants of human nature; we are told, in particular, that aesthetics--certainly a most important department both in theoretical philosophy and in practical life--is prejudiced by a monistic philosophy. But David Friedrich Strauss, one of our subtlest exponents of aesthetics and also one of our noblest writers, has already refuted such a charge; and shown how, on the contrary, the care for poetry and the cultivation of the beautiful are in the "new faith" called upon to play a still greater part than ever. My present hearers, at once investigators and lovers of nature, do not need to be told that every new insight which we obtain into the secrets of nature at the same time also kindles our souls, affords new material for imagination to work on, and enlarges our perception of the beautiful. To convince ourselves how closely all these noblest spiritual activities of man hang together, how intimately the knowledge of truth is bound up with the love of goodness and veneration of the beautiful, it will be enough to mention a single name, Germany's greatest genius--Wolfgang Goethe. If the perception of the aesthetic significance of our monistic nature-religion, as well as of its ethical value, has hitherto so little pervaded the educated classes, this is due chiefly to the defects of our school training. It is true that in the course of the last few decades an infinite deal has been spoken and written about school reform and the principles of education; but of any real progress there is as yet but little trace. Here also reigns the physical law of inertia; here also--and more especially in German schools--the scholasticism of the Middle Ages exhibits a power of inertia, against which any rational reform of education must laboriously contest every inch of ground. In this important department also, a department on which hangs the weal or woe of future generations, matters will not improve till the monistic doctrine of nature is accepted as the essential and sure foundation. The school of the twentieth century, flourishing anew on this firm ground, shall have to unfold to the rising youth not only the wonderful truths of the evolution of the cosmos, but also the inexhaustible treasures of beauty lying everywhere hidden therein. Whether we marvel at the majesty of the lofty mountains or the magic world of the sea, whether with the telescope we explore the infinitely great wonders of the starry heaven, or with the microscope the yet more surprising wonders of a life infinitely small, everywhere does Divine Nature open up to us an inexhaustible fountain of aesthetic enjoyment. Blind and insensible have the great majority of mankind hitherto wandered through this glorious wonderland of a world; a sickly and unnatural theology has made it repulsive as a "vale of tears." But now, at last, it is given to the mightily advancing human mind to have its eyes opened; it is given to it to show that a true knowledge of nature affords full satisfaction and inexhaustible nourishment not only for its searching understanding, but also for its yearning spirit. Monistic investigation of nature as knowledge of the true, monistic ethic as training for the good, monistic aesthetic as pursuit of the beautiful--these are the three great departments of our monism: by the harmonious and consistent cultivation of these we effect at last the truly beatific union of religion and science, so painfully longed after by so many to-day. The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, these are the three august Divine Ones before which we bow the knee in adoration; in the unforced combination and mutual supplementing of these we gain the pure idea of God.[20] To this "triune" Divine Ideal shall the coming twentieth century build its altars. Ten years ago I was present at the celebration of the third centenary of the university of Würzburg, which forty years ago I had entered as a medical student. The festal address on that occasion was delivered in the university church by the then rector, the distinguished chemist, Johannes Wislicenus. His concluding words were: "God, the Spirit of Goodness and of Truth, grant it." I now add, "and the Spirit of Beauty." It is in this sense that I also, on this commemorative occasion, dedicate to you my best wishes. May the investigation of nature's secrets flourish and prosper in this corner of our Thüringian land also, and may the fruits of knowledge, ripening here in Altenburg, contribute no less to the culture of the spirit and to the advancement of true religion, than those which three hundred and seventy years ago the great reformer, Martin Luther, brought to the light of day in another corner of Thüringen, on the Wartburg at Eisenach. Between Wartburg and Altenburg, on the northern border of Thüringen, lies Weimar, the classical City of the Muses, and, close by it, our national university of Jena. I regard it as a good omen that precisely at this moment a rare celebration should have called together in Weimar the most illustrious patrons of the university of Jena, the defenders of free research and free teaching.[21] In the hope that the defence and promotion of these may still be continued, I conclude my monistic Confession of Faith with the words: "May God, the Spirit of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, be with us." NOTES] [Footnote 1: _Scientific Articles of Faith_. In Professor Schlesinger's address (delivered on 9th October at Altenburg) on this subject he rightly called attention to the limits of knowledge of nature (in Kant's sense of the terms) imposed upon us by the imperfection of our perceptive organs. The gaps which the empirical investigation of nature must thus leave in science, can, however, be filled up by hypotheses, by conjectures of more or less probability. These we cannot indeed for the time establish on a secure basis; and yet we may make use of them in the way of explaining phenomena, in so far as they are not inconsistent with a rational knowledge of nature. Such rational hypotheses are scientific articles of faith, and therefore very different from ecclesiastical articles of faith or religious dogmas, which are either pure fictions (resting on no empirical evidence), or simply irrational (contradicting the law of causality). As instances of rational hypotheses of first-rate importance may be mentioned our belief in the oneness of matter (the building up of the elements from primary atoms), our belief in equivocal generation, our belief in the essential unity of all natural phenomena, as maintained by monism (on which compare my _General Morphology_, _vol_. i. pp. 105, 164, etc., also my _Natural History of Creation_, 8th ed., 1889, pp. 21, 360, 795). As the simpler occurrences of inorganic nature and the more complicated phenomena of organic life are alike reducible to the same natural forces, and as, further, these in their turn have their common foundation in a simple primal principle pervading infinite space, we can regard this last (the cosmic ether) as all-comprehending divinity, and upon this found the thesis: "Belief in God is reconcilable with science." In this pantheistic view, and also in his criticism of a one-sided materialism, I entirely agree with Professor Schlesinger, though unable to concur with him in some of his biological, and especially of his anthropological, conclusions (_cf_. his article on "Facts and Deductions derived from the Action of Universal Space" _Mittheilungen aus dem Osterlande_, Bd. v., Altenburg, 1892).] [Footnote 2: _Unity of Nature_. I consider the fundamental unity of inorganic and organic nature, as well as their genetic relation, to be an essential axiom of monism. I particularly emphasise this "article of faith" here, as there are still scientists of repute who contest it. Not only is the old mystical "vital power" brought back upon the stage again from time to time, but even the "miraculous" origin of organic life out of "dead" inorganic nature is often brought up still against the doctrines of evolution, as an insoluble riddle--as one of Du Bois-Reymond's "seven riddles of the world" (see his _Discourse on Leibnitz_, 1880). The solution of this "transcendent" riddle of the world, and of the allied question of archigony (equivocal generation, in a strictly defined meaning of the term), can only be reached by a critical analysis and unprejudiced comparison of matter, form, and energy in inorganic and organic nature. This I have already done (1866) in the second book of my _General Morphology_ (vol. i. pp. 109-238): "General Researches as to the Nature and First Beginning of Organisms, their Relation to things Inorganic, and their Division into Plants and Animals."] A short résumé of this is contained in Lecture XV. of my _Natural History of Creation_ (8th ed., pp. 340-370). The most serious difficulties which formerly beset the monistic view there given may now be held to have been taken out of the way by recent discoveries concerning the nature of protoplasm, the discovery of the Monera, the more accurate study of the closely-related single-celled Protista, their comparison with the ancestral cell (or fertilised egg-cell), and also by the chemical carbon-theory. (See my "Studies on Monera and other Protista," in the _Jenaische Zeitschrift für Naturwissenschaft_, vols. iv. and v., 1868-1870; also Carl Naegeli, _Mechanisch-physiologische Begründung der Abstammungslehre_, 1884.)] [Footnote 3: _Religion in the Lower Animals_. We cannot fail to recognise in the more highly developed of our domestic animals (especially in dogs, horses, and elephants) some first beginnings of those higher brain-functions which we designate as reason and consciousness, religion and morality; they differ only in degree, not in kind, from the corresponding mental activities of the lowest human races. If, like the dogs, the apes, and especially the anthropoids, had been for thousands of years domesticated and brought up in close relation with civilised man, the similarity of their mental activities to those of man would undoubtedly have been much more striking than it is. The apparently deep gulf which separates man from these most highly-developed mammals "is mainly founded on the fact that in man several conspicuous attributes are united, which in the other animals occur only separately, viz. (1) The higher degree of differentiation of the larynx (speech), (2) brain (mind), and (3) extremities; and (4) the upright posture. It is merely the happy combination of these important animal organs and functions at a higher stage of evolution that raises the majority of mankind so far above all lower animals" (_General Morphology_, 1866, vol. ii. p. 430).] [Footnote 4: _Inheritance of Acquired Characters_. As the controversy on this important question is still unsettled, special attention may here be called to the valuable data for arriving at a decision which are afforded precisely by the development of instincts among the higher animals, and of speech and reason in man. "The inheritance of characters acquired during the life of the individual, is an indispensable axiom of the monistic doctrine of evolution." "Those who, with Weismann and Galton, deny this, entirely exclude thereby the possibility of any formative influence of the outer world upon organic form" (_Anthropogenie_, 4th ed., pp. xxiii., 836; see, further, the works there referred to of Eimer, Weismann, Ray-Lankester, etc.; also Ludwig Wilser's _Die Vererbung der geistigen Eigenschaften_, Heidelberg, 1892).] [Footnote 5: _Theosophical System of Nature_. Of all the modern attempts of dualistic philosophy to establish the knowledge of nature on a theological basis (that of Christian monotheism), the _Essay on Classification_ of Louis Agassiz is by far the most important,--in strictness, indeed, is the only one worthy of mention. (On this see my _Natural History of Creation_, Lect. III., also "Aims and Methods of the Modern Embryology," 1875, _Jena Zeitschr. für Naturw., Bd. x., Supplement_.)] [Footnote 6: _Darwin and Copernicus_. This is the title of an address delivered by Du Bois-Reymond on 25th January 1883, in the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and afterwards published in his _Collected Addresses_ (_vol_. ii. 1887). As the author himself mentions in a note (p. 500) that this gave rise, "most unmeritedly," to great excitement, and called down upon him the violent attacks of the clerical press, I may be allowed to point out here that it contained nothing new, I myself, fifteen years previously, in my lectures on "The Origin and Genealogy of the Human Race," having carried out in detail the comparison between Darwin and Copernicus, and the service rendered by these two heroes in putting an end to the anthropocentric and geocentric views of the world. (See the Third Series in Virchow and Holtzendorff's _Collection of Popular Scientific Lectures_, Nos. 53 and 54, 1868, 4th ed., 1881.) When Du Bois-Reymond says, "For me, Darwin is the Copernicus of the organic world," I am the more pleased to find that he agrees (partly in identical words) with my way of thinking, as he himself, quite unnecessarily, takes up an attitude of opposition towards me. The same is the case with regard to the explanation of innate ideas by Darwinism, which he has attempted in his address (1870) on "Leibnitzian Ideas in Modern Science" (vol. i. of the _Collected Addresses_). Here also he is most agreeably at one with me in what, four years before, I had elaborated in my _General Morphology_ (vol. ii. p. 446), and in my _Natural History of Creation_ (1868). "The laws of heredity and adaptation explain to us how it is that _à priori_ ideas have been developed out of what was originally _à posteriori_ knowledge," etc. I cannot fail to be highly flattered in being able in these last days to greet the renowned orator of the Berlin Academy as a friend and patron of the _Natural History of Creation_, which he had previously designated a bad romance. But his winged words are not on that account to be forgotten, that "the genealogical trees of phylogeny are about as much worth as, in the eyes of the historical critic, are those of the Homeric heroes" (_Darwin versus Galiani_, 1876).] [Footnote 7: _The Law of the Conservation of Substance_. Strictly taken, this belongs also to "scientific articles of faith," and could stand as the first article of our "monistic religion." Physicists of the present day, it is true, generally (and correctly) regard their "law of the conservation of energy" as the immovable foundation of all their science (Robert Mayer, Helmholtz), just as in like manner chemists so regard their fundamental law of the "conservation of matter" (Lavoisier). Sceptical philosophers could, however, raise certain objections to either of these fundamental laws with as much success as against their combination into the single superior law of the "conservation of substance." As a matter of fact, dualistic philosophy still attempts to raise such objections, often under the guise of cautious criticism. The sceptical (in part also purely dogmatic) objections have a semblance of justification only in so far as they relate to the fundamental problem of substance, the primary question as to the connection between matter and energy. While freely recognising the presence of this real "boundary of natural knowledge," we can yet, within this boundary, apply quite universally the "mechanical law of causality." The complicated "phenomena of mind," as they are called (more especially consciousness), fall under the "law of the conservation of substance" just as strictly as do the simpler mechanical processes of nature dealt with in inorganic physics and chemistry. Compare note 16.] [Footnote 8: _Kant and Monism_. As recent German philosophy has in a large measure returned to Kant, and in some cases even deified as "infallible" the great Königsberg philosopher, it may be well here to point out once more that his system of critical philosophy is a mixture of monistic and dualistic ingredients. His critical principles of the theory of knowledge will always remain of fundamental importance: his proof that we are unable to know the essential and profoundest essence of substance, the "thing in itself" (or "the combination of matter and energy"); that our knowledge remains subjective in its nature; that it is conditioned by the organisation of our brain and sensory organs, and can therefore only deal with the phenomena which our experience of the outer world affords us. But within these "limits of human knowledge" a positive monistic knowledge of nature is still possible, in contrast to all dualistic and metaphysical fantasies. One such great fact of monistic knowledge was the mechanical cosmogony of Kant and Laplace, the "Essay on the Constitution and Mechanical Origin of the Universe, according to the Principles of Newton" (1755). In the whole field of our knowledge of inorganic nature, Kant held firmly to the monistic point of view, allowing mechanism alone as the real explanation of the phenomena. In the science of organic nature also, on the other hand, he held monism to be valid indeed, yet insufficient; here he considered it necessary to call in the aid of final as well as of efficient causes. (_Cf_. the fifth lecture of my _Natural History of Creation_ on "The Evolution-Theory of Kant and Lamarck"; also Albrecht Rau's _Kant und die Naturforschung: Eine Prüfung der Resultate des idealistischen Kritikismus durch den realistischen Kosmos_, vol. ii., 1886.) Once thus on the downgrade of dualistic teleology, Kant afterwards arrived at his untenable metaphysical views of "God, Freedom, and Immortality." It is probable that Kant would have escaped these errors if he had had a thorough anatomical and physiological training. The natural sciences were, indeed, at that time truly in their infancy. I am firmly convinced that Kant's system of critical philosophy would have turned out quite otherwise from what it was, and purely monistic, if he had had at his disposal the then unsuspected treasures of empirical natural knowledge which we now possess.] [Footnote 9: _The Ether_. In a thoughtful lecture on the relations between light and electricity at the sixty-second Congress of German naturalists and physicians in Heidelberg in 1889, Heinrich Hertz explains the scope of his brilliant discovery: "Thus the domain of electricity extends over the whole of nature. It comes nearer to ourselves; we learn that we actually possess an electric organ, the eye. Here we are brought face to face with the question as to unmediated _actio in distans_. Is there such a thing? Not far off from this, in another direction, lies the question of the nature of electricity. And immediately connected therewith arises the momentous and primary question as to the nature of the ether, of the properties of the medium that fills all space, its structure, its rest or motion, its infinitude or finitude. It becomes every day more manifest that this question rises above all others, that a knowledge of what the ether is would reveal to us not only the nature of the old 'imponderables,' but also of the old 'matter' itself and its most essential properties, weight and inertia. Modern physics is not far from the question whether everything that exists is not created from the ether." This question is already being answered in the affirmative by some monistic physicists, as, for example, by J. G. Vogt in his most suggestive work on _The Nature of Electricity and Magnetism_, on _The Basis of the Conception of a Single Substance_ (Leipsic, 1891). He regards the atoms of mass (the primal atoms of the kinetic theory of matter) as individualised centres of concentration of the continuous substance that uninterruptedly fills all space; the mobile elastic part of this substance between the atoms, and universally distributed, is--the ether. Georg Helm in Dresden, on the basis of mathematico-physical experiments, had already at an earlier date arrived at the same conclusions; in his treatise on "Influences at a Distance mediated by the Ether" (_Annalen der Physik und Chemie_, 1881, Bd. xiv.), he shows that it requires only the postulate of one particular kind of matter, the ether, to explain influence at a distance and radiation; that is, as regards these phenomena, all the qualities ascribable to matter, except that of motion, are of no account; in other words, that in thinking of the ether we simply require to think of it as "the mobile."] [Footnote 10: _Atoms and Elements_. The evidences, numerous and important, for the composite nature of our empirical elements, have lately been compendiously discussed by Gustav Wendt in his treatise, _Die Entwicklung der Elemente: Entwurf zu einer biologischen Grundlage fur Chemie und Physik_[I] (Berlin, 1891); compare also Wilhelm Freyer's _Die organischen Elemente und ihre Stellung im System_[II] (Wiesbaden, 1891), Victor Meyer's _Chemische Probleme der Gegenwart_[III] (Heidelberg, 1890), and W. Crookes's _Genesis of the Elements_. For the different views as to the nature of the atom, see Philip Spiller on "The Doctrines of Atoms" in _Die Urkraft des Weltalls nach ihrem Wesen und Wirken auf allen Naturgebieten[IV]_ (Berlin, 1886), (1. The philosophy of nature; 2. The doctrine of the ether; 3. The ethical side of the science of nature). For the constitution of the elements out of atoms, see A. Turner, Die Kraft und Masse im Raume[V] (Leipsic, 3rd ed., 1886), (1. On the nature of matter and its relationships; 2. Atomic combinations; 3. The nature of the molecules and their combinations. Theory of crystallisation). Note I "The Development of the Elements: an Essay towards a Biological Basis for Chemistry and Physics." Note II "The Organic Elements and their Place in the System." Note III "Chemical Problems of the Day." Note IV "The Primary Force of the Universe, its Nature and Action." Note V "Force and Matter in Space."] [Footnote 11: _World-Substance_. The relation of the two fundamental constituents of the cosmos, ether and mass, may perhaps be made apparent, in accordance with one out of many hypotheses, by the following, partly provisional, scheme.] World (=Substance=Cosmos).] (Nature as knowable by Man.)] Ether (="spirit") (mobile Mass (="body") (inert or or active substance). passive substance). Property of Vibration. Property of Inertia.] Chief Functions: Electricity, Chief Functions: Gravity, Magnetism, Light, Heat. Inertia, Chemical Affinity. Structure: dynamical; Structure: atomic, discontinuous, continuous, elastic substance, inelastic substance, not composed of atoms (?) composed of atoms (?)] Theosophical: "God the Theosophical: "Created Creator" (always in motion). world" (passively formed).] "Influence of space." "Products of space condensation."] [Footnote 12: _General doctrine of Evolution_. The fundamental importance of the modern doctrine of evolution, and of the monistic philosophy based upon it, is clearly evidenced by the steady increase of its copious literature. I have cited the most important treatises on this subject in the new (eighth) edition of my _Natural History of Creation_ (1889). Compare, specially, Carus Sterne (Ernst Krause), _Werden und Vergehen: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte des Naturganzen in gemeinverständlicher Fassung_[VI] (3rd ed., Berlin, 1886); Hugo Spitzer, _Beiträge zur Descendenztheorie und zur Methodologie der Naturwissenschaft_ (Graz, 1886);[VII] Albrecht Ran, _Ludwig Feuerbach's Philosophie der Naturforschung und die philosophische Kritik der Gegenwart_ (Leipsic, 1882);[VIII] Hermann Wolff, _Kosmos: Die Weltentwicklung nach monitisch-psychologischen Principien auf Grundlage der exacten Naturforschung_ (Leipsic, 1890).[IX] Note VI "Growth and Decay: a Popular History of the Development of the Cosmos." Note VII "Contributions towards a Theory of Descent, and towards a Methodology of the Sciences of Nature." Note VIII "Ludwig Feuerbach's Philosophy of Science, and the Philosophical Criticism of the Present Time." Note IX "Cosmos: The Development of the Cosmos according to Monistic Principles on the Basis of Exact Science."] [Footnote 13: _History of Descent_. The idea and the task of phylogeny, or the history of descent, I first defined in 1866, in the sixth book of my _General Morphology_ (_vol_. ii. pp. 301-422), and the substance of this, as well as an account of its relation to ontogeny or history of development, is set forth in a popular form in Part II. of my _Natural History of Creation_ (8th ed., Berlin, 1889). A special application of both these divisions of the history of evolution to man, is attempted in my _Anthropogenie_ (4th ed.), revised and enlarged, 1891: Part I. History of development. Part II. History of descent.] [Footnote 14: _Opponents of the Doctrine of Descent_. Since the death of Louis Agassiz (1873), Rudolf Virchow is regarded as the sole noteworthy opponent of Darwinism and the theory of descent; he never misses an opportunity (as recently in Moscow) of opposing it as "unproved hypothesis." See as to this my pamphlet, _Freedom in Science and in Teaching_, a reply to Virchow's address at Munich on "Freedom of Science in the Modern State" (Stuttgart, 1878; Eng. tr., 1892).] [Footnote 15: _Cellular Psychology_. See on this my paper on "Cell-souls and Soul-cells," in the _Deutsche Rundschau_ (July 1878), reprinted in Part 1, of _Collected Popular Lectures_; also "The Cell-soul and Cellular Psychology" in my discourse on _Freedom in Science and Teaching_ (Stuttgart, 1878; Eng. tr., 1892, p. 46); _Natural History of Creation_ (8th ed., pp. 444, 777); and _Descent of Man_ (4th ed., pp. 128, 147). See also, Max Verworn, _Psycho-physiologische Protisten-Studien_ (Jena, 1889), and Paul Carus, _The Soul of Man: An Investigation of the Facts of Physiological and Experimental Psychology_ (Chicago, 1891). Among recent attempts to reform psychology on the basis of evolutionary doctrine in a monistic sense, special mention must be made of Georg Heinrich Schneider's _Der thierische Wille: Systematische Darstellung und Erklärung der thierischen Triebe und deren Entstehung, Entwickelung und Verbreitung im Thierreiche als Grundlage zu einer vergleichenden Willenslehre_[X] (Leipsic, 1880). Compare also his supplementary work, entitled _Der menschliche Wille vom Standpunkte der neuen Entwickelungstheorie_[XI] (1882); also the _Psychology of Herbert Spencer_ and the new edition of Wilhelm Wundt's _Menschen-und Thierseele[XII]_ (Leipsic, 1892). Note X "Will in the Lower Animals: a Systematic Exposition and Explanation of Animal Instincts, and their Origin, Development, and Difference in the Animal Kingdom, as Basis of a Comparative Doctrine of Volition." Note XI "The Human Will from the Standpoint of the Modern Theory of Evolution." Note XII "Soul in Man and Brute." [Footnote 16: _Consciousness_. The antiquated view of Du Bois-Reymond (1872)--that human consciousness is an unsoluble "world-riddle," a transcendent phenomenon in essential antithesis to all other natural phenomena--continues to be upheld in numerous writings. It is chiefly on this that the dualistic view of the world founds its assertion, that man is an altogether peculiar being, and that his personal soul is immortal; and this is the reason why the "Leipsic ignorabimus-speech" of Du Bois-Reymond has for twenty years been prized as a defence by all representatives of the mythological view of the world, and extolled as a refutation of "monistic dogma." The closing word of the discourse, "ignorabimus," was translated as a present, and this "ignoramus" taken to mean that "we know nothing at all"; or, even worse, that "we can never come to clearness about anything, and any further talk about the matter is idle." The famous "ignorabimus" address remains certainly an important rhetorical work of art; it is a "beautiful sermon," characterised by its highly-finished form and its surprising variety of philosophico-scientific pictures. It is well known, however, that the majority (and especially women) judge a "beautiful sermon" not according to the value of the thoughts embodied in it, but according to its excellence as an aesthetical entertainment. While Du Bois treats his audience at great length to disquisitions on the wondrous performances of the genius of Laplace, he afterwards glides over, the most important part of his subject in eleven short lines, and makes not the slightest further attempt to solve the main question he has to deal with--as to whether the world is really "doubly incomprehensible." For my own part, on the contrary, I have already repeatedly sought to show that the two limits to our knowledge of nature are one and the same; the fact of consciousness and the relation of consciousness to the brain are to us not less, but neither are they more, puzzling, than the fact of seeing and hearing, than the fact of gravitation, than the connection between matter and energy. Compare my discourse on _Freedom in Science and Teaching_ (1878), pp. 78, 82, etc.] [Footnote 17: _Immortality_. Perhaps in no ecclesiastical article of faith is the gross materialistic conception of Christian dogma so evident as in the cherished doctrine of personal immortality, and that of "the resurrection of the body," associated with it. As to this, Savage, in his excellent work on _Religion in the Light of the Darwinian Doctrine_, has well remarked: "One of the standing accusations of the Church against science is that it is materialistic. On this I would like to point out, in passing, that the whole Church-conception concerning a future life has always been, and still is, the purest materialism. It is represented that the material body is to rise again, and inhabit a material heaven." Compare also Ludwig Buchner, _Das zunkünftige Leben und die moderne Wissenschaft_ (Leipsic, 1889); Lester Ward, "Causes of Belief in Immortality" (_The Forum_, vol. VIII., September 1889); and Paul Carus, _The Soul of Man: an Investigation of the Facts of Physiological and Experimental Psychology_ (Chicago, 1891). Carus aptly points out the analogy between the ancient and the modern ideas with respect to light, and with respect to the soul. Just as formerly the luminous flame was explained by means of a special fiery matter (_phlogiston_), so the thinking soul was explained by the hypothesis of a peculiar gaseous soul-substance. We now know that the light of the flame is a sum of electric vibrations of the ether, and the soul a sum of plasma-movements in the ganglion-cells. As compared with this scientific conception, the doctrine of immortality of scholastic psychology has about the same value as the materialistic conceptions of the Red Indian about a future life in Schiller's "Nadowessian Death-Song."] [Footnote 18: _Monistic Ethic_. All Ethic, the theoretical as well as the practical doctrine of morals, as a "science of law" (_Normwissenschaft_), stands in immediate connection with the view that is taken of the world (_Weltanschauung_), and consequently with religion. This position I regard as exceedingly important, and have recently upheld in a paper on "Ethik und Weltanschauung," in opposition to the "Society for Ethical Culture" lately founded in Berlin, which would teach and promote ethics without reference to any view of the world or to religion. (Compare the new weekly journal, _Die Zukunft_, edited by Maximilian Harden, Berlin, 1892, Nos. V.-VII.). Just as I take the monistic to be the only rational basis for all science, I claim the same also for ethics. On this subject compare especially the ethical writings of Herbert Spencer and those of B. von Carneri--_Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus_ (1871); _Entwickelung und Glückseligkeit_ (1886); and more particularly, the latest of all, _Der moderne Mensch_ (Bonn, 1891); further, Wilhelm Streeker, _Welt und Menschheit_ (Leipsic, 1892); Harald Höffding, _Die Grundlage der humanen Ethik_ (Bonn, 1880); and the recent large work of Wilhelm Wundt, _Ethik, eine Untersuchung der Thatsachen und Gesetze des sittlichen Lebens_ (Stuttgart, 2nd ed., 1892).] [Footnote 19: _Homotheism_. Under the term homotheism (or anthropomorphism) we include all the various forms of religious belief which ascribe to a personal God purely human characteristics. However variously these anthropomorphic ideas may have shaped themselves in dualistic and pluralistic religions, all in common retain the unworthy conception that God (_Theos_) and man (_homo_) are organised similarly and according to the same type (homotype). In the region of poetry such personifications are both pleasing and legitimate. In the region of science they are quite inadmissible; they are doubly objectionable now that we know that only in late Tertiary times was man developed from pithecoid mammals. Every religious dogma which represents God as a "spirit" in human form, degrades Him to a "gaseous vertebrate" (_General Morphology_, 1866; Chap, xxx., God in Nature). The expression "homotheism" is ambiguous and etymologically objectionable, but more practical than the cumbersome word "Anthropotheism."] [Footnote 20: _Monistic Religion_. Amongst the many attempts which have been made in the course of the last twenty years to reform religion in a monistic direction on the basis of advanced knowledge of nature, by far the most important is the epoch-making work of David Friedrich Strauss, entitled _The Old Faith and the New: A Confession_ (11th ed., Bonn, 1881: _Collected Writings_, 1878). Compare M. J. Savage, _Religion in the Light of the Darwinian Doctrine_; John William Draper, _History of the Conflict between Religion and Science_; Carl Friedrich Retzer, _Die naturwissenschaftliche Weltanschauung und ihre Ideale, ein Ersatz fuer das religiöse Dogma_ (Leipsic, 1890); E. Koch, _Natur und Menschengeist im Lichte der Entwickelungslehre_ (Berlin, 1891). For the phylogeny of religion see the interesting work of U. Van Ende, _Histoire Naturelle de la Croyance_ (Paris, 1887).] [Footnote 21: _Freedom in Teaching_. The jubilee of the "Naturforschende Gesellschaft des Osterlandes" was celebrated in Altenburg on October 9, 1892, contemporaneously with the commencement of the brilliant celebration of the golden wedding of the Grand Duke and Duchess in Weimar. As exceptional as the celebration are the characteristics which distinguish this august couple. The Grand Duke Carl Alexander has, during a prosperous reign of forty years, constantly shown himself an illustrious patron of science and art; as Rector Magnificentissimus of our Thüringian university of Jena, he has always afforded his protection to its most sacred palladium--the right of the free investigation and teaching of truth. The Grand Duchess Sophie, the heiress and guardian of the Goethe archives, has in Weimar prepared a fitting home for that precious legacy of our most brilliant literary period, and has anew made accessible to the German nation the ideal treasures of thought of her greatest intellectual hero. The history of culture will never forget the service which the princely couple have thereby rendered to the human mind in its higher development, and at the same time to true religion.] 
34067	----	[Transcriber's note] This is derived from a copy on the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/catholicchurchme008742mbp Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book. Obvious spelling errors have been corrected but "inventive" and inconsistent spelling is left unchanged. Extended quotations and citations are indented. Footnotes have been renumbered to avoid ambiguity, and relocated to the end of the enclosing paragraph. [End Transcriber's note] CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE [FIRST SERIES] SKETCHES OF THE LIVES OF CATHOLIC ECCLESIASTICS WHO WERE AMONG THE GREAT FOUNDERS IN SCIENCE By JAMES J. WALSH, K.ST.G., M.D., PH.D., LITT.D. _Dean and Professor of Medicine and of Nervous Diseases at Fordham University School of Medicine; Professor of Physiological Psychology in the Cathedral College, New York; Member of A.M.A., N.Y. State Med. Soc., A.A.A.S., Life Mem of N.Y. Historical Society._ SECOND EDITION PHILADELPHIA American Ecclesiastical Review The Dolphin Press MCMX. COPYRIGHT. 1906, 1910 American Ecclesiastical Review The Dolphin Press "A sorrow's crown of sorrow." THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER {vii} PREFACE. The following sketches of the lives of clergymen who were great scientists have appeared at various times during the past five years in Catholic magazines. They were written because the materials for them had gradually accumulated during the preparation of various courses of lectures, and it seemed advisable to put them in order in such a way that they might be helpful to others working along similar lines. They all range themselves naturally around the central idea that the submission of the human reason to Christian belief, and of the mind and heart to the authority of the Church, is quite compatible with original thinking of the highest order, and with that absolute freedom of investigation into physical science, which has only too often been said to be quite impossible to churchmen. For this reason friends have suggested that they should be published together in a form in which they would be more easy of consultation than when scattered in different periodicals. It was urged, too, that they would thus also be more effective for the cause which they uphold. This friendly suggestion has been yielded to, whether justifiably or not the reader must decide for himself. There is so great a flood of books, good, bad, and indifferent, ascribing their existence to the advice of well-meaning friends, that we poor authors are evidently not in a position to judge for ourselves of the merit of our works or of the possible interest they may arouse. {viii} I have to thank the editors of the _American Catholic Quarterly Review_, of the _Ave Maria_, and of _The Ecclesiastical Review_ and _The Dolphin_, for their kind permission to republish the articles which appeared originally in their pages. All of them, though substantially remaining the same, have been revised, modified in a number of particulars, and added to very considerably in most cases. The call for a second edition--the third thousand--of this little book is gratifying. Its sale encouraged the preparation of a Second Series of CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE, and now the continued demand suggests a Third Series, which will be issued during the year. Some minor corrections have been made in this edition, but the book is substantially the same. {ix} CONTENTS. PAGE PREFACE ix I. THE SUPPOSED OPPOSITION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION 3 II. COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 15 III. BASIL VALENTINE. FOUNDER OF MODERN CHEMISTRY 45 IV. LINACRE: SCHOLAR, PHYSICIAN, PRIEST 79 V. FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. SCIENTIST, ORIENTALIST, AND COLLECTOR 111 VI. BISHOP STENSEN: ANATOMIST AND FATHER OF GEOLOGY 137 VII. ABBÉ HAÜY: FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY 169 VIII. ABBOT MENDEL: A NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 195 {x} {1} I. THE SUPPOSED OPPOSITION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. {2} {3} I. THE SUPPOSED OPPOSITION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. A common impression prevails that there is serious, if not invincible, opposition between science and religion. This persuasion has been minimized to a great degree in recent years, and yet sufficient of it remains to make a great many people think that, if there is not entire incompatibility between science and religion, there is at least such a diversity of purposes and aims in these two great realms of human thought that those who cultivate one field are not able to appreciate the labors of those who occupy themselves in the other. Indeed, it is usually accepted as a truth that to follow science with assiduity is practically sure to lead to unorthodoxy in religion. This is supposed to be especially true if the acquisition of scientific knowledge is pursued along lines that involve original research and new investigation. Somehow, it is thought that any one who has a mind free enough from the influence of prejudice and tradition to become an original thinker or investigator, is inevitably prone to abandon the old orthodox lines of thought in respect to religion. Like a good many other convictions and persuasions that exist more or less as {4} commonplaces in the subconscious intellects of a great many people, this is not true. Our American humorist said that it is not so much the ignorance of mankind that makes him ridiculous as the knowing so many things "that ain't so." The supposed opposition between science and religion is precisely an apposite type of one of the things "that ain't so." It is so firmly fixed as a rule, however, that many people have accepted it without being quite conscious of the fact that it exists as one of the elements influencing many of their judgments--a very important factor in their apperception. Now, it so happens that a number of prominent original investigators in modern science were not only thoroughly orthodox in their religious beliefs, but were even faithful clergymen and guiding spirits for others in the path of Christianity. The names of those who are included in the present volume is the best proof of this. The series of sketches was written at various times, and yet there was a central thought guiding the selection of the various scientific workers. Most of them lived at about the time when, according to an unfortunate tradition that has been very generally accepted, the Church dominated human thinking so tyrannously as practically to preclude all notion of original investigation in any line of thought, but especially in matters relating to physical science. Most of the men whose lives are sketched lived during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and first half of the {5} seventeenth centuries. All of them were Catholic clergymen of high standing, and none of them suffered anything like persecution for his opinions; all remained faithful adherents of the Church through long lives. It is hoped that this volume, without being in any sense controversial, may tend to throw light on many points that have been the subject of controversy; and by showing how absolutely free these great clergymen-scientists were to pursue their investigations in science, it may serve to demonstrate how utterly unfounded is the prejudice that would declare that the ecclesiastical authorities of these particular centuries were united in their opposition to scientific advance. There is no doubt that at times men have been the subject of persecution because of scientific opinions. In all of these cases, without exception, however--and this is particularly true of such men as Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Michael Servetus--a little investigation of the personal character of the individuals involved in these persecutions will show the victims to have been of that especially irritating class of individuals who so constantly awaken opposition to whatever opinions they may hold by upholding them overstrenuously and inopportunely. They were the kind of men who could say nothing without, to some extent at least, arousing the resentment of those around them who still clung to older ideas. We all know this class of individual very well. {6} In these gentler modern times we may even bewail the fact that there is no such expeditious method of disposing of him as in the olden time. This is not a defence of what was done in their regard, but is a word of explanation that shows how human were the motives at work and how unecclesiastical the procedures, even though church institutions, Protestant and Catholic alike, were used by the offended parties to rid them of obnoxious argumentators. In this matter it must not be forgotten that persecution has been the very common associate of noteworthy advances in science, quite apart from any question of the relations between science and religion. There has scarcely been a single important advance in the history of applied science especially, that has not brought down upon the devoted head of the discoverer, for a time at least, the ill-will of his own generation. Take the case of medicine, for instance. Vesalius was persecuted, but not by the ecclesiastical authorities. The bitter opposition to him and to his work came from his colleagues in medicine, who thought that he was departing from the teaching of Galen, and considered that a cardinal medical heresy not to be forgiven. Harvey, the famous discoverer of the circulation of the blood, lost much of his lucrative medical practice after the publication of his discovery, because his medical contemporaries thought the notion of the heart pumping blood through the arteries to be so foolish that they refused to {7} admit that it could come from a man of common sense, much less from a scientific physician. Nor need it be thought that this spirit of opposition to novelty existed only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Almost in our own time Semmelweis, who first taught the necessity for extreme cleanliness in obstetrical work, met with so much opposition in the introduction of the precautions he considered necessary that he was finally driven insane. His methods reduced the mortality in the great lying-in hospitals of Europe from nearly ten per cent for such cases down to less than one per cent, thus saving many thousands of lives every year. Despite this very natural tendency to decry the value of new discoveries in science and the opposition they aroused, it will be found that the lives of these clergymen scientists show us that they met with much more sympathy in their work than was usually accorded to original investigators in science in other paths in life. This is so different from the ordinary impression in the matter that it seems worth while calling it to particular attention. While we have selected lives of certain of the great leaders in science, we would not wish it to be understood that these are the only ones among the clergymen of the last four centuries who deserve an honorable place high up in the roll of successful scientific investigators. Only those are taken who illustrate activity in sciences that are supposed to have been especially forbidden to clergymen. It {8} has been said over and over again, for instance, that there was distinct ecclesiastical opposition to the study of chemistry. Indeed, many writers have not hesitated to say that there was a bull, or at least a decree, issued by one or more of the popes forbidding the study of chemistry. This, is not only not true, but the very pope who is said to have issued the decree, John XXII, was himself an ardent student of the medical sciences. We still possess several books from him on these subjects, and his decree was meant only to suppress pseudo-science, which, as always, was exploiting the people for its own ends. The fact that a century later the foundation of modern chemical pharmacology was laid by a Benedictine monk, Basil Valentine, shows how unfounded is the idea that the papal decree actually hampered in any way the development of chemical investigation or the advance of chemical science. Owing to the Galileo controversy, astronomy is ordinarily supposed to have been another of the sciences to which it was extremely indiscreet at least, not to say dangerous, for a clergyman to devote himself. The great founder of modern astronomy, however, Copernicus, was not only a clergyman, but one indeed so faithful and ardent that it is said to have been owing to his efforts that the diocese in which he lived did not go over to Lutheranism during his lifetime, as did most of the other dioceses in that part of Germany. The fact that Copernicus's book was involved in the Galileo trial has rendered his {9} position still further misunderstood, but the matter is fully cleared up in the subsequent sketch of his life. As a matter of fact, it is in astronomy particularly that clergymen have always been in the forefront of advance; and it must not be forgotten that it was the Catholic Church that secured the scientific data necessary for the correction of the Julian Calendar, and that it was a pope who proclaimed the advisability of the correction to the world. Down to our own day there have always been very prominent clergymen astronomers. One of the best known names in the history of the astronomy of the nineteenth century is that of Father Piazzi, to whom we owe the discovery of the first of the asteroids. Other well-known names, such as Father Secchi, who was the head of the papal observatory at Rome, and Father Perry, the English Jesuit, might well be mentioned. The papal observatory at Rome has for centuries been doing some of the best work in astronomy accomplished anywhere, although it has always been limited in its means, has had inadequate resources to draw on, and has succeeded in accomplishing what it has done only because of the generous devotion of those attached to it. To go back to the Galileo controversy for a moment, there seems no better answer to the assertion that his trial shows clearly the opposition between religion, or at least ecclesiastical authorities, and science, than to recall, as we have done, in writing the accompanying sketch of the {10} life of Father Kircher, S.J., that just after the trial Roman ecclesiastics very generally were ready to encourage liberally a man who devoted himself to all forms of physical science, who was an original thinker in many of them, who was a great teacher, whose writings did more to disseminate knowledge of advances in science than those of any man of his time, and whose idea of the collection of scientific curiosities into a great museum at Rome (which still bears his name) was one of the fertile germinal suggestions in which modern science was to find seeds for future growth. It is often asserted that geology was one of the sciences that was distinctly opposed by churchmen; yet we shall see that the father of modern geology, one of the greatest anatomists of his time, was not only a convert to Catholicity, but became a clergyman about the time he was writing the little book that laid the foundation of modern geology. We shall see, too, that, far from religion and science clashing in him, he afterwards was made a bishop, in the hope that he should be able to go back to his native land and induce others to become members of that Church wherein he had found peace and happiness. In the modern times biology has been supposed to be the special subject of opposition, or at least fear, on the part of ecclesiastical authorities. It is for this reason that the life of Abbot Mendel has been introduced. While working in {11} his monastery garden in the little town of Brünn in Moravia, this Augustinian monk discovered certain precious laws of heredity that are considered by progressive twentieth-century scientists to be the most important contributions to the difficult problems relating to inheritance in biology that have been made. These constitute the reasons for this little book on Catholic clergymen scientists. It is published, not with any ulterior motives, but simply to impress certain details of truth in the history of science that have been neglected in recent years and, by presenting sympathetic lives of great clergymen scientists, to show that not only is there no essential opposition between science and religion, but on the contrary that the quiet peace of the cloister and of a religious life have often contributed not a little to that precious placidity of mind which seems to be so necessary for the discovery of great, new scientific truths. {12} II. COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES. {13} All the vast and most progressive systems that human wisdom has brought forth as substitutes for religion, have never succeeded in interesting any but the learned, the ambitious, or at most the prosperous and happy. But the great majority of mankind can never come under these categories. The great majority of men are suffering, and suffering from moral as well as physical evils. Man's first bread is grief, and his first want is consolation. Now which of these systems has ever consoled an afflicted heart, or repeopled a lonely one? Which of these teachers has ever shown men how to wipe away a tear? Christianity alone has from the beginning promised to console man in the sorrows incidental to life by purifying the inclinations of his heart, and she alone has kept her promise.--MONTALEMBERT, Introduction to _Life of St. Elizabeth_. {14} [Illustration: NICOLAO COPERNICO] {15} II. COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES. The association of the name of Copernicus with that of Galileo has always cast an air of unorthodoxy about the great astronomer. The condemnation of certain propositions in his work on astronomy in which Copernicus first set forth the idea of the universe as we know it at present, in contradistinction to the old Ptolemaic system of astronomy, would seem to emphasize this suspicion of unorthodox thinking. He is rightly looked upon as one of the great pioneers of our modern physical science, and, as it is generally supposed that scientific tendencies lead away from religion, there are doubtless many who look upon Copernicus as naturally one of the leaders in this rationalistic movement. It is forgotten that scarcely any of the great original thinkers have escaped the stigma of having certain propositions in some of their books condemned, and that this indeed is only an index of the fallibility of the human mind and of the need there is for some authoritative teacher. The sentences in Copernicus's book requiring correction were but few, and were rather matters of terminology than of actual perversion of accepted teaching. It was as such that their modification was suggested. In spite of this, the {16} impression remains that Copernicus must be considered as a rationalizing scientist, the first in a long roll of original scientific investigators whose work has made the edifice of Christianity totter by removing many of the foundation-stones of its traditional authority. It is rather surprising, in view of this common impression with regard to Copernicus, to find him, according to recent biographers, a faithful clergyman in honor with his ecclesiastical superiors, a distinguished physician whose chief patients were clerical friends of prominent position and the great noblemen of his day, who not only retained all his faith and reverence for the Church, but seems to have been especially religious, a devoted adherent of the Blessed Virgin Mother of God, and the author of a series of poems in her honor that constitute a distinct contribution to the literature of his time. All this should not be astonishing, however; for in the list of the churchmen of the half century just before the great religious revolt in Germany are to be found some of the best known names in the history of the intellectual development of the race. This statement is so contrary to the usual impression that obtains in regard to the character of that period as to be a distinct source of surprise to the ordinary reader of history who has the realization of its truth thrust upon him for the first time. Just before the so-called Reformation, the clergy are considered to have been so sunk in ignorance, or at least to {17} have been so indifferent to intellectual pursuits and so cramped in mind as regards progress, or so timorous because of inquisition methods, that no great advances in thought, and especially none in science, could possibly be looked for from them. To find, then, that not only were faithful churchmen leaders in thought, discoverers in science, organizers in education, initiators of new progress, teachers of the New Learning, but that they were also typical representatives and yet prudent directors of the advancing spirit of that truly wonderful time, is apt to make us think that surely--as the Count de Maistre said one hundred years ago, and the Cambridge Modern History repeats at the beginning of the twentieth century when treating of this very period--"history has been a conspiracy against the truth." Not quite fifty years before Luther's movement of protest began--that is, in 1471--there passed away in a little town in the Rhineland a man who has been a greater spiritual force than perhaps any other single man that has ever existed. This was Thomas à Kempis, a product of the schools of the Brethren of the Common Life, a teaching order that during these fifty years before the Protestant Revolution had over ten thousand pupils in its schools in the Rhineland and the Netherlands alone. As among these pupils there occur such names as Erasmus, Nicholas of Cusa, Agricola, not to mention many less illustrious, some idea of this old teaching institution, that has been very aptly compared to our {18} modern Brothers of the Christian Schools, can be realized. Kempis was a worthy initiator of a great half century. He had among his contemporaries, or followers in the next generation, such men as Grocyn, Dean Colet, and Linacre in England, Cardinal Ximenes in Spain, and Copernicus in Germany. Considering the usual impression in this matter as regards the lack of interest at Rome in serious study, it is curiously interesting to realize how closely these great scholars and thinkers were in touch with the famous popes of the Renaissance period. The second half of the sixteenth century saw the elevation to the papacy of some of the most learned and worthy men that have ever occupied the Chair of Peter. In 1447 Nicholas V became pope, and during his eight years of pontificate initiated a movement of sympathy with modern art and letters that was never to be extinguished. To him more than to any other may be attributed the foundation of the Vatican Library. To him also is attributed the famous expression that "no art can be too lofty for the service of the Church." He was succeeded by Calixtus III, a patron of learning, who was followed by Pius II, the famous AEneas Sylvius, one of the greatest scholars and most learned men of his day, who had done more for the spread of culture and of education in the various parts of Europe than perhaps any other alive at the time. The next Pope, Paul II, accomplished much {19} during a period of great danger by arousing the Christian opposition to the Saracens. His encouragement and material aid to the Hungarians, who were making a bold stand against the Oriental invaders, merit for him a place in the rôle of defenders of civilization. To him is due the introduction of the recently discovered art of printing and its installation on a sumptuous scale worthy of the center of Christian culture. His successor, Sixtus IV, deserves the title of the founder of modern Rome. Bridges, aqueducts, public buildings, libraries, churches--all owe to his fostering care their restoration and renewed foundation. He made it the purpose of his life to attract distinguished humanistic scholars to his capital, and Rome became the metropolis of culture and learning as well as the mother city of Christendom. Under such popes it is no wonder that Rome and the cities of Italy generally became the homes of art and culture, centers of the new humanistic learning and the shelters of the scholars of the outer world. The Italian universities entered on a period of intellectual and educational development as glorious almost as the art movement that characterized the time. As this was marked by the work of such men as that universal genius Leonardo da Vinci, of Michael Angelo, poet, painter, sculptor, architect; of Raphael, Titian, and Correggio, whose contemporaries were worthy of them in every way, some idea can be attained of the wonderful era that developed. No {20} wonder scholars in every department of learning flocked to Italy for inspiration and the enthusiasm bred of scholarly fellowship in such an environment. From England came men like Linacre, Selling, Grocyn, and Dean Colet; Erasmus came from the Netherlands, and Copernicus from Poland. Copernicus there obtained that scientific training which was later to prove so fruitful in his practical work as a physician and in his scientific work as the founder of modern astronomy. It may be as well to say at the beginning that even Copernicus was not the first to suggest that the earth moved, and not the sun; and that, curiously enough, his anticipator was another churchman, Nicholas of Cusa, the famous Bishop of Brixen. Readers of Janssen's _History of the German People_ will remember that the distinguished historian introduces his monumental work by a short sketch of the career of Cusanus, as he is called, who may be well taken as the typical pre-Reformation scholar and clergyman. Cusa wrote in a manuscript--which is still preserved in the hospital of Cues, or Cusa--published for the first time by Professor Clemens in 1847: "I have long considered that this earth can not be fixed, but moves as do the other stars--_sed movetur ut aliae stellae_." What a curious commentary these words, written more than half a century before Galileo was born, form on the famous expression so often quoted because supposed to have been drawn from Galileo by the condemnation of his doctrine at Rome: {21} _E pur se muove_--"and yet it moves!" Cusanus was a Cardinal, the personal friend of three popes, and he seems to have had no hesitation in expressing his opinion in the matter. In the same manuscript the Cardinal adds: "And to my mind the earth revolves upon its axis once in a day and a night." Cusanus was, moreover, one of the most independent thinkers that the world has ever seen, yet he was intrusted by the pope about the middle of the fifteenth century with the reformation of abuses in the Church in Germany. The pope seems to have been glad to be able to secure a man of such straightforward ways for his reformatory designs. The ideas of Nicholas of Cusa with regard to knowledge and the liberty of judgment in things not matters of faith can be very well appreciated from some of his expressions. "To know and to think," he says in one passage, "to see the truth with the eye of the mind is always a joy. The older a man grows, the greater is the pleasure it affords him; and the more he devotes himself to the search after truth, the stronger grows his desire of possessing it. As love is the life of the heart, so is the endeavor after knowledge and truth the life of the mind. In the midst of the movements of time, of the daily work of life, of its perplexities and contradictions, we should lift our gaze fearlessly to the clear vault of heaven and seek ever to obtain a firmer grasp of, and keener insight into, the origin of all goodness and duty, the capacities of our own hearts and minds, {22} the intellectual fruits of mankind throughout the centuries, and the wondrous works of nature around us; but ever remembering that in humility alone lies true greatness, and that knowledge and wisdom are alone profitable in so far as our lives are governed by them." [Footnote 1] It is no wonder, then, that the time was ripe for Copernicus and his great work in astronomy, nor that that work should be accomplished while he was a canon of a cathedral and for a time the vicar-general of a diocese. It is now nearly five years since Father Adolph Muller, S.J., professor of Astronomy in the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome, and director of a private observatory on the Janiculum in that city, wrote his historical scientific study [Footnote 2] of the great founder of modern astronomy. The book has been reviewed, criticized and discussed very thoroughly since then, and has been translated into several languages. The latest translation was into Italian, the work of Father Pietro Mezzetti, S.J., [Footnote 3] and was published in Rome at the end of 1902--having had the benefit {23} of the author's revision. The historical details, then, of Copernicus's life may be considered to have been cast into definite shape, and his career may be appreciated with confidence as to the absolute accuracy and essential significance of all its features. [Footnote 1: _History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages_. By Johannes Janssen Translated from the German by M A Mitchell and A M Christie. Vol I, p. 3.] [Footnote 2: _Nikolaus Kopernicus, Der Altmeister der neueren Astronomie, Ein Lebens und Kultur Bild_. Von Adolf Muller, S.J.] [Footnote 3: Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the Pontifical Leonine College of Anagni] Nicholas Copernicus--to give him the Latin and more usual form of his name--was the youngest of four children of Niclas Copernigk, who removed from Cracow in Poland to Thorn in East Prussia (though then a city of Poland), where he married Barbara Watzelrode, a daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families of the province. His mother's brother, after having been a canon for many years in the cathedral of Frauenburg, was elected Bishop of the Province of Ermland. The future astronomer was born in 1473, at a time when Thorn, after having been for over two hundred years under the rule of the Teutonic Knights, had for some seven years been under the dominion of the King of Poland. There were two boys and two girls in the family; and their fervent Catholicity can be judged from the fact that all of them, parents and children, were inscribed among the members of the Third Order of St. Dominic. Barbara, the older sister, became a religious in the Cistercian Convent of Kulm, of which her aunt Catherine was abbess, and of which later on she herself became abbess. Andrew, the oldest son, became a priest; and Nicholas, the subject of this sketch, at least assumed, as we shall see, all the {24} obligations of the ecclesiastical life, though it is not certain that he received the major religious orders. Copernicus's collegiate education was obtained at the University of Cracow, at that time one of the most important seats of learning in Europe. The five-hundredth anniversary of the founding of this University was celebrated with great pomp only a few years ago. Its origin, however, dates back to the times of Casimir the Great, at the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century. Its foundation was due to the same spirit of enthusiastic devotion to letters that gave us all the other great universities of the thirteenth century. The original institution was so much improved by Jagello, King of Poland, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, that it bears his name and is known as the Jagellonian University. It was very natural for Copernicus to go back to his father's native city for his education; but his ambitious spirit was not content with the opportunities afforded there. He does not seem to have taken his academic degrees, and the tradition that he received his doctorate in medicine at the University of Cracow cannot be substantiated by any documentary evidence. At Cracow, Copernicus devoted himself mainly to classical studies, though his interest in astronomy seems to have been awakened there. In fact, it is said that his desire to be able to read Ptolemy's astronomy in the original Greek, and {25} to obtain a good copy of it, led him to look to Italy for his further education. During his years at Cracow, however, he seems to have made numerous observations in astronomy, as most of the astronomical data in his books are found reduced to the meridian of Cracow. The observatory of Frauenburg, at which his work in astronomy in later life was carried on, was on the same meridian; so that it is difficult to say, as have some of his biographers, that, since Cracow was the capital of his native country, motives of patriotism influenced him to continue his observations according to this same meridian. Copernicus was anxious, no doubt, to come in contact with some of the great astronomers at the universities of Italy, whom he knew by reputation and whose work was attracting attention all over Europe at that time. How faithfully Copernicus applied himself to his classical studies can be best appreciated from some Latin poems written by him during his student days. These poems are an index, too, of the personal character of the man, and give some interesting hints of the religious side of his character. Altogether there are seven Latin odes, each ode composed of seven strophes. The seven odes are united by a certain community of interest or succession of subjects. All of them refer to the history of the Redeemer either in types or in reality. In the first one the prophets prefigure the appearance of the Saviour; in the second the patriarchs sigh for His coming; the {26} third depicts the scene of the Nativity in the Cave of Bethlehem; the fourth is concerned with the Circumcision and the imposition of the Name chosen by the Holy Ghost; the fifth treats of the Star and the Magi and their guidance to the Manger; the sixth concerns the presentation in the Temple; and the seventh, the scene in which Jesus at the age of twelve disputes with the doctors in the Temple at Jerusalem. Copernicus's recent biographers have called attention particularly to the poetical beauties with which he surrounds every mention of the Blessed Virgin and her qualities. As is evident even from our brief resume of the subjects of the odes, the themes selected are just those in which the special devotion of the writer to the Mother of the Saviour could be very well brought out. There are, besides, a number of astronomical allusions which stamp the poems as the work of Copernicus, and which have been sufficient to defend their authenticity against the attacks made by certain critics, who tried to point out how different was the style from that of Copernicus's later years in his scientific writings. The tradition of authorship is, however, too well established on other grounds to be disturbed by criticism of this sort. The poems were dedicated to the Pope. In writing poetry Copernicus was only doing what Tycho Brahe and Kepler, his great successors in astronomy, did after him; and the argument with regard to the difference of style in the two kinds of writings would hold also as regards these authors. {27} Copernicus's years as a boy and man--that is, up to the age of thirty-five--corresponded with a time of great intellectual activity in Europe. This fact is not as generally recognized as it should be, for intellectual activity is supposed to have awakened after the so-called Reformation. During the years from 1472 to 1506, however, there were founded in Germany alone no less than six universities: those of Ingolstadt, Treves, Tubingen, Mentz, Wittenberg, and Frankfort-on-the-Oder. These were not by any means the first great institutions of learning that arose in Germany. The universities of Prague and Vienna were more than a century old, and, with Heidelberg, Cologne, Erfurt, Leipsic, and Rostock, besides Greifswald and Freiburg, founded about the middle of the fifteenth century, had reached a high state of development, and contained larger numbers of students, with few exceptions, than these same institutions have ever had down to our own day. In most cases their charters were derived from the pope; and most of the universities were actually recognized as ecclesiastical institutions, in the sense that their officials held ecclesiastical authority. At this time--the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century--it was not unusual for students, in their enthusiasm for learning, to attempt to exhaust nearly the whole round of university studies. Medicine seems to have been a favorite subject with scholars who were widely interested in knowledge for its own {28} sake. Almost at the same time that Copernicus was studying in Italy, the distinguished English Greek scholar, Linacre, was also engaged in what would now be called post-graduate work at various Italian universities, and in the household of Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence, with whose son--so much did Lorenzo think of him--he was allowed to study Greek. Linacre (as will be seen more at length in the sketch of his life in this volume), besides being the greatest Greek scholar of his time, the friend later of More and Colet and Erasmus in London, was also the greatest physician in England. To those familiar with the times, it may be a source of surprise to think of Copernicus, interested as we know him to have been in literature and devoted so cordially to astronomy, yet taking up medicine as a profession. He seems, however, to have been led to do so by his distinguished teacher, Novara, who realized the talent of his Polish pupil for mathematics and astronomy and yet felt that he should have some profession in life. A century ago Coleridge, the English writer, said that a literary man should have some other occupation. Oliver Wendell Holmes improved upon this by adding: "And, as far as possible, he should confine himself to the other occupation." Novara seems to have realized that Copernicus might be under the necessity of knowing how to do something else besides making astronomical observations, in order to gain his living; and as medicine was {29} satisfyingly scientific, the old teacher suggested his taking it up as a profession. Copernicus made his medical studies in Ferrara and Padua, and obtained his doctorate with honors from Ferrara. Copernicus seems to have taken up the practice of his profession seriously, and to have persevered in it to the end of his life. His biographers say that in the exercise of his professional duties he was animated by the spirit of a person who had devoted himself to the ecclesiastical life. While he did not publicly practise his profession, he was ever ready to assist the poor; and he also acquired great reputation in the surrounding country for his medical attendance upon clerics of all ranks. This continued to be the case, notwithstanding the fact that after the death of his uncle his mother inherited considerable wealth, and the family circumstances changed so much that he might well have given up any labors that were meant only to add to his income. In a word, he seems to have had a sincere interest in his professional work, and to have continued its exercise because of the opportunities it afforded for the satisfaction of a mind devoted to scientific research. Copernicus acquired considerable reputation by his medical services. His friend Giese speaks of him as a very skilful physician, and even calls him a second AEsculapius. Maurice Ferber, who became Bishop of Ermland in 1523, suffered from a severe chronic illness that began about 1529. He obtained permission from the canons {30} of the cathedral to have Doctor Copernicus, whose ability and zeal he never ceased to praise, to come from the cathedral town where he ordinarily resided to Heilsburg, in order to have him near him. Bishop Ferber's successor, Dantisco, also secured Copernicus's aid in a severe illness, and declared that his restoration to health was mainly due to the efforts of his learned physician. Giese was so confident of the Doctor's skill that when he became Bishop of Kulm and on one of his episcopal visitations fell ill at a considerable distance from Copernicus's place of residence, he insisted on having the astronomer doctor brought to take care of him. In 1541 Duke Albert of Prussia became very much worried over the illness of one of his most trusted counsellors. In his distress he had recourse to Copernicus, and his letter asking the Canon of the Cathedral of Frauenburg to come to attend the patient is still extant. He says that the cure of the illness is "very much at his heart"; and, as every other means has failed, he hopes Copernicus will do what he can for the assistance of his faithful and valued counsellor. Copernicus yielded to the request, and the counsellor began to improve shortly after his arrival. At the end of some weeks the Duke wrote again to the canons of the cathedral asking that the leave of absence granted to Copernicus should be extended in order to enable him to complete the cure which had been so happily begun. In this second letter the Duke talks of Copernicus as a {31} most skilful and learned physician. At the end of the month there is a third letter from the Duke, in which he thanks all the canons of the cathedral for their goodness in having granted the desired permission, and he adds that he shall ever feel under obligations "for the assistance rendered by that very worthy and excellent physician, Nicholas Copernicus, a doctor who is deserving of all honor." Not long afterward, when Copernicus's book on astronomy was published, a copy of it was sent to the Duke, and he replied that he was deeply grateful for it, and that he should always preserve it as a souvenir of the most learned and gentlest of men. There are a number of notes on the art of medicine made by Copernicus in the books of the cathedral library at Frauenburg. They serve to show how faithful a student he was, and to a certain extent give an idea of the independent habit of mind which he brought to the investigation of medicine as well as to the study of astronomy. Unfortunately, these have not as yet found an editor; but it is to be hoped that we shall soon know more of the medical thinking of a man over whose mind tradition, in the unworthier sense of that word, exercised so little influence. In 1530 Copernicus wrote a short prelude to the longer work on astronomy which he was to publish later. The propositions contained in this work show how far he had advanced on the road to his ultimate discovery. After a few words of introduction, the following seven axioms are laid down:-- {32} 1. The celestial spheres and their orbits have not a single center. 2. The center of the earth is not the center of the universe, but only the center of gravity and of the moon's orbit. 3. The planes of the orbits lie around the sun, which may be considered as the center of the universe. 4. The distance from the earth to the sun compared with that from the earth to the fixed stars is extremely small. 5. The daily motion of the heavenly sphere is apparent that is, it is an effect of the rotary motion of the earth upon it axis. 6. The apparent motions of the moon and of the sun are so different because of the effect produced by the motion of the earth. 7. The movements of the earth account for the apparent retrograde motion and other irregularities of the movements of the planets. It is enough to assume that the earth alone moves, in order to explain all the other movements observed in the heavens. It is no wonder that one of his bishop-friends, Frisio, writing to another bishop-friend, Dantisco, said: "If Copernicus succeeds in demonstrating the truth of his thesis--and we may well consider that he will from this prelude--he will give us a new heaven and a new earth." This shorter exposition of Copernicus's views was found in manuscript in the imperial library in Vienna only about a quarter of a century ago. {33} It is mentioned by Tycho Brahe in one of his works on astronomy in which he reviews the various contemporary advances made in the knowledge of the heavens. The publication of Copernicus's great work, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium," was delayed until he was advanced in years, because his astronomical opinions were constantly progressing; and, with the patience of true genius, he was not satisfied with anything less than the perfect expression of truth as he saw it. It has sometimes been said that it was delayed because Copernicus feared the storm of religious persecution which he foresaw it would surely arouse. How utterly without foundation is this pretence, which has unfortunately crept into serious history, can be seen from the fact that Pope Paul III accepted the dedication of the work; and of the twelve popes who immediately followed Paul not one even thought of proceeding against Copernicus's work. His teaching was never questioned by any of the Roman Congregations for nearly one hundred years after his death. Galileo's injudicious insistence in his presentation of Copernicus's doctrine, on the novelties of opinion that controverted long-established beliefs, was then responsible for the condemnation by the Congregation of the Index; and, as we shall see, this was not absolute, but only required that certain passages should be corrected. The corrections demanded were unimportant as regards the actual science, and {34} merely insisted that Copernicus's teaching was hypothesis and not yet actual demonstration. It must not be forgotten, after all, that the reasons advanced by Copernicus for his idea of the movements of the planets were not supported by any absolute demonstration, but only by reasons from analogy. Nearly a hundred years later than his time, even after the first discoveries had been made by the newly constructed telescopes, in Galileo's day, there was no absolute proof of the true system of the heavens. The famous Jesuit astronomer, Father Secchi, says the reasons adduced by Galileo were no real proofs: they were only certain analogies, and by no means excluded the possibility of the contrary propositions with regard to the movements of the heavens being true. "None of the real proofs for the earth's rotation upon its axis were known at the time of Galileo, nor were there direct conclusive arguments for the earth's moving around the sun." Even Galileo himself confessed that he had not any strict demonstration of his views, such as Cardinal Bellarmine requested. He wrote to the Cardinal, "The system seems to be true;" and he gave as a reason that it corresponded to the phenomena. According to the astronomers of the time, however, the old Ptolemaic system, in the shape in which it was explained by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who was acknowledged as the greatest of European astronomers, appeared to give quite a satisfactory explanation of the {35} phenomena observed. The English philosopher, Lord Bacon, more than a decade after Galileo's announcement, considered that there were certain phenomena in nature contrary to the Copernican theory, and so he rejected it altogether. This was within a few years of the condemnation by the Congregation at Rome. As pointed out by Father Heinzle, S.J., in his article on Galileo in the "Catholic World" for 1887, "science was so far from determining the question of the truth or falsity of either the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system that shortly before 1633, the year of Galileo's condemnation, a number of savants, such as Fromond in Louvain, Morin in Paris, Berigard in Pisa, Bartolinus in Copenhagen, and Scheiner in Rome, wrote against Copernicanism." As we have said, Copernicus's book was not condemned unconditionally by the Roman authorities, but only until it should be corrected. This assured protection to the principal part of the work, and the warning issued by the Roman Congregation in the year 1820 particularizes the details that had to be corrected. It is interesting to note that whenever Copernicus is spoken of in this Monitum it is always in flattering terms as a "noble astrologer"--the word astrologer having at that time no unworthy meaning. The whole work is praised and its scientific quality acknowledged. The passages requiring correction were not many. In the first book, at the beginning of the {36} fifth chapter, Copernicus made the declaration that "the immobility of the earth was not a decided question, but was still open to discussion." In place of these words it was suggested that the following should be inserted: "In order to explain the apparent motions of the celestial bodies, it is a matter of indifference whether we admit that the earth occupies a place in the middle of the heavens or not." In the eighth chapter of the first book, Copernicus said: "Why, then, this repugnance to concede to our globe its own movement as natural to it as is its spherical form? Why prefer to make the whole heavens revolve around it, with the great danger of disturbance that would result, instead of explaining all these apparent movements of the heavenly bodies by the real rotation of the earth, according to the words of AEneas, 'We are carried from the port, and the land and the cities recede'?" This passage was to be modified as follows: "Why not, then, admit a certain mobility of the earth corresponding to its form, since the whole universe of which we know the bounds is moved, producing appearances which recall to the mind the well-known saying of AEneas in Virgil, 'The land and the cities recede'?" Toward the end of the same chapter Copernicus, continuing the same train of thought, says: "I do not fear to add that it is incomparably more unreasonable to make the immense vault of the heavens revolve than to admit the {37} revolution of our little terrestrial globe." This passage was to be modified as follows: "In one case as well as in the other--that is, whether we admit the rotation of the earth or that of the heavenly spheres--we encounter the same difficulties." The ninth chapter of the first book begins with these words: "There being no difficulty in admitting, then, the mobility of the earth, let us proceed to see whether it has one or a number of movements, and whether, therefore, our earth is a simple planet like the other planets." The following words were to be substituted: "Supposing, then, that the earth does move, it is necessary to examine whether this movement is multiple or not." Toward the middle of the tenth chapter Copernicus declares: "I do not hesitate to defend the proposition that the earth, accompanied by the moon, moves around the sun;" while the wording of this proposition had to be changed so as to substitute the term "admit" for "defend." The title of the eleventh chapter, "Demonstration of the Triple Movement of the Earth," was modified to read as follows: "The Hypothesis of the Triple Movement of the Earth, and the Reasons Therefor." The title of the twentieth chapter of the fourth book originally read: "On the Size of the Three Stars [_Sidera_], the sun, the moon, and the earth." The word "stars" was removed from this title, the earth not being considered as a star. The concluding words of {38} the tenth chapter of the first book, "So great is the magnificent work of the Omnipotent Artificer," had to be cancelled, because they expressed an assurance of the truth of his system not warranted by knowledge. With these few unimportant changes, any one might read and study Copernicus's work with perfect freedom. Traditions to the contrary notwithstanding, Galileo, because of the friendship and encouragement of the churchmen in Italy, had been placed in conditions eminently suited for study and investigation. Several popes and a number of prominent ecclesiastics were his constant friends and patrons. The perpetual secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, M. Bertrand, himself a great mathematician and historian, declares that the long life of Galileo was one of the most enviable that is recorded in the history of science. "The tale of his misfortunes has confirmed the triumph of the truth for which he suffered. Let us tell the whole truth. This great lesson was learned without any profound sorrow to Galileo; and his long life, considered as a whole, was one of the most serene and enviable in the history of science." Copernicus, like Galileo, had clerical friends to thank for an environment that proved the greatest possible aid to his scientific work. His position as Canon of the Cathedral of Frauenburg provided him with learned leisure, while his clerical friends took just enough interest in his investigations and the preliminary {39} announcements of his discoveries to make his pursuit of astronomical studies to some definite conclusion a worthy aim in life. It was this assistance that enabled him to publish his book eventually and bring his great theory before the world. Copernicus, far from having any leanings toward the so-called "reform" movement (as has often been asserted), was evidently a staunch supporter of his friend and patron Bishop Maurice Ferber, of Ermland, who kept his see loyal to Rome at a time when the secularization of the Teutonic order and the falling away of many bishops all around him make his position as a faithful son of the Church and that of his diocese noteworthy in the history of that time and place. It may well be said that under less favorable conditions Copernicus's work might never have been finished. As it was, his book met with great opposition from the Reformers, but remained absolutely acceptable even to the most rigorous churchmen until Galileo's unfortunate insistence on the points of it that were opposed to generally accepted theories. During all his long life Copernicus remained one of the simplest of men. Genius as he was, he could not have failed to realize how great was the significance of the discoveries he had made in astronomy. In spite of this he continued to exercise during a long career the simple duties of his post as Canon of the Cathedral of Frauenberg, nor did he fail to give such time as was asked of him for the medical treatment of the {40} poor or of his friends, the ecclesiastics of the neighborhood. These duties--as he seems to have considered them--must have taken many precious hours from his studies, but they were given unstintingly. When he came to die, his humility was even more prominent than during life. It was at his own request that there was graven upon his tombstone simply the prayer, "I ask not the grace accorded to Paul, not that given to Peter: give me only the favor Thou didst show to the thief on the cross." There is perhaps no better example in all the world of the simplicity of true genius nor any better example of how sublimely religious may be the soul that has far transcended the bounds of the scientific knowledge of its own day. The greatness of Copernicus's life-work can best be realized from the extent to which he surpassed even well-known contemporaries in astronomy and from his practical anticipation of the opinions of some of his greatest successors. Even Tycho Brahe, important though he is in the history of astronomical science, taught many years after Copernicus's death the doctrine that the earth is the center of the universe. Newton had in Copernicus a precursor who divined the theory of universal gravitation; and even Kepler's great laws, especially the elliptical form of the orbits of the planets, are at least hinted at in Copernicus's writings. He is certainly one of the most original geniuses of all times; and it is interesting to find that the completeness of his {41} scholarly career, far from being rendered abortive by friction with ecclesiastical superiors, as we might imagine probable from the traditions that hang around his name, was rather made possible by the sympathy and encouragement of clerical friends and Church authorities. Copernicus, the scholar, astronomer, physician, and clergyman, is a type of the eve of the Reformation period, and his life is the best possible refutation of the slanders with regard to the unprogressiveness of the Church and churchmen of that epoch which have unfortunately been only too common in the histories of the time. {42} {43} III. BASIL VALENTINE, FOUNDER OF MODERN CHEMISTRY. {44} Let us, then, banish into the world of fiction that affirmation so long repeated by foolish credulity which made monasteries an asylum for indolence and incapacity, for misanthropy and pusillanimity, for feeble and melancholic temperaments, and for men who were no longer fit to serve society in the world. Monasteries were never intended to collect the invalids of the world. It was not the sick souls, but on the contrary the most vigorous and healthful the human race has ever produced, who presented themselves in crowds to fill them.--MONTALEMBERT, _Monks of the West_. {45} III. BASIL VALENTINE, FOUNDER OF MODERN CHEMISTRY. The Protestant tradition which presumes a priori that no good can possibly have come out of the Nazareth of the times before the Reformation, and especially the immediately preceding century, has served to obscure to an unfortunate degree the history of several hundred years extremely important in every department of education. Strange as it may seem to those unfamiliar with the period, it is in that department which is supposed to be so typically modern the--physical sciences--that this neglect is most serious. Such a hold has this Protestant tradition on even educated minds that it is a source of great surprise to most people to be told that there were in many parts of Europe original observers in the physical sciences all during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries who were doing ground-breaking work of the highest value, work that was destined to mean much for the development of modern science. Speculations and experiments with regard to the philosopher's stone and the transmutation of metals are supposed to fill up all the interests of the alchemists of those days. As a matter of fact, however, men were making original observations of very {46} profound significance, and these were considered so valuable by their contemporaries that, though printing had not yet been invented, even the immense labor involved in copying large folio volumes by hand did not suffice to deter them from multiplying the writings of these men and thus preserving them for future generations, until the printing-press came to perpetuate them. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with some of the supposed foundations of modern chemistry crumbling to pieces under the influences of the peculiarly active light thrown upon older chemical theories by the discovery of radium and the radio-active elements generally, there is a reawakening of interest in some of the old-time chemical observers whose work used to be laughed at as so unscientific and whose theory of the transmutation of elements into one another was considered so absurd. The idea that it would be impossible under any circumstances to convert one element into another belongs entirely to the nineteenth century. Even so distinguished a mind as that of Newton, in the preceding century, could not bring itself to acknowledge the modern supposition of the absurdity of metallic transformation, but, on the contrary, believed very firmly in this as a basic chemical principle and confessed that it might be expected to occur at any time. He had seen specimens of gold ores in connexion with metallic copper, and had concluded that this was a manifestation of the natural transformation of one of these yellow metals into the other. {47} With the discovery that radium transforms itself into helium, and that indeed all the so-called radio-activities of the very heavy metals are probably due to a natural transmutation process constantly at work, the ideas of the older chemists cease entirely to be a subject for amusement. The physical chemists of the present day are very ready to admit that the old teaching of the absolute independence of something over seventy elements is no longer tenable, except as a working hypothesis. The doctrine of matter and form taught for so many centuries by the scholastic philosophers which proclaimed that all matter is composed of two principles, an underlying material substratum and a dynamic or informing principle, has now more acknowledged verisimilitude, or lies at least closer to the generally accepted ideas of the most progressive scientists, than it has at any time for the last two or three centuries. Not only the great physicists, but also the great chemists, are speculating along lines that suggest the existence of but one form of matter, modified according to the energies that it possesses under a varying physical and chemical environment. This is, after all, only a restatement in modern terms of the teaching of St. Thomas of Aquin in the thirteenth century. It is not surprising, then, that there should be a reawakening of interest in the lives of some of the men who, dominated by the earlier scholastic ideas and by the tradition of the possibility of finding the philosopher's stone, which would {48} transmute the baser metals into the precious metals, devoted themselves with quite as much zeal as any modern chemist to the observation of chemical phenomena. One of the most interesting of these--indeed he might well be said to be the greatest of the alchemists--is the man whose only name that we know is that which appears on a series of manuscripts written in the High German dialect of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. That name is Basil Valentine, and the writer, according to the best historical traditions, was a Benedictine monk. The name Basil Valentine may only have been a pseudonym, for it has been impossible to trace it among the records of the monasteries of the time. That the writer was a monk there seems to be no doubt, for his writings in manuscript and printed form began to have their vogue at a time when there was little likelihood of their being attributed to a monk unless an indubitable tradition connected them with some monastery. This Basil Valentine (to accept the only name we have), as we can judge very well from his writings, eminently deserves the designation of the last of the alchemists and the first of the chemists. There is practically a universal recognition of the fact now that he deserves also the title of Founder of Modern Chemistry, not only because of the value of the observations contained in his writings, but also because of the fact that they proved so suggestive to certain {49} scientific geniuses during the century succeeding Valentine's life. Almost more than to have added to the precious heritage of knowledge for mankind is it a boon for a scientific observer to have awakened the spirit of observation in others and to be the founder of a new school of thought. This Basil Valentine undoubtedly did. Besides, his work furnishes evidence that the investigating spirit was abroad just when it is usually supposed not to have been, for the Thuringian monk surely did not do all his investigating alone, but must have received as well as given many a suggestion to his contemporaries. In the history of education there are two commonplaces that are appealed to oftener than any other as the sources of material with regard to the influence of the Catholic Church on education during the centuries preceding the Reformation. These are the supposed idleness of the monks, and the foolish belief in the transmutation of metals and the search for the philosopher's stone which dominated the minds of so many of the educated men of the time. It is in Germany especially that these two features of the pre-Reformation period are supposed to be best illustrated. In recent years, however, there has come quite a revolution in the feelings even of those outside of the Church with regard to the proper appreciation of the work of the monastic scholars of these earlier centuries. Even though some of them did dream golden dreams over their alembics, the love of knowledge meant {50} more to them, as to the serious students of any age, than anything that might be made by it. As for their scientific beliefs, if there can be a conversion of one element into another, as seems true of radium, then the possibility of the transmutation of metals is not so absurd as, for a century or more, it has seemed; and it is not impossible that at some time even gold may be manufactured out of other metallic materials. Of course, a still worthier change of mind has come over the attitude of educators because of the growing sense of appreciation for the wonderful work of the monks of the Middle Ages, and even of those centuries that are supposed to show least of the influence of these groups of men who, forgetting material progress, devoted themselves to the preservation and the cultivation of the things of the spirit. The impression that would consider the pre-Reformation monks in Germany as unworthy of their high calling in the great mass is almost entirely without foundation. Obscure though the lives of most of them were, many of them rose above their environment in such a way as to make their work landmarks in the history of progress for all time. Because their discoveries are buried in the old Latin folios that are contained only in the best libraries, not often consulted by the modern scientist, it is usually thought that the scientific investigators of these centuries before the Reformation did no work that would be worth while considering in our present day. It is only some {51} one who goes into this matter as a labor of love who will consider it worth his while to take the trouble seriously to consult these musty old tomes. Many a scholar, however, has found his labor well rewarded by the discovery of many an anticipation of modern science in these volumes so much neglected and where such treasure-trove is least expected. Professor Clifford Allbutt, the Regius Professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, in his address on "The Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery Down to the End of the Sixteenth Century," which was delivered at the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences during the Exposition in 1904, has shown how much that is supposed to be distinctly modern in medicine, and above all in surgery, was the subject of discussion at the French and Italian universities of the thirteenth century. William Salicet, for instance, who taught at the University of Bologna, published a large series of case histories, substituted the knife for the Arabic use of the cautery, described the danger of wounds of the neck, investigated the causes of the failure of healing by first intention, and sutured divided nerves. His pupil, Lanfranc, who taught later at the University of Paris, went farther than his master by distinguishing between venous and arterial hemorrhage, requiring digital compression for an hour to stop hemorrhage from the _venae pulsatiles_--the pulsating veins, as they were called--and if this failed because of the size of the vessel, {52} suggesting the application of a ligature. Lanfranc's chapter on injuries to the head still remains a noteworthy book in surgery that establishes beyond a doubt how thoughtfully practical were these teachers in the medieval universities. It must be remembered that at this time all the teachers in universities, even those in the medical schools as well as those occupied with surgery, were clerics. Professor Allbutt calls attention over and over again to this fact, because it emphasizes the thoroughness of educational methods, in spite of the supposed difficulties that would lie in the way of an exclusively clerical teaching staff. In chemistry the advances made during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were even more noteworthy than those in any other department of science. Albertus Magnus, who taught at Paris, wrote no less than sixteen treatises on chemical subjects, and, notwithstanding the fact that he was a theologian as well as a scientist and that his printed works filled sixteen folio volumes, he somehow found the time to make many observations for himself and performed numberless experiments in order to clear up doubts. The larger histories of chemistry accord him his proper place and hail him as a great founder in chemistry and a pioneer in original investigation. Even St. Thomas of Aquin, much as he was occupied with theology and philosophy, found some time to devote to chemical questions. After {53} all, this is only what might have been expected of the favorite pupil of Albertus Magnus. Three treatises on chemical subjects from Aquinas's pen have been preserved for us, and it is to him that we are said to owe the origin of the word amalgam, which he first used in describing various chemical methods of metallic combination with mercury that were discovered in the search for the genuine transmutation of metals. Albertus Magnus's other great scientific pupil, Roger Bacon, the English Franciscan friar, followed more closely in the physical scientific ways of his great master. Altogether he wrote some eighteen treatises on chemical subjects. For a long time it was considered that he was the inventor of gunpowder, though this is now known to have been introduced into Europe by the Arabs. Roger Bacon studied gunpowder and various other explosive combinations in considerable detail, and it is for this reason that he obtained the undeserved reputation of being an original discoverer in this line. How well he realized how much might be accomplished by means of the energy stored up in explosives can perhaps be best appreciated from the fact that he suggested that boats would go along the rivers and across the seas without either sails or oars and that carriages would go along the streets without horse or man power. He considered that man would eventually invent a method of harnessing these explosive mixtures and of utilizing their energies for his purposes without {54} danger. It is curiously interesting to find, as we begin the twentieth century, and gasolene is so commonly used for the driving of automobiles and motor boats and is being introduced even on railroad cars in the West as the most available source of energy for suburban traffic, that this generation should only be fulfilling the idea of the old Franciscan friar of the thirteenth century, who prophesied that in explosives there was the secret of eventually manageable energy for transportation purposes. Succeeding centuries were not as fruitful in great scientists as the thirteenth, and yet at the beginning of the fourteenth there was a pope, three of whose scientific treatises--one on the transmutation of metals, which he considers an impossibility, at least as far as the manufacture of gold and silver was concerned; a treatise on diseases of the eyes, of which Professor Allbutt [Footnote 4] says that it was not without its distinctive practical value, though compiled so early in the history of eye surgery; and, finally, his treatise on the preservation of the health, written when he was himself over eighty years of age--are all considered by good authorities as worthy of the best scientific spirit of the time. This pope was John XXII, of whom it has been said over and over again by Protestant historians that he issued a bull forbidding chemistry, though he was himself one of the enthusiastic students of chemistry {55} in his younger years and always retained his interest in the science. [Footnote 5] [Footnote 4: Address cited] [Footnote 5: For the refutation of this calumny with regard to John XXII, see "Pope John XXII and the supposed Bull forbidding Chemistry," by James J. Walsh, Ph. D., LL. D., in the _Medical Library and Historical Journal_, October, 1905.] During the fourteenth century Arnold of Villanova, the inventor of nitric acid, and the two Hollanduses kept up the tradition of original investigation in chemistry. Altogether there are some dozen treatises from these three men on chemical subjects. The Hollanduses particularly did their work in a spirit of thoroughly frank, original investigation. They were more interested in minerals than in any other class of substances, but did not waste much time on the question of transmutation of metals. Professor Thompson, the professor of chemistry at Edinburgh, said in his history of chemistry many years ago that the Hollanduses have very clear descriptions of their processes of treating minerals in investigating their composition, which serve to show that their knowledge was by no means entirely theoretical or acquired only from books or by argumentation. Before the end of this fourteenth century, according to the best authorities on this subject, Basil Valentine, the more particular subject of our essay, was born. Valentine's career is a typical example of the personally obscure but intellectually brilliant lives {56} which these old monks lived. It seems probable, according to the best authorities, as we have said, that his work began shortly before the middle of the fifteenth century, although most of what was important in it was accomplished during the second half. It would not be so surprising, as most people who have been brought up to consider the period just before the Reformation in Germany as wanting in progressive scholars might imagine, for a supremely great original investigator to have existed in North Germany about this time. After all, before the end of the century, Copernicus, the Pole, working in northern Germany, had announced his theory that the earth was not the center of the universe, and had set forth all that this announcement meant. To a bishop-friend who said to him, "But this means that you are giving us a new universe," he replied that the universe was already there, but his theory would lead men to recognize its existence. In southern Germany, Thomas à Kempis, who died in 1471, had traced for man the outlines of another universe, that of his own soul, from its mystically practical side. These great Germans were only the worthy contemporaries of many other German scholars scarcely less distinguished than these supreme geniuses. The second half of the fifteenth century, the beginning of the Renaissance in Germany as well as Italy, is that wonderful time in history when somehow men's eyes were opened to see farther and their minds broadened to gather in more of the truth of {57} man's relation to the universe, than had ever before been the case in all the centuries of human existence, or than has ever been possible even in these more modern centuries, though supposedly we are the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time. Coming as he did before printing, when the spirit of tradition was even more rife and dominating than it has been since, it is almost needless to say that there are many curious legends associated with the name of Basil Valentine. Two centuries before his time, Roger Bacon, doing his work in England, had succeeded in attracting so much attention even from the common people, because of his wonderful scientific discoveries, that his name became a by-word and many strange magical feats were attributed to him. Friar Bacon was the great wizard even in the plays of the Elizabethan period. A number of the same sort of myths attached themselves to the Benedictine monk of the fifteenth century. He was proclaimed in popular story to have been a wonderful magician. Even his manuscript, it was said, had not been published directly, but had been hidden in a pillar in the church attached to the monastery and had been discovered there after the splitting open of the pillar by a bolt of lightning from heaven. It is the extension of this tradition that has sometimes led to the assumption that Valentine lived in an earlier century, some even going so far as to say that he, too, like Roger Bacon, was a product of the {58} thirteenth century. It seems reasonably possible, however, to separate the traditional from what is actual in his existence, and thus to obtain some idea at least of his work, if not of the details of his life. The internal evidence from his works enable the historian of science to place him within a half century of the discovery of America. One of the stories told with regard to Basil Valentine, because it has become a commonplace in philology, has made him more generally known than any of his actual discoveries. In one of the most popular of the old-fashioned text-books of chemistry in use a quarter of a century ago, in the chapter on Antimony, there was a story that I suppose students never forgot. It was said that Basil Valentine, a monk of the Middle Ages, was the discoverer of this substance. After having experimented with it in a number of ways, he threw some of it out of his laboratory one day, where the swine of the monastery, finding it, proceeded to gobble it up together with some other refuse. He watched the effect upon the swine very carefully, and found that, after a preliminary period of digestive disturbance, these swine developed an enormous appetite and became fatter than any of the others. This seemed a rather desirable result, and Basil Valentine, ever on the search for the practical, thought that he might use the remedy to good purpose even on the members of the community. Now, some of the monks in the monastery were of rather frail health and delicate constitution, {59} and he thought that the putting on of a little fat in their case might be a good thing. Accordingly he administered, surreptitiously, some of the salts of antimony, with which he was experimenting, in the food served to these monks. The result, however, was not so favorable as in the case of the hogs. Indeed, according to one, though less authentic, version of the story, some of the poor monks, the unconscious subjects of the experiment, even perished as the result of the ingestion of the antimonial compounds. According to the better version they suffered only the usual unpleasant consequences of taking antimony, which are, however, quite enough for a fitting climax to the story. Basil Valentine called the new substance which he had discovered antimony, that is, opposed to monks. It might be good for hogs, but it was a form of monks' bane, as it were. [Footnote 6] [Footnote 6: It is curious to trace how old are the traditions on which some of these old stories that must now be rejected, are founded. I have come upon the story with regard to Basil Valentine and the antimony and the monks in an old French medical encyclopedia of biography, published in the seventeenth century, and at that time there was no doubt at all expressed as to its truth. How much older than this it may be I do not know, though it is probable that it comes from the sixteenth century, when the _kakoethes scribendi_ attacked many people because of the facility of printing, and when most of the good stories that have so worried the modern dry-as-dust historian in his researches for their correction became a part of the body of supposed historical tradition.] {60} Unfortunately for most of the good stories of history, modern criticism has nearly always failed to find any authentic basis for them, and they have had to go the way of the legends of Washington's hatchet and Tell's apple. We are sorry to say that that seems to be true also of this particular story. Antimony, the word, is very probably derived from certain dialectic forms of the Greek word for the metal, and the name is no more derived from _anti_ and _monachus_ than it is from _anti_ and _monos_ (opposed to single existence), another fictitious derivation that has been suggested, and one whose etymological value is supposed to consist in the fact that antimony is practically never found alone in nature. Notwithstanding the apparent cloud of unfounded traditions that are associated with his name, there can be no doubt at all of the fact that Valentinus--to give him the Latin name by which he is commonly designated in foreign literatures--was one of the great geniuses who, working in obscurity, make precious steps into the unknown that enable humanity after them to see things more clearly than ever before. There are definite historical grounds for placing Basil Valentine as the first of the series of careful observers who differentiated chemistry from the old alchemy and applied its precious treasures of information to the uses of medicine. It was because of the study of Basil Valentine's work that Paracelsus broke away from the Galenic traditions, so supreme in medicine up to his time, {61} and began our modern pharmaceutics. Following on the heels of Paracelsus came Van Helmont, the father of modern medical chemistry, and these three did more than any others to enlarge the scope of medication and to make observation rather than authority the most important criterion of truth in medicine. Indeed, the work of these three men dominated medicine, or at least the department of pharmaceutics, down almost to our own day, and their influence is still felt in drug-giving. While we do not know the absolute date of either the birth or the death of Basil Valentine and are not sure even of the exact period in which he lived and did his work, we are sure that a great original observer about the time of the invention of printing studied mercury and sulphur and various salts, and above all, introduced antimony to the notice of the scientific world, and especially to the favor of practitioners of medicine. His book, "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony," is full of conclusions not quite justified by his premises nor by his observations. There is no doubt, however, that the observational methods which he employed did give an immense amount of knowledge and formed the basis of the method of investigation by which the chemical side of medicine was to develop during the next two or three centuries. Great harm was done by the abuse of antimony, but then great harm is done by the abuse of anything, no matter how good it may be. For a {62} time it came to be the most important drug in medicine and was only replaced by venesection. The fact of the matter is that doctors were looking for effects from their drugs, and antimony is, above all things, effective. Patients, too, wished to see the effect of the medicines they took. They do so even yet, and when antimony was administered there was no doubt about its working. Some five years ago, when Sir Michael Foster, M.D., professor of physiology in the University of Cambridge, England, was invited to deliver the Lane lectures at the Cooper Medical College, in San Francisco, he took for his subject "The History of Physiology." In the course of his lecture on "The Rise of Chemical Physiology" he began with the name of Basil Valentine, who first attracted men's attention to the many chemical substances around them that might be used in the treatment of disease, and said of him:-- He was one of the alchemists, but in addition to his inquiries into the properties of metals and his search for the philosopher's stone, he busied himself with the nature of drugs, vegetable and mineral, and with their action as remedies for disease. He was no anatomist, no physiologist, but rather what nowadays we should call a pharmacologist. He did not care for the problem of the body, all he sought to understand was how the constituents of the soil and of plants might be treated so as to be available for healing the sick and how they produced their effects. We apparently owe to him the introduction of many chemical substances, for instance, of {63} hydrochloric acid, which he prepared from oil of vitriol and salt, and of many vegetable drugs. And he was apparently the author of certain conceptions which, as we shall see, played an important part in the development of chemistry and of physiology. To him, it seems, we owe the idea of the three "elements," as they were and have been called, replacing the old idea of the ancients of the four elements--earth, air, fire, and water. It must be remembered, however, that both in the ancient and in the new idea the word "element" was not intended to mean that which it means to us now, a fundamental unit of matter, but a general quality or property of matter. The three elements of Valentine were (1) sulphur, or that which is combustible, which is changed or destroyed, or which at all events disappears during burning or combustion; (2) mercury, that which temporarily disappears during burning or combustion, which is dissociated in the burning from the body burnt, but which may be recovered, that is to say, that which is volatile, and (3) salt, that which is fixed, the residue or ash which remains after burning. The most interesting of Basil Valentine's books, and the one which has had the most enduring influence, is undoubtedly "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony." It has been translated and has had a wide vogue in every language of modern Europe. Its recommendation of antimony had such an effect upon medical practice that it continued to be the most important drug in the pharmacopoeia down almost to the middle of the nineteenth century. If any proof were needed that Basil Valentine or that the author of the books that go under that name was a monk, it would be found in the {64} introduction to this volume, which not only states that fact very clearly, but also in doing so makes use of language that shows the writer to have been deeply imbued with the old monastic spirit. I quote the first paragraph of this introduction in order to make clear what I mean. The quotation is taken from the English translation of the work as published in London in 1678. Curiously enough, seeing the obscurity surrounding Valentine himself, we do not know for sure who made the translation. The translator apologizes somewhat for the deeply religious spirit of the book, but considers that he was not justified in eliminating any of this. Of course, the translation is left in the quaint old-fashioned form so eminently suited to the thoughts of the old master, and the spelling and use of capitals is not changed: Basil Valentine--His Triumphant Chariot of Antimony Since I, Basil Valentine, by Religious Vows am bound to live according to the Order of St. Benedict, and that requires another manner of spirit of Holiness than the common state of Mortals exercised in the profane business of this World; I thought it my duty before all things, in the beginning of this little book, to declare what is necessary to be known by the pious Spagyrist [old-time name for medical chemist], inflamed with an ardent desire of this Art, as what he ought to do, and whereunto to direct his aim, that he may lay such foundations of the whole matter as may be stable; lest his Building, shaken with the Winds, happen to fall, and the whole Edifice to be involved in shameful Ruine, {65} which otherwise, being founded on more firm and solid principles, might have continued for a long series of time Which Admonition I judged was, is and always will be a necessary part of my Religious Office; especially since we must all die, and no one of us which are now, whether high or low, shall long be seen among the number of men For it concerns me to recommend these Meditations of Mortality to Posterity, leaving them behind me, not only that honor may be given to the Divine Majesty, but also that Men may obey him sincerely in all things. In this my Meditation I found that there were five principal heads, chiefly to be considered by the wise and prudent spectators of our Wisdom and Art. The first of which is, Invocation of God. The second, Contemplation of Nature The third, True Preparation. The fourth, the Way of Using. The fifth, Utility and Fruit. For he who regards not these, shall never obtain place among true Chymists, or fill up the number of perfect Spagyrists. Therefore, touching these five heads, we shall here following treat and so far declare them, as that the general Work may be brought to light and perfected by an intent and studious Operator. This book, though the title might seem to indicate it, is not devoted entirely to the study of antimony, but contains many important additions to the chemistry of the time. For instance, Basil Valentine explains in this work how what he calls the spirit of salt might be obtained. He succeeded in manufacturing this material by treating common salt with oil of vitriol and heat. From the description of the uses to which he put the end product of his chemical manipulation, it is evident that under the name of spirit of salt {66} he is describing what we now know as hydrochloric acid. This is the first definite mention of it in the history of science, and the method suggested for its preparation is not very different from that employed even at the present time. He also suggests in this volume how alcohol may be obtained in high strengths. He distilled the spirit obtained from wine over carbonate of potassium, and thus succeeded in depriving it of a great proportion of its water. We have said that he was deeply interested in the philosopher's stone. Naturally this turned his attention to the study of metals, and so it is not surprising to find that he succeeded in formulating a method by which metallic copper could be obtained. The substance used for the purpose was copper pyrites, which was changed to an impure sulphate of copper by the action of oil of vitriol and moist air. The sulphate of copper occurred in solution, and the copper could be precipitated from it by plunging an iron bar into it. Basil Valentine recognized the presence of this peculiar yellow metal and studied some of its qualities. He does not seem to have been quite sure, however, whether the phenomenon that he witnessed was not really a transmutation of the iron into copper, as a consequence of the other chemicals present. There are some observations on chemical physiology, and especially with regard to respiration, in the book on antimony which show their author to have anticipated the true explanation of the {67} theory of respiration. He states that animals breathe, because the air is needed to support their life, and that all the animals exhibit the phenomenon of respiration. He even insists that the fishes, though living in water, breathe air, and he adduces in support of this idea the fact that whenever a river is entirely frozen the fishes die. The reason for this being, according to this old-time physiologist, not that the fishes are frozen to death, but that they are not able to obtain air in the ice as they did in the water, and consequently perish. There are many testimonies to the practical character of all his knowledge and his desire to apply it for the benefit of humanity. The old monk could not repress the expression of his impatience with physicians who gave to patients for diseases of which they knew little, remedies of which they knew less. For him it was an unpardonable sin for a physician not to have faithfully studied the various mixtures that he prescribed for his patients, and not to know not only their appearance and taste and effect, but also the limits of their application. Considering that at the present time it is a frequent source of complaint that physicians often prescribe remedies with whose physical appearances they are not familiar, this complaint of the old-time chemist alchemist will be all the more interesting for the modern physician. It is evident that when Basil Valentine allows his ire to get the better of him it is because of his indignation over the {68} quacks who were abusing medicine and patients in his time, as they have ever since. There is a curious bit of aspersion on mere book-learning in the passage that has a distinctly modern ring, and one feels the truth of Russell Lowell's expression that to read a great genius, no matter how antique, is like reading a commentary in the morning paper, so up-to-date does genius ever remain:-- And whensoever I shall have occasion to contend in the School with such a Doctor, who knows not how himself to prepare his own medicines, but commits that business to another, I am sure I shall obtain the Palm from him; for indeed that good man knows not what medicines he prescribes to the sick; whether the color of them be white, black, grey, or blew, he cannot tell; nor doth this wretched man know whether the medicine he gives be dry or hot, cold or humid; but he only knows that he found it so written in his Books, and thence pretends knowledge (or as it were, Possession) by Prescription of a very long time; yet he desires to further Information Here again let it be lawful to exclaim, Good God, to what a state is the matter brought! what goodness of minde is in these men! what care do they take of the sick! Wo, wo to them! in the day of Judgment they will find the fruit of their ignorance and rashness, then they will see Him whom they pierced, when they neglected their Neighbor, sought after money and nothing else; whereas were they cordial in their profession, they would spend Nights and Days in Labour that they might become more learned in their Art, whence more certain health would accrew to the sick with their Estimation and greater glory to themselves. But since Labour is tedious to them, they commit the {69} matter to chance, and being secure of their Honour, and content with their Fame, they (like Brawlers) defend themselves with a certain garrulity, without any respect had to Confidence or Truth. Perhaps one of the reasons why Valentine's book has been of such enduring interest is that it is written in an eminently human vein and out of a lively imagination. It is full of figures relating to many other things besides chemistry, which serve to show how deeply this investigating observer was attentive to all the problems of life around him. For instance, when he wants to describe the affinity that exists between many substances in chemistry, and which makes it impossible for them not to be attracted to one another, he takes a figure from the attractions that he sees exist among men and women. There are some paragraphs with regard to the influence of the passion of love that one might think rather a quotation from an old-time sermon than from a great ground-breaking book in the science of chemistry. Love leaves nothing entire or sound in man; it impedes his sleep; he cannot rest either day or night; it takes off his appetite that he hath no disposition either to meat or drink by reason of the continual torments of his heart and mind. It deprives him of all Providence, hence he neglects his affairs, vocation and business. He minds neither study, labor nor prayer; casts away all thoughts of anything but the body beloved; this is his study, this his most vain occupation. If to lovers the success be not answerable to their wish, or so soon {70} and prosperously as they desire, how many melancholies henceforth arise, with griefs and sadnesses, with which they pine away and wax so lean as they have scarcely any flesh cleaving to the bones Yea, at last they lose the life itself, as may be proved by many examples! for such men, (which is an horrible thing to think of) slight and neglect all perils and detriments, both of the body and life, and of the soul and eternal salvation It is evident that human nature is not different in our sophisticated twentieth century from that which this observant old monk saw around him in the fifteenth. He continues:-- How many testimonies of this violence which is in love, are daily found? for it not only inflames the younger sort, but it so far exaggerates some persons far gone in years as through the burning heat thereof, they are almost mad Natural diseases are for the most part governed by the complexion of man and therefore invade some more fiercely, others more gently; but Love, without distinction of poor or rich, young or old, seizeth all, and having seized so blinds them as forgetting all rules of reason, they neither see nor hear any snare. But then the old monk thinks that he has said enough about this subject and apologizes for his digression in another paragraph that should remove any lingering doubt there may be with regard to the genuineness of his monastic character. The personal element in his confession is so naive and so simply straightforward that instead of seeming to be the result of conceit, and so repelling the reader, it rather attracts his {71} kindly feeling for its author. The paragraph would remind one in certain ways of that personal element that was to become more popular in literature after Montaigne had made such extensive use of it. But of these enough; for it becomes not a religious man to insist too long upon these cogitations, or to give place to such a flame in his heart. Hitherto (without boasting I speak it) I have throughout the whole course of my life kept myself safe and free from it, and I pray and invoke God to vouchsafe me his Grace that I may keep holy and inviolate the faith which I have sworn, and live contented with my spiritual spouse, the Holy, Catholick Church. For no other reason have I alleaged these than that I might express the love with which all tinctures ought to be moved towards metals, if ever they be admitted by them into true friendship, and by love, which permeates the inmost parts, be converted into a better state The application of the figure at the end of his long digression is characteristic of the period in which he wrote and to a considerable extent also of the German literary methods of the time. In this volume on the use of antimony there are in most of the editions certain biographical notes which have sometimes been accepted as authentic, but oftener rejected. According to these, Basil Valentine was born in a town in Alsace, on the southern bank of the Rhine. As a consequence of this, there are several towns that have laid claim to being his birthplace. M. Jean Reynaud, the distinguished French {72} philosophical writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, once said that Basil Valentine, like Ossian and Homer, had many towns claim him years after his death. He also suggested that, like those old poets, it was possible that the writings sometimes attributed to Basil Valentine were really the work not of one man, but of several individuals. There are, however, many objections to this theory, the most forceful of which is the internal evidence of the books themselves and their style and method of treatment. Other biographic details contained in "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony" are undoubtedly more correct. According to them, Basil Valentine travelled in England and Holland on missions for his Order, and went through France and Spain on a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella. Besides this work, there is a number of other books of Basil Valentine's, printed during the first half of the sixteenth century, that are well-known and copies of which may be found in most of the important libraries. The United States Surgeon General's Library at Washington contains several of the works on medical subjects, and the New York Academy of Medicine Library has some valuable editions of his works. Some of his other well-known books, each of which is a good-sized octavo volume, bear the following descriptive titles (I give them in English, though, as they are usually to be found, they are in Latin, sixteenth-century {73} translations of the original German): "The World in Miniature: or, The Mystery of the World and of Human Medical Science," published at Marburg, 1609;--"The Chemical Apocalypse: or, The Manifestation of Artificial Chemical Compounds," published at Erfurt in 1624;--"A Chemico-Philosophic Treatise Concerning Things Natural and Preternatural, Especially Relating to the Metals and the Minerals," published at Frankfurt in 1676;--"Haliography: or, The Science of Salts: A Treatise on the Preparation, Use and Chemical Properties of All the Mineral, Animal and Vegetable Salts," published at Bologna in 1644;--"The Twelve Keys of Philosophy," Leipsic, 1630. The great interest manifested in Basil Valentine's work at the Renaissance period can be best realized from the number of manuscript copies and their wide distribution. His books were not all printed at one place, but, on the contrary, in different portions of Europe. The original edition of "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony" was published at Leipsic in the early part of the sixteenth century. The first editions of the other books, however, appeared at places so distant from Leipsic as Amsterdam and Bologna, while various cities of Germany, as Erfurt and Frankfurt, claim the original editions of still other works. Many of the manuscript copies still exist in various libraries in Europe; and while there is no doubt that some unimportant additions to the supposed works of Basil Valentine have come {74} from the attribution to him of scientific treatises of other German writers, the style and the method of the principal works mentioned are entirely too similar not to have been the fruit of a single mind and that possessed of a distinct investigating genius setting it far above any of its contemporaries in scientific speculation and observation. The most interesting feature of all of Basil Valentine's writings that are extant is the distinctive tendency to make his observations of special practical utility. His studies in antimony were made mainly with the idea of showing how that substance might be used in medicine. He did not neglect to point out other possible uses, however, and knew the secret of the employment of antimony in order to give sharpness and definition to the impression produced by metal types. It would seem as though he was the first scientist who discussed this subject, and there is even some question whether printers and type founders did not derive their ideas in this matter from Basil Valentine, rather than he from them. Interested as he was in the transmutation of metals, he never failed to try to find and suggest some medicinal use for all of the substances that he investigated. His was no greedy search for gold and no accumulation of investigations with the idea of benefiting only himself. Mankind was always in his mind, and perhaps there is no better demonstration of his fulfilment of the character of the monk than this constant {75} solicitude to benefit others by every bit of investigation that he carried out. For him with medieval nobleness of spirit the first part of every work must be the invocation of God, and the last, though no less important than the first, must be the utility and fruit for mankind that can be derived from it. {76} {77} IV. LINACRE: SCHOLAR, PHYSICIAN, PRIEST. {78} Linacre, as Dr. Payne remarks, "was possessed from his youth till his death by the enthusiasm of learning. He was an idealist devoted to objects which the world thought of little use." Painstaking, accurate, critical, hypercritical perhaps, he remains to-day the chief literary representative of British Medicine. Neither in Britain nor in Greater Britain have we maintained the place in the world of letters created for us by Linacre's noble start. Quoted by Osler in _AEquanimitas_. [Illustration: THOMAS LINACRE] {79} IV. LINACRE: SCHOLAR, PHYSICIAN, PRIEST. Not long ago, in one of his piquant little essays, Mr. Augustine Birrell discussed the question as to what really happened at the time of the so-called Reformation in England. There is much more doubt with regard to this matter, even in the minds of non-Catholics, than is usually suspected. Mr. Birrell seems to have considered it one of the most important problems, and at the same time not by any means the least intricate one, in modern English history. The so-called High Church people emphatically insist that there is no break in the continuity of the Church of England, and that the modern Anglicanism is a direct descendant of the old British Church. They reject with scorn the idea that it was the Lutheran movement on the Continent which brought about the changes in the Anglican Church at that time. Protestantism did not come into England for a considerable period after the change in the constitution of the Anglican Church, and when it did come its tendencies were quite as subversal of the authority of the Anglican as of the Roman Church, Protestantism is the mother of Nonconformism in England. It can be seen, then, that the question as to what did really take place in the time {80} of Henry VIII and of Edward VI is still open. It has seemed to me that no little light on this vexed historical question will be thrown by a careful study of the life of Dr. Linacre, who, besides being the best known physician of his time in England, was the greatest scholar of the English Renaissance period, yet had all his life been on very intimate terms with the ecclesiastical authorities, and eventually gave up his honors, his fortune, and his profession to become a simple priest of the old English Church. Considering the usually accepted notions as to the sad state of affairs supposed to exist in the Church at the beginning of the sixteenth century, this is a very remarkable occurrence, and deserves careful study to determine its complete significance, for it tells better than anything else the opinion of a distinguished contemporary. Few men have ever been more highly thought of by their own generation. None has been more sincerely respected by intimate friends, who were themselves the leaders of the thought of their generation, than Thomas Linacre, scholar, physician and priest; and his action must stand as the highest possible tribute to the Church in England at that time. How unimpaired his practical judgment of men and affairs was at the time he made his change from royal physician to simple priest can best be gathered from the sagacity displayed in the foundation of the Royal College of Physicians, an institution he was endowing with the {81} wealth he had accumulated in some twenty years of most lucrative medical practice. The Royal College of Physicians represents the first attempt to secure the regulation of the practice of medicine in England, and, thanks to its founder's wonderful foresight and practical wisdom, it remains down to our own day, under its original constitution, one of the most effective and highly honored of British scientific foundations. No distinction is more sought at the present time by young British medical men, or by American or even Continental graduates in medicine, than the privilege of adding to their names the letters "F.R.C.P.(Eng.)," Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of England. The College worked the reformation of medical practice in England, and its methods have proved the suggestive formulae for many another such institution and for laws that all over the world protect, to some extent at least, the public from quacks and charlatans. Linacre's change of profession at the end of his life has been a fruitful source of conjecture and misconception on the part of his biographers. Few of them seem to be able to appreciate the fact, common enough in the history of the Church, that a man may, even when well on in years, give up everything to which his life has been so far directed, and from a sense of duty devote himself entirely to the attainment of "the one thing necessary." Linacre appears only to have done what many another in the history of {82} the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries did without any comment; but his English biographers insist on seeing ulterior motives in it, or else fail entirely to understand it. The same action is not so rare even in our own day that it should be the source of misconception by later writers. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell has, in the early part of _Dr. North and His Friends_, a very curious passage with regard to Linacre. One of the characters, St. Clair, says: "I saw, the other day, at Owen's, a life of one Linacre, a doctor, who had the luck to live about 1460 to 1524, when men knew little and thought they knew all. In his old age he took for novelty to reading St. Matthew. The fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters were enough. He threw the book aside and cried out, 'Either this is not the Gospel, or we are not Christians.' What else could he say?" St. Clair uses the story to enforce an idea of his own, which he states as a question, as follows: "And have none of you the courage to wrestle with the thought I gave you, that Christ could not have expected the mass of men to live the life He pointed out as desirable for the first disciples of His faith?" Dr. Mitchell's anecdote is not accepted by Linacre's biographers generally, though it is copied by Dr. Payne, the writer of the article on Linacre in the (English) _Dictionary of National Biography_, who, however, discredits it somewhat. The story is founded on Sir John Cheke's {83} account of the conversion of Linacre. It is very doubtful, however, whether Linacre's deprecations of the actions of Christians had reference to anything more than the practice of false swearing so forcibly denounced in the Scriptures, which had apparently become frequent in his time. This is Selden's version of the story as quoted by Dr. Johnson, who was Linacre's well-known biographer. Sir John Cheke in his account seems to hint that this chance reading of the Scriptures represented the first occasion Linacre had ever taken of an opportunity to read the New Testament. Perhaps we are expected to believe that, following the worn-out Protestant tradition of the old Church's discouraging of the reading of the Bible, and of the extreme scarcity of copies of the Book, this was the first time he had ever had a good opportunity to read it. This, of course, is nonsense. Linacre's early education had been obtained at the school of the monastery of Christ Church at Canterbury, and the monastery schools all used the New Testament as a text-book, and as the offices of the day at which the students were required to attend contain these very passages from Matthew which Linacre is supposed to have read for the first time later in life, this idea is preposterous. Besides, Linacre, as one of the great scholars of his time, intimate friend of Sir Thomas More, of Dean Colet, and Erasmus, can scarcely be thought to find his first copy of the Bible only when advanced in years. This is {84} evidently a post-Reformation addition, part of the Protestant tradition with regard to the supposed suppression of the Scriptures in pre-Reformation days, which every one acknowledges now to be without foundation. Linacre, as many another before and since, seems only to have realized the true significance of the striking passages in Matthew after life's experiences and disappointments had made him take more seriously the clauses of the Sermon on the Mount. There is much in fifth, sixth, and seventh Matthew that might disturb the complacent equanimity of a man whose main objects in life, though pursued with all honorable unselfishness, had been the personal satisfaction of wide scholarship and success in his chosen profession. With regard to Sir John Cheke's story, Dr. John Noble Johnson, who wrote the life of Thomas Linacre, [Footnote 7] which is accepted as the authoritative biography by all subsequent writers, says: "The whole statement carries with it an air of invention, if not on the part of Cheke himself, at least on that of the individual from whom he derives it, and it is refuted by {85} Linacre's known habits of moderation and the many ecclesiastical friendships which, with a single exception, were preserved without interruption until his death. It was a most frequent mode of silencing opposition to the received and established tenets of the Church, when arguments were wanting, to brand the impugner with the opprobrious titles of heretic and infidel, the common resource of the enemies to innovation in every age and country." [Footnote 7: "The Life of Thomas Linacre," Doctor in Medicine, Physician to King Henry VIII, the Tutor and Friend of Sir Thomas More and the Founder of the College of Physicians in London By John Noble Johnson, M D., late Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London. Edited by Robert Graves, of the Inner Temple, Barrister at Law London: Edward Lumley, Chancery Lane 1835.] The interesting result of the reflections inspired in Linacre by the reading of Matthew was, as has been said, the resignation of his high office of Royal Physician and the surrender of his wealth for the foundation of chairs in Medicine and Greek at Oxford and Cambridge. With the true liberal spirit of a man who wished to accomplish as much good as possible, his foundations were not limited to his own University of Oxford. After these educational foundations, however, his wealth was applied to the endowment of the Royal College of Physicians and its library, and to the provision of such accessories as might be expected to make the College a permanently useful institution, though left at the same time perfectly capable of that evolution which would suit it to subsequent times and the development of the science and practice of medicine. It is evident that the life of such a man can scarcely fail to be of personal as well as historic interest. {86} Thomas Linacre was born about 1460--the year is uncertain--at Canterbury. Nothing is known of his parents or their condition, though this very silence in their regard would seem to indicate that they were poor and obscure. His education was obtained at the school of the monastery of Christ Church, Canterbury, then presided over by the famous William Selling, the first of the great students of the new learning in England. Selling's interest seems to have helped Linacre to get to Oxford, where he entered at All Souls' College in 1480. In 1484 he was elected a Fellow of the College, and seems to have distinguished himself in Greek, to which he applied himself with special assiduity under Cornelio Vitelli. Though Greek is sometimes spoken of as having been introduced into Western Europe only at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Linacre undoubtedly laid the foundation of that remarkable knowledge of the language which he displayed at a later period of his life, during his student days at Oxford in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Linacre went to Italy under the most auspicious circumstances. His old tutor and friend at Canterbury, Selling, who had become one of the leading ecclesiastics of England, was sent to Rome as an Ambassador by Henry VII. He took Linacre with him. A number of English scholars had recently been in Italy and had attracted attention by their geniality, by their thorough-going devotion to scholarly studies, {87} and by their success in their work. Selling himself had made a number of firm friends among the Italian students of the New Learning on a former visit, and they now welcomed him with enthusiasm and were ready to receive his protégé with goodwill and provide him with the best opportunities for study. As a member of the train of the English ambassador, Linacre had an entrée to political circles that proved of great service to him, and put him on a distinct footing above that of the ordinary English student in Italy. Partly because of these and partly because of his own interesting and attractive personal character, Linacre had a number of special opportunities promptly placed at his disposal. Church dignitaries in Rome welcomed him and he was at once received into scholarly circles wherever he went in Italy. Almost as soon as he arrived in Florence, where he expected seriously to take up the study of Latin and Greek, he became the intimate friend of the family of Lorenzo de' Medici, who was so charmed with his personality and his readily recognizable talent that he chose him for the companion of his son's studies and received him into his own household. Politian was at this time the tutor of the young de' Medici in Latin, and Demetrius Chalcondylas the tutor in Greek. Under these two eminent scholars Linacre obtained a knowledge of Latin and Greek such as it would have been impossible to have obtained under any other {88} circumstances, and which with his talents at once stamped him as one of the foremost humanistic scholars in Europe. While in Florence he came in contact with Lorenzo the Magnificent's younger son, who afterwards became Leo X. The friendship thus formed lasted all during Linacre's lifetime, and later on he dedicated at least one of his books to Alexander de' Medici after the latter's elevation to the papal throne. It is no wonder that Linacre always looked back on Italy as the Alma Mater--the fond mother in the fullest sense of the term--to whom he owed his precious opportunities for education and the broadest possible culture. In after-life the expression of his feelings was often tinged with romantic tenderness. It is said that when he was crossing the Alps, on his homeward journey, leaving Italy after finishing his years of apprenticeship of study, standing on the highest point of the mountains from which he could still see the Italian plains, he built with his own hands a rough altar of stone and dedicated it to the land of his studies--the land in which he had spent six happy years--under the fond title of _Sancta Mater Studiorum_. At first, after his return from Italy, Linacre lectured on Greek at Oxford. Something of the influence acquired over English students and the good he accomplished may be appreciated from the fact that with Grocyn he had such students as More and the famous Dean Colet. Erasmus also was attracted from the Netherlands and {89} studied Greek under Linacre, to whom he refers in the most kindly and appreciative terms many times in his after life. Linacre wrote books besides lecturing, and his work on certain fine points in the grammar of classical Latinity proved a revelation to English students of the old classical languages, for nothing so advanced as this had ever before been attempted outside Italy. In one of the last years of the fifteenth century Linacre was appointed tutor to Prince Arthur, the elder brother of Henry VIII, to whom it will be remembered that Catherine of Aragon had been betrothed before her marriage with Henry. Arthur's untimely death, however, soon put an end to Linacres' tutorship. As pointed out by Einstein, the reputation of Grocyn and Linacre was not confined to England, but soon spread all over the Continent. After the death of the great Italian humanists of the fifteenth century, who had no worthy successors in the Italian peninsula, these two men became the principal European representatives of the New Learning. There were other distinguished men, however, such as Vives, the Spaniard; Lascaris, the Greek; Buda, or Budaeus, the Frenchman, and Erasmus, whom we have already mentioned--all of whom joined at various times in praising Linacre. Some of Linacre's books were published by the elder Aldus at Venice; and Aldus is even said to have sent his regrets on publishing his edition of Linacre's translation of "The Sphere {90} of Proclus," that the distinguished English humanist had not forwarded him others of his works to print. Aldus appreciatively added the hope that the eloquence and classic severity of style in Linacre's works and in those of the English humanists generally "might shame the Italian philosophers and scholars out of their uncultured methods of writing." Augusta Theodosia Drane (Mother Raphael), in her book on "Christian Schools and Scholars," gives a very pleasant picture of how Dean Colet, Eramus, and More used at this time to spend their afternoons down at Stepney (then a very charming suburb of London), of whose parish church Colet was the vicar. They stopped at Colet's house and were entertained by his mother, to whom we find pleasant references in the letters that passed between these scholars. Linacre was also often of the party, and the conversations between these greatest students and literary geniuses of their age would indeed be interesting reading, if we could only have had preserved for us, in some way, the table-talk of those afternoons. Erasmus particularly was noted for his wit and for his ability to turn aside any serious discussions that might arise among his friends, so as to prevent anything like unpleasant argument in their friendly intercourse. A favorite way seems to have been to insist on telling one of the old jokes from a classic author whose origin would naturally be presumed to be much later than the date the New Learning had found for it. {91} Dean Colet's mother appears to have been much more than merely the conventional hostess. Erasmus sketches her in her ninetieth year with her countenance still so fair and cheerful that you would think she had never shed a tear. Her son tells in some of his letters to Erasmus and More of how much his mother liked his visitors and how agreeable she found their talk and witty conversation. They seem to have appreciated her in turn, for in Mother Raphael's chapter on English Scholars of the Renaissance there is something of a description of her garden, in which were to be found strawberries, lately brought from Holland, some of the finer varieties of which Mrs. Colet possessed through Erasmus's acquaintance in that country. Mrs. Colet also had some of the damask roses that had lately been introduced into England by Linacre, who was naturally anxious that the mother of his friend should have the opportunity to raise some of the beautiful flowers he was so much interested in domesticating in England. It is a very charming picture, this, of the early humanists in England, and very different from what might easily be imagined by those unfamiliar with the details of the life of the period. Linacre was later to give up his worldly emoluments and honors and become a clergyman, in order to do good and at the same time satisfy his own craving for self-abnegation. More was to rise to the highest positions in England, and then for conscience' sake was to suffer death {92} rather than yield to the wishes of his king in a matter in which he saw principle involved. Dean Colet himself was to be the ornament of the English clergy and the model of the scholar clergyman of the eve of the Reformation, to whom many generations were to look back as a worthy object of reverence. Erasmus was to become involved first with and then against Luther, and to be offered a cardinal's hat before his death. His work, like Newman's, was done entirely in the intellectual field. Meantime, in the morning of life, all of them were enjoying the pleasures of friendly intercourse and the charms of domestic felicity under circumstances that showed that their study of humanism and their admiration for the classics impaired none of their sympathetic humanity or their appreciation of the innocent delights of the present. For us, however, Linacre's most interesting biographic details are those which relate to medicine, for, besides his humanistic studies while in Italy, Linacre graduated in medicine, obtaining the degree of doctor at Padua. The memory of the brilliant disputation which he sustained in the presence of the medical faculty in order to obtain his degree is still one of the precious traditions in the medical school of Padua. He does not seem to have considered his medical education finished, however, by the mere fact of having obtained his doctor's degree, and there is a tradition of his having studied later at Vicenza under Nicholas Leonicenus, the most celebrated {93} physician and scholar in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century, who many years afterwards referred with pardonable pride to the fact that he had been Linacre's teacher in medicine. It may seem strange to many that Linacre, with all his knowledge of the classics, should have devoted himself for so many years to the study of medicine in addition to his humanistic studies. It must not be forgotten, however, that the revival of the classics of Latin and Greek brought with it a renewed knowledge of the great Latin and Greek fathers of medicine, Hippocrates and Galen. This had a wonderful effect in inspiring the medical students of the time with renewed enthusiasm for the work in which they were engaged. A knowledge of the classics led to the restoration of the study of anatomy, botany, and of clinical medicine, which had been neglected in the midst of application to the Arabian writers in medicine during the preceding centuries. The restoration of the classics made of medicine a progressive science in which every student felt the possibility of making great discoveries that would endure not only for his own reputation but for the benefit of humanity. These thoughts seem to have attracted many promising young men to the study of medicine. The result was a period of writing and active observation in medicine that undoubtedly makes this one of the most important of literary medical eras. Some idea of the activity of the writers of the time can be gathered from the important {94} medical books--most of them large folios which were printed during the last half of the sixteenth century in Italy. There is a series of these books to be seen in one of the cases of the library of the Surgeon-General at Washington, which, though by no means complete, must be a source of never-ending surprise to those who are apt to think of this period as a _saison morte_ in medical literature. There must have been an extremely great interest in medicine to justify all this printing. Some of the books are among the real incunabula of the art of printing. For instance, in 1474 there was published at Bologna De Manfredi's "Liber de Homine;" at Venice, in 1476, Petrus de Albano's work on medicine; and in the next twenty years from the same home of printing there came large tomes by Angelata, a translation of Celsus, and Aurelius Cornelius and Articellus's "Thesaurus Medicorum Veterum," besides several translations of Avicenna and Platina's work "De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine." At Ferrara, Arculanus's great work was published, while at Modena there appeared the "Hortus Sanitatis," or Garden of Health, whose author was J. Cuba. There were also translations from other Arabian authors on medicine in addition to Avicenna, notably a translation of Rhazes Abu Bekr Muhammed Ben Zankariah Abrazi, a distinguished writer among the Arabian physicians of the Middle Ages. Linacre's translations of Galen remain still the {95} standard, and they have been reprinted many times. As Erasmus once wrote to a friend, in sending some of these books of Galen, "I present you with the works of Galen, now by the help of Linacre speaking better Latin than they ever before spoke Greek." Linacre also translated Aristotle into Latin, and Erasmus paid them the high compliment of saying that Linacre's Latin was as lucid, as straightforward, and as thoroughly intelligible as was Aristotle's Greek. Of the translations of Aristotle unfortunately none is extant. Of Galen we have the "De Sanitate Tuenda," the "Methodus Medendi," the "De Symptomatum Differentiis et Causis," and the "De Pulsuum Usu." The latter particularly is a noteworthy monograph on an important subject, in which Galen's observations were of great value. Under the title, "The Significance of the Pulse," it has been translated into English, and has influenced many generations of English medical men. While we have very few remains of Linacre's work as a physician, there seems to be no doubt that he was considered by all those best capable of judging, to stand at the head of his profession in England. To his care, as one of his biographers remarked, was committed the health of the foremost in Church and State. Besides being the Royal Physician, he was the regular medical attendant of Cardinal Wolsey, of Archbishop Warham, the Primate of England, of Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, the Keeper {96} of the Privy Seal, and of Sir Reginald Bray, Knight of the Garter and Lord High Treasurer, and of all of the famous scholars of England. Erasmus, whilst absent in France, writes to give him an account of his feelings, and begs him to prescribe for him, as he knows no one else to whom he can turn with equal confidence. After a voyage across the channel, during which he had been four days at sea--making a passage by the way that now takes less than two hours--Erasmus describes his condition, his headache, with the glands behind his ears swollen, his temples throbbing, a constant buzzing in his ears; and laments that no Linacre was at hand to restore him to health by skilful advice. In a subsequent letter he writes from Paris to ask for a copy of a prescription given him while in London by Linacre, but which a stupid servant had left at the apothecary shop, so that Erasmus could not have it filled in Paris. An instance of his skill in prognosis, the most difficult part of the practice of medicine according to Hippocrates and all subsequent authorities, is cited by all his biographers, with regard to his friend William Lily, the grammarian. Lily was suffering from a malignant tumor involving the hip, which surgeons in consultation had decided should be removed. Linacre plainly foretold that its removal would surely prove fatal, and the event verified his unfavorable prognosis. Generally it seems to have been considered that his opinion was of great value in all {97} serious matters, and it was eagerly sought for. Some of the nobility and clergy of the time came even from the Continent over to England by no means an easy journey, even for a healthy man in those days, as can be appreciated from Erasmus's experience just cited--in order to obtain Linacre's opinion. One of Erasmus's letters to Billibaldus Pirckheimer contains a particular account of the method of treatment by which he was relieved of his severe pain under Linacre's direction in a very tormenting attack of renal colic. The details, especially the use of poultice applications as hot as could be borne, show that Linacre thoroughly understood the use of heat in the relaxation of spasm, while his careful preparation of the remedies to be employed in the presence of the patient himself would seem to show that he had a very high appreciation of how much the mental state of the patient and the attitude of expectancy thus awakened may have in giving relief even in cases of severe pain. The only medical writings of Linacre's that we possess are translations. We have said already that the reversion at the end of the fifteenth century to the classical authorities in medicine undoubtedly did much to introduce the observant phase of medical science, which had its highest expression in Vesalius at the beginning of the sixteenth century and continued to flourish so fruitfully during the next two centuries at most of the Italian universities. His translations then {98} were of themselves more suggestive contributions to medicine than would perhaps have been any even of his original observations, since the mind of his generation was not ready as yet to be influenced by discoveries made by contemporaries. The best proof of Linacre's great practical interest in medicine is his realization of the need for the Royal College of Physicians and his arrangements for it. The Roll of the College, which comprises biographical sketches of all the eminent physicians whose names are recorded in the annals from the foundation of the College in 1518, and is published under the authority of the College itself, contains the best tribute to Linacre's work that can possibly be paid. It says: "The most magnificent of Linacre's labors was the design of the Royal College of Physicians of London--a standing monument of the enlightened views and generosity of its projectors. In the execution of it Linacre stood alone, for the munificence of the Crown was limited to a grant of letters patent; whilst the expenses and provision of the College was left to be defrayed out of his own means, or of those who were associated with him in its foundation." "In the year 1518," says Dr. Johnson, [Footnote 8] "when Linacre's scheme was carried into effect, the practice of medicine was scarcely elevated above that of the mechanical arts, nor was the majority of its practitioners {99} among the laity better instructed than the mechanics by whom these arts were exercised. With the diffusion of learning to the republics and states of Italy, establishments solely for the advancement of science had been formed with success; but no society devoted to the interests of learning yet existed in England, unfettered by a union with the hierarchy, or exempted from the rigors and seclusions which were imposed upon its members as the necessary obligation of a monastic and religious life. In reflecting on the advantages which had been derived from these institutions, Linacre did not forget the impossibility of adapting rules and regulations which accorded with the state of society in the Middle Ages to the improved state of learning in his own, and his plans were avowedly modelled on some similar community of which many cities of Italy afforded rather striking examples." [Footnote 8: _Life of Linacre_, London, 1835.] Some idea of the state into which the practice of medicine had fallen in England before Linacre's foundation of the Royal College of Physicians may be gathered from the words of the charter of the College. "Before this period a great multitude of ignorant persons, of whom the greater part had no insight into physic, nor into any other kind of learning--some could not even read the letters on the book, so far forth that common artificers as smiths, weavers and women--boldly and accustomably took upon them great cures to the high displeasure of God, great infamy to the faculty, and the grievous hurt, {100} damage, and destruction of many of the King's liege people." After the foundation of the College there was a definite way of deciding formally who were, or were not, legally licensed to practise. As a consequence, when serious malpractice came to public notice, those without a license were occasionally treated in the most summary manner. Stowe, in his chronicles, gives a very vivid and picturesque description of the treatment of one of these quacks who had been especially flagrant in his imposition upon the people. A counterfeit doctor was set on horseback, his face to the horse's tail, the tail being forced into his hand as a bridle, a collar of jordans about his neck, a whetstone on his breast, and so led through the city of London with ringing of basins, and banished. "Such deceivers," continued the old chronicler, "no doubt are many, who being never trained up in reading or practice of physics and Chirurgery do boast to do great cures, especially upon women, as to make them straight that before were crooked, corbed, or crumped in any part of their bodies and other such things. But the contrary is true. For some have received gold when they have better deserved the whetstone." [Footnote 9] Human nature has not changed very much in the {101} four centuries since Linacre's foundation, and while the model that he set in the matter of providing a proper licensing body for physicians has done something to lessen the evils complained of, the abuses still remain; and the old chronicler will find in our time not a few who, in his opinion, might deserve the whetstone. We can scarcely realize how much Linacre accomplished by means of the Royal College of Physicians, or how great was the organizing spirit of the man to enable him to recognize the best way out of the chaos of medical practice in his time. [Footnote 9: "To get the whetstone" is an old English expression, meaning to take the prize for lying. It is derived from the old custom of driving rogues, whose wits were too sharp, out of town with a whetstone around their necks.] "The wisdom of Linacre's plan," wrote Dr. Friend, "speaks for itself. His scheme, without doubt, was not only to create a good understanding and unanimity among his own profession (which of itself was an excellent thought), but to make them more useful to the public. And he imagined that by separating them from the vulgar empirics and setting them upon such a reputable foot of distinction, there would always arise a spirit of emulation among men liberally educated, which would animate them in pursuing their inquiries into the nature of diseases and the methods of cure for the benefit of mankind; and perhaps no founder ever had the good fortune to have his designs succeed more to his wish." His plans with regard to the teaching of medicine at the two great English Universities did not succeed so well, but that was the fault not of Linacre nor of the directions left in his will, but {102} of the times, which were awry for educational matters. Notwithstanding Linacre's bequest of funds for two professorships at Oxford and one at Cambridge, it is typical of the times that the chairs were not founded for many years. During Henry VIII's time, the great effort of government was not to encourage new foundations but to break up old ones, in order to obtain money for the royal treasury, so that educational institutions of all kinds suffered eclipse. The first formal action with regard to the Linacre bequest was taken in the third year of Edward VI. Two lectureships were established in Merton College, Oxford, and one in St. John's College, Cambridge. Linacre's idea had been that these foundations should be University lectureships, but Anthony Wood says that the University had lost in prestige so much during Henry VIII's time that it was considered preferable to attach the lectureships to Merton College, which had considerable reputation because of its medical school. During Elizabeth's time these Linacre lectureships sank to be sinecures and for nearly a hundred years served but for the support of a fellowship. The Oxford foundation was revived in 1856 by the University Commissioners, and the present splendid foundation of the lectures in physiology bears Linacre's name in honor of his original grant. At the age of about fifty Linacre was ordained priest. His idea in becoming a clergyman, as confessed in letters to his friends, was partly in {103} order to obtain leisure for his favorite studies, but also out of the desire to give himself up to something other than the mere worldly pursuits in which he had been occupied during all his previous life. His biographer, Dr. Johnson, says: "In examining the motives of this choice of Linacre's, it would seem that he was guided less by the expectation of dignity and preferment than by the desire of retirement and of rendering himself acquainted with those writings which might afford him consolation in old age and relief from the infirmities which a life of assiduous study and application had tended to produce." The precise time of Linacre's ordination is not known, nor is it certain whether he was ordained by Archbishop Warham of Canterbury, or by Cardinal Wolsey, the Archbishop of York. He received his first clerical appointment from Warham, by whom he was collated to the rectory of Mersham in Kent. He held this place scarcely a month, but his resignation was followed by his installation as prebend in the Cathedral of Wells, and by an admission to the Church of Hawkhurst in Kent, which he held until the year of his death. Seven years later he was made prebend in the Collegiate Chapel of St. Stephen, Westminster, and in the following year he became prebendary of South Newbold in the Church of York. This was in the year 1518. In the following year he received the dignified and lucrative appointment of presenter to the Cathedral of York, for which he was indebted to Cardinal Wolsey, to whom {104} about this time he dedicated his translation of Galen "On the Use of the Pulse." He seems also to have held several other benefices during the later years of his life, although some of them were resigned within so short a time as to make it difficult to understand why he should have accepted them, since the expenses of institution must have exceeded the profits which were derived from them during the period of possession. Linacre owed his clerical opportunities during the last years of his life particularly to Archbishop Warham, who, as ambassador, primate, and chancellor, occupied a large and honorable place in the history of the times. Erasmus says of him in one of his letters: "Such were his vigilance and attention in all matters relating to religion and to the offices of the Church that no concern which was foreign to them seemed ever to distract him. He had sufficient time for a scrupulous performance of the accustomed exercises of prayer, for the almost daily celebration of the Mass, for twice or thrice hearing divine service, for determining suits, for receiving embassies, for consultation with the king when matters of moment required his presence, for the visitation of churches when regulation was needed, for the welcome of frequently two hundred guests, and lastly for a literary leisure." As the close friend of such men, it is evident that Linacre must have accomplished much good as a clergyman; and it seems not unlikely that his frequent changes of rectorship were rather {105} due to the fact that the Primate wished to make use of his influence in various parts of his diocese for the benefit of religion than for any personal motives on Linacre's part, who, in order to enter the service of the Church, had given up so much more than he could expect as a clergyman. Linacre as a clergyman continued to deserve the goodwill and esteem of all his former friends, and seems to have made many new ones. At the time of his death he was one of the most honored individuals in England. All of his biographers are agreed in stating that he was the representative Englishman of his time, looked up to by all his contemporaries, respected and admired by those who had not the opportunity of his intimate acquaintance, and heartily loved by friends, who were themselves some of the best men of the time. The concluding paragraph of the appreciation of Linacre's character in _Lives of British Physicians_ [Footnote 10] is as follows: "To sum up his character it was said of him that no Englishman of his day had had such famous masters, namely, Demetrius and Politian of Florence; such noble patrons, Lorenzo de' Medici, Henry VII and Henry VIII; such high-born scholars, the Prince Arthur and Princess Mary of England; or such learned friends, for amongst the latter were to be enumerated Erasmus, Melanchthon, Latimer, {106} Tonstal, and Sir Thomas More." His biographer might have added the names of others of the pre-Reformation period, men of culture and character whose merits only the historical researches of recent years have brought out--Prior Selling, Dean Colet (though his friendship was unfortunately interrupted), Archbishop Warham, Cardinal Wolsey, Grocyn, and further scholars and churchmen. [Footnote 10: London. John Murray, 1830.] Dr. J. F. Payne, in summing up the opinion of Linacre held by his contemporaries, in the "Dictionary of National Biography" (British), pays a high tribute to the man. "Linacre's personal character was highly esteemed by his contemporaries. He was evidently capable of absolute devotion to a great cause, animated by genuine public spirit and a boundless zeal for learning." Erasmus sketches him humorously in the "Encomium Moriae" (The Praise of Foolishness)--with a play on the word _Moriae_ in reference to his great friend, Thomas More, of whom Erasmus thought so much--showing him a tireless student. The distinguished foreign scholar, however, considered Linacre as an enthusiast in recondite studies, but no mere pedant. Dr. Payne closes his appreciation with these words: "Linacre had, it would seem, no enemies." Caius, the distinguished English physician and scholar, himself one of the best known members of the Royal College of Physicians and the founder of Caius College, Cambridge, sketches {107} Linacre's character (he had as a young man known him personally) in very sympathetic vein. As Dr. Caius was one of the greatest Englishmen of his time in the middle of the sixteenth century, his opinion must carry great weight. It is to him that we owe the famous epitaph that for long in old St. Paul's, London, was to be read on Linacre's tombstone:-- "_Fraudes dolosque mire perosus, fidus amicis, omnibus ordinibus juxta carus_. A stern hater of deceit and underhand ways, faithful to his friends, equally dear to all classes," Surely this is a worthy tribute to the great physician, clergyman, scholar, and philanthropist of the eve of the Reformation in England. {108} V. FATHER KIRCHER, S.J.: SCIENTIST, ORIENTALIST, AND COLLECTOR. {109} Oportet autem neque recentiores viros in his fraudare quae vel repererunt vel recte secuti sunt; et tamen ea quae apud antiquiores aliquos posita sunt auctoribus suis reddere.--CELSUS _de Medicina_. {110} [Illustration: ATHANASIUS KIRCHER] {111} V. FATHER KIRCHER, S.J.: SCIENTIST, ORIENTALIST, AND COLLECTOR. Except in the minds of the unconquerably intolerant, the Galileo controversy has in recent years settled down to occupy something of its proper place in the history of the supposed conflict between religion and science. In touching the subject in the life of Copernicus we suggested that it has come to be generally recognized, as M. Bertrand, the perpetual Secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, himself a distinguished mathematician and historian, declares, that "the great lesson for those who would wish to oppose reason with violence was clearly to be read in Galileo's story, and the scandal of his condemnation was learned without any profound sorrow to Galileo himself; and his long life, considered as a whole, was the most serene and enviable in the history of science." Somehow, notwithstanding the directness of this declaration, there is still left in the minds of many an impression rather difficult to eradicate that there was definite, persistent opposition to everything associated with scientific progress among the churchmen of the time of Galileo. Perhaps no better answer to this unfortunate, because absolutely untrue, impression could be in {112} formulated than is to be found in a sketch of the career of Father Athanasius Kircher, the distinguished Jesuit who for so many years occupied himself with nearly every branch of science in Rome, under the fostering care of the Church. He had been Professor of Physics, Mathematics, and Oriental Languages at Würzburg, but was driven from there by the disturbances incident to the Thirty Years' War, in 1631. He continued his scientific investigation at Avignon. From here, within two years after Galileo's trial in 1635, he was, through the influence of Cardinal Barberini, summoned to Rome, where he devoted himself to mathematics at first, and then to every branch of science, as well as the Oriental languages, not only with the approval, but also with the most liberal pecuniary aid from the ecclesiastical authorities of the papal court and city. Some idea of the breadth of Father Kircher's scientific sympathy and his genius for scientific observation and discovery, which amounted almost to intuition, may be gathered from the fact that to him we owe the first definite statement of the germ theory of disease; and he seems to have been the first to recognize the presence of what are now called microbes. At the same time his works on magnetism contained not only all the knowledge of his own time, but also some wonderful suggestions as to the possibilities of the development of this science. His studies with regard to light are almost as epochal as those with regard to magnetism. Besides these, he {113} was the first to find any clue to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and yet found time to write a geographical work on Latium, the country surrounding Rome, and to make collections for his museum which rendered it in its time the best scientific collection in the world. It may very well indeed be said that visitors to Rome with scientific tendencies found as much that was suggestive in Father Kircher's museum--the "Kircherianum," as it came to be called--as artists and sculptors and architects found in the Vatican collections of the papal city. All of this work was accomplished within the half century after Galileo's trial, for Father Kircher died in 1680, at the age of seventy-eight, having lived, as so many of the great scientists have done, a long life in the midst of the most persistent activity. Kircher, more than perhaps any other, can be said to be the founder of modern natural science. Before any one else, in a practical way, he realized the necessity for the collection of an immense amount of data, if science was to be founded on the broad, firm foundation of observed truth. The principle which had been announced by Bacon in the "Novum Organon"--"to take all that comes rather than to choose, and to heap up rather than to register"--was never carried out as fully as by Father Kircher. As Edmund Gosse said in the June number of _Harper's_, 1904, "Bacon had started a great idea, but he had not carried it out. He is not the founder, he is the prophet {114} of modern physical science. To be in direct touch with nature, to adventure in the unexplored fields of knowledge, and to do this by carrying out an endless course of slow and sure experiments, this was the counsel of the 'Novum Organon.'" Bacon died in 1626, and scarcely more than a decade had passed before Kircher was carrying out the work thus outlined by the English philosopher in a way that was surprisingly successful, even looked at from the standpoint of our modern science. Needless to say, however, it was not because of Bacon's suggestion that he did so, for it is more than doubtful whether he knew of Bacon's writings until long after the lines of his life-work had been traced by his own inquiring spirit. The fulness of time had come. The inductive philosophy was in the air. Bacon's formulae, which the English philosopher never practically applied, and Father Kircher's assiduous collection of data, were but expressions of the spirit of the times. How faithfully the work of the first modern inductive scientist was accomplished we shall see. It may be easily imagined that a certain interest in Father Kircher, apart from his scientific attainments and the desire to show how much and how successful was the attention given to natural science by churchmen about the time of the Galileo controversy, might influence this judgment of the distinguished Jesuit's scientific accomplishments. With regard to his discoveries in medicine especially, and above all his {115} announcement of the microbic origin of contagious disease, it may be thought that this was a mere chance expression and not at all the result of serious scientific conclusions. Tyndall, however, the distinguished English physicist, would not be the one to give credit for scientific discoveries, and to a clergyman in a distant century, unless there was definite evidence of the discovery. It is not generally known that to the great English physicist we owe the almost absolute demonstration of the impossibility of spontaneous generation, together with a series of studies showing the existence everywhere in the atmosphere of minute forms of life to which fermentative changes and also the infectious diseases--though at that time this was only a probability--are to be attributed. When Tyndall was reviewing, in the midst of the controversy over spontaneous generation, the question of the microbic origin of disease, he said: "Side by side with many other theories has run the germ theory of epidemic disease. The notion was expressed by Kircher and favored by Linnaeus, that epidemic diseases may be due to germs which enter the body and produce disturbance by the development within the body of parasitic forms of life." How much attention Father Kircher's book on the pest or plague, in which his theory of the micro-organismal origin of disease is put forward, attracted from the medical profession can be understood from the fact that it was submitted to three of the most distinguished physicians in {116} Rome before being printed, and that their testimony to its value as a contribution to medicine prefaced the first edition. They are not sparing in their praise of it. Dr. Joseph Benedict Sinibaldus, who was the Professor of the Practice of Medicine in the Roman University at the time, says that "Father Kircher's book not only contains an excellent resume of all that is known about the pest or plague, but also as many valuable hints and suggestions on the origin and spread of the disease, which had never before been made." He considers it a very wonderful thing that a non-medical man should have been able to place himself so thoroughly in touch with the present state of medicine in respect to this disease and then point out the conditions of future progress. Dr. Paul Zachias, who was a distinguished Roman physician of the time, said that he had long known Father Kircher as an eminent writer on other subjects, but that after reading his book on the pest he must consider him also distinguished in medical writing. He says: "While he has set his hand at other's harvests, he has done it with so much wisdom and prudence as to win the admiration of the harvesters already in the field." He adds that there can be no doubt that it would be a source of profit for medical men to read this little book and that it will undoubtedly prove beneficial to future generations. Testimony of another kind to the value of Father Kircher's book is to be found in the fact {117} that within a half-year after its publication in Latin it appeared in several other languages. It is too much the custom of these modern times to consider that scientific progress in the centuries before our own and its immediate predecessor was likely to attract little attention for many years, and was especially slow to make its way into foreign countries. Anything, however, of real importance in science took but a very short time to travel from one country to another in Europe in the seventeenth century, and the fact that scientific men generally used Latin as a common language made the spread of discoveries and speculations much easier even than at the present time. Our increased means of communication have really only served to allow sensational announcements of a progress in science--which is usually no progress at all--to be spread quite as effectually in modern times as were real advances in the older days. There is no good account of Father Kircher's life available in English, and it has seemed only proper that the more important at least of the details of the life of the man who thus anticipated the beginnings of modern bacteriology and of the relations of micro-organisms to disease, should not be left in obscurity. His life history is all the more interesting and important because it illustrates the interest of the churchmen of the time, and especially of the Roman ecclesiastical authorities, in all forms of science; for Father Kircher is undoubtedly one of the greatest scholars of {118} history and one of the scientific geniuses in whose works can be found, as the result of some wonderful principles of intuition incomprehensible to the slower intellectual operations of ordinary men, anticipations of many of the discoveries of the after-time. There is scarcely a modern science he did not touch upon, and nothing that he touched did he fail to illuminate. His magnificent collections in the museum of the Roman College demonstrate very well his extremely wide interests in all scientific matters. The history of Father Kircher's career furnishes perhaps the best possible refutation of the oft-repeated slander that Jesuit education was narrow and was so founded upon and rooted in authority that original research and investigation, in scientific matters particularly, were impossible, and that it utterly failed to encourage new discoveries of any kind. As a matter of fact, Kircher was not only not hampered in his work by his superiors or by the ecclesiastical authorities, but the respect in which he was held at Rome enabled him to use the influence of the Church and of great churchmen all over the world, with the best possible effect, for the assembling at the Roman College of objects of the most various kinds, illustrating especially the modern sciences of archeology, ethnology, and paleontology, besides Egyptian and Assyrian history. Athanasius Kircher was born 2 May, 1602, at Geisa, near Fulda, in South Germany. He was educated at the Jesuit College of Fulda, and at {119} the early age of sixteen, having completed his college course, entered the Jesuit novitiate at Mainz. After his novitiate he continued his philosophical and classical studies at Paderborn and completed his years of scholastic teaching in various cities of South Germany--Munster, Cologne, and Coblenz--finally finishing his education by theological studies at Cologne and Mainz. Toward the end of the third decade of the seventeenth century he became Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at Würzburg. Here his interest in Oriental languages began, and he established a special course in this subject at the University of Würzburg. During the Thirty Years' War, however, the invasion of Germany very seriously disturbed university work, and finally in 1631 Father Kircher was sent by his superiors to Avignon in South France, where he continued his teaching some four years, attracting no little attention by his wide interest in many sciences and by various scientific works that showed him to be a man of very broad genius. In 1635, through the influence of Cardinal Barberini, he was summoned to Rome, where he became Professor of Mathematics and Oriental Languages in the famous Roman College of the Jesuits, which was considered at that time one of the greatest educational institutions in the world. His interest in science, however, was not lessened by teaching duties that would apparently have demanded all his time; and, as we shall see, he continued to issue books on the most diverse {120} scientific subjects, most of them illustrated by absolutely new experimental observations and all of them attracting widespread attention. Father Kircher began his career as a writer on science at the early age of twenty-seven, when he issued his first work on magnetism. The title of this volume, "Ars Magnesia tum Theorematice tum Problematice Proposita," shows that the subject was not treated entirely from a speculative standpoint. Indeed, in the preface he states that he hopes that the principal value of the book will be found in the fact that the knowledge of magnetism is presented by a new method, with special demonstrations, and that the conclusions are confirmed by various practical uses and long-continued experience with magnets of various kinds. Although it may be a source of great surprise, Father Kircher's genius was essentially experimental. He has been spoken of not infrequently as a man who collected the scientific information of his time in such a way as to display, as says the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, "a wide and varied learning, but that he was a man singularly devoid of judgment and critical discernment." He was in some respects the direct opposite of the opinion thus expressed, since his learning was always of a practical character, and there are very few subjects in this writing which he has not himself illustrated by means of new and ingenious experiments. Perhaps the best possible proof of this is to be {121} found in the fact that his second scientific work was on the construction of sun-dials, and that one of the discoveries he himself considered most valuable was the invention of a calculating machine, as well as of a complicated arrangement for illustrating the positions of the stars in the heavens. He constructed, moreover, a large burning-glass in order to demonstrate the possibility of the story told of Archimedes, that he had succeeded in burning the enemy's ships in the harbor at Syracuse by means of a large lens. But Father Kircher's surest claim to being a practical genius is to be found in his invention of the magic lantern. It was another Jesuit, Aquilonius, in his work on optics, issued in 1613, who had first sought to explain how the two pictures presented to the two eyes are fused into one, and it was in a practical demonstration of this by means of lenses that Kircher hit upon the invention of the projecting stereoscope. After his call to Rome our subject continued his work on magnetism, and in 1641 issued a further treatise on the subject called "Magnes" or "De Arte Magnetica." While he continued to teach Oriental languages and issued in 1644 a book with the title "Lingua AEgyptiaca Restituta," he also continued to apply himself especially to the development of physical science. Accordingly in 1645 there appeared his volume "Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae." This was a treatise on light, illustrated, as was his treatise on magnetism, by many original experiments and demonstrations. {122} During the five years until 1650 the department of acoustics came under his consideration, so that in that year we have from his pen a treatise called "Musurgia Universalis," with the subtitle, "The Art of Harmony and Discord; a treatise on the whole doctrine of sound with the philosophy of music treated from the standpoint of practical as well as theoretic science." During the next five years astronomy was his special hobby, and the result was in 1656 a treatise on astronomy called "Iter Celeste." This contained a description of the earth and the heavens and discussed the nature of the fixed and moving stars, with various considerations as to the composition and structure of these bodies. A second volume on this subject appeared in 1660. The variety of Father Kircher's interests in science was not yet exhausted, however. Five years after the completion of his two volumes on astronomy there came one on "Mundus Subterraneus." This treated of the modern subjects of geology, metallurgy, and mineralogy, as well as the chemistry of minerals. It also contained a treatise on animals that live under the ground, and on insects. This was considered one of the author's greatest books, and the whole of it was translated into French, whilst abstracts from it, especially the chapters on poisons, appeared in most of the other languages of Europe. Part of it was translated even into English, though seventeenth-century Englishmen were loath to draw their inspiration from Jesuit writers. {123} Jesuits were, however, at this time generally acknowledged on the Continent to be leaders in every department of thought, sympathetic coadjutors in every step in scientific progress. Strange as it may appear to those who will not understand the Jesuit spirit of love for learning, two of the most distinguished scientists whose names are immortal in the history of physical sciences in different departments during this century, Kepler and Harvey, were on intimate terms of friendship with the Jesuits of Germany. Harvey, on the occasion of a visit to the Continent, stopped for a prolonged visit with the Jesuits at Cologne, so that some of his English friends joked him about the possibility of his making converts of the Jesuits. These witticisms, however, did not seem to distract Harvey very much, for he returned on a subsequent occasion to spend some further days with his Jesuit scientific friends along the Rhine. In the meantime Father Kircher was issuing notable books on his always favorite subject of the Oriental languages. In 1650 there appeared "Obeliscus Pamphilius," containing an explanation of the hieroglyphics to be found on the obelisk which by the order of Innocent X, a member of the Pamfili family, was placed in the Piazza Navona by Bernini. This is no mere pamphlet, as might be thought, but a book of 560 pages. In 1652 there appeared "OEdipus AEgyptiacus," that is, the revealer of the sphinx-like riddle of the Egyptian ancient languages. In 1653 a second volume of this appeared, and in 1655 a third {124} volume. It was considered so important that it was translated into Russian and other Slav languages, besides several other European languages. His book, "Lingua AEgyptiaca Restituta," which appeared in 1644, when Kircher was forty-two years of age, is considered to be of value yet in the study of Oriental languages, and was dedicated to the patron, Emperor Ferdinand III, whose liberality made its publication possible. It is often a subject for conjecture just how science was studied and taught in centuries before the nineteenth, and just what text-books were employed. A little familiarity with Father Kircher's publications, however, will show that there was plenty of very suitable material for text-books to be found in his works. Under his own direction, what at the present time would be called a text-book of physics, but which at that time was called "Physiologia Experimentalis," was issued, containing all the experimental and demonstrative parts of his various books on chemistry, physics, music, magnetism, and mechanics, as well as acoustics and optics. This formed the groundwork of most text-books of science for a full century afterwards. Indeed, until the beginning of the distinctly modern science of chemistry with the discoveries of Priestley and Lavoisier, there was to be little added of serious import in science. Perhaps the most commendable feature of Father Kircher's books is the fact that he himself seems never to have considered that he had {125} exhausted a subject. The first work he published was on magnetism. Some twelve years later he returned to the subject, and wrote a more extensive work, containing many improvements over the first volume. The same thing is true of his studies in sound. In 1650, when not quite fifty years of age, he issued his "Musurgia Universalis," a sub-title of which stated that it contains the whole doctrine of sound and the practical and theoretical philosophy of music. A little over twenty years later, however, he published the "Phonurgia Nova," the sub-title of which showed that it was mainly concerned with the experimental demonstration of various truths in acoustics and with the development of the doctrine he had originally stated in the "Musurgia." It is no wonder that his contemporaries spoke of him as the _Doctor centum artium_--the teacher of a hundred arts--for there was practically no branch of scientific knowledge in his time in which he was not expert. Scientific visitors to Rome always considered it one of the privileges of their stay in the papal city to have the opportunity to meet Father Kircher, and it was thought a very great honor to be shown through his museum by himself. Of course, it is difficult for present-day scientists to imagine a man exhausting the whole round of science in this way. Many who have read but little more than the titles of Father Kircher's many books are accordingly prone to speak of him as a mine of information, but without any {126} proper critical judgment. He has succeeded, according to them, in heaping together an immense amount of information, but it is of the most disparate value. There is no doubt that he took account of many things in science that are manifestly absurd. Astrology, for instance, had not, in his time, gone out of fashion entirely, and he refers many events in men's lives to the influence of the stars. He even made rules for astrological predictions, and his astronomical machine for exhibiting the motions of the stars was also meant to be helpful in the construction of astrological tables. It must not be forgotten, however, that in his time the best astronomers, like Tycho Brahe and even Kepler, had not entirely given up the idea of the influence of the stars over man's destiny. As regards other sciences, there are details of information that may appear quite as superstitious as the belief in astrology. Kircher, for instance, accepted the idea of the possibility of the transmutation of metals. It is to be said, though, that all mankind were convinced of this possibility, and indeed not entirely without reason. All during the nineteenth century scientists believed very firmly in the absolute independence of chemical elements and their utter non-interchangeability. As the result of recent discoveries, however, in which one element has apparently been observed giving rise to another, much of this doctrine has come to be considered as improbable, and now the idea of possible transmutation of {127} metals and other chemical elements into one another appears not so absurd as it was half a century ago. Any one who will take up a text-book of science of a century ago will find in it many glaring absurdities. It will seem almost impossible that a scientific thinker, in his right senses, could have accepted some of the propositions that are calmly set down as absolute truths. Every generation has made itself ridiculous by knowing many things "that are not so," and even ours is no exception. Father Kircher was not outside this rule, though he was ahead of his generation in the critical faculty that enabled him to eliminate many falsities and to illuminate half-truths in the science of his day. Undoubtedly the most interesting of Father Kircher's scientific books is his work On the Pest, with some considerations on its origin, mode of distribution, and treatment, which about the middle of the seventeenth century gathered together all the medical theories of the times as to the causation of contagious disease, discussed them with critical judgment and reached conclusions which anticipate much of what is most modern in our present-day medicine. It is this work of Father Kircher's that is now most often referred to, and very deservedly so, because it is one of the classics which represents a landmark in knowledge for all time. It merits a place beside such books as Harvey on the Circulation of Blood, or even Vesalius on Human {128} Anatomy. As we have seen, it is now quoted from by our best recent authorities who attempt seriously to trace the history of the microbic theory of disease, and its conclusions are the result of logical processes and not the mere chance lighting upon truth of a mind that had the theories of the time before it. In it Father Kircher's genius is best exhibited. It has the faults of his too ready credibility; and his desire to discuss all possible phases of the question, even those which are now manifestly absurd, has led him into what prove to be useless digressions. But on the whole it represents very well the first great example of the application of the principle of inductive science to modern medicine. All the known facts and observations are collected and discussed, and then the conclusions are suggested. It is very interesting to trace the development of Father Kircher's ideas with regard to the origin, causation, and communication of disease, because in many points he so clearly anticipates medical knowledge that has only come to be definitely accepted in very recent times. It has often been pointed out that Sir Robert Boyle declared that the processes of fermentation and those which brought about infectious disease, were probably of similar nature, and that the scientist who solved the problem of the cause of fermentation would throw great light on the origin of these diseases. This prophetic remark was absolutely verified when Pasteur, a chemist who had solved the problem of fermentation, also solved {129} the weightier questions connected with human diseases. Before even Boyle, however, Father Kircher had expressed his opinion that disease processes were similar to those of putrefaction. He considered that putrefaction was due to the presence of certain _corpuscula_, as he called them, and these he said were also probably active in the causation of infectious disease. He was not sure whether or not these _corpuscula_ were living, in the sense that they could multiply of themselves. He considered, however, that this was very probable. As to their distribution, he is especially happy in his anticipations of modern medical progress. While he considered it very possible that they were carried through the air, he gives it as his deliberate opinion that living things were the most frequent agents for the distribution of the corpuscles of disease. He is sure that they are carried by flies, for instance, and that they may be inoculated by the stings of such insects as fleas or mosquitoes. He even gives some examples that he knew of in which this was demonstrated. Still more striking is his insistence on the fact that such a contagious disease as pest may be carried by cats and dogs and other domestic animals. The cat seemed to him to be associated with special danger in this matter, and he gives an example of a nunnery which had carefully protected itself against possible infection, but had allowed a cat to come in, with the result that some cases of the disease developed. {130} An interesting bit of discussion is to be found in the chapter in which Father Kircher takes up the consideration of the problem whether infectious disease can ever be produced by the imagination. He is speaking particularly of the pest, but there is more than a suspicion that under the name pest came at times of epidemics many of our modern contagious diseases. Father Kircher says that there is no doubt that worry plays an important role in predisposing persons to take the disease. He does not consider, however, that it can originate of itself, or be engendered in the person without contact with some previous case of pest. With regard to the question of predisposition he is very modern. He points out that many persons do not take the disease, because evidently of some protective quality which they possess. He is sure, too, that the best possible protection comes from keeping in good, general health. A curious suggestion is that with regard to the grave-diggers and undertakers. It has often been noted in Italy, so Father Kircher asserts, that these individuals as a rule did not succumb to the disease, notwithstanding their extreme exposure, when the majority of the population were suffering from it. Toward the end of the epidemic, however, at the time when the townspeople were beginning to rejoice over its practical disappearance, it was not unusual to have these caretakers of the dead brought down with the disease--often, too, in fatal form. Father {131} Kircher considers that only strong and healthy individuals would take up such an occupation. That the satisfaction of accomplishing a large amount of work and making money kept them in good health. Later on, however, as the result of overwork during the time of the epidemic and also of discouragement because they saw the end of prosperous times for them, they became predisposed to the disease and then fell victims. With regard to the prevention of the pest in individual cases, Father Kircher has some very sensible remarks. He says that physicians as a rule depend on certain medicinal protectives or on amulets which they carry. The amulets he considers to be merely superstitious. The sweet-smelling substances that are sometimes employed are probably without any preventive action. Certain physicians employed a prophylactic remedy made up of very many substances. This is what in modern days we would be apt to call a "gunshot prescription." It contained so many ingredients that it was hoped that some one of them would hit the right spot and prove effective. Father Kircher has another name for it. We do not know whether it is original with him, but in any case it is worth while remembering. He calls it a "calendar prescription," because when written it resembled a list of the days of the month. His opinion of this "calendar prescription" is not very high. It seems to him that if one ingredient did good, most of the others would be {132} almost as sure to do harm. The main factor in prophylaxis to his mind was to keep in normal health, and this seemed not quite compatible with frequent recourse to a prescription containing so many drugs that were almost sure to have no good effect and might have an ill effect. It is all the more interesting to find these common-sense views because ordinarily Father Kircher is set down as one who accepted most of the traditions of his time without inquiring very deeply into their origin or truth, simply reporting them out of the fulness of his rather pedantic information. In most cases it will be found, however, that, like Herodotus, reporting the curious things that had been told him in his travels, he is very careful to state what are his own opinions and what he owes to others and gives place to, though without attaching much credence to them. It must not be forgotten that his great contemporaries, Von Helmont and Paracelsus, were not free from many of the curious scientific superstitions of their time, though they had, like him, in many respects the true scientific spirit. Von Helmont, for instance, was a firm believer in the doctrine of spontaneous generation, and even went so far as to consider that it had its application to animals of rather high order. For instance, one of his works contains a rather famous prescription to bring about the spontaneous generation of mice. What was needed was a jar of meal kept in a dark corner covered by some soiled linen. After three weeks these elements {133} would be found to have bred mice. Too much must not be expected, then, of Kircher in the matter of crediting supposedly scientific traditions. It may seem surprising that Father Kircher's book did not produce a greater impression upon the medical research work and teaching of the day and lead to an earlier development of microbiology. Unfortunately, however, the instruments of precision necessary for such a study were not then at hand, and the gradual loss of prestige of the book is therefore readily to be understood. The explanation of this delay in the development of science is very well put by Crookshank, who is the professor of comparative pathology and bacteriology at King's College, London, and one of the acknowledged authorities on these subjects in the medical world. Professor Crookshank says, at the beginning of the first chapter of his text-book on bacteriology, in which he traces the origin of the science, that the first attempt to demonstrate the existence of the _contagium vivum_ dates back almost to the discovery of the microscope:--[Footnote 11] [Footnote 11: _A Text-Book of Bacteriology_. Including the Etiology and Prevention of Infectious Diseases By Edgar M. Crookshank. Fourth Edition London, 1896] Athanasius Kircher nearly two and a half centuries ago expressed his belief that there were definite micro-organisms to which diseases were attributable. The microscope had revealed that all decomposing {134} substances swarmed with countless micro-organisms which were invisible to the naked eye, and Kircher sought for similar organisms in disease, which he considered might be due to their agency. The microscopes which he describes obviously could not admit of the possibility of studying or even detecting the micro-organisms which are now known to be associated with certain diseases; and it is not surprising that his teaching did not at the time gain much attention. They were destined, however, to receive a great impetus from the discoveries which emanated not long after from the father of microscopy, Leeuwenhoek. This reference to Kircher's work, however, shows that more cordial appreciation of his scientific genius has come in our day, and it seems not unlikely that in the progress of more accurate and detailed knowledge of scientific origins his reputation will grow as it deserves. With that doubtless will come a better understanding of the true attitude of the scholars of the time--so many of whom were churchmen--to so-called physical science in contradistinction to philosophy, in which of course they had always been profoundly interested. The work done by Kircher could never have been accomplished but for the sympathetic interest of those who are falsely supposed to have been bitterly opposed to all progress in the natural sciences, but whose opposition was really limited to theoretic phases of scientific inquiry that threatened, as has scientific theory so often since, to prove directly contradictory to revealed truth. {135} VI. BISHOP STENSEN: ANATOMIST AND FATHER OF GEOLOGY. {136} God makes sages and saints that they may be fountain-heads of wisdom and virtue for all who yearn and aspire: and whoever has superior knowledge or ability is thereby committed to more effectual and unselfish service of his fellow-men. If the love of fame be but an infirmity of noble souls, the craving of professional reputation is but conceit and vanity. To be of help, and to be of help not merely to animals, but to immortal, pure, loving spirits this is the noblest earthly fate.--BISHOP SPALDING: _The Physician's Calling and Education_. [Illustration: NICOLAUS STENONIS] {137} VI. BISHOP STENSEN, ANATOMIST AND FATHER OF GEOLOGY. In the sketch of the life of Father Athanasius Kircher, the distinguished Jesuit scientist, mathematician, and Orientalist, I called attention to the fact that, at the very time when Galileo was tried and condemned at Rome, because of his abuse of Scripture for the demonstration of scientific thesis, a condemnation which has been often since proclaimed to be due to the Church's intolerant opposition to science, the ecclesiastical authorities at Rome invited Father Kircher, who was at that time teaching mathematics in Germany, to come to Rome, and during the next half-century encouraged him in every way in the cultivation of all the physical sciences of the times. It was to popes and cardinals, as well as to influential members of his own order of the Jesuits, that Father Kircher owed his opportunities for the foundation of a complete and magnificent museum, illustrating many phases of natural science--the first of its kind in the world, and which yet continues to be one of the noteworthy collections. During the decade in which the condemnation of Galileo and the invitation of Father Kircher to Rome took place, there was born, at {138} Copenhagen, a man whose career of distinction in science was to prove even more effectively than that of Kircher, if possible, that there was no opposition in ecclesiastical circles in Italy, during this century, to the development of natural science even in departments in respect to which the Church has, over and over again, been said to be specially intolerant. This scientist was Nicholas Stensen, the discoverer of the duct of the parotid gland, which conducts saliva into the mouth, and the founder, in the truest sense of the word, of the modern science of geology. Stensen's discovery of the duct which has since borne his name was due to no mere accident; for he was one of the really great anatomists of all time, and one distinguished particularly for his powers of original observation and investigation. To have the two distinctions, then, of a leader in anatomy and a founder in geology, stamps him as one of the supreme scientific geniuses of all time, a man not only of a fruitfully inquiring disposition of mind, but also one who possessed a very definite realization of how important for the cause of scientific truth is the necessity of testing all ideas with regard to things physical, by actual observations of nature and by drawing conclusions not wider than the observed facts. Notwithstanding this characteristically scientific temper of mind, which, according to most modern ideas, at least, would seem to be sure to lead him away from religious truth, Stensen at the {139} very height of his career as a scientist, while studying anatomy and geology in Italy, became a convert from Lutheranism, in which he had been born, to Catholicity, and thereafter made it one of the prime objects of his life to bring as many others as possible of the separated brethren into the fold of the Church. When he accepted the professorship of anatomy at the University of Copenhagen, it was with the definite idea that he might be able to use the influence of his position to make people realize how much of religious truth there was in the old Church from which they had been separated in the preceding century. After a time, however, his zeal led him to resign his position, and ask to be made a priest, in order that he might be able more effectively to fulfil what he now considered the main purpose of his life, the winning of souls to the Church. As, since his conversion, he had given every evidence of the most sincere piety and humble simplicity, his desires were granted. His book on geology, however, was partly written during the very time when he was preparing for sacred orders, and was warmly welcomed by all his Catholic friends. After spending some time as a missionary, and attracting a great deal of attention by his devout life and by the many friends and converts he succeeded in making, the recently converted Duke of Hanover asked that the zealous Danish convert should be made bishop of his capital city. This request was immediately granted, and Stensen spent several years {140} in the hardest missionary labor in his new field. As a matter of fact, his labors proved too much for his rather delicate constitution, and he died at the comparatively early age of forty-eight. The visitor to the University of Copenhagen marvels to find among the portraits of her professors of anatomy one in the robes of a Roman Catholic bishop. This is Stensen. In 1881, when the International Geographical Congress met at Bologna, it adjourned at the end of the session to Florence to unveil a bust of Stensen, over his tomb there. Here evidently is a man whose life is well worth studying, because of all that it means for the history of his time. Nicholas Stensen--or, as he is often called, Steno, because this is the Latin form of his name, and Latin was practically exclusively used, during his age, in scientific circles all over Europe--was born 20 January, 1638, in Copenhagen. His father died while he was comparatively young, and his mother married again, both her husbands being goldsmiths in high repute for their skill, and both of them in rather well-to-do circumstances. His early education was obtained at Copenhagen, and the results displayed in his attainments show how well it must have been conducted. Later in life he spoke and wrote Latin very fluently and had, besides, a very thorough knowledge of Greek and of Hebrew. Of the modern languages, German, French, Italian, and Low Dutch he knew very well, mainly from residence in the various countries in which they {141} are spoken. A more unusual attainment at that time, and one showing the ardor of his thirst for knowledge, was an acquaintance with English. In early life he was especially fond of mathematics and, indeed, it was almost by accident that this did not become his chosen field of educational development. At eighteen he became a student of the University of Copenhagen, and after some preliminary studies in philosophy and philology devoted himself mainly to medicine. At this time the Danish University was especially distinguished for its work in anatomy. The famous family of Bartholini, who had for several generations been teaching there, had proved a copious source of inspiration for the students in their department, and as a consequence original investigation of a high order, with enthusiasm for the development of anatomical science, had become the rule. The external situation was not favorable to learning, for Denmark was engaged in harassing and costly wars during a considerable portion of the seventeenth century; yet the work accomplished here was, undoubtedly, some of the best in Europe. Young Stensen had the advantage of having Thomas Bartholini as his preceptor, and soon, because of his enthusiasm for science, as friend and father. Stensen had been at the University scarcely two years when the city of Copenhagen was besieged by the Swedes. Professor Lutz, of the University of St. Louis, who has recently written {142} an article on Stensen, which appeared in the _Medical Library and Historical Journal_ for July, 1904, says of this period: A regiment of students numbering two hundred and sixty-six, called "the black coats" on account of their dark clothes, was formed for the defence of the city; upon its roster we find the name of young Steno. During the day they were at work mending the ramparts, and the nights were spent in repelling the attacks of the enemy. In the course of this long siege, the city was compelled to cope with a more formidable enemy than the Swedes--famine with all its horrors--before relief came in the shape of provisions and reinforcements furnished by the Dutch fleet. Throughout these turbulent days the student soldiers rendered valuable services to their country, and though it be true that "inter arma silent musae"--"the war gods do not favor the muses"--it appears nevertheless that Steno attended the lectures and dissections which were conducted by the teachers in the intervals when the student were not on duty. After some three years spent at the University of Copenhagen, Stensen, as was the custom of the times, went to pursue his post-graduate studies in a foreign university. Bartholini furnished him with a letter of recommendation to Professor Blasius, who was teaching anatomy at Amsterdam in Holland. Amsterdam had become famous during the seventeenth century for the very practical character of its anatomical teaching. As the result of the cordial commendation of Bartholini, Stensen became an inmate of the house of Professor Blasius, and was given {143} special opportunities to pursue his anatomical studies for himself. He had been but a very short time at Amsterdam, when he made the discovery to which his name has ever since been attached, that of the duct of the parotid gland. Stensen's discovery was made while he was dissecting the head of a sheep. He found shortly afterwards, however, that the canal could be demonstrated to exist in the dog, though it was not so large a structure. Blasius seems to have been rather annoyed at the fact that a student, just beginning work with him, should make so important a discovery, and wished to claim the honor of it for himself. There is no doubt, however, now, notwithstanding the discussion over the priority of the discovery which took place at the time, that Stensen was the first to make this important observation. Not long before, Wharton, an English observer, had demonstrated the existence of a canal leading from the submaxillary gland into the mouth. This might have been expected to lead to the discovery of other glandular ducts, but so far had not. As a matter of fact, the function of the parotid gland was not well understood at this time. During the discussion as to priority of discovery, Steno pointed out one fact which he very properly considers as the most conclusive proof that Blasius did not discover the duct of the gland. He says: "Blasius shows plainly in his treatise 'De Medicina Generali' that he has never sought for the duct, for he does not assign {144} to it either the proper point of beginning or ending, and assigns to the parotid gland itself so unworthy a function as that of furnishing warmth to the ear, so that if I were not perfectly sure of having once shown him the duct myself, I should be tempted to say that he had never seen it." Bartholini settled the controversy, and at the same time removed any discouragement that might have arisen in his young pupil's mind, by writing to him:-- Your assiduity in investigating the secrets of the human body, as well as your fortunate discoveries, are highly praised by the learned of your country. The fatherland congratulates itself upon such a citizen, I upon such a pupil, through whose efforts anatomy makes daily progress, and our lympathic vessels are traced out more and more. You divide honors with Wharton, since you have added to his internal duct an external one, and have thereby discovered the sources of the saliva concerning which many have hitherto dreamed much, but which no one has (permit the expression) pointed out with the finger. Continue, my Steno, to follow the path to immortal glory which true anatomy holds out to you. Under the stimulus of such encouragement, it is no wonder that Stensen continued his original work with eminent success. He published an extensive article on the glands of the eye and the vessels of the nose. Bartholini wrote to him again: "Your fame is growing from day to day, for your pen and your sharp eye know no rest." Later he wrote {145} again: "You may count upon the favor of the king as well as upon the applause of the learned." After three years at the University of Amsterdam, Steno returned to Copenhagen, where he published his "Anatomical Observations Concerning the Muscles and Glands." It was in this book that he announced his persuasion that the heart was a muscle. As he said himself, "the heart has been considered the seat of natural warmth, the throne of the soul; but if you examine it more closely, it turns out to be nothing but a muscle. The men of the past would not have been so grossly mistaken with regard to it, had they not preferred their imaginary theories to the results of the simple observation of nature." It is easy to understand that this observation created a very great sensation. It had much to do with overthrowing certain theoretic systems of medicine, and nearly a century later the distinguished physiologist, Haller, did not hesitate to proclaim the volume in which it occurs, as a "golden book." Stensen's studies in anatomy stamp him as an original genius of a high order, and this is all the more remarkable because his career occurs just in those years when there were distinguished discoverers in anatomy in every country in Europe. When Stensen began his work in anatomy, Harvey was still alive. The elder Bartholini, the first who ever established an anatomical museum, was another of his contemporaries. Among the names of distinguished anatomists {146} with whom Stensen was brought intimately in contact during the course of his studies in Holland, France and Italy are those of Swammerdam, Van Horne, and Malpighi. There is no doubt that his intercourse with such men sharpened his own intellectual activity, and increased his enthusiasm for original investigation in contradistinction to the mere accumulation of information. His contemporaries, indeed, exhausted most of the adjectives of the Latin language in trying to express their appreciation of his acuity of observation. He was spoken of as _oculatissimus_--that is, as being all eyes, _subtilissimus, acutissimus, sagacissimus_ in his knowledge of the human body, and as the most perspicacious anatomist of the time. Leibnitz and Haller were in accord in considering him one of the greatest of anatomists. In later years this admiration for Stensen's genius has not been less enthusiastically expressed. Haeser, in his "History of Medicine," the third edition of which appeared at Jena in 1879, says: "Among the greatest anatomists of the seventeenth century belongs Nicholas Steno, the most distinguished pupil of Thomas Bartholini. Steno was rightly considered in his own time as one of the greatest of anatomical discoverers. There is scarcely any part of the human body the knowledge of which was not rendered more complete by his investigations." The most valuable discovery made by Stensen was undoubtedly that the heart is a muscle. It {147} must not be forgotten that in his time, Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood was not yet generally accepted; indeed, there were many who considered the theory (as they called it) of the English investigator as one of the passing fads of medicine. Two significant discoveries, made after Harvey, served, however, to establish the theory of the circulation of the blood on a firm basis and to make it a definite medical doctrine. The most important of these was Malpighi's discovery that the capillaries--that is, the minute vessels at the end of the arterial tree on the surface of the body and in various organs--served as the direct connexion between the veins and the arteries. This demonstrated just how the blood passed from the arterial to the venous system. Scarcely less important, however, for the confirmation of Harvey's teaching was Stensen's demonstration of the muscular character of the tissue of the heart. Some of his observations upon muscles are extremely interesting, and, though he made many mistakes in explaining their function, he added not a little to the anatomical and physiological knowledge of the time in their regard. He seems to have been one of the first to recognize the fact that in the higher animals the heart may continue to beat for a considerable time after the animal is apparently dead; and, indeed, that by irritation of the removed heart, voluntary contractions may be brought about which will continue spontaneously for some moments. {148} With regard to the objections made by some, that such studies as these upon muscles could scarcely be expected to produce any direct result for the treatment of disease, or in the ordinary practice of medicine, Stensen said in reply that it is only on the basis of the anatomical, physiological, and pathological observation that progress in medicine is to be looked for. In spite, then, of the discouragement of the many, who look always for immediate practical results, Stensen continued his investigation, and even proposed to make an extended study of the mechanism of the muscular action. In the meantime, however, there had gradually been coming into his life another element which was to prove more absorbing than even his zeal for scientific discovery. It is this which constitutes the essential index of the man's character and has been sadly misunderstood by many of his biographers. Sir Michael Foster, of Cambridge, England, in his "Lectures on the History of Physiology," originally delivered as the Lane Lectures at Cooper Medical College, San Francisco, said:-- While thus engaged, still working at physiology, Stensen turned his versatile mind to other problems, as well as to those of comparative anatomy, and especially to those of the infant, indeed hardly as yet born, science of geology. His work "De solido intra solidum" is thought by geologists to be a brilliant effort toward the beginning of their science In 1672 he returned for a while to his native city of {149} Copenhagen, but within two years he was back again at Florence; and then there came to him, while as yet a young man of some thirty-six summers, a sudden and profound change in his life. In his early days he had heard much, too much perhaps, of the doctrines of Luther. Probably he had been repelled by the austere devotion which ruled the paternal roof. And, as his answer to Bossuet shows, his university life and studies, his intercourse with the active intellects of many lands, and his passion for inquiry into natural knowledge, had freed him from passive obedience to dogma. He doubtless, as did many others of his time, looked upon himself as one of the enlightened, as one raised above the barren theological questions which were moving the minds of lesser men Yet it was out of this sceptical state of mind, that life in Italy and intimate contact with ecclesiastics and religious, so often said to be likely not to have any such effect, brought this acute scientific mind into the Catholic Church. Nor did he become merely a formal adherent, but an ardent believer, and then an enthusiastic proselytizer. One American writer of a history of medicine, in his utter failure to comprehend or sympathize with the change that came over Stensen, speaks of him as having become at the end of his life a mere "peripatetic converter of heretics." This phase of Stensen's life has, however, as ample significance as any that preceded it. Steno's expectations of the professorship of anatomy at Copenhagen were disappointed, but the appointment went to Jacobson, whose work indeed is scarcely less distinguished than that of {150} his unsuccessful rival. The next few years Stensen passed in Paris, where he was assiduous in making dissections, and where he attracted much attention; and then, somewhat later, in Italy; in 1665 and 1666 he was in Rome. Thence he went to Florence, in order to perfect himself in Italian. The next few years he spent in this city, having received the appointment of body physician to the Grand Duke, as well as an appointment of visiting physician, as we would call it now, to the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. It was while at Florence that the whole current of Stensen's life was changed by his conversion to Catholicity. His position as physician to the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova brought him frequently into the apothecary shop attached to the hospital. As a result he came to know very well the religious in charge of the department, Sister Maria Flavia, the daughter of a well-known Tuscan family. At this time she had been for some thirty-five years a nun. Before long she learned that the distinguished young physician, at this time scarcely thirty years of age, who was such a pleasant gentleman in all his ways, was a Lutheran. She began, as she told afterwards, first by prayer, and then by friendly suggestions, to attempt to win him to the Catholic Church. Stensen, who seems already to have been well-disposed toward the Church, and who had always been known for a wonderful purity of heart and simplicity of character, listened very willingly to the naive words of the {151} old religious, who might very well have been his mother. Many years later, by the command of her confessor, the good Sister related the detailed story of his conversion. She began very simply by telling him one day that if he did not accept the true Catholic faith, he would surely go to hell. He listened to this without any impatience, and she said it a number of other times, half jokingly perhaps, but much more than half in earnest. As he listened so kindly, she said to him one day that he must pray every day to God to let him know the truth. This he promised to do and, as she found out from his servant (what is it these nuns do not find out?) he did pray every evening. One day, while he was in the apothecary shop, the Angelus bell rang, and she asked him to say the Angelus. He was perfectly willing to say the first part of the Hail Mary, but he did not want to say the second part, as he did not believe in the invocation of the Blessed Virgin and the saints. Then she asked him to visit the Church of the Blessed Virgin, the Santissima Nunziata, which he did. After this she suggested to him that he should abstain from meat on Fridays and Saturdays, which he promised to do, and which the good nun found out once more from his servant, he actually did do. And then the religious thought it was time to suggest that he should consult a clergyman, and his conversion was not long delayed. Young Stensen seems to have been the object {152} of solicitude on the part of a number of the good, elderly women with whom he was brought in contact. He discussed with Signora Arnolfini the great difficulty he had in believing the mystery of the Eucharist. Another good woman, the Signora Lavinia Felice, seeing how interested he was in things Catholic, succeeded in bringing him to the notice of a prominent Jesuit in Florence. As his friend, Sister Maria Flavia, had recommended the same Father to him, he followed the advice all the more readily, and it was not long before his last doubts were solved. It was after his conversion that Stensen received his invitation to become the professor of anatomy at the University of Copenhagen. Much as he had become attached to Florence, the thought of returning to his native city was sweet; and then besides he hoped that he might be able to influence his countrymen in their views toward the Catholic Church. It was not long, however, before the bigotry of his compatriots made life so unpleasant for him in Copenhagen that he resigned his position and returned to Italy. Various official posts in Florence were open for him, but now he had resolved to devote himself to the service of the Church, and so he became a priest. His contemporary, the Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, said with regard to him: "Already as a member of a Protestant sect he had lived a life of innocence and had practised all the moral virtues. After his conversion he had marked out for himself so severe a method of life and had {153} remained so true to it that in a very short time he reached a high degree of perfection." The Archbishop does not hesitate to say that he had become a man of constant union with God and entirely dead to himself. There was very little hesitation, then, in accepting him as a candidate for the priesthood, and as his knowledge of theology was very thorough, most of the delay in raising him to that dignity came from his own humility and his desire to prepare himself properly for the privilege. He made the exercises of St. Ignatius as part of his preparation, and after his ordination it was a source of remark with how much devotion he said his first and all succeeding Masses. It was not long before the piety of Stensen's life attracted great attention. At this time he was in frequent communication with such men as Spinoza and Leibnitz, the distinguished philosophers. It is curious to think of the ardent mystic, the pantheistic philosopher, and the speculative scientist, so different in character, having many interests in common. It was during these years in Italy that Stensen did what must be considered, undoubtedly, his most important work, even more important, if possible, than his anatomical discoveries. This was his foundation of the science of geology. As has been well said in a prominent text-book of geology, his book on this subject sets him in that group of men who as prophets of science often run far ahead of their times to point out the path which later centuries will follow in the road of {154} knowledge. It is rather surprising to find that the seventeenth century must enjoy the privilege of being considered the cradle of geological knowledge. There is no doubt, however, that the great principles of the science were laid down in Stensen's little book, which he intended only to be an introduction to a more extensive work, but the latter was unfortunately never completed, nor, indeed, so far as we are able to decide now, ever seriously begun. One of the basic principles of the science of geology Stensen taught as follows: "If a given body of definite form, produced according to the laws of nature, be carefully examined, it will show in itself the place and manner of its origin." This principle he showed would apply so comprehensively that the existence of many things, hitherto apparently inexplicable, became rather easy of solution. It must not be forgotten that before this time two explanations for the existence of peculiar bodies, or of ordinary bodies, in peculiar places, had been offered. According to one school of thought, the fossils found deep in the earth, or sometimes in the midst of rocks, had been created there. It was as if the creative force had run beyond the ordinary bounds of nature and had produced certain things, ordinarily associated with life, even in the midst of dead matter. The other explanation suggested was that the flood had in its work of destruction upon earth caused many anomalous displacements of living things, and had buried some of the {155} animals under such circumstances that later they were found even beneath rocks, or deep down in the earth, far beyond where the animals could be supposed to have penetrated by any ordinary means during life. Stensen had observed very faithfully the various strata that are to be found wherever special appearances of the earth's surface were exposed, or wherever deep excavations were made. His explanation of how these various strata are formed will serve to show, perhaps better than anything else, how far advanced he was in his realization of ideas that are supposed to belong only to modern geology. He said: "The powdery layers of the earth's surface must necessarily at some time have been held in suspension in water, from which they were precipitated by their own weight. The movement of the fluid scattered the precipitate here and there and gave to it a level surface." "Bodies of considerable circumference," Stensen continues, "which are found in the various layers of the earth, followed the laws of gravity as regards their position and their relations to one another. The powdery material of the earth's strata took on so completely the form of the bodies which it surrounded that even the smallest apertures became filled up and the powdery layer fitted accurately to the surface of the object and even took something of its polish." With regard to the composition of the various strata of the earth, the father of geology {156} considered that if in a layer of rock all the portions are of the same kind there is no reason to deny that such a layer came into existence at the time of creation, when the whole surface of the earth was covered with fluid. If, however, in any one stratum portions of another stratum are found, or if the remains of plants or animals occur, there is no doubt that such a stratum had not its origin at the time of creation, but came into existence later. If there is to be found in a stratum traces of sea salt, or the remains of sea animals, or portions of vessels, or such like objects, which are only to be encountered at the bottom of the sea, then it must be considered that this portion of the earth's surface once was below the sea level, though it may happen that this occurred only by the accident of a flood of some kind. The great distance from the sea, or other body of water, at the present time, may be due to the sinking of the water level in the neighborhood, or by the rising up of a mountain from some internal terrestrial cause in the interval of time. He continues:-- If one finds in any layer remains of branches of trees, or herbs, then it is only right to conclude that these objects were brought together because of flood or of some such condition in the place where they are now found. If in a layer coal and ashes and burnt clay or other scorched bodies are found, then it seems sure that some place in the neighborhood of a watercourse a fire took place, and this is all the more sure when the whole layer consists of ashes and {157} coal. Whenever in the same place the material of which all the layers is composed is the same, there seems to be no doubt that the fluid to which the stratum owes its origin did not at different times obtain different material for its building purposes. In respect to the mountains and their formation, Stensen said very definitely:-- All the mountains which we see now have not existed from the beginning of things. Mountains do not, however, grow as do plants. The stones of which mountains are composed have only a certain analogy with the bones of animals, but have no similarity in structure or in origin, nor have they the same function and purpose. Mountain ranges, or chains of mountains as some prefer to call them, do not always run in certain directions, though this has sometimes been claimed. Such claims correspond neither to reason nor to observation. Mountains may be very much disturbed in the course of years. Mountain peaks rise and fall somewhat. Chasms open and shut here and there in them, and though there are those who pretend that it is only the credulous who will accept the stories of such happenings, there is no doubt that they have been established on trustworthy evidence. In the course of his observations in Italy, Stensen had seen many mussel shells, which had been gathered from various layers of the earth's surface. With regard to the shells themselves, he said that there could be no doubt that they had come as the excretion of the mantle of the mussel, and that the differences that could be noted in them were in accordance with the varying forms of these animals. He pointed out, however, that some of the mussel shells found in {158} strata of rock were really mussel shells in every respect as regards the material of which they were composed as well as their interior structure and their external form, so that there could be no possible question of their origin. On the other hand, a certain number of the so-called mussel shells were not composed of the ordinary materials of which such shells are usually made up; but had indeed only the external form of genuine shells. Stensen considered, however, that even these must be regarded as originating in real mussel shells, the original substance having been later on replaced by other material. He explained this replacement process in very much the same way that we now suggest the explanation of various processes of petrification. There is no doubt that in this he went far beyond his contemporaries, and pointed out very clearly what was to be the teaching of generations long after his own. The same principles he applied to mussel shells, Stensen considered must have their application also to all other portions of animal bodies, teeth, bones, whole skeletons, and even more perishable animal materials that might be found buried in the earth's strata. His treatment of the question of the remains of plants was quite as satisfactory as that of the animals. He distinguished between the impressions of plants, the petrification of plants, the carbonization of plants, and then dwelt somewhat on the tendency of certain minerals to form dendrites, that is, branching {159} processes which look not unlike plants. He pointed out how easy it is to be deceived by these appearances, and stated very clearly the distinction between real plants and such simulated ones. It will be scarcely necessary for us to apologize for having given so much space to Stensen's work on geology. Many distinguished scientists, however, have insisted that no greater advance at the birth of a science was ever made than that which Stensen accomplished in his geological work. Hoffman says that after carefully studying the work, he has come to the conclusion that of the successors of Stensen, no student of the mountains down to Werner's day had succeeded in comprehending so many fruitful points of view in geology. None of his great successors in geology has succeeded in introducing so many new ideas into the science as the first great observer. For several centuries most of his successors in geology remained far behind him in creative genius, and so there is little progress worth while noting in the knowledge of the method of earth formation, until almost the beginning of the nineteenth century, though his little book was written in 1668 and 1669. Leibnitz regretted very much that Stensen did not complete his work on geology as he originally intended. Had he succeeded in gathering together all of his original observations, illustrated by the material he had collected, his work would have had much greater effect. As it was, the golden truth which he had expressed in such {160} few words, without being able always to state just how he had come to his conclusions, was only of avail to science in a limited way. Men had to repeat his observations long years afterwards in order to realize the truth of what he had laid down. Leibnitz considered that it took more than a century for geological science to reach the point at which it had been left by Steno's work, and which he had reached at a single bound. There is scarcely a single modern geologist interested at all in the history of the science who has not paid a worthy tribute to Steno's great basic discoveries in the science. It was not a matter for surprise, then, that the International Congress of Geologists which met at Bologna in 1881 assembled at his tomb in Florence in order to do him honor, after the regular sessions of the Congress had closed. They erected to his memory a tablet with the following scription: "Nicolae Stenonis imaginem vides hospes quam aere collato docti amplius mille ex universo terrarum orbe insculpendam curarunt in memoriam ejus diei IV cal. Octobr. an. MDCCCLXXXI quo geologi post conventum Bononiae habitum praeside Joanne Capellinio equite hue peregrinati sunt atque adstantibus legatis flor Municipii et R. Instituti Altiorum doctrinarum cineres viri inter geologos et anatomicos praestantissimi in hujus templi hypogaeo laurea corona honoris gratique animi ergo honestaverunt." [Footnote 12] [Footnote 12: You behold here, traveller, the bust of Nicholas Steno as it was set up by more than a thousand scientists from all over the world, as a memorial to him, on the fourth of the Kalends of October, 1881. The geologists of the world, after their meeting in Bologna, under the presidency of Count John Capellini, made a pilgrimage to his tomb, and in the presence of the chosen representatives of the municipality, and of the learned professors of the University, honored the mortal ashes of this man, illustrious among geologists and anatomists.] {161} Stensen's work brought him in contact with some of the distinguished men of the seventeenth century, all of whom learned to appreciate his breadth of intelligence and acuity of judgment. We have already mentioned his epistolary relation with Spinoza, and have said something about the controversy with Leibnitz, into which, in spite of his disinclination to controversy generally, he was drawn by the circumstances of the time and the solicitation of friends. Another great thinker of the century with whom he was brought into intimate relationship was Des Cartes, the distinguished philosopher. In fact, Des Cartes's system of thought influenced Stensen not a little, and he felt, when describing the function of muscles in the human body, and especially when he demonstrated that the heart was a muscle, that the mechanical notions he was thus introducing into anatomy were likely to prove confirmatory of Des Cartes's philosophic speculations. Almost more than any other, Stensen was the father of many ideas that have since become common, with regard to the physics of the human body and its qualities as a machine. With his breadth of view, from familiarity {162} with the progress of science generally in his time, Steno's discussions of the reason for the lack of exact knowledge and for the prevalence of error, in spite of enthusiastic investigation, are worth while appreciating. He considered that the reason why so many portions of natural science are still in doubt is that in the investigation of natural objects no careful distinction is made between what is known to a certainty and what is known only with a certain amount of assurance. He discusses the question of deductive and inductive science, and considers that even those who depend on experience will not infrequently be found in error, because their conclusions are wider than their premises, and because it only too often happens that they admit principles as true for which they have no sure evidence. Stensen considered it important, therefore, not to hurry on in the explanation of things, but, so far as possible, to cling to old-time principles that had been universally accepted, since nearly always these would be found to contain fruitful germs of truth. He was universally acknowledged as one of the greatest original thinkers of his time, and his conversion to the Church did much to dissipate religious prejudices among those of German nationality. His influence over distinguished visitors who came to Florence, and who were very glad to have the opportunity of making his acquaintance, was such that not a few Northern visitors became, like himself, converts to the Church. {163} It was in the midst of this that the request of the Duke of Hanover came that he should consent to become the bishop of his capital city. It was only after Stensen had been put under holy obedience that he would consent to accept the proffered dignity. His first thought was to distribute all his goods among the poor, and betake himself even without shoes on his feet, on a pedestrian journey to Rome. First, however, he made a pilgrimage to Loretto, where he arrived so overcome by the fatigue of the journey that the clergyman who took care of him while there, insisted on his accepting a pair of shoes from him, though he could not prevail upon him to travel in any other way than on foot. His first action, after his consecration as bishop, was to write a letter, sending his episcopal benediction to Sister Maria Flavia, to whom he felt he owed the great privilege of his life. His lasting sense of satisfaction and consolation in his change of religion may be appreciated from what is, perhaps, the most interesting personal document that we have from Stensen's own hand, in which, on the eighteenth anniversary of his conversion, he writes to a friend to describe his feelings. "To-morrow," he says, "I shall finish, God willing, the eighteenth year of my happy life as a member of the Church. I wish to acknowledge once more my thankfulness for the part which you took under God in my conversion. As I hope to have the grace to be grateful to Him forever, so I sigh for the opportunity to express {164} my thankfulnes to you and your family. I can feel that my own ingratitude toward God, my slowness in His service, make me unworthy of His graces; but I hope that you who have helped me to enter his service will not cease to pray, so that I may obtain pardon for the past and grace for the future, in order in some measure to repay all the favors that have been conferred on me." The distinguishing characteristic of his life as a bishop was his insistence on poverty as the principal element of his existence. He refused to enter his diocese in state in the carriage which the Duke offered to provide for him, but proceeded there on foot. No question of supposed dignity could make him employ a number of servants, and his only retainers were converts made by himself, who helped in the household and whom he treated quite as equals. He became engaged in one controversy on religious matters, but said that he did not consider that converts had ever been made by controversies. He compared it, indeed, to the gladiatorial contests in which the contestants had their heads completely enveloped in armor, so as to prevent any possible penetration of the weapons of an opponent. He insisted especially that in religious controversies the contending parties do not realize the significance given to words by each other, and that therefore no good can result. After a time, Stensen did not find his work in Hamburg very satisfactory, because it was typically a missionary country, and the Jesuit {165} missionaries who had been introduced were accomplishing all that could be hoped for. Accordingly, when the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin became a convert to the Catholic Church, and asked that Stensen should be sent as a bishop into his dukedom, the request was complied with. Here, in the hardest kind of labor as a missionary, and in the midst of poverty that was truly apostolic, Stensen worked out the remaining years of his life. At his death he was looked upon as almost a saint. Notwithstanding his close relationship with two reigning princes, he did not leave enough personal effects to defray the expenses of his funeral. Besides his bishop's ring, and the very simple episcopal cross he wore, he had nothing of any value except some relics of St. Francis Xavier, St. Ignatius Loyola, and St. Philip Neri, which he had prized above all other treasures. His missionary labors had not been marked by any very striking success in the number of converts made. In this his life would seem to have been a bitter personal disappointment. He never looked upon it as such, however, but continued to be eminently cheerful and friendly until the end. As a matter of fact, the influence of his career was to be felt much more two centuries after his death than during his lifetime. At the present moment, his life is well known in northern Germany, thanks to the biographic sketch written by Father Plenkers for the _Stimmen aus Maria Laach_, which has been very widely {166} circulated since its appearance in 1884. Something of the reaction among scientific minds in Germany toward a healthier orthodoxy of feeling, with regard to great religious questions, is undoubtedly due to the spread of the knowledge of the career of the great anatomist and geologist who gave up his scientific work for the sake of the spread of the higher truth. After his death the Medici family asked for and obtained the privilege of having his body buried in San Lorenzo at Florence, with the members of the princely Medici house. More and more do visitors realize that the tablet over his remains chronicles the death of a man who was undoubtedly one of the world's great scientists, and one of the most original thinkers of his time, and that time a period greatly fertile in the history of science. {167} VII. ABBÉ HAÜY, FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY. {168} They continue this day as they were created, perfect in number and measure and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essential constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning created not only heaven and earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist.--CLERK MAXWELL _On the Molecule_, "Nature," Vol. VIII. 1873. [Illustration: RÉNÉ JUST HAÜY] {169} VII. ABBÉ HAÜY, [Footnote 13] FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY [Footnote 13: Pronounced a-ue (Century Dictionary), Nearly Represented By _ah-we_.] Modern learning is gradually losing something of the self-complacency that characterized it in so constantly harboring the thought that the most important discoveries in physical science came in the nineteenth century. A more general attention to critical history has led to the realization that many of the primal discoveries whose importance made the development of modern science possible, came in earlier centuries, though their full significance was not then fully appreciated. The foundations of most of our modern sciences were, indeed, laid in the eighteenth century, but some of them came much earlier. It is genius alone that is able to break away from established traditions of knowledge, and, stepping across the boundary into the unknown, blaze a path along which it will be easy for subsequent workers to follow. Only in recent years has the due meed of appreciation for these great pioneers become part of the precious traditions of scientific knowledge. We have seen that clergymen were great original investigators in science in the older times and we shall find, though it may be a source of {170} astonishment to most people that even our modern science has had some supreme original workers, during the last two centuries, in the ranks of the Catholic clergy. The eighteenth century was not behind the seventeenth in original contributions made to science by clergymen. About the middle of the century, a Premonstratensian monk, Procopius Dirwisch by name, of the little town of Prenditz in Bohemia, demonstrated the identity of electrical phenomena with lightning, thus anticipating the work of our own Franklin. Dirwisch dared to set up a lightning-conductor, by which during thunderstorms he obtained sparks from clouds, and also learned to appreciate the danger involved in this experiment. When, in 1751, he printed his article on this subject, he pointed out this danger. His warning, however, was not always heeded, and at least one subsequent experimenter was struck dead by a charge of electricity. Just at the junction of the last two centuries, Father Piazzi enriched the realm of science by one of the most important of modern discoveries in astronomy. On the night of 31 December, 1800--1 January, 1801, he discovered the little planet Ceres. This was the first of the asteroids, so many more of which were to be revealed to astronomical study during the next half-century. Father Piazzi's discovery was made, not by accident, but as the result of detailed astronomical work of the most painstaking character. He {171} had set out to make a map of the heavens, and to determine and locate the absolute position of all the visible stars. He had succeeded in cataloguing over 7,000 stars when his attention was called to one, hitherto supposed to be fixed, which he found had moved, during the interval between two observations, from its original position. He made still other observations, and thus determined the fact that it was a planetoid and not a fixed star with which he had to deal. Needless to say, his discovery proved a strong incentive to patient astronomical study of the same kind; and it is to these, rather than to great single discoveries, that we owe whatever progress in astronomy was made during the nineteenth century. Contemporary with both of these last-mentioned men, and worthy to share in the scientific honors that were theirs, was the Abbé Haüy, who toward the end of the second half of the eighteenth century founded the science of crystallography; made a series of observations the value of which can never be disputed, originated theories some of which have served down to our own time as the basis of crystal knowledge, and attracted the attention of many students to the new science because of his charming personal character and his winning teaching methods. His life is a typical example of the value of work done in patient obscurity, founded on observation, and not on brilliant theories; and what he accomplished stamps him as one of the great {172} scientific geniuses of all time--one of the men who widened the bounds of knowledge in directions hitherto considered inaccessible to the ordinary methods of human investigation. It is a commonplace of the lecturer on popular science at the present day, that the impulse to the development of our modern scientific discoveries which became so marked toward the end of the eighteenth century, was due in a noteworthy degree to the work of the French Encyclopedists. Their bringing together of all the details of knowledge in a form in which it could be readily consulted, and in which previous progress and the special lines of advance could be realized, might be expected to prove a fruitful source of suggestive investigation. As a matter of fact, however, a detailed knowledge of the past in science often seems to be rather a hindrance than a help to original genius, always prone to take its own way if not too much disturbed by the conventional knowledge already gained. Most of the great discoverers in science were comparatively young men when they began their careers as original investigators; and it was apparently their freedom from the incubus of too copious information that left their minds untrammelled to follow their own bent in seeking for causes where others had failed to find any hints of possible developments. This was certainly the case with regard to many of those distinguished founders who lived in centuries prior to the nineteenth. Most of {173} them were men under thirty years of age, and not one of them had been noted, before he began his own researches, for the extent of his knowledge in the particular department of science in which his work was to prove so fruitful. Their lives illustrate the essential difference there is between theory and observation in science. The theorizer reaches conclusions that are popular as a rule in his own generation, and receives the honor due to a progressive scientist; the observer usually has his announcements of what he has actually seen scouted by those who are engaged in the same studies, and it is only succeeding generations who appreciate how much he really accomplished. This was especially exemplified in the case of the Abbé Haüy, whose work in crystallography was to mean so much. What he learned was not from books, but from contact with the actual objects of his department of science; and it is because the example of a life like this can scarcely fail to serve a good purpose for the twentieth-century student, in impressing the lesson of the value of observation as opposed to theory, that its details are retold. Réné Just Haüy was born 28 February, 1743, in the little village of Saint-Just, in the Department of Oise, somewhat north of the center of France. Like many another great genius, he was the son of very poor parents. His father was a struggling linen-weaver, who was able to support himself only with difficulty. At first {174} there seemed to be no other prospect for his eldest son than to succeed to his father's business. Certainly there seemed to be no possibility that he should be able to gain his livelihood by any other means than by the work of his hands. Fortunately, however, there was in Haüy's native town a Premonstratensian monastery, and it was not long before some of the monks began to notice that the son of the weaver was of an especially pious disposition and attended church ceremonies very faithfully. The chance was given to him to attend the monastery school, and he succeeded admirably in his studies. As a consequence, the prior had his attention directed to the boy, and found in him the signs of a superior intelligence. He summoned the lad's parents and discussed with them the possibility of obtaining for their son an education. There were many difficulties in the way, but the principal one was their absolute financial inability to help him. If the son was to obtain an education, it must be somehow through his own efforts, and without any expense to his parents. The prior thereupon obtained for young Haüy a position as a member of a church choir in Paris; and, later, some of those to whom he had recommended the boy secured for him a place in the college of Navarre. Here, during the course of a few years, he made such an impression upon the members of the faculty that they asked him to become one of the teaching corps of the institution. It was a very modest position that he {175} held, and his salary scarcely more than paid for his board and clothes and a few books. Haüy was well satisfied, however, because his position provided him with opportunities for pursuing the studies for which he cared most. At this time he was interested mainly in literature, and succeeded in learning several languages, which were to be of considerable use to him later on in his scientific career. After some years spent in the college of Navarre he was ordained priest, and not long afterward became a member of the faculty of the college of Cardinal Lemoine. Here his position was somewhat better, and he was brought in contact with many of the prominent scholars of Paris. He seems, however, to have been quite contented in his rather narrow circle of interests, and was not specially anxious to advance himself. It is rather curious to realize that a man who was later to spend all his time in the pursuit of the physical sciences, knew practically nothing at all about them, and certainly had no special interest in any particular branch of science, until he reached the age of almost thirty years. Even then his first introduction to serious science did not come because of any special interest that had been aroused in his own mind, but entirely because of his friendship for a distinguished old fellow-professor, whose walks he used to share, and who was deeply interested in botany. This was the Abbé Lhomond, a very {176} well-known scholar, to whom we owe a number of classic text-books arranged especially for young folk. The Abbé's recreation consisted in botanizing expeditions; and Haüy, who had chosen the kindly old priest as his spiritual director, was his most frequent companion. Occasionally, when M. Lhomond was ailing, and unable to take his usual walks, Haüy spent the time with him. He rather regretted the fact that he did not know enough about botany to be able to make collections of certain plants to bring to the professor at such times, in order that the latter might not entirely miss his favorite recreation. Accordingly, one summer when he was on his vacation at his country home, he asked one of the Premonstratensian monks, who was very much interested in botany, to teach him the principles of the science, so as to enable him to recognize various plants. Of course his request was granted. He expected to have a pleasant surprise for Abbé Lhomond on his return, and to draw even closer in his friendly relations with him, because of their mutual interest in what the old Abbé called his _scientia amabilis_ (lovely science). His little plan worked to perfection, and there was won for the study of physical science a new recruit, who was to do as much as probably any one of his generation to extend scientific knowledge in one department, though that department was rather distant from botany. Haüy's interest in botany, however, was to {177} prove only temporary. It brought him in contact with other departments of natural history, and it was not long before he found that his favorite study was that of minerals, and especially of the various forms of crystals. So absorbed did he become in this subject that nothing pleased him better than the opportunity to spend long days in the investigation of the comparative size and shape of the crystals in the museum at Paris. A friend has said of him that, whether they were the most precious stones and gems or the most worthless specimens of ordinary minerals, it was always only their crystalline shape that interested Haüy. Diamonds he studied, but only in order to determine their angles; and apparently they had no more attraction for him than any other well-defined crystal--much less, indeed, than some of the more complex crystalline varieties, which attracted his interest because of the difficulty of the problems they presented. Like many another advance in science, Haüy's first great original step in crystallography was the result of what would be called a lucky accident. These accidents, however, be it noted, happen only to geniuses who are capable of taking advantage of them. How many a man had seen an apple fall from a tree before this little circumstance gave Newton the hint from which grew, eventually, the laws of gravity! Many a man, doubtless, had seen little boys tapping on logs of wood, to hear how well sound was {178} carried through a solid body, without getting from this any hint, such as Laennec derived from it, for the invention of the stethoscope. So, too, many a person before Haüy's time had seen a crystal fall and break, leaving a smooth surface, without deriving any hint for the explanation of the origin of crystals. According to the familiar story, Haüy was one day looking over a collection of very fine crystals in the house of Citizen Du Croisset, Treasurer of France. He was examining an especially fine specimen of calcspar, when it fell from his hands and was broken. Of course the visitor was much disturbed by this accident. His friend, however, in order to show him that he was not at all put out at the breaking of the crystal, insisted on Haüy's taking it with him for purposes of study, as they had both been very much interested in the perfectly smooth plane of the fracture. As Haüy himself says, this broken portion had a peculiarly brilliant lustre, "polished, as it were by nature," as beautifully as the outer portions of the crystal; thus demonstrating that in building up of so large a crystal there must have been certain steps of progress, at any of which, were the formation arrested, smooth surfaces would be found. On taking the crystal home, Haüy proceeded further to break up the smaller fragment; and he soon found that he could remove slice after slice of it, until there was no trace of the original prism, but in place of it a rhomboid, {179} perfectly similar to Iceland spar, and lying in the middle of what was the original prism. This fact seemed to him very important. From it he began the development of a theory of crystallization, using this observation as the key. Before this time it had been hard for students of mineralogy to understand how it was that substances of the same composition might yet have what seemed to be different crystalline forms. Calcspar, for instance, might be found crystallized in forms, apparently, quite at variance with one another. By his studies, however, Haüy was able to determine that whenever substances of the same composition crystallized, even though the external form of the crystals seemed to be different, all of them were found to have the same internal nucleus. Whenever the mineral under observation was chemically different from another, then the nucleus also had a distinctive character; and so there came the law that all substances of the same kind crystallized in the same way, notwithstanding apparent differences. Indeed, one of the first results of this law was the recognition of the fact that when the crystalline forms of two minerals were essentially different, then, no matter how similar they might be, there was sure to be some chemical difference. This enabled Haüy to make certain prophecies with regard to the composition of minerals. A number of different kinds of crystals had been classed together under the name of {180} heavyspar. Some of these could not, by the splitting process, be made to produce _nuclei_ of similar forms, and the angles of the crystals were quite different. Haüy insisted that, in spite of close resemblances, there was an essential distinction in the chemical composition of these two different crystalline formations; and before long careful investigation showed that, while many of the specimens called heavyspar contain barium, some of them contain a new substance--strontium--which had been very little studied heretofore. This principle did not prove to be absolute in its application; but the amount of truth in it attracted attention to the subject of crystallography because of the help which that science would afford in the easy recognition of the general chemical composition of mineral substances. The most important part of Haüy's work was the annunciation of the law of symmetry. He emphasized the fact that the forms of crystals are not irregular or capricious, but are very constant and definite, and founded on absolutely fixed and ascertainable laws. He even showed that, while from certain crystalline nuclei sundry secondary forms may be derived, there are other forms that cannot by any possibility occur. Any change of crystalline form noticed in his experiments led to a corresponding change along all similar parts of the crystal. The angles, the edges, the faces, were modified in the same way, at the same time. All these elements of mensuration within the crystal Haüy thought could be indicated by rational coefficients. {181} Crystallography, however, did not absorb all Haüy's attention. He further demonstrated his intellectual power by following out other important lines of investigation that had been suggested by his study of crystals. It is to him more than to any other, for instance, that is due the first steps in our knowledge of pyro-(or thermo-) electricity. Mr. George Chrystal, professor of mathematics at the University of St. Andrews, in the article on electricity written for the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia, says it was reserved for the Abbé Haüy in his Treatise on Mineralogy to throw a clear light on this curious branch of the science of electricity. To those who are familiar with the history of the development of this science it will be no surprise to find a clergyman playing a prominent role in its development. During the days of the beginning of electricity many ecclesiastics seem to have been particularly interested in the curious ways of electrical phenomena, and as a consequence they are the original discoverers of some of the most important early advances. Not long before this, Professor Gordon, a Scotch Benedictine monk who was teaching at the University of Erfurt, constructed the first practical electrical machine. Kleist, who is one of the three men to whom is attributed the discovery of the principle of storing and concentrating electricity, and who invented the Leyden Jar, which was named after the town where it was first manufactured, was also a member of a Religious Order. As {182} we have already stated, Dirwisch, the Premonstratensian monk, set up a lightning-conductor by which he obtained sparks from the clouds even before our own Franklin. Abbé Haüy was only following a very common precedent, then, when he succeeded by his original research in setting the science of pyro-electricity firmly on its feet. It is true, others before him had noted that substances like tourmaline possessed electrical properties. There is even some good reason for thinking that the _lyncurium_ of the ancients which, according to certain of the Greek philosophers, especially Theophrastus, who seems to have made a close study of the subject, attracted light bodies, was really our modern tourmaline. In modern times the Dutch found this mineral in Ceylon and, because it attracted ashes and other light substances to itself, called it _aschentriker_--that is, attractor of ashes. Others had still further experimented with this curious substance and its interesting electrical phenomena. It remained for Abbé Haüy, however, to demonstrate the scientific properties of tourmaline and the relations which its electrical phenomena bore toward the crystalline structure of the mineral. He showed that the electricity of tourmaline decreases rapidly from the summits or poles toward the middle of the crystal. As a matter of fact, at the middle of the crystal its electrical power becomes imperceptible. He showed also that each particle of a crystal {183} that exhibits pyro-electricity is itself a source of the same sort of electricity and exhibits polarity. His experimental observations served to prove also that the pyro-electric state has an important connexion with the want of symmetry in the crystals of the substances that exhibit this curious property. In tourmaline, for instance, he found the vitreous charge always at the summit of the crystal which had six faces, and the resinous electricity at the summit of the crystal with three faces. His experiments soon showed him, too, that there were a number of other substances, besides tourmaline, which possessed this same electrical property when subjected to heat in the crystalline stage. Among these were the Siberian and Brazilian topaz, borate of magnesia, mesotype, sphene, and calamine. In all of these other pyro-electrical crystals, Haüy detected a corresponding deviation from the rules of symmetry in their secondary crystals to that which occurs in tourmaline. In a word, after he had concluded his experiments and observations there was very little left for others to add to this branch of science, although such distinguished men as Sir David Brewster in England were among his successors in the study of the peculiar phenomena of pyro-electricity. It may naturally enough be thought that, born in the country, of poor parents, and compelled to work for his living, Haüy would at least have the advantage of rugged health to help him in his {184} career. He had been a delicate child, however; and his physical condition never improved to such an extent as to inure him to hardships of any kind. One of his biographers has gone so far as to say that his life was one long malady. The only distraction from his almost constant suffering was his studies. Yet this man lived to be nearly eighty years of age, and accomplished an amount of work that might well be envied even by the hardiest. In the midst of his magnificent success as a scientist, Haüy was faithful to all his obligations as a priest. His name was known throughout Europe, and many of the scientific societies had considered that they were honoring themselves by conferring titles, or degrees, upon him; but he continued to be the humble, simple student that he had always been. At the beginning of the Revolution, Abbé Haüy was among the priests who refused the oath which the Republican government insisted on their taking, and which so many of them considered derogatory to their duty as churchmen. Those who refused were thrown into prison, Haüy among them. He did not seem to mind his incarceration much, but he was not a little perturbed by the fact that the officers who made the arrest insisted on taking his precious papers, and that his crystals were all tossed aside and many of them broken. For some time he was kept in confinement with a number of other members of the faculty of the University, mainly {185} clergymen, in the Seminary of St. Firmin, which had been turned into a temporary jail. Haüy did not allow his studies to be entirely interrupted by his imprisonment. He succeeded in obtaining permission to have his cabinets of crystals brought to his cell, and he continued his investigation of them. It was not long before powerful friends, and especially his scientific colleague, Gregory St. Hilaire, interested themselves in his case, and succeeded in obtaining his liberation. When the order for his release came, however, Haüy was engaged on a very interesting problem in crystallography, and he refused to interrupt his work and leave the prison. It was only after considerable persuasion that he consented to go the next morning. It may be added that only two weeks later many from this same prison were sent to the guillotine. It is rather remarkable that the Revolutionary government, after his release, did not disturb him in any way. He was so much occupied with his scientific pursuits that he seems to have been considered absolutely incapable of antagonizing the government; and, as he had no enemies, he was not denounced to the Convention. This was fortunate, because it enabled him to pursue his studies in peace. There was many another member of the faculty of the University who had not the same good fortune. Lavoisier was thrown into prison, and, in spite of all the influence that could be brought to bear, the great discoverer of oxygen met his death by the guillotine. At least {186} two others of the professors in the physical department, Borda and De Lambre, were dismissed from their posts. Haüy, though himself a priest who had refused to take the oath, and though he continued to exercise his religious functions, did not hesitate to formulate petitions for his imprisoned scientific friends; yet, because of his well-known gentleness of character, this did not result in arousing the enmity of any members of the government, or attracting such odious attention as might have made his religious and scientific work extremely difficult or even prevented it entirely. Notwithstanding the stormy times of the French Revolution and the stirring events going on all round him in Paris, Haüy continued to study his crystals in order to complete his observations; and then he embodied his investigations and his theories in his famous "Treatise on Crystallography." This attracted attention not only on account of the evident novelty of the subject, but more especially because of the very thorough method with which Haüy had accomplished his work. His style, says the historian of crystallography, was "perspicuous and elegant. The volume itself was noteworthy for its clear arrangement and full illustration by figures." In spite of its deficiencies, then deficiencies which must exist in any ground-breaking work--this monograph has had an enduring influence. Some of the most serious flaws in his theory were soon brought to light because of the very stimulus afforded by his investigations. {187} As to the real value of his treatise, perhaps no better estimate can be formed than that given by Cuvier in his collection of historical eulogies (Vol. III, p. 155): "In possession of a large collection, to which there flowed from all sides the most varied minerals, arranged with the assistance of young, enthusiastic, and progressive students, it was not long before there was given back to Haüy the time which he had apparently wasted over other things. In a few years he raised up a wondrous monument, which brought as much glory to France as it did somewhat later to himself. After centuries of neglect, his country at one bound found itself in the first rank in this department of natural science. In Haüy's book are united in the highest degree two qualities which are seldom associated. One of these is that it was founded on an original discovery which had sprung entirely from the genius of its author; and the other is that this discovery is pursued and developed with almost unheard-of persistence down even to the least important mineral variety. Everything in the work is great, both as regards conception and detail. It is as complete as the theory it announces." It was not surprising, then, that, after the death of Professor Dolomieu, Haüy should be raised to the chair of mineralogy and made director of that department in the Paris Museum of Natural History. Here he was to have new triumphs. We have already said that his book was noted for the elegance of its style and its perspicuity. {188} As the result of this absolute clearness of ideas, and completeness and simplicity of expression, Haüy attracted to him a large number of pupils. Moreover, all those interested in the science, when they came in contact with him, were so charmed by his grace and simplicity of manner that they were very glad to attend his lectures and to be considered as his personal friends. Among his listeners were often such men as La Place, Berthollet, Fourcroy, Lagrange and Lavoisier. It was not long before honors of all kinds, degrees from universities and memberships in scientific societies all over Europe, began to be heaped upon Haüy. They did not, however, cause any change in the manners or mode of life of the simple professor of old times. Every day he continued to take his little walks through the city, and was very glad to have opportunity to be of assistance to others. He showed strangers the way to points of interest for which they inquired, whenever it was necessary, obtained entrance cards for them to the collection; and not a few of those who were thus enabled to take advantage of his kindness failed to realize who the distinguished man was to whom they owed their opportunities. His old-fashioned clothing still continued to be quite good enough for him, and his modest demeanor and simple speech did not betray in any way the distinguished scientist he had become. Some idea of the consideration in which the {189} Abbé Haüy was held by his contemporaries may be gathered from the fact that several of the reigning monarchs of Europe, as well as the heirs apparent to many thrones, came at some time or other to visit him, to see his collection, and to hear the kindly old man talk on his hobby. There was only one other scientist in the nineteenth century--and that was Pasteur, toward the end of it--who attracted as much attention from royalty. Among Haüy's visitors were the King of Prussia, the Emperor of Austria, the Archduke John, as well as the Emperor of Russia and his two brothers, Nicholas and Michael, the first of whom succeeded his elder brother, Alexander, to the throne, and half a century later was ruling Russia during the Crimean War. The Prince Royal of Denmark spent a portion of each year for several years with Haüy, being one of his intimates, who was admitted to his room while he was confined to his bed, and who was permitted to share his personal investigations and scientific studies. His most striking characteristic was his suavity toward all. The humblest of his students was as sure to receive a kindly reception from him, and to have his difficulties solved with as much patience as the most distinguished professor in this department. It was said that he had students of all classes. The attendants at the normal school were invited to visit him at his house, and he permitted them to learn all his secrets. When they came to him for a whole {190} day, he insisted on taking part in their games, and allowed them to go home only after they had taken supper with him. All of them looked upon him as a personal friend, and some of them were more confidential with him than with their nearest relatives. Many a young man in Paris during the troublous times of the Revolutionary period found in the good Abbé Haüy not only a kind friend, but a wise director and another father. It is said that one day, when taking his usual walk, he came upon two former soldiers who were just preparing to fight a duel and were on their way to the dueling ground. He succeeded in getting them to tell him the cause of their quarrel, and after a time tempted them to come with him into what I fear we should call at the present day a saloon. Here, over a glass of wine, he finally persuaded them to make peace and seal it effectually. It is hard to reconcile this absolute simplicity of character and kindness of heart with what is sometimes assumed to be the typical, distant, abstracted, self-centered ways of the great scientist. Few men have had so many proofs of the lofty appreciation of great contemporaries. Many incidents serve to show how much Napoleon thought of the distinguished scholar who had created a new department of science and attracted the attention of the world to his splendid work at Paris. Not long after he became emperor, Napoleon named him Honorary Canon of the {191} Cathedral of Notre Dame; and when he founded the Legion of Honor, he made the Abbé one of the original members. Shortly after these dignities had been conferred upon him, it happened that the Abbé fell ill; and Napoleon, having sent his own physician to him, went personally to call on him in his humble quarters, saying to the physician: "Remember that you must cure Abbé Haüy, and restore him to us as one of the glories of our reign." After Napoleon's return from Elba, he told the Abbé that the latter's "Treatise on Crystallography" was one of the books that he had specially selected to take with him to Elba, to while away the leisure that he thought he would have for many years. Abbé Haüy's independence of spirit, and his unselfish devotion to his native country, may be best appreciated from the tradition that after the return from Elba, when there was a popular vote for the confirmation of Napoleon's second usurpation, the old scientist voted, No. In spite of his constant labor at his investigations, his uniformly regular life enabled him to maintain his health, and he lived to the ripe age of over seventy-nine. Toward the end of his career, he did not obtain the recognition that his labors deserved. After the Restoration, he was not in favor with the new authorities in France, and he accordingly lost his position as professor at the University. The absolute simplicity of life that he had always maintained now stood him in good stead; and, notwithstanding the {192} smallness of his income, he did not have to make any change in his ordinary routine. Unfortunately, an accidental fall in his room at the beginning of his eightieth year confined him to his bed; and then his health began to fail very seriously. He died on the 3 June, 1822. He had shown during his illness the same gentleness and humility, and even enthusiasm for study whenever it was possible, that had always characterized him. While he was confined to his bed he divided his time between prayer, attention to the new edition of his works which was about to appear, and his interest for the future of those students who had helped him in his investigations. Cuvier says of him that "he was as faithful to his religious duties as he was in the pursuit of his studies. The profoundest speculations with regard to weighty matters of science had not kept him from the least important duty which ecclesiastical regulations might require of him." There is, perhaps, no life in all the history of science which shows so clearly how absolutely untrue is the declaration so often made, that there is essential opposition between the intellectual disposition of the inquiring scientist and those other mental qualities which are necessary to enable the Christian to bow humbly before the mysteries of religion, acknowledge all that is beyond understanding in what has been revealed, and observe faithfully all the duties that flow from such belief. {193} VIII. ABBOT MENDEL: A NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.-- Closing sentence of DARWIN'S _Origin of Species_. {194} [Illustration: GREGOR MENDEL] {195} VIII. ABBOT MENDEL, [Footnote 14]: A NEW, OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY. [Footnote 14: The portrait of Abbot Mendel which precedes this sketch was kindly furnished by the Vicar of the Augustinian Monastery of Brünn. It represents him holding a fuchsia, his favorite flower, and was taken in 1867, just as he was completing the researches which were a generation later to make his name so famous. The portrait has for this reason a very special interest as a human document. We may add that the sketch of Abbot Mendel which appears here was read by the Very Rev. Klemens Janetschek, the Vicar of the Monastery, who suggested one slight change in it, so that it may be said to have had the revision of one who knew him and his environment very well.] Scientific progress does not run in cycles of centuries, and as a rule it bears no relationship to the conventional arrangement of years. As has been well said--for science a new century begins every second. There are interesting coincidences, however, of epoch-making discoveries in science corresponding with the beginning of definite eras in time that are at least impressive from a mnemonic standpoint, if from no other. The very eve of the nineteenth century saw the first definite formulation of the theory of evolution. Lamarck, the distinguished French biologist, stated a theory of development in nature which, although it attracted very little attention {196} for many years after its publication, has come in our day to be recognized as the most suggestive advance in biology in modern times. As we begin the twentieth century, the most interesting question in biology is undoubtedly that of heredity. Just at the dawn of the century three distinguished scientists, working in different countries, rediscovered a law with regard to heredity which promises to be even more important for the science of biology in the twentieth century than was Lamarck's work for the nineteenth century. This law, which, it is thought, will do more to simplify the problems of heredity than all the observations and theories of nineteenth-century workers, and which has already done much more to point out the methods by which observation, and the lines along which experimentation shall be best directed so as to replace elaborate but untrustworthy scientific theorizing by definite knowledge, was discovered by a member of a small religious community in the little-known town of Brünn, in Austria, some thirty-five years before the beginning of the present century. Considering how generally, in English-speaking countries at least, it is supposed that the training of a clergyman and particularly that of a religious unfits him for any such initiative in science, Father Mendel's discovery comes with all the more emphatic surprise. There is no doubt, however, in the minds of many of the most prominent present-day workers in biology that his {197} discoveries are of a ground-breaking character that will furnish substantial foundation for a new development of scientific knowledge with regard to heredity. Lest it should be thought that perhaps there is a tendency to make Father Mendel's discovery appear more important here than it really is, because of his station in life, it seems desirable to quote some recent authoritative expressions of opinion with regard to the value of his observations and the importance of the law he enunciated, as well as the principle which he considered to be the explanation of that law. In the February number of _Harper's Monthly_ for 1903, Professor Thomas Hunt Morgan, Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr, and one of the best known of our American biologists, whose recent work on "Regeneration" has attracted favorable notice all over the world, calls attention to the revolutionary character of Mendel's discovery. He considers that recent demonstrations of the mathematical truth of Mendel's Law absolutely confirm Mendel's original observations, and the movement thus initiated, in Professor Morgan's eyes, gives the final _coup de grace_ to the theory of natural selection. "If," he says, "we reject Darwin's theory of natural selection as an explanation of evolution, we have at least a new and promising outlook in another direction and are in a position to answer the oft-heard but unscientific query of those who must cling to some dogma: if you reject Darwin, what better have you to offer?" {198} Professor Edmund B. Wilson, the Director of the Zoological Laboratory of Columbia University, called attention in _Science_ (19 December, 1902) to the fact that studies in cytology, that is to say, observations on the formation, development, and maturation of cells, confirm Mendel's principles of inheritance and thus furnish another proof of the truth of these principles. Two students working in Professor Wilson's laboratory have obtained definite evidence in favor of the cytological explanation of Mendel's principles, and have thus made an important step in the solution of one of the important fundamental mysteries of cell development in the very early life of organisms. In a paper read before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last year, Professor W. E. Castle, of Harvard University, said with regard to Mendel's Law of Heredity:-- What will doubtless rank as one of the greatest discoveries in the study of biology, and in the study of heredity, perhaps the greatest, was made by Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, in the garden of his cloister, some forty years ago. The discovery was announced in the proceedings of a fairly well-known scientific society, but seems to have attracted little attention, and to have been soon forgotten. The Darwinian theory then occupied the centre of the scientific stage, and Mendel's brilliant discovery was all but unnoticed for a third of a century. Meanwhile, the discussion aroused by Weissman's germ plasm theory, in particular the idea of the non-inheritance of acquired characters, put the scientific public into a more receptive frame of mind. Mendel's law was rediscovered {199} independently by three different botanists, engaged in the study of plant hybrids--de Vries, Correns, and Tschermak, in the year 1900. It remained, however, for a zoologist, Bateson, two years later, to point out the full importance and the wide applicability of the law. Since then the Mendelian discoveries have attracted the attention of biologists generally. [Footnote 15] [Footnote 15: This paper was originally published in part in the _Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences_, Vol. xxxviii, No. 18, January, 1903. It may be found complete in _Science_ for 25 September, 1903.] Professor Bateson, whose book on Mendel's "Principles of Heredity" is the best popular exposition in English of Mendel's work, says that an exact determination of the laws of heredity will probably produce more change in man's outlook upon the world and in his power over nature than any other advance in natural knowledge that can be clearly foreseen. No one has better opportunities of pursuing such work than horticulturists and stockbreeders. They are daily witnesses of the phenomena of heredity. Their success also depends largely on a knowledge of its laws, and obviously every increase in that knowledge is of direct and special importance to them. After thus insisting on the theoretic and practical importance of the subject, Professor Bateson says:-- As regards the Mendelian principles which it is the chief aim of this introduction to present clearly before the reader, it may be said that by the {200} application of those principles we are enabled to reach and deal in a comprehensive manner with phenomena of a fundamental nature, lying at the very root of all conceptions not merely of the physiology of reproduction and heredity, but even of the essential nature of living organisms; and I think that I use no extravagant words when, in introducing Mendel's work to the notice of the Royal Horticultural Society's Journal, I ventured to declare that his experiments are worthy to rank with those which laid the foundation of the atomic laws of chemistry. Professor L. H. Bailey, who is the Director of the Horticultural Department at Cornell University and the editor of the authoritative _Encyclopedia of Horticulture_, was one of the first of recent scientists to call attention to Mendel's work. It was, we believe, because of a reference to Mendel's papers by Bailey that Professor de Vries was put on the track of Mendel's discoveries and found that the Austrian monk had completely anticipated the work at which he was then engaged. In a recent issue of _The Independent_, of New York, Professor Bailey said:-- The teaching of Mendel strikes at the root of two or three difficult and vital problems. It presents a new conception of the proximate mechanism of heredity. The hypothesis of heredity that it suggests will focus our attention along new lines, and will, I believe, arouse as much discussion as Weissmann's hypothesis, and it is probable that it will have a wider influence. Whether it expresses the actual means of heredity or not, it is yet much too early to say. But the hypothesis (which Father Mendel evolved in order to explain the reasons for his law as he saw them) is even a {201} greater contribution to science than the so-called Mendel's Law as to the numerical results of hybridization. In the general discussion of evolution Mendel's work will be of the greatest value because it introduces a new point of view, challenges old ideas and opinions, gives us a new theory for discussion, emphasizes the great importance of actual experiments for the solution of many questions of evolution, and then forces the necessity for giving greater attention to the real characters and attributes of plants and animals than to the vague groups that we are in the habit of calling species. It is very evident that a man of whose work so many authorities are agreed that it is the beginning of a new era in biology, and especially in that most interesting of all questions, heredity, must be worthy of close acquaintance. Hence the present sketch of his career and personality, as far as they are ascertainable, for his modesty, and the failure of the world to recognize his worth in his lifetime, have unfortunately deprived us of many details that would have been precious. Gregor Johann Mendel was born 27 July, 1822, at Heinzendorf, nor far from Odrau, in Austrian Silesia. He was the son of a well-to-do peasant farmer, who gave him every opportunity of getting a good education when he was young. He was educated at Olmutz, in Moravia, and after graduating from the college there, at the age of twenty-one, he entered as a novice the Augustinian Order, beginning his novitiate in 1843 in the Augustinian monastery Königen-kloster, in Altbrünn. He was very successful in {202} his theological studies, and in 1846 he was ordained priest. He seems to have made a striking success as a teacher, especially of natural history and physics, in the higher Realschule in Brünn. He attracted the attention of his superiors, who were persuaded to give him additional opportunities for the study of the sciences, particularly of biological science, for which he had a distinct liking and special talents. Accordingly, in 1851 he went to Vienna for the purpose of doing post-graduate work in the natural sciences at the university there. During the two years he spent at this institution he attracted attention by his serious application to study, but apparently without having given any special evidence of the talent for original observation that was in him. In 1853 he returned to the monastery in Altbrünn, and at the beginning of the school year became a teacher at the Realschule in Brünn. He remained in Brünn for the rest of his life, dying at the comparatively early age of sixty-two, in 1884. During the last sixteen years of his life he held the position of abbot of the monastery, the duties of which prevented him from applying himself as he probably would have desired, to the further investigation of scientific questions. The experiments on which his great discoveries were founded were carried out in the garden of the monastery during the sixteen years from 1853 to 1868. How serious was his scientific devotion may be gathered from the fact that in {203} establishing the law which now bears his name, and which was founded on observations on peas, some 10,000 plants were carefully examined, their various peculiarities noted, their ancestry carefully traced, the seeds kept in definite order and entirely separate, so as to be used for the study of certain qualities in their descendants, and the whole scheme of experimentation planned with such detail that for the first time in the history of studies in heredity, no extraneous and inexplicable data were allowed to enter the problem. Besides his work on plants, Mendel occupied himself with other observations of a scientific character on two subjects which were at that time attracting considerable attention. These were the state and condition of the ground-water--a subject which was thought to stand at the basis of hygienic principles at the time and which had occupied the attention of the distinguished Professor Pettenkofer and the Munich School of Hygiene for many years--and weather observations. At that time Pettenkofer, the most widely known of sanitary scientists, thought that he was able to show that the curve of frequency of typhoid fever in the different seasons of the year depended upon the closeness with which the ground-water came to the surface. Authorities in hygiene generally do not now accept this supposed law, for other factors have been found which are so much more important that, if the ground-water has any influence, it can be neglected. Mendel's observations in the matter {204} were, however, in line with the scientific ideas of the time and undoubtedly must be considered of value. The other subject in which Mendel interested himself was meteorology. He published in the journal of the Brünn Society of Naturalists a series of statistical observations with regard to the weather. Besides this he organized in connexion with the Realschule in Brünn a series of observation stations in different parts of the country around; and at the time when most scientists considered meteorological problems to be too complex for hopeful solution, Mendel seems to have realized that the questions involved depended rather on the collation of a sufficient number of observations and the deduction of definite laws from them than on any theoretic principles of a supposed science of the weather. The man evidently had a genius for scientific observations. His personal character was of the highest. The fact that his fellow-monks selected him as abbot of the monastery shows the consideration in which he was held for tact and true religious feeling. There are many still alive in Brünn who remember him well and cannot say enough of his kindly disposition, the _fröliche Liebenswürdigkeit_ (which means even more than our personal magnetism), that won for him respect and reverence from all. He is remembered, not only for his successful discoveries, and not alone by his friends and the fellow-members of the Naturalist Society, but by practically all his {205} contemporaries in the town; and it is his lovable personal character that seems to have most impressed itself on them. He was for a time the president of the Brünn Society of Naturalists, while also abbot of the monastery. This is, perhaps, a combination that would strike English-speaking people as rather curious, but seems to have been considered not out of the regular course of events in Austria. Father Mendel's introduction to his paper on plant hybridization, which describes the result of the experiments made by him in deducing the law which he announces, is a model of simple straightforwardness. It breathes the spirit of the loftiest science in its clear-eyed vision of the nature of the problem he had to solve, the factors which make up the problem, and the experimental observations necessary to elucidate it. We reproduce the introductory remarks here from the translations made of them by the Royal Horticultural Society of England. [Footnote 16] Father Mendel said at the beginning of his paper as read 8 February, 1865:-- [Footnote 16: The original paper was published in the "Verhandlungen des Naturforscher-Vereins," in Brünn, Abhandlungen, iv, that is, the proceedings of the year 1865, which were published in 1866. Copies of these transactions were exchanged with all the important scientific journals, especially those in connexion with important societies and universities throughout Europe, and the wonder is that this paper attracted so little attention.] Experience of artificial fertilization such as is affected with ornamental plants in order to obtain new variations in color, has led to the experiments, the {206} details of which I am about to discuss. The striking regularity with which the same hybrid forms always reappeared whenever fertilization took place between the same species, induced further experiments to be undertaken, the object of which was to follow up the developments of the hybrid in a number of successive generations of their progeny. Those who survey the work that has been done in this department up to the present time will arrive at the conviction that among all the numerous experiments made not one has been carried out to such an extent and in such a way as to make it possible to determine the number of different forms under which the offspring of hybrids appear, or to arrange these forms with certainty, according to their separate generations, or to ascertain definitely their statistical relations. These three primary necessities for the solution of the problem of heredity--namely, first, the number of different forms under which the offspring of hybrids appear; secondly, the arrangement of these forms, with definiteness and certainty, as regards their relations in the separate generation; and thirdly, the statistical results of the hybridization of the plants in successive generations, are the secret of the success of Mendel's work, as has been very well said by Bateson, in commenting on this paragraph in his work on Mendel's "Principles of Heredity." This was the first time that any one had ever realized exactly the nature of the problems presented in, their naked simplicity. "To see a problem well is more than half to solve it," and this proved to be the case with Mendel's straightforward vision of the nature of the experiments required for advance in our knowledge of heredity. {207} While Mendel was beginning his experiments almost absolutely under the guidance of his own scientific spirit, and undertaking his series of observations in the monastery garden without any reference to other work in this line, he knew very well what distinguished botanists were doing in this line and was by no means presumptuously following a study of the deepest of nature's problems without knowing what others had accomplished in the matter in recent years. In the second paragraph of his introduction he quotes the men whose work in this science was attracting attention, and says that to this object numerous careful observers, such a Kölreuter, Gärtner, Herbert, Lecoq, Wichura and others, had devoted a part of their lives with inexhaustible perseverance. To quote Mendel's own words:-- Gärtner, especially in his work, "Die Bastarderzeugung im Pflanzenreiche," [Footnote 17] has recorded very valuable observations; and quite recently Wichura published the results of some profound observations on the hybrids of the willow. That so far no generally applicable law governing the formation and development of hybrids has been successfully formulated can hardly be wondered at by anyone who is acquainted with the extent of the task and can appreciate the difficulties with which experiments of this class have to contend. A final decision can only be arrived at when we shall have before us the results of the changed detailed experiments made on plants belonging to the most diverse orders. It requires some courage indeed to undertake a labor of such far-reaching extent; it appears, however, to be the only right way by which we can finally reach the solution of a question the importance of which can not be overestimated in connexion with the history of the evolution of organic forms. The paper now presented records the results of such a detailed experiment. This experiment was practically confined to a small plant group, and is now after eight years' pursuit concluded in all essentials. Whether the plan upon which the separate experiments were conducted and carried out was the best suited to attain the desired end is left to the friendly decision of the reader. [Footnote 17: The Production of Hybrids in the Vegetable Kingdom.] {208} Mendel's discoveries with regard to peas and the influence of heredity on them, were founded on very simple, but very interesting, observations. He found that if peas of different colors were taken, that is to say, if, for instance, yellow-colored peas were crossed with green, the resulting pea seeds were, in the great majority of cases, of yellow color. If the yellow-colored peas obtained from such crossing were planted and allowed to be fertilized only by pollen from plants raised from similar seeds, the succeeding generation, however, did not give all yellow peas, but a definite number of yellow and a definite number of green. In other words, while there might have been expected a permanence of the yellow color, there was really a reversion in a number of the plants apparently to the type of the grandparent. Mendel tried the same experiment with seeds of different shape. Certain peas are rounded and certain others are wrinkled. When these were crossed, the next generation {209} consisted of wrinkled peas, but the next succeeding generation presented a definite number of round peas besides the wrinkled ones, and so on as before. He next bred peas with regard to other single qualities, such as the color of the seed coat, the inflation or constriction of the pod, as to the coloring of the pod, as to the distribution of the flowers along the stem, as to the length of the stem, finding always, no matter what the quality tested, the laws of heredity he had formulated always held true. What he thus discovered he formulated somewhat as follows: In the case of each of the crosses the hybrid character, that is, the quality of the resultant seed, resembles one of the parental forms so closely that the other escapes observation completely or cannot be detected with certainty. This quality thus impressed on the next generation, Mendel called the dominant quality. As, however, the reversion of a definite proportion of the peas in the third generation to that quality of the original parent which did not appear in the second generation was found to occur, thus showing that, though it cannot be detected, it is present, Mendel called it the recessive quality. He did not find transitional forms in any of his experiments, but constantly observed that when plants were bred with regard to two special qualities, one of those qualities became dominant in the resultant hybrid, and the other became recessive, that is, present though latent and ready to produce its effects upon a definite proportion of the succeeding generation. {210} Remembering, then, that Mendel means by hybrid the result of the crossing of two distinct species, his significant discovery has been stated thus: The hybrid, whatever its own character, produces ripe germ cells, which bear only the pure character of one parent or the other. Thus, when one parent has the character "A," in peas, for example, a green color, and the other the character "B," in peas once more a yellow color, the hybrid will have in cases of simple dominance the character "AB" or "BA," but with the second quality in either case not noticeable. Whatever the character of the hybrid may be, that is to say, to revert to the example of the peas, whether it be green or yellow, its germ cells when mature will bear either the character "A" (green), or the character "B" (yellow), but not both. As Professor Castle says: "This perfectly simple principle is known as the law of segregation, or the law of the purity of the germ cells. It bids fair to prove as fundamental to a right understanding of the facts of heredity as is the law of definite proportions in chemistry. From it follow many important consequences." To follow this acute observer's work still further by letting the crossbreds fertilize themselves, Mendel raised a third generation. In this generation were individuals which showed the dominant character and also individuals which presented the recessive character. Such an observation had of course been made in a good many instances before. {211} But Mendel noted--and this is the essence of the new discovery in his observations--that in this third generation the numerical proportion of dominants to recessives is in the average of a series of cases approximately constant--being, in fact, as three to one. With almost absolute regularity this proportion was maintained in every case of crossing of pairs of characters, quite opposed to one another, in his pea plants. In the first generation, raised from his crossbreds, or, as he calls them, hybrids, there were seventy-five per cent dominants and twenty-five per cent recessives. When these plants were again self-fertilized and the offspring of each plant separately sown, a new surprise awaited the observer. The progeny of the recessives remained pure recessive; and in any number of subsequent generations never produced the dominant type again, that is, never reverted to the original parent, whose qualities had failed to appear in the second generation. When the seeds obtained by self-fertilizing the plants with the dominant characteristics were sown, it was found by the test of progeny that the dominants were not all of like nature, but consisted of two classes--first, some which gave rise to pure dominants; and secondly, others which gave a mixed offspring, composed partly of recessives, partly of dominants. Once more, however, the ratio of heredity asserted itself and it was found that the average numerical proportions were constant--those with pure dominant {212} offspring being to those with mixed offspring as one to two. Hence, it was seen that the seventy-five per cent of dominants are not really of identical constitution, but consist of twenty-five per cent which are pure dominants and fifty per cent which are really crossbreds, though like most of the crossbreds raised by crossing the two original varieties, they exhibit the dominant character only. These fifty crossbreds have mixed offspring; these offspring again in their numerical proportion follow the same law, namely, three dominants to one recessive. The recessives are pure like those of the last generation, but the dominants can, by further self-fertilization and cultivation of the seeds produced, be again shown to be made up of pure dominant and crossbreds in the same proportion of one dominant to two crossbreds. The process of breaking up into the parent forms is thus continued in each successive generation, the same numerical laws being followed so far as observation has gone. As Mendel's observations have now been confirmed by workers in many parts of the world, investigating many different kinds of plants, it would seem that this law which he discovered has a basis in the nature of things and is to furnish the foundation for a new and scientific theory of heredity, while at the same time affording scope for the collection of observations of the most valuable character with a definite purpose and without any theoretic bias. {213} The task of the practical breeder who seeks to establish or fix a new variety produced by cross-breeding in a case involving two variable characters is simply the isolation and propagation of that one in each sixteen of the second generation offspring which will be pure as regards the desired combination of characters. Mendel's discovery, by putting the breeder in possession of this information enables him to attack this problem systematically with confidence in the outcome, whereas hitherto his work, important and fascinating as it is, has consisted largely of groping for a treasure in the dark. The greater the number of separately variable characters involved in a cross, the greater will be the number of new combinations obtainable; the greater too will be the number of individuals which it will be necessary to raise in order to secure all the possible combinations; and the greater again will be the difficulty of isolating the pure, that is, the stable forms in such as are similar to them in appearance, but still hybrid in one or more characters. The law of Mendel reduces to an exact science the art of breeding in the case most carefully studied by him, that of entire dominance. It gives to the breeder a new conception of "purity." No animal or plant is "pure," simply because it is descended from a long line of ancestors, possessing a desired combination of characters; but any animal or plant is pure if it produces _gametes_--that is, particles for conjugation of only one sort--even though its grandparents may among {214} themselves have possessed opposite characters. The existence of purity can be established with certainty only by suitable breeding tests, especially by crossing with recessives; but it may be safely assumed for any animal or plant, descended from parents which were like each other and had been shown by breeding tests to be pure. This naturally leads us to what some biologists have considered to be the most important part of his work--the theory which he elaborated to explain his results, the principle which he considers to be the basis of the laws he discovered. Mendel suggests as following logically from the results of his experiments and observations a certain theory of the constitution of germinal particles. He has put this important matter so clearly himself and with such little waste of words that it seems better to quote the translation of the passage as given by Professor Bateson, [Footnote 18] than to attempt to explain it in other words. Mendel says:-- [Footnote 18: Bateson: _Mendel's Principles of Heredity_. Cambridge. The University Press. 1902.] The results of the previously described experiments induced further experiments, the results of which appear fitted to afford some conclusions as regards the composition of the egg and pollen-cells of hybrids. An important matter for consideration is afforded in peas (_pisum_) by the circumstance that among the progeny of the hybrids constant forms appear, and that this occurs, too, in all combinations of the associated characters. So far as experience goes, we find it in every {215} case confirmed that constant progeny can only be formed when the egg-cells and the fertilizing pollen are of like character, so that both are provided with the material for creating quite similar individuals, as is the case with the normal fertilization of pure species. We must therefore regard it as essential that exactly similar factors are at work also in the production of the constant forms in the hybrid plants. Since the various constant forms are produced in one plant, or even in one flower of a plant, the conclusion appears logical that in the ovaries of the hybrids there are formed as many sorts of egg-cells and in the anthers as many sorts of pollen-cells as there are possible constant combination forms, and that these egg and pollen-cells agree in their internal composition with those of the separate forms. In point of fact, it is possible to demonstrate theoretically that this hypothesis would fully suffice to account for the development of the hybrids in the separate generations, if we might at the same time assume that the various kinds of egg and pollen-cells were formed in the hybrids on the average in equal numbers. Bateson says in a note on this passage that this last and the preceding paragraph contain the essence of the Mendelian principles of heredity. Mendel himself, after stating this hypothesis, gives the details of a series of experiments by which he was able to decide that the theoretic considerations suggested were founded in the nature of plants and their germinal cells. It will, of course, be interesting to realize what the bearing of Mendel's discoveries is on the question of the stability of species as well as on the origin of species. Professor Morgan, in his {216} article on Darwinism in the "Light of Modern Criticism," already quoted, says the important fact (with regard to Mendel's Law) from the point of view of the theory of evolution is that "the new species have sprung fully armed from the old ones, like Minerva from the head of Jove." "From de Vries's results," he adds, "we understand better how it is that we do not see new forms arising, because they appear, as it were, fully equipped over night. Old species are not slowly changed into new ones, but a shaking up of the old organization takes place and the egg brings forth a new species. It is like the turning of the kaleidoscope, a slight shift and the new figure suddenly appears. It needs no great penetration to see that this point of view is entirely different from the conception of the formation of new species by accumulating individual variations, until they are carried so far that the new form may be called a new species." With regard to this question of the transformation of one species into another, Mendel himself, in the concluding paragraphs of his article on hybridization, seems to agree with the expressions of Morgan. He quotes Gärtner's opinion with apparent approval: "Gärtner, by the results of these transformation experiments was led to oppose the opinion of those naturalists who dispute the stability of plant species and believe in a continuous evolution of vegetation. He perceives in the complete transformation of one species into another an indubitable proof that {217} species are fixed within limits beyond which they cannot change." "Although this opinion," adds Mendel, "cannot be unconditionally accepted, we find, on the other hand, in Gärtner's experiments a noteworthy confirmation of that supposition regarding the variability of cultivated plants which has already been expressed." This expression of opinion is not very definite, and Bateson, in what Professor Wilson of Columbia calls his "recent admirable little book on Mendel's principles," adds the following note that may prove of service in elucidating Mendel's meaning, as few men have entered so fully into the understanding of Mendel's work as Bateson, who introduced him to the English-speaking scientific public, "The argument of this paragraph appears to be that though the general mutability of natural species might be doubtful, yet among cultivated plants the transference of characters may be accomplished and may occur by _integral steps_ [italics ours], until one species is definitely 'transformed' into the other." Needless to say, this is quite different from the gradual transformation of species that Darwinism or Lamarckism assumes to take place. One species becomes another _per saltum_ in virtue of some special energy infused into it, some original tendency of its intrinsic nature, not because of gradual modification by forces outside of the organisms, nor because of the combination of influences they are subjected to from without and within, because of tendency to evolute plus {218} environmental forces. This throws biology back to the permanency of species in themselves, though successive generations may be of different species, and does away with the idea of missing links, since there are no gradual connecting gradations. A very interesting phase of Mendel's discoveries is concerned with the relative value of the egg-cell and the pollen-cell, as regards their effect upon future generations. It is an old and oft-discussed problem as to which of these germinal particles is the more important in its influence upon the transmission of parental qualities. Mendel's observations would seem to decide definitely that, in plants and, by implication, in animals, since the germinal process is biogenetically similar, the value of both germinal particles is exactly equal. In a note, Mendel says:-- _In pisum_ (i. e. in peas), it is beyond doubt that, for the formation of the new embryo, a perfect union of the elements of both fertilizing cells must take place. How could we otherwise explain that, among the offspring of the hybrids, both original types reappear in equal numbers, and with all their peculiarities? If the influence of the egg-cell upon the pollen-cell were only external, if it fulfilled the role of a nurse only, then the result of each artificial fertilization could be no other than that the developed hybrid should exactly resemble the pollen parent, or, at any rate, do so very closely. These experiments, so far, have in no wise been confirmed. An evident proof of the complete union of the contents of both cells is afforded by the {219} experience gained on all sides, that it is immaterial as regards the form of the hybrid which of the original species is the seed cell, or which the pollen parent! This is the first actual demonstration of the equivalent value of both germinal particles as regards their influence on transmission inheritance in future generations. It is only by simplifying the problem so that all disturbing factors could be eliminated that Mendel succeeded in making this demonstration. Too many qualities have hitherto been considered with consequent confusion as to the results obtained. It is of the genius of the man that he should have been able to succeed in seeing the problem in simple terms while it is apparently so complex, and thus obtain results that are as far-reaching as the problem they solve is basic in its character. Bateson, in his work Mendel's _Principles of Heredity_, says:-- It may seem surprising that a work of such importance should so long have failed to find recognition and to become current in the world of science. It is true that the Journal in which it appeared is scarce, but this circumstance has seldom long delayed general recognition. The cause is unquestionably to be found in that neglect of the experimental study of the problem of species which supervened on the general acceptance of the Darwinian doctrine. The problem of species, as Kölreuter, Gärtner, Naudin, Wichura, and the hybridists of the middle of the nineteenth century conceived it, attracted thenceforth no workers. {220} The question, it was imagined, had been answered and the debate ended. No one felt much interest in the matter. A host of other lines of work was suddenly opened up, and in 1865 the more original investigators naturally found these new methods of research more attractive than the tedious observations of hybridizers, whose inquiries were supposed, moreover, to have led to no definite results. In 1868 appeared the first edition of Darwin's _Animals and Plants_, marking the very zenith of these studies with regard to hybrids and the questions in heredity which they illustrate, and thenceforth the decline in the experimental investigation of evolution and the problem of species have been studied. With the rediscovery and confirmation of Mendel's work by de Vries, Correns and Tschermak in 1900 a new era begins. Had Mendel's work come into the hands of Darwin it is not too much to say that the history of the development of evolutionary philosophy would have been very different from that which we have witnessed. That Mendel's work, appearing as it did at a moment when several naturalists of the first rank were still occupied with these problems, should have passed wholly unnoted, will always remain inexplicable, the more so as the Brünn society exchanged its publication with most of the great academies of Europe, including both the Royal and the Linnean societies of London. The whole history of Mendel's work, its long period without effect upon scientific thought, its thoroughly simple yet satisfactory character, its basis in manifold observations of problems simplified to the last degree, and its present complete acceptance illustrate very well the chief defect of the last two generations of workers in biology. {221} There has been entirely too much theorizing, too much effort at observations for the purpose of bolstering up preconceived ideas--preaccepted dogmas of science that have proved false in the end--and too little straightforward observation and simple reporting of the facts without trying to have them fit into any theory prematurely, that is until their true place was found. This will be the criterion by which the latter half of nineteenth century biology will be judged; and because of failure here much of our supposed progress will have no effect on the current of biological progress, but will represent only an eddy in which there was no end of bustling movement manifest but no real advance. As stated very clearly by Professor Morgan at the beginning of this paper, and Professor Bateson near the end, Darwin's doctrine of natural selection as the main factor in evolution and its practically universal premature acceptance by scientific workers in biology are undoubtedly responsible for this. The present generation may well be warned, then, not to surrender their judgment to taking theories, but to wait in patience for the facts in the case, working, not theorizing, while they wait. 
15807	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 15807-h.htm or 15807-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/5/8/0/15807/15807-h/15807-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/5/8/0/15807/15807-h.zip) AMONG THE FORCES Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of THY hands.--Psalm viii, 6 by HENRY WHITE WARREN, LL.D. One of the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church Author of "Recreations in Astronomy," "The Bible in the World's Education," etc. New York: Eaton & Mains Cincinnati: Curts & Jennings 1898 [Frontispiece: Old Faithful Geyser.] E. I. W. Eximia Inter Vires. CONTENTS Why Written The Man Who Needed 452,696 Barrels of Water The Sun's Great Horses Old Sun Help Moon Help More Moon Help Star Help Help from Insensible Seas The Fairy Gravitation More Gravitation The Fairy Pulls Great Loads The Fairy Draws Greater Loads The Fairy Works a Pump Handle The Help of Inertia One Plant Help Gas Help Natural Affection of Metals Natural Affection Between Metal and Liquid Natural Affection of Metal and Gas Hint Help Creations Now in Progress Some Curious Behaviors of Atoms Mobility of Seeming Solids The Next World to Conquer Our Enjoyment of Nature's Forces The Matterhorn The Grand Canon of the Colorado River. The Yellowstone Park Geysers Sea Sculpture The Power of Vegetable Life Spiritual Dynamics When This World is Not LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Old Faithful Geyser . . . . Frontispiece Breaking Waves Incline at Mauch Chunk The Head of the Toboggan Slide. The Big Trees The Matterhorn The Punch Bowl, Yellowstone Geysers. Formation of the Grotto Geyser Bee-Hive Geyser Pulpit Terrace and Bunsen Peak "The Breakers," Santa Cruz, Cal. The Work and the Worker, Santa Cruz, Cal. Yellow Chili Squash in Harness Squash Grown Under Pressure A Natural Bridge, Santa Cruz, Cal. An Excavated Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal A Double Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal. A Triple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal. Remains of a Quadruple Natural Arch Arch Remains, Side Wall Broken AMONG THE FORCES WHY WRITTEN Fairies, fays, genii, sprites, etc., were once supposed to be helpful to some favored men. The stories about these imaginary beings have always had a fascinating interest. The most famous of these stories were told at Bagdad in the eleventh century, and were called _The Arabian Nights' Entertainment_. Then men were said to use all sorts of obedient powers, sorceries, tricks, and genii to aid them in getting wealth, fame, and beautiful brides. But I find the realities of to-day far greater, more useful and interesting, than the imaginations of the past. The powers at work about us are far more kindly and powerful than the Slave of the Ring or of the Lamp. The object of writing this series of papers about applications of powers to the service of man, their designed king, is manifold. I desire all my readers to see what marvelous provision the Father has made for his children in this their nursery and schoolhouse. He has always been trying to crowd on men more helps and blessings than they were willing to take. From the first mist that went up from the Garden the power of steam has been in every drop of water. Yet men carried their burdens. Since the first storm the swiftness and power of lightning have been trying to startle man into seeing that in it were speed and force to carry his thought and himself. But man still plodded and groaned under loads that might have been lifted by physical forces. I have seen in many lands men bringing to their houses water from the hills in heavy stone jars. Gravitation was meant to do that work, and to make it leap and laugh with pearly spray in every woman's kitchen. The good Father has offered his all-power on all occasions to all men. I desire that the works of God should keep their designed relation to thought. He says, Consider the lilies; look into the heavens; number the stars; go to the ant; be wise; ask the beasts, the fowl, the fishes; or "talk even to the earth, and it showeth thee." Every flower and star, rainbow and insect, was meant to be so provocative of thought that any man who never saw a human book might be largely educated. And every one of these thoughts is related to man's best prosperity and joy. He is a most regal king if he achieve the designed dominion over a thousand powerful servitors. It is well to see that God's present actual powers in full play about us are vastly beyond all the dreams of Arabian imagination. It leads us to expect greater things of him hereafter. That human imagination could so dream is proof of the greatness of its Creator. But that he has actually surpassed those dreams is prophecy of more greatness to come. I desire that my readers of this generation shall be the great thinkers and inventors of the next. There are amazing powers just waiting to be revealed. Draw aside the curtain. We have not yet learned the A B C of science. We have not yet grasped the scepters of provided dominion. Those who are most in the image and likeness of the Cause of these forces are most likely to do it. THE MAN WHO NEEDED 452,696 BARRELS OF WATER A man once had a large field of wheat. He had toiled hard to clear the land, plow the soil, and sow the seed. The crop grew beautifully and was his joy by day and by night. But when it was just ready to head out it suddenly stopped growing for want of moisture. It looked as if all his hard work would be in vain. The poor farmer thought of his wife and children, who were likely to starve in the coming winter. He shed many tears, but they could not moisten one little stalk. Suddenly he said, "I will water it myself." The field was a mile square, and it needed an inch of water over it all. He quickly figured out that there were 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile. On every twelve square feet a cubic foot of water was needed. A cubic foot of water weighs sixty-two and a third pounds. Hence it would require 74,754 tons of water. To draw this amount 74,754 teams, each drawing a ton, would be required. But they would tramp the wheat all down. Besides, the nearest water in sufficient quantity was the ocean, one thousand miles away over the mountains. It would take three months to make the journey. And, worse than all else, the water of the ocean is so salt that it would ruin the crop. [Illustration: Breaking Waves.] Alas! there were three impossibilities--so many teams, so many miles, so long time--and two ruins if he could overcome the impossibilities--trampling down the wheat and bringing so much salt. Alas, alas! what could he do but see the poor wheat die of thirst and his poor wife and children die of hunger? Suddenly he determined to ask the sun to help him. And the sun said he would. That was a very little thing for such a great body to do. So he heated the air over the ocean till it became so thirsty that it drank plenty of water, choosing only the sweet fresh water and leaving all the salt in the ocean. Then the warm air rose, because the heat had expanded it and made it lighter, and the other air rushed down the mountains all over that side of the continent to take its place. Then the warm air went landward in an upper current and carried its load of water in great piles and mountains of clouds; it lifted them over the great ranges of mountains and rained down its thousands of tons of sweet water a thousand miles from the sea, so gently that not a stalk of wheat was trampled down, nor was a single root made acrid by any taste of brine. Besides the precious drink the sun brought the most delicate food for the wheat. There was carbonic acid, that makes soda water so delicious, besides oxygen, that is so stimulating, nitrogen, ammonia, and half a dozen other things that are so nutritious to growing plants. Thus the wheat grew up in beauty, headed out abundantly, and matured perfectly. Then the farmer stopped weeping for laughter, and in his joy he remembered to thank, not the sun, nor the wind, but the great One who made them both. THE SUN'S GREAT HORSES There was once a man who had thousands of acres of mighty forests in the distant mountains. They were valueless there, but would be exceedingly valuable in the great cities hundreds of miles away, if he could only find any power to transport them thither. So he looked for a team that could haul whole counties of forests so many miles. He saw that the sun drew the greatest loads, and he asked it to help him. And the sun said that was what he was made for; he existed only to help man. He said that he had made those great forests to grow for a thousand years so as to be ready for man when he needed them, and that he was now ready to help move them where they were wanted. So he told the man who owned the forest that there was a great power, which men called gravitation, that seemed to reside in the center of the earth and every other world, but that it worked everywhere. It held the stones down to the earth, made the rain fall, and water to run down hill; and if the man would arrange a road, so that gravitation and the sun could work together, the forest would soon be transported from the mountains to the sea. So the man made a trough a great many miles long, the two sides coming together like a great letter V. Then the sun brought water from the sea and kept the trough nearly full year after year. The man put into it the lumber and logs from the great forests, and gravitation pulled the lumber and water ever so swiftly, night and day, miles away to the sea. How I have laughed as I have seen that perpetual stream of lumber and timber pour out so far from where the sun grew them for man. For the sun never ceased to supply the water, and gravitation never ceased to pull. This man who relentlessly cut down the great forests never said, "How good the sun is!" nor, "How strong is gravitation!" but said continually, "How smart I am!" OLD SUN HELP Holland is a land that is said to draw twenty feet of water. Its surface is below sea level. Since 1440 they have been recovering land from the sea. They have acquired 230,000 acres in all. Fifty years ago they diked off 45,000 acres of an arm of the sea, called Haarlem Meer, that had an average depth of twelve and three quarters feet of water, and proposed to pump it out so as to have that much more fertile land. They wanted to raise 35,000,000 tons of water a month a distance of ten feet, to get through in time. Who could work the handle? The sun would evaporate two inches a year, but that was too slow. So they used the old force of the sun, reservoired in former ages. Coal is condensed sunshine, still keeping all the old light and power. By a suitable engine they lifted 112 tons ten feet at every stroke, and in 1848, five years after they began to apply old sun force, 41,675 acres were ready for sale and culture. The water that accumulates now, from rain and infiltration, is lifted out by the sun force as exhibited in wind on windmills. They groaningly work while men sleep. The Netherlandish engineers are now devising plans to pump out the Zuyder Zee, an area of two thousand square miles. There is plenty of power of every kind for anything, material, mental, spiritual. The problem is the application of it. The thinker is king. This is only one instance of numberless applications of old sun force. In this country coal does more work than every man, woman, and child in the whole land. It pumps out deep mines, hoists ore to the surface, speeds a thousand trains, drives great ships, in face of waves and winds, thousands of miles and faster than transcontinental trains. It digs, spins, weaves, saws, planes, grinds, plows, reaps, and does everything it is asked to do. It is a vast reservoir of force, for the accumulation of which thousands of years were required. MOON HELP At Foo-Chow, China, there is a stone bridge, more than a mile long, uniting the two parts of the city. It is not constructed with arches, but piers are built up from the bottom of the river and great granite stringers are laid horizontally from pier to pier. I measured some of these great stone stringers, and found them to be three feet square and forty-five feet long. They weigh over thirty tons each. How could they be lifted, handled, and put in place over the water on slender piers? How was it done? There was no Hercules to perform the mighty labor, nor Amphion to lure them to their place with the music of his golden lyre. Tradition says that the Chinese, being astute astronomers, got the moon to do the work. It was certainly very shrewd, if they did. Why not use the moon for more than a lantern? Is it not a part of the "all things" over which man was made to have dominion? Well, the Chinese engineers brought the great granite blocks to the bridge site on floats, and when the tide lifted the floats and stones they blocked up the stones on the piers and let the floats sink with the outgoing tide. Then they blocked up the stones on the floats again, and as the moon lifted the tides once more they lifted the stones farther toward their place, until at length the work was done for each set of stones. Dear, good moon, what a pull you have! You are not merely for the delight of lovers, pleasant as you are for that, but you are ready to do gigantic work. No wonder that the Chinese, as they look at the solid and enduring character of that bridge, name it, after the poetic and flowery habit of the country, "The Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages." MORE MOON HELP Years ago, before there were any railroads, New York city had thousands of tons of merchandise it wished to send out West. Teams were few and slow, so they asked the moon to help. It was ready; had been waiting thousands of years. We shall soon see that it is easy to slide millions of tons of coal down hill, but how could we slide freight up from New York to Albany? It is very simple. Lift up the lower end of the river till it shall be down hill all the way to Albany. But who can lift up the end of the river? The moon. It reaches abroad over the ocean and gathers up water from afar, brings it up by Cape Hatteras and in from toward England, pours it in through the Narrows, fills up the great harbor, and sets the great Hudson flowing up toward Albany. Then men put their big boats on the current and slide up the river. Six hours later the moon takes the water out of the harbor and lets other boats slide the other way. New York itself has made use of the moon to get rid of its immense amount of garbage and sewage. It would soon breed a pestilence, and the city be like the buried cities of old; but the moon comes to its aid, and carries away and buries all this foul breeder of a pestilence, and washes all the harbor and bay with clean floods of water twice a day. Good moon! It not only lights, but works. The tide in New York Harbor rises only about five feet; up in the Bay of Fundy it ramps, rushes, raves, and rises more than fifty feet high. In former times men used to put mill wheels into the currents of the tides; when they rushed into little bays and salt ponds they turned the wheels one way; when out, the other. STAR HELP "We for whose sake all Nature stands, And stars their courses move." Do the stars, that are so far away and seem so small, send us any help? Assuredly. Nothing exists for itself. All is for man. Magnetism tells the sailor which way he is going. Stars not only do this, when visible, but they also tell just where on the round globe he is. A glance into their bright eyes, from a rolling deck, by an uneducated sailor, aided by the tables of accomplished scholars, tells him exactly where he is--in mid Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, or Antarctic Ocean, or at the mouth of the harbor he has sought for months. We lift up our eyes higher than the hills. Help comes from the skies. This help was started long since, with providential foresight and care. Is he steering by the North Star? A ray of guidance was sent from that lighthouse in the sky half a century before his need, that it might arrive just at the critical time. It has been ever since on its way. The stars give us, on land and sea, all our reliable standards of time. There is no other source. They are reliable to the hundredth part of a second. The Italian physicians, in their ignorance of the origin of a disease, named it the influenza, because they imagined that it came from the influence of the stars. No! There is nothing malign in the sweet influences of the Pleiades. The stars are of special use as a mental gymnasium. On their lofty bars and trapezes the mind can swing itself higher and farther than on any other material thing. Infinity and omnipotence are factors in their problems. They also fill the soul of the rapt beholder with adoring wonder. They are the greatest symbols of the unweariableness of the power and of the minuteness of the knowledge of God. He calleth all their millions by name, and for the greatness of his power not one faileth to come. Number the stars of a clear Eastern sky, if you are able. So multitudinous and enduring shall the influence of one good man be. HELP FROM INSENSIBLE SEAS Suppose one has been at sea a month. He has tacked to every point of the compass, been driven by gales, becalmed in doldrums. At length Euroclydon leaps on him, and he lets her drive. And when for many days and nights neither sun nor stars appear, how can he tell where he is, which way he drives, where the land lies? There is an insensible ocean. No sense detects its presence. It has gulf streams that flow through us, storms whose waves engulf us, but we feel them not. There are various intensities of its power, the north end of the world not having half as much as the south. There are two places in the north half of the world that have greater intensity than the rest, and only one in the south. It looks as if there were unsoundable depths in some places and shoals in others. The currents do not flow in exactly the same direction all the time, but their variations are within definite limits. How shall we detect these steady currents when wind and waves are in tumultuous confusion? They are always present. No winds blow them aside, no waves drench their subtle fire, no mountains make them swerve. But how shall we find them? Float a bit of magnetic ore in a pail of water, or suspend a bit of magnetized steel by a thread, and these currents make the ore or needle point north and south. Now let waves buffet either side, typhoons roar, and maelstroms whirl; we have, out of the invisible, insensible sea of magnetic influence, a sure and steady guide. Now we can sail out of sight of headlands. We have in the darkness and light, in calm and storm, an unswerving guide. Now Columbus can steer for any new world. Does not this seem like a spiritual force? Lodestone can impart its qualities to hard steel without the impairment of its own power. There is a giving that does not impoverish, and a withholding that does not enrich. Wherever there is need there is supply. The proper search with appropriate faculties will find it. There are yet more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. THE FAIRY GRAVITATION The Germans imagine that they have fairy kobolds, sprites, and gnomes which play under ground and haunt mines. I know a real one. I will give you his name. It is called "Gravitation." The name does not sound any more fairylike than a sledge hammer, but its nature and work are as fairylike as a spider's web. I will give samples of his helpful work for man. In the mountains about Saltzburg, south of Munich, are great thick beds of solid salt. How can they get it down to the cities where it is needed? Instead of digging it out, and packing it on the backs of mules for forty miles, they turn in a stream of water and make a little lake which absorbs very much salt--all it can carry. Then they lay a pipe, like a fairy railroad, and gravitation carries the salt water gently and swiftly forty miles, to where the railroads can take it everywhere. It goes so easily! There is no railroad to build, no car to haul back, only to stand still and see gravitation do the work. How do they get the salt and water apart? O, just as easily. They ask the wind to help them. They cut brush about four feet long, and pile it up twenty feet high and as long as they please. Then a pipe with holes in it is laid along the top, the water trickles down all over the loose brush, and the thirsty wind blows through and drinks out most of the water. They might let on the water so slowly that all of it would be drunk out by the wind, leaving the solid salt on the bushes. But they do not want it there. So they turn on so much water that the thirsty wind can drink only the most of it, and the rest drops down into great pans, needing only a little evaporation by boiling to become beautiful salt again, white as the snows of December. There are other minerals besides salt in the beds in the mountains, and, being soluble in water, they also come down the tiny railroad with musical laughter. How can we separate them, so that the salt shall be pure for our tables? The other minerals are less avaricious of water than salt, so they are precipitated, or become solid, sooner than salt does. Hence with nice care the other minerals can be left solid on the bushes, while the salt brine falls off. Afterward pure water can be turned on and these other minerals can be washed off in a solution of their own. No fairies could work better than those of solution and crystallization. MORE GRAVITATION At Hutchinson, Kan., there are great beds of solid rock salt four hundred feet below the surface. Men want to get and use two thousand barrels a day. How shall they get it to the top of the ground? They might dig a great well--or, as the miners say, sink a shaft--pump out the water, go down and blast out the salt, and laboriously haul it up in defiance of gravitation. No; that is too hard. Better ask this strong gravitation to bring it up. But does it work down and up? Did any one ever know of gravitation raising anything? O yes, many things. A balloon may weigh as much as a ton, but when inflated it weighs less than so much air; so the heavier air flows down under and shoulders it up. When a heavy weight and a light one are hung over a pulley, the light one goes up because gravity acts more on the other. Water poured down a long tube will rise if the tube is bent up into a shorter arm. Exactly. So we bore a four-inch hole down to the salt and put in an iron tube. We do not care about the water. It is no bother. Then inside of this tube we put a two-inch tube that is a few feet higher. Now pour water down the small longer tube. It saturates itself with salt, and comes flowing over the top of the shorter tube as easily as water runs down hill. Multiply the wells, dry out the water, and you have your two thousand barrels of salt lifted every day--just as easy as thinking! We want a steady, unswerving force that will pull our clock hands with an exact motion day and night, year in and year out. We hang up a string, and ask gravitation to take hold and pull. We put on some lead or brass for a handle, to take hold of. It takes hold and pulls, unweariedly, unvaryingly, and ceaselessly. It turns single water-wheels with a power of more than twelve hundred horses. It holds down houses, so that they are not blown away. It was made to serve man, and it works without a grumble. Thus the higher force in nature always prevails over the lower, and the greater amount over the less amount of the same force. What is the highest force? THE FAIRY PULLS GREAT LOADS Far back in the hills west of Mauch Chunk, Pa., lie great beds of coal. They were made under the sea long ages ago, raised up, roofed over by the Allegheny Mountains, and kept waiting as great reservoirs of power for the use of man. But how can these mountains be gotten to the distant cities by the sea? Faith in what power can say to these mountains, "Be thou removed far hence, and cast into the sea?" It is easy. Along the winding sides of the mountains have been laid two rails like steel ribbons for a dozen miles, from the coal beds to water and railroad transportation. Put a half dozen loaded cars on the track, and with one man at the brake, lest gravitation should prove too willing a helper, away they go, through the springtime freshness or the autumn glory, spinning and singing down to the point of universal distribution. [Illustration: Incline at Mauch Chunk.] On one occasion the brake for some reason would not work. The cars just flew like an arrow. The man's hair stood up from fright and the wind. Coming to a curve the cars kept straight on, ran down a bank, dashed right into the end of a house and spilled their whole load in the cellar. Probably no man ever laid in a winter's supply of coal so quickly or so undesirably. But how do we get the cars back? It is pleasant sliding down hill on a rail, but who pulls the sled back? Gravitation. It is just as willing to work both ways as one way. Think of a great letter X a dozen miles long. Lay it down on the side against three or four rough hills. Bend the X till it will fit the curves and precipices of these hills. That is the double track. Now when loaded cars have come down one bar of the X by gravity, draw them up by a sharp incline to the upper end of the other bar, and away they go by gravity to the other end. Draw them up one more incline, and they are ready to take a new load and buzz down to the bottom again. I have been riding round the glorious mountain sides in a horseless, steamless, electricityless carriage, and been delighted to find hundreds of tons of coal shooting over my head at the crossings of the X, and both cars were drawn in opposite directions by the same force of gravity in the heart of the earth. If you do not take off your hat and cheer for the superb force of gravitation, the wind is very apt to take it off for you. THE FAIRY DRAWS GREATER LOADS Pittsburg has 5,000,000 tons of coal every year that it wishes to send South, much of it as far as New Orleans--2,050 miles. What force is sufficient for moving such great mountains so far? Any boy may find it. Tie a stone to the end of a string, whirl it around the finger and feel it pull. How much is the pull? That depends on the weight of the stone, the length of the string, and the swiftness of the whirl. In the case of David's sling it pulled away hard enough to crash into the head of Goliath. Suppose the stone to be as big as the earth (8,000 miles in diameter), the length of the string to be its distance from the sun (92,500,000 miles), and the swiftness of flight the speed of the earth in its orbit (1,000 miles a minute). The pull represents the power of gravitation that holds the earth to the sun. If we use steel wires instead of gravitation for this purpose, each strong enough to support half a score of people (1,500 pounds), how many would it take? We would need to distribute them over the whole earth: from pole to pole, from side to side, over all the land and sea. Then they would need to be so near together that a mouse could not run around among them. Here is a measureless power. Can it be gotten to take Pittsburgh coal to New Orleans? Certainly; it was made to serve man. So the coal is put on great flatboats, 36 x 176 feet, a thousand tons to a boat, and gravitation takes the mighty burden down the long toboggan slide of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to the journey's end. How easy! [Illustration: The Head of the Toboggan Slide.] One load sent down was 43,000 tons. The flatboats were lashed together as one solid boat covering six and one half acres, more space than a whole block of houses in a city, with one little steamboat to steer. There is always plenty of power; just belt on for anything you want done. This is only one thing that gravitation does for man on these rivers. And there are many rivers. They serve the savage on his log and the scientist in his palace steamer with equal readiness. THE FAIRY WORKS A PUMP HANDLE The Slave of the Ring could take Aladdin into a cave of wealth, and by speaking the words, "Open Sesame," Ali Baba was admitted into the cave that held the treasures of the forty thieves. But that is very little. I have just come from a cave in Virginia City, Nev., from which men took $120,000,000. In following the veins of silver the miners went down 3,500 feet--more than three fifths of a mile. There it was fearfully hot, but the main trouble was water. They had dug a deep, deep well. How could they get the water out? Pumps were of no use. A column of water one foot square of that height weighs 218,242 pounds. Who could work the other end of the pump handle? They thought of evaporating the water and sending it up as steam. But it was found that it would take an incredible amount of coal. They thought of separating it into oxygen and hydrogen, and then its own lightness would carry it up very quickly. But they had no power that would resolve even quarts into their ultimate elements, where tons would be required. So they asked gravitation to help them. It readily offered to do so. It could not let go its hold of the water in the mine, nor anywhere else, for fear everything would go to pieces, but it offered to overcome force with greater force. So it sent the men twenty miles away in the mountains to dig a ditch all the way to the mine, and then gravitation brought water to a reservoir four hundred feet above the mouth of the mine. Now a column of this water one foot square can be taken from this higher reservoir down to the bottom of the mine and weigh 25,000 pounds more than a like column that comes from the bottom to the top. This extra 25,000 pounds is an extra force available to lift itself and the other water out of the deep well, and they turn the greater force into a pump and work it in the cylinder as if it were steam. It lifts not only the water that works the pump, but the other water also out of the mine by gravitation. So man gets the water out by pouring more water in. THE HELP OF INERTIA Since the time of David many boys have swung pebbles by a string, or sling, and felt the pull of what we call a centrifugal (center-fleeing) force. David utilized it to one good purpose. Goliath was greatly surprised; such a thing never entered his head before. Whether a stone or an idea enters one's head depends on the kind of head he has. We utilize this force in many ways now. Some boys swing a pail of milk over their heads, and if swung fast enough the centrifugal force overcomes the force of gravitation, and the milk does not fall. That is not utilizing the force. It often terrorizes the careful mother, anxious for the safety of the milk. But in the arts of practical life we do utilize this force, which is only inertia. Once it took a long time for molasses to drain out of a hogshead of damp sugar. Now it is put into a great tub, with holes in the side, which is made to revolve rapidly, and the molasses flies out. In the best laundries clothes are not wrung out, to the great damage of tender fabrics, but are put into such a tub and whirled nearly dry. So fifty yards of woolen cloth just out of the dye vat--who could wring it? It is coiled in a tub called a wizard, and whirled. Muddy water is put through a process called clarification. It is the same, except that there are no holes in the vessel. The heavier particles of dirt, that would settle in time, take the outside, leaving perfectly clean water in the middle. A perpendicular perforated pipe, with a faucet below, drains off all the clear water and leaves all the mud. Milk is brought in from the milking and put into a separator; whirl it, and the heavier milk takes the outside of the whirling mass, and the lighter cream can be drawn off from the middle. It is far more perfectly separated than by any skimming. A rotary snowplow slices off two feet of a ten-foot drift at each revolution, and by centrifugal force flings it out of the cutting with a speed that a hundred navvies or dagos cannot equal. ONE PLANT HELP A thousand acres of land on Cape Cod were once blown away. This wind excavation was ten feet deep. It was not an extraordinary wind, but extraordinary land. It was made of rock ground up into fine sand by the waves on the shore. In all the deserts of the world the wind blows the itinerant sand on its far journeys. If the wind is moderate it heaps the sand up into little hills, some of them six hundred feet high, around any obstruction, and then blows the sand up the slanting face of the hill and over the top, where it falls out of the wind on the leeward side. In this way the hill is always traveling. In North Carolina hills start inland, and travel right on, burying a house or farm if it be in the way, but resurrecting it again on the other side as the hill goes on. Anyone may see these hills at the south end of Lake Michigan, as he approaches Chicago, west of San Francisco, all along up the Columbia River--the sand having come on the wings of the wind from the coast. But to see the whole visible world on a march one needs to go to a really large desert. The Pyramids and the Sphinx have been partly buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations are mere miasmatic marshes now. This is partly in consequence of the silt brought in by the rivers; but where the rivers do not flow in it is because the sand blows in along the shore. Harbors are especially endangered when their protection from the waves consists of a bank of sand, as on Cape Cod and the Sandy Hook below the Narrows of the harbor of New York. How can man combat part of the continent on the move, driven by the ceaseless powers of the air? By a humble plant or two. The movement of the sand hills that threaten to destroy the marvelous beauty of the grounds of the Hotel del Monte at Monterey is stopped by planting dwarf pines. The sand dunes that prevent much of Holland from being reconquered by the sea are protected with great care by willows, etc., and the coast sands of parts of eastern France have been sown with sea pine and broom. The tract of a thousand acres on Cape Cod had been protected by humble beach grass. Some careless herder let the cows eat it in places, and away went part of a township. It is now a punishable crime on Cape Cod to destroy beach grass. GAS HELP This refers to more than stump speech-making. The old Romans drove through solid rock numerous tunnels similar to the one for draining Lago de Celano, fifty miles east of Rome. This one was three and a half miles long, through solid rock, and every chip cost a blow of a human arm to dislodge it. Of course the process was very slow. We do works vastly greater. We drive tunnels three times as long for double-track railways through rock that is held down by an Alp. We use common air to drill the holes and a thin gas to break the rock. The Mont Cenis tunnel required the removal of 900,000 cubic yards of rock. Near Dover, England, 1,000,000,000 tons of cliff were torn down and scattered over fifteen acres in an instant. How was it done? By gas. There are a dozen kinds of solids which can be handled--some of them frozen, thawed, soaked in water, with impunity--but let a spark of fire touch them and they break into vast volumes of uncontrollable gas that will rend the heart out of a mountain in order to expand. Gunpowder was first used in 1350; so the old Romans knew nothing of its power. They flung javelins a few rods by the strength of the arm; we throw great iron shells, starting with an initial velocity of fifteen hundred feet a second and going ten miles. The air pressure against the front of a fifteen-inch shell going at that speed is 2,865 pounds. That ton and a half of resistance of gas in front must be much more than overcome by gas behind. But the least use of explosives is in war; not over ten per cent is so used. The Mont Cenis tunnel took enough for 200,000,000 musket cartridges. As much as 2,000 kegs have been fired at once in California to loosen up gravel for mining, and 23 tons were exploded at once under Hell Gate, at New York. How strong is this gas? As strong as you please. Steam is sometimes worked at a pressure of 400 pounds to the inch, but not usually over 100 pounds. It would be no use to turn steam into a hole drilled in rock. The ordinary pressure of exploded gas is 80,000 pounds to the square inch. It can be made many times more forceful. It works as well in water, under the sea, or makes earthquakes in oil wells 2,000 feet deep, as under mountains. The wildest imagination of Scheherezade never dreamed in _Arabian Nights_ of genii that had a tithe of the power of these real forces. Her genii shut up in bottles had to wait centuries for some fisherman to let them out. NATURAL AFFECTION OF METALS "Sacra fames auri." The hunger for gold, which in men is called accursed, in metals is justly called sacred. In all the water of the sea there is gold--about 400 tons in a cubic mile--in very much of the soil, some in all Philadelphia clay, in the Pactolian sands of every river where Midas has bathed, and in many rocks of the earth. But it is so fine and so mixed with other substances that in many cases it cannot be seen. Look at the ore from a mine that is giving its owners millions of dollars. Not a speck of gold can be seen. How can it be secured? Set a trap for it. Put down something that has an affinity--voracious appetite, unslakable thirst, metallic affection--for gold, and they will come together. We have heard of potable gold--"_potabile aurum_." There are metals to which all gold is drinkable. Mercury is one of them. Cut transverse channels, or nail little cleats across a wooden chute for carrying water. Put mercury in the grooves or before the cleats, and shovel auriferous gravel and sand into the rushing water. The mercury will bibulously drink into itself all the fine invisible gold, while the unaffectionate sand goes on, bereaved of its wealth. Put gold-bearing quartz under an upright log shod with iron. Lift and drop the log a few hundred times on the rock, until it is crushed so fine that it flows over the edge of the trough with constantly going water, and an amalgam of mercury spread over the inclined way down which the endusted water flows will drink up all the gold by force of natural affection therefor. Neither can the gold be seen in the mercury. But it is there. Squeeze the mercury through chamois skin. An amalgam, mostly gold, refuses to go through. Or apply heat. The mercury flies away as vapor and the gold remains. If thou seekest for wisdom as for silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasure, thou shalt find. NATURAL AFFECTION BETWEEN METAL AND LIQUID A little boy had a silver mug that he prized very highly, as it was the gift of his grandfather. The boy was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but, what was much better, he had a mug often filled with what he needed. One day he dipped it into a glass jar of what seemed to him water, and letting go of it saw it go to the bottom. He went to find his father to fish it out for him. When he came back his heavy solid mug looked as if it were made of the skeleton leaves of the forest when the green chlorophyll has decayed away in the winter and left only the gauzy veins and veinlets through which the leaves were made. Soon even this fretwork was gone, and there was no sign of it to be seen. The liquid had eaten or drank the solid metal up, particle by particle. The liquid was nitric acid. The poor little boy had often seen salt, and especially sugar, absorbed in water, but never his precious solid silver mug, and the bright tears rolled down his cheeks freely. But his father thought of two things: First, that the blue tint told him that the jeweler had sold for silver to the grandfather a mug that was part copper; and secondly, that he would put some common salt into the nitric acid--which it liked so much better than silver that it dropped the silver, just as a boy might drop bread when he sought to fill his hands with cake. So the father recovered the invisible silver and made it into a precious mug again. NATURAL AFFECTION OP METAL AND GAS A man was waked up one night in a strange house by a noise he could not understand. He wanted a light, and wanted it very much, but he had no matches that would take fire by the heat of friction. He knew of many other ways of starting a fire. If water gets to the cargo of lime in a vessel it sets the ship on fire. It is of no use to try to put it out by water, for it only makes more heat. He knew that dried alum and sugar suitably mixed would burst into flame if exposed to the air; that nitric acid and oil of turpentine would take fire if mixed; that flint struck by steel would start fire enough to explode a powder magazine; and that Elijah called down from heaven a kind of fire that burned twelve "barrels" of water as easily as ordinary water puts out ordinary fire. But he had none of these ways of lighting his candle at hand--not even the last. So he took a bit of potassium metal, bright as silver, out of a bottle of naphtha, put it in the candle wick, touched it with a bit of dripping ice, and so lighted his candle. The potassium was so avaricious of oxygen that it decomposed the water to get it. Indeed, it was a case of mutual affection. The oxygen preferred the company of potassium to that of the hydrogen in the water, and went to it even at the risk of being burned. I was so interested in seeing a bit of silver-like metal and water take fire as they touched that I forgot all about the occasion of the noise. HINT HELP Benjamin C. B. Tilghman, of Philadelphia, once went into the lighthouse at Cape May, and, observing that the window glass was translucent rather than transparent, asked the keeper why he put ground glass in the windows. "We do not," said the keeper. "We put in the clear glass, and the wind blows the sand against it and roughens the outer surface like ground glass." The answer was to him like the falling apple to Newton. He put on his thinking cap and went out. It was better than the cap of Fortunatus to him. He thought, "If nature does this, why cannot I make a fiercer blast, let sand trickle into it, and so hurl a million little hammers at the glass, and grind it more swiftly than we do on stones with a stream of wet sand added?" He tried jets of steam and of air with sand, and found that he could roughen a pane of glass almost instantly. By coating a part of the glass with hot beeswax, applied with a brush, through a stencil, or covering it with paper cut into any desired figures, he could engrave the most delicate and intricate patterns as readily as if plain. Glass is often made all white, except a very thin coating of brilliant colored glass on one side. This he could cut through, leaving letters of brilliant color and the general surface white, or _vice versa_. Seal cutting is a very delicate and difficult art, old as the Pharaohs. Protect the surface that is to be left, and the sand blast will cut out the required design neatly and swiftly. There is no known substance, not even corundum, hard enough to resist the swift impact of myriads of little stones. It will cut more granite into shape in an hour than a man can in a day. Surely no one will be sorry to learn that General Tilghman sold part of his patents, taken out in October, 1870, for $400,000, and receives the untold benefits of the rest to this day. So much for thinking. Nature gives thousands of hints. Some can take them; some can only take the other thing. The hints are greatly preferred by nature and man. CREATIONS NOW IN PROGRESS The forces of creation are yet in full play. Who can direct them? Rewards greater than Tilghman's await the thinker. We are permitted not only to think God's thoughts after him, but to do his works. "Greater works than these that I do shall he do who believeth on me," says the Greatest Worker. Great profit incites to do the work noted below. Carbon as charcoal is worth about six cents a bushel; as plumbago, for lead pencils or for the bicycle chain, it is worth more; as diamond it has been sold for $500,000 for less than an ounce, and that was regarded as less than half its value. Such a stone is so valuable that $15,000 has been spent in grinding and polishing its surface. The glazier pays $5.00 for a bit of carbon so small that it would take about ten thousand of them to make an ounce. Why is there such a difference in value? Simply arrangement and compactness. Can we so enormously enhance the value of a bushel of charcoal by arrangement and compression? Not very satisfactorily as yet. We can apply almost limitless pressure, but that does not make diamonds. Every particle must go to its place by some law and force we have not yet attained the mastery of. We do not know and control the law and force in nature that would enable us to say to a few million bricks, stones, bits of glass, etc., "Fly up through earth, water, and air, and combine into a perfect palace, with walls, buttresses, towers, and windows all in exact architectural harmony." But there is such a law and force for crystals, if not for palaces. There is wisdom to originate and power to manage such a force. It does not take masses of rock and stick them together, nor even particles from a fluid, but atoms from a gas. Atoms as fine as those of air must be taken and put in their place, one by one, under enormous pressure, to have the resulting crystal as compact as a diamond. The force of crystallization is used by us in many inferior ways, as in making crystals of rock candy, sulphur, salt, etc., but for the making of diamonds it is too much for us, except in a small way. While we cannot yet use the force that builds large white diamonds we can use the diamonds themselves. Set a number of them around a section of an iron tube, place it against a rock, at the surface or deep down in a mine, cause it to revolve rapidly by machinery, and it will bore into the rock, leaving a core. Force in water, to remove the dust and chips, and the diamond teeth will eat their way hundreds of feet in any direction; and by examining the extracted core miners can tell what sort of ore there is hundreds of feet in advance. Hence, they go only where they know that value lies. SOME CURIOUS BEHAVIORS OF ATOMS Ultimate atoms of matter are asserted to be impenetrable. That is, if a mass of them really touched each other, that mass would not be condensible by any force. But atoms of matter do not touch. It is thinkable, but not demonstrable, that condensation might go on till there were no discernible substance left, only force. Matter exists in three states: solid, liquid, and gas. It is thought that all matter may be passed through the three stages--iron being capable of being volatilized, and gases condensed to liquids and solids--the chief difference of these states being greater or less distance between the constituent atoms and molecules. In gas the particles are distant from each other, like gnats flying in the air; in liquids, distant as men passing in a busy street; in solids, as men in a congregation, so sparse that each can easily move about. The congregation can easily disperse to the rarity of those walking in the street, and the men in the street condense to the density of the congregation. So, matter can change in going from solids to liquids and gases, or _vice versa_. The behavior of atoms in the process is surpassingly interesting. Gold changes its density, and therefore its thickness, between the two dies of the mint that make it money. How do the particles behave as they snuggle up closer to each other? Take a piece of iron wire and bend it. The atoms on the inner side become nearer together, those on the outside farther apart. Twist it. The outer particles revolve on each other; those of the middle do not move. They assume and maintain their new relations. Hang a weight on a wire. It does not stretch like a rubber thread, but it stretches. Eight wires were tested as to their tensile strength. They gave an average of forty-five pounds, and an elongation averaging nineteen per cent of the total length. Then a wire of the same kind was given time to adjust itself to its new and trying circumstances. Forty pounds were hung on one day, three pounds more the next day, and so on, increasing the weights by diminishing quantities, till in sixty days it carried fifty-seven pounds. So it seems that exercise strengthened the wire nearly twenty-seven per cent. While those atoms are hustling about, lengthening the wire and getting a better grip on one another, they grow warm with the exercise. Hold a thick rubber band against your lip--suddenly stretch it. The lip easily perceives the greater heat. After a few moments let it contract. The greater coldness is equally perceptible. A wire suspending thirty-nine pounds being twisted ninety-five full turns lengthened itself one sixteen-hundredth of its length. Being further twisted by twenty-five turns it shortened itself one fourth of its previous elongation. During the twisting some sections took far more torsion than others. A steel wire supporting thirty-nine pounds was twisted one hundred and twenty times and then allowed to untwist at will. It let out only thirty-eight turns and retained eighty-two in the new permanent relation of particles. A wire has been known to accommodate itself to nearly fourteen hundred twists, and still the atoms did not let go of each other. They slid about on each other as freely as the atoms of water, but they still held on. It is easier to conceive of these atoms sliding about, making the wire thinner and longer, when we consider that it is the opinion of our best physicists that molecules made of atoms are never still. Masses of matter may be still, but not the constituent elements. They are always in intensest activity, like a mass of bees--those inside coming out, outside ones going in--but the mass remains the same. The atoms of water behave extraordinarily. I know of a boiler and pipes for heating a house. When the fire was applied and the temperature was changed from that of the street to two hundred degrees, it was easy to see that there was a whole barrel more of it than when it was let into the boiler. It had been swollen by the heat, but it was nothing but water. Mobile, flexible, and yielding as water seems to be, it has an obstinacy quite remarkable. It was for a long time supposed to be absolutely incompressible. It is nearly so. A pressure that would reduce air to one hundredth of its bulk would not discernibly affect water. Put a ton weight on a cubic inch of water; it does not flinch nor perceptibly shrink, yet the atoms of water do not fill the space they occupy. They object to being crowded. They make no objection to having other matter come in and possess the space unoccupied by them. Air so much enjoys its free, agile state, leaping over hills and plains, kissing a thousand flowers, that it greatly objects to being condensed to a liquid. First we must take away all the heat. Two hundred and ten degrees of heat changes water to steam filling 1,728 times as much space. No amount of pressure will condense steam to water unless the heat is removed. So take heat away from air till it is more than two hundred degrees below zero, and then a pressure of about two hundred atmospheres (14.7 pounds each) changes common air to fluid. It fights desperately against condensation, growing hot with the effort, and it maintains its resilience for years at any point of pressure short of the final surrender that gives up to become liquid. Perhaps sometime we shall have the pure air of the mountains or the sea condensed to fluid and sold by the quart to the dwellers in the city, to be expanded into air once more. The marvel is not greater that gas is able to sustain itself under the awful pressure with its particles in extreme dispersion, than that what we call solids should have their molecules in a mazy dance and yet keep their strength. Since this world, in power, fineness, finish, beauty, and adaptations, not only surpasses our accomplishment, but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are. MOBILITY OF SEEMING SOLIDS When a human breath, or the white jet of a steam whistle, or the black cough of a locomotive smokestack is projected into the air it is easy to see that the air is mobile. Its particles easily roll over one another in voluminously infolding wreaths. The same is seen in water. The crest of a wave falls over a portion of air, imprisoning it for a moment, and the mingled air and water of different densities prevent the light of the sun or sky from going straight down into the black depths and being lost, but by being reflected and turned back it shows like beautiful white lace, constantly created and dissolved with a thousandfold more beauty than any that ever came from human hands. All the three shifting elements of the swift creations are mobile. This seems to be the case because these elements are not solid. The particles have plenty of room to play about each other, to execute mazy dances and minuets with vastly more space than substance. Extend the thought a little. Things that seem to us most solid are equally mobile. An iron wire seems solid. It is so; some parts much more so than others. The surface that has been in closest contact with the die as the wire was drawn through, reducing its size by one half, perhaps, is vastly more dense than the inner parts that have not been so condensed. File away one tenth of a wire, taking it all from the surface, and you weaken the tensile strength of the wire one half. But, dense and solid as this iron is, its particles are as mobile within certain limits as the particles of air. An electric message sent through a mile of wire is not anything transmitted; matter is not transferred, but the particles are set to dancing in wavy motion from end to end. Particles are leaping within ordered limits and according to regular laws as really as the clouds swirl and the air trembles into song through the throat of a singer. When a wire is made sensitive by electricity the breath of a child can make it vibrate from end to end, ensouled with the child's laughter or fancies. Nay, more, and far more wonderful, the wire will be sensitive to the number of vibrations of a certain note of music, and no receiver at the other end will gather up its sensitive tremblings unless it is pitched to the keynote of the vibrations sent. In this way eight sets of vibrations have been sent on one wire both ways at the same time, and no set of signals has in any way interfered with the completeness and audibility of the rest. Sixteen sets of waltzes were being performed at one and the same time by the particles of one wire without confusion. Because the air is transmitting the notes of an organ from the loft to the opposite end of the church, it is not incapable of bringing the sound of a voice in an opposite direction to the organist from the other end of the church. The extreme mobility of steel is seen when the red-hot metal is plunged into water. Instantly every particle takes a new position, making it a hundredfold more hard than before it was heated. But these particles of transferred steel are still mobile. A man's razor does not cut smoothly. It is dull, or has a ragged edge that is more inclined to draw tears than cut hairs. He draws the razor over the tender palm of his hand a few times, rearranges the particles of the edge and builds them out into a sharper form. Then the razor returns to the lip with the dainty touch of a kiss instead of a saw. Or the tearful man dips the razor in hot water and the particles run out to make a wider blade and, of course, a thinner, sharper edge. Drop the tire of a wagon wheel into a circular fire. As the heat increases each particle says to its neighbor, "Please stand a little further off; this more than July heat is uncomfortable." So the close friends stand a little further apart, lengthening the tire an inch or two. Then, being taken out of the fire and put on the wheel and cooled, the particles snuggle up together again, holding the wheel with a grip of cold iron. Mobile and loose, with plenty of room to play, as the particles have, neither wire nor tire loses its tensile strength. They hold together, whether arms are locked around each other's waist, or hand clasps hand in farther reach. What change has come to iron when it has been made red or white hot? Its particles have simply been mobilized. It differs from cold iron as an army in barracks and forts differs from an army mobilized. Nothing has been added but movement. There is no caloric substance. Heat is a mode of motion. The particles of iron have been made to vibrate among themselves. When the rapidity of movement reaches four hundred and sixty millions of millions of vibrations per second it so affects the eye that we say it is red-hot. When other systems of vibration have been added for yellow, etc., up to seven hundred and thirty millions of millions for the violet, and all continue in full play, the eye perceives what we call white heat. It is a simple illustration of the readiness of seeming solids to vibrate with almost infinite swiftness. I have been to-day in what is to me a kind of heaven below--the workshop of my much-loved friend, John A. Brashear, in Allegheny, Pa. He easily makes and measures things to one four-hundred-thousandth of an inch of accuracy. I put my hand for a few seconds on a great piece of glass three inches thick. The human heat raised a lump detectable by his measurements. We were testing a piece of glass half an inch thick; and five inches in diameter. I put my two thumbnails at the two sides as it rested on its bed, and could see at once that I had compressed the glass to a shorter diameter. We twisted it in so many ways that I said, "That is a piece of glass putty." And yet it was the firmest texture possible to secure. Great lenses are so sensitive that one cannot go near them without throwing them discernibly out of shape. It were easy to show that there is no solid earth nor immovable mountains. I came away saying to my friend, "I am glad God lets you into so much of his finest thinking." He is a mechanic, not a theologian. This foremost man in the world in his fine department was lately but a "greasy mechanic," an engineer in a rolling mill. But for elasticity and mobility nothing approaches the celestial ether. Its vibrations reach into millions of millions per second, and its wave-lengths for extreme red light are only .0000266 of an inch long, and for extreme violet still less--.0000167 of an inch. It is easier molding hot iron than cold, mobile things than immobile. This world has been made elastic, ready to take new forms. New creations are easy, for man, even--much more so for God. Of angels, Milton says: "Thousands at his bidding speed, And post o'er land and ocean without rest." No less is it true of atoms. In him all things live and move. Such intense activities could not be without an infinite God immanent in matter. THE NEXT WORLD TO CONQUER Man's next realm of conquest is the celestial ether. It has higher powers, greater intensities, and quicker activities than any realm he has yet attempted. When the emissory or corpuscular theory of light had to be abandoned a medium for light's interplay between worlds had to be conceived. The existence of an all-pervasive medium called the luminiferous ether was launched as a theory. Its reality has been so far demonstrated that but very few doubters remain. What facts of its conditions and powers can be known? It differs almost totally from our conceptions of matter. Of the eighteen necessary properties of matter perhaps only one, extension, can be predicated of it. It is unlimited, all-pervasive; even where worlds are non-attractive, does not accumulate about suns or other bodies; has no structure, chemical relations, nor inertia; is not heatable, and is not cognizable by any of our present senses. Does it not take us one step toward an apprehension of the revealed condition of spirit? Recall its actual activities. Two hundred and fifty-eight vibrations of air per second produce on the ear the sensation we call _do_, or _C_ of the soprano scale; five hundred and sixteen give the upper _C_, or an octave above. So the sound runs up in air till, above, say, thirty-five thousand vibrations per second, there is plenty of sound inaudible to our ears. But not inaudible to finer ears. To them the morning stars sing together in mighty chorus: "Forever singing as they shine, 'The hand that made us is divine.'" Electricity has as great a variety of vibrations as sound. Since some kinds of electricity do not readily pass through space devoid of air, though light and heat do, it seems likely that some of the lower intensities and slower vibrations of electricity are not in ether but in air. Certainly some of the higher intensities are in ether. Between two hundred and four hundred millions of millions of vibrations of ether per second are the different sorts of heat. Between four hundred and eight hundred vibrations are the different colors of light. Beyond eight hundred vibrations there is plenty of light, invisible to our eyes, known as chemical rays and probably the Roentgen rays. Beyond these are there vibrations for thought-transference? Who knoweth? These familiar facts are called up to show the almost infinite capacities and intensities of the ether. Matter is more forceful, as it is less dense. Rock is solid, and has little force except obstinate resistance. Steam is rarer and more forceful. Gases suddenly born of dynamite touched by fire in the rock under a mountain have the tremendous pressure of eighty thousand pounds to the square inch. Ether is so rare that its density, compared with water, is represented by a decimal fraction with twenty-seven ciphers before it. When the worlds navigate this sea, do they plow through it as a ship through the waves, forcing them aside, or as a sieve letting the water through it? Doubtless the sieve is the better symbol. Certainly the vibrations flow through solid glass and most solid diamond. To be sure, they are a little hampered by the solid substance. The speed of light is reduced from one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second in space to one hundred and twenty thousand in glass. If ether can so readily go through such solids, no wonder that a spirit body could appear to the disciples, "the doors being shut." Marvelous discoveries in the capacities of ether have been made lately. In 1842 Joseph Henry found that electric waves in the top of his house provoked action in a wire circuit in the cellar, through two floors and ceilings, without wire connections. More than twenty years ago Professor Loomis, of the United States coast survey, telegraphed twenty miles between mountains by electric impulses sent from kites. Last year Mr. Preece, the cable being broken, sent, without wires, one hundred and fifty-six messages between the mainland and the island of Mull, a distance of four and a half miles. Marconi, an Italian, has sent recognizable signals through seven or eight thick walls of the London post-office, and three fourths of a mile through a hill. Jagadis Chunder Bose, of India, has fired a pistol by an electric vibration seventy-five feet away and through more than four feet of masonry. Since brick does not elastically vibrate to such infinitesimal impulses as electric waves, ether must. It has already been proven that one can telegraph to a flying train from the overhead wires. Ether is a far better medium of transmission than iron. A wire will now carry eight messages each way, at the same time, without interference. What will not the more facile ether do? Such are some of the first vague suggestions of a realm of power and knowledge not yet explored. They are mere auroral hints of a new dawn. The full day is yet to shine. Like timid children, we have peered into the schoolhouse--afraid of the unknown master. If we will but enter we shall find that the Master is our Father, and that he has fitted up this house, out of his own infinite wisdom, skill, and love, that we may be like him in wisdom and power as well as in love. OUR ENJOYMENT OF NATURE'S FORCES We are a fighting race; not because we enjoy fights, but we enjoy the exercise of force. In early times when we knew of no forces to handle but our own, and no object to exercise them on but our fellow-men, there were feuds, tyrannies, wars, and general desolation. In the Thirty Years' War the population of Germany was starved and murdered down from sixteen millions to less than five millions. But since we have found field, room, and ample verge for the play of our forces in material realms, and have acquired mastery of the superb forces of nature, we have come to an era of peace. We can now use our forces and those of nature with as real a sense of dominion and mastery on material things, resulting in comfort, as formerly on our fellow-men, resulting in ruin. We now devote to the conquest of nature what we once devoted to the conquest of men. There is a fascination in looking on force and its results. Some men never stand in the presence of an engine in full play without a feeling of reverence, as if they stood in the presence of God--and they do. The turning to these forces is a characteristic of our age that makes it an age of adventure and discovery. The heart of equatorial Africa has been explored, and soon the poles will hold no undiscovered secrets. Among the great monuments of power the mountains stand supreme. All the cohesions, chemical affinities, affections of metals, liquids, and gases are in full play, and the measureless power of gravitation. And yet higher forces have chasmed, veined, infiltrated, disintegrated, molded, bent the rocky strata like sheets of paper, and lifted the whole mass miles in air as if it were a mere bubble of gas. The study of these powers is one of the fascinations of our time. Let me ask you to enjoy with me several of the greatest manifestations of force on this world of ours. THE MONTE ROSA Many of us in America know little of one of the great subjects of thought and endeavor in Europe. We are occasionally surprised by hearing that such a man fell into a crevasse, or that four men were killed on the Matterhorn, or five on the Lyskamm, and others elsewhere, and we wonder why they went there. The Alps are a great object of interest to all Europe. I have now before me a catalogue of 1,478 works on the Alps for sale by one bookseller. It seems incredible. In this list are over a dozen volumes describing different ascents of a single mountain, and that not the most difficult. There are publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology, botany, and one volume of _Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont Blanc_. The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem. The summit of the Jungfrau, for example, consists of gneiss granite, but two masses of Jura limestone have been thrust into it, and their ends folded over. It is the habit, of the Germans especially, to send students into the Alps with a case for flowers, a net for butterflies, and a box for bugs. Every rod is a schoolhouse. They speak of the "snow mountains" with ardent affection. Every Englishman, having no mountains at home, speaks and feels as if he owned the Alps. He, however, cares less for their flowers, bugs, and butterflies than for their qualities as a gymnasium and a measure of his physical ability. The name of every mountain or pass he has climbed is duly burnt into his Alpenstock, and the said stock, well burnt over, is his pride in travel and a grand testimonial of his ability at home. There are numerous Alpine clubs in England, France, and Italy. In the grand exhibition of the nation at Milan the Alpine clubs have one of the most interesting exhibits. This general interest in the Alps is a testimony to man's admiration of the grandest work of God within reach, and to his continued devotion to physical hardihood in the midst of the enervating influences of civilization. There is one place in the world devoted by divine decree to pure air. You are obliged to use it. Toiling up these steeps the breathing quickens fourfold, till every particle of the blood has been bathed again and again in the perfect air. Tyndall records that he once staggered out of the murks and disease of London, fearing that his lifework was done. He crawled out of the hotel on the Bell Alp and, feeling new life, breasted the mountain, hour after hour, till every acrid humor had oozed away, and every part of his body had become so renewed that he was well from that time. In such a sanitarium, school of every department of knowledge, training-place for hardihood, and monument of Nature's grandest work, man does well to be interested. You want to ascend these mountains? Come to Zermatt. With a wand ten miles long you can touch twenty snow-peaks. Europe has but one higher. Twenty glaciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents into the little green valley. Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more difficult than either or both. A plumbline dropped from the summit of Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt. You first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles. In the afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the Riffelhouse. It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your house--only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the house. This takes three hours--an hour to each hundred stories; after the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have reached the first floor. The next day you go up and down the Görner Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a view unequaled in Europe. Ordering the guide to be ready and the porter to call you at one o'clock, you lie down to dream of the glorious revelations of the morrow. The porter's rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the question, "What is the weather?" he said, "Not utterly bad." There is plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly near. We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent. The lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct. Was the storm over? The guides would give no opinion. It was their interest to go, it was ours to go only in good weather. By three o'clock I noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an inch upward. I gave the order to start. The other parties said, "Good for your pluck! _Bon voyage, gute reise_," and went to bed. In an hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier. The sky was brilliant. Hopes were high. The glacier with its vast medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long, was crossed in the dawn. The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks with glory, and we shouted victory. But in a moment the sun was clouded, and so were we. Soon it came out again, and continued clear. But the guide said, "Only the good God knows if we shall have clear weather." Men get pious amid perils. I thought of the aneroid, and felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his servants. Leaving the glacier, we came to the real mountain. Six hours and a half will put one on the top, but he ought to take eight. I have no fondness for men who come to the Alps to see how quickly they can do the ascents. They simply proclaim that their object is not to see and enjoy, but to boast. We go up the lateral moraine, a huge ridge fifty feet high, with rocks in it ten feet square turned by the mighty plow of ice below. We scramble up the rocks of the mountain. Hour after hour we toil upward. At length we come to the snow-slopes, and are all four roped together. There are great crevasses, fifty or a hundred feet deep, with slight bridges of snow over them. If a man drops in the rest must pull him out. Being heavier than any other man of the party I thrust a leg through one snow-bridge, but I had just fixed my ice ax in the firm abutment and was saved the inconvenience and delay of dangling by a rope in a chasm. The beauty of these cold blue ice vaults cannot be described. They are often fringed with icicles. In one place they had formed from an overhanging shelf, reached the bottom, and then the shelf had melted away, leaving the icicles in an apparently reversed condition. We passed one place where vast masses of ice had rolled down from above, and we saw how a breath might start a new avalanche. We were up in one of nature's grandest workshops. How the view widened! How the fleeting cloud and sunshine heightened the effect in the valley below! The glorious air made us know what the man meant who every morning thanked God that he was alive. Some have little occasion to be thankful in that respect. Here we learned the use of a guide. Having carefully chosen him, by testimony of persons having experience, we were to follow him; not only generally, but step by step. Put each foot in his track. He had trodden the snow to firmness. But being heavier than he it often gave way under my pressure. One such slump and recovery takes more strength than ten regular steps. Not so in following the Guide to the fairer and greater heights of the next world. He who carried this world and its burden of sin on his heart trod the quicksands of time into such firmness that no man walking in his steps, however great his sins, ever breaks down the track. And just so in that upward way, one fall and recovery takes more strength than ten rising steps. Meanwhile, what of the weather? Uncertainty. Avalanches thundered from the Breithorn and Lyskamm, telling of a penetrative moisture in the air. The Matterhorn refused to take in its signal flags of storm. Still the sun shone clear. We had put in six of the eight hours' work of ascent when snow began to fall. Soon it was too thick to see far. We came to a chasm that looked vast in the deception of the storm. It was only twenty feet wide. Getting round this the storm deepened till we could scarcely see one another. There was no mountain, no sky. We halted of necessity. The guide said, "Go back." I said, "Wait." We waited in wind, hail, and snow till all vestige of the track by which we had come--our only guide back if the storm continued--was lost except the holes made by the Alpenstocks. The snow drifted over, and did not fill these so quickly. Not knowing but that the storm might last two days, as is frequently the case, I reluctantly gave the order to go down. In an hour we got below the storm. The valley into which we looked was full of brightest sunshine; the mountain above us looked like a cowled monk. In another hour the whole sky was perfectly clear. O that I had kept my faith in my aneroid! Had I held to the faith that started me in the morning--endured the storm, not wavered at suggestions of peril, defied apparent knowledge of local guides--and then been able to surmount the difficulty of the new-fallen snow, I should have been favored with such a view as is not enjoyed once in ten years; for men cannot go up all the way in storm, nor soon enough after to get all the benefit of the cleared air. Better things were prepared for me than I knew; indications of them offered to my faith; they were firmly grasped, and held almost long enough for realization, and then let go in an hour of darkness and storm. I reached the Riffelhouse after eleven hours' struggle with rocks and softened snow, and said to the guide, "To-morrow I start for the Matterhorn." To do this we go down the three hundred stories to Zermatt. Every mountain excursion I ever made has been in the highest degree profitable. Even this one, though robbed of its hoped-for culmination, has been one of the richest I have ever enjoyed. THE MATTERHORN The Matterhorn is peculiar. I do not know of another mountain like it on the earth. There are such splintered and precipitous spires on the moon. How it came to be such I treated of fully in _Sights and Insights_. It is approximately a three-sided mountain, fourteen thousand seven hundred and eighteen feet high, whose sides are so steep as to be unassailable. Approach can be made only along the angle at the junction of the planes. [Illustration: The Matterhorn.] It was long supposed to be inaccessible. Assault after assault was made on it by the best and most ambitious Alp climbers, but it kept its virgin height untrodden. However, in 1864, seven men, almost unexpectedly, achieved the victory; but in descending four of them were precipitated, down an almost perpendicular declivity, four thousand feet. They had achieved the summit after hundreds of others had failed. They had reveled in the upper glories, deposited proof of their visit, and started to return. According to law, they were roped together. According to custom, in a difficult place all remain still, holding the rope, except one who carefully moves on. Croz, the first guide, was reaching up to take the feet of Mr. Haddow and help him down to where he stood. Suddenly Haddow's strength failed, or he slipped and struck Croz on the shoulders, knocking him off his narrow footing. They two immediately jerked off Rev. Mr. Hudson. The three falling jerked off Lord Francis Douglas. Four were loose and falling; only three left on the rocks. Just then the rope somehow parted, and all four dropped that great fraction of a mile. The mountain climber makes a sad pilgrimage to the graves of three of them in Zermatt; the fourth probably fell in a crevasse of the glacier at the foot, and may be brought to the sight of friends in perhaps two score years, when the river of ice shall have moved down into the valleys where the sun has power to melt away the ice. This accident gave the mountain a reputation for danger to which an occasional death on it since has added. Each of these later unfortunate occurrences is attributable to personal perversity or deficiency. Peril depends more on the man than on circumstances. One is in danger on a wall twenty feet high, another safe on a precipice of a thousand feet. No man has a right to peril his life in mere mountain climbing; that great sacrifice must be reserved for saving others, or for establishing moral principle. The morning after coming from Monte Rosa myself and son left Zermatt at half past seven for the top of the Matterhorn, twelve hours distant, under the guidance of Peter Knubel, his brother, and Peter Truffer, three of the best guides for this work in the country. In an hour the dwellings of the mountain-loving people are left behind, the tree limit is passed soon after, the grass cheers us for three hours, when we enter on the wide desolation of the moraines. Here is a little chapel. I entered it as reverently and prayed as earnestly for God's will, not mine, to be done as I ever did in my life, and I am confident that amid the unutterable grandeur that succeeded I felt his presence and help as fully as at any other time. At ten minutes of two we were roped together and feeling our way carefully in the cut steps on a glacier so steep that, standing erect, one could put his hand upon it. We were on this nearly an hour. Just as we left it for the rocks a great noise above, and a little to the south, attracted attention. A vast mass of stone had detached itself from the overhanging cliff at the top, and falling on the steep slope had broken into a hundred pieces. These went bounding down the side in long leaps. Wherever one struck a cloud of powdered stone leaped into the air, till the whole mountain side smoked and thundered with the grand cannonade. The omen augured to me that the mountain was going to do its best for our reception and entertainment. Fortunately these rock avalanches occur on the steep, unapproachable sides, and not at the angle where men climb. How the mountain grew upon us as we clung to its sides! When the great objects below had changed to littleness the heights above seemed greater than ever. At half past four we came to a perpendicular height of twenty feet, with a slight slope above. Down this precipice hung a rope; there was also an occasional projection of an inch or two of stone for the mailed foot. At the top, on a little shelf, under hundreds of feet of overhanging rock, some stones had been built round and over a little space for passing the night. The rude cabin occupied all the width of the shelf, so that passing to its other end there was not room to walk without holding on by one's hands in the crevices of the wall. We were now at home; had taken nine hours to do what could be done in eight. What an eyrie in which to sleep! Below us was a sheer descent, of a thousand or two feet, to the glacier. Above us towered the crest of the mountain, seemingly higher than ever. The sharp shadow of the lofty pyramid lengthened toward Monte Rosa. Italy lifted up its mountains tipped with sunshine to cheer us. The Obernese Alps, beyond the Rhone, answered with numerous torches to light us to our sleep. According to prearrangement, at eight o'clock we kindled a light on our crag to tell our friends in Zermatt that we had accomplished the first stage of our journey. They answered instantly with a cheery blaze, and we lay down to sleep. When four of us lay together I was so crowded against the wall that I thought if it should give way I could fall two thousand feet out of bed without possibility of stopping on the way. The ice was two feet thick on the floor, and by reason of the scarcity of bedding I was reminded of the damp, chilly sheets of some unaired guest-chambers. I do not think I slept a moment, but I passed the night in a most happy, thoughtful, and exultant frame of mind. At half past three in the morning we were roped together--fifteen feet of rope between each two men--for the final three or four hours' work. It is everywhere steep; it is every minute hands and feet on the rocks; sometimes you cling with fingers, elbows, knees, and feet, and are tempted to add the nose and chin. Where it is least steep the guide's heels are right in your face; when it is precipitous you only see a line of rope before you. We make the final pause an hour before the top. Here every weight and the fear that so easily besets one must be laid aside. No part of the way has seemed so difficult; not even that just past--when we rounded a shoulder on the ice for sixty feet, sometimes not over twenty inches wide, on the verge of a precipice four thousand feet high. To this day I can see the wrinkled form of that far-down glacier below, though I took care not to make more than one glance at it. The rocks become smoother and steeper, if possible. A chain or rope trails from above in four places. You have good hope that it is well secured, and wish you were lighter, as you go up hand over hand. Then a beautiful slope for hands, knees, and feet for half an hour, and the top is reached at half past six. The view is sublime. Moses on Pisgah could have had no such vision. He had knowledge added of the future grandeur of his people, but such a revelation as this tells so clearly what God can do for his people hereafter that that element of Moses's enjoyment can be perceived, if not fully appreciated. All the well-known mountains stand up like friends to cheer us. Mont Blanc has the smile of the morning sun to greet us withal. Monte Rosa chides us for not partaking of her prepared visions. The kingdoms of the world--France, Switzerland, Italy--are at our feet. One hundred and twenty snow-peaks flame like huge altar piles in the morning sun. The exhilarant air gives ecstasy to body, the new visions intensity of feeling to soul. The Old World has sunk out of sight. This is Mount Zion, the city of God. New Jerusalem has come down out of heaven adorned as a bride for her husband. The pavements are like glass mingled with fire. The gates of the morning are pearl. The walls, near or far according to your thought, are like jasper and sapphire. The glory of God and of the Lamb lightens it. But we must descend, though it is good to be here. It is even more difficult and tedious than the ascent. _Non facilis descensus_. With your face to the mountain you have only the present surface and the effort for that instant. But when you turn your back on the mountain the imminent danger appears. It is not merely ahead, but the sides are much more dangerous. On the way down we had more cannonades. In six hours we were off the cliffs, and by half past three we had let ourselves down, inch by inch, to Zermatt, a distance of nine thousand four hundred feet. Looking up to the Matterhorn this next morning after the climb, I feel for it a personal affection. It has put more pictures of grandeur into my being than ever entered in such a way before. It is grand enough to bear acquaintance. People who view it from a distance must be strangers. It has been, and ever will be, a great example and lofty monument of my Father's power. He taketh up the isles as a very little thing; he toucheth the mountains and they smoke. The strength of the hills is his also; and he has made all things for his children, and waits to do greater things than these. THE GRAND CANON OF THE COLORADO RIVER Before me lies a thin bit of red rock, rippled as delicately as a woman's hair, bearing marks of raindrops that came from the south. It was once soft clay. It was laid down close to the igneous Archaean rocks when Mother Earth was in her girlhood and water first began to flow. More clay flowed over, and all was hardened into rock. Many strata, variously colored and composed, were deposited, till our bit of beauty was buried thousands of feet deep. The strata were tilted variously and abraded wondrously, for our earth has been treated very much as the fair-armed bread-maker treats the lump of dough she doubles and kneads on the molding board. Other rocks of a much harder nature, composed in part of the shells of inexpressible multitudes of Ocean's infusoria, were laid down from the superincumbent sea. Still the delicate ripple marks were preserved. Nature's vast library was being formed, and on this scrap of a leaf not a letter was lost. Beside this stone now lies another of the purest white. It once flowed as water impregnated with lime, and clung to the lower side of a rock now as high above the sea as many a famous mountain. The water gradually evaporated, and the lime still hung like tiny drops. Between the two stones now so near together was once a perpendicular distance of more than a mile of impenetrable rock. How did they ever get together? Let us see. After the rock making, by the deposit of clay, limestone, etc., this vast plain was lifted seven thousand feet above the sea and rimmed round with mountains. Perhaps in being afterward volcanically tossed in one of this old world's spasms an irregular crack ripped its way along a few hundred miles. Into this crack rushed a great river, perhaps also an inland ocean or vast Lake Superior, of which Salt Lake may be a little remnant puddle. These tumultuous waters proceeded to pulverize, dissolve, and carry away these six thousand feet of rock deposited between the two stones. There was fall enough to make forty Niagaras. I was once where a deluge of rain had fallen a few days before in a mountain valley. It tore loose some huge rocks and plunged down a precipice of one thousand feet. The rock at the bottom was crushed under the frightful weight of the tumbling superincumbent mass, and every few minutes the top became the bottom. In one hour millions of tons of rock were crushed to pebbles and spread for miles over the plain, filling up a whole village to the roofs of the houses. I knew three villages utterly destroyed by a rush of water only ten feet deep. Water and gravitation make a frightful plow. Here some prehistoric Mississippi turned its mighty furrows. The Colorado River is one of our great rivers. It is over two thousand miles long, reaches from near our northern to beyond our southern border, and drains three hundred thousand square miles of the west side of the Rocky Mountains. Great as it remains, it is a mere thread to what it once was. It is easy to see that there were several epochs of work. Suppose the first one took off the upper limestone rock to the depth of several thousand feet. This cutting is of various widths. Just here it is eighteen miles wide; but as such rocks are of varying hardness there are many promontories that distinctly project out, say, half a mile from the general rim line, and rising in the center are various Catskill and Holyoke mountains, with defiantly perpendicular sides, that persisted in resisting the mighty rush of waters. The outer portions of their foundations were cut away by the mighty flood and, as the ages went by, occasionally the sides thundered into the chasm, leaving the wall positively perpendicular. We may now suppose the ocean waters nearly exhausted and only the mighty rivers that had made that ocean were left to flow; indeed, the rising Sierras of some range unknown at the present may have shut off whole oceans of rain. The rivers that remained began to cut a much narrower channel into the softer sand and clay-rock below. From the great mountain-rimmed plateau rivers poured in at the sides, cutting lateral cañons down to the central flow. Between these stand the little Holyokes aforesaid, with greatly narrowed base. I go down with most reverent awe and pick the little ripple-rain-marked leaf out of its place in the book of nature, a veritable table of stone written by the finger of God, and bring it up and lay it alongside of one formed, eons after, at the top. They be brothers both, formed by the same forces and for the same end. Standing by this stupendous work of nature day after day, I try to stretch my mind to some large computation of the work done. A whole day is taken to go down the gorge to the river. It takes seven miles of zigzag trail, sometimes frightfully steep, along shelves not over two feet wide, under rock thousands of feet above and going down thousands of feet below, to get down that perpendicular mile. It was an immense day's work. The day was full of perceptions of the grandeur of vast rock masses never before suggested, except by the mighty mass of the Matterhorn seen close by from its Hörnli shoulder. There was the river--a regular freight train, running day and night, the track unincumbered with returning cars (they were returned by the elevated road of the upper air)--burdened with dissolved rock and earth. A slip into this river scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the sea. What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in uncounted ages! In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it has built out the land at its mouth one hundred miles into the Gulf. In the side cañon down which we worked our sublime and toilful way it was easy to see the work done. Sometimes the fierce torrent would pile the bottom of a side cañon with every variety of stone, from the wall a mile high, into one tremendous heap of conglomerate. The next rush of waters would tear a channel through this and pour millions of tons into the main river. For years Boston toiled, in feeble imitation of Milton's angels, to bring the Milton Hills into the back Bay and South Boston Flats. Boston made more land than the city originally contained, but it did not move a teaspoonful compared with these excavations. The section traversed that day seemed while we were in it like a mighty chasm, a world half rent asunder, full of vast sublimities, but the next day, seen from the rim as a part of the mighty whole, it appeared comparatively little. One gets new meanings of the words almighty, eternity, infinity, in the presence of things done that seem to require them all. In 1869 Major J. W. Powell, aided by nine men, attempted to pass down this tumultuous river with four boats specially constructed for the purpose. In ninety-eight days he had made one thousand miles, much of it in extremest peril. For weeks there was no possibility of climbing to the plateau above. Any great scene in nature is like the woman you fall in love with at first sight for some pose of head, queenly carriage, auroral flush of color, penetrative music of voice, or a glance of soul through its illumined windows. You do not know much about her, but in long years of heroic endurance of trials, in the great dignity of motherhood, in the unspeakable comfortings that are scarcely short of godlike, and in the supernal, ineffable beauty and loveliness that cover it all, you find a richness and worth of which the most ardent lover never dreamed. The first sight of the cañon often brings strong men to their knees in awe and adoration. The gorge at Niagara is one hundred and fifty feet deep; it is far short of this, which is six thousand six hundred and forty. Great is the first impression, but in the longer and closer acquaintance every sense of beauty is flooded to the utmost. The next morning I was out before "jocund day stood tiptoe on the breezy mountain tops." I have seen many sunrises In this world and one other: I have watched the moon slowly rolling its deep valleys for weeks into its morning sunlight. I knew what to expect. But nature always surpasses expectations. The sinuosities of the rim sent back their various colors. A hundred domes and spires, wind sculptured and water sculptured, reached up like Memnon to catch the first light of the sun, and seemed to me to break out into Memnonian music. As the world rolled the steady light penetrated deeper, shadows diminished, light spaces broadened and multiplied, till it seemed as if a new creation were veritably going forward and a new "Let there be light" had been uttered. I had seen it for the first time the night before in the mellow light of a nearly full moon, but the sunlight really seemed to make, in respect to breadth, depth, and definiteness, a new creation. One peculiar effect I never noticed elsewhere. It is well known that the blue sky is not blue and there is no sky. Blue is the color of the atmosphere, and when seen in the miles deep overhead, or condensed in a jar, it shows its own true color. So, looking into this inconceivable cañon, the true color came out most beauteously. There was a background of red and yellowish rocks. These made the cold blue blush with warm color. The sapphire was backed with sardonyx, and the bluish white of the chalcedony was half pellucid to the gold chrysolite behind it. God was laying the foundation of his perfect city there, and the light of it seemed fit for the redeemed to walk in, and to have been made by the luminousness of Him who is light. One great purpose of this world is its use as significant symbol and hint of the world to come. The communication of ideas and feelings there is not by slow, clumsy speech, often misunderstood, originally made to express low physical wants, but it is by charade, panorama, parable, and music rolling like the voice of many waters in a storm. The greatest things and relations of earth are as hintful of greater things as a bit of float ore in the plains is suggestive of boundless mines in the upper hills. So the joy of finding one lost lamb in the wilderness tells of the joy of finding and saving a human soul. One should never go to any of God's great wonders to see sights, but to live life; to read in them the figures, symbols, and types of the more wonderful things in the new heavens and the new earth. The old Hebrew prophets and poets saw God everywhere in nature. The floods clap their hands and the hills are joyful together before the Lord. Miss Proctor, in the Yosemite, caught the same lofty spirit, and sang: "Perpetual masses here intone, Uncounted censers swing, A psalm on every breeze is blown; The echoing peaks from throne to throne Greet the indwelling King; The Lord, the Lord is everywhere, And seraph-tongued are earth and air." THE YELLOWSTONE PARK GEYSERS THEIR ESSENTIAL FACTS AND CAUSES I have been to school. Dame Nature is a most kind and skillful teacher. She first put me into the ABC class, and advanced me through conic sections. The first thing in the geyser line she showed me was a mound of rock, large as a small cock of hay, with a projection on top large as a shallow pint bowl turned upside down. In the center of this was a half-inch hole, and from it every two seconds, with a musical chuckle of steam, a handful of diamond drops of water was ejected to a height of from two to five feet. I sat down with it half an hour, compelled to continuous laughter by its own musical cachinnations. There were all the essentials of a geyser. There was a mound, not always existent, built up by deposits from the water supersaturated with mineral. It might be three feet high; it might be thirty. There was the jet of water ejected by subterranean forces. It might be half an inch in diameter; it might be three hundred feet, as in the case of the Excelsior geyser. It might rise six inches; it might rise two hundred and fifty feet. There was the interval between the jets. It might be two seconds; it might be weeks or years. [Illustration: Formation of the Grotto Geyser.] A subsequent lesson in my Progressive Geyser Reader was the "Economic." Here was a round basin ten feet in diameter, very shallow, with a hole in the middle about one foot across. The water was perfectly calm. But every six minutes a sudden spurt of water and steam would rise about thirty feet, for thirty seconds, and then settle economically, without waste of water, into the pool, sinking with pulsations as on an elastic cushion a foot below the bottom of the pool. One could stride the opening like a colossus for five and one half minutes without fear. He might be using the calm depth for a mirror. But stay a moment too long and he is scalded to death by the sudden outburst. The next lesson required more patience and gave more abundant reward. I found a great raised platform on which stood a castellated rock, more than twenty feet square, that had been built up particle by particle into a perfect solid by deposits from the fiery flood. In the center was a brilliant orange-colored throat that went down into the bowels of the earth. That was not the geyser--it was only the trump through which the archangel was to blow. I had heard the preliminary tuning of the instrument. The guide book said the grand play of this "Castle" geyser began from eight to thirty hours after a previous exhibition, and was preceded by jets of water fifteen to twenty feet high, and that these continued five or six hours before the grand eruption. I hovered near the grand stand till the full thirty hours and the six predictive hours were over, and then, as the thunder above roared threateningly and the rain fell suggestively, I took a rubber coat and camped on the trail of that famous spouter. Geysers are more than a trifle freaky. "Old Faithful" is a notable exception. Every sixty-five minutes, with almost the regularity of star time, he throws his column of hissing water one hundred and fifty feet high. Others are irregular, sometimes playing every three hours for a few times, and then taking a rest for three or more days. This Castle geyser is not registered to be quiet more than thirty hours, nor to indulge in preparatory spouts for more than six hours. When I finally camped to watch it out all these premonitory symptoms had been duly exhibited. I first carefully noted the frequency and height of the spouts, that any change might foretell the grand finale. There were ten spouts to the minute, and an average height of twenty feet. Hours went by with no hint of a change: ten to the minute, twenty feet in height. People by the dozen came and asked when it would go off. I said, "Liable to go any minute; it is long past due now." Stage loads of tourists, scheduled to run on time, drove up, waited a few minutes, and drove on, as if the grand object of the trip was to make time--not to see the grandeur they had come a thousand miles to enjoy. A photographer set up his camera to catch a shadow of the great display. He stood, sometimes air-bulb in hand, an hour or two, then folded his camera tent and stole away. Five hours had passed and night was near. Everybody was gone. I lay down on the ground to convince myself that I was perfectly patient. I attained so nearly to Nirvana that a little ground squirrel came and ran over me, kissing my hand in a most friendly way. Six hours of waiting were nearly over when, without a single previous hint of change, one descending spout was met by an ascending one, and a vast column of hissing water rose, with a sound of continuous thunder, one hundred feet in air; and stood there like a pillar of cloud in the desert. The air throbbed as in a cannonade, and the sun brushed away all clouds as if he could not bear to miss a sight he had seen perhaps a million times. Then the top of this upward Niagara bent over like the calyx of a calla, and the downward Niagara covered all that elevated masonry with a rushing cascade. Shifting my position a little, I could see that the sun was thrilling the whole glorious outpour with rainbows. At such times one can neither measure nor express emotions by words. In the thunder which anyone can hear there is always, for all who can receive it, the ineffably sweet voice of the Father saying, "Thou art my beloved son, and all this grand display is for thy precious sake." In sixteen minutes the flow of waters ceased, and a rush of saturated steam succeeded. At the same time the fierce swish of ascending waters and of descending cascades ceased, and a clear, definite note, as of a trumpet, exceeding long and loud, was blown. No archangel could have done better. As the steam rolled skyward it was condensed, and a very heavy rain fell on about an acre at the east as it was drifted by the air. It looked more like lines of water than separated drops. I found it thoroughly cooled by its flight in the upper air. I climbed the huge natural masonry, and stood on the top. I could have put my hand into the hot rushing of measureless power. What a sight it was! There were the brilliant colors of the throat, open, three feet wide, and the dazzling whiteness of the steam. At thirty-two minutes from the beginning the steam suddenly became drier, like that close to the spout of a kettle, or close to the whistle of an engine. All pure steam is invisible. At the same time the note of the trumpet distinctly changed. The heavy rain at the east as suddenly stopped. The air could absorb the present amount of moisture. One could see farther down the terrible throat that seemed about to be rent asunder. The awful grandeur was becoming too much for human endurance. The contorted forms of rocks on the summit began to take the forms and heads of dragons, such as the Chinese carve on their monuments. The awful column began to change its effect from terror to fascination, and I knew how Empedocles felt when he flung himself into the burning Aetna. It was time to get down and stand further off. [Illustration: Bee-Hive Geyser.] The long waiting had been rewarded. "To patient faith the prize is sure." The grand tumult began to subside. It was beyond all my expectations. Nature never disappoints, for she is of God and in her he yet immanently abides. The next day the sky and all the air were full of falling rain. How could it be otherwise? It was the geyser returning to earth. I sought the place. The awful trumpet was silent, and the steam exhaled as gently as a sleeping baby's breath. Only one more lesson will be recited at present. I had just arrived in camp when they told me that the Splendid geyser, after two days of quiet, was showing signs of uneasiness. I immediately went out to study my lesson. There was a little hill of very gentle slopes, a little pool at the top, three holes at the west side of it, with a dozen sputtering hot springs scattered about, while in a direct line at the east, within one hundred and forty feet, were the Comet, the Daisy, and another geyser. The Daisy was a beauty, playing forty feet high every two or four hours. All the slopes were constantly flowing with hot water. This general survey was no sooner taken than our glorious Splendid began to play. The roaring column, tinted with the sunset glories, gradually climbed to a height of two hundred feet, leaned a little to the southeast, and bent like a glorious arch of triumph to the earth, almost as solid on its descending as on its ascending side. No wonder it is named "Splendid." Whoever has studied waterfalls of great height--I have seen nearly forty justly famous falls--has noticed that when a column or mass of water makes the fearful plunge smaller masses of water are constantly feathered off at the sides and delayed by the resistance of the air, while the central mass hurries downward by its concentrated weight. The general appearance is that of numerous spearheads with serrated edges, feathered with light, thrust from some celestial armory into the writhing pool of agonized waters below. In the geyser one gets this effect both in the ascending and in the descending flood. Four times that first night dear old Splendid lured me from my bed to watch her Titanic play in the full light of the moon. During all this time not a hot spring ceased its boiling, nor a smaller geyser its wondrous play, for this gigantic outburst of power that might well have absorbed every energy for a mile around. Obviously they have no connection. Then my beloved Splendid settled into a three-days' rest. These are the essential facts of geyser display. There are very many variations of performance in every respect, I have seen over twenty geysers in almost jocular, and certainly in overwhelmingly magnificent, activity. "To him who in the love of nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language." WHAT ARE THE CAUSES? What is the power that can throw a stream of water two by six feet over the tops of the highest skyscrapers of Chicago? It is heat manifested in the expansive power of steam. Scientists have theorized long and experimented patiently to read the open book of this tremendous manifestation of uncontrollable energy. At first the form and action of a teakettle was supposed to be explanatory. Everyone knows that when steam accumulates under the lid it forces a gentle stream of water from the higher nozzle. This fact was made the basis of a theory to account for geysers by Sir George Mackenzie in 1811. But to suppose that nature has gone into the teakettle manufacturing business to the extent of thirty such kettles in a space of four square miles was seen to be preposterous. So the construction theory was given up. But suppose a tube (how it is made will be explained later), large or small, regular or irregular, to extend far into the earth, near or through any great source of heat resulting from condensation, combustion, chemical action, or central fire. Now suppose this tube to be filled with water from surface or subterranean sources. Heat converts water, under the pressure of one atmosphere, or fifteen pounds to the square inch, into steam at a temperature of two hundred and twelve degrees. But under greater pressure more heat is required to make steam. The water never leaps and bubbles in an engine boiler. The awful pressure compels it to be quiet. A cubic inch of water will make a cubic foot--one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight times as much--of steam under the pressure of one atmosphere. But under the pressure of a column of water one thousand feet high, giving a pressure of four hundred and thirty-two pounds to the square inch at the bottom, water becomes steam, if at all, only by great heat. Every engineer knows that the pressure exerted by steam increases by great geometrical ratios as the heat increases by small arithmetical ratios. Steam made by two hundred and twelve degrees exerts a pressure, as we have said, of fifteen pounds. To simply double the two hundred and twelve degrees of heat increases the steam pressure twenty-three times. Now suppose the subterranean tube or lake of Old Faithful to be freshly filled with its million gallons of water. Sufficient heat makes steam under any pressure. It rises up the tube and is condensed to water again by the colder water above. Hence no commotion. But the whole volume of water grows hotter for an hour. When it is too hot to absorb the steam, and the tube is too narrow to let the amount made bubble up through the water, it lifts the whole mass with a sudden jerk. The instant the pressure of the water is taken off in any degree, the water below, that was kept water by the pressure, breaks into steam most voluminously, and the measureless power floods the earth and sky with water and steam. It is also known that superheated steam suddenly takes on such great power that no boiler can hold it. Once let the water in a boiler get very low and no boiler can hold the force of the resultant superheated steam. The same heat that, applied to water, gives perfect safety, applied to steam gives utter destruction. Hence the amazing force of the vast jets of the geyser that follow the first spurts. As soon as the steam is blown off the subterranean waterworks fill the tube and the process is repeated. This modus operandi was first proposed as a theory by Bunsen in 1846, and later was demonstrated by the artificial geyser of Professor J. H. J. Muller, of Freiburg. [Illustration: Pulpit Terrace and Bunsen Peak.] MOUNDS OF MINERAL DEPOSITS I have the extremely difficult task of representing emotions by words--glories of color and form seen by the eye by symbols meant to be addressed to the ear. Before seeking to describe the diverse colors made largely by one substance, let us remember that while silica, the principal part of these water-built mounds, is one of the three parts of granite, namely, the white crystal quartz, it is also the substance of the beautifully variegated jasper, the lapis lazuli, the green malachite, and the opal, with its cloudy milk-whiteness through which flashes its heart of fire. Silica and alumina combine to make common clay, but alumina forms itself into the red ruby, the golden-tinted topaz, the violet oriental amethyst, the red, white, yellow, and violet sapphire, and the beautiful green emerald. With substances of such rare capabilities we may expect rich results in color and form. We turn now to deposits from water of these two substances, especially the first. About the Old Faithful geyser is a mound about one hundred and forty-five feet broad at the base, twelve feet high, jeweled over with pools of beauty of every shape, beaded and fretted with glories of color never seen before except in the sky. How were they made? Water is a general solvent. It can take into its substance several similar bulks of other substances without greatly increasing its own, some actually diminishing it. Hot alkaline water will dissolve even silica rock. When water is saturated with sugar, salt, or other substance, if a little or much water is evaporated some of the saturating substance must be deposited as a solid. All crystals, as quartz or diamonds, have been made by deposits from water. Hot water can hold in solution much more of a solid than cold water. Therefore, when hot water comes out of the earth and is cooled, some of the saturating substance must be deposited as a solid. It is done in various ways, especially two. Suppose a little pool with perpendicular sides, say twenty feet across. It leaps and boils two feet high. It deposits nothing till the water comes to the cooling edge. Then it builds up a wall where it overflows, and wherever it flows it builds. The result is that you walk up the gentle slopes of a broad flat cone, and find the little lakelet in a gorgeous setting, perfectly full at every point of the circumference. If there is but little overflow, the result may be to deposit all the matter where it first cools, and make a perpendicular wall around the cup two or ten feet high. If the overflow is too much to be cooled at once, the deposit may still be made fifty or one hundred feet from the point of issue. If the overflow is sufficient, it may be building up every inch of a vast cone at once, every foot being wet. [Illustration: The Punch Bowl, Yellowstone Geysers.] Many minerals are held in solution and are deposited at various stages of evaporation. Let us suppose the lake to have the bottom sloping toward the abysmal center; the different minerals will be assorted as if with a sieve. At the Sunlight Basin the edge is as flaming red as one ever sees in the sunlit sky. And every color ever seen in a sunset flames almost as brilliantly in the varying depths. Suppose a low cone to be flooded only occasionally, as in the case of the Old Faithful geyser. The cooled water falling from the upper air builds up, under the terrible drench of the cataract, walls three or four inches high, making pools of every conceivable shape, a few inches deep, in which are the most exquisite and varied colors ever seen by mortal eye. You walk about on these dividing walls and gaze into the beaded and impearled pools of a hundred shades of different colors, never equaled except by that perpetual glory of the sunset. Consider the case of a pool that does not overflow. Just as lakes that have no outlet must grow more and more salt till some have become solid salt beds, so must this pool, tossing its hot waves two or three feet high, evaporate its water and deposit its solids. Where? First, against the cooler sides of the rock under the water, tending to reduce the opening to a mere throat. Second, each wavelet tossed in air is cooled, and deposits on the edge, solid as quartz, a crust that overhangs the pool and tends to close it over as with hot ice. It may build thus a mound fifteen feet high with an open throat in the middle. Thus the pool has constructed an intermittent geyser. If the water supply continues, it also destroys itself. The throat closes up by its own deposits. It is a case of geyseral membranous croup. I exceedingly longed to try vivisection on a geyser, or at least take one of half a hundred, drain it off, and make a post-mortem examination. On my very last day I found opportunity. I found a dead geyser, though not by any means yet cold. It was still so hot that people had given it an infernal name. I squeezed myself down through its hot throat, which seemed a veritable open sepulcher, and found a cave about twenty-five feet deep, twelve feet wide, and about sixty feet long. It was elliptical in form, the sides coming together at a sharp angle at the ends, bottom, and top. The way down to the fiery heart of the earth had simply grown up by deposits of silex on the sides and at the bottom. The water had evaporated by the intense heat, and I was in the hot hollow that had once held an earthquake and volcano. When I squeezed up to the blessed upper air I was glad there was no help from below. I could tell of mounds that grew so fast as to inclose the limbs of a tree, making the firmest kind of a ladder by which I climbed to the top; of floods that overflowed acres of forest, leaving every tree firmly planted in solid rock; of mounds hundreds of feet high, covering twenty acres with forms of indescribable beauty--but I despair. The half has not been told. It cannot be. Great and marvelous are all Thy works, Lord God Almighty! In wisdom hast Thou made them all. Emerson says: "Whilst common sense looks at things or visible nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify." Using these faculties and not mere eyesight, one must surely say: "Since this world, in power, fineness, finish, beauty, and adaptations not only surpasses our accomplishment, but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are." SEA SCULPTURE* *Reprinted from _The Chautauquan_. When the Russians charged on the Grivitza redoubt at Plevna they first launched one column of men that they knew would be all shot down long before they could reach it. But they made a cloud of smoke under the cover of which a second column was launched. They would all be shot down. But they carried the covering cloud so far that a third column broke out of it and successfully carried the redoubt. They carried it, but ten thousand men lay on the death-smitten slope. So the great ocean sends eight or ten thousand columns a day to charge with flying banners of spray on the rocky ramparts of the shore at Santa Cruz, California. There are not many things in the material world more sublime than a thousand miles of crested waves rushing with terrible might against the rocky shore. While they are yet some distance from the land a small boat can ride their foaming billows, but as they approach the shallower places they seem to take on sudden rage and irresistible force. Those roaring waves rear up two or three times as high. They have great perpendicular fronts down which Niagaras are pouring. The spray flies from their tops like the mane of a thousand wild horses charging in the wind. No ship can hold anchor in the breakers. They may dare a thousand storms outside, but once let them fall into the clutch of this resistless power and they are doomed. The waves seem frantic with rage, resistless in force; they rush with fury, smite the cliffs with thunder, and are flung fifty feet into the air; with what effect on the rocks we will try to relate. [Illustration: "The Breakers," Santa Cruz, Cal.] No. 1 of our illustrations shows "The Breakers," a two-story house of that name where hospitality, grace, and beauty abide; where hundreds of roses bloom in a day, and where flowers, prodigal as creative processes, abound. The breakers from which the house is named are not seen in the picture. When the wind has been blowing hard, maybe one hundred miles out at sea, they come racing in from the point, feather-crested, a dozen at once, to show how rolls the far Wairoa at some other world's end. All these pictures are taken in the calm weather, or there would be little seen besides the great leaps of spray, often fifty feet high. At the bottom of the cliff appear the nodules and bowlders that were too hard to be bitten into dust and have fallen out of the cliff, which is fifty feet high, as the sea eats it away. Some of these are sculptured into the likeness effaces and figures, solemn and grotesque. It is easy to find Pharaoh, Cleopatra, Tantalus, represented here. This house is at the beginning of the famous Cliff Drive that rounds the lighthouse at the point and stretches away for miles above the ever-changing, now beautiful, now sublime, and always great Pacific, that rolls its six thousand miles of billows toward us from Hong Kong. Occasionally the road must be set back, and once the lighthouse was moved back from the cliffs, eaten away by the edacious tooth of the sea. As Emerson says, "I never count the hours I spend in wandering by the sea; like God it useth me." There is a wideness like his mercy, a power like his omnipotence, a persistence like his patience, a length of work like his eternity. The rocks of Santa Cruz, as in many other places, were laid in regular order, like the leaves of a book on its side. But by various forces they have been crumbled, some torn out, and in many places piled together. These layers, beginning at the bottom, are as follows; (1) igneous granite, unstratified; (2) limestone laid down from life in the ocean, metamorphosed by heat and all fossils thereby destroyed; (3) limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil shells and very hard; (4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6) conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of organic matter. In our second illustration some of these layers, or strata, may be distinguished. [Illustration: The Work and the Worker, Santa Cruz, Cal.] When the awful blows of the sea smite the rock, if it finds a place less hard than others, it wears into it a slight depression, after half a hundred thousand strokes, more or less, and ever after, as the years go by, it drives its wedges home in that place. A shallow cave results. Then the waters converge on the sides of the cave and meet with awful force in the middle. Thus a tunnel is excavated, like a drift in a mine, each wave making the tremendous charge and the reflowing surges bringing away all the detritus. This tunnel may be driven or excavated two hundred feet inland, under the shore. At each inrush of the wave the air is terribly condensed before it. It seeks outlet. And so it happens that the air is driven up through some crack in the rock and the superincumbent earth, one or two hundred feet from the shore, and a great hole appears in the ground from twenty to seventy feet deep. Then the water spouts fiercely up and returning carries back the earth and broken rock into the sea. No. 3 of the illustrations here given represents such a great excavation one hundred feet back from the shore. It is one hundred and fifty feet long by ninety wide and over fifty feet deep. All the material had been carried out to sea by the refluent wave. On the natural bridge seen in front the great crowd in Broadway, New York, might pass or a troop of cavalry could be maneuvered. Through the arch a ship with masts thirty feet high might enter at high tide. Through the abutment of the arch where the afternoon sun pours its brightness the waves have cut other arches not visible in the picture. When the arches become too many or too wide the natural bridge will fall and be carried out to sea like many another. [Illustration: A Natural Bridge, Santa Cruz, Cal.] But what does the sea do with the harder parts of the cliff? Its waves wear away the rock on each side and leave one or more long fingers reaching out into the sea. The wear and tear on such a projection is immense. A strong swimmer may play with the breakers away from the cliff. At exactly the right moment he may dive headlong through the pearly green Niagara that has not yet fallen quite to his head and may sport in the comparatively quiet water beyond, while the wild ruin falls with a sound of thunder on the beach. But let him once be caught and dashed against the rocks and there is no more life or wholeness of bones within him. In the swirl of converging currents between two rocky projections, as the coarse sand and gravel is surged around a few hundred thousand times, there is a great tendency to wear through the wall of the projecting finger. It is often done. Illustration No. 4 shows at low tide such a projection cut through. Since the picture was taken the bridge has fallen, the detritus been carted away by the waves, and the pier stands lonely in the sea. [Illustration: An Excavated Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.] No. 5 shows one bridge exceedingly frail and another more substantial nearer the famous Cliff Drive. I go to the frail one every year with anxiety lest I shall find it has been carried away. How I wish I could show my readers the delicate sculpture and carving further back, nearer yet to the drive. But note the various strata, the rocks worn to a point as even the milder waves run over them; note the cracks that tell of the awful push and stress of the titanic struggle. [Illustration: A Double Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.] Illustration No. 6 shows three such under-hewn arches. The long projection of rock is so curved as to prevent the arches being fully seen in any one view. I have waded and swam through these rocky vistas, and there, where any more than moderate waves would have mangled me against the tusks of the cruel rocks, I have found little specimens of aquatic life by the millions, clinging fast to the rocks that were home to them and protecting themselves by taking lime out of the water and building such a solid wall of shell that no fierceness of the wildest storm could work them harm. All these seek their food from Him who feeds all life, and he heaves the ocean up to their mouths that they may drink. [Illustration: A Triple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.] No. 7 shows what has been a quadruple arch, only one part of which is still standing. Out in the sea, lonely and by itself, appears a pier, scarcely emergent from the waves, which once supported an arch parallel to the one now standing and also one at right angles to the shore. The one now standing makes the fourth. But the ever-working sea carves and carries away arch and shore alike. At some points a careful and even admiring observer sees little change for years, but the remorseless tooth gnaws on unceasingly. [Illustration: Remains of a Quadruple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.] On the right near the point is seen a board sign. It says here, as in many other places, "Danger." Sometimes two converging waves meet at the land, rise unexpectedly, sweep over the point irresistibly, and carry away anyone who stands there. One large and two small shreds of skin now gone from the palm of my left hand give proof of an experience there that did not result quite so disastrously. The illustration facing page 188 is another example of an arch cut through the rocky barrier of the shore. But in this case the trend of the less hard rock was at such an angle to the shore that the sea broke into the channel once more, and then the combined waves from the two entrances forced the passage one hundred and forty paces inland. It terminates in another natural bridge and deep excavation beyond, which are not shown in the picture. [Illustration: Arch Remains Side Wall Broken, Santa Clara, Cal.] What becomes of this comminuted rock, cleft by wedges of water, scoured over by hundreds of tons of sharp sand? It is carried out by gentle undercurrents into the bay and ocean, and laid down where winds never blow nor waves ever beat, as gently as dust falls through the summer air. It incloses fossils of the plant and animal life of to-day. There rest in nature's own sepulcher the skeletons of sharks and whales of to-day and possibly of man. Sometime, if the depths become heights, as they have in a thousand places in the past, a fit intelligence may read therein much of the present history of the world. We say to that coming age, as a past age has said to us, "Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee, and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee." THE POWER OF VEGETABLE LIFE I have a great variety of little masses of matter--some small as a pin's blunt point, and none of them bigger than a pin's head. They are smooth, glossy, hard, exceedingly beautiful under the microscope, and clearly distinguishable one from another. They have such intense individuality, are so self-assertive, that by no process can those of one kind be made to look or act like those of another. These little masses of matter are centers of incredible power. They are seeds. Select two for examination, and, unfolding, one becomes grass--soft, succulent, a carpet for dainty feet, a rest for weary eyes, part food, but mostly drink, for hungry beasts. It exhausts all its energy quickly. Grass today is, and to-morrow is cut down and withered, ready for the oven. Try the other seed. It is of the pin head size. It is dark brown, hard-shelled, dry, of resinous smell to nostrils sensitive as a bird's. The bird drops it in the soil, where the dews fall and where the sun kisses the sleeping princesses into life. Now the latent powers of that little center of force begin to play. They first open the hard shell from the inside, then build out an arm white and tender as a nerve fiber, but which shall become great and tough as an oak. This arm shuns the light and goes down into the dark ground, pushing aside the pebbles and earth. Soon after the seed thrusts out of the same crevice another arm that has an instinct to go upward to the light. Neither of these arms is yet solid and strong. They are beyond expression tender, delicate, and porous, but the one is to become great roots that reach all over an acre, and the other one of California's big trees, thirty feet in diameter and four hundred feet high. How is it to be done? By powers latent in the seed developing and expanding for a thousand years. What a power it must be! First, it is a power of selection--might we not say discrimination? That little seed can never by any power of persuasion or environment be made to produce grass or any other kind of a tree, as manzanita, mango, banyan, catalpa, etc., but simply and only _sequoia gigantea_. There are hundreds of shapes and kinds of leaves with names it gives one a headache to remember. But this seed never makes a single mistake. It produces millions of leaves, but every one is awl-shaped--subulate. Woods have many odors--sickening, aromatic, balsamic, medicinal. We go to the other side of the world to bring the odor of sandal or camphor to our nostrils. But amid so many odors our seed will make but one. It is resinous, like some of those odors the Lord enjoyed when they bathed with their delicious fragrance the cruel saw that cut their substance, and atmosphered with new delights the one who destroyed their life. The big tree, with subtle chemistry no man can imitate, always makes its fragrance with unerring exactness. [Illustration: The Big Trees.] There are thousands of seeds finished with a perfectness and beauty we are hardly acute enough to discover. The microscopist revels in the forms of the dainty scales of its armor and the opalescent tints of its color. The sunset is not more delicate and exquisite. But the big tree never makes but one kind of seed, and leaves no one of its thousands unfinished. The same is true of bark, grain of wood, method of putting out limbs, outline of the mass, reach of roots, and every other peculiarity. It discriminates. But how does it build itself? Myriads of rootlets search the surrounding country for elements it needs for making bark, wood, leaf, flower, and seed. They often find what they want in other organizations or other chemical compounds. But with a power of analytical chemistry they separate what they want and appropriate it to their majestic growths. But how is material conveyed from rootlet to veinlet of leaf hundreds of feet away? The great tree is more full of channels of communication than Venice or Stockholm is of canals, and it is along these watery ways of commerce that the material is conveyed. These channels are a succession of cells that act like locks, set for the perpendicular elevation of the freight. The tiny boats run day and night in the season, and though it is dark within, and though there are a thousand piers, no freight that starts underground for a leaf is ever landed on the way for bark or woody fiber. Freight never goes astray, nor are express packages miscarried. What starts for bark, leaf, fiber, seed, is deposited as bark, leaf, fiber, seed, and nothing else. There are hundreds of miles of canals, but every boat knows where to land its unmarked freight. Curious as is this work underground, that in the upper air is more so. The tree builds most of its solid substance from the mobile and tenuous air. Trees are largely condensed air. By the magic chemistry of the sunshine and vegetable life the tree breathes through its myriad leaves and extracts carbon to be built into wood. Had we the same power to extract fuel from the air we need not dig for coal. In doing this work the power of life in the tree has to overcome many other kinds of force. There is the power of cohesion. How it holds the particles of stone or iron together! You can hardly break its force with a great sledge. But the power of life in the tree, or even grass, must master the power of cohesion and take out of the disintegrating rock what it wants. So it must overcome the power of chemical affinity in water and air. The substances it wants are in other combinations, the power of which must be overcome. Gravitation is a great power, but the thousand tons of this tree's vast weight must be lifted and sustained in defiance of it. So for a thousand years gravitation sees the tree rise higher and higher, till the great lesson is taught that it is a weakling compared with the power of life. There is not a place where one can put his finger that there are not a dozen forces in full play, every one of which is plastic, elastic, and ready to yield to any force that is higher. So the tree stands, not mere lumber and cordwood, or an obstacle to be gotten rid of by fire, but an embodiment of life unexhausted for a thousand years. The fairy-fingered breeze plays through its myriad harp strings. It makes wide miles of air aromatic. Animal life feeds on the quintessence of life in its seeds. But most of all it is an object lesson that power triumphs over lesser power, and that the highest power has dominion over all other power. The great power of vegetable life was shown under circumstances that seemed the least favorable in the following experiment: In the Agricultural College at Amherst, Mass., a squash of the yellow Chili variety was put in harness in 1874 to see how much it would lift by its power of growth. [Illustration: Yellow Chili Squash in Harness.] It was not an oak or mahogany tree, but a soft, pulpy, squashy squash that one could poke his finger into, nourished through a soft, succulent vine that one could mash between finger and thumb. A good idea of the harness is given by the illustration. The squash was confined in an open harness of iron and wood, and the amount lifted was indicated by weights on the lever over the top. There were, including seventy nodal roots, more than eighty thousand feet of roots and rootlets. These roots increased one thousand feet in twenty-four hours. They were afforded every advantage by being grown in a hot bed. On August 21 it lifted sixty pounds. By September 30 it lifted a ton. On October 24 it carried over two tons. The squash grew gnarled like an oak, and its substance was almost as compact as mahogany. Its inner cavity was very small, but it perfectly elaborated its seeds, as usual. The lever to indicate the weight had to be changed for stronger ones from time to time. More weights were sought. They scurried through the town and got an anvil and pieces of railroad iron and hung them at varying distances, as shown in the cut. By the 31st of October it was carrying a weight of five thousand pounds. Then owing to defects of the new contrivance the rind was broken through without showing what might have been done under better conditions. Every particle of the squash had to be added and find itself elbow room under this enormous pressure. But life will assert itself. [Illustration: Squash in Cage.] No wonder that the Lord, seeking some form of speech to represent his power in human souls, says, "I am the vine, ye are the branches." The tremendous life of infinite strength surges up through the vine and out into all branches that are really vitally attached. No wonder that much fruit is expected, and that one who knew most of this imparted power said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." SPIRITUAL DYNAMICS* *Reprinted from _The Study_. Will God indeed dwell upon the earth? asked Solomon. Will God indeed work with man on the earth? asks the pushing, working spirit of to-day. Has man a right to expect a special lending of the infinite power to help out his human endeavors? Does God put special forces to open some doors, close others, influence some men to come to his help, hinder others, bring to bear influences benign, restrain those malign, and invigorate a man's own powers so that his arm has the strength of ten, because his heart is pure enough for God to work in it and through it? If this is so, in what fields, under what conditions, to what extent, and in accordance with what laws may we expect aid? First, it is evident that there is power not ourselves. We did not make this world. We did not put into it even the lowest force, gravitation. It is more than our minds can compass to measure its power. We have no arithmetic to tell its power on every mote in the sunbeam, or flower, or grain-head bowing toward the earth, tree brought down with a crash, or avalanche with thunder. Much less can we measure the power that holds the earth to the sun spite of its measureless centrifugal force. We did not make the next highest force, cohesion. The particles of rock and iron cohere with so great an energy that gravitation cannot overcome it. But it is not by our energy. We did not make the next highest force, chemical affinity, that masters both gravitation and cohesion. Water, the result of chemical affinity between oxygen and hydrogen, can be rent into its constituent elements with nothing less than a stream of lightning. We did not make the next highest force, vegetative life. That masters gravitation, and lifts up the tree in spite of it; masters cohesion--the tree's rootlets tear asunder the particles of stone; masters chemical affinity--it takes the oxygen from air and water. We did not create that force, measureless to our minds. We say it must have come out of some omnipotence greater than all of them. The conclusion of all minds is, there is a power not ourselves. It is unthinkable that these forces before mentioned should have originated themselves. It is equally so that they could maintain and continue themselves. There must be some continual upholding by a word of power. It is equally plain that there is intelligence, thought, and plan behind these forces. They are not blind Samsons grinding in a prison-house, and liable at any moment to bring down in utter ruin every pillar of the universe on which they can put their hands. If intelligent and planful, there must be personality. We may as well call it by the name by which it is universally known, God. Now does this intelligent and powerful personality know our plans and lend his powers to the accomplishment of our purposes? It is better to put it the other way. Mr. Lincoln taught us the truer statement when one said to him, in the awful anxiety of the war, "I think God is on our side;" he answered, "My great concern is to know if we are on God's side." So our question is better thus: Does this intelligent, powerful personality accept and use our energy in the accomplishment of his plans? That will depend on what he wants done. If he only wants mountains lifted, he can put the shoulder of an earthquake under the strata of a continent and tilt them up edgewise, or toss up a hundred miles of strata and let them come down the other side up. If he wants mountains carried hence and cast into the sea, he can bring rivers to carry for thousands of years numberless tons. If he wants worlds held in rhythmic relations to their sun, he can take gravitation. Man is of no use; he cannot reach so far. But if this being has anything to do that he cannot do, he will gladly welcome man's aid. Has he? Yes. Obviously he wants things done he cannot do alone. Worlds are dead. Trees do not think. Morning stars may sing together, but they cannot love. None of them have character. None of them have conscious responsiveness to the full tides of power and love that flush the universe. None of them are permanent, or worth keeping forever. They are only scaffolding. He wants something greater than he can make; something as great as God and man and angels together can make. He wants not mere matter acted upon from without, but intelligences active in themselves; wants not mere miles of granite, but hearts responsive to love, and character that is sturdier than granite, more enduring than the hills that seem to be everlasting, and of so great a price that a whole world is of less value than a single soul, and of such permanence that it shall flourish in immortal youth when worlds, short-lived in comparison, shall have passed away. God can make worlds in plenty, but he wants something so much better that they shall be mere parade-grounds for the training of his armies. Are there proofs that God's forces are cooperating with ours? Many. Gravitation holds us to the earth. We do not drift, all sides up successively, in space or chaos. We never want a breath but there are oceans of it rushing to answer our hunger for it. But especially do we undertake all our more definite efforts with a full expectation of the aid of the forces without us. Man takes to agriculture with a relish that indicates that the soil and he are akin. He expects all its energies to cooperate with him. He plants the grain or seed expecting that all its vegetative forces will cowork with his plans. Every energy of earth, air, water, and the far-off sun work into his plans as if they had no other end in all their being. If a man wants a house, he expects the solidity of the rock, all the adaptations of wood that has been growing for a century, expects the beauty of the fir tree, the pine, and the box to come together to beautify the place of his dwelling. There are other forces into which man can put his scepter of power and hand of mastery. They all work for and with him. Does he want his burdens carried? The river will convey the Indian on a log or the armaments of the greatest nations. The wind fits itself into the shoulder of his sail on the sea, and steam does more work on the land than all the human race together. Does he want swiftness? The lightning comes and goes between the ends of the earth saying, "Here am I." Obviously all these kinds of forces are always on hand to work into man's plans. Is not our whole question settled? If these fundamental forces, these oceans of air and energy, forces so great that man cannot measure them, so delicate and fine that man does not discover them in thousands of years, are all waiting and palpitating to rush into the service of man to advance his plans, and hint of plans larger than he ever dreamed, until he grows great by handling these ineffable factors, how can it be otherwise than that the energies, thoughts, and loves back of these forces, and out of which they come, and of which they are the visible signs and exponents, are working together with man? Then, in all probability, nay in all certainty, all other forces, whether they be thrones or dominions, principalities or powers, things present or things to come, will also lend all their energies to the help of man. God does not aid in the lowest and leave us to ourselves in the highest. He does not feed the body and let the soul famish, does not help us to the meat that perishes and let us starve for the bread of eternal life. Scripture passages, literally thousands in number, proclaim God's control of the regular operations of nature, his sovereignty over birth, life, death, disease, afflictions, and prosperity, over what we call accident, his execution of righteous retributions, bringing of deliverance, setting up thrones, and casting down princes. He upholds all things by the direct exercise of his power. "The uniformities of nature are his ordinary method of working; its irregularities his method upon occasional condition; its interferences his method under the pressure of a higher law." There can be no general providence which is not special, no care for the whole which does not include care for all the parts, no provided safety for the head which does not number all the hairs. The Old Testament doctrine of a special and minute providence over the chosen nation is expanded by Christ's loving teaching and ministrations into an equal care for the personal individual (Matt. vii, 11; xviii, 19; Heb. iv, 16). The cold glacial period of human fear that poured its ice floe over the mind of man, making him feel like an orphaned race in a godless world, has retired before the gentle beams of the Sun of Righteousness, and the winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds and hearts has commenced. It is everywhere recognized that the great outcome of a man's life is not the title to a thousand acres. He is soon dispossessed. It is not all the bonds and money he can hold. A dead man's hands are empty. It is not reputation that the winds blow away. But it is character that he acquires and carries with him. He has a fidelity to principle that is like Abdiel's. He is faithful among the faithless. He has allegiance to right that the lure of all the kingdoms of the earth cannot swerve for a moment. He counts soul so much above the body that no fiery furnaces, heated seven times hotter than they are wont, sway him for a moment from adherence to the interests of soul as against even the existence of the body. Now, how has such an eminence of character been attained? Not altogether by individual evolution. Ancestral tendencies, parental example, the great force of strong, eternal principles, the moral muscle acquired in the gymnasium of temptation, and confessedly and especially a spiritual force vouchsafed from without, have wrought out this greatest result of heaven and earth. Of some men you expect nothing but goodness and greatness. They would belie all the tendencies of their blood to be otherwise than good. Some are constantly trained under the mighty influences of great principles that sway men as much as gravitation sways the worlds. What could be expected of the men of '76 when the air was electric with patriotism? What could be expected of men whose childhood was filled with the sacrifices of men who made themselves pilgrims and strangers over the earth, from England to Holland and thence over the drear and inhospitable sea to America, for the sake of liberty? What could be expected of men whose whole ancestry was cut off by the slaughter following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and they themselves exiled for liberty to worship God? What can be expected of men who have been tried in the furnace of temptation till they are pure gold? Nay, more, what can be expected of men who have in these temptations been strengthened out of God? Besides the strength of development by the resistance of evil, they have found that God made a way of escape, that he strengthened, them and that they were thus by supernal power able to bear it. Nay, rather, what may not be expected of such men? But we will not forget that this great outcome is precisely the plan of God for every man's life, and that when man works he finds that there are forces outside of him thoroughly cooperative with him. He starts a rock down the mountain side, but gravitation reaches out ready fingers and hurls it a thousand times faster and faster. He launches his ship on the sea and the wind and steam carry it thousands of miles. He speaks his quiet breath into the ear of the phone and electricity carries it in every tone and inflection of personal quality a thousand miles. He vows, and works for purity and greatness of personal character, and a thousand gravitations of love, a thousand great winds of Pentecost, a thousand vital principles on which all greatness hangs, a thousand influences of other men, and especially a thousand personal aids of a present God, cooperate with his plans and works. Of course every man who believes in a new type so high that good birth, wealth, culture, education, and broad opportunity cannot attain it believes in the divine co-operation to that end. It must be born of the Spirit. God sends forth his Spirit into our hearts crying, Abba, Father! It pleases the Father himself to reveal his Son in us. Not only is this cooperation true in regard to the beginning of this higher life, but especially so in regard to the development and perfection of that life into the stature of perfect manhood in Christ Jesus. By continuous effort to lead into all truth, by intensity of endeavor that can only be represented by groanings that cannot be worded in human speech, the perfection of saints is sought. And in the final glorification of those saints every man will say nothing of his own efforts, but all the praise will be unto him who hath redeemed us unto God, and washed us in his blood. To what extent, then, may we expect God will lend his forces to work out our plans? First, in so far as those forces have to do with the maturing and perfecting of our character they become his plans. No energy will be withheld. All our plans should be such. The end in character may often be attained as well by failure of our plans as by success. God has to choose the poor in this world's things, rich in faith, to do his great work. And he has to make "the best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft a-gley" to get the desired outcome of character. He is then working with, not against, us. He would rather have any star for his crown of glory than tons of perishable gold. But outside of our plans and work for ourselves what cooperation may we expect in our plans and work for others? Every preacher knows that for spiritual work in saving others the word of the Lord is true, "Without me ye can do nothing." There must be an outpouring of the Spirit or there is no Pentecost. Over against that settled conviction is the thrice-blessed command and assurance of the Master, "Go preach my Gospel; and lo, I am with you alway" (blessed iteration), "unto the end of the world." That has not yet come. But there are other enterprises men must push--mines to be dug, railroads to be surveyed and built, slaves to be emancipated, farms to be cultivated, mischiefs framed by a law to be averted, charities to be exercised, schools to be founded, and generally a living to be gotten. To what extent may we expect divine aid? First, all these things are his purposes and plans. But since it is necessary for our development that we do our level best, he will not do what we can. We can plant and water, but God only can give the increase. Even the fable maker says that a teamster, whose wagon was stuck in the mud, seeing Jupiter Omnipotens riding by on the chariot of the clouds, dropped on his knees and implored his help. "Get up, O lazy one!" said Jupiter; "clear away the mud, put your shoulder to the wheel, and whip up your horses." We may call on God to open the rock in the dry and thirsty land where no water is, but not to lift our teacups. It is no use to ask God for a special shower when deep plowing is all that is needed. It is no use to ask God to build churches, send missionaries, endow schools, and convert the world, till we have done our best. But when we have done our best what may we expect? All things. They shall work together for good to those who love God enough to do their best for him in any plane of work. One could preach fifty sermons on the great works done by men, obviously too great for man's accomplishment. Time would fail me to tell of Moses, Gideon, Paul, Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, William of Orange, Washington, John Brown, Abe Lincoln, and thousands more of whom this world was not worthy, who, undeniably by divine aid, wrought righteousness. One of the great sins of our age is that men do not see God immanent in all things. We have found so many ways of his working that we call laws, so many segments of his power, that we have forgotten him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. A sustainer is as necessary as a creator. There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God who worketh all in all. The next great service to be done by human philosophy is to bring back God in human thought into his own world. Since these things are so, what are the conditions under which we may work the works of God by his power? First, they must be his works, not ours as opposed to his, but ours as included in his. All our works may be wrought in God, if we do his works, follow his plans, and are aided by his strength. Second, they must be attempted with the right motive of glorifying God. Christ is the pattern. He came not to do his own will, but the will of him who sent him. And he did always the things that pleased him. In our fervid desires for the accomplishment of some great thing we should be as willing it should be accomplished by another as by ourselves. The personal pride is often a fly in the sweet-smelling savor. God would rather have a given work not done, or done by another, than to have one of his dear ones puffed up with sinful pride. Great Saul must often be removed and the work be left undone, or be done by some humble David. "Inaudible voices call us, and we go; Invisible hands restrain us, and we stay; Forces, unfelt by our dull senses, sway Our wavering wills, and hedge us in the way We call our own, because we do not know. "Are we, then, slaves of ignorant circumstance? Nay, God forbid! God holds the world, not blind, unreasoning chance!" How shall we secure the cooperative power? There is power of every kind everywhere in plenty. All the Niagaras and Mississippis have run to waste since they began to thunder and flow. Greater power is in the wind everywhere. One can rake up enough electricity to turn all the wheels of a great city whenever he chooses to start his rake. The sky is full of Pentecosts. Power enough, but how shall we belt on? By fasting, prayer, and by willing to do the will of God. We have so much haste that we do not tarry at Jerusalem for fullness of power. Moses was forty years in the wilderness: Daniel fasted and prayed for one and twenty days. We are told to pray without ceasing, and that there are kinds of devils that go not out except at the command of those who fast and pray. "More things are wrought by prayer than This world dreams of." The Bible is a record of achievements impossible to man. They are achievements of leaderships, emancipations, governments, getting money for building God's houses, making strong the weak, waxing valiant in fight, and turning the world upside down. The trouble with many of our modern saints is that they seek for purity only instead of power, ecstasy instead of excellence, self-satisfaction in a garden of spices instead of a baptism that straightens them out in a garden of agony. They are seekers of spiritual joys instead of good governments, cities well policed and sewered, with every street safe for the feet of innocence. The next revelation of new possibilities of grace that will break out of the old Word will be that of power. How will this divine aid manifest itself? In the giving of wisdom for our plans and their execution. God will not help in any foolish plans. He wants no St. Peter's built in a village of six hundred people, no temple, except on a Moriah to which a whole nation goes up. Due proportion is a law of all his creations. The disciples planned not only to begin at Jerusalem, but to stay there. Their plans were wrong, and they had to be driven out by persecutions and martyrdoms (Acts viii, 4). But Africa, Europe, and Asia eagerly received the light which Jerusalem resisted. Some ministers to-day stay by their fine Jerusalems when the kitchens of the surrounding country wait to welcome them. The Spirit suffered not Paul to go into Bithynia, but sent him to Macedonia. Had he then persisted in going to Asia his work would have been in vain. We may expect wisdom in the choice of the human agents we select. Half a general's success lies in his choice of lieutenants. No class leader should be appointed nor steward nominated till after prayer for divine guidance. God has more efficient men for his Church than we know of. He is thinking of Paul when we see only Matthias (Acts i, 26). When Paul had to depart asunder from Barnabas God sent him Silas, the fellow-singer in the dungeon, and Timothy, who was dearer to him than any other man. We may expect opposition to be diminished or thwarted. Let Hezekiah spread every letter of Rab-shakeh before the Lord and pray (2 Kings xix, 14). The answer will be, "I have heard" (v. 20). Let the answer to every slander that Gashmu repeateth among the heathen be, "O Lord, strengthen my hands" (Neh. vi, 9); "My God, think thou upon Tobiah and Sanballat according to these their works" (v. 14). Then all the heathen and enemies will "perceive that this work was wrought of our God" (v. l6). "When a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." The purpose of the manifestation of the Son of God was "that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John iii, 8). Lastly, we may expect actual help. These plans are all dear to God. He wishes them all accomplished. They have been wisely made. Opposition has been diminished. It only remains that our hearts be open to guidance and strengthening. Moses was sure I AM had sent him. Elijah had the very words to be uttered to Ahab put into his mouth. Nehemiah told the people that for building a city "the joy of the Lord is your strength." God strengthened the right hand of Cyrus. The three Hebrew children and Daniel knew that God was able to deliver them from fire and lions. "Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thy heart." And the great promise of the Lord to be with his disciples to the end is not so much a promise for comfort as for the accomplishment of their mission. Paul said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." And all great doers for God, in all ages, have gladly testified that they have been girded for their work by the Almighty. The designed outcome of this paper is that every reader should get a fresh revelation of the immanency of God in the kingdom of nature and grace; that the reader is more intimately related to him and his plans than is gravitation; that there are laws as imperative, exact, and sure to yield results in the mental and spiritual realms as in the material; that he is a part of God's agencies, and that all of God's forces are a part of his; that he may sing with new meaning, "We for whose sakes all nature stands And stars their courses move;" that in the burning vividness of this new conception each man may boldly undertake things for God--conversions, purifications, missionary enlargements, business enterprises--that he knows are too great for himself; that he may find new helps for spiritual victories as great as this age has found for material triumphs in steam and electricity; and that in all things man may be uplifted and God thereby glorified. How shall it be done? First, by a vivid conception that cooperation is designed, provided for, and expected. We are children of God; there can be but one great end through the ages in the universe. There should be cooperation of every force. There have been thousands of evident cooperations--waters divided and burned by celestial fire, Pharaohs rebuked, Ninevehs warned, exiles recalled, Jerusalems rebuilded, Luthers upheld, preachers of today changed from waning, not desired, half-over-the-dead-line ministers into vigorous, flaming heralds of the Gospel, who possessed tenfold power to what they had before; we ourselves personally helped in manifest and undeniable instances, and so have come to believe that God can do anything, anywhere, if he can get the right kind of a man. Promises of aid are abundant. Heaven and earth shall pass away sooner than one jot or tittle of these words fail. We are invited to test them: "Come now, and prove me herewith, and see if I will not open the windows of heaven once more, as at the deluge, and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it." Second, select some definite work too great for us to do alone, as the preparation of a sermon that shall have unusual power of persuasion to change action, the conduct of a prayer meeting of remarkable interest, the casting out of some devil of evil speech or action, the conversion of one individual, the raising of more money for some of God's purposes, and then go about the work, not alone, but in such a way that God can lead and we help. Let the fasting and prayer not be lacking. When the right direction comes let Jonathan take his armor-bearer and climb up on his hands and knees against the Philistines, let Paul go to Macedonia, Peter to Cornelius, Wesley send help to America. Bishop Foss said, in regard to several crises in a most serious sickness, that Christ always arrived before it came. So in regard to work to be done. The Lord was in Nineveh before Jonah, in Caesarea before Peter, and will be in the heart of every sinner we seek to get converted before we arrive. Any man who wants to do an immense business should seek a good partner. We are workers together with God. What is being done worthy of the copartnership? WHEN THIS WORLD IS NOT* *Reprinted from the _Methodist Review_. "The day of the Lord will come . . .; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up." What is there after that? To this question there are three answers: I. There are left all of what may be called natural forces that there were before the world was created. They are not dependent on it. The sea is not lost when one bubble or a thousand break on the rocky shore. The world is not the main thing in the universe. It is only a temporary contrivance, a mere scaffolding for a special purpose. When that purpose is fulfilled it is natural that it should pass away. The time then comes when the voice that shook the earth should signify the removal of "those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." We already have a kingdom that cannot be moved. "The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." It should not be supposed that the space away from the world is an empty desert. God is everywhere, and creative energy is omnipresent. Not merely is a millionth of space occupied where the worlds are, but all space is full of God and his manifestations of wisdom and power. David could think of no place of hiding from that presence. The first word of revelation is, "In the beginning God created the heaven." And the great angel, standing on sea and land when time is to be no longer, swears by Him who "created heaven, and the things that therein are," in distinction from the earth and its things that are to be removed. What God created with things that are therein is not empty. Poets, the true seers, recognize this. When Longfellow died one of them, remembering the heartbreaking hunt of Gabriel for Evangeline, and their passing each other on opposite sides of an island in the Mississippi, makes him say of his wife long since gone before: And now I shall seek her once more, On some Mississippi's vast tide That flows the whole universe through, Than earth's widest rivers more wide. Evangeline I shall not miss Though we wander the dim starry sheen, On opposite sides of rivers so vast That islands of worlds intervene. But what is there in space? There is the great ceaseless force of gravitation. Though the weakest of natural forces, yet when displayed in world-masses its might is measureless by man's arithmetic. Tie an apple or a stone to one end of a string, and taking the other end whirl it around your finger, noting its pull. That depends on the weight of the whirling ball, the length of the string, and the swiftness of the whirl. The stone let loose from David's finger flies crashing into the head of Goliath. But suppose the stone is eight thousand miles in diameter, the string ninety-two million five hundred thousand miles long, and the swiftness one thousand miles a minute, what needs be the tensile strength of the string? If we covered the whole side of the earth next the sun, from pole to pole and from side to side, with steel wires attaching the earth to the sun, thus representing the tension of gravitation, the wires would need to be so many that a mouse could not run around among them. There swings the moon above us. Its best service is not its light, though lovers prize that highly. Its gravitative work is its best. It lifts the sea and pours it into every river and fiord of the coast. Our universal tug-boat is in the sky. It saves millions of dollars in towage to London alone every year. And this world would not be habitable without the moon to wash out every festering swamp and deposit of sewage along the shore. Gravitation reaches every place, whether worlds be there or not. This force is universally present and effective. In the possibilities of a no-world condition a spirit may be able to so relate itself to matter that gravitation would impart its incredible swiftness of transference to a soul thus temporarily relating itself to matter. What gravitation does in the absence of the kind of matter we know it is difficult to assert. But as will be seen in our second division there is still ample room for its exercise when worlds as such have ceased to be. In space empty of worlds there is light. It flies or runs one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. There must be somewhat on which its wing-beat shall fall, stepping stones for its hurrying feet. We call it ether, not knowing what we mean. But in this space is the play of intensest force and quickest activity. There are hundreds of millions of millions of wing-beats or footfalls in a second. Mathematical necessities surpass mental conceptions. In a cubic mile of space there are demonstrably seventy millions of foot tons of power. Steam and lightning have nothing comparable to the activity and power of the celestial ether. Sir William Thompson thinks he has proved that a cubic mile of celestial ether may have as little as one billionth of a pound of ponderable matter. It is too fine for our experimentation, too strong for our measurement. We must get rid of our thumby fingers first. What is light doing in space? That has greatly puzzled all philosophers. Without question there is inexpressible power. It is seen in velocity. But what is it doing? The law of conservation of force forbids the thought that it can be wasted. On the earth its power long ages ago was turned into coal. The power was reservoired in mountains ready for man. It is so great that a piece of coal that weighs the same as a silver dollar carries a ton's weight a mile at sea. But what is the thousand million times more light than ever struck the earth doing in space? That is among the things we want to find out when we get there. There will be ample opportunity, space, time, and light enough. It is biblically asserted and scientifically demonstrable that space is full of causes of sound. To anyone capable of turning these causes to effects this sound is not dull and monotonous, but richly varied into songful music. Light makes its impression of color by its different number of vibrations. So music sounds its keys. We know the number of vibrations necessary for the note C of the soprano scale, and the number that runs the pitch up to inaudibility. We know the number of vibrations of light necessary to give us a sensation of red or violet. These, apprehended by a sufficiently sensitive ear, pour not only light to one organ, but tuneful harmonies to another. The morning stars do sing together, and when worlds are gone, and heavy ears of clay laid down, we may be able to hear them Singing as they shine, "The hand that made us is divine." There are places where this music is so fine that the soft and soul-like sounds of a zephyr in the pines would be like a storm in comparison, and places where the fierce intensity of light in a congeries of suns would make it seem as if all the stops of being from piccolo to sub-bass had been drawn. No angel flying interstellar spaces, no soul fallen overboard and left behind by a swift-sailing world, need fear being left in awful silences. There seems to be good evidence that electrical disturbances in the sun are almost instantly reported and effective on the earth. It is evident that the destructive force in cyclones is not wind, but electricity. It is altogether likely that it is generated in the sun, and that all the space between it and us thrills with this unknown power.[1] All astronomers except Faye admit the connection between sun spots and the condition of the earth's magnetic elements. The parallelism between auroral and sun-spot frequency is almost perfect. That between sun spots and cyclones is as confidently asserted, but not quite so demonstrable. Enough proof exists to make this clear, that space may be full of higher Andes and Alps, rivers broader than Gulf Streams, skies brighter than the Milky Way, more beautiful than the rainbow. Occasionally some scoffer who thinks he is smart and does not know that he is mistaken asks with an air of a Socrates putting his last question: "You say that 'heaven is above us.' But if one dies at noon and another at midnight, one goes toward Orion and the other toward Hercules; or an Eskimo goes toward Polaris and a Patagonian toward the coal-black hole in the sky near the south pole. Where is your heaven anyhow?" O sapient, sapient questioner! Heaven is above us, you especially; but going in different directions from such a little world as this is no more than a bee's leaving different sides of a bruised pear exuding honey. Up or down he is in the same fragrant garden, warm, light, redolent of roses, tremulous with bird song, amid a thousand caves of honeysuckles, "illuminate seclusions swung in air" to which his open sesame gives entrance at will. II. But there will be in space what the world has become. It is nowhere intimated that matter had been annihilated. Worlds shall perish as worlds. They shall wax old as doth a garment. They will be folded up as a vesture, and they "shall be changed." The motto with which this article began says heavens pass away, elements melt, earth and its works are burned up. But always after the heaven and earth pass away we are to look for "new heavens and a new earth." On all that God has made he has stamped the great principle of progress, refinement, development--rock to soil, soil to vegetable life, to insect, bird, and man. Each dies as to what it is, that it may have resurrection or may feed something higher. So, in the light of revelation, earth is not lost. Science comes, after ages of creeping, up to the same position. It, too, asserts that matter is indestructible. Burn a candle in a great jar hermetically sealed. The weight of the jar and contents is just the same after the burning as before. A burned-up candle as big as the world will not be annihilated. It will be "changed." It is necessary for us to get familiar with some of the protean metamorphoses of matter. Up at New Almaden, above the writer, is a vast mass of porous lava rock into which has been infiltrated a great deal of mercury. How shall we get it out? You can jar out numberless minute globules by hand. This metal, be it remembered, is liquid, and so heavy that solid iron floats in it as cork does in water. Now, to get it out of the rock we apply fire, and the mercury exhales away in the smoke. The real task of scientific painstaking is to get that heavy stuff out of the smoke again. It is changed, volatilized, and it likes that state so well that it is very difficult to persuade it to come back to heaviness again. Take a great mass of marble. It was not always a mountain. It floated invisibly in the sea. Invisible animals took it up, particle by particle, to build a testudo, a traveling house, for themselves. The ephemeral life departing, there was a rain of dead shells to make limestone masses at the bottom of the sea. It will not always remain rock. Air and water disintegrate it once more. Little rootlets seize upon it and it goes coursing in the veins of plants. It becomes fiber to the tree, color to the rose, and fragrance to the violet. But, whether floating invisibly in the water, shell of infusoria in the seas, marble asleep in the Pentelican hills, constituting the sparkle and fizz of soda water, claiming the world's admiration as the Venus de Milo, or giving beauty and meaning to the most fitting symbol that goes between lovers, it is still the same matter. It may be diffused as gas or concentrated as a world, but it is still the same matter. Matter is worthy of God's creation. Astronomy is awe-full; microscopy is no less so. Astronomy means immensity, bulk; atoms mean individuality. The essence of matter seems to be spirit, personality. It seems to be able to count, or at least to be cognizant of certain exact quantities. An atom of bromine will combine with one of hydrogen; one of oxygen with two of hydrogen; one of nitrogen with three of hydrogen; one of silicon with four of hydrogen, etc. They marry without thought of divorce. A group of atoms married by affinity is called a molecule. Two atoms of hydrogen joined to one of oxygen make water. They are like three marbles laid near together on the ground, not close together; for we well know that water does not fill all the space it occupies. We can put eight or ten similar bulks of other substances into a glass of water without greatly increasing its bulk, some actually diminishing it. Water molecules are like a mass of shot, with large interstices between. Drive the atoms of water apart by heat till the water becomes steam, till they are as three marbles a larger distance apart, yet the molecule is not destroyed, the union is still indissoluble. One physicist has declared that the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen are probably not nearer to each other in water than one hundred and fifty men would be if scattered over the surface of England--one man for each four hundred square miles.[2] What must the distance be in steam? what the greater distance in the more extreme rarefactions? It is asserted that millions of cubic miles of some comets tails would not make a cubic inch of matter solid as iron. Now, when earth and oceans are "changed" to this sort of tenuity creations will be more easy. We shall not be obliged to hew out our material with broadaxes, nor blast it out with dynamite. Let us not fear that these creations will not be permanent; they will be enough so for our purpose. We can then afford to waste more worlds in a day than dull stupidity can count in a lifetime. We are getting used to this sort of work already. When we reduce common air in a bulb to one one-thousandth of its normal density at the sea we get the possibility of continuous incandescent electric light by the vibration of platinum wire. When we reduce it to a tenuity of one millionth of the normal density we get the possibility of the X rays by vibrations of itself without any platinum wire. The greater the tenuity the greater the creative results. For example, water in freezing exerts an expansive, thrusting force of thirty thousand pounds to the square inch, over two thousand tons to the square foot; an incomprehensible force, but applicable in nature to little besides splitting rocks. On the other hand, when water is rarefied into steam its power is vastly more versatile, tractable, and serviceable in a thousand ways. Take a bit of metal called zinc. It is heavy, subject to gravitation, solid, subject to cohesion. But cause it to be burned, to pass away, and be changed. To do this we use fire, not the ordinary kind, but liquid that we keep in a bottle and call acid. The zinc is burned up. What becomes of it? It becomes electricity. How changed! It is no longer solid, but is a live fire that rings bells in our houses, picks up our thought and pours it into the ear of a friend miles away by the telephone, or thousands of miles away by the telegraph. Burning up is only the means of a new and higher life. Ah, delicate Ariel, tricksy sprite, the only way to get you is to burn up the solid body. The possibility of rare creation depends on rare material, on spirit-like tenuity. And that is what the world goes into. There is a substance called nitrite of amyl, known to many as a medicine for heart disease. It is applied by inhaling its odor--a style of very much rarefied application. Fill a tube with its vapor. It is invisible as ordinary air in daylight. But pour a beam of direct sunlight from end to end along its major axis. A dense cloud forms along the path of the sunbeam; creation is going on. What the sun may do in the thinner vapors the world goes into when burned up will be for us to find out when we get there. Standing on Popocatepetl we have seen a sea of clouds below, white as the light of transfiguration, tossed into waves a mile high by the touch of the sunbeam. Creative ordering was observed in actual process. It is done under our eyes to show us how easy it is. Would it be any less glorious if there were no Popocatepetl? A thrush among vines outside is just now showing us how easy it is to create an ecstasy of music out of silence. She has only to open her mouth and the innate aptitudes of air rush in to actualize her creative wish. Not only is it easy for the bird, but she is even provoked to this love and good works by the creation of a rainbow on the retreating blackness of a storm yonder. Thunder is the sub-bass nature furnishes her, and thus invites her to add the complementary notes. Some one may think that all this tenuity is as vaporous as the stuff that dreams are made of, and call for solid rocks for foundations. Perhaps we may so call while we have material bodies of two hundred pounds' weight. Yet even these bodies are delicate enough to be valuable to us solely because they have the utmost chemical stability. We are burning up their substance with every breath in order to have delicacy of feeling and thought. What were a wooden body worth? Substances are valuable to us according to their fineness and facility of change. Even iron is mobile in all its particles. We call it solid, but it is not. We lift our eyes from this writing and behold the tumbling surf of the great Pacific sea. Line after line of its billows are charging on the shore and tumbling in utmost confusion and roar of advancing and refluent waves. So the iron of the telephone wire. You often hold the receiver to your ear listening, not to the voice of business or friendship of men, but to the gentle hum of the rolling surf in the wire's own substance. And, in order that we may know the essential stability of things that are fine, we are told that the city which hath enduring foundations is in the spirit world, not this kind of material. The whole new Jerusalem to come down "out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband," is as movable as a train of cars is movable here. There may still be rainbows and rivers of life if there are no more rocks. There is a real realm of "scientific imagination." But all our imaginings fall far short of realities. Some men do not desire this realm, and demand solid rocks to walk on. But a bird does not. He oars himself along the upper fields and rides on air. So does a bicyclist and balloonist. Some men have a sort of contempt for aeronauts and workers at flying machines. That feeling is a testimony to their depravity and groveling tendencies. Aeronautics and nautics are an effort toward angelhood. Men can walk water who are willing to take a boat for an overshoe. So we may air when we get the right shoe. Browning gives us a delicious sense of being amphibian as we swim. And the butterfly, that winged rather than rooted flower, looking down upon us as we float, begets in us a great longing to be polyphibian. We have innate tendencies toward a life of finer surroundings, and we shall take to them with zest, if we are not too much of the earth earthy. We were designed for this finer life. We do take to it even now in the days of our deterioration, not to say depravity. The great marvels of the world are not so much in matter as in man. We were meant to be more sensitive to finer influences than we are. We are far more so than we think. Take your child into the street. Another child coughs at a window on the other side, and your child has three months of terrific whooping-cough. All such diseases are taken by homeopathic doses of the millionth dilution. Many people feel "in their bones" the coming of storms days before their arrival. We knew a man who ate honey with delight till he was twenty-five years old, and then could do so no more. This peculiarity he inherited from his father. One man has an insatiable desire for drink because some ancestor of his, back in the third or fourth generation, bequeathed him that curse. In the South you can go a mile in the face of the wind and find that peerless blossom of a magnolia by following the drift of its far-reaching odor. Who has not received a letter and knew before opening it that it had violets within? It had atmosphered itself with rich perfume, and something far richer, for three thousand miles. The first influences which came over the Atlantic cable were so feeble that a sleeping infant's breath were a whirlwind in comparison. But they were read. It is no wonder that the old astrologers thought that men's whole lives were influenced by the stars. Every vegetable life, from the meanest flower that blows to the largest tree, has its whole existence shaped by the sun. Doubtless man's body was meant to be an Aeolian (how the vowels and liquids flow into the very name!) harp of a thousand strings over which a thousand delicate influences might breathe. Soul was meant to be sensitive to the influences of the Spirit. This capability has been somewhat lost in our deterioration. To recover these finer faculties men are required to die. And for the field of exercising them the world must be changed. Paul understood this. He associated some sort of perfection with the resurrection, with the buying back of the powers of the body. And the whole creation waiteth for the apocalypse of the full-sized sons of God. Does one fear the change from gross to fine, from force of freezing to the winged energy of steam, from solid zinc to lightning? Our whole desire for education is a desire for refining influences. We know there is a higher love for country than that begotten by the fanfare of the Fourth of July. There is a smile of joy at our country's education and purity finer than the guffaws provoked by hearing the howls of a dog and the explosions of firecrackers when the two are inextricably mixed. There is a flame of religious love when the heart sacrifices itself in humble realization of the joy of its adorable love purer than the fierce fire of the hating heart that applies the torch to the martyr's pyre. We give our lives to seeking these higher refinements because they are stronger and more like God. Does one fear to leave bodily appetites and passions for spiritual aptitudes fitted to finer surroundings? He should not. Man has had two modes of life already--one, slightly conscious, closely confined, peculiarly nourished, in the dark, without the possible exercise of any one of the five senses. That is prenatal. He comes into the next life. At once he breathes, often vociferously, looks about with eyes of wonder, nourishes himself with avidity, is fitted to his new surroundings, his immensely wider life, and finds his superior companions and surroundings fitted to him, even to his finest need for love. Why hesitate for a third mode of life? He loses modes of nourishment; so he has before. He loses relations to former life; so he has before. He comes into new companionships and surroundings; so he has before. But each time and in every respect his powers, possibilities, and field have been immensely enlarged. O the hour when this material Shall have vanished like a cloud, When amid the wide ethereal All the invisible shall crowd. In that sudden, strange transition, By what new and finer sense Shall we grasp the mighty vision, And receive the influence? Knowledge of the third state of man is not so difficult to attain in the second as knowledge of the second was in the first. If a fit intelligence should study a specimen of man about to emerge from its first stage of existence, it could judge much of the conditions of the second. Feet suggest solid land; lungs suggest liquid air; eyes, light; hands, acquisitiveness, and hence dominion; tongue, talk, and hence companions, etc. What fore-gleams have we of the future life? They are from two sources--revelation and present aptitudes not yet realized. What feet have we for undiscovered continents, what wings for wider and finer airs, what eyes for diviner light? Everything tells us that such aptitudes have fit field for development. The water fowl flies through night and storm, lone wandering but not lost, straight to the south with instinct for mild airs, food, and a nest among the rushes. It is not disappointed. Man has an instinct for dominion which cannot be gratified here. He weeps for more worlds to conquer. He is only a boy yet, getting a grip on the hilt of the sword of conquest, feeling for some Prospero's wand that is able to command the tempest. When he gets the proper pitch of power, take away his body, and he is, as Richter says, no more afraid, and he is also free from the binding effect of gravitation. Then there are worlds enough, and every one a lighthouse to guide him to its harbor. They all seek a Columbus with more allurements than America did hers. Dominion over ten cities is the reward for faithfulness in the use of a single talent. Man has an instinct for travel and speed. To travel a couple of months is a sufficient reward for a thousand toilful days. He earnestly desires speed, develops race horses and bicycles to surpass them, yachts, and engines. Not satisfied with this, he harnesses lightning that takes his mind, his thought, to the ends of the earth in a twinkling. But he is stopped there. How he yearns to go to the moon, the sun, and stars! But he could not take his present body through the temperatures of space three or four hundred degrees below zero. So he must find a way of disembodying and of attachment to some force swift as lightning, of which there are plenty in the spaces when the world has ceased to be a world. It is all provided for by death. Man has an instinct for knowledge not gratified nor gratifiable in the present narrow bounds that hedge him in like walls of hewn stone. A thousand questions he cannot solve about himself, his relations to others and to the world about him, beset him here. There he shall know even as he is known by perfect intelligence. Here he has an instinct for love that is unsunderable. But the wails of separation have filled the air since Eve shrieked over Abel. Husbands and fathers are ever crying: Immortal? I feel it and know it. Who doubts of such as she? But that's the pang's very essence, Immortal away from me. But there, in finer realms, shall be a knitting of severed friendships up to be sundered no more forever. Specially has man sought in this stage of being to know God. Job, in his pain and loss, assailed by the cruel rebukes of his friends and desolate by the desertion of his wife, says, "O that I knew where I might find him." David cries out while his tears are flowing day and night, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?" Moses, in the broadest of visions, material, historic, prophetic, says to God, "Show me thy glory." And common men have always turned the high places of earth to altar piles, and blackened the heavens with the smoke of their sacrifices. But the means of knowing God are to be increased. The very essence of life eternal is to know the true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. Great pains have been taken to manifest forth God to dull senses and to oxlike thoughts here; greater pains, with better results, shall be taken there. Every reader of the Apocalypse notices with joy, if not rapture, that when the book that was sealed with seven seals, which no man in heaven, nor earth, was able to reveal, nor open, nor even look upon, was finally opened by the Lamb, and its marvelous panoramas, charades, and symbolic significances had to be carefully explained to John, the man best able of any to understand them--we observe with rapture that the regular inhabitants of that hitherto unseen world understood all at once, and broke into shouts like the sound of these many waters in a storm. Above all these superior manifestations in finer realms the pure in heart shall _see_ God. III. But there is in space what there was before the world began. Philosophy asserts that the invisible universe is a perfect fluid in which not even atoms exist, and atoms are produced therefrom by the First Great Cause by creation, not by development. This conception is full of difficulties to thought. We cannot even agree whether creation was in time or eternity. But all agree in this, that the invisible is rapidly absorbing all the force at least of the visible universe, and that when force is gone the corpse will not remain unburied. Indeed, when the range of seeing puts the size of an atom at less than one two-hundred-and-twenty-four-thousandth of an inch, and when the range of thinking puts it at less than one six-millionth of an inch, many prefer to consider an atom as a center of force and not as a material entity at all. But, amid uncertainties, this is certain, that the forces of the visible worlds are extraneous. They come out of the invisible. They are all also returning to the invisible; that is what light is doing in space, previously referred to. This incredibly high-class energy is not banking up coal in the celestial ether as it did on the earth, but is returning to the quick, mobile forces of the invisible worlds. One thing more is certain, that the origin of all the forces of the invisible is in personality; for the atom, it is agreed, bears all the marks of being a manufactured article. Different-sized shot could not have greater uniformity of structure and constitution. And their whole behavior shows that they are controlled by an admirable wisdom past finding out. That these forces exist and are necessarily active there are three proofs. Worlds have been made, not of things and forces that do appear. They were abundantly displayed in the physical miracles of Christ and others; and these forces, independently of the physical miracles at various times, have continuously helped men. (1) Concerning the first fact--that worlds have been made--nothing need be said except that these forces, being personal, cannot be supposed to be exhausted, and hence creations can go on continuously. We are assured that they do. And the personal element more and more relates itself to personalities. "I go to prepare a place for you," to fit up a mansion according to tastes, needs, and enjoyments of the future occupant. (2) This is the place to assert, not to prove, that this visible world has always been subject to the forces of the invisible world. It does not matter whether these forces are personal or personally directed. Its waters divide, gravitation at that point being overcome; they harden for a path, or bodies are levitated; they burn by a fire as fierce as that which plays between two electric poles. These forces are not the ordinary endowments of matter; they step out of the realm of the greater invisible, execute their mission, and, like an angel's sudden appearance, disappear. Who knows how frequently they come? We, for whose sake all nature stands "and stars their courses move," may need more frequent motherly attentions than the infant knows of. They will not be lacking, even if not sufficiently evident to the infant to be cried for. "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." (3) It is here designed to be asserted that the forces of the invisible seek to be continually in full play on the intellectual and moral natures of man. Our unique Christian Scriptures have this thought for their whole significance. It begins with God's walking with Adam in the garden, and goes on till it is said, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you," in the invisible, and by the invisible, from before the foundation of the visible world. It includes all time and opportunity between and after; we need specify only to intensify the conception of the fact. Paul says, "Having therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day," when otherwise oppressive circumstances and hate of men seeking to kill him would have prevented his continuing in life. It is possible for all who believe to be given power, out of the invisible, to become sons of God. It has been said that there is power and continuousness enough in the tides, winds, rotating and revolving worlds for man to make a machine for perpetual motion. The only difficulty is to belt on. The great object of life in the visible should be to belt on to the invisible. Our great Example who did this made his ordinary doing better than common men's best, his parentheses of thought richer than other men's paragraphs and volumes. And he left on record for us promises of greater works than these, at which we stagger through unbelief. We should not; for men who have lived by the evidence of things not seen, and sought a city that received Jesus out of sight, have found that "God is not ashamed to be called their God." They have wrought marvels that men tell over like a rosary of what is possible to men. It is beyond the belief of all who have not been touched by the power of an endless life. But what they do is chiefly valuable as evidence of what they are. It is little that men quench the violence of fire, and receive their dead raised to life again. It is great that they are able to do it. That they hold the hand that holds the world is something. But that they have eyes to see, a wisdom to choose, and will to execute the best, is more. Fire may kindle again and the resurrected die, but the great personality survives. These forces are not discontinuous, connected with this temporary world, and liable to cease when it fails. They belong to the permanent, invisible order of things. Suppose one loses his body. Then there is no force whereby earth can hold its child any longer to its breast. It flies on at terrific speed, dwindling to a speck in unknown distances, and leaving the man amid infinitudes alone. But there are other attractions. There was One uplifted on a cross to draw all men unto him. Love has finer attraction for souls than gravitation has for bodies. Then all his being thrills with Joy. And past The comets' sweep, the choral stars above, With multiplying raptures drawn more swift He flies into the very heart of love. It is hoped that the object of this writing is accomplished--to widen our view of the great principle of continuity in the universe. It is not sought to dwarf the earth, but to fit it rightly into its place as a part of a great whole. It is better for a state to be a part of a glorious union than to be independent; better for a man to belong to the entirety of creation than to be Robinson Crusoe on his island. We belong to more than this earth. It is not of the greatest importance whether we lose it or it lose itself. We look for a "new heavens and a new earth." We are, or should be, used to their forces, and at home among their personalities. This universe is a unity. It is not made up of separate, catastrophic movements, but it all flows on like the sweetly blended notes of a psalm. "Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;" though the heavens be "rolled together as a scroll," the stars fall, "even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs," when it is shaken with the wind, and though our bodies are whelmed in the removal of things that can be shaken. For even then we may find the calm force that shakes the earth is the force that is from everlasting to everlasting; may find that it is personal and loving. It says, "Lo, it is I; be not afraid." Whatever comes, whether one sail the spaces in the great ship we call the world, or fall overboard into Mississippis and Amazons of power in which worlds are mere drifting islands, he will be at peace and at home anywhere. He will ever say: "The winds that o'er my ocean run Blow from all worlds, beyond the sun; Through life, through death, through faith, through time, Great breaths of God, they sweep sublime, Eternal trades that cannot veer, And blowing, teach us how to steer; And well for him whose joy, whose care, Is but to keep before them fair. "O thou, God's mariner, heart of mine, Spread canvas to these airs divine. Spread sail and let thy past life be Forgotten in thy destiny." [1]The action that drives off the material of a comet's tail proves that other forces besides gravitation are operative in the interplanetary space.--_The Sun_, C. A. Young, p. 156. [2]See _Recreations in Astronomy_, p. 357. 
39566	----	[Illustration: EFFECT of HEAT. Frontispiece.] CURIOSITIES OF HEAT. by REV. LYMAN B. TEFFT. Philadelphia: The Bible and Publication Society, 530 Arch Street. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by The Bible and Publication Society, In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. Westcott & Thomson, Stereotypers, Philada. CONTENTS. PAGE CHAPTER I. MR. WILTON'S BIBLE CLASS 7 CHAPTER II. NEW THOUGHTS FOR THE SCHOLARS 26 CHAPTER III. A DIFFICULT QUESTION 58 CHAPTER IV. HEAT A GIFT OF GOD 83 CHAPTER V. CONVEYANCE AND VARIETIES OF HEAT 100 CHAPTER VI. MANAGEMENT AND SOURCES OF HEAT 120 CHAPTER VII. PRESERVATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF HEAT 152 CHAPTER VIII. MODIFICATION OF TEMPERATURE 176 CHAPTER IX. THE MINISTRY OF SUFFERING 190 CHAPTER X. TRANSPORTATION OF HEAT 213 CHAPTER XI. AN EFFECTIVE SERMON 233 CHAPTER XII. TRANSFER OF HEAT IN SPACE 254 CHAPTER XIII. OCEAN CURRENTS AND ICEBERGS 272 CHAPTER XIV. COMBUSTION.--COAL-BEDS 292 CHAPTER XV. ECONOMY OF HEAT 305 CHAPTER XVI. A DAY OF JOY AND GLADNESS 320 CURIOSITIES OF HEAT. CHAPTER I. MR. WILTON'S BIBLE CLASS. "The book of Nature is my Bible. I agree with old Cicero: I count Nature the best guide, and follow her as if she were a god, and wish for no other." These were the words of Mr. Hume, an infidel, spoken in the village store. It was Monday evening. By some strange freak, or led by a divine impulse, he had determined, the previous Sunday afternoon, to go to church and hear what the minister had to say. So the Christian people were all surprised to see Mr. Hume walk into their assembly--a thing which had not been seen before in a twelvemonth. Mr. Hume did not shun the church from a dislike of the minister. He believed Mr. Wilton to be a good man, and he knew him to be kind and earnest, well instructed in every kind of knowledge and mighty in the Scriptures. He kept aloof because he hated the Bible. He had been instructed in the Scriptures when a boy, and many Bible truths still clung to his memory which he would have been glad to banish. He could not forget those stirring words which have come down to us from the Lord Jesus, and from prophets and apostles, and they sorely troubled his conscience. He counted the Bible an enemy, and determined that he would not believe it. At that time there was an increasing religious interest in the church. Mr. Wilton had seen many an eye grow tearful as he unfolded the love of Christ and urged upon his hearers the claims of the exalted Redeemer. He found an increasing readiness to listen when he talked with the young people of his congregation. The prayer-meetings were filling up, and becoming more interesting and solemn. The impenitent dropped in to these meetings more frequently than was their wont. Mr. Wilton himself felt the power of Christ coming upon him and girding him as if for some great spiritual conflict. His heart was filled with an unspeakable yearning to see sinners converted and Christ glorified. He seemed to himself to work without fatigue. His sermons came to him as if by inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He felt a new sense of his call from God to preach the gospel to men, and spoke as an ambassador of Christ, praying men tenderly, persuadingly, to be reconciled to God, yet as one that has a right to speak, and the authority to announce to man the conditions of salvation. A few of the spiritual-minded saw this little cloud rising, but the people in general knew nothing of it. Least of all did Mr. Hume suspect such an undercurrent of religious interest; yet for some reason, he hardly knew what, he felt inclined to go to church. That afternoon the preacher spoke as if his soul were awed, yet lifted to heavenly heights, by the presence of God and Christ. Reading as his text the words, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself" (Ps. l. 21), he showed, first, the false notions which men form of God, and then unfolded, with great power and pungency, the Scripture revelation of the one infinite, personal, living, holy, just, and gracious Jehovah. This was the very theme which Mr. Hume wished most of all not to hear. That very name, Jehovah, of all the names applied to God, was most disagreeable; it suggested the idea of the living God who manifested himself in olden time and wrought wonders before the eyes of men. But the infidel, with his active mind, could not help listening, nor could he loosen his conscience from the grasp of the truth. Yet he could fight against it, and this he did, determined that he would not believe in such a God--a God who held him accountable, and would bring him into judgment in the last great day. In this state of mind he dropped into Deacon Gregory's store. Deacon Gregory was accustomed to obey Paul's injunction to Timothy: "Be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine." Having taken Mr. Hume's orders for groceries, he said, "I was glad to see you at church yesterday, Mr. Hume. How were you interested in the sermon?" "I like Mr. Wilton," answered Mr. Hume; "I think him a very earnest and good man." "But were you not interested and pleased with the discourse? It seems to me that I shall never lose the impression of God's existence and character which that discourse made upon me. I almost felt that Mr. Wilton spoke from inspiration." "I suppose he was inspired just as much as the writers of that book which men call 'the Bible.'" "But can you wholly get rid of the conviction that the Bible is the word of God, written by holy men inspired by the Holy Spirit?" "You know, Deacon Gregory, that I do not believe what you profess to believe. The book of Nature is my Bible. I agree with old Cicero: I count Nature the best guide, and follow her as if she were a god, and wish no other." Deacon Gregory had never read Cicero, and of course did not attempt to show, as he might otherwise have done, that Cicero did not mean to deny the existence of a living, personal God, who governs the world. "But," said he, "does not the book of Nature--your Bible, as you call it--have something to say of God? Does it not speak of an infinitely wise and good Creator and Governor? Do not the works of Nature tell of the same God whose being and character were preached to us yesterday from the Holy Scriptures?" "Nature has never spoken to me of any God except herself. What need is there of a creator? Who can prove that the universe did not exist from eternity? Nature has her laws of development, and under those laws all the operations of nature go on. You had better read Darwin. If one must find the character of God in nature, he may as well picture an evil creator and governor as one that is good and righteous. Does Nature punish those whom you call the wicked? Does Nature reward the righteous? Do not the laws of Nature bring suffering to the good and the bad alike, and happiness also to all classes of men? Would you, if you had power, create a world like this--a world in which danger, pain, and death, in every shape, lie in ambush against its inhabitants every hour of their poor existence? But I must go." Pausing a moment, however, as if reluctant to go, with a voice sad and almost tremulous, which revealed a great deal more of his heart than he designed to express, he added: "God knows, deacon, if there be a God, how I wish I knew the truth about these matters. The world and myself are to me great and dreadful mysteries." "'He that will do his will shall know of the doctrine,'" answered Deacon Gregory; and inviting him to come to church again, they separated. This conversation with the pious deacon, though he had himself done most of the talking and had his say almost unopposed, did not tend at all to bring rest to Mr. Hume's conscience. He saw that the deacon's faith in God did for him more than belief in Nature and worship at the altar of Science could do for unbelievers. He felt also that he had spoken a little too freely, especially in revealing, at the last, his unrest of spirit from the want of fixed convictions in regard to religious truth. Deacon Gregory, by the sincerity and manliness of his address, was accustomed to draw out the hearts of men so that they expressed them more freely than they designed. Upon a bench in a shaded corner of the store sat a lad of sixteen or seventeen years, unnoticed for the time being by either Mr. Hume or Deacon Gregory. His name was Ansel, and he was the son of the senior deacon of the church. He was in the village academy, and had there been nearly fitted for college. He stood at the head of his class, and, with his sharp intelligence, his impetuous energy, and high ambition, every one was predicting for him a distinguished life. He had grown up thus far in the bosom of a family where piety was no pretence. Earnest prayer had gone up for him by day and by night. He had been well trained in the Sunday-school, and for a year had been a member of the small class of young men taught by Mr. Wilton. He had always shown a ready interest in all Bible studies and a quick understanding of Scripture doctrine, so that some thought him not far from the kingdom of God. But Deacon Arnold little thought what was in the heart of his son. He might have known, for to read his son's heart he had only to recall his own early manhood. For years he had hung trembling upon the brink of ruin, swept, at times, by his self-will and turbulent youthful passions, to the very verge of the precipice, and had been preserved only by singular grace from falling over. Now Ansel was following in his father's early footsteps--self-willed, and stubborn against the Spirit of God, and, at times, almost persuaded to cast off all religious restraint, that he might carve out his worldly fortunes untrammeled by religious or conscientious scruples. He had rarely heard infidel sentiments expressed, but the little that he had heard had attracted him, and had encouraged him to give loose reins to his own unbelieving disposition. It had not escaped his notice that the two or three men whom he had heard spoken of as infidels were among the most respectable and shrewdest business-men in the village. The idea, moreover, of rejecting all authoritative doctrine, and believing whatever should please him, carried with it so free and independent an air, and harmonized so well with his natural disposition, that he easily drifted in the direction of unbelief. Sitting this evening unobserved, he drank in every word which Mr. Hume uttered. Some of the notions thrown out were quite new to him. "The book of Nature my Bible"--"Nature reveals no God but her own laws"--"No proof that the matter of the universe has not existed from eternity uncreated"--"Nature has her laws of development"--"No need of a God to govern the world,"--these were seed-thoughts in Ansel's mind. He had before thought of the only alternative to be set over against belief in the sacred Scriptures as simply unbelief--bare, blank denial of their truth. He had not dreamed of building up a set of proud, rationalistic notions, and denying the truths of religion in the character of a young philosopher. He kept his thoughts to himself, and turned them over and over in his mind during the week, and when again he met his pastor in the Bible class his head was full of his new notions. The lesson went on, however, and closed as usual. It so happened that this was the last in a series of lessons upon the Gospel of John. It was necessary, therefore, that another course of lessons should be decided upon. Mr. Wilton proposed the question to the class: "What shall be our next course of lessons? Would you like to study one of the Epistles--the Epistle to the Romans or that to the Hebrews?" And he briefly stated the subject discussed in these Epistles of Paul. "Perhaps," he continued, "you would prefer to study one of the historic books of the Old Testament?" The class had no opinion. They wavered between an Epistle and a historic book and topical lessons which should confine them to no one book of the Bible. Then Ansel spoke up: "Mr. Wilton, why can we not study something which we know to be true?" Ansel meant to be very cautious as well as very respectful, and did not design to commit himself by suggesting his own thoughts. He was respectful, but in the confusion of the moment he had brought out the very thoughts which he meant to conceal. Mr. Wilton was startled, though he did not fully understand the drift of Ansel's question. "What do you mean, Ansel?" he asked; "do you think Genesis less trustworthy than the Epistle of Paul?" Ansel saw that he had committed himself and must now make the best of his situation. He therefore answered cautiously: "Some persons, I have heard said, do not believe the Bible to be inspired, and they say that we have no evidence that it is true." "What have you been reading, Ansel, that has put such thoughts into your mind?" "I have never read a book that said anything against the Bible." "But what did you mean? Do you wish to study the evidences of the truth and inspiration of the Holy Scriptures?" "I should indeed like a course of lessons upon that subject, but that was not quite what I was thinking of." "What book can you find which is true if the Bible is not true?" "I do not know, sir, but I heard Mr. Hume say that the book of Nature is his Bible, and that we do not need any other, and that, whether the Bible be true or not, we know that the teachings of Nature must be true." "But we should find," said Mr. Wilton, "that the teachings of Nature and the Bible would perfectly agree. Did Mr. Hume say that what he calls 'The book of Nature' contradicts the sacred Scriptures?" Now that Ansel could give the thoughts which filled his mind, not as his own, but as Mr. Hume's, he showed no farther hesitation in speaking. "Yes, sir," he answered; "he said that Nature teaches us that there is no God, because there is no need of any. He said that we cannot prove that God created the universe, but that matter has existed from eternity uncreated, and that all the changes in nature go on by certain laws of development, and that a certain Mr. Darwin had written a book and proved this." The reader will notice that in the report of Mr. Hume's language the scholar went somewhat farther than his master had done. Mr. Wilton was well acquainted with the present shape of scientific infidelity, and saw that Ansel's statements were somewhat exaggerated, but he understood in a moment the drift of Ansel's thoughts, though he could not tell as yet how deep and fixed an impression had been made upon his mind. But he did not care to probe Ansel's conscience just then and there, in order to learn the exact state of the case. "If I understand you, then," he said, "you would like a course of lessons in the teachings of Nature?" "Of course, I did not suppose that you would allow us to have a course of lessons in the works of Nature instead of the Bible." "But if I were willing to give you a course of lessons showing the footprints of the Creator, so to speak, in the physical world, how would it please you?" "I should like it very much." "How would such a plan please the other members of the class?" The idea was entirely new; no one of them had ever dreamed of studying in a Bible class anything except the Bible; but young people are not averse to novelties, and they readily gave their assent. Yet I should do the class injustice by leaving the impression that they were influenced simply by the love of something new. They were of just that age when one hardly knows whether to call them lads or young men; they had been well instructed, and were just beginning to think independently. They were rapidly becoming conscious of their own mental power, and were eager to try their strength upon every line of thought. Their own weakness they had hardly begun to learn. Perhaps they were all the more ready to undertake such a course of study because they knew nothing of the difficulties attending it. The tinkling of the superintendent's bell warned them to close their conversation. "We have not time to-day," said Mr. Wilton, "to fix on the particular line of study which we shall follow. Of course we cannot examine all the works of Nature, and study every science, and trace the footprints of the Creator in every place where he has walked; we must fix on some small part of the works of God, and direct our attention closely to that. We shall find this course more profitable than roaming carelessly over a much larger space. Our next lesson will have to be a general one--a kind of preface to what shall come after. In the mean while, you can be collecting your thoughts upon the subject, and calling to mind anything that you have read bearing upon the handiwork of God manifest in Nature." The school closed, and as the scholars pass out let me introduce to you the members of the pastor's class. This class was small for several reasons. The church to which Mr. Wilton preached was not the popular church. The fashionable people and all who loved popularity and drifted with the tide went to another church. Careless, thoughtless young people naturally went with the crowd, and of those who attended his church some did not care to join his class. He was too much in earnest to please them. He made religion a reality, and his instruction compelled them to think, and of course those who did not like to think were not well pleased with him. But there were a few of the young men who were greatly interested in his instructions. They were earnest readers of instructive books; they liked conversation which called out thought; they were most of all pleased with questions and themes which gave them new ideas. Indeed, in the community, there were two classes of persons who held Mr. Wilton in the highest esteem and regard: one of these was composed of men and women of earnest, intelligent piety, experienced Christians; the other, of those who were not Christians, but who respected sincerity and disinterested godliness, and liked sermons filled with meat and marrow. Thus, at the present time, we find his class composed of but three young men. With Ansel you are already acquainted. The second is Peter Thornton, the son of a master-carpenter. He was frank, outspoken, quick in the acquisition of almost every kind of knowledge, but very little given to silent reflection. He listened to his pastor's instruction as he would go to a well-filled library, to draw out its stores of information. Morals and moralizing he did not like. He was not pious, and gave no indication of serious impressions. The third was Samuel Ledyard, the son of a poor widow. By painful industry and economy his pious mother was giving him the best advantages for education which the village afforded, praying the Lord to give him a part in the blessed work of preaching the gospel and winning sinners to Christ and salvation. When but twelve years of age he gave himself to Christ, and had been trying faithfully to follow his Lord. The long winter evenings were spent in reading books of history and science--books fitted to furnish and strengthen his mind--and long ere the light dimmed the morning star he was poring over his Bible, alternately reading the word and praying that his mind might be opened to understand the truth in its beauty and greatness, and that the truth might be wrought in him by vital experiences. With such habits it was no wonder that he grew in grace--it was no wonder that he grew in all manly qualities. He was silent, meditative, and retiring, as gentle in his ways as a quiet girl, yet all who knew him recognized in him a singular weight and worth of character. Those to whom the Lord revealed his secrets began to say that Samuel was appointed of God to preach the gospel, and his mother felt the assurance growing strong in her heart that her prayer was granted, and that the Lord was preparing her only son and only child for a place in the gospel ministry. If only she might train up a son to such a work, and when she should go to her rest leave in her place a man working for Christ in his harvest-field, gathering sheaves unto everlasting life, she felt that her cup would be full. She was ready to say with Simeon: "Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." How unlike she was to those mothers who lay all hindrances in the way of their sons entering the work of the Christian ministry, willing that they should do anything but this! and how different from those who declare that their daughters shall never wed ministers of the gospel, teaching them to despise the service of a pastor's wife! How often God gives over such sons and daughters--children consecrated from their birth to worldliness--to be entangled and lost in worldly snares! As such mothers sow, thus also do they reap. These were the three lads, just growing into young manhood, at this time under the instruction of Mr. Wilton. He was not ashamed of his class, though it was small. As he saw them expanding in thought and taking shape under his hand, he felt that in them he was perpetuating his influence in coming generations. He believed that in one or more of them he should preach the gospel after his body was sleeping in the earth awaiting the resurrection. I trust the kind reader will be interested in following the course of study through which their pastor shall lead them. CHAPTER II. NEW THOUGHTS FOR THE SCHOLARS. The little class which has been introduced to the reader came together the next Lord's Day interested and expectant, yet not knowing what to expect. They had chosen a course of study, yet they could not tell what that course was to be. They had tried to think of something definite about it, but could fix their minds upon nothing. In fact, the whole subject was new, and they could not decide where or how to take hold of it. They came together, therefore, with no more knowledge of the subject than when they separated. Mr. Wilton himself came before his class in a state of doubt. He had given the subject many hours of thought, and had carried it to his closet and besought the guidance of the Holy Spirit, for he believed the divine Spirit to be the best guide in understanding the works as well as the word of God. He felt that his prayer had been heard and answered. He was prepared, therefore, to speak with the force of clear understanding and positive convictions. But the precise line of study he had left to be determined by circumstances, perhaps by the previous studies of his class in their academic course. This was to be decided by further consultation. "Since no lesson was assigned upon which you could prepare yourselves," Mr. Wilton said, after the opening exercises of the school were finished, "I shall spend the half hour to-day in a kind of conversational lecture. You may call this the preface or introduction to the lessons which will follow. I shall try to make plain some general principles which we must keep in mind, whatever department of God's works we shall attempt to examine. I wish you to feel entirely free to interrupt me at any time, and ask any question or present any objection which may strike your minds. We must, if possible, have no prowling bands of enemies in the rear. I wish to make everything as plain as the case will admit. "One thing let me remind you of in the beginning: I shall not try to prove to you that there is a God. I shall not try to prove that the world had a creator. There are some things which men do not believe merely on account of good evidence, nor disbelieve for want of proof. Men believe in their own existence, but not from a course of argument. Most men believe in the real existence of the outward world--the earth, the hills, the rivers, the trees, everything which we see and hear and feel--but not on account of proof. Here and there a strange man is found who professes to disbelieve the real existence of all material things, but he disbelieves not for want of proof. Men believe that their sight and hearing and touch do not deceive them, but their confidence in them is not the result of a course of reasoning. To believe in our own existence, and in the existence of the world outside of us, and in the truthfulness of our senses, is natural; to disbelieve these things is unnatural: it shows a state of disordered mental action. When such disbelief is not practically corrected by a man's understanding he is counted insane, and is treated accordingly. "Belief in the existence of God is also a natural belief. A denial of God's existence shows, not disordered mental action, but a disordered moral and spiritual state. It shows the absence of that spiritual faculty by which we receive spiritual impressions, and are brought into contact with the spiritual world, and hold intercourse with God and Christ and the Holy Spirit. Men must be convinced of the existence of God through their conscience, their moral and spiritual nature. Do not misunderstand me. I do not say that good evidence cannot be brought to prove to one's reason the existence of God, but God has not left his existence to be _proved_: he has _revealed_ himself to men's consciences and to their faith; and those in whom conscience and faith are well developed, sound, and right do not need an elaborate argument to prove the divine existence. I shall simply try to show that the works of creation exhibit the wisdom and goodness of God. If any man, looking at such indications of wisdom and kindness, can believe that it all comes by chance or is the work of some evil agency, and that no Being of boundless intelligence, wisdom, power, and goodness has anything to do with the making and governing the world, he certainly shows great prejudice: he does not want to recognize God's existence. He must be one of those spoken of by the Psalmist who say, 'no God.' "During my recent visit to Greenville I visited a mill, the largest of its kind in the country. In one room was a machine, something like a huge straw-cutter, working with great power. In another room was a large steam boiler hung upon a shaft and made slowly to revolve while filled with steam. In a third room were large oval tanks, or cisterns, which might be filled with water. Across each tank was a heavy shaft carrying a drum set with steel blades, and as the drum revolved these blades passed other blades in the bottom of the tank, cutting whatever came between like scissors. In a fourth room were certain long and complicated machines. Each machine was composed mostly of rollers. There were large rollers and small rollers, solid rollers of enormous weight, and hollow rollers to be heated by steam within. Over and around a portion of these rollers passed a broad wirecloth belt. Over others passed a like belt of felted cloth. With these machines before you, could you tell me whether the inventor were a wise and skillful machinist?" "How could we tell," asked Peter, "without knowing what kind of work the machine was designed to do?" "You could not tell," answered Mr. Wilton; "you would need to know both what the machine was designed to do and all the processes by which the work was to be carried on. This brings out the first point which I wish you to fix in mind. It is this: To judge of the wisdom of any contrivance, we must understand the purpose, or object, which the inventor had in view; we must understand the work to be accomplished, and also the difficulties to be overcome. An ordinary locomotive steam-engine is admirably fitted to run on iron rails, but he would be a foolish man who should purchase such an engine to draw a train of loaded wagons over a common road of earth. On such a road it could not even move itself. It is good for that for which it was made, and for nothing else. How would you apply this principle to the subject we are now considering? You may answer, Samuel." "I think you mean," said Samuel, "that, in order to judge of the wisdom and goodness of God in creating and governing this world, we must know the object he had in view in making such a world." "That is my meaning, and I am glad that you understand me so perfectly. If this world were created with no other object than to be the grazing-field for herds of cattle, which see no difference between the beauty of the violet and the dull shapelessness of the cold earth upon which it grows, and never lift their eyes above the horizon, then all the beauty of earth and sky would be useless; there would be no wisdom or goodness in the creation of this beauty. There would be no wisdom or goodness in laying up in store beds of coal, buried deep beneath the surface of the earth, if God designed the world to be inhabited only by savages too rude and ignorant ever to mine it, and turn it to some practical use. "But let me give you another illustration, which can better be applied to the condition of things in this world. Just in the outskirts of one of our inland cities I once saw a large and elegant building, whether a private dwelling or a public institution I could not at first tell. It stood high and airy, commanding the most pleasing prospect that all the region presented. We will follow a visitor as he goes to examine that noble establishment. "As he comes nearer, he sees that the edifice is simple and classic in its style and chaste in its architectural adornment. It is a pleasure for the eye to rest upon its graceful symmetry. But in place of the light and graceful fence which he expects to find enclosing its grounds, he sees a stockade strong and high. The janitor turns the heavy key, the rusty bolt flies back, and the visitor enters the enclosure. Within the stockade he finds a portion of the ground laid out with taste and cultivated with choice and beautiful flowers; another part is devoted to the culture of garden vegetables. He finds workshops also for the manufacture of pails and tubs, brooms and mattresses. The visitor is ushered into the mansion itself. He finds everything more than comfortable; the rooms are heated from furnaces below; every part is perfectly ventilated; the windows command a view of the country around which must please the most cultivated eye; a school-room is provided with all needed apparatus for the most thorough instruction. 'Surely,' says the visitor, 'the founder of this institution must have been both wise and good. He must have loved the young in order to study and supply all their needs so completely.' But some things strike the visitor painfully. The windows are grated with iron, and some of the rooms are almost like prison cells. 'Can it be possible,' he thinks within himself, 'that the young need to be confined by a stockade in so pleasant a place and shut in by grates of iron for the enjoyment of such advantages?' The master as he teaches his pupils seems as kind and gentle as a mother, yet there is a firmness and authority in his tones and a rigidity in his training, as if his government were kept braced against a mutinous spirit. The means of punishment also are provided, and, when occasion requires, stern chastisement is employed. All this seems to the visitor like an enigma. The institution appears to him like a bundle of contradictions. A father could not have provided a pleasanter home or larger advantages for his children, but fathers do not commonly surround their homes with stockades, and cover their windows with bars of iron, and train their obedient children with a hand of such firm, unyielding force. 'Pray, sir,' he says to the master, 'what is this strange contradictory institution?' 'It is the State Reform School,' the master answers. 'And who are these lads and young men for whom all this work and wisdom is expended?' 'They are those who have taken the first steps in crime, but have not as yet become hardened and fixed in wickedness, and are sent here with the hope of overcoming their vicious propensities and training them to virtue and an honorable manhood.' "Everything is now made plain. The need of the stockade, and the grated windows, and the rigid government, as well as of the pure air, the garniture of beauty, and the kind loving care, is manifest. It is a place unsuited to a family of obedient children, and equally unsuitable as a place of confinement for confirmed criminals, shut up, not for reform, but for punishment. It is wisely adapted to the work designed to be accomplished, and to no other. "In like manner, if we would judge of the wisdom and goodness of God in the creation and government of this world, we must understand the use for which the world was designed. Is this plain to you, Ansel, and does it seem reasonable?" "Yes, sir; I think I understand it, and I can see no objection to the principle. I think even Mr. Hume could find no fault with that. But how shall we know the object for which God made and governs the world?" "That is the next point to be considered. Perhaps you will tell us what seems to you to be that object? Young people sometimes have thoughts and opinions upon the greatest questions." "I have never formed an opinion of my own," Ansel replied, "but I have always heard it said that God designed to show how perfect and good and beautiful a world he could make. But many things in the world seem to me neither perfect, nor good, nor beautiful." "Why, Ansel!" exclaimed Samuel; "the Bible says that 'God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good.'" "And, Mr. Wilton," asked Peter, "does not the Bible say that 'God created all things for his own glory'?" "Before answering any of these questions, let me ask Samuel a question. What do you understand to be the meaning of the words you quoted from the last verse of the first chapter of Genesis?--'God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good.'" "I suppose it means," answered Samuel, "that God made everything just as good and beautiful as it can be, so that any change must be a change for the worse. The lecturer last winter said that if men could entirely destroy any one of the most troublesome species of insects, their destruction would be a great loss to the world, and that if a single atom of matter belonging to the earth were annihilated, it might throw the solar system out of balance, so that it would finally be destroyed." "I remember," said Mr. Wilton, "that some lecturer last winter made statements of that kind, and I have heard other people declare that the least possible change in the world would be injurious, if not destructive, to the interests of man, and that the most troublesome beasts and insects and the most loathsome reptiles are necessary to human happiness. Does that seem to you to be true, Samuel?" "I have always tried to believe it, because I thought I ought to believe it. It has seemed to me to be dishonoring God to believe that he did not make the best possible world." "You are right in trying to believe what seems to be right and true, even though difficulties do lie in the way. Difficulties do not by any means show that an opinion is false. We must certainly believe that God made this world perfect for the object which he had in view in making it. But not a few skeptics deny the existence of a good, wise, righteous Creator and Governor, because they have a wrong idea of the end for which the world was created, and, consequently, a wrong idea of that in which its perfection must consist. Let me ask you a few questions which will lead your minds in the right direction. Do not men produce by cultivation better fruits and vegetables than Nature ever grows when left to herself?" "Yes, sir," said Ansel; "the peach and apple and potato have been brought up to their present state of excellence by great care and exertion. Originally, they were almost worthless." "And not only that," said Mr. Wilton, "but when once that careful culture is relaxed they begin to return to their former badness. Again, do we not improve upon Nature by drainage and improve upon the climate by irrigation?--in fact, do not men by drainage and irrigation and all manner of culture greatly improve the natural climate of a country?" "I think that is true," said Ansel. "I never thought of that before," said Peter. "Moreover, do you not suppose that heaven will be more beautiful than the earth, and that a thousand troublesome things besides sin--loathsome sights, discordant and jarring noises, disgusting and nauseous odors--will be absent from that 'better land'?" "And _I_ never thought of that before," said Samuel. "I am sure that many unpleasant things besides those which sin has brought into the world will not be found in heaven. I see that this world might be changed and not be made worse for holy beings to live in." "The world is very good," said Mr. Wilton, "for the purpose for which it was created, but we need not look upon it as designed for a specimen of the most beautiful, pleasant, and desirable world which the Creator could produce." "But you have not told us," said Peter, "what the Bible means when it says that God created all things for his own glory. Does it not mean that he made the world so good and perfect that all creatures ought to praise him on account of it?" "We ought," said Mr. Wilton, "to praise God for the wisdom and goodness displayed in the works of creation. That is the teaching of the Bible in many places; it is also the sentiment of the Bible that God created the world and carries on all things for his own glory, but it nowhere uses the exact language which you have employed. In Isa. xliii. 7, speaking of 'every one that is called by my name,' the Lord says, 'I have created him for my glory.' In Prov. xvi. 4 it is written, 'The Lord hath made all things for himself; yea, even the wicked for the day of evil;' and the four and twenty elders fell before the throne of God saying: 'Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are'--that is, exist--'and were created.' I might quote other texts of similar meaning. We are taught also that our first and supreme aim in all our conduct should be the glory of God. 'Whatever ye do, do it all to the glory of God.' But here two questions arise: What is the glory of God? and, What is it for God to glorify himself by his works of creation and government? Who will tell us?" All were silent, and Mr. Wilton went on speaking: "The word glory means, first and literally, a halo of light. The glory of God is the radiance, or halo, so to speak, of his infinite attributes and holy character. God glorifies himself when he reveals himself, and makes known his character, and causes the uncreated splendor of his attributes to break forth, so that his creatures recognize them and adore him. This, you see, is very different from the idea of glory among ambitious men. God glorified himself in the creation of the physical world, because from that creation his wisdom, power, and goodness are manifest. He glorified himself in the creation of angels and men, because they were created in the image of God and are finite pictures, so to speak, of the infinite Creator--a revelation of his spiritual being and personality. He glorifies himself in his government of the world, because his administration of affairs exhibits his justice, mercy, and holiness. This is what we mean by the glory of God and his working all things for his own glory. This is somewhat difficult for persons of your age, so we will leave it and return to the exact subject of discussion. Admitting that God created the world and governs it for his own glory--that is, to reveal himself--for what specific purpose did he design this earth?" "I don't know," said Peter, "that we understand what you mean by 'specific purpose.'" "Very well, then," said Mr. Wilton; "I will suggest the answer. Does the world seem as if fitted up to be the dwelling-place of holy beings?" "I have never thought of the question before," said Ansel; "but it seems to me that many things in this world would give pain even to angels if they lived here with bodies like ours." "I agree with you, Ansel. If men were sinless and holy as the angels of heaven, many things in this world would bring them distress. But does it seem reasonable that the world was designed merely as a place of punishment for men by reason of their wickedness?" "Some men are not wicked," replied Samuel. "There have always been men willing to die rather than disobey God. Surely, God does not punish such men. And many beautiful and pleasant things are found in the world--arrangements plainly designed for the welfare and happiness of men." "I think you are right, Samuel. But, without asking further questions, I will give you the conclusions to which my study upon this subject has brought me, and some of the reasons for those conclusions. "This world was made chiefly as the dwelling-place of man. The world was not planned merely as the abode of brute animals. Men are nobler than the brutes. Men have permanent interests and advantages. Aside from the glory of God, men are an end unto themselves. To become and be _men_ is the noblest object of human life, but the animal tribes exist for the use and benefit of others. To be an end to itself, a creature must be immortal; but the brutes exist for the use and advantage of man, live out their transient life, and exist no more. This is the view presented in the sacred Scriptures. God gave to man lordship over the earth--not only over the soil to subdue it, and over the great forces of Nature to bring them into subjection for human advantage, but also over the brute creation, 'over the fish of the sea, the fowls of the air, and every living thing that moveth upon the earth.' I conclude also that God did not prepare this world as a prison-house and place of punishment for rebels against his government. Too many pleasant things abound for me to believe that. The pleasant breezy air, the glorious sunlight, the refreshing showers, the treasures of mineral wealth stored up in the earth, the fertile land and golden wheat, the beauty spread over all nature, the sweet consciousness of existence, so that just to live and act is joy, and the comfort and hope of immortal pleasure enjoyed by truly Christian men,--all these things, and many more, assure me that not the subtle shrewdness of a tormentor nor the unmingled justice of an inexorable judge, but the heart of a kind and loving Father, planned our earthly dwelling-place. You said, Samuel, with truth, that there are many pious men in the world who are dear to God, and Paul says, 'We know that all things work together for good to them that love God.' For those dear ones Christ has such love that he counts everything--whether good or bad--that is done to them as if done to himself. 'Inasmuch,' he says, 'as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' Moreover, Jesus said: 'For God so loved the world, that he sent his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' From these words of Jesus we see that there is love manifested in the dealings of God with the inhabitants of our world. Were it not so, there would nothing remain but a 'fearful looking-for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries.' "On the other hand, I conclude that God made the world as the dwelling-place, not of obedient, holy children, but of those who are disobedient, fallen, and alienated. These disobedient and alienated ones he holds under discipline and chastisement, in order to keep their wickedness in check, to recover them from their sins, and train them up in virtue and holiness, or to remove from the obstinate and incorrigible all excuse for their sins and all plea against their final condemnation. In doing this he glorifies himself by manifesting his wisdom, goodness, mercy, and holiness. "This opinion seems probable from the fact that this is the purpose for which God has actually used and is now using the world. Here he keeps and governs the human race. This race is made up neither of holy beings nor of hopeless reprobates. They are the creatures of God; fallen indeed, yet loved; sinful, but objects of divine compassion; deserving of righteous wrath, but the recipients of the offers of salvation through Christ. Even penitent believers in Christ and devoted servants of God are not free from evil propensities, but need to be kept under constant training and discipline. This is the use to which the Creator has actually put the world. Is it not reasonable to believe that he designed it for their use? Ought we to believe that God planned the world for an object for which it never has been and never will be employed? "If sin were removed from the world, the chief part of human suffering would be removed. This no man can deny. Wars would cease; the want, disease, and woe resulting from selfishness, idleness, and vice would disappear, and nothing would stand between man and his Maker. What new life and joy would fill the world if free communication were restored between man and God, and the divine smile were again to enlighten the world! It would seem that heaven had enlarged her borders to embrace this earthly ball. But the fact would still remain that this physical world is unfitted to be the dwelling-place of sinless beings. The constitution of the world would bring upon them pains and evils which would seem a most unworthy heritage for loving and obedient children of our heavenly Father. Let sin be taken away, and wearisome toil in subduing the earth would remain. The soil of the earth is hard and clogged with stones, and clammy with stagnant waters, and sown well with the seeds of noxious weeds, and overgrown with thorns and thistles. Endless watchfulness and toil is the price of a livelihood. With the sweat of his face man must eat his bread. An army of enemies have pre-empted the soil which man must till. This state of things the word of God refers to sin: 'Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.' The necessity of toiling as we do now for our daily bread, God denounced upon man as a curse on account of sin. We cannot, therefore, regard this as a suitable condition for sinless beings. "This burden of toil is lightened by the progress of modern sciences and inventions much less than some men think. Every step of progress has been made by the sacrifice of hecatombs of human lives. From our laboratories and workshops products of human skill, rich and rare, are sent forth; but what are they but smelted and hammered and graven and woven human bones and sinews, the health and life of men? No means have been discovered by which the most necessary processes of the arts can be made otherwise than dangerous to health. Only when thousands of miserable workmen had perished was Sir Humphrey Davy's safety-lamp invented; and now the danger, to say nothing of the hard toil, of the collier's life is only lessened, but not removed. Still, our furnaces roar and the whole tide of civilization goes on by the health-destroying servitude of men, buried alive as it were in the dark bosom of the earth. Would that seem to be a fitting employment for the sinless children of the all-loving Father? Employés in many kinds of manufacture slowly sink under the accumulated evils of daily toil, and no means of making their employments healthful have been discovered. The friction-match, which has become so nearly a necessity, is made by a process so destructive to health that only a certain class of laborers can be prevailed upon to do the work. I might go on to speak of other painful circumstances in which men find themselves by the almost antagonistic attitude of Nature. But if we reject these dangerous processes of manufacture and art, we go back at once to the wooden plough, the distaff and tinder-box of primitive times, and also to primitive poverty and primitive toil, and, I may also add, to primitive exposure to the hostile and pitiless forces and inclemencies of Nature. Purge the earth of sin, and wearisome toil would still remain. Nature must be nursed and cultivated or she yields no bread. Her hostile attitude must be overcome; the thorns and thistles must be rooted out; and every step of progress, won by suffering, must be held by painful work and watchfulness; otherwise Nature returns to the wild and savage state. Relax the culture of the choicest fruit, and it begins to deteriorate; leave the best-blooded breed of cattle to itself, and it returns again to the level of native, uncultured stock. "The inhabitants of this world are also liable at all times to diseases and destructive accidents. This condition of things could not be changed without changing the entire structure and plan of the world. Is that a fit dwelling-place for a sinless being where chilling winds one day shrivel his skin and fill his bones with rheumatic pains, and the next, sweltering heats pervade all his system with languid lassitude--where miasma lies in wait unseen to poison his blood, kindle the malignant fever, and bring him to the shades of death, and every form of accident crouches in ambush, ready to spring upon his victim unawares and tear him limb from limb? We cannot see that the absence of sin would dissipate this liability to disease and the danger of accidents. Nay, this liability and danger are written upon the very constitution of the human body. The finger of God has engraved it upon every muscle and bone and life-cell. The Creator gave the body that wonderful power called the _vis medicatrix_--the power of recovering from injuries and repairing damage done to itself. Pull a leg from a grasshopper and another grows in its place. By this we know that the Creator understood the liability of this little insect to lose a limb, and prepared him for it. In like manner the power in man's body to heal a wound or join a broken bone gives us to understand that the Creator expected man to live in the midst of danger. The precaution proves the risk. "These accidents are such as no possible carefulness could guard against. To say nothing of the fact that all our knowledge of these perils comes from a painful experience of danger and death, what care, even after ages of sad experience, could ward off the thunderbolt? What carefulness could guard against the tornado on the land, or the hurricane and the cyclone upon the sea? Who should stand sentinel against the unseen poison borne upon the wings of the wind? What power should save him from the bursting of the volcano and the jaws of the earthquake? What care could give him knowledge of the qualities of all natural substances, that he might avoid their dangerous properties? We can suppose a divine care over man that should do all this and save men from harm, but it would be a providence superseding all human knowledge and exertion--it must be a providence to which the human race is now a stranger; miracles would then be the rule, and the undisturbed course of Nature the exception. "If, however, we suppose that God designed the world as a training-school, so to speak, of fallen beings, such as the word of God declares the human race to be, all is plain, everything is suitable and harmonious. We can see the fitness of at least the chief outlines of man's earthly condition, and can perceive God's wisdom and goodness in the constitution of the world. "The pain and woe-producing agencies of Nature are seen to be not at all contradictory to goodness, but on the other hand eminently wise and righteous. The whole sum of human misery expresses God's displeasure at sin. By their sufferings men learn how abhorrent is sin in God's sight. By the consequences of evil-doing they learn not to transgress. As none are free from the taint of depravity, none are free from pains. The necessity of labor--one of the elements of the primal curse--is a check to sin on the part of the vicious, and a discipline and trial to virtue on the part of the penitent. The multiform trials of life--which can indeed be borne well only by the grace of God--while they teach the evil of sin and keep the heart chastened and subdued, nourish heroic and dauntless virtue in the faithful. 'Daily cares' become 'a heavenly discipline.' Dangers and calamities startle the stupid conscience, and keep alive the sense of responsibility to God on the part of the wicked; they quicken the sense of weakness and dependence in the believing and educate their faith in God. The more sudden and overwhelming these evils, and the more these dangers are placed beyond the possibility of being warded off by human care, the more do they awaken in men a sense of the divine presence and of responsibility to God. "But would not all these natural agencies subserve essentially the same ends in the discipline of unfallen and sinless beings? By no means. If sufferings came upon a sinless being, he could not feel that they came as chastisements; he could not feel them to be deserved. They would be to him a 'curse causeless,' and hence would bring no advantage. He could only cry out in astonishment, 'Father, why am I, thine obedient son, thus smitten?' Calamity falling upon the innocent would be an anomaly in the universe. But now the sufferer, pierced through and through with a sense of ill desert, meekly bows his head, murmuring, 'Father, all thy judgments are just and right.' "One very important feature of the world we live in is its moral symbolism. The world is full of most suggestive symbols and emblems of moral good and evil. There are all beautiful and glorious things, to stand as types of goodness, truth, and righteousness; there are all loathsome, malignant, and hideous things, to serve as the types of folly and wickedness. Was it merely an accident that the dove was fitted to become the emblem of purity and of the Holy Spirit? the lamb, to be the emblem of gentleness, of Christ the gentle Sufferer, and of his suffering people? the ant, to be the type of prudent industry? the horse, of spirit and daring? and the lion, of strength and regal state? Was it only an accident that prepared cruel beasts and disgusting, poisonous reptiles as the types of evil passions and sins--that made the venom of the viper, the cunning of the fox, the blood-thirstiness of the wolf, the folly of the ape, and the filth of the swine, symbols of foul, subtle, malignant sin and folly? Nature is full of these emblems. The palm tree with its crown of glory, the cedar of Lebanon, the fading flower and withering grass, the early dew and the morning mist, the thorn hidden among the leaves of the fragrant rose, poisons sweet to the taste, and medicines bitter as gall,--how all these natural things preach to men sermons concerning spiritual verities! There is no virtue or grace which is not commended to man by its image of beauty in the animal tribes; there is no vice against which men are not warned by its loathsome, disgusting form shadowed out in the instinctive baseness of irresponsible brutes. "Thus we find earth, air, and sky to be full of silent voices proclaiming in the ears of man that which he most of all needs to remember. These types and symbols of virtue and vice are specially needed by fallen beings. They seem fitted for beings whose spiritual eyes are blinded and all their spiritual senses blunted--beings with whom there is no longer 'open vision' of spiritual realities. These pictures of evil are most impressive to men who see in them the reflection of their own base passions. How the fetid goat and the swine wallowing in the mire speak to the lecherous man and the drunkard! In a world of sinless beings these mimic vices would seem rather to mar God's handiwork. "Set the human race, fallen as it is, in a world where the patience of daily industrious toil would not be needed, and the race would rot with putrid, festering vice. Remove all danger, and men would forget and deny that the Creator holds them responsible. Let no evil consequences follow evil-doing, and men would cease to make a distinction between right and wrong. Take away death, and they would deny the existence of a spiritual world. But in this world God has hedged men around with checks and penalties and painful discipline, such as are of use only in dealing with sinners. "I conclude, therefore, that God prepared this world as it now is as a place of discipline for a fallen race. This is the use to which he has devoted it in the past; and when there is no longer need of such a world for the discipline of men, we learn from the word of God that a 'new heaven and a new earth' shall be provided. This world is thus declared to be an unfit abode for the glorified saints. To judge, then, of the wisdom and goodness of God in the works of nature, we must keep in mind the object for which the Creator prepared the world. Ansel, tell us how this strikes you." "I never thought of it in this way before," he answered; "indeed I have thought very little of this subject, but--" Tinkle, tinkle went the bell upon the superintendent's desk. This was the second time the superintendent had struck his bell, but Mr. Wilton had been so intent upon his subject that he did not hear the first ringing. The school was dismissed, but Mr. Wilton remained with his class to fix upon the particular department of nature which they would study. He found that all were studying natural philosophy, and had recently gone over the subject of heat. At his recommendation, therefore, they agreed to examine, as a specimen of God's works, his management of heat in the world. Mr. Wilton requested them to review the subject during the week, and be prepared to state and apply the general principles touching the nature, phenomena, and laws of heat which they had already learned. This work they will enter upon next Lord's Day. CHAPTER III. A DIFFICULT QUESTION. During the week, Ansel, Peter, and Samuel were busy reviewing and fixing in memory what they had already learned of the nature and laws of heat. They were not only interested in the new line of study, and desirous of pleasing Mr. Wilton, but they also felt that their scholarship was to be tested, and each one was ambitious of standing equal to the best. Ansel, of course, was busy and ambitious. The lesson was coming somewhat upon his own ground, and he felt in no wise unwilling to show how well he had mastered the subject. He entered upon it with feelings a little different, however, from his anticipations. The explanation which Mr. Wilton had given of the purpose of the Creator in making such a world seemed to him very reasonable. He could make no objection to it. But that explanation had taken away at one sweep a whole store of objections to God's goodness which he was waiting to bring out as soon as a good opportunity was presented. A world designed for the dwelling-place of sinners--sinners not already given over and doomed to final wrath, but to be recovered from sin and trained in virtue and holiness, or, if incorrigible, to be held in check and used as helps in the discipline of the righteous--he plainly saw must be as unlike a world fitted up for holy beings as a reform school is different from a home for kind and obedient children. Those arrangements which he had thought the most painful and objectionable might, after all, be the wisest and best. He did not see where to put in a reasonable objection to Mr. Wilton's unexpected argument, yet he did not feel quite satisfied to confess to himself that he was so soon and so easily defeated. In this state of mind, on Saturday morning he met Mr. Hume upon the street. "Good-morning, Ansel," said Mr. Hume. "Good-morning," returned Ansel. "I hear," said Mr. Hume, "that you have given up studying the Bible in your Bible class, and have begun the study of natural philosophy. Is that so?" "Not quite true, Mr. Hume. We are to examine some department of the works of Nature, and see what indications appear of the Creator's wisdom and goodness." "That is a little different from the report which came to me. But what did you learn last Sunday?" "Mr. Wilton told us that in order to judge of the wisdom and goodness of God in any of the affairs of this world we must consider the object for which that arrangement was designed. He said that if a man examine a cotton-gin, supposing it to be a threshing-machine, he would be likely to pronounce it a foolish and worthless contrivance; and that the fine edge of a razor would be worse than useless upon the cutter of a breaking-up plough. He told us that the earth was not prepared as the dwelling-place of sinless beings, but as a place of discipline for the fallen human race, and that we ought not to look upon it as the choicest specimen of workmanship which the Creator could construct." "I have heard that Mr. Wilton believes something of that kind. Ansel, have you studied geology?" "I have read a little upon that subject and have heard some lectures." "Can you tell me, then, whether or not the natural laws which prevailed on the earth ages and ages ago, before the earth was fit for men to live upon it, are the same as those which have been in operation in these later ages, since men have inhabited it?" "I suppose that the same laws have prevailed from the beginning of the geologic periods. I think that geology makes that very evident." "If that were not so," said Mr. Hume, "the past history of the globe would be a riddle to us; it would be confusion worse confounded. In regard to those early ages we could not reason from cause to effect, for we should know nothing of the forces and principles then in existence. In geologic studies we judge the past from the present, and if that be not a trustworthy method of reasoning, all the conclusions of geologists are as worthless as dreams. Have you any reason to suppose, from what you have read on this subject, that a curse changed the character of the earth as a dwelling-place for man some six thousand years ago? Is it true, as Milton says, that then 'The sun Had _first_ his precept so to move, so shine, As might affect the earth with cold and heat Scarce tolerable, and from the north call Decrepit winter--from the south to bring Solstitial summer's heat'? Did the Creator then 'Bid his angels turn askance The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more From the sun's axle'? Or was death then first introduced among the brute creation, as Milton fancies?-- 'But Discord first, Daughter of sin, among the irrational Death introduced through fierce antipathy; Beast now with beast 'gan war, and fowl with fowl, And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving, Devoured each other.'" "Animals must have died," said Ansel, "for their remains lie imbedded in rock which certainly existed before man lived on the earth." "I wish you would ask Mr. Wilton one question for me." "I am willing to ask him any proper question, and I suppose you would not wish me to ask any other." "I certainly would not. Will you ask him how it was possible for man not to sin and fall if God created the world for a sinful race myriads of ages before man was brought into existence? It would seem that if man had remained obedient he could not have lived pleasantly in a world prepared for sinners, and at the same time, by man's obedience, all the Creator's plans touching this world would have been dislocated and disappointed." "I will ask him, sir," said Ansel, "at the first good opportunity." This good opportunity occurred sooner than Ansel expected, for, before entering upon the proposed lesson the next Lord's Day, Mr. Wilton said to the class: "I wish in these lessons to advance carefully and safely, and, as far as possible, have everything well understood. For that reason I invite you to speak freely of any difficulties or objections which may suggest themselves to your own minds or which you may hear presented by others. At the close of the last lesson the views which I had presented to you seemed very reasonable, but it is possible that, as you have thought upon the subject during the week, objections may have arisen in your minds. If so, I should be glad to hear them now." "There are many things," said Peter, "of which I cannot see the use, even if we suppose that the earth was designed as the dwelling-place of sinners." "It would be very surprising indeed if you could unravel all the mysteries of creation in a week's time. Wiser men than any of us have spent a lifetime in searching out the meaning of God's works, and died still in the dark upon many points. We need not expect to unravel and understand all the deep, complex, and delicately-interwoven contrivances in a world so vast and curious as this. The world is a great mystery--mysterious as a whole, and mysterious in all its parts--upon any supposition. But the explanation which I gave of its design furnishes a sufficient reason for the great outline of creation. This gives a reason for the pains and miseries which dog man at every step. This gives a reason for the earth's being left rugged and sluggish, bringing forth thorns and thistles, and requiring to be subdued by patient industry. It shows a ground for the necessity of exhausting toil under a frowning sky and mid miasmatic airs--for the liability to diseases and accidents, and the hard necessity of death. These great elements of divine providence are not stripped of their halo of mystery, but with this explanation they are seen to form a harmonious whole for the accomplishment of a great and glorious purpose." Mr. Wilton paused. Then Ansel said, "Mr. Hume wished me to ask you a question." "Very well, I should be glad to hear it. I hope, indeed, that he sends his question from interest in the subject, and not with the design of perplexing us. I wish also that he were here to ask the question and hear the answer for himself. But what is the question?" "He wished me to ask how it was possible for man not to sin and fall if God placed him in a world prepared for a race of sinners and unfitted for a sinless race. He said that in such a case, if man had remained obedient, the plans of God would have been disarranged." "What answer did you try to give him, Ansel?" "I did not try to make any explanation. It seemed to me a very great objection. I did not see how such a course was consistent with God's righteousness." "And you are not the first person who has objected to this as a great inconsistency. I am afraid the discussion will take more time than we ought to spare, but now that the question has been asked and the objection presented, I must take time to answer it, even if it consume the whole half hour. "In considering this subject, as well as many others, we need to remember that the existence of difficulties is no objection to a principle or a fact. Difficulties wholly inexplicable by man attend facts and principles which must be true. A fact may be incomprehensible, though undeniable. The great Doctor Johnson said, 'There are insuperable objections against a plenum, and insuperable objections against a vacuum, yet one of these must be true.' What did he mean by that, Samuel?" "He meant, I suppose, that we could not explain the possibility that any space should be wholly empty of matter, and could no more explain the possibility that any space should be filled with matter, but that all space must be filled, or else there must be empty space. Whether we can explain the possibility or not, one of them must be true." "That is right. The same is true of many other facts besides a plenum and a vacuum. We cannot conceive of infinite space; we cannot conceive that space should not be infinite, but bounded. We cannot conceive of the creation of the world from nothing, and no more can we conceive of its eternal existence. The truth is that the mind of man cannot grasp such subjects so as to reason upon them correctly. No sooner do we attempt to reason about the infinite things of God than we run into absurdities and reach the most contradictory conclusions. And in this respect it makes no difference with what principle or proposition we start if it only contain some infinite element. Let me give you a simple illustration from geometry--an illustration which, very likely, is familiar to you: the larger a circle, the less is the curvature of the line which bounds it; that is, the more nearly does that line approach a straight line. An infinite circle must be bounded by a straight line, because with any degree of curvature the circle would be less than infinite. But a straight line cannot bound a circle. The attempt to reason about an infinite circle brings us at once to the most palpable absurdities and contradictions. Or take this illustration: the whole of a thing is greater than any of its parts. But divide a line of infinite length in the middle, and each part is infinite. We reach the conclusion either that the half is equal to the whole or that other wholly incomprehensible proposition, that one infinity is twice as great as another infinity. I have made these statements to show you that the existence of difficulties does not indicate, much less prove, that a fact is not real and true. "Mr. Hume thinks the fact that the earth existed in its present condition before men sinned an insuperable objection to the view that this world was prepared as a place for the discipline of a fallen race. But let us look at the other side, and see if equal objections do not exist. The Creator foresaw the fall of man; is there no objection to the supposition that, knowing that man would sin, God made no provision for it? On the one supposition he foresees the evil and makes no provision; on the other, he foresees it and provides for the catastrophe. The former supposition certainly involves the greater difficulties. "The objector may reply that the plan of God, by embracing the fall of man and including it as one of its essential elements, made that fall necessary. But why should not God embrace in his plan that great event, the fall of man, which he foresaw in the future? Would it have been wiser and better to leave out of account that most stupendous fact in the history of the human race? This same objection, which Mr. Hume and many others have brought forward, lies with equal force against the great central fact of the gospel, the death of Christ. God's plan touching this world included the incarnation and death of his Son. Jesus, the 'Lamb of God,' is spoken of as 'slain from the foundation of the world.' Rev. xiii. 8. But the incarnation and death of Christ presuppose the apostasy of the human race. Did this plan touching Christ make the apostasy of man a necessity? If preparing a world--fallen, so to speak, beforehand--for a race which God foresaw would fall, be inconsistent with his righteousness, it must be equally inconsistent to prepare a Saviour beforehand for that same race. "Again, the divine plan touching the death of his Son included his betrayal by Judas and his crucifixion by the Jews. If Judas had known that God had poised the salvation of man upon the pivot of his treachery, he would doubtless have argued as Mr. Hume and others are accustomed to do. But did God's plan excuse his treason against his Lord? His own conscience, piercing and rending his soul with remorse, drove him to self-destruction, and Christ confirmed the sentence of his conscience and called him the 'son of perdition.' The fact that God weaves the foreseen crimes of men into his plans is no palliation of their guilt. "Would it be wise and well to take no account of foreseen events? Jesus has gone to prepare mansions for those who will, as he foresees, believe in him: why not make provision for foreseen evils also? Our civil government, knowing the liability to crime among men--a liability which the experience of man has shown to be a practical certainty--makes provision for those crimes by maintaining a police, reform schools, prisons, and armies. The Governor of the universe, knowing the liability of man to sin and fall--a liability which by his foreknowledge was to him a certainty--made provision for that foreseen apostasy. He made provision, both by the creation of a world suited to a sinful race kept under a probation of mercy, and by appointing a Redeemer, the 'Lamb of God,' slain, in the eternal purpose, before the foundation of the world. If Mr. Hume's objection has force at all, it has force against every wise provision of God to meet the consequences of man's foreseen wickedness. It is wise, forsooth, on man's part, to foresee coming evil and prepare for it; but if God do this, men count it worse than folly: they declare it to be an endorsement of the evil! So foolishly do men reason about the high things of God! My answer to Mr. Hume, then, has four parts: "1. The existence of unexplainable difficulties does not disprove the truth and reality of any fact or principle. "2. The supposition that God made provision for the present apostasy of the human race is burdened with fewer and smaller difficulties than its denial. "3. The word of God declares that he did make provision for the fall of man by the pre-appointment of a Redeemer. "4. That style of reasoning which seeks to justify or palliate man's first sin because God prepared this world for a fallen race would palliate and justify all wickedness, because the sins of men are woven into every figure of the web of divine providence. Not the treason of Judas alone, but the whole sum of man's evil-doing, is embraced in the far-reaching plan of God. How this magnifies the wisdom of God! He binds together in one bundle his own righteousness and the sins of men, in a most intricate interlacing, yet without blending the two and without staining the glory of his holiness. "I hope I have made this plain. Do you think, Ansel, that you can repeat the substance of this answer to Mr. Hume?" "I will try, sir, if he asks." "You will all notice," added Mr. Wilton, "that I have not denied that there is a deep mystery in this preparation for the sins of men not yet created, and that I have not attempted to explain this mystery. I have only tried to show that the admission of the view I have given you is more satisfactory to reason than its denial, and that the mysteries of this view are not unreasonable and self-contradictory, for the greatest mysteries are often the most reasonable things in the world. "My introduction has become much longer than I designed, but now let us turn our attention to the subject of the lesson. "To aid us in understanding God's wise arrangements in the management of heat, we need, first, to consider what heat is and to review the laws of its action. Without this, we could look on and wonder at God's working in nature, but could not explain that which we saw. "Ansel, will you state the theories which have been held touching the nature of heat?" "I will do it as well as I can. The ancient philosophers supposed fire to be one of the four elements of which all bodies were composed. The three other elements were earth, air, and water. These four elements were mingled in various proportions. Of these, fire was esteemed the purest and most ethereal; this constantly tended upward to the empyrean, the highest heaven, where the element of fire and light was supposed to exist unmingled and pure. In the seventeenth century, Beccher and Stahl, two German chemists, brought forward what is known as the _phlogistic hypothesis_. They supposed that every combustible body held in composition a pure, ethereal substance which they called _phlogiston_, a Greek word which signifies _burned_, and that in combustion this phlogiston escaped. Flame was supposed to be this escaping phlogiston. These were the notions held about fire and combustion, but they are hardly worthy to be called theories of heat. The discovery of oxygen by Dr. Priestley of England, in 1774, and the introduction of the balance by Lavoisier of France, joined with the ever-enlarging circle of facts to be explained, rendered the phlogistic hypothesis untenable, and it was thrown aside. "Until a few years since the _caloric_ theory was generally received. According to this theory, heat is a _substance_, a subtle ether, diffused through all bodies and surrounding their atoms. This ether has been supposed to have a strong attraction for the atoms of every other substance, while between its own atoms a strong repulsion exists. In solid bodies each atom of matter, or in compound bodies each cluster of atoms, has been supposed to be surrounded by a little atmosphere, so to speak, of caloric, which prevented the atoms from coming into absolute contact. According to this theory, heat expands bodies by increasing and deepening these minute atmospheres, thus pressing the atoms farther from each other." "You need not explain this theory farther," said Mr. Wilton; "we have hardly time to go into the history of theories. Tell us the latest received theory." "The theory now commonly believed is called the _mechanical_ or _dynamic_ theory. According to this theory, the essence of heat is _motion_. A hot body is one whose atoms are in a state of rapid and intense motion or vibration; and the sensation of heat on touching a hot body arises from the impact, or rapid blows, of the agitated atoms, communicating the same atomic vibration to the flesh and nerves of the hand." "Very well stated, Ansel. This is the theory now more commonly received. The caloric theory, like the crude notions of the old Greek philosophers about fire, and like the phlogistic hypothesis, has been rejected because it failed to explain the phenomena of heat. Whether the dynamic theory is destined to share the same fate remains to be seen. It seems, however, to have a better foundation than its predecessors. The dynamic theory, though recently made popular, is by no means a recent conception. It was advocated by such men as Bacon, Newton, Rumford, Davy, Locke, and others. Locke, the distinguished intellectual philosopher who lived in the latter half of the seventeenth century (born 1632, died 1704), said, 'Heat is a very brisk agitation of the insensible parts of an object, which produces in us that sensation from which we denominate the object hot, so that what in our sensations is heat in the object is nothing but motion.' Benjamin Thompson, an American gentleman who went to Europe in the time of our revolution, and for his scientific fame was made Count Rumford, and became the founder of the Royal Institution of England, declared that he could form no conception of the nature of heat generated by friction unless it were motion. "A beautiful generalization has been made to show how well this idea of heat harmonizes with the entire plan of the universe. In the whole boundless universe each system of worlds, like our solar system, may be regarded as a molecule, or complex atom. These cosmical molecules, or complex atoms of the universe, are in motion through unmeasured space. In these systems of worlds the planets, with their satellites, are the molecules, and they are in motion--indeed, they commonly have several motions. Our earth, for example, rotates upon its axis once each day; it revolves in its orbit around the sun once each year, and the axis of the earth has a slow wabbling motion which produces the precession of the equinoxes, requiring 25,868 years for a complete revolution. The earth also is made up of parts, and all these are in ceaseless motion. As said the old Greek philosopher, 'All things flow'--that is, everything is in a state of change. Solomon has well described this perpetual movement and change: 'One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place whence he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north. It whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither do they return again. All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.' Eccles. i. 4-9. It is certainly in harmony with this universal movement that the atoms of matter, though they seem so closely packed, should in their inconceivable smallness through inconceivably minute spaces vibrate, or rotate, or revolve through an orbit, never at rest. Intensity of heat we may think of as intensity of this atomic motion--a wider swing, so to speak, in their vibration or revolution. This, of course, requires a wider separation of the atoms and a consequent expansion of bodies. A feebler atomic motion permits the atoms to approach each other. In this manner we explain the enlargement of bodies by heat and their contraction by decrease of temperature. 'The ideas of the best-informed philosophers are as yet uncertain regarding the exact nature of the motion of heat, but the great point at present is to regard it as a motion of some kind, leaving its more precise character to be dealt with in future investigation.' This is the most we can do at present." "What is the evidence," asked Samuel, "that the dynamic theory of heat is true?" "The evidence that any theory is true is its ability to explain the facts or phenomena with which it has to do. If it explains all the facts and contradicts no known principles, it is regarded as true, or at least no objection can be made to it. Let me illustrate. Astronomers had long inquired what force or law controlled the movements of the heavenly bodies. At length Newton answered, A force of attraction between bodies which decreases in proportion as the square of the distance between them increases. This explanation has been found sufficient to explain all the known facts in the working of the heavenly bodies. Upon the basis of this theory astronomers calculate the positions of planets and comets for years and centuries to come. "This theory led to the discovery of the planet Neptune, the last discovered of the primary planets. For thirty years irregularities in the motion of Uranus had been noticed. These variations were so slight that if another planet had revolved in the proper orbit of Uranus they would have seemed to the naked eye, throughout their course, one and the same star. This slight irregularity of motion was so nicely measured that the place of the unseen planet which caused it was almost exactly calculated from the estimated force and direction of its attraction. This theory of a universal attraction of gravitation so well explains all the facts in the case, and has become so universally received, that we are liable to forget that, after all, it is nothing but a theory. "Our idea of the structure of the solar system was at first only a theory. The astronomer does not see the planets revolving in regular circles through the heavens and moving around the sun. He only sees the shining points moving back and forth upon the concave vault, doubling and crossing their tracks apparently in the greatest disorder. How shall their motions be explained? Astronomers have found that the motions of planets revolving around a central sun, when seen from one of the planets, must present just these apparent irregularities. This explanation is so full and complete that it is now counted not a theory, but an established fact. The same may be said of the shape of the earth. "The dynamic theory of heat explains the phenomena of heat better than any other explanation that has been proposed. It explains the radiation of heat from the sun or from any other hot body: vibrations or impulses are propagated through that ether which is supposed to fill all space. It explains the conduction of heat through solid bodies in the same manner. It explains the expansion of bodies: the atomic motion forces the atoms of bodies farther apart. It explains the production of heat by friction or collision, which no other theory is able to do: the shock of the collision generates this atomic vibration. It explains the production of heat by combustion: the atoms of oxygen and carbon or hydrogen dash against each other and generate heat by the collision. This theory explains the transmutation of motion, or living force, and electricity, into heat, and the transmutation of heat into electric or mechanical force. These points will come up again, and I now only refer to them in answering Samuel's question. The dynamic theory explains the phenomena of heat and its relations to force, light, and electricity exceedingly well, and for this reason men look upon it with favor and count it as probably true. If in the progress of scientific investigation it shall be found to explain all the new facts discovered and meet well all the demands made upon it, it will at length be received as an admitted principle in physical science. The _wave_ theory of light and the _vibratory_ theory of sound may be looked upon as thus established. "At our next lesson we shall take a rapid review of the effects and laws of heat." CHAPTER IV. HEAT A GIFT OF GOD. The class is again promptly in place and ready for work. "As I announced a week ago," said Mr. Wilton, "we will to-day take a rapid review of the effects and laws of heat. Will you tell us, Peter, the first and chief of these effects?" "Yes, sir: combustion." "What is combustion?" "Commonly the rapid union of oxygen with some combustible substance, attended with the evolution of heat." "Was your answer correct, then?" "No, sir," said Peter, blushing; "I spoke before I thought." "Will you correct your answer?" "The first and chief effect of heat is expansion." "That is right. Our sensation of heat is of course only a _sensation_--merely the _feeling_ which results from the effects of heat upon our nerves--but the chief physical effect of heat is the expansion of bodies. The chemical qualities of bodies are not changed: they are not made either heavier or lighter. A sufficiently high temperature renders bodies luminous, and then we call them red hot or white hot. Solid bodies begin to be luminous at a temperature of about one thousand degrees. But the one invariable effect of heat, with two or three apparent exceptions, is expansion. You may mention, Samuel, some familiar illustrations of the effect of heat in expanding bodies." "The blacksmith heats the wagon-tire in order that it may easily slip over the wheel. If a kettle be filled with cold water, by heating it the water is expanded and runs over. I have noticed that the spaces between the ends of the successive iron rails upon the railroad are larger in winter than in summer, showing that the rails are shorter in winter than in summer. While skating during the cold winter evenings upon the mill-pond, I have seen cracks in the thick ice start and run across the mill-pond with a roar almost like thunder. The ice was contracted by the cold till it could no longer fill the whole space between the banks, and being frozen fast to the banks, it was torn asunder. The mercury in the tube of a thermometer is constantly expanding or contracting by every change of temperature." "Yes, those are all good illustrations, and we might go on to mention others equally good by the score. In cold countries, during the intense cold of winter, the surface of the earth cracks by shrinkage, just as you have seen the ice upon the mill-pond torn in two. The Britannia iron tubular bridge over the St. Lawrence at Montreal rises and falls two and one-half inches on account of greater expansion of the upper surface when exposed to the heat of the sun, while a loaded freight train causes a depression of but one-fourth of an inch. A few years since, in order to make some philosophical experiments connected with the rotation of the earth upon its axis, a ball was suspended by a wire in the interior of Bunker Hill monument. By this means it was accidentally discovered that the heat of the sun, expanding the sides of the monument exposed to its rays, caused the whole monument to sway back and forth daily." Here Ansel raised his hand. "What is it, Ansel?" "I was going to mention the belief of geologists that the mountain ranges were thrown up by the contracting of the earth's crust on account of cooling." "That is an illustration of contraction by loss of heat on an enormous scale. The materials which form our globe may have existed in the beginning in a nebulous or gaseous state. There is certainly very good reason for believing that the earth was once in a fluid state, the whole of its substance molten by intense heat. It is certain that the interior is now hot, and portions of it molten. It is by very many believed that the whole interior is molten. The crust of the earth may have been formed by cooling. If after an outer crust had been formed, and its temperature had fallen so low as to become nearly stationary, the interior mass continued to cool, the molten mass would tend to sink away from the crust and the crust would sink in upon it by wrinkling. Thus mountains may have been formed. Along the line of fracture the easiest vents would be formed for volcanoes. But this carries us somewhat aside from our subject, and as the expansion of bodies by heat has been sufficiently illustrated, we will leave it. Will some one now state the manner in which the dynamic theory of heat explains this expansion?" Samuel answered: "I think you have already given us the explanation." "I have briefly referred to it, but you may give it again." "The atomic motion which is supposed to constitute what we call heat, whatever that motion be, whether a vibration or rotation or revolution, requires that the atoms of bodies shall not be packed in absolute contact, and the more intense the agitation or the wider the swing of the vibration or revolution, the greater must be their separation. Hence heat expands bodies by thrusting their atoms farther apart." "That will do," said Mr. Wilton. "Let us look now at some of the secondary effects of heat. You may mention some of them, Ansel." "Heat relaxes or overpowers the cohesive attraction of bodies." "What is cohesive attraction?" "It is that force which binds together the atoms of matter in simple substances, that is, bodies like iron or copper or silver, composed of but one kind of substance, or in compound bodies it is the force which unites the compound molecules of matter." "Give us now some illustrations of the effect of heat in overcoming cohesive attraction." "The blacksmith heats his iron in order to overcome its cohesive attraction and render it soft, that he may easily hammer it. The founder heats his metal till its cohesion is so far destroyed that it becomes fluid and can be poured into the mould. Heat relaxes the cohesive force of ice and changes it to water, and by farther heating its cohesion is entirely overcome and the water is changed to a gas." "We use heat also in cooking our food," spoke up Peter: "is it not because heat destroys the cohesive attraction, and thus softens it?" "If that were the only effect of heat upon food," said Mr. Wilton, "we should be obliged to eat our food hot, for as soon as it cooled the cohesion would return and the food would be raw again. The operation of heat in cooking is various, and part of the effect is commonly to be ascribed to the water in which the food is cooked or to that which is contained in it. By the combined agency of heat and water starch swells to twenty or thirty times its original bulk and the minute starch grains burst open. In cooking potatoes the starch of the potato absorbs a portion of the water that is in it, and thus renders it dry and mealy. The action of heat and water upon rice, wheat, and other grains is similar to their operation upon starch. In the baking of bread the starch is converted into gum. In boiling flesh the effect is partly due to the solvent powers of water: the juices of the flesh are extracted, the gelatin is dissolved, the fat is liquefied, and the cells in which the fatty matter is held more or less burst, the albumen is solidified, and by long boiling the texture and fibre of the flesh are destroyed. The albumen of an egg, that is, the white, coagulates by heat. But in most of these processes the action of heat cannot be separated from that of water. "But there is another effect of heat very important both in nature and in the arts. What is that?" "The quickening of chemical affinity," answered Samuel. "That is right: heat is necessary for the operation of chemical affinity. Perhaps this is only a weakening of the cohesive force, thus allowing the chemical attractions to assert their strength. But the fact is that, while in many cases the chemical affinities act with great energy at ordinary temperatures, in other cases they slumber, however closely the substances are brought into contact, till their temperature is raised. Samuel, you may mention some illustrations of this principle." "A few months ago I visited Hazard's powder mills, in Enfield, Connecticut, and there learned how gunpowder is made. The charcoal, the sulphur, and the nitre are first finely pulverized, then ground together for hours till thoroughly mixed, and afterward pressed together. This mass is then broken into grains and the grains polished. But though these elements are brought into so close contact, yet they do not combine and explode till heat is applied. The same is true of the combustion of wood and coal. The carbon and the hydrogen of the fuel are constantly surrounded with the oxygen of the air, but they do not take fire and burn, that is, they do not combine with the oxygen, till they are raised to a red heat, or perhaps even to a higher temperature. If a stove filled with burning coal be cooled down to a low temperature by applying ice, the combustion will cease, the fire will go out. Our teacher at the academy on one occasion heated a steel watch-spring red hot and plunged it into a jar of oxygen, and the steel spring began quickly to burn with great fury." "You have given us good illustrations, Samuel, and that which is true of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen is true of substances in general. The effect of heat in producing chemical changes is very important everywhere. It is seen not only in the chemist's laboratory and in the artisan's shop, but also in the laboratory of Nature. Plant a grain of corn in midwinter: why does it not germinate and grow? Nothing is needed but the requisite heat to quicken the chemical affinities into action. Earth and air furnish the needed material for the growth of forest trees in winter as well as in summer, but the cold holds in check the chemical forces and prevents the requisite chemical combinations. No sooner does the sun quicken that atomic vibration or revolution which we call heat than vegetable growth begins. Heat is necessary for those chemical changes by which food is digested in the stomach and the processes of nutrition carried on in every part of the body. If a man finish his dinner with ice cream or ice water, the process of digestion is delayed till the contents of the stomach recover their proper temperature. This is one chief reason why warm, comfortable clothing is so very important, especially for children. All the vital processes are chemical processes: they are carried on through chemical affinities. Unless the body be kept at a suitable temperature, these processes are feeble and imperfect, nutrition and vital combustion are hindered, and diseases are engendered. "These, then, are the chief effects of heat. It expands bodies, weakens cohesive attraction, and quickens the chemical affinities into activity." Ansel again raised his hand. "What do you wish?" "Will you please tell us, Mr. Wilton, how this weakening of cohesive attraction is explained upon the dynamic theory of heat?" "I will do so with pleasure. The increased atomic motion in the heated body throws the atoms farther apart, as we have already learned, and by this increase of distance their attraction is diminished. If the earth were twice its present distance from the sun, their attraction for each other would be four times less than it now is; if its distance were three times as great, their attraction for each other would be nine times less. The attraction of gravitation diminishes in proportion as the square of the distance through which it must act increases. Perhaps cohesive attraction diminishes according to the same law, though the spaces are so small that this cannot be demonstrated, but it is certainly weakened by the expansion of bodies through the agency of heat." Here Peter raised his hand. "What will you say, Peter?" "Do not men heat and burn bricks, not to soften them, but to harden them?" "That is true," said Mr. Wilton; "but in this there is a process of drying as well as of heating, and the hardening is due chiefly to the complete drying by the intense heat. Too great heat will melt bricks while in the process of burning. I once heard a brick-burner say that he could melt the brick around the arches in his kiln in half an hour, if he pleased to put in fuel and let the fire burn. Indeed, almost every known solid substance has been fused by heat. Whether carbon has ever been melted is an unsettled question." "I would like to inquire," said Samuel, "why water will not burn. Is it because it evaporates before it reaches a sufficiently high temperature?" "This is a little aside from our subject, but the incombustibility of water is a provision of the Creator so very important that we will stop to notice it. I think, however, that by a little thought you yourself can answer the question. Tell me again what combustion is." "Combustion is commonly the combining of oxygen with some other substance called a combustible. The rusting of iron and the decay of organic bodies are forms of slow combustion." "Now tell us the composition of water." "Water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen--eight parts of oxygen to one of hydrogen, by weight, or two parts of hydrogen to one of oxygen, by measure." "How is water formed from these two gases? Are they mixed together as oxygen and nitrogen are mingled in the air, or are they chemically united?" "They are chemically united: they are burned together. When hydrogen burns, the product is water." "Water is then a _product_ of _combustion_. Can you not now tell why water is incombustible?" "I think I now see the reason. The oxygen, being itself the supporter of combustion, will not burn, and the hydrogen has been already once burned in the formation of water." "And that which is true of water is true, in a greater or less degree, of other products of combustion. The burning of charcoal produces carbonic acid, and carbonic acid will not burn because it is the production of combustion. A candle is extinguished by it as quickly as by water. By a recent invention carbonic acid is used to extinguish conflagrations. The carbon has once united with oxygen, and a second combination with an additional amount, or, as a chemist would say, with another equivalent, of oxygen is much more difficult." "I think," said Samuel, "I now understand why water will not burn, but will you please also to tell us why water puts out fire better than almost anything else?" "In order to extinguish fire one of two things must be done: either the supply of oxygen must be cut off or the combustible must be cooled down to a temperature below the burning point, when the combustion will cease of itself. When we shut the draught of an air-tight stove, we check the combustion by shutting off the full supply of oxygen. If we could wholly prevent the access of oxygen to the fuel, the fire would at once be extinguished. If oxygen should then be admitted again before the fuel had cooled down below the burning point, combustion would at once begin again. A blazing brand is extinguished by being thrust into ashes, because it is shut away from oxygen. In the same way we extinguish the flame of a candle with a tin extinguisher. On the other hand, fires often go out because the necessary temperature is not maintained. Water puts out fire in both these ways, but especially by the second. Water poured in torrents from a fire engine upon a fire forms a film of water, and the burning material shuts out the oxygen. But the water acts chiefly by lowering the temperature. No other known substance except hydrogen gas requires so much heat to raise it through a given number of degrees of temperature as water. As much heat is required to heat one pound of water as thirty pounds of mercury. Hence, water poured upon burning timber cools it to so low a temperature that it ceases to burn. "In addition to this, we may notice that wood saturated with water cannot be heated above the boiling point of water till the water is evaporated. As fast as the wood and the water rise or tend to rise above two hundred and twelve degrees, the water changes into steam and carries away the additional heat. The consumption of heat in the formation of vapor we must look at more carefully in a future lesson. We will suppose that a house is in flames. A fire engine throws a stream of cold water into the midst of the conflagration. The cold water, dashing against the burning wood, cools the heated surface; it is absorbed into the pores of the wood and hinders its rapid heating; a portion of the water, being changed into steam, carries off the heat; the steam, mingling with the flame, lowers the temperature of the burning gas, and in proportion as steam fills the surrounding space oxygen is driven away. A burning coal mine in England was once extinguished by forcing steam into it, thus driving out the air which supported the combustion and cooling down the burning coal. "The advantages which men receive from these agencies of heat are so manifest that we cannot help noticing them. I do not refer to the comfort of a pleasant temperature, nor the impossibility of living in a temperature extremely low, but to all those processes by which man subdues nature, provides for himself food, clothing, and dwelling-places, and builds up civilization. Heat is that force which enables man to accomplish his ends. Heat brings the iron from the native ore, and heat renders it malleable and plastic to be shaped for man's uses. Heat quickens the chemical affinities and renders the arts of civilized life a possibility. Heat brings together oxygen and carbon in ten thousand furnaces, and the heat engendered by the combustion, changed to force, drives the ponderous or nimble machinery which carries on the work of the world. Heat quickens the chemical affinities and causes the wheat to grow; heat prepares the wheat for man's food; and by the aid of heat that food is changed in man's body, nutrition goes on, the body is built up, waste matter is removed, and all the vital processes are supported. Without these agencies of heat--softening and subduing stubborn matter on the one side, and quickening its forces on the other--man could not exist. "Let me remind you that these agencies of heat are of God's devising. If the operations of heat are beneficent to man, it is because God wished to bless his creatures. I am not much given to moralizing, but when I see how completely these simple effects of heat meet man's wants, I cannot help remembering and admiring the wisdom of the great Designer. It is _God_ and not blind, unconscious Nature that is working." "This reminds me," said Samuel, "of the tradition in Greek mythology that Prometheus stole fire from Jupiter and brought it down to man in a reed as a precious treasure. It seems to me like a gift from heaven." "This mythological tradition has, however, one falsehood: there was no need that men should steal fire from the gods; God freely gave it. Heat is indeed a gift from heaven." CHAPTER V. CONVEYANCE AND VARIETIES OF HEAT. "To-day we review the modes in which heat passes or is conveyed from place to place. It is evident that if heat were confined to the very place or point where it is generated, it could subserve none of those uses to which it is now applied in the economy of Nature or in the works and arts of man. But heat passes from place to place with great facility, and by one method, with the speed of light, it tends to diffuse itself evenly through all; it seeks an equilibrium. The modes of its diffusion, or conveyance, are three in number. Ansel may name them." "Heat passes from place to place and from body to body by 'conduction,' by 'radiation,' and by 'convection.'" "What is meant, Ansel, by the 'conduction' of heat?" "The passing of heat from atom to atom and from particle to particle through a body is called conduction." "That is right. I will call upon Peter to give some illustrations of the conduction of heat." "The examples are so many," Peter answered, "that I hardly know what to mention first. If I hold a pin in the flame of a lamp, the part of the pin that touches the flame is first heated, but soon the heat runs along the whole length of the pin and burns my fingers. The parts of a stove which touch the fire are first heated, and from them the heat spreads through the whole stove. A pine-wood shaving, kindled at one end, is heated by conduction, but the heat passes through it very little faster than the flame follows. Heat escapes from our bodies by being slowly conducted through our clothing. There is no end to the examples of conduction which one might give." "We must not think of the conduction of heat," said Mr. Wilton, "as if it were a fluid slowly absorbed by a porous body, as water poured upon the ground soaks into it, or as water percolates through a lump of sugar and moistens the whole of it. We must remember that the transfer of heat is not a transfer of any substance, but a transfer of motion. One atom is set in motion, and strikes against another atom and sets that in motion, and thus motion is communicated from atom to atom and from molecule to molecule through the whole mass of matter till every atom is agitated with the heat vibrations. Do all bodies conduct heat with equal rapidity?" "No, sir," replied Ansel; "there is the greatest possible difference. Some substances are called good conductors, because heat permeates them so readily and rapidly; others conduct heat very slowly, and are called poor conductors or bad conductors." "That is right. Every child soon learns by experience to make a practical distinction of this kind. He very soon understands that he can hold a stick of wood without burning his hand, even though it be blazing at the other end, but that when a piece of iron is red hot at one end he must not take hold of it at the other. The child very soon learns to know the different feeling of a cotton night-gown from one of flannel, and the difference in apparent warmth between a linen pillow-case and a woolen blanket. After a room has been heated for a considerable time the various objects in it all become of the same temperature, and the same is true in a cold room; but how great the difference in the sensations produced by touching the oil-cloth and a woolen carpet in a cold room! Good conductors of heat, if hot, feel very hot; or if cold, feel very cold; while poor conductors make a much less decided impression. Why is this, Samuel?" "The good conductors receive heat or part with it very readily. If the good conductor be hotter than our bodies, it imparts its heat rapidly to our hand, and because we receive heat rapidly from it, it feels to us very hot. Or if it be colder than our bodies, it takes heat from our hands very rapidly, and gives the impression of being very cold. Poor conductors impart heat to the skin or take it away more slowly, and hence feel as if their temperature were more nearly like that of the body." "The conducting qualities of bodies," said Mr. Wilton, "seem to depend chiefly upon their structure or the arrangement of their atoms. Bodies which are compact and solid in their structure convey heat more rapidly than those which are loose and porous. Hence solids are better conductors than fluids, and fluids are better conductors than gases, and among solids the metals are better conductors than organized bodies, like wood or flesh, and better than the loose and porous minerals. In bodies of loose, porous, or fibrous texture, the continuity of the conductory substance is constantly broken. The particles in a mass of sawdust touch only at a few points, leaving frequent spaces. In woolen and cotton fabrics the points of junction of the fibres are very few, comparatively. For this reason the motion is not readily communicated from atom to atom. "The crystalline arrangement of atoms has an influence upon conduction of heat. Heat is conducted more rapidly in a direction parallel with the axis of crystallization than across that axis. Wood conducts heat more rapidly in the direction of the grain. This arrangement seems to be well adapted for keeping trees warm in winter. Their roots reach down into the earth, which remains warm in the coldest weather. This heat of the earth travels along the fibres up through the tree, while the heat conducted across the fibres escapes much more slowly into the open air. The bark also, being a very bad conductor, hinders the escape of heat. Of metals, silver is the best conductor. I will give you a brief table which will show the great difference in the conducting qualities of some of the metals. Counting the conducting qualities of silver as 100, the table is: 'Silver, 100; Gold, 53; Copper, 74; Iron, 12; Platinum, 8; German Silver, 6; Bismuth, 2.'--_Youmans._ "What is the second method by which heat passes from place to place?" "It is radiated," replied Ansel. "And what is radiation?" "It is motion in straight lines or rays diverging from a centre. From a hot body heat is passing off in straight lines in every direction. As a lamp radiates light, so does a hot body radiate heat." "Radiant heat," said Mr. Wilton, "moves with the same velocity as light, that is, one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles per second. It also follows the same general principles as light in all its motions. It is absorbed, reflected, or transmitted in the same manner as light. And this is true of either luminous heat--that is, heat radiated from a body which is red hot--or obscure, or dark heat. "As there are good and poor conductors, so there are good and bad radiators of heat. The radiation of heat depends upon three conditions: "1. Upon the temperature of the body. The higher the temperature, the more rapid and energetic is its radiation. "2. Upon the surface of the radiating body. A dull, rough surface radiates heat more rapidly than a surface bright and polished. "3. Upon the substance of the radiating surface. With surfaces equally smooth and bright, some substances radiate heat much better than others. A surface of varnish radiates heat much more powerfully than a surface of gold or silver. "Ansel, you may, if you can, explain the radiation of heat." "I can give no other explanation than that radiation is conduction through that subtle ether which is supposed to pervade all space." "Very well; perhaps that is as good an explanation as can be given. But it seems rather like the propagation of an impulse than the spreading of atomic vibrations in every direction. The motion is propagated in straight lines. If it be conduction, it must be carried on by different vibrations from those of ponderable substances. Heat, light, and electricity are supposed to be all propagated through the same theoretical ether. Sir Isaac Newton estimated the density of the ether as seventy thousand times less than the density of our atmosphere, and its elasticity in proportion to its density as four hundred and ninety millions times greater. But the very existence of this universally-diffused ether is a supposition made to account for the phenomena of light, heat, and electricity; and, of course, all its qualities must be theoretical also. Radiation is believed to be the propagation of a motion or impulse through an inconceivably rare and elastic ether. "Peter, what is the third method by which heat passes from place to place?" "Convection," was his reply. "What is meant by convection of heat?" "The conveyance of heat by carrying a heated body. If I remove a hot iron or a kettle of hot water, I must of course carry the heat which it contains." "A very good illustration of the convection of heat," said Mr. Wilton, "is seen in the common method of heating water. The heat is applied at the bottom of the vessel containing the water; as fast as the water at the bottom next the fire is heated, it rises and carries the heat to the top; cold water comes to take its place, and this in turn is heated and rises and carries heat to the top. This process is carried on till all the water comes to the same temperature. Thus water is heated by convection of heat. "A grander illustration is seen in winds and ocean currents. Warm winds carry heat enough to warm a continent, and the mighty ocean currents are still more efficient in transferring heat from one part of the earth to another. "Another point we need to understand. When radiant heat falls upon a body, what becomes of it?" "It is disposed of," answered Samuel, "in one of three ways: it may be reflected according to the same principles by which light is reflected; or it may be transmitted, that is, pass through the body; or it may be absorbed, that is, stop in it." "Very well stated, Samuel. In regard to reflection I need to say very little. You know how light is reflected from a polished surface, such as a lamp reflector: heat is reflected in the same manner. One fact you must bear in mind touching reflected heat: it does not heat the reflecting body. "There is no need of telling you that light passes through certain substances. It passes through gases and through some liquids and some solids. The best of glass, though it is so solid, interposes very little hindrance to the passage of light. Heat in like manner radiates through certain solids. Luminous heat is radiated through glass. Rock-salt transmits dark heat also. A plate of alum permits light to pass, but stops both luminous heat and dark heat. Remember that transmitted heat, as was said of reflected heat, does not heat the body through which it passes. I have seen boys make burning-glasses of ice. The heat passes through them and burns that upon which it is concentrated, while the ice itself through which the heat passes is not melted. "If a body have a good radiating surface, that is, if its surface be dull and rough, the heat which falls upon it will be mostly absorbed. The reflecting and absorbing qualities hold an inverse ratio to each other; the better the reflecting qualities, the worse the absorbing, and the worse the reflecting, the better the absorbing. Heat which is absorbed by a body commonly raises its temperature, and remains in the body till it is slowly radiated or is conducted away by the air or other bodies which come in contact with it. "What is that heat called, Ansel, which is absorbed by a body with no rise of temperature?" "It is called _latent_ heat." "That is the old and common expression, but what is meant by latent heat?" "The word _latent_ signifies _lying hidden_ or _concealed_. Latent heat, as you suggested in your first question, is that heat which a body receives without showing it by a change of temperature." "That name 'latent heat,'" said Mr. Wilton, "expresses the opinion of those who invented it; they supposed that heat was in some manner hidden in certain bodies. We must not suppose, however, that this latent heat continues to exist in bodies as heat; latent heat is that heat which is converted into force or some other motion than the atomic heat vibrations, and is employed otherwise than in raising the temperature. You will understand this best by an illustration. "Take one hundred pounds of ice at the temperature of thirty-two degrees, that is, as warm as is possible without melting. That one hundred pounds of ice will absorb heat which would raise one hundred pounds of ice water through one hundred and forty degrees, and by receiving that heat it is melted, but the water produced has the temperature of thirty-two degrees. It has received one hundred and forty degrees of heat, but its temperature is not raised a single degree. This one hundred and forty degrees of heat has been transmuted into force and employed in overcoming the crystalline attraction of the atoms of water. "Let that ice water at thirty-two degrees of temperature receive one hundred and eighty degrees of heat, and the water rises to two hundred and twelve degrees, the temperature of boiling. But whatever additional heat is absorbed brings no increase of temperature, but transforms the water into steam. It is employed in overcoming the cohesive attraction of the molecules of water and changing the liquid to a gas. About one thousand degrees of heat is thus expended, but the steam which is produced has only the temperature of two hundred and twelve degrees. If the process be reversed, the steam gives up, as it is said, the one thousand degrees of heat in returning to the condition of water and the one hundred and forty degrees in resuming the crystalline structure of ice. The heat which was employed as force in overcoming the atomic and molecular attractions is transmuted again to heat, and shows itself in raising the temperature. And that which is true of water is true of any other substance in changing its form from a solid to a liquid or from a liquid to a gas, or the opposite. In an amount different for each kind of matter, in all these changes of condition, heat is transmuted to force or force to heat. "These transmutations are going on ceaselessly in the operations of Nature, and without understanding them we cannot appreciate the wonderful operations of heat in the world. The heat of the sun beams upon the ocean; the greater part of that heat is expended as force in overcoming the molecular attraction of water, thus converting it to vapor, and in raising that vapor to the higher regions of the atmosphere. This heat-force, or, as we might call it, 'sunpower,' expended upon the earth, amounts to thousands of millions of horse-power daily. [Illustration: TRANSMUTATION of HEAT. Page 113.] "Examples of the transmutation of force into heat abound everywhere. A boy strikes his heel upon the stone pavement; from the point of contact between the stone and the steel points in his boot heel sparks of fire fly out. Force is changed to heat so intense that particles of steel are set on fire. Savages who have no better methods of kindling fire rub dry wood together till the sticks ignite. The force expended in overcoming the friction is changed to heat. In the combustion of coal beneath the steam boiler we see both processes going on. The atoms of carbon dash against the atoms of oxygen, and the force of the collision generates the heat of the combustion. This heat, born thus of force, is again transmuted to force, and drives the engine and the machinery attached. In our study of God's management of heat we shall constantly meet with these changes. You will need, therefore, to study carefully this subject of latent heat. "Dr. Joule, of Manchester, England, has discovered the ratio between heat and force, that is, the amount of force which by transmutation produces any given amount of heat. The force of a one-pound weight which has fallen one foot is taken as the unit of force, and the amount of heat which is required to raise one pound of water one degree is taken as the unit of heat. By many and various careful experiments, Dr. Joule demonstrated that 772 units of force are the equivalent of one unit of heat. A pound weight falling 772 feet, or 772 pounds falling one foot, and then arrested, produces heat sufficient to raise one pound of water one degree. The result is the same whatever the method by which the force is expended. If water be agitated or shaken, if sticks of wood or iron plates be rubbed together, if an anvil be struck with a hammer, or if a bar of iron or copper be moved back and forth between the poles of an electromagnet, the force expended is changed to heat. You must remember, however, that force becomes heat only so far as the force is actually expended, or used up so that it no longer exists as force. "These conclusions are supported by other beautiful experiments. 'An electric current which, by resistance in passing through an imperfect conductor, produces heat sufficient to raise one pound of water one degree, sets free an amount of hydrogen which, when burned, raises exactly one pound of water one degree. Again, the same amount of electricity will produce an attractive magnetic force by which a weight of 772 pounds may be raised one foot high.'--_Youmans._ We conclude from experiments like these that heat, mechanical force, and electricity are interchangeable forces; they may be transmuted the one into another. "By this principle of the transmutation of heat and mechanical force we explain the production of heat by compression and the loss of heat by expansion. Samuel, you may state the fact upon this point." "If any substance be suddenly compressed," answered Samuel, "heat appears; if it be expanded, cold is produced. Since gases expand or yield to pressure so readily, they furnish the best illustration of this principle." "The suddenness of the compression or expansion," said Mr. Wilton, "is a matter of no consequence. The effect is the same whether the operation be sudden or slow, but if the compression or expansion be slow, the heat or cold generated is less apparent; the heat is dissipated as fast as produced and the colder gas is warmed by the vessel which contains it. Ansel, how shall we explain this?" "I cannot explain it, sir." "The explanation is very simple," said Mr. Wilton. "Mechanical force is employed in the compression of the gas; the force is expended and used up upon the gas, and appears again in the form of atomic heat motion. In the expansion of gases the operation is just the reverse; the atomic heat motion is expended in producing expansion, and hence disappears as heat. The general principle is that no force can be expended in two ways at the same time. "One other point we must notice to-day, that is, _specific heat_. What is understood, Ansel, by this term, specific heat?" "The relative amount of heat which different substances require to raise their temperature through any given number of degrees." "That is right. I think that you all must have noticed that it requires much more heat to raise the temperature of some bodies than others. What an amount of heat is required to raise the temperature of water! That heat which will raise one pound of water one degree will cause an equal increase of temperature in five pounds of sulphur, or four pounds of air, or nine pounds of iron, or eleven pounds of copper, or thirty pounds of mercury, lead, or gold. This is what is meant by saying that one substance has a greater capacity for heat than another. The specific heat of water is greater than that of any other known substance except hydrogen gas. This fact, taken in connection with its great specific latent heat and its poor conducting qualities, renders it exceedingly important in regulating climate and moderating extremes of temperature; of this you will be reminded very often as our lessons go on. "No law or principle determining the specific heat of the various elements and explaining the different capacities for heat has as yet been discovered. It has been suggested that specific heat depends upon the number of atoms, that it holds an inverse ratio to their combining numbers, or, what is the same thing, a direct ratio to the number of atoms. This would harmonize well with the dynamic theory of heat, but the harmony between the specific heat of substances and the number of atoms is not sufficiently uniform to establish this supposition. "This completes our review of first principles. I hope that this not very entertaining review of your academic studies has not wearied you of the very word _heat_ and worn out your interest in examining God's management of heat before making a beginning." "I think," said Samuel, "that we are not in the habit of becoming disgusted with our studies." "You may expect," continued Mr. Wilton, "if the past has been interesting to you, that the lessons to come will prove more interesting still. Next week we shall consider the abundant provision which the Creator has made for warming the earth." And let me say to you, patient reader, that if I had known that you were as familiar with the laws and principles of heat as Ansel, Peter, and Samuel seem to have been, this and the preceeding chapter would not have been written. However dull this review may have seemed to you, it was needful, perhaps, for others, that they might understand the wonderful works of God which we shall now proceed to examine. And, reader, do not forget that heat itself, that subtle motion and mighty force, with all its laws and principles, is one of God's works. Already have we been looking at the Creator's handiwork. Already have we been trying to trace out the thoughts of God as they are written in the "Bible of Nature." The thoughts of God are great and wonderful. It has been useful and interesting to read thus far in this book written with the finger of the Creator of worlds and of man, even if we turn not another page. CHAPTER VI. MANAGEMENT AND SOURCES OF HEAT. While the lessons which have been reported were going on, the religious interest in the church was deepening. Mr. Wilton did not cease to make his sermons instructive, but, in addition to the instruction, he made them more and more pungent and persuasive. He aimed to gather up the impressions and convictions already wrought in the minds of his hearers and combine them for united and immediate effect. He believed that this was to be a reaping-time. Mr. Hume was becoming interested, not because he had been at church, for he had not been there, but the Holy Spirit of God was working upon his heart. He was becoming uneasy in his unbelief. For some reason, he knew not why, his opinions were becoming more and more unsettled. He did not like to go to the house of God; his self-will and pride of consistency rebelled against the thought of hearing and believing the gospel; but he was restless and discontented away from the place of worship. His associations with his infidel comrades grew distasteful. His Sundays were days of distress: with his attention relieved from business cares, thoughts of God and eternity pressed upon him, and he could not escape them. At length he determined to go and hear Mr. Wilton again: perhaps he should hear something which he could so positively reject as to set his mind at rest. He went, accordingly, the next Lord's Day, and heard a very impressive sermon. The text for the forenoon was Ps. lxvi. 5: "Come and see the works of God: he is terrible in his doing toward the children of men." The sermon gave first a brief and rapid review of some striking displays of God's displeasure at the sins of men: that ancient world of men whose "thoughts were only evil continually" he overwhelmed with the flood; he burned with fire from heaven Sodom and Gomorrah, Zeboim and Admah, those lascivious and festering cities of the plain; he sent his torturing and consuming plagues upon the Egyptians, and sunk the army of Pharoah like a stone in the deep waters of the Red Sea: "they sank as lead in the mighty waters;" he caused the earth to open and receive Korah and his adherents, and bade his angel in "one night" to touch with death the thousands of Sennacherib's army. This record of divine wrath against evil-doers has startled the consciences of wicked men, and will continue to startle them so long as the ungodly live upon the earth. It is easy for unbelievers to call the word of God a record of fabulous wonders, but that record lives and will live, and its words assert their divinity by touching and burning the consciences of men as if they were tongues of fire. "But to the thoughtful man," said Mr. Wilton, "there is a manifestation of God's displeasure at sin even more impressive than these miraculous judgments. The Creator has built his wrath against sin into the very fabric of the universe; he has written it upon the very atoms and elements of matter and of mind, and graved it upon the 'nature of things.' The forces of Nature are all instinct with holy wrath against ungodliness. Evil doing works out evil consequences by the regular course of nature. Babylon, Nineveh, and Tyre were great and prosperous, and as mighty in wickedness as in commerce and war. In the height of their prosperity God denounced upon them disaster and desolation, and by the natural processes of evil their decay and destruction came upon them. No miracle broke the harmony of their mighty march to decay and the silence of death. Great nations have perished, but not till they became corrupt. Rome fell, but luxury first gendered luxuriant vices, and vices enervated her hardihood and undermined the defences of her courage. No righteous nation ever perished. No nation ever fell into decay till ripe in sin and ready for moral putrefaction. But against wicked and corrupt nations wars and desolations are determined, and the end thereof is with a flood. The very forces of Nature seem allied in firm compact with the laws of God, ready with resistless hand to avenge their transgression and to visit evil upon evil-doers. This steady march of all the forces of the world in bringing decay and wretchedness upon sinners is more impressive than any single desultory example of avenging wrath. "But perhaps an unbeliever replies, 'Not so; there is a natural law of development, decay, and death, apart from sin. Trees grow up, become old, and die. Men pass from childhood up to manhood, and from manhood down to second childhood, and return to the dust whence they came. By a like principle, nations pass through similar changes of development, decay, and desolation. But in all this there is no manifestation of divine favor or disfavor.' "This is narrow and false reasoning. If a single great city had become corrupt while all the world beside remained righteous, and God had denounced his displeasure upon it and had executed his wrath by sudden and tremendous judgment, that one city standing out in single and solitary ungodliness and desolation, who would deny, who could deny, that the fate of that unhappy city was a manifestation of divine displeasure? If a second example were made of a second ungodly city, would the expression of divine wrath be weakened? Nay; every man would say that it is made stronger. What if a third example be made of a third city? What if every wicked city is made an example? What if God embody his displeasure at evil-doing in the structure of the world, and give to the very atoms of matter and the elements of mind such natures that by the working of their own proper forces, without a miracle, they shall bring pain and evil, decay and death, upon the ungodly? What is this but writing his wrath against sin upon the earth and sky, upon matter and the consciences of men, declaring by this that till the heavens and the earth and the spirits of men be no more he will never withdraw his indignation? This is what God has done. The wicked man sets in motion the machinery which works out his own everlasting undoing. His own hand sows the seeds of death, and as those seeds germinate they strike their roots into his corruptions and draw their nourishment from his evil life. Thus do sinners go on 'treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgments of God.' "But remember that God has not left the world in these later ages without the testimony of wrathful judgments which ought to startle and alarm the consciences of the wicked like the fires of Sodom. Let me give you what I suppose to be a true record of the fate which befell a band of bold blasphemers. In that uprising of infidelity which took place near the close of the last century there was formed at Newburg, N. Y., through the influence of a man known as 'Blind Palmer,' an association of infidels under the name of the Druidical Society. The object of the society was to uproot and destroy revealed religion. In pursuit of this object they descended to the most blasphemous mockery. At one of their meetings they burned the Bible, baptized a cat, partook of the bread and wine as appointed for the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, and gave the elements to a dog. Then the wrath of God broke out upon them. 'On the evening of that very day he who had administered the mock sacrament was attacked with a violent inflammatory disease; his inflamed eyeballs were protruded from their sockets; his tongue was swollen, and he died before morning in great bodily and mental agony. Dr. H----, another of the same party, was found dead in his bed the next morning. D---- D----, a printer who was present, three days after fell in a fit, and died immediately. In a few days three others were drowned. Within five years from the time the Druidical Society was organized all the thirty-six original members--actors in the blasphemous ceremonies spoken of--died in some strange or unnatural manner. Two were starved to death, seven were drowned, eight were shot, five committed suicide, seven died on the gallows, one was frozen to death, and three died, the record says, _accidentally_.' Be sure of this: God has not left the world nor forgotten his judgments against his enemies, neither is he tied up and hampered by the laws of Nature. 'God is angry with the wicked every day. If he turn not, he will whet his sword: he hath bent his bow and made it ready. He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death.' "But remember, also, that God does not limit his expression of wrath to these natural agencies. The smile of God beams direct upon the soul as the warm rays of the sun fall upon the cold earth, and the frown of God throws a shadow which darkens the soul with the gloom of eternal death." This discourse stirred the mind of Mr. Hume in a wonderful manner. The story of God's judgments upon wicked men and dissolute cities he had read many a time in his boyhood, but the rapid review of them by Mr. Wilton seemed to bring them up with a lifelike vividness. And that view of the forces of Nature, as allied with the moral laws of God to work out wrath upon evil-doers, was new to him, but his own mind quick as thought suggested many more illustrations than Mr. Wilton had time to give. He remembered that all manner of vices--drunkenness, lust, devotion to gay, sensual pleasures--bring ruin to men. He had noticed that the saddest faces are those of worn-out lovers of pleasure, and he knew that lovers of pleasure are very quickly worn out--that five years of sensuality will waste the powers of life more than fifty years of good work. He knew also that infidels and blasphemers, whatever else they might be, were unhappy men, and died joyless, foreboding deaths. He was not exactly angry, but his heart rebelled against thus being held by the mighty power of God, willing or unwilling, and against the thought that even Nature herself had conspired against him. It seemed to him hard that he was born into such a world, and that there was no escape from it. He did not consider at the moment that God and his works were against him only because he was against God, and that by submitting to God in loving obedience all the forces of God's world and God's providential government would turn in his favor--"that all things work together for good to them that love God." At length better thoughts came to him. "I must know," he said to himself, "whether these things are so. I have never examined the subject to discover the truth, but have tried to find reasons for disbelieving the Bible and denying the gospel. I ought to look at the other side. If Nature and Nature's God have blessings in store for the willing and the obedient, why should not I know this and receive my share?" Under the impulse of thoughts like these he formed the sudden resolution to join Mr. Wilton's Bible class--that is, if he would receive him willingly, of which he had no small doubt. Coming directly forward at the proper time, he said to Mr. Wilton: "I have learned what your class is studying, and should like, I hardly know why, to join your class for a few Sundays, if you are entirely willing." Mr. Wilton, of course, did not know the exact state of Mr. Hume's mind; he did not know but that he came with a contentious spirit to bring up objections and propose hard questions; but he felt certain that, whatever his state of mind, the Spirit of God was bringing him to take this step. He had prayed for him; in prayer his soul had travailed in pain for him; and he felt that by way of the throne of grace he had obtained a hold upon Mr. Hume--that the Holy Spirit had bound a cord between them which could not be broken. He believed, therefore, that, whether he came penitent or angry, good would result from his coming. He gave him, therefore, a hearty welcome. "I am not only willing," he said, "but very glad, to have you come; and as I know that you have kept yourself informed of the latest phases of modern science, I hope we shall have your help in unfolding the subject which we are engaged in studying. I think you will be able to do us good." "Your kind welcome ought certainly to incline me to do anything which I can to help the interest of your study, but I only ask the privilege of sitting with your class as a silent listener." The Sunday-school opened as usual, and the classes entered upon their work. "You have come in, Mr. Hume, at just the proper point in the progress of our lessons," said Mr. Wilton. "We have been preparing the way by a brief review of the laws of heat. We have gone over the effects of heat; the conduction, radiation, and convection of heat; thermal reflection, absorption, and transmission; specific and latent heat. We have tried to form a conception of the existence and operations of heat according to the dynamic theory that heat is a mode of atomic motion. This review would have had little interest to you. We are now prepared to look at the goodness and wisdom of God in the management of heat. We are not trying to prove the existence of a Creator and Governor--we are only looking at the mighty and wise works of that God in whom we already believe. We shall find the works of God planned and wrought out with wondrous skill, and that wonderful skill is employed in the interest of goodness. God has planned and wrought for the benefit of his creatures. His wisdom and goodness are exhibited on the grandest scale and in gigantic proportions. This is all that is needed practically to demonstrate the existence of God. A good conscience does the rest. Being once assured that there is a Creator, a good conscience leaps to the conclusion that we ought to obey and serve him. Nay, the very work and existence of a conscience implies a divine Lawgiver and Ruler. To a good conscience a God is a necessity. But as we are not now attempting to show that there is a God, but to study his works, we will pass this point. "With respect to the subject before us, let us first notice that heat is a necessity to the world and to man, and that God has made ample provision for that need. What the condition of the world would be without heat we can only conjecture. In the polar regions a natural temperature of seventy degrees below zero has been observed. At this temperature all the water upon the globe would turn to ice hard as adamant; all vegetation would cease, and with the disappearance of vegetable life all animal life must perish. The whole earth would be a frozen, lifeless, silent waste in the midst of silent space. Some lines in Byron's picture of universal darkness would fitly describe the state of the world: 'The waves are dead, the tides are in their grave, The winds are withered in the stagnant air, And the clouds are perished.' This description would be no figure, for motion as well as life depends upon heat. Yet seventy degrees below zero is but the beginning of cold. 'By mixing liquid protoxide of nitrogen with bisulphate of carbon in a vacuum, M. Natterer produced a temperature of two hundred and twenty degrees below zero.' At this temperature some of the so-called permanent gases--as carbonic acid, chlorine, and ammonia--can be compressed into liquids, and it is believed that in the complete absence of all heat all the gases would become solids. But by the agency of heat the world teems with active life. Vegetation clothes the earth with a garment of beauty; and earth, air, and sea swarm with living creatures full of enjoyment. This great need of the world is bountifully supplied. The power and wisdom of God are employed in producing happiness. "This, however, is but a part of the benefit which heat confers upon the world. The chief inhabitant of the earth is man, and man was created for something higher than bare existence. He was created for civilization and culture. The savage state is not, as some self-styled philosophers dream, the natural state of man. Nothing is so much against Nature. The natural state is that condition in which he attains the fullest development. Let a brute be placed in so unfavorable conditions that his growth is dwarfed and his natural instincts are not called into exercise, and no one would look upon that as a natural state. But man, wild, uncultured, undeveloped, is spoken of as being in his natural state. There could be no greater mistake. Culture and civilization are according to Nature, but culture and civilization require that man should get the mastery of Nature and subdue her forces. Till man gets the victory over the forces of this rough world, he spends a precarious existence in a hard struggle to gain a meagre support for his animal life. But when once science brings art, and the mastery of Nature is gained, man can rise into culture and beauty. Opportunity is given for development. He blossoms into greatness and strength. Ideal and spiritual ends take the place of mere subsistence. "But by what agency does man achieve the mastery of Nature? By the agency of heat. By the aid of heat man subdues the world. Heat brings the lustrous metal from its native ore; heat fashions the metal into a thousand shapes for the use of men; heat reigns as king in the curious processes of the chemist's laboratory, and the laboratory is the mother of all those modern arts which bless and beautify human life. By heat man prepares his food; by heat he drives his machinery; by heat he outstrips the flight of the winds; by heat he turns winter into summer and in his own dwelling makes for himself a perpetual springtime. For these purposes of human comfort and culture, God has provided generous stores of heat and placed them under man's control. He has placed in man's hands the means by which he can generate a heat which devours the hardest metals like stubble and a cold greater by far than Nature ever produces. We see that the Creator has provided for man as a being susceptible of culture and development, as a being of soul and sentiment, of spirit and aspiration. God has fitted the world to be the dwelling-place of spiritual beings like man." "I beg your pardon," said Mr. Hume at this point, "that the first word I speak in your class should be a question which amounts to an objection." "I shall be glad," said Mr. Wilton, "to hear your question, even though it be an objection. I will also answer it if I can." "I wished to ask why it is, if God designed to provide for man's wants, that man can supply his wants, especially his higher wants--the wants of his intellectual and spiritual nature--only with the greatest difficulty and toil? The brutes supply their need with comparative ease, but man with boundless thought and labor." "Your question is an important one, and deserves an answer. For myself, I look upon the fact to which you refer as one of the many points in which this world is adapted to human needs. Man is put in a condition which requires boundless thought and toil for the supply of his higher wants just because he possesses a nobler nature and such thought and exertion are needed for its development. Which is the more desirable condition for a young man to be placed in--one in which his every wish is anticipated and his every aspiration is gratified without exertion on his own part, or one in which opportunity and means are furnished for self-help, one in which he can supply his wants and satisfy his aspirations only by the exercise of his best abilities? Which will encourage the larger manliness and nurture the higher culture and strength? He who has no need for exertion rises at best only to a soft and feeble luxury, without mental vigor or moral force. What does man need besides scope and reward for exertion? Effort and struggle are necessities of our nature. This is especially true of man's higher faculties. Human greatness and goodness are not created by a word: they must be developed by exertion. For this reason God has made exertion necessary, and as much more necessary with man than with the brutes as his culture is more the result of voluntary, intelligent exertion. Does this explanation seem to you satisfactory, Mr. Hume?" "I have no fault to find with it; I must think of it." "Very well, then; if no other one has a question to ask, we will look at another subject. We will survey the storehouses of heat which God has prepared for warming the earth. Samuel, you may name the first great source of heat." "I think, sir, that the sun is the chief source of heat." "We certainly receive the larger part of our heat from the sun. No one can doubt this. So much of our heat comes from the sun that the temperature of the earth varies according to the sun's heat, as if that were the only supply. If but a fleecy cloud pass between the sun and the earth, we feel a decided change of temperature. A few hours less of sunshine each day, and a few degrees more of inclination to the sun's rays, change summer to winter and make the difference between the torrid and the frigid zones. Withdraw the heat of the sun altogether, and the whole world would become a desert of frozen death." "What is the cause of the sun's heat?" asked Peter. "You have asked a question which I cannot answer, and which no man can answer. The most careful and patient observations have been made to discover if possible the constitution of the sun; learned and curious conjectures have been brought forward to explain the source of its heat; but the positive results have not been very large. It is certain that the sun is a globe revolving upon its axis in a period of twenty-five days, nine hours, and thirty-six minutes. This is known by the motion of dark spots upon its surface. The appearance of the sun as seen through a telescope is that of a globe of fire, its surface often in a state of violent agitation and flecked here and there with dark, irregular, changeable spots. These spots are sometimes of enormous dimensions--thirty thousand or fifty thousand miles in diameter. They present a dark centre with a narrow border or penumbra of lighter shade. To account for these spots, it has been conjectured that the body of the sun is dark, but surrounded by a double envelope of clouds, the outer layer of which is intensely luminous. Openings in such enveloping clouds would present an appearance like the spots upon the sun. According to this supposition, the heat and light of the sun proceed, not from the body of the sun, but from this luminous enveloping cloud. But granting that this supposition is true, it gives no explanation of the origin of the sun's heat. Laplace conjectured that the sun is a globe of fire in a state of violent, explosive conflagration, and that the spots are enormous crater-like caverns in its surface. Newton conjectured that comets falling into the sun and being consumed feed the solar fires and maintain its temperature. The reception of the dynamic theory of heat has led to the revival, in a modified form, of this conjecture of Newton. It is suggested that meteors or meteoric matter falling into the sun generates its heat by the force of concussion. To show that the intense heat of the sun might be thus generated, elaborate calculations have been made. It has been demonstrated that if the sun were a solid mass of anthracite coal, its combustion would maintain its heat at its present rate of emission only five thousand years, while the falling of the planet Jupiter into the sun would generate an equal amount of heat for thirty-five thousand years. A lump of coal falling from the earth to the sun would produce three thousand times more heat by the concussion than by its combustion. "The nearest approach that has been made, of an exact and scientific kind, toward determining the constitution of the sun's surface has resulted from an examination of the _solar spectrum_. A ray of light, by passing through a triangular prism of glass, is, as you know, divided into its elements, or constituent colors. The ray of light is spread out like a half-open fan. This divided and expanded ray, thrown upon a screen, is called the spectrum. An examination of the solar spectrum by a microscope shows certain fine dark lines across it. The lines are invariably the same in their position and grouping. The spectrum of the stellar light is found to differ from that of the solar light, and the light of one star differs from that of another star. Light from incandescent metallic vapors gives bright lines across the spectrum. Each metal has its own number, position, grouping, and color of these spectral lines. By comparing the solar spectrum with the spectra of the various metals--the processes are curious and the explanation difficult to be understood--corresponding lines are discovered, and the conclusion is reached that the sun's atmosphere contains the vapors of several of our well-known metals, as iron, nickel, sodium, potassium, and others. This is a most curious and marvelous scientific feat, to make an approximate chemical analysis of the sun and stars by means of their light. The conclusions, however, seem trustworthy. "Can you tell us, Ansel, whether the earth receives heat from the moon and stars?" "I cannot, sir." "I should be glad, Mr. Hume, to have you instruct us upon this point." "In regard to the fixed stars," answered Mr. Hume, "counting them as the remote suns of other planetary systems, we must believe that they radiate more or less heat upon the earth; some indeed have extravagantly maintained that we receive from them nearly as much heat as from the sun. The heat received from them is so small that we perceive no difference whether they be hidden, or shine with their utmost brilliancy. I do not know that investigations have been made to determine scientifically their exact thermal influence upon the earth. But little more can be said about the heat of the moon. The light of the full moon, concentrated by a two-foot burning-glass and thrown upon the bulb of the most delicate thermometer, produces no perceptible effect. By means of the electroscope or galvanometer, it is said, however, that the moon's heat has been detected. At a late scientific convention held in Chicago, Prof. Elias Loomis read a paper, in which he stated that Mr. Harrison of England, by a comparison of observations made for sixteen years at Greenwich, nine years at Oxford, and sixteen years at Berlin, has discovered that the moon exerts a sensible influence upon the temperature of the earth, the highest temperature occurring from six to nine days after the new moon and the lowest about four days after the full moon. The conclusion, the opposite of what we should naturally expect--the higher temperature occurring when the enlightened face of the moon is turned from the earth--was explained by supposing the moon's heat to be dark heat which would be absorbed by the vapors and the clouds, and thus tend to warm and dissipate them. By the dispersion of the clouds, the radiation of heat from the earth's surface would go on more rapidly and the temperature would fall. According to this explanation, the lunar heat reduces instead of raising the temperature of the earth. The difference of temperature due to the moon's influence Mr. Harrison believed to be two and a half degrees. Upon extending his calculations through forty-three years of observations made at Greenwich, he found the difference reduced to about one degree. As for myself, I confess myself still a skeptic touching the supposed influence of the moon upon temperature." "Upon that subject, I think," said Mr. Wilton, "that we must wait patiently for more light. The popular superstitions which refer sickness and health, and every kind of good or evil fortune, to the benign or malignant influence of the moon, we, of course, must reject. Samuel, will you name the second chief source of heat?" "I am obliged to answer as Ansel answered just now--I cannot tell. The enormous amount of wood and coal burned amounts to something, but this can have very little effect upon the temperature of the earth." "The second great store of heat is the internal heat of the earth," said Mr. Wilton. "The importance of this store of heat we can easily understand by considering that the earth is a mass of molten mineral matter cooled and hardened upon the surface. The crust upon which we live is warmed from beneath by an ocean, or rather a globe, a world, of glowing molten rock. Deep excavations have been made in mining operations, and artesian wells have been bored to still greater depths--as deep as two thousand, three thousand, or thirty-five hundred feet. The heat of the sun penetrates not more than seventy-five or a hundred feet; below that depth the temperature of the earth remains the same throughout the year. Below the point of constant temperature the heat of the earth is found to increase regularly and constantly. The rate of increase varies in different regions, but the average rate is about one degree of temperature for each fifty or sixty feet of descent. From this rate of increase it is easy to calculate the temperature at any given depth. At a depth of less than two miles water would boil. At twelve miles in depth the rock becomes incandescent. At twenty-two miles silver melts, at twenty-four miles gold melts, and at thirty-five miles cast iron becomes liquid. Volcanic eruptions also demonstrate the existence of immense masses of molten rock in the interior of the earth; and we can account for the existence of volcanoes only by supposing that they now communicate or once communicated with the deep interior heat of the earth. The thickness of the earth's crust is, however, a matter of conjecture. The melting point of different substances rises as the pressure upon them increases, and as the density of the rock increases its conducting power becomes greater. The crust of the earth, therefore, may be fifty miles in thickness, or it may be one hundred miles or two hundred or three hundred miles. The effect of this internal heat in maintaining the temperature of the earth must be very great." "I want to ask," said Peter, "how this internal heat came to exist, and how it is maintained?" "This, like your former question, is altogether beyond our knowledge. All that we certainly know is that God made it thus. The process of creation, if indeed God did not create the earth by a word, without a process, is a matter of sublimest and most venturesome conjecture. According to the opinion of some, the elements of which the earth is composed were created separate and uncombined, and were suffered afterward to unite by their chemical affinities. This chemical combination would be nothing else than a tremendous conflagration, and the result would be the most intense heat of which we can form a conception. Others have dreamed of a 'fire-mist' created of God and by some means condensed into worlds. The temperature of the earth is maintained, so far as we know, only by the poor conducting quality of the enveloping crust preventing its cooling. At the present rate of radiation, millions of years would be required to render the change of temperature perceptible. "What is the third great natural source of heat? I will ask Mr. Hume." "Mechanical action, or force transmuted to heat." "Will you please explain this?" "Strictly speaking," said Mr. Hume, "this is not to be counted an original source of heat. But heat is used in the production of winds and waves, the flow of rivers, and all the ceaseless activities of the world, and this force reappears from time to time transmuted again to heat. Whenever in the friction of air and of water, in the dashing of matter against matter and force against force, motion and force seem to be lost, heat is produced. The water of the sea after long storms is said to be sensibly warmed. We can appreciate the amount of heat generated in this manner only by considering in how many thousand ways force is meeting force and motion is destroyed. All this lost motion--lost as sensible motion--reappears as atomic motion, that is, as heat. Such heat has been applied to artificial uses. Heat generated by the friction of iron plates ground together has been used for heating buildings." "And this transmutation of living force and heat," added Mr. Wilton, "is but one of many illustrations of God's economy in the management of heat. Nothing is wasted. The voices of Nature all echo the words of Jesus: 'Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.' "The fourth source of heat is chemical action. What is the chief form of this which is used for the production of heat? Samuel may tell us." "Combustion, I think, sir." "That is right; and the most common form of combustion is the combination of carbon with oxygen. This is commonly employed, not because it generates the most intense heat, but because carbon exists so abundantly, and is the most available and the cheapest. The most common form of carbon is wood and coal. This is that storehouse of heat which God has placed in man's keeping. Without this the larger part of the earth's surface would be uninhabitable. This renders culture and civilization possible. Without it the arts could have no existence. The key of this storehouse of heat God has given to man, so that he may enter in and use its treasures at his pleasure. In the finer arts where very great heat is required, hydrogen is used in place of carbon. Jets of oxygen and hydrogen gas thrown together constitute what is called the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, and generate the intensest heat which can be produced by man. "Another source of heat not often mentioned is electrical force. This, like mechanical force, may be transmuted into heat. An electric current sent through an insufficient or poor conductor heats it, and, if the current be sufficiently strong, consumes it. Thus lightning-rods are sometimes melted and buildings set on fire. "These, then, are the natural reservoirs of heat: 1, the sun and other heavenly bodies; 2, the internal heat of the earth; 3, living force, or motion; 4, chemical action; 5, electric force. "We can hardly over-estimate the abundance of these natural supplies of heat. The world is warmed on the most munificent scale. The earth receives from the sun heat sufficient to boil three hundred cubic miles of ice water per hour, and the whole sum of the sun's heat would boil 700,000,000,000 cubic miles of ice water in the same time, that is, the heat radiated by the sun would boil a mass of ice water of the size of our globe in twenty-five minutes. "The amount of carbon provided by the Creator is enormous beyond conception. Vast regions of country are covered with dense forests, but the fuel from the forests is but a handful in comparison with the fuel stored up in coal-beds below the surface of the earth. Mr. Mitchel estimated the extent of the coal-beds of a portion of Europe as follows: Great Britain, 12,000 square miles; Spain, 3500; France, 1700; Belgium, 5180. Mr. R. C. Taylor has made a like estimate for North America, giving to British America 18,000 and to the United States 134,000 square miles. "These estimates, you will notice, say nothing of Asia, Africa, South America, or the islands of the sea, and include only the smaller part of Europe. In the United States, also, new coal-fields are constantly discovered. The supply of carbon for fuel seems exhaustless. In the British islands about 100,000,000 tons of coal are mined annually. At this rate the known supply would last for a thousand years. In the United States the supply has no known limit. "You will keep in mind that this supply of heat is also a supply of mechanical force. The coal-fields are an exhaustless storehouse of heat and power. They warm the dwellings of man and drive millions of engines working with the strength of Titans for human welfare. "In this bountiful supply of heat to warm the earth and serve human needs must we not see a kind design on the part of the Creator? God has provided that which the world needs. He has provided without stint or limit. The general heating of the globe he accomplishes by his own power. He has provided for human culture, development, and happiness by placing stores of heat under man's control. He has furnished scope and means and encouragement for achieving greatness and goodness. He has put man in the condition which a wise father would desire for his son. "In our next lesson we will look at the preservation and distribution of heat, some of the primary elements and arrangements upon which the temperature of the earth depends." CHAPTER VII. PRESERVATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF HEAT. Another Lord's Day comes, and the members of the class are, as usual, all in their places. They find the subject increasing in interest after leaving the review of the laws and principles of heat. "A week ago," said Mr. Wilton, "we looked at the chief sources of heat. These are the sun, the internal heat of the earth, chemical action, in which combustion is most important, electrical action, and mechanical action, or 'living force.' The amount of heat furnished from these sources is above all comprehension. The Creator seems bountiful even to prodigality in supplying heat for the needs of the world and the uses of man. But with all this largeness of supply the provision would prove wholly inadequate if it were not prudently husbanded and all the avenues of waste carefully closed. Men of ample incomes sometimes come to want from too free expenditure. Their incomes are large, but their expenses are larger. So it would prove in respect to heat if Nature were not as prudent in saving as she is bountiful in providing. Will some one mention some of the general methods by which the waste of heat is prevented?" No one answered. Mr. Hume did not think it best to put himself forward in answering questions, and therefore answered only when personally addressed. The others were silent because they had nothing to say. "I see that I shall have to suggest the answer. Ansel, what part of the atmosphere is warmest?" "The bottom, I suppose, for the higher a man goes up upon the lofty mountains or in a balloon, the colder he finds the air." "That is right; and we need to ascend only about three miles, even in the tropics, to reach the region of perpetual snow, while in the polar regions the line of perpetual freezing comes down to the sea level. What would be the effect, Ansel, if the atmosphere were as warm, or warmer, at the top than at the surface of the earth? How would that affect the rate of radiation from the earth?" "It must, of course, increase the radiation very much. With the temperature twenty or fifty or seventy degrees below zero, the radiation must be very little." "By some means, then, the atmosphere is kept warm at the surface of the earth and cold in the higher regions, and in this manner the radiation of heat into open space is prevented. This is accomplished notwithstanding that the top of the atmosphere is nearer the chief source of heat, the sun. This would be no very easy problem if its solution were left to human ingenuity. The explanation is very simple, however, when once suggested. The atmosphere is diathermic, that is, it permits the luminous heat from the sun to pass directly through it without heating the air, but the solid earth stops the heat by absorption, and is warmed by it. The warm surface of the earth imparts, in turn, its heat to the atmosphere resting upon it. This warm air, being expanded by the heat received, becomes lighter than the cold air around, and rises, or rather is forced, upward by the greater weight of the colder air. But as it rises and the pressure of the air is diminished it expands still further. By this expansion its sensible heat becomes latent, that is, the heat is transmuted into force, and, as force, is incapable of being radiated. In this manner radiation from the upper surface of the atmosphere is greatly hindered and waste of heat is in a good degree prevented. "In respect to this heating of the atmosphere from the surface of the earth, a layer of clouds sometimes forms a kind of second surface which receives the sun's rays and warms the air above. A few years ago I saw a balloon ascension in Providence, R. I. The day was bleak and chilly, and the sky entirely covered with clouds. The aeronauts were expecting a chilly voyage. The balloon shot like an arrow toward the zenith, and in five minutes was completely hidden by the clouds. But to the surprise of the voyagers of the sky, on passing through the clouds their thermometer rose ten degrees. This, doubtless, must very often be the case. The air above the clouds must often be warmer than that below. "I think you all must have noticed illustrations of this principle on a small scale. Have you not seen that snow and ice often melt around straws and sticks, the snow or ice remaining still frozen at a little distance, as if the sticks and straws were warm and had melted them? Have you not seen a dark-colored board covered with ice, and the ice remain firm till the sun shone upon it, and then the ice melt upon the under surface, leaving the upper surface unaffected?" "I have seen such things a great many times," said Peter, "and wondered what the reason was." "The reason is that ice is _diathermic_. Heat passes through the ice without warming; but when the rays of heat fall upon the stick or stone or board, the heat is absorbed, the dark body is heated and in turn warms and melts the ice. In the same manner the atmosphere is warmed. The heat-rays of the sun pass through the atmosphere and fall upon the surface of the earth; the earth is warmed, and in turn warms the air resting upon it. "The gases and watery vapor contained in the air also hinder the radiation of heat from the earth. Pure atmospheric air is perfectly diathermic to both luminous and dark heat, and vapors and gases are also diathermic to luminous heat. But to dark heat some of the gases are almost impenetrable. Ammonia stops dark heat almost completely. In a smaller degree watery vapor does the same. Gases and vapors thus serve as blankets to keep the earth warm. The heat of the sun, being luminous heat, penetrates the atmosphere with its vapors and foreign gases, and falls upon the earth almost without loss, but, being absorbed by the earth, it becomes dark heat, and cannot be radiated back through the same gases and vapors. Vapor serves thus as a valve: it admits the heat of the sun to the surface of the earth, but prevents its escape. Prof. Youmans calls watery vapor the barb of heat; it catches the heat of the sun and holds it fast. "Who can sufficiently admire the simplicity of these arrangements for preventing the radiation of heat into the stellar regions?--and their efficiency is no less admirable than their simplicity. Arrangements like these show that the Creator had a definite object in view, and that object is benevolent. For the advantage and enjoyment of the inhabitants of this world these arrangements were made. "We ought at this point to look at those adjustments by which the earth receives just the amount of heat needed to maintain the requisite temperature. The importance of maintaining some certain average temperature cannot be over-estimated. Every animal and plant has its own _habitat_--that is, its natural dwelling-place or location--outside of which it perishes or maintains a stunted and precarious life. The habitat of animals and plants depends in a very great degree upon temperature. What a panorama would be seen if we could fly like a bird from the equator to the poles, and look down upon the ever-changing animal and vegetable life as we pass! How the luxuriant vegetation and flaunting colors of the tropics would shade off into the scantier vegetable life and more sober hues of the temperate zones, and these in turn die out and disappear in polar barrenness! We should see the lion and tiger give place to the bear and the wolf, the elephant and camel to the ox and horse, and these to the white bear and reindeer. This sublime panorama we see, in miniature, in ascending lofty mountains in the tropics. Around the base of the mountain flourish the rich and various productions of the torrid zone; a few thousand feet of elevation bring us among the productions of the temperate zones. The most valuable fruits and grains thrive. Then vegetation becomes scanty and stunted, and at last disappears. The top of Mt. Washington, 6234 feet high, in latitude forty-four degrees, is as bare of trees and plants and every form of vegetation as the north pole. "The fitting temperature is almost as necessary to the animal tribes as to vegetable life. Animals which are native to the tropics do not thrive in colder countries, or if the difference of temperature be very great, they perish. A change from a cold to a warm region is equally disastrous. Man indeed transfers animals from their natural habitat by protecting them from the extremes of temperature, but this is, of course, no exception to the general principle of which I am speaking. A change of only a few degrees in the mean annual temperature would render this earth a hard place for even the human race to subsist. But the temperature of the earth depends upon many a wise adjustment--how many, we cannot tell. Will you tell us, Samuel, the first adjustment or arrangement upon which the temperature of the earth depends?" "It must depend chiefly I think upon the intensity of the sun's heat." "Whether or not that be the chief adjustment by which the right temperature is secured, it is at least a very important item. The intensity of the sun's heat must, of course, be considered in connection with its distance from the earth. The distance of the sun is no less important than the power of his rays; indeed, in one sense, it is more important, for if the intensity of the sun's heat were doubled, the temperature of the earth would be increased only twofold; whereas, if the earth were brought to one-half its present distance from the sun, the heat would be increased four times. Heat being one of the radiant forces, its intensity diminishes in proportion to the square of the distance through which it acts. If the earth were 190,000,000 of miles from the sun instead of 95,000,000, as it now is, the force of the sun's rays would be diminished fourfold. The Creator has so fixed the distance of the earth and sun, and the power of the sun's heat, as to give to this world a temperature suited to its various inhabitants. "The temperature of the earth has also some dependence upon our atmosphere. Can you tell us, Ansel, how the temperature of the earth is affected by the atmosphere?" "You have already told us that the atmosphere is _diathermic_, allowing the heat of the sun to fall upon the earth almost undiminished in force. If the air were so constituted as to intercept the sun's rays, it is plain that the earth would receive less heat." "This adaptation of our atmosphere to transmit the sun's rays," said Mr. Wilton, "is more subtle than it appears at first sight. It is not merely a matter of depth and density, though those are important considerations, nor is it merely a question of the elements of which the atmosphere is composed. Simple gases are _diathermic_. The atmosphere is therefore made up of two simple gases, oxygen and nitrogen, not chemically combined, but mixed together. Compound gases intercept the passage of heat. Ammonia, composed of hydrogen and nitrogen chemically united, almost wholly stops it. Even ozone, which is nothing but oxygen in a changed or _allotropic_ state, is not _diathermic_. The _diathermic_ quality of the air depends, then, not only upon the fact that it is composed of simple elements mingled, but not chemically joined, but also upon the _state_, or _condition_, of those simple elements. "Another point deserves attention. Oxygen is an element having a wide range of very strong and active affinities. It is ready to unite with every known substance, fluorine excepted. What if some other equally active element were mingled with oxygen to form the atmosphere? What if, in place of nitrogen, vapor of sulphur were substituted? What if hydrogen were put in the place of nitrogen? The two elements would combine in sudden combustion or explosion, and the atmosphere itself would perish. But nitrogen is a substance so sluggish and inert that it can be brought into union with oxygen only by indirect processes. Because the air is composed of one so inert element as nitrogen, the atmosphere is preserved, and, what is almost as important, it is kept, as it now is, composed of simple elements, and hence _diathermic_. If our atmosphere were a compound gas, the world would perish with cold. "The temperature of the earth depends also upon certain qualities of the earth's surface. I should be glad to have Mr. Hume explain this." "I suppose," answered Mr. Hume, "that you refer to the qualities of the earth as an absorbent and conductor of heat. The earth must needs have the capacity of receiving and retaining the heat which falls upon it from the sun. If the earth's surface were polished and brilliant, the heat of the sun would be reflected into space as from the surface of a mirror, and very small advantage would the earth receive from the solar heat. A dark soil absorbs heat more readily than a soil of lighter color, and a wet soil, on account of the high specific heat of water, requires more heat to raise its temperature than a dry soil. The mineral elements of the soil and its compactness or porosity also help to make up its capacity for receiving and retaining heat. The color and constitution of the soil sometimes go far toward making the climate of a region. The conducting qualities of the earth's crust in its profoundest depths also must be taken into account. If the crust of the earth were composed of silver, or any other substance of like conducting quality, and the interior of the earth were molten rock, as it now is, the interior heat would be so rapidly conducted to the surface that everything upon the earth would be consumed." "Upon so many circumstances wisely adjusted and nicely blended," said Mr. Wilton, "does the temperature of the earth depend. The intensity of the sun's heat, the dimensions of the earth's orbit, the constitution of our atmosphere in the subtlest qualities and relations of its elements, and the material, structure, and color of the earth's crust,--on all these and many other things which I cannot stop to mention depends the temperature needful for the well-being of the inhabitants of this globe. I beg your pardon, Mr. Hume, but allow me to ask whether such a combination of agencies and conditions, uniting to work out good for man, does not seem to you quite superhuman and worthy of a wise and good Creator?" "I cannot deny it, sir," he replied; "I am not prepared to make any objections. There are many things painful to man in the vicissitudes of heat and cold, and if I were to make a world, I suppose I should leave them out, or perhaps make the world upon a very different plan. But I am not prepared to affirm that any changes which I could make would be improvements, though I have thought until recently that more of knowledge and power, and perhaps more of chance, too, than of wisdom and goodness, were displayed in the works of Nature. But I must confess my opinion has been much modified." "I think your change of mind is in the right direction, and I am glad that it is so. We learn the secrets of Nature and appreciate her spirit much better when we come as reverent questioners than when we come with preconceived notions and a patronizing air. I can well understand your feelings and state, for I myself have traveled over the same ground. My eyes were once dazzled with the glories of science; I worshiped at the shrine of natural laws. But I have learned that God is greater than Nature, the Creator is mightier than the creation. Nature has no mind or purpose apart from the plan and will of the supreme Architect and Ruler, and this inner plan and purpose of Nature is seen only in the government and discipline of our sinful race. I shall greatly rejoice for you and with you if you shall go on to the same end which I have reached." "I shall much rejoice if I reach some satisfactory and peaceful conclusion." "To understand the management of heat," said Mr. Wilton, "we must take note of the differences and fluctuations of terrestrial temperature. The sources of heat are constant. The sun sends out its flood of heat uninterrupted and changeless for ever. The internal fires of the earth give an even inward heat. Mechanical and chemical agencies are active everywhere. These sources of heat do not fluctuate, flaming up and dying away, yet temperature is the most variable of all inconstant things. In passing from equator to pole we go from torrid to frigid, from everlasting summer to everlasting winter. And not only this, but in the same region the temperature never remains the same for even twenty-four hours. The thermometer may pass from forty degrees above to thirty below zero in a very few hours. We must first consider the agencies by which these inequalities are produced. Ansel may mention the first of these." "The shape of the earth," said Ansel. "How does the form of the earth operate to produce inequality of temperature?" "The earth is a sphere, and the rays of the sun fall upon it in nearly parallel lines. Upon the centre of the hemisphere which is turned toward the sun the rays fall perpendicularly, the sun is directly over head, while toward the edges of the hemisphere, on account of the curvature of the earth's surface, the rays fall more and more slanting, as if the sun were sinking toward the horizon." "What is that inequality of temperature which is produced by the shape of the earth?" "The five zones," answered Peter. "This subject is so well understood," said Mr. Wilton, "that I need not spend time in explaining it. Every boy knows the difference between setting his wet slate before the fire to dry so that the heat will fall squarely and perpendicularly upon it and placing it edgewise to the fire. Upon the torrid zone the sun shines perpendicularly, upon the temperate zones obliquely, and upon the frigid zones still more obliquely, and during a part of the year the sun is entirely hidden. In proportion as the rays of heat fall obliquely, any given amount of heat is spread, so to speak, over a larger surface, and the larger the space over which it is spread, the feebler it becomes. What is another cause of inequality of temperature?" No one answered. "Samuel, what is the cause of day and night?" "The turning of the earth upon its axis." "And the rotation of the earth upon its axis," continued Mr. Wilton, "brings not only an alternation of light and darkness, but also of heat and cold. The heat of the sun is withdrawn along with the light. The heat of the sun is not withdrawn from the earth, but one-half of the earth's surface is constantly turned away from its influence. This must produce a daily change of temperature. This diurnal fluctuation of temperature may be very small or it may amount to seventy or eighty degrees. Samuel, what is a third cause of unequal temperature?" "The inclined position of the earth's axis and the revolution of the earth around the sun cause the change of seasons." "If it were not for this, the earth would still have her zones of seasons; a part of the earth would have endless summer, a part endless spring, and the rest unbroken winter, but the alternation of seasons at the same place would be unknown. The axis of the earth is now inclined about twenty-three degrees, twenty-seven minutes, twenty-three seconds to the plane of the earth's orbit, and as this axis maintains constantly the same position, being parallel in one part of the earth's orbit to its position in any other part of its orbit, during one part of the year the north pole is turned twenty-three and a half degrees toward the sun, while in the opposite part of the year the south pole is in like manner brought into the light and heat. This causes the sun to appear to move to and fro, north and south, twenty-three degrees, twenty-seven minutes, and twenty-three seconds from the equator in either direction. The tropics, or turning-places, mark the limits of the sun's northern and southern journey. Everywhere between the tropics the sun, at some period of the year, passes through the zenith, that is, exactly overhead at noon. North and south of the tropics the sun seems to rise higher in summer and to sink lower in winter. In summer the sun at midday is about forty-seven degrees nearer the zenith than in winter. Within the polar circles, which are the same distance from the poles as the tropics from the equator, the heat of the sun is entirely withdrawn during a portion of the year, and during another portion of about equal length the sun does not set. The extremes of temperature, caused by the inclination of the earth's axis and its revolution around the sun, are very great. In the northern part of Minnesota, the temperature rises in summer to one hundred degrees, and in winter sinks to fifty degrees below zero, giving thus an alternation of one hundred and fifty degrees. "In this connection you may also remember that the sun is nearer the earth in one part of its orbit than in another part. This difference amounts to about 3,000,000 miles. The sun also remains eight days longer north of the equator than south of it. Our summer, therefore, is eight days longer than the summer of the southern hemispheres, and our winters are correspondingly shorter. These differences tend, however, to balance each other, for while the southern summer is shorter, the sun at that time is nearer, and while our summer is longer, the sun is more distant. Peter, you may explain to us the effect upon temperature caused by the division of the earth's surface into land and water." "I learned while studying physical geography that the temperature is more even upon the sea than upon the land. But why, I do not know." "The smooth surface of the sea reflects heat better than the rough land: for this reason, a larger proportion of the heat which falls upon the sea is not absorbed, but reflected and lost, so far as the temperature of this world is concerned. Water is also a very poor conductor of heat, and has withal a very high specific heat. For these reasons the sea receives and parts with heat more slowly than the land, and its absorption or radiation causes a smaller variation of temperature. The result is, therefore, that the sea is cooler in summer and warmer in winter than the land, and the average ocean temperature is lower than the mean continental temperature. The land receives heat more readily and parts with it more rapidly; the fluctuations of temperature must therefore be greater. Hence, the interiors of the continents have much greater extremes of temperature than the sea-board. But of the influence of water in equalizing temperature I shall have occasion to speak again more at length, and will pass it by for the present. What effect, Peter, has the unevenness of the earth's surface upon temperature?" "The higher we ascend upon mountains, the colder we find it." "That is, Peter, the greater the elevation of any place or country above the sea level, the lower the temperature. Almost the whole surface of the earth is an alternation of mountain and hill, valley and plain. One continent has a very much greater mean elevation than another. One region or tract of country lies sloping toward the sun, another is inclined from it. The effect in the one case is the same as if the sun were brought more nearly overhead; in the other case, the sun is depressed toward the horizon. It is all the same as if the region of country were brought nearer the equator or removed farther from it. The effects of the curvature of the earth are obviated or exaggerated. Do clouds tend to produce inequalities of temperature?" "I think they must do this," answered Samuel. "Clouds cover one portion of the earth's surface and shut out the heat of the sun, while other portions are well exposed to the sun's rays." "That is right, Samuel. Does any one think of another cause of inequality of temperature?" There was a pause. Then Mr. Hume answered: "Considering the unmeasured cycles of the past, the gradual cooling of the earth has brought a great change of temperature." "And this change," continued Mr. Wilton, "has been very important for the welfare of the human race. At the present temperature of the earth, the coal-beds, so necessary for the culture and progress of the race, could hardly have been formed, and at the temperature of the carboniferous periods, when the coal-beds were deposited, the human race could with difficulty have survived. The high temperature required to prepare the earth for man is now no longer needed, but would prove destructive. And this great change of temperature was doubtless caused by the cooling of the earth. "The result of all these agencies--the shape of the earth, its daily and yearly motions, the inclination of its axis, the eccentricity of its orbit, the division of its surface into land and water, the varying elevation of its surface, and the clouds and storms that hide the sun--is that we have great extremes and rapid transitions of heat and cold, and every variety of climate. These changes of temperature are often painful and, unless guarded against, dangerous. Yet, taken as a whole, can one doubt that variety of climate and change of temperature are of advantage to man? What weariness and lassitude a changeless temperature would bring! How the cooler air of the night comes as a tonic after the relaxation of the heated noonday! Who can estimate the value of our northern winters, not alone in building up a vigorous and nervous physical frame, but in helping the culture of men and nurturing the domestic virtues? We might almost say that her winter evenings have been the making of New England. But periods of heat are needed for bringing fruit and grain to ripeness. What variety and richness of productions for the use of man the different zones furnish! The supply of man's wants would be comparatively meagre if we had but one zone, even though we had our choice of the zones. But every zone is necessary for the perfection of the temperate zones. That we may have the warmth of summer in the temperate zones we must have the torrid zone. That we may have the tonic cold of the temperate zones we must needs have the severity of polar winters. I do not mean that the Creator could not devise a world that should not have these painful extremes, yet enjoy the advantages of the temperate regions. But that would plainly require a world constituted upon principles very unlike those which now prevail. With God this is doubtless possible, but the mode is to us inconceivable. But we can easily see that by the present arrangement of things God has secured many great advantages for man--how many and how great, we can hardly understand--and the apparent disadvantages we cannot positively affirm to be real evils. We can safely declare that this world is well adapted to man's necessities. But these inequalities of temperature are modified and softened by a most comprehensive and beneficent system of agencies by which the extremes are prevented from becoming destructive. In this system of compensating agencies two great divine ideas are clearly developed, economy in the expenditure of heat and benevolence toward man. Upon this subject we are now prepared to enter." CHAPTER VIII. MODIFICATION OF TEMPERATURE. Resuming the subject where it was left the previous Lord's Day, Mr. Wilton said: "We saw at our last session that the most prominent and permanent features of the earth tend to produce differences and great extremes of temperature. These variations of temperature within due limits must be regarded as beneficial, if not absolutely essential, to the well-being of the human race. The different zones give the world a richer and more varied supply of food, and finer and more varied plants and animals. The change of seasons gives variety in the experience of life; the warmth of summer ripens the fruit and grain, and the cold of winter tones up the physical strength; nay, the winter's frost is a natural subsoiler, loosening up the hard earth and promoting vegetable growth. As for man's higher interests, no one can tell how much the world is indebted to winter evenings, to a period of darkness longer than is needed for sleep, and a period of cold during which the work of husbandry may largely cease. Learning, the domestic virtues, and religion are greatly indebted to our winters. But were these agencies which tend to produce inequality of temperature suffered to operate without counteracting influences, the extremes of heat and cold would cease to be genial and healthful, and become destructive. We are now to begin the consideration of those counteracting agencies by which the extremes of temperature are moderated. "Let us look first at the daily fluctuation of temperature caused by the revolution of the earth upon its axis. The rotation of the earth brings every place by turns under the influence of the sun's rays, and in turn withdraws it from the heat of the sun, thus producing a daily change of temperature. How is this diurnal change of temperature alleviated?" This was addressed to all, but no one answered. "Mr. Hume, I should be glad to have you suggest the answer." "There are two chief agencies," Mr. Hume replied--"first, the absorption of heat during the day and the radiation of that heat during the night; and, secondly, the formation of watery vapor during the day and the deposition of dew by night." "The first of these agencies," said Mr. Wilton, "is so plain that very little explanation need be made. During the day, while the sun is shining and the temperature is rising, the surface of the earth, the rocks, the trees, and all things are absorbing heat. This heat is, so to speak, laid up in store, ready for use in time of need. In due time the sun sinks low and sets behind the horizon; the supply of heat is cut off and the temperature begins to fall. Then all those objects which during the day were laying up heat in store begin to radiate heat into the air, and by their contact with it keep up its warmth. Commonly, the temperature falls so low that bodies radiate more heat than they absorb before the setting of the sun. In this process water plays a very conspicuous part. You will call to mind what was said before about the large specific heat of water. By means of this, water is able to store up heat in large amounts--larger in proportion to its weight than any other substance except hydrogen gas. The heat that is stored up during the day is given off by contact with the air and by radiation during the night. "But water plays a still more important part in moderating the daily fluctuations of temperature by the process of evaporation and the formation of dew. Call to mind what was said of the formation of vapor when we were speaking of latent heat. Heat water to two hundred and twelve degrees--the boiling point: it must still be heated a long time before it evaporates. Boiling water must receive five and a half times more heat to give it the form of vapor than to raise it from the freezing to the boiling point; that is, about one thousand degrees of heat are required to turn boiling hot water to vapor. The same amount of heat is required for the formation of vapor whatever the temperature of the water from which the vapor rises. There is only this difference--vapor from cold water is cold, while vapor from hot water is hot. Evaporation goes on more rapidly in proportion as the temperature rises, but vapor is formed at all temperatures. Evaporation goes on from ice. The Alpine glaciers, or rivers of ice, sink away several feet by evaporation from their surface during their slow course of many years down the mountain ravines. This process of evaporation goes on, I say, during the day, and in the formation of vapor an amount of heat which would raise an equal weight of water through one thousand degrees of temperature is used up. "This vapor which is formed is not supported _by the_ air, as men commonly suppose. It is true that clouds are held up by the atmosphere, but clouds are condensed vapor--minute globules of water floating in the air. Vapor is invisible. You must have noticed that steam is invisible till it is condensed by contact with the colder air. Vapor rests upon the earth and supports itself by its own elastic force, just as the atmosphere supports itself. The presence of air makes no difference with the formation of vapor, except that in a vacuum vapor forms very much more rapidly, because no air stands in its way. But at any given temperature, in the air or in a vacuum, the same amount of vapor rises in due time, and the same amount can support itself. Vapor seems to circulate between the atoms of air, as sand fills the spaces between marbles. At the temperature of four degrees below zero vapor equal to two-thirds of an inch of water can be formed and support itself by its elasticity; that is, the elastic force of vapor at four degrees below zero is equal to two-fifths of an ounce per square inch; at thirty-six degrees vapor equal to two and two-thirds inches of water can support itself; at eighty degrees vapor equal to thirteen inches of water can exist; at one hundred and seventy-nine degrees, seventeen feet; and at two hundred and twelve degrees nearly thirty-four feet; that is, vapor at two hundred and twelve degrees has an elastic force of fifteen pounds to the square inch. Let us suppose that at sunrise the air has a temperature of thirty-six degrees, and that as much vapor is already formed as can sustain itself at that temperature. As the sun sheds down his rays the temperature rises and more vapor is formed. We will suppose that half an inch of water is evaporated. Some of this vapor will be carried by ascending currents of air into the higher regions and condensed into clouds, some will be carried by winds into drier and warmer regions, yet the amount of vapor will increase during the day. We will suppose that during the night the temperature falls again to thirty-six degrees; all the excess of vapor above two inches and two-thirds of water will be condensed and become dew or fog, and in this condensation the thousand degrees of heat absorbed in the formation of the vapor will be given out again. If vapor equal to one inch of water be condensed, heat is set free sufficient to boil a sheet of ice water, five and a half inches in thickness, extending over the whole region; that is, it would be all the same as if a fire were kindled on every square rod of land hot enough to boil during the night more than twenty barrels of ice water. In this illustration I have supposed a larger condensation than commonly takes place, but very much less than is conceivable. Suppose that the temperature is eighty degrees, and that, as is possible, more than one foot of water exists in the state of vapor. Let the temperature fall to thirty-six degrees, and full ten inches of water must be condensed, setting free heat which would boil four and a half feet of ice water. So large a condensation as this never takes place in twelve hours, partly because the full amount of vapor which might be formed is never actually produced, and partly because the condensation of but a small part of this vapor would check the fall of temperature and prevent farther condensation. The supposition that I have made shows the possibilities of this method of moderating extremes of heat and cold. Were it not for these processes, our days would be much warmer and our nights much cooler than they now are. By the formation of vapor the excess of heat during the day is stored up in a latent form; that is, it is used, not as heat, but as force, and is employed in bringing the atoms of water into new relationship; during the night the vapor returns to its former state as water, and the heat-force again becomes sensible heat. Thus the day is cooled and the night made warmer. "Ansel, have you ever heard the 'dew point' spoken of?" "Yes, sir, I have." "Do you know what is meant by it?" "That point or degree of temperature at which dew begins to be formed." "Upon what does the dew point depend?" "Upon the amount of vapor in the air." "That is right, Ansel. If at any time the full possible amount of vapor should exist, any diminution of the temperature must, of course, cause dew to be deposited. Do you know, Ansel, how to ascertain the dew point at any time?" "No, sir, I do not." "There is a beautiful instrument known as Daniell's Hygrometer which shows the dew point as a thermometer shows the temperature. But any one can easily determine the dew point without a special instrument for that purpose. Pour warm water into a glass pitcher or goblet whose outer surface has been wiped perfectly dry, and polished. Into this set a common thermometer. Cool down this warm water by dropping into it small pieces of ice, and notice carefully when the polished glass begins to be dimmed as if it had been breathed upon. When that begins to take place the thermometer will show the dew point. In this manner we can determine the amount of vapor in the air, and by estimating the probable temperature of the night judge of the probability that dew will fall." "I have noticed some things," said Peter, "about the formation of dew which I do not understand, and I wish very much to ask about them." "I should be glad to hear your questions, and will answer them if I can." "I have noticed that dew falls on clear nights, but not very often on cloudy nights. I don't see why that is so." "Have you ever noticed whether cloudy nights or clear nights are the warmer?" "Cloudy nights are commonly warmer, I think, but I never could see the reason for that, either." "Can you tell why a newspaper spread over a tomato vine keeps the frost from the vine?" "Because the frost comes upon the paper instead of the vine, of course." "But why do you say, of course? Why does not the dew--for frost is nothing but dew frozen as it forms--come upon the under side of the paper?" "How could the dew fall upon the under side?" "That is just the point which we need first of all to understand. Men commonly speak of dew as if it fell. I don't know but I have spoken of the falling of dew in this lesson. But dew does not fall at all. The vapor simply touches some cold object, and is condensed upon it. The vapor by its elasticity presses against the cold body, and the process of condensation continues until either the body is warmed by the heat set free so that its temperature rises above the dew point, or till the vapor is so far exhausted that the dew point falls below the existing temperature. Dew is formed upon the upper surface and not upon the under, because the upper surface is cool and the under surface is warmer. Beneath the paper spread over the tomato vine, the earth is radiating heat and the paper is radiating it back again. If the paper were not there, the heat would be radiated into space and not returned again. The vine would soon radiate away its little store of heat, its temperature would sink, below the dew point, and dew or frost would be deposited upon it. The under surfaces of objects are kept warm by the radiation from the earth. In the same manner clouds are wrapped around the earth and keep it warm by radiating back its radiant heat. Dew is not formed on cloudy nights, because they are warmer: the clouds throw back the heat which otherwise would be lost in open space." "I never knew before," said Peter, "that clouds were of any great use except to send down rain." "We shall see in the course of our lessons that clouds are of very great use in warming the earth in other ways, as well as by serving as blankets and radiating back the heat which otherwise would escape." "I wanted also to ask why dew falls--I mean, is formed--on grass and leaves of plants while stones are dry." "I will answer your question by asking another. Did you ever see barefoot boys running in the cold dew stop and stand upon a stone or rock to get their feet warm?" "Oh yes, sir; I have done it myself." "Why did you stand upon a rock?" "Because I had learned that the rocks would be warm." "I think that answers your question. The rocks and stones are warmer than the grass and the leaves. The blades of grass and the leaves are thin and pointed and rough, and have a very large radiating surface. They have but little heat, and that little they part with rapidly. The rocks and stones, on the other hand, are bulky, and contain a much larger store of heat, their radiating surface is comparatively small; only one side is exposed, the other being covered by the warm earth, from which they are drinking in heat almost as rapidly as they lose it. They therefore do not lose heat enough to sink their temperature to the dew point. "So much, then, for the means employed to moderate the changes of temperature from day to night and from night to day. But upon the sea-coast and upon certain islands of the sea another agency is employed. Will some one suggest what this agency is?" No one else answered, and finally Mr. Hume said: "I suppose, of course, that you refer to the land and sea breezes?" "This is what I had in mind. During the day the land is warmer than the sea, and the breeze from the sea blowing upon the land cools the air. During the night the land radiates its heat more rapidly than the water, and soon the sea becomes the warmer. Then a breeze springs up in the opposite direction; the cooler air of the land flows out upon the sea. By this means the air upon the land and the air upon the sea are daily commingled, thus securing a more even temperature upon the land. This softens the extremes of daily temperature. I make only this brief reference to the land and sea breezes, because in another connection we shall examine the general subject of winds and their influence in the equalization of temperature. "The result of all these influences is that the changes of temperature from day to night and from night to day, while not inconsiderable, are by no means destructive, and in many cases are no greater than is refreshing and agreeable. These agencies remind us every day of the wise provision of the Creator for the well-being of his creatures. 'Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.' This care for the earthly well-being of men is but a type of his care for their spiritual happiness. The plan of salvation, and the ways of divine providence working in accordance therewith, are more wonderful both in their means and their end than the greatest of the works of Nature. If while we study the natural we forget the supernatural, we commit the greatest mistake: we pass by the greater to examine the less. The natural is valuable only as it leads to the spiritual." CHAPTER IX. THE MINISTRY OF SUFFERING. "You must know, Mr. Wilton," said Mr. Hume, "that my mind is full of objections, whether I speak them out or keep silence. I have looked so long upon one side only that I find it hard to look upon other sides also; and if there be a Satan, as the Bible teaches, I think he must be marshaling all his legions to overwhelm me by the force of his impetuous assaults. I cannot disguise the fact--I do not attempt to disguise it--that my mind is not at ease. It used to be at rest, at least comparatively so--not happy, yet not agitated and distressed. My heart was not satisfied, but I believed that my position of unbelief was logically impregnable. But I confess it, my unbelief has of late been shaken. I am no longer contented. How I came into this state, I do not know. I am certain that my present unrest was not produced by the force of arguments which I had heard. It seems to me as if it sprang up uncaused. The old arguments which I have thought impregnable do not now satisfy me. Why, I cannot tell. I think this statement is due to you to explain my position in your Bible class, and also to prepare the way for a question which I wish very much to propose. I have no objections to make to the marks of wisdom and benevolent design seen in the works of creation which I cannot myself answer and remove. Good-will and goodness to the inhabitants of the earth lie on the very surface of things; or, if I go beneath the surface, I find them no less manifest in the profoundest and subtlest arrangements of the universe. If I say, 'This is all the work of chance,' my very language is self-contradictory and looks me out of countenance, for the very idea of chance is the opposite of wise and orderly arrangement. The difference between design and chance is that the one works by orderly arrangements adapted to the accomplishment of a foreseen end, while the other shows itself in chaotic disorder, with no adaptation to the accomplishment of a purpose. To say that a universe like this, filled in every part with order and beauty, with subtle and unseen elements and agencies working out into the boldest relief in the accomplishment of beneficent ends, all minute elements blending in the sublime sweep of the universal plan,--to say that such a universe is the work of chance is to use language without meaning. "If I deny a providential plan in the creation and government of the world, and attribute to brute matter a nature that, by its own inherent force, spontaneously develops into all these contrivances of use and beauty, I see that the wisdom of the whole universe is concentrated in the nature of matter, and, if it be possible, infinite subtlety of design is doubly manifest. To create a machine which, upon its elements being thrown into an indiscriminate pile, shall arrange itself, adapt part to part, and set itself in motion; which shall repair all its breaks, produce other machines as curious as itself, and thus reproduce itself and perpetuate its existence for ever--that would certainly be the acme of intelligent design. "Or if I go farther and deny a Creator, ascribing to the universe an eternal, uncreated existence, I see that I only entangle myself in a complication of difficulties. I find myself standing face to face with the best-established facts of geology. If the fact that the animal tribes which inhabit the earth, and especially the human race, had a beginning be not well established, then no fact in geological science can be reckoned as fixed. Geology has overturned the idea of an infinite series of generations of animals and men. Nor do I see that I gain any advantage or give any explanation of the universe by attributing to matter everything which others refer to an intelligent and almighty Creator. The distinction between mind and matter is that mind is endowed with intelligence and will, while matter has neither intelligence nor will, but only blind forces, blind attractions and repulsions. If I attribute the order, beauty, design, and benevolence of the universe to mere matter, I clothe matter with the attributes of spirit. In fact, I only set up another God and ascribe to the universe a true divinity. I make myself a kind of pantheist, investing all matter with the attributes of mind and spirit. All this I have pondered over for many a day, and I cannot deny that a belief in an intelligent Creator of the universe is logically more satisfactory. But there is one question which confronts me at every turn. I suppose that I might at length work out an answer for myself and that I should now see the explanation if all my thinking for so many years had not been upon the other side." "I am afraid that I shall not be able to give you satisfaction," replied Mr. Wilton, "but I shall be glad to hear your question. I can at least appreciate your state, and sympathize with you in your groping and struggling. I am glad that you are walking the road you have just described. You say that you do not know what has brought you to your present state. I can easily tell you: your experience at this point is not singular; I think the Holy Spirit of God has been leading you and has brought you to your present position. I trust in God that he will lead you still farther. You have great cause for thankfulness and great cause for trembling. Let me caution you: be careful how you treat the divine Spirit; walk softly; be honest, sincere, and simple-hearted as a little child. 'Except a man become as a little child, he cannot see the kingdom of God.' Above all things, be sincere and straightforward. Deal truly and frankly with the Spirit. If you will only be honest and frank,--honest and frank to yourself, honest and frank to all men, honest and frank with God,--God will soon give you cause to praise him and love him for ever and ever. But what is the question which you wished to propose?" "My difficulty is this: Along with the many arrangements for conferring enjoyment and promoting the well-being of man are other arrangements for suffering. Man is made as capable of suffering as of enjoyment, and there are appliances provided which are certain to inflict that pain of which man is capable. How is this provision for suffering in man and in all sentient creatures consistent with the benevolence elsewhere shown? How are we to combine these two sets of arrangements in our thinking?" "A full unfolding of the ministry of pain in the good providence of God would lead us entirely aside from our course of study." "But for me," said Mr. Hume, earnestly, "it would be not at all aside; for if I can once see that the provision for suffering made in the constitution of man and of Nature is not repugnant to the idea of a wise and good Creator and Disposer of human affairs, I will admit whatever you shall have to say afterward, and I shall feel that the gospel of Christ comes to man and comes to me with a moral force which ought not to be resisted. I know that I have no right to come into your class and ask you to turn aside from your course of study, and the gospel certainly owes nothing to me, yet I do hope you will give the opinions which you hold upon this subject, if you have formed any positive opinions." "I am sure," exclaimed Peter, "that we shall all be very glad to have you spend the time of this lesson in speaking of this subject." "But how would it please you if my talk upon the ministry of pain should prove to be very much like a sermon?" "I think we like your sermons. I know that we were never so much interested in them as now." "Very well, then; I will give you, as Mr. Hume says, some of my conclusions touching this matter of pain and suffering; and if my opinions are not satisfactory or do not cover the facts in the case, it will not be because I have given the subject little thought or have had little experience of suffering. The Lord has led me by a rugged road; he has given me tears to drink and mingled my cup with weeping. But for this I thank him, and I expect, when I shall look back from the life to come upon my earthly course, to see my days of pain and grief shining more brightly than the hours of radiant sunshine. "First of all, then, I believe that with the clear exhibition of benevolent design which we see in this world we ought not to doubt the goodness of the Creator, even if we can give no rational explanation of the suffering which abounds. We ought not to believe, we cannot believe, that the Creator's own attributes are self-contradictory and antagonistic, that the same infinite Being is both good and evil, partly benevolent and partly malignant. If God is good at all, he is wholly good. Nor can we believe that a good being and an evil being--God and Satan--hold joint sway over the universe and co-operated in the work of creation, and that the good is to be ascribed to the one, and the pain and suffering to the other. Whether we can explain it or not, we must believe that there is a good reason for the existence of suffering; unless, indeed, we count the infliction of pain the chief end of the creation, and refer the happiness which men enjoy to some incidental arrangements not contemplated as important in the work of creation. But no sane man can think that this world is the work of a demon seeking to fill the earth with groans and wretchedness. Our consciences and our reason alike require us to believe in the supremacy of goodness. "In presenting my views, I of course cannot attempt to prove everything from the beginning: I must take some things for granted between us. We must start with the admission that there is a God, and that he is a righteous, moral governor. We must at least believe what Paul declares to be needful: 'He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.' We must also believe our own consciences when they testify that men are responsible, free moral actors, and that sin and guilt are not false notions arising from diseased and morbid mental conditions, but realities, true ideas which arise in the mind when it works as God designed. Do you freely admit these points of belief, Mr. Hume?" "Yes, sir; I could not ask you to prove every point touched upon in the argument, for that would require half a score of volumes, nor will I deny the testimony of my own conscience that there is a God, and that men are rightly responsible to him." "Starting, then, with these fundamental principles, we will look first at the provision made for physical pain. Men and, I suppose, all living creatures are created with the capacity of suffering. The same nerves of sensation which if excited naturally give rise to pleasure may be excited unnaturally and inflict pain. But why not endow living creatures with nerves of sensation which could experience pleasure, but could not feel pain? Is this possible? Perhaps so, but no man can affirm it with certainty. I do not think that any man can clearly conceive such a thing. To us the capacity of enjoying and that of suffering seem inseparable. But there is no need of insisting upon this point, for the capacity of feeling pain is a most benevolent provision of the Creator for the benefit of living creatures. It is designed to save life and limb. Pain is the sentinel set to guard the outposts of the citadel of life. If there were no pain, men would thrust their hands into flames without knowing it. They would indulge in all manner of destructive excesses, and no sufferings would warn them of danger. They would drink poison, and no pain would bid them make haste to take the antidote. Tear men limb from limb, hew them in pieces with the sword, and no painful sensations would rouse them to self-defence. Without this benevolent provision of pain the race of man could hardly be saved from extinction. How much more would this be true of the animal tribes, which are wholly dependent on instinct for guidance and impulse to action! We accordingly find pain possible in those parts of the body where pain can subserve the purpose of protection; elsewhere no provision is made for pain. Nerves of sensation abound in those parts which require especial care or are especially exposed. The skin is exposed, therefore the skin is well supplied with nerves. The parts beneath the skin are less exposed, and are injured only by first wounding the skin; they are therefore less sensitive. The heart, though so very important, is almost insensible to pain, because the capacity of suffering at that point would confer no protection. The eye is delicate and requires the greatest care, and to secure that needed care the Creator has made it delicately susceptible of pain. The sole of the foot, as its work demanded, was made capable of bearing the roughest usage, and hence the sole of the foot is but little supplied with nerves of sensation. Still farther, when on account of injury any part of the body requires unwonted care, provision is made that the injured part shall become especially sensitive. A bone when well and sound may be cut or sawed almost without pain, but when the bone is injured it becomes inflamed and feels pain most keenly. When a limb for the sake of its own safety ought to be kept quiet, Nature makes it painful to move it. For the benevolent object of preserving life and guarding the well-being of living creatures pain is given. The provision for pain shows the presence of danger, the liability of receiving injury, and the kind design of putting men on their guard. It is the automatic guardian of our happiness. This is all that I have to say about bodily pain. "Mental suffering and pain of conscience are designed, first of all, to subserve the same purpose. The sense of guilt when a man commits a wicked act is designed, first, to lead him to repentance. It is the divine alarum placed within the soul to remind men that they have done evil and received moral damage which must be repaired. It is the moral goad which pricks men to warn them to turn from wickedness. If evil-doing were as pleasant as well-doing, men would see no difference between right and wrong; all moral ideas would be subverted and the glory and beauty of man would be trailed in the dust. "But a guilty conscience continues to trouble wicked men after the day of repentance has passed; Remorse indeed seems to rise up with preternatural power when Mercy has withdrawn for ever from the sight of Hope. What is the meaning of this? It means that which we admitted in the beginning, that sinners are guilty in God's sight, that guilt is a real thing and deserves punishment, and that God, the holy and righteous King of men, does actually punish the guilty. God is holy and abhors sin. Remorse of conscience is the shadow of the Creator's frown, the voice of his eternal indignation echoing and re-echoing in the soul of man. It is the divine wrath penetrating the human spirit and making itself felt. As the holy God abhors sin for ever, the wicked must expect to feel that abhorrence for ever. He who puts himself into a rebellious position toward his Creator must stand in that unnatural attitude guilty and suffering. We can conceive that this should be otherwise only by subverting the foundations of the moral world. Beings created in the image of God, created with a conscience and moral affections, created with moral freedom, can attain blessedness only by aspiring to heavenly things and becoming God-like. If they break away from the divine will and order, they must suffer the divine frown, they must feel that frown. How can God make his frown felt except by looking pain, so to speak, into the sinner's conscience? "But this whole subject of pain and suffering derives a double significance from the fact that the human race is a fallen race, alienated from God by wicked works, yet under a merciful dispensation in which they are called to return to obedience. There is no moral quality good and beautiful to our eyes or pleasing to God in which men are not altogether lacking, and what is still worse, men grow in evil; their last state is worse than the first. There is no healing power in the man which can renovate his heart and bring him back to holiness. It would seem as if some satanic power were hurrying the human race along the road to ruin. If men are to be saved, it must be by a force of renovation outside of themselves, which shall reverse the evil bias of their nature. You say that the world seems fitted to develop man's capacity for suffering, and that this appears to be as much a part of the divine plan as the impartation of happiness. What, think you, would be the result if the human race were planted in a world where nothing could give pain, where everything would afford gratification? What, Mr. Hume, do you think the effect would be upon creatures such as we all know men to be?" "I hardly dare answer with the little thought I have given to the subject. I would rather listen than speak." "I have noticed," exclaimed Ansel, "that those boys who have everything done to suit them at home are the most unmanageable in school and the most disagreeable to play with." "Picture to yourselves," continued Mr. Wilton, "a man who from childhood should have nothing to suffer, no pain or weariness or hardness to bear. From childhood he has no bodily pain, and the comforts of life are so carefully and bountifully provided that he receives no unpleasant sensation. Winter never chills him, summer never heats him. His slightest wants are all anticipated. All his sensations are pleasure. Let the same be true of his mind. His will is never crossed; whatever he wishes is given him; there is no call for self-denial or self-control or abstinence or patience. He feels no pressure of need spurring him to exertion. His whole life is enjoyment. His very body would grow up, not strengthened and compacted for exertion, but fitted only for the softness of indolence and ease. His will would be the selfishness of self-will rather than an intelligent, reasonable self-control. There would be no tenderness and power of love, no endurance and patience in labor, no strength of moral purpose under temptation, no self-denial and self-sacrifice of love for the good of others or for the attainment of a higher blessedness, no faith in God nurtured in darkness and trial. We should have a mushroom growth of luxurious tastes and indolent ease, impulsiveness and impatience, strength only in selfish, passionate self-will and rampant, luxuriant vices. No other result would be possible with creatures like us. Strength is developed only under circumstances which call for the exercise of strength. A certain hardness and hardihood of living is needed to develop a manly body. Resolute intellectual exertion in the face of difficulties is demanded to educate the mental faculties. An earthly life not wholly satisfactory is needed to awaken in faithless men a longing for a better land. We may look upon the sufferings of this world, taken as a whole, as an expression of God's displeasure at sin. How very much is such an expression needed! If life were nothing but pleasure, how completely men would forget sin and duty and God and heaven! All the varied experiences of joy and sorrow, of good and ill, of trial and triumph, are needed for man's spiritual discipline. I think you will bear me witness that the noblest, sweetest, most beautiful characters are found in those who have drunk the cup of sorrow to the dregs." "I cannot deny it, Mr. Wilton. There is old Deacon Smith. We all know something of his history, I suppose. He was a poor boy; when he was twelve years of age his father died, and his mother died four years later. But he worked his way, first to a good education, and then to an honorable position and ample fortune. Then the dishonesty of a partner brought him back to poverty too late in life for him to recover himself. Now in his old age he works for a small salary in the office of another. But he is as cheerful and as grateful as if he had all that heart could wish, and had never in his life suffered a pang. I think he verily believes that everything which has befallen him has been an expression of God's love for him. He sheds no tears except for the griefs of others. I think he truly rejoices with those that rejoice and weeps with those that weep. As for faith in God, I suppose he would go into a lion's den as calmly as did Daniel. If every professor of religion were like him, I am sure that nobody could say a word against the gospel. I freely confess that Deacon Smith's character has affected me more than all the arguments I have heard in favor of Christianity." "As to that, Mr. Hume," replied Mr. Wilton, "we have both of us, doubtless, seen men who would hate a man the more bitterly in proportion as he should show himself Christlike. And as to every church-member being like Deacon Smith, we could hardly expect such a character to be nurtured in a day or a year. Deacon Smith has become what he is by a lifetime of severest spiritual discipline and patient endeavor. Such characters are wrought out only by a discipline of every form of trial. This world is constituted as it is for the purpose of giving just such a discipline of effort and patience. "This explanation brings us, however, only to the vestibule of the great mystery of suffering in the work of recovering man from the Fall. The Captain of our salvation, who put himself in man's place and took upon himself all human conditions, was made perfect through suffering. The full preparation for his work as the Saviour of man called for a discipline of pain. I shall not attempt to explain this experience of Christ, but salvation brings the believer into a state of profoundest and most mysterious union with Christ. The believer must walk in the footsteps of Jesus. As Christ first came into a condition of sympathy with man, so must man come into a condition of sympathy with him. The believer must share and repeat, in a feebler way, of course, the experiences of the Lord Jesus. He must fill up that which is behind of the sufferings of his Saviour. By this union with Christ in the discipline of pain the Christian is prepared for a union of blessedness. 'If we suffer, we shall also reign with him.' How broad and deep this union of the believer with Christ may be, I cannot tell. I am not able to measure this idea. It seems to me like one of God's infinite thoughts, revealed in its dimness to overawe the souls of men by its shadowy sublimity--seen only enough to suggest how much vaster is that which remains unseen--an iceberg, one part standing out and nine parts sunk in the unfathomed sea. It is a thought to be felt and experienced rather than weighed and measured by human logic. This is all that I have to say upon this subject. Do these views commend themselves to you, Mr. Hume?" "I do not know," was the reply; "I want to revolve the subject in my own mind. I have received some new ideas, but I judge that a man needs experience in this matter as well as thinking. If I had Deacon Smith's experience of life, I could form a better opinion. As much as this I can see to be true--that provision for bodily pain is a safeguard to the happiness and life of men, and that a world which should anticipate every human want, leaving nothing to be struggled after and nothing to be endured, would have a disastrous influence upon human character. I will admit that the provision for pain is wise and good." "One other point," continued Mr. Wilton, "we ought to notice before leaving this subject. The word of God says, 'We know that all things work together for good to them which love God,' but it says no such thing of those who do not love him. The afflictions of this life work out for the righteous 'a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.' The ministry of pain is a ministry of love only to those who submit to Christ. To those who kick at God's mercies the best blessings turn to evils and curses; to the faithful in Christ the greatest griefs and calamities become choice blessings. A submissive heart and the agency of the Holy Spirit are needed to sanctify pain. It is a great mistake to think that all men are made better by afflictions. Only the few get good from the discipline of life. With many persons troubles only stir up the worst passions till they rage like caged tigers." "This last remark, Mr. Wilton, has thrown a flood of light upon this subject. But it seems strange to me to find myself saying this. I see how it is that so large a part of the pains of life is found in the end to accomplish no good. The evil remains evil. Do you think that my long trial of doubt and unrest and pain of heart can ever be blessed to my good?" "That it can be so blessed to your good and to the good of many others I have no doubt; but whether it will be, I cannot tell. That depends upon yourself, upon your coming through Christ to God as your heavenly Father. It is my earnest prayer that from your unrest of spirit deep peace in Christ may break forth; and many others unite in the same." "I certainly hope," said Mr. Hume, "that my life may not come to nothing. It seems as if something better than a few years of mingled pain and pleasure, overshadowed by most painful doubt and darkness and followed by a plunge into nothingness, must be possible for me." "God give you grace," said Mr. Wilton, earnestly, "to forget the things which are behind, and reach out your hands toward the worthiest destiny! But remember that there is a destiny more terrible than to cease to be, there is a death deeper and darker than the grave. 'There is a death whose pang Outlasts the fleeting breath; Oh, what eternal terrors hang Around the second death!'" Mr. Wilton did not think it best to attempt to draw out Mr. Hume farther at that time. He saw that he appeared to be under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and hoped that he would soon experience the new birth by which old things pass away and all things become new. He knew that time is an element even in the operations of the Spirit, and he feared to shake the bough too roughly lest the fruit should fall untimely only to wither in his hand. Happily, the superintendent's bell brought the conversation at that point to a natural conclusion. CHAPTER X. TRANSPORTATION OF HEAT. "To-day we come to that subject which we should have looked at a week ago, if that I hope not unprofitable discussion of the uses of trials and the ministry of pain had not prevented. We must now examine the arrangement for softening the rigors of winter and toning down the heat of summer. The general principle is that in summer the earth receives an excess of heat, while in winter the opposite is true. These extremes are mitigated by transferring heat from summer to winter. How is this accomplished? Any one who has thoughts upon this subject may answer." "I have some thoughts," said Ansel, "but whether right or wrong, I cannot tell. I should think heat might be carried from summer to winter in the same way as from day to night." "What are some of those means for transferring heat which seem to you to operate the same in the annual as in the daily changes of temperature?" "One is the absorption and radiation of heat, and another is the evaporation of water and the condensation of vapor." "You are right," said Mr. Wilton. "The effect of these operations in the equalization of the annual extremes of heat is in no wise different from their effect upon the temperature of day and night, but from summer to winter their effect is vaster and more impressive. During the summer, sea and land, and 'all that in them is,' are receiving heat and rising in temperature. The heat of summer penetrates and warms the earth nearly a hundred feet in depth. Into the sea heat penetrates still deeper. How vast the amount of heat required to warm the whole surface of the earth and sea to such depths! By withdrawing so much heat from active use the intensity of the summer temperature is softened. During the colder months the land and sea slowly radiate their heat. We can hardly over-estimate the effect of this alternate absorption and radiation of heat. So great is the effect of this stored up heat that the sea and the great lakes never freeze even in the coldest winter weather, except in the polar regions, and the temperature must fall far below freezing and continue for a long time below the freezing point before the earth begins to freeze. The great bodies of water, remaining always at a temperature above thirty-two degrees, are especially important in warming the wintry air. In the coldest weather they seem like steaming caldrons throwing up their warm vapor. It is the absorption and radiation of heat alone which prevent the temperature of the atmosphere from rising or falling suddenly to the highest or lowest point possible. The sun breaks forth in all its splendor at noonday in summer: what if the sun were to remain stationary, shining thus in his strength for days and months? Everything would be consumed with heat. But why do not the glowing rays of the sun raise the temperature at once to the highest possible point? Because the earth and sea and every object upon the earth absorb the heat, storing it up and holding it in reserve. On the other hand, when the sun sets and his heat is withdrawn, why does not the temperature fall suddenly to the lowest possible point? Because the heat held in store is slowly radiated and the change of temperature rendered gradual. "In this work of absorbing and radiating heat every object, earth, air, and sea, does its appropriate share. But water stands chief, and performs the largest service. Its high specific heat enables it to hold in store the largest calorific treasure, and causes it to change its temperature more slowly. "The formation and condensation of vapor also operate in the same manner as in the transitions of day and night. During the summer the higher average temperature makes it possible for a much larger amount of vapor to be formed than in winter. You remember that at eighty degrees vapor equal to thirteen inches of water can sustain itself, while at thirty-six degrees the elastic force of vapor is equal to the pressure of only two inches and two-fifths of water, and at four degrees to three-fifths of an inch. If the mean summer temperature at any place were eighty degrees, it would be possible for more than one foot of water to be held in the form of vapor. In the formation of this vapor heat would be consumed sufficient to boil more than five and a half feet of ice water. If the mean winter temperature at the same place be thirty-six degrees, more than three-fourths of this vapor must be condensed and give out its latent heat to warm the air. It is not to be supposed that the full amount of vapor which can support itself does commonly exist, but the difference between the average amount of vapor in summer and in winter must be very great. I suppose this difference often amounts to four or six inches of water. If we suppose it to be four inches, an amount of heat is transferred from summer to winter sufficient to boil twenty-two inches of ice water. In estimating the effect of this we must consider that this heat is not given out gradually and regularly for three months, but whenever there is a sudden fall of temperature vapor is condensed, latent heat becomes sensible, and the suddenness and intensity of the fall are diminished. We need also to bear in mind that every open body of water is sending up its clouds of vapor constantly. The open lakes, and especially the sea, are like a seething caldron; and thus immensely more vapor is condensed during the winter months than is brought over from summer to winter. Much of the vapor formed in winter is to be set to the account of summer, for it is the summer's heat absorbed by the water, which maintains its temperature and enables it to throw up such clouds of vapor, even in midwinter. But this comes in more properly at another place, and we will leave it for the present. "There is another transition experienced by water by which heat treasured up in summer is made available for softening the rigors of winter. Who will suggest it?" "It is the freezing of water," said Mr. Hume. "In the process of crystallization one hundred and forty degrees of latent heat become sensible." "And this," continued Mr. Wilton, "is no inconsiderable matter. Every pound of water frozen upon the surface of our lakes and rivers, every pound of water frozen in the wet earth, every pound of water frozen as snow or sleet in the air, gives out as much heat as would boil an equal amount of water at seventy-two degrees. Have you never heard of setting tubs of water in cellars to keep vegetables from freezing?" "I have," replied Peter. "I visited my grandfather two years ago, and his cellar sometimes froze. I asked him why he put tubs of water in his cellar, but he could not tell me, only he said that he knew that tubs of water in his cellar did keep his vegetables from being nipped with the frost." "Can you tell us, Peter, why tubs of water set in a cellar should have this effect?" "I suppose that when the water begins to freeze it begins to give out its latent heat." "That is one part of the reason. The water is drawn from the well at perhaps fifty degrees; it must lose eighteen degrees of heat before it begins to freeze, and all the heat which the water loses the air of the cellar gains. And then, as you said, as soon as the water begins to freeze latent heat begins to become sensible. Every pound of water frozen sets free heat enough to raise a pound of water through one hundred and forty degrees. But why do not the vegetables begin to freeze as soon as the water?" "I don't know." "Water holding salt or other minerals in solution freezes at a lower temperature than pure water. For this reason the juices of vegetables and fruits and the sap of trees may be cooled below thirty-two degrees without freezing. On this account the water set in cellars tends to prevent vegetables from freezing; the water begins to freeze at thirty-two degrees, while potatoes and turnips may be cooled a little lower than thirty-two degrees without harm. In this manner the buds of trees are sometimes warmed and protected by the coating of ice which forms around them. The drops of water, falling through the sleety air, touch upon the twigs of trees and freeze upon them, an icy coat embracing them all around. In freezing, the water gives out one hundred and forty degrees of heat, a part of which goes to the air and a part to the twig." "This reminds me," said Ansel, "of what the Irishman said on being told that snow contains heat, that 'it would be a blessed thing for the poor if one could tell how many snowballs it would take to boil a tea-kettle.'" "It might be difficult to use snowballs to boil the tea-kettle, but the heat given out in the formation of the snowflakes is doubtless employed quite as usefully for the poor as if used in preparing their tea. You have all noticed that before a snow-storm, or perhaps during the early part of the storm, the temperature generally becomes milder, and you have often heard the remark, 'It is too cold to snow.' Men have learned that the coming of a snow-storm is attended by a warming of the air. This popular impression is philosophical, yet few understand its philosophy. A foot of snow falls, equal to two or three inches of water. In the condensation of the vapor which formed this snow one thousand degrees of latent heat become sensible, and then in the congelation of the clouds into snowflakes one hundred and forty degrees of heat are evolved. This softening of the rigors of winter is, I think, as great a blessing to the poor as the heating of the tea-kettle. Let us make an estimate of the amount of heat set free in the production of one great snow-storm. Two feet of snow falls, equal, we will suppose, to five inches of water. In the condensation of the watery vapor one thousand degrees of heat are evolved, and in the congelation one hundred and forty degrees--an amount of heat which would boil three feet of cold spring water. In every square mile there are 27,878,400 square feet, and a square mile of water three feet in depth would contain 83,625,200 cubic feet. The production of such a snow-storm sets free for every square mile of surface heat which would boil more than 80,000,000 of cubic feet of spring water. Such a storm sometimes extends over a region of country a thousand miles square, that is, over a million of square miles. In the production of one such storm--a very heavy and extensive storm, I have supposed--heat is generated which would boil eighty millions of millions (80,000,000,000,000) of cubic feet of spring water--an amount altogether too vast for our comprehension. To accomplish this result by combustion would require more than 500,000,000 of tons of anthracite coal--an amount at least three times as great as the yearly product of all the coal-mines of the world. And this is but one heavy storm. The amount of rainfall in the United States may be thirty-six inches or forty or forty-five inches. Supposing the average rainfall of the whole earth to be twenty-four inches--an estimate very far below the truth--we have this result: There are, in round numbers, two hundred millions of square miles of surface, more than five and a half quadrillions (5,575,680,000,000,000) of square feet and more than eleven quadrillions of cubic feet of water. The condensation of this amount of vapor would boil more than sixty quadrillions of cubic feet of ice water. One pound of anthracite coal burned under the most favorable circumstances will boil sixty pounds of ice water. To boil sixty quadrillions of cubic feet of ice water would require sixty quadrillions of pounds of coal--thirty billions of tons--not less than twenty-five tons to every inhabitant of the globe. At this rate a very few years would exhaust the coal-fields of the world. Calculations like these are useful in showing upon how stupendous a scale the Creator carries on his operations. But we must remember that these works are carried on, not to amaze men, but to benefit them. The works go on silently and unseen, challenging no attention from fools, receiving no thought except from the patient student of Nature, and eliciting no thankful recognition save from a few reverent worshipers. "But I have been led away from a point which I had in mind. While considering the effect of heat in expanding bodies, I reminded you that water presents a marked peculiarity, and promised to speak of it more fully. This is the place for us to look at this singular and beautiful peculiarity of water. What is the general principle touching the effect of heat upon bodies?" "Heat expands bodies and cold contracts them," answered Ansel. "Water both illustrates this rule and presents some very interesting apparent exceptions. It contracts by cold like other bodies till it reaches the temperature of thirty-nine and a half degrees; it then begins to expand, and expands regularly till it falls to thirty-two degrees; at that point it freezes, and in freezing it expands at once about one-ninth of its bulk. If the cooling process be continued, the ice produced contracts like any other solid. This peculiarity of the interrupted and unequal expansion of water is of the utmost importance in the affairs of our world. Consider the result if the water were to contract by cold as do other bodies down to the freezing point and below it. Water is cooled from the top by contact with the cold air. As the upper film of water cooled it would sink and a new stratum be brought to the surface; that in turn would be cooled and sink, and thus the cooling process would go on with the utmost rapidity till the whole body of water should be reduced to the freezing temperature. Then congelation would begin, and the first particles of ice formed would sink to the bottom, and as fast as the water became frozen at the top the ice would sink. In this manner a solid body of ice would be formed at the bottom of our lakes and rivers, while the surface would remain unfrozen in contact with the cold air till the whole body of water became a compact mass of ice. Great lakes turned to solid ice would not be thawed during the whole of the summer, for the water warmed from the top would not sink, but would form a warm stratum of water upon the surface, while, below, the solid ice would lie hardly feeling the summer heat. Nay, more; in the higher latitudes it would seem as if the very ocean must be turned to solid ice, never to be melted till the end of time. By the singular expansion of water below thirty-nine and half degrees and its great expansion in congelation, these disastrous consequences are prevented. Our lakes are cooled even in winter only to thirty-nine and a half degrees; below this temperature the colder water is lighter and remains upon the surface; ice floats upon the surface. The top becomes ice, but the great mass of the water remains at thirty-nine degrees, and the inhabitants of the waters live on unharmed. Spring comes, and the ice, being upon the surface, is soon melted, and the unbound waves begin again to ripple forth their unconscious joy." "Do you look upon this irregular expansion and contraction of water," asked Mr. Hume, "as a real exception to the rule that heat expands bodies?" "Not at all. In freezing, a new force comes in and asserts itself--the force of crystallization; or, more exactly, as the force of heat diminishes the force of crystallization becomes predominant, and throws the atoms into new positions and new relationships. To this new arrangement of atoms is due the expansion in freezing. Ice contracts and expands by cold and heat the same as any other solid. The attraction of crystallization begins, doubtless, to throw the atoms into their new and crystalline arrangement at the temperature of thirty-nine and a half degrees. "We must remember that the heat which is set free in the condensation of vapor and in the freezing of water is absorbed in the formation of vapor and the melting of water. As much heat is taken from summer as is conferred upon winter. The summer is cooled as much as winter is warmed. The formation of vapor is a cooling process. Water is prevented from rising above the boiling point by the formation of vapor. Perspiration cools us by the evaporation to which it gives rise from the whole surface of our bodies. And the higher the temperature, the more rapid the evaporation, and the more vigorous the cooling process. "We might look at other appliances for transferring heat from summer to winter, but they belong in principle to another department. We have now looked at some of the means for transferring heat in time. The heat is treasured up at the heated noonday, to be brought out for use during the cool hours of night; it is garnered from the excessive heats of summer to supply the deficiencies of winter. It is laid up in store to-day to be expended at any future time when needed. The transfer is a transfer not in space, but in time. We must hereafter examine those arrangements by which heat is transported through space. Some of these arrangements exert an influence upon day and night and upon summer and winter, and thus throw further light upon the subjects already discussed. Already more than once topics have been suggested and their full consideration put off till some more fitting time. In our next lesson we must begin the examination of these new principles. We have before spoken of the vicissitudes of days and seasons and years. We shall now have to do with the vicissitudes of zones and lands and seas, of deserts and mountain ranges. The elements become vaster, the stage is broader, and the movements more sublime. "I am glad that you are so well interested in these great and beautiful works of God's wisdom and power, but I hope that you do not forget that the crucified Christ is pre-eminently the power of God and the wisdom of God. These natural works are but the husk of which salvation from sin by Christ is the kernel. These outward things are wonderful and beautiful for the setting, but the gem, the royal precious stone, the Koh-i-noor, the 'mountain of light,' for which the setting was made, is the true knowledge of the true God and of his Son Jesus Christ. During the past few weeks you have heard others asking, 'What shall we do to be saved?' I should be greatly guilty if I allowed you to think earth, air, and sea, with all their silent and solemn movements, more important than our spiritual attitude toward God the Father and Christ the Saviour. Are you, Samuel, in your interest in studying Nature, forgetting Christ and the souls of men?" "I hope not, and I think not. During the three years since my baptism I have never felt so much my obligation to Christ as now. I never felt before so deep a desire that my friends should repent and believe in Jesus. I think the love of Christ constrains me. I have not felt before that my work was very important; I have been expecting to work more earnestly by and by; but lately I have felt that Christ gives me something to do now for which he holds me responsible." "What have you tried to do for Christ?" "I have been praying for some of my young friends, and especially for Ansel and Peter. And then I felt that I must talk with them as well as pray for them." "And can you, my young friends, be careless about your own salvation while Samuel is so anxious for you? Are you contented to live 'having no hope and without God in the world'? Is your happiness here and hereafter more important to Samuel than to yourselves?" "We are interested," said Ansel. "We have been talking together about being Christians, but we don't know what to do." "They said," broke in Samuel, "that they wished I would ask you to preach a sermon and tell them what they must do to be saved. They wished to go on with these lessons, but they thought that perhaps you would be willing to preach a sermon just upon that subject." "You know that I often speak of that subject, and when persons have come to the inquiry-meeting I have told them what they must do. But I know that there must needs be 'line upon line.' If Ansel and Peter wish it, I will devote a sermon to the subject, and make it as plain as I can. Hardly anything gives me more pleasure than to explain the way of salvation when I know that my hearers are interested." "We do wish to have you preach upon that subject, and I am sure that you will have a great many interested hearers besides Ansel and myself." "But, Samuel, did you not pray for Mr. Hume also, and talk with him?" "I prayed for him, but I was afraid to speak with him. I have tried to pray for him a double portion because I could not speak with him." Tears gathered in Mr. Hume's eyes; the thought came to him that his unbelief had raised a barrier between himself and both God and his people. This pious young man was afraid to come to him lest he should meet the scornful arguments and cold derision of a proud unbeliever. He felt humbled--he, a subtle, well-read unbeliever, and Samuel a pious lad yearning for the salvation of his soul, but daring only to pray in secret for him. "Have not you, Mr. Hume, been treating Christ and the Holy Spirit as Samuel feared that you would treat him?" "Perhaps so," he answered. "I am sorry that Samuel did not come to me freely. I think he need not be afraid of me now. I also hope you will preach the sermon which Ansel and Peter wish to hear." Mr. Wilton assured them that he would do as they wished unless the Spirit clearly drew him to some other subject. "I always look," he said, "to the Holy Spirit for direction in my preaching. 'When he, the Spirit of truth, is come,' said Jesus, 'he will lead you into all truth.' This was fulfilled pre-eminently, I suppose, in the inspired men who laid the foundation of the Church, but the Spirit still dwells in believers and leads those who love and follow Christ. The preacher of the gospel can do nothing without the power of the Spirit of God." And I, kind reader, will give you the outline of the sermon if the Spirit bids him preach it. CHAPTER XI. AN EFFECTIVE SERMON. Mr. Wilton preached the sermon spoken of at the close of the last chapter the next Lord's Day morning. The more he thought upon the matter and inquired the mind of the Spirit, the more he felt that for a purpose the Spirit was calling him to unfold again the authority of God and the conditions of salvation. He gave notice of his subject, and invited all good men to pray that he might be able, like a good and wise steward of the mysteries of grace, to bring forth out of the treasure-house things new and old, and that the word might prove as a nail fastened in a sure place by the Master of assemblies. Much prayer was offered, and the people came together in a spirit of unwonted solemnity and earnestness. Mr. Wilton prayed to the glorified Redeemer for his blessing: "O thou exalted Christ, we assemble in thy name and by thine authority. Thou hast bidden us not forsake the assembling of ourselves together for thy worship and the preaching of thy gospel. By thy grace we enjoy another of these sacred days. By thy death thou didst purchase for thy people eternal redemption. Thou hast wrought out for them a great and glorious salvation. For thy great love wherewith thou hast loved us thou didst empty thyself of divine glories, and madest thyself a servant among servants, and didst suffer in the garden, and die upon the cross, and enter the grave. Now thou art exalted at the right hand of the Father, a Prince and a Saviour, to give repentance and remission of sins. O thou that judgest men, thy justice is great and glorious as thy mercies. Years ago we tested thy love, years ago we felt the shadow of thy wrath; our guilt made us afraid and we cried unto thee, and thou forgavest our sins, and didst shed abroad thy peace in our hearts. In these recent days thou hast brought other sinners to feel their guilt. They have seen thee upon the cross, and have been smitten with anguish, and have repented, and thou hast received them. Others are bowed down; they mourn; they feel themselves poor and needy; they confess thy justice; they feel the need of thy salvation; they walk in darkness; they grope and find no light; they look unto thee from a distance; but they do not come to thee, they do not follow thee. Wilt thou not draw them to thyself? Wilt thou not bow their pride of heart and turn their wills and make their hearts tender, gentle, and believing? Wilt thou not smite the rock, and cause the waters of penitent grief to flow? Lay thy cross, O Jesus, upon their shoulders and upon their hearts, that they may bear it after thee and share thy glory. Open thou their eyes that they may see eternal destinies and look upon thy divine glories, thy beauty, and thy tenderness. Let them follow thee and trust in thee, strengthened and comforted by thy rod and thy staff. O Christ, for thine eternal love with which thou hast loved us, reach down thine arm mighty to save and lift us up. Lord, save or we perish. And speak thou by thy servant to-day, and cause all that hear to recognize the message not as his, but as thine." He read as his text Acts xvi. 30: "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" He briefly recited the arrest, imprisonment, and release of Paul and Silas. "The salvation for which the jailer cried out was not deliverance from the dangers of the earthquake, nor from the displeasure of the Roman governor. This was the bitter cry of a soul sinking under a load of guilt and trembling at the thought of God's impending wrath. Some of you can appreciate his feelings and his fears. Your sins against God and Christ and the Holy Spirit have risen up before you; they stare you in the face; they condemn you. You feel your guilt--not a light and trifling fault, but guilt deep and dark, such as creatures made in the image of God incur by rebellion against the blessed and holy Creator. The Holy Spirit has recited the divine law in your ears. Your consciences have heard that voice and echoed its condemnation. You desire to escape that divine displeasure; you desire to have the fires of guilt that burn in your consciences quenched. You cry out, 'Men and brethren, what shall we do?' The answer must be drawn from many parts of the Holy Scriptures. "Understand, in the first place, that you are not to be saved by searching out some plan of salvation for yourselves. Ask for the old paths. 'He that entereth not by the door, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.' 'Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid.' 'There is but one name given under heaven among men by which we must be saved.' "Understand also that it is useless to attempt to save yourselves by making yourselves righteous. You have tried, I doubt not, to make yourselves better. Perhaps you have resolved that you would not come to Christ till you can present yourselves in some degree worthy of his care. Have you succeeded in getting rid of your sins? Can you blot out your past sins? Can you erase the record which stands written in the book of remembrance on high? The law of God written in this Bible condemns you; God condemns you; you are condemned already for not believing in the name of God's only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus from heaven. Can you change that condemnation by your feeble, fickle resolutions to reform? 'Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil.' "Be assured also that it does not belong to you to change your own hearts. 'Ye must be born again;' 'except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.' But that second birth comes not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. 'Ye must be born again, but ye must be born of the Spirit.' Notice that the word _saved_ is in the passive voice. Sinners do not save themselves; they must be saved by another; they must be saved by one able to save, by one almighty to save, from the wrath of God and from sin, by one able to do for those who trust in him all that they need to have done in order to make their salvation complete and glorious. Christ is able to do this. The crucified and risen Christ is exalted a Prince and Saviour, to give repentance and remission of sins. The word of God says, 'To give,' and he rejoices to give. "On one point we must pause and dwell with special clearness. Every anxious sinner must not only feel his guilty and lost condition, but he should also thoroughly understand what he means when he asks what he must do to be saved. He should see to it that he wants that salvation which Jesus gives. "In the Scriptures the sinner who would be saved is called upon to return to God. He has gone astray. He must retrace his steps. What is meant by this? I mean that man's sin consisted at first and consists to-day in saying, 'I will,' and 'I will not,' in opposition to the will and command of God. God said, 'Thou shalt not;' man said, 'I will.' God says, 'Thou shalt;' sinners say, 'I will not.' If a sinner is to be saved from sin, this opposition must cease. When God says, 'Thou shalt not,' the sinner must reply, 'I will not,' and when God says, 'Thou shalt,' the sinner must answer, 'I will.' The sinner's 'will' and 'will not' must agree with God's 'shall' and 'shall not.' In place of your self-will you must put God's will; that is, repentance, a turning about, a returning to God. But remember, salvation, if it be real and thorough, is not submission for an hour, a day, or a year, but submission for ever and ever. It is submission without condition and without limits. "The sinner says, 'This is a hard saying,' this utter and boundless denial of self-will and selfishness. But is it hard that the creature should yield to the Creator, that ignorance should yield to wisdom, that selfishness should yield to love, that sin should yield to holiness, that poor, lost, wretched, fallen man should yield to the eternal and ever-blessed God? It is only by yielding that his will is brought into sweet harmony with the will of God, and that he can be a sharer of the divine blessedness. "Your views on this point should be clear and distinct. If you wish only to be saved from the penalty of your sins, you do not desire the salvation which Jesus gives. He saves his people, not in their sins, but from their sins. If, however, you really wish for his full and glorious salvation, you will desire that your will may be wholly subdued to the will of God. You will be found ready to unite in the memorable prayer of the Lord Jesus, 'Not my will but thine be done.' Salvation implies the giving up of self-will and a reverent submission to the will of God. "Other sinful passions oppose the grace of God, but chiefly as helpers and supporters of self-will. Pride and vanity strengthen self-will. Turbulent fleshly lusts urge on and back up self-will. Fear of man, fear of danger, and unbelief are but props of self-will. When 'my Lord Will-be-will' submits, the town of Mansoul returns to her rightful allegiance. "The question at issue between God and the sinner, the question of self-will or submission, is often contested around the performance of some single definite duty. The Holy Spirit often presents to the convicted sinner's conscience some single duty and presses its performance. That duty is a test of the feelings and desires of the sinner's heart. So the Spirit understands it, so the sinner often understands it. As, in the garden of Eden, God gave to Adam a test command, so does he now press upon the conscience of convicted sinners test duties to show them what they are. That which is required may be important, exceedingly important, in and of itself, or it may be in itself of very little consequence, but in every case the duty is all-important and its performance absolutely essential, because the Spirit has laid it upon the sinner's conscience. It will show whether he wishes for salvation from sin or not. "I used to hear a Christian relate an experience like this. While the Spirit of God was striving with him and conviction of sin was heavy upon him, he felt a clear impression that he ought to go to his barn, and there at one certain place upon the hay-mow kneel and pray. His self-will rose in rebellion, chiefly, it would seem, because it was laid upon his conscience as a duty. But his distress grew upon him. He went to his barn and stood at another place and tried to pray, but no light or peace came; his sense of his sins grew heavier. How could it be otherwise? He went to the spot where he thought that he ought to go, and stood and prayed. Still no peace came, but increasing sense of sin. At length he thought, 'Why should I not? Why not give up my own will? Why not pray that God's will may be done?' He yielded, he kneeled at the place where he had thought he ought to kneel, and there he first felt peace before God. This was a singular experience. Perhaps a man more intelligent and better taught in the Sacred Scriptures would never have such a thing pressed upon his conscience. But the battle of self-will is commonly fought around some single definite duty. That duty may be a confession of wrong done to a neighbor, or conversation with an impenitent associate, or a public confession of sin before the great congregation. Whatever it may be, it shows the sinner his heart and leads him to decide to follow his own will just as he had always been accustomed to do, or it will lead him to pray earnestly that he may be enabled in everything to bow his will to the will of God. He will want the full salvation which Jesus in his grace brings men--salvation from the penalty of sin and deliverance from its power. "I draw no bow at a venture and speak not doubtfully when I say some of you are standing face to face with duties pressed upon you by the Holy Spirit. Your self-will, supported by pride, and fear of man, and unbelief, and Satanic temptation, refuses to yield. The yoke of Christ seems to you like bondage. The cross is supremely heavy. You draw back from it, and refuse to bear it. I cannot take away the cross which the Spirit bids you bear. I dare not do it; I will not do it. As the messenger of Christ, I repeat the voice of the Spirit and lay the duty, whatsoever it may be, upon your consciences. Do you really and honestly wish to be saved from sin? Then you will yield to the Spirit's kind and gracious movings; you will yield humbly but heartily. If, however, you want something else than the salvation which Jesus gives, what can you expect but perplexity, difficulty, darkness? I beseech of you, deal truly and faithfully with yourselves on this point. "To those who wish really to be saved I have good news to proclaim. There is a Saviour such as you need. Trust in Jesus as your Saviour. Place the whole work of your salvation in his gracious hands. Christ saves sinners just such as you are. The faith which you are but to exercise is nothing else than your confidence, by which you entrust yourselves to him. Faith has no saving virtue in itself, but it is the hand by which the sinner takes hold of Christ. With this duty few of you will have any great difficulty. When once you wish to be saved from sin and are ready to submit to the will of Christ, you will have no reluctance to take him for your Saviour. You believe that Christ is a divine Saviour. If saved at all, you expect to be saved by him who died on Calvary. Hardly for the world would you resign your opportunity of coming to Christ and receiving his grace. You believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, the great sacrifice for sin. It remains that you should gladly accept what he offers and follow him as loving, trusting disciples. "Follow the Spirit, and you will be led to Jesus and will come speedily to the joy of salvation; resist the Spirit, and you grope in boundless darkness and fall upon the dark mountains. "In the Holy Scriptures the question of the text is asked and answered many times. Hardly any two answers are alike. Are there different conditions and different duties required of different men? By no means. But the Holy Spirit adapted the answer to the different spiritual states of the various inquirers. The answer is made to each questioner's heart. A self-righteous young man came to Jesus asking, 'Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may inherit everlasting life?' Jesus answered, 'Keep the commandments: thou shalt do no murder; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness; honor thy father and thy mother; and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' The young man answered, 'All these have I kept from my youth up; what lack I yet?' Jesus said, 'If thou wilt be perfect, go sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me.' The young man went away sorrowful. Jesus knew his self-righteousness, and gave him answers which opened that young man's eyes to see himself. He gave him a test command, and the young man's revulsion from that duty showed that, notwithstanding his self-confident claim to righteousness, his riches filled all his heart. If your hearts are filled with the love of the world, you must put your possessions out of your hearts and follow Jesus. "Nicodemus also came making the same inquiry. He must have asked something like this, for Jesus answered such a question. 'Ye must be born again; ye must be born of the Spirit,' said Jesus. Nicodemus was looking for a legal salvation by outward formal services, but Christ gave him to understand that salvation involves a great spiritual renovation wrought by the Holy Spirit, by which men old in sin become new creatures and enter the kingdom of God as little children. He taught him thus that salvation was only from God. If any of you are looking for a cloak of self-righteous religious duties which you can put on, be assured that true religion springs from a work of God wrought in the heart. You must be born again by the power of the Holy Spirit. You must become new creatures in Christ Jesus. "On the day of Pentecost the great company of men 'out of every country under the whole heaven,' while listening to Peter's pungent address, cried out, 'Men and brethren, what shall we do?' 'Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of the Lord Jesus, for the remission of sins,' answered Peter. Here were men who had a hand in crucifying Christ, or if they had no active share in that deed of darkness, they had consented to his death; they were partakers of the crime; very likely they had cried, 'Crucify him, crucify him.' They saw their sin, and were pricked in the heart. Well might they repent of their rejection and crucifixion of their promised Saviour, the Son of God, from heaven. Others were devout men who had come to Jerusalem to worship. Like Simeon they may have waited long for the consolation of Israel. How easy for them to enroll themselves among the followers of Christ! All alike are commanded after repentance to put on Christ by baptism. That burial with Christ was the symbol of their dying and living again--of their dying unto sin and living again unto God. The same duties are enjoined upon you. Repent of your long rejection of the grace of God and his Son Jesus Christ, and before God and men devote yourselves to his service by a public confession of Christ in baptism. "The jailer of Philippi was taken in the midst of his sins. He was holding the servants of Christ in his dungeon. He knew for what offence they had been seized, and he made himself a partner in the crime of persecuting them by the zest with which he thrust them into the inner prison and made their feet fast in the stocks. His conscience was ill at ease. Then came the earthquake's shock, and he felt as if called to stand face to face with his Judge. His soul was pierced through and through with a sense of guilt. 'What must I do to be saved?' he cried in the bitterness of his conviction. 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved,' answered Paul. This is the answer to all of you who are well convicted of sin and have given up all self-righteous hopes. Christ saves you. Look to Christ, ask Christ; whosoever comes to him he will in no wise cast out. Will you not come to him? Will you not trust his promises and commit yourselves to his hands to be saved? He waits to bless you. He delights to be gracious. To save sinners he lived among men, and died and has ascended. His hands are full of gifts. He comes to you, and stands and knocks at the door of your hearts. Will you bolt the door? There is joy in heaven over repenting sinners. This alone of all earthly transactions carries joy to Christ and the angels. Accept of Christ, and earth and heaven will throb with a common joy." These words were listened to with most earnest attention, for at that time Christ and heaven were realities in the minds of men, and salvation was a living issue. Mr. Wilton spoke as an earnest man, without cant or circumlocution, pressing upon men of thought and conscience the great concerns of eternity. The full result of this discourse will be known only when the opening of the books at the last day shall reveal it, but the beginning of the result was seen in the evening prayer-meeting. When the invitation was given for anxious persons to make known their feelings, both Ansel and Peter arose, and confessing in few words that the Spirit of God had been striving with them, and that they had been resisting the Spirit, said that now they were determined to resist no more, and asked Christians to pray for them that they might be able to submit fully to the Lord Jesus and trust entirely in him. Then there was a pause. Mr. Wilton was just on the point of rising to close the meeting when Mr. Hume rose to his feet. After a sudden start of surprise, a deep hush passed over the congregation, and in the midst of deepest silence Mr. Hume said: "I have been more than merely an impenitent man: I have been an unbeliever; I have been an infidel. I have not only tried to disbelieve the Holy Scripture, but I have actually disbelieved. I have thought myself wiser than the word of God. I do not mean that I have enjoyed peace, that my conscience has been at rest, and that I have been happy in my unbelief. Three months ago I began to grow more than usually discontented with myself. Questions which I counted settled and put to rest for ever came back to trouble me. A hundred times a day the questions came, What if there be a God who holds me responsible? What if there be a future life and a judgment day? What if Christ be the Son of God? Why such questions should haunt me day and night I could not tell. I have learned to believe that the Spirit of God was speaking to me. This restlessness brought me to the church for half a day. If my object was to gain rest in unbelief, I could not have done worse. My old arguments were unavailing to break the force of the truths preached. The questions which had been sounding in my ears and echoing in my heart began to change to solemn affirmations: 'There is a God;' 'There is a day of judgment;' 'Appointed unto man once to die, and after that the judgment;' 'Christ is risen.' Texts of Scripture learned in my boyhood and forgotten long years ago came back fresh to my memory. But I will not stop to rehearse to you all my struggles of mind for two months past. For a few weeks you have seen me here. I determined that I would try to find Christ if he manifests himself to men in these latter days. For two weeks I have tried to pray, but I have found no satisfaction. Christ has not manifested himself. My darkness has grown deeper and deeper. I have sometimes almost determined to abandon all thought of Christ and throw myself back again upon my former unbelief. But I could not lay down the subject. "Since I began to try to pray I have felt, faintly at first, like the whisper of a suggestion, but becoming clearer and stronger, like a voice from heaven, that I must in this congregation confess my former state and the feelings which I have had. It seemed to me that I could not do this. It seemed easier to die than to stand up here and confess that my belief, which I had pressed upon others and had boasted of as better than the gospel, had given me no peace. To-day I have been made to understand that the Spirit of God has set me face to face with this confession. I have seen what it means to be saved--that my self-will must die or I must bid adieu to Christ and hope. I cannot live and die hopeless. I cannot rest my head upon unbelief. I confess to you that all my thoughts have been wrong. My beliefs and my unbelief have done me no good. My whole life has been enmity and opposition to the Holy Spirit. I will try to oppose the Spirit no more. I know not what the Spirit may lay upon me, I know not how soon I may break my resolution, but I now feel that I want to be saved from sin, and cannot do otherwise than follow the Spirit though I dwell in darkness for ever. If Christ reject me I cannot complain, but if you think there is hope for one who has so despised the grace of God, I entreat you to pray for me." It is needless to say that from scores of family altars and closets supplications went up to God that night for the salvation of Mr. Hume and Ansel and Peter, and men prayed especially that Mr. Hume, who for years had been such a tower of strength to the ungodly and the dread of Christians, might be saved for the glory of Christ and the confounding of unbelievers. Those prayers were heard. When the report of that meeting and that confession went out through the community, unbelievers were silent. It was as if the God of battles had emptied his quiver into the hearts of his enemies. CHAPTER XII. TRANSFER OF HEAT IN SPACE. "We now turn our attention," said Mr. Wilton, "to a new theme. In the vicissitudes of day and night and of summer and winter heat is transferred _in time_. We now are to look at the arrangements by which heat is transferred _in space_. But since the transfer of heat in space requires more or less of time, the means employed are such as suffice to accomplish both objects. Heat is treasured up and carried away to distant regions, and delivered up for use as occasion demands. "In a previous lesson the inclination of the earth's axis was spoken of. By this means the northern hemisphere of the earth is turned somewhat toward the sun during one half of the year, and receives a correspondingly larger portion of heat, while during the other half of the year the southern hemisphere is turned toward the sun and is warmed. This inclination of the earth's axis to the plane of its orbit gives us the change of seasons. "The change of seasons is manifestly designed for the welfare of man. Along with the genial warmth of summer, fruits and grains and the comforts of life are carried far toward the poles, into regions which otherwise would be desolate with perpetual frost. But these extremes need to be softened; otherwise, the violence of the changes would prove destructive rather than beneficent. The severity of these annual changes of temperature is ameliorated by some of the grandest movements and arrangements upon our globe. These arrangements we have in a very imperfect way already examined. "But there are other inequalities of temperature besides those of day and night, summer and winter. Passing from the equator toward the poles, every degree of the earth's surface passed over causes the sun to sink one degree from the zenith toward the horizon, and gives a corresponding lower temperature, till within the polar circles for a part of the year the sun is entirely hidden and winter reigns without a rival. The temperature of the sea differs from the temperature of the land; the sun comes nearer to one hemisphere than the other, and remains longer north of the equator than south. These and many other differences upon the earth give to different parts of the world every possible variety of temperature and climate. These differences of temperature upon sea and land, from zone to zone and from hemisphere to hemisphere, are equalized or ameliorated by many agencies, but chiefly by a transfer of heat in space, a transfer of heat from place to place. "I do not need to tell you that while we in the northern hemisphere are enjoying the warmth of summer the southern hemisphere is enduring the severities of winter, and in turn, when winter comes to us, summer smiles upon the nations that live south of the equator. You also remember that the orbit of the earth is not an exact circle, but an ellipse, that is, what is sometimes called in common language a long circle. For this reason the earth is three millions of miles nearer the sun in one part of its orbit than when in another part. Can you tell us, Peter, at what season of year the earth is nearer the sun?" "In midwinter, or about the first of January. I have always remembered it because it seemed so strange to me, when I learned it, that the sun should be nearest the earth at the coldest season of the year." "Yes, one is reminded by it of the humorous argument that the sun must emit cold instead of heat, because when we are at the point of the earth's orbit which is nearest the sun it is winter, and the higher one ascends upon mountains toward the sun, the colder he finds it. But this nearness of the sun while south of the equator would naturally give the southern hemisphere a warmer summer than the northern. For this there is a beautiful compensation. The earth passes through her orbit more rapidly when nearer the sun, and that half of her orbit is also smaller, so that, as the result of this, the sun remains north of the equator about eight days longer than in the southern hemisphere. The sun is nearer while in the southern hemisphere, but the summer is shorter. That which the southern hemisphere gains in distance it loses in time, and that which the northern loses in distance it gains in time. "The nearness of the sun while south of the equator, the shortness of the summer, and the corresponding distance of the sun and length of the winter would tend to give the southern hemisphere great extremes of heat and cold, a short and hot summer and a long and cold winter. For this also there is a most interesting compensation in the comparative amount of land and water north and south of the equator. Much more than one-half of the dry land lies in the northern hemisphere. This would tend to give the northern hemisphere extremes of heat and cold. South of the equator there is comparatively little land and much water, which tends to give the southern hemisphere evenness of temperature. The inequalities of the earth's orbit and the earth's motion in its orbit we find counterbalanced by the arrangement of land and water upon the earth's surface. "In connection with this we may notice still another compensation in the elevation of the lands by which the burning heat of the torrid zone and the rigors of the colder zones are more or less diminished. The greater the elevation of any region of country, the cooler must be its climate. Physical geographers like Baron von Humboldt and Guyot have made calculations which show that those grand divisions of the earth which lie in the hot regions of the earth are most elevated above the sea level. South America lies higher than North America, Asia is more elevated than Europe, and Africa is more elevated than Asia. The continents rise as they approach the equator and sink toward the sea level as they come nearer the poles. As these colder lands approach the water level their valleys sink beneath the sea, their coast lines become deeply indented with bays and gulfs, and lakes abound. Thus the warmer waters of the sea are interspersed among the cooler lands, and the temperature of the lands is raised. The very elevation of the continents and the configuration of the lands have a providential relation to the temperature and climate of the world. We cannot suppose that arrangements like these, so aptly fitted to the needs of man, came by chance. In the unmeasured ages past, while this earth was in preparation for man, God had the beneficent _end_ in view; nay, in the very beginning, the whole plan and its beautiful completion was had clearly in mind. Millions of ages ago the great Creator tenderly considered the comfort and well-being of the human race, the latest born of his creatures, in these last ages. "As a general statement, the torrid zone receives an excess of heat, while the frigid zones receive too little, and the temperate zones, lying between, receive, at different times and places, sometimes too little and sometimes too much. The providential arrangements for equalizing temperature are, then, chiefly arrangements for conveying heat from the overheated tropical regions and scattering it over the temperate and polar regions. First among these means we will notice the _trade-winds_, or, as for the sake of brevity they are often called, 'the trades.' Will you tell us, Samuel, how winds are caused?" "The air is heated at some place and expands; it becomes lighter and rises, while the colder air around rushes in to fill its place." "You use the words which are commonly employed in explaining the origin of winds, and very likely your idea is right, but the language needs a little correction. The warm air does not rise of its own accord, so to speak, but is pressed upward. The warm air is expanded; it presses outward and upward; the same weight of warm air occupies more space than cold air; the warm air rises and overtops the surrounding air, and then flows off in order to reach the common level. The column of warm air is lighter than the cooler air, and cannot balance it; consequently, the cold air sinks down, pressing the warm air upward. In this manner an ascending current of warm air is formed, and also currents of cold air flowing from every direction toward the warm centre. These currents continue until the temperature of the air is equalized. "The atmosphere is commonly believed to be forty-five or fifty miles in height, though some men have estimated its height as very much less than this, while others believe it to be six or seven hundred miles in height. Are we to suppose that the column of heated air reaches to the top of the atmosphere?" "I think not," answered Mr. Hume. "The rarefaction of the lower part of the column renders the whole column lighter than the air around, and the warm air, as we know by the movements of the clouds, after rising a little way, spreads off in every direction, forming upper currents corresponding to the currents below, but moving in the opposite direction." "Only a few days ago," remarked Peter, "I saw in the same part of the sky clouds moving in exactly opposite directions, and others which seemed to be standing still. I knew how one layer of clouds might be moving north and another layer moving south, but I did not understand why some should be standing still." "Do you imagine, Peter, that the upper and lower currents of air, moving in opposite directions, come sharply together, the one sliding against the other?" "I think not," said Peter. "Supposing, then, as is certainly true, that a stratum of still air lies between the upper and lower winds, does not that explain how certain clouds might be standing still while the others were moving?" "I might have thought of that myself." "But how does this carry heat from the warmer region to the colder regions around?" asked Ansel. "I see how the colder air coming in would cool the warm region, and how the warm ascending air would carry away the excess of heat, but how do the cooler regions get the advantage of this heat?" "That is just what I was on the point of explaining. Do you remember what was said about the production of cold by expansion and of heat by compression?" "I remember that if air be rarefied by removing pressure from it, its temperature falls: I think you said that a part of its sensible heat becomes latent; and if air be compressed, its temperature rises. I have seen experiments with the air pump and condenser to prove this." "That principle explains the transfer of heat by winds. If the heated air rose to the upper regions, and there radiated its heat, nothing would be gained; the heat would be simply radiated into space. But as the warm air rises pressure is more and more removed from it; it expands; its sensible heat becomes latent and is thus kept from radiation; its temperature falls, but not from loss of heat. This rarefied air forms the upper current flowing away from the heated centre. In due time this air must come to the surface of the earth again. Whenever this takes place the air is brought again under pressure; it is compressed, and its latent heat becomes again sensible. Heat is thus transferred from the warmer region to the colder in a latent condition, so that it cannot be lost. We must now apply this to the trade-winds. What are the trade-winds, Mr. Hume?" "They are regular winds blowing from a little north and south of the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn south-west and north-west toward the equator." "These winds are called _trade-winds_," continued Mr. Wilton, "on account of their great advantage to trade or commerce. The regular and steady sweep of these winds bears the merchantmen rapidly and safely on their way. The formation of 'the trades' is easily explained. By the intense heat of the sun under the equator the air is greatly expanded and rarefied; the heated air rises along the whole line of the equator; from both sides the cooler air presses in, is heated, and rises; thus steady winds are formed from the tropics, or a little beyond the tropics, toward the equator. If the earth had no rotation upon its axis, these winds would blow directly toward the equator, exactly south and north. The rotation of the earth gives the trade-winds their oblique, south-west and north-west direction. Suppose that a single particle of air at the tropic of Cancer starts upon its journey toward the equator. At its starting it has the same motion eastward as the surface of the earth at that place, that is, about nine hundred and fifty miles per hour. But as it moves on southward the degrees of longitude become longer and the motion of the earth's surface becomes more rapid, till at the equator its motion is one thousand and forty miles per hour. But the particle of air we are watching is not fastened to the earth's surface, and as the earth moves more rapidly the nearer we come to the equator, the particle of air falls behind, that is, the air moves southward and eastward, but the earth moves eastward more rapidly than the air, so that the air falls behind and seems to be moving westward. The result is that the air upon the earth's surface moves south-west. That which takes place with a single particle takes place with the whole body of the air, and that which takes place north of the equator takes place south of it also, producing north-west winds. On reaching the equator the winds from the north and the south meet and stop, forming the equatorial calms, and mingling together, they rise into the higher regions. In rising, the air bears away heat from the torrid zone, and this heat, rendered latent by the expansion of the air, is carried north and south by the upper currents as far as the limits of 'the trades.' In due time these upper currents descend and their latent becomes sensible heat, and is used in raising the temperature. Mr. Hume, can you suggest any method by which we can estimate the amount of heat which is carried north and south by the return trades?" "I know of no method, except to estimate the amount of heat necessary to raise that flood of air which pours in from the temperate zones to the equatorial heat. That immense amount of heat must, nearly all of it, be carried away to the temperate regions." "This is the general explanation of the trade-winds. You must understand, however, that, in certain regions and under certain conditions, the trades are liable to interruption or change of direction. Desert regions within or near the tropics give rise to local winds which overpower the trades. In Southern Asia, while the sun is north of the equator, the land becomes so much hotter than the sea under the equator that the trade-wind is overpowered and reversed, forming a wind which blows to the north-east instead of the south-west. But this is only a beautiful flexure, so to speak, of a general arrangement for the greater advantage of a particular region. By this means the summer winds of Southern Asia come from the sea. Northern winds would have been dry. Prevailing northern winds would have made the whole of Southern Asia a desert; but the south-west monsoons come from the Indian Ocean laden with vapor, and render Southern Asia a very garden for fertility. "The next great agency for equalizing temperature between the torrid and temperature zones is the formation and condensation of vapor. This comes in here, because it depends for its efficiency upon the agency of winds. More than once this method of conveying heat from place to place has been hinted at, but deferred till we came to the proper place to speak of winds. "The trade-winds, passing over from a colder to a warmer climate, are constantly accumulating vapor. Under the equator the annual evaporation from the surface of the ocean is set down at fifteen feet, or half an inch daily. The formation of this vapor consumes heat which would boil more than eighty feet of ice water. The vapor thus formed is borne upward by the ascending current of heated air. On reaching the higher regions a portion of it is condensed and forms a belt of clouds around the earth. This belt of clouds along the equator is known as the 'cloud-ring.' This cloud-ring shields the belt of calms from the burning rays of the sun and sends down almost incessant rains. But does not that condensation which forms the cloud-ring set free latent heat, and thus intensify the great heat of the equator? Latent heat becomes sensible, but it is given out into the ascending current of air, and serves only to give it another lift till by expansion of the air it again becomes latent. The heat is simply transferred from the vapor to the air. The vapor which remains uncondensed is borne away on the wings of the return 'trades' to the south and to the north, and in due time is condensed and returns to the earth as rain; the heat which is given out by its condensation, wherever and whenever it is condensed, is given over as latent heat to the keeping of the air, and is passed back for use whenever the air descends to the earth. "Vapor gathered from sea or land is everywhere exerting this equalizing influence upon temperature. Does the temperature rise in any place? Vapor is formed. Every moist body begins to give up its moisture, and the excess of heat is employed in turning this water into vapor. This is the method by which perspiration cools man or beast; whether it be insensible perspiration from the invisible pores of the skin, or perspiration standing in beady drops upon the face of the toiling laborer, vapor is formed and heat is carried away. Have you not noticed on close, muggy days when nothing dries, showing that very little vapor is forming, that perspiration seems to have no cooling effect? It oozes from the skin, but does not evaporate, and hence does not carry off the surplus heat. Animals like dogs and oxen, that do not become wet with perspiration, do not bear heat well; they soon pant and loll, attempting to get rid of the excessive heat through the moist breath and open mouth. "The sum-total of heat transferred by this agency is too great for comprehension. Look at the Amazon rolling to the ocean a flood broad as an arm of the sea. That great river is brought from the Atlantic Ocean on the shoulders of the trade-wind. As the vapor is slowly lifted by the rise of the land from the sea level to the summits of the Andes, it is condensed, and falls as rain. Well is it for South America that the Andes were thrown up on the western coast, for the winds west of the mountains are dry as a pressed sponge, and the most of that narrow slope is barren and desolate. South America would be a desert if the Andes ran along the eastern coast. Look at the Mississippi, and the great rivers of Europe, and the matchless rivers of Southern Asia. All the rivers of the world represent only the _wastage_ of the rain which falls upon the land after supplying the wants of the vegetable kingdom and keeping the lands moist. All this water is lifted into the air by heat, and every movement of vapor is a movement of heat. Every particle of vapor goes freighted with heat. Every cloud driven across the sky represents the transfer of heat, and every transfer is in the direction of equalization. Everywhere the tendency is to equilibrium. Nature has no processes for transferring heat from colder to warmer regions. "We may form a conception of the amount of heat transferred by the agency of vapor by estimating the amount of heat-force required to evaporate the water which forms our rain-clouds and lift them into the upper regions. According to a calculation of Mr. Allen, late of Providence, to evaporate one-eighth of an inch of water daily from that belt of the surface of the earth lying within the tropics, and raise it five thousand feet high, requires 4,700,000,000 horse-power, or one hundred and thirty times the effective force of the whole human race, reckoning it at 250,000,000 able-bodied men. But the actual evaporation from the sea within the tropics is believed to be about half an inch daily--four times as great as Mr. Allen's supposition. "I see, however, that our time is nearly exhausted, and I wish before closing to revert to that more important theme upon which I spoke this forenoon. I do not know how the truths preached interested or affected you, nor do I now wish to have you tell me. I wish only to say that, as the sermon was preached at your request, I hope it proved applicable to you, and that you will give the truths presented earnest attention. Consider them well, and make your conclusions known this evening." The conclusion which the evening made known, you, reader, have already learned. CHAPTER XIII. OCEAN CURRENTS AND ICEBERGS. A week has passed since Mr. Hume made his frank confession. He went home no lighter of heart than before, yet he felt in some respects different, for he had attempted to do what was right in the sight of God. But he did not feel the joy of sins forgiven. He had not looked upon Christ as a Saviour for himself. He felt that God had distinctly set life and death before him. His doubts were gone; the spiritual world was a reality; Christ stood at his right hand and Satan at his left; he stood where the path of destiny divided, the one path leading up to heavenly seats with Christ, the other leading down to darkness and despair. A voice seemed to be whispering in his ears, "This is the last call." He went to his chamber determined, if possible, to settle the question of life or death before he left the place and before he slept. He took his Bible, and on his knees turned and read the Psalms at random. But the cloud of darkness only gathered deeper. The words of David's penitential Psalm caught his eye: "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight." He felt that these words of David were true in his case also. All his long impenitence and bold unbelief had been against God. By night and by day, for many a long year, before the sleepless eye of God, he had lifted up his hand, almost defying the holy One, yet the lightning of God had not smitten him. He wondered as much at the long-suffering of God as at his own dreadful daring of the divine wrath. He had been taught better things; he was trained to know the Scriptures and to go reverently to the house of God, but he had turned from Christ and hope. He read on: "Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation." He felt that this belonged to himself more than to David. David had shed the blood of natural life, but he had destroyed the souls of men. He had stood chief among unbelievers. He had led young men into infidelity. He had seen them drink in his unbelief like water, throw off all restraint, and rush headlong to ruin. He had wrought a work of evil which he could never undo, and for which he could make no atonement. What was a confession in comparison with the ruin he had caused? What could his confession do for the young men already, perhaps, among the lost through his influence? Could his late repentance call them back to life and hope? Would God forgive and raise to heavenly heights a man who had dragged others down to hell? Would it be possible that Christ should fill his soul with blessedness while his victims were drinking the wine of the wrath of God? A deep horror seized him. The darkness of eternal death seemed to enfold him. Must he, then, after having caught a glimpse of life and joy, be cut off from hope and be driven from God for ever? This would be just, but he felt that he could not endure it. "O thou great and holy God," he prayed, "I will ascribe righteousness to thee though thy righteous wrath shall sink me to hell; but, O thou merciful God, my soul cannot endure thy justice. The foretaste of thy wrath fills me with the pangs of eternal death. O God, have mercy upon me. O God, blot out my transgressions. Create in me a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me. O Christ, whom I have despised, cast me not from thy presence. Help me to submit to thee. Help me to follow thee. Spare me that I may undo something of that which I have done against thy glory and the souls of men. O Jesus, I can do nothing to save myself. O Lord, have mercy on me, the chief of sinners." He read the invitations and promises of Christ, and prayed again. Again he read and again he prayed. Little by little the promises of Christ stirred a feeble faith in his heart; he felt that there was still hope for him, and with the determination to cast himself upon the sure mercies of Christ and to devote himself to his service, he threw himself upon his bed, and being wearied almost to exhaustion, soon fell asleep. When he awoke it was broad daylight. He had slept a sweet, refreshing sleep. But he was refreshed not merely in body. He woke to a new world. His heart was filled with sweet thankfulness. "How beautiful," he said, "is God's world! I never saw it so before, but the earth and sky seem clothed in glory. But most wonderful of all is God's goodness to me. I have rebelled against him all my life, yet he has loved me and sought for my salvation, and now the sunlight of his love has broken through the thick clouds of my sin, and a day of hope and joy has dawned upon my life. Christ has indeed revealed himself. Blessed be his holy name for ever and ever! What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits? I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows now in presence of all his people. I will teach transgressors thy ways, and sinners shall be converted unto thee." All this was known to the people, for during the week Mr. Hume had spoken of it in private and in public. He had told it to Mr. Wilton, and they had rejoiced together. Ansel and Peter had also regularly presented themselves at every meeting as anxious inquirers desiring the grace of God. Peter had also on his knees said from the heart, "Here, Lord, I give myself away," and had received the assurance that his sins were forgiven. The Spirit of God witnessed with his spirit that he was born of God. He began at once to use all his influence to bring his young friends to Jesus. The addition of two such workers as Mr. Hume and Peter, each moving in his own circle of acquaintances, gave a fresh impulse to the religious interest, which was now becoming deep and pervasive. Especially had Mr. Hume's conversion, so clear and positive, confounded those who had sat "in the seat of the scornful," and many came in now for the first time to see for themselves what it could be that had mastered their cold, clear-headed leader in unbelief. But Ansel still walked in darkness. He had talked with Mr. Wilton, but no light had entered his mind. He said that he thought he had submitted in all things to the will of God. He was becoming impatient that Christ had not come to him as to others. This was their condition as they came together upon the Lord's Day. They all understood each other, and had no need now to ask questions or make explanations. Mr. Wilton believed that the study of God's works would not interrupt the working of the Holy Spirit, and therefore went on with his lesson as usual. "We have already spoken of the transfer of heat from the torrid to the temperate and frigid zones by the agency of winds and watery vapor. These carry heat chiefly in a latent condition. But great movements of heat take place in a sensible state. In this transfer of heat, also, water is the great carrier. The winds and vapor go freighted with latent heat above, and the waters and wind go freighted with sensible heat below. We will first examine the operation of the ocean currents. "Not only do rivers run through the lands and hasten to the sea, but in the midst of the oceans rivers are flowing in comparison with which the Mississippi, the Amazon, and the Yang-tse-kiang are rippling brooklets. The earth is belted by these ocean streams traversing the seas. An ocean current, called the Gulf Stream, issues from the Gulf of Mexico between the Florida coast and the Bahama islands. It flows northward off the coast of the United States, gradually increasing in breadth and spreading over the Atlantic Ocean. It is deflected by the New England coast and the great shoals off Newfoundland, called the Grand Banks, or else by another current flowing southward from Baffin's Bay, and strikes across the North Atlantic, bathing the shores of the British islands and reaching even to Iceland. "The general outline of the ocean currents is this: issuing from the South Pacific, a current flowing eastward splits upon Cape Horn. The western portion, called Humboldt's current, flows northward along the western coast of South America, and is swallowed up and lost in the great equatorial current of the Pacific. This is a broad current flowing westward and covering the entire space between the tropics. Striking upon the eastern shores of Asia, this equatorial current divides, one part flowing northward along the coast of Asia, the other finding its way through the many islands, sweeping across the Indian Ocean, and flowing down the eastern shore of Africa on each side of Madagascar. Doubling the Cape of Good Hope, the current continues in a north-westerly direction across the Atlantic. Striking upon Cape St. Roque, this current again divides; a part flows south and a part pours into the Caribbean Sea. From the Caribbean Sea it issues as the Gulf Stream, of which I have already spoken. This Gulf Stream impinges upon the western coast of Europe, and pours partly into the North Sea and partly flows south off the western coast of Africa, completing thus the circuit of the Atlantic. The currents of the Indian and of the great Southern Oceans are as yet very imperfectly understood. Of all the ocean streams the Gulf Stream is most famous and best understood. I shall therefore use this as an illustration of the agency of ocean currents in conveying heat and modifying climate. "The waters of the Caribbean Sea are heated by the tropic sun to eighty-eight degrees. From these heated waters the Gulf Stream issues salter and warmer, and of a deeper blue, than the waters of the surrounding sea. Its greatest velocity as it issues from the gulf is a little more than three miles per hour. As it flows northward its velocity diminishes, its breadth becomes greater, and its depth less. It covers thus with its warm waters a broad belt of the Atlantic Ocean, and extends its influence to the most northern part of Europe. You can judge of the amount of heat which is removed from the tropics when I tell you that the unmeasured flood of the Gulf Stream would swallow up three thousand rivers like the Mississippi. This one ocean stream is many times greater than all the rivers of the world. We feel the warmth of the Gulf Stream with every wind that blows from the sea. To this the British isles owe their mild, moist climate and perennial greenness, and by its influence a winter in Iceland, upon the Arctic circle, is no more rigorous than a winter in Montreal, twenty-one degrees nearer the equator. But what is the Gulf Stream, though it be fifty fold greater than all the rivers of the world, in comparison with the whole sum of the ocean streams? Upper currents and under currents fill the sea. They meet the explorers of the sea everywhere. The navigator drops his measuring line, and finds it swept away and drawn out by unseen currents. All these movements of the waters are in favor of the equalization of temperature. The cooler waters of the frigid and temperate zones are mingled with the heated waters of the tropics and exchanged for the equatorial waters. The transfer of heat would not be greater if broad rivers of molten lava were flowing from the equator to the poles. "Another agency for the transfer of heat is the movement of ice, and especially of icebergs." "Will you not tell us," said Samuel, "how these ocean currents are produced? I can understand how winds are formed, but I do not see that these streams in the sea could be formed in the same way." "I designed to speak of this, but for the moment it had slipped from my mind: I am glad that you called my attention to it. I do not expect, however, to give a full and satisfactory account of their origin. If I should do this, I should succeed where every other man has failed. I shall not attempt a full explanation. By some means or other, the waters of the ocean are thrown out of equilibrium, and these currents are plainly an effort to restore the balance or equilibrium of the waters. Many influences and agencies conspire to disturb the equilibrium of the sea. The attractions of the sun and moon are constantly counteracting the attraction of the earth and lifting the waters, so to speak, above their natural level. The tides produced by these attractions of the sun and moon are the immediate cause of some of the minor local currents. The winds set the waters in motion, tending to pile them up in one place and leave the sea below its natural level at another. The effect of strong winds in piling up the waters, even upon our great lakes, is very considerable. A heavy east wind upon Lake Erie has been known to drive the waters toward the western end of the lake so much as to leave Niagara River above the falls almost dry. On the other hand, a heavy west wind drives the waters eastward, and produces almost a flood in the river. The influence of constant winds like the 'trades' acting upon an immense expanse of water must be very much greater. Unequal evaporation tends to destroy the balance of the waters. In the colder regions the evaporation is very little, while within the tropics it amounts to about half an inch daily, or fifteen feet per annum. The head of the Red Sea is two feet lower than its mouth on account of evaporation. This unequal evaporation causes also an unequal saltness, and consequently an unequal weight. The fresher and lighter water cannot balance an equal bulk of salter and heavier water. When once currents are started the revolution of the earth upon its axis would affect them, just as the rotation of the earth affects the trade-winds. Now, all these various agencies, and perhaps many others, combine their influence to destroy the equilibrium of the waters of the ocean. They unite and interweave their influence in a thousand ways beyond all human calculation. The result is the ocean currents. But how much is due to one cause and how much to another in the present state of knowledge no man can tell. Only for a few years have the phenomena of ocean currents been made the object of scientific observation and research. But the effect of ocean currents in modifying climate is well understood, and the modification of climate means nothing else than the transfer of heat. This is all that I have to say of the rivers of the sea, and if there are no more questions, we will now look at the movement of heat caused by icebergs." No question was asked, and Mr. Wilton continued: "In polar regions there must be an immense formation of ice. Except in the oceans, the movements of water are chiefly movements of water in the condition of ice. Only for a small part of the year could water exist unfrozen. Immense regions of the Antarctic continent seem to be covered with one broad glacier. The ice pushes down into the sea until, undermined by the dashing of the waves, it breaks off, and enormous fragments are launched upon the deep waters. Sir James Ross saw in the southern ocean a chain of such icebergs extending as far as the eye could reach from the mast-head, many of them from one hundred feet to one hundred and eighty feet in height and miles across. Captain d'Urville saw one thirteen miles long and one hundred feet high. Its bulk was so vast that though the waves were dashing against it not a tremor was perceptible. Astronomic observations could be made from it as if it were solid rock rooted in the heart of the earth. In the same manner icebergs are formed in the northern ocean also. How much heat is given out in the freezing of water?" "About one hundred and forty degrees," answered Peter. "In the formation of icebergs, then, heat is given out nearly sufficient to boil an equal quantity of cold water. The icebergs float away toward the equator. They come down from Baffin's Bay till they meet the Gulf Stream off Newfoundland. In the southern hemisphere they come ten degrees nearer the equator. As they float toward the tropics they slowly melt, and in their melting they exact from the air and the sea where they melt the same amount of heat which they gave up in their freezing. If they melted at the same place where they froze, there would be no transfer of heat. But they are formed in the polar regions; they give out their heat in the frigid zone, while they melt and absorb a like amount of heat from the temperate zones. In this manner the polar regions are exchanging with the temperate zones ice for water. They borrow water, rob it of its latent heat, and send it back in the form of ice. The temperate zones supply the needed heat and bring the ice back to the form of water, when the polar regions again borrow it, seize upon its heat, and again send it back in the form of ice mountains. The effect is the same as if thousands of railroad trains were transporting water to the frigid zones, leaving it there to freeze and give up its one hundred and forty degrees of latent heat, and bringing it back in the form of ice. Let us estimate the bulk of one such iceberg as that seen by Captain d'Urville. It was thirteen miles long and one hundred feet high, and we will suppose that it was four miles broad. Standing out from the water one hundred feet, it must have sunk at least eight hundred feet below the surface. This would give us the enormous bulk of (1,304,709,120,000) one trillion three hundred and four billions seven hundred and nine millions one hundred and twenty thousand cubic feet of ice. The burning of one pound of coal will generate heat sufficient to melt about five and a half cubic feet of ice. To melt one such iceberg would require more than one hundred and eighteen millions of tons of anthracite coal. This is the amount of heat given out in the polar region by its freezing. This is the amount of heat transported from the warmer to the colder regions. But what is one iceberg to the thousands which drift yearly from the frigid zones toward the tropics? "But even this hardly represents the entire transfer of heat by the agency of icebergs. The icebergs are formed from the snows of polar storms, and these are formed from the condensation and freezing of vapors. In the process of condensation one thousand degrees of heat are given out. Every iceberg _represents_ a transfer of heat sufficient to boil more than six times its weight of ice water. "One marked illustration of the effect of icebergs we ought to notice. Down through Baffin's Bay icebergs are constantly floating. They are borne on southward till, in the still waters of the Grand Banks, between the polar current and the Gulf Stream, they float around and melt and disappear. To these melting icebergs the chilliness and unfailing fogs of the Grand Banks are due; and not only this, but the very existence of the Banks is supposed to be due to the deposit of sediment, sand, earth, and stone brought by polar ice. "I have spoken only of the polar glaciers and the icebergs formed by their pushing off into the sea. But the same transfer of heat is taking place, on a very much smaller scale and within narrow limits, by the glaciers of the Alps and every other mountain glacier. The glaciers are nothing else than rivers of ice. Snow falls upon the mountain tops and valleys of the mountain sides from age to age. The snow slowly changes to the structure of ice, and by its enormous weight flows down through the gorges of the mountain sides, till in the warmer vales below it melts and disappears. We have not time to go into a full examination of all the interesting phenomena of glaciers, but this one point you will notice and remember: these rivers of ice--for they flow like rivers--cool the valleys and tend to warm the mountain tops; of course upon the tops of the mountains there can be no accumulation of heat, because, standing out into the eternal coldness of space, and swept by winds for ever, and exposed by the thinness of the air to a rapidity of evaporation unknown at the sea level, heat is caught up and borne away in a moment. [Illustration: TRANSPORTATION of HEAT. Page 288.] "This closes this department of our theme. I might have gone much more into details and given you great stores of particular facts and figures, but they would have added nothing to your understanding of the subject, and we can hardly afford to devote our Lord's Day to mastering the details of the natural sciences. We have now looked at some of the methods by which the extremes of heat and cold, in day and night, in summer and winter, and in the tropics and polar regions, are mitigated. The same principles operate upon the smallest and upon the largest scale. If there is need for me to attempt in a formal way to awaken in you admiration for the wisdom and goodness of God shown in all these beneficent arrangements for equalizing temperature, our study has been largely in vain. We have only to remember that all these contrivances are the Lord's designs. He created the world; he endowed matter with its qualities and forces, and he gave it these qualities and forces for the purpose of using it as he has used it. He planned all those contrivances by which he secures the comfort and the good of man, and the fact that these natural agencies are fitted for moral uses in recovering sinners to holiness and blessedness is but the culmination of its adaptation to the uses of man. "This, however, does not complete our course of study. A few other points will demand our attention for two or three more lessons. But while we go on with our studies of Nature, remember that the physical was created for the sake of the spiritual; the spiritual is more important. Let us not subvert the divine order and sink the high purpose of the creation to mere material agencies and contrivances. To know God is greater and better than to understand Nature. That we might know and enjoy and glorify the Creator was the object of our creation. We cannot express it in better language than that employed in the old catechism: 'The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.' That term 'for ever' includes the present life as well as the future. We ought to know, enjoy, and glorify God to-day. I hope that another week may find Ansel with some happy experience in this matter." CHAPTER XIV. COMBUSTION.--COAL-BEDS. Another Lord's Day comes, and no change has taken place with the class which calls for mention. Ansel still walks in darkness, ready indeed on every occasion to manifest his concern for the salvation of his soul, diligent in reading the Scriptures, frequent in prayer, and giving yet no indication of a flagging of his avowed purpose to follow Christ, but he receives no comfort and peace. A painful and distressed interest is becoming more and more concentrated upon him. What will be the end of his groping in darkness? This cannot last always. Unless the hindrance, whatever it be, which prevents the exercise of faith, be seen and removed, Ansel will probably soon go back to his former careless state, and, it may be, become tenfold more obdurate than before. He will be likely, on the one hand, to become self-righteous from his supposed effort to come to Jesus, and, on the other, discouraged and despairing, feeling that for him effort is vain and salvation unattainable. While he remains in this state the very lapse of time is dangerous. All feel concerned for him, but no questions are asked, and the lesson goes on as usual. "The method of transferring heat which we are now to examine is wholly different in principle from any which we have as yet considered. I refer to the production of heat by combustion. The transfer of heat by combustion cannot be compared for vastness with those great movements of heat which have before claimed our attention, yet for the comfort and well-being of the human race combustion is exceedingly important. Without that command of heat which combustion gives, man could not rise at best above the savage state, and in fact could hardly exist upon the earth. We smile at the Grecian myth that Prometheus stole fire from the gods and brought it to men in his reed staff, but fire is certainly worthy of being counted one of God's great gifts. But whence comes the heat of combustion? Is it a new and original generation of heat, or is it merely a transfer? Will some one explain this?" "I don't think that I can tell," said Samuel. "I remember the principles you have given us about the nature and production of heat, but I do not know how to apply them to combustion." "I did not suppose that you would be able to explain all the phenomena of Nature at sight, yet the production of heat by combustion is not difficult to be understood. The burning of wood and coal is chiefly the union of oxygen with carbon. The oxygen of the air unites with the carbon of the combustible. The attractive force between oxygen and carbon is very strong. When they unite, the atoms of oxygen dash against the atoms of carbon with great violence. As they dash one upon another their motion is lost, but by the laws of transmutation of forces that lost motion reappears as heat; that is, the motion of the atoms as they fall the one against the other is changed to that vibration of the atoms which we call heat. The atoms of carbon, in their separation from oxygen, may be compared to weights suspended, ready to fall. Let once the cord be cut, and the weight falls and dashes against the earth; its motion in falling is lost, and reappears as heat. So carbon is suspended, so to speak, waiting to unite with oxygen. But how is the weight raised? How is carbon brought into this state of suspense, waiting to dash upon oxygen and develop heat? That is not its natural state. "Carbonic acid is found everywhere mingled in small proportions with the atmosphere. This carbonic acid is nothing else than carbon and oxygen united in the proportion of one atom of carbon to two atoms of oxygen. This is the natural state of carbon. This carbonic acid is the food of plants; it is this which supports all vegetable growth. The carbonic acid is absorbed by the leaves of plants and trees, and in the hidden laboratory of the leaf, by what process is one of the undiscovered secrets of Nature, the carbon is separated from the oxygen, the oxygen is discharged through the pores of the leaf, and the carbon is carried into the circulation to build up the fabric of the woody fibre. That which the most skillful chemist in the world cannot do, except by indirect processes and at a high temperature, the leaves are doing directly at the ordinary temperature. Vegetable growth is a deoxidizing process. To accomplish this an enormous force is requisite. To separate carbon and oxygen, a force is demanded which is able to overcome their powerful attraction. How shall we estimate the strength of this force? In order that they may unite, as in the explosion of gunpowder, solid rocks are torn asunder. The attraction of carbon and oxygen is strong enough to tear great rocks in twain. It is this attraction which sends the cannon ball and the shell like meteors of death upon their errands of destruction. This great force must be overcome; carbon must be separated from oxygen and built into trees. This is the lifting up of the weight. But whence comes the force necessary to accomplish this? From the sunbeam. The heat of the summer's sun, employed as force, is used to deoxidize carbonic acid. Heat is used, and used up, in lifting the weight which in its fall shall generate again a like amount of heat. The combustion of wood produces the same amount of heat as was needful to separate its carbon from the carbonic acid of the air. Vegetable growth is thus a cooling process; heat is withdrawn from use as heat, and is employed as force. As force it has nothing to do with temperature. The summer's heat, employed in vegetable growth, reappears in the blazing billets of the kitchen fire. Heat is condensed and solidified, so to speak, and placed under man's control. In this solidified form heat may be laid up in store or transported at pleasure. "The grandest application of this principle is seen in the formation of the coal-beds. At some early period in the unmeasured ages past, the temperature of the earth must have been much higher than it now is; the air was filled with moisture, and carbonic acid abounded. As a consequence, there was an enormous vegetable growth. This, as we have seen, is a heat-consuming process. The heat is withdrawn from the air and employed in deoxidizing the carbonic acid. This vast vegetable growth--enormous ferns and coniferous trees--fell, and was swept by rivers or by floods into valleys, or the beds of lakes, or the sea; the sediment of the waters covered it, and there, shut up from the air and subjected to a heavy pressure, this vegetable mass underwent a slow transformation. Peter, have you ever seen a coal-pit? I do not mean a coal _mine_, but that which charcoal-burners call a coal-pit." "I have seen them many a time." "Tell us, then, how wood is burned to coal without being burned up." "The wood is set on end, closely packed in the shape of a mound, and then covered with earth. Fire is kindled in the middle of the pile, and just enough air admitted through air-holes at the bottom to keep up a slow burning. It burns just fast enough to heat and dry the wood without burning it up." "The same process," said Mr. Wilton, "went on in the formation of the coal-beds, but very much more slowly. Under the pressure of earth and water the vegetable deposits lie smouldering, not for a few days, but probably for ages, till nothing but the carbon remains, and that pressed into a solid mass heavy as stone. Veins of coal are found interspersed with layers of earth and rock, layer above layer, and these layers are commonly not level, but more or less inclined and sometimes broken. This shows that a deposit of driftwood was made, then a deposit of sand or clay, then another deposit of vegetable material and another layer of earth. At length, by internal convulsions, the whole surface was raised from beneath the waters, and in due time the coal-veins were laid open, and the coal brought out for the use of man. Then the force so long pent up and held in suspense is set free; the stored-up heat of the geologic ages is brought out for use. The excess of heat in that ancient period is handed down to these later times. How sublime this transfer of heat! It carries us back, in imagination, to the 'heroic ages,' so to speak, of the history of creation. By other methods heat is treasured up for a day or a year: by this method it is kept in store for myriads of ages. We see that the same natural forces were working in those early ages as to-day, and the same benevolent Creator was arranging the affairs of the world for man's advantage. The sunbeam which streamed upon the earth long ages before man was created is to-day smelting ores, driving machinery, dragging ponderous trains of loaded cars, and ploughing the seas with freighted keels. This seems like a fairy-story or a dream, but instead of that it is the soberest of philosophic and scientific truth. "We ought also to notice the internal heat of the earth. This has been handed down from the day of creation, it would seem, till the present. No new principle is seen in the earth's internal fires, but a sublime illustration of the storing up of heat in a hot body and its slow radiation. "The origin of the internal heat of the earth we can only conjecture. Perhaps God created the various elements separate, uncombined, and allowed them then to combine according to their natural affinities. This sublime conflagration of all the elements of the earth would generate the highest temperature which could be produced by combustion. The elements would melt with fervent heat; everything which could be vaporized by heat would be turned to vapor. Then radiation of heat would begin. Vapors would sink to fluids and fluids turn to solids; a hard crust would be formed on the surface of the globe through which the heat of the still molten mass within would be slowly conducted and escape. Upon this internal heat the earth depends in no small degree for its temperature. The heat generated perhaps upon the day of creation helps now to render the earth habitable. "That the earth was once in a fluid state and has lost a portion of its heat by radiation is indicated by several facts. It is one of the received beliefs among geologists that at some period in the past the temperature of the earth was much higher than it now is. The animals and plants which flourished during the ages when the coal-fields were deposited show that sea and land were warmer than at present. It is believed that the change of temperature has taken place on account of the cooling of the earth from radiation. The rate of radiation is so slow, however, that no farther sensible change of temperature can take place for thousands of generations. "The form of the earth also indicates that it was once fluid. The earth is an oblate spheroid, a flattened sphere, and has that degree of flatness which a fluid mass would assume if revolving at its present rate. The earth swells at the equator and rises thirteen or fourteen miles above the sea level at the poles. The waters of the ocean move freely and take the same form as if the whole globe were fluid, and the solid parts of the earth have the same degree of convexity, which shows that it took its form from its own rotation upon its axis while in a fluid state. This would also show that in the primal ages, when the earth was in a plastic or fluid state, it had the same rate of rotation as at present. "The lifting up of the mountain ranges also is best explained by supposing that the earth was once molten. The earth cooled, a crust was formed, and by farther cooling and contraction of the molten mass within the crust wrinkled and formed mountain chains. Thus the higher temperature of the geologic ages, the form of the earth as if it were a revolving fluid mass, and the corrugation of its surface--these, joined with its present internal heat, point to the fact that it was once molten and fluid to its surface. The benefits of this heat laid up in store on the day of creation we still enjoy." "Before the class is dismissed," said Mr. Hume, "I should like to say a few words." "I have nothing farther to say to-day," answered Mr. Wilton, "and we should be glad to hear you now. Say on." "I wish only to say that these lessons have led me to such thoughts of God's wisdom and goodness as I never had before. Of course it is not strange that this should be the case with me. I now look at everything with new eyes. It is not merely this one element of heat in Nature that moves my admiration, but I have been led to consider a thousand things in which the goodness of God is shown. My thoughts of the divine goodness are as fresh and interesting to me as my impressions of his righteousness and holiness are startling. For years I have tried with might and main to look upon the dark side of the world and to exaggerate its physical evils. I have searched for disorder and want of adaptation. As long as I misunderstood the purpose of the creation, I thought I was successful in impugning the wisdom of the arrangements of this physical world. While I supposed that the earth must needs be the Creator's masterpiece in beauty and pleasantness and all manner of perfections, designed just to give sensual pleasure to its inhabitants, I could find, or thought I found, many faults in the Creator's work. Now I withdraw all my former charges. My eyes are opened. The rougher elements of man's life will henceforth have a new meaning to me. I see that God seeks not so much present pleasure for men as their holiness. He lays a solid foundation for their happiness. He seeks to render men blessed by bringing them into likeness and union with himself. These are new views to me, and I thank my heavenly Father that this new light has dawned upon me. I feel now that I can bear the ills of this life cheerfully, understanding that the Lord is using them as a means of spiritual discipline. It seems to me as if this lower world and man's lowly life were already glorified by a beam of light falling from heaven. I hope that my young friends have been as much profited as I have been." "I rejoice with you, Mr. Hume. 'We know that all things work together for good to them that love God.' This light has shone upon me for many years." CHAPTER XV. ECONOMY OF HEAT. "In this final lesson I wish," said Mr. Wilton, "to bring before you some general views of the whole subject of the agency and management of heat. "When Jesus had fed the five thousand men upon the mountain side by the Sea of Galilee, he said to his disciples, 'Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.' The Christ who spoke these words was the same Christ by whom 'all things were created that are in heaven and that are in the earth, visible and invisible.' These words inculcate the propriety of saving, the very opposite of extravagance and wastefulness. The same prudent economy we find in all God's works. Nothing is wasted. God provides bountifully; he is not stinted in his works; we find nothing narrow or mean; his resources are ample for all his undertakings. Perhaps a careless observer might charge him with prodigality and wastefulness. The wilderness rejoices in beauty and fertility upon which no human eye gazes, and which supplies no human want. 'Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.' Rich fruit grows ruddy and golden in the autumnal sun only to fall and decay. How small a part of the seeds which might germinate and reproduce the parent plant ever fulfill this their legitimate object! But this is not waste. As for the beauty with which the unpeopled wastes are smiling, we know not what other beings besides man 'grow glad at the sight.' Fruits and grains and seeds were appointed as much to nourish the animal kingdom as to reproduce plants and trees. And that which decays is not wasted. The oak lifts high its leafy arms and does battle with the tempests for a century, and then having served its purpose in Nature, if man does not call it to the higher mission of serving his purposes, Nature begins to pull down the structure she has reared and rebuild the elements in other forms--such forms as man perchance may need. The fruit that falls and decays is not wasted; it shall blush with golden tints in other forms and in other years. God pulls down the old that he may build the new. The same elements appear and reappear in a thousand shapes. There is endless change, but no waste. This sentiment, 'Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost,' which is proclaimed throughout all Nature, is uttered most emphatically in the management of heat. God has provided most bountiful stores of heat, but has left no heat to go to waste. Will you, Mr. Hume, suggest one of the general arrangements for the economical use of heat?" "I think that the arrangement for economizing heat which ought to be mentioned first is the confinement of heat to the locality where it is needed." "Will you explain that a little farther, Mr. Hume?" "All living creatures are confined near the surface of the earth. They penetrate only a few feet into the earth and soar a few hundred feet above it. Heat is therefore confined to the region of the earth's surface. It penetrates but a little way below the surface, and when warm air rises into the higher regions, heat becomes latent. The higher parts of the atmosphere are cold, and in the empty spaces of the heavens the temperature is we know not how low. God has provided for heating only that part of the world which needs to be heated. I think you spoke of this in some one of the earlier lessons." "Perhaps I did. But I refer to it again to call especial attention to the idea of the economical use of heat. Who will mention another method by which heat is economized?" No one answered. "I asked the question, but did not expect an answer. God shows economy in the use of heat by accomplishing many different results by its agency. I do not mean that the same identical heat accomplishes different results at the same time. The same force cannot accomplish two works. As man cannot spend his money and at the same time keep it, no more can heat be used and not used up in that form. The heat which raises the temperature can do nothing else at the same time, and when it is employed as force it ceases to affect temperature. But by this one agency of heat the Creator brings very various works to pass. Heat expands bodies, relaxes cohesive attraction, and brings the chemical affinities into activity. By this means the elements of Nature are subdued to human uses, seeds germinate, all the processes of vegetable life go on, and digestion and nutrition are carried forward in the bodies of animals. By the agency of heat the winds blow, the deep waters of the ocean circulate, clouds are formed, dew and rain refresh the earth, rivers flow, and all the activities of life fill the world. The employment of one agency for the accomplishment of so many works indicates economy in the expenditure of force and means. Moreover, the same heat appears and reappears again and again, passing from the sensible to the latent form and back again, asserting itself alternately in raising the temperature and as active force. A beam of heat falls upon our world: it is partly absorbed by the earth, and warms it. A part of that warmth is used in setting the chemical affinities in action in the sprouting of seeds; a part warms the air by conduction; a part is radiated, and being stopped by the vapor in the air, warms it; the heat of the air is partly used in the evaporation of water: the vapor formed is condensed and waters the earth, and gives out the heat by which it was formed; that raises the temperature of the air; a part of it is used in deoxidizing carbonic acid and building up the forests; the forest tree falls by the woodman's axe, is burned for fuel, and gives out its heat again, or if it falls and decays, the result is the same; the heat given out by combustion cooks the laborer's dinner and warms his room, or it goes out again, and is used in preparing food for the growing wheat; that wheat is used for food, and by slow combustion in the blood the heat is again evolved, the body is warmed, and the chemical operations of digestion and nutrition are maintained; the heat is radiated or conducted from the body into the atmosphere, and again raises the temperature and goes to do other work. At last, so far as our earth is concerned, it escapes into the stellar spaces, and goes to bless other worlds. In all these operations no heat-force is frittered away and wasted and lost. This is one of the accepted doctrines of physical science. Heat is used bountifully, but economically and without waste. "Even the inequalities and variations of temperature must be counted economy in the use of heat. The heat of midday is not needed at all hours, and therefore it is not always provided; the heat of summer is not always useful, and is therefore not given; a higher temperature for a part of the year and a part of the day is necessary, and is bestowed. The smallest amount of heat is so disposed as to accomplish the largest result. Keep in mind, then, the economical aspect of God's management of heat. "I would also have you remember how few are the principles involved in all the ways and means for transporting heat and equalizing temperature. All the various phenomena which we have examined can be brought under two general principles. The first principle or method is the heating and cooling of bodies. Bodies absorb heat; they part with their heat by conduction or radiation. If they are heated and cooled without change of place, heat is transported in time, but not in place. If the body be removed from one place to another between the heating and the cooling or between the cooling and the heating, heat is transported in both time and space. This applies alike to solids, liquids, and gases; each one is a carrier of heat in proportion to its specific heat. "The second principle or method is the transportation of heat by the change of sensible to latent heat and its restoration to a sensible state. Under this principle there are four cases: "1. Heat is employed in the evaporation of liquids, and is restored again to use as affecting temperature by the condensation of the vapor. "2. Heat is employed in liquifying solids, and becomes latent thereby, and returns to the sensible state when the liquid solidifies. These two principles find their grandest application in the changes of water: of this application I have chiefly spoken; but they apply also to other bodies--to metals as well as to liquids. "3. Heat is rendered latent in the expansion of gases from removal of pressure, and latent heat becomes sensible by the compression of gases. "4. Heat is employed in the deoxidation of carbonic acid or other combinations of oxygen, and is evolved in combustion. While in the latent condition, heat may be kept without loss for an unlimited period of time or transported from equator to pole. By the various applications of these two general principles, all the different methods of equalizing temperature are determined. "I would have you remember also that these processes for transporting heat and modifying temperature are not confined to the regular changes of days and seasons and the permanent differences of zones, but apply to every possible difference of temperature. One minute the sun shines out in full splendor; the next, a cloud hides his face and cuts off his fervent beams; the methods employed to soften the heat of the one minute and the chill of the next are the same which equalize the temperature of the seasons. Evaporation carries off the heat from the seething tropics, evaporation carries off the excess of heat from the bodies of animals and men. The same methods are equally efficient upon the grandest and upon the smallest scale. "In this connection let me give one or two illustrations of the delicacy with which general principles adapt themselves to the minutest circumstances. When the earth is wet, it is fitting that evaporation should go on rapidly and remove the excess of water, but when the ground is drier, it is fitting that evaporation should be checked and the remaining moisture spared. This result is secured not merely by the lack of moisture at the surface, but also by the decreased capacity of the earth for absorbing heat. A dark color absorbs heat more readily than a lighter color, and the earth becomes, as a general rule, darker when wet; and lighter when dry. Moist earth, therefore, receives heat more readily than dry earth, and the excessive moisture is the more rapidly carried off by evaporation. "Another more interesting illustration is presented by the odor of flowers. In its place I told you that watery vapor hinders the radiation of heat from the earth. Dark heat is absorbed by it. The same is true of other gases, and also of the odors of fragrant substances. A bed of flowers fills the air around with odors. By these odors much of the heat radiated by the earth is stopped. By this means the air around the blooming flowers is warmed. The invisible fragrance raises the temperature and secures for the blooming plants a more genial atmosphere. The Lord provides for the flowers when most of all they need to be cherished by a congenial warmth. "This completes what I have to say to you upon the subject of heat. I might have gone far more into particulars, and extended these lessons over six months instead of three. We started with the design of finding out whether the works of Nature have anything to say about a wise and good Creator. We could not examine the whole circle of God's works, and therefore chose a single department--that of heat. I will leave yourselves to decide whether we have found marks of divine wisdom and goodness, whether Nature has had anything to say to _us_ about a Creator." "It seems to me," said Samuel, "that if the works of Nature do not show God's goodness and wisdom, it would be hard to tell what works would show them. I think I shall always, after this, look upon the earth and sky with more interest than I have ever felt in them before; I shall always look upon them as having something to do with God." "We certainly ought," said Mr. Wilton, "to study Nature in such a manner and with such a spirit that we shall be led to reverence and worship the Creator. Some very good men are afraid of scientific study, as if there were something in it to draw men from belief in the Scriptures and the Jehovah revealed in them; and it cannot be denied that not a few unbelievers have tried to find a foundation and a defence for their infidelity in scientific studies; but such men are not made skeptics by earnest and reverent study of God's works: they were unbelievers before and aside from physical studies, and they only try to glorify their rejection of the Bible and Christ by deifying science and the creation and holding them up in opposition to inspired revelations. If ever you find the works of God separating you from God, you may know at once that you misunderstand those works or come to them with a wrong spirit. 'The undevout astronomer,' it has been said, 'is mad,' and the same might, with good reason, be said of every undevout student of physical science. "In selecting heat for our examination, I did not take the only rich department of Nature's works. The practical chemist would find a richer and broader field of research, and so would the anatomist and animal physiologist, the geologist, or the physical geographer. I purposely chose a comparatively narrow field, in order that our course of study might not become wearisome by its length. You will find ample scope in the fields of natural science for your largest powers, and enough to carry your thoughts reverently to the great Creator and Governor. "In one respect the study of Nature resembles the study of the Sacred Scriptures. It is a revelation; it is an embodiment of God's thoughts; in it God has expressed himself; and Nature, by most suggestive symbols and types, teaches much more moral truth and spiritual sentiment than some men think. In the brute creation it gives us, in pantomime, all the virtues and graces and all repulsive vices and cruel passions. To this book of Nature we ought to come without prejudice, reverently inquiring what is written therein. We must study it thoroughly and interpret it as we interpret the written word, comparing Scripture with Scripture. It is a great attainment to be able to read and understand the thoughts of God embodied in his works. "In another respect, the book of Nature and the Sacred Scriptures have very little in common. The Bible is occupied pre-eminently with moral duties and spiritual relationship. Its great themes are sin and salvation. Christ is the great central truth. One might compare the Scriptures to a picture in which one central figure seizes every eye, and by whose radiance the whole picture is filled with light, and that central figure is Christ; or we might compare the Bible to a sublime oratorio, the glorious symphony of the ages; through it all is heard one strain, sweetly exultant as angel voices, faintly heard at first amid the sadness of the fall, but rising still above the terrific bass of Sinai and its ever-repeating echoes, growing more clear and strong upon the harps of the prophets, till its rapturous beauty pours itself triumphant along the plains of Bethlehem. In this revelation of salvation from the guilt and ruin of sin the Bible stands alone. Upon this subject Nature is silent. Salvation by Christ is the gem enshrined in the Scriptures. But what is the setting for this gem? The works of God on the earth and in the heavens. The prophets were men in sympathy with Nature. How David sung the praises of the divine handiwork!--'O Lord, how manifold are thy works; in wisdom hast thou made them all.' 'The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.' How Christ unfolded the deepest spiritual truths by the symbols of Nature! But if the casket be so worthy, what shall be said of the gem which is enshrined within? That is the pearl of great price. To that book which speaks in no doubtful voice of deliverance from sin let us turn with increasing reverence; and above all, let us come to him who came to reveal our God, who came to be as well as to make a revelation of God, being himself 'the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person.' I am glad that you all now feel that you know him whom to know is everlasting life." From these words of Mr. Wilton you will conclude that Ansel has at length found rest in Christ. In another brief chapter I will tell you of his experience, and then bid you adieu. CHAPTER XVI. A DAY OF JOY AND GLADNESS. The reader has already learned that after Ansel had confessed himself an anxious inquirer and professed himself willing to obey Christ, he remained three or four weeks still in darkness. Others found peace in believing, but he felt no joyful confidence that Christ had received him and forgiven his sins. He sometimes felt almost discouraged, and sometimes was tempted to complain of God for not treating him as favorably as others, or to feel chagrined because others were rejoicing, while he found no light. But he fought against these evil thoughts and insinuations of Satan, and did not flag in his private devotions or cease to confess himself, always and everywhere, an anxious inquirer, still in darkness, but desiring to find the grace of God. If ever he was tempted to push away all concern about salvation and return by force to his former careless state, the words of Christ would come to his mind: "Will ye also go away?" and Peter's answer, "Lord, to whom shall we go? for thou hast the words of eternal life." The alternative, salvation by Christ or the loss of his soul, stared him in the face. "I can but perish if I go; I am resolved to try; For if I stay away, I know, I must for ever die." Great interest was felt for him and much prayer was offered in his behalf, but he seemed to make no progress toward a better state. Mr. Wilton had talked with him, but had failed to discover what it was that hindered his humble acceptance of the grace of Christ. After long and anxious musing upon Ansel's character and surroundings and the previous conversations which he had had with him, Mr. Wilton determined to probe him more fully. For this reason he invited Ansel to his study, where the following conversation transpired: "Good-morning, my young friend; how do you find yourself to-day?" "I am feeling, I think, very much as when I was here a week ago." "Are you becoming discouraged and almost ready to give up all effort to follow Christ?" "I do sometimes feel very much discouraged, but I am not ready to give up my interest in religion." "Have you no more enjoyment in reading the Scriptures and in your prayer in secret than you had a week ago?" "I think that I am trying to do right in doing these things, and I enjoy them better than I should if I felt that I was doing something wrong, but I do not feel as I think a Christian ought to feel." "Are your thoughts and feelings and opinions about Christ and salvation the same as they were six weeks ago?" "I think they are very different." "I am glad to hear that; but can you tell how they are different?" "At that time I felt that I was a sinner, but was fighting against that feeling. I wished that Christ would let me alone, and that the Holy Spirit would not trouble me. But now I very much wish that I may feel my sins, and that Christ may come to me and save me. I wish to follow the Spirit." "Did you expect a month ago that at this time you would be feeling and acting as you now feel and act?" "No, sir; I meant then to fight it through, and not let anybody know how I felt." "Do you wish now that you had fought it through, as you proposed, and kept all your feelings to yourself?" "I am very thankful that I did not keep on hiding my feelings. I almost tremble to think what the result would have been." "You have said that you wish to spend your life in serving Christ. Does it seem to you a hard and painful work--a work that you would get rid of if you could--or does working for Christ and confessing Christ before men seem attractive?" "I think his service seems pleasant; there is no other life that seems half as pleasant." "Do you believe that Christ is able to save you?" "I suppose he is. If he cannot save me, there is no hope for me, for I cannot save myself." "Do you believe that he is willing to save you?" "I think he is, if I come to him and trust in him. I suppose he is willing to save all who come to him." "Are you unwilling to come to him--to trust him and submit to him?" "I don't know; I have tried to come to Christ, but I have met with no such change as I have always supposed that a Christian ought to have." "What do you think it is that hinders your coming into light and joy as others have done?" "I cannot tell. I suppose it must be something or other in myself, but I cannot guess what it is." "I would like to ask you a few questions which you may think rather close and personal, and which you may find it hard to answer frankly. You know the spiritual adviser, as well as the physician, must first of all find out the condition of the patient." "I am willing to have you ask any questions you please, and I will try to answer them as well as I can." "Did you ever think, Ansel, that you were very ambitious?" "I knew that, like many others, I was a little ambitious, but I never thought that I was very much so." "Perhaps you were more ambitious than you thought. You know that you would work day and night rather than not stand at the head of every class you were in. On the play-ground you asserted your position as leader in every game. Did you not carry the same idea of being chief into your plans and expectations for the future? You were ambitious of standing the very first whatever course of life you might follow. Was not this so?" "I don't know: I can't deny it; I think it was." "It is possible, Ansel, that you are trying to carry the same ambition into the kingdom of Christ. Perhaps you have wished in conversion some brilliant experience which would draw attention to you. Tell me how this is. Would you be satisfied to have a commonplace experience, such as thousands of others have, which would attract no special notice? Have you not formed an idea of the great and brilliant change you must pass through, and are you not refusing to take anything else from the Lord's hands?" Tears gathered in Ansel's eyes, and his face worked painfully. At length he answered: "Your question is a hard one to answer, but I cannot deny it; I am afraid it is so. I have heard persons tell of the great load of sin like a pack on their shoulders, and of the earth seeming as if it would open and swallow them up, of sleepless nights and unspeakable anguish, and then of light and joy, so that they could never doubt that they were converted. I have been expecting that I was to have such an experience, but I have not seen it. Is it wrong to wish for such an experience?" "It is certainly wrong to _insist_ upon such an experience. God leads each one to himself in his own chosen way. There was but one Saul, whom Christ met and blinded with the dazzling light. As a general rule, when a sinner makes up his mind in what way he will be converted, the Lord will disappoint him. If he fixes in his mind that he will not come to an anxious-seat, or will not confess his feelings till he can say that his sins are pardoned, or will not do anything else, the Lord will very likely bring him to do the very thing he resolved that he would not do. If he attempts to bring his ambitious aspirations into Christ's kingdom, he will be disappointed. 'The first shall be last and the last first.' Men become great in Christian service by counting themselves the least of all, and humbling themselves to become the servants of all. You need to examine yourself in this matter. If you have looked for something great and startling, be contented with something small and commonplace. It is an unspeakable privilege to be brought into Christ's kingdom in any manner. It is sometimes a great blessing to have a very unmarked and plain style of conversion. Such a convert is compelled to look to the truly scriptural evidences of a change of heart instead of resting upon the evidence, often deceptive, of a great and sudden illumination or a fancied voice from heaven. Some of the greatest and best of men have been unable to tell at all the time of their conversion. Richard Baxter could not tell even the year of his change. The best experiences I have known have been those where the converts could tell very little about themselves; they had been doing something else besides looking into themselves to watch the motions of their own thoughts." "I will try to do as you say. But what kind of evidence am I to look for?" "The same kind of evidence which you now look for in me or any other Christian. It is not one thing to come to Christ and another thing to follow Christ. The best evidence that a sinner has come to Christ is that he actually follows Christ and serves him. 'By their fruits ye shall know them.' 'Bring forth fruits meet for repentance,' said John the Baptist. Bring forth fruits that show that your thoughts about sin, and about Christ, and about the service of Christ have been changed. Look for the same kind of evidence in yourself that you would look for in any stranger whom you should meet. But above all things take the words of Jesus as true and rest on them; consecrate yourself to Jesus with all the heart; with lowliness of mind hold yourself ready for any work or any sacrifice; you will find that evidences will take care of themselves. When men come into sympathy with Christ, when they believe his words, walk with him, and talk with him, and bear the cross with him, when they enter into a partnership of service and suffering with Christ,--the Spirit bears witness with their spirits that they are born of God." "I will try to follow your advice, and am very thankful that you have spoken about my ambitious spirit." "Another caution I wish to give you. Do not think that you, by any methods or by cherishing any spirit, are to make yourself fit to be saved. If you are saved at all, Christ must take you as a sinner, and a great sinner. If you get rid of your spirit of pride, it will be by Christ's saving you from it. Let me also suggest to you that which a consideration of your associations suggested to me, that you may have stumbled at the idea of baptism. You must have heard baptism spoken of very disrespectfully, and it is possible that you may have learned to look upon it as a humiliation and a reproach. You may have recoiled from the thought of submitting to it." "That was my feeling once, but since I have been willing to have my feelings known I have ceased to be afraid of what those who despise religion may say." "Be careful now, since you feel that your sympathies are with the Christian band, that your love of greatness does not lead you to resist the Spirit. Be willing to be small. Be thankful for small gifts. I trust that your present feelings will before long give place to a humble trust, a childlike confidence, and a holy boldness in Christ, and that your usefulness in the kingdom of God will be all the greater because he now requires you in the beginning to trample under foot your budding pride and die to all human ambitions." When Ansel gave up the idea of a wonderful conversion, a sudden illumination which should bring with it something of éclat, he found that he could understand the Scriptures better and have more enjoyment in his religious duties. While he humbled himself, hoping for little, he found his soul soon filled with a deep, quiet joy. The next Saturday afternoon was the regular time for the covenant-meeting, and also, according to custom, for hearing the experiences of any who wished to unite with the church by baptism. Ansel, Peter, and Mr. Hume came, along with others, to present themselves to the church. In regard to Mr. Hume there had been much speculation among his former comrades as to what course he would take. Some said: "Mr. Hume will never wet the sole of his foot in that river. Don't you remember how he used to laugh at the idea of being plunged in the river in honor of a dead man? He may talk in meeting, but it is a very different thing to go down into the river with the whole hillside covered with people." Others said: "We can't tell what has come over him, but he will not go back now. He has gone too far to retreat." Some even ventured to approach Mr. Hume himself with their raillery: "What do you think now of being dipped in the river in honor of a dead man?" "I think that I would be willing to be baptized a thousand times if I could recall by that means what I have spoken against baptism." "And what, Mr. Hume, about the ice water?" "You know and I know," he answered, "that we always respected those who did not shrink from cold water for Christ's sake. What effeminacy, what more than effeminacy, for a resolute man to hesitate and tremble at baptism! We should be ashamed of such weakness in any worldly matter. I have given you occasion for all your raillery, but as I once was a leader in evil, so I wish that I might lead you to better things." Ansel, Peter, and the rest gave an account of their religious experiences, and last of all Mr. Hume. "What leads you," asked Mr. Wilton, "to present yourself to the church, asking for baptism?" "I think that the love of Christ leads me. I have done a great deal against Christ, and now I wish, if possible, to do something to show my love for him. I come to obey the word and example of Christ by being buried with him in baptism." They were received for baptism, and the time of administration fixed at half-past twelve o'clock the next day. The Lord's Day was cold and blustering. Many were disappointed, for they hoped that the day would prove warm and sunny. But the blustering day did not prevent the gathering of a great company by the riverside. As the congregations left the churches they turned their steps toward the place of baptism. Ungodly men turned out, and those who never came to hear the preaching of the gospel flocked together to see the gospel preached by this symbolic service. The word had gone out that Mr. Hume was to be baptized, and this drew together his former associates. At the place chosen the river swept around in a gentle curve and the bank rose up like a magnificent amphitheatre; while just above, the land put out into the water and threw the current upon the opposite side. Here gathered almost the entire population of the village to witness that simple and solemn service which from the days of John the Baptist has thrilled so many hearts. The candidates came warmly clad, brought from their own homes in a close carriage. Gathered there, the little band of Christians, surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, first sang the hymn commencing: "Thou hast said, exalted Jesus, Take thy cross and follow me; Shall the word with terror seize us? Shall we from the burden flee? Lord, I'll take it, And rejoicing follow thee." Then Mr. Wilton read with a voice that reached all the company a few passages from the New Testament which authorized and commanded that service. After that he prayed that the joyful presence of Christ might attend those about to follow him in baptism, that believers might be encouraged, and careless sinners awakened. One by one the converts were buried with Christ, and one by one they came up out of the water, forgetting all else in the joy of obedience. They sang the words consecrated by use at so many riversides: "Oh how happy are they Who their Saviour obey, And have laid up their treasure above! Tongue can never express The sweet comfort and peace Of a soul in its earliest love." These words found a response in many hearts. High up upon the river bank were gathered a little knot of mocking unbelievers. One among them, seven years before, had publicly professed his faith in Christ. For a little time he seemed to be treading in the Lord's ways, but falling among evil associates, he not only neglected Christian duties, but became a professed unbeliever. He read infidel books and loaned them to others. He sought to sow the seeds of unbelief wherever he went. Upon this Lord's Day he stood with others profanely mocking at the sacred service. With shivering, tremulous accents he exclaimed, "Poor Harry Gill is very cold; I would not go into the water to please any Christ for five hundred dollars." That young man went home with deep conviction of sin upon him. Two days after, Mr. Wilton was called at ten o'clock at night to visit him. He was trembling like an aspen leaf with his deep anguish of conscience, and for two days and nights his body shook under his fear. Then little by little faith took the place of fear, and hope smiled upon him. He was the next person whom Mr. Wilton baptized. Look in upon the Christian band assembled that Lord's Day evening. Upon the faces of those who had been baptized there was no sign that the service of that day had been painful; if they had done the duty as a cross, the cross must have been quickly followed by a crown of joy, for every face was radiant with light. Among them was one little girl twelve years of age whose face, as she rose from the water, shone like the face of an angel, and the transfiguration of that moment had hardly begun to fade away. Ansel was peacefully happy, and from the face of Mr. Hume the old look of dissatisfaction was all gone; his soul had entered into rest, and he felt at home. Every one of them testified that it had been the happiest day of his life. They declared themselves willing for Christ's sake to be baptized a hundred times if he commanded. They had already found that "in keeping his commandments there is great reward." I should be glad, kind reader, to trace with you the Christian course of these disciples through the years that follow. But we must leave them. I am sure, however, that their course will be upward. Their experience was not the mere effervescence of fickle feeling. The word of God germinated in their hearts; they had root in themselves. They believed, they believed the truths of the gospel, and therefore they felt, and therefore they acted. "Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world," and believing that they were truly born of the Spirit, we are confident that "he which hath begun a good work in them will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ." 
28677	----	Scientific and Religious Journal. VOL. I. NOVEMBER, 1880. NO. 11. THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF OUR RELIGION. The character which the gospel of Christ requires is made up of all that is lovely, is formed upon the highest model, but it is not composed of the insensibility, the anger, the pride, the egotism, the worldliness, which is so common among men. It is not the cold indifference of modern moralists; it is not the rank and scepticism of modern doubters, nor yet the intellectual rashness and moral phantoms of modern scientists. These have done all they could to take possession of the human heart, and have left it more miserable than it was before. The great author of our holy religion, through the instrumentality of our blessed Savior, brings us into the possession of his own spirit; imparts to us the elements of his own divine excellence; forms us anew in his own image. The idea of "Emanuel, God with us," is composed of the richest elements. It embraces all that is venerable in wisdom, wonderful in authority, and touching in goodness. Human greatness, blended with imperfections and many limitations, is seen only in detached and separate parts; never appears in any one character whole and entire; but in our Lord Jesus Christ these conceptions, or scattered rays of an ideal excellence, are brought together and constitute the real attributes of that Savior whom we worship, who stands in the nearest relation to us, who is the "head of all principality and power," and who pervades all nature with his presence. The object of the Christian religion is to recover man from his degraded, miserable condition, elevate him above his debasement, and reinvest him with the character of Christ, that he may eventually dwell with the angels in the perfections of the Infinite One. The views and spirit transfused into the soul of the Christian are very different from the views and spirit of the world. The spirit of the world is pride and selfishness, the pride of rank and office, the pride of wealth and worldly accomplishments, which lives for the praise of men. On the contrary, the Savior imparts to all his worshipers the loveliest of all the graces, a heaven-born humility, a modest estimate of one's own worth, and a deep sense of unworthiness on account of human weakness. As Christians we learn to humble ourselves in view of the majesty and perfections of our heavenly Master. "Before honor is humility." The Savior commands an humble religion; its love is humble, its faith is humble; its repentance, its baptism, its hopes, its joys, its raptures are all humble. True greatness is not found except in an humble mind; never is an archangel more exalted, more truly great, than when he bows before the throne of Christ. The spirit of the world is self-will and insubordination, hard-heartedness and impenitence, or inflexible perseverance in sin. The spirit of the world is one of self-indulgence and guilty pleasure. Sinners are lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. They are eager for enjoyment and obtain it in dissipated behavior, thought and feeling. Lawless pleasure is the idol of the sinner's heart and the rule of his life; it often leads him to shame, infamy and ruin. The religion of Christ gives, in the place of this, the love of God and duty. The pleasures of the Christian are much broader and brighter than the pleasures of the disobedient; they are far superior to the sinner's day dreams and pleasures of sense. The spirit of the world rejects the truth of God; distrusts his word; has not sufficient confidence in his declarations, or, it may be, love for his praises, and so leans upon self, having no wants, fears, or despondency which it does not presume to relieve for itself. And often it happens when corruptions, doubts and disobedience have kept rule until the poor man is ruined and the hope of a better day is literally exhausted, that the soul under the dominion of sin cries, "Lord, save, or I perish." Have you faith in God and in his word? then let unshaken confidence in Jesus Christ his son and our Savior become the great principle and impulse of action, rise up in the dignity of true manhood or womanhood and obey the gospel and live. It is hard to conceive of a darker, deeper chasm than that which would be made by the absence of this great principle and impulse of action which has formed thousands of characters in the image of the Redeemer. Let no one suppose that the obligation to live a Christian life is a light one. Holiness is the highest attainment of a rational soul; it is the greatest good within the reach of man; it is the greatest good in the universe. Seek this, it is most sublime and excellent; seek to be virtuous and holy that your hearts may be won and subdued by the power of His own word. "Purify your souls in obeying the truth." There is nothing in the universe that can be a substitute for purity or holiness, it is an indispensable qualification for the heavenly world. O, when will men _understand_ and _realize_ that nothing possesses importance compared with this which relates to God and eternity. Never was there stronger evidence of folly than that man presents who chooses this world for his portion. If tears could quench the fires of torment they would be quenched at the remembrance of the folly which preferred this world's goods to the salvation of the soul. There is nothing upon earth that hurts the true-hearted, energetic Christian like the indifference with which those who have hope toward God are directing their way toward that "exceeding and eternal weight of glory." In a short time we shall pass through the tomb. To-day we are floating upon the stream, to-morrow we may be floating upon the ocean of eternity. Another step and we have entered on the world of retribution, but what retribution is it? Is it the world of peace and joy? or is it the region of tribulation and anguish? "To those who by patient continuance in _well-doing_, seek for glory and honor and immortality--eternal life. But to those who are contentious and obey not the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doth evil." Is it not a melancholy state of being to be gliding down the stream of time under the fearful uncertainty whether we will land in the realms of bliss or the regions of anguish? You may be happy without power above your fellows, without influence over them, without great learning, without wealth, but you can not be happy without God. Give man all of this world that he desires, multiply around him the gratifications of sense and the pleasures of thought, and if God is not his joy and refuge the day is not far distant when he will feel as did the poor prodigal in a far country feeding upon husks in nakedness and want; but if you are a Christian you dwell with God in Christ, for "God is in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing unto them their trespasses," and if any man be in Christ he is a new creature. Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not--doth not serve sin. Nothing can make you _miserable_ while you enjoy the presence of God. If you have accepted the Savior as "Emanuel, God with us," as "God manifested in the flesh," and have entered into him, you are at home with God--with the Father of your spirit--and why should you not be happy? "In him (Christ) all fullness dwells." God is there. Paul says, "All the promise of God in him are yea, and in him amen unto the glory of God by us." "It pleased the Father that _in him_ all fullness should dwell." Are you in him? He says, "I am the door, by me if any man enter the same shall be saved," but the door was never known to be of any use to the man who passes by it. It is only of importance to those who enter. Have you no interest in this open door? It was said to a very needy people, "See, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it." God is in Christ, Christ is the great doorway to the Father's house. He says, "I am the way; no man cometh unto the Father but by me." Do you ask how shall I enter the door? Well, do you really believe that it is your own duty to enter the door, or do you wait to be thrown into it by some unknown spiritual convulsion that you never have as yet experienced? How is this? Let us see. When the Savior was in the world he gathered about him a great many disciples. John the Baptist also gathered a great many more and prepared them for the Lord. These all received the "baptism of repentance for the remission of sins," were converted and saved. Jesus said to them, "Now, ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you"--John xv, 3. All this was accomplished before these disciples were baptized at Pentecost or any where else with the Holy Spirit. It was not given until Jesus was glorified, and when it was given it was not given to sinners to make them saints, but to the disciples who were already converted and pardoned, to guide them into all truth, to endow them with apostolic authority. Jesus said to them, "Ye shall receive power after the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth." Acts i, 8. So these disciples were converted and cleansed--saved before they were baptized with the Holy Spirit. There is no case in all the world's history of a sinner being baptized with the Holy Spirit in order to his conversion from sin, or in order to put him into Christ. These disciples who were baptized with the Holy Spirit were by the same means qualified to fill the offices of apostles and prophets--were guided into all truth--preached the gospel with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven, and that "gospel is the power of God unto salvation, unto every one that believeth." Jesus said, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature; he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned." Paul says, "Christ loved the church and gave himself for it that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word." On Pentecost, when hundreds were convicted of their sins, and said, What shall we do? the answer from the spirit of God was, "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. These all entered into Christ--the door, while those disciples who had entered a good while before Pentecost were put into the offices of apostles and prophets by the baptism of the spirit. No man should wait to be _put_ into the open door, to be put into Christ, but should do as all the disciples of Christ did in the days of Christ and of his apostles--flee for refuge into an open door--not wait to be put in, but enter. You can be saved in heaven without being put into the office of an apostle or prophet, but you can not enter heaven without being sanctified and cleansed. Will you come and enter by the Lord Jesus, become a child of God by faith in Jesus Christ, being baptized into Christ? Do you say this is not the way? Then, why? O, why should the pages of this book of books be burthened with such things? Were those disciples who received the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins before Pentecost out of Christ--uncleansed--unwashed? No! They were clean through the word spoken unto them. They were converted--pardoned. Will you enter Christ, or wait to be put into Christ? Why is it that all men are not put into Christ? I answer, men are not put into Christ, they enter in--they come to Christ--they come to God--God is in Christ. The spirit and the bride say, come! And let him that heareth say, Come! And let him that is athirst come! And whosoever will let him take the water of life freely." "Many of the Corinthians hearing believed and were baptized." "When the Samaritans believed, they were baptized, both men and women." This is our entrance into the door. We have now just entered into the church of Christ--into the family of God--it is God's house--we are at home in the Father's house, and naught will harm us if we live at home, if we are "obedient children not fashioning ourselves after our former lusts." The injunction comes to us here: "Add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge temperance, to temperance patience, to patience brotherly kindness, to brotherly kindness godliness, and to godliness charity, and if these things be in you and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But he that lacketh these things is blind and can not see afar off, and had forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure, for if ye do these things ye shall never fall. For _so_ an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." "Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life and enter through the gates into the city." Men in disobedience to the gospel feel, when they approach the cold Jordan of death, that every thing upon which they built their hopes is being swept away. Their thoughts, their treasures, their grandeur, their honors, their little world, their all, fails them here. They have lived at a distance from God, and now they tremble at the thought of approaching before him whose great mercy they have rejected. Death is a terror to sinful man--his afflictions are his darkest hours. It is not so with the Christian. To him death has no sting; over him the grave has no victory to boast, nor has the second death any power. He has unshaken confidence that every thing is safe in the hands of Jesus. What but obedience to the gospel of the blessed God will enable the child of faith, when flesh and heart fail to say, "Thou wilt show me the path of life; in thy presence is fullness of joy, and at thy right hand are pleasures forevermore." What then must be the happiness of fixing the heart on God, where there is nothing unlovely, nothing fickle, nothing false or dying. We may place our affections on the things of earth, and sooner or later we are severed from them. Here all is change, disappointment and consequent sorrow. It is not so in Heaven where all, is pure and immutable. From our best affections towards creatures up to the love of God there is a height as lofty as his ways and attributes are above the attributes and ways of mortals. No fear can haunt the mind that he may change in his character of love. He is beyond the reach of accident or change, perfect in goodness and power, and to those who trust in him, he is a sure and never-ending, and ever-increasing source of joy. "Blessed are all they that put their trust in '_Emanuel_.'" Their very sacrifices are more than compensated. If we give up self it is for the love of God. If we give up time it is for eternity, and in the exchange our happiness is not diminished either here or hereafter. OUR INDEBTEDNESS TO REVELATION.--No. V. LANGUAGE AND RELIGION. BY P.T. RUSSELL. _Christian._ Having in my last article traced language and religion to their necessary and only possible source, I am now ready to hear any objections that may be entertained. Mr. Skeptic, if you have any, present them. _Skeptic._ Suppose that I admit all that you say, it would, in the nature of the case, account for the origin of one language only, while facts show that there are an unnumbered variety. So your argument is at fault. The same difficulty belongs to your conclusion concerning the origin of religion. Can you remove this difficulty? _Christian._ Yes but while I am pleased with your frankness, I must say, the difficulty is only apparent, not real. Look at yonder tree. There is but one main stem, or trunk, and many leading branches. These principal branches are each also divided into several minor branches, and these also throw out many lesser limbs and twigs. So it is with languages. As the smallest twig at the extreme end of either of those limbs can be traced to the trunk through the main branches, so all the various languages that are in use to-day, can and may be traced to a few older ones, and these, again, to one principal or parent language. The English language of the present time differs widely from the English of three or four centuries ago. Its number of words have more than doubled. And this has not been the result of the creation of new words, but of borrowing from other and older languages. So extensively has this been carried on, that Dr. Webster says, that in gathering and arranging material for his dictionary, he found himself under the necessity of consulting thirty European and Asiatic languages. Our language may be called an amalgamation from a great many other languages. It is not an original language. We, like the ancient Greeks, have been borrowing extensively, and, like them, we have been careful to keep all that we borrowed. What is true of our language is equally true of all modern languages. Wherever there is commercial or other free intercourse, each party is found borrowing words from the other, and thus their vocabularies are lapping and continually increasing. _I am now ready to introduce the important consideration_, it is this, all modern languages are shaded by a few ancient ones. The English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc., are deeply shaded through borrowing from the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and ancient languages, while these last, as well as other ancient languages, have never borrowed from the former. This shows that Greek, Latin and Hebrew are older than the others. I shall now take for granted _that_ which all real linguists declare to be true, viz: that the smaller number of languages from which we and our contemporaries have so freely borrowed, are all shaded by their borrowings from one; and, as the younger always borrows from the older, that one must of necessity be the parent language of all languages. This conclusion accounts for the word "babel" in our language, and its equivalent in all others, as well as for the existence of a multitude of words too tedious to mention. RELIGION AND ITS ORIGIN. The word is from "religo," and signifies _to bind over_. Webster says, "This word seems originally to have signified an oath or vow to the gods, or an obligation of such oath or vow." Religion, in its comprehensive sense, includes a belief in the being and perfections of God, in the revelation of his will to man, in man's obligation to obey his commands--any religion consisting in a belief of a supreme power or powers, governing the world, and in the worshiping of such power or powers. That men have the power to become religious is too evident to require a word in argument; even Tyndal admitted that there was a place in man's psychological nature for religion. Now, since man possesses this, and as all his other powers and faculties were made for use, it is but reasonable that this faculty should also have its proper sphere of action. TWO QUESTIONS. They are these: First, was Polytheism or Monotheism the primitive religion? Second, is religion human or Divine in its origin? In answering these questions I shall gather facts, and from them deduce my conclusion, after the inductive method. First, universal history and tradition as far back as they can be traced, without one dissenting voice, locate the origin of man in Asia. From this point men migrated in every direction. Here, in Asia, their language and religion, if they had any, would be one and the same. This would, in the nature of the case, be true, whether religion was at first human or Divine. Again, as all derivative languages are found to be shaded by one primitive language, so all derivative religions will, on examination, be found to be shaded by the one primitive religion. That is, the leading or fundamental idea will be found more or less unclouded in all the more modern religions. Now, which is it that shades all religions? Is it Polytheism or Monotheism? Is the fundamental thought of either found in all the others? Will any one pretend that Polytheism is the primitive religion? Is its leading thought of many gods, found in all religions? It is not in Judaism, Christianity, nor Mahomedanism. These are one in their advocacy of one living and true God. This fact breaks the chain of Polytheism and ruins its claim to be considered the first religion. Here we must leave Polytheism and look after the claim of Monotheism. If this is the first form of religion, it must, according to our rule, shade all other religions; if it does not, then, from this stand-point all is yet in the dark. MONOTHEISM TESTED. In all time past it has been conceded that the maxim, "_vox populi, vox dei_," is true when taken in its broad or universal sense. "We are apt to attribute that to be true which all men presume. It is an argument with us that anything which seems true to all, as that there are gods, shows that they have engrafted in them an opinion concerning gods, neither is there any so void of laws or good manners that doth not believe that there are some gods."--Sen. Epist. C. 17. "This seems a firm thing which is alleged why we should believe gods to be, because no nation is so fierce, no man so wild, whose mind has not been imbued with an opinion concerning gods, or that uses proceed from bad customs. But all do however conceive a _Divine power_ and nature to exist. Now, in all things, the consent of all nations is supposed to be the law of nature."--Cicero, Tusc., q. 1, p. 299. "In such a quarreling and tumult and gangling, you may see this one thing by common consent, acknowledged law and speech, that there is _one God, the king and father of all, and many gods the children of God_. This the Greek says; and this the Barbarian says; the inhabitant of the continent and the Islander, the wise and the unwise do say the same."--Max. Tyn., Dis. 1, p. 5. "It is an ancient saying and running in the race of all men, that from God were all things, and by him all things were constituted, and do consist."--Demundo (dedicated to Alexander), cap. 6. Here I rest, not for want of more witnesses, for the testimony of all antiquity is full on this point. There is not an ancient tribe, race, or nation, of which we have any information, historic or traditional, who did not acknowledge the existence of _one Supreme Being_. In this the chain is unbroken, so Monotheism must have been the first religion. The chain of Polytheism is broken many times. All nations did not acknowledge the existence of many gods. Indeed, no nation of antiquity acknowledged a plurality of supreme gods, while all nations acknowledged a _Supreme God_, who, with them, was the father of gods and men. So in this way the chain was always broken, _never whole_. Polytheism then could not, in the very nature of things, be the original religion with Monotheism engrafted upon it. Simple Polytheism never existed with any nation; it always displayed a supreme head, a Supreme God--father of gods and men. And even this form of Polytheism was acknowledged by a part of our race only. The idea is worthy of being repeated, that all nations of men throughout all antiquity acknowledged one living and true supreme and master God presiding over all gods and men. This idea lies at the foundation of all ancient Polytheism, and most certainly at the foundation of all ancient Monotheism. Now, as religion simply consists primarily in man's relation to God, with the accessory idea of dependence upon and obligation to him, the question is: Was that religion earthly or Divine in its origin? Were these thoughts the thoughts of men only, or were they too high for us? Can you think of your relation and obligation to a being of whom you have never heard or learned? No. Neither could man in the beginning, nor at any subsequent time. Religion came not from earth. Human genius was not and could not have been its foundation. There is but one other possible source, which is simply the will and teachings of the creator. Religion is unearthly, and hence Divine in its origin. The stream always declares the nature of the fountain. Gentlemen skeptics, you boast of free and fearless thought. Make your vaunting good. Examine, if you dare, and let us have your strong reasons, if you have any. The nature of man made revelation a necessity. This will be the theme of my next. Truth never fears the light, but known error is a coward, and loves the dark. * * * * * A NOBLE book! All men's book. It is our first statement of the never-ending problem of man's destiny and God's ways with men on earth.--_Carlyle._ FORCE AND LIFE. DR. J.L. PARSONS. The origin of force and life in the universe is a great puzzle to materialistic scientists. In the azoic period of our earth there was no life on it. The living creatures now on the earth must, therefore, have had some origin. That origin is not due to spontaneous generation, according to the testimony of the most enlightened scientists, Professor Haeckel to the contrary notwithstanding. The various vital manifestations and exhibitions of force in the universe are due to some cause. The intuitions of mankind, as well as the teachings of science, declare there must be a cause lying behind the universe which has produced it. Two great philosophies contend for the mastery in the solution of the problem of life. Materialistic philosophy seeks to account for the origin of all things on principles which deny the existence of God, the Creator, and which make man wholly a material being. Christianity declares that the God of the Bible is behind the universe as its cause. The only things which materialists recognize as having any existence in the universe are matter and force. If force be used in the sense of mind or spirit, which it is not in this case, I have no objection to this statement. One of the first elementary lessons in material philosophy is the _inertia_ of matter. Being at rest matter has no power to set itself in motion. Being in motion it has no power to put itself at rest. It is moved by a force which is in no sense an attribute of matter. Since the earth is in motion and teems with life, that motion and life must be due to force, which is the only remaining existence in the universe. As a cause lying behind the universe, this force is denominated the unknown force. Prior to and in the azoic age we have nothing in the universe but matter and force, and according to Mr. Spencer, not only an unknown force, but also an unseen and an unknowable force. Subsequent to the azoic period and now we have the earth full of life, intelligence and religion due to the unknown force. This unknown, unseen and unknowable force may be studied in the light of its manifestations and effects, Mr. Spencer to the contrary notwithstanding. Since all effects are contained in their causes, the universe as an effect must have been and must be contained in the great unknown force as its cause. The characteristics which mark the effect must mark the cause also. If the stream be fresh water, the fountain which sends it forth must be fresh water also; for the stream is contained in the fountain. If there be no fountain there can be no stream. If there be no cause there can be no effect. If there be no involution there can be no evolution. The stream can not rise higher than its fountain. The universe now contains life. The unknown force must also contain life; for all effects are contained in their causes. The universe has in it mind. The unknown force must have mind; for all effects are contained in their causes. The universe has in it goodness and religion. So must the unknown force possess goodness and religion; for all effects are contained in their causes. The unknown cause of all things must possess mind, intelligence, goodness, holiness, else these things could not have proceeded from the unknown cause. "_Ex nihilo nihil fit_" is still true. But life, mind, energy, holiness, are attributes of the God of the Bible. Whenever science divests the unknown force of these attributes which characterize Jehovah, she has left a cause wholly inadequate to the production of the universe. Whenever she invests the unknown force with life, power, intelligence and goodness, she has set up the God of the Bible. Again, man is possessed of a mind and a religious element in his nature. If man's origin be due to the monkey or the tadpole, then the monkey or the tadpole must have a mind and a religious nature; for all effects are contained in their causes. The monkey must have a mind superior to that of Newton's, and the tadpole must be more religious than man; for the stream can not rise higher than its fountain! Man has a religious element in his nature. That element seeks to be satisfied religiously, as the eye instinctively seeks for light, the ear for sound, or the body for food. Until the constitutional elements of man's nature are changed, he will instinctively seek for a God capable of satisfying this element of his being. This part of man is satisfied in the Bible and in the God of the Bible. Hence I conclude that the race as a race will never go into atheism. As for myself, I heartily believe and fully accept the statement of the inspired bard of Israel concerning the problem of force and life: "With thee is the fountain of life." God the author of life and the source of all the force in the universe. I do not for one moment believe the teaching of my learned skeptical professor of physiology, Sanford E. Chaillei, that life is the result of organization; that digestion is a chemical process; and that animal heat and force result from this process. His favorite illustration was the steam engine. The fuel in the fire-box generated the heat which made the water in the boiler boil, and thus the _steam force_ was produced that moved the boat on the river. But, unfortunately for this illustration the Professor always left out of the consideration the fireman. No amount of fuel and water would ever generate force sufficient to turn a wheel without a fireman to light the fuel. So no amount of bread and meat in a man's stomach would ever generate enough force to produce a single blood corpuscle without the vital force to set in motion and keep up the process of digestion and assimilation. Without a God to endow the body with this vital force, there would be none, and consequently no digestion and no animal heat or physical force. If animal life and force result from organization and chemical digestion, a chemist could make a dead body live, where the organs are not destroyed, by putting food into the stomach and giving it time to chemically digest, which it would do in a short time, but it will neither produce animal heat nor support life. If digestion is a chemical process, the chemist ought to be able to take bread and meat and make a red blood corpuscle, which he can not do. Digestion and assimilation are _vital_ processes. The vital force always eludes the test of the chemist; but that force is always present in the living animal economy. The chemist can purchase every ingredient that enters into the composition of bone except the vital force, without which he can not make an inch of bone. The making of bone is a vital process which takes place only in the living animal economy. No physician can possibly have a correct physiological theory of the cure of disease who ignores the presence and power and office of the vital force in the human system. The body of man was formed of the dust of the ground according to Moses, and no mistake; Mr. Ingersoll to the contrary notwithstanding. Moses further says that the Lord God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." According to this author, life did not result from organization. What the Almighty breathed into his nostrils was not atmospheric air; for the air was in his nostrils before Jehovah breathed the breath of life into them, and yet it did not make this body live. Using the term breath in the sense of air that we breathe, the old adage that "men die for the want of breath" is not true; for the body dead is surrounded with the same air as when it was living. When the Creator breathed the breath of life into the newly-formed body, and man became a living soul, he imparted more to it than simply air; and when the body dies, something more than simply air or breath has departed from it. Solomon was wiser than the average wise acre or the conceited materialistic doctor when he said concerning death: "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." "The body without the spirit is dead," says Inspiration. It is the presence of this spirit in the human body, imparted to it by the Almighty, which vitalizes the body, which produces the vital force, by which force the body is builded and its operations carried on. As the Creator formed the body of the first man of the dust of the ground, and vitalized it by breathing into it the breath of life, and endowed it with a living germ and vital force by which, under proper circumstances, it reproduces itself; so God said: "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, _whose seed is in itself_, upon the earth." The seed has in it a germ of life and a hidden vital force which heat, moisture and the soil have the capacity of developing, so that it reproduces itself. Every vital manifestation of this seed is the result of vital force with which the Creator has endowed every perfect seed. This force in the animal and vegetable kingdoms produces vital manifestations. Chemical and other physical forces never produce vital manifestations. "Gravity is that species of force by which all bodies or particles of matter in the universe tend toward each other." The reason why bodies are drawn towards each other in this manner is because God has endowed them with a force which compels them to act in this way. To call it the force of gravity is no explanation of either the origin or nature of this force. To say that gravity makes the apple fall down instead of up is a polite way of expressing one's ignorance of such questions. To say that nature makes a seed grow, that nature heals a wound, is only to make a show of learning. God made the worlds and upholds them by the power of his word. God energizes nature. All the physical and vital forces of the universe are but the manifestation of his power. God has endowed all things that grow with the germ of life. Atheistical philosophy starts without God and ends without him. It seeks for spontaneous generation, but never finds it. It would have a stream without a fountain, and an effect without a cause, and a world without a Creator. I have no use for any theory of life, or of medicine, which denies the existence of God, whom I regard as the source of all the forces in the universe. Nature is only the manifestation of his power and wisdom. There is nothing supernatural in the universe unless it be God himself. All the wonderful phenomena of the human body are the result of a living force with which he has endowed it, and are to be explained, if explained at all, by a better knowledge of the intentions and workings of this force. This knowledge will be obtained by a more careful study of nature, by a more intimate acquaintance with him and his works. Anatomically, physiologically, and intellectually, "man is fearfully and wonderfully made"; and every wonderful thing connected with him is worthy of our careful consideration. _Kokomo, Ind._ "ALLEGED CONTRADICTIONS." ANSWERED, PERHAPS THE THOUSANDTH TIME, BY REQUEST FROM LOGANSPORT. "Michal, the daughter of Saul, had no child unto the day of her death."--Second Samuel, vi, 23. "But the king took the five sons of Michal, _whom she brought up for Adriel_, the son of Barzillai, the Meholathite."--Second Samuel, xxi, 8. Dear friend, if you will notice the last quotation closely you will find that the words which I have italicised clearly indicate the true solution of the difficulty, which has no real historic existence. Those sons _were not the natural sons_ of Michal, but adopted sons, which she brought up for Adriel, whose wife was _Moreb_, the natural mother of those children. But, somehow, it comes to pass that you refer me in both cases to the first book of Samuel instead of the second. How is this? _Second case._ "And it came to pass after these things that God did tempt Abraham." The contrary does not happen to be a contradiction. Here it is, "Let no man say when he is _tempted_ I _am tempted_ of God; for God can not be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man with evil."--James i, 13. Any grammarian can see at once that there is no contradiction here. God did (try) tempt Abraham. When was this and what was it for? Well, it was thousands of years before James's _present tense_ language was written. Suppose I give a parallel. Here it is: Let no Jew say when he offers a lamb he offers it to obey the Lord, for the Lord accepteth not lambs, neither does he require them of any man. The contradiction is found in the fact that some thousands of years in the past, the Lord did, for wise and benevolent purposes, require Jews to offer lambs. Now, can any man fail to see that there is no contradiction here. God did tempt Abraham. What was it for? Answer. He simply designed to teach Abraham, in a way that would impress the lesson upon the mind for all time to come, that the human beings were not to be offered in burnt sacrifices as the heathen were wont to do. His angel said to Abraham, "Stay thy hand." See! there is an offering fast by the horns in the bushes. _Don't kill your son!_ Yes, God did try or tempt Abraham. It was a grand trial of his loyalty to God. And it was God's most effectual way of teaching Abraham and his posterity that they must not offer their sons and daughters in the fire as the heathen did. There is not only no contradiction here, but a grand lesson also, which represents God in just the reverse of the infidel interpretation of the case. _Third case._ "And the man which journeyed with him stood speechless, _hearing a voice_, but seeing _no man_."--Acts iv, 7. This voice heard by those persons was in the _Hebrew tongue_, and as such was _not understood_ by those who were with Saul. So we have it upon record in the 22d chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, that "they saw _the light_ and were afraid, but they heard not," that is, _understood not_, the voice. That the voice was in the Hebrew is asserted in the twenty-sixth chapter and the fourteenth verse. We often hear a man's voice, and fail at the same time--say we did not hear because we did not understand the words uttered. Such is the latitude of the original term translated by the word _hear_. So there is no contradiction here. The term _hear_ in one passage is used with reference simply to the noise; in the other it is used with reference to the _words spoken_, which they _understood not_. So it is said, they heard them not. Can you hear a man speaking in a dead language? You can hear the voice in the sense of hearing the noise, but you can't hear the voice in the sense of _hearing the language_. No man can hear a language unless he understands it in the sense of the original term. _Your fourth case is in the following quotations_: "And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel; for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved."--Gen. xxxii, 30. It somehow happens that my good querist in giving this quotation refers me to the 31st chapter, which is wrong again. He says he has taken advice, and has read the contexts. Well, perhaps he has. But this is the second mistake _any way_. The first is reference to the wrong book. The second is reference to the wrong chapter. How is this? Our querist's contrary is, however, in these words, "No man hath seen God at any time."--John's Record i, 18. Our friend, proposing these contradictions for my consideration, says he has "given himself the trouble to investigate;" has "read the context in connection with each quotation, and still they are not clear," yet for the last quotation he refers me to 1 John iv, 12. Well, well; how shall we understand this? And how shall we harmonize the quotations? Well, "No man hath seen _God_ at any time"--this is true, for he is "the King Eternal, immortal, _invisible_, whom no man hath seen" with the literal eye, "_nor can see_." This teaching is positive and pointed, but in ancient times even "those to whom the word of God was sent were called gods." So said Jesus. The one Jacob saw was called a man. And again, there was a messenger--an angel, if you please--that bore Jehovah's name upon him. (See Exodus xxiii, 21, _and context_.) This was the angel of God's presence. "The angel of his presence saved them."--Isaiah lxiii, 9. God's great messenger bore his name. Men saw him, the angel, and seeing him saw God, for this angel was God with them--God's representative bearing his name. This angel God, or angel having God's name in him, talked with Moses. Moses saw him, and it is truthfully said that Moses saw God, that is, saw this angel whose name was that of God. "And when forty years were transpired there appeared to him, Moses, in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, an angel of the Lord in a flame of fire in a bush. When Moses saw it he wondered at the sight, and as he drew near to behold it, the voice of the Lord came unto him." * * * * * This (Moses) is he, that was in the church in the wilderness with the angel which spoke to him in the Mount Sinai and with our fathers, etc. Moses went up into Sinai and saw God, but it was simply the angel that bore his name--the angel of his presence. That is all there is of it. I once sat in a church-house in Logansport when there were present representatives from different states in our Union, and a gentleman made a little address and introduced them to the audience, saying, Ohio is here, Iowa is here, Kentucky is here, Illinois is here, California is here. How was this? Well, those men were messengers from those states, and their presence was the presence of those several states. Just so the angel of God's presence was with Moses; and Stephen said, _with our fathers_. The presence of this angel was the presence of God, and they who saw him saw God, for this angel's name was _God_, or, in other words, "God's name was in him." But the God whose name this angel bore, and whose name even men bore who were called Gods, because to them the word of God was sent, and they, having God's word, were his representatives, _has not been seen at any time, neither indeed can be with literal eyes_. N.B.--Friends who wish to engage our attention and space must remember the important rule among editors, and send their name along with their requests and articles. SOME THINGS THAT NEED THOUGHT. It has been said of past nations, that side by side have grown in their midst the elements both of greatness and of ruin. There is one phase of our society, as Americans, which is more to be dreaded than all others known to the philosophic mind, that is the reckless licentiousness which characterizes many politicians during political campaigns. In ancient times a grand safeguard against this debasing practice was found in the law that said, "Thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of my people." This evil, like all others, when it becomes a strong habit, is well calculated to stir up anger, and wrath, and hatred; to stir up the passions, and destroy confidence, which is always and only disastrous to the social state. This growing evil needs to be checked by some means, otherwise our country will experience tumults growing out of maddened party ambition, and party interests, which will cause disaster and grief. The ballot-box needs to be guarded with wise and severe laws, because it is the pivotal wheel in our government. And next to this, because of the relation it sustains to our government's welfare, is the reputation of our public officials. I would not screen them from their just deserts, but I do say that the leaders in political affairs should be, in common with all others, too high-minded to indulge in slandering each other, as many are in the habit of doing. It reminds me in some of our political campaigns of the cursing-matches of the Popes, in some of the councils that were held during the dark ages. It is possible that we have in Indiana, and perhaps in some of the other states, sufficient law upon the subjects of slander, but law that is disregarded, being seldom enforced, amounts to nothing. Then, there is a disposition growing out of the pride of character to disregard the slanderer's tongue. Yet licentiousness tends to civil and social ruin all the same. That is to say, it destroys confidence, breeds retaliation and corruption, and inflames all the baser passions known in the dying agonies of a civil government. As an American citizen I would warn our people to manufacture all the public sentiment possible against this low, vile, and debasing practice, by pleading with our countrymen against it. And let us never hold our peace until we shall have thrown such safeguard around our ballot-box as will put an end to all the abominable corruptions that now threaten our existence as a free people. Is it true of us, that we carry the seeds of our own destruction as a nation in our own bosom? Are we to die as a nation, over the ballot-box? Shall we be so foolish? Let statesmen and politicians look well to the essential elements of the nation's life, by the advocacy of reform at this point where reform is most needed. And let Christians of every name plead for morality as an essential qualification for a place at the head of so great affairs as belong of right to the people of counties, states and nation. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. It is time for us to look after the moral elements of every man's life who proposes himself as a candidate for office in our midst, but we can well afford to be satisfied with the truth. Shall we look to this? While we pray as Christians for such rulers and authorities as will look to the permanent and lasting interests of our country, let us vote as we pray. Do we pray one way and vote another? If so, let us repent. Do we pray for righteous rulers and for a good government and then vote for profane, wicked men; for men of intemperate habits, men who are perfectly indifferent to the moral welfare of our country; men who will disregard the welfare of the nation by neglecting the elements of national greatness? If political parties triumph in this government through slander, trickery, whisky and corruption, and continue to do so, the time will inevitably come when we will realize the facts of national ruin. We might as well think of a man having good health and living long upon the earth who takes poison into his stomach continually, as to think of future glory as a nation if we carry out our purposes by dishonest, illegal measures and by railing, in a slanderous and unjustifiable manner, against the best men of the nation. It has been said that political parties are necessary as checks to corruption, but when parties themselves indulge in all manner of corruption in order to succeed as parties, they are no longer checks, but abettors of corruption. Let the preachers, whose business it is to reprove sin, and who have been kept from taking the risk of being shut out of Paradise, by being kept out of politics(?) open their mouths and be heard all over this country against all these immoral, vile practices indulged as a means of political success. The ignorant, fossilized partisan who looks no higher than party will perhaps raise a yell of indignation against them, but at the same time he will continue the use of the same old argument, viz: the pool of politics is too filthy for preachers to meddle with. Is it a filthy pool? Then let us bring all the purifying elements of the nation to bear upon it and see if there is anything in it besides corruption. If there is not, the sooner we find it out the better, and if there is, the sooner we get it separated from its corruption the better. THE RELIGION AND SOCIETY OF GREECE. HOW DOES IT COMPARE WITH OURS. From the Egyptians and other nations to whom the Grecians were indebted for their earliest laws, they derived their established religion. To the worship of the twelve principal divinities the gratitude of the succeeding ages added the deification of heroes and legislators renowned for their important services to society. Various degrees of adoration were paid to the gods and to the souls of departed heroes. Temples were erected, festivals were instituted, games were celebrated, and sacrifices were offered with more or less pomp and magnificence to them all. A regular gradation of immortal beings was acknowledged to preside throughout universal nature from the Naiad, who was adored as the tutelary guardian of a stream to Jupiter, the father of gods and men, who ruled with Supreme power over heaven and earth. The religion of the people extended little beyond the external honors paid to the gods of their country and the attendance upon sacrifices and processions. The sacred ceremonies were magnificent and public, except that the votaries of Bacchus and Ceres were indulged in their secret mysteries. The festivals were observed with every circumstance of pomp and splendor to charm the eye and please the imagination. A sacrifice was a feast attended with gayety and even licentiousness. Every temple was the resort of the idle and the dissolute, and the shrines of the Cyprian Venus and the Athenian Minerva could attest that devotion, far from being a pure and exalted exercise of the mind, was only the introduction to dissoluteness and debauchery. The northern regions of Greece were particularly renowned for temples from which oracles were issued. The temple of Apollo at Delphi, situated upon a lofty rock near Parnassus, and that of Jupiter in the groves of Dodona, were celebrated for the responses of the Pythia and the priests; they were held in the greatest veneration for many ages, and their oracles were consulted even in the most enlightened times by philosophers themselves, who, in this instance, as well as many others, conformed to the popular superstitions. The spirit of the religion of ancient Greece was included in these principles, that the worship of the gods was of superior obligation and importance to all other duties, and that they frequently displayed their power in this world in the punishment of the bad and the prosperity of the virtuous. Such were the opinions inculcated by the most celebrated philosophers and poets but the common people, more gratified by the fictions of the received mythology, than by tenets of pure morals, found in the actions recorded of their gods and goddesses a sufficient justification of every species of licentiousness. With respect to a future state of existence, the philosophers themselves appear to have fluctuated in uncertainty, as may be collected from the sentiments of Socrates. The poets inculcated a belief in Tartarus and Elysium. They have drawn a picture of Tartarus in the most gloomy and horrific colors, where men, who had been remarkable for impiety to the gods, such as Tantalus, Tityus and Sisyphus, were tormented with a variety of misery ingeniously adapted to their crimes. The prospect of Elysium is beautiful and inviting, as described by Homer, Hesiod and Pindar. In that delightful region there is no inclement weather, but the soft zephyrs blow from the ocean to refresh the inhabitants who live without care and anxiety; there the sky is always serene and the sunshine is perpetual. The earth yields delicious fruits for their sustenance three times per year. But these enjoyments were confined to the persons who were of rank and distinction. Their Elysium was a sensual heaven. How very different is the Christian's future happy home? Proteus informed Menelaus that he would be conveyed to the Islands of the Blessed, because he was the husband of Helen, and the son-in-law of Jupiter. No incentives to goodness from the consideration of a future state are held out by the older poets to the female sex, or to the ignoble or common people, however pure their conduct or exemplary their virtue. In later times we find that Pindar extends his rewards to good men in general; but Euripides is sometimes skeptical, and Iphigenia without hesitation expresses her disbelief of the popular mythology. The learned Jortin says, It gives us pleasure to trace in Homer the important doctrine of a supreme God, a providence, and a free agency in man, supposed to be consistent with fate or destiny; a difference between moral good and evil, inferior gods or angels, some favorable to men, others malevolent, and the immortality of the soul; but it gives us pain to find these notions so miserably corrupted that they must have had a very weak influence to excite men to virtue and deter them from crime.--Jortin, Dissertation vi, p. 245. This observation may be applied to the state of opinions even in the most enlightened times of Greece, when the credulity and ignorance of the common people, and the errors and doubts of the greatest philosophers, proved the _necessity_ and the importance of the Christian religion. The possible attainments of a religious nature were very different from ours. In the times of Lycurgus there were two hereditary kings or presidents; their power was controlled by Lycurgus, through the gift of equal authority to twenty-eight senators. The two kings commanded the armies and high-priests of the temples. The senators were the executive and legislative council of the state; with them the laws originated. The assembly of the people elected the senators by saying yes or no to the measures proposed to them, but had no right to discuss their propriety--were not allowed the privilege. Lycurgus allowed every family an equal amount of land; prohibited the use of gold and silver, and made iron money the only currency of the country, in order to check the avarice of the people. He forbade foreign travel in order to retain the morals of his people, or keep them from the corruptions of other nations. To produce a hardy people, he required the women to indulge in all the athletic exercises of his government. The children were inspected as soon as they were born, and those considered worthy were handed over to the public nurses, and the unworthy, that is, the deformed and sickly, were taken out and left in the woods and upon the mountains to perish. All the children of the Spartans were considered as the property of the state, and their education consisted in accustoming them to endure the cravings of hunger and thirst, with the scourge of discipline and every degree of suffering. The business of Spartans consisted in preparing themselves for war. They were disciplined in such a manner that it was necessary to curb them constantly, lest they should rashly undertake to make conquests. Out of this character of the Greeks arose that old saying, "When Greek meets Greek then comes the tug of war." Many of the laws of the Spartans would, in this country at least, destroy all the finer feeling, and inaugurate a reign of despotism utterly at variance with Christianity. God's time to give to the inhabitants of the earth the glorious system of our holy religion was not until our race was educated, so as to be no longer the slaves of the reigning ambition and passion of such men as Lycurgus. The Savior's hour was several centuries from Lycurgus. Here it is appropriate to remark that God, in his providence with the nations of men, has during all the ages given to men just as fast as they were able to receive. THE RELATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY TO HUMAN GREATNESS. Some who deny the existence of spirit apart from matter allow that the greatness of man consists in his being an eating animal. Others allow that it lies in the fact that he is a working animal; while some have allowed that it was found in the fact that he is a fighting animal. And all _infidels_ agree in one thing, viz.: that man is simply an animal. But the animal nature of man is not to be considered, with any degree of truth, his crown of glory; his true greatness can not be identified with it. We are acquainted with animals that can eat more, and seem to do it with a greater relish. Others can run faster, jump higher, overcome greater weight and outdo him in all manner of physical labor. They are in possession of greater courage and fight with greater ferocity. So we must search for man's greatness outside of all these elements of character. Can we find no brighter, higher principles in the human character? To do so we must lay aside the animal nature of man altogether, and consider his character as it is blended with his intellectual and moral nature. In other words, we must consider man as man, not as an animal. We must consider him as a mind or spirit, and look to something higher than eating, laboring at the helm, and fighting, if we would discover his true greatness. In the improvement of mind is the true improvement of man in all his relations. Without this he is unqualified for all the various obligations that are necessary to be discharged in order to the development of true greatness. To be great a man must rise above the little, the mean, the vile and the degraded. To do this he must be educated, trained, until the fruits of a virtuous and useful intelligence are seen in his every-day life. Men are not considered great nor admired for the simple development of physical nature. Infidels claim that cultivated literature is incompatible with religion. It has been said that a man of ardent piety can not produce a work that will live in after ages. This is a libel upon the truth, and upon him who said: "I am the truth." Faith in God certainly places the maximum of greatness upon the human mind. The man who believes in the existence of mind apart from matter, and consequently looks upon death as a blessed state of rest to the good man which lies between the two great activities of time and eternity, and also believes in God and future rewards, has stronger motives to sound moral rectitude than the man who denies and ridicules these great truths. "The seat of law is the bosom of God, and her voice is the harmony of the world." It is respect for law that brings responsibilities home to the heart. Where there is no faith there is no respect for law pertaining to future rewards; and where this is the case there is no sense of moral obligations connecting man with the future retribution. So there is nothing resting upon an unbeliever's heart that will serve as a check upon his passions, and deter him from living with reference to the gratification of a mere animal nature. Skepticism, by shutting God out of the mind, destroys the very idea of law. Cicero's description of law is in these noble words: There is one true and original law conformable to reason and to nature, diffused over all, invariable, eternal, which calls to the fulfillment of duty and to abstinence from injustice, and which calls with that irresistible voice which is felt in all its authority wherever it is heard. This law can not be abolished or curtailed, nor affected in its sanctions by any law of man. A whole senate, a whole people, can not dispense from its paramount obligations. It requires no commentators to render it intelligible; nor is it different at Rome, at Athens, from what it was ages ago, nor is it different now from what it will be in ages to come. In all nations and in every age it has been, is, and forever will be the same--_one_, as God, its greatest author, _is one_. Man is man, _truly_, as he yields himself to this divine influence. Faith in God implants this law in the individual and national heart. Infidelity excludes its authority and influence and leaves man to the mercy of his undisciplined appetites. The fruits of infidelity have always been selfishness. The Christian believer regards himself as subordinated to a higher power, and labors under a sense of obligations which begets habits of self-control that are the life of morality. The ideal character of the Christian religion is such that faith in God and future rewards tend to make the earth life an image of the divine. This is the glory of both reason and faith, that it perceives the invisible. The students of the present have no trouble to see that the true greatness of the nation of antiquity was in their attribute of morality. Virtue and morality in an ancient ruler shines in history even across the dark ages, and makes glad the heart of the student of the nineteenth century. Faith in God has been the great leading thought in the rise of nations--that is, in reformations. Luther and Melancthon preceded Lord Bacon, Newton and Locke. The few stars that lit up the gloomy night that preceded the reformation and the revival of literature were lighted by the faith of God. Speaking of this fact, Dr. Goode says: "We behold a flood of noonday bursting all at once over every quarter of the horizon and dissipating the darkness of a thousand years; we behold mankind in almost every quarter of Europe, from the Carpathian Mountains to the pillars of Hercules, from the Tiber to the Vistula, waking as from a profound sleep to a life of activity and bold adventure; ignorance falling prostrate before advancing knowledge; brutality and barbarism giving way to science and polite letters; vice and anarchy to order and moral conduct. "The modern opposers of Christianity, reasoning in a retro-grade motion--that is, going backwards--ascribe every improvement to science and philosophy, but it was religion that took the lead in _both_ the great revival of learning and the reformation. Aldhelm, Bede and Alcuin were three great Anglo-Saxon luminaries of the eighth century. Alcuin was the tutor and confidential friend of Charlemagne. Ingulph, made abbot of Croyland by William the Conquerer, was the bright light of the eleventh century. To him we are indebted for much that has come down to us. John of Salisbury, Girald the Cambrian, and the monk Adelard, and Robert of Reading were all religious leaders. The last two traveled in Egypt and Arabia, studied mathematics at Cordovia. Adelard translated Euclid out of Arabic into Latin. Such also was Alfred the Great, who was victorious in prosperity and adversity, as a legislator and philosopher, as a soldier and politician, a king and a Christian; he was the pride of princes, the flower of society and the delight of mankind." Roger Bacon, of notoriety on account of his superior knowledge of physics, was the bright Christian light of the thirteenth century. From this century all the way through the reformation the revival of faith in God was the revival of the golden age of learning or literature. When faith in God expired in France the entire social fabric steadily declined until all crumbled and fell as in the ruins of an earthquake. At the same time the inhabitants, loosened from the restraints which faith in the living God imposes, stained every part of the country with blood, and its glory and grandeur perished. It has been well said that the rights of man can not be well secured and enjoyed unless he is viewed in his relations to God. Where government aims at and subserves this end it is a blessing. Blackstone has well remarked that the whole should protect all its parts, and that every part should pay obedience to the will of the whole; or, in other words, that the community shall guard the rights of each individual member, and that in return for this protection each individual should submit to the law of the community. Faith lets God down into the hearts of lawmakers, and a sense of accountability to him must, most certainly, have a grand tendency to refine laws in their first conception. At least it happens to be true that wherever God is feared and law made the basis of the legislation and policy of a nation, that nation is, in fact, found to excel in those interests which are essential to a nation's well-being and glory. We challenge any man, or set of men, to an estimate of the comparative purity and morals of the nations of the earth. It is, and forever will be, found to correspond with their religious systems. The great conflict which is now going on in every civilized country is a conflict between faith and infidelity. For the triumph of light and truth the very throne of God is pledged. There may be difficulties to encounter, but these will be vanquished. As well undertake to pluck the sun and stars from the heavens, and spread the black curtain of one long protracted night over the world, as to try to quench the light of immortal truth as it flows freely into the hearts of so many millions and stirs up the deep fountains of human spirits. * * * * * "Owing to the attitude of the churches for the last fifteen hundred years truth-telling has not been a very lucrative business."--_Col. Ingersoll._ The Colonel's business _has been very lucrative_, therefore his _has not been a truth-telling business_. THE THEORY OF THE ORIGINAL FREE-THINKERS. _See how they have advanced!_ "Free-thinking Christians," a name lately adopted by a society which arose in the year 1799, and has ever since regularly assembled in London, calling itself _a church of God_ founded on the principles of free inquiry. Their first members separated from a congregation of Trinitarian dissenters in Parliament Court Chapel, Bishopgate street; they rejected the doctrine of the trinity, the atonement, and other points of Calvinism; then the sacraments and the immateriality of the soul; and lastly, the inspiration of the scriptures and public worship, for they have neither singing nor praying in their assemblies, and regard the Bible only as an authentic history. These free-thinking Christians readily admit that, since their first assembling as a body, their sentiments have undergone considerable alteration on points of primary importance, but they contend that this is the natural consequence of free inquiry; that men who had heretofore been the slaves of error could not but advance in the attainment of truth after adopting a system which left thought _unrestrained and conscience free_, and they are still ready to renounce any opinion whenever it shall appear to them untenable. In consequence, their public meetings, which are mostly on Sunday forenoons, resemble rather a debating society than a Christian Church. The elder opens the meeting by stating the subject for consideration, and, at his call, several speakers successively address the meeting. It is not unusual to hear among them difference of opinion, and they are all prompt to controvert the current doctrines of the Christian world, to show their dissent from all sects and parties, and their aversion to the clergy and to Christian ministers of all denominations. This society was little known till the year 1808, when they advertised their intention of publicly inquiring into the existence of a being called _the devil_. So singular a notice could not fail of drawing a considerable number of persons to their assembly, especially on a Sunday morning. The landlord of the house at which they met in the old 'Change, alarmed for his personal security, obliged them to remove, and they engaged the large room at the Paul's Head, Cateaton street. Here the magistracy interfered, but as they had taken the precaution to license themselves under the toleration act, nothing could be done legally to restrain them. Since then they have set up a periodical publication under the title of the "Free-thinking Christian's Magazine," in which they profess to disseminate Christian, moral, and philosophical truth, and they have erected a handsome meeting-house in the crescent behind Jewin street, Cripplegate, where this weekly assembly, consisting of members and strangers, is said to amount to between four and five hundred persons. The following appears to be the latest summary of their opinions: "The Christian religion," they say, "consists in the worship of one God, eternal, just, and good, and in an obedience to the commands of Jesus, his messenger on earth, who taught the wicked to repent of the error of their ways and that God was ever ready to receive them. Forms and ordinances, parade and show, are no points of his system, but virtue and purity of heart can alone prepare man for a blissful existence beyond the grave, the wisdom and hope of which were furnished by the resurrection of the teacher of their faith, _a member of earth and an heir of immortality_."--Free-thinking Christians' Magazine; Hannah Adams's Dictionary of all Religions, page 82. REMARKS. The above dictionary is in my possession. It was published in 1817 by James Eastburn & Company at the literary rooms, corner of Broadway and Pine streets, New York, and by Cummings and Hilliard, No. 1 Cornhill, Boston. The author credits the above article to the above-named magazine, so we may rely upon it as the freethinker's own presentation of his theory in its early history. It will be of great interest to all our readers, as it will enable them to see, at once, the origin of so-called free-thought. It had its origin with Calvinistic errors upon the subject of the Trinity, a vicarious atonement, and kindred ideas concerning human redemption. It will be of interest also to mark the improvements (?) of free-thinkers, who are always boasting of being in the advance guard in warring with error and ignorance. They had neither singing nor prayers when they started out, and in these regards they have not apostatized from their first faith, for they are up to this time a praiseless and prayerless people, never praying unless it is when they have the cramp or some other disease. Their wants seem to be few and easily supplied. Health and hominy are the staples of spiritual food with them at the present. The time was when, as a society, they wished to wear some of the main elements of the Christian religion, such as belief in the existence of God; the existence of the church of God, and belief in the resurrection of Christ, and through him the resurrection of all men; but they have long ere this thrown aside all these. In the beginning of their history they were noted, as our author says, for their disposition to promptly "controvert the current doctrines of the Christian world," and "show their dissent from all sects and parties, and their aversion to the clergy, and to Christian ministers of all denominations." This trait of character they still retain, regardless of the advance of Christians from Calvinistic errors. This looks like they were determined on hating the profession of Christianity, regardless of its character. _Such_ is their chronic disease. They talk no more of worshiping the eternal God, nor of obeying the commands of Jesus. But it is just to say of their most noted leaders that they confess that the _Christ life_ was, and is, the most exalted and praiseworthy life of all the ages. And, while this life remains to challenge the world to imitation, we Christians shall rejoice, believing in Christ and realizing that our foundation stands sure and secure. In their origin they built a fine church house, but now they go to China and borrow "Josh house," as an odius epithet for church house, forgetting that their China brethren are simply clinging to their own old philosophy of nature and her lessons, without the religion of the Bible; and, also, forgetting that they, themselves, allow that all that is, is right, being, from natural selection, simply the survival of the fittest. Eight years more and a century will have passed since free thought started out in Parliament Court Chapel, and from present indications we are inclined to think that all men will be under the necessity of conceding that Christianity is the _fittest_, for it stoutly refuses to die. In their beginning they repudiated the idea of the inspiration of the Bible; to this they have held without change. Further than this, they acknowledged that the Bible was an authentic history, but now they calumniate the idea, and blaspheme the Bible and its God. In these respects they have grown backwards; and they no longer claim to "worship one God, eternal, just and good," nor to "obey the commands of Jesus," "rejecting sacraments, forms, ordinances, parade and show, along with song and prayer." Perhaps they cast up their accounts, and found that there could, in the very nature of things, be no worship outside of all these elements of worship, and then determined to be more honest at least, and endeavor in the future to people the earth with a non-worshipping, Godless, Christless, praiseless, prayerless, non-hoping set of inhabitants, who would give all up in death for the sake of free thought. WHAT A MAN MAY BE AND BE A CHRISTIAN IN THE ESTIMATION OF COL. INGERSOLL. We find the following in the Colonel's speech, which was delivered at Rockford, Ill., on Tuesday, October 5, 1880. We publish it in order to show the utter fallacy of the infidel's claim that Christianity is necessarily in conflict with education; that Christians are necessarily bigots, narrow-minded men, dangerous to the liberty of man, woman and child. Read it, ye fault-finding skeptics and infidels, and save your claims against the Christian religion if you can. Correllate it with the hollow utterances of Colonel Ingersoll, which are so often repeated by him in other addresses directed wholly against Christianity, if you can. Here it is: "I have known him (Garfield) for years. I know him as well as I know any other man, and I tell you he has more brains, more education, wider and more splendid views than any other man who has been nominated for the Presidency by any party since I was born. Some people say to me: 'How can you vote for Garfield when he is a Christian and was a preacher?' I tell them: 'I have two reasons: One is, I am not a bigot, and the other is, General Garfield is not a bigot. He does not agree with me; I do not agree with him on thousands of things; _but on the great luminous principle that every man must give to every other man every right that he claims for himself we do absolutely agree._' [Italics mine.--ED.] I would despise myself if I would vote against a man in politics simply because we differed about what is known as religion. I will vote for a liberal Catholic, a liberal Presbyterian, a liberal Methodist, a liberal anything ten thousand times quicker than I would vote for an illiberal free-thinker. I believe in the right. I believe in doing to other people in these matters as I would like them to do to me. _General Garfield is an honest man every way; intellectual every way._ He is a poor man; he is rich in honor, in integrity he is wealthy, and in brains he is a millionaire. * * * He is a great, good, broad, kind, tender man, and he will do, if elected President, what he believes to be right." SUM OF POSSIBILITIES. 1. It is possible for an honest man to be the best educated man in the nation, and at the same time be a Christian. 2. It is possible for the millionaire in brains to be the best educated man in the nation, and at the same time be a Christian. 3. It is possible for a man to be a Christian, and not be a bigot. 4. It is possible for a man to be a Christian, and an advocate of the great luminous principle that every man must give to every other man every right that he claims for himself. 5. It is possible for a man to be a Christian and be a liberal man. 6. It is possible for a man to be honest every way, and be a Christian. 7. It is possible for a man to be a Christian, and be every way an intellectual man. 8. It is possible for a man to be a Christian, and be rich in honor. 9. It is possible for a man to be a Christian, and be wealthy in integrity. 10. It is possible for a man to be a Christian, and be a great man. 11. It is possible for a man to be a Christian, and be a good man. 12. It is possible for a man to be a Christian, and be a broad, kind, tender man. 13. It is possible for a man to be a Christian, and have wider and more splendid views than any other man. And Colonel Ingersoll says he knows all this to be so. Now what shall we think of the utterances of lesser lights in infidelity since we have the living fact before us that Christianity is in perfect harmony with the very highest education; with the widest and most splendid views; with honesty every way; with greatness; with goodness; with integrity; with honor; with kindness and tenderness; with the great luminous principle that a man must give to every other man every right that he claims for himself? And it is also in perfect harmony with a great and _liberal heart_. We have hope that Colonel Ingersoll will yet find his way into the temple of truth, which reveals the glory and grandeur of the perfect harmony that exists between Christianity and all that is truly great and good--since he has pronounced the word "Eureka." LIFE AND FORCE ARE NOT THE SAME. Hylozoism is the doctrine that life and matter are inseparable. This doctrine has been presented in several different forms. Straton, of Lampsacus, claimed that molecules were each and all of them in possession of life. The Stoics did not, however, accord life to each and every distinct particle of matter, but held that the universe, as a whole, was a being animated by a principle which gave to it motion, form and life. This principle they called the soul of the universe. This idea was advocated by the followers of Plotinus, who contended that this soul of the world animated the smallest particle of matter. Spinoza asserted that all things were alive in different degrees. Matter, according to Leibnitz and Boscovish, and others, is always endowed with force. Attraction and repulsion and chemical affinity, all indicate activity in matter; but all this fails to meet the demands of science, for this simple reason, life is a force always connected with organization, which much of matter wants. Spontaneous motion, growth, nutrition, separation of parts, and generation are phenomena which indicate the presence of life; which most certainly is not co-extensive with matter. So Hylozoism, ancient and modern, under whatever name you please to term it, _breaks down_. Here, also, we discover that it is foolishness to confound the terms _life_ and _force_. MACAULAY ON SUNDAY. * * * This day is not lost. While the machinery is stopped, while the car rests on the road, while the treasury is silent, while the smoke ceases to rise from the chimney of the factory, the nation enriches itself none the less than during the working days of the week. Man, the machine of all machines, * * * is recuperating and gathering strength as well, that on Monday he returns to his work with his mind clearer, and more courage for his work, and with renewed vigor. THE ENTERPRISE. The Christian Foundation is approaching the close of its first year, and I think it proper now to return my heart-felt gratitude to those who have given strength to it in its youth, when strength was and is most needed. I do not claim that it is perfect or faultless, but I am glad to know that its reputation has been and is all that I can ask, viewing it in the light of my own limited intelligence. I have been and am endeavoring to make this journal food for the intellect. I have the consolation, whether it lives long or short, of knowing that I have given it my best energies and attention. And I have refrained from loading it with advertisements, simply for profits. I shall continue it if permitted by Providence. And as the year is drawing to a close, I wish to say to all its patrons, can you not remain with this journal at least through another year, and by so doing assist me in placing one matter of fact, biblical and scientific, as well as logical defense of our religion, upon a solid basis. It will continue to know no party or sect, and it will continue to defend the truth wherever found. "Truth stands true to her God; man alone vacillates." NAPOLEON BONAPARTE'S ESTIMATE OF THE CHRIST. Napoleon said, "I know men, and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions; that resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and whatever other religion the distance of infinity. As for me, I recognize the gods and these great men as beings like myself. Nothing announces them as divine. It is not so with Christ. Everything in him astonishes me; between him and whoever else in the world there is no term of comparison. He is truly a being by himself. In fact, the sciences and philosophy avail nothing for salvation, and Jesus came into the world to reveal the mysteries of Heaven and the laws of the spirit; also he has nothing to do but with the soul, and to that alone he brings his gospel. * * * Jesus borrowed nothing from our sciences. He is not a philosopher, since he advances by miracles, and from the commencement his disciples worshipped him. "The Bible contains a complete series of facts of historical men, to explain time and eternity, such as no other religion has to offer. Even the impious themselves have never dared to deny the sublimity of the gospel. * * * In every other existence but that of Christ how many imperfections! * * Christ proved that he was the son of the Eternal by his disregard of time. All his doctrines signify one only and the same thing--_eternity_." OBITUARY. "LITTLE MYRTIE" BOGG, daughter of Dr. M.M. and Mary A. Bogg, of Macy, Indiana, departed this life on the 6th day of October, 1880. Aged two years, 7 months and 28 days. She leaves along with her parents three lovely sisters. One great consolation to parents and sisters is in the fact that "Little Myrtie" bore her afflictions with the fortitude and patience of _even true womanhood_, but best of all was the good Christian sense and rare intelligence that she exhibited in her last hours. Let her last words, "By, by," and "come and see Myrtie," burn upon the altar of the heart until we all meet her in the better land. Transcriber's Note The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. 
28248	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 28248-h.htm or 28248-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/8/2/4/28248/28248-h/28248-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/8/2/4/28248/28248-h.zip) Transcriber's note: The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS; Or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. by HUGH MILLER * * * * * WORKS BY HUGH MILLER, PUBLISHED BY GOULD AND LINCOLN, 59 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON. I. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE; OR, NEW WALKS IN AN OLD FIELD. Illustrated with Plates and Geological Sections. 12mo, cloth. Price $1.00. "It is withal one of the most beautiful specimens of English composition to be found, conveying information on a most difficult and profound science, in a style at once novel, pleasing and elegant."--DR. SPRAGUE, ALBANY SPECTATOR. II. MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. With a fine Engraving of the Author. 12mo, cloth. Price $1.00. A thrillingly interesting and instructive book of travels; presenting the most perfectly life-like views of England and its People to be found in the language. III. THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR; OR, THE ASTEROLEPIS OF STROMNESS. With numerous Illustrations. With a Memoir of the Author, by Louis Agassiz. 12mo, cloth. Price $1.00. Dr. Buckland said HE WOULD GIVE HIS LEFT HAND TO POSSESS SUCH POWERS OF DESCRIPTION AS THIS MAN. IV. MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. With a full length Portrait of the Author. 12mo, cloth. Price $1.25. This is a personal narrative of a deeply interesting and instructive character, concerning one of the most remarkable men of the age. It should be read and studied by every young man in the land. V. TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS; OR, GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES, NATURAL AND REVEALED. "Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field."--JOB. With numerous elegant Illustrations. One volume, royal 12mo. Price $1.25. This is the largest and most comprehensive geological work of this distinguished author. It exhibits the profound learning, the felicitous style, and the scientific perception, which characterize his former works, while it embraces the latest results of geological discovery. But the great charm of the book lies in those passages of glowing eloquence, in which, having spread out his facts, the author proceeds to make deductions from them of the most striking and exciting character. * * * * * --> The above works may be had in sets of uniform size and style of binding. VALUABLE WORKS. KNOWLEDGE IS POWER: A VIEW OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES OF MODERN SOCIETY, and the Result of Labor, Capital, and Skill. By CHARLES KNIGHT. American edition, with Additions, by DAVID A. WELLS, Editor of "Annual of Scientific Discovery," &c. With numerous Illustrations. 12mo, cloth. $1.25. This work is eminently entitled to be ranked in that class, styled, "BOOKS FOR THE PEOPLE." The author is one of the most popular writers of the day. "Knowledge is Power" treats of those things Which "come home to the business and bosoms" of every man. It is remarkable for its fullness and variety of information, and for the felicity and force with which the author applies his facts to his reasoning. The facts and illustrations are drawn from almost every branch of skilful industry. It is a work which the mechanic and artizan of every description will be sure to read with a RELISH. This is a work of rare merit, and touches many strings of importance with which society is linked together. No work we have ever seen is better calculated to inspire and awaken inventive genius in man than this. Almost every department of human labor is represented, and it contains a large fund of useful information, condensed in a volume, every chapter of which is worth the cost of the book. It would be an act of manifest injustice to the community for any editor to feel an indifference about commending this volume to a reading public.--N.Y. CH. HERALD. The style is admirable, and the book itself is as full of information as an egg is of meat.--JOURNAL. As teachers we know no better remuneration, than for them FIRST to buy this book and diligently read it themselves; SECOND, to teach to their pupils the principles of industrial organization which it contains, and of the facts by which it is illustrated. It is one of the merits of this book that its facts will interest youthful minds and be retained to blossom hereafter into theories of which they are now incapable. THIRD, endeavor to have a copy procured for the district library, that the parents may read it, and the teachers reap fruit in the present generation.--N.Y. TEACHER. Contains a great amount of information, accompanied with numerous illustrations, rendering it a compendious history of the subjects upon which it treats.--N.Y. COURIER AND INQUIRER. We commend the work as one of real value and profitable reading.--ROCHESTER AMERICAN. This work is a rich repository of valuable information on various subjects, having a bearing on the industrial end social interests of a community.--PURITAN RECORDER. MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. BY HUGH MILLER, author of "Old Red Sandstone," "Footprints of the Creator," "My First Impressions of England," etc. 12mo, cloth. $1.25. "This autobiography is quite worthy of the renowned author. His first attempts at literature, and his career until he stood forth an acknowledged power among the philosophers and ecclesiastical leaders of his native land, are given without egotism, with a power and vivacity which are equally truthful and delightsome."--PRESBYTERIAN. "Hugh Miller is one of the most remarkable men of the age. Having risen from the humble walks of life, and from the employment of a stone-cutter, to the highest rank among scientific men, everything relating to his history possesses an interest which belongs to that of few living men. There is much even in his school-boy days which points to the man as he now is. The book has all the ease and graphic power which in characteristic of his writings."--NEW YORK OBSERVER. "This volume is a book for the ten thousand. It is embellished with an admirable likeness of Hugh Miller, the stone mason--his coat off and his sleeves rolled up--with the implements of labor in hand--his form erect, and his eye bright and piercing. The biography of such a man will interest every reader. It is a living thing--teaching a lesson of self-culture of immense value."--PHILADELPHIA CHRISTIAN OBSERVER. "It is a portion of autobiography exquisitely told. He is a living proof that a single man may contain within himself something more than all the books in the world, some unuttered word, if he will look within and read. This is one of the best books we have had of late, and must have a hearty welcome and a large circulation in America."--LONDON CORRESP. N.Y. TRIBUNE. "It is a work of rare interest; at times having the fascination of a romance, and again suggesting the profoundest views of education and of science. The ex-mason holds a graphic pen; a quiet humor runs through his pages; he tells a story well, and some of his pictures of home life might almost be classed with Wilson's."--NEW YORK INDEPENDENT. "This autobiography is THE book for poor boys, and others who are struggling with poverty and limited advantages; and perhaps it is not too much to predict that in a few years it will become one of the poor man's classics, filling a space on his scanty shelf next to the Autobiography of Franklin."--NEW ENGLAND FARMER. "Lovers of the romantic should not neglect the book, as it contains a narrative of tender passion and happily reciprocated affection, which will be read with subdued emotion and unfailing interest."--BOSTON TRAVELLER. * * * * * [Illustration: SPHENOPTERIS AFFINIS. A Fern of the Lower Coal Measures. (_Restored._)] THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS; Or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. by HUGH MILLER, Author of "The Old Red Sandstone," "Footprints of the Creator," Etc., Etc. With Memorials of the Death and Character of the Author. "Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field."--JOB. Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 59 Washington Street. New York: Sheldon, Blakeman & Co. Cincinnati: George S. Blanchard. 1857. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by GOULD AND LINCOLN, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. Electro-Stereotyped by Geo. J. Stiles, 23 Congress St., Boston. TO JAMES MILLER, ESQ., F.R.S.E. PROFESSOR OF SURGERY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. MY DEAR SIR, This volume is chiefly taken up in answering, to the best of its author's knowledge and ability, the various questions which the old theology of Scotland has been asking for the last few years of the newest of the sciences. Will you pardon me the liberty I take in dedicating it to you? In compliance with the peculiar demand of the time, that what a man knows of science or of art he should freely communicate to his neighbors, we took the field nearly together as popular lecturers, and have at least so far resembled each other in our measure of success, that the same class of censors have been severe upon both. For while you have been condemned as a physiologist for asserting that the human framework, when fairly wrought during the week, is greatly the better for the rest of the Sabbath, I have been described by the same pen as one of the wretched class of persons who teach that geology, rightly understood, does not conflict with revelation. Besides, I owe it to your kindness that, when set aside by the indisposition which renders it doubtful whether I shall ever again address a popular audience, you enabled me creditably to fulfil one of my engagements by reading for me in public two of the following discourses, and by doing them an amount of justice on that occasion which could never have been done them by their author. Further, your kind attentions and advice during the crisis of my illness were certainly every way suited to remind me of those so gratefully acknowledged by the wit of the last century, when he bethought him of "kind Arbuthnot's aid, Who knew his art, but not his trade." And so, though the old style of dedication has been long out of fashion, I avail myself of the opportunity it affords me of expressing my entire concurrence in your physiological views, my heartfelt gratitude for your good services and friendship, and my sincere respect for the disinterested part you have taken in the important work of elevating and informing your humbler countryfolk,--while at the same time maintaining professionally, with Simpson and with Goodsir, the reputation of that school of anatomy and medicine for which the Scottish capital has been long so famous. I am, MY DEAR SIR, With sincere respect and regard, Yours affectionately, HUGH MILLER. TO THE READER. Of the twelve following Lectures, four (the First, Second, Fifth, and Sixth) were delivered before the members of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution (1852 and 1855). One (the Third) was read at Exeter Hall before the Young Men's Christian Association (1854), and the substance of two of the others (the Eleventh and Twelfth) at Glasgow, before the Geological Section of the British Association (1855). Of the five others,--written mainly to complete and impart a character of unity to the volume of which they form a part,--only three (the Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth) were addressed viva voce to popular audiences. The Third Lecture was published both in this country and America, and translated into some of the Continental languages. The rest now appear in print for the first time. Though their writer has had certainly no reason to complain of the measure of favor with which the read or spoken ones have been received, they are perhaps all better adapted for perusal in the closet than for delivery in the public hall or lecture-room; while the two concluding Lectures are mayhap suited to interest only geologists who, having already acquainted themselves with the generally ascertained facts of their science, are curious to cultivate a further knowledge with such new facts as in the course of discovery are from time to time added to the common fund. In such of the following Lectures as deal with but the established geologic phenomena, and owe whatever little merit they may possess to the inferences drawn from these, or on the conclusions based upon them, most of the figured illustrations, though not all, will be recognized as familiar: in the two concluding Lectures, on the contrary, they will be found to be almost entirely new. They are contributions, representative of the patient gleanings of years, to the geologic records of Scotland; and exhibit, in a more or less perfect state, no inconsiderable portion of all the forms yet detected in the rocks of her earlier Palæozoic and Secondary floras. It will be seen that I adopt, in my Third and Fourth Lectures, that scheme of reconciliation between the Geologic and Mosaic Records which accepts the six days of creation as vastly extended periods; and I have been reminded by a somewhat captious critic that I once held a very different view, and twitted with what he terms inconsistency. I certainly did once believe with Chalmers and with Buckland that the six days were simply natural days of twenty-four hours each,--that they had compressed the entire work of the existing creation,--and that the latest of the geologic ages was separated by a great chaotic gap from our own. My labors at the time as a practical geologist had been very much restricted to the Palæozoic and Secondary rocks, more especially to the Old Red and Carboniferous Systems of the one division, and the Oolitic System of the other; and the long extinct organisms which I found in them certainly did not conflict with the view of Chalmers. All I found necessary at the time to the work of reconciliation was some scheme that would permit me to assign to the earth a high antiquity, and to regard it as the scene of many succeeding creations. During the last nine years, however, I have spent a few weeks every autumn in exploring the later formations, and acquainting myself with their peculiar organisms. I have traced them upwards from the raised beaches and old coast lines of the human period, to the brick clays, Clyde beds, and drift and boulder deposits of the Pleistocene era, and again from these, with the help of museums and collections, up through the mammaliferous crag of England, to its Red and its Coral crags. And the conclusion at which I have been compelled to arrive is, that for many long ages ere man was ushered into being, not a few of his humbler contemporaries of the fields and woods enjoyed life in their present haunts, and that for thousands of years anterior to even their appearance, many of the existing molluscs lived in our seas. That day during which the present creation came into being, and in which God, when he had made "the beast of the earth after his kind, and the cattle after their kind," at length terminated the work by moulding a creature in his own image, to whom he gave dominion over them all, was not a brief period of a few hours' duration, but extended over mayhap millenniums of centuries. No blank chaotic gap of death and darkness separated the creation to which man belongs from that of the old extinct elephant, hippopotamus, and hyæna; for familiar animals such as the red deer, the roe, the fox, the wild cat, and the badger, lived throughout the period which connected their times with our own; and so I have been compelled to hold, that the days of creation were not natural, but prophetic days, and stretched far back into the bygone eternity. After in some degree committing myself to the other side, I have yielded to evidence which I found it impossible to resist; and such in this matter has been my inconsistency,--an inconsistency of which the world has furnished examples in all the sciences, and will, I trust, in its onward progress, continue to furnish many more. EDINBURGH, DECEMBER, 1856. [The last proofs of this preface were despatched by the Author to his printer only the day before that melancholy termination of his life, the details of which will be found in the "MEMORIALS" following.--AM. PUBLISHERS.] CONTENTS. PAGE MEMORIALS OF THE DEATH AND CHARACTER OF HUGH MILLER, 7 LECTURE FIRST. THE PALÆONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS, 33 LECTURE SECOND. THE PALÆONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF ANIMALS, 86 LECTURE THIRD. THE TWO RECORDS, MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL, 141 LECTURE FOURTH. THE MOSAIC VISION OF CREATION, 179 LECTURE FIFTH. GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. PART I. 211 LECTURE SIXTH. GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. PART II. 237 LECTURE SEVENTH. THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. PART I. 283 LECTURE EIGHTH. THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. PART II. 320 LECTURE NINTH. THE DISCOVERABLE AND THE REVEALED, 362 LECTURE TENTH. THE GEOLOGY OF THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS, 392 LECTURE ELEVENTH. ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. PART I. 429 LECTURE TWELFTH. ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. PART II. 463 List of Illustrations PAGE A Restoration of Sphenopteris affinis (_Frontispiece_) 1. The Genealogy of Plants, 40 2. Cyclopteris Hibernicus, 42 3. Conifer of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 43 4. The Genealogy of Animals, 45 5. Oldhamia antiqua (_oldest known Zoophyte_), 48 6. Palæochorda minor, 49 7. Lycopodium clavatum, 51 8. Equisetum fluviatile, 51 9. Osmunda regalis (_Royal Fern_), 52 10. Pinus sylvestris (_Scotch Fir_), 53 11. Calamite? of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 55 12. Lycopodite? of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 55 13. Fern? of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 56 14-19. Ferns of the Coal Measures, 58 20. Altingia excelsa (_Norfolk Island Pine_), 59 21. East Indian Fern (_Asophila perrotetiana_), 60 22. Section of Stem, of Tree-Fern (_Cyathea_), 60 23-25. Lepidodendron Sternbergii, 62 26. Calamites Mougeotii, 63 27. Sphenophyllum dentatum, 63 28. Sigillaria reniformis, 64 29. Sigillaria reniformis (_nat. size_), 65 30. Sigillaria pachyderma, 66 31. Stigmaria ficoides, 67 32. Favularia tessellata, 68 33. Lepidodendron obovatum, 68 34. Cycas revoluta, 69 35. Zamia pungens, 69 36. Zamia Feneonis, 69 37. Mantellia nidiformis, 70 38. Equisetum columnare, 71 39. Carpolithes conica, 72 40. Carpolithes Bucklandii, 72 41. Acer trilobatum, 73 42. Ulmus Bronnii (_leaf of a tree allied to the Elm_), 74 43. Palmacites Lamanonis (_a Palm of the Miocene of Aix_), 75 44. Cyclophthalmus Bucklandii (_a Fossil Scorpion of the Coal Measures of Bohemia_), 81 45. Fossil Dragon-Fly, 83 46. Cyathaxonia Dalmani, 88 47. Glyptocrinus decadactylus, 88 48. Calymene Blumenbachii, 89 49. Orthisina Verneuili, 89 50. Lituites cornu-arietis, 89 51. Lingula Lowisii, 89 52. Fort Jackson Shark (_Cestracion Philippi_), 91 53. The Genealogy of Fishes, 93 54. Amblypterus macropterus (_a Ganoid of the Carboniferous System_), 94 55. Lebias cephalotes (_Cycloids of Aix_), 94 56. Platax altissimus (_a Ctenoid of Monte Bolca_), 95 57. Pterichthys oblongus, 98 58. Pleuracanthus lævissimus, 100 59. Carcharias productus (_Cutting Tooth_), 101 60. Placodus gigas (_Crushing Teeth_), 101 61. Vespertilio Parisiensis (_a Bat of the Eocene_), 106 62. Ichthyosaurus communis, 106 63. Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, 108 64. Pterodactylus crassirostris, 108 65. Chelonia Benstedi, 109 66. Palæophis Toliapicus (_Ophidian of the Eocene_), 110 67. Bird-tracks of the Connecticut, 113 68. Fossil Footprint, 114 69. Thylacotherium Prevosti, 117 70. Anoplotherium commune, 120 71. Animals of the Paris Basin, 121 72. Dinotherium giganteum, 122 73. Elephas primigenius (_Great British Elephant_), 127 74. Trogontherium Cuvieri (_Gigantic Beaver_), 128 75. Ursus spelæus (_Cave Bear_), 128 76. Hyæena Spelæa (_Cave Hyæna_), 129 77. Asaphus caudatus, 134 78. Orthoceras laterale, 134 79. Spirigerina reticularis, 134 80. Ammonites margaritatus, 134 81. Ammonites bisulcatus, 134 82. Belemnitella mucronata, 134 83. Belemnites sulcatus, 134 84. Murex alveolatus, 135 85. Astarte Omalli, 135 86. Balanus crassus, 136 87. Astarte arctica, 152 88. Tellina proxima, 152 89. Norwegian Spruce (_Abies excelsa_), 153 90. Lepidodendron Sternbergii, 164 91. Calamites cannæformis, 165 92. Megatherium Cuvieri, 167 93. Skull of Dinotherium giganteum 168 94. Ammonites Humphriesianus, 242 95. Encrinites moniliformis, 243 96. Cupressocrinus crassius, 243 97. Pentacrinus fasciculosus, 245 98. Chamfered and Imbricated Scales, 246 99. Scale of Holoptychius giganteus, 247 100. Section of Scale of Holoptychius, 248 101. Sigillaria Groeseri, 255 102-104. Whorled Shells of the Old Red Sandstone, 256 105. Murchisonia bigranulosa, 258 106. Conularia ornata, 258 107. Calico pattern (_Manchester_), 259 108. Smithia Pengellyi, 259 109. Apamæean Medal, 298 110. Old Mexican Picture, 299 111. Megaceros Hibernicus (_Irish Elk_), 331 112. Mylodon robustus, 346 113. Glyptodon clavipes, 346 114. The Geography of Cosmas, 376 115. The Heavens and Earth of Cosmas, 377 116. Nummulites lævigata (_Pharaoh's Beans_), 421 117. Silurian Organism, Graptolite, etc., 431 118. Fucoid, 433 119. Fucoids, 434 120. Plant resembling Lycopodium clavatum, 437 121. Parka decipiens, 449 122. Fossil Fern (_probably_), 450 123. Unnamed Fossil Plant, 450 124. Cyclopterus Hibernicus, 458 125. New and peculiar Fern from Airdrie coal field, 464 126. Stigmaria, 465 127. The same, magnified, 465 128. Stigmaria, 466 129. Sphenopteris bifida, 470 130. Conifers? 475 131. Conifer Twigs, 476 132. Unnamed Fossil Plant, 478 133. Zamia, 479 134. Zamia, 480 135. Zamia of the Lias, 481 136. Zamia of the Oolite, 481 137. Zamia resembling Z. lanceolata, 482 138. Fossil Cone, 483 139. Fossil Cone, 484 140. Helmsdale Fossil Plants, 485 141. Fossil Ferns in Helmsdale Deposits, 486 142. Unnamed Fossil Plant, 488 143. Pecopteris obtusifolia, 489 144. Apparent Fern (_new_), 490 145. Pachypteris, 490 146. Phlebopteris, 491 147. Unnamed Fossil Plant, 492 148. Pentagon, illustrative of Fern allies, 493 149. Imbricated Stem, 494 150. Fossil Plant (_Helmsdale_), 495 151. Dicotyledonous Leaf of the Oolite, 496 152. Fern, 497 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. Unknown he came. He went a Mystery-- A mighty vessel foundered in the calm, Her freight half-given to the world. To die He longed, nor feared to meet the great "I AM." Fret not. God's mystery is solved to him. He quarried Truth all rough-hewn from the earth, And chiselled it into a perfect gem-- A rounded Absolute. Twain at a birth-- Science with a celestial halo crowned, And Heavenly Truth--God's Works by His Word illumed-- These twain he viewed in holiest concord bound. Reason outsoared itself. His mind consumed By its volcanic fire, and frantic driven, He dreamed himself in hell and woke in heaven. EDINBURGH, December, 1856. MEMORIALS OF THE DEATH AND CHARACTER OF HUGH MILLER, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF HIS FUNERAL OBSEQUIES. Near the end of last autumn the American publishers of Hugh Miller's works received from him, through his Edinburgh publishers, the offer of a new work from his pen. The offer was accepted and a contract was at once closed. Soon the advance sheets began to come; and as successive portions were received and perused, it became more and more evident that the work was destined not only to extend his fame, but to establish for him new and special claims to the admiration and gratitude of mankind. In the midst of these anticipations, and ere more than half the sheets had been received, the publishers and the public here were startled by the news that Mr. Miller had come to a violent death. The paragraph conveying the intelligence was such as to leave the mind in a state of painful suspense. But the next steamer from Europe brought full details of the lamentable event. It appeared that in a momentary fit of mental aberration he had died by his own hand, on the night of December 23d, 1856. The cause was over much brain-work. He had been long and incessantly engaged in preparing the present work for the press, when, just as he had given the last touches to the eloquent, the immortal record, reason abandoned her throne, and in the brief interregnum, that great light of science was quenched forever. The event caused universal lamentation throughout the British Isles. It was treated as a public calamity. The British press, from the _London Times_ to the remotest provincial newspaper, gave expression to the general sorrow in strains of unwonted eloquence; and in so doing recounted his great services to the cause of science, and paid homage to his genius. Some of the articles which the event thus called forth have seemed to the American publishers worthy of preservation, from the authentic facts which they embody, the judgments which they express, and the literary excellence by which they are marked. They have therefore determined to print them in connection with this work as permanent Memorials of its distinguished and lamented author. The first piece appeared in the _Edinburgh Witness_ of December 27th, 1856,--the paper of which Mr. Miller had been the editor from its establishment in 1840. It presents an authentic account of the circumstances attending his death, and is understood to be from the pen of the REV. WILLIAM HANNA, L.L.D., the son-in-law and biographer of Dr. Chalmers, and sometime editor of the _North British Review_. In the belief that nothing touching the character and memory of such a man can be regarded with other than the deepest interest, the friends of Mr. Hugh Miller have thought it due at once to his great name and to the cause of truth, to lay fully before the public a statement of the most mournful circumstances under which he has departed from this life. For some months past his over-tasked intellect had given evidence of disorder. He became the prey of false or exaggerated alarms. He fancied--if, indeed, it was a fancy--that occasionally, and for brief intervals, his faculties quite failed him,--that his mind broke down. He was engaged at this time with a treatise on the "Testimony of the Rocks," upon which he was putting out all his strength,--working at his top-most pitch of intensity. That volume will in a few weeks be in the hands of many of our readers; and while they peruse it with the saddened impression that his intellect and genius poured out their latest treasures in its composition, they will search through it in vain for the slightest evidence of feebleness or decaying power. Rather let us anticipate the general verdict that will be pronounced upon it, and speak of it as one of the ablest of all his writings. But he wrought at it too eagerly. Hours after midnight the light was seen to glimmer through the window of that room which within the same eventful week was to witness the close of the volume, and the close of the writer's life. This over-working of the brain began to tell upon his mental health. He had always been somewhat moodily apprehensive of being attacked by footpads, and had carried loaded firearms about his person. Latterly, having occasion sometimes to return to Portobello from Edinburgh at unseasonable hours, he had furnished himself with a revolver. But now, to all his old fears as to attacks upon his person, there was added an exciting and over-mastering impression that his house, and especially that Museum, the fruit of so much care, which was contained in a separate outer building, were exposed to the assault of burglars. He read all the recent stories of house robberies. He believed that one night, lately, an actual attempt to break in upon his Museum had been made. Visions of ticket-of-leave men, prowling about his premises, haunted him by day and by night. The revolver, which lay nightly near him, was not enough; a broad-bladed dagger was kept beside it; whilst behind him, at his bed head, a claymore stood ready at hand. A week or so ago, a new and more aggravated feature of cerebral disorder showed itself in sudden and singular sensations in his head. They came only after lengthened intervals. They did not last long, but were intensely violent. The terrible idea that his brain was deeply and hopelessly diseased,--that his mind was on the verge of ruin,--took hold of him, and stood out before his eye in all that appalling magnitude in which such an imagination as his alone could picture it. It was mostly at night that these wild paroxysms of the brain visited him; but up till last Monday he had spoken of them to no one. A friend who had a long conversation with him on the Thursday of last week, never enjoyed an interview more, or remembers him in a more genial mood. On the Saturday forenoon another friend from Edinburgh found him in the same happy frame. As was his wont when with an old friend with whom he felt particularly at ease, he read or recited some favorite passages, repeating, on this occasion, with great emphasis, that noble prayer of John Knox,[1] which, he told his friend, it had been his frequent custom to repeat privately during the days of the Disruption. On the forenoon of Sunday last he worshipped in the Free Church at Portobello; and in the evening read a little work which had been put into his hands, penning that brief notice of it which will be read with melancholy interest as his last contribution to this journal. About ten o'clock on Monday morning he took what with him was an altogether unusual step. He called on Dr. Balfour, in Portobello, to consult him as to his state of health. "On my asking," says Dr. Balfour, in a communication with which we have been favored, "what was the matter with him, he replied, 'My brain is giving way. I cannot put two thoughts together to-day. I have had a dreadful night of it; I cannot face another such. I was impressed with the idea that my Museum was attacked by robbers, and that I had got up, put on my clothes, and gone out with a loaded pistol to shoot them. Immediately after that I became unconscious. How long that continued, I cannot say; but when I awoke in the morning I was trembling all over, and quite confused in my brain. On rising I felt as if a stiletto was suddenly, and as quickly as an electric shock, passed through my brain from front to back, and left a burning sensation on the top of the brain just below the bone. So thoroughly convinced was I that I must have been out through the night, that I examined my trousers to see if they were wet or covered with mud, but could find none.' He further said,--'I may state that I was somewhat similarly affected through the night twice last week, and I examined my trousers in the morning to see if I had been out. Still the terrible sensations were not nearly so bad as they were last night; and I may further inform you, that towards the end of last week, while passing through the Exchange in Edinburgh, I was seized with such a giddiness that I staggered, and would, I think, have fallen, had I not gone into an entry, where I leaned against the wall, and became quite unconscious for some seconds.'" Dr. Balfour stated his opinion of the case; told him that he was over-working his brain, and agreed to call on him on the following day to make a fuller examination. Meanwhile the quick eye of affection had noticed that there was something wrong, and on Monday forenoon Mrs. Miller came up to Edinburgh to express her anxiety to Professor Miller, and request that he would see her husband. "I arranged," says Professor Miller, "to meet Dr. Balfour at Shrub Mount (Mr. Hugh Miller's house), on the afternoon of next day. We met accordingly at half-past three on Tuesday. He was a little annoyed at Mrs. Miller's having given me the trouble, as he called it, but received me quite in his ordinary kind, friendly manner. We examined his chest and found that unusually well; but soon we discovered that it was head symptoms that made him uneasy. He acknowledged having been, night after night, up till very late in the morning, working hard and continuously at his new book, 'which,' with much satisfaction, he said, 'I have finished this day.' He was sensible that his head had suffered in consequence, as evidenced in two ways: first, occasionally he felt as if a very fine poignard had been suddenly passed through and through his brain. The pain was intense, and momentarily followed by confusion and giddiness, and the sense of being 'very drunk,'--unable to stand or walk. He thought that a period of unconsciousness must have followed this,--a kind of swoon,--but he had never fallen. Second, what annoyed him most, however, was a kind of nightmare, which for some nights past had rendered sleep most miserable. It was no dream, he said; he saw no distinct vision, and could remember nothing of what had passed accurately. It was a sense of vague and yet intense horror, with a conviction of being abroad in the night wind, and dragged through places as if by some invisible power. 'Last night,' he said, 'I felt as if I had been ridden by a witch for fifty miles, and rose far more wearied in mind and body than when I lay down.' So strong was his conviction of having been out, that he had difficulty in persuading himself to the contrary, by carefully examining his clothes in the morning, to see if they were not wet or dirty; and he looked inquiringly and anxiously to his wife, asking if she was sure he had not been out last night, and walking in this disturbed trance or dream. His pulse was quiet, but tongue foul. The head was not hot, but he could not say it was free from pain. But I need not enter into professional details. Suffice it to say that we came to the conclusion that he was suffering from an over-worked mind, disordering his digestive organs, enervating his whole frame, and threatening serious head affection. We told him this, and enjoined absolute discontinuance of work, bed at eleven, light supper (he had all his life made that a principal meal), thinning the hair of the head, a warm sponging-bath at bed time, &c. To all our commands he readily promised obedience, not forgetting the discontinuance of neck rubbing, to which he had unfortunately been prevailed to submit some days before. For fully an hour we talked together on these and other subjects, and I left him with no apprehension of impending evil, and little doubting but that a short time of rest and regimen would restore him to his wonted vigor." It was a cheerful hour that thus was passed, and his wife and family partook of the hopeful feeling with which his kind friend, Professor Miller, had parted with him. It was now near the dinner hour, and the servant entered the room to spread the table. She found Mr. Miller in the room alone. Another of the paroxysms was on him. His face was such a picture of horror that she shrunk in terror from the sight. He flung himself on the sofa, and buried his head, as if in agony, upon the cushion. Again, however, the vision flitted by, and left him in perfect health. The evening was spent quietly with his family. During tea he employed himself in reading aloud Cowper's "Castaway," the Sonnet on Mary Unwin, and one of his more playful pieces, for the special pleasure of his children. Having corrected some proofs of the forthcoming volume, he went up stairs to his study. At the appointed hour he had taken the bath, but unfortunately his natural and peculiar repugnance to physic had induced him to leave untaken the medicine that had been prescribed. He had retired into his sleeping-room,--a small apartment opening out of his study, and which, for some time past, in consideration of the delicate state of his wife's health, and the irregularity of his own hours of study, he occupied at night alone,--and lain sometime upon the bed. The horrible trance, more horrible than ever, must have returned. All that can now be known of what followed is to be gathered from the facts, that next morning his body, half dressed, was found lying lifeless on the floor, the feet upon the study rug, the chest pierced with the ball of the revolver pistol, which was found lying in the bath that stood close by.[2] The deadly bullet had perforated the left lung, grazed the heart, cut through the pulmonary artery at its root, and lodged in the rib in the right side. Death must have been instantaneous. The servant by whom the body was first discovered, acting with singular discretion, gave no alarm, but went instantly in search of the doctor and minister; and on the latter the melancholy duty was devolved of breaking the fearful intelligence to that now broken-hearted widow, over whose bitter Borrow it becomes us to draw the veil. The body was lifted and laid upon the bed. We saw it there a few hours afterwards. The head lay back sideways on the pillow. There was the massive brow, the firm-set, manly features, we had so often looked upon admiringly, just as we had lately seen them,--no touch nor trace upon them of disease,--nothing but that overspread pallor of death to distinguish them from what they had been. But the expression of that countenance in death will live in our memory forever. Death by gunshot wounds is said to leave no trace of suffering behind; and never was there a face of the dead freer from all shadow of pain, or grief, or conflict, than that of our dear departed friend. And as we bent over it, and remembered the troubled look it sometimes had in life, and thought what must have been the sublimely terrific expression that it wore at the moment when the fatal deed was done, we could not help thinking that it lay there to tell us, in that expression of unruffled, majestic repose that sat upon every feature, what we so assuredly believe, that the spirit had passed through a terrible tornado, in which reason had been broken down; but that it had made the great passage in safety, and stood looking back to us, in humble, grateful triumph, from the other side. On looking round the room in which the body had been discovered, a folio sheet of paper was seen lying on the table. On the centre of the page the following lines were written,--the last which that pen was ever to trace:-- "DEAREST LYDIA,--My brain burns. I _must_ have _walked_; and a fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought. God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon me. Dearest Lydia, dear children, farewell. My brain burns as the recollection grows. My dear, dear wife, farewell." HUGH MILLER. What a legacy of love to a broken-hearted family! and to us, and all who loved him, how pleasing to observe, that in that bewildering hour, when the horror of that great darkness came down upon that noble spirit, and some hideous, shapeless phantom overpowered it, and took from it even the capacity to discern the right from the wrong, humility, and faith, and affection, still kept their hold;--amid the ruins of the intellect, that tender heart remaining still unbroken! These last lines remain as the surest evidence of the mysterious power that laid his spirit prostrate, and of the noble elements of which that spirit was composed,--humble, and reverent, and loving to the last. Yesterday, at the request of friends, and under the authority of the Procurator-Fiscal, a _post mortem_ examination of the body took place. We subjoin the result:-- "EDINBURGH, December 26, 1856. "We hereby certify, on soul and conscience, that we have this day examined the body of Mr. Hugh Miller, at Shrub Mount, Portobello. "The cause of death we found to be a pistol-shot through the left side of the chest; and this, we are satisfied, was inflicted by his own hand. "From the diseased appearances found in the brain, taken in connection with the history of the case, we have no doubt that the act was suicidal under the impulse of insanity." JAMES MILLER, W.T. GAIRDNER, A.H. BALFOUR, A.M. EDWARDS. We must ask to be excused from attempting any analysis of Mr. Miller's character and genius, or any estimate of the distinguished services he has rendered to literature, science, and the Christian faith. His loss is too heavy a one,--his removal has come upon us too suddenly and too awfully for mind or hand to be steady enough for such a task. The voice of the public press has already told what a place he had won for himself in the admiration and affection of his countrymen; and for the delicate and tender way in which the manner of his departure has universally been alluded to, were we permitted to speak in the name of Mr. Miller's friends, we should express our deepest gratitude. It is a beautiful and worthy tribute that his brother journalists have rendered to the memory of one who was a laborer along with them in elevating the talent and tone of our newspaper literature. As Free Churchmen, however, it would be unpardonable were we to omit all reference, at such a time as this, to what he did on behalf of the church of his adoption. Dr. Chalmers did not err when, self-oblivious, he spake of Mr. Miller, as he so often did, as the greatest Scotchman alive after Sir Walter Scott's death, and as the man who had done more than all others to defend and make popular throughout the country the non-intrusion cause. We know well what the mutual love and veneration was of those two great men for one another whilst living; and now that both are gone,--and hereafter we believe still more so than even now,--their two names will be intertwined in the grateful and admiring remembrance of the ministers and members of the Free Church. It was die high honor of the writer of these hurried lines to record the part taken by his venerated relative in that great ecclesiastical struggle which terminated in the Disruption. At that lime it was matter to him of great regret that, as his office was that of the biographer, and not of the historian, there did not occur those natural opportunities of speaking of the part taken by Mr. Miller in that struggle, of which he gladly would have availed himself. And he almost wishes now that he had violated what appeared to him to be his duty, in order to create such an opportunity. He feels as if in this he had done some injustice to the dead,--an injustice which it would gratify him beyond measure if he could now in any way repair, by expressing it as his own judgment, and the judgment of the vast body of his Church, that, next to the writings and actings of Dr. Chalmers, the leading articles of Mr. Miller in this journal did more than anything else to give the Free Church the place it holds in the affections of so many of our fellow-countrymen. But Mr. Miller was far more than a Free Churchman, and did for the Christianity of his country and the world a far higher service than any which in that simple character and office was rendered by him. There was nothing in him of the spirit and temper of the sectarian. He breathed too broad an atmosphere to live and move within such narrow bounds. In the heat of the conflict there may have been too much occasionally of the partisan; and in the pleasure that the sweep and stroke of his intellectual tomahawk gave to him who wielded it, he may have forgotten at times the pain inflicted where it fell; but let his writings before and after the Disruption be now consulted, and it will be found that it was mainly because of his firm belief, whether right or wrong, that the interests of vital godliness were wrapped up in it, that he took his stand, and played his conspicuous part, in the ecclesiastical conflict. It is well known that for some time past,--for reasons to which it would be altogether unseasonable to allude,--he has ceased to take any active part in ecclesiastical affairs. He had retired even, in a great measure, from the field of general literature, to devote himself to the study of Geology. His past labors in this department,--enough to give him a high and honored place among its most distinguished cultivators,--he looked upon but as his training for the great life-work he had marked out for himself,--the full investigation and illustration of the Geology of Scotland. He had large materials already collected for this work; and it was his intention, after completing that volume which has happily been left in so finished a state, to set himself to their arrangement. The friends of science in many lands will mourn over the incompleted project which, however ably it may hereafter be accomplished by another, it were vain to hope shall ever be so accomplished as it should have been by one who united in himself the power of accurate observation, of logical deduction, of broad generalization, and of pictorial and poetic representation. But the friends of Christianity cannot regret, that since it was the mysterious decree of Heaven that he should prematurely fall,--his work as a pure Geologist not half done,--he should have been led aside by the publication of the Vestiges of Creation to that track of semi-theological, semi-scientific research to which his later studies and later writings have been devoted. That, as it now seems to us, was the great work which it was given him on earth to do,--to illustrate the perfect harmony of all that science tells us of the physical structure and history of our globe, with all that the Bible tells of the creation and government of this earth by and through Christ Jesus our Lord. The establishment and exhibition of that harmony was a task to which is it too much to say that there was no man living so competent as he? We leave it to the future to declare how much he has done by his writings to fulfil that task; but mourning, as we now can only do, over his sad and melancholy death,--to that very death, with all the tragic circumstances that surround it, we would point as the closing sacrifice offered on the altar of our faith. His very intellect, his reason,--God's most precious gift,--a gift dearer than life,--perished in the great endeavor to harmonize the works and word of the Eternal. A most inscrutable event, that such an intellect should have been suffered to go to wreck through too eager a prosecution of such a work. But amid the mystery, which we cannot penetrate, our love, and our veneration, and our gratitude, toward that so highly gifted and truly Christian man shall only grow the deeper because of the cloud and the whirlwind in which he has been borne off from our side. On the 31st of December, two days after the obsequies had been performed, Dr. Hanna resumed the subject in the following elevated strain: We have still but little heart to dilate on any political or literary topic. Our thoughts can dwell on but one thrice melancholy event. Need we name that event? Alas, no! It had occurred but a few hours when the tidings of it struck our city with stunning, stupefying, and deeply saddening blow. It has already thrilled our whole land; and is on its way, through a hundred channels, to the west, to the east, and to the south, carrying with it mourning and lamentation throughout the vast area which is covered by the language in which Hugh Miller wrote. Writing, as it were, amid the deep shadows of the funeral chamber, and brought in a manner into the very presence of the dead, we are made strongly to feel, and we daresay our readers to a large extent will feel, too, the nothingness of those discussions which usually occupy and engross men. The weightiest matter that ever occupied the wisdom of cabinet or the pen of journalist appears verily but fleeting and transitory, when brought thus into prominent contrast with the awful realities of human existence and destiny; and it is only when reflection shows us that these matters are yet parts of a grand Providential scheme, embracing man's happiness now, and entering deeply into the question of his future and eternal well-being, that we can see in them that amount of significance and importance which they really possess. From the firmament of British literature and science a great light has departed. But yesterday we rejoiced in its beams, and now it has set all suddenly and forever; and to us there remains but the melancholy task of bewailing its departure, and tracing very hastily and imperfectly its track. The intellectual powers of Hugh Miller had certainly not declined. He was marked to the very last by that wonderful robustness of mind which had characterized him all through life. His sense was as manly, his judgment as sound and comprehensive, his penetration as discriminating and deep, his imagination as vigorous and bold, and his taste as pure and trusty, as they had ever been. The whole of his great powers were found working together up to the last week of his earthly career, with their usually calm, noiseless strength, and finely balanced and exquisitely toned harmony. We have evidence of this fact under his own hand in recent numbers of the _Witness_. His last two articles were, the one on Russia, and the other on our modern poets. The former,--that on the resources of the Russian empire,--is characterized by the same wide range of thinking, the same skill in analysis, and the same power of grouping and arranging details, and making them to throw light on some great principle, which usually marked and notified his hand when employed on such subjects. The latter,--that on the poets,--is rich and genial as usual, betokening a full and unclouded recollection of all his early reading in that department of our literature, abounding in the finest touches of pathos and beauty, and redolent with a most generous sympathy with kindred genius. It is not inconsistent with what we have now stated, and it is the fact, that latterly the inroads of disease, which had entrenched itself deeply in a constitution originally strong, and which kept steadily advancing upon the vital powers, had come so near the seat of the mind, that for short intervals the noble spirit was sadly beclouded, and its moral and intellectual action momentarily suspended. But, apart from this, there seemed ground to believe that there was yet before Mr. Miller much honorable and noble labor. The strong man, after all his tasks, appeared to be still strong. His powers were mellowing into richness and calm, matured strength; his conceptions of great principles were growing yet wider; his store of facts, literary as well as scientific, was accumulating with every busy and laborious year that passed over him; and there did seem ground to expect from his pen, unrivalled among his contemporaries in its exquisite purity and calm power, many a deep thoughted article, and many a profoundly reasoned and richly illustrated volume. We looked to him for the solution of many a dark question in science; and we certainly hoped, from that fine union of science and theology which dwelt in him above all men, for a yet fuller and more complete adjustment of the two great records of Creation,--that of the Rocks, and that of Moses. But alas! all these hopes have suddenly failed us. It seemed right otherwise to the Great Disposer of all. He has said to his faithful servant, "Enough." Let us look back upon that work. We by no means aim at giving a calm, well weighed, and deeply pondered estimate of it, but only such a glance as the circumstances permit and require. His great and special work was his advocacy of the principles of the Free Church. Mr. Miller was _par excellence_ the popular expounder and defender of these principles, whether in their embryotic state in the Non-Intrusion party, or as embodied in the fully developed and completely emancipated Free Protesting Church of Scotland. For this service, in connection with which he would have best liked to be remembered, as he best deserved it, he had unconsciously been undergoing a course of preparation even when a boy. He himself has told us with what eagerness he devoured, at that period of life, the legendary histories of Wallace and Bruce; and the occupation had its use. It gave him a capacity for admiring what was great though perilous in exploit, and for truly and largely sympathizing with what was patriotic and self-sacrificing in character; and so it created a groundwork for his own future thinking and acting. The admiration he then bore to these earliest of our "Scottish Worthies," who vindicated on Bannockburn, and kindred fields, Scotland's right to be an independent and free country, he afterwards transferred to our later "Worthies," whom he revered as greater still. Not that he ever lost his admiration of the former, or ceased to value the incalculable services they rendered to the Scottish nation; but that he regarded Knox and Melville as men occupying a yet higher platform,--as gifted with a yet deeper insight into their country's wants,--as, in short, carrying forward and consummating the glorious task which Wallace and Bruce had but begun. He saw that unless our reformers had come after our heroes, planting schools, founding colleges, and, above all, imparting to their countrymen a scriptural and rational faith, in vain had Bruce unsheathed his sword,--in vain had Wallace laid down his life. Wallace and Bruce had created an independent country; Knox and Melville had created an independent people. They were the creators of the Scottish nation,--the real enfranchisers of our people; and it was this that taught Mr. Miller to venerate these men so profoundly, and that made him in his inmost soul a devoted follower, and to the utmost extent of his great faculties a defender, of their cause. He was a soldier from love,--pure, heroic, chivalrous devotion soaring infinitely above the partisan. He saw that the Church of Scotland was the creator of the rights and privileges of the people of Scotland,--that she was the grand palladium of the country's liberties,--that while she stood an independent and free institution, the people stood an independent and free nation,--and that bonds to her meant slavery to them. Therefore did he gird on the sword when he saw peril gathering around her. The privileges,--the entire standing of the common people, as given them by the Reformation,--he saw to be in danger: he was "one of themselves;" and he felt and fought as if almost the quarrel had been a personal one, and the question at issue his own liberty or slavery. How richly equipped and nobly armed he came into the field, we need not here state. What fulness yet precision of ecclesiastical lore,--what strength and conclusiveness of argument,--what flashes of humor, wit, and sarcasm,--and in what a luminous yet profoundly philosophical light did he set the great principles involved in the controversy, making them patent in the very cottages of our land, and so fixing them in the understandings of the very humblest of our people, that they never afterwards could be either misunderstood or forgotten! It was thus that the way was prepared for the great result of the 18th of May, 1843. Of Mr. Miller, as a man of science and a public journalist, we cannot speak at present at any length. In him the love of science was deeply seated and early developed. The first arena on which he appeared--obscure and humble as it was--afforded him special opportunities of initiating himself into what to him was then, and continued ever afterwards to be, a most fascinating study. The study of geology was eagerly prosecuted amid the multifarious duties, and during the brief pauses, of a busy life. Several original discoveries rewarded his patient and laborious investigations. He succeeded at length in placing his name in the first rank of British scientific thinkers and writers. His works are characterized by a fine union of strict science, classic diction, and enchanting description, which rises not unfrequently into the loftiest vein of poetry. The fruits of his researches were ever made to bear upon the defence and elucidation of the Oracles of Truth. Our common Christianity owes much to his pen. Viewing him as a journalist, Mr. Miller not only excelled in article writing,--the most difficult of all kinds of composition,--but, as will be generally admitted, he has introduced a new era into newspaper writing. If the moral tone of our newspaper press is higher now than it was twenty-five years ago, we have Mr. Miller in large degree to thank for it; and to him, too, is to be traced that purer style and more philosophic spirit which begins to be discernible in the columns of our public journals. But the character in which his personal friends will deplore him most, and will most frequently recall his memory, will be that of the man. How meek and gentle he was!--how unpretending and modest, even as a very child!--how true and steady in friendship!--how wise and playful his mirth!--how ripened and chastened his wisdom!--how ready to counsel!--how willing to oblige!--how generous and large his sympathies! No little jealousies, no fretful envyings, had he! Even in opposition, how noble and manly was he: if a powerful, he was a fair and open antagonist; and whatever hard blows were dealt, they were dealt in his own journal. We have seen him in various moods and in all circumstances; but never did we hear him utter an unkind or disparaging word of man. He was, too, a sincere and humble Christian; and the lively faith which he cherished in the adorable Redeemer and his all-efficacious sacrifice, bore abundantly its good fruits in a life including no ordinary variety of condition and trial, and running on to such term as to make abundantly manifest what manner of man he was. The article which follows is from the _Edinburgh News_. It is evidently from the pen of one who was intimately acquainted with Hugh Miller, and is worthy of attention, not only for its eloquent and discriminating notices of his works, but also for its statements respecting his great designs, never, alas, to be accomplished. It is not many months since we chronicled the death of the greatest of living Scotsmen, and the prince of modern philosophers--Sir William Hamilton. These last few days have bereft us of another of our countrymen not less illustrious, and known all over the world as one of the princes of geology. We cannot well estimate the loss which society sustains in the death of Mr. Miller. He occupied a foremost place among us, and there is none on whom his mantle can fall. In the world of letters his name takes high rank, for undoubtedly he was one of the ablest writers in our literature. Who can have read without delight his manly, vigorous language, soaring sometimes into the highest eloquence, anon plunging into the depths of metaphysical argument, or grappling with the dry technicalities of science, yet ever rolling along with the same easy, onward flow? His style has all the charm of Goldsmith's sweetness, with the infusion of a rich vigor that gives it an air of great originality. He is one of the few writers who have successfully conjoined the graces of literature with the formal details of science, and whose works are perused for their literary excellences, independently altogether of their scientific merit. His writings will ever be regarded among the classics of the English language. For obvious reasons we pass over his editorial labors. It is on the republic of science that his death will fall most heavily. There can be little doubt that he has done more to popularize his favorite department than any other writer. Of all geological works, his enjoy, perhaps, the widest circulation--not in this country, merely, but all over the world, and especially in the United States. His reputation, however, does not rest solely on his standing as an exponent of science to the people; he was himself an original and accurate observer. When the infant science of geology was battling for existence against the opposing phalanx of united Christendom, Hugh Miller, then a mere lad, was quietly working as a stone-mason in the north of Scotland, and employing his leisure time among the fossil fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, and the ammonites and the belemnites of the Lias, that abound in the neighborhood of Cromarty. As years rolled slowly away, he continued his observations, and when at length, in 1841, the results were given to the world in his well known "Old Red Sandstone," every one was charmed with the novelty and beauty of the style, and his reputation as a writer was at once established. Men of science, however, though acknowledging the graphic and elegant diction of his descriptions, had some doubts as to their truthfulness. Indeed, by some geologists they were cast aside as fanciful, and other restorations of the Old Red fishes were proposed and adopted. Those who are acquainted with Old Red ichthyolites, or who have had the pleasure of examining the exquisite series in Mr. Miller's collection, may well smile at the absurdity of the restorations that were adopted. Yet some of these found their way into a work of no little popularity,--Mantell's "Medals of Creation." It is sufficient to state that the drawings there given bear no resemblance to anything in the heavens above or on the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth, nor to any fossil organism that has ever been discovered. At length the progress of investigation led to the discarding of these monstrosities, and Miller's restorations were returned to, as, after all, the true ones. "The Old Red Sandstone" formed an era in the history of fossil geology. That formation had hitherto been regarded as well nigh barren of organic remains; but Mr. Miller demonstrated that it contains at least three successive stages, each characterized by a suite of uncouth and hitherto unknown fishes. A few years later he published his "Footprints of the Creator." This is undoubtedly his _chef-d'oeuvre_, exhibiting, as it does, the full powers of his massive intellect and his poetic imagination. As a piece of scientific investigation and research, it is of a very high order; as a reply to the crudities of the development theory, it is unanswerable; and as a contribution to our physico-theological literature, it ranks, with Chalmers' "Astronomical Lectures," among the finest in this or any other language. Some of the ideas are as profound as they are original, opening up a new field of thought, which it was doubtless the intention of the deceased himself to cultivate. His published works, however, contain but a fraction, of the labors of his lifetime. For many years past he has been, one of the most energetic members of the Royal Physical Society, at whose meetings he from time to time made known the progress of his researches. Were these papers collected, they would form several goodly volumes. But their author studiously refrained from publishing them, save occasionally in the columns of the _Witness_ newspaper. It was his intention that they should each form a part of the great work of his life, to which for many years his leisure moments had been devoted. His design was to combine the results of all his labors among the different rock formations of Scotland into one grand picture of the geological history of our country. For this end he had explored a large part of the Scottish counties, anxious that his statements should rest as far as possible upon the authority of his own personal investigations. His knowledge of the geology of the country was thus far more extensive than was generally supposed. We may refer particularly to that branch of it on which he bestowed the unremitted attention of his closing years,--the palæontological history of the glacial beds,--that strange and as yet almost unknown period that ushered in the existing creation. He studied it minutely along the shores of the Moray Firth, on the east coast of Scotland, along the shores of Fife and the Lothians, and on the coast of Ayrshire and the Firth of Clyde. This last summer he made a tour through the centre of the island, and obtained boreal shells at Buchlyvie in Stirlingshire,--the _omphalos_ of Scotland. The importance of this discovery, in connection with those he had previously made in following out the same chain of evidence, can only be appreciated by those who have paid some attention to geology. We may state briefly that it proves the central area of Scotland to have been submerged beneath an icy sea, and icebergs to have grated along over what is now the busy valley of the Forth and Clyde, while the waters were tenanted by shells at present found only in the Northern Ocean. A large part of his work is written, though it is to be feared that much knowledge, amassed in the course of its preparation, has perished with him. In particular, there were whole sections of his Museum understood only by himself. Every little fragment had its story, and contributed its quota of evidence to the truth of his descriptions. There is, perhaps, but another mind in Britain,--that of Sir Philip Egerton,--that can catch up the thread, and read off, though with difficulty, the meaning of those carefully arranged fragments. Yet, even with such aid, much must long, if not forever, remain dark and obscure. The work on which he was more immediately engaged at the time of his death was partly theological, partly scientific. It was to embrace the substance of some lectures lately delivered, and a paper read last year before the British Association at Glasgow on the fossil plants collected by himself from the Oolite and Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. It was likewise to contain the figures of some thirty or forty hitherto undescribed species of vegetables. We hope that, as it was all but ready for publication, it may yet be given to the world. The name of Hugh Miller will ever stand forth as synonymous with all that is honest and manly; as the impersonation of moral courage and indomitable energy; as the true ideal of a self-educated man. From the humblest sphere of life, and from the toils of a stone-mason's apprentice, without means, without friends, without other than the most rudimentary education, he rose, by his own unaided and unwearied exertions, to fill one of the brightest pages in the annals of our country. And when, in future years, an example is sought of unconquerable perseverance, of fearless integrity, and of earnest, ceaseless activity, the voice of universal approbation shall proclaim--"_the stone-mason of Cromurty_." We have spoken of this mournful event only as a public calamity; yet, to those who were personally acquainted with the departed, it is invested with no ordinary sadness. Long, long shall they remember the playful fancy, the rich humor, the warm, genial heart of their friend. His simple, open frankness endeared him to every one, though his retiring disposition prevented him from making many intimate friendships. To those who enjoyed this higher privilege, his death must have caused the most poignant regret. Yet what can even their sorrow be to that of the relatives of the departed? We lament the death of one who was alike an honor to his profession, to literature, to science, and to his country,--one of the most loved and cherished of friends. Let us not forget to mingle our sympathy and our sorrow with that deeper grief that mourns the loss of a husband and a father. As coming from a different quarter, and presenting a somewhat different view, the following, from the _London Literary Gazette_, should have a place here. Hugh Miller was born at Cromarty in 1805. In his early life he worked as a laborer in the Sandstone quarries in his native district, and afterwards as a stone-mason in different parts of Scotland. In a work published in 1854, "My Schools and Schoolmasters, or the story of my Education," Mr. Miller gives a most interesting account of his early history, and of the training and self-culture by which he rose to honorable rank in literature and science. Notwithstanding the unpretending statements of this narrative, and the disavowal of any other elements of success than are within ordinary reach, every reader of that book feels that homage is due to a genius original and rare, as well as to natural talents diligently and judiciously cultivated. While professedly written for the benefit of the working classes of his own country, there are few who may not derive pleasant and profitable lessons from this most remarkable piece of autobiography. After being engaged in manual labor for about fifteen years, Mr. Miller was for some time manager of a bank that was established in his native town. While in this position, a pamphlet that he published, on the ecclesiastical controversies which then distracted Scotland, attracted the attention of the leaders of the party who now form the Free Church, and they invited him to be editor of the _Witness_ newspaper, then about to be established for the advocacy of their principles. Mr. Miller had already published a volume of "Legendary Tales of Cromarty," of which the late Baron Hume, nephew of the historian, himself a man of much judgment and taste, said it was "written in an English style, which he had begun to regard as one of the lost arts." The ability displayed by Mr. Miller as editor of the _Witness_, and the influence exerted by him on ecclesiastical and educational events in Scotland, are well known. Mr. Miller did not confine his newspaper to topics of local or passing interest. In its columns he made public his geological observations and researches; and most of his works originally appeared in the form of articles in that newspaper. It was in 1840, the year at which the autobiographical memoir closes, that the name of Hugh Miller first became widely known beyond his own country. At the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Glasgow that year, Sir Roderick, then Mr. Murchison, gave an account of the striking discoveries recently made in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. M. Agassiz, who was present, pointed out the peculiarities and the importance of these discoveries; and it was on this occasion that he proposed to associate the name of Mr. Miller with them, by the wonderful fossil, the _Pterichthys Milleri_, specimens of which were then under the notice of the section. Dr. Buckland, following M. Agassiz, said that "he had never been so much astonished in his life by the powers of any man as he had been by the geological descriptions of Mr. Miller. He described these objects with a felicity which made him ashamed of the comparative meagreness and poverty of his own descriptions in the 'Bridgewater Treatise,' which had cost him hours and days of labor. He (Dr. Buckland) _would give his left hand to possess such powers of description as this man_; and if it pleased Providence to spare his useful life, he, if any one, would certainly render the science attractive and popular, and do equal service to theology and geology." At the meetings of the Association, the language of panegyric and of mutual compliment is not unfrequent, and does not signify much; but these were spontaneous tributes of praise to one comparatively unknown. The publication of the volume on the "Old Red Sandstone," with the details of the author's discoveries and researches, more than justified all the anticipations that had been formed. It was received with highest approbation, not by men of science alone, for the interest of its facts, but by men of letters, for the beauty of its style. Sir Roderick Murchison, in his address to the Geological Society that year, "hailed the accession to their science of such a writer," and said that "his work is, to a beginner, worth a thousand didactic treatises." The _Edinburgh Review_ spoke of the book being "as admirable for the clearness of its descriptions, and the sweetness of its composition, as for the purity and gracefulness that pervade it." The impression made by such a testimony was the more marked, that the reviewer spoke of the writer as a fellow countryman, "meritorious and self-taught." In 1847 appeared "First Impressions of England and its People," the result of a tour made during the previous year. Some parts of this book, especially the account of the pilgrimages to Stratford-on-Avon, and the Leasowes, and Olney, and other places memorable for their literary associations, are as fine pieces of descriptive writing as the English language possesses. This magic of style characterized all his works, whether those of a more popular kind, or his scientific treatises, such as the "Old Red Sandstone," and "Footprints of the Creator," a volume suggested by the "Vestiges of Creation," and subversive of the fallacies of that superficial and plausible book. Not one of the authors of our day has approached Hugh Miller as a master of English composition, for the equal of which we must go back to the times of Addison, Hume, and Goldsmith. Other living writers have now a wider celebrity, but they owe it much to the peculiarities of their style or the popularity of their topics. Mr. Miller has taken subjects of science, too often rendered dry and repulsive, and has thrown over them an air of attractive romance. His writings on literature, history, and politics, are known to comparatively few, from having appeared in the columns of a local newspaper. A judicious selection from his miscellaneous articles in the _Witness_ would widely extend his fame, and secure for him a place, in classic English literature, as high as he held during his life as a periodical writer and as a scientific geologist. The personal appearance of Mr. Miller, or "Old Red," as he was familiarly named by his scientific friends, will not be forgotten by any who have seen him. A head of great massiveness, magnified by an abundant profusion of sub-Celtic hair, was set on a body of muscular compactness, but which in later years felt the undermining influence of a life of unusual physical and mental toil. Generally wrapped in a bulky plaid, and with a garb ready for any work, he had the appearance of a shepherd from the Rosshire hills rather than an author and a man of science. In conversation or in lecturing, the man of original genius and cultivated mind at once shone out, and his abundant information and philosophical acuteness were only less remarkable than his amiable disposition, his generous spirit, and his consistent, humble piety. Literature and science have lost in him one of their brightest ornaments, and Scotland one of its greatest men. * * * * * On the Sabbath following Mr. Miller's death, sermons referring to the event were preached in many of the churches in Edinburgh. Some of these were reported in the newspapers, among which may be mentioned those by the Rev. Drs. Hanna, Guthrie, Hetherington, Begg, and Tweedie. On Monday, December the 29th, the Funeral Obsequies were performed. The following account of the imposing ceremonial is from the _Edinburgh Witness_. FUNERAL OF MR. HUGH MILLER. The mortal remains of this truly great man were consigned to the grave on Monday, amid the most marked demonstrations of sorrow on the part of the entire community. The private company, numbering about sixty individuals, met at Shrub Mount, the residence of the deceased at Portobello, about a quarter to one in the afternoon. Amongst those present were the Lord Provost of Edinburgh; A.M. Dunlop, Esq., M.P.; A. Black, Esq., M.P.; Professors Simpson, Balfour, and Fraser; Rev. Principal Cunningham; Professor James Buchanan; Rev. Drs. Guthrie, Candlish, Hanna, Bruce, Begg, Hetherington, and Wylie; Rev. Messrs. M'Kenzie of Dunfermline, Cameron and Hunter of Nagpoor; Maurice Lothian, Esq.; Geo. Dalziell, Esq., W.S.; W. Wood, Esq.; R. Paul, Esq.; Francis Russell, Esq., advocate; M. Torrance, Esq.; Dr. Russell; Dr. Geo. Bell; J.F. Macfarlan, Esq.; Archibald Gibson, Esq.; and Councillor Johnston. The devotional exercises were conducted by Dr. Guthrie, who was deeply affected during the prayer, and whose feelings at times threatened to overcome him. Thirteen two-horse mourning coaches were here in waiting to convey the company to the place of sepulture in the Grange Cemetery, preceded by the hearse, which had four horses. The melancholy event, as might have been expected, cast a gloom over the whole of Portobello; and the Provost and Magistrates, anticipating the general feeling of the inhabitants, to whom Mr. Miller had endeared himself by his genius and the modesty of his demeanor, and also by the readiness which he ever displayed to contribute to their intellectual elevation, by taking part in several courses of popular lectures in the town, recommended the closing of the different shops,--a request which was at once readily complied with. Another striking proof of the general desire to pay the last tribute of respect to the remains of the deceased, was furnished by the circumstance that upwards of one hundred gentlemen, many of whom had, so recently as the previous Tuesday, listened to the reading of one of the ablest of his lectures, by the Rev. Mr. Wight, the Congregational minister, met at half-past twelve in the Free Church, in order to accompany the funeral, either on foot or in carriages, to the burial place,--a distance of about four miles. After a short, impressive religious service, conducted by the Rev. Mr. Philip and the Rev. Mr. Wight, they proceeded to join the private company, who had by this time taken their places in the mourning carriages, on their way to Edinburgh. On reaching the General Post-Office, in Waterloo Place, the ranks of the funeral procession were largely augmented, there being here as many as from twenty to thirty private carriages in waiting, filled with the leading citizens, and a large body of the inhabitants, of all ranks, classes, and denominations, drawn up in line three or four abreast. The Kirk-Session of Free St. John's, of which Mr. Miller was an office-bearer, headed by the Rev. Dr. Guthrie and the Rev. Dr. Hanna, who left the carriage at the Post-Office, occupied the front of the procession, immediately followed by the Royal Physical Society, of which the lamented deceased was a leading member, the _employes_ in the _Witness_ office, and a large body of the general public. A still more numerous body of the citizens, as well as of parties from Glasgow, Liverpool, Stirling, Bridge of Allan, and other parts of the country, drew up in the rear of the long line of carriages, while the sides of the streets were also lined with mourners, who accompanied the procession to the Cemetery. Besides the large concourse of people who here joined the procession, the whole front of the Register Office and the corners of the North Bridge were densely occupied by some thousands of spectators; and it may be safely said, that no event since the death of Dr. Chalmers has caused such deep-felt sorrow and regret in Edinburgh. The numbers present in the funeral _cortege_ must have amounted to from one to two thousand; indeed, one paper states that "at one time there could not have been many less than four thousand people in the procession;" whilst another journal says, that although the inclemency of the weather, the day being one of the dreariest of the season, "kept back many who would otherwise have swelled the line of mourners, even with this drawback, it has been informed that the attendance was even greater than on the occasion of the funeral of Dr. Chalmers in 1847." After a short delay, caused by these accessions to the procession, the whole moved up the North Bridge. It was gratifying to observe that nearly all the shops on the North and South Bridges, and in Nicolson and Clerk streets, along which the _cortege_ passed, were closed; and along the whole route many a saddened countenance and tearful eye could be seen, all testifying to the deep respect entertained for him whose manly form had so often traversed these same streets. On reaching the entrance of the Grange Cemetery, the coffin was removed from the hearse, and borne shoulder high to the tomb, followed by the pall-bearers and the general company. The ground selected for the burial-place is the westmost space but one on the northern side of the Cemetery, and in a line with the graves of Dr. Chalmers, Sir Andrew Agnew, and Sheriff Speirs, with which it is in close proximity. As many of our readers are aware, the situation is one of surpassing scenic beauty, and was described by the deceased's own matchless pen but a few years ago, on the occasion of the burial of Chalmers; and certainly in the grave of Hugh Miller a new feature of attraction has been added to the spot. The pall-bearers were Mr. Miller's oldest son,--a boy about fourteen years of age,--who was accompanied by his younger brother, six or seven years old; Mr. A. Williamson, his half-brother and nearest kinsman; Mr. Fairly, his partner in business; Rev. Dr. Guthrie, Rev. Dr. Hanna, Mr. Dunlop, M.P., Mr. R. Paul, and Principal Cunningham. The mournful ceremony was now near its close. As the heavy, dull sound, caused by the fall of the damp earth upon the coffin, fell upon the ear, a sad and painful sensation crept over the frame, increased as this was by the wintry aspect of the day and the heavy leaden sky, which, like a pall, was spread over the face of nature, in striking harmony with the solemnity of the scene. A few minutes more, and all was over; and the vast company, uncovered, paid the closing mark of respect to the ashes of the mighty dead. A touching scene occurred at the close of all. After the whole of the company had retired, a laboring man, clad in humble habiliments, seized hold of a handful of ivy or laurel leaves, and gently strewed them upon the grave, while the tearful eye eloquently spoke of the strength of his feelings. So passed away one of whom Dr. Chalmers made the remark that "since Scott's death he was the greatest Scotchman that was left." "The space his name occupied in the literary and scientific world," says another, "could hardly have been conjectured, but for the blank he leaves behind him now that he has left it. Other men may have extended the domain of science wider; but no man has done more to extend the circle of its votaries by the magic of his style and the life-like power of his descriptions; nor has any man done more to keep together the claims, too often made to appear divergent, of Science and Religion, and to blend them into one intelligent and reasonable service. It was worth while to have lived to effect this, even at the cost of the clouds which saddened and darkened the close. But ----'glory without end Scatters the clouds away; and on that name attend The thanks and praises of all time.'" A PRAYER BY JOHN KNOX, MADE AT THE FIRST ASSEMBLIE OF THE CONGREGATION, WHEN THE CONFESSION OF OUR FAITHE AND WHOLE ORDERS OF THE CHURCH WAS THERE RED AND APPROVED.[3] O Lord God Almightie, and Father moste mcrcifull, there is none lyke thee in heaven nor in earthe, which workest all thinges for the glorie of thy name and the comfort of thyne elect. Thou dydst once make man ruler over all thy creatures, and placed hym in the garden of all pleasures; but how soone, alas, dyd he in his felicitie forget thy goodness? Thy people Israel also, in their wealth dyd evermore runne astray, abusinge thy manifold mercies; lyke as all fleshe contynually rageth when it hath gotten libertie and external prosperitie. But such is thy wisdome adjoyned to thy mercies, deare Father, that thou sekest all means possible to brynge thy chyldren to the sure sense and lyvely feelinge of thy fatherly favour. And therefore when prosperitie wyll not serve, then sendest thow adversitie, graciously correctinge all thy chyldren whome thou receyvest into thy howshold. Wherfore we, wretched and miserable synners, render unto thee most humble and hartie thankes, that yt hath pleased thee to call us home to thy folde by thy Fatherly correction at this present, wheras in our prosperitie and libertie we dyd neglect thy graces offered unto us. For the which negligence, and many other grevous synnes whereof we now accuse our selves before thee, thow mightest moste justly have gyven us up to reprobate mynds and induration of our hartes, as thow haste done others. But such is thy goodnes, O Lord, that thou semest to forget alt our offences, and haste called us of thy good pleasure from all idolatries into this Citie most Christianlye refourmed, to professe thy name, and to suffer some crosse amongest thy people for thy truth and Gospell's sake; and so to be thy wytnesses with thy Prophets and Apostles, yea, with thy dearely beloved Sonne Jesus Christ our head, to whome thow dost begynne here to fashion us lyke, that in his glorie we may also be lyke hym when he shall appear. O Lord God, what are we upon whome thowe shuldest shewe this great mercye? O moste lovynge Lord, forgyve us our unthankfulnes, and all our synnes, for Jesus Christ's sake. O heavenly Father, increase thy Holy Spirit in us, to teache our heartes to cry Abba, deare Father! to assure us of our eternal election in Christ; to revele thy wyll more and more towards us; to confirme us so in thy trewthe, that we may lyve and dye therein; and that by the power of the same Spirit we may boldlely gyve an accompts of our faith to all men with humblenes and mekenes, that whereas they backbyte and slaunder us as evyll doers, they may be ashamed and once stopp their mowthes, seinge our good conversation in Christ Iesu, for whose sake we beseche thee, O Lord God, to guide, governe, and prosper this our enterprise in assemblinge our bretherne, to prayse thy holie name. And not only to be here present with us thy children according to thy promesse, but also mercifullie to assist thy like persecuted people, our Bretherne, gathered in all other places, that they and we, consentinge together in one spirite and truethe, may (all worldly respectes set a part) seke thy onely honor and glorie in all our and their Assemblies. SO BE IT. THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS. LECTURE FIRST. THE PALÆONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS. Palæontology, or the science of ancient organisms, deals, as its subject, with all the plants and animals of all the geologic periods. It bears nearly the same sort of relation to the _physical_ history of the past, that biography does to the civil and political history of the past. For just as a complete biographic system would include every name known to the historian, a complete palæontologic system would include every fossil known to the geologist. It enumerates and describes all the organic existences of all the extinct creations,--all the existences, too, of the present creation that occur in the fossil or semi-fossil form; and, thus coextensive in space with the earth's surface,--nay, greatly more than coextensive with the earth's surface,--for in the vast hieroglyphic record which our globe composes, page lies beneath page, and inscription covers over inscription,--coextensive, too, in time, with every period in the terrestrial history since being first began upon our planet,--it presents to the student a theme so vast and multifarious, that it might seem but the result, on his part, of a proper modesty, conscious of the limited range of his powers, and of the brief and fleeting term of his life, were he to despair of being ever able effectually to grapple with it. "But," to borrow from one of the most ingenious of our Scottish metaphysicians, "in this, as in other instances in which nature has given us difficulties with which to cope, she has not left us to be wholly overcome." "If," says Dr. Thomas Brown, in his remarks on the classifying principle,--"if she has placed us in a labyrinth, she has at the same time furnished us with a clue which may guide us, not, indeed, through all its dark and intricate windings, but through those broad paths which conduct us into day. The single power by which we discover resemblance or relation in general, is a sufficient aid to us in the perplexity or confusion of our first attempts at arrangement. It begins by converting thousands, and more than thousands, into one; and, reducing in the same manner the numbers thus formed, it arrives at last at the few distinctive characters of those great comprehensive tribes on which it ceases to operate, because there is nothing left to oppress the memory or the understanding." But, is this all? Can the Palæontologist but say that that classifying principle, which in every other department of science yields such assistance to the memory, is also of use in his, or but urge that it enables him to sort and arrange his facts; and that, by converting one idea into the type and exemplar of many resembling ones, it imparts to him an ability of carrying not inadequate conceptions of the mighty whole in his mind? If this were all, you might well ask, Why obtrude upon us, in connection with your special science, a common semi-metaphysical idea, equally applicable to all the sciences,--in especial, for example, to that botany which is the science of existing plants, and to that zoology which is the science of existing animals? Nay, I reply, but it is not all. I refer to this classifying principle because, while it exists in relation to all other sciences as a principle--to use the words of the metaphysician just quoted--"given to us by nature,"--as a principle of _the mind within_,--it exists in Palæontological science as a principle of nature itself,--as a principle palpably _external to the mind_. It is a marvellous fact, whose full meaning we can as yet but imperfectly comprehend, that myriads of ages ere there existed a human mind, well nigh the same principles of classification now developed by man's intellect in our better treatises of zoology and botany, were developed on this earth by the successive geologic periods; and that the by-past productions of our planet, animal and vegetable, were chronologically arranged in its history, according to the same laws of thought which impart regularity and order to the works of the later naturalist and phytologists. I need scarce say how slow and interrupted in both provinces the course of arrangement has been, or how often succeeding writers have had to undo what their predecessors had done, only to have their own classifications set aside by _their_ successors in turn. At length, however, when the work appears to be well nigh completed, a new science has arisen, which presents us with a very wonderful means of testing it. Cowley, in his too eulogistic ode to Hobbes,--smit by the singular ingenuity of the philosophic infidel, and unable to look through his sophisms to the consequences which they involved,--could say, in addressing him, that "only God could know Whether the fair idea he did show Agreed entirely with God's own or no." And he then not very wisely added,-- "This, I dare boldly tell, 'T is so like truth, 't will serve our turn as well." We now know, however, that no mere resemblance to truth will for any considerable length of time serve its turn. It is because the resemblances have, like those of Hobbes, been mere resemblances, that so much time and labor have had to be wasted by the pioneers of science in their removal; and, now that a wonderful opportunity has occurred of comparing, in this matter of classification, the human with the Divine idea,--the idea embodied by the zoologists and botanists in their respective systems, with the idea embodied by the Creator of all in geologic history,--we cannot perhaps do better, in entering upon our subject, than to glance briefly at the great features in which God's order of classification, as developed in Palæontology, agrees with the order in which man has at length learned to range the living productions, plant and animal, by which he is surrounded, and of which he himself forms the most remarkable portion. In an age in which a class of writers not without their influence in the world of letters would fain repudiate every argument derived from _design_, and denounce all who hold with Paley and Chalmers as anthropomorphists, that labor to create for themselves a god of their own type and form, it may be not altogether unprofitable to contemplate the wonderful parallelism which exists between the Divine and human systems of classification, and--remembering that the geologists who have discovered the one had no hand in assisting the naturalists and phytologists who framed the other--soberly to inquire whether we have not a new argument in the fact for an identity in constitution and quality of the Divine and human minds,--not a mere fanciful identity, the result of a disposition on the part of man to imagine to himself a God bearing his own likeness, but an identity real and actual, and the result of that creative act by which God formed man in his own image. The study of plants and animals seems to have been a favorite one with thoughtful men in every age of the world. According to the Psalmist, these great "works of the Lord are sought out of all them that have pleasure therein." The Book of Job, probably the oldest writing in existence, is full of vivid descriptions of the wild denizens of the flood and desert; and it is expressly recorded of the wise old king, that he "spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall; and also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes." Solomon was a zoologist and botanist; and there is palpable classification in the manner in which his studies are described. It is a law of the human mind, as has been already said, that, wherever a large stock of facts are acquired, the classifying principle steps in to arrange them. "Even the rudest wanderer in the fields," says Dr. Brown, "finds that the profusion of blossoms around him--in the greater number of which he is able himself to discover many striking resemblances--may be reduced to some order of arrangement." But, for many centuries, this arranging faculty labored but to little purpose. As specimens of the strange classification that continued to obtain down till comparatively modern times, let us select that of two works which, from the literary celebrity of their authors, still possess a classical standing in letters,--Cowley's "Treatise on Plants," and Goldsmith's "History of the Earth and Animated Nature." The plants we find arranged by the poet on the simple but very inadequate principle of size and show. Herbs are placed first, as lowest and least conspicuous in the scale; then flowers; and, finally, trees. Among the herbs, at least two of the ferns--the true maidenhair and the spleenwort--are assigned places among plants of such high standing as sage, mint, and rosemary: among the flowers, monocotyledons, such as the iris, the tulip, and the lily, appear among dicotyledons, such as the rose, the violet, the sunflower, and the auricula: and among trees we find the palms placed between the plum and the olive; and the yew, the fir, and the juniper, flanked on one side by the box and the holly, and on the other by the oak. Such, in treating of plants, was the classification adopted by one of the most learned of English poets in the year 1657. Nor was Goldsmith,-who wrote more than a century later, much more fortunate in dealing with the animal kingdom. Buffon had already published his great work; and even he could bethink him of no better mode of dividing his animals than into wild and tame. And in Goldsmith, who adopted, in treating of the mammals, a similar principle, we find the fishes and molluscs placed, in advance of the sauroid, ophidian, and batrachian reptiles,--the whale united in close relationship to the sharks and rays,--animals of the tortoise kind classed among animals of the lobster kind, and both among shell fish, such as the snail, the nautilus, and the oyster. And yet Goldsmith was engaged on his work little more than eighty years ago. In fine, the true principles of classification in the animal kingdom are of well nigh as recent development as geologic science itself, and not greatly more ancient in even the _vegetable_ kingdom. It would, of course, be wholly out of place to attempt giving a minute history here of the progress of arrangement in either department; but it can scarce be held that the natural system of plants was other than very incomplete previous to 1789, when Jussieu first enunciated his scheme of classification; nor did it receive its later improvements until so late as 1846, when, after the publication, in succession, of the schemes of De Candolle and Endlicher, Lindley communicated his finished system to the world. And there certainly existed no even tolerably perfect system of zoology until 1816, when the "Animal Kingdom" of Cuvier appeared. Later naturalists,--such as Agassiz, in his own special department, the history of fishes, and Professor Owen in the invertebrate divisions,--have improved on the classification of even the great Frenchman; but for purposes of comparison between the scheme developed in geologic history and that at length elaborated by the human mind, the system of Cuvier will be found, for at least our present purpose, sufficiently complete. And in tracing through time the course of the vegetable kingdom, let us adopt, as our standard to measure it by, the system of Lindley. Commencing at the bottom of the scale, we find the Thallogens, or flowerless plants which lack proper stems and leaves,--a class which includes all the algæ. Next succeed the Acrogens, or flowerless plants that possess both stems and leaves,--such as the ferns and their allies. Next, omitting an inconspicuous class, represented by but a few parasitical plants incapable of preservation as fossils, come the Endogens,--monocotyledonous flowering plants, that include the palms, the liliaceæ, and several other families, all characterized by the parallel venation of their leaves. Next, omitting another inconspicuous tribe, there follows a very important class,--the Gymnogens,--polycotyledonous trees, represented by the conifers; and cycadaceæ. And, last of all, come the Dicotyledonous Exogens,--a class to which all our fruit, and what are known as our "forest trees," belong, with a vastly preponderating majority of the herbs and flowers that impart fertility and beauty to our gardens and meadows. This last class, though but one, now occupies much greater space in the vegetable kingdom than all the others united. Such is the arrangement of Lindley, or rather an arrangement the slow growth of ages, to which this distinguished botanist has given the last finishing touches. And let us now mark how closely it resembles the geologic arrangement as developed in the successive stages of the earth's history. [Illustration: Fig. 1.[4] -+------------------------- | Thallogens. Silurian. | | Acrogens. -+-----+------------------- | | | Gymnogens. Old Red. | | | | | | -+-----+-----+------------- | | | | Monocotyledons. Carboniferous. | | | | | | | | -+-----+-----+-----+------- Permian. | | | | -+-----+-----+-----+------- Triassic. | | | | -+-----+-----+-----+------- | | | | : Dicotyledons. Oolitic. | | | | : | | | | | -+-----+-----+-----+-----+- | | | | | Cretaceous. | | | | | | | | | | -+-----+-----+-----+-----+- Dicotyledonous Trees. | | | | | Tertiary. | | | | | | | | | | -+-----+-----+-----+-----+- Geologic [Thal. Ac. Gy. Mon. Dic.] arrangement. Lindley's [Thal. Ac. Mon. Gy. Dic.] arrangement. THE GENEALOGY OF PLANTS.] The most ancient period of whose organisms any trace remains in the rocks seems to have been, prevailingly at least, a period of Thallogens. We must, of course, take into account the fact, that it has yielded no land plants, and that the sea is everywhere now, as of old, the great habitat of the algæ,--one of the four great orders into which the Thallogens are divided. There appear no traces of a terrestrial vegetation until we reach the uppermost beds of the Upper Silurian System. But, account for the fact as we may, it is at least worthy of notice, that, alike in the systems of our botanists and in the chronological arrangements of our geologists, the first or introductory class which occurs in the ascending order is this humble Thallogenic class. There is some trace in the Lower Silurians of Scotland of a vegetable structure which may have belonged to one of the humbler Endogens, of which, at least, a single genus, the _Zosteraceæ,_ still exists in salt water; but the trace is faint and doubtful, and, even were it established, it would form merely a solitary exception to the general evidence that the first known period of vegetable existence was a period of Thallogens. The terrestrial remains of the Upper Silurians of England, the oldest yet known, consist chiefly of spore-like bodies, which belonged, says Dr. Hooker, to Lycopodiaceæ,--an order of the second or acrogenic class. And, in the second great geologic period,--that of the Old Red Sandstone,--we find this second class not inadequately represented. In its lowest fossiliferous beds we detect a Lycopodite which not a little resembles one of the commonest of our club mosses,--_Lycopodium clavatum_,--with a minute fern and a large striated plant resembling a calamite, and evidently allied to an existing genus of Acrogens, the equisetaceæ. In the Middle Old Red Sandstone there also occurs a small fern, with some trace of a larger; and one of its best preserved vegetable organisms is a lepidodendron,--an extinct ally of the Lycopodiums; while in the upper beds of the system, especially as developed in the south of Ireland, the noble fern known as _Cyclopteris Hibernicus_ is very abundant. This fern has been detected also in the Upper Old Red of our own country, mingled with fragments of contemporary calamites. With, however, these earliest plants of the land yet known, there occurs a true wood, which belonged, as shown by its structure, to a gymnospermous or polycotyledonous tree, and which we find associated with remains of Coccosteus and Diplacanthus. [Illustration: Fig. 2. CYCLOPTERIS HIBERNICUS. (Nat. size.)] [Illustration: Fig. 3. CONIFER OF THE LOWER OLD RED SANDSTONE. Cromarty. (Mag. forty diameters.)] And here let me remark, that the facts of Palæontological science compel us to blend, in some degree, with the classification of our modern botanists, that of the botanists of an earlier time. In a passage already quoted, Solomon is said to have discoursed of plants, "from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,"--from the great tree to the minute herb; and Cowley rose, in his metrical treatise, as has been shown, from descriptions of herbs and flowers to descriptions of fruit and forest trees. And as in every age in which there existed a terrestrial vegetation there seem to have been "trees" as certainly as "herbs," the palæontological botantist finds that he has, in consequence, to range his classes, not in one series, but in two,--the Gymnogens, or cone-bearing trees, in a line nearly parallel with the Acrogens, or flowerless, spore-bearing herbs. But the arrangement is in no degree the less striking from the circumstance that it is ranged, not in one, but in two lines. It is, however, an untoward arrangement for the purposes of the Lamarckian, whose peculiar hypothesis would imperatively demand, not a double, but a single column, in which the ferns and club mosses would stand far in advance, in point of time, of the Coniferæ. In the Coal Measures, so remarkable for the great luxuriance of their flora, both the Gymnogens and Acrogens are largely developed, with a very puzzling intermediate class, that, while they attained to the size of trees, like the former, retained in a remarkable degree, as in the Lepidodendra and the Calamites, the peculiar features of the latter. And with these there appear, though more sparingly, the Endogens,--monocotyledonous plants, represented by a few palm-like trees (Palmacites), a few date-like fruits (Trigonocarpum), and a few grass-like herbs (Poacites). In the great Secondary division, the true dicotyledonous plants first appear; but, so far as is yet known, no dicotyledonous wood. In the earlier formations of the division a degree of doubt attaches to even the few leaves of this class hitherto detected; but in the Lower Cretaceous strata they become at once unequivocal in their character, and comparatively abundant, both as individuals and species; and in the Tertiary deposits they greatly outnumber all the humbler classes, and appear not only as herbs, but also as great trees. Not, however, until shortly before the introduction of man do some of their highest orders, such as the Rosaceæ, come upon the scene, as plants of that great garden--including the fields of the agriculturist--which it has been part of man's set task upon earth to keep and to dress. And such seems to be the order of classification in the vegetable kingdom, as developed in creation, and determined by the geologic periods. [Illustration: Fig. 4.[5] -+-----+-----+------------------------------- | | | Rad. Art. Mol. Silurian. | | | | | | | Fishes. -+-----+-----+-----+------------------------- | | | | Old Red. | | | | | | | | | Reptiles. -+-----+-----+-----+-----+------------------- | | | | | Carboniferous. | | | | | | | | | | -+-----+-----+-----+-----+------------------- Permian. | | | | | -+-----+-----+-----+-----+------------------- Triassic. | | | | | -+-----+-----+-----+-----+------------------- | | | | | | Birds. Oolitic. | | | | | | : Mammals. | | | | | | : -+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+------- | | | | | | : Cretaceous. | | | | | | : | | | | | | : -+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+------- | | | | | | | Pla. Mam. Tertiary. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+- Recent. | | | | | | | | Man. -+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+- Geologic [Rad. Art. Mol. Fish. Rep. Bird. Mam. Man.] Arrangement. Cuvier's [Rad. Art. Mol. Fish. Rep. Bird. Mam. Man.] Arrangement. THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS.] The parallelism which exists between the course of creation, as exhibited in the animal kingdom, and the classification of the greatest zoologist of modern times, is perhaps still more remarkable. Cuvier divides all animals into vertebrate and invertebrate; the invertebrates consisting, according to his arrangement, of three great divisions,--mollusca, articulata, and radiata; and the vertebrates, of four great classes,--the mammals, the birds, the reptiles, and the fishes. From the lowest zone at which organic remains occur, up till the higher beds of the Lower Silurian System, all the animal remains yet found belong to the invertebrate divisions. The numerous tables of stone which compose the leaves of this first and earliest of the geologic volumes correspond in their contents with that concluding volume of Cuvier's great work in which he deals with the mollusca, articulata, and radiata; with, however, this difference, that the three great divisions, instead of occurring in a continnous series, are ranged, like the terrestrial herbs and trees, in parallel columns. The chain of animal being on its first appearance is, if I may so express myself, a threefold chain;--a fact nicely correspondent with the further fact, that we cannot in the present creation range _serially_, as either higher or lower in the scale, at least two of these divisions,--the mollusca and articulata. In one of the higher beds of the Upper Silurian System,--a bed which borders on the base of the Old Red Sandstone,--the vertebrates make their earliest appearance in their fourth or ichthyic class; and we find ourselves in that volume of the geologic record which corresponds to Cuvier's volume on the fishes. In the many-folded pages of the Old Red Sandstone, till we reach the highest and last, there occur the remains of no other vertebrates than those of this fourth class; but in its uppermost deposits there appear traces of the third or reptilian class; and in passing upwards still, through the Carboniferous, Permian, and Triassic Systems, we find reptiles continuing the master existences of the time. The geologic volume in which these great formations are included corresponds to the Cuvierian one devoted to the Reptilia. Early in the Oolitic System, birds, Cuvier's second class of the vertebrata, make their first appearance, though their remains, like those of birds in the present time, are rare and infrequent; and, for at least the earlier periods of their existence, we know that they were,--that they haunted for food the waters of the period, and waded in their shallows,--only from marks similar to those by which Crusoe became first aware of the visits paid to his island by his savage neighbors,--their footprints, left impressed on the sands over which they stalked of old. This early Oolitic volume corresponds in its contents to the section devoted by Cuvier, in his great work, to his second class, the birds. And in the Stonisfield slate,--a deposit interposed between the "Inferior" and "Great Oolites," we detect the earliest indications of his first or mammaliferous class, apparently represented, however, by but one order,--the Marsupiata, or pouched animals, to whose special place in the scale I shall afterwards have occasion to refer. Not until we reach the times of the Tertiary division do the mammals in their higher orders appear. The great Tertiary volume corresponds to those volumes of Cuvier which treat of the placental animals that suckle their young. And finally,--last born of creation,--man appears upon the scene, in his several races and varieties; the sublime arch of animal being at length receives its keystone; and the finished work stands up complete, from foundation to pinnacle, at once an admirably adjusted occupant of space, and a wonderful monument of Divine arrangement and classification, as it exists in time. Save at two special points, to which I shall afterwards advert, the particular arrangement unfolded by geologic history is exactly that which the greatest and most philosophic of the naturalists had, just previous to its discovery, originated and adopted as most conformable to nature: the arrangements of geologic history as exhibited in time, if, commencing at the earliest ages, we pursue it downwards, is exactly that of the "Animal Kingdom" of Cuvier read backwards. Let us then, in grappling with the vast multiplicity of our subject, attempt reducing and simplifying it by means of the classifying principle; not simply, however,--again to recur to the remark of the metaphysician,--as an internal principle given us by nature, but as an external principle _exemplified_ by nature. Let us take the organisms of the old geologic periods in the order in which they occur in time; secure, as has been shown, that if our chronology be correct, our classification will, as a consequence, be good. It will be for the natural theologians of the coming age to show the bearing of this wonderful fact on the progress of man towards the just and the solid, and on the being and character of man's Creator,--to establish, on the one hand, against the undue depreciators of intellect and its results, that in certain departments of mind, such as that which deals with the arrangement and development of the scheme of organic being, human thought is not profitlessly revolving in an idle circle, but progressing Godwards, and gradually unlocking the order of creation. And, on the other hand, it will be equally his proper business to demand of the Pantheist how,--seeing that only _persons_ (such as the Cuviers and Lindleys) could have wrought out for themselves the real arrangement of this scheme,--how, I say, or on what principle, it is to be held that it was a scheme originated and established at the beginning, not by a _personal_, but by an impersonal God. But our present business is with the _fact_ of the parallel arrangements, Divine and human,--not with the inferences legitimately deducible from it. [Illustration: Fig. 5. OLDHAMIA ANTIQUA;--the oldest known Zoophyte. Wrae Head, Ireland.] [Illustration: Fig. 6. PALÆOCHORDA MINOR. (One half nat. size.)] Beginning with the plants, let us, however, remark, that they do not precede in the order of their appearance the humbler animals. No more ancient organism than the _Oldhamia_ of the Lowest Irish Silurians, a plant-like zoophyte somewhat resembling our modern sertularia, has yet been detected by the geologist; though only a few months ago the researches of Mr. Salter in the ancient rocks of the Longmynd, Shropshire, previously deemed unfossiliferous, have given, to it what seem to be contemporary vegetable organisms, in a few ill-preserved fucoids. So far as is yet known, plants and animals appear together. The long upward march of the animal kingdom takes its departure at its starting point from a thick forest of algæ. In Bohemia, in Norway, in Sweden, in the British Islands, in North America, wherever, in fine, what appears to be the lowest, or at least one of the lowest, zones of life has yet been detected, the rocks are found to be darkened by the remains of algæ, so abundantly developed in some cases, that they compose, as in the ancient Lower Silurians of Dumfriesshire, impure beds of anthracite several feet in thickness. Apparently, from the original looseness of their texture, the individual plants are but indifferently preserved; nor can we expect that organisms so ancient should exhibit any _very_ close resemblance to the plants which darken the half-tide rocks and skerries of our coasts at the present time. We do detect, however, in some of these primordial fossils, at least a noticeable likeness to families familiar to the modern algæologist. The cord-like plant, _Chorda filum_, known to our children as "dead men's ropes," from its proving fatal at times to the too adventurous swimmer who gets entangled in its thick wreaths, had a Lower Silurian representative, known to the Palæontologist as the _Palæochorda_, or ancient chorda, which existed apparently in two species,--a larger and smaller. The still better known _Chondrus crispus_, the Irish moss or carrageen of our cookery-books, has likewise its apparent though more distant representative in _Chondritis_, a Lower Silurian algæ, of which there seems to exist at least three species. The fucoids, or kelp weeds, appear to have had also their representatives in such plants as _Fucoides gracilis_ of the Lower Silurians of the Malverns; in short, the Thallogens of the first ages of vegetable life seem to have resembled, in the group, and in at least their more prominent features, the algæ of the existing time. And with the first indications of land we pass direct from the Thallogens to the Acrogens,--from the sea weeds to the fern allies. The Lycopodiaceæ;, or club mosses, bear in the axils of their leaves minute circular cases, which form the receptacles of their spore-like seeds. And when, high in the Upper Silurian System, and just when preparing to quit it for the Lower Old Red Sandstone, we detect our earliest terrestrial organisms, we find that they are composed exclusively of those little spore receptacles. The number of land plants gradually increases as we ascend into the overlying system. Still, however, the Flora of even the Old Red is but meagre and poor; and you will perhaps permit me to lighten this part of my subject, which threatens too palpably to partake of the poverty of that with which it deals, by a simple illustration. [Illustration: Fig. 7. LYCOPODIUM CLAVATUM.] [Illustration: Fig. 8. EQUISETUM FLUVIATILE.] We stand, at low ebb, on the outer edge of one of those iron-bound shores of the Western Highlands, rich in forests of algæ, from which, not yet a generation bygone, our Celtic proprietors used to derive a larger portion of their revenues than from their fields and moors. Rock and skerry are brown with sea weed. The long cylindrical lines of _Chorda filum_, many feet in length, lie aslant in the tideway; long shaggy bunches of _Fucus serratus_ and _Fucus nodosus_ droop heavily from the rock sides; while the flatter ledges, that form the uneven floor upon which we tread, bristle thick with the stiff, cartilaginous, many-cleft fronds of at least two species of chondrus,--the common carrageen, and the smaller species, _C. Norvegicus_. Now, in the thickly-spread fucoids of this Highland shore we have not a _very_ inadequate representation of the first, or thallogenic vegetation,--that of the great Silurian period, as exhibited in the rocks, from the base to nearly the top of the system. And should we add to the rocky tract, rich in fucoids, a submarine meadow of pale shell sand, covered by a deep green swathe of zostera, with its jointed saccharine roots and slim flowers, unfurnished with petals, we would render it perhaps more adequately representative still. [Illustration: Fig. 9. OSMUNDA REGALIS. (Royal Fern.)] We cross the beach, and enter on a bare brown moor, comparatively fertile, however, in the club mosses. One of the largest and finest of the species, _Lycopodium clavatum_, with its long scaly stems and upright spikes of lighter green,--altogether a graceful though flowerless plant, which the herd-boy learns to select from among its fellows, and to bind round his cap,--goes trailing on the drier spots for many feet over the soil; while at the edge of trickling runnel or marshy hollow, a smaller and less hardy species, _Lycopodium inundatum_, takes its place. The marshes themselves bristle thick with the deep green horse tail, _Equisetum fluviatile_, with its fluted stem and verticillate series of linear brandies. Two other species of the same genus, _Equisetum sylvaticum_ and _Equisetum arvense_, flourish on the drier parts of the moor, blent with two species of minute ferns, the moonwort and the adder's tongue,--ferns that, like the magnificent royal fern (_Osmunda regalis_), though on a much humbler scale, bear their seed cases on independent stems, and were much sought after of old for imaginary virtues, which the modern schools of medicine refuse to recognize. Higher up the moor, ferns of ampler size occur, and what seems to be rushes, which bear atop conglobate panicles on their smooth leafless stems; but at its lower edge little else appears than the higher Acrogens,--ferns and their allies. There occurs, however, just beyond the first group of club mosses,--a remarkable exception in a solitary pine,--the advance guard of one of the ancient forests of the country, which may be seen far in the background, clothing with its shaggy covering of deep green the lower hill-slopes. And as we found in the Thallogens of that littoral zone over which we have just passed, representatives of the marine flora of the Silurian System, from the first appearance of organisms in its nether beds, to its bone-bed of the Upper Ludlow rocks, in which the Lycopodites first appear, so in the Acrogens of that moor, with its solitary coniferous tree, we may recognize an equally striking representative of the terrestrial flora which existed during the deposition of these Ludlow rocks, and of the various formations of the Old Red Sandstone, Lower, Middle, and Upper. [Illustration: Fig. 10. PINUS SYLVESTRIS. (Scotch Fir.)] [Illustration: Fig. 11. CALAMITE? Of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. Shetland. (One eighth nat. size.)] [Illustration: Fig. 12. LYCOPODITE? Of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. Thurso. (Mag. two diameters.)] In the upper beds of the Upper Silurian, as has been already remarked, Lycopodites are the only terrestrial plants yet found. In the Lower Old Red Sandstone we find added to these, with Thallogens that bear at least the same _general_ character as in the system beneath, minute ferns, and a greatly larger plant, allied to the horse tails. The Old Red flora seems to have been prevailingly an acrogenic flora; and yet with almost its first beginnings,--contemporary with at least the earlier fossils of the system in Scotland, we find a true polycotyledonous tree, not lower in the scale than the araucarites of the Coal Measures,--which in structure it greatly resembles,--or than the pines or cedars of our own times (see Fig. 3). In the Middle Old Red Sandstone there occurs, with plants representative apparently of the ferns and their allies, a somewhat equivocal and doubtful organism, which may have been the panicle or compound fruit of some aquatic rush; while in the Upper Old Red, just ere the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures began to be, there existed in considerable abundance a stately fern, the _Cyclopteris Hibernicus_ (see Fig. 2), of mayhap not smaller proportions than our monarch of the British ferns, _Osmunda regalis_, associated with a peculiar lepidodendron, and what seems to be a lepidostrobus,--possibly the fructiferous spike or cone of the latter, mingled with carbonaceous stems, which, in the simplicity of their texture, and their abundance, give evidence of a low but not scanty vegetation. Ere passing to the luxuriant carboniferous flora, I shall make but one other remark. The existing plants whence we derive our analogies in dealing with the vegetation of this early period, contribute but little, if at all, to the support of animal life. The ferns and their allies remain untouched by the grazing animals. Our native club mosses, though once used in medicine, are positively deleterious; the horse tails, though harmless, so abound in silex, which wraps them round with a cuticle of stone, that they are rarely cropped by cattle; while the thickets of fern which cover our hill-sides, and seem so temptingly rich and green in their season, scarce support the existence of a single creature, and remain untouched in stem and leaf, from their first appearance in spring, until they droop and wither under the frosts of early winter. Even the insects that infest the herbaria of the botanist almost never injure his ferns. Nor are our resin-producing conifers, though they nourish a few beetles, favorites with the herbivorous tribes in a much greater degree. Judging from all we yet know, the earliest terrestrial flora may have covered the dry land with its mantle of cheerful green, and served its general purposes, chemical and others, in the well-balanced economy of nature; but the herb-eating animals would have fared but ill even where it throve most luxuriantly; and it seems to harmonize with the fact of its non-edible character, that up to the present time we know not that a single herbivorous animal lived among its shades. From all that appears, it may be inferred that it had not to serve the purposes of the floras of the passing time, in which, according to the poet, "The world's bread depends on the shooting of a seed." [Illustration: Fig. 13. FERN? of Lower Old Red Sandstone. Orkney. (Nat. Size.)] The flora of the Coal Measures was the richest and most luxuriant, in at least individual productions, with which the fossil botanist has formed any acquaintance. Never before or since did our planet bear so rank a vegetation as that of which the numerous coal seams and inflammable shales of the carboniferous period form but a portion of the remains,--the portion spared, in the first instance, by dissipation and decay, and in the second by the denuding agencies. Almost all our coal,--the stored up fuel of a world,--forms but a comparatively small part of the produce of this wonderful flora. Amid much that was so strange and antique of type in its productions as to set the analogies of the botanist at fault, there occurred one solitary order, not a few of whose species closely resembled their cogeners of the present time. I refer, of course, to its ferns. And these seem to have formed no small proportion of the entire flora of the period. Francis estimates the recent dorsiferous ferns of Great Britain at thirty-five species, and the species of all the other genera at six more,--forty-one species in all; and as the flowering plants of the country do not fall short of fourteen hundred species, the ferns bear to them the rather small proportion of about one to thirty-five; whereas of the British Coal Measure flora, in which we do not yet reckon quite three hundred species of plants, about a hundred and twenty were ferns. Three sevenths of the entire carboniferous flora of Britain belonged to this familiar class; and for about fifty species more we can discover no nearer analogies than those which connect them with the fern allies. And if with the British Coal Measure we include those also of the Continent of America, we shall find the proportions in favor of the ferns still greater. The number of carboniferous plants hitherto described amounts, says M. Ad. Brogniart, to about five hundred, and of these two hundred and fifty,--one half of the whole,--were ferns. [Illustration: Fig. 14.] [Illustration: Fig. 15.] [Illustration: Fig. 16.] [Illustration: Fig. 17.] [Illustration: Fig. 18.] [Illustration: Fig. 19.] [Illustration: FERNS OF THE COAL MEASURES.[6]] [Illustration: Fig. 20. ALTINGIA EXCELSA. Norfolk Island Pine. (Young Specimen.)] Rising in the scale from the lower to the higher vegetable forms of the system,--from its ferns to its trees,--we find great conifers,--so great that they must have raised their heads more than a hundred feet over the soil; and such was their abundance in this neighborhood, that one can scarce examine a fragment of coal beside one's household fire that is not charged with their carbonized remains. Though marked by certain peculiarities of structure, they bore, as is shown by the fossil trunks of Granton and Craigleith, the familiar outlines of true coniferous trees; and would mayhap have differed no more in appearance from their successors of the same order that now live in our forests, than these differ from the conifers of New Zealand or of New South Wales. We have thus, in the numerous ferns and numerous coniferous trees of the Coal Measures, known objects by which to conceive of some of the more prominent features of the flora of which they composed so large a part. We have not inadequate conceptions of at once the giants of its forests and the green swathe of its plains and hill-sides,--of its mighty trees and its dwarf _underwood_,--of its cedars of Lebanon, so to speak, and its hyssop of the wall. But of an intermediate class we have no existing representatives; and in this class the fossil botanist finds puzzles and enigmas with which hitherto at least he has been able to deal with only indifferent success. There is a view, however, sufficiently simple, which may be found somewhat to lessen, if not altogether remove, the difficulty. Nature does not dwell willingly in mediocrity; and so in all ages she as certainly produced trees, or plants of tree-like proportions and bulk, as she did minute shrubs and herbs. In not a few of the existing orders and families, such as the Rosaceæ, the Leguminosæ, the Myrtaceæ, and many others, we have plants of all sizes, from the creeping herb, half hidden in the sward, to the stately tree. The wild dwarf strawberry and minute stone-bramble are of the same order as our finer orchard trees,--apple, pear, and plum,--or as those noble hawthorn, mountain ash, and wild cherry trees, that impart such beauty to our lawns and woods; and the minute spring vetch and everlasting pea are denizens of the same great family as the tall locust and rosewood trees, and the gorgeous laburnum. Did there exist no other plants than the Rosaceæ or the Leguminosæ, we would possess, notwithstanding, herbs, shrubs, and trees, just as we do now. And in plants of a greatly humbler order we have instances of similar variety in point of size. The humblest grass in our meadows belongs to the same natural order as the tall bamboo, that, shooting up its panicles amid the jungles of India to the height of sixty feet, looks down upon all the second class trees of the country. Again, the minute forked spleenwort of Arthur Seat, which rarely exceeds three inches in length, is of the same family as those tree-ferns of New Zealand and Tasmania that rise to an elevation of from twenty to thirty feet. And we know how in the ferns provision is made for the attainment and maintenance of the tree-like size and character. The rachis, which in the smaller species is either subterranean or runs along the ground, takes in the tree-fern a different direction, and, rising erect, climbs slowly upwards in the character of a trunk or stem, and sends out atop, year after year, a higher and yet higher coronal of fronds. And in order to impart the necessary strength to this trunk, and to enable it to war for ages with the elements, its mass of soft cellular tissue is strengthened all round by internal buttresses of dense vascular fibre, tough and elastic as the strongest woods. Now, not a few of the more anomalous forms of the Coal Measures seem to be simply fern allies of the types Lycopodiaceæ, Marsileaceæ, and Equisetum, that, escaping from the mediocrity of mere herbs, shot up into trees,--some of them very great trees,--and that had of necessity to be furnished with a tissue widely different from that of their minuter contemporaries and successors. It was of course an absolute mechanical necessity, that if they were to present, by being tall and large, a wide front to the tempest, they should also be comparatively solid and strong to resist it; but with this simple mechanical requirement there seems to have mingled a principle of a more occult character. The Gymnogens or conifers were the highest vegetable existences of the period,--its true trees; and all the tree-like fern allies were strengthened to meet the necessities of their increased size, on, if I may so speak, a _coniferous_ principle. Tissue resembling that of their contemporary conifers imparted the necessary rigidity to their framework; nay, so strangely were they pervaded throughout by the coniferous characteristics, that it seems difficult to determine whether they really most resembled the acrogenous or gymnogenous families. The Lepidodendra,--great plants of the club moss type, that rose from fifty to seventy feet in height,--had well nigh as many points of resemblance to the coniferæ as to the Lycopodites. The Calamites,--reed-like, jointed plants, that more nearly resemble the Equisetaceæ than aught else which now exists, but which attained, in the larger specimens, to the height of ordinary trees, also manifest very decidedly, in their internal structure, some of the characteristics of the conifers. It has been remarked by Lindley and Hutton of even Sphenophyllum,--a genus of plants with verticillate leaves, of which at least six species occur in our Coal Measures, and which Brogniart refers to one of the humblest families of the fern allies,--that it seems at least as nearly related to the Coniferæ as to its lowlier representatives, the Marsileaceæ. And it is this union of traits, pertaining to what are now widely separated orders, that imparts to not a few of the vegetables of the Coal Measures their singularly anomalous character. [Illustration: Fig. 21. EAST INDIA TREE-FERN.[7] (_Asophila perrotetiana._)] [Illustration: Fig. 22. SECTION OF STEM OF TREE-FERN.[8] (_Cyathea._)] [Illustration: Fig. 23.] [Illustration: Fig. 24.] [Illustration: Fig. 25.] [Illustration: LEPIDODENDRON STERNBERGII.[9]] [Illustration: Fig. 26. CALAMITES MOUGEOTII.] [Illustration: Fig. 27. SPHENOPHYLLUM DENTATUM.] [Illustration: Fig. 28. SIGILLARIA RENIFORMIS.] Let me attempt introducing you more intimately to one of those plants which present scarce any analogy with existing forms, and which must have imparted so strange a character and appearance to the flora of the Coal Measures. The Sigillaria formed a numerous genus of the Carboniferous period: no fewer than twenty-two different species have been enumerated in the British coal fields alone; and such was their individual abundance, that there are great seams of coal which seem to be almost entirely composed of their remains. At least the ancient soil on which these seams rest, and on which their materials appear to have been elaborated from the elements, is in many instances as thickly traversed by their underground stems as the soil occupied by our densest forests is traversed by the tangled roots of the trees by which it is covered; and we often find associated with them in these cases the remains of no other plant. The Sigillaria were remarkable for their beautifully sculptured stems, various in their pattern, according to their species. All were fluted vertically, somewhat like columns of the Grecian Doric; and each flute or channel had its line of sculpture running adown its centre. In one species (_S. flexuosa_) the sculpture consists of round knobs, surrounded by single rings, like the heads of the bolts of the ship carpenter; in another (_S. reniformis_) the knobs are double, and of an oval form, somewhat resembling pairs of kidneys,--a resemblance to which the species owes its name. In another species (_S. catenulata_) what seems a minute chain of distinctly formed elliptical links drops down the middle of each flute; in yet another (_S. oculata_) the carvings are of an oval form, and, bearing each a round impression in its centre, they somewhat resemble rows of staring goggle-eyes; while the carvings in yet another species (_S. pachyderma_) consist chiefly of crescent-shaped depressions. The roots, or rather underground stems, of this curious genus attracted notice, from their singularity, long ere their connection with the carved and fluted stems had been determined, and have been often described as the "stigmaria" of the fossil botanist. They, too, have their curious carvings, consisting of deeply marked stigmata, quincuncially arranged, with each a little ring at its bottom, and, in at least one rare species, surrounded by a sculptured star. Unlike true roots, they terminate abruptly; each rootlet which they send forth was jointed to the little ring or dimpled knob at the bottom of the stigmata; and the appearance of the whole, as it radiated from the central mass, whence the carved trunk proceeded, somewhat resembled that of an enormous coach-wheel divested of the rim. Unfortunately we cannot yet complete our description of this strange plant. A specimen, traced for about forty feet across a shale bed, was found to bifurcate atop into two great branches,--a characteristic in which, with several others, it differed from most of the tree-ferns,--a class of plants to which Adolphe Brogniart is inclined to deem it related; but no specimen has yet shown the nature of its foliage. I am, however, not a little disposed to believe with Brogniart that it may have borne as leaves some of the supposed ferns of the Coal Measures; nowhere, at least, have I found these lie so thickly, layer above layer, as around the stems of Sigillaria; and the fact that, even in our own times, plants widely differing from the tree-ferns,--such, for instance, as one of the Cycadeæ,--should bear leaves scarce distinguishable from fern fronds, may well reconcile us to an apparent anomaly in the case of an ancient plant such as Sigillaria, whose entire constitution, so far as it has been ascertained, appears to have been anomalous. The sculpturesque character of this richly fretted genus was shared by not a few of its contemporaries. The Ulodendra, with their rectilinear rows of circular scars, and their stems covered with leaf-like carvings, rivalled in effect the ornately relieved torus of a Corinthian column: Favularia, Knorria, Halonia, many of the Calamites, and all the Lepidodendra, exhibited the most delicate sculpturing. In walking among the ruins of this ancient flora, the Palæontologist almost feels as if he had got among the broken fragments of Italian palaces, erected long ages ago, when the architecture of Rome was most ornate, and every moulding was roughened with ornament; and in attempting to call up in fancy the old Carboniferous forests, he has to dwell on this peculiar feature as one of the most prominent, and to see, in the multitude of trunks darkened above by clouds of foliage, that rise upon him in the prospect, the slim columns of an elder Alhambra, roughened with arabesque tracery and exquisite filagree work. [Illustration: Fig. 29. SIGILLARIA RENIFORMIS. (Nat. size.)] [Illustration: Fig. 30. SIGILLARIA PACHYDERMA. (One fourth nat. size.)] [Illustration: Fig. 31. STIGMARIA FICOIDES. (One fourth nat. size.)] [Illustration: Fig. 32. FAVULARIA TESSELLATA. (One fifth nat. size.)] [Illustration: Fig. 33. LEPIDODENDRON OBOVATUM. (Nat. size.)] [Illustration: Fig. 34. CYCAS REVOLUTA. (_Recent._)] [Illustration: Fig.35. ZAMIA PUNGENS. (_Recent._)] [Illustration: Fig. 36. ZAMIA FENEONIS (PORTLAND OOLITE.)] [Illustration: Fig. 37. MANTELLIA NIDIFORMIS. (Portland Dirt-bed.)] In the Oolitic flora we find a few peculiar features introduced. The Cyeadeæ,--a family of plants allied to the ferns on the one hand, and to the conifers on the other, and which in their general aspect not a little resemble stunted palms,--appear in this flora for the first time. Its coniferous genera, too, receive great accessions to their numbers, and begin to resemble, more closely than at an earlier period, the genera which still continue to exist. The cypresses, the yews, the thujas, the dammaras, all make their earliest appearance in the flora of the Oolite. Among our existing woods there seem to be but two conifers (that attain to the dignity of trees) indigenous to Britain,--the common yew, _Taxus baccata_, and the common Scotch fir, _Pinus sylvestris_; and yet we know that the latter alone formed, during the last few centuries, great woods, that darkened for many miles together the now barren moors and bare hill-sides of the Highlands of Scotland,--moors and hill-sides that, though long since divested of their last tree, are still known by their old name of _forests_. In the times of the Oolite, on the other hand, Britain had from fourteen to twenty different species of conifers; and its great forests, of whose existence we have direct evidence in the very abundant lignites of the system, must have possessed a richness and variety which our ancient fir woods of the historic or human period could not have possessed. With the Conifers and the Cycadeæ there were many ferns associated,--so many, that they still composed nearly two fifths of the entire flora; and associated with these, though in reduced proportions, we find the fern allies. The reduction, however, of these last is rather in species than in individuals. The Brora Coal, one of the most considerable Oolitic seams in Europe, seems to have been formed almost exclusively of an equisetum,--_E. columnare_. In this flora the more equivocal productions of the Coal Measures are represented by what seems to be the last of the Calamites; but it contains no Lepidodendra,--no Ulodendra,--no Sigillaria,--no Favularia,--no Knorria or Halonia. Those monsters of the vegetable world that united to the forms of its humbler productions the bulk of trees, had, with the solitary exception of the Calamites, passed into extinction; and ere the close of the system they too had disappeared. The forms borne by most of the Oolitic plants were comparatively familiar forms. With the Acrogens and Gymnogens we find the first indication of the Liliaceæ, or lily-like plants,--of plants, too, allied to the Pandanaceæ or screw pines, the fruits of which are sometimes preserved in a wonderfully perfect state of keeping in the Inferior Oolite, together with Carpolithes,--palm-like fruits, very ornately sculptured,--and the remains of at least one other monocotyledon, that bears the somewhat general name of an Endogenite. With these there occur a few disputed leaves, which I must persist in regarding as dicotyledonous. But they formed, whatever their true character, a very inconspicuous feature in the Oolitic flora; and not until the overlying Cretaceous System is ushered in do we find leaves in any considerable quantity decidedly of this high family; nor until we enter into the earlier Tertiaries do we succeed in detecting a true dicotyledonous tree. On such an amount of observation is this order of succession determined,--though the evidence is, of course, mainly negative,--that when, some eight or ten years ago, Dr. John Wilson, the learned Free Church missionary to the Parsees of India, submitted to me specimens of fossil woods which he had picked up in the Egyptian Desert, in order that I might if possible determine their age, I told him, ere yet the optical lapidary had prepared them for examination, that if they exhibited the coniferous structure, they might belong to any geologic period from the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone downwards; but that if they manifested in their tissue the dicotyledonous character, they could not be older than the times of the Tertiary. On submitting them in thin slices to the microscope, they were found to exhibit the peculiar dicotyledonous structure as strongly as the oak or chestnut. And Lieutenant Newbold's researches in the deposit in which they occur has since demonstrated, on stratigraphical evidence, that not only does it belong to the great Tertiary division, but also to one of the comparatively modern formations of the Tertiary. [Illustration: Fig. 38 EQUISETUM COLUMNARE. (Nat. size.)] [Illustration: Fig. 39. CARPOLITHES CONICA. (Reduced one third.)] [Illustration: Fig. 40. CARPOLITHES BUCKLANDII.[10] (Reduced one third.)] [Illustration: Fig. 41. ACER TRILOBATUM.[11] (Miocene of OEningen.)] [Illustration: Fig. 42. ULMUS BRONNII.[12] (Miocene of Bohemia.)] [Illustration: Fig. 43. PALMACITES LAMANONIS. (A Palm of the Miocene of Aix.)] The earlier flora of this Tertiary division presents an aspect widely different from that of any of the previous ones. The ferns and their allies sink into their existing proportions; nor do the coniferæ, previously so abundant, occupy any longer a prominent place. On the other hand, the dicotyledonous herbs and trees, previously so inconspicuous in creation, are largely developed. Trees of those Amentiferous orders to which the oak, the hazel, the beech, and the plane belong, were perhaps not less abundant in the Eocene woods than in those of the present time: they were mingled with trees of the Laurel, the Leguminous, and the Anonaceous or custard apple families, with many others; and deep forests, in the latitude of London (in which the intertropical forms must now be protected, as in the Crystal Palace, with coverings of glass, and warmed by artificial heat), abounded in graceful palms. Mr. Bowerbank found in the London clay of the island of Sheppey alone the fruits of no fewer than thirteen different species of this picturesque family, which lends so peculiar a feature to the landscapes in which it occurs; and ascertained that the undergrowth beneath was composed, in large proportion, of creeping plants of the gourd and melon order. From the middle or Miocene flora of the Tertiary division,--of which we seem to possess in Britain only the small but interesting fragment detected by his Grace the Duke of Argyll among the trap-beds of Mull,--most of the more exotic forms seem to have been excluded. The palms, however, still survive in no fewer than thirty-one different species, and we find in great abundance, in the place of the other exotics, remains of the plane and buckthorn families,--part of a group of plants that in their general aspect, as shown in the Tertiary deposits of the Continent, not a little resembled the vegetation of the United States at the present day. The nearer we approach to existing times, the more familiar in form and outline do the herbs and trees become. We detect, as has been shown, at least one existing _order_ in the ferns of the Coal Measures; we detect at least existing _genera_ among the Coniferæ, Equisetaceæ, and Cycadaceæ of the Oolite; the acacias, gourds, and laurels of the Eocene flora, and the planes, willows, and buckthorns of the Miocene, though we fail to identify their species with aught that now lives, still more strongly remind us of the recent productions of our forests or conservatories; and, on entering, in our downward course, the Pleistocene period, we at length find ourselves among familiar _species_. On old terrestrial surfaces, that date before the times of the glacial period, and underlie the boulder clay, the remains of forests of oak, birch, hazel, and fir have been detected,--all of the familiar species indigenous to the country, and which still flourish in our native woods. And it was held by the late Professor Edward Forbes, that the most ancient of his five existing British floras,--that which occurs in the south-west of Ireland, and corresponds with the flora of the northwest of Spain and the Pyrenees,--had been introduced into the country as early, perhaps, as the times of the Miocene. Be this, however, as it may, there can rest no doubt on the great antiquity of the prevailing trees of our indigenous forests. The oak, the birch, the hazel, the Scotch fir, all lived, I repeat, in what is now Britain, ere the last great depression of the land. The gigantic northern elephant and rhinoceros, extinct for untold ages, forced their way through their tangled branches; and the British tiger and hyæna harbored in their thickets. Cuvier framed an argument for the fixity of species on the fact that the birds and beasts embalmed in the catacombs were identical in every respect with the animals of the same kinds that live now. But what, it has been asked, was a brief period of three thousand years, compared with the geologic ages? or how could any such argument be founded on a basis so little extended? It is, however, to no such narrow basis we can refer in the case of these woods. All human history is comprised in the nearer corner of the immense period which they measure out; and yet, from their first appearance in creation till now they have not altered a single fibre. And such, on this point, is the invariable testimony of Palæontologic science,--testimony so invariable, that no great Palæontologist was ever yet an asserter of the development hypothesis. With the existing trees of our indigenous woods it is probable that in even these early times a considerable portion of the herbs of our recent flora would have been associated, though their remains, less fitted for preservation, have failed to leave distinct trace behind them. We at least know generally, that with each succeeding period there appeared a more extensively useful and various vegetation than that which had gone before. I have already referred to the sombre, unproductive character of the earliest terrestrial flora with which we are acquainted. It was a flora unfitted, apparently, for the support of either graminivorous bird or herbivorous quadruped. The singularly profuse vegetation of the Coal Measures was, with all its wild luxuriance, of a resembling cast. So far as appears, neither flock nor herd could have lived on its greenest and richest plains; nor does even the flora of the Oolite seem to have been in the least suited for the purposes of the shepherd or herdsman. Not until we enter on the Tertiary periods do we find floras amid which man might have profitably labored as a dresser of gardens, a tiller of fields, or a keeper of flocks and herds. Nay, there are whole orders and families of plants of the very first importance to man which do not appear until late in even the Tertiary ages. Some degree of doubt must always attach to merely negative evidence; but Agassiz, a geologist whose statements must be received with respect by every student of the science, finds reason to conclude that the order of the Rosaceæ,--an order more important to the gardener than almost any other, and to which the apple, the pear, the quince, the cherry, the plum, the peach, the apricot, the victorine, the almond, the raspberry, the strawberry, and the various brambleberries belong, together with all the roses and the potentillas,--was introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man. And the true grasses,--a still more important order, which, as the corn-bearing plants of the agriculturist, feed at the present time at least two thirds of the human species, and in their humbler varieties form the staple food of the _grazing_ animals,--scarce appear in the fossil state at all. They are peculiarly plants of the human period. Let me instance one other family of which the fossil botanist has not yet succeeded in finding any trace in even the Tertiary deposits, and which appears to have been specially created for the gratification of human sense. Unlike the Rosaceæ, it exhibits no rich blow of color, or tempting show of luscious fruit;--- it does not appeal very directly to either the sense of taste or of sight: but it is richly odoriferous; and, though deemed somewhat out of place in the garden for the last century and more, it enters largely into the composition of some of our most fashionable perfumes. I refer to the _Labiate_ family,--a family to which the lavenders, the mints, the thymes, and the hyssops belong, with basil, rosemary, and marjoram,--all plants of "gray renown," as Shenstone happily remarks in his description of the herbal of his "Schoolmistress." "Herbs too she knew, and well of each could speak, That in her garden sipped the silvery dew, Where no vain flower disclosed a gaudy streak, But herbs for use and physic not a few, Of gray renown within those borders grew. The tufted basil, pun-provoking thyme, And fragrant balm, and sage of sober hue. "And marjoram sweet in shepherd's posie found, And lavender, whose spikes of azure bloom Shall be erewhile in arid bundles bound, To lurk amid her labors of the loom, And crown her kerchiefs clean with meikle rare perfume. "And here trim rosemary, that whilom crowned The daintiest garden of the proudest peer, Ere, driven from its envied site, it found A sacred shelter for its branches here, Where, edged with gold, its glittering skirts appear, With horehound gray, and mint of softer green." All the plants here enumerated belong to the labiate family; which, though unfashionable even in Shenstone's days, have still their products favorably received in the very best society. The rosemary, whose banishment from the gardens of the great he specially records, enters largely in the composition of eau de Cologne. Of the lavenders, one species (_Lavendula vera_) yields the well known lavender oil, and another (_L. latifolio_) the spike oil. The peppermint (_Meantha viridus_) furnishes the essence so popular under that name among our confectioners; and one of the most valued perfumes of the East (next to the famous _Attar_, a product of the Rosaceæ) is the oil of the _Patchouly_ plant, another of the labiates. Let me indulge, ere quitting this part of the subject, in a single remark. There have been classes of religionists, not wholly absent from our own country, and well known on the Continent, who have deemed it a merit to deny themselves every pleasure of sense, however innocent and delicate. The excellent but mistaken Pascal refused to look upon a lovely landscape; and the Port Royalist nuns remarked, somewhat simply for their side of the argument, that they seemed as if warring with Providence, seeing that the favors which he was abundantly showering upon them, they, in obedience to the stern law of their lives, were continually rejecting. But it is better, surely, to be on the side of Providence against Pascal and the nuns, than on the side of Pascal and the nuns against Providence. The great Creator, who has provided so wisely and abundantly for all his creatures, knows what is best for us, infinitely better than we do ourselves; and there is neither sense nor merit, surely, in churlishly refusing to partake of that ample entertainment, sprinkled with delicate perfumes, garnished with roses, and crowned with the most delicious fruit, which we now know was not only specially prepared for us, but also got ready, as nearly as we can judge, for the appointed hour of our appearance at the feast. This we also know, that when the Divine Man came into the world,--unlike the Port Royalists, he did not refuse the temperate use of any of these luxuries, not even of that "ointment of spikenard, very precious" (a product of the labiate family), with which Mary anointed his feet. [Illustration: Fig. 44. CYCLOPHTHALMUS BUCKLANDI. (A Fossil Scorpion of the Coal Measures of Bohemia.)] [Illustration: Fig. 45. FOSSIL DRAGON-FLY. Solenhofen.] Though it may at first seem a little out of place, let us anticipate here, for the sake of the illustration which it affords, one of the sections of the other great division of our subject,--that which treats of the fossil animals. Let us run briefly over the geologic history of insects, in order that we may mark the peculiar light which it casts on the character of the ancient floras. No insects have yet been detected in the Silurian or Old Red Sandstone Systems. They first appear amid the hard, dry, flowerless vegetation of the Coal Measures, and in genera suited to its character. Among these the scorpions take a prominent place,--carnivorous arachnidæ of ill repute, that live under stones and fallen trunks, and seize fast with their nippers upon the creatures on which they prey, crustaceans usually, such as the wood-louse, or insects, such as the earth-beetles and their grubs. With the scorpions there occur cockroaches of types not at all unlike the existing ones, and that, judging from their appearance, must have been foul feeders, to which scarce anything could have come amiss as food. Books, manuscripts, leather, ink, oil, meat, even the bodies of the dead, are devoured indiscriminately by the recent _Blatta gigantea_ of the warmer parts of the globe,--one of the most disagreeable pests of the European settler, or of war vessels on foreign stations. I have among my books an age-embrowned copy of Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany," that had been carried into foreign parts by a musical relation, after it had seen hard service at home, and had become smoke dried and black; and yet even it, though but little tempting, as might be thought, was not safe from the cockroaches; for, finding it left open one day, they ate out in half an hour half its table of contents, consisting of several leaves. Assuredly, if the ancient _Blattæ_ were as little nice in their eating as the devourers of the "Tea Table Miscellany," they would not have lacked food amid even the unproductive flora and meagre fauna of the Coal Measures. With these ancient cockroaches a few locusts and beetles have been found associated, together with a small _Tinea_,--a creature allied to the common clothes-moth, and a _Phasmia_,--a creature related to the spectre insects. But the group is an inconsiderable one; for insects seem to have occupied no very conspicuous place in the carboniferous fauna. The beetles appear to have been of the wood and seed devouring kinds, and would probably have found their food among the conifers; the _Phasmidæ_ and grasshoppers would have lived on the tender shoots of the less rigid plants their contemporaries; the _Tinea_, probably on ligneous or cottony fibre. Not a single insect has the system yet produced of the now numerous kinds that seek their food among flowers. In the Oolitic ages, however, insects become greatly more numerous,--so numerous that they seemed to have formed almost exclusively the food of the earliest mammals, and apparently also of some of the flying reptiles of the time. The magnificent dragon-flies, the carnivorous tyrants of their race, were abundant; and we now know, that while they were, as their name indicates, dragons to the weaker insects, they themselves were devoured by dragons as truly such as were ever yet feigned by romancer of the middle ages. Ants were also common, with crickets, grasshoppers, bugs both of the land and water, beetles, two-winged flies, and, in species distinct from the preceding carboniferous ones, the disgusting cockroaches. And for the first time amid the remains of a flora that seems to have had its few flowers,--though flowers could have formed no conspicuous feature in even an Oolitic landscape,--we detect in a few broken fragments of the wings of butterflies, decided trace of the flower-sucking insects. Not, however, until we enter into the great Tertiary division do these become numerous. The first bee makes its appearance in the amber of the Eocene, locked up hermetically in its gem-like tomb,--an embalmed corpse in a crystal coffin,--along with fragments of flower-bearing herbs and trees. The first of the Bombycidæ too,--insects that maybe seen suspended over flowers by the scarce visible vibrations of their wings, sucking the honied juices by means of their long, slender trunks,--also appear in the amber, associated with moths, butterflies, and a few caterpillars. Bees and butterflies are present in increased proportions in the latter Tertiary deposits: but not until that terminal creation to which we ourselves belong was ushered on the scene did they receive their fullest development. There is exquisite poetry in Wordsworth's reference to "the soft murmur of the vagrant bee,"-- "A slender sound, yet hoary Time Doth to the soul exalt it with the chime Of all his years; a company Of ages coming, ages gone, Nations from before them sweeping." And yet, mayhap, the naked scientific facts of the history of this busy insect are scarcely less poetic than the pleasing imagination of the poet regarding it. They tell that man's world, with all its griefs and troubles, is more emphatically a world of flowers than any of the creations that preceded it, and that as one great family--the grasses--were called into existence, in order, apparently, that he might enter in favoring circumstances upon his two earliest avocations, and be in good hope a keeper of herds and a tiller of the ground; and as another family of plants--the Rosaceæ--was created in order that the gardens which it would be also one of his vocations to keep and to dress should have their trees "good for food and pleasant to the taste;" so flowers in general were profusely produced just ere he appeared, to minister to that sense of beauty which distinguishes him from all the lower creatures, and to which he owes not a few of his most exquisite enjoyments. The poet accepted the bee as a sign of high significance: the geologist also accepts her as a sign. Her entombed remains testify to the gradual fitting up of our earth as a place of habitation for a creature destined to seek delight for the mind and the eye as certainly as for the grosser senses, and in especial marks the introduction of the stately forest trees, and the arrival of the delicious flowers. And, "Thus in their stations lifting toward the sky The foliaged head in cloud-like majesty, The shadow-casting race of trees survive: Thus in the train of spring arrive Sweet flowers: what living eye hath viewed Their myriads? endlessly renewed Wherever strikes the sun's glad ray, Where'er the subtile waters stray, Wherever sportive zephyrs bend Their course, or genial showers descend." LECTURE SECOND. THE PALÆONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF ANIMALS. Amid the unceasing change and endless variety of nature there occur certain great radical ideas, that, while they form, if I may so express myself, the groundwork of the change,--the basis of the variety,--admit in themselves of no change or variety whatever. They constitute the aye-enduring tissue on which the ever-changing patterns of creation are inscribed: the patterns are ever varying; the tissue which exhibits them for ever remains the same. In the animal kingdom, for instance, the prominent ideas have always been uniform. However much the faunas of the various geologic periods may have differed from each other, or from the fauna which now exists, in their general aspect and character, they were all, if I may so speak, equally underlaid by the great leading ideas which still constitute the master types of animal life. And these leading ideas are four in number. _First_, there is the _star-like_ type of life,--life embodied in a form that, as in the corals, the sea-anemones, the sea-urchins, and the star-fishes, radiates outwards from a centre; _second_, there is the _articulated_ type of life,--life embodied in a form composed, as in the worms, crustaceans, and insects, of a series of rings united by their edges, but more or less moveable on each other; _third_, there is the bilateral or _molluscan_ type of life,--life embodied in a form in which there is a duality of corresponding parts, ranged, as in the cuttle-fishes, the clams, and the snails, on the sides of a central axis or plane; and _fourth_, there is the _vertebrate_ type of life,--life embodied in a form in which an internal skeleton is built up into two cavities placed the one over the other; the upper for the reception of the nervous centres, cerebral and spinal,--the lower for the lodgment of the respiratory, circulatory, and digestive organs. Such have been the four central ideas of the faunas of every succeeding creation, except perhaps the earliest of all, that of the Lower Silurian System, in which, so far as is yet known, only three of the number existed,--the radiated, articulated, and molluscan ideas or types. That Omnipotent Creator, infinite in his resources,--who, in at least the details of his workings, seems never yet to have repeated himself, but, as Lyell well expresses it, breaks, when the parents of a species have been moulded, the dye in which they were cast,--manifests himself, in these four great ideas, as the unchanging and unchangeable One. They serve to bind together the present with all the past; and determine the unity of the authorship of a wonderfully complicated design, executed on a groundwork broad as time, and whose scope and bearing are deep as eternity. The fauna of the Silurian System bears in all its three great types the stamp of a fashion peculiarly antique, and which, save in a few of the mollusca, has long since become obsolete. Its radiate animals are chiefly corals, simple or compound, whose inhabitants may have somewhat resembled the sea-anemones; with zoophites, akin mayhap to the sea-pens, though the relationship must have been a remote one; and numerous crinoids, or stone lilies, some of which consisted of but a sculptured calyx without petals, while others threw off a series of long, flexible arms, that divided and subdivided like the branches of a tree, and were thickly fringed by hair-like fibres. There is great variety and beauty among these Silurian crinoids; and, from the ornate sculpture of their groined and ribbed _capitals_ and slender _columns_, the Gothic architect might borrow not a few striking ideas. [Illustration: Fig. 46. CYATHAXONIA DALMANI.] The difference between the older and newer fashions, as exemplified in the cup-shaped corals, may be indicated in a single sentence. The ancient corals were stars of four rays, or of multiples of four; the modern corals are stars of six rays, or of multiples of six. But though, at a certain definite period,--that during which the great Palæozoic division ended and the Secondary division began--nature, in forming this class of creatures, discarded the number four, and adopted instead the number six, the great leading idea of the star itself was equally retained in corals of the modern as in those of the more ancient type. [Illustration: Fig. 47. GLYPTOCRINUS DECADACTYLUS. (Hudson River Group, Lower Silurian.)] [Illustration: Fig. 48. CALYMENE BLUMENBACHII.] [Illustration: Fig. 49. ORTHISINA VERNEUILI.] [Illustration: Fig. 50. LITUITES CORNU-ARIETIS.] [Illustration: Fig. 51. LINGULA LOWISII.] The articulata of the Silurian period bore a still more peculiar character. They consisted mainly of the Trilobites,--a family in whose nicely-jointed shells the armorer of the middle ages might have found almost all the contrivances of his craft, anticipated, with not a few besides which he had failed to discover; and which, after receiving so immense a development during the middle and later times of the Silurian period, that whole rocks were formed almost exclusively of their remains, gradually died out in the times of the Old Red Sandstone, and disappeared for ever from creation after the Carboniferous Limestone had been deposited. The Palæontologist knows no more unique family than that of the Trilobites, or a family more unlike any which now exists, or a family which marks with more certainty the early rocks in which they occur. And yet, though formed in a fashion that perished myriads of ages ago, how admirably does it not exhibit the articulated type of being, and illustrate that unity of design which, amid endless diversity, pervades all nature. The mollusca of the Silurians ranged from the high cephalopoda, represented in our existing seas by the nautili and the cuttle-fishes, to the low brachipods, some of whose congeners may still be detected in the terebratula of our Highland lochs and bays, and some in the lingulæ of the southern hemisphere. The cephalopods of the system are all of an obsolete type, that disappeared myriads of ages ago,--a remark which, with the exceptions just intimated, and perhaps one or two others, applies equally to its brachipods; but of at least two of its intermediate families,--the gasteropoda and lamellibranchiata,--several of the forms resemble those of recent shells of the temperate latitudes. In its general aspect, however, the Silurian fauna, antiquely fashioned, as I have said, as became its place in the primeval ages of existence, was unlike any other which the world ever saw; and the absence of the vertebrata, or at least the inconspicuous place which they occupied if they were at all present, must have imparted to the whole, as a group, a humble and mediocre character. It seems to have been for many ages together a creation of molluscs, corals, and Crustacea. At length, in an upper bed of the system, immediately under the base of the Old Red Sandstone, the remains of the earliest known fishes appear, blent with what also appears for the first time,--the fragmentary remains of a terrestrial vegetation. The rocks beneath this ancient bone-bed have yielded, as I have already said, no trace of any plant higher than the Thallogens, or at least not higher than the Zosteracea,--plants whose proper habitat is the sea; but, through an apparently simultaneous advance of the two kingdoms, animal and vegetable,--though of course the simultaneousness may be but merely apparent,--the first land plants and the first vertebrates appear together in the same deposit. What, let us inquire, is the character of these ancient fishes, that first complete the scale of animated nature in its four master ideas, by adding the vertebrate to the invertebrate divisions? So far as is yet known, they all consist of one well marked order,--that placoidal order of Agassiz that to an internal framework of cartilage adds an external armature, consisting of plates, spines, and shagreen points of solid bone. Either of the two kinds of dog-fishes on our coasts,--the spiked or spotted,--maybe accepted as not inadequate representatives of this order as it now exists. The Port Jackson shark, however,--a creature that to the dorsal spines and shagreen-covered skin of the common dog-fish adds a mouth terminal at the snout, not placed beneath, as in most other sharks, and a palate covered with a dense pavement of crushing teeth,--better illustrates the order as it first appeared in creation than any of our British placoids. [Illustration: Fig. 52. PORT JACKSON SHARK. (Cestracion Phillippi.)] [Illustration: Fig. 53.[13] ----------------------- Silurian. -----+-----------------Placoid. | | Ganoid. Old Red. | | -----+----+------------ | | Carboniferous. | | -----+----+------------ Permian. | | -----+----+------------ Triassic. | | -----+----+------------ | | Oolitic. | | -----+----+----+----+-- Cretaceous. | | | | Ctenoid and Cycloid. | | | | -----+----+----+----+-- Tertiary. | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+-- Geologic [Pla. Gan. Cte. Cyc.] arrangement. Agassiz's [Pla. Gan. Cte. Cyc.] arrangement. THE GENEALOGY OF FISHES.] [Illustration: Fig. 54. AMBLYPTERUS MACROPTERTUS. From the Coal at Saarbruck. (A Ganoid of the Carboniferous System.)] [Illustration: Fig. 55. LEBIAS CEPHALOTES. Cycloids of Aix. (_Miocene._)] [Illustration: Fig. 56. PLATAX ALTISSIMUS. A Ctenoid of Monte Bolca. (_Eocene._)] And here let me adduce another and very remarkable instance of the correspondence which obtains between the sequence in which certain classes of organisms were first ushered into being, and the order of classification adopted, after many revisions, by the higher naturalists. Cuvier, with not a few of the ichthyologists who preceded him, arranged the fishes into two distinct series,--the Cartilaginous and Osseous; and these last he mainly divided into the hard or spiny-finned fishes, and the soft or joint-finned fishes. He placed the sturgeon in his Cartilaginous series; while in his soft-finned order he found a place for the Polypterus of the Nile and the Lepidosteus of the Ohio and St. Lawrence. But the arrangement, though it seemed at the time one of the best and most natural possible, failed to meet any corresponding arrangement in the course of geologic history. The place assigned to the class of fishes as a whole corresponded to their place in the Palæontological scale;--- first of the vertebrate division in the order of their appearance, they border, as in the "_Animal Kingdom_" of the naturalist, on the invertebrate divisions. But it was not until the new classification of Agassiz had ranged them after a different fashion that the correspondence became complete in all its parts. First, he erected the fishes that to an internal cartilaginous skeleton unite an external armature of plates and points of bone, into his Placoid order; next, gathering together a mere handful of individuals from among the various orders and families over which they had been scattered,--the sturgeons from among the cartilaginous fishes, and the lepidosteus and polypterus from among the Clupia or herrings,--he erected into a small ganoid order all the fishes that are covered, whatever the consistency of their skeleton, by a continuous or nearly continuous armor of enamelled bone, or by great bony plates that lock into each other at their edges. Out of the remaining fishes,--those covered with scales of a horny substance, and which now comprise nearly nine tenths of the whole class,--he erected two orders more,--a Ctenoid order, consisting of fishes whose scales, like those of the perch, are pectinated at their lower edges like the teeth of a comb, and a Cycloid order, composed of fishes whose scales, like those of the salmon, are defined all around by a simple continuous margin; and no sooner was the division effected than it was found to cast a singularly clear light on the early history of the class. The earliest fishes--firstborn of their family--seem to have been all placoids. The Silurian System has not yet afforded trace of any other vertebral animal. With the Old Red Sandstone the ganoids were ushered upon the scene in amazing abundance; and for untold ages, comprising mayhap millions of years, the entire ichthyic class consisted, so far as is yet known, of but these two orders. During the times of the Old Red Sandstone, of the Carboniferous, of the Permian, of the Triassic, and of the Oolitic Systems, all fishes, though apparently as numerous individually as they are now, were comprised in the ganoidal and placoidal orders. The period of these orders seems to have been nearly correspondent with the reign, in the vegetable kingdom, of the Acrogens and Gymnogens, with the intermediate classes, their allies. At length, during the ages of the Chalk, the Cycloids and Ctenoids were ushered in, and were gradually developed in creation until the human period, in which they seem to have reached their culminating point, and now many times exceed in number and importance all other fishes. We do not see a sturgeon (our British representative of the ganoids) once in a twelvemonth; and though the skate and dog-fish (our representatives of the placoids) are greatly less rare, their number bears but a small proportion to that of the fishes belonging to the two prevailing orders, of which thousands of boat-loads are landed on our coasts every day. The all but entire disappearance of the ganoids from creation is surely a curious and not unsuggestive circumstance. In the human family there are races that have long since reached their culminating point, and are now either fast disappearing or have already disappeared. The Aztecs of Central America, or the Copts of the valley of the Nile, are but the inconsiderable fragments of once mighty nations, memorials of whose greatness live in the vast sepulchral mounds of the far West, or in the temples of Thebes or Luxor, or the pyramids of Gizah. But in the rivers of these very countries,--in the Polypterus of the Nile, or the Lepidosteus of the Mississippi,--we are presented with the few surviving fragments of a dynasty compared with which that of Egypt or of Central America occupied but an exceedingly small portion of either space or time. The dynasty of the ganoids was at one time coextensive with every river, lake, and sea, and endured during the unreckoned _eons_ which extended from the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone until those of the Chalk. I may here mention, that as there are orders of plants, such as the Rosaceæ and the Grasses, that scarce preceded man in their appearance, so there are families of fishes that seem peculiarly to belong to the human period. Of these, there is a family very familiar on our coasts, and which, though it furnishes none of our higher ichthyic luxuries, is remarkable for the numbers of the human family which it provides with a wholesome and palatable food. The delicate Salmonidæ and the Pleuronectidæ,--families to which the salmon and turbot belong,--were ushered into being as early as the times of the Chalk; but the Gadidæ or cod family,--that family to which the cod proper, the haddock, the dorse, the whiting, the coal-fish, the pollock, the hake, the torsk, and the ling belong, with many other useful and wholesome species,--did not precede man by at least any period of time appreciable to the geologist. No trace of the family has yet been detected in even the Tertiary rocks. [Illustration: Fig. 57 PTERICHTHYS OBLONGUS. (One half nat. size.)] Of the ganoids of the second age of vertebrate existence,--that of the Old Red Sandstone,--some were remarkable for the strangeness of their forms, and some for constituting links of connection which no longer exist in nature, between the ganoid and placoid orders. The Acanth family, which ceased with the Coal Measures, was characterized, especially in its Old Red species, by a combination of traits common to both orders; and among the extremer forms, in which Palæontologists for a time failed to detect that of the fish at all, we reckon those of the genera Coccosteus, Pterichthys, and Cephalaspis. The more aberrant genera, however, even while they consisted each of several species, were comparatively short lived. The Coccosteus and Cephalaspis were restricted to but one formation apiece; while the Pterichthys, which appears for the first time in the lower deposits of the Old Red Sandstone, becomes extinct at its close. On the other hand, some of the genera that exemplified the general type of their class were extremely long lived. The Celacanths were reproduced in many various species, from the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone to those of the Chalk; and the Cestracions, which appear in the Upper Ludlow Rocks as the oldest of fishes, continue in at least one species to exist still. It would almost seem as if some such law influenced the destiny of genera in this ichthyic class, as that which we find so often exemplified in our species. The dwarf, or giant, or deformed person, is seldom a long liver;--all the more remarkable instances of longevity have been furnished by individuals cast in the ordinary mould and proportions of the species. Not a few of these primordial ganoids wore, however, of the highest rank and standing ever exemplified by their class; and we find Agassiz boldly assigning a reason for their superiority to their successors, important for the fact which it embodies, and worthy, as coming from him, of our most respectful attention. "It is plain," we find him saying, "that before the class of reptiles was introduced upon our globe, the fishes, being then the only representatives of the type of vertebrata, were invested with the characters of a higher order, embodying, as it were, a prospective view of a higher development in another class, which was introduced as a distinct type only at a later period; and from that time the reptilian character, which had been so prominent in the oldest fishes, was gradually reduced, till in more recent periods, and in the present creation, the fishes lost all this herpetological relationship, and were at last endowed with characters which contrast as much, when compared with those of reptiles, as they agreed closely in the beginning. Lepidosteus alone reminds us in our time of these old-fashioned characters of the class of fishes as it was in former days." [Illustration: Fig. 58 PLEURACANTHUS LÆVISSIMUS. (_Coal Measures._) (Half nat. size.)] The ancient fishes seem to have received their fullest development during the Carboniferous period. Their number was very great: some of them attained to an enormous size, and, though the true reptile had already appeared, they continued to retain, till the close of the system, the high reptilian character and organization. Nothing, however, so impresses the observer as the formidable character of the offensive weapons with which they were furnished, and the amazing strength of their defensive armature. I need scarce say, that the Palæontologist finds no trace in nature of that golden age of the world, of which the poets delighted to sing, when all creatures lived together in unbroken peace, and war and bloodshed were unknown. Ever since animal life began upon our planet, there existed, in all the departments of being, carnivorous classes, who could not live but by the death of their neighbors, and who were armed, in consequence, for their destruction, like the butcher with his axe and knife, and the angler with his hook and spear. But there were certain periods in the history of the past, during which these weapons assumed a more formidable aspect than at others; and never were they more formidable than in the times of the Coal Measures. The teeth of the Rhizodus--a ganoidal fish of our coal fields--were more sharp and trenchant than those of the crocodile of the Nile, and in the larger specimens fully four times the bulk and size of the teeth of the hugest reptile of this species that now lives. The dorsal spine of its contemporary, the Gyracanthus, a great placoid, much exceeded in size that of any existing fish: it was a mighty spear head, ornately carved like that of a New Zealand chief, but in a style that, when he first saw a specimen in my collection, greatly excited the admiration of Mr. Ruskin. But one of the most remarkable weapons of the period was the sting of the Pleuracanthus, another great placoid of the age of gigantic fishes. It was sharp and polished as a stiletto, but, from its rounded form and dense structure, of great strength; and along two of its sides, from the taper point to within a few inches of the base, there ran a thickly-set row of barbs, hooked downwards, like the thorns that bristle on the young shoots of the wild rose, and which must have rendered it a weapon not merely of destruction, but also of torture. The defensive armor of the period, especially that of its ganoids, seems to have been us remarkable for its powers of resistance as the offensive must have been for their potency in the assault; and it seems probable that in the great strength of the bony and enamelled armature of this order of fishes we have the secret of the extremely formidable character of the teeth, spines, and stings that coexisted along with it. [Illustration: Fig. 59. CARCHARIAS PRODUCTUS. Cutting Tooth. (_Miocene._)] [Illustration: Fig. 60. PLACODUS GIGAS. Crushing Teeth. (_Trias._)] Such of the fishes of the present time as live on crustacea and the shelled molluscs,--such as the Wrasse or rock-fish family, and at least one of the Goby family, the sea-wolf,--have an apparatus of crushing teeth greatly more solid and strong than the teeth of such of their contemporaries as are either herbivorous or feed on the weaker families of their own class. A similar remark applies to the ancient sharks, as contrasted with those of later times. So long as the strongly-armed ganoidal order prevailed in nature, the sharks were furnished with massive crushing teeth; but when the ganoids waned in creation, and the soft-scaled cycloid and ctenoid orders took and amply filled the place which they had left vacant, the well known modern form of sharks' teeth was introduced,--a form much rather suited for cutting soft bodies than for crushing hard ones. In fine, the offensive weapons of the times of the Coal Measures seem very formidable, just as those personal weapons of the middle ages seem so that were borne at a time when every soldier took the field cased in armor of proof. The slim scimitar or slender rapier would have availed but little against massive iron helmets or mail coats of tempered steel. And so the warriors of the period armed themselves with ponderous maces, battle-axes as massive as hammers, and double-handed swords of great weight and strength. Before passing onwards to other and higher classes and orders, as they occurred in creation, permit me to make the formidable armor of the earlier fishes, offensive and defensive, the subject of a single remark. We are told by Goethe, in his autobiography, that he had attained his sixth year when the terrible earthquake at Lisbon took place,--"an event," he says, "which greatly disturbed" his "peace of mind for the first time." He could not reconcile a catastrophe so suddenly destructive to thousands, with the ideas which he had already formed for himself of a Providence all-powerful and all-benevolent. But he afterwards learned, he tells us, to recognize in such events the "_God of the Old Testament._" I know not in what spirit the remark was made; but this I know, that it is the God of the Old Testament whom we see exhibited in all nature and all providence; and that it is at once wisdom and duty in his rational creatures, however darkly they may perceive or imperfectly they may comprehend, to hold in implicit faith that the Adorable Monarch of all the past and of all the future is a King who "can do no wrong." This early exhibition of tooth, and spine, and sting,--of weapons constructed alike to cut and to pierce,--to unite two of the most indispensable requirements of the modern armorer,--a keen edge to a strong back,--nay, stranger still, the examples furnished in this primeval time, of weapons formed not only to kill, but also to torture,--must be altogether at variance with the preconceived opinions of those who hold that until man appeared in creation, and darkened its sympathetic face with the stain of moral guilt, the reign of violence and outrage did not begin, and that there was no death among the inferior creatures, and no suffering. But preconceived opinion, whether it hold fast, with Lactantius and the old Schoolmen, to the belief that there can be no antipodes, or assert, with Caccini and Bellarmine, that our globe hangs lazily in the midst of the heavens, while the sun moves round it, must yield ultimately to scientific truth. And it is a truth as certain as the existence of a southern hemisphere, or the motion of the earth round both its own axis and the great solar centre, that, untold ages ere man had sinned or suffered, the animal creation exhibited exactly its present state of war,--that the strong, armed with formidable weapons, exquisitely constructed to kill, preyed upon the weak; and that the weak, sheathed, many of them, in defensive armor equally admirable in its mechanism, and ever increasing and multiplying upon the earth far beyond the requirements of the mere maintenance of their races, were enabled to escape, as species, the assaults of the tyrant tribes, and to exist unthinned for unreckoned ages. It has been weakly and impiously urged,--as if it were merely with the geologist that men had to settle this matter,--that such an economy of warfare and suffering,--of warring and of being warred upon,--would be, in the words of the infant Goethe, unworthy of an all-powerful and all-benevolent Providence, and in effect a libel on his government and character. But that grave charge we leave the objectors to settle with the great Creator himself. Be it theirs, not ours, according to the poet, to "Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod, Rejudge his justice, be the god of God." Be it enough for the geologist rightly to interpret the record of creation,--to declare the truth as he finds it,--to demonstrate, from evidence no clear intellect ever yet resisted, that he, the Creator, from whom even the young lions seek their food, and who giveth to all the beasts, great and small, their meat in due season, ever wrought as he now works in his animal kingdom,--that he gave to the primeval fishes their spines and their stings,--to the primeval reptiles their trenchant teeth and their strong armor of bone,--to the primeval mammals their great tusks and their sharp claws,--that he of old divided all his creatures, as now, into animals of prey and the animals preyed upon,--that from the beginning of things he inseparably established among his non-responsible existences the twin laws of generation and of death,--nay, further, passing from the established truths of _Geologic_ to one of the best established truths of _Theologic_ science,--God's eternal justice and truth,--let us assert, that in the Divine government the matter of fact always determines the question of right, and that whatever has been done by him who rendereth no account to man of his matters, he had in all ages, and in all places, an unchallengeable right to do. The oldest known reptiles appear just a little before the close of the Old Red Sandstone, just as the oldest known fishes appeared just a little before the close of the Silurian System. What seems to be the Upper Old Red of our own country, though there still hangs a shade of doubt on the subject, has furnished the remains of a small reptile, equally akin, it would appear, to the lizards and the batrachians; and what seems to be the Upper Old Red of the United States has exhibited the foot-tracks of a larger animal of the same class, which not a little resemble those which would be impressed on recent sand or clay by the alligator of the Mississippi, did not the alligator of the Mississippi efface its own footprints (a consequence of the shortness of its legs) by the trail of its abdomen. In the Coal Measures, the reptiles hitherto found,--and it is still little more than ten years since the first was detected,--are all allied, though not without a cross of the higher crocodilian or lacertian nature, to the batrachian order,--that lowest order of the reptiles to which the frogs, newts, and salamanders belong. These reptiles of the carboniferous era, though only a few twelvemonths ago we little suspected the fact, seem to have been not very rare in our own neighborhood. My attention was called some time since by Mr. Henry Cadell,--an intelligent practical geologist,--to certain appearances in one of the Duke of Buccleuch's coal pits near Dalkeith, which lie regarded as the tracks of air-breathing quadrupeds; and, after examining a specimen, containing four footprints, which he had brought above ground, and which not a little excited my curiosity, we visited the pit together. And there, in a side working about half a mile from the pit mouth, and about four hundred feet under the surface, I found the roof of the coal, which rose at a high angle, traversed by so many foot-tracks, upwards, downwards, and athwart, that it cost me some little care to trace the individual lines. At least one of the number, however,--consisting of eleven footprints of the right and as many of the left foot--I was able to trace from side to side of the working, a distance of four yards; and several of the others for shorter spaces. The prints, which were reverses or casts in a very coarse sandstone, were about thirtecn inches apart across the creature's chest, and rather more than a foot apart from its fore to its hinder limbs. They were alternately larger and smaller,--the smaller (those of the fore feet) measuring about four inches in length, and the larger (those of the hinder feet) about six inches. The number of toes seemed to be alternately four and five; but from the circumstance that the original matrix on which the tracks had been impressed,--a micaceous clay resolved into a loose fissile sandstone,--had fallen away in the working of the pit, leaving but the boldly-relieved though ill-defined casts on the coarse sandstone, I could not definitely determine the point. Enough, however, remained to show that at that spot,--little more than a mile from where the Duke of Buccleuch's palace now stands,--large reptiles had congregated in considerable numbers shortly after the great eight feet coal seam of the Dalkeith basin had been formed. In another part of the pit I found foot-tracks of apparently the same animal in equal abundance, but still less distinct in their state of keeping. But they bore testimony with the others to the comparative abundance of reptilian life at an early period, when the coal-bearing strata of the empire were little more than half deposited. It was not, however, until the Permian and Triassic Systems had come to a close, and even the earlier ages of the Oolitic System had passed away, that the class received its fullest development in creation. And certainly very wonderful was the development which it then did receive. Reptiles became everywhere the lords and masters of this lower world. When any class of the air-breathing vertebrates is very largely developed, we find it taking possession of all the three old terrestrial elements,--earth, air, and water. The human period, for instance, like that which immediately preceded it, is peculiarly a period of mammals; and we find the class, _free_, if I may so express myself, of the three elements, disputing possession of the sea with the fishes, in its Cetaceans, its seals, and its sea-lions, and of the air with the birds, in its numerous genera of the bat family. Further, not until the great mammaliferous period is fairly ushered in do either the bats or the whales make their appearance in creation. Remains of Oolitic reptiles have been mistaken in more than one instance for those of Cetacea; but it is now generally held that the earliest known specimens of the family belong to the Tertiary ages, while those of the oldest bats occur in the Eocene of the Paris Basin, associated with the bones of dolphins, lamantines, and morses. Now, in the times of the Oolite it was the reptilian class that possessed itself of all the elements. Its gigantic enaliosaurs, huge reptilian _whales_ mounted on paddles, were the tyrants of the ocean, and must have reigned supreme over the already reduced class of fishes; its pterodactyles,--dragons as strange as were ever feigned by romancer of the middle ages, and that to the jaws and teeth of the crocodile added the wings of a bat and the body and tail of an ordinary mammal, had "the power of the air," and, pursuing the fleetest insects in their flight, captured and bore them down;[14] its lakes and rivers abounded in crocodiles and fresh water tortoises of ancient type and fashion; and its woods and plains were the haunts of a strange reptilian fauna, of what has been well termed "fearfully great lizards,"--some of which, such as the iguanodon, rivalled the largest elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in length and bulk. Judging from what remains, it seems not improbable that the reptiles of this Oolitic period were quite as numerous individually, and consisted of well nigh as many genera and species, as all the mammals of the present time. In the cretaceous ages, the class, though still the dominant one, is visibly reduced in its standing; it had reached its culminating point in the Oolite, and then began to decline; and with the first dawn of the Tertiary division we find it occupying, as now, a very subordinate place in creation. Curiously enough, it is not until its times of humiliation and decay that one of the most remarkable of its orders appears,--an order itself illustrative of extreme degradation, and which figures largely, in every scheme of mythology that borrowed through traditional channels from Divine revelation, as a meet representative of man's great enemy the Evil One. I of course refer to the ophidian or serpent family. The earliest ophidian remains known to the Palæontologist occur in that ancient deposit of the Tertiary division known as the London Clay, and must have belonged to serpents, some of them allied to the Pythons, some to the sea-snakes, which, judging from the corresponding parts of recent species, must have been from fourteen to twenty feet in length. [Illustration: Fig. 61. VESPERTILIO PARISIENSIS. A Bat of the Eocene.] [Illustration: Fig. 62 ICHTHYOSAURUS COMMUNIS. (_Lias._)] [Illustration: Fig. 63. PLESIOSAURUS DOLICHODEIRUS. (_Lias._)] [Illustration: Fig. 64. PTERODACTYLUS CRASSIROSTRIS. (_Oolite._)] [Illustration: Fig. 65. CHELONIA BENSTEDI. (_Chalk._)] [Illustration: Fig. 66. PALÆOPHIS TOLIAPICUS. (_Ophidian of the Eocene._)] And here let us again pause for a moment, to remark how strangely these irascible, repulsive reptiles,--creatures lengthened out far beyond the proportions of the other members of their class by mere vegetative repetitions of the vertebræ,--condemned to derive, worm-like, their ability of progressive motion from the ring-like scutes of the abdomen--venomous in many of their species,--formidable in others to even the noblest animals, from their fascinating powers and their great craft,--without, fore or hinder limbs, without thoracic or pelvic arches,--the very types and exemplars (our highest naturalists being the judges) of the extreme of animal degradation,--let us, I say, remark how strangely their history has been mixed up with that of man and of religion in all the older mythologies, and in that Divine Revelation whence the older mythologies were derived. It was one of the most ancient of the Phoenician fables, that the great antagonist of the gods was a gigantic serpent, that had at one time been their subject, but revolted against them and became their enemy. It was a monstrous serpent that assailed and strove to destroy the _mother_ of Apollo ere yet the birth of the god, but which, long after, _Apollo_ in turn assaulted and slew. It was a great serpent that watched over the apples of the Hesperides, and that Hercules, ere he could possess himself of the fruit, had to combat and kill. It was a frightful serpent that guarded the golden fleece from Jason, and which the hero had to destroy in the first instance, and next to exterminate the strange brood of armed men that sprang up from its sown teeth. In short, the old mythologies are well nigh as full of the serpent as those ancient Runic obelisks of our country, whose endless knots and complicated fretwork are formed throughout of the interlacings of snakes. Let us, however, accept as representative of this innumerable class of legends, the classical story, rendered yet more classical by the profound and reverend comment given by Bacon in his "Wisdom of the Ancients." "Jupiter and the other gods," says the philosopher, in his simple version of the tradition, "conferred upon men a most acceptable and desirable boon,--the gift of perpetual youth. But men, foolishly overjoyed hereat, laid this present of the gods upon an ass, who, in returning back with it, being extremely thirsty, and coming to a fountain, the serpent who was guardian thereof would not suffer him to drink but upon condition of receiving the burden he carried, whatever it should be. The silly ass complied; and thus the perpetual renewal of youth was for a sup of water transferred from men to the race of serpents." "That this gift of perpetual youth should pass from men to serpents," continues Bacon, "seems added, by way of ornament and illustration, to the fable." And it certainly _has_ much the appearance of an after-thought. But how very striking the resemblance, borne by the story, as a whole, to that narrative in the opening page of human history which exhibits the first parents of the race as yielding up to the temptation of the serpent the gift of immortality; and further, how remarkable the fact, that the reptile selected as typical here of the great fallen spirit that kept not his first estate, should be at once the reptile of latest appearance in creation, and the one selected by philosophical naturalists as representative of a reversed process in the course of being,--of a downward, sinking career, from the vertebrate antetype towards greatly lower types in the invertebrate divisions! The fallen spirit is represented in revelation by what we are now taught to recognize in science as a _degraded_ reptile. [Illustration: Fig. 67. BIRD TRACKS OF THE CONNECTICUT. (_Lias or Oolite._)] [Illustration: Fig. 68. FOSSIL FOOTPRINT. Connecticut.] Birds make their first appearance in a Red Sandstone deposit of the United States in the valley of the Connecticut, which was at one time supposed to belong to the Triassic System, but which is now held to be at least not older than the times of the Lias. No fragments of the skeletons of birds have yet been discovered in formations older than the Chalk: the Connecticut remains are those of footprints exclusively; and yet they tell their extraordinary story, so far as it extends, with remarkable precision and distinctness. They were apparently all of the Grallæ or stilt order of birds,--an order to which the cranes, herons, and bustards belong, with the ostriches and cassowaries, and which is characterized by possessing but three toes on each foot (one species of ostrich has but two), or, if a fourth toe be present, so imperfectly is it developed in most of the cases, that it fails to reach the ground. And in almost all the footprints of the primeval birds of the Connecticut there are only three toes exhibited. Peculiar, ill understood laws regulate the phalangal divisions of the various animals. It is a law of the human kind, for instance, that the thumb should consist of but three phalanges; while the fingers, even the smallest, consist of four. And, in the same way, it is a law generally exemplified among birds, that of the three toes which correspond to the fingers, the inner toe should be composed of three phalanges, the middle or largest toe of four phalanges, and the outer toe, though but second in point of size, of five phalanges. Such is the law now, and such was equally the law, as shown by the American footprints, in the times of the Lias. Some of the impressions are of singular distinctness. Every claw and phalange has left its mark in the stone; while the trifid termination of the tarso-metatarsal bone leaves three marks more,--fifteen in all,--the true ornithic number. In some of the specimens even the pressure of a metatarsal brush, still possessed by some birds, is distinctly traceable; nay, there are instances in which the impress of the dermoid papillæ has remained as sharply as if made in wax. But the immense size of some of these footprints served to militate for a time against belief in their ornithic origin. The impressions that are but secondary in point of size greatly exceed those of the hugest birds which now exist; while those of the largest class equal the prints of the bulkier quadrupeds. There are tridactyle footprints in the red sandstones of Connecticut that measure eighteen inches in length from the heel to the middle claw, nearly thirteen inches in breadth from the outer to the inner toe, and which indicate, from their distance apart in the straight line, a stride of about six feet in the creature that impressed them in these ancient sands,--measurements that might well startle zoologists who had derived their experience of the ornithic class from existing birds exclusively. Comparatively recent discoveries have, however, if not lessened, at least familiarized us to the wonder. In a deposit of New Zealand that dates little if at all in advance of the human period, there have been detected the remains of birds scarce inferior in size to those of America in the Liassic ages. The bones of the _Dinornus giganteus_, exhibited by the late Dr. Mantell in Edinburgh in the autumn of 1850, greatly exceeded in bulk those of the largest horse. A thigh bone sixteen inches in length measured nearly nine inches in circumference in the middle of the shaft: the head of a tibia measured twenty-one inches in circumference. It was estimated that a foot entire in all its parts, which formed an interesting portion of the exhibition, would, when it was furnished with nails, and covered by the integuments, have measured about fifteen inches in length; and it was calculated by a very competent authority, Professor Owen, that of the other bones of the leg to which it belonged, the tibia must have been about two feet nine inches, and the femur about fourteen and a half inches long. The larger thigh bone referred to must have belonged, it was held, to a bird that stood from eleven to twelve feet high,--the extreme height of the great African elephant. Such were the monster birds of a comparatively recent period; and their remains serve to render credible the evidence furnished by the great footprints of their remote predecessors of the Lias. The huge feet of the greatest Dinornus whose bones have yet been found would have left impressions scarcely an inch shorter than those of the still huger birds of the Connecticut. Is it not truly wonderful, that in this late age of the world, in which the invention of the poets seems to content itself with humbler and lowlier flights than of old, we should thus find the facts of geology fully rivalling, in the strange and the _outré_, the wildest fancies of the romancers who flourished in the middle ages? I have already referred to flying dragons,--real existences of the Oolitic period,--that were quite as extraordinary of type, if not altogether so huge of bulk, as those with which the Seven Champions of Christendom used to do battle; and here are we introduced to birds of the Liassic ages that were scarce less gigantic than the roc of Sinbad the Sailor. They are fraught with strange meanings these footprints of the Connecticut. They tell of a time far removed into the by-past eternity, when great birds frequented by myriads the shores of a nameless lake, to wade into its shallows in quest of mail-covered fishes of the ancient type, or long-extinct molluscs; while reptiles equally gigantic, and of still stranger proportions, haunted the neighboring swamps and savannahs; and when the same sun that shone on the tall moving forms beside the waters, and threw their long shadows across the red sands, lighted up the glades of deep forests, all of whose fantastic productions,--tree, bush, and herb,--have even in their very species long since passed away. And of this scene of things only the footprints remain,--"footprints on the sands of time," that tell us, among other matters, whence the graceful American poet derived his quiet but singularly effective and unmistakeably indigenous figure:-- "Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, _And, departing, leave behind us_ _Footprints on the sand of time._ Footprints that perhaps another, Sailing o'er life's solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again." [Illustration: Fig. 69. THYLACOTHERIUM PREVOSTI. (_Stonisfield Slate._)] With the Stonisfield slates,--a deposit which lies above what is known as the Inferior Oolite,--the remains of mammaliferous animals first appear. As, however, no other mammalian remains occur until after the close of the great Secondary Division, and as certain marked peculiarities attach to these Oolitic ones, it may be well to inquire whether their place, so far in advance of their fellows, may not be indicative of a radical difference of character,--a difference considerable enough to suggest to the zoologist an improvement in his scheme of classification. It has been shown by Professor Owen,--our highest authority in comparative anatomy,--that while one Stonisfield genus unequivocally belonged to the marsupial order, another of its genera bears also certain of the marsupial traits; and that the group which they composed,--a very small one, and consisting exclusively of minute insect-eating animals,--exhibits in its general aspect the characteristics of this pouched family. Even the genus of the group that least resembles them was pronounced by Cuvier to have its nearest affinities with the opossums. And let us mark how very much may be implied in this circumstance. In the "_Animal Kingdom_" of the great naturalist just named, the marsupiata, or pouched animals, are made to occupy the fourth place among the nine orders of the Mammalia; but should they not rather occupy a place intermediate between the placental mammals and the birds? and does not nature indicate their true position by the position which she assigns to them in the geologic scale? The birds are oviparous; and between the extrusion of the egg and the development of the perfect young bird they have to hatch it into life during a long period of incubation. The marsupiata are not oviparous, for their _eggs_ want the enveloping shell or skin; but they, too, are extruded in an exceedingly rudimentary and foetal state, and have to undergo in the pouch a greatly longer period of _incubation_ than that demanded by nature for any bird whatever. The young kangaroo is extruded, after it has remained for little more than a month in the womb, as a foetus scarcely an inch in length by somewhat less than half an inch in breadth: it is blind, exhibiting merely dark eye spots; its limbs are so rudimentary, that even the hinder legs, so largely developed in the genus when mature, exist as mere stumps; it is unable even to suck, but, holding permanently on by a minute dug, has the sustaining fluid occasionally pressed into its mouth by the mother. And, undergoing a peculiar but not the less real process of incubation, the creature that had to remain for little more than a month in the womb,--strictly thirty-nine days,--has to remain in the mother's pouch, ere it is fully developed and able to provide for itself, for a period of eight months. It is found to increase in weight during this hatching process, from somewhat less than an ounce to somewhat more than eight pounds. Now, this surely is a process quite as nearly akin to the incubation of egg-bearing birds as to the ordinary nursing process of the placental mammals; and on the occult but apparently real principle, that the true arrangement of the animal kingdom is that which we find exemplified by the successive introduction of its various classes and orders in the course of geologic history, should we not anticipate a point of time for the introduction of the marsupiata, intermediate between the widely-distant points at which the egg-bearing birds and the true placental mammals appeared? Ranged at once chronologically, and by their mode of reproduction, the various classes of the vertebrata would run, did we accept the suggested reading, as follows:--First appear cold-blooded vertebrates (fishes), that propagate by eggs or spawn,--chiefly by the latter. Next appear cold-blooded vertebrates (reptiles), that propagate by eggs or spawn,--chiefly by the former. Then appear warm-blooded vertebrates (birds), that propagate by eggs exclusively. Then warm-blooded vertebrates come upon the stage, that produce _eggs_ without shells, which have to be subjected for months to a species of extra-placental incubation. And last of all the true placental mammals appear. And thus, tried by the test of perfect reproduction, the great vertebral division receives its full development in creation. [Illustration: Fig. 70. ANOPLTHERIUM COMMUNE. (_Eocene._)] The placental mammals make their appearance, as I have said, in the earliest ages of the great Tertiary division, and exhibit in the group an aspect very unlike that which they at present bear. The Eocene ages were peculiarly the ages of the Palæotheres,--strange animals of that pachydermatous or thick-skinned order to which the elephants, the tapirs, the hogs, and the horses belong. It had been remarked by naturalists, that there are fewer families of this order in living nature than of almost any other, and that, of the existing genera, not a few are widely separated in their analogies from the others. But in the Palæotheres of the Eocene, which ranged in size from a large horse to a hare, not a few of the missing links have been found,--links connecting the tapirs to the hogs, and the hogs to the Palæotheres proper; and there is at least one species suggestive of an union of some of the more peculiar traits of the tapirs and the horses. It was among these extinct Pachydermata of the Paris basin that Cuvier effected his wonderful restorations, and produced those figures in outline which are now as familiar to the geologist as any of the forms of the existing animals. The London Clay and the Eocene of the Isle of Wight have also yielded numerous specimens of those pachyderms, whose identity with the Continental ones has been established by Owen; but they are more fragmentary, and their state of keeping less perfect, than those furnished by the gypsum quarries of Velay and Montmartre. In these the smaller animals occur often in a state of preservation so peculiar and partial as to excite the curiosity of even the untaught workmen. Only half the skeleton is present. The limbs and ribs of the under side are found lying in nearly their proper places; while of the limbs and ribs of the upper side usually not a trace can be detected,--even the upper side of the skull is often awanting. It-would almost seem as if some pre-Adamite butcher had divided the carcasses longitudinally, and carried away with him all the upper halves. The reading of the enigma seems to be, that when the creatures lay down and died, the gypsum in which their remains occur was soft enough to permit their under sides to sink into it, and that then gradually hardening, it kept the bones in their places; while the uncovered upper sides, exposed to the disintegrating influences, either mouldered away piecemeal, or were removed by accident. The bones of the larger animals of the basin are usually found detached; and ere they could be reconstructed into perfect skeletons, they taxed the extraordinary powers of the greatest of comparative anatomists. Rather more than twenty different species of extinct mammals have been detected in the Paris basin,--not a great number, it may be thought; and yet for so limited a locality we may deem it not a very small one, when we take into account the fact that all our native mammals of Britain and Ireland amount (according to Fleming), if we except the Cetaceæ and the seals, to but forty species. [Illustration: Fig 71. ANIMALS OF THE PARIS BASIN.[15] (_Eocene._)] [Illustration: Fig. 72. DINOTHERIUM GIGANTEUM. (_Miocene._)] In the Middle or Miocene Tertiary, pachyderms, though of a wholly different type from their predecessors, are still the prevailing forms. The Dinotherium, one of the greatest quadrupedal mammals that ever lived, seems to have formed a connecting link in this middle age between the Pachydermata and the Cetaceæ. Each ramus of the under jaw, which in the larger specimens are fully four feet in length, bore at the symphysis a great bent tusk turned downwards, which appears to have been employed as a pickaxe in uprooting the aquatic plants and liliaceous roots on which the creature seems to have lived. The head, which measured about three feet across,--a breadth, sufficient, surely, to satisfy the demands of the most exacting phrenologist,--was provided with muscles of enormous strength, arranged so as to give potent effect to the operations of this strange tool. The hinder part of the skull not a little resembled that of the Cetaceæ; while, from the form of the nasal bones, the creature was evidently furnished with a trunk like the elephant. It seems not improbable, therefore, that this bulkiest of mammaliferous quadrupeds constituted, as I have said, a sort of uniting tie between creatures still associated in the human mind, from the circumstance of their massive proportions, as the greatest that swim the sea or walk the land,--the whale and the elephant. The Mastodon, an elephantoid animal, also furnished, like the elephant, with tusks and trunk, but marked by certain peculiarities which constitute it a different genus, seems in Europe to have been contemporary with the Dinotherium; but in North America (the scene of its greatest numerical development) it appears to belong to a later age. In height it did not surpass the African elephant, but it considerably exceeded it in length,--a specimen which could not have stood above twelve feet high indicating a length of about twenty-five feet: it had what the elephants want,--tusks fixed in its lower jaw, which the males retained through life, but the females lost when young; its limbs were proportionally shorter, but more massive, and its abdomen more elongated and slim; its grinder teeth too, some of which have been known to weigh from seventeen to twenty pounds, and their cusps elevated into great mammæ-like protuberances, to which the creature owes its name, and wholly differ in their proportions and outline from the grinders of the elephant. The much greater remoteness of the mastodonic period in Europe than in America is a circumstance worthy of notice, as it is one of many facts that seem to indicate a general transposition of at least the later geologic ages on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. Groups of corresponding character on the eastern and western shores of this great ocean were not contemporaneous in time. It has been repeatedly remarked, that the existing plants and trees of the United States, with not a few of its fishes and reptiles, bear in their forms and construction the marks of a much greater antiquity than those of Europe. The geologist who sets himself to discover similar types on the eastern side of the Atlantic would have to seek for them among the deposits of the later Tertiaries. North America seems to be still passing through its later Tertiary ages; and it appears to be a consequence of this curious transposition, that while in Europe the mastodonic period is removed by two great geologic eras from the present time, it is removed from it in America by only one. Even in America, however, that period lies far beyond the reach of human tradition,--a fact borne out by the pseudo-traditions retailed by the aborigines regarding the mastodon. By none of at least the higher naturalists has there been a doubt entertained respecting its herbivorous character; and the discovery of late years of the stomach of an individual charged with decayed herbage and fragments of the succulent branches of trees, some of them of existing species, has demonstrated the solidity of the reasonings founded on its general structure and aspect. The pseudo-traditions, however, represent it in every instance as a carnivorous tyrant, that, had it not been itself destroyed, would have destroyed all the other animals its contemporaries. It is said by the red men of Virginia, "that a troop of these tremendous quadrupeds made fearful havoc for some time among the deer, the buffaloes, and all the other animals created for the use of the Indians, and spread desolation far and wide. At last '_the Mighty Man above_' seized his thunder and killed them all, with the exception of the largest of the males, who presenting his head to the thunderbolts, shook them off as they fell; but, being wounded in the side, he betook himself to flight towards the great lakes, where he still resides at the present day." Let me here remind you in the passing, that that antiquity of type which characterizes the recent productions of North America is one of many wonders,--not absolutely geological in themselves, but which, save for the revelations of geology, would have forever remained unnoted and unknown,--which have been pressed, during the last half century, on the notice of naturalists. "It is a circumstance quite extraordinary and unexpected," says Agassiz, in his profoundly interesting work on Lake Superior, "that the fossil plants of the Tertiary beds of Oeningen resemble more closely the trees and shrubs which grow at present in the eastern parts of North America, than those of any other parts of the world; thus allowing us to express correctly the difference between the opposite coasts of Europe and America, by saying that the present eastern American flora, and, I may add, the fauna also, have a more ancient character than those of Europe. The plants, especially the trees and shrubs, growing in our days in the United States, are, as it were, old-fashioned; and the characteristic genera Lagomys, Chelydra, and the large Salamanders with permanent gills, that remind us of the fossils of Oeningen, are at least equally so;--they bear the marks of former ages." How strange a fact! Not only are we accustomed to speak of the eastern continents as the Old World, in contradistinction to the great continent of the west, but to speak also of the world before the Flood as the Old World, in contradistinction to the post-diluvian world which succeeded it. And yet equally, if we receive the term in either of its acceptations, is America an older world still,--an older world than that of the eastern continents,--an older world, in the fashion and type of its productions, than the world before the Flood. And when the immigrant settler takes axe amid the deep backwoods, to lay open for the first time what he deems a new country, the great trees that fall before him,--the brushwood that he lops away with a sweep of his tool,--the unfamiliar herbs which he tramples under foot,--the lazy fish-like reptile that scarce stirs out of his path as he descends to the neighboring creek to drink,--the fierce alligator-like tortoise, with the large limbs and small carpace, that he sees watching among the reeds for fish and frogs, just as he reaches the water,--and the little hare-like rodent, without a tail, that he startles by the way,--all attest, by the antiqueness of the mould in which they are cast, how old a country the seemingly new one really is,--a country vastly older, in type at least, than that of the antediluvians and the patriarchs, and only to be compared with that which flourished on the eastern side of the Atlantic long ere the appearance of man, and the remains of whose perished productions we find locked up in the _loess_ of the Rhine, or amid the lignites of Nassau. America is emphatically the _Old_ World. If we accept, however, as sound the ingenious logic by which Colton labors to show, in not inelegant verse, that the _Moderns_ are the true _Ancients_, we may continue to term it the New World still. "We that on these late days are thrown Must be the oldest Ancients known; The _earliest_ Modern earth hath seen Was Adam in his apron green. He lived when young Creation pealed Her morning hymn o'er flood and field, Till all her infant offspring came To that great christening for a name. And he that would the Ancients know, Must forward come, not backward go: The learned lumber of the shelves Shows nothing older than ourselves. But who in older times than we Shall live?--That infant on the knee,-- See sights to us were never shown, And secrets known to us unknown." [Illustration: Fig. 73. ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS. (_Mammoth._) Great British Elephant.] [Illustration: Fig. 74. TROGONTHERIUM CUVIERI. Gigantic Beaver. (_Pleistocene._)] [Illustration: Fig. 75. URSUS SPELÆUS. Cave Bear. (_Pleistocene._)] [Illustration: Fig. 76. HYENA SPELÆA. Cave Hyæna. (_Pleistocene._)] The group of mammals which, in Europe, at least, immediately preceded the human period seems to have been everywhere a remarkable one; and nowhere was it more so than in the British islands. Our present mammaliferous fauna is rather poor; but the contents of the later deposits show that we must regard it as but a mere fragment of a very noble one. Associated with species that still exist in the less cultivated parts of the country, such as the badger, the fox, the wild cat, the roe and the red deer, we find the remains of great animals, whose congeners must now be sought for in the intertropical regions. Britain, during the times of the boulder clay, and for ages previous, had its native elephant, its two species of rhinoceros, its hippopotamus, its hyæna, its tiger, its three species of bears, its two species of beavers, its great elk, and its gigantic deer. Forms now found widely apart, and in very different climates, meet within the British area. During at least the earlier times of the group, the temperature of our island seems to have been very much what it is now. As I have already had occasion to remark, the British oak flourished on its plains and lower slopes, and the birch and Scotch fir on its hills. And yet under these familiar trees the lagomys or tailless hare, a form now mainly restricted to Siberia and the wilds of Northern America, and the reindeer, an animal whose proper habitat at the present time is Lapland, were associated with forms that are now only to be found between the tropics, such as that of the hippopotamus and rhinoceros. These last, however, unequivocally of extinct species, seem to have been adapted to live in a temperate climate; and we know from the famous Siberian specimen, that the British elephant, with its covering of long hair and closely-felted wool, was fitted to sustain the rigors of a very severe one. It is surely a strange fact, but not less true than strange, that since hill and dale assumed in Britain their present configuration, and the oak and birch flourished in its woods, there were caves in England haunted for ages by families of hyænas,--that they dragged into their dens with the carcasses of long extinct animals those of the still familiar denizens of our hill-sides, and feasted, now on the lagomys, and now on the common hare,--that they now fastened on the beaver or the reindeer, and now upon the roebuck or the goat. In one of these caves, such of the bones as projected from the stiff soil have been actually worn smooth in a narrow passage where the hyænas used to come in contact with them in passing out and in; and for several feet in depth the floor beneath is composed almost exclusively of gnawed fragments, that still exhibit the deeply indented marks of formidable teeth. In the famous Kirkdale cave alone, parts of the skeletons of from two to three hundred hyænas have been detected, mixed with portions of the osseous framework of the cave-tiger, the cave-bear, the ox, the deer, the mammoth, and the rhinoceros. That cave must have been a den of wild creatures for many ages ere the times of the boulder clay, during which period it was shut up from all access to the light and air by a drift deposit, and lay covered over until again laid open by some workmen little more than thirty years ago. Not only were many of the wild animals of the country which still exist contemporary for a time with its extinct bears, tigers, and elephants, but it seems at least highly probable that several of our domesticated breeds derived their origin from progenitors whose remains we find entombed in the bone-caves and other deposits of the same age; though of course the changes effected by domestication in almost all the tame animals renders the question of their identity with the indigenous breeds somewhat obscure. Cuvier was, however, unable to detect any difference between the skeleton of a fossil horse, contemporary with the elephant, and that of our domestic breed: a fossil goat of the same age cannot be distinguished from the domesticated animal; and one of our two fossil oxen (_Bos longifrons_) does not differ more from some of the existing breeds than these have, in the course of time, been made, chiefly by artificial means, to differ among themselves. But of one of our domestic tribes no trace has yet been found in the rocks: like the cod family among fishes, or the Rosaceæ among plants, it seems to have preceded man by but a very brief period. And certainly, if created specially for his use, though the pride of the herald might prevent him from selecting it as in aught typical of the human race, it would yet not be easy to instance a family of animals that has ministered more extensively to his necessities. I refer to the sheep,--that soft and harmless creature, that clothes civilized man everywhere in the colder latitudes with its fleece,--that feeds him with its flesh,--that gives its bowels to be spun into the catgut with which he refits his musical instruments,--whose horns he has learned to fashion into a thousand useful trinkets,--and whose skin, converted into parchment, served to convey to later times the thinking of the first full blow of the human intellect across the dreary gulf of the middle ages. At length the human period begins. A creature appears upon the scene unlike all that had preceded him, and whose nature it equally is to look back upon the events of the past,--among other matters, on that succession of beings upon the planet which he inhabits, with which we are this evening attempting to deal,--and to anticipate at least one succession more, in that still future state in which he himself is again to appear, in happier circumstances than now, and in a worthier character. We possess another history of the primeval age and subsequent chronology of the human family than that which we find inscribed in the rocks. And it is well that we do so. From various causes, the geologic evidence regarding the period of man's first appearance on earth is singularly obscure. That custom of "burying his dead out of his sight," which obtained, we know, in the patriarchal times, and was probably in use ever since man came first under the law of death, has had the effect of mingling his remains with those of creatures that were extinct for ages ere he began to be. The cavern, once a haunt of carnivorous animals, that in the first simple ages of his history had furnished him with a shelter when living, became his burying-place when dead; and thus his bones, and his first rude attempts in pottery and weapon-making, have been found associated with the remains of the cave-hyæna and cave-tiger, with the teeth of the ancient hippopotamus, and the tusks of the primeval elephant. The evidence on the point, too,--from the great paucity of human remains of a comparatively remote period, and from the circumstance that they are rarely seen by geologists in the stratum in which they occur,--is usually very imperfect in its details. Further, it is an evidence obnoxious to suspicion, from the fact that a keen controversy has arisen on the subject of man's antiquity, that such fragments of man himself or of his works as manifest great age have been pressed to serve as weapons in the fray,--that, occurring always in superficial and local deposits, their true era may be greatly antedated, under the influence of prejudice, by men who have no design wilfully to deceive,--and that while, respecting the older formations, with their abundant organisms, the conclusions of any one geologist may be tested by all the others, the geologist who once in a lifetime picks up in a stratified sand or clay a stone arrow-head or a human bone, finds that the data on which he founds his conclusions may be received or rejected by his contemporaries, but not re-examined. It may be safely stated, however, that that ancient record in which man is represented as the lastborn of creation, is opposed by no geologic fact; and that if, according to Chalmers, "the Mosaic writings do not fix the antiquity of the globe," they at least _do_ fix--making allowance, of course, for the varying estimates of the chronologer--"the antiquity of the human species." The great column of being, with its base set in the sea, and inscribed, like some old triumphal pillar, with many a strange form,--at once hieroglyphic and figure,--bears, as the ornately sculptured capital, which imparts beauty and finish to the whole, reasoning, responsible man. There is surely a very wonderful harmony manifested in the proportions of that nice sequence in which the invertebrates--the fishes, the reptiles, the birds, the marsupials, the placental mammals, and, last of all, man himself--are so exquisitely arranged. It reminds us of the fine figure employed by Dryden in his first Ode for St. Cecilia's Day,--a figure which, viewed in the light cast on it by the modern science of Palæontology, stands out in bolder relief than that in which it could have appeared to the poet himself:-- "From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began; From harmony to harmony, Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The _diapason_ closing full in man." [Illustration: Fig. 77. ASAPHUS CAUDATUS. (_Silurian._)] [Illustration: Fig. 78. ORTHOCERAS LATERALE. (_Mountain Limestone._)] [Illustration: Fig. 79. SPIRIGERINA RETICULARIS. (_Old Red Sandstone._)] [Illustration: Fig. 80. A. MARGARITATUS. (_Lias._)] [Illustration: Fig. 81. A. BISULCATUS. (_Lias._)] [Illustration: Fig. 82. BELEMNITELLA MUCRONATA. (_Chalk._)] [Illustration: Fig. 83. BELEMNITES SULCATUS. (_Oolite._)] In the limits to which I have restricted myself, I have been able to do little more than simply to chronicle the successive eras in which the various classes and divisions of the organic kingdom, vegetable and animal, make their appearance in creation. I have produced merely a brief record of the various births, in their order, of that great family whose father is God. And in pursuing such a plan, much, of necessity, must have been omitted. I ought perhaps to have told you, that very rarely, if ever, do the master forms of a period constitute the prevailing or typical organisms of its deposits. Of the three great divisions of which the geologic scale consists,--Palæozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary,--the first, or ichthyic period, is marked chiefly, not by its great fishes, but by the peculiar character of its brachipodous and cephalopodous mollusca, and in its earlier stages by its three-lobed crustaceæ; the second or reptilian period was emphatically the period of the ammonite and belemnite; while the third and last, or mammalian period, was that of gastropodous and conchiferous molluscs, impressed, generically at least, by all the features of the group which still exists in our seas. Save in a few local deposits, fishes do not form the prevailing organisms in the formations of the age of fishes; nor reptiles in the formations of the age of reptiles; nor yet mammals in the formations of the age of mammals. Nay, it is not improbable that the recent or human period may be marked most prominently in the future, when it comes to exist simply as a geologic system, by a still humbler organism than most of these molluscs. On almost all rocky shores a line of pale gray may be seen at low water, running for mile after mile along the belt that has been laid bare at the bases of the cliffs by the fall of the tide. It owes its pale color to millions of millions of a small balanus (_B. balanoides_), produced in such amazing abundance in the littoral zone as to cover with a rough crust every minute portion of rock and every sedentary shell. Other species of the same genus (_B. crenatus_ and _B. porcatus_) occupy the depths of the sea beyond; and their remains, washed ashore by the waves, and mingled with those of the littoral species, form often great accumulations of shell sand. I have seen among the Hebrides a shell sand accumulated along the beach to the depth of many feet, of which fully two thirds was composed of the valves and compartments of balanidæ; and a similar sand on the east coast of Scotland, a little to the south of St. Andrews, formed in still larger proportions of the fragments of a single species,--_Balanus crenatus_. Now, this genus, so amazingly abundant at the present time in every existing sea, and whose accumulated remains bid fair to exist as great limestone rocks in the future, had no existence in the Palæozoic or Secondary ages. It first appears in the times of the earlier Tertiary, in, however, only a single species; and, becoming gradually of more and more importance as a group, it receives its fullest numerical development in the present time. And thus the remains of a sub-class of animals, low in their standing among the articulata, may form one of the most prominent Palæontological features of the human period. But enough for the present of circumstance and detail. [Illustration: Fig. 84. MUREX ALVEOLATUS. (_Red Crag._)] [Illustration: Fig. 85. ASTARTE OMALII. (_Red Crag._)] [Illustration: Fig. 86. BALANUS CRASSUS. (_Red Crag._)] Such, so far as the geologist has yet been able to read the records of his science, has been the course of creation, from the first beginnings of vitality upon our planet, until the appearance of man. And very wonderful, surely, has that course been! How strange a procession! Never yet on Egyptian obelisk or Assyrian frieze,--where long lines of figures seem stalking across the granite, each charged with symbol and mystery,--have our Layards or Rawlinsons seen aught so extraordinary as that long procession of being which, starting out of the blank depths of the bygone eternity, is still defiling across the stage, and of which we ourselves form some of the passing figures. Who shall declare the profound meanings with which these geologic hieroglyphics are charged, or indicate the ultimate goal at which the long procession is destined to arrive? The readings already given, the conclusions already deduced, are as various as the hopes and fears, the habits of thought, and the cast of intellect, of the several interpreters who have set themselves,--some, alas! with but little preparation and very imperfect knowledge,--to declare in their order the details of this marvellous, dream-like vision, and, with the dream, "the interpretation thereof." One class of interpreters may well remind us of the dim-eyed old man,--the genius of unbelief so poetically described by Coleridge,--who, sitting in his cold and dreary cave, "talked much and vehemently concerning an infinite series of causes and effects, which he explained to be a string of blind men, the last of whom caught hold of the skirt of the one before him, he of the next, and so on, till they were all out of sight, and that they all walked infallibly straight, without making one false step, though all were alike blind." With these must I class those assertors of the development hypothesis who can see in the upward progress of being only the operations of an incomprehending and incomprehensible law, through which, in the course of unreckoned ages, the lower tribes and families have risen into the higher, and inferior into superior natures, and in virtue of which, in short, the animal creation has grown, in at least its nobler specimens, altogether unwittingly, without thought or care on its own part, and without intelligence on the part of the operating law, from irrational to rational, and risen in the scale from the mere promptings of instinct to the highest exercise of reason,--from apes and baboons to Bacons and Newtons. The blind lead the blind;--the unseeing law operates on the unperceiving creatures; and they go, not together into the ditch, but direct onwards, straight as an arrow, and higher and higher at every step. Another class look with profound melancholy on that great city of the dead,--the burial-place of all that ever lived in the past,--which occupies with its ever-extending pavements of gravestones, and its ever-lengthening streets of tombs and sepulchres, every region opened up by the geologist. They see the onward procession of being as if but tipped with life, and nought but inanimate carcasses all behind,--dead individuals, dead species, dead genera, dead creations,--a universe of death; and ask whether the same annihilation which overtook in turn all the races of all the past, shall not one day overtake our own race also, and a time come when men and their works shall have no existence save as stone-pervaded fossils locked up in the rock forever? Nowhere do we find the doubts and fears of this class more admirably portrayed than in the works of perhaps the most thoughtful and suggestive of living poets:-- "Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams, So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life? 'So careful of the type!' but no, From scarped cliff and quarried stone, She cries, 'A thousand types are gone; I care for nothing; all shall go: Thou makest thine appeal to me; I bring to life, I bring to death; The spirit does but mean the breath. I know no more.' And he,--shall he, Man, her last work, who seemed so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies And built him fanes of fruitless prayer, Who trusted God was love indeed, And love creation's final law, Though Nature, red in tooth and claw, With ravine shrieked against his creed,-- Who loved, who suffered countless ills, Who battled for the true, the just,-- Be blown about the desert dust, Or sealed within the iron hills? No more!--a monster then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tore each other in their slime, Were mellow music matched with him. O, life, as futile then as frail,-- O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer or redress, Behind the vail, behind the vail!" The sagacity of the poet here,--that strange sagacity which seems so nearly akin to the prophetic spirit,--suggests in this noble passage the true reading of the enigma. The appearance of man upon the scene of being constitutes a new era in creation; the operations of a new _instinct_ come into play,--that _instinct_ which anticipates a life after the grave, and reposes in implicit faith upon a God alike just and good, who is the pledged "rewarder of all who diligently seek Him." And in looking along the long line of being,--ever rising in the scale from higher to yet higher manifestations, or abroad on the lower animals, whom instinct never deceives,--can we hold that man, immeasurably higher in his place, and infinitely higher in his hopes and aspirations, than all that ever went before him, should be, notwithstanding, the one grand error in creation,--the one painful worker, in the midst of present trouble, for a state into which he is never to enter,--the befooled expectant of a happy future, which he is never to see? Assuredly no. He who keeps faith with all his humbler creatures,--who gives to even the bee and the dormouse the winter for which they prepare,--will to a certainty not break faith with man,--with man, alike the deputed lord of the present creation, and the chosen heir of all the future. We have been looking abroad on the old geologic burying-grounds, and deciphering the strange inscriptions on their tombs; but there are other burying-grounds, and other tombs,--solitary churchyards among the hills, where the dust of the martyrs lies, and tombs that rise over the ashes of the wise and good; nor are there awanting, on even the monuments of the perished races, frequent hieroglyphics, and symbols of high meaning, which darkly intimate to us, that while _their_ burial-yards contain but the debris of the past, we are to regard the others as charged with the sown seed of the future. LECTURE THIRD. THE TWO RECORDS, MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. It is now exactly fifty years since a clergyman of the Scottish Church, engaged in lecturing at St. Andrews, took occasion in enumerating the various earths of the chemist, to allude to the science, then in its infancy, that specially deals with the rocks and soils which these earths compose. "There is a prejudice," he remarked, "against the speculations of the geologist, which I am anxious to remove. It has been said that they nurture infidel propensities. It has been alleged that geology, by referring the origin of the globe to a higher antiquity than is assigned to it by the writings of Moses, undermines our faith in the inspiration of the Bible, and in all the animating prospects of the immortality which it unfolds. This is a false alarm. _The writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe._" The bold lecturer on this occasion,--for it needed no small courage in a divine of any Established Church to take up, at the beginning of the present century, a position so determined on the geologic side,--was at the time an obscure young man, characterized, in the small circle in which he moved, by the ardor of his temperament and the breadth and originality of his views; but not yet distinguished in the science or literature of his country, and of comparatively little weight in the theological field. He was marked, too, by what his soberer acquaintance deemed eccentricities of thought and conduct. When the opposite view was all but universal, he held and taught that free trade would be not only a general benefit to the people of this country, but would inflict permanent injury on no one class or portion of them; and further, at a time when the streets and lanes of all the great cities of the empire were lighted with oil burnt in lamps, he held that the time was not distant when a carburetted hydrogen gas would be substituted instead; and, on getting his snug parsonage-house repaired, he actually introduced into the walls a system of tubes and pipes for the passage into its various rooms of the gaseous fluid yet to be employed as the illuminating agent. Time and experience have since impressed their stamp on these supposed eccentricities, and shown them to be the sagacious forecastings of a man who saw further and more clearly than his contemporaries; and fame has since blown his name very widely, as one of the most comprehensive and enlightened, and, withal, one of the most thoroughly earnest and sincere, of modern theologians. The bold lecturer of St. Andrews was Dr. Thomas Chalmers,--a divine whose writings are now known wherever the English language is spoken, and whose wonderful eloquence lives in memory as a vanished power, which even his extraordinary writings fail adequately to represent. And in the position which he took up at this early period with respect to geology and the Divine Record, we have yet another instance of the great sagacity of the man, and of his ability of correctly estimating the prevailing weight of the evidence with which, though but partially collected at the time, the geologist was preparing to establish the leading propositions of his science. Even in this late age, when the scientific standing of geology is all but universally recognized, and the vast periods of time which it demands fully conceded, neither geologist nor theologian, could, in any new scheme of reconciliation, shape his first proposition more skilfully than it was shaped by Chalmers a full half century ago. It has formed since that time the preliminary proposition of those ornaments of at once science and the English Church, the present venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Bird Sumner, with Doctors Buckland, Conybeare, and Professor Sedgwick; of eminent evangelistic Dissenters too, such as the late Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. John Harris, Dr. Robert Vaughan, Dr. James Hamilton, and the Rev. Mr. Binney,--enlightened and distinguished men, who all came early to the conclusion, with the lecturer of St. Andrews, that "the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe." In 1814, ten years after the date of the St. Andrews' lectures, Dr. Chalmers produced his more elaborate scheme of reconciliation between the Divine and the Geologic Records, in a "Review of Cuvier's Theory of the Earth;" and that scheme, perfectly adequate to bring the Mosaic narrative into harmony with what was known at the time of geologic history, has been very extensively received and adopted. It may, indeed, still be regarded as the most popular of the various existing schemes. It teaches, and teaches truly, that between the first act of creation, which evoked out of the previous nothing the _matter_ of the heavens and earth, and the first act of the first day's work recorded in Genesis, periods of vast duration may have intervened; but further, it insists that the days themselves were but natural days of twenty-four hours each; and that, ere they began, the earth, though mayhap in the previous period a fair residence of life, had become void and formless, and the sun, moon, and stars, though mayhap they had before given light, had been, at least in relation to our planet, temporarily extinguished. In short, while it teaches that the successive creations of the geologist may all have found ample room in the period preceding that creation to which man belongs, it teaches also that the record in Genesis bears reference to but the existing creation, and that there lay between it and the preceding ones a chaotic period of death and darkness. The scheme propounded by the late Dr. Pye Smith, and since adopted by several writers, differs from that of Chalmers in but one circumstance, though an important one. Dr. Smith held, with the great northern divine, that the Mosaic days were natural days; that they were preceded by a chaotic period; and that the work done in them related to but that last of the creations to which the human species belongs. Further, however, he held in addition, that the chaos of darkness and confusion out of which that creation was called was of but limited extent, and that outside its area, and during the period of its existence, many of our present lands and seas may have enjoyed the light of the sun, and been tenanted by animals and occupied by plants, the descendants of which still continue to exist. The treatise of Dr. Pye Smith was published exactly a quarter of a century posterior to the promulgation, through the press, of the argument of Dr. Chalmers; and this important addition,--elaborated by its author between the years 1837 and 1839,--seems to have been made to suit the more advanced state of geological science at the time. The scheme of reconciliation perfectly adequate in 1814 was found in 1839 to be no longer so; and this mainly through a peculiarity in the order in which geological fact has been evolved and accumulated in this country, and the great fossiliferous systems studied and wrought out; to which I must be permitted briefly to advert. William Smith, the "Father of English Geology," as he has been well termed (a humble engineer and mineral surveyor, possessed of but the ordinary education of men of his class and profession), was born upon the English Oolite,--that system which, among the five prevailing divisions of the great Secondary class of rocks, holds exactly the middle place. The Triassic system and the Lias lie beneath it; the Cretaceous system and the Weald rest above. Smith, while yet a child, had his attention attracted by the Oolitic fossils; and it was observed, that while his youthful contemporaries had their garnered stores of marbles purchased at the toy shop, he had collected, instead, a hoard of spherical fossil terebratulæ, which served the purposes of the game equally well. The interest which he took in organic remains, and the deposits in which they occur, influenced him in the choice of a profession; and, when supporting himself in honest independence as a skilful mineral surveyor and engineer, he travelled over many thousand miles of country, taking as his starting point the city of Bath, which stands near what is termed the Great Oolite: and from that centre he carefully explored the various Secondary formations above and below. He ascertained that these always occur in a certain determinate order; that each contains fossils peculiar to itself; and that they run diagonally across the kingdom in nearly parallel lines from north-east to south-west. And, devoting every hour which he could snatch from his professional labors to the work, in about a quarter of a century, or rather more, he completed his great stratigraphical map of England. But, though a truly Herculean achievement, regarded as that of a single man unindebted to public support, and uncheered by even any very general sympathy in his labors, it was found to be chiefly valuable in its tracings of the Secondary deposits, and strictly exact in only that Oolitic centre from which his labors began. It was remarked at an early period that he ought to have restricted his publication to the formations which lie between the Chalk and the Red Marl inclusive; or, in other words, to the great Secondary division. The Coal Measures had, however, been previously better known, from their economic importance, and the number of the workings opened among them, than the deposits of any other system; and ere the publication of the map of Smith, Cuvier and Brogniart had rendered famous all over the world the older Tertiary formations of the age of the London Clay. But both ends of the geological scale, comprising those ancient systems older than the Coal, and representative of periods in which, so far as is yet known, life, animal and vegetable, first began upon our planet, and those systems of comparatively modern date, representative of the periods which immediately preceded the human epoch, were equally unknown. The light fell strongly on only that middle portion of the series on which the labors of Smith had been mainly concentrated. The vast geologic bridge, which, like that in the exquisite allegory of Addison, strode across a "part of the great tide of eternity," "had a black cloud hanging at each end of it." And such was the state of geologic science when, in 1814, Dr. Chalmers framed his scheme of reconciliation. Since that time, however, a light not less strong than the one thrown by William Smith on the formations of the Lias and the Oolite has been cast on both the older and the newer fossiliferous systems. Two great gaps still remain to be filled up,--that which separates the Palæozoic from the Secondary division, and that which separates the Secondary from the Tertiary one. But they occur at neither end of the geological scale. Mainly through the labors of two distinguished geologists, who, finding the geologic school of their own country distracted by a fierce and fruitless controversy, attached themselves to the geologic school of England, and have since received the honor of knighthood in acknowledgment of their labors, both ends of the geologic scale have been completed. Sir Roderick Murchison addressed himself to the formations older than the Coal, more especially to the Upper and Lower Silurian systems, from the Ludlow rooks to the Llandeilo flags. The Old Red Sandstone too, a system which lies more immediately beneath the Coal, has also been explored, and its various deposits, with their peculiar organic remains, enumerated and described. And Sir Charles Lyell, setting himself to the other extremity of the scale, has wrought out the Tertiary formations, and separated them into the four great divisions which they are now recognized as forming. And of these, the very names indicate that certain proportions of their organisms still continue to exist. It is a great fact, now fully established in the course of geological discovery, that between the plants which in the present time cover the earth, and the animals which inhabit it, and the animals and plants of the later extinct creations, there occurred no break or blank, but that, on the contrary, many of the existing organisms were contemporary during the morning of their being, with many of the extinct ones during the evening of theirs. We know further, that not a few of the shells which now live on our coasts, and several of even the wild animals which continue to survive amid our tracts of hill and forest, were in existence many ages ere the human age began. Instead of dating their beginning only a single natural day, or at most two natural days, in advance of man, they must have preceded him by many thousands of years. In fine, in consequence of that comparatively recent extension of geologic fact in the direction of the later systems and formations, through which we are led to know that the present creation was not cut off abruptly from the preceding one, but that, on the contrary, it dovetailed into it at a thousand different points, we are led also to know, that any scheme of reconciliation which would separate between the recent and the extinct existences by a chaotic gulf of death and darkness, is a scheme which no longer meets the necessities of the case. Though perfectly adequate forty years ago, it has been greatly outgrown by the progress of geological discovery, and is, as I have said, adequate no longer; and it becomes a not unimportant matter to determine the special scheme that would bring into completest harmony the course of creation, as now ascertained by the geologist, and that brief but sublime narrative of its progress which forms a meet introduction in Holy Writ to the history of the human family. The first question to which we must address ourselves in any such inquiry is of course a very obvious one,--_What are the facts scientifically determined which now demand a new scheme of reconciliation?_ There runs around the shores of Great Britain and Ireland a flat terrace of unequal breadth, backed by an escarpment of varied height and character, which is known to geologists as the old coast-line. On this flat terrace most of the seaport towns of the empire are built. The subsoil which underlies its covering of vegetable mould consists usually of stratified sands and gravels, arranged after the same fashion as on the neighboring beach, and interspersed in the same manner with sea shells. The escarpment behind, when formed of materials of no great coherency, such as gravel or clay, exists as a sloping, grass-covered bank,--at one place running out into promontories that encroach upon the terrace beneath,--at another receding into picturesque, bay-like recesses; and where composed, as in many localities, of rock of an enduring quality, we find it worn, as if by the action of the surf,--in some parts relieved into insulated stacks, in others hollowed into deep caverns,--in short, presenting all the appearance of a precipitous coast-line, subjected to the action of the waves. Now, no geologist can or does doubt that this escarpment was at one time the coast-line of the island,--the line against which the waves broke at high water in some distant age, when either the sea stood from twenty to thirty feet higher along our shores than it does now, or the land sat from twenty to thirty feet lower. Nor can the geologist doubt, that along the flat terrace beneath, with its stratified beds of sand and gravel, and its accumulations of sea shells, the tides must have risen and fallen twice every day, as they now rise and fall along the beach that at present girdles our country. But, in reference to at least human history, the age of the old coast-line and terrace must be a very remote one. Though geologically recent, it lies far beyond the reach of any written record. It has been shown by Mr. Smith of Jordanhill, one of our highest authorities on the subject, that the wall of Antoninus, erected by the Romans as a protection against the Northern Caledonians, was made to terminate at the Firths of Forth and Clyde, with relation, not to the level of the old coast-line, but to that of the existing one. And so we must infer that, ere the year A.D. 140 (the year during which, according to our antiquaries, the greater part of the wall was erected) the old coast-line had attained to its present elevation over the sea. Further, however, we know from the history of Diodorus the Sicilian, that at a period earlier by at least two hundred years, St. Michael's Mount, in Cornwall, was connected with the mainland at low water, just as it is now, by a flat isthmus, across which, upon the falling of the tide, the ancient Cornish miners used to carry over their tin in carts. Had the relative levels of sea and land been those of the old coast-line at the time, St. Michael's Mount, instead of being accessible at low ebb would have been separated from the shore by a strait from three to five fathoms in depth. It would not have been then as now, as described in the verse of Carew,-- "Both land and island twice a day." But even the incidental notice of Diodorus Siculus represents very inadequately the antiquity of the existing coast-line. Some of its caves, hollowed in hard rock in the line of faults and shifts by the attrition of the surf, are more than a hundred feet in depth; and it must have required many centuries to excavate tough trap or rigid gneiss to a depth so considerable, by a process so slow. And yet, however long the sea may have stood against the present coast-line, it must have stood for a considerably longer period against the ancient one. The latter presents generally marks of greater attrition than the modern line, and its wave-hollowed caves are of a depth considerably more profound. In determining, on an extensive tract of coast, the average profundity of both classes of caverns from a considerable number of each, I ascertained that the proportional average depth of the modern to the ancient is as two to three. For every two centuries, then, during which the waves have been scooping out the caves of the present coast-line, they must have been engaged for three centuries in scooping out those of the old one. But we know _historically_, that for at least twenty centuries the sea has been toiling in these modern caves; and who shall dare affirm that it has not been toiling in them for at least ten centuries more? But if the sea has stood for but even two thousand six hundred years against the present coast-line (and no geologist would dare fix his estimate lower), then must it have stood against the old line, ere it could have excavated caves one third deeper, three thousand nine hundred years. And both periods united (six thousand five hundred years) more than exhaust the Hebrew chronology. Yet what a mere beginning of geologic history does not the epoch of the old coast-line form! It is but a mere starting point from the recent period. Not a single shell seems to have become extinct during the last six thousand five hundred years! The shells which lie embedded in the subsoils beneath the old coast-line are exactly those which still live in our seas. [Illustration: Fig. 87. ASTARTE ARCTICA.] [Illustration: Fig. 88. TELLINA PROXIMA.] Above this ancient line of coast we find, at various heights, beds of shells of vastly older date than those of the low-lying terrace, and many of which are no longer to be found living around our shores. I spent some time last autumn in exploring one of these beds, once a sea bottom, but now raised two hundred and thirty feet over the sea, in which there occurred great numbers of shells now not British, though found in many parts of Britain at heights varying from two hundred to nearly fourteen hundred feet over the existing sea level. But though no longer British shells, they are shells that still continue to live in high northern latitudes, as on the shores of Iceland and Spitzbergen; and the abundance in which they were developed on the submerged plains and hill-sides of what are now England and Scotland, during what is termed the Pleistocene period, shows of itself what a very protracted period that was. The prevailing tellina of the bed which I last explored,--a bed which occurs in some places six miles inland, in others elevated on the top of dizzy crags,--is a sub-arctic shell (_Tellina proxima_), of which only dead valves are now to be detected on our coasts, but which may be found living at the North Cape and in Greenland. The prevailing astarte, its contemporary, was _Astarte arctica_, now so rare as a British species, that many of our most sedulous collectors have never seen a native specimen, but which is comparatively common on the northern shores of Iceland, and on the eastern coasts of Norway, within the arctic circle. In this elevated Scottish bed of the Pleistocene period I laid these boreal shells open to the light by hundreds, on the spot evidently where the individuals had lived and died. Under the severe climatal conditions to which (probably from some change in the direction of the gulf stream) what is now Northern Europe had been brought, this tellina and astarte had increased and multiplied until they became prevailing shells of the British area; and this increase must have been the slow work of ages, during which the plains, and not a few of the table lands, of the country, were submerged in a sub-arctic sea, and Great Britain existed as but a scattered archipelago of wintry islands. But in a still earlier period, of which there exists unequivocal evidence in the buried forests of Happisburgh and Cromer, the country had not only its head above water, as now, but seems to have possessed oven more than its present breadth of surface. During this ancient time,--more remote by many centuries than not only the times of the old coast-line, but than even those of the partial submergence of the island,--that northern mammoth lived in great abundance, of which the remains have been found by hundreds in England alone, together with the northern hippopotamus, and at least two northern species of rhinoceros. And though they have all ceased to exist, with their wild associates in the forests and jungles of the Pleistocene, the cave-hyæna, the cave-tiger, and the cave-bear, we know that the descendants of some of their feebler contemporaries, such as the badger, the fox, the wild cat, and the red deer, still live amid our hills and brakes. The trees, too, under which they roamed, and whose remains we find buried in the same deposits as theirs, were of species that still hold their place as aboriginal trees of the country, or of at least the more northerly provinces of the continent. The common Scotch fir, the common birch, and a continental species of conifer of the far north, the Norwegian spruce (_Abies excelsa_), have been found underlying the Pleistocene drift, and rooted in the mammiferous crag; and for many ages must the old extinct elephant have roamed amid these familiar trees. From one limited tract of sea bottom on the Norfolk coast the fishermen engaged in dredging oysters brought ashore, in the course of thirteen years (from 1820 to 1833), no fewer than two thousand elephants' grinders, besides great tusks and numerous portions of skeletons. It was calculated that these remains could not have belonged to fewer than five hundred individual mammoths of English growth; and, various in their states of keeping, and belonging to animals of which only a few at a time could have found sufficient food in a limited tract of country, the inference seems inevitable that they must have belonged, not to one or two, but to many succeeding generations. The further fact, that remains of this ancient elephant (_Elephas primigenius_) occur all round the globe in a broad belt, extending from the fortieth to near the seventieth degree of north latitude, leads to the same conclusion. It must have required many ages ere an animal that breeds so slowly as the elephant could have extended itself over an area so vast. [Illustration: Fig. 89. NORWEGIAN SPRUCE. (Abies excelsa.)] Many of the contemporaries of this northern mammoth, especially of its molluscan contemporaries, continue, as I have said, to live in their descendants. Of even a still more ancient period, represented by the Red Crag, seventy out of every hundred species of shells still exist; and of an older period still, represented by the Coraline Crag, there survive sixty out of every hundred. In the Red Crag, for instance, we find the first known ancestors of our common edible periwinkle and common edible mussel; and in the Coraline Crag, the first known ancestors of the common horse-mussel, the common whelk, the common oyster, and the great pecten. There then occurs a break in the geologic deposits of Britain, which, however, in other parts of Europe we find so filled up as to render it evident that no corresponding break took place in the chain of existence; but that, on the contrary, from the present time up to the times represented by the earliest Eocene formations of the Tertiary division, day has succeeded day, and season has followed season, and that no chasm or hiatus--no age of general chaos, darkness, and death--has occurred, to break the line of succession, or check the course of life. All the evidence runs counter to the supposition that immediately before the appearance of man upon earth, there existed a chaotic period which separated the previous from the present creation. Up till the commencement of the Eocene ages, if even then, there was no such chaotic period, in at least what is now Britain and the European continent: the persistency from a high antiquity of some of the existing races, of not only plants and shells, but of even some of the mammiferous animals, such as the badger, the goat, and the wild cat, prove there was not; and any scheme of reconciliation which takes such a period for granted must be deemed as unsuited to the present state of geologic knowledge, as any scheme would have been forty years ago which took it for granted that the writings of Moses _do_ "fix the antiquity of the globe." The scheme of reconciliation adopted by the late Dr. Pye Smith, though, save in one particular, identical, as I have said, with that of Dr. Chalmers, is made, in virtue of its single point of difference, to steer clear of the difficulty. Both schemes exhibit the creation recorded in Genesis as an event which took place about six thousand years ago; both describe it as begun and completed in six natural days; and both represent it as cut off from a previously existing creation by a chaotic period of death and darkness. But while, according to the scheme of Chalmers, both the Biblical creation and the previous period of death are represented as coextensive with the globe, they are represented, according to that of Dr. Smith, as limited and local. They may have extended, it is said, over only a few provinces of Central Asia, in which, when all was life and light in other parts of the globe, there reigned for a time only death and darkness amid the welterings of a chaotic sea; which, at the Divine command, was penetrated by light, and occupied by dry land, and ultimately, ere the end of the creative week, became a centre in which certain plants and animals, and finally man himself, were created. And this scheme, by leaving to the geologist in this country and elsewhere, save mayhap in some unknown Asiatic district, his unbroken series, certainly does not conflict with the facts educed by geologic discovery. It virtually removes Scripture altogether out of the field. I must confess, however, that on this, and on some other accounts, it has failed to satisfy me. I have stumbled, too, at the conception of a merely local and limited chaos, in which the darkness would be so complete, that when first penetrated by the light, that penetration could be described as actually a _making_ or creating of light; and that, while life obtained all around its precincts, could yet be thoroughly void of life, A local darkness so profound as to admit no ray of light seems to have fallen for a time on Egypt, as one of the ten plagues; but the event was evidently miraculous; and no student of natural science is entitled to have recourse, in order to extricate himself out of a difficulty, to supposititious, unrecorded miracle. Creation cannot take place without miracle; but it would be a strange reversal of all our previous conclusions on the subject, should we have to hold that the dead, dark, blank out of which creation arose was miraculous also. And if, rejecting miracle, we cast ourselves on the purely natural, we find that the local darknesses dependent on known causes, of which we have any record in history, were always either very imperfect, like the darkness of your London fogs, or very temporary, like the darkness described by Pliny as occasioned by a cloud of volcanic ashes; and so, altogether inadequate to meet the demands of a hypothesis such as that of Dr. Smith. And yet further, I am disposed, I must add, to look for a broader and more general meaning in that grand description of the creation of all things with which the Divine record so appropriately opens, than I could recognize it as forming, were I assured it referred to but one of many existing creations,--a creation restricted to mayhap a few hundred square miles of country, and to mayhap a few scores of animals and plants. What, then, is the scheme of reconciliation which I would venture to propound? Let me first remark, in reply, that I come before you this evening, not as a philologist, but simply as a student of geological fact, who, believing his Bible, believes also, that though theologians have at various times striven hard to pledge it to false science, geographical, astronomical, and geological, it has been pledged by its Divine Author to no falsehood whatever. I occupy exactly the position now, with respect to geology, that the mere Christian geographer would have occupied with respect to geography in the days of those doctors of Salamanca who deemed it unscriptural to hold with Columbus that the world is round,--not flat; or exactly the position which the mere Christian astronomer would have occupied with respect to astronomy in the days of that Francis Turrettine who deemed it unscriptural to hold with Newton and Galileo, that it is the earth which moves in the heavens, and the sun which stands still. The mere geographer or astronomer might have been wholly unable to discuss with Turrettine or the doctors the niceties of Chaldaic punctuation, or the various meanings of the Hebrew verbs. But this much, notwithstanding, he would be perfectly qualified to say:--However great your skill as linguists, your reading of what you term the scriptural geography or scriptural astronomy must of necessity be a false reading, seeing that it commits Scripture to what, in my character as a geographer or astronomer, I know to be a monstrously false geography or astronomy. Premising, then, that I make no pretensions to even the slightest skill in philology, I remark further, that it has been held by accomplished philologists, that the days of the Mosaic creation may be regarded, without doing violence to the genius of the Hebrew language, as successive periods of great extent. And certainly, in looking at my English Bible, I find that the portion of time spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis as _six_ days, is spoken of in the second chapter as _one_ day. True, there are other philologers, such as the late Professor Moses Stuart, who take a different view; but then I find this same Professor Stuart striving hard to make the phraseology of Moses "fix the antiquity of the globe;" and so, as a mere geologist, I reject his philology, on exactly the same principle on which the mere geographer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the philology of the doctors of Salamanca, or on which the mere astronomer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the philology of Turrettine and the old Franciscans. I would, in any such case, at once, and without hesitation, cut the philological knot, by determining that that philology cannot be sound which would commit the Scriptures to a science that cannot be true. Waiving, however, the question as a philological one, and simply holding with Cuvier, Parkinson, and Silliman, that each of the _six_ days of the Mosaic narrative in the first chapter were what is assuredly meant by the _day_ referred to in the second,--not natural days, but lengthened periods,--I find myself called on, as a geologist, to account for but three of the six. Of the period during which light was created,--of the period during which a firmament was made to separate the waters from the waters,--or of the period during which the two great lights of the earth, with the other heavenly bodies, became visible from the earth's surface,--we need expect to find no record in the rocks. Let me, however, pause for a moment, to remark the peculiar character of the language in which we are first introduced in the Mosaic narrative to the heavenly bodies,--sun, moon, and stars. The moon, though absolutely one of the smallest lights of our system, is described as secondary and subordinate to only its greatest light, the sun. It is the apparent, then, not the actual, which we find in the passage,--what _seemed_ to be, not what _was_; and as it was merely what appeared to be greatest that was described as greatest, on what grounds are we to hold that it may not also have been what _appeared_ at the time to be made that has been described as made? The sun, moon, and stars may have been created long before, though it was not until this fourth period of creation that they became visible from the earth's surface. The geologist, in his attempts to collate the Divine with the geologic record, has, I repeat, only three of the six periods of creation to account for,--the period of plants, the period of great sea monsters and creeping things, and the period of cattle and beasts of the earth. He is called on to question his systems and formations regarding the remains of these three great periods, and of these only. And the question once fairly stated, what, I ask, is the reply? All geologists agree in holding that the vast geological scale naturally divides into _three_ great parts. There are many lesser divisions,--divisions into systems, formations, deposits, beds, strata; but the master divisions, in each of which we find a type of life so unlike that of the others, that even the unpractised eye can detect the difference, are simply three,--the Palæozoic, or oldest fossiliferous division; the Secondary, or middle fossiliferous division; and the Tertiary, or latest fossiliferous division. In the first, or Palæozoic division, we find corals, crustaceans, molluscs, fishes, and, in its later formations, a few reptiles. But none of these classes of organisms give its leading character to the Palæozoic; they do not constitute its prominent feature, or render it more remarkable as a scene of life than any of the divisions which followed. That which chiefly distinguished the Palæozoic from the Secondary and Tertiary periods was its gorgeous flora. It was emphatically the period of plants,--"of herbs yielding seed after their kind." In no other age did the world ever witness such a flora: the youth of the earth was peculiarly a green and umbrageous youth,--a youth of dusk and tangled forests, of huge pines and stately araucarians, of the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculptured sigillaria, and the hirsute lepidodendron. Wherever dry land, or shallow lake, or running stream appeared, from where Melville Island now spreads out its ice wastes under the star of the pole, to where the arid plains of Australia lie solitary beneath the bright cross of the south, a rank and luxuriant herbage cumbered every footbreadth of the dank and steaming soil; and even to distant planets our earth must have shone through the enveloping cloud with a green and delicate ray. Of this extraordinary age of plants we have our cheerful remembrancers and witnesses in the flames that roar in our chimneys when we pile up the winter fire,--in the brilliant gas that now casts its light on this great assemblage, and that lightens up the streets and lanes of this vast city,--in the glowing furnaces that smelt our metals, and give moving power to our ponderous engines,--in the long dusky trains that, with shriek and snort, speed dart-like athwart our landscapes,--and in the great cloud-enveloped vessels that darken the lower reaches of your noble river, and rush in foam over ocean and sea. The geologic evidence is so complete as to be patent to all, that the first great period of organized being was, as described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly a period of herbs and trees, "yielding seed after their kind." The middle great period of the geologist--that of the Secondary division--possessed, like the earlier one, its herbs and plants, but they were of a greatly less luxuriant and conspicuous character than their predecessors, and no longer formed the prominent trait or feature of the creation to which they belonged. The period had also its corals, its crustaceans, its molluscs, its fishes, and in some one or two exceptional instances its dwarf mammals. But the grand existences of the age,--the existences in which it excelled every other creation, earlier or later, were its huge creeping things,--its enormous monsters of the deep,--and, as shown by the impressions of their footprints stamped upon the rocks, its gigantic birds. It was peculiarly the age of egg-bearing animals, winged and wingless. Its wonderful _whales_, not, however, as now, of the mammalian, but of the reptilian class,--ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs,--must have tempested the deep; its creeping lizards and crocodiles, such as the teliosaurus, megalosaurus, and iguanodon,--creatures some of which more than rivalled the existing elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in bulk,--must have crowded the plains or haunted by myriads the rivers of the period; and we know that the footprints of at least one of its many birds are fully twice the size of those made by the horse or camel. We are thus prepared to demonstrate, that the second period of the geologist was peculiarly and characteristically a period of whale-like reptiles of the sea, of enormous creeping reptiles of the land, and of numerous birds, some of them of gigantic size; and, in meet accordance with the fact, we find that the second Mosaic period with which the geologist is called on to deal was a period in which God created the fowl that flieth above the earth, with moving [or creeping] creatures, both in the waters and on the land, and what our translation renders great whales, but that I find rendered, in the margin, great sea monsters. The Tertiary period had also its prominent class of existences. Its flora seems to have been no more conspicuous than that of the present time; its reptiles occupy a very subordinate place; but its beasts of the field were by far the most wonderfully developed, both in size and numbers, that ever appeared upon earth. Its mammoths and its mastodons, its rhinoceri and its hippopotami, its enormous dinotherium and colossal megatherium, greatly more than equalled in bulk the largest mammals of the present time, and vastly exceeded them in number. The remains of one of its elephants (_Elephas primigenius_) are still so abundant amid the frozen wastes of Siberia, that what have been not inappropriately termed "ivory quarries" have been wrought among their bones for more than a hundred years. Even in our own country, of which, as I have already shown, this elephant was for long ages a native, so abundant are the skeletons and tusks, that there is scarcely a local museum in the kingdom that has not its specimens, dug out of the Pleistocene deposits of the neighborhood. And with this ancient elephant there were meetly associated in Britain, as on the northern continents generally all around the globe, many other mammals of corresponding magnitude. "Grand indeed," says an English naturalist, "was the fauna of the British islands in those early days. Tigers as large again as the biggest Asiatic species lurked in the ancient thickets; elephants of nearly twice the bulk of the largest individuals that now exist in Africa or Ceylon roamed in herds; at least two species of rhinoceros forced their way through the primeval forest; and the lakes and rivers were tenanted by hippopotami as bulky, and with as great tusks, as those of Africa." The massive cave-bear and large cave-hyæna belonged to the same formidable group, with at least two species of great oxen (_Bos longifrons_ and _Bos primigenius_), with a horse of smaller size, and an elk (_Megaceros Hibernicus_) that stood ten feet four inches in height. Truly this Tertiary age--this third and last of the great geologic periods--was peculiarly the age of great "beasts of the earth after their kind, and of cattle after their kind." Permit me at this stage, in addressing myself to a London audience, to refer to what has been well termed one of the great _sights_ of London. An illustration drawn from what must be familiar to you all may impart to your conceptions, respecting the facts on which I build, a degree of tangibility which otherwise they could not possess. [Illustration: Fig. 90. LEPIDODENDRON STERNBERGII.] One of perhaps the most deeply interesting departments of your great British Museum--the wonder of the world--is that noble gallery, consisting of a suite of rooms, opening in line, the one beyond the other, which forms its rich storehouse of organic remains. You must of coarse remember the order in which the organisms of that gallery are ranged. The visitor is first ushered into a spacious room devoted to fossil plants, chiefly of the Coal Measures. And if these organisms are in any degree less imposing in their aspect than those of the apartments which follow in the series, it is only because that, from the exceeding greatness of the Coal Measure plants, they can be exhibited in but bits and fragments. Within less than an hour's walk of the Scottish capital there are single trees of this ancient period deeply embedded in the sandstone strata, which, though existing as mere mutilated portions of their former selves, would yet fail to find accommodation in that great apartment. One of those fossil trees,--a noble araucarian,--which occurs in what is known as the Granton quarry, is a mere fragment, for it wants both root and top, and yet what remains is sixty-one feet in length by six feet in diameter; and beside it there lies a smaller araucarian, also mutilated, for it wants top and branches, and _it_ measures seventy feet in length by four feet in diameter. I saw lately, in a quarry of the Coal Measures about two miles from my dwelling-house, near Edinburgh, the stem of a plant (_Lepidodendron Sternbergii_), allied to the dwarfish club mosses of our moors, considerably thicker than the body of a man, and which, reckoning on the ordinary proportions of the plant, must have been at least seventy feet in height. And of a kind of aquatic reed (calamites), that more resembles the diminutive mare's tail of our marshes than aught else that now lives, remains have been found in abundance in the same coal field, more than a foot in diameter by thirty feet in length. Imposing, then, as are the vegetable remains of this portion of the National Museum, they would be greatly more imposing still did they more adequately represent the gigantic flora of the remote age to which they belong. [Illustration: Fig. 91. CALAMITES CANNÆFORMIS.] Passing onwards in the gallery from the great plants of the Palæozoic division to the animals of the Secondary one, the attention is at once arrested by the monstrous forms on the wall. Shapes that more than rival in strangeness the great dragons, and griffins, and "laithly worms," of mediæval legend, or, according to Milton, the "gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire," of classical fable, frown on the passing visitor; and, though wrapped up in their dead and stony sleep of ages, seem not only the most strange, but also the most terrible things on which his eye ever rested. Enormous jaws, bristling with pointed teeth, gape horrid in the stone, under staring eye-sockets a full foot in diameter. Necks that half equal in length the entire body of the boa-constrictor stretch out from bodies mounted on fins like those of a fish, and furnished with tails somewhat resembling those of the mammals. Here we see a winged dragon, that, armed with sharp teeth and strong claws, had careered through the air on leathern wings like those of a bat; there an enormous crocodilian whale, that, mounted on many-jointed paddles, had traversed, in quest of prey, the green depths of the sea; yonder a herbivorous lizard, with a horn like that of the rhinoceros projecting from its snout, and that, when it browsed amid the dank meadows of the Wealden, must have stood about twelve feet high. All is enormous, monstrous, vast, amid the creeping and flying things and the great sea monsters of this division of the gallery. [Illustration: Fig. 92. MEGATHERIUM CUVIERI.] We pass on into the third and lower division, and an entirely different class of existences now catch the eye. The huge mastodon, with his enormous length of body, and his tusks projecting from both upper and under jaw, stands erect in the middle of the floor,--a giant skeleton. We see beside him the great bones of the megatherium,--thigh bones eleven inches in diameter, and claw-armed toes more than two feet in length. There, too, ranged species beyond species, are the extinct elephants; and there the ponderous skull of the dinotherium, with the bent tusks in its lower jaw, that give to it the appearance of a great pickaxe, and that must have dug deeply of old amid the liliaceous roots and bulbs of the Tertiary lakes and rivers. There also are the massive heads and spreading horn-cores of the _Bos primigenius_, and the large bones and broad plank-like horns of the great Irish elk. And there too, in the same apartment, but leaning against its further wall,--last, as most recent, of all the objects of wonder in that great gallery,--is the famous human skeleton of Guadaloupe, standing out in bold relief from its slab of gray limestone. It occurs in the series, just as the series closes, a little beyond the mastodon and the mammoths; and, in its strange character as a fossil man, attracts the attention scarce less powerfully than the great Palæozoic plants, the great Secondary reptiles, or the great Tertiary mammals. [Illustration: Fig. 93. SKULL OF DINOTHERIUM GIGANTEUM. (_Miocene._)] I last passed through this wondrous gallery at the time when the attraction of the Great Exhibition had filled London with curious visitors from all parts of the empire; and a group of intelligent mechanics, fresh from some manufacturing town of the midland counties, were sauntering on through its chambers immediately before me. They stood amazed beneath the dragons of the Oolite and Lias; and, with more than the admiration and wonder of the disciples of old when contemplating the huge stones of the Temple, they turned to say, in almost the old words, "Lo! master, what manner of great beasts are these?" "These are," I replied, "the sea monsters and creeping things of the second great period of organic existence." The reply seemed satisfactory, and we passed on together to the terminal apartments of the range appropriated to the Tertiary organisms. And there, before the enormous mammals, the mechanics again stood in wonder, and turned to inquire. Anticipating the query, I said, "And these are the huge beasts of the earth, and the cattle of the third great period of organic existence; and yonder, in the same apartment, you see, but at its further end, is the famous fossil man of Guadaloupe, locked up by the petrifactive agencies in a slab of limestone." The mechanics again seemed satisfied. And, of course, had I encountered them in the first chamber of the suite, and had they questioned me respecting the organisms with which _it_ is occupied, I would have told them that they were the remains of the herbs and trees of the _first_ great period of organic existence. But in the chamber of the mammals we parted, and I saw them no more. There could not be a simpler incident. And yet, rightly apprehended, it reads its lesson. You have all visited the scene of it, and must all have been struck by the three salient points, if I may so speak, by which that noble gallery lays strongest hold of the memory, and most powerfully impresses the imagination,--by its gigantic plants of the first period (imperfectly as these are represented in the collection), by its strange misproportioned sea monsters and creeping things of the second, and by its huge mammals of the third. Amid many thousand various objects, and a perplexing multiplicity of detail, which it would require the patient study of years even partially to classify and know, these are the great prominent features of the gallery, that involuntarily, on the part of the visitor, force themselves on his attention. They at once pressed themselves on the attention of the intelligent though unscientific mechanics, and, I doubt not, still dwell vividly in their recollections; and I now ask you, when you again visit the national museum, and verify the fact of the great prominence of these classes of objects, to bear in mind, that the gallery in which they occur represents, both in the order and character of its contents, the course of creation. I ask you to remember that, had there been human eyes on earth during the Palæozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary periods, they would have been filled in succession by the great plants, the great reptiles, and the great mammals, just as those of the mechanics were filled by them in the museum. As the sun and moon, when they first became visible in the heavens, would have seemed to human eyes--had there been human eyes to see--not only the greatest of the celestial lights, but peculiarly the prominent objects of the epoch in which they appeared, so would these plants, reptiles, and mammals, have seemed in succession the prominent objects of the several epochs in which _they_ appeared. And, asking the geologist to say whether my replies to the mechanics were not, with all their simplicity, true to geological fact, and the theologian to say whether the statements which they embodied were not, with all their geology, true to the scriptural narrative, I ask further, whether (of course, making due allowance for the laxity of the terms botanic and zoological of a primitive language unadapted to the niceties of botanic or zoologic science) the Mosaic account of creation could be rendered more essentially true, than we actually find it, to the history of creation geologically ascertained. If, taking the Mosaic days as equivalent to lengthened periods, we hold that, in giving their brief history, the inspired writer seized on but those salient points that, like the two great lights of the day and night, would have arrested most powerfully, during these periods, a human eye, we shall find the harmony of the two records complete. In your visit to the museum, I would yet further ask you to mark the place of the human skeleton in the great gallery. It stands--at least it stood only a few years ago--in the same apartment with the huge mammifers. And it is surely worthy of remark, that while in both the sacred and geologic records a strongly defined line separates between the period of plants and the succeeding periods of reptiles, and again between the period of reptiles and the succeeding period of mammals, no line in either record separates between this period of mammals and the human period. Man came into being as the lastborn of creation, just ere the close of that sixth day--the third and terminal period of organic creation--to which the great mammals belong. Let me yet further remark, that in each of these three great periods we find, with respect to the classes of existences, vegetable or animal, by which they were most prominently characterized, certain well marked culminating points together, if I may so express myself,--twilight periods of morning dawn and evening decline. The plants of the earlier and terminal systems of the Palæozoic division are few and small: it was only during the protracted _eons_ of the Carboniferous period that they received their amazing development, unequalled in any previous or succeeding time.[16] In like manner, in the earlier or Triassic deposits of the Secondary division, the reptilian remains are comparatively inconsiderable; and they are almost equally so in its Cretaceous or later deposits. It was during those middle ages of the division, represented by its Liassic, Oolitic, and Wealden formations, that the class existed in that abundance which rendered it so peculiarly, above every other age, an age of creeping things and great sea monsters. And so also, in the Tertiary, regarded as but an early portion of the human division, there was a period of increase and diminution,--a morning and evening of mammalian life. The mammals of its early Eocene ages were comparatively small in bulk and low in standing; in its concluding ages, too, immediately ere the appearance of man, or just as he had appeared, they exhibited, both in size and number, a reduced and less imposing aspect. It was chiefly in its middle and latter, or Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene ages, that the myriads of its huger giants,--its dinotheria, mastodons, and mammoths,--cumbered the soil. I, of course, restrict my remarks to the three periods of organic life, and have not inquired whether aught analogous to these mornings and evenings of increase and diminution need be sought after in any of the others. Such are a few of the geological facts which lead me to believe that the _days_ of the Mosaic account were great periods, not natural days; and be it remembered, that between the scheme of lengthened periods and the scheme of a merely local chaos, which existed no one knows how, and of a merely local creation, which had its scene no one knows where, geological science leaves us now no choice whatever. It has been urged, however, that this scheme of periods is irreconcileable with that Divine "reason" for the institution of the Sabbath which he who appointed the day of old has, in his goodness, vouchsafed to man. I have failed to see any force in the objection. God the Creator, who wrought during six periods, rested during the seventh period; and as we have no evidence whatever that he recommenced his work of creation,--as, on the contrary, man seems to be the last formed of creatures,--God may be resting still. The presumption is strong that his Sabbath is an extended period, not a natural day, and that the work of Redemption is his Sabbath day's work. And so I cannot see that it in the least interferes with the integrity of the reason rendered to read it as follows:--Work during six periods, and rest on the seventh; for in six periods the Lord created the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh period _He_ rested. The Divine periods may have been very great,--the human periods very small; just as a vast continent or the huge earth itself is very great, and a map or geographical globe very small. But if in the map or globe the proportions be faithfully maintained, and the scale, though a minute one, be true in all its parts and applications, we pronounce the map or globe, notwithstanding the smallness of its size, a faithful copy. Were man's Sabbaths to be kept as enjoined, and in the Divine proportions, it would scarcely interfere with the logic of the "reason annexed to the fourth commandment," though in this matter, as in all others in which man can be an imitator of God, the imitation should be a miniature one. The work of Redemption may, I repeat, be the work of God's Sabbath day. What, I ask, viewed as a whole, is the prominent characteristic of geologic history, or of that corresponding history of creation which forms the grandly fashioned vestibule of the sacred volume? Of both alike the leading characteristic is progress. In both alike do we find an upward progress from dead matter to the humbler forms of vitality, and from thence to the higher. And after great cattle and beasts of the earth had, in due order, succeeded inanimate plants, sea monsters, and moving creatures that had life, the moral agent, man, enters upon the scene. Previous to his appearance on earth, each succeeding elevation in the long upward march had been a result of creation. The creative fiat went forth, and dead matter came into existence. The creative fiat went forth, and plants, with the lower animal forms, came into existence. The creative fiat went forth, and the oviparous animals,--birds and reptiles,--came into existence. The creative fiat went forth, and the mammiferous animals,--cattle and beasts of the earth,--came into existence. And, finally, last in the series, the creative fiat went forth, and responsible, immortal man, came into existence. But has the course of progress come, in consequence, to a close? No. God's work of elevating, raising, heightening,--of making the high in due progression succeed the low,--still goes on. But man's responsibility, his immortality, his God-implanted instincts respecting an eternal future, forbid that that work of elevation and progress should be, as in all the other instances, a work of creation. To create would be to supersede. God's work of elevation _now_ is the work of fitting and preparing peccable, imperfect man for a perfect, impeccable, future state. God's seventh day's work is the work of Redemption. And, read in this light, his reason vouchsafed to man for the institution of the Sabbath is found to yield a meaning of peculiar breadth and emphasis. God, it seems to say, rests on _his_ Sabbath from his creative labors, in order that by his Sabbath day's work he may save and elevate you. Rest ye also on your Sabbaths, that through your co-operation with him in this great work ye may be elevated and saved. Made originally in the image of God, let God be your pattern and example. Engaged in your material and temporal employments, labor in the proportions in which he labored; but, in order that you may enjoy an eternal future with him, rest also in the proportions in which he rests. One other remark ere I conclude. In the history of the earth which we inhabit, molluscs, fishes, reptiles, mammals, had each in succession their periods of vast duration; and then the human period began,--the period of a fellow worker with God, created in God's own image. What is to be the next advance? Is there to be merely a repetition of the past?--an introduction a second time of man made in the image of God? No. The geologist, in those tables of stone which form his records, finds no example of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish, of the reptile, of the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty--"the _kingdom_"--not of glorified man made in the image of God, but of God himself in the form of man. In the doctrine of the two conjoined natures, human and Divine, and in the further doctrine that the terminal dynasty is to be peculiarly the dynasty of HIM in whom the natures are united, we find that required progression beyond which progress cannot go. We find the point of elevation never to be exceeded meetly coincident with the final period never to be terminated,--the infinite in height harmoniously associated with the eternal in duration. Creation and the Creator meet at one point, and in one person. The long ascending line from dead matter to man has been a progress Godwards,--not an asymptotical progress, but destined from the beginning to furnish a point of union; and occupying that point as true God and true man,--as Creator and created,--we recognize the adorable Monarch of all the future! LECTURE FOURTH. THE MOSAIC VISION OF CREATION. The history of creation is introduced into the "Paradise Lost" as a piece of narrative, and forms one of the two great episodes of the poem. Milton represents the common father of the race as "led on" by a desire to know "What within Eden or without was done Before his memory;" and straightway Raphael, "the affable archangel," in compliance with the wish, enters into a description of the six days' work of the Divine Creator,--a description in which, as Addison well remarks, "the whole energy of our tongue is employed, and the several great scenes of creation rise up to view, one after another, in such a manner, that the reader seems present at this wonderful work, and to assist among the choirs of angels who are spectators of it." In the other great episode of the poem,--that in which the more prominent changes which were to happen in after time upon the earth are made to pass before Adam, he is represented as carried by Michael to the top of a great mountain, lofty as that on which in a long posterior age the Tempter placed our Saviour, and where the coming events are described as rising up in vision before him. In the earlier episode, as in those of the Odyssey and Æneid, in which heroes relate in the courts of princes the story of their adventures, there is but narrative and description; in the later, a series of magnificent pictures, that form and then dissolve before the spectator, and comprise, in their vivid tints and pregnant outlines, the future history of a world. And one of these two episodes,--that which relates to the creation of all things,--must have as certainly had a place in human history as in the master epic of England. Man would have forever remained ignorant of many of those events related in the opening chapters of Scripture, which took place ere there was a human eye to witness, or a human memory to record, had he not been permitted, like Adam of old, to hold intercourse with the intelligences that had preceded him in creation, or with the great Creator himself, the Author of them all; and the question has been asked of late, both in our own country and on the Continent, What was the form and nature of the revelation by which the pre-Adamic history of the earth and heavens was originally conveyed to man? Was it conveyed, like the sublime story of Raphael, as a piece of narrative, dictated, mayhap, to the inspired penman, or miraculously borne in upon his mind? Or was it conveyed by a succession of sublime visions like that which Michael is represented as calling up before Adam, when, purging his "visual nerves with euphrasy and rue," he enabled him to see, in a series of scenes, the history of his offspring from the crime of Cain down to the destruction of the Old World by a flood? The passages in which the history of creation is recorded give no intimation whatever of their own history; and so we are left to balance the probabilities regarding the mode and form in which they were originally revealed, and to found our ultimate conclusions respecting them on evidence, not direct, but circumstantial. The Continental writers on this curious subject may be regarded as not inadequately represented by Dr. J.H. Kurtz, Professor of Theology at Dorpat,--one of the many ingenious biblical scholars of modern Germany. We find him stating the question, in his _Bibel und Astronomie_ (second edition, 1849), with great precision and clearness, but in a manner, so far at least as the form of his thinking is concerned, strikingly characteristic of what may be termed the theological fashion of his country in the present day. "The source of all human history," he says, "is _eye-witness_, be it that of the reporter, or of another whose account has been handed down. Only what man has himself seen or experienced can be the subject of man's historical compositions. So that history, so far as man can write it, can begin with but the point at which he has entered into conscious existence, and end with the moment that constitutes the present time. Beyond these points, however, lies a great province of historic development, existing on the one side as the _Past_, on the other side as the _Future_. For when man begins to be an observer or actor of history, he himself, and the whole circumstantials of his condition, have already come historically into being. Nor does the flow of development stop with what is his present. Millions of influences are spinning the thread still on; but no one can tell what the compound result of all their energies is to be. Both these sorts of history, then, lie beyond the region of man's knowledge, which is shut up in space and time, and can only call the present its own. It is God alone who, standing beyond and above space and time, sees backwards and forwards both the development which preceded the first _present_ of men, and that which will succeed this our latest _present_. Whatever the difference of the two kinds of history may be, they hold the same position in relation both to the principle of the human ignorance and the principle of the human knowledge. The principle of the ignorance is man's condition as a creature; the principle of the knowledge is the Divine knowledge; and the medium between ignorance and knowledge is objectively Divine revelation, and subjectively prophetic vision by man, in which he beholds with the eye of the mind what is shut and hid from the eye of his body." From these premises Dr. Kurtz goes on to argue that the pre-Adamic history of the past being _theologically_ in the same category as the yet undeveloped history of the future, that record of its leading events which occurs in the Mosaic narrative is simply _prophecy_ described backwards; and that, coming under the prophetic law, it ought of consequence to be subjected to the prophetic rule of exposition. There are some very ingenious reasonings employed in fortifying this point; and, after quoting from Eichhorn a passage to the effect that the opening chapter in Genesis is much rather a creative picture than a creative history, and from Ammon to the effect that the author of it evidently takes the position of a beholder of creation, the learned German concludes his general statement by remarking, that the scenes of the chapter are prophetic tableaux, each containing a leading phase of the drama of creation. "Before the eye of the seer," he says, "scene after scene is unfolded, until at length, in the seven of them, the course of creation, in its main _momenta_, has been fully represented." The revelation has every characteristic of prophecy by vision,--prophecy by eye-witnessing; and may be perhaps best understood by regarding it simply as an exhibition of the actual phenomena of creation presented to the mental eye of the prophet under the ordinary laws of perspective, and truthfully described by him in the simple language of his time. In our own country a similar view has been taken by the author of a singularly ingenious little work which issued about two years ago from the press of Mr. Constable of Edinburgh, "The Mosaic Record in Harmony with Geology."[17] The writer, however, exhibits, in dealing with his subject, the characteristic sobriety of the Anglo-Saxon mind; and while the leading features of his theory agree essentially with those of the Continental one, he does not press it so far. In canvassing the _form_ of the revelation made to Moses in the opening of Genesis, he discusses the nature of the inspiration enjoyed by that great prophet; and thus retranslates literally from the Hebrew the passage in which the Divine Being is himself introduced as speaking direct on the point in the controversy raised by Aaron and Miriam. "And He [the Lord] said, hear now my words: If he [Moses] were _your_ prophet [subordinate, or at least not superior, to the prophetess and the high priest], I, Jehovah, in the vision to him would make myself known: in the dream would I speak to him. Not so _my_ servant Moses [God's prophet, not theirs]; in all my house faithful is he. Mouth to mouth do I speak to him, and vision, but not in dark speeches; and likeness of Jehovah he beholds." Moses, then, was favored with "visions without dark speeches." Now, as implied in the passage thus retranslated, there is a grand distinction between symbolic and therefore _dark_ visions, and visions not symbolic nor dark. Visions addressed, as the word indicates, to the eye, may be obviously of a twofold character,--they may be either darker than words, or a great deal clearer than words. The vision, for instance, of future monarchies which Daniel saw symbolized under the form of monstrous animals had to be explained in words; the vision of Peter, which led to the general admission of the Gentiles into the Christian Church, had also virtually to be explained in words; they were both visions of the dark class; and revelation abounds in such. But there were also visions greatly clearer than words. Such, for instance, was the vision of the secret chamber of imagery, with its seventy men of the ancients of Israel given over to idolatry, which was seen by the prophet as he sat in his own house; and the vision of the worshippers of the sun in the inner court of the temple, witnessed from what was _naturally_ the same impossible point of view; with the vision of the Jewish women in the western gate "weeping for Thammuz," when, according to Milton's noble version, "The love tale Infected Sion's daughters with like heat, Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch Ezekiel saw, when, by the vision led, His eye surveyed the dark idolatries Of alienated Judah." Here, then, were there visions of scenes actually taking place at the time, which, greatly clearer than any merely verbal description, substituted the seeing of the eye for the hearing of the ear. And visions of this latter kind were enjoyed, argues the writer of this ingenious treatise, by the prophet Moses. One of the cases adduced may be best given in the author's own words. "Moses," he says, "received directions from God how to proceed in constructing the Tabernacle and its sacred furniture; and David also was instructed how the Temple of Solomon should be built. Let us hear Scripture regarding the nature of the directions given to these men:-- 'According unto the _appearance_ [literally sight, vision] which the Lord had showed unto Moses, so he made the _candlestick_.'--(Num. 5:4.) 'The whole in _writing_, by the hand of Jehovah upon me, he taught; the whole works of the pattern.'--(1 Chron. 28:19.) "There was thus a writing in the case of David; a sight or vision of the thing to be made in that of Moses." So far the author of the Treatise. He might have added further, that from the nature of things, the revelation to Moses in this instance _must_ have been "sight or vision," if, indeed, what is not in the least likely, the peculiar architecture and style of ornament used in the Tabernacle was not a borrowed style, already employed in the service of idolatry. An old, long established architecture can be adequately described by speech or writing; a new, original architecture can be adequately described only by pattern or model, that is, by sight or vision. Any intelligent cutter in stone or carver in wood could furnish to order, though the order were merely a verbal one, a Corinthian or Ionic capital; but no such mechanic, however skilful or ingenious, could furnish to order, if unprovided with a pattern or drawing, a _facsimile_ of one of the ornately sculptured capitals of Gloucester Cathedral or York Minster. To ensure a _facsimile_ in any such case, the originals, or representations of them, would require to be submitted to the eye,--not merely described to the ear. Nay, from the example given in the text,--that of the golden candlestick,--we have an instance furnished in recent times of the utter inadequacy of mere description for the purposes of the sculptor or artist. Ever since copperplate engravings and illustrated Bibles became comparatively common, representations of the branched candlestick taken from the written description have been common also. The candlestick on the arch of Titus, though not deemed an exact representation of the original one described in the Pentateuch, is now regarded,--correctly, it cannot be doubted,--as at least the nearest approximation to it extant. Public attention was first drawn to this interesting piece of sculpture in comparatively modern times; and it was then found that all the previous representations taken from the written description were widely erroneous. They only served to show, not the true outlines of the golden candlestick, but merely that inadequacy of verbal description for artistic purposes which must have rendered _vision_, or, in other words, optical representation, imperative in the case of Moses. Some of our most sober minded commentators take virtually the same view of this necessity of vision for ensuring the production of the true pattern of the Tabernacle. "The Lord," says Thomas Scott, "not only directed Moses by words how to build the Tabernacle and form its sacred furniture, but showed him a model exactly representing the form of every part, and the proportion of each to all the rest." There must have been clear optical vision in the case,--"vision without dark speeches." Such, too, was the character of other of the Mosaic visions, besides that of the "pattern" seen in the Mount. The burning bush, for instance, was a vision addressed to the eye; and seemed to come so palpably under the ordinary optical laws, that the prophet _drew near_ to examine the extraordinary phenomena which it exhibited. The visual or optical character of _some_ of the revelations made to Moses thus established, the writer goes on to inquire whether that special revelation which exhibits the generations of the heavens and earth in their order was not a visual revelation also. "Were the words that Moses wrote," he asks, "merely impressed upon his mind? Did he hold the pen, and another dictate? Or did he see in vision the scenes that he describes? The freshness and point of the narrative," he continues, "the freedom of the description, and the unlikelihood that Moses was an unthinking machine in the composition, all indicate that he saw in vision what he has here given us in writing. _He is describing from actual observation._" The writer remarks in an earlier portion of his treatise, that all who have adopted the theory advocated in the previous lecture,--the "Two Records," which was, I may state, published in a separate form, ere the appearance of his work, and which he does me the honor of largely quoting,--go upon the supposition that things during the Mosaic days are described as they would appear to the eye of one placed upon earth; and he argues that, as no man existed in those distant ages, a reason must be assigned for this _popular_ view of creation which the record is rightly assumed to take. And certainly, if it was in reality a view described from actual vision, the fact would form of itself an adequate reason. What man had actually seen, though but in dream or picture, would of course be described _as seen by man_: like all human history, it would, to borrow from Kurtz, be founded on eye-witnessing; and the fact that the Mosaic record of creation is _apparently_ thus founded, affords a strong presumption that it was in reality revealed, not by dictation, but by vision. Nor, be it remembered, has the recognition of a purely _optical_ character in the revelation been restricted to the assertion of any one theory of reconciliation. It was as certainly held by Chalmers and Dr. Pye Smith, as by Dr. Kurtz and the author of this treatise; nay, it has been recognized by not a few of their opponents also. Granville Penn, for instance, does not scruple to avow his belief, in his elaborate "Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaic Geologies," that both sun and moon were created on the first day of creation, though they did not become "_optically_ visible" until the fourth. "In truth, that the fourth day only rendered visible the sidereal creation of the first day, is manifested," he says, "by collating the transactions of the two days. On the first day, we are told generally, 'God divided the light, or day, and the darkness, or night;' but the physical agents which he employed for that division are not there declared. On the fourth day, we are told referentially, 'God commanded the lights [or luminaries] for dividing day and night, to give their light upon earth.' Here, then, it is evident from the retrospective implication of the latter description, that the lights or luminaries for dividing day and night, which were to give their light upon the earth for the first time on the fourth day, were the unexpressed physical agents by which God divided the day and night on the first day." Now, whatever may be thought of Mr. Penn's argument here, there can be no doubt that it demonstrates at least his own belief in the purely optical character of the Mosaic account of the sidereal creation. It is an account, he held, not of what God wrought on the first day in the heavens, but of what a human eye would have seen on the fourth day from the earth. And Moses Stuart, in his philological assault on the geologists, is scarce less explicit in his avowal of a similar belief. "Every one sees," he says, "that to speak of the sun as rising and setting, is to describe, in common parlance, what appears _optically_, that is, to our sensible view, as reality. But the history of creation is a different affair. In ONE RESPECT, indeed, there is a resemblance. _The historian everywhere speaks as an optical observer stationed on a point of our world, and surveying from this the heavens and the earth, and speaking of them as seen in this manner by his bodily eye._ The sun, and moon, and stars, are servants of the earth, lighted up to garnish and to cheer it, and to be the guardians of its times and seasons. Other uses he knows not for them: certainly of other uses he does not speak. The distances, magnitudes, orbicular motions, gravitating powers, and projectile forces of the planets and of the stars, are all out of the circle of his history, and probably beyond his knowledge. Inspiration does not make men _omniscient_. It does not teach them the scientific truths of astronomy, or chemistry, or botany, nor any science as such. Inspiration is concerned with teaching _religious_ truths, and such facts or occurrences as are connected immediately with illustrating, or with impressing them on the mind." Thus far Dr. Stuart and Mr. Penn,--men whose evidence on this special head must be sufficient to show that it is not merely geologists who have recognized an _optical_ or _visual_ character in the Mosaic history of creation. And certainly the inference deduced from the admitted _fact_, that is, the inference that the optical description must have been founded on a revelation addressed to the eye,--a revelation by vision,--does seem a fair and legitimate one. The revelation must have been either a revelation in words or ideas, or a revelation of scenes and events pictorially exhibited. Failing, however, to record its own history, it leaves the student equally at liberty, so far as _external_ evidence is concerned, to take up either view; while, so far as _internal_ evidence goes, the presumption seems all in favor of revelation by vision; for, while no reason can be assigned why, in a revelation by word or idea, appearances which took place ere there existed a human eye should be _optically_ described, nothing can be more natural or obvious than that they should be so described, had they been revealed by vision as a piece of _eye-witnessing_. It seems, then, at least eminently probable that such was the mode or form of the revelation in this case, and that he who saw by vision on the Mount the pattern of the Tabernacle and its sacred furniture, and in the Wilderness of Horeb the bush burning but not consumed,--types and symbols of the coming dispensation and of its Divine Author,--saw also by vision the _pattern_ of those successive pre-Adamic creations, animal and vegetable, through which our world was fitted up as a place of human habitation. The _reason_ why the drama of creation has been _optically_ described seems to be, that it was in reality _visionally_ revealed. A further question still remains: _If_ the revelation was by vision, that circumstance affords of itself a satisfactory reason why the description should be _optical_; and, on the other hand, since the description is decidedly _optical_, the presumption is of course strong that the revelation was by vision. But why, it may be asked, by vision? Can the presumption be yet further strengthened by showing that this visual mode or form was preferable to any other? Can there be a reason, in fine, assigned _for_ the _reason_,--for that revelation by vision which accounts for the optical character of the description? The question is a difficult one; but I think there can. There seems to be a peculiar fitness in a revelation made by vision, for conveying an account of creation to various tribes and peoples of various degrees of acquirement, and throughout a long course of ages in which the knowledge of the heavenly bodies or of the earth's history, that is, the sciences of astronomy and geology, did not at first exist, but in which ultimately they came to be studied and known. We must recognize such a mode as equally fitted for the earlier and the more modern times,--for the ages anterior to the rise of science, and the ages posterior to its rise. The prophet, by describing what he had actually seen in language fitted to the ideas of his time, would shock no previously existing prejudice that had been founded on the apparent evidence of the senses; he could as safely describe the moon as the second great light of creation, as he could the sun as its first great light, and both, too, as equally subordinate to the planet which we inhabit. On the other hand, an enlightened age, when it had come to discover this key to the description, would find it _optically_ true in all its details. But how differently would not a revelation have fared, in at least the earlier time, that was strictly scientific in its details,--a revelation, for instance, of the great truth demonstrated by Galileo, that the sun rests in the centre of the heavens, while the apparently immoveable earth sweeps with giddy velocity around it; or of the great truth demonstrated by Newton, that our ponderous planet is kept from falling off into empty space by the operation of the same law that impels a descending pebble towards the ground! A great miracle wrought in proof of the truth of the revelation might serve to enforce the belief of it on the generation to whom it had been given; but the generations that followed, to whom the miracle would exist as a piece of mere testimony, would credit, in preference, the apparently surer evidence of their senses, and become unbelievers. They would act, all unwittingly, on the principle of Hume's famous argument, and prefer to rest rather on their own _experience_ of the great phenomena of nature, than on the doubtful testimony of their ancestors, reduced in the lapse of ages to a dim, attenuated tradition. Nor would a geological revelation have fared better, in at least those periods intermediate between the darker and more scientific ages, in which ingenious men, somewhat skeptical in their leanings, cultivate literature, and look down rather superciliously on the ignorance and barbarism of the past. What would skeptics such as Hobbes and Hume have said of an opening chapter in Genesis that would describe successive periods,--first of molluscs, star-lilies, and crustaceans, next of fishes, next of reptiles and birds, then of mammals, and finally of man; and that would minutely portray a period in which there were lizards bulkier than elephants, reptilian whales furnished with necks slim and long as the bodies of great snakes, and flying dragons, whose spread of wing greatly more than doubled that of the largest bird? The world would assuredly not receive such a revelation. Nor, further, have scientific facts or principles been revealed to man which he has been furnished with the ability of observing or discovering for himself. It is according to the economy of revelation, that the truths which it exhibits should be of a kind which, lying beyond the reach of his ken, he himself could never have elicited. From every view of the case, then, a prophetic exhibition of the pre-Adamic scenes and events by vision seems to be the one best suited for the opening chapters of a revelation vouchsafed for the accomplishment of moral, not scientific purposes, and at once destined to be contemporary with every stage of civilization, and to address itself to minds of every various calibre, and every different degree of enlightenment. The statement of Dr. Kurtz, that as vision of pre-Adamic history comes under the same laws as vision of history still future, it ought therefore to be read by the same rules, craves reflection. "Since the source of knowledge for both kinds of history," we find him saying, "and not only the source, but the means, and manner, and way of coming to know, is the same, viz., the _eye-witness_ of the prophet's mental eye, it follows that the historical representation which he who thus comes to know, _projects_ [or portrays], in virtue of this eye-witnessing of his, holds the same relation to the reality in both the cases we speak of, and must be subjected to the same laws of exposition. We thus get this very important rule of interpretation, viz., that the representations of pre-human events, which rest upon revelation, are to be handled from the same point of view, and expounded by the same laws, as the prophecies and representations of future times and events, which also rest upon revelation. This, then, is the only proper point of view for scientific exposition of the Mosaic history of creation; that is to say, if we acknowledge that it proceeded from Divine revelation, not from philosophic speculation or experimental investigation, or from the ideas of reflecting men." There is certainly food for thought in this striking and original view; and there is at least one simple rule of prophetic exposition which may be applied to the pre-Adamic history, in accordance with the principle which it suggests. After all that a scientific theology has done for the right interpretation of prophecy, we find the prediction always best read by the light of its accomplishment. The event which it foretold forms its true key; and when this key is wanting, all is uncertainty. The past is comparatively clear. The hieroglyphic forms which crowd the anterior portions of the prophetic tablet are found wonderfully to harmonize (men such as the profound Newton being the judges) with those great historic events, already become matter of history, which they foreshadowed and symbolized; but, on the other hand, the hieroglyphics which occupy the tablet's posterior portion,--the hieroglyphics that symbolize events still future,--are invincibly difficult and inexplicable. I have read several works on prophecy produced in the last age, in which the writers were bold enough to quit the clue with which history furnishes the student of fulfilled prophecy, and, with the prophecies yet unfulfilled as their guide, to plunge into a troubled sea of speculation regarding the history of the future. And I have found that in every instance they were deplorably at fault regarding even the events that were nearest at hand at the time. History is thus the surest interpreter of the revealed prophecies which referred to events _posterior_ to the times of the prophet. In what shall we find the surest interpretation of the revealed _prophecies_ that referred to events _anterior_ to his time? In what light, or on what principle, shall we most correctly read the prophetic drama of creation? In the light, I reply, of scientific discovery,--on the principle that the clear and certain must be accepted, when attainable, as the proper exponents of the doubtful and obscure. What fully developed history is to the prophecy which of old looked forwards, fully developed science is to the prophecy which of old looked backwards. Scarce any one will question whether that portion of the creation drama which deals with the heavenly bodies ought to be read in the light of established astronomic discovery or no; for, save by perhaps a few of Father Cullen's monks, who can still hold that the sun moves round the earth, and is only six feet in diameter, all theologians have now received the astronomic doctrines, and know that they rest upon a basis at least as certain as any of the historic events symbolized in fulfilled prophecy. And were we to challenge for the established geologic doctrines a similar place and position with respect to those portions of the drama which deal with the two great kingdoms of nature, plant and animal, we might safely do so in the belief that the claim will be one day as universally recognized as the astronomic one is now. On this principle there may, of course, be portions of the _prophetic_ pre-Adamic past of as doubtful interpretation at the present time, from the imperfect development of physical science, as is any portion of the prophetic future from the imperfect development of historic events. The science necessary to the interpretation of the one may be as certainly still to discover as the events necessary to the interpretation of the other may be still to take place. Three centuries have not yet passed since astronomic science was sufficiently developed to form a true key to the various notices of the heavenly bodies which occur in Scripture; among the others, to the notice of their final appearance on the _fourth_ day of creation. Little more than half a century has yet passed since geologic science was sufficiently developed to influence the interpretation given of the three _other_ days' work. And respecting the work of at least the first and second days, more especially that of the second, we can still but vaguely guess. The science necessary to the right understanding of these portions of the prophetic record has still, it would seem, to be developed, if, indeed, it be destined at all to exist; and at present we can indulge in but doubtful surmises regarding them. What may be termed the three _geologic_ days,--the third, fifth, and sixth,--may be held to have extended over those Carboniferous periods during which the great plants were created,--over those Oolitic and Cretacious periods during which the great sea monsters and birds were created,--and over those Tertiary periods during which the great terrestrial mammals were created. For the intervening or fourth day we have that wide space represented by the Permian and Triassic periods, which, less conspicuous in their floras than the period that went immediately before, and less conspicuous in their faunas than the periods that came immediately after, were marked by the decline, and ultimate extinction, of the Palæozoic forms, and the first partially developed beginnings of the Secondary ones. And for the first and second days there remain the great Azoic period, during which the immensely developed gneisses, mica schists, and primary clay slates, were deposited, and the two extended periods represented by the Silurian and Old Red Sandstone systems. These, taken together, exhaust the geologic scale, and may be named in their order as, _first_, the Azoic day or period; _second_, the Silurian and Old Red Sandstone day or period; _third_, the Carboniferous day or period; _fourth_, the Permian and Triassic day or period; _fifth_, the Oolitic and Cretaceous day or period; and _sixth_, the Tertiary day or period. Let us attempt conceiving how they might have appeared pictorially, if revealed in a series of visions to Moses, as the successive scenes of a great air-drawn panorama. During the Azoic period, ere life appears to have begun on our planet, the temperature of the earth's crust seems to have been so high, that the strata, at first deposited apparently in water, passed into a semi-fluid state, became strangely waved and contorted, and assumed in its composition a highly crystalline character. Such is peculiarly the case with the fundamental or gneiss deposits of the period. In the overlying mica schist there is still much of contortion and disturbance; whereas the clay slate, which lies over all, gives evidence, in its more mechanical texture, and the regularity of its strata, that a gradual refrigeration of the general mass had been taking place, and that the close of the Azoic period was comparatively quiet and cool. Let us suppose that during the earlier part of this period of excessive heat the waters of the ocean had stood at the boiling point even at the surface, and much higher in the profounder depths, and further, that the half-molten crust of the earth, stretched out over a molten abyss, was so thin that it could not support, save for a short time, after some convulsion, even a small island above the sea level. What, in such circumstances, would be the aspect of the scene, optically exhibited from some point in space elevated a few hundred yards over the sea? It would be simply a blank, in which the intensest glow of fire would fail to be seen at a few yards' distance. An inconsiderable escape of steam from the safety-valve of a railway engine forms so thick a screen, that, as it lingers for a moment, in the passing, opposite the carriage windows, the passengers fail to discern through it the landscape beyond. A continuous stratum of steam, then, that attained to the height of even our present atmosphere, would wrap up the earth in a darkness gross and palpable as that of Egypt of old,--a darkness through which even a single ray of light would fail to penetrate. And beneath this thick canopy the unseen deep would literally "boil as a pot," wildly tempested from below; while from time to time more deeply seated convulsion would upheave sudden to the surface vast tracts of semi-molten rock, soon again to disappear, and from which waves of bulk enormous would roll outwards, to meet in wild conflict with the giant waves of other convulsions, or return to hiss and sputter against the intensely heated and fast foundering mass, whose violent upheaval had first elevated and sent them abroad. Such would be the probable state of things during the times of the earlier gneiss and mica schist deposits,--times buried deep in that chaotic night or "evening" which must have continued to exist for mayhap many ages after that beginning of things in which God created the heavens and the earth, and which preceded the first day. To a human eye stationed within the cloud, all, as I have said, must have been thick darkness: to eyes Divine, that could have looked through the enveloping haze, the appearance would have been that described by Milton, as seen by angel and archangel at the beginning of creation, when from the gates of heaven they looked down upon chaos:-- "On heavenly ground they stood, and from the shore They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss, Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild, Up from the bottom turned by furious _heat_ And surging waves, as mountains to assault Heaven's height, and with the centre mix the pole." At length, however, as the earth's surface gradually cooled down, and the enveloping waters sunk to a lower temperature,--let us suppose, during the latter times of the mica schist, and the earlier times of the clay slate,--the steam atmosphere would become less dense and thick, and at length the rays of the sun would struggle through, at first doubtfully and diffused, forming a faint twilight, but gradually strengthening as the latter ages of the slate formation passed away, until, at the close of the great primary period, day and night,--the one still dim and gray, the other wrapped in a pall of thickest darkness,--would succeed each other as now, as the earth revolved on its axis, and the unseen luminary rose high over the cloud in the east, or sunk in the west beneath the undefined and murky horizon. And here again the _optical_ appearance would be exactly that described by Milton:-- "'Let there be light,' said God, and forthwith light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure, Sprung from the deep, and from her native east To journey through the airy gloom began, Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sun Was not: she in a cloudy tabernacle Sojourned the while. God saw the light was good, And light from darkness by the hemisphere Divided: light the day, and darkness night, He named. This was the first day, even and morn." The second day's work has been interpreted variously, according to the generally received science of the times of the various commentators who have dealt with it. Even in Milton, though the great poet rejected the earlier idea of a solid firmament, we find prominence given to that of a vast hollow sphere of "circumfluous waters," which, by encircling the atmosphere, kept aloof the "fierce extremes of chaos." Later commentators, such as the late Drs. Kitto and Pye Smith, hold that the Scriptural analogue of the _firmament_ here--by the way, a Greek, not a Hebrew idea, first introduced into the Septuagint--was in reality simply the atmosphere with its clouds. "The historian" [Moses], says Dr. Kitto, "speaks as things would have appeared to a spectator at the time of the creation. A portion of the heavy watery vapor had flown into the upper regions, and rested there in dense clouds, which still obscured the sun; while below, the whole earth was covered with water. Thus we see the propriety with which the firmament is said to have divided the waters from the waters." It is certainly probable that in a vision of creation the atmospheric phenomena of the second great act of the creation drama might have stood out with much greater prominence to the prophetic eye placed in the circumstances of a natural one, than any of its other appearances. The invertebrate life of the Silurian period, or even the ichthyic life of the earlier Old Bed Sandstone period, must have been comparatively inconspicuous from any sub-ærial point of view elevated but a few hundred feet over the sea level. Even the few islets of the latter ages of the period, with their ferns, lepidodendra, and coniferous trees, forming, as they did, an exceptional feature in these ages of vast oceans, and of organisms all but exclusively marine, may have well been excluded from a representative diorama that exhibited optically the grand characteristics of the time. Further, it seems equally probable that the introduction of organized existence on our planet was preceded by a change in the atmospheric conditions which had obtained during the previous period, in which the earth had been a desert and empty void. We know that just before the close of the Silurian ages terrestrial plants had appeared, and that before the close of the Old Red Sandstone ages, air-breathing animals had been produced; and infer that the atmosphere in which both could have existed must have been considerably different from that which lay dark and heavy over the bare hot rocks, and tenantless, steam-emitting seas, of the previous time. Under a gray, opaque sky, in which neither sun nor moon appear, we are not unfrequently presented with a varied drapery of clouds,--a drapery varied in form, though not in color: bank often seems piled over bank, shaded beneath and lighter above; or the whole breaks into dappled cloudlets, which bear--to borrow from the poetic description of Bloomfield--the "beauteous semblance of a flock at rest." And if such ærial draperies appeared in this early period, with the clear space between them and the earth which we so often see in gray, sunless days, the optical aspect must have been widely different from that of the previous time, in which a dense vaporous fog lay heavy upon rock and sea, and extended from the earth's surface to the upper heights of the atmosphere. The third day's vision seems to be more purely geological in its character than either of the previous two. Extensive tracts of dry land appear, and there springs up over them, at the Divine command, a rank vegetation. And we know that what seems to be the corresponding Carboniferous period, unlike any of the preceding ones, was remarkable for its great tracts of terrestrial surface, and for its extraordinary flora. For the first time dry land, and organized bodies at once bulky enough, and exhibited in a medium clear enough, to render them conspicuous objects in a distant prospect, appear in the Mosaic drama; and we still find at once evidence of the existence of extensive though apparently very flat lands, and the remains of a wonderfully gigantic and abundant vegetation, in what appear to be the rocks of this period. The vision of the fourth day, like that of the second, pertained not to the earth, but to the _heavens_; the sun, moon, and stars become visible, and form the sole subjects of the prophetic description. And just as, during the second period, the earth would in all probability have failed to furnish any feature of mark enough to divert a human eye placed on a commanding station from the conspicuous _atmospheric_ phenomena of the time, so it seems equally probable that during this fourth period it would have failed to furnish any feature of mark enough to divert a human eye from the still more conspicuous _celestial_ phenomena of the time. As has been already incidentally remarked, the Permian and Triassic periods were "epochs"--to employ the language of the late Professor Edward Forbes--"of great poverty of production of generic types." On the other hand, the appearance for the first time of sun, moon, and stars, must have formed a scene well suited to divert the attention of the seer from every other. Nor (as has been somewhat rashly argued by Dr. Kitto and several others) does it seem irrational to hold that three very extended _periods_ should have elapsed ere the sidereal heavens became visible on earth. Addison's popular illustration, drawn from one of the calculations of Newton, made in an age when comets were believed to be solid bodies, rendered the reading public familiar, considerably more than a century ago, with the vast time which large bodies greatly heated would take in cooling. "According to Sir Isaac Newton's calculation," said the exquisitely classical essayist, "the comet that made its appearance in 1680 imbibed so much heat by its approaches to the sun, that it would have been two thousand times hotter than red hot iron had it been a globe of that metal; and that, supposing it as big as the earth, and at the same distance from the sun, it would be fifty thousand years in cooling before it recovered its natural temper." Such was an estimate of the philosopher, that excited no little wonder in the days of our great grandfathers, for the vast time which it demanded; and, now that the data on which such a calculation ought to be founded are better known than in the age of Newton, yet more time would be required still. It is now ascertained, from the circumstance that no dew is deposited in our summer evenings save under a clear sky, that even a thin covering of cloud,--serving as a robe to keep the earth warm,--prevents the surface heat of the planet from radiating into the spaces beyond. And such a cloud, thick and continuous, as must have wrapped round the earth as with a mantle during the earlier geologic periods, must have served to retard for many ages the radiation, and consequently the reduction, of that internal heat of which it was itself a consequence. Further, the rocks and soils that form the surface of our globe would be much more indifferent conductors of heat than the iron superficies of Newton's ball, and would serve yet more to lengthen out the cooling process. Nor would a planet covered over for ages with a thick screen of vapor be a novelty even yet in the universe. It is doubtful whether astronomers have ever yet looked on the face of Mercury: it is at least very generally held that hitherto only his clouds have been seen. Even Jupiter, though it is thought his mountains have been occasionally detected raising their peaks through openings in his cloudy atmosphere, is known chiefly by the dark shifting bands that, streaking his surface in the line of his trade winds, belong not to his body, but to his thick dark covering. It is questionable whether a human eye on the surface of Mercury would ever behold the sun, notwithstanding his near proximity; nor would he be often visible, if at all, from the surface of Jupiter. Nor, yet further, would a warm steaming atmosphere muffled in clouds have been unfavorable to a rank, flowerless vegetation like that of the Coal Measures. There are moist, mild, cloudy days of spring and early Summer that rejoice the heart of the farmer, for he knows how conducive they are to the young growth on his fields. The Coal Measure climate would have consisted of an unbroken series of these, with mayhap a little more of cloud and moisture, and a great deal more of heat. The earth would have been a vast greenhouse covered with smoked glass; and a vigorous though mayhap loosely knit and faintly colored vegetation would have luxuriated under its shade. The fifth and sixth days,--that of winged fowl and great sea monsters, and that of cattle and beasts of the earth,--I must regard as adequately represented by those Secondary ages, Oolitic and Cretaceous, during which birds were introduced, and reptiles received their greatest development, and those Tertiary ages during which the gigantic mammals possessed the earth and occupied the largest space in creation. To the close of this latter period,--the evening of the sixth day,--man belongs,--at once the last created of terrestrial creatures, and infinitely beyond comparison the most elevated in the scale; and with man's appearance on the scene the days of creation end, and the Divine Sabbath begins,--that Sabbath of rest from creative labor of which the proper work is the moral development and elevation of the species, and which will terminate only with the full completion of that sublime task on the full accomplishment of which God's eternal purposes and the tendencies of man's progressive nature seem alike directed. Now, I am greatly mistaken if we have not in the six geologic periods all the elements, without misplacement or exaggeration, of the Mosaic drama of creation. I have referred in my brief survey to extended periods. It is probable, however, that the prophetic vision of creation, if such was its character, consisted of only single representative scenes, embracing each but a point of time; it was, let us suppose, a diorama, over whose shifting pictures the curtain rose and fell six times in succession,--once during the Azoic period, once during the earlier or middle Palæozoic period, once during the Carboniferous period, once during the Permian or Triassic period, once during the Oolitic or Cretaceous period, and finally, once during the Tertiary period. Dr. Kurtz holds, taking the Sabbath into the series, that the division into _seven_ scenes or stages may have been regulated with reference to the importance and sacredness of the mythic number seven,--the symbol of completeness or perfection; but the suggestion will perhaps not now carry much weight among the theologians of Britain, whatever it might have done two centuries ago. It is true, that creation _might_ have been exhibited, not by seven, but by seven hundred, or even by seven thousand scenes; and that the accomplished man of science, skilled in every branch of physics, might have found something distinct in them all. But not the less do the seven, or rather the six, exhibited scenes appear to be not symbolic or mystical, at least not exclusively symbolic or mystical, but truly representative of successive periods, strongly distinctive in their character, and capable, with the three geologic days as given points in the problem, of being treated geologically. Another of the questions raised, both by the German doctor and the writer in our own country, must be recognized as eminently suggestive. "We treat the history of creation," says Dr. Kurtz, "with its six days' work, as a connected series of so many prophetic visions. The appearance and evanishing of each such vision seem to the seer as a morning and an evening, apparently because these were presented to him as an increase and decrease of light, like morning and evening twilight." And we find the Scottish writer taking essentially the same view. "Each day contains," he says, "the description of what he [Moses] beheld in a single vision, and when it faded it was twilight. There is nothing forced in supposing that, after the vision had for a time illumined the fancy of the seer, it was withdrawn from his eyes, in the same way that the landscape becomes dim on the approach of evening.... From this point of view, a 'day' can only mean the period during which the Divinely enlightened fancy of the seer was active. When all continued bright and manifest before his entranced but still conscious soul, it was 'day' or 'light.' When the dimness of departing enlightenment fell upon the scene, it was the evening twilight." The _days_, then, are removed, we find, by the holders of this view, altogether from the province of chronology to the province of prophetic vision; they are represented simply as parts of the exhibited scenery, or rather as forming the measures of the apparent time during which the scenery _was_ exhibited. We must also hold, however, that in the character of symbolic days they were as truly representative of the lapse of foregone periods of creation as the scenery itself was representative of the creative work accomplished in these periods. For if the apparent days occurred in only the vision, and were not symbolic of foregone periods, they could not have been transferred with any logical propriety from the vision itself to that which the vision represented, as we find done in what our Shorter Catechism terms "the reason annexed to the Fourth Commandment."[18] The days must have been prophetic days, introduced, indeed, into the panorama of creation as mayhap mere openings and droppings of the curtain, but not the less symbolic of that series of successive periods, each characterized by its own productions and events, in which creation itself was comprised. Nothing more probable, however, than that even Moses himself may have been unacquainted with the _extent_ of the periods represented in the vision; nay, he may have been equally unconscious of the actual extent of the seeming days by which they were symbolized. "Visions without dark speeches,"--visions, not of symbolic apparitions, but of actual existences and events, past or present,--may, nay must, have differed from what may be termed the dark hieroglyphic visions; but we find in all visions an element of mere representative value introduced when they deal with time, and that they occur as if wholly outside its pale. These creation "days" seem, in relation to what they typify, to have been, if I may so express myself, the mere _modules_ of a graduated scale. Such a description of the creative vision of Moses as the one given by Milton of that vision of the future, which he represents as conjured up before Adam by the archangel, would be a task rather for the scientific poet than for the mere practical geologist or sober theologian. Let us suppose that it took place far from man, in an untrodden recess of the Midian desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush had been vouchsafed; and that, as in the vision of St. John in Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as certainly addressed as the eye. A "great darkness" first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the "horror;" and, as the Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildly troubled waters, as a visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision into a few brief moments, pass away; the creative voice is again heard, "Let there be light," and straightway a gray diffused light springs up in the east, and, casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming, vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the west. One heavy, sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint light waxes fainter,--it sinks beneath the dim, undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits awhile on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night. The light again brightens,--it is day; and over an expanse of ocean without visible bound the horizon has become wider and sharper of outline than before. There is life in that great sea,--invertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic, life; but, from the comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. That lower stratum of the heavens occupied in the previous vision by seething steam, or gray, smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the previously invisible vapor of the tepid sea has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere they lie, thick and manifold,--an upper sea of great waves, separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament, and, like them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty advance has taken place in creation; but its most conspicuous optical sign is the existence of a transparent atmosphere,--of a firmament, stretched out over the earth, that separates the waters above from the waters below. But darkness descends for the third time upon the seer, for the evening and the morning have completed the second day. Yet again the light rises under a canopy of cloud; but the scene has changed, and there is no longer an unbroken expanse of sea. The white surf breaks, at the distant horizon, on an insulated reef, formed mayhap by the Silurian or Old Red coral zoophytes ages before, during the bygone yesterday; and beats in long lines of foam, nearer at hand, against a low, winding shore, the seaward barrier of a widely spread country. For at the Divine command the land has arisen from the deep,--not inconspicuously and in scattered islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive though flat and marshy continents, little raised over the sea level; and a yet further fiat has covered them with the great carboniferous flora. The scene is one of mighty forests of cone-bearing trees,--of palms, and tree-ferns, and gigantic club mosses, on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. There is deep gloom in the recesses of the thicker woods, and low thick mists creep along the dank marsh or sluggish stream. But there is a general lightening of the sky over head; as the day declines, a redder flush than had hitherto lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern covered bank and long withdrawing glade. And while the fourth evening has fallen on the prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears on, and the fourth dawn approaches, that yet another change has taken place. The Creator has spoken, and the stars look out from openings of deep unclouded blue; and as day rises, and the planet of morning pales in the east, the broken cloudlets are transmuted from bronze into gold, and anon the gold becomes fire, and at length the glorious sun arises out of the sea, and enters on his course rejoicing. It is a brilliant day; the waves, of a deeper and softer blue than before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with little else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of brighter green; and as the sun declines amid even richer glories than those which had encircled his rising, the moon appears full orbed in the east,--to the human eye the second great luminary of the heavens,--and climbs slowly to the zenith as night advances, shedding its mild radiance on land and sea. Again the day breaks; the prospect consists, as before, of land and ocean. There are great pine woods, reed-covered swamps, wide plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines over all. But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening, over the narrower seas, or brighten with the sunlit gleam of their wings the thick woods. And ocean has its monsters: great "_tanninim_" tempest the deep, as they heave their huge bulk over the surface, to inhale the life-sustaining air; and out of their nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a "seething pot or cauldron." Monstrous creatures, armed in massive scales, haunt the rivers, or scour the flat rank meadows; earth, air, and water are charged with animal life; and the sun sets on a busy scene, in which unerring instinct pursues unremittingly its few simple ends,--the support and preservation of the individual, the propagation of the species, and the protection and maintenance of the young. Again the night descends, for the fifth day has closed; and morning breaks on the sixth and last day of creation. Cattle and beasts of the fields graze on the plains; the thick-skinned rhinoceros wallows in the marshes; the squat hippopotamus rustles among the reeds, or plunges sullenly into the river; great herds of elephants seek their food amid the young herbage of the woods; while animals of fiercer nature,--the lion, the leopard, and the bear,--harbor in deep caves till the evening, or lie in wait for their prey amid tangled thickets, or beneath some broken bank. At length, as the day wanes and the shadows lengthen, man, the responsible lord of creation, formed in God's own image, is introduced upon the scene, and the work of creation ceases forever upon the earth. The night falls once more upon the prospect, and there dawns yet another morrow,--the morrow of God's rest,--that Divine Sabbath in which there is no more creative labor, and which, "blessed and sanctified" beyond all the days that had gone before, has as its special object the moral elevation and final redemption of man. And over _it_ no evening is represented in the record as falling, for its special work is not yet complete. Such seems to have been the sublime panorama of creation exhibited in vision of old to "The shepherd who first taught the chosen seed, In the beginning how the heavens and earth Rose out of chaos;" and, rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth that militates against even the minutest or least prominent of its details. LECTURE FIFTH. GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. PART I. The science of the geologist seems destined to exert a marked influence on that of the natural theologian. For not only does it greatly add to the materials on which the natural theologian founds his deductions, by adding to the organisms, plant and animal, of the present creation the extinct organisms of the creations of the past, with all their extraordinary display of adaptation and design; but it affords him, besides, materials peculiar to itself, in the history which it furnishes both of the appearance of these organisms in time, and of the wonderful order in which they were chronologically arranged. Not only--to borrow from Paley's illustration--does it enable him to argue on the old grounds, from the contrivance exhibited in the _watch_ found on the moor, that the watch could not have lain upon the moor forever; but it establishes further, on different and more direct evidence, that there was a time when absolutely the watch was not there; nay, further, so to speak, that there was a previous time in which no watches existed at all, but only water clocks; yet, further, that there was a time in which there were not even water clocks, but only sundials; and further, an earlier time still in which sundials were not, nor any measurers of time of any kind. And this is distinct ground from that urged by Paley. For, besides holding that each of these contrivances must have had in turn an originator or contriver, it adds historic fact to philosophic inference. Geology takes up the master volume of the greatest of the natural theologians, and, after scanning its many apt instances of palpable design, drawn from the mechanism of existing plants and animals, authoritatively decides that not one of these plants or animals had begun to be in the times of the Chalk; nay, that they all date their origin from a period posterior to that of the Eocene. And the fact is, of course, corroborative of the inference. "That well constructed edifice," says the natural theologian, "cannot be a mere _lusus naturæ_, or chance combination of stones and wood; it must have been erected by a builder." "Yes," remarks the geologist, "it was erected some time during the last nine years. I passed the way ten years ago, and saw only a blank space where it now stands." Nor does the established fact of an absolute beginning of organic being seem more pregnant with important consequences to the science of the natural theologian than the fact of the peculiar order in which they begin to be. The importance of the now demonstrated fact, that all the living organisms which exist on earth had a beginning, and that a time was when they were not, will be best appreciated by those who know how much, and, it must be added, how unsuccessfully, writers on the evidences have labored to convict of an absurdity, on this special head, the atheistic assertors of an infinite series of beings. Even Robert Hall (in his famous Sermon on Modern Infidelity) could but play, when he attempted grappling with the subject, upon the words _time_ and _eternity_, and strangely argue, that as each member of an infinite series must have begun in _time_, while the succession itself was _eternal_, it was palpably absurd to ask us to believe in a _succession_ of beings that was thus infinitely earlier than any of the beings themselves which composed the succession. And Bentley, more perversely ingenious still, could assert, that as each of the individuals in an infinite series must have consisted of many parts,--that as each man in such a series, for instance, must have had ten fingers and ten toes,--it was palpably absurd to ask us to believe in an infinity which thus comprised many infinities,--ten infinities of fingers, for example, and ten infinities of toes. The infidels had the better in this part of the argument. It was surely easy enough to show against the great preacher, on the one hand, that _time_ in such a question is but a mere word that means simply a certain limited or definite period which had a beginning, whereas eternity means an unlimited and undefinable period which had no beginning;--that his seeming argument was no argument, but merely a sort of verbal play on this difference of signification in the words;--further, that man could conceive of an infinite series, whether extended in infinite space, or subsisting in infinite time, just as well as he could conceive of any other infinity, and in the same way; and that the only mode of disproving the possibility of such a series would be to show, what of course cannot be shown, that in conceiving of it in the progressive mode in which, according to Locke, man can alone conceive of the infinite or the eternal, there would be a point reached at which it would be impossible for him to go on adding millions on millions to the previous sum. The symbolic "_ad infinitum_" could be made as adequately representative in the case of an infinite series of men or animals in unlimited time, as of an infinite series of feet or inches in unlimited space, or of an infinite series of hours or minutes in the past eternity. And as for Bentley, on the other hand, he ought surely to have known that all infinities are not equal, seeing that Newton had expressly told him so in the second of his four famous letters; but that, on the contrary, one infinity may be not only ten times greater than another infinity, but even infinitely greater than another infinity; and that so the conception of an infinity of men possessed of ten infinities of fingers and toes is in no respect an absurdity. Of the three infinities possible in space, the second is infinitely greater than the first, and the third infinitely greater than the second. A line infinitely produced is capable of being divided into--that is, consists of--an infinity of given parts; a plane infinitely extended is capable of being divided into an infinity of infinitely divisible lines; and a cube, that is, a solid, infinitely expanded, is capable of being divided into an infinity of infinitely divisible planes. In fine, metaphysic theology furnishes no argument against the infinite series of the atheist. But geology does. Every plant and animal that now lives upon earth began to be during the great Tertiary period, and had no place among the plants and animals of the great Secondary division. We can trace several of our existing quadrupeds, such as the badger, the hare, the fox, the red deer, and the wild cat, up till the earlier times of the Pleistocene; and not a few of our existing shells, such as the great pecten, the edible oyster, the whelk, and the Pelican's-foot shell, up till the greatly earlier times of the Coraline Crag. But at certain definite lines in the deposits of the past, representative of certain points in the course of time, the existing mammals and molluscs cease to appear, and we find their places occupied by other mammals and molluscs. Even such of our British shells as seem to have enjoyed as species the longest term of life cannot be traced beyond the times of the Pliocene deposits. We detect their remains in a perfect state of keeping in almost every shell-bearing bed, till we reach the Red and Coraline Crags, where we find them for the last time; and, on passing into older and deeper lying beds, we see their places taken by other shells, of species altogether distinct. The very common shell _Purpura lapillus_, for instance, is found in our raised beaches, in our Clyde beds, in our boulder clays and mammaliferous crags, and, finally, in the Red Crag, beyond which it fails to appear. And such also is the history of the common edible mussel and common periwinkle; whereas the common edible cockle, and common edible pecten (_P. opercularis_) occur not only in all these successive beds, but in the Coral Crag also. They are older by a whole deposit than their present contemporaries, the mussel and periwinkle; and these, in turn, seem of older standing than shells such as _Murex erinaceus_, that has not been traced beyond the times of the mammaliferous crag, or than shells such as _Scrobicularia piperata_, that has not been detected in more ancient deposits than raised sea beaches of the later periods, and the elevated bottoms of old estuaries and lagoons. We thus know, that in certain periods, nearer or more remote, all our existing molluscs _began_ to exist, and that they had no existence during the previous periods; which were, however, richer in animals of the same great molluscan group than the present time. Our British group of recent marine shells falls somewhat short of _four_ hundred species;[19] whereas the group characteristic of the older Miocene deposits, largely developed in those districts of France which border on the Bay of Biscay, and more sparingly in the south of England, near Yarmouth, comprises more than six hundred species. Nearly an equal number of still older shells have been detected in a single deposit of the Paris basin,--the _Calcaire grossier_; and a good many more in a more ancient formation still, the London Clay. On entering the Chalk, we find a yet older group of shells, wholly unlike any of the preceding ones; and in the Oolite and Lias yet other and different groups. And thus group preceded group throughout all the Tertiary, Secondary, and Palæozoic periods; some of them remarkable for the number of species which they contained, others for the profuse abundance of their individual specimens, until, deep in the rocks at the base of the Silurian system, we detect what seems to be the primordial group, beneath which only a single animal organism is known to occur,--the _Oldhamia antiqua_,--a plant-like zoophyte, akin apparently to some of our recent sertularia, (See fig. 5, page 48.) Each of the extinct groups had, we find, a beginning and an end;--there is not in the wide domain of physical science a more certain fact; and every species of the group which now exists had, like all their predecessors on the scene, their beginning also. The "infinite series" of the atheists of former times can have no place in modern science: all organic existences, recent or extinct, vegetable or animal, have had their beginning;--there was a time when they were not. The geologist can indicate that time, if not by years, at least by periods, and show what its relations were to the periods that went before and that came after; and as it is equally a recognized truth on both sides of the controversy, that as something now exists, something must have existed forever, and as it must now be not less surely recognized, that that something was not the race of man, nor yet any other of the many races of man's predecessors or contemporaries, the question, What then was that something? comes with a point and directness which it did not possess at any former time. By what, or through whom, did these races of nicely organized plants and animals begin to be? Hitherto at least there has been but one reply to the question originated on the skeptical side. All these races, it is said, have been _developed_, in the long course of ages, into what they now are, as the young animal is developed in the womb, or the young plant is developed from the seed. Topsy, in the novel, "'spected that she was not made, but growed;" and the only class of opponents which the geological theist finds in the field which his science has laid open to the world is a class that hold by the philosophy of Topsy. Let me briefly remark regarding this development hypothesis, with which I have elsewhere dealt at considerable length, that while the facts of the geologist are demonstrably such, that is, truths capable of proof, the hypothesis is a mere dream, unsupported by a shadow of evidence. A man of a lively imagination could no doubt originate many such dreams; nay, we know that in the dark ages dreams of the kind were actually originated. The _Anser Bernicla_, or barnacle goose, a common winter visitant of our coasts, was once believed to be developed out of decaying wood long submerged in sea water: and one of our commonest cirripedes or barnacles, _Lepas anatifera_, still bears, in its specific name of the goose-producing _lepas_, evidence that it was the creature specially recognized by our ancestors as the half-developed goose. As if in memory of this old development legend, the bird still bears the name of the barnacle, and the barnacle of the bird; and we know further, that very intelligent men for their age, such as Gerardes the herbalist (1597), and Hector Boece the historian (1524), both examined these shells, and, knowing but little of comparative anatomy, were satisfied that the animal within was the partially developed embryo of a fowl. Such was one of the fables gravely credited as a piece of natural history in Britain about three centuries ago, and such was the kind of evidence by which it was supported. And we know that the followers of Epicurus received from their master, without apparent suspicion, fables still more extravagant, and that wanted even such a shadow of proof to support them as satisfied the herbalist and the historian. The Epicureans at least professed to believe that the earth, after spontaneously producing herbs and trees, began to produce in great numbers mushroom-like bodies, that, when they came to maturity, burst open, giving egress each to a young animal, which proved the founder of a race; and that thus, in succession, all the members of the animal kingdom were ushered into existence. But whether the dream be that of the Epicureans of classic times, or that of the naturalists of the middle ages, or that of the Lamarckians of our own days, it is equally a dream, and can have no place assigned to it among either the solid facts or the sober deductions of science. Nay, the dream of the Lamarckians labors under a special disadvantage, from which the dreams of the others are free. If some modern Boece or Epicurus were to assert that at certain definite periods, removed from fifteen to fifty thousand years from the present time, all our existing animals were developed from decaying wood, or from a wonderful kind of mushrooms that the earth produced only once every ten thousand years, the assertion, if incapable of proof, would be at least equally incapable of being _dis_-proven. But when the Lamarckian affirms that all our recent species of plants and animals were developed out of previously existing plants and animals of species entirely different, he affirms what, if true, _would_ be capable of proof; and so, if it cannot be proven, it is only because it is not true. The trilobites have been extinct ever since the times of the Mountain Limestone; and yet, by series of specimens, the individual development of certain species of this family, almost from the extrusion of the animal from the egg until the attainment of its full size, has been satisfactorily shown. By specimen after specimen has every stage of growth and every degree of development been exemplified; and the Palæontologist has come as thoroughly to know the creatures, in consequence, under their various changes from youth to age, as if they had been his contemporaries, and had grown up under his eye. And had our existing species, vegetable and animal, been derived from other species of the earlier periods, it would have been equally possible to demonstrate, by a series of specimens, _their_ relationship. Let us again instance the British shells. Losing certain species in each of the older and yet older deposits at which we successively arrive, we at length reach the Red and Coraline Crags, where we find, mingled with the familiar forms, a large per centage of forms now extinct; then going on to the shells of the lower Miocene, more than six hundred species appear, almost all of which are strange to us; and then, passing to the Eocene shells of the _Calcaire grossier_, we find ourselves among well nigh as large a group of yet other and older strangers, not one of which we are able to identify with any shell now living in the British area. There would be thus no lack of materials for forming such a genealogy of the British shells, had they been gradually developed out of the extinct species, as that which M. Barrande has formed of the trilobites. But no such genealogy can be formed. We cannot link on a single recent shell to a single extinct one. _Up_ to a certain point we find the recent shells exhibiting all their present specific peculiarities, and beyond that point they cease to appear. _Down_ to a certain point the extinct shells also exhibit all _their_ specific peculiarities, and then they disappear forever. There are no intermediate species,--no connecting links,--no such connected series of specimens to be found as enables us to trace a trilobite through all its metamorphoses from youth to age. All geologic history is full of the beginnings and the ends of species,--of their first and their last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of development. The Lamarckian sets himself to grapple, in his dream, with the history of all creation: we awaken him, and ask him to grapple, instead, with the history of but a few individual species,--with that of the mussel or the whelk, the clam or the oyster; and we find from his helpless ignorance and incapacity what a mere pretender he is. But while no hypothesis of development can neutralize or explain away the great geologic fact, that every true species had a beginning independently, apparently, of every preceding species, there was demonstrably a general progress, in the course of creation, from lower to higher forms, which seems scarce less fraught with important consequences to the natural theologian than this fact of _beginning_ itself. For while the one fact effectually disposes of the "infinite series" of the atheist, the other fact disposes scarce less effectually of those reasonings on the skeptical side which, framed on the assumption that creation is a "singular effect,"--an effect without duplicate,--have been employed in urging, that from that one effect only can we know aught regarding the producing cause. Knowing of the cause from but the effect, and having experience of but one effect, we cannot rationally hold, it has been argued, that the producing cause could have originated effects of a higher or more perfect kind. The creation which it produced we know; but, having no other measure of its power, we cannot regard it, it has been contended, as equal to the production of a better or nobler creation, or of course hold that it _could_ originate such a state of things as that perfect future state which faith delights to contemplate. It has been well said of the author of this ingenious argument,--by far the most sagacious of the skeptics,--that if we admit his premises we shall find it difficult indeed to set aside his conclusions. And how, in this case, does geology deal with his premises? By opening to us the history of the remote past of our planet, and introducing us, through the present, to former creations, it breaks down that _singularity_ of effect on which he built, and for one creation gives us many. It gives us exactly that which, as he truly argued, his contemporaries had not,--an _experience_ in creations. And let us mark how, applied to each of these in succession, his argument would tell. There was a time when life, animal or vegetable, did not exist on our planet, and when all creation, from its centre to its circumference, was but a creation of dead matter. What, in that early age, would have been the effect of the argument of Hume? Simply this,--that though the producing Cause of all that appeared was competent to the formation of gases and earths, metals and minerals, it would be unphilosophic to deem him adequate to the origination of a single plant or animal, even to that of a spore or of a monad. Ages pass by, and the Palæozoic creation is ushered in, with its tall araucarians and pines, its highly organized fishes, and its reptiles of comparatively low standing. And how now, and with what effect, does the argument apply? It is now rendered evident, that in the earlier creation the producing Cause had exerted but a portion of his power, and that he could have done greatly more than he actually did, seeing that we now find him adequate to the origination of vitality and organization in its two great kingdoms, plant and animal. But, still confining ourselves with cautious skepticism within the limits of our argument, we continue to hold that, as fishes of a high and reptiles of a low order, with trees of the cone-bearing family, are the most perfect specimens of their respective classes which the producing Cause has originated, it would be rash to hold, in the absence of proof, that he _could_ originate aught higher or more perfect. And now, as yet other ages pass away, the creation of the great Secondary division takes the place of that of the vanished Palæozoic; and we find in its few dicotyledonous plants, in its reptiles of highest standing, in its great birds, and in its some two or three humble marsupial mammals, that in the previous, as in the earlier creation, the producing Cause had been, if I may so express myself, working greatly under his strength, and that in this third creation we have a still higher display of his potency. With some misgivings, however, we again apply our argument. And now yet another creation,--that of the Tertiary period, with its noble forests of dicotyledonous trees and its sagacious and gigantic mammals,--rises upon the scene; and as our experience in creations has now become very considerable, and as we have seen each in succession higher than that which preceded it, we find that, notwithstanding our assumed skepticism, we had, compelled by one of the most deeply seated instincts of our nature, been secretly anticipating the advance which the new state of things actually realizes. But applying the argument once more, we at least assume to hold, that as the sagacious elephant is the highest example of animal life yet produced by the originating Cause, it would be unphilosophic to deem him capable of producing a higher example. And, while we are thus reasoning, man appears upon creation,--a creature immeasurably superior to all the others, and whose very nature it is to make use of his experience of the past for his guidance in the future. And if that only be solid experience or just reasoning which enables us truly to anticipate the events which are to come, and so to make provision for them; and if that experience be not solid, and that reasoning not just, which would serve but to darken our discernment, and prevent us from correctly predicating the cast and complexion of coming events; what ought to be our decision regarding an argument which, had it been employed in each of the vanished creations of the past, would have had but the effect of arresting all just anticipation regarding the immediately succeeding creation, and which, thus reversing the main end and object of philosophy, would render the philosopher who clung to it less sagacious in divining the future than even the ordinary man? But, in truth, the existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The footprint on the sand--to refer to his happy illustration--does not now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a higher level; and, founding at once on an acquaintance with the past, extended throughout all the periods of the geologist, and on that instinct of our nature whose peculiar function it is to anticipate at least one creation more, we must regard the expectation of "new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness," as not unphilosophic, but as, on the contrary, altogether rational and according to experience. Such is the bearing of geological science on two of the most important questions that have yet been raised in the field of natural theology. Nor does it bear much less directly on a controversy to which, during the earlier half of the last century, there was no little importance attached in Britain, and which engaged on its opposite sides some of the finest and most vigorous intellects of the age and country. The school of infidelity represented by Bolingbroke, and, in at least his earlier writings, by Soame Jenyns, and which, in a modified form, attained to much popularity through Pope's famous "Essay," assigned to man a comparatively inconsiderable space in the system of the universe. It regarded him as but a single link in a chain of mutual dependency,--a chain which would be no longer an entire, but a broken one, were he to be struck out of it, but as thus more important from his position than from his nature or his powers. You will remember that one of the sections of Pope's first epistle to his "good St. John" is avowedly devoted to show what he terms the "absurdity of man's supposing himself the final cause of the creation;" and though this great master of condensed meaning and brilliant point is now less read than he was in the days of our grandfathers, you will all remember the elegant stanzas in which he states the usual claims of the species only to ridicule them. It is human pride personified that he represents as exclaiming,-- "For me kind Nature wakes her genial power, Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower, Annual for me the grape, the rose, renew The juice nectarious and the balmy dew. For me the mine a thousand treasures brings; For me health gushes from a thousand springs; Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise; My footstool earth, my canopy the skies." You will further remember how the poet, after thus reducing the claims and lowering the position of the species, set himself to show that man, viewed in relation to the place which he occupies, ought not to be regarded as an imperfect being. Man is, he said, as perfect as he ought to be. And, such being the case, the Author of all, looking, it would seem, very little after him, has just left him to take care of himself. A cold, unfeeling abstraction, like the gods of the old Epicurean, the Great First Cause of this school is a being "Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall; Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, And now a bubble burst, and now a world." Such, assuredly, was not that God of the New Testament whom the Saviour of mankind revealed to his disciples as caring for all his creatures of the dust, but as caring most for the highest of all. "Are not two sparrows," he said, "sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father. Fear ye not, therefore; ye are of more value than many sparrows." It was the error of this ingenious but very unsolid school, that it regarded the mere _order_ of the universe as itself an end or final cause. It reasoned respecting creation, as if it would be true philosophy to account for the origin and existence of some great city, such as the city of Washington in the United States, built, as we know, for purely political purposes, by showing that,--as it was remarkable for its order, for the rectilinear directness of its streets, and the rectangularity of its squares,--it must have been erected simply to be a perfect embodiment of regularity; and to urge further that, save in their character as component parts of a perfect whole, the House of Representatives and the mansion of the President were of no more intrinsic importance, or no more decidedly the _end_ of the whole, than any low tavern or outhouse in the lesser streets or lanes. The destruction of either the outhouse or the House of Representatives would equally form a void in the general plan of the city, regarded as an admirably arranged whole. And it was thus with the grand scheme of creation; for, "From nature's chain whatever link we strike, Tenth or tenth thousand, breaks the chain alike." Nor is it in other than due keeping with such a view of creation, that its great Author should be represented as a cold abstraction, without love or regard, and equally indifferent to the man and the sparrow, to the atom and the planet. Order has respect to but the _relations_ of things or of beings,--not to the things or beings themselves; order is the _figure_ which, as mere etched points or strokes, they compose,--the legend which, as signs or characters, they form; and who cares anything for the component strokes or dots irrespective of the print, or for the component letters or words apart from the writing? The "equal eye," in such a scheme, would of necessity be an indifferent one. Against this strange doctrine, though in some measure countenanced by the glosses of Warburton in his defence of Pope, the theologians protested,--none of them, however, more vigorously than Johnson, in his famous critique on the "Free Inquiry" of Soame Jenyns. Nor is it uninteresting to mark with what a purely instinctive feeling of the right some of the better poets, whose "lyre," according to Cowper, was their "heart," protested against it too. Poor Goldsmith, when sitting a homeless vagabond on the slopes of the Alps, could exclaim in a greatly truer tone than that of his polished predecessor,-- "Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine!" And in Cowper himself we find all Goldsmith's intense feeling of appropriation, that "calls the delightful scenery all its own," associated "With worthy thoughts of that unvaried love That planned, and built, and still upholds, a world So clothed with beauty, for rebellious man." Strange to say, however, it is to the higher exponents of natural science, and in especial to the geologists, that it has been left to deal most directly with the sophistries of Bolingbroke and Pope. Oken, a man quite as far wrong in some points as either the poet or his master, was the first to remark, and this in the oracular, enigmatical style peculiar to the German, that "man is the sum total of all the animals." Gifted, as all allow, with a peculiarly nice eye for detecting those analogies which unite the animal world into a harmonious whole, he remarked, that in one existence or being all these analogies converge. Even the humbler students of the heavens have learned to find for themselves the star of the pole, by following the direction indicated by what are termed the two pointer stars in the Great Bear. And to the eye of Oken all the groups of the animal kingdom formed a sphere of constellations, each of which has its pointer stars, if I may so speak, turned towards man. Man occupies, as it were, the central point in the great circle of being; so that those lines which pass singly through each of the inferior animals stationed at its circumference, meet in him; and thus, as the focus in which the scattered rays unite, he imparts by his presence a unity and completeness to creation which it would not possess were he away. You will be startled, however, by the language in which the German embodies his view; though it may be not uninstructive to refer to it in evidence of the fact that a man may be _intellectually_ on the very verge of truth, and yet for every moral purpose infinitely removed from it. "Man," he says, "is God manifest in the flesh." And yet it may be admitted that there is a certain loose sense in which man _is_ "God manifest in the flesh." As may be afterwards shown, he is God's _image_ manifested in the flesh; and an image or likeness _is_ a manifestation or making evident of that which it represents, whether it be an image or likeness of body or of mind. Not less extraordinary, but greatly more sound in their application, are the views of Professor Owen,--supreme in his own special walk as a comparative anatomist. We find him recognizing man as exemplifying in his structure the perfection of that type in which, from the earliest ages, nature had been working with reference to some future development, and as _therefore_ a foreordained existence. "The recognition of an ideal exemplar for the vertebrated animals proves," he says, "that the knowledge of such a being as man must have existed before man appeared. For the Divine mind that planned the archetype also foreknew all its modifications. The archetypal idea was manifested in the flesh under divers modifications, upon this planet, long prior to the existence of those animal species that actually exemplify it." So far Owen. And not less wonderful is the conclusion at which Agassiz has arrived, after a survey of the geologic existences, more extended and minute, in at least the ichthyic department, than that of any other man. "It is evident," we find him saying, in the conclusion of his recent work, "The Principles of Zoology,"[20] "that there is a manifest progress in the succession of beings on the surface of the earth. This progress consists in an increasing similarity to the living fauna, and among the vertebrates, especially in their increasing resemblance to man. But this connection is not the consequence of a direct lineage between the faunas of different ages. There is nothing like parental descent connecting them. The fishes of the Palæozoic age are in no respect the ancestors of the reptiles of the Secondary age, nor does man descend from the mammals which preceded him in the Tertiary age. The link by which they are connected is of a higher and immaterial nature; and their connection is to be sought in the view of the Creator himself, whose aim in forming the earth, in allowing it to undergo the successive changes which geology has pointed out, and in creating successively all the different types of animals which have passed away, _was to introduce man upon the surface of our globe_. MAN IS THE END TOWARDS WHICH ALL THE ANIMAL CREATION HAS TENDED FROM THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE FIRST PALÆOZOIC FISHES." These, surely, are extraordinary deductions. "In thy book," says the Psalmist, "all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of them." And here is natural science, by the voice of two of its most distinguished professors, saying exactly the same thing. Of the earliest known vertebrates,--the placoidal fishes of the Upper Silurian rocks,--we possess only fragments, which, however, sufficiently indicate, from their resemblance to the corresponding parts of an existing shark,--the cestracion,--that they belonged to fishes furnished with the two pairs of fins now so generally recognized as the homologues of the fore and hinder limbs in quadrupeds. With the second earliest vertebrates,--the ganoids of the Old Red Sandstone,--we are more directly acquainted, and know that they exhibited the true typical form,--a vertebral column terminating in a brain-protecting skull; and that, in at least the acanth, celacanth, and dipterian families, they had the limb-like fins. In the upper parts of the system the earliest reptiles leave the first known traces of the typical foot, with its five digits. Higher still in one of the deposits of the Trias we are startled by what seems to be the impression of a human hand of an uncouth massive shape, but with the thumb apparently set in opposition, as in man, to the other fingers; we next trace the type upwards among the wonderfully developed reptiles of the Secondary periods; then among the mammals of the Tertiary ages, higher and yet higher forms appear; the mute prophecies of the coming being become with each approach clearer, fuller, more expressive, and at length receive their fulfilment in the advent of man. A double meaning attaches to the term type; and hence some ambiguity in the writings which have appeared on this curious subject. Type means a prophecy embodied in symbol; it means also what Sir Joshua Reynolds well terms "one of the general forms of nature,"--a pattern form, from which all others in the same class or family, however numerous, are recognized as mere exceptions and aberrations. But in the geologic series both meanings converge and become one. The form or number typical as the _general_ form or number, is found typical also as a _prophecy_ of the form or number that came at length to be exemplified in the deputed lord of creation. Let us in our examples take typical numbers, as more easily illustrated without diagrams than typical forms. There are vertebrate animals of the second age of ichthyic existence, that, like the _Pterichthys_ and _Coccosteus_, were furnished with but two limbs. The murænidæ of recent times have no more; at least one of their number, the muræna proper, wants limbs altogether; so also do the lampreys. The snakes are equally limbless, save that the boas and pythons possess the rudiments of a single pair; and such also is the condition, among the amphibia, of all the known species of Coecilia. And yet, notwithstanding these exceptional cases, the true typical number of limbs, as shown by a preponderating majority of the vertebrates of all ages of the world, is four. And this typical number is the human number. There is as certainly a typical number of digits too, as of the limbs which bear them. The exceptions are many. All the species of the horse genus possess but a single digit; the cattle family possess but two digits, the rhinoceros three digits, the hippopotamus four digits; many animals, such as the dog and cat, have but four digits on one pair of limbs and five on the other; whereas in some of the fishes the number of digits is singularly great,--from ten to twenty in most species, and in the rays from eighty to a hundred. And yet, as shown in the rocks, in which, however, the aberrations appear early, the true typical number is five on both the fore and hinder limbs. And such is the number in man. There is also, in at least the mammalia, a typical number of vertebræ in the neck. The three-toed sloth has nine cervical vertebræ; the manati only six; but seven is the typical number. And seven is the human number also. Man, in short, is pre-eminently what a theologian would term the antetypical existence,--the being in whom the types meet and are fulfilled. And not only do typical forms and numbers of the exemplified character meet in man, but there are not a few parts of his framework which in the inferior animals exist as but mere symbols, of as little importance as dugs in the male animal, though they acquire significancy and use in him. Such, for instance, are the many-jointed but moveless and unnecessary bones of which the stiff inflexible _fin_ of the dugong and the fore paw of the mole consist, and which exist in his arm as essential portions, none of which could be wanted, of an exquisitely flexible instrument. In other cases, the old types are exemplified serially in the growth and development of certain portions of his frame. Such is specially the case with that all important portion of it, the organ of thought and feeling. The human brain is built up by a wonderful process, during which it assumes in succession the form of the brain of a fish, of a reptile, of a bird, of a mammiferous quadruped; and, finally, it takes upon it its unique character as a human brain. Hence the remark of Oken, that "man is the sum total of all the animals;" hence, too, a recognition of type in the _history_ of the successive vertebral periods of the geologist, symbolical of the history of every individual man. It is not difficult to conceive how, on a subject of such complexity, especially if approached in an irreverent spirit, grave mistakes and misconceptions should take place. Virgil knew just enough of Hebrew prophecy to misapply, in his _Pollio_, to his great patron Octavius, those ancient predictions which foretold that in that age the Messiah was to appear. And I am inclined to hold, that in the more ingenious speculations of the Lamarckians we have just a similar misapplication of what, emboldened by the views of Owen and Agassiz, I shall venture to term the _Geologic Prophecies_. The term is new, but the idea which it embodies, though it at first existed rather as a nice poetic instinct than as a scientifically based thought, is at least as old as the times of Herder and Coleridge. In a passage quoted from the former writer by Dr. M'Cosh, in his very masterly work on typical forms, I find the profound German remarking of the strange resemblances which pervade all nature, and impart a general unity to its forms, that it would seem "as if on all our earth the form-abounding mother had proposed to herself but one type,--one proto-plasma,--according to which, and for which, she formed them all. Know, then," he continues, "what this form is. It is the identical one which man also wears." And the remark of Coleridge, in his "Aids to Reflection," is still more definite. "Let us carry us back in spirit," he says, "to the mysterious week, the teeming work days of the Creator (as _they rose in_ VISION _before the eye of the inspired historian_) of the operations of the heavens and of the earth, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And who that watched their ways with an understanding heart could, as the vision evolved still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee, the home-building, wedded, and divorceless swallow, and, above all, the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealths and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband folk that fold in their tiny flocks on the honey leaf, and the virgin sister with the holy instincts of maternal love detached and in selfless purity, and not say in himself, Behold the shadow of approaching humanity, the sun rising from behind in the kindling morn of creation?" There is fancy here; but it is that sagacious fancy, vouchsafed to only the true poet, which has so often proved the pioneer of scientific discovery, and which is in reality more sober and truthful, in the midst of its apparent extravagance, than the gravest cogitations of ordinary men. It is surely no incredible thing, that He who, in the dispensations of the human period, spake by type and symbol, and who, when He walked the earth in the flesh, taught in parable and allegory, should have also spoken in the geologic ages by prophetic figures embodied in the form and structure of animals. Nay, what the poet imagined, though in a somewhat extreme form, the philosophers seem to be on the very eve of confirming. The foreknown "archetypal idea" of Owen,--"the immaterial link of connection" of all the past with all the present, which Agassiz resolves into the foreordained design of the Creator,--will be yet found, I cannot doubt, to translate themselves into one great general truth, namely, that the Palæozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary dispensations of creation were charged, like the patriarchal and Mosaic dispensations of grace, with the "shadows of better things to come." The advent of man simply as such was the great event prefigured during the old geologic ages. The advent of that Divine Man "who hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light," was the great event prefigured during the historic ages. It is these two grand events, equally portions of one sublime scheme, originated when God took counsel with himself in the depths of eternity, that bind together past, present, and future,--the geologic with the Patriarchal, the Mosaic, and the Christian ages, and all together with that new heavens and new earth, the last of many creations, in which there shall be "no more death nor curse, but the throne of God and the Lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall serve him." "There is absurdity," said Pope, "in man's conceiting himself the final cause of creation." Unless, however, man had the entire scheme of creation before him, with the further partially known scheme of which but a part constitutes the grand theme of revelation, how could he pronounce on the absurdity? The knowledge of the geologist ascends no higher than man. He sees all nature in the pre-Adamic past, pointing with prophetic finger towards him; and on even the argument of Hume,--just and solid within its proper limits,--he refuses to acquiesce in the unfounded inference of Pope. In order to prove the absurdity of "man's conceiting himself the final cause of creation," proof of an ulterior cause,--of a higher end and aim,--must he adduced; and of aught higher than man, the geologist, as such, knows nothing. The long vista opened up by his science closes with the deputed lord of creation,--with man as he at present exists; and when, casting himself full upon revelation, the vail is drawn aside, and an infinitely grander vista stretches out before him into the future, he sees man--no longer, however, the natural, but the Divine man--occupying what is at once its terminal point and its highest apex. Such are some of the bearings of geologic science on the science of natural theology. Geology has disposed effectually and forever of the oft-urged assumption of an infinite series; it deals as no other science could have dealt with the assertion of the skeptic, that creation is a "singular effect;" it casts a flood of unexpected light on the somewhat obsolete plausibilities of Bolingbroke and Jenyns, that exhibits their utterly unsolid character; yet further, it exhibits in a new aspect the argument founded on design, and invests the place and standing of man in _creation_ with a peculiar significancy and importance, from its relation to the future. But on this latter part of my subject--necessarily of considerable extent and multiplicity, and connected rather with revealed than with natural religion--I must not now expatiate. I shall, however, attempt laying before you, on some future evening, a few thoughts on this portion of the general question, which you may at least find suggestive of others, and which, if they fail to elicit new truths, may have the effect of opening up upon an old truth or two a few fresh avenues through which to survey them. The character of man as a fellow-worker with his Creator in the material province has still to be considered in the light of geology. Man was the first, and is still the only creature of whom we know anything, who has set himself to carry on and improve the work of the world's original framer,--who is a planter of woods, a tiller of fields, and a keeper of gardens,--and who carries on his work of mechanical contrivance on obviously the same principles as those on which the Divine designer wrought of old, and on which he works still. It may not be wholly unprofitable to acquaint ourselves, through evidence furnished by the rocks, with the remarkable fact, that the Creator imparted to man the Divine image before he united to man's the Divine nature. LECTURE SIXTH. GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. PART II. Up till the introduction of man upon our planet, the humbler creatures, his predecessors, formed but mere figures in its various landscapes, and failed to alter or affect by their works the face of nature. They were conspicuous, not from what they _did_, but from what they _were_. At a very early period reefs of coral, the work of minute zoophytes, whitened the shallows of the ocean, or encircled with pale, ever broadening frames, solitary islands green with the shrubs and trees of extinct floras; but, though products of the animal world, they were not built up under the direction of even an instinctive intelligence, but were as entirely the results of a _vegetative_ process of mere growth as the forests or reed brakes of the old Carboniferous savannahs. At a later time an ant hill might be here and there descried, rearing its squat, brown pyramid amid the recesses of some Oolitic forest; or, in a period still more recent, the dam of the gigantic beaver might be seen extending its minute eye-like circlet of blue amid the windings of some bosky ravine of the Pliocene age; or existing as a little mound-skirted pond, with the rude half-submerged _cottage_ of the creature, its architect, rising beside it, on some rivulet of the Pleistocene. But how inconsiderable such works, compared with the wide extent of prospect in which they were included! How entirely inconspicuous rather, save when placed in the immediate foreground of the pictures into whose composition they entered! Not until the introduction of man upon earth do we find a creature whose works sensibly affect and modify the aspects of nature. But when man appears, how mighty the change which he effects! Immediately on his creation he takes under his care the vegetable productions of use and show: it becomes his business to keep and dress a garden. He next becomes a tiller of fields, then a planter of vineyards: here he cuts down great forests; there he rears extensive woods. He makes himself places of habitation; and busy cities spring up as the trophies of his diligence and skill. His labors, as they grow upon the waste, affect the appearance of vast continents; until at length, from many a hill-top and tall spire, scarce a rood of ground can be seen on which he has not built, or sown, or planted, or around which lie has not erected his walls or reared his hedges. Man, in this great department of industry, is what none of his predecessors upon the earth ever were,--"a fellow-worker" with the Creator. He is a mighty _improver_ of creation. We recognize that as improvement which adapts nature more thoroughly to man's own necessities and wants, and renders it more pleasing both to his sense of the æsthetic and to his more material senses also. He adds to the beauty of the flowers which he takes under his charge,--to the delicacy and fertility of the fruits; the seeds of the wild grasses become corn beneath his care; the green herbs grow great of root or bulb, or bulky and succulent of top and leaf; the wild produce of nature _sports_ under his hand; the rose and lily broaden their disks and multiply their petals; the harsh green crab swells out into a delicious golden-rinded apple, streaked with crimson; the productions of his kitchen garden, strangely metamorphosed to serve the uses of his table, bear forms unknown to nature; an occult law of change and development inherent to these organisms meets in him with the developing instinct and ability, and they are regenerated under his surveillance. Nor is his influence over many of the animals less marked. The habits which he imparts to the parents become _nature_, in his behalf, in their offspring. The dog acquires, under his tutelage, the virtues of fidelity to a master and affection to a friend. The ox and horse learn to assist him in the labors of the fields. The udders of the cow and goat distend beneath his care far beyond the size necessary in the wild state, and supply him with rich milk, and the other various products of the dairy. The fleece of the sheep becomes finer of texture and longer of fibre in his pens and folds; and even the indocile silkworm spins, in his sheltered conservatories, and among the mulberry trees which he has planted, a larger, and brighter, and more glistening cocoon. Man is the great creature-worker of the world,--its one created being, that, taking up the work of the adorable Creator, carries it on to higher results and nobler developments, and finds a field for his persevering ingenuity and skill in every province in which his Maker had expatiated before him. He is evidently--to adopt and modify the remark of Oken--God's image "manifest in the flesh." Surveyed from the special point of view furnished by this peculiar nature of man, unique in creation, all the past of our planet divides into two periods;--the period, inclusive of every age known to the geologist, during which only the Creator wrought; and the period during which man has wrought, and to which all human history belongs. In such a view we are presented with two sets of works,--those of the Creator-worker, and those of the creature-worker; and the vast fund of materials on which the natural theologian frames his arguments demonstrative of design or contrivance, assumes a new significancy and interest when employed as evidence that there exists a certain correspondence of nature and intellect between the two workers, human and Divine. The ability of accomplishing the same ends by the same means,--in other words, of thinking and acting in the same practical tract,--indicates a similarity, if not identity, of intellectual nature. In the Chinese centre of civilization, for instance, printing, gunpowder, the mariner's compass, with the various chemical and mechanical arts of elegant life, were originated without concert with the European centre of civilization, simply because in China, as in Europe, the same human faculties, prompted by the same tastes and necessities, had expatiated in the same tracts of invention, and had, as a consequence, educed the same results. I was much struck, when spending half an hour in a museum illustrative of the arts in China, by the identity of these with our own, especially in the purely mechanical departments; and again, when similarly employed in that apartment devoted, in the British Museum, to the domestic utensils of the ancient Egyptians. The identity of the more common contrivances which I witnessed, with familiar contrivances in our own country, I regarded as altogether as conclusive of an identity of mind in the individuals who had originated them, as if I had actually seen human creatures at work on them all. One class of productions showed me that the potter's wheel and the turning lathe had been known and employed as certainly in China and ancient Egypt as in Britain. Another, that their weaving processes must have been nearly the same. The Chinese know, for instance, as well as ourselves, that patterns can be delicately brought out,--as in the damasks,--without the assistance of color, simply by exposing silken or flaxen fibre at different angles to the light; and they have fallen, as their work shows, on the right methods of producing it. And the Egyptians anticipated us in even our most homely household contrivances. They even fermented their bread and trussed their fowls after the same fashion; and thus gave evidence, in these familiar matters, that they thought and contrived "after the manner of men." Now, in acquainting myself with the organisms of the geologic periods, I have been similarly but more deeply impressed by what I must be permitted to term the _human_ cast and character of the contrivances which they exemplified. Not only could I understand the principles on which they were constructed, but further, not a few of them had, I found, been actually introduced into works of human invention ages ere they were discovered in the rock. What the great Creator-worker had originated in the Palæozoic and Secondary periods, had been in after times originated by the little creature-worker, wholly unaware that his contrivance had been anticipated, and was but a repetition of a previously executed design. In the later geologic ages the organization of the various extinct animals so nearly resembled that of the animals which still live, that we may regard it as not inadequately represented by the illustrations of Paley. A few such exceptional contrivances appear among the mammals of the Tertiary as that formed by the huge pickaxe-like tusks of the Dinotherium, or a few such extraordinary modifications of the ordinary mammalian framework as that exhibited in the enormously massive pelvic arches and hinder limbs of the Mylodon and Megatherium. But not until we pass into the deposits of the Secondary period, and get among its cephalopoda, do we find a mechanism altogether unlike any with which we are acquainted among living organisms. As admirably shown by Buckland, the partitions which separate into chambers all the whorls of the ammonite except the outermost one, were exquisitely adapted to strengthen, by the tortuous windings of their outer edges, a shell which had to combine great lightness with great powers of resistance. Itself a continuous arch throughout, it was supported by a series of continuous arches inside, somewhat resembling in form the groined ribs of the Gothic roof, but which, unlike the ponderous stone work of the mediæval architects, were as light as they were strong. And to this combination of arches there was added, in the ribs and grooves of the shell, yet another element of strength,--that which has of late been introduced into iron roofs, which, by means of their corrugations,--ribs and grooves like those of the ammonite,--are made to span over wide spaces, without the support of beams or rafters. Still more recently, the same principle has been introduced into metallic boats, which, when corrugated, like the old ammonites, are found to be sufficiently strong to resist almost any degree of pressure without the wonted addition of an interior framework. Similar evidences of design appear in the other extinct molluscs peculiar to these geologic ages, such as the hamite and turrilite. The belemnite seems to have united the principle of the float to that of the sinker, as we see both united in some of our modern life boats, which are steadied on their keel by one principle, and preserved from foundering by the other; or as we find them united by the boy in his mimic smack, which he hollows out and decks, in order to render it sufficiently light, while at the same time he furnishes it with a keel of lead, in order to render it sufficiently steady. The old articulata abound in marks of ingenious mechanical contrivance. The trilobites were covered over back and head with the most exquisitely constructed plate armor: but as their abdomens seem to have been soft and defenceless, they had the ability of coiling themselves round on the approach of danger, plate moving on plate with the nicest adjustment, till the rim of the armed tail rested on that of the armed head, and the creature presented the appearance of a ball defended at every point. In some genera, as in Calymene, the tail consisted of jointed segments till its termination; in others, as in Illænus, there was a great caudal shield, that in size and form corresponded to the shield which covered the head; the segments of Calymene, from the flexibility of their joints, fitted close to the cerebral rim; while the same effect was produced in the inflexible shields, caudal and cephalic, of Illænus, by their exact correspondence, and the flexibility of the connecting rings, which enabled them to fit together like two equal-sized cymbals brought into contact at every point by the hand. Nor were the ancient crinoids less remarkable for the amount of nice contrivance which their structures exhibited, than the ancient molluscs or crustaceans. In their calyx-like bodies, consisting always of many parts, we find the principle of the arch introduced in almost every possible form and modification, and the utmost flexibility secured to their stony arms by the amazing number of the pieces of which they were composed, and the nice disposition of the joints. In the Pentacrinites of the Secondary period (see Fig. 97) an immense spread of arms, about a thousand in number, and composed of about a hundred thousand separate pieces, had all the flexibility, though formed of solid lime, of a _drift_ of nets, and yet were so nicely jointed, tooth fitting into tooth in all their numerous parts, and the whole so bound together by ligament, that, with all the flexibility, they had also all the toughness and tenacity, of pieces of thread network. Human ingenuity, with the same purposes to effect, that is, the sweeping of shoals of swimming animals into a central receptacle, would probably construct a somewhat similar machine; but it would take half a lifetime to execute one equally elaborate. [Illustration: Fig. 94. AMMONITES HUMPHRIESIANUS. (_Oolite._)] [Illustration: Fig. 95. ENCRINITES MONILIFORMIS. (_Trias._)] [Illustration: Fig. 96. CUPRESSOCRINUS CRASSUS. (_Old Red Sandstone._)] [Illustration: Fig. 97.[21] PENTACRINUS FASCICULOSUS. (_Lias._)] [Illustration: Fig. 98. _a_, CHAMFERED SCALES. (_Osteolepis._) _b_, IMBRICATED SCALES. (_Glyptolepis._) (_Old Red Sandstone._)] In carefully examining, for purposes of restoration, some of the earliest ganoidal fishes, I was not a little impressed by the peculiar mechanical contrivances exhibited in their largely developed dermal skeletons. In some cases these contrivances were sufficiently simple, resembling those which we find exemplified in the humbler trades, originated in comparatively unenlightened ages; and yet their simplicity had but the effect of rendering the peculiarly _human_ cast of the mind exhibited in their production all the more obvious. The bony scales which covered fishes such as the Osteolepis and Diplopterus of the Old Red Sandstone, or the Megalichthys of the Coal Measures, were of considerable mass and thickness. They could not, compatibly with much nicety of finish, be laid over each other, like the thin horny scales of the salmon or herring; and so we find them curiously fitted together, not like slates on a modern roof, but like hewn stones on an ancient one. There ran on the upper surface of each, along the anterior side and higher end, a groove of a depth equal to half the thickness of the scale; and along the posterior side and lower end, on the under surface, a sort of bevelled chamfer, which, fitting into the grooves of the scales immediately behind and beneath it, brought their surfaces to the same line, and rendered the shining coverings of these strongly armed ganoids as smooth and even as those of the most delicately coated fishes of the present day. In the scales of the Celacanth family the arrangement was different. Though exceedingly massive in some of the genera, they were imbricated, like those of the Pangolins; and were chiefly remarkable for the combination of contrivances which they exhibited for securing the greatest possible amount of strength from the least possible amount of thickness. The scales of _Holoptychius giganteus_ may be selected as representative of those of the family to which it belonged. It consisted of three plates, or rather, like the human skull, of two solid plates, with a _diploe_ or spongy layer between. The outer surface was curiously fretted into alternate ridges and furrows; and hence the name of the genus,--_wrinkled scale_; and these imparted to the exterior plate on which they occurred, and which was formed of solid bone, the strength which results from a corrugated or fluted surface. Cromwell, in commissioning a friend to send him a helmet, shrewdly stipulated that it should be a "fluted pot;" and we find that the Holoptychius had got the principle of the fluted pot exemplified in the outer plate of each of its scales, untold ages before. The spongy middle plate must, like the diploe of the skull, have served to deaden the vibrations of a blow dealt from the outside. It was a stratum of sand bags piled up in the middle of a plank rampart. Their innermost table was formed, like the outer, of solid bone, but had a different arrangement. It was properly not one, but several tables, in each of which the osseous fibres, spread out in the general plane of the scale, lay at a diverse angle from those of the table immediately in contact with it. The principle was evidently that of the double-woven cloth, or cloth of two incorporated layers, such as _moleskin_, in which, from the arrangement of the threads, what a draper would term the _tear_ of the one layer or fold lies at a different angle in the general fabric from that of the other. We are thus presented, in a single fossil scale little more than the eighth part of an inch in thickness, with three distinct strengthening principles,--the principle of Cromwell's "fluted pot,"--the principle of a rampart lined with plank, and filled with sand bags in the centre,--and the principle of the double-woven fabrics of the "moleskin" manufacturer.[22] The contrivances exemplified in the cuirass of the Pterichthys were scarce less remarkable. It was formed of bony plates, strongly arched above, but comparatively flat beneath; and along both its anterior and posterior rims a sudden thickening of the plates formed a massive band, which served to strengthen the entire structure, as transverse ribs of stone are found strengthening Gothic vaults of the Norman age. The scale covered tail of the creature issued from within the posterior rim, which formed around it a complete though irregular ring, arched above and depressed beneath; whereas the anterior rim, to which the head was attached, was incomplete when separated from it. It was, in its detached state, an arch wanting the keystone. A keystone, however, projected outwards from the occipital plate of the head; and, as it had to form at once the bond of connection between the cerebral armature of the creature and its cuirass, and to complete the arch formed by the strengthening belt or rib of the latter, it curiously combined the principle of both the dovetail of the carpenter and the keystone of the mason. Viewed from above, it was a dovetail, forming a strong attachment of the head to the body; viewed in the transverse section, it was an efficient keystone, that gave solidity and strength to the arched belt or rib. Both keystone and dovetail are comparatively simple contrivances; but I know not that they have been united in the same piece, save in the very ancient instance furnished by the strong bony plate which connected the helmet of the Pterichthys with its cuirass. [Illustration: Fig. 99. SCALE OF HOLOPTYCHIUS GIGANTEUS. (Nat. size.) (_Old Red Sandstone._)] [Illustration: Fig. 100. SECTION OF SCALE OF HOLOPTYCHIUS. (Mag. eight diameters.)] A brief anecdote, yet further illustrative of the framework of this ancient ganoid, may throw some additional light on what I have ventured to term the _human_ cast of the contrivances exhibited in the organisms of the old geologic ages. After carefully examining many specimens, I published a restoration of both the upper and under side of Pterichthys fully fifteen years ago. The greatest of living ichthyologists, however, misled by a series of specimens much less complete than mine, differed from me in my conclusions; and what I had represented as the creature's under or abdominal side, he represented as its upper or dorsal side; while its actual upper side he regarded as belonging to another, though closely allied, genus. I had no opportunity, as he resided on the Continent at the time, of submitting to him the specimens on which I had founded; though, at once certain of his thorough candor and love of truth, and of the solidity of my data, I felt confident that, in order to alter his decision, it was but necessary that I should submit to him my evidence. Meanwhile, however, the case was regarded as settled against me; and I found at least one popular and very ingenious writer on geology, after referring to my description of the Pterichthys, going on to say that, though graphic, it was not correct, and that he himself could describe it at least more truthfully, if not more vividly, than I had done. And then there followed a description identical with that by which mine had been supplanted. Five years had passed, when one day our greatest British authority on fossil fishes, Sir Philip Egerton, was struck, when passing an hour among the ichthyic organisms of his princely collection, by the appearance presented by a central plate in the cuirass of the Pterichthys. It is of a lozenge form, and, occupying exactly such a place in the nether armature of the creature as that occupied by the lozenge shaped spot on the ace of diamonds, it comes in contact with four other plates that lie around it, and represent, so to speak, the white portions of the card. And Sir Philip now found, that instead of lying over, it lay under, the four contiguous plates: they overlapped it, instead of being overlapped by it. This, he at once said, on ascertaining the fact, cannot be the _upper_ side of the Pterichthys. A plate so arranged would have formed no proper protection to the exposed dorsal surface of the creature's body, as a slight blow would have at once sent it in upon the interior framework; but a proper enough one to the under side of a heavy swimmer, that, like the flat fishes, kept close to the bottom;--a character which, as shown by the massive bulk of its body, and its small spread of fin, must have belonged to the Pterichthys. Sir Philip followed up his observations on the central plate by a minute examination of the other parts of the creature's armature; and the survey terminated in a recognition of the earlier restoration,--set aside so long before,--as virtually the true one;--a recognition in which Agassiz, when made acquainted with the nature of the evidence, at once acquiesced. Now, here was there a question which had been raised regarding the true mechanism of one of the oldest ganoidal fishes, and settled erroneously on wrong data, again opened up, to be settled anew on one of the most obvious mechanical principles exemplified in the simple art of the slater or tiler. The argument of Sir Philip amounted simply to this:--If the accepted restoration be a true one, then the Creator of the Pterichthys must have committed a mistake in mechanics which an ordinary slater would have avoided; but as the Creator commits no such blunders, the mistake probably occurs in but the restoration. I may mention, that the dorsal surface of this ancient fish had also its central plate,--a lozenge truncated at its two longer ends; and that, moulded to meet the necessities of its position, it was not flat, like the under one, but strongly arched; and that on four of its six sides it overrode by a squamose suture the lower plates with which it came in contact. These are but humble illustrations of the designing principle, as exhibited of old; and yet they impress none the less strongly on that account. Among the many contrivances of the Chinese Museum, to which I have already referred, none seemed more to excite the curiosity of visitors than a set of tall-backed, elaborately carved chairs, exceedingly like those which were used in our own country two centuries ago, and which Cowper so exquisitely describes. For thousands of miles in the wide tract that spreads out between European Christendom and the great wall, the inhabitants squat upon mats or carpets, or loll on divans; and the contrivance of the chair is unknown: it reappears in China, however, and reappears, not as a mere seat or stool, but as, in every bar and limb, the identical chair of Europe arrested a century or two back in its development. And every corresponding tenon and mortise exhibited by the Chinese and European examples of this simple piece of furniture served more forcibly to show an identity of character in the minds which had originated them in countries so far apart, than the more elaborate contrivances which, though illustrative of the same principles of invention, were less easily understood. It is so with the more simple and familiar instances of adaptation furnished by the works of the Creator. We infer from them, more directly than from the complex mechanisms, that he who wrought of old after the manner of a man must have, in his intellectual character, if I may so express myself, certain man-like qualities and traits. In all those works on Natural Theology that treat, like the work of Paley, on the argument of design, the assumption of a certain unity of the intellectual nature of the Creator and creature is made, tacitly at least, the basis of all the reasonings; and it is in the cases in which the design is most simple that the argument is most generally understood. It is in the lower _skirts_ of the Divine nature that we most readily trace the resemblance to the nature of man,--an effect, mayhap, of the narrow reach of our faculties in their present infantile state. [Illustration: Fig. 101. SIGILLARIA GROESERI (_Coal Measures._)] [Illustration: Fig. 102. Fig. 103. Fig. 104. WHORLED SHELLS OF THE OLD RED SANDSTONE.[23]] But the resemblance is not restricted to the constructive department. Both in the Chinese collection and among the Egyptian antiquities exhibited in the British Museum, I found color as certainly as mechanical contrivance. And the color furnished not only a practical example from both the early and the remote peoples of the same sort of chemical science as exists at the present time among ourselves in our dyeworks and pigment manufactories, but it also showed a certain identity with our own of their sense of beauty. The Chinese satins are gorgeous with green, blue, yellow, scarlet, crimson, and purple, and have fringes heavy with thread of gold. Gilding is as common among this distant people as among ourselves, and at once shows a familiarity with the art of the gold beater, and a sensibility to the beauty of a golden surface; and in the painted ornaments I detected the rich tints of vermilion and crimson lake, with the mineral blues, yellows, and greens. In the Egyptian department, though the blanching influences of three thousand years had dimmed the tints and tarnished the metals, I found evidence of the same regard to hue and lustre as exists still in China and among ourselves; all that now pleases the eye in London and Pekin had pleased it in Thebes during the times of the earlier Pharaohs. And just as we infer from the mechanical contrivances of the Creative-Worker that he possesses a certain identity of mind in the _constructive_ department with his creature-workers, and this upon the principle on which we infer an identity of mind between the creature-workers of China, ancient Egypt, and our own country, seeing that their works are identical, must we not also infer, on the same principle, that he possesses in the _æsthetic_ department a certain identity with them also. True, this region of the beautiful, ever surrounded by an atmosphere of obscure, ill-settled metaphysics, is greatly less clear than that mechanical province of whose various machines, whether of Divine or human contrivance, it can be at least affirmed that machines they _are_, and that they effect their purposes by contrivances of the same or of resembling kinds. And yet the appearance in nature, age after age, of the same forms and colors of beauty which man, in gratifying his taste for the lovely in shape and hue, is ever reproducing for himself, does seem to justify our inference of an identity of mind in this province also. The colors of the old geologic organisms, like those of the paintings of ancient Egypt, are greatly faded. A few, however, of the Secondary, and even Palæozoic shells, still retain the rich prismatic hues of the original nacre. Many of the Tertiary division still bear the distinctive painted spots. Some of the later fossil fishes, when first laid open in the rock, exhibit the pearly gleam that must of old have lighted up the green depths of the water as they darted through. Not a few of the fossil corals preserve enough of their former color to impart much delicacy of tint to the marbles in which they occur. But it is chiefly in form, not in shade or hue, that we find in the organisms of the geologic ages examples of that beauty in which man delights, and which he is ever reproducing for himself. There is scarce an architectural ornament of the Gothic or Grecian styles which may not be found existing as fossils in the rocks. The Ulodendron was sculptured into gracefully arranged rows of pointed and closely imbricated leaves, similar to those into which the Roman architects fretted the torus of the Corinthian order. The Sigillaria were fluted columns ornately carved in the line of the channelled flutes; the Lepidodendra bore, according to their species, sculptured scales, or lozenges, or egg-like hollows, set in a sort of frame, and relieved into knobs and furrows; all of them furnishing examples of a delicate diaper work, like that so admired in our more ornate Gothic buildings, such as Westminster Abbey, or Canterbury and Chichester Cathedrals, only greatly more exquisite in their design and finish. The scroll shells, a very numerous section of the class in the earlier ages, such as Maclurea, Euomphalus, Clymenia, and the great family of the ammonites, were volutes of varying proportions, but not less graceful than the ornament of similar proportions so frequently introduced into Greek and Roman architecture, and of which we have such prominent examples in the capitals of the Ionic, Corinthian, and composite orders. In what is known as the modern Ionic the spiral of the volute is not all on one plane; it is a Euomphalus: in the central volutes of the Corinthian the spiral is an open one; it is a Lituite or Gyroceras: in the ancient Ionic it is either wholly flat, as in Planorbus or the upper side of Maclurea, or slightly relieved, as in the ammonites. There is no form of the volute known to the architect which may not be found in the rocks, but there are many forms in the rocks unknown to the architect. Nor are the spire-like shells (see Fig. 105) less remarkable for the rich and varied style of their ornamentation than the whorled ones. They are spires, pinnacles, turrets, broaches; ornate, in some instances, beyond the reach of the architect, and illustrative, in almost all, of his happiest forms and proportions. We detect among the fossils the germs of numerous designs developed in almost every department of art; but merely to enumerate them would require a volume. One form of the old classic lamp was that of the nautilus; another, that of _Gyphæa incurva_; the zigzag mouldings of the Norman Gothic may be found in the carinated oysters of the Greensand; the more delicate frettings of similar form which roughened the pillars of a somewhat later age occur on Conularia and the dorsal spines of Gyracanthus. The old corals, too, abound in ornamental patterns, which man, unaware of their existence at the time, devised long after for himself. In an article on calico printing, which forms part of a recent history of Lancashire, there are a few of the patterns introduced, backed by the recommendation that they were the most successful ever tried. Of one of these, known as "Lane's Net," there sold a greater number of pieces than of any other pattern ever brought into the market. It led to many imitations; and one of the most popular of these answers line for line, save that it is more stiff and rectilinear, to the pattern in a recently discovered Old Red Sandstone coral, the _Smithia Pengellyi_. The beautifully arranged lines which so smit the dames of England, that each had to provide herself with a gown of the fabric which they adorned, had been stamped amid the rocks _eons_ of ages before. And it must not be forgotten, that all these forms and shades of beauty which once filled all nature, but of which only a few fragments, or a few faded tints, survive, were created, not to gratify man's love of the æsthetic, seeing that man had no existence until long after they had disappeared, but in meet harmony with the tastes and faculties of the Divine Worker, who had in his wisdom produced them all. [Illustration: Fig. 105. MURCHISONIA BIGRANULOSA. (_Old Red Sandstone._)] [Illustration: Fig. 106. CONULARIA ORNATA. (_Old Red Sandstone._)] [Illustration: Fig. 107. CALICO PATTERN. (_Manchester._)] [Illustration: Fig. 108. SMITHIA PENGELLYI. (_Old Red Sandstone._)] You will, I trust, bear with me should I seek, in depths where the light shed by science becomes obscure, to guide my steps by light derived from another and wholly different source. In an assembly such as that which I have now the honor of addressing, there must be many shades of religious opinion. I shall, however, assail no man's faith, but simply lay before you a few deductions which, founded on my own, have supplied me with what I deem a consistent theory of the curious class of phenomena with which this evening we have been mainly dealing. First, then, I must hold that we receive the true explanation of the _man_-like character of the Creator's workings ere man was, in the remarkable text in which we are told that "God made man in his own image and likeness." There is no restriction here to moral quality: the moral image man had, and in large measure lost; but the intellectual image he still retains. As a geometrician, as an arithmetician, as a chemist, as an astronomer,--in short, in all the departments of what are known as the strict sciences,--man differs from his Maker, not in kind, but in degree,--not as matter differs from mind, or darkness from light, but simply as a mere portion of space or time differs from _all_ space or _all_ time. I have already referred to mechanical contrivances as identically the same in the Divine and human productions; nor can I doubt that, not only in the pervading sense of the beautiful in form and color which it is our privilege as men in some degree to experience and possess, but also in that perception of harmony which constitutes the _musical_ sense, and in that poetic feeling of which Scripture furnishes us with at once the earliest and the highest examples, and which we may term the _poetic_ sense, we bear the stamp and impress of the Divine image. Now, if this be so, we must look upon the schemes of Creation, Revelation, and Providence, not as schemes of mere adaptation to man's nature, but as schemes also specially adapted to the nature of God as the pattern and original nature. Further, it speaks, I must hold, of the harmony and unity of one sublime scheme, that, after long ages of immaturity,--after the dynasties of the fish, the reptile, and the mammal should in succession have terminated,--man should have at length come upon the scene in the image of God; and that, at a still later period, God himself should have come upon the scene in the form of man; and that thus all God's workings in creation should be indissolubly linked to God himself, not by any such mere likeness or image of the Divinity as that which the first Adam bore, but by Divinity itself in the Second Adam; so that on the rainbow-encircled apex of the pyramid of created being the Son of God and the Son of Man should sit enthroned forever in one adorable person. That man should have been made in the image of God seems to have been a meet preparation for God's after assumption of the form of man. It was perhaps thus secured that _stock_ and _graft_, if I may venture on such a metaphor, should have the necessary affinity, and be capable of being united in a single person. The false gods of the Egyptians assumed, it was fabled, the forms of brutes: it was the human form and nature that was assumed by the true God;--so far as we know, the only form and nature that could have brought him into direct union with at once the matter and mind of the universe which he had created and made,--with "true body and reasonable soul." Yet further, I learn by inevitable inference from one of the more distinctive articles of my creed, that as certainly as the dynasty of the fish was predetermined in the scheme of Providence to be succeeded by the higher dynasty of the reptile, and that of the reptile by the still higher dynasty of the mammal, so it was equally predetermined that the dynasty of responsible, fallible man should be succeeded by the dynasty of glorified, immortal man; and that, in consequence, the present mixed state of things is not a mere result, as some theologians believe, of a certain human act which was perpetrated about six thousand years ago, but was, virtually at least, the effect of a God-determined decree, old as eternity,--a decree in which that act was written as a portion of the general programme. In looking abroad on that great history of life, of which the latter portions are recorded in the pages of revelation, and the earlier in the rocks, I feel my grasp of a doctrine first taught me by our Calvinistic Catechism at my mother's knee, tightening instead of relaxing. "The decrees of God are his eternal purposes," I was told, "according to the counsel of his will, whereby for his own glory he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass." And what I was told early I still believe. The programme of Creation and Providence, in all its successive periods, is of God, not of man. With the arrangements of the old geologic periods it is obvious man could have had nothing to do: the primeval ages of wondrous plants and monster animals ran their course without counsel taken of him; and in reading their record in the bowels of the earth, and in learning from their strange characters that such ages there were, and what they produced, we are the better enabled to appreciate the impressive directness of the sublime message to Job, when the "Lord answered him out of the whirlwind, and said, Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding." And I can as little regard the present scene of things as an ultimate consequence of what man had willed or wrought, as even any of the pre-Adamic ages. It is simply one scene in a foreordained series,--a scene intermediate in place between the age of the irresponsible mammal and of glorified man; and to provide for the upward passage to the ultimate state, we know that, in reference to the purposes of the Eternal, he through whom the work of restoration has been effected was in reality what he is designated in the remarkable text, "The Lamb slain from the _foundations_ of the world." First in the course of things, man in the image of God, and next, in meet sequence, God in the form of man, have been equally from all eternity predetermined actors in the same great scheme. I approach a profound and terrible mystery. We can see how in the pre-Adamic ages higher should have succeeded lower dynasties. To be low was not to be immoral; to be low was not to be guilt-stained and miserable. The sea anemone on its half-tide rock, and the fern on its mossy hill-side, are low in their respective kingdoms; but they are, notwithstanding, worthy, in their quiet, unobtrusive beauty, of the God who formed them. It is only when the human period begins that we are startled and perplexed by the problem of a lowness not innocent,--an inferiority tantamount to moral deformity. In the period of responsibility, to be low means to be evil; and how, we ask, could a lowness and inferiority resolvable into moral evil have had any place in the decrees of that Judge who ever does what is right, and in whom moral evil can have no place? The subject is one which it seems not given to man thoroughly to comprehend. Permit me, however, to remark in reply, that in a sense so plain, so obvious, so unequivocally true, that it would lead an intelligent jury, impannelled in the case, conscientiously to convict, and a wise judge righteously to condemn, all that is evil in the present state of things man may as certainly have wrought out for himself, as the criminals whom we see sentenced at every justiciary court work out for themselves the course of punishment to which they are justly subjected. It has been well said of the Author of all by the poet, that, "binding nature fast in fate," he "left free the human will." And it is this freedom or independency of will operating on an intellect moulded after the image and likeness of the Divinity that has rendered men capable of being what the Scriptures so emphatically term "fellow-workers with God." In a humble and restricted sense, as I have already remarked,--humble and restricted, but in that restricted sense obviously true,--the surface of the earth far and wide testifies to this fact of fellowship in working. The deputed lord of creation, availing himself of God's natural laws, does what no mere animal of the old geologic ages ever did, or ever could have done,--he adorns and beautifies the earth, and adds tenfold to its original fertility and productiveness. In this special sense, then, he is a fellow-worker with Him who, according to the Psalmist, "causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man, and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil that maketh his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart." But it is in a greatly higher sense, and in reference to God's moral laws, that he is fitted to be his fellow-worker in the Scriptural sense. And his proper employment in this department is the elevation and development, moral and intellectual, of himself and his fellow-men, both in adaptation to the demands of the present time, and in preparation for a future state. All experience, however, serves to show that in this paramount department man greatly fails; nay, that he is infinitely less true to his proper end and destiny than the beasts that perish to their several instincts. And yet it may be remarked, that such of the lower animals as are guided by pure instinct are greatly more infallible within their proper spheres than the higher, half-reasoning animals. The mathematical bee never constructs a false angle; the sagacious dog is not unfrequently _out_ in his calculations. The higher the animal in the scale, the greater its liability to error. But it is not the less true, that no fish, no reptile, no mammal, of the geologic or the recent ages, ever so failed in working out the purposes it was created to serve, as man has failed in working out _his_; further, in no creature save in man does there exist that war of the mind between appetite and duty of which the Apostle so consciously complained. And we must seek an explanation of these twin facts in that original freedom of the will which, while it rendered man capable of being _of choice_ God's fellow-worker, also conferred on him an ability of choosing _not_ to work with God. And his choice of not working with him, or of working against him, being once freely made, we may see how, from man's very constitution and nature, as an intelligence united to matter that increases his kind from generation to generation in virtue of the original law, the ability of again working with God might be forever destroyed. And thus man's general condition as a lapsed creature may be as unequivocally a consequence of man's own act, as the condition of individuals born free, but doomed to slavery in punishment of their offences, is a consequence of _their_ own acts. A brief survey of the many-colored and variously-placed human family, as at present distributed on the earth, may enable us in some degree to conceive of a matter which, involving, as it does, that master problem of moral science, the origin of evil, seems, as I have said, not to be given to man fully to comprehend. "The different races of mankind," says Humboldt, employing, let me remark, the language of the distinguished German naturalist Müller, to give expression to the view which he himself adopts,--"the different races of mankind are not different species of a genus, but forms of one sole species." "The human species," says Cuvier, "appears to be single." "When we compare," says Pritchard, "all the facts and observations which have been heretofore fully established as to the specific instincts and separate psychical endowments of all the distinct tribes of sentient beings in the universe, we are entitled to draw confidently the conclusion, that all human races are of one species and one family." "God hath made of one blood," said the Apostle Paul, in addressing himself to the _élite_ of Athens, "all nations, for to dwell on the face of all the earth." Such, on this special head, is the testimony of Revelation, and such the conclusion of our highest scientific authorities. The question has, indeed, been raised in these latter times, whether each species of animals may not have been originally created, not by single pairs or in single centres, but by several pairs and in several centres, and, of course, the human species among the rest? And the _query_,--for in reality it amounts to nothing more,--has been favorably entertained on the other side of the Atlantic. On purely scientific grounds it is of course difficult to prove a negative in the case, just as it would be difficult to prove a negative were the question to be, whether the planet Venus was not composed of quartz rock, or the planet Mars of Old Red Sandstone? But the portion of the problem really solvable by science,--the identity of the human race under all its conditions, and in all its varieties,--science _has_ solved. It has determined that all the various tribes of man are but forms of a single species. And in the definition of species,--waiving the American _doubt_ until it shall at least become something more,--I am content to follow the higher authorities. "We unite," says M. de Candolle, "under the designation of a _species_, all those individuals that mutually bear to each other so close a resemblance as to allow of our supposing that they may have proceeded originally from a single being or a single pair." "A _species_," says Buffon, "is a constant succession of individuals similar to and capable of reproducing each other." "A _species_," says Cuvier, "is a succession of individuals which reproduces and perpetuates itself." Now, all history and all tradition, so far as they throw light on the question at all, agree in showing that the centre in which the human species originated must have been somewhere in the temperate regions of the East, not far distant from the Caucasian group of mountains. All the old seats of civilization,--that of Nineveh, Babylon, Palestine, Egypt, and Greece,--are spread out around this centre. And it is certainly a circumstance worthy of notice, and surely not without bearing on the _physical_ condition of primeval humanity, that in this centre we find a variety of the species which naturalists of the highest standing regard as fundamentally typical of the highest races of the globe. "The natives of the Caucasus," says Cuvier, "are even now considered as the handsomest on earth." And wherever man has, if I may so speak, _fallen_ least,--wherever he has retained, at least intellectually, the Divine image,--this Caucasian type of feature and figure, with, of course, certain national modifications, he also retains. It was developed in a remarkable degree among the old Greeks, as may be seen from the busts of some of their handsomer men; and still more remarkably in their _beau ideal_ of beauty, as exemplified in the statues of their gods. We see it also, though dashed with a shade of severity, in the strong forms and stern features of monarchs that reigned of old in Nineveh and Babylon, as brought to light in their impressive effigies by the excavations of Rawlinson and Layard. And further, though somewhat modified by the African dash, we detect it in the colossal statues of Egypt. Nor, as shown by Egyptian paintings still fresh in color and outline, was it less traceable in the ancient Jewish countenance and figure. It is still palpable, too, amid all the minor peculiarities of national physiognomy, in the various peoples of Europe. We may see it in our own country, though, as Sir Walter Scott truly tells us,-- "The rugged form may mark the mountain band, And harsher features and a mien more grave." It walks, however, the boards of our Parliament House here in a very respectable type of Caucasian man; and all agree that nowhere else in modern Europe is it to be found more true to its original contour than among the high-bred aristocracy of England, especially among the female members of the class. Looking, then, at the entire evidence,--at the admitted fact that the Circassians of the present day are an eminently handsome people,--that the old Greeks, Ninevites, Egyptians, Jews, Romans, and with these all the modern nations of Europe, are but the varieties of the central race that have retained in greatest perfection the original traits,--I do not see how we are to avoid the conclusion that this Caucasian type was the type of Adamic man. Adam, the father of mankind, was no squalid savage of doubtful humanity, but a noble specimen of man; and Eve a soft Circassian beauty, but exquisitely lovely beyond the lot of fallen humanity. "The loveliest pair That ever yet in love's embraces met: Adam, the goodliest man of men since born His sons; the fairest of her daughters Eve." I know not whether I should add what follows. It has been said that Luke, the "beloved physician," was also a painter. It has been said that that traditionary, time-honored form, which we at once recognize in the pictures of the old masters as that of the Saviour of mankind, he in reality bore when he walked this earth in the flesh. I know not what degree of probability attaches to the belief. I know not whether the traditionary form be in reality the true one. This, however, I know, that _if_ such was the form which the adorable Redeemer assumed when he took to himself a real body and a reasonable soul, the second Adam, like the first, exemplified, when upon earth, the perfect type of Caucasian man. Let me next remark, that the further we remove from the original centre of the race, the more degraded and sunk do we find the several varieties of humanity. We must set wholly aside, in our survey, the disturbing element of modern emigration. Caucasian man has been pressing outwards. In the backwoods of America, in Southern Africa, in Australia, and in the Polynesian islands, the old Adamic type has been asserting its superiority, and annihilating before it the degraded races. But taking into account merely the aboriginal varieties, it seems to be a general rule, that the further we remove in any direction from the Adamic centre, the more animalized and sunk do we find the various tribes or races. Contrary to the conceptions of the assertors of the development hypothesis, we ascertain, as we proceed outwards, that the course is not one of progression from the low to the high, but of descent from the high to the low. Passing northwards, we meet, where the lichen-covered land projects into the frozen ocean, with the diminutive Laps, squat, ungraceful, with their flat features surmounted by pyramidal skulls of small capacity, and, as a race, unfitted for the arts either of peace or war. We meet also with the timid Namollas, with noses so flat as to be scarce visible in the women and children of the race; and with the swarthy Kamtschatkans, with their broad faces, protuberant bellies, and thin, ill-formed legs. Passing southwards, we come to the negro tribes, with their sooty skins, broad noses, thick lips, projecting jawbones, and partially-webbed fingers. And then we find ourselves among the squalid Hottentots, repulsively ugly, and begrimmed with filth; or the still more miserable Bushmen. Passing eastwards, after taking leave of the Persian and Indian branches of the Caucasian race, we meet with the squat Mongolian, with his high cheek bones set on a broad face, and his compressed, unintellectual, pig-like eyes; or encounter, in the Indian Archipelago or the Australian interior, the pitiably low Alforian races, with their narrow, retreating foreheads, slim, feeble limbs, and baboon-like faces. Or, finally, passing westward, we find the large-jawed, copper-colored Indians of the New World, vigorous in some of the northern tribes as animals, though feeble as men, but gradually sinking in southern America, as among the wild Caribs or spotted Araucans; till at the extremity of the continent we find, naked and shivering among their snows, the hideous, small-eyed, small-limbed, flat-headed Fuegians, perhaps the most wretched of human creatures. And all these varieties of the species, in which we find humanity "fallen," according to the poet, "into disgrace," are varieties that have lapsed from the original Caucasian type. They are all the descendants of man as God created him; but they do not exemplify man as God created him. They do not represent, save in hideous caricature, the glorious creature moulded of old by the hand of the Divine Worker. They are fallen,--degraded; many of them, as races, hopelessly lost. For all experience serves to show, that when a tribe of men falls beneath a certain level, it cannot come into competition with civilized man, pressing outwards from his old centres to possess the earth, without becoming extinct before him. Sunk beneath a certain level, as in the forests of America, in Van Dieman's Land, in New South Wales, and among the Bushmen of the Cape, the experience of more than a hundred years demonstrates that its destiny is extinction,--not restoration. Individuals may be recovered by the labors of some zealous missionary; but it is the fate of the race, after a few generations, to disappear. It has fallen too hopelessly low to be restored. There remain curious traces in the New World of these perished tribes. The Bible, translated into an old Indian language, from which the devoted David Brainerd taught so successfully a nation of Red Men, still exists; but it speaks in a dead tongue, which no one can now understand; for the nation to whom he preached has become extinct. And Humboldt tells us, in referring to a perished tribe of South America, that there lived in 1806, when he visited their country, an old parrot in Maypures, which could not be understood, because, as the natives informed him, it spoke the language of the Atures. Tribes of the aborigines of Australia have wholly disappeared during the present generation; and I remember seeing it stated in a newspaper paragraph, which appeared a few years ago, that the last male survivor of the natives of Tasmania was at that time in the latter stages of consumption. But if man, in at least the more degraded varieties of the race, be so palpably _not_ what the Creator originally made him, by whom, then, was he made the poor lost creature which in these races we find him to be? He was made what he is, I reply, by man himself; and this, in many instances, by a process which we may see every day taking place among ourselves in individuals and families, though happily, not in races. Man's nature again,--to employ the condensed statement of the poet,--has been bound fast in fate, but his will has been left free. He is free either to resign himself to the indolence and self-indulgence so natural to the species; or, "spurning delights, to live laborious days;"--free either to sink into ignorant sloth, dependent uselessness, and self-induced imbecility, bodily and mental, or to assert by honest labor a noble independence,--to seek after knowledge as for hidden treasures, and, in the search, to sharpen his faculties and invigorate his mind. And while we see around us some men addressing themselves with stout, brave hearts to what Carlyle terms, with homely vigor, their "heavy job of work," and, by denying themselves many an insidious indulgence, doing it effectually and well, and rearing up well-taught families in usefulness and comfort, to be the stay of the future, we see other men yielding to the ignoble solicitations of appetite or of indolence, and becoming worse than useless themselves, and the parents of ignorant, immoral, and worse than useless families. The wandering vagrants of Great Britain at the present time have been estimated at from fifteen to twenty thousand souls; the hereditary paupers of England,--a vastly more numerous class,--have become, in a considerable degree, a sept distinct from the general community; and in all our large towns there are certain per centages of the population,--unhappily ever increasing per centages,--that, darkened in mind and embruted in sentiment, are widely recognized as emphatically the dangerous classes of the community. And let us remember that we are witnessing in these instances no new thing in the history of the species: every period since that of the vagabond Cain has had its waifs and stragglers, who fell behind in the general march. In circumstances such as obtained in the earlier ages of the human family, all the existing nomades and paupers of our country would have passed into distinct races of men. For in the course of a few generations their forms and complexions would begin to tell of the self-induced degradation that had taken place in their minds; and in a few ages more they would have become permanent varieties of the species. There are cases in which not more than from two to three centuries have been found sufficient thoroughly to alter the original physiognomy of a race. "On the plantation of Ulster in 1611, and afterwards, on the success of the British against the rebels in 1641 and 1689," says a shrewd writer of the present day, himself an Irishman, "great multitudes of the native Irish were driven from Armagh and the south of Down, into the mountainous tract extending from the Barony of Fleurs eastward to the sea; on the other side of the kingdom the same race were exposed to the worst effects of hunger and ignorance, the two great brutalizers of the human race. The descendants of these exiles are now distinguished physically by great degradation. They are remarkable for open, projecting mouths, with prominent teeth and exposed gums; and their advancing cheek bones and depressed noses bear barbarism on their very front. In Sligo and northern Mayo the consequences of the two centuries of degradation and hardship exhibit themselves in the whole physical condition of the people, affecting not only the features, but the frame. Five feet two inches on an average,--pot-bellied, bow-legged, abortively featured, their clothing a wisp of rags,--these spectres of a people that were once well-grown, able-bodied, and comely, stalk abroad into the daylight of civilization, the annual apparition of Irish ugliness and Irish want." Such is man as man himself has made him,--not man as he came from the hand of the Creator. In many instances the degradation has been voluntary; in others it has been forced upon families and races by the iron hand of oppression; in almost all,--whether self-chosen by the parents or imposed upon them,--the children and the children's children have, as a matter of inevitable necessity, been born to it. For, whatever we may think of the Scriptural doctrine on this special head, it is a fact broad and palpable in the economy of nature, that parents _do_ occupy a federal position; and that the lapsed progenitors, when cut off from civilization and all external interference of a missionary character, become the founders of a lapsed race. The iniquities of the parents are visited upon the children. And in all such instances it is _man_ left to the freedom of his own will that is the deteriorator of man. The doctrine of the Fall, in its purely theologic aspect, is a doctrine which must be apprehended by faith; but it is at least something to find that the analogies of science, instead of running counter to it, run in exactly the same line. It is one of the inevitable consequences of that nature of man which the Creator "bound fast in fate," while he left free his will, that the free will of the parent should become the destiny of the child. But the subject is one in which we can see our way as but "through a glass darkly." Nay, it is possible that the master problem which it involves no created intelligence can thoroughly unlock. It has been well said, that the "poet's heart" is informed by a "terrible sagacity;" and I am at times disposed to regard Milton's conception of the perplexity of the fallen spirits, when reasoning on "fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute," and finding "no end in wandering mazes lost," much rather as a sober truth caught from the invisible world, than as merely an ingenious fancy. The late Robert Montgomery has rather unhappily chosen Satan as one of the themes of his muse; and in his long poem, designated in its second title "Intellect without God," he has set that personage a-reasoning in a style which, I fear, more completely demonstrates the absence of God than the presence of intellect. It has, however, sometimes occurred to me, that a poet of the larger calibre, who to the Divine faculty and vision added such a knowledge of geologic science as that which Virgil possessed of the Natural History of his time, or as that which Milton possessed of the general learning of _his_, might find, in a somewhat similar subject, the materials of a poem which "posterity would not willingly let die." There is one of the satirists justly severe on a class of critics "Who, drily plain, without invention's aid, Write dull receipts how poems may be made." But at some risk of rendering myself obnoxious to his censure, I shall attempt indicating at least the general scope and character of what the schoolmen might term a _possible_ poem; which, if vivified by the genius of some of the higher masters of the lyre, broad of faculty, and at once great poets and great men, might prove one precious boon more to the world, suited, conformably to the special demands of these latter times, to "assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to man." There has been war among the intelligences of God's spiritual creation. Lucifer, son of the morning, has fallen like fire from heaven; and our present earth, existing as a half-extinguished hell, has received him and his angels. Dead matter exists, and in the unembodied spirits vitality exists; but not yet in all the universe of God has the vitality been united to the matter; animal life, to even the profound apprehension of the fallen angel, is an inconceivable idea. Meanwhile, as the scarce reckoned centuries roll by, vacantly and dull, like the cheerless days and nights over the head of some unhappy captive, the miserable prisoners of our planet become aware that there is a slow change taking place in the condition of their prison-house. Where a low, dark archipelago of islands raise their flat backs over the thermal waters, the heat glows less intensely than of old; the red fire bursts forth less frequently; the dread earthquake shakes more rarely; save in a few centres of intenser action, the great deep no longer boils like a pot; and though the heavens are still shut out by a gray ceiling of thick vapor, through which sun or moon never yet appeared, a less gloomy twilight struggles at noonday through the enveloping cloud, and falls more cheerfully than heretofore upon land and sea. At length there comes a morning in which great ocean and the scattered islands declare that God the Creator had descended to visit the earth. The hitherto verdureless land bears the green flush of vegetation; and there are creeping things among the trees. Nor is the till now unexampled mystery of animal life absent from the sounds and bays. It is the highest intelligences that manifest the deepest interest in the works of the All Wise. Nor can we doubt that on that morning of creative miracle, in which matter and vitality were first united in the bonds of a strange wedlock, the comprehensive intellect of the great fallen spirit--profound and active beyond the lot of humanity--would have found ample employment in attempting to fathom the vast mystery, and in vainly asking what these strange things might mean. With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation,--as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,--must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker,--scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! Standing in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the chill and withering shadow of that secret of the Lord which was not with him, how thoroughly must he not have seen, and with what bitter malignity felt, that the grasp of the Almighty was still upon him, and that in the ever varying problem of creation, which, with all his powers, he failed to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained an unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he had rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to flee, emphatically spake to him, as in an after age to the patriarch Job, and, with the quiet dignity of the Infinite, challenged him either to do or to know! "Shall he that coutendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproveth God, let him answer. Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? or canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?" With what wild thoughts must that restless and unhappy spirit have wandered amid the tangled mazes of the old carboniferous forests! With what bitter mockeries must he have watched the fierce wars which raged in their sluggish waters, among ravenous creatures horrid with trenchant teeth, barbed sting, and sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of plate and scale! And how, as generation after generation passed away, and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land had been, or the land rose to possess the ancient seats of the ocean,--how, when looking back upon myriads of ages, and when calling up in memory what once had been, the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view than the features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze-borne clouds,--how must he have felt, as he became conscious that the earth was fast ripening, and that, as its foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of existence,--how must he have felt, if, like some old augur looking into the inner mysteries of animal life, with their strange prophecies, the truth had at length burst upon him, that reasoning, accountable man was fast coming to the birth,--man, the moral agent,--man, the ultimate work and end of creation,--man, a creature in whom, as in the inferior animals, vitality was to be united to matter, but in whom also, as in no inferior animal, responsibility was to be united to vitality! How must expectancy have quickened,--how must solicitude have grown,--when, after the dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the dynasty of the reptile, and that of the reptile by the dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time had at length arrived when the earth had become fixed and stable, and the proud waves of ocean had been stayed,--when, after species and genera in both kingdoms had been increased tenfold beyond the precedent of any former age, the Creative Hand seemed to pause in its working, and the finished creation to demand its lord! Even at this late period, how strange may not the doubts and uncertainties have been that remained to darken the mind of the lost spirit! It was according to his experience,--stretched backwards to the first beginnings of organic vitality, and coextensive, at a still earlier period, with God's spiritual universe,--that all _animals_ should die,--that all _moral agents_ should live. How, in this new creature,--this prodigy of creation, who was to unite what never before had been united,--the nature of the animals that _die_ with the standing and responsibility of the moral agents that _live_,--how, in this partaker of the double nature, was the discrepancy to be reconciled? How, in this matter, were the opposite claims of life and death to be adjusted, or the absolute _immortality_, which cannot admit of degrees, to be made to meet with and shade into the _mortality_ which, let us extend the term of previous vitality as we may, must forever involve the antagonistic idea of final annihilation and the ceasing to be? At length creation receives its deputed monarch. For, moulded by God's own finger, and in God's own likeness, man enters upon the scene, an exquisite creature, rich in native faculty, pregnant with the yet undeveloped seeds of all wisdom and knowledge, tender of heart and pure of spirit, formed to hold high communion with his Creator, and to breathe abroad his soul in sympathy over all that the Creator had made. And yet, left to the freedom of his own will, there is a weakness in the flesh that betrays his earthly lineage. It is into the dust of the ground that the living soul has been breathed. The son of the soil, who, like the inferior animals, his subjects, sleeps and wakes, and can feel thirst and hunger, and the weariness of toil, and the sweets of rest, and who come under the general law, "increase and multiply," promulgated of old to them, stands less firmly than the immaterial spirits stood of old; and yet even they rebelled against Heaven, and fell. There awakes a grim hope in the sullen lord of the first revolt. Ages beyond tale or reckoning has this temple of creation been in building. Long have its mute prophecies in fishes and in creeping things, in bird and in beast, told of coming man, its final object and end. And now there needeth but one blow, and the whole edifice is destroyed, God's purposes marred and frustrated, and this new favorite of earth dashed back to the dust out of which he was created, and brought, like the old, extinct races, under the eternal law of death. Armed with the experience in evil of unsummed ages, the Tempter plies his work: nor is it to low or ignoble appetites that he appeals. It is to the newly-formed creature's thirst for knowledge; it is to his love stronger than death. The wiles of the Old Serpent prevail; man falls prostrate before him; creation trembles; and then from amid the trees of the garden comes the voice of God. And lo! in an enigma mysterious and dark a new dispensation of prophecy begins. Victims bleed; altars smoke; the tabernacle arises amid the white tents of the desert; the temple ascends all glorious on the heights of Mount Zion; prophet after prophet declares his message. At length, in the fulness of time, the Messiah comes; and, in satisfying the law, and in fulfilling all righteousness, and in bringing life and immortality to light, abundantly shows forth that the terminal dynasty of all creation had been of old foreordained, ere the foundations of the world, to possess for its eternal lord and monarch, not primeval man, created in the image of God, but God, made manifest in the flesh, in the form of primeval man. But how breaks on the baffled Tempter the sublime revelation? Wearily did he toil,--darkly did he devise, and take, in his great misery, deep counsel against the Almighty; and yet all the while, while striving and resisting as an enemy, has he been wielded as a tool; when, glaring aloof in his proud rebellion, the grasp of the Omnipotent has been upon him, and the Eternal Purposes have encompassed him, and he has been working out, all unwittingly, the foreordained decree, "For our God maketh the wrath of the wicked to praise him, and the remainder thereof doth he restrain." But enough, for the present, of the poems that might be. Permit me, however, to add, in the words of one of the most suggestive, and certainly not least powerful, of English thinkers, that "a fall of some sort or other,--the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute,--is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis," he adds, "man is unintelligible,--with it every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight." Such, in this matter, was the ultimate judgment of a man who in youth had entertained very opposite views,--the poet Coleridge. It has been said that the inferences of the geologist militate against those of the theologian. Nay, not those of our higher geologists and higher theologians,--not what our Murchisons and Sedgwicks infer in the one field, with what our Chalmerses and Isaac Taylors infer in the other. Between the Word and the Works of God there can be no actual discrepancies; and the seeming ones are discernible only by the men who see worst. "Mote-like they flicker in unsteady eyes, And weakest his who best descries." The geologist, as certainly as the theologian, has a province exclusively his own; and were the theologian ever to remember that the Scriptures could not possibly have been given to us as revelations of scientific truth, seeing that a single scientific truth they never yet revealed, and the geologist that it must be in vain to seek in science those truths which lead to salvation, seeing that in science these truths were never yet found, there would be little danger even of difference among them, and none of collision. Nay, there is, I doubt not, a time coming in which the Butlers and Chalmerses of the future will be content to recognize the geologic field as that of their richest and most pregnant analogies. It is with the history of the pre-Adamic ages that geology sets itself to deal; and by carefully conning the ancient characters graven in the rocks, and by deciphering the strange inscriptions which they compose, it greatly extends the record of God's doings upon the earth. And what more natural to expect, or rational to hold, than that the Unchangeable One should have wrought in all time after one general type and pattern, or than that we may seek, in the hope of finding, meet correspondences and striking analogies between his revealed workings during the human period, and his previous workings of old during the geologic periods,--correspondences and analogies suited to establish the identity of the worker, and, of course, from that identity to demonstrate the authenticity of the revelation? Permit me to bring out, in conclusion, what I have often thought on this subject, but have not been able so tersely to express, in a brief quotation from one of the most instructive works of the present age, the "Method of the Divine Government," by the Rev. Dr. M'Cosh:--"Science has a foundation," says this solid thinker and accomplished writer, "and so has religion. Let them unite their foundations, and the basis will be broader, and they will be two compartments of one great fabric reared to the glory of God. Let the one be the outer and the other the inner court. In the one let all look, and admire, and adore; and in the other let those who have faith kneel, and pray, and praise. Let the one be the sanctuary where human learning may present its richest incense as an offering to God, and the other, the holiest of all, separated from it by a veil now rent in twain, and in which, on a blood-sprinkled mercy seat, we pour out the love of a reconciled heart, and hear the oracles of the living God." LECTURE SEVENTH. THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. PART I. There are events so striking in themselves or from their accompaniments, that they powerfully impress the memories of children but little removed from infancy, and are retained by them in a sort of troubled recollection ever after, however extended their term of life. Samuel Johnson was only two and a half years old when, in accordance with the belief of the time, he was touched by Queen Anne for the "Evil;" but more than seventy years after, he could call up in memory a dream-like recollection of the lady dressed in a black hood, and glittering with diamonds, into whose awful presence he had been ushered on that occasion, and who had done for the cure of his complaint all that legitimate royalty could do. And an ancient lady of the north country, who had been carried, when a child, in her nurse's arms, to witness the last witch execution that took place in Scotland, could distinctly tell, after the lapse of nearly a century, that the fire was surrounded by an awe-struck crowd, and that the smoke of the burning, when blown about her by a cross breeze, had a foul and suffocating odor. In this respect the memory of infant tribes and nations seems to resemble that of individuals. There are characters and events which impress it so strongly, that they seem never to be forgotten, but live as traditions, sometimes mayhap very vague, and much modified by the inventions of an after time, but which, in floating downwards to late ages, always bear about them a certain strong impress of their pristine reality. They are shadows that have become ill defined from the vast distance of the objects that cast them,--like the shadows of great birds flung, in a summer's day, from the blue depths of the sky to the landscape far below,--but whose very presence, however diffused they may have become, testifies to the existence of the remote realities from which they are thrown, and without which they could have had no being at all. The old mythologies are filled with shadowy traditions of this kind,--shadows of the world's "gray fathers,"--which, like those shadows seen reflected on clouds by travellers who ascend lofty mountains, are exaggerated into the most gigantic proportions, and bear radiant glories around their heads. There is, however, one special tradition which seems to be more deeply impressed and more widely spread than any of the others. The destruction of well nigh the whole human race, in an early age of the world's history, by a great deluge, appears to have so impressed the minds of the few survivors, and seems to have been handed down to their children, in consequence, with such terror-struck impressiveness, that their remote descendants of the present day have not even yet forgotten it. It appears in almost every mythology, and lives in the most distant countries, and among the most barbarous tribes. It was the laudable ambition of Humboldt,--first entertained at a very early period of life,--to penetrate into distant regions, unknown to the natives of Europe at the time, that he might acquaint himself, in fields of research altogether fresh and new, with men and with nature in their most primitive conditions. In carrying out his design, he journeyed far into the woody wilderness that surrounds the Orinoco, and found himself among tribes of wild Indians whose very names were unknown to the civilized world. And yet among even these forgotten races of the human family he found the tradition of the deluge still fresh and distinct; not confined to single tribes, but general among the scattered nations of that great region, and intertwined with curious additions, suggestive of the inventions of classic mythology in the Old World. "The belief in a great deluge," we find him saying, "is not confined to one nation singly,--the Tamanacs: it makes part of a system of historical tradition, of which we find scattered notions among the Maypures of the great cataracts; among the Indians of the Rio Erevato, which runs into the Caura; and among almost all the tribes of the Upper Orinoco. When the Tamanacs are asked how the human race survived this great deluge,--'_the age of water_' of the Mexicans,--they say, a man and woman saved themselves on a high mountain called Tamanacu, situated on the banks of the Asiveru, and, _casting behind them over their heads_ the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, they saw the seeds contained in these fruits produce men and women, who re-peopled the earth. Thus," adds the philosophic traveller, "we find in all simplicity, among nations now in a savage state, a tradition which the Greeks embellished with all the charms of imagination." The resemblance is certainly very striking. "Quit the temple," said the Oracle to Deucalion and Pyrrha, when they had consulted it, after the great deluge, regarding the mode in which the earth was to be re-peopled,--"vail your heads, unloose your girdles, and throw behind your backs the bones of your grandmother." Rightly interpreting what seemed darkest and most obscure in the reply, they took "stones of the earth," and, casting them behind them, the stones flung by Deucalion became men, and those by Pyrrha became women, and thus the disfurnished world was peopled anew. The navigator always regards himself as sure of his position when he has _two_ landmarks to determine it by, or when in the open ocean he can ascertain, not only his latitude, but his longitude also. And this curious American tradition seems to have its two such marks,--its two bisecting lines of determination,--to identify it with the classic tradition of the Old World that refers evidently to the same great event. There are other portions of America in which the tradition of the Flood is still more distinct than among the forests of the Orinoco. It is related by Herrera, one of the Spanish historians of America, that even the most barbarous of the Brazilians had some knowledge of a general deluge; that in Peru the ancient Indians reported, that many years before there were any Incas, all the people were drowned by a great flood, save six persons, the progenitors of the existing races, who were saved on a float; that among the Mechoachans it was believed that a single family was preserved, during the outburst of the waters, in an ark, with a sufficient number of animals to replenish the new world; and, more curious still, that it used to be told by the original inhabitants of Cuba, that "an old man, knowing the deluge was to come, built a great ship, and went into it with his family and abundance of animals; and that, wearying during the continuance of the flood, he sent out a crow, which at first did not return, staying to feed on the dead bodies, but afterwards returned bearing with it a green branch." The resemblance borne by this last tradition to the Mosaic narrative is so close as to awaken a doubt whether it may not have been but a mere recollection of the teaching of some early missionary. Nor can its genuineness now be tested, seeing that the race which cherished it has been long since extinct. It may be stated, however, that a similar suspicion crossed the mind of Humboldt when he was engaged in collecting the traditions of the Indians of the Orinoco; but that on further reflection and inquiry he dismissed the doubt as groundless. He even set himself to examine whether the district was not a fossiliferous one, and whether beds of sea shells, or deposits charged with the petrified remains of corals or of fishes, might not have originated among the aborigines some mere myth of a great inundation sufficient to account for the appearances in the rocks. But he found that the region was mainly a primary one, in which he could detect only a single patch of sedimentary rock, existing as an unfossiliferous sandstone. And so, though little prejudiced in favor of the Mosaic record, he could not avoid arriving at the conclusion, simply in his character as a philosophic inquirer, who had no other object than to attain to the real and the true, that the legend of the wild Maypures and Tamanacs regarding a great destructive deluge was simply one of the many forms of that oldest of traditions which appears to be well nigh coextensive with the human family, and which, in all its varied editions, seems to point at one and the same signal event. Very varied some of these editions are. The inhabitants of Tahiti tell, for instance, that the Supreme God, a long time ago, being angry, dragged the earth through the sea, but that by a happy accident _their_ island broke off and was preserved; the Indians of Terra Firma believe, that when the great deluge took place, one man, with his wife and children, escaped in a canoe; and the Indians of the North American lakes hold, that the father of all their tribes being warned in a dream that a flood was coming, built a raft, on which he preserved his family, and pairs of all the animals, and which drifted about for many months, until at length a new earth was made for their reception by the "Mighty Man above." In that widely extended portion of the Old World over which Christianity has spread in its three great types,--Greek, Romish, and Protestant,--and in the scarce less extended portion occupied by the followers of Mohammed, the Scriptural account of the deluge, or the imperfect reflection of it borrowed by the Koran, has, of course, supplanted the old traditions. But outside these regions we find the traditions existing still. One of the sacred books of the Parsees (representatives of the ancient Persians) records, that "the world having been corrupted by Ahriman the Evil One, it was thought necessary to bring over it a universal flood of waters, that all impurity might be washed away. Accordingly the rain came down in drops as large as the head of a bull, until the earth was wholly covered with water, and all the creatures of the Evil One perished. And then the flood gradually subsided, and first the mountains, and next the plains, appeared once more." In the Scandinavian Edda, between whose wild fables and those of the sacred books of the Parsees there has been a resemblance traced by accomplished antiquaries such as Mallet, the tradition of the deluge takes a singularly monstrous form. On the death of the great giant Ymir, whose flesh and bones form the rocks and soils of the earth, and who was slain by the early gods, his blood, which now constitutes the ocean, rushed so copiously out of his wounds, that all the old race of the lesser giants, his offspring, were drowned in the flood which it occasioned, save one; and he, by escaping on board his bark with his wife, outlived the deluge. The tradition here is evidently allegorized, but it is by no means lost in the allegory. Sir William Jones, perhaps the most learned and accomplished man of his age (such at least was the estimate of Johnson), and the first who fairly opened up the great storehouse of eastern antiquities, describes the tradition of the deluge as prevalent also in the vast Chinese empire, with its three hundred millions of people. He states that it was there believed that, just ere the appearance of Fohi in the mountains, a mighty flood, which first "flowed abundantly, and then subsided, covered for a time the whole earth, and separated the higher from the lower age of mankind." The Hindu tradition, as related by Sir William, though disfigured by strange additions, is still more explicit. An evil demon having purloined the sacred books from Brahma, the whole race of men became corrupt except the seven Nishis, and in especial the holy Satyavrata, the prince of a maritime region, who, when one day bathing in a river, was visited by the god Vishnu in the shape of a fish, and thus addressed by him:--"In seven days all creatures who have offended me shall be destroyed by a deluge; but thou shalt be secured in a capacious vessel, miraculously formed. Take, therefore, all kinds of medicinal herbs, and esculent grain for food, and, together with the seven holy men, your respective wives, and pairs of all animals, enter the ark without fear: then shalt thou know God face to face, and all thy questions shall be answered." The god then disappeared; and after seven days, during which Satyavrata had conformed in all respects to the instructions given him, the ocean began to overflow the coasts, and the earth to be flooded by constant rains, when a large vessel was seen coming floating shore-wards on the rising waters; into which the Prince and the seven virtuous Nishis entered, with their wives, all laden with plants and grain, and accompanied by the animals. During the deluge Vishnu preserved the ark by again taking the form of a fish, and tying it fast to himself; and when the waters had subsided, he communicated the contents of the sacred books to the holy Satyavrata, after first slaying the demon who had stolen them. It is added, however, that the good man having, on one occasion long after, by "the act of destiny," drunk mead, he became senseless, and lay asleep naked, and that Charma, one of three sons who had been born to him, finding him in that sad state, called on his two brothers to witness the shame of their father, and said to them, What has now befallen? In what state is this our sire? But by the two brothers,--more dutiful than Charma,--he was hidden with clothes, and recalled to his senses; and, having recovered his intellect, and perfectly knowing what had passed, he cursed Charma, saying, "Thou shalt be a servant of servants." It would be difficult certainly to produce a more curious legend, or one more strikingly illustrative of the mixture of truth and fable which must ever be looked for in that tradition which some are content to accept even in religion as a trustworthy guide. In ever varying tradition, as in those difficult problems in physical science which have to be wrought out from a multitude of differing observations, it is, if I may so express myself, the mean result of the whole that must be accepted as approximately the true one. And the mean result of those dim and distorted recollections of the various tribes of men which refer to the Flood is a result which bears simply to this effect,--that in some early age of the world a great deluge took place, in which well nigh the whole human family was destroyed. The ancient traditions which have come down to us embalmed in classic literature form but a small portion of what seems once to have existed in the wide region now overspread by Christianity and Mohammedanism. A second deluge, more fatal to at least the productions of the human mind than the first had been, overspread the earth during what are known as the Middle Ages; and so signal was the wreck which it occasioned, that of seven heathen writers[24] whose testimony regarding the Flood Josephus cites as corroborative of his own, not one has descended in his writings to these later times. We learn, however, from the Jewish historian, that one of their number, Berosus, was a Chaldean; that two of the others, Hieronymus and Manetho, were Egyptians; and that a third, Nicolaus, whose history he quotes, was a citizen of Damascus. "There is," said this latter writer, in his perished history, "a great mountain in Armenia, over Minyas, called Baris, upon which it is reported that many who fled at the time of the deluge were saved; and that one who was carried in an ark came on shore on the top of it; and that the remains of the timber were a great while preserved. This might be the man," added this forgotten writer, "about whom Moses, the legislator of the Jews, wrote." The works of the Chaldean, Berosus, have long since been lost, all save a few extracts preserved by the Patristic writers. One of these, however, which embodies the Chaldean tradition of the Flood, is very remarkable. Like the Scandinavian legend, it represents the antediluvians as giants, all of whom, save one, became exceedingly impious and depraved. "But there was one among the giants," says Berosus, "that reverenced the gods, and was more wise and prudent than all the rest. His name was Noa; he dwelt in Syria, with his three sons, Sem, Japet, Chem, and their wives, the great Tidea, Pandora, Noela, and Noegla. This man, fearing the destruction which, he foresaw from the stars, would come to pass, began, in the seventy-eighth year before the inundation, to build a ship covered like an ark. Seventy-eight years from the time he began to build this ship, the ocean of a sudden broke out, and all the inland seas and the rivers and fountains bursting from beneath (attended by the most violent rains from heaven for many days), overflowed all the mountains; so that the whole human race was buried in the waters, except Noa and his family, who were saved by means of the ship, which, being lifted up by the waters, rested at last upon the top of the Gendyae or Mountain, on which, it is reported, there now remaineth some part, and that men take away the bitumen from it, and make use of it by way of charm or expiation, to avoid evil." A more general Assyrian tradition, somewhat different in its details, also survives.[25] The god Chronus, it was said, appeared in a vision to Xisuthrus, the tenth king of Babylon; and, warning him that on a certain day there would be a great flood upon the earth, by which mankind would be destroyed, he enjoined him to build a vessel, and to bring into it his friends and relatives, with everything necessary to sustain life, and all the various animals, birds, and quadrupeds. In obedience to the command, the king built a vessel about three quarters of a mile in length and half a mile in breadth, which he loaded with stores and the different kinds of animals; and into which, on the day of the flood, he himself entered, accompanied by his wife and children, and all his friends. The flood broke out. After, however, accomplishing its work of destruction, it abated; and the king sent out birds from the vessel, which, at first finding no food or place of rest, returned to him; but which, when, after the lapse of some days, he sent them forth again, came back to him with their feet tinged with mud. On a third trial they returned no more; upon which, judging that the surface of the earth was laid dry, he made an opening in the vessel, and, looking forth, found it stranded on a mountain of the land of Armenia. There seems to exist no such definite outline of the Egyptian tradition referred to by Josephus as that preserved of the Chaldean one. Plato, In his "Timæus," makes the Egyptian priest whom he introduces as discoursing with Solon, to attribute that clear recollection of a remote antiquity which survived in Egypt, to its comparative freedom from those great floods which had at various times desolated Greece, and destroyed the memory of remote events by the destruction of the people and their records; and Bacon had evidently this passage in view when he poetically remarked, in his magnificent essay on the "Vicissitude of Things," that "the great winding sheets that bury all things in oblivion are two,--deluges and earthquakes; from which two destructions is to be noted," he adds, "that the remnant of people that happen to be preserved are commonly ignorant and mountainous people, that can give no account of the time past." Even in Egypt, however, the recollection of the deluge seems to have survived, though it lay entangled amid what seem to be symbolized memories of unusual floodings of the river Nile. "The Noah of Egypt," says Professor Hitchcock, in his singularly ingenious essay (Historical and Geological Deluges Compared), "appears to have been Osiris. Typhon, a personification of the ocean, enticed him into an ark, which, being closed, he was forced to sea; and it was a curious fact, that he embarked on the seventeenth day of the month Athyr,--the very day, most probably, when Noah entered the ark." The classical tradition of Greece, as if the events whence it took its rise had been viewed through a multiplying glass, appears to have been increased from one to many. Plutarch enumerates no fewer than five great floods; and Plato makes his Egyptian priest describe the Greek deluges as oft repeated and numerous. There was the flood of Deucalion, the flood of Ogyges, and several other floods; and no little time and learning have been wasted in attempting to fix their several periods. But, lying far within the mythologic ages,--the last of them to which any determining circumstances are attached, in the days of that Prometheus who stole fire from heaven, and was chained by Jupiter to Mount Caucasus,--it appears greatly more probable that the traditions respecting them should be the mere repeated and re-repeated echoes of one signal event, than that many wide-spread and destructive floods should have taken place in the obscure, fabulous ages of Grecian story, while not one such flood has happened during its two thousand five hundred years of authentic history. Nor is it difficult to conceive how such repetitions of the original tradition _should_ have taken place. The traditions of the same event preserved by tribes living in even the same tract of country come in course of time considerably to differ from each other in their adjuncts and circumstances; those, for instance, of the various tribes of the Orinoco do so; and should these tribes come to be fused ultimately into one nation, nothing seems more probable than that their varying editions, instead of being also fused together, should remain distinct, as the recollections of separate and independent catastrophes. And thus the several deluges of Grecian mythology may in reality testify, not to the occurrence of several floods, but to the existence merely of several independent tribes, among whom the one great tradition has been so altered and modified ere they came to possess a common literature, that when at length they became skilful enough to place it on record, it appeared to them not as one, but as many. The admirable reflection of Humboldt suggested by the South American traditions seems, incidentally at least, to bear out this view. "Those ancient traditions of the human race," he says, "which we find dispersed over the whole surface of the globe, like the relics of a vast shipwreck, are highly interesting in the philosophical study of our own species. How many different tongues belonging to branches that appear totally distinct transmit to us the same facts! The traditions concerning races that have been destroyed, and the renewal of nature, scarcely vary in reality, though every nation gives them a local coloring. In the great continents, as in the smallest islands of the Pacific Ocean, it is always on the loftiest and nearest mountain that the remains of the human race have been saved; and this event appears the more recent in proportion as the nations are uncultivated, and as the knowledge they have of their own existence has no very remote date." And it seems at least not improbable, that the several traditions of apparently special deluges,--deluges each with its own set of circumstances, and from which the progenitors of one nation were saved on a hill-top, those of another on a raft, and those of yet another in an ark or canoe, and which in one instance destroyed only giants, and had in another the loss which they occasioned repaired by date-stones, and in yet another by stones of the earth,--should come to be regarded among a people composed of various tribes, and but little accustomed to sift the evidence on which they founded, rather as all diverse narratives of diverse events, than as in reality but varied accounts of one and the same tremendous catastrophe. Taking it for granted, then, that the several Greek traditions refer to but one great event, let us accept that which records what is known as the flood of Deucalion, as more adequately representative of the general type of its class, especially in the edition given by Lucian (in his work "De Dea Syria"), than any of the others. "The present world," says this writer, "is peopled from the sons of Deucalion. In respect to the former brood, they were men of violence, and lawless in their dealings; they regarded not oaths, nor observed the rites of hospitality, nor showed mercy to those who sued for it. On this account they were doomed to destruction; and for this purpose there was a mighty eruption of water from the earth, attended with heavy showers from above, so that the rivers swelled and the sea overflowed, till the whole earth was covered with a flood, and all flesh drowned. Deucalion alone was preserved, to people the world. This mercy was shown him on account of his justice and piety. His preservation was effected in this manner:--He put all his family, both his sons and their wives, into a vast ark which he had provided, and he then went into it himself. At the same time, animals of every species,--boars, horses, lions, serpents,--whatever lived upon the face of the earth,--followed him by pairs; all which he received into the ark, and experienced no evil from them." Such is the tradition of Deucalion, as preserved by Lucian. It is added by his contemporary Plutarch, that "Deucalion, as his voyage was drawing to a close, sent out a dove, which coming in a short time back to him, indicated that the waters still covered the earth; but which on a second occasion failed to return; or, as some say, returned to him with mud-stained feet, and thus intimated the abatement of the flood." It cannot, I think, be rationally doubted that we have in this ancient legend one other tradition of the Noachian Deluge. Even as related by Ovid, with all the license of the poet, we find in it the great leading traits that indicate its parentage. I quote from the vigorous translation of Dryden. "Impetuous rain descends; Nor from his patrimonial heaven alone Is Jove content to pour his vengeance down; But from his brother of the seas he craves To help him with auxiliary waves. Then with his mace the monarch struck the ground; With inward trembling earth received the wound, And rising streams a ready passage found. Now seas and earth were in confusion lost,-- A world of waters, and without a coast. A mountain of tremendous height there stands Betwixt the Athenian and Boeotian lands: Parnassus is its name, whose forky rise Mounts through the clouds, and mates the lofty skies. High on the summit of this dubious cliff, Deucalion, wafting, moored his little skiff: He, with his wife, were only left behind Of perished man; they two were human kind: The most upright of mortal men was he,-- The most serene and holy woman she." [Illustration: Fig. 109. APAMÆAN MEDAL.] Such are some of the traditions of that great catastrophe which overtook the human family in its infancy, and made so deep an impression on the memories of the few awe-struck survivors, that the race never forgot it. Ere the dispersal of the family it would have of course existed as but one unique recollection,--a single reflection on the face of an unbroken mirror. But the mirror has since been shattered into a thousand pieces; and we now find the object, originally but one, pictured in each broken fragment, with various degrees of distinctness, according to the various degrees of injury received by the reflecting medium. _Picture_, too, scarce less certainly than language spoken and written, testifies to the wide extent of the tradition. Its symbols are found stamped on coins of old classical Greece; they have been traced amid the ancient hieroglyphics of Egypt, recognized in the sculptured caves of Hindustan, and detected even in the far west, among the picture writings of Mexico. The several glyphic representatives of the tradition bear, like its various written or oral editions, a considerable resemblance to each other. Even in the rude paintings of the old Mexican, the same leading idea may be traced as in the classic sculpture of the Greek. On what is known to antiquaries as the Apamæan medal, struck during the reign of Philip the elder, we find the familiar name of _Noe_ inscribed on a floating chest or ark, within which a man and woman are seen seated, and to which a bird on the wing is represented as bearing a branch.[26] And in an ancient Mexican painting, figured by Humboldt, "the man and woman who survived the age of water" are shown similarly inclosed in a leaf-tufted box, or hollow trunk of a tree; while a gigantic female,--Matalcueje, the goddess of water,--is seen pouring down her floods around them, and upon an overwhelmed human figure, representative apparently of the victims of the catastrophe. All is classical in the forms of the one representation, and uncouth in those of the other. They bear the same sort of _artistic_ relation to each other that the rude Tamanac tradition bears, in a _literary_ point of view, to the well constructed story and elegant verse of Ovid; but they are charged apparently with the same meaning, and shadow forth the same event. [Illustration: Fig. 110. OLD MEXICAN PICTURE. (_Humboldt._)] The tradition of the Flood may, I repeat, be properly regarded as universal; seeing there is scarce any considerable race of man among which, in some of its many forms, it is not to be found. Now, it has been argued by some of the older theologians, with a not very cogent logic, that the universality of the tradition establishes the universality of the Flood,--that where the tradition _is to be found_, the Flood _must have been_;--an argument which would have force if it could also be shown that each tribe had had its own Noah, saved by ark, raft, or canoe, or on some tall mountain summit, in the region in which his descendants continued to reside; but of no force whatever if the Noah of the race was but one, and if the scene of his danger and deliverance was restricted, as of necessity it must have been in that case, to a single locality. Further, if, as we believe, there was but one Noah,--if, according to the Scriptural account, condensed into a single sentence by the Apostle, only "eight souls" were saved in the great catastrophe of the race,--there could have existed no human testimony to determine whether the exterminating deluge that occasioned their destruction was a universal deluge, or merely a partial one. It could not be known by men shut up in an ark, nor even though from a mast top they could have swept the horizon with a telescope, whether the waters that spread out on every side of them, covering the old familiar mountains, and occupying the entire range of their vision, extended all around the globe, or found their limits some eight or ten hundred miles away. The point is one respecting which, as certainly as respecting the creation of the world itself, or of the world's inhabitants, there could have existed no human _witness-bearing_: contemporary man, left to the unassisted evidence of his senses, _must_ of necessity have been ignorant of the extent of the deluge. True, what man could never have known of himself, God could have told him, and in many cases _has_ told him; but then, God's revelations have in most instances been made to effect exclusively moral purposes; and we know that those who have perilously held that, along with the moral facts, definite physical facts, geographic, geologic, or astronomical, had also been imparted, have almost invariably found themselves involved in monstrous error. And in this matter of the Flood, though it be a fact of great moral significancy that God in an early period of the human history destroyed the whole race for their wickedness,--all save one just man and his family,--it is not in the least a matter of moral significancy whether or no the deluge by which the judgment was effected covered not only the parts of the earth occupied by man at the time, but extended also to Terra del Fuego, Tahiti, and the Falkland Islands. In fine, though the question whether the Noachian deluge was universal, or merely partial, is an interesting question in physics, it is in no higher degree a moral one than those questions which relate to the right figure or age of the earth, or to the true motions of the heavenly bodies. And it will be found that the only passages in Scripture which refer to this strictly physical subject, instead of determining the geographic extent of the Flood, serve only to raise a question regarding their own extent of meaning. It is known to all students of the sacred writings, that there is a numerous class of passages in both the Old and New Testaments in which, by a sort of metonymy common in the East, a considerable part is spoken of as the whole, though in reality often greatly less than a moiety of the whole. Of this class are the passages in which it is said, that on the day of Pentecost there were Jews assembled at Jerusalem "out of _every nation under heaven_;" "that the gospel was preached to _every creature under heaven_;" that the Queen of Sheba came to hear the wisdom of Solomon from the "_uttermost parts of the earth_;" that God put the dread and fear of the children of Israel upon the nations that were "_under the whole heaven_;" and that "_all countries_ came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn." And of course the universally admitted existence of such a class of passages, in which words are _not_ to be accepted in their rigidly literal meanings, but with certain great modifications, renders the task of determining and distinguishing such passages from others in which the meaning is definite and strict, not only legitimate, but also laudable; and justifies us in inquiring whether those passages descriptive of the Flood or its effects, in which it is said that the "waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth," so that "_all_ the high hills that were under _the whole heavens_ were covered," or that "_all_ flesh died that moved upon the earth," belong to their number or no. There are some instances in which the Scriptures themselves reveal the character and limit the meaning of the metonymic passages. They do so with respect to the passage already quoted regarding the stranger Jews assembled in Jerusalem at the Pentecostal feast,--"out of every nation under heaven." For further on we read that these Jews had come from but the various countries extending around Judea, as far as Italy on the one hand, and the Persian Gulf on the other;--an area large, indeed, but scarce equal to a one fiftieth part of the earth's surface. But there is no such explanation given to limit or restrict most of the other passages; the modifying element must be sought for outside the sacred volume,--in ancient history or ancient geography. The reader must, for instance, acquaint himself with the progress of discovery in early ages, or the boundaries of the Roman Empire under the first Cæsars, ere he can form a probable conjecture regarding the extent of that "all the earth" which sought the presence of Solomon, or a correct estimate respecting the limits of that "all the world" which Cæsar Augustus could have taxed. And to this last class, which fail to explain themselves, the passages respecting the Flood evidently belong. Like the passages cited, and, with these, almost all the texts of Scripture in which questions of physical science are involved, the limiting, modifying, explaining facts and circumstances must be sought for in that outside region of secular research, historic and scientific, from which of late years so much valuable biblical illustration has been derived, and with which it is so imperatively the duty of the Church to keep up an acquaintance at least as close and intimate as that maintained with it by her gainsayers and assailants. That the Noachian deluge might have been but partial, not universal, was held, let me here remark, by distinguished theologians in our own country, at least as early as the seventeenth century. It was held, for instance, by the learned biblical commentator, old Matthew Poole, whom we find saying, in his Synopsis on Genesis, that "it is not to be supposed that the entire globe of the earth was covered with water;" for "where," he adds, "was the need of overwhelming those regions in which there were no human beings?" It was held also by that distinguished Protestant churchman of the reign of Charles II., Bishop Stillingfleet, whom Principal Cunningham of Edinburgh well describes, in his elaborate edition of the Bishop's work, "The Doctrines and Practices of the Church of Rome," as a divine of "great talents and prodigious learning." "I cannot see," says the Bishop, in his "Origines Sacra," "any urgent necessity from the Scriptures to assert that the Flood did spread over all the surface of the earth. That all mankind, those in the ark excepted, were destroyed by it, is most certain, according to the Scriptures. The Flood was universal as to mankind; but from thence follows no necessity at all of asserting the universality of it as to the globe of the earth, unless it be sufficiently proved that the whole earth was peopled before the Flood, which I despair of ever seeing proved." It was not, however, until the comparatively recent times in which the belief entertained by Poole and Stillingfleet was adopted and enforced by writers such as Dr. Pye Smith, and Professor Hitchcock of the United States, that there was any show of argument displayed against the theory of a partial deluge which would now be deemed worthy of consideration. And these modern objections may be found ingeniously arrayed by the late Dr. John Kitto, in his "Daily Bible Illustrations," published only six years ago (in 1850), and by the learned Dr. William Hamilton of Mobile, in his "Friend of Moses," published in 1852. Both these writers, however, virtually agree with their opponents in holding that the strict meaning of the terms employed by Moses in describing the deluge is to be determined on considerations apart from the mere philological ones. After marshalling his objections to the theory of a local flood, Dr. Kitto goes on to say, "We yield our judgment to what appears to us the _force of these arguments_ as to the _meaning_ of Scripture;" and we find Dr. Hamilton prefacing his objections as follows:--"Were the mere universality of some of the terms employed in the Mosaic narrative the _sole_ ground of objection to the hypothesis of a _local_ inundation only in the days of Noah, that hypothesis might perhaps be deemed admissible. But there are," he adds, "other and more serious difficulties attending it." Let us, then, briefly examine these supposed difficulties and objections; and as they have been better and more amply stated by Dr. Kitto than by any other writer with whom I am acquainted,--for Dr. Hamilton takes up rather the arguments in favor of a universal, than the objections against a merely partial flood,--let us take them as they occur in his writings, especially in the excellent work now before me,--his "Daily Bible Illustrations." It will scarce be suspected that such an accomplished writer, who did so much for Biblical Illustration, and whose admirable Pictorial Bible formed, with but four works more, what Chalmers used to term with peculiar emphasis his "Biblical Library,"[27] would do injustice to any cause, or any line of argument which he adopted, if it was in reality a good and sound one. It may be well, however, not to test too rigidly the value of the remark,--meant to be at least of the nature of argument,--when we find him saying that "a plain man sitting down to read the Scripture account of the deluge would have no doubt of its universality." Perhaps not. But it is at least equally certain, that plain men who set themselves to deduce from Scripture the figure of the planet we inhabit had as little doubt, until corrected by the geographer, that the earth was a great plane,--not a sphere; that plain men who set themselves to acquire from Scripture some notion of the planetary motions had no doubt, in the same way, until corrected by the astronomer, that it was the earth that rested, and the sun that moved round it; and that plain men who have sought to determine from Scripture the age of the earth have had no doubt, until corrected by the geologist, that it was at most not much more than six thousand years old. In fine, when plain men, who, according to Cowper, "know, and know no more, their Bible true," have in perhaps every instance learned from it what it was in reality intended to teach,--the way of salvation,--it seems scarce less certain, that in every instance in which they have sought to deduce from it what it was _not_ intended to teach,--the truths of physical science,--they have fallen into extravagant error. And as any question which, bearing, not on the punitory extent and ethical consequences of the Flood, but merely on its geographic limits and natural effects, is not a moral, but a purely physical question, it would be but a fair presumption, founded on the almost invariable experience of ages, that the deductions from Scripture of the "plain men" regarding it would be, not true, but false deductions. Of apparently not more real weight and importance is the doctor's further remark, that there seems, after all, to be a marked difference between the terms in which the universality of the deluge is spoken of, and the terms employed in those admittedly metonymic passages in which the whole is substituted for a part. "What limitation," he asks, "can we assign to such a phrase as this:--'all the high hills that were UNDER THE WHOLE HEAVENS were covered?' If here the phrase had been, 'upon the face of the whole earth,' we should have been told that 'the whole earth' had sometimes the meaning of 'the whole land;' but, as if designedly to obviate such a limitation of meaning, we have here the largest phrase of universality which the language of man affords,--'under the whole heavens!'" So far Dr. Kitto. But his argument seems to be not more valuable in this case than in the other. It was upon the nations that were "UNDER THE WHOLE HEAVENS" that Deity represented himself as putting the fear and dread of the children of Israel; but he would be certainly a very "plain man" who would infer from the universality of a passage so evidently metonymic, that that fear extended to the people of Japan on the one hand, or to the Red Indians of the Rocky Mountains on the other. The phrase "_under the whole heavens_" seems to be but coextensive in meaning with the phrase "upon the face of the whole earth." The "whole earth" is evidently tantamount to the whole terrestrial floor,--the "whole heavens," to the whole celestial roof that arches over it; and on what principle the whole terrestrial floor is to be deemed less extensive than the floor under the whole celestial roof, really does not appear. Further, nothing can be more certain than that both the phrases contrasted by Dr. Kitto are equally employed in the metonymic form. When, however, the doctor passes to argument based upon natural science, we find what he adduces worthy of our attention, were it but for the inquiries which it suggests. "If the deluge were but local," we find him saying, "what was the need of taking _birds_ into the ark; and among them birds so widely diffused as the raven and the dove? A deluge which could overspread the region which these birds inhabit could hardly have been less than universal. If the deluge were local, and all the birds of these kinds in that district perished,--though we should think they might have fled to the uninundated regions,--it would have been useless to encumber the ark with them, seeing that the birds of the same species which survived in the lands not overflowed would speedily replenish the inundated tract as soon as the waters subsided." It will be found that the reasoning here is mainly based upon an error in natural science, into which even naturalists of the last century, such as Buffon, not unfrequently fell, and which was almost universal among the earlier voyagers and travellers,--the error of confounding as identical the merely allied birds and beasts of distant countries, and of thus assigning to _species_ wide areas in creation which in reality they do not occupy. The grouse, for instance, is a widely spread genus, or rather _family_; for it consists of more genera than one. It is so extensively present over the northern hemisphere, that Siberia, Norway, Iceland, and North America, have all their grouse,--the latter continent, indeed, from five to eight different kinds; and yet so restricted are some of the species of which they consist, that, were the British islands to be submerged, one of the best known of the family,--the red grouse, or moor-fowl (_Lagopus Scoticus_),--would disappear from creation. This bird, which, rated at its money value, is one of the most important in Europe,--for the barren moors which it frequents in the Highlands of Scotland alone are let every season almost entirely for its sake for hundreds of thousands of pounds,--is exclusively a British bird; and, unless by miracle a new migratory instinct were given to it, a complete submersion of the British islands would secure its destruction. If the submergence amounted to but a few hundred miles in lateral extent, the moor-fowl would to a certainty not seek the distant uninundated land. Nor is it at all to be inferred, that in a merely local but wide spread deluge, birds occupying a more extensive area than that overspread by the Flood would, according to Dr. Kitto, "speedily replenish the inundated tract as soon as the waters had subsided." The statement must have been hazarded in ignorance of the peculiar habits of many of the non-migratory birds. Up till about the middle of the last century, the capercailzie, or great cock of the woods, was a native of Scotland. It was exterminated, however, about the time of the last Rebellion, or not long after: the last specimen seen among the pine forests of Strathspey was killed, it is said, in the year 1745: the last specimen seen among the woods of Strathglass survived till the year 1760. Pennant relates that he saw in 1769 a specimen, probably a stuffed one, that had been killed shortly before in the neighborhood of Inverness. But from at least that time the species disappeared from the British islands; and, though it continued to exist in Norway, did not "replenish the tracts from which it had been extirpated." The late Marquis of Breadalbane was at no small cost and trouble in re-introducing the species, and to some extent he succeeded; but the capercailzie is, I understand, still restricted to the Breadalbane woods. I have seen the golden eagle annihilated as a species in move than one district of the north of Scotland; nor, though it still exists in other parts of the kingdom, and is comparatively common among the mountains of Norway, have I known it in any instance to spread anew over the tracts from which it had been extirpated. So much for the general reasonings of Dr. Kitto. Further, we find him stating, that a deluge which could overspread the region inhabited by birds so widely diffused as the raven and the dove, could hardly have been less than universal. The doctor, however, ought to have known that the _dove_ is a _family_, not a _species_. All the American species of doves, for example, differ from the six European species, three of which are to be found in Scotland. Of even the American passenger pigeons (_Ectopistes migratoria_), which occur in such numbers in their native country as actually to eclipse, during their migratory flights, the light of day, only a single straggler,--the one whose chance visit has been recorded by Dr. Fleming,--seems to have been ever seen in Britain. And the East has also its own peculiar species, unknown to Europe. The golden-green pigeons and the great crowned pigeons of the Indian isles are never seen in northern and western latitudes, save in stuffed specimens in a museum. The Vinago pigeons, with their vividly bright plumes, though they exist in several species, are all restricted to the woods of the torrid zone. Even the collared dove of Africa and the Levant rarely visits, and then only as a straggler, the western and northern parts of Europe. The blue-capped turteline pigeon is restricted, as a species, to the island of Celebes; the blue and green turteline pigeon is a native of New Guinea; the Cape turtle occurs in but the southern parts of Africa; the Nicobar ground pigeon in but the Indian Archipelago; the magnificent fruit pigeon in the eastern parts of Australia; and the crowned goura pigeon, the giant of its family, in the Molucca Islands. No single species of dove seems to be so widely spread but that it might be exterminated in a merely partial deluge; and of course conjecture may in vain weary itself in striving to determine what that particular species was which Noah sent forth as a messenger from the ark, or in inquiring what was the extent of the area which it occupied? The common raven is more widely spread than any single species of pigeon. Even the raven, however, seems restricted to the northern hemisphere. India and Southern Africa have both their ravens; but the species differ from each other, and from the widely spread northern one. It is a question whether even the pied raven of the Faroe Isles be not a distinct bird from the black raven of our own country: if not an independent species, it is at least a very remarkable variety. Further, when extirpated in a district, it is found that, as in the case of the capercailzie and the golden eagle, the neighboring regions in which the raven continues to exist fail for ages to furnish a fresh supply. There are counties in England in which the raven is now never seen; and I am acquainted with a district in the north of Scotland from which, when a pair that were known to breed for more than a century in a tall cliff were destroyed by the fowler, the species disappeared.[28] Such, when examined, are the arguments drawn by Dr. Kitto from natural science; nor is he in any degree happier when he resorts to arguments more restrictedly physical. "If," we find him saying, "the waters of the Deluge rose fifteen cubits above all the mountains of the countries which the raven and the dove inhabit, _the level must have been high enough to give universality to the Deluge_." The only point here not already dealt with,--for I have just shown that certain species of the dove and the raven might have of necessity been inmates of the ark, though the Flood had been only a partial one,--is that which refers to the submergence of the hills over at least an extensive tract, and to the inference, evident in the passage, that if lofty mountains were covered in one portion of the globe, mountains of similar altitude must have been equally covered in every other portion of it. The inference here seems to be founded on a common but altogether mistaken view of some of the grandest operations of nature with which modern science has brought us acquainted. It has been well remarked, that when two opposing explanations of extraordinary natural phenomena are given,--one of a simple and seemingly common sense character, the other complex and apparently absurd,--it is almost always safer to adopt the apparently absurd than the seemingly common sense one. Dr. Kitto's "plain man," yielding to the dictates of what he would deem common sense,--which, of course, in questions of natural science is tantamount to common nonsense,--would be sure to go wrong. And we find the remark not inaptly illustrated by the now well established fact, that while the medium level of the ocean is one of the most fixed lines in nature, the level of the great continents, with their table-lands and mountains, is an ever fluctuating line. It may seem strange that land should be less stable than water. We see the tide rising and falling twice every twenty-four hours, and the rock ever remaining in its place;--we speak of the fixed earth and the unstable sea. And yet, while we have no evidence whatever that the sea level has changed during at least the ages of the Tertiary formations, and absolutely know that it could not have varied more than a few yards, or at most a few fathoms, we have direct evidence that during that time great mountain chains, many thousand feet in height, such as the Alps, have arisen from the bottom of the ocean, and that great continents have sunk beneath it and disappeared. The larger part of northern Europe and America have been covered by the sea since our present group of shells began to exist; and it seems not improbable that the lower portion of the valley of the Jordan was depressed to its present low level of thirteen hundred feet beneath the Mediterranean since the times of the deluge. On several parts of the coasts of Britain and Ireland the voyager can look down through the clear sea, in depths to which the tide never falls, on the remains of submerged forests; and it is a demonstrable fact, that even during the present age there are certain extensive tracts of land which have sunk beneath the sea level, while certain other extensive tracts have been elevated over it. In 1819, a wide expanse of country in the delta of the Indus, containing fully two thousand square miles of flat meadow, was converted by a sudden depression of the land, accompanied by an earthquake, into an inland sea; and the tower of a small fort, which occupied nearly the middle of the sunken area, and on which many of the inhabitants of a neighboring village succeeded in saving themselves, may still be seen raising its shattered head over the surface,--the only object visible in a waste of waters of which the eye fails to determine the extent. About three years after this event, a tract of country, interposed between the foot of the Andes and the Pacific, more than equal in area to all Great Britain, was elevated from two to seven feet over its former level, and rocks laid bare in the sea, which the pilots and fishermen of the coast had never before seen. On the Indian coast the sea _seemed_ to be rising at nearly the same time when it _appeared_ to be falling on the American one; and on the latter such was the actual impression entertained by the people. It is stated by Sir Charles Lyell, in his "Elements," that he was informed by Mr. Cruickshanks, an English botanist who resided in Chili at the time, "that it was the general belief of the fishermen and inhabitants, _not_ that the land had risen, but that the ocean had permanently retreated." But if it had retreated from the Chilian shore, how could it have risen on the Indian one? In like manner the sea appears to be receding from the north-eastern shores of Sweden at the rate of nearly four vertical feet in the century; while it seems to be advancing on the western coasts of Greenland at apparently a rate more considerable, though there the ratio of its rise has not been marked with equal care. It seems to be rising on even the Swedish province of Scania; while all the time, however, the actual motion,--upwards in one region, downwards in another,--is in the solid earth,--not in the unstable water, which merely serves as a sort of hydrostatic _level_, to indicate this fact of subsidence or elevation in the land. And of course all the reasoning, founded on mere appearances, that would reverse the process by assigning permanency to the level of the land, and fluctuation to that of the sea, would lead to inevitable error. Let us, for the illustration's sake, suppose that the British islands had been the scene of the Deluge; and that it had been occasioned by a gradual depression in the earth's surface of about fifteen hundred miles in length, a thousand miles in breadth, five thousand feet in depth in its centre, and which gradually trended all around towards the sides. Such a depression would form a scarce appreciable inequality on the surface of even a three feet globe; in a twelve inch globe it might be represented by the abrasion of a small patch of the varnish; nor would it have in nature one sixth the depth, or one sixteenth the area, of the bed of the Atlantic Ocean. Let us suppose further, that it had been produced by an equable sinking of the surface, prolonged for forty days at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five feet per day,--a motion not equal to that of the minute-hand of a clock whose dial plate measures two feet in diameter. Further, let us suppose that a thoroughly intelligent man,--let us say Dr. Kitto himself,--secure from all personal danger in an ark perched on some such commanding eminence as Arthur's Seat, had been a witness of the catastrophe; and that, instead of having merely to reason respecting it after the lapse of more than four thousand years, he had been enabled to bear testimony regarding it from the evidence of his senses. In the first place, let me remark that the sinking or downward motion of the earth's crust would be altogether inappreciable by sense; in the next, that the depression, even when it had reached its acme, would in no sensible degree affect the contour of surrounding objects. Even at the end of the forty days, when the five thousand feet of depression had been reached, the gradient of declination across the sunken area would not exceed _ten_ feet per mile, and across the larger diameter would amount to but _six feet eight inches_ per mile. Of course, at the end of the twentieth day the gradients would be represented by but one half these sums, and would be altogether inappreciable in the landscape; the hills would seem quite as high as before, and the valleys not more profound. The only sensible sign felt or visible of what was taking place would be simply a persistent rising of the sea at somewhat less than twice its rate of flow during stream tides. Ocean, as if forgetful of its ancient bounds, would continue to encroach upon the land. On the second day the greater part of what is now the site of Edinburgh would be covered; on the seventh day the tide would have reached the vessel perched on the top of the hill now known as Arthur's Seat; on the sixteenth day the highest peak of the Pentlands would have disappeared; and in nine days more the distant summit of Ben Lomond. From the roof of the slowly drifting ark nothing would then have appeared save a shoreless ocean. But it would have taken yet other eleven days ere the proud crest of Ben Nevis, the highest land in the British islands, would have been submerged; and the eve of the fortieth day would have seen it covered by little more than five hundred feet of water. An actual witness, in such circumstances, however intelligent, could have but testified to the persistent rise of the sea, accompanied mayhap by rain and tempest; he could but tell how that for many days together it had been flood without ebb, as if the fountains of the great deep had been broken up; and that at length he was encompassed by what seemed a shoreless ocean. But he would certainly depart perilously from his position as a witness-bearer, were he to argue, that when his ark had begun to float on a hill eight hundred feet in height, all hills upon the surface of the globe of a corresponding altitude must have been also covered; or that, from what was in reality but a local depression, a universal deluge might be legitimately inferred. His error would be of the same nature (though of course immensely greater) as that of the native of Chili who held, that because the ocean had retreated from the coasts of his own country, it had of necessity also retreated from the delta of the Indus; or as that of the inhabitant of Cutch who held, that as the sea had risen high over his native districts, it had also of necessity overflowed the coasts of Chili and Aracan. Dr. Kitto brings forward but one other objection to a Flood only partial, and that the one virtually disposed of by Bishop Stillingfleet in the terminal half of a short sentence. The Bishop "despaired," as he well might, "of ever seeing it proved that the whole earth had been peopled before the Deluge." "It has been much urged of late," says Dr. Kitto, "that the Deluge was not universal, but was confined to a particular region, which man inhabited. It may be freely admitted that, seeing the object of the Flood was to drown mankind, there was no need that it should extend beyond the region of man's habitation. But this theory necessarily assigns to the world before the Flood a lower population, and a more limited extension of it, than we are prepared to concede." He then goes on to argue, that, as the species increased very rapidly immediately after the Deluge, it must have increased in a ratio at least equally rapid before that catastrophe took place. But how gratuitous the assumption! It would be quite as safe to infer, that as the human race multiplied greatly in Ireland during the first half of the present century, it must have also multiplied greatly in Italy, a much finer country, during the first half of the fifth century, or in the wealthier portions of Kurdistan during the first half of the thirteenth. Ere applying, however, the Irish ratio of increase to either the Italy of thirteen hundred years ago, or to the Kurdistan of five hundred years ago, it would surely be necessary to take into account the important fact, that these were the ages of Zingis Khan and of Attila; of Zingis Khan, who, on possessing himself of the three capitals of the one country, coolly butchered four millions three hundred and forty-seven thousand persons, their inhabitants; and of that Attila, "the scourge of God," who used to say, more especially in reference to the other country, that "whenever his horse-hoofs had once trod, the grass never afterwards grew," and before whose ravages the human race seemed melting away. The terms in which the great wickedness of the antediluvians is described indicate a period of violence and outrage;--the age which preceded the Flood was an age of "giants" and of "mighty men," and of "men of renown,"--forgotten Attilas, Alarics, and Zingis Khans, mayhap,--"giants of mighty bone and bold emprise," who became famous for their "infinite manslaughter," and the thousands whom they destroyed. Such is decidedly the view which the brief Scriptural description suggested to the poets; and certainly, when a question comes to be one of guess work, no other class of persons guess half so sagaciously as they. It has not unfrequently occurred to me,--and in a question of this kind one suggestion may be quite as admissible as another,--that the Deluge may have been more a visitation of mercy to the race than of judgment. Even in our own times, as happened in New Zealand during the present century, and in Tahiti about the close of the last, tribes restricted to one tract of country, when seized by the madness of conquest, have narrowly escaped extermination. We know that in some instances better have been destroyed by worse races,--that the more refined have at times yielded to the more barbarous,--yielded so entirely, that all that survived of vast populations and a comparatively high civilization have been broken temples, and great burial mounds locked up in the solitudes of deep forests; and further, that whole peoples, exhausted by their vices, have sunk into such a state of depression and decline, that, unable any longer to supply the inevitable waste of nature, they have dropt into extinction. And such may have been the condition of the human race during that period of portentous evil and violence which preceded the deluge. We know that the good came at length to be restricted to a single family; and even the evil, instead of being numbered, as now, by hundreds of millions, may have been comprised in a few thousands, or at most a few hundred thousands, that were becoming fewer every year, from the indulgence of fierce and evil passions, in a time of outrage and violence. The Creator of the race may have dealt with it on this occasion of judgment, as a florist does with some decaying plant, which he cuts down to the ground in order to secure a fresh shoot from the root. At all events, the _proof_ of an antediluvian population at once enormously great and very largely spread must rest with those who hold, with Dr. Kitto, that its numbers and extent were such as to militate against the probability of a deluge merely partial; and any such proof we may, with the good old Bishop of Worcester, well "despair of ever seeing" produced. Even admitting, however, for the argument's sake, that the inhabitants of the Old World may have been as numerous as those of China are now,--a number estimated by the recent authorities at more than three hundred and fifty millions,--and the admission is certainly greatly larger than there is argument enough on the other side to extort,--a comparatively partial deluge would have been sufficient to secure their destruction. In short, it may be fairly concluded, that if there be a show of reason against the theory of a flood merely local, it has not yet been exhibited. Even Dr. Kitto, with all his ingenuity and learning, has failed to array against it arguments of any real weight or cogency; and in my next address I may be perhaps able to show you that the objections which, on the other hand, bear against the antagonist hypothesis, are at once solid and numerous. I may be mistaken in my estimate; but for some years past I have regarded them as altogether insurmountable. LECTURE EIGHTH. THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. PART II. A century has not yet gone by since all the organic remains on which the science of Palæontology is now founded were regarded as the wrecks of a universal deluge, and held good in evidence that the waters had prevailed in every known country, and risen over the highest hills. Intelligent observers were not wanting at even an earlier time who maintained that a temporary flood could not have occasioned phenomena so extraordinary. Such was the view taken by several Italian naturalists of the seventeenth century, and in Britain by the distinguished mathematician Hooke, the contemporary, and in some matters rival, of Newton. But the conclusions of these observers, now so generally adopted, were regarded both in Popish and Protestant countries as but little friendly to Revelation; and so strong was the opposite opinion, and so generally were petrifactions regarded as so many proofs of a universal deluge, that Voltaire felt himself constrained, first in his Dissertation drawn up for the Academy at Bologna, and next in his article on shells in the Philosophical Dictionary, to take up the question as charged with one of the evidences of that Revelation which it was the great design of his life to subvert. And with an unfairness too characteristic of his sparkling but unsolid writings, we find him arguing, that all fossil shells were either those of fresh water lakes and rivers evaporated during dry seasons, or of land snails developed in unusual abundance during wet ones; or that they were shells which had been dropped from the hats of pilgrims on their way from the Holy Land to their homes; or that they were shells that had gone astray from cabinets and museums; or, finally, that they were not shells at all, but mere shell-like forms, produced by some occult process of nature in the bowels of the earth. In fine, in order to destroy the credibility of the Noachian deluge, the brilliant Frenchman exhausted every expedient in his attempts to neutralize that Palæontologic evidence on which geologists now found some of their most legitimate conclusions. But he only succeeded, instead, in producing compositions of which every sentence contains either an absurdity or an untruth, and in raising a reaction against the special school of infidelity which he had founded, that at length bore it down. He wrote in the middle of the Paris basin, with its multitude of fossil shells and bones; and, when penning his article for the Encyclopædia, he had, he tells us, a boxful of the shell-charged soil of the Faluns of Touraine actually before him; but the deluge had to be put down, whatever the nature or bearing of the facts; and so he could find in either no evidence of a time when the sea had covered the land. He found, instead, only "some mussels, because there were ponds in the neighborhood." As for the "spiral petrifactions termed _cornu ammonis_," of which the Jurassic Alps are full, they were not nautili, he said; they could be nothing else than reptiles; seeing that reptiles take almost always the form of a spiral when not in motion; and it was surely more likely, that when petrified they should still retain the spiral disposition, than that "the Indian Ocean should have long ago overflowed the mountains of Europe." Were there not, however, real shells of the Syrian type in France and Italy? Perhaps so. But ought "we not to recollect," he asked, "the numberless bands of pilgrims who carried their money to the Holy Land, and brought back shells? or was it preferable to think that the sea of Joppa and Sidon had covered Burgundy and Milanais?" As for the seeming shells of the less superficial deposits, "Are we sure," he inquired, "that the soil of the earth cannot produce fossils?" Agate in some specimens contains its apparent sprigs of moss, which, we know, never existed as the vegetable they resemble; and why should not the earth have, in like manner, produced its apparent shells? Or are not many of these shells mere lake or river petrifactions?--one never sees among them "true marine substances"!! "If there _were_ any, why have we never seen bones of sea dogs, sharks, and whales?"!!! And thus he ran on, in the belief apparently that he had to deal with but an ignorant priesthood, too little acquainted with the facts to make out a case against him in behalf of the Mosaic narrative, and whom at least, should argument fail him, he could vanquish with a joke. There was, however, a young German, who had not at the time quite made up his mind either for the French school or against it, who was no uninterested reader of Voltaire's disquisitions on fossil shells. And this young man was destined to be in the coming age what the Frenchman had been in the closing one,--the leading mind of Europe. He, too, had been looking at fossils; and having no case to make out either for or against Moses, or any one else, he had received in a fair and candid spirit the evidence with which they were charged. And the gross dishonesty of Voltaire in the matter formed so decided a turning point with him, that from that time forward he employed his great influence in bearing down the French school of infidelity, as a school detestably false and hollow;--a warning, surely, to all, whether they stand up for Revelation or against it, of the danger of being, like the witty Frenchman, "wicked overmuch." "To us youths," says Goethe, in his Autobiography, "with our German love of truth and nature, the factious dishonesty of Voltaire, and the perversion of so many worthy subjects, became more and more annoying, and we daily strengthened ourselves in our aversion from him. He could never have done with degrading religion and the sacred books for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as he called it; and thus produced in me many an unpleasing sensation. But when I now learned, that to weaken the tradition of a Deluge, he had denied all petrified shells, and only admitted them as _lusus naturæ_, he entirely lost my confidence; for my own eyes had on the Baschberg plainly enough shown me that I stood on the bottom of an old dried-up sea, among the _exuviæ_ of its ancient inhabitants. These mountains had certainly been once covered with waves,--whether before or during the Deluge did not concern me: it was enough that the valley of the Rhine had been a monstrous lake,--a bay extending beyond the reach of eyesight: out of this I was _not_ to be talked. I thought much more of advancing in the knowledge of lands and mountains, let what would be the result." I know not in the whole history of opinion a more instructive passage than this. Little could Voltaire have known what he was in reality doing, or how egregiously he was overreaching himself, when, in laboring to bear down the evidence borne by fossils to the ancient upheavals and cataclysms, he suffered himself to make use of assertions and arguments so palpably unfair. And those who employ, in their zeal against the geologists, what is still exceedingly common,--the Voltairean style of argument,--especially if they employ it in what they deem the behalf of religion, might do well to inquire whether they are not in some little danger of producing the Voltairean result. No man acquainted with the general outlines of Palæontology, or the true succession of the sedimentary formations, has been able to believe, during the last half century, that any proof of a general deluge can be derived from the _older_ geologic systems,--Palæozoic, Secondary, or Tertiary. It has been held, however, by accomplished geologists, within even the last thirty years, that such proof might be successfully sought for in what are known as the superficial deposits. Such was the belief of Cuvier,--a man who, even in geologic science, which was certainly not his peculiar province, exerted a mighty influence over the thinking of other men. "I agree with MM. Deluc and Dolomieu in thinking," we find him saying, in his widely famed "Theory of the Earth," "that if anything in geology be established, it is, that the surface of our globe has undergone a great and sudden revolution, the date of which cannot be referred to a much earlier period than five or six thousand years ago." But from the same celebrated work we learn that Cuvier held that this sudden catastrophe,--occasioned, as he supposed, by an elevation of the sea bottom and a submergence of the previously existing land,--had _not_ been universal; seeing he could entertain the belief that the three great races of the human family,--Ethiopian, Mongolian, and Caucasian,--had all escaped from it in several directions. In referring to the marked peculiarities of the Mongolian race, so very distinct from the Caucasian, he merely intimates, that he was "tempted to believe their ancestors and ours had escaped the great catastrophe on different sides;" but in dwelling on the still more marked peculiarities of the Negroes, we find him explicitly stating, that, "all their characters clearly show that they had escaped from the overwhelming deluge at another point than the Caucasian and Altaic races; from which they had perhaps been separated," he adds, "for a long time previous to the occurrence of that event." For a season, geologists of high standing in our own country, such as Buckland and Conybeare, followed Cuvier so far as to hold, that the superficial deposits bore evidence everywhere of a great cataclysm, the last of the geologic catastrophes; and which might be identified, they believed, with the Noachian Deluge. Against this view one of the most distinguished of Scottish naturalists, Dr. John Fleming, raised a vigorous protest as early as the year 1826, and conclusively showed that no temporary flood could have produced the existing appearances. And so thoroughly were his facts and reasonings confirmed by subsequent discovery, that the geologists of name who had acquiesced, wholly or in part, in the Cuvierian view, read in succession their recantations: Dr. Buckland in especial, who had written most largely on the subject, and committed himself most thoroughly, did so a very few years after: nor does the hypothesis of Cuvier appear to have been since adopted by any writer of scientific reputation. Instead, therefore, of contending with arguments or inferences which there are now no parties in the field to maintain, I shall briefly refer to a few of the leading characteristics of those superficial deposits on which the abandoned conclusions were originally based, and show, in the passing, that they are not such as a temporary deluge could have produced. The superficial deposits include what is known as the mammaliferous crag, the drift, the boulder and brick clays, the stratified sands and gravels, the travelled rocks, the ösars, and moraines of the _higher_ latitudes. For it is a fact very significant in its bearings on the diluvial controversy, that it is in the higher latitudes in both hemispheres that these peculiar deposits are chiefly to be found. They have been traced in Patagonia in the one hemisphere, from the southern limits of the country to the forty-first degree of south latitude; and in Europe in the other, to the fortieth; and in America to even the thirty-eighth degree of north latitude. But in the great belt, nearly eighty degrees in breadth, which, encircling the globe from east to west, includes with the torrid the warmer portions of the temperate zones, they have scarce any existence at all, or exist at least in different forms and exceedingly reduced proportions. The superficial deposits, in their most characteristic conditions, are deposits of the colder portions of the globe, and in many parts indicate that there prevailed during their formation a much severer climate than now obtains in the regions in which they occur. The shells which they contain in Britain, for instance, though almost all of existing species, are many of them such as are not now to be found in the British seas, but in seas about ten degrees further to the north; and there is evidence that the line of perpetual snow must have descended at the time to a lower level than that attained by our second-class hills, and that almost every Highland valley had its glacier. They represent, too, vast periods of time;--earlier periods, during which the land gradually sank, till only its higher eminences were uncovered, and great floats of icebergs went careering over its submerged plains and lower hills; and later periods, during which the land as gradually arose, after apparently many pauses and oscillations, until at length, when it had reached a level scarce eighty feet higher than that which it at present maintains, the climate softened, and the glaciers which had formed in the later times among its hills ultimately disappeared. Beds of sea-shells of the boreal type, that belong to those ice ages, may be still found occupying the places in which they had lived and died, many miles inland, and hundreds of feet over the sea level. Boring shells, such as the pholodadidæ, may be detected far out of sight of the ocean, still occupying the cells which they had scooped out for themselves in hard limestone or yielding shale; and serpula and nuliporate encrustations may be seen still adhering to rocks raised to giddy elevations over the sea. The group of mammals, however, which lived during this period, and to whose abundant tusks and skeletons one of its older deposits (the mammaliferous crag) owes its name, was marked by so peculiar a character, that evidence of a universal deluge has been often sought for in their remains. The group,--that which immediately preceded the animals of our own times, and included not a few of the indigenous species which still inhabit our country,--was chiefly remarkable for containing many genera, all of whose existing species are exotic. It had its great elephant, its two species of rhinoceros, its hippopotamus, its hyæna, its tiger, and its monkey; and much ingenious calculation has been employed by writers such as Granville Penn, in attempting to show how these remains might have been transported from the intertropical regions during the Flood, not only to Britain, but even to the northern wastes of Siberia,--a voyage of from four to five thousand miles. There are instances on record in which the bodies of the drowned have been drifted from ninety to a hundred and fifty miles from the spot where they had been first submerged; but they have always been found, in these cases, in a condition of sad mutilation and decay; whereas the carcass of the ancient elephant which was discovered, a little ere the commencement of the present century, locked up in ice in Siberia, three thousand six hundred miles from where elephants now live, was in such a state of excellent keeping, that the bears and dogs fed upon its flesh. It seems a significant circumstance too, that the remains of these fossil elephants, tigers, and hyænas, should be associated in even our own country with those of well known northern species,--with the remains of the reindeer, of the red deer, of the Lithuanian auroch, of the European beaver, of the European wolf, of the wild cat, the fox, and the otter. Writers, however, such as Mr. Penn, got over both difficulties. He showed, for instance, how a ship had once run across the Atlantic under bare poles, during an almost continued hurricane, at the rate of two hundred and eighty-eight miles in twenty-four hours,--nearly the rate at which the great American steamers cross the same ocean now; and why, he asked, might not the carcasses of elephants have drifted northwards at an equal rate on the tides of the deluge? And as for the mixed character of the group with which these remains are found associated, _that_ was exactly what Mr. Penn would have expected in the circumstances. It was the result of a tumultuary flood, which had brought together in our northern region the floating carcasses of the animals of all climates, to sink in unwonted companionship, when putrefaction had done its work, into the same deposits. He had, however, unluckily overlooked the fact, that comparative anatomy is in reality a science; and further, that it is a science of which men such as Cuvier and Owen know a great deal more than the men who never studied it, however respectable. It is the recorded decision of these great anatomists,--a decision which has been many times tested and confirmed,--that the northern species of elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, and hyæna, were entirely different from the intertropical species; that they differed from them very considerably more than the ass differs from the horse, or the dog from the wolf; and that, while there is a preponderating amount of evidence to show that they were natives of the countries in which their remains are now found, there is not a shadow of evidence to show that they had ever lived, or _could_ have lived, in an intertropical country. Of the northern elephant, it is positively known, from the Siberian specimen, that it was covered, like many other sub-arctic animals, with long hair, and a thick crisp undergrowth of wool, about three inches in length,--certainly not an intertropical provision; and so entirely different was it in form from either of the existing species, African or Indian, that a child could be taught in a single lesson to distinguish it by the tusks alone. In fine, the assumption that challenges the remains of the old Pleistocene carnivora and pachydermata as those of intertropical species brought northwards by a universal deluge, is about as well based and sound as if it challenged the bones of foxes occasionally found in our woods for the remains of dogs of Aleppo or Askalon brought into Britain by the Crusaders, or as if it pronounced a dead ass to be one of the cavalry horses of the fatal charge of Balaklava, transported to England from the Crimea as a relic of the fight. The hypothesis confounds as a species the Rosinante of Quixote with the Dapple of Sancho Panza, and frames its argument on the mistake. That this extinct group of animals inhabited for ages the countries in which their remains are now embedded, is rendered evident by their great numbers in some localities, and from their occurrence in various states of preservation, and in beds of various ages. The five hundred mammoths whose tusks and grinders were dragged up in thirteen years by the oyster dredgers of the Norfolk coast from a tract of submerged drift, could not all have been contemporary in a small corner of England, but must have represented several generations. And of course the two thousand grinders brought up from the exposed surface of the drift must have borne but a small proportion to the thousands still dispersed throughout the entire depth of the deposit. Any argument, however, founded on the mere numbers of these elephantine tusks and grinders, and which evaded the important question of species, might be eluded, however unfairly, by the assertors of a universal deluge. Floods certainly do at times accumulate, in great heaps, bodies of the same specific gravity; and why might not a universal flood have accumulated on this special tract of drift, the carcasses of many elephants? But it will be found greatly more difficult to elude the ingenious argument on the general question of Professor Owen. Next, perhaps, to the extinct elephant, one of the most numerous animals of this ancient group was the great Irish elk, _Megaceros Hibernicus_, a creature that, measured to the top of its enormous antlers, stood ten feet four inches in height, and exceeded in bulk and size the largest horses. Like all other species of the deer family, the creature annually shed and renewed its horns; "and a male deer may be reckoned," says Professor Owen, "to have left about eight pairs of antlers, besides its bones, to testify its former existence upon the earth. But as the female has usually no antlers, our expectations might be limited to the discovery of four times as many pairs of antlers as skeletons in the superficial deposits of the countries in which such deer have lived and died. The actual proportion of the fossil antlers of the great extinct species of British Pliocene deer (which antlers are proved by the form of their base to have been shed by the living animals) to the fossil bones of the same species, is somewhat greater than in the above calculation. Although, therefore, it may be contended that the swollen carcass of a drowned exotic deer might be borne along a diluvial wave to a considerable distance, and its bones ultimately deposited far from its native soil, _it is not credible that all the solid shed antlers of such species of deer could be carried by the same cause to the same distance_; or that any of them could be rolled for a short distance, with other heavy debris of a mighty torrent, without fracture and signs of friction. But the shed antlers of the large extinct species of deer found in this island and in Ireland have commonly their parts or branches entire as when they fell; and the fractured specimens are generally found in caves, and _show marks of the teeth of the ossivorous hyænas_ by which they had been gnawed; thus at the same time revealing the mode in which they were introduced into those caves, and _proving the contemporaneous existence in this island of both kinds of mammalia_." [Illustration: Fig. 111. MEGACEROS HIBERNICUS. (_Irish Elk._)] But the contents of the bone caves, consisting in large part of the extinct mammals, ought of themselves to be decisive in this question. As the opening of the Kirkdale cavern is only about four feet each way, a diluvial wave, charged with the wreck of the lower latitudes, could scarce have washed into such an orifice any considerable number of the intertropical animals. And yet there has been found in this cave,--with the teeth of a very young mammoth, of a very great tiger, of a tiger-like animal whose genus is extinct, of a rhinoceros, and of a hippopotamus,--the fragmentary remains of from two to three hundred hyænas. Further, even supposing, what is impossible, that a diluvial wave had swept them all from the tropics into the four-feet hole, on what principle is it to be explained that the bones thus washed into the cave should be all gnawed bones, even those of the hyænas themselves, whereas the bones of the same creatures found in the mammaliferous deposits of the country bear no marks of teeth? Mr. Granville Penn, however, gets over the difficulty of the cave, which is hollowed, I may mention, in a limestone of the Oolitic series, inclosing the ammonite and belemnite, by asserting that its mammaliferous contents may be _somewhat older than itself_! The limestone existed, he holds, as but a mere unformed pulp at the time the intertropical animals came floating northwards: they sank into it; the gasses evolved during putrefaction blew up the plastic lime above them into a great oblong bubble, somewhat as a glass-blower blows up a bottle; and hence the Kirkdale cavern, with its gnawed bones and its amazing number of teeth. And certainly a _geologic_ argument of this ingenious character has one signal advantage,--it is in no danger whatever of being answered by the geologists. Mr. Penn, in a second edition of his work, expressed some surprise that an Edinburgh Reviewer should have merely stated his _argument_ without replying to it!! But I need not dwell on the arguments for a universal deluge which have been derived from the superficial deposits. They all belong to an immature age of geologic science, and are of no value whatever. Let us pass rather to the consideration of the facts and arguments which militate against the universality of the catastrophe. The form and dimensions of Noah's ark are definitely given in the sacred record. It seems to have been a great oblong box, somewhat like a wooden granary, three stories high, and furnished with a roof apparently of the ordinary angular shape, but with a somewhat broader ridge than common; and it measured three hundred cubits in length, fifty cubits in breadth, and thirty cubits in height. A good deal of controversy has, however, arisen regarding the cubit employed; some holding, with Sir Walter Raleigh, and most of the older theologians, such as Shuckford and Hales, that the Noachian cubit was what is known as the common or natural cubit, "containing," says Sir Walter, "one foot and a half, or a length equal to that of the human fore-arm measured from the sharp of the elbow to the point of the middle finger;" others contending that it was the palm-cubit, "which taketh," adds my authority, "one handful more than the common;" yet others, the royal or Persian cubit of twenty-one inches; and so on; for there are, it seems, five several kinds of cubit to choose from, all differing each from the others. The controversy is one in which there is exceeding little footing for any party. I am inclined, however, to adopt, with Raleigh and Hales, the _natural_ cubit, for the following reason. The given dimensions of the ark form the oldest example of measurement of which we have any record; and all, or almost all, the older and simpler standards of measure bear reference to portions of the human frame. There is the span, the palm, the hand-breadth, the thumb-breadth (or inch), the hair-breadth, and the _foot_. The simple fisherman on our coasts still measures off his fathoms by stretching out both his arms to the full; the village sempstress still tells off her cloth-breadths by finger-lengths and _nails_; the untaught tiller of the soil still estimates the area of his little field by _pacing_ along its sides. Man's first and most obvious expedient, when he sets himself to measure, is to employ his own person as his standard; and the first or common cubit was a measure of this natural description equal in length to the extended fore-arm and hand. All the other cubits were artificial compounds of after introduction; and so, in the absence of direct evidence on the point, I accept the most natural and oldest cubit as in all probability the one employed in the oldest recorded piece of cubit measurement. And the ark, if measured by the common or natural cubit, must have been a vessel four hundred and fifty feet in length, seventy-five feet in breadth, and forty-five feet in height. Dr. Kitto, however, though we find him remarking that in computations of Scripture measures the cubit may be regarded as half a yard (Sir Walter's estimate), adopts, in his own computation of the size of the ark, without assigning any reason why, the palm-cubit, or cubit of twenty-one inches and nearly nine lines (21.888 inches); and, waving all controversy on the question, let us, for the argument's sake, admit the larger measure. Let us,--however much inclined to hold with Raleigh, Shuckford, and Hales,--agree with Dr. Kitto that the ark was five hundred and forty-seven feet in length, by ninety-one feet in breadth. Such dimensions, multiplied by three, the number of stories in the vessel, would give an area equal to about one seventh that of the great Crystal Palace of 1851. Or, to take a more definite illustration from the same vast building, the area of the three floors of the ark, taken together, would fall short by about twenty-eight thousand square feet of that of the northern gallery of the Palace, which measured one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight feet in length, by ninety-six feet in breadth. And thus, yielding to our opponents their own large measurements, let us now see whether the non-universality of the deluge cannot be fairly predicated from the dimensions of the ark. I may first remark, however, that measures so definite as those given by Moses (definite, of course, if we waive the doubt regarding the cubit employed) were effectual in setting the arithmeticians to work in all ages of the Church, in order to determine whether all the animals in the world, by sevens and by pairs, with food sufficient to serve them for a twelvemonth, could have been accommodated in the given space. It was a sort of stock problem, that required, it was thought, no very high attainments to solve. Eighty years have not yet passed since kind old Samuel Johnson, in writing to little Miss Thrale a nice little letter, recommending her to be a good girl, and to mind her arithmetic, advised her to try the ark problem. "If you can borrow 'Wilkins' Real Character,'" we find him saying to the young lady, "a folio which perhaps the booksellers can let you have, you will have a very curious calculation, _which you are qualified to consider_, to show that Noah's ark was capable of holding all the known animals of the world, with provision for all the time in which the earth was under water." Unluckily, however, though the dimensions of the ark were known, the animals of the world were not; and so the question, in at least one of its terms, had to be very frequently restated. Let us take it as we find it presented (drawn, however, from a much older source), in Sir Walter Raleigh's magnificent "History of the World." "If in a ship of such greatness," says this distinguished man, "we seek room for eighty-nine distinct species of beasts, or, lest any should be omitted, for a hundred several kinds, we shall easily find place both for them and for the birds, which in bigness are no way answerable to them, and for meat to sustain them all. For there are three sorts of beasts whose bodies are of a quantity well known; the beef, the sheep, and the wolf; to which the rest may be reduced by saying, according to Aristotle, that one elephant is equal to four beeves, one lion to two wolves, and so of the rest. Of beasts, some feed on vegetables, others on flesh. There are one-and-thirty kinds of the greater sort feeding on vegetables, of which number only three are clean, according to the law of Moses, whereof seven of a kind entered into the ark, namely, three couples for breed, and one odd one for sacrifice; the other eight-and-twenty kinds were 'taken by two of each kind; so that in all there were in the ark one-and-twenty great beasts clean, and six-and-fifty unclean; estimable for largeness as ninety-one beeves; yet, for a supplement (lest, perhaps, any species be omitted), lot them be valued as a hundred and twenty beeves. Of the lesser sort feeding on vegetables were in the ark six-and-twenty kinds, estimable, with good allowance for supply, as fourscore sheep. Of those which devour flesh were two-and-thirty kinds, answerable to threescore and four wolves. All these two hundred and eighty beasts might be kept in one story or room of the ark, in their several cabins; their meat in a second; the birds and their provision in a third, with space to spare for Noah and his family, and all their necessaries." Such was the calculation of the great voyager Raleigh,--a man who had a more practical acquaintance with _stowage_ than perhaps any of the other writers who have speculated on the capabilities of the ark; and his estimate seems sober and judicious. It will be seen, however, that from the vast increase in our knowledge of the mammals which has taken place since the age in which the "History of the World" was written, the calculation which embraced all the eighty-nine known animals of that time would embrace those of but a single centre of creation now; and that the estimate of Sir Walter tells, in consequence, on the side, not of a universal, but of a partial deluge. As man extended his acquaintance with the mammals, he found their number greatly increasing on his hands. Button, like Raleigh, though a professed naturalist, and a writer of admirable genius, had no very distinct notions of species. He was inclined to question whether even the ass might not be merely a degraded horse; and confounded many of the mammals of the New World with their representative congeners in the Old. And yet, in summing up his history of the mammaliferous division, he could state, that though it included descriptions of "a hundred and thirty-four different species of creatures that suckled their young, many of which had not been observed or described before," it was necessarily incomplete, as there were still others to add to the list, for whose history there existed no materials. At the same time he remarked, however, that the "number of quadruped animals whose existence is certain and well established does not amount to more than two hundred on the surface of the known world." Yet here was the extreme estimate made by Raleigh, with what he deemed large allowance for the unknown animals, fairly doubled; and under the hands of more discriminating naturalists, and in the inevitable course of discovery, the number has so enormously increased, that the "eighty-nine distinct species" known to the great voyager have been represented during the last thirty years by the one thousand mammals of Swainson's estimate, the one thousand one hundred and forty-nine mammals of Charles Bonaparte's estimate, the one thousand two hundred and thirty mammals of Winding's estimate, and the one thousand five hundred mammals of Oken's estimate. In the first edition of the admirable "Physical Atlas" of Johnston (published in 1848) there are one thousand six hundred and twenty-six different species of mammals enumerated; and in the second edition (published in 1856), one thousand six hundred and fifty-eight species. And to this very extraordinary advance on the eighty-nine mammals of Raleigh, and the two hundred mammals of Buffon, we must add the six thousand two hundred and sixty-six birds of Lesson, and the six hundred and fifty-seven reptiles of Charles Bonaparte; or at least,--subtracting the sea snakes, and perhaps the turtles, as fitted to live outside the ark,--his six hundred and _forty-two_ reptiles.[29] Such is the number of the known vertebrates, exclusive of the fishes, with which in this question we have now to deal. Still, however, there are a few lingering theologians, some of them very intelligent men, who continue to regard the ark as quite big enough for them all. Dr. Hamilton of Mobile, for instance, after fairly stating Swainson's estimate, namely, one thousand mammalia, six thousand birds, and one thousand five hundred reptiles and amphibiæ, goes on to say, that "it must not be forgotten, that of all these, the vastly greater proportion are small; and that numbers of them could be placed together in the same compartment of the ark." This, however, permit me to say with all respect, is not meeting the real difficulty. No doubt many of the birds are small,--many of the reptiles are small,--many even of the mammals are small,--many small animals were known in the days of Raleigh, and a much greater number of small animals are known now; but the question proper to the case seems to be, What proportions do both the large and the small animals now known bear to the large and small animals known in the days of Raleigh or Buffon; and how much additional accommodation-room would they require during their supposed voyage of a twelvemonth? There are two different ways in which the list of the known animals has been increased, especially of the known mammals. They have been increased in a certain appreciable proportion by _discovery_; and as discovery has been made chiefly in islands,--for the great continents had been previously known,--and as the mammals of islands, as has been well remarked by Cuvier, are usually small, of this appreciable proportion the bulk is comparatively not great. The great kangaroo (_Macropus giganteus_), though the inhabitant of an island which ranks among the continents, would not much exceed in bulk, tried by Raleigh's quaint scale of measurement, a sheep and a half, or at most two sheep; and yet I know not that discovery in the islands has added a larger animal to the previously known ones than the great kangaroo. Mr. Waterhouse, when he published, in 1841, his "History of the Marsupialia," reckoned up one hundred and five distinct species of pouched animals; and eighteen species more,--in all one hundred and twenty-three,--have been since added to the order. With the exception of an opossum or two, all these marsupiata may be regarded as discoveries made since the time of Buffon; most of them, as I have said, are small. And such, generally, has been the nature of the revelations made during the last seventy years by positive _discovery_. It is not, however, by discovery, but by scientific scrutiny into the true nature and distinctions of species, that the recent enormous increase in the number of the known mammals has mainly taken place. And in these cases it will generally be found that the new species, which had been previously confounded with some old ones, so nearly resemble the latter in bulk, as well as aspect, as to justify in some degree the mistake. Let us take two of the greatest animals as examples,--the elephant and the rhinoceros. Buffon confounded the African with the Asiatic elephant. We now know that they represent two well marked species, _Elephas Africanus_ and _Elephas Indicus_; and that an ark which contained the ancestors of all the existing animals would require to have its _two_ pair of elephants, not the one pair only which would have been deemed sufficient eighty years ago. Again, with respect to the rhinoceros, Buffon was acquainted with the single horned animal, and had _heard_ of the animal with two horns; and so, though by no means certain that the "_variety_ was constant," he yet held that "two distinct species might possibly be established." But we now know that there are six species of rhinoceros (seven, according to the "Physical Atlas,")--_Rh. Indicus_, _Rh. Javanus_, _Rh. Sumatrensis_, _Rh. Africanus_, _Rh. simus_, and _Rh. ketloa_; and that, instead of _possibly_ four, at least twelve, or more probably fourteen, animals of the genus would require, on the hypothesis of a universal deluge, to have been accommodated in the ark. Buffon even held that the bison of America might be identical with not simply the auroch of Europe, which it closely resembles, but with even the European ox, which it does _not_ resemble. But it is now known, that while the European aurochs are provided by nature with but fourteen pairs of ribs, the American bison is furnished with fifteen. Of each of the ruminants that divide the hoof, there were _seven_ introduced into the ark; and it may be well to mark how, even during the last few years, our acquaintance with this order of animals has been growing, and how greatly the known species, in their relation to human knowledge, have in consequence increased. In 1848 (in the first edition of the "Physical Atlas") Mr. Waterhouse estimated the oxen at thirteen species; in 1856 (in the second edition) he estimates them at twenty. In 1848 he estimated the sheep at twenty-one species; in 1856 he estimates them at twenty-seven. In 1848 he estimated the goats at fourteen species; in 1856 he estimates them at twenty. In 1846 he estimated the deer at thirty-eight species; in 1856 he estimates them at fifty-one. In short, if, excluding the lamas and the musks as doubtfully _clean_, tried by the Mosaic test, we but add to the sheep, goats, deer, and cattle, the forty-eight species of unequivocally _clean_ antelopes, and multiply the whole by seven, we shall have as the result a sum total of one thousand one hundred and sixty-two individuals,--a number more than four times greater than that for which Raleigh made provision in the ark, and considerably more than twice greater than that provided for by the students of Buffon. Such is the nature and amount of the increase which has taken place during the last half century in the mammaliferous fauna. In so great a majority of cases has it increased its _bulk_ in the ratio in which it has increased its numbers, that if one ark was not deemed more than sufficient to accommodate the animal world known to the French naturalist of eighty years ago, it would require at least from five to six arks to accommodate the animal world known in the present day. Even in the days of Buffon, however, and at a still earlier period, the ark, regarded as a natural means of preservation from death by _drowning_, was usually coupled, in the case of at least the carnivorous animals, with certain miraculous provisions against death by _starving_. It seems to have been generally taken for granted, that the flesh-eating animals, when introduced to the shelter of the ark, entirely changed the nature indicated by their form of teeth, the character of their stomachs, and the shortness of their bowels, and fed, for the time they remained in it, exclusively on vegetable substances, which, in ordinary circumstances, their lacteals could not have converted into chyle. Certain figurative expressions in Scripture taken literally, which refer to a class of wild animals whose real destiny is rather, it would seem, to be extirpated than to be changed, coupled with the belief, now no longer tenable, that there was a time, ere man had sinned, when there was no death among the inferior creatures, and of course no eaters of flesh, rendered the belief easy of reception; but it involved a miracle nowhere recorded; and the burden of the proof that such a miracle actually took place in the circumstances lies of necessity on the assertors of a universal deluge. Further, of even the creatures that live on vegetables, many are restricted in their food to single plants, which are themselves restricted to limited localities and remote regions of the globe. Dr. Hamilton has not referred, in his list of animals, to the insects,--a class which, though they were estimated in 1842 to consist of no fewer than five hundred and fifty thousand species, might yet be accommodated in a comparatively limited space. But how extraordinary an amount of miracle would it not require to bring them all together into any one centre, or to preserve them there! Many of them, like the myriapoda and the thysanura, have no wings, and but feeble locomotive powers; many of them, such as the ephemera and the male ants, live after they have got their wings only a few hours, or at most a few days; and there are myriads of them that can live upon but single plants that grow in very limited botanic centres. Even supposing them all brought into the ark by miracle as eggs, what multitudes of them would not, without the exertion of further miracle, require to be sent back to their proper habitats as wingless grubs, or as insects restricted by nature to a few days of life! Or, supposing the eggs all left in their several localities to lie under water for a twelvemonth amid mud and debris,--though certain of the hardier kinds might survive such treatment, by miracle alone could the preponderating majority of the class be preserved. And be it remembered, that the expedient of having recourse to supposititious miracle in order to get over a difficulty insurmountable on every natural principle, is not of the nature of argument, but simply an evidence of the want of it. Argument is at an end when supposititious miracle is introduced. But the very inadequate size of the ark, though a conclusive proof that all, or nearly all, the progenitors of our existing animals could not have harbored within it from any general cataclysm, does not furnish a stronger argument against the possibility of any such assemblage, than the peculiar manner in which we now find these animals distributed over the earth's surface. Linnæus held, early in the last century, that all creatures which now inhabit the globe had proceeded originally from some such common centre as the ark might have furnished; but no zoologist acquainted with the distribution of species can acquiesce in any such conclusion now. We now know that every great continent has its own peculiar fauna; that the original centres of distribution must have been, not one, but many; further, that the areas or circles around these centres must have been occupied by their pristine animals in ages long anterior to that of the Noachian Deluge; nay, that in even the latter geologic ages, they were preceded in them by animals of the same general type. There are fourteen such areas or provinces enumerated by the later naturalists. It may be well, however, instead of running any risk of losing ourselves amid the less nicely defined provinces of the Old World, to draw our illustrations from two and a half provinces of later discovery, whose limits have been rigidly fixed by nature. "The great continents," says Cuvier, "contain species peculiar to each; insomuch that whenever large countries of this description have been discovered, which their situation had kept isolated from the rest of the world, the class of quadrupeds which they contained has been found extremely different from any that had existed elsewhere. Thus, when the Spaniards first penetrated into South America, they did not find a single species of quadruped the same as any of Europe, Asia, or Africa. The puma, the jaguar, the tapir, the cabiai, the lama, the vicuna, the sloths, the armadilloes, the opossums, and the whole tribe of sapajous, were to them entirely new animals, of which they had no idea. Similar circumstances have recurred in our own time, when the coasts of New Holland and the adjacent islands were first explored. The various species of kangaroo, phascolomys, dasyurus, and perameles, the flying phalangers, the ornithorynchi, and echidnæ, have astonished naturalists by the strangeness of their conformations, which presented proportions contrary to all former rules, and were incapable of being arranged under any of the systems then in use." New Zealand, though singularly devoid of indigenous mammals and reptiles,--for the only native mammal seems to be a peculiar species of rat, and the only native reptile a small, harmless lizard,--has a scarce less remarkable fauna than either of these great continents. It consists almost exclusively of birds, some of them so ill provided with wings, that, like the _wika_ of the natives, they can only run along the ground. And it is a most significant fact, that both in the two great continents and the New Zealand islands there existed, in the later geologic ages, extinct faunas that bore the peculiar generic characters by which their recent ones are still distinguished. The sloths and armadilloes of South America had their gigantic predecessors in the enormous megatherium and mylodon, and the strongly armed glyptodon; the kangaroos and wombats of Australia had their extinct predecessors in a kangaroo nearly twice the size of the largest living species, and in so huge a wombat, that its bones have been mistaken for those of the hippopotamus; and the ornithic inhabitants of New Zealand had their predecessors in the monstrous birds, such as the dinornis, the aptornis, and the palapteryx,--wingless creatures like the ostrich, that stood from six to twelve feet in height. In these several regions two _generations_ of species of the genera peculiar to them have existed,--the recent generation by whose descendants they are still inhabited, and the extinct gigantic generation, whose remains we find locked up in their soils and caves. But how are such facts reconcileable with the hypothesis of a universal deluge? [Illustration: Fig. 112. MYLODON ROBUSTUS.] [Illustration: Fig. 113. GLYPTODON CLAVIPES.] The deluge was an event of the existing creation. Had it been universal, it would either have broken up all the diverse centres, and substituted one great general centre instead,--that in which the ark rested; or else, at an enormous expense of miracle, all the animals preserved by _natural_ means by Noah would have had to be returned by _supernatural_ means to the regions whence by means _equally supernatural_ they had been brought. The sloths and armadilloes,--little fitted by nature for long journeys,--would have required to be ferried across the Atlantic to the regions in which the remains of the megatherium and glyptodon lie entombed; the kangaroo and wombat, to the insulated continent that contains the bones of the extinct macropus and phalcolomys; and the New Zealand birds, including its heavy flying quails and its wingless wood-hen, to those remote islands of the Pacific in which the skeletons of _Palapteryx ingens_ and _Dinornus giganteus_ lie entombed. Nor will it avail aught to urge, with certain assertors of a universal deluge, that during the cataclysm, sea and land changed their places, and that what is now land had formed the bottom of the antediluvian ocean, and, _vice versa_, what is now sea had been the land on which the first human inhabitants of the earth increased and multiplied. No geologist who knows how very various the ages of the several table-lands and mountain chains in reality are could acquiesce in such an hypothesis; our own Scottish shores,--if to the term of the existing we add that of the ancient coast line,--must have formed the limits of the land from a time vastly more remote than the age of the deluge. But even supposing, for the argument's sake, the hypothesis recognized as admissible, what, in the circumstances of the case, would be gained by the admission? A continuous tract of land would have stretched,--when all the oceans were continents and all the continents oceans,--between the South American and the Asiatic coasts. And it is just possible that, during the hundred and twenty years in which the ark was in building, a pair of sloths might have crept by inches across this continuous tract, from where the skeletons of the great megatheria are buried, to where the great vessel stood. But after the Flood had subsided, and the change in sea and land had taken place, there would remain for them no longer a roadway; and so, though their journey outwards might, in all save the impulse which led to it, have been altogether a natural one, their voyage homewards could not be other than miraculous. Nor would the exertion of miracle have had to be restricted to the transport of the _remoter_ travellers. How, we may well ask, had the Flood been universal, could even such islands as Great Britain and Ireland have ever been replenished with many of their original inhabitants? Even supposing it possible that animals, such as the red deer and the native ox _might_ have swam across the Straits of Dover or the Irish Channel, to graze anew over deposits in which the bones and horns of their remote ancestors had been entombed long ages before, the feat would have been surely far beyond the power of such feeble natives of the soil as the mole, the hedgehog, the shrew, the dormouse, and the field-vole. Dr. Pye Smith, in dealing with this subject, has emphatically said, that "all land animals having their geographical regions, to which their constitutional natures are congenial,--many of them being unable to live in any other situation,--we cannot represent to ourselves the idea of their being brought into one small spot from the polar regions, the torrid zone, and all the other climates of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, Australia, and the thousands of islands,--their preservation and provision, and the final disposal of them,--without bringing up the idea of miracles more stupendous than any that are recorded in Scripture. The great decisive miracle of Christianity," he adds,--"the resurrection of the Lord Jesus,--sinks down before it." And let us remember that the preservation and redistribution of the land animals would demand but a portion of the amount of miracle absolutely necessary for the preservation, in the circumstances, of the entire fauna of the globe. The fresh water fishes, molluscs, crustacea, and zoophytes, could be kept alive in a universal deluge only by miraculous means. It has been urged that, though the living individuals were to perish, their spawn might be preserved by natural means. It must be remembered, however, that even of some fishes whose proper habitat is the sea, such as the salmon, it is essential for the maintenance of the species that the spawn should be deposited in fresh water, nay, in running fresh water; for in still water, however pure, the eggs in a few weeks addle and die. The eggs of the common trout also require to be deposited in running fresh water; while other fresh water fishes, such as the tench and carp, are reared most successfully in still, reedy ponds. The fresh water fishes spawn, too, at very different seasons, and the young remain for very different periods in the egg. The perch and grayling spawn in the end of April or the beginning of May; the tench and roach about the middle of June; the common trout and powan in October and November. And while some fishes, such as the salmon, remain from ninety to a hundred days in the egg, others, such as the trout, are extruded in five weeks. Without special miracle the spawn of all the fresh water fishes could not be in existence _as such_ at one and the same time; without special miracle it could not maintain its vitality in a universal deluge; and without special miracle, even did it maintain its vitality, it could not remain in the egg state throughout an entire twelvemonth, but would be developed into fishes of the several species to which it belonged at very different periods. Further, in a universal deluge, without special miracle vast numbers of even the salt water animals could not fail to be extirpated; in particular, almost all the molluscs of the littoral and laminarian zones. Nor would the vegetable kingdom fare greatly better than the animal one. Of the one hundred thousand species of known plants, few indeed would survive submersion for a twelvemonth; nor would the seeds of most of the others fare better than the plants themselves. There are certain hardy seeds that in favorable circumstances maintain their vitality for ages; and there are others, strongly encased in water-tight shells or skins, that have floated across oceans to germinate in distant islands; but such, as every florist knows, is not the general character of seeds; and not until after many unsuccessful attempts, and many expedients had been resorted to, have the more delicate kinds been brought uninjured, even on shipboard, from distant countries to our own. It is not too much to hold that, without special miracle, at least three fourths of the terrestrial vegetation of the globe would have perished in a universal deluge that covered over the dry land for a year. Assuredly the various vegetable centres or regions,--estimated by Schouw at twenty-five,--bear witness to no such catastrophe. Still distinct and unbroken, as of old, either no effacing flood has passed over them, or they were shielded from its effects at an expense of miracle many times more considerable than that at which the Jews were brought out of Egypt and preserved amid the nations, or Christianity itself was ultimately established.[30] There is, however, a class of learned and thoroughly respectable theologians who seem disposed to accept rather of any amount of unrecorded miracle, than to admit of a merely partial deluge, coextensive with but the human family. "Were the difficulty attending this subject tenfold greater, and seemingly beyond all satisfactory explanation," says Dr. William Hamilton, "if I yet find it recorded in the Book of Revelation, that in the deluge '_every living thing in which is the breath of life perished, and Noah only remained alive, and they which were with him in the ark_,' I could still believe it implicitly, satisfied that the difficulty of explanation springs solely from the imperfection of human knowledge, and not from any limitation in the power or the wisdom of God, nor yet from any lack of trustworthiness in the document given us in a revelation from God,--a document given to men by the hands of Moses, the learned, accomplished, and eminently devout Jewish legislator." Here again, however, Dr. Hamilton seems to have mistaken the question actually at issue. The true question is, not whether or no Moses is to be believed in the matter, but whether or no we in reality understand Moses. The question is, whether we are to regard the passages in which he describes the Flood as universal, as belonging to the very numerous metonymic texts of Scripture in which a part--sometimes a not very large part--is described as the whole, or to regard them as strictly and severely literal. Or, in other words, whether we are, with learned and solid divines of the olden time, such as Poole and Stillingfleet, and with many ingenious and accomplished divines of the passing age, such as the late Dr. Pye Smith and the Rev. Professor Hitchcock, to regard these passages as merely metonymic; or, with Drs. Hamilton and Kitto, to regard them as strictly literal, and to call up in support of the literal reading an amount of supposititious miracle, compared with which all the recorded miracles of the Old and New Testaments sink into insignificance. The controversy does not lie between Moses and the naturalists, but between the _readings_ of theologians such as Matthew Poole and Stillingfleet on the one hand, and the _readings_ of theologians such as Drs. Hamilton and Kitto on the other. And finding all natural science arrayed against the conclusions of the one class, and in favor of those of the other, and believing, further, that there has been always such a marked economy shown in the exercise of miraculous powers, that there has never been more of miracle employed in any one of the dispensations than was needed,[31] I must hold that the theologians who believe that the deluge was but coextensive with the moral purpose which it served are more in the right, and may be more safely followed, than the theologians who hold that it extended greatly further than was necessary. It is not with Moses or the truth of revelation that our controversy lies, but with the opponents of Stillingfleet and of Poole. To only one of the other arguments employed in this controversy need I at all refer. The cones of volcanic craters are formed of loose incoherent scoriæ and ashes, and, when exposed, as in the case of submarine volcanoes, such as Graham's Island and the islands of Nyoe and Sabrina, to the denuding force of waves and currents, they have in a few weeks, or at most a few months, been washed completely away. And yet in various parts of the world, such as Auvergne in central France, and along the flanks of Ætna, there are cones of long extinct or long slumbering volcanoes, which, though of at least triple the antiquity of the Noachian deluge, and though composed of the ordinary incoherent materials, exhibit no marks of denudation. According to the calculations of Sir Charles Lyell, no devastating flood could have passed over the forest zone of Ætna during the last twelve thousand years,--for such is the antiquity which he assigns to its older lateral cones, that retain in integrity their original shape; and the volcanic cones of Auvergne, which inclose in their ashes the remains of extinct animals, and present an outline as perfect as those of Ætna, are deemed older still. Graham Island arose out of the sea early in July, 1831; in the beginning of the following August it had attained to a circumference of three miles, and to a height of two hundred feet; and yet in less than three months from that time the waves had washed its immense mass down to the sea level; and in a few weeks more it existed but as a dangerous shoal. And such inevitably would have been the fate of the equally incoherent cone-like craters of Ætna and Auvergne during the seven and a half months that intervened between the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep and the reappearance of the mountain-tops, had they been included within the area of the deluge. It is estimated that even the newer Auvergne lavas are as old as the times of the Miocene. It is at least a demonstrable fact, that the slow action of streams had hollowed them in several places into deep chasms nearly two thousand years ago; for the remains of Roman works of about that age survive, to show that they had then, as now, to be spanned over by bridges, and that baths had been erected in their denuded recesses; and yet the craters out of which these lavas had flowed retain well nigh all their original sharpness of outline. No wave ever dashed against their symmetrically sloping sides. Now, I have in no instance seen the argument derivable from this class of facts fairly met. The supposed mistake of the Canonico Recupero, or rather of Brydone, who argued that the "lowest of a series of seven distinct lavas of Ætna, most of them covered by thick intervening beds of rich earth, must have been fourteen thousand years old," has been often referred to in the controversy. Brydone or the Canon mistook, it has been said, beds of brown ashes, each of which might have been deposited during a single shower, for beds of rich earth, each of which would have taken centuries to form. The oldest of the series of lava beds, therefore, instead of being fourteen thousand, might be scarce fourteen hundred years old. And if Brydone or the Canon were thus mistaken in their calculations, why may not the modern geologists be also mistaken in theirs? Now, altogether waiving the question as to whether the ingenious traveller of eighty-six years ago was or was not mistaken in his estimate,--for to those acquainted with geologic fact in general, or more particularly with the elaborate descriptions of Ætna given during the last thirty years by Elie de Beaumont, Hoffmann, and Sir Charles Lyell, the facts of Brydone, in their bearing on either the age of the earth or the age of the mountain, can well be spared,--waiving, I say, the question whether the traveller was in reality in mistake, I must be permitted to remark, that the concurrent testimony of geologists cannot in fairness be placed on the same level as the testimony of a man who, though accomplished and intelligent, was not only no geologist, but who observed and described ere geology had any existence as a science. Further, I must be allowed to add, that geology _is_ now a science; and that individuals unacquainted with it in its character as such place themselves in positions greatly more perilous than they seem to think, when they enter on the field of argument with men who for many years have made it a subject of special study. It is not by "bidding down" the age of the extinct or quiescent volcanoes by a species of blind haggling, or by presuming mistake in the calculations regarding them, simply because mistakes are possible and have sometimes been made, that that portion of the cumulative evidence against a universal deluge which they furnish is to be neutralized or set aside. The argument on the general question _is_ a cumulative one; and while many of its component portions are of themselves so conclusive, that only supposititious miracle, and not presentable argument, can be arrayed against them, its aggregate force seems wholly irresistible. In passing, however, from the facts and reasonings that bear against the hypothesis of a universal deluge, to indicate in a few sentences both the possible mode in which a merely partial flood might have taken place, and the probable extent of area which it covered, I shall have to remove from very strong to comparatively weak ground,--from what can be maintained as argument, to what can at best be but offered as conjecture. There is a remarkable portion of the globe, chiefly in the Asiatic continent, though it extends into Europe, and which is nearly equal to all Europe in area, whose rivers (some of them, such as the Volga, the Oural, the Sihon, the Kour, and the Amoo, of great size) do not fall into the ocean, or into any of the many seas which communicate with it. They are, on the contrary, all _turned inwards_, if I may so express myself; losing themselves, in the eastern parts of the tract, in the lakes of a rainless district, in which they supply but the waste of evaporation, and falling, in the western parts, into seas such as the Caspian and the Aral. In this region there are extensive districts still under the level of the ocean. The shore line of the Caspian, for instance, is rather more than eighty-three feet beneath that of the Black Sea; and some of the great flat steppes which spread out around it, such as what is known as the Steppe of Astracan, have a mean level of about thirty feet beneath that of the Baltic. Were there a trench-like strip of country that communicated between the Caspian and the Gulf of Finland to be depressed beneath the level of the latter sea, it would _so open up the fountains of the great deep_ as to lay under water an extensive and populous region, containing the cities of Astracan and Astrabad, and many other towns and villages. Nor is it unworthy of remark, surely, that one of the depressed steppes of this peculiar region is known as the "Low Steppe of the Caucasus," and forms no inconsiderable portion of the great recognized centre of the human family. The Mount Ararat on which, according to many of our commentators, the ark rested, rises immediately on the western edge of this great hollow; the Mount Ararat selected as the scene of that event by Sir Walter Raleigh, certainly not without some show of reason, lies far within it. Vast plains, white with salt, and charged with sea shells, show that the Caspian Sea was at no distant period greatly more extensive than it is now. In an outer region, which includes the vast desert of Khiva, shells also abound; but they seem to belong, as a group, rather to some of the later Tertiary eras than to the recent period. It is quite possible, however, that,--as on parts of the western shores of our own country, where recent marine deposits lie over marine deposits of the Pleistocene age, while a terrestrial deposit, representative of an intervening paroxysm of upheaval, lies between,--it is possible, I say, that in this great depressed area, the region covered of old by a Tertiary sea, which we know united the Sea of Aral with the Caspian, and rolled over many a wide steppe and vast plain, may have been again covered for a brief period (after ages of upheaval) by the breaking in of the great deep during that season of judgment when, with the exception of one family, the whole human race was destroyed. It seems confirmatory of this view, that during even the historic period, at least one of the neighboring inland seas, though it belongs to a different system from that of the Caspian and the Aral, covered a vastly greater area than it does now,--a consequence, apparently, of a more considerable depression in the Caucasian region than at present exists. Herodotus, as quoted by Cuvier in his "Theory of the Earth," represents the Sea of Azoff as equal in extent to the Euxine. With the known facts, then, regarding this depressed Asiatic region before us, let us see whether we cannot originate a theory of the Deluge free from at least the palpable monstrosities of the older ones. Let us suppose that the human family, still amounting to several millions, though greatly reduced by exterminating wars and exhausting vices, were congregated in that tract of country which, extending eastwards from the modern Ararat to far beyond the Sea of Aral, includes the original Caucasian centre of the race: let us suppose that, the hour of judgment having at length arrived, the land began gradually to sink, as the tract in the run of Cutch sank in the year 1819, or as the tract in the southern part of North America, known as the "sunk country," sank in the year 1821: further, let us suppose that the depression took place slowly and equably for forty days together, at the rate of about four hundred feet per day,--a rate not twice greater than that at which the tide rises in the Straits of Magellan, and which would have rendered itself apparent as but a persistent inward flowing of the sea: let us yet further suppose, that from mayhap some volcanic outburst coincident with the depression, and an effect of the same deep seated cause, the atmosphere was so affected, that heavy drenching rains continued to descend during the whole time, and that, though they could contribute but little to the actual volume of the flood,--at most only some five or six inches per day,--they at least _seemed_ to constitute one of its main causes, and added greatly to its terrors, by swelling the rivers, and rushing downwards in torrents from the hills. The depression, which, by extending to the Euxine Sea and the Persian Gulf on the one hand, and to the Gulf of Finland on the other, would open up by three separate channels the fountains of the great deep, and which included, let us suppose, an area of about two thousand miles each way, would, at the end of the fortieth day, be sunk in its centre to the depth of sixteen thousand feet,--a depth sufficiently profound to bury the loftiest mountains of the district; and yet, having a gradient of declination of but sixteen feet per mile, the contour of its hills and plains would remain apparently what they had been before,--the doomed inhabitants would see but the water rising along the mountain sides, and one refuge after another swept away, till the last witness of the scene would have perished, and the last hill-top would have disappeared. And when, after a hundred and fifty days had come and gone, the depressed hollow would have begun slowly to rise,--and when, after the fifth month had passed, the ark would have grounded on the summit of Mount Ararat,--all that could have been seen from the upper window of the vessel would be simply a boundless sea, roughened by tides, now flowing outwards, with a reversed course, towards the distant ocean, by the three great outlets which, during the period of depression, had given access to the waters. Noah would of course see that "the fountains of the deep were stopped," and "the waters returning from off the earth continually;" but whether the Deluge had been partial or universal, he could neither see nor know. His prospect in either case would have been equally that described by the poet Bowles:-- "The mighty ark Rests upon Ararat; but nought around Its inmates can behold, save o'er the expanse Of boundless waters the sun's orient orb Stretching the hull's long shadow, or the moon In silence through the silver-curtained clouds Sailing, as she herself were lost and left In hollow loneliness." Let me further remark, that in one important sense a partial Flood, such as the one of which I have conceived as adequate to the destruction, in an early age, of the whole human family, could scarce be regarded as miraculous. Several of our first geologists hold, that some of the formidable cataclysms of the remote past may have been occasioned by the sudden upheaval of vast continents, which, by displacing great bodies of water, and rolling them outwards in the character of enormous waves, inundated wide regions elevated hundreds of feet over the sea level, and strewed them over with the rock boulders, clays, gravels, and organic debris of deep sea bottoms. And these cataclysms they regard as perfectly natural, though of course very unusual, events. Nor would the gradual depression of a continent, or, as in the supposed case, of a portion of a continent, be in any degree less natural than the sudden upheaval of a continent. It would, on the contrary, be much more according to experience. Nay, were such a depression and elevation of the great Asiatic basin to take place during the coming twelvemonth as that of which I have conceived as the probable cause of the Deluge, though the geologists would have to describe it as beyond comparison the most remarkable oscillation of level which had taken place within the historic period, they would certainly regard it as no more miraculous than the great earthquake of Lisbon, or than that exhibition of the volcanic forces which elevated the mountain of Jorullo in a single night sixteen hundred feet over the plain. And why have recourse, in speculating on the real event of four thousand years ago, to supposititious miracle, if an event of apparently the same kind would not be regarded as miraculous now? May we not in this matter take our stand beside the poet, who, when recognizing a Providence in the great Calabrian earthquake, and in the overwhelming wave by which it was accompanied, pertinently inquired of the skeptics,-- "Has not God Still wrought by means since first he made the world? _And did he not of old employ his means To drown it?_ What is his creation less Than a capacious reservoir of means, Formed for his use, and ready at his will?" The revelation to Noah, which warned him of a coming Flood, and taught him how to prepare for it, was evidently miraculous: the Flood itself may have been purely providential. But on this part of the subject I need not dwell. I have accomplished my purpose if I have shown, as was attempted of old by divines such as Stillingfleet and Poole, that there "seems to be no reason why the Deluge should be extended beyond the occasion of it, which was the corruption of man," but, on the contrary, much reason against it; and that, on the other hand, a Flood restricted and partial, and yet sufficient to destroy the race in an early age, while still congregating in their original centre, cannot be regarded as by any means an incredible event. The incredibility lies in the mere human glosses and misinterpretations in which its history has been enveloped. Divested of these, and viewed in its connection with those wonderful traditions which still float all over the world regarding it, it forms, not one of the stumbling-blocks, but one of the evidences, of our faith; and renders the exercise a not unprofitable one, when, according to the poet,-- "Back through the dusk Of ages Contemplation turns her view, To mark, as from its infancy, the world Peopled again from that mysterious shrine That rested on the top of Ararat." LECTURE NINTH. THE DISCOVERABLE AND THE REVEALED. It seems natural, nay, inevitable, that false revelations, which have descended from remote, unscientific ages, should be committed to a false science. Natural phenomena, when of an extraordinary character, powerfully impress the untutored mind. In operating, through the curiosity or the fears of men, upon that instinct of humanity--never wholly inactive in even the rudest state--which cannot witness any remarkable effect without seeking to connect it with its producing cause, they excite into activity in the search the imaginative faculty,--always of earlier development than the judgment in both peoples and individuals, and which never fails, when so employed, to conduct to delusions and extravagances. And this state of mind gives birth simultaneously to both false religion and false science. Great tempests, inundations, eclipses, earthquakes, thunder and lightning, famine and pestilence, the births of monsters, or the rare visitation of strange fishes or wild animals, come all to be included in the mythologic domain. Even the untutored Indian "sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind." And when an order of priesthood springs up, a portion of the leisure of the class is usually employed in speculating on these phenomena; and to their speculations they give the form of direct revelation. Thus almost all the false religions of the old world--not grafted, like Mohammedanism, on the true one--have their pretended revelations regarding the form, structure, and origin of the earth, the mechanism of the heavens, the electric and meteoric phenomena, and even the arrangement of oceans and continents on the surface of our planet. The old extinct forms of heathenism,--Etrurian, Egyptian, Phoenician, and Babylonian,--had all their cosmogonies.[32] In the wild mythology of ancient Scandinavia, of which we find such distinct traces in the languages and superstitions of northern Europe, and which even in our own country continues to give the names of its uncouth deities to the days of our week, there is a strange genesis of not only the heavens and earth, but of the gods also. It has, besides, its scheme of the universe in its great mundane tree of three vast roots,--celestial, terrestrial, and infernal,--which supports the land, the sea, the sky, and all things. The leading religions of the East which still survive, such as Buddhism, Brahminism, and Parseeism, have all their astronomy, geography, meteorology, and geology, existing as component parts of their several systems. Nor have there been wanting ingenious men who, though little tolerant of the various attempts made to reconcile the Mosaic account of creation with the discoveries of modern science, have looked with a favorable eye on the wild science of the false religions, and professed to detect in it at least striking analogies with the deductions of both the geologist and the astronomer. When the skeptical wits of the last century wished to produce, by way of foil, a morality vastly superior, as they said, to that of Christianity, they had recourse to the Brahmins and the Chinese. And though we hear less of the ethics of these people since we have come to know them better, we are still occasionally reminded of the superiority of their science. Hinduism has been regarded as furnishing examples of the geologic doctrine of a succession of creations extended over immensely protracted geologic periods; and Buddhism represented as charged with both the geologic doctrine and the perhaps less certain astronomic deduction of a plurality of worlds. And before entering on our general argument, it may be well to show by specimen what mere chance hits these are, and how enormous the amount of the nonsense and absurdity really is in which they are set. When Brahma, wearied with the work of producing and maintaining the universe, goes to sleep, say the Hindus,--an occurrence which happens at the end of every four millions of years,--a deluge of water rises high above the sun and moon, and the worlds and their inhabitants are destroyed. When he awakes, however, he immediately sets himself to produce anew; and another universe springs up, consisting, like the former one, of ten worlds placed over each other, like the stories of a tall building, and replenished with plants and animals. Of these our own world is the eighth in number, reckoning from the ground floor upwards; there are seven worlds worse than itself beneath it, and two better ones above; with a few worlds more higher up still, to which the destroying flood does not reach, save once or twice in an eternity or so; and which, in consequence, have not to be re-created each time with the others. The special forms which the upper and nether worlds exhibit do not seem to be very well known; but that which man inhabits is "flat, like the flower of the water-lily, in which the petals project beyond each other;" and it has in all, including sea and land, a diameter of several hundred thousand _millions_ of miles. It has its many great oceans,--one of these (unfortunately the only one in contact with man's place of habitation) of salt water, one of sugar-cane juice, one of spirituous liquor, one of clarified butter, and one of sour curds. It has, besides, its very great ocean of sweet water. And around all, forming a sort of gigantic hoop or ring, there extends a continent of pure gold. Of all the luminaries that rise over this huge world, the sun is the nearest: the distance of the moon is twice as great; the lesser fixed stars occur immediately beyond; then Mercury, then Venus, then Mars, then Jupiter, then Saturn; and finally, the great bear and the polar star. And such is that cosmogony and astronomy of the Brahmins to which their religion, in its character as a revelation, stands committed, and in which a very lenient criticism has found the geologic revolutions. Let me draw my next illustration from Buddhism, the most ancient and most widely spread religion of the East; for, though partially overlaid in the great Indian peninsula by the more modern monstrosities of Brahminism, it extends in one direction from the Persian Gulf to Formosa and Japan, and in the other from the wastes of Siberia to the Gulf of Siam. Scarce any of the other forms of heathenism darken so large a portion of the map as Buddhism,--a superstition which is estimated to include within its pale nearly one third of the whole human species. It has been held, I need scarce say, by most astronomers since the times of Newton, that the universe consists of innumerable systems of worlds, furnished each with its own sun; and held by most geologists during the last fifty years, that the past duration of our earth was divided into periods of vast extent, each of which had a creation of its own. And certainly in Buddhism we find both these ideas,--the idea of the existence of separate systems, each with its own sun; and the idea of successive periods, each with its own creation. We ascertain on examination; however, that in the superstition they are not scientific ideas at all, but mere chance guesses, set, like those of Brahminism, in a farago of wild and monstrous fable. Each of the many systems of which the universe is composed consists, say the Buddhists, of three worlds of a circular form, joined together at the edges, so that there intervenes between them an angular interspace, which constitutes their common hell; and to each of these systems there is a sun and moon apportioned, that take their daily journeys over them, returning at night through a void space underneath. And each of the bygone successive creations was a creation originated, it is added, out of chaos, through the stored-up merits of the Buddhas, and the effects of a life-invigorating rain, and which sank into chaos again when the old stock of merit, accumulated in the previous period, was exhausted. The creatures of each period, too, whether brute or human, were animated by but the souls of former creatures embodied anew. In the centre of each of the three worlds of which a system or _sackwala_ consists, there is a vast mountain, more than forty thousand miles in height, surrounded by a circular sea, which is in turn surrounded by a ring of land and rock. Another circular sea lies outside the ring, and a second solid ring outside the sea; and thus rings of land and water alternate from the centre to the circumference. According to the geography of the Buddhas, a model of our own earth would exactly resemble that old-fashioned ornament,--a work of the turning-lathe,--which some of my auditors must have seen roughening the upper board of the ornate parlor bellows of the last century, and which consisted of a large central knob, surrounded by alternate circular rings and furrows. And as in the old-fashioned bellows each ring flattened, and each furrow became shallower, in proportion as it was removed from the centre, so in the Buddhist earth, the seas, from being many thousand miles deep in the inner rings, shallow so greatly, that in the outer rings their depth is only an inch; while the continents, from being forty thousand miles high, sink into mere plains, almost on the level of the surrounding ocean. Such is the geography to which this religion pledges itself. Its astronomy, on the other hand, is not quite so bad as that to which Father Cullen has affixed his imprimatur, seeing that, though it gives the same sort of diurnal journey to the sun, it confers upon it a diameter, not of only six feet, but of four hundred miles. Nor is its geology a great deal worse than that of many Christians. It makes the earth consist, reckoning from its foundations upwards, of a layer of wind, a layer of water, a layer of substance resembling honey, a layer of rock, and a layer of soil. Such is a small portion of the natural science of Buddhism: the minute details of its monstrous cosmogony, with its descriptions of fabulous oceans, inhabited by fishes thousands of miles in length, and of wonderful forests abounding in trees four hundred miles high, and haunted by singing lions that leap two miles at a bound, occupy many chapters of the sacred volumes. Every form of faith has its heretics; and there are, it would seem, heretics among even the Buddhists, who, instead of adopting the nonsense of the priests in this physical department, originate a nonsense equally great of their own. The error of concluding that the worlds of the universe are finite in number, say the sacred books, is the heresy _antawada_; the error of concluding that the world itself is infinite is the heresy _anantawada_; the error of concluding that the world is finite vertically but infinite horizontally is the heresy _anantanantawada_; and the error of concluding the world to be neither finite nor infinite is the heresy _nawantanantawada_. A name equally formidable would be, of course, found for the students of modern astronomy and the other kindred sciences, among the professed believers in Buddh, did not these contrive to get over the difficulty by observing, "that certain things, as stated in the _Sastras_, must have been so formerly; but great changes have taken place in these in latter times; and for astronomical purposes astronomical rules must be followed." Believers in Buddhism may be still found by tens of millions on the shores of the Yellow Sea. Let me select my third specimen of a universe-fashioning mythology from a faith, long since extinct, that had its seat on the opposite side of the Old World, along the coasts of the Northern Atlantic. The old Teutonic religion professed to reveal, like that of Buddh and of Brahma, _how_ the heavens and earth were formed, and of _what_. Ymir, the great frost-giant, a being mysteriously engendered out of frozen vapor, was slain by the god Odin and his brothers; and, dragging his body into the middle of the universe, they employed the materials of which it was composed in forming the earth. Of his blood they made the vast ocean, and all the lakes and rivers; of his flesh they constructed the land, placing it in the midst of the waters; of his bones they built up the mountains; his teeth and jaws they broke up into the stones and pebbles of the earth and shore; of his great skull they fashioned the vault of the heavens; and, tossing his brains into the air, they became the clouds. Earth, sea, and sky, however, thus made, were supported by the great ash-tree Yggdrasill, which, with its roots anchored deep in the primordial abyss, rose up through the vast central mountains of the world, and, stretching forth its branches to the furthest heaven, bore the stars as its fruit. Encircling the whole earth like a ring, lay the huge snake Midgard,--always hidden in the sea, save when half drawn forth on one occasion by the god Thor; outside the snake a broader ring of ice-mountains swept round both land and ocean, and formed the outer frame of the world,--for there lay only blank space beyond; and over all, the sun and moon performed their journeys, chased through the sky by ravenous wolves, that ever sought to devour them. Such was the wild dream of our Scandinavian ancestors,--a dream, however, that occupied as prominent a place in their Edda as any of their other religious beliefs, and which, with the first dawn of science, would not only have fallen itself, but would have also dragged down the others along with it. Now this physical department has ever proved the vulnerable portion of false religions,--the portion which, if I may use the metaphor, their originators could not dip in the infernal river. The ability of drawing the line, in the early and ignorant ages of the world, between what man can of himself discover and what he cannot, is an ability which man cannot possibly possess. The ancient Chaldeans, who first watched the motions of the planets, could not possibly have foreseen, that while on the one hand men would be one day able of themselves to measure and weigh these bodies, and to determine their distances from the earth and from each other, men might never be able of themselves to demonstrate the fact of their authorship, or to discover the true character of their author. Nay, if they could have at all thought on the subject, the latter would have seemed to them by much the simpler discovery of the two. To know at such a time what was in reality discoverable and what was not, would be to know by anticipation what is not yet known,--the limits of all human knowledge. It would be to trace a line non-existent at the period, and untraceable, in the nature of things, until the history of the human race shall be completed. It was held by even the sagacious Socrates, that men cannot arrive at any certainty in questions respecting the form or motion of the earth, or the mechanism of the heavens; and so he set himself to elucidate what he deemed much simpler matters,--to prove, for instance, as we find in the Phedon, that human souls existed ere they came to inhabit their mortal bodies, and retained faint recollections of great misfortunes that had overtaken them ere their embodiment as men, and of sufferings to which they had been subjected in a primevous state. And lacking this ability of distinguishing between the naturally discoverable and what cannot be naturally discovered, the originators of the old mythologic beliefs obtruded into provinces in which ultimately the lawless nature of the obtrusion could not fail to be detected; and thus, by making their false science a portion of their false religion, they created what was afterwards to prove its weakest and most vulnerable part. We absolutely know that the course at present pursued by enlightened Christian missionaries in India is to bring scientific truth into direct antagonism with the monstrously false science of the pretended revelations of Parseeism, Brahminism, and Buddhism; and that by this means the general falsity of these systems has been so plainly shown, that it has become a matter of doubt whether a single educated native of any considerable ability in reality believes in them. They seem to have lost their hold of all the minds capable of appreciating the weight and force of scientific evidence. Let us further remark, that since it seems inevitable that pretended revelations of ancient date should pledge themselves to a false science, the presumption must be strong that an ancient revelation of great multiplicity of detail, which has _not_ so pledged itself, is not a false, but a true revelation. Nay, if we find in it the line drawn between what man can know of himself and what he cannot know, and determine that this line was traced in a remote and primitive age, we have positive evidence in the circumstance, good so far as it extends, of its Divine origin. Now, it will be ultimately found that this line was drawn with exquisite precision in the Hebrew Scriptures,--not merely the most ancient works that profess to be revelations, but absolutely the most ancient of all writings. Unfortunately, however, what God seems to have done for his Revelation, influential theologians of both the Romish and Orthodox Churches have labored hard to undo; and, from their mistaking, in not a few remarkable passages, the scope and object of the vouchsafed message, they have at various times striven to pledge it to a science as false as even that of Buddhist, Teuton, or Hindu. And so, not only has the argument been weakened and obscured which might be founded on the rectitude of the line drawn of old between what ought and what ought not to be the subject of revelation, but even a positive argument has been furnished to the infidel,--ever ready to identify the glosses of the theologian with the enunciations of revelation itself,--similar to that which the Christian missionary directs against the false religions of India. It may be well briefly to inquire how this unlucky mistake has originated. It is of first importance often to the navigator that he should have a good chronometer, seeing that his ability of determining his exact position on wide seas, and, in consequence, of determining also the exact place and bearing of the rocks and reefs which he must avoid, and of the lands and harbors on which he must direct his course, must very much depend upon the rectitude of his instrument. But it may be of very little importance to him to know how chronometers are made. And so a friend may reveal to him where the best chronometers are to be purchased, with the name of the maker, without at the same time revealing to him the principle on which they are constructed. Let us suppose, however, that from some peculiarity in the mode of the revelation, the navigator has come to believe that it includes both items,--an enunciation regarding the place where and the maker from whom the best chronometers are to be had, and a further enunciation regarding the true mechanism of chronometers. Let us suppose further, that while the good faith and intelligence of his friend are unquestionable, the supposed revelation regarding the construction of chronometers, which he thinks he owes to him, is altogether erroneous and absurd. The chronometer mainly differs from the ordinary watch in being formed of a mixture of metals, which preserve so nice a chemical balance, that those changes of temperature which quicken or retard the movements of common time-pieces fail to affect it. Now, let us suppose that the friend and adviser of the sailor had said to him,--using a common metonymy,--there are no chronometers anywhere constructed that so _completely neutralize the temperature_ as the ones I recommend to you; and that the sailor had at once leaped to the conclusion, that the remark was authority enough for holding that it is the principle of chronometers, not to be composed of such counteractive combinations of metals as that the expansion of one shall be checked by the contraction of another, but to keep up an equal temperature within through a heat-engendering quality in the amalgamated metals. Such a mistake might be readily enough originated in this way; and yet it would be a very serious mistake indeed; seeing that it would substitute an active for a passive principle,--a principle of equalizing the temperature by acting upon it, for a principle of inert impassibility to the temperature. And of course not only would the sailor himself be in error in taking such a view, but he might seriously compromise the intelligence or integrity of his friend in the judgment of all who held, on his testimony, that it was with his friend, and not from his own misconception of his friend's meaning, that the view had originated. And how, let us ask, ere dismissing our lengthened illustration, is an error such as the supposed one here to be tested, and its erroneousness exposed? There can be but one reply to such a query. It might be wholly in vain to fall back upon the _ipsissima verba_ of the revelation made by the sailor's friend. Though in reality but an enunciation regarding the _authorship_ of certain chronometers, it might possibly enough appear, from its metonymic character, to be also a revelation regarding the _construction_ of chronometers. The sailor's error respecting the construction of chronometers is to be tested and exposed, not by any references to what his friend had said, but by the art of the chronometer maker. The demonstrable principles of the art, as practised by the makers of chronometers, must be the test of all supposed _revelations_ regarding the principles and mechanism of chronometer making. [Illustration: Fig. 114. THE GEOGRAPHY OF COSMAS.[33] (_From a reduced facsimile of the original print in the British Museum._)] Now, it will be found that those mistakes of the theologians to which I refer have been exactly similar to that of the navigator in the supposed case, and that they are mistakes which must be corrected on exactly the same principle. The departments in which the mistakes have been made, have, as in the false religious, been chiefly three,--the geographic, astronomic, and geologic provinces. The geographic errors are of comparatively ancient date. They belong mainly to the later patristic and earlier middle ages, when the monk Cosmas, as the geographer of the Church, represented the earth as a parallelogrammical plain, twice longer than it was broad, deeply indented by the inland seas,--the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf,--and encompassed by a rectangular trench occupied by the oceans. Some of my audience will, however, remember that of the council of clergymen which met in Salamanca in 1486 to examine and test the views of Christopher Columbus, a considerable portion held it to be grossly heterodox to believe that by sailing westwards the eastern parts of the world could be reached. No one could entertain such a view without also believing that there were antipodes, and that the world was round, not flat,--errors denounced by not only great theologians of the golden age of ecclesiastical learning, such as Lactantius and St. Augustine, but also directly opposed, it was said, to the very letter of Scripture. "They observed," says Washington Irving, in his "Life of Columbus," "that in the Psalms the heavens are said to be extended like a hide,--that is, according to commentators, the curtain or covering of a tent, which among the ancient pastoral nations was formed of the hides of animals; and that St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, compares the heavens to a tabernacle or tent extended over the earth, which they thence inferred must be flat." In the sectional view of Cosmas the heavens are represented as a semicircular vault or tent raised on perpendicular walls; a vast mountain beyond the "Great Sea," lofty as the innermost continent of the Buddhist cosmogony, rises immediately under it; when the sun passed behind this mountain it was night, and when it emerged from it, it was day. And certainly under the crystal box of the monk it would be in vain to attempt, by passing westwards, to arrive at the far east. The cosmogony of Cosmas was also that of the doctors of Salamanca; and the views of Columbus were denounced as heterodox because they failed to conform to it. Such was one of the earlier mistakes of the theologians. When merely told regarding the authorship of the chronometer, they held that they had been told also respecting the mechanism of the chronometer. Attaching literal meanings to what we now recognize as merely poetic or oratorical figures, they believed that not only was it revealed to them that God had created the heavens and earth, but also that he had created the earth in the form of an extended plain, and placed a semi-globular heavens over it, just as one places a semi-globular case of glass over a piece of flower-plot or a miniature thicket of fern. And how, I ask, was this error ultimately corrected? Simply by that science of the geographer which demonstrates that the earth is not flat, but spherical, and that the heavens have not edges, like a skin-tent or glass-case, to come anywhere in contact with it, but consist mainly of a diffused atmosphere, with illimitable space beyond. [Illustration: Fig. 115. THE HEAVENS AND EARTH OF COSMAS.[34] (_Sectional View._)] The second great error to which the theologians would fain have pledged the truth of Scripture was an error in the astronomical province. I need scarce refer to the often-adduced case of Galileo. The doctrine which the philosopher had to "abjure, curse, and detest," and which he was never again to teach, "because erroneous, heretical, and contrary to Scripture," was the doctrine of the earth's motion and the sun's stability. But to the part taken by our Protestant divines in the same controversy,--men still regarded as authorities in their own proper walk,--I must be allowed to refer, as less known, though not less instructive, than that enacted by the Romish Church in the case of Galileo. "This, we affirm, that is, that the earth rests, and the sun moves daily around it," said Voetius, a great Dutch divine of the middle of the seventeenth century, "with all divines, natural philosophers, Jews and Mohammedans, Greeks and Latins, excepting one or two of the ancients, and the modern followers of Copernicus." And we detect Heideggeri, a Swiss theologian, who flourished about half an age later, giving expression, a few years ere the commencement of the last century, to a similar view, as the one taken by himself and many others, and as a view "from which," he states, "our pious reverence for the Scriptures, the word of truth, will not allow us to depart." A still more remarkable instance occurs in Turrettine, whom we find in one of his writings arguing in the strictly logical form, "in opposition to certain philosophers," and in behalf of the old Ptolemaic doctrine that the sun moves in the heavens and revolves round the earth, while the earth itself remains at rest in the midst. "_First_," he remarks, "the sun is said in Scripture to move in the heavens, and to rise and set. 'The sun is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.' 'The sun knoweth his going down.' 'The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down.' _Secondly_, The sun by a miracle stood still in the time of Joshua; and by a miracle it went back in the time of Hezekiah. _Thirdly_, The earth is said to be fixed immovably. 'The earth is also established that it cannot be moved.' 'Thou hast established the earth, and it abideth.' 'They continue this day according to their ordinance.' _Fourthly_, Neither could birds, which often fly off through an hour's circuit, be able to return to their nests. _Fifthly_, Whatever flies or is suspended in the air ought (by this theory) to move from west to east; but this is proved not to be true, from birds, arrows shot forth, atoms made manifest in the sun, and down floating in the atmosphere." The theologian, after thus laying down the law, sets himself to meet objections. If it be urged that the Scriptures in natural things speak according to the common opinion, Turrettine answers, "_First_, The Spirit of God best understands natural things. _Secondly_, That in giving instruction in religion, he meant these things should be used, not abused. _Thirdly_, That he is not the author of any error. _Fourthly_, Neither is he to be corrected on the pretence of our blind reason." If it be further urged, that birds, the air, and all things are moved with the earth, he answers, "_First_, That this is a mere fiction, since air is a fluid body; and _secondly_, if so, by what force would birds be able to go from east to west?" Now this I must regard as a passage as instructive as it is extraordinary. Turrettine was one of the most accomplished theologians of his age; nor is that age by any means a remote one. Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, had all finished their labors long ere he published this passage; nay, at the time when his work issued from the Amsterdam press (1695), Isaac Newton had attained his fifty-third year; and fully ten years previous, Professor David Gregory, nephew of the inventor of the Gregorian telescope, had begun to teach, from his chair in the University of Edinburgh, the doctrine of gravitation and the true mechanism of the heavens, as unfolded in the Newtonian philosophy. The learned theologian, had he applied himself to astronomical science, could have found at the time very enlightened teachers; but falling into exactly the mistake of the sailor of my illustration, or that into which, two centuries before, the doctors of Salamanca had fallen, he set himself, instead, to contend with the astronomers, and, to the extent of his influence, labored to pledge revelation to an astronomy as false as that of the Buddhist, Hindu, or old Teuton. His mistake, I repeat, was exactly that of the sailor. Though in the Scriptures only the fact of the _authorship_ of the great chronometer set in the heavens "to be a sign for seasons, and for days and years," is revealed, he regarded himself as also informed respecting the principles on which the chronometer was constructed, or at least respecting the true nature of its movements; and several very important deductions may, I think, be drawn from the carefully constructed passage in which he so unwittingly records his error, and the grounds of it. In the first place, we may safely hold that the texts of Scripture quoted by so able a theologian are those which have most the appearance of being revelations to men respecting the motions of the heavenly bodies. We may conclusively infer, that if _they_ do not reveal the character of those motions, then nowhere in Scripture is their character revealed. In the second place, it is obvious that the cited texts do _not_ reveal the nature of the motions. It would be as rational to hold that our best almanacs reveal the Ptolemaic astronomy. In the scientific portion of our almanacs there occur many phrases which are perfectly well understood, and indicate very definitely what the writer really intends to express by them, that yet, taken literally, are not scientifically true. The words, "Sun rises," and "Sun sets," and "Moon rises," and "Moon sets," occur in every page; there are two pages--those devoted to the months of March and September--in which the phrase occurs, "Sun crosses the equinoctial line;" and further, in the other pages, such phrases as "Sun enters Aries," "Sun enters Taurus," "Sun enters Gemini," &c., &c., are not unfrequent. The phrase, "new moon," is also of common occurrence. And these phrases, interpreted after the manner of Turrettine, and according to their strict grammatical meaning, would of course imply that the sun has a motion round our planet,--that the moon moves round it every twenty-four hours,--and that the earth is provided every month with a new satellite. And yet we know that none of these ideas are in the mind of the writer who, in compiling the almanac, employs the phrases. He employs them to indicate, not the nature of the heavenly motions, but the exact time when, from the several motions of the earth, the sun and moon are brought into certain apparent positions with respect to either the earth itself or to the celestial signs; or to indicate the time at which the moon completes its monthly revolution, and presents a wholly darkened disk to the earth. The commentator skilful enough to pledge the almanac, in virtue of the literal meaning of the specified phrases, to the old Ptolemaic hypothesis, would pledge it to a false science, which its author never held. And such, evidently, has been the part enacted by Turrettine and the elder theologians. The Scriptural phrases are in no degree more express respecting the motion of the sun and the other heavenly bodies than those of the almanac, which, we know, do not refer to motion at all, but to time. Nor are we less justified in holding that the cited Scriptures do not refer to _motion_, but to _authorship_. In the third place, however, it is not by any mere reconsideration of the adduced passages that the error, once made, is to be corrected. In a purely astronomic question the appeal lies, not to Scripture, but to astronomic science. And in the fourth place, the reasonings of Turrettine, when, quitting his own proper walk, he discourses, not as a theologian, but as a natural philosopher, are such as to read a lesson not wholly unneeded in the present day. They show how in a department in which it demanded the united life-long labors of a Kepler, Galileo, and Newton to elicit the truth, the hasty guesses of a great theologian, rashly ventured in a polemic spirit, gave form and body to but ludicrous error. It is not after a fashion so impetuous and headlong that the elaborately wrought key must be plied which unlocks the profound mysteries of nature. But of this more anon. Let me remark in the passing, that while Turrettine, one of the greatest of theologians, failed, as we have seen, to find in Scripture the fact of astronomic _construction_, La Place, one of the greatest of the astronomers, failed in a manner equally signal to find in his science the fact of astronomic _authorship_. The profound Frenchman (whom Sir David Brewster well characterizes as "the philosopher to whom posterity will probably assign the place next to Newton "), by demonstrating that certain irregularities in the motion of the heavenly bodies, which had been supposed to indicate a future termination to the whole, were but mere oscillations, subject to periodic correction, and indicative of no such termination in consequence, demonstrated also that, from all that appears, the present astronomical movements might go on forever. And as he could find in the solar system no indications of an end, so was he unable, he said, to find in it any trace of a beginning. He failed in discovering in all astronomy the fact of authorship, just as Turrettine had failed in finding in all Scripture the fact of astronomic construction. And here lies, I am inclined to think, the true line between revelation and science,--a line drawn of old with a God-derived precision, which can be rightly appreciated neither by mere theologians like Turrettine, nor by mere men of science like La Place, but which is notwithstanding fraught with an evidence direct in its bearing on the truth of Scripture. That great fact, moral in its influence, of the authorship of the heavens and earth, which the science of La Place failed of itself to discover, and which was equally unknown to the ancient philosophers, God has revealed. It is "through faith we understand that the worlds were formed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." And, on the other hand, the great truths, physical in their bearing, to the discovery of which science is fully competent, God did not reveal, but left them to be developed piecemeal by the unassisted human faculties. And that ability of nicely drawing the line between the two classes of truths in a very remote age of the world, which we find manifested in the oldest of the Scriptural books, I must regard as an ability which could have been derived only through inspiration, and from God alone. Let us, however, pursue our argument. Questions of geography, such as those entertained by the theologians of Salamanca, must be tested, we conclude, not by a revelation never intended by its Divine Author to teach geography, but by the findings of geographic science. Questions in astronomy, such as those which Turrettine and the opponents of Galileo entertained, must be tried, we hold, not by a revelation never intended to teach astronomy, but by the findings of astronomic science. But how deal, I next ask, with the theologian who holds that geologic fact has been revealed to him? Geology is as thoroughly a physical science as either geography or astronomy. Its facts are equally capable of being educed and established by the unassisted human intellect. It seems quite as unlikely that it should have been made a special subject of revelation, in its character as a science, as either of these sciences; or that the line so nicely maintained with respect to _them_ should have been transgressed with regard to _it_. In short, in order satisfactorily to answer our query, it seems but necessary satisfactorily to answer another, namely, What, in this special department, are truth and fact scientifically ascertained? There are, however, certain texts that appear to have a more direct bearing on the successive periods of the geologist than any of those that were once held to refer to the form of the earth, or to the nature of the heavenly bodies, are now believed to have on geography or astronomy. No one now holds that there is a geography revealed in Scripture, or regards the cavils of the Salamanca doctors as other than mere aberrations of the human mind. Nor, save mayhap in the darker corners of the Greek and Romish Churches, are there men in the present day who hold that there is a revealed astronomy. The texts so confidently quoted by Turrettine, such as "The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down," are regarded in every Protestant Church as simply tantamount, in their bearing on the question at issue, to the "Sun rises" and "Sun sets" of the almanac. But while the Scriptures do not reveal the form of the earth or the motions of the planets, they do reveal the fact that the miracle of creation was effected, not by a single act, but in several successive acts. And it is with the organisms produced by successive acts of creation, and the formations deposited during the periods in which these acts took place, that the geologist is called on by his science to deal. And hence, while there are now no attempts made to reconcile geographic or astronomic fact with the Scripture passages which refer, in the language of the time, to the glory of the heavens or the stability of the earth, just because it is held that there is really nothing geographic or astronomic in the passages to conflict with the geographic or astronomic facts, we still seek to reconcile the facts of geologic science with what is termed the Mosaic geology. We inquire whether, in its leading features, the Mosaic does not correspond with the geologic record; and whether the _days_ of the retrospective prophecy of creation are to be regarded as coextensive with the vast periods of the geologist, or as merely representative portions of them, or as literal days of twenty-four hours each? But though we thus seek to harmonize the two records, we continue to regard their grounds and objects as entirely different. The object of geology is simply the elucidation of the history of the earth, and of the story of its various creations; and its grounds are, like those of astronomy or geography, or of any other physical science, facts and inferences scientifically determined or deduced; while, on the other hand, the grounds of the Mosaic record are those on which the other Scriptures rest, and which have been so well laid down in what we may term the higher literature of the "Evidences," while at least some of its objects,--for who shall declare them all?--seem to be, first, to establish the all-important fact of the Divine authorship of the universe, and to show that all its various forces are not self-existent, but owe their origin to a Great First Cause; next, to exhibit the progressive character of God's workings,--a character which equally applies to his works of creation and providence; and, in the third place, to furnish a basis and precedent, in the Divine example, for that institution of the Sabbath which bears not only a prophetic reference to the great dynasty to come,--last of all the dynasties, and of which re-created men are to be the happy subjects, and the Divine Man the adorable Monarch,--but which has also been specially established in order that right preparation may be made for the terminal state which it symbolizes and foreshadows. Here, as certainly as in the other physical sciences, the line has been drawn with perfect precision between what man could and what he could not have known of himself. What he could have known, and in part already knows, is geologic science; what in all probability he never could have known is the fact of the Divine authorship of the universe, and the true nature of the institution of the Sabbath, as a time of preparation for the final state, and as alike representative of God's workings in the past, and of his eternally predetermined scheme for the future. "Is it not certain," Socrates is represented as inquiring, in "the first Alcibiades," of his gay and confident pupil, "that you know nothing but what has been told you by others, or what you have found out for yourself?" There is at once exquisite simplicity and great terseness in this natural division of the only modes in which men can acquire knowledge; and we find it wonderfully exemplified in all revelation. Scripture draws practically a broad line between the two modes; and while it tells man all that is necessary to his wants and welfare as a religious creature, it does not communicate to him a single scientific fact which he is competent to find out for himself. About an age previous to the times of Turrettine, the danger of "corrupting philosophy through an intermixed divinity" was admirably shown by Bacon in his "Novum Organum;" and the line indicated was exactly what we now find was laid down of old with such precision in Scripture. "To deify error and to adore vain things," said the great philosopher, "may be well accounted the plague of the understanding. Some modern men, guilty of much levity, have so indulged this vanity, that they have essayed to find natural philosophy in the first chapter of Genesis, the Book of Job, and other places of holy writ, seeking the living among the dead. Now this vanity is so much the more to be checked and restrained, because, by unadvised mixture of Divine and human things, not only a phantastical philosophy is produced, but also an heretical religion. Therefore it is safe to give unto Faith, with a sober mind, the things that are Faith's." The passage, partially quoted, has been not unfrequently misapplied, as if it bore, not against theologians such as Turrettine and the Franciscans, but against theologians such as Chalmers, Dr. Bird Sumner, and Dr. Pye Smith,--not against the men who derive a false science from Scripture, into which God never introduced natural science of any kind, but against the men who, having sought and acquired their science where it is alone to be found, have striven to bring Scripture, in the misinterpreted passages, into harmony with its findings. Taken, however, as a whole, its true meaning is obvious. It is the men who have "essayed to find natural philosophy" positively revealed in Genesis and the other sacred books,--not the men who have merely shown that there is nothing in Scripture which conflicts with the natural philosophy legitimately found elsewhere,--that are obnoxious to the censure conveyed in the remark. It is they only, and not the others, that are "_phantastical_" in their philosophy and "_heretical_" in their religion. I say heretical in their religion. The Ptolemaic doctrine which ascribed to the earth a central place in the universe was only scientifically false, whereas the same doctrine in Turrettine and the Franciscans, from the circumstance that they pledged the Scripture to its falsity, and professed to derive it direct from revelation, was not only scientifically false, but a heresy to boot. And, in like manner, it is the class who term themselves the "Mosaic geologists,"--men such as the Granville Penns, Moses Stewarts, Eleazar Lords, Dean Cockburns, and Peter Macfarlanes,--who essay to "find natural philosophy in the first chapter of Genesis," and that too a demonstrably false natural philosophy, who are obnoxious to the Baconian censure now. No true geologist ever professes to deduce his geology from Scripture. It is from the earth's crust, with its numerous systems, always invariable in their order, and its successive groups of fossil remains, always (in accordance with their place and age) of a certain determinable character,--not in a revelation never intended by its Divine Author to teach any natural science as such,--that he derives the materials with which he builds. Had there been no Divine Revelation, geology would be as certainly what it now is as either geography or astronomy. That it comes in the present time more in contact with revealed truth than either of these sciences, is, as I have shown, merely a consequence of the fact that there is a history given in the opening passages of Scripture, for far other than geological purposes, of the authorship of the heavens and earth, and of the successive stages of creation; and further, from the circumstance that, from various motives, men are ever and anon inquiring how the geologic agrees with the Scriptural record. It may be well here to remind the anti-geologists, in connection with this part of my subject, of what at the utmost they may hope to accomplish. Judging from all I have yet seen of their writings, they seem to be as certainly impressed by the belief that they are settling textually the geologic question of the world's antiquity, as the doctors of Salamanca held that they were settling textually the question of the world's form; or Turrettine and the Franciscans, that they were settling textually the question of the world's motion, or rather want of motion. But the mistake is quite as gross in their case as in that of Turrettine and the doctors. Geology rests on a broad, ever extending basis of evidence, wholly independent of the revelation on which they profess, very unintelligently, in all the instances I have yet known, to found their objections. What they need at most promise themselves is, to defeat those attempts to reconcile the two records which are made by geologists who respect and believe the Scripture testimony,--not a very laudable feat, even could it be accomplished, and certainly worthy of being made rather a subject of condolence than of congratulation. And though, of course, men should pursue the truth simply for its own sake, and independently either of the consequences which it may be found to involve, or of the company with which it may bring them acquainted, the anti-geologists might be worse employed than in scanning the character and aims of the associates with whom they virtually league themselves when they declare war against the Christian geologist. There are three different parties in the field, either directly opposed, or at least little friendly, to the men who honestly attempt reconciling the Mosaic with the geologic record. First, there are the anti-geologists,--men who hold that geological questions are to be settled now as the Franciscans contemporary with Galileo held that astronomical questions were to be settled in the seventeenth century, or as the doctors of Salamanca contemporary with Columbus held that geographic questions were to be settled in the fifteenth. And _they_ believe that geology, as interpreted by the geologists, is entirely false, because, as they think, irreconcilable with Scripture; further, that our planet had no existence some seven or eight thousand years ago,--that the apparent antiquity of the various sedimentary systems and organic groups of the earth's crust is wholly illusive,--and that the very oldest of them cannot be more than a few days older than the human period. In fine, just as it was held two centuries ago by Turrettine and the Franciscans, that the Bible as interpreted by _them_ was the only legitimate authority in astronomic questions, so this class now hold that the Bible as interpreted by _them_ is the only legitimate authority in geologic questions; and further, that the Bible being, as they contend, wholly opposed to the deductions of the geologist, these deductions must of necessity be erroneous. Next, there is a class, more largely represented in society than in literature, who, looking at the general bearings of the question, the character and standing of the geologists, and the sublime nature of their discoveries, believe that geology ranks as certainly among the sciences as astronomy itself; but who, little in earnest in their religion, are quite ready enough, when they find theologians asserting the irreconcilability of the geologic doctrines with those of Scripture, to believe them; nay, not only so, but to repeat the assertion. It is not fashionable in the present age openly to avow infidelity, save mayhap in some modified rationalistic or pantheistic form; but in no age did the thing itself exist more extensively; and the number of individuals is very great who, while they profess an outward respect for revelation, have no serious quarrel with the class who, in their blind zeal in its behalf, are in reality undermining its foundations. Nor are there avowed infidels awanting who also make common cause with the party so far as to assert that the results of geologic discovery conflict irreconcilably with the Mosaic account of creation. But there is yet another class, composed of respectable and able men, who, from the natural influence of their acquirements and talents, are perhaps more dangerous allies still, and whom we find represented by writers such as Mr. Babbage and the Rev. Baden Powell. It is held by both these accomplished men, that it is in vain to attempt reconciling the Mosaic writings with the geologic discoveries: both are intimately acquainted with the evidence adduced by the geologist, and entertain no doubt whatever regarding what it establishes; but though in the main friendly to at least the moral sanctions of the New Testament, both virtually set aside the Mosaic cosmogony; the one (Mr. Babbage) on the professed grounds that we really cannot arrive with any certainty at the meaning of that old Hebrew introduction to the Scriptures in which the genesis of things is described; and the other (Mr. Powell) on the assumption that that introduction is but a mere picturesque myth or parable, as little scientifically true as the parables of our Saviour or of Nathan the seer are historically so. Now, I cannot think that the anti-geologists are quite in the place in which they either ought or intend to be when engaged virtually in making common cause with either of these latter classes.[35] Be this as it may, however, it may be not uninstructive, and perhaps not wholly unamusing, to examine what the claims really are of some of our later anti-geologists to be recognized as the legitimate and qualified censors of geologic fact or inference. It will be seen, that in the passage which I have quoted from Turrettine, the theologian, in three of his five divisions, restricts himself to the theologic province, and that when in his own proper sphere even his errors are respectable; but that in the two concluding divisions he passes into the province of the natural philosopher, and that there his respectability ceases for the time, and he becomes eminently ridiculous. The anti-geologists,--men of considerably smaller calibre than the massive Dutch divine of the seventeenth century,--also enter into a field not their own. Passing from the theologic province, they obtrude into that of the geologist, and settle against him, apparently after a few minutes' consideration, or as mere special pleaders, questions on which he has been concentrating the patient study and directing the laborious explorations of years. And an exhibition by specimen of the nonsense to which they have in this way committed themselves in their haste, may not be wholly uninstructive. But I must defer the display till another evening. I shall do them no injustice; but I trust it will be forgiven me should I exhibit, as they have exhibited themselves, a class of writers to whose assaults I have submitted for the last fourteen years without provocation and without reply. LECTURE TENTH. THE GEOLOGY OF THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. It has been well remarked, that that writer would be equally in danger of error who would assign very abstruse motives for the conduct of great bodies of men, or very obvious causes for the great phenomena of nature. The motives of the masses,--on a level always with the average comprehension,--are never abstruse; the causes of the phenomena, on the other hand, are never obvious. And when these last are hastily sought after, not from any devotion to scientific truth, or any genuine love of it, but for some purpose of controversy, we may receive it as a sure and certain fact that they will not be found. Some mere plausibility will be produced instead, bearing on its front an obviousness favorable mayhap to its reception for the time by the vulgar, but in reality fatal to its claims in the estimate of all deep thinkers; while truth will meanwhile lie concealed far below, in the bottom of her well, until patiently solicited forth by some previously unthought of process, in the character of some wholly unanticipated result. Such, in the history of science, has been the course and character of error on the one hand, and of actual discovery on the other: the error has been always comparatively obvious,--the discovery unexpected and abstruse. And as men descend in the scale of accomplishment or intellect, a nearer and yet nearer approximation takes place between their conceptions of the causes of the occult processes of nature, and the common and obvious motives which influence large masses of their fellows; until at length the sublime contrivances of the universe sink, in their interpretation of them, into the clumsy expedients of a bungling mechanism. Tested by their reading of the phenomena on this principle, we find curious gradations between the higher and the humbler orders of minds. The vortices of Descartes, for instance, involve but a simple idea, that might have been struck out by almost any individual of a tolerably lively fancy, who had walked by the side of a winding river, and seen sticks and straws revolving in its eddies. But no fancy, however active, or no reach of mere common sense, however respectable, could have originated, or conducted to a successful conclusion, that profound contemplation into which Newton fell in the garden of Woolsthorpe, when he saw the loosened apple drop from the tree, and succeeded in demonstrating that the planets are retained in their orbits by the same law which impels a falling pebble towards the ground. So little obvious, indeed, was the Newtonian scheme, that most of the contemporary generation of philosophers,--some of them, such as Fontenelle and his brother academicians of France, men of no mean standing,--died rejecting it. And the objections of Turrettine to the motion of the earth on its axis are, we find, still more obvious than even the idea of the vortices. It does at first seem natural enough to suppose, that if the earth's surface be speeding eastwards at the rate of several hundred miles in the hour (a thousand miles at the equator), the birds which flutter over it should be somewhat in danger of being left behind; and that atoms and down flakes floating in the atmosphere in a time of calm, instead of appearing, as they often do, either in a state of rest, or moving with equal freedom in every direction, ought to be seen hurrying westwards, as if puffed by the breath of a tornado. Such an objection must for a time have appeared as just as it seems obvious, especially in one's study on a Saturday night, with much of one's lecture still to write, and the Sabbath too near to permit of verification or experiment. Fontenelle, however, though he could not get over the difficulty of conceiving how the same gravitation which made a stone fall also kept the moon in its place, fairly surmounted that which puzzled Turrettine; and in his "Plurality of Worlds,"--a publication of the same age as the "Compendium Theologica,"--he makes his Marchioness surmount it too. "'But I have a difficulty to solve,' he represents the lady as saying, 'and you must be serious. As the earth moves, the air changes every moment; so we breathe the air of another country.' 'Not at all,' replied I; 'for the air which encompasses the earth follows with us, and turns with us. Have you not seen the labors of the silkworm? The shell or cocoon which it weaves around itself with so much art is of a down very loose and soft; and so the earth, which is solid, is covered, from the surface twenty leagues upwards, with a kind of down, which is the air, and, like the shell of the silkworm, turns along with it.'" Even Turrettine, however, was as far in advance of some of our contemners of science in the present day, as Fontenelle was in advance of Turrettine, or Newton in advance of Fontenelle. The old theologian could scarce have held, with a living ecclesiastic of the Romish Church in Ireland, Father Cullen, that the sun is _possibly_ only a fathom in diameter; or have asserted with a most Protestant lecturer who addressed an audience in Edinburgh little more than three years ago, that, though God created all the wild animals, it was the devil who made the flesh-eaters among them fierce and carnivorous; and, of course, shortened their bowels, lengthened their teeth, and stuck formidable claws into the points of their digits.[36] Further, the error of Turrettine was but that of his age, whereas our modern decriers of scientific fact and inference are always men greatly in the rear of theirs, and as far inferior to the ancient assertors of the same errors as the few untutored peasants and fishermen of our own time, located in remote parts of the country, who still retain the old faith in witchcraft, are inferior to the great lawyers, poets, and divines,--the Fairfaxes, Henry Mores, Judge Haleses, and Sir George Mackenzies,--who in the seventeenth century entertained a similar belief. And so it may seem somewhat idle work to take any pains in "scattering" such a "rear of darkness thin" as this forlorn phalanx composes. "Let them alone," said a lunatic in the lucid fit, to a soldier who had told him, when asked why he carried a sword, that it was to kill his enemies,--"let them alone, and they will all die of themselves." But though very inconsiderable, there is a comparatively large proportion of the class perilously posted, on both sides of the Atlantic, in what used to be termed of old in Scotland "the chair of verity;" and there they sometimes succeed in doing harm, all unwittingly, not to the science which they oppose, but to the religion which they profess to defend. I was not a little struck lately by finding in a religious periodical of the United States, a worthy Episcopalian clergyman bitterly complaining, that whenever his sense of duty led him to denounce from his pulpit the gross infidelity of modern geology, he could see an unbelieving grin rising on the faces of not a few of his congregation. Alas! who can doubt that such ecclesiastics as this good clergyman must virtually be powerful preachers on the skeptical side, to all among their people who, with intelligence enough to appreciate the geologic evidence, are still unsettled in their minds respecting that of the Christian faith. And so on this consideration alone it may be found not uninstructive to devote the address of the present evening to an exposure of the errors and nonsense of our modern anti-geologists,--the true successors and representatives, in the passing age, of the Franciscan and Salamanca doctors of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Let me first remark, that no one need expect to be original simply by being absurd. There is a cycle in nonsense, as certainly as in opinion of a more solid kind, which ever and anon brings back the delusions and errors of an earlier time: the follies of the present day are transcripts, unwittingly produced, and with of course a few variations, of follies which existed centuries ago; and it seems to be on this principle,--a consequence, mayhap, of the limited range of the human mind, not only in its elucidations of truth, but also in its forms of error,--that scarce an explanation of geologic phenomena has been given by the anti-geologists of our own times, that was not anticipated by writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was held, for instance,--in opposition to the great painter, Leonardo da Vinci, who flourished early in the sixteenth century, and was one of the first who, after the revival of learning, asserted the true character of organic remains,--that fossils were formed in the rocks through the planetary influences, or a certain plastic force in nature, and had never entered into the composition of living creatures or plants. And this view obtained very generally till about the middle of the seventeenth century, when, save for a brief space long after, in the times of Voltaire, it ceased to be regarded as any longer tenable. Curiously enough, however, it was virtually reproduced by one of the extant anti-geologists,--a clergyman of the English Church,--only three years ago, in a publication written, he says, to counteract "the immense mischief occasioned by the infidel works of geologists, _especially among the lower classes_," and which he has termed "a brief and complete refutation" of their "anti-scriptural theory."[37] "Fossils," says this courageous writer, "were not necessarily animated structures:" some of them were in all probability "formed of stone from the very first;" others, of inanimate flesh and bone. "The mammoth found under the ice in arctic regions had not necessarily been a living creature: it was created under the ice, and then preserved in that peculiar form of preservation, instead of being transmuted into stone, like the rest of its class." Such was the state of keeping of this famous mammoth, when discovered a little ere the beginning of the present century, that, as I had occasion formerly to remark, dogs and bears fed upon its flesh; and its bones, and part of its skin, covered with long red hair, are now in the museum of Petersburg. But there is no evidence whatever, according to this writer, that it had ever been a living creature: it was simply a created carcass. All organisms are, he holds, models or archetypes, fashioned during the first day in the depths of chaos, to typify or foreshadow the living plants and animals that were to be called into existence a few days later. "What," he asks, "do the cocoa-nuts, melons, and gourds, which have been found in the strata, show, but that the vegetable had its perfect archetype in chaos as well as the animal?" Nay, further, the geologist has but got into the apartment in which the original architect stored up his plans and models,--many of them, however, rejected ones. For "though every animal is formed after his archetype," we find him saying, "the converse is not true, that every chaotic structure is represented by its living _facsimile_." But they typify, if not living organisms, much more important things,--"they represent," says our writer, "the land of the shadow of death;" and the strata containing them, which geologists have opened, are symbolical of the "gates of death." "The state of preservation in which most fossils are, instead of having mouldered away, foreshadows immortality. The gradation, too, from the organisms whose types are _said to be_ lost or destroyed, and confused in innumerable heaps, up to the perfect and complete specimen, is no fanciful representation of the resurrection; while the isolated bones and parts of skeletons which, though found far apart, as they were created, have been fitted together by the skill of the accomplished anatomist, give assurance of the fact that our scattered dust--our _membra disjecta_--shall come together at the sound of the last trump." And this is "geology on Scripture principles," soberly expounded by a man who respects facts, while he gives no place to fancy. The "English clergyman" then goes on to show in his pamphlet, that the Coal Measures furnish no evidence of the earth's antiquity. They were formed, he says, by the finger of the Creator, "immediately and at once. A carboniferous tree of gigantic size has been discovered," he adds, "in the interior of the earth, of such a shape as entirely to prove the absurdity of a theory [that of the earth's antiquity] which has not a single valid argument to support it. It is described as having its trunk rising from the earth perpendicularly ten feet, and then bending over and extending horizontally sixty feet. Now, what living tree thus lopsided could support such a weight in such a direction? It seems to have been _created on purpose to silence the_ HORRID BLASPHEMIES _of geologists_; for it proves to a demonstration, that the upper, nether, and surrounding matter came into existence with it at the same instant; for how else could it have been preserved in such a position?" The triumph secured by the carboniferous tree, however,--though it does not seem wholly impossible that a tree might in any age of the world have been broken over some ten feet from its root, and bent in a horizontal position,--seems in some danger of being neutralized, as we read on, by the circumstance that geologists find not unfrequently, among their fossils, the dung of the carnivorous vertebrates, charged in many instances with the teeth, bones, and scales of the creatures on which they had preyed, and strongly impressed, in at least the coprolites of the larger Palæozoic ganoids, and of the enaliosaurs of the Secondary period, by the screw-like markings of a spiral intestine, similar in form to that now exemplified by the sharks and rays. And in maintaining his hypothesis that most fossils are mere archetypes--mere plans or models--of existences to be, the archetypal dung proves rather a stumbling-block, and the English clergyman waxes exceedingly wroth against the geologists. "We cannot," he says, "believe in such things as coprolites. They are only a curious form of matter commanded by Him who has made the flower to assume all shapes as well as all hues. He who would not allow so much as a tool to be lifted up on the stones that composed his altar, would certainly not allow the _work_ of animals to compose his creation, much less, then, their dung. The geological assertion that the Creator of this world formed it in some parts of coprolites savors very much of Satan or Beelzebub, the god of dung. Geologists could scarcely have made a more unfortunate self-refuting assertion than this." I question, however, whether the clergyman does well to be angry with the geologists here. That fossils are mere models and archetypes, is _his_ hypothesis, not theirs; and so it is he himself who is answerable, not they, for what he deems the impiety of the archetypal dung. His next statement is of a kind suited somewhat to astonish the practical geologist. "_It is the constant language of geologists_," he says, in giving the result of their discoveries, "_that no young have been found!!!_ while the larger fossils have been detected isolated, or in the company of others, all differing in kind." "Archetypal resemblances of ova have been found, and such things as _moths_; but these are distinct and perfect in their kind. The occurrence of the young, which are imperfect, is a fact which has not been, and never can be, established; _therefore it never can be proved that this world has had a longer existence than six thousand years_." It is "the constant language of geologists" that "no young have been found" in the fossil state. Amazing assertion! "Therefore it never can be proved that this world has had a longer existence than six thousand years." Astonishing inference! There is not a tyro in geology who ever looked over a set of fossils, or ever spent an hour in exploring a fossiliferous deposit, who does not know that the remains of organisms in every stage of growth may be found lying side by side in the same bed,--that almost every museum contains its series of molluscs, crustaceans, fishes, and corals, formed to illustrate species in their various stages of growth,--that, in especial, among the ammonites of the Secondary ages, and the trilobites of the Palæozoic ones, these series have been made with great care, in order to prevent the erroneous multiplication of species,--and that, in short, every richly fossiliferous stratum in the earth's crust repeats the lesson so often deduced from our churchyards, where graves of all sizes, from that of the infant of a day to that of the aged adult, may be found lying side by side. What the English clergyman represents as "the constant language of geologists," is a language which _no_ geologist ever yet used, or ever will. And his inference is in every way worthy of his premises. The flourish with which he concludes his pamphlet would be infinitely amusing had his language been just a little less solemn. "The writer of the above remarks has felt it his duty," we find him saying, "to publish them, not only to refute the arguments of the vain and puffed-lip geologist, who fancies himself wiser than God, but also to prevent, by God's blessing, the evil that must ensue from tampering with the sacred text. And now, what has Satan to say? Why, THE TABLES ARE TURNED. Let men beware. Why did not the British Association, at their twenty-third meeting, in September, 1853, acknowledge their error as a body, in applauding so loudly the assertion of one of their geological members at a previous meeting, that this earth existed ages before man? They may now have the satisfaction of thinking that, in spite of themselves, those impious plaudits have been turned by the wrath of God into hisses." Strange as the fact may seem, this passage was written, not in grave joke, but in serious earnest. The belief that fossil remains had never entered into the composition of living organisms, but had been formed in the rocks just as we find them, gradually gave place, during the seventeenth century, to the belief that they were the debris of the Noachian Deluge, and evidences, as they occurred in almost every known country, and were found on the top of lofty hills, of at once its universality and the height to which its waters had prevailed. And this hypothesis, like the others, has been reproduced by some of the anti-geologists of the present day. The known fact,--a result of modern science,--that the several formations (always invariable in their order of succession) have their groups of organisms peculiar to themselves, has, however, interposed a difficulty from which the earlier cosmogonists were exempt. It has become necessary to show that the Noachian cataclysm was strangely selective, in burying in the beds which it is held by the class to have formed, now one group of plants and animals, now quite another group, and anon yet another and different group still; and all this many times repeated with such nice care and discrimination, that not a single organism of the lower beds is to be detected in the middle ones, nor yet a single organism of either the middle or lower in the beds that lie above. Even this task, however, just a little lightened by here and there a suppression of the facts, has been attempted by the redoubtable Dean of York.[38] Fire and water were, he conceives, equally agents in the great catastrophe that destroyed the old world,--a circumstance which, if true, would have furnished with an admirable apology the class of persons who, according to the wit, would have cried out "Fire, fire," at the deluge. The dean conceives that at the commencement of the Flood, when torrents of rain were falling upon the land, numerous submarine volcanoes began to disgorge their molten contents into the sea, destroying the fish, and all other marine productions, by the intensity of the heat, and at the same time locking them up in strata formed of the erupted matter. This process took place ere the land floods, laden with the spoils of island and continent, and the accompanying mud and sand, could arrive at the remoter depths; which, however, they ultimately reached, and formed a second formation, overlying the first. There were thus two formations originated,--a marine formation below, and a terrestrial or fresh water formation above; but as these two deposits could not be made to include all the geological phenomena with which even the dean was acquainted, he had nicely to parcel out the work of his volcanoes on the one hand, and that of his land floods on the other, into separate fits or paroxysms, each of which served to entomb a distinct class of creatures, and originate a definite set of rocks. Thus, the first work of his volcanoes was to form the Transition series of strata. As a commencement of the whole, the internal fire blew up from the bed of the ocean, in tremendous explosions, vast quantities of pulverized rock mixed with clay, which, slowly subsiding, and covering up, as it sank, shells, stone-lilies, and trilobites, formed the Silurian rocks. A second explosion brought up the vents of the volcanoes to the level of the ocean; and while the Old Red Sandstone, thus produced, and charged with fish killed by the heat, was settling on their flanks, they themselves, as if seized by black vomit, began to disgorge in vast quantities, coal in the liquid state. Very opportunely, just ere it cooled, enormous quantities of vegetables, washed out to sea by the extraordinary land floods, were precipitated immediately over it; and, sticking in its viscid surface, or sinking into its substance through cracks formed in it during the cooling, they became attached to it in such considerable masses, as to lead long after to the very mistaken notion that coal itself was of vegetable origin. Then there ensued another deposit of red sand, with salt boiled into it; and then a deposition of lime and clay. The land floods still continuing, the great Sauroid reptiles which had haunted the rivers and lower plains began to yield to their force, and their carcasses, floating out to sea, sank amid the slowly subsiding lime and clay, now known as the Lias. The volcanoes too were still very active; and the lighter shells, ammonites, and the like, which had been previously bobbing up and down on the boiling surface, now sank by myriads; for the viscid argillaceous mud thrown up by the fiery ebullitions from beneath stuck fast to them, and dragged them down. Then came the formation of the Oolite, rolled into little egg-like pellets by the waves; and last of all, the Green sand and Chalk; after which the waters ran off, and sank into the deep hollow which now forms the bed of the ocean, but which previous to the cataclysm had been the place of the land. The dean, as he went on, fell into some little confusion regarding the true place of some of his animals, such as the megatherium, which arrived in his arrangement a little too soon. He spoke, too--if a newspaper report is to be credited--of a heavy creature soon overtaken and drowned by the rising waters, which he termed the _pterogactylus_, and which does not seem to have turned up, either in the body or out of it, since it was lost on that memorable occasion. Nor did he make any provision in his arrangement for the formation of the various Tertiary deposits. But then all these are slight matters, that could be very easily woven into his hypothesis. As the flood rose along the hill sides, first such of the weightier animals would perish as could not readily climb steep acclivities; and then the oxen, the horses, the deer, and the goats, with the lighter carnivora, who, as they would die last,--some of them not until the final disappearance of the hill-tops,--would of course be entombed in the upper deposits. Such is the hypothesis of the Dean of York,--a hypothesis of which it may be justly affirmed, that it is well nigh as ingenious as the circumstances of the case permit, and against which little else can be urged than that it must seem rather cumbrous and fanciful to the class who do not know geology, and, on the whole, somewhat inadequate to the class who do. The Flood, however, is not left to do the whole geologic work, by even such of the anti-geologists as assign to it the largest share. A great unrecorded convulsion which accompanied the Fall is held by some of their number to have greatly assisted, by laying down the older formations of the fossiliferous rocks; and very much is said to have been done during the extended antediluvian period that succeeded it. One of perhaps the most amusing though least known of the writers that take this special view is a Scotchman, resident in a secluded provincial town, who for the last twelve or fifteen years has been printing ingenious little books against the infidel geologists, and getting letters of similar character inserted in such of our country newspapers as are ambitious of rendering their science equal to their literature. And from the great trouble which he has taken with the writings of the individual who now addresses you, he seems to regard them as peculiarly unsolid and dangerous. According to this profound cosmogonist, the world before the Fall was rather more than twice its present size, and very artificially constructed.[39] It was a hollow ball, supported inside by a framework of metal wrought into hexagonal reticulations, somewhat like the framework of the great iron bridge over the river Wear at Sunderland; and which had an open space in its centre, occupied by a vast tubular furnace lying direct south and north, which threw out huge volumes of flame towards the poles. Over the reticulated framework there rose a great, thick _firmament_ of metal, which formed the inner shell of the globe; over the metal there lay a considerably thicker shell of granite; and over the granite, a thinner shell of a substance not specified, perhaps not known, but which, from its being completely water-tight, served the purpose of the layer of asphalt or _terra cotta_ which the architect spreads over his flat roofs, or on the tops of his sloping terraces, afterwards to be covered with soil and laid out into gardens. Such, it seems, was that portion of the framework of our great globe which corresponded to the hollow lath and plaster framework of the little globes used in schools; while its uppermost layer,--correspondent with the slips of the map which the geographer pastes on the model and then varnishes,--was formed of earth and water, economically laid out into "most useful and tasteful configurations,"--the earth into pretty little rising grounds and valleys, and the water into seas and lakes of no great extent, but which formed, from their very handsome combinations, "a terraqueous surface all over PERFECTLY PARADISAICAL." Over this exquisitely neat earth there lay an enveloping atmosphere, greatly thinner and less dense than the air at present is, and incapable, in consequence, of being agitated by storms; while directly over the northern and southern extremities of the world the polar auroras, now so fitful and broken, extended in a permanent arch, and gave light, during the long dark winters, to the regions lying below. And as warmth was as necessary to the paradisaical perfection of these districts as light, they received the necessary heat from the great double-acting furnace in the interior, which, belching out flames at both ends, acted powerfully against the polar portions of the metallic crust or shell, and thus maintained the necessary glow in the absence of the sun, on the principle on which a frying-pan or Scotch _girdle_ is heated when placed by the cookmaid over the fire. And such, according to this excellent world-fashioner and very zealous man, was the construction of that unblighted and unbroken earth which was of old pronounced to be "very good." The Fall, however, produced a most remarkable and singularly disastrous change. The earth was somehow partially crushed and broken, contemporaneously with the event,--like a strong fishing basket when it accidentally falls from a coach-top under the wheel; and, from a most interesting colored copperplate that illustrates one of the author's treatises (for he draws as well as he writes), the exact damage which it received can be minutely estimated. The interior network was compressed into all sorts of irregular polygons; the iron firmament was broken into great fragments,--some of which may be seen in the print hanging down into the hollow interior, like patches of broken plaster dangling from a ceiling, suspended by the hairs originally employed to give the necessary tenacity to the lime. The great granitic shell was also broken, but broken so nicely, on the principle of the arch, that the pieces remained in nearly their original places. Finally, vast rents are seen to occur in the cement and soil of the outer crust; and these great rents, which must have formed enormous gulfs and deep interminable ravines, were destined, it would seem, to perform a most important part in the future geology of the globe. Forming impassable lines of demarcation between the several portions into which they broke up the earth's surface, they imprisoned the recently created animals in separate groups, kept as completely from mixing together as the fallow-deer of one loftily-walled park are kept from mixing with the white oxen of another loftily-walled park, or as the kangaroos or duck-billed quadrupeds of Australia are kept by the surrounding ocean from mixing with the tigers of Sumatra or the tortoises of Madagascar. I employ the writer's own happy illustration:--"In some places these fragments" of the earth's crust "would be piled more or less above each other, and in others quite detached and isolated, like fragments of ice on the bank of a river after a thaw." They would of course be on very different levels, each having, as I have said, a distinct group of animals of its own; and when, after the lapse of nearly two thousand years, the great catastrophe of the Flood came on, it would necessarily find, as it rose along the levels, and submerged platform after platform in succession, a different and yet different set of creatures to kill. To borrow from the description of this ingenious cosmogonist, "those on the lower fragments would be first engulphed, and their races completely extinguished from off the surface, and deposited in the earth; then those on higher and higher upwards, till the whole became submerged. And we have only to suppose that man, with the present survivors, were those that occupied one of the higher table-lands when the Flood commenced (and of course in that case Noah could collect into the ark only out of those of his own country); then the result would be, that man and his present contemporaries would be among the last overwhelmed. This will sufficiently account for the fact of his and their remains not being found deep in the earth.... "The two most interesting geological facts therefore, namely, that distinct organisms are to be found in distinct formations respectively; and secondly, _that no remains of man, and few or none of the other races at present surviving, are to be found in any but comparatively recent formations,_--these two grand facts of geology, we say, instead of pointing back to vast cycles of ages before the creation, seem to point merely to the peculiar physical circumstances of the fallen planet in the interval between those two eventful stages in its history, the Fall and Flood, and the natural consequences of these circumstances in causing distinct divisions, and some of these of different elevations, among the organic living creatures, during the interval." One other circumstance completes this really original and beautiful hypothesis. The cosmogonist holds that the Flood,--no mere tranquil rising of the waters, as some suppose,--was accompanied by terrible convulsions, which reduced to utter ruin the already shattered earth. The granitic dome fell inwards upon the central furnace; and the fires, bursting outwards under the enormous pressure, found vent at the surface, and made the volcanoes. And this collapsed and diminished world,--scarce half the bulk of the old one,--with no heating furnace under its polar regions, nor aught save the merest tatters of an aurora flitting occasionally over them,--greatly too dense in itself, and surrounded by a greatly too dense atmosphere,--with its huge mountains, vast oceans, wide steppes, and arid deserts, with its snows, its frosts, its drenching rains, its horrible tempests, its terrible thunder storms, and devastating earthquakes,--all alike frightful defects, not in the original plan,--is not only unlike the primeval world, not very good, or, unlike the antediluvian world, tolerably good, but not good at all. "On taking a bird's-eye view of the geographical and hydrographical features or superficies of the globe," says this bold writer, "any unprejudiced person must at once admit, that in either of these departments there is scarce a trace of that beautiful, tasteful, and economical design which we have a right to expect from the admitted qualities of the great Author, and his avowed object in the structure and report of it when newly finished." It is added, however, that "its _present object_, as the _Siberia_--the penal settlement--of expatriated rebels, it is in its _present state_ well calculated to fulfil." It may be worth mentioning, that the writer who sets himself after a fashion so peculiar to assert and justify the ways of Providence against the geologists resides in one of the loveliest districts in Scotland,--a district, however, shaggy with rock, and overshadowed by great mountains, and occasionally visited by earthquake tremors, and both snow and thunder storms, and so, with all its wild beauty to other eyes, merely, I must suppose, one of the rougher districts of the penal Siberia in his. He is, indeed, particularly severe upon mountains; though not, as he tells us, wholly devoid of a lurking prejudice in their favor. But what weak prejudice might palliate or plead for, his better judgment condemns. "See," says this judicious writer, "vast districts of the globe disfigured by tremendous masses of rugged and almost barren mountains.... What, cry some, would you bury as deformities the lofty peak and rugged mountain brow, nature's palaces,--generally the grandest and most sublime objects in natural scenery! We cordially assure the reader we are by no means prejudiced against these grand objects; _for if prejudice we have on the subject, it is rather on the other side_. It is therefore the force of evidence alone makes us,--reluctantly we admit,--give up these to rank among the derangements and deformities of nature. She, according to her usual _taste_ and _economy_, would never be at the expense of rearing, and that upon ground _that might have otherwise been much better occupied_, such unwieldy, useless masses of matter, merely for the sake of gratifying the taste for grandeur and sublimity in a few of her sons, nor, indeed, for any other use we ever heard ascribed to them.... According to _our_ test, a rich and gently undulatory surface, intersected with rivulets and sheets of water, in the places taken up by these elevations, would be far better, as combining in the highest degree the _utile cum dulce_."[40] To such of my audience as are familiar with Dr. Thomas Burnet's "Sacred Theory of the Earth" (1684), that revolution in the cycle of hypothesis to which I have referred, and through which the visionaries of the later ages return to the dreams which had occupied the visionaries of an earlier time, must be sufficiently apparent in this passage. For not only does Burnet speak after the same manner of hills and mountains, but also of an idle, ill-founded prejudice entertained in their favor. We find him thus summing up a general survey of the mountains of the globe:--"Look upon these great ranges: in what confusion do they lie! They have neither form nor beauty, nor shape, nor order, no more than the clouds in the air. Then, how barren, how desolate, how naked are they! How they stand neglected by nature! Neither the rains can soften them, nor the dews from heaven make them fruitful. I give this short survey of the mountains of the earth _to help to remove that prejudice we are apt to have_, or that conceit that the present earth is regularly formed.... There is nothing in nature," adds this writer, "more shapeless and ill-figured than an old rock or a mountain." I leave it to my audience to determine how far this depreciatory view,--whether regarded as that of Dr. Burnet or of the modern anti-geologist,--agrees with the estimate of the higher minds, or whether it manifests the proper respect for the adorable Being who, in his infinite wisdom, made our world what it is. Let me next show that some of even the abler and more respectable anti-geologists exhibit no very profound veneration for the letter of Scripture, when, instead of bearing, as they think, against the deductions of their opponents, they find it directly opposed to fancies of their own. It is held by not a few among them, that at the Deluge the sea and land changed places. When the waters receded, it was found, they allege, that the old land had become ocean, and the old ocean had become land; and as there are certain rivers which are described in Scripture as flowing beside Eden, and which, judging by the names given them, still exist, it has become imperative on the assertors of the hypothesis to show that the rivers which now drain tracts of what they hold was then sea, and that fall into seas which they hold were then land, could not by any possibility have formed the boundaries of the old Adamic garden. Let us mark how Mr. Granville Penn,--certainly one of the most extensively informed of his class,--deals with this difficulty.[41] There are, he argues, certain great corruptions of Scripture. What had been at first written as marginal notes by uninspired men, and were in some cases very erroneous and absurd, came in the course of transcription to be transferred, wholly by mistake, from the side of the page into the body of the text; and thus, in at least a few places, the Scriptures were vitiated, and now declare, instead of Divine truth, what is neither sense nor fact. And on this very general, and certainly most perilous ground, he goes on to argue, unsupported by a single ancient manuscript, and solely on what he terms internal evidence, that the verses in Genesis which conflict with his hypothesis must be regarded as mere idle glosses, ignorantly or surreptitiously introduced into the text by the ancient copyists. "In the second chapter of Genesis," we find him saying, "_there appears an internal critical evidence_ of an insertion of the 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th verses, similar to that of the 4th verse of the 5th chapter of St. John, and constituting, in a similar manner, a _parenthesis_ intersecting the thread of the narrative, and introduced solely for a similar purpose of illustration. It does not wear the character of the simple narrative in which it appears, but _of the surcharge of the gloss or note of a later age, founded upon the fanciful traditions then prevailing with respect to the situation of the ancient Paradise_." This certainly is cutting the knot; and, if erected into a precedent by the geologist, would no doubt greatly facilitate the labor of reconciliation. It would, however, be perilous work for _him_. "A wolf," says Plutarch, "peeping into a hut where a company of shepherds were assembled, saw them regaling themselves with a joint of mutton. 'Ye gods!' he exclaimed, 'what a clamor these men would have raised if they had caught _me_ at such a banquet.'" I need scarcely add, that the hypothesis in whose behalf Scripture is thus divested of its authority, and recklessly cast aside, is entirely a worthless one; and that the various continents of the globe, instead of all dating from one period little more than four thousand years back, are of very various ages,--some of them comparatively modern, though absolutely old in relation to human history; and some of so hoar an antiquity, that the term since man appeared upon earth might be employed as a mere unit to measure it by. It need not surprise us that a writer who takes such strange liberties with a book which he professes to respect, and which he must have had many opportunities of knowing, should take still greater liberties with a science for which he entertains no respect whatever, and of whose first principles he is palpably ignorant. And yet the wild recklessness of some of his explanations of geological phenomena must somewhat astonish all sufficiently acquainted with the science to know that the place and relations of its various formations have been long since determined, and now as certainly form the regulating data of the practical miner, as the places and relations long since determined by the geographer form the regulating data of the practical navigator or engineer. It is as certain, for instance, that the Oolitic system underlies the Green Sand and the Chalk, with all the various formations of the Tertiary division,--Eocene Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene,--as that York is situated to the south of Edinburgh, or that both these cities lie very considerably to the north of London and Paris. And the anti-geologist who would argue, in the heat of controversy, that the Oolite and the Pleistocene were contemporaneous deposits, would be no more worthy of reply than the anti-geographer who would assert, in order to serve some argumentative purpose, that the North Cape lies in the same latitudinal parallel as South California, or that Terra del Fuego is but a day's sailing from Iceland. And yet such, as I intimated on a former evening, is the line taken up by Mr. Granville Penn, in dealing with the difficulties of the Kirkdale Cave, so remarkable for its accumulations of gnawed bones of the Pleistocene ages,--especially for its bones of hyænas, tigers, bears, wolves, rhinoceroses, and elephants. The cave occurs in the moorlands of Yorkshire, in a limestone rock of that Oolitic division to which the Oxford Clay and the Coral Rag belong, and contains corals and shells that had passed into extinction long even ere the Tertiary period began; while in the cave itself, mixed with bones of the extinct mammals of the geologic age in immediate advance of the present one, there have been found the contemporary remains of animals that still live in our fields and woods, such as the hare, the rabbit, the weasel, and the water rat. And we find Mr. Penn assigning both the Oolitic rock in which the cave is hollowed, and the mammalian remains of the cave itself, equally to the period of the deluge. The limestone existed at that time, it would seem, as a soft calcareous paste, into which the animal remains, floated northwards from intertropical regions on the waters of the Flood, were precipitated in vast quantities, and sank, and then, fermenting under the putrefactive influences, the gas which they formed blow up the yielding lime and mud around them into a long narrow cave, just as a glass-blower blows up a bottle, or as a little yeast blows up into similar but greatly smaller cavities a bit of leaven. And the stalactites and stalagmites which encrust the Kirkdale Cave are, Mr. Penn holds, simply the last runnings of the lime that exuded after the general mass had begun to set. Certainly any one disposed to take such liberties with the Bible on the one hand, and with geologic science on the other, as those taken in the given instances by this most formidable of the anti-geologists, could have but little difficulty in making either Scripture as geological or geology as Scriptural as he had a mind. His chief danger would be that of making the sounder theologians just a little angry, and of escaping, unless quoted for the joke's sake, the notice of the geologists altogether. In truth, the extreme absurdity of our later anti-geologists in virtually contending, in the controversy, that _their_ ignorance of an interesting science, founded on millions of determined facts, ought to be permitted to weigh against the knowledge of the men who have studied it most thoroughly, forms their best defence. It secures them against all save neglect. As, however, some of their number are well meaning men, who would not be ridiculous if they could help it, and only oppose themselves to the geologists because they deem them mischievous and in error, it may be worth while showing them, by an example or two, the ludicrous nature of the positions which in their honest ignorance they permit themselves to occupy, and the real scope and bearing of the arguments which they unwittingly permit themselves to use. I shall adduce two several instances of reasoning, directed by the anti-geologists _against_ their antagonists (as they themselves believed), but which, from their ignorance of the true state of the argument, and of the bearing of the facts with which they dealt, in reality made out for these antagonists as strong a case as they could possibly have made out for themselves. And I am sure that, rather than be found siding with their opponents, the anti-geologists would be content even to acquire a little geology. I shall select my first instance from the records of the annual controversy which used to rage some ten or fifteen years ago, in sermons, newspapers, and magazines, immediately after every meeting of the British Association. A religious Dublin newspaper,--the "Statesman and Record,"--since extinct, took always an active part in these discussions on the anti-geological side, and boldly affirmed, as in a number now before me, that geology had the devil for its author. A learned correspondent of the paper, who was, however, somewhat more charitable, thought that at least the _facts_ of the science might be exempted from a condemnation so sweeping; nay, that, well interpreted, they might be found decidedly opposed to at least the more mischievous deductions of the geologists; and in illustrating the point, we find him thus arguing, from certain appearances in the valley of the Nile, that the globe which we inhabit cannot possibly be more than six thousand years old.[42] "The valley of the Nile," says this writer, "is known to be covered with a bed of slime which the river has deposited in its periodical inundations, and which rests on a foundation of sand, like that of the adjacent desert. The French savans who accompanied Bonaparte in his Egyptian expedition made several experiments to ascertain the thickness and depth of this superincumbent bed. They dug about two hundred pits, and carefully measured the thickness in the transversal section of the valley, where the deposit had been free from obstacles, and had not been materially increased or lessened by local causes. They found the mean of all these measurements to be six and a half metres, or rather more than twenty feet. M. Gironde endeavored to determine the quantity of slime deposited in a century; and he found that the elevation of soil in that period was rather less than four inches and a half! Dividing the total thickness of the bed by the centenary elevation, he found the quotient 56.50; whence it followed that the inundations had commenced 5650 years before the year 1800, when the experiments were made,--a number which only differed 159 years from the Mosaic date. The difference is not very important, when it is considered that the most trifling error, whether in the measure of the entire superincumbent bed, or in the valuation of the quantity of slime deposited in a century, affects the final results. Notwithstanding this, the coincidence between the sacred historian and the computations of science is remarkable, and furnishes one proof more of the harmony existing between nature and revelation. An honest experimentalist was constrained to arrive at this conclusion at a period when the infidel school of our continental neighbors was in high feather. I am sorry to add, that the result of his own calculation had not that effect on the philosopher himself, or his free-thinking associates, which, for their own sakes, was desirable; but it is no less valuable to us on that account; for we know that an unwilling witness to the truth is worth a score of evidences already prejudiced in its favor." Now, this is clear, distinct statement; and nothing can be more evident than that the theologian who makes it holds he is reasoning with conclusive effect in behalf of what may be termed the short chronology,--not in its legitimate connection with the recent introduction of the human species, but in its supposed bearing on the age of the earth. And in doing so he commits himself to the apparent positive fact, determined on what may be regarded as geologic data, that the river Nile has been flowing over its bed for about as many years as have elapsed, according to the Hebrew chronology adopted by Usher, since the creation of man, and no more. To the integrity of this inference he pledges himself, as an inference to which the infidel ought to have yielded, as conclusive in its bearing on the question of the earth's age, and as of singular value to the believer who sets himself to deal with the evidences of his faith. Now, without referring to the circumstance that the data on which the French savans under Napoleon founded have since been challenged by geologists, such as Lieutenant Newbold and Sir G. Wilkinson, who have carefully surveyed the rocks and soils of Egypt with the assistance of clearer light than existed at the commencement of the century, let us, for the argument's sake, hold the inference to be quite as good as this theologian regards it. And see, we urge upon him, that you yourself do not suffer it to drop should you find that it commits you to the other side of the argument. Be at least as fair and honest as you say the infidels ought to have been. The six and a half metres of silt and slime,--representative, let us hold, of from five to six thousand years,--rest, you say, on "a foundation of sand like that of the adjacent desert." But have you ascertained on what the sand rests? I know nothing of that, replies the theologian; I had not even thought of that. But the geologist has thought of it, we reply; and has spent much time under the hot sun in ascertaining the point. For nearly three hundred miles,--from the inner boundaries of the delta to within a few hours' journey of the cataracts,--the silt and sand rest on what is known as the "marine" or nummulitic limestone,--a formation of great extent, for it runs into the Nubian desert on the one hand, and into the Libyan desert on the other; and which, though it abounds in the animalcules of the European chalk, is held to belong, in at least its upper beds, which are charged with nummulites, to the earlier Eocene. Over this marine limestone there rests a newer formation, of later Tertiary age, which contains the casts of sea shells, and whole forests of dicotyledonous trees, converted into a flint-like chert; and over all repose the sands and gravels of the desert. Underneath the silt of the river, then, and the sand of the desert, lie these two formations of the Tertiary division. The lower, which is of great thickness, must have been of slow formation. It is composed almost exclusively, in many parts, of microscopic animals, and abounds in others in fossil shells,--nautili, ostreadæ, turritella, and nummulites, with corals, sponges, the remains of crustacea, and the teeth of fishes. And between the period of its deposition and that of the formation which rests upon it the surface of what is now Egypt must have been elevated over the surface of the sea, to be covered, in the course of ages, by great forests, which, ere the land assumed its present form and level, were submerged by another oscillation of the surface, and petrified amid beds of a siliceous sand at the bottom of the ocean. Nor is the underlying marine limestone by any means the oldest of the sedimentary rocks of Egypt. It rests on a sandstone of Permian or Triassic age; the sandstone rests, in turn, on the famous Breccia de Verde of Egypt; and the Breccia on a group of Azoic rocks, gneisses, quartzes, mica schists, and clay slates, that wrap round the granitic nucleus of Syene. The formations of Egypt constitute a well-determined part of that great series of systems which compose the upper portion of the earth's crust: its silt is by far the most inconsiderable of its deposits; and if five thousand six hundred and fifty years were exhausted in laying down layer after layer of the twenty feet which form _its_ average thickness, what enormous periods must we not demand in addition for the laying down of the forest formation, of the marine limestone formation, of the New Red Sandstone formation, of the Breccia de Verde formation, and, in short, for the some ten miles of fossiliferous rock of which those deposits form such definite, well-determined portions; besides the time necessary for the production of the enormously developed Azoic rocks which lie under all! The theologian, in this instance, instead of reasoning, as he himself supposed, in behalf of the short chronology, has been making out a very formidable case for the long one; and all that the geologist can have to urge upon him in the circumstances is simply that he should act as he holds the infidel ought to have done, and yield to the force of evidence. I may mention in the passing, that some of the most ancient buildings of Egypt are formed of the Tertiary marine limestones of the country; the stones of the pyramids are charged with nummulites, known to the Arabs as "Pharaoh's beans;" and these organisms stand out in high relief on the weathered portions of the Great Sphinx. Some of the oldest things in the world in their relation to human history,--erections, many of which had survived the memory of their founders even in the days of Herodotus,--are formed of materials so modern in their relation to the geologic epochs, that they had no existence as rock until after the Palæozoic and Secondary ages had gone by. Not only the Carboniferous sandstone of the High Church and Parliament House of Edinburgh, but even the Oolitic (that is, Portland stone) of Somerset House and St. Paul's, are of an antiquity incalculably vast compared with the stone out of which the oldest of the pyramids were fashioned. [Illustration: Fig. 116. NUMMULITES LÆVIGATA. (_Pharaoh's Beans._)] The second example which I shall adduce is one with which many of my auditors must be already familiar. The Falls of Niagara are gradually eating their way through an elevated tract of table-land, upwards towards Lake Erie, at the rate of about fifty yards in forty years; and it has been argued by Sir Charles Lyell, that as they are now seven miles distant from Queenston, where the elevation of the plateaux begins, they must have taken about ten thousand years to scoop out their present deep channel through that space.[43] Ten thousand years ago the Falls were, he infers, at Queenston; and the grounds on which he reasons are exactly those on which one would infer that a laborer who had cut a ditch two hundred yards long at the rate of ten yards per day, and was still at work without pause or intermission, had begun to cut it just twenty days previous. A reverend anti-geologist takes up Sir Charles;[44] and, after denouncing the calculation as "a stab at the Christian religion," seeing it involves the assertion that the "Falls were actually at Queenston four thousand years before the creation of the world according to Moses," he brings certain facts, adduced both by other writers and Sir Charles himself, to bear on the calculation, such as the fact that the deep trench through which the Niagara runs is much narrower in its lower than in its upper reaches, and that the river must have performed its work of excavation, when the breadth was less, at a greatly quicker rate than now. And thus the work of excavating the trench is brought fairly within six thousand years. Nor is the principle of the reasoning bad. In our illustration of the ditch excavated by the laborer we of course take it for granted that it is a ditch of the same depth and breadth throughout, and excavated in the same sort of soil; for if greatly narrower and shallower at one place than at another, or dug in a greatly softer mould, the rate of its excavation at different times might be very different indeed, and the general calculation widely erroneous, if based on the ratio of progress when it went on most slowly, taken as an average ratio for the whole. But the anti-geologist provokes only a smile when, in his triumph, he exultingly exclaims, "It is on grounds such as these that the most learned and voluminous among English geologists disputes the Mosaic history of the Creation and Deluge,--a strong proof that even men of argument on other subjects often reason in the most childish and ridiculous manner, and on grounds totally false, when they undertake to deny the truth of the Holy Scriptures." Now, it must be wholly unnecessary to remark here, that it is surely one thing to "undertake to deny the truth of the Holy Scriptures," and quite another and different thing to hold that the Niagara Falls may have been at Queenston ten thousand years ago; or further, that it seems not in the least wise to stake the truth of Revelation on any such issue. Let me request you, however, to observe, that in one important respect this writer resembles the former one. The former, ignorant of the various phenomena exhibited by the great deposits of Egypt, exhausted all his five thousand six hundred years of available time in accounting for the formation of one of the least of them,--the silt of the Nile; and the latter, though he bids down Sir Charles some four thousand four hundred years or so in the one item of scooping out the bed of the St. Lawrence, at least expends the remainder of the ten thousand,--his five thousand six hundred years,--in that work of excavation alone, and leaves himself no further sums to set off against the various geologic processes that may have preceded it. In this case, as in the other, let us grant, for the argument's sake, all the facts. Let us admit that the trench through which the St. Lawrence now flows has been cut by the river in somewhat less than six thousand years. But through what, let us ask, has it been cut? There can exist no doubt on the subject: it has been cut through an ancient graveyard of the Upper Silurian system, charged with the peculiar fossils characteristic of what are known as the Clinton and Niagara groups, and common, many of them, to the Upper Silurian of our own country and of the European continent. _Leptæna depressa_ and _Pentamerus oblongus_, two of the most frequent shells of the deposit, occur also in equal abundance in the Dudley and Caradoc formations of England; its prevailing encrinite, _Ichthyocrinus lævis_, is scarce distinguishable from an encrinite which I have often picked up in the quarries of the "Wren's Nest" (_Ichthyocrinus pyriformis_); while its prevailing trilobite, _Phacops limulurus_, seems to be but a transatlantic variety of our well known _Asaphus (Phacops) caudatus_. Further, the sequence of the various formations both above and below the Niagara group, is shown with remarkable distinctness in that part of the world along the shores of the great lakes. They may be traced downward, on the one hand, along the Lower Silurian deposits, to the non-fossiliferous base on which the system rests, and upwards, on the other, through the Old Red Sandstone and the Carboniferous Limestone, to the workable Coal Measures. Both stratigraphically and palæontologically the place in the scale of the Niagara graveyard can be definitely determined; and a superficial deposit on the heights in its immediate neighborhood shows that the river did not begin its work of excavation among its long extinct shells, trilobites, and corals, until after not only the great Palæozoic, but also the Secondary and Tertiary divisions had been laid down, and the recent period ushered in. The superficial shells of the adjacent heights belong to the Pleistocene age, and show that in even that comparatively modern time the lower lands of Upper Canada were submerged beneath the level of the ocean, and that a series of deep seas, connected by broad sounds, occupied the place of the great lakes. Not until the last upheaval of the land was the river now known as the St. Lawrence called into existence, to begin its work of excavation; and ere that event took place, fully ten miles of fossiliferous rock had been deposited on the earth's surface, charged with the remains of many succeeding creations. The deposit through which the St. Lawrence is slowly mining its way is older than the river itself by the vast breadth of the four Tertiary periods, by that of all the Secondary ages,--Cretaceous, Oolitic, and Triassic,--by the periods, too, of the Permian system, of the Carboniferous system, of the Old Red system, and of the uppermost beds of the Upper Silurian system. But a simple illustration may better serve to show the true character of the conclusion urged here by the opponent of Sir Charles, than any such line of statement as that which I employ, however clear to the geologist. In the year 1817, Prince's Street, in Edinburgh, was opened up to the Calton Hill, and the Calton burying-ground cut through to the depth of many feet by the roadway. Let us suppose that when the excavation has been carried a hundred yards into the cemetery, a geologist, finding the laborers cutting on the average about a yard per day, simply intimates as his opinion that the laborers have been a hundred days at work. "No," replies a controversialist on the anti-geological side; "for the first fifty yards, so soft was the subsoil, and so shallow the covering of mould, that the laborers must have cut at the rate of two yards a day; it has been merely for the last fifty yards that they have been excavating at the present slow rate: they cannot have been more than seventy-five days at work. I marvel exceedingly at the absurdity of geological reasoners: _palpably the burying-ground of the Calton is only seventy-five days old._" Now, such, in no exaggerated, but, on the contrary, greatly modified form, is the argument that would limit the age of the earth to the period during which the St. Lawrence has been scooping out a channel for itself, from Queenston to Niagara, through an ancient Silurian burying-ground. Both arguments alike confound the age of the ancient burying-grounds with the date of the modern excavations opened up through them; but in order to render the argument of my illustration equally absurd with the other, it would be not only necessary to infer that the Calton cemetery was only seventy-five days old, but also that the rock on which it rested was no older. But enough of follies such as these! I had marked a good many other passages of similar character in the writings of the recent anti-geologists, and would have little difficulty in filling a volume with such; but it would be a useless, though mayhap curious work, and is much better exhibited by specimen than as a whole. A little folly is amusing, but much of it fatigues. There is a time coming, and now not very distant, when the vagaries of the anti-geologists will be as obsolete as those of the geographers of Salamanca, or as those of the astronomers who upheld the orthodoxy of Ptolemy against Galileo and Newton; and when they will be regarded as a sort of curious fossils, very monstrous and bizarre, and altogether of an extinct type, but which had once not only life, but were formidable. It will then be seen by all what a noble vestibule the old geologic ages form to that human period in which moral responsibility first began upon earth, and a creature destined to immortality anticipated an eternal hereafter. There is always much of the mean and the little in the worlds which man creates for himself, and in the history which he gives them. Of all the abortions of the middle ages which have come down to us, I know not a more miserable one,--at once ludicrous and sad,--than that heavens and earth of Cosmas _Indicopleustes_, the monk, which I illustrated by diagrams in my last lecture (Figs. 114, 115). They are just such heavens and earth as a monk might have made, and made too at a sitting. The heavens, represented as a solid arch raised on tall walls, resemble, as a whole, the arch which figures in the middle of a freemason's apron, or, more homely still, the section of a wine cellar; while the earth lies beneath as a great plain or floor, with a huge hill in the distance, behind which the sun passes when it is night. And yet this scheme gave law to the world for more than six centuries, and lay like a nightmare on physical discovery, astronomic and geographical. The anti-geologists have been less mischievous, for they live in a more enlightened age; and we already see but the straggling remains of the body, and know that the time cannot be far distant when it will be as completely extinct as any of the old faunas. The great globe, ever revolving on itself, and journeying in space round the sun, in obedience to laws which it immortalized a Newton to discover and demonstrate, is an infinitely more sublime and noble object than the earth of Cosmas the monk, with its conical mountain and its crypt-like firmament; nor can I doubt that its history throughout the long geologic ages,--its strange story of successive creations, each placed in advance of that which had gone before, and its succeeding organisms, vegetable and animal, ranged according to their appearance in time, on principles which our profounder students of natural science have but of late determined,--will be found in an equal degree more worthy of its Divine Author than that which would huddle the whole into a few literal days, and convert the incalculably ancient universe which we inhabit into a hastily run-up erection of yesterday. LECTURE ELEVENTH. ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND.[45] PART I. Scotland has its four fossil floras,--its flora of the Old Red Sandstone, its Carboniferous flora, its Oolitic flora, and that flora of apparently Tertiary age of which his Grace the Duke of Argyll found so interesting a fragment overflown by the thick basalt beds and trap tuffs of Mull. Of these, the only one adequately known to the geologist is the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures,--probably the richest, in at least individual plants, which the world has yet seen. The others are all but wholly unknown; and the Association may be the more disposed to tolerate the comparative meagreness of the few brief remarks which I purpose making on two of their number,--the floras of the Old Red Sandstone and the Oolite,--from the consideration that that meagreness is only too truly representative of the present state of our knowledge regarding them; and that if my descriptions be scanty and inadequate, it is only because the facts are still few. How much of the lost may yet be recovered I know not; but the circumstance that two great floras,--remote predecessors of the existing one,--which once covered with their continuous mantle of green the dry land of what is now Scotland, should be represented by but a few coniferous fossils, a few cycadaceous fronds, a few ferns and club mosses, must serve to show what mere fragments of the past history of our country we have yet been able to recover from the rocks, and how very much in the work of exploration and discovery still remains for us to do. We stand on the further edge of the great floras of by-past creations, and have gathered but a few handfuls of faded leaves, a few broken branches, a few decayed cones. The Silurian deposits of our country have not yet furnished us with any unequivocal traces of a terrestrial vegetation. Professor Nicol of Aberdeen, on subjecting to the microscope the ashes of a Silurian anthracite which occurs in Peeblesshire, detected in it minute tubular fibres, which seem, he says, to indicate a higher class of vegetation than the algæ; but these may have belonged to a marine vegetation notwithstanding. I detected some years ago, in the Trilobite-bearing schists of Girvan, associated with graptolites of the Lower Silurian type, a vegetable organism somewhat resembling the leaf of one of the pond weeds,--an order of plants, some of whose species, such as Zostera, find their proper habitats in salt water. I have placed beside this specimen a fragment of the same graptolite-bearing rock, across which I have pasted part of a leaf of _Zostera marina_, the only plant of our Scottish seas which is furnished with true roots, bears real flowers inclosed in herbaceous spathes, and produces a well formed farinaceous seed. It will be seen, that in the few points of comparison which can be instituted between forms so exceedingly simple, the ancient very closely resembles the recent organism. It is not impossible, therefore, that the Silurian vegetable may have belonged to some tribe of plants allied to Zostera; and if so, we can easily conceive how the Silurian anthracite of our country may be altogether of marine origin, and may yet exhibit in its microscopic tubular fibres vestiges of a vegetation higher than the algæ. [Illustration: Fig. 117. _a_, SILURIAN ORGANISM. _b_, GRAPTOLITE. _c_, PORTION OF THE LEAF OF ZOSTERA MARINA.] [It were well, in dealing with the very ancient floras, in which equivocal forms occur that might have belonged to either the land or the sea, to keep in view those curious plants of the present time, the habitats of which are decidedly marine, but which are marked by many of the peculiarities of the seed-bearing plants of the land. The superiority of Zostera to the common sea weeds of our coasts appears to have struck in the north of Scotland eyes very little practised in such matters, and seems to have given rise, in consequence, to a popular myth. _Zostera marina_ abounds on a series of sand banks, partially uncovered by the larger stream tides, which lie directly opposite the town of Cromarty, near the spot pointed out by tradition as the site of an earlier town, which was swept away some two or three hundred years ago by the encroachments of the sea. And these banks, with their thick covering of green Zostera, used to be pointed out by the fishermen of the place, in my younger days, as the _meadows_ of the old town, still bearing their original coverings of vegetation,--a vegetation altered no doubt by the "sea change" that had come over it, but still essentially the same, it was said, as that which had smiled around the old burgh, and not at all akin to the brown kelp or tangle that every storm from the boisterous north-east heaps along the shore. It was virtually affirmed that the luxuriant terrestrial grasses of ancient Cromarty had made a virtue of necessity in their altered circumstances; and that, settling down into grasses of the sea, they remained to testify that an ancient Cromarty there had _once been_. _Zostera marina_, like most plants of the land, ripens its seeds towards the close of autumn; and I have seen a smart night's frost at this season, when coincident with a stream tide that laid bare the beds, nip its seed-bearing stems by thousands; and have found them strewed along the beach a few days after, with all their grass-like spikes fully developed, and their grain-like seeds charged with a farinaceous substance, which one would scarce expect to find developed in the sea. In the higher reaches of the Cromarty Firth, the Zostera beds, which are of great extent, are much frequented, during the more protracted frosts of a severe winter, by wild geese and swans, that dig up and feed upon the saccharine roots of the plant. The Zostera of the warmer latitudes attain to a larger size than those of our Scottish seas. "A southern species," says Loudon, "_Zostera oceanica_, has leaves a foot long and an inch broad. It is used as a thatch, which is said to last a century; bleaches white with exposure; and furnishes the rush-like material from which the envelops of Italian liquor flasks are prepared." The simple rectilinear venation of ribbon-like fronds, usually much broken, that occurs in the Lower Old Red Sandstone, has often reminded me of that exhibited by this exotic species of Zostera.] [Illustration: Fig. 118. FUCOID.] [Illustration: Fig. 119. FUCOIDS.] Associated with the earliest ichthyic remains of the Old Red Sandstone, we find vegetable organisms in such abundance, that they communicate often a fissile character to the stone in which they occur. But, existing as mere carbonaceous markings, their state of keeping is usually so bad, that they tell us little else than that the antiquely-formed fishes of this remote period swam over sea bottoms darkened by forests of algæ. The prevailing plant was one furnished with a long, smooth stem, which, though it threw off, in the alternate order, numerous branches at least half as stout as itself, preserved its thickness for considerable distances without diminution,--a common fucoidal characteristic. We find its remains mixed in the rock, though sparingly, with those of a rough-edged plant, knobbed somewhat like the thong-like receptacles of _Himanthalia lorea_, which also threw off branches like the other, but diminished more rapidly. A greatly more minute vegetable organism of the same beds, characterized by its bifid partings, which strike off at angles of about sixty, somewhat resembles the small-fronded variety of _Dictyota dichotoma_, save that the slim terminations of the frond are usually bent into little hooks, like the tendrils of the pea just as their points begin to turn. Another rather rare plant of the period, existing as a broad, irregularly cleft frond, somewhat resembling that of a modern _Cutleria_ or _Nitophyllum_, betrays at once, in its outline and general appearance, its marine origin; as does also an equally rare contemporary, which, judging from its appearance, seems to have been a true fucus. It exists in the rock as if simply drawn in Indian ink; for it exhibits no structure, though, as in some of the ferns of the Coal Measures, what were once the curls of its leaflets continue to exist as sensible hollows on the surface. It broadens and divides atop into three or four lobes, and these, in turn, broaden and divide into minor lobes, double or ternate, and usually rounded at their terminations. In general appearance the plant not a little resembles those specimens of _Fucus vesiculosus_ which we find existing in a diminutive form, and divested of both the receptacles and the air vessels, at the mouth of rivers. Of two other kinds of plants I have seen only confused masses, in which the individuals were so crowded together, and withal so fragmentary and broken, that their separate forms could not be traced. In the one the general appearance was such as might be produced by compressed and tangled masses of _Chorda filium_, in which the linear and even tubular character of the plant could be determined, but not its continuous, cord-like aspect; in the other, the fragments seemed well nigh as slim as hairs, and the appearance was such as might be produced by branches of that common ectocarpus, _E. littoralis_, which may be seen on our rocky coasts roughening at low water the stems of laminaria. When highly magnified, a mesial groove might be detected running along each of the hair-like lines. With these marine plants we occasionally find large rectilinear stems, resolved into a true coal, but retaining no organic character by which to distinguish them. As I have seen some of these more than three inches in diameter, and, though existing as mere fragments, several feet in length, they must, if they were also plants of the sea, have exceeded in size our largest laminaria.[46] And such are the few vegetable organisms, of apparently aquatic origin, which I have hitherto succeeded in detecting in the Lower Old Red Sandstone of Scotland.[47] Their individual numbers, however, must have been very great, though, from the destructible character of their tissues, their forms have perished in the stone. The immensely developed flagstones of Caithness seem to owe their dark color to organic matter mainly of vegetable origin. So strongly bituminous, indeed, are some of the beds of dingier tint, that they flame in the fire like slates steeped in oil. [Illustration: Fig. 120.] The remains of a terrestrial vegetation in this deposit are greatly scantier than those of its marine plants; but they must be regarded as possessing a peculiar interest, as, with the exception of the spore cases of the Ludlow rocks, the oldest of their class, in at least the British islands, whose true place in the scale can be satisfactorily established. In the flagstones of Orkney there occurs, though very rarely, a minute vegetable organism, which I have elsewhere described as having much the appearance of one of our smaller ferns, such as the maidenhair-spleenwort, or dwarf moonwort. It consists of a minute stem, partially covered by what seems to be a small sheath or hollow bract, and bifurcates into two fronds or pinnæ, fringed by from ten to twelve leaflets, that nearly impinge on each other, and somewhat resemble in their mode of arrangement the leaflets of one of our commonest Aspleniums,--_Asplenium trichomanes_. One of our highest authorities, however, in such matters (Professor Balfour of Edinburgh) questions whether this organism be in reality a fern, and describes it from the specimen on the table, in the Palæontological chapter of his admirable Class Book, simply as "a remarkable pinnate frond." (Fig. 13, p. 56.) We find it associated with the remains of a terrestrial plant allied to lepidodendron, and which in size and general appearance not a little resembles one of our commonest club mosses,--_Lycopodium clavatum_.[48] It sends out its branches in exactly the same style,--some short and simple, others branched like the parent stem,--in an arrangement approximately alternate; and is everywhere covered, stem and branch, by thickly set scale-like leaflets, that, suddenly narrowing, terminate in exceedingly slim points. It has, however, proportionally a stouter stem than Lycopodium; its leaves, when seen in profile, seem more rectilinear and thin; and none of its branches yet found bear the fructiferous stalk or spike. Its resemblance, however, to this commonest of the Lycopodia,--a plant that may be gathered by handfuls on the moors by which the flagstones are covered,--is close enough to suggest a new reading of the familiar adage on the meeting of extremes. Between the times of this ancient fossil,--one of the oldest of land plants yet known,--and those of the existing club moss that now scatters its light spores by millions over the dead and blackened remains of its remote predecessor, many creations must have intervened, and many a prodigy of the vegetable world appeared, especially in the earlier and middle periods,--Sigillaria, Favularia, Knorria, and Ulodendron,--that have had no representatives in the floras of latter times; and yet here, flanking the immense scale at both its ends, do we find plants of so nearly the same form and type, that it demands a careful survey to distinguish their points of difference. Here, for instance, to illustrate the fact, is there a specimen of _Lycopodium clavatum_, from one of these Caithness moors, that agrees branch for branch, and both in the disposition of its scales and in general outline, with the specimen in the stone. What seems to be an early representative of the Calamites occurs in the same beds. Some of the specimens are of large size,--at least from nine inches to a foot in circumference,--and retain their thickness, though existing as fragments several feet in length, with but little diminution throughout. They resembled the interior casts of Calamites in being longitudinally furrowed; but the furrows are flatter, and are themselves minutely striated lengthwise by lines as fine as hairs; and, instead of presenting any appearance of joints, there run diagonally across the stems, interrupted and very irregular lines of knobs. These I find referred to by Dr. Joseph Hooker, in describing a set of massive but ill preserved remains of the same organism detected in South Ness quarry, near Lerwick, by the Hon. Mr. Tuffnell, as taking, in two of the specimens, "the appearance of transverse knobs and bars (mayhap spirally arranged) that cross the striæ obliquely. But though the knobs," he adds, "may perhaps indicate a peculiar character of the plants, they have more probably been caused by pressure during silicification." As, however, they also occur in the best preserved fragment of the plant which I have yet seen,--a Thurso specimen which I owe to my friend Mr. Dick,--I deem it best to regard them, provisionally at least, as one of the characteristics of the plant. I may mention, that while I disinterred one of my specimens from the Thurso flagstones, where it occurred among remains of Dipterus and Asterolepis, I derived another specimen from the great overlying formation of pale Red Sandstone to which the lofty hills of Hoy and the tall mural precipices of Dunnet Head belong; and that this plant is the only organism which has yet been found in this uppermost member of the Lower Old Red, to at least the north of the Moray Firth. Another apparently terrestrial organism of the lower formation, of, however, rare occurrence, very much resembles a sheathing bract or spathe. It is of considerable size,--from four to six inches in length, by from two to three inches in breadth,--of a broadly elliptical and yet somewhat lanceolate form, deeply but irregularly corrugated, the rugæ exhibiting a tendency to converge towards both its lower and upper terminations, and with, in some instances, what seems to be the fragment of a second spathe springing from its base. Another and much smaller vegetable organism of the same beds presents the form of a spathe-enveloped bud or unblown flower wrapped up in its calyx; but all the specimens which I have yet seen are too obscure to admit of certain determination. I may here mention, that curious markings, which have been regarded as impressions made by vegetables that had themselves disappeared, have been detected during the last twelvemonth in a quarry of the Lower Old Red Sandstone near Huntly, by the Rev. Mr. Mackay of Rhynie. They are very curious and very puzzling; but though some of the specimens present the appearance of a continuous midrib, that throws off, with a certain degree of regularity, apparent leaflets, I am inclined to regard them rather as lying within the province of the ichnologist than of the fossil botanist. They bear the same sort of resemblance to a long, thickly-leaved frond, like that of the "hard fern," that the cast of a many-legged annelid does to a club moss; and I was struck, on my first walk along the Portobello beach, after examining a specimen kindly sent me by Mr. Mackay, to see how nearly the tract of a small shore crab (_Carcinus Mænas_) along the wet sand resembled them, in exhibiting what seemed to be an obscure midrib fringed with leaflets. But the genuine vegetable organism of the formation, indicative of the highest rank of any yet found in it, is a true wood of the cone-bearing order. I laid open the nodule which contains this specimen, in one of the ichthyolite beds of Cromarty, rather more than eighteen years ago; but though I described it, in the first edition of my little work on the Old Red Sandstone, in 1841, as exhibiting the woody fibre, it was not until 1845 that, with the assistance of the optical lapidary, I subjected its structure to the test of the microscope. It turned out, as I had anticipated, to be the portion of a tree; and on my submitting the prepared specimen to one of our highest authorities,--the late Mr. William Nicol,--he at once decided that the "reticulated texture of the transverse section, though somewhat compressed, clearly indicated a coniferous origin." I may add, that this most ancient of Scottish lignites presents several peculiarities of structure. Like some of the Araucarians of the warmer latitudes, it exhibits no lines of yearly growth; its medullary rays are slender, and comparatively inconspicuous; and the discs which mottle the sides of its sap-chambers, when viewed in the longitudinal section, are exceedingly minute, and are ranged, so far as can be judged in their imperfect state of keeping, in the alternate order peculiar to the Araucarians. On what perished land of the early Palæozoic ages did this venerably antique tree cast root and flourish, when the extinct genera Pterichthys and Coccosteus were enjoying life by millions in the surrounding seas, long ere the flora or fauna of the Coal Measures had begun to be? I may be here permitted to mention, that in a little volume, written in reply to a widely known and very ingenious work on the Development hypothesis, I described and figured this unequivocally genuine lignite, in order to show that a true wood takes its place among the earliest terrestrial plants known to the geologist. I at the same time mentioned,--desirous, of course, that the facts of the question should be fairly stated, whatever their bearing,--that the nodule in which it occurred had been partially washed out of the fish bed in which I found it, by the action of the surf; and my opponent, fixing on the circumstance, insinuated, in the answer with which he honored me, that it had _not_ belonged to the bed at all, but had been derived from some other formation of later date. He ought, however, to have taken into account my further statement, namely, that the same nodule which enclosed the lignite contained part of another fossil, the well marked scales of _Diplacanthus striatus_, an ichthyolite restricted, like the Coccosteus (a specimen of which occurred in a neighboring nodule), to the Lower Old Red Sandstone exclusively. If there be any value whatever in palæontological evidence, this Cromarty lignite must have been deposited in a sea inhabited by the Coccosteus and Diplacanthus. It is demonstrable that, while yet in the recent state, a Diplacanthus lay down and died beside it; and the evidence in the case is unequivocally this, that in the oldest portion of the oldest terrestrial flora yet known, there occurs the fragment of a tree quite as high in the scale as the stately Norfolk Island pine, or the noble cedar of Lebanon. [I have failed hitherto in finding any remains of terrestrial plant-covered surfaces in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland, though decided traces of desiccated sub-ærial ones are not rare. Shallows and banks seem to have been numerous during the period of at least the Lower formation. The flagstones of Caithness and Orkney, and the argillaceous fish beds of Cromarty and Ross, not only abound in the ripple-marked surfaces of a shallow sea, but also in cracked and flawed planes that must have dried and split into polygonal partings in the air and the sun. The appearance of these in the neighborhood of the town of Thurso, about half a mile to the east of the river, is not a little curious. Bearing throughout the general dingy hue of the flagstones, they yet consist of alternating beds of two distinct characters and qualities. The one kind, fissile, finely grained, and sharply ripple-marked, seems to have been deposited in shallow water; the other, not fissile, but, if I may so speak, felted together so as to yield with difficulty to the hammer in any direction, and traversed by polygonal partings, filled up usually by the substance of the overlying stratum, appears to have had a different origin. The state of keeping, too, in which the ichthyic remains of these alternating beds occur is always very different. The smaller and more delicately organized fishes are never found entire, save in the fissile, finely grained beds; in the others we detect only scattered fragments; and even these, unless they belonged to the robust Asterolepis or his congeners,--which, however, in these beds they usually do,--much broken. The polygonal partings seem to indicate that these toughly-felted beds, whose very style of weathering--rough, gnarled, fretted into globose protuberances and irregular hollows--shows that it had not been formed by quiet deposition, must have had their broad backs raised for a time above the surface of the water, to be desiccated in the hot sun. And the fragmentary state of the fossils which they contain seems to point, with the roughnesses of their weathered surfaces, to some peculiarity in their origin. The recollection which they awoke in my mind with each visit I paid them for three years together, may probably indicate what that origin was. I had a relation who died more than a quarter of a century ago, who passed many years in British Guiana, in the colony of Berbice, and whose graphic descriptions of that part of South America made a strong impression upon me when a boy, and still dwells in my memory. He was settled on a cotton plantation near the coast side; and so exceedingly flat was the surrounding country, that the house in which he dwelt, though nearly two miles distant from the shore, stood little more than five feet above its level. The soil consisted of a dark gray consolidated mud; and in looking seawards from the margin of the land, there was nothing to be seen, when the tide fell, save dreary mud flats whole miles in extent, with the line of blue water beyond stretching along the distant horizon. These mud flats were much frequented by birds of the wader family, that used to come and fish in the shallow pools for the small fry that had lingered behind when the tide fell; and my cousin, a keen sportsman in his day, has told me that he used to steal upon them in his mud shoes,--flat boards attached to the soles, like the snow shoes of the higher latitudes,--and enjoy rare sport in knocking down magnificent game, such as "the roseate spoonbill" and "gorgeous flamingo." There were times, however, when the mud shoe proved of no avail, and the flat expanse remained impassable for weeks,-- "A boggy syrtis, neither sea Nor good dry land." The coast,--directly impinged on by the drift current, and beaten by the long roll of waves which had first begun to rise under the impulsions of the trade winds on the African coast two thousand miles away,--was much exposed to tempests; and after every fresh storm from the east, a huge bank of mud used to come rolling in from the sea, three or four feet abreast, and remain wholly impassable until, during some two or three neap tides, its surface had been exposed to a tropical sun, and partially consolidated by the heat. And then the waste would become passable as before, and the chopped and broken surface, exposed to the ordinary action of the sea, and to gradual depositions during flood, would begin to be smoothed over, and the birds would find themselves no longer safe. Now, I am inclined to think that we have here the conditions necessary to the formation of the Thurso deposits. Let us suppose, near where Thurso now stands, a wide tract of flat mud banks in a sea so shallow as to be laid dry at ebb for miles together. Let us further suppose periods of tranquil deposition or re-arrangement, during which one ripple-marked stratum is laid quietly down over another, and the fish, killed by accident, or left stranded by the evaporation of the little pools, are covered up, like the plants in a botanist's drying-book, in a state of complete entireness. Let us yet further suppose great mud banks driven by occasional tempests from the deeper water beyond, and so heaped up over these sedimentary beds as to be exposed during even the flood of neap tides to the desiccating influences of the atmosphere and the sun, until the surface has become hard as a sun-burned brick, and has chopped into polygonal partings, with wide rents between. And finally, let us suppose the whole in this state laid under water at the return of stream tides, and exposed to the ordinary sedimentary action. Does it not seem probable that the alternating beds in all their conditions would be given us by such a process? In the stratum represented by the mud bank, the stone would be of what I have termed a _felted_, not a fissile character; its organic remains would exist in a fragmentary and scattered state,--for, torn up from their places of original deposition, and rolled onwards in the storm-impelled mud, they could not fail to be broken up and dispersed; and further, they would be in large part those of bulky deep-sea fishes. And lastly, the surface of these beds would be polygonally cracked and flawed, and the wider cracks filled up by the substance of the overlying strata. And these overlying strata, on the other hand,--the result of a period of quiet deposition in shallow water,--would be regularly bedded, and their ichthyic remains, consisting mainly of small littoral fishes, would be preserved in a state of comparative entireness. For, however, such numerous repetitions of alternately _felted_ and fissile ripple-marked strata as we find in the neighborhood of Thurso,--repetitions carried on for hundreds of feet in vertical extent,--we require yet another condition,--that condition of gradual subsidence in the general crust which can alone account for the fact so often pressed upon the geologist in exploring the Coal Measures, that in deposits thousands of feet in thickness, each stratum in succession had been laid down in a shallow sea.] It is a curious circumstance, that the Old Red flagstones which lie along the southern flanks of the Grampians, and are represented by the gray stone known in commerce as the Arbroath Pavement, have not, so far as is yet known, an organism in common with the Old Red flagstones of the north. I at one time supposed that the rectilinear, smooth-stemmed fucoid, already described, occurred in both series, as the gray stones have also their smooth-stemmed, rectilinear, tape-like organism; but the points of resemblance were too few and simple to justify the conclusion that they were identical, and I have since ascertained that they were entirely different plants. The fucoid of the Caithness flagstones threw off, as I have shown, in the alternate order, numerous ribbon-like branches or fronds; whereas the ribbon-like fronds or branches of the Forfarshire plant rose by dozens from a common root, like the fronds of Zostera, and somewhat resembled a scourge of cords fastened to a handle. Contemporary with this organism of the gray flagstone formation, and thickly occupying the planes on which it rests, there occur fragments of twisted stems, some of them from three to four inches in diameter (though represented by but mere films of carbonaceous matter), and irregularly streaked, or rather _wrinkled_, longitudinally, like the bark of some of our forest trees, though on a smaller scale. With these we find in considerable abundance irregularly-shaped patches, also of carbonaceous matter, reticulated into the semblance of polygonal, or, in some instances, egg-shaped meshes, and which remind one of pieces of ill woven lace. When first laid open, these meshes are filled each with a carbonaceous speck; and, from their supposed resemblance, in the aggregated form, to the eggs of the frog in their albuminous envelop, the quarriers term them "puddock [frog] spawn." The slabs in which they occur, thickly covered over with their vegetable impressions, did certainly remind me, when I first examined them some fifteen years ago, of the bottom of some stagnant ditch beside some decaying hedge, as it appears in middle spring, when paved with fragments of dead branches and withered grass, and mottled with its life-impregnated patches of the gelid substance regarding which a provincial poet tells his readers, in classical Scotch, that "Puddock-spue is fu' o' e'en, An' every e'e 's a pu-head."[49] Higher authorities than the quarriers,--among the rest, the late Dr. Mantell,--have been disposed to regard these polygonal markings as the fossilized spawn of ancient Batrachians; but there now seems to be evidence enough from which to conclude that they are the remains, not of the eggs of an animal, but of the seed of a plant. Such was the view taken many years ago by Dr. Fleming,--the original discoverer, let me add, of fossils both in those Upper and Middle Old Red Sandstone deposits that lie in Scotland to the south of the Grampians. "These organisms," we find him saying, in a paper published in "Cheek's Edinburgh Journal" (1831), "occur in the form of circular flat patches, not equalling an inch in diameter, and composed of numerous smaller contiguous pieces. They are not unlike what might be expected to result from a compressed berry, such as the bramble or the rasp. As, however, they are found adjacent to the narrow leaves of gramineous [looking] vegetables, and chiefly in clay slate, originally lacustrine silt, it is probable that they constituted the conglobate panicles of extinct species of the genus Junicus or Sparzanium." From specimens subsequently found by Dr. Fleming, and on which he has erected his species _Parka decipiens_, it seems evident that the nearly circular bodies (which in all the better preserved instances circumscribe the small polygonal ones) were set in receptacles somewhat resembling the receptacle or calyx of the strawberry or rasp. Judging from one of the specimens, this calyx appears to have consisted of five pieces, which united in a central stem, and were traversed by broad irregularly diverging striæ. And the spawn-like patches of Carmylie appear to be simply ill preserved specimens of this fruit, whatever its true character, in which the minute circular portions, divested of the receptacle and stem, had been thrown into irregular forms by the joint agency of pressure and decay. The great abundance of these organisms,--for so abundant are they, that visitors to the Carmylie quarries find they can carry away with them as many specimens as they please,--may be regarded as of itself indicative of a vegetable origin.[50] It is not in the least strange, however, that they should have been taken for patches of spawn. The large-grained spawn of fishes, such as the lump-fish, salmon, or sturgeon, might be readily enough mistaken, in even the recent state, for the detached spherical-seed vessels of fruit, such as the bramble-berry, the stone-bramble, or the rasp. "Hang it!" I once heard a countryman exclaim, on helping himself at table to a spoonful of Caviare, which he had mistaken for a sweet-meat, and instantly, according to Milton, "with sputtering noise rejected,"--"Hang it for nasty stuff!--I took it for bramble berry jam." [Illustration: Fig. 121. PARKA DECIPIENS.] [Illustration: Fig. 122.] [Illustration: Fig. 123.] Along with these curious remains Dr. Fleming found an organism which in form somewhat resembles the spike of one of the grasses, save that the better preserved bracts terminate in fan or kidney-shaped leaflets, with a simple venation radiating from the base. It is probably a fern, more minute in its pinnules than even our smallest specimens of true maidenhair. Its stipes, however, seems proportionally stouter than that of any of the smaller ferns with which I am acquainted. But the state of keeping of the specimen is not good, nor do I know that another has yet been found. Further, in the same beds Dr. Fleming found a curious nondescript vegetable, or rather part of a vegetable, with smooth narrow stems, resembling those of the smooth-stemmed organism of the Caithness flagstones, but unlike it in the circumstance that its detached nearly parallel stalks anastomose with each other by means of cross branches, that unite them in the middle, somewhat in the style of the Siamese twins. I have heard the doctor suggest, but know not whether he has placed the remark on record, that these parallel stems may have been but the internal fibres of some larger plant, whose more succulent portions have disappeared; and certainly, while such instances of anastomosis are rare among the _stems_ of plants, they are common enough among their _internal fibres_, as all who have examined the macerated _debris_ of a kitchen-garden or a turnip-field must have had occasion to remark. We sometimes, however, find cases of anastomosis among the stems of even the higher plants. I have seen oftener than once, in neglected hawthorn hedges, the branch of one plant entering into the stem of another, and becoming incorporated with its substance; and we are told by Professor Balfour, that this kind of chance adhesion is often seen in the branches of the ivy; and that not unfrequently, by a similar process, the roots of contiguous trees are united. Nor does it seem improbable, that what occasionally takes place among the higher plants of the present time may have been common among some of the comparatively low plants of so ancient a period as that of the Middle Old Red Sandstone. This formation of the gray tilestones has furnished one vegetable organism apparently higher in the scale than those just described, in a well marked Lepidodendron, which exhibits, like the Araucarian of the Lower Old Red, though less distinctly, the internal structure. It was found about sixteen years ago in a pavement quarry near Clockbriggs,--the last station on the Aberdeen and Forfar Railway as the traveller approaches the town of Forfar from the north. I owe my specimen of this ancient Lepidodendron to Mr. William Miller, banker, Dundee, an accomplished geologist, who has taken no little trouble in determining its true history. He has ascertained that it occurred deep in the rock, seventy-one feet from the surface; that the beds which rested over it were composed, in the descending order, first, of a conglomerate thirty feet thick; secondly, of a red rock four feet thick; thirdly, of twenty-eight feet of the soft shaly substance known to the quarriers as caulm; and fourthly, of more than nine feet of gray pavement, immediately under which, in a soft, argillaceous stratum, lay the organism. It was about four feet in length, bulged out at the lower end into a bulb-like protuberance, which may have been, however, merely an accidental result of its state of keeping; and threw off, at an acute angle, two branches about a foot from the top. It was covered with a bark of brittle coal, which is, however, wanting in all the fragments that have been preserved; and was resolved internally into a brown calcareous substance of about the hardness of ordinary marble, and very much resembling that into which the petrifactive agencies have consolidated the fossil trees of Granton and Craigleith. From the decorticated condition of the surviving fragments, and the imperfect preservation of the interior structure, in all save the central portions of its transverse sections, it yields no specific marks by which to distinguish it; but enough remains in its irregular network of cells, devoid of linear arrangement, and untraversed by medullary rays, to demonstrate its generic standing as a Lepidodendron. [It has been questioned whether the lower place in the Old Red System should be assigned to the flagstones of Caithness and Ross, with their characteristic Dipterus and Coccosteus beds, or to the gray tilestones of Forfar and Kincardineshires, with their equally characteristic Cephalaspis. The evidence on the point is certainly not so conclusive as I deemed it fifteen years ago, when our highest authority on the subject not only regarded the tilestone of the Silurian regions of England as a member of the Old Red Sandstone (an arrangement which I am still disposed to deem the true one), but also held further, that there had been detected in this formation near Downtown Castle, Herefordshire, broken remains of _Dipterus macrolepidotus_, one of the best marked ichthyolites of the flagstones of Caithness and Orkney. A great and unbroken series of fossiliferous rocks, with Dipterus at its base, Cephalaspis in its medial spaces, and Holoptychius at its top, might well be regarded as the analogue of the Old Red of Scotland, with the Caithness flagstones ranged at its bottom, the Cephalaspis beds of Forfarshire placed in its middle, and the Holoptychius beds of Scot-Crag and Clashbinnie on its upper horizon; but since that time the tilestones have been transferred to the Upper Silurian division of rocks, and the evidence furnished by their supposed Dipterus has not been confirmed. And as the Old Red Sandstones of Scotland have no true fossiliferous base, but rest on primary rocks both to the south and north of the Grampians, it may be regarded as in some degree a moot point whether the lowest fossiliferous beds to the north be older or newer than those to the south, or, what is quite possible, of the same age. Provisionally, however, I have arranged my paper on the supposition that the Coccostean formation of the north is the lowest and oldest of the three; and this from the following considerations. In the first place, the Coccosteus and its contemporaries appear in the north at a very short distance above the base of the system. I have disinterred an Osteolepis from a fish bed near Cromarty only thirty-three feet over the great conglomerate, and only a hundred and twenty-nine feet over the granitic gneiss beneath; whereas the Cephalaspis beds occur high above the primary base of the system in the south,--at some distance over even the thick conglomerate of Stonehaven and Dunnottar; and under this conglomerate, as shown in the section furnished by the valley of the North Esk, there lies a pale red sandstone member of the system, estimated by Colonel Imrie at seven hundred and eighty feet in thickness. The conglomerate itself he estimates at twelve hundred feet. Adopting as correct Colonel Imrie's section, taken along the banks of the North Esk,--and the colonel was unquestionably a truthful observer,--the Cephalaspis beds of the south lie nearly two thousand (nineteen hundred and eighty) feet above the Azoic slates on which the Old Red Sandstone of Forfarshire rests, whereas the Coccosteus and Osteolepis beds of the north lie only one hundred and twenty-nine feet over the Azoic gneiss on which the Old Red Sandstone of Cromarty rests. There is thus at least _room_ in the south for an underlying fossiliferous formation between that of the Cephalaspis and the base of the system, but none in the north beneath that of the Coccosteus and its base. In the north we find the _room_ lying above, between the Coccostean and Holoptychian formations, and represented by that great unfossiliferous deposit of pale sandstone to which the hills of Hoy and the rocks of Duncansbay Head and of Tarbet Ness belong. Further, in the second place, while the upper or Holoptychian formation is found _directly_ overlying that of the Coccosteus in only one locality,--Moray,--we find it directly overlying that of the Cephalaspis in _two_ widely separated localities;--in the vast band of Old Red which runs diagonally across the island from sea to sea, parallel to the Grampian chain, and in the immensely developed Red Sandstones of England and Wales. And it is of course more probable that the two corroborative instances should represent the natural succession of the formations, and the single instance the accidental gap in the scale consequent on the missing formation, than that, _vice versa_, the solitary instance should represent the natural succession, while the two mutually corroborative ones should represent, in localities widely apart, the mere accident of the gap. But, in the third place, I attach more weight to a conclusion founded on the positive character of the groups of organic remains by which the three great formations of the Old Red System are characterized, than I do to either of these considerations. The organisms of the Cephalaspian deposits differ _generically_, and in their whole aspect, from both those of the Coccostean and Holoptychian formations; whereas the organisms of the Coccostean formations, while they resemble generically and in the group those of the Holoptychian one, mainly differ from them _specifically_. The extreme _generic_ difference in the one case argues evidently a great difference in _condition_,--the lesser specific difference in the other, a great difference in point _of time_. The Cephalaspian formation might, as a fresh water formation, be nearly contemporary with either of the other two, or, as seems more probable, interposed between them; while they themselves, on the other hand, generically similar and decidedly marine in their character, must have been so widely separated in time, that all the species of the lower group became extinct ere those of the upper one had been ushered into being. And such are some of the considerations that still lead me, notwithstanding the failure of previous evidence, to hold, at least, provisionally, that our Scottish flagstones to the north of the Grampians occupy a lower horizon than our Scottish tilestones to the south. It must, however, be stated, on the other hand, that the crustaceans of the gray tilestones of Forfar and Kincardine not a little resemble those of the Upper Silurian and red tilestone beds of England; and that, judging from the ichthyodorulites found in both, their fishes must have been at least generically allied. The crustaceans of the upper Silurian of Lesmahagow, too, seem certainly much akin to those of the Forfarshire tilestones.] [Illustration: Fig. 124. CYCLOPTERUS HIBERNICUS.] Above this gray tilestone formation lies the Upper Old Red Sandstone, with its peculiar group of ichthyic organisms, none of which seem specially identical with those of either the Caithness or the Forfarshire beds. For it is an interesting circumstance, suggestive surely of the vast periods which must have elapsed during its deposition, that the great Old Red System has, as I have just said, its three distinct platforms of organic existence, each wholly different from the others. Generically and in the group, however, the Upper fishes much more closely resemble, I repeat, the fishes of the Lower or Caithness and Cromarty platform, than they do those of the Forfarshire and Kincardine one. The vegetable remains of the Upper formation in Scotland are both rare and ill preserved. I have seen what I deemed fucoidal markings dimly impressed on the planes of some of the strata, not in the carbonaceous form so common in the other two formations, but as mere colored films of a deeper red than the surrounding matrix. Further, I have detected in the same beds, and existing in the same state, fragments of a striated organism, which may have formed part of either a true calamite, like those of the Coal Measures, or of some such striated but jointless vegetable as that of the Lower Old Red of Thurso and Lerwick.[51] With these markings ferns are occasionally found; and to one of these, from the light which it throws on the true place in the scale of a series of deposits in a sister country, there attaches no little interest. I owe my specimen to Mr. John Stewart of Edinburgh, who laid it open in a micaceous red sandstone in the quarry of Prestonhaugh, near Dunse, where it is associated with some of the better known ichthyic organisms of the Upper Old Red Sandstone, such as _Pterichthys major_ and _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_. Existing as but a deep red film in the rock, with a tolerably well defined outline, but without trace of the characteristic venation on which the fossil botanist, in dealing with the ferns, founds his generic distinctions, I could only determine that it was either a Cyclopterus or Neuropterus. My collection was visited, however, by the late lamented Edward Forbes, only a few weeks before his death; and he at once recognized in my Berwickshire fern, so unequivocally an organism of the Upper Old Red, the _Cyclopterus Hibernicus_ of those largely developed beds of yellow sandstone which form so marked a feature in the geology of the south of Ireland, and whose true place, whether as Upper Old Red or Lower Carboniferous, has been the subject of so much controversy. I had been previously introduced by Professor Forbes, in the Museum of Economic Geology in Jermyn Street, London, to an interesting collection of plants from these yellow beds, and had an opportunity afforded me of examining the only ichthyic organism hitherto found associated with them; and was struck, though I could not identify its species, with its peculiarly Old Red aspect; but the evidence of the Cyclopterus is of course more conclusive than that of the fish; and we may, I think, legitimately conclude, that in Ireland, as in our own country, it was a contemporary of the great Pterichthys (_P. major_),--the hugest, and at least one of the last, of his race,--and gave its rich green to the hill sides of what is still the Emerald Island during the latter ages of the Old Red Sandstone, and ere the Carboniferous period had yet begun. The _Cyclopterus Hibernicus_, as shown both by the Prestonhaugh specimen and those of Ireland, was a bipinnate fern of very considerable size,--probably a tree fern. Its pinnæ, opposite in the lower part of the frond, are alternate in the upper; while its leaflets, which are of a sub-rhomboidal form, and so closely ranged as to impinge on each other, are at least generally alternate in their arrangement throughout. Among living plants it seems most nearly represented by a South American species,--_Didymocloena pulcherrima_,--one of the smaller tree ferns. The leaves of this graceful species are bipinnate, like those of the fossil; and the pinnæ (thickly set with simple, alternately arranged leaflets) are opposite in the lower part of the frond, and alternate in the upper. Widely as they are separated in time, the recent South American Didymocloena and the Old Red Sandstone Cyclopterus, that passed into extinction ere the times of the Coal, might be ranged together, so far at least as appears from their forms, as kindred species. It were very desirable that we had a good monograph of the Irish Old Red plants, the contemporaries of the latter, as the completest and best preserved representatives of the Middle Palæozoic flora yet found. Sir Roderick Murchison has figured a single pinnæ of this Cyclopterus in his recently published "Siluria;" and Sir Charles Lyell, both that and one of its contemporary Lepidodendra, in the last edition of his "Elements." These interesting fragments, however, serve but to excite our curiosity for more. When urging Professor Edward Forbes on the subject, ere parting from him for, alas! what proved to be the last time, he intimated an intention of soon taking it up; but I fear his purposed monograph represents only one of many works, important to science, which his untimely death has arrested for mayhap long years to come. In the uppermost beds of the Upper Old Red formation in Scotland, which are usually of a pale or light yellow color, the vegetable remains again become strongly carbonaceous, but their state of preservation continues bad,--too bad to admit of the determination of either species or genera; and not until we rise a very little beyond the system do we find the remains of a flora either rich or well preserved. But very remarkable is the change which at this stage at once occurs. We pass at a single stride from great poverty to great wealth. The suddenness of the change seems suited to remind one of that experienced by the voyager, when,--after traversing for many days some wide expanse of ocean, unvaried save by its banks of floating sea weed, or, where occasionally and at wide intervals, he picks up some leaf-bearing bough, or marks some fragment of drift weed go floating past,--he enters at length the sheltered lagoon of some coral island, and sees all around the deep green of a tropical vegetation descending in tangled luxuriance to the water's edge,--tall, erect ferns, and creeping lycopodiaceæ, and the pandanus, with its ærial roots and its screw-like clusters of narrow leaves, and, high over all, tall palms, with their huge pinnate fronds, and their curiously aggregated groups of massive fruit. And yet the more meagre vegetation of the earlier time is not without its special interest. The land plants of the Old Red Sandstone seem to compose, all over the world, the most ancient of the terrestrial floras. It was held only a few years ago, that the Silurians of the United States had their plants allied to the Lepidodendron. But the group in which these occur has since been transferred from the Upper Silurian to the Old Red System; and we find it expressly stated by Professor H. D. Rogers, in his valuable contribution to the "Physical Atlas" (second edition, 1856), that "the Cadent [or Lower Old Red] strata are the oldest American formations in which remains of a true terrestrial vegetation have yet been discovered." It has been shown, too, by Sir Roderick Murchison, that the supposed Silurian plants of Oporto are in reality Carboniferous, and owe their apparent position to a reverse folding of the strata. I have already referred to the solitary spore-cases of the Ludlow Rocks; and beneath these rocks, says Sir Roderick (1854), "no remains of plants have been discovered which are recognizably of terrestrial origin." Scanty, too, as the terrestrial flora of the Old Red Sandstone everywhere is, we find it exhibiting very definitely the leading Palæozoic features. Its prevailing plants are the ferns and their apparent allies. It has in our own country, as has been just shown, its ferns, its lepidodendra, its striated plants allied to the calamites, and its decided araucanite; in America, in the Cadent series, it had its "plants allied to ferns and lepidodendra;" and in the Devonian basin of Sabero in Spain, its characteristic organisms are, a lepidodendron (_L. Chemungensis_), and a very peculiar fern (_Sphenopteris laxus_).[52] But while in its main features it resembled the succeeding flora of the Carboniferous period, it seems in all its forms to have been specifically distinct. It was the independent flora of an earlier creation than that to which we owe the coal. For the meagreness of the paper in which I have attempted to describe it as it occurs in Scotland, I have but one apology to offer. My lecture contains but little; but then, such is the scantiness of the materials on which I had to work, that it could not have contained much: if, according to the dramatist, the "amount be beggarly," it is because the "boxes are empty." Partly, apparently, from the circumstance that the organisms of this flora were ill suited for preservation in the rocks, and partly because, judging from what appears, the most ancient lands of the globe were widely scattered and of narrow extent, this oldest of the floras is everywhere the most meagre. LECTURE TWELFTH. ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. PART II. In the noble flora of the Coal Measures much still remains to be done in Scotland. Our Lower Carboniferous rocks are of immense development; the Limestones of Burdiehouse, with their numerous terrestrial plants, occur many hundred feet beneath our Mountain Limestones; and our list of vegetable species peculiar to these lower deposits is still very incomplete. Even in those higher Carboniferous rocks with which the many coal workings of the country have rendered us comparatively familiar, there appears to be still a good deal of the new and the unknown to repay the labor of future exploration. It was only last year that Mr. Gourlay[53] of this city (Glasgow) added to our fossil flora a new Volkmannia from the coal field of Carluke; and I detected very recently in a neighboring locality (the Airdrie coal field), though in but an indifferent state of keeping, what seems to be a new and very peculiar fern. It presents at first sight more the appearance of a Cycadaceous frond than any other vegetable organism of the Carboniferous age which I have yet seen. From a mid stem there proceed at right angles, and in alternate order, a series of sessile, lanceolate, acute leaflets, nearly two inches in length by about an eighth part of an inch in breadth, and about three lines apart. Each is furnished with a slender midrib; and, what seems a singular, though not entirely unique, feature in a fern, their edges are densely hirsute, and bristle with thick, short hair, nearly as stiff as prickles. The venation is not distinctly preserved; but enough remains to show that it must have been peculiar,--apparently radiating outwards from a series of centres ranged along the midrib. Nay, the apparent hairs seem to be but prolongations of the nerves carried beyond the edges of the leaflets. There is a Stigmaria, too, on the table, very ornate in its sculpture, of which I have now found three specimens in a quarry of the Lower Coal Measures near Portobello, that has still to be figured and described. In this richly ornamented Stigmaria the characteristic areolæ present the ordinary aspect. Each, however, forms the centre of a sculptured star, consisting of from eighteen to twenty rays, or rather the centre of a sculptured flower of the composite order, resembling a meadow daisy or sea-aster. The minute petals,--if we are to accept the latter comparison,--are of an irregularly lenticular form, generally entire, but in some instances ranged in two, or even three, concentric lines round the depressed centre of the areolæ; while the interspaces outside are occupied by numerous fretted markings, resembling broken fragments of petals, which, though less regularly ranged than the others, are effective in imparting a richly ornate aspect to the whole. [Illustration: Fig. 125.] [Illustration: Fig. 126. STIGMARIA.] [Illustration: Fig. 127. THE SAME, MAGNIFIED.] Ever since the appearance, in 1846, of Mr. Binney's paper on the relations of stigmaria to sigillaria as roots and stems, I have been looking for distinguishing specific marks among the former; and, failing for a time to find any, I concluded that, though the stems of the sigillarian genus were variously sculptured, their roots might in all the species have been the same. The present rich specimen does seem, however, to bear the specific stamp; and, from the peculiar character of the termination of another specimen on the table, I am inclined to hold that the stigmaria may have borne the appearance rather of underground stems than of proper roots. This specimen suddenly terminates, at a thickness of two and a half inches, in a rounded point, abrupt as that of one of the massier cacti; and every part of the blunt sudden termination is thickly fretted over with the characteristic areolæ. The slim tubular rootlets must have stuck out on every side from the obtuse rounded termination of this underground stem, as we see, on a small scale, the leaflets of our larger club mosses sticking out from what are comparatively the scarce less abrupt terminations of their creeping stems and branches. In at least certain stages of growth the sub-ærial stems of Lepidodendron also terminated abruptly (see Fig. 24); and the only terminal point of Ulodendron I ever saw was nearly as obtuse as that of Stigmaria. [Illustration: Fig. 128. STIGMARIA.] I have been long desirous of acquainting myself with the true character of this latter plant (Ulodendron), but hitherto my labors have not been very successful. A specimen of _Ulodendron minus_, however, now on the table, which I disinterred several years ago from out a bed of ferruginous shale in the Water of Leith, a little above the village of Colinton, exhibits several peculiarities which, so far as I know, have not yet been described. Though rather less than ten inches in length by about three inches in breadth, it exhibits no fewer than seven of those round, beautifully sculptured scars, ranged rectilinearly along the trunk, by which this ancient genus is so remarkably characterized. It is covered with small, sharply relieved, obovate scales, most of them furnished with an apparent midrib, and with their edges slightly turned up; from which peculiarities, and their great beauty, they seem suited to remind the architect of that style of sculpture adopted by Palladio from his master Vitruvius, when, in ornamenting the Corinthian and composite torus, lie fretted it into closely imbricated obovate leaves. These scales are ranged in elegant curves, not unlike those ornamental curves,--a feat of the turning-lathe,--which one sees roughening the backs of ladies' watches of French manufacture. My fossil exhibited, as it lay in the rock, what I never saw in any other specimen,--a true branch sticking out at an acute angle from the stem, and fretted with scales of a peculiar form, which in one little corner appear also on the main stem, but which differ so considerably from those of the obovate, apparently imbricated type, that, if found on a separate specimen, they might be held to indicate difference of species. It has been shown by Messrs. Lindley and Hutton, on the evidence of one of the specimens figured in the "Fossil Flora," that the line of circular scars so remarkable in this genus, and which is held to be the impressions made by a rectilinear range of almost sessile cones, existed in duplicate on each stem,--a row occurring on two of the sides of the plant directly opposite each other. The branch in my specimen struck off from one of the intermediate sides at right angles with the cones. We already know that these were ranged in one plane; nor, if the branches were ranged in one plane also,--certainly the disposition of branch which would consort best with such a disposition of cone,--would the arrangement be without example in the vegetable kingdom as it even now exists. "Our host," says the late Captain Basil Hall, in his brief description of the island of Java, "carried us to see a singular tree, which had been brought from Madagascar, called familiarly the _Traveller's Friend_, Urania being, I believe, its botanic name. We found it to differ from most other trees in having all its branches in one plane, like the sticks of a fan or the feathers of a peacock's tail." I may further mention, that the specimen which showed me the abrupt cactus-like terminations of Ulodendron repeated the evidence of Messrs. Lindley and Hutton's specimen regarding the arrangement of the cone scars on opposite sides, and showed also that these scars ascended to within little more than an inch of the top of the plant. As there are cases in which the _position_ of a fossil plant may add, from its bearing on geologic history, a threefold interest to the fossil itself, regarded simply as an organism, I may be permitted to refer to a circumstance already recorded, that there was a well marked Bechera detected about two years ago by Dr. Macbean of Edinburgh, an accomplished naturalist and careful observer, in a thin argillaceous stratum, interposed, in the Queen's Park, between a bed of columnar basalt and a bed of trap-tuff, in the side of the eminence occupied atop by the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel. The stratified bed in which it occurs seems, from its texture and color, to be composed mainly of trappean materials, but deposited and arranged in water; and abounds in carbonaceous markings, usually in so imperfect a state of keeping that, though long known to some of the Edinburgh geologists, not a single species, or even genus, were they able to determine. All that could be said was, that they seemed fucoidal, and might of course belong to any age. The Bechera, however, shows that the deposit is one of the Lower Coal Measures. There was found associated with it a tooth of a Carboniferous Holoptychius, whose evidence bore out the same conclusion; and both fossils derive an importance from the light which they throw on the age of the bed of tuff which underlies the stratum in which they occur. At least this trap-rock must be as old as the fossiliferous layer which rests upon it, or rather, as shown by its underlying position, a little older: it must be a trap of the earlier Carboniferous period. Further, it must have been, not injected among the strata, but poured out over the surface,--in all probability covered at the time by water; and there must have formed over it, ere another overflow of trap took place, a thin sedimentary bed charged with fragments of the plants of the period, and visited, when in the course of deposition, by some of its fishes. [Illustration: Fig. 129. SPHENOPTERIS BIFIDA. (_Burdiehouse._)] Even among the vegetable organisms of our Coal Measures, already partially described and figured, much remains to be accomplished in the way of restoration. Portions of _Sphenopteris bifida_, for instance, a fern of the Lower Carboniferous rocks have been repeatedly figured; but a beautiful specimen on the table, which exhibits what seems to be the complete frond of the plant, will give, I doubt not, fresh ideas respecting the general framework, if I may so speak, of this skeleton fern, to even those best acquainted with the figures; and an elaborate restoration of its contemporary, _Sphenopteris affinis_ (see frontispiece) which I completed from a fine series of specimens in my collection, will be new, as a whole, to those most familiar with this commonest of the Burdiehouse fossils. From comparisons instituted between minute portions of this Sphenopteris and a recent fern, it has been held considerably to resemble a Davallia of the West Indies; whereas it will be seen from the entire frond that it was characterized by very striking peculiarities, exemplified, say some of our higher botanical authorities, to whom I have submitted my restoration, by no fern that now lives. The frond of _Davallia Canariensis_, though unlike in its venation, greatly resembles in general outline one of the larger pinnæ of _Sphenopteris affinis_; but these pinnæ form only a small part of the entire frond of this Sphenopteris. It was furnished with a stout leafless rachis, or leaf-stalk, exceedingly similar in form to that of our common brake (_Pteris aquilina_). So completely, indeed, did it exhibit the same club-like, slightly bent termination, the same gradual diminution in thickness, and the same smooth surface, that one accustomed to see this part of the bracken used as a thatch can scarce doubt that the stipes of Sphenopteris would have served the purpose equally well; nay, that were it still in existence to be so employed, a roof thatched with it, on which the pinnæ and leaflets were concealed, and only the club-like stems exposed, row above row, in the style of the fern-thatcher, could not be distinguished, so far as form and size went, from a roof thatched with brake. High above the club-like termination of the rachis the stem divided into two parts, each of which, a little higher up, also divided into two; these in turn, in at least the larger fronds, also bifurcated; and this law of bifurcation,--a marked, mayhap unique, peculiarity in a fern,--regulated all the larger divisions of the frond, though its smaller pinnæ and leaflets were alternate. It was a further peculiarity of the plant that, unlike the brake, it threw off, ere the main divisions of its rachis took place, two pinnæ placed in the alternate order, and of comparatively small size. The frond of _Sphenopteris bifida_ was of a more simple form than that of its larger congener, and not a little resembled a living fern of New Zealand, _Coenopteris vivipara_. It was tripinnate; its secondary stems were placed directly opposite on the midrib, but its tertiary ones in the alternate arrangement; and its leaflets which were also alternate, were as rectilinear and slim as mere veins, or as the thread-like leaflets of asparagus. Like the fronds of Coenopteris when not in seed, it must have presented the appearance of the mere macerated framework of a fern. I need scarce remark that, independently of the scientific interest which must attach to restorations of these early plants, they speak powerfully to the imagination, and supply it with materials from which to construct the vanished landscapes of the Carboniferous ages. From one such restored fern as the two now submitted to the Association, it is not difficult to pass in fancy to the dank slopes of the ancient land of the Lower Coal Measures, when they waved as thickly with graceful Sphenopteres as our existing hill sides with the common brake; and when every breeze that rustled through the old forests bent in mimic waves their slim flexible stems and light and graceful foliage. In 1844, when Professor Nicol, of Marischal College, Aberdeen, appended to his interesting "Guide to the Geology of Scotland," a list of the Scottish fossils known at the time, he enumerated only two vegetable species of the Scotch Oolitic system,--_Equisetum columnare_ and _Pinites_ or _Peuce Eiggensis_; the former one of the early discoveries of our distinguished President, Sir Roderick Murchison; the latter, of the late Mr. William Nicol of Edinburgh. Chiefly from researches in the Lias of Eathie, near Cromarty, and in the Oolites of Sutherland and the Hebrides, I have been enabled to increase the list from two to rather more than fifty species,--not a great number, certainly, regarded as the sole representative of a flora; and yet it may be deemed comparatively not a very small one by such as may remember, that in 1837, when Dr. Buckland published the second edition of his "Bridgewater Treatise," Adolphe Brogniart had enumerated only seventy species of plants as occurring in all the Secondary formations of Europe, from the Chalk to the Trias inclusive. In a paper such as the present I can of course do little more than just indicate a few of the more striking features of the Scottish flora of the middle Secondary ages. Like that of the period of the true Coal, it had its numerous coniferous trees. As shown by the fossil woods of Helmsdale and Eigg, old Oolitic Scotland, like the Scotland of three centuries ago, must have had its mighty forests of pine;[54] and in one respect these trees seem to have more nearly resembled those of the recent pine forests of our country than the trees of the coniferous forests of the remote Carboniferous era. For while we scarce ever find a cone associated with the coniferous woods of the Coal Measures,--Lindley and Hatton never saw but one from all the English coal fields, and Mr. Alexander Bryson of Edinburgh, only one from all the coal fields of Scotland,--tree-cones of at least four different species, more probably of five, are not rare in our Scottish deposits of the Lias and Oolite. It seems not improbable that in the Carboniferous genera Pinites, Pitus, and Anabathra, which approach but remotely to aught that now exists, the place of the ligneous scaly cone may have been taken, as in the junipers and the yews, by a perishable berry; while the Pines and Araucarians of the Oolite were, like their congeners in recent times, in reality coniferous, that is, cone-bearing trees. It is another characteristic of these Secondary conifers, that while the woods of the Palæozoic periods exhibit often, like those of the tropics, none of the dense concentric lines of annual growth which mark the reign of winter, these annual lines are scarce less strongly impressed on the Oolitic woods than on those of Norway or of our own country in the present day. In some of the fossil trees these yearly rings are of great breadth; they seem to have sprung up in the rich soil of sheltered hollows and plains, and to have increased in diameter from half an inch to three quarters of an inch yearly; while in other trees of the same species the yearly zones of growth are singularly narrow,--in some instances little more than half a line in thickness. Rooted on some exposed hill side, in a shallow and meagre soil, they increased their diameter during the twelvemonth little more than a line in the severer seasons, and little more than an eighth part of an inch even when the seasons were most favorable. Further, whether the rings be large or small, we ordinarily find them occurring in the same specimens in groups of larger and smaller. In one of my Helmsdale specimens, indicative generally of rapid growth, there are four contiguous annual rings, which measure in all an inch and two twelfths across, while the four contiguous rings immediately beside them measure only half an inch. "If, at the present day," says a distinguished fossil botanist, "a warm and moist summer produces a broader annual layer than a cold and dry one, and if fossil plants exhibit such appearances as we refer in recent plants to a diversity of summers, then it is reasonable to suppose that a similar diversity formerly prevailed." The same reasoning is of course as applicable to _groups_ of annual layers as to _single_ annual layers; and may we not venture to infer from the almost invariable occurrence of such groups in the woods of this ancient system, that that ill-understood law of the weather which gives us in irregular succession groups of colder and warmer seasons, and whose operation, as Bacon tells us, was first remarked in the provinces of the Netherlands, was as certainly in existence during the ages of the Oolite as at the present time? [Illustration: Fig. 130. CONIFERS?] [Illustration: Fig. 131. CONIFER TWIGS.] Twigs which exhibit the foliage of these ancient conifers seem to be less rare in our Scotch deposits than in those of England of the same age. My collection contains fossil sprigs, with the slim needle-like leaves attached, of what seem to be from six to seven different species; and it is worthy of notice, that they resemble in the group rather the coniferæ of the southern than those of the northern hemisphere. One sprig in my collection seems scarcely distinguishable from that of the recent _Altingia excelsa_; another, from that of the recent _Altingia cunninghami_. Lindley and Hutton figure in their fossil flora a minute branch of _Dacrydium cupressinum_, in order to show how nearly the twigs of a large tree, from fifty to a hundred feet high, may resemble some of the "fossils referable to Lycopodiaceæ." More than one of the Oolitic twigs in my collection are of a resembling character, and may have belonged either to cone-bearing trees or to club mosses. Respecting, however, the real character of at least one of the specimens,--a minute branch from the Lias of Eathie, with the leaflets attached,--there can be no mistake. The thicker part of the stem is in such a state of keeping, that it presents to the microscope, in a sliced preparation, the internal structure, and exhibits, as in recent coniferous twigs of a year's growth, a central pith, a single ring of reticulated tissue arranged in lines that radiate outwards, and a thin layer of enveloping bark. Nothing, then, can be more certain than that this ancient twig, which must be accepted as representative of the foliage of whole forests of the Secondary ages in Scotland, formed part of a conifer of the Lias; and the foliage of several of the other twigs, its contemporaries, though I have failed to demonstrate their true character in the same way, bear a scarce less coniferous aspect. The cones of the period, from the circumstance that they are locked up in a hard limestone that clings closely around their scales, and from the further circumstance that the semi-calcareous lignite into which they are resolved is softer and less tenacious than the enclosing matrix, present, when laid open, not their outer surfaces, but mere sections of their interior; and give, in consequence, save in their general proportions and outline, but few specific marks by which to distinguish them. We see, however, in some cases in these sections what would be otherwise unseen,--the flat naked seeds lying embedded in their hollow receptacles between the scales, and in as perfect a state of keeping as the seeds of recent pines that had ripened only a twelvemonth ago. Had not the vitality of seeds its limits in time, like life of all other kinds, one might commit these perfect fossil germs to the soil, in the hope of seeing the old extinct forests called, through their agency, a second time into existence. Of three apparent species of cones which occur in the Eathie Lias, the smallest seems to have resembled in size and appearance that of the Scotch fir; the largest, which consisted from bottom to top, as seen in section, of from nine to ten scales, appears to have been more in the proportions of the oblong oval cones of the spruce family; while a cone of intermediate length, but of considerably greater breadth, assumed the rounded form of the cones of the cedar. I have found in the same deposit what seems to be the sprig of a conifer, with four apparently embryo cones attached to it in the alternate order. These are rather more sessile than the young cones of the larch; but the aspect of the whole is that of a larch twig in early summer, when the minute and tender cones, possessed of all the beauty of flowers, first appear along its sides. [Illustration: Fig. 132.] [Illustration: Fig. 133. ZAMIA.] [Illustration: Fig. 134. ZAMIA.] Among conifers of the Pine and Araucarian type we mark the first appearance in this system, in at least Scotland, of the genus Thuja. One of the Helmsdale plants of this genus closely resembles the common Arbor Vitæ (_Thuja occidentalis_) of our gardens and shrubberies. It exhibits the same numerous slim, thick-clustered branchlets, covered over by the same minute, sessile, scale-like leaves; and so entirely reminds one of the recent Thuja, that it seems difficult to conceive of it as the member of a flora so ancient as that of the Oolite. But not a few of the Oolitic plants in Scotland bear this modern aspect. The great development of its Cycadaceæ,--an order unknown in our Coal Measures,--also forms a prominent feature of the Oolitic flora. One of the first known genera of this curious order,--the genus Pterophyllum,--appears in the Trias. It distinctively marks the commencement of the Secondary flora, and intimates that the once great Palæozoic flora, after gradually waning throughout the Permian ages, and becoming extinct at their close, had been succeeded by a vegetation altogether new. At least one of the Helmsdale forms of this family is identical with a Yorkshire species already named and figured,--_Zamia pectinata_: a well marked Zamia which occurs in the Lias of Eathie appears to be new. Its pinnate leaves were furnished with a strong woody midrib, so well preserved in the rock, that it yields its internal structure to the microscope. The ribbon-like pinnæ or leaflets were rectilinear, retaining their full breadth until they united to the stem at right angles, but set somewhat awry; and, like several of the recent Zamiæ, they were striped longitudinally with cord-like lines. (Fig. 133.) Even the mode of decay of this Zamia, as shown by the abrupt termination of its leaflets, exactly resembled that of its existing congeners. (Fig. 134.) The withered points of the pinnæ of recent Zamiæ drop off as if clipped across with a pair of scissors; and in fossil fronds of this Zamia of the Lias we find exactly the same clipped-like appearance. (Fig. 135.) Another Scotch Zamia (Fig. 136), which occurs in the Lower Oolite of Helmsdale, resembles the Eathie one in the breadth of its leaflets, but they are not wholly so rectilinear, diminishing slightly towards their base of attachment; they are ranged, too, along the stem or midrib, not at a right angle, but at an acute one; the line of attachment is not set awry, but on the general plane of the leaf; and the midrib itself is considerably less massive and round. A third species from the same locality bears a general resemblance to the latter; but the leaflets are narrower at the base, and, as the print indicates (Fig. 136), so differently attached to the stem, that from the pressure in the rock most of them have become detached; while yet a fourth species (Fig. 137), very closely resembles a Zamia of the Scarborough Oolite,--_Z. lanceolata_. The leaflets, however, contract much more suddenly from their greatest breadth than those of _lanceolata_, into a pseudo-footstalk; and the contraction takes place not almost equally on both sides, as in that species, but almost exclusively on the upper side. And so, provisionally at least, this Helmsdale Zamia may be regarded as specifically new. [Illustration: Fig. 135.] [Illustration: Fig. 136.] [Illustration: Fig. 137.] [Illustration: Fig. 138. CONE.] With the leaves of the Eathie Zamia, we find, in this northern outlier of the Lias, cones of a peculiar form, which, like the leaves themselves, are still unfigured and undescribed, and some of which could scarce have belonged to any coniferous tree. In one of these (Fig. 138), the ligneous bracts or scales, narrow and long, and gradually tapering till they assume nearly the awl-shaped form, cluster out thick from the base and middle portions of the cone, and, like the involucral appendages of the hazel-nut, or the sepals of the yet unfolded rose-bud, sweep gracefully upwards to the top, where they present at their margins minute denticulations. In another species the bracts are broader, thinner, and more leaf-like: they rise, too, more from the base of the cone, and less from its middle portions; so that the whole must have resembled an enormous bud, with strong woody scales, some of which extended from base to apex. The first described of these two species seems to have been more decidedly a _cone_ than the other; but it is probable that they were both connecting links between such leathern seed-bearing flowers as we find developed in _Cycas revoluta_, and such seed-bearing cones as we find exemplified in _Zamia pungens_. The bud-like cone, however, does not seem to have been that of a Cycadaceous plant, as it occupied evidently not a terminal position on the plant that bore it, like the cones of Zamia or the flowers of Cycas, but a lateral one, like the lateral flowers of some of the Cactus tribe. Another class of vegetable forms, of occasional occurrence in the Helmsdale beds, seems intermediate between the Cycadaceæ and the ferns: at least, so near is the approach to the ordinary fern outline, while retaining the stiff ligneous character of Zamia, that it is scarce less difficult to determine to which of the two orders of plants such organisms belonged, than to decide whether some of the slim graceful sprigs of foliage that occur in the rocks beside them belonged to the conifers or the club mosses. And I am informed by Sir Charles Lyell, that (as some of the existing conifers bear a foliage scarce distinguishable from that of Lycopodiaceæ), so a recently discovered Zamia is furnished with fronds that scarce differ from those of a fern. Even _Zamia pectinata_ may, as Sternberg remarks, have been a fern. Lindley and Hutton place it merely provisionally among the Cycadaceæ, in deference to the judgment of Adolphe Brogniart, and point out its resemblance to _Polypodium pectinatum_; and a small Helmsdale frond which I have placed beside it bears the impress of a character scarce less equivocal. The flora of the Oolite was peculiarly a flora of intermediate forms. [Illustration: Fig. 139.] [Illustration: Fig. 140.] We recognize another characteristic of our Oolitic flora in its simple-leaved fronds, in some of the species not a little resembling those of the recent Scolopendrium, or Hart's-Tongue fern,--a form regarded by Adolphe Brogniart as peculiarly characteristic of his third period of vegetation. These simple ferns are, in the Helmsdale deposits, of three distinct types. There is first a lanceolate leaf, from two and a half to three inches in length, of not unfrequent occurrence, which may have formed, however, only one of the four leaflets, united by their pseudo-footstalks, which compose the frond of Glossopteris,--a distinctive Oolitic genus. There is next a simple ovate lanceolate leaf, from four to five and a half inches in length, which in form and venation, and all save its _thrice_ greater size, not a little resembles the leaflets of a Coal Measure neuropteris,--_N. acuminata_. And, in the third place, there are the simple leaves that in general outline resemble, as I have said, the fronds of the recent Hart's-Tongue fern (_Scolopendrium vulgare_), except that their base is lanceolate, not cordate. Of these last there are two kinds in the beds, representative of two several species, or, as their difference in general aspect and detail is very great, mayhap two several genera. The smaller of the two has a slender midrib, depressed on its upper side, and flanked on each side by a row of minute, slightly elongated protuberances, but elevated on the under side, and flanked by rows of small but well marked grooves, that curve outwards to the edges of the leaf. The larger resemble a Tæniopteris of the English and Continental Oolites, save that its midrib is more massive, its venation less at right angles with the stem, its base more elongated, and its size much greater. Some of the Helmsdale specimens are of gigantic proportions. From, however, a description and figure of a plant of evidently the same genus,--a Tæniopteris of the Virginian Oolite, given by Professor W.B. Rogers of the United States,--I find that some of the American fronds are larger still. My largest leaf from Helmsdale must have been nearly five inches in breadth; and if its proportions were those of some of the smaller ones of apparently the same species from the same locality, it must have measured about thirty inches in length. But fragments of American leaves have been found more than six inches in breadth, and whose length cannot have fallen short of forty inches. The Tæniopteris, as its name bears, is regarded as a fern. From, however, the leathern-like thickness of some of the Sutherland specimens,--from the great massiveness of their midrib,--from the rectilinear simplicity of their fibres,--and, withal, from, in some instances, their great size,--I am much disposed to believe that in our Scotch, mayhap also in the American species, it may have been the frond of some simple-leaved Cycas or Zamia. But the point is one which it must be left for the future satisfactorily to settle; though provisionally I may be permitted to regard these leaves as belonging to some Cycadaceous plant, whose fronds, in their venation and form, resembled the simple fronds of Scolopendrium, just as the leaves of some of its congeners resembled the fronds of the pinnate ferns. [Illustration: Fig. 141.] [Illustration: Fig. 142.] I have already referred to the close resemblance which certain Cycadaceous genera bear to certain of the fern family. In at least two species of Pterophyllum,--_P. comptum_ and _P. minus_,--the divisions of the leaflets seem little else than accidental rents in a simple frond; in _P. Nelsoni_ they are apparently _nothing_ more; and similar divisions, evidently, however, the effect of accident, and less rounded at their extremities than in at least _P. comptum_, we find exhibited by some of the Helmsdale specimens of Tæniopteris (See Fig. 142, p. 488.) But whatever the nature of these simple fronds, they seem to impart much of its peculiar character, all the world over, to the flora of the Oolitic ages. [Illustration: Fig. 143. PECOPTERIS OBTUSIFOLIA.] [Illustration: Fig. 144.] [Illustration: Fig. 145. PACHYPTERIS.] The compound ferns of the formation are numerous, and at least proportionally a considerable part of them seem identical in species with those of the Oolite of England. (See Fig. 143.) Among these there occur _Pecopteris Whitbiensis_, _Pecopteris obtusifolia_, _Pecopteris insignis_,--all well marked English species; with several others. It has, besides, its apparent ferns, that seem to be new--(Fig. 144)--that are at least not figured in any of the fossil floras to which I have access,--(Fig. 145),--such as a well defined Pachypteris, with leaflets broader and rounder than the typical _P. lanceolata_, and a much stouter midrib; a minute Sphenopteris too, and what seems to be a Phlebopteris, somewhat resembling _P. propinqua_, but greatly more massive in its general proportions. The equisetacea we find represented in the Brora deposits by _Equisetum columnare_,--a plant the broken remains of which occur in great abundance, and which, as was remarked by our President many years ago, in his paper on the Sutherlandshire Oolite, must have entered largely into the composition of the bed of lignite known as the Brora Coal. We find associated with it what seems to be the last of the Calamites,--_Calamites arenaceus_,--a name, however, which seems to have been bestowed both on this Oolitic plant and a resembling Carboniferous species. The deposit has also its Lycopodites, though, from their resemblance in foliage to the conifers, there exists that difficulty in drawing the line between them to which I have already adverted. One of these, however, so exactly resembles a lycopodite of both the Virginian and Yorkshire Oolite,--_L. uncifolius_,--that I cannot avoid regarding it as specifically identical; and it seems more than doubtful whether the stem which I have placed among the conifers is not a lycopodite also. It exhibits not only the general outline of the true club moss, but, like the fossil club mosses too, it wants that degree of ligniferous body in the rock which the coniferous fossils almost always possess. Yet another of the organisms of the deposit seems to have been either a lycopodite or a fern. Its leaflets are exceedingly minute, and set alternately on a stem slender as a hair,--circumstances in which it resembles some of the tiny lycopodites of the tropics, such as _Lycopodium apodium_. I must mention, however, that the larger plant of the same beds which I have placed beside it, and which resembles it so closely that my engraver finds it difficult to indicate any other difference between them than that of size, appears to be a true fern, not a lycopodium. To yet another vegetable organism of the system,--an organism which must be regarded, if I do not mistake its character, as at once very interesting and extraordinary, occurring as it does so low in the scale, and bearing an antiquity so high,--I shall advert, after a preliminary remark on a general characteristic of the flora to which it belongs, but to which it seems to furnish a striking exception. [Illustration: Fig. 146. PHLEBOPTERIS.] [Illustration: Fig. 147.] [Illustration: Fig. 148.] From the disappearance of many of those anomalous types of the Coal Measures which so puzzle the botanist, and the extensive introduction of types that still exist, we can better conceive of the general features and relations of the flora of the Oolite than of those of the earlier floras. And yet the general result at which we arrive may be found not without its bearing on the older vegetations also. Throughout almost all the families of this Oolitic flora, there seems to have run a curious bond of relationship, which, like those ties which bound together some of the old clans of our country, united them, high and low, into one great sept, and conferred upon them a certain wonderful unity of character and appearance. Let us assume the ferns as our central group. Though less abundant than in the earlier creation of the Carboniferous system, they seem to have occupied, judging from their remains, very considerable space in the Oolitic vegetation; and with the ferns there were associated in great abundance the two prevailing families of the Pterides,--Equiseta and Lycopodia,--plants which, in most of our modern treatises on the ferns proper, take their place as the fern allies. (See Fig. 148.) Let us place these along two of the sides of a pentagon,--the Lycopodia on the right side of the ferns, the Equiseta on the left; further, let us occupy the two remaining sides of the figure by the Coniferæ and the Cycadaceæ,--placing the Coniferæ on the side next the Lycopodia, and the Cycadaceæ, as the last added keystone of the erection, between these and the Equiseta. And now, let us consider how very curious the links are which give a wonderful unity to the whole. We still find great difficulty in distinguishing between the foliage of some of even the existing club mosses and the conifers; and the ancient Lepidodendra are very generally recognized as of a type intermediate between the two. Similar intermediate types, exemplified by extinct families, united the conifers and the ferns. The analogy of _Kirchneria_ with the _Thinnfeldia_, says Dr. Braun, is very remarkable, notwithstanding that the former is a fern, and that the latter is ranked among conifers. The points of resemblance borne by the conifers to the huge Equiseta of the Oolitic period seem to have been equally striking. The pores which traverse longitudinally the channelled grooves by which the stems of our recent Equiseta are so delicately fluted, are said considerably more to resemble the discs of pines and araucarians than ordinary stomata. Mr. Francis does not hesitate to say, in his work on British Ferns, that the relation of this special family to the Coniferæ is so strong, both in external and internal structure, that it is not without some hesitation he places them among the fern allies; and it has been ascertained by Mr. Dawes, in his researches regarding the calamite, that in its internal structure this apparent representative of Equiseta in the earlier ages of the world united "a network of quadrangular tissue similar to that of Coniferæ to other quadrangular cells arranged in perpendicular series," like the cells of plants of a humbler order. The relations of the Cycadacean order to ferns on the one hand, and to the Coniferæ on the other, are equally well marked. As in the ferns, the venation of its fronds is circinate, or scroll-like,--they have in several respects a resembling structure,--in at least one recent species they have a nearly identical form; and fronds of this fern-like type seem to have been comparatively common during the times of the Oolite. On the other hand, the Cycadaceæ manifest close relations to the conifers. Both have their seeds originally naked; both are cone-bearing; both possess discs on the sides of their cellules; and in both, in the transverse section, these cellules are subhexagonal, and radiate from a centre. Such were the very curious relations that united into one great sept the prevailing members of the Oolitic flora; and similar bonds of connection seem to have existed in the floras of the still earlier ages. [Illustration: Fig. 149. IMBRICATED STEM. (_Helmsdale._)] [Illustration: Fig. 150. (_Helmsdale._)] [Illustration: Fig. 151.] In the Oolite of Scotland I have, however, at length found trace of a vegetable organism that _seems_ to have lain, if I may so express myself, outside the pentagon, and was not a member of any of the great families which it comprised. (See Fig. 151.) I succeeded about four years ago in disinterring from the limestone of Helmsdale what _appears_ to be a true dicotyledonous leaf, with the fragment of another leaf, which I at first supposed might have belonged to a plant of the same great class, but which I now find might have been a portion of a fern. When _Phlebopteris Phillipsii_ was first detected in the Oolite of Yorkshire, Lindley and Hatton, regarding it as dicotyledonous, originated their term Dictyophillum as a general one for all such leaves. But it has since been assigned to a greatly lower order,--the ferns; and Sir Charles Lyell has kindly shown me that an exotic fern of the present day exhibits exactly such a reticulated style of venation as my Helmsdale fragment. (See Fig. 152, p. 497.) The other leaf, however, though also fragmentary, and but indifferently preserved, seems to be decidedly marked by the dicotyledonous character; and so I continue to regard it, provisionally at least, as one of the first precursors in Scotland of our great forest trees, and of so many of our flowering and fruit-bearing plants, and as apparently occupying the same relative place in advance of its contemporaries as that occupied by the conifer of the Old Red Sandstone in advance of the ferns and Lycopodaceæ with which I found it associated. In the arrangement of its larger veins the better preserved Oolitic leaf somewhat resembles that of the buckthorn; but its state of keeping is such that it has failed to leave its exterior outline in the stone. [Illustration: Fig. 152.] One or two general remarks, in conclusion, on the Oolite flora of Scotland may be permitted me by the Association. In its aspect as a whole it greatly resembles the Oolite flora of Virginia, though separated in space from the locality in which the latter occurs by a distance of nearly four thousand miles. There are several species of plants common to both, such as _Equisetum columnare_, _Calamites arenaceus_, _Pecopteris Whitbiensis_, _Lycopodites uncifolius_, and apparently _Tæniopteris magnifolia_; both, too, manifest the great abundance in which they were developed of old by the beds of coal into which their remains have been converted. The coal of the Virginia Oolite has been profitably wrought for many years: it is stated by Sir Charles Lyell, who carefully examined the deposit, and has given as the results of his observation in his second series of Travels in the United States, that the annual quantity taken from the Oolitic pits by Philadelphia alone amounted to ten thousand tons; and though, on the other hand, the Sutherlandshire deposit has never been profitably wrought, it has been at least wrought more extensively than any other in the British Oolite. The seam of Brora, varying from three feet three to three feet eight inches in thickness, furnished, says Sir Roderick Murchison, between the years 1814 and 1826, no less than seventy thousand tons of coal. Such is its extent, too, that nearly thirty miles from the pit's mouth (in Ross-shire under the Northern Sutor) I have found it still existing, though in diminished proportions, as a decided coal seam, which it must have taken no small amount of vegetable matter to form. And almost on the other side of the world, nearly five thousand miles from the Sutherland beds, and more than eight thousand miles from the Carolina ones, the same Oolitic flora again appears, associated with beds of coal. At Nagpur in Central India the Oolitic Sandstones abound in simple fronded ferns, such us Tæniopteris and Glossopteris, and has its Zamites, its coniferous leaves, and its equisetaceæ. Compared with existing floras, that of our Scottish Oolite seems to have most nearly resembled the flora of New Zealand,--a flora remarkable for the great abundance of its ferns, and its vast forests of coniferous trees, that retain at all seasons their coverings of acicular spiky leaves. It is to this flora that _Dacrydium cupressinum_,--so like a club moss in its foliage,--belongs; and _Podocarpus ferrugineus_,--a tree which more closely resembles in its foliage the Eathie conifer, save that its spiky leaves are somewhat narrower and longer than any other with which I am acquainted. About two thirds of the plants which cover the plains, or rise on the hill-sides of that country, are cryptogamic, consisting mainly of ferns and their allies; and it is a curious circumstance,--which was, however, not without precedent in the merely physical conditions of the Oolitic flora of Scotland,--that so shallow is the soil even where its greatest forests have sprung up, and so immediately does the rock lie below, that the central axes of the trees do not elongate downwards into a tap, but throw out horizontally on every side a thick network of roots, which rises so high over the surface as to render walking through the woods a difficult and very fatiguing exercise. The flora of the Oolite, like that of New Zealand, seems to have been in large part cryptogamic, consisting of ferns and the allied horse-tail and club moss families. Its forests seem to have contained only cone-bearing trees; at least among the many thousand specimens of its fossil woods which have been examined, no tissue of the true, dicotyledonous character has yet been found; and with the exception of the leaves just described, all those yet found in the System, which could have belonged to true trees, are of the acicular form common to the Coniferæ, and show in their dense ligneous structure that they were persistent, not deciduous. Nor is there evidence wanting that many of the Coniferæ of the period grew in so shallow a soil, that their tap-roots were flattened and bent backwards, and they were left to derive their sole support, like the trees of the New Zealand forests, from such of their roots as shot out horizontally. We even know the nature of the rock upon which they rested. As shown by fragments still locked up among the interstices of their petrified roots, it was an Old Red flagstone similar to that of Caithness in the neighborhood of Wick and Thurso, and containing the same fossil remains. In the water-rolled pebbles of the Conglomerate of Helmsdale and Port Gower,--pebbles encrusted by Oolitic corals, and enclosed in a calcareous paste, containing Oolitic belemnites and astreæ,--I have found the well marked fishes and fucoids of the Old Red Sandstone. As shown by the appearance of the rounded masses in which these lay, they must have presented as ancient an appearance in the times of the Lower Oolite as they do now; and the glimpse which they lent of so remote an antiquity, through the medium of an antiquity which, save for the comparison which they furnished the means of instituting, might be well deemed superlatively remote, I have felt singularly awe-inspiring and impressive. Macaulay anticipates a time when the traveller from some distant land shall take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to survey the ruins of St. Paul's. In disinterring from amid the antique remains of the Oolite the immensely more antique remains of the Old Red Sandstone, I have felt as such a traveller would feel if, on setting himself to dig among the scattered heaps for memorials of the ruined city, he had fallen on what had been once the Assyrian Gallery of the British Museum, and had found mingling with the antiquities of perished London the greatly older and more venerable antiquities of Nineveh or of Babylon. The land of the Oolite in this northern locality must have been covered by a soil which,--except that from a lack of the boulder clays it must have been poorer and shallower,--must have not a little resembled that of the lower plains of Cromarty, Caithness, and Eastern Ross. And on this Palæozoic platform, long exposed, as the Oolitic Conglomerates abundantly testify, to denuding and disintegrating agencies,--a platform beaten by the surf where it descended to the sea level, and washed in the interior by rivers, with here a tall hill or abrupt precipice, and there a flat plain or sluggish morass,--there grew vast forests of cone-bearing trees, tangled thickets of gigantic equisetaceæ, numerous forms of Cycas and Zamia, and wide-rolling seas of fern, amid whose open spaces club mosses of extinct tribes sent forth their long, creeping stems, spiky and dry, and thickly mottled with pseudo-spore-bearing catkins. The curtain drops over this ancient flora of the Oolite in Scotland; and when, long after, there is a corner of the thick enveloping screen withdrawn, and we catch a partial glimpse of one of the old Tertiary forests of our country, all is new. Trees of the high dicotyledonous class, allied to the plane and the buckthorn, prevail in the landscape, intermingled, however, with dingy funereal yews; and the ferns and equisetæ that rise in the darker openings of the wood approach to the existing type. And yet, though _eons_ of the past eternity have elapsed since we looked out upon Cycas and Zamia, and the last of the Calamites, the time is still early, and long ages must lapse ere man shall arise out of the dust, to keep and to dress fields waving with the productions of yet another and different flora, and to busy himself with all the labor which he taketh under the sun. Our country, in this Tertiary time, has still its great outbursts of molten matter, that bury in fiery deluges many feet in depth, and many square miles in extent, the debris of wide tracts of woodland and marsh; and the basaltic columns still form in its great lava bed; and ever and anon, as the volcanic agencies awake, clouds of ashes darken the heavens, and cover up the landscape as if with accumulated drifts of a protracted snow storm. Who shall declare what, throughout those long ages, the history of creation has been? We see at wide intervals the mere fragments of successive floras; but know not how what seem the blank interspaces were filled, or how, as extinction overtook in succession one tribe of existences after another, and species, like individuals, yielded to the great law of death, yet other species were brought to the birth, and ushered upon the scene, and the chain of being was maintained unbroken. We see only detached bits of that green web which has covered our earth ever since the dry land first appeared; but the web itself seems to have been continuous throughout all time; though ever as breadth after breadth issued from the creative loom, the pattern has altered, and the sculpturesque and graceful forms that illustrated its first beginnings and its middle spaces have yielded to flowers of richer color and blow, and fruits of fairer shade and outline; and for gigantic club mosses stretching forth their hirsute arms, goodly trees of the Lord have expanded their great boughs; and for the barren fern and the calamite, clustering in thickets beside the waters, or spreading on flowerless hill slopes, luxuriant orchards have yielded their ruddy flush, and rich harvests their golden gleam. THE END. FOOTNOTES: [1] The Prayer will be found at the end of these Memorials. [2] The same revolver proved to be the instrument of death to another person, two days after. The circumstances are thus related in the _Edinburgh Witness_ of December 27:-- "A most melancholy event, arising out of the following circumstances, occurred yesterday in the shop of Mr. Thomson, gunmaker. In the beginning of July, last year, Mr. Hugh Miller bought a six-shot revolving chamber pistol, size of ball ninety-two to the pound, from the late firm of Messrs. Alexander Thomson & Son, gunmakers, 16 Union Place. A few days after, he called and said he thought it a little stiff in its workings, and got it made to revolve more readily. The pistol has not been seen by Mr. Thomson since then; but in his absence a few minutes at dinner yesterday, Professor Miller called about twenty minutes from two, and asked Mr. Thomson's foreman how many of the six shots had been fired. He added, 'Mind, it is loaded.' The foreman, instead of removing the breech or chamber to examine it, bad incautiously turned the pistol entire towards his own person, and lifting up the hammer with his fingers, while he counted the remaining loaded chambers, he must have slipped his fingers while the pistol was turned to his own head. It exploded, and the ball lodging in the angle of his right eye, he fell back a lifeless corpse. The pistol is a bolted one, which permits of being carried loaded with perfect safety. Having been wet internally, rust may have stopped the action of the bolt. It is a singular fact that Hugh Miller dropped the pistol into the bath, where it remained for several hours. This may account for the apparent incaution of Mr. Thomson's foreman." [3] See _ante_, p. 9. [4] The horizontal lines in this diagram indicate the divisions of the various geologic systems; the vertical lines the sweep of the various classes or sub-classes of plants across the geologic scale, with, so far as has yet been ascertained, the place of their first appearance in creation; while the double line of type below shows in what degree the order of their occurrence agrees with the arrangement of the botanist. The single point of difference indicated by the diagram between the order of occurrence and that of arrangement, viz., the transposition of the gymnogenous and monocotyledonous classes, must be regarded as purely provisional. It is definitely ascertained that the Lower Old Red Sandstone has its coniferous wood, but not yet definitely ascertained that it has its true monocotyledonous plants; though indications are not awanting that the latter were introduced upon the scene at least as early as the pines or araucarians; and the chance discovery of some fossil in a sufficiently good state of keeping to determine the point may, of course, at once retranspose the transposition, and bring into complete correspondence the geologic and botanic arrangements. [5] The horizontal lines of the diagram here indicate, as in Fig. 1, the divisions of the several geologic systems; the vertical lines represent the leading divisions and classes of animals, and, as shown by the formations in which their earliest known remains occur, the probable period of their first appearance in creation; while the double line of text below exhibits the complete correspondence which obtains between their occurrence, in nature and the Cuvierian arrangement. The line representative of the Radiata ought perhaps to have been elevated a little higher than either of its two neighbors. [6] Fig. 14, Neuropteris Loshii. Fig. 15, Neuropteris gigantea. Fig. 16, Neuropteris acuminata. Fig. 17, Sphenopteris affinis. Fig. 18, Pecopteris heterophylla. Fig. 19, Sphenopteris dilitata. [7] Fig. 21, _r a_, Rachis, greatly thickened towards its base by numerous ærial roots, shot downwards to the soil, and which closely cover the stem. [8] Fig. 22, _m_, Cellular tissue of the centre of rachis; _d_, similar tissue of the circumference; _f_, _v_, darkly-colored woody fibres of great strength, the "internal buttresses" of the illustration; _e_, the outer cortical portion formed by the bases of the leaves. [9] Fig. 23, Branching stem, with bark and leaves. Fig. 24. Extremity of branch. Fig. 25, Extremity of another branch, with indication of cone-like receptacle of spores or seed. [10] No true fossil palms have yet been detected in the great Oolitic and Wealden systems, though they certainly occur in the Carboniferous and Permian rocks, and are comparatively common in the earlier and middle Tertiary formations. Much cannot be founded on merely negative evidence; but it would be certainly a curious circumstance should it be found that this graceful family, first ushered into being some time in the later Palæozoic periods, was withdrawn from creation during the Middle ages of the earth's history, to be again introduced in greatly more than the earlier proportions during the Tertiary and recent periods. [11] Leaf of a tree allied to the maple. [12] Leaf of a tree allied to the elm. [13] Here, as in the former diagrams (Figs. 1 and 4), the horizontal lines represent the divisions of the great geologic systems; while the vertical lines indicate the sweep of the several orders of fishes across the scale, and the periods, so far as has yet been determined, of their first occurrence in creation. [14] Some of these _dragons_ of the Secondary ages were of very considerable size. The wings of a Pterodactyle of the Chalk, in the possession of Mr. Bowerbank, must have had a spread of about eighteen feet; those of a recently discovered Pterodactyle of the Greensand, a spread of not less than twenty-seven feet. The _Lammer-geyer_ of the Alps has an extent of wing of but from ten to eleven feet; while that of the great Condor of the Andes, the largest of flying birds, does not exceed twelve feet. [15] _a_, Palæotherium magnum. _b_, Palæotherium minus. _c_, Anoplotherium commune. [16] It will be seen that there is no attempt made in this lecture to represent the great Palæozoic division as characterized _throughout its entire extent_ by a luxuriant flora. It is, on the contrary, expressly stated here, that the "plants of its earlier and terminal formations (_i.e._ those of the Silurian, Old Red, and Permian Systems) were _few and small_," and that "it was _only during the protracted eons of the carboniferous period that they received their amazing development, unequalled in any previous or succeeding time_." Being thus express in my limitation, I think I have just cause of complaint against any one who represents me us unfairly laboring, in this very composition, to make it be believed that the _whole_ Palæozoic period was characterized by a gorgeous flora; and as thus sophistically generalizing in the first instance, in order to make a fallacious use of the generalization in the second, with the intention of misleading non-geologic readers. Such, however, as may be seen from the following extracts from the "Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Science at Philadelphia," is the charge preferred against me by a citizen of the United States. "Mr. William Parker Foulke asked the attention of the Society to a lecture by Mr. Hugh Miller, recently republished in the United States under the title of 'The Two Records, Mosaic and Geological,' and made some remarks upon the importance of maintaining a careful scrutiny of the logic of the natural sciences.... Mr. Miller teaches that, in the attempt to reconcile the two 'records,' there are only three periods to be accounted for by the geologist, viz. 'the period of _plants_; the period of _great sea monsters and creeping things_; and the period of _cattle and beasts of the earth_;' and that the first of these periods is represented by the rocks grouped under the term _Palæozoic_, and is distinguished from the _Secondary_ and _Tertiary_ chiefly by its gorgeous flora; and that the geological evidence is so complete as to be patent to all, that the first great period of organized being was, as described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly a period of herbs and trees, yielding seed after their kind. The general reader, not familiar with the details of geological arrangement, could not fail to infer from such a statement, used for such a purpose, that the Palæozoic rocks are regarded by geologists as forming one group representative of one period, which can properly be said to be distinguished as a _whole_ by its gorgeous flora; and that it is properly so distinguished _for the argument in question_. It was familiar to the Academy, as well as to Mr. Miller, that from the _carboniferous_ rocks downward (backward in order of time), there have been discriminated a large number of periods, differing from one another in mineral and in organic remains; and that the proportion of the _carboniferous_ era to the whole series is small, whether we regard the thickness of its deposits or its conjectural chronology. It in only of this _carboniferous_ era, _the latest of this series_, that the author's remarks could be true; and even of this, if taken for the entire surface of the earth, it could not be truly asserted that 'the evidence is so complete as to be patent to all,' that the quantity of its vegetable products distinguishes it from the earth's surface during the era in which we live. To confound by implication all this periods termed Palæozoic, so as to apply to them as a whole what could be true, if at all, only of the _carboniferous_ period, is a fallacious use of a generalization _made for a purpose_, and upon a principle not properly available for the writer's argument," &c. So far the "Proceedings" of the Academy. This, surely, is very much the reverse of fair. I, however, refer the matter, without note or comment (so far at least as it involves the question whether Mr. Foulke has not, in the face of the most express statement on my part, wholly misrepresented me), to the judgment of candid and intelligent readers on both sides of the Atlantic. I know not that I should recognize Mr. Foulke as entitled, after such a display, to be dealt with simply as the member of a learned society who differs from me on a scientific question; nor does his reference to the "carboniferous era" as "the _latest_ of the" Palæozoic "series," and his apparent unacquaintance with that Permian period, in reality the terminal one of the division during which the Palæozoic forms seem to have gradually died away, in order to give place to those of the Secondary division, inspire any very high respect for his acquirements as a geologist. Waiving, however, the legitimacy of his claim, I may be permitted to repeat, for the further information of the non-geological reader, that the _carboniferous_ formations, _wherever they have yet been detected_, justify, in the amazing abundance of their carbonized vegetable organisms, the name which they bear. Mr. Foulke, in three short sentences, uses the terms "carboniferous era," "carboniferous rocks," "carboniferous period," four several times; and these terms are derived from the predominating amount of carbon (elaborated of old by the plants of the period) which occurs in its several formations. The very language which he has to employ is of itself a confirmation of the statement which he challenges. For so "patent" is this _carboniferous_ character of the system, that it has given to it its universally accepted designation,--the verbal sign by which it is represented wherever it is known. Mr. F. states, that "if taken for the entire surface of the earth," it cannot be truly asserted that the carboniferous flora preponderated over that of the present time, or, at least, that its preponderance could not be regarded as "patent to all," The statement admits of so many different meanings, that I know not whether I shall succeed in replying to the special meaning intended by Mr. Foulke. There are no doubt carboniferous deposits on the earth's surface still unknown to the geologist, the evidence of which on the point must be regarded, in consequence, not as "patent to all," but as _nil_. They are witnesses absent from court, whose testimony has not yet been tendered. But equally certain it is, I repeat, that wherever carboniferous formations _have_ been discovered and examined, they have been found to bear the unique characteristic to which the system owes its name,--they have been found charged with the carbon, existing usually as great beds of coal, which was elaborated of old by its unrivalled flora from the elements. And as this evidence is certain and positive, no one would be entitled to set off against it, as of equal weight, the merely negative evidence of some one or two deposits of the carboniferous age that did not bear the carboniferous character, even were such known to exist; far less is anyone entitled to set off against it the _possibly_ negative evidence of deposits of the carboniferous age not yet discovered nor examined; for that would be simply to set off against good positive evidence, what is no evidence at all. It would be to set off the _possible_ evidence of the absent witnesses, not yet precognosced in the case, against the express declarations of the witnesses already examined, and strong on the positive side. Surely an American, before appealing, in a question of this kind, to the bare possibility of the existence somewhere or other of barely negative evidence, ought to have bethought him of the very extraordinary positive evidence furnished by the carboniferous deposits of his own great country. The coal fields of Britain and the European continent had been wrought for ages ere those of North America were known, and for ages more after it had been but ascertained that the New, like the Old World, has its Coal Measures. And during the latter period the _argument_ of Mr. Foulke might have been employed, just as now, and some member of a learned society might have urged that, though the coal fields of Europe bore evidence to the former existence of a singularly luxuriant flora, beyond comparison more vast than the European one of the present day, the same could not be predicated of the American coal fields, whose carbonized remains _might_ be found representative of a flora which had been at least not more largely developed than that existing American flora to which the great western forests belong. Now, however, the time for any such argument has gone by; the American coal fields have been carefully explored; and what is the result? The geologist has come to know, that even the mighty forests of America are inconsiderable, compared with its deposits of coal; nay, that all its forests gathered into one heap would fail to furnish the materials of a single coal seam equal to that of Pittsburg; and that centuries after all its thick woods shall have disappeared before the axe, and it shall have come to present the comparatively bare, unwooded aspect of the long civilized countries of Southern Europe, it will continue to derive the elements of its commercial greatness, and the cheerful blaze of its many millions of domestic hearths, from the unprecedentedly luxurious flora of the old carboniferous ages. Truly, very wonderful are the coal fields of Northern America! If geologists inferred, as they well might, that the extinct flora which had originated the European coal vastly outrivalled in luxuriance that of the existing time, what shall be said of that flora of the same age which originated the coal deposits of Nova Scotia and the United States,--deposits _twenty times as great_ as all those of all Europe put together! [17] Such is also the view taken by the author of a recently published work, "The Genesis of the Earth and of Man." "Christian philosophers have been compelled to acknowledge," says this writer, "that the Mosaic account of creation is only reconcileable with demonstrated facts, by its being regarded as a record of _appearances_; and if so, to vindicate the truth of God, we must consider it, so far as the acts are concerned, as the relation of a revelation to the _sight_, which was sufficient for all its purposes, rather than as one in words; though the words are perfectly true as describing the revelation itself, and the revelation is equally true as showing man the principal phenomena which he would have seen had it been possible for him to be a witness of the events. Further, if we view the narrative as the description of a series of visions, while we find it to be perfectly reconcileable with the statement in other parts of Scripture, that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, we remove, with other difficulties, the only strong objection to the opinion of those who regard the 'six days' as periods of undeflnable duration, and who may even believe that we are now in the 'seventh day,'--the day of rest or of cessation from the work of creation. Certainly, 'the day of God,' and 'the day of the Lord,' and the 'thousand two hundred and threescore days,' of the Revelation of St. John, and the 'seventy weeks' in the Prophecy of Daniel, are not to be understood in their primary and natural senses," &c., &c. [18] "For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it." [19] Forbes and Hanley enumerate one hundred and sixty bivalves, and two hundred and thirty-two univalves,--in all three hundred and ninety-two species, as the only known shell-bearing molluscs of the existing British seas. [20] Principles of Zoology: touching the Structure, Development, Distribution, and Natural Arrangement of the Races of Animals, living and extinct. With numerous Illustrations. For the Use of Schools and Colleges. Part I., "Comparative Physiology." By Louis Agassiz and Augustus A. Gould. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. [21] _a_, Articulating surface of joint. _b_, Fragment of column, exhibiting laterally the tooth processes, so fitted into each other as to admit of flexure without risk of dislocation. The uppermost joint shows two lateral cavities for the articulation of auxiliary arms. [22] Perhaps one strengthening principle more might be enumerated as occurring in this curious piece of mechanism. In the layer of the nether plate, the fibres, instead of being laid in parallel lines, like the threads in the moleskin of my illustration, seem to be _felted_ together,--an arrangement which must have added considerably to their coherency and powers of resistance. [23] Fig. 102, Clymenia Sedwicki; Fig. 103, Gyroceras Eifelensis; Fig. 104, Cirrus Goldfussii. [24] Berosus, Hieronymus, Mnaseas, Nicolaus, Manetho, Mochus, and Hestæus. [25] See Cory's "Ancient Fragments." [26] As was common in Bible illustrations published in our own country a century and a half ago, the old Greek artist has introduced into his medal two points of time. Two of the figures represent _Noe_ and his wife quitting the ark; while the other two exhibit them as seated within it. An English print of the death of Abel, now before me, which dates a little after the times of the Revolution, shows, on the same principle, the two brothers, represented by four figures,--two of these quietly offering up their respective sacrifices in the background, and the other two grappling in deadly warfare in front. [27] "In preparing the 'Horæ Biblicæ Quotidianæ,' he [Dr. Chalmers] had beside him, for use and reference, the Concordance, the Pictorial Bible, Poole's Synopsis, Henry's Commentary, and Robertson's Researches in Palestine. These constituted what he called his Biblical Library. 'There,' said he to a friend, pointing, as he spoke, to the above named volumes as they lay together on his library table, with a volume of the 'Quotidianæ,' in which he had just been writing, lying open beside them,--'these are the books I use: all that is Biblical is there.'"--_Dr. Hanna's Preface to "Daily Scripture Readings."_ [28] The raven is said to live for more than a hundred years. I am, however, not prepared to say that it was the same pair of birds that used, year after year, to build on the same rock-shelf among the precipices of Navity, from the times of my great-grandfather's boyhood to those of my own. [29] The following estimate of the air-breathing vertebrates (that of the "Physical Atlas," second edition, 1856) may be regarded as the latest. It will he seen that it does not include the cetacea or the seals:-- SPECIES. Quadrumana 170 Marsupialia 123 Edentata 28 Pachydermata 39 Terrestrial Carnivora 514 Rodentia 604 Ruminantia 180 ---- 1658 Birds 6266 Reptiles 657 Turtles 8} Sea Snakes 7} 15 ---- 642 Great as is this number of animals, compared with those known a century ago, there are indications that the list is to be increased rather than diminished. Even by the latest European authorities the reindeer is represented as consisting of but a single species, common to the sub-arctic regions of both the Old and New Worlds; whereas in the "Canadian Naturalist" for 1856 I find it stated, on what seems to be competent authority, that America has its two species of reindeer, and that they both differ from the European species. [30] If I do not introduce here the argument founded on the great age of certain gigantic trees, such as the Baobab of intertropical Africa, or the Taxodium of South America, it is not because I have any reason to challenge the estimates of Adamson or Candolle. The one tree may have lived its five thousand, the other its six thousand, years; but as the grounds have been disputed on which the calculations respecting their vast age have been founded, and as they cannot be reëxamined anew by the reader, I wholly omit the evidence, in the general question, which they have been supposed to furnish. [31] The following excellent remarks on the economy of miracle, by Chalmers, bear very directly on this subject:--"It is remarkable that God is sparing of miracles, and seems to prefer the ordinary processes of nature, if equally effectual for the accomplishment of his purposes. He might have saved Noah and his family by miracles; but he is not prodigal of these, and so he appointed that an ark should be made to bear up the living cargo which was to be kept alive on the surface of the waters; and not only so, but he respects the laws of the animal physiology, as he did those of hydrostatics, in that he put them by pairs into the ark, male and female, to secure their transmission to after ages, and food was stored up to sustain them during their long confinement. In short, he dispenses with miracles when these are not requisite for the fulfilment of his ends; and he never dispenses with the ordinary means when these are fitted, and at the same time sufficient, for the occasion."--_Daily Scripture Readings_, vol. i. p. 10. [32] For a brief but masterly view of these ancient cosmogonies, see the Rev. D. Macdonald's "Creation and the Fall." Edinburgh: Constable & Co. [33] 1. The great surrounding oceans. 2. Caspian Sea. 3. River Phison. 4-4. Points of the Compass. 5. Mediterranean Sea. 6. Red Sea. 7-8. Persian Gulf, with the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. 9. River Gihon. [34] 1. The sun Occident. 2. The sun orient. 3. The Heavens. 4. Great mountain behind which the sun is hidden when it is night. 5. The Mediterranean Sea. 6. Red Sea. 7. Persian Gulf. 8. Garden of Eden. 9. Great surrounding ocean 10. The Creator looking down upon his work, and seeing that all was good. [35] The very different terms which Mr. Powell employs in characterizing the anti-geologists, from those which he makes use of in denouncing the men honestly bent on reconciling the enunciations of revelation with the findings of geologic science,--a class which included in the past, divines such as Chalmers, Buckland, and Pye Smith, and comprises divines such as Hitchcock and the Archbishop of Canterbury now,--is worthy of being noted. In two sermons, "Christianity without Judaism," written by this clergyman of the Church of England, to show that all days of the week are alike, and the Christian Sabbath a mere blunder, I find the following passage:--"Some divines have consistently rejected all geology and all science as profane and carnal; and some even, when pretending to call themselves men of science, have stooped to the miserable policy, of tampering with the truth, investing the real facts in false disguises, to cringe to the prejudices of the many, and to pervert science into a seeming accordance with popular prepossessions." I cannot believe that this will be regarded as justifiable language: it seems scarce worthy of a man of science; and will, I fear, only be accepted as good in evidence that the _odium theologicum_ is not restricted to what is termed the orthodox side of the Church. [36] The gentleman here referred to lectured no later than October, 1853, against the doctrines of the geologists; and modestly chose as the scene of his labors the city of Hutton and Playfair. What he set himself specially to "demonstrate" was, as he said, that the geologic "theories as to antiquity of the earth, successive eras, &c., were not only fallacious and unphilosophical, but rendered nugatory the authority of the sacred Scriptures." Not only, however, did he exert himself in demolishing the geologists as infidel, but he denounced also as unsound the theology of good old Isaac Watts. The lines taught us in our infancy,-- "Let dogs delight to bark and bite, For God hath made them so," were, he remarked, decidedly heterodox. They ought to have run instead,-- "Let dogs delight to bark and bite, _Satan_ hath made them so"!!! [37] "A Brief and Complete Refutation of the Anti-Scriptural Theory of Geologists." By a Clergyman of the Church of England. London: Wertheim & Macintosh. 1853. [38] Newspaper Report of Meeting of the British Association held at York in September, 1844. [39] See "Primary and Present State of the Solar System, particularly of our own Planet;" and "Exposure of the Principles of Modern Geology." By P. M'Farlane, Author of the "Primary and Present State of the Solar System." Edinburgh: Thomas Grant. [40] One of the more brilliant writers of the present day,--a native of the picturesque village in which this anti-geologist resides,--describes in a recent work, with the enthusiasm of the poet, the noble mountains which rise around it. I know not, however, whether my admiration of the passage was not in some degree dashed by a few comic notions suggestive of an "imaginary conversation," in the style of Landor, between this popular author and his anti-geologic townsman, on the merits of hills in general, and in especial on the claims of those which encircle Comrie "as the mountains are round about Jerusalem." The two gentlemen would, I suspect, experience considerable difficulty in laying down, in such a discussion, their common principles. [41] "Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies." By Granville Penn, Esq. London, 1825. [42] "Statesman and Record," October 6th, 1846. [43] Sir Charles Lyell's statement is by no means so express or definite as it is represented to be in this passage, in which I have taken the evidence of his opponents regarding it. What he really says (see his "Principles," second edition, 1832) is what follows:--"_If_ the ratio of recession had never exceeded fifty yards in forty years, it must have required nearly ten thousand years for the excavation of the whole ravine; but no probable conjecture can be offered as to the quantity of time consumed in such an operation, because the retrograde movement may have been much more rapid when the whole current was confined within a space not exceeding a fourth or fifth of that which the Falls now occupy." In the eighth edition of the same work, however, published in 1850, after he had examined the Falls, there occurs the following re-statement of the case:--"After the most careful inquiries I was able to make during my visit to the spot in 1841-42, I came to the conclusion that the average [recession] of one foot a year would be a much more probable conjecture than that of one and a quarter yards. In that case it would have required _thirty-five thousand years_ for the retreat of the Falls from the escarpment of Queenston to their present site. It seems by no means improbable that such a result would be no exaggeration of the truth, although we cannot assume that the retrograde movement has been uniform. At some points it may have receded much faster than at present; but in general its progress was probably slower, because the cataract, when it began to recede, must have been nearly twice its present height." [44] "Scottish Christian Herald," 1838, vol. iii., p. 766. [45] The substance of this and the following lecture was originally given in a single paper, before the Geological Section of the British Association, held at Glasgow in September 1855. So considerable have been the additions, however, that the one paper has swelled into two lectures. Most of the added matter was at first thrown into the form of Notes; but it was found, that from their length and frequency, they would have embarrassed the printer, mayhap the reader also; and so most of the larger ones have been introduced into the text within brackets. [46] A curious set of these, with specimens of the smooth-stemmed fucoid collected by Mr. John Miller of Thurso,--a meritorious laborer in the geologic field,--were exhibited at Glasgow to the Association. The larger stems were thickly traversed in Mr. J. Miller's specimens by diagonal lines, which seemed, however, to be merely lines of rhomboidal fracture in the glassy coal into which the plants were converted, and not one of their original characters. [47] I must, however, add, that there was found in the neighborhood of Stromness about fifteen years ago, by Dr. John Fleming, a curious nondescript vegetable organism, which, though equivocal in character and appearance, was in all probability a plant of the sea. It consisted of a flattened cylinder, in some of the specimens exceeding a foot in length by an inch in breadth, and traversed on both the upper and under sides by a mesial groove extending to the extremities. It bore no external markings, and the section exhibited but an indistinct fibrous structure, sufficient, however, to indicate its vegetable origin. I have not hitherto succeeded in finding for myself specimens of this organism, which has been named provisionally, by Dr. Fleming, _Stroma obscura_; but it seems not improbable that certain supposed fragments of wood, detected by Mr. Charles Peach in the Caithness Flagstones, but which do not exhibit the woody structure, may have belonged to it. [48] I figured this species from an imperfect Cromarty specimen fifteen years ago. (See "Old Red Sandstone," first edition, 1841, Plate VII. Fig. 4). Of the greatly better specimens now figured I owe the larger one (Fig. 120) to Mrs. Mill, Thurso, who detected it in the richly fossiliferous flagstones of the locality in which she resides, and kindly made it over to me; and the specimen of which I have given a magnificent representation (Fig. 12, p. 55) to my friend Mr. Robert Dick. I have, besides, seen several specimens of the same organism, in a better or worse state of keeping, in the interesting collection of the Rev. Charles Clouston, Sandwick, near Stromness. [49] "Frogspawn is full of eyes [that is, black eye-like points], and every eye is a tadpole." [50] Mr. Page figures, in his "Advanced Text Book of Geology" (p. 127), a few circular markings from the Forfarshire beds, which he still regards as spawn, probably that of a Crustacean, and which certainly differ greatly in appearance from the markings found enclosed in the apparent spathes. [51] Since these sentences were written I have seen a description of both the plants of the Upper Old Red to which they refer, in an interesting sketch of the geology of Roxburgshire by the Rev. James Duncan, which forms part of a recent publication devoted to the history and antiquities of the shire. "In the red quarry of Denholm Hill there occurs," says Mr. Duncan, "a stratum of soft yellowish sandstone, which contains impressions of an apparent fucoid in considerable quantity. One or several linear stems diverge from a point, and throw off at acute angles, as they grow upwards, branches or leaves very similar to the stem, which are in turn subdivided into others. The width of the stalks is generally about a quarter of an inch, the length often a foot. The color is brown, blackish-brown, or grayish. The same plant also occurs in the whitestone quarry [an overlying bed] in the form of Carbonaceous impressions. There can be little doubt that it is a fucoid. The general mode of growth greatly resembles that of certain seaweeds; and in some specimens we have seen the branches dilated a little at the extremities, like those of such of the living fuci as expand in order to afford space for the fructification. It is deserving of remark, that the plant is seldom observed lying horizontally on the rock in a direction parallel to its stratification, but rising up through the layers, so as only to be seen when the stone is broken across; as if it had been standing erect, or kept buoyant in water, while the stony matter to which it owes its preservation was deposited around it." Mr. Duncan, after next referring to the remains of what he deems a land plant, derived from the same deposit, and which, though sadly mutilated, presents not a little of the appearance of the naked framework of a frond of Cyclopterus Hibernicus divested of the leaflets, goes on to describe the apparent calamite of the formation. "The best preserved vegetable remain yet found in Denholm Hill quarry," he says, "is the radical portion of what we cannot hesitate to call a species of calamite. The lower part is regularly and beautifully rounded, bulging and prominent, nearly four inches in diameter. About an inch from the bottom it contracts somewhat suddenly in two separate stages, and, from the uppermost sends up a stem about an inch in diameter, and nearly of the same length, where it is broken across. At the origin of this stem the small longitudinal ridges are distinctly marked; and the whole outline of the figure, though converted into stone, is as well defined as it could have been in the living plant." Mr. Duncan accompanies his description with a figure of the organism described, which, however, rather resembles the bulb of a liliaceous plant than the root of a calamite, which in all the better preserved, specimens contracts, instead of expanding, as it descends. The apparent expansion, however, in the Old Red specimen may be simply a result of compression in its upper part: the under part certainly much resembles, in the dome-like symmetry of its outline, the radical termination of a solitary calamite. [52] "Though the coal of Sabero is apparently included in Devonian rocks," says Sir Roderick Murchison, "M. Casiano de Prado thinks that this appearance may be do to inverted folds of the strata." On the other hand, M. Alcide D'Orbigny regards it us decidedly Old Red; and certainly its Sphenopteris and Lepidodendron bent much more the aspect of Devonian than of Carboniferous plants. [53] Now, alas! no more. In Mr. Gourlay the energy and shrewd business habits of the accomplished merchant were added to an enlightened zeal for general science, and no inconsiderable knowledge in both the geologic and botanic provinces. The marked success, in several respects, of the brilliant meeting of the British Association which held in Glasgow in September 1855, was owing in no small measure to the indefatigable exertions and well calculated arrangements of Mr. Gourlay. [54] Trees must have been very abundant in what is now Scotland in these Secondary ages. Trunks of the common Scotch fir are of scarce more frequent occurrence in our mosses than the trunks of somewhat resembling trees among the shales of the Lower Oolite of Helmsdale. On examining in that neighborhood, about ten years since, a huge heap of materials which had been collected along the sea shore for burning into lime in a temporary kiln, I found that more than three fourths of the whole consisted of fragments of coniferous wood washed out of the shale beds by the surf, and the remainder of a massive Isastrea. And only two years ago, after many kilnfuls had been gathered and burnt, his grace the Duke of Argyll found that fossil wood could still he collected by cartloads along the shore of Helmsdale. The same woods also occur at Port Gower, Kintradwell, Shandwick, and Eathie. In the Island of Eigg, too, in an Oolite deposit, locked up in trap, and whose stratigraphical relations cannot in consequence be exactly traced, great fragments of _Pinites Eiggensis_ are so abundant, that, armed with a mattock, I have dug out of the rock, in a few minutes, specimens enough to supply a dozen of museums. In short, judging from its fossiliferous remains, it seems not improbable that old Oolitic Scotland was as densely covered with coniferous trees as the Scotland of Roman times, when the great Caledonian forest stretched northwards from the wall of Antoninus to the furthest Thule. IMPORTANT LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC WORKS, PUBLISHED BY GOULD AND LINCOLN, 59 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON. * * * * * ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY; Or, Year Book of Facts in Science and Art. By DAVID A. WELLS, A.M. 12 mo, cloth, $1.25. 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This edition contains Important additions of words and phrases NOT IN THE ENGLISH EDITION, making it in all respects MORE FULL AND PERFECT THAN THE AUTHOR'S EDITION. The work has already become one of standard authority, both in this country and in Great Britain. THE ELEMENTS OF GEOLOGY. Adapted to Schools and Colleges. With numerous Illustrations. By J.R. LOOMIS. Lewisburg University, Pa. 12mo, cloth, 75 cts. It is surpassed by no work before the American public. We hope that every teacher among our readers will examine the work and put the justness of our remarks to the test of his judgment and experience.--M.B. ANDERSON, LL. D.--[Pres. of Rochester University, N.Y.] This is just such a work as is needed for all our schools. It should take its place as a text-book in all the schools of the land.--[N.Y. Observer.] THE EARTH AND MAN. By Prof. ARNOLD GUYOT. With Illustrations. 12mo, cloth, $1.25. INFLUENCE OF THE HISTORY OT SCIENCE UPON INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 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With an Explanatory Text, Geological Sections, and Plates of the Fossils which characterize the Formations. By JULES MARCOU. Two volumes. Octavo, cloth, $3.00. --> The Map is elegantly colored, and done up with linen cloth back, and folded in octavo form, with thick cloth covers. KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. A view of the Productive Forces of Modern Society, and the Results of Labor, Capital and Skill. By CHARLES KNIGHT. With numerous Illustrations. American edition. Revised, with Additions, by DAVID A. WELLS, editor of the "Annual of Scientific Discovery." 12mo, cloth, $1.25. CYCLOPÆDIA OF ANECDOTES OF LITERATURE AND THE FINE ARTS. A choice selection of Anecdotes of the various forms of Literature, of the Arts, of Architecture, Engravings, Music, Poetry, Painting and Sculpture, and of the most celebrated Literary Characters and Artists of different Countries and Ages, &c. By KAZLITT ARVINE, A.M. With numerous Illustrations. 725 pages, octavo, cloth, $3.00. This is unquestionably the choicest collection of ANECDOTES ever published. It contains THREE THOUSAND AND FORTY ANECDOTES, and more than ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY ILLUSTRATIONS. It is admirably adapted to literary and scientific men, to artists, mechanics, and others, as a DICTIONARY FOR REFERENCE, in relation to facts on the numberless subjects and characters introduced. KITTO'S POPULAR CYCLOPÆDIA OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE. Condensed from the larger work, by the author, JOHN KITTO, D.D. Assisted by JAMES TAYLOR, D.D. With _over_ 500 _Illustrations_. Octavo, 812 pp., cloth, $3.00. This work answers the purpose of a commentary, while at the same time it furnishes a complete DICTIONARY OF THE BIBLE, embodying the products of the best and most recent researches in biblical literature, in which the scholars of Europe and America have been engaged. It is not only intended for ministers and theological students, but is also particularly adapted to parents, Sabbath-school teachers, and the great body of the religious public. HISTORY OF PALESTINE. With the Geography and Natural History of the Country, the Customs and Institutions of the Hebrews, etc. By JOHN KITTO, D.D. With upwards of 200 Illustrations. 12mo, cloth. $1.25. Beyond all dispute this is the best historical compendium of the Holy Land, from the days of Abraham, to those of the late Pasha of Egypt, Mehemet Ali.--[Edinburgh Review.] --> In the numerous notices and reviews, the work has been strongly recommended, as not only admirably adapted to the FAMILY, but also as a text-book for SABBATH and WEEK DAY SCHOOLS. CHAMBERS'S CYCLOPÆDIA OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. Two large imperial octavo volumes of 1400 pages; with upwards of 300 elegant Illustrations. By ROBERT CHAMBERS. Embossed cloth, $5.00. This work embraces about ONE THOUSAND AUTHORS, chronologically arranged and classed as Poets, Historians, Dramatists, Philosophers, Metaphysicians, Divines, etc., with choice selections from their writings, connected by a Biographical, Historical, and Critical Narrative; thus presenting a complete view of English literature from the earliest to the present time. Let the reader open where he will, he cannot fail to find matter for profit and delight. The selections are gems--infinite riches in a little room; in the language of another, "A WHOLE ENGLISH LIBRARY FUSED DOWN INTO ONE CHEAP BOOK!" CHAMBERS'S MISCELLANY OF USEFUL AND ENTERTAINING KNOWLEDGE. By WILLIAM CHAMBERS. With Illustrations. Ten vols., 16mo, cloth, $7.00. CHAMBERS'S HOME BOOK AND POCKET MISCELLANY. A choice Selection of Interesting and Instructive Reading for the Old and the Young. Six vols. 16mo, cloth, $3.00. This work is fully equal, if not superior, to either of the Chamber's other works in interest, containing a vast fund of valuable information, furnishing ample variety for every class of readers. CHAMBERS'S REPOSITORY OF INSTRUCTIVE AND AMUSING PAPERS. With Illustrations. 16mo, cloth, bound. 4 vols. in two, $1.75; and 4 vols. in one, $1.50. THE CRUISE OF THE NORTH STAR; A Narrative of the Excursion of Mr. Vanderbilt's Party, in her Voyage to England, Russia, Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, Malta, Turkey, Madeira, etc. By Rev. JOHN OVERTON CHOULES, D.D. With elegant Illustrations, etc. 12mo, cloth, gilt back and sides, $1.50. VISITS TO EUROPEAN CELEBRITIES. By the Rev. WILLIAM B. SPRAGUE, D.D. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. A series of graphic and life-like Personal Sketches of many of the most distinguished men and women of Europe, with whom the author became acquainted in the course of several European tours, where he saw them in their own homes and under the most advantageous circumstances. "It was my uniform custom, after every such interview, to take copious memoranda of the converation, including an account of the individual's appearance and manners; in short, defining as well as I could, the whole impression which his physical, intellectual, and moral man had made upon me." From the memoranda thus made, the material for the present instructive and exceedingly interesting volume is derived. Besides these "pen and ink" sketches, the work contains the novel attraction of a FAC SIMILE OF THE SIGNATURE of each of the persons introduced. PILGRIMAGE TO EGYPT; EXPLORATIONS OF THE NILE. With Observations, illustrative of the Manners, Customs, etc. By Hon. J.V.C. SMITH, M.D. With numerous elegant Engravings, 12mo; cloth, $1.25. THE STORY OF THE CAMPAIGN. A complete Narrative of the War in Southern Russia. Written in a Tent in the Crimea. By Major E. BRUCE HAMLEY, author of "Lady Lee's Widowhood." With a new and complete Map of the Seat of War. 12mo. paper covers, 37-1/2 cts. POETICAL WORKS. MILTON'S POETICAL WORKS. With Life and Elegant Illustrations. 16mo, cloth, $1.00; fine cloth, gilt, $1.25. POETICAL WORKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. With Life, and Illustrations on Steel. 16mo, cl., $1; fine cl., gilt, $1.25. COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM COWPER. With a Life, and Critical Notices of his Writings. With new and elegant Illustrations on Steel. 16mo. cloth, $1.00; fine cloth, gilt, $1.25. --> The above Poetical Works, by standard authors, are all of uniform size and style, printed on fine paper, from clear, distinct type, with new and elegant illustrations, richly bound in full gilt, and plain; thus rendering them, in connection with the exceedingly LOW PRICE at which they are offered, the cheapest and most desirable of any of the numerous editions of these author's works now in the market. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF JOHN FOSTER. Edited by J.E. RYLAND, with Notices of Mr. Foster as a Preacher and a Companion. By JOHN SHEPPARD. Two volumes in one, 700 pages. 12mo, cloth, $1.25. In simplicity of language, in majesty of conception, in the eloquence of that conciseness which conveys in a short sentence more meaning than the mind dares at once admit,--his writings are unmatched.--[North British Review.] GUIDO AND JULIUS. Tho Doctrine of Sin and the Propitiator; or, the True Consecration of the Doubter. Exhibited in the Correspondence of two Friends. By FREDERICK AUGUSTUS O. THOLUCH, D.D. Translated by JONATHAN EDWARDS RYLAND. With an Introduction by JOHN PYE SMITH, D.D. 16mo, cloth, 60 cents. NEW AND COMPLETE CONDENSED CONCORDANCE To the Holy Scriptures. By ALEXANDER CRUDEN. Revised and re-edited by Rev. DAVID KING, L.L.D. Octavo, cloth backs, $1.25, sheep, $1.50. VALUABLE WORKS PUBLISHED BY GOULD AND LINCOLN, 59 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON. THE CHRISTIAN'S DAILY TREASURY. A Religious Exercise for Every Day in the Year. By E. TEMPLE. A new and improved edition. 12mo. cloth, $1.00. A work for every Christian. It is indeed a "Treasury" of good things. THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST; Or, Christianity Viewed in its Leading Aspects. By the Rev. A.L.R. FOOTE, author of "Incidents in the Life of our Saviour," etc. 16mo, cloth, 50 cents. THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. Social and Individual. By PETER BAYNE, M.A. 12mo, cloth, $1.25. The demand for this extraordinary work, commencing before its publication, is still eager and constant. There is but one voice respecting it; men of all denominations agree in pronouncing it one of the most admirable works of the age. GOD REVEALED IN THE PROCESS OF CREATION. And by the Manifestation of Jesus Christ. Including an Examination of the Development Theory contained in the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," By JAMES B. WALKER, author of "Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation." 12mo, cloth, $1.00. PHILOSOPHY OF THE PLAN OF SALVATION. By an AMERICAN CITIZEN. An Introductory Essay, by CALVIN E. STOWE, D.D. New improved edition, with a SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER. 12mo, cloth, 75 cts. This book is generally admitted to be one of the best in the English language. The work has been translated into several different languages in Europe. A capital book to circulate among young men. A WREATH AROUND THE CROSS; Or, Scripture Truths Illustrated. By A. MORTON BROWN, D.D. Recommendatory Preface, by JOHN ANGELL JAMES. Beautiful Frontispiece. 16mo, cloth, 60 cents. THE BETTER LAND; Or, The Believer's Journey and Future Home. By REV. A.C. THOMPSON. 12mo, cloth, 85 cents. A most charming and instructive book for all now journeying to the "Better Land," and especially for those who have friends already entered upon its never-ending joys. THE MISSION OF THE COMFORTER. With copious Notes. By JULIUS CHARLES HARE. With the Notes translated for the American edition. 12mo, cloth, $1.25. DR. WAYLAND'S UNIVERSITY SERMON Delivered in the Chapel of Brown University. 12mo, cloth, S1.00. THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD. And their Relations to Christianity. By FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, A.M., Professor of Divinity, King's College, London. 16mo, cloth, 60 cts. SACRED RHETORIC; Or, Composition and Delivery of Sermons. By HENRY. J. RIPLEY, Professor in Newton Theological Institution, Including Professor Ware's Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching. 12mo, 75 cts. THE PREACHER AND THE KING; Or, Bourdalone in the Court of Louis XIV. An Account of that distinguished Era, Translated from the French of L.F. BUNGENER. With an Introduction by the Rev. GEORGE POTTS, D.D. New edition, with a fine Likeness, and a Sketch of the Author's Life. 12mo, cloth, $1.25. It combines substantial history with the highest charm of romance. Its attractions are so various that it can hardly fail to find readers of almost every description.--[Puritan Recorder.] THE PRIEST AND THE HUGUENOT; Or, Persecution in the Age of Louis XV. Translated from the French of L.F. BUNGENER. 2 vols., 12mo, cloth, $2.25. --> This is truly a masterly production, full of interest, and may be set down as one of the greatest Protestant works of the age. FOOTSTEPS OF OUR FOREFATHERS. What they Suffered and what they Sought. Describing Localities and portraying Personages and Events conspicuous in the Struggles for Religious Liberty. By JAMES G. MIALL. Thirty-six fine Illustrations. 12mo, $1.00. An exceedingly entertaining work. The reader soon becomes so deeply entertained that he finds it difficult to lay aside the book till finished,--[Ch. Parlor Mag.] A work absorbingly interesting, and very instructive.--[Western Lit. Magazine.] MEMORIALS OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY. Presenting, in a graphic, compact, and popular form, Memorable Events of Early Ecclesiastical History, etc. By JAMES G. MIALL. With numerous elegant Illustrations. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. --> This, like the "Footsteps of our Forefathers," will be found a work of uncommon interest. WORKS BY JOHN HARRIS, D.D. 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BOLTON, of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. 12mo. cloth, 80 cents. WORKS BY DR. TWEEDIE. GLAD TIDINGS; or, The Gospel of Peace. A series of Daily Meditations for Christian Disciples. By Rev. W.K. TWEEDIE, D.D. With elegant Illustrated Title-page. 16mo, cloth, 63 cts. THE MORN OF LIFE; or, Examples of Female Excellence. A Book for Young Ladies. 16mo, cloth. _In press._ A LAMP TO THE PATH; or, the Bible in the Heart, the Home, and the Market Place. With an elegant Illustrated Title-page. 16mo, cloth. 63 cts. SEED TIME AND HARVEST; or, Sow Well and Reap Well. A Book for the Young. With an elegant Illustrated Title-page. 16mo, cloth, 63 cts. --> The above works, by Dr. Tweedie, are of uniform size and style. They are most charming, pious, and instructive works, beautifully gotten up, and well adapted for "gift-books." WORKS BY JOHN ANGELL JAMES. THE CHURCH MEMBER'S GUIDE; Edited by J.O. CHOULES, D.D. New edition. With an Introductory Essay by Rev. HUBBARD WINSLOW. Cloth, 33c. CHRISTIAN PROGRESS. A Sequel to the Anxious Inquirer. 18mo, cloth, 31c. --> One of the best and most useful works of this popular author. THE CHURCH IN EARNEST. Seventh thousand. 18mo, cloth, 40 cents MOTHERS OF THE WISE AND GOOD. By JABEZ BURNS, D.D. 16mo, cloth, 75 cents. We wish it were in every family, and read by every mother in the land.--[Lutheran Observer.] MY MOTHER; Or, Recollections of Maternal Influence. By a New England Clergyman, With a beautiful Frontispiece. 12mo, cloth, 75 cents. This is one of the most charming books that have issued from the press for a long period. "It is," says a distinguished author, "one of those rare pictures painted from life with the exquisite skill of one of the 'Old Masters,' which no seldom present themselves to the amateur." THE EXCELLENT WOMAN. With an Introduction by Rev. W.B. SPRAGUE, D.D. Containing twenty-four splendid Illustrations. 12mo. cloth, $1.00; cloth, gilt, $1.75; extra Turkey, $2.50. --> This elegant volume is an appropriate and valuable "gift book" for the husband to present the wife, or the child the mother. MEMORIES OF A GRANDMOTHER. By a Lady of Massachusetts. l6mo, cloth, 50 cents. THE MARRIAGE RING; Or, How to make Home Happy. By JOHN ANGELL JAMES. Beautiful illustrated edition 16mo, cloth, gilt, 75 cents. A beautiful volume, and a very suitable present to a newly-married couple.--[N.V. Christian Intelligencer] WORKS BY WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS, D.D. RELIGIOUS PROGRESS; Discourses on the Development of the Christian Character. 12mo, cloth, 85 cts. This work is from the pen of one of the brightest lights of the American pulpit. We scarcely know of any living writer who has a finer command of powerful thought and glowing, impressive language than he.--[DR. SPRAGUE, Alb. Atl.] LECTURES ON THE LORD'S PRAYER Third edition. 12mo, cloth, 85 cts. Their breadth of view, strength of logic, and stirring eloquence place them among the very best homilitical efforts of the age. Every page is full of suggestions as well as eloquence.--Ch. Parlor Mag. MISCELLANIES. New improved edition. _Price reduced._ 12mo, $1.25. VALUABLE WORKS. THE HALLIG; OR, THE SHEEPFOLD IN THE WATERS. A Tale of Humble Life on the Coast of Schleswig. Translated from the German of Biernatzski, by Mrs. GEORGE P. MARSH. With a Biographical Sketch of the Author. 12mo. cloth. $1.00. The author of this work was the grandson of an exiled Polish nobleman. His own portrait is understood to be drawn in one of the characters of the Tale, and indeed the whole work has a substantial foundation in fact. In Germany it has passed through several editions, and is there regarded as the chef-d'oeuvre of the author. As a revelation of an entire new phase of human society, it will strongly remind the reader of Miss Bremer's tales. In originality and brilliancy of imagination, it is not inferior those;--its aim is far higher. The elegance of Mrs. Marsh's translation will at once arrest the attention of every competent judge. HON. ROBERT C. WINTHROP. "I have read it with deep interest. Mrs. Marsh has given us an admirable version of a most striking and powerful work." FROM PROF. F.D. HUNTINGTON, D.D., IN THE RELIGIOUS MAGAZINE. "Wherever the work goes it fascinates the cultivated and the illiterate, the young and the old, the devout and the careless. Our own copy is in brisk circulation. The vivid and eloquent description of the strange scenery, the thrilling accounts of the mysterious action of the waters and vapors of the Schleswig coast, &c., all form a story of uncommon attractions and unmingled excellence." DR. SPRAGUE IN ALBANY SPECTATOR. "A rare and beautiful work. It is an interesting contribution to the physical geography of a part of Europe lying quite beyond the reach of ordinary observation, and as a genial and faithful sketch of human life under conditions which are hardly paralleled elsewhere." The tale is a novel one, containing thrilling scenes, as well as religious teachings.--PRESBYTERIAN. A beautiful and exquisite natural tale. In novelty of life and customs, as well as in nicely drawn shades of local and personal character the Hallig, is equalled by very few works of fiction.--BOSTON ATLAS. The story, which is deeply thrilling, is exclusively religious.--CH. SECRETARY. Here we have another such book as makes the reading of it a luxury, even in hot summer weather. It takes us to an island home, in the chill regions of the North Sea, and introduces us to pastoral scenes as lively and as edifying as those of Oberlin, in the Ban de la Roche.--SOUTHERN BAP. THE CAMEL: His Organization, Habits and Uses, considered with reference to his Introduction into the United States. BY GEORGE P. MARSH, late U. S. Minister at Constantinople. 16mo, cloth. 75 cents. This book treats of a subject of great interest, especially at the present time. It furnishes the only complete and reliable account of the Camel in the language. It is the result of extensive research and personal observation, and it has been prepared with special reference to the experiment now being made by our Government, of domesticating the Camel in this country. A repository of interesting information respecting the Camel. The author collected the principal materials for his work during his residence and travels for some years in the East. He describes the species, size, color, temper, longevity, useful products, diet, powers, training and speed of the Camel, and treats of his introduction into the United States.--PHIL. CHRISTIAN OBSERVER. This is a most interesting book, on several accounts. The subject is full of romance and information; the treatment is able and thorough.--TEXAS CH. ADVOCATE. Our Government have taken measures for introducing the Camel into this country, and an appropriation of $30,000 has been made by Congress. It becomes a matter of practical importance, therefore, to obtain the fullest and most reliable information possible respecting the animal and his adaptation to this country. His advent among us will stimulate general curiosity, and raise a thousand questions respecting his character and habits of life, his powers of endurance, his food, his speed, his length of life, his fecundity, the methods of managing and using him, the cost of keeping him, the value of his carcass after death, &c. This work furnishes, in a small compass, all the desired information.--BOSTON ATLAS. A complete sketch of the habits and nature of the Camel is given, which has great interest. The value of the camel as a beast of burden is abundantly confirmed.--N.Y. EVANGELIST. IMPORTANT WORKS. ANALYTICAL CONCORDANCE OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES; or, The Bible presented under Distinct and Classified Heads or Topics. By JOHN EADIE, D.D., LL. D., Author of "Biblical Cyclopædia," "Dictionary of the Bible," &c., &c. One volume, royal octavo, 836 pp. Cloth. $3.00; sheep, $3.50. _Just published._ The publishers would call the special attention of clergymen and others to some of the peculiar features of this great work. 1. It is a concordance of _subjects_, not of _words_. In this it differs from the common concordance, which, of course, it does not supersede. Both are necessary to the Biblical student. 2. It embraces all the topics, both secular and religious, which are naturally suggested by the entire contents of the Bible. In this it differs from Scripture Manuals and Topical Text-books, which are confined to religious or doctrinal topics. 3. It contains _the whole of the Bible without abridgment_, differing in no respect from the Bible in common use, except in the classification of its contents. 4. It contains a synopsis, separate from the concordance, presenting within the compass of a few pages a bird's-eye view of the whole contents. 5. It contains a table of contents, embracing nearly two thousand heads, arranged in alphabetical order. 6. It is much superior to the only other work in the language prepared on the same general plan, and is offered to the public at much less cost. The purchaser gets not only a _Concordance_, but also a _Bible_, in this volume. The superior convenience arising out of this fact,--saving, as it does, the necessity of having two books at hand and of making two references, instead of one,--will be readily apparent. The general subjects (under each of which there are a vast number of sub-divisions) are arranged as follows, viz.: Agriculture, Animals, Architecture, Army, Arms, Body, Canaan, Covenant, Diet and Dress, Disease and Death, Earth, Family, Genealogy, God, Heaven, Idolatry, Idols, Jesus Christ, Jews, Laws, Magistrates, Man, Marriage, Metals and Minerals, Ministers of Religion, Miracles, Occupations, Ordinances, Parables and Emblems, Persecution, Praise and Prayer, Prophecy, Providence, Redemption, Sabbaths and Holy Days, Sacrifice, Scriptures, Speech, Spirits, Tabernacle and Temple, Vineyard and Orchard, Visions and Dreams, War, Water. That such a work as this is of exceeding great convenience is matter of obvious remark. But it is much more than that; it is also an instructive work. It is adapted not only to assist the student in prosecuting the investigation of preconceived ideas, but also to impart ideas which the most careful reading of the Bible in its ordinary arrangement might not suggest. Let him take up any one of the subjects--"Agriculture," for example--and see if such be not the case. This feature places the work in a higher grade than that of the common Concordance. It shows it to be, so to speak, a work of more mind. No Biblical student would willingly dispense with this Concordance when once possessed. It is adapted to the necessities of all classes,--clergymen and theological students; Sabbath-school superintendents and teachers; authors engaged in the composition of religious and even secular works; and, in fine, common readers of the Bible, intent only on their own improvement. A COMMENTARY ON THE ORIGINAL TEXT OF THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. By HORATIO B. HACKETT, D.D., Professor of Biblical Literature and Interpretation, in the Newton Theological Institution. --> A new, revised, and enlarged edition. _In Press._ --> This most important and very popular work, has been thoroughly revised (some parts being entirely rewritten), and considerably enlarged by the introduction of important new matter, the result of the Author's continued, laborious investigations since the publication of the first edition, aided by the more recent published criticisms on this portion of the Divine Word, by other distinguished Biblical Scholars, in this country and in Europe. AMOS LAWRENCE. DIARY AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THE LATE AMOS LAWRENCE; with a brief account of some Incidents in his Life. Edited by his son, WILLIAM R. LAWRENCE, M.D. With fine steel Portraits of AMOS and ABBOTT LAWRENCE, an Engraving of their Birth-place, a Fac-simile page of Mr. Lawrence's Hand-writing, and a copious Index. Octavo edition, cloth, $1.50. Royal duodecimo edition, $1.00. This work was first published in an elegant octavo volume, and sold at the unusually low price of $1.50. At the solicitation of numerous benevolent individuals who were desirous of circulating the work--so remarkably adapted to do good, especially to young men--_gratuitously_, and of giving those of moderate means, of every class, an opportunity of possessing it, the royal duodecimo, or "_cheap edition_," was issued, varying from the other edition, only in a reduction in the size (allowing less margin), and the _thickness_ of the paper. Within six months after the first publication of this work, _twenty-two thousand_ copies had been sold. This extraordinary sale is to be accounted for by the character of the man and the merits of the book. It is the memoir of a Boston merchant, who became distinguished for his great wealth, but more distinguished for the manner in which he used it. It is the memoir of a man, who, commencing business with only $20, gave away in public and private charities, _during his lifetime_ more, probably, than any other person in America. It is substantially an _autobiography_, containing a full account of Mr. Lawrence's career as a merchant, of his various multiplied charities, and of his domestic life. "We have by us another work, the 'Life of Amos Lawrence.' We heard it once said in the pulpit, 'There is no work of art like a noble life,' and for that reason he who has achieved one, takes rank with the great artists and becomes the world's property. WE ARE PROUD OF THIS BOOK. WE ARE WILLING TO LET IT GO FORTH TO OTHER LANDS AS A SPECIMEN OF WHAT AMERICA CAN PRODUCE. In the old world, reviewers have called Barnum THE characteristic American man. We are willing enough to admit that he is a characteristic American man; he is ONE fruit of our soil, but Amos Lawrence is another. Let our country have credit for him also. THE GOOD EFFECT WHICH THIS LIFE MAY HAVE IN DETERMINING THE COURSE OF YOUNG MEN TO HONOR AND VIRTUE IS INCALCULABLE."--MRS. STOWE, IN N.Y. INDEPENDENT. "We are glad to know that our large business houses are purchasing copies of this work for each of their numerous clerks. Its influence on young men cannot be otherwise than highly salutary. As a business man, Mr. Lawrence was a pattern for the young clerk."--BOSTON TRAVELLER. "We are thankful for the volume before us. It carries us back to the farm-house of Mr. Lawrence's birth, and the village store of his first apprenticeship. It exhibits a charity noble and active, while the young merchant was still poor. And above all, it reveals to us a beautiful cluster of sister graces, a keen sense of honor, integrity which never knew the shadow of suspicion, candor in the estimate of character, filial piety, rigid fidelity in every domestic relation, and all these connected with and flowing from steadfast religious principle, profound sentiments of devotion, and a vivid realization of spiritual truth."--NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. "We are glad that American Biography has been enriched by such a contribution to its treasures. In all that composes the career of 'the good man,' and the practical Christian, we have read few memoirs more full of instruction, or richer in lessons of wisdom and virtue. We cordially unite in the opinion that the publication of this memoir was a duty owed to Society."--NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE. "With the intention of placing it within the reach of a large number, the mere cost price is charged, and a more beautifully printed volume, or one calculated to do more good, has not been issued from the press of late years."--EVENING GAZETTE. "This book, besides being of a different class from most biographies, has another peculiar charm. It shows the inside life of the man. You have, as it were, a peep behind the curtain, and see Mr. Lawrence as he went in and out among business men, as he appeared on change, as he received his friends, as he poured out, 'with liberal hand and generous heart,' his wealth for the benefit of others, as he received the greetings and salutations of children, and as he appeared in the bosom of his family at his own hearth stone."--BRUNSWICK TELEGRAPH. "It is printed on new type, the best paper, and is illustrated by four beautiful plates. How it can be sold for the price named is a marvel."--NORFOLK CO. JOURNAL. "It was first privately printed, and a limited number of copies were distributed among the relatives and near friends of the deceased. This volume was read with the deepest interest by those who were so favored as to obtain a copy, and it passed from friend to friend as rapidly as it could be read. Dr. Lawrence has yielded to the general wish, and made public the volume. It will now be widely circulated, will certainly prove a standard work, and be read over and over again."--BOSTON DAILY ADVERTISER. MODERN ATHEISM. MODERN ATHEISM, under its Forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws. By JAMES BUCHANAN, D.D., LL. D. 12mo, cloth, $1.25. The Author of this work is the successor of Dr. Chalmers in the Chair of Divinity in the New College, Edinburgh, and the intellectual leader of the Scottish Free Church. FROM HUGH MILLER, AUTHOR OF "OLD RED SANDSTONE," &c., &c.,--The work before us is one of at once the most readable and solid which we have ever perused. FROM THE "NEWS OF THE CHURCHES."--It is a work of which nothing less can be said, than that, both in spirit and substance, style and argument, it fixes irreversibly the name of the author as a leading classic in the Christian literature of Britain. FROM HOWARD MALCOM, D.D., PRESIDENT OF LEWISBURG UNIVERSITY.--No work has come into my hands, for a long time, so helpful to me as a teacher of metaphysics and morals. I know of nothing which will answer for a substitute. The public specially needs such a book at this time, when the covert atheism of Fichte, Wolfe, Hegel, Kant, Schelling, D'Holbach, Comte, Crousse, Atkinson, Martineau, Leroux, Mackay, Holyoake, and others, is being spread abroad with all earnestness, supported, at least in some places, both by church influence and university honors. I cannot but hope that a work so timely, scholarly, and complete, will do much good. It is one of the most solid and remarkable books in its department of literature; one of the most scholarly and profound inductions of modern Christian literature.--WORCESTER TRANSCRIPT. Dr. Buchanan has earned a high and well-deserved reputation as a classical writer and close logical reasoner. He deals heavy, deadly blows on atheism in all its various forms; and wherever the work is read it cannot fail to do good.--CHRISTIAN SECRETARY. It is a work which places its author at once in the highest rank of modern religious authors. His analyses of the doctrines held by the various schools of modern atheism are admirable, and his criticism original and profound; while his arguments in defence of the Christian Faith are powerful and convincing. It is an attractive as well as a solid book; and he who peruses a few of its pages is, as it were, irresistibly drawn on to a thorough reading of the book.--BOSTON PORTFOLIO. The style is very felicitous, and the reasoning clear and cogent. The opposing theories are fairly stated and combated with remarkable case and skill. Even when the argument falls within the range of science, it is so happily stated that no intelligent reader can fail to understand it. Such a profound, dispassionate work is particularly called for at the present time.--BOSTON JOURNAL. It is justly described as "a great argument," "magnificent in its strength, order, and beauty," in defence of truth, and against the variant theories of atheism. It reviews the doctrines of the different schools of modern Atheism, gives a fair statement of their theories, answers and refutes them, never evading, but meeting and crushing their arguments.--PHILA. CHRISTIAN OBSERVER. Dr. Buchanan is candid and impartial, too, as a strong a man can afford to be, evades no argument, undertakes no opposing view, but meets his antagonists with the quiet and unswerving confidence of a locomotive on iron tracks, pretty sure to crush them.--CHRISTIAN REGISTER. We hail this production of a master mind as a lucid, vigorous, discriminating, and satisfactory refutation of the various false philosophies which have appeared in modern times to allure ingenuous youth to their destruction. Dr. Buchanan has studied them thoroughly, weighed them dispassionately, and exposed their falsity and emptiness. His refutation is a clear stream of light from beginning to end.--PHILA. PRESBYTERIAN. We recommend "Modern Atheism" as a book for the times, and as having special claims on theological students.--UNIVERSALIST QUARTERLY. It is remarkable for the clearness with which it apprehends and the fairness with which it states, not less than for the ability with which it replies to, the schemes of unbelief in its various modern forms. It will be found easy to read--though not light reading--and very quickening to thought, while it clears away, one by one, the mists which the Devil has conjured around the great doctrines of our Faith, by the help of some of his ingenious modern coadjutors, and leaves the truth of God standing in its serene and pristine majesty, as if the breath of hatred never had been breathed forth against it.--CONGREGATIONALIST. Dr. Buchanan has here gone into the enemy's camp, and defeated him on his own ground. The work is a masterly defence of faith against dogmatic unbelief on the one hand, and that universal skepticism on the other, which neither affirms nor denies, on the ground of an assumed deficiency of evidence as to the reality of God and religion.--N.Y. CHRISTIAN CHRONICLE. It is a clearly and vigorously written book. It is particularly valuable for its clear statement and masterly refutation of the Pantheism of Spinoza and his School.--CHRISTIAN HERALD. 
35772	----	RELIGION AND SCIENCE RELIGION AND SCIENCE FROM GALILEO TO BERGSON BY JOHN CHARLTON HARDWICK "Philosophy will always be hard, and what it promises even in the end is no clear theory nor any complete understanding or vision. But its certain reward is a continual evidence and a heightened apprehension of the ineffable mystery of life, of life in all its complexity and all its unity and worth." F. H. BRADLEY, _Essays in Truth and Reality_, p. 106. LONDON SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. 1920 TO MY FATHER PREFACE The chapters which follow are not intended as even a slight sketch of the history of Thought since the Renaissance. Their object is more modest, i.e. to illustrate the thesis that mankind, being "incurably religious," insists (however hopeless the enterprise may sometimes seem) upon interpreting the universe spiritually. Thus it is quite natural that only a few typical names should find their places here: and often no sufficient reason may appear for one being included rather than another. For instance, in the tenth chapter, T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and A. J. Balfour are mentioned, while Martineau and the Cairds are passed over. Needless to say, there was no doctrinal prejudice here. Again, in the fourth chapter, Pascal is dealt with at some length, but Boehme, an equally important thinker, is ignored. And so on. I should like to acknowledge here my obligation to Dr. Mercer, Canon of Chester, for his advice upon books, especially with regard to material for the final chapters. Also to the Rev. H. D. A. Major, Principal of Ripon Hall, for suggestions about the general plan of the book; and to the Rev. E. Harvey (a mathematical graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, at present studying medicine) for valuable information about the present position of psychic research. J. C. H. ALTRINGHAM, _March 23rd, 1920_. CONTENTS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY PAGE Religion and Science defined. "Accurate and systematic knowledge" necessarily affects our "attitude to life." Can our systematised knowledge sanction a religious attitude? This the "religious problem." Religious harmony of Middle Ages. Will it return? 1 CHAPTER II THE DISSOLUTION OF THE OLD SYNTHESIS The old World-Scheme described. Aquinas and Scholasticism. Cusanus criticises conventional ideas of space. The New Astronomy of Copernicus. Bruno and an infinite universe. Galileo's telescope. The New Physics and an automatic universe. The New Logic 8 CHAPTER III GROWTH OF THE MECHANICAL THEORY The New Science creates a New Philosophy. Universality of Mechanics. Importance of Harvey's discovery. Descartes extends the mechanical theory to cover physiology and psychology. Hobbes and a naturalistic ethic. Newton extends the operation of law from the earth to the heavens. Religious attitude of these thinkers. Significance of their thought 18 CHAPTER IV SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY REACTIONS A Law of Thought. Spinoza. A Mechanical Universe spiritually interpreted. _Natura Naturans_, what it means. The _Ethics_. Spinoza's mysticism. His personality. Leibniz and a philosophy of personality. His monads. Pascal. His significance. _The Pensées._ The eternal protest of religion. Man defies the universe. Results 28 CHAPTER V RISE OF AN ANTI-RELIGIOUS SCIENCE Anti-clericalism in eighteenth-century France. Voltaire's propaganda. Diderot and the Encyclopædists. Holbach's _System of Nature_. Laplace's astronomy. Lavoisier and the New Chemistry. Dalton's atomic theory. Results for religion 42 CHAPTER VI RISE OF GERMAN IDEALISM Importance, for the mechanical view, of Locke's theory of knowledge. Weakness of speculative philosophy. Rise of the "critical" philosophy. Kant. He seeks to solve the problem: How is knowledge possible? Kant's view of the mind's function in knowledge. Mechanism a "form of thought," subjective not objective. Kant's view of reality. Can we know reality? The two worlds 52 CHAPTER VII THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT Kant clears the ground for a new philosophy. Significance of Rousseau. His attitude to culture. The new philosophy in Germany, its goal. Fichte. Hegel a rationalistic-romanticist. His method. Hegelianism. Significance for religious thought of Schleiermacher. The autonomy of religion and religious experience 62 CHAPTER VIII MECHANISM AND LIFE Rise of bio-chemistry and bio-physics in Germany. Significance of these movements. The Origin of Species. Lamarck. The new geology. Darwin. Results of his theory 74 CHAPTER IX MATERIALISM AND AGNOSTICISM Early decline of Romanticism in Germany. Comte and the "positive" philosophy. Materialism in Germany. Darwinism and the "argument from design." Haeckel. Spencerian evolutionism. Spencer's moral idealism. His philosophy of religion. Agnosticism. Rise of philosophic pessimism. Significance of Nietzsche 84 CHAPTER X REACTIONS IN PHILOSOPHY German idealism naturalised in England by Coleridge and Carlyle. These writers described. _Sartor Resartus._ Idealism at Oxford, T. H. Green. F. H. Bradley. Balfour's plea for a philosophy of science. Revival of Idealism in Germany. Lotze. His view of "values" and reality 98 CHAPTER XI SOME RECENT TENDENCIES IN PHILOSOPHY A new philosophy of Science. Mach on "Economy of Thought." "Abstractness" and artificiality of scientific method. Boutroux and natural law. James' view of the mind carried further by Bergson. His view of the intellect. What it can, and what it cannot, do for us. Intuition. Indeterminism and Pluralism. Leibniz revived. Ward's philosophy of personality 110 CHAPTER XII SOME RECENT TENDENCIES IN SCIENCE The "New" Physics. New theories of matter. The "New" Biology. Driesch and neo-vitalism. The "New" Psychology. "Spiritualism." The outlook for the future 125 CHAPTER XIII SOME FINAL CONSIDERATIONS History of Thought supplies no material for dogmatising. Yet a progress of ideas is evident. Permanency of "spiritual" view of reality. Its continual revival. Sabatier's saying. Need of freedom, alike for religion and for science 137 RELIGION AND SCIENCE CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY. RELIGION AND SCIENCE Numerous attempts to define religion have made it evident that religion is indefinable. We may, however, say this much about it, that religion is _an attitude towards life_: a way of looking at existence. It is true that this definition is too wide, and includes things which are not religion--there are certain attitudes to life which are definitely anti-religious--that of the materialist, for instance. However, it will serve a purpose, and we can improve upon it as we proceed. It is a mistake to put too much faith in definitions: at any rate it is better to have our definitions (if have them we must) too wide than too narrow. Science is, fortunately, much easier to define. _Accurate and systematic knowledge_ is what we mean by science--knowledge about anything, provided that the facts are (so far as possible) accurately described and systematically classified. Professor Karl Pearson, the highest authority on the principles of scientific method and theory, writes: "The man who classifies facts of any kind whatever, who sees their mutual relation and describes their sequences, is applying the scientific method and is a man of science. The facts may belong to the past history of mankind, to the social statistics of our great cities, to the atmosphere of the most distant stars, to the digestive organs of a worm, or to the life of a scarcely visible bacillus. It is not facts themselves which make science, but the method by which they are dealt with. The material of science is co-extensive with the whole physical universe, not only that universe as it now exists, but with its past history and the past history of all life therein. When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of that universe, every phase of present or past life therein, has been classified, and co-ordinated with the rest, then the mission of science will be completed."[1] Science, then, is systematic and accurate knowledge; and when we have systematic and accurate knowledge about everything there is to be known, the programme of science will be complete. This is only to say that the task it has set itself is one that will never end. So much, then, for our definitions. Religion is "an attitude to life": science is "systematic and accurate knowledge." How does the one affect the other? What are the relations between the two? That is the topic which will occupy our attention during the chapters that follow. To answer the question properly will involve a certain amount of acquaintance with the history of ideas. We must first put the preliminary question: How, as a matter of fact, have men's scientific ideas affected their religious ideas (or _vice versa_) in times past? Having tried to answer this question, we shall be in a better position to approach the religious problem as it presents itself to-day. Meanwhile a few remarks of a general character will not be out of place. It is evident that "science" can hardly fail to affect "religion." Systematised knowledge necessarily affects an individual's (or a society's) attitude to life--either by broadening and elevating that attitude, or by debasing it. Our knowledge, or what we believe to be such, tends to create certain preconceptions which make our minds hostile to certain beliefs or ideas. A man reared from his cradle on mechanical science will tend to regard miracles with suspicion; if he be logical (as he generally is not) freedom of the will, even in the most limited sense, will appear chimerical. Nor will his general attitude to life remain unaffected by his views on these points. Systematised knowledge may thus conceivably come into conflict with the presuppositions or the ideals of some particular religion. It is then that a "religious problem" arises. A religion indissolubly associated with a geocentric conception of the universe would tend to become discredited as soon as that conception had been disposed of by "systematic knowledge." Science may even tend to produce an attitude to life hostile not only to a particular religion but to _all_ religion. If materialism should ultimately be found to be consistent with systematic and accurate knowledge, it is difficult to see how any attitude to life which could be appropriately described as "religion" could survive. The religious problem would then, at any rate, cease to trouble us. The religious apologists would be free to turn their attention to matters of more moment. But it is not only with the cessation of religion that the religious problem slumbers. There are certain happy periods when religion flourishes undisturbed by obstinate questionings. These classical ages of religion exist when systematised knowledge seems to support the contemporary religious outlook--when science and religion speak with one voice. Such unanimity seems to us to-day too good to be possible, but that is only because our own age is exceptional--not because those happier ages were exceptional; they, in fact--if we trace history backwards--would seem rather to have been the rule. Primitive man, it would seem, was troubled by no discords of the kind which disturb our peace. His systematic knowledge--such as it was--was entirely in accord with his religion, the two were, in fact, in his case practically one. His science _was_ his religion. It may not have been very sound science, nor very elevated religion, but it served his purpose admirably. He was too busy with the struggle for survival to indulge in speculation. His religion was severely practical, and he was faithful to it because experience seemed to indicate that it paid. But the Stone Age hardly deserves (in spite of its freedom from religious difficulties) to be described as one of the classical ages of religion; absence of struggle does not necessarily mean richness of life. There are ages which better deserve that appellation. There are times when all existing culture--even of a high level--is closely associated with the current religion, endorses its ideals, sanctions its hopes, puts the stamp of finality upon its faith. Such an age cannot perhaps hope to be permanent; for life means movement, and movement upsets equilibrium, and human knowledge tends to increase faster than the human mind can adapt itself to it or digest it. But such ages are looked back upon with regret when they are past, they shed a golden radiance over history, their tradition lingers, they even leave behind them monuments of art and literature which are the wonder, and the inimitable models, of succeeding generations. Such an epoch was that which left to us our Gothic cathedrals. These are the creation of one of those classic ages "when all existing culture is cast or bent in obedience to the religious idea." When scientist, scholar and ecclesiastic spoke with one voice and listened to one message; when prince and peasant worshipped together the same divinities; when to be outside the religious community was to be cut off from the brotherhood of mankind. "The Church" was then co-extensive with civilisation: those without the fold were barbarians, hardly worthy of the name of man. That time of splendid harmony, however, is now past; no lamentations will restore it. We have reached another world. But it need not remain only a memory; it ought also to serve as an inspiration. The conditions of affairs during the classic ages of religion, however impossible at the moment, must remain our ideal. Head and heart must some day speak again with one voice, our hopes and beliefs must be consistent with our knowledge. Science must sanction that attitude towards existence which our highest instincts dictate. It is only too likely that this consummation is yet distant. Yet even if our generation has to reconcile itself to spiritual and moral discord, it should never overlook the existence of a happier ideal, and even the possibility of its fulfilment. Fortunately for the interests of religion, men feel they _must_ effect some kind of a reconciliation between the opposing demands which proceed from different sides of their nature. Each for himself tries to approximate science and religion, and the struggle to do this creates in each individual spiritual life. Tension sometimes creates light, and struggle engenders life. So long as there are men sufficiently _interested_ in religion to ask for a solution of its problems, religion will remain superior to the disintegration towards which all discord, if unchecked, proceeds. It is sometimes said that the religious harmony of the Middle Ages, of which we have spoken, having been due to imperfect knowledge, is never likely to repeat itself, unless we sink back into the ignorance of barbarism: and (it is urged) we know too much to be at peace. Having tasted of the fruits of knowledge, the human race is cast forth from its Paradise. This view is unduly pessimistic. There is no valid reason for excluding the possibility that our knowledge of reality and those ideal hopes which constitute our religion may actually coincide. Religion and science, approaching the problem of existence from contrary directions, may independently arrive at an identical solution. That the two actually do attack the enigma from different sides has led many people to regard the two as hostile forces. Such is not the case. Religion and science regard reality from different angles, but it is the same reality that is the object of their vision, and the goal of their search. Religion looks at existence as a whole, and attempts to determine its meaning and value for mankind. Religion, we may say, stands at the centre of existence, and regards reality from a central position. The province of science, on the other hand, is not to take so wide a survey, but to gain knowledge piece-meal: to locate points inductively, and thus to plot out the curve which we believe existence constitutes. If the _loci_, as they are successively fixed, seem to indicate that the curve is identical with the circle which religion has already intuitively postulated, the problem of existence would have been solved. Science and religion working by different methods would have described the same circle. When science has completed its circle, its centre may be found to stand just at the point where religion has always confidently declared it to be. Knowledge and faith will then, and not till then, be one. CHAPTER II THE DISSOLUTION OF THE OLD SYNTHESIS We have seen that there are classic religious periods when faith and knowledge have seemed to approximate to one another. The Middle Ages in Europe constituted such a period; no "Religion _v._ Science" controversy could then be said to exist; the best scientific knowledge of the time seemed to sanction the popular religious notions. Learned and lay thought in the same terms; the wolf lay down with the lamb. THE OLD WORLD-SCHEME.--It is important to grasp the main features of a world-scheme which as late as the fifteenth century passed everywhere without criticism. The father of it was Aristotle. His conception of the universe rested upon the plain contrast, which strikes the unsophisticated observer, between the unembarrassed and regular movements of the heavenly bodies and the disordered agitations of sublunary things. Hence the heavenly region was eternal, and the region of earth transitory: yonder, the motions that take place are eternal and regular; here, motion and rest alternate, nothing "continueth in one stay." At the centre of the universe stands Earth: hence we mount through three sublunary strata to the region of the celestial ether, which is purer as distance from the Earth increases. These strata form three concentric "spheres" which, solid yet transparent (like crystal), revolve around the earth. The first contains the moon--like a fly in amber; the second, the sun; the third, the fixed stars; which last sphere is also the first of several successive heavens, the highest of which is the seat of Deity. This Aristotelio-Ptolemaic system[2] formed a coherent framework for biblical world-notions. Here too, earth stands still while sun and stars revolve; here, too, the seat of Deity is the highest heaven. This was an universe where men could feel their feet on firm ground; their minds found rest in those simple and definite notions which make religious conceptions easy to understand and accept; their imaginations were not yet disturbed and disquieted by thoughts of space and time without end and without beginning. AQUINAS.--Such was the "world of nature," the theatre for that "world of grace" which Revelation spoke of, and which led eventually to the eternal "world of glory" in which the faithful should have their portion. _Natura_, _gratia_, _gloria_ was the ascending series (like another set of celestial spheres), and the whole economy was elaborated into a logical system, known to the historians of thought as Scholasticism: a philosophy which found its most perfect and memorable expression in Thomas Aquinas (1227-74), the _doctor angelicus_ of Catholic theology, canonised less than fifty years after his death. The _Summa Philosophica_, where Aquinas deals with the rational foundations of a Christian Theism, and the _Summa Theologica_, where he erects his elaborate structure of theology and ethics, together constitute "one of the most magnificent monuments of the human intellect, dwarfing all other bodies of theology into insignificance."[3] In him the erudition of an epoch found its spokesman; he was the personification of an intellectual ideal. To his contemporaries he stood beyond the range of criticism. In the _Paradiso_ (x.8.2) it is St. Thomas who speaks in heaven. Nevertheless, the Scholastic world-scheme, though based on "the evidence of the senses, the investigations of antiquity, and the authority of the Church," and though Aquinas had set the seal of finality upon it, was destined to gradual discredit and ultimate extinction. DISINTEGRATION BEGINS.--It was open to attack on two sides. _Either_ observations or calculations might be brought forward, conflicting with it, or making another conception possible or probable: _Or_ the validity of conventional ideas of space might be disputed. The latter type of criticism was the first to occur. Nicholas Cusanus (1401-1464), an inhabitant of the Low Countries, subsequently bishop and cardinal, developed unconventional notions about Space. He suggested that wherever man finds himself--on earth, sun, or star--he will always regard himself as standing at the centre of existence. There is, in fact, no point in the universe which might not appropriately be called its centre, and to say that the earth stands at the centre is only (what we should now call it) an anthropomorphism. So much for _place_; and similarly with _motion_. Here, too, there is no absolute standard to apply: motion may exist, but be unnoticed if there be no spot at absolute rest from which to take bearings. "We are like a man in a boat sailing with the stream, who does not know that the water is flowing, and who cannot see the banks: how is he to discover whether the boat is moving?" Cusanus, in fact, denies the fundamental Aristotelian dogma that the earth is the central point of the universe, because, on general grounds, there _can_ be no absolute central point. This gave a shock to the "geocentric theory" from which it never recovered. Worse shocks, however, were to come. The name of the man who actually (as Luther complained) turned the world upside down, is notorious enough. Poles and Germans alike have claimed the nationality of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543); who, having been a student at Cracow and in Italy, became a prebendary in Frauenburg Cathedral. THE NEW ASTRONOMY.--The general criticisms of Cusanus were elaborated by Copernicus. The senses cannot inform us (when any motion takes place) _what_ it is that moves. It may be the thing perceived that moves, or the percipient--or both. And it would be _possible_ to account for the movements of celestial bodies by the supposition that it is the earth that moves, and not they. Copernicus' whole work consisted in the mathematical demonstration that this hypothesis could account for the phenomena as we observe them. In fact, when these demonstrations were eventually published (it was only on his death-bed that Copernicus received a copy of his book--and he had already lost consciousness) they were introduced by a discreet preface, which intimated that the whole thing might safely be regarded as a _jeu d'esprit_ on the part of an eccentric mathematician. And this editorial _caveto_, though written by another hand, preserved the Copernican theories from the notoriety that might otherwise have attended, and afterwards did attend, them. Copernican conceptions were semi-traditional. The sun displaces the earth as the central point of the universe: around it revolve the planets--including the earth; and, at an immeasurable distance, is the immovable heaven of the fixed stars. Copernicus left it an open question whether or no the universe was infinite. It remained for his successor, the greatest of the Renaissance thinkers, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) to declare it to be limitless, and to contain an infinity of worlds like our own. The fixed stars became, for him, suns surrounded by planets. The traditional distinction between the celestial and sublunary spheres had vanished. The bewilderment and indignation excited by these ideas, revolting to the conscience of his time, cost their author his life. GALILEO.--The criticism of the old world-conceptions was, however, to be based on yet more sure ground by one who relied, not on general considerations, but on observation and experiment. Galileo (1564-1642) studied philosophy, physics, and mathematics at Pisa; and as professor expounded the old astronomy long after he had ceased to regard it as adequate. Not until 1610, after he had constructed a telescope and observed the satellites of Jupiter, did he openly confess his adherence to the system of Copernicus. The observation of sun-spots and the phases of Venus confirmed his opinion. Aristotelian astronomers declined to witness these phenomena through his telescope, and perhaps Galileo was right in observing with a sigh that were the stars themselves to descend from heaven to bear him witness his critics would remain obdurate.[4] It was not until 1632 that a complete exposition of the conflict between the two world-systems was produced by Galileo. It took the form of a dialogue between three speakers--conservative, mediating, and extreme. The views of the author, however, were not sufficiently concealed, the book was prohibited, and Galileo summoned to Rome, and upon threat of torture, subdued into a recantation and a promise not to offend in the future. That Galileo perjured himself is not open to doubt, nor did he change his convictions. A subsequent work, surreptitiously printed in Holland, contained the same heresies expressed with less reserve. THE NEW PHYSICS.--It might be said, then, that the fabric of the universe had been reconstructed by the thinkers whose explorations we have hitherto followed. This achievement, however, though sufficiently startling in itself, was not the only, and perhaps not the most important, of their performances. The question still awaited solution: _By what forces and laws is the new world-system maintained in activity?_ The traditional reply had been that the universe was kept in motion by the operation of the Deity. While the truth of this reply was not questioned by the advocates of the "new" science, it did not seem to them to dispel the obscurity surrounding certain points about which they required information. It was Galileo who observed that the appeal to the divine will explains nothing just because it explains everything. It takes the inquirer back too far--behind those details of method which arouse his speculative interest. This desire to understand those methods of operation which natural objects appear to follow, led philosophers to enunciate certain "laws" about them. These served as "explanations" of particular classes of phenomena. It was the phenomena of _motion_ that especially attracted their attention; and many ingenious experiments were performed by Galileo, in particular, which led him to conclusions which then seemed paradoxical, but now serve as axioms of physical science; for "the laws of motion contain the key to all scientific knowledge of material nature." When Galileo, after careful experiment, established the proposition that a body can neither change its motion of itself, nor pass from motion to rest, the fundamental "law of inertia"--of such incalculable importance to the development of modern physics--had been established. AN AUTOMATIC UNIVERSE.--A proposition of this kind may not at first seem to involve important philosophical or theological consequences. But we only have to consider that it provided a natural explanation of the continued and untiring motion of the heavenly bodies. It did not, it is true, explain how that motion arose; but the motion being "given," it had now been shown how it would, in the absence of obstructions, be perpetual. In fact, speculations of this kind opened up the way to the _mechanical_ explanation of nature, a theory which had been already speculatively held by Leonardo da Vinci, who is already convinced that "necessity is the eternal bond, the eternal rule of Nature." SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS.--It was not only, however, the spectacle of a system running automatically that suggested to observers a mechanical theory to explain it. There was also the fact that phenomena were observed to occur in accordance with certain simple mathematical laws. Galileo's experiments with falling bodies led him to foreshadow principles which were afterwards elaborated and fully demonstrated by Newton, who may be said to have been the first to construct a mechanical universe. The principle had already been formulated by a contemporary of Galileo--Johannes Kepler--in the axiom _ubi materia, ibi geometria_. RESULTS.--The thinkers whose speculations have engaged us were indeed responsible for creating a revolution in ideas. For a finite universe whose centre was the earth, and which was kept in motion by the operation of the Deity, they had substituted the conception of illimitable space sown with innumerable systems like our own; and had created the beginning of a mechanical conception of nature. THE NEW LOGIC.--But it was not only the scientific dogmas of the old system that had been so rudely overthrown--the very principles upon which those dogmas rested had been submitted to a destructive criticism. The new science produced a new logic. This order of events is not unusual: first, the new scientific discoveries, and then in the wake of the discoverers, comes the innovating critic who systematises the logical or scientific methods to which the new knowledge seems to have been due. First, Kepler and Galileo, who used the "inductive" method, and then Lord Bacon of Verulam (1561-1626), who discovered the inductive logic, and established it as a system. FRANCIS BACON.--Bacon's doctrine may be summarised by his own epigram, "If a man begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties." Which is really a criticism of what is known as the a priori method, whereby the inquirer starts with certain predefined theories to which all phenomena must conform, and which all experience must verify. If facts will not suit the particular theory, so much the worse for the facts: one could always disregard them, and apply a blind eye to Galileo's telescope. Such is always the procedure of the dogmatic mind, which is already so certain of the truth of its notions that no evidence can persuade it to the contrary. But it is not by such means that knowledge is advanced, and it was for a reversal of these that Bacon pleaded. Leonardo da Vinci had already anticipated the Baconian logic (which did not wait for Bacon until it was applied) when he laid down the proposition that wisdom was the daughter of experience, and rejected all speculations which experience, the common mother of all sciences, could not confirm. Hence, knowledge was the product of time; the process of collecting material for a judgment must often be slow, but the results were worth the labour--these would not be speculative, but true. Nor need it be supposed that Bacon excluded imagination from playing a part in increasing knowledge, he did not plead _only_ for a mechanical collection of material. It is imagination which in face of abundant material creates the hypothesis which accounts for it being what it is. And he was prepared to admit the value of preliminary hypotheses which might be replaced as further facts were collected, or as insight became more clear. Here, too, Bacon describes the method followed by modern science. PRESTIGE OF NEW METHODS.--And so, by the time when Bacon had laid down his pen after writing the _New Logic_, the work of discrediting the old system, elaborated with such ingenious industry by Aquinas, was tolerably complete. The new science had begun already to be fruitful in results, both practical and speculative. The successors of Galileo and of Bacon applied the new principles with vigour, and reached astonishing results. Justified by these, the new methods secured a prestige which has not decreased for three centuries. CHAPTER III GROWTH OF THE MECHANICAL THEORY DECLINE OF SCHOLASTICISM.--By the time of Lord Bacon, the Scholastic philosophy might have been described as extinct; it no longer survived as a living system. The loss was a serious one to mankind, which was poorer by the discrediting of an authoritative body of thought, a possession it seems ill able to dispense with. The Baconian philosophy was an imperfect substitute; it was little more than a system of enquiry, a manual of scientific procedure, for Bacon himself was not in the philosophical sense a profound or constructive thinker, though he was one of those men of talent who can give utterance to the tendencies of an epoch. THE NEW PHILOSOPHY.--The task, however, of constructing a new philosophy of the universe was courageously taken in hand by a succession of thinkers, and the energy of thought which the great problem generated is characteristic of perhaps the most vigorous century of European history--the seventeenth. The tendency of the new discoveries in science had not been obscure, and Modern Philosophy starts with an attempt to represent the universe as a self-working machine--a co-ordinated whole, throughout which the principles of mathematics are universally valid. The trend of ideas set in motion by the new discoveries in astronomy seemed to point in this direction. But to introduce mechanics into the celestial regions, though an important step, was but a beginning. Mechanics must be _universally_ valid--even in the human body--or the new teaching was vain. Exceptions may prove a rule, but they destroy a philosophy. THE SUBJUGATION OF PHYSIOLOGY.--It was an Englishman who provided the necessary facts to fill the gravest gap in the mechanical theory. It was already known in the previous century that the blood of animals circulated throughout the body; the existence and use of veins and heart-valves was also known, but it was William Harvey (1578-1657) who discovered the heart to be the organ responsible for _maintaining_ the circulation of the blood, by purely mechanical means. This was a fact of the utmost significance. In the sphere of physiology, where theories about mysterious powers of blood or soul had been hitherto authoritative, it effected a revolution. Indeed it is true to say that Harvey "is to physiology what Galileo was to physics." He proved that "the general laws of motion are valid within as well as without the organism"--an important extension of the mechanical theory. DESCARTES.--Among the leading men who accepted Harvey's theory, one of the first was René Descartes (1596-1650). Well might this thinker welcome it, for it was a most important contribution to the imposing philosophic fabric for which he was industriously collecting materials. Descartes, apart from his philosophical speculations, is an interesting character, being a Frenchman of noble birth who was educated by the Jesuits, saw something of contemporary life in Paris, served as a military officer in Holland and Germany, and made some original discoveries in mathematics. The mathematical mind, accustomed as it is to deal with highly abstract ideas, takes kindly to metaphysics. And it very often solves the mystery of the universe by expressing all its contents in mathematical terms. Such, at least, was Descartes' method. The simplest and clearest ideas which we can have of anything are mathematical, i.e. extension and mobility. And it is by concentrating our attention upon this simple and mathematical aspect of things that we shall arrive at a proper understanding of all that goes on in the material world. UNIVERSALITY OF MATHEMATICS.--A phenomenon was, in Descartes' eyes, "explained" only when a "cause" which is its exact _mathematical equivalent_, has been indicated. The "cause" and the "effect" are two sides of a mathematical equation (_Causa aequat effectum_). Anything that happens in the material world (the fall of a stone, the beat of a heart, the rising of the sun) is really nothing more than a redistribution of portions of that sum of motion which, once generated at the Creation, has remained unaltered, and unalterable, in the universe ever since. The sum of motion is constant, there can be no addition to or subtraction from it. In this sense it would be true that "there is nothing new under the sun": only ever-new distributions of the old. THE UNIVERSE A MACHINE.--Once assume that all phenomena can be interpreted in terms of motion, and add the proposition (already enunciated by Galileo) that motion once set going will proceed for ever, unless some impediment from outside intervenes, and the mechanical view of the universe is complete. The universe is a machine, i.e. a thing that works (1) according to mathematical principles, (2) automatically. ELABORATIONS OF THE MECHANICAL THEORY.--The importance of Descartes lies not in his having invented this conception (we have already seen it in the hands of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, and others), but in his having elaborated it. This he did in two directions: (1) he attempted to supply a mechanical theory of the evolution of the world-system; _i.e._ to show how the heavenly bodies came into being by natural and mechanical processes; (2) he applied the mechanical theory to organisms; animals and men were complex machines. (Here, as we have seen, the discovery of Harvey was of prime importance.) It is hardly necessary to describe at length Descartes' mechanical theory of the evolution of the world-system, though an interest attaches to it as being the ancestor of the modern "nebular hypothesis." Matter in whirling motion around fixed centres is the original _datum_ from which Descartes evokes the universe. With regard to the mechanical theory of organisms, Descartes developed it at some length in various treatises. All the functions and actions of animals were regarded by him as entirely involuntary and mechanical. "That the lamb flees at the sight of a wolf happens because the rays of light from the body of the wolf strike the eye of the lamb, and set the muscles in motion by means of the 'reflex' currents of the animal spirits." In the case of human beings, owing to the phenomenon of "consciousness," Descartes felt compelled to assume a "soul"--a _thinking_ substance in reciprocal action with the _material_ substance (of the brain). This, too, is an anticipation of the modern theory of "psycho-physical parallelism." CARTESIANISM.--The ideas of Descartes had considerable influence among his contemporaries, and Cartesianism, as it was called, became fashionable in intellectual circles. It developed a tendency towards free enquiry and independent thought; and it was even more significant as an atmosphere than as a system of ideas. Though in this respect too, it was both important and vital; as we have observed, modern mechanical theories find their parent in Descartes. Nor was it only, we may remark, among philosophers and men of science that Cartesian ideas were popular; they were accepted and elaborated by the religious thinkers who hoped to harmonise and humanise theology and science. Pascal, Bossuet and Fénelon, the finest minds in the French Church, were eager Cartesians.[5] This aspect of the matter, i.e. the significance of Cartesianism for religion, we can for the present postpone. RESULTS SO FAR.--Successive breaches in the Scholastic system have now been noted. Copernicus had introduced a new astronomy, Galileo a new physics, Descartes (with the help of Harvey) a new physiology, and the beginnings of a new psychology. CONTRIBUTIONS OF HOBBES.--The step that remained was taken by an Englishman, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who attempted to provide a system of ethics and a theory of politics upon a purely naturalistic basis. Hobbes was a particularly energetic thinker. He worked out a psychology of the feelings, which reduced everything to the impulse of self-preservation and the instinct for power. Men were induced by these instincts to agree to certain rules of conduct, for the sake of expediency. Social life seems essential if men are to live together--the instinct of self-preservation demands it--and social life in turn demands certain renunciations: thus fidelity, gratitude, forbearance, justice, etc., must be practised. Thus Hobbes attempted to banish all mysterious or obscure forces from morality, which was the characteristic and inevitable product of human nature and human circumstances. This way of looking at things seemed strange to all, and even revolting to some, of Hobbes' contemporaries. As the mystical powers of motion which the Scholastics had believed in were banished by the new physics and the new physiology, so the new psychology could allow of no mystical faculty which can decide in all problems of good and evil. With Hobbes, then, a naturalistic view of the universe may be said to have been tolerably complete: it embraces physics, psychology, and ethics. There still remained, of course, a number of gaps in scientific knowledge, and consequently any philosophy based thereupon could not yet be regarded as secure. These gaps, however, as research proceeded and successive discoveries were made, tended to diminish both in size and quantity. NEWTON.--The seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries were fruitful in revelations of this kind, and natural knowledge steadily and even rapidly progressed. And one thinker, who may be regarded as a link between the seventeenth century and that which succeeded it, may now claim our attention. The name of Newton (1642-1727) is as familiar to Englishmen as that of Shakespeare, and the discovery by him of the "law of gravitation" is one of those scraps of information which we acquire, and perhaps fail to understand, in early childhood. Newton's scientific method is a no less important aspect of his work than its results. The _Principia_, in which he gave his discovery to the world, is "a model for all scientific investigations which has never been surpassed." It was, indeed, a brilliant application of the principle of inferring the unknown from the already known, without any dogmatic leaps in the dark. The principle with which he began was that what is true in the narrower spheres of experience (e.g. in the case of an apple falling) is true also in the wider spheres (e.g. in the movements of the celestial bodies). He then made a careful mathematical deduction of what would happen in the case of the planets, assuming that the laws of falling bodies on the earth were applicable to them also. And he concluded by showing that what would happen according to mathematics under this assumption _actually does happen_. The conclusion follows that the same force, i.e. "attraction," operates in both cases. It is no wonder that this final and successful operation was performed by Newton "in a state of excitement so great that he could hardly see his figures." SIGNIFICANCE OF HIS DISCOVERY.--The philosophic importance of the discovery that the motions of the planets may be explained by the "law of gravitation" was twofold. In the first place, it now became possible to understand how the universe held together (a problem which the new astronomy had not solved); and in the second place, the theory constituted a large extension of the mechanical view. It demonstrated that "the physical laws which hold good on the surface of the earth are valid throughout the universe, so far as we can know anything of it." Thus the area of existence in which physical law held good was at once infinitely widened. The mechanical theories of Galileo, Descartes, and others, not only received confirmation, but became more comprehensive than before. So that Newton may be said to have put the finishing touch upon the achievements of his predecessors, and to have crowned their labours with success. And his work has the characteristic of permanency: his "gravitation formula" has stood the test of time. "It still stands there," says a careful and authoritative writer, "as almost the only firmly established mathematical relation, expressive of a property of all matter, to which the progress of more than two centuries has added nothing, and from which it has taken nothing away."[6] RELIGIOUS COROLLARIES.--It would be a profound mistake to assume that the creators of the mechanical view, as it has hitherto met us, were animated by any hostility to religion. Nor did they believe their theories to involve any disastrous consequences in that sphere. The new astronomy of Copernicus had actually been made the basis of a spiritual view of the universe by the profound genius (both philosophical and religious) of Giordano Bruno. And the fact that the ecclesiastical authorities rejected his view need not divest it of importance or of value in our eyes. Bruno's own faith was not disturbed by the infidelity of his persecutors. "Ye who pass judgment upon me feel, maybe, greater fear than I upon whom it is passed," were his last words to them. Had they _believed_, they need not have been afraid, and might have been content with the policy of Gamaliel. As for Descartes and Hobbes, their notions were no doubt distasteful to conservative minds (the Jesuits were no friends to either), but Descartes regarded himself, and would fain have been regarded by others, as a good Catholic; and Hobbes, theologically, was what in these days we might call a Liberal Protestant. Cartesianism, as we have seen, came to be a name for a type of thought which studied to harmonise science and theology, and one of the most profound religious geniuses of any age--Pascal, was (as we have seen) a Cartesian. As for Newton, his view of the universe was essentially a religious one, though he did not allow theological speculations to intrude upon his strictly scientific work. His attitude is indicated by a reply to the inquiry of a contemporary theologian as to how the movements and structure of the solar system were to be accounted for. "To your query I answer that the motions which the planets now have could not spring from any natural cause alone.... To compare and adjust all these things together (i.e. quantities of matter and gravitating powers, etc.) in so great a variety of bodies, argues the cause to be not blind and fortuitous, but very well skilled in mechanism and geometry."[7] Still, the mechanical view contained within it sinister possibilities; and the instincts of conservative thinkers were not altogether at fault. The mechanical view in itself need not be hostile to a spiritual and rational religion (though it is fatal to most forms of superstition); and yet that view can be used in the interests of anti-religious prejudice--and, as we shall see, it was so used, and with considerable effect. Meanwhile, however, we shall pass on to consider the work of three thinkers who are typical of a revolt from what was in danger of becoming the all-absorbing tyranny of mechanics. This reaction (for so it may be termed) we shall proceed, in the following chapter, to examine. CHAPTER IV SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY REACTIONS A LAW OF THOUGHT.--Whenever a tendency of thought has been vigorously prosecuted for any length of time, a reaction invariably displays itself. This rule is illustrated by the history of thought in the seventeenth century. Mechanical categories, as we have seen, had been steadily extending themselves for the better part of two centuries, and with the materialism of Hobbes the process seemed fairly complete. Meanwhile, however, human thought began to explore other avenues. Though reaction from mechanical ways of thinking did not (at any rate, in the circles with which we are concerned) take the form of an obscurantist retreat into prejudice or superstition, the results of the new science and its attendant mechanistic philosophy served as a base for further explorations. The principles which Descartes and Hobbes had laid down were criticised by being carried out to their logical conclusions. SPINOZA.--The philosopher with whom we shall first concern ourselves was a Jew of Spanish extraction, living in what was then the freest country in Europe--Holland. Spinoza (1632-1677) was undoubtedly the greatest thinker of his own age, which was highly fertile in that respect, and he still stands as one of the most notable figures in the long history of European thought. Not only is his outlook comprehensive, and his thought many-sided, but his standpoint was "detached" to a degree hitherto unknown. He was untainted, so far as a human being ever can be, by "anthropomorphism"; he endeavoured to transcend the merely human outlook. Here is always the dividing line between the great and the merely mediocre thinker. SPINOZA'S METHOD.--Spinoza's philosophical ancestry may be traced back to Bruno, whose acquaintance we made in a previous chapter, but in whose company we did not long remain. This highly original mind had already, by the doctrine of the infinitude and the divinity of nature, shown how the concept of God and the concept of nature might be closely bound up together. By similar means, Spinoza hoped to indicate the reality of the spiritual, without disturbing the mechanical world-conception which the new science and new philosophy had created between them. He wished somehow to find God not outside, but _in_ Nature; not in disturbances of the order of Nature, but _in that order itself_. THE TERM NATURE.--It would be a misapprehension to suppose that the terms "God" and "Nature" are regarded by Spinoza as interchangeable, though his numerous critics were accustomed to declare that this was the case. On the contrary, Spinoza, in order to anticipate the misunderstanding which he saw might arise on this point, reintroduced into philosophy a pair of terms which the Scholastics had long before brought into currency, but which had since fallen out of fashion--_Natura naturans_ and _Natura naturata_. We might perhaps translate the former of these, "Creative Nature," and the latter, "Created Nature." _Natura naturans_ is equivalent to "Nature as a creative power," or "The creative power immanent in Nature." _Natura naturata_ is equivalent to "Nature as it is when created," or "The results of the creative power immanent in Nature." And the _Natura naturans_ is active in the _Natura naturata_ at all points: the creative power is immanent in creation. As Spinoza puts it in one of his letters: "I assert that God is (as it is called) the immanent, not the external cause of all things. That is to say, I assert with Paul, that in God all things live and move.... But if any one thinks that the _Theologico-Political Treatise_ (one of his works) assumes that God and Nature are one and the same, he is entirely mistaken."[8] Thus, for Spinoza, the order of nature, which had seemed to so many of his contemporaries, from the religious point of view, such a devastating conception, as leaving no room for the spiritual, was itself only explicable if interpreted spiritually. "Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God" (_Ethics_ i. 15) sums up his attitude. All things may be, as the new science taught, 'determined' but they are determined "by the necessity of the divine nature" (_Ethics_ i. 29). THE "ETHICS."--Spinoza may rightly be termed a man of one book. In his _Ethics_ is to be found a complete and final expression of his philosophy. "How boundless," says Goethe of this great book, "is the disinterestedness conspicuous in every sentence, how exalted the resignation which submits itself once for all to the great laws of existence, instead of trying to get through life with the help of trivial consolations; and what an atmosphere of peace breathes through the whole!" According to its teaching the true happiness and highest activity of men is to be found in what Spinoza terms "the intellectual love of God." The phrase seems to have been used to designate that full and clearer knowledge which is aware that we ourselves and all the conditions of our life are determined by the infinite Nature, by God Himself, who moves in us as well as in all things acting upon us. The initiated no longer regard themselves as single, isolated, impotent beings, but as included in the divine nature. Themselves and all things are seen under the form of eternity. This thought is, according to Spinoza, the fruit of the highest activity of the human mind; this is the _amor intellectualis dei_; and the supreme good for man. His doctrine of immortality is bound up with this intellectual form of religious mysticism--knowledge of God involves participation in His immortality: "Death is the less harmful the more the mind's knowledge is clear and distinct, and the more the mind loves God.... The human mind may be of such a nature that the part of it which we showed to perish with the body may be of no moment to it in respect to what remains." He who is "affected with love towards God" has a mind "of which the greater part is eternal." Thus the soul achieves its emancipation by identifying itself with God--who is the object of its knowledge and love. The path is arduous, and the closing passage of the _Ethics_ admits this: "If the road I have shown is very difficult, it can yet be discovered. And clearly it must be very hard when it is so seldom found.... But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare." SPINOZA AND RELIGION.--It is interesting to note that Spinoza, though a "free-thinking" Jew, adopts towards the fundamental dogma of Christianity an attitude which approximates to the classical expression of it in the Fourth Gospel. He held that "God's eternal wisdom, which reveals itself in all things, and especially in the human mind, has given a special revelation of itself in Christ." Perhaps his ethic, like that of the Stoics, with whom he had so much in common, was better adapted to satisfy the needs of the philosopher than of the ordinary man. But, in the seventeenth century, it was the philosophers and learned men that were in need of a spiritual interpretation of the universe; common men had theirs already, in the traditional pietism which philosophers are often too ready to despise. To Spinoza--and this is one of the many indications of the genuine profundity of his thought--the simple believers seemed already to be in possession of too much of the truth for it to be desirable or profitable for them to indulge in speculation. To the question of his landlady at the Hague as to whether she could be saved by the religion which she professed, his reply was that her religion was good, that she should seek no other, and that she would certainly be saved by it if she led a quiet and pious life. SPINOZA'S PERSONALITY.--The figure of Spinoza stands as one of the most imposing and attractive in the whole history of philosophy, and his was an unworldliness, a simplicity, and a humility purely Franciscan. Like all Jews then, he knew a trade--that of lens grinding--and by this he was able to live frugally, while he elaborated his thought. He dedicated his life to the labour of quiet contemplation; nor was he ambitious of recognition, which indeed generally came to him in the form of abuse. He did not escape "the exquisite rancour of theological hatred," but it was his belief, and the conviction inspired his life, that-- "Neither riches, nor sensuous enjoyment, nor honours, can be a true good for man"; but on the contrary, "that the only thing which is able to fill the mind with ever-new satisfaction is the striving after knowledge, by means of which the mind is united with that which remains constant while all else changes." "The God-intoxicated," was the name given to Spinoza long afterwards in Germany. He died (like St. Francis) at forty-five, worn out with the toil of thought. And it renews one's faith in the perspicacity of commonplace people to learn that his barber, sending in a bill after the death of the philosopher, alluded to his late customer as "Mr. Spinoza of blessed memory." It was left to a contemporary theologian to describe him as "an unclean and foul atheist." LEIBNIZ.--Spinoza had taken over from Descartes and Hobbes their mechanical and determinist conception of nature, though he gave to it, as we have seen, an interpretation of his own. His attitude was a blend of that rationalism and mysticism which were characteristic of so much seventeenth century thought. A far more complete reaction, however, displays itself in the system of a contemporary of Spinoza's--Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716); who, when already a youth, had become an enthusiastic devotee of the new science; the study of Kepler, Galileo and Descartes caused him to feel as though "transported into a different world." Though a German by birth, Leibniz lived continuously in France, and wrote habitually in the language of that country. CONTRAST TO SPINOZA.--Spinoza and Leibniz stand as examples of two distinct methods of eluding the despotism of mechanics--methods which will meet us again in the course of our survey. Spinoza accepts the mechanical view as being inevitable and even desirable, but subjects it to a spiritual interpretation--he regards it as the way in which the _Natura naturans_ works.[9] Leibniz, on the other hand, viewed existence from an entirely different standpoint. He was bold enough to reject the mechanical view altogether; or rather he preferred to regard it as a convenient abstraction, or a useful formula, which might reflect certain aspects of reality, but could not do justice to its concrete richness and complexity. A PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALS.--Leibniz's criticism of Descartes and the mechanical school proceeded along different lines from that of Spinoza, who, as we have seen, accepted the mechanical view as the basis of his speculation. An axiom of that view was (as we know) the conservation of motion. For this conservation of _motion_, Leibniz substitutes the conservation of _force_ as being logically the more fundamental concept. True reality, according to him, is not _motion_ itself, but the _force which is its cause_. Force and existence became for him identical terms; to work and to exist were the same. That force is the true reality, Leibniz expressed in the language of his time by saying, "Force is substance, and all substance is force"--a proposition which would not be repudiated by modern science--and upon this statement his philosophy is built. But it was not "force in general" or some "universal force" that was regarded by him as the final reality: Leibniz was not a forerunner of Herbert Spencer. Reality for him consisted in _individual centres of force_--a multitude of individual and independent beings, each with its own idiosyncrasy, and following its own lines. Existence was, in fact, for him, _individual_. It was the _individual_ centres of force--not _general_ principles, universal substances, laws or forces--that make up reality. DOCTRINE OF MONADS.--This view of reality was formulated by Leibniz in his famous doctrine of "monads." "Monad" was the technical name applied by him to those absolute individuals which he regarded as constituting true reality. The word, meaning "unity," was simple and appropriate. And he declared that the "monad," to be rightly understood, must be regarded as analogous to our own souls. This principle of analogy was described by Leibniz as _mon grand principe des choses naturelles_. Thus reality was interpreted by him not in physical but in psychical terms, or if the expression be preferred, in terms of personality.[10] Of these "monads" there exist, according to this view, infinitely many degrees. In fact all existence differs only in degree from our own. Even between mind and matter there is only a quantitative and not a qualitative gulf. For there are sleeping, dreaming, and more or less waking monads; and matter is a form of unconscious mind; the monads which compose material objects being "minds without memory," "momentary minds." Let Leibniz speak for himself:-- "Each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, but is also actually subdivided without end.... Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fishes.... Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe...."[11] Leibniz may indeed be said to have been the first to outline a theory of "panpsychism" (as it is termed), according to which there is nothing that is not, in its degree, alive. As we shall have occasion to observe, Leibniz was here (as elsewhere) a forerunner of much recent philosophy. The significance of the Spinozist and Leibnizian systems of thought, though regarding existence from such diverse standpoints, was, for practical purposes the same. Both alike led out, though by different paths, beyond the mechanical theory of the universe. They, indeed, represent two types of thought which attempt to reach the same end by different methods. Their counterparts will meet us again as this history proceeds. PASCAL.--But before passing out from the seventeenth century, one thinker ought to detain us; for from more than one point of view he was a notable personality, and of first-rate importance in the history of religious, as distinct from purely philosophical thought. He was indeed one of those figures who are distinguished among distinguished men of all times. Blaise Pascal was born in 1623, and was a boy of precocious mathematical ability. By the age of twelve he is said to have worked out independently most of the first and second books of Euclid; at sixteen he wrote a treatise on Conics which attracted the attention of Descartes; at nineteen he completed a calculating machine--a device that had never been dreamt of before. At this point it is not surprising to learn that his health broke down. Pascal is not a systematic philosopher; but his acute intellect was united to an inner restlessness of soul. Neither science nor philosophy could bring him peace, for his needs were far deeper than any merely rational systematisation of ideas could satisfy. Some have said of him that he was fundamentally a sceptic, but one for whom religious faith was essential; certainly in him were united an acute critical faculty and an intense religious experience. Perhaps the two are not so incompatible after all. THE "PENSÉES."--Pascal is chiefly famous for two works, the _Lettres Provinciales_ and the _Pensées_. The former is controversial literature, but yet a classic of the French language: in sum, it is an attack on the Jesuits; but it need not here detain us, for with theology, as such, we are not concerned, and still less with ecclesiastical systems. The _Pensées_ is a collection of fragments, the material for an Apology for Christianity which was never written. The autograph MS. preserved in the _Bibliothèque Nationale_ at Paris "is made up of scraps of paper of all shapes and sizes, written often on both sides ... and dealing with all sorts of subjects." One is reminded of the mythical scraps of manuscript from which the genius of Carlyle distilled the philosophy of the sagacious Teufelsdröch. But it is in these detached fragments that Pascal has expressed his spiritual and intellectual struggles; they contain his philosophy of life. And, however unsystematic in arrangement, they do reveal a fairly definite temper and attitude of mind. PASCAL'S PHILOSOPHY.--In the first place, the _Thoughts_ voice a reaction against the "Cartesian intellectualism" which was then the prevalent tendency in scientific and philosophical circles. "The last attainment of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things beyond it" might perhaps have been published by Pascal's predecessors. "To laugh at philosophy is to be a true philosopher" would have seemed like blasphemy or nonsense to most of his contemporaries, but it was neither of these. Behind sayings of this description lay the strong conviction that mere logic was incapable of probing the depths of existence. "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing," is sound psychology, and not scepticism or obscurantism. Of course it all depends what one means by "reason." Too many of Pascal's contemporaries applied the word to a more or less shallow rationalism utterly opposed to a spiritual view of things, whereas reason properly understood is "the logic of the whole personality."[12] That Pascal was no mere narrow anti-rational obscurantist is evident, not only from his own extraordinary insight, but from his continual reiteration of his idea that the essential dignity of man lies in his thought: "All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not worth the smallest mind, for a mind knows them, and itself, and bodies know nothing." Here lies the true greatness of man. In respect of material bulk he is nothing, but his thought cannot be measured. "Man is only a reed, the feeblest reed in nature, _but he is a thinking reed_." The saying has become famous, and the words that follow are hardly less so; they remove the overpowering and crushing incubus of man's illimitable material environment, which, since Copernicus, had weighed upon thinkers like a nightmare: "Were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which slays him, because he knows that he dies, and the advantage that the universe has over him: of this the universe knows nothing. Thus all man's dignity lies in his thought."[13] PASCAL'S PESSIMISM.--It has been said that an unbridgeable gulf lies between those who believe and those who disbelieve in mankind. It is to the latter category that Pascal belongs. His faith in the dignity of man is paradoxically associated with a realisation of his weakness and imbecility: "What a chimera, then, is man! What an oddity, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, senseless earth-worm; depository of truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error; the glory and the refuse of the universe." "We desire truth, and find in ourselves only uncertainty; we seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We are unable not to wish for truth and happiness, and incapable either of certainty or felicity." In fact, we may say that Pascal was the first, in an age of exaggerated reverence for logic (the _damnosa hereditas_ of the Scholastic theologians) to understand that the best arguments for religion are the facts of human experience, and the conditions of human life. "In vain, O men, do ye seek within yourselves the cure for your troubles! All your knowledge can only teach you that it is not within yourselves that ye find the true or good!" Here we have the language of religious experience. The result of Augustine's meditation upon life was the same: _Inquietum cor nostrum dum requiescat in te._ It is a tongue that the "psychic man" can never understand; it seems to him affectation; such language is foreign to the easy optimism of an age of confidence. Indeed Pascal, though so intensely modern, is a stranger, and his words often enigmas to our time. _Vanitas vanitatum_ is thus the verdict that he passes upon human experience. "The last act is tragic, however fine the comedy of all the rest." SIGNIFICANCE OF PASCAL.--It is not as a systematic thinker that Pascal is of importance to the historian of thought. He typifies that more or less inarticulate and unreasoned revolt which the arrogance and optimism of a new science or a new philosophy arouse against themselves. He voices the eternal protest that it is not by bread alone that men live. As is generally the case with such protests, the pessimism of Pascal was no doubt exaggerated; but exaggeration is necessary if minds are to be impressed; and those who feel strongly see only one side of a question. RESULTS.--Thus in the three figures that have passed before us, we see a threefold protest against that exclusion of the spiritual from the human view of life. Spinoza, the pantheist, sees God everywhere;[14] Leibniz finds in every recess of nature the principle of personality; Pascal finds the only cure for human frailty and misery in religion. CHAPTER V RISE OF AN ANTI-RELIGIOUS SCIENCE ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS.--As we have seen, a mechanical view of the universe was not felt by thinkers like Descartes or Newton, or even Hobbes, to involve any consequences that were necessarily hostile to religion. The new science sometimes might be anti-theological, because the current theology still seemed too much infected with Scholasticism, but it was not, in the hands of its most notable exponents, anti-religious. Science had no quarrel with religion as such, nor even with a rational type of theology. Of course the new views aroused many suspicions, and did not escape criticism at the hands of Church authorities, both Protestant and Catholic. And (as we have seen) some early scientists paid very dearly for their allegiance to the spirit of scientific enquiry; but as time went on, actual persecution became impossible, morally and practically. But theologians were never, during the seventeenth century at least, quite reconciled to a science and a philosophy which seemed to them to be leading men towards areas quite uninhabitable for religion. But in spite of suspicions on either side, and the prevalence of some measure of intolerance, it cannot be said that relations between the scientists or philosophers and the theologians were very seriously strained until well on in the eighteenth century. ANTI-RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA.--That this comparatively pacific state of affairs came to an end was the fault, primarily, at least, neither of the theologians nor of the scientists. A different atmosphere gradually began to envelop and to embitter the controversy. Orthodox religion, especially in Catholic countries, came to be associated with political reaction, and the most envenomed onslaughts began to be made upon what seemed to be the chief stronghold of a discredited regime. Especially was this the case in France, where corrupt political conditions were aggravated by the intense social misery which they had created. Thus France became the cradle of the phenomenon known as anti-clericalism, which is the product not so much of disbelief in a creed as of hatred of a system; it was the correlative of a Church in which religion was extinct, for genuine Catholicism had been rooted out of France early in the eighteenth century, just as Protestantism had been drowned in blood a century before.[15] SCIENCE POPULARISED.--In two respects France, during the second half of the eighteenth century, was far in advance of other countries. No other literature of that age can be compared with the French for the skill and charm with which scientific views were expressed. There was no lack of first-rate propagandists. And not only in the popularisation, but in the systematic teaching of science, France for a long period led the way.[16] Whereas the history of English or German literature of the eighteenth century could be written almost without reference to science, it is with scientific problems that the names of some of the most brilliant French _littérateurs_ are associated. And whereas in England, scientific men worked (in spite of the existence of the Royal Society) more or less in isolation, in France the savants have always been a brotherhood.[17] VOLTAIRE.--One of the most notorious names associated with the type of propaganda referred to is that of Voltaire (1694-1778). Voltaire's polemic cannot be described as anti-religious, for he himself was a theist. It was, rather, political in character. The object of his attack was the Catholic Church as existing in France in his day, which he regarded as the chief surviving obstacle to human progress. _Écrasez l'infâme_ was his motto; and if this seems a trifle fanatical, let us not forget, as an acute critic has observed, "that what Catholicism was accomplishing in France in the first half of the eighteenth century was not anything less momentous than the slow strangling of French civilisation."[18] Voltaire was an industrious and prolific writer (his works are numbered by scores), but he was also a master of French prose, and he was universally read. From the point of view of the history of European thought his importance lies in his popularisation in France of the Newtonian physics.[19] _Newtonisme_ was a word coined by him, and became associated with a mechanical view of nature. He also conducted a vigorous polemic against certain religious notions, then current, but now out-of-date, and which need not here detain us. Voltaire was an anti-clerical, but he was not hostile to religion; he was chiefly regarded as an exponent of English (i.e. progressive) ideas. LA METTRIE.--An advance in the materialistic direction was taken, however, by La Mettrie (1709-1751), who approached the problem from the side of physiology (he was a physician by profession). His two important contributions were _Histoire naturelle de l'âme_ (1745), and _L'Homme Machine_ (1748). The titles are sufficient to indicate the scope of these works. That of the latter points back to Descartes, who had applied the mechanical theory to animals only, and not to man. La Mettrie extended his application to include man. The implications of this theory did not escape La Mettrie's contemporaries. DIDEROT AND HIS ENCYCLOPÆDIA.--A definite period in the history of thought is certainly marked by the successful attempt on the part of a group of progressive thinkers, to extend the circle open to scientific ideas by the publication of an Encyclopædia which should contain all the latest knowledge and speculation. The credit for this notable performance was due to Diderot, who in spite of immense difficulties, which were aggravated by the ecclesiastical authorities and the supporters of reaction in general, carried the work through to a triumphant conclusion. The first volume appeared in 1751. The work was composed with an eye to current prejudices; the language was guarded, but the anti-clerical tendency of the whole was by no means obscure. Diderot, however, did not obtrude in the Encyclopædia the definitely anti-religious opinions which he had developed and which are revealed in his correspondence. HOLBACH.--A disciple of the Encyclopædist--Holbach, a young German settled in Paris--was bolder than his master, and published, under the name of a savant who had recently died, a book which became widely notorious, and has been called the Bible of materialism--the _Système de la Nature_ (1770). Like Voltaire's _Élémens_, and La Mettrie's _L'Homme Machine_, it was published in Holland. "The book is materialism reduced to a system. It contains no really new thoughts. Its significance lies in the energy and indignation with which every spiritualistic and dualistic view was run to earth on account of its injuriousness both in practice and in theory,"[20] is the estimate of a distinguished and impartial writer. Rumour gave the credit of its authorship to Diderot, who was so disturbed by the compliment as hastily to leave Paris for the frontier. His admiration of it is, however, recorded. After proclaiming his disgust at the contemporary fashion of "mixing up incredulity and superstition," he observes that no such fault is to be found in the _System of Nature_. "The author is not an atheist in one page, and a deist in another. His philosophy is all of a piece." Certainly to those with an appetite for negative dogmatism the work left nothing to be desired. The following passage indicates the attitude and method of the author, who, in the matter of style, did not fall short of the French tradition: "If we go back to the beginning, we shall always find that ignorance and fear have created gods; fancy, enthusiasm or deceit has adorned or disfigured them; weakness worships them; credulity preserves them in life; custom regards them, and tyranny supports them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own ends." The philosophy of religion which inspired these sentences may appear to us sufficiently crude. And indeed an impartial reader will have to confess that much of this eighteenth century polemic against religion, however well-intentioned, is singularly wide of the mark. It is all characterised by an imperfect knowledge of the psychological foundations of religion, and quite devoid of what is now termed the "historic sense." The faults of Voltaire and Holbach, however, were those of their age, which was often short-sighted in its recognition of facts, and superficial in its reasoning from them. Even Dr. Johnson, who found this section of contemporary French literature so distasteful, never laid his finger upon its real weakness; the fundamental fallacies upon which it rested escaped him. He, like Voltaire and the rest, was a child of the age. PROPAGANDA NOT SCIENCE.--It is very doubtful whether the genuine scientists, who devoted themselves not to propaganda but to research, could have been ready to sanction the uses to which their own discoveries were put. From the exhaustive references of Lange in his _History of Materialism_ (Engl. Trans., Vol. II, pp. 49-123), it is evident that "the extreme views of La Mettrie, Diderot, and Holbach cannot be fathered on any of the great scientists or philosophers, but were an attempt to supply scientific principles to the solution of philosophical, ethical, or religious questions, frequently for practical and political purposes."[21] There are certainly risks attached to the popularisation of the results of scientific research. Theories have to be presented with an appearance of finality which does not legitimately belong to them, and sometimes in a somewhat startling aspect, otherwise the reader is left cold, for it is excitement rather than genuine information that attracts the majority. As a judicious writer has observed: "No ideas lend themselves to such easy, but likewise to such shallow generalisations as those of science. Once let out of the hand which uses them in the strict and cautious manner by which alone they lead to valuable results, they are apt to work mischief. Because the tool is so sharp, the object to which it is applied seems to be so easily handled. The correct use of scientific ideas is only learnt by patient training, and should be governed by the not easily acquired habit of self-restraint."[22] SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS.--Alongside of this rigorous propaganda, which prepared the way for the upheaval of 1789, genuine scientific progress was being made, especially in the regions of Astronomy, Botany and Chemistry. The ideas of Newton were taken up and elaborated by means of more efficient mathematical processes--especially the theory of infinitesimals--by the distinguished astronomer, Laplace, in his _Système du Monde_ (1796), and in the successive volumes of his _Méchanique Céleste_ (1799-1825), which has been called a new _Principia_. Important advances in chemistry are associated with the name of Lavoisier (1743-1794), who introduced into that science a principle which has become axiomatic, and which to-day remains the foundation of all work in the laboratory. To Lavoisier belongs the merit of introducing what is known as the "quantitative method" into chemistry, and thus establishing that science upon the exact--that is to say mathematical--basis, where it now rests and putting exact research in the place of vague reasoning. His principle was that _in all chemical combinations and reactions, the total weight of the various ingredients remains unchanged_; there is (in spite of appearances) neither loss nor gain of actual matter. "The quantity of matter is the same at the end as at the beginning of every operation." It was Lavoisier who finally established the correct theory of combustion; that it consisted in the combination of a special element called oxygen, with other bodies or elements. THE ATOMIC THEORY.--Lavoisier had opened a door to researches which naturally led the way to the establishment of the atomic theory of matter on an experimental, and not merely a theoretical basis. That theory is indeed nothing more than the elaboration of Lavoisier's own principle. John Dalton (1766-1844), a Manchester quaker, published in 1810 his _New System of Chemical Philosophy_, where highly important conclusions are drawn both from Lavoisier's facts and from experimental results of other chemists. Of these, Dalton gave an account and an explanation which has ever since been the soul of all chemical reasoning. This explanation is known as his Atomic theory. The two facts of which Dalton's theory is an explanation are as follows. _First_ (Lavoisier's fact), that the total weight of substances remains always the same, be they combined in ever so many different ways. _Second_, that all substances, be they in large or in small quantities, combine with each other, or separate from each other, in definite and fixed proportions. The theory of Dalton was that these combinations take place between independent particles of matter, which are indestructible and indivisible. These "atoms" of the various elements have definite weights which are responsible for the proportion in which they are found to combine. These facts of proportion in combination, or "chemical affinity," could not be accounted for by the theory which regards matter as "continuous," but only by the opposite theory that it is "discrete" (i.e. divided up into particles). PHILOSOPHICAL COROLLARIES.--These strictly scientific theories associated with the name of Laplace, Lavoisier, and Dalton tended to strengthen in the popular estimation, the philosophical conclusions of writers like Holbach. The scientists themselves remained "agnostic" with regard to questions that lay outside their scope: they maintained here the correct attitude for scientific research. The question put by Napoleon to Laplace, why he had not introduced the name of God into the _Méchanique Céleste_, was out of place, and deserved the crushing reply it received. Scientific research is not concerned with questions of philosophy. Still, it did not escape popular attention that the old pillar of a mechanistic view of the universe now seemed to be reinforced by another. The theory of _the conservation of energy_ was now supplemented by that of the _indestructibility of matter_ (Lavoisier). And to crown all, the old atomic theory, which Lucretius had made the foundation of his dogmatic materialism, was now re-established on an experimental basis. So far as physical science was concerned, the situation seemed menacing to a religious view of life. Men felt that they inhabited a world of indestructible matter, moved by a certain measure of force, unchangeable and fixed. The prison of determinism and matter was closing around them. CHAPTER VI RISE OF GERMAN IDEALISM AN UNSTEMMED TIDE.--In spite of those important reactions of thought which we have associated with the name of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Pascal, the mechanical view had not ceased, as the last chapter has shown us, to extend itself during the eighteenth century, when it became highly fashionable in progressive circles. COMMON-SENSE PHILOSOPHY.--The strength of this mechanical view lies in the fact that it stands on the shoulders of a natural science which itself has its feet firmly planted on the irrefragible rock of sense-experience. The mechanical view thus rests, in the last resort, upon the belief (which is held everywhere with confidence by plain men) that sense-experience is a sound foundation for knowledge. The importance of this belief had been recognised by the English philosopher, Locke (1632-1704), who in his _Essay concerning Human Understanding_ (1690), lays it down that all human knowledge is based, ultimately, upon sense-experience. This highly important work had an immense influence, and, under Locke's tutelage, many thinkers regarded with suspicion any knowledge which might seem not to be derivable, in one way or another, from that source. As the strength of Samson lay in his unshorn hair, so the strength of the mechanical theory lay, and still lies, in the acceptance of Locke's theory of human knowledge, i.e. that it is all derived from the senses. And the Delilah who can shear away Locke's conclusions, leaves Samson helpless; mechanical materialism becomes a discredited theory. Hence the truth of the saying that the problem of knowledge is the preliminary question for philosophy. WEAKNESS OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY.--Spinoza and Leibniz may be said to have dispensed with this foundation. Taking the scientific knowledge of their time for granted, they drew certain conclusions therefrom; but their results, however imposing, were felt to be the result rather of speculation than of reason. Such was the more or less unexpressed estimate of their work. It was undervalued, for both Spinoza and Leibniz were thinkers of the first calibre; and yet there was some justice in the charge. By the end of the eighteenth century the days of merely speculative philosophy were past. THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY.--The time was ripe for a new metaphysic--for a fresh step forward in philosophic method. That step was taken by the celebrated Immanuel Kant, who is the originator of what is known, in the history of thought, as the Critical Philosophy. The word _critical_ signifies a particular method of approaching the problem of existence, a method which must be contrasted with that of the _speculative_ philosophy, of which Spinoza and Leibniz are examples. The critical philosophy, before attempting (as Spinoza had done) to tackle the problem of _existence_, first attacked the problem of _knowledge_. Before asking _What is the truth?_ it put the preliminary question, _What are the means at man's disposal for reaching the truth?_ It prefaced all philosophical enquiry by an examination into the nature and scope of human thought. Such was the preparatory investigation which was to place metaphysics upon a secure and scientific foundation. For the new philosophy, the gateway to all sound knowledge is the reflection of the human mind upon itself. "Know thyself," is its advice to the inquiring spirit of man. Here, if anywhere, is to be found the philosopher's stone. IMMANUEL KANT.--The celebrated Immanuel Kant was born at Königsberg in 1724, and died in his native town in 1804. Between those dates he lived the industrious and uneventful life of a university professor. The Seven Years' War and the French Revolution left him undisturbed, though not unmoved. He was a man of quiet, regular habits, and his fellow-townsmen would set their clocks by his daily promenade.[23] But the adventurous originality of his thought serves as a contrast to this peaceful picture. Kant, indeed, laid the foundations of philosophy afresh. With characteristic insight, he went to the very root problem of all, and challenged human thought itself. Before we can know anything, we must first of all demand the credentials of the instrument by which knowledge is gained. Before asking, _What_ do I know? the preliminary question should be, _How_ do I know? Otherwise we cannot say whether we are in a position to give any answer to those ultimate problems, the answers to which constitute philosophy. It is far from easy to present Kant's criticism of knowledge at once simply and accurately. This philosopher has a not undeserved reputation for obscurity, and had he written in any other language than German, he would perhaps have found no readers. THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE.--It had already been realised by the predecessors of Kant that what is called "sense-experience" is a less simple process than it seems, and that our senses cannot be said to reveal to us any object as it actually _is_. John Locke himself was not the first to point out that the so-called "secondary qualities" of any material object (i.e. colour, taste, etc.) are produced just as much by the person who perceives, as by the object which is perceived. Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes, besides others, had been aware of this fact, which indeed becomes evident to the most superficial analysis of sense-experience. The "primary qualities," i.e. density, extension, etc., continued to be regarded as subsisting _in_ the objects themselves, and independently of any perceiving consciousness. But even this view did not prove permanent, and it was the episcopal philosopher, George Berkeley (1685-1753) who demonstrated in his _New Theory of Vision_ that not even _these_ qualities could rightly be regarded as subsisting independently. Thus it had already been realised, long before Kant wrote his _Critique of Pure Reason_ (published, 1781), that our senses are far from revealing to us things as they _are_; it is only the _appearances_ of things and not the _things themselves_ that the senses present to us. Indeed, as is well known, the Scotch philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), who was a master in the art of raising problems, extended this line of criticism until it reached to pure scepticism. He put the question, If all our knowledge is derived from sense-experience, and _if_ sense-experience only supplies us with appearance and not reality, what degree of trustworthiness can there be in human knowledge? And he was not afraid to give the logical answer--None. Hume may thus be said to have brought things to an impasse. As a matter of fact, what he had done was to refute Locke's theory of knowledge (i.e. that it is derived entirely from sense-experience) by means of a _reductio ad absurdum_. THE KANTIAN CRITICISM.--Kant says that it was Hume who "awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers." By this he meant that Hume made him realise that it was no use indulging in philosophic speculation generally, or listening to the speculations of others, until "the Problem of Knowledge" was satisfactorily solved. To this problem Kant applied himself. And recognising Locke to be the _fons et origo malorum_, he subjected his theory of human knowledge to a close analysis, and exposed it as being fallacious. Far from sense-experience being responsible for all our knowledge, Kant proved that important elements of knowledge are quite independent of sense-experience; especially was this so in the case of certain mathematical propositions. (Hence the question, How is pure mathematics possible? was put by Kant at the beginning of his philosophy.) But it is neither necessary nor desirable to enter into the arguments by means of which Kant proved his thesis, which was that the human mind contains in itself certain principles of knowledge (e.g. the idea of cause and effect, the ideas of mathematics, and so on) which it does not owe to sense-experience. KANT'S COPERNICAN HYPOTHESIS.--Kant called these principles of knowledge, _forms of thought_ or _categories_. The name, perhaps, is irrelevant to our purpose; all that we need to understand is that Kant turned the tables upon Locke. Locke said that the mind was a _tabula rasa_ which passively received impressions from outside. Kant said that the mind is nothing of the kind; it is not passive, but active; it does not "receive" whatever is offered, it "selects" what it wants; and _it imposes its own "forms of thought" upon the outside world_. Photography had not been invented at the time of this controversy, but Kant might have said: The mind is not a photographic plate receiving impressions from without, it rather resembles the lens which impressions must pass through, and be transformed by, before they can create a picture. Kant had, in fact, by this theory, instituted a revolution. His new dogma was: _The mind is the mould into which all our knowledge must be cast; and the constitution of our mind predetermines the shape that our knowledge takes._ Thus Kant had discovered that not only sensuous perception, but rational understanding also, has its forms and presuppositions. Just as we become aware of objects only by means of senses which perhaps hide or distort as much as they reveal; so also our rational knowledge is conditioned by the nature of our understanding, which dictates to reality the "forms" under which it can be understood and known. MECHANISM UNDERMINED.--How did this affect the mechanical theory? The connection is obvious. Mechanism is nothing but one of the forms of thought that the mind imposes on phenomena. Just as Copernicus had discovered that it is due to our position on the earth that the heavenly bodies _appear_ to move round us, so Kant had discovered that it is due to the nature of our senses and understanding that we perceive things in space and time, and understand them as being mechanically determined. The space and time, and the mechanical determinism are not in the things, _but in our minds_. The fact is that we can only grasp things under these forms. Space, time, mechanical causation are forms and laws, _not_ of nature, _but of the human intellect_, which is so constituted as to see things in this way. Thus those axioms of science and of mathematics which lie at the base of all exact knowledge, and which had hitherto been regarded as _objective_, i.e. as inherent in the nature of things, were shewn by Kant to be, as a matter of fact, _subjective_, that is (in Kant's own phrase) "they express the conditions under which alone we are able to apprehend or understand the object." Thus all knowledge is conditioned by our nature, by the framework, so to speak, not only of our senses but of our minds. In this way the mechanical view was outflanked; that view certainly seems to us inevitable and certain, but this is due to the constitution of our minds; the world seems to us to be determined, just as it seems blue to a person wearing blue spectacles. But there is no sufficient reason for supposing that it _is_ either determined or blue. The law of mechanical causation is an axiom, but it is a subjective axiom. APPEARANCE AND REALITY.--This may not seem much of an advance on Hume's position. Human knowledge still seems precarious, if we assume the mind to be a kind of dictator which imposes its own laws upon nature. And Kant indeed frankly admitted that neither our senses nor our reason were able to reveal to us things as they _are_, but only things as they _seem_; we grasp _appearance_, not _reality_, and (to use Kant's phraseology) _phenomena_ not _noumena_. Thus Kant cut away the ground from under all rationalistic _dogmatism_; he shewed its presumptuous futility. THE PATHWAY TO REALITY.--Kant, however, did not remain satisfied with the negative results of his critical philosophy, valuable as these were. Reality, it is true, lies out of range of the human reason, but it is not entirely inaccessible to us, and scepticism about the ultimate nature of things is not the necessary corollary of Kant's, as it was of Hume's, philosophy. Kant drew a distinction between the "Theoretical Reason," which his _Critique of Pure Reason_ had dealt with, and the "Practical Reason," which he discusses in his _Critique of Practical Reason_ (1788). THE "PRACTICAL REASON."--By the "practical reason" Kant meant the moral consciousness, and the law of the "practical reason" is the moral law, the fulfilment of which constitutes duty. This law springs neither from outside authority nor from experience; it is autonomous. And it is upon the existence of this autonomous moral consciousness that Kant plants his foothold in his endeavour to find a refuge from the philosophic agnosticism to which his analysis of the "theoretical reason" had led; and upon this rock he founded his belief in "God, Freedom, and Immortality." By means of his "practical reason," man gets into touch with that real world, which his "theoretical reason" is unable to reach. In fact, the "practical reason" itself (or moral consciousness) is an element in man's nature which belongs to the _real_, as opposed to the _phenomenal_ world. For man himself is a citizen of both worlds, and has (so to speak) a dual nature, a foot on either shore. He is an inhabitant both of the world of mechanical phenomena, and of the "timeless world of freedom," which lies altogether outside of all mechanical conceptions. KANT AND RELIGION.--"Religion we must seek in ourselves, not outside ourselves," is a saying of Kant's that gives the clue to his general attitude. It is only in that world which cannot be interpreted mechanically (i.e. the inner world of freedom of which we never cease to be conscious) that we may seek, or can hope to find the source of religion. It is not the spectacle of the mechanically determined world of nature, but the demands of the moral consciousness that create religion. For instance, it is the gulf that yawns between the ideal commands of the moral law, and the actual possibilities (so poor and meagre) of fulfilling and satisfying them, that creates, in the view of Kant, the need of God and immortality. These alone can guarantee the realisation of the ideal claims of the moral consciousness. RELIGIOUS FAITH.--Thus the "practical reason" leads on to convictions concerning what lies beyond the limits defined by the "theoretical reason." The nature of the demands of the moral consciousness give us an insight into the nature of the super-phenomenal (transcendental, noumenal) world. That world must be of such a kind as to sanction and guarantee our moral ideals; it must be friendly and not hostile or indifferent to those ideals which man cherishes, but which his "phenomenal" experience seems to contradict. Thus we see the truth of the saying that "The universe as a moral system is the last word of the Kantian philosophy."[24] KANT'S INFLUENCE.--Kant was one of those thinkers who are responsible for turning the stream of thought into fresh channels. Through his researches into the nature of human knowledge, he discovered the conditions upon which it rests, and defined the limits beyond which it cannot pass. Thus, once for all, he put an end to dogmatism. And to Kant also belongs the credit of having established the reality and validity of _inner_ experience. The rock upon which his philosophy is built is no external fact or event--nothing in time or space--but the moral consciousness itself. And thus he restores, as the central interest of philosophy, the human individual, with all his experiences of need, of hope, and of insight. Personality is the principle of his philosophy. In this he is the true successor of the Reformation. CHAPTER VII THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT KANT AND AFTER.--With Kant the hey-day of rationalism terminated. He had put an end to the superficial psychology upon which it rested. For the rationalists, the life of the mind had consisted in _intellectual ideas_; but a more careful analysis indicated the presence of deeper-lying elements, which had hitherto been disregarded; there existed other important constituents besides the intellectual. Kant's criticism of "pure reason" did much to discredit the old view; and by founding his philosophy upon the non-intellectual "moral consciousness," he heightened the prestige of feeling as against reason (in the narrow and limited sense of that word). Thus Kant is not undeservedly called the father of a philosophy which succeeded him, and which was based upon the idea of the supremacy of feeling. But, at the same time, that title is more accurate as an estimate of another philosopher of rather different characteristics. ROUSSEAU.--Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a man of unique genius whose figure occupies a prominent position not only in the annals of philosophy, but in social, political, and literary history. Even more than Voltaire was he responsible for sowing seeds of thought which bore fruit in the events of the Revolution. And indeed, it is as the author of the notorious _Contrat Social_ that he is most widely known. ROUSSEAU'S "SENSIBILITY."--Rousseau was one of those philosophers whose character is the formative element which gives shape to their doctrines. His was a profoundly emotional temperament. He left behind him an invaluable document which lays bare all the psychological sources of his philosophy. The _Confessions_ reveal to us a man highly sensitive and morbidly introspective, the slave of unreasoning impulses and passions. In the eyes of some short-sighted persons, these first-hand revelations will obscure or cast doubt upon the capacity and genius of the man, for they do little to prejudice opinion in his favour. HE DEFIES THE ZEITGEIST.--Rousseau's profound originality lies in his having dared to dispute a dogma to which the prestige of an axiom then attached. He endeavoured to undermine the popular faith in scientific and philosophic culture. He went right back to Pascal, who, a century before, had raised the question as to the value of scientific knowledge for personal life, by proclaiming "The whole of philosophy is not worth an hour's study." Rousseau's first philosophical work was occasioned by the offer of a prize on the part of a provincial academy for a thesis on the problem "Whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has contributed to purify manners?" "The question pierced Rousseau's soul like a flash of lightning." He felt (he tells us) that he saw a new world, and felt a new man; he saw no longer the world of culture, of science, of philosophy (which he felt to be as artificial as it was ineffective and vain), but the _real_ world of personality, of living feeling, of the inner life. It flashed upon him that it was the primitive and elementary feelings, the great and simple relations of life, which gave to existence its value. The rest was superficial and irrelevant. ROUSSEAU AND RELIGION.--The intellectualist is ever the aristocrat.[25] Voltaire and the philosophers of the "enlightenment" spoke of the unenlightened multitude as _la canaille_. Its beliefs were superstitions. Rousseau knew that the things which men have in common are more vital than those in which they differ, and the primitive instincts of the race which we all share, are the most important part of our nature. Among these primitive instincts, indomitable and irrepressible, is the instinct of religion. Thus Rousseau transferred the religious problem from the sphere of external observation and explanation of the world (to which the rationalists had promoted or degraded it), back to inner personal feeling. This marked an epoch in the philosophy of religion. Moreover, Rousseau was able to write in a convincing fashion of religion, because (and here he differed from the intellectuals of his day) he had personal experience of what it meant. Hence wherever he alludes to religion his language has the ring of sincerity; it is always spontaneous, and sometimes it is passionate and poetic. His religious experience took the form of nature-mysticism, undogmatic (because non-intellectualist), but rich and deep: "I can find no more worthy adoration of God than the silent admiration which the contemplation of His works begets in us, and which cannot be expressed by any prescribed acts.... In my room I pray seldomer and more coldly; but the sight of a beautiful landscape moves me, I cannot tell why. I once read of a certain bishop, who, when visiting in his diocese, encountered an old woman whose only prayers consisted in a sigh 'Oh!' The bishop said to her, 'Good mother, always pray like that; your prayer is worth more than ours.' My prayer is of that kind."[26] Here we have one form of the religious spirit; for the mystic it is always true that "there is neither speech nor language." The mystic and the dogmatist stand at opposite poles, for dogmatism is always an attempt at definition even when that which is to be defined is indefinable; and here is to be found the common denominator between Kant and Rousseau. The former, by his analysis of reason, discredited dogmatism: the latter, by his apotheosis of feeling, contributed towards the same result. ROMANTICISM IN GERMANY.--This strong movement of feeling, created on the one hand by Kant's _Critique_, and by the mysticism of Rousseau, took different forms in the two countries to which these two philosophers belonged. In France the new philosophy became the hot-bed of revolutionary ideas; whereas in Germany it found vent in a ferment of speculative systems, and in an outcrop of artistic production. It produced the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and the prose and poetry of Goethe and Schiller. "It was the age of 'beautiful souls' and of 'noble hearts'; men believed themselves capable of the highest things; the immediate needs of the heart were set over against reason ... under many successive forms Romanticism prevailed in literature, effecting the re-birth of human fancy after the long labour of intellect."[27] THE GOAL OF PHILOSOPHY.--Philosophic young Germany had set itself an ambitious programme. Kant, indeed, had cleared the ground for them, but his warnings that an eagle cannot soar beyond the atmosphere which supports it, were disregarded. The philosophy of Kant himself was felt by the successors to be lacking in the _idea of totality_--in the conception of a whole. His division of existence into Appearance and Reality seemed to indicate a certain lack of finish in his philosophy; and they set themselves to explore the root of reality which to Kant seemed undiscoverable, but in which the sensuous and super-sensuous worlds are united, and from which they have emerged. This task became and remained the grand problem of philosophy for a whole generation of thinkers. All externality, isolation, and division were to disappear, all existence must be shown to be but degrees and phases of the one infinite reality. Spinoza's work had to be done again in the light of increased psychological knowledge. FICHTE.--Of the thinkers who addressed themselves to this ambitious task, only two need be considered here; and these are chosen because they attacked the problem from different directions. In the first place, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who had been the first to lay down the programme of thought with explicitness, realised and admitted that the task which philosophy had set itself was beyond the powers of any logical train of thought. The "higher unity" of existence, the demonstration of which was the goal of philosophy, could be reached only by a process of intellectual intuition,[28] it must be guessed or divined; for it presents itself (and this is a characteristically "Romanticist" idea) to the human mind in the immediacy of feeling, and not by discursive thought. It was of the essence of Fichte's philosophy, as it had been of Spinoza's, that a point may be attained where the mind feels itself to be at one with the truly real, and only when this point is reached--i.e. _sub specie aeternitatis_, will it arrive at and retain the conviction of the universal order and unity of existence. From this standpoint, and from this alone, does it become possible to grasp "the meaning of those dualities and contrasts which we find around and in us, the differences of self and not-self, of mind and matter, of subject and object, of appearance and reality, of truth and semblance." HEGEL.--It has been said, perhaps with justice, that "philosophy is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct." The remark might seem, at least in the eyes of some, to be particularly applicable to the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Not because his arguments are bad, but because he attempted to establish by strict logic the conclusions which Fichte sought to reach by means of intuition, and which perhaps are only attainable by that method. Hegel attempted to climb, by a strict process of reasoning, to the position from which the Fichtean landscape might spread itself below as a logical whole: he claimed to be a reasoner as well as a seer. And thereby he may be said to have furnished "the programme of thought for a certain class of intellects which will never die out." Thus Hegel was something of a hybrid, and may be described as a rationalistic-romanticist. Nor are his arguments the easiest to understand. "The only thing that is certain," writes a commentator who stands at an opposite philosophical pole, "is that whatever you may say of his procedure, some one will accuse you of misunderstanding it. I make no claim to understanding it; I treat it merely impressionistically."[29] And this is all we can do here. HEGEL'S METHOD.--Hegel proceeds by means of what he calls the _Dialectical Method_. He understands by "dialectic" (1) a property of all our _thoughts_ in virtue of which, each particular thought necessarily passes over into another; and also (2) a property of _things_, in virtue of which every particular thing necessarily belongs to, or is related to, all other things. A thing "by itself" is nothing. Hence a similarity or parallelism between the _method of thought_ and the _nature of things_. Logic is of the nature of things. The way in which thought reaches truth is also the way in which things exist. Hegel expressed this in his well-known saying "the real is the rational, and the rational is the real." Perhaps more poetically or obscurely the same proposition is expressed by declaring: "When we think existence, existence thinks in us," and "The pulse of existence itself beats in our thinking." Hegel's logic may, in fact, be described as an attempt to conceive the movement of thought as being at the same time the law of the universe. Logic (to repeat what we said before) is of the nature of things: reality is rational, and what is rational is real. Thus logic for Hegel did not mean (as it meant for Kant) the forms or laws of thought: it signified the very core of reality. For all that Kant knew, reality might or might not be rational: all he asserted was that the human mind rationalised reality (or parts of it). For Hegel, logic or reason was the living and moving spirit of the world. The essence of reality and the essence of thought were one. The absolute reality was spirit.[30] HEGELIANISM.--Hegel's philosophy may be described as an attempt to reach the standpoint of religious mysticism by means of purely rational processes. It is the finding of rational grounds for supra-rational intuitions. The attempt is laudable, and, in the eyes of many, it was successful. And, as we shall see, Hegelianism had an important future, especially in England; nor, as a system of thought, is it yet extinct. Its central conception is that which, in one shape or another, will never cease to appeal to mankind--that existence is, at bottom, spiritual in character--that spirit is the only ultimate reality. That Hegelianism provides a rational basis for a spiritual religion is obvious enough; nor is it necessary to indicate the possibilities of linking up the Christian doctrine of the Logos with a philosophy for which Reason was the very core and ground of existence. Hegel may indeed be said to have laid the foundation of Christian theology afresh; or rather to have restored what was best in the old theology, and given it the prestige of modernity. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY.--In fact, for Hegel as for all rationalists whose attitude is also religious, religion and philosophy were two forms of the same thing. Religion contains philosophic truths under the form of imagination: philosophy contains religious truth under the form of reason. The difference is one of form only, not of content. This had not been the view of Rousseau, nor is it the deepest view; and it was not the view of a thinker of the Romantic school who did more than any individual among his predecessors to bring the religious problem to the point where it now stands. SCHLEIERMACHER.--While the sun of Romanticism was at its zenith, the spirit of Kant's critical philosophy was kept alive by a thinker of as deep spiritual and intellectual insight as Hegel himself. Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (1768-1834) brought the religious problem down from those altitudes to which Romanticist metaphysics had raised it, to what Kant had called "the fertile bathos of experience." He approached religion from the side of inner experience, the point of view of psychology. The profound insight of Kant had already shown that this was the direction on which future thought would travel, by tracing back the religious problem to a _personal need_ more clearly and penetratingly than ever before--a need set up by the incongruity of the real and the ideal. HIS VIEW OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS.--Just as Rousseau, owing to his own religious experience, was in a better position to attack the religious problem than the philosophers of the "enlightenment," so Schleiermacher had the advantage of some Romanticists. As a boy, he had been put to school with the Moravians, and throughout his own life he never ceased to declare that the years spent among them had been of vital importance to the development of his views. In 1801 he writes: "My way of thinking has indeed no other foundation than my own peculiar character, my inborn mysticism, my education as it has been determined from within." And his own experience of religion established in him the conviction that the innermost life of men must be lived in feeling, and that this alone can bring man into immediate relation to the highest. His acceptance of Kant's criticism of reason led him to understand that intellectual concepts, in the religious sphere, (i.e. dogmas) must always be of secondary importance: _experience_ comes first. And his profound originality lies just here, and it is just here that Schleiermacher stands out as the forerunner of the modern view. He it was who first made it evident that religious ideas derive their validity from that inner experience which they are an attempt to describe. If a dogma is an expression of an experience felt by man in his innermost life, it is a _valid_ dogma, even if philosophic criticism hesitates to sanction it.[31] WHAT IS RELIGION?--The distance of this position from that of the eighteenth century intellectualism which regarded religion either as a form of philosophy or of superstition, is obvious. Schleiermacher attacks two intellectualist prejudices in particular: (1) That according to which religion is conceived of primarily as a doctrine (either revealed, or grounded on reason), and (2) That which regards religion as merely a means towards morality. Religion, according to Schleiermacher, has an existence independent of (though, no doubt, associated with) philosophy, superstition, or morality. Its essence consists neither in speculation nor in action, but in a certain type of feeling, of inner experience. Schleiermacher characterised this particular type of feeling as _a feeling of dependence_: the immediate consciousness that everything finite exists in and through the infinite, everything temporal in and through the eternal. That Schleiermacher should have described the specifically religious feeling in this particular way is comparatively irrelevant so far as our present purpose is concerned. The point of importance is that he was the first to recognise the _independence_ of religion, to see in it a legitimate and natural form of human activity, which exists, not for the sake of knowledge or of morality, but for its own sake, and on its own account. Here, though Hegel took a different view, Schleiermacher is one in spirit with the Romantic school; indeed, he may be said to have drawn the logical conclusions of Romanticism. The independence and originality of religion is the necessary consequence of a philosophy which set itself against the unbalanced intellectualism of the "enlightenment." The permanent significance of Romanticism lies here: That it discredited once for all the notion that there is only one road to reality--that of logic. It is not only philosophy, but religion and art that remove the veil which hides the supra-sensible world from us. And to close our eyes to the facts of religious experience, or to attempt to discredit them by the application of irrelevant terms such as "superstition," is not only to display ourselves as philistines, but also to forsake the highest traditions of science--veneration for experience, and the realms of fact. CHAPTER VIII MECHANISM AND LIFE RECAPITULATORY.--We have already observed the mechanical theory, in the hands of Descartes, expanding itself to cover organisms and the phenomena of life, and in La Mettrie's _L'Homme Machine_, reducing even human beings to the status of automata. These theories were, however, known to be insecurely based upon somewhat hasty generalisations, for, in point of fact, the science of biology was as yet in its infancy; the _data_ for a complete vindication of the mechanical position were as yet wanting. ADVANCE OF BIOLOGY.--Biological science, however, during the first half of the nineteenth century made considerable advances, and research continually kept bringing to light facts which seemed to substantiate the brilliant, if premature, hypothesis of Descartes. It will not be necessary for us to do more than take hasty note of certain important developments. It was in 1828 that the German chemist Whöler (1800-1882) for the first time in biological history prepared an organic compound (urea) from inorganic materials--an achievement universally recognised to be of the utmost significance. As a distinguished historian of the science of chemistry puts it: "This discovery destroyed the difference which was then considered to exist between organic and inorganic bodies, viz. that the former could only be formed under the influence of vegetable or animal vital forces, whereas the latter could be artificially produced."[32] Ten years later another German, Schleider (1804-1881) propounded the cellular theory of the structure and growth of plants, a theory which was soon extended to animal organisms by Schwann (1810-1882). The publication of this famous theory was described by a contemporary as "a burst of daylight"; it indeed illuminated what had hitherto been buried in mystery and mythology--the structure and method of growth of plants and animals. It seemed to render superfluous any form of the old conception of a "vital force" to explain the phenomena of growth, if it could now be assumed that the cells automatically absorbed outside material, increased in number by the division of individuals, and built up the organism by continual repetition of this process. Schwann was also responsible for initiating a number of minute physiological investigations which led to a far more intimate knowledge of the action of nerves and muscles, and interpreted these in mechanical terms. "Investigations which were carried on with all the resources of modern physics regarding the phenomena of animal movements, gradually substituted for the miracles of the 'vital forces' a molecular mechanism, complicated, indeed, and likely to baffle our efforts for a long time to come, but intelligible, nevertheless, as a mechanism."[33] Subsequent researches, notably of Helmholtz (1821-1895) and Meyer, lent strong support to this interpretation. The conception of the conservation of energy (an important axiom of the mechanical theory) was successfully applied by them to the economy of organisms. The organism was found not to _create_ energy, but only to contain remarkably efficient means of deriving it from materials absorbed as food. Thus animal warmth and the power of motion are originally "sunlight transformed in the organism of the plant," and afterwards appropriated by the animal. The power with which we move our limbs is as much the product of combustion as is the power of a steam engine, the only difference being that the organism is, of the two, the more efficient converter of energy. THE MECHANICAL THEORY SUBSTANTIATED.--Thus, whether biologists were considering the _structure_ or the _behaviour_ of organisms, they were arriving at the same conclusions. The structure was revealed as physical and chemical structure, and the behaviour as the resultant of familiar physical and chemical processes. Hence biology came to be regarded as a compartment of physics and chemistry, for life itself was nothing but a complex physical or chemical phenomenon. Life could thus be satisfactorily expressed in terms of matter and energy. The speculations of Descartes seemed to be established by experimental science. THE FINAL OBSTACLE.--The situation, already satisfactory to those whose hope it was to see the mechanical theory impregnably established, was marred, however, by one untoward circumstance. The phenomena of organic structure, growth, and behaviour having been reduced to order, and expressed in terms of physics and chemistry, certain important facts still resisted explanation, and stood out as a last stronghold of the older view. THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.--The existence of definite forms of animal and vegetable life, whose infinite variety and complexity was continually being increased by research[34]--still remained a mystery. How did these innumerable species naturally and automatically come into being? was the question that must be satisfactorily answered before the mechanical view could be held to cover all the facts. The direction in which to look for a reply had been indicated by a number of thinkers. The French naturalist Buffon, the philosopher Kant, and the poet Goethe--besides other thinkers--had already in the eighteenth century familiarised the idea that species are not immutable, but that, by some means or other, new forms of life are derived from pre-existing ones. The conception had gained a firm foothold in England, where it was hospitably entertained by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and where it formed the staple of a book which caused a good deal of controversy in its day, and which is not yet forgotten.[35] LAMARCK.--The evolutionary idea, however, though attractive to philosophers, and even to men of science, was insufficient as an explanation of the origin of species so long as the processes of transformation remained obscure. Naturalists could not accept an hypothesis for which there seemed to be such imperfect evidence. An ingenious French scientist, J. Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) had indeed, in 1809, propounded the theory--ever since known by his name--that the use or disuse of particular organs might, after a long series of generations, result in the formation of new species. (The ideas denoted by the words "environment," "adaptation," "acquired habits"--now so familiar--may be said to have been introduced by him). But the scientific prejudices of the time were against Lamarck's theories, and he had to lament their inhospitable reception. Indeed Lamarck's critics did not hesitate to exercise their powers of ridicule, or to make fun of the giraffe who derived his long neck from the attempts of his ancestors to browse on high trees. Darwin himself talks of "Lamarck's nonsense," and of his "veritable rubbish"--language, however, which he was subsequently able to retract. THE NEW GEOLOGY.--Perhaps the most stubborn obstacle which Lamarckian theories had to meet was the current prejudice as to the age (or youth) of the earth. Contemporary geologists were by no means prepared to grant Lamarck the illimitable periods of time which his transformation processes seemed to require. Consequently it is not surprising that the new theories, perhaps for the first time, received a measure of justice at the hands of one who himself became responsible for a revolution in the science of geology. "I devoured Lamarck _en voyage_," writes Charles Lyell, describing a journey from Oxford in 1827. "His theories delighted me more than any novel I ever read, and much in the same way, for they address themselves to the imagination.... That the earth is quite as old as he supposes, has long been my creed."[36] In spite of the fascination of these theories, however, Lyell was not carried away by them, and it was not for some years that he estimated them at their true value. Meanwhile the new geology made its appearance with the publication of the three volumes of his own _Principles of Geology_, between 1829 and 1833. The significance of the book for biological speculation--for theories of the origin of species--lay in its thesis that the present condition of the earth is the product of geological processes incalculably long. Hitherto the "catastrophic theory" had been dominant--the notion that a series of immense catastrophic events (like the Deluge) had been responsible for the present condition of the earth's surface. For this Lyell substituted his "Evolutionary Theory," according to which the almost invisibly slow geological processes which we may now see operating around us, are typical of the behaviour of the crust of this planet for incalculable periods of time; for even the slowest changes, if sufficient time is allowed them, are capable of producing the most stupendous results. Lyell may be said to have extended the age of the earth _ad infinitum_. Just as Galileo removed all barriers of space, Lyell removed those of time. Their joint achievement was to present to humanity a universe infinite both in space and time--a staggering conception. RESULTS OF LYELL'S THEORY.--Though Lyell's boldness disturbed a good many of his contemporaries, those biologists who were engaged upon seeking the origin of species were thankful to one who had removed the chief obstacle to the solution of their difficulties. They were now relieved of one embarrassment: Lyell gave them the power to draw on the Bank of Time to any extent; bankruptcy was no longer possible.[37] Indeed, Lyell seems himself to have been convinced of the evolutionary origin of species (though the mode of its operation still remained a mystery for him no less than for the biologists themselves). In fact, it became quite evident that the idea of "continuity" which the _Principles of Geology_ had established in the inorganic world, must be equally applicable to the organic world. DARWIN.--The theory of a common descent of species had occurred, as early as 1837, to an enthusiastic student of Lyell's writings, who was also a personal friend. Charles Darwin had collected much geological, botanical, and zoological matter on his voyage with the _Beagle_ round the world, and continued for twenty years to accumulate an immense volume of _data_ to substantiate a theory which had first suddenly suggested itself to him in 1838 as the result of reading for amusement Malthus' _Essay on the Principle of Population_. This celebrated book, first published in 1798, had attempted to describe the forces which ensure the multiplication, or check the increase of population. The proposition laid down by Malthus was that population tends to vary with the means of subsistence. He had studied his problem from a social or political point of view, but the same principle was seen by Darwin to apply to all living creatures. Two forces are seen everywhere in conflict: (a) the luxuriant powers of reproduction possessed by and exercised by each species; (b) the difficulties and obstacles by which the species tend to be eliminated. The contest between the powers of reproduction and those of elimination--this "over-production" and "crowding-out"--is what was afterwards termed the "struggle for existence." "NATURAL SELECTION."--Darwin's momentous theory was that this struggle, proceeding for untold ages, had resulted in the continual formation of new species. Granted that the numerous offspring of any individual member of a species tend to vary, those variations survive which happen to be best fitted to cope with the environment. These in their turn leave offspring, the variations and the selections are repeated, and so on _ad infinitum_; and the result is that entirely new species are formed by a long process of insignificant changes. This, briefly put, is the celebrated theory of "Natural Selection." The habit of scientific caution was characteristic of Darwin, who at first would not write down "even the briefest sketch" of his hypothesis, but devoted nearly twenty years to the accumulation of evidential _data_. His friends continually warned him that he would be forestalled, and this actually occurred, as is well known, in 1858, when the book which was to give the new theory to the world was already half written. The naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace, on a collecting expedition in the East Indies, "in a flash of insight" while sick with fever, found the same solution of the mystery that had puzzled biologists so long. Wallace's letter to Darwin, containing the abstract of his theory, came "like a bolt from the blue." The behaviour of the two men was worthy of the highest traditions of scientific research. The matter was put into the hands of Lyell, and Wallace's paper, together with certain extracts from Darwin's unpublished notes, were read before the Linnean Society, and the preparation of Darwin's book was hurried on. In November, 1859, _The Origin of Species_ was published. RESULTS OF DARWIN'S THEORY.--The importance (for the general trend of thought) of this joint achievement of Darwin and Wallace was considerable, and could not but be regarded as an extension of the mechanical theory. The origin of species might still to some extent remain mysterious (for "natural selection" was soon realised to be only one of many factors at work in evolution), yet the area of mystery was patently reduced, and the "inexplicable" driven further back. A formula had been provided, which seemed to be as valid, and likely to prove as permanent and fruitful in biological research as Newton's law of gravity had been in the realm of physics. In point of fact, Darwin had only substituted new problems of "variation" and "heredity" for the old one of the diversity of species; but an impression was created by the new discoveries that a purely mechanical explanation of the origin of life and even of mind was within reach. THE DESCENT OF MAN.--With regard to "mind," the impression was re-inforced by Darwin's next book--the _Descent of Man_, where the gap between man and the animals was finally bridged. The work was merely an extension of the principles previously applied by him, and as a theory it had been present to Darwin's mind as far back as 1837. As soon as he had become "convinced that species were mutable productions," he could not "avoid the belief that man must come under the same law."[38] Indeed the Descent was nothing more than a corollary to the _Origin of Species_. The earlier work contains the whole of Darwinism. THE POSITION REACHED.--And with the full publication of Darwin's theories a point was reached when a more or less consistently materialistic position seemed possible. The foundations of such a position had been strengthened by the scientific atomism of Dalton, and the results of German research in the field of _organic_ chemistry seemed to open up possibilities of expressing even life in terms of matter. And, finally, the evolutionary hypothesis had reduced some of the most obscure biological problems to manageable proportions. The prospects for a purely naturalistic philosophy were phenomenally bright. CHAPTER IX MATERIALISM AND AGNOSTICISM FROM SCIENCE TO PHILOSOPHY.--The record of certain important scientific discoveries has occupied us in two recent chapters, and it is now time to examine the philosophic results that were drawn from them. It is true that the generalisations drawn from the results of scientific research were sometimes hasty, and not always sanctioned by the gifted minds to whom these results were due; yet they were assured a popular reception, and exercised an immense influence. It is not always the most accurate thinkers whose ideas gain the widest currency. DISCREDIT OF ROMANTICISM.--The Idealistic movement in philosophy which we have seen flourishing in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had begun, after the lapse of a generation, to decline.[39] The causes of decline, as often happens, were in part, at least, other than intellectual. Hegelianism had become associated with political reaction, and "a philosophy has lost its charm when it enters the service of absolutism." And a rising spirit of enterprise in commerce and industry also contributed to a change of attitude, for as material interests develop, men have less leisure for speculation, and often lose their taste for ideals. Probably there should also be taken into account the sentimentality that had attached itself to Romanticism and with which men were sated. This revolt has its most pointed expression in the prose writings of the poet Heine, who attacks with satiric bitterness "the new troubadours, so morbid and somnambulistic, so high-flown and aristocratic, and altogether so unnatural." METAPHYSICS REJECTED.--The reaction against the philosophy of Romanticism took the form of a complete revolt against speculative philosophy. But instead of going back to Kant, and taking up a vigorously critical attitude, it took refuge in the prejudices of "common sense." The new movement must be associated in the first place with a French thinker, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who made the attempt to substitute scientific and _positive_ knowledge for the vague speculations which had hitherto passed for philosophy. He was, in fact, the founder of that system of ideas known as Positivism, which (as we shall see) gained great vogue later, especially in England. Comte's doctrine was that, all spheres of Nature now being brought under the sway of positive science, the time had arrived for men, when constructing their conceptions of life and the world, to reject all but such ideas as positive science can accept. The age of theology and speculation was past; the new age of positive science, where both imagination and argumentation should be subordinate to observation, was at hand. Comte, as is well known, became the founder of what he hoped might develop into a new Catholicism--the "Religion of Humanity," and an atmosphere of moral idealism permeates his thought. GERMAN EXTREMISTS.--In Germany, the home of Romanticism, the revolt took a radical shape in the hands of writers like Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) and Büchner. "I unconditionally repudiate absolute, self-sufficing speculation--speculation which draws its material from within," says the former, in the Introduction to his _Essence of Christianity_[40] (1841) and asserts that he "places philosophy in the negation of philosophy." Büchner, a far less acute thinker than Feuerbach, adopts a similar attitude, protests against pedantry, and appeals (the appeal is always dangerous) to common sense: "Expositions which are not intelligible to an educated man are scarcely worth the ink they are printed with. Whatever is clearly conceived can be clearly expressed." It is not surprising that the book _Force and Matter_ (1855)--in the preface to which these sentiments are expressed--went through sixteen editions in thirty years and was translated into most European languages. It is an extreme expression of the most thorough-going materialism, and the circumstance that its conclusions were acceptable neither to cautious scientists nor to critical philosophers, did not compromise its authority with the general public. As was only natural, for materialism is a creed for which the evidence is all on the surface, and to which the objections, being less obvious, escape notice. And Büchner's pleas for intelligibility and clearness, though in some sense justified by the inconceivable pedantry of much German metaphysics, was, in point of fact, only a form of cant; for "there are difficulties lying in the subject-matter itself which cannot be banished from the sphere of philosophy." Appeals to popular prejudices are not a more legitimate form of philosophic, than of scientific controversy; serious thinkers do not thus stoop to the expedients of the politician. EFFECTS OF DARWIN'S THEORY.--It would be a serious mistake, then, to imagine that materialistic naturalism had to wait for the publication of the _Origin of Species_ (1859) before it could become a formidable theory. And yet the appearance of Darwin's book had important effects, and among these is to be reckoned a certain weakening of the old "Argument from Design," according to which the complexity and delicacy evident everywhere in the world of nature, could not be attributed to chance, but pointed to the existence and activity of a divine Designer. Paley, during the eighteenth century, had elaborated the argument with a wealth of detailed instances of "contrivance": "The pivot upon which the head turns, the ligament within the socket of the hip-joint, the pulley or trochlear muscles of the eye; the epiglottis, the bandages which tie down the tendons of the wrist and instep," and so on. And it was not so much the doubt cast by it upon the separate creation of particular species that was the disturbing element in Darwin's hypothesis (few men now regarded the book of _Genesis_ as a manual of natural science, or faith in it, as such, as a matter of religious obligation); it was rather that the new doctrine of "natural selection" seemed to invalidate the "argument from design." Design or chance had been the alternatives offered by Paley, and chance only had to be mentioned to be rejected; but Darwin made it possible to escape from the dilemma. He showed how, if certain conditions were granted, the whole process of the manufacture of species would naturally and inevitably follow. Neither design nor chance was the explanation: there was another alternative, _the influence of environment_. Thus Paley's instances of elaborate "contrivance" were explained by Darwin as instances of adaptation. The environment under which these organs had developed had made them what they were; they could not, under the given circumstances, have been different. As a very lucid writer puts it: "Before Darwin's great discovery, those who denied the existence of a Contriver were hard put to it to explain the appearance of contrivance. Darwin, within certain limits and on certain suppositions, provided an explanation. He showed how the most complicated and purposeful organs, if only they were useful to the species, might gradually arise out of random variations, continuously weeded by an unthinking process of elimination."[41] DARWINISM EXPLOITED.--In fact, it became evident that popular materialism had been strongly reinforced by the new biology; and though Darwin himself was cautious in adding philosophic or religious corollaries to his own propositions, some of his more eager disciples did not hesitate to fill in his blanks, and to draw conclusions which the master was too conservative, too blind, or perhaps too scientific to sanction. The distinguished zoologist Haeckel (1834-1919) may be reckoned the most notable amongst these. He was one of the first German scientists to give his adherence to Darwin, who seems to have considered him too zealous a disciple. "Your boldness sometimes makes me tremble," he wrote (November 19, 1868). It is not every scientist who can perceive the limits of an hypothesis, or who insists so conscientiously as Darwin did, upon the necessity for its verification. HERBERT SPENCER.--Though there were not wanting in England writers to exploit Darwinian theories in the interests of a narrow secularism, their work was not of first-rate importance, and need not detain us. A new evolutionary philosophy was, however, worked out by a conscientious thinker of a different calibre--Mr. Herbert Spencer. He indeed may be described as the Aristotle of a new world-view. He attempted to co-ordinate and unify all human knowledge, and to present the world with a final philosophy based upon the _data_ supplied by natural science. To this ambitious task he devoted a lifetime of patient work, broken by intervals of ill-health. In 1850 the _System of Synthetic Philosophy_ was projected; its _First Principles_ were published in 1862, but it was not until 1896 that the gigantic enterprise was complete. Spencer was inspired neither by hostility to religion in general, nor to Christianity in particular. The motive of his work was a more honourable one. He felt, with many of his contemporaries, that the foundations of the old religion were no longer secure, and that the old sanctions of morality were already gravely compromised; and he wished to supply a new creed and a new discipline in the place of these. His principal objects were social and ethical. And in this important respect he may be associated with Comte. Both were sociologists and moralists before they were philosophers, which accounts for their overlooking and underestimating various important philosophic difficulties. A few remarks about Spencer's system are here not out of place. He attempted to reduce experience to a unity by seeking evidence for the existence of a single and universal _law_. This unifying principle he found in a general law of evolution. He formulated this law in language which is perhaps less obscure than it seems, and which practically amounts to this, that there is a perpetual process going on which reduces disorder to order, undifferentiated sameness to specialised variety.[42] The _First Principles_ was published before the _Origin of Species_, and the confirmation which Darwin's work supplied to Spencer's theory must have recommended the latter to the minds of scientifically trained thinkers. Moreover, Spencer sanctioned a hopeful outlook; evolutionary optimism was an attractive and an idealistic, as well as a reasonable philosophy. It demanded the subordination of the individual to society, it urged the necessity of self-discipline and of industry, and pointed (if these conditions were fulfilled) to a brighter future, and to a new humanity. The generous idealism of the following passage is characteristic of Spencer's outlook, and of those who thought--and hoped--with him; it occurs at the end of his _Principles of Ethics_: "The highest ambition of the beneficent will be to have a share--even though an utterly inappreciable and unknown share--in 'the making of Man.'... As time goes on, there will be more and more of those whose unselfish end will be the further evolution of Humanity. While contemplating from the heights of thought that far-off life of the race never to be enjoyed by them, but only by a remote posterity, they will feel a calm pleasure in the consciousness of having aided the advance towards it." Spencer, then, evidently deserves the important place that he occupies in the history of thought. For though he was forced, for lack of those final scientific results which he vainly hoped might soon be forthcoming, to leave some vital gaps in his scheme,[43] he had made an imposing attempt to systematise and unify all human experience. And his attempt to base an idealistic morality upon sure grounds of natural science was valuable and important. SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.--At the same time, Spencer could not remain satisfied with a mere _description_ of natural phenomena, however complete and comprehensive such description might seem; he desired to offer, besides this, an _explanation_ of these phenomena--how did they come to be, and how do they continue to exist? To provide this explanation, Spencer postulated the existence of an Unknown Power which is at once the origin and the sustaining ground of everything. This power he regarded as lying quite out of range not only of the human senses, but of the human intellect. It was not only unknown but _unknowable_. This celebrated doctrine of the Unknowable is not the least interesting or important part of Spencer's system, and it is perhaps more germane than any other speculation of his to our present subject, as this _terra incognita_ was allotted by him to religion as its peculiar province. He hoped that the undisputed possession and occupation by religion of this territory might put an end to its perpetual conflict with science, and substitute for this a reasonable, if not cordial, understanding. Science might contentedly appropriate the sphere of the knowable, and leave to religion the undefined and perhaps infinite area of the unknowable; and he hoped this division of labour would be both fruitful and permanent. THE VICTORIAN AGNOSTICS.--Through this doctrine of the Unknowable, Herbert Spencer was the father of that form of belief or disbelief which was pertinently named Agnosticism by the most celebrated of its exponents--Huxley. This combination of Positivism in science with Agnosticism in religion and philosophy, became highly popular in a wide circle in England during the last third of the nineteenth century, especially among the scientifically educated. Leslie Stephen, with the pride of a disciple and the pardonable zeal of a propagandist, claimed for it the distinction of being "the religion of all sensible men." This austere faith owed much to the qualities of those who preached it. Their wide culture, their power of literary expression,[44] their intellectual vigour, and above all their moral earnestness and social enthusiasm recommended what had otherwise seemed a barren and unpromising creed. The generous humanitarian sympathies of Comte supplied the idealistic elements without which no faith can become popular, and the apparent stability of its scientific basis seemed to those impatient of speculative doubt, a great rock in a desert of shifting sand. This new scientific Humanism had an immense vogue, and its effects upon national life were, on the whole, of a quite healthy character. Occasional lapses into intolerance, no doubt, occurred; but much may be excused in the self-confidence of a new faith, not yet tested by the experiences and the criticisms of years. THEOLOGICAL POLEMICS.--The attacks of orthodox apologists upon this new orientation, though carried through with the best intentions, were too often conducted on mistaken lines and certainly on too narrow a front. A particular theory of scriptural inspiration (now widely abandoned), and of the miraculous, seemed to obsess the controversialists. Nor were the Agnostics (it must be confessed) any more alive to the real issues. Hence, to the modern student, an oppressive atmosphere of deadness and sterility seems to brood over these vigorous but superannuated polemics; and hence the complete oblivion into which this literature has fallen. The saying is profoundly true that "nothing so quickly waxes old as apologetics." Even the contributions to the subject by so accomplished a journalist as Huxley--his _Essays on Science and Christian Tradition_--can only be read by those whom an almost Teutonic industry characterises. Once so eagerly perused and earnestly pondered, the controversial literature of this interesting epoch (which now seems so remote) reposes on the higher shelves of libraries, accumulating the peaceful dust of oblivion. These projectiles have, in fact, done their work, and if they have proved less fatal than was hoped by those who launched them, they were dispatched with good intentions, and their explosion cleared the air. The most effective method of attack would have been to suggest that what was good in the new system was as old as Christianity, and that the rest was disputable science and still more disputable philosophy. The latter half of this task was, as we shall subsequently find, creditably performed by an important school of critical thinkers. But its former half, i.e. the task of proving that what was valuable in the new Humanism, was Christian--might, one would suppose, have been more successfully performed by the official champions of orthodoxy. These might have left science to the scientists, to have left off advertising their own incompetence in that sphere by passages of arms such as took place between Bishop Wilberforce and Huxley at the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860, which are never very desirable, and always discreditable to the discomfited party.[45] ILLOGICALITY OF NATURALISTIC IDEALISM.--In point of fact, "the religion of all sensible men" (in spite of its philosophic weakness) was equivalent to Christian stoicism; its social enthusiasm, its humanitarianism, its conscientious truthfulness, were the fruit of a stock grown on Christian soil. Its ethical presuppositions were entirely Christian, nor were they sanctioned (in spite of Herbert Spencer's elaborate apologetic) by the new biology. Nietzsche was a far more legitimate child of Darwinism than was Huxley. Indeed, towards the close of his life, some doubts invaded the mind of the latter, and he was constrained by an intellectual sincerity which does him and his school the highest credit, to utter a word of warning. We refer to his famous _Romanes Lecture_ of 1894. The thesis of this important utterance was that the field of human interests is a narrow heritage carved out from a hostile environment into which it is destined one day to relapse. It is a cultivated garden with the wilderness all around; created only at the cost of infinite sacrifice and perpetual toil, and preserved only with difficulty. The implacable jungle seeks everywhere to encroach on the borders of the clearing, whose ultimate engulfment can only be postponed, not prevented. Two quotations may suffice: "Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it." "The theory of evolution encourages no millennial expectations. If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, sometime, the summit will be reached, and the downward route will be commenced. The most daring imagination will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the power and intelligence of man can ever arrest the procession of the great year."[46] PESSIMISM.--Coming, as it did, at the end of a generation of dogmatic optimism, this pronouncement is symptomatic of a certain disillusionment which had already begun to mar the fair picture of Positivist prophecy. The human race seemed destined to an ambiguous future; the parabola of progress would one day reach its summit, and the fall begin. At last upon our planet the episode of Life would pass, and be neither forgotten nor remembered; the world would sink into the eternal silence, from which for one transitory and insignificant moment, it had awakened.[47] NIETZSCHE.--As might have been expected, it was in Germany that the logical conclusions of a naturalistic outlook were drawn. Here, philosophic pessimism had already been introduced by Schopenhauer (1788-1860), and his disciple Nietzsche was not afraid to formulate a scheme of ethics based on the conception of "the survival of the fittest," and equivalent to an apotheosis of barbarism. The virtues of self-assertion, ruthlessness, and pride were to eradicate the vices of abnegation, pity, and humility. Christian morality was a disease; Christianity itself was the appropriate product of the degenerate epoch, and of the loathsome environment that gave it birth. This radical thinker, free from English "compromise," could be satisfied with no morality which was parasitic upon Christianity. He had clearness of vision to see whither the naturalistic road would carry its pious wayfarers. To him the moral idealism of Spencer was moonshine or stupidity--"the milk of pious sentiment." SIGNIFICANCE OF NIETZSCHE.--Nietzsche has come in for a fair share of abuse, but it is only just to say that philosophy stands heavily endebted to this thinker. He was not afraid to draw logical conclusions, and to put questions which more conventional philosophers had preferred should remain in the background. It is well for a moralist to arise, once in a generation, who will clear his own mind of cant and, without undue respect for the conventions, approach the really fundamental questions in a spirit of sincerity. The extravagant impieties of Nietzsche may have shocked his hearers, but they have cleared the air. He exposed, perhaps with too little _finesse_, the nakedness of Naturalism, and tore off that mantle of idealism under which it had been masquerading. And he may be said, by so doing, to have written _finis_ at the foot of a chapter in the history of philosophy. CHAPTER X REACTIONS IN PHILOSOPHY VICISSITUDES OF IDEALISM.--At the beginning of the last chapter we noticed the early collapse of idealism in Germany. But the prophets of Romanticism, when they were no longer honoured at home, found an hospitable reception elsewhere, and especially in England. Indeed, even before the prestige of idealism had begun to decline in Germany, Englishmen had been introduced to it by the writings and translations of S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834) and Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). These two popularisers of German ideas were _littérateurs_ rather than professional philosophers, but for that very reason their vogue and influence were the wider. COLERIDGE.--Coleridge was in spirit a genuine Romanticist; being, as were some of the most notable of the German school--e.g., Goethe and Schiller--a poet as well as a philosopher. In his _Biographia Literaria_ he has left behind the story of his intellectual and spiritual development. He acknowledges his debt to Kant, to the Romanticists, and in particular to Schelling, whose "intuitionism" was naturally congenial to him. Coleridge was never able to embody his philosophical creed in any single work; he does not seem to have possessed the necessary power of application. He was unfortunate in being a man of weak character, and his ineffectiveness struck his contemporaries. But in spite of these disadvantages--his sentimentality, the lack of clearness of his thought, his weakness for opium--he certainly exercised an important influence, especially in the realm of theology. His ideas, though vague, were calculated to awaken the speculative habit, and, introduced as they were, to a wide circle, were fruitful and stimulating. English theology had been, in the eighteenth century, of an arid kind, and the English philosophical tradition lacked, for the most part, appreciation of those deeper aspects of reality which had appealed to German thinkers. Coleridge, by introducing German speculation to his countrymen, was able "to free theology of some of its narrowness, and to deepen and enlarge the spiritual outlook of his age."[48] THOMAS CARLYLE.--Carlyle was a man of a very different temper, whose attitude towards Coleridge was "half contemptuous, half compassionate." A typically Carlylean characterisation of him may be found in the _Life of Sterling_: "He was thought to hold--he alone in England--the key of German and other Transcendentalisms.... A sublime man, who alone in those dark days escaped from black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with God, Freedom, Immortality, still his. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma...." "The good man ... gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings ... the deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength.... He spoke as if preaching--preaching earnestly and hopelessly the weightiest things." Carlyle himself had all the character and industry that Coleridge lacked, and it was another side of German idealism that had appealed to him. The Scotchman was of the same fibre and stock as that other half-Scotchman, Kant. Here was the source from which he had drawn his inspiration. We see in Carlyle the same moral earnestness, the same "toughness" of thought, the same absence of "sentimental moonshine." From Kant, too, he derives a vigorous independence of thought, a religious respect for individuality, a horror of shams and affectation. Kant was a true child of the Reformation, and Carlyle is a genuine disciple. In a single important respect, however, he differed from (and improved upon) his master. Kant lacked, or at least did not display, the saving grace of humour; in Carlyle this quality looks out from every page--keen, satirical, sometimes bitter, sometimes grotesque; he ridiculed his own generation, its vices, its prejudices, its superstitions. SARTOR RESARTUS.--For our purpose, _Sartor Resartus_--that profound and humorous book--is Carlyle's masterpiece: here all the characteristic Kantian doctrines may be found. The "philosophy of clothes"--which is the quaint title behind which Kantian idealism is made to masquerade--starts from the thought that just as an acquaintance with his clothes will not reveal to us the man, so an acquaintance with _phenomena_ (which is all that science can claim to give us) cannot reveal to us the real ground of existence, which remains an inscrutable mystery. We must "look on clothes till they become transparent," if we could understand reality. "To the eye of vulgar Logic what is man? An omnivorous biped that wears breeches. To the eye of pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition." And so with Nature; to science it is a mechanism, to the understanding heart it is "the living garment of God." "It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-Vesture of the Eternal.... The whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing...." The visible world is but a symbol of a profound and awful reality; and all Nature's products, in their degree, symbols as well: but of these, man is the highest. "The true SHEKINAH is Man: where else is the GOD'S PRESENCE manifested, not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in our fellow-man?" This leads up to the essential doctrine of the Kantian system: that man is a creature of two worlds, who has a foot in either; hence in the phenomenal world he can never find satisfaction. "Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in jointstock company, to make one Shoeblack Happy? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two, for the Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach...." "There is in man a HIGHER than Love of happiness: he can do without happiness and instead thereof find Blessedness! has it not been to preach forth this same HIGHER that sages and martyrs ... have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony to the God-like that is in man?" CARLYLE'S INFLUENCE.--In spite of Carlyle's strange literary mannerisms and his grotesquely Germanic phrases, his writings had great attractiveness for those of his contemporaries who felt themselves smothered by the materialism and utilitarianism of early Victorian England. He was able to re-vitalise idealism amongst them. Moreover he appealed strongly to those to whom the Coleridgean speculations were uncongenial. The strongly developed _moral_ element, both in his writings and in his own somewhat stern and austere personality--what Taine called his "puritanism"--appealed strongly to a certain side of English feeling. His countrymen felt that his was a native genius that they could understand. In fact we may say that the influence of Carlyle, especially among the young and generous minded, has been incalculable in extent and invaluable in quality. Spiritual life in England stands under a deep obligation to him. ROMANTICISM AT OXFORD.--Englishmen were thus not entire strangers to German idealism, which had possessed its interpreters in the earlier half of the nineteenth century. Not, however, until it had experienced a decline in Germany (a reaction which occupied our attention in the last chapter), did Romanticism become naturalised in England by being adopted in academic circles. Among the most notable of English idealists was T. H. Green--fellow and tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. In this thinker we have a widely different type of mind from that of either Coleridge or Carlyle. He was a thinker rather than a poet or a prophet, and he belonged to what we have noticed as the intellectualist--i.e. Hegelian--wing of Romanticism. Green's chief work was his _Prolegomena to Ethics_ (published posthumously in 1883), where arguments, which were familiar to those acquainted with Hegel, presented themselves. Green begins with an analysis of experience, and leads to the conclusion that Nature--if by it we mean "the connected order of experience"--implies "something other than itself, as the condition of its being what it is." And "of that 'something' we are entitled to say, positively, that it is a self-distinguishing consciousness" (section 52). If these conclusions be valid, the bottom falls out of Naturalism, for if nature "implies something other than itself," it does not stand alone; and that nature _does_ stand alone is the beginning and end of all naturalist theory. And, furthermore, this "something other than itself," which Nature involves, is "a self-distinguishing consciousness"; i.e. something to which we can attribute personality. GREEN AND SPENCER CONTRASTED.--This theory has only to be compared with that of Herbert Spencer for a fundamental difference to declare itself. The two systems do indeed adopt as axiomatic the conception of the uniformity and unity of nature, which works in accordance with a single law. But Spencer saw in that law the expression of a blind force, an unknowable power, of which it would be no more and no less true to say that it was "spiritual" than that it was "material." But for Green the law was the expression of a spiritual principal analogous to our own intelligence--a manifestation (to use theological language) of God. F. H. BRADLEY.--Undoubtedly the most notable of English Hegelians is F. H. Bradley, whose metaphysical essay, _Appearance and Reality_, was a work of genuine originality. The book is not of a type to make much appeal outside academic circles, though it is written in an easy and attractive style: its results may seem, to the unsophisticated reader, somewhat too ambiguous. "Ultimate Doubts" is the title of the last chapter, and "It costs us little to find that in the end Reality is inscrutable," is a remark not uncharacteristic of the author. Yet this really profound thinker and acute reasoner played an important part in helping to discredit that negative dogmatism which was so much in vogue during his own lifetime. He pointed out the limits beyond which natural science could not transgress without lapsing into "dogmatic superstition." "Too often the science of mere Nature, forgetting its own limits and false to its true aims, attempts to speak about first principles. It becomes transcendent, and offers us a dogmatic and uncritical metaphysics" (p. 284). Though the fault has not always been on the side of the scientists: "Metaphysics itself, by its interference with physical science, has induced that to act, as it thinks, in self-defence, and has led it, in so doing, to become metaphysical. And this interference of metaphysics I would admit and deplore, as the result and the parent of most injurious misunderstanding.... So long as natural science keeps merely to the sphere of phenomena and the laws of their occurrence, metaphysics has no right to a single word of criticism" (p. 285). This critical handling of the problem of the relations of science and philosophy did much to draw attention to the confusion of thought lying at the base of much popular materialism. It began to be realised that the principles of physical science are only fruitful of good results in the sphere properly belonging to them; and that the uncritical use of these principles results in a hybrid philosophy, which is neither sound science nor rational metaphysics. A. J. BALFOUR.--Before Bradley's essay was published, a somewhat similar line of criticism had been developed by Mr. A. J. Balfour in his _Defence of Philosophic Doubt_ (1879). Its title sounds unpromising, but the book voiced a demand for a rational philosophy of science which was practically non-existent at that time; and consequently, in the absence of any adequate examination of the principles of science, uncritical dogmatism flourished quite unchallenged. Balfour, elsewhere, indicates the objects with which he wrote the book--to elicit from the disciples of natural science a _rationale_ of their method: "A full and systematic attempt, first to enumerate, and then to justify, the presuppositions on which all science finally rests, has, it seems to me, still to be made. After the critical examination which I desiderate has been thoroughly carried out, it may appear that at the very root of our scientific system of belief lie problems of which no satisfactory solution has yet been devised."[49] Thus Balfour drew attention to the fact that the common-sense philosophy of naturalism rested upon a tacit agreement to overlook certain important problems which are the indispensable preliminaries to any thinking which can be called critical, or lay claim to be regarded as philosophy in the strict sense. That some of these problems seem artificial, and the questions raised by them gratuitous, to the eye of "common sense" is an irrelevant consideration, for "nothing stands more in need of demonstration than the obvious." NATURALISM CHECKED.--Thus Bradley and Balfour between them, merely by adopting a critical attitude, created an embarrassing situation for naturalism. Between them these writers administered a serious check to that naively uncritical dogmatism which, backed by the prestige of natural science, had sought to impose itself on the world as a new orthodoxy less liberal, in some ways, than the old. Nor did they stop short at negative criticism, but substituted (according to the idealistic tradition) a spiritual view of reality for the mechanistic materialism that had become so popular. _Appearance and Reality_ is a book of which the trend might seem too obscure, but it ends with a note that is definite enough: "Outside of spirit there is not, and there cannot be, any reality; and, the more that anything is spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real," are Bradley's closing words. As for Balfour, he leads his readers up to a point which he describes as "the threshold of Christian Theology." And having propounded the perplexities in which the "common sense" philosophy (on which naturalism depends) is involved, he says: "I do not believe that any escape from them (the perplexities) is possible, unless we are prepared to bring to the study of the world the presupposition that it was the work of a rational Being, who made _it_ intelligible, and at the same time made _us_, in however feeble a fashion, able to understand it."[50] REVIVAL OF IDEALISM IN GERMANY. LOTZE.--We have perhaps dwelt at too great length upon the backwash of the idealistic wave in England, for idealism is not a native philosophy amongst us; possibly, because we are not metaphysically-minded in the same sense as are the purer Teutonic breed. And it is time to pass on to pay a brief tribute to the work of a German philosopher who accepted the mechanical theory in its totality, without sacrificing what we may call the spiritual values of existence. Hermann Lotze (1817-1881) was inclined to feel that the weakness of Romanticism lay in a tendency to despise or overlook what Kant had called "the fertile bathos of experience." The Romanticists had too often neglected natural science, which, in the shape of naturalistic materialism, had its revenge by destroying them. Büchner was the Nemesis of an idealism which was at once vague and sentimental. LOTZE'S "MICROCOSMOS."--Lotze's attitude and method are conspicuous in his well-known work, which took him eight years to complete (1856-1864)--the _Microcosmos_. After guiding his readers "through the realms of natural phenomena and historical evolution," thus constructing a sufficiently stable basis out of _facts_--he leads them on to an ideal world composed of what he calls "values." His position may thus be summarised: The world presents itself to the observer in three aspects--(1) The world of individual "things," which are bewildering and intricate; (2) the laws (i.e., "laws of nature") which the human intellect has discovered among them, thus finding regularity and order; (3) the "values" which the human soul applies to things, and which it is the human task to cultivate. This world of ideals or values (3) is that for the sake of which the worlds of phenomena and law (1 and 2) exist. These (1 and 2) constitute respectively the material _in_ which, and the forms _through_ which, the world of "values" is to be realised.[51] Thus phenomena and law are the raw material out of which "values" are created; and these "values" themselves constitute (in the eyes of Lotze) a higher reality. Thus the central doctrine of his system is that the truly Real is what has supreme worth: it is _worth_ that creates reality. The paradoxicality of this may make it difficult to accept; but Lotze is only expressing in his own way the fundamental thesis of all forms of idealism, that "the ideal is the real"; that the world of phenomena is secondary to and dependent upon a "world of spirit," or an "ideal world." Lotze himself in the introduction to the _Microcosmos_, expresses what is at once the foundation and the kernel of his system: he says it is his purpose to show "_how absolutely universal is the extent_, and at the same time how _completely subordinate the significance, of the mission which mechanism has to fulfil in the structure of the world_." (E.T., p. xvi.) Mechanism is universal, _because_ it is the raw material, so to speak, out of which reality is to be made. That reality can be expressed in terms of mechanism is true, just as a poem can be described as a scrap of paper scratched upon with a pen; but this reduction of reality to its lowest terms, ends by emptying reality of content. Mechanism is a _universal_ feature, but it is a _subordinate_ feature, of reality. Nature requires, if we are to arrive at the truth about it, not only to be described and analysed, but also interpreted in the light of the idea of _value_ or _worth_. LOTZE AND THEOLOGY.--Lotze's theories exercised an important influence upon the development in Germany and elsewhere of a type of theology known as Ritschlianism. Albrecht Ritschl, a disciple of Lotze, attempted to dissociate religion from metaphysics, and to base it upon "judgments of value." Christian dogma, for instance, is an attempt to express, in philosophical terms, _the unique value to humanity of the moral and religious consciousness of Christ_. So far as a dogma is faithful to that central idea, and makes a genuine attempt to express it, so far--and so far only--is it true. This type of theology, uniting itself with certain philosophical tendencies which will engage our attention later, became the basis of what was known as the Modernist movement in the Roman Catholic Church. CONCLUSIONS.--Thus in the nineteenth century, in England (and indeed on the continent also) the idealistic attitude, though it sometimes might seem compromised, was never submerged; in spite of the materialistic outlook of an age only too preoccupied with scientific discovery and commercial expansion. CHAPTER XI SOME RECENT TENDENCIES IN PHILOSOPHY THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE.--In the last chapter we heard A. J. Balfour complaining of the absence of "a full and systematic attempt, first to enumerate, and then to justify, the presuppositions on which all science finally rests." And Mr. F. H. Bradley also drew attention to the absence of any critical philosophy of science in England. The need was for scientific standpoints to be investigated _de novo_; and the process had, as a matter of fact, already been begun on the Continent. MACH.--Ernst Mach, Professor of Physics at Prague, and subsequently Professor of Physics at Vienna (thus combining the roles of scientist and metaphysician--always a highly instructive and fruitful combination) had as early as 1863 laid it down as the task of science to give "an economic presentation of the facts." By which phrase he meant that science takes account only of the salient features of phenomena, selecting only those which seem strictly serviceable to its own purpose. SCIENCE "ABSTRACT" OR "SELECTIVE."--Mathematical science (which is the "pure" science _par excellence_) deals not--as is generally supposed--with "things," but with _certain selected aspects_ of things. For example, for purposes of arithmetic, every leaf on a tree is an "unit" (i.e. all are "identical"); but, in point of fact, there exist no two leaves that are alike, as Leibniz, long ago, pointed out. Again, for geometrical purposes two fields may be regarded as of like area; but no two fields are, or ever have been, so. Thus mathematics--where scientific method is seen at its purest--proceeds by deliberately disregarding individuality; it regards the differences between individuals as non-essential, and irrelevant to its purpose. ECONOMY OF THOUGHT.--And mathematical science is justified in acting in this way. This method, highly abstract as it is--in fact, just because it is highly abstract--leads to invaluable results. It's justification is that it is _economical of thought_; disregarding all irrelevant considerations, it is able, by using a short-cut, to reach its goal. Did the mathematician have to take into consideration all the manifold and complex aspects of each concrete "thing" (whether it be leaf, or field, or lever, or what not) with which he deals, he would never be able to cut his way through the jungle. His method of abstraction carries him at once to his goal. MACH ON THE "MECHANICAL VIEW."--Mach's criticism of the mechanical view of nature proceeded upon similar lines. He termed that view "analogical," by which he meant that mechanical "laws of nature" serve us as formal patterns to which the processes of nature may (for convenience sake) be represented as conforming. A clear account, though not a _complete_ account, of all physical processes may be given in terms of mechanical "law." And in fact it remains a question, Mach observed, "whether the mechanical view of things, instead of being the profoundest, is not in point of fact, the shallowest of all."[52] SCIENCE NOT INVALID BUT INCOMPLETE.--This line of criticism of scientific method--i.e. that it deals with abstractions and analogies rather than with _things_, for the sake of economy and convenience of thought--does not deprive science of validity, but only invalidates that superficial dogmatism which had crept into so many investigations. A critical estimate of scientific methods makes it evident how much and how little we have the right to expect from them. They will enable us to give a simple description of _phenomena_ as they are seen when reduced to their simplest terms of matter and motion; but of ultimate and final causes they will tell us nothing. "The system of conceptions by which the exact sciences try to describe the phenomena of nature ... is symbolic, a kind of shorthand, unconsciously invented and perfected for the sake of convenience and for practical use ... the leading principle is that of Economy of Thought" (Merz, Vol. III, p. 579). BOUTROUX.--This criticism of the mechanical method of dealing with reality was seconded by Boutroux's criticism of the principle of Natural Law. Émile Boutroux (1845-1918)--Professor at the Sorbonne--in two important treatises, examines with great minuteness this aspect of the scientific method. In the earlier of these works, _The Contingency of the Laws of Nature_ (1879) he suggests that these laws only give, so to speak, the _habits_ which things display. They constitute, as it were, "the bed in which the stream of occurrence flows, which the stream itself had hollowed out, although its course has come to be determined by this bed" (Höffding, _Modern Philosophers_, p. 101). In his _Natural Law in Science and Philosophy_ (1895), Boutroux lays it down that the laws of nature, as science describes them, may indeed represent, but are by no means identical with, the laws of nature as they really are. The laws of science are true, not absolutely but relatively, i.e. are not elements in, but symbols of, reality. The notion that everything is "determined" (i.e. the opposite of "contingent"), though absolutely indispensable to the mechanical theory, is nevertheless a way of looking at things rather than a faithful picture of reality--a way in which we see things rather than the way things exist in themselves. As Boutroux himself puts it in his final chapter: "That which we call the 'laws of nature' is the sum total of the methods we have discovered for adapting things to the mind, and subjecting them to be moulded by the will." RESULTS.--Here we have Boutroux approaching very closely to the standpoint of Mach; indeed the theories of the two men are complementary to one another. For Mach, the mechanical view is a way of looking at things, distinctly useful for understanding and using them--an "economy of thought." For Boutroux, the determinist view is also a way of looking at things that is useful for the same purposes. Thus the interpretation of reality in terms of mathematics and "unalterable law," is artificial; an abstract way of thinking which deals not with reality itself but with certain deliberately selected aspects of it. RISE OF A NEW PHILOSOPHY.--This examination of the principles of natural science was the beginning of what afterwards proved to be a revolution in thought. What had been more or less negative criticism in Mach and Boutroux, became the basis of a new philosophy in the hands of William James and Bergson. The names, and even the ideas, of these two original thinkers are familiar far outside strictly philosophical circles, and it will almost be possible to presume upon a certain acquaintance with them on the part of our readers. WILLIAM JAMES.--James himself, like Mach, was led to philosophy by the road of scientific investigation. He was a psychologist, and it is as the author of his _Principles of Psychology_ that his name will be remembered. This work is notable as containing the first complete application of the Darwinian theory to the evolution of mind. Mental action is there represented as a capacity developed by the organism to enable it to deal with its environment. As an exponent of James puts it: "The mind, like an antenna, feels its way for the organism. It gropes about, advances and recoils, making many random efforts and many failures; always urged into taking the initiative and doomed to success or failure in some hour of trial."[53] The corollary which attaches to propositions of this kind is that knowledge in all its varieties and developments arises from _practical needs_. And the mind (here is an echo of Mach) _selects_ those aspects of reality which concern it, and out of that selected material makes up a new (mental) world of its own. Which world is far from being a "picture" of reality, but which is "symbolic" of it (here is another memory of Mach).[54] This view obviously cuts the ground from under dogmatic materialism. The world which that philosophy regards as _reality_, is, to the critical eye, a collection of abstractions, a mental creation arising out of the practical needs of life. HENRI BERGSON.--This line of criticism, that of the evolutionary psychologist, opened up by James, has been carried to extreme lengths by the French philosopher Bergson. "Dig to the very roots of nature and of mind" is his advice. He begins by asking, How, as a matter of history, has human intellect developed? He then, and then only, proceeds to put the question (which uncritical thinkers always put _first_), What can the intellect do for us? His theory of the origin of intellect is the same as that of William James. Life (through the evolutionary process) has produced it. But the conclusion that he draws from this hypothesis is that _the intellect, being itself a product of life, or a form of life, cannot understand the whole of life_. This thesis is elaborated with a wealth of illustration and erudition, both scientific and philosophic, and with a literary grace and charm possible only for a Frenchman, in the famous work _Évolution Créatrice_ (1907). BERGSON'S ADVANCE ON MACH AND JAMES.--Those thinkers who had made a serious attempt at a philosophy of science, had demonstrated that the "mechanical view" of nature was a mental abstraction, and not a complete representation of reality. Such is the debt of philosophy to the researches of Mach, Boutroux, James, and others who worked along their lines. But it remained for Bergson to demonstrate that the mechanical view was _the inevitable product of the mental processes which we describe by the word "intellect."_ The path which led Bergson to this goal will have to be briefly indicated by us. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE INTELLECT.--What is the "intellect," to which we look in vain for any _complete_ explanation of existence? This is the preliminary question. Our intellect is, as James had taught, a faculty developed by the evolutionary process in our species to enable it to deal with its _material_ environment. And Bergson was the first to point out that as a consequence of its having been developed for this particular purpose (i.e., dealing with a _material_ environment), intellect is "never quite at its ease, never entirely at home, except when it is working upon inert matter." If it has to deal with "living" matter, it "treats it as inert, without troubling about the life that animated it." Such is the first characteristic of the intellect: it feels at home in dealing with dead matter, and living matter it prefers to treat "as inert." Another characteristic of intellect is that, just as it treats the living as if it were non-living, so it prefers to treat the mobile as though it were motionless. Motion is a thing which the intellect simply cannot grasp; it has to treat it artificially, and represent a process which in reality is continuous and indivisible, as discontinuous and divisible--a succession of points, out of which no magic can conjure motion. Philosophy became aware of this as soon as it opened its eyes. Hence the paradox of Zeno, that Achilles will never overtake the tortoise, if the latter once gets a start. For if space and time are infinitely divisible (as intellect holds them to be), by the time Achilles has reached the tortoise's starting point, the tortoise has already got ahead of _that_ starting point, and so on _ad infinitum_; the interval between them being endlessly diminished, but never disappearing. Zeno's paradox arises because of an innate fault in the "intellectual" method of dealing with motion; a method which Bergson calls "cinematographical," because it regards a single movement as a succession of infinitely small motions. That method is hopeless; and if we expect to understand motion by its means, "You will always experience the disappointment of the child, who tries, by clapping its hands together to crush the smoke. The movement slips through the interval, because every attempt to reconstitute change out of states implies the absurd proposition that movement is made up of immobilities."[55] So that the intellect is best fitted to deal, not with living and moving, but with dead and motionless matter. Of the latter it can form a clear idea; but in dealing with the former, it finds itself at a loss; it has to abstract the life and the motion from what lives or moves, and what it cannot grasp, it must treat as non-existent. BERGSON'S ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM.--A penetrating remark of James' will help us, at this point, to understand the significance for philosophy of these new theories. "In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of Protagoras, Hume, and James Mill, rationalism has never been seriously questioned, for its sharpest critics have always had a tender place for it in their hearts, and have obeyed some of its mandates. They have not been consistent, they have played fast and loose with the enemy, and Bergson alone has been radical."[56] Bergson's philosophy is, in fact, a reaction against intellectualism or rationalism; by which is meant the theory that pure reason is competent by its nature to give a complete and exhaustive account of reality. But according to Bergson, intellect, which is a faculty developed to enable men to subdue and turn to advantage their material environment, and which is, as it were, "fascinated by the contemplation of inert matter," will not reveal the true meaning and nature of existence; it gives us "a translation of life in terms of inertia," and can do no more. This criticism of the intellect (if it be sound), though it does not invalidate the work of that faculty in its own proper sphere, necessarily involves its discredit as a key to the unlocking of the final mysteries of life and of being. These things lie outside its province. "Whether it wants to treat of the life of the body, or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigour, the stiffness, and the brutality of an instrument not designed for such use."[57] INTELLECT AND INSTINCT.--Since intellect, by its methods, has induced men to turn their backs on reality, and to look on abstractions instead, the only hope of reaching reality is through an entire change of method and direction. There is, according to Bergson, a non-intellectual variety of knowledge, which (from his point of view) it was a kind of original sin ever to depart from; an original sin which has vitiated all our philosophic thinking from the days of Plato. This variety of knowledge is more original and fundamental than any which the processes of the intellect, vitiated as these are by certain inherent perversions, can give us. Intellect cannot correct itself; we must call in the aid of some other faculty if we would understand reality. Bergson finds this faculty in what he calls "instinct." According to him, consciousness has developed in two divergent directions--instinct and intellect; and the difference between these is not one of intensity or degree, but of _kind_.[58] They are two divergent developments of the same original consciousness, of which common origin they both retain traces, for they are not entirely dissimilar, nor is either of them ever found in a pure state. Intellect is characteristic of man. Instinct is most highly developed among certain insects, notably the _hymenopterae_ (i.e., bees and ants).[59] BLINDNESS OF INTELLECT.--And the difficulty of the philosophical problem for man arises from the anomalies of his own constitution (as interpreted by Bergson in the light of his theory of instinct and intellect). As he puts it: "There are things that Intelligence (or intellect) alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them." (_Creative Evolution_, p. 159). "If the consciousness which slumbers in instinct were to wake up ... if we knew how to question it, and if it knew how to reply, it would deliver to our keeping the most intimate secrets of life." Thus Bergson regards it as impossible that intellect should ever supply us with the complete truth about reality; there are things, e.g. life itself--which altogether elude its grasp. INTUITION.--The situation, however, is not entirely hopeless. Man possesses some measure of instinct, which, when it has "become disinterested, self-conscious, and capable of reflecting upon its object," Bergson calls intuition. By means of this faculty, man is able, darkly perhaps but not ineffectually, to grope his way towards an understanding of reality. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY.--Just as the criticisms of Cusanus and others freed thought from an incubus which seemed likely to prevent its further development, so the movement initiated by Mach and culminating (for the present) in Bergson, has done much to discredit "a certain new scholasticism that has grown up during the latter half of the nineteenth century around the physics of Galileo, as the old scholasticism grew up around Aristotle."[60] Mechanical determinism was characteristic of much nineteenth-century thought in Europe, not only amongst materialists, but also, in certain cases, amongst idealists as well. Against this aspect of contemporary philosophy, the work of James and Bergson has been a revolt. "Indeterminism," i.e. a belief in the reality of freedom and spontaneity, is an essential part of their system. Their indeterminism is indeed the necessary and logical accompaniment of their anti-intellectualism. For determinism is "a fabrication of the _intellect_," a device which makes reality more manageable, more amenable to logic, more easily systematised. Freedom, like life and motion, eludes the categories of the intellect. THE MECHANICAL VIEW ASSAILED.--Such are the lines upon which the new criticism of the mechanical view (the most radical criticism it has had to meet since Kant) proceeds. That view, and the idea of predetermined human action which it involves, is an inevitable product of an intellect naturally incapable of understanding freedom and spontaneity. These, as they destroy its scheme of thought, it casts out as an illusion. "Incorrigibly presumptuous," it insists on interpreting freedom by means of those notions which suit inert matter alone, and therefore always perceives it as necessity. So that all life, far from being subjected to mechanical necessity, as had seemed the inevitable conclusion of naturalistic philosophy, was spontaneity (so to speak) materialised and embodied: "All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity ... is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge, able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death."[61] We have indeed travelled a long way from the austere abstractions of Mr. Herbert Spencer. The new evolutionism is very different from the old. It substitutes for "mechanism" another conception--that of "dynamism," according to which the process of evolution is something undetermined and impredictable--"creative," in fact. The world of organic life is embodied "creative activity," and what this "creative activity" is, we ourselves experience every time we act freely. PLURALISM.--The philosophy of Bergson is a reaction against the mechanical evolutionism (i.e. naturalism) of the nineteenth century. Closely allied with it is another movement of thought, known as _pluralism_. This, too, is a reaction, not so much against naturalism, as against certain forms of idealism. Idealism, it will be remembered, seeks to interpret reality in terms of mind or spirit. And it does this in certain cases--notably in the case of F. H. Bradley--by regarding all _phenomena_ as forms or aspects of the one absolute mind or spirit. This has seemed to many thinkers a philosophy too abstract and too remote from the world of experience. Hence the question arose whether it might not be possible to interpret nature in terms of mind without being compelled to take refuge in the abstractions of "absolutism." And pluralism is an attempt to solve the problem. LEIBNIZ REVIVED.--Leibniz' system of "monads," the nature of which will hardly have been forgotten, has been the model to which philosophers have looked in constructing their new system. And the "Monadology" may be taken as the type to which all modern attempts to construct a "pluralistic" philosophy more or less conform. The essence of "pluralism"--whether Leibnizian or other--lies in the proposition that there exists an indefinite variety of beings, some higher, some lower than ourselves. The pluralist agrees with the idealist in declaring that the essence of reality is _spirit_, but differs from him in declining to allow independent spirits to be absorbed by an "all-devouring Absolute." PLURALISM AND THEISM.--William James himself, in a work _A Pluralistic Universe_ (1909) outlined a philosophy of spirit radically opposed to "Absolute Idealism," which he subjects to a good deal of criticism. Another important work, written from a similar point of view, is Professor James Ward's _Pluralism and Theism_ (1911).[62] With regard to modern pluralism, the notable features are two. In the first place, it is a philosophy of _personality_, which it regards as the most fundamental form of reality; and also, that it is _theistic_ in a sense peculiar to itself. It believes in a God who may be termed the supreme monad, i.e. the head of a system of monads; but whose power may be said, in certain respects, to be limited. And indeed some such position seems to be the _logical_ conclusion that follows from the premises with which pluralists start, and also (we may add) from the facts of experience.[63] Pluralists unite in affirming that their God is (what they deny the idealistic Absolute to be) the God of the religious consciousness. James elaborates this thesis with his usual resourcefulness and skill. The controversy, however, is one into which it does not seem necessary for us to enter. Pluralism and idealism are or may be both definitely spiritual philosophies, and perhaps they appeal to different types of mind. We, at any rate, shall not undertake to judge between them. Both alike are preferable to dogmatic naturalism. CHAPTER XII SOME RECENT TENDENCIES IN SCIENCE SCIENTIFIC METHOD.--In the last chapter, attention was drawn to some important attempts to supply science with a sound philosophy of method, i.e. to give a critical account of those processes, logical and otherwise, which issue in what is called "scientific knowledge." The general results of these attempts was to re-enforce the validity of sound scientific method _within its own sphere_. But, at the same time, it was felt likely to prove an unreliable guide elsewhere. THE NEW PHYSICS.--Meanwhile, while the logic of science was being scrutinised by philosophers, scientific research was itself going steadily forward, and fresh discoveries of a highly important nature were coming to light. In the sphere of physical science, more especially, revolutions of Copernican proportions quietly took place. The whole subject of physics is of a highly technical nature, quite unsuitable for discussion here, and, indeed, entirely beyond the range of the present writer. To indicate the nature of the discoveries which were made, however, involves few technicalities: though the method by which these were demonstrated and established must remain obscure to all but mathematical specialists. COLLAPSE OF THE ATOMIC THEORY.--Dalton's theory of atoms was described in a previous chapter. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance attached by materialists, ever since Lucretius, to the conception of indivisible and indestructible atoms. It was regarded as integral to materialism, and never was the prestige of this theory higher than during the nineteenth century, which "will go down in scientific history as the era of the atomic theory of matter." Towards the close of the century, the theory collapsed. Atoms were found to be neither indivisible nor indestructible; and the process of the breaking up of the atom has actually been observed. As is very generally known, it is in the case of a particular element, _radium_, that this phenomenon occurs. That substance, wherever it occurs, is undergoing a continual process of disintegration; radium atoms are continually breaking up into more elementary bodies. Were it not for the fact that radium itself is the product of the disintegration of another element, it would be impossible to account for its survival. It continually evaporates (the life of radium is only 2500 years) but it is as continually renewed by the infinitely slower disintegration of uranium. ELECTRONS.--The particles into which the radium atom disintegrates are known as _electrons_. And according to the new theory of matter, not only radium atoms, but the atoms of all the other elements (hitherto regarded as irreducible) are composed of electrons, differently grouped. The radium atom is infinitely more unstable than the atoms of the other elements; but it is possible to conceive of the disintegration of these also. They are all alike composed of the same elementary particles--different compounds of the same primitive substance. MATTER A FORM OF ELECTRICITY.--And the most remarkable part of the new theory is that these primitive particles of which material atoms are composed, are themselves the units which constitute what we call "electricity." Thus matter and electricity are now expressed in common terms--they are regarded as different manifestations of the same substance. And of the two conceptions--matter and electricity--it is the latter that is the more simple and fundamental. As a high authority puts it: "Whereas through the greater part of the nineteenth century, 'matter' was the concept which was looked upon as fundamental in physical science, and of which there was a curious accidental property called electricity, it now appears that electricity must be more fundamental than matter, in the sense that our more elementary matter must now be conceived as a manifestation of extremely complex electrical phenomena."[64] As to whether the electrons themselves, in their turn, are irreducible units, there may be room for doubt. According to Professor J. Larmor the electron is "a nucleus of intrinsic strain in the ether."[65] If this view be sound, matter may be regarded as a manifestation of the ether; "a persistent strain-form flitting through an universal sea of ether." As to the nature of the ether, that is a subject of speculation among physicists. It is variously described as an "elastic fluid," and as "a fairly close packed conglomerate of minute grains in continual oscillation."[66] It may indeed be said that modern physical theories have succeeded in reducing matter, which seems comparatively knowable, to a substance of which little is known and, therefore, of which much can be postulated; it can be called sub-natural, or super-natural, according to taste. We may, perhaps, satisfy ourselves with the words of Professor Tait: "We do not know, and are probably incapable of discovering, _what_ matter is"; and "The discovery of the ultimate nature of matter is probably beyond the range of human intelligence."[67] And yet we can agree with Mr. Arthur Balfour when he says[68] "we know too much about matter to be materialists." That, in itself, a generation ago would have been regarded as a large admission from the standpoint of physical science. RESULTS OF THE NEW PHYSICS.--The reduction of knowable and tangible matter to intangible electricity or unknowable ether may not seem to be much of an advance from the point of view of those who are interested in establishing a spiritual theory of the universe. But electricity is a species of energy which can be expressed in terms of will--which is the only kind of energy that we are acquainted with at first hand. "What is objectively energy is subjectively will; or, in other words, manifested energy is the visibility of will."[69] And so far as the "unknowable" ether is concerned, it gives less scope to those powers of dogmatism, the exercise of which characterised scientists of the old materialistic school; and it is the habit of oracular pronouncements which does the harm, by rendering any intellectual or spiritual progress impossible. In any case, whatever be the substitute which is to replace the old theory, we may congratulate ourselves, with Professor J. S. Haldane, that "we have parted once for all with the notion of a real and self-existent Material universe; and we must remember where we now are."[70] THE NEW BIOLOGY.--But if the results of the new physics have been disturbing to those who had hoped that materialism was a finally established theory, the results of recent biological research have been equally embarrassing to them. The anti-mechanistic trend of recent biological theory is only too evident. The organism is regarded no longer by the majority of biologists as fully explicable in terms of mechanics and chemistry. To quote Professor Haldane again, "The main outstanding fact is that the mechanistic account of the universe breaks down completely in connection with the phenomena of life.... In the case of life, the facts are inconsistent with the physical and chemical account of phenomena."[71] The organism can no longer be regarded as even an extremely complex kind of machine; that word will not cover the facts, and biologists are compelled to look elsewhere for a less misleading terminology. To describe the organism as a machine, is to give to that word a very comprehensive connotation. For the organism is a machine different in kind from any that has been constructed by man; it is "a self-stoking, self-repairing, self-preservative, self-adjusting, self-increasing, self-producing engine."[72] THE RESEARCHES OF DRIESCH.--Just as modern physics is concerned with the infinitely small--the ultra-microscopic, in fact--so modern biologists are concentrating attention upon microscopic organisms, where life is seen at its lowest terms, and where (if anywhere) they may expect to discover what are the _differentia_ of life, i.e. what are the qualities that distinguish living organic from inorganic matter. Perhaps the most notable of the researches conducted in this sphere, of recent years, have been those of Professor Driesch, who expounded his results in the _Gifford Lectures_ for 1907-1908 (_The Science and Philosophy of the Organism_). The phenomena upon which Driesch lays considerable stress are those which occur upon a division of certain living embryos. An embryo, when cut in half, displays remarkable powers of self-adjustment and continued development. Each half can, as it were, regulate itself, and make a fresh start; a process which results in two self-contained organisms, though of smaller size than would have resulted from a single undivided organism. The cells which compose the organism seem able to adapt themselves to whatever demands are made upon them. Like workmen building a bridge, all of them _can_ do every single act--if need arise--and the result of their labours is a perfect bridge, even if some of the workmen fall sick or are killed or injured in an accident. Driesch sums up the results of his researches by saying: "There is something in the organism's behaviour--in the widest sense of the word--which is opposed to an inorganic resolution of the same (i.e. to its complete expression in terms of chemistry and physics), and which shows that the living organism is more than a sum or aggregate of its parts; that it is insufficient to call the organism 'a typically combined body' (i.e., a machine), without further explanation."[73] THE PROBLEM OF LIFE.--The problem is: What is it in an organism which causes it to behave in a fashion so impossible for any machine? To answer this question satisfactorily would be to have solved the mystery of life. Biologists do not answer the question; they do not say what this peculiar potency is, but they give it a name. Driesch calls it _entelechy_, i.e. "purposiveness," and he also speaks of _psychoids_, i.e. "primitive minds." Names do not carry us very far; but the mere fact that biologists have gone to the trouble of providing a name, is important. It constitutes an admission on their part that there is something mysterious about the organism; for it has been a principle of modern science since the days of Galileo never to appeal to mysterious causes if known ones can be found. The _deus ex machina_ method seems to them fundamentally unsound, and so it is. If every difficulty were considered solved merely by the word "mystery," knowledge would never advance. Labelled ignorance is still ignorance. It is not names, but things that are important. But in this particular instance the application of the name _entelechy_ indicates that, in the opinion of such an authority as Driesch, at any rate, something exists which no merely physical or chemical term can completely describe. And Driesch is typical of the trend of much modern biology. It is only the very extreme optimists who now look for a final explanation of the living organism in terms of physics and chemistry. RESULTS OF THE NEW BIOLOGY.--But if life resists all attempts to reduce it to matter and motion, we are confronted with the breakdown of the mechanical theory of the universe, which has been slowly but progressively elaborated since the days of Leonardo da Vinci, and applied impartially to the organic and the inorganic spheres. But this ultra-dogmatic theory now seems too cramped to contain the facts; even scientists resent the claims of materialist-mechanical orthodoxy. Some indeed adopt not merely a critical, but a provocative attitude, and seek to discredit the prestige of mechanics. Professor J. S. Haldane not only vindicates the freedom, but prophesies the speedy advance of biology to a position of pre-eminence. Not only are biological phenomena irreducible to terms of mechanics, but it is mechanics that will have to be re-interpreted in terms of biology. "It is at least evident that the extension of biological conceptions to the whole of nature may be much nearer than seemed conceivable even a few years ago. When the day of that extension comes, the physical and chemical world as we now conceive it--the world of atoms and energy--will be recognised as nothing but an appearance ... it will stand confessed as a world of abstractions like that of the pure mathematicians."[74] THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY.--Not only physical and biological, but psychological science will contribute very largely to the reconstruction of view which is now taking place. Particular attention is due to those branches of psychology which deal experimentally with the subconscious, with instincts, with the phenomena of thought transference, psychotherapy, and of so-called "spiritualism." In none of these spheres can research yet be said to have proceeded far enough to justify the luxury of dogmatising over results. Considerable confusion of opinion may still exist, but it is now generally recognised that there is a wide sphere of research in psychical regions which is practically a _terra incognita_. And those most competent to judge of results seem to be most cautious in their statements. We are in the position of not knowing what a day may bring forth; and an expectant agnosticism with regard to many problems is perhaps the right attitude to adopt. The somewhat arrogant negations of the last generation are now out of place; they were never, in the strict sense, scientific, and they are now demodés. It is extremely difficult to imagine a return to the view which dismisses "mind" from the universe as being an obscure by-product of matter, or a comparatively insignificant "epiphenomenon" accompanying certain obscure chemical or mechanical processes. The old theories, gratifying in their simplicity, will no longer cover the facts. PSYCHICAL RESEARCH.--One particular branch of experimental psychology, which has attracted a large measure of public attention, calls for a few remarks. The attempt has been made to give experimental proof of the existence of "disembodied spirits," human or otherwise. The whole subject, exceptionally exposed as it is to the influence of prejudices of various kinds, requires to be treated with great caution, and it is inadvisable, in the present condition of the problem, to make dogmatic statements in any direction. What appears to be certain is that the occurrence is well established of various _phenomena_ which it is extremely difficult to explain in accordance with our present knowledge of matter, of space, or of mental action. The occurrence of such phenomena is no longer disputed; but it is over the _explanation_ of them that controversy is active. And it seems quite certain that the very least in the way of concessions that these new facts will force from conservative scientists is _a radical revision of current notions of the range of human mental action_. The mind is evidently capable of producing certain effects--even upon matter--which would have seemed incredible a short while ago. So much is the least that may be expected. But in the view of many competent and highly scientific observers, some far more radical revision of our notions may be necessary. Some scientists of good repute (e.g. Sir Oliver Lodge, in England, and Flammarion and others on the Continent) are convinced that the facts can only adequately be explained by reference to another world--interlocked, as it were, with this.[75] And it has to be admitted that this, what may be called more "advanced" explanation, is more in accordance than the other with a rather universal tradition or assumption of mankind in all ages. It will be easily seen that the whole subject is one of the most extreme difficulty. There is a general hesitancy in accepting what is called the "spirit hypothesis," so long as any other can be found; a hesitancy justified in view of the extreme complexity of the world we live in (where so much is even yet unknown), and in view of the great difficulty which there seems to be in adducing _exact_ proofs of the "spirit theory." A REASONABLE ATTITUDE.--We shall, no doubt, be wise at present to refuse to cry "Proven," and whilst admitting that all things are possible--perhaps even probable--to await with patience the results of further investigation. It has to be admitted that, while many people are superstitious and easily attracted by picturesque theories, there are others who are as prejudiced, in their way, against new ideas, as were those astronomers who, being committed to Ptolemaic views, refused to look through Galileo's telescope. It is not only theologians who have, in the history of thought, been guilty of obscurantism. In the early days of hypnotic experiments the scientific world in general "pooh-poohed" the idea of hypnotism; and it took a considerable time before it would allow itself to be convinced that such a thing was possible. Facts, in the end, were too strong even for prejudice. It is facts, eventually, that decide matters; and, no doubt, before a very long period has elapsed, sufficient facts will have accumulated to allow the scientific world to form more definite and better-grounded opinions than are possible to-day. Meanwhile, the ordinary man will do well to remember that the universe is really a very wonderful place, and that the knowledge of the wisest of us about it can only be described as infinitesimal. The traditions of nineteenth-century materialism are still strong amongst us, even with those who are least conscious of them. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in that philosophy. RESULTS.--These new conceptions of matter, of life, and of mind, which are the products of the new physics, the new biology, and the new psychology respectively, may be confidently left to themselves to work out their own salvation. They have the strength of youth. What is evident is that we have crossed the threshold of a new era in the history of science. The outlook of the future will be as different from that of the recent past as was the new science of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton from the dogmatic but fanciful notions which the Scholastic theologians had borrowed from Aristotle, and sought to impose as a permanent revelation. The current of thought is never stayed. The future is obscure, but one thing is certain, that the coming generations will see catastrophic changes in the outlook of science; and the materialistic and mechanistic _weltanschauung_, which lately seemed so formidable, may soon become as superannuated as astrology. The theory which overshadowed the religious life of a century, and which had become more and more menacing as scientific knowledge increased in extent and popularity, has fallen into discredit. Its prestige will not revive. CHAPTER XIII SOME FINAL CONSIDERATIONS VALUE OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.--It may perhaps be felt that our protracted excursion has not advanced us far beyond the position at which we stood in the opening chapter. Indeed, the history of philosophy may seem not to establish any very definite conclusions; and those who study the subject in the hope that it will supply them with material for dogmatising are likely to be disappointed. We have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that the riddle of the universe has as yet received no final solution at the hands of the metaphysicians. It is only too evident that, as the poet says: "Our little systems have their day, They have their day, and cease to be." And yet it would be an error to suppose that this lack of finality about philosophical opinion, or the want of unanimity among philosophers, indicates that no progress has been made. There are certain landmarks in the history of philosophy--such as Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_--which mark a point behind which we shall not again regress (assuming that our culture and civilisation is preserved). Even if we have not grasped the whole truth about things yet, we are still justified in assuming that we are gradually, if painfully, getting nearer to the goal. But surely we are entitled to believe that it is not the crude appetite for metaphysical dogma that attracts men to the history of philosophy. Its fascination rather resembles that of the history of religion: both are, as it were, Odysseys of the human spirit; nor is there any activity of man that has not its appeal to the human heart: for _cor ad cor loquitur_. And, again, we should reflect that those who ask for final conclusions, forget that the _search_ for truth may be, in and for itself, of the highest spiritual value. The best starting-point for the history of philosophy is a famous passage from Lessing. "Not the truth which is at the disposal of every man, but the honest pains he has taken to come at the truth make the worth of a man. For not through the possession, but through the pursuit of truth do his powers increase, and in this alone consists his ever-increasing perfection. Possession makes us quiet, indolent, proud.... If God with all truth in His right hand, and in His left the single, unceasing striving after truth, even though coupled with the condition that I should ever and always err, came to me and said, 'Choose!' I would in all humility clasp this left hand and say, 'Father, give me this! Is not pure truth for Thee alone?'"[76] But there is another respect in which some knowledge of the history of thought may be an important advantage. It may not bestow upon us the liberty of dogmatising ourselves, but it does bestow upon us a certain imperturbability in the face of the dogmatisms of others. Airs of systematic omniscience, "the pride of a pretended knowledge," will leave us unimpressed and undismayed. The latest pretentious product of popular philosophy will, in the majority of cases, be recognised as an old heresy in a new garb; "new" thought will not impress (at least, by its novelty) those who know that it is old. But it is against the crudities of materialistic naturalism that even a slight acquaintance with the history of ideas will form an antidote. The various exposures of it, from Hume and Kant to Bergson, will be to some extent familiar; and it will be a recognised fact that its chief popular attraction is at the same time its chief philosophic weakness; and this is that it is nothing more or less than a systematisation of the prejudices of common sense. "As a theory of first principles, the best that can be said of its pretensions is that they are ridiculous."[77] SOME DEDUCTIONS FROM HISTORY.--But, it may be asked, what definite conclusions have the foregoing chapters to offer? Some, if we are not mistaken, of a genuinely positive character. It will be necessary to recall certain facts and reflections to the minds of our readers. In the early chapters we noted the rise of an independent science, and the collapse of the medieval world view with which popular religious notions were associated so closely, that many conservative thinkers expected to see both involved in a common ruin. Science seemed to threaten the existence of a religion bound up with conceptions of space and of force which were being brought into discredit. These misgivings turned out, however, to be ill-founded. Certain advantages, no doubt, of simplicity and definiteness, which had belonged to the old notions, had been irrecoverably lost; but thinkers like Giordano Bruno showed that the conception of an infinite universe was by no means hostile to religion; but that, on the contrary, it might be a conception of the highest spiritual value. Such are the sentiments expressed in some sonnets which precede Bruno's dialogue "On the Infinite Universe." "It seemed to Bruno as if he had never breathed freely until the limits of the universe had been extended to infinity, and the fixed spheres had disappeared. No longer now was there a limit to the flight of the spirit, no 'so far and no further'; the narrow prison in which the old beliefs had confined men's spirits had now to open its gates and let in the pure air of a new life."[78] The scientific did not seem to him incompatible with a fundamentally religious conception of the world, at least for those who were not afraid "to take ship upon the seas of the infinite." DANGERS OF THE "MECHANICAL VIEW."--Thus it was not _science_ that was hostile to religion. This was not the case until science began to be associated with a certain fairly definite philosophy of a mechanistic, and later of a materialist, description. Religion could not have survived the final establishment of such a philosophy as this, for the indispensable element in a religious attitude of life is the idea that _somehow there lies behind things a power or essence that has something in common with our own natures_--something that can, without an abuse of language, be called personal. Any philosophy that rules out this idea creates an atmosphere in which religion cannot breathe. And it was just this atmosphere that the mechanistic view, unless amplified by considerations of another kind (as it was e.g. in the case of Spinoza) tended to create. THE "MECHANICAL VIEW" NEVER UNCHALLENGED.--And with regard to this mechanistic philosophy, we have to observe that it never seems to have commended itself, as a final and complete solution, to the best minds. In the seventeenth century, it will be remembered, the mechanical conception was transcended (though in entirely different ways) by Spinoza and by Leibniz, and the religious consciousness of the age, in the person of Pascal, protested against it. And although, during the eighteenth century, this philosophy persisted, and was considerably reinforced (with the help of further discoveries in the realm of physics) by the school of Holbach and Diderot, yet it had still to face the radical criticism of Kant. This criticism, as we shall remember, indicated that the mechanical view is a way in which the human mind--owing to its constitution--regards phenomena. If it is to understand them, the human mind cannot help viewing them in that fashion; it must subject things to the mould in which all its thought is cast. Mechanism is the _medium_ through which the mind understands phenomena. It belongs not to the things in themselves, but to our way of understanding them. And attached to this radical criticism of mechanical notions, was an idealistic philosophy of the most genuinely religious and spiritual character. Kantian idealism is one of those contributions to human thought behind which we shall not again regress. It is a phenomenon of incalculable value and importance. The immediate results of Kant's critical idealism was a luxuriant growth of a spiritual type of philosophy upon the ground he had cleared and prepared. Romanticism may be regarded as a revolt of those sides of human nature upon which the tyranny of mechanism pressed hardest--religion, speculation, poetry, music, art. "You may expel nature with a pitchfork, but she persists in returning." The Horatian remark is true also of the human mind; you may try to weed out religion and poetry, but your success will only be temporary; for nature herself is more persistent than the most earnest of materialists and (what is more) she outlives him. And with regard to the materialist or mechanistic view, it is highly interesting to note that its greatest attraction has consisted in something which, strictly speaking, is not its own property. In the eighteenth century in France, and in the nineteenth century in Germany and England, the popularity of this view was derived from its altogether illegitimate association with a high moral and social idealism, which (it is only too evident) had been borrowed--without sufficient acknowledgment--from the Christian tradition. The rather self-conscious atheism (for instance) of Shelley or Byron--which they had presumably derived from Diderot and his contemporaries--was less a denial of God than an affirmation of the rights of humanity. This generous philosophy of revolt from contemporary tyranny and pharisaism is atheistic only in name. The callous and cynical powers, both political and ecclesiastical, that were the object of their bitter attacks were the embodiments of atheism, for "He alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being, e.g. love, wisdom, justice, are nothing."[79] THE PRESENT SITUATION.--During the nineteenth century the mechanical view received some accession of strength owing to the reduction of biology to what seemed like subjection. But, at the same time, an idealistic philosophy had taken a strong hold in England, and towards the end of the century critical students of scientific method cast doubt upon the _finality_ of the mechanical view. They regarded it as artificial, abstract, and symbolic only of reality. This critical movement may be associated with the names of Mach, Boutroux, and (perhaps above all) of Bergson. Moreover, towards the end of the century, a number of new facts in physics, biology, and psychology came to light and tended to discredit the mechanical view as a final explanation of reality. The indestructibility of matter, even the conservation of energy and of mass (corner stones of the mechanico-materialist view) began openly to be questioned, not by metaphysicians, but by men of science themselves. The foes of materialism were those of its own household.[80] Thus assailed from without by the philosophers, and from within by the scientists themselves, the mechanical view, after a reign of three centuries (disturbed though these may have been by successive rebellions) seems destined to disappear. It may indeed subsist as an approximate and convenient way of regarding reality, of which it will no longer pretend to give an absolute and complete account. It will continue to reign as a constitutional monarch, but the days of its tyranny are at an end. And it is not unlikely that future generations will look with surprise upon our respect for a theory which to them will wear something of the same aspect as medieval astrology now presents to ourselves. SOME DEDUCTIONS.--If the history of thought showed no other results than the impaired prestige of naturalism, it would be worth attention and study. The facts undoubtedly compromise that prestige, for history indicates that at no period has naturalism been able to impose itself permanently. If there has been a movement in that direction, it has elicited a corresponding reaction. The human mind seems unable to remain satisfied with the negations which systematised common sense seeks to impose upon it. There is an instinctive appetite in humanity for a spiritual view of things, and Sabatier was undoubtedly right in observing that mankind is "incurably religious." Neither Hobbes, nor Holbach, nor Büchner, with the best will in the world, can exorcise from the human heart that instinct which seeks for itself personal relations with the universe--which sees a mind behind phenomena. This is one of those instincts of which it is true that the more you repress them the more insurgent they become--they will have their way in the end. Thus naturalism, blind to the mutilation of our nature of which it is guilty, is psychologically unsound. And yet, our nature is not so easily mutilated after all. Naturalistic dogmatism has it in its power to create an atmosphere which is unhealthy for religion, but that growth has its roots too deep for it to be easily destroyed. Springing as it does from the depths of our nature, it will prove as permanent as humanity itself. This is not to deny that this type of dogmatism may do, as it actually has done, a great deal of harm. A plant may be strong and vigorous, but under unceasing bitter weather, it will tend to become discouraged. Otherwise it would not be worth while to write criticisms of naturalism. FREEDOM.--Perhaps the best service we can do is to protest against indulging an appetite for negative dogmatism. Such an attitude is a negation of the freedom of thought. And it is in an atmosphere of freedom that both religion and science flourish best. A hard and fast naturalistic outlook may prove, and actually has proved, an incubus from which even scientists themselves may pray to be delivered. Nor has religion always enjoyed that full measure of freedom which is indispensable to its vigorous life. The curious and sad fact is that the human mind seems to delight in creating prisons for itself. The scientific spirit created a mechanico-materialistic scheme which has ended by becoming the enemy of scientific research, and which (besides this) asks, as a sacrifice, the mutilation of our spiritual instincts. And so with religion. The religious instinct (like the scientific) tends to create its prisons. The pride of, a pretended knowledge reduces to a mechanical scheme the mysteries of life and death; it provides superficial standardised solutions for the problems of existence. Of course, it is clear enough, that in religion as in science, we cannot, even if we would, start each of us from the beginning. We have to accept and to revere the riches of knowledge and experience accumulated by those who have gone before. And yet, in religion as in science, life consists in movement; we must go forward. The past may be an inspiration, but it must not be the limit of our thought, or it becomes an incubus. The glance must be forward not backward; the stream flows, and we are borne on its bosom. Humanity, like an explorer, has its face set towards the unknown. Both science and religion are children of freedom, without which the creative spirit in man is crushed. And here, with this note of warning (though perhaps rather of encouragement) we may close. FOOTNOTES: [1] _The Grammar of Science_, pp. 12, 13. [2] Ptolemy of Alexandria: 127-151 A.D. [3] J. M. Heald in art. "Aquinas" in _Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics_. [4] Monks and theologians were betrayed into some controversial asperities. "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven" formed the appropriate text for a sermon by a Dominican. [5] In spite of this, however, Descartes' works, in 1663, appeared in the Index of forbidden books: and his doctrines were banned by Royal decree from the French universities. Jesuit influences, which were not at all favourable to _native_ religion in France (or elsewhere!), may have been responsible for this obscurantist policy. [6] Merz, _History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century_, Vol. I, p. 384. [7] Quoted by Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, p. 4. [8] Höffding, _History of Modern Philosophy_, Vol. I, p. 315. It may set the scruples of some at rest to be reminded that Aquinas himself applied the term _Natura Naturans_ to God as the cause of all existence. Eckhart and Bruno had made a similar application of it (cf. Martineau, _Study of Spinoza_, p. 226). [9] Here we may note, by way of an anticipation, a truth that Kant afterwards was the first to grasp clearly: that it is only when the mechanism of phenomena is proved, that religion can be purged of materialism. [10] Cf. letter to Arnauld, quoted by Höffding, I, p. 347: "The substantial unity presupposes a complete, indivisible being. Nothing of this kind is to be found in figure or motion ... but only in a soul or a substantial form similar to that which we call an 'I.'" [11] The _Monadology_ (quoted by Pattison, _Idea of God_, p. 180). [12] Inge, _Christian Mysticism_, p. 19. [13] Cf. "With space the universe encloses me and engulfs me like an atom, but with thought I enclose the universe." A great saying. [14] Novalis called him "the God-intoxicated": a bold phrase. [15] We refer, of course, to the promulgation of the Bull _Unigenitus_, procured from Pope Clement XI by the Jesuits; when their opponents, the Jansenists "of all professions and classes, were subjected to imprisonment, confiscation, and every species of oppression" (Jervis, _Student's History of France_, p. 415). The manoeuvre is characterised by another historian as a "struggle of narrow-minded fanaticism, allied to absolutely unscrupulous political ambition, against all the learning and virtue which the French clergy still possessed" (Chamberlain, _Foundations of the Nineteenth Century_, Vol. II, p. 379). [16] Even before the age of the Revolution, Paris possessed many great schools. The _Collège de France_ was founded in 1530; there was the _College et École de Chirurgie_, the _Jardin des Plantes_, the _École royale des Mines_, etc. (cf. Merz, _History of European Thought_, Vol. I, p. 107). [17] Merz says of Newton: "In his own country that fruitful co-operation which can only be secured by an academic organisation and by endowment of research was wanting" (I, p. 99). As late as 1740 the whole revenue of the Royal Society was only £232 _per annum_. [18] Morley, _Voltaire_, p. 41. [19] He published his _Élémens de la Philosophie de Newton_ in 1738. [20] Höffding, Vol. I, p. 481. [21] See note in Merz, Vol. I, p. 145. [22] Merz, Vol. I, p. 143. [23] The receipt and perusal of Rousseau's _Emile_, are said to have interrupted the walk on one occasion, to the great astonishment of the Königsbergers. [24] Pringle Pattison, _Idea of God_, p. 26. [25] "Atheism is aristocratic," was the reply of Robespierre to one who mocked at his _Être Suprême_. [26] _Confessions_, Book XII. [27] Höffding, Vol. II, p. 9. [28] Fichte's word is _Anschauung_, for which the English language possesses no exact equivalent. It "implies something akin, though perhaps superior to, seeing or perceiving by means of the senses," and it approaches less closely to "inspiration" than does the English word "intuition." The term acquired a meaning somewhat akin to the _amor intellectualis Dei_ of Spinoza, which we have met before. (See note in Merz, III, p. 445.) [29] William James, _A Pluralistic Universe_, p. 92. [30] Here again a certain ambiguity surrounds the German word. _Geist_ is inadequately translated by either "mind" or "spirit": it comprises the meaning of both words (cf. Merz, III, p. 466). [31] This does not mean that what is not good enough for philosophy is good enough for religion. The idea behind Schleiermacher is that what philosophy cannot sanction, religious experience _can_ sanction. And it has to be remembered that, as a follower of Kant, he assigned very definite limits to the powers of philosophy. He was not an Hegelian--Hegel's and Schleiermacher's views of the religious problem are quite incompatible--the one believed, the other did not believe, that reason could solve that problem. [32] Kopp, _Geschichte der Chemie_, Vol. I, p. 442 (quoted by Merz, Vol. I, p. 191). [33] Merz, Vol. I, p. 218. [34] According to one authority (Judd, in his _Coming of Evolution_) the number of known species of plants and animals must be placed at 600,000 (p. 10). [35] _Vestiges of Creation_, published anonymously in 1844, passed through nine large editions by 1853. The author was Robert Chambers (1802-71), a geologist. [36] _Life and Letters_, Vol. I, p. 168 (_vide_ Judd, _Coming of Evolution_, p. 89). [37] As a matter of fact, biologists soon demanded more than even Lyell's geology could give them. Recent discoveries about the nature of matter have, however, further extended the possible age of our planet. [38] Darwin, _Life_, Vol. I, p. 93. [39] "If we wish to fix a definite point to describe as the end of the idealistic period in Germany, no such distinctive event offers itself as the French Revolution of July, 1830" (Lange, _History of Materialism_, E.T., Vol. II, p. 245). [40] A famous book which, though negative in its conclusions, places its author alongside Schleiermacher as one of the founders of the modern science of Religious Psychology. [41] Balfour, _Theism and Humanism_, p. 36. [42] "Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." [43] Spencer confessed that of the _Synthetic Philosophy_ "two volumes are missing," the two important volumes on Inorganic Evolution, leading to the evolution of the living and of the non-living (cf. criticisms by Professor James Ward in his _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, Lecture IX). [44] For an instance of the masterly work turned out by this school and of the attractiveness of their propaganda, read Huxley's lecture, "On a Piece of Chalk," delivered to the working men of Norwich during the meeting of the British Association in 1868. [45] For this famous encounter, see _Life of Huxley_, Vol. I, pp. 179-89, and _Life of J. R. Green_, pp. 44, 45. [46] As we shall subsequently find, this cosmic pessimism is less well grounded than Huxley believed. Still, Spencer's own scientific presuppositions were the same as Huxley's, so that the passage remains a pertinent criticism of the Evolutionary Philosophy as elaborated by him. [47] It is instructive to observe that a similar note of latent pessimism is struck by the last notable survivor of the School we have endeavoured to describe. Viscount Morley at the end of his _Recollections_ (1917), questioned as to the outcome of those generous hopes entertained with such confidence by his contemporaries, is compelled to ejaculate with philosophic brevity, _circumspice_, as he contemplates a spectacle of unparalleled horror. [48] Storr, _Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth Century_, p. 329. See which book for a valuable chapter upon Coleridge. [49] _Foundations of Belief_, p. 98. [50] _Foundations of Belief_, p. 309. [51] For this summary of Lotze's doctrine, see Merz, Vol. III, p. 615 and ff. [52] Quoted by Ward in _Pluralism and Theism_, p. 103. For a brief yet adequate treatment of Mach's criticisms see Höffding's _Modern Philosophers_, pp. 115-21. [53] R. B. Perry, _Present Philosophical Tendencies_, p. 351. [54] It is impossible to go deeper into James' "theory of knowledge" without using technical language. A few of his own phrases, however, may help to elucidate things. "Abstract concepts ... are salient aspects of our concrete experiences which we find it useful to single out" (_Meaning of Truth_, p. 246). Elsewhere he speaks of them as things we have learned to "cut out" from experience, as "flowers gathered," and as "moments dipped out from the stream of time" (_A Pluralistic Universe_, p. 235). I owe these quotations to Perry, op. cit. [55] _Creative Evolution_, p. 325. [56] _A Pluralistic Universe_, p. 237. [57] _Creative Evolution_, p. 174. [58] i.e. Intellect is not (as it is generally represented to be) a developed form of instinct, nor instinct an embryonic form of intellect. [59] The extraordinary and miraculous phenomena of instinct--especially as celebrated by the distinguished French scientist Fabre--cannot be rightly understood by trying to interpret them in terms of intellect. This is to misread them completely. [60] Bergson's characterisation of Spencerian Evolutionism (_Creative Evolution_, p. 391). [61] _Creative Evolution_, p. 286. [62] Other notable pluralists in England are F. C. S. Schiller and Dr. MacTaggart. [63] The _logical_ conclusion, we say, though this may not be the ultimate truth about the matter. The most attractive theories are often the most superficial. [64] Professor Cunningham in Pearson's _Grammar of Science_, Part I, p. 356. [65] Quoted by W. C. D. Whetham in his _Recent Development of Physical Science_, p. 280. No reference is given by him. [66] One theory attributes the existence of matter to occasional misfits among these grains. [67] Quoted by Bishop Mercer. _Problem of Creation_, Appendix B. [68] In _Theism and Humanism_. [69] Mercer, op. cit., p. 106. [70] _Mechanism, Life, and Personality_ (1913), p. 81. [71] Op. cit. pp. 64, 66. [72] Professor J. Arthur Thomson, in an article entitled, "Is there one Science of Nature?" (_Hibbert Journal_, Oct., 1911). [73] _The Science and Philosophy of the Organism_, Vol. II, p. 338. [74] Op. cit. p. 101. [75] Other names of distinguished scientists holding this view are: Sir W. Crookes the Physicist and Sir W. F. Barrett, F.R.S., in England, Dr. Hodgson and Prof. James Hyslop in America, Lombroso in Italy, Richet in France. [76] From his _Duplik_. Quoted by Höffding, _History of Philosophy_, Vol. II, p. 21. [77] F. H. Bradley on "Phenomenalism" (_Appearance and Reality_, p. 126). [78] Höffding, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 129. [79] Feuerbach, _Essence of Christianity_, p. 21. [80] We now learn that conceptions of space of a highly unorthodox character are entertained by physicists and mathematicians, as the result of recent researches in the sphere of the gravitation of light. INDEX Agnosticism, 92 Anti-clericalism, 43 Aquinas, 9 f., 30 _n._ Aristotle, 8, 136 Atomic theory, the, 49 collapse of, 126 Bacon, Lord, 16 f. Balfour, A. J., 105 f., 110, 128 Bergson, 115-121, 143 Berkeley, 55 Boutroux, 112 f., 143 Bradley, F. H., 104 f., 110, 122, 139 Bruno, 12, 25, 29 f., 140 Büchner, 86, 144 Buffon, 77 Carlyle, Thomas, 38, 99-102 Coleridge, S. T., 98 f. Comte, 85, 89, 92 Copernicus, 11, 22, 25, 58 Cunningham, Prof., 127 Cusanus, 10 Dalton, 49, 83, 126 Darwin, 80-83, 87 f. Descartes, 19-22, 26, 37, 43, 55, 74, 136 Design, Argument from, 87 f. Diderot, 45 f., 48, 141, 144 Driesch, 130 f. Eckhart, 30 _n._ Encyclopædia, The, 45 Electrons, 126 Feuerbach, 85, 95 Fichte, 65-67 Galileo, 12-15, 22, 55, 79, 136 Goethe, 30, 65 Green, T. H., 103 f. Haeckel, 88 Haldane, Prof. J. S., 129, 132 Harvey, William, 19, 22 Hegel, 67-70 Heine, 85 Helmholtz, 75 Hobbes, 22, 26, 43, 55, 144 Holbach, 46-48, 141, 144 Hume, 55 f., 58 Huxley, 92 f., 95 Inge, 38 _n._ James, William, 114 f., 123 Jansenists, the, 43 _n._ Jesuits, the, 22 _n._, 26, 37, 43 _n._ Johnson, Dr., 47 Kant, 53-61, 66, 70, 77, 85, 137, 141 and Hegel compared, 69 and Locke compared, 57 and Rousseau compared, 65 Kepler, 15 Lamarck, 77 La Mettrie, 45, 48, 74 Lange, 47, 84 Laplace, 48 f. Larmor, Prof. J., 127 Lavoisier, 49 f. Leibniz, 33-36, 41, 52 f., 122, 141 Leonardo da Vinci, 14, 16, 132 Lessing, 138 Locke, 52 f., 55 f. Lodge, Sir O., 134 Lotze, 107-109 Lyell, 78-80 Mach, 110-114, 143 Malthus' _Essay on Population_, 80 Meyer, 75 McTaggart, 123 _n._ Modernism, 109 Monads, 35 f., 122 "Natural Selection," 81, 87 Newton, 23-26, 43, 44 _n._, 48, 82, 136 Nietzsche, 94, 96 f. Paley, 87 Pascal, 22, 36-41 Pearson, Prof. Karl, 1 Pessimism, 95 Positivism, 85, 95 Ritschl, 109 Rousseau, 54 _n._, 62-65, 80 _Sartor Resartus_, 100 Schelling, 65 Schiller, 65 Schiller, F. C. S., 123 _n._ Schleider, 75 Schleiermacher, 70-72 Spencer, Herbert, 35, 77, 89-92, 122 Spinoza, 28-33, 41, 52 f., 67, 141 "Spiritualism," 133-136 Stephen, Leslie, 92 Tait, Prof., 128 Thomson, Prof. J. A., 130 _n._ Voltaire, 44 f. Wallace, Alfred Russell, 81 f. Ward, Prof. James, 26 _n._, 91 _n._, 123 Whöler, 74 Zeno's paradox, 117 Printed in Great Britain at _The Mayflower Press, Plymouth._ William Brandon & Son, Ltd. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. Punctuation has been corrected without note. Spelling, grammatical and typographical errors have been corrected in the text: Page 68: "understand" changed to "understands" Page 70: "fom" changed to "from" Page 128: "subjectly" changed to "subjectively" Page 138: "Odyssies" changed to "Odysseys" Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original. 
33049	----	file was produced from scans of public domain works at the University of Michigan's Making of America collection.) [Transcriber's note: All footnotes are renumbered and moved to the end of the text before the index.] THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD, ACCORDING TO REVELATION AND SCIENCE. BY J. W. DAWSON, LL.D., F.R.S., F.G.S., PRINCIPAL AND VICE-CHANCELLOR OF M'GILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL; AUTHOR OF "ACADIAN GEOLOGY," "THE STORY OF THE EARTH AND MAN," "LIFE'S DAWN ON EARTH," ETC. "Speak to the Earth, and it shall teach thee." --_Job._ [Illustration] NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE. 1877. TO HIS EXCELLENCY THE RIGHT HON. THE EARL OF DUFFERIN, K.P., K.C.B., ETC., GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF CANADA, _This Work is Respectfully Dedicated_, AS A SLIGHT TRIBUTE OF ESTEEM TO ONE WHO GRACES THE HIGHEST POSITION IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA BY HIS EMINENT PERSONAL QUALITIES, HIS REPUTATION AS A STATESMAN AND AN AUTHOR, AND HIS KIND AND ENLIGHTENED PATRONAGE OF EDUCATION, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE. PREFACE. The scope of this work is in the main identical with that of "Archaia," published in 1860; but in attempting to prepare a new edition brought up to the present condition of the subject, it was found that so much required to be rewritten as to make it essentially a new book, and it was therefore decided to give it a new name, more clearly indicating its character and purpose. The intention of this new publication is to throw as much light as possible on the present condition of the much-agitated questions respecting the origin of the world and its inhabitants. To students of the Bible it will afford the means of determining the precise import of the biblical references to creation, and of their relation to what is known from other sources. To geologists and biologists it is intended to give some intelligible explanation of the connection of the doctrines of revealed religion with the results of their respective sciences. A still higher end to which the author would gladly contribute is that of aiding thoughtful men perplexed with the apparent antagonisms of science and religion, and of indicating how they may best harmonize our great and growing knowledge of nature with our old and cherished beliefs as to the origin and destiny of man. In aiming at these results, it has not been thought necessary to assume a controversial attitude or to stand on the defensive, either with regard to religion or science, but rather to attempt to arrive at broad and comprehensive views which may exhibit those higher harmonies of the spiritual and the natural which they derive from their common Author, and which reach beyond the petty difficulties arising from narrow or imperfect views of either or both. Such an aim is too high to be fully attained, but in so far as it can be reached we may hope to rescue science from a dry and barren infidelity, and religion from mere fruitless sentiment or enfeebling superstition. Since the publication of "Archaia," the subject of which it treats has passed through several phases, but the author has seen no reason to abandon in the least degree the principles of interpretation on which he then insisted, and he takes a hopeful view as to their ultimate prevalence. It is true that the wide acceptance of hypotheses of "evolution" has led to a more decided antagonism than heretofore between some of the utterances of scientific men and the religious ideas of mankind, and to a contemptuous disregard of revealed religion in the more shallow literature of the time; but, on the other hand, a barrier of scientific fact and induction has been slowly rising to stem this current of crude and rash hypothesis. Of this nature are the great discoveries as to the physical constitution and probable origin of the universe, the doctrine of the correlation and conservation of forces, the new estimates of the age of the earth, the overthrow of the doctrine of spontaneous generation, the high bodily and mental type of the earliest known men, the light which philology has thrown on the unity of language, our growing knowledge of the uniformity of the constructive and other habits of primitive men, and of the condition of man in the earlier historic time, the greater completeness of our conceptions as to the phenomena of life and their relation to organizable matters--all these and many other aspects of the later progress of science must tend to bring it back into greater harmony with revealed religion. On the other side, there has been a growing disposition on the part of theologians to inquire as to the actual views of nature presented in the Bible, and to separate these from those accretions of obsolete philosophy which have been too often confounded with them. With respect to the first chapter of Genesis more especially, there has been a decided growth in the acceptance of those principles for which I contended in 1860. In illustration of this I may refer to the fact that in 1862 it was precisely on these principles that Dr. McCaul conducted his able defence of the Mosaic record of creation in the "Aids to Faith," which may almost be regarded as an authoritative expression of the views of orthodox Christians in opposition to those of the once notorious "Essays and Reviews." Equally significant is the adoption of this method of interpretation by Dr. Tayler Lewis in his masterly "Special Introduction" to the first chapter of Genesis, in the American edition of Lange's Commentary, edited by Dr. Philip Schaff; and the manifest approval with which the lucid statement of the relations of Geology and the Bible by Dr. Arnold Guyot, was received by the great gathering of divines at the Convention of the Evangelical Alliance in New York, in 1873, bears testimony to the same fact. The author has also had the honor of being invited to illustrate this mode of reconciliation to the students of two of the most important theological colleges in America, in lectures afterwards published and widely circulated. The time is perhaps nearer than we anticipate when Natural Science and Theology will unite in the conviction that the first chapter of Genesis "stands alone among the traditions of mankind in the wonderful simplicity and grandeur of its words," and that "the meaning of these words is always a meaning ahead of science--not because it anticipates the results of science, but because it is independent of them, and runs as it were round the outer margin of all possible discovery."[1] In the Appendix the reader will find several short essays on special points collateral to the general subject, and important in the solution of some of its difficulties, but which could not be conveniently included in the text. More especially I would refer to the summaries given in the Appendix of the present state of our knowledge as to the origin of life, of species, and of man--topics not discussed in much detail in the body of the work, both because of the wide fields of controversy to which they lead, and because I have treated of them somewhat fully in a previous work, "The Story of the Earth and Man," in which the detailed history of life as disclosed by science was the main subject in hand. J. W. D. _May, 1877._ CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE MYSTERY OF ORIGINS AND ITS SOLUTIONS. Reality of the Unseen.--Personality of God.--Possibility of a Revelation of Origins.--Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic Solutions of the Mystery.--The Abrahamic Genesis.--The Mosaic Genesis Page 9 CHAPTER II. OBJECTS AND NATURE OF A REVELATION OF ORIGINS. Objects to be Attained by a Revelation of Origins.--Its Method and Structure.--Vision of Creation.--Translation of the First Chapter of Genesis 35 CHAPTER III. OBJECTS AND NATURE OF A REVELATION OF ORIGINS (_continued_). Character of the Revelation and its Views of Nature.--Natural Law.-- Progress and Development.--Purpose and Use.--Type or Pattern 70 CHAPTER IV. THE BEGINNING. The Universe not eternal.--Its Creation.--The Heavens.--The Earth.-- The Creator, Elohim.--The Beginning very Remote in Time 87 CHAPTER V. THE DESOLATE VOID. Characteristics of Biblical Chaos.--The Primitive Deep.--The Divine Spirit.--The Breath of God.--Chaos in other Cosmogonies.--Chemical and Physical Conditions of the Primitive Chaos 100 CHAPTER VI. LIGHT AND CREATIVE DAYS. What is Implied in Cosmic Light.--Its Gradual Condensation.--Day and Night.--Days of Creation.--Their Nature and Length.--They are Olams, Æons or Time-worlds.--Objections to this View Answered.--Confirmations from Extraneous Sources. 115 CHAPTER VII. THE ATMOSPHERE. Its Present Constitution.--Waters Above and Below.--The "Expanse" of Genesis not a Solid Arch.--Mythology of the Atmosphere.-- Superstitions connected with it Opposed by the Bible. 157 CHAPTER VIII. THE DRY LAND AND THE FIRST PLANTS. The Earth of the Bible is the Dry Land.--Its Elevation and Support above the Waters.--Structure of the Continents arranged from the first.--The First Vegetation.--Its Nature.--Introduction of Life.-- Organization and Reproduction.--Objections considered.--Geological Indications. 174 CHAPTER IX. LUMINARIES. How Introduced.--What Implied in this.--Dominion of Existing Causes. --Astronomy of the Hebrews.--Not Connected with Astrology 199 CHAPTER X. THE LOWER ANIMALS. The Sheretzim, or Swarmers.--Their Origin from the Waters.--The Great Reptiles.--Their Creation.--Coincidences with Geology. --Hypotheses of Evolution 211 CHAPTER XI. THE HIGHER ANIMALS AND MAN. The Placental Mammals.--The Principal Groups of these.--Man, how Introduced.--His Early Condition.--His Relations to Nature 230 CHAPTER XII. THE REST OF THE CREATOR. The Sabbath of Creation.--The Modern Period.--Its Early History. --The Fall and Antediluvian Man.--Postdiluvian Extension of Men 249 CHAPTER XIII. UNITY AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN. Biblical Account of his Introduction and Early History.--Historical Testimony with respect to his Unity and Antiquity.--Testimony of Language 263 CHAPTER XIV. UNITY AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN (_continued_). Geological Evidence of Antiquity of Man.--General Conditions of Post-glacial and Modern Periods.--Remains of Man in Caverns, in River-gravels, etc.--Palæocosmic and Neocosmic Men 294 CHAPTER XV. COMPARISONS AND CONCLUSIONS. Geological Chronology.--Table of Succession of Life.--Points of Agreement of the Two Records.--Parallelism of Genesis and Physical Science with Reference to the Origin and Early History of the World. --Conclusion 322 APPENDICES. A.--True and False Evolution. 363 B.--Evolution and Creation by Law. 373 C.--Modes of Creation. 377 D.--Theories of Life. 383 E.--Recent Facts as to the Antiquity of Man. 386 F.--Glacial Periods in Connection with Genesis. 395 G.--Chemistry of the Primeval Earth. 400 H.--Tannin and Bhemah. 405 I.--Ancient Mythologies. 408 K.--Assyrian and Egyptian Texts. 412 L.--Species and Varieties in Connection with Evolution and the Unity of Man. 414 THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD. CHAPTER I. THE MYSTERY OF ORIGINS AND ITS SOLUTIONS. "The things that are seen are temporal."--PAUL. Have we or can we have any certain solution of those two great questions--Whence are all things? and Whither do all things tend? No thinking man is content to live merely in a transitory present, ever emerging out of darkness and ever returning thither again, without knowing any thing of the origin and issue of the world and its inhabitants. Yet it would seem that to-day men are as much in uncertainty on these subjects as at any previous time. It even appears as if all our added knowledge would only, for a time at least, deprive us of the solutions to which we trusted, and give no others in their room. Christians have been accustomed to rest on the cosmogony and prophecy of the Bible; but we are now frankly told on all hands that these are valueless, and that even ministers of religion more or less "sacrifice their sincerity" in making them the basis of their teachings. On the other hand, we are informed that nothing can be discerned in the universe beyond matter and force, and that it is by a purely material and spontaneous evolution that all things exist. But when we ask as to the origin of matter and force, and the laws which regulate them--as to the end to which their movement is tending, as to the manner in which they have evolved the myriad forms of life and the human intelligence itself--the only answer is that these are "insoluble mysteries." Are we, then, to fall back on the real or imagined revelations and traditions of the past, and to endeavor to find in them some foothold of assurance; or are we to wait till further progress in science may have cleared up some of the present mysteries? Whatever may be said of the former alternative, all honest students of science will unite with me in the admission that the latter is hopeless. We need not seek to belittle the magnificent triumphs of modern science. They have been real and stupendous. But it is of their very nature to conduct us to ultimate facts and laws of which science can give no explanation; and the further we push our inquiries the more insuperably does the wall of mystery rise before us. It is true we can furnish the materials for philosophical speculations which may be built on scientific facts and principles; but these are in their nature uncertain, and must constantly change as knowledge advances. They can not solve for us the great practical problems of our origin and destiny. In these circumstances no apology is needed for a thorough and careful inquiry into those foundations of religious belief which rest on the idea of a revelation of origins and destinies made to man from without, and on which we may build the superstructure of a rational religion, giving guidance for the present and hope for the future. In the following pages I propose to enter upon so much of this subject as relates to the origin and earliest history of the world, in so far as these are treated of in the Bible and in the traditions of the more ancient nations; and this with reference to the present standpoint of science in relation to these questions. To discuss such questions at all, certain preliminary admissions are necessary. These are: (1) The reality of an unseen universe, spiritual rather than material in its nature. (2) The existence of a personal God, or of a great Universal Will. (3) The possibility of communication taking place between God and man. I do not propose to attempt any proof of these positions, but it may be well to explain what they mean. (1) That the great machine for the dissipation of energy, in which we exist, and which we call the universe, must have a correlative and complement in the unseen, is a conclusion now forced upon physicists by the necessities of the doctrine of the conservation of force. In short, it seems that, unless we admit this conclusion, we can not believe in the possible existence of the material universe itself, and must sink into absolute nihilism. This doctrine is expressed by the apostle Paul in the statement, "The things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal," and it has been ably discussed by the authors of the remarkable work, "The Unseen Universe." That this unseen world is spiritual--that is, not subject to the same material laws with the visible universe--is also a fair deduction from physical science, as well as a doctrine of Scripture. I prefer the term spiritual to supernatural, because the first is the term used in the Bible, and because the latter has had associated with it ideas of the miraculous and abnormal, not implied at all in the idea of the spiritual, which in some important senses may be more natural than the material. (2) The idea of a personal God implies not merely the existence of an unknown absolute power, as Herbert Spencer seems to hold, or of "an Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness," as Matthew Arnold puts it, but of a Being of whom we can affirm will, intelligence, feeling, self-consciousness, not certainly precisely as they occur in us, but in a higher and more perfect form, of which our own consciousness furnishes the type, or "image and shadow," as Moses long ago phrased it. On the one hand, it is true that we can not fully comprehend such a personal God, because not limited by the conditions which limit us. On the other hand, it is clear that our intellect, as constituted, can furnish us with no ultimate explanation of the universe except in the action of such a primary personal will. In the Bible the absolute personality of God is expressed by the title "I am." His intimate relation to us is indicated by the expression, "In him we live, and move, and have our being." His all-pervading essence is stated as "the fullness of him that filleth all in all." His relative personality is shadowed forth by the attribution to him of love, anger, and other human feelings and sentiments, and by presenting him in the endearing relation of the universal Father. (3) With reference to the possibility of communication between God and man, it may truly be said that such communication is not only possible, but infinitely probable. God is not only near to us, but we are in him, and, independently of the testimony of revelation, it has been felt by all classes of men, from the rudest and most primitive savages up to our great English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, that if there is a God, he can not be excluded from communion with his intelligent creatures, either directly or through the medium of ministering spirits.[2] Farther, placed as man is in the midst of complex and to him inexplicable phenomena, involved in a conflict of good and evil, happiness and misery, to which the wisest and the greatest minds have found no issue, subject to be degraded by low passions and tempted to great extremes of evil, and himself weak, impulsive, and vacillating, there seems the most urgent need for divine communication. It may be said that these are conflicts and problems which God has left man to decide and solve for himself by his own reason. But when we consider how slow this process is, and how imperfect even now, after the experience of ages, we seem to need some intervention that shall stimulate the human mind, and impel it forward with greater rapidity. Farther, it would appear only right that an intelligent and accountable being, placed in a world like this, should have some explanation of his origin and destiny given him at first, and that, if he should perchance go astray, a helping hand should be extended to him. Practically it is an historical fact that all the great impulses given to humanity have been by men claiming divine guidance or inspiration, and professing to bring light and truth from the unseen world. It would be too much to say that all these prophets and reformers have been inspired of heaven; but scarcely too much to say that they have either received a message of God, or have been permitted to transmit to our world messages for weal or woe from powers without in subordination to him. Farther, we shall have reason in the sequel to see that in far back prehistoric times there must have been impulses given to mankind, and revelations made to them, as potent as those which have acted in later historic periods. In Holy Scripture the Word of God is represented as "enlightening every man;[3]" and with reference to our present subject we are told that "by faith we understand that the ages of the world were constituted by the Word of God, so that the visible things were not made of those which appear."[4] In other words, that the will of God has been active and operative as the sole cause throughout all ages of the world's creation and history, and that the visible universe is not a mere product of its own phenomena. We may call this faith, if we please, an intuition or instinct, a God-given gift, or a product of our own thought acting on evidence afforded by the outer world; but in any case it seems to be the sole possible solution of the mystery of origins. These points being premised, we are in a position to inquire as to the teaching of our own Holy Scriptures, and in this inquiry we can easily take along with them all other revelations, pretended or true, that deal with our subject. Max Müller, in his lectures on the Science of Religion, rejects the ordinary division into natural and revealed, and adopts a threefold grouping, corresponding to the great division of languages into Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic. With some modification and explanation, this classification will serve well our present purpose. As to natural and revealed religions, if we regard our own as revealed, we must admit an element of revelation in all others as well. According to the Hebrew Scriptures revelation began in Eden, and was continued more or less in all successive ages up to the apostolic times. Consequently the earlier revelations of the antediluvian and postdiluvian times must have been the common property of all races, and must have been associated with whatever elements of natural religion they had. When, therefore, we call our religion distinctively a revealed one, we must admit that traces of the same revelation may be found in all others. On the other hand, when we characterize our religion as Hebrew or Semitic, we must bear in mind that in its earlier stages it was not so limited; but that, if as old as it professes to be, it must include a substratum common to it with the old religions of the Turanians and Aryans. Neglect of these very simple considerations often leads to great confusion in the minds both of Christians and unbelievers, as to the relation of Christianity to heathenism, and especially to the older and more primitive forms of heathenism. The Turanian stock, of which the Mongolian peoples of Northern Asia may be taken as the type, includes also the American races, and the oldest historical populations of Western Asia and of Europe; and they are the peoples who, in their physical features and their art tendencies, most nearly resemble the prehistoric men of the caves and gravels. They largely consist of the populations which the Bible affiliates with Ham. They are remarkable for their permanent and stationary forms of civilization or barbarism, and for the languages least developed in grammatical structure. These people had and still have traditions of the creation and early history of man similar to those in the earlier Biblical books; but the connection of their religions with that of the Bible breaks off from the time of Abraham; and the earlier portions of revelation which they possessed became disintegrated into a polytheism which takes very largely the form of animism, or of attributing some special spiritual indwelling to all natural objects, and also that of worship of ancestors and heroes. The portion of primitive theological belief to which they have clung most persistently is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which in all their religious beliefs occupies a prominent place, and has always been connected with special attention to rites of sepulture and monuments to the dead. Their version of the revelation of creation appears most distinctly in the sacred book of the Quichés of Central America, and in the creation myths of the Mexicans, Iroquois, Algonquins, and other North American tribes; and it has been handed down to us through the Semitic Assyrians from the ancient Chaldæo-turanian population of the valley of the Euphrates. The Aryan races have been remarkable for their changeable and versatile character. Their religious ideas in the most primitive times appear to have been not dissimilar from those of the Turanians; and the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Scandinavians, and Celts have all gone some length in developing and modifying these, apparently by purely human imaginative and intellectual materials. But all these developments were defective in a moral point of view, and had lost the stability and rational basis which proceed from monotheism. Hence they have given way before other and higher faiths; and at this day the more advanced nations of the Aryan, or in Scriptural language the Japhetic stock, have adopted the Semitic faith; and, as Noah long ago predicted, "dwell in the tents of Shem." No indigenous account of the genesis of things remains among the Aryan races, with the exception of that in the Avesta, and in some ancient Hindoo hymns, and these are merely variations of the Turanian or Semitic cosmogony. God has given to the Aryans no special revelations of his will, and they would have been left to grope for themselves along the paths of science and philosophy, but for the advent among them of the prophets of "Jehovah the God of Shem." It is to the Semitic race that God has been most liberal in his gift of inspiration. Gathering up and treasuring the old common inheritance of religion, and eliminating from it the accretions of superstition, the children of Abraham at one time stood alone, or almost alone, as adherents of a belief in one God the Creator. Their theology was added to from age to age by a succession of prophets, all working in one line of development, till it culminated in the appearance of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to expand itself over the other races. Among them it has undergone two remarkable phases of retrograde development--the one in Mohammedanism, which carries it back to a resemblance to its own earlier patriarchal stage, the other in Roman and Greek ecclesiasticism, which have taken it back to the Levitical system, along with a strong color of paganism. Still its original documents survive, and retain their hold on large portions of the more enlightened Aryan nations, while through their means these documents have entered on a new career of conquest among the Semites and Turanians. They are, however, it must be admitted, among the Aryan races of Europe, growing in a somewhat uncongenial soil; partly because of the materialistic organization of these races, and partly because of the abundant remains of heathenism which still linger among them; and it is possible that they may not realize their full triumphs over humanity till the Semitic races return to the position of Abraham, and erect again in the world the standard of monotheistic faith, under the auspices of a purified Christianity. It follows from this hasty survey that it is the Semitic solution of the question of origins, as contained in the Hebrew Scriptures, that mainly concerns us; and in the first place we must consider the foundation and historical development of this solution, as many misconceptions prevail on these points. We may discuss these subjects under the heads of the Abrahamic Genesis and the Mosaic Genesis, and may in a subsequent chapter consider the results of these in the Genesis of the later Scripture writers. THE ABRAHAMIC GENESIS. It has been a favorite theory with some learned men that the earlier parts of the book of Genesis existed as ancient documents even in the time of Moses, and were incorporated by him in his work, and attempts have been made to separate, on various grounds, the older from the newer portions. Until lately, however, these attempts have been altogether conjectural and destitute of any positive basis of archæological fact. A new and interesting aspect has been given to them by the recent readings of the inscriptions on clay tablets found at Nineveh, and to which especial attention has been given by the late Mr. G. Smith, of the Archæological Department of the British Museum. Assurbanipal, king of Assyria, one of the kings known to the Greeks by the name of Sardanapalus, reigned at Nineveh about B.C. 673. He was a grandson of the Biblical Sennacherib, and son of Esarhaddon, and it seems that he had inherited from his fathers a library of Chaldean and Assyrian literature, written not on perishable paper or parchment, but on tablets of clay, and containing much ancient lore of the nations inhabiting the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Assurbanipal, living when the Assyrian empire had attained to the acme of its greatness, had leisure to become a greater patron of learning than any preceding king. His scribes ransacked the record chambers of the oldest temples in the world; and Babel, Erech, Accad, and Ur had to yield up their treasures of history and theology to diligent copyists, who transcribed them in beautiful arrow-head characters on new clay tablets, and deposited them in the library of the great king. It would appear that, at the same time, these documents were edited, archaic forms of expression translated, and lacunæ caused by decay or fracture repaired. They were also inscribed with legends stating the sources whence they had been derived. The empire of Assyria went down in blood, and its palaces were destroyed with fire, but the imperishable clay tablets which had formed the treasure of their libraries remained, more or less broken it is true, among the ruins. Exhumed by Layard and Smith, they are now among the collections of the British Museum, and their decipherment is throwing a new and strange light on the cosmogony and religions of the early East. Though the date of the writing of these tablets is comparatively modern, being about the time of the later kings of Judah, the original records from which they were transcribed profess to have been very ancient--some of them about 1600 years before the time of Assurbanipal, so that they go back to a time anterior to that of the early Hebrew patriarchs. Their genuineness has been endorsed, in one case, by the discovery by Mr. Loftus, in the city of Senkereh, of an apparent original, bearing date about 1600 years before Christ, and other inscriptions of equal or greater antiquity have been found in the ruins of Ur, on the Euphrates. Nor does there seem any reason to doubt that the scribes of Assurbanipal faithfully transcribed the oldest records extant in their time. Their care and diligence are also shown by the fact that where different versions of these records existed in different cities, they have made copies of these variant manuscripts, instead of attempting to reduce them to one text. The subjects treated of in the Nineveh tablets are very various, but those that concern our present purpose are the documents relating to the creation, the fall of man, and the deluge, of which considerable portions have been recovered, and have been translated by Mr. Smith. These documents carry us back to a time when the Turanian religions had not yet been separated from the Semitic. The early Chaldeans, termed Cushites in the Bible, and who under Nimrod seem to have established the first empire in that region, are now known to have been Turanian; and among them apparently arose at a very early period a literature and a mythology. The Chaldeans were politically subjugated by the Semitic Assyrians, but they retained their religious predominance; and until a comparatively late period existed as a learned and priestly caste. To these primitive _Chasdim_ were undoubtedly due the creation legends collected by the scribes of Assurbanipal. They were obtained in the old Chaldean cities, in the temples under the guardianship of Chaldean priests; and their date carries them back to a time anterior to the Assyrian conquest, and in which Chaldean kings still reigned. Here, then, we have an important connecting link between the cosmogonies of the Turanian and Semitic races; and leaving out of sight for the present the legends of the deluge and other matters allied to it, we may inquire as to the nature and contents of the Assyrian and Chaldean record of creation. The Assyrian Genesis is similar in order and arrangement to that in our own Bible, and gives the same general order of the creative work. Its days, however, of creation, as indeed there is good internal evidence to prove those of Moses also are, seem to be periods or ages. It treats of the creation of gods, as well as of the universe, and thus introduces a polytheistic system; and it seems to recognize, like the Avesta, a primitive principle of evil, presiding over chaos, and subsequently introducing evil among men. These points may be illustrated by an extract from Mr. Smith's translation. It relates to the earlier part of the work: "When above were not raised the heavens, And below on the earth a plant had not grown up The deep also had not broken up its boundaries Chaos (or water) Tiamat (the sea or abyss) was the producing mother of them all These waters at the beginning were ordained But a tree had not grown a flower had not unfolded When the gods had not sprung up any one of them A plant had not grown and order did not exist Were made also the great gods The gods Lahma and Lahamu they caused to come * * * And they grew * * * The gods Sar and Kisar were made A course of days and a long time passed The god Anu * * * The gods Sar and * * *" Here the first existences are Chaos (Mummu, or confusion) and Tiamat, which is the Thalatth of Berosus, representing the sea or primitive abyss, but also recognized as a female deity or first mother. Then we have Lahma and Lahamu, which represent power or motion in nature, and are the equivalents of the Divine Spirit moving on the face of the waters in our Genesis. Next we have the production of Sar or Iloar and Kisar, representing the expanse or firmament. Sar is supposed to be the god Assur of the Assyrians, a great weather god, and after whom their nation and its founder were named. The next process is the creation of the heaven and the earth, represented by Anu and Anatu. Anu was always one of the greater gods, and was identified with the higher or starry heavens. In succeeding tablets to this we find Bel or Belus introduced, as the agent in the creation of animals and of men; and he is the true Demiurgus or Mediator of the Assyrian system. Next we have the introduction of Hea or Saturn, who is the equivalent of the Biblical Adam, and of Ishtar, mother of men, who is the Isba or Eve of Genesis. The rest of this legend evidently relates to deified men, among whom are Merodach, Nebo, and other heroes. The first remark that we may make on this Assyrian Genesis is that, while it resembles generally the Mosaic account of creation, it also strongly resembles the old cosmogonies of the Egyptians and Persians, and those of the widely scattered Turanians of Northern Asia and of America. As an extreme illustration of this, and to obviate the necessity of digression at this point of our inquiry, I introduce here some extracts from the Popul Vuh, or sacred book of the Quiché Indians of Central America, an undoubted product of prehistoric religion in the western continent.[5] "And the heaven was formed, and all the signs thereof set in their angle and alignment, and its boundaries fixed toward the four winds by the Creator and Former, and Mother and Father of life and existence--he by whom all move and breathe, the Father and Cherisher of the peace of nations and of the civilization of his people--he whose wisdom has projected the excellence of all that is on the earth or in the lakes or in the sea." "Behold the first word and the first discourse. There was yet no man nor any animal, * * * nothing was but the firmament. The face of the earth had not yet appeared over the peaceful sea, and all the space of heaven * * * nothing but immobility and silence in the night." "Alone also the Creator, the Former, the Dominator, the Feathered Serpent--those that engender, those that give being--they are upon the water like a growing light. They are enveloped in green and blue, and therefore their name is Gucumatz."[6] "Lo now how the heavens exist, how exists also the Heart of Heaven; such is the name of God. It is thus that he is called. And they spake, they consulted together and meditated; they mingled their words and their opinions." "And the creation [of the earth] was verily after this wise. Earth, they said, and on the instant it was formed; like a cloud or a fog was its beginning. Then the mountains rose over the water like great fishes; in an instant the mountains and the plains were visible, and the cypress and the pine appeared. Then was the Gucumatz filled with joy, crying out: Blessed be thy coming, O Heart of Heaven, Hurakan, Thunderbolt. Our work and our labor has accomplished its end." This corresponds to the work of the first four creative days; and next details are given as to the introduction of animals, with which, however, the Creator is represented as dissatisfied, because they could not know or invoke the Creator. They are therefore condemned to be subject to be devoured one of another. Again there is a council in heaven, and the gods determine to make man. But he also is imperfect, for he has speech without intelligence: so he is condemned to be destroyed by water. A new council is held, and a second race of men produced; but this fails in the capacity for religious worship--"they forgot the Heart of Heaven." These were partly destroyed by fire and partly converted into apes. Lastly another council is held, and perfect men created. Then follows a remarkable series of stories relating to the early history and migrations of men. It is known that similar creation myths existed among the Mexicans and other early civilized nations of America, and in ruder and more grotesque forms even among the semi-barbarous and hunter tribes. Their connection with the ancient Semitic and Turanian revelations of Asia is unquestionable. We have thus in the Assyrian Genesis a relic of early religious belief belonging to a period when such widely separated stocks as the Assyrian and American were still one: to a period, therefore, presumably long anterior to that of Moses. Yet at this very early period the central portions at least of the Turanian race had already devised some means of recording their traditions in writing--probably the arrow-head writing, afterwards used by the Assyrians, had already been invented. Again, at this early period a complex polytheism had already sprung up, and this was connected with cosmological ideas, inasmuch as the primitive abyss, the firmament, the starry heavens, the principle of life, were all subordinate gods; and so were also some of the earliest of the patriarchs of the human race. It is possible, however, that this was among the early Chaldeans an exoteric representation for the vulgar, and that the priestly caste may have understood it in a monotheistic sense. In any case, the idea of a Supreme Creator remains behind the whole. Farther, in the early Chaldean record we have a more detailed and expanded document than that of the Hebrew Genesis, probably intended for the popular ear, and to include as much as possible of the current mythology. As an example, I quote the following in relation to the creation of the moon, being apparently a part of the narrative of that creative period corresponding with the fourth day of Genesis: "In its mass [that is, of the lower chaos] he made a boiling, The God Uru [the moon] he caused to rise out, the night he overshadowed. To fix it also for the light of the night until the shining of the day, That the month might not be broken and in its amount be regular. At the beginning of the month at the rising of the night, His horns are breaking through to shine in the heavens. On the seventh day to a circle he begins to swell, And stretches toward the dawn farther." We now come to the historical connection of all this with Abraham and with the Hebrew Scriptures. The early life of the "Father of the Faithful" belongs to the time when Turanian and Semitic elements were mingled in the Euphratean valley. Himself of the stock of Shem, he dwelt in Ur of the Chaldees, a city in whose ruins, now known by the name of Mugheir, Chaldean inscriptions have been found of a date anterior to that of the patriarch. In the time of Abraham a polytheistic religion already existed in Ur, for we are told that his father "served other gods." Further, the legends of the creation and the deluge, and the antediluvian age, with the history of Nimrod and other postdiluvian heroes, existed in a written form; and, strange though this may seem, there can be little doubt that Abraham, before he left Ur of the Chaldees, had read the same creation legends that have so recently been translated and published by Mr. Smith. But Abraham's relation to these was of a peculiar kind. With a spiritual enlightenment beyond that of his age, he dissented from the Turanian animism and polytheism, and maintained that pure and spiritual monotheism which, according to the Bible, had been the original faith of the sons of Noah. But he was overborne by the tendencies of his time, and probably by the royal and priestly influence then dominant in Chaldea, and he went forth from his native land in search of a country where he might have freedom to worship God. It is thus that Abraham appears as the earliest reformer, the first of those martyrs of conscience who fear not to differ from the majority, the father and prototype of the faithful of every age, and the earliest apostle of the monotheistic faith which still reigns among all the higher races of men. Did Abraham take with him in his pilgrimage the records of his people? It is scarcely possible to doubt that he did, and this probably in a written form, but purified from the polytheism and inane imaginations accreted upon them; or perhaps he had access to still older and more primitive records anterior to the rise of the Turanian superstitions. In any case we may safely infer that Abraham and his tribe carried with them the substance of all that part of Genesis which contains the history of the world up to his time, and that this would be a precious heir-loom of his family, until it was edited and incorporated in the Pentateuch by his great descendant Moses. It seems plain, therefore, that the original prophet or seer to whom the narrative of creation was revealed lived before Abraham, but we need not doubt that the latter had the benefit of divine guidance in his noble stand against the idolatry of his age, and in his selection of the documents on which his own theology was based. These considerations help us to understand the persistence of Hebrew monotheism in the presence of the idolatries of Canaan and Egypt, since these were closely allied to the Chaldean system against which Abraham had protested. They also explain the recognition by Abraham, as co-religionists, of such monotheistic personages as Melchisedec, king of Salem. They further illustrate the nature of the religious basis in his people's beliefs on which Moses had to work, and on which he founded his theocratic system. Before leaving this part of the subject, I would observe that the view above given; while it explains the agreement between the Hebrew Genesis and other ancient religious beliefs, is in strict accordance with the teachings of Genesis itself. The history given there implies monotheism and knowledge of God as the Creator and Redeemer, in antediluvian and early postdiluvian times, a decadence from this into a systematic polytheism at a very early date, the protest and dissent of Abraham, his call of God to be the upholder of a purer faith, and the maintenance of that faith by his descendants. Besides this, any careful reader of Genesis and of the book of Job, which, whatever its origin, must be more ancient than the Mosaic law, will readily discover indications that Abraham and the patriarchs were in the possession of documents and traditions of the same purport with those in the early chapters of Genesis, and that these were to them their only sacred literature. The reader of the Pentateuch must carry this idea with him, if he would have any clear conception of the unity and symmetry of these remarkable books. THE MOSAIC GENESIS. In the period of 400 years intervening between Abraham's departure from Ur and the exodus of Israel from Egypt, no great prophetic mind, like that of the Father of the Faithful, appeared among the Hebrews. But then arose Moses, the greatest figure in all antiquity before the advent of Christ, and who was destined to give permanence and world-wide prevalence to the faith for which Abraham had sacrificed so much. Under the leadership of Moses, the Abrahamidæ, now reduced to the condition of a serf population, emancipated themselves from Egyptian bondage, and, after forty years of wandering desert life, settled themselves permanently on the hills and in the valleys of Palestine. The voice of the ruling race, indistinctly conveyed to us from that distant antiquity, maintains that the fugitive slaves were an abject and contemptible herd; but the leader of the exodus informs us that, though cruelly trodden down by a haughty despot, they were of noble parentage, the heirs of high hopes and promises. Their migration is certainly the most remarkable national movement in the world's history--remarkable, not merely in its events and immediate circumstances, but in its remote political, literary, and moral results. The rulers of Egypt, polished, enlightened, and practical men, were yet the devotees of a complicated system of hero and animal worship, like that from which Abraham dissented, and derived in great part from the "animism" which caused some of the oldest nations of the world to associate a spiritual indwelling with the natural objects surrounding them; or, if they had ceased to believe in this, they had sunk into a materialistic devotion to the good things of the present world, combined with a superstitious belief in the efficacy of priestly absolution. The slaves, leaving all this behind them, rose in their religious opinions to the pure and spiritual monotheism of the great father of their race; and their leader presented to them a law unequalled up to our time in its union of justice, patriotism, and benevolence, and established among them, for the first time in the world's history, a free constitutional republic. Nor is this all; unexampled though such results are elsewhere in the case of serfs suddenly emancipated. The Hebrew lawgiver has interwoven his institutions in a great historical composition, including the grand and simple cosmogony of the patriarchs, a detailed account of the affiliation and ethnological relations of the races of men, and a narrative of the fortunes of his own people; intimating not only that they were a favored and chosen race, but that of them was to arise a great Deliverer, who would bless all nations with pardon and with peace,[7] and would solve once for all those great problems of the relations of man to God and the unseen world, which in the time of Moses as in our own were the most momentous of all, and gave to questions of origins all their practical value. The lawgiver passed to his rest. His laws and literature, surviving through many vicissitudes, have produced in each succeeding age a new harvest of poetry and history, leavened with their own spirit. In the mean time the learning and the superstition of Egypt faded from the eyes of men. The splendid political and military organizations of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Macedon arose and crumbled into dust. The wonderful literature of Greece blazed forth and expired. That of Rome, a reflex and copy of the former, had reached its culminating point; and no prophet had arisen among any of these Gentile nations to teach them the truth of God. The world, with all its national liberties crushed out, its religion and its philosophy corrupted and enfeebled to the last degree by an endless succession of borrowings and intermixtures, lay prostrate under the iron heel of Rome. Then appeared among the now obscure remnant of Israel, one who announced himself as the Prophet like unto Moses, promised of old; but a prophet whose mission it was to redeem not Israel only, but the whole world, and to make all who will believe, children of faithful Abraham. Adopting the whole of the sacred literature of the Hebrews, and proving his mission by its words, he sent forth a few plain men to write its closing books, and to plant it on the ruins of all the time-honored beliefs of the nations--beliefs supported by a splendid and highly organized priestly system and by despotic power, and gilded by all the highest efforts of poetry and art. The story is a very familiar one; but it is marvellous beyond all others. Nor is the modern history of the Bible less wonderful. Exhumed from the rubbish of the Middle Ages, it has entered on a new career of victory. It has stimulated the mind of modern Europe to all its highest efforts, and has been the charter of its civil and religious liberties. Its wondrous revelation of all that man most desires to know, in the past, in the present, and in his future destinies, has gone home to the hearts of men in all ranks of society and in all countries. In many great nations it is the only rule of religious faith. In every civilized country it is the basis of all that is most valuable in religion. Where it has been withheld from the people, civilization in its highest aspects has languished, and superstition, priestcraft, and tyranny have held their ground or have perished under the assaults of a heartless and inhuman infidelity. Where it has been a household book, education has necessarily flourished, liberty has taken root, and the higher nature of man has been developed to the full. Driven from many other countries by tyrannical interference with liberty of thought and discussion, or by a short-sighted ecclesiasticism, it has taken up its special abode with the greatest commercial nations of our time; and, scattered by their agency broadcast over the world, it is read by every nation under heaven in its own tongue, and is slowly but surely preparing the way for wider and greater changes than any that have heretofore resulted from its influence. Explain it as we may, the Bible is a great literary miracle; and no amount of inspiration or authority that can be claimed for it is more strange or incredible than the actual history of the book. Yet no book has ever thrown itself into so decided antagonism with all the great forces of evil in the world. Tyranny hates it, because the Bible so strongly maintains the individual value and rights of man as man. The spirit of caste dislikes it for the same reason. Anarchical license, on the other hand, finds nothing but discouragement in it. Priestcraft gnashes its teeth at it, as the very embodiment of private judgment in religion, and because it so scornfully ignores human authority in matters of conscience, and human intervention between man and his Maker. Skepticism sneers at it, because it requires faith and humility, and threatens ruin to the unbeliever. It launches its thunders against every form of violence or fraud or allurement that seeks to profit by wrong or to pander to the vices of mankind; all these consequently are its foes. On the other hand, by its uncompromising stand with reference to certain scientific and historical facts, it has appeared to oppose the progress of thought and speculation; though, as we shall see, it has been unfairly accused in this last respect. With its antagonism to the evil that is in the world we have at present nothing to do, except to caution the student of this venerable literature against the prejudices which interested and unscrupulous foes seek to cultivate. Its doctrine of the origin of man and of the world, and the relation of this to modern scientific and historical results, is that which now claims our attention; and this more especially in the relation which the Mosaic cosmogony, considered as an early revelation from God, may be found to bear to the facts which modern scientific research has elicited from the universe itself. The aspects in which apparent conflicts present themselves are threefold. At one time it was not unusual to impugn the historical accuracy of the Pentateuch on the evidence of the Greek historians; and on many points scarcely any corroborative evidence could be cited in favor of the Hebrew writers. In our own time much of this difficulty has been removed, and an immense amount of learned research has been reduced to waste paper, by the circumstance that the monuments of Egypt and Assyria have risen up to bear testimony in favor of the Bible; and scarcely any sane man now doubts the value of the Hebrew history. The battle-ground has in consequence been shifted farther back, to points concerning the affiliation of the races of men, the absolute antiquity of man's residence on the earth, and the condition of prehistoric men; questions on which we can scarcely expect to find, at least for a long time, any decisive monumental or scientific evidence. Secondly, the Bible commits itself to certain cosmological doctrines and statements respecting the system of nature, and details of that system, more or less approaching to the domain which geology occupies in its investigations of the past history of the earth; and at every stage in the progress of modern science, independently of the mischief done by smatterers and skeptics, earnest bigotry on the one hand, and earnest scientific enthusiasm on the other, have come into collision. One stumbling-block after another has, it is true, been removed by mutual concession and farther enlightenment, and by the removal of false traditional interpretations of the sacred records, as well as by farther discoveries in relation to nature. But the field of conflict has thereby apparently only changed; and we still have some Christians in consequence regarding the revelations of natural science with suspicion, and some scientific men cherishing a sullen resentment against what they regard as an intolerant intermeddling of theology with the domain of legitimate investigation. Lastly, the great growth of physical science, and the tendency to take partial views of the universe as if it were comprehended in mere matter and force, with similarly partial views of the doctrines of continuity and the conservation of forces, along with the growth of a belief in spontaneous evolution as a philosophical dogma, have placed many scientific minds in a position which makes them treat the whole question of the origin and destiny of man and of the world with absolute indifference. There can nevertheless be no question that the whole subject is at the present moment in a more satisfactory state than ever previously; that much has been done for the solution of difficulties; that many theologians admit the great service which in many cases science has rendered to the interpretation of the Bible, and that most naturalists feel themselves free from undue trammels. Above all, there is a very general disposition to admit the distinctness and independence of the fields of revelation and natural science, the possibility of their arriving at some of the same truths, though in very different ways, and the folly of expecting them fully and manifestly to agree in the present state of our information. The literature of this kind of natural history has also become very extensive, and there are few persons who do not at least know that there are methods of reconciling the cosmogony of Moses with that obtained from the study of nature. For this very reason the time is favorable for an unprejudiced discussion of the questions involved; and for presenting on the one hand to naturalists a summary of what the Bible does actually teach respecting the early history of the earth and man, and on the other to those whose studies lie in the book which they regard as the Word of God, rather than in the material universe which they regard as his work, a view of the points in which the teaching of the Bible comes into contact with natural science at its present stage of progress. These are the ends which I propose to myself in the following pages, and which I shall endeavor to pursue in a spirit of fair and truthful investigation; having regard on the one hand to the claims and influence of the venerable Book of God, and on the other to the rights and legitimate results of modern scientific inquiry. The plan which I have proposed to myself in this part of my subject is to take the statements of Genesis in their order, and consider what they import, and how they appear to harmonize with what we know from other sources. This will occupy some space, but it will save time in dealing with the remaining parts of the subject. Before entering upon it, I propose to devote one chapter to the answers to three questions which concern the whole doctrine of revealed religion, whether Semitic, Turanian, or Aryan. These are: (1) _Why_ the origin of things should be revealed; (2) _How_ it could be revealed; and (3) _What_ would require to be revealed in order to form the basis of a rational theism. CHAPTER II. OBJECTS AND NATURE OF A REVELATION OF ORIGINS. "There are two books from which I collect my divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant nature--that universal and public manuscript that lies expansed unto the eyes of all."--SIR T. BROWNE. There are some questions, simple enough in themselves, respecting the general character and object of the references to nature and creation in the Scriptures, which yet are so variously and vaguely answered that they deserve some consideration before entering on the detailed study of the subject. These are: (1) The object of the introduction of such subjects into the Hebrew sacred books--the _why_ of the revelation of origins. (2) The origin, character, and structure of the narrative of creation and other cosmological statements in those books--the _how_ of the revelation. (3) The character of the Biblical cosmogony, and general views of nature to which it leads--the _what_ of the revelation. (1) _The Object of the Introduction of a Cosmogony in the Bible._--Man, even in his rudest and most uncivilized state, does not limit his mental vision to his daily wants. He desires to live not merely in the present, but in the future also and the past. This is a psychological peculiarity which, as much as any other, marks his separation from the lower animals, and which in his utmost degradation he never wholly loses. Whatever may be fancied as to imagined prehistoric nations, it is certain that no people now existing, or historically known to us, is so rude as to be destitute of some hopes or fears in reference to the future, some traditions as to the distant past. Every religious system that has had any influence over the human mind has included such ideas. Nor are we to regard this as an accident. It depends on fixed principles in our constitution, which crave as their proper aliment such information; and if it can not be obtained, the mind, rather than want it, invents for itself. We might infer from this very circumstance that a true religion, emanating from the Creator, would supply this craving; and might content ourselves with affirming that, on this ground alone, it behooved revelation to have a cosmogony. But the religion of the Hebrews especially required to be explicit as to the origin of the earth and all things therein. Its peculiar dogma is that of one only God, the Creator, requiring the sole homage of his creatures. The heathen for the most part acknowledged in some form a supreme god, but they also gave divine honors to subordinate gods, to deceased ancestors and heroes, and to natural phenomena, in such a manner as practically to obscure their ideas of the Creator, or altogether to set aside his worship. The influence of such idolatry was the chief antagonism which the Hebrew monotheism had to encounter; and we learn from the history of the nation how often the worshippers of Jehovah were led astray by its allurements. To guard against this danger, it was absolutely necessary that no place should be left for the introduction of polytheism, by placing the whole work of creation and providence under the sole jurisdiction of the One God. Moses consequently takes strong ground on these points. He first insists on the creation of all things by the fiat of the Supreme. Next he specifies the elaboration and arrangement of all the powers of inanimate nature, and the introduction of every form of organic existence, as the work of the same First Cause. Lastly, he insists on the creation of a primal human pair, and on the descent from them of all the branches of the human race, including of course those ancestors and magnates who up to his time had been honored with apotheosis; and on the same principle he explains the golden age of Eden, the fall, the cherubic emblems, the deluge, and other facts in human history interwoven by the heathen with their idolatries. He thus grasps the whole material of ancient idolatry, reduces it within the compass of monotheism, and shows its relation to the one true primitive religion, which was that not only of the Hebrews, but of right that of the whole world, whose prevailing polytheism consisted in perversions of its truth or unity. For such reasons the early chapters of Genesis are so far from being of the character of digressions from the scope and intention of the book, that they form a substratum of doctrine absolutely essential to the Hebrew faith, and equally so to its development in Christianity. The references to nature in the Bible, however, and especially in its poetical books, far exceed the absolute requirements of the reasons above stated; and this leads to another and very interesting view, namely, the tendency of monotheism to the development of truthful and exalted ideas of nature. The Hebrew theology allowed no attempt at visible representations of the Creator or of his works for purposes of worship. It thus to a great extent prevented that connection of imitative art with religion which flourished in heathen antiquity, and has been introduced into certain forms of Christianity. But it cultivated the higher arts of poetry and song, and taught them to draw their inspiration from nature as the only visible revelation of Deity. Hence the growth of a healthy "physico-theology," excluding all idolatry of natural phenomena, and all superstitious dread of them as independent powers, but inviting to their examination as manifestations of God, and leading to conceptions of the unity of plan in the cosmos, of which polytheism, even in its highest literary efforts, was quite incapable. In the same manner the Bible has always proved itself an active stimulant of natural science, connecting such studies, as it does, with our higher religious sentiments; while polytheism and materialism have acted as repressive influences, the one because it obscures the unity of nature, the other because, in robbing it of its presiding Divinity, it gives a cold and repulsive, corpse-like aspect, chilling to the imagination, and incapable of attracting the general mind. Naturalists should not forget their obligations to the Bible in this respect, and should on this very ground prefer its teachings to those of modern pantheism and positivism, and still more to those of mere priestly authority. Very few minds are content with simple materialism, and those who must have a God, if they do not recognize the Jehovah of the Hebrew Scriptures as the Creator and Supreme Ruler of the universe, are too likely to seek for him in the dimness of human authority and tradition, or of pantheistic philosophy; both of them more akin to ancient heathenism than to modern civilization, and in their ultimate tendencies, if not in their immediate consequences, quite as hostile to progress in science as to evangelical Christianity. Every student of human nature is aware of the influence in favor of the appreciation of natural beauty and sublimity which the Bible impresses on those who are deeply imbued with its teaching; even where that same teaching has induced what may be regarded as a puritanical dislike of imitative art, at least in its religious aspects. On the other hand, naturalists can not refuse to acknowledge the surpassing majesty of the views of nature presented in the Bible. No one has expressed this better than Humboldt: "It is characteristic of the poetry of the Hebrews that, as a reflex of monotheism, it always embraces the universe in its unity, comprising both terrestrial life and the luminous realms of space; it dwells but rarely on the individuality of phenomena, preferring the contemplation of great masses. The Hebrew poet does not depict nature as a self-dependent object, glorious in its individual beauty, but always as in relation or subjection to a higher spiritual power. Nature is to him a work of creation and order--the living expression of the omnipresence of the Divinity in the visible world." In reference to the 104th Psalm, which may be viewed as a poetical version of the narrative of creation in Genesis, the same great writer remarks: "We are astonished to find in a lyrical poem of such a limited compass, the whole universe--the heavens and the earth--sketched with a few bold touches. The calm and toilsome life of man, from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, when his daily work is done, is here contrasted with the moving life of the elements of nature. This contrast and generalization in the conception of the mutual action of natural phenomena, and the retrospection of an omnipresent invisible Power, which can renew the earth or crumble it to dust, constitute a solemn and exalted rather than a gentle form of poetic creation."[8] If we admit the source of inspiration claimed by the Hebrew poets, we shall not be surprised that they should thus write of nature. We shall only lament that so many pious and learned interpreters of Scripture have been too little acquainted with nature to appreciate the natural history of the Book of God, or adequately to illustrate it to those who depend on their teaching; and that so many naturalists have contented themselves with wondering at the large general views of the Hebrew poets, without considering that they are based on a revelation of the nature and order of the creative work which supplied to the Hebrew mind the place of those geological wonders which have astonished and enlarged the minds of modern nations. A modern divine, himself well read in nature, truly says: "If men of piety were also men of science, and if men of science were to read the Scriptures, there would be more faith on the earth and also more philosophy."[9] In a similar strain the patient botanist of the marine algæ thus pleads for the joint claims of the Bible and nature: "Unfortunately it happens that in the educational course prescribed to our divines natural history has no place, for which reason many are ignorant of the important bearings which the book of nature has on the book of revelation. They do not consider, apparently, that both are from God--both are his faithful witnesses to mankind. And if this be so, is it reasonable to suppose that either, without the other, can be fully understood? It is only necessary to glance at the absurd commentaries in reference to natural objects which are to be found in too many annotations of the Holy Scriptures to be convinced of the benefit which the clergy would themselves derive from a more extended study of the works of creation. And to missionaries especially, a minute familiarity with natural objects must be a powerful assistance in awakening the attention of the savage, who, after his manner, is a close observer, and likely to detect a fallacy in his teacher, should the latter attempt a practical illustration of his discourse without sufficient knowledge. These are not days in which persons who ought to be our guides in matters of doctrine can afford to be behind the rest of the world in knowledge; nor can they safely sneer at the knowledge which puffeth up, until, like the apostle, they have sounded its depths and proved its shallowness."[10] It is truly much to be desired that divines and commentators, instead of trying to distort the representations of nature in the Bible into the supposed requirements of a barbarous age, or of setting aside modern discoveries as if they could have no connection with Scripture truth, would study natural objects and laws sufficiently to bring themselves in this respect to the level of the Hebrew writers. Such knowledge would be cheaply purchased even by the sacrifice of a part of their verbal and literary training. It is well that this point is now attracting the attention of the Christian world, and it is but just to admit that some of our more eminent religious writers have produced noble examples of accurate illustrations of Scripture derived from nature. In any case, the Bible itself can not be charged with any neglect of the claims of nature or with any narrow tendency to place material and spiritual things in antagonism to one another. Another reason why a revelation from God must deal with the origins of things, is that such revelation is, like creation, in its own nature progressive. It is given little by little to successive generations of men, and must proceed from the first rudiments of religious truth onward to its higher developments with the growth of humanity from age to age. Hence the teachings in the early chapters of Genesis are of the simplest and most child-like character, and the first of these early teachings is necessarily that of God the Creator, just as our elementary catechisms for children have been wont to begin with the question, "Who made you?" In this way man is led in the most direct and simple way to the feet of the Universal Father, and a foundation is laid whereon further religious teaching adapted to the growth of the individual mind and to the growing complications of human society can be built. But again, alike in the earliest and simplest as in the more advanced states of the human mind, if spiritual things are to be taught, it must be through the medium of material things. We have no language to express in any direct way spiritual truths; they must be given to us in terms of the natural. We have not yet learned the tongue of the immortals, and probably can not learn it in this world. The word "spirit" itself, which we borrow from the Latin, the Greek _Pneuma_, the Hebrew _Ruah_, primarily all agree in signifying breath or wind. We have to speak of our own breath when we mean our spiritual nature, of God's breath when we mean his spiritual nature, and so of all other things not obvious to our senses. There is constant danger in this that the material shall be taken for the spiritual of which it is the symbol, the figure for the reality, the creature for the Creator, and this danger is best counteracted by a decided testimony in relation to the origin of all material things in the will of the spiritual and eternal God. Thus the Bible writers are enabled to use a free and bold manner of speech respecting divine things. Their expressions at one time appear pantheistic and at another anthropomorphic; they see God in every thing, and use with the utmost freedom natural emblems to indicate his perfections and procedure, and our relations to him. In this way there is life and action in their teaching, and it is removed as far as possible from a dry, abstract theology, while equally remote from any tinge of idolatry or superstition. It may, however, be objected that by the introduction of a cosmogony the Bible exposes itself to a conflict with science, and that thereby injury results both to science and to religion. This is a grave charge, and one that has evidently had much weight with many minds, since it has been the subject of entire treatises designed to illustrate the history of the conflict or to explain its nature. The revelation of God's will to man for his moral guidance, if necessary at all, was necessary before the rise of natural science. Men could not do without the knowledge of the unity of nature and of the unity of God, until these great truths could be worked out by scientific induction. Perhaps they might never have been so worked out. Therefore a revealed book of origins has a right to precedence in this matter. Nor need it in any way come into conflict with the science subsequently to grow up. Science does not deal so much with the origin of nature as with its method and laws, and all that is necessary on the part of a revelation, to avoid conflict with it, is to confine itself to statements of phenomena and to avoid hypotheses. This is eminently the course of the Bible. In its cosmogony it shuns all embellishments and details, and contents itself with the fact of creation and a slight sketch of its order; and in their subsequent references to nature the sacred writers are strictly phenomenal in their statements, and refer every thing directly to the will of God, without any theory as to secondary causes and relations. They are thus decided and positive on the points with reference to which it behooves revelation to testify, and absolutely non-committal on the points which belong to the exclusive domain of science. What, then, are we to say of the imaginary "conflict of science with religion," of which so much has been made? Simply that it results largely from misapprehension and from misuse of terms. True religion, which consists in practical love to God and to our fellow-men, can have no conflict with science. True science is its fast ally. The Bible, considered as a revelation of spiritual truth to man for his salvation and enlightenment, can have no conflict with science. It promotes the study of nature, rendering it honorable by giving it the dignity of an inquiry into the ways of God, and rendering it safe by separating it from all ideas of magic and necromancy. It gives a theological basis to the ideas of the unity of nature and of natural law. The conflict of science, when historically analyzed, is found to have been fourfold--with the Church, with theology, with superstition, and with false or imperfect science and philosophy. Religious men may have identified themselves from time to time with these opponents, but that is all; and much more frequently the opposition has been by bad men more or less professing religious objects. Organizations calling themselves "the Church," and whose warrant from the Bible is often of the slenderest, have denounced and opposed and persecuted new scientific truths; but they have just as often denounced the Bible itself, and religious doctrines founded on it. Theology claims to be itself one of the sciences, and as such it is necessarily imperfect and progressive, and may at any time be more or less in conflict with other sciences; but theology is not religion, and may often have very little in common either with true religion or the Bible. When discussions arise between theology and other sciences, it is only a pity that either side should indulge in what has been called the _odium theologicum_, but which is unfortunately not confined to divines. Superstition, considered as the unreasonable fear of natural agencies, is a passive rather than an active opponent of science. But revelation, which affirms unity, law, and a Father's hand in nature, is the deadly foe of superstition, and no people who have been readers of the Bible and imbued with its spirit have ever been found ready to molest or persecute science. Work of this sort has been done only by the ignorant, superstitious, and priest-ridden votaries of systems which withhold the Bible from the people, and detest it as much as they dislike science. Perhaps the most troublesome opposition to science, or rather to the progress of science, has sprung from the tenacity with which men hold to old ideas. These, which may have been at one time the best science attainable, root themselves in popular literature, and even in learned bodies and in educational books and institutions. They become identified with men's conceptions both of nature and religion, and modify their interpretations of the Bible itself. It thus becomes a most difficult matter to wrench them from men's minds, and their advocates are too apt to invoke in their defense political, social, and ecclesiastical powers, and to seek to support them by the authority of revelation, when this may perhaps be quite as favorable to the newer views opposed to them. All these conflicts are, however, necessary incidents in human progress, which comes only by conflict; and there is reason to believe that they would be as severe in the absence of revealed religion as in its presence, were it not that the absence of revelation seems often to produce a fixity and stagnation of thought unfavorable to any new views, and consequently to some extent to any intellectual conflict. It has been, indeed, to the disinterment of the Bible in the Reformation of the fifteenth century that the world owes, more than to any other cause, the immense growth of modern science, and the freedom of discussion which now prevails. The Protestant idea of individual judgment in matters of religion is thoroughly Biblical, for the Bible everywhere appeals to men in this way; and this idea is the strongest guarantee that the world possesses for intellectual liberty in other matters. We conclude, therefore, on all these grounds, that it was necessary that a revelation from God should take strong and positive ground on the question of the origin of the universe. * * * * * (2) _The Origin, Method, and Structure of the Scriptural Cosmogony._--A respectable physicist, but somewhat shallow naturalist and theologian, whose works at one time attracted much attention, has said of the first chapter of Genesis: "It can not be history--it may be poetry." Its claims to be history we shall investigate under another head, but it is pertinent to our present inquiry to ask whether it can be poetry. That its substance or matter is poetical no one who has read it once can believe; but it can not be denied that in its form it approaches somewhat to that kind of thought-rhythm or parallelism which gives so peculiar a character to Hebrew poetry. We learn from many Scripture passages, especially in the Proverbs, that this poetical parallelism need not necessarily be connected with poetical thought; that in truth it might be used, as rhyme is sometimes with us, to aid the memory. The oldest acknowledged verse in Scripture is a case in point. Lamech, who lived before the flood, appears to have slain a man in self-defense, or at least in an encounter in which he himself was wounded; and he attempts to define the nature of the crime in the following words: "Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; Ye wives of Lamech, hearken to my speech:-- I have slain a man to my wounding, And a young man to my hurt; If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, Truly Lamech seventy and seven fold." All this is prosaic enough in matter, but the form into which it is thrown gives it a certain dignity, and impresses it on the memory; which last object was probably what the author of this sole fragment of antediluvian literature had in view. He succeeded too--for the sentiment was handed down, probably orally; and Moses incorporates it in his narration, perhaps on account of its interest as the first record of the distinction between willful murder like that of Cain, and justifiable homicide. It is interesting also to observe the same parallelism of style, no doubt with the same objects, in many old Egyptian monumental inscriptions, which, however grandiloquent, are scarcely poetical.[11] It also appears in that ancient record of creation and the deluge recently rescued from the clay tablets of Nineveh. Now in the first chapter of Genesis, and the first three verses of chapter second, being the formal general narrative of creation, on which, as we shall see, every other statement on the subject in the Bible is based, we have this peculiar parallelism of style. If we ask why, the answer must, I think, be--to give dignity and symmetry to what would otherwise be a dry abstract, and still more to aid memory. This last consideration, perhaps indicating that this chapter, like the apology of Lamech, had been handed down orally for a long period, connects itself with the theory of the pre-Abrahamic origin of these documents to which reference has already been made. The form of the narrative, however, in no way impairs its precision or accuracy of statement. On this Eichhorn well says: "There lies at the foundation of the first chapter a carefully designed plan, all whose parts are carried out with much art, whereby its appropriate place is assigned to every idea;" and we may add, whereby every idea is expressed in the simplest and fewest words, yet with marvellous accuracy, amounting to an almost scientific precision of diction, for which both the form into which it is thrown and the homogeneous and simple character of the Hebrew language are very well adapted. Much of this indeed remains in the English version, though our language is less perfectly suited than the Hebrew for the concise announcement of general truths of this description. Our translators have, however, deviated greatly from the true sense of many important words, especially where they have taken the Septuagint translation for their guide, as in the words "firmament," "whales," "creeping things," etc. These errors will be noticed in subsequent pages. In the mean time I may merely add that the labors of the ablest Biblical critics give us every reason to conclude that the received text of Genesis preserves, almost without an iota of change, the beautiful simplicity of its first chapter; and that we now have it in a more perfect state than that in which it was presented to the translators of most of the early versions. It must also be admitted that the object in view was best served by that direct reference to the creative fiat, and ignoring of all secondary causes, which are conspicuous in this narrative. This is indeed the general tone of the Bible in speaking of natural phenomena; and this mode of proceeding is in perfect harmony with its claims to divine authority. Had not this course been chosen, no other could have been adopted, in strict consistency with truth, short of a full revelation of the whole system of nature, in the details of all its laws and processes. This we now know would have been impossible, and, if possible, useless or even mischievous. Regarded from this point of view--the plenary inspiration of the book--the Scriptural references to creation profess to furnish a very general outline, for theological purposes, of the principal features of a vast region unexplored when they were written, and into which human research has yet penetrated along only a few lines. Natural science, in following out these lines of observation, has reached some of the objects delineated in the Scriptural sketch; of others it has obtained distant glimpses; many are probably unknown, and we can appreciate the true value and dimensions relatively to the whole of very few. So vast indeed are the subjects of the bold sketch of the Hebrew prophet, that natural science can not pretend as yet so to fill in the outline as quite to measure the accuracy of its proportions. Yet the lines, though few, are so boldly drawn, and with so much apparent unity and symmetry, that we almost involuntarily admit that they are accurate and complete. This may appear to be underrating the actual progress of science relatively to this great foreshadowing outline; but I know that those most deeply versed in the knowledge of nature will be the least disposed to quarrel with it, whatever skepticism they may entertain as to the greater general completeness of the inspired record. Another point which deserves a passing notice here is the theory of Dr. Kurtz and others, that the Mosaic narrative represents a vision of creation, analogous to those prophetic visions which appear in the later books of Scripture. This is beyond all question the most simple and probable solution of the origin of the document, when viewed as inspired, but we shall have to recur to it on a future page. But with respect to the precise origin of this cosmogony, the question now arises, Is it really in substance a revelation from God to man? We must not disguise from ourselves that this deliberate statement of an order of creation in so far challenges comparison with the results of science, and this in a very different way from that which applies to the incidental references to nature in the Bible. Further, inasmuch as it relates to events which transpired before the creation of man, it is of the nature of prophecy rather than of history. It is, in short, either an inspired revelation of the divine procedure in creation, or it is a product of human imagination or research, or a deliberate fraud. To no part of the Bible do these alternatives more strictly apply than to its first chapter. This "can not be history" in the strict acceptation of the term. It relates to events which no human eye witnessed, respecting which no human testimony could give any information. It represents the creation of man as the last of a long series of events, of which it professes to inform us. The knowledge of these events can not have been a matter of human experience. If at all entitled to confidence, the narrative must, therefore, be received as an inspired document, not handed down by any doubtful tradition, but existing as originally transfused into human language from the mind of the Author of nature himself. This view is in no way affected by the hypothesis, already mentioned, that the first chapters of Genesis were compiled by Moses from more ancient documents. This merely throws back the revelation to a higher antiquity, and requires us to suppose the agency of two inspired men instead of one. It would be out of place here to enter into any argument for the inspiration of Scripture, or to attempt to define the nature of that inspiration. I merely wish to impress on the mind of the reader that without the admission of its reality, or at least its possibility, our present inquiry becomes merely a matter of curious antiquarian research. We must also on this ground distinguish between the claims of the Scriptures and those of tradition or secular history, when they refer to the same facts. The traditions and cosmogonies of some ancient nations have many features in common with the Bible narrative; and, on the supposition that Moses compiled from older documents, they may be portions of this more ancient sacred truth, but clothed in the varied garments of the fanciful mythological creeds which have sprung up in later and more degenerate times. Such fragments may safely be received as secondary aids to the understanding of the authentic record, but it would be folly to seek in them for the whole truth. They are but the scattered masses of ore, by tracing which we may sometimes open up new and rich portions of the vein of primitive lore from which they have been derived. It is, however, quite necessary here formally to inquire if there are any hypotheses short of that of plenary inspiration which may allow us to attach any value whatever to this most ancient document. I know but two views of this kind that are worthy of any attention. 1. The Mosaic account of creation may be a result of ancient scientific inquiries, analogous to those of modern geology. 2. It may be an allegorical or poetical mythus, not intended to be historical, but either devised for some extraneous purpose, or consisting of the conjectures of some gifted intellect. These alternatives we may shortly consider, though the materials for their full discussion can be furnished only by facts to be subsequently stated. I am not aware that the first of these views has been maintained by any modern writer. Some eminent scientific men are, however, disposed to adopt such an explanation of the ancient Hindoo hymns, as well as of the cosmogony of Pythagoras, which bears evidence of this origin; and it may be an easy step to infer that the Hebrew cosmogony was derived from some similar source. Not many years ago such a supposition would have been regarded as almost insane. Then the science of antiquity was only another name for the philosophy of Greece and Rome. But in recent times we have seen Egypt disclose the ruins of a mighty civilization, more grand and massive though less elegant than that of Greece, and which had reached its acme ere Greece had received its alphabet--a civilization which, according to the Scripture history, is derived from that of the primeval Cushite empire, which extended from the plains of Shinar over all Southeastern Asia, but was crushed at its centre before the dawn of secular history. We have now little reason to doubt that Moses, when he studied the learning of Egypt, held converse with men who saw more clearly and deeply into nature's mysteries than did Thales or Pythagoras, or even Aristotle.[12] Still later the remnants of old Nineveh have been exhumed from their long sepulture, and antiquaries have been astonished by the discovery that knowledge and arts, supposed to belong exclusively to far more recent times, were in the days of the early Hebrew kings, and probably very long previously, firmly established on the banks of the Tigris. Such discoveries, when compared with hints furnished by the Scriptures, tend greatly to exalt our ideas of the state of civilization at the time when they were written; and we shall perceive, in the course of our inquiry, many additional reasons for believing that the ancient Israelites were much farther advanced in natural science than is commonly supposed. We have, however, no positive proof of such a theory, and it is subject to many grave objections. The narrative itself makes no pretension to a scientific origin, it quotes no authority, and it is connected with no philosophical speculations or deductions. It bears no internal evidence of having been the result of inductive inquiry, but appeals at once to faith in the truth of the great ultimate doctrine of absolute creation, and then proceeds to detail the steps of the process, in the manner of history as recorded by a witness, and not in the manner of science tracing back effects to their causes. Farther, it refers to conditions of our planet respecting which science has even now attained to no conclusions supported by evidence, and is not in a position to make dogmatic assertions. The tone of all the ancient cosmogonies has in these respects a resemblance to that of the Scriptures, and bears testimony to a general impression pervading the mind of antiquity that there was a divine and authoritative testimony to the facts of creation, distinct from history, philosophical speculation, or induction. One of the boldest and simplest methods of this kind is that followed by the authors of the "Types of Mankind," in the attempt to assign a purely human origin to Genesis 1st. These writers admit the greater antiquity of the first chapter, though assigning the whole of the book to a comparatively modern date. They say: "The 'document Jehovah'[13] does not especially concern our present subject; and it is incomparable with the grander conception of the more ancient and unknown writer of Genesis 1st. With extreme felicity of diction and conciseness of plan, the latter has defined the most philosophical views of antiquity upon _cosmogony_; in fact so well that it has required the palæontological discoveries of the nineteenth century--at least 2500 years after his death--to overthrow his _septenary_ arrangement of 'Creation;' which, after all, would still be correct enough in great principles, were it not for one individual oversight and one unlucky blunder; not exposed, however, until long after his era, by post-Copernican astronomy. The oversight is where he wrote (Gen. i. 6-8), 'Let there be _raquiê_,' _i. e._, a _firmament_; which proves that his notions of 'sky' (solid like the concavity of a copper basin, with _stars_ set as brilliants in the metal) were the same as those of adjacent people of his time--indeed, of all men before the publication of Newton's 'Principia' and of Laplace's 'Mécanique Céleste.' The blunder is where he conceives that _aur_, 'light,' and _iom_, 'day' (Gen. i. 14-18), could have been physically possible _three whole days_ before the 'two great luminaries,' _Sun_ and _Moon_, were created. These venial errors deducted, his majestic song beautifully illustrates the simple process of ratiocination through which--often without the slightest historical proof of intercourse--different 'Types of Mankind,' at distinct epochas, and in countries widely apart, had arrived, naturally, at cosmogonic conclusions similar to the doctrines of that Hebraical school of which his harmonic and melodious numbers remain a magnificent memento. "That process seems to have been the following: The ancients knew, as we do, that man _is_ upon the earth; and they were persuaded, as we are, that his appearance was preceded by unfathomable depths of time. Unable (as we are still) to measure periods antecedent to man by any _chronological_ standard, the ancients rationally reached the tabulation of some events anterior to man through _induction_--a method not original with Lord Bacon, because known to St. Paul; 'for his unseen things from the creation of the world, his power and Godhead, are clearly seen, _being understood by the things that are made_' (Rom. i., 20). Man, they felt, could not have lived upon earth without _animal_ food; ergo, 'cattle' preceded him, together with birds, reptiles, fishes, etc. Nothing living, they knew, could have existed without light and heat; ergo, the _solar system_ antedated animal life, no less than the _vegetation_ indispensable for animal support. But terrestrial plants can not grow without _earth_; ergo, that dry land had to be separated from pre-existent 'waters.' Their geological speculations inclining rather to the _Neptunian_ than to the _Plutonian_ theory--for Werner ever preceded Hutton--the ancients found it difficult to 'divide the waters from the waters' without interposing a metallic substance that 'divided the waters which were _under_ the firmament from the waters that were _above_ the firmament;' so they inferred, logically, that a _firmament_ must have been actually created for this object. [_E.g._, 'The _windows_ of the skies' (Gen. vii., 11); 'the waters _above_ the skies' (Psa. cxlviii., 4).] Before the 'waters' (and here is the peculiar error of the genesiacal bard) some of the ancients claimed the pre-existence of _light_ (a view adopted by the writer of Genesis 1st); while others asserted that 'chaos' prevailed. Both schools united, however, in the conviction that DARKNESS--_Erebus_--anteceded all other _created things_. What, said these ancients, can have existed before the 'darkness?' _Ens entium_, the CREATOR, was the humbled reply. _Elohim_ is the Hebrew vocal expression of that climax; to define whose attributes, save through the phenomena of creation, is an attempt we leave to others more presumptuous than ourselves." The problem here set to the "unknown" author of Genesis is a hard one--given the one fact that "man is" to find in detail how the world was formed in a series of preceding ages of vast duration. Is it possible that such a problem could have been so worked out as to have endured the test of three thousand years, and the scrutiny of modern science? But there is an "oversight" in one detail, and a "blunder" in another. By reference farther on, the reader will find under the chapters on "Light" and the "Atmosphere" that the oversight and blunder are those not of the writer of Genesis, but of the learned American ethnologists in the nineteenth century; a circumstance which cuts in two ways in defense of the ancient author so unhappily unknown to his modern critics. The second of the alternatives above referred to, the mythical hypothesis, has been advanced and ably supported, especially on the continent of Europe, and by such English writers as are disposed to apply the methods of modern rationalistic criticism to the Bible. In one of its least objectionable forms it is thus stated by Professor Powell: "The narrative, then, of six periods of creation, followed by a seventh similar period of rest and blessing, was clearly designed by adaptation to their conceptions to enforce upon the Israelites the institution of the Sabbath; and in whatever way its details may be interpreted, it can not be regarded as an _historical_ statement of the _primeval_ institution of a Sabbath; a supposition which is indeed on other grounds sufficiently improbable, though often adopted. * * * If, then, we would avoid the alternative of being compelled to admit what must amount to impugning the truth of those portions at least of the Old Testament, we surely are bound to give fair consideration to the only suggestion which can set us entirely free from all the difficulties arising from the geological contradiction which does and must exist against any conceivable interpretation which retains the assertion of the historical character of the details of the narrative, as referring to the distinct transactions of each of the seven periods. * * * The one great fact couched in the general assertion that all things were created by the sole power of one Supreme Being is the whole of the representation to which an historical character can be assigned. As to the particular form in which the descriptive narrative is conveyed, we merely affirm that it can not be history--it may be poetry."[14] The general ground on which this view is entertained is the supposed irreconcilable contradiction between the literal interpretation of the Mosaic record and the facts of geology. The real amount of this difficulty we are not, in the present stage of our inquiry, prepared to estimate. We can, however, readily understand that the hypothesis depends on the supposition that the narrative of creation is posterior in date to the Mosaic ritual, and that this plain and circumstantial series of statements is a fable designed to support the Sabbatical institution, instead of the rite being, as represented in the Bible itself, a commemoration of the previously recorded fact. This is, fortunately, a gratuitous assumption, contrary to the probable date of the documents, as deduced from internal evidence and from comparison with the Assyrian and other cosmogonies; and it also completely ignores the other manifest uses mentioned under our first head. If proved, it would give to the whole the character of a pious fraud, and would obviously render any comparison with the geological history of the earth altogether unnecessary. While, therefore, it must be freely admitted that the Mosaic narrative can not be history, in so far at least as history is a product of human experience, we can not admit that it is a poetical mythus, or, in other words, that it is destitute of substantial truth, unless proved by good evidence to be so; and, when this is proved, we must also admit that it is quite undeserving of the credit which it claims as a revelation from God. Since, therefore, the events recorded in the first chapter of Genesis were not witnessed by man; since there is no reason to believe that they were discovered by scientific inquiry; and since, if true, they can not be a poetical myth, we must, in the mean time, return to our former supposition that the Mosaic cosmogony is a direct revelation from the Creator. In this respect, the position of this part of the earth's Biblical history resembles that of prophecy. Writers _may_ accurately relate contemporary events, or those which belong to the human period, without inspiration; but the moment that they profess accurately to foretell the history of the future, or to inform us of events which preceded the human period, we must either believe them to be inspired, or reject them as impostors or fanatics. Many attempts have been made to find intermediate standing-ground, but it is so precarious that the nicest of our modern critical balancers have been unable to maintain themselves upon it. Having thus determined that the Mosaic cosmogony, in its grand general features, must either be inspired or worthless, we have further to inquire to what extent it is necessary to suppose that the particular details and mode of expression of the narrative, and the subsequent allusions to nature in the Bible, must be regarded as entitled to this position. We may conceive them to have been left to the discretion of the writers; and, in that case, they will merely represent the knowledge of nature actually existing at the time. On the other hand, their accuracy may have been secured by the divine afflatus. Few modern writers have been disposed to insist on the latter alternative, and have rather assumed that these references and details are accommodated to the state of knowledge at the time. I must observe here, however, that a careful consideration of the facts gives to a naturalist a much higher estimate of the real value of the observations of nature embodied in the Scriptures than that which divines have ordinarily entertained; and, consequently, that if we suppose them of human origin, we must be prepared to modify the views generally entertained of early Oriental simplicity and ignorance. The truth is, that a large proportion of the difficulties in Scriptural natural history appear to have arisen from want of such accommodation to the low state of the knowledge of nature among translators and expositors; and this is precisely what we should expect in a veritable revelation. Its moral and religious doctrines were slowly developed, each new light illuminating previous obscurities. Its human history comes out as evidence of its truth, when compared with monumental inscriptions; and why should not the All-wise have constructed as skilfully its teachings respecting his own works? There can be no doubt whatever that the Scripture writers intended to address themselves to the common mind, which now as then requires simple and popular teaching, but they were under obligation to give truthful statements; and we need not hesitate to say, with Dr. Chalmers, in reference to a book making such claims as those of the Bible: "There is no argument, saving that grounded on the usages of popular language, which would tempt us to meddle with the literalities of that ancient and, as appears to us, authoritative document, any farther than may be required by those conventionalities of speech which spring from 'optical' impressions of nature."[15] Attempt as we may to disguise it, any other view is totally unworthy of the great Ruler of the universe, especially in a document characterized as emphatically _the truth_, and in a moral revelation, in which statements respecting natural objects need not be inserted, unless they could be rendered at once truthful and illustrative of the higher objects of the revelation. The statement often so flippantly made that the Bible was not intended to teach natural history has no application here. _Spiritual_ truths are no doubt shadowed forth in the Bible by material emblems, often but rudely resembling them, because the nature of human thought and language render this necessary, not only to the unlearned, but in some degree to all; but this principle of adaptation can not be applied to plain material facts. Yet a confusion of these two very distinct cases appears to prevail almost unaccountably in the minds of many expositors. They tell us that the Scriptures ascribe bodily members to the immaterial God, and typify his spiritual procedure by outward emblems; and this they think analogous to such doctrines as a solid firmament, a plane earth, and others of a like nature, which they ascribe to the sacred writers. We shall find that the writers of the Scriptures had themselves much clearer views, and that, even in poetical language, they take no such liberties with truth. As an illustration of the extent to which this doctrine of "accommodation" carries us beyond the limits of fair interpretation, I cite the following passage from one of the ablest and most judicious writers on the subject:[16] "It was the opinion of the ancients that the earth, at a certain height, was surrounded by a transparent hollow sphere of solid matter, which they called the firmament. When rain descended, they supposed that it was through windows or holes made in the crystalline curtain suspended in mid-heavens. To these notions the language of the Bible is frequently conformed. * * * But the most decisive example I have to give on this subject is derived from astronomy. Until the time of Copernicus no opinion respecting natural phenomena was thought better established than that the earth is fixed immovably in the centre of the universe, and that the heavenly bodies move diurnally round it. To sustain this view the most decisive language of Scripture might be quoted. God is there said to have '_established the foundations of the earth, so that they could not be removed forever_;' and the sacred writers expressly declare that the heavenly bodies _arise and set_, and nowhere allude to any proper motion of the earth." Will it be believed that, with the exception of the poetical expression, "windows of heaven," and the common forms of speech relating to sunrise and sunset, the above "decisive" instances of accommodation have no foundation whatever in the language of Scripture. The doctrine of the rotation of solid celestial spheres around the earth belongs to a Greek philosophy which arose after the Hebrew cosmogony was complete; and though it occurs in the Septuagint and other ancient versions, it is not based on the Hebrew original. In truth, we know that those Grecian philosophers--of the Ionic and Pythagorean schools--who lived nearest the times of the Hebrew writers, and who derived the elements of their science from Egypt and Western Asia, taught very different doctrines. How absurd, then, is it thus to fasten upon the sacred writers, contrary to their own words, the views of a school of astronomy which probably arose long after their time, when we know that more accurate ideas prevailed nearer their epoch. Secondly, though there is some reason for stating that the "ancients," though certainly not those of Israel, believed in celestial spheres supporting the heavenly bodies, I suspect that the doctrine of a solid vault _supporting the clouds_, except as a mere poetical or mythological fancy, is a product of the imagination of the theologians and closet philosophers of a more modern time. The testimony of men's senses appears to be in favor of the whole universe revolving around a plane earth, though the oldest astronomical school with which we are acquainted suspected that this is an illusion; but the every-day observation of the most unlettered man who treads the fields and is wet with the mists and rains must convince him that there is no _sub-nubilar_ solid sphere. If, therefore, the Bible had taught such a doctrine, it would have shocked the common-sense even of the plain husbandmen to whom it was addressed, and could have found no fit audience except among a portion of the literati of comparatively modern times. Thirdly, with respect to the foundations of the earth, I may remark that in the tenth verse of Genesis there occurs a definition as precise as that of any lexicon--"and God called the _dry land_ earth;" consequently it is but fair to assume that the earth afterwards spoken of as supported above the waters is the dry land or continental masses of the earth, and no geologist can object to the statement that the dry land is supported above the waters by foundations or pillars. We shall find in our examination of the document itself that all the instances of such accommodation which have been cited by writers on this subject are as baseless as those above referred to. It is much to be regretted that so many otherwise useful expositors have either wanted that familiarity with the aspects of external nature by which all the Hebrew writers are characterized, or have taken too little pains to ascertain the actual meaning of the references to creation which they find in the Bible. I may further remark that if such instances of accommodation could be found in the later poetical books, it would be extremely unfair to apply them as aids in the interpretation of the plain, precise, and unadorned statements of the first chapters of Genesis. There is, however, throughout even the higher poetry of the Bible, a truthful representation and high appreciation of nature for which we seek in vain in any other poetry, and we may fairly trace this in part to the influence of the cosmogony which appears in its first chapter. The Hebrew was thus taught to recognize the unity of nature as the work of an Almighty Intelligence, to regard all its operations as regulated by his unchanging law or "decree," and to venerate it as a revelation of his supreme wisdom and goodness. On this account he was likely to regard careful observation and representation with as scrupulous attention as the modern naturalist. Nor must we forget that the Old Testament literature has descended to us through two dark ages--that of Greek and Roman polytheism and of Middle Age barbarism--and that we must not confound its tenets with those of either. The religious ideas of both these ages were favorable to certain forms of literature and art, but eminently unfavorable to the successful prosecution of the study of nature. Hence we have a right to expect in the literature of the golden age of primeval monotheism more affinity with the ideas of modern science than in any intermediate time; and the truthful delineation which the claims of the Bible to inspiration require might have been, as already hinted, to a certain extent secured merely by the reflex influence of its earlier statements, without the necessity of our supposing that illustrations of this kind in the later books came directly from the Spirit of God. Our discussion of this part of the subject has necessarily been rather desultory, and the arguments adduced must depend for their full confirmation on the results of our future inquiries. The conclusions arrived at may be summed up as follows: 1. That the Mosaic cosmogony must be considered, like the prophecies of the Bible, to claim the rank of inspired teaching, and must depend for its authority on the maintenance of that claim. 2. That the incidental references to nature in other parts of Scripture indicate, at least, the influence of these earlier teachings, and of a pure monotheistic faith, in creating a high and just appreciation of nature among the Hebrew people. It is now necessary to inquire in what precise form this remarkable revelation of the origin of the world has been given. I have already referred to the hypothesis that it represents a vision of creation presented to the mind of a seer, as if in a series of pictures which he represents to us in words. This is perhaps the most intelligible conception of the manner of communication of a revelation from God; and inasmuch as it is that referred to in other parts of the Bible as the mode of presentation of the future to inspired prophets, there can be no impropriety in supposing it to have been the means of communicating the knowledge of the unknown past. We may imagine the seer--perhaps some aboriginal patriarch, long before the time of Moses--perhaps the first man himself--wrapt in ecstatic vision, having his senses closed to all the impressions of the present time, and looking as at a moving procession of the events of the earth's past history, presented to him in a series of apparent days and nights. In the first chapter of Genesis he rehearses this divine vision to us, not in poetry, but in a series of regularly arranged parts or strophes, thrown into a sort of rhythmical order fitted to impress them on the memory, and to allow them to be handed down from mouth to mouth, perhaps through successive generations of men, before they could be fixed in a written form of words. Though the style can scarcely be called poetical, since its expressions are obviously literal and unadorned by figures of speech, the production may not unfairly be called the Song or Ballad of Creation, and it presents an Archaic simplicity reminding us of the compositions of the oldest and rudest times, while it has also an artificial and orderly arrangement, much obscured by its division into verses and chapters in our Bibles. It is undoubtedly also characterized by a clearness and grandeur of expression very striking and majestic, and which shows that it was written by and intended for men of no mean and contracted minds, but who could grasp the great problems of the origin of things, and comprehend and express them in a bold and vigorous manner. It may be well, before proceeding farther, to present to the reader this ancient document in a form more literal and intelligible, and probably nearer to its original dress, than that in which we are most familiar with it in our English Bibles: THE ABORIGINAL SONG OF CREATION. _Beginning._ In the Beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth, And the Earth was formless and empty, And darkness on the surface of the deep, And the Breath of God moved on the Surface of the Waters. _Day One._ _And God said_--"Let Light be," And Light was. And God saw the Light that it was good. And God called the Light Day, And the darkness he called Night. And Evening was and Morning was--Day one. _Day Second._ _And God said_--"Let there be an Expanse in the midst of the waters, And let it divide the waters from the waters." And God made the Expanse, And divided the waters below the Expanse from the waters above the Expanse. And it was so. And God called the Expanse Heavens. And Evening was and Morning was, a Second Day. _Day Third._ _And God said_--"Let the waters under the Heavens be gathered into one place, And let the Dry Land appear." And it was so, And God called the Dry Land Earth, And the gathering of waters called he Seas. And God saw that it was good. _And God said_--"Let the earth shoot forth herbage, The Herb yielding seed and the fruit-tree yielding fruit containing seed after its kind, on the earth." And it was so. And the earth brought forth herbage, The Herb yielding seed and the Tree yielding fruit whose seed is in it after its kind, And God saw that it was good. And Evening was and Morning was, a Third Day. _Day Fourth._ _And God said_--"Let there be Luminaries in the Expanse of Heaven, To divide the day from the night, And let them be for Signs and for Seasons, And for Days and for Years. And let them be Luminaries in the Expanse of Heaven To give light on the earth." And it was so. And God made two great Luminaries, The greater Luminary to rule the day, The lesser Luminary to rule the night, The Stars also. And God placed them in the Expanse of Heaven To give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, And to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And Evening was and Morning was, a Fourth Day. _Day Fifth._ _And God said_--"Let the waters swarm with swarmers, having life, And let winged animals fly over the earth on the surface of the expanse of heaven." And God created great Reptiles, And every living thing that moveth, With which the waters swarmed after their kind, And every winged bird after its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying-- "Be fruitful and multiply, And fill the waters of the sea; And let birds multiply in the land." And Evening was and Morning was, a Fifth Day. _Day Sixth._ _And God said_--"Let the Land bring forth living things after their kind, Herbivores and smaller mammals and Carnivores after their kind." And it was so. And God made all Carnivores after their kind, And all Herbivores after their kind, And all minor mammals after their kind. And God saw that it was good. _And God said_--"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, And let him have dominion over the fish in the sea And over the birds of the heavens, And over the Herbivora, And over the Earth, And over all the minor animals that creep upon the earth." And God created man in his own image, In the image of God created he him, Male and female created he them. And God blessed them. And God said unto them-- "Be fruitful and multiply, And replenish the earth and subdue it, And have dominion over the fishes of the sea And over the birds of the air, And over all the animals that move upon the earth." _And God said_--"Behold, I have given you all herbs yielding seed, Which are on the surface of the whole earth, And every tree with fruit having seed, They shall be unto you for food. And to all the animals of the land And to all the birds of the heavens, And to all things moving on the land having the breath of life, I have given every green herb for food." And it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and behold it was very good. And Evening was and Morning was, a Sixth Day. _Day Seventh._ Thus the Heavens and the Earth were finished, And all the hosts of them. And on the seventh day God ended the work which he had made, And he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, Because that in it he rested from all his work that he had created and made. CHAPTER III. OBJECTS AND NATURE OF A REVELATION OF ORIGINS--_Continued._ "What if earth Be but a shadow of heaven, and things therein Each to the other like; more than on earth is thought." MILTON. (3) _Character of the Biblical Cosmogony, and general Views of Nature which it Contains or to which it Leads._--Much of what appertains to the character of the revelation of origins has been anticipated under previous heads. We have only to read the Song of Creation, as given in the last chapter, to understand its power and influence as a beginning of religious doctrine. The revelation was written for plain men in the infancy of the world. Imagine Chaldean or Hebrew shepherd listening to these majestic lines from the lips of some ancient patriarch, and receiving them as truly the words of God. What a grand opening to him of both the seen and unseen worlds! Henceforth he has no superstitious dread of the stars above, or of the lightning and thunder, or of the dark woods and flowing waters beneath. They are all the works of the one Creator, the same Creator who is his own Maker, in whose image and shadow he is made. He can look up now to the heavens or around upon the earth, and see in all the handiwork of God, and can worship God through all. He can see that the power that cares for the birds and the flowers of the field cares for him. He is no longer the slave and sport of unknown and dreadful powers; they are God's workmanship and under his control--nay, God has given him a mission to subdue and rule over them. So these noble words raise him to a new manhood, and emancipate him from the torture of endless fears, and open to him vast new fields of thought and inquiry, which may enrich him with boundless treasures of new religious and intellectual wealth. Imagine still farther that he wanders into those great cities which are the seats of the idolatries of his time. He enters magnificent temples, sees elaborately decorated altars, huge images, gorgeous ceremonials, priests gay in vestments and imposing in numbers. He is invited to bow down before the bull Apis, to worship the statue of Belus or of Ishtar, of Osiris or of Isis. But this is not in his book of origins. All these things are contrivances of man, not works of God, and their aim is to invite him to adore that which is merely his fellow-creature, that which he has the divine commission to subdue and rule. So our primitive Puritan turns away. He will rather raise an altar of rough stones in the desert, and worship the unseen yet real Creator, the God that has no local habitation in temples made with hands, yet is everywhere present. Such is the moral elevation to which this revelation of origins raises humanity; and when there was added to it the farther history of primeval innocence, of the fall, and of the promise of a Redeemer, and of the fate of the godless antediluvians, there was a whole system of religion, pure and elevating, and placing the Abrahamidæ, who for ages seem alone to have held to it, on a plane of spiritual vantage immeasurably above that of other nations. Farther, every succeeding prophet whose works are included in the sacred canon, following up these doctrines in the same spirit, and added new treasures of divine knowledge from age to age. But admitting all this, it may be asked, Are these ancient records of any value to us? May we not now dispense with them, and trust to the light of science? The infinitely varied and discordant notions of our modern literature on these great questions of origin, the incapacity of any philosophical system to reach the common mind for practical purposes, and the baseless character of any religious system which does not build on these great primitive truths, give a sufficient answer. Farther, we may affirm that the greatest and widest generalizations of our modern science have, in so far as they are of practical importance, been anticipated in the revelations of the Bible, and that in the cosmogony of Genesis and its continuation in the other sacred books we have general views of the universe as broad as those of any philosophies, ancient or modern. This is a hard test for our revelation, but it can be endured, and we may shortly inquire what we find in the Bible of such great general truths. Many may be disposed to admit the accurate delineation of natural facts open to human observation in the sacred Scriptures, who may not be prepared to find in these ancient books any general views akin to those of the ancient philosophers, or to those obtained by inductive processes in modern times. Yet views of this kind are scattered through the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and are a natural outgrowth and development of the great facts and principles asserted in the first chapter of Genesis. They resolve themselves, almost as a matter of course, into the two leading ideas of order and adaptation. I have already quoted the eloquent admission by Baron Humboldt of the presence of these ideas of the cosmos in Psalm civ. They are both conspicuous in the narrative of creation, and equally so in a great number of other passages. "Order is heaven's first law; and the second is like unto it--that every thing serves an end. This is the sum of all science. These are the two mites, even all that she hath, which she throws into the treasury of the Lord; and, as she does so in faith, Eternal Wisdom looks on and approves the deed."[17] These two mites, lawfully acquired by science, by her independent exertions, she may, however, recognize as of the same coinage with the treasure already laid up in the rich storehouse of the Hebrew literature; but in a peculiar and complex form, which may be illustrated under the following general statements: 1. The Scriptures assert invariable natural law, and constantly recurring cycles in nature. Natural law is expressed as the ordinance or decree of Jehovah. From the oldest of the Hebrew books I select the following examples:[18] "When he made a decree for the rain, And a way for the thunder-flash." --Job xxviii., 26. "Knowest thou the ordinances of the heavens? Canst thou establish a dominion even over the earth?" --Job xxxviii., 33. The later books give us such views as the following: "He hath established them [the heavens] for ever and ever; He hath made a decree which shall not pass." --Psa. cxlviii., 6. "Thou art forever, O Jehovah, thy word is established in the heavens; Thou hast established the earth, and it abideth; They continue this day according to thine ordinances, for all are thy servants." --Psa. cxix., 90. "When he established the clouds above; When he strengthened the fountains of the deep; When he gave to the sea his decree, That the waters should not pass his commandment; When he appointed the foundations of the earth." --Prov. viii., 28. Many similar instances will be found in succeeding pages; and in the mean time we may turn to the idea of recurring cycles, which forms the starting-point of the reasonings of Solomon on the current of human affairs, in the book of Ecclesiastes: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for the ages. The sun ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteneth to its place whence it arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth unto the north. It whirleth about continually, and returneth again according to its circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea doth not overflow; unto the place whence the rivers came, thither they return again." I might fill pages with quotations more or less illustrative of the statement in proof of which the above texts are cited; but enough has been given to show that the doctrine of the Bible is not that of fortuitous occurrence, or of materialism, or of pantheism, or of arbitrary supernaturalism, but of invariable natural law representing the decree of a wise and unchanging Creator. It is a common but groundless and shallow charge against the Bible that it teaches an "arbitrary supernaturalism." What it does teach is that all nature is regulated by the laws of God, which like himself are unchanging, but which are so complex in their relations and adjustments that they allow of infinite variety, and do not exclude even miraculous intervention, or what appears to our limited intelligence as such. In opposition to this, it is true, some physicists have held that natural law is a fatal necessity.[19] If they mean by this a merely hypothetical necessity that certain effects must follow if certain laws act, this is in accordance with the Biblical view, for nothing can resist the will of God. But if they mean an absolute necessity that these laws can not be suspended or counteracted by higher laws, or by the will of the Creator, they assert what is not only contrary to Scripture, but absurd, for "blind metaphysical necessity, which is the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things."[20] It could lead merely to a dead and inert equilibrium. On the hypothesis of mere physical necessity, the universe either never could have existed, or must have come to an end infinite ages ago, which is the same thing. Only on the hypothesis of law proceeding from an intelligent will can we logically account for nature. 2. The Bible recognizes progress and development in nature. At the very outset we have this idea embodied in the gradual elaboration of all things in the six creative periods, rising from the formless void of the beginning, through successive stages of inorganic and organic being, up to Eden and to man. Beyond this point the work of creation stops; but there is to be an occupation and improvement of the whole earth by man spreading from Eden. This process is arrested or impeded by sin and the fall. Here commences the special province of the Bible, in explaining the means of recovery from the fall, and of the establishment of a new spiritual and moral kingdom, and finally of the restoration of Eden in a new heaven and earth. All this is moral, and relates to man, in so far as the present state of things is concerned; but we have the commentary of Jesus: "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;" the remarkable statement of Paul, that the whole creation is involved in the results of man's moral fall and restoration, and the equally remarkable one that the Redeemer is also the maker of the "worlds" or ages of the earth's physical progress, as well as of the future "new heaven and new earth." Peter also rebukes indignantly those scoffers who maintained that all things had remained as they are since the beginning; and refers to the creation week and to the deluge as earnests of the great changes yet in store for the earth.[21] It is indeed curious to observe how in our version of the Bible this idea of progress in the universe, or of "time-worlds," as it has been called, has been variously replaced by the words "world" and "eternity," owing to the defective ideas prevalent at the time when the translation was made. In the Hebrew Scriptures the term _Olam_, "age," and in the New Testament the equivalent term _Ai[=o]n_ have been thus treated, and their real significance much obscured. Thus when it is said, "by faith we understand that the _worlds_ were framed," or "by him God made the _worlds_,"[22] or that certain of God's plans have been hid "from the beginning of the _world_,"[23] the reference is not to worlds in space, but to worlds in time, or ages of God's working in the universe. So also these ages of God's working are given to us as our only intelligible type of eternity, of which absolutely we can have no conception. Thus God's "eternal purpose" is his purpose of the ages. So when he is the "King eternal,"[24] and in that capacity gives to his people "life everlasting," he is the King of the ages, and gives life of the ages. So in the noble hymn attributed to Moses (Psalm xc.), where our version has, "from everlasting to everlasting thou art God,"[25] the original is, "from age to age thou art, O God." It has perhaps been a defect of our modern science that it has familiarized us merely with the existence of worlds in space, and not with their existence in time. It is only in comparatively modern times that the developments of chronological geology and of physical astronomy have brought before us, not only the long ages in which the earth was passing through its formative stages, but also the fact that still longer æons are embraced in the history of the other bodies of our solar system, and of the starry orbs and nebulæ. These grand conceptions were already embodied in the Hebrew revelation, and were used there as the means of giving some faint approach to a conception of the unlimited existence of God himself, of the ages in which his creative work has been going on, and of the future life he has prepared for his redeemed people. Such views of development and progress are not unknown to many ancient cosmogonies and philosophical systems, but they had no stable foundation in observed fact until the rise of modern geology and physical astronomy; which enable us to affirm that, in addition to those changeless physical laws which cause the bodies of the universe to wheel in unvarying cycles, and all natural powers to reproduce themselves, and, in addition to those organic laws which produce unceasing successions of living individuals, there is a higher law of progress. We can now trace back man, the animals and plants his contemporaries, and others which preceded them, our continents and mountain ranges, and the solid rocks of which they are composed--nay, the very fabric of the solar system itself--to their several origins at distinct points of time; and can maintain that since the earth began to wheel around the sun, no succeeding year has seen it precisely as it was in the year before. The old Hebrew record affirms, and I presume scarcely any sane man really doubts, that this law of progress emanates from the mind and power of one creative Being. When men see in natural law only recurring cycles, they may be pardoned for falling even into the absurdity of believing in eternal succession; but when they see change and progress, and this in a uniform direction, overmastering recurring cycles, and introducing new objects and powers not accounted for by previous objects or powers, they are brought very near to the presence of the Spiritual Creator. And hence, although no science can reach back to the act of creation, this doctrine is much more strongly held in our day by geologists than by physicists. It is quite true that the idea of creative acts has been superseded to a great extent by that of "creation by law," or by that of "evolution." Still behind all there lies a primary creative power; and the validity of these ideas and their bearing on theism and creation we shall have to discuss in the sequel. In one thing only does the Bible here part company with natural science. The Bible goes on into the future, and predicts a final condition of our planet, of which science can from its investigations learn nothing. 3. The Bible recognizes purpose, use, and special adaptation in nature. It is, in short, full of natural theology, akin in some respects to that which has been so elaborately worked out by so many modern writers. Numerous passages in support of this will occur to every one who has read the Scriptures. It is necessary here, however, to direct attention to a distinction very obvious in Scripture, but not always attended to by writers on this subject. The Bible maintains the true "final cause" of all nature to be, not its material and special adaptations or its value to man, but the pleasure or satisfaction of the Creator himself. In the earlier periods of Creation, before man was upon the earth, God contemplates his work and pronounces it good. The heavenly hosts praise him, saying, "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." Further, the Bible represents intelligences higher than man as sharing in the delight which may be derived from the contemplation of God's works. When the earth first rose from the waters to greet the light, "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." There are many things in nature that strongly impress the naturalist with this same view, that the Creator takes pleasure in his works; and, like human genius in its highest efforts, rejoices in production, even if no sentient being should be ready to sympathize. The elaborate structures of fossils, of which we have only fragmentary remains, the profusion of natural objects of surpassing beauty that grow and perish unseen by us, the delicate microscopic mechanism of nearly all organic structures, point to other reasons for beauty and order than those that concern man, or the mere utilities of human beings; and though there are now naturalists who deny absolutely that beauty is an object in nature, and assign even the colors of flowers and insects to utility alone, and this of a very low order, this doctrine is so repulsive to our higher sentiments that there is little danger of its general acceptance; while the slightest consideration shows that the utilities referred to could have been secured without any of this consummate beauty associated with them, and our perception of and delight in which mark in a way beyond the ability of skepticism to cavil at our own spiritual kinship with the Author of all this profusion of beauty. Yet man is represented as the chief created being for whom this earth has been prepared and designed. He obtains dominion over it. A chosen spot is prepared for him, in which not only his wants but his tastes are consulted; and, being made in the image of his Maker, his æsthetic sentiments correspond with the beauties of the Maker's work, and he finds there also food for his reason and imagination. This view of the subject, as well as others already referred to, is finely represented in the address of the Almighty to Job.[26] The Bible also very often refers to the special adaptations of natural objects and laws to each other, and to the promotion of the happiness of sentient creatures lower than man. The 104th Psalm is replete with notices of such adaptations, and so is the address to Job; and indeed this view seems hardly ever absent from the minds of the Hebrew writers, but has its highest applications in the lilies of the field, that toil not neither do they spin, and the sparrows that are sold for a farthing, yet the heavenly Father has clothed the one with surpassing beauty, and provides food for the other, nor allows it to fail without his knowledge. I may, by way of farther illustration, merely name a few of the adaptations referred to in Job xxxviii. and the following chapters. The winds and the clouds are so arranged as to afford the required supplies of moisture to the wilderness where no man is, to "cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth." For similar objects the tempest is ordered, and the clouds arranged "by wisdom." The adaptations of the wild ass, the wild goat, the ostrich, the migratory birds, the horse, the hippopotamus, the crocodile, to their several habitats, modes of life, and uses in nature, are most vividly sketched and applied as illustrations of the consummate wisdom of the Creator, which descends to the minutest details of organization and habit. It is to be observed here that in holding this doctrine of use and adaptation in nature, the Bible is only consistent with its own theory of rational theism. The Monotheist can not refer nature to a conflict of antagonistic powers and forces. He must recognize in it a unity of plan; and even those things which appear aberrant, irregular, or noxious must have their place in this plan. Hence in the Bible God is maker not only of the day but of the night, not only of the peaceful cattle but of the voracious crocodile, not only of the sunshine and shower but of the tornado and the earthquake. Further, in all these things God is manifested, so that we may learn "his eternal power and divinity[27] from the things which he has made," and in all these also there are emblems of his relations to us. This argument from design is in truth the only proof the Bible condescends to urge for the existence of God; and it is the only one in which in his later days our great English philosopher Mill could see any validity.[28] If the reader happens to be familiar with the objections to the doctrine of final causes, or teleology, in nature, urged in our day by Spencer, Haeckel, and others, he will have seen from the foregoing statements that these objections are in themselves baseless, or inapplicable to this doctrine as maintained in the Bible. There is no consistency in the position of men who, when they dig a rudely chipped flint out of a bed of gravel, immediately infer an intelligent workman, and who refuse to see any indication of a higher intelligence in the creation of the workman himself. It is a blind philosophy which professes to see in primal atoms the "promise and potency of mind," and which fails to perceive that such potency is more inconceivable than the evidence of primary and supreme mind. The men who maintain that wings were not planned for flight, but that flight has produced wings, and thousands of like propositions, are simply amusing themselves with paradoxes to which may very properly be applied the strange word devised by Haeckel to express his theory of nature--_Dysteleology_, or purposelessness. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the teleology of the Bible is not of that narrow kind which would make man the sole object of nature, and the supreme judge of its adaptations. Inasmuch as God's plan goes over all the ages past and future, and relates to the welfare of all sentient beings known or unknown to us, and also to his own sovereign pleasure as the supreme object, we may not be in a position either to understand or profit by all its parts, and hence may expect to find many mysteries, and many things that we can not at present reconcile with God's wisdom and goodness. We know but "parts of his ways," the "fullness of his power who can understand." "His judgments are unsearchable," "his ways are past finding out." 4. The law of type or pattern in nature is distinctly indicated in the Bible. This is a principle only recently understood by naturalists, but it has more or less dimly dawned on the minds of many great thinkers in all ages. Nor is this wonderful, for the idea of type is scarcely ever absent from our own conceptions of any work that we may undertake. In any such work we anticipate recurring daily toil, like the returning cycles of nature. We look for progress, like that of the growth of the universe. We study adaptation both of the several parts to subordinate uses, and of the whole to some general design. But we also keep in view some pattern, style, or order, according to which the whole is arranged, and the mutual relations of the parts are adjusted. The architect must adhere to some order of architecture, and to some style within that order. The potter, the calico-printer, and the silversmith must equally study uniformity of pattern in their several manufactures. The Almighty Worker has exhibited the same idea in his works. In the animal kingdom, for instance, we have four or more leading types of structure. Taking any one of these--the vertebrate, for example--we have a uniform general plan, embracing the vertebral column constructed of the same elements; the members, whether the arm of man, the limb of the quadruped, or the wing of the bat or the bird, or the swimming-paddle of the whale, built of the same bones. In like manner all the parts of the vertebral column itself in the same animal, whether in the skull, the neck, or the trunk, are composed of the same elementary structures. These types are farther found to be sketched out--first in their more general, and then in their special features--in proceeding from the lower species of the same type to the higher, in proceeding from the earlier to the later stages of embryonic development, and in proceeding from the more ancient to the more recent creatures that have succeeded each other in geological time. Man, the highest of the vertebrates, is thus the archetype, representing and including all the lower and earlier members of the vertebrate type. The above are but trite and familiar examples of a doctrine which may furbish and has furnished the material of volumes. There can be no question that the Hebrew Bible is the oldest book in which this principle is stated. In the first chapter of Genesis we have specific type in the creation of plants and animals after their kinds or species, and in the formation of man in the image and likeness of the Creator; and, as we shall find in the sequel, there are some curious ideas of higher and more general types in the grouping of the creatures referred to. The same idea is indicated in the closing chapters of Job, where the three higher classes of the vertebrates are represented by a number of examples, and the typical likeness of one of these--the hippopotamus--to man, seems to be recognized. Dr. McCosh has quoted, as an illustration of the doctrine of types, a very remarkable passage from Psalm cxxxix.: "I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvellous are thy works, And that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from Thee, When I was made in secret, And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth: Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; And in thy book all my members were written, Which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of them." It would too much tax the faith of many to ask them to believe that the writer of the above passage, or the Spirit that inspired him, actually meant to teach--what we now know so well from geology--that the prototypes of all the parts of the archetypal human structure may be found in those fossil remains of extinct animals which may, in nearly every country, be dug up from the rocks of the earth. No objection need, however, be taken to our reading in it the doctrine of embryonic development according to a systematic type. Science, it is true, or rather I should perhaps say philosophical speculation, has sometimes pushed this idea of plan into that of a spontaneous genetic evolution of things in time, without any creative superintendence or definite purpose. This way of viewing the matter is, however, as we shall have occasion to see, both bald and irrational, and wants the symmetry and completeness of that style of thought which grasps at once progress and plan and adaptation, as emanating from a Supreme Will. The question of how the plan has been worked out will come up for detailed consideration farther on. In the mean time we have before us the fact that the Bible represents the cosmos as not the product of a blind conflict of self-existent forces, but as the result of the production and guidance of these forces by infinite wisdom. It is more than curious that this idea of type, so long existing in an isolated and often depised form, as a theological thought in the imagery of Scripture, should now be a leading idea of natural science; and that while comparative anatomy teaches us that the structures of all past and present lower animals point to man, who, as Professor Owen expresses it, has had all his parts and organs "sketched out in anticipation in the inferior animals," the Bible points still farther forward to an exaltation of the human type itself into what even the comparative anatomist might perhaps regard as among the "possible modifications of it beyond those realized in this little orb of ours," could he but learn its real nature. Under the foregoing heads, of the object, the structure, the authority, and the general cosmical views of the Scripture, I have endeavored to group certain leading thoughts important as preliminary to the study of the subject; and, in now entering on the details of the Old Testament cosmogony, I trust the reader will pardon me for assuming, as a working hypothesis, that we are studying an inspired book, revealing the origin of nature, and presenting accurate pictures of natural facts and broad general views of the cosmos, at least until in the progress of our inquiry we find reason to adopt lower views; and that he will, in the mean time, be content to follow me in that careful and systematic analysis which a work claiming such a character surely demands. CHAPTER IV. THE BEGINNING. "In the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the earth."--Genesis i., 1. It is a remarkable and instructive fact that the first verse of the Hebrew sacred writings speaks of the material universe--speaks of it as a whole, and as originating in a power outside of itself. The universe, then, in the conception of this ancient writer, is not eternal. It had a beginning, but that beginning in the indefinite and by us unmeasured past. It did not originate fortuitously, or by any merely accidental conflict of self-existent material atoms, but by an act--an act of will on the part of a Being designated by that name which among all the Semitic peoples represented the ultimate, eternal, inscrutable source of power and object of awe and veneration. With the simplicity and child-like faith of an archaic age, the writer makes no attempt to combat any objections or difficulties with which this great fundamental truth may be assailed. He feels its axiomatic force as the basis of all true religion and sound philosophy, and the ultimate fact which must ever bar our further progress in the investigation of the origin of things--the production from non-existence of the material universe by the eternal self-existent God. It did not concern him to know what might be the nature of that unconditioned self-existence; for though, like our ideas of space and time, incomprehensible, it must be assumed. It did not concern him to know how matter and force subsist, or what may be the difference between a material universe cognizable by our senses and the absolute want of all the phenomena of such a universe or of whatever may be their basis and essence. Such questions can never be answered, yet the succession of these phenomena must have had a commencement somewhere in time. How simple and how grand is his statement! How plain and yet how profound its teachings! It is evident that the writer grasps firmly the essence of the question as to the beginning of things, and covers the whole ground which advanced scientific or philosophical speculation can yet traverse. That the universe must have had a beginning no one now needs to be told. If any philosophical speculator ever truly held that there has been an endless succession of phenomena, science has now completely negatived the idea by showing us the beginning of all things that we know in the present universe, and by establishing the strongest probabilities that even its ultimate atoms could not have been eternal. But the question remains--If there was a beginning, what existed in that beginning? To this question many partial and imperfect answers have been given, but our ancient record includes them all. If any one should say, "In the beginning was nothing." Yes, says Genesis, there was, it is true, nothing of the present matter and arrangements of nature. Yet all was present potentially in the will of the Creator. "In the beginning were atoms," says another. Yes, says Genesis, but they were created; and so says modern science, and must say of ultimate particles determined by weight and measure, and incapable of modification in their essential properties--"They have the properties of a manufactured article."[29] "In the beginning were forces," says yet another. True, says Genesis; but all forces are one in origin--they represent merely the fiat of the eternal and self-existent. So says science, that force must in the ultimate resort be an "expression of Will."[30] "In the beginning was Elohim," adds our old Semitic authority, and in him are the absolute and eternal thought and will, the Creator from whom and by whom and in whom are all things. Thus the simple familiar words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," answer all possible questions as to the origin of things, and include all under the conception of theism. Let us now look at these pregnant words more particularly as to their precise import and significance. The divine personality expressed by the Hebrew Elohim may be fairly said to include all that can be claimed for the pantheistic conception of "dynamis," or universal material power. Lange gives this as included in the term Elohim, in his discussion of this term in his book on Genesis. It has been aptly said that if, physically speaking, the fall of a sparrow produces a gravitative effect that extends throughout the universe, there can be no reason why it should be unknown to God. God is thus everywhere, and always. Yet he is everywhere and always present as a personality knowing and willing. From his thought and will in the beginning proceeded the universe. By him it was created. What, then, is creation in the sense of the Hebrew writer. The act is expressed by the verb _bara_, a word of comparatively rare occurrence in the Scriptures, and employed to denote absolute creation, though its primary sense is to cut or carve, and it is indeed a near relative of our own English word "pare." If, says Professor Stuart, of Andover, this word "does not mean to create in the highest sense, then the Hebrews had no word by which they could designate this idea." Yet, like our English "create," the word is used in secondary and figurative senses, which in no degree detract from its force when strictly and literally used. Since, however, these secondary senses may often appear to obscure the primitive meaning, we must examine them in detail. In the first chapter of Genesis, after the general statement in verse 1, other verbs signifying to _form_ or _make_ are used to denote the elaboration of the separate parts of the universe, and the word "create" is found in only two places, when it refers to the introduction of "great whales" (reptiles) and of man. These uses of the word have been cited to disprove its sense of absolute creation. It must be observed, however, that in the first of these cases we have the earliest appearance of animal life, and in the second the introduction of a rational and spiritual nature. Nothing but pure materialism can suppose that the elements of vital and spiritual being were included in the matter of the heavens and the earth as produced in the beginning; and as the Scripture writers were not materialists, we may infer that they recognized, in the introduction of life and reason, acts of absolute creation, just as in the origin of matter itself. In Genesis ii. and iii. we have a form of expression which well marks the distinction between creation and making. God is there said to have rested from all his works which he "created and made"--literally, created "for or in reference to making," the word for making being one of those already referred to.[31] The force of this expression consists in its intimating that God had not only finished the work of _creation_, properly so called, but also the elaboration of the various details of the universe, as formed or fashioned out of the original materials. Of a similar character is the expression in Isaiah xlii., 5, "Jehovah, he that _created_ the heavens and spread them out;" and that in Psalm cxlviii., 5, "He commanded and they were _created_, he hath also established them for ever and ever." In as far as I am aware, the word _bara_ in all the remaining instances of its occurrence in the Pentateuch refers to the creation of man, with the following exceptions: Exodus xxxiv., 10, "I will do (create) marvels, such as have not been seen in all the earth;" Numbers xvi., 30, "If the Lord make a new thing (create a creation), and the earth open her mouth and swallow them up." These verses are types of a class of expressions in which the proper term for creation is applied to the production of something new, strange, and marvellous; for instance, "Create in me a clean heart, O Lord;" "Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth." It is, however, evidently an inversion of sound exposition to say that these secondary or figurative meanings should determine the primary and literal sense in Genesis i. On the contrary, we should rather infer that the sacred writers in these cases selected the proper word for creation, to express in the most forcible manner the novel and thorough character of the changes to which they refer, and their direct dependence on the Divine will. By such expressions we are in effect referred back to the original use of the word, as denoting the actual creation of matter by the command of God, in contradistinction from those arrangements which have been effected by the gradual operation of secondary agents, or of laws attached to matter at its creation. It has been farther observed[32] that in the Hebrew Scriptures this word _bara_ is applied to God only as an agent, not to any human artificer; a fact which is very important with reference to its true significance. Viewing creation in this light, we need not perplex ourselves with the question whether we should consider Genesis i., 1, to refer to the essence of matter as distinguished from its qualities. We may content ourselves with the explanation given by Paul in the eleventh of Hebrews: "By faith we are certain that the worlds[33] were created by the decree of God, so that that which _is seen_ was made of that which _appears not_." Or, with reference to the other uses of the word, if the first introduction of animal life was a creation, and if the introduction of the rational nature of man was a creation, we may suppose that the original creation was in like manner the introduction or first production of those entities which we call matter and force, and which to science now are as much ultimate facts as they were to Moses. The _nature_ of the act of creation being thus settled, its _extent_ may be ascertained by an examination of the terms heaven and earth. The word "heavens" (_shamayim_) has in Hebrew as in English a variety of significations. Of material heavens there are, in the quaint language of Poole, "_tres regiones, ubi aves, ubi nubes, ubi sidera_;" or (1) the atmosphere or firmament;[34] (2) the region of clouds in the upper part of the atmosphere;[35] (3) the depths of space comprehending the starry orbs.[36] Besides these we have the "heaven of heavens," the abode of God and spiritual beings.[37] The application of the term "heaven" to the atmosphere will be considered when we reach the 6th and 7th verses. In the mean time we may accept the word in this place as including the material heavens in the widest sense: (1.) Because it is not here, as in verse 8th, restricted to the atmosphere by the terms of the narrative; this restriction in verse 8th in fact implying the wider sense of the word in preceding verses. (2.) Because the atmospheric firmament, elsewhere called heaven, divides the waters above from those below, whereas it is evident that all these waters, and of consequence the materials of the atmosphere itself, are included in the earth of the following verse. (3.) Because in verse 14th the sidereal heavens are spoken of as arranged from pre-existing materials, which refers their actual creation back to this passage. In the words now under consideration we therefore regard the heavens as including the whole material universe beyond the limits of our earth. That this sense of the word is not unknown to the writers of Scripture, and that they had enlarged and rational views of the star-spangled abysses of space, will appear from the terms employed by Moses in his solemn warning against the Sabæan idolatry, in Deuteronomy iv.: "And lest thou lift up thine eyes to the heavens, and when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of the heavens, shouldest be incited to worship them and serve them which Jehovah thy God hath appointed to all nations under the whole heavens." To the same effect is the expression of the awe and wonder of the poet king of Israel in Psalm viii.: "When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, The moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him?" I may observe, however, that throughout the Scriptures the word in question is much more frequently applied to the atmospheric than to the sidereal heavens. The reason of this appears in the terms of verse 8th. If we have correctly referred the term "heavens" to the whole of extramundane space, then the word "earth" must denote our globe as a distinct world, with all the liquid and aeriform substances on its surface. The arrangement of the whole universe under the heads "heaven" and "earth" has been derided as a division into "infinity and an atom;" but when we consider the relative importance of the earth to us, and that it constitutes the principal object of the whole revelation to which this is introductory, the absurdity disappears, and we recognize the classification as in the circumstances natural and rational. The word "earth" (_aretz_) is, however, generally used to denote the dry land, or even a region or district of country. It is indeed expressly restricted to the dry land in verse 10th; but as in the case of the parallel limitation of the word "heaven," we may consider this as a hint that its previous meaning is more extended. That it is really so, appears from the following considerations: (1.) It includes the deep, or the material from which the sea and atmosphere were afterwards formed. (2.) The subsequent verses show that at the period in question no dry land existed. If instances of a similar meaning from other parts of Scripture are required, I give the following: Genesis ii., 1 to 4, "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them;" "these are the generations of the heavens and the earth." In this general summary of the creative work, the earth evidently includes the seas and all that is in them, as well as the dry land; and the whole expression denotes the universe. The well-known and striking remark of Job, "Who hangeth the earth upon nothing," is also a case in point, and must refer to the whole world, since in other parts of the same book the dry land or continental masses of the earth are said, and with great truth and propriety, to be supported above the waters on pillars or foundations. The following passages may also be cited as instances of the occurrence of the idea of the whole world expressed by the word "earth:" Exodus x., 29, "And Moses said unto him, As soon as I am gone out of the city, I will spread abroad my hands unto the Lord, and the thunder shall cease, neither shall there be any more hail; that thou mayest know the earth is the Lord's;" Deuteronomy x., 14, "Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the Lord's, the earth also, and all that therein is." The material universe was brought into existence in the "beginning"--a term evidently indefinite as far as regards any known epoch, and implying merely priority to all other recorded events. It can not be the first day, for there is no expressed connection, and the work of the first day is distinct from that of the beginning. It can not be a general term for the whole six days, since these are separated from it by that chaotic or formless state to which we are next introduced. The beginning, therefore, is the threshold of creation--the line that separates the old tenantless condition of space from the world-crowded galaxies of the existing universe. The only other information respecting it that we have in Scripture is in that fine descriptive poem in Proverbs viii., in which the Wisdom of God personified--who may be held to represent the Almighty Word, or Logos, introduced in the formula "God said," and afterward referred to in Scripture as the manifested or conditioned Deity, the Mediator between man and the otherwise inaccessible Divinity, the agent in the work of creation as well as in that of redemption--narrates the origin of all created things: "Jehovah possessed[38] me, the beginning of his way, Before his work of old. I was set up from everlasting, From the beginning, before the earth was; When there were no deeps I was brought forth, When there were no fountains abounding in water." The beginning here precedes the creation of the earth, as well as of the deep which encompassed its surface in its earliest condition. The beginning, in this point of view, stretches back from the origin of the world into the depths of eternity. It is to us emphatically _the_ beginning, because it witnessed the birth of our material system; but to the eternal Jehovah it was but the beginning of a great series of his operations, and we have no information of its absolute duration. From the time when God began to create the celestial orbs, until that time when it could be said that he had created the heavens and the earth, countless ages may have rolled along, and myriads of worlds may have passed through various stages of existence, and the creation of our planetary system may have been one of the last acts of that long beginning. The author of creation is Elohim, or God in his general aspect to nature and man, and not in that special aspect in reference to the Hebrew commonwealth and to the work of redemption indicated by the name Jehovah (_Iaveh_). We need not enter into the doubtful etymology of the word; but may content ourselves with that supported by many, perhaps the majority of authorities, which gives it the meaning of "Object of dread or adoration," or with that preferred by Gesenius, which makes it mean the "Strong or mighty one." Its plural form has also greatly tried the ingenuity of the commentators. After carefully considering the various hypotheses, such as that of the plural of majesty of the Rabbins, and the primitive polytheism supposed by certain Rationalists, I can see no better reason than an attempt to give a grammatical expression to that plurality in unity indicated by the appearance of the Spirit or breath of God and his Word, or manifested will and power, as distinct agents in the succeeding verses. This was probably always held by the Hebrews in a general form; and was by our Saviour and his apostles specialized in that trinitarian doctrine which enables both John and Paul explicitly to assert the agency of the second person of the Trinity in the creative work. This elementary trinitarian idea of the first chapter of Genesis may be further stated thus: The name Elohim expresses the absolute unconditioned will and reason--the Godhead. The manifestation of God in creative power, and in the framing and ordering of the cosmos, is represented by the formula "God said"--the equivalent of the Divine Word. The further manifestation of God in love of and sympathy with his work is represented by the Breath of God, and by the expression, "God saw that it was good"--operations these of the Divine Spirit. The aboriginal root of the word Elohim probably lies far back of the Semitic literature, and comes from the natural exclamations "al," "lo," "la," which arise from the spontaneous action of the human vocal organs in the presence of any object of awe or wonder. The plural form may in like manner be simply equivalent to our terms Godhead or Divinity, implying all that is essentially God without specification or distinction of personalities. As Dr. Tayler Lewis well remarks in his "Introduction to Genesis," we should not dismiss such plurals as mere _usus loquendi_. The plural form of the name of God, of the heavens (literally, the "heights"), of the _olamim_, or time-worlds, of the word for life in Genesis (lives), indicates an idea of vastness and diversity not measurable by speech, which must have been impressed on the minds of early men, otherwise these forms would not have arisen. God, heaven, time, life, were to them existences stretching outward to infinity, and not to be denoted by the bare singular form suitable to ordinary objects. Fairly regarding, then, this ancient form of words, we may hold it as a clear, concise, and accurate enunciation of an ultimate doctrine of the origin of things, which with all our increased knowledge of the history of the earth we are not in a position to replace with any thing better or more probable. On the other hand, this sublime dogma of creation leaves us perfectly free to interrogate nature for ourselves, as to all that it can reveal of the duration and progress of the creative work. But the positive gain which comes from this ancient formula goes far beyond these negative qualities. If received, this one word of the Old Testament is sufficient to deliver us forever from the superstitious dread of nature, and to present it to us as neither self-existent nor omnipotent, but as the mere handiwork of a spiritual Creator to whom we are kin; as not a product of chance or caprice, but as the result of a definite plan of the All-wise; as not a congeries of unconnected facts and processes, but as a cosmos, a well-ordered though complex machine, designed by Him who is the Almighty and the supreme object of reverence. Had this verse alone constituted the whole Bible, this one utterance would, wherever known and received, have been an inestimable boon to mankind; proclaiming deliverance to the captives of every form of nature-worship and idolatry, and fixing that idea of unity of plan in the universe which is the fruitful and stable root of all true progress in science. We owe profound thanks to the old Hebrew prophet for these words--words which have broken from the necks of once superstitious Aryan races chains more galling than those of Egyptian bondage. CHAPTER V. THE DESOLATE VOID. "And the earth was desolate and empty, and darkness was upon the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved on the surface of the waters."--Genesis i., 2. We have here a few bold outlines of a dark and mysterious scene--a condition of the earth of which we have no certain intimation from any other source, except the speculations based on modern discoveries in physical science. It was "unshaped and empty," formless and uninhabited. The words thus translated are sufficiently plain in their meaning. The first is used by Isaiah to denote the desolation of a ruined city, and in Job and the Psalms as characteristic of the wilderness or desert. Both in connection are employed by Isaiah to express the destruction of Idumea, and by Jeremiah in a powerful description of the ruin of nations by God's judgments. When thus united, they form the strongest expression which the Hebrew could supply for solitary, uninhabited desolation, like that of a city reduced to heaps of rubbish, and to the silence and loneliness of utter decay. In the present connection these words inform us that the earth was in a chaotic state, and unfit for the residence of organized beings. The words themselves suggest the important question: Are they intended to represent this as the original condition of the earth? Was it a scene of desolation and confusion when it sprang from the hand of its Creator? or was this state of ruin consequent on convulsions which may have been preceded by a very different condition, not mentioned by the inspired historian? That it may have been so is rendered possible by the circumstance that the words employed are generally used to denote the ruin of places formerly inhabited, and by the want of any necessary connection in time between the first and second verses. It has even been proposed, though this does violence to the construction, to read "and the earth became" desolate and empty. Farther, it seems, _à priori_, improbable that the first act of creative power should have resulted in the production of a mere chaos. The crust of the earth also shows, in its alternations of strata and organic remains, evidence of a great series of changes extending over vast periods, and which might, in a revelation intended for moral purposes, with great propriety be omitted. For such reasons some eminent expositors of these words are disposed to consider the first verse as a title or introduction, and to refer to this period the whole series of geological changes; and this view has formed one of the most popular solutions of the apparent discrepancies between the geological and Scriptural histories of the world. It is evident, however, that if we continue to view the term "earth" as including the whole globe, this hypothesis becomes altogether untenable. The subsequent verses inform us that at the period in question the earth was covered by a universal ocean, possessed no atmosphere and received no light, and had not entered into its present relations with the other bodies of our system. No conceivable convulsions could have effected such changes on an earth previously possessing these arrangements; and geology assures us that the existing laws and dispositions in these respects have prevailed from the earliest periods to which it can lead us back, and that the modern state of things was not separated from those which preceded it by any such general chaos. To avoid this difficulty, which has been much more strongly felt as these facts have been more and more clearly developed by modern science, it has been held that the word earth may denote only a particular region, temporarily obscured and reduced to ruin, and about to be fitted up, by the operations of the six days, for the residence of man; and that consequently the narrative of the six days refers not to the original arrangement of the surface, relations, and inhabitants of our planet, but to the retrieval from ruin and repeopling of a limited territory, supposed to have been in Central Asia, and which had been submerged and its atmosphere obscured by aqueous or volcanic vapors. The chief support of this view is the fact, previously noticed, that the word earth is very frequently used in the signification of region, district, country; to which may be added the supposed necessity for harmonizing the Scriptures with geological discovery, and at the same time viewing the days of creation as literal solar days. Can we, however, after finding that in verse 1st the term earth must mean the whole world, suddenly restrict it in verse 2d to a limited region. Is it possible that the writer who in verse 10th for the first time intimates a limitation of the meaning of this word, by the solemn announcement, "And God called the _dry land_ earth," should in a previous place use it in a much more limited sense without any hint of such restriction. The case stands thus: A writer uses the word earth in the most general sense; in the next sentence he is supposed, without any intimation of his intention, to use the same word to denote a region or country, and by so doing entirely to change the meaning of his whole discourse from that which would otherwise have attached to it. Yet the same writer when, a few sentences farther on, it becomes necessary for him to use the word earth to denote the dry land as distinguished from the seas, formally and with an assertion of divine authority, intimates the change of meaning. Is not this supposition contrary not only to sound principles of interpretation, but also to common-sense; and would it not tend to render worthless the testimony of a writer to whose diction such inaccuracy must be ascribed. It is in truth to me surprising beyond measure that such a view could ever have obtained currency; and I fear it is to be attributed to a determination, at all hazards and with any amount of violence to the written record, to make geology and religion coincide. Must we then throw aside this simple and convenient method of reconciliation, sanctioned by Chalmers, Smith, Harris, King, Hitchcock, and many other great or respectable names, and on which so many good men complacently rest. Truth obliges us to do so, and to confess that both geology and Scripture refuse to be reconciled on this basis. We may still admit that the lapse of time between the beginning and the first day may have been great; but we must emphatically deny that this interval corresponds with the time indicated by the series of fossiliferous rocks. Before leaving this part of the subject, I may remark that the desolate and empty condition of the earth was not necessarily a chaotic mass of confusion--_rudis indigestaque moles_; but in reality, when physically considered, may have been a more symmetrical and homogeneous condition than any that it subsequently assumed. If the earth were first a vast globe of vapor, then a liquid spheroid, and then acquired a crust not yet seamed by fissures or broken by corrugations, and eventually covered with a universal ocean, then in each of these early conditions it would, in regard to its form, be a more perfect globe than at any succeeding time. That something of this kind is the intention of our historian is implied in his subsequent statements as to the absence of land and the prevalence of a universal ocean in the immediately succeeding period, which imply that the crust had not yet been ruptured or disturbed, but presented an even and uniform surface, no part of which could project above the comparatively thin fluid envelope. The second clause introduces a new object--"_the deep_." Whatever its precise nature, this is evidently something included in the earth of verse 1st, and created with it. The word occurs in other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures in various senses. It often denotes the sea, especially when in an agitated state (Psa. xlii., 8; Job xxxviii., 10). In Psalm cxxxv., however, it is distinguished from the sea: "Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, in the earth, in the seas, and _in all deeps_." In other cases it has been supposed to refer to interior recesses of the earth, as when at the deluge "the fountains of the great deep" are said to have been broken up. It is probable, however, that this refers to the ocean. In some places it would appear to mean the atmosphere or its waters; as Prov. viii., 27-29, "When he prepared the heavens, I was there; when he described a circle on the face of the deep, when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep." The Septuagint in this passage reads "throne on the winds" and "fountains under the heaven."[39] Though we can not attach much value to these readings, there seems little reason to doubt that the author of this passage understands by the deep the atmospheric waters, and not the sea, which he mentions separately. The same meaning must be attached to the word in another passage of the Book of Proverbs: "The Lord in wisdom hath founded the earth, by understanding hath he established the heavens; by his knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the small rain." In the passage now under consideration, it would seem that we have both the deep and the waters mentioned, and this not in a way which would lead us to infer their identity. The darkness on the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God on the face of the waters seem to refer to the condition of two distinct objects at the same time. Neither can the word here refer to subterranean cavities, for the ascription of a surface to these, and the statement that they were enveloped in darkness, would in this case have neither meaning nor use. For these reasons I am induced to believe that the locality of the deep or abyss is to be sought, not in the universal ocean or the interior of the earth, but in the vaporous or aeriform mass mantling the surface of our nascent planet, and containing the materials out of which the atmosphere was afterward elaborated. This is a view leading to important consequences: one of which is that the darkness on the surface of the deep can not have been, as believed by the advocates of a local chaos, a mere atmospheric obscuration; since even at the _surface_ of what then represented the atmosphere darkness prevailed. "God covered the earth with the deep as with a garment, and the waters stood above the hills," and without this outer garment was the darkness of space destitute of luminaries, at least of those greater ones which are of primary importance to us. We learn from the following verses that there was no layer of clear atmosphere in this misty deep, separating the clouds from the ocean waters. The last clause of the verse has always been obscure, and perhaps it is still impossible to form a clear idea of the operation intended to be described. We are not even certain whether it is intended to represent any thing within the compass of ordinary natural laws, or to denote a direct intervention of the Creator, miraculous in its nature and confined to one period. It is possible that the general intention of the statement may be to the effect that the agency of the divine power in separating the waters from the incumbent vapors had already commenced--that the Spirit which would afterward evoke so many wonders out of the chaotic mass was already acting upon it in an unseen and mysterious way, preparing it for its future destiny. Some commentators, both Jewish and Christian, are, however, disposed to view the _Ruach Elohim_, Spirit, or breath of God, as meaning a wind of God, or mighty wind, according to a well-known Hebrew idiom. The word in its primary sense means wind or breath, and there are undoubted instances of the expression "wind of God" for a great or strong wind. For example, Isaiah xl., 7: "The grass withereth because the wind of the Lord bloweth upon it;" see also 2 Kings ii., 16. Such examples, however, are very rare, and by no means sufficient of themselves to establish this interpretation. Those who hold this view do so mainly in consideration of the advantage which it affords in attaching a definite meaning to the expression. Many of them are not, however, aware of its precise import in a cosmical point of view. A violent wind, before the formation of the atmosphere, and the establishment of the laws which regulate the suspension and motions of aqueous vapors and clouds, must have been merely an agitation of the confused misty and vaporous mass of the deep; since, as Ainsworth--more careful than modern interpreters--long ago observed, "winde (which is the moving of the aier) was not created till the second day, that the firmament was spred, and the aier made." Such an agitation is by no means improbable. It would be a very likely accompaniment of a boiling ocean, resting on a heated surface, and of excessive condensation of moisture in the upper regions of the atmosphere; and might act as an influential means of preparing the earth for the operations of the second day. It is curious also that the Phoenician cosmogony is said to have contained the idea of a mighty wind in connection with this part of creation, and the idea of seething or commotion in the primitive chaos also occurs in the Assyrian tablets of creation, while the Quiché legend represents Hurakon, the storm-god, as specially concerned in the creative work.[40] On the other hand, the verb used in the text rather expresses hovering or brooding than violent motion, and this better corresponds with the old fable of the mundane egg, which seems to have been derived from the event recorded in this verse. The more evangelical view, which supposes the Holy Spirit to be intended, is also more in accordance with the general scope of the Scripture teachings on this subject; and the opposite idea is, as Calvin well says, "too frigid" to meet with much favor from evangelical theologians. Chaos, the equivalent of the Hebrew "desolation and emptiness," figures largely in all ancient cosmogonies. That of the Egyptians is interesting, not only from its resemblance to the Hebrew doctrine, but also from its probable connection with the cosmogony of the Greeks. Taking the version of Diodorus Siculus, which though comparatively modern, yet corresponds with the hints derived from older sources, we find the original chaos to have been an intermingled condition of elements constituting heaven and earth. This is the Hebrew "deep." The first step of progress is the separation of these; the fiery particles ascending above, and not only producing light, but the revolution of the heavenly bodies--a curious foreshadowing of the nebular hypothesis of modern astronomy. After these, in the terms of the lines quoted by Diodorus from Euripides, plants, birds, mammals, and finally man are produced, not however by a direct creative fiat, but by the spontaneous fecundity of the teeming earth. The Phoenician cosmogony attributed to Sancuniathon has the void, the deep, and the brooding Spirit; and one of the terms employed, "baau," is the same with the Hebrew "bohu," void, if read without the points. The Babylonians, according to Berosus, believed in a chaos--which, however, like the literal-day theory of some moderns, produced many monsters before Belus intervened to separate heaven and earth. But the Assyrian legend found in the Nineveh tablets is very precise in its intimation of the Chaos or _Tiamat_, the mother of all things; and, farther, it recognizes this personified chaos as the principle of evil, whose "dragon" becomes the tempter of the progenitors of mankind, exactly like the Biblical serpent. This "dragon of the abyss" is thus identical in name and function with the evil principle even of the last book of the New Testament, and we have in this also probably the origin of the Ahriman of the Avesta. Thus in these Eastern theologies the primeval chaos becomes the type of evil as opposed to the order, beauty, and goodness of the creation of God--a very natural association; but one kept in the background by the Hebrew Scriptures, as tending to a dualistic belief subversive of monotheism. The Greek myth of Chaos, and its children Erebus and Night, who give birth to Aether and Day, is the same tradition, personified after the fanciful manner of a people who, in the primitive period of their civilization, had no profound appreciation of nature, but were full of human sympathies.[41] Lastly, in a hymn translated by Dr. Max Müller from the Rig-Veda, a work probably far older than the Institutes of Menu, we have such utterances as the following: "Nor aught nor nought existed: yon bright sky Was not, nor heaven's broad woof outstretched above. What covered all? what sheltered? what concealed? Was it the water's fathomless abyss? * * * Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled In gloom profound--an ocean without light; The germ that still lay covered in the husk Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat." It is evident that the state of our planet which we have just been considering is one of which we can scarcely form any adequate conception, and science can in no way aid us, except by suggesting hypotheses or conjectures. It is remarkable, however, that nearly all the cosmological theories which have been devised contain some of the elements of the inspired narrative. The words of Moses appear to suggest a heated and cooling globe, its crust as yet unbroken by internal forces, covered by a universal ocean, on which rested a mass of confused vaporous substances; and it is of such materials, thus combined by the sacred historian, that cosmologists have built up their several theories, aqueous or igneous, of the early state of the earth. Geology, as a science of observation and induction, does not carry us back to this period. It must still and always say, with Hutton, that it can find "no trace of a beginning, no prospect of an end"--not because there has been no beginning or will be no end, but because the facts which it collects extend neither to the one nor the other. Geology, like every other department of natural history, can but investigate the facts which are open to observation, and reason on these in accordance with the known laws and arrangements of existing nature. It finds these laws to hold for the oldest period to which the rocky archives of the earth extend. Respecting the origin of these general laws and arrangements, or the condition of the earth before they originated, it knows nothing. In like manner a botanist may determine the age of a forest by counting the growth rings of the oldest trees, but he can tell nothing of the forests that may have preceded it, or of the condition of the surface before it supported a forest. So the archæologist may on Egyptian monuments read the names and history of successive dynasties of kings, but he can tell nothing of the state of the country and its native tribes before those dynasties began or their monuments were built. Yet geology at least establishes a probability that a time was when organized beings did not exist, and when many of the arrangements of the surface of our earth had not been perfected; and the few facts which have given birth to the theories promulgated on this subject tend to show that this pre-geological condition of the earth may have been such as that described in the words now under consideration. I may remark, in addition, that if the words of Moses imply the cooling of the globe from a molten or intensely heated state down to a temperature at which water could exist on its surface, the known rate of cooling of bodies of the dimensions and materials of the earth shows that the time included in these two verses of Genesis must have been enormous, amounting it may be to many millions of years. There are two other sciences besides geology which have in modern times attempted to penetrate into the mysteries of the primitive abyss, at least by hypothetical explanations--astronomy and chemistry. The magnificent nebular hypothesis of La Place, which explains the formation of the whole solar system by the condensation of a revolving mass of gaseous matter, would manifestly bring our earth to the condition of a fluid body, with or without a solid crust, and surrounded by a huge atmosphere of its more volatile materials, gradually condensing itself around the central nucleus. Chemistry informs us that this vaporous mass would contain not only the atmospheric air and water, but all the carbon, sulphur, phosphorus, chlorine, and other elements, volatile in themselves, or forming volatile compounds with oxygen or hydrogen, that are now imprisoned in various states of combination in the solid crust of the earth. Such an atmosphere--vast, dark, pestilential, and capable in its condensation of producing the most intense chemical action--is a necessity of an earth condensing from a vaporous and incandescent state. Thus, in so far as scientific speculation ventures to penetrate into the genesis of the earth, its conclusions are at one with the Mosaic cosmogony and with the traditions of most ancient nations as to the primitive existence of a chaos--formless and void, in which "nor aught nor nought existed." Some of the details of the Mosaic vision of the primeval chaos may be supplied by the probabilities established by physics and chemistry. Our first idea of the earth would be a vast vaporous ball, recently spun out from the general mass of vapors forming the nebula which once represented the solar system. This huge cloud, whirling its annual round about the still vaporous centre of the system, would consist of all the materials now constituting the solid rocks as well as those of the seas and atmosphere, their atoms kept asunder by the force of heat, preventing not only their mechanical union, but even their chemical combination. But heat is being radiated on all sides into space, and the opposing force of gravitation is little by little gathering the particles toward the centre. At length a liquid nucleus is formed, while upon this are being precipitated showers of condensing matter from the still vast atmosphere to add to its volume. As this process advances, a new brilliancy is given to the feebly shining vapors by the incandescence of solid particles in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and in this stage our earth would be a little sun, a miniature of that which now forms the centre of our system, and which still, by virtue of its greater mass, continues in this state. But at length, by further cooling, this brilliancy is lost, and the still fluid globe is surrounded by a vast cloudy pall, in which condensing vapors gather in huge dark masses, and amid terrible electrical explosions, pour, in constantly increasing, acid, corrosive rains, upon the heated nucleus, combining with its materials, or again flashing into vapors. Thus darkness dense and gross would settle upon the vaporous deep, and would continue for long ages, until the atmosphere could be finally cleared of its superfluous vapors. In the mean time a crust of slag or cinder has been forming upon the molten nucleus. Broken again and again by the heaving of the seething mass, it at length sets permanently, and finally allows some portion of the liquid rain condensed upon it to remain as a boiling ocean. Then began the reign of the waters, under which the first stratified rocks were laid down by the deposit of earthy and saline matter suspended or dissolved in the heated sea. Such is the picture which science presents to us of the genesis of the earth, and so far as we can judge from his words, such must have been the picture presented to the mental vision of the ancient seer of creation; but he could discern also that mysterious influence, the "breath of Elohim," which moved on the face of the waters, and prepared for the evolution of land and of life from their bosom. He saw-- "An earth--formless and void; A vaporous abyss--dark at its very surface; A universal ocean--the breath of God hovering over it." How could such a scene be represented in words? since it presented none of the familiar features of the actual world. Had he attempted to dilate upon it, he would, in the absence of the facts furnished by modern science, have been obliged, like the writers of some of the less simple and primitive cosmogonies already quoted,[42] to adopt the feeble expedient of enumerating the things not present. He wisely contents himself with a few well-chosen words, which boldly sketch the crude materials of a world hopeless and chaotic but for the animating breath of the Almighty, who has created even that old chaos out of which is to be worked in the course of the six creative days all the variety and beauty of a finished world. In conclusion, the reader will perceive how this reticence of the author of Genesis strengthens the argument for the primitive age of the document, and for the vision-theory as to its origin; and will also observe that, in the conception of this ancient writer, the "promise and potency" of order and life reside not alone in the atoms of a vaporous world, but also in the will of its Creator. CHAPTER VI. LIGHT AND CREATIVE DAYS. "And God said, Let light be, and light was; and God saw the light that it was good, and separated the light from the darkness; and God called the light Day; and the darkness he called Night. And Evening was and Morning was--Day one."--Genesis i., 3-5. Light is the first element of order and perfection introduced upon our planet--the first innovation on the old régime of darkness and desolation. There is a beautiful propriety in this, for the Hebrew _Aur_ (light) should be viewed as including heat and electricity as well as light; and these three forces--if they are really distinct, and not merely various movements of one and the same ether--are in themselves, or the proximate causes of their manifestation, the prime movers of the machinery of nature, the vivifying forces without which the primeval desolation would have been eternal. The statement presented here is, however, a bold one. Light without luminaries, which were afterward formed--independent light, so to speak, shining all around the earth--is an idea not likely to have occurred in the days of Moses to the framer of a fictitious cosmogony, and yet it corresponds in a remarkable manner with some of the theories which have grown out of modern induction. I have said that the Hebrew word translated "light" includes the vibratory movements which we call heat and electricity as well. I make this statement, not intending to assert that the Hebrews experimented on these forces in the manner of modern science, and would therefore be prepared to understand their laws or correlations as fully as we can. I give the word this general sense simply because throughout the Bible it is used to denote the solar light and heat, and also the electric light of the thunder-cloud: "the light of His cloud," "the bright light which is in the clouds." The absence of "_aur_," therefore, in the primeval earth, is the absence of solar radiation, of the lightning's flash, and of volcanic fires. We shall in the succeeding verses find additional reasons for excluding all these phenomena from the darkness of the primeval night. The light of the first day can not reasonably be supposed to have been in any other than a visible and active state. Whether light be, as supposed by the older physicists, luminous matter radiated with immense velocity, or, as now appears more probable, merely the undulations of a universally diffused ether, its motion had already commenced. The idea of the matter of light as distinct from its power of affecting the senses does not appear in the Scriptures any farther than that the Hebrew name is probably radically identical with the word ether now used to express the undulating medium by which light is propagated; and if it did, the general creation of matter being stated in verse 1, and the notice of the separation of light and darkness being distinctly given in the present verse, there is no place left for such a view here. For this reason, that explanation of these words which supposes that on the first day the _matter_ of light, or the ether whose motions produce light, was created, and that on the fourth day, when luminaries were appointed, it became visible by beginning to undulate, must be abandoned; and the connection between these two statements must be sought in some other group of facts than that connected with the existence of the matter of light as distinct from its undulations. What, then, was the nature of the light which on the first day shone without the presence of any local luminary? It must have proceeded from luminous matter diffused through the whole space of the solar system, or surrounding our globe as with a mantle. It was "clothed with light as with a garment," "Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sun was not." We have already rejected the hypothesis that the primeval night proceeded from a temporary obscuration of the atmosphere; and the expression, "God said, Let light be," affords an additional reason, since, in accordance with the strict precision of language which everywhere prevails in this ancient document, a mere restoration of light would not be stated in such terms. If we wish to find a natural explanation of the mode of illumination referred to, we must recur to one or other of the suppositions mentioned above, that the luminous matter formed a nebulous atmosphere, slowly concentrating itself toward the centre of the solar system, or that it formed a special envelope of our earth, which subsequently disappeared. We may suppose this light-giving matter to be the same with that which now surrounds the sun, and constitutes the stratum of luminous substance which, by its wondrous and unceasing power of emitting light, gives him all his glory. To explain the division of the light from the darkness, we need only suppose that the luminous matter, in the progress of its concentration, was at length all gathered within the earth's orbit, and then, as one hemisphere only would be illuminated at a time, the separation of light from darkness, or of day from night, would be established. This hypothesis, suggested by the words themselves, affords a simple and natural explanation of a statement otherwise obscure. It is an instructive circumstance that the probabilities respecting the early state of our planet, thus deduced from the Scriptural narrative, correspond very closely with the most ingenious and truly philosophical speculation ever hazarded respecting the origin of our solar system. I refer to the cosmical hypothesis of La Place, which was certainly formed without any reference to the Bible; and by persons whose views of the Mosaic narrative are of that shallow character which is too prevalent, has been suspected as of infidel tendency. La Place's theory is based on the following properties of the solar system, which will be found referred to in this connection in many popular works on astronomy: 1. The orbits of the planets are nearly circular. 2. They revolve nearly in the plane of the sun's equator.[43] 3. They all revolve round the sun in one direction, which is also the direction of the sun's rotation. 4. They rotate on their axes also, as far as is known, in the same direction. 5. Their satellites, with the exception of those of Uranus and Neptune, revolve in the same direction. Now all these coincidences can scarcely have been fortuitous, and yet they might have been otherwise without affecting the working of the system; and, farther, if not fortuitous, they correspond precisely with the results which would flow from the condensation of a revolving mass of nebulous matter. La Place, therefore, conceived that in the beginning the matter of our system existed in the condition of a mass of vaporous material, having a central nucleus more or less dense, and the whole rotating in a uniform direction. Such a mass must, "in condensing by cold, leave in the plane of its equator zones of vapor composed of substances which required an intense degree of cold to return to a liquid or solid state. These zones must have begun by circulating round the sun in the form of concentric rings, the most volatile molecules of which must have formed the superior part, and the most condensed the inferior part. If all the nebulous molecules of which these rings are composed had continued to cool without disuniting, they would have ended by forming a liquid or solid ring. But the regular constitution which all parts of the ring would require for this, and which they would have needed to preserve when cooling, would make this phenomenon extremely rare. Accordingly the solar system presents only one instance of it--that of the rings of Saturn. Generally the ring must have broken into several parts which have continued to circulate round the sun, and with almost equal velocity, while at the same time, in consequence of their separation, they would acquire a rotatory motion round their respective centres of gravity; and as the molecules of the superior part of the ring--that is to say, those farthest from the centre of the sun--had necessarily an absolute velocity greater than the molecules of the inferior part which is nearest it, the rotatory motion common to all the fragments must always have been in the same direction with the orbitual motion. However, if after their division one of these fragments has been sufficiently superior to the others to unite them to it by its attraction, they will have formed only a mass of vapor, which, by the continual friction of all its parts, must have assumed the form of a spheroid, flattened at the poles and expanded in the direction of its equator."[44] Here, then, are rings of vapor left by the successive retreats of the atmosphere of the sun, changed into so many planets in the condition of vapor, circulating round the central orb, and possessing a rotatory motion in the direction of their revolution, while the solar mass was gradually contracting itself round its centre and assuming its present organized form. Such is a general view of the hypothesis of La Place, which may also be followed out into all the known details of the solar system, and will be found to account for them all. Into these details, however, we can not now enter. Let us now compare this ingenious speculation with the Scripture narrative. In both we have the raw material of the heavens and the earth created before it assumed its distinct forms. In both we have that state of the planets characterized as without form and void, the condensing nebulous mass of La Place's theory being in perfect correspondence with the Scriptural "deep." In both it is implied that the permanent mutual relations of the several bodies of the system must have been perfected long after their origin. Lastly, supposing the luminous atmosphere of our sun to have been of such a character as to concentrate itself wholly around the centre of the system, and that as it became concentrated it acquired its intense luminosity, we have in both the production of light from the same cause; and in both it would follow that the concentration of this matter within the orbit of the earth would effect the separation of day from night, by illuminating alternately the opposite sides of the earth. It is true that the theory of La Place does not provide for any such special condensation of luminous matter, nor for any precise stage of the process as that in which the arrangements of light and darkness should be completed; but under his hypothesis it seems necessary to account in some such way for the sole luminosity of the sun; and the point of separation of day and night must have been a marked epoch in the history of the process for each planet. The theory of accretion of matter which has in modern times been associated with that of La Place would equally well accord with the indications in our Mosaic record.[45] It is further to be observed that so long as the material of the earth constituted a part of the great vaporous mass, it would be encompassed with its diffused light, and that after it had been left outside the contracting solar envelope, it might still retain some independent luminosity in its atmosphere, a trace of which may still exist in the auroral displays of the upper strata of the air. The earth might thus at first be in total darkness. It might then be dimly lighted by the surrounding nebulosity, or by a luminous envelope in its own atmosphere. Then it might, as before explained, relapse into the darkness of its misty mantle, and as this cleared away and the light of the sun increased and became condensed, the latter would gradually be installed into his office as the sole orb of day. It is quite evident that we thus have a sufficient hypothetical explanation of the light of the first of the creative æons; and this is all that in the present state of science we can expect. "Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof, that thou shouldest take it to the bound thereof, and know the way to the house thereof?" For the reasons above given, we must regard the hypothesis of the great French astronomer as a wonderful approximation to the grand and simple plan of the construction of our system as revealed in Scripture. Nor must we omit to notice that the telescope and the spectroscope reveal to us in the heavens gaseous nebular bodies which may well be new systems in progress of formation, and in which the Creator is even now dividing the light from the darkness. Still another thought in connection with this subject is that the theory of a condensing system affords a measure of the aggregate time occupied in the work of creation. Sir William Thomson's well-known calculations give us one hundred millions of years as the possible age of the earth as a planetary globe; but calculations of the sun's heat as produced by gravitation alone would give a much less time. We have, however, a right to assume an original heated condition of the vaporous mass from which the sun was formed. Still the date above given would seem to be a maximum rather than a minimum age for the solar system. "God saw the light that it was good," though it illuminated but a waste of lifeless waters. It was good because beautiful in itself, and because God saw it in its relations to long trains of processes and wonderful organic structures on which it was to act as a vivifying agency. Throughout the Scriptures light is not only good, but an emblem of higher good. In Psalm civ. God is represented as "clothing himself with light as with a garment;" and in many other parts of these exquisite lyrics we have similar figures. "The Lord is my light and salvation;" "Lift up the light of thy countenance upon me;" "The entrance of thy law giveth light;" "The path of the just is as a shining light." And the great spiritual Light of the world, the "only begotten of the Father," the mediator alike in creation and redemption, is himself the "Sun of Righteousness." Perhaps the noblest Scripture passage relating to the blessing of light is one in the address of Jehovah to Job, which is unfortunately so imperfectly translated in the English version as to be almost unintelligible: "Hast thou in thy lifetime given law to the morning, Or caused the dawn to know its place, That it may enclose the horizon in its grasp, And chase the robbers before it: It rolls along as the seal over the clay, Causing all things to stand forth in gorgeous apparel."[46] Job xxxviii., 12. The concluding words, "Day one," bring us to the consideration of one of the most difficult problems in this history, and one on which its significance in a great measure depends--the meaning of the word _day_, and the length of the days of creation. In pursuing this investigation, I shall refrain from noticing in detail the views of the many able modern writers who, from Cuvier, De Luc, and Jameson, down to Hugh Miller, Donald McDonald, and Tayler Lewis, have maintained the period theory, or those equally numerous and able writers who have supported the opposite view. I acknowledge obligations to them all, but prefer to direct my attention immediately to the record itself. The first important fact that strikes us is one which has not received the attention it deserves, viz., that the word _day_ is evidently used in three senses in the record itself. We are told (verse 5th) that God called the _light_, that is, the diurnal continuance of light, day. We are also informed that the _evening_ and the _morning_ were the first day. Day, therefore, in one of these clauses is the light as separated from the darkness, which we may call the _natural day_; in the other it is the whole time occupied in the creation of light and its separation from the darkness, whether that was a _civil or astronomical day_ of twenty-four hours or some longer period. In other words, the daylight, to which God is represented as restricting the use of the term day, is only a part of a day of creation, which included both light and darkness, and which might be either a civil day or a longer period, but could not be the natural day intervening between sunrise and sunset, which is the _ordinary_ day of Scripture phraseology. Again, in the 4th verse of chapter ii., which begins the second part of the history, the whole creative week is called one day--"In the day that Jehovah Elohim made the earth and the heavens." Such an expression must surely in such a place imply more than a mere inadvertence on the part of the writer or writers. To pave the way for a right understanding of the day of creation, it may be well to consider, in the first place, the manner in which the _shorter day_ is introduced. In the expression, "God _called_ the light day," we find for the first time the Creator naming his works, and we may infer that some important purpose was to be served by this. The nature of this purpose we ascertain by comparison with other instances of the same kind occurring in the chapter. God called the darkness night, the firmament heaven, the dry land earth, the gathered waters seas. In all these cases the purpose seems to have been one of verbal definition, perhaps along with an assertion of sovereignty. It was necessary to distinguish the diurnal darkness from that unvaried darkness which had been of old, and to discriminate between the limited waters of an earth having dry land on its surface and those of the ancient universal ocean. This is effected by introducing two new terms, night and seas. In like manner it was necessary to mark the new application of the term earth to the dry land, and that of heaven to the atmosphere, more especially as these were the senses in which the words were to be popularly used. The intention, therefore, in all these cases was to affix to certain things names different from those which they had previously borne in the narrative, and to certain terms new senses differing from those in which they had been previously used. Applying this explanation here, it results that the probable reason for calling the light day is to point out that the word occurs in two senses, and that while it was to be the popular and proper term for the natural day, this sense must be distinguished from its other meaning as a day of creation. In short, we may take this as a plain and authoritative declaration _that the day of creation is not the day of popular speech_. We see in this a striking instance of the general truth that in the simplicity of the structure of this record we find not carelessness, but studied and severe precision, and are warned against the neglect of the smallest peculiarities in its diction. What, then, is the day of creation, as distinguished by Moses himself from the natural day. The general opinion, and that which at first sight appears most probable, is that it is merely the ordinary civil day of twenty-four hours. Those who adopt this view insist on the impropriety of diverting the word from its usual sense. Unfortunately, however, for this argument, the word is not very frequently used in the Scriptures for the whole twenty-four hours of the earth's revolution. Its etymology gives it the sense of the time of glowing or warmth, and in accordance with this the divine authority here limits its meaning to the daylight. Accordingly throughout the Hebrew Scriptures _yom_ is generally the natural and not the civil day; and where the latter is intended, the compound terms "day and night" and "evening and morning" are frequently used. Any one who glances over the word "day" in a good English concordance can satisfy himself of this fact. But the sense of natural day from sunrise to sunset is expressly excluded here by the context, as already shown; and all that we can say in favor of the interpretation that limits the day of creation to twenty-four hours, is that next to the use of the word for the natural day, which is its true popular meaning, its use for the civil day is perhaps the most frequent. It is therefore by no means a statement of the whole truth to affirm, as many writers have done, that the civil day is _the ordinary_ meaning of the term. At the same time we may admit that this is _one_ of its ordinary meanings, and therefore may be its meaning here. Another argument frequently urged is that the day of creation is said to have had an evening and morning. We shall consider this more fully in the sequel, and in the mean time may observe that it appears rather hazardous to attribute an ordinary evening and morning to a day which, on the face of the record, preceded the formation and arrangement of the luminaries which are "for days and for years."[47] But it may be affirmed that in the Bible long and undefined periods are indicated by the word "day." In many of these cases the word is in the plural: as Genesis iv., 3, "And after days it came to pass," rendered in our version "in process of time;" Genesis xl., 4, "days in ward," rendered "a season." Such instances as these are not applicable to the present question, since the plural may have the sense of indefinite time, merely by denoting an undetermined number of natural days. Passages in which the singular occurs in this sense are those which strictly apply to the case in hand, and such are by no means rare. A very remarkable example is that in Genesis ii., 4, already mentioned, where we find, "In the day when Jehovah Elohim made the earth and the heavens." This day must either mean the beginning, or must include the whole six days; most probably the latter, since the word "made" refers not to the act of creation, properly so called, but to the elaborating processes of the creative week; and occurring as this does immediately after the narrative of creation, it seems almost like an intentional intimation of the wide import of the creative days. It has been objected, however, that the expression "in the day" is properly a compound adverb, having the force of "when" or "at the time." But the learned and ingenious authors who urge this objection have omitted to consider the relative probabilities as to whether the adverbial use had arisen while the word _yom_ meant simply a day, or whether the use of the noun for long periods was the reason of the introduction of such an adverbial expression. The probabilities are in favor of the latter, for it is not likely that men would construct an adverb referring to indefinite time from a word denoting one of the most precisely limited portions of time, unless that word had also a second and more unlimited sense. Admitting, therefore, that the phrase is an adverb of time, its use so early as the date of the composition of Genesis, to denote a period longer than a literal day, seems to imply that this indefinite use of the word was of high antiquity, and probably preceded the invention of any term by which long periods could be denoted. This use of the word "day" is, however, not limited to cases of the occurrence of the formula "in the day." The following are a few out of many instances that might be quoted: Job xviii., 20, "They that come after him shall be astonished at his day;" Job xv., 32, "It shall be accomplished before his _time_;" Judges xviii., 30, "Until the day of the captivity of the land;" Deut. i., 39, "And your children which in that day had no knowledge of good and evil;" Gen. xxxix., 10, "And it came to pass about that time" (on that day). We find also abundance of such expressions as "day of calamity," "day of distress," "day of wrath," "day of God's power," "day of prosperity." In such passages the word is evidently used in the sense of era or period of time, and this in prose as well as poetry. There is a remarkable passage in the Psalms, which conveys the idea of a day of God as distinct from human or terrestrial days: "Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. Thou turnest man to destruction, And sayest, Return, ye children of men; For a thousand years are in thy sight as yesterday when it is past, And as a watch in the night."[48] It is a singular coincidence that the authorship of this Psalm is attributed to Moses, and that its style and language correspond with the songs credited to him in Deuteronomy. It is farther to be observed that the reference is to the long periods employed in creation as contrasted with the limited space of years allotted to man. Its meaning, too, is somewhat obscured by the inaccurate translation of the third line. In the original it is, "From _olam_ to _olam_ thou art, O El"--that is, "from age to age." These long ages of creation, constituting a duration to us relatively eternal, were so protracted that even a thousand years are but as a watch in the night. If this Psalm is rightly attributed to the author of the first chapter of Genesis, it seems absolutely certain that he understood his own creative days as being _Olamim_ or æons. The same thought occurs in the Second Epistle of Peter: "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." That the other writers of the Old Testament understood the creative days in this sense, might be inferred from the entire absence of any reference to the work of creation as short, since it occupied only six days. Such reference we may find in modern writers, but never in the Scriptures. On the contrary, we receive the impression of the creative work as long continued. Thus the divine Wisdom says in Prov. viii., The Lord possessed me "from the beginning of his way before his works of old, from everlasting, before the antiquities of the earth." So in Psalm cxlv., God's kingdom relatively to nature and providence is a kingdom "of all ages." In Psalm civ., which is a poetical version of the creative work, and the oldest extant commentary on Genesis i., it is evident that there was no idea in the mind of the writer of a short time, but rather of long consecutive processes; and I may remark here that the course of the narrative itself in Genesis i., implies time for the replenishing of the earth with various forms of being in preparation for others, exactly as in Psalm civ. Perhaps one of the most conclusive arguments in favor of the length of the creative days is that furnished by the seventh day and the institution of the Sabbath. In Genesis the seventh day is not said to have had any evening or morning, nor is God said to have resumed his work on any eighth day. Consequently the seventh day of creation must be still current. Now in the fourth commandment the Israelites are enjoined to "remember the Sabbath-day," because "in six days God created the heavens and the earth." Observe here that the Sabbath is to be remembered as an institution already known. Observe farther that the commandment is placed in the middle of the Decalogue, a solitary piece of apparently arbitrary ritual amid the plainest and most obvious moral duties. Observe also that the reason given--namely, God's six days' work and seventh day's rest--seems at first sight both far-fetched and trivial, as an argument for abstaining from work in a seventh part of our time. How is all this to be explained? Simply, I think, on the supposition that the Lawgiver, and those for whom he legislated, knew beforehand the history of creation and the fall, as we have them recorded in Genesis, and knew that God's days are æons. The argument is not, "God worked on six natural days, and rested on the seventh; do you therefore the same." Such an argument could have no moral or religious force, more especially as it could not be affirmed that God habitually works and rests in this way. The argument reaches far deeper and higher. It is this. God created the world in six of his days, and on the seventh rested, and invited man in Eden to enter on his rest as a perpetual Sabbath of happiness. But man fell, and lost God's Sabbath. Therefore a weekly Sabbath was prescribed to him as a memorial of what he had lost, and a pledge of what God has promised in the renewal of life and happiness through our Saviour. Thus the Sabbath is the central point of the moral law--the Gospel in the Decalogue--the connection between God and man through the promise of redemption. It is this and this alone that gives it its true religious significance, but is lost on the natural-day theory. It would farther seem that this view of the law was that of our Lord himself, and was known to the Jews of his time, for, when blamed for healing a man on the Sabbath, he says, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work"--an argument whose force depended on the fact that God continues to work in his providence throughout his long Sabbath, which has never been broken except by man. Farther, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews takes this view in arguing as to the rest or Sabbatism that remains to the people of God. His argument (chap. iv., 4) may be stated thus: God finished his work and entered into his rest. Man, in consequence of the fall, failed to do so. He has made several attempts since, but unsuccessfully. Now Christ has finished his work, and has entered into his Sabbath, and through him we may enter into that rest of God which otherwise we can not attain to. This does not, it is true, refer to the keeping of a Sabbath-day; but it implies an understanding of the reference to God's olamic Sabbath, and also implies that Christ, having entered into his Sabbatism in heaven, gives us a warrant for the Christian Sabbath or Lord's day, which has the same relation to Christ's present Sabbatism in heaven that the old Sabbath had to God's rest from his work of creation.[49] We may add to these considerations the use of the Greek term _Ai[=o]n_ in the New Testament, for what may be called time-worlds as distinguished from space-worlds. For example, take the expression in Heb. i., 2: "His Son, by whom he made the worlds," or, literally, "constituted the æons"--the long time-worlds of the creation. For God's worlds must exist in time as well as in space, and both may to our minds alike appear as infinities. If, then, we find that Moses himself seems to have understood his creative days as æons, that the succeeding Old Testament writers favor the same view, that this view is essential to the true significance of the Sabbath and the Lord's day, and that it is sustained by Christ and his apostles, there is surely no need for our clinging to a mediæval notion which has no theological value, and is in opposition to the facts of nature. On the contrary, should not even children be taught these grand truths, and led to contemplate the great work of Him who is from æon to æon, and to think of that Sabbatism which he prepared for us, and which he still offers to us in the future, in connection with the succession of worlds in time revealed by geology, and which rivals in grandeur and perhaps exceeds in interest the extension of worlds in space revealed by astronomy. In truth, we should bear in mind that the great revelations of astronomy have too much habituated us to think of space-worlds rather than time-worlds, while the latter idea was evidently dominant with the Biblical writers as it is also with modern geologists. Viewed as æons--divine days, or time-worlds--the days of creation are thus a reality for all ages; and connect themselves with the highest moral teachings of the Bible in relation to the fall of man and God's plan for his restoration, begun in this seventh æon of the world's long history, and to be completed in that second divine Sabbatism, secured by the work of redemption, the final "rest" of the "new heavens and new earth," which remains for the people of God. But supposing that the inspired writer intended to say that the world was formed in six long periods of time, could not he have used some other word than _yom_ that would have been liable to fewer doubts. There are words which might have been used, as, for instance, _eth_, time, season, or _olam_, age, ancient time, eternity. The former, however, has about it a want of precision as to its beginning and end which unfits it for this use; the latter we have already seen is used as equivalent to the creative _yom_. On the whole, I am unable to find any instance which would justify me in affirming that, on the supposition that Moses intended long periods, he could have better expressed the idea than by the use of the word _yom_, more especially if he and those to whom he wrote were familiar with the thought, preserved to us in the mythology of the Hindoos and Persians, and probably widely diffused in ancient Asia, that a working day of the Creator immeasurably transcends a working day of man.[50] Many objections to the view which I have thus endeavored to support from internal evidence will at once occur to every intelligent reader familiar with the literature of this subject. I shall now attempt to give the principal of these objections a candid consideration. (1.) It is objected that the time occupied in the work of creation is given as a reason for the observance of the seventh day as a Sabbath; and that this requires us to view the days of creation as literal days. "For in six days Jehovah made the heaven and the earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh day; therefore Jehovah blessed the Sabbath-day and sanctified it." The argument used here is, however, as we have already seen, one of analogy. Because God rested on his seventh day, he blessed and sanctified it, and required men in like manner to sanctify their seventh day.[51] Now, if it should appear that the working day of God is not the same with the working day of man, and that the Sabbath of God is of proportionate length to his working day, the analogy is not weakened; more especially as we find the same analogy extended to the seventh year. If it should be said, God worked in the creation of the world in six long ages, and rested on the seventh, therefore man, in commemoration of this fact, and of his own loss of an interest in God's rest by the fall, shall sanctify the seventh of his working days, the argument is stronger, the example more intelligible, than on the common supposition. This objection is, in fact, a piece of pedantic hyperorthodoxy which has too long been handed about without investigation. I may add to what has been already said in reference to it, the following vigorous thrust by Hugh Miller:[52] "I can not avoid thinking that many of our theologians attach a too narrow meaning to the remarkable reason attached to the fourth commandment by the divine Lawgiver. "God rested on the seventh day," says the text, "from all his work which he had created and made; and God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it." And such is the reason given in the Decalogue why man should rest on the Sabbath-day. God rested on the Sabbath-day and sanctified it; and therefore man ought also to rest on the Sabbath and keep it holy. But I know not where we shall find grounds for the belief that the Sabbath-day during which God rested was merely commensurate with one of the Sabbaths of short-lived man--a brief period measured by a single revolution of the earth on its axis. We have not, as has been shown, a shadow of evidence that he resumed his work of creation on the morrow; the geologist finds no trace of post-Adamic creation; the theologian can tell us of none. God's Sabbath of rest may still exist; the work of redemption may be the work of his Sabbath-day. That elevatory process through successive acts of creation, which engaged him during myriads of ages, was of an ordinary week-day character; but when the term of his moral government began, the elevatory process peculiar to it assumed the divine character of the Sabbath. This special view appears to lend peculiar emphasis to the reason embodied in the commandment. The collation of the passage with the geologic record seems, as if by a species of retranslation, to make it enunciate as its injunction, "Keep this day, not merely as a day of memorial related to a past fact, but also as a day of co-operation with God in the work of elevation, in relation both to a present fact and a future purpose." "God keeps his Sabbath," it says, "in order that he may save; keep yours also that ye may be saved." It serves besides to throw light on the prominence of the Sabbatical command, in a digest of law of which no jot or tittle can pass away until the fulfillment of all things. During the present dynasty of probation and trial, that special work of both God and man on which the character of the future dynasty depends is the Sabbath-day work of saving and being saved. "The common objection to that special view which regards the days of creation as immensely protracted periods of time, furnishes a specimen, if not of reasoning in a circle, at least of reasoning from a mere assumption. It first takes for granted that the Sabbath-day during which God rested was a day of but twenty-four hours, and then argues from the supposition that, in order to keep up the proportion between the six previous working days and the seventh day of rest, which the reason annexed to the fourth commandment demands, these previous days must also have been twenty-four hours each. It would, I have begun to suspect, square better with the ascertained facts, and be at least equally in accordance with Scripture, to reverse the process, and argue that because God's working days were immensely protracted periods, his Sabbath also must be an immensely protracted period. The reason attached to the law of the Sabbath seems to be simply a reason of proportion: the objection to which I refer is an objection palpably founded on considerations of proportion, and certainly were the reason to be divested of proportion, it would be divested also of its distinctive character as a reason. Were it as follows, it could not be at all understood: "Six days shalt thou labor, etc.; but on the seventh day shalt thou do no labor, etc.; for in six immensely protracted periods of several thousand years each did the Lord make the heavens and the earth, etc.; and then rested during a brief day of twenty-four hours; therefore the Lord blessed the brief day of twenty-four hours and hallowed it." This, I repeat, would not be reason. All, however, that seems necessary to the integrity of the reason, in its character as such, is that the proportion of six parts to seven should be maintained. God's periods may be periods expressed algebraically by letters symbolical of unknown quantities, and man's periods by letters symbolical of quantities well known; but if God's Sabbath be equal to one of his six working days, and man's Sabbath equal to one of his six working days, the integrity of proportion is maintained." Not only does this view of the case entirely remove the objection, but, as we have already seen, it throws a new light on the nature and reason of the Sabbath. No good reason, except that of setting an example, can be assigned for God's resting for a literal day. But if God's Sabbath of rest from natural creation is still in progress, and if our short Sabbaths are symbolical of the work of that great Sabbath in its present gray morning and in its coming glorious noon, then may the Christian thank this question, incidentally raised by geology and its long periods, for a ray of light which shines along the whole course of Scripture history, from the first Sabbath up to that final "rest which remaineth for the people of God."[53] (2.) It is objected that evening and morning are ascribed to the first day. This has been already noticed; it may here be considered more fully. The word evening in the original is literally the darkening, the sunset, the dusk. Morning is the _opening_ or _breaking forth_ of light--the daybreak. It must not be denied that the explanation of these terms is attended with some difficulty, but this is not at all lessened by narrowing the day to twenty-four hours. The first operation of the first day was the creation of light; next we have the Creator contemplating his work and pronouncing it to be good; then we have the separation of the light and darkness, previously, it is to be presumed, intermixed; and all this without the presence of a sun or other luminary. Which of these operations occupied the evening, and which the morning, if the day consisted of but twenty-four hours, beginning, according to Hebrew custom, in the evening? Was the old primeval darkness the evening or night, and the first breaking forth of light morning? This is almost the only view compatible with the Hebrew civil day beginning at evening, but it would at once lengthen the day beyond twenty-four hours, and contradict the terms of the record. Again, were the separated light and darkness the morning and evening? If so, why is the evening mentioned first, contrary to the supposed facts of the case? why, indeed, are the evening and morning mentioned at all, since on that supposition this is merely a repetition? Lastly, shall we adopt the ingenious expedient of dividing the evening and morning between two days, and maintaining that the evening belongs to the first and the morning to the second day, which would deprive the first day of a morning, and render the creative days, whatever their length, altogether different from Hebrew natural or civil days? It is unnecessary to pursue such inquiries farther, since it is evident that the terms of the record will not agree with the supposition of natural evening and morning. This is of itself a strong presumption against the hypothesis of civil days, since the writer was under no necessity so to word these verses that they would not give any rational or connected sense on the supposition of natural evening and morning, unless he wished to be otherwise understood. But what is the meaning of evening and morning, if these days were long periods? Here fewer difficulties meet us. First: It is readily conceivable that the beginning and end of a period named a day should be called evening and morning. But what made the use of these divisions necessary or appropriate? I answer that nature and revelation both give grounds at least to suspect that the evening, or earlier part of each period, was a time of comparative inaction, sometimes even of retrogression, and that the latter part of each period was that of its greatest activity and perfection. Thus, on the views stated in a former chapter, in the first day there was a time when luminous matter, either gradually concentrating itself toward the sun, or surrounding the earth itself, shed a dim but slowly increasing light; then there were day and night, the light increasing in intensity as, toward the end of the period, the luminous matter became more and more concentrated around the sun. So in our own seventh day, the earlier part was a time of deplorable retrogression, and though the Sun of Righteousness has arisen, we have seen as yet only a dim and cloudy morning. On the theory of days of vision, as expounded by Hugh Miller, in the "Testimony of the Rocks," in one of his noblest passages, the evening and night fall on each picture presented to the seer like the curtain of a stage. Secondly: Though the explanation stated above is the most probable, the hypothesis of long periods admits of another, namely, that the writer means to inform us that evening and morning, once established by the separation of light from darkness, continued without cessation throughout the remainder of the period--rolling from this time uninterruptedly around our planet, like the seal cylinder over the clay.[54] This explanation is, however, less applicable to the following days than to the first. Nor does this accord with the curious fact that the seventh day, which, on the hypothesis of long periods, is still in progress, is not said to have had an evening or morning. (3.) It is objected that the first chapter of Genesis "is not a poem nor a piece of oratorical diction," but a simple prosaic narrative, and consequently that its terms must be taken in a literal sense. In answer to this, I urge that the most truly literal sense of the word, namely, the _natural_ day, is excluded by the terms of the narrative; and that the word may be received as a literal day of the Creator, in the sense of one of his working periods, without involving the use of poetical diction, and in harmony with the wording of plain prosaic passages in other parts of the Bible. Examples of this have already been given. It is, however, true that, though the first chapter of Genesis is not strictly poetical, it is thrown into a metrical form which admits of some approach to a figurative expression in the case of a term of this kind. (4.) It has been urged that in cases where day is used to denote period, as in the expressions "day of calamity," etc., the adjuncts plainly show that it can not mean an ordinary day. In answer to this, I merely refer to the internal evidence already adduced, and to the deliberate character of the statements, in the manner rather of the description of processes than of acts. The difficulties attending the explanation of the evening and the morning, and the successive creation of herbivorous and carnivorous animals, are also strong indications which should serve here to mark the sense, just as the context does in the cases above referred to. (5.) In Professor Hitchcock's valuable and popular "Religion of Geology," I find some additional objections, which deserve notice as specimens of the learned trifles which pass current among writers on this subject, much to the detriment of sound Scriptural literature. I give them in the words of the author. 1. "From Genesis ii., 5 compared with Genesis i., 11 and 12, it seems that it had not rained on the earth till the third day; a fact altogether probable if the days were of twenty-four hours, but absurd if they were long periods." It strikes us that the absurdity here is all on the side of the short days. Why should any prominence be given to a fact so common as the lapse of two ordinary days without rain, more especially if a region of the earth and not the whole is referred to, and in a document prepared for a people residing in climates such as those of Egypt and Palestine. But what could be more instructive and confirmatory of the truth of the narrative than the fact that in the two long periods which preceded the formation and clearing up of the atmosphere or firmament, on which rain depends, and the elevation of the dry land, which so greatly modifies its distribution, there had been no rain such as now occurs. This is a most important fact, and one of the marked coincidences of the record with scientific truth. The objection, therefore, merely shows that the ordinary day hypothesis tends to convert one of the finest internal harmonies of this wonderful history into an empty and, in some respects, absurd commonplace. 2. "This hypothesis (that days are long periods) assumes that Moses describes the creation of all the animals and plants that have ever lived on our globe. But geology decides that the species now living, since they are not found in the rocks any lower than man is,[55] could not have been contemporaneous with those in the rocks, but must have been created when man was--that is, in the sixth day. Of such a creation no mention is made in Genesis; the inference is that Moses does not describe the creation of the existing races, but only of those that lived thousands of years earlier, and whose existence was scarcely suspected till modern times. Who will admit such an absurdity?" In answer to this objection, I remark that it is based on a false assumption. The hypothesis of long periods does not require us to assume that Moses notices all the animals and plants that have ever lived, but on the contrary that he informs us only of the _first appearance_ of each great natural type in the animal and vegetable kingdoms; just as he informs us of the first appearance of dry land on the third day, but says nothing of the changes which it underwent on subsequent days. Thus plants were created on the third day, and though they may have been several times destroyed and renewed as to genera and species, we infer that they continued to exist in all the succeeding days, though the inspired historian does not inform us of the fact. So also many tribes of animals were created in the early part of the fifth day, and it is quite unnecessary for us to be informed that these tribes continued to exist through the sixth day. If the days were long periods, the inspired writer could not have adopted any other course, unless he had been instructed to write a treatise on Palæontology, and to describe the fauna and flora of each successive period with their characteristic differences. 3. "Though there is a general resemblance between the order of creation as described in Genesis and by geology, yet when we look at the details of the creation of the organic world, as required by this hypothesis, we find manifest discrepancy. Thus the Bible represents plants only to have been created on the third day, and animals not till the fifth; and hence at least the lower half of the fossiliferous rocks ought to contain nothing but vegetables. Whereas in fact the lower half of these rocks, all below the carboniferous, although abounding in animals, contain scarcely any plants, and these in the lowest strata fucoids or sea-weeds. But the Mosaic account evidently describes flowering and seed-bearing plants, not flowerless and seedless algæ. Again, reptiles are described in Genesis as created on the fifth day; but reptilia and batrachians existed as early as the time when the lower carboniferous and even old red sandstone were in course of deposition, as their tracks on those rocks in Nova Scotia and Pennsylvania evince.[56] In short, if we maintain that Moses describes fossils as well as living species, we find discrepancy instead of correspondence between his order of creation and that of geology." In this objection it is assumed that the geological history of the earth goes back to the third day of creation, or, in other words, to the dawn of organic life. None of the greater authorities in geology would, however, now venture to make such an assertion, and the progress of geology is rapidly making the contrary more and more probable. The fact is that, on the supposition that the days of creation are long periods, the whole series of the fossiliferous rocks belongs to the fifth and sixth days; and that for the early plant creation of the third day, and the great physical changes of the fourth, geology has nothing as yet to show, except a mass of metamorphosed eozoic rocks which have hitherto yielded no fossils except a few Protozoa; but which contain vast quantities of carbon in the form of graphite, which may be the remains of plants. I have much pleasure in quoting, as a further answer to these objections, the following from Professor Dana:[57] "Accepting the account in Genesis as true, the seeming discrepancy between it and geology rests mainly here: Geology holds, and has held from the first, that the progress of creation was mainly through secondary causes; for the existence of the science presupposes this. Moses, on the contrary, was thought to sustain the idea of a simple fiat for each step. Grant this first point to science, and what farther conflict is there? _The question of the length of time_, it is replied. But not so; for if we may take the record as allowing more than six days of twenty-four hours, the Bible then places no limit to time. _The question of the days and periods_, it is replied again. But this is of little moment in comparison with the first principle granted. Those who admit the length of time and stand upon days of twenty-four hours have to place geological time _before_ the six days, and then assume a chaos and reordering of creation, on the six-day and fiat principle, after a previous creation that had operated for a long period through secondary causes. Others take days as periods, and thus allow the required time, admitting that creation was one in progress, a grand whole, instead of a _first_ creation excepting man by one method, and a _second_ with man by the other. This is now the remaining question between the theologians and geologists; for all the minor points, as to the exact interpretation of each day, do not affect the general concordance or discordance of the Bible and science. "On this point geology is now explicit in its decision, and indeed has long been so. It proves that there was no return to chaos, no great revolution, that creation was beyond doubt one in its progress. We know that some geologists have taken the other view. But it is only in the capacity of theologians, and not as geologists. The Rev. Dr. Buckland, in placing the great events of geology between the first and second verses of the Mosaic account, did not pretend that there was a geological basis for such an hypothesis; and no writer since has ever brought forward the first fact in geology to support the idea of a rearrangement just before man; not one solitary fact has ever been appealed to. The conclusion was on Biblical grounds, and not in any sense on geological. The best that Buckland could say, when he wrote twenty-five years since, was that geology did not absolutely disprove such an hypothesis; and that can not be said now. "It is often asserted, in order to unsettle confidence in these particular teachings of geology, that geology is a changing science. In this connection the remark conveys an erroneous impression. Geology is a progressive science; and all its progress tends to establish more firmly these two principles: (1) The slow progress of creation through secondary causes, as explained; and (2) the progress by periods analogous to the days of Genesis." I have, I trust, shown that the principal objections to the lengthening of the Mosaic days into great cosmical periods are of a character too light and superficial to deserve any regard. I shall now endeavor to add to the internal evidence previously given some considerations of an external character which support this view. 1. The fact that the creation was progressive, that it proceeded from the formation of the raw material of the universe, through successive stages, to the perfection of living organisms, if we regard the analogy of God's operations as disclosed in the geological history of the earth and in the present course of nature, must impress us with a suspicion that long periods were employed in the work. God might have prepared the earth for man in an instant. He did not choose to do so, but on the contrary proceeded step by step; and the record he has given us does not receive its full significance nor attain its full harmony with the course of geological history, unless we can understand each day of the creative week as including a long succession of ages. 2. We have, as already explained, reason to believe that the seventh day at least has been of long duration. At the close of the sixth, God rested from all his work of material creation, and we have as yet no evidence that he has resumed it. Neither theologians nor evolutionists will, I presume, desire to maintain that any strictly creative acts have occurred in the modern period of geology. We know that the present day, if it is the seventh, has lasted already for at least six thousand years, and, if we may judge from the testimony of prophecy, has yet a long space to run, before it merges in that "new heaven and new earth" for which all believers look, and which will constitute the first day of an endless sabbatism. 3. The philosophical and religious systems of many ancient nations afford intimations of the somewhat extensive prevalence in ancient times of the notion of long creative periods, corresponding to the Mosaic days. These notions, in so far as they are based on truth, are probably derived from the Mosaic narrative itself, or from the primitive patriarchal documents which may have formed the basis of that narrative. They are, no doubt, all more or less garbled versions, and can not be regarded as of any authority, but they serve to show what was the interpretation of the document in a very remote antiquity. I have collected from a variety of sources the following examples: The ancient mythology of Persia appears to have had six creative periods, each apparently of a thousand years, and corresponding very nearly with the Mosaic days.[58] The Chaldeans had a similar system, to which in a previous chapter we have already referred. The Etruscans possessed a history of the creation, somewhat resembling that of the Bible, and representing the creation as occupying six periods of a thousand years each.[59] The Egyptians believed that the world had been subject to a series of destructions and renewals, the intervals between which amounted to 120,000 years, or, according to other authorities, to 300,000 or 360,000 years. This system of destruction and renewal the Egyptian priests appear to have wrought out into considerable detail, but though important truths may be concealed under their mysterious dogmas, it will not repay us to dwell on the fragments that remain of them. There can be no doubt, however, that at least the basis of the Egyptian cosmogony must have been the common property of all the Hamite nations, of which Egypt was the greatest and most permanent; and therefore in all probability derived from the ideas of creation which were current not long after the Deluge. The Egyptians appear also, as already stated, to have had a physical cosmogony, beginning with a chaos in which heaven and earth were mingled, and from which were evolved fiery matters which ascended into the heavens, and moist earthy matters which formed the earth and the sea; and from these were produced, by the agency of solar heat, the various animals. The terms of this cosmogony, as it is given by Diodorus Siculus, indicate the belief of long formative periods.[60] The Hindoos have a somewhat extended, though, according to the translations, a not very intelligible cosmogony. It plainly, however, asserts long periods of creative work, and is interesting as an ancient cosmogony preserved entire and without transmission through secondary channels. The following is a summary, in so far as I have been able to gather it, from the translation of the Institutes of Menu by Sir W. Jones.[61] The introduction to the Institutes represents Menu as questioned by the "divine sages" respecting the laws that should regulate all classes or castes. He proceeds to detail the course of creation, stating that the "Self-existing Power,[62] undiscovered, but making this world discernible, He whom the mind alone can perceive, whose essence eludes the external senses, who has no visible parts, who exists from eternity, even the soul of all being, whom no being can comprehend, shone forth in person." After giving this exalted view of the Creator, the writer proceeds to state that the Self-existent created the waters, and then an egg, from which he himself comes forth as Brahma the forefather of spirits. "The waters are called Nara because they are the production of _Nara_, the spirit of God, and since they were his first _Ayana_, or place of motion, he thence is named _Narayana_, or moving on the waters. In the egg Brahma remained a year, and caused the egg to divide, forming the heaven above and the earth beneath, and the subtile ether, the eight regions, and the receptacle of waters between. He then drew forth from the supreme soul mind with all its powers and properties." The rest of the account appears to be very confused, and I confess to a great extent unintelligible to me. There follows, however, a continuation of the narrative, stating that there is a succession of seven Menus, each of whom produces and supports the earth during his reign. It is in the account of these successive Menus that the following statement respecting the days and years of Brahma occurs: "A day of the Gods is equal to a year. Four thousand years of the Gods are called a Critya or Satya age. Four ages are an age of the Gods. _One thousand divine ages (equal to more than four millions of human years) are a day of Brahma the Creator._ Seventy-two divine ages are one manwantara. * * * The aggregate of four ages they call a divine age, and believe that in every thousand such ages, or in every day of Brahma, fourteen Menus are successively invested with the sovereignty of the earth. Each Menu they suppose transmits his authority to his sons and grandsons during a period of seventy-two divine ages, and such a period they call a manwantara. Thirty such days (of the Creator), or calpas, constitute a month of Brahma; twelve such months one of his years, and 100 such years his age, of which they assert that fifty years have elapsed. We are thus, according to the Hindoos, in the first day or calpa of the fifty-first year of Brahma's life, and in the twenty-eighth divine age of the _seventh manwantara_ of that day. In the present day of Brahma the first Menu was named the Son of the Self-existent, and by him the institutes of religion and civil duties are said to have been delivered. In his time occurred a new creation called the _Lotos_ creation." Of five Menus who succeeded him, Sir William could find little but the names, but the accounts of the seventh are very full, and it appears that in his reign the earth was destroyed by a flood. Sir William suggests that the first Menu may represent the creation, and that the seventh may be Noah. The name Menu or Manu is equivalent to "man," and signifies "the intelligent."[63] In this Hindoo cosmogony we have many points of correspondence with the Scripture narrative: for instance, the Self-existent Creator; the agency of the Son of God and the Holy Spirit; the absolute creation of matter; the hovering of the Spirit over the primeval waters; the sevenfold division of the creative process; and the idea of days of the Creator of immense duration. If we suppose the day of Brahma in the Hindoo cosmogony to represent the Mosaic day, then it amounts to no less than 4,320,000 years; or if, with Sir W. Jones, we suppose the manwantara to represent the Mosaic day, its duration will be 308,571 years; and the total antiquity of the earth, without counting the undefined "beginning," will be either more than twenty-five or than two millions of years. It would be folly, however, to suppose that these Hindoo numbers, which are probably purely conjectural, or based on astronomical cycles, make any near approximation to the facts of the case. The Institutes of Menu are probably in their present form not of great antiquity, but there are other Hindoo documents of greater age which maintain similar views, and it is probable that the account of the creation in the Institutes is at least an imperfect version of the original narrative as it existed among the earliest colonists of India.[64] It corresponds in many points with the oldest notions on these subjects that remain to us in the wrecks of the mythology of Egypt and other ancient nations, and it aids in proving that the fabulous ages of gods and demigods in the ancient mythologies _are really pre-Adamite_; and belong not to human history, but to the work of creation. It also shows that the idea of long creative periods as equivalents of the Mosaic days must, in the infancy of the postdiluvian world, have been very widely diffused. Such evidence is, no doubt, of small authority in the interpretation of Scripture; but it must be admitted that serious consideration is due to a method of interpretation which thus tends to bring the Mosaic account into harmony with the facts of modern science, and with the belief of almost universal antiquity, and at the same time gives it its fullest significance and most perfect internal symmetry of parts. It is also very interesting to note the wide diffusion among the most ancient nations of cosmological views identical in their main features with those of the Bible, proving, almost beyond doubt, that these views had some common and very ancient source, and commanded universal belief among the primitive tribes of men. I have hitherto in this part of the discussion avoided detailed reference to what may be regarded as the "prophetic day" view of the narrative of creation. This may be shortly stated as follows: In the prophetical parts of Scripture the prophet sees in vision, as in a picture or acted scene, the events that are to come to pass, and in consequence represents years or longer periods by days of vision. Now the revelation of the pre-Adamite past is in its nature akin to that of the unknown future; and Moses may have seen these wondrous events in vision--in visions of successive days--under the guise of which he presents geological time. Some things in the form of the narrative favor this view, and it certainly affords the most clearly intelligible theory as to the mode in which such a revelation may have been made to man. It is advocated by Kurtz, by the author of an excellent little work, the "Harmony of the Mosaic and Geological Records," by Hugh Miller, and more recently by Tayler Lewis. To these writers I must refer for its more full illustration, and for the grand pictorial view which it gives of the vision of the creative week. In reviewing the somewhat lengthy train of reasoning into which the term "day" has led us, it appears that from internal evidence alone it can be rendered probable that the day of creation is neither the natural nor the civil day. It also appears that the objections urged against the doctrine of day-periods are of no weight when properly scrutinized, and that it harmonizes with the progressive nature of the work, the evidence of geology, and the cosmological notions of ancient nations. I do not suppose that this position has been incontrovertibly established; but I believe that every serious difficulty has been removed from its acceptance; and with this, for the present, I remain satisfied. Every step of our subsequent progress will afford new criteria of its truth or fallacy. One further question of some interest is--What, according to the theory of long creative days and the testimony of geology, would be the length and precise cosmical nature of these days? With regard to the first part of the question, we do not know the actual value of our geological ages in time; but it is probable that each great creative æon may have extended through millions of years. As to the nature of the days, this may have been determined by direct volitions of the Creator, or indirectly by some of those great astronomical cycles which arise from the varying eccentricity of the earth's orbit, or the diminution of the velocity of its rotation, or by its gradual cooling. With reference to these points, science has as yet little information to give. Sir William Thomson has, indeed, indicated for the time since the earth's crust first began to form a period of between one and two hundred millions of years; but Professor Guthrie Tait, on the other hand, argues that ten or fifteen millions of years are probably sufficient,[65] and Lockyer has suggested an hypothesis of successive rekindlings of the solar heat which might give a more protracted time than that of Thomson. Some of the hypotheses of derivation current, but which are based rather on philosophical speculation than on scientific fact, would also require a longer time than that allowed by Thomson; and it is to be regretted that some geologists, by giving credence to such hypotheses of derivation, and by loose reasoning on the time required for the denudation and deposition of rocks, have been induced to commit themselves to very extravagant estimates as to geological time. On the whole, it is evident that only the most vague guesses can at present be based on the facts in our possession, though the whole time required has unquestionably been very great, the deposition of the series of stratified rocks probably requiring at least the greater part of the minimum time allowed by Thomson.[66] As to the cosmical nature of the periods, while some geologists appear to regard the whole of geological time as a continuous evolution without any breaks, it is evidently more in accordance with facts to hold that there have been cycles of repose and activity succeeding each other, and that these have been of different grades. In the succession of deposits it is plain that periods of depression and upheaval common to all the continental masses have succeeded each other at somewhat regular intervals, and that within these periods there have been alternations of colder and warmer climates. These, however, are not equal to the creative days of our record, for they are greatly more numerous. They are but the vastly protracted hours of these almost endless days. Beyond and above these there is another grade of geological period, marked not by mere gradual elevation and depression of the continental areas, but by vast crumplings of the earth's crust and enormous changes of level. Such a great movement unquestionably closed the Eozoic period of geology. Another of less magnitude occurred in what is termed the Permian age at the end of the Palæozoic. A third terminated the Mesozoic age, and introduced the Tertiary or Kainozoic. Perhaps we should reckon the glacial age, though characterized by far less physical change than the others, as a fourth. The possible physical causes which have been suggested for such greater disturbances are the collapses of the crust in equatorial regions, which may be supposed to have resulted at long intervals of time, from the gradual retardation of the earth's rotation caused by the tides, or the similar collapses and other changes due to the shrinkages of the earth's interior caused by its gradual cooling, and to the unequal deposition of material by water on different parts of its surface.[67] The more full discussion of these points belongs, however, to a future chapter. These greater movements of the crust, would, as already stated, coincide to some extent with the later creative days in the manner indicated below: ================================================================== Collapse of crust at close of | Close of Fourth Æon, Eozoic Time, | and beginning of Fifth. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Collapse in Permian Period and | Middle of Fifth Æon. end of Palæozoic Time, | ------------------------------------------------------------------ Great subsidence and collapse | Close of Fifth Æon, and beginning at close of Mesozoic Age, | of Sixth. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Great subsidence of the | End of Sixth Æon. Pleistocene or Glacial Age, | ================================================================== The question recurs--Why are God's days so long? He is not like us, a being of yesterday. He is "from Olam to Olam," and even in human history one day is with him as a thousand years; and we who live in these later days of the world know full well how slow the march of his plan has been even in human history. We shall know in the endless ages of a future eternity that even to us these long creative days may at last become but as watches in the night. CHAPTER VII. THE ATMOSPHERE. "And God said, Let there be an expanse between the waters; and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the expanse, and separated the waters which are under the expanse from the waters which are over the expanse: and it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."--Genesis i. 6-8. At the opening of the period to which we are now introduced the earth was covered by the waters, and these were in such a condition that there was no distinction between the seas and the clouds. No atmosphere separated them, or, in other words, dense fogs and mists everywhere rested on the surface of the primeval ocean. To understand as far as possible the precise condition of the earth's surface at this period, it will be necessary to notice the present constitution of the atmosphere, especially in its relations to aqueous vapor. The regular and constant constituents of the atmosphere are the elements oxygen and nitrogen, which, at the temperature and pressure existing on the surface of our globe, are permanently aeriform or gaseous. Beside these gases, the air always contains a quantity of the vapor of water in a perfectly aeriform and transparent condition. This vapor is not, however, permanently gaseous. At all temperatures below 212 degrees it tends to the liquid state; and its elastic force, which preserves its particles in the separated state of vapor, increases or diminishes at a more rapid rate than the increase or diminution of temperature. Hence the quantity of vapor that can be suspended in clear air depends on the temperature of the air itself. As the temperature of the air rises, its power of sustaining vapor increases more rapidly than its temperature; and as the temperature of the air falls, the elastic force of its contained vapor diminishes in a greater ratio, until it can exist as an invisible vapor no longer, but becomes condensed into minute bubbles or globules, forming cloud, mist, or rain. Two other circumstances operate along with these properties of air and vapor. The heat radiated from the earth's surface causes the lower strata of air to be, in ordinary circumstances, warmer than the higher; and, on the other hand, warm air, being lighter than that which is colder, the warm layer of air at the surface continually tends to rise through and above the colder currents immediately over it. Let us consider the operation of the causes thus roughly sketched in a column of calm air. The lower portion becomes warmed, and if in contact with water takes up a quantity of its vapor proportioned to the temperature, or in ordinary circumstances somewhat less than this proportion. It then tends to ascend, and as it rises and becomes mixed with colder air it gradually loses its power of sustaining moisture, and at a height proportioned to the diminution of temperature and the quantity of vapor originally contained in the air, it begins to part with water, which becomes condensed in the form of mist or cloud; and the surface at which this precipitation takes place is often still more distinctly marked when two masses or layers of air at different temperatures become intermixed; in which case, on the principle already stated, the mean temperature produced is unable to sustain the vapor proper to the two extremes, and moisture is precipitated. It thus happens that layers of cloud accumulate in the atmosphere, while between them and the surface there is a stratum of clear air. Fogs and mists are in the present state of nature exceptional appearances, depending generally on local causes, and showing what the world might be but for that balancing of temperature and the elastic force of vapor which constitutes the atmospheric firmament.[68] The quantity of water thus suspended over the earth is enormous. "When we see a cloud resolve itself into rain, and pour out thousands of gallons of water, we can not comprehend how it can float in the atmosphere."[69] The explanation is--1st, the extreme levity of the minute globules, which causes them to fall very slowly; 2d, they are supported by currents of air, especially by the ascending currents developed both in still air and in storms; 3dly, clouds are often dissolving on one side and forming on another. A cloud gradually descending may be dissolving away by evaporation at the base as fast as new matter is being added above. On the other hand, an ascending warm current of air may be constantly depositing moisture at the base of the cloud, and this may be evaporating under the solar rays above. In this case a cloud is "merely the visible form of an aerial space, in which certain processes are at the moment in equilibrium, and all the particles in a state of upward movement."[70] But so soon as condensation markedly exceeds evaporation, rain falls, and the atmosphere discharges its vast load of water--how vast we may gather from the fact that the waters of all the rivers are but a part of the overflowings of the great atmospheric reservoir. "God binds up the waters in his thick cloud, and the cloud is not rent under them." It is thus that the terrestrial waters are divided into those above and those below that expanse of clear air in which we live and move, exempt from the dense, dark mists of the earth's earlier state, yet enjoying the benefits of the cloudy curtain that veils the burning sun, and of the cloudy reservoirs that drop down rain to nourish every green thing. We have no reason to suppose that the laws which regulate mixtures of gases and vapors did not prevail in the period in question. It is probable that these laws are as old as the creation of matter; but the condition of our earth up to the second day must have been such as prevented them from operating as at present. Such a condition might possibly be the result of an excessive evaporation occasioned by internal heat. The interior of the earth still remains in a heated state, and includes large subterranean reservoirs of melted rock, as is proved by the increase of temperature in deep mines and borings, and by the widely extended phenomena of hot springs and volcanic action. At the period in question the internal temperature of the earth was probably vastly greater than at present, and perhaps the whole interior of the globe may have been in a state of igneous fluidity. At the same time the external solid crust may have been thin, and it was not fractured and thickened in places by the upheaval of mountain chains or the deposition of great and unequal sheets of sediment; for, as I may again remind the reader, the primitive chaos did not consist of a confused accumulation of rocky masses, but the earth's crust must then have been more smooth and unbroken than at any subsequent period. This being the internal condition of the earth, it is quite conceivable, without any violation of the existing laws of nature, that the waters of the ocean, warmed by internal heat, may have sent up a sufficient quantity of vapor to keep the lower strata of air in a constant state of saturation, and to occasion an equally constant precipitation of moisture from the colder strata above. This would merely be the universal operation of a cause similar to that which now produces fogs at the northern limit of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, and in other localities where currents of warm water flow under or near to cooler air. Such a state of things is more conceivable in a globe covered with water, and consequently destitute of the dry and powerfully radiating surfaces which land presents, and receiving from without the rays, not of a solar orb, but of a comparatively feeble and diffused luminous ether. The continued action of these causes would gradually cool the earth's crust and its incumbent waters, until the heat from without preponderated over that from within, when the result stated in the text would be effected. The statements of our primitive authority for this condition of the earth might also be accounted for on the supposition that the permanently gaseous part of the atmosphere did not at the period in question exist in its present state, but that it was on the second day actually elaborated and caused to take its place in separating the atmospheric from the oceanic waters. The first is by far the more probable view; but we may still apply to such speculations the words of Elihu, the friend of Job: "Stand still and consider the wonderful works of God. Dost thou know when God disposes them, And the lightning of his cloud shines forth? Dost thou know the poising of the dark clouds, The wonderful works of the Perfect in knowledge?" We may now consider the words in which this great improvement in the condition of the earth is recorded. The Hebrew term for the atmosphere is _Rakiah_, literally, something expanded or beaten out--an expanse. It is rendered in our version "firmament," a word conveying the notion of support and fixity, and in the Septuagint "_Stereoma_," a word having a similar meaning. The idea conveyed by the Hebrew word is not, however, that of _strength_, but of _extent_; or as Milton--the most accurate of expositors of these words--has it: "The firmament, expanse of liquid, pure, Transparent, elemental air, diffused In circuit to the uttermost convex Of this great round." That this was really the way in which this word was understood by the Hebrews appears from several passages of the Bible. Job says of God, "Who alone _spreadeth_ out the heavens."[71] David, in the 104th Psalm, which is a poetical paraphrase of the history of creation, speaks of the Creator as "_stretching_ out the heavens as a curtain." In later writers, as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, similar expressions occur. The notion of a solid or arched firmament was probably altogether remote from the minds of these writers. Such beliefs may have prevailed at the time when the Septuagint translation was made, but I have no hesitation in affirming that no trace of them can be found in the Old Testament. In proof of this, I may refer to some of the passages which have been cited as affording the strongest instances of this kind of "accommodation." In Exodus xxiv., 10, we are told, "And they saw the God of Israel, and under his feet as it were a paved work of sapphire, and as it were the heaven itself in its clearness." This is evidently a comparison of the pavement seen under the feet of Jehovah to a sapphire in its color, and to the heavens in its transparency. The intention of the writer is not to give information respecting the heavens, or to liken them either to a pavement or a sapphire; all that we can infer is that he believed the heavens to be clear or transparent. Job mentions the "pillars of heaven," but the connection shows that this is merely a poetical expression for lofty mountains. The earthquake causes these pillars of heaven to "tremble." We are informed in the book of Job that God "ties up his waters in his thick cloud, and the cloud is not rent under them." We are also told of the "treasures of snow and the treasures of hail," and rain is called the "bottles of heaven," and is said to be poured out of the "lattices of heaven." I recognize in all these mere poetical figures, not intended to be literally understood. Some learned writers wish us to believe that the intention of the Bible in these places is actually to teach that the clouds are contained in skin bottles, or something similar, and that they are emptied through hatches in a solid firmament. To found such a belief, however, on a few figurative statements, seems ridiculous, especially when we consider that the writers of the Scriptures show themselves to be well acquainted with nature, and would not be likely on any account to deviate so far from the ordinary testimony of the senses; more especially as by doing so they would enable every unlettered man who has seen a cloud gather on a mountain's brow or dissolve away before increasing heat to oppose the evidence of his senses to their statements, and perhaps to reject them with scorn as a barefaced imposture. But, lastly, we are triumphantly directed to the question of Elihu in his address to Job: "Hast thou with him stretched out the sky, Which is firm and like a molten mirror?" But the word translated sky here is not "_rakiah_," or "_shamayim_," but another signifying the _clouds_, so that we should regard Elihu as speaking of the apparent firmness or stability, and the beautiful reflected tints of the clouds. His words may be paraphrased thus: "Hast thou aided Him in spreading out those clouds, which appear so stable and self-sustaining, and so beautifully reflect the sunlight?"[72] The above passages form the only authority which I can find in the Scriptures for the doctrine of a solid firmament, which may therefore be characterized as a modern figment of men more learned in books but less acquainted with nature than the Scripture writers. As a contrast to all such doctrines I may quote the sublime opening of the poetical account of creation in Psalm civ., which we may also take here as elsewhere as the oldest and most authoritative commentary on the first chapter of Genesis: "Bless the Lord, O my soul! O Lord, my God, thou art very great: Thou art clothed with honor and majesty, Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment, Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain (of a tent), _Who layest the beams of thy chambers in the waters, Who makest the clouds thy chariots, Who walkest upon the wings of the wind_." The waters here are those above the firmament, the whole of this part of the Psalm being occupied with the heavens; and there is no place left for the solid firmament, of which the writer evidently knew nothing. He represents God as laying his chambers on the waters, instead of on the supposed firmament, and as careering in cloudy chariots on the wings of the wind, instead of over a solid arch. For all the above reasons, we conclude that the "expanse" of the verses under consideration was understood by the writers of the book of God to be _aerial_, not _solid_; and the "establishment of the clouds above," as it is finely called in Proverbs, is the effect of those meteorological laws to which I have already referred, and which were now for the first time brought into operation by the divine Legislator. The Hebrew theology was not of a kind to require such expedients as that of solid heavenly arches; it recurred at once to the will--the decree--of Jehovah; and was content to believe that through this efficient cause the "rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full," for "to the place whence the rivers came, thither they return again," through the agency of those floating clouds, "the waters above the heavens," which "pour down rain according to the vapor thereof." God called the expanse "Heaven." In former chapters we have noticed that heaven in the popular speech of the Hebrews, as in our own, had different meanings, applying alike to the cloudy, the astral, and the spiritual heavens. The Creator here sanctions its application to the aerial expanse; and accordingly throughout the Scriptures it is used in this way; _rakiah_ occurs very rarely, as if it had become nearly obsolete, or was perhaps regarded as a merely technical or descriptive term. The divine sanction for the use of the term heaven for the atmosphere is, as already explained, to indicate that this popular use is not to interfere with its application to the whole universe beyond our earth in verse 1st. The poetical parts of the Bible, and especially the book of Job, which is probably the most ancient of the whole, abound in references to the atmosphere and its phenomena. I may quote a few of these passages, to enable us to understand the views of these subjects given in the Bible, and the meaning attached to the creation of the atmosphere, in very ancient periods. In Job, 38th chapter, we have the following: "In what way is the lightning distributed, And how is the east wind spread abroad over the earth? Who hath opened a channel for the pouring rain, Or a way for the thunder-flash? To cause it to rain on the land where no man is, In the desert where no one dwells; To saturate the desolate and waste ground, And to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth." Here we have the unequal and unforeseen distribution of thunder-storms, beyond the knowledge and power of man, but under the absolute control of God, and designed by him for beneficent purposes. Equally fine are some of the following lines: "Dost thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, That abundance of waters may cover thee? Dost thou send forth the lightnings, and they go, And say unto thee, Here are we? Who can number the clouds by wisdom, Or cause the bottles of heaven to empty themselves? When the dust groweth into mire, And the clods cleave fast together?" In the 36th and 37th chapters of the same book we have a grand description of atmospheric changes in their relation to man and his works. The speaker is Elihu, who in this ancient book most favorably represents the knowledge of nature that existed at a time probably anterior to the age of Moses--a knowledge far superior to that which we find in the works of many modern poets and expositors, and accompanied by an intense appreciation of the grandeur and beauty of natural objects: "For he draweth up the drops of water, Rain is condensed[73] from his vapor, Which the clouds do drop, And distill upon man abundantly. Yea, can any understand the distribution of the clouds Or the thundering of his tabernacle.[74] Behold he spreadeth his lightning upon it, He covereth it as with the depths of the sea.[75] By these he executes judgment on the people, By these also he giveth food in abundance; His hands he covers with the lightning, And commands it (against the enemy) in its striking; He uttereth to it his decree,[76] Concerning the herd as well as proud man. At this also my heart trembles, And bounds out of its place; Hear attentively the thunder of his voice, And the loud sound that goes from his mouth. He directs it under the whole heavens, And his lightning to the ends of the earth. After it his voice roareth, He thundereth with the voice of his majesty; And delays not (the tempest) when his voice is heard. God thundereth marvellously with his voice, He doeth wonders which we can not comprehend; For he saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth. Also to the pouring rain, even the great rain of his might. He sealeth up the hand of every man, That all men may know his work. Then the beasts go to their dens, And remain in their caverns. Out of the south cometh the whirlwind And cold out of the north, By the breath of God the frost is produced And the breadth of waters becomes bound; With moisture he loads the thick cloud, He spreads the cloud of his lightning, And it is turned about by his direction, To execute his pleasure on the face of the world; Whether for correction, for his land, or for mercy, He causeth it to come. Hearken unto this, O Job, Stand still and consider the wonderful works of God. Dost thou know when God disposes these things, And the lightning of his cloud flashes forth? Dost thou know the poising of the clouds, The wonderful work of the Perfect in knowledge? When thy garments become warm When he quieteth the earth by the south wind; Hast thou with him spread out the clouds Firm and like a molten mirror?"[77] It would not be easy to find, in the poetry of any nation or time, a description of so many natural phenomena, so fine in feeling or truthful in delineation. It should go far to dispel the too prevalent ideas of early Oriental ignorance, and should lead to a more full appreciation of these noble pictures of nature, unsurpassed in the literature of any people or time. I trust that the previous illustrations are sufficient to show, not only that the _stereoma_, or solid firmament of the Septuagint, is not to be found in Scripture, but that the positive doctrine of the Bible on the subject is of a very different character. For instance, in the above extract from the book of Job, Elihu speaks of the poising or suspension of the clouds as inscrutable, and tells us that God draws up water into the clouds, and pours down rain according to the vapor thereof; he also speaks of the clouds as being scattered before the brightness of the sun; and notices, in truthful as well as exalted language, the nature and succession of the lightning's flash, the thunder, and the precipitation of rain that follows. Solomon also informs us that the "establishment of the clouds above" is due to the law or will of Jehovah. Finally, in this connection, the divine sanction given to the use of the term heaven for the atmosphere may in itself be regarded as an intimation that no definite barrier separates our film of atmosphere from the boundless abyss of heaven without. Of this period natural science gives us no intimation. In the earliest geological epochs organic life, dry land, and an atmosphere already existed. At the period now under consideration the two former had not been called into existence, and the latter was in process of elaboration from the materials of the primeval deep. If the formation of the atmosphere in its existing conditions was, as already hinted, a result of the gradual cooling of the earth, then this period must have been of great length, and the action of the heated waters on the crust of the globe may have produced thick layers of detrital matter destined to form the first soils of the succeeding æon. We know nothing, however, of these primitive strata, and most of them must have been removed by denuding agencies in succeeding periods, or restored by subterranean heat to the crystalline state. The events and results of this day may be summed up as follows: "At the commencement of the period the earth was enveloped by a misty or vaporous mantle. In its progress those relations of air and vapor which cause the separation of the clouds from the earth by a layer of clear air, and the varied alternations of sunshine and rain, were established. At the close of the period the newly formed atmosphere covered a universal ocean; and there was probably a very regular and uniform condition of the atmospheric currents, and of the processes of evaporation and condensation." But while we must affirm that no idea of a solid atmospheric vault can be detected in the Bible, and while we may also affirm that such an idea would have been altogether foreign to its tone, which invariably refers all things not to secondary machinery, but to the will and fiat of the Supreme, we must not forget that a most important moral purpose was to be served by the assertion of the establishment of the atmospheric expanse. Among all nations the phenomena of the atmosphere have had important theological and mythological relations. The ever-changing and apparently capricious aspects of the atmosphere and its clouds, the terrible effects of storms, and the balmy influence of sunshine and calm, deeply impress the minds of simple and superstitious men, and this all the more that in their daily life and expeditions they are constantly subjected to the effects of atmospheric vicissitudes. Hence the greatest gods of all the ancient nations are weather-gods--rulers of the atmospheric heavens--displaying their anger in the thunder-storm and tornado. It is likely that in most cases, as in many barbarous tribes of modern times, these weather-gods were malevolent beings contending against the genial influences of the heavenly Sun-god; but in nearly every case their supposed practical importance has elevated them, as in the case of the Olympian Zeus, the Scandinavian Thor, and the American Hurakon, to the place of supreme divinity. This was one of the superstitions which the Hebrew monotheism had to overcome. Hence the atmosphere is affirmed to be under Jehovah's law, and all its phenomena are attributed to his power. The value of this as cutting at the root of the most widespread superstitions it is easy to understand, and it has a farther value in teaching that even the apparently unstable and capricious air is a thing established from the first and amenable to the ordinance of God. How difficult it has been to eradicate superstitious views of the atmosphere may be learned from the fact that St. Paul, in writing to the enlightened citizens of Ephesus, could speak of the power which the heathen worshipped as the "Prince of the powers of the air," and it is also evidenced by the abundant notions of this kind which have survived from the Middle Ages among the more ignorant part of the people even in lands called Christian. While, however, the Bible affirms the atmosphere to be subject to law, it does not carry this into the domain of physical necessity, and affirm with some modern materialistic philosophers that it is useless to pray for rain. It is God who gives rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, and what he gives he can withhold. Perhaps no part of our subject can better than this illustrate the rational distinction between a mere physical fatalism, or a mere superstitious fear of capricious nature, and that belief in a divine Lawgiver which lies between these extremes. Modern science may smile at the poor Indian, who in his fear invokes Hurakon or Tlaloc or the terrible Thunder-bird, and may even despise that nobler worship of the great Phoenician Sun-god, the source and fountain of all light and life; against which, though it was the grandest of all the old idolatries, Elijah waged war to the death. But may it not equally deride the faith of Elijah himself, when, after three years of drought, he prayed in the sight of assembled Israel for rain? It may do so if physical law amounts to an invariable necessity, and if there is no supreme Will behind it. But if natural laws are the expression of the divine will, if these laws are multiform and complicated in their relations, and regulate vastly varied causes interacting with each other, and if the action and welfare of man come within the scope of these laws, then there is nothing irrational in the supposition that God, without any capricious or miraculous intervention, may have so correlated the myriad adjustments of his creation as that, while it is his usual rule that rain falls alike on the evil and on the good, he may make its descent at particular times and places to depend on the needs and requests of his own children. In truth the belief in law is essential to the philosophical conception of prayer. If the universe were a mere chaos of chances, or if it were a result of absolute necessity, there would be no place for intelligent prayer; but if it is under the control of a Lawgiver, wise and merciful, not a mere manager of material machinery, but a true Father of all, then we can go to such a being with our requests, not in the belief that we can change his great plans, or that any advantage could result from this if it were possible, but that these plans may be made in his boundless wisdom and love to meet our necessities. There is also in the Bible the farther promise that, if we are truly the children of God, regulating our conduct by his will and enlightened by his spirit, we shall know how to pray for what is in accordance with his divine purpose, and how to receive with gladness whatever he sees fit to give. While, therefore, the Biblical doctrine as to natural law emancipates us from fears of angry storm-demons, it draws us near to a heavenly Father, whose power is above all the tempests of earth, and who, while ruling by law, has regulated all things in conformity with the higher law of love. When God had made the atmosphere, he saw that it was good, and the highest significance is given to this by the consideration that God is love. The position of the Bible is thus the true mean between superstitions at once unhappy and debasing, and a materialistic infidelity that would reduce the universe to a dead, remorseless machine, in which we must struggle for a precarious existence till we are crushed between its wheels. CHAPTER VIII. THE DRY LAND AND THE FIRST PLANTS. "And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of waters called he seas; and God saw that it was good. "And God said, Let the earth bring forth the springing herb, the herb bearing seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, after its kind, whose seed is in it on the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth the tender herb, the herb yielding seed, and the tree bearing fruit whose seed is in it, after its kind; and God saw that it was good."--Genesis i., 10, 11. These are events sufficiently simple and intelligible in their general character. Geology shows us that the emergence of the dry land must have resulted from the elevation of parts of the bed of the ancient universal ocean, and that the agent employed in such changes is the bending and crumpling of the outer crust of the earth, caused by lateral pressure, and operating either in a slow and regular manner or by sudden paroxysms. It farther informs us that the existing continents consist of stratified or bedded masses, more or less inclined, fissured and irregularly elevated, and usually supported by crystalline rocks which have been produced among them, or forced up beneath or through them by internal agencies, and which truly constitute the pillars and foundations of the earth. These elevations, it is true, were successive, and belong to different periods; but the appearance of the first dry land is that intended here. The elevation of the dry land is more frequently referred to in Scripture than any other cosmological fact; and while all have been misapprehended, the statements on this subject have been even more unjustly dealt with than others. In the text, the word "earth" (_aretz_[78]) is, by divine sanction, narrowed in meaning to the dry land; but while some expositors are quite willing to restrict it to this, or even a more limited sense, in the first and second verses of this chapter, almost the only verses in the Bible where the terms of the narrative make such a restriction inadmissible, they are equally ready to understand it as meaning the whole globe in places where the explanatory clause in the verse now under consideration teaches us that we should understand the land only, as distinguished from the sea. I may quote some of these passages, and note the views they give; always bearing in mind that, after the intimation here given, we must understand the term "earth" as applying _only to the continents_ or _dry land_, unless where the context otherwise fixes the meaning. We may first turn to Psalm civ.: "Thou laidst the foundations of the earth, That it should never be removed; Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment; The waters stood above the mountains; At thy rebuke they fled; At the sound of thy thunder they hasted away; Mountains ascended, valleys descended To the place thou hast appointed for them: Thou hast appointed them bounds that they may not pass, That they return not again to cover the earth." The position of these verses in this "the hymn of creation" leaves no doubt that they refer to the events we are now considering. I have given above the literal reading of the line that refers to the elevation of mountains and subsidence of valleys; admitting, however, that the grammatical construction gives an air of probability to the rendering in our version, "they go up by the mountains, they go down by the valleys," which, on the other hand, is rendered very improbable by the sense. In whichever sense we understand this line, the picture presented to us by the Psalmist includes the elevation of the mountains and continents, the subsidence of the waters into their depressed basins, and the firm establishment of the dry land on its rocky foundations, the whole accompanied by a feature not noticed in Genesis--the voice of God's thunder--or, in other words, electrical and volcanic explosions. The following quotations refer to the same subject: "Before the mountains were settled, Before the hills was I (the Wisdom of God) brought forth; While as yet he had not made the earth, Nor the plains, nor the higher parts of the habitable world. When he gave the sea his decree That the waters should not pass his limits, When he determined the foundations of the earth." --Proverbs viii., 25. "Thou hast established the earth, and it endureth, According to thy decrees they continue this day, For all are thy servants." --Psalm cxix., 90. "Who shaketh the earth out of its place, And its pillars tremble." --Job ix., 6. "Where wast thou when I founded the earth? Declare, if thou hast knowledge. Who hath fixed the proportion thereof, if thou knowest? Who stretched the line upon it? Upon what are its foundations settled? Or who laid its corner-stone, When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy? Who shut up the sea with doors In its bursting forth as from the womb? When I made the cloud its garment, And swathed it in thick darkness, I measured out for it my limit, And fixed its bars and doors; And said, Thus far shalt thou come, but no farther, And here shall thy proud waves be stayed." --Job xxxviii., 4. In these passages the foundation of the earth at first, as well as the shaking of its pillars by the earthquake, are connected with what we usually call natural law--the decree of the Almighty--the unchanging arrangements of an unchangeable Creator, whose "hands formed the dry land."[79] This is the ultimate cause not only of the elevation of the land, but of all other natural things and processes. The naturalist does not require to be informed that the details, in so far as they are referred to in the above passages, are perfectly in accordance with what we know of the nature and support of continental masses. Geological observation and mathematical calculation have in our day combined their powers to give clear views of the manner in which the fractured strata of the earth are wedged and arched together, and supported by internal igneous masses upheaved from beneath, and subsequently cooled and hardened. A general view of these facts which we have learned from scientific inquiry, the Hebrews gleaned with nearly as much precision from the short account of the elevation of the land in Genesis, and from the later comments of their inspired poets. From the same source our own great poet, Milton, learned these cosmical facts, before the rise of geology, and expressed them in unexceptionable terms: "The mountains huge appear Emergent, and their broad bare backs upheave Into the clouds, their tops ascend the sky. So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad and deep, Capacious bed of waters." In further illustration of the opinions of the Scripture writers respecting the nature of the earth, and the disturbances to which it is liable, I quote the following passages. The first is from the magnificent description of Jehovah descending to succor his people amid the terrors of the earthquake, the volcano, and the thunder-storm, in Psalm xviii.: "Then shook and trembled the earth, The foundations of the hills moved and were shaken, Because he was angry. Smoke went up from his nostrils, Fire from his mouth devoured, Coals were kindled by it. Then were seen the channels of the waters, And the foundations of the world were discovered, At thy rebuke--O Jehovah-- At the blast of the breath of thy nostrils." In another place in the Psalms we find volcanic action thus tersely sketched: "He looketh on the earth and it trembleth, He toucheth the hills and they smoke." --Psalm civ., 32. Perhaps the most remarkable discourse on this subject in the whole Bible is that in Job xxviii., in which mining operations are introduced as an illustration of the difficulty of obtaining true wisdom. This passage is interesting both from its extreme antiquity, and the advancement in knowledge and practical skill which it indicates. It presents, however, many difficulties; and its details have almost entirely lost their true significance in our common English version: "Surely there is a vein for silver, And a place for the gold which men refine; Iron is taken from the earth, And copper is molten from the ore. To the end of darkness and to all extremes man searcheth, For the stones of darkness and the shadow of death. He opens a passage [shaft] from where men dwell, Unsupported by the foot, they hang down and swing to and fro.[80] The earth--out of it cometh bread; And beneath, it is overturned as by fire.[81] Its stones are the place of sapphires, And it hath lumps[82] of gold. The path (thereto) the bird of prey hath not known, The vulture's eye hath not seen it.[83] The wild beasts' whelps have not trodden it, The lion hath not passed over it. Man layeth his hand on the hard rock, He turneth up the mountains from their roots, He cutteth channels [_adits_] in the rocks, His eye seeth every precious thing. He restraineth the streams from trickling, And bringeth the hidden thing to light. But where shall wisdom be found, And where is the place of understanding?" This passage, incidentally introduced, gives us a glimpse of the knowledge of the interior of the earth and its products, as it existed in an age probably anterior to that of Moses. It brings before us the repositories of the valuable metals and gems--the mining operations, apparently of some magnitude and difficulty, undertaken in extracting them--and the wonderful structure of the earth itself, green and productive at the surface, rich in precious metals beneath, and deeper still the abode of intense subterranean fires. The only thing wanting to give completeness to the picture is some mention of the fossil remains buried in the earth; and, as the main thought is the eager and successful search for useful minerals, this can hardly be regarded as a defect. The application of all this is finer than almost any thing else in didactic poetry. Man can explore depths of the earth inaccessible to all other creatures, and extract thence treasures of inestimable value; yet, after thus exhausting all the natural riches of the earth, he too often lacks that highest wisdom which alone can fit him for the true ends of his spiritual being. How true is all this, even in our own wonder-working days! A poet of to-day could scarcely say more of subterranean wonders, or say it more truthfully and beautifully; nor could he arrive at a conclusion more pregnant with the highest philosophy than the closing words: "The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; And to depart from evil is understanding." The emergence of the dry land is followed by a repetition of the approval of the Creator. "God saw that it was good." To our view that primeval dry land would scarcely have seemed good. It was a world of bare, rocky peaks, and verdureless valleys--here active volcanoes, with their heaps of scoriæ and scarcely cooled lava currents--there vast mudflats, recently upheaved from the bottom of the waters--nowhere even a blade of grass or a clinging lichen. Yet it was good in the view of its Maker, who could see it in relation to the uses for which he had made it, and as a fit preparatory step to the new wonders he was soon to introduce. Then too, as we are informed in Job xxxviii., "The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." We also, when we think of the beautiful variety of the terrestrial surface, the character and composition of its soils, the variety of climate and exposure resulting from its degrees of elevation, the arrangements for the continuance of springs and streams, and many other beneficial provisions connected with the merely mechanical arrangements of the dry land, may well join in the tribute of praise to the All-wise Creator. There is, however, a farther thought suggested by the approval of the great Artificer. In this wondrous progress of creation, it seems as if every thing at first was in its best estate. No succeeding state could parallel the unbroken symmetry of the earth in the fluid and vaporous condition of the "deep." Before the elevation of the land, the atmospheric currents and the deposition of moisture must have been surpassingly regular. The first dry land may have presented crags and peaks and ravines and volcanic cones in a more marvellous and perfect manner than any succeeding continents--even as the dry and barren moon now, in this respect, far surpasses the earths. In the progress of organic life, geology gives similar indications, in the variety and magnitude of many animal types on their first introduction; so that this may very possibly be a law of creation. During the emergence of the first dry land, large quantities of detrital matter must have been deposited in the waters, and in part elevated into land. All of these beds would, probably, be destitute of organic remains; but if such beds were formed and still remain, they are probably unknown to us, for the oldest formations that we know--those of the Eozoic age--contain traces of such remains. It has, indeed, been suggested that these most ancient organisms are, as it were, overlooked in the history of creation, or regarded as equivalent to those shapeless monsters and animals of the darkness that are referred to in the older Turanian versions of this story of creation. I doubt very much, however, if this is a fair interpretation of our ancient record; but we shall be in a better position to discuss it when we come to the actual introduction of animals. Modern analogy would induce us to believe that the land was not elevated suddenly; but either by a series of small paroxysms, as in the case of Chili, or by a gradual and imperceptible movement, as in the case of Sweden--two of the most remarkable modern instances of elevation of land--accompanied, however, in the case of the last by local subsidence.[84] In either of these ways the seas and rivers would have time to smooth the more rugged inequalities, to widen the ravines into valleys, and to spread out sediment in the lower grounds; thus fitting the surface for the habitation of plants and animals. We must not suppose, however, that the dry land had any close resemblance to that now existing in its form or distribution. Geology amply proves that since the first appearance of dry land, its contour has frequently been changed, and probably also its position. Hence nearly all our present land consists of rocks which have been formed under the waters, long after the period now under consideration, and have been subsequently hardened and elevated; and since all the existing high mountain ranges are of a comparatively late age, it is probable that this primeval dry land was low, as well as, in the earlier part of the period at least, of comparatively small extent. It is, however, by no means certain that there may not have been a greater expanse of land toward the close of this period than that which afterwards existed in those older periods of animal life to which the earliest fossiliferous rocks of the geologist carry us back; since, as already hinted, it seems to be a rule in creation that each new object shall be highly developed of its kind at its first appearance, and since there have been in geological time many great subsidences as well as elevations. Neither must we forget that the oldest land has been subjected throughout geological time to wearing and degrading agencies, and that from its waste the later formations have been mainly derived. It would be wrong, however, to omit to state that, though we may know at present no remains of the first dry land, we are not ignorant of its general distribution; for the present continents show, in the arrangement of their formations and mountain chains, evidence that they are parts of a plan sketched out from the beginning. It has often been remarked by physical geographers that the great lines of coast and mountain ranges are generally in directions approaching to northeast and southwest, or northwest and southeast, and that where they run in other directions, as in the case of the south of Europe and Asia, they are much broken by salient and re-entering angles, formed by lines having these directions. Professor R. Owen, of Tennessee, and Professor Pierce, of Harvard College, were, I believe, the first to point out that these lines are in reality parts of great circles tangent to the polar circles, and the latter to suggest a theory of their origin, based on the action of solar heat and the seasons on a cooling earth. This has been more fully stated by Mr. W. Lowthian Green in his curious book, "Vestiges of the Molten Globe."[85] It would appear that the great circles in question are in reality at right angles to the line of direction of the attraction of the sun and moon at the period of either solstice, and when they happen to be in conjunction or opposition at these periods; and that such circles would be the lines on which the thin crust of a cooling globe would be most likely to be ruptured by its internal tidal-wave. Whatever the cause of the phenomenon, it is evident that in the formation of its surface inequalities the earth has cracked--so to speak--along two series of great circles tangent to the polar circles; and that these, with certain subordinate lines of fracture running north and south and east and west, have determined the forms of the continents from their origin. M. Elie de Beaumont, and after him most other geologists, have attributed the elevation of the continents and the upheaval and plication of mountain chains to the secular refrigeration of the earth, causing its outer shell to become too capacious for its contracting interior mass, and thus to break or bend, and to settle toward the centre. This view would well accord with the terms in which the elevation of the land is mentioned throughout the Bible, and especially with the general progress of the work as we have gleaned it from the Mosaic narrative; since from the period of the desolate void and aeriform deep to that now before us secular refrigeration must have been steadily in progress. Let us also observe here that the earliest fractures of the crust would determine the first coast lines, and the first slopes along which sedimentary matter would descend from the land and be deposited in the sea. They would also modify the direction of the ocean currents. Thus the deposition of new formations would be directed by these old lines, as would also to some extent the course of all subsequent fractures and plications. Thus it happens that the lines of outcrop of the oldest rocks first raised out of the waters already marked out the forms of the continents, and that the later formations appear rather as fillings-up and extensions of the skeleton established by the first dry land. Farther, the lines of plication first established along the borders of the continents formed resisting walls along which, in the continued contraction of the earth, pressure was exerted from the ocean bed, widening and elevating these lines of upheaval, and still farther fixing the general forms of the continents, and giving variety to their surfaces. In the progress of geological time there have also been successive depressions and re-elevations of the continental plateaus, subjecting them alternately to the wearing and disintegrating action of the atmosphere and its waters, and to the influence of waves and ocean currents, and especially to that of the deep-seated polar currents which have throughout geological ages been loading the submerged areas of the earth's surface with the products of the waste caused by frost and ice in the polar regions. These causes again have been progressively increasing the oblateness of the earth's figure, and, along with the slackening of its rotation, preparing the way for those periodical collapses in the equatorial and temperate regions which form the boundaries of some of our most important geological periods.[86] Throughout all these changes the great general plan of the continents, first sketched out when the "foundations of the earth" were laid, before Eozoic time, was being elaborated. The same creative period that witnessed the first appearance of dry land saw it also clothed with vegetation; and it is quite likely that this is intended to teach that no time was lost in clothing the earth with plants--that the first emerging portions received their vegetable tenants as they became fitted for them--and that each additional region, as it rose above the surface of the waters, in like manner received the species of plants for which it was adapted. What was the nature of this earliest vegetation? The sacred writer specifies three descriptions of plants as included in it; and, by considering the terms which he uses, some information on this subject may be gained. _Deshé_, translated "grass" in our version, is derived from a verb signifying to spring up or bud forth; the same verb, indeed, used in this verse to denote "bringing forth," literally causing to spring up. Its radical meaning is, therefore, vegetation in the act of sprouting or springing forth; or, as connected with this, young and delicate herbage. Thus, in Job xxxviii., "To satisfy the desolate and waste ground, and to cause the bud of the _young herbage_ to spring forth." Here the reference is, no doubt, to the bulbous and tuberous rooted plants of the desert plains, which, fading away in the summer drought, burst forth with magical rapidity on the setting-in of rain. The following passages are similar: Psalm xxiii., "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures" (literally, young or _tender herbage_); Deuteronomy xxiii., "Small rain upon the _tender herb_;" Isaiah xxxvii., "_Grass_ on the house-tops." The word is also used for herbage such as can be eaten by cattle or cut down for fodder, though even in these cases the idea of young and tender herbage is evidently included; "Fat as a heifer at _grass_" (Jer. xiv.)--that is, feeding on young succulent grass, not that which is dry and parched. "Cut down as the grass, or wither as the green herb," like the soft, tender grass, soon cut down and quickly withering. With respect to the use of the word in this place, I may remark: 1. It is not here correctly translated by the word "grass;" for grass bears seed, and is, consequently, a member of the second class of plants mentioned. Even if we set aside all idea of inspiration, it is obviously impossible that any one living among a pastoral or agricultural people could have been ignorant of this fact. 2. It can scarcely be a general term, including all plants when in a young or tender state. The idea of their springing up is included in the verb, and this was but a very temporary condition. Besides, this word does not appear to be employed for the young state of shrubs or trees. 3. We thus appear to be shut up to the conclusion that _deshé_ here means those plants, mostly small and herbaceous, which bear no proper seeds;[87] in other words, the Cryptogamia--as fungi, mosses, lichens, ferns, etc. The remaining words are translated with sufficient accuracy in our version. They denote seed-bearing or phoenogamous herbs and trees. The special mention of the fructification of plants is probably intended not only for distinction, but also to indicate the new power of organic reproduction now first introduced on the surface of our planet, and to mark its difference from the creative act itself. That this new and wondrous phenomenon should be so stated is thus in strict scientific propriety, and it is precisely the point that would be seized by an intelligent spectator of the visions of creation, who had previously witnessed only the accretion and disintegration of mineral substances, and to whom this marvellous power of organic reproduction would be in every respect a new creation. The arrangement of plants in the three great classes of cryptogams, seed-bearing herbs, and fruit-bearing trees differs in one important point--viz., the separation of herbaceous plants from trees--from modern botanical classification. It is, however, sufficiently natural for the purposes of a general description like this, and perhaps gives more precise ideas of the meaning intended than any other arrangement equally concise and popular. It is also probable that the object of the writer was not so much a natural-history classification as an account of the _order_ of creation, and that he wishes to affirm that the introduction of these three classes of plants on the earth corresponded with the order here stated. This view renders it unnecessary to vindicate the accuracy of the arrangement on botanical grounds, since the historical order was evidently better suited to the purpose in view, and in so far as the earlier appearance of cryptogamous plants is concerned, it is in strict accordance with geological fact. A very important truth is contained in the expression "after its kind"--that is, after its _species_; for the Hebrew "_min_," used here, has strictly this sense, and, like the Greek _idea_ and the Latin _species_, conveys the notion of form as well as that of kind. It is used to denote species of animals, in Leviticus i., 14, and in Deuteronomy xiv., 15. We are taught by this statement that plants were created each kind by itself; and that creation was not a sort of slump-work to be perfected by the operation of a law of development, as fancied by some modern speculators. In this assertion of the distinctness of species, and the production of each as a distinct part of the creative plan, revelation tallies perfectly with the conclusions of natural science, which lead us to believe that each species, as observed by us, is permanently reproductive, variable within narrow limits, and incapable of permanent intermixture with other species; and though hypotheses of modification by descent, and of the production of new species by such modification, may be formed, they are not in accordance with experience, and are still among the unproved speculations which haunt the outskirts of true science. We shall be better prepared, however, to weigh the relations of such hypotheses to our revelation of origins when we shall have reached the period of the introduction of animal life. Some additional facts contained in the recapitulation of the creative work in Chapter II. may very properly be considered here, as they seem to refer to the climatal conditions of the earth during the growth of the most ancient vegetation, and before the final adjustment of the astronomical relations of the earth on the fourth day. "And every shrub of the land before it was on the earth, and every herb of the land before it sprung up. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground; but a mist ascended from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground." This has been supposed to be a description of the state of the earth during the whole period anterior to the fall of man. There is, however, no Scripture evidence of this; and geology informs us that rain fell as at present far back in the Palæozoic period, countless ages before the creation of man or the existing animals. Although, however, such a condition of the earth as that stated in these verses has not been known in any geological period, yet it is not inconceivable, but in reality corresponds with the other conditions of nature likely to have prevailed on the third day, as described in Genesis. The land of this period, we may suppose, was not very extensive nor very elevated. Hence the temperature would be uniform and the air moist. The luminous and calorific matter connected with the sun still occupied a large space, and therefore diffused heat and light more uniformly than at present. The internal heat of the earth may still have produced an effect in warming the oceanic waters. The combined operation of these causes, of which we, perhaps, have some traces as late as the Carboniferous period, might well produce a state of things in which the earth was watered, not by showers of rain, but by the gentle and continued precipitation of finely divided moisture, in the manner now observed in those climates in which vegetation is nourished for a considerable part of the year by nocturnal mists and copious dews. The atmosphere, in short, as yet partook in some slight degree of the same moist and misty character which prevailed before the "establishment of the clouds above"--the airy firmament of the second day. The introduction of these explanatory particulars by the sacred historian furnishes an additional argument for the theory of long periods. That vegetation should exist for two or three natural days without rain or the irrigation which is given in culture, was, as already stated, a circumstance altogether unworthy of notice; but the growth during a long period of a varied and highly organized flora, without this advantage, and by the aid of a special natural provision afterward discontinued, was in all respects so remarkable and so highly illustrative of the expedients of the divine wisdom that it deserved a prominent place. It is evident that the words of the inspired writer include plants belonging to all the great subdivisions of the vegetable kingdom. This earliest vegetation was not rude or incomplete, or restricted to the lower forms of life. It was not even, like that of the coal period, solely or mainly cryptogamous or gymnospermous. It included trees bearing fruit, as well as lichens and mosses, and it received the same stamp of approbation bestowed on other portions of the work--"it was good." We have a good right to assume that its excellence had reference not only to its own period, but to subsequent conditions of the earth. Vegetation is the great assimilating power, the converter of inorganic into organic matter suitable for the sustenance of animals. In like manner the lower tribes of plants prepare the way for the higher. We should therefore have expected _à priori_ that vegetation would have clothed the earth before the creation of animals, and a sufficient time before it to allow soils to be accumulated, and surplus stores of organic matter to be prepared in advance: this consideration alone would also induce us to assign a considerable duration to the third day. After the elevation of land, and the draining off from it of the saline matter with which it would be saturated, a process often very tedious, especially in low tracts of ground, the soil would still consist only of mineral matter, and must have been for a long period occupied by plants suited to this condition of things, in order that sufficient organic matter might be accumulated for the growth of a more varied vegetation; a consideration which perhaps illustrates the order of the plants in the narrative. It may be objected to the above views that, however accordant with chemical and physiological probabilities, they do not harmonize with the facts of geology; since the earliest fossiliferous formations contain almost exclusively the remains of animals, which must therefore have preceded, or at least been coeval with, the earliest forms of terrestrial vegetation. This objection is founded on well-ascertained facts, but facts which may have no connection with the third day of creation when regarded as a long period. The oldest geological formations are of marine origin, and contain remains of marine animals, with those of plants supposed to be allied to the existing algæ or sea-weeds. Geology can not, however, assure us either that no land plants existed contemporaneously with these earliest animals, or that no land flora preceded them. These oldest fossiliferous rocks may mark the commencement of animal life, but they testify nothing as to the existence or non-existence of a previous period of vegetation alone. Farther, the rocks which contain the oldest remains of life exist as far as yet known in a condition so highly metamorphic as almost to preclude the possibility of their containing any distinguishable vegetable fossils; yet they contain vast deposits of carbon in the form of graphite, and if this, like more modern coaly matter, was accumulated by vegetable growth, it must indicate an exuberance of plants in these earliest geological periods, but of plants as yet altogether unknown to us. It is possible, therefore, that in these Eozoic rocks we may have remnants of the formations of the third Mosaic day; and if we should ever be so fortunate as to find any portion of them containing vegetable fossils, and these of species differing from any hitherto known, either in a fossil state or recent, and rising higher, in elevation and complexity of type, than the flora of the succeeding Silurian and Carboniferous eras, we may then suppose that we have penetrated to the monuments of this third creative æon. The only other alternative by which these verses can be reconciled with geology is that adopted by the late Hugh Miller, who supposes that the plants of the third day are those of the Carboniferous period; but, besides the apparent anachronism involved in this, we now know that the coal flora consisted mainly of cryptogams allied to ferns and club-mosses, and of gymnosperms allied to the pines and cycads, the higher orders of plants being almost entirely wanting. For these reasons we are shut up to the conclusion that this flora of the third day must have its place before the Palæozoic period of geology. To those who are familiar with the vast lapse of time required by the geological history of the earth, it may be startling to ascribe the whole of it to three or four of the creative days. If, however, it be admitted that these days were periods of unknown duration, no reason remains for limiting their length any farther than the facts of the case require. If in the strata of the earth which are accessible to us we can detect the evidence of its existence for myriads of years, why may not its Creator be able to carry our view back for myriads more. It may be humbling to our pride of knowledge, but it is not on any scientific ground improbable, that the oldest animal remains known to geology belong to the middle period of the earth's history, and were preceded by an enormous lapse of ages in which the earth was being prepared for animal existence, but of which no records remain, except those contained in the inspired history. It would be quite unphilosophical for geology to affirm either that animal life must always have existed, or that its earliest animals are necessarily the earliest organic beings. To use, with a slight modification, the words of an able thinker on these subjects,[88] "For ages the prejudice prevailed that the historical period, or that which is coeval with the life of man, exhausted the whole history of the globe. Geologists removed that prejudice," but must not substitute "another in its place, viz., that geological time is coeval with the globe itself, or that organic life always existed on its surface." A second doubt as to the existence of this primitive flora may be based on the statement that it included the highest forms of plants. Had it consisted only of low and imperfect vegetables, there might have been much less difficulty in admitting its probability. Farther, we find that even in the Carboniferous period scarcely any plants of the higher orders flourished, and there was a preponderance of the lower forms of the vegetable kingdom. We have, however, in geological chronology, many illustrations of the fact that the progress of improvement has not been continuous or uninterrupted, and that the preservation of the flora and fauna of many geological periods has been very imperfect. Hence the occurrence in one particular stratum or group of strata of few or low representatives of animal and vegetable life affords no proof that a better state of things may not have existed previously. We also find, in the case of animals, that each tribe attained to its highest development at the time when, in the progress of creation, it occupied the summit of the scale of life. Analogy would thus lead us to believe that when plants alone existed, they may have assumed nobler forms than any now existing, or that tribes now represented by few and humble species may at that time have been so great in numbers and development as to fill all the offices of our present complicated flora, as well as, perhaps, some of those now occupied by animals. We have this principle exemplified in the Carboniferous flora, by the magnitude of its arborescent club-mosses, and the vast variety of its gymnosperms. For this reason we may anticipate that if any remains of this early plant-creation should be disinterred, they will prove to be among the most wonderful and interesting geological relics ever discovered, and will enlarge our views of the compass and capabilities of the vegetable kingdom, and especially of its lower forms. A farther objection is the uselessness of the existence of plants for a long period, without any animals to subsist on or enjoy them, and even without forming any accumulation of fossil fuel or other products useful to man. The only direct answer to this has already been given. The previous existence of plants may have been, and probably was, essential to the comfort and subsistence of the animals afterwards introduced. Independently of this, however, we have an analogous case in the geological history of animals, which prevents this fact from standing alone. Why was the earth tenanted so long by the inferior races of animals, and why were so much skill and contrivance expended on their structures, and even on their external ornament, when there was no intelligent mind on earth to appreciate their beauties. Even in the present world we may as well ask why the uninhabited islands of the ocean are found to be replete with luxuriant vegetable life, why God causes it to rain in the desert where human foot never treads, or why he clothes with a marvellous exuberance of beautiful animal and plant forms the depths of the sea. We can but say that these things seemed and seem good to the Creator, and may serve uses unknown to us; and this is precisely what we must be content to say respecting the plant-creation of the Eozoic period. Some writers[89] on this subject have suggested that the cosmical use of this plant-creation was the abstraction from the atmosphere of an excess of carbonic acid unfavorable to the animal life subsequently to be introduced. This use it may have served, and when its effects had been gradually lost through metamorphism and decay, that second great withdrawal of carbon which took place in the Carboniferous period may have been rendered necessary. The reasons afforded by natural history for supposing that plants preceded animals are thus stated by Professor Dana: "The proof from science of the existence of plants before animals is inferential, and still may be deemed satisfactory. Distinct fossils have not been found, all that ever existed in the azoic[90] rocks having been obliterated. The arguments in the affirmative are as follows: "1. The existence of limestone rocks among the other beds, similar limestones in later ages having been of organic origin; also the occurrence of carbon in the shape of graphite, graphite being, in known cases in rocks, a result of the alteration of the carbon of plants. "2. The fact that the cooling earth would have been fitted for vegetable life for a long age before animals could have existed; the principle being exemplified everywhere that the earth was occupied at each period with the highest kinds of life the conditions allowed. "3. The fact that vegetation subserved an important purpose in the coal-period in ridding the atmosphere of carbonic acid for the subsequent introduction of land animals, suggests a valid reason for believing that the same great purpose, the true purpose of vegetation, was effected through the ocean before the _waters_ were fitted for animal life. "4. Vegetation being directly or mediately the food of animals, it must have had a previous existence. The latter part of the azoic age in geology we therefore regard as the age when the plant kingdom was instituted, the latter half of the third day in Genesis. However short or long the epoch, it was one of the great steps of progress." In concluding the examination of the work of the third day, I must again remind the reader that, on the theory of long creative periods, the words under consideration must refer to the first introduction of vegetation, in forms that have long since ceased to exist. Geology informs us that in the period of which it is cognizant the vegetation of the earth has been several times renewed, and that no plants of the older and middle geological periods now exist. We may therefore rest assured that the vegetable species, and probably also many of the generic and family forms of the vegetation of the third day, have long since perished, and been replaced by others suited to the changed condition of the earth. It is indeed probable that during the third and fourth days themselves there might be many removals and renewals of the terrestrial flora, so that perhaps every species created at the commencement of the introduction of plants may have been extinct before the close of the period. Nevertheless it was marked by the introduction of vegetation, which in one or another set of forms has ever since clothed the earth. At the commencement of the third day the earth was still covered by the waters. As time advanced islands and mountain-peaks arose from the ocean, vomiting forth the molten and igneous materials of the interior of the earth's crust. Plains and valleys were then spread around, rivers traced out their beds, and the ocean was limited by coasts and divided by far-stretching continents. At the command of the Creator plants sprung from the soil--the earliest of organized structures--at first probably few and small, and fitted to contend against the disadvantages of soils impregnated with saline particles and destitute of organic matter; but as the day advanced increasing in number, magnitude, and elevation, until at length the earth was clothed with a luxuriant and varied vegetation, worthy the approval of the Creator, and the admiring song of the angelic "sons of God." CHAPTER IX. LUMINARIES. "And God said, Let there be luminaries in the expanse of heaven, to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and for years. And let them be for luminaries in the expanse of heaven, to give light on the earth: and it was so. "And God made two great luminaries, the greater luminary to preside over the day, the lesser luminary to preside over the night. He made the stars also. And God placed them in the expanse of heaven to give light on the earth, and to preside over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day."--Genesis i., 14-19. After so long a sojourn on the earth, we are in these verses again carried to the heavens. Every scientific reader is struck with the position of this remarkable statement, interrupting as it does the progress of the organic creation, and constituting a break in the midst of the terrestrial history which is the immediate subject of the narrative; thus, in effect, as has often been remarked, dividing the creative week into two portions. Why was the completion of the heavenly bodies so long delayed? Why were light and vegetation introduced previously? If we can not fully answer these questions, we may at least suppose that the position of these verses is not accidental, though certainly not that which would have been chosen for its own sake by any fabricator of systems ancient or modern. Let us inquire, however, what are the precise terms of the record. 1. The word here used to denote the objects produced clearly distinguishes them from the product of the first day's creation. Then God said, "Let _light_ be;" he now says, "Let _luminaries_ or light-bearers be." We have already seen that the light of the first day may have emanated from an extended luminous mass, at first occupying the whole extent of the solar system, and more or less attached to the several planetary bodies, and afterwards concentrated within the earth's orbit. The verses now under consideration inform us that the process of concentration was now complete, that our great central luminary had attained to its perfect state. This process of concentration may have been proceeding during the whole of the intervening time, or it may have been completed at once by some more rapid process of the nature of a direct interposition of creative power. 2. The division of light from darkness is expressed by the same terms, and is of the same nature with that on the first day. This separation was now produced in its full extent by the perfect condensation of the luminiferous matters around the sun. 3. The heavenly bodies are said to be intended for _signs_--that is, for marks or indications--either of the seasons, days, and years afterwards mentioned, or of the majesty and power of the true God, as the Creator of objects so grand and elevated as to become to the ignorant heathen objects of idolatrous worship; or perhaps of the earthly events they are supposed to influence. The arrangements now perfected for the first time enabled natural days, seasons, and years to have their limits accurately marked. Previously to this period there had been no distinctly marked seasons, and consequently no natural separation of years, nor were the limits of days at all accurately defined. 4. The terms _expanse_ and _heaven_, previously applied to the atmosphere, are here combined to denote the more distant starry and planetary heavens. There is no ambiguity involved in this, since the writer must have well known that no one could so far mistake as to suppose that the heavenly bodies are placed in that atmospheric expanse which supports the clouds. 5. The luminaries were _made_ or appointed to their office on the fourth day. They are not said to have been created, being included in the creation of the beginning. They were now completed, and fully fitted for their work. An important part of this fitting seems to have been the setting or placing them in the heavens, conveying to us the impression that the mutual relations and regular motions of the heavenly bodies were now for the first time perfected. 6. The stars are introduced in a parenthetical manner, which leaves it doubtful whether we are merely informed in general terms that they are works of God, as well as those heavenly bodies which are of more importance to us, or that they were arranged as heavenly luminaries useful to our earth on the fourth day. The term includes the fixed stars, and it is by no means probable that these were in any way affected by the work referred to the fourth day, any farther than their appearance from our earth is concerned. This view is confirmed by the language of the 104th Psalm, which in this part of the work mentions the sun and moon alone, without the fixed stars or planets. It is evident that the changes referred to this period related to the whole solar system, and resulted in the completion of that system in the form which it now bears, or at least in the final adjustment of the motions and relations of the earth; and we have reason to believe that the condensation of the luminous envelope around the sun was one of the most important of these changes. On the hypothesis of La Place, already referred to as most in accordance with the earlier stages of the work, there seems to be no especial reason why the completion of the process of elaboration of the sun and planets should be accelerated at this particular stage. We can easily understand, however, that those closing steps which brought the solar system into a state of permanent and final equilibrium would form a marked epoch in the work; and we can also understand that now, on the eve of the introduction of animal life, there is a certain propriety in the representation of the Creator interfering to close up the merely inorganic part of his great work, and bring this department at least to its final perfection. The fourth day, then, in geological language, marks _the complete introduction of "existing causes" in inorganic nature_, and we henceforth find no more creative interference, except in the domain of organization. This accords admirably with the deductions of modern geology, and especially with that great principle so well expounded by Sir Charles Lyell, and which forms the true basis of modern geological reasonings--that we should seek in existing causes of change for the explanation of the appearances of the rocks of the earth's crust. Geology probably carries us back to the introduction of animal life; and shows us that since that time land, sea, and atmosphere, summer and winter, day and night--all the great inorganic conditions affecting animal life--have existed as at present, and have been subject to modifications the same in kind with those which they now experience, though perhaps different in degree. In this ancient record we find in like manner that the period immediately preceding the creation of animals witnessed the completion of all the great general arrangements on which these phenomena depend. The Bible, therefore, and science agree in the truth that existing causes have been in full force since the creation of animals; and that since that period the exercise of creative power has been limited to the organic world. This has a curious bearing, not often thought of, on modern theories of evolution as compared with the teaching of the Bible. In one important sense, absolute creation, in so far as the inorganic universe is concerned, is in our Mosaic narrative limited to the production of matter and force at first. All else is called making, forming, or appointing. Thus the production of all the arrangements of the waters, the atmosphere, the earth, and the heavens, in the work of the first four days, and even the introduction of plants, may be correctly termed an evolution or development from preformed materials, with the single exception that the reproductive power and specific diversities of plants are recognized as entirely new facts. Creation is properly resumed when animal life is introduced. Hence, in so far as a comparison with the terms of Genesis is concerned, hypotheses as to the evolution of animal life from inorganic matter are in a different position from hypotheses as to the previous evolution of the parts of inorganic nature; and still more so from statements as to the progress of inorganic nature subsequent to the introduction of animals; since within that period, which really includes the whole of geological time, absolutely no creation whatever in the domain of inanimate nature is affirmed in the Biblical record to have taken place. On the contrary, all the arrangements of inorganic nature are represented as finally completed before the creation of animals. The obliquity of the earth's axis, which gives us the changes of the seasons, is apparently included in the arrangements of the fourth creative day. The cause of this obliquity, and the time when it may have attained to its present amount, have been fertile themes of discussion. It is clear, however, that if this obliquity was established, as appears to be stated here, before the introduction of animal life, it can have no bearing on the changes of climate of which we have evidence in geological time since the dawn of animal life, unless, indeed, it is capable of greater variation than astronomers admit; and the same remark applies to supposed changes in the position of the poles themselves. There is, however, nothing in this record to oppose the idea of any secular changes in these arrangements under the laws appointed in the fourth creative period. The record relating to the fourth day is silent respecting the mundane history of the period; and geology gives no very certain information concerning it. If, however, we assume that any of the Eozoic or pre-eozoic rocks are deposits of this or the preceding period, we may infer from the disturbances and alteration which these have suffered, prior to the deposition of the Cambrian and Silurian, that during or toward the close of this day the crust of the earth was affected by great movements. There is another consideration also leading to important conclusions in relation to this period. In the earliest fossiliferous rocks there seems to be good evidence that the dry land contemporary with the seas in which they were formed was of very small extent. Now, since on the third day a very plentiful and highly developed vegetation was produced, we may infer that during that period the extent of dry land was considerable, and was probably gradually increasing. If, then, the Cambrian and Silurian systems, so rich in marine organic remains, belong to the commencement of the fifth day, we must conclude that during the fourth much of the land previously existing had been again submerged. In other words, during the third day the extent of terrestrial surface was increasing, on the fourth day it diminished, and on the fifth it again increased, and probably has on the whole continued to increase up to the present time. One most important geological consequence of this is that the marine animals of the fifth day probably commenced their existence on sea bottoms which were the old soil surfaces of submerged continents previously clothed with vegetation, and which consequently contained much organic matter fitted to form a basis of support for the newly created animals. I shall close my remarks on the fourth day by a few quotations from those passages of Scripture which refer to the objects of this day's work. I have already referred to that beautiful passage in Deuteronomy where the Israelites are warned against the crime of worshipping those heavenly bodies which the Lord God hath "divided to every nation under the whole heaven." In the book of Job also we find that the heavenly bodies were in his day regarded as signal manifestations of the power of God, and that several of the principal constellations had received names: "He commandeth the sun, and it shineth not; He sealeth up the stars;[91] He alone spreadeth out the heavens, And walketh on the high waves of the sea;[92] He maketh Arcturus, Orion, The Pleiades, and the hidden chambers of the south; Who doeth great things past finding out; Yea, marvellous things beyond number." --Job ix., 9. "Canst thou tighten the bonds of the Pleiades,[93] Or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth the Mazzaroth in their season, Or lead forth Arcturus and its sons? Knowest thou the laws of the heavens, Or hast thou appointed their dominion over the earth?" --Job xxxviii., 31. I may merely remark on these passages that the chambers of the south are supposed to be those parts of the southern heavens invisible in the latitude in which Job resided. The bonds of Pleiades and of Orion probably refer to the apparently close union of the stars of the former group, and the wide separation of those of the latter; a difference which, to the thoughtful observer of the heavens, is more striking than most instances of that irregular grouping of the stars which still forms a question in astronomy, from the uncertainty whether it is real, or only an optical deception arising from stars at different distances coming nearly into a line with each other. I have seen in some recent astronomical work this very instance of the Pleiades and Orion taken as a marked illustration of this problematical fact in astronomy. _Mazzaroth_ are supposed by modern expositors to be the signs of the Zodiac. On the whole, the Hebrew books give us little information as to the astronomical theories of the time when they were written. They are entirely non-committal as to the nature of the connections and revolutions of the heavenly bodies; and indeed regard these as matters in their time beyond the grasp of the human mind, though well known to the Creator and regulated by his laws. From other sources we have facts leading to the belief that even in the time of Moses, and certainly in that of the later Biblical writers, there was not a little practical astronomy in the East, and some good theory. The Hindoo astronomy professes to have observations from 3000 B.C., and the arguments of Baily and others, founded on internal evidence, give some color of truth to the claim. The Chaldeans at a very early period had ascertained the principal circles of the sphere, the position of the poles, and the nature of the apparent motions of the heavens as the results of revolution on an inclined axis. The Egyptian astronomy we know mainly from what the Greeks borrowed from it. Thales, 640 B.C., taught that the moon is lighted by the sun, and that the earth is spherical, and the position of its five zones. Pythagoras, 580 B.C., knew, in addition to the sphericity of the earth, the obliquity of the ecliptic, the identity of the evening and morning star, and that the earth revolves round the sun. This Greek astronomy appears immediately after the opening of Egypt to the Greeks; and both these philosophers studied in that country. Such knowledge, and more of the same character, may therefore have existed in Egypt at a much earlier period. The Psalms abound in beautiful references to the creation of the fourth day: "When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, The moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man, that thou visitest him?" --Psalm viii. "Who telleth the number of the stars, Who calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great praise; His understanding is infinite. The Lord lifteth up the meek; He casteth the wicked to the ground." --Psalm cxlvii. "The heavens declare the glory of God, The firmament showeth his handiwork; Day unto day uttereth speech, Night unto night showeth knowledge. They have no speech nor language, Their voice is not heard; Yet their line is gone out to all the earth, And their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a pavilion for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, And rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. Its going forth is from the end of the heavens, And its circuit unto the end of them. And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." --Psalm xix. These are excellent illustrations of the truth of the Scripture mode of treating natural objects, in connection with their Maker. It is but a barren and fruitless philosophy which sees the work and not its author--a narrow piety which loves God but despises his works. The Bible holds forth the golden mean between these extremes, in a strain of lofty poetry and acute perception of the great and beautiful, whether seen in the Creator or reflected from his works. The work of this day opens up a wide field for astronomical illustration, more especially in relation to the wisdom and benevolence of the Creator as displayed in the heavens; but it would be foreign to our present purpose to enter into these. It may be well, however, to think for a moment of the importance of the facts suggested by the writer of Genesis in mentioning the use of the heavenly bodies as signs of time. To what extent civilization or even the continued existence of man as an intelligent being would have been possible without the marks of subdivision of time given by the great astronomical clock of the universe, it is almost impossible for us to imagine. Without such marks of time, in any case, the whole fabric of human culture must have been different from what it is. Farther, in connection with this, it is a grand thought of our early revelation that all these heavenly bodies, however magnificent, and however they might seem to the heathen to be objects of worship, are but marks on God's clock, parts of a mere machine which keeps time for us, and is therefore our servant, as the children of the great Artificer, and not our ruler. The idea has been termed an astrological one; but astrology as a means of divination has no place in the record. The heavenly bodies are under the law of the Creator, and their function relatively to us is to give light and to give time. Astrological divination is an outgrowth of the Sabæan idolatry, and held in abomination by the monotheistic author of Genesis. His object may be summed up in the following general statements: 1. The heavenly hosts and their arrangements are the work of Jehovah, and are regulated wholly by his laws or ordinances; a striking illustration of the recognition by the Hebrew writer both of creative interference, and that stable, natural law which too often withdraws the mind of the philosopher from the ideas of creation and of providence. 2. The heavenly bodies have a relation to the earth--are parts of the same plan, and, whatever other uses they were made to serve, were made for the benefit of man. 3. The general physical arrangements of the solar system were perfected before the introduction of animals on our planet. CHAPTER X. THE LOWER ANIMALS. "And God said, Let the waters swarm with swarming living creatures, and let birds fly on the surface of the expanse of heaven. And God created great reptiles, and every living moving thing, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good. "And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters of the seas, and let the flying creatures multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day."--Genesis i., 20-23. In these words, so full of busy, active, thronging life, we now enter on that part of the earth's history which has been most fully elucidated by geology, and we have thus an additional reason for carefully weighing the terms of the narrative, which here, as in other places, contain large and important truths couched in language of the simplest character. 1. In accordance with the views now entertained by the best lexicographers, the word translated in our version "creeping things" has been rendered "prolific or swarming creatures." The Hebrew is _Sheretz_, a noun derived from the verb used in this verse to denote bringing forth abundantly. It is loosely translated in the Septuagint _Erpeta_, reptiles; and this view our English translators appear to have adopted, without, perhaps, any very clear notions of the creatures intended. The manner in which it is used in other passages places its true meaning beyond doubt. I select as illustrations of the most apposite character those verses in Leviticus in which clean and unclean animals are specified, and in which we have a right to expect the most precise zoological nomenclature that the Hebrew can afford. In Leviticus xi., 20-23, _insects_ are defined to be _flying sheretzim_, and in verse 29, etc., under the designation "_sheretzim of the land_," we have animals named in our version the weasel, mouse, tortoise, ferret, chameleon, lizard, snail, and mole. The first of these animals is believed to have been a burrowing creature, perhaps a mole; the second, from the meaning of its name, "ravager of fields," is thought to have been a mouse. Some doubt, however, attends both of these identifications, but it appears certain that the remaining six species are small reptiles, principally lizards. We learn, therefore, that the smaller reptiles, and _perhaps_ also a few small mammals, are _sheretzim_. In verses 41 and 42 we are introduced to other tribes. "And every _sheretz_ that swarmeth on the earth shall be an abomination unto you; it shall not be eaten; whatsoever goeth upon the belly (serpents, worms, snails, etc.), and whatsoever hath more feet (than four) (insects, arachnidans, myriapods)." In verses 9 and 10 of the same chapter we have an enumeration of the _sheretzim_ of the waters: "Whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas and in the rivers, them shall ye eat. And all that have not fins and scales in the seas and the rivers, of all that swarm in the waters (all the _sheretzim_ of the waters), they shall be an abomination unto you." Here the general term _sheretz_ includes all the fishes and the invertebrate animals of the waters. From the whole of the above passages we learn that this is a general term for all the invertebrate animals and the two lower classes of vertebrates, or, in other words, for the whole animal kingdom except the mammalia and birds. To all these creatures the name is particularly appropriate, all of them being oviparous or ovoviviparous, and consequently producing great numbers of young and multiplying very rapidly. The only other creatures which can be included under the term are the two doubtful species of small mammals already mentioned. Nothing can be more fair and obvious than this explanation of the term, based both on etymology and on the precise nomenclature of the ceremonial law. We conclude, therefore, that the prolific animals of the fifth day's creation belonged to the three Cuvierian sub-kingdoms of the Radiata, Articulata, and Mollusca, and to the classes of Fish and Reptiles among the vertebrata. 2. One peculiar group of _sheretzim_ is especially distinguished by name--the _tanninim_, or "great whales" of our version. It would be amusing, had we time, to notice the variety of conjectures to which this word has given rise, and the perplexities of commentators in reference to it. In our version and the Septuagint it is usually rendered dragon; but in this place the seventy have thought proper to put _Ketos_ (whale), and our translators have followed them. Subsequent translators and commentators have laid under contribution all sorts of marine monsters, including the sea-serpent, in their endeavors to attach a precise meaning to the word; while others have been content to admit that it may signify any kind or all kinds of large aquatic animals. The greater part of the difficulty appears to have arisen from confounding two distinct words, _tannin_ and _tan_, both names of animals; and the confusion has been increased by the circumstance that in two places the words have been interchanged, probably by errors of transcribers. _Tan_ occurs in twelve places, and from these we can gather that it inhabits ruined cities, deserts, and places to which ostriches resort, that it suckles its young, is of predaceous and shy habits, utters a wailing cry, and is not of large size, nor formidable to man. The most probable conjecture as to the animal intended is that of Gesenius, who supposes it to be the jackal. The other word (_tannin_), which is that used in the text, is applied as an emblem of Egypt and its kings, and also of the conquering kings of Babylon. It is spoken of as furious when enraged, and formidable to man, and is said to be an inhabitant of rivers and of the sea, but more especially of the Nile. In short, it is the crocodile of the Nile. We can easily understand the perplexity of those writers who suppose these two words to be identical, and endeavor to combine all the characters above mentioned in one animal or tribe of animals. As a farther illustration of the marked difference in the meanings of the two words, we may compare the 34th and 37th verses of the fifty-first chapter of Jeremiah. In the first of these verses the King of Babylon is represented as a "dragon" (_tannin_), which had swallowed up Israel. In the second it is predicted that Babylon itself shall become heaps, a dwelling-place for "dragons" (_tanim_). There can be no doubt that the animals intended here are quite different. The devouring _tannin_ is a huge predaceous river reptile, a fit emblem of the Babylonian monarch; the _tan_ is the jackal that will soon howl in his ruined palaces. It is interesting to know that philologists trace a connection between _tannin_ and the Greek _teino_, Latin _tendo_, and similar words, signifying to stretch or extend, in the Sanscrit, Gothic, and other languages, leading to the inference that the Hebrew word primarily denotes a lengthened or extended creature, which corresponds well with its application to the crocodile. Taking all the above facts in connection, we are quite safe in concluding that the creatures referred to by the word under consideration are literally large reptilian animals; and, from the special mention made of them, we may infer that, in their day, they were the lords of creation.[94] 3. In verse 21 the remainder of the _sheretzim_, besides the larger reptiles, are included in the general expression, "Living creature that moveth." The term "living creature" is, literally, "creature having the breath of life;" the power of respiration being apparently in Hebrew the distinctive character of the animal. The word moveth (_ramash_), in its more general sense, expresses the power of voluntary motion, as exhibited in animals in general. In a few places, however, it has a more precise meaning, as in 1 Kings iv., 33, where the vertebrated animals are included in the four classes of "beasts, fowl, _creeping things_ (or reptiles, _remes_), and fishes." In the present connection it probably has its most general sense; unless, indeed, the apparent repetition in this verse relates to the amphibious or semi-terrestrial creatures associated with the great reptiles; and, in that case, the humbler reptilian animals alone may be meant. 4. We may again note that the introduction of animal life is marked by the use of the word "create," for the first time since the general creation of the heavens and the earth. We may also note that the animal, as well as the plant, was created "after its kind," or "species by species." The animals are grouped under three great classes--the Remes, the Tanninim, and the Birds; but, lest any misconception should arise as to the relations of species to these groups, we are expressly informed that the species is here the true unit of the creative work. It is worth while, therefore, to note that this most ancient authority on this much controverted topic connects species on the one hand with the creative fiat, and on the other with the power of continuous reproduction. 5. In addition to the great mass of _sheretzim_, so accurately characterized by Milton as "----Reptile with spawn abundant," the creation of the fifth day included a higher tribe of oviparous animals--the birds, the fowl or winged creature of the text. Birds alone, we think, must be meant here, as we have already seen that insects are included under the general term _sheretzim_. 6. It is farther to be observed that _the waters_ give origin to the first animals--an interesting point when we consider the contrast here with the creation of plants and of the higher animals, both of which proceed from the earth. 7. It can not fail to be observed that we have in these verses two different arrangements of the animals created, neither corresponding exactly with what modern science teaches us to regard as the true grouping of the animal kingdom, according to its affinities. The order in the first enumeration should, from the analogy of the chapter, indicate that of successive creation. The order of the second list may, perhaps, be that of the relative importance of the animals, as it appeared to the writer. Or there may have been a twofold division of the period--the earlier commencing with the creation of the humbler invertebrates, the later characterized by the great reptiles--which is the actual state of the case as disclosed by geology. 8. The Creator recognizes the introduction of sentient existence and volition by _blessing_ this new work of his hands, and inviting the swarms of the newly peopled world to enjoy that happiness for which they were fitted, and to increase and fill the earth, inaugurating thus a new power destined to still higher developments. When we inquire what information geology affords respecting the period under consideration, the answer may be full and explicit. Geological discovery has carried us back to an epoch corresponding with the beginning of this day, and has disclosed a long and varied series of living beings, extending from this early period up to the introduction of the higher races of animals. To enter on the geological details of these changes, and on descriptions of the creatures which succeeded each other on the earth, would swell this volume into a treatise on palæontology, and would be quite unnecessary, as so many excellent popular works on this subject already exist. I shall, therefore, confine myself to a few general statements, and to marking the points in which Scripture and geology coincide in their respective histories of this long period, which appears to include the whole of the Palæozoic and Mesozoic epochs of geology, with their grand and varied succession of rock formations and living beings. In the Primordial or oldest fossiliferous rocks next in succession to those great Eozoic formations in which protozoa alone have been discovered, we find the remains of crustaceans, mollusks, and radiates--such as shrimps, shell-fish, and starfishes--which appear to have inhabited the bottom of a shallow ocean. Among these were some genera belonging to the higher forms of invertebrate life, but apparently as yet no vertebrated animals. Fishes were then introduced, and have left their remains in the upper Silurian rocks, and very abundantly in the Devonian and Carboniferous, in the latter of which also the first reptiles occur, but are principally members of that lower group to which the frogs and newts and their allies belong. The animal kingdom appears to have reached no higher than the reptiles in the Palæozoic or primary period of geology, and its reptiles are comparatively small and few; though fishes had attained to a point of perfection which they have not since exceeded. There was also, especially in the Carboniferous age, an abundant and luxuriant vegetation. The Mesozoic period is, however, emphatically the age of reptiles. This class then reached its climax, in the number, perfection, and magnitude of its species, which filled all those stations in the economy of nature now assigned to the mammalia. Birds also belong to this era, though apparently much less numerous and important than at present. Only a few species of small mammals, of the lowest or marsupial type, appear as a presage of the mammalian creation of the succeeding tertiary era. In these two geological periods, then--the Palæozoic and Mesozoic--we find, first, the lower _sheretzim_ represented by the invertebrata and the fishes, then the great reptiles and the birds; and it can not be denied that, if we admit that the Mosaic day under consideration corresponds with these geological periods, it would be impossible better to characterize their creations in so few words adapted to popular comprehension. I may add that all the species whose remains are found in the Palæozoic and Mesozoic rocks are extinct, and known to us only as fossils; and their connection with the present system of nature consists only in their forming with it a more perfect series than our present fauna alone could afford, unless, indeed, we should find reason to believe that any modern animals are their modified descendants. They belong to the same system of types, but are parts of it which have served their purpose and have been laid aside. The coincidences above noted between geology and Scripture may be summed up as follows: 1. According to both records, the causes which at present regulate the distribution of light, heat, and moisture, and of land and water, were, during the whole of this period, much the same as at present. The eyes of the trilobite of the old Silurian rocks are fitted for the same conditions with respect to light with those of existing animals of the same class. The coniferous trees of the coal measures show annual rings of growth. Impressions of rain-marks have been found in the shales of the coal measures and Devonian system. Hills and valleys, swamps and lagoons, rivers, bays, seas, coral reefs and shell beds, have all left indubitable evidence of their existence in the geological record. On the other hand, the Bible affirms that all the earth's physical features were perfected on the fourth day, and immediately before the creation of animals. The land and the water have undergone during this long lapse of ages many minor changes. Whole tribes of animals and plants have been swept away and replaced by others, but the general aspect of inorganic nature has remained the same. 2. Both records show the existence of vegetation during this period; though the geologic record, if taken alone, would, from its want of information respecting the third day, lead us to infer that plants are no older than animals, while the Bible does not speak of the nature of the vegetation that may have existed on the fifth day. 3. Both records inform us that reptiles and birds were the higher and leading forms of animals, and that all the lower forms of animals co-existed with them. In both we have especial notice of the gigantic Saurian reptiles of the latter part of the period; and if we have the remains of a few small species of mammals in the Mesozoic rocks, these, like a few similar creatures apparently included under the word _sheretz_ in Leviticus, are not sufficiently important to negative the general fact of the reign of reptiles.[95] 4. It accords with both records that the work of creation in this period was gradually progressive. Species after species was locally introduced, extended itself, and, after having served its purpose, gradually became extinct. And thus each successive rock formation presents new groups of species, each rising in numbers and perfection above the last, and marking a gradual assimilation of the general conditions of our planet to their present state, yet without any convulsions or general catastrophes affecting the whole earth at once. 5. In both records the time between the creation of the first animals and the introduction of the mammalia as a dominant class forms a well-marked period. I would not too positively assert that the close of the fifth day accords precisely with that of the Mesozoic or secondary period. The well-marked line of separation, however, in many parts of the world, between this and the earlier tertiary rocks succeeding to it, points to this as extremely probable. It thus appears that Scripture and geology so far concur respecting the events of this period as to establish, even without any other evidence, a probability that the fifth day corresponds with the geological ages with which I have endeavored to identify it. Geology, however, gives us no means of measuring precisely the length of this day; but it gives us the impression that it occupied an enormous length of time, compared with which the whole human period is quite insignificant; and rivalling those mythical "days of the Creator" which we have noticed as forming a part of the Hindoo mythology. Why was the earth thus occupied for countless ages by an animal population whose highest members were reptiles and birds? The fact can not be doubted, since geology and Scripture, the research of man and the Word of God, concur in affirming it. We know that the lowest of these creatures was, in its own place, no less worthy of the Creator than those which we regard as the highest in the scale of organization, and that the animals of the ancient, equally with those of the modern world, abounded in proofs of the wisdom, power, and goodness of their Maker. Comparative anatomy has shown that these extinct animals, though often varying much from their modern representatives, are in no respect rude or imperfect; that they have the same appearance of careful planning and elaborate execution, the same combination of ornament and utility, the same nice adaptation to the conditions of their existence, which we observe in modern creatures. In addition to this, the many new and wonderful contrivances and combinations which they present, and their relations to existing objects, have greatly enlarged our views of the variety and harmony of the whole system of nature. They are, therefore, in these respects, not without their use as manifestations of the Creator, in this our later age. There is another reason, hinted at by Buckland, Miller, and other writers on this subject, which weighs much with my mind. All animals and plants are constructed on a few leading types or patterns, which are again divided into subordinate types, just as in architecture we have certain leading styles, and these again may admit of several orders, and these of farther modifications. Types are farther modified to suit a great variety of minor adaptations. Now we know that the earth is, at any one time, inadequate to display all the modifications of all the types. Hence our existing system of organic nature, though probably more complete than any that preceded it, is still only fragmentary. It is like what architecture would be, if all memorials of all buildings more than a century old were swept away. But, from the beginning to the end of the creative work, there has been, or will be, room for the whole plan. Hence fossils are little by little completing our system of nature; and, if all were known, would perhaps wholly do so. The great plan must be progressive, and all its parts must be perishable, except its last culminating-point and archetype, man. Tennyson expresses this truth in the following lines: "The wish that of the living whole No life may fail beyond the grave; Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul? Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life. 'So careful of the type?' but no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, 'a thousand types are gone; I care for nothing, all shall go. 'Thou makest thine appeal to me: I bring to life, I bring to death: The spirit does but mean the breath: I know no more.' And he, shall he, Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, Who trusted God was love indeed, And love Creation's final law-- Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw, With ravine, shriek'd against his creed-- Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal'd within the iron hills? No more? A monster, then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music match'd with him. O life as futile, then, as frail! O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil." The farther explanation given by evolutionists that those ancient forms of life may be the actual ancestors of the present animals, and that through all the ages the Creator was gradually perfecting his work by a series of descents with modification, was probably not before the mind of our ancient Hebrew authority, nor need we attach much value to it till some proof of the process has been obtained from Nature. A farther reason, however, which was intelligible to the author of Genesis, and which is fondly dwelt on in succeeding books of the Bible, depends on the idea that the Creator himself is not indifferent to the marvellous structures, instincts, and powers which he has bestowed upon the lower races of animals. Witness the answer of the Almighty to Job, when he spake out of the whirlwind to vindicate his own plans in creation and providence; and brought before the patriarch a long train of animals, explaining and dwelling on the structure and powers of each, in contrast with the puny efforts and rude artificial contrivances of man. Witness also the preservation, in the rocks, of the fossil remains of extinct creatures, as if he who made them was unwilling that the evidence of their existence should perish, and purposely treasured them through all the revolutions of the earth, that through them men might magnify his name. The Psalmist would almost appear to have had all these thoughts before his mind when he poured out his wonder in the 104th Psalm: "O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all. The earth is full of thy riches; So is this wide and great sea, Wherein are moving things innumerable, Creatures both small and great. There go the ships [or "floating animals"]; There is leviathan, which thou hast formed to sport therein: That thou givest them they gather. Thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good; Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled; Thou takest away their breath, they return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the earth." There are, however, good reasons to believe that, in the plans of divine wisdom, the long periods in which the earth was occupied by the inferior races were necessary to its subsequent adaptation to the residence of man. To these periods our present continents gradually grew up in all their variety and beauty. The materials of old rocks were comminuted and mixed to form fertile soils,[96] and stores of mineral products were accumulated to enable man to earn his subsistence and the blessings of civilization by the sweat of his brow. If it pleased the Almighty during these preparatory stages to replenish the land and sea with living things full of life and beauty and happiness, who shall venture to criticise his procedure, or to say to Him, "What doest thou?" It would be decidedly wrong, in the present state of that which is popularly called science, to omit to inquire here what relation to the work of the fifth creative day those theories of development and evolution which have obtained so great currency may bear. The long time employed in the introduction of the lower animals, the use of the terms "make" and "form," instead of "create," and the expression "let the waters bring forth," may well be understood as countenancing some form of mediate creation, or of "creation by law," or "theistic evolution," as it has been termed; but they give no countenance to the idea either of the spontaneous evolution of living beings under the influence of merely physical causes and without creative intervention, or of the transmutation of one kind of animal into another. Still, with reference to this last idea, it is plain that revelation gives us no definition of species as distinguished from varieties or races, so that there is nothing to prevent the supposition that, within certain limits indicated by the expression "after its kind," animals or plants may have been so constituted as to vary greatly in the progress of geological time. If we ask whether any thing is known to science which can give even a decided probability to the notion that living beings are parts of an undirected evolution proceeding under merely dead insentient forces, and without intention, the answer must be emphatically no. I have elsewhere fully discussed these questions, and may here make some general statements as to certain scientific facts which at present bar the way against the hypothesis of evolution as applied to life, and especially against that form of it to which Darwin and his disciples have given so great prominence. 1. The albuminous or protoplasmic material, which seems to be necessary to the existence of every living being, is known to us as a product only of the action of previously living protoplasm. Though it is often stated that the production of albumen from its elements is a process not differing from the formation of water or any other inorganic material from its elements, this statement is false in fact, since, though many so-called organic substances have been produced by chemical processes, no particle of either living or non-living organizable matter of the nature of protoplasm has ever been so produced. The origin, therefore, of this albuminous matter is as much a mystery to us at present as that of any of the chemical elements. 2. Though some animals and plants are very simple in their visible structure, they all present vital properties not to be found in dead albuminous matter, and no mode is known whereby the properties of life can be communicated to dead matter. All the experiments hitherto made, and very eminently those recently performed by Pasteur, Tyndall, and Dallinger, lead to the conclusion that even the simplest living beings can be produced only from germs originating in previously living organisms of similar structure. The simplest living organisms are thus to science ultimate facts, for which it can not account except conjecturally. 3. No case is certainly known in human experience where any species of animal or plant has been so changed as to assume all the characters of a new species. Species are thus practically to science unchangeable units, the origin of which we have as yet no means of tracing. 4. Though the general history of animal life in time bears a certain resemblance to the development of the individual animal from the embryo, there is no reason whatever to believe that this is more than a mere relation of analogy, arising from the fact that in both cases the law of procedure is to pass from the simpler forms to the more complex, and from the more generalized to the more specialized. The external conditions and details of the two kinds of series are altogether different, and become more so the more they are investigated. This shows that the causes can not have been similar. 5. In tracing back animals and groups of animals in geological time, we find that they always end without any link of connection with previous beings, and in circumstances which render any such connections improbable. In the work of our next creative day, the series of animals preceding the modern horse has been cited as a good instance of probable evolution; but not only are the members of the series so widely separated in space and time that no connection can be traced, but the earliest of them, the _Orohippus_, would require, on the theory, to have been preceded by a previous series extending so far back that it is impossible, under any supposition of the imperfection of our present knowledge, to consider such extension probable. The same difficulty applies to every case of tracing back any specific form either of animal or plant. This general result proves, as I have elsewhere attempted to show,[97] that the introduction of the various animal types must have been abrupt, and under some influence quite different from that of evolution. These are what I would term the five fatal objections to evolution as at present held, as a means of accounting for the introduction and succession of animals. To what extent they may be weakened or strengthened by the future progress of science it is impossible to say, but so long as they exist it is mere folly and presumption to affirm that modern science supports the doctrine of evolution. There can be no doubt, however, that the Bible leaves us perfectly free to inquire as to the plan and method of the Creator, and that, whatever discoveries we may make, we shall find that his plans are orderly, methodical, and continuous, and not of the nature of an arbitrary patchwork. Though science as yet gives us no certain laws for the introduction of new specific types, it indicates certain possible modes of the origination of varieties, races, and sub-species of previously existing types. One of these is that struggle for existence against adverse external conditions, which, however, has been harped upon too exclusively by the Darwinian school, and which will give chiefly depauperated and degraded forms. Another is that expansion under exceptionally favorable conditions which arises where species are admitted to wider new areas of geographical range and more abundant and varied means of sustenance. Land animals and plants must have experienced this in times of continental elevation; marine animals and plants in times of continental depression. Another is the tendency to what has been called reproductive retardation and acceleration which species undergo under conditions exceptionally unfavorable or favorable, and which in some modern aquatic animals produces differences so great that members of the same species have sometimes been placed in different genera. Lastly, it is conceivable that species may have been so constructed that after a certain number of generations they may spontaneously undergo either abrupt or gradual changes, similar to those which the individual undergoes at certain stages of growth. This last furnishes the only true analogy possible between embryology and geological succession. While, however, science is silent as to the production of new specific types, and only gives us indications as to the origin of varieties and races, it is curious that the Bible suggests three methods in which new organisms may be, and according to it have been introduced by the Creator. The first is that of immediate and direct creation, as when God created the great Tanninim. The second is that of mediate creation, through the materials previously existing, as when he said, "Let the land bring forth plants," or "Let the waters bring forth animals." The third is that of production from a previous organism by power other than that of ordinary reproduction, as in the origination of Eve from Adam, and the miraculous conception of Jesus. These are the only points in which its teachings approach the limits of speculations as to evolution, and they certainly leave scope enough for the legitimate inquiries of science.[98] CHAPTER XI. THE HIGHER ANIMALS AND MAN. "And God said, Let the land bring forth animals after their kinds; the herbivora, the reptiles, and the carnivora, after their kinds; and it was so. And God made carnivorous mammals after their kinds, and herbivorous mammals after their kinds, and every reptile of the land after its kind; and God saw that it was good. "And God said, Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and over the herbivora and over all the land. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them; and God said, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food, and to every beast of the earth and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat; and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And evening and morning were the sixth day."--Genesis i., 24-31. The creation of animals, unlike that of plants, occupies two days. Here our attention is restricted to the inhabitants of the _land_, and chiefly to their higher forms. Several new names are introduced to our notice, which I have endeavored to translate as literally as possible by introducing zoological terms where those in common use were deficient. 1. The first tribe of animals noticed here is named _Bhemah_, "cattle" in our version; and in the Septuagint "quadrupeds" in one of the verses, and "cattle" in the other. Both of these senses are of common occurrence in the Scriptures, cattle or domesticated animals being usually designated by this word; while in other passages, as in 1 Kings iv., 33, where Solomon is said to have written a treatise on "_beasts_, fowls, creeping things, and fishes," it appears to include all the mammalia. Notwithstanding this wide range of meaning, however, there are passages, and these of the greatest authority in reference to our present subject, in which it strictly means the herbivorous mammals, and which show that when it was necessary to distinguish these from the predaceous or carnivorous tribes this term was specially employed. In Leviticus xi., 22-27, we have a specification of all the Bhemoth that might and might not be used for food. It includes all the true ruminants, with the coney, the hare, and the hog, animals of the rodent and pachydermatous orders. The carnivorous quadrupeds are designated by a different generic term. In this chapter of Leviticus, therefore, which contains the only approach to a system in natural history to be found in the Bible, _bhemah_ is strictly a synonym of _herbivora_, including especially ungulates and rodents. That this is its proper meaning here is confirmed by the considerations that in this place it can denote but a part of the land quadrupeds, and that the idea of cattle or domesticated animals would be an anachronism. At the same time there need be no objection to the view that the especial capacity of ruminants and other herbivora for domestication is connected with the use of the word in this place. 2. The word _remes_, "creeping things" in our version, as we have already shown, is a very general term, referring to the power of motion possessed by animals, especially on the surface of the ground. It here in all probability refers to the additional types of terrestrial reptiles, and other creatures lower than the mammals, introduced in this period. 3. The compound term (_hay'th-eretz_) which I have ventured to render "carnivora," is literally animal of the land; but though thus general in its meaning, it is here evidently intended to denote a particular tribe of animals inhabiting the land, and not included in the scope of the two words already noticed. In other parts of Scripture this term is used in the sense of a "wild beast." In a few places, like the other terms already noticed, it is used of all kinds of animals, but that above stated is its general meaning, and perfectly accords with the requirements of the passage. The creation of the sixth day therefore includes--1st, the herbivorous mammalia; 2d, a variety of terrestrial reptilia, and other lower forms not included in the work of the previous day; 3d, the carnivorous mammalia. It will be observed that the order in the two verses is different. In verse 24th it is herbivora, "creeping things," and carnivora. In verse 25th it is carnivora, herbivora, and "creeping things." One of these may, as in the account of the fifth day, indicate the order of _time_ in the creation, and the other the order of _rank_ in the animals made, or there may have been two divisions of the work, in the earlier of which herbivorous animals took the lead, and in the later those that are carnivorous. In either case we may infer that the herbivora predominated in the earlier creations of the period. It is almost unnecessary to say this period corresponds with the Tertiary or Cainozoic era of geologists. The coincidences are very marked and striking. As already stated, though in the later secondary period there were great facilities for the preservation of mammals in the strata then being deposited, only a few small species of the humblest order have been found; and the occurrence of the higher orders of this class is to some extent precluded by the fact that the place in nature now occupied by the mammals was then provided for by the vast development of the reptile tribes. At the very beginning of the tertiary period all this was changed; most of the gigantic reptiles had disappeared, and terrestrial mammals of large size and high organization had taken their place. Perhaps no geological change is more striking and remarkable than the sudden disappearance of the reptilian fauna at the close of the mesozoic, and the equally abrupt appearance of numerous species of large mammals, and this not in one region only, but over both the great continents, and not only where a sudden break occurs in the series of formations, but also where, as in Western America, they pass gradually into each other. During the whole tertiary period this predominance of the mammalia continued; and as the mesozoic was the period of giant reptiles, so the tertiary was that of great mammals. It is a singular and perhaps not accidental coincidence that so many of the early tertiary mammals known to us are large herbivora, such as would be included in the Hebrew word _bhemah_; and that in the book of Job the hippopotamus is called _behemoth_, the plural form being apparently used to denote that this animal is the chief of the creatures known under the general term _bhemah_, while geology informs us that the prevailing order of mammals in the older tertiary period was that of the ungulates, and that many of the extinct creatures of this group are very closely allied to the hippopotamus. Behemoth thus figures in the book of Job, not only as at the time a marked illustration of creative power, but to our farther knowledge also as a singular remnant of an extinct gigantic race. It is at least curious that while in the fifth day great reptiles like those of the secondary rocks form the burden of the work, in the sixth we have a term which so directly reminds us of those gigantic pachyderms which figure so largely in the tertiary period. Large carnivora also occur in the tertiary formations, and there are some forms of reptile life, as, for example, the serpents, which first appear in the tertiary. I may refer to any popular text-book of geology in evidence of the exact conformity of this to the progress of mammalian life, as we now know it in detail from the study of the successive tertiary deposits. The following short summary from Dana, though written several years ago, still expresses the main features of the case: "The quadrupeds did not all come forth together. Large and powerful herbivorous species first take possession of the earth, with only a few small carnivora. These pass away. Other herbivora with a larger proportion of carnivora next appear. These also are exterminated; and so with others. Then the carnivora appear in vast numbers and power, and the herbivora also abound. Moreover these races attain a magnitude and number far surpassing all that now exist, as much so indeed, on all the continents, North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, as the old mastodon, twenty feet long and nine feet high, exceeds the modern buffalo. Such, according to geology, was the age of mammals, when the brute species existed in their greatest magnificence, and brutal ferocity had free play; when the dens of bears and hyenas, prowling tigers and lions far larger than any now existing, covered Britain and Europe. Mammoths and mastodons wandered over the plains of North America, huge sloth-like Megatheria passed their sluggish lives on the pampas of South America, and elephantine marsupials strolled about Australia. "As the mammalian age draws to a close, the ancient carnivora and herbivora of that era all pass away, excepting, it is believed, a few that are useful to man. New creations of smaller size peopled the groves; the vegetation received accessions to its foliage, fruit-trees and flowers, and the seas brighter forms of water life. This we know from comparisons with the fossils of the preceding mammalian age. There was at this time no chaotic upturning, but only the opening of creation to its fullest expansion; and so in Genesis no new day is begun, it is still the _sixth day_." The creation of man is prefaced by expressions implying deliberation and care. It is not said, "Let the earth bring forth" man, but let us form or fashion man. This marks the relative importance of the human species, and the heavenly origin of its nobler immaterial part. Man is also said to have been "created," implying that in his constitution there was something new and not included in previous parts of the work, even in its material. Man was created, as the Hebrew literally reads, the shadow and similitude of God--the greatest of the visible manifestations of Deity in the lower world--the reflected image of his Maker, and, under the Supreme Lawgiver, the delegated ruler of the earth. Now for the first time was the earth tenanted by a being capable of comprehending the purposes and plans of Jehovah, of regarding his works with intelligent admiration, and of shadowing forth the excellences of his moral nature. For countless ages the earth had been inhabited by creatures wonderful in their structures and instincts, and mutely testifying, as their buried remains still do, to the Creator's glory; but limited within a narrow range of animal propensities, and having no power of raising a thought or aspiration toward the Being who made them. Now, however, man enters on the scene, and the sons of God, who had shouted for joy when the first land emerged from the bosom of the deep, saw the wondrous spectacle of a spiritual nature analogous to their own, united to a corporeal frame constructed on the same general type with the higher of those irrational creatures whose presence on earth they had so long witnessed. Man was to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the _bhemah_ or herbivorous animals. The carnivorous creatures are not mentioned, and possibly were not included in man's dominion. We shall find an explanation of this farther on. The nature of man's dominion we are left to infer. In his state of innocence it must have been a mild and gentle sway, interfering in no respect wilts the free exercise of the powers of enjoyment bestowed on animals by the Creator, a rule akin to that which a merciful man exercises over a domesticated animal, and which some animals are capable of repaying with a warm and devoted affection. Now, however, man's rule has become a tyranny. "The whole creation groans" because of it. He desolates the face of nature wherever he appears, unsettling the nice balance of natural agencies, and introducing remediless confusion and suffering among the lower creatures, even when in the might of his boasted civilization he professes to renovate and improve the face of nature. He retains enough of the image of his Maker to enable him to a great extent to assert his dominion, and to aspire after a restoration of his original paradise, but he has lost so much that the power which he retains is necessarily abused to selfish ends. Man, like the other creatures, was destined to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. We are also informed in chapter second that he was placed in a "garden," a chosen spot in the alluvial plains of Western Asia, belonging to the later geological formations, and thus prepared by the whole series of prior geological changes, replenished with all things useful to him, and containing nothing hurtful, at least in so far as the animal creation was concerned. These facts, taken in connection, lead to grave questions. How is the happy and innocent state of man consistent with the contemporaneous existence of carnivorous and predaceous animals, which, as both Scripture and geology state, were created in abundance in the sixth day? How, when confined to a limited region, could he increase and multiply and replenish the earth? These questions, which have caused no little perplexity, are easily solved when brought into the light of our modern knowledge of nature. 1. Every large region of the earth is inhabited by a group of animals differing in the proportions of identical species, and in the presence of distinct species, from the groups inhabiting other districts. There is also sufficient reason to conclude that all animals and plants have spread from certain local centres of creation, in which certain groups of species have been produced and allowed to extend themselves, until they met and became intermingled with species extending from other centres. Now the district of Asia, in the vicinity of the Euphrates and Tigris, to which the Scripture assigns the origin of the human race, is the centre to which we can with the greatest probability trace several of the species of animals and plants most useful to man, and it lies near the confines of warmer and colder regions of distribution in the Old World, and also near the boundary of the Asiatic and European regions. At the period under consideration it may have been peopled with a group of animals specially suited to association with the progenitors of mankind. 2. To remove all zoological difficulties from the position of primeval man in his state of innocence, we have but to suppose, in accordance with all the probabilities of the case, that man was created along with a group of creatures adapted to contribute to his happiness, and having no tendency to injure or annoy; and that it is the formation of these creatures--the group of his own centre of creation--that is especially noticed in Genesis ii., 19, _et seq._, where God is represented as forming them out of the ground and exhibiting them to Adam; a passage otherwise superfluous, and indeed tending to confuse the meaning of the document. 3. The difficulty attending the early extension of the human race is at once obviated by the geological doctrine of the extinction of species. We know that in past geological periods large and important groups of species have become extinct, and have been replaced by new groups extending from new centres; and we know that this process has removed, in early geological periods, many creatures that would have been highly injurious to human interests had they remained. Now the group of species created with man being the latest introduced, we may infer, on geological grounds, that it would have extended itself within the spheres of older zoological and botanical districts, and would have replaced their species, which, in the ordinary operation of natural laws, may have been verging toward extinction. Thus not only man, but the Eden in which he dwelt, with all its animals and plants, would have gradually encroached on the surrounding wilderness, until man's happy and peaceful reign had replaced that of the ferocious beasts that preceded him in dominion, and had extended at least over all the temperate region of the earth. 4. The cursing of the ground for man's sake, on his fall from innocence, would thus consist in the permission given to the predaceous animals and the thorns and the briers of other centres of creation to invade his Eden; or, in his own expulsion, to contend with the animals and plants which were intended to have given way and become extinct before him. Thus the fall of man would produce an arrestment in the progress of the earth in that last great revolution which would have converted it into an Eden; and the anomalies of its present state consist, according to Scripture, in a mixture of the conditions of the tertiary with those of the human period. 5. Though there is good ground for believing that man was to have been exempted from the general law of mortality, we can not infer that any such exemption would have been enjoyed by his companion animals; we only know that he himself would have been free from all annoyance and injury and decay from external causes. We may also conclude that, while Eden was sufficient for his habitation, the remainder of the earth would continue, just as in the earlier tertiary periods, under the dominion of the predaceous mammals, reptiles, and birds. 6. The above views enable us on the one hand to avoid the difficulties that attend the admission of predaceous animals into Eden, and on the other the still more formidable difficulties that attend the attempt to exclude them altogether from the Adamic world. They also illustrate the geological fact that many animals, contemporaneous with man, extend far back into the Tertiary period. These are creatures not belonging to the Edenic centre of creation, but introduced in an earlier part of the sixth day, and now permitted to exist along with man in his fallen state. I have stated these supposed conditions of the Adamic creation briefly, and with as little illustration as possible, that they may connectedly strike the mind of the reader. Each of these statements is in harmony with the Scriptural narrative on the one hand, and with geology on the other; and, taken together, they afford an intelligible history of the introduction of man. If a geologist were to state, _à priori_, the conditions proper to the creation of any important species, he could only say--the preparation or selection of some region of the earth for it, and its production along with a group of plants and animals suited to it. These are precisely the conditions implied in the Scriptural account of the creation of Adam.[99] The difficulties of the subject have arisen from supposing, contrary to the narrative itself, that the conditions necessary for Eden must in the first instance have extended over the whole earth, and that the creatures with which man is in his present dispersion brought into contact must necessarily have been his companions there. One would think that many persons derive their idea of the first man in Eden from nursery picture-books; for the Bible gives no countenance to the idea that all the animals in the world were in Eden. On the contrary, it asserts that a selection was made both in the case of animals and plants, and that this Edenic assemblage of creatures constituted man's associates in his state of primeval innocence. The food of animals is specified at the close of the work of this day. The grant to man is every herb bearing seed, and every fruit-tree. That to the lower animals is more extensive--every green herb. This can not mean that every animal in the earth was herbivorous. It may refer to the group of animals associated with man in Eden, and this is most likely the intention of the writer; but if it includes the animals of the whole earth, we may be certain, from the express mention of carnivorous creatures in the work of the fifth and sixth days, that it indicates merely the general fact that the support of the whole animal kingdom is based on vegetation. A most important circumstance in connection with the work of the sixth day is that it witnessed the creation both of man and the mammalia. A fictitious writer would probably have exalted man by assigning to him a separate day, and by placing the whole animal kingdom together in respect to time. He would be all the more likely to do this, if unacquainted, as most ignorant persons as well as literary men are, with the importance and teeming multitudes of the lower tribes of animals, and with the typical identity of the human frame with that of the higher animals. Moses has not done so, we are at liberty to suppose, because the vision of creation had it otherwise; and modern geology has amply vindicated him in this by its disclosure of the intimate connection of the human with the tertiary period; and has shown in this as in other instances that truth and not "accommodation" was the object of the sacred writer. While, as already stated, many existing species extend far back into the tertiary period, showing that the earth has been visited by no universal catastrophe since the first creation of mammals; on the other hand, we can not with certainty trace any existing species back beyond the commencement of the tertiary era. Geology and revelation, therefore, coincide in referring the creation of man to the close of the period in which mammals were introduced and became predominant, and in establishing a marked separation between that period and the preceding one in which the lower animals held undisputed sway. This coincidence, while it strengthens the probability that the creative days were long periods, opposes an almost insurmountable obstacle to every other hypothesis of reconciliation with geological science. At the close of this day the Creator again reviews his work, and pronounces it good. Step by step the world had been evolved from a primeval chaos, through many successive physical changes and long series of organized beings. It had now reached its acme of perfection, and had received its most illustrious tenant, possessing an organism excelling all others in majesty and beauty, and an immaterial soul the shadow of the glorious Creator himself. Well might the angels sing, when the long-protracted work was thus grandly completed: "Thrice happy man, And sons of men, whom God hath thus advanced, Created in his image, there to dwell And worship him, and in reward to rule Over his works in earth, or sea, or air, And multiply a race of worshippers Holy and just; thrice happy, if they know Their happiness and persevere upright." The Hebrew idea of the golden age of Eden is pure and exalted. It consists in the enjoyment of the favor of God, and of all that is beautiful and excellent in his works. God and nature are the whole. Nor is it merely a rude, unintelligent, sensuous enjoyment. Man primeval is not a lazy savage gathering acorns. He is made in the image of the Creator; he is to keep and dress his garden, and it is furnished with every plant good for food and pleasant to the sight. In the midst of our material civilization we need to disabuse ourselves of some prejudices before we can realize the fact that man, without the arts of life or any need of them, is not necessarily a barbarian or a savage. Yet even Adam must have been an agriculturist with strong and willing hands, and must have had some need of agricultural implements such as those with which the least civilized of his descendants have been wont to till the soil. Still, without art or with very little of it, he could enjoy all that is beautiful and grand in nature, and could rise from the observation of nature to communion with God. We need the more to realize this, inasmuch as there seems so strong a tendency to confound material civilization with higher culture, and to hold that man primeval must have been low and debased simply because he may have had no temples and no machinery. We must remember that he had nature, which is higher than fine art, and that when in harmony with his surroundings he may have had no need either of exhausting labor or of mechanical contrivances. Farther, in the contemplation of nature and in seeking after God, he had higher teachers than our boasted civilization can claim. Alas for fallen man, with his poor civilization gathered little by little from the dust of earth, and his paltry art that halts immeasurably behind nature. How little is he able even to appreciate the high estate of his great ancestor. The world of fallen men has worshipped art too much, reverenced and studied God and nature too little. The savage displays the lowest taste when he admires the rude figures which he paints on his face or his garments more than the glorious painting that adorns nature; yet even he acknowledges the pre-eminent excellence of nature by imitating her forms and colors, and by adapting her painted plumes and flowers to his own use. There is a wide interval, including many gradations, between this low position and that of the cultivated amateur or artist. The art of the latter makes a nearer approach to the truly beautiful, inasmuch as it more accurately represents the geometric and organic forms and the coloring of nature; and inasmuch as it devises ideal combinations not found in the actual world; which ideal combinations, however, are beautiful or monstrous just as they realize or violate the harmonies of nature. It is only the highest culture that brings man back to his primitive refinement. Art takes her true place when she sits at the feet of nature, and brings her students to drink in its beauties, that they may endeavor, however imperfectly, to reproduce them. On the other hand, the student of nature must not content himself with "writing Latin names on white paper," wherewith to label nature's productions, but must rise to the contemplation of the order and beauty of the Cosmos as a revelation of Divinity. Both will thus rise to that highest taste which will enable them to appreciate not only the elegance of individual forms, but their structure, their harmonies, their grouping and their relations, their special adaptation, and their places as parts of a great system. Thus art will attain that highest point in which it displays original genius, without violating natural truth and unity, and nature will be regarded as the highest art. Much is said and done in our time with reference to the cultivation of popular taste for fine art as a means of civilization; and this, so far as it goes, is well; but the only sure path to the highest taste-education is the cultivation of the study of nature. This is also an easier branch of education, provided the instructors have sufficient knowledge. Good works of art are rare and costly; but good works of nature are everywhere around us, waiting to be examined. Such education, popularly diffused, would react on the efforts of art. It would enable a widely extended public to appreciate real excellence, and would cause works of art to be valued just in proportion to the extent to which they realize or deviate from natural truth and unity. I do not profess to speak authoritatively on such subjects, but I confess that the strong impression on my mind is that neither the revered antique models, nor the practice and principles of the generality of modern art reformers, would endure such criticism; and that if we could combine popular enthusiasm for art with scientific appreciation of nature, a new and better art might arise from the union. I may appear to dwell too long upon this topic; but my excuse must be that it leads to a true estimate both of natural history and of the sacred Scriptures. The study of nature guides to those large views of the unity and order of creation which alone are worthy of a being of the rank of man, and which lead him to adequate conceptions of the Creator; but the truly wise recognize three grades of beauty. First, that of art, which, in its higher efforts, can raise ordinary minds far above themselves. Secondly, that of nature, which, in its most common objects, must transcend the former, since its artist is that God of whose infinite mind the genius of the artist is only a faint reflection. Thirdly, that pre-eminent beauty of moral goodness revealed only in the spiritual nature of the Supreme. The first is one of the natural resources of fallen man in his search for happiness. The second was man's joy in his primeval innocence. The third is the inheritance of man redeemed. It is folly to place these on the same level. It is greater folly to worship either or both of the first without regard to the last. It is true wisdom to aspire to the last, and to regard nature as the handmaid of piety, art as but the handmaid of nature. Nature to the unobservant is merely a mass of things more or less beautiful or interesting, but without any definite order or significance. An observer soon arrives at the conclusion that it is a series of circling changes, ever returning to the same points, ever renewing their courses, under the action of invariable laws. But if he rests here, he falls infinitely short of the idea of the Cosmos, and stands on the brink of the profound error of eternal succession. A little further progress conducts him to the inviting field of special adaptation and mutual relation of things. He finds that nothing is without its use; that every structure is most nicely adjusted to special ends; that the supposed ceaseless circling of nature is merely the continuous action of great powers, by which an infinity of utilities are worked out--the great fly-wheel which, in its unceasing and at first sight apparently aimless round, is giving motion to thousands of reels and spindles and shuttles, that are spinning and weaving, in all its varied patterns, the great web of life. But the observer, as he looks on this web, is surprised to find that it has in its whole extent a wondrous pattern. He rises to the contemplation of type in nature, a great truth to which science has only lately opened its eyes. He begins dimly to perceive that the Creator has from the beginning had a plan before his mind, that this plan embraced various types or patterns of existence; that on these patterns he has been working out the whole system of nature, adapting each to all the variety of uses by an infinity of minor modifications. That, in short, whether he study the eye of a gnat or the structure of a mountain chain, he sees not only objects of beauty and utility, but parts of far-reaching plans of infinite wisdom, by which all objects, however separated in time or space, are linked together. How much of positive pleasure does that man lose who passes through life absorbed with its wants and its artificialities, and regarding with a "brute, unconscious gaze" the grand revelation of a higher intelligence in the outer world. It is only in an approximation through our Divine Redeemer to the moral likeness of God that we can be truly happy; but of the subsidiary pleasures which we are here permitted to enjoy, the contemplation of nature is one of the best and purest. It was the pleasure, the show, the spectacle prepared for man in Eden, and how much true philosophy and taste shine in the simple words that in paradise God planted trees "pleasant to the sight," as well as "good for food." Other things being equal, the nearer we can return to this primitive taste, the greater will be our sensuous enjoyment, the better the influence of our pleasures on our moral nature, because they will then depend on the cultivation of tastes at once natural and harmless, and will not lead us to communion with and reverence for merely human genius, but will conduct us into the presence of the infinite perfection of the Creator. The Bible knows but one species of man. It is not said that men were created after their species, as we read of the groups of animals. Man was made, "male and female;" and in the fuller details afterwards given in the second chapter--where the writer, having finished his general narrative, commences his special history of man--but one primitive pair is introduced to our notice. We scarcely need the detailed tables of affiliation afterward given, or the declaration of the apostle who preached to the supposed autochthones of Athens, that "God has made of one blood all nations," to assure us of the Scriptural unity of man. If, therefore, there were any good reason to believe that man is not of one but several origins, we must admit Moses to have been very imperfectly informed. Nor, on the other hand, does the Bible any more than geology allow us to assign a very high antiquity to the origin of man relatively to that of the earth on which he dwells. The genealogical tables of the Bible may admit of some limits of difference of opinion as to the age of the human world or æon, and also of that of the deluge, from which man took his second point of departure; but they do not allow us to put the origin of man farther back than that of the present or modern condition of our continents and the present races of animals. They therefore limit us to the modern or quaternary period of geology. The question of man's antiquity, so much agitated now, demands, however, a separate and careful consideration; but we must first devote a few pages to the simple statements of the Bible respecting the Sabbath of creation and its relation to human history. CHAPTER XII. THE REST OF THE CREATOR. "And the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because that in it God rested from all his work which he had created to make."--Genesis ii., 1-3. The end of the sixth day closed the work of creation properly so called, as well as that of forming and arranging the things created. The beginning of the seventh introduced a period which, according to the views already stated, was to be occupied by the continued increase and diffusion of man and the creatures under his dominion, and by the gradual disappearance of tribes of creatures unconnected with his well-being. Science in this well accords with Scripture. No proof exists of the production of a new species since the creation of man; and all geological and archæological evidence points to him and a few of the higher mammals as the newest of the creatures. There is, on the other hand, good evidence that several species have become extinct since his creation. Those who believe in the continuous evolution of animals and men, it is true, can see no actual termination of the process with the introduction of man; but even they see that the appearance of a rational and moral being at least changes the nature and order of the development. Nor can they doubt that man is the last born of nature, and that the whole animal creation is crowned by him as its capital or topmost pinnacle. The later speculators on this subject have never reached any truth beyond that long ago stated by the lamented Edward Forbes--a most careful observer and accurate reasoner on the more recent changes of the earth's surface. He infers, from the distribution of species from their centres of creation, that man is the latest product of creative power; or, in other words, that none of those species or groups of species which he had been able to trace to their centres, or the spots at which they probably originated, appear to be of later or as late origin as man. "This consideration," he says, "induces me to believe that the last province in time was completed by the coming of man, and to maintain an hypothesis that man stands unique in space and time, himself equal to the sum of any pre-existing centre of creation or of all--an hypothesis consistent with man's moral and social position in the world." The seventh day, then, was to have been that in which all the happiness, beauty, and perfection of the others were to have been concentrated. But an element of instability was present in the being who occupied the summit of the animal scale. Not regulated by blind and unerring instincts, but a free agent, with a high intellectual and moral nature, and liable to be acted on by temptation from without; under such influence he lost his moral balance in stretching out his hand to grasp the peculiar powers of Deity, and fell beyond the hope of self-redemption--perpetuating, by one of those laws which regulate the transmission of mixed corporeal and spiritual natures, his degradation to every generation of his species. And so God's great work was marred, and all his plans seemed to be foiled, when they had just reached their completion. Thus far science might carry us unaided; for there is not a true naturalist, however skeptical as to revealed religion, who does not feel in his inmost heart the disjointed state of the present relations of man to nature; the natural wreck that results from his artificial modes of life, the long trains of violations of the symmetry of nature that follow in the wake of his most boasted achievements. But here natural science stops; and just as we have found that, in tracing back the world's history, the Bible carries us much farther than geology, so science, having led us to suspect the fallen state of man, leaves us henceforth to the teaching of revelation. And how glorious that teaching! God did not find himself baffled--his resources are infinite--he had foreseen and prepared for all this apparent evil; and out of the moral wreck he proceeds to work out the grand process of _redemption_, which is the especial object of the seventh day, and which will result in the production of a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. In the seventh, as in the former days, the evening precedes the morning. For four thousand years the world groped in its darkness--a darkness tenanted by moral monsters as powerful and destructive as the old pre-Adamite reptiles. The Sun of Righteousness at length arose, and the darkness began to pass away; but eighteen centuries have elapsed, and we still see but the gray dawn of morning, which we yet firmly believe will brighten into a glorious day that shall know no succeeding night.[100] The seventh day is the modern or human era in geology; and, though it can not yet boast of any physical changes so great as those of past periods, it is still of much interest, as affording the facts on which we must depend for explanations of past changes; and as immediately connected in time with those later tertiary periods which afford so many curious problems to the geological student. The actual connection of the human with preceding periods is still involved in some obscurity; and, as we shall see, there has recently been a strong tendency to throw back the origin of man into prehistoric ages of enormous length, on grounds which are, however, much less certain than is commonly imagined. This question we have to examine; but before entering upon it may shortly sketch the actual import of the statements of the Hebrew Scriptures respecting what may be called the prehistoric duration of the human species. This is the more necessary, as the most crude notions seem very widely to prevail on the subject. I shall, therefore, in this place notice some general facts deducible from the Bible, and which may be useful in appreciating the true relation of the human era to those which preceded it. It will be understood that I shall endeavor merely to present a picture of what the Bible actually teaches, and which any one can verify by reading the book of Genesis. 1. The local centre of creation of the human species, and probably of a group of creatures coeval with it, was Eden; a country of which the Scriptures give a somewhat minute geographical description. It was evidently a district of Western Asia; and, from its possession of several important rivers, rather a region or large territory than a limited spot, such as many, who have discussed the question of the site of Eden, seem to suppose. In this view it is a matter of no moment to fix its site more nearly than the indication of the Bible that it included the sources and probably large portions of the valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and perhaps the Oxus and Jaxartes. Into the minor difficulties respecting the site of Eden it would be unprofitable to enter, and it will matter little if we accept that view, which, however, I think less probable, that it was placed in the lower part of the valley of the Euphrates. I may merely mention one particular of the Biblical description, because it throws light on the great antiquity of this geographical delineation, and has been strangely misconceived by expositors--the relation of those rivers to Cush or Ethiopia and Havilah, a tribal name derived from that of a grandson of Cush. On consulting the tenth chapter of Genesis, it will be found that the Cushites under Nimrod, very soon after the deluge, are stated to have pushed their migrations and conquests along the Tigris to the northward, and established there the first empire. It is probably this primitive Cushite empire, called Ethiopia in our translation, which in the epoch of the description of Eden occupied the Euphratean valley, and being bounded on one side by the river called Gihon, was thus believed to extend over the old site of Eden. Thus the Cush or Ethiopia of the description has no direct connection with the African Ethiopia, and speculations based on such a supposed connection are groundless. On the other hand this feature furnishes an interesting coincidence with other parts of Genesis, and throws light on many obscure points in the early history of man; and since this Cushite empire had perished even before the time of Moses, it indicates a still more ancient tradition respecting the primeval abode of our species. 2. Before the deluge this region must have been the seat of a dense population, which, according to the Biblical account, must have made considerable advances in the arts, and at the same time sunk very low in moral debasement.[101] Whether any remains of the central portions of this ancient population or its works exist will probably not be determined with absolute certainty till we have accurate geological investigations of the whole country in the neighborhood of the Caspian Sea and along the great rivers of Western Asia, though there is nothing unreasonable in the belief that some of the old prehistoric men whose remains are discovered in caves and river gravels in Europe may belong to the antediluvian race. Should such remains be found, we might infer, from the extreme longevity and other characteristics assigned to the antediluvians, that their skeletons would present peculiarities entitling them to be considered a well-marked variety of the human species, and this not of a low type of physical organization. We may also infer that the family of man very early divided into two races--one retaining in greater purity the moral endowments of the species, the other excelling in the mechanical and fine arts; and that there were rude and savage outlying communities of men then as at present. If the so-called palæolithic men of Europe are antediluvian, they were probably of such outlying tribes, and possibly of the mixed race which sprung up in the later antediluvian age, and who are described as mighty men physically, and men of violence. It would be quite natural that this intermixture of the Sethite and Cainite races should produce a race excelling both in energy and physical endowments--the "giants" that were in those days.[102] If any remains of the two central nations of the antediluvian period are ever discovered, we may confidently anticipate that the distinctive characteristics of these races may be detected in their osseous structures as well as in their works of art. Farther, it is to be inferred from notices in the fourth chapter of Genesis, that before the deluge there was both a nomadic and a settled population, and that the principal seat of the Cainite, or more debased yet energetic branch of the human family, was to the eastward of the site of Eden. No intimations are given by which the works of art of antediluvian times could be distinguished from those of later periods; but that curious summary of the treasures of antediluvian man contained in the notice that the land of Havilah produced gold and agate and pearl (Gen. ii., 12) would lead us to believe that the early antediluvian age was on the whole an age of stone, in which flint for weapons, and gold and shell wampum for ornaments, were the leading kinds of wealth. On the other hand, the notices of antediluvian metallurgy, and the building and construction of the ark, would lead us to infer that the later antediluvians had attained to much perfection in some constructive arts--a conclusion which harmonizes with the otherwise inexplicable perfection of such art soon after the deluge, as evidenced not only by the story of Babel, but also by the early works of the Assyrians and Egyptians. 3. When the antediluvian population had fully proved itself unfit to enter into the divine scheme of moral renovation, it was swept away by a fearful physical catastrophe. The deluge might, in all its relations, furnish material for an entire treatise. I may remark here, as its most important geological peculiarity, that it was evidently a _local_ convulsion. The object, that of destroying the human race and the animal population of its peculiar centre of creation, the preservation of specimens of these creatures in the ark, and the physical requirements of the case, necessitate this conclusion, which is now accepted by the best Biblical expositors,[103] and which inflicts no violence on the terms of the record. Viewed in this light, the phenomena recorded in the Bible, in connection with geological probabilities, lead us to infer that the physical agencies evoked by the divine power to destroy this ungodly race were a subsidence of the region they inhabited, so as to admit the oceanic waters, and extensive atmospherical disturbances connected with that subsidence, and perhaps with the elevation of neighboring regions. In this case it is possible that the Caspian Sea, which is now more than eighty feet below the level of the ocean,[104] and which was probably much more extensive then than at present, received much of the drainage of the flood, and that the mud and sand deposits of this sea and the adjoining desert plains, once manifestly a part of its bottom, conceal any remains that exist of the antediluvian population. In connection with this, it may be remarked that, in the book of Job, Eliphaz speaks as if the locality of those wicked nations which existed before the deluge was known and accessible in his time: "Hast thou marked the ancient way Which wicked men have trodden, Who were seized [by the waters] in a moment, And whose foundations a flood swept away?" --Job xxii., 15. On comparing this statement with the answer of Job in the 26th chapter, verse 5th, it would seem that the ungodly antediluvians were supposed to be still under the waters; a belief quite intelligible if the Caspian, which, on the latest and most probable views of the locality of the events of this book, was not very remote from the residence of Job,[105] was supposed to mark the position of the pre-Noachic population, as the Dead Sea afterward did that of the cities of the plain. Some of the dates assigned to the book of Job would, however, render it possible that this last catastrophe is that to which _he_ refers: "The _Rephaim_ tremble from beneath The waters and their inhabitants. Sheol is naked before him, And destruction hath no covering." The word _Rephaim_ here has been variously rendered "shades of the dead" and "giants." It is properly the family or national name of certain tribes of gigantic Hamite men (the Anakim, Emim, etc.) inhabiting Western Asia at a very remote period; and it must here refer either to them or to the still earlier antediluvian giants.[106] It is also an important point to be noticed here that the narrative of the deluge in Genesis is given as the testimony or record of an eye-witness, and is to be so understood; and that the terms of the record imply, not as usually held that all sorts of animals were taken into Noah's ark, but only a selection, the character of which is clearly indicated by a comparison of the five lists of animals given in the narrative. Bearing this in mind, and noticing that the writer tells of his own experience as to the rise of the water, the drifting of the ark, the disappearance of all visible shore, and the sounding fifteen cubits where a hill had before been, all the difficulties of the narrative of the deluge will at once disappear. These difficulties have in fact arisen from regarding the story as the composition of a historian, not as what it manifestly is, the log or journal of a contemporary, introduced with probably little change by the compiler of the book. After the deluge, we find the human race settled in the plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, attracted thither by the fertility of their alluvial soils. There we find them engaging in a great political scheme, no doubt founded on recollections of the old antediluvian nationalities, and on a dread of the evils which able and aspiring men would anticipate from that wide dispersion of the human race that appears to have been intended by the Creator in the new circumstances of the earth. They commenced accordingly the erection of a city or tower at Babel, in the plain of Shinar, to form a common bond of union, a great public work that should be a rallying-point for the race, and around which its patriotism might concentrate itself. The attempt was counteracted by an interposition of divine Providence; and thenceforth the diffusion of the human race proceeded unchecked, carrying with it everywhere the memory of the celebrated tower, which perpetuated itself not only in the mounds of Assyria and Babylon and the pyramids of Egypt, but in the teocallis and temple mounds of the New World. The Babel enterprise is in fact the first recorded development of that mound-building instinct which the earlier races everywhere evince, and which has been a distinguishing characteristic more especially of the Cushite or Turanian race, and has apparently made them the teachers of constructive arts to all other peoples. Perhaps a dread of the total decay and loss of the surviving antediluvian arts in construction and other matters may have been one impelling motive to the building of Babel. Perhaps it was connected with the communistic ideas of the Turanian race, and their conflict with the patriarchal habits of the Semites. Out of the enterprise at Babel, however, arose a new type of evil, which, in the forms of military despotism, the spirit of conquest, hero-worship, and the alliance of these influences with literature and the arts, has been handed down through every succeeding age to our own time. The name of Nimrod, the son of Cush, has been preserved to us in the Bible, and also apparently in the tablets and inscriptions of Assyria, as the founder of the first despotism. This bold and ambitious man, subsequently deified under different names, established a Hamite or Turanian empire, which appears to have extended its sway over the tribes occupying Southwestern Asia and Northeastern Africa, everywhere supporting its power by force of arms, and introducing a debasing polytheistic hero-worship, and certain forms of art probably derived from antediluvian times. The centre of this Cushite empire, however, gave way to the rising power of Assyria or the Ashurite branch of the sons of Shem, at a period antecedent to the dawn of profane history, except in its mythical form; and when the light of secular history first breaks upon us, we find Egypt standing forth as the only stable representative of the arts, the systems, and the superstitions of the old Cushite empire, of which it had been the southern branch; while other remnants of the Hamite races, included in the empire of Nimrod, were scattered over Western Asia, and, migrating into Europe, with or after the ruder but less demoralized sons of Japheth, carried with them their characteristic civilization and mythology, to take root in new forms in Greece and Italy.[107] Meanwhile the Assyrian and Persian (Elamite) races were growing in Middle Asia, and probably driving the more eastern remnants of the Nimrodic empire into India, borrowing at the same time their superstitions and their claims to universal dominion. These views, which I believe to correspond with the few notices in the Bible and in ancient history, and to be daily receiving new confirmations from the investigations of the ancient Assyrian monuments, enable us to understand many mysterious problems in the early history of man. They give us reason to suspect that the _principle_ of the first empire was an imitation of the antediluvian world, and that its arts and customs were mainly derived from that source. They show how it happens that Egypt, a country so far removed from the starting-point of man after the deluge, should appear to be the cradle of the arts, and they account for the Hamite and perhaps antediluvian elements, mixed with primeval Biblical ideas, as the cherubim, etc., in the old heathenism of India, Assyria, and Southern Europe, and which they share with Egypt, having derived them from the same source. They also show how it is that in the most remote antiquity we find two well-developed and opposite religious systems; the pure theism of Noah, and those who retained his faith, and the idolatry of those tribes which regarded with adoring veneration the objects and stages of the creative work, the grander powers and objects of nature, the mighty Cainites of the world before the flood, and the postdiluvian leaders who followed them in their violence, their cultivation of the arts, and their rebellion against God. These heroes were identified with imaginative conceptions of the heavenly bodies, animals, and other natural objects, associated with the fortunes of cities and nations, with particular territories, and with war and the useful arts, transmitted under different names to one country after another, and localized in each; and it is only in comparatively modern times that we have been able to recognize the full certainty of the view held long since by many ingenious writers, that among the greater gods of Egypt and Assyria, and of consequence among those also of Greece and Rome, were Nimrod, Ham, Ashur, Noah, Mizraim, and other worthies and tyrants of the old world; and to suspect that Tubalcain and Naamah, and other antediluvian names, were similarly honored, though subsequently overshadowed by more recent divinities. The later Assyrian readings of Rawlinson, Hincks, and the lamented George Smith, and the more recent works on Egyptian antiquities, are full of pregnant hints on these subjects. It would, however, lead us too far from our immediate subject to enter more fully into these questions. I have referred to them merely to point out connecting-links between the secular and sacred history of the earlier part of the human period, as a useful sequel to our comparison of the latter with the conclusions of science, and as furnishing hints which may guide the geologist in connecting the human with the tertiary period, and in distinguishing between the antediluvian and postdiluvian portions of the former. It may be said, however, that all this Biblical history, however it may accord with the little that remains to us of the written annals of early Oriental nations, is entirely at variance with those modern archæological discussions which point to an immense antiquity of the human race, and to a primitive barbarism out of which all human culture was little by little evolved; and which results of archæological investigation, while contradictory to the Hebrew Scriptures, are entirely in accord with the evolutionist philosophy. The prominence now given to such views as these renders it necessary that we should denote a special chapter to their discussion. CHAPTER XIII. UNITY AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN. "These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood."--Genesis x., 32. The theologians and evangelical Christians of our time, and with them the credibility of the Holy Scriptures, are supposed by many to have been impaled on a zoological and archæological dilemma, in a manner which renders nugatory all attempts to reconcile the Mosaic cosmogony with science. The Bible, as we have seen, knows but one Adam, and that Adam not a myth or an ethnic name, but a veritable man; but some naturalists and ethnologists think that they have found decisive evidence that man is not of one but of several origins. The religious tendency of this doctrine no Christian can fail to perceive. In whatever way put, or under whatever disguise, it renders the Bible history worthless, reduces us to that isolation of race from race cultivated in ancient times by the various local idolatries, and destroys the brotherhood of man and the universality of that Christian atonement which proclaims that "as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive." Fortunately, however, the greater weight of biological and archæological evidence is here on the side of the Bible, and philology comes in with strong corroborative proof. But just as the orthodox theologian is beginning to congratulate himself on the aid he has thus received, some of his new friends gravely tell him that, in order to maintain their view, it is necessary to believe that man has resided on earth for countless ages, and that it is quite a mistake to suppose that his starting-point is so recent as the Mosaic deluge. Nay, some very rampant theorists of some ethnological schools try to pierce Moses and his abettors with both horns of the dilemma at once, maintaining that men may be of different species, and yet may have existed for an enormous length of time as well. The recent prevalence of theories of evolution has, however, thrown quite into the background the discussions formerly active respecting the unity of man, but has, along with geological and archæological discovery, given increased prominence to those relating to the date of the origin of our species and the manner of its introduction. The Bible gives us a definite epoch, that of the deluge, about 2000 to 3000 B.C., for all existing races of men; but this, according to it, was only the second starting-point of humanity, and though no family but that of Noah survived the terrible catastrophe, it would be a great error to suppose that nothing antediluvian appears in the subsequent history of man. Before the deluge there were arts and an old civilization, extending over at least two thousand years, and after the deluge men carried with them these heirlooms of the old world to commence with them new nations. This has been tacitly ignored by many of the writers who underrate the value of the Hebrew history. It may be as well for this reason to place, in a series of propositions, the principal points in Genesis which relate to the questions now before us. 1. Adam and Isha, the woman, afterward called Eve (Life-giver), in consequence of the promise of a Redeemer, commenced a life of husbandry on their expulsion from Eden, which, on the ordinary views of the Bible chronology, may be supposed to have occurred from 4000 to 5000 years before the Christian era; and during the lifetime of the primal pair, the sheep, at least, was domesticated. The Bible, of course, knows nothing of the imaginary continent of Lemuria, in which, according to some hypotheses, men are supposed to have had their birth from apes. A few generations after, in the time of Lamech, cattle were domesticated; and the metals copper and iron were applied to use--the latter probably meteoric iron; and hence, it may be, the Hindoo and Hellenic myths of Twachtrei and Hephæstos in connection with the thunderbolt. We learn, however, incidentally, as already mentioned, in the description of Eden in Genesis, chapter 2d, that there was a previous stone age, in which "flint, pearls or shell beads, and stream-gold" were the chief treasures of man, for this is implied in the "gold, bedolach, and onyx" of the land of Havilah. It is certain also, from the discoveries made in Assyria, on the site of Troy, and elsewhere, that the use of stone implements continued in Western Asia long after the deluge. In the time of Noah the distinction of clean and unclean beasts, and the taking of seven pairs of certain beasts and birds into the ark, imply that certain mammals and birds were domesticated.[108] 2. Before the flood, as already remarked, there was a division of man into two nationalities or races; and there was a citizen, an agricultural, a pastoral, and a nomadic population. Farther, the remarkable progress in the arts implied in the building of such structures as the Tower of Babel, and other temple and palace mounds in Assyria, and of the pyramids of Egypt, within a few generations after the deluge, proves that a very advanced material civilization and great skill in constructive arts had been reached in antediluvian times.[109] 3. After the deluge, the arts of the antediluvians and their citizen life were almost immediately revived in the plain of Shinar; but the plans of the Babel leaders, like those of many others who have attempted to force distinct tribes into one nationality, failed. The guilt attributed to them probably relates to the attempt to break up the patriarchal and tribal organization, which in these early times was the outward form of true religion, in favor of some sort of national organization, not compatible with the extension of man immediately over the world, and tending to consolidation into dense communities. It may be a question here whether the tribal communism which has prevailed among the American Indians and other rude races was the primitive form of society which the Babel-builders essayed to change, or whether the Semitic patriarchal system had at first prevailed, and the Babel difficulties were connected with a conflict between this and communism or despotism, both new Turanian or Aryan introductions. In any case, Babel, and Babylon its successor, remain in the subsequent Biblical literature as types of the God-defying and antichristian systems that have succeeded each other from the time of Nimrod to this day. 4. The human race was scattered over the earth in family groups or tribes, each headed by a leading patriarch, who gave it its name. First, the three sons of Noah formed three main stems, and from these diverged several family branches. The ethnological chart in the 10th chapter of Genesis gives the principal branches under patriarchal and ethnic names; but these, of course, continued to subdivide beyond the space and time referred to by the sacred writer. It is simply absurd to object, as some writers have done, to the universality of the statements in Genesis, that they do not mention in detail the whole earth. They refer to a few generations only, and beyond this restrict themselves to the one branch of the human family to which the Bible principally relates. We should be thankful for so much of the leading lines of ethnological divergence, without complaining that it is not followed out into its minute ramifications and into all history. 5. The tripartite division in Genesis x. indicates a somewhat strict geographical separation of the three main trunks. The regions marked out for Japheth include Europe and Northwestern Asia. The name Japheth, as well as the statements in the table, indicate a versatile, nomadic, and colonizing disposition as characteristic of these tribes.[110] The Median population, the same with a portion of that now often called Aryan,[111] was the only branch remaining near the original seats of the species, and in a settled condition. The outlying portions of the posterity of Japheth, on account of their wide dispersion, must at a very early period have fallen into comparative barbarism, such as we find in historic periods all over Western and Northern Europe and Northern Asia. Owing to their habitat, the Japhetites of the Bible include none of the black races, unless certain Indian and Australian nations are outlying portions of this family. The Shemite nations showed little tendency to migrate, being grouped about the Euphrates and Tigris valleys and neighboring regions. For this reason, with the exception of certain Arab tribes, they present no instances of barbarism, and generally retained a high cerebral organization, and respectable though stationary civilization, and they possess the oldest alphabet and literature. The posterity of Ham differs remarkably from the others. It spread itself over Southern, Central, and Eastern Asia, Southern Europe, and Northern Africa, and constitutes the stock alike of the Turanian and African races, as well as probably of the American tribes. It has all along displayed a great capacity for certain forms of art and semi-civilization, but has rarely risen to the level of the Shemite and Japhetite races. It established the earliest military and monarchical institutions, and presents at the dawn of history--in Assyria, in Egypt, and India--settled and arbitrary forms in politics and religion, of a character so much resembling that of an old and corrupt civilization that we can scarcely avoid supposing that Ham and his family had preserved more than any of the other Noachian races the arts and institutions of the old world before the flood. It certainly presents itself in early postdiluvian times as the first representative and teacher of art and material civilization. The Hamite race is remarkable for the early development of pantheism and hero-worship, and for the artificial character of its culture. It presents us with the darkest colors, and in the vast solitudes of Africa and Central Asia its outlying tribes must have fallen into comparative barbarism a few centuries after the deluge. It is farther to be observed that, according to the Bible, the Canaanites and other Hamite nations spoke languages not essentially different from those of the Shemites, while the Japhetite nations were to them barbarians--"a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand." There was, too, at the date of the dispersion of Babel, already a distinction of tongues within each of the great races of men. 6. All the divisions of the family of Noah had from the first the domesticated animals and the principal arts of life, and enjoyed these in a national capacity so soon as sufficiently numerous. The more scattered tribes, wandering into fresh regions, and adopting the life of hunters, lost the characteristics of civilization, and diverged widely from the primitive languages. We should thus have, according to the Hebrew ethnology, a central area presenting the principal stems of all the three races in a permanently civilized state. All around this area should lie aberrant and often barbarous tribes, differing most widely from the original type in the more distant regions, and in those least favorable to human health and subsistence. In these outlying regions, secondary centres of civilization might grow up, differing from that of the primitive centre, except in so far as the common principles of human nature and intercommunication might prevent this. All these conclusions, fairly deducible at once from the Mosaic ethnology and the theory of dispersion from a centre, are perfectly in accordance with observed facts, though in absolute contradiction to prevalent ethnological conclusions, based on these facts in connection with theories of development. A multitude of Bible notices might easily be quoted illustrative of these points, and also of the consistency of the Mosaic narrative with itself. One of them may suffice here. Abraham, who is said by the Jews to have been contemporary with Shem, as Menes by the Egyptians with Ham, at least lived sufficiently near to the time of the rise of the earliest nations to be taken as an illustration of this primitive condition of society. He was not a patriarch of the first or second rank, like Ham or Mizraim or Canaan, but a subordinate family leader several removes from the survivors of the deluge. Yet his tribe increases in comparatively few years to a considerable number. He is treated as an equal by the monarchs of Egypt and Philistia. He defeats, with a band of three or four hundred retainers, a confederacy of four Euphratean kings representing the embryo state of the Persian and Assyrian empires, and already relatively so strong that they have overrun much of Western Asia. All this bespeaks in a most consistent manner the rapid rise of many small nationalities, scattered over the better parts of wide regions, and still in a feeble condition, though inheriting from their ancestors an old civilization, and laying the foundations of powerful states. If we attach any historical value whatever to the narrative, it obviously implies that at a date of about two thousand years before Christ the regions afterward occupied by the oldest historic empires were still thinly peopled, and their dominant races little more than feeble tribes. This farther corresponds with the authentic history of all the ancient nations, however these may have been extended by previous mythical periods. About or shortly before the time of Abraham, Menes was draining for the first time the swamps of Egypt, Ninus or Nimrod was founding the Assyrian empire, the Phoenicians were founding Sidon, agriculture was being introduced into China, the Vedas were being written in India, the Persian monarchy was being founded; and, in short, all the historical nations of the East were originating, and this apparently by springing into being with an already formed civilization. Such being the Hebrew account of the date and early history of man, it may be proper here to compare it with such deductions from archæological and geological investigation as may seem to conflict with it, and at the same time to make some comparisons with the Turanian and Aryan traditions and speculations as to human origins. The special lines of investigation important here are: 1. Early historical records other than the Bible; 2. The diversity of human languages; 3. The geological evidence afforded by remains of prehistoric men found in caverns and other repositories. The last of these is at present that which has attained the greatest development. 1. _Early Human History._--Had the human race everywhere preserved historical records, we should have had some certain evidence as to the places and times of origination of its tribes and peoples. Unfortunately this has not been the case. All savage and barbarous races, and many of those now civilized, have lost all records of their early history. Most of the so-called ancient nations are comparatively modern, and their history after a very short course loses itself in uncertain tradition and mythical fancies. The only really ancient nations that have given us in detail their own written history are the Hebrews, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Hindoos, and the Chinese. The last people, though professedly very ancient, trace their history from a period of barbarism--a view confirmed by their physical characters and the nature of their civilization; and on this account, if no other, their history can not be considered as of much archæological value. According to their own records, their earliest authentic history goes back to about 2800 B.C., and was preceded by a prehistoric period of uncertain duration. The astronomical deductions of Schlegel, which would extend their history to 17,000 years, are evidently altogether unreliable.[112] The early Hindoo history is palpably fabulous or distorted, and has been variously modified and changed in comparatively modern times. There is one great and very ancient people--the Egyptian--evidently civilized from the beginning of all history, that have succeeded in transmitting to us, though only in fragments, their primeval history; and of late years constant additions have been made from inscribed tablets and monuments to our knowledge of the ancient history of the Assyrians and Chaldeans. The Egyptian history has been gathered first from sketches by Greek travellers, and from fragments of the chronicles of Manetho, one of the later Egyptian priests; and, secondly, from the inscriptions deciphered on Egyptian monuments and papyri. It is still in a very fragmentary and uncertain state, but has been used with considerable effect to prove both the diversity of races of men and the pre-Noachic antiquity of the species. The Egyptian, in features and physical conformation, tended to the European form, just as the modern Fellahs and Berbers do; but he had a dark complexion, a somewhat elongated head and flattened lips, and certain negroid peculiarities in his limbs. His language combined many of the peculiarities of the Semitic, Aryan, and African tongues, indicating thereby great antiquity or else great intermixture, but not, as some ethnographers demand, both; most probably the former--the Egyptians being really the oldest civilized people that we certainly know, and therefore, if languages have one origin, likely to be near its root-stock. The actual history of Egypt begins from Menes, the first human king, a monarch, or rather tribal chief, who took up his abode in the flats and fens of Lower Egypt, certainly not very long after the deluge. His name has been translated "one who walks with Khem," or Ham; one, therefore, who was contemporary with this great patriarch and god of the Egyptians, which will place his time within a few centuries of the Biblical flood. The date of Menes has been variously placed. In correction of the ordinary Hebrew chronology, we have the following attempts: Josephus places his reign 2350 B.C. Dr. Hales' calculation 2412 Manetho and the Monuments, as corrected by Syncellus {2712 and calculated by various archæologists {to {2782 Herodotus, astronomical reduction by Rennell 2890 Estimate by Gliddon in "Ancient Egypt" 2750 Bunsen, "Egypt's Place," etc. 4000 The truth may be somewhere near the mean of the shorter chronologies given in the list.[113] That of Bunsen is liable to very grave objections; more especially as he adds to it other views, altogether unsupported by historical evidence, which would carry back the deluge to 10,000 years B.C. It rests wholly on the chronology of Manetho, who lived 300 years B.C.; and who, even if the Egyptians then possessed authentic documents extending 3700 years before his time, may have erred in his rendering of them; and is farther liable to grave suspicions of having merely grouped the names on the monuments of his country arbitrarily in Sothic cycles. Farther, they rest on an interpretation of Manetho, which supposes his early dynasties to have been successive, while good reasons have been found to prove that many of them consist of contemporaneous petty sovereigns of parts of Egypt. The early parts of Manetho's lists are purely mythical, and it is impossible to fix the point where his authentic history commences. He copied from monuments which have no consecutive dates, the precise age of which could only be vaguely known even in his time, and which are different in their statements in different localities. It is only by making due allowance for these uncertainties that any historical value can be attached to these earlier dynasties of Manetho. Yet Bunsen has built on an uncertain interpretation of this writer, as handed down in a very fragmentary and evidently garbled condition, and on the equally or more uncertain chronology of Eratosthenes, a system differing from all previous belief on the subject, from the Hebrew history, and from all former interpretations of the monuments and Manetho.[114] Discarding, therefore, in the mean time, this date, and the still older one claimed by Mariette,[115] we may roughly estimate the date of Menes as 2000 to 2500 years B.C.,[116] and proceed to state some of the facts developed by Egyptologists. One of the most striking of these is the proof that Egypt was a new country in the days of Menes and several generations of his successors. The monuments of this period show little of the complicated idolatry, ritual, and caste system of later times, and are deficient in evidence of the refinement and variety of art afterward attained. They also show that these early monarchs were principally engaged in dyking, and otherwise reclaiming the alluvial flats; an evidence precisely of the same character with that which every traveller sees in the more recently settled districts of Canada, where the forest is giving way to the exertions of the farmer. Farther, in this primitive period, known as the "old monarchy," few domestic animals appear, and experiments seem to have been in progress to tame others, natives of the country, as the hyena, the antelope, the stork. Even the dog in the older dynasties is represented by one or at most two varieties, and the prevalent one is a wolfish-looking animal akin to the present wild or half-tamed dogs of the East.[117] The Egyptians, too, of the earlier dynasties, are more homogeneous in their appearance than those of the later, after conquest and migration had introduced new races; and the earliest monumental notice referring to Negro tribes does not appear until the 12th dynasty, about half-way between the epoch of Menes and the Christian era, nor does any representation of the Negro features occur until, at the earliest, the 17th dynasty. This allows ample time--one thousand years at the least--for the development, under abnormal circumstances and isolation, of all the most strongly marked varieties of man. Still Egypt, even under the old monarchy, presents evidence of the continuation of antediluvian culture.[118] It is obvious, in short, that the whole aspect of early Egyptian history presents to us a people already civilized taking possession of that country at a period corresponding with that of the subsidence of the Noachian deluge, and not finding there any remains of older populations. Nor have any remains of such populations been found by modern investigation.[119] In Assyria the results of the recent discoveries, so well known through many learned and popular works, strikingly confirm the Hebrew chronology. They indicate no slow emergence from barbarism, but show that in Assyria as in Egypt implements of stone and metal were used together by a primitive people, already far advanced in civilization; and the oldest historical names only carry us back to cities and sovereigns of the Abrahamic age, while the story of the primitive empire of Nimrod and the traditions of the deluge seem to have survived in more or less mythical legends. The earliest Assyrian monuments would seem to belong to a Turanian race, of which comparatively little is known, but which may correspond with the primitive Cushites of Biblical story. To these, it is true, Berosus attaches a fabulous antiquity; but this is not confirmed by the monuments. These, according to the latest facts disclosed by Smith, Rawlinson, and others, appear to fix a date of about 1800 B.C. for the foundation of the Assyrian monarchy proper, and the oldest previous date given by Assurbampal, who reigned about B.C. 668 to 626, gives 1635 years before his time, or say 2280 B.C., as the date of an Elamite king Kudarnankundi, who seems to be the leader of a primitive tribe, one of the oldest in the region, and who has been conjectured to have been the Chedorlaomer of Genesis, but was probably one of his predecessors. We gather from the Assyrian annals that the early Turanian kings, while mound-builders like their kindred elsewhere, and acquainted with metals and with the cuneiform writing, yet constituted comparatively small nations, and were much occupied with hunting and other rude sports, and with predatory expeditions, so as to answer very nearly to the Biblical conception of the early Cushite kingdom of the valley of the Euphrates, which was probably in the same stage of culture with the nations that in a later period inhabited the valley of the Mississippi, and are known as the Alleghans. In connection with the early history of man, much importance has been attached to the division of the early historic and prehistoric ages into the periods of Stone, Bronze, and Iron, and of the former into a Palæolithic or ancient stone age, and a more modern or Neolithic stone age. It is plain, however, that too great importance has been attached to these distinctions, and that they express rather differences of circumstances and of culture than of age, so that they have really no bearing on the Biblical chronology. If palæolithic or rudely chipped implements are the oldest known, as they not improbably were the first tools used by man, yet their use has extended in the case of rude nations all the way up to the present time; and in America and Northern Asia we know that their antiquity is but of yesterday, and that they were used with highly finished implements of bone, and of those softer stones that admit of being polished. No certain line can therefore be drawn even locally between a Neolithic and a Palæolithic period, especially since in localities where flint implements were extensively quarried and made, as on the banks of rivers in Northern France and Southern England, and in such places as "Grimes' Graves" and Cissbury in the latter country, where mines were sunk in the chalk for the extraction of flints, it necessarily happened that vast multitudes of unfinished or spoiled implements and weapons were left on the ground, while the better-formed specimens were for the most part taken away. This conclusion is amply supported by similar localities in America, where people well acquainted with many of the arts of life have left quantities of strictly palæolithic material. Wilson, Southall, and other writers have accumulated so many examples of this that I think the distinction of Palæolithic and Neolithic ages must now be given up by all investigators who possess ordinary judgment. A remarkable instauce is the celebrated "Flint ridge" of Ohio, which was a great quarry of flint for implements used by the ancient mound-builders, a highly civilized race, as well as by the modern Indians. Here are found countless multitudes of palæolithic flint implements of all the ordinary types, but which are merely the unfinished material of workers capable of producing the most exquisite implements. There can be scarcely a doubt that the palæolithic implements of the European gravels, in so far as they are the workmanship of man, are in like manner merely the relics of old flint quarries.[120] Possibly a more accurate measurement of time for particular regions of the world might be deduced from the introduction of bronze and iron. If the former was, as many antiquarians suppose, a local discovery in Europe, and not introduced from abroad, it can give no measurement of time whatever. In America, as the facts detailed by Dr. Wilson show, while a bronze age existed in Peru, it was the copper age in the Mississippi Valley, and the stone age elsewhere; and these conditions might have co-existed for any length of time, and could give no indication of relative dates. On the other hand, the iron introduced by European commerce spread at once over the continent, and came into use in the most remote tribes, and its introduction into America clearly marks an historical epoch. With regard to bronze in Europe, we must bear in mind that tin was to be procured only in England and Spain, and in the latter in very small quantity; the mines of Saxony do not seem to have been known till the Middle Ages. We must further consider that tin ore is a substance not metallic in appearance, and little likely to attract the attention of savages; and that, as we gather from a hint of Pliny, it was probably first observed, in the West at least, as stream tin, in the Spanish gold washings. Lastly, when we place in connection with these considerations the fact that in the earliest times of which we have certain knowledge, the tin trade of Spain and England was monopolized by the Phoenicians, there seems to be a strong probability that the extension of the trade of this nation to the western Mediterranean really inaugurated the bronze period. The only valid argument against this is the fact that moulds and other indications of native bronze casting have been found in Switzerland, Denmark, and elsewhere; but these show nothing more than that the natives could recast bronze articles, just as the American Indians can forge fish-hooks and knives out of nails and iron hoops. Other considerations might be adduced in proof of this view, but our limits will not permit us to refer to them. The important questions still remain: When was this trade commenced, and how rapidly did it extend itself from the sea-coast across Europe? The British tin trade must have been in existence in the time of Herodotus, though his notion of the locality was not more definite than that it was in the extremity of the earth. The Phoenician settlements in the western Mediterranean must have existed as early as the time of Solomon, when "ships of Tarshish" was the general designation of seagoing ships for long voyages. How long previously these colonies existed we do not know; but considering the great scarcity and value of tin in those very ancient times, we may infer that perhaps only the Spanish, and not the British deposits were known thus early; or that the Phoenicians had only indirect access to the latter. Perhaps we may fix the time when these traders were able to supply the nations of Europe with abundance of bronze in exchange for their products, at, say 1000 to 1200 B.C., as the earliest probable period; and possibly from one to two centuries would be a sufficient allowance for the complete penetration of the trade throughout Europe. But of course wars or migrations might retard or accelerate the process; and there may have been isolated spots in which a partial stone period extended up to those comparatively recent times in which first the Greek trade, and afterward the entire overthrow of the Carthaginian power by the Romans, terminated forever the age of bronze and substituted the age of iron. This would leave, according to our ordinary chronologies, at least ten or fifteen centuries for the postdiluvian stone period in Europe and Western Asia, a time quite sufficient in our view for all that part of it represented by such monuments as the Danish shell-heaps or the platform habitations of the Swiss lakes; leaving the remains of the prehistoric caverns and river gravels for the antediluvian period. A few facts in illustration of these points, and also of the Biblical history, may be mentioned here. We know perfectly that the early Chaldeans of the Euphratean valley were acquainted with the use of metals--bronze certainly, and at a very early date iron; yet flint knives and other implements of stone are found under circumstances which show that they were used in the palmy days of the Assyrian empire. The inhabitants of Egypt were acquainted with bronze and iron long before the date of the Exodus, yet the Egyptians used stone knives for some purposes up to a comparatively modern time. Joshua used stone knives for the purpose of circumcision; and according to Herodotus there were Ethiopians in the army of Xerxes who used stone-tipped arrows. If any antiquarian were to stumble on the "hill of the foreskins"--a mound under which were buried in all probability the multitudinous flint flakes used in the circumcision of the thousands of Israel--or the grave in which some of the Ethiopian auxiliaries of Xerxes were buried with their flint arrow-heads and javelins of antelopes' horn, how absurd would be the inference that these repositories were of the palæolithic age. Nay, so late as 1870 a traveller was informed that the Bagos, a people of Abyssinia, still made and used stone hatchets and flint knives.[121] In Europe we find reason to believe that the Ligurians of Northwestern Italy were flint-folk of very rude type until they were conquered by the Gauls about 400 B.C.[122] Though the Gauls, Britons, and Germans of the age of Julius Cæsar had iron weapons, yet it is evident that the metal was very scarce, and that bronze was more common; and in confirmation of this it is found that in the trenches before Alize, the Alesia of Cæsar, where the final struggle of the Roman general with Vercingetorix took place, weapons of stone, bronze, and iron are intermixed. All over the more northern parts of Europe there is the best reason to believe that the use of stone and bronze continued to a much later period, and locally until long after the Christian era. It is clear that such facts as these must greatly modify our ideas of the probable age of the Swiss lake villages, and should induce the greatest caution in claiming any special antiquity for particular classes of implements. One of the most remarkable discoveries of modern times is that of the site of ancient Troy by Dr. Schliemann, and it affords clear and decisive evidence as to the historic value of the ages to which we have referred. Troy was destroyed by the Greeks perhaps about 1300 B.C., and we know from Homer that this was in what for the Greeks and Trojans may properly be termed the copper age, weapons and armor of that metal being in common use, and also the mode of burial by cremation. We may well suppose that at that early date the stone age was still in full force in Northern Europe and Asia, and in the mountains of Switzerland; and as the tin mines of England had not yet been reached, bronze was scarce and dear even in Eastern Europe and Asia. Now Schliemann has disinterred the undoubted Trojan Ilium on the hill of Hissarlik; but he finds it to be only one of several buried cities, and the succession of strata will be most clearly seen in the section on the following page, compiled from his clear and circumstantial descriptions. It is needless to say that this presents a succession of the stone age to one of comparatively high civilization. It also forms an epitome of that of the whole East, and of primitive man in general, in some very important respects. We have first, at a date probably coeval with that of the earliest monarchies of Assyria and Egypt, a primitive people whose arts and mode of life remind us strongly of the American Toltecans and Peruvians.[123] Schliemann supposes them to have been Aryan, but they were more probably of Turanian race. They must have occupied the site for a very long time. They were succeeded by a more cultivated people of fine physical organization, yet possibly still Turanians or primitive Aryans, who by trade or plunder had accumulated large stores of metallic wealth, and had made advances in the arts of life placing them on a level with the early Phoenicians and Egyptians, with whom they probably had intercourse. These ===================================================================== |Surface. | | | |Fifth stratum to 6-1/2 feet. |The Greek Ilium, with buildings | |and objects of art characteristic | |of the Hellenic civilization of | |historic periods. --------------------------------------------------------------------- |Fourth stratum to 13 feet. |A second barbarous people, but | |probably allied to the first. | |Very coarse pottery. Implements | |and weapons of copper or bronze-- | |stone knives and saws. --------------------------------------------------------------------- |Third stratum to 23 feet. |Barbarous people occupying the | |site of Troy. Rude stone | |implements and rude pottery. | |Buildings of small stones and clay. | |Some objects of pottery found here | |would on American sites be regarded | |as probably tobacco-pipes. --------------------------------------------------------------------- |Second stratum to 33 feet. |Homeric Troy. Implements and | |weapons of copper, bronze, and | |stone. Pottery, some of it of | |Peruvian and ancient Cypriot types. | |Fine gold jewelry, and gold and | |silver vessels. Armor similar to | |that described by Homer. Stone | |buildings and walls. This city had | |been sacked and burned. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | First stratum to 46 or 53 feet.|Primitive or prehistoric Troy. | |Stone implements, polished and | |chipped. Millstones, copper nails, | |pottery--some with patterns | |curiously resembling those of | |America--bone implements, | Rock. |terra-cotta disks. Stone buildings. ===================================================================== were the Trojans of the Homeric poems, and the destruction of their city was probably in the first instance celebrated in their own native songs, which Homer at a date but little later[124] wove into his magnificent poem, and idealized and exaggerated. The Trojans worshipped an owl-headed goddess--the Athena of the Homeric poems; and from symbols found are believed also to have had the worship of a sacred tree, and of fire or of the Sun. All of these are widespread superstitions over both the Old and New World. But while Troy flourished there were barbarous nations not far off still in the stone age; and when the city had fallen, these, possibly in successive hordes, took possession of the fertile plain and used the old city as their stronghold, perhaps till the foundation of the Greek city about 650 B.C. I have sketched in some detail these interesting discoveries, as they so clearly illustrate an actual succession of ages, and so conclusively show the uncertainty of the classification into ages of stone and metal, except when taken in connection with the precise circumstances of each locality. I have referred above only to the question of historic or postdiluvian man. We have still to consider what remains exist of antediluvian man. These may be studied in connection with our third head of geological evidences of man's antiquity; for if the Mosaic narrative be true, the diluvial catastrophe must have constituted a physical separation between historic man and prehistoric; since, in so far as antediluvian ages are concerned, all are prehistoric or mythical everywhere except in the sacred history itself. Antediluvian men may thus in geology be Pleistocene as distinguished from modern, or Palæocosmic as distinguished from Neocosmic.[125] 2. _Language in Relation to the Antiquity of Man._--In many animals the voice has a distinctive character; but in man it has an importance altogether peculiar. The gift of speech is one of his sole prerogatives, and identity in its mode of exercise is not only the strongest proof of similarity of psychical constitution, but more than any other character marks identity of origin. The tongues of men are many and various; and at first sight this diversity may, as indeed it often does, convey the impression of radical diversity of race. But modern philological investigations have shown many and unexpected links of connection in vocabulary or grammatical structure, or both, between languages apparently the most dissimilar. I do not here refer to the vague and fanciful parallels with which our ancestors were often amused, but to the results of sober and scientific inquiry. "Nothing," says Professor Max Müller, "necessitates the admission of different independent beginnings for the material elements of the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech; nay, it is possible even now to point out radicals which, under various changes and disguises, have been current in these three branches ever since their first separation." Of the truth of this I have convinced myself by some original investigation, and also of the farther truth that of this radical unity of all human tongues there is more full evidence than many philologists are disposed to admit, and that the results of future study must be to connect more and more with each other the several main stems of language. Whether this results merely from the psychical unity of the human race, or from the historical derivation of languages from one root, is not so material as the fact of unity; but that the latter is implied it would not be difficult to show.[126] Let us examine for a little these results as they are presented to us by Latham, Müller, Bunsen, and other modern philologists. A convenient starting-point is afforded by the great group of languages known as the Indo-European, Japhetic, or Aryan. From the Ganges to the west coast of Ireland, through Indian, Persian, Greek, Italian, German, Celt, runs one great language--the Sanscrit and the dark Hindoo at one extreme, the Erse and the xanthous Celt at the other. No one now doubts the affinity of this great belt of languages. No one can pretend that any one of these nations learned its language from another. They are all decided branches of a common stock. Lying in and near this area are other nations--as the Arabs, the Syrians, the Jews--speaking languages differing in words and structure--the Semitic tongues. Do these mark a different origin? The philologists answer in the negative, pointing to the features of resemblance which still remain, and above all to certain intermediate tongues of so high antiquity that they are rather to be regarded as root-stocks from which other languages diverged than as mixtures. The principal of these is the ancient Egyptian, represented by the inscriptions on the monuments of that wonderful people, and by the more modern Coptic, which, according to Bunsen and Latham, presents decided affinities to both the great classes previously mentioned, and may be regarded as strictly intermediate in its character. It has accordingly been designated by the term Sub-Semitic.[127] But it shares this character with all or nearly all the other African languages, which bear strong marks of affinity to the Egyptian and Semitic tongues. On this subject Dr. Latham says, "That the uniformity of languages throughout Africa is greater than it is either in Asia or in Europe, is a statement to which I have not the least hesitation in committing myself."[128] To the north the Indo-European area is bounded by a great group of semi-barbarous populations, mostly with Mongolian features, and speaking languages which have been grouped as Turanian. These Turanian languages, on the one hand, graduate without any break into those of the Esquimaux and American Indians; on the other, according to Müller and Latham, they are united, though less distinctly, with the Semitic and Japhetic tongues. They not improbably represent in more or less altered forms the most primitive stock of language from which both the Semitic and Japhetic groups have branched. Another great area on the coasts and in the islands of the Pacific is overspread by the Malay, which, through the populations of Transgangetic India, connects itself with the great Indo-European line. Mr. Edkins, in his remarkable book on "China's Place in Philology," has collected a large amount of fact tending to show that the early Chinese in its monosyllabic radicals presents root-forms traceable into all the stocks of human speech in the Old World; and the American languages would have furnished him with similar lines of affinity. If we regard physical characters, manners, and customs, and mythologies, as well as mere language, it is much easier thus to link together nearly all the populations of the globe. In investigations of this kind, it is true, the links of connection are often delicate and evanescent; yet they have conveyed to the ablest investigators the strong impression that the phenomena are rather those of division of a radical language than of union of several radically distinct. This impression is farther strengthened when we regard several results incidental to these researches. Latham has shown that the languages of men may be regarded as arranged in lines of divergence, the extreme points of which are Fuego, Tasmania, Easter Island; and that from all these points they converge to a common centre in Western Asia, where we find a cluster of the most ancient and perfect languages; and even Haeckel is obliged to adopt in his map of the affiliation of races of men a similar scheme, though he, without any good historical or scientific evidence, extends it back into the imaginary lost continent of Lemuria. Farther, the languages of the various populations differ in proceeding from these centres in a manner pointing to degeneracy such as is likely to occur in small and rude tribes separating from a parent stock. These lines of radiation follow the most easy and probable lines of migration of the human race spreading from one centre. It must also be observed that in the primary migration of men, there must of necessity have been at its extreme limits outlying and isolated tribes, placed in circumstances in which language would very rapidly change; especially as these tribes, migrating or driven forward, would be continually arriving at new regions presenting new circumstances and objects. When at length the utmost limit in any direction was reached, the inroads of new races of population would press into close contact these various tribes with their different dialects. Where the distance was greatest before reaching this limit, we might expect, as in America, to find the greatest mutual variety and amount of difference from the original stock. After the primary migration had terminated, the displacements arising from secondary migrations and conquests, would necessarily complicate the matter by breaking up the original gradations of difference, and thereby rendering lines of migration difficult to trace. Taking all these points into the account, along with the known tendencies of languages in all circumstances to vary, it is really wonderful that philology is still able to give so decided indications of unity. There is, in the usual manner of speaking of these subjects, a source of misapprehension, which deserves special mention in this place. The Hebrew Scriptures derive all the nations of the ancient world from three patriarchs, and the names of these have often been attached to particular races of men and their languages; but it should never be supposed that these classifications are likely to agree with the Bible affiliation. They may to a certain extent do so, but not necessarily or even probably. In the nature of the case, those portions of these families which remained near the original centre, and in a civilized state, would retain the original language and features comparatively unchanged. Those which wandered far, fell into barbarism, or became subjected to extreme climatic influences, would vary more in all respects. Hence any general classification, whether on physical or philological characters, will be likely to unite, as in the Caucasian group of Cuvier, men of all the three primitive families, while it will separate the outlying and aberrant portions from their main stems of affiliation. Want of attention to this point has led to much misconception; and perhaps it would be well to abandon altogether terms founded on the names of the sons of Noah, except where historical affiliation is the point in question. It would be well if it were understood that when the terms Semitic, Japhetic,[129] and Hametic are used, direct reference is made to the Hebrew ethnology; and that, where other arrangements are adopted, other terms should be used. It is obviously unfair to apply the terms of Moses in a different way from that in which he uses them. A very prevalent error of this kind has been to apply the term Japhetic to a number of nations not of such origin according to the Bible; and another of more modern date is to extend the term Semitic to all the races descended from Ham, because of resemblance of language. It should be borne in mind that, assuming the truth of the Scriptural affiliation, there should be a "central" group of races and languages where the whole of the three families meet, and "sporadic"[130] groups representing the changes of the outlying and barbarous tribes. While, however, all the more eminent philologists adhere to the original unity of language, they are by no means agreed as to the antiquity of man; and some, as for instance Latham and Dr. Max Müller, are disposed to claim an antiquity for our species far beyond that usually admitted. In so far as this affects the Bible history, it is important, inasmuch as this would appear to limit the possible antiquity of all languages to the time of the deluge. The date of this event has been variously estimated, on Biblical grounds, at from 1650 B.C. (Usher) to 3155 B.C. (Josephus and Hales); but the longest of these dates does not appear to satisfy the demands of philology. The reason of this demand is the supposed length of time required to effect the necessary changes. The subject is one on which definite data can scarcely be obtained. Languages change now, even when reduced to a comparatively stable form by writing. They change more rapidly when men migrate into new climates, and are placed in contact with new objects. The English, the Dutch, and the German were perhaps all at the dawn of the mediæval era Mæso-Gothic. At the same rate of change, allowing for greater barbarism and greater migrations, they may very well have been something not far from Egyptian or Sanscrit 2000 years before Christ. The truth is that present rates of variation afford no criterion for the changes that must occur in the languages of small and isolated tribes lapsing into or rising from barbarism, possessing few words, and constantly requiring to name new objects and until some ratio shall have been established between these conditions and those of modern languages, fixed by literature and by a comparatively stationary state of society, it is useless to make any demands for longer time on this ground.[131] Even in the present day, Moffat informs us that in South Africa the separation of parts of a tribe, for even a few months, may produce a notable difference of dialect. If we take the existing languages of civilized men whose history is known, we shall find that it is impossible to trace many of them back as far as the Christian era, and when we have passed over even half that interval, they become so different as to be unintelligible to those who now speak them. Where there are exceptions to this, they arise entirely from the effects of literature and artificial culture. While, therefore, there is good ground in philology for the belief in one primitive language, there seems no absolute necessity to have recourse even to the confusion of tongues at Babel to explain the diversities of language.[132] Farther, the Bible carries back the Semitic group of languages at least to the time of the Deluge, but it does not seem necessary on the mere ground of antediluvian names, to carry it any farther back, and the Assyrian inscriptions show the coexistence of Turanian and Semitic tongues at the dawn of history in the region of the Euphrates and Tigris. One or other of these--or a monosyllabic language underlying it--was probably an antediluvian tongue, and the other a very early derivative; and both history and philology would assign the precedence to the Turanian language, which was probably most akin to that which had descended from antediluvian times, and which at that early period of dispersion indicated in the Bible story of Babel, had begun to throw off its two great branches of the Aryan and Semitic languages. These, proceeding in two dissimilar lines of development, continue to exist to this day along with the surviving portions of the uncultivated Turanian speech. To this point, however, we may return under another head. CHAPTER XIV. UNITY AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN--(_Continued._) "By the word of God the heavens were from of old, and the earth, formed out of water, and by means of water, by which waters the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished."--2 Peter iii., 5, 6. 3. _Geological Evidence as to the Antiquity of Man._--No geological fact can now be more firmly established than the ascending progression of animal life, whereby from the early invertebrates of the Eozoic and Primordial series we pass upward through the dynasties of fishes and reptiles and brute mammals to the reign of man. In this great series man is obviously the last term; and when we inquire at what point he was introduced, the answer must be in the later part of the great Cainozoic or Tertiary period, which is the latest of the whole. Not only have we the negative fact of the absence of his remains from all the earlier Tertiary formations, but the positive fact that all the mammalia of these earlier ages are now extinct, and that man could not have survived the changes of condition which destroyed them and introduced the species now our contemporaries. This fact is altogether independent of any question as to the introduction of species by derivation or by creation. The oldest geological period in which any animals nearly related in structure to man occur is that named the Miocene, and no traces of man have as yet been found in any deposits of this age. All human remains known belong either to the Pleistocene or Modern. Now the Pleistocene was characterized by one of those periods of glacial cold which have swept over the earth--by one of those great winters which have so chilled the continents that few forms of life could survive them--and man comes in at the close of this cold period, in what is called the Post-glacial age. Some geologists, it is true, hold to an interglacial warm period, in which man is supposed to have existed, but the evidence of this is extremely slender and doubtful, and it carries back in any case human antiquity but a very little way. I have, in my "Story of the Earth and Man," shown reason for the belief, in which I find Professor Hughes, of Cambridge, coincides with me,[133] that the interglacial periods are merely an ingenious expedient to get rid of the difficulties attending the hypothesis of the universal glaciation of the northern hemisphere. But, though man is thus geologically modern, it is held that historically his existence on earth may have been very ancient, extending perhaps ten or twenty, or even a hundred times longer than the period of six or seven thousand years supposed to be proved by sacred history. Let us first, as plainly and simply as possible, present the facts supposed thus to extend the antiquity of man, and then inquire as to their validity and force as arguments in this direction. The arguments from geology in favor of a great antiquity for man may be summarized thus: (1) Human remains are found in caverns under very thick stalagmitic crusts, and in deposits of earth which must have accumulated before these stalagmites began to form, and when the caverns were differently situated with reference to the local drainages. (2) Remains of man are found under peat-bogs which have grown so little in modern times that their antiquity on the whole must be very great. (3) Implements, presumably made by men, are found in river-gravels so high above existing riverbeds that great physical changes must have occurred since they were accumulated. (4) One case is on record where a human bone is believed to have been found under a deposit of glacial age. (5) Human remains have been found under circumstances which indicate that very important changes of level have taken place since their accumulation. (6) Human remains have been found under circumstances which indicate great changes of climate as intervening between their date and that of the modern period. (7) Man is known to have existed, in Europe at least, at the same time with some quadrupeds formerly supposed to have been extinct before his introduction. (8) The implements, weapons, etc., found in the oldest of these repositories are different from those known to have been used in historic times. These several heads include, I think, all the really material evidence of a geological character. It is evidence of a kind not easily reducible into definite dates, but there can be no doubt that its nature, and the rapid accumulation of facts within a small number of years, have created a deep and widespread conviction among geologists and archæologists that we must relegate the origin of man to a much more remote antiquity than that sanctioned by history or by the Biblical chronology. I shall first review the character of this evidence, and then state a number of geological facts which bear in the other direction, and have been somewhat lost sight of in recent discussions. Of the facts above referred to, the most important are those which relate to caverns, peat-bogs, and river-gravels. We may, therefore, first consider the nature and amount of this evidence. That the reader may more distinctly understand the geological history of these more recent periods of the earth's history which are supposed to have witnessed the advent of man, in Western Europe at least, I quote the following summary from Sir Charles Lyell of the more modern changes in that portion of the world. These are: "First, a continental period, toward the close of which the forest of Cromer flourished; when the land was at least 500 feet above its present level, perhaps much higher. * * * The remains of _Hippopotamus major_ and _Rhinoceros etruscus_, found in beds of this period, seem to indicate a climate somewhat milder than that now prevailing in Great Britain. [This was a _Preglacial_ era, and may be regarded as belonging to the close of the Pliocene tertiary.] "Secondly, a period of submergence, by which the land north of the Thames and Bristol Channel, and that of Ireland, was generally reduced to * * * an archipelago. * * * This was the period of great submergence and of floating ice, when the Scandinavian flora, which occupied the lower grounds during the first continental period, may have obtained exclusive possession of the only lands not covered with perpetual snow. [This represents the Glacial period; but according to the more extreme glacialists only a portion of that period.] "Thirdly, a second continental period, when the bed of the glacial sea, with its marine shells and erratic blocks, was laid dry, and when the quantity of land equalled that of the first period. * * * During this period there were glaciers in the higher mountains of Scotland and Wales, and the Welsh glaciers * * * pushed before them and cleared out the marine drift with which some valleys had been filled during the period of submergence. * * * During this last period the passage of the Germanic flora into the British area took place, and the Scandinavian plants, together with northern insects, birds, and quadrupeds, retreated into the higher grounds. * * * "Fourthly, the next and last change comprised the breaking up of the land of the British area once more into numerous islands, ending in the present geographical condition of things. There were probably many oscillations of level during this last conversion of continuous land into islands, and such movements in opposite directions would account for the occurrence of marine shells at moderate heights above the level of the sea, notwithstanding a general lowering of the land. * * * During this period a gradual amelioration of temperature took place, from the cold of the glacial period to the climate of historical times."[134] The second continental period above referred to is that which appears on the best evidence to have been the time of the introduction of man; but such facts as that of the Settle Cave, and the implements of the breccia in Kent's Cave, if rightly interpreted, would make man preglacial or "interglacial." The deposits found in caverns in France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and England have afforded a large proportion of the remains from which we derive our notions of the most ancient prehistoric men of Europe. From the Belgian caves, as explored by M. Dupont, we learn that there were two successive prehistoric races, both rude or comparatively uncivilized. The first were men of Turanian type, but of great bodily stature and high cerebral organization, and showing remarkable skill in the manufacture of implements and ornaments of bone and ivory. These men are believed to have been contemporary with the earlier postglacial mammals, as the mammoth and hairy rhinoceros, and to have lived at a time when the European land was more extensive than at present, stretching far to the west of Ireland, and connecting Great Britain with the Continent. The skeletons found at Cro-Magnon, Mentone, and elsewhere in France fully confirm the deductions of Dupont as to this earliest race of Palæocosmic, Palæolithic, or antediluvian man. This grand race seems to have perished or been driven from Europe by the great depression of the level of the land which inaugurated the modern era, and which was probably accompanied by many oscillations of level as well as by considerable changes of climate. They were succeeded by a second race, equally Turanian in type, but of small stature, and resembling the modern Lapps. These were the "allophylian" peoples displaced by the historical Celts, and up to their time the reindeer seems to have existed abundantly in France and Germany. These two successive prehistoric populations have been termed respectively men of the "mammoth" age and men of the "reindeer" age. The Bible record would lead us to regard the earlier and gigantic men as antediluvian, and the smaller or Lappish race as postdiluvian. We may therefore, having already at some length considered the postdiluvian age, take up the mode of occurrence of the remains of the earlier of the two races--that of the mammoth age. The caverns themselves may be divided into those of residence, of sepulture, and of driftage, though one cavern has often successively assumed two at least of these characters. In the caverns of residence large accumulations have been formed of ashes, charcoal, bones, and other débris of cookery, among which are found flint and bone implements, the general character of which, as well as that of the needles, stone hammers, mortars for paint, and other domestic appliances, are not more dissimilar from those of the Red Indian and Esquimau races in North America than these are from one another, and in many things, as in the bone harpoons, the resemblance is very striking indeed. In tendency to imitative art, and in the skill of their delineations of animals, the prehistoric men seem to have surpassed all the American races except the semi-civilized mound-builders and the more cultivated Mexican and Peruvian nations. With regard to the residence of these men of the mammoth age in caverns, several things are indicated by American analogies to which some attention should be paid. It is not likely that caverns were the usual places of residence of the whole population. They may have been winter houses for small tribes and detached families of fugitives or outlaws, or they may have been places of resort for hunting parties at certain seasons of the year. The large quantities of broken and uncooked bones of particular species, as of the horse and reindeer, in some of the caverns, would farther indicate a habit of making great battues, like those of the American hunting tribes, at certain seasons, and of preparing quantities of pemmican or dried meat preserved with marrow and fat for future use. The number of bone needles found in some of the caves would seem to hint that, like the Americans, they sewed up their pemmican in skin bags. The multitude of flint flakes and of rude stone implements applicable to breaking bones certainly indicates a wholesale cutting of flesh and preparation of marrow. In the "Story of the Earth," I have suggested in connection with this that there may have been towns or villages of these people unknown to us, and which would afford higher conceptions of their progress in the arts. This anticipation appears recently to have been realized in the discovery of such a town or fortified village of the mammoth age at Soloutre, in France, and which seems to afford evidence that these ancient people had already domesticated the horse, using it as food as well as a beast of burden, in the manner of the Khirgis and certain other Tartar tribes of Central Asia.[135] This, with the undoubtedly high cerebral organization indicated by the skulls of the mammoth age, notably raises our estimate of the position of man at this early date. With regard to caves of sepulture, the same remark may be made as with regard to the caves of residence. They do not seem to have been the burial-places of large populations, but only occasional places of interment, few bodies being found in them, and these often interred in the midst of culinary débris, evidencing previous or contemporary residence. With regard to the latter, it seems to have been no uncommon practice with some North American tribes to bury the dead either in the floors of their huts or in their immediate proximity. It is probable, however, that the few examples known of caves of sepulture of this period indicate not tribal or national places of burial, but occasional and accidental cases, happening to hunting or war parties, perhaps remote from their ordinary places of residence. In so far as method of burial is concerned, the men of the Palæocosmic or Mammoth age seem to have buried the dead extended at full length, and not in the crouching posture usual with some later races. Like the Americans, they painted the dead man, and buried him with his robes and ornaments, and probably with his weapons, thus intimating their belief in happy hunting-grounds beyond the grave.[136] I may remark here that all the known interments of the mammoth age indicate a race of men of great cerebral capacity, with long heads and coarsely marked features, of large stature and muscular vigor, surpassing indeed much in all these respects the average man of modern Europe. These characteristics befit men who had to contend with the mammoth and his contemporaries, and to subdue the then vast wildernesses of the eastern continent, and they correspond with the Biblical characteristics of antediluvian man. Among caves of driftage may be classed some of those near Liège, in Belgium, and, partially at least, those of Kent's Hole and Brixham, in England. In these only disarticulated remnants of human skeletons, or more frequently only flint implements, some of them of doubtful character, have been found. In my "Story of the Earth," I have taken the carefully explored Kent's Cavern of Torquay as a typical example, and have condensed its phenomena as described by Mr. Pengelly. I now repeat this description, with some important emendations suggested by that gentleman in more recent reports and in private correspondence. The somewhat extensive and ramifying cavern of Kent's Hole is an irregular excavation, evidently due partly to fissures or joints in limestone rock, and partly to the erosive action of water enlarging such fissures into chambers and galleries. At what time it was originally cut we do not know, but it must have existed as a cavern at the close of the Pliocene or beginning of the Post-pliocene period, since which time it has been receiving a series of deposits which have quite filled up some of its smaller branches. First and lowest, according to Mr. Pengelly, of the deposits as yet known, is a "breccia," or mass of broken and rounded stones, with hardened red clay filling the interstices. Some of the stones are of the rock which forms the roof and walls of the cave, but the greater number, especially the rounded ones, are from more distant parts of the surrounding country. Many are fragments of grit from the Devonian beds of adjacent hills. There are also fragments of stalagmite from an old crust broken up when the breccia was deposited, and possibly belonging to Pliocene times. In this mass, the depth of which is unknown, are numerous bones, nearly all of one kind of animal, the cave bear or bears, for there may be more than one species--creatures which seem to have lived in Western Europe from the close of the Pliocene down to the modern period. They must have been among the earliest and most permanent tenants of Kent's Hole at a time when its lower chambers were still filled with water. Teeth of a lion and of the common fox also occur in this deposit, but rarely. Next above the breccia is a floor of "stalagmite," or stony carbonate of lime, deposited from the drippings of the roof, and in some places more than twelve feet thick. This also contains bones of the cave bear, deposited when there was less access of water to the cavern. Mr. Pengelly infers the existence of man at this time from the occurrence of chipped flints supposed to be artificial; but which, in so far as I can judge from the specimens described and figured, must still be regarded as of doubtful origin. After the old stalagmite floor above mentioned was formed, the cave again received deposits of muddy water and stones; but now a change occurs in the remains embedded. This stony clay, or "cave earth," has yielded an immense quantity of teeth and bones, including those of the elephant, rhinoceros, horse, hyena, cave bear, reindeer, and Irish elk. With these were found weapons of chipped flint, and harpoons, needles, and bodkins of bone, precisely similar to those of the North American Indians and other rude races. The "cave earth" is four feet or more in thickness. It is not stratified, and contains many fallen fragments of rock, rounded stones, and broken pieces of stalagmite. It also has patches of the excrement of hyenas, which the explorers suppose to indicate the temporary residence of these animals; and besides fragments of charcoal scattered in the mass, there is in one spot, near the top, a limited layer of burned wood, with remains which indicate the cooking and eating of repasts of animal food by man. It is clear that when this bed was formed the cavern was liable to be inundated with muddy water, carrying stones and perhaps some of the bones and implements, and breaking up in places the old stalagmite floor.[137] One of the most puzzling features, especially to those who take an exclusively uniformitarian view, is that the entrance of water-borne mud and stones implies a level of the bottom of the water in the neighboring valleys of nearly one hundred feet above its present height. The cave earth is covered by a second crust of stalagmite, less dense and thick than that below, and containing only a few bones, which are of the same general character with those beneath, but include a fragment of a human jaw with teeth. Evidently when this stalagmite was formed the influx of water-borne materials had ceased, or nearly so; and Mr. Pengelly appears to affirm, though without assigning any reason, that none of these bones could, like the masses of stalagmite, have been lifted from lower beds, or washed into the cave from without. The next bed marks a new change. It is a layer of black mould from three to ten inches thick. Its microscopic structure does not seem to have been examined; but it is probably a forest soil, introduced by growth, by water, by wind, and by ingress of animals, all of them modern, and contains works of art from the old British times before the Roman invasion up to the porter bottles and dropped half-pence of modern visitors. Lastly, in and upon the black mould are many fallen blocks from the roof of the cave. There can be no doubt that this cave and the neighboring one of Brixham have done very much to impress the minds of British geologists with ideas of the great antiquity of man; and they have, more than any other postglacial monuments, shown the existence of some animals now extinct up to the human age. Of precise data for determining time, they have, however, given nothing. The only measures which seem to have been applied, namely, the rate of growth of stalagmite and the rate of erosion of neighboring valleys, are, from the very sequence of the deposits, obviously worthless; and the only apparently constant measure, namely, the fall of blocks from the roof, seems not to have been applied, and Mr. Pengelly declares that it can not be practically used. We are therefore quite uncertain as to the number of centuries involved in the filling of this cave, and must remain so until some surer system of calculation can be devised. We may, however, attempt to sketch the series of events which it indicates. The animals found in Kent's Hole are all "postglacial," some of them of course survivors from "preglacial" times, and some of them still surviving. They therefore inhabited the country after it rose from the great glacial submergence. Perhaps the first colonists of the coast of Devonshire in this period were the cave bears, migrating on floating ice, and subsisting like the arctic bear and the black bear of Anti-costi, on fish, and on the garbage cast up by the sea. They may have found Kent's Hole a sea-side cavern, with perhaps some of its galleries still full of water and filling with breccia, with which the bones of dead bears became mixed. In the case of such a deposit as this breccia, however, the precise time when its materials were finally laid down in their present form, or the length of time necessary for its accumulation, can not be definitely settled. It may be a result of continued torrential action or of some sudden cataclysm. As the land rose, these creatures for the most part betook themselves to lower levels, and in process of time the cavern stood upon a hill-side, perhaps several hundreds of feet above the sea; and the mountain streams, their beds not yet emptied of glacial detritus, washed into it stones and mud, and probably bones also, while it appears that hyenas occupied the cave at intervals, and dragged in remains of mammals of many species which had now swarmed across the plains elevated out of the sea, and multiplied in the land. This was the time of the cave earth; and before its deposit was completed, though how long before an unstratified and therefore probably often-disturbed bed of this kind can not tell, man himself seems to have been added to the inhabitants of the British land. In pursuit of game he sometimes ascended the valleys beyond the cavern, or even penetrated into its outer chambers; or perhaps there were even in those days rude and savage hill-men, inhabiting the forests and warring with the more cultivated denizens of plains below, which are now deep under the waters. Their weapons, and other implements dropped in the cavern or lost in hunting, or buried in the flesh of wounded animals which crept to the streams to assuage their thirst, are those found in the cave earth. The absence of the human bones may merely show that the mighty hunters of those days were too hardy, athletic, and intelligent often to perish from accidental causes, and that they did not use this cavern for a place of burial. The fragments of charcoal show that they were acquainted with fire, and possibly that they sometimes took shelter in the cave. But the land again subsided. The valley of that now nameless river, of which the Rhine and the Thames may have alike been tributaries, disappeared under the sea; and perhaps some tribe, driven from the lower lands, took up its abode in this cave, now again near the encroaching waves, and left there the remains of their last repasts ere they were driven farther inland or engulfed in the waters. For a time the cavern may have been wholly submerged, and the charcoal of the extinguished fires became covered with its thin coating of clay. But ere long it re-emerged to form part of an island, long barren and desolate; and the valleys having been cut deeper by the receding waters, it no longer received muddy deposits, and the crust formed by drippings from its roof contained only bones and pebbles washed by rains and occasional land floods from its own clay deposits. Finally, the modern forests overspread the land, and were tenanted by the modern animals. Man returned to use the cavern again as a place of refuge or habitation, and to leave there the relics contained in the black earth. This seems at present the only intelligible history of this curious cave and others resembling it; though, when we consider the imperfection of the results obtained even by a large amount of labor, and the difficult and confused character of the deposits in this and similar caves, too much value should not be attached to such histories, which may at any time be contradicted or modified by new facts or different explanations of those already known. The time involved depends very much on the answer to the question whether we should regard the postglacial subsidence and re-elevation as somewhat sudden, or as occupying long ages at the slow rate at which some parts of our continents are now rising or sinking. Mr. Pengelly thinks it possible, but not proved, that the lower breccia of Kent's Cavern may be interglacial or preglacial in age. One case only is known where a human bone has been found in a cavern under deposits supposed to be of the nature of the glacial drift. It is that of the Victoria Cave, at Settle, in Yorkshire. At this place a human fibula was found under a layer of boulder clay. But there are too many chances of this bone having come into this position by some purely local accident to allow us to attach much importance to it until future discoveries shall have supplied other instances of the kind.[138] I may close this survey of the cave deposits with a summary of the results of M. Dupont, as obtained from two of the caves explored by him, that of Margite and that of Frontal. In the first of these caverns, resting on rolled pebbles which covered the floor, were four distinct layers of river mud deposited by inundations, and amounting to two yards and a half in thickness. In all of these layers were bones. The lowest contained rude flint implements, and bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, bear, horse, chamois, reindeer, stag, and hyena. In the overlying deposits are some flint implements of more artistic form and a greater prevalence of the bones of the reindeer. In the second cave, that of Frontal, over a similar deposit of alluvial mud of the mammoth age, was found a sepulchre containing the remains of sixteen individuals, of the second or diminutive Lappish race before referred to. The door of the cave had been closed by these people with a slab of stone, and in front was a hearth for funeral feasts, built on the deposits of the mammoth age, and containing bones of animals all recent or now living in Belgium, and without any traces of the bones of the extinct quadrupeds. This burial-place belonged to the Neocosmic yet prehistoric race which replaced the Palæocosmic men of the mammoth age. What is the absolute antiquity of the Palæocosmic age in Europe? We have no monumental or historical chronology to answer this question, but only the measures of time furnished by the accumulation of deposits, by the deposition of stalagmite, by the gradual extinction of animals, and by the erosion of valleys and other physical changes. These somewhat loose measures have been applied in various ways, but the tendency of geologists, from the prevalence of uniformitarian views, and the prejudice created by familiarity with the long times of previous geologic periods, has been to assign to them too great rather than too little value, both as measures of time and as indicating a remote antiquity. With reference to the accumulation of deposits, whether derived from disintegration of the roof and walls of the cave, introduced by land floods or river inundations or by the residence of man, their rate is of very difficult estimation. Loose stones fallen from the roof, as in the case of Kent's Cave, would give a fair measure of time if we could be sure that the climate had continued uniform, and that there had been no violent earthquakes. Mr. Pengelly has, however, hopelessly given up this kind of evidence. Where, as in the case of many of these caves, land floods and river inundations have entered, these may have been frequent or separated by long intervals of time, and they may have been of great or small amount. Where, for instance, as in one of the Belgian caves, there are six beds of ossiferous mud, but for the fact that five layers of stalagmite separate them we might not have known whether they represent six annual inundations, or floods separated by many centuries from each other. In the case of the Victoria Cave at Settle, Dawkins, reasoning from the accumulation of two feet of detritus over British remains that may be supposed to be 1200 years old, gives a basis which would at the same rate of deposit allow about 5000 years for the date of palæolithic men; but Prestwich and others, on the basis of stalagmite deposits, claim a vastly higher antiquity for the men who made the implements found in Kent's Hole and Brixham. If we now turn to these stalagmite floors, when we consider that they have been formed by the slow solution of limestone by rain-water charged with carbonic acid, and the dropping of this water on the floor, and when we are told that in Kent's Cavern a marked date shows that the stalagmite has grown at the rate of only one twentieth of an inch since 1688, and that there are two beds of stalagmite, one of which is in some places twelve feet thick, we are impressed with the conviction of a vast antiquity. But when we are told by Dawkins that the rate of deposit in Ingleborough Cave may be estimated at a quarter of an inch per annum, and when we consider that the present rate of deposit in Kent's Hole is probably very different from what it was in the former condition of the country, stalagmite becomes a very unsafe measure of time. With respect again to the accumulation of kitchen-midden stuff in the course of the occupancy of caverns, this proceeds with great rapidity, when caves are steadily occupied and it is not the practice to cleanse out the débris of fires, food, and bedding. Even when the occupation is temporary, a tribe of savages engaged with the preparation of dried meat and pemmican in a very short time produce a considerable heap of bones and other rejectamenta. Looking next to the extinction of animals, we find that the species found in the oldest deposits containing human remains are in part still extant. Others which are locally extinct we know existed in Europe until historical times, that is, within the last two thousand years. How long previously to this the others became extinct we have no certain means of knowing, though it seems probable that they disappeared gradually and successively. We have, however, farther to bear in mind the possibility of cataclysms or climatal changes which may have proved speedily fatal to many species over large areas. In any case we have this certain fact that, though the time elapsed has been sufficient for the extinction of many species, it does not seem to have sufficed to effect any noteworthy change on those that survived. Farther, we may consider that time is only one factor in this matter, and not the one which is the efficient cause of change, since we know no reason why one species of animal should not continue to be reproduced as long as another, but for the occurrence of physical changes of a prejudicial character. We have still remaining the changes which have taken place in the erosion of valleys since the caverns were occupied. Dupont informs us that the openings of some of the caverns once flooded by rivers are now in limestone cliffs two hundred feet above the water, while no appreciable lowering of the bottoms of the ravines is taking place now. This would in some contingencies put back the period of filling of the caves to an indefinite antiquity. But then the questions occur--Was there once more water in the rivers or more obstruction at their outlets, or was the erosive power greater at one time than now, or were the river valleys excavated in still more ancient time, and partly filled with mud when the water entered the caves, and may this mud have been since swept away? So, in like manner, the waters flowing in the channels near Brixham Cave and Kent's Hole were apparently about seventy feet higher in times of flood than at present, but the time involved is subject to the same doubts as in the case of the Belgian caves. Hughes has well remarked that elevations of the land, by causing rivers to form waterfalls and cascades, which they cut back, may greatly accelerate the rate of erosion. Farther, there is the best reason to believe that in the glacial period many old valleys were filled with clay, and that the modern cutting consisted merely in the removal of this clay. Belt has shown in a recent paper[139] good reason to believe that this is the case with the Falls of Niagara, and that the cutting actually effected through rock within the later Pleistocene and modern period has been that only of the new gorge from the whirlpool to Queenstown, the main part of the ravine being of older date and merely re-excavated. This would greatly reduce the ordinary estimate of time based on the cutting of the Niagara gorge. This leads us next to consider the occurrence of human remains and objects of art in the river-gravels themselves, and the amount of excavation and deposit involved in the deposition of these gravels. In the river-gravels of the Somme, and of many other rivers in France and Southern England, chipped flints and rude flint implements are found in so great quantity as to imply that the beds and banks of these streams were resorted to for flint material, and that the unfinished and rejected implements left in the holes and trenches, or on the heaps where the work was carried on, were afterward sorted by running water, perhaps in abnormal floods and debacles, such as occur in all river valleys occasionally, perhaps in that great diluvial catastrophe which seems to have terminated the residence of Palæocosmic man in Europe. Wilson has well shown how the heaps left by American tribes in and near their flint quarries would furnish the material for such accumulations. The time required for the erosion of the valleys and the deposit of the gravels has been very variously estimated. In the case of the Somme, which river is not appreciably deepening its bed, if we suppose it to have cut its wide valley to the depth of one hundred and fifty feet out of solid chalk since the so-called "high level" gravels of France and the South of England were deposited, the time required shades off into infinity. So Evans, in his work on "The Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain," looking upon the amount of excavation of wide and deep valleys since the stone implements of Bournemouth are supposed to have been deposited in gravel, says, "Who can fully comprehend how immensely remote was the epoch when that vast bay was high and dry land?" and he becomes poetical in delineating the view that must have met the eyes of "palæolithic" man. And undoubtedly, if one is to be limited to the precise nature and amount of causes now at work in the district, the time must not only be "immensely remote," but illimitably so. The difficulty lies with the exaggerated uniformitarianism of the supposition that such causes could have produced the results. But, for reasons to be immediately stated, the time required is liable to numerous deductions; and recently Tylor, Pattison, Collard, and others have insisted ably on these deductions, as has also Professor Hughes, of Cambridge. I have myself urged them strongly in the work already referred to. In the first place, when we see a deep river valley in which the present stream is doing an almost infinitesimal amount of deepening, we are not to infer that this represents all its work past and present. In times of unusual flood it may do in one week more than in many previous years. Farther, if there have been elevations or depressions of the land, when the land has been raised the cutting power has at once been enormously increased, and when depressed it has been diminished, or filling has taken the place of cutting. Again, if the climate in time past has been more extreme, or the amount of rainfall greater, the cutting action has then been proportionally rapid. Perhaps no influence is greater in this respect than that which is known to the colonists in Northeastern America as "ice-freshets," when in spring, before the ice has had time to disappear from the rivers, sudden thaws and rains produce great floods, which rushing down over the icy crust, or breaking and hurling its masses before them, work terrible havoc on the banks and alluvial flats, depositing great beds of gravel, and sweeping away immense masses that had lain undisturbed for centuries. Now we know that in Europe the human period was preceded by what has been termed the glacial age, and as it was passing away there must have been unexampled floods and ice-freshets, and a temporary "pluvial period," as it has been called, in which the volume of the rivers was immensely increased. Farther, it is an established fact that the period of the appearance of man was a time when the continents in the northern hemisphere were more elevated than at present, and when consequently the cutting action of rivers was at a maximum. This was again followed by a period of depression, accompanied probably by many local cataclysms, if not by a general deluge; and there are strong geological reasons to believe that this convulsion was connected with the disappearance from Europe of Palæocosmic man, and many of the animals his contemporaries. This view I advocated some time ago in my "Story of the Earth;" and more recently Mr. Pattison, in an able paper read before the Victoria Institute, has developed it in greater detail, and supported it by a great mass of geological authority. If the Palæocosmic period was one of continental elevation, when the greater seats of population were in the valleys of great rivers now covered by the German Ocean and the English Channel, and when the valleys of the Thames and the Somme were those of upland streams frequented by straggling parties and small tribes, and the seats of extensive flint factories for the supply of the plains below, and if this state of things was terminated by a diluvial debacle, we can account for all the phenomena of the drift implements without any extravagant estimate of time. I quote with much pleasure on this subject the following from the report of a lecture on "Geological Measures of Time," by Professor Hughes, before the Royal Institution of London. Hughes was, like myself, a companion of Sir Charles Lyell in some of his journeys, though belonging to a younger generation of geologists, and is an accurate observer and reasoner. "Another method of estimating the lapse of time is founded upon the supposed rate at which rivers scoop out their channels. Although no very exact estimates have been attempted, still the immense quantity of work that has been done, as compared with the slow rate at which a river is now excavating that same part of the valley, is often appealed to as a proof of a great lapse of time. "The fact of such an enormous lapse of time is not questioned, but this part of the evidence is challenged. "The previous considerations of the rate of accumulation of silt on the low lands prepares us to inquire whether there is any waste at all along the alluvial plains. Several examples were given to show that the lowering of valleys was brought about by receding rapids and waterfalls; for instance, following up the Rhine, its terraces could often be traced back to where the waterfall was seen to produce at once almost all the difference of level between the river reaches above and below it. At Schaffhausen the river terrace below the hotel could be traced back and found to be continuous with the river margin above the fall. The wide plains occurring here and there, such as the Mayence basin, were due to the river being arrested by the hard rocks of the gorges below Bingen so long that it had time to wind from side to side through the soft rocks above the gorges. When waterfalls cut back to such basins or to lakes they would recede rapidly, tapping the waters of the lake, eating back the soft beds of the alluvial plains, and probably in both cases leaving terraces as evidence, not of upheavals or of convulsions, but of the arrival of a waterfall which had been gradually travelling up the valley. So when the Rhone cuts back from the falls at Belgarde we shall have terraces where now is the shore of Geneva; so also when the Falls of Schaffhausen, and ages afterward when the Falls of Laufenburg have tapped the Lake of Constance, there will be terraces marking its previous levels. And so we may explain the former greater extent of the Lake of Zurich, which stood higher and spread wider by Utznach and Wetzikon before it was tapped by the arrival of waterfalls, which cut back into it and let its waters run off until they fell to their present level. "A small upheaval near the mouth of a river would have a similar effect. The Thames below London and the Somme below St. Acheul can now only just hand on the mud brought down from higher ground; but suppose an elevation of a hundred feet over those parts of England and France (quite imperceptible if extended over 10,000, 1000, or even 100 years), and the rivers would tumble over soft mud and clay and chalk, and soon eat their way back from Sheppey to London, and from St. Valery to Amiens. "So when we want to estimate the age of the gravels on the top of the cliff at the Reculvers, or on the edge of the plateau of St. Acheul, we have to ask, not how long would it take the rivers to cut down to their present level from the height of those gravels at the rate at which that part of their channel is being lowered now, but how long would it take the Somme or Thames, which once ran at the level of those gravels, to cut back from where its mouth or next waterfall was then to where it runs over rapids now. We ought to know what movements of upheaval and depression there have been; what long alluvial flats or lakes which may have checked floods, but also arrested the rock-protecting gravel; how much the wash of the estuarine waves has helped. In fact, it is clear that observations made on the action of the rivers at those points now have nothing to do with the calculation of the age of the terraces above, and that the circumstances upon which the rate of recession of the waterfalls and rapids depends are so numerous and changeable that it is at present unsafe to attempt any estimate of the time required to produce the results observed." I may close this discussion by quoting from the paper of my friend Mr. Pattison, already referred to, the following summing up of his conclusions, in which I fully concur: "We may assume it as established that there was a time when England was connected with the Continent, when big animals roamed in summer up the watercourses and across the uplands, and man, armed only with rude stones, followed them into the marshes and woods, hunted them for sustenance, and consumed them in shelter of caves, then accessible from the river levels. This state of things was continued until disturbed by oscillations of surface, accompanied by excessive rainfalls and rushes of water from the water-sheds of the rivers, until the great animals were driven out or destroyed, and man ceased to visit these parts. The disturbances continued, the Strait of Dover was formed, the configuration of the soft parts of the islands and continents was fixed, action subsided, and the present state of things obtained. Man resumed his residence, but with loss of the mammoth and its companions. The reindeer now constituted the type of a state of things which lasted down to the historic period, without any other from that time to this. * * * "Chronologists are agreed that about 2000 years B.C. Abraham migrated from Mesopotamia to Canaan, and that at this time Egypt at least was old in civilization. Beyond this we have no positive scale of time in Scripture; for it is evident, from the narrative itself, that the latter does not cover the whole time. * * * "Ussher estimates from Scripture the creation of man as about 2000 years before this. During the latter portion of this time civilization was proceeding under settled governments in the East, interrupted, says the record and tradition, by a flood. * * * "So Lucretius: 'Thus, too, the insurgent waters once o'erpowered, As fables tell, and deluged many a state; Till, in its turn, the congregated waves By cause more potent conquered, heaven restrain'd Its ceaseless torrents, and the flood decreased.' Barbarism covered the whole Western world; neither in the 2000 years before Abraham, nor in the 2000 years afterward, have we any light reflected from these regions to the East. In this 4000 years, or in the somewhat longer period which probably will be ultimately settled as warranted by the record, we place hypothetically all the phenomena of the later mammalian age, including the introduction of man as a hunter, the first occupation of the caves by him also, the diluvial phenomena of the wide valleys, the oscillations and disturbances of the earth's crust, alterations in the coast-line, and physical settlement of the country; after this comes the second occupation of the caves. In short, if we say that, hypothetically, the whole first known human age occurred within 4000 years of the Christian era, no one can say that it is geologically impossible. Who can say that 1643 years is insufficient to comprise all the phenomena that occurred during a period confessedly characterized by more rapid and extensive action than at present--a period during which ruptures in the earth's crust, oscillations, and permanent uprising took place, and the intermittent action of violent floods caused the deposit and disturbance and resettlement of the gravels and brick-earth? There is nothing to interfere with the prevalent opinion that man was introduced here while the glacial period was dying out, and while it was still furnishing flood-waters sufficient to scour and re-sort the gravels of the valleys down which they flowed. This supposition may be extended to both the great continents." To conclude: Our mode of reconciling the Mosaic history of antediluvian man with the disclosures of the gravels and caves would be to identify Palæocosmic man, or man of the mammoth age, with antediluvian man; to suppose that the changes which closed his existence in Europe as well as Western Asia were those recorded in the Noachian deluge; and that the second colonization of the diminished and shrunken Europe of the modern period was effected by the descendants of Noah. It may be asked--Must we suppose that the Adam of the Bible was of the type of the coarsely featured and gigantic men of the European caverns? I would answer--Not precisely so; but it is quite possible that Adam may have been Turanian in feature. We should certainly suppose him to have been a man well developed in brain and muscle. Such men as those found in the caves would rather represent the ruder "Nephelim," the "giants that were in those days," than Adam in Eden. Farther, the new colonists of Europe after the deluge would no doubt be a very rude and somewhat degenerate branch of Noachidæ, probably driven before more powerful tribes in the course of the dispersion. The higher races of both periods are probably to be looked for in Western Asia; but even there we must expect to find cave men like those whose remains were found by Tristram in the caves near Tyre, and like the Horim of Moses; and we must also expect to find the antediluvian age in the main an age of stone everywhere, and its arts, except in certain great centres of population, perhaps not more advanced than those of the Polynesians, or those of the agricultural American tribes before the discovery of America by Columbus. As a geologist, and as one who has been in the main of the school of Lyell, and after having observed with much care the deposits of the more modern periods on both sides of the Atlantic, I have from the first dissented from those of my scientific brethren who have unhesitatingly given their adhesion to the long periods claimed for human history, and have maintained that their hasty conclusions on this subject must bring geological reasoning into disrepute, and react injuriously on our noble science. We require to make great demands on time for the prehuman periods of the earth's history, but not more than sacred history is willing to allow for the modern or human age. CHAPTER XV. COMPARISONS AND CONCLUSIONS. "Lo, these are but the outlines of his ways, and how faint the whisper which we hear of him--the thunder of his power who could understand?"--Job xxvi., 14. In the preceding pages I have, as far as possible, avoided that mode of treating my subject which was wont to be expressed as the "reconciliation" of Scripture and Natural Science, and have followed the direct guidance of the Mosaic record, only turning aside where some apt illustration or coincidence could be perceived. In the present chapter I propose to inquire what the science of the earth teaches on these same subjects, and to point out certain manifest and remarkable correspondences between these teachings and those of revelation. Here I know that I enter on dangerous ground, and that if I have been so fortunate as to carry the intelligent reader with me thus far, I may chance to lose him now. The Hebrew Scriptures are common property; no one can fairly deny me the right to study them, even though I do so in no clerical or theological capacity; and even if I should appear extreme in some of my views, or venture to be almost as enthusiastic as the commentators of Homer, Shakespeare, or Dante, I can not be very severely blamed. But the direct comparison of these ancient records with results of modern science is obnoxious to many minds on different grounds; and all the more so that so few men are at once students both of nature and revelation. There are, as yet, but few even of educated men whose range of study has included any thing that is practical or useful either in Hebrew literature or geological science. That slipshod Christianity which contents itself with supposing that conclusions which are false in nature may be true in theology is mere superstition or professional priestcraft, and has nothing in common with the Bible; but there are still multitudes of good men, trained in the verbal and abstract learning which at one time constituted nearly the whole of education, who regard geology as a mass of crude hypotheses destitute of coherence, a perpetual battle-ground of conflicting opinions, all destined in time to be swept away. It must be admitted, too, that from the nature of geological evidence, and from the liability to error in details, the solidity of its conclusions is not likely soon to be appreciated as fully as is desirable by the common mind; while it is unfortunately true that the outskirts of science are infested with hosts of half-informed and superficial writers, who state these conclusions incorrectly, or apply them in an unreasonable manner to matters on which they have no bearing. On the other hand, the geologist, fully aware of the substantial nature of the foundations of the science of the earth, regards it as little less than absurd to find parallels to its principles in an ancient theological work. Still there are possible meeting-points of things so dissimilar as Bible lore and geological exploration. If man is a being connected on the one hand with material nature, and on the other with the spiritual essence of the Creator; if that Creator has given to man powers of exploring and comprehending his plans in the universe, and at the same time has condescended to reveal to him directly his will on certain points, there is nothing unphilosophical or improbable in the supposition that the same truths may be struck out on the one hand by the action of the human mind on nature, and on the other by the action of the Divine mind on that of man. The highest and most nobly constituted minds have ever been striving to scale heaven above and dive into the earth below, that they may extort from them the secret of their origin, and may find what are the privileges and destinies of man himself. They have learned much; and if through other gifted minds, and through his heaven-descended Word and Spirit, God has condescended to reveal himself, there must surely be much in common in that which God's works teach to earnest inquirers and that which he directly makes known. But few of our greatest thinkers, whether on nature or theology, have reached the firm ground of this higher probability; or if they have reached it, have dreaded the scorn of the half-learned too much to utter their convictions. Still this is a position which the enlightened Christian and student of nature must be prepared to occupy, humbly and with admission of much ignorance and incapacity, but with bold assertion of the truth that there are meeting-points of nature and revelation which afford legitimate subjects of study. In entering on these subjects, we may receive certain great truths in reference to the history of the earth as established by geological evidence. In the present rapidly progressive state of the science, however, it is by no means easy to separate its assured and settled results from those that have been founded on too hasty generalization, or are yet immature; and at the same time to avoid overlooking new and important truths, sufficiently established, yet not known in all their dimensions. In the following summary I shall endeavor to present to the reader only well-ascertained general truths, without indulging in those deviations from accuracy for effect too often met with in popular books. On the other hand, we have already found that the Scriptures enunciate distinct doctrines on many points relating to the earth's early history, to which it will here be necessary merely to refer in general terms. Let us in the first place shortly consider the conclusions of geology as to the origin and progress of creation. 1. The widest and most important generalization of modern geology is that all the materials of the earth's crust, to the greatest depth that man can reach, either by actual excavation or inference from superficial arrangements, are of such a nature as to prove that they are not, in their present state, original portions of the earth's structure; but that they are the results of the operation, during long periods, of the causes of change--whether mechanical, chemical, or vital--now in operation, on the land, in the seas, and in the interior of the earth. For example, the most common rocks of our continents are conglomerates, sandstones, shales, and slates; all of which are made up of the débris of older rocks broken down into gravel, sand, or mud, and then re-cemented. To these we may add limestones, which have been made up by the accumulation of corals and shells, or by deposits from calcareous springs; coal, composed of vegetable matter; and granite, syenite, greenstone, and trap, which are molten rocks formed in the manner of modern lavas. So general has been this sorting, altering, and disturbance of the substance of the earth's crust, that, though we know its structure over large portions of our continents to the depth of several miles, the geologist can point to no instance of a truly primitive rock which can be affirmed to have remained unchanged and _in situ_ since the beginning. "All are aware that the solid parts of the earth consist of distinct substances, such as clay, chalk, sand, limestone, coal, slate, granite, and the like; but, previously to observation, it is commonly imagined that all had remained from the first in the state in which we now see them--that they were created in their present forms and in their present position. The geologist now comes to a different conclusion; discovering proofs that the external parts of the earth were not all produced in the beginning of things in the state in which we now behold them, nor in an instant of time. On the contrary, he can show that they have acquired their actual condition and configuration gradually and at successive periods, during each of which distinct races of living beings have flourished on the land and in the waters; the remains of these creatures lying buried in the crust of the earth."[140] 2. Having ascertained that the rocks of the earth have thus been produced by secondary causes, we next affirm, on the evidence of geology, that a distinct order of succession of these deposits can be ascertained; and though there are innumerable local variations in the nature of the rocks formed at the same period, yet there is, on the great scale, a regular sequence of formations over the whole earth. This succession is of the greatest importance in the case of aqueous rocks, or those formed in water; and it is evident that in the case of beds of sand, clay, etc., deposited in this way, the upper must be the more recent of any two layers. This simple principle, complicated in various ways by the fractures and disturbances to which the beds have been subjected, forms the basis of the succession of "formations" in geology as deduced from stratigraphical evidence. 3. This regular series of formations would be of little value as a history of the earth were it not that nearly all the aqueous rocks contain remains of the contemporary animals and plants. Ever since the earth began to be tenanted by organized beings, the various accumulations formed in the bottoms of seas and at the mouths of rivers have entombed remains of marine animals, more especially their harder parts, as shells, corals, and bones, and also fragments or entire specimens of land animals and plants. Hence, in any rock of aqueous formation, we may find fossil remains of the living creatures that existed in the waters in which that rock was accumulated or on the neighboring land. If in the process of building up the continents, the same locality constituted in succession a part of the bottom of the ocean, of an inland sea, of an estuary, and a lake, we should find in the fossil remains entombed in the deposits of that place evidences of these various conditions; and thus a somewhat curious history of local changes might be obtained. Geology affords more extensive disclosures of this nature. It shows that as we descend into the older formations we gradually lose sight of the existing animals and plants, and find the remains of others not now existing; and these, in turn, themselves disappear, and were preceded by others; so that the whole living population of the earth appears to have been several times renewed prior to the beginning of the present order of things. This seems farther to have occurred in a slow and gradual manner, not by successive great cataclysms or clearances of the surface of the earth, followed by wholesale renewal. This doctrine of geological uniformity is, however, to be understood as limited by the equally certain fact that there has been progress and advance, both in the inorganic arrangements of the earth's surface and in its organized inhabitants, and that there have, in geological as in historical times, been local cataclysms and convulsions, as those of earthquakes and volcanoes, often on a very extensive scale. Farther, there are good reasons to believe that there have been alternations of cold or glacial periods and of warm periods, of periods of subsidence and re-elevation, and of periods of greater and less activity of certain of the leading agents of geological change. But as to the extent of these differences and their bearing on the geological history, there is still much uncertainty and difference of opinion.[141] In the sediment _now_ accumulating in the bottom of the waters are being buried remains of the existing animals and plants. A geological formation is being produced, and it contains the skeletons and other solid parts of a vast variety of creatures belonging to all climates, and which have lived on land as well as in fresh and salt water. Let us now suppose that by a series of changes, sudden or gradual, all the present organized beings were swept away, and that, when the earth was renewed by the power of the Creator, a new race of intelligent beings could explore those parts of the former sea basins that had been elevated into land. They would find the remains of multitudes of creatures not existing in their time; and by the presence of these they could distinguish the deposits of the former period from those that belonged to their own. They could also compare these remains with the corresponding parts of creatures which were their own contemporaries, and could thus infer the circumstances in which they had lived, the modes of subsistence for which they had been adapted, and the changes in the distribution of land and water and other physical conditions which had occurred. This, then, is precisely the place which fossil organic remains occupy in modern geology, except that our present system of nature rests on the ruins, not of one previous system, but of several. 4. By the aid of the superposition of deposits and their organic remains, geology can divide the history of the earth into distinct periods. These periods are not separated by merely arbitrary boundaries, but to some extent mark important eras in the progress of our earth; though they usually pass into each other at their confines, and the nature of the evidence prevents us from ascertaining the precise length of the periods themselves, or the intervals in time which may separate the several monuments by which they are distinguished. The following table will serve to give an idea of the arrangement at present generally received, with some of the more important facts in the succession of animal and vegetable life, as connected with our present subject. It commences with the oldest periods known to geology, and gives in the animal and vegetable kingdoms the _first appearance_ of each class, with a few notes of the subsequent history of the principal forms. It must, however, be borne in mind that farther discoveries may extend some classes farther back than we at present know them, and that a more detailed table, descending to orders and families, would give a more precise view of the succession of life. Farther, the several geological formations would admit of much subdivision, and are represented locally by various kinds and different thicknesses of sediment.[142] TABULAR VIEW OF THE SUCCESSION OF GEOLOGICAL FORMATIONS AND ORGANIC REMAINS. ==================================================================== PERIODS. | SYSTEMS OF | CLASSES OF ANIMALS. | PLANTS. | FORMATIONS. | | -------------------------------------------------------------------- I. |Ancient Metamorphic |Eozoon and probably other|Graphite and EOZOIC |rocks of | Protozoa. |Iron Ores PERIOD. |Scandinavia, | |representing |Canada, etc. | |Vegetable | | |Matter. -------------------------------------------------------------------- II. |Cambrian. |_Radiata_--Hydrozoa, |Algæ. PRIMARY | | Echinodermata | OR | | (Cystideans). | PALÆOZOIC| |_Mollusca_--Brachiopoda, | PERIOD. | | Lamellibranchiata, | | | Gasteropoda, Cephalopoda| | | (Bivalve and Univalve | | | Shell-fishes). | | |_Articulata_--Annelida, | | | Crustacea (Worms and | | | Soft Shell-fishes of the| | | lower grades). | | | | |Lower Silurian. |_Radiata_--Anthozoa |Algæ. | | (coral animals), | | | Echinodermata | | | (sea stars, etc.). | | |_Mollusca_--Polyzoa, | | | Tunicata. | | |Other Mollusks and | | | Articulates as before. | | | | |Upper Silurian. |Radiates, Mollusks, and |Acrogenous | | Articulates as before. |Land plants. | |_Vertebrata_--First | | | Ganoid and Placoid | | | Fishes. | | | | |Erian or Devonian. |_Articulata_--Insects |Acrogens | | and higher Crustaceans. |and | |_Vertebrata_--Fishes, |Gymnosperms. | | Ganoid and Placoid. | | | | |Carboniferous. |_Mollusca_--Pulmonata |Acrogens, | | (Land Snails). |Gymnosperms, | |_Articulata_--Myriapods, |Endogens? | | Arachnidans (Gallyworms,| | | Spiders and Scorpions). | | |_Vertebrata_--Batrachians| | | or Amphibians prevalent.| | | | |Permian. |_Vertebrata_--Lacertian | | | or Lizard-like | | | Reptiles. | -------------------------------------------------------------------- III. |Triassic. |_Vertebrata_--Higher | SECONDARY| | Reptiles prevalent; | OR | | Marsupial Mammals. | MESOZOIC | | | PERIOD. |Jurassic. |_Vertebrata_--Great |Endogenous | | prevalence of higher |trees. | | Reptiles; Fishes, | | | homocerque; Earliest | | | Birds. | | | | |Cretaceous. |_Vertebrata_--Decadence |Angiospermous | | of reign of Reptiles; |Exogens. | | Ordinary Bony Fishes. | -------------------------------------------------------------------- IV. |Eocene. |_Vertebrata_--Mammals |Exogens TERTIARY | | prevalent, especially |prevalent. OR | | Pachyderms; Cycloid | CAINOZOIC| | and Ctenoid Fishes | PERIOD. | | prevalent. | | |First _living_ |Some Modern | | Invertebrates. |Species | | |appear. |Miocene. |Living Invertebrates more| | | numerous. | | | | |Pliocene. |Living Invertebrates | | | still more numerous. | -------------------------------------------------------------------- V. |Post-Pliocene. |First living Mammals. |Existing POST- | |Living Invertebrates |vegetation. TERTIARY | | prevalent. | OR | | | MODERN |Post-Glacial |Man and living Mammals. | PERIOD. |and Recent. | | ==================================================================== The oldest fossil remains known are the Protozoa of the Laurentian rocks. In the succeeding Cambrian or Primordial rocks we find many extinct species of zoophytes, shell-fish, and crustaceans, and the algæ or sea-weeds. In the Palæozoic period as a whole, though numerous Batrachian or Amphibian reptiles existed toward its close, the higher orders of fishes seem to have been the dominant tribe of animals; and vegetation was nearly limited to cryptogams and gymnosperms. In the Mesozoic period, though small mammalia had been created, large terrestrial and marine reptiles were the ruling race, and fishes occupied a subordinate position; while, at the close, the higher orders of plants took a prominent place. In the Tertiary and Modern eras, the mammalia, with man, have assumed the highest or dominant position in nature. On this series of groups, and the succession of living beings, Sir. C. Lyell remarks "It is not pretended that the principal sections called Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary are of equivalent importance, or that the subordinate groups comprise monuments relating to equal portions of time or of the earth's history. But we can assert that they each relate to successive periods, during which certain animals and plants, for the most part peculiar to their respective eras, flourished, and during which different kinds of sediment were deposited." We have already, in previous chapters, noticed the parallelism of the succession of life in the earth as revealed in Genesis with that disclosed by geology; but this subject must be farther referred to in the sequel, and in the mean time the reader may compare for himself the succession of life in the table with that in the later creative days. 5. The lapse of time embraced in the geological history of the earth is enormous. Fully to appreciate this it is necessary to study the science in detail, and to explore its phenomena as disclosed in actual nature. A few facts, however, out of hundreds which might have been selected, will suffice to indicate the state of the case. The delta and alluvial plain of the Mississippi have an area of more than 12,000 square miles, and must have an average depth of about 800 feet. At the present rate of conveyance of sediment by the river, it has been calculated that a period of about 33,000 years is implied in the deposition of this comparatively modern formation.[143] To be quite safe, let us take 30,000 years, and add 50,000 more for the remainder of the Post-pliocene or Quaternary. We may then safely multiply this number by forty, for the length of the Tertiary period. We may add three times as much for the Mesozoic period, and this will be far under the truth. It will then be quite safe to assume that the Palæozoic period was three times as long as the Mesozoic and Tertiary together. This would give altogether, say, 51,280,000 years for the whole of geological time from the beginning of the Palæozoic, leaving the duration of the Eozoic and previous periods undetermined, but requiring perhaps nearly as much time. Great though these demands may seem, they would be probably far below the rigid requirements of the case were it not for the probability that the present rate of transference of material by the great river is less than it was in Post-pliocene and early modern times. This might enable us to reduce our estimate considerably within the scope of a hundred millions of years.[144] Take another illustration from an older formation. An excellent coast section at the Joggins, in Nova Scotia, exhibits in the coal formation proper a series of beds with erect trunks and roots of trees _in situ_, amounting to nearly 100. About 100 forests have successively grown, partially decayed, and been entombed in muddy and sandy sediment. In the same section, including in all about 14,000 feet of beds, there are 76 seams of coal, each of which can be proved to have taken more time for its accumulation than that required for the growth of a forest. Supposing all these separate fossil soils and coals to have been formed with the greatest possible rapidity, forty thousand years would be a very moderate calculation for this portion of the Carboniferous system; and for aught that we know thousands of years may be represented by a single fossil soil. But this is the age of only one member of the Carboniferous system, itself only a member of the great Palæozoic group, and we have made no allowance for the abrasion from previous rocks and deposition of the immense mass of sandy and muddy sediment in which the coals and forests are imbedded, and which is vastly greater than the deltas of the largest modern rivers. Considerations of a physical rather than of a geological nature also give us long periods for the probable existence of the earth, though they serve to correct somewhat the extravagant estimates of some theorists. Croll has based an interesting calculation on the amount of erosion of the land by rivers. That of the Mississippi amounts to one foot in 6000 years. That of the Ganges gives one foot in 2358 years, the average being, say, one foot in 4179 years. Some smaller rivers give a much shorter time; but the average of two great rivers, one draining a very large area of the western and another of the eastern hemisphere, and in very different climates and geographical conditions, will probably be the most reliable datum. Croll, however, prefers the Mississippi rate.[145] If we estimate the proportion of land to water as 576 to 1390, this will give for the entire area of the ocean a rate of deposition of one foot in 14,400 years. Now the entire thickness of all the stratified rocks is estimated at 72,000 feet; and at this rate the enormous time of 1,036,800,000 years would be necessary. But we have no right to assume that deposition has been going on uniformly over the entire sea-bottom. On the contrary, the greater part of it takes place within a belt of about one hundred miles from the coasts, and the deposit of calcareous and other matters over the remainder will scarcely make up for the portions of this belt on which no deposit is taking place. This will give an area of deposit of about 11,650,000 square miles, consequently only one twelfth of the above time, or about 86,400,000 years, would be required. This can be but a very rough calculation; but it has the merit of squaring very nearly with the calculations derived from physical considerations, more especially by Sir William Thomson, which limit the possible existence of the earth's solid crust to one hundred millions of years. Similar conclusions have also been deduced from what is known of the physical constitution of the sun. Croll's own ingenious theory of glacial periods produced by the varying eccentricity of the earth's orbit, along with the precession of the equinoxes, would give, according to him, about 80,000 years ago for the date of the Glacial period, and for the beginning of the Tertiary period about 3,000,000 years ago. It would thus appear that physical and geological science conspire in assigning a great antiquity to the earth, but not an unlimited antiquity. They agree in restricting the ages that have elapsed since the introduction of life within one hundred millions of years. I confess, however, that a consideration of the fact that all our geological measures of erosion and deposition seem to be based on cases which refer to what may be termed minimum action leads me to believe that the actual time will fall very far within this limit. For example, if we were to suppose an elevation of the land drained by the Mississippi even to a small amount, its cutting power would be vastly increased for a long time. The same effect would result from a subsidence and re-elevation, or from any cause increasing the amount of rainfall or deposition of snows in winter. Now we know that such things have occurred in the past, while we have no reason to believe that the amount of action was ever much less than at present. Similar considerations apply to nearly all our geological measures of time; and there has been a tendency to exaggerate these, as if geologists were entitled to demand unlimited time, and to stretch the doctrine of uniformity to the utmost. 6. During the whole time referred to by geology, the great laws both of inorganic and organic nature have been the same as at present. The evidence of light and darkness, of sunshine and shower, of summer and winter, and of all the known igneous and aqueous causes of change, extends back almost, and in some of these cases altogether, to the beginning of the Palæozoic period. In like manner the animals and plants of the oldest rocks are constructed on the same physiological and anatomical principles with existing tribes, and they can be arranged in the same genera, orders, or classes, though specifically distinct. The revolutions of the globe have involved no change of the general laws of matter; and though it is possible that geology has carried us back to the time when the laws that regulate life began to operate, it does not show that they were less perfect than now, and it indicates no trace of the beginning of the inorganic laws. Geological changes have resulted not from the institution of new laws, but from new _dispositions_, under existing laws and general arrangements. There is every reason to believe that in the inorganic world these dispositions have required no new creative interpositions during the time to which geology refers, but merely the continued action of the properties bestowed on matter when first produced. In the organic world the case is different. 7. In the succession of animal and vegetable life we find a constant improvement and advance by the introduction of new types of being. We have already given a general outline of this advancement of organized nature. It has consisted in the introduction, from time to time, of new and more highly organized beings, so as at once to increase the variety of nature, and to provide for the elevation of the summit of the graduated scale of life to higher and higher points. At the same time, in each successive period, it has been the law of creation that the forms of life then dominant should attain their highest development, and should then be succeeded by more advanced types. For instance, in the earlier Palæozoic period we have molluscous animals and fishes, then apparently the highest forms of life, appearing with a very advanced organization, not surpassed, if even equalled, in modern times. In the latter part of the same period, some lower forms of vegetable life, now restricted to a comparatively humble place, were employed to constitute magnificent forests. In the Mesozoic period, again, reptiles attained to their highest point in organization and variety of form and employment, while mammalia had as yet scarcely appeared.[146] 8. If now we ask in what manner the succession of life on the earth has been produced, two apparently opposite hypotheses rise before us. The one is that of introduction of new species by creative acts, the other that of development of new species by changes of those previously existing. In one respect the difference of these views is little more than one of expression, for the meaning of the statements depends on what we understand by a species and what by a mere varietal form, and also on what we understand by creation and what we mean by development. Twenty years ago nearly all geologists were believers in creation, though it must be admitted without precisely understanding what they meant by the term. Now, the great impression produced by Darwin's speculations and the prevalence of the evolutionist philosophy have produced a leaning in the other direction. More recently, however, the absurdities into which the extreme evolutionists find themselves driven have produced a reaction; and we hope that views consistent with revelation, or at least with Theism, will again be in the ascendant, and that present controversies will serve to give more precise and definite views than heretofore of the relation of nature to God. As illustrations of the opinions prevalent before the rise of the development theory, I may quote from Pictet and Bronn, two of the most eminent palæontologists. Pictet says, in the introduction to his "Traité de Paléontologie:" "It seems to me impossible that we should admit, as an explanation of the phenomena of successive faunas, the passage of species into one another; the limits of such transitions of species, even supposing that the lapse of a vast period of time may have given them a character of reality much greater than that which the study of existing nature leads us to suppose, are still infinitely within those differences which distinguish two successive faunas. Lastly, we can least of all account by this theory for the appearance of new _types_, to explain the introduction of which we must necessarily, in the present state of science, recur to the idea of distinct creations posterior to the first." The following are the general conclusions of Bronn, in his elaborate and most valuable essay, presented to the French Academy in 1856, as summarized in a notice of the work in the Journal of the Geological Society: "1. The first productions of this power in the oldest Neptunian strata of the earth consisted of Plants, Zoophytes, Mollusks, Crustaceans, and perhaps even Fish; the simultaneous appearance of which, therefore, contradicts the assumption that the more perfect organic forms arose out of the gradual transformation in time of the more imperfect forms. "2. The same power which produced the first organic forms has continued to operate in intensively as well as extensively increasing activity during the whole subsequent geological period, up to the final appearance of man; but here also can no traces be found of a gradual transformation of old species and genera into new; but the new have everywhere appeared as new without the co-operation of the former. "3. In the succession of the different forms of plants and animals, a certain regular course and plan is perceptible, which is quite independent of chance. While all species possess only a limited duration, and must sooner or later disappear, they make way for subsequent new ones, which not only almost always offer an equivalent, in number, organization, and duties to be performed, for those which have disappeared, but which are also generally more varied, and therefore more perfect, and always maintain an equilibrium with each other in their stage of organization, their mode of life, and functions. There always exists, therefore, a certain fixed relation between the newly arising and the disappearing forms of organic life. "4. A similar relation necessarily exists between the newly arising organic forms and the outward conditions of life which prevailed at their first appearance on the earth's surface, or at the place of their appearance. "5. A fixed plan appears to be the basis of the whole series of development of organic forms, in so far as man makes his first appearance at its close, when he finds every thing prepared that is necessary to his own existence and to his progressive development and improvement--which would not have been possible had he appeared at a former period. "6. Such a regular progress in carrying out the same plan from the beginning to the end of a period of millions of years can only be accounted for in one of two ways. Either this course of successive development during millions of years has been the regular immediate result of the systematic action of a conscious Creator, who on every occasion settled and carried out not only the order of appearance, formation, organization, and terrestrial object of each of the countless numbers of species of plants and animals, but also the number of the first individuals, the place of their settlement in every instance, although it was in his power to create every thing at once--or there existed some natural power hitherto entirely unknown to us, which by means of its own laws formed the species of plants and animals, and arranged and regulated all those countless individual conditions; which power, however, must in this case have stood in the most immediate connection with, and in perfect subordination to, those powers which caused the gradually progressing perfection of the crust of the earth, and the gradual development of the outward conditions of life for the constantly increasing numbers and higher classes of organic forms in consequence of this perfection. Only in this way can we explain how the development of the organic world could have regularly kept pace with that of the inorganic. Such a power, although we know it not, would not only be in perfect accordance with all the other functions of nature, but the Creator, who regulated the development of organic nature by means of such a force so implanted in it, as he guides that of the inorganic world by the mere co-operation of attraction and affinity, must appear to us more exalted and imposing than if we assumed that he must always be giving the same care to the introduction and change of the vegetable and animal world on the surface of the earth as a gardener daily bestows on each individual plant in the arrangement of his garden. "7. We therefore believe that all species of plants and animals were originally produced by some natural power unknown to us, and not by transformation from a few original forms, and that that power was in the closest and most necessary connection with those powers and circumstances which effected the perfection of the earth's surface." Barrande also, probably the greatest living palæontologist of Europe, adheres substantially to these views; as Agassiz did, and I believe Hall and Dana still do, in America. I have, for my own part, seen no reason to dissent from these views, though in the sequel I shall endeavor to present some considerations which may tend to reconcile with them some of the hypotheses of a contrary nature now held. It must be admitted, however, that the majority of geologists and biologists have abandoned these views of Pictet and Bronn, and have gone over to the evolutionist philosophy, with how little reason I have endeavored to show elsewhere,[147] and shall farther illustrate in the Appendix. Let it be observed, however, that even evolution does not affect the grand idea of the unity of nature, or the fact that the plan of the Creator in the organic world was so vast that it required the whole duration of our planet, in all its stages of physical existence, to embrace the whole. There is but one system of organic nature; but, to exhibit the whole of it, not only all the climates and conditions now existing are required, but those also of all past geological periods. Further, the progress of nature being mainly in the direction of differentiation of functions once combined, it has a limit backward in the most general forms and conditions, and forward in the most specialized. This is the history of the individual and probably also of the type, of the world itself and of the universe; and for this reason material nature necessarily lacks the eternity of its author. It appears, from the above facts and reasonings, that geology informs us--1. That the materials of our existing continents are of secondary origin, as distinguished from primitive or coeval with the beginning. 2. That a chronological order of formation of these rocks can be made out. 3. That the fossil remains contained in the rocks constitute a chronology of animal and vegetable existence. 4. That the history of the earth may be divided in this way into distinct periods, all pre-Adamite. 5. That the pre-Adamite periods were of enormous duration. 6. That during these periods the existing general laws of nature were in force, though the dispositions of inorganic nature were different in different periods, and the animals and plants of successive periods were also different from each other. 7. The introduction of new species of animals and of plants, while indicating advance in the perfection of nature, does not prove spontaneous development, but rather a definite plan and law of creation. The parallelism of these conclusions of careful inductive inquiry into the structure of the earth's crust, with the results which we have already obtained from revelation, may be summed up under the following heads: 1. Scripture and Science both testify to the great fact that there was a beginning--a time when none of all the parts of the fabric of the universe existed; when the Self-Existent was the sole occupant of space. The Scriptures announce in plain terms this great truth, and thereby rise at once high above atheism, pantheism, and materialism, and lay a broad and sure foundation for a pure and spiritual theology. Had the pen of inspiration written but the words, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," and added no more, these words alone would have borne the impress of their heavenly birth, and would, if received in faith, have done much for the progress of the human mind. These words contain a negation of hero-worship, star-worship, animal-worship, and every other form of idolatry. They still more emphatically deny atheism and materialism, and point upward from nature to its spiritual Creator--the One, the Triune, the Eternal, the Self-Existent, the All-Pervading, the Almighty. They call upon us, as with a voice of thunder, to bow down before that Awful Being of whom it can be said that he created the heavens and the earth. They thus embody the whole essence of natural theology, and most appropriately stand at the entrance of Holy Scripture, referring us to the works which men behold, as the visible manifestation of the attributes of the Being whose spiritual nature is unveiled in revelation. Scripture thus begins with the announcement of a great ultimate fact, to which science conducts us with but slow and timid steps. Yet science, and especially geological science, can bear witness to this great truth. The materialist, reasoning on the fancied stability of natural things, and their inscription within invariable laws, concludes that matter must be eternal. No, replies the geologist, certainly not in its present form. This is but of recent origin, and was preceded by other arrangements. Every existing species can be traced back to a time when it was not; so can the existing continents, mountains, and seas. Under our processes of investigation the present melts away like a dream, and we are landed on the shores of past and unknown worlds. But I read, says the objector, that you can see "no evidence of a beginning, no prospect of an end." It is true, answers geology; but, in so saying, it is not intended that the present state of things had not an ascertained beginning, but that there has been a great and, so far as we know, unlimited series of changes carried on under the guidance of intelligence. These changes we have traced back very far, without being able to say that we have reached the first. We can trace back man and his contemporaries to their origin, and we can reach the points at which still older dynasties of life began to exist. Knowing, then, that all these had a beginning, we infer that if others preceded them they also had a beginning. But, says another objector, is not the present the child of the past? Are not all the creatures that inhabit the earth the lineal descendants of creatures of past periods, or may not the whole be parts of one continual succession, under the operation of an eternal law of development? No, answers geology, species are immutable, except within narrow limits, and do not pass into each other, in tracing them toward their origin. On the contrary, they appear at once in their most perfect state, and continue unchanged till they are forced off the stage of existence to give place to other creatures. The origin of species is a mystery, and belongs to no natural law that has yet been established. Thus, then, stands the case at present. Scripture asserts a beginning and a creation. Science admits these, as far as the objects with which it is conversant extend, and the notions of eternal succession and spontaneous development, discountenanced both by theology and science, are obliged to take refuge in those misty regions where modern philosophical skepticism consorts with the shades of departed heathenism.[148] 2. Both records exhibit the progressive character of creation, and in much the same aspect. The Almighty might have called into existence, by one single momentary act, a world complete in all its parts. From both Scripture and geology we know that he has not done so--why we need not inquire, though we can see that the process employed was that best adapted to show forth the variety of his resources and the infinitely varied elements that enter into the perfect whole. The Scripture history may be viewed as dividing the progress of the creation into two great periods, the later of which only is embraced in the geological record. The first commences with the original chaos, and reaches to the completion of inorganic nature on the fourth day. Had we any geological records of the first of these periods, we should perceive the evidences of slow mutations, tending to the sorting and arrangement of the materials of the earth, and to produce distinct light and darkness, sea and land, atmosphere and cloud, out of what was originally a mixture of the whole. We should also, according to the Scriptural record, find this period interlocking with the next, by the intervention of a great vegetable creation, before the final adjustment of the earth's relations to the other bodies of our system. The second period is that of the creative development of animal life. From both records we learn that various ranks or gradations existed from the first introduction of animals; but that on the earlier stages only certain of the lower forms of animals were present; that these soon attained their highest point, and then gradually, on each succeeding platform, the variety of nature in its higher--the vertebrate--form increased, and the upper margin of animal life attained a more and more elevated point, culminating at length in man; while certain of the older forms were dropped, as no longer required. In the oldest fossiliferous rocks next to the Eozoic, which so far have afforded only Protozoa--e. g., the Cambrian and Lower Silurian--we find the mollusca represented mainly by their highest and lowest classes, by allies of the cuttle-fish and nautilus, and by the lowest bivalve shell-fishes. The Articulata are represented by the highest marine class--the crustaceans--and by the lowest--the worms, which have left their marks on some of the lowest fossiliferous beds. The Radiata, in like manner, are represented by species of their highest class--the starfishes, etc.--and by some of their simpler polyp forms. At the very beginning, then, of the fossiliferous series, the three lower sub-kingdoms exhibit species of their most elevated aquatic classes, though not of the very highest orders in those classes. The vertebrated sub-kingdom has, as far as yet known, no representative in these lowest beds. In the Upper Silurian series, however, we find remains of fishes; and in the succeeding Devonian and carboniferous rocks the fishes rise to the highest structures of their class; and we find several species of reptiles, representing the next of the vertebrated classes in ascending order. Here a very remarkable fact meets us. Before the close of the Palæozoic period the three lower sub-kingdoms and the fishes had already attained the highest perfection of which their types are capable. Multitudes of new species and genera were added subsequently, but none of them rising higher in the scale of organization than those which occur in the Palæozoic rocks. Thenceforth the progressive improvement of the animal kingdom consisted in the addition, first of the reptile, which attained its highest perfection and importance in the Mesozoic period, and then of the bird and mammal, which did not attain their highest forms till the Modern period. This geological order of animal life, it is scarcely necessary to add, agrees perfectly with that sketched by Moses, in which the lower types are completed at once, and the progress is wholly in the higher. In the inspired narrative we have already noticed some peculiarities, as, for instance, the early appearance of a highly developed flora, and the special mention of great reptiles in the work of the fifth day, which correspond with the significant fact that high types of structure appeared at the very introduction of each new group of organized beings--a fact which, more than any other in geology, shows that, in the organic department, elevation has always been a strictly _creative_ work, and that there is in the constitution of animal species no innate tendency to elevation, but that on the contrary we should rather suspect a tendency to degeneracy and ultimate disappearance, requiring that the fiat of the Creator should after a time go out again to "renew the face of the earth." In the natural as in the moral world, the only law of progress is the will and the power of God. In one sense, however, progress in the organic world has been dependent on, though not caused by, progress in the inorganic. We see in geology many grounds for believing that each new tribe of animals or plants was introduced just as the earth became fitted for it; and even in the present world we see that regions composed of the more ancient rocks, and not modified by subsequent disturbances, present few of the means of support for man and the higher animals; while those districts in which various revolutions of the earth have accumulated fertile soils or deposited useful minerals are the chief seats of civilization and population. In like manner we know that those regions which the Bible informs us were the cradle of the human race and the seats of the oldest nations are geologically among the most recent parts of the existing continents, and were no doubt selected by the Creator partly on that account for the birthplace of man. We thus find that the Bible and the geologists are agreed not only as to the fact and order of progress, but also as to its manner and use. 3. Both records agree in affirming that since the beginning there has been but one great system of nature. We can imagine it to have been otherwise. Our existing nature might have been preceded by a state of things having no connection with it. The arrangements of the earth's surface might have been altogether different; races of creatures might have existed having no affinity with or resemblance to those of the present world, and we might have been able to trace no present beneficial consequences as flowing from these past states of our planet. Had geology made such revelations as these, the consequences in relation to natural theology and the credibility of Scripture would have been momentous. The Mosaic narrative could scarcely, in that case, have been interpreted in such a manner as to accord with geological conclusions. The questions would have arisen--Are there more creative Powers than one? If one, is He an imperfect or capricious being who changes his plans of operation? The divine authority of the Scriptures, as well as the unity and perfections of God, might thus have been involved in serious doubts. Happily for us, there is nothing of this kind in the geological history of the earth; as there is manifestly nothing of it in that which is revealed in Scripture. In the Scripture narrative each act of creation prepares for the others, and in its consequences extends to them all. The inspired writer announces the introduction of each new part of creation, and then leaves it without any reference to the various phases which it assumed as the work advanced. In the grand general view which he takes, the land and seas first made represent those of all the following periods. So do the first plants, the first invertebrate animals, the first fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals. He thus assures us that, however long the periods represented by days of creation, the system of nature was one from the beginning. In like manner in the geological record each of the successive conditions of the earth is related to those which precede and those which follow, as part of a series. So also a uniform plan of construction pervades organic nature, and uniform laws the inorganic world in all periods. We can thus include in one system of natural history all animals and plants, fossil as well as recent, and can resolve all inorganic changes into the operation of existing laws. The former of these facts is in its nature so remarkable as almost to warrant the belief of special design. Naturalists had arranged the existing animals and plants, without any reference to fossil species, in kingdoms, sub-kingdoms, classes, orders, families, and genera. Geological research has added a vast number of species not now existing in a living state; yet all these fossils can be inserted within the limits of recognized groups. We do not require to add a new kingdom, sub-kingdom, or class; but, on the contrary, all the fossil genera and species go into the existing divisions, in such a manner as to fill them up precisely where they are most deficient, thus occupying what would otherwise be gaps in the existing system of nature. The principal difficulty which they occasion to the zoologist and botanist is that, by filling the intervals between genera previously widely separated, they give to the whole a degree of continuity which renders it more difficult to decide where the boundaries separating the groups should be placed. We also find that the animals and plants of the earlier periods often combined in one form powers and properties afterward separated in distinct groups; thus in the earlier formations the sauroid fishes unite peculiarities afterward divided between the fish and reptiles, constituting what Agassiz has called a synthetic type. Again, the series of creatures in time accords with the ranks which a study of their types of structure induces the naturalist to assign them in his system; and also within each of the great sub-kingdoms presents many points of accordance with the progress of the embryonic development of the individual animal. Nor is this contradictory to the statement that the earlier representatives of types are often of high and perfect organization, for the progress both in geological time and in the life of the individual is so much one of specialization that an immature animal often presents points of affinity to higher forms that disappear in the adult. In connection with this, earlier organic forms often appear to foreshadow and predict others that are to succeed them in time, as the winged and marine reptiles of the Mesozoic foreshadow the birds and cetaceans. Agassiz has admirably illustrated these links of connection between the past and the present in the essay on classification prefixed to his "Contributions to the Natural History of America." In reference to "prophetic" types, he says: "They appear now like a prophecy in those earlier times of an order of things not possible with the earlier combinations then prevailing in the animal kingdom, but exhibiting in a later period in a striking manner the antecedent consideration of every step in the gradation of animals." 4. The periods into which geology divides the history of the earth are different from those of Scripture, yet when properly understood there is a marked correspondence. Geology refers only to the fifth and sixth days of creation, or, at most, to these with parts of the fourth and seventh, and it divides this portion of the work into several eras, founded on alternations of rock formations and changes in organic remains. The nature of geological evidence renders it probable that many apparently well-marked breaks in the chain may result merely from deficiency in the preserved remains; and consequently that what appear to the geologist to be very distinct periods may in reality run together. The only natural divisions that Scripture teaches us to look for are those between the fifth and sixth days, and those which within these days mark the introduction of new animal forms, as, for instance, the great reptiles of the fifth day. We have already seen that the beginning of the fifth day can be referred almost with certainty to the Palæozoic period. The beginning of the sixth day may with nearly equal certainty be referred to that of the Tertiary era. The introduction of great reptiles and birds in the fifth day synchronizes and corresponds with the beginning of the Mesozoic period; and that of man at the close of the sixth day with the commencement of the Modern era in geology. These four great coincidences are so much more than we could have expected, in records so very different in their nature and origin, that we need not pause to search for others of a more obscure character. It may be well to introduce here a tabular view of this correspondence between the geological and Biblical periods, extending it as far as either record can carry us, and thus giving a complete general view of the origin and history of the world as deduced from revelation and science. In comparing this table with that on page 330, it will be observed that the latter refers to the last half of the creative week only, the earlier half being occupied with physical changes which, however probable inferentially, are not within the scope of geological observation. PARALLELISM OF THE SCRIPTURAL COSMOGONY WITH THE ASTRONOMICAL AND GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE EARTH. ==================================================================== | BIBLICAL ÆONS. | PERIODS DEDUCED FROM SCIENTIFIC | CONSIDERATIONS. -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Beginning. |Creation of Matter. | _First Day._--Earth mantled by |Condensation of Planetary Bodies the Vaporous Deep--Production | from a nebulous mass--Hypothesis of Light. | of original incandescence. | _Second Day._--Earth covered by |Primitive Universal Ocean, and the Waters--Formation of the | establishment of Atmospheric Atmosphere. | equilibrium. | _Third Day._--Emergence of Dry |Elevation of the land which Land--Introduction of | furnished the materials of the Vegetation. | oldest rocks--Eozoic Period of | Geology? | _Fourth Day._--Completion of the |Metamorphism of Eozoic rocks and arrangements of the Solar System.| disturbances preceding the | Cambrian epoch--Present | arrangement of Seasons--Dominion | of "Existing Causes" begins. | _Fifth Day._--Invertebrates and |Palæozoic Period--Reign of Fishes, and afterward great | Invertebrates and Fishes. Reptiles and Birds created. |Mesozoic Period--Reign of | Reptiles. | _Sixth Day._--Introduction of |Tertiary Period--Reign of Mammals. Mammals--Creation of Man and |Post-Tertiary--Existing Mammals Edenic Group of Animals. | and Man. | _Seventh Day._--Cessation of Work |Period of Human History. of Creation--Fall and Redemption | of Man. | | _Eighth Day._--New Heavens and | Earth to succeed the Human Epoch | --"The Rest (Sabbath) that | remains to the People of God." | [149] | ====================================================================== _Note._--The above table is identical with that published in "Archaia" in 1860, and which the author sees no reason now to change. 5. In both records the ocean gives birth to the first dry land, and it is the sea that is first inhabited, yet both lead at least to the suspicion that a state of igneous fluidity preceded the primitive universal ocean. In Scripture the original prevalence of the ocean is distinctly stated, and all geologists are agreed that in the early fossiliferous periods the sea must have prevailed much more extensively than at present. Scripture also expressly states that the waters were the birthplace of the earliest animals, and geology has as yet discovered in the whole Silurian series no terrestrial animal, though marine creatures are extremely abundant; and though air-breathing creatures are found in the later Palæozoic, they are, with the exception of insects, of that semi-amphibious character which is proper to alluvial flats and the deltas of rivers. It is true that the negative evidence collected by geology does not render it altogether impossible that terrestrial animals, even mammals, may have existed in the earliest periods; yet there are, as already pointed out, some positive indications opposed to this. The Scripture, however, commits itself to the statement that the higher land animals did not exist so early, though it must be observed that there is nothing in the Mosaic narrative adverse to the existence of birds, insects, and reptiles in the earlier Palæozoic periods. I have said that the Bible, which informs us of a universal ocean preceding the existence of land, also gives indications of a still earlier period of igneous fluidity or gaseous expansion. Geology also and astronomy have their reasonings and speculations as to the prevalence of such conditions. Here, however, both records become dim and obscure, though it is evident that both point in the same direction, and combine those aqueous and igneous origins which in the last century afforded so fertile ground of one-sided dispute. 6. Both records concur in maintaining what is usually termed the doctrine of existing causes in geology. Scripture and geology alike show that since the beginning of the fifth day, or Palæozoic period, the inorganic world has continued under the dominion of the same causes that now regulate its changes and processes. The sacred narrative gives no hint of any creative interposition in this department after the fourth day; and geology assures us that all the rocks with which it is acquainted have been produced by the same causes that are now throwing down detritus in the bottom of the waters, or bringing up volcanic products from the interior of the earth. This grand generalization, therefore, first worked out in modern times by Sir Charles Lyell, from a laborious collection of the changes occurring in the present state of the world, was, as a doctrine of divine revelation, announced more than three thousand years ago by the Hebrew lawgiver; not for scientific purposes, but as a part of the theology of the Hebrew monotheism. 7. Both records agree in assuring us that death prevailed in the world ever since animals were introduced. The punishment threatened to Adam, and considerations connected with man's state of innocence, have led to the belief that the Bible teaches that the lower animals, as well as man, were exempt from death before the fall. When, however, we find the great _tanninim_, or crocodilian reptiles, created in the fifth day, and beasts of prey on the sixth, we need entertain no doubt on the subject, in so far as Scripture is concerned. The geological record is equally explicit. Carnivorous creatures, with the most formidable powers of destruction, have left their remains in all parts of the geological series; and indeed, up to the introduction of man, the carnivorous fishes, reptiles, and quadrupeds were the lords and tyrants of the earth. There can be little doubt, however, that the introduction of man was the beginning of a change in this respect. A creature destitute of offensive weapons, and subsisting on fruits, was to rule by the power of intellect. As already hinted, it is probable that in Eden he was surrounded by a group of inoffensive animals, and that those creatures which he had cause to dread would have disappeared as he extended his dominion. In this way the law of violent death and destruction which prevailed under the dynasties of the fish, the reptile, and the carnivorous mammifer would ultimately have been abrogated; and under the milder sway of man life and peace would have reigned in a manner to which our knowledge of pre-Adamite and present nature may afford no adequate key. Be this as it may, on the important point of the original prevalence of death among the lower animals both records are at one. 8. In the department of "final causes," as they have been termed, Scripture and geology unite in affording large and interesting views. They illustrate the procedure of the All-wise Creator during a long succession of ages, and thus enable us to see the effects of any of his laws, not only at one time, but in far distant periods. To reject the consideration of this peculiarity of geological science would be the extremest folly, and would involve at once a misinterpretation of the geologic record and a denial of the agency of an intelligent Designer as revealed in Scripture, and indicated by the succession of beings. Many of the past changes of the earth acquire their full significance only when taken in connection with the present wants of the earth's inhabitants; and along the whole course of the geological history the creatures that we meet with are equally rich in the evidences of nice adaptation to circumstances and wonderful contrivances for special ends, with their modern representatives. As an example of the former, how wonderful is the connection of the great vegetable accumulations of the ancient coal swamps, and the bands and nodules of iron-stone which were separated from the ferruginous sands or clays in their vicinity by the action of this very vegetable matter, with the whole fabric of modern civilization, and especially with the prosperity of that race which, in our time, stands in the front of the world's progress. In a very ancient period, wide swamps and deltas, teeming with vegetable life, and which, if they now existed, would be but pestilent breeders of miasmata, spread over large tracts of the northern hemisphere, on which marine animals had previously accumulated thick sheets of limestone. Vast beds of vegetable matter were collected by growth in these swamps, and the waste particles that passed off in the form of organic acids were employed in concentrating the oxide of iron in underlying clays and sands. In the lapse of ages the whole of these accumulations were buried deep in the crust of the earth; and long periods succeeded, when the earth was tenanted by reptilian and other creatures, unconscious of the treasures beneath them. The modern period arrived. The equable climate of the coal era had passed away. Continents were prepared for the residence of man, and the edges of the old carboniferous beds were exposed by subterranean movements, and laid bare by denudation. Man was introduced, fell from his state of innocence, and was condemned to earn his subsistence by the sweat of his brow; and now for the first time appears the use of these buried coal swamps. They now afford at once the materials of improvement in the arts and of comfortable subsistence in extreme climates, and subjects of surpassing interest to the naturalist. Similar instances may be gleaned by the natural theologian from nearly every part of the geological history. Lastly. Both records represent man as the last of God's works, and the culminating-point of the whole creation. We have already had occasion to refer to this as a result of zoology, geology, and Scriptural exegesis, and may here confine ourselves to the moral consequences of this great truth. Man is the capital of the column; and, if marred and defaced by moral evil, the symmetry of the whole is to be restored, not by rejecting him altogether, like the extinct species of the ancient world, and replacing him by another, but by re-casting him in the image of his Divine Redeemer. Man, though recently introduced, is to exist eternally. He is, in one or another state of being, to be witness of all future changes of the earth. He has before him the option of being one with his Maker, and sharing in a future glorious and finally renovated condition of our planet, or of sinking into endless degradation. Such is the great spiritual drama of man's fate to be acted out on the theatre of the world. Every human being must play his part in it, and the present must decide what that part shall be. The Bible bases these great foreshadowings of the future on its own peculiar evidence; yet I may venture humbly to maintain that its harmony with natural science, as far as the latter can ascend, gives to the Word of God a pre-eminent claim on the attention of the naturalist. The Bible, unlike every other system of religious doctrine, fears no investigation or discussion. It courts these. "While science," says a modern divine,[150] "is fatal to superstition, it is fortification to a Scriptural faith. The Bible is the bravest of books. Coming from God, and conscious of nothing but God's truth, it awaits the progress of knowledge with calm security. It watches the antiquary ransacking among classic ruins, and rejoices in every medal he discovers and every inscription he deciphers; for from that rusty coin or corroded marble it expects nothing but confirmations of its own veracity. In the unlocking of an Egyptian hieroglyphic or the unearthing of some implement it hails the resurrection of so many witnesses; and with sparkling elation it follows the botanist as he scales Mount Lebanon, or the zoologist as he makes acquaintance with the beasts of the Syrian desert; or the traveller as he stumbles on a long-lost Petra or Nineveh or Babylon. And from the march of time it fears no evil, but calmly abides the fulfilment of those prophecies and the forthcoming of those events with whose predicted story inspiration has already inscribed its page. It is not light but darkness which the Bible deprecates; and if men of piety were also men of science, and if men of science were to search the Scriptures, there would be more faith in the earth, and also more philosophy." The reader has, I trust, found in the preceding pages sufficient evidence that the Bible has nothing to dread from the revelations of geology, but much to hope in the way of elucidation of its meaning and confirmation of its truth. If convinced of this, I trust that he will allow me now to ask for the warnings, promises, and predictions of the Book of God his entire confidence; and, in conclusion, to direct his attention to the glorious prospects which it holds forth to the human race, and to every individual of it who, in humility and self-renunciation, casts himself in faith on that Divine Redeemer who is at once the creator of the heavens and the earth, and the brother and the friend of the penitent and the contrite. That same old book, which carries back our view to those ancient conditions of our planet which preceded not only the creation of man, but the earliest periods of which science has cognizance, likewise carries our minds forward into the farthest depths of futurity, and shows that all present things must pass away. It reveals to us a new heaven and a new earth, which are to replace those now existing; when the Eternal Son of God, the manifestation of the Father equally in creation and redemption, shall come forth conquering and to conquer, and shall sweep away into utter extinction all the blood-stained tyrannies of the present earth, even as he has swept away the brute dynasties of the pre-Adamite world, and shall establish a reign of peace, of love, and of holiness that shall never pass away: when the purified sons of Adam, rejoicing in immortal youth and happiness, shall be able to look back with enlarged understandings and grateful hearts on the whole history of creation and redemption, and shall join their angelic brethren in the final and more ecstatic repetition of that hymn of praise with which the heavenly hosts greeted the birth of our planet. May God in his mercy grant that he who writes and they who read may "stand in their lot at the end of the days" and enjoy the full fruition of these glorious prospects. APPENDIX. A.--TRUE AND FALSE EVOLUTION. The term "evolution" need not in itself be a bugbear on theological grounds. The Bible writers would, I presume, have no objection to it if understood to mean the development of the plans of the Creator in nature. That kind of evolution to which they would object, and to which enlightened reason also objects, is the spontaneous evolution of nothing into atoms and force, and of these into all the wonderful and complicated plan of nature, without any guiding mind. Farther, biological and palæontological science, as well as the Bible, object to the derivation of living things from dead matter by merely natural means, because this can not be proved to be possible, and to the production of the series of organic forms found as fossils in the rocks of the earth by the process of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, because this does not suffice to account for the complex phenomena presented by this succession. With reference to the testimony of palæontology, I have in other publications developed this very fully; and would here merely quote the summing up of the argument, as given in my Address of 1875 before the American Association for the Advancement of Science: "I have thus far said nothing of the bearing of the prevalent ideas of descent with modification on this wonderful procession of life. None of these of course can be expected to take us back to the origin of living beings; but they also fail to explain why so vast numbers of highly organized species struggle into existence simultaneously in one age and disappear in another; why no continuous chain of succession in time can be found gradually blending species into each other; and why in the natural succession of things degradation under the influence of external conditions and final extinction seem to be laws of organic existence. It is useless here to appeal to the imperfection of the record or to the movements or migrations of species. The record is now in many important parts too complete, and the simultaneousness of the entrance of the faunas and floras too certainly established, and moving species from place to place only evades the difficulty. The truth is that such hypotheses are at present premature, and that we require to have larger collections of facts. Independently of this, however, it appears to me that from a philosophical point of view it is extremely probable that all theories of evolution as at present applied to life are fundamentally defective in being too partial in their character; and perhaps I can not better group the remainder of the facts to which I wish to refer than by using them to illustrate this feature of most of the later attempts at generalization on this subject. "First, then, these hypotheses are too partial in their tendency to refer numerous and complex phenomena to one cause, or to a few causes only, when all trustworthy analogy would indicate that they must result from many concurrent forces and determinations of force. We have all no doubt read those ingenious, not to say amusing, speculations in which some entomologists and botanists have indulged with reference to the mutual relations of flowers and haustellate insects. Geologically the facts oblige us to begin with cryptogamous plants and mandibulate insects, and out of the desire of insects for non-existent honey, and the adaptations of plants to the requirements of non-existent suctorial apparatus, we have to evolve the marvellous complexity of floral form and coloring, and the exquisitely delicate apparatus of the mouths of haustellate insects. Now when it is borne in mind that this theory implies a mental confusion on our part precisely similar to that which in the department of mechanics actuates the seekers for perpetual motion, that we have not the smallest tittle of evidence that the changes required have actually occurred in any one case, and that the thousands of other structures and relations of the plant and the insect have to be worked out by a series of concurrent evolutions so complex and absolutely incalculable in the aggregate that the cycles and epicycles of the Ptolemaic astronomy were child's play in comparison, we need not wonder that the common-sense of mankind revolts against such fancies, and that we are accused of attempting to construct the universe by methods that would baffle Omnipotence itself, because they are simply absurd. In this aspect of them indeed such speculations are necessarily futile, because no mind can grasp all the complexities of even any one case, and it is useless to follow out an imaginary line of development which unexplained facts must contradict at every step. This is also no doubt the reason why all recent attempts at constructing 'Phylogenies' are so changeable, and why no two experts can agree about the details of any of them. "A second aspect in which such speculations are too partial is in the unwarranted use which they make of analogy. It is not unusual to find such analogies as that between the embryonic development of the individual animal and the succession of animals in geological time placed on a level with that reasoning from analogy by which geologists apply modern causes to explain geological formations. No claim could be more unfounded. When the geologist studies ancient limestones built up of the remains of corals, and then applies the phenomena of modern coral reefs to explain their origin, he brings the latter to bear on the former by an analogy which includes not merely the apparent results, but the causes at work, and the conditions of their action, and it is on this that the validity of his comparison depends, in so far as it relates to similarity of mode of formation. But when we compare the development of an animal from an embryo cell with the progress of animals in time, though we have a curious analogy as to the steps of the process, the conditions and causes at work are known to be altogether dissimilar, and therefore we have no evidence whatever as to identity of cause, and our reasoning becomes at once the most transparent of fallacies. Farther, we have no right here to overlook the fact that the conditions of the embryo are determined by those of a previous adult, and that no sooner does this hereditary potentiality produce a new adult animal than the terrible external agencies of the physical world, in presence of which all life exists, begin to tell on the organism, and after a struggle of longer or shorter duration it succumbs to death, and its substance returns into inorganic nature--a law from which even the longer life of the species does not seem to exempt it. All this is so plain and manifest that it is extraordinary that evolutionists will continue to use such partial and imperfect arguments. Another example may be taken from that application of the doctrine of natural selection to explain the introduction of species in geological time, which is so elaborately discussed by Sir C. Lyell in the last edition of his 'Principles of Geology.' The great geologist evidently leans strongly to the theory, and claims for it the 'highest degree of probability;' yet he perceives that there is a serious gap in it, since no modern fact has ever proved the origin of a new species by modification. Such a gap, if it existed in those grand analogies by which we explain geological formations through modern causes, would be admitted to be fatal. "A third illustration of the partial character of these hypotheses may be taken from the use made of the theory deduced from modern physical discoveries, that life must be merely a product of the continuous operation of physical laws. The assumption, for it is nothing more, that the phenomena of life are produced merely by some arrangement of physical forces, even if it be admitted to be true, gives only a partial explanation of the possible origin of life. It does not account for the fact that life as a force or combination of forces is set in antagonism to all other forces. It does not account for the marvellous connection of life with organization. It does not account for the determination and arrangement of forces implied in life. A very simple illustration may make this plain. If the problem to be solved were the origin of the mariner's compass, one might assert that it is wholly a physical arrangement both as to matter and force. Another might assert that it involves mind and intelligence in addition. In some sense both would be right. The properties of magnetic force and of iron or steel are purely physical, and it might even be within the bounds of possibility that somewhere in the universe a mass of natural loadstone may have been so balanced as to swing in harmony with the earth's magnetism. Yet we would surely be regarded as very credulous if we could be induced to believe that the mariner's compass has originated in that way. This argument applies with a thousandfold greater force to the origin of life, which involves even in its simplest forms so many more adjustments of force and so much more complex machinery. "Fourthly, these hypotheses are partial, inasmuch as they fail to account for the vastly varied and correlated interdependencies of natural things and forces, and for the unity of plan which pervades the whole. These can be explained only by taking into the account another element from without. Even when it professes to admit the existence of a God, the evolutionist reasoning of our day contents itself altogether with the physical or visible universe, and leaves entirely out of sight the power of the unseen and spiritual, as if this were something with which science has nothing to do, but which belongs only to imagination or sentiment. So much has this been the case, that when recently a few physicists and naturalists have turned to this aspect of the case, they have seemed to be teaching new and startling truths, though only reviving some of the oldest and most permanent ideas of our race. From the dawn of human thought it has been the conclusion alike of philosophers, theologians, and the common-sense of mankind that the seen can be explained only by reference to the unseen, and that any merely physical theory of the world is necessarily partial. This, too, is the position of our sacred Scriptures, and is broadly stated in their opening verse; and indeed it lies alike at the basis of all true religion and all sound philosophy, for it must necessarily be that 'the things that are seen are temporal, the things that are unseen eternal.' With reference to the primal aggregation of energy in the visible universe, with reference to the introduction of life, with reference to the soul of man, with reference to the heavenly gifts of genius and prophecy, with reference to the introduction of the Saviour himself into the world, and with reference to the spiritual gifts and graces of God's people--all these spring not from sporadic acts of intervention, but from the continuous action of God and the unseen world, and this we must never forget is the true ideal of creation in Scripture and in sound theology. Only in such exceptional and little influential philosophies as that of Democritus, and in the speculations of a few men carried off their balance by the brilliant physical discoveries of our age, has this necessarily partial and imperfect view been adopted. Never, indeed, was its imperfection more clear than in the light of modern science. "Geology, by tracing back all present things to their origin, was the first science to establish on a basis of observed facts the necessity of a beginning and end of the world. But even physical science now teaches us that the visible world is a vast machine for the dissipation of energy; that the processes going on in it must have had a beginning in time, and that all things tend to a final and helpless equilibrium. This necessity implies an unseen power, an invisible universe, in which the visible universe must have originated, and to which its energy is ever returning. The hiatus between the seen and the unseen may be bridged over by the conceptions of atomic vortices of force, and by the universal and continuous ether; but whether or not, it has become clear that the conception of the unseen as existing has become necessary to our belief in the possible existence of the physical universe itself, even without taking life into the account. "It is in the domain of life, however, that this necessity becomes most apparent; and it is in the plant that we first clearly perceive a visible testimony to that unseen which is the counterpart of the seen. Life in the plant opposes the outward rush of force in our system, arrests a part of it on its way, fixes it as potential energy, and thus, forming a mere eddy, so to speak, in the process of dissipation of energy, it accumulates that on which animal life and man himself may subsist, and asserts for a time supremacy over the seen and temporal on behalf of the unseen and eternal. I say for a time, because life is, in the visible universe, as at present constituted, but a temporary exception, introduced from that unseen world where it is no longer the exception, but the eternal rule. In a still higher sense, then, than that in which matter and force testify to a Creator, organization and life, whether in the plant, the animal, or man, bear the same testimony, and exist as outposts put forth in the succession of ages from that higher heaven that surrounds the visible universe. In them, too, Almighty power is no doubt conditioned or limited by law, yet they bear more distinctly upon them the impress of their Maker; and, while all explanations of the physical universe which refuse to recognize its spiritual and unseen origin must necessarily be partial and in the end incomprehensible, this destiny falls more quickly and surely on the attempt to account for life and its succession on merely materialistic principles. "Here again, however, I must remind you that creation, as maintained against such materialistic evolution, whether by theology, philosophy, or Holy Scripture, is necessarily a continuous, nay, an eternal influence, not an intervention of disconnected acts. It is the true continuity, which includes and binds together all other continuity. "It is here that natural science meets with theology, not as an antagonist, but as a friend and ally in its time of greatest need; and I must here record my belief that neither men of science nor theologians have a right to separate what God in Holy Scripture has joined together, or to build up a wall between nature and religion, and write upon it 'no thoroughfare.' The science that does this must be impotent to explain nature, and without hold on the higher sentiments of man. The theology that does this must sink into mere superstition. "In conclusion, can we formulate a few of the general laws, or perhaps I had better call them general conclusions, respecting life, in which all palæontologists may agree? Perhaps it is not possible to do this at present satisfactorily, but the attempt may do no harm. We may, then, I think, make the following affirmations: "1. The existence of life and organization on the earth is not eternal, nor even coeval with the beginning of the physical universe, but may possibly date from Laurentian or immediately pre-Laurentian times. "2. The introduction of new species of animals and plants has been a continuous process, not necessarily in the sense of derivation of one species from another, but in the higher sense of the continued operation of the cause or causes which introduced life at first. This, as already stated, I take to be the true theological or Scriptural as well as scientific idea of what we ordinarily and somewhat loosely term creation. "3. Though thus continuous, the process has not been uniform; but periods of rapid production of species have alternated with others in which many disappeared and few were introduced. This may have been an effect of physical cycles reacting on the progress of life. "4. Species, like individuals, have greater energy and vitality in their younger stages, and rapidly assume all their varietal forms, and extend themselves as widely as external circumstances will permit. Like individuals also, they have their periods of old age and decay, though the life of some species has been of enormous duration in comparison with that of others; the difference appearing to be connected with degrees of adaptation to different conditions of life. "5. Many allied species, constituting groups of animals and plants, have made their appearance at once in various parts of the earth, and these groups have obeyed the same laws with the individual and the species in culminating rapidly, and then slowly diminishing, though a large group once introduced has rarely disappeared altogether. "6. Groups of species, as genera and orders, do not usually begin with their highest or lowest forms, but with intermediate and generalized types, and they show a capacity for both elevation and degradation in their subsequent history. "7. The history of life presents a progress from the lower to the higher, and from the simpler to the more complex, and from the more generalized to the more specialized. In this progress new types are introduced and take the place of the older ones, which sink to a relatively subordinate place and become thus degraded. But the physical and organic changes have been so correlated and adjusted that life has not only always maintained its existence, but has been enabled to assume more complex forms, and that older forms have been made to prepare the way for newer, so that there has been on the whole a steady elevation culminating in man himself. Elevation and specialization have, however, been secured at the expense of vital energy and range of adaptation, until the new element of a rational and inventive nature was introduced in the case of man. "8. In regard to the larger and more distinct types, we can not find evidence that they have, in their introduction, been preceded by similar forms connecting them with previous groups; but there is reason to believe that many supposed representative species in successive formations are really only races or varieties. "9. In so far as we can trace their history, specific types are permanent in their characters from their introduction to their extinction, and their earlier varietal forms are similar to their later ones. "10. Palæontology furnishes no direct evidence, perhaps never can furnish any, as to the actual transformation of one species into another, or as to the actual circumstances of creation of a species, but the drift of its testimony is to show that species come in _per saltum_, rather than by any slow and gradual process. "11. The origin and history of life can not, any more than the origin and determination of matter and force, be explained on purely material grounds, but involve the consideration of power referable to the unseen and spiritual world. "Different minds may state these principles in different ways, but I believe that, in so far as palæontology is concerned, in substance they must hold good, at least as steps to higher truths." B.--EVOLUTION AND CREATION BY LAW. Evolutionist writers have a great horror of what they term "intervention." But they should be informed that the idea of a planning Creator does not involve intervention in an extraordinary or miraculous sense, any more than what we call the ordinary operations of nature. It is a common but childish prejudice that every discovery of a secondary cause diminishes so much of what is to be referred to the agency of God. On the contrary, such discoveries merely aid us in comprehending the manner of his action. But when evolutionists, in their zeal to get rid of creative intervention, trace all things to the interaction of insensate causes, they fall into the absurdity of believing in absolute unmitigated chance as the cause of perfect order. Evidences of this may be found by the score in Darwin's works on the origin of species. I quote, however, from another and usually clear thinker, Wallace, in a review of the Duke of Argyll's "Reign of Law," which appeared some years ago, but represents very well this phase of thought: "'It is curious,' says the Duke of Argyll, 'to observe the language which this most advanced disciple of pure naturalism [Mr. Darwin] instinctively uses, when he has to describe the complicated structure of this curious order of plants [the Orchids]. Caution in ascribing intentions to nature does not seem to occur to him as possible. Intention is the one thing which he does see, and which, when he does not see, he seeks for diligently until he finds it. He exhausts every form of words and of illustration by which intention or mental purpose can be described. 'Contrivance'--'curious contrivance'--'beautiful contrivance'--these are expressions which occur over and over again. Here is one sentence describing the parts of a particular species: 'the labellum is developed into a long nectary, _in order_ to attract lepidoptera, and we shall presently give reason for suspecting that the nectar is _purposely_ so lodged that it can be sucked only slowly, _in order_ to give time for the curious chemical quality of this viscid matter setting hard and dry.'" Many other examples of similar expressions are quoted by the duke, who maintains that no explanation of these "contrivances" has been or can be given, except on the supposition of a personal contriver, specially arranging the details of each case, although causing them to be produced by the ordinary processes of growth and reproduction. "Now there is a difficulty in this view of the origin of the structure of orchids which the duke does not allude to. The majority of flowering plants are fertilized, either without the agency of insects, or, when insects are required, without any very important modification of the structure of the flower. It is evident, therefore, that flowers might have been formed as varied, fantastic, and beautiful as the orchids, and yet have been fertilized by insects in the same manner as violets or clover or primroses, or a thousand other flowers. The strange springs and traps and pitfalls found in the flowers of orchids can not be necessary _per se_, since exactly the same end is gained in ten thousand other flowers which do not possess them. Is it not, then, an extraordinary idea to imagine the Creator of the universe _contriving_ the various complicated parts of these flowers as a mechanic might contrive an ingenious toy or a difficult puzzle? Is it not a more worthy conception that they are some of the results of those general laws which were so co-ordinated at the first introduction of life upon the earth as to result necessarily in the utmost possible development of varied forms?" A moment's thought is sufficient to show that there is no essential difference between the Creator contriving every detail of the structure of an orchid and his producing it through some intermediate cause, or his commanding it into existence by his almighty word. The same mental process, so to speak, of the contriver is implied in either case. But there is an immeasurable difference between any of those ideas and that of the orchid producing its parts spontaneously under the operation of insensate physical law, whatever that may be, alone. Again, in the same review, Wallace writes: "The uncertainty of opinion among naturalists as to which are species and which varieties is one of Mr. Darwin's very strong arguments that these two names can not belong to things quite distinct in nature and origin. The reviewer says that this argument is of no weight, because the works of man present exactly the same phenomena, and he instances patent inventions, and the excessive difficulty of determining whether they are new or old. I accept the analogy, and maintain that it is all in favor of Mr. Darwin's views; for are not all inventions of the same kind directly affiliated to a common ancestor. Are not improved steam-engines or clocks the lineal descendants of some existing steam-engine or clock? Is there ever a new creation in art or science any more than in nature? Did ever patentee absolutely originate any complete and entire invention no portion of which was derived from any thing that had been made or described before? It is, therefore, clear that the difficulty of distinguishing the various classes of inventions which claim to be new is of the same nature as the difficulty of distinguishing varieties and species, because neither are absolute new creations, but both are alike descendants of pre-existing forms, from which and from each other they differ by varying and often imperceptible degrees. It appears, then, that however plausible this writer's objections may seem, whenever he descends from generalities to any specific statement his supposed difficulties turn out to be in reality strongly confirmatory of Mr. Darwin's view." Now that improved steam-engines are lineal descendants of other steam-engines is absolute nonsense, in any other aspect than that the structure of one suggested the structure of another to a contriving mind. We need not affirm this of God; but we may affirm that the plans of the creative mind constitute the true link of connection between the different states and developments of inorganic and organic objects. This is the real meaning of creation by law, as distinguished from mere chance on the one hand, and arbitrary and capricious intervention on the other. Both of these extremes are equally illogical; and it can not be too frequently repeated that divine revelation avoids both by maintaining with equal firmness the agency of the Creator, and that agency not capricious, but according to plan and purpose; embracing not merely the action of the divine mind itself, but under it of all the forces and material things created. C.--MODES OF CREATION. A question often asked, but not easily answered, with reference to the creation of animals and plants, is--What was its precise method, and to what extent is such intervention conceivable. This is, it is true, not a properly scientific question, since science can not inform us of the act of creation. Nor is it properly a theological one, since revelation appeals to our faith in the facts, without giving us much information as to the mode. It can, therefore, be answered only conjecturally, except in so far as the law or plan of creation can be inferred from what is known, either from science or revelation, as to the history of life. We may, in the first place, assume that law or plan must characterize creation. The Scriptural idea of it is not reconcilable with the supposition of a series of arbitrary acts any more than the scientific idea. The nature of these laws, as disclosed by Palæontology, has been already considered in a preceding part of this Appendix. What we may conjecture as to the nature of the creative act itself, from a comparison of nature and revelation, may be summed up as follows: 1. If we reduce organized beings to their ultimate organisms--cells or plastids--and with Spencer and Haeckel suppose these to be farther divisible into still smaller particles or plastidules, each composed of several complex particles of albumen or protoplasm, we may suppose the primary act of creation to consist in the aggregation of molecules of albuminous matter into such plastidules bearing the same relations, as "manufactured articles," to the future cell that inorganic molecules bear to crystals, and possessing within themselves the potencies of organic forms. This is the nearest approach that we can make to the primary creative act, and its scientific basis is merely hypothetical, while revelation gives us no intimation as to any such constitution of organized matter. 2. The formulæ in Genesis, "Let the land produce," and "Let the waters produce," imply some sort of mediate creation through the agency of the land and the waters, but of what sort we have no means of knowing. They include, however, the idea of the origin of the lower and humbler forms of life from material pre-existing in inorganic nature, and also the idea of the previous preparation of the land and the waters for the sustenance of the creatures produced. 3. The expression in the case of man--"out of the dust"--would seem to intimate that the human body was constituted of merely elementary matter, without any previous preparation in organic forms. It may, however, be intended merely to inform us that, while the spirit is in the image of God, the bodily frame is "of the earth earthy," and in no respect different in general nature from that of the inferior animals. 4. The Bible indicates some ways in which creatures may be modified or changed into new species, or may give rise to new forms of life. The human body is, we are told, capable of transformation into a new or spiritual body, different in many important respects, and the future general prevalence of this change is an article of religious faith. The Bible represents the woman as produced from the man by a species of fission, not known to us as a natural possibility, except in some of the lower forms of life. The birth of the Saviour is represented as having been by parthenogenesis, and if it had pleased God that Jesus was to remain on earth as the progenitor of a new and higher type of man to replace that now existing, this might be regarded as the introduction of a new species. To what extent the Creator may have so acted on the constitution of organized beings as to produce changes of this kind we have no means of knowing; but if he have done so, we may be sure that it has been in accordance with some definite plan or law. 5. We have a right to infer from Scripture that there must be some creative law which provides for the introduction of species, _de novo_, from unorganized matter, and which has been or is called into action by conditions as yet altogether unknown to us, and as yet inimitable, and therefore in some sense miraculous. Whether we shall ever by scientific investigation discover the law of this kind of divine intervention it is impossible to say. That all the theories of spontaneous generation and derivation hitherto promulgated are but wild guesses at it is but too evident. 6. Since in inorganic nature we meet with such ultimate facts as atoms of different kinds and with different properties; and ether of non-atomic constitution, all of which seem to be necessary to the existence of the world as it is, we may expect in like manner to find at the basis of organic structures and phenomena varied kinds of ultimate organisms and forces, probably much more complicated than those of inorganic nature. The broad simplicity of existing theories of derivation and evolution is thus in itself a presumption against their truth, except as very partial explanations. 7. We have no right to consider the species "after their kinds" of revelation as coincident with the species recognized by science. Many of these may be merely races, the production of which in the course of time and in special circumstances may fall within the powers of created species, and which may merely be the phases of such species in time and place. Only the accumulation of vast additional stores of facts can enable us to have any certain opinion on this point, and till it is settled the doctrine of derivation must remain purely hypothetical. 8. The inference of evolutionists that because certain forms of life succeed each other in geological time, they must have been derived from each other, has an aspect of truth and simplicity; but the idea of law or plan in creation suggests that the link of connection may be of a less direct nature than mere descent with modification. This has been referred to under a previous head. 9. In the scheme of revelation all the successions and changes of organized beings, just as much as their introduction at first, belong to the will and plan of God. Revelation opposes no obstacle to any scientific investigation of the nature and method of this plan, nor does it contemplate the idea that any discoveries of this kind in any way isolate the Creator from his works. Farther, inasmuch as God is always present in all his works, one part of his procedure can scarcely be considered an "intervention" any more than another. 10. As an illustration of the hypothetical condition of this subject, and of the views which may be taken as to its details, I quote from a memoir of my own certain conclusions with reference to the origin of the species of land plants which are found in the older geological formations. The conclusions stated are at the end of a detailed consideration of these plants and the circumstances of their occurrence: "(1.) Some of the forms reckoned as specific in the Devonian and Carboniferous formations may be really derivative races. There are indications that such races may have originated in one or more of the following ways: (_a_) By a natural tendency in synthetic types to become specialized in the direction of one or other of their constituent elements. In this way such plants as _Arthrostigma_ and _Psilophyton_ may have assumed new varietal forms. (_b_) By embryonic retardation or acceleration,[151] whereby certain species may have had their maturity advanced or postponed, thus giving them various grades of perfection in reproduction and complexity of structure. The fact that so many Erian and Carboniferous plants seem to be on the confines of the groups of Acrogens and Gymnosperms may be supposed favorable to such exchanges. (_c_) The contraction and breaking up of floras which occurred in the Middle Erian and Lower Carboniferous may have been eminently favorable to the production of such varietal forms as would result from what has been called the 'struggle for existence.' (_d_) The elevation of a great expanse of new land at the close of the Middle Erian and the beginning of the Coal period would, by permitting the extension of series over wide areas and fertile soils, and by removing the pressure previously existing, be eminently favorable to the production of new, and especially of improved, varieties. "(2.) Whatever importance we may attach to the above supposed causes of change, we still require to account for the origin of our specific types. This may forever elude our observation, but we may at least hope to ascertain the external conditions favorable to their production. In order to attain even to this it will be necessary to inquire critically, with reference to every acknowledged species, what its claims to distinctness are, so that we may be enabled to distinguish specific types from mere varieties. Having attained to some certainty in this, we may be prepared to inquire whether the conditions favorable to the appearance of new varieties were also those favorable to the creation of new types, or the reverse--whether these conditions were those of compression or expansion, or to what extent the appearance of new types may be independent of any external conditions, other than those absolutely necessary for their existence. I am not without hope that the further study of fossil plants may enable us thus to approach to a comprehension of the laws of the creation, as distinguished from those of the continued existence of species. "In the present state of our knowledge we have no good ground either to limit the number of specific types beyond what a fair study of our material may warrant, or to infer that such primitive types must necessarily have been of low grade, or that progress in varietal forms has always been upward. The occurrence of such an advanced and specialized type as that of _Syringoxylon_ in the Middle Devonian should guard us against these errors. The creative process may have been applicable to the highest as well as to the lowest forms, and subsequent deviations must have included degradation as well as elevation. I can conceive nothing more unreasonable than the statement sometimes made that it is illogical or even absurd to suppose that highly organized beings could have been produced except by derivation from previously existing organisms. This is begging the whole question at issue, depriving science of a noble department of inquiry on which it has as yet barely entered, and anticipating by unwarranted assertions conclusions which may perhaps suddenly dawn upon us through the inspiration of some great intellect, or may for generations to come baffle the united exertions of all the earnest promoters of natural science. Our present attitude should not be that of dogmatists, but that of patient workers content to labor for a harvest of grand generalizations which may not come till we have passed away, but which, if we are earnest and true to nature and its Creator, may reward even some of us."[152] D.--PRESENT CONDITION OF THEORIES OF LIFE. One of the most learned and ingenious essays on this subject recently published[153] states on its first page that all the varieties of opinion may be summed up under two heads: "1. Those which require the addition to ordinary matter of an immaterial or spiritual essence, substance, or power, general or local, whose presence is the efficient cause of life; and, "2. Those which attribute the phenomena of life solely to the mode of combination of the ordinary material elements of which the organism is composed, without the addition of any such immaterial essence, power, or force." It is quite true that physiologists have up to this time argued out these two alternatives, and that at present the second is probably the more prevalent. It is however also true that neither includes or can possibly include the whole truth, and that enlightened theism may enable us to hold both, or all that is true in either. Undoubtedly we must hold that a higher spiritual power or Creator is necessary to the existence of life; but then this is necessary also to the existence of dead matter and force. So that if physiologists think proper to trace the whole phenomena of life to material causes, they do not on that account in any way invalidate the evidence for a spiritual Creator, nor for a spiritual element in the higher nature of man. Yet so inconceivably shallow is much of the biological reasoning of the day, that it is quite common to find physiologists referring all life to spontaneous and uncaused material agencies, because they have concluded that the arrangements of matter and force are sufficient to explain it; and, on the other hand, to find theistic writers accusing physiology of materialism, if it finds the causes of vital phenomena in material forces, as if God could be present only in those processes which we can not understand. What we really know as to the material basis of life may be summed up in a few words. Chemically, life is based on compounds of the albuminous group. These are highly complex in a molecular point of view, and seem to be formed in nature only where certain structures, those of the vegetable cell, exist under certain conditions. These albuminous substances do not necessarily possess vital properties. They may exist in a dead state just as other substances. Under certain conditions, however, those of forming part of a so-called living organism, they present phenomena of mechanical movement and molecular change, and of transformation or transmission of force, which enable them to transform themselves into various kinds of tissues, to nourish these when formed, and to establish a consensus of action between different parts of the organism; and these properties are vastly varied in detail according to the kind of organism in which they take place, and the conditions under which the organism exists. The actually living matter presents no distinct structure recognizable by the microscope, and can not be distinguished chemically from ordinary albumen or protoplasm; but when living it must either exist in some peculiar and complex molecular arrangement unknown as yet to chemistry and physics, or must be actuated by some force or form of force called vital, and not as yet isolated or reduced to known laws or correlation. It does not concern theism or theology which of these may eventually prove to be the true view, or if it should be found, which is quite possible, that there is no real difference between them. In any case it is certain that in the lower animals, and in the merely physiological properties of man himself, living matter may act independently of any higher spiritual nature in the individual, though of course not independently of the higher power of God, which gave matter its properties and sustains them in their action. It is farther certain that in man the spiritual nature dominates and controls the vital, except when under abnormal conditions the latter unduly gains the mastery, and quenches altogether the spirit. In the language of the Bible, the merely vital endowments of the man belong to the flesh ([Greek: sarx]), and to the rational mind or soul ([Greek: psychê]). The higher nature which man derives directly from God is the spirit ([Greek: pneuma]). Either of these parts of the complex humanity is capable of life ([Greek: zôê]) and of immortality. Either of them is capable of being in a state of death, though the import of this differs in its application to each. In Genesis, the body is composed of the ordinary earth-materials--the "dust of the ground." The higher nature is seen in the "shadow and likeness of God," and in the inbreathing of the Divine Spirit whereby man became a "living soul" in a higher sense than that in which the animals possess the ordinary "breath of life." With these views agree the later doctrines of the Bible as to the "trichotomy" of "body, soul, and spirit" in man, and of the added influence of the Spirit of God as acting on humanity. E.--RECENT FACTS AS TO THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN. Several recent statements as to new facts supposed to prove a preglacial antiquity for our species have been promulgated in scientific journals; but so great doubt rests upon them that they do not invalidate the statement that the earliest human remains belong to the postglacial age. I may refer to the following: A very remarkable discovery was made in 1875 by Professor Rutimeyer, of Basle. In a brown coal deposit of Tertiary, or at least of "interglacial" age--whatever that may mean in Switzerland--he found some fragments of wood so interlaced as to resemble wattle or basket-work. Steenstrup has, however, re-examined the evidence, and adduces strong reasons for the conclusion that the alleged human workmanship is really that of beavers. The Swedish geologists have shown that there is no properly Palæolithic age in Scandinavia, and that even the reindeer had probably disappeared from Denmark and Sweden before their occupation by man. Some facts, however, seemed to indicate a residence of man in Sweden before the great post-pliocene subsidence. One of the most important of these is the celebrated hut of Sodertelge, referred to in this connection by Lyell. Recent observations have, however, shown that this hut was really covered by a landslip, and that its age may not be greater than eight centuries. Torel has recently explained this in the Proceedings of the Archæological Congress of Stockholm. The human bone found in the Victoria Cave at Settle, apparently under a patch of boulder-clay, has been regarded as a good evidence of the preglacial origin of man. It has, however, always appeared to readers of the description as a very doubtful case; and Professor Hughes, of Cambridge, has recently expressed the opinion that the drift covering the bone may be merely a "pocket" of that material disengaged from a cavity in the limestone by the wearing of the cliff. The same geologist has also shown reason to believe that the supposed case of the occurrence of palæolithic implements under boulder-clay near Brandon, discovered by Mr. Skertchley, and paraded by Geikie as a demonstration of the "interglacial" antiquity of man, in accordance with his system of successive glacial periods, is really an error, and has no foundation in the facts of the case. Mr. Pengelly has endeavored to maintain the value of the deposit of stalagmite as a means of establishing dates, in his "Notes of Recent Notices of the Geology of Devonshire," Part I., 1874; but, I confess, with little success. He urges, in opposition to the Ingleborough Cave, that at Cheddar, where, according to him, no appreciable deposit whatever is taking place on the existing stalagmite. But this, of course, is evidence not applicable to the case in hand, as in the Cheddar case no stalagmite crust whatever would be produced. There are, no doubt, crevices and caves in which old stalagmite is even being removed or diminished in thickness. He farther asserts that in Kent's Cave teeth of the cave bear and other extinct animals are found covered by not more than an inch and a half of stalagmite, and consequently that if this were deposited at the rate of a quarter of an inch per annum--the supposed rate on the "Jockey Cap" at Ingleborough--these animals must have lived in Devonshire only six years ago, which is, of course, absurd. But he fails to perceive that this mode of occurrence is quite intelligible on the supposition of a rapid decrease in the amount of deposition in the later part of the stalagmite period. He farther refers to the fact that the thicker masses of stalagmite, which correspond to the places of more active drip of water, are in the same position in both crusts of stalagmite. This shows that the sources of water containing bicarbonate of lime have been the same from the first; but it proves nothing as to the rate of deposit. Mr. Pengelly's own estimate of the rate of deposit gives, however, a length of time which is sufficient to show that there must be error somewhere in his calculations. He states the aggregate thickness of the two crusts at twelve feet, and then, assuming a rate of deposit of 0.05 inch in 250 years, or one inch in 5000 years, he arrives at the conclusion that the whole deposit required 720,000 years for its formation. He is "willing to suppose" the mechanical deposits to have accumulated more rapidly; but allowing one fourth of the time for them, we have nearly a million of years claimed for the residence of man in Devonshire, which, independently of other considerations, would push back the Palæozoic trilobites and corals of that county into the primitive reign of fire, and which in point of fact amounts to a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the whole argument. Professor Hughes[154] refers, as a case of rapid deposition of matter akin to stalagmite, to the deposit of travertine in the old Roman aqueduct of the Pont du Gard, near Avignon, where a thickness of fourteen inches seems to have accumulated in about 800 years. Mr. J. Carey has given in _Nature_, December 18, 1873, another instance where a deposit 0.75 inch thick was formed in fifteen years in a lead mine in Durham. Mr. W. B. Clarke in the same journal gives a case where in a cave at Brixton, known as Poole's Hole, a deposit one eighth of an inch in thickness was formed in six months. Such examples show how unsafe it is to reason as to the rate of deposit in by-gone times, and when climatal and local conditions may have been very different from those at present subsisting. In an able address before the biological section of the British Association in 1876, Wallace adduces the following considerations as bearing on these questions; and these are well worthy of attention as showing that it is the necessities of evolution rather than of geological facts that demand the assumption of a great antiquity for man, and induce so many writers to accept any evidence for this, however doubtful: (1) The great cerebral development of the so-called Palæolithic men, which shows no indications of graduating into inferior races. (2) The great variety of the implements of these ancient men, and the excellence of their carvings on bone and ivory, point to a similar conclusion. (3) Man is not related to any existing species of ape, but in various ways to several different species. (4) There is an accumulation of evidence to show that the earliest historical races excelled in many processes in the arts and in many kinds of culture. He instances the wonderful mechanical and engineering skill evidenced in the pyramids of Egypt in proof of this. His conclusion is either that the origin of man by development from apes must be pushed much farther back than any geologists at present hold, and I may add far beyond any probable date, or that he must have originated by some "distinct and higher agency"--which last is no doubt the true conclusion. Haeckel, in his recent work, the "History of Creation," sketches the development of man from a monad, in twenty-two stages; but he has to admit that stage twenty-first, or that of the "Ape-like man," nowhere exists, either recent or fossil. He has to assume that this missing link has perished in the submergence of an imaginary continent of Lemuria, in the Indian Ocean; and it is instructive to observe that, after deducting this, his affiliation of the races of men, as indicated in a map of the distribution of the species, is in the main very similar to that with which we are familiar in ordinary collections of maps illustrative of the Bible. The Post-glacial, Palæocosmic, or Palæolithic men of Europe are not improbably antediluvian; and as to their precise date we know little. As to postdiluvian man, Canon Rawlinson has recently pointed out[155] the remarkable convergence of all historic dates toward a time between 2000 to 3000 years B.C., or about the date of the Biblical deluge, which may reasonably be inferred to have occurred about 3200 B.C. He gives the following summary of historical origins as ascertained from the best data, and which accord with the representation of the Bible that in the time of Abraham the great monarchies of Egypt and the East were scarcely more powerful than the nomad tribe led by that patriarch: Oldest date of Babylon 2300 B.C. " " Assyria 1500 " " Iran 1500 " " India 1200 " " China 1154 " " Phoenicia 1700 " " Troad 2000 " " Egypt 2760 Sept. date of Deluge 3200 He rejects, of course, the fabulous chronologies of Egypt, China, and India as mythical, or referring to prehuman and antediluvian periods. It is to be observed that while these dates place the origins of the oldest civilized nations at periods considerably subsequent to the deluge, they do not prevent us from supposing that these nations commenced their existence wills an advanced civilization borrowed from antediluvian times, which is indeed a fair conclusion from the Biblical history, independently of the monumental evidence referred to by Wallace in a previous paragraph. The Duke of Argyll, in his excellent little work "Primeval Man," in which he discusses the arguments in favor of primitive savagery advanced by Sir J. Lubbock in opposition to the views of Archbishop Whately in his lecture on the "Origin of Civilization," shows that there is no necessity to suppose a slow progress of mankind in the arts extending over indefinite ages; and his argument in this respect connects itself with the facts as to the high cerebral organization of Palæocosmic men referred to above by Wallace. In summing up one division of his argument, he truly remarks: "If we assume with the supporters of the savage-theory that man has himself invented all that he now knows, then the very earliest inventions of our race must have been the most wonderful of all, and the richest in the fruits they bore. The man who first discovered the use of fire, and the use of those grasses which we now know under the name of corn, were discoverers compared with whom, as regards the value of their ideas to the world, Faraday and Wheatstone are but the inventors of ingenious toys. It may possibly be true, as Whately argues, that man never could have discovered these things without divine instruction. If so, it is fatal to the savage theory. But it is equally fatal to that theory if we assume the opposite position, and suppose that the noblest discoveries ever made by man were made by him in primeval times." I may add that this is true, however far into antiquity we may stretch back these primeval times. Professor E. S. Morse, in his address to the American Association, in 1876, as vice-president, takes as a theme the contributions of American zoologists to theories of evolution, and closes with those which refer to what he modestly terms "man's lowly origin." These contributions he sums up under three heads, as bearing on the following points: "1. That in his earlier stages he reveals certain persistent characters of the ape; 2. That the more ancient men reveal more ape-like features than the present existing men; and, 3. That certain characteristics pertaining to early men still persist in the inferior races of men." Under the first head he gives contributions to the well-known fact that embryonic stages of the human being, like those of other high types, approximate to forms permanent in lower types. This is a fact inseparable from the law of reproduction; and as has been already shown in the text, absolutely without logical significance as even an analogical argument in favor of evolution. Under the second and third heads, he refers to cases of exceptional skulls and bones belonging to idiots and degraded races of men, as showing tendencies to lower forms, which as a matter of course they do, though with essential differences still marking them as human; and he assumes without any proof that these were relatively more common in primitive times, and that they are cases of reversion to a previous simian stage, instead of being results of abnormal conditions in the individual or variety. He sums up these arguments in the following paragraph: "If we take into account the rapidly accumulating data of European naturalists concerning primitive man, with the mass of evidence presented in these notes, we find an array of facts which irresistibly point to a common origin with animals directly below us, and these evidences are found in the massive skulls with coarse ridges for muscular attachments, the rounding of the base of the nostrils, the early ossification of the nasal bones, the small cranial capacity in certain forms, the prominence of the frontal crest, the posterior position of the _foramen magnum_, the approximation of the temporal ridges, the lateral flattening of the tibia, the perforation of the humerus, the tendency of the pelvis to depart from its usual proportions; and, associated with all these, a rudeness of culture and the evidence of the manifestation of the coarsest instincts. He must be blind, indeed, who can not recognize the bearing of such grave and suggestive modifications." Yet Professor Morse knows that there is no true specific or even generic kinship between man and any species of ape; that the phenomena of idiocy and degeneracy have no real resemblance to those of distinct specific types; that the resemblances of man to apes, such as they are, point not in a direct manner to any stock of apes, but in a desultory way to several; and consequently that, if derived from any such animals, it must be from some stock altogether unknown to us as yet, either among recent or fossil animals. Farther, as Cope, himself an evolutionist, admits, while we can trace the skeletons of Eocene mammals through several directions of specialization in succeeding Tertiary times, man presents the phenomenon of an unspecialized skeleton which can not fairly be connected with any of these lines. Lastly, his quotation from Fiske, with reference to the supposed effect of a protracted infancy to develop the moral characteristics of man, though accompanied with the usual unfair and unreasonable sneer (which a naturalist like Morse should have been ashamed to quote) against men "still capable of believing that the human race was created by miracle in a single day," is the feeblest possible attempt to bridge over the gap between the spiritual nature of man and the merely psychical nature of brutes. It is plain that if American naturalists have done nothing more in favor of the lowly origin of man than that which Professor Morse has been able, evidently with much industry and pains, to gather, we need not for the present abandon our claims to a higher origin. It is farther significant in connection with this that Professor Huxley, in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence,[156] avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of man from apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas, in his recent lectures,[157] admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and Haeckel[158] has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown. In Chapter XIII. I have not touched on the question of the absolute origin of language--this not being necessary to my argument. On this interesting subject, however, we have, in the naming of the animals by the first man, recorded in the second chapter of Genesis, not only the primary truth of his superiority to them, but a farther indication that the roots of human speech, other than interjectional, lie in onomatopoeia, and especially in the voices of animals, and that the gift of speech was not the slow growth of ages, but an endowment of man from the first, just as much as any of his other powers or properties. An interesting discussion of this subject will be found in the concluding chapters of Wilson's "Prehistoric Man," second edition. Farther, the so-called "tallies" found with the bones of Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable work of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archæology or geology. (See Wilson, _op. cit._, vol. ii., p. 54.) I have not noticed, except incidentally, the alleged discoveries of very ancient human remains in America, as they all appear very problematical. There is, however, some evidence of the coexistence of man with the mastodon and other postglacial animals in Illinois and elsewhere. F.--BEARING OF GLACIAL PERIODS UPON THE INTERPRETATION OF GENESIS. Whatever views may be taken as to that period of cold which occurs at the close of the Tertiary and beginning of the Modern period, it can not be held to have constituted any such break as to be considered, as it was at one time, an equivalent for the Biblical chaos. This is proved by the survival through this period of a very large proportion of the animals and plants still existing in the northern hemisphere. The chronological system of animals and plants has been continuous, as the Bible represents it, since their first appearance on earth. It is further remarkable that while there is geological evidence of climates colder than the present in the temperate regions, there is equally good proof of warmer climates even within the arctic circle than those of the cold temperate regions at present. It is difficult to account for these vicissitudes of climate, and much controversy exists on the subject; but it seems certain that in the earlier Tertiary and Cretaceous periods, for example, the supplies of heat and light were so diffused over the earth as to permit the growth of a temperate vegetation in Greenland, and even in Spitzbergen. Geologists, however unwillingly, have been obliged to admit this as one of those great possibilities, altogether unexpected beforehand, which have been developed in the history of our planet. Various modes of explaining this succession of cold and warm periods have been adopted, all more or less hypothetical. Lyell has argued that it may be explained by a different distribution of land and water and of the ocean currents. Croll accounts for it by the varying eccentricity of the earth's orbit, in connection with the precession of the equinoxes. Evans by a shifting of the axis of rotation of the earth. Drayson, Bell, Warring, and others, by a change in the inclination of the earth's axis. Others by the secular diminution of the internal heat of the earth, and of that of the sun. Others by the supposed recurrence of periods in which the sun gives more or less heat, or in which the earth is passing through colder or warmer regions of space. As the subject is of interest with reference to possible correspondences of these great summers and winters of the earth with the stages of the creative work, it may be well to notice shortly the relative merits of these theories. (1.) The hypothesis of Croll is one of the most ingenious and elaborate of the whole; but it has two great defects. One is that the causes alleged are so uncertain and so complicated that it is difficult to estimate their real value. Another is that it proves too much, namely, a regular succession of cold and warm periods throughout geological time, of which we have no good evidence, and which is on many grounds improbable. (2.) That the earth's axis of rotation has continued unchanged throughout the whole of the geological ages seems proved by the fact that the principal lines of crumpling and upheaval from the Laurentian period downward are arranged in great circles of the earth tangent to the polar circle; and that the lines of deposit of sediment in the Palæozoic age are coincident with the present direction of the arctic currents. (3.) Astronomers consider it improbable that the obliquity of the ecliptic has materially changed, and serious differences of opinion exist as to the effects which a greater or less obliquity would produce on climate. It seems certain, however, that a less obliquity would occasion a more uniform distribution of heat and light throughout the year; and this, co-operating with other causes leading to a warm climate, might enable a temperate vegetation to approach the pole more closely than at present. (4.) That the energy of the sun's radiation and the internal heat of the earth have been slowly decreasing seems certain; but it is now generally admitted that these changes are so gradual that little effect can have been produced by them, except in the older geological periods, and that they can have no connection with the great glacial period of the Post-pliocene. (5.) It is otherwise with the hypothesis that the sun's heat may, like that of some variable stars, have increased and diminished. There is, of course, no direct evidence of this, except the small differences observed in cycles of eleven and fifty-five years from the greater or less development of sunspots, and the analogy of observed variable stars. Still it is a possible cause of variations of climate. It might also aid in accounting for the extraordinary evidences of desert conditions and desiccation presented by the salt deposits of different geological periods in temperate latitudes. (6.) The theory of the passage of the earth through zones of space of variable temperature is now generally abandoned, as there seems no reason to believe that such differences exist. (7.) The theory of Lyell that changes in the distribution of land and water may, with the possible co-operation of other causes, have produced the observed diversities of climate, is that which seems best to meet the conditions presented. It is based on the known properties of land and water as to the absorption, radiation, and convection of heat, and on the remarkable diversities of climate in similar latitudes arising from this cause at present. Farther, it accords with the known fact that very great changes of level have occurred in connection with the glacial period. This theory undoubtedly embraces a true cause, admitted by all geologists, and it dispenses with the necessity of believing in the recurrence of glacial periods at regular intervals. It farther accords best with the evidence afforded by fossils, and especially by fossil plants. It has also the merit of directing due attention to the diversities of geographical conditions at different periods, and of dealing with causes of change operating within the earth itself. The only doubt with respect to it is its sufficiency to explain the changes which have occurred, and the view entertained of this will depend very much on the interpretation of the facts as to the intensity of the last glacial period. If moderate views can be taken of this, and if means can be found, by a less obliquity of the ecliptic or otherwise, to furnish a continuous supply of light in the arctic regions, the difficulties which have been alleged against it would disappear. (8.) In connection with former periods of cold and warmth, and with the existence of temperate and tropical vegetation in polar latitudes, we should not forget that view which takes into account the probable effects of different conditions of the atmosphere, and the greater quantity of carbonic acid present in it, in early geological periods. This would, of course, best apply to the palæozoic floras, in so far as our present knowledge extends; but there may have been similar conditions in later periods. Dr. Sterry Hunt thus states this hypothesis: "The agency of plants in purifying the primitive atmosphere was long since pointed out by Brongniart, and our great stores of fossil fuel have been derived from the decomposition, by the ancient vegetation, of the excess of carbonic acid of the early atmosphere, which through this agency was exchanged for oxygen gas. In this connection the vegetation of former periods presents the curious phenomenon of plants allied to those now growing beneath the tropics flourishing within the polar circles. Many ingenious hypotheses have been proposed to account for the warmer climate of earlier times, but are at best unsatisfactory, and it appears to me that the true solution of the problem may be found in the constitution of the early atmosphere, when considered in the light of Dr. Tyndall's beautiful researches on radiant heat. He has found that the presence of a few hundredths of carbonic-acid gas in the atmosphere, while offering almost no obstacle to the passage of the solar rays, would suffice to prevent almost entirely the loss by radiation of obscure heat, so that the surface of the land beneath such an atmosphere would become like a vast orchard-house, in which the conditions of climate necessary to a luxuriant vegetation would be extended even to the polar regions." It is obvious that, in the production of complex effects of this kind, various causes, whether astronomical or connected with the mutations of the earth's crust, may have co-operated, and probably in all extreme cases did co-operate. In any case it is evident that the vicissitudes of climate and the great pulsations of the crust, which have raised and depressed portions of the surface and changed the position of its covering of waters, have been potent agents in the hands of the Creator in effecting the changes and succession of living beings, which are thus, as Genesis intimates, children of the waters and of the land, and of the influences of the heavens. It is also interesting in this connection to observe that the occurrence of such periods of general warm climate as that in the Miocene shows that it would have been possible for man, under certain conditions, to have extended himself far more widely in his Edenic state than we can conceive of in the present condition of the earth. The modern world is perhaps even in this way "cursed" for man's sake. G.--DR. STERRY HUNT ON THE CHEMISTRY OF THE PRIMEVAL EARTH. On looking back to the reference to this subject in Chapter V., I think it may be desirable to present to the reader in some more definite manner the conditions of a forming world; and I can not do this in any other way so well as by quoting the words of Dr. Sterry Hunt, as given in the abstract of his lecture on this subject delivered before the Royal Institution of London in 1867: "This hypothesis of the nature of the sun and of the luminous process going on at its surface is the one lately put forward by Faye, and, although it has met with opposition, appears to be that which accords best with our present knowledge of the chemical and physical conditions of matter, such as we must suppose it to exist in the condensing gaseous mass which, according to the nebular hypothesis, should form the centre of our solar system. Taking this, as we have already done, for granted, it matters little whether we imagine the different planets to have been successively detached as rings during the rotation of the primal mass, as is generally conceived, or whether we admit with Chacornac a process of aggregation or concretion, operating within the primal nebular mass, resulting in the production of sun and planets. In either case we come to the conclusion that our earth must at one time have been in an intensely heated gaseous condition, such as the sun now presents, self-luminous, and with a process of condensation going on at first at the surface only, until by cooling it must have reached the point where the gaseous centre was exchanged for one of combined and liquefied matter. "Here commences the chemistry of the earth, to the discussion of which the foregoing considerations have been only preliminary. So long as the gaseous condition of the earth lasted, we may suppose the whole mass to have been homogeneous; but when the temperature became so reduced that the existence of chemical compounds at the centre became possible, those which were most stable at the elevated temperature then prevailing would be first formed. Thus, for example, while compounds of oxygen with mercury or even with hydrogen could not exist, oxides of silicon, aluminium, calcium, magnesium, and iron might be formed and condense in a liquid form at the centre of the globe. By progressive cooling, still other elements would be removed from the gaseous mass, which would form the atmosphere of the non-gaseous nucleus. We may suppose an arrangement of the condensed matters at the centre according to their respective specific gravities, and thus the fact that the density of the earth as a whole is about twice the mean density of the matters which form its solid surface may be explained. Metallic or metalloidal compounds of elements, grouped differently from any compounds known to us, and far more dense, may exist in the centre of the earth. "The process of combination and cooling having gone on until those elements which are not volatile in the heat of our ordinary furnaces were condensed into a liquid form, we may here inquire what would be the result, upon the mass, of a further reduction of temperature. It is generally assumed that in the cooling of a liquid globe of mineral matter, congelation would commence at the surface, as in the case of water; but water offers an exception to most other liquids, inasmuch as it is denser in the liquid than in the solid form. Hence ice floats on water, and freezing water becomes covered with a layer of ice, which protects the liquid below. With most other matters, however, and notably with the various mineral and earthy compounds analogous to those which may be supposed to have formed the fiery-fluid earth, numerous and careful experiments show that the products of solidification are much denser than the liquid mass; so that solidification would have commenced at the centre, whose temperature would thus be the congealing point of these liquid compounds. The important researches of Hopkins and Fairbairn on the influence of pressure in augmenting the melting-point of such compounds as contract in solidifying are to be considered in this connection. "It is with the superficial portions of the fused mineral mass of the globe that we have now to do; since there is no good reason for supposing that the deeply seated portions have intervened in any direct manner in the production of the rocks which form the superficial crust. This, at the time of its first solidification, presented probably an irregular, diversified surface from the result of contraction of the congealing mass, which at last formed a liquid bath of no great depth surrounding the solid nucleus. It is to the composition of this crust that we must direct our attention, since therein would be found all the elements (with the exception of such as were still in the gaseous form) now met with in the known rocks of the earth. This crust is now everywhere buried beneath its own ruins, and we can only from chemical considerations attempt to reconstruct it. If we consider the conditions through which it has passed, and the chemical affinities which must have come into play, we shall see that these are just what would now result if the solid land, sea, and air were made to react upon each other under the influence of intense heat. To the chemist it is at once evident that from this would result the conversion of all carbonates, chlorides, and sulphates into silicates, and the separation of the carbon, chlorine, and sulphur in the form of acid gases, which, with nitrogen, watery vapor, and a probable excess of oxygen, would form the dense primeval atmosphere. The resulting fused mass would contain all the bases as silicates, and must have much resembled in composition certain furnace-slags or volcanic glasses. The atmosphere, charged with acid gases, which surrounded this primitive rock must have been of immense density. Under the pressure of such a high barometric column, condensation would take place at a temperature much above the present boiling-point of water, and the depressed portions of the half-cooled crust would be flooded with a highly heated solution of hydrochloric acid, whose action in decomposing the silicates is easily intelligible to the chemist. The formation of chlorides of the various bases, and the separation of silica, would go on until the affinities of the acid were satisfied, and there would be a separation of silica, taking the form of quartz, and the production of a sea-water holding in solution, besides the chlorides of sodium, calcium, and magnesium, salts of aluminium and other metallic bases. The atmosphere, being thus deprived of its volatile chlorine and sulphur compounds, would approximate to that of our own time, but differ in its greater amount of carbonic acid. "We next enter into the second phase in the action of the atmosphere upon the earth's crust. This, unlike the first, which was subaqueous, or operative only on the portion covered with the precipitated water, is sub-aerial, and consists in the decomposition of the exposed parts of the primitive crust under the influence of the carbonic acid and moisture of the air, which convert the complex silicates of the crust into a silicate of alumina, or clay, while the separated lime, magnesia, and alkalies, being converted into carbonates, are carried down into the sea in a state of solution. "The first effect of these dissolved carbonates would be to precipitate the dissolved alumina and the heavy metals, after which would result a decomposition of the chloride of calcium of the sea-water, resulting in the production of carbonate of lime or limestone, and chloride of sodium or common salt. This process is one still going on at the earth's surface, slowly breaking down and destroying the hardest rocks, and, aided by mechanical processes, transforming them into clays; although the action, from the comparative rarity of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, is less energetic than in earlier times, when the abundance of this gas, and a higher temperature, favored the chemical decomposition of the rocks. But now, as then, every clod of clay formed from the decay of a crystalline rock corresponded to an equivalent of carbonic acid abstracted from the atmosphere, and equivalents of carbonate of lime and common salt formed from the chloride of calcium of the sea-water."[159] H.--TANNIN AND BHEMAH. The following synopsis of the instances of the occurrence of the words _tannin_ and _tan_ will serve to show the propriety of the meaning, "great reptiles," assigned in the text to the former, as well as to illustrate the utility in such cases of "comparing Scripture with Scripture:" 1. TANNIN. Exod. vii., 9.--Take thy rod and Probably a serpent, though perhaps cast it before Pharaoh, and it a crocodile. shall become a _serpent_. (Septuagint, "[Greek: drakôn].") Deut. xxxii., 33.--Their vine is Probably a species of serpent. the poison of _dragons_. (Septuagint, "[Greek: drakôn].") Job vii., 12.--Am I a sea, or a Michaelis and others think, _whale_, that thou settest a probably correctly, that the Nile watch over me. and the crocodile, both objects of vigilance to the Egyptians, are intended. (Septuagint, "[Greek: drakôn].") Psa. lxxiv., 14.--Thou didst Evidently refers to the destruction divide the sea by thy strength. of the Egyptians in the Red Thou breakest the heads of the Sea, under emblem of the crocodile. _dragons_ in the waters. (Septuagint, "[Greek: drakôn].") Psa. xci., 13.--The young lion The association shows that a and the _dragon_ thou shalt powerful carnivorous animal is trample under foot. meant. (Septuagint, "[Greek: drakôn].") Psa. cxlviii., 7.--Praise the Evidently an aquatic creature. Lord, ye _dragons_ and all deeps. (Septuagint, "[Greek: drakôn].") Isa. xxvii., 1.--He shall slay A large predaceous aquatic animal the _dragon_ in the midst of the (the crocodile), used here as sea [river]. an emblem of Egypt. (Septuagint, "[Greek: drakôn].") Isa. li., 9.--Hath cut Rahab and Same as above. wounded the _dragon_. Jer. li., 34.--[Nebuchadnezzar] A large predaceous animal. hath swallowed me up as a (Septuagint, [Greek: "drakôn."]) _dragon_. Ezek. xxix., 3.--Pharaoh, king In the Hebrew _tanim_ appears by of Egypt, the great _dragon_ mistake for _tannin_. This is that lieth in the rivers. clearly the crocodile of the Nile. Verses 4 and 5 show that it is a large aquatic animal with _scales_. (Septuagint, [Greek: "drakôn."]) 2. TAN. Psa. xliv., 19.--Thou hast sore Some understand this of shipwreck; broken us in the place of but, more probably, the _dragons_. place of dragons is the desert. (Septuagint, [Greek: "kakôsis."]) Isa. xxxiv., 13.--[Bozrah in An animal inhabiting ruins, and Idumea] shall be a habitation of associated with the ostrich. _dragons_ and a court of owls [or (Septuagint, [Greek: "seirên."]) ostriches]. Isa. xliii., 20.--The wild Evidently an animal of the dry beasts shall honor me, deserts. the _dragons_ and the ostriches, (Septuagint, [Greek: "seirên."]) because I give water in the wilderness. Isa. xiii., 22.--Dragons in Represented as inhabiting the their pleasant palaces. ruins of Babylon, and associated with wild beasts of the desert. (Septuagint, [Greek: "xchinos."]) Isa. xxxv., 7.--And the parched An animal making its lair or nest ground shall become a pool, and in dry, parched places. the thirsty land springs of (Septuagint, [Greek: "hornis."]) water; in the habitation of _dragons_, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. Job xxx., 29.--I am a brother of The association indicates an animal _dragons_ and a companion of of the desert, and the context ostriches. that its cry is mournful. (Septuagint, [Greek: "seirên."]) Jer. ix., 11; x., 22.--I will Same as above. See also Jeremiah make Jerusalem heaps, a den of xlix., 33; li., 37; and Mal. i., 3, _dragons_. where the word is in the female form (_tanoth_). (Septuagint, [Greek: "drakôn"] and [Greek: "strouthos."]) Lam. iv., 3.--Even the In the Hebrew text the word is _sea-monsters_ draw out the _tannin_, evidently an error for breast, they give suck to their _tanim_. The suckling of young, and young ones. The daughter of my association of ostriches, agree with people is become cruel, like this. (Septuagint, "[Greek: drakôn].") the ostriches in the wilderness. Micah i., 8.--I will make a The wailing cry accords with the wailing like the _dragons_, and view of Gesenius that the jackal is mourning like the owls meant. [ostriches]. (Septuagint, "[Greek: drakôn].") We learn from the above comparative view that the _tannin_ is an aquatic animal of large size, and predaceous, clothed with scales, and a fit emblem of the monarchies of Egypt and Assyria. In two places it is possible that some species of serpent is denoted by it. We must suppose, therefore, that in Genesis i. it denotes large crocodilian and perhaps serpentiform reptiles. The _tan_ is evidently a small mammal of the desert. I omitted to notice in the text a criticism of my explanation of the word _bhemah_ in "Archaia," made in Archdeacon Pratt's "Scripture and Science not at Variance" (edition of 1872). He opposes to the meaning of "herbivorous animals" which I have sought to establish, two exceptional passages. In one of these, Deut. xxviii., 26, the word is used in its most general sense for all beasts, which the context shows can not be its meaning in Gen. i. In the other, Prov. xxx., 30, he says it is applied to the lion. The actual expression used, however, merely implies that the lion is "mighty among _bhemah_," the comparison being probably between the strength of the lion and that of oxen, antelopes, and other strong and active creatures. It does not affirm that the lion is one of the _bhemah_. While I have every respect for the erudition of Archdeacon Pratt, and highly value his book, I must regard this objection as an example of a style of biblical exposition much to be deprecated, though too often employed. I.--ANCIENT MYTHOLOGIES. The current views respecting the relations of ancient mythologies with each other and with the Bible have been continually shifting and oscillating between extremes. The latest and at present most popular of these extreme views is that so well expounded by Dr. Max Müller in his various essays on these subjects, and which traces at least the Indo-European theogony to a mere personification of natural objects. The views given in the text are those which to the author appear alone compatible with the Bible, and with the relations of Semitic and Aryan theology; but, as the subject is generally regarded from a quite different point of view, a little further explanation may be necessary. 1. According to the Bible, spiritual monotheism is the primitive faith of man, and with this it ranks the doctrine of a malignant spirit or being opposed to God, and of a primitive state of perfection and happiness. It is scarcely necessary to say that these doctrines may be found as sub-strata in all the ancient theologies. 2. In the Hebrew theology the fall introduces the new doctrine of a mediator or deliverer, human and divine, and an external symbolism, that of the cherubic forms, composite figures made up of parts of the man, the lion, the ox, and the eagle. These forms are referred back to Eden, where they are manifestly the emblems of the perfections of the Deity, lost to man by the fall, and now opposed to his entrance into Eden and access to the tree of life, the symbol of his immortal happiness. Subsequently the cherubim are the visible indications of the presence of God in the tabernacle and temple; and in the Apocalypse they reappear as emblems of the Divine perfections, as reflected in the character of man redeemed. The cherubim, as guardians of the sacred tree, and of sacred places in general, appear in the worship of the Assyrians and Egyptians, as the winged lions and bulls of the former, and the sphinx of the latter. They can also be recognized in the sepulchral monuments of Greek Asia and of Etruria. Farther, it was evidently an easy step to proceed from these cherubic figures to the adoration of sacred animals. But the cherubic emblems were connected with the idea of a coming Redeemer, and this was with equal ease perverted into hero-worship. Every great conqueror, inventor, or reformer was thus recognized as in some sense the "coming man," just as Eve supposed she saw him in her first-born. In addition to this, the sacredness of the first mother as the mother of the promised seed of the woman, led to the introduction of female deities. 3. The earliest ecclesiastical system was the patriarchal, and this also admitted of corruption into idolatry. The great patriarch, venerable by age and wisdom, when he left this earth for the spirit world, was supposed there, in the presence of God, to be the special guardian of his children on earth. Some of the gods of Egypt and of Greece were obviously of this character, and in China and Polynesia we see at this day this kind of idolatry in a condition of active vitality. 4. As stated in the text, the mythology of Egypt and Greece bears evident marks of having personified certain cosmological facts akin to those of the Hebrew narrative of creation. In this way ancient idolators disposed of the prehistoric and pre-Adamite world, changing it into a period of gods and demigods. This is very apparent in the remarkable Assyrian Genesis recovered by the late George Smith from the clay tablets found in the ruined palace of Assurbanipal. 5. In all rude and imaginative nations, which have lost the distinct idea of the one God, the Creator, nature becomes more or less a source of superstitions. Its grand and more rare phenomena of volcanoes, earthquakes, thunder-storms, eclipses, become supernatural portents; and as the idea of power associates itself with them, they are personified as actual agents and become gods. In like manner, the more constant and useful objects and processes of nature become personified as beneficent deities. This may be, to a great extent, the character of the Aryan theology; but, except where all ideas of primitive religion and traditions of early history have been lost, it can not be the whole of the religion of any people. The Bible negatively recognizes this source of idolatry, in so constantly referring all natural phenomena to the divine decree. In connection with this, it is worthy of remark that rude man tends to venerate the new animal forms of strange lands. Something of this kind has probably led some of the American Indians to give a sort of divine honor to the bear. It was in Egypt that man first became familiar with the strange and gigantic fauna of Africa, whose effect on his mind in primitive times we may gather from the book of Job. In Egypt, consequently, there must have been a strong natural tendency to the adoration of animals. The above origins of idolatry and mythology, as stated or implied in the Bible, of course assume that the Semitic monotheistic religion is the primitive one. The first deviations from it probably originated in the family of Ham. A city of the Rephaim of Bashan was in the days of Abraham named after Ashtoreth Karnaim--the two-horned Astarte, a female divinity and prototype of Diana, and perhaps an historic personage, in whom both the moon and the domestic ox were rendered objects of worship. This is the earliest Bible notice of idolatry.[160] In Egypt a mythology of complex diversity existed at least as far back. We must remember, however, that Egypt is Cush as well as Mizraim, and its idolatry is probably to be traced, in the first instance, to the Nimrodic empire, from which, as from a common centre, certain new and irreligious ideas seem to have been propagated among all the branches of the human family. It is quite probable that the correspondences between Egyptian, Greek, and Hindoo myths go back as far as to the time when the first despotism was erected on the plain of Shinar, and when able but ungodly men set themselves to erect new political and social institutions on the ruins of all that their fathers had held sacred. In addition to this, the mythology and language of the Aryans alike bear the impress of the innovating and restless spirit of the sons of Japhet. I have stated the above propositions to show that the Bible affords a rational and connected theory of the origin of the false religions of antiquity; and to suggest as inquiries in relation to every form of mythology--how much of it is primitive monotheism, how much cherub-worship, how much hero-worship, how much ancestor-worship, how much distorted cosmogony, how much pure idealism and superstition, since all these are usually present. I may be allowed further to remind the reader how much evidence we have, even in modern times, of the strong tendency of the human mind to fall into one or another of these forms of idolatry; and to ask him to reflect that really the only effectual conservative element is that of revelation. How strong an argument is this for the necessity to man of an inspired rule of religious faith. [The above note was in substance contained in the Appendix to "Archaia" in 1860, and its correctness has, I think, been confirmed by subsequent discoveries.] K.--ASSYRIAN AND EGYPTIAN TEXTS. Progress is continually being made in the decipherment and publication of these, and new facts are coming to light in consequence as to the religions of the early postdiluvian period. According to the late George Smith and to Mr. Sayce, in their contributions to Bagster's "Records of the Past," the earliest monumental history of Babylonia reveals two races, the Akkadian or Urdu, a Turanian race, with an agglutinate language of the Finnish or Tartar type, and the Sumir or Keen-gi, believed to be Shemitic. The race of Akkad seems to have invented the cuneiform writing at a very early period, and it no doubt represents the primitive Cushites of the Bible, to whom is attributed the empire of Nimrod, whose first cities were Babel and Erech and Akkad and Calneh. Very ancient inscriptions of this early Chaldean or Cushite race exist, probably earlier than the time of Abraham. That of king Urukh, who is called "a very ancient king," on an inscription of Nabonadius, 555 B.C., represents himself as building temples to several gods and goddesses, so that in his time there was already a developed polytheism, unless, indeed, he was himself the inventor or introducer of much of it. Yet one can gather from the probably contemporary Creation and Deluge tablets translated by Mr. Smith, that a Supreme God was still recognized, and that the subordinate deities, though their worship was probably gaining in importance, were still only local and created beings. Yet it was undoubtedly from this embryo idolatry that Abraham dissented, and was thus led to leave his native land. In like manner, in the early Egyptian Hymn to Amen Ra, translated by Mr. Goodwin, though we have the gods mentioned, they are inferior beings, and not higher in position than the angels of the Old Testament, while Ra himself is "Lord of Eternity, Maker Everlasting," and is praised as "Chief creator of the whole earth, Supporter of affairs above every god, In whose goodness the gods rejoice." Thus, although there can be little doubt that Ra was a sun-god, there can be as little that he is the Il or El of the Shemitic peoples, and that his worship represents that of the one God, the Creator. It seems probable also that there was an esoteric doctrine of this kind among the priests and the educated, however gross the polytheism of the vulgar. In short, the state of things in Assyria and Egypt was not dissimilar from that prevailing at this day in India, where learned men may fall back upon the ancient Vedas, and maintain that their religion is monotheistic, while the common people worship innumerable gods. All this points to a primitive monotheism, just as the peculiar forms of adoration given to saints and the Virgin Mary in the Greek and Roman churches historically imply a primitive Christianity on which these newer beliefs and rites have been engrafted. L.--SPECIES AND VARIETAL FORMS WITH REFERENCE TO THE UNITY OF MAN. In the concluding chapters of "Archaia" the nature of species, as distinguished from varieties, was discussed, and specially applied to the varieties and races of man. This discussion has been omitted from the text of the present work; but, in an abridged form, is introduced here, with especial reference to those more recent views of this subject now prevalent in consequence of the growth of the philosophy of evolution; but which I feel convinced must, with the progress of science, return nearer to the opinions held by me in 1860, and summarized below. We can determine species only by the comparison of individuals. If all these agree in all their characters except those appertaining to sex, age, and other conditions of the individual merely, we say that they belong to the same species. If all species were invariable to this extent, there could be no practical difficulty, except that of obtaining specimens for comparison. But in the case of very many species there are minor differences, not sufficient to establish specific diversity, but to suggest its possibility; and in such cases there is often great liability to error. In cases of this kind we have principally two criteria: first, the nature and amount of the differences; secondly, their shading gradually into each other, or the contrary. Under the first of these we inquire--Are they no greater in amount than those which may be observed in individuals of the same parentage? Are they no greater than those which occur in other species of similar structure or habits? Do they occur in points known in other species to be readily variable, or in points that usually remain unchanged? Are none of them constant in the one supposed species, and constantly absent in the other? Under the second we ask--Are the individuals presenting these differences connected together by others showing a series of gradations uniting the extremes by minute degrees of difference? If we can answer these questions--or such of them as we have the means of answering--in the affirmative, we have no hesitation in referring all to the same species. If obliged to answer all or many in the negative, we must at least hesitate in the identification; and if the material is abundant, and the distinguishing characters clear and well defined, we conclude that there is a specific difference. Species determined in this way must possess certain general properties in common: 1. Their individuals must fall within a certain range of uniform characters, wider or narrower in the case of different species. 2. The intervals between species must be distinctly marked, and not slurred over by intermediate gradations. 3. The specific characters must be invariably transmitted from generation to generation, so that they remain equally distinct in their limits if traced backward or forward in time, in so far as our observation may extend. 4. Within the limits of the species there is more or less liability to variation; and this, though perhaps developed by external circumstances, is really inherent in the species, and must necessarily form a part of its proper description. 5. There is also a physiological distinction between species, namely, that the individuals are sterile with one another, whereas this does not apply to varieties; and though Darwin has labored to break down this distinction by insisting on rare exceptional cases, and suggesting many supposed ways by which varieties of the same species might possibly attain to this kind of distinctness, the difference still remains as a fact in nature; though one not readily available in practically distinguishing species. These general properties of species will, I think, be admitted by all naturalists as based on nature, and absolutely necessary to the existence of natural history as a science, independently of any hypotheses as to the possible changes of specific forms in the lapse of time. I now proceed to give a similar summary of the laws of the varieties which may exist--always be it observed, within the limits of the species. 1. The limits of variation are very different in different species. There are many in which no well-marked variations have been observed. There are others in which the variations are so marked that they have been divided, even by skilful naturalists, into distinct species or even genera. I do not here refer to differences of age and sex. These in many animals are so great that nothing but actual knowledge of the relation that subsists would prevent the individuals from being entirely separated from one another. I refer merely to the varieties that exist in adults of the same sex, including, however, those that depend on arrest of development, and thus make the adult of one variety resemble in some respects the young of another; as, for instance, in the hornless oxen, and beardless individuals among men. If we inquire as to the causes on which the greater or less disposition to vary depends, we must, in the first place, confess our ignorance, by saying that it appears to be in a great measure constitutional, or dependent on minute and as yet not distinctly appreciable structural, physiological, and psychical characters. Darwin states that Pallas long ago suggested, from the known facts that the seeds of hybrid plants and grafted trees are very variable, the theory that mixture of breeds tends to produce variability; but Darwin does not seem to attach much importance to this, and admits our inability to explain the origin of these differences.[161] We know, however, certain properties of species that are always or usually connected with great liability to variation. The principal of these are the following: 1. The liability to vary is, in many cases, not merely a specific peculiarity; it is often general in the members of a genus or family. Thus the cats, as a family, are little prone to vary; the wolves and foxes very much so. 2. Species that are very widely distributed over the earth's surface are usually very variable. In this case the capacity to vary probably adapts the creature to a great variety of circumstances, and so enables it to be widely distributed. It must be observed here that hardiness and variability of constitution are more important to extensive distribution than mere locomotive powers, for matters have evidently been so arranged in nature that, where the habitat is suitable, colonists will find their way to it, even in the face of difficulties almost insurmountable. 3. Constitutional liability to vary is sometimes connected with or dependent on extreme simplicity of structure, in other cases on a high degree of intelligence and consequent adaptation to various modes of subsistence. Those minute, simply organized, and very variable creatures, the Foraminifera, exemplify the first of these apparent causes; the crafty wolves furnish examples of the second. 4. Susceptibility to variation is farther modified by the greater or less adaptability of the digestive and locomotive organs to varied kinds of food and habitat. The monkeys, intelligent, imitative, and active, are nevertheless very limited in range and variability, because they can comfortably subsist only in forests, and in the warmer regions of the earth. The hog, more sluggish and less intelligent, has an omnivorous appetite, and no very special requirements of habitat, and so can vary greatly and extend over a large portion of the earth. Farther, in connection with this subject it may be observed that the conditions favorable to variation are also in the case of the higher animals favorable to domestication, while it may also be affirmed that, other things being equal, animals in a domesticated state are much more liable to vary than those in a wild state, and this independent of intentional selection. Darwin admits this, and gives many examples of it. 2. Varieties may originate in two different ways. In the case of wild animals it is generally supposed that they are gradually induced by the slow operation of external influences; but it is certain that in domesticated animals they often appear suddenly and unexpectedly, and are not on that account at all less permanent. A large proportion of our breeds of domestic animals appear to originate in this way. A very remarkable instance is that of the "Niata" cattle of the Banda Orientale, described by Darwin in his "Voyage of a Naturalist." These cattle are believed to have originated about a century ago among the Indians to the south of the La Plata, and the breed propagates itself with great constancy. "They appear," says Darwin, "externally to hold nearly the same relation to other cattle which bull-dogs hold to other dogs. Their forehead is very short and broad, with the nasal end turned up, and the upper lip much drawn back; their lower jaws project outward; when walking they carry their heads low on a short neck, and their hinder legs are rather longer compared with the front legs than is usual." It is farther remarkable in respect to this breed that it is, from its conformation of head, less adapted to the severe droughts of those regions than the ordinary cattle, and can not, therefore, be regarded as an adaptation to circumstances. In his later work on animals under domestication, Darwin gives many other instances of the origination of breeds of cattle and other animals in this abrupt and mysterious manner, and without any selection, though he strongly leans to the conclusion that slow and gradual changes are the most frequent causes of variation. It is to be observed, however, that very slow changes are in more danger of being accidentally diverted or obliterated by crossing, and that the first stages of an incipient change may be too unimportant to be permanent. Many writers on the subject of the Unity of Man assume that any marked variety must require a long time for its production. Our experience in the case of the domestic animals teaches the reverse of this view; a very important point too often overlooked. 3. The duration or permanence of varieties is very different. Some return at once to the normal type when the causes of change are removed. Others perpetuate themselves nearly as invariably as species, and are named races. It is these races only that we are likely to mistake for true species, since here we have that permanent reproduction which is one of the characteristics of the species. The race, however, wants the other characteristics of species as above stated; and it differs essentially in having branched from a primitive species, and in not having an independent origin. It is quite evident that in the absence of historical evidence we must be very likely to err by supposing races to have really originated in distinct "primordial forms." Such error is especially likely to arise if we overlook the fact of the sudden origination of such races, and their great permanency if kept distinct. There are two facts which deserve especial notice, as removing some of the difficulty in such cases. One is that well-marked races usually originate only in domesticated animals, or in wild animals which, owing to accidental circumstances, are placed in abnormal circumstances. Another is, that there always remains a tendency to return, in favorable circumstances, to the original type. This tendency to reversion is much underrated by Darwin and his followers; yet they constantly recur to it as a means of proving possible derivation, and their writings abound in examples of it. Perhaps the most remarkable of these reversions are those which occur when varieties destitute of all the markings of the original stock are crossed and reproduce those markings, which Darwin shows to occur in pigeons and domestic fowls. The domesticated races usually require a certain amount of care to preserve them in a state of purity, both on this account and on account of the readiness with which they intermix with other varieties of the same species. Many very interesting facts in illustration of these points might be adduced. The domesticated hog differs in many important characters from the wild boar. In South America and the West Indies it has returned, in three centuries or less, to its original form.[162] The horse is probably not known in a state originally wild, but it has run wild in America and in Siberia. In the prairies of North America, according to Catlin[163] they still show great varieties of color. The same is the case in Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia[164] where herds of wild horses have existed since an early period in the settlement of America. In South America and Siberia they have assumed a uniform chestnut or bay color. In the plains of Western America they retain the dimensions and vigor of the better breeds of domesticated horses. In Sable Island they have already degenerated to the level of Highland ponies; but in all countries where they have run wild, the elongated and arched head, high shoulders, straight back, and other structural characters probably of the original wild horse, have appeared. We also learn from such instances that, while races among domesticated animals may appear suddenly, they revert to the original type, when unmixed, comparatively slowly; and this especially when the variation is in the nature of degeneracy. 4. Some characters are more subject to variation than others. In the higher animals variation takes place very readily in the color and texture of the skin and its appendages. This, from its direct relation to the external world, and ready sympathy with the condition of the digestive organs, might be expected to take the lead. In those domesticated animals which are little liable to vary in other respects, as the cat and duck, the color very readily changes. Next may be placed the stature and external proportions, and the form of such appendages as the external ear and tail. All these characters are very variable in domestic animals. Next we may place the form of the skull, which, though little variable in the wild state, is nearly always changed by domestication. Psychological functions, as the so-called instincts of animals, are also very liable to change, and to have these changes perpetuated in races. Very remarkable instances of this have been collected by Sir C. Lyell[165] and Dr. Prichard. Lastly, important physiological characters, as the period of gestation, etc., and the structure of the internal organs connected with the functions of nutrition, respiration, etc., are little liable to change, and remain unaffected by the most extreme variations in other points; and it is, no doubt, in these more essential and internal parts that the tendency survives to return under favorable circumstances to the original type. 5. Varieties or races of the same species are fully reproductive with each other, which is not the case with true species. Mutual sterility of varieties of the same species is an exceptional peculiarity, if it ever truly exist; and, on the other hand, the cross-fertilization of varieties of the same species, whether in animals or plants, tends to vigorous life, and also to return to the primitive or average type. On the other hand, intermixture of distinct species rarely, if ever, occurs freely in nature. It is generally a result of artificial contrivance. Again, hybrids produced from species known to be distinct are either wholly barren, or barren _inter se_, reproducing only with one of the original stocks, and rapidly returning to it; or if ever fertile _inter se_, which is somewhat doubtful, rapidly run out. It has been maintained by Pallas and others, and Darwin leans to this idea, that there is still another possibility, namely, that of the perfect and continued fertility of such mixed races, especially after long domestication; but their proofs are derived principally from the intermixture of the races of dogs and of poultry, which are cases actually in dispute at present, as to the original unity or diversity of the so-called species. If we apply these considerations to man, our conclusion must be that, even in his bodily frame, he is not merely specifically but ordinally distinct from other animals, and that the differences between races of men are varietal rather than specific. This view is confirmed by the following facts: 1. The case of man is not that of a wild animal; and it presents many points of difference even from the case of the domesticated lower animals. According to the Bible history, man was originally fitted to subsist on fruits, to inhabit a temperate climate, and to be exempt from the necessity of destroying or contending with other animals. This view unquestionably accords very well with his organization. He still subsists principally on vegetable food, is most numerous in the warmer regions of the earth; and, when so subsisting in these regions, is naturally peaceful and timid. On the whole, however, his habits of life are artificial--more so than those of any domesticated animal. He is, therefore, in the conditions most favorable to variation. Again, man possesses more than merely animal instincts. His mental powers permit him to devise means of locomotion, of protection, of subsistence, far superior to those of any mere animal; and his dominant will, insatiable in its desires, bends the bodily frame to uses and exposes it to external influences more various than any inferior animal can dream of. Man is also more educable and plastic in his constitution than other animals, owing both to his being less hemmed in by unchanging instincts, and to his physical frame being less restricted in its adaptations. If a single species, he is also more widely distributed than any other; and there are even single races which exceed in their extent of distribution nearly all the inferior animals. Nor is there anything in his structure specially to limit him to plains, or hills, or forests, or coasts, or inland regions. All the causes which we can suppose likely to produce variation thus meet in man, who is himself the producer of most of the distinct races that we observe in the lower animals. If, therefore, we condescend to compare man with these creatures, it must be under protest that what we learn from them must be understood with reference to his greater capabilities. 2. The races of men are deficient in some of the essential characters of species. It is true that they are reproduced with considerable permanency; though a great many cases of spontaneous change, of atavism, or return to the character of progenitors, and of slow variation under changed conditions, have been recorded. But the most manifest deficiency in true specific characters is in the invariable shading-off of one race into another, and in the entire failure of those who maintain the distinction of species in the attempt accurately to define their number and limits. The characters run into each other in such a manner that no natural arrangement based on the whole can apparently be arrived at; and when one particular ground is taken, as color, or shape of skull, the so-called species have still no distinct limits; and all the arrangements formed differ from each other, and from the deductions of philology and history. Thus, from the division of Virey into two species, on the entirely arbitrary ground of facial angle, to that of Bory de St. Vincent into fifteen, we have a great number and variety of distinctions, all incapable of zoological definition; or, if capable of definition, eminently unnatural. There are, in short, no missing links between the varieties of men corresponding to that which obtains between man and lower animals. 3. The races of men differ in those points in which the higher animals usually vary with the greatest facility. The physical characters chiefly relied on have been color, character of hair, and form of skull, together with diversities in stature and general proportion. These are precisely the points in which our domestic races are most prone to vary. The manner in which these characters differ in the races of men may be aptly illustrated by a few examples of the arrangements to which they lead. Dr. Pickering, of the U. S. Exploring Expedition[166]--who does not, however, commit himself to any specific distinctions--has arranged the various races of men on the very simple and obvious ground of color. He obtains in this way four races--the White, the Brown, the Blackish-brown, the Black. The distinction is easy; but it divides races historically, philologically, and structurally alike; and unites those which, on other grounds, would be separated. The white race includes the Hamite Abyssinian, the Semitic Arabian, the Japhetic Greek. The Ethiopian or Berber is separated from the cognate Abyssinian, and the dark Hindoo from the paler races speaking like him tongues allied to the Sanscrit. The Papuan, on the other hand, takes his place with the Hindoo; while the allied Australian must be content to rank with the Negro; and the Hottentot is promoted to a place beside the Malay. It is unnecessary to pursue any farther the arrangement of this painstaking and conscientious inquirer. It conclusively demonstrates that the color of the varieties of the human race must be arbitrary and accidental, and altogether independent of unity or diversity of origin. Some use has been made, by the advocates of diversity of species, of the quality of the hair in the different races. That of the Negro is said to be flat in its cross section--in this respect approaching to wool; that of the European is oval; and that of the Mongolian and American round.[167] The subject has as yet been very imperfectly investigated; but its indications point to no greater variety than that which occurs in many domesticated animals--as, for instance, the hog and sheep. Nay, Dr. Carpenter states[168]--and the writer has satisfied himself of the fact by his own observation--that it does not exceed the differences in the hair from different parts of the body of the same individual. The human hair, like that of mammals in general, consists of three tissues: an outer cortical layer, marked by transverse striæ, having in man the aspect of delicate lines, but in many other animals assuming the character of distinct joints or prominent serrations; a layer of elongated, fibrous cells, to which the hair owes most of its tenacity; and an inner cylinder of rounded cells. In the proportionate development of these several parts, in the quantity of coloring matter present, and in the transverse section, the human hair differs very considerably in different parts of the body. It also differs very markedly in individuals of different complexions. Similar but not greater differences obtain in the hair of the scalp in different races; but the flatness of the Negro's hair connects itself inseparably with the oval of the hair of the ordinary European, and this with the round observed in some other races. It generally holds that curled and frizzled hair is flatter than that which is lank and straight; but this is not constant, for I have found that the waved or frizzled hair of the New Hebrideans, intermediate apparently between the Polynesians and Papuans, is nearly circular in outline, and differs from European hair mainly in the greater development of the fibrous structure and the intensity of the color. Large series of comparisons are required; but those already made point to variation rather than specific difference. Some facts also appear to indicate very marked differences as occurring in the same race from constant exposure or habitual covering; and also the occasional appearance of the most abnormal forms, without apparent cause, in individuals. The differences depending on greater or less abundance or vigor of growth of the hair are obviously altogether trivial, when compared with such examples as the hairless dogs of Chili and hairless cattle of Brazil, or even with the differences in this respect observed in individuals of the same race of men. Confessedly the most important differences of the races of men are those of the skeleton, in all parts of which variations of proportion occur, and are of course more or less communicated to the muscular investments. Of these, as they exist in the pelvis, limbs, etc., I need say nothing; for, manifest though they are, they all fall far within the limits of variation in familiar domestic animals, and also of hereditary malformation or defect of development occurring in the European nations, and only requiring isolation for its perpetuation as a race. The differences in the skull merit more attention, for it is in this and in its enclosed brain that man most markedly differs from the lower animals, as well as race from race. It is in the form rather than in the mere dimensions of the skull that we should look for specific differences; and here, adopting the vertical method of Blumenbach as the most characteristic and valuable, we find a greater or less antero-posterior diameter--a greater or less development of the jaws and bones of the face. The skull of the normal European, or Caucasian of Cuvier, is round oval; and the jaws and cheek-bones project little beyond its anterior margin, when viewed from above. The skull of the Mongolian of Cuvier is nearly round, and the cheek-bones and jaws project much more strongly in front and at the sides. The Negro skull is lengthened from back to front; the jaws project strongly, or are prognathous; but the cheek-bones are little prominent. For the extremes of these varieties, Retzius proposed the names of brachy-kephalic or short-headed, and dolicho-kephalic or long-headed, which have come into general use. The differences indicated by these terms are of great interest, as distinctive marks of many of the unmixed races of men; but, when pushed to extremes, lead to very incorrect generalizations--as Professor D. Wilson has well shown in his paper on the supposed uniformity of type in the American races--a doctrine which he fully refutes by showing that within a very narrow geographical range this primitive and unmixed race presents very great differences of cranial form.[169] Exclusive of idiots, artificially compressed heads, and deformities, the differences between the brachy-kephalic and dolicho-kephalic heads range from equality in the parietal and longitudinal diameter to the proportion of about 14 to 24. As stated by some ethnologists, these differences appear quite characteristic and distinct; but, so soon as we attempt any minute discrimination, all confidence in them as specific characters disappears. In our ordinary European races similar differences, and nearly as extensive, occur. The dolicho-kephalic head is really only an immature form perpetuated; and appears not only in the Negro, but in the Esquimau, and in certain ancient and modern Celtic races. The brachy-kephalic head, in like manner, is characteristic of certain tribes and portions of tribes of Americans, but not of all; of many northern Asiatic nations; of certain Celtic and Scandinavian tribes; and often appears in the modern European races as an occasional character. Farther, as Retzius has well shown, the long heads and prominent jaws are not always associated with each other; and his classification is really the testimony of an able observer against the value of these characters. He shows that the Celtic and Germanic races (in part) have long heads and straight jaws; while the Negroes, Australians, Oceanians, Caribs, Greenlanders, etc., have long heads and prominent jaws. The Laplanders, Finns, Turks, Sclaves, Persians, etc., have short heads and straight jaws; while the Tartars, Mongolians, Incas, Malays, Papuans, etc., have short heads and prominent jaws. Another defect in the argument often based on the diverse forms of heads is its want of acknowledgment of the ascertained and popularly known fact that these forms in different tribes or individuals of the same race are markedly influenced by culture and habits of life. In all races ignorance and debasement tend to induce a prognathous form, while culture tends to the elevation of the nasal bones, to an orthognathous condition of the jaws, and to an elevation and expansion of the cranium.[170] Again, no adequate allowance has been made in the case of these forms of skull for the influence of modes of nurture in infancy. Dr. Morton, observing that the brachy-kephalic American skull was often unequal sided, and the occiput much flattened, suggests that this is "an exaggeration of the natural form produced by the pressure of the cradle-board in common use among the American natives." Dr. Wilson has noticed the same unsymmetrical character in brachy-kephalic skulls in British barrows, and has suspected some artificial agency in infancy; and says, in reference to the American instances, "I think it extremely probable that further investigation will tend to the conclusion that the vertical or flattened occiput, instead of being a typical characteristic, pertains entirely to the class of artificial modifications of the natural cranium familiar to the American ethnologist." While the points in which the races of men vary are those in which lower animals are most liable to undergo change, the several races display a remarkable constancy in those which are usually less variable. Prichard and Carpenter have well shown this in relation to physiological points, as, for instance, the age of arriving at maturity, the average and extreme duration of life, and the several periods connected with reproduction. The coincidence in these points alone is by many eminent physiologists justly regarded as sufficient evidence of the unity of the species. 4. It may also be affirmed, in relation to the varieties of man, that they do not exceed in amount or extent those observed in the lower animals. If with Frederick Cuvier, Dr. Carpenter, and many other naturalists, we regard the dog as a single species, descended in all probability from the wolf, we can have no hesitation in concluding that this animal far exceeds man in variability.[171] But this is denied by many, not without some show of reason; and we may, therefore, select some animal respecting which little doubt can be entertained. Perhaps the best example is the common hog (_Sus scrofa_), an undoubted descendant of the wild boar, and a creature especially suitable for comparison with man, inasmuch as its possible range of food is very much the same with his, which is not the case with any other of our domesticated animals; and as its headquarters as a species are in the same regions which have supported the greatest and oldest known communities of men. We may exclude from our comparison the Chinese hog, by some regarded as a distinct species (_Sus Indicus_), though no wild original is known, and it breeds freely with the common hog. The color of the domestic hog varies, like that of man, from white to black; and in the black hog the skin as well as the hair partakes of the dark color. The abundance and quality of the hair vary extremely; the stature and form are equally variable, much more so than in man. Blumenbach long ago remarked that the difference between the skull of the ordinary domestic hog and that of the wild boar is quite equal to that observed between the Negro and European skulls. Darwin shows that it is much greater, and illustrates this by an amusing pair of portraits. The breeds of swine even differ in directions altogether unparalleled in man. For instance, both in America and Europe solid-hoofed swine have originated and become a permanent variety; and there is said to be another variety with five toes.[172] These are the more remarkable, because, in the American instances, there can be no doubt that it is the common hog which has assumed these abnormal forms. 5. All varieties or races of men intermix freely, in a manner which strongly indicates specific unity. We hold here, as already stated, that no good case of a permanent race arising from intermixture of distinct species of the lower animals has been adduced; but there is another fact in relation to this subject which the advocates of specific diversity would do well to study. Even in varieties of those domestic animals which are certainly specifically identical, as the hog, the sheep, the ox--although crosses between the varieties may easily be produced--they are not readily maintained, and sometimes tend to die out. What are called good crosses lead to improved energy, and continual breeding in and in of the same variety leads to degeneracy and decay; but, on the other hand, crosses of certain varieties are proved by experience to be of weakly and unproductive quality; and every practical book on cattle contains remarks on the difficulty of keeping up crosses without intermixture with one of the pure breeds. It would thus appear that very unlike varieties of the same species display in this respect, in an imperfect manner, the peculiarities of distinct species. It is on this principle that I would in part account for some of the exceptional facts which occur in mixed races of men. What, then, are the facts in the case of man? In producing crosses of distinct species, as in the case of the horse and ass, breeders are obliged to resort to expedients to overcome the natural repugnance to such intermixture. In the case of even the most extreme varieties of man, if such repugnance exists, it is voluntarily overcome, as the slave population of America testifies abundantly. By far the greater part of the intermixtures of races of men tend to increase of vital energy and vigor, as in the case of judicious crosses of some domestic animals. Where a different result occurs, we usually find sufficient secondary causes to account for it. I shall refer to but one such case--that of the half-breed American Indian. In so far as I have had opportunities of observation or inquiry, these people are prolific, much more so than the unmixed Indian. They are also energetic, and often highly intellectual; but they are of delicate constitution, especially liable to scrofulous diseases, and therefore not long-lived. Now this is precisely the result which often occurs in domestic animals, where a highly cultivated race is bred with one that is of ruder character and training; and it very probably results from the circumstance that the progeny may inherit too much of the delicacy of the one parent to endure the hardships congenial to the other; or, on the other hand, too much of the wild nature of the ruder parent to subsist under the more delicate nurture of the more cultivated. This difficulty does not apply to the intermixture of the Negro and the European, though between the pure races this is a cross too abrupt to be likely to be in the first instance successful. 6. The races of man may have originated in the same manner with the breeds of our domesticated animals. There are many facts which render it probable that they did originate in this way. Take color, for instance. The fair varieties of man occur only in the northern temperate zone, and chiefly in the equable climates of that zone. In extreme climates, even when cold, dusky and yellow colors appear. The black and blackish-brown colors are confined to the inter-tropical regions, and appear in such portions of all the great races of mankind as have been long domiciled there. Diet and degree of exposure have also evidently very much to do with form, stature, and color. The deer-eating Chippewayan of certain districts of North America is a better developed man than his compatriots who subsist principally on rabbits and such meaner fare; and excess of carbonaceous food, and deficiency of perspiration or of combustion in the lungs, appear everywhere to darken the skin.[173] The Negro type in its extreme form is peculiar to low and humid river valleys of tropical Africa. In Australasia similar characters appear in men of a very different race in similar circumstances. The Mongolian type reappears in South Africa. The Esquimau is like the Fuegian. The American Indian, both of South and North America, resembles the Mongol; but in several of the middle regions of the American continent men appear who approximate to the Malay. Everywhere and in all races coarse features and deviations from the oval form of skull are observed in rude populations. Where men have sunk into a child-like simplicity, the elongated forms prevail. Where they have become carnivorous, aggressive, and actively barbarous, the brachy-kephalic forms abound. These and many other considerations tend to the conclusion that these varieties are inseparably connected with external conditions. It may still be asked--Were not the races created as they are, with especial reference to these conditions? I answer no--because the differences are of a character in every respect like those that appear in other true species as the results of influences from without. Farther, not only have we varieties of man resulting from the slow operation of climatal and other conditions, but we have the sudden development of races. One remarkable instance may illustrate my meaning. It is the hairy family of Siam, described by Mr. Crawford and Mr. Yule.[174] The peculiarities here consisted of a fine silky coat of hair covering the face and less thickly the whole body, with at the same time the entire absence of the canine and molar teeth. The person in whom these characters originated was sent to Ava as a curiosity when five years old. He married at twenty-two, his wife being an ordinary Burmese woman. One of two children who survived infancy had all the characters of the father. This was a girl; and on her marriage the same characters reappeared in one of two boys constituting her family when seen by Mr. Yule. Here was a variety of a most extreme character, originating without apparent cause, and capable of propagation for three generations, even when crossed with the ordinary type. Had it originated in circumstances favorable to the preservation of its purity, it might have produced a tribe or nation of hairy men, with no teeth except incisors. Such a tribe would, with some ethnologists, have constituted a new and very distinct species; and any one who had suggested the possibility of its having originated within a few generations as a variety would have been laughed at for his credulity. It is unnecessary to cite any further instances. I merely wish to insist on the necessity of a rigid comparison of the variations which appear in man, either suddenly or in a slow or secular manner, with the characters of the so-called races or species. 7. If we turn from the merely physical constitution of man, and inquire as to his psychical and spiritual endowments, it would be easy to show, as Dr. Carpenter and others have done, in opposition to Darwin, that on the one hand an impassable barrier separates man from the lower animals, and that on the other there is an essential unity among the races of men. But this subject I have discussed fully in the concluding chapters of my "Story of the Earth." If man is thus so very variable, and if many of his leading varieties have existed for a very long time, does not the fact that we have but one species afford very strong evidence that species change only within fixed limits, and do not pass over into new specific types. Viewed in this way, variability within the specific limits becomes in itself one of the strongest arguments against the doctrine of descent with modification as a mode of origination of new species. Let us now add to all this the farther consideration, so well illustrated in the "Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ" of Christy and Lartet, that the oldest-known men of the caves and gravels may be placed in one of the varieties, and this the most widely distributed, of modern man, and we have a further argument which tells most strongly against the assumption either of the extreme antiquity or of the unlimited variability of the human species. FOOTNOTES [Footnote 1: Argyll's "Primeval Man."] [Footnote 2: Essays on Theism, 1875.] [Footnote 3: John i., 9.] [Footnote 4: Hebrews xi., 3.] [Footnote 5: I avail myself of the condensed translation in Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii. The original French translation of Brasseur du Bourbourg is more full.] [Footnote 6: The Feathered Serpent is perhaps the representative of the Dragon and Serpent in the Semitic version; but has not the same evil import, and his color gave sacredness to blue and green stones, as the turquois and emerald, both in North and South America, and perhaps also in Asia and Africa.] [Footnote 7: I do not think it necessary to attach any value to the doubts of certain schools of criticism as to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Whatever quibbles may be raised on isolated texts, no rational student can doubt that we have in these books a collection of authentic documents of the Exodus. They are absolutely inexplicable on any other supposition.] [Footnote 8: "Cosmos," Otté's translation.] [Footnote 9: Hamilton, "Royal Preacher."] [Footnote 10: Harvey, "Nereis Boreali Americana."] [Footnote 11: Osburn, "Monumental History of Egypt."] [Footnote 12: On this subject I may refer naturalists to the intimate acquaintance with animals and their habits, indicated by manner of their use as sacred emblems, and as symbols in hieroglyphic writing. Another illustration is afforded by the Mosaic narrative of the miracles and plagues connected with the exodus. The Egyptian king, on this occasion, consulted the _philosophers_ and _augurs_. These learned men evidently regarded the serpent-rod miracle as but a more skilful form of one of the tricks of serpent-charmers. They showed Pharaoh the possibility of reddening the Nile water by artificial means, or perhaps by the development of red algæ in it. They explained the inroad of frogs on natural principles, probably referring to the immense abundance ordinarily of the ova and tadpoles of these creatures compared with that of the adults. But when the dust of the land became gnats ("lice" in our version), this was a phenomenon beyond their experience. Either the species was unknown to them, or its production out of the dry ground was an anomaly, or they knew that no larvæ adequate to explain it had previously existed. In the case of this plague, therefore, comparatively insignificant and easily simulated, they honestly confessed--"This is the finger of God." No better evidence could be desired that the savans here opposed to Moses were men of high character and extensive observation. Many other facts of similar tendency might be cited both from Moses and the Egyptian monuments.] [Footnote 13: That in Genesis, chap. ii.] [Footnote 14: Kitto's Cyclopædia, art. "Creation."] [Footnote 15: Much that is very silly has been written as to the extent of the supposed "optical view" taken by the Hebrew writers; many worthy literary men appearing to suppose that _scientific_ views of nature must necessarily be different from those which we obtain by the evidence of our senses. The very contrary is the fact; and so long as any writers state correctly what they observe, without insisting on any fanciful hypotheses, science has no fault to find with them. What science most detests is the ignorant speculations of those who have not observed at all, or have observed imperfectly. It is a leading excellence of the Hebrew Scriptures that they state facts without giving any theories to account for them. It is, on the contrary, the circumstance that unscientific writers will not be content to be "optical," but must theorize, that spoils much of our modern literature, especially in its descriptions of nature.] [Footnote 16: Prof. Hitchcock.] [Footnote 17: McCosh, "Typical Forms and Special Ends."] [Footnote 18: I adopt that view of the date of Job which makes it precede the Exodus, because the religious ideas of the book are patriarchal, and it contains no allusions to the Hebrew history or institutions. Were I to suggest an hypothesis as to its origin, it would be that it was written or found by Moses when in exile, and published among his countrymen in Egypt, to revive their monotheistic religion, and cheer them under the apparent desertion of their God and the evils of their bondage.] [Footnote 19: Tyndall seems to hold this.] [Footnote 20: Newton.] [Footnote 21: John v., 17; Rom. viii., 22; Heb. i., 2; 2 Peter iii.] [Footnote 22: Heb. i., 2.] [Footnote 23: Eph. iii., 9.] [Footnote 24: 1 Tim. i., 17.] [Footnote 25: Eph. iv., 11.] [Footnote 26: Job xxxviii. and xxxix.] [Footnote 27: Romans i., 20.] [Footnote 28: Essays on Theism.] [Footnote 29: Herschel, Dissertation on the Study of Natural Philosophy; Maxwell, Lecture before the British Association.] [Footnote 30: Carpenter, "Human Physiology."] [Footnote 31: Asah.] [Footnote 32: McDonald, "Creation and the Fall."] [Footnote 33: Literally, "ages" or "time-worlds," as they have been called.] [Footnote 34: Genesis i., 8, 26-28.] [Footnote 35: Job xxxviii., 37.] [Footnote 36: Gen. i., 14; Deut. xvii., 3.] [Footnote 37: Gen. xxviii., 17; Job xv., 15; Psa. ii., 4.] [Footnote 38: Not "created," as some read. The verb is _kana_, not _bara_.] [Footnote 39: The usual Septuagint rendering is _Abyssus_.] [Footnote 40: Smith, "Assyrian Genesis." Brasseur de Bourbourg's translation of the "Popol Vuh" of the ancient Central American Indians.] [Footnote 41: It is impossible to avoid recognizing in the Greek Theogony, as it appears in Hesiod and the Orphic poems, an inextricable intermingling of a cosmogony akin to that of Moses with legendary stories of deceased ancestors; and this has, I must confess, always appeared to me to be a more rational way of accounting for it than its reference to mere nature-myths. Chaos, or space, for the chaos of Hesiod differs from that of Ovid, came first, then Gaea, the earth, and Tartarus, or the lower world. Chaos gave birth to Erebos (identical with the Hebrew Ereb or Erev, evening) and Nyx, or night. These again give birth to Aether, the equivalent of the Hebrew expanse or firmament, and to Hemera, the day, and then the heavenly bodies were perfected. So far the legend is apparently based on some primitive history of creation, not essentially different from that of the Bible. But the Greek Theogony here skips suddenly to the human period; and under the fables of the marriage of Gaea and Uranos, and the Titans, appears to present to us the antediluvian world, with its intermarriages of the sons of God and men, and its Nephelim or Giants, with their mechanic arts and their crimes. Beyond this, in Kronos and his three sons, and in the strange history of Zeus, the chief of these, we have a coarse and fanciful version of the story of the family of Noah, the insult offered by Ham to his father, and the subsequent quarrels and dispersion of mankind. The Zeus of Homer appears to be the elder of the three, or Japheth, the real father of the Greeks, according to the Bible; but in the time of Hesiod Zeus was the youngest, perhaps indicating that the worship of the Egyptian Zeus, Ammon or Ham, had already supplanted among the Greeks that of their own ancestor. But it is curious that even in the Bible, though Japhet is said to be the greater, he is placed last in the lists. After the introduction of Greek savans and literati to Egypt, about B.C. 660, they began to regard their own mythology from this point of view, though obliged to be reserved on the subject. The cosmology of Thales, the astronomy of Anaxagoras, and the history of Herodotus afford early evidence of this, and it abounds in later writers. I may refer the reader to Grote (History of Greece, vol. i.) for an able and agreeable summary of this subject; and may add that even the few coincidences above pointed out between Greek mythology and the Bible, independently of the multitudes of more doubtful character to be found in the older writers on this subject, appear very wonderful, when we consider that among the Greeks these vestiges of primitive religion, whether brought with them from the East or received from abroad, must have been handed down for a long time by oral tradition among the people; but obscure though they may be, the circumstance that some old writers have ridden the resemblances to death affords no excuse for the prevailing neglect of them in more modern times.] [Footnote 42: Pages 21, 22, and 109, _supra_.] [Footnote 43: The minor planets discovered in more recent times between Mars and Jupiter form an exception to this; but they are of little importance, and exceptional in other respects as well. To give their arrangement and the motions of the satellites of Uranus, would require the further assumption of some unknown disturbing cause.] [Footnote 44: Nichol's "Planetary System."] [Footnote 45: Proctor's Lectures, etc.] [Footnote 46: This translation is as literal as is consistent with the bold abruptness of the original. The last idea is that of a cylindrical seal rolling over clay, and leaving behind a beautiful impression where all before was a blank.] [Footnote 47: Professor Dana thus sums up the various meanings of the word _day_ in Genesis: "_First_, in verse 5, the _light_ in general is called day, the darkness night. _Second_, in the same verse, _evening and morning_ make the first day, before the sun appears. _Third_, in verse 14, day stands for _twelve hours_, or the period of daylight, as dependent on the sun. _Fourth_, same verse, in the phrase "days and seasons," day stands for a period of _twenty-four hours_. _Fifth_, at the close of the account, in verse 4 of the second chapter, day means the _whole period of creation_. These uses are the same that we have in our own language." Warring, in his book "The Miracle of To-day," has suggested that the Mosaic days are _epochal_ days, each considered as the close and culmination of a period. This is an ingenious suggestion, and very well coincides with the day-period theory as defended in the text.] [Footnote 48: Psalm xc.] [Footnote 49: It may be desirable to give here, in a slightly paraphrased version, but strictly in accordance with the views of the best expositors, the essential part of the passage in Hebrews, chap. iv.: "For God hath spoken in a certain place" (Gen. ii., 2) of the seventh day in this wise--'And God did rest on the seventh day from all his works;' and in this place again--'They shall not enter into my rest' (Psa. xcv., 11). Seeing, therefore, it still remaineth that some enter therein, and they to whom it (God's Sabbatism) was first proclaimed entered not in, because of disobedience (in the fall, and afterward in the sin of the Israelites in the desert), again he fixes a certain day, saying in David's writings, long after the time of Joshua--'To-day, if ye hear his voice, harden not your hearts.' For if Joshua had given them rest in Canaan, he would not afterward have spoken of another day. There is therefore yet reserved a keeping of a Sabbath for the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest (that is, Jesus Christ, who has finished his work and entered into his rest in heaven), he himself also rested from his own works, as God did from his own. Let us therefore earnestly strive to enter into that rest." It is evident that in this passage God's Sabbatism, the rest intended for man in Eden and for Israel in Canaan, Christ's rest in heaven after finishing his work, and the final heavenly rest of Christ's people, are all indefinite periods mutually related, and can not possibly be natural days.] [Footnote 50: For the benefit of those who may value ancient authorities in such matters, and to show that such views may rationally be entertained independently of geology, I quote the following passage from Origen: "Cuinam quæso sensum habenti convenienter videbitur dictum, quod dies prima et secunda et tertia, in quibus et vespera nominatur, et mane, fuerint sine sole, et sine luna et sine stellis: prima autern dies sine coelo." So St. Augustine expressly states his belief that the creative days could not be of the ordinary kind: "Qui dies, cujusmodi sint, aut perdifficile nobis, aut etiam impossibile est cogitare, quanto magis discere." Bede also remarks, "Fortassis hic diei nomen, totius temporis nomen est, et omnia volumina seculorum hoc vocabulo includit." Many similar opinions of old commentators might be quoted. It is also not unworthy of note that the cardinal number is used here, "one day" for first day; and though the Hebrew grammarians have sought to found on this, and a few similar passages, a rule that the cardinal may be substituted for the ordinal, many learned Hebraists insist that this use of the cardinal number implies singularity and peculiarity as well as mere priority.] [Footnote 51: It is to be observed, however, that on the so-called literal day hypothesis the first Sabbath was not man's seventh day, but rather his first, since he must have been created toward the close of the sixth day.] [Footnote 52: "Footprints of the Creator."] [Footnote 53: This idea occurs in Lord Bacon's "Confession of Faith," and De Luc also maintains that the Creator's Sabbath must have been of long continuance.] [Footnote 54: See the quotation from Job, _supra_.] [Footnote 55: This is not strictly correct, as many animals, especially of the lower tribes, extend back to the early tertiary periods, long before the creation of man; a fact which of itself is irreconcilable with the Mosaic narrative on the theory of literal or ordinary days.] [Footnote 56: Since this was written, the bones of many Batrachian reptiles have been found in the Carboniferous, both in Europe and America. No reptilian remains have yet been found in the Devonian rocks.] [Footnote 57: _Biblical Repository_, 1856. See also an excellent paper by Prof. C. H. Hitchcock, _Bibliotheca Sacra_, 1867.] [Footnote 58: Rhode, quoted by McDonald, "Creation and the Fall," p. 62; Eusebius, Chron. Arm.] [Footnote 59: Suidas, Lexicon--"Tyrrenia."] [Footnote 60: Diodorus Siculus, bk. i. Prichard, Egyptian Mythology.] [Footnote 61: "Asiatic Researches."] [Footnote 62: This name is exactly identical in meaning with the Hebrew Jehovah Elohim.] [Footnote 63: Müller, Sanscrit Literature.] [Footnote 64: The theology of the Institutes is clearly primitive Semitic in its character; and therefore, if the Bible is true, must be older than the Aryan theogony of the Rig-Veda, as expounded by Müller, whatever the relative age of the documents.] [Footnote 65: "Recent Advances in Physical Science."] [Footnote 66: Croll's "Climate and Time" contains some interesting facts as to this.] [Footnote 67: See the discussion of this in the author's "Story of the Earth," and in Sir William Thomson's British Association Address, 1876.] [Footnote 68: Daniell's Meteorological Essays; Prout's Bridgewater Treatise; art. "Meteorology," Encyc. Brit.; "Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea."] [Footnote 69: Kaemtz, "Course of Meteorology."] [Footnote 70: Encyc. Brit., art. "Meteorology."] [Footnote 71: It is not meant that the word _rakiah_ occurs in these passages, but to show how by other words the idea of stretching out or extension rather than solidity is implied. The verb in the first two passages is _nata_, to spread out.] [Footnote 72: See also Humboldt, "Cosmos," vol. ii., pt. 1.] [Footnote 73: Heb., "they refine."] [Footnote 74: "His pavilion round about him was dark waters and thick clouds of the skies," Psa. xviii. This expression explains that in the text.] [Footnote 75: Or "He darkens the depths of the sea."] [Footnote 76: Translation of these lines much disputed and very difficult. Gesenius and Conant render it, "His thunder tells of him; to the herds even of him who is on high."] [Footnote 77: I take advantage of this long quotation to state that in the case of this and other passages quoted from the Old Testament I have carefully consulted the original; but have availed myself freely of the renderings of such of the numerous versions and commentaries as I have been able to obtain, whenever they appeared accurate and expressive, and have not scrupled occasionally to give a free translation where this seemed necessary to perspicuity. In the book of Job, I have consulted principally the translation appended to Barnes's Commentary, Conant's translation, 1857, and those of Tayler Lewis and Evans in Schaff's edition of Lange, 1874.] [Footnote 78: The word is one of those that pervade both Semitic and Indo-European tongues: Sanscrit, _ahara_; Pehlevi, _arta_; Latin, _terra_; German, _Erde_; Gothic, _airtha_; Scottish, _yird_; English, _earth_.--Gesenius.] [Footnote 79: Psalm xcv.] [Footnote 80: Gesenius.] [Footnote 81: Perhaps "changed," metamorphosed, as by fire. Conant has "destroyed."] [Footnote 82: "Dust" in our version, literally lumps or "nuggets."] [Footnote 83: The vulgar and incorrect idea that the vulture "scents the carrion from afar," so often reproduced by later poets, has no place in the Bible poetry. It is the bird's keen eye that enables him to find his prey.] [Footnote 84: Lyell's "Principles of Geology."] [Footnote 85: Stanford, London, 1875.] [Footnote 86: In further explanation of these general geological changes, see "The Story of the Earth and Man," by the author.] [Footnote 87: "Tenera herba, sine semine saltem conspicuo."--Rosenmüller, "Scholia."] [Footnote 88: Haughton, Address to the Geological Society, Dublin.] [Footnote 89: See McDonald, "Creation and the Fall." Professor Guyot, I believe, deserves the credit of having first mentioned, on the American side of the Atlantic, the doctrine respecting the introduction of plants advocated in this chapter.] [Footnote 90: "Eozoic" of this work. Professor Dana in the latest edition of his Manual uses the name "Archaean."] [Footnote 91: This may refer to an eclipse, but from the character of the preceding verses more probably to the obscurity of a tempest. It is remarkable that eclipses, which so much strike the minds of men and affect them with superstitious awe, are not distinctly mentioned in the Old Testament, though referred to in the prophetical parts of the New Testament.] [Footnote 92: Perhaps rather the high places of the waters, referring to the atmospheric waters.] [Footnote 93: The rendering "sweet influences" in our version may be correct, but the weight of argument appears to favor the view of Gesenius that the close bond of union between the stars of this group is referred to. I think it is Herder who well unites both views, the Pleiades being bound together in a sisterly union, and also ushering in the spring by their appearance above the horizon. Conant applies the whole to the seasons, the bands of Orion being in this view those of winter.] [Footnote 94: It would be unfair to suppress the farther probability that the writer intends specially to indicate that the sacred crocodile of the Nile was itself a creature of Jehovah, and among the humbler of those creatures.] [Footnote 95: The interesting discovery, by Mr. Beale and others, of several species of mammalia in the Purbeck, and that of Professor Emmons of a mammal in rocks of similar age in the Southern States of America, do not invalidate this statement; for all these, like the _Microlestes_ of the German trias and the _Amphitherium_ of the Stonesfeld slate, are small marsupials belonging to the least perfect type of mammals. The discovery of so many species of these humbler creatures, goes far to increase the improbability of the existence of the higher mammals.] [Footnote 96: It is very interesting, in connection with this, to note that nearly all the earliest and greatest seats of population and civilization have been placed on the more modern geological deposits, or on those in which stores of fuel have been accumulated by the growth of extinct plants.] [Footnote 97: See Appendix.] [Footnote 98: See Appendix for farther discussion of this subject.] [Footnote 99: See Lyell, Principles of Geology, "Introduction of Species."] [Footnote 100: For the exposition of the details of the fall, I beg to refer the reader to McDonald's "Creation and the Fall," to Kitto's "Antediluvians and Patriarchs," and to Kurtz's "History of the Old Covenant."] [Footnote 101: The Bible specifies, perhaps only as the principal of these arts, music and musical instruments by Jubal, metallurgy by Tubalcain, the domestication of cattle and the nomade life by Jabal. It is highly probable that these inventors are introduced into the Mosaic record for a theological reason, to point out the folly of the worship rendered to Phtha, Hephæstos, Vulcan, Horus, Phoebus, and other inventors, either traditionary representatives of the family of Lamech, or other heroes wrongly identified with them. Very possibly their sister Naamah, "the beautiful," is introduced for the same reason, as the true original of some of the female deities of the heathen.] [Footnote 102: I can not for a moment entertain the monstrous supposition of many expositors that the "sons of God" of these passages are angels, and the "Nephelim" hybrids between angels and men.] [Footnote 103: See Lange's "Commentary on Genesis."] [Footnote 104: The Russian surveys of 1836 made it one hundred and eight English feet; but later authorities reduce it to eighty-three feet six inches below the Black Sea.] [Footnote 105: Kitto's "Bible Illustrations"--Book of Job.] [Footnote 106: See article "Rephaim" in Kitto's "Journal of Sacred Literature." But Gesenius and others regard it, not as an ethnic name, but as a term for the "shades" or spirits of the dead. See Conant on Job.] [Footnote 107: On the Biblical view of this subject, the so-called Aryan mythology, common to India and Greece, is either a derivative from the Cushite civilization, or a spontaneous growth of the Japetic stock scattered by the Cushite empire. The Semitic and Hamitic mythologies are derived from the primeval cherubic worship of Eden, corrupted and mixed with deification of natural objects and stages of the creative work, and with adoration of deified ancestors and heroes.] [Footnote 108: Genesis 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th chapters. See also our previous remarks on the deluge.] [Footnote 109: Genesis iv.] [Footnote 110: Japheth is "enlargement," his sons are Scythians and inhabitants of the isles, varying in language and nationality; and Noah predicts, "God shall enlarge Japheth, he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, Ham shall be his servant." These are surely characteristic ethnological traits for a period so early. On the rationalist view, it may be supposed that this prediction was not written until the characters in question had developed themselves; but since the greatest enlargement of Japheth has occurred since the discovery of America, there would be quite as good ground for maintaining that Noah's prophecy was interpolated after the time of Columbus.] [Footnote 111: The language of this people, the stem of the Indo-European languages, is, though in a later form, probably that of the Aryan or Persepolitan part of the trilingual inscriptions at Behistun and elsewhere in Persia.] [Footnote 112: Edkins, "China's Place in Philology."] [Footnote 113: Reginald S. Poole has adduced very ingenious arguments, monumental, astronomical, and mythological, for the date B.C. 2717.] [Footnote 114: It is curious that almost simultaneously with the appearance of Bunsen's scheme a similiar view was attempted to be maintained on geological grounds. In a series of borings in the delta of the Nile, undertaken by Mr. Horner, there was found a piece of pottery at a depth which appeared to indicate an antiquity of 13,371 years. But the basis of the calculation is the rate of deposit (3-1/2 inches per century) calculated for the ground around the statue of Rameses II. at Memphis, dated at 1361 B.C.; and Mr. Sharpe has objected that no mud could have been deposited around that statue from its erection until the destruction of Memphis, perhaps 800 years B.C. Farther, we have to take into account the natural or artificial changes of the river's bed, which in this very place is said to have been diverted from its course by Menes, and which near Cairo is now nearly a mile from its former site. The liability to error and fraud in boring operations is also very well known. It has farther been suggested that the deep cracks which form in the soil of Egypt, and the sinking of wells in ancient times, are other probable causes of error; and it is stated that pieces of burnt brick, which was not in use in Egypt until the Roman times, have been found at even greater depths than the pottery referred to by Mr. Horner. This discovery, at first sight so startling, and vouched for by a geologist of unquestioned honor and ability, is thus open to the same doubts with the Guadaloupe skeletons, the human bones in ossiferous caverns, and that found in the mud of the Mississippi; all of which have, on examination, proved of no value as proofs of the geological antiquity of man.] [Footnote 115: 5004 B.C.] [Footnote 116: Perhaps the earliest certain date in Egyptian history is that of Thothmes III. of the eighteenth dynasty, ascertained by Birch on astronomical evidence as about 1445 B.C. (about 1600, Manetho); and it seems nearly certain that before the eighteenth dynasty, of which this king was the fifth sovereign, there was no settled general government over all Egypt.] [Footnote 117: The Egyptians seem, like our modern cattle-breeders, to have taken pride in the initiation and preservation of varieties. Their sacred bull, Apis, was required to represent one of the varieties of the ox; and one can scarcely avoid believing that some of their deified ancestors must have earned their celebrity as tamers or breeders of animals. At a later period, the experiments of Jacob with Laban's flock furnish a curious instance of attempts to induce variation.] [Footnote 118: See for evidence of these views early notices in Genesis, and Lenormant and Osburne on Egyptian Monuments and History.] [Footnote 119: There is no good reason to believe the flint implements mentioned by Delanoüe and others, as found on the banks of the Nile, to be older than the historic period.] [Footnote 120: Wilson, "Prehistoric Man," 2d edition, p. 68.] [Footnote 121: Southall has accumulated a great number of these facts in his book on the antiquity of man.] [Footnote 122: Professor Issel, quoted in _Popular Science Monthly_.] [Footnote 123: Wilson has remarked the striking similarity of the pottery of these people to American fictile wares. This similarity applies also to the early Cyprian art.] [Footnote 124: I agree with Gladstone's conclusions as to the date and country of Homer.] [Footnote 125: I suggested these terms in my lectures published under the title "Nature and the Bible," 1875.] [Footnote 126: Since these words were written I have read the remarkable book of Edkins on the Chinese language, which supplies much additional information.] [Footnote 127: Donaldson has pointed out (British Association Proceedings, 1851) links of connection between the Slavonian or Sarmatian tongues and the Semitic languages, which in like manner indicate the primitive union of the two great branches of languages.] [Footnote 128: "Man and his Migrations." See also "Descriptive Ethnology," where the Semitic affinities are very strongly brought out.] [Footnote 129: I can scarcely except such terms as "Japetic" and "Japetidæ," for Iapetus can hardly be any thing else than a traditional name borrowed from Semitic ethnology, or handed down from the Japhetic progenitors of the Greeks.] [Footnote 130: See art. "Philology," Encyc. Brit.] [Footnote 131: Grammatical structure is no doubt more permanent than vocabulary, yet we find great changes in the latter, both in tracing cognate languages from one region to another, and from period to period. The Indo-Germanic languages in Europe furnish enough of familiar instances.] [Footnote 132: It is fair, however, to observe that the Bible refers the first great divergence of language to a divine intervention at the Tower of Babel. The precise nature of this we do not know; but it would tend to diminish the time required.] [Footnote 133: Lecture in the Royal Institution, March 24, 1876.] [Footnote 134: "Antiquity of Man," 4th ed.] [Footnote 135: Southall, _Op. cit._] [Footnote 136: The Mentone skeleton described by Dr. Rivière gives evidence of these facts.] [Footnote 137: Mr. Pengelly declines to admit this; but assigns no cause for the breaking up of portions of the old floor, which he merely refers in general terms to "natural causes."] [Footnote 138: This whole subject of supposed preglacial or interglacial men is still in great confusion and uncertainty, and is complicated with questions, still debated, as to the ages of the supposed glacial and postglacial deposits.] [Footnote 139: _Quarterly Journal of Science_, April, 1875.] [Footnote 140: Lyell's "Manual of Elementary Geology."] [Footnote 141: For a full discussion of this subject, see the "Story of the Earth and Man."] [Footnote 142: Such a table, with an admirable exposition of the entire succession, as at present known, is given in the Appendix to Lyell's "Students' Manual of Geology."] [Footnote 143: Lyell, basing his calculations on the surveys of Messrs. Humphreys and Abbott, but others give very different estimates.] [Footnote 144: A perfectly parallel example is that of the growth of the peninsula of Florida in the modern period, by the same processes now adding to its shores; and this has afforded to Professor Agassiz a still more extended measure of the Post-tertiary period.] [Footnote 145: Reade, of Liverpool, has recently given a much slower rate--one foot in 13,000 years--as a result of recent English surveys; but I have not seen his precise data, and the result certainly differs from those of all other observations.] [Footnote 146: I am quite aware that it may be objected to all this that it is based on merely negative evidence; but this is not strictly the case. There are positive indications of these truths. For example, in the Mesozoic epoch the lacertian reptiles presented huge elephantine carnivorous and herbivorous species--the Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, etc.; flying species, with hollow bones and ample wings--the Pterodactyles; and aquatic whale-like species--Pliosaurus, Ichthyosaurus, etc. These creatures actually filled the offices now occupied by the mammals; and, though lacertian in their affinities, they must have had circulatory, respiratory, and nervous systems far in advance of any modern reptiles even of the order of Loricates.] [Footnote 147: "Story of the Earth"--concluding chapters.] [Footnote 148: This was written in 1860 for the first edition of "Archaia." I see no reason to change it now, and its vindication will be, found in the Appendix.] [Footnote 149: Heb. iv., 9; 2 Peter iii., 13.] [Footnote 150: Hamilton.] [Footnote 151: In the manner illustrated by Hyatt and Cope.] [Footnote 152: Report on Fossil Plants of the Upper Silurian and Devonian, 1871.] [Footnote 153: Drysdale's "Protoplasmic Theories of Life."] [Footnote 154: Lecture before the Royal Institution of London.] [Footnote 155: _Leisure Hour_, 1876.] [Footnote 156: See critique in _International Review_, January, 1877.] [Footnote 157: Reported in _Nature_, 1876.] [Footnote 158: "History of Creation."] [Footnote 159: See also Hunt, "Chemical and Geological Essays," p. 35.] [Footnote 160: Except, perhaps, Job xxxi., 27.] [Footnote 161: "Animals and Plants under Domestication," p. 406.] [Footnote 162: Prichard. This is admitted by Darwin, who gives other examples, though he insists much on the climatal variations which still remain in feral pigs.] [Footnote 163: "North American Indians."] [Footnote 164: Haliburton's "Nova Scotia;" Gilpin's Lecture on Sable Island.] [Footnote 165: "Principles of Geology;" "Natural History of Man." See also a very able article on the "Varieties of Man," by Dr. Carpenter, in Todd's Cyclopædia.] [Footnote 166: "The Races of Men," etc. Boston, 1848.] [Footnote 167: Browne, of Philadelphia, quoted by Kneeland and others.] [Footnote 168: Todd's Cyclopædia, art. "Varieties of Man."] [Footnote 169: "Prehistoric Man."] [Footnote 170: Carpenter in Todd's Cyclopædia.] [Footnote 171: For an interesting inquiry into the origin of the dog, see the article in Todd's Cyclopædia already referred to; and the subject is fully discussed by Darwin, who leans to the theory of the diversity of origin in dogs.] [Footnote 172: Prichard, Bachman, Cabell.] [Footnote 173: A curious note, by Dr. John Rae, on the change of complexion in the Sandwich Islanders, consequent on the introduction of clothing, may be found in the "Montreal Medical Chronicle," 1856, and the "Canadian Journal" for the same year.] [Footnote 174: Latham's "Descriptive Ethnology."] INDEX. Abraham, 25, 270. Abrahamic Genesis, 18. Abyss, 104. "Accommodation," theory of, 61. Adaptation in nature, 78. Æons of creation, 132. Agassiz on prophetic types, 350. on species, 342. Animals, higher, creation of the, 230. lower, creation of the, 211. Antediluvians, 253. Antiquity of man, 263, 386. of man, geological evidence of the, 294. of man, history in relation to the, 271. of man, language in relation to the, 285. of the earth, 154, 331. _Aretz_ (earth), 94, 175. Argyll, Duke of, on creation by law, 373. Duke of, on the origin of civilization, 391. Aryan race, 16, 267. Assyrian Genesis, 19, 108. Texts, 412. Astronomy of the Bible, 207. Atmosphere, constitution of the, 157. creation of the, 160. Augustine on creative days, 134. _Aur_ (light), 115. Babel, 258, 266. _Bara_ (create), 90. Beaumont, De, on continents, 184. Bede on creative days, 133. Beginning, the, 87, 95. _Behemoth_, 233. _Bhemah_ (herbivores), 231, 406. Birds, creation of, 216, 219. Bronn on the origin of species, 339. Bronze, age of, 279. Bunsen's chronology, 273. Cainozoic period, 331. Carnivora, creation of, 232. Caverns, human remains in, 298. Centres of creation, 238. Chaos, 100, 107. chemistry of, 112. Chinese language, 288. Comparisons and conclusions, 322. "Conflict of the Bible with science," 44. Continents, their origin, 182. Cosmogony, Assyrian, 108. Egyptian, 106, 198. Greek, 109. Hebrew, its character, 70. Hebrew, its objects, 35. Hebrew, its origin, 46. Indian, 110, 148. Persian, 147. Phoenician, 107. Cranial characters of primitive men, 298. Creation, 90. by law, 373. centres of, 238. days of, 115. modes of, 375, 377. of birds, 216, 219. of carnivora, 232. of great reptiles, 213. of herbivora, 231. of higher animals, 230. of lower animals, 211. of man, 235. of plants, 186. Croll, calculations of erosion, 334. glacial theory of, 396. Dana on creation of plants, 196. on creative days, 144. on tertiary fauna, 234. Darwin on species, 338. Day of creation, first, 115. of creation, second, 157. of creation, third, 174. of creation, fourth, 199. of creation, fifth, 211. of creation, sixth, 230. of creation, seventh, 249. Days of creation, 115. of creation compared with geological periods, 155. prophetic, 65. Death before the fall, 355. "Deep," the, 104. Deluge, the, 256. _Deshé_ (herbage), 186. Design in nature, 78. Desolate void, 100. Drysdale on theories of life, 383. Dupont on Belgian caves, 308. Earth, the, 94, 102, 175. its foundations, 177. Ecclesiastes, chap. i., 74. Eden, conditions of, 237, 252. site of, 237-252. Edkins on the Chinese language, 286, 288. Egypt, early history of, 272. Egyptian Cosmogony, 106, 198. Texts, 412. _Elohim_, 89, 97. Evans on the erosion of valleys, 313. Evening of creative days, 138. Evolution as applied to animals, 226, 363. Excavation of valleys, 315. Exodus xxiv., 10, 163. Fall of man, 250. Final causes, 355. Firmament, the, 162. Fluidity, original, of the earth, 110. Forbes on creation of man, 250. Foundations of the earth, 177. Frontal, cave of, 308. Genesis, chap. i., translated, 66. chap. i., 1, 87. chap. i., 2, 100. chap. i., 3 to 5, 115. chap. i., 6 to 8, 157. chap. i., 10 to 11, 174. chap. i., 14 to 19, 199. chap. i., 20 to 23, 211. chap. i., 24 to 31, 230. chap. ii., 1 to 3, 299. chap. iv., 23, 46. chap. x., 22, 263. the Abrahamic, 18. the Assyrian, 20. the Mosaic, 27. the Quiché, 22. Geology, principles of, 325. Glacial periods, theories of, 395. God, personality of, 11. "Grass" in Genesis i., 186. Greek myths, 109. Green on the forms of continents, 184. Haeckel on the affiliation of races, 289. on man and apes, 389. Hamite races, 268. Harmony of revelation and science, 342. Havilah, productions of, 255. _Hay'th-eretz_ (wild beast), 232. Heavens, the, 92, 165. Herbivora, creation of, 231. Hindoos, cosmogony of the, 149. Hitchcock on creative days, 141. Horner on the alluvium of the Nile, 274. Hughes on the excavation of valleys, 315. on interglacial periods, 295. on stalagmite, 388. on the Victoria Cave, 387. Humboldt on Hebrew poetry, 39. Hunt on the chemistry of the primeval earth, 400. Hurakon, 107. Hut of Sodertelge, 386. Ice-freshets in America, 314 Incandescence of the earth, 110, 119. India, cosmogony of, 149. Japhetic races, 267, 268. Jehovah, 96. Job ix., 5, 176. ix., 9, 206. xxii., 15, 257. xxviii., 179. xxviii., 26, 73. xxxvi., 166. xxxvii., 14, 161. xxxviii., 166, 177, 206. Jones, Sir W., on Indian cosmogony, 149. Kent's Cavern, 302. Kurtz on days of vision, 49. Lamech, his poem, 46. Land, its creation, 174. geological history of, 182. Languages, unity of, 285, 291. La Place, nebular hypothesis of, 119. Latham on African languages, 288. on the radiation of languages, 289. Laws of nature, in the Bible, 73. Lemuria, 289. Leviticus xi., 212. Life, succession of, 331, 337. theories of, 383. Light, 115, 121. Logos, 96. Luminaries, 199. Lyell on the cause of the glacial period, 397. on the delta of the Mississippi, 333. on the pleistocene period, 297. Mammals, creation of, 231. Mammoth age, 299. Man, antiquity of, 386. creation of, 235. neocosmic, 285. palæocosmic, 285, 319. Man, unity of, 263, 414. Manetho, chronology of, 273. Margite, cave of, 308. Menes, his epoch, 273. Mesozoic period, 218, 331. Miller on creative days, 135. Mining noticed in the Bible, 179. Mississippi, delta of the, 333. Mist watering the ground, 189. Modern period of geology, 251. Modes of creation, 377. Moffatt on African languages, 292. Morse on the evolution of man, 391. Mosaic Genesis, 27. Müller's classification of religions, 14. Mythology, ancient, its origin, 408. of the atmosphere, 171. as related to the Bible, 109, 261. Nature, study of, 244. Neocosmic man, 285. "Neolithic" men, 278. Niagara, excavation of, 312. Nimrod, 259. Noah, sons of, 266. Palæocosmic men, 285, 319. "Palæolithic" men, 278. Palæozoic animals, 217. period, 231. Parallelism of Scripture and geology, 343. Pattison on the antiquity of man, 318. Pengelly on Kent's Cavern, 302. on stalagmite, 387. Periods, creative, 126. geological, 330. Persians, cosmogony of the, 147. Philological evidence of the antiquity of man, 285. Pictet on the origin of species, 339. Pierce on the forms of continents, 184. Pillars of the earth, 177. Plants, creation of, 186. Plastids and plastidules, 377. Pratt, Archdeacon, on _bhemah_, 406. Prayer and law, 171. Progress in nature, 75, 337. Proverbs, viii., 74, 96, 176. Psalm viii., 208. viii., 1, 94. xviii., 178. xix., 208. xc., 108. civ., 164, 175, 178, 224. cxix., 90, 74. cxix., 20, 176. cxxxix., 84. cxlvii., 208. cxlviii., 6, 73. Purpose in nature, 78. Quiché Genesis, 22, 107. _Rakiah_ (the expanse), 162. Rawlinson on historical dates, 390. Reconciliation of the Bible and geology, 342. Reindeer age, 299. Religion, Aryan, 16. Turanian, 15. Semitic, 16. _Remes_ (creeping things), 215. _Rephaim_, 257. Reptiles, 213, 215. Revelation, idea of, 12. River valleys, excavation of, 314. Ruach Elohim, 106. Rutimeyer on interglacial men, 386. Sabbath, the, as related to ages of creation, 130. of the Creator, 249. Schliemann on Troy, 282. _Shamayim_ (heavens), 92. Shemite races, 16. _Sheretz_ (swarming creature), 211. Somme, gravels of the, 313. Song of creation, 66. Species, Agassiz on, 61. Bronn on, 339. distinct from varieties, 414. in Genesis i., 215. origin of, 368, 378. Spirit of God in creation, 106. Stalagmite, deposition of, 310, 385. _Stereoma_, 162. Stone, ages of, 281. Table of Biblical periods, 352. of geological periods, 330. Tait, Prof., on the age of the earth, 154. _Tannin_ (great reptile), 213, 405. Tennyson on types in nature, 222. Theories of the origin of genesis, 51. Thomson, Sir Wm., on the age of the earth, 154. Time, geological, 321, 332. Torel on the Sodertelge hut, 386. Troy, as described by Schliemann, 282. Type in nature, 82, 222. Unity of man, 263, 414. of nature, 36. Universe, the unseen, 11. Variation, laws of, 414. Veda, its cosmogony, 110. Vegetation, its creation, 186. of Eozoic period, 192. Victoria Cave, 386. Vision of creation, 65. Void, the, 100. Wallace on evolution, 373. on primitive man, 389. Waters above the heavens, 159. "Whales, great," 213. Wilson on American skulls, 427. on ancient pottery, 283. THE END. By PRINCIPAL DAWSON. EARTH AND MAN. The Story of the Earth and Man. By J. W. DAWSON, LL.D., F.R.S., F.G.S., Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University, Montreal. With Twenty Illustrations. 12mo, Cloth, $1 50. An admirable book. It is a clear and interesting _résumé_ of the results of geological investigation, told in simple language, devoid of technicalities. The unscientific reader will obtain more knowledge of geology in one hour's reading of this book than he will in a week's study of more elaborate and professional books upon the same subject. It is vigorously written, and with a certain picturesqueness that is exceedingly attractive. The chapters upon primitive man are peculiarly interesting.--_Saturday Evening Gazette_, Boston. The pleasantly written volume before us tells the story of the paleontology and physical geography of the earth in prehuman ages, and closes with a discussion of the theories of the appearance, late in geological time, of man upon the earth. Dr. Dawson's sketch of paleontology will, we feel sure, be found interesting by all readers.--_Athenæum_, London. Since Hugh Miller's time no scientific geologist has done more than Principal Dawson to extend popular interest in this branch of study, to secure attention to its educational value, or to remove misapprehensions which exist in some quarters as to the relations of science and Scripture on geological questions.--_Leisure Hour_, London. We have read his book with profound interest. It is intelligible, candid, modest.--_Boston Transcript._ ORIGIN OF THE WORLD. The Origin of the World, according to Revelation and Science. By J. W. DAWSON, LL.D., F.R.S., F.G.S., &c. 12mo, Cloth. * * * * * PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. HARPER & BROTHERS _will send either of the above works by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United Slates, on receipt of the price._ By ALEXANDER WINCHELL, SKETCHES OF CREATION: a Popular View of some of the Grand Conclusions of the Sciences in Reference to the History of Matter and of Life. Together with a Statement of the Intimations of Science respecting the Primordial Condition and the Ultimate Destiny of the Earth and the Solar System. By ALEXANDER WINCHELL, LL.D. With Illustrations. 12mo, Cloth, $2 00. A GEOLOGICAL CHART: exhibiting the Classification and Relative Positions of the Rocks, and the Various Phenomena of Stratigraphical Geology; together with an Indication of Geological Equivalents, the most important American and Foreign Synonyms, the Economical Products of the Rocks, and numerous Typical Localities; with an Actual Section from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains, near the Parallel of Thirty-nine Degrees. By ALEXANDER WINCHELL, LL.D. Mounted on roller, $10 00. _With a Key._ 8vo, Paper, 25 cents. THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION; its Data, its Principles, its Speculations, and its Theistic Bearings. By ALEXANDER WINCHELL, LL.D. 12mo, Cloth, $1 00. RECONCILIATION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. By ALEXANDER WINCHELL, LL.D. 12mo, Cloth, $2 00. _Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York._ HARPER & BROTHERS _will send any of the above works by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt of the price._ 
42968	----	Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including inconsistencies in hyphenation. It seems that the italic typeface used in this book did not have an ae ligature. Names of genera and higher taxonomic groups are not capitalized in the printed book: they have bee left unchanged. Some changes have been made. They are listed at the end of the text. Italic text has been marked with _underscores_. OE ligatures have been expanded. THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE [Illustration: ERNST HAECKEL] THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE _AT THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY_ BY ERNST HAECKEL (Ph.D., M.D., LL.D., Sc.D., and Professor at the University of Jena) AUTHOR OF "THE HISTORY OF CREATION" "THE EVOLUTION OF MAN" ETC. TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH McCABE [Illustration] HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON 1905 Copyright, 1900, by HARPER & BROTHERS. _All rights reserved._ CONTENTS PAGE AUTHOR'S PREFACE v TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xi CHAPTER I THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 1 CHAPTER II OUR BODILY FRAME 22 CHAPTER III OUR LIFE 39 CHAPTER IV OUR EMBRYONIC DEVELOPMENT 53 CHAPTER V THE HISTORY OF OUR SPECIES 71 CHAPTER VI THE NATURE OF THE SOUL 88 CHAPTER VII PSYCHIC GRADATIONS 108 CHAPTER VIII THE EMBRYOLOGY OF THE SOUL 132 CHAPTER IX THE PHYLOGENY OF THE SOUL 148 CHAPTER X CONSCIOUSNESS 170 CHAPTER XI THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 188 CHAPTER XII THE LAW OF SUBSTANCE 211 CHAPTER XIII THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 233 CHAPTER XIV THE UNITY OF NATURE 254 CHAPTER XV GOD AND THE WORLD 275 CHAPTER XVI KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 292 CHAPTER XVII SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY 308 CHAPTER XVIII OUR MONISTIC RELIGION 331 CHAPTER XIX OUR MONISTIC ETHICS 347 CHAPTER XX SOLUTION OF THE WORLD-PROBLEMS 365 CONCLUSION 380 INDEX 385 AUTHOR'S PREFACE The present study of the monistic philosophy is intended for thoughtful readers of every condition who are united in an honest search for the truth. An intensification of this effort of man to attain a knowledge of the truth is one of the most salient features of the nineteenth century. That is easily explained, in the first place, by the immense progress of science, especially in its most important branch, the history of humanity; it is due, in the second place, to the open contradiction that has developed during the century between science and the traditional "Revelation"; and, finally, it arises from the inevitable extension and deepening of the rational demand for an elucidation of the innumerable facts that have been recently brought to light, and for a fuller knowledge of their causes. Unfortunately, this vast progress of empirical knowledge in our "Century of Science" has not been accompanied by a corresponding advancement of its theoretical interpretation--that higher knowledge of the causal nexus of individual phenomena which we call philosophy. We find, on the contrary, that the abstract and almost wholly metaphysical science which has been taught in our universities for the last hundred years under the name of "philosophy" is far from assimilating our hard-earned treasures of experimental research. On the other hand, we have to admit, with equal regret, that most of the representatives of what is called "exact science" are content with the special care of their own narrow branches of observation and experiment, and deem superfluous the deeper study of the universal connection of the phenomena they observe--that is, philosophy. While these pure empiricists "do not see the wood for the trees," the metaphysicians, on the other hand, are satisfied with the mere picture of the wood, and trouble not about its individual trees. The idea of a "philosophy of nature," to which both those methods of research, the empirical and the speculative, naturally converge, is even yet contemptuously rejected by large numbers of representatives of both tendencies. This unnatural and fatal opposition between science and philosophy, between the results of experience and of thought, is undoubtedly becoming more and more onerous and painful to thoughtful people. That is easily proved by the increasing spread of the immense popular literature of "natural philosophy" which has sprung up in the course of the last half-century. It is seen, too, in the welcome fact that, in spite of the mutual aversion of the scientific observer and the speculative philosopher, nevertheless eminent thinkers from both camps league themselves in a united effort to attain the solution of that highest object of inquiry which we briefly denominate the "world-riddles." The studies of these "world-riddles" which I offer in the present work cannot reasonably claim to give a perfect solution of them; they merely offer to a wide circle of readers a critical inquiry into the problem, and seek to answer the question as to how nearly we have approached that solution at the present day. What stage in the attainment of truth have we actually arrived at in this closing year of the nineteenth century? What progress have we really made during its course towards that immeasurably distant goal? The answer which I give to these great questions must, naturally, be merely subjective and only partly correct; for my knowledge of nature and my ability to interpret its objective reality are limited, as are those of every man. The one point that I can claim for it, and which, indeed, I must ask of my strongest opponents, is that my Monistic Philosophy is sincere from beginning to end--it is the complete expression of the conviction that has come to me, after many years of ardent research into Nature and unceasing reflection, as to the true basis of its phenomena. For fully half a century has my mind's work proceeded, and I now, in my sixty-sixth year, may venture to claim that it is mature; I am fully convinced that this "ripe fruit" of the tree of knowledge will receive no important addition and suffer no substantial modification during the brief spell of life that remains to me. I presented all the essential and distinctive elements of my monistic and genetic philosophy thirty-three years ago, in my _General Morphology of Organisms_, a large and laborious work, which has had but a limited circulation. It was the first attempt to apply in detail the newly established theory of evolution to the whole science of organic forms. In order to secure the acceptance of at least one part of the new thought which it contained, and to kindle a wider interest in the greatest advancement of knowledge that our century has witnessed, I published my _Natural History of Creation_ two years afterwards. As this less complicated work, in spite of its great defects, ran into nine large editions and twelve different translations, it has contributed not a little to the spread of monistic views. The same may be said of the less known _Anthropogeny_[1] (1874), in which I set myself the difficult task of rendering the most important facts of the theory of man's descent accessible and intelligible to the general reader; the fourth, enlarged, edition of that work appeared in 1891. In the paper which I read at the fourth International Congress of Zoology at Cambridge, in 1898, on "Our Present Knowledge of the Descent of Man"[2] (a seventh edition of which appeared in 1899), I treated certain significant and particularly valuable advances which this important branch of anthropology has recently made. Other isolated questions of our modern natural philosophy, which are peculiarly interesting, have been dealt with in my _Collected Popular Lectures on the Subject of Evolution_ (1878). Finally, I have briefly presented the broad principles of my monistic philosophy and its relation to the dominant faith in my _Confession of Faith of a Man of Science: Monism as a Connecting Link between Religion and Science_[3] (1892, eighth edition, 1899). The present work on _The Riddle of the Universe_ is the continuation, confirmation, and integration of the views which I have urged for a generation in the aforesaid volumes. It marks the close of my studies on the monistic conception of the universe. The earlier plan, which I projected many years ago, of constructing a complete "System of Monistic Philosophy" on the basis of evolution will never be carried into effect now. My strength is no longer equal to the task, and many warnings of approaching age urge me to desist. Indeed, I am wholly a child of the nineteenth century, and with its close I draw the line under my life's work. The vast extension of human knowledge which has taken place during the present century, owing to a happy division of labor, makes it impossible to-day to range over all its branches with equal thoroughness, and to show their essential unity and connection. Even a genius of the highest type, having an equal command of every branch of science, and largely endowed with the artistic faculty of comprehensive presentation, would be incapable of setting forth a complete view of the cosmos in the space of a moderate volume. My own command of the various branches of science is uneven and defective, so that I can attempt no more than to sketch the general plan of such a world-picture, and point out the pervading unity of its parts, however imperfect be the execution. Thus it is that this work on the world-enigma has something of the character of a sketch-book, in which studies of unequal value are associated. As the material of the book was partly written many years ago, and partly produced for the first time during the last few years, the composition is, unfortunately, uneven at times; repetitions, too, have proved unavoidable. I trust those defects will be overlooked. In taking leave of my readers, I venture the hope that, through my sincere and conscientious work--in spite of its faults, of which I am not unconscious--I have contributed a little towards the solution of the great enigma. Amid the clash of theories, I trust that I have indicated to many a reader who is absorbed in the zealous pursuit of purely rational knowledge that path which, it is my firm conviction, alone leads to the truth--the path of empirical investigation and of the Monistic Philosophy which is based upon it. ERNST HAECKEL. JENA, GERMANY. PREFACE The hour is close upon us when we shall commence our retrospect of one of the most wonderful sections of time that was ever measured by the sweep of the earth. Already the expert is at work, dissecting out and studying his particular phase of that vast world of thought and action we call the nineteenth century. Art, literature, commerce, industry, politics, ethics--all have their high interpreters among us; but in the chance of life it has fallen out that there is none to read aright for us, in historic retrospect, what after ages will probably regard as the most salient feature of the nineteenth century--the conflict of theology with philosophy and science. The pens of our Huxleys, and Tyndalls, and Darwins lie where they fell; there is none left in strength among us to sum up the issues of that struggle with knowledge and sympathy. In these circumstances it has been thought fitting that we should introduce to English readers the latest work of Professor Haeckel. Germany, as the reader will quickly perceive, is witnessing the same strange reaction of thought that we see about us here in England, yet _Die Welträthsel_ found an immediate and very extensive circle of readers. One of the most prominent zoologists of the century, Professor Haeckel, has a unique claim to pronounce with authority, from the scientific side, on what is known as "the conflict of science and religion." In the contradictory estimates that are urged on us--for the modern ecclesiastic is as emphatic in his assurance that the conflict has ended favorably to theology as the rationalist is with his counter-assertion--the last words of one of the leading combatants of the second half of the century, still, happily, in full vigor of mind, will be heard with respect and close attention. A glance at the index of the work suffices to indicate its comprehensive character. The judgment of the distinguished scientist cannot fail to have weight on all the topics included; yet the reader will soon discover a vein of exceptionally interesting thought in the chapters on evolution. The evolution of the human body is no longer a matter of serious dispute. It has passed the first two tribunals--those of theology and of an _à priori_ philosophy--and is only challenged at the third and last--that of empirical proof--by the decorative heads of scientific bodies and a few isolated thinkers. "_Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto._" But the question of the evolution of the human mind, or soul, has been successfully divorced from that of the body. Roman Catholic advanced theologians, whose precise terminology demanded a clear position, admit the latter and deny the former categorically. Other theologians, and many philosophers, have still a vague notion that the evidence for the one does not impair their sentimental objection to the other. Dr. Haeckel's work summarizes the evidence for the evolution of mind in a masterly and profoundly interesting fashion. It seems impossible to follow his broad survey of the psychic world, from protist to man, without bearing away a conviction of the natural origin of every power and content of the human soul. TRANSLATOR. _October, 1900._ THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE CHAPTER I THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM The Condition of Civilization and of Thought at the Close of the Nineteenth Century--Progress of Our Knowledge of Nature, of the Organic and Inorganic Sciences--The Law of Substance and the Law of Evolution--Progress of Technical Science and of Applied Chemistry--Stagnancy in other Departments of Life: Legal and Political Administration, Education, and the Church--Conflict of Reason and Dogma--Anthropism--Cosmological Perspective--Cosmological Theorems--Refutation of the Delusion of Man's Importance--Number of "World-Riddles"--Criticism of the "Seven" Enigmas--The Way to Solve Them--Function of the Senses and of the Brain--Induction and Deduction--Reason, Sentiment, and Revelation--Philosophy and Science--Experience and Speculation--Dualism and Monism The close of the nineteenth century offers one of the most remarkable spectacles to the thoughtful observer. All educated people are agreed that it has in many respects immeasurably outstripped its predecessors, and has achieved tasks that were deemed impracticable at its commencement. An entirely new character has been given to the whole of our modern civilization, not only by our astounding theoretical progress in sound knowledge of nature, but also by the remarkably fertile practical application of that knowledge in technical science, industry, commerce, and so forth. On the other hand, however, we have made little or no progress in moral and social life, in comparison with earlier centuries; at times there has been serious reaction. And from this obvious conflict there have arisen, not only an uneasy sense of dismemberment and falseness, but even the danger of grave catastrophes in the political and social world. It is, then, not merely the right, but the sacred duty, of every honorable and humanitarian thinker to devote himself conscientiously to the settlement of that conflict, and to warding off the dangers that it brings in its train. In our conviction this can only be done by a courageous effort to attain the truth, and by the formation of a clear view of the world--a view that shall be based on truth and conformity to reality. If we recall to mind the imperfect condition of science at the beginning of the century, and compare this with the magnificent structure of its closing years, we are compelled to admit that marvellous progress has been made during its course. Every single branch of science can boast that it has, especially during the latter half of the century, made numerous acquisitions of the utmost value. Both in our microscopic knowledge of the little and in our telescopic investigation of the great we have attained an invaluable insight that seemed inconceivable a hundred years ago. Improved methods of microscopic and biological research have not only revealed to us an invisible world of living things in the kingdom of the protists, full of an infinite wealth of forms, but they have taught us to recognize in the tiny cell the all-pervading "elementary organism" of whose social communities--the tissues--the body of every multicellular plant and animal, even that of man, is composed. This anatomical knowledge is of extreme importance; and it is supplemented by the embryological discovery that each of the higher multicellular organisms is developed out of one simple cell, the impregnated ovum. The "cellular theory," which has been founded on that discovery, has given us the first true interpretation of the physical, chemical, and even the psychological processes of life--those mysterious phenomena for whose explanation it had been customary to postulate a supernatural "vital force" or "immortal soul." Moreover, the true character of disease has been made clear and intelligible to the physician for the first time by the cognate science of Cellular Pathology. The discoveries of the nineteenth century in the inorganic world are no less important. Physics has made astounding progress in every section of its province--in optics and acoustics, in magnetism and electricity, in mechanics and thermo-dynamics; and, what is still more important, it has proved the unity of the forces of the entire universe. The mechanical theory of heat has shown how intimately they are connected, and how each can, in certain conditions, transform itself directly into another. Spectral analysis has taught us that the same matter which enters into the composition of all bodies on earth, including its living inhabitants, builds up the rest of the planets, the sun, and the most distant stars. Astro-physics has considerably enlarged our cosmic perspective in revealing to us, in the immeasurable depths of space, millions of circling spheres larger than our earth, and, like it, in endless transformation, in an eternal rhythm of life and death. Chemistry has introduced us to a multitude of new substances, all of which arise from the combination of a few (about seventy) elements that are incapable of further analysis; some of them play a most important part in every branch of life. It has been shown that one of these elements--carbon--is the remarkable substance that effects the endless variety of organic syntheses, and thus may be considered "the chemical basis of life." All the particular advances, however, of physics and chemistry yield in theoretical importance to the discovery of the great law which brings them all to one common focus, the "Law of Substance." As this fundamental cosmic law establishes the eternal persistence of matter and force, their unvarying constancy throughout the entire universe, it has become the pole-star that guides our Monistic Philosophy through the mighty labyrinth to a solution of the world-problem. Since we intend to make a general survey of the actual condition of our knowledge of nature and its progress during the present century in the following chapters, we shall delay no longer with the review of its particular branches. We would only mention one important advance, which was contemporary with the discovery of the law of substance, and which supplements it--the establishment of the theory of evolution. It is true that there were philosophers who spoke of the evolution of things a thousand years ago; but the recognition that such a law dominates the entire universe, and that the world is nothing else than an eternal "evolution of substance," is a fruit of the nineteenth century. It was not until the second half of this century that it attained to perfect clearness and a universal application. The immortal merit of establishing the doctrine on an empirical basis, and pointing out its world-wide application, belongs to the great scientist Charles Darwin; he it was who, in 1859, supplied a solid foundation for the theory of descent, which the able French naturalist Jean Lamarck had already sketched in its broad outlines in 1809, and the fundamental idea of which had been almost prophetically enunciated in 1799 by Germany's greatest poet and thinker, Wolfgang Goethe. In that theory we have the key to "the question of all questions," to the great enigma of "the place of man in nature," and of his natural development. If we are in a position to-day to recognize the sovereignty of the law of evolution--and, indeed, of a monistic evolution--in every province of nature, and to use it, in conjunction with the law of substance, for a simple interpretation of all natural phenomena, we owe it chiefly to those three distinguished naturalists; they shine as three stars of the first magnitude amid all the great men of the century. This marvellous progress in a theoretical knowledge of nature has been followed by a manifold practical application in every branch of civilized life. If we are to-day in the "age of commerce," if international trade and communication have attained dimensions beyond the conception of any previous age, if we have transcended the limits of space and time by our telegraph and telephone, we owe it, in the first place, to the technical advancement of physics, especially in the application of steam and electricity. If, in photography, we can, with the utmost ease, compel the sunbeam to create for us in a moment's time a correct picture of any object we like; if we have made enormous progress in agriculture, and in a variety of other pursuits; if, in surgery, we have brought an infinite relief to human pain by our chloroform and morphia, our antiseptics and serous therapeutics, we owe it all to applied chemistry. But it is so well known how much we have surpassed all earlier centuries through these and other scientific discoveries that we need linger over the question no longer. While we look back with a just pride on the immense progress of the nineteenth century in a knowledge of nature and in its practical application, we find, unfortunately, a very different and far from agreeable picture when we turn to another and not less important province of modern life. To our great regret we must endorse the words of Alfred Wallace: "Compared with our astounding progress in physical science and its practical application, our system of government, of administrative justice, and of national education, and our entire social and moral organization, remain in a state of barbarism." To convince ourselves of the truth of this grave indictment we need only cast an unprejudiced glance at our public life, or look into the mirror that is daily offered to us by the press, the organ of public sentiment. We begin our review with justice, the _fundamentum regnorum_. No one can maintain that its condition to-day is in harmony with our advanced knowledge of man and the world. Not a week passes in which we do not read of judicial decisions over which every thoughtful man shakes his head in despair; many of the decisions of our higher and lower courts are simply unintelligible. We are not referring in the treatment of this particular "world-problem" to the fact that many modern states, in spite of their paper constitutions, are really governed with absolute despotism, and that many who occupy the bench give judgment less in accordance with their sincere conviction than with wishes expressed in higher quarters. We readily admit that the majority of judges and counsel decide conscientiously, and err simply from human frailty. Most of their errors, indeed, are due to defective preparation. It is popularly supposed that these are just the men of highest education, and that on that very account they have the preference in nominations to different offices. However, this famed "legal education" is for the most part rather of a formal and technical character. They have but a superficial acquaintance with that chief and peculiar object of their activity, the human organism, and its most important function, the mind. That is evident from the curious views as to the liberty of the will, responsibility, etc., which we encounter daily. I once told an eminent jurist that the tiny spherical ovum from which every man is developed is as truly endowed with life as the embryo of two, or seven, or even nine months; he laughed incredulously. Most of the students of jurisprudence have no acquaintance with anthropology, psychology, and the doctrine of evolution--the very first requisites for a correct estimate of human nature. They have "no time" for it; their time is already too largely bespoken for an exhaustive study of beer and wine and for the noble art of fencing. The rest of their valuable study-time is required for the purpose of learning some hundreds of paragraphs of law books, a knowledge of which is supposed to qualify the jurist for any position whatever in our modern civilized community. We shall touch but lightly on the unfortunate province of politics, for the unsatisfactory condition of the modern political world is only too familiar. In a great measure its evils are due to the fact that most of our officials are jurists--that is, men of high technical education, but utterly devoid of that thorough knowledge of human nature which is only obtained by the study of comparative anthropology and the monistic psychology--men without an acquaintance with those social relations of which we find the earlier types in comparative zoology and the theory of evolution, in the cellular theory, and the study of the protists. We can only arrive at a correct knowledge of the structure and life of the social body, the state, through a scientific knowledge of the structure and life of the individuals who compose it, and the cells of which they are in turn composed. If our political rulers and our "representatives of the people" possessed this invaluable biological and anthropological knowledge, we should not find our journals so full of the sociological blunders and political nonsense which at present are far from adorning our parliamentary reports, and even many of our official documents. Worst of all is it when the modern state flings itself into the arms of the reactionary Church, and when the narrow-minded self-interest of parties and the infatuation of short-sighted party-leaders lend their support to the hierarchy. Then are witnessed such sad scenes as the German Reichstag puts before our eyes even at the close of the nineteenth century. We have the spectacle of the educated German people in the power of the ultramontane Centre, under the rule of the Roman papacy, which is its bitterest and most dangerous enemy. Then superstition and stupidity reign instead of right and reason. Never will our government improve until it casts off the fetters of the Church and raises the views of the citizens on man and the world to a higher level by a general scientific education. That does not raise the question of any special form of constitution. Whether a monarchy or a republic be preferable, whether the constitution should be aristocratic or democratic, are subordinate questions in comparison with the supreme question: Shall the modern civilized state be spiritual or secular? Shall it be _theocratic_--ruled by the irrational formulæ of faith and by clerical despotism--or _nomocratic_--under the sovereignty of rational laws and civic right? The first task is to kindle a rational interest in our youth, and to uplift our citizens and free them from superstition. That can only be achieved by a timely reform of our schools. Our education of the young is no more in harmony with modern scientific progress than our legal and political world. Physical science, which is so much more important than all other sciences, and which, properly understood, really embraces all the so-called moral sciences, is still regarded as a mere accessory in our schools, if not treated as the Cinderella of the curriculum. Most of our teachers still give the most prominent place to that dead learning which has come down from the cloistral schools of the Middle Ages. In the front rank we have grammatical gymnastics and an immense waste of time over a "thorough knowledge" of classics and of the history of foreign nations. Ethics, the most important object of practical philosophy, is entirely neglected, and its place is usurped by the ecclesiastical creed. Faith must take precedence over knowledge--not that scientific faith which leads to a monistic religion, but the irrational superstition that lays the foundation of a perverted Christianity. The valuable teaching of modern cosmology and anthropology, of biology and evolution, is most inadequately imparted, if not entirely unknown, in our higher schools; while the memory is burdened with a mass of philological and historical facts which are utterly useless, either from the point of view of theoretical education or for the practical purposes of life. Moreover, the antiquated arrangements and the distribution of faculties in the universities are just as little in harmony with the point we have reached in monistic science as the curriculum of the primary and secondary schools. The climax of the opposition to modern education and its foundation, advanced natural philosophy, is reached, of course, in the Church. We are not speaking here of ultramontane papistry, nor of the orthodox evangelical tendencies, which do not fall far short of it in ignorance and in the crass superstition of their dogmas. We are imagining ourselves for the moment to be in the church of a liberal Protestant minister, who has a good average education, and who finds room for "the rights of reason" by the side of his faith. There, besides excellent moral teaching, which is in perfect harmony with our own monistic ethics, and humanitarian discussion of which we cordially approve, we hear ideas on the nature of God, of the world, of man, and of life which are directly opposed to all scientific experience. It is no wonder that physicists and chemists, doctors and philosophers, who have made a thorough study of nature, refuse a hearing to such preachers. Our theologians and our politicians are just as ignorant as our philosophers and our jurists of that elementary knowledge of nature which is based on the monistic theory of evolution, and which is already far exceeded in the triumph of our modern learning. From this opposition, which we can only briefly point out at present, there arise grave conflicts in our modern life which urgently demand a settlement. Our modern education, the outcome of our great advance in knowledge, has a claim upon every department of public and private life; it would see humanity raised, by the instrumentality of reason, to that higher grade of culture, and, consequently, to that better path towards happiness which has been opened out to us by the progress of modern science. That aim, however, is vigorously opposed by the influential parties who would detain the mind in the exploded views of the Middle Ages with regard to the most important problems of life; they linger in the fold of traditional dogma, and would have reason prostrate itself before their "higher revelation." That is the condition of things, to a very large extent, in theology and philosophy, in sociology and jurisprudence. It is not that the motives of the latter are to be attributed, as a rule, to pure self-interest; they spring partly from ignorance of the facts, and partly from an indolent acquiescence in tradition. The most dangerous of the three great enemies of reason and knowledge is not malice; but ignorance, or, perhaps, indolence. The gods themselves still strive in vain against these two latter influences when they have happily vanquished the first. One of the main supports of that reactionary system is still what we may call "anthropism." I designate by this term "that powerful and world-wide group of erroneous opinions which opposes the human organism to the whole of the rest of nature, and represents it to be the preordained end of the organic creation, an entity essentially distinct from it, a godlike being." Closer examination of this group of ideas shows it to be made up of three different dogmas, which we may distinguish as the _anthropocentric_, the _anthropomorphic_, and the _anthropolatrous_.[4] I. The _anthropocentric_ dogma culminates in the idea that man is the preordained centre and aim of all terrestrial life--or, in a wider sense, of the whole universe. As this error is extremely conducive to man's interest, and as it is intimately connected with the creation-myth of the three great Mediterranean religions, and with the dogmas of the Mosaic, Christian, and Mohammedan theologies, it still dominates the greater part of the civilized world. II. The _anthropomorphic_ dogma is likewise connected with the creation-myth of the three aforesaid religions, and of many others. It likens the creation and control of the world by God to the artificial creation of a talented engineer or mechanic, and to the administration of a wise ruler. God, as creator, sustainer, and ruler of the world, is thus represented after a purely human fashion in his thought and work. Hence it follows, in turn, that man is godlike. "God made man to His own image and likeness." The older, naïve mythology is pure "homotheism," attributing human shape, flesh, and blood to the gods. It is more intelligible than the modern mystic theosophy that adores a personal God as an invisible--properly speaking, gaseous--being, yet makes him think, speak, and act in human fashion; it gives us the paradoxical picture of a "gaseous vertebrate." III. The _anthropolatric_ dogma naturally results from this comparison of the activity of God and man; it ends in the apotheosis of the human organism. A further result is the belief in the personal immortality of the soul, and the dualistic dogma of the twofold nature of man, whose "immortal soul" is conceived as but the temporary inhabitant of the mortal frame. Thus these three anthropistic dogmas, variously adapted to the respective professions of the different religions, came at length to be vested with an extraordinary importance, and proved the source of the most dangerous errors. The anthropistic view of the world which springs from them is in irreconcilable opposition to our monistic system; indeed, it is at once disproved by our new cosmological perspective. Not only the three anthropistic dogmas, but many other notions of the dualistic philosophy and orthodox religion, are found to be untenable as soon as we regard them critically from the cosmological perspective of our monistic system. We understand by that the comprehensive view of the universe which we have from the highest point of our monistic interpretation of nature. From that stand-point we see the truth of the following "cosmological theorems," most of which, in our opinion, have already been amply demonstrated: (1) The universe, or the cosmos, is eternal, infinite, and illimitable. (2) Its substance, with its two attributes (matter and energy), fills infinite space, and is in eternal motion. (3) This motion runs on through infinite time as an unbroken development, with a periodic change from life to death, from evolution to devolution. (4) The innumerable bodies which are scattered about the space-filling ether all obey the same "law of substance;" while the rotating masses slowly move towards their destruction and dissolution in one part of space others are springing into new life and development in other quarters of the universe. (5) Our sun is one of these unnumbered perishable bodies, and our earth is one of the countless transitory planets that encircle them. (6) Our earth has gone through a long process of cooling before water, in liquid form (the first condition of organic life), could settle thereon. (7) The ensuing biogenetic process, the slow development and transformation of countless organic forms, must have taken many millions of years--considerably over a hundred.[5] (8) Among the different kinds of animals which arose in the later stages of the biogenetic process on earth the vertebrates have far outstripped all other competitors in the evolutionary race. (9) The most important branch of the vertebrates, the mammals, were developed later (during the triassic period) from the lower amphibia and the reptilia. (10) The most perfect and most highly developed branch of the class mammalia is the order of primates, which first put in an appearance, by development from the lowest prochoriata, at the beginning of the Tertiary period--at least three million years ago. (11) The youngest and most perfect twig of the branch primates is man, who sprang from a series of manlike apes towards the end of the Tertiary period. (12) Consequently, the so-called "history of the world"--that is, the brief period of a few thousand years which measures the duration of civilization--is an evanescently short episode in the long course of organic evolution, just as this, in turn, is merely a small portion of the history of our planetary system; and as our mother-earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. Nothing seems to me better adapted than this magnificent cosmological perspective to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. It not only clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance, and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element. This boundless presumption of conceited man has misled him into making himself "the image of God," claiming an "eternal life" for his ephemeral personality, and imagining that he possesses unlimited "freedom of will." The ridiculous imperial folly of Caligula is but a special form of man's arrogant assumption of divinity. Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach the solution of the "riddles of the universe." The uneducated member of a civilized community is surrounded with countless enigmas at every step, just as truly as the savage. Their number, however, decreases with every stride of civilization and of science; and the monistic philosophy is ultimately confronted with but one simple and comprehensive enigma--the "problem of substance." Still, we may find it useful to include a certain number of problems under that title. In the famous speech which Emil du Bois-Reymond delivered in 1880, in the Leibnitz session of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, he distinguished seven world-enigmas, which he enumerated as follows: (1) The nature of matter and force. (2) The origin of motion. (3) The origin of life. (4) The (apparently preordained) orderly arrangement of nature. (5) The origin of simple sensation and consciousness. (6) Rational thought, and the origin of the cognate faculty, speech. (7) The question of the freedom of the will. Three of these seven enigmas are considered by the orator of the Berlin Academy to be entirely transcendental and insoluble--they are the first, second, and fifth; three others (the third, fourth, and sixth) he considers to be capable of solution, though extremely difficult; as to the seventh and last "world-enigma," the freedom of the will, which is the one of the greatest practical importance, he remains undecided. As my monism differs materially from that of the Berlin orator, and as his idea of the "seven great enigmas" has been very widely accepted, it may be useful to indicate their true position at once. In my opinion, the three transcendental problems (1, 2, and 5) are settled by our conception of substance (_vide_ chap. xii.); the three which he considers difficult, though soluble, (3, 4, and 6), are decisively answered by our modern theory of evolution; the seventh and last, the freedom of the will, is not an object for critical, scientific inquiry at all, for it is a pure dogma, based on an illusion, and has no real existence. The means and methods we have chosen for attaining the solution of the great enigma do not differ, on the whole, from those of all purely scientific investigation--firstly, experience; secondly, inference. Scientific experience comes to us by observation and experiment, which involve the activity of our sense-organs in the first place, and, secondly, of the inner sense-centres in the cortex of the brain. The microscopic elementary organs of the former are the sense-cells; of the latter, groups of ganglionic cells. The experiences which we derive from the outer world by these invaluable instruments of our mental life are then moulded into ideas by other parts of the brain, and these, in their turn, are united in a chain of reasoning by association. The construction of this chain may take place in two different ways, which are, in my opinion, equally valuable and indispensable: _induction_ and _deduction_. The higher cerebral operations, the construction of complicated chains of reasoning, abstraction, the formation of concepts, the completion of the perceptive faculty by the plastic faculty of the imagination--in a word, consciousness, thought, and speculation--are functions of the ganglionic cells of the cortex of the brain, just like the preceding simpler mental functions. We unite them all in the supreme concept of _reason_.[6] By reason only can we attain to a correct knowledge of the world and a solution of its great problems. Reason is man's highest gift, the only prerogative that essentially distinguishes him from the lower animals. Nevertheless, it has only reached this high position by the progress of culture and education, by the development of knowledge. The uneducated man and the savage are just as little (or just as much) "rational" as our nearest relatives among the mammals (apes, dogs, elephants, etc.). Yet the opinion still obtains in many quarters that, besides our godlike reason, we have two further (and even surer!) methods of receiving knowledge--emotion and revelation. We must at once dispose of this dangerous error. Emotion has nothing whatever to do with the attainment of truth. That which we prize under the name of "emotion" is an elaborate activity of the brain, which consists of feelings of like and dislike, motions of assent and dissent, impulses of desire and aversion. It may be influenced by the most diverse activities of the organism, by the cravings of the senses and the muscles, the stomach, the sexual organs, etc. The interests of truth are far from promoted by these conditions and vacillations of emotion; on the contrary, such circumstances often disturb that reason which alone is adapted to the pursuit of truth, and frequently mar its perceptive power. No cosmic problem is solved, or even advanced, by the cerebral function we call emotion. And the same must be said of the so-called "revelation," and of the "truths of faith" which it is supposed to communicate; they are based entirely on a deception, consciously or unconsciously, as we shall see in the sixteenth chapter. We must welcome as one of the most fortunate steps in the direction of a solution of the great cosmic problems the fact that of recent years there is a growing tendency to recognize the two paths which alone lead thereto--_experience_ and _thought_, or _speculation_--to be of equal value, and mutually complementary. Philosophers have come to see that pure speculation--such, for instance, as Plato and Hegel employed for the construction of their _idealist_ systems--does not lead to knowledge of reality. On the other hand, scientists have been convinced that mere experience--such as Bacon and Mill, for example, made the basis of their _realist_ systems--is insufficient of itself for a complete philosophy. For these two great paths of knowledge, sense-experience and rational thought, are two distinct cerebral functions; the one is elaborated by the sense-organs and the inner sense-centres, the other by the thought-centres, the great "centres of association in the cortex of the brain," which lie between the sense-centres. (Cf. cc. vii. and x.) True knowledge is only acquired by combining the activity of the two. Nevertheless, there are still many philosophers who would construct the world out of their own inner consciousness, and who reject our empirical science precisely because they have no knowledge of the real world. On the other hand, there are many scientists who still contend that the sole object of science is "the knowledge of facts, the objective investigation of isolated phenomena"; that "the age of philosophy" is past, and science has taken its place.[7] This one-sided over-estimation of experience is as dangerous an error as the converse exaggeration of the value of speculation. Both channels of knowledge are mutually indispensable. The greatest triumphs of modern science--the cellular theory, the dynamic theory of heat, the theory of evolution, and the law of substance--are _philosophic achievements_; not, however, the fruit of pure speculation, but of an antecedent experience of the widest and most searching character. At the commencement of the nineteenth century the great idealistic poet, Schiller, gave his counsel to both groups of combatants, the philosophers and the scientists: "Does strife divide your efforts--no union bless your toil? Will truth e'er be delivered if ye your forces rend?" Since then the situation has, happily, been profoundly modified; while both schools, in their different paths, have pressed onward towards the same high goal, they have recognized their common aspiration, and they draw nearer to a knowledge of the truth in mutual covenant. At the end of the nineteenth century we have returned to that monistic attitude which our greatest realistic poet, Goethe, had recognized from its very commencement to be alone correct and fruitful.[8] All the different philosophical tendencies may, from the point of view of modern science, be ranged in two antagonistic groups; they represent either a _dualistic_ or a _monistic_ interpretation of the cosmos. The former is usually bound up with teleological and idealistic dogmas, the latter with mechanical and realistic theories. Dualism, in the widest sense, breaks up the universe into two entirely distinct substances--the material world and an immaterial God, who is represented to be its creator, sustainer, and ruler. Monism, on the contrary (likewise taken in its widest sense), recognizes one sole substance in the universe, which is at once "God and nature"; body and spirit (or matter and energy) it holds to be inseparable. The extramundane God of dualism leads necessarily to theism; and the intra-mundane God of the monist leads to pantheism. The different ideas of _monism_ and _materialism_, and likewise the essentially distinct tendencies of theoretical and practical materialism, are still very frequently confused. As this and other similar cases of confusion of ideas are very prejudicial, and give rise to innumerable errors, we shall make the following brief observations, in order to prevent misunderstanding: I. Pure monism is identical neither with the theoretical materialism that denies the existence of spirit, and dissolves the world into a heap of dead atoms, nor with the theoretical spiritualism (lately entitled "energetic" spiritualism by Ostwald) which rejects the notion of matter, and considers the world to be a specially arranged group of "energies" or immaterial natural forces. II. On the contrary, we hold, with Goethe, that "matter cannot exist and be operative without spirit, nor spirit without matter." We adhere firmly to the pure, unequivocal monism of Spinoza: Matter, or infinitely extended substance, and spirit (or energy), or sensitive and thinking substance, are the two fundamental attributes or principal properties of the all-embracing divine essence of the world, the universal substance. (Cf. chap. xii.) CHAPTER II OUR BODILY FRAME Fundamental Importance of Anatomy--Human Anatomy--Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, Vesalius--Comparative Anatomy--Georges Cuvier--Johannes Müller--Karl Gegenbaur--Histology--The Cellular Theory--Schleiden and Schwann--Kölliker--Virchow--Man a Vertebrate, a Tetrapod, a Mammal, a Placental, a Primate--Prosimiæ and Simiæ--The Catarrhinæ--Papiomorphic and Anthropomorphic Apes--Essential Likeness of Man and the Ape in Corporal Structure All biological research, all investigation into the forms and vital activities of organisms, must first deal with the visible body, in which the morphological and physiological phenomena are observed. This fundamental rule holds good for man just as much as for all other living things. Moreover, the inquiry must not confine itself to mere observation of the outer form; it must penetrate to the interior, and study both the general plan and the minute details of the structure. The science which pursues this fundamental investigation in the broadest sense is anatomy. The first stimulus to an inquiry into the human frame arose, naturally, in medicine. As it was usually practised by the priests in the older civilizations, we may assume that these highest representatives of the education of the time had already acquired a certain amount of anatomical knowledge two thousand years before Christ, or even earlier. We do not, however, find more exact observations, founded on the dissection of mammals, and applied, by analogy, to the human frame, until we come to the Greek scientists of the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ--Empedocles (of Agrigentum) and Democritus (of Abdera), and especially the most famous physician of classic antiquity, Hippocrates (of Cos). It was from these and other sources that the great Aristotle, the renowned "father of natural history," equally comprehensive as investigator and philosopher, derived his first knowledge. After him only one anatomist of any consequence is found in antiquity, the Greek physician Claudius Galenus (of Pergamus), who developed a wealthy practice in Rome in the second century after Christ, under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. All these ancient anatomists acquired their knowledge, as a rule, not by the dissection of the human body itself--which was then sternly forbidden--but by a study of the bodies of the animals which most closely resembled man, especially the apes; they were all, indeed, comparative anatomists. The triumph of Christianity and its mystic theories meant retrogression to anatomy, as it did to all the other sciences. The popes were resolved above all things to detain humanity in ignorance; they rightly deemed a knowledge of the human organism to be a dangerous source of enlightenment as to our true nature. During the long period of thirteen centuries the writings of Galen were almost the only source of human anatomy, just as the works of Aristotle were for the whole of natural history. It was not until the sixteenth century, when the spiritual tyranny of the papacy was broken by the Reformation, and the geocentric theory, so intimately connected with papal doctrine, was destroyed by the new cosmic system of Copernicus, that the knowledge of the human frame entered upon a new period of progress. The great anatomists, Vesalius (of Brussels), and Eustachius and Fallopius (of Modena), advanced the knowledge of our bodily structure so much by their own thorough investigations that little remained for their numerous followers to do, with regard to the more obvious phenomena, except the substantiation of details. Andreas Vesalius, as courageous as he was talented and indefatigable, was the pioneer of the movement; he completed in his twenty-eighth year (1543) that great and systematic work _De humani corporis fabrica_; he gave to the whole of human anatomy a new and independent scope and a more solid foundation. On that account he was, at a later date, at Madrid--where he was physician to Charles V. and Philip II.--condemned to death by the Inquisition as a magician. He only escaped by undertaking a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; in returning he suffered shipwreck on the Isle of Zante, and died there in misery and destitution. The great merit of the nineteenth century, as far as our knowledge of the human frame is concerned, lies in the founding of two new lines of research of immense importance--comparative anatomy and histology, or microscopic anatomy. The former was intimately associated with human anatomy from the very beginning; indeed, it had to supply the place of the latter so long because the dissection of human corpses was a crime visited with capital punishment--that was the case even in the fifteenth century! But the many anatomists of the next three centuries devoted themselves mainly to a more accurate study of the human organism. The elaborate science which we now call comparative anatomy was born in the year 1803, when the great French zoologist Georges Cuvier (a native of Mömpelgard, in Alsace) published his profound _Leçons sur l'anatomie comparée_, and endeavored to formulate, for the first time, definite laws as to the organism of man and the beasts. While his predecessors--among whom was Goethe in 1790--had mainly contented themselves with comparing the skeleton of man with those of other animals, Cuvier's broader vision took in the whole of the animal organization. He distinguished therein four great and mutually independent types: Vertebrata, Articulata, Mollusca, and Radiata. This advance was of extreme consequence for our "question of all questions," since it clearly brought out the fact that man belonged to the vertebral type, and differed fundamentally from all the other types. It is true that the keen-sighted Linné had already, in his _Systema Natuae_, made a great step in advance by assigning man a definite place in the class of mammals; he had even drawn up the three groups of half-apes, apes, and men (_Lemur_, _simia_, and _homo_) in the order of primates. But his keen, systematic mind was not furnished with that profound empirical foundation, supplied by comparative anatomy, which Cuvier was the first to attain. Further developments were added by the great comparative anatomists of our own century--Friedrich Meckel (Halle), Johannes Müller (Berlin), Richard Owen, T. Huxley, and Karl Gegenbaur (Jena, subsequently Heidelberg). The last-named, in applying the evolutionary theory, which Darwin had just established, to comparative anatomy, raised his science to the front rank of biological studies. The numerous comparative anatomical works of Gegenbaur are, like his well-known _Manual of Human Anatomy_, equally distinguished by a thorough empirical acquaintance with their immense multitudes of facts, and by a comprehensive control of his material, and its philosophic appreciation in the evolutionary sense. His recent _Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrata_ establishes the solid foundation on which our conviction of the vertebral character of man in every aspect is chiefly based. Microscopic anatomy has been developed, in the course of the present century, in a very different fashion from comparative anatomy. At the beginning of the century (1802) a French physician, Bichat, made an attempt to dissect the organs of the human body into their finer constituents by the aid of the microscope, and to show the connection of these various _tissues_ (_hista_, or _tela_). This first attempt led to little result, because the scientist was ignorant of the one common element of all the different tissues. This was first discovered (1838) in the shape of the _cell_, in the plant world, by Matthias Schleiden, and immediately afterwards proved to be the same in the animal world by Theodor Schwann, the pupil and assistant of Johannes Müller at Berlin. Two other distinguished pupils of this great master, who are still living, Albert Kölliker and Rudolph Virchow, took up the cellular theory, and the theory of tissues which is founded on it, in the sixties, and applied them to the human organism in all its details, both in health and disease; they proved that, in man and all other animals, every tissue is made up of the same microscopic particles, the _cells_, and these "elementary organisms" are the real, self-active citizens which, in combinations of millions, constitute the "cellular state," our body. All these cells spring from one simple cell, the _cytula_, or impregnated ovum, by continuous subdivision. The general structure and combination of the tissues are the same in man as in the other vertebrates. Among these the mammals, the youngest and most highly developed class take precedence, in virtue of certain special features which were acquired late. Such are, for instance, the microscopic texture of the hair, of the glands of the skin, and of the breasts, and the corpuscles of the blood, which are quite peculiar to mammals, and different from those of the other vertebrates; man, even in these finest histological relations, is a _true mammal_. The microscopic researches of Albert Kölliker and Franz Leydig (at Würzburg) not only enlarged our knowledge of the finer structure of man and the beasts in every direction, but they were especially important in the light of their connection with the evolution of the cell and the tissue; they confirmed the great theory of Carl Theodor Siebold (1845) that the lowest animals, the Infusoria and the Rhizopods, are unicellular organisms. Our whole frame, both in its general plan and its detailed structure, presents the characteristic type of the vertebrates. This most important and most highly developed group in the animal world was first recognized in its natural unity in 1801 by the great Lamarck; he embraced under that title the four higher animal groups of Linné--mammals, birds, amphibia, and fishes. To these he opposed the two lower classes, insects and worms, as invertebrates. Cuvier (1812) established the unity of the vertebrate type on a firmer basis by his comparative anatomy. It is quite true that all the vertebrates, from the fish up to man, agree in every essential feature; they all have a firm internal skeleton, a framework of cartilage and bone, consisting principally of a vertebral column and a skull; the advanced construction of the latter presents many variations, but, on the whole, all may be reduced to the same fundamental type. Further, in all vertebrates the "organ of the mind," the central nervous system, in the shape of a spinal cord and a brain, lies at the back of this axial skeleton. Moreover, what we said of its bony environment, the skull, is also true of the brain--the instrument of consciousness and all the higher functions of the mind; its construction and size present very many variations in detail, but its general characteristic structure remains always the same. We meet the same phenomenon when we compare the rest of our organs with those of the other vertebrates; everywhere, in virtue of heredity, the original plan and the relative distribution of the organs remain the same, although, through adaptation to different environments, the size and the structure of particular sections offer considerable variation. Thus we find that in all cases the blood circulates in two main blood-vessels, of which one--the aorta--passes over the intestine, and the other--the principal vein--passes underneath, and that by the broadening out of the latter in a very definite spot a heart has arisen; this "ventral heart" is just as characteristic of all vertebrates as the "dorsal heart" is of the articulata and mollusca. Equally characteristic of all vertebrates is the early division of the intestinal tube into a "head-gut" (or gill-gut), which serves in respiration, and a "body-gut" (or liver-gut), which co-operates with the liver in digestion; so are, likewise, the ramification of the muscular system, the peculiar structure of the urinary and sexual organs, and so forth. In all these anatomical relations _man is a true vertebrate_. Aristotle gave the name of four-footed, or tetrapoda, to all the higher warm-blooded animals which are distinguished by the possession of two pairs of legs. The category was enlarged subsequently, and its title changed into the Latin "quadrupeda," when Cuvier proved that even "two-legged" birds and men are really "four-footed"; he showed that the internal skeleton of the four legs in all the higher land-vertebrates, from the amphibia up to man, was originally constructed after the same pattern out of a definite number of members. The "arm" of man and the "wing" of bats and birds have the same typical skeleton as the foreleg of the animals which are conspicuously "four-footed." The anatomical unity of the fully developed skeleton in the four limbs of all tetrapods is very important. In order to appreciate it fully one has only to compare carefully the skeleton of a salamander or a frog with that of a monkey or a man. One perceives at once that the humeral zone in front and the pelvic zone behind are made up of the same principal parts as in the rest of the quadrupeds. We find in all cases that the first section of the leg proper consists of one strong marrow-bone (the _humerus_, in the forearm; the _femur_, behind); the second part, on the contrary, originally always consists of two bones (the _ulna_ and _radius_, in front; the _fibula_ and _tibia_, behind). When we further compare the developed structure of the foot proper we are surprised to find that the small bones of which it is made up are also similarly arranged and distributed in every case: in the front limb the three groups of bones of the forefoot (or "hand") correspond in all classes of the tetrapoda: (1) the _carpus_, (2) the _metacarpus_, (3) the five fingers (_digiti anteriores_); in the rear limb, similarly, we have always the same three osseous groups of the hind foot: (1) the _tarsus_, (2) the _metatarsus_, and (3) the five toes (_digiti posteriores_). It was a very difficult task to reduce all these little bones to one primitive type, and to establish the equivalence (or homology) of the separate parts in all cases; they present extreme variations of form and construction in detail, sometimes being partly fused together and losing their individuality. This great task was first successfully achieved by the most eminent comparative anatomist of our day, Karl Gegenbaur. He pointed out, in his _Researches into the Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrata_ (1864), how this characteristic "five-toed leg" of the land tetrapods originally (not before the Carboniferous period) arose out of the radiating fin (the breast-fin, or the belly-fin) of the ancient fishes. He had also, in his famous _Researches into the Skull of the Vertebrata_ (1872), deduced the younger skull of the tetrapods from the oldest cranial form among the fishes, that of the shark. It is especially remarkable that the original number of the toes (five) on each of the four feet, which first appeared in the old amphibia of the Carboniferous period, has, in virtue of a strict heredity, been preserved even to the present day in man. Also, naturally and harmoniously, the typical construction of the joints, ligaments, muscles, and nerves of the two pairs of legs has, in the main, remained the same as in the rest of the "four-footed." In all these important relations _man is a true tetrapod_. The mammals are the youngest and most advanced class of the vertebrates. It is true they are derived from the older class of amphibia, like birds and reptiles: yet they are distinguished from all the other tetrapods by a number of very striking anatomical features. Externally, there is the clothing of the skin with hair, and the possession of two kinds of skin glands--the sweat glands and the sebaceous glands. A local development of these glands on the abdominal skin gave rise (probably during the Triassic period) to the organ which is especially characteristic of the class, and from which it derives its name--the _mammarium_. This important instrument of lactation is made up of milk glands (_mammae_) and the "mammar-pouches" (folds of the abdominal skin); in its development the teats appear, through which the young mammal sucks its mother's milk. In internal structure the most remarkable feature is the possession of a complete diaphragm, a muscular wall which, in all mammals--and _only_ in mammals--separates the thoracic from the abdominal cavity; in all other vertebrates there is no such separation. The skull of mammals is distinguished by a number of remarkable formations, especially in the maxillary apparatus (the upper and lower jaws, and the temporal bones). Moreover, the brain, the olfactory organ, the heart, the lungs, the internal and external sexual organs, the kidneys, and other parts of the body present special peculiarities, both in general and detailed structure, in the mammals; all these, taken collectively, point unequivocally to an early derivation of the mammals from the older groups of the reptiles and amphibia, which must have taken place, at the latest, in the Triassic period--at least twelve million years ago! In all these important characteristics _man is a true mammal_. The numerous orders (12-33) which modern systematic zoology distinguishes in the class of mammals had been arranged in 1816 (by Blainville) in three natural groups, which still hold good as sub-classes: (1) the monotrema, (2) the marsupialia, and (3) the placentalia. These three sub-classes not only differ in the important respect of bodily structure and development, but they correspond, also, to three different historical stages in the formation of the class, as we shall see later on. The monotremes of the Triassic period were followed by the marsupials of the Jurassic, and these by the placentals of the Cretaceous. Man belongs to this, the youngest, sub-class; for he presents in his organization all the features which distinguish the placentals from the marsupials and the still older monotremes. First of all, there is the peculiar organ which gives a name to the placentals--the _placenta_. It serves the purpose of nourishing the young mammal embryo for a long time during its enclosure in the mother's womb; it consists of blood-bearing tufts which grow out of the chorion surrounding the embryo, and penetrate corresponding cavities in the mucous membrane of the maternal uterus; the delicate skin between the two structures is so attenuated in this spot that the nutriment in the mother's blood can pass directly into the blood of the child. This excellent contrivance for nourishing the embryo, which makes its first appearance at a somewhat late date, gives the foetus the opportunity of a longer maintenance and a higher development in the protecting womb; it is wanting in the _implacentalia_, the two older sub-classes of the marsupials and the monotremes. There are, likewise, other anatomical features, particularly the higher development of the brain and the absence of the marsupial bone, which raise the placentals above all their implacental ancestors. In all these important particulars _man is a true placental_. The very varied sub-class of the placentals has been recently subdivided into a great number of orders; they are usually put at from ten to sixteen, but when we include the important extinct forms which have been recently discovered the number runs up to from twenty to twenty-six. In order to facilitate the study of these numerous orders, and to obtain a deeper insight into their kindred construction, it is very useful to form them into great natural groups, which I have called "legions." In my latest attempt[9] to arrange the advanced system of placentals in phylogenetic order I have substituted eight of these legions for the twenty-six orders, and shown that these may be reduced to four main groups. These, in turn, are traceable to one common ancestral group of all the placentals, their fossil ancestors, the _prochoriata_ of the Cretaceous period. These are directly connected with the marsupial ancestors of the Jurassic period. We will only specify here, as the most important living representatives of these four main groups, the rodentia, the ungulata, the carnivora, and the primates. To the legion of the primates belong the prosimiæ (half-apes), the simiæ (real apes), and man. All the members of these three orders agree in many important features, and are at the same time distinguished by these features from the other twenty-three orders of placentals. They are especially conspicuous for the length of their bones, which were originally adapted to their arboreal manner of life. Their hands and feet are five-fingered, and the long fingers are excellently suited for grasping and embracing the branches of trees; they are provided, either partially or completely, with nails, but have no claws. The dentition is complete, containing all four classes--incisors, canine, premolars, and molars. Primates are also distinguished from all the other placentals by important features in the special construction of the skull and the brain; and these are the more striking in proportion to their development and the lateness of their appearance in the history of the earth. In all these important anatomical features our human organism agrees with that of all the other primates: _man is a true primate_. An impartial and thorough comparison of the bodily structure of the primates forces us to distinguish two orders in this most advanced legion of the mammalia--half-apes (_prosimiae_ or _hemipitheci_) and apes (_simiae_ or _pitheci_). The former seem in every respect to be the lower and older, the latter to be the higher and younger order. The womb of the half-ape is still double, or two-horned, as it is in all the other mammals. In the true ape, on the contrary, the right and left wombs have completely amalgamated; they blend into a pear-shaped womb, which the human mother possesses besides the ape. In the skull of the apes, just as in that of man, the orbits of the eyes are completely separated from the temporal cavities by an osseous partition; in the _prosimiae_ this is either entirely wanting or very imperfect. Finally, the cerebrum of the _prosimia_ is either quite smooth or very slightly furrowed, and proportionately small; that of the true ape is much larger, and the gray bed especially, the organ of higher psychic activity, is much more developed; the characteristic convolutions and furrows appear on its surface exactly in proportion as the ape approaches to man. In these and other important respects, particularly in the construction of the face and the hands, _man presents all the anatomical marks of a true ape_. The extensive order of apes was divided by Geoffroi, in 1812, into two sub-orders, which are still universally accepted in systematic zoology--New World and Old World monkeys, according to the hemisphere they respectively inhabit. The American "New World" monkeys are called _Platyrrhinae_ (flat-nosed); their nose is flat, and the nostrils divergent, with a broad partition. The "Old World" monkeys, on the contrary, are called collectively _Catarrhinae_ (narrow-nosed); their nostrils point downward, like man's, and the dividing cartilage is narrow. A further difference between the two groups is that the tympanum is superficial in the _platyrrhinae_, but lies deeper, inside the petrous bone, in the _catarrhinae_; in the latter a long and narrow bony passage has been formed, while in the former it is still short and wide, or even altogether wanting. Finally, we have a much more important and decisive difference between the two groups in the circumstance that all the Old World monkeys have the same teeth as man--_i. e._, twenty deciduous and thirty-two permanent teeth (two incisors, one canine, two premolars, and three molars in each half of the jaw). The New World monkeys, on the other hand, have an additional premolar in each half-jaw, or thirty-six teeth altogether. The fact that these anatomical differences of the two simian groups are universal and conspicuous, and that they harmonize with their geographical distribution in the two hemispheres, fully authorizes a sharp systematic division of the two, as well as the phylogenetic conclusion that for a very long period (for more than a million years) the two sub-orders have been developing quite independently of each other in the western and eastern hemispheres. That is a most important point in view of the genealogy of our race; for man bears all the marks of a _true catarrhina_; he has descended from some extinct member of this sub-order in the Old World. The numerous types of _catarrhinae_ which still survive in Asia and Africa have been formed into two sections for some time--the tailed, doglike apes (the _cynopitheci_) and the tailless, manlike apes (the _anthropomorpha_). The latter are much nearer to man than the former, not only in the absence of a tail and in the general build of the body (especially of the head), but also on account of certain features which are unimportant in themselves but very significant in their constancy. The sacrum of the anthropoid ape, like that of man, is made up of the fusion of five vertebræ; that of the _cynopithecus_ consists of three (more rarely four) sacral vertebræ. The premolar teeth of the _cynopitheci_ are greater in length than breadth; those of the _anthropomorpha_ are broader than they are long; and the first molar has four protuberances in the former, five in the latter. Furthermore, the outer incisor of the lower jaw is broader than the inner one in the manlike apes and man; in the doglike ape it is the smaller. Finally, there is a special significance in the fact, established by Selenka in 1890, that the anthropoid apes share with man the peculiar structure of the discoid _placenta_, the _decidua reflexa_, and the pedicle of the allantois. In fact, even a superficial comparison of the bodily structure of the _anthropomorpha_ which still survive makes it clear that both the Asiatic (the orang-outang and the gibbous ape) and the African (the gorilla and chimpanzee) representatives of this group are nearer to man in build than any of the _cynopitheci_. Under the latter group we include the dog-faced papiomorpha, the baboon, and the long-tailed monkey, at a very low stage. The anatomical difference between these low papiomorpha and the most highly developed anthropoid apes is greater in every respect, whatever organ we take for comparison, than the difference between the latter and man. This instructive fact was established with great penetration by the anatomist Robert Hartmann, in his work on _The Anthropoid Apes_;[10] he proposed to divide the order of _Simiae_ in a new way--namely, into the two great groups of _primaria_ (man and the anthropoid ape) and the _simiae_ proper, or _pitheci_ (the rest of the catarrhinæ and all the platyrrhinæ). In any case, we have a clear proof of _the close affinity of man and the anthropoid ape_. Thus comparative anatomy proves to the satisfaction of every unprejudiced and critical student the significant fact that the body of man and that of the anthropoid ape are not only peculiarly similar, but they are practically one and the same in every important respect. The same two hundred bones, in the same order and structure, make up our inner skeleton; the same three hundred muscles effect our movements; the same hair clothes our skin; the same groups of ganglionic cells build up the marvellous structure of our brain; the same four chambered heart is the central pulsometer in our circulation; the same thirty-two teeth are set in the same order in our jaws; the same salivary, hepatic, and gastric glands compass our digestive process; the same reproductive organs insure the maintenance of our race. It is true that we find, on close examination, certain minor differences in point of size and shape in most of the organs of man and the ape; but we discover the same, or similar, differences between the higher and lower races of men, when we make a careful comparison--even, in fact, in a minute comparison of the various individuals of our own race. We find no two persons who have exactly the same size and form of nose, ears, eyes, and so forth. One has only to compare attentively these special features in many different persons in any large company to convince one's self of the astonishing diversity of their construction and the infinite variability of specific forms. Not infrequently even two sisters are so much unlike as to make their origin from the same parents almost incredible. Yet all these individual variations do not weaken the significance of the fundamental similarity of structure; they are traceable to certain minute differences in the growth of the individual features. CHAPTER III OUR LIFE Development of Physiology in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Galen--Experiment and Vivisection--Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood by Harvey--Vitalism: Haller--Teleological and Vitalistic Conception of Life--Mechanical and Monistic View of the Physiological Processes--Comparative Physiology in the Nineteenth Century: Johannes Müller--Cellular Physiology: Max Verworn--Cellular Pathology: Virchow--Mammal Physiology--Similarity of all Vital Activity in Man and the Ape It is only in the nineteenth century that our knowledge of human life has attained the dignity of a genuine, independent science; during the course of the century it has developed into one of the highest, most interesting, and most important branches of knowledge. This "science of the vital functions," physiology, had, it is true, been regarded at a much earlier date as a desirable, if not a necessary, condition of success in medical treatment, and had been constantly associated with anatomy, the science of the structure of the body. But it was only much later, and much more slowly, than the latter that it could be thoroughly studied, as it had to contend with much more serious difficulties. The idea of life, as the opposite of death, naturally became the subject of speculation at a very early age. In the living man, just as in other living animals, there were certain peculiar changes, especially movements, which were wanting in lifeless nature: spontaneous locomotion, the beat of the heart, the drawing of the breath, speech, and so forth. But the discrimination of such "organic movements" from similar phenomena in inorganic bodies was by no means easy, and was frequently impossible; the flowing stream, the flickering flame, the rushing wind, the falling rock, seemed to man to exhibit the same movements. It was quite natural that primitive man should attribute an independent life to these "dead" bodies. He knew no more of the real sources of movement in the one case than in the other. We find the earliest scientific observations on the nature of man's vital functions (as well as on his structure) in the Greek natural philosophers and physicians of the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ. The best collection of the physiological facts which were known at that time is to be found in the _Natural History_ of Aristotle; a great number of his assertions were probably taken from Democritus and Hippocrates. The school of the latter had already made attempts to explain the mystery; it postulated as the ultimate source of life in man and the beasts a volatile "spirit of life" (Pneuma); and Erasistratus (280 B.C.) already drew a distinction between the lower and the higher "spirit of life," the _pneuma zoticon_ in the heart and the _pneuma psychicon_ in the brain. The credit of gathering these scattered truths into unity, and of making the first attempt at a systematic physiology, belongs to the great Greek physician Galen; we have already recognized in him the first great anatomist of antiquity (cf. p. 23). In his researches into the organs of the body he never lost sight of the question of their vital activity, their functions; and even in this direction he proceeded by the same comparative method, taking for his principal study the animals which approach nearest to man. Whatever he learned from these he applied directly to man. He recognized the value of physiological experiment; in his vivisection of apes, dogs, and swine he made a number of interesting experiments. Vivisection has been made the object of a violent attack in recent years, not only by the ignorant and narrow-minded, but by theological enemies of knowledge and by perfervid sentimentalists; it is, however, one of the _indispensable_ methods of research into the nature of life, and has given us invaluable information on the most important questions. This was recognized by Galen seventeen hundred years ago. Galen reduces all the different functions of the body to three groups, which correspond to the three forms of the _pneuma_, or vital spirit. The _pneuma psychicon_--the soul--which resides in the brain and nerves, is the cause of thought, sensation, and will (voluntary movement); the _pneuma zoticon_--the heart--is responsible for the beat of the heart, the pulse, and the temperature; the _pneuma physicon_, seated in the liver, is the source of the so-called vegetative functions, digestion and assimilation, growth and reproduction. He especially emphasized the renewal of the blood in the lungs, and expressed a hope that we should some day succeed in isolating the permanent element in the atmosphere--the _pneuma_, as he calls it--which is taken into the blood in respiration. More than fifteen centuries elapsed before this _pneuma_--oxygen--was discovered by Lavoisier. In human physiology, as well as in anatomy, the great system of Galen was for thirteen centuries the _Codex aureus_, the inviolable source of all knowledge. The influence of Christianity, so fatal to scientific culture, raised the same insuperable obstacles in this as in every other branch of secular knowledge. Not a single scientist appeared from the third to the sixteenth century who dared to make independent research into man's vital activity, and transcend the limits of the Galenic system. It was not until the sixteenth century that experiments were made in that direction by a number of distinguished physicians and anatomists (Paracelsus, Servetus, Vesalius, and others). In 1628 Harvey published his great discovery of the circulation of the blood, and showed that the heart is a pump, which drives the red stream unceasingly through the connected system of arteries and veins by a rhythmic, unconscious contraction of its muscles. Not less important were Harvey's researches into the procreation of animals, as a result of which he formulated the well-known law: "Every living thing comes from an egg" (_omne vivum ex ovo_). The powerful impetus which Harvey gave to physiological observation and experiment led to a great number of discoveries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were co-ordinated for the first time by the learned Albrecht Haller about the middle of the last century; in his great work, _Elementa Physiologiae_, he established the inherent importance of the science, independently of its relation to practical medicine. In postulating, however, a special "sensitive force or sensibility" for neural action, and a special "irritability" for muscular movement, Haller gave strong support to the erroneous idea of a specific "vital force" (_vis vitalis_). For more than a century afterwards, from the middle of the eighteenth until the middle of the nineteenth century, medicine and (especially) physiology were dominated by the old idea that a certain number of the vital processes may be traced to physical and chemical causes, but that others are the outcome of a special vital force which is independent of physical agencies. However much scientists differed in their conceptions of its nature and its relation to the "soul," they were all agreed as to its independence of, and essential distinction from, the chemico-physical forces of ordinary "matter"; it was a self-contained force (_archaeus_), unknown in inorganic nature, which compelled ordinary forces into its service. Not only the distinctly psychical activity, the sensibility of the nerves and the irritability of the muscles, but even the phenomena of sense activity, of reproduction, and of development seemed so wonderful and so mysterious in their sources that it was impossible to attribute them to simple physical and chemical processes. As the free activity of the vital force was purposive and conscious, it led, in philosophy, to a complete _teleology_; especially did this seem indisputable when even the "critical" philosopher Kant had acknowledged, in his famous critique of the teleological position, that, though the mind's authority to give a mechanical interpretation of all phenomena is theoretically unlimited, yet its actual capacity for such interpretation does not extend to the phenomena of organic life; here we are compelled to have recourse to a _purposive_--therefore _supernatural_--principle. This divergence of the _vital_ phenomena from the _mechanical_ processes of life became, naturally, more conspicuous as science advanced in the chemical and physical explanation of the latter. The circulation of the blood and a number of other phenomena could be traced to mechanical agencies; respiration and digestion were attributable to chemical processes like those we find in inorganic nature. On the other hand, it seemed impossible to do this with the wonderful performances of the nerves and muscles, and with the characteristic life of the mind; the co-ordination of all the different forces in the life of the individual seemed also beyond such a mechanical interpretation. Hence there arose a complete physiological dualism--an essential distinction was drawn between inorganic and organic nature, between mechanical and vital processes, between material force and life force, between the body and the soul. At the beginning of the nineteenth century this vitalism was firmly established in France by Louis Dumas, and in Germany by Reil. Alexander Humboldt had already published a poetical presentation of it in 1795, in his narrative of the _Legend of Rhodes_; it is repeated, with critical notes, in his _Views of Nature_. In the first half of the seventeenth century the famous philosopher Descartes, starting from Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, put forward the idea that the body of man, like that of other animals, is merely an intricate machine, and that its movements take place under the same mechanical laws as the movements of an automaton of human construction. It is true that Descartes, at the same time, claimed for man the exclusive possession of a perfectly independent, immaterial soul, and held that its subjective experience, thought, was the only thing in the world of which we have direct and certain cognizance ("_Cogito, ergo sum_"). Yet this dualism did not prevent him from doing much to advance our knowledge of the mechanical life processes in detail. Borelli followed (1660) with a reduction of the movements of the animal body to purely physical laws, and Sylvius endeavored, about the same time, to give a purely chemical explanation of the phenomena of digestion and respiration; the former founded the _iatromechanical_, the latter the _iatrochemical_, school of medicine. However, these rational tendencies towards a natural, mechanical explanation of the phenomena of life did not attain to a universal acceptance and application; in the course of the eighteenth century they fell entirely away before the advance of teleological vitalism. The final disproof of the latter and a return to mechanism only became possible with the happy growth of the new science of comparative physiology in the forties of the present century. Our knowledge of the vital functions, like our knowledge of the structure of the human body, was originally obtained, for the most part, not by direct observation of the human organism itself, but by a study of the more closely related animals among the vertebrates, especially the mammals. In this sense the very earliest beginning of human anatomy and physiology was "comparative." But the distinct science of "comparative physiology," which embraces the whole sphere of life phenomena, from the lowest animal up to man, is a triumph of the nineteenth century. Its famous creator was Johannes Müller, of Berlin (born, the son of a shoemaker, at Coblentz, in 1801). For fully twenty-five years--from 1833 to 1858--this most versatile and most comprehensive biologist of our age evinced an activity at the Berlin University, as professor and investigator, which is only comparable with the associated work of Haller and Cuvier. Nearly every one of the great biologists who have taught and worked in Germany for the last sixty years was, directly or indirectly, a pupil of Johannes Müller. Starting from the anatomy and physiology of man, he soon gathered all the chief groups of the higher and lower animals within his sphere of comparison. As, moreover, he compared the structure of extinct animals with the living, and the healthy organism with the diseased, endeavoring to bring together all the phenomena of life in a truly philosophic fashion, he attained a biological knowledge far in advance of his predecessors. The most valuable fruit of these comprehensive studies of Johannes Müller was his _Manual of Human Physiology_. This classical work contains much more than the title indicates; it is the sketch of a comprehensive "comparative biology." It is still unsurpassed in respect of its contents and range of investigation. In particular, we find the methods of observation and experiment applied in it as masterfully as the philosophic processes of induction and deduction. Müller was originally a vitalist, like all the physiologists of his time. Nevertheless, the current idea of a vital force took a novel form in his speculations, and gradually transformed itself into the very opposite. For he attempted to explain the phenomena of life mechanically in every department of physiology. His "transfigured" vital force was not _above_ the physical and chemical laws of the rest of nature but entirely bound up with them. It was, in a word, nothing more than life itself--that is, the sum of all the movements which we perceive in the living organism. He sought especially to give them the same mechanical interpretation in the life of the senses and of the mind as in the working of the muscles; the same in the phenomena of circulation, respiration, and digestion as in generation and development. Müller's success was chiefly due to the fact that he always began with the simplest life phenomena of the lowest animals, and followed them step by step in their gradual development up to the very highest, to man. In this his method of _critical comparison_ proved its value both from the physiological and from the anatomical point of view. Johannes Müller is, moreover, the only great scientist who has equally cultivated these two branches of research, and combined them with equal brilliancy. Immediately after his death his vast scientific kingdom fell into four distinct provinces, which are now nearly always represented by four or more chairs--human and comparative anatomy, pathological anatomy, physiology, and the history of evolution. This sudden division of Müller's immense realm of learning in 1858 has been compared to the dissolution of the empire which Alexander the Great had consolidated and ruled. Among the many pupils of Johannes Müller who, either during his lifetime or after his death, labored hard for the advancement of the various branches of biology, one of the most fortunate--if not the most important--was Theodor Schwann. When the able botanist Schleiden, in 1838, indicated the cell as the common elementary organ of all plants, and proved that all the different tissues of the plant are merely combinations of cells, Johannes Müller recognized at once the extraordinary possibilities of this important discovery. He himself sought to point out the same composition in various tissues of the animal body--for instance, in the spinal cord of vertebrates--and thus led his pupil, Schwann, to extend the discovery to all the animal tissues. This difficult task was accomplished by Schwann in his _Microscopic Researches into the Accordance in the Structure and Growth of Plants and Animals_ (1839). Thus was the foundation laid of the "cellular theory," the profound importance of which, both in physiology and anatomy, has become clearer and more widely recognized in each subsequent year. Moreover, it was shown by two other pupils of Johannes Müller that the activity of all organisms is, in the ultimate analysis, the activity of the components of their tissues, the microscopic cells--these were the able physiologist Ernst Brücke, of Vienna, and the distinguished histologist Albert Kölliker, of Würzburg. Brücke correctly denominated the cells the "elementary organisms," and showed that, in the body of man and of all other animals, they are the only actual, independent factors of the life process. Kölliker earned special distinction, not only in the construction of the whole science of histology, but particularly by showing that the animal ovum and its products are simple cells. Still, however widely the immense importance of the cellular theory for all biological research was acknowledged, the "cellular physiology" which is based on it only began an independent development very recently. In this Max Verworn (of Jena) earned a twofold distinction. In his _Psycho-physiological Studies of the Protistae_ (1889) he showed, as a result of an ingenious series of experimental researches, that the "theory of a cell-soul" which I put forward in 1866[11] is completely established by an accurate study of the unicellular protozoa, and that "the psychic phenomena of the protistæ form the bridge which unites the chemical processes of inorganic nature with the mental life of the highest animals." Verworn has further developed these views, and based them on the modern theory of evolution, in his _General Physiology_. This distinguished work returns to the comprehensive point of view of Johannes Müller, in opposition to the one-sided and narrow methods of those modern physiologists who think to discover the nature of the vital phenomena by the exclusive aid of chemical and physical experiments. Verworn showed that it is only by Müller's comparative method and by a profound study of the physiology of the cell that we can reach the higher stand-point which will give us a comprehensive survey of the wonderful realm of the phenomena of life. Only thus do we become convinced that the vital processes in man are subject to the same physical and chemical laws as those of all other animals. The fundamental importance of the cellular theory for all branches of biology was made clear in the second half of the nineteenth century, not only by the rapid progress of morphology and physiology, but also by the entire reform of that biological science which has always been deemed most important on account of its relation to practical medicine--pathology, or the science of disease. Many even of the older physicians were convinced that human diseases were natural phenomena, like all other manifestations of life, and should be studied scientifically, like other vital functions. Particular schools of medicine--the Iatrophysical and the Iatrochemical--had already, in the seventeenth century, attempted to trace the sources of disease to certain physical and chemical changes. However, the imperfect condition of science at that period precluded any lasting results of these efforts. Many of the older theories, which sought the nature of disease in supernatural and mystical causes, were almost universally accepted down to the middle of the nineteenth century. It was then that Rudolf Virchow, another pupil of Müller, conceived the happy idea of transferring the cellular theory from the healthy to the diseased organism; he sought in the more minute metamorphoses of the diseased cells and the tissues they composed the true source of those larger changes which, in the form of disease, threaten the living organism with peril and death. Especially during the seven years of his professorship at Würzburg (1849-56) Virchow pursued his great task with such brilliant results that his _Cellular Pathology_ (published in 1858) turned, at one stroke, the whole of pathology and the dependent science of practical medicine into new and eminently fruitful paths. This reform of medicine is significant for our present purpose in that it led us to a monistic and purely scientific conception of disease. In sickness, no less than in health, man is subject to the same eternal "iron laws" of physics and chemistry as all the rest of the organic world. Among the numerous classes of animals which modern zoology distinguishes the mammals occupy a pre-eminent position, not only on morphological grounds, but also for physiological reasons. As man belongs to the class of mammals (see p. 27) by every portion of his frame, we must expect him to share his characteristic functions with the rest of the mammals. Such we find to be the case. The circulation of the blood and respiration are accomplished in man under precisely the same laws and in the same manner as in all the other mammals--_and in these alone_; they are determined by the peculiar structure of their heart and lungs. In mammals only is all the arterial blood conducted from the left ventricle of the heart to the body by one, the _left_, branch of the aorta, while in birds it passes along the _right_ branch, and in reptiles along both branches. The blood of mammals is distinguished from that of any other vertebrate by the circumstance that its red cells have lost their nucleus (by reversion). The respiratory movements are effected largely by the diaphragm in this class of animals alone, because only in them does it form a complete partition between the pectoral and abdominal cavities. Special importance, however, in this highest class of animals, attaches to the production of milk in the breasts (_mammae_), and to the peculiar method of the rearing of the young, which entails the supplying of the offspring with the mother's milk. As this nutritive process reacts most powerfully on the other vital functions, and the maternal affection of mammals must have arisen from this intimate form of rearing, the name of the class justly reminds us of its great importance. In millions of pictures, most of them produced by painters of the highest rank, the "madonna with the child" is revered as the purest and noblest type of maternal love--the instinct which is found in its extreme form in the exaggerated tenderness of the mother-ape. As the apes approach nearest to man of all the mammals in point of structure, we shall expect to hear the same of their vital functions; and that we find to be the case. Everybody knows how closely the habits, the movements, the sense activity, the mental life, and the parental customs of apes resemble those of man. Scientific physiology proves the same significant resemblance in other less familiar processes, particularly in the working of the heart, the division of the breasts, and the sexual life. In the latter connection it is especially noteworthy that the mature females of many kinds of apes suffer a periodical discharge of blood from the womb, which corresponds to the menstruation of the human female. The secretion of the milk in the glands and the suctorial process also take place in the female ape in precisely the same fashion as in women. Finally, it is of especial interest that the speech of apes seems on physiological comparison to be a stage in the formation of articulate human speech. Among living apes there is an Indian species which is musical; the _hylobates syndactylus_ sings a full octave in perfectly pure, harmonious half-tones. No impartial philologist can hesitate any longer to admit that our elaborate rational language has been slowly and gradually developed out of the imperfect speech of our Pliocene simian ancestors. CHAPTER IV OUR EMBRYONIC DEVELOPMENT The Older Embryology--The Theory of Preformation--The Theory of Scatulation: Haller and Leibnitz--The Theory of Epigenesis: C. F. Wolff--The Theory of Germinal Layers: Carl Ernst Baer--Discovery of the Human Ovum: Remak, Kölliker--The Egg-Cell and the Sperm-Cell--The Theory of the Gastræa--Protozoa and Metazoa--The Ova and the Spermatozoa: Oscar Hertwig--Conception--Embryonic Development in Man--Uniformity of the Vertebrate Embryo--The Germinal Membranes in Man--The Amnion, the Serolemma, and the Allantois--The Formation of the Placenta and the "After-Birth"--The _Decidua_ and the _Funiculus Umbilicalis_--The Discoid Placenta of Man and the Ape Comparative ontogeny, or the science of the development of the individual animal, is a child of the nineteenth century in even a truer sense than comparative anatomy and physiology. How is the child formed in the mother's womb? How do animals evolve from ova? How does the plant come forth from the seed? These pregnant questions have occupied the thoughtful mind for thousands of years. Yet it is only seventy years since the embryologist Baer pointed out the correct means and methods for penetrating into the mysteries of embryonic life; it is only forty years since Darwin, by his reform of the theory of descent, gave us the key which should open the long-closed door, and lead to a knowledge of embryonic agencies. As I have endeavored to give a complete, popular presentation of this very interesting but difficult study in the first section of my _Anthropogeny_, I will confine myself here to a brief survey and discussion of the most important phenomena. Let us first cast a historical glance at the older ontogeny, and the theory of preformation which is connected with it. The classical works of Aristotle, the many-sided "father of science," are the oldest known scientific sources of embryology, as we found them to be for comparative anatomy. Not only in his great natural history, but also in a special small work, _Five Books on the Generation and Development of Animals_, the great philosopher gives us a host of interesting facts, adding many observations on their significance; it was not until our own days that many of them were fully appreciated, and, indeed, we may say, discovered afresh. Naturally, many fables and errors are mixed up with them; it was all that was known at that time of the hidden growth of the human germ. Yet during the long space of the next two thousand years the slumbering science made no further progress. It was not until the commencement of the seventeenth century that there was a renewal of activity. In 1600 the Italian anatomist Fabricius ab Aquapendente published at Padua the first pictures and descriptions of the embryos of man and some of the higher animals; in 1687 the famous Marcello Malpighi, of Bologna, a distinguished pioneer alike in zoology and botany, published the first consistent exposition of the growth of the chick in the hatched egg. All these older scientists were possessed with the idea that the complete body, with all its parts, was already contained in the ovum of animals, only it was so minute and transparent that it could not be detected; that, therefore, the whole development was nothing more than a _growth_, or an "unfolding," of the parts that were already "infolded" (_involutae_). This erroneous notion, almost universally accepted until the beginning of the present century, is called the "preformation theory"; sometimes it is called the "evolution theory" (in the literal sense of "unfolding"); but the latter title is accepted by modern scientists for the very different theory of "transformation." Closely connected with the preformation theory, and as a logical consequence of it, there arose in the last century a further theory which keenly interested all thoughtful biologists--the curious "theory of scatulation." As it was thought that the outline of the entire organism, with all its parts, was present in the egg, the ovary of the embryo had to be supposed to contain the ova of the following generation; these, again, the ova of the next, and so on _in infinitum_! On that basis the distinguished physiologist Haller calculated that God had created together, 6000 years ago--on the sixth day of his creatorial labors--the germs of 200,000,000,000 men, and ingeniously packed them all in the ovary of our venerable mother Eve. Even the gifted philosopher Leibnitz fully accepted this conclusion, and embodied it in his monadist theory; and as, on his theory, soul and body are in eternal, inseparable companionship, the consequence had to be accepted for the soul; "the souls of men have existed in organized bodies in their ancestors from Adam downward--that is, from the very beginning of things." In the month of November, 1759, a young doctor of twenty-six years, Caspar Friedrich Wolff (son of a Berlin tailor), published his dissertation for the degree at Halle, under the title, _Theoria Generationis_. Supported by a series of most laborious and painstaking observations, he proved the entire falsity of the dominant theories of preformation and scatulation. In the hatched egg there is at first no trace of the coming chick and its organs; instead of it we find on top of the yolk a small, circular, white disk. This thin "germinal disk" becomes gradually round, and then breaks up into four folds, lying upon each other, which are the rudiments of the four chief systems of organs--the nervous system above, the muscular system underneath, the vascular system (with the heart), and, finally, the alimentary canal. Thus, as Wolff justly remarked, the embryonic development does not consist in an unfolding of the preformed organs, but in a series of new constructions; it is a true _epigenesis_. One part arises after another, and all make their appearance in a simple form, which is very different from the later structure. This only appears after a series of most remarkable formations. Although this great discovery--one of the most important of the eighteenth century--could be directly proved by a verification of the facts Wolff had observed, and although the "theory of generation" which was founded on it was in reality not a theory at all, but a simple fact, it met with no sympathy whatever for half a century. It was particularly retarded by the high authority of Haller, who fought it strenuously with the dogmatic assertion that "there is no such thing as development: no part of the animal body is formed before another; all were created together." Wolff, who had to go to St. Petersburg, was long in his grave before the forgotten facts he had observed were discovered afresh by Oken at Jena, in 1806. After Wolff's "epigenesis theory" had been established by Oken and Neckel (whose important work on the development of the alimentary canal was translated from Latin into German), a number of young German scientists devoted themselves eagerly to more accurate embryological research. The most important and successful of these was Carl Ernst Baer. His principal work appeared in 1828, with the title, _History of the Development of Animals: Observations and Reflections_. Not only the phenomena of the formation of the germ are clearly illustrated and fully described in it, but it adds a number of very pregnant speculations. In particular, the form of the embryo of man and the mammals is correctly presented, and the vastly different development of the lower invertebrate animals is also considered. The two leaflike layers which appear in the round germ disk of the higher vertebrates first divide, according to Baer, into two further layers, and these four germinal layers are transformed into four tubes, which represent the fundamental organs--the skin layer, the muscular layer, the vascular layer, and the mucous layer. Then, by very complicated evolutionary processes, the later organs arise, in substantially the same manner, in man and all the other vertebrates. The three chief groups of invertebrates, which in their turn differ widely from each other, have a very different development. One of the most important of Baer's many discoveries was the finding of the human ovum. Up to that time the little vesicles which are found in great numbers in the human ovary and in that of all other mammals had been taken for the ova. Baer was the first to prove, in 1827, that the real ova are enclosed in these vesicles--the "Graafian follicles"--and much smaller, being tiny spheres 1-120th inch in diameter, visible to the naked eye as minute specks under favorable conditions. He discovered likewise that from this tiny ovum of the mammal there develops first a characteristic germ globule, a hollow sphere with liquid contents, the wall of which forms the slender germinal membrane, or blastoderm. Ten years after Baer had given a firm foundation to embryological science by his theory of germ layers a new task confronted it on the establishment of the cellular theory in 1838. What is the relation of the ovum and the layers which arise from it to the tissues and cells which compose the fully developed organism? The correct answer to this difficult question was given about the middle of this century by two distinguished pupils of Johannes Müller--Robert Remak, of Berlin, and Albert Kölliker, of Würzburg. They showed that the ovum is at first one simple cell, and that the many germinal globules, or granules, which arise from it by repeated segmentation, are also simple cells. From this mulberry-like group of cells are constructed first the germinal layers, and subsequently by differentiation, or division of labor, all the different organs. Kölliker has the further merit of showing that the seminal fluid of male animals is also a mass of microscopic cells. The active pin-shaped "seed-animalcules," or _spermatozoa_, in it are merely ciliated cells, as I first proved in the case of the seed-filaments of the sponge in 1866. Thus it was proved that both the materials of generation, the male sperm and the female ova, fell in with the cellular theory. That was a discovery of which the great philosophic significance was not appreciated until a much later date, on a close study of the phenomena of conception in 1875. All the older studies in embryonic development concern man and the higher vertebrates, especially the embryonic bird, since hens' eggs are the largest and most convenient objects for investigation, and are plentiful enough to facilitate experiment; we can hatch them in the incubator, as well as by the natural function of the hen, and so observe from hour to hour, during the space of three weeks, the whole series of formations, from the simple germ cell to the complete organism. Even Baer had only been able to gather from such observations the fact that the different classes of vertebrates agreed in the characteristic form of the germ layers and the growth of particular organs. In the innumerable classes of invertebrates, on the other hand--that is, in the great majority of animals--the embryonic development seemed to run quite a different course, and most of them seemed to be altogether without true germinal layers. It was not until about the middle of the century that such layers were found in some of the invertebrates. Huxley, for instance, found them in the medusæ in 1849, and Kölliker in the cephalopods in 1844. Particularly important was the discovery of Kowalewsky (1886) that the lowest vertebrate--the lancelot, or amphioxus--is developed in just the same manner (and a very original fashion it is) as an invertebrate, apparently quite remote, tunicate, the sea-squirt, or ascidian. Even in some of the worms, the radiata and the articulata, a similar formation of the germinal layers was pointed out by the same observer. I myself was then (since 1886) occupied with the embryology of the sponges, corals, medusæ, and siphonophoræ, and, as I found the same formation of two primary germ layers everywhere in these lowest classes of multicellular animals, I came to the conclusion that this important embryonic feature is common to the entire animal world. The circumstance that in the sponges and the cnidaria (polyps, medusæ, etc.) the body consists for a long time, sometimes throughout life, merely of two simple layers of cells, seemed to me especially significant. Huxley had already (1849) compared these, in the case of the medusæ, with the two primary germinal layers of the vertebrates. On the ground of these observations and comparisons I then, in 1872, in my _Philosophy of the Calcispongiae_, published the "theory of the gastræa," of which the following are the essential points: I. The whole animal world falls into two essentially different groups, the unicellular primitive animals (Protozoa) and the multicellular animals with complex tissues (Metazoa). The entire organism of the protozoon (the rhizopods of the infusoria) remains throughout life a single simple cell (or occasionally a loose colony of cells without the formation of tissue, a _coenobium_). The organism of the metazoon, on the contrary, is only unicellular at the commencement, and is subsequently built up of a number of cells which form tissues. II. Hence the method of reproduction and development is very different in each of these great categories of animals. The protozoa usually multiply by _non-sexual_ means, by fission, gemmation, or spores; they have no real ova and no sperm. The metazoa, on the contrary, are divided into male and female sexes, and generally propagate sexually, by means of true ova, which are fertilized by the male sperm. III. Hence, further, true germinal layers, and the tissues which are formed from them, are found only in the metazoa; they are entirely wanting in the protozoa. IV. In all the metazoa only two primary layers appear at first, and these have always the same essential significance; from the _outer_ layer the external skin and the nervous system are developed; from the _inner_ layer are formed the alimentary canal and all the other organs. V. I called the germ, which always arises first from the impregnated ovum, and which consists of these two primary layers, the "gut-larva," or the _gastrula_; its cup-shaped body with the two layers encloses originally a simple digestive cavity, the primitive gut (the _progaster_ or _archenteron_), and its simple opening is the primitive mouth (the _prostoma_ or _blastoporus_). These are the earliest organs of the multicellular body, and the two cell layers of its enclosing wall, simple epithelia, are its earliest tissues; all the other organs and tissues are a later and secondary growth from these. VI. From this similarity, or _homology_, of the gastrula in all classes of compound animals I drew the conclusion, in virtue of the biogenetic law (p. 81), that all the metazoa come originally from one simple ancestral form, the _gastraea_, and that this ancient (Laurentian), long-extinct form had the structure and composition of the actual gastrula, in which it is preserved by heredity. VII. This phylogenetic conclusion, based on the comparison of ontogenetic facts, is confirmed by the circumstance that there are several of these gastræades still in existence (_gastraemaria_, _cyemaria_, _physemaria_, etc.), and also some ancient forms of other animal groups whose organization is very little higher (the _olynthus_ of the sponges, the _hydra_, or common fresh-water polyp, of the cnidaria, the _convoluta_ and other cryptocæla, or worms of the simplest type, of the _platodes_). VIII. In the further development of the various tissue-forming animals from the gastrula we have to distinguish two principal groups. The earlier and _lower_ types (the _coelenteria_ or _acoelomia_) have no body cavity, no vent, and no blood; such is the case with the gastræades, sponges, cnidaria, and platodes. The later and _higher_ types (the _caelomaria_ or _bilateria_), on the other hand, have a true body cavity, and generally blood and a vent; to these we must refer the worms and the higher types of animals which were evolved from these later on, the echinodermata, mollusca, articulata, tunicata, and vertebrata. Those are the main points of my "gastræa theory"; I have since enlarged the first sketch of it (given in 1872), and have endeavored to substantiate it in a series of "Studies on the gastræa theory" (1873-84). Although it was almost universally rejected at first, and fiercely combated for ten years by many authorities, it is now (and has been for the last fifteen years) accepted by nearly all my colleagues. Let us now see what far-reaching consequences follow from it, and from the evolution of the germ, especially with regard to our great question, "the place of man in nature." The human ovum, like that of all other animals, is a single cell, and this tiny globular egg cell (about the 120th of an inch in diameter) has just the same characteristic appearance as that of all other viviparous organisms. The little ball of protoplasm is surrounded by a thick, transparent, finely reticulated membrane, called the _zona pellucida_; even the little, globular, germinal vesicle (the cell-nucleus), which is enclosed in the protoplasm (the cell-body), is of the same size and the same qualities as in the rest of the mammals. The same applies to the active spermatozoa of the male, the minute, threadlike, ciliated cells of which millions are found in every drop of the seminal fluid; on account of their lifelike movements they were previously taken to be forms of life, as the name indicates (spermatozoa--sperm animals). Moreover, the origin of both these important sexual cells in their respective organs is the same in man as in the other mammals; both the ova in the ovary of the female and the spermatozoa in the spermarium of the male arise in the same fashion--they always come from cells, which are originally derived from the coelous epithelium, the layer of cells which clothes the cavity of the body. The most important moment in the life of every man, as in that of all other complex animals, is the moment in which he begins his individual existence; it is the moment when the sexual cells of both parents meet and coalesce for the formation of a single simple cell. This new cell, the impregnated egg cell, is the individual stem cell (the _cytula_), the continued segmentation of which produces the cells of the germinal layers and the gastrula. With the formation of this cytula, hence in the process of conception itself, the existence of the personality, the independent individual, commences. This ontogenic fact is supremely important, for the most far-reaching conclusions may be drawn from it. In the first place, we have a clear perception that man, like all the other complex animals, inherits all his personal characteristics, bodily and mental, from his parents; and, further, we come to the momentous conclusion that the new personality which arises thus can lay no claim to "immortality." Hence the minute processes of conception and sexual generation are of the first importance. We are, however, only familiar with their details since 1875, when Oscar Hertwig, my pupil and fellow-traveller at that time, began his researches into the impregnation of the egg of the sea-urchin at Ajaccio, in Corsica. The beautiful capital of the island in which Napoleon the Great was born, in 1769, was also the spot in which the mysteries of animal conception were carefully studied for the first time in their most important aspects. Hertwig found that the one essential element in conception is the coalescence of the two sexual cells and their nuclei. Only one out of the millions of male ciliated cells which press round the ovum penetrates to its nucleus. The nuclei of both cells, of the spermatozoon and of the ovum, drawn together by a mysterious force, which we take to be a chemical sense-activity, related to smell, approach each other and melt into one. Thus, by the sensitive perception of the sexual nuclei, following upon a kind of "erotic chemicotropism," a new cell is formed, which unites in itself the inherited qualities of both parents; the nucleus of the spermatozoon conveys the paternal features, the nucleus of the ovum those of the mother, to the stem cell, from which the child is to be developed. That applies both to the bodily and to the mental characteristics. The formation of the germinal layers by the repeated division of the stem cell, the growth of the gastrula and of the later germ structures which succeed it, take place in man in just the same manner as in the other higher mammals, under the peculiar conditions which differentiate this group from the lower vertebrates. In the earlier stages of development these special characters of the placentalia are not to be detected. The significant embryonic or larval form of the chordula, which succeeds the gastrula, has substantially the same structure in all vertebrates; a simple straight rod, the dorsal cord, lies lengthways along the main axis of the shield-shaped body--the "embryonic shield"; above the cord the spinal marrow develops out of the outer germinal layer, while the gut makes its appearance underneath. Then, on both sides, to the right and left of the axial rod, appear the segments of the "pro-vertebræ" and the outlines of the muscular plates, with which the formation of the members of the vertebrate body begins. The gill-clefts appear on either side of the fore-gut; they are the openings of the gullet, through which, in our primitive fish-ancestors, the water which had entered at the mouth for breathing purposes made its exit at the sides of the head. By a tenacious heredity these gill-clefts, which have no meaning except for our fish-like aquatic ancestors, are still preserved in the embryo of man and all the other vertebrates. They disappear after a time. Even after the five vesicles of the embryonic brain appear in the head, and the rudiments of the eyes and ears at the sides, and after the legs sprout out at the base of the fish-like embryo, in the form of two roundish, flat buds, the foetus is still so like that of other vertebrates that it is indistinguishable from them. The substantial similarity in outer form and inner structure which characterizes the embryo of man and other vertebrates in this early stage of development is an embryological fact of the first importance; from it, by the fundamental law of biogeny, we may draw the most momentous conclusions. There is but one explanation of it--heredity from a common parent form. When we see that, at a certain stage, the embryos of man and the ape, the dog and the rabbit, the pig and the sheep, although recognizable as higher vertebrates, cannot be distinguished from each other, the fact can only be elucidated by assuming a common parentage. And this explanation is strengthened when we follow the subsequent divergence of these embryonic forms. The nearer two animals are in their bodily structure, and, therefore, in the scheme of nature, so much the longer do we find their embryos to retain this resemblance, and so much the closer do they approach each other in the ancestral tree of their respective group, so much the closer is their genetic relationship. Hence it is that the embryos of man and the anthropoid ape retain the resemblance much later, at an advanced stage of development, when their distinction from the embryos of other mammals can be seen at a glance. I have illustrated this significant fact by a juxtaposition of corresponding stages in the development of a number of different vertebrates in my _Natural History of Creation_ and in my _Anthropogeny_. The great phylogenetic significance of the resemblance we have described is seen, not only in the comparison of the embryos of vertebrates, but also in the comparison of their protective membranes. All vertebrates of the three higher classes--reptiles, birds, and mammals--are distinguished from the lower classes by the possession of certain special foetal membranes, the amnion and the serolemma. The embryo is enclosed in these membranes, or bags, which are full of water, and is thus protected from pressure or shock. This provident arrangement probably arose during the Permian period, when the oldest reptiles, the _proreptilia_, the common ancestors of all the amniotes (animals with an _amnion_), completely adapted themselves to a life on land. Their direct ancestors, the amphibia, and the fishes are devoid of these foetal membranes; they would have been superfluous to these inhabitants of the water. With the inheritance of these protective coverings are closely connected two other changes in the amniotes: firstly, the entire disappearance of the gills (while the gill arches and clefts continue to be inherited as "rudimentary organs"); secondly, the construction of the _allantois_. This vesicular bag, filled with water, grows out of the hind-gut in the embryo of all the amniotes, and is nothing else than an enlargement of the bladder of their amphibious ancestors. From its innermost and inferior section is formed subsequently the permanent bladder of the amniotes, while the larger outer part shrivels up. Usually this has an important part to play for a long time as the respiratory organ of the embryo, a number of large blood-vessels spreading out over its inner surface. The formation of the membranes, the amnion and the serolemma, and of the allantois, is just the same, and is effected by the same complicated process of growth, in man as in all the other amniotes; _man is a true amniote_. The nourishment of the foetus in the maternal womb is effected, as is well known, by a peculiar organ, richly supplied with blood at its surface, called the _placenta_. This important nutritive organ is a spongy, round disk, from six to eight inches in diameter, about an inch thick, and one or two pounds in weight; it is separated after the birth of the child, and issues as the "after-birth." The placenta consists of two very different parts, the foetal and the maternal part. The latter contains highly developed sinuses, which retain the blood conveyed to them by the arteries of the mother. On the other hand, the foetal placenta is formed by innumerable branching tufts or villi, which grow out of the outer surface of the allantois, and derive their blood from the umbilical vessels. The hollow, blood-filled villi of the foetal placenta protrude into the sinuses of the maternal placenta, and the slender membrane between the two is so attenuated that it offers no impediment to the direct interchange of material through the nutritive blood-stream (by osmosis). In the older and lower groups of the placentals the entire surface of the chorion is covered with a number of short villi; these "chorion-villi" take the form of pit-like depressions of the mucous membrane of the mother, and are easily detached at birth. That happens in most of the ungulata (the sow, camel, mare, etc.), the cetacea, and the prosimiæ; these "mallo-placentalia" (with a _diffuse_ placenta) have been denominated the _indeciduata_. The same formation is present in man and the other placentals in the beginning. It is soon modified, however, as the villi on one part of the chorion are withdrawn; while on the other part they grow proportionately stronger, and unite intimately with the mucous membrane of the womb. It is in consequence of this intimate blending that a portion of the uterus is detached at birth, and carried away with loss of blood. This detachable membrane--the _decidua_--is a characteristic of the higher placentalia, which have, consequently, been grouped under the title of _deciduata_; to that category belong the carnassia, rodentia, simiæ, and man. In the carnassia and some of the ungulata (the elephant, for instance) the placenta takes the form of a girdle, hence they are known as the _zonoplacentalia_; in the rodentia, the insectivora (the mole and the hedge-hog), the apes, and man, it takes the form of a disk. Even ten years ago the majority of embryologists thought that man was distinguished by certain peculiarities in the form of the placenta--namely, by the possession of what is called the _decidua reflexa_, and by a special formation of the umbilical chord which unites the _decidua_ to the foetus. It was supposed that the rest of the placentals, including the apes, were without these special embryonic structures. The _funiculus umbilicalis_ is a smooth, cylindrical cord, from sixteen to twenty-three inches long, and as thick as the little finger. It forms the connecting link between the foetus and the maternal placenta, since it conducts the nutritive vessels from the body of the foetus to the placenta; it comprises, besides, the pedicle of the allantois and the yelk-sac. The yelk-sac in the human case forms the greater portion of the germinal vesicle during the third week of gestation; but it shrivels up afterwards so that it was formerly entirely missed in the mature foetus. Yet it remains all the time in a rudimentary condition, and may be detected even after birth as the little umbilical vesicle. Moreover, even the vesicular structure of the allantois disappears at an early stage in the human case; with a deflection of the amnion, it gives rise to the pedicle. We cannot enter here into a discussion of the complicated anatomical and embryological relations of these structures. I have described and illustrated them in my _Anthropogeny_ (twenty-third chapter). The opponents of evolution still appealed to these "special features" of human embryology, which were supposed to distinguish man from all the other mammals, even so late as ten years ago. But in 1890 Emil Selenka proved that the same features are found in the anthropoid apes, especially in the orang (_satyrus_), while the lower apes are without them. Thus Huxley's pithecometra thesis was substantiated once more: "The differences between man and the great apes are not so great as are those between the manlike apes and the lower monkeys." The supposed "evidences _against_ the near blood-relationship of man and the apes" proved, on a closer examination of the real circumstances, to be strong reasons in favor of it. Every scientist who penetrates with open eyes into this dark but profoundly interesting labyrinth of our embryonic development, and who is competent to compare it critically with that of the rest of the mammals, will find in it a most important aid towards the elucidation of the descent of our species. For the various stages of our embryonic development, in the character of _palingenetic_ phenomena of heredity, cast a brilliant light on the corresponding stages of our ancestral tree, in accordance with the great law of biogeny. But even the _cenogenetic_ phenomena of adaptation, the formation of the temporary foetal organs--the characteristic foetal membranes, and especially the placenta--gives us sufficiently definite indications of our _close genetic relationship with the primates_. CHAPTER V THE HISTORY OF OUR SPECIES Origin of Man--Mythical History of Creation--Moses and Linné--The Creation of Permanent Species--The Catastrophic Theory: Cuvier--Transformism: Goethe--Theory of Descent: Lamarck--Theory of Selection: Darwin--Evolution (Phylogeny)--Ancestral Trees--General Morphology--Natural History of Creation--Systematic Phylogeny--Fundamental Law of Biogeny--Anthropogeny--Descent of Man from the Ape--Pithecoid Theory--The Fossil Pithecanthropus of Dubois The youngest of the great branches of the living tree of biology is the science we call biological evolution, or _phylogeny_. It came into existence much later, and under much more difficult circumstances, than its natural sister, embryonic evolution or _ontogeny_. The object of the latter was to attain a knowledge of the mysterious processes by which the individual organism, plant or animal, developed from the egg. Phylogeny has to answer the much more obscure and difficult question: "What is the origin of the different organic species of plants and animals?" Ontogeny (embryology and metamorphism) could follow the empirical method of direct observation in the solution of its not remote problem; it needed but to follow, day by day and hour by hour, the visible changes which the foetus experiences during a brief period in the course of its development from the ovum. Much more difficult was the remote problem of phylogeny; for the slow processes of gradual construction, which effect the rise of new species of animals and plants, go on imperceptibly during thousands and even millions of years. Their direct observation is possible only within very narrow limits; the vast majority of these historical processes can only be known by direct inference--by critical reflection, and by a comparative use of empirical sciences which belong to very different fields of thought, palæontology, ontogeny, and morphology. To this we must add the immense opposition which was everywhere made to biological evolution on account of the close connection between questions of organic creation and supernatural myths and religious dogmas. For these reasons it can easily be understood how it is that the scientific existence of a true theory of origins was only secured, amid fierce controversy, in the course of the last forty years. Every serious attempt that was made before the beginning of the nineteenth century to solve the problem of the origin of species lost its way in the mythological labyrinth of the supernatural stories of creation. The efforts of a few distinguished thinkers to emancipate themselves from this tyranny and attain to a naturalistic interpretation proved unavailing. A great variety of creation myths arose in connection with their religion in all the ancient civilized nations. During the Middle Ages triumphant Christendom naturally arrogated to itself the sole right of pronouncing on the question; and, the Bible being the basis of the structure of the Christian religion, the whole story of creation was taken from the book of Genesis. Even Carl Linné, the famous Swedish scientist, started from that basis when, in 1735, in his classical _Systema Naturae_, he made the first attempt at a systematic arrangement, nomenclature, and classification of the innumerable objects in nature. As the best practical aid in that attempt he introduced the well-known double or binary nomenclature; to each kind of animals and plants he gave a particular specific name, and added to it the wider-reaching name of the genus. A _genus_ served to unite the nearest related _species_; thus, for instance, Linné grouped under the genus "dog" (_canis_), as different species, the house-dog (_canis familiaris_), the jackal (_canis aureus_), the wolf (_canis lupus_) the fox (_canis vulpes_), etc. This binary nomenclature immediately proved of such great practical assistance that it was universally accepted, and is still always followed in zoological and botanical classification. But the theoretical dogma which Linné himself connected with his practical idea of species was fraught with the gravest peril to science. The first question which forced itself on the mind of the thoughtful scientist was the question as to the nature of the concept of species, its contents, and its range. And the creator of the idea answered this fundamental question by a naïve appeal to the dominant Mosaic legend of creation: "_Species tot sunt diversae, quot diversas formas ab initio creavit infinitum ens_"--(There are just so many distinct species as there were distinct types created in the beginning by the Infinite). This theosophic dogma cut short all attempt at a natural explanation of the origin of species. Linné was acquainted only with the plant and animal worlds that exist to-day; he had no suspicion of the much more numerous extinct species which had peopled the earth with their varying forms in the earlier period of its development. It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that we were introduced to these fossil animals by Cuvier. In his famous work on the fossil bones of the four-footed vertebrates he gave (1812) the first correct description and true interpretation of many of these fossil remains. He showed, too, that a series of very different animal populations have succeeded each other in the various stages of the earth's history. Since Cuvier held firmly to Linné's idea of the absolute permanency of species, he thought their origin could only be explained by the supposition that a series of great cataclysms and new creations had marked the history of the globe; he imagined that all living creatures were destroyed at the commencement of each of these terrestrial revolutions, and an entirely new population was created at its close. Although this "catastrophic theory" of Cuvier's led to the most absurd consequences, and was nothing more than a bald faith in miracles, it obtained almost universal recognition, and reigned triumphant until the coming of Darwin. It is easy to understand that these prevalent ideas of the absolute unchangeability and supernatural creation of organic species could not satisfy the more penetrating thinkers. We find several eminent minds already, in the second half of the last century, busy with the attempt to find a natural explanation of the "problem of creation." Pre-eminent among them was the great German poet and philosopher, Wolfgang Goethe, who, by his long and assiduous study of morphology, obtained, more than a hundred years ago, a clear insight into the intimate connection of all organic forms, and a firm conviction of a common natural origin. In his famed _Metamorphosis of Plants_ (1790) he derived all the different species of plants from one primitive type, and all their different organs from one primitive organ--the leaf. In his vertebral theory of the skull he endeavored to prove that the skulls of the vertebrates--including man--were all alike made up of certain groups of bones, arranged in a definite structure, and that these bones are nothing else than transformed vertebræ. It was his penetrating study of comparative osteology that led Goethe to a firm conviction of the unity of the animal organization; he had recognized that the human skeleton is framed on the same fundamental type as that of all other vertebrates--"built on a primitive plan that only deviates more or less to one side or other in its very constant features, and still develops and refashions itself daily." This remodelling, or transformation, is brought about, according to Goethe, by the constant interaction of two powerful constructive forces--a centripetal force within the organism, the "tendency to specification," and a centrifugal force without, the tendency to variation, or the "idea of metamorphosis"; the former corresponds to what we now call heredity, the latter to the modern idea of adaptation. How deeply Goethe had penetrated into their character by these philosophic studies of the "construction and reconstruction of organic natures," and how far, therefore, he must be considered the most important precursor of Darwin and Lamarck,[12] may be gathered from the interesting passages from his works which I have collected in the fourth chapter of my _Natural History of Creation_. These evolutionary ideas of Goethe, however, like analogous ideas of Kant, Owen, Treviranus, and other philosophers of the commencement of the century (which we have quoted in the above work), did not amount to more than certain general conclusions. They had not that great lever which the "natural history of creation" needed for its firm foundation on a criticism of the dogma of fixed species; this lever was first supplied by Lamarck. The first thorough attempt at a scientific establishment of transformism was made at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the great French scientist Jean Lamarck, the chief opponent of his colleague, Cuvier, at Paris. He had already, in 1802, in his _Observations on Living Organisms_, expressed the new ideas as to the mutability and formation of species, which he thoroughly established in 1809 in the two volumes of his profound work, _Philosophie Zoologique_. In this work he first gave expression to the correct idea, in opposition to the prevalent dogma of fixed species, that the organic "species" is an _artificial abstraction_, a concept of only relative value, like the wider-ranging concepts of genus, family, order, and class. He went on to affirm that all species are changeable, and have arisen from older species in the course of very long periods of time. The common parent forms from which they have descended were originally very simple and lowly organisms. The first and oldest of them arose by abiogenesis. While the type is preserved by _heredity_ in the succession of generations, _adaptation_, on the other hand, effects a constant modification of the species by change of habits and the exercise of the various organs. Even our human organism has arisen in the same natural manner, by gradual transformation, from a group of pithecoid mammals. For all these phenomena--indeed, for all phenomena both in nature and in the mind--Lamarck takes exclusively mechanical, physical, and chemical activities to be the true efficient causes. His magnificent _Philosophie Zoologique_ contains all the elements of a purely monistic system of nature on the basis of evolution. I have fully treated these achievements of Lamarck in the fourth chapter of my _Anthropogeny_, and in the fourth chapter of the _Natural History of Creation_. Science had now to wait until this great effort to give a scientific foundation to the theory of evolution should shatter the dominant myth of a "specific creation, and open out the path of natural" development. In this respect Lamarck was not more successful in resisting the conservative authority of his great opponent, Cuvier, than was his colleague and sympathizer, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, twenty years later. The famous controversies which he had with Cuvier in the Parisian Academy in 1830 ended with the complete triumph of the latter. I have elsewhere fully described these conflicts, in which Goethe took so lively an interest. The great expansion which the study of biology experienced at that time, the abundance of interesting discoveries in comparative anatomy and physiology, the establishment of the cellular theory, and the progress of ontogeny, gave zoologists and botanists so overwhelming a flood of welcome material to deal with that the difficult and obscure question of the origin of species was easily forgotten for a time. People rested content with the old dogma of creation. Even when Charles Lyell refuted Cuvier's extraordinary "catastrophic theory" in his _Principles of Geology_, in 1830, and vindicated a natural, continuous evolution for the inorganic structure of our planet, his simple principle of continuity found no one to apply it to the inorganic world. The rudiments of a natural phylogeny which were buried in Lamarck's works were as completely forgotten as the germ of a natural ontogeny which Caspar Friedrich Wolff had given fifty years earlier in his _Theory of Generation_. In both cases a full half-century elapsed before the great idea of a natural development won a fitting recognition. Only when Darwin (in 1859) approached the solution of the problem from a different side altogether, and made a happy use of the rich treasures of empirical knowledge which had accumulated in the mean time, did men begin to think once more of Lamarck as his great precursor. The unparalleled success of Charles Darwin is well known. It shows him to-day, at the close of the century, to have been, if not the greatest, at least the most effective of its distinguished scientists. No other of the many great thinkers of our time has achieved so magnificent, so thorough, and so far-reaching a success with a single classical work as Darwin did in 1859 with his famous _Origin of Species_. It is true that the reform of comparative anatomy and physiology by Johannes Müller had inaugurated a new and fertile epoch for the whole of biology, that the establishment of the cellular theory by Schleiden and Schwann, the reform of ontogeny by Baer, and the formulation of the law of substance by Robert Mayer and Helmholtz were scientific facts of the first importance; but no one of them has had so profound an influence on the whole structure of human knowledge as Darwin's theory of the natural origin of species. For it at once gave us the solution of the mystic "problem of creation," the great "question of all questions"--the problem of the true character and origin of man himself. If we compare the two great founders of transformism, we find in Lamarck a preponderant inclination to _deduction_, and to forming a completely monistic scheme of nature; in Darwin we have a predominant application of _induction_, and a prudent concern to establish the different parts of the theory of selection as firmly as possible on a basis of observation and experiment. While the French scientist far outran the then limits of empirical knowledge, and rather sketched the programme of future investigation, the English empiricist was mainly preoccupied about securing a unifying principle of interpretation for a mass of empirical knowledge which had hitherto accumulated without being understood. We can thus understand how it was that the success of Darwin was just as overwhelming as that of Lamarck was evanescent. Darwin, however, had not only the signal merit of bringing all the results of the various biological sciences to a common focus in the principle of descent, and thus giving them a harmonious interpretation, but he also discovered, in the principle of selection, that direct cause of transformation which Lamarck had missed. In applying, as a practical breeder, the experience of artificial selection to organisms in a state of nature, and in recognizing in the "struggle for life" the selective principle of natural selection, Darwin created his momentous "theory of selection," which is what we properly call Darwinism. One of the most pressing of the many important tasks which Darwin proposed to modern biology was the reform of the zoological and botanical system. Since the innumerable species of animals and plants were not created by a supernatural miracle, but evolved by natural processes, their ancestral tree is their "natural system." The first attempt to frame a system in this sense was made by myself in 1866, in my _General Morphology of Organisms_. The first volume of this work ("General Anatomy") dealt with the "mechanical science of the developed forms"; the second volume ("General Evolution") was occupied with the science of the "developing forms." The systematic introduction to the latter formed a "genealogical survey of the natural system of organisms." Until that time the term "evolution" had been taken to mean exclusively, both in zoology and botany, the development of individual organisms--embryology, or metamorphic science. I established the opposite view, that this history of the embryo (ontogeny) must be completed by a second, equally valuable, and closely connected branch of thought--the history of the race (phylogeny). Both these branches of evolutionary science are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation; it has a precise and comprehensive expression in my "fundamental law of biogeny." As the new views I had put forward in my _General Morphology_ met with very little notice, and still less acceptance, from my scientific colleagues, in spite of their severely scientific setting, I thought I would make the most important of them accessible to a wider circle of informed readers by a smaller work, written in a more popular style. This was done in 1868, in _The Natural History of Creation_ (a series of popular scientific lectures on evolution in general, and the systems of Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck in particular). If the success of my _General Morphology_ was far below my reasonable anticipation, that of _The Natural History of Creation_ went far beyond it. In a period of thirty years nine editions and twelve different translations of it have appeared. In spite of its great defects, the book has contributed much to the popularization of the main ideas of modern evolution. Still, I could only give the barest outlines in it of my chief object, the phylogenetic construction of a natural system. I have, therefore, given the complete proof, which is wanting in the earlier work, of the phylogenetic system in a subsequent larger work, my _Systematic Phylogeny_ (outlines of a natural system of organisms on the basis of their specific development). The first volume of it deals with the protists and plants (1894), the second with the invertebrate animals (1896), the third with the vertebrates (1895). The ancestral tree of both the smaller and the larger groups is carried on in this work as far as my knowledge of the three great "ancestral documents"--palæontology, ontogeny, and morphology--qualified me to extend it. I had already, in my _General Morphology_ (at the end of the fifth book), described the close causative connection which exists, in my opinion, between the two branches of organic evolution as one of the most important ideas of transformism, and I had framed a precise formula for it in a number of "theses on the causal nexus of biontic and phyletic development": "_Ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis_, determined by the physiological functions of heredity (generation) and adaptation (maintenance)." Darwin himself had emphasized the great significance of his theory for the elucidation of embryology in 1859, and Fritz Müller had endeavored to prove it as regards the Crustacea in the able little work, _Facts and Arguments for Darwin_ (1864). My own task has been to prove the universal application and the fundamental importance of the biogenetic law in a series of works, especially in the _Biology of the Calcispongiae_ (1872), and in _Studies on the Gastraea Theory_ (1873-1884). The theory of the homology of the germinal layers and of the relations of _palingenesis_ to _cenogenesis_ which I have exposed in them has been confirmed subsequently by a number of works of other zoologists. That theory makes it possible to follow nature's law of unity in the innumerable variations of animal embryology; it gives us for their ancestral history a common derivation from a simple primitive stem form. The far-seeing founder of the theory of descent, Lamarck, clearly recognized in 1809 that it was of universal application; that even man himself, the most highly developed of the mammals, is derived from the same stem as all the other mammals; and that this in its turn belongs to the same older branch of the ancestral tree as the rest of the vertebrates. He had even indicated the agencies by which it might be possible to explain man's descent from the apes as the nearest related mammals. Darwin, who was, naturally, of the same conviction, purposely avoided this least acceptable consequence of his theory in his chief work in 1859, and put it forward for the first time in his _Descent of Man_ in 1871. In the mean time (1863) Huxley had very ably discussed this most important consequence of evolution in his famous _Place of Man in Nature_. With the aid of comparative anatomy and ontogeny, and the support of the facts of palæontology, Huxley proved that the "descent of man from the ape" is a necessary consequence of Darwinism, and that no other scientific explanation of the origin of the human race is possible. Of the same opinion was Karl Gegenbaur, the most distinguished representative of comparative anatomy, who lifted his science to a higher level by a consistent and ingenious application of the theory of descent. As a further consequence of the "pithecoid theory" (the theory of the descent of man from the ape) there now arose the difficult task of investigating, not only the nearest related mammal ancestors of man in the Tertiary epoch, but also the long series of the older animal ancestors which had lived in earlier periods of the earth's history and been developed in the course of countless millions of years. I had made a start with the hypothetical solution of this great historic problem in my _General Morphology_; a further development of it appeared in 1874 in my _Anthropogeny_ (first section, Origin of the Individual; second section, Origin of the Race). The fourth, enlarged, edition of this work (1891) contains that theory of the development of man which approaches nearest, in my own opinion, to the still remote truth, in the light of our present knowledge of the documentary evidence. I was especially preoccupied in its composition to use the three empirical "documents"--palæontology, ontogeny, and morphology (or comparative anatomy)--as evenly and harmoniously as possible. It is true that my hypotheses were in many cases supplemented and corrected in detail by later phylogenetic research; yet I am convinced that the ancestral tree of human origin which I have sketched therein is substantially correct. For the historical succession of vertebrate fossils corresponds completely with the morphological evolutionary scale which is revealed to us by comparative anatomy and ontogeny. After the Silurian fishes come the _dipnoi_ of the Devonian period--the Carboniferous amphibia, the Permian reptilia, and the Mesozoic mammals. Of these, again, the lowest forms, the monotremes, appear first in the Triassic period, the marsupials in the Jurassic, and then the oldest placentals in the Cretaceous. Of the placentals, in turn, the first to appear in the oldest Tertiary period (the Eocene) are the lowest primates, the prosimiæ, which are followed by the simiæ in the Miocene. Of the catarrhinæ, the cynopitheci precede the anthropomorpha; from one branch of the latter, during the Pliocene period, arises the ape-man without speech (the _pithecanthropus alalus_); and from him descends, finally, speaking man. The chain of our earlier invertebrate ancestors is much more difficult to investigate and much less safe than this tree of our vertebrate predecessors; we have no fossilized relics of their soft, boneless structures, so palæontology can give us no assistance in this case. The evidence of comparative anatomy and ontogeny, therefore, becomes all the more important. Since the human embryo passes through the same _chordula_-stage as the germs of all other vertebrates, since it evolves, similarly, out of two germinal layers of a _gastrula_, we infer, in virtue of the biogenetic law, the early existence of corresponding ancestral forms--vermalia, gastræada, etc. Most important of all is the fact that the human embryo, like that of all other animals, arises originally from a single cell; for this "stem-cell" (_cytula_)--the impregnated egg cell--points indubitably to a corresponding unicellular ancestor, a primitive, Laurentian protozoon. For the purpose of our monistic philosophy, however, it is a matter of comparative indifference how the succession of our animal predecessors may be confirmed in detail. Sufficient for us, as an incontestable historical fact, is the important thesis that man descends immediately from the ape, and secondarily from a long series of lower vertebrates. I have laid stress on the logical proof of this "pithecometra-thesis" in the seventh book of the _General Morphology_: "The thesis that man has been evolved from lower vertebrates, and immediately from the _simiae_, is a special inference which results with absolute necessity from the general inductive law of the theory of descent." For the definitive proof and establishment of this fundamental pithecometra-thesis the palæontological discoveries of the last thirty years are of the greatest importance; in particular, the astonishing discoveries of a number of extinct mammals of the Tertiary period have enabled us to draw up clearly in its main outlines the evolutionary history of this most important class of animals, from the lowest oviparous monotremes up to man. The four chief groups of the placentals, the heterogeneous legions of the carnassia, the rodentia, the ungulata, and the primates, seem to be separated by profound gulfs, when we confine our attention to their representatives of to-day. But these gulfs are completely bridged, and the sharp distinctions of the four legions are entirely lost, when we compare their extinct predecessors of the Tertiary period, and when we go back into the Eocene twilight of history, in the oldest part of the Tertiary period--at least three million years ago. There we find the great sub-class of the placentals, which to-day comprises more than two thousand five hundred species, represented by only a small number of little, insignificant "proplacentals"; and in these _prochoriata_ the characters of the four divergent legions are so intermingled and toned down that we cannot in reason do other than consider them as the precursors of those features. The oldest carnassia (the _ictopsales_), the oldest rodentia (the _esthonychales_), the oldest ungulata (the _condylarthrales_) and the oldest primates (the _lemuravales_), all have the same fundamental skeletal structure, and the same typical dentition of the primitive placentals, consisting of forty-four teeth (three incisors, one canine, four premolars, and three molars in each half of the jaw); all are characterized by the small size and the imperfect structure of the brain (especially of its chief part, the cortex, which does not become a true "organ of thought" until later on in the Miocene and Pliocene representatives); they have all short legs and five-toed, flat-soled feet (_plantigrada_). In many cases among these oldest placentals of the Eocene period it was very difficult to say at first whether they should be classed with the carnassia, rodentia, ungulata, or primates; so very closely, even to confusion, do these four groups of the placentals, which diverge so widely afterwards, approach each other at that time. Their common origin from a single ancestral group follows incontestably. These _prochoriata_ lived in the preceding Cretaceous period (more than three million years ago), and were probably developed in the Jurassic period from a group of insectivorous marsupials (_amphitheria_) by the formation of a primitive _placenta diffusa_, a placenta of the simplest type. But the most important of all the recent palaeontological discoveries which have served to elucidate the origin of the placentals relate to our own stem, the legion of primates. Formerly fossil remains of the primates were very scarce. Even Cuvier, the great founder of palaeontology, maintained until his last day (1832) that there were no fossilized primates; he had himself, it is true, described the skull of an Eocene prosimiæ (_adapis_), but he had wrongly classed it with the ungulata. However, during the last twenty years a fair number of well-preserved fossilized skeletons of prosimiæ and simiæ have been discovered; in them we find all the chief intermediate members which complete the connecting chain of ancestors from the oldest prosimiæ to man. The most famous and most interesting of these discoveries is the fossil ape-man of Java, the much-talked-of _pithecanthropus erectus_, found by a Dutch military doctor, Eugen Dubois, in 1894. It is in truth the much-sought "missing link," supposed to be wanting in the chain of primates, which stretches unbroken from the lowest catarrhinæ to the highest-developed man. I have dealt exhaustively with the significance of this discovery in the paper which I read on August 26, 1898, at the Fourth International Zoological Congress at Cambridge.[13] The palæontologist, who knows the conditions of the formation and preservation of fossils, will think the discovery of the pithecanthropus an unusually lucky accident. The apes, being arboreal, seldom came into the circumstances (unless they happened to fall into the water) which would secure the preservation and petrifaction of their skeleton. Thus, by the discovery of this fossil man-monkey of Java the descent of man from the ape has become just as clear and certain from the palæontological side as it was previously from the evidence of comparative anatomy and ontogeny. We now have all the principal documents which tell the history of our race. CHAPTER VI THE NATURE OF THE SOUL Fundamental Importance of Psychology--Its Definition and Methods--Divergence of Views Thereon--Dualistic and Monistic Psychology--Relation to the Law of Substance--Confusion of Ideas--Psychological Metamorphoses: Kant, Virchow, Du Bois-Reymond--Methods of Research of Psychic Science--Introspective Method (Self-Observation)--Exact Method (Psycho-Physics)--Comparative Method (Animal Psychology)--Psychological Change of Principles: Wundt--Folk-Psychology and Ethnography: Bastian--Ontogenetic Psychology: Preyer--Phylogenetic Psychology: Darwin, Romanes The phenomena which are comprised under the title of the "life of the soul," or the psychic activity, are, on the one hand, the most important and interesting, on the other the most intricate and problematical, of all the phenomena we are acquainted with. As the knowledge of nature, the object of the present philosophic study, is itself a part of the life of the soul, and as anthropology, and even cosmology, presuppose a correct knowledge of the "psyche," we may regard psychology, the scientific study of the soul, both as the foundation and the postulate of all other sciences. From another point of view it is itself a part of philosophy, or physiology, or anthropology. The great difficulty of establishing it on a naturalistic basis arises from the fact that psychology, in turn, presupposes a correct acquaintance with the human organism, especially the brain, the chief organ of psychic activity. The great majority of "psychologists" have little or no acquaintance with these anatomical foundations of the soul, and thus it happens that in no other science do we find such contradictions and untenable notions as to its proper meaning and its essential object as are current in psychology. This confusion has become more and more palpable during the last thirty years, in proportion as the immense progress of anatomy and physiology has increased our knowledge of the structure and the functions of the chief psychic organ. What we call the soul is, in my opinion, a natural phenomenon; I therefore consider psychology to be a branch of natural science--a section of physiology. Consequently, I must emphatically assert from the commencement that we have no different methods of research for that science than for any of the others; we have in the first place observation and experiment, in the second place the theory of evolution, and in the third place metaphysical speculation, which seek to penetrate as far as possible into the cryptic nature of the phenomena by inductive and deductive reasoning. However, with a view to a thorough appreciation of the question, we must first of all put clearly before the reader the antithesis of the dualistic and the monistic theories. The prevailing conception of the psychic activity, which we contest, considers soul and body to be two distinct entities. These two entities can exist independently of each other; there is no intrinsic necessity for their union. The organized body is a mortal, material nature, chemically composed of living protoplasm and its compounds (plasma-products). The soul, on the other hand, is an immortal, immaterial being, a spiritual agent, whose mysterious activity is entirely incomprehensible to us. This trivial conception is, as such, spiritualistic, and its contradictory is, in a certain sense, materialistic. It is, at the same time, supernatural and transcendental, since it affirms the existence of forces which can exist and operate without a material basis; it rests on the assumption that outside of and beyond nature there is a "spiritual," immaterial world, of which we have no experience, and of which we can learn nothing by natural means. This hypothetical "spirit world," which is supposed to be entirely independent of the material universe, and on the assumption of which the whole artificial structure of the dualistic system is based, is purely a product of poetic imagination; the same must be said of the parallel belief in the "immortality of the soul," the scientific impossibility of which we must prove more fully later on (chap. xi.). If the beliefs which prevail in these credulous circles had a sound foundation, the phenomena they relate to could not be subject to the "law of substance"; moreover, this single exception to the highest law of the cosmos must have appeared very late in the history of the organic world, since it only concerns the "soul" of man and of the higher animals. The dogma of "free will," another essential element of the dualistic psychology, is similarly irreconcilable with the universal law of substance. Our own naturalistic conception of the psychic activity sees in it a group of vital phenomena, which are dependent on a definite material substratum, like all other phenomena. We shall give to this material basis of all psychic activity, without which it is inconceivable, the provisional name of "psychoplasm"; and for this good reason--that chemical analysis proves it to be a body of the group we call protoplasmic bodies the albuminoid carbon-combinations which are at the root of all vital processes. In the higher animals, which have a nervous system and sense-organs, "neuroplasm," the nerve-material, has been differentiated out of psychoplasm. Our conception is, in this sense, materialistic. It is at the same time empirical and naturalistic, for our scientific experience has never yet taught us the existence of forces that can dispense with a material substratum, or of a spiritual world over and above the realm of nature. Like all other natural phenomena, the psychic processes are subject to the supreme, all-ruling law of substance; not even in this province is there a single exception to this highest cosmological law (compare chap. xii.). The phenomena of the lowly psychic life of the unicellular protist and the plant, and of the lowest animal forms--their irritability, their reflex movements, their sensitiveness and instinct of self-preservation--are directly determined by physiological action in the protoplasm of their cells--that is, by physical and chemical changes which are partly due to heredity and partly to adaptation. And we must say just the same of the higher psychic activity of the higher animals and man, of the formation of ideas and concepts, of the marvellous phenomena of reason and consciousness; for the latter have been phylogenetically evolved from the former, and it is merely a higher degree of integration or centralization, of association or combination of functions which were formerly isolated, that has elevated them in this manner. The first task of every science is the clear definition of the object it has to investigate. In no science, however, is this preliminary task so difficult as in psychology; and this circumstance is the more remarkable since logic, the science of defining, is itself a part of psychology. When we compare all that has been said by the most distinguished philosophers and scientists of all ages on the fundamental idea of psychology, we find ourselves in a perfect chaos of contradictory notions. What, really, is the "soul"? What is its relation to the "mind"? What is the inner meaning of "consciousness"? What is the difference between "sensation" and "sentiment"? What is "instinct"? What is the meaning of "free will"? What is "presentation"? What is the difference between "intellect" and "reason"? What is the true nature of "emotion"? What is the relation between all these "psychic phenomena" and the "body"? The answers to these and many other cognate questions are infinitely varied; not only are the views of the most eminent thinkers on these questions widely divergent, but even the same scientific authority has often completely changed his views in the course of his psychological development. Indeed, this "psychological metamorphosis" of so many thinkers has contributed not a little to the _colossal confusion of ideas_ which prevails in psychology more than in any other branch of knowledge. The most interesting example of such an entire change of objective and subjective psychological opinions is found in the case of the most influential leader of German philosophy, Immanuel Kant. The young, severely _critical_ Kant came to the conclusion that the three great buttresses of mysticism--"God, freedom, and immortality"--were untenable in the light of "pure reason"; the older, _dogmatic_ Kant found that these three great hallucinations were postulates of "practical reason," and were, as such, indispensable. The more the distinguished modern school of "Neokantians" urges a "return to Kant" as the only possible salvation from the frightful jumble of modern metaphysics, the more clearly do we perceive the undeniable and fatal contradiction between the fundamental opinions of the young and the older Kant. We shall return to this point later on. Other interesting examples of this change of views are found in two of the most famous living scientists, R. Virchow and E. du Bois-Reymond; the metamorphoses of their fundamental views on psychology cannot be overlooked, as both these Berlin biologists have played a most important part at Germany's greatest university for more than forty years, and have, therefore, directly and indirectly, had a most profound influence on the modern mind. Rudolph Virchow, the eminent founder of cellular pathology, was a _pure monist_ in the best days of his scientific activity, about the middle of the century; he passed at that time as one of the most distinguished representatives of the newly awakened _materialism_, which appeared in 1855, especially through two famous works, almost contemporaneous in appearance--Ludwig Büchner's _Matter and Force_ and Carl Vogt's _Superstition and Science_. Virchow published his general biological views on the vital processes in man--which he takes to be purely mechanical natural phenomena--in a series of distinguished papers in the first volumes of the _Archiv für pathologische Anatomie_, which he founded. The most important of these articles, and the one in which he most clearly expresses his monistic views of that period, is that on "The Tendencies Towards Unity in Scientific Medicine" (1849). It was certainly not without careful thought, and a conviction of its philosophic value, that Virchow put this "medical confession of faith" at the head of his _Collected Essays on Scientific Medicine_ in 1856. He defended in it, clearly and definitely, the fundamental principles of monism, which I am presenting here with a view to the solution of the world-problem; he vindicated the exclusive title of empirical science, of which the only reliable sources are sense and brain activity; he vigorously attacked anthropological dualism, the alleged "revelation," and the transcendental philosophy, with their two methods--"faith and anthropomorphism." Above all, he emphasized the monistic character of anthropology, the inseparable connection of spirit and body, of force and matter. "I am convinced," he exclaims, at the end of his preface, "that I shall never find myself compelled to deny the thesis of _the unity_ of human nature." Unhappily, this "conviction" proved to be a grave error. Twenty-eight years afterwards Virchow represented the diametrically opposite view; it is to be found in the famous speech on "The Liberty of Science in Modern States," which he delivered at the Scientific Congress at Munich in 1877, and which contains attacks that I have repelled in my _Free Science and Free Teaching_ (1878). In Emil du Bois-Reymond we find similar contradictions with regard to the most important and fundamental theses of philosophy. The more completely the distinguished orator of the Berlin Academy had defended the main principles of the monistic philosophy, the more he had contributed to the refutation of vitalism and the transcendental view of life, so much the louder was the triumphant cry of our opponents when in 1872, in his famous _Ignorabimus-Speech_, he spoke of consciousness as an insoluble problem, and opposed it to the other functions of the brain as a supernatural phenomenon. I return to the point in the tenth chapter. The peculiar character of many of the psychic phenomena, especially of consciousness, necessitates certain modifications of our ordinary scientific methods. We have, for instance, to associate with the customary _objective_, external observation, the _introspective_ method, the _subjective_, internal observation which scrutinizes our own personality in the mirror of consciousness. The majority of psychologists have started from this "certainty of the ego": "_Cogito ergo sum_," as Descartes said--I think, therefore I am. Let us first cast a glance at this way of inquiry, and then deal with the second, complementary, method. By far the greater part of the theories of the soul which have been put forward during the last two thousand years or more are based on introspective inquiry--that is, on "self-observation," and on the conclusions which we draw from the association and criticism of these subjective experiences. Introspection is the only possible method of inquiry for an important section of psychology, especially for the study of consciousness. Hence this cerebral function occupies a special position, and has been a more prolific source of philosophic error than any of the others (cf. chap. x.). It is, however, most unsatisfactory, and it leads to entirely false or incomplete notions, to take this self-observation of the mind to be the chief, or, especially, to be the only source of mental science, as has happened in the case of many and distinguished philosophers. A great number of the principal psychic phenomena, particularly the activity of the senses and speech, can only be studied in the same way as every other vital function of the organism--that is, firstly, by a thorough anatomical study of their organs, and, secondly, by an exact physiological analysis of the functions which depend on them. In order, however, to complete this external study of the mental life, and to supplement the results of _internal_ observation, one needs a thorough knowledge of human anatomy, histology, ontogeny, and physiology. Most of our so-called "psychologists" have little or no knowledge of these indispensable foundations of anthropology; they are, therefore, incompetent to pronounce on the character even of their own "soul." It must be remembered, too, that the distinguished personality of one of these psychologists usually offers a specimen of an educated mind of the highest civilized races; it is the last link of a long ancestral chain, and the innumerable older and inferior links are indispensable for its proper understanding. Hence it is that most of the psychological literature of the day is so much waste paper. The introspective method is certainly extremely valuable and indispensable; still it needs the constant co-operation and assistance of the other methods. In proportion as the various branches of the human tree of knowledge have developed during the century, and the methods of the different sciences have been perfected, the desire has grown to make them _exact_; that is, to make the study of phenomena as purely empirical as possible, and to formulate the laws that result as clearly as the circumstances permit--if possible, _mathematically_. The latter is, however, only feasible in a small province of human knowledge, especially in those sciences in which there is question of measurable quantities; in mathematics, in the first place, and to a greater or less extent in astronomy, mechanics, and a great part of physics and chemistry. Hence these studies are called "exact sciences" in the narrower sense. It is, however, productive only of error to call all the physical sciences _exact_, and oppose them to the historical, mental, and moral sciences. The greater part of physical science can no more be treated as an _exact_ science than history can; this is especially true of biology and of its subsidiary branch, psychology. As psychology is a part of physiology, it must, as a general rule, follow the chief methods of that science. It must establish the facts of psychic activity by empirical methods as much as possible, by observation and experiment, and it must then gather the laws of the mind by inductive and deductive inferences from its observations, and formulate them with the utmost distinctness. But, for obvious reasons, it is rarely possible to formulate them mathematically. Such a procedure is only profitable in one section of the physiology of the senses; it is not practicable in the greater part of cerebral physiology. One small section of physiology, which seems amenable to the "exact" method of investigation, has been carefully studied for the last twenty years and raised to the position of a separate science under the title of _psycho-physics_. Its founders, the physiologists Theodor Fechner and Ernst Heinrich Weber, first of all closely investigated the dependence of sensations on the external stimuli that act on the organs of sense, and particularly the quantitative relation between the strength of the stimulus and the intensity of the sensation. They found that a certain minimum strength of stimulus is requisite for the excitement of a sensation, and that a given stimulus must be varied to a definite amount before there is any perceptible change in the sensation. For the highest sensations (of sight, hearing, and pressure) the law holds good that their variations are proportionate to the changes in the strength of the stimulus. From this empirical "law of Weber" Fechner inferred, by mathematical operations, his "fundamental law of psycho-physics," according to which the intensity of a sensation increases in arithmetical progression, the strength of the stimulus in geometrical progression. However, Fechner's law and other psycho-physical laws are frequently contested, and their "exactness" is called into question. In any case modern psycho-physics has fallen far short of the great hopes with which it was greeted twenty years ago; the field of its applicability is extremely limited. One important result of its work is that it has proved the application of physical laws in one, if only a small, branch of the life of the "soul"--an application which was long ago postulated on principle by the materialist psychology for the whole province of mental life. In this, as in many other branches of physiology, the "exact" method has proved inadequate and of little service. It is the ideal to aim at everywhere, but it is unattainable in most cases. Much more profitable are the comparative and genetic methods. The striking resemblance of man's psychic activity to that of the higher animals--especially our nearest relatives among the mammals--is a familiar fact. Most uncivilized races still make no material distinction between the two sets of mental processes, as the well-known animal fables, the old legends, and the idea of the transmigration of souls prove. Even most of the philosophers of classical antiquity shared the same conviction, and discovered no essential qualitative difference, but merely a quantitative one, between the soul of man and that of the brute. Plato himself, who was the first to draw a fundamental distinction between soul and body, made one and the same soul (or "idea") pass through a number of animal and human bodies in his theory of metempsychosis. It was Christianity, intimately connecting faith in immortality with faith in God, that emphasized the essential difference of the immortal soul of man from the mortal soul of the brute. In the dualistic philosophy the idea prevailed principally through the influence of Descartes (1643); he contended that man alone had a true "soul," and, consequently, sensation and free will, and that the animals were mere automata, or machines, without will or sensibility. Ever since the majority of psychologists--including even Kant--have entirely neglected the mental life of the brute, and restricted psychological research to man: human psychology, mainly introspective, dispensed with the fruitful comparative method, and so remained at that lower point of view which human morphology took before Cuvier raised it to the position of a "philosophic science" by the foundation of comparative anatomy. Scientific interest in the psychic activity of the brute was revived in the second half of the last century, in connection with the advance of systematic zoology and physiology. A strong impulse was given to it by the work of Reimarus: "General observations on the instincts of animals" (Hamburg, 1760). At the same time a deeper scientific investigation had been facilitated by the thorough reform of physiology by Johannes Müller. This distinguished biologist, having a comprehensive knowledge of the whole field of organic nature, of morphology, and of physiology, introduced the "exact methods" of observation and experiment into the whole province of physiology, and, with consummate skill, combined them with the comparative methods. He applied them, not only to mental life in the broader sense (to speech, senses, and brain-action), but to all the other phenomena of life. The sixth book of his _Manual of Human Physiology_ treats specially of the life of the soul, and contains eighty pages of important psychological observations. During the last forty years a great number of works on comparative animal psychology have appeared, principally occasioned by the great impulse which Darwin gave in 1859 by his work on _The Origin of Species_, and by the application of the idea of evolution to the province of psychology. The more important of these works we owe to Romanes and Sir J. Lubbock, in England; to W. Wundt, L. Büchner, G. Schneider, Fritz Schultze, and Karl Groos, in Germany; to Alfred Espinas and E. Jourdan, in France; and to Tito Vignoli, in Italy. In Germany, Wilhelm Wundt, of Leipzig, is considered to be the ablest living psychologist; he has the inestimable advantage over most other philosophers of a thorough zoological, anatomical, and physiological education. Formerly assistant and pupil of Helmholtz, Wundt had early accustomed himself to follow the application of the laws of physics and chemistry through the whole field of physiology, and, consequently, in the sense of Johannes Müller, in _psychology_, as a subsection of the latter. Starting from this point of view, Wundt published his valuable "Lectures on human and animal psychology" in 1863. He proved, as he himself tells us in the preface, that the theatre of the most important psychic processes is in the "unconscious soul," and he affords us "a view of the mechanism which, in the unconscious background of the soul, manipulates the impressions which arise from the external stimuli." What seems to me, however, of special importance and value in Wundt's work is that he "extends the law of the persistence of force for the first time to the psychic world, and makes use of a series of facts of electro-physiology by way of demonstration." Thirty years afterwards (1892) Wundt published a second, much abridged and entirely modified, edition of his work. The important principles of the first edition are entirely abandoned in the second, and the monistic is exchanged for a purely dualistic stand-point. Wundt himself says in the preface to the second edition that he has emancipated himself from the fundamental errors of the first, and that he "learned many years ago to consider the work a sin of his youth"; it "weighed on him as a kind of crime, from which he longed to free himself as soon as possible." In fact, the most important systems of psychology are completely opposed to each other in the two editions of Wundt's famous _Observations_. In the first edition he is purely monistic and materialistic, in the second edition purely dualistic and spiritualistic. In the one psychology is treated as a _physical_ science, on the same laws as the whole of physiology, of which it is only a part; thirty years afterwards he finds psychology to be a _spiritual_ science, with principles and objects entirely different from those of physical science. This conversion is most clearly expressed in his principle of psycho-physical parallelism, according to which "every psychic event has a corresponding physical change"; but the two are completely independent, and are not in any natural causal connection. This complete dualism of body and soul, of nature and mind, naturally gave the liveliest satisfaction to the prevailing school-philosophy, and was acclaimed by it as an important advance, especially seeing that it came from a distinguished scientist who had previously adhered to the opposite system of monism. As I myself continue, after more than forty years' study, in this "narrow" position, and have not been able to free myself from it in spite of all my efforts, I must naturally consider the "youthful sin" of the young physiologist Wundt to be a correct knowledge of nature, and energetically defend it against the antagonistic view of the old philosopher Wundt. This entire change of philosophical principles, which we find in Wundt, as we found it in Kant, Virchow, Du Bois-Reymond, Karl Ernst Baer, and others, is very interesting. In their youth these able and talented scientists embrace the whole field of biological research in a broad survey, and make strenuous efforts to find a unifying, natural basis for their knowledge; in their later years they have found that this is not completely attainable, and so they entirely abandon the idea. In extenuation of these psychological metamorphoses they can, naturally, plead that in their youth they overlooked the difficulties of the great task, and misconceived the true goal; with the maturer judgment of age and the accumulation of experience they were convinced of their errors, and discovered the true path to the source of truth. On the other hand, it is possible to think that great scientists approach their task with less prejudice and more energy in their earlier years--that their vision is clearer and their judgment purer; the experiences of later years sometimes have the effect, not of enriching, but of disturbing, the mind, and with old age there comes a gradual decay of the brain, just as happens in all other organs. In any case, this change of views is in itself an instructive psychological fact; because, like many other forms of change of opinion, it shows that the highest psychic functions are subject to profound individual changes in the course of life, like all the other vital processes. For the profitable construction of comparative psychology it is extremely important not to confine the critical comparison to man and the brute in general, but to put side by side the innumerable gradations of their mental activity. Only thus can we attain a clear knowledge of the long scale of psychic development which runs unbroken from the lowest, unicellular forms of life up to the mammals, and to man at their head. But even within the limits of our own race such gradations are very noticeable, and the ramifications of the "psychic ancestral tree" are very numerous. The psychic difference between the crudest savage of the lowest grade and the most perfect specimen of the highest civilization is colossal--much greater than is commonly supposed. By the due appreciation of this fact, especially in the latter half of the century, the "Anthropology of the uncivilized races" (Waitz) has received a strong support, and comparative ethnography has come to be considered extremely important for psychological purposes. Unfortunately, the enormous quantity of raw material of this science has not yet been treated in a satisfactory critical manner. What confused and mystic ideas still prevail in this department may be seen, for instance, in the _Völkergedanke_ of the famous traveller, Adolf Bastian, who, though a prolific writer, merely turns out a hopeless mass of uncritical compilation and confused speculation. The most neglected of all psychological methods, even up to the present day, is the evolution of the soul; yet this little-frequented path is precisely the one that leads us most quickly and securely through the gloomy primeval forest of psychological prejudices, dogmas, and errors, to a clear insight into many of the chief psychic problems. As I did in the other branch of organic evolution, I again put before the reader the two great branches of the science which I differentiated in 1866--ontogeny and phylogeny. The ontogeny, or embryonic development, of the soul, individual or biontic psychogeny, investigates the gradual and hierarchic development of the soul in the individual, and seeks to learn the laws by which it is controlled. For a great part of the life of the mind a good deal has been done in this direction for centuries; rational pedagogy must have set itself the task at an early date of the theoretical study of the gradual development and formative capacity of the young mind that was committed to it for education and formation. Most pedagogues, however, were idealistic or dualistic philosophers, and so they went to work with all the prejudices of the spiritualistic psychology. It is only in the last few decades that this dogmatic tendency has been largely superseded even in the school by scientific methods; we now find a greater concern to apply the chief laws of evolution even in the discussion of the soul of the child. The raw material of the child's soul is already qualitatively determined by _heredity_ from parents and ancestors; education has the noble task of bringing it to a perfect maturity by intellectual instruction and moral training--that is, by _adaptation_. Wilhelm Preyer was the first to lay the foundation of our knowledge of the early psychic development in his interesting work on _The Mind of the Child_. Much is still to be done in the study of the later stages and metamorphoses of the individual soul, and once more the correct, critical application of the biogenetic law is proving a guiding star to the scientific mind. A new and fertile epoch of higher development dawned for psychology and all other biological sciences when Charles Darwin applied the principles of evolution to them forty years ago. The seventh chapter of his epoch-making work on _The Origin of Species_ is devoted to instinct. It contains the valuable proof that the instincts of animals are subject, like all other vital processes, to the general laws of historic development. The special instincts of particular species were formed by _adaptation_, and the modifications thus acquired were handed on to posterity by _heredity_; in their formation and preservation natural selection plays the same part as in the transformation of every other physiological function. Darwin afterwards developed this fundamental thought in a number of works, showing that the same laws of "mental evolution" hold good throughout the entire organic world, not less in man than in the brute, and even in the plant. Hence the unity of the organic world, which is revealed by the common origin of its members, applies also to the entire province of psychic life, from the simplest unicellular organism up to man. To George Romanes we owe the further development of Darwin's psychology and its special application to the different sections of psychic activity. Unfortunately, his premature decease prevented the completion of the great work which was to reconstruct every section of comparative psychology on the lines of monistic evolution. The two volumes of this work which were completed are among the most valuable productions of psychological literature. For, conformably to the principles of our modern monistic research, his first care was to collect and arrange all the important facts which have been empirically established in the field of comparative psychology in the course of centuries; in the second place, these facts are tested with an _objective criticism_, and systematically distributed; finally, such rational conclusions are drawn from them on the chief general questions of psychology as are in harmony with the fundamental principles of modern monism. The first volume of Romanes's work bears the title of _Mental Evolution in the Animal World_; it presents, in natural connection, the entire length of the chain of psychic evolution in the animal world, from the simplest sensations and instincts of the lowest animals to the elaborate phenomena of consciousness and reason in the highest. It contains also a number of extracts from a manuscript which Darwin left "on instinct," and a complete collection of all that he wrote in the province of psychology. The second and more important volume of Romanes's work treats of "Mental evolution in man and the origin of human faculties." The distinguished psychologist gives a convincing proof in it "that the psychological barrier between man and the brute has been overcome." Man's power of conceptual thought and of abstraction has been gradually evolved from the non-conceptual stages of thought and ideation in the nearest related mammals. Man's highest mental powers--reason, speech, and conscience--have arisen from the lower stages of the same faculties in our primate ancestors (the simiæ and prosimiæ). Man has no single mental faculty which is his exclusive prerogative. His whole psychic life differs from that of the nearest related mammals only in degree, and not in kind; quantitatively, not qualitatively. I recommend those of my readers who are interested in these momentous questions of psychology to study the profound work of Romanes. I am completely at one with him and Darwin in almost all their views and convictions. Wherever an apparent discrepancy is found between these authors and my earlier productions, it is either a case of imperfect expression on my part or an unimportant difference in application of principle. For the rest, it is characteristic of this "science of ideas" that the most eminent philosophers hold entirely antagonistic views on its fundamental notions. CHAPTER VII PSYCHIC GRADATIONS Psychological Unity of Organic Nature--Material Basis of the Soul: Psychoplasm--Scale of Sensation--Scale of Movement--Scale of Reflex Action--Simple and Compound Reflex Action--Reflex Action and Consciousness--Scale of Perception--Unconscious and Conscious Perception--Scale of Memory--Unconscious and Conscious Memory--Association of Perceptions--Instinct--Primary and Secondary Instincts--Scale of Reason--Language--Emotion and Passion--The Will--Freedom of the Will The great progress which psychology has made, with the assistance of evolution, in the latter half of the century culminates in the recognition of _the psychological unity of the organic world_. Comparative psychology, in co-operation with the ontogeny and phylogeny of the _psyche_, has enforced the conviction that organic life in all its stages, from the simplest unicellular protozoon up to man, springs from the same elementary forces of nature, from the physiological functions of sensation and movement. The future task of scientific psychology, therefore, is not, as it once was, the exclusively subjective and introspective analysis of the highly developed mind of a philosopher, but the objective, comparative study of the long gradation by which man has slowly arisen through a vast series of lower animal conditions. This great task of separating the different steps in the psychological ladder, and proving their unbroken phylogenetic connection, has only been seriously attempted during the last ten years, especially in the splendid work of Romanes. We must confine ourselves here to a brief discussion of a few of the general questions which that gradation has suggested. All the phenomena of the psychic life are, without exception, bound up with certain material changes in the living substance of the body, the _protoplasm_. We have given to that part of the protoplasm which seems to be the indispensable substratum of psychic life the name of _psychoplasm_ (the "soul-substance," in the monistic sense); in other words, we do not attribute any peculiar "essence" to it, but we consider the _psyche_ to be merely _a collective idea of all the psychic functions of protoplasm_. In this sense the "soul" is merely a physiological abstraction like "assimilation" or "generation." In man and the higher animals, in accordance with the division of labor of the organs and tissues, the psychoplasm is a differentiated part of the nervous system, the _neuroplasm_ of the ganglionic cells and their fibres. In the lower animals, however, which have no special nerves and organs of sense, and in the plants, the psychoplasm has not yet reached an independent differentiation. Finally, in the unicellular protists, the psychoplasm is identified either with the whole of the living protoplasm of the simple cell or with a portion of it. In all cases, in the lowest as well as the highest stages of the psychological hierarchy, a certain chemical composition and a certain physical activity of the psychoplasm are indispensable before the "soul" can function or act. That is equally true of the elementary psychic function of the plasmatic sensation and movement of the protozoa, and of the complex functions of the sense-organs and the brain in the higher animals and man. The activity of the psychoplasm, which we call the "soul," is always connected with metabolism. All living organisms, without exception, are sensitive; they are influenced by the condition of their environment, and react thereon by certain modifications in their own structure. Light and heat, gravity and electricity, mechanical processes and chemical action in the environment, act as _stimuli_ on the sensitive psychoplasm, and effect changes in its molecular composition. We may distinguish the following five chief stages of this sensibility: I. At the lowest stage of organization the _whole psychoplasm_, as such, is sensitive, and reacts on the stimuli from without; that is the case with the lowest protists, with many plants, and with some of the most rudimentary animals. II. At the second stage very simple and undiscriminating _sense-organs_ begin to appear on the surface of the organism, in the form of protoplasmic filaments and pigment spots, the forerunners of the nerves of touch and the eyes; these are found in some of the higher protists and in many of the lower animals and plants. III. At the third stage _specific organs_ of sense, each with a peculiar adaptation, have arisen by differentiation out of these rudimentary processes: there are the chemical instruments of smell and taste, and the physical organs of touch, temperature, hearing, and sight. The "specific energy" of these sense-organs is not an original inherent property of theirs, but has been gained by functional adaptation and progressive heredity. IV. The fourth stage is characterized by the _centralization_ or integration of the _nervous system_, and, consequently, of sensation; by the association of the previously isolated or localized sensations presentations arise, though they still remain unconscious. That is the condition of many both of the lower and the higher animals. V. Finally, at the fifth stage, the highest psychic function, _conscious perception_, is developed by the mirroring of the sensations in a central part of the nervous system, as we find in man and the higher vertebrates, and probably in some of the higher invertebrates, notably the articulata. All living organisms without exception have the faculty of _spontaneous movement_, in contradistinction to the rigidity and inertia of unorganized substances (_e.g._, crystals); in other words, certain changes of place of the particles occur in the living psychoplasm from internal causes, which have their source in its own chemical composition. These active vital movements are partly discovered by direct observation and partly only known indirectly, by inference from their effects. We may distinguish five stages of them. I. At the lowest stage of organic life, in the chromacea, and many protophyta and lower metaphyta, we perceive only those _movements of growth_ which are common to all organisms. They are usually so slow that they cannot be directly observed; they have to be inferred from their results--from the change in size and form of the growing organism. II. Many protists, particularly unicellular algæ of the groups of diatomacea and desmidiacea, accomplish a kind of creeping or swimming motion by _secretion_, by ejecting a slimy substance at one side. III. Other organisms which float in water--for instance, many of the radiolaria, siphonophora, ktenophora, and others--ascend and descend by altering their _specific gravity_, sometimes by osmosis, sometimes by the separation or squeezing-out of air. IV. Many plants, especially the sensitive plants (mimosa) and other papilionacea, effect movements of their leaves or other organs by _change of pressure_--that is, they alter the strain of the protoplasm, and, consequently, its pressure on the enclosing elastic walls of the cells. V. The most important of all organic movements are the _phenomena of contraction_--_i.e._, changes of form at the surface of the organism, which are dependent on a twofold displacement of their elements; they always involve two different conditions or phases of motion--contraction and expansion. Four different forms of this plasmatic contraction may be enumerated: (_a_) Amoeboid movement (in rhizopods, blood-cells, pigment-cells, etc.). (_b_) A similar flow of protoplasm within enclosed cells. (_c_) Vibratory motion (ciliary movements) in infusoria, spermatozoa, ciliated epithelial cells. (_d_) Muscular movement (in most animals). The elementary psychic activity that arises from the combination of sensation and movement is called _reflex_ (in the widest sense), reflective function, or _reflex action_. The movement--no matter what kind it is--seems in this case to be the immediate result of the _stimulus_ which evoked the sensation; it has, on that account, been called stimulated motion in its simplest form (in the protists). All living protoplasm has this feature of irritability. Any physical or chemical change in the environment may, in certain circumstances, act as a stimulus on the psychoplasm, and elicit or "release" a movement. We shall see later on how this important physical concept of "releasing" directly connects the simplest organic reflex actions with similar mechanical phenomena of movement in the inorganic world (for instance, in the explosion of powder by a spark, or of dynamite by a blow). We may distinguish the following seven stages in the scale of reflex action: I. At the lowest stage of organization, in the lowest protists, the stimuli of the outer world (heat, light, electricity, etc.) cause in the indifferent protoplasm only those indispensable movements of growth and nutrition which are common to all organisms, and are absolutely necessary for their preservation. That is also the case in most of the plants. II. In the case of many freely moving protists (especially the amoeba, the heliozoon, and the rhizopod) the stimuli from without produce on every spot of the unprotected surface of the unicellular organism external movements which take the form of changes of shape, and sometimes changes of place (amoeboid movement, pseudopod formation, the extension and withdrawal of what look like feet); these indefinite, variable processes of the protoplasm are not yet permanent organs. In the same way, general organic irritability takes the form of indeterminate reflex action in the sensitive plants and the lowest metazoa; in many multicellular organisms the stimuli may be conducted from one cell to another, as all the cells are connected by fine fibres. III. Many protists, especially the more highly developed protozoa, produce on their unicellular body two little organs of the simplest character--an organ of touch and an organ of movement. Both these instruments are direct external projections of protoplasm; the stimulus, which alights on the first, is immediately conducted to the other by the psychoplasm of the unicellular body, and causes it to contract. This phenomenon is particularly easy to observe, and even produce experimentally, in many of the stationary infusoria (for instance, the _poteriodendron_ among the flagellata, and the _vorticella_ among the ciliata). The faintest stimulus that touches the extremely sensitive hairs, or _cilia_, at the free end of the cells, immediately causes a contraction of a thread-like stalk at the other, fixed end. This phenomenon is known as a "simple reflex arch." IV. These phenomena of the unicellular organism of the infusoria lead on to the interesting mechanism of the neuro-muscular cells, which we find in the multicellular body of many of the lower metazoa, especially in the cnidaria (polyps and corals). Each single neuro-muscular cell is a "unicellular reflex organ"; it has on its surface a sensitive spot, and a motor muscular fibre inside at the opposite end; the latter contracts as soon as the former is stimulated. V. In other cnidaria, notably in the free swimming medusæ--which are closely related to the stationary polyps--the simple neuro-muscular cell becomes two different cells, connected by a filament; an external _sense-cell_ (in the outer skin) and an internal _muscular cell_ (under the skin). In this _bicellular reflex organ_ the one cell is the rudimentary organ of sensation, the other of movement; the connecting bridge of the psychoplasmic filament conducts the stimulus from one to the other. VI. The most important step in the gradual construction of the reflex mechanism is the division into three cells; in the place of the simple connecting bridge we spoke of there appears a third independent cell, the _soul-cell_, or ganglionic cell; with it appears also a new psychic function, _unconscious presentation_, which has its seat in this cell. The stimulus is first conducted from the sensitive cell to this intermediate presentative or psychic cell, and then issued from this to the motor muscular cell as a mandate of movement. These _tricellular reflex organs_ are preponderantly developed in the great majority of the invertebrates. VII. Instead of this arrangement we find in most of the vertebrates a _quadricellular reflex organ_, two distinct "soul-cells," instead of one, being inserted between the sensitive cell and the motor cell. The external stimulus, in this case, is first conducted centripetally to the sensitive cell (the sensible psychic cell), from this to the _will-cell_ (the motor psychic cell), and from this, finally, to the contractile muscular cell. When many such reflex organs combine and new psychic cells are interposed we have the intricate reflex mechanism of man and the higher vertebrates. The important distinction which we make, in morphology and physiology, between unicellular and multicellular organisms holds good for their elementary psychic activity, reflex action. In the unicellular protists (both the plasmodomous primitive plants, or _protophyta_, and the plasmophagous primitive animals, or _protozoa_) the whole physical process of reflex action takes place in the protoplasm of one single cell; their "cell-soul" seems to be a unifying function of the psychoplasm of which the various phases only begin to be seen separately when the differentiation of special organs sets in. The second stage of psychic activity, compound reflex action, begins with the cenobitic protists (_v.g._, the volvox and the carchesium). The innumerable social cells, which make up this cell-community or coenobium, are always more or less connected, often directly connected by filamentous bridges of protoplasm. A stimulus that alights on one or more cells of the community is communicated to the rest by means of the connecting fibres, and may produce a general contraction. This connection is found, also, in the tissues of the multicellular animals and plants. It was erroneously believed at one time that the cells of vegetal tissue were completely isolated from each other, but we have now discovered fine filaments of protoplasm throughout, which penetrate the thick membranes of the cells, and maintain a material and psychological communication between their living plasmic contents. That is the explanation of the mimosa: when the tread of the passer-by shakes the root of the plant, the stimulus is immediately conveyed to all the cells, and causes a general contraction of its tender leaves and a drooping of the stems. An important and universal feature of all reflex phenomena is the absence of consciousness. For reasons which we shall give in the tenth chapter we only admit the presence of consciousness in man and the higher animals, not in plants, the lower animals, and the protists; consequently all stimulated movements in the latter must be regarded as reflex--that is, all movements which are not _spontaneous_, not the outcome of internal causes (impulsive and automatic movements).[14] It is different with the higher animals which have developed a centralized nervous system and elaborate sense-organs. In these cases consciousness has been gradually evolved from the psychic reflex activity, and now conscious, voluntary action appears, in opposition to the still continuing reflex action below. However, we must distinguish two different processes, as we did in the question of instinct--primary and secondary reflex action. Primary reflex actions are those which have never reached the stage of consciousness in phyletic development, and thus preserve the primitive character (by heredity from lower animal forms). Secondary reflex actions are those which were conscious, voluntary actions in our ancestors, but which afterwards became unconscious from habit or the lapse of consciousness. It is impossible to draw a hard and fast line in such cases between conscious and unconscious psychic function. Older psychologists (Herbart, for instance) considered "presentation" to be the fundamental psychic phenomenon, from which all the others are derived. Modern comparative psychology endorses this view in so far as it relates to the idea of _unconscious_ presentation; but it considers _conscious_ presentation to be a secondary phenomenon of mental life, which is entirely wanting in plants and the lower animals, and is only developed in the higher animals. Among the many contradictory definitions which psychologists have given of "presentation," we think the best is that which makes it consist in an internal picture of the external object which is given us in sensation--an "idea," in the broader sense. We may distinguish the following four stages in the rising scale of presentative function: I. _Cellular presentation._--At the lowest stages we find presentation to be a general physiological property of psychoplasm; even in the simplest unicellular protist sensations may leave a permanent trace in the psychoplasm, and these may be reproduced by memory. In more than four thousand kinds of radiolaria, which I have described, every single species is distinguished by special, hereditary skeletal structure. The construction of this specific, and often highly elaborate, skeleton by a cell of the simplest description (generally globular) is only intelligible when we attribute the faculty of presentation, and, indeed, of a special reproduction of the plastic "feeling of distance," to the constructive protoplasm--as I have pointed out in my _Psychology of the Radiolaria_.[15] II. _Histionic presentation._--In the coenobia or cell-colonies of the social protists, and still better in the tissues of plants and lower, nerveless animals (sponges, polyps, etc.), we find the second stage of unconscious presentation, which consists of the common psychic activity of a number of closely connected cells. If a single stimulus may, instead of simply spending itself in the reflex movement of an organ (the leaf of a plant, for instance, or the arm of a polyp), leave a permanent impression, which can be spontaneously reproduced later on, we are bound to assume, in explaining the phenomenon, a histionic presentation, dependent on the psychoplasm of the associated tissue-cells. III. _Unconscious presentation in the ganglionic cells._--This third and higher stage of presentation is the commonest form the function takes in the animal world; it seems to be a localization of presentation in definite "soul-cells." In its simplest form it appears at the sixth stage of reflex action, when the tricellular reflex organ arises: the seat of presentation is then the intermediate psychic cell, which is interposed between the sensitive cell and the muscular cell. With the increasing development of the animal nervous system and its progressive differentiation and integration, this unconscious presentation also rises to higher stages. IV. _Conscious presentation in the cerebral cells._--With the highest stage of development of the animal organization consciousness arises, as a special function of a certain central organ of the nervous system. As the presentations are conscious, and as special parts of the brain arise for the association of these conscious presentations, the organism is qualified for those highest psychic functions which we call thought and reflection, intellect and reason. Although the tracing of the phyletic barrier between the older, unconscious, and the younger, conscious, presentation is extremely difficult, we can affirm, with some degree of probability, that the evolution of the latter from the former was _polyphyletic_; because we find conscious and rational thought, not only in the highest forms of the vertebrate stem (man, mammals, birds, and a part of the lower vertebrates), but also in the most highly developed representatives of other animal groups (ants and other insects, spiders and the higher crabs among the articulata, cephalopods among the mollusca). The evolutionary scale of memory is closely connected with that of presentation; this extremely important function of the psychoplasm--the condition of all further psychic development--consists essentially in the _reproduction of presentations_. The impressions in the bioplasm, which the stimulus produced as sensations, and which became presentations in remaining, are revived by memory; they pass from potentiality to actuality. The latent potential energy of the psychoplasm is transformed into kinetic energy. We may distinguish four stages in the upward development of memory, corresponding to the four stages of presentation. I. _Cellular memory._--Thirty years ago Ewald Hering showed "memory to be a general property of organized matter" in a thoughtful work, and indicated the great significance of this function, "to which we owe almost all that we are and have." Six years later, in my work on _The Perigenesis of the Plastidule, or the Undulatory Origin of the Parts of Life: an Experiment in the Mechanical Explanation of Elementary Evolutionary Processes_, I developed these ideas, and endeavored to base them on the principles of evolution. I have attempted to show in that work that unconscious memory is a universal and very important function of all _plastidules_; that is, of those hypothetical molecules, or groups of molecules, which Naegeli has called _micellae_, others _bioplasts_, and so forth. Only _living_ plastidules, as individual molecules of the active protoplasm, are reproductive, and so gifted with memory; that is the chief difference between the organic and inorganic worlds. It might be stated thus: "Heredity is the memory of the plastidule, while variability is its comprehension." The elementary memory of the unicellular protist is made up of the molecular memory of the plastidules or _micellae_, of which its living cell-body is constructed. As regards the extraordinary performances of unconscious memory in these unicellular protists, nothing could be more instructive than the infinitely varied and regular formation of their defensive apparatus, their shells and skeletons; in particular, the diatomes and cosmaria among the protophytes, and the radiolaria and thalamophora among the protozoa, afford an abundance of most interesting illustrations. In many thousand species of these protists the specific form which is inherited is _relatively constant_, and proves the fidelity of their unconscious cellular memory. II. _Histionic memory._--Equally interesting examples of the second stage of memory, the unconscious memory of tissues, are found in the heredity of the individual organs of plants and the lower, nerveless animals (sponges, etc.). This second stage seems to be _a reproduction of the histionic presentations_, that association of cellular presentations which sets in with the formation of coenobia in the social protists. III. In the same way we must regard the third stage, the unconscious memory of those animals which have a nervous system, as a reproduction of the corresponding "unconscious presentations" which are stored up in certain ganglionic cells. In most of the lower animals all memory is unconscious. Moreover, even in man and the higher animals, to whom we must ascribe consciousness, the daily acts of unconscious memory are much more numerous and varied than those of the conscious faculty; we shall easily convince ourselves of that if we make an impartial study of a thousand unconscious acts we perform daily out of habit, and without thinking of them, in walking, speaking, writing, eating, and so forth. IV. Conscious memory, which is the work of certain brain-cells in man and the higher animals, is an "internal mirroring" of very late development, the highest outcome of the same psychic reproduction of presentations which were mere unconscious processes in the ganglionic cells of our lower animal ancestors. The concatenation of presentations--usually called the association of ideas--also runs through a long scale, from the lowest to the highest stages. This, too, is originally and predominantly unconscious ("instinct"); only in the higher classes of animals does it gradually become conscious ("reason"). The psychic results of this "association of ideas" are extremely varied; still, a very long, unbroken line of gradual development connects the simplest unconscious association of the lowest protist with the elaborate conscious chain of ideas of the civilized man. The _unity of consciousness_ in man is given as its highest consequence (Hume, Condillac). All higher mental activity becomes more perfect in proportion as the normal association extends to more numerous presentations, and in proportion to the order which is imposed on them by the "criticism of pure reason." In dreams, where this criticism is absent, the association of the reproduced impressions often takes the wildest forms. Even in the work of the poetic imagination, which constructs new groups of images by varying the association of the impressions received, and in hallucinations, etc., they are often most unnaturally arranged, and seem to the prosaic observer to be perfectly irrational. This is especially true of supernatural "forms of belief," the apparitions of spiritism, and the fantastic notions of the transcendental dualist philosophy; though it is precisely these _abnormal associations_ of "faith" and of "revelation" that have often been deemed the greatest treasures of the human mind (cf. chap. xvi.). The antiquated psychology of the Middle Ages (which, however, still numbers many adherents) considered the mental life of man and that of the brute to be two entirely different phenomena; the one it attributed to "reason," the other to "instinct." In harmony with the traditional story of creation, it was assumed that each animal species had received a definite, unconscious psychic force from the Creator at its formation, and that this instinct of each species was just as unchangeable as its bodily structure. Lamarck proved the untenableness of this error in 1809 by establishing the theory of Descent, and Darwin completely demolished it in 1859. He proved the following important theses with the aid of his theory of selection: 1. The instincts of species show individual differences, and are just as subject to modification under the law of _adaptation_ as the morphological features of their bodily structure. 2. These modifications (generally arising from a change of habits) are partly transmitted to offspring by _heredity_, and thus accumulate and are accentuated in the course of generations. 3. _Selection_, both artificial and natural, singles out certain of these inherited modifications of the psychic activity; it preserves the most useful and rejects the least adaptive. 4. The _divergence_ of psychic character which thus arises leads, in the course of generations, to the formation of new instincts, just as the divergence of morphological character gives rise to new species. Darwin's theory of instinct is now accepted by most biologists; Romanes has treated it so ably, and so greatly expanded it in his distinguished work on _Mental Evolution in the Animal World_, that I need merely refer to it here. I will only venture the brief statement that, in my opinion, there are instincts in _all_ organisms--in all the protists and plants as well as in all the animals and in man; though in the latter they tend to disappear in proportion as reason makes progress at their expense. The two chief classes of instincts to be differentiated are the primary and secondary. Primary instincts are the common lower impulses which are unconscious and inherent in the psychoplasm from the commencement of organic life; especially the impulses to self-preservation (by defence and maintenance) and to the preservation of the species (by generation and the care of the young). Both these fundamental instincts of organic life, _hunger_ and _love_, sprang up originally in perfect unconsciousness, without any co-operation of the intellect or reason. It is otherwise with the _secondary_ instincts. These were due originally to an intelligent adaptation, to rational thought and resolution, and to purposive conscious action. Gradually, however, they became so automatic that this "other nature" acted unconsciously, and, even through the action of heredity, seemed to be "innate" in subsequent generations. The consciousness and deliberation which originally accompanied these particular instincts of the higher animals and man have died away in the course of the life of the plastidules (as in "abridged heredity"). The unconscious purposive actions of the higher animals (for instance, their mechanical instincts) thus come to appear in the light of innate impulses. We have to explain in the same way the origin of the "_à priori_ ideas" of man; they were originally formed empirically by his predecessors.[16] In the superficial psychological treatises which ignore the mental activity of animals and attribute to man only a "true soul," we find him credited also with the exclusive possession of reason and consciousness. This is another trivial error (still to be found in many a manual, nevertheless) which the comparative psychology of the last forty years has entirely dissipated. The higher vertebrates (especially those mammals which are most nearly related to man) have just as good a title to "reason" as man himself, and within the limits of the animal world there is the same long chain of the gradual development of reason as in the case of humanity. The difference between the reason of a Goethe, a Kant, a Lamarck, or a Darwin, and that of the lowest savage, a Veddah, an Akka, a native Australian, or a Patagonian, is much greater than the graduated difference between the reason of the latter and that of the most "rational" mammals, the anthropoid apes, or even the papiomorpha, the dog, or the elephant. This important thesis has been convincingly proved by the thoroughly critical comparative work of Romanes and others. We shall not, therefore, attempt to cover that ground here, nor to enlarge on the distinction between the reason and the intellect; as to the meaning and limits of these concepts philosophic experts give the most contradictory definitions, as they do on so many other fundamental questions of psychology. In general it may be said that the process of the formation of concepts, which is common to both these cerebral functions, is confined to the narrower circle of concrete, proximate associations in the intellect, but reaches out to the wider circle of abstract, more comprehensive groups of associations in the work of reason. In the long gradation which connects the reflex actions and the instincts of the lower animals with the reason of the highest, intellect precedes the latter. And there is the fact, of great importance to our whole psychological treatise, that even these highest of our mental faculties are just as much subject to the laws of heredity and adaptation as are their respective organs; Flechsig pointed out in 1894 that the "organs of thought," in man and the higher mammals, are those parts of the cortex of the brain which lie between the four inner sense-centres (cf. chapters x. and xi.). The higher grade of development of ideas, of intellect and reason, which raises man so much above the brute, is intimately connected with the rise of language. Still here also we have to recognize a long chain of evolution which stretches unbroken from the lowest to the highest stages. Speech is no more an exclusive prerogative of man than reason. In the wider sense, it is a common feature of all the higher gregarious animals, at least of all the articulata and the vertebrates, which live in communities or herds; they need it for the purpose of understanding each other and communicating their impressions. This is effected either by touch or by signs, or by sounds having a definite meaning. The song of the bird or of the anthropoid ape (_hylobates_), the bark of the dog, the neigh of the horse, the chirp of the cricket, the cry of the cicada, are all specimens of animal speech. Only in man, however, has that articulate conceptual speech developed which has enabled his reason to attain such high achievements. Comparative philology, one of the most interesting sciences that has arisen during the century, has shown that the numerous elaborate languages of the different nations have been slowly and gradually evolved from a few simple primitive tongues (Wilhelm Humboldt, Bopp, Schleicher, Steinthal, and others). August Schleicher, of Jena, in particular, has proved that the historical development of language takes place under the same phylogenetic laws as the evolution of other physiological faculties and their organs. Romanes (1893) has expanded this proof, and amply demonstrated that human speech, also, differs from that of the brute only in _degree_ of development, not in essence and kind. The important group of psychic activities which we embrace under the name of "emotion" plays a conspicuous part both in theoretical and practical psychology. From our point of view they have a peculiar importance from the fact that we clearly see in them the direct connection of cerebral functions with other physiological functions (the beat of the heart, sense-action, muscular movement, etc.); they, therefore, prove the unnatural and untenable character of the philosophy which would essentially dissociate psychology from physiology. All the external expressions of emotional life which we find in man are also present in the higher animals (especially in the anthropoid ape and the dog); however varied their development may be, they are all derived from the two elementary functions of the _psyche_, sensation and motion, and from their combination in reflex action and presentation. To the province of sensation, in a wide sense, we must attribute the feeling of _like_ and _dislike_ which determines the emotion; while the corresponding _desire_ and _aversion_ (love and hatred), the effort to attain what is liked and avoid what is disliked, belong to the category of movement. "Attraction" and "repulsion" seem to be the sources of _will_, that momentous element of the soul which determines the character of the individual. The _passions_, which play so important a part in the psychic life of man, are but intensifications of emotion. Romanes has recently shown that these also are common to man and the brute. Even at the lowest stage of organic life we find in all the protists those elementary feelings of like and dislike, revealing themselves in what are called their _tropisms_, in the striving after light and darkness, heat or cold, and in their different relations to positive and negative electricity. On the other hand, we find at the highest stage of psychic life, in civilized man, those finer shades of emotion, of delight and disgust, of love and hatred, which are the mainsprings of civilization and the inexhaustible sources of poetry. Yet a connecting chain of all conceivable gradations unites the most primitive elements of feeling in the psychoplasm of the unicellular protist with the highest forms of passion that rule in the ganglionic cells of the cortex of the human brain. That the latter are absolutely amenable to physical laws was proved long ago by the great Spinoza in his famous _Statics of Emotion_. The notion of _will_ has as many different meanings and definitions as most other psychological notions--presentation, soul, mind, and so forth. Sometimes will is taken in the widest sense as a _cosmic attribute_, as in the "World as will and presentation" of Schopenhauer; sometimes it is taken in its narrowest sense as an _anthropological attribute_, the exclusive prerogative of man--as Descartes taught, for instance, who considered the brute to be a mere machine, without will or sensation. In the ordinary use of the term, _will_ is derived from the phenomenon of voluntary movement, and is thus regarded as a psychic attribute of most animals. But when we examine the will in the light of comparative physiology and evolution, we find--as we do in the case of sensation--that it is a universal property of living psychoplasm. The automatic and the reflex movements which we observe everywhere, even in the unicellular protists, seem to be the outcome of inclinations which are inseparably connected with the very idea of life. Even in the plants and lowest animals these inclinations, or tropisms, seem to be the joint outcome of the inclinations of all the combined individual cells. But when the "tricellular reflex organ" arises (page 115), and a third independent cell--the "psychic," or "ganglionic," cell--is interposed between the sense-cell and the motor cell, we have an independent elementary organ of will. In the lower animals, however, this will remains _unconscious_. It is only when consciousness arises in the higher animals, as the subjective mirror of the objective, though internal, processes in the neuroplasm of the psychic cells, that the will reaches that highest stage which likens it in character to the human will, and which, in the case of man, assumes in common parlance the predicate of "liberty." Its free dominion and action become more and more deceptive as the muscular system and the sense-organs develop with a free and rapid locomotion, entailing a correlative evolution of the brain and the organs of thought. The question of the liberty of the will is the one which has more than any other cosmic problem occupied the time of thoughtful humanity, the more so that in this case the great philosophic interest of the question was enhanced by the association of most momentous consequences for practical philosophy--for ethics, education, law, and so forth. Emil du Bois-Reymond, who treats it as the seventh and last of his "seven cosmic problems," rightly says of the question: "Affecting everybody, apparently accessible to everybody, intimately involved in the fundamental conditions of human society, vitally connected with religious belief, this question has been of immeasurable importance in the history of civilization. There is probably no other object of thought on which the modern library contains so many dusty folios that will never again be opened." The importance of the question is also seen in the fact that Kant put it in the same category with the questions of the immortality of the soul and belief in God. He called these three great questions the indispensable "postulates of practical reason," though he had already clearly shown them to have no reality whatever in the light of _pure_ reason. The most remarkable fact in connection with this fierce and confused struggle over the freedom of the will is, perhaps, that it has been theoretically rejected, not only by the greatest critical philosophers, but even by their extreme opponents, and yet it is still affirmed to be self-evident by the majority of people. Some of the first teachers of the Christian Churches--such as St. Augustine and Calvin--rejected the freedom of the will as decisively as the famous leaders of pure materialism, Holbach in the eighteenth and Büchner in the nineteenth century. Christian theologians deny it, because it is irreconcilable with their belief in the omnipotence of God and in predestination. God, omnipotent and omniscient, saw and willed all things from eternity--he must, consequently, have predetermined the conduct of man. If man, with his free will, were to act otherwise than God had ordained, God would not be all-mighty and all-knowing. In the same sense Leibnitz, too, was an unconditional determinist. The monistic scientists of the last century, especially Laplace, defended determinism as a consequence of their mechanical view of life. The great struggle between the determinist and the indeterminist, between the opponent and the sustainer of the freedom of the will, has ended to-day, after more than two thousand years, completely in favor of the determinist. The human will has no more freedom than that of the higher animals, from which it differs only in degree, not in kind. In the last century the dogma of liberty was fought with general philosophic and cosmological arguments. The nineteenth century has given us very different weapons for its definitive destruction--the powerful weapons which we find in the arsenal of comparative physiology and evolution. We now know that each act of the will is as fatally determined by the organization of the individual and as dependent on the momentary condition of his environment as every other psychic activity. The character of the inclination was determined long ago by _heredity_ from parents and ancestors; the determination to each particular act is an instance of _adaptation_ to the circumstances of the moment wherein the strongest motive prevails, according to the laws which govern the statics of emotion. Ontogeny teaches us to understand the evolution of the will in the individual child. Phylogeny reveals to us the historical development of the will within the ranks of our vertebrate ancestors. CHAPTER VIII THE EMBRYOLOGY OF THE SOUL Importance of Ontogeny to Psychology--Development of the Child-Soul--Commencement of Existence of the Individual Soul--The Storing of the Soul--Mythology of the Origin of the Soul--Physiology of the Origin of the Soul--Elementary Processes in Conception--Coalescence of the Ovum and the Spermatozoon--Cell-Love--Heredity of the Soul from Parents and Ancestors--Its Physiological Nature as the Mechanics of the Protoplasm--Blending of Souls (Psychic Amphigony)--Reversion, Psychological Atavism--The Biogenetic Law in Psychology--Palingenetic Repetition and Cenogenetic Modification--Embryonic and Post-Embryonic Psychogeny The human soul--whatever we may hold as to its nature--undergoes a continual development throughout the life of the individual. This ontogenetic fact is of fundamental importance in our monistic psychology, though the "professional" psychologists pay little or no attention to it. Since the embryology of the individual is, on Baer's principle--and in accordance with the universal belief of modern biologists--the "true torch-bearer for all research into the organic body," it will afford us a reliable light on the momentous problems of its psychic activity. Although, however, this "embryology of the soul" is so important and interesting, it has hitherto met with the consideration it deserves only within a very narrow circle. Until recently teachers were almost the only ones to occupy themselves with a part of the problem; since their avocation compelled them to assist and supervise the formation of the psychic activity in the child, they were bound to take a theoretical interest, also, in the psychogenetic facts that came under their notice. However, these teachers, for the most part, both in recent and in earlier times, were dominated by the current dualistic psychology--in so far as they reflected at all; and they were totally ignorant of the important facts of comparative psychology, and unacquainted with the structure and function of the brain. Moreover, their observations only extended to children in their school-days, or in the years immediately preceding. The remarkable phenomena which the individual psychogeny of the child offers in its earliest years, and which are the joy and admiration of all thoughtful parents, were scarcely ever made the subject of serious scientific research. Wilhelm Preyer was the pioneer of this study in his interesting work on _The Mind of the Child_ (1881). To obtain a perfectly clear knowledge of the matter, however, we must go further back still; we must commence at the first appearance of the soul in the impregnated ovum. The origin of the human individual--body and soul--was still wrapped in complete mystery at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Caspar Friedrich Wolff had, it is true, discovered the true character of embryonic development in 1759, in his _theoria generationis_, and proved with the confidence of a critical observer that there is a true _epigenesis_--_i.e._, a series of very remarkable formative processes--in the evolution of the foetus from the simple ovum. But the physiologists of the time, with the famous Albert Haller at their head, flatly refused to entertain these empirical truths, which may be directly proved by microscopic observation, and clung to the old dogma of "preformation." This theory assumed that in the human ovum--and in the egg of all other animals--the organism was already present, or "preformed," in all its parts; the "evolution" of the embryo consisted literally in an "unfolding" (_evolutio_) of the folded organs. One curious consequence of this error was the theory of _scatulation_, which we have mentioned on p. 55; since the ovary had to be admitted to be present in the embryo of the woman, it was also necessary to suppose that the germs of the next generation were already formed in it, and so on _in infinitum_. Opposed to this dogma of the "Ovulists" was the equally erroneous notion of the "Animalculists"; the latter held that the germ was not really in the female ovum, but in the paternal element, and that the store of succeeding generations was to be sought in the spermatozoa. Leibnitz consistently applied this theory of scatulation to the human soul; he denied that either soul or body had a real development (_epigenesis_), and said in his _Theodicy_: "Thus I consider that the souls which are destined one day to become human exist in the seed, like those of other species; that they have existed in our ancestors as far back as Adam--that is, since the beginning of the world--in the forms of organized bodies." Similar notions prevailed in biology and philosophy until the third decade of the present century, when the reform of embryology by Baer gave them their death blow. In the province of psychology, however, they still find many adherents; they form one group of the many curious mystical ideas which give us a living illustration of the ontogeny of the soul. The more accurate knowledge which we have recently obtained, through comparative ethnology, of the various forms of myths of ancient and modern uncivilized races, is also of great interest in psychogeny. Still, it would take us too far from our purpose if we were to enter into it with any fulness here; we must refer the reader to Adalbert Svoboda's excellent work on _Forms of Faith_ (1897). In respect of their scientific and poetical contents, we may arrange all pertinent _psychogenetic myths_ in the following five groups: I. The myth of transmigration.--The soul lived formerly in the body of another animal, and passed from this into a human body. The Egyptian priests, for instance, taught that the human soul wandered through all the species of animals after the death of the body, returning to a human frame after three thousand years of transmigration. II. The myth of the in-planting of the soul.--The soul existed independently in another place--a psychogenetic store, as it were (in a kind of embryonic slumber or latent life); it was taken out by a bird (sometimes represented as an eagle, generally as a white stork), and implanted in the human body. III. The myth of the creation of the soul.--God creates the souls, and keeps them stored--sometimes in a pond (living in the form of _plankton_), according to other myths in a tree (where they are conceived as the fruit of a phanerogam); the Creator takes them from the pond or tree, and inserts them in the human germ during the act of conception. IV. The myth of the scatulation of the soul (the theory of Leibnitz which we have given above). V. The myth of the division of the soul (the theory of Rudolph Wagner [1855] and of other physiologists).--In the act of procreation a portion is detached from both the (immaterial) souls of the parents; the maternal contribution passes in the ovum, the paternal in the spermatozoa; when these two germinal cells coalesce, the two psychic fragments that accompany them also combine to form a new (immaterial) soul. Although the poetic fancies we have mentioned as to the origin of the individual human soul are still widely accepted, their purely mythological character is now firmly established. The deeply interesting and remarkable research which has been made in the course of the last twenty-five years into the more minute processes of the impregnation and germination of the ovum has made it clear that these mysterious phenomena belong entirely to the province of cellular physiology (cf. p. 48). Both the female element, the ovum, and the male fertilizing body, the sperma or spermatozoa, are _simple cells_. These living cells possess a certain sum of physiological properties to which we give the title of the "cell-soul," just as we do in the permanently unicellular protist (see p. 48). Both germinal cells have the faculty of movement and sensation. The young ovum, or egg-cell, moves after the manner of an amoeba; the minute spermatozoa, of which there are millions in every drop of the seminal fluid, are ciliated cells, and swim about as freely in the sperm, by means of their lashes or _cilia_, as the ordinary ciliated infusoria (the flagellata). When the two cells meet as a result of copulation, or when they are brought into contact through artificial fertilization (in the fishes, for instance), they attract each other and become firmly attached. The main cause of this cellular attraction is a chemical sensitive action of the protoplasm, allied to smell or taste, which we call "erotic chemicotropism"; it may also be correctly (both in the chemical and the romantic sense) termed "cellular affinity" or "sexual cell-love." A number of the ciliated cells in the sperm swim rapidly towards the stationary egg-cell and seek to penetrate into it. As Hertwig showed in 1875, as a rule only one of the suitors is fortunate enough to reach the desired goal. As soon as this favored spermatozoon has pierced into the body of the ovum with its head (the nucleus of the cell), a thin mucous layer is detached from the ovum which prevents the further entrance of spermatozoa. The formation of this protective membrane was only prevented when Hertwig kept the ovum stiff with cold by lowering the temperature, or benumbed it with narcotics (chloroform, morphia, nicotine, etc.); then there was "super-impregnation" or "poly-spermy"--a number of sperm-threads pierced into the body of the unconscious ovum. This remarkable fact proved that there is a low degree of "cellular instinct" (or, at least, of specific, lively sensation) in the sexual cells just as effectively as do the important phenomena that immediately follow in their interior. Both nuclei--that of the ovum and of the spermatozoon--attract each other, approach, and, on contact, completely fuse together. Thus from the impregnated ovum arises the important new cell which we call the "stem-cell" (_cytula_), from the repeated segmentation of which the whole polycellular organism is evolved. The psychological information which is afforded by these remarkable facts of impregnation, which have only been properly observed during the last twenty-five years, is supremely important; its vast significance has hitherto been very far from appreciated. We shall condense the main conclusions of research in the following five theses: I. Each human individual, like every other higher animal, is a single simple cell at the commencement of his existence. II. This "stem-cell" (cytula) is formed in the same manner in all cases--that is, by the blending or copulation of two separate cells of diverse origin, the female ovum and the male spermatozoon. III. Each of these sexual cells has its own "cell-soul"--that is, each is distinguished by a peculiar form of sensation and movement. IV. At the moment of conception or impregnation, not only the protoplasm and the nuclei of the two sexual cells coalesce, but also their "cell-souls"; in other words, the potential energies which are latent in both, and inseparable from the matter of the protoplasm, unite for the formation of a new potential energy, the "germ-soul" of the newly constructed stem-cell. V. Consequently each personality owes his bodily and spiritual qualities to both parents; by heredity the nucleus of the ovum contributes a portion of the maternal features, while the nucleus of the spermatozoon brings a part of the father's characteristics. By these empirical facts of conception, moreover, the further fact of extreme importance is established, that every man, like every other animal, _has a beginning of existence_; the complete copulation of the two sexual cell-nuclei marks the precise moment when not only the body, but also the "soul," of the new stem-cell makes its appearance. This fact suffices of itself to destroy the myth of the immortality of the soul, to which we shall return later on. It suffices, too, for the destruction of the still prevalent superstition that man owes his personal existence to the favor of God. Its origin is rather to be attributed solely to the "eros" of his parents, to that powerful impulse that is common to all polycellular animals and plants, and leads to their nuptial union. But the essential point in this physiological process is not the "embrace," as was formerly supposed, or the amorousness connected therewith; it is simply the introduction of the spermatozoa into the vagina. This is the sole means, in the land-dwelling animals, by which the fertilizing element can reach the released ova (which usually takes place in the uterus in man). In the case of the lower aquatic animals (fishes, mussels, medusæ, etc.) the mature sexual elements on both sides are simply discharged into the water, and their union is let to chance; they have no real copulation, and so they show none of those higher psychic "erotic" functions which play so conspicuous a part in the life of the higher animals. Hence it is, also, that all the lower, non-copulating animals are wanting in those interesting organs which Darwin has called "secondary sexual characters," and which are the outcome of sexual selection: such are the beard of man, the antlers of the stag, the beautiful plumage of the bird of paradise and of so many other birds, together with other distinctions of the male which are absent in the female. Among the above theses as to the physiology of conception the inheritance of the psychic qualities of the two parents is of particular importance for psychological purposes. It is well known that every child inherits from both his parents peculiarities of character, temperament, talent, acuteness of sense, and strength of will. It is equally well known that even psychic qualities are often (if not always) transmitted from grandparents by heredity--often, in fact, a man resembles his grandparents more than his parents in certain respects; and that is true both of bodily and mental features. All the chief laws of heredity which I first formulated in my _General Morphology_, and popularized in my _Natural History of Creation_, are just as valid and universal in their application to psychic phenomena as to bodily structure--in fact, they are frequently more striking and conspicuous in the former than in the latter. However, the great province of heredity, to the inestimable importance of which Darwin first opened our eyes in 1859, is thickly beset with obscure problems and physiological difficulties. We dare not claim, even after forty years of research, that all its aspects are clear to us. Yet we have done so much that we can confidently speak of heredity as a _physiological function_ of the organism, which is directly connected with the faculty of generation; and we must reduce it, like all other vital phenomena, to exclusively physical and chemical processes, to the _mechanics of the protoplasm_. We now know accurately enough the process of impregnation itself; we know that in it the nucleus of the spermatozoon contributes the qualities of the male parent, and the nucleus of the ovum gives the qualities of the mother, to the newly born stem-cell. The blending of the two nuclei is the "physiological moment" of heredity; by it the personal features of both body and soul are transmitted to the new individual. These facts of ontogeny are beyond the explanation of the dualistic and mystic psychology which still prevails in the schools; whereas they find a perfectly simple interpretation in our monistic philosophy. The physiological fact which is most material for a correct appreciation of individual psychogeny is the _continuity_ of the _psyche_ through the rise and fall of generations. A new individual comes into existence at the moment of conception; yet it is not an independent entity, either in respect of its mental or its bodily features, but merely the product of the blending of the two parental factors, the maternal egg-cell and paternal sperm-cell. The cell-souls of these two sexual cells combine in the act of conception for the formation of a new cell-soul, just as truly as the two cell-nuclei, which are the material vehicles of this psychic potential energy, unite to form a new nucleus. As we now see that the individuals of one and the same species--even sisters born of the same parents--always show certain differences, however slight, we must assume that these variations were already present in the chemical plasmatic constitution of the generative cells themselves.[17] These facts alone would suffice to explain the infinite variety of individual features, of soul and of bodily form, that we find in the organic world. As an extreme, but one-sided, consequence of them, there is the theory of Weismann, which considers the _amphimixis_, or the blending of the germ-plasm in sexual generation, to be the universal and the sole cause of individual variability. This exclusive theory, which is connected with his theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm, is, in my opinion, an exaggeration. I am convinced, on the contrary, that the great laws of _progressive heredity_ and of the correlative _functional adaptation_ apply to the soul as well as to the body. The new characteristics which the individual has acquired during life may react to some extent on the molecular texture of the germ-plasm in the egg-cell and sperm-cell, and may thus be transferred to the next generation by heredity in certain conditions (naturally, only in the form of latent energy). Although in the soul-blending at the moment of conception only the latent forces of the two parent souls are transmitted by the coalescence of the erotic cell-nuclei, still it is possible that the hereditary psychic influence of earlier, and sometimes very much older, generations may be communicated at the same time. For the laws of _latent heredity_ or atavism apply to the soul just as validly as to the anatomical organization. We find these remarkable phenomena of reversion in a very simple and instructive form in the alternation of generations of the polyps and medusæ. Here we see two very different generations alternate so regularly that the first resembles the third, fifth, and so on; while the second (very different from the preceding) is like the fourth, sixth, etc. (_Natural History of Creation_). We do not find such alternation of generations in man and the higher animals and plants, in which, owing to continuous heredity, each generation resembles the next; nevertheless, even in these cases we often meet with phenomena of reversion, which must be reduced to the same law of latent heredity. Eminent men often take more after their grandparents than their parents even in the finer shades of psychic activity--in the possession of certain artistic talents or inclinations, in force of character, and in warmth of temperament; not infrequently there is a striking feature which neither parents nor grandparents possessed, but which may be traced a long way back to an older branch of the family. Even in these remarkable cases of atavism the same laws of heredity apply to the _psyche_ and to the physiognomy, to the personal quality of the sense-organs, muscles, skeleton, and other parts of the body. We can trace them most clearly in the reigning dynasties and in old families of the nobility, whose conspicuous share in the life of the State has given occasion to a more careful historical picture of the individuals in the chain of generations--for instance, in the Hohenzollerns, the princes of Orange, the Bourbons, etc., and in the Roman Cæsars. The causal-nexus of _biontic_ (individual) and _phyletic_ (historical) evolution, which I gave in my _General Morphology_ as the supreme law at the root of all biogenetic research, has a universal application to psychology no less than to morphology. I have fully treated the special importance which it has with regard to man, in both respects, in the first chapter of my _Anthropogeny_. In man, as in all other organisms, "the embryonic development is an epitome of the historical development of the species. This condensed and abbreviated recapitulation is the more complete in proportion as the original _epitomized development_ (_palingenesis_) is preserved by a constant heredity; on the other hand, it falls off from completeness in proportion as the later _disturbing development_ (_cenogenesis_) is accentuated by varying adaptation." While we apply this law to the evolution of the soul, we must lay special stress on the injunction to keep _both_ sides of it critically before us. For, in the case of man, just as in all the higher animals and plants, such appreciable perturbations of type (or _cenogeneses_) have taken place during the millions of years of development that the original simple idea of _palingenesis_, or "epitome of history," has been greatly disturbed and altered. While, on the one side, the _palingenetic_ recapitulation is preserved by the laws of like-time and like-place heredity, it is subject to an essential _cenogenetic_ change, on the other hand, by the laws of abbreviated and simplified heredity. That is clearly seen in the embryonic evolution of the psychic organs, the nervous system, the muscles, and the sense-organs. But it applies in just the same manner to the psychic functions, which are absolutely dependent on the normal construction of these organs. Their evolution is subject to great cenogenetic modification in man and all other viviparous animals, precisely because the complete development of the embryo occupies a longer time within the body of the mother. But we have to distinguish two periods of individual psychogeny: (1) the embryonic, and (2) the post-embryonic development of the soul. I. _Embryonic Psychogeny._--The human foetus, or embryo, normally takes nine months (or two hundred and seventy days) to develop in the uterus. During this time it is entirely cut off from the outer world, and protected, not only by the thick muscular wall of the womb, but also by the special foetal membranes (_embryolemmata_) which are common to all the three higher classes of vertebrates--reptiles, birds, and mammals. In all the classes of amniotes these membranes (the _amnion_ and the _serolemma_) develop in just the same fashion. They represent the protective arrangements which were acquired by the earliest reptiles (_proreptilia_), the common parents of all the amniotes, in the Permian period (towards the end of the palæozoic age), when these higher vertebrates accustomed themselves to live on land and breathe the atmosphere. Their ancestors, the amphibia of the Carboniferous period, still lived and breathed in the water, like their earlier predecessors, the fishes. In the case of these older and lower vertebrates that lived in the water, the embryonic development had the palingenetic character in a still higher degree, as is the case in most of the fishes and amphibia of the present day. The familiar tadpole and the larva of the salamander or the frog still preserve the structure of their fish-ancestors in the first part of their life in the water; they resemble them, likewise, in their habits of life, in breathing by gills, in the action of their sense-organs, and in other psychic organs. Then, when the interesting metamorphosis of the swimming tadpole takes place, and when it adapts itself to a land-life, the fish-like body changes into that of a four-footed, crawling amphibium; instead of the gill-breathing in the water comes an exclusive breathing of the atmosphere by means of lungs, and, with the changed habits of life, even the psychic apparatus, the nervous system, and the sense-organs reach a higher degree of construction. If we could completely follow the psychogeny of the tadpole from beginning to end, we should be able to apply the biogenetic law in many ways to its psychic evolution. For it develops in direct communication with the changing conditions of the outer world, and so must quickly adapt its sensation and movement to these. The swimming tadpole has not only the structure but the habits of life of a fish, and only acquires those of a frog in its metamorphosis. It is different with man and all the other amniotes; their embryo is entirely withdrawn from the direct influence of the outer world, and cut off from any reciprocal action therewith, by enclosure in its protective membranes. Besides, the special care of the young on the part of the amniotes gives their embryo much more favorable conditions for the cenogenetic abbreviation of the palingenetic evolution. There is, in the first place, the excellent arrangement for the nourishment of the embryo; in the reptiles, birds, and monotremes (the oviparous mammals) it is effected by the great yellow nutritive yelk, which is associated with the egg; in the rest of the mammals (the marsupials and placentals) it is effected by the mother's blood, which is conducted to the foetus by the blood-vessels of the yelk-sac and the allantois. In the case of the most highly developed placentals this elaborate nutritive arrangement has reached the highest degree of perfection by the construction of a placenta; hence in these classes the embryo is fully developed before birth. But its soul remains during all this time in a state of embryonic slumber, a state of repose which Preyer has justly compared to the hibernation of animals. We have a similar long sleep in the chrysalis stage of those insects which undergo a complete metamorphosis--butterflies, bees, flies, beetles, and so forth. This sleep of the pupa, during which the most important formations of organs and tissues take place, is the more interesting from the fact that the preceding condition of the free larva (caterpillar, grub, or maggot) included a highly developed psychic activity, and that this is, significantly, lower than the stage which is seen afterwards (when the chrysalis sleep is over) in the perfect, winged, sexually mature insect. Man's psychic activity, like that of most of the higher animals, runs through a long series of stages of development during the individual life. We may single out the five following as the most important of them: I. The soul of the new-born infant up to the birth of self-consciousness and the learning of speech. II. The soul of the boy or girl up to puberty (_i.e._, until the awakening of the sexual instinct). III. The soul of the youth or maiden up to the time of sexual intercourse (the "idealist" period). IV. The soul of the grown man and the mature woman (the period of full maturity and of the founding of families, lasting until about the sixtieth year for the man and the fiftieth for the woman--until _involution_ sets in). V. The soul of the old man or woman (the period of degeneration). Man's psychic life runs the same evolution--upward progress, full maturity, and downward degeneration--as every other vital activity in his organization. CHAPTER IX THE PHYLOGENY OF THE SOUL Gradual Historical Evolution of the Human Soul from the Animal Soul--Methods of Phylogenetic Psychology--Four Chief Stages in the Phylogeny of the Soul: I. The Cell-Soul (Cytopsyche) of the Protist (Infusoria, Ova, etc.): Cellular Psychology; II. The Soul of a Colony of Cells, or the Cenobitic Soul (Coenopsyche): Psychology of the Morula and Blastula; III. The Soul of the Tissue (Histopsyche): Its Twofold Nature: The Soul of the Plant: The Soul of the Lower, Nerveless Animal: Double Soul of the Siphonophora (Personal and Kormal Soul); IV. The Nerve-Soul (Neuropsyche) of the Higher Animal--Three Sections of its Psychic Apparatus: Sense-Organs, Muscles, and Nerves--Typical Formation of the Nerve-Centre in the Various Groups of Animals--Psychic Organ of the Vertebrate: the Brain and the Spinal Cord--Phylogeny of the Mammal Soul The theory of descent, combined with anthropological research, has convinced us of the descent of our human organism from a long series of animal ancestors by a slow and gradual transformation occupying many millions of years. Since, then, we cannot dissever man's psychic life from the rest of his vital functions--we are rather forced to a conviction of the natural evolution of our whole body and mind--it becomes one of the main tasks of the modern monistic psychology to trace the stages of the historical development of the soul of man from the soul of the brute. Our "phylogeny of the soul" seeks to attain this object; it may also, as a branch of general psychology, be called _phylogenetic_ psychology, or, in contradistinction to _biontic_ (individual), _phyletic psychogeny_. And, although this new science has scarcely been taken up in earnest yet, and most of the "professional" psychologists deny its very right to existence, we must claim for it the utmost importance and the deepest interest. For, in our opinion, it is its special province to solve for us the great enigma of the nature and origin of the human soul. The methods and paths which will lead us to the remote goal of a complete phylogenetic psychology--a goal that is still buried in the mists of the future, and almost imperceptible to many--do not differ from those of other branches of evolutionary research. Comparative anatomy, physiology, and ontogeny are of the first importance. Much support is given also by palæontology, for the order in which the fossil remains of the various classes of vertebrates succeed each other in the course of organic evolution reveals to us, to some extent, the gradual growth of their psychic power as well as their phyletic connection. We must admit that we are here, as we are in every branch of phylogenetic research, driven to the construction of a number of hypotheses in order to fill up the considerable lacunæ of empirical phylogeny. Yet these hypotheses cast so clear and significant a light on the chief stages of historical development that we are afforded a most gratifying insight into their entire course. The comparative psychology of man and the higher animals enables us to learn from the highest group of the placentals, the primates, the long strides by which the human soul has advanced beyond the _psyche_ of the anthropoid ape. The phylogeny of the mammals and of the lower vertebrates acquaints us with the long series of the earlier ancestors of the primates which have arisen within this stem since the Silurian age. All these vertebrates agree in the structure and development of their characteristic psychic organ--the spinal cord. We learn from the comparative anatomy of the vermalia that this spinal cord has been evolved from a dorsal _acroganglion_, or vertical brain, of an invertebrate ancestor. We learn, further, from comparative ontogeny that this simple psychic organ has been evolved from the stratum of cells in the outer germinal layer, the ectoderm, of the platodes. In these earliest flat-worms, which have no specialized nervous system, the outer skin-covering serves as a general sensitive and psychic organ. Finally, comparative embryology teaches us that these simple metazoa have arisen by gastrulation from blastæades, from hollow spheres, the wall of which is merely one simple layer of cells, the _blastoderm_; and the same science, with the aid of the biogenetic law, explains how these protozoic coenobia originally sprang from the simplest unicellular organisms. On a critical study of these different embryonic formations, the evolution of which from each other we can directly observe under the microscope, we arrive, by means of the great law of biogeny, at a series of most important conclusions as to the chief stages in the development of our psychic life. We may distinguish eight of these to begin with: I. Unicellular protozoa with a simple cell-soul: the infusoria. II. Multicellular protozoa with a communal soul: the catallacta. III. The earliest metazoa with an epithelial soul: the platodes. IV. Invertebrate ancestors with a simple vertical brain: the vermalia. V. Vertebrates without skull or brain, with a simple spinal cord: the acrania. VI. Animals with skull and brain (of five vesicles): the craniota. VII. Mammals with predominant development of the cortex of the brain: the placentals. VIII. The higher anthropoid apes and man, with organs of thought (in the cerebrum): the anthropomorpha. Among these eight stages in the development of the human soul we may further distinguish more or less clearly a number of subordinate stages. Naturally, however, in reconstructing them we have to fall back on the same defective evidence of empirical psychology which the comparative anatomy and physiology of the actual fauna affords us. As the craniote animals of the sixth stage--and these are true fishes--are already found fossilized in the Silurian system, we are forced to assume that the five preceding series of ancestors (which were incapable of fossilization) were evolved in an earlier, pre-Silurian age. I. _The cell-soul_ (_or cytopsyche_): first stage of phyletic psychogenesis.--The earliest ancestors of man and all other animals were unicellular protozoa. This fundamental hypothesis of rational phylogeny is based, in virtue of the phylogenetic law, on the familiar embryological fact that every man, like every other metazoon (_i.e._, every multicellular organism with tissues), begins his personal existence as a simple cell, the stem-cell (_cytula_), or the impregnated egg-cell (see p. 63). As this cell has a "soul" from the commencement, so had also the corresponding unicellular _ancestral forms_, which were represented in the oldest series of man's ancestors by a number of different protozoa. We learn the character of the psychic activity of these unicellular organisms from the comparative physiology of the protists of to-day. Close observation and careful experiment have opened out to us in this respect, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new world of the most interesting phenomena. The best description of them was given by Max Verworn in his thoughtful work, based on original research, _Psycho-physiological Studies of the Protists_. The work includes also the few earlier observations of the "psychic life of the protist." Verworn came to the firm conclusion that the psychic processes are unconscious in all the protists, that the phenomena of sensation and movement coincide with the molecular vital processes in their protoplasm, and that their ultimate causes are to be sought in the properties of the protoplasmic molecules (the _plastidules_). "Hence the psychic phenomena of the protists form a bridge that connects the chemical processes of the inorganic world with the psychic life of the highest animals; they represent the germ of the highest psychic phenomena of the metazoa and of man." The careful observations and many experiments of Verworn, together with those of Wilhelm Engelmann, Wilhelm Preyer, Richard Hertwig, and other more recent students of the protists, afford conclusive evidence for my "theory of the cell-soul" (1866). On the strength of several years of study of different kinds of protists, especially rhizopods and infusoria, I published a theory thirty-three years ago to the effect that every living cell has psychic properties, and that the psychic life of the multicellular animals and plants is merely the sum total of the psychic functions of the cells which build up their structure. In the lower groups (in algæ and sponges, for instance) _all_ the cells of the body have an equal share in it (or with very slight differences); in the higher groups, in harmony with the law of the "division of labor," only a select portion of them are involved--the "soul-cells." The important consequences of this "cellular psychology" were partly treated in my work on _The Perigenesis of the Plastidule_ (1876), and partly in my speech at Munich, in 1877, on "Modern Evolution in Relation to the Whole of Science." A more popular presentation of them is to be found in my two Vienna papers (1878) on "The Origin and Development of the Sense-Organs" and on "Cell-Souls and Soul-Cells." Moreover, the cell-soul, even within the limits of the protist world, presents a long series of stages of development, from the most simple and primitive to a comparatively elaborate activity. In the earliest and simplest protists the faculty of sensation and movement is equally distributed over the entire protoplasm of the homogeneous morsel; in the higher forms certain "cell-instruments," or _organella_, appear, as their physiological organs. Motor cell-parts of that character are found in the pseudopodia of the rhizopods, and the vibrating hairs, lashes, or cilia of the infusoria. The cell-nucleus, which is wanting in the earlier and lower protists, is considered to be an internal central organ of the cell-life. It is especially noteworthy, from a physiologico-chemical point of view, that the very earliest protists were plasmodomous, with plant-like nutrition--hence _protophyta_, or primitive plants; from these came as a secondary stage, by metasitism, the first plasmophagi, with animal nutrition--the _protozoa_, or primitive animals.[18] This metasitism, or circulation of nutritive matter, implies an important psychological advance; with it began the development of those characteristic properties of the animal soul which are wanting in the plant. We find the highest development of the animal cell-soul in the class of ciliata, or ciliated infusoria. When we compare their activity with the corresponding psychic life of the higher, multicellular animals, we find scarcely any psychological difference; the sensitive and motor _organella_ of these protozoa seem to accomplish the same as the sense-organs, nerves, and muscles of the metazoa. Indeed, we have found in the great cell-nucleus (_meganucleus_) of the infusoria a central organ of psychic activity, which plays much the same part in their unicellular organism as the brain does in the psychic life of higher animals. However, it is very difficult to determine how far this comparison is justified; the views of experts diverge considerably over the matter. Some take all spontaneous bodily movement in them to be automatic, or impulsive, and all stimulated movement to be reflex; others are convinced that such movements are partly voluntary and intentional. The latter would attribute to the infusoria a certain degree of consciousness, and even self-consciousness; but this is rejected by the others. However that very difficult question may be settled, it does not alter the fact that these unicellular protozoa give proof of the possession of a highly developed "cell-soul," which is of great interest for a correct decision as to the _psyche_ of our earliest unicellular ancestors. II. _The communal or cenobitic soul_ (_coenopsyche_): second stage of phyletic psychogenesis.--Individual development begins, in man and in all other multicellular animals, with the repeated segmentation of one simple cell. This _stem-cell_, the impregnated ovum, divides first into two daughter cells, by a process of ordinary indirect segmentation; as the process is repeated there arise (by equal division of the egg) successively four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four such new cells, or "blastomeres." Usually (that is, in the case of the majority of animals) an irregular enlargement sooner or later takes the place of this original regular division of cells. But the result is the same in all cases--the formation of a (generally spherical) cluster of heterogeneous (originally homogeneous) cells. This stage is called the _morula_ ("mulberry," which it somewhat resembles in shape). Then, as a rule, a fluid gathers in the interior of this aggregate of cells; it changes into a spherical vesicle; all the cells go to its surface, and arrange themselves in one simple layer--the _blastoderm_. The hollow sphere which is thus formed is the important stage of the "germinal vesicle," the _blastula_, or blastosphere. The psychological phenomena which we directly observe in the formation of the blastula are partly sensations, partly movements, of this community of cells. The movements may be divided into two groups: (1) the inner movements, which are always repeated in substantially the same manner in the process of ordinary (indirect) segmentation of cells (formation of the axis of the nucleus, mitosis, karyokinesis, etc.); (2) the outer movements, which are seen in the regular change of position of the social cells and their grouping for the construction of the blastoderm. We assume that these movements are hereditary and unconscious, because they are always determined in the same fashion by heredity from the earlier protist ancestors. The sensations also fall into two groups: (1) the sensations of the individual cells, which reveal themselves in the assertion of their individual independence and their relation to neighboring cells (with which they are in contact, and partly in direct combination, by means of protoplasmic fibres); (2) the common sensation of the entire community of cells, which is seen in the individual formation of the _blastula_ as a hollow vesicle. The causal interpretation of the formation of the blastula is given us by the biogenetic law, which explains the phenomena we directly observe to be the outcome of heredity, and relates them to corresponding historical processes which took place long ago in the origin of the earliest protist-coenobia, the blastæads. But we get a physiological and psychological insight into these important phenomena of the earliest cell-communities by observation and experiment on their modern representatives. Such permanent cell-communities or colonies are still found in great numbers both among the plasmodomous primitive plants (for instance, the paulotomacea, diatomacea, volvocinæ, etc.) and the plasmophagous primitive animals (the infusoria and rhizopods). In all these coenobia we can easily distinguish two different grades of psychic activity: (1) the cell-soul of the individual cells (the "elementary organisms") and (2) the communal soul of the entire colony. III. _The tissue-soul_ (_histopsyche_): third stage of phyletic psychogenesis.--In all multicellular, tissue-forming plants (_metaphyta_) and in the lowest, nerveless classes of tissue-forming animals (_metazoa_) we have to distinguish two different forms of psychic activity--namely: (1) the _psyche_ of the individual cells which compose the tissue, and (2) the _psyche_ of the tissue itself, or of the "cell-state" which is made up of the tissues. This "tissue-soul" is the higher psychological function which gives physiological individuality to the compound multicellular organism as a true "cell-commonwealth." It controls all the separate "cell-souls" of the social cells--the mutually dependent "citizens" which constitute the community. This fundamental twofold character of the _psyche_ in the metaphyta and the lower, nerveless metazoa is very important. It may be verified by unprejudiced observation and suitable experiment. In the first place, each single cell has its own sensation and movement, and, in addition, each tissue and each organ, composed of a number of homogeneous cells, has its special irritability and psychic unity (_e.g._, the pollen and stamens). A. _The plant-soul_ (_phytopsyche_) is, in our view, the summary of the entire psychic activity of the tissue-forming, multicellular plant (the _metaphyton_, as distinct from the unicellular _protophyton_); it is, however, the subject of the most diverse opinions even at the present day. It was once customary to draw an essential distinction between the plant and the animal, on the ground that the latter had a "soul" and the plant had none. However, an unprejudiced comparison of the irritability and movements of various higher plants and lower animals convinced many observers, even at the beginning of the century, that there must be a "soul" on both sides. At a later date Fechner, Leitgeb, and others strongly contended for the plant-soul. But a profounder knowledge of the subject was obtained when the similarity of the elementary structure of the plant and of the animal was proved by the cellular theory, and especially when the similarity of conduct of the active, living protoplasm in both was shown in the plasma theory of Max Schultze (1859). Modern comparative physiology has shown that the physiological attitude towards various stimuli (light, heat, electricity, gravity, friction, chemical action, etc.) of the "sensitive" portions of many plants and animals is exactly the same, and that the reflex movements which the stimuli elicit take place in precisely the same manner on both sides. Hence, if it was necessary to attribute this activity to a "soul" in the lower, nerveless metazoa (sponges, polyps, etc.), it was also necessary in the case of many (if not all) metaphyta, at least in the very sensitive _mimosa_, the "fly-traps" (_dionaea_ and _drosera_), and the numerous kinds of climbing plants. It is true that modern vegetal physiology has given a purely physical explanation of many of these stimulated movements, or tropisms, by special features of growth, variations of pressure, etc. Yet these mechanical causes are neither more nor less _psychophysical_ than the similar "reflex movements" of the sponges, polyps, and other nerveless metazoa, even though their mechanism is entirely different. The character of the tissue-soul reveals itself in the same way in both cases--the cells of the tissue (the regular, orderly structure of cells) transmit the stimuli they have received in one part, and thus provoke movements of other parts, or of the whole organ. This transmission of stimuli has as much title to be called "psychic activity" as its more complete form in the higher animals with nerves; the anatomic explanation of it is that the social cells of the tissue, or cell-community, are not isolated from each other (as was formerly supposed), but are connected throughout by fine threads or bridges of protoplasm. When the sensitive mimosa closes its graceful leaves and droops its stalk at contact, or on being shaken; when the irritable fly-trap (the dionæa) swiftly clasps its leaves together at a touch, and captures a fly; the sensation seems to be keener, the transmission of the stimulus more rapid, and the movement more energetic than in the reflex action of the stimulated bath-sponge and many other sponges. B. _The soul of the nerveless metazoa._--Of very special interest for comparative psychology in general, and for the phylogeny of the animal soul in particular, is the psychic activity of those lower metazoa which have tissues, and sometimes differentiated organs, but no nerves or specific organs of sense. To this category belong four different groups of the earliest coelenterates: (_a_) the gastræads, (_b_) the platodaria, (_c_) the sponges, and (_d_) the hydropolyps, the lowest form of cnidaria. The _gastraeads_ (or animals with a primitive gut) form a small group of the lowest coelenterates, which is of great importance as the common ancestral group of all the metazoa. The body of these little swimming animals looks like a tiny (generally oval) vesicle, which has a simple cavity with one opening--the primitive gut and the primitive mouth. The wall of the digestive cavity is formed of two simple layers of cells, or epithelium, the inner of which--the gut-layer--is responsible for the vegetal activity of nourishment, while the outer, or skin-layer, discharges the animal functions of movement and sensation. The homogeneous sensitive cells of the skin-layer bear long, slender hairs or lashes (_cilia_), by the vibration of which the swimming motion is effected. The few surviving forms of gastræads, the gastræmaria (_trichoplacidae_) and cyemaria (_orthonectidae_), are extremely interesting, from the fact that they remain throughout life at a stage of structure which is passed by all the other metazoa (from the sponge to man) at the commencement of their embryonic development. As I have shown in my _Theory of the Gastraea_ (1872), a very characteristic embryonic form, the _gastrula_, is immediately developed from the _blastula_ in all the tissue animals. The germinal membrane (blastoderm), which represents the wall of the hollow vesicle, forms a depression at one side, and this soon sinks in so deep that the inner cavity of the vesicle disappears. The half of the membrane which bends in is thus laid on, and inside, the other half; the latter forms the _skin-layer_, or outer germinal layer (ectoderm or epiblast), and the former becomes the _gut-layer_, or inner germinal layer (endoderm or hypoblast). The new cavity of the cup-shaped body is the digestive stomach cavity (the _progaste_), and its opening is the primitive mouth (or _prostoma_).[19] The skin-layer, or ectoderm, is the primitive psychic organ in the metazoa; from it, in all the nerve animals, not only the external skin and the organs of sense, but also the nervous system, are developed. In the gastræads, which have no nerves, all the cells which compose the simple epithelium of the ectoderm are equally organs of sensation and of movement; we have here the tissue-soul in its simplest form. The platodaria, the earliest and simplest form of the platodes, seem to be of the same primitive construction. Some of these cryptocoela--the _convoluta_, etc.--have no specific nervous system, while their nearest relatives, the turbellaria, have already differentiated one, and even developed a vertical brain. The _sponges_ form a peculiar group in the animal world, which differs widely in organization from all the other metazoa. The innumerable kinds of sponges grow, as a rule, at the bottom of the sea. The simplest form of sponge, the _olynthus_, is in reality nothing more than a _gastraea_, the body-wall of which is perforated like a sieve, with fine pores, in order to permit the entrance of the nourishing stream of water. In the majority of sponges--even in the most familiar one, the bath-sponge--the bulbous organism constructs a kind of stem or tree, which is made up of thousands of these gastræads, and permeated by a nutritive system of canals. Sensation and movement are only developed in the faintest degree in the sponges; they have no nerves, muscles, or organs of sense. It was therefore quite natural that such stationary, shapeless, insensitive animals should have been commonly taken to be plants in earlier years. Their psychic life--for which no special organs have been differentiated--is far inferior to that of the mimosa and other sensitive plants. _The soul of the cnidaria_ is of the utmost importance in comparative and phylogenetic psychology; for in this numerous group of the coelenterates the historical evolution of the _nerve-soul_ out of the _tissue-soul_ is repeated before our eyes. To this group belong the innumerable classes of stationary polyps and corals, and of swimming medusæ and siphonophora. As the common ancestor of all the cnidaria we can safely assign a very simple polyp, which is substantially the same in structure as the common, still surviving, fresh-water polyp--the hydra. Yet the hydræ, and the stationary, closely related _hydropolyps_, have no nerves or higher sense-organs, although they are extremely sensitive. On the other hand, the free-swimming medusæ, which are developed from them--and are still connected with them by alternation of generations--have an independent nervous system and specific sense-organs. Here, also, we may directly observe the ontogenetic evolution of the nerve-soul (_neuropsyche_) out of the tissue-soul (_histopsyche_), and thus learn its phylogenetic origin. This is the more interesting as such phenomena are _polyphyletic_--that is, they have occurred several times--more than once, at least--quite independently. As I have shown elsewhere, the hydromedusæ have arisen from the hydropolyps in a different manner from that of the evolution of the scyphomedusæ from the scyphopolyps; the gemmation is terminal in the case of the latter, and lateral with the former. In addition, both groups have characteristic hereditary differences in the more minute structure of their psychic organs. The class of siphonophora is also very interesting to the psychologist. In these pretty, free-swimming organisms, which come from the hydromedusæ we can observe a double soul: the _personal soul_ of the numerous individualities which compose them, and the common, harmoniously acting psyche of the entire colony. IV. _The nerve-soul_ (_neuropsyche_): fourth stage of phyletic psychogeny.--The psychic life of all the higher animals is conducted, as in man, by means of a more or less complicated "psychic apparatus." This apparatus is always composed of three chief sections: the _organs of sense_ are responsible for the various sensations; the _muscles_ effect the movements; the _nerves_ form the connection between the two by means of a special central organ, the brain or ganglion. The arrangement and action of this psychic mechanism have been frequently compared with those of a telegraphic system: the nerves are the wires, the brain the central, and the sense-organs subordinate stations. The motor nerves conduct the commands of the will centrifugally from the nerve-centre to the muscles, by the contraction of which they produce the movements: the sensitive nerves transmit the various sensations centripetally--that is, from the peripheral sense-organs to the brain, and thus render an account of the impressions they receive from the outer world. The ganglionic cells, or "psychic cells," which compose the central nervous organ, are the most perfect of all organic elements; they not only conduct the commerce between the muscles and the organs of sense, but they also effect the highest performances of the animal soul, the formation of ideas and thoughts, and especially consciousness. The great progress of anatomy, physiology, histology, and ontogeny has recently added a wealth of interesting discoveries to our knowledge of the mechanism of the soul. If speculative philosophy assimilated only the most important of these significant results of empirical biology, it would have a very different character from that it unfortunately presents. As I have not space for an exhaustive treatment of them here, I will confine myself to a relation of the chief facts. Each of the higher animal species has a characteristic psychic organ; the central nervous system of each has certain peculiarities of shape, position, and composition. The medusæ, among the radiating cnidaria, have a ring of nervous matter at the border of the fringe, generally provided with four or eight ganglia. The mouth of the five-rayed cnidarion is girt with a nerve-ring, from which proceed five branches. The bi-symmetrical _platodes_ and the _vermalia_ have a vertical brain, or acroganglion, composed of two dorsal ganglia, lying above the mouth; from these "upper ganglia" two branch nerves proceed to the skin and the muscles. In some of the vermalia and in the mollusca a pair of ventral "lower ganglia" are added, which are connected with the former by a ring round the gullet. This ring is found also in the _articulata_; but in these it is continued on the belly side of the long body as a ventral medulla, a double fibre like a rope-ladder, which expands into a double ganglion in each member. The vertebrates have an entirely different formation of the psychic organ; they have always a spinal medulla developed at the back of the body; and from an expansion of its fore part there arises subsequently the characteristic vesicular brain.[20] Although the psychic organs of the higher species of animals differ very materially in position, form, and composition, nevertheless comparative anatomy is in a position to prove a common origin for most of them--namely, from the vertical brain of the platodes and vermalia; they have all, moreover, had their origin in the outermost layer of the embryo, the _ectoderm_, or outer skin-layer. Hence we find the same typical structure in all varieties of the central nervous organ--a combination of ganglionic cells, or "psychic cells" (the real active elementary organs of the soul), and of nerve-fibres, which effect the connection and transmission of the action. The first fact we meet in the comparative psychology of the vertebrates, and which should be the empirical starting-point of all scientific human psychology, is the characteristic structure of the central nervous system. This central psychic organ has a particular position, shape, and texture in the vertebrate as it has in all the higher species. In every case we find a spinal medulla, a strong cylindrical nervous cord, which runs down the middle of the back, in the upper part of the vertebral column (or the cord which represents it). In every case a number of nerves branch off from this medulla in regular division, one pair to each segment or vertebra. In every case this medullary cord arises in the same way in the foetus; a fine groove appears in the middle axis of the skin at the back; then the parallel borders of this medullary groove are lifted up a little, bend over towards each other, and form into a kind of tube. The long dorsal cylindrical medullary tube which is thus formed is thoroughly characteristic of the vertebrates; it is always the same in the early embryonic sketch of the organism, and it is always the chief feature of the different kinds of psychic organ which evolve from it in time. Only one single group of invertebrates has a similar structure: the rare, marine _tunicata_, copelata, ascidia, and thalidiæ. These animals have other important peculiarities of structure (especially in the chorda and the gut) which show a striking divergence from the other invertebrates and resemblance to the vertebrates. The inference we draw is that both these groups, the vertebrates and the tunicates, have arisen from a common ancestral group of the vermalia, the _prochordonia_.[21] Still, there is a great difference between the two classes in the fact that the body of the tunicate does not articulate, or form members, and has a very simple organization (most of them subsequently attach themselves to the bottom of the sea and degenerate). The vertebrate, on the other hand, is characterized by an early development of internal members, and the formation of pro-vertebræ (_vertebratio_). This prepares the way for the much higher development of their organism, which finally attains perfection in man. This is easily seen in the finer structure of his spinal cord, and in the development of a number of segmental pairs of nerves, the spinal nerves, which proceed to the various parts of the body. The long ancestral history of our "vertebrate soul" commences with the formation of the most rudimentary spinal cord in the earliest acrania; slowly and gradually, through a period of many millions of years, it conducts to that marvellous structure of the human brain which seems to entitle the highest primate form to quite an exceptional position in nature. Since a clear conception of this slow and steady progress of our phyletic psychogeny is indispensable for a true psychology, we must divide that vast period into a number of stages or sections: in each of them the perfecting of the structure of the nervous centre has been accompanied by a corresponding evolution of its function, the _psyche_. I distinguish eight of these periods in the phylogeny of the spinal cord, which are characterized by eight different groups of vertebrates: (1) the acrania; (2) the cyclostomata; (3) the fishes; (4) the amphibia; (5) the implacental mammals (monotremes and marsupials); (6) the earlier placental mammals, especially the prosimiæ; (7) the younger primates, the simiæ; and (8) the anthropoid apes and man. I. First stage--the _acrania_: their only modern representative is the lancelot or amphioxus; the psychic organ remains a simple medullary tube, and contains a regularly segmented spinal cord, without brain. II. Second stage--the _cyclostomata_: the oldest group of the craniota, now only represented by the _petromyzontes_ and _myxinoides_: the fore-termination of the cord expands into a vesicle, which then subdivides into five successive parts--the great-brain, intermediate-brain, middle-brain, little-brain, and hind-brain: these five cerebral vesicles form the common type from which the brain of all craniota has evolved, from the lamprey to man. III. Third stage--the _primitive fishes_ (_selachii_): similar to the modern shark: in these oldest fishes, from which all the gnathostomata descend, the more pronounced division of the five cerebral vesicles sets in. IV. Fourth stage--the _amphibia_. These earliest land animals, making their first appearance in the Carboniferous period, represent the commencement of the characteristic structure of the _tetrapod_ and a corresponding development of the fish-brain: it advances still further in their Permian successors, the _reptiles_, the earliest representatives of which, the _tocosauria_, are the common ancestors of all the amniota (reptiles and birds on one side, mammals on the other). V.-VIII. Fifth to the eighth stages--the _mammals_. I have exhaustively treated, and illustrated with a number of plates, in my _Anthropogeny_, the evolution of our nervous system and the correlative question of the development of the soul. I have now, therefore, merely to refer the reader to that work. It only remains for me to add a few remarks on the last and most interesting class of facts pertaining to this--to the evolution of the soul and its organs within the limits of the class mammalia. In doing so, I must remind the reader that the _monophyletic origin_ of this class--that is, the descent of all the mammals from one common ancestral form (of the Triassic period)--is now fully established. The most important consequence of the monophyletic origin of the mammals is the necessity of deriving the human soul from a long evolutionary series of other mammal souls. A deep anatomical and physiological gulf separated the brain structure and the dependent psychic activity of the higher mammals from those of the lower: this gulf, however, is completely bridged over by a long series of intermediate stages. The period of at least fourteen (more than a hundred, on other estimates) million years, which has elapsed since the commencement of the Triassic period, is amply sufficient to allow even the greatest psychological advance. The following is a summary of the results of investigation in this quarter, which has recently been very penetrating: I. The brain of the mammal is differentiated from that of the other vertebrates by certain features, which are found in all branches of the class; especially by a preponderant development of the first and fourth vesicles, the cerebrum and cerebellum, while the third vesicle, the middle brain, disappears altogether. II. The brain development of the lowest and earliest mammals (the monotremes, marsupials, and prochoriates) is closely allied to that of their palæozoic ancestors, the Carboniferous amphibia (the _stegocephala_) and the Permian reptiles (the _tocosauria_). III. During the Tertiary period commences the typical development of the cerebrum, which distinguishes the younger mammals so strikingly from the older. IV. The special development (quantitatively and qualitatively) of the cerebrum which is so prominent a feature in man, and which is the root of his pre-eminent psychic achievements, is only found, outside humanity, in a small section of the most highly developed mammals of the earlier Tertiary epoch, especially in the anthropoid apes. V. The differences of brain structure and psychic faculty which separate man from the anthropoid ape are slighter than the corresponding interval between the anthropoid apes and the lower primates (the earliest simiæ and prosimiæ). VI. Consequently, the historical, gradual evolution of the human soul from a long chain of higher and lower mammal souls must, by application of the universally valid phyletic laws of the theory of descent, be regarded as a _fact_ which has been scientifically proved. CHAPTER X CONSCIOUSNESS Consciousness as a Natural Phenomenon--Its Definition--Difficulties of the Problem--Its Relation to the Life of the Soul--Our Human Consciousness--Various Theories: I. Anthropistic Theory (Descartes); II. Neurological Theory (Darwin); III. Animal Theory (Schopenhauer); IV. Biological Theory (Fechner); V. Cellular Theory (Fritz Schultze); VI. Atomistic Theory--Monistic and Dualistic Theories--Transcendental Character of Consciousness--The Ignorabimus Verdict of Du Bois-Reymond--Physiology of Consciousness--Discovery of the Organs of Thought by Flechsig--Pathology--Double and Intermittent Consciousness--Ontogeny of Consciousness: Modifications at Different Ages--Phylogeny of Consciousness--Formation of Concepts No phenomenon of the life of the soul is so wonderful and so variously interpreted as consciousness. The most contradictory views are current to-day, as they were two thousand years ago, not only with regard to the nature of this psychic function and its relation to the body, but even as to its diffusion in the organic world and its origin and development. It is more responsible than any other psychic faculty for the erroneous idea of an "immaterial soul" and the belief in "personal immortality"; many of the gravest errors that still dominate even our modern civilization may be traced to it. Hence it is that I have entitled consciousness "the central mystery of psychology"; it is the strong citadel of all mystic and dualistic errors, before whose ramparts the best-equipped efforts of reason threaten to miscarry. This fact would suffice of itself to induce us to make a special critical study of consciousness from our monistic point of view. We shall see that consciousness is simply a natural phenomenon like any other psychic quality, and that it is subject to the law of substance like all other natural phenomena. Even as to the elementary idea of consciousness, its contents and extension, the views of the most distinguished philosophers and scientists are widely divergent. Perhaps the meaning of consciousness is best conceived as an _internal perception_, and compared with the action of _a mirror_. As its two chief departments we distinguish objective and subjective consciousness--consciousness of the world, the non-ego, and of the ego. By far the greater part of our conscious activity, as Schopenhauer justly remarked, belongs to the consciousness of the outer world, or the non-ego: this _world-consciousness_ embraces all possible phenomena of the outer world which are in any sense accessible to our minds. Much more contracted is the sphere of _self-consciousness_, the internal mirror of all our own psychic activity, all our presentations, sensations, and volitions. Many distinguished thinkers, especially on the physiological side (Wundt and Ziehen, for instance) take the ideas of consciousness and psychic function to be identical--"all psychic action is conscious"; the province of psychic life, they say, is coextensive with that of consciousness. In our opinion, such a definition gives an undue extension to the meaning of consciousness, and occasions many errors and misunderstandings. We share, rather, the view of other philosophers (Romanes, Fritz Schultze, and Paulsen), that even our unconscious presentations, sensations, and volitions pertain to our psychic life; indeed, the province of these unconscious psychic actions (reflex action, and so forth) is far more extensive than that of consciousness. Moreover, the two provinces are intimately connected, and are separated by no sharp line of demarcation. An unconscious presentation may become conscious at any moment; let our attention be withdrawn from it by some other object, and forthwith it disappears from consciousness once more. The only source of our knowledge of consciousness is that faculty itself; that is the chief cause of the extraordinary difficulty of subjecting it to scientific research. Subject and object are one and the same in it: the perceptive subject mirrors itself in its own inner nature, which is to be the object of our inquiry. Thus we can never have a complete objective certainty of the consciousness of others; we can only proceed by a comparison of their psychic condition with our own. As long as this comparison is restricted to _normal_ people we are justified in drawing certain conclusions as to their consciousness, the validity of which is unchallenged. But when we pass on to consider _abnormal_ individuals (the genius, the eccentric, the stupid, or the insane) our conclusions from analogy are either unsafe or entirely erroneous. The same must be said with even greater truth when we attempt to compare human consciousness with that of the animals (even the higher, but especially the lower). In that case such grave difficulties arise that the views of physiologists and philosophers diverge as widely as the poles on the subject. We shall briefly enumerate the most important of these views. I. _The anthropistic theory of consciousness._--It is peculiar to man. To Descartes we must trace the widespread notion that consciousness and thought are man's exclusive prerogative, and that he alone is blessed with an "immortal soul." This famous French philosopher and mathematician (educated in a Jesuit College) established a rigid partition between the psychic activity of man and that of the brute. In his opinion the human soul, a thinking, immaterial being, is completely separated from the body, which is extended and material. Yet it is united to the body at a certain point in the brain (the _glandula pinealis_) for the purpose of receiving impressions from the outer world and effecting muscular movements. The animals, not being endowed with thought, have no soul: they are mere automata, or cleverly constructed machines, whose sensations, presentations, and volitions are purely mechanical, and take place according to the ordinary laws of physics. Hence Descartes was a _dualist_ in human psychology, and a _monist_ in the psychology of the brute. This open contradiction in so clear and acute a thinker is very striking; in explaining it, it is not unnatural to suppose that he concealed his real opinion, and left the discovery of it to independent scholars. As a pupil of the Jesuits, Descartes had been taught to deny the truth in the face of his better insight; and perhaps he dreaded the power and the fires of the Church. Besides, his sceptical principle, that every sincere effort to attain the truth must start with a doubt of the traditional dogma had already drawn upon him fanatical accusations of scepticism and atheism. The great influence which Descartes had on subsequent philosophy was very remarkable, and entirely in harmony with his "book-keeping by double entry." The _materialists_ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries appealed to the Cartesian theory of the animal soul and its purely mechanical activity in support of their monistic psychology. The _spiritualists_, on the other hand, asserted that their dogma of the immortality of the soul and its independence of the body was firmly established by Descartes' theory of the human soul. This view is still prevalent in the camp of the theologians and dualistic metaphysicians. The scientific conception of nature, however, which has been built up in the nineteenth century, has, with the aid of empirical progress, in physiological and comparative psychology, completely falsified it. II. _Neurological theory of consciousness._--It is present only in man and those higher animals which have a centralized nervous system and organs of sense. The conviction that a large number of animals--at least the higher mammals--are not less endowed than man with a thinking soul and consciousness prevails in modern zoology, exact physiology, and the monistic psychology. The immense progress we have made in the various branches of biology has contributed to bring about a recognition of this important truth. We confine ourselves for the present to the higher vertebrates, and especially the mammals. That these most intelligent specimens of these highly developed vertebrates--apes and dogs, in particular--have a strong resemblance to man in their whole psychic life has been recognized and speculated on for thousands of years. Their faculty of presentation and sensation, of feeling and desire, is so like that of man that we need adduce no proof of our thesis. But even the higher associational activity of the brain, the formation of judgments and their connection into chains of reasoning, thought, and consciousness in the narrower sense, are developed in them after the same fashion as in man: they differ only in degree, not in kind. Moreover, we learn from comparative anatomy and histology that the intricate structure of the brain (both in general and in detail) is substantially the same in the mammals as it is in man. The same lesson is enforced by comparative ontogeny with regard to the origin of these psychic organs. Comparative physiology teaches us that the various states of consciousness are just the same in these highest placentals as in man; and we learn by experiment that there is the same reaction to external stimuli. The higher animals can be narcotized by alcohol, chloroform, ether, etc., and may be hypnotized by the usual methods, just as in the case of man. It is, however, impossible to determine mathematically at what stage of animal life consciousness is to be first recognized as such. Some zoologists draw the line very high in the scale, others very low. Darwin, who most accurately distinguishes the various stages of consciousness, intelligence, and emotion in the higher animals, and explains them by progressive evolution, points out how difficult, or even impossible, it is to determine the first beginning of this supreme psychic faculty in the lower animals. Personally, out of the many contradictory theories, I take that to be most probable which holds _the centralization of the nervous system_ to be a condition of consciousness; and that is wanting in the lower classes of animals. The presence of a central nervous organ, of highly developed sense-organs, and an elaborate association of groups of presentations, seem to me to be required before the unity of consciousness is possible. III. _Animal theory of consciousness._--All animals, and they alone, have consciousness. This theory would draw a sharp distinction between the psychic life of the animal and of the plant. Such a distinction was urged by many of the older writers, and was clearly formulated by Linné in his celebrated _Systema Naturae_; the two great kingdoms of the organic world are, in his opinion, divided by the fact that animals have sensation and consciousness, and the plants are devoid of them. Later on Schopenhauer laid stress on the same distinction: "Consciousness is only known to us as a feature of animal nature. Even though it extend upwards through the whole animal kingdom, even to man and his reason, the unconsciousness of the plant, from which it started, remains as the basic feature. In the lowest animals we have but the dawn of it." The inaccuracy of this view was obvious by about the middle of the present century, when a deeper study was made of the psychic activity of the lower animal forms, especially the coelenterates (sponges and cnidaria): they are undoubtedly animals, yet there is no more trace of a definite consciousness in them than in most of the plants. The distinction between the two kingdoms was still further obliterated when more careful research was made into their unicellular forms. There is no psychological difference between the plasmophagous protozoa and the plasmodomous protophyta, even in respect of their consciousness. IV. _Biological theory of consciousness._--It is found in all organisms, animal or vegetal, but not in lifeless bodies (such as crystals). This opinion is usually associated with the idea that all organisms (as distinguished from inorganic substances) have souls: the three ideas--life, soul, and consciousness--are then taken to be coextensive. Another modification of this view holds that, though these fundamental phenomena of organic life are inseparably connected, yet consciousness is only a part of the activity of the soul, and of the vital activity. Fechner, in particular, has endeavored to prove that the plant has a "soul," in the same sense as an animal is said to have one; and many credit the vegetal soul with a consciousness similar to that of the animal soul. In truth, the remarkable stimulated movements of the leaves of the sensitive plants (the mimosa, drosera, and dionæa), the automatic movements of other plants (the clover and wood-sorrel, and especially the hedysarum), the movements of the "sleeping plants" (particularly the _papilionacea_), etc., are strikingly similar to the movements of the lower animal forms: whoever ascribes consciousness to the latter cannot refuse it to such vegetal forms. V. _Cellular theory of consciousness._--It is a vital property of every cell. The application of the cellular theory to every branch of biology involved its extension to psychology. Just as we take the living cell to be the "elementary organism" in anatomy and physiology, and derive the whole system of the multicellular animal or plant from it, so, with equal right, we may consider the "cell-soul" to be the psychological unit, and the complex psychic activity of the higher organism to be the result of the combination of the psychic activity of the cells which compose it. I gave the outlines of this _cellular psychology_ in my _General Morphology_ in 1866, and entered more fully into the subject in my paper on "Cell-Souls and Soul-Cells." I was led to a deeper study of this "elementary psychology" by my protracted research into the unicellular forms of life. Many of these tiny (generally microscopic) protists show similar expressions of sensation and will, and similar instincts and movements, to those of higher animals; that is especially true of the very sensitive and lively infusoria. In the relation of these sensitive cell-organisms to their environment, and in many other of their vital expressions (for instance, in the wonderful architecture of the rhizopods, the thalamophoræ, and the infusoria), we seemed to have clear indications of conscious psychic action. If, then, we accept the biological theory of consciousness (No. IV.), and credit every psychic function with a share of that faculty, we shall be compelled to ascribe it to each independent protist cell. In that case its material basis would be either the entire protoplasm of the cell, or its nucleus, or a portion of it. In the "psychade theory" of Fritz Schultze the elementary consciousness of the _psychade_ would have the same relation to the individual cells as personal consciousness has to the multicellular organism of the personality in the higher animals and man. It is impossible definitively to disprove this theory, which I held at one time. Still, I now feel compelled to agree with Max Verworn, in his belief that none of the protists have a developed self-consciousness, but that their sensations and movements are of an unconscious character. VI. _Atomistic theory of consciousness._--It is an elementary property of all atoms. This atomistic hypothesis goes furthest of all the different views as to the extension of consciousness. It certainly escapes the difficulty which so many philosophers and biologists experience in solving the problem of the first origin of consciousness. It is a phenomenon of so peculiar a character that a derivation of it from other psychic functions seems extremely hazardous. It seemed, therefore, the easiest way out of the difficulty to conceive it as an inherent property of all matter, like gravitation or chemical affinity. On that hypothesis there would be as many forms of this original consciousness as there are chemical elements; each atom of hydrogen would have its hydrogenic consciousness, each atom of carbon its carbonic consciousness, and so forth. There are philosophers, even, who ascribe consciousness to the four elements of Empedocles, the union of which, by "love and hate," produces the totality of things. Personally, I have never subscribed to this hypothesis of atomic consciousness. I emphasize the point because Emil du Bois-Reymond has attributed it to me. In the controversy I had with him (1880) he violently attacked my "pernicious and false philosophy," and contended that I had, in my paper on "The Perigenesis of the Plastidule," "laid it down as a metaphysical axiom that every atom has its individual consciousness." On the contrary, I explicitly stated that I conceive the elementary psychic qualities of sensation and will, which may be attributed to atoms, to be _unconscious_--just as unconscious as the elementary memory which I, in company with that distinguished physiologist, Ewald Hering, consider to be "a common function of all organized matter"--or, more correctly, "living substance." Du Bois-Reymond curiously confuses "soul" and "consciousness"; whether from oversight or not I cannot say. Since he considers consciousness to be a transcendental phenomenon (as we shall see presently), while denying that character to other psychic functions--the action of the senses, for example--I must infer that he recognizes the difference of the two ideas. Other parts of his eloquent speeches contain quite the opposite view, for the famous orator not infrequently contradicts himself on important questions of principle. However, I repeat that, in my opinion, consciousness is only _part_ of the psychic phenomena which we find in man and the higher animals; the great majority of them are unconscious. However divergent are the different views as to the nature and origin of consciousness, they may, nevertheless, on a clear and logical examination, all be reduced to two fundamental theories--the transcendental (or dualistic) and the physiological (or monistic). I have myself always held the latter view, in the light of my evolutionary principles, and it is now shared by a great number of distinguished scientists, though it is by no means generally accepted. The transcendental theory is the older and much more common; it has recently come once more into prominence, principally through Du Bois-Reymond, and it has acquired a great importance in modern discussions of cosmic problems through his famous "Ignorabimus speech." On account of the extreme importance of this fundamental question we must touch briefly on its main features. In the celebrated discourse on "The Limits of Natural Science," which E. du Bois-Reymond gave on August 14, 1872, at the Scientific Congress at Leipzig, he spoke of two "absolute limits" to our possible knowledge of nature which the human mind will never transcend in its most advanced science--_never_, as the oft-quoted termination of the address, "Ignorabimus," emphatically pronounces. The first absolutely insoluble "world-enigma" is the "connection of matter and force," and the distinctive character of these fundamental natural phenomena; we shall go more fully into this "problem of substance" in the twelfth chapter. The second insuperable difficulty of philosophy is given as the problem of consciousness--the question how our mental activity is to be explained by material conditions, especially movements, how "substance [the substance which underlies matter and force] comes, under certain conditions, to feel, to desire, and to think." For brevity, and in order to give a characteristic name to the Leipzig discourse, I have called it the "Ignorabimus speech"; this is the more permissible, as E. du Bois-Reymond himself, with a just pride, eight years afterwards, speaking of the extraordinary consequences of his discourse, said: "Criticism sounded every possible note, from friendly praise to the severest censure, and the word 'Ignorabimus,' which was the culmination of my inquiry, was at once transformed into a kind of scientific shibboleth." It is quite true that loud praise and approbation resounded in the halls of the dualistic and spiritualistic philosophy, and especially in the camp of the "Church militant"; even the spiritists and the host of believers, who thought the immortality of their precious souls was saved by the "Ignorabimus," joined in the chorus. The "severest censure" came at first only from a few scientists and philosophers--from the few who had sufficient scientific knowledge and moral courage to oppose the dogmatism of the all-powerful secretary and dictator of the Berlin Academy of Science. Towards the end, however, the author of the "Ignorabimus speech" briefly alluded to the question whether these two great "world-enigmas," the general problem of substance and the special problem of consciousness, are not two aspects of one and the same problem. "This idea," he said, "is certainly the simplest, and preferable to the one which makes the world doubly incomprehensible. Such, however, is the nature of things that even here we can obtain no clear knowledge, and it is useless to speak further of the question." The latter sentiment I have always stoutly contested, and have endeavored to prove that the two great questions are not two distinct problems. "The neurological problem of consciousness is but a particular aspect of the all-pervading cosmological problem of substance." The peculiar phenomenon of consciousness is not, as Du Bois-Reymond and the dualistic school would have us believe, a completely "transcendental" problem; it is, as I showed thirty-three years ago, a _physiological_ problem, and, as such, must be reduced to the phenomena of physics and chemistry. I subsequently gave it the more definite title of a _neurological_ problem, as I share the view that true consciousness (thought and reason) is only present in those higher animals which have a centralized nervous system and organs of sense of a certain degree of development. Those conditions are certainly found in the higher vertebrates, especially in the placental mammals, the class from which man has sprung. The consciousness of the highest apes, dogs, elephants, etc., differs from that of man in degree only, not in kind, and the graduated interval between the consciousness of these "rational" placentals and that of the lowest races of men (the Veddahs, etc.) is less than the corresponding interval between these uncivilized races and the highest specimens of thoughtful humanity (Spinoza, Goethe, Lamarck, Darwin, etc.). Consciousness is but a part of the higher activity of the soul, and as such it is dependent on the normal structure of the corresponding psychic organ, the brain. Physiological observation and experiment determined twenty years ago that the particular portion of the mammal-brain which we call the _seat_ (preferably the _organ_) of consciousness is a part of the cerebrum, an area in the late-developed gray bed, or cortex, which is evolved out of the convex dorsal portion of the primary cerebral vesicle, the "fore-brain." Now, the morphological proof of this physiological thesis has been successfully given by the remarkable progress of the microscopic anatomy of the brain, which we owe to the perfect methods of research of modern science (Kölliker, Flechsig, Golgi, Edinger, Weigert, and others). The most important development is the discovery of the _organs of thought_ by Paul Flechsig, of Leipzig; he proved that in the gray bed of the brain are found the four seats of the central sense-organs, or four "inner spheres of sensation"--the sphere of touch in the vertical lobe, the sphere of smell in the frontal lobe, the sphere of sight in the occipital lobe, and the sphere of hearing in the temporal lobe. Between these four "sense-centres" lie the four great "thought-centres," or centres of association, the _real organs of mental life_; they are those highest instruments of psychic activity that produce thought and consciousness. In front we have the frontal brain or centre of association; behind, on top there is the vertical brain, or parietal centre of association, and underneath the principal brain, or "the great occipito-temporal centre of association" (the most important of all); lower down, and internally, the insular brain or the insula of Reil, the insular centre of association. These four "thought-centres," distinguished from the intermediate "sense-centres" by a peculiar and elaborate nerve-structure, are the true and sole organs of thought and consciousness. Flechsig has recently pointed out that, in the case of man, very specific structures are found in one part of them; these structures are wanting in the other mammals, and they, therefore, afford an explanation of the superiority of man's mental powers. The momentous announcement of modern physiology, that the cerebrum is the organ of consciousness and mental action in man and the higher mammals, is illustrated and confirmed by the pathological study of its diseases. When parts of the cortex are destroyed by disease their respective functions are affected, and thus we are enabled, to some extent, to localize the activities of the brain; when certain parts of the area are diseased, that portion of thought and consciousness disappears which depends on those particular sections. Pathological experiment yields the same result; the decay of some known area (for instance, the centre of speech) extinguishes its function (speech). In fact, there is proof enough in the most familiar phenomena of consciousness of their complete dependence on chemical changes in the substance of the brain. Many beverages (such as coffee and tea) stimulate our powers of thought; others (such as wine and beer) intensify feeling; musk and camphor reanimate the fainting consciousness; ether and chloroform deaden it, and so forth. How would that be possible if consciousness were an immaterial entity, independent of these anatomical organs? And what becomes of the consciousness of the "immortal soul" when it no longer has the use of these organs? These and other familiar facts prove that man's consciousness--and that of the nearest mammals--is _changeable_, and that its activity is always open to modification from inner (alimentation, circulation, etc.) and outer causes (lesion of the brain, stimulation, etc.). Very instructive, too, are the facts of double and intermittent consciousness, which remind us of "alternate generations of presentations." The same individual has an entirely different consciousness on different days, with a change of circumstances; he does not know to-day what he did yesterday: yesterday he could say, "I am I"; to-day he must say, "I am another being." Such intermittence of consciousness may last not only days, but months, and even years; the change may even become permanent. As everybody knows, the new-born infant has no consciousness. Preyer has shown that it is only developed after the child has begun to speak; for a long time it speaks of itself in the third person. In the important moment when it first pronounces the word "I," when the feeling of self becomes clear, we have the beginning of self-consciousness, and of the antithesis to the non-ego. The rapid and solid progress in knowledge which the child makes in its first ten years, under the care of parents and teachers, and the slower progress of the second decade, until it reaches complete maturity of mind, are intimately connected with a great advancement in the growth and development of consciousness and of its organ, the brain. But even when the pupil has got his "certificate of maturity" his consciousness is still far from mature; it is then that his "world-consciousness" first begins to develop, in his manifold relations with the outer world. Then, in the third decade, we have the full maturity of rational thought and consciousness, which, in cases of normal development, yield their ripe fruits during the next three decades. The slow, gradual degeneration of the higher mental powers, which characterizes senility, usually sets in at the commencement of the seventh decade--sometimes earlier, sometimes later. Memory, receptiveness, and interest in particular objects gradually decay; though productivity, mature consciousness, and philosophic interest in general truths often remain for many years longer. The individual development of consciousness in earlier youth proves the universal validity of the _biogenetic law_; and, indeed, it is still recognizable in many ways during the later years. In any case, the ontogenesis of consciousness makes it perfectly clear that it is not an "immaterial entity," but a physiological function of the brain, and that it is, consequently, no exception to the general law of substance. From the fact that consciousness, like all other psychic functions, is dependent on the normal development of certain organs, and that it gradually unfolds in the child in proportion to the development of those organs, we may already conclude that it has arisen in the animal kingdom by a gradual historical development. Still, however certain we are of the fact of this natural evolution of consciousness, we are, unfortunately, not yet in a position to enter more deeply into the question and construct special hypotheses in elucidation of it. Palæontology, it is true, gives us a few facts which are not without significance. For instance, the quantitative and qualitative development of the brain of the placental mammals during the Tertiary period is very remarkable. The cavity of many of the fossil skulls of the period has been carefully examined, and has given us a good deal of reliable information as to the size, and, to some extent, as to the structure, of the brain they enclosed. We find, within the limits of one and the same group (the ungulates, the rodents, or the primates), a marked advance in the later miocene and pliocene specimens as compared with the earlier eocene and oligocene representatives of the same stem; in the former the brain (in proportion to the size of the organism) is six to eight times as large as in the latter. Moreover, that highest stage of consciousness, which is reached by man alone, has been evolved step by step--even by the very progress of civilization--from a lower condition, as we find illustrated to-day in the case of uncivilized races. That is easily proved by a comparison of their languages, which is closely connected with the comparison of their ideas. The higher the conceptual faculty advances in thoughtful civilized man, the more qualified he is to detect common features amid a multitude of details, and embody them in general concepts, and so much the clearer and deeper does his consciousness become. CHAPTER XI THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL The Citadel of Superstition--Athanatism and Thanatism--Individual Character of Death--Immortality of the Unicellular Organisms (Protists)--Cosmic and Personal Immortality--Primary Thanatism (of Uncivilized Peoples)--Secondary Thanatism (of Ancient and Recent Philosophers)--Athanatism and Religion--Origin of the Belief in Immortality--Christian Athanatism--Eternal Life--The Day of Judgment--Metaphysical Athanatism--Substance of the Soul--Ether Souls and Air Souls; Fluid Souls and Solid Souls--Immortality of the Animal Soul--Arguments for and Against Athanatism--Athanatist Illusions When we turn from the genetic study of the soul to the great question of its immortality, we come to that highest point of superstition which is regarded as the impregnable citadel of all mystical and dualistic notions. For in this crucial question, more than in any other problem, philosophic thought is complicated by the selfish interest of the human personality, who is determined to have a guarantee of his existence beyond the grave at any price. This "higher necessity of feeling" is so powerful that it sweeps aside all the logical arguments of critical reason. Consciously or unconsciously, most men are influenced in all their general views, and, therefore, in their theory of life, by the dogma of personal immortality; and to this theoretical error must be added practical consequences of the most far-reaching character. It is our task, therefore, to submit every aspect of this important dogma to a critical examination, and to prove its untenability in the light of the empirical data of modern biology. In order to have a short and convenient expression for the two opposed opinions on the question, we shall call the belief in man's personal immortality "athanatism" (from _athanes_ or _athanatos_ == immortal). On the other hand, we give the name of "thanatism" (from _thanatos_ == death) to the opinion which holds that at a man's death not only all the other physiological functions are arrested, but his "soul" also disappears--that is, that sum of cerebral functions which psychic dualism regards as a peculiar entity, independent of the other vital processes in the living body. In approaching this physiological problem of death we must point out the _individual_ character of this organic phenomenon. By death we understand simply the definitive cessation of the vital activity of the _individual_ organism, no matter to which category or stage of individuality the organism in question belongs. Man is dead when his own personality ceases to exist, whether he has left offspring that they may continue to propagate for many generations or not. In a certain sense we often say that the minds of great men (in a dynasty of eminent rulers, for instance, or a family of talented artists) live for many generations; and in the same way we speak of the "soul" of a noble woman living in her children and children's children. But in these cases we are dealing with intricate phenomena of _heredity_, in which a microscopic cell (the sperm-cell of the father or the egg-cell of the mother) transmits certain features to offspring. The particular personalities who produce those sexual cells in thousands are mortal beings, and at their death their personal psychic activity is extinguished like every other physiological function. A number of eminent zoologists--Weismann being particularly prominent--have recently defended the opinion that only the lowest unicellular organisms, the protists, are immortal, in contradistinction to the multicellular plants and animals, whose bodies are formed of tissues. This curious theory is especially based on the fact that most of the protists multiply without sexual means, by division or the formation of spores. In such processes the whole body of the unicellular organism breaks up into two or more equal parts (daughter cells), and each of these portions completes itself by further growth until it has the size and form of the mother cell. However, by the very process of division the _individuality_ of the unicellular creature has been destroyed; both its physiological and its morphological unity have gone. The view of Weismann is logically inconsistent with the very notion of _individual_--an "indivisible" entity; for it implies a unity which cannot be divided without destroying its nature. In this sense the unicellular protophyta and protozoa are throughout life _physiological individuals_, just as much as the multicellular tissue-plants and animals. A sexual propagation by simple division is found in many of the multicellular species (for instance, in many cnidaria, corals, medusæ, etc.); the mother animal, the division of which gives birth to the two daughter animals, ceases to exist with the segmentation. "The protozoa," says Weismann, "have no individuals and no generations in the metazoic sense." I must entirely dissent from his thesis. As I was the first to introduce the title of _metazoa_, and oppose these multicellular, tissue-forming animals to the unicellular _protozoa_ (infusoria, rhizopods, etc.), and as I was the first to point out the essential difference in the development of the two (the former from germinal layers, and the latter not), I must protest that I consider the _protozoa_ to be just as mortal in the physiological (and psychological) sense as the _metazoa_; neither body nor soul is immortal in either group. The other erroneous consequences of Weismann's notion have been refuted by Moebius (1884), who justly remarks that "every event in the world is periodic," and that "there is no source from which immortal organic individuals might have sprung." When we take the idea of immortality in the widest sense, and extend it to the totality of the knowable universe, it has a scientific significance; it is then not merely acceptable, but self-evident, to the monistic philosopher. In that sense the thesis of the indestructibility and eternal duration of all that exists is equivalent to our supreme law of nature, the _law of substance_ (see chap. xii). As we intend to discuss this immortality of the cosmos fully later on, in establishing the theory of the persistence of matter and force, we shall not dilate on it at present. We pass on immediately to the criticism of that belief in immortality which is the only sense usually attached to the word, the immortality of the individual soul. We shall first inquire into the extent and the origin of this mystic and dualistic notion, and point out, in particular, the wide acceptance of the contradictory thesis, our monistic, empirically established _thanatism_. I must distinguish two essentially different forms of thanatism--primary and secondary; primary thanatism is the original absence of the dogma of immortality (in the primitive uncivilized races); secondary thanatism is the later outcome of a rational knowledge of nature in the civilized intelligence. We still find it asserted in philosophic, and especially in theological, works that belief in the personal immortality of the human soul was originally shared by all men--or, at least, by all "rational" men. That is not the case. This dogma is not an original idea of the human mind, nor has it ever found universal acceptance. It has been absolutely proved by modern comparative ethnology that many uncivilized races of the earliest and most primitive stage had no notion either of immortality or of God. That is true, for instance, of the Veddahs of Ceylon, those primitive pygmies whom, on the authority of the able studies of the Sarasins, we consider to be a relic of the earliest inhabitants of India;[22] it is also the case in several of the earliest groups of the nearly related Dravidas, the Indian Seelongs, and some native Australian races. Similarly, several of the primitive branches of the American race, in the interior of Brazil, on the upper Amazon, etc., have no knowledge either of gods or immortality. This _primary_ absence of belief in immortality and deity is an extremely important fact; it is, obviously, easy to distinguish from the _secondary_ absence of such belief, which has come about in the highest civilized races as the result of laborious critico-philosophical study. Differently from the primary thanatism which originally characterized primitive man, and has always been widely spread, the _secondary_ absence of belief in immortality is only found at a late stage of history: it is the ripe fruit of profound reflection on life and death, the outcome of bold and independent philosophical speculation. We first meet it in some of the Ionic philosophers of the sixth century B.C., then in the founders of the old materialistic philosophy, Democritus and Empedocles, and also in Simonides and Epicurus, Seneca and Plinius, and in an elaborate form in Lucretius Carus. With the spread of Christianity at the decay of classical antiquity, athanatism, one of its chief articles of faith, dominated the world, and so, amid other forms of superstition, the myth of personal immortality came to be invested with a high importance. Naturally, through the long night of the Dark Ages it was rarely that a brave free-thinker ventured to express an opinion to the contrary: the examples of Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and other independent philosophers, effectually destroyed all freedom of utterance. Heresy only became possible when the Reformation and the Renaissance had broken the power of the papacy. The history of modern philosophy tells of the manifold methods by which the matured mind of man sought to rid itself of the superstition of immortality. Still, the intimate connection of the belief with the Christian dogma invested it with such power, even in the more emancipated sphere of Protestantism, that the majority of convinced free-thinkers kept their sentiments to themselves. From time to time some distinguished scholar ventured to make a frank declaration of his belief in the impossibility of the continued life of the soul after death. This was done in France in the second half of the eighteenth century by Voltaire, Danton, Mirabeau, and others, and by the leaders of the materialistic school of those days, Holbach, Lamettrie, etc. The same opinion was defended by the able friend of the Materialists, the greatest of the Hohenzollerns, the monistic "philosopher of Sans-souci." What would Frederick the Great, the "crowned thanatist and atheist," say, could he compare his monistic views with those of his successor of to-day? Among thoughtful physicians the conviction that the existence of the soul came to an end at death has been common for centuries: generally, however, they refrained from giving it expression. Moreover, the empirical science of the brain remained so imperfect during the last century that the soul could continue to be regarded as its mysterious inhabitant. It was the gigantic progress of biology in the present century, and especially in the latter half of the century, that finally destroyed the myth. The establishment of the theory of descent and the cellular theory, the astounding discoveries of ontogeny and experimental physiology--above all, the marvellous progress of the microscopic anatomy of the brain, gradually deprived athanatism of every basis; now, indeed, it is rarely that an informed and honorable biologist is found to defend the immortality of the soul. All the monistic philosophers of the century (Strauss, Feuerbach, Büchner, Spencer, etc.) are thanatists. The dogma of personal immortality owes its great popularity and its high importance to its intimate connection with the teaching of Christianity. This circumstance gave rise to the erroneous and still prevalent belief that the myth is a fundamental element of all the higher religions. That is by no means the case. The higher Oriental religions include no belief whatever in the immortality of the soul; it is not found in Buddhism, the religion that dominates thirty per cent. of the entire human race; it is not found in the ancient popular religion of the Chinese, nor in the reformed religion of Confucius which succeeded it; and, what is still more significant, it is not found in the earlier and purer religion of the Jews. Neither in the "five Mosaic books," nor in any of the writings of the Old Testament which were written before the Babylonian Exile, is there any trace of the notion of individual persistence after death. The mystic notion that the human soul will live forever after death has had a polyphyletic origin. It was unknown to the earliest speaking man (the hypothetical _homo primigenius_ of Asia), to his predecessors, of course, the _pithecanthropus_ and _prothylobates_, and to the least developed of his modern successors, the Veddahs of Ceylon, the Seelongs of India, and other distant races. With the development of reason and deeper reflection on life and death, sleep and dreams, mystic ideas of a dualistic composition of our nature were evolved--independently of each other--in a number of the earlier races. Very different influences were at work in these polyphyletic creations--worship of ancestors, love of relatives, love of life and desire of its prolongation, hope of better conditions of life beyond the grave, hope of the reward of good and punishment of evil deeds, and so forth. Comparative psychology has recently brought to our knowledge a great variety of myths and legends of that character; they are, for the most part, closely associated with the oldest forms of theistic and religious belief. In most of the modern religions athanatism is intimately connected with theism; the majority of believers transfer their materialistic idea of a "personal God" to their "immortal soul." That is particularly true of the dominant religion of modern civilized states, Christianity. As everybody knows, the dogma of the immortality of the soul has long since assumed in the Christian religion that rigid form which it has in the articles of faith: "I believe in the resurrection of the body and in an eternal life." Man will arise on "the last day," as Christ is alleged to have done on Easter morn, and receive a reward according to the tenor of his earthly life. This typically Christian idea is thoroughly materialistic and anthropomorphic; it is very little superior to the corresponding crude legends of uncivilized peoples. The impossibility of "the resurrection of the body" is clear to every man who has some knowledge of anatomy and physiology. The resurrection of Christ, which is celebrated every Easter by millions of Christians, is as purely mythical as "the awakening of the dead," which he is alleged to have taught. These mystic articles of faith are just as untenable in the light of pure reason as the cognate hypothesis of "eternal life." The fantastic notions which the Christian Church disseminates as to the eternal life of the immortal soul after the dissolution of the body are just as materialistic as the dogma of "the resurrection of the body." In his interesting work on _Religion in the Light of the Darwinian Theory_, Savage justly remarks: "It is one of the standing charges of the Church against science that it is materialistic. I must say, in passing, that the whole ecclesiastical doctrine of a future life has always been, and still is, materialism of the purest type. It teaches that the material body shall rise, and dwell in a material heaven." To prove this one has only to read impartially some of the sermons and ornate discourses in which the glory of the future life is extolled as the highest good of the Christian, and belief in it is laid down to be the foundation of morality. According to them, all the joys of the most advanced modern civilization await the pious believer in Paradise, while the "All-loving Father" reserves his eternal fires for the godless materialist. In opposition to the materialist athanatism, which is dominant in the Christian and Mohammedan Churches, we have, apparently, a purer and higher form of faith in the _metaphysical athanatism_, as taught by most of our dualist and spiritualist philosophers. Plato must be considered its chief creator: in the fourth century before Christ he taught that complete dualism of body and soul which afterwards became one of the most important, theoretically, and one of the most influential, practically, of the Christian articles of faith. The body is mortal, material, physical; the soul is immortal, immaterial, metaphysical. They are only temporarily associated, for the course of the individual life. As Plato postulated an eternal life before as well as after this temporary association, he must be classed as an adherent of "metempsychosis," or transmigration of souls; the soul existed as such, or as an "eternal idea," before it entered into a human body. When it quits one body it seeks such other as is most suited to its character for its habitation. The souls of bloody tyrants pass into the bodies of wolves and vultures, those of virtuous toilers migrate into the bodies of bees and ants, and so forth. The childish naïvety of this Platonic morality is obvious; on closer examination his views are found to be absolutely incompatible with the scientific truth which we owe to modern anatomy, physiology, histology, and ontogeny; we mention them only because, in spite of their absurdity, they have had a profound influence on thought and culture. On the one hand, the mysticism of the Neo-Platonists, which penetrated into Christianity, attaches itself to the psychology of Plato; on the other hand, it became subsequently one of the chief supports of spiritualistic and idealistic philosophy. The Platonic "idea" gave way in time to the notion of psychic "substance"; this is just as incomprehensible and metaphysical, though it often assumed a physical appearance. The conception of the soul as a "substance" is far from clear in many psychologists; sometimes it is regarded as an "immaterial" entity of a peculiar character in an abstract and idealistic sense, sometimes in a concrete and realistic sense, and sometimes as a confused _tertium quid_ between the two. If we adhere to the monistic idea of substance, which we develop in chap. xii., and which takes it to be the simplest element of our whole world-system, we find _energy_ and _matter_ inseparably associated in it. We must, therefore, distinguish in the "substance of the soul" the characteristic psychic _energy_ which is all we perceive (sensation, presentation, volition, etc.), and the psychic _matter_, which is the inseparable basis of its activity--that is, the living protoplasm. Thus, in the higher animals the "matter" of the soul is a part of the nervous system; in the lower nerveless animals and plants it is a part of their multicellular protoplasmic body; and in the unicellular protists it is a part of their protoplasmic cell-body. In this way we are brought once more to the psychic organs, and to an appreciation of the fact that these material organs are indispensable for the action of the soul; but the soul itself is _actual_--it is the sum-total of their physiological functions. However, the idea of a specific "soul-substance" found in the dualistic philosophers who admit such a thing is very different from this. They conceive the immortal soul to be material, yet invisible, and essentially different from the visible body which it inhabits. Thus _invisibility_ comes to be regarded as a most important attribute of the soul. Some, in fact, compare the soul with ether, and regard it, like ether, as an extremely subtle, light, and highly elastic material, an imponderable agency, that fills the intervals between the ponderable particles of the living organism, others compare the soul with the wind, and so give it a gaseous nature; and it is this simile which first found favor with primitive peoples, and led in time to the familiar dualistic conception. When a man died, the body remained as a lifeless corpse, but the immortal soul "flew out of it with the last breath." The comparison of the human soul with physical ether as a qualitatively similar idea has assumed a more concrete shape in recent times through the great progress of optics and electricity (especially in the last decade); for these sciences have taught us a good deal about the energy of ether, and enabled us to formulate certain conclusions as to the material character of this all-pervading agency. As I intend to describe these important discoveries later on (in chap. xii.), I shall do no more at present than briefly point out that they render the notion of an "etheric soul" absolutely untenable. Such an etheric soul--that is a psychic substance--which is similar to physical ether, and which, like ether, passes between the ponderable elements of the living protoplasm or the molecules of the brain, cannot possibly account for the individual life of the soul. Neither the mystic notions of that kind which were warmly discussed about the middle of the century, nor the attempts of modern "Neovitalists" to put their mystical "vital force" on a line with physical ether, call for refutation any longer. Much more widespread, and still much respected, is the view which ascribes a gaseous nature to the substance of the soul. The comparison of human breath with the wind is a very old one; they were originally considered to be identical, and were both given the same name. The _anemos_ and _psyche_ of the Greeks, and the _anima_ and _spiritus_ of the Romans, were originally all names for "a breath of wind"; they were transferred from this to the breath of man. After a time this "living breath" was identified with the "vital force," and finally it came to be regarded as the soul itself, or, in a narrower sense, as its highest manifestation, the "spirit." From that the imagination went on to derive the mystic notion of individual "spirits"; these, also, are still usually conceived as "aëriform beings"--though they are credited with the physiological functions of an organism, and they have been photographed in certain well-known spiritist circles. Experimental physics has succeeded, during the last decade of the century, in reducing all gaseous bodies to a liquid--most of them, also, to a solid--condition. Nothing more is needed than special apparatus, which exerts a violent pressure on the gases at a very low temperature. By this process not only the atmospheric elements, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, but even compound gases (such as carbonic-acid gas) and gaseous aggregates (like the atmosphere) have been changed from gaseous to liquid form. In this way the "invisible" substances have become "visible" to all, and in a certain sense "tangible." With this transformation the mystic nimbus which formerly veiled the character of the gas in popular estimation--as an invisible body that wrought visible effects--has entirely disappeared. If, then, the substance of the soul were really gaseous, it should be possible to liquefy it by the application of a high pressure at a low temperature. We could then catch the soul as it is "breathed out" at the moment of death, condense it, and exhibit it in a bottle as "immortal fluid" (_Fluidum animae immortale_). By a further lowering of temperature and increase of pressure it might be possible to solidify it--to produce "soul-snow." The experiment has not yet succeeded. If athanatism were true, if, indeed, the human soul were to live for all eternity, we should have to grant the same privilege to the souls of the higher animals, at least to those of the nearest related mammals (apes, dogs, etc.). For man is not distinguished from them by a special _kind_ of soul, or by any peculiar and exclusive psychic function, but only by a higher _degree_ of psychic activity, a superior stage of development. In particular, consciousness--the function of the association of ideas, thought, and reason--has reached a higher level in many men (by no means in all) than in most of the animals. Yet this difference is far from being so great as is popularly supposed; and it is much slighter in every respect than the corresponding difference between the higher and the lower animal souls, or even the difference between the highest and the lowest stages of the human soul itself. If we ascribe "personal immortality" to man, we are bound to grant it also to the higher animals. It is, therefore, quite natural that we should find this belief in the immortality of the animal soul among many ancient and modern peoples; we even meet it sometimes to-day in many thoughtful men who postulate an "immortal life" for themselves, and have, at the same time, a thorough empirical knowledge of the psychic life of the animals. I once knew an old head-forester, who, being left a widower and without children at an early age, had lived alone for more than thirty years in a noble forest of East Prussia. His only companions were one or two servants, with whom he exchanged merely a few necessary words, and a great pack of different kinds of dogs, with which he lived in perfect psychic communion. Through many years of training this keen observer and friend of nature had penetrated deep into the individual souls of his dogs, and he was as convinced of their personal immortality as he was of his own. Some of his most intelligent dogs were, in his impartial and objective estimation, at a higher stage of psychic development than his old, stupid maid and the rough, wrinkled manservant. Any unprejudiced observer, who will study the conscious and intelligent psychic activity of a fine dog for a year, and follow attentively the physiological processes of its thought, judgment, and reason, will have to admit that it has just as valid a claim to immortality as man himself. The proofs of the immortality of the soul, which have been adduced for the last two thousand years, and are, indeed, still credited with some validity, have their origin, for the most part, not in an effort to discover the truth, but in an alleged "necessity of emotion"--that is, in imagination and poetic conceit. As Kant puts it, the immortality of the soul is not an object of pure reason, but a "postulate of practical reason." But we must set "practical reason" entirely aside, together with all the "exigencies of emotion, or of moral education, etc.," when we enter upon an honest and impartial pursuit of truth; for we shall only attain it by the work of pure reason, starting from empirical data and capable of logical analysis. We have to say the same of athanatism as of theism; both are creations of poetic mysticism and of transcendental "faith," not of rational science. When we come to analyze all the different proofs that have been urged for the immortality of the soul, we find that not a single one of them is of a scientific character; not a single one is consistent with the truths we have learned in the last few decades from physiological psychology and the theory of descent. The _theological_ proof--that a personal creator has breathed an immortal soul (generally regarded as a portion of the divine soul) into man--is a pure myth. The _cosmological_ proof--that the "moral order of the world" demands the eternal duration of the human soul--is a baseless dogma. The _teleological_ proof--that the "higher destiny" of man involves the perfecting of his defective, earthly soul beyond the grave--rests on a false anthropism. The _moral_ proof--that the defects and the unsatisfied desires of earthly existence must be fulfilled by "compensative justice" on the other side of eternity--is nothing more than a pious wish. The _ethnological_ proof--that the belief in immortality, like the belief in God, is an innate truth, common to all humanity--is an error in fact. The _ontological_ proof--that the soul, being a "simple, immaterial, and indivisible entity," cannot be involved in the corruption of death--is based on an entirely erroneous view of the psychic phenomena; it is a spiritualistic fallacy. All these and similar "proofs of athanatism" are in a parlous condition; they are definitely annulled by the scientific criticism of the last few decades. The extreme importance of the subject leads us to oppose to these untenable "proofs of immortality" a brief exposition of the sound scientific arguments against it. The _physiological_ argument shows that the human soul is not an independent, immaterial substance, but, like the soul of all the higher animals, merely a collective title for the sum-total of man's cerebral functions; and these are just as much determined by physical and chemical processes as any of the other vital functions, and just as amenable to the law of substance. The _histological_ argument is based on the extremely complicated microscopic structure of the brain; it shows us the true "elementary organs of the soul" in the ganglionic cells. The _experimental_ argument proves that the various functions of the soul are bound up with certain special parts of the brain, and cannot be exercised unless these are in a normal condition; if the areas are destroyed, their function is extinguished; and this is especially applicable to the "organs of thought," the four central instruments of mental activity. The _pathological_ argument is the complement of the physiological; when certain parts of the brain (the centres of speech, sight, hearing, etc.) are destroyed by sickness, their activity (speech, vision, hearing, etc.) disappears; in this way nature herself makes the decisive physiological experiment. The _ontogenetic_ argument puts before us the facts of the development of the soul in the individual; we see how the child-soul gradually unfolds its various powers; the youth presents them in full bloom, the mature man shows their ripe fruit; in old age we see the gradual decay of the psychic powers, corresponding to the senile degeneration of the brain. The _phylogenetic_ argument derives its strength from palæontology, and the comparative anatomy and physiology of the brain; co-operating with and completing each other, these sciences prove to the hilt that the human brain (and, consequently, its function--the soul) has been evolved step by step from that of the mammal, and, still further back, from that of the lower vertebrate. These inquiries, which might be supplemented by many other results of modern science, prove the old dogma of the immortality of the soul to be absolutely untenable; in the twentieth century it will not be regarded as a subject of serious scientific research, but will be left wholly to transcendental "faith." The "critique of pure reason" shows this treasured faith to be a mere _superstition_, like the belief in a personal God which generally accompanies it. Yet even to-day millions of "believers"--not only of the lower, uneducated masses, but even of the most cultured classes--look on this superstition as their dearest possession and their most "priceless treasure." It is, therefore, necessary to enter more deeply into the subject, and--assuming it to be true--to make a critical inquiry into its practical value. It soon becomes apparent to the impartial critic that this value rests, for the most part, on fancy, on the want of clear judgment and consecutive thought. It is my firm and honest conviction that a definitive abandonment of these "athanatist illusions" would involve no painful loss, but an inestimable positive gain for humanity. Man's "emotional craving" clings to the belief on immortality for two main reasons: firstly, in the hope of better conditions of life beyond the grave; and, secondly, in the hope of seeing once more the dear and loved ones whom death has torn from us. As for the first hope, it corresponds to a natural feeling of the justice of compensation, which is quite correct subjectively, but has no objective validity whatever. We make our claim for an indemnity for the unnumbered defects and sorrows of our earthly existence, without the slightest real prospect or guarantee of receiving it. We long for an eternal life in which we shall meet no sadness and no pain, but an unbounded peace and joy. The pictures that most men form of this blissful existence are extremely curious; the immaterial soul is placed in the midst of grossly material pleasures. The imagination of each believer paints the enduring splendor according to his personal taste. The American Indian, whose athanatism Schiller has so well depicted, trusts to find in his Paradise the finest hunting-grounds with innumerable hordes of buffaloes and bears; the Eskimo looks forward to sun-tipped icebergs with an inexhaustible supply of bears, seals, and other polar animals; the effeminate Cingalese frames his Paradise on the wonderful island-paradise of Ceylon with its noble gardens and forests--adding that there will be unlimited supplies of rice and curry, of cocoanuts and other fruit, always at hand; the Mohammedan Arab believes it will be a place of shady gardens of flowers, watered by cool springs, and filled with lovely maidens; the Catholic fisherman of Sicily looks forward to a daily superabundance of the most valuable fishes and the finest macaroni, and eternal absolution for all his sins, which he can go on committing in his eternal home; the evangelical of North Europe longs for an immense Gothic cathedral, in which he can chant the praises of the Lord of Hosts for all eternity. In a word, each believer really expects his eternal life to be a direct continuation of his individual life on earth, only in a "much improved and enlarged edition." We must lay special stress on the thoroughly materialistic character of _Christian_ athanatism, which is closely connected with the absurd dogma of the "resurrection of the body." As thousands of paintings of famous masters inform us, the bodies that have risen again, with the souls that have been born again, walk about in heaven just as they did in this vale of tears; they see God with their eyes, they hear His voice with their ears, they sing hymns to His praise with their larynx, and so forth. In fine, the modern inhabitants of the Christian Paradise have the same dual character of body and soul, the same organs of an earthly body, as our ancient ancestors had in Odin's Hall in Walhalla, as the "immortal" Turks and Arabs have in Mohammed's lovely gardens, as the old Greek demi-gods and heroes had in the enjoyment of nectar and ambrosia at the table of Zeus. But, however gloriously we may depict this eternal life in Paradise, it remains _endless_ in duration. Do we realize what "eternity" means?--the uninterrupted continuance of our individual life forever! The profound legend of the "wandering Jew," the fruitless search for rest of the unhappy Ahasuerus, should teach us to appreciate such an "eternal life" at its true value. The best we can desire after a courageous life, spent in doing good according to our light, is the eternal peace of the grave. "Lord, give them an eternal rest." Any impartial scholar who is acquainted with geological calculations of time, and has reflected on the long series of millions of years the organic history of the earth has occupied, must admit that the crude notion of an eternal life is not a _comfort_, but a fearful _menace_, to the best of men. Only want of clear judgment and consecutive thought can dispute it. The best and most plausible ground for athanatism is found in the hope that immortality will reunite us to the beloved friends who have been prematurely taken from us by some grim mischance. But even this supposed good fortune proves to be an illusion on closer inquiry; and in any case it would be greatly marred by the prospect of meeting the less agreeable acquaintances and the enemies who have troubled our existence here below. Even the closest family ties would involve many a difficulty. There are plenty of men who would gladly sacrifice all the glories of Paradise if it meant the eternal companionship of their "better half" and their mother-in-law. It is more than questionable whether Henry VIII. would like the prospect of living eternally with his six wives; or Augustus the Strong of Poland, who had a hundred mistresses and three hundred and fifty-two children. As he was on good terms with the Vicar of Christ, he must be assumed to be in Paradise, in spite of his sins, and in spite of the fact that his mad military ventures cost the lives of more than a hundred thousand Saxons. Another insoluble difficulty faces the athanatist when he asks _in what stage of their individual development_ the disembodied souls will spend their eternal life. Will the new-born infant develop its psychic powers in heaven under the same hard conditions of the "struggle for life" which educate man here on earth? Will the talented youth who has fallen in the wholesale murder of war unfold his rich, unused mental powers in Walhalla? Will the feeble, childish old man, who has filled the world with the fame of his deeds in the ripeness of his age, live forever in mental decay? Or will he return to an earlier stage of development? If the immortal souls in Olympus are to live in a condition of rejuvenescence and perfectness, then both the stimulus to the formation of, and the interest in, personality disappear for them. Not less impossible, in the light of pure reason, do we find the anthropistic myth of the "last judgment," and the separation of the souls of men into two great groups, of which one is destined for the eternal joys of Paradise and the other for the eternal torments of hell--and that from a personal God who is called the "Father of Love"! And it is this "Universal Father" who has himself created the conditions of heredity and adaptation, in virtue of which the elect, on the one side, were _bound_ to pursue the path towards eternal bliss, and the luckless poor and miserable, on the other hand, were _driven_ into the paths of the damned? A critical comparison of the countless and manifold fantasies which belief in immortality has produced during the last few thousand years in the different races and religions yields a most remarkable picture. An intensely interesting presentation of it, based on most extensive original research, may be found in Adalbert Svoboda's distinguished works, _The Illusion of the Soul_ and _Forms of Faith_. However absurd and inconsistent with modern knowledge most of these myths seem to be, they still play an important part, and, as "postulates of practical reason," they exercise a powerful influence on the opinions of individuals and on the destiny of races. The idealist and spiritualist philosophy of the day will freely grant that these prevalent materialistic forms of belief in immortality are untenable; it will say that the refined idea of an immaterial soul, a Platonic "idea" or a transcendental psychic substance, must be substituted for them. But modern realism can have nothing whatever to do with these incomprehensible notions; they satisfy neither the mind's feeling of causality nor the yearning of our emotions. If we take a comprehensive glance at all that modern anthropology, psychology, and cosmology teach with regard to athanatism, we are forced to this definite conclusion: "The belief in the immortality of the human soul is a dogma which is in hopeless contradiction with the most solid empirical truths of modern science." CHAPTER XII THE LAW OF SUBSTANCE The Fundamental Chemical Law of the Constancy of Matter--The Fundamental Physical Law of the Conservation of Energy--Combination of Both Laws in the Law of Substance--The Kinetic, Pyknotic, and Dualistic Ideas of Substance--Monism of Matter--Ponderable Matter--Atoms and Elements--Affinity of the Elements--The Soul of the Atom (Feeling and Inclination)--Existence and Character of Ether--Ether and Ponderable Matter--Force and Energy--Potential and Actual Force--Unity of Natural Forces--Supremacy of the Law of Substance The supreme and all-pervading law of nature, the true and only cosmological law, is, in my opinion, _the law of substance_; its discovery and establishment is the greatest intellectual triumph of the nineteenth century, in the sense that all other known laws of nature are subordinate to it. Under the name of "law of substance" we embrace two supreme laws of different origin and age--the older is the chemical law of the "conservation of matter," and the younger is the physical law of the "conservation of energy."[23] It will be self-evident to many readers, and it is acknowledged by most of the scientific men of the day, that these two great laws are essentially inseparable. This fundamental thesis, however, is still much contested in some quarters, and we must proceed to furnish the proof of it. But we must first devote a few words to each of the two laws. The law of the "_persistence_" or "_indestructibility of matter_," established by Lavoisier in 1789, may be formulated thus: The sum of matter, which fills infinite space, is unchangeable. A body has merely changed its form, when it seems to have disappeared. When coal burns, it is changed into carbonic-acid gas by combination with the oxygen of the atmosphere; when a piece of sugar melts in water, it merely passes from the solid to the fluid condition. In the same way, it is merely a question of change of form in the cases where a new body seems to be produced. A shower of rain is the moisture of the atmosphere cast down in the form of drops of water; when a piece of iron rusts, the surface layer of the metal has combined with water and with atmospheric oxygen, and formed a "rust," or oxyhydrate of iron. Nowhere in nature do we find an example of the production, or "creation," of new matter; nowhere does a particle of existing matter pass entirely away. This empirical truth is now the unquestionable foundation of chemistry; it may be directly verified at any moment by means of the balance. To the great French chemist Lavoisier belongs the high merit of first making this experiment with the balance. At the present day the scientist, who is occupied from one end of the year to the other with the study of natural phenomena, is so firmly convinced of the absolute "constancy" of matter that he is no longer able to imagine the contrary state of things. We may formulate the "_law of the persistence of force_" or "_conservation of energy_" thus: The sum of force, which is at work in infinite space and produces all phenomena, is unchangeable. When the locomotive rushes along the line, the potential energy of the steam is transformed into the kinetic or actual energy of the mechanical movement; when we hear its shrill whistle, as it speeds along, the sound-waves of the vibrating atmosphere are conveyed through the tympanum and the three bones of the ear into the inner labyrinth, and thence transferred by the auditory nerve to the acoustic ganglionic cells which form the centre of hearing in the temporal lobe of the gray bed of the brain. The whole marvellous panorama of life that spreads over the surface of our globe is, in the last analysis, transformed sunlight. It is well known how the remarkable progress of technical science has made it possible for us to convert the different physical forces from one form to another; heat may be changed into molar movement, or movement of mass; this in turn into light or sound, and then into electricity, and so forth. Accurate measurement of the quantity of force which is used in this metamorphosis has shown that it is "constant" or unchanged. No particle of living energy is ever extinguished; no particle is ever created anew. Friedrich Mohr, of Bonn, was very near to the discovery of this great fact in 1837, but the discovery was actually made by the able Swabian physician, Robert Mayer, of Heilbronn, in 1842. Independently of Mayer, however, the principle was reached almost at the same time by the famous physiologist, Hermann Helmholtz; five years afterwards he pointed out its general application to, and fertility in, every branch of physics. We ought to say to-day that it rules also in the entire province of physiology--that is, of "organic physics"; but on that point we meet a strenuous opposition from the vitalistic biologists and the dualist and spiritualist philosophers. For these the peculiar "spiritual forces" of human nature are a group of "free" forces, not subject to the law of energy; the idea is closely connected with the dogma of the "freedom of the will." We have, however, already seen (p. 204) that the dogma is untenable. Modern physics draws a distinction between "force" and "energy," but our general observations so far have not needed a reference to it. The conviction that these two great cosmic theorems, the chemical law of the persistence of matter and the physical law of the persistence of force, are fundamentally one, is of the utmost importance in our monistic system. The two theories are just as intimately united as their objects--matter and force or energy. Indeed, this fundamental unity of the two laws is self-evident to many monistic scientists and philosophers, since they merely relate to two different aspects of one and the same object, the _cosmos_. But, however natural the thought may be, it is still very far from being generally accepted. It is stoutly contested by the entire dualistic philosophy, vitalistic biology, and parallelistic psychology; even, in fact, by a few (inconsistent) monists, who think they find a check to it in "consciousness," in the higher mental activity of man, or in other phenomena of our "free mental life." For my part, I am convinced of the profound importance of the unifying "law of substance," as an expression of the inseparable connection in reality of two laws which are only separated in conception. That they were not originally taken together and their unity recognized from the beginning is merely an accident of the date of their respective discoveries. The earlier and more accessible chemical law of the persistence of matter was detected by Lavoisier in 1789, and, after a general application of the balance, became the basis of exact chemistry. On the other hand, the more recondite law of the persistence of force was only discovered by Mayer in 1842, and only laid down as the basis of exact physics by Helmholtz. The unity of the two laws--still much disputed--is expressed by many scientists who are convinced of it in the formula: "Law of the persistence of matter and force." In order to have a briefer and more convenient expression for this fundamental thought, I proposed some time ago to call it the "law of substance" or the "fundamental cosmic law"; it might also be called the "universal law," or the "law of constancy," or the "axiom of the constancy of the universe." In the ultimate analysis it is found to be a necessary consequence of the principle of causality.[24] The first thinker to introduce the purely monistic conception of substance into science and appreciate its profound importance was the great philosopher Baruch Spinoza; his chief work appeared shortly after his premature death in 1677, just one hundred years before Lavoisier gave empirical proof of the constancy of matter by means of the chemist's principal instrument, the balance. In his stately pantheistic system the notion of the _world_ (the universe, or the cosmos) is identical with the all-pervading notion of God; it is at one and the same time the purest and most rational _monism_ and the clearest and most abstract _monotheism_. This universal substance, this "divine nature of the world," shows us two different aspects of its being, or two fundamental attributes--matter (infinitely _extended_ substance) and spirit (the all-embracing energy of _thought_). All the changes which have since come over the idea of substance are reduced, on a logical analysis, to this supreme thought of Spinoza's; with Goethe I take it to be the loftiest, profoundest, and truest thought of all ages. Every single object in the world which comes within the sphere of our cognizance, all individual forms of existence, are but special transitory forms--_accidents_ or _modes_--of substance. These modes are material things when we regard them under the attribute of _extension_ (or "occupation of space"), but forces or ideas when we consider them under the attribute of _thought_ (or "energy"). To this profound thought of Spinoza our purified monism returns after a lapse of two hundred years; for us, too, matter (space-filling substance) and energy (moving force) are but two inseparable attributes of the one underlying substance. Among the various modifications which the fundamental idea of substance has undergone in modern physics, in association with the prevalent atomism, we shall select only two of the most divergent theories for a brief discussion, the kinetic and the pyknotic. Both theories agree that we have succeeded in reducing all the different forces of nature to one common original force; gravity and chemical action, electricity and magnetism, light and heat, etc., are only different manifestations, forms, or _dynamodes_, of a single primitive force (_prodynamis_). This fundamental force is generally conceived as a vibratory motion of the smallest particles of matter--a vibration of atoms. The atoms themselves, according to the usual "kinetic theory of substance," are dead, separate particles of matter, which dance to and fro in empty space and act at a distance. The real founder and most distinguished representative of the kinetic theory is Newton, the famous discoverer of the law of gravitation. In his great work, the _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica_ (1687), he showed that throughout the universe the same law of attraction controls the unvarying constancy of gravitation; the attraction of two particles being in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance. This universal force of gravity is at work in the fall of an apple and the tidal wave no less than in the course of the planets round the sun and the movements of all the heavenly bodies. Newton had the immortal merit of establishing the law of gravitation and embodying it in an indisputable mathematical formula. Yet this _dead mathematical formula_, on which most scientists lay great stress, as so frequently happens, gives us merely the _quantitative_ demonstration of the theory; it gives us no insight whatever into the _qualitative_ nature of the phenomena. The action at a distance without a medium, which Newton deduced from his law of gravitation, and which became one of the most serious and most dangerous dogmas of later physics, does not afford the slightest explanation of the real causes of attraction; indeed, it long obstructed our way to the real discovery of them. I cannot but suspect that his speculations on this mysterious action at a distance contributed not a little to the leading of the great English mathematician into the obscure labyrinth of mystic dreams and theistic superstition in which he passed the last thirty-four years of his life; we find him, at the end, giving metaphysical hypotheses on the predictions of Daniel and on the paradoxical fantasies of St. John. In fundamental opposition to the theory of vibration, or the kinetic theory of substance, we have the modern "theory of condensation," or the pyknotic theory of substance. It is most ably established in the suggestive work of J. C. Vogt on _The Nature of Electricity and Magnetism on the Basis of a Simplified Conception of Substance_ (1891). Vogt assumes the primitive force of the world, the universal _prodynamis_, to be, not the vibration or oscillation of particles in empty space, but the condensation of a simple primitive substance, which fills the infinity of space in an unbroken continuity. Its sole inherent mechanical form of activity consists in a tendency to condensation or contraction, which produces infinitesimal centres of condensation; these may change their degree of thickness, and, therefore, their volume, but are constant as such. These minute parts of the universal substance, the centres of condensation, which might be called _pyknatoms_, correspond in general to the ultimate separate atoms of the kinetic theory; they differ, however, very considerably in that they are credited with sensation and inclination (or will-movement of the simplest form), _with souls_, in a certain sense--in harmony with the old theory of Empedocles of the "love and hatred of the elements." Moreover, these "atoms with souls" do not float in empty space, but in the continuous, extremely attenuated intermediate substance, which represents the uncondensed portion of the primitive matter. By means of certain "constellations, centres of perturbation, or systems of deformation," great masses of centres of condensation quickly unite in immense proportions, and so obtain a preponderance over the surrounding masses. By that process the primitive substance, which in its original state of quiescence had the same mean consistency throughout, divides or differentiates into two kinds. The centres of disturbance, which _positively_ exceed the mean consistency in virtue of the _pyknosis_ or condensation, form the ponderable matter of bodies; the finer, intermediate substance, which occupies the space between them, and _negatively_ falls below the mean consistency, forms the ether, or imponderable matter. As a consequence of this division into mass and ether there ensues a ceaseless struggle between the two antagonistic elements, and this struggle is the source of all physical processes. The positive ponderable matter, the element with the feeling of like or desire, is continually striving to complete the process of condensation, and thus collecting an enormous amount of _potential_ energy; the negative, imponderable matter, on the other hand, offers a perpetual and equal resistance to the further increase of its strain and of the feeling of dislike connected therewith, and thus gathers the utmost amount of _actual_ energy. We cannot go any further here into the details of the brilliant theory of J. C. Vogt. The interested reader cannot do better than have recourse to the second volume of the above work for a clear, popular exposition of the difficult problem. I am myself too little informed in physics and mathematics to enter into a critical discussion of its lights and shades; still, I think that this pyknotic theory of substance will prove more acceptable to every biologist who is convinced of the unity of nature than the kinetic theory which prevails in physics to-day. A misunderstanding may easily arise from the fact that Vogt puts his process of condensation in explicit contradiction with the general phenomenon of motion; but it must be remembered that he is speaking of vibratory movement in the sense of the physicist. His hypothetical "condensation" is just as much determined by a movement of substance as is the hypothetical "vibration"; only the kind of movement and the relation of the moving elements are very different in the two hypotheses. Moreover, it is not the whole theory of vibration, but only an important section of it, that is contradicted by the theory of condensation. Modern physics, for the most part, still firmly adheres to the older theory of vibration, to the idea of an _actio in distans_ and the eternal vibration of dead atoms in empty space; it rejects the pyknotic theory. Although Vogt's theory may be still far from perfect, and his original speculations may be marred by many errors, yet I think he has rendered a very good service in eliminating the untenable principles of the kinetic theory of substance. As to my own opinion--and that of many other scientists--I must lay down the following theses, which are involved in Vogt's pyknotic theory, as indispensable for a truly monistic view of substance, and one that covers the whole field of organic and inorganic nature: I. The two fundamental forms of substance, ponderable matter and ether, are not dead and only moved by extrinsic force, but they are endowed with sensation and will (though, naturally, of the lowest grade); they experience an inclination for condensation, a dislike of strain; they strive after the one and struggle against the other. II. There is no such thing as empty space; that part of space which is not occupied with ponderable atoms is filled with ether. III. There is no such thing as an action at a distance through perfectly empty space; all action of bodies upon each other is either determined by immediate contact or is effected by the mediation of ether. Both the theories of substance which we have just contrasted are _monistic_ in principle, since the opposition between the two conditions of substance--mass and ether--is not original; moreover, they involve a continuous immediate contact and reciprocal action of the two elements. It is otherwise with the _dualistic_ theories of substance which still obtain in the idealist and spiritualist philosophy, and which have the support of a powerful theology, in so far as theology indulges in such metaphysical speculations. These theories draw a distinction between two entirely different kinds of substance, material and immaterial. Material substance enters into the composition of the bodies which are the object of physics and chemistry; the law of the persistence of matter and force is confined to this world (apart from a belief in its "creation from nothing" and other miracles). Immaterial substance is found in the "spiritual world" to which the law does not extend; in this province the laws of physics and chemistry are either entirely inapplicable or they are subordinated to a "vital force," or a "free will," or a "divine omnipotence," or some other phantom which is beyond the ken of critical science. In truth, these profound errors need no further refutation to-day, for experience has never yet discovered for us a single immaterial substance, a single force which is not dependent on matter, or a single form of energy which is not exerted by material movement, whether it be of mass, or of ether, or of both. Even the most elaborate and most perfect forms of energy that we know--the psychic life of the higher animals, the thought and reason of man--depend on material processes, or changes in the neuroplasm of the ganglionic cells; they are inconceivable apart from such modifications. I have already shown (chap. xi.) that the physiological hypothesis of a special, immaterial "soul-substance" is untenable. The study of ponderable matter is primarily the concern of chemistry. Few are ignorant of the astonishing theoretical progress which this science has made in the course of the century and the immense practical influence it has had on every aspect of modern life. We shall confine ourselves here to a few remarks on the more important questions which concern the nature of ponderable matter. It is well known that analytical chemistry has succeeded in resolving the immense variety of bodies in nature into a small number of simple elements--that is, simple bodies which are incapable of further analysis. The number of these elements is about seventy. Only fourteen of them are widely distributed on the earth and of much practical importance; the majority are rare elements (principally metals) of little practical moment. The affinity of these groups of elements, and the remarkable proportions of their atomic weights, which Lothar Meyer and Mendelejeff have proved in their _Periodic System of the Elements_, make it extremely probable that they are not _absolute species_ of ponderable matter--that is, not eternally unchangeable particles. The seventy elements have in that system been distributed into eight leading groups, and arranged in them according to their atomic weight, so that the elements which have a chemical affinity are formed into families. The relations of the various groups in such a natural system of the elements recall, on the one hand, similar relations of the innumerable compounds of carbon, and, again, the relations of parallel groups in the natural arrangement of the animal and plant species. Since in the latter cases the "affinity" of the related forms is based on descent from a common parent form, it seems very probable that the same holds good of the families and orders of the chemical elements. We may, therefore, conclude that the "empirical elements" we now know are not really simple, ultimate, and unchangeable forms of matter, but compounds of homogeneous, simple, primitive atoms, variously distributed as to number and grouping. The recent speculations of Gustav Wendt, Wilhelm Preyer, Sir W. Crookes, and others, have pointed out how we may conceive the evolution of the elements from a simple primitive material, the _prothyl_. The modern atomistic theory, which is regarded as an indispensable instrument in chemistry to-day, must be carefully distinguished from the old philosophic atomism which was taught more than two thousand years ago by a group of distinguished thinkers of antiquity--Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus: it was considerably developed and modified later on by Descartes, Hobbes, Leibnitz, and other famous philosophers. But it was not until 1808 that modern atomism assumed a definite and acceptable form, and was furnished with an empirical basis by Dalton, who formulated the "law of simple and multiple proportions" in the formation of chemical combinations. He first determined the atomic weight of the different elements, and thus created the solid and exact foundation on which more recent chemical theories are based; these are all _atomistic_, in the sense that they assume the elements to be made up of homogeneous, infinitesimal, distinct particles, which are incapable of further analysis. That does not touch the question of the real nature of the atoms--their form, size, psychology, etc. These atomic qualities are merely hypothetical; while the _chemistry_ of the atoms, their "chemical affinity"--that is, the constant proportion in which they combine with the atoms of other elements--is empirical.[25] The different relation of the various elements towards each other, which chemistry calls "affinity," is one of the most important properties of ponderable matter; it is manifested in the different relative quantities or proportions of their combination in the intensity of its consummation. Every shade of inclination, from complete indifference to the fiercest passion, is exemplified in the chemical relation of the various elements towards each other, just as we find in the psychology of man, and especially in the life of the sexes. Goethe, in his classical romance, _Affinities_, compared the relations of pairs of lovers with the phenomenon of the same name in the formation of chemical combinations. The irresistible passion that draws Edward to the sympathetic Ottilia, or Paris to Helen, and leaps over all bounds of reason and morality, is the same powerful "unconscious" attractive force which impels the living spermatozoon to force an entrance into the ovum in the fertilization of the egg of the animal or plant--the same impetuous movement which unites two atoms of hydrogen to one atom of oxygen for the formation of a molecule of water. This fundamental _unity of affinity in the whole of nature_, from the simplest chemical process to the most complicated love story, was recognized by the great Greek scientist, Empedocles, in the fifth century B.C., in his theory of "the love and hatred of the elements." It receives empirical confirmation from the interesting progress of cellular psychology, the great significance of which we have only learned to appreciate in the last thirty years. On those phenomena we base our conviction that even the _atom_ is not without a rudimentary form of sensation and will, or as it is better expressed, of feeling (_aesthesis_) and inclination (_tropesis_)--that is, a universal "soul" of the simplest character. The same must be said of the molecules which are composed of two or more atoms. Further combinations of different kinds of these molecules give rise to simple and, subsequently, complex chemical compounds, in the activity of which the same phenomena are repeated in a more complicated form. The study of ether, or imponderable matter, pertains principally to physics. The existence of an extremely attenuated medium, filling the whole of space outside of ponderable matter, was known and applied to the elucidation of various phenomena (especially light) a long time ago; but it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that we became more closely acquainted with this remarkable substance, in connection with our astonishing empirical discoveries in the province of electricity, with their experimental detection, their theoretical interpretation, and their practical application. The path was opened in particular by the famous researches of Heinrich Hertz, of Bonn, in 1888. The premature death of a brilliant young physicist of so much promise cannot be sufficiently deplored. Like the premature death of Spinoza, Raphael, Schubert, and many other great men, it is one of those brutal facts of human history which are enough of themselves to destroy the untenable myth of a "wise Providence" and an "All-loving Father in heaven." The existence of ether (or cosmic ether) as a real element is a _positive fact_, and has been known as such for the last twelve years. We sometimes read even to-day that ether is a "pure hypothesis"; this erroneous assertion comes not only from uninformed philosophers and "popular" writers, but even from certain "prudent and exact physicists." But there would be just as much reason to deny the existence of ponderable matter. As a matter of fact, there are metaphysicians who accomplish even this feat, and whose highest wisdom lies in denying or calling into question the existence of an external universe; according to them only one real entity exists--their own precious personality, or, to be more correct, their immortal soul. Several modern physiologists have embraced this ultra-idealist view, which is to be found in Descartes, Berkeley, Fichte, and others. Their "psycho-monism" affirms: "One thing only exists, and that is my own mind." This audacious spiritualism seems to us to rest on an erroneous inference from Kant's correct critical theory, that we can know the outer world only in the phenomenal aspect which is accessible to our human organs of thought--the brain and the organs of sense. If by those means we can attain only an imperfect and limited knowledge of the material world, that is no reason for denying its existence altogether. In my opinion, the existence of ether is as certain as that of ponderable matter--as certain as my own existence, as I reflect and write on it. As we assure ourselves of the existence of ponderable matter by its mass and weight, by chemical and mechanical experiments, so we prove that of ether by the experiences and experiments of optics and electricity. Although, however, the existence of ether is now regarded as a positive fact by nearly all physicists, and although many effects of this remarkable substance are familiar to us through an extensive experience, especially in the way of optical and electrical experiments, yet we are still far from being clear and confident as to its real character. The views of the most eminent physicists, who have made a special study of it, are extremely divergent; they frequently contradict each other on the most important points. One is, therefore, free to choose among the contradictory hypotheses according to one's knowledge and judgment. I will put in the following eight theses the view which has approved itself to me after mature reflection on the subject, though I am no expert in this department: I. Ether fills the whole of space, in so far as it is not occupied by ponderable matter, as a _continuous substance_; it fully occupies the space between the atoms of ponderable matter. II. Ether has probably no chemical quality, and is not composed of atoms. If it be supposed that it consists of minute homogeneous atoms (for instance, indivisible etheric particles of a uniform size), it must be further supposed that there is something else between these atoms, either "empty space" or a third, completely unknown medium, a purely hypothetical "interether"; the question as to the nature of this brings us back to the original difficulty, and so on _in infinitum_. III. As the idea of an empty space and an action at a distance is scarcely possible in the present condition of our knowledge (at least it does not help to a clear monistic view), I postulate for ether a special structure which is not atomistic, like that of ponderable matter, and which may provisionally be called (without further determination) _etheric_ or _dynamic_ structure. IV. The consistency of ether is also peculiar, on our hypothesis, and different from that of ponderable matter. It is neither gaseous, as some conceive, nor solid, as others suppose; the best idea of it can be formed by comparison with an extremely attenuated, elastic, and light jelly. V. Ether may be called _imponderable_ matter in the sense that we have no means of determining its weight experimentally. If it really has weight, as is very probable, it must be so slight as to be far below the capacity of our most delicate balance. Some physicists have attempted to determine its weight by the energy of the light-waves, and have discovered that it is some fifteen trillion times lighter than atmospheric air; on that hypothesis a sphere of ether of the size of our earth would weigh at least two hundred and fifty pounds(?). VI. The etheric consistency may probably (in accordance with the pyknotic theory) pass into the gaseous state under certain conditions by progressive condensation, just as a gas may be converted into a fluid, and ultimately into a solid, by lowering its temperature. VII. Consequently, these three conditions of matter may be arranged (and it is a point of great importance in our monistic cosmogony) in a genetic, continuous order. We may distinguish five stages in it: (1) the etheric, (2) the gaseous, (3) the fluid, (4) the viscous (in the living protoplasm), and (5) the solid state. VIII. Ether is boundless and immeasurable, like the space it occupies. It is in eternal motion; and this specific movement of ether (it is immaterial whether we conceive it as vibration, strain, condensation, etc.), in reciprocal action with mass-movement (or gravitation), is the ultimate cause of all phenomena. "The great question of the nature of ether," as Hertz justly calls it, includes the question of its relation to ponderable matter; for these two forms of matter are not only always in the closest external contact, but also in eternal, dynamic, reciprocal action. We may divide the most general phenomena of nature, which are distinguished by physics as natural forces or "functions of matter," into two groups; the first of them may be regarded mainly (though not exclusively) as a function of ether, and the second a function of ponderable matter--as in the following scheme which I take from my _Monism_: THE WORLD (NATURE, OR THE COSMOS) ---------------------------------+------------------------------------- ETHER--Imponderable. | MASS--Ponderable. ---------------------------------+------------------------------------- | 1. _Consistency_: | 1. _Consistency_: | Etheric (_i.e._, neither | Not etheric (but gaseous, fluid, gaseous nor fluid, nor solid). | or solid). | 2. _Structure_: | 2. _Structure_: | Not atomistic, not made up of | Atomistic, made up of infinitesimal, separate particles (atoms), but | distinct particles (atoms) continuous. | discontinuous. | 3. _Chief Functions_: | 3. _Chief Functions_: | Light, radiant heat, electricity,| Gravity, inertia, molecular heat, and magnetism. | and chemical affinity. ---------------------------------+------------------------------------- The two groups of functions of matter, which we have opposed in this table, may, to some extent, be regarded as the outcome of the first "division of labor" in the development of matter, the "primary ergonomy of matter." But this distinction must not be supposed to involve an absolute separation of the two antithetic groups; they always retain their connection, and are in constant reciprocal action. It is well known that the optical and electrical phenomena of ether are closely connected with mechanical and chemical changes in ponderable elements; the radiant heat of ether may be directly converted into the mechanical heat of the mass; gravitation is impossible unless the ether effects the mutual attraction of the separated atoms, because we cannot admit the idea of an _actio in distans_. In like manner, the conversion of one form of energy into another, as indicated in the law of the persistence of force, illustrates the constant reciprocity of the two chief types of substance, ether and mass. The great law of nature, which, under the title of the "law of substance," we put at the head of all physical considerations, was conceived as the law of "the persistence of force" by Robert Meyer, who first formulated it, and Helmholtz, who continued the work. Another German scientist, Friedrich Mohr, of Bonn, had clearly outlined it in its main features ten years earlier (1837). The old idea of _force_ was, after a time, differentiated by modern physics from that of _energy_, which was at first synonymous with it. Hence the law is now usually called the "law of the persistence of energy." However, this finer distinction need not enter into the general consideration, to which I must confine myself here, and into the question of the great principle of the "persistence of substance." The interested reader will find a very clear treatment of the question in Tyndall's excellent paper on "The Fundamental Law of Nature," in his _Fragments of Science_. It fully explains the broad significance of this profound cosmic law, and points out its application to the main problems of very different branches of science. We shall confine our attention to the important fact that the "principle of energy" and the correlative idea of the unity of natural forces, on the basis of a common origin, are now accepted by all competent physicists, and are regarded as the greatest advance of physics in the nineteenth century. We now know that heat, sound, light, chemical action, electricity, and magnetism are all modes of motion. We can, by a certain apparatus, convert any one of these forces into another, and prove by an accurate measurement that not a single particle of energy is lost in the process. The sum-total of force or energy in the universe remains constant, no matter what changes take place around us; it is eternal and infinite, like the matter on which it is inseparably dependent. The whole drama of nature apparently consists in an alternation of movement and repose; yet the bodies at rest have an inalienable quantity of force, just as truly as those that are in motion. It is in this movement that the potential energy of the former is converted into the kinetic energy of the latter. "As the principle of the persistence of force takes into account repulsion as well as attraction, it affirms that the mechanical value of the potential energy and the kinetic energy in the material world is a constant quantity. To put it briefly, the force of the universe is divided into two parts, which may be mutually converted, according to a fixed relation of value. The diminution of the one involves the increase of the other; the total value remains unchanged in the universe." The potential energy and the actual, or kinetic, energy are being continually transformed from one condition to the other; but the infinite sum of force in the world at large never suffers the slightest curtailment. Once modern physics had established the law of substance as far as the simpler relations of inorganic bodies are concerned, physiology took up the story, and proved its application to the entire province of the organic world. It showed that all the vital activities of the organism--without exception--are based on a constant "reciprocity of force" and a correlative change of material, or metabolism, just as much as the simplest processes in "lifeless" bodies. Not only the growth and the nutrition of plants and animals, but even their functions of sensation and movement, their sense-action and psychic life, depend on the conversion of potential into kinetic energy, and _vice versâ_. This supreme law dominates also those elaborate performances of the nervous system which we call, in the higher animals and man, "the action of the mind." Our monistic view, that the great cosmic law applies throughout the whole of nature, is of the highest moment. For it not only involves, on its positive side, the essential unity of the cosmos and the causal connection of all phenomena that come within our cognizance, but it also, in a negative way, marks the highest intellectual progress, in that it definitely rules out the three central dogmas of metaphysics--God, freedom, and immortality. In assigning mechanical causes to phenomena everywhere, the law of substance comes into line with the universal law of causality. CHAPTER XIII THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD The Notion of Creation--Miracles--Creation of the Whole Universe and of its Various Parts--Creation of Substance (Cosmological Creation)--Deism: One Creative Day--Creation of Separate Entities--Five Forms of Ontological Creationism--Theory of Evolution--I. Monistic Cosmogony--Beginning and End of the World--The Infinity and Eternity of the Universe--Space and Time--_Universum perpetuum mobile_--Entropy of the Universe--II. Monistic Geogeny--History of the Inorganic and Organic Worlds--III. Monistic Biogeny--Transformism and the Theory of Descent: Lamarck and Darwin--IV. Monistic Anthropogeny--Origin of Man The greatest, vastest, and most difficult of all cosmic problems is that of the origin and development of the world--the "question of creation," in a word. Even to the solution of this most difficult world-riddle the nineteenth century has contributed more than all its predecessors; in a certain sense, indeed, it has found the solution. We have at least attained to a clear view of the fact that all the partial questions of creation are indivisibly connected, that they represent one single, comprehensive "cosmic problem," and that the key to this problem is found in the one magic word--evolution. The great questions of the creation of man, the creation of the animals and plants, the creation of the earth and the sun, etc., are all parts of the general question, What is the origin of the whole world? Has it been _created_ by supernatural power, or has it been _evolved_ by a natural process? What are the causes and the manner of this evolution? If we succeed in finding the correct answer to one of these questions, we have, according to our monistic conception of the world, cast a brilliant light on the solution of them all, and on the entire cosmic problem. The current opinion as to the origin of the world in earlier ages was almost a universal belief in creation. This belief has been expressed in thousands of interesting, more or less fabulous, legends, poems, cosmogonies, and myths. A few great philosophers were devoid of it, especially those remarkable free-thinkers of classical antiquity who first conceived the idea of natural evolution. All the creation-myths, on the contrary, were of a supernatural, miraculous, and transcendental character. Incompetent, as it was, to investigate for itself the nature of the world and its origin by natural causes, the undeveloped mind naturally had recourse to the idea of miracle. In most of these creation-myths _anthropism_ was blended with the belief in the miraculous. The creator was supposed to have constructed the world on a definite plan, just as man accomplishes his artificial constructions; the conception of the creator was generally completely anthropomorphic, a palpable "anthropistic creationism." The "all-mighty maker of heaven and earth," as he is called in Genesis and the Catechism, is just as humanly conceived as the modern creator of Agassiz and Reinke, or the intelligent "engineer" of other recent biologists. Entering more fully into the notion of creation, we can distinguish as two entirely different acts the production of the universe as a whole and the partial production of its various parts, in harmony with Spinoza's idea of _substance_ (the universe) and _accidents_ (or _modes_, the individual phenomena of substance). This distinction is of great importance, because there are many eminent philosophers who admit the one and reject the other. According to this creationist theory, then, God has "made the world out of nothing." It is supposed that God (a rational, but immaterial, being) existed by himself for an eternity before he resolved to create the world. Some supporters of the theory restrict God's creative function to one single act; they believe that this extramundane God (the rest of whose life is shrouded in mystery) created the substance of the world in a single moment, endowed it with the faculty of the most extensive evolution, and troubled no further about it. This view may be found, for instance, in the English Deists in many forms. It approaches very close to our monistic theory of evolution, only abandoning it in the one instant in which God accomplished the creation. Other creationists contend that God did not confine himself to the mere creation of matter, but that he continues to be operative as the "sustainer and ruler of the world." Different modifications of this belief are found, some approaching very close to _pantheism_ and others to complete _theism_. All these and similar forms of belief in creation are incompatible with the law of the persistence of matter and force; that law knows nothing of a beginning. It is interesting to note that E. du Bois-Reymond has identified himself with this cosmological creationism in his latest speech (on "Neovitalism," 1894). "It is more consonant with the divine omnipotence," he says, "to assume that it created the whole material of the world in one creative act unthinkable ages ago in such wise that it should be endowed with inviolable laws to control the origin and the progress of living things--that, for instance, here on earth rudimentary organisms should arise from which, without further assistance, the whole of living nature could be evolved, from a primitive bacillus to the graceful palm-wood, from a primitive micrococcus to Solomon's lovely wives or to the brain of Newton. Thus we are content with _one_ creative day, and we derive organic nature mechanically, without the aid of either old or new vitalism." Du Bois-Reymond here shows, as in the question of consciousness, the shallow and illogical character of his monistic thought. According to another still prevalent theory, which may be called "ontological creationism," God not only created the world at large, but also its separate contents. In the Christian world the old Semitic legend of creation, taken from Genesis, is still very widely accepted; even among modern scientists it finds an adherent here and there. I have fully entered into the criticism of it in the first chapter of my _Natural History of Creation_. The following theories may be enumerated as the most interesting modifications of this ontological creationism: I. _Dualistic creation._--God restricted his interference to _two_ creative acts. First he created the inorganic world, mere dead substance, to which alone the law of energy applies, working blindly and aimlessly in the mechanism of material things and the building of the mountains; then God attained intelligence and communicated it to the purposive intelligent forces which initiate and control organic evolution.[26] II. _Trialistic creation._--God made the world in _three_ creative acts: (_a_) the creation of the heavens--the extra-terrestrial world, (_b_) the creation of the earth (as the centre of the world) and of its living inhabitants, and (_c_) the creation of man (in the image and likeness of God). This dogma is still widely prevalent among theologians and other "educated" people; it is taught as the truth in many of our schools. III. _Heptameral creation_; a creation in seven days (_teste_ Moses).--Although few educated people really believe in this Mosaic myth now, it is still firmly impressed on our children in the biblical lessons of their earliest years. The numerous attempts that have been made, especially in England, to harmonize it with the modern theory of evolution have entirely failed. It obtained some importance in science when Linné adopted it in the establishment of his system, and based his definition of organic species (which he considered to be unchangeable) on it: "There are as many different species of animals and plants as there were different forms created in the beginning by the Infinite." This dogma was pretty generally held until the time of Darwin (1859), although Lamarck had already proved its untenability in 1809. IV. _Periodic creation._--At the beginning of each period of the earth's history the whole population of animals and plants was created anew, and destroyed by a general catastrophe at its close; there were as many general creative acts as there are distinct geological periods (the catastrophic theory of Cuvier [1818] and Louis Agassiz [1858]). Palæontology, which seemed to support this theory in its more imperfect stage, has since completely refuted it. V. _Individual creation._--Every single man--and every individual animal and plant--does not arise by a natural process of growth, but is created by the favor of God. This view of creation is still often met with in journals, especially in the "births" column. The special talents and features of our children are often gratefully acknowledged to be "gifts of God"; their hereditary defects fit into another theory. The error of these creation-legends and the cognate belief in miracles must have been apparent to thoughtful minds at an early period; more than two thousand years ago we find that many attempts were made to replace them by a rational theory, and to explain the origin of the world by natural causes. In the front rank, once more, we must place the leaders of the Ionic school, with Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Aristotle, Lucretius, and other ancient philosophers. The first imperfect attempts which they made astonish us, in a measure, by the flashes of mental light in which they anticipate modern ideas. It must be remembered that classical antiquity had not that solid groundwork for scientific speculation which has been provided by the countless observations and experiments of modern scientists. During the Middle Ages--especially during the domination of the papacy--scientific work in this direction entirely ceased. The torture and the stake of the Inquisition insured that an unconditional belief in the Hebrew mythology should be the final answer to all the questions of creation. Even the phenomena which led directly to the observation of the _facts_ of evolution--the embryology of the plant and the animal, and of man--remained unnoticed, or only excited the interest of an occasional keen observer; but their discoveries were ignored or forgotten. Moreover, the path to a correct knowledge of natural development was barred by the dominant theory of preformation, the dogma which held that the characteristic form and structure of each animal and plant were already sketched in miniature in the germ (cf. p. 54). The science which we now call the science of evolution (in the broadest sense) is, both in its general outline and in its separate parts, a child of the nineteenth century; it is one of its most momentous and most brilliant achievements. Almost unknown in the preceding century, this theory has now become the sure foundation of our whole world-system. I have treated it exhaustively in my _General Morphology_ (1866), more popularly in my _Natural History of Creation_ (1868), and in its special application to man in my _Anthropogeny_ (1874). Here I shall restrict myself to a brief survey of the chief advances which the science has made in the course of the century. It falls into four sections, according to the nature of its object; that is, it deals with the natural origin of (1) the cosmos, (2) the earth, (3) terrestrial forms of life, and (4) man. I.--MONISTIC COSMOGONY The first attempt to explain the constitution and the mechanical origin of the world in a simple manner by "Newtonian laws"--that is, by mathematical and physical laws--was made by Immanuel Kant in the famous work of his youth (1755), _General History of the Earth and Theory of the Heavens_. Unfortunately, this distinguished and daring work remained almost unknown for ninety years; it was only disinterred in 1845 by Alexander Humboldt in the first volume of his _Cosmos_. In the mean time the great French mathematician, Pierre Laplace, had arrived independently at similar views to those of Kant, and he gave them a mathematical foundation in his _Exposition du Système du Monde_ (1796). His chief work, the _Mécanique Céleste_, appeared a hundred years ago. The analogous features of the cosmogony of Kant and Laplace consist, as is well known, in a mechanical explanation of the movements of the planets, and the conclusion which is drawn therefrom, that all the cosmic bodies were formed originally by a condensation of rotating nebulous spheres. This "nebular hypothesis" has been much improved and supplemented since, but it is still the best of all the attempts to explain the origin of the world on monistic and mechanical lines. It has recently been strongly confirmed and enlarged by the theory that this cosmogonic process did not simply take place once, but is periodically repeated. While new cosmic bodies arise and develop out of rotating masses of nebula in some parts of the universe, in other parts old, extinct, frigid suns come into collision, and are once more reduced by the heat generated to the condition of nebulæ. Nearly all the older and the more recent cosmogonies, including most of those which were inspired by Kant and Laplace, started from the popular idea that the world had had a beginning. Hence, according to a widespread version of the nebular hypothesis, "in the beginning" was made a vast nebula of infinitely attenuated and light material, and at a certain moment ("countless ages ago") a movement of rotation was imparted to this mass. Given this "first beginning" of the cosmogonic movement, it is easy, on mechanical principles, to deduce and mathematically establish the further phenomena of the formation of the cosmic bodies, the separation of the planets, and so forth. This first "origin of movement" is Du Bois-Reymond's second "world-enigma"; he regards it as transcendental. Many other scientists and philosophers are equally helpless before this difficulty; they resign themselves to the notion that we have here a primary "supernatural impetus" to the scheme of things, a "miracle." In our opinion, this second "world-enigma" is solved by the recognition that movement is as innate and original a property of substance as is sensation. The proof of this monistic assumption is found, first, in the law of substance, and, secondly, in the discoveries which astronomy and physics have made in the latter half of the century. By the spectral analysis of Bunsen and Kirchhoff (1860) we have found, not only that the millions of bodies, which fill the infinity of space, are of the same material as our own sun and earth, but also that they are in various stages of evolution; we have obtained by its aid information as to the movements and distances of the stars, which the telescope would never have given us. Moreover, the telescope itself has been vastly improved, and has, in alliance with photography, made a host of scientific discoveries of which no one dreamed at the beginning of the century. In particular, a closer acquaintance with comets, meteorites, star-clusters, and nebulæ has helped us to realize the great significance of the smaller bodies which are found in millions in the space between the stars. We now know that the _paths_ of the millions of heavenly bodies are _changeable_, and to some extent irregular, whereas the planetary system was formerly thought to be constant, and the rotating spheres were described as pursuing their orbits in eternal regularity. Astro-physics owes much of its triumph to the immense progress of other branches of physics, of optics, and electricity, and especially of the theory of ether. And here, again, our supreme law of substance is found to be one of the most valuable achievements of modern science. We now know that it rules unconditionally in the most distant reaches of space, just as it does in our planetary system, in the most minute particle of the earth as well as in the smallest cell of our human frame. We are, moreover, justified in concluding, if we are not logically compelled to conclude, that the persistence of matter and force has held good throughout all time as it does to-day. Through all eternity the infinite universe has been, and is, subject to the law of substance. From this great progress of astronomy and physics, which mutually elucidate and supplement each other, we draw a series of most important conclusions with regard to the constitution and evolution of the cosmos, and the persistence and transformation of substance. Let us put them briefly in the following theses: I. The _extent_ of the universe is infinite and unbounded; it is empty in no part, but everywhere filled with substance. II. The _duration_ of the world is equally infinite and unbounded; it has no beginning and no end: it is eternity. III. Substance is everywhere and always in uninterrupted movement and transformation: nowhere is there perfect repose and rigidity; yet the infinite quantity of matter and of eternally changing force remains constant. IV. This universal movement of substance in space takes the form of an eternal cycle or of a periodical process of evolution. V. The phases of this evolution consist in a periodic change of consistency, of which the first outcome is the primary division into mass and ether--the ergonomy of ponderable and imponderable matter. VI. This division is effected by a progressive condensation of matter as the formation of countless infinitesimal "centres of condensation," in which the inherent primitive properties of substance--feeling and inclination--are the active causes. VII. While minute and then larger bodies are being formed by this pyknotic process in one part of space, and the intermediate ether increases its strain, the opposite process--the destruction of cosmic bodies by collision--is taking place in another quarter. VIII. The immense quantity of heat which is generated in this mechanical process of the collision of swiftly moving bodies represents the new kinetic energy which effects the movement of the resultant nebulæ and the construction of new rotating bodies. The eternal drama begins afresh. Even our mother earth, which was formed of part of the gyrating solar system millions of ages ago, will grow cold and lifeless after the lapse of further millions, and, gradually narrowing its orbit, will fall eventually into the sun. It seems to me that these modern discoveries as to the periodic decay and re-birth of cosmic bodies, which we owe to the most recent advance of physics and astronomy, associated with the law of substance, are especially important in giving us a clear insight into the universal cosmic process of evolution. In their light our earth shrinks into the slender proportions of a "mote in the sunbeam," of which unnumbered millions chase each other through the vast depths of space. Our own "human nature," which exalted itself into an image of God in its anthropistic illusion, sinks to the level of a placental mammal, which has no more value for the universe at large than the ant, the fly of a summer's day, the microscopic infusorium, or the smallest bacillus. Humanity is but a transitory phase of the evolution of an eternal substance, a particular phenomenal form of matter and energy, the true proportion of which we soon perceive when we set it on the background of infinite space and eternal time. Since Kant explained space and time to be merely "forms of perception"--space the form of external, time of internal, sensitivity--there has been a keen controversy, which still continues, over this important problem. A large section of modern metaphysicians have persuaded themselves that this "critical fact" possesses a great importance as the starting-point of "a purely idealist theory of knowledge," and that, consequently, the natural opinion of the ordinary healthy mind as to the _reality_ of time and space is swept aside. This narrow and ultra-idealist conception of time and space has become a prolific source of error. It overlooks the fact that Kant only touched one side of the problem, the _subjective_ side, in that theory, and recognized the equal validity of its _objective_ side. "Time and space," he said, "have empirical reality, but transcendental ideality." Our modern monism is quite compatible with this thesis of Kant's, but not with the one-sided exaggeration of the subjective aspect of the problem; the latter leads logically to the absurd idealism that culminates in Berkeley's thesis, "Bodies are but ideas; their essence is in their perception." The thesis should be read thus: "Bodies are only ideas for my personal consciousness; their existence is just as real as that of my organs of thought, the ganglionic cells in the gray bed of my brain, which receive the impress of bodies on my sense-organs and form those ideas by association of the impressions." It is just as easy to doubt or to deny the reality of my own consciousness as to doubt that of time and space. In the delirium of fever, in hallucinations, in dreams, and in double-consciousness, I take ideas to be true which are merely fancies. I mistake my own personality for another (_vide_ p. 185); Descartes' famous _Cogito ergo sum_ applies no longer. On the other hand, the reality of time and space is now fully established by that expansion of our philosophy which we owe to the law of substance and to our monistic cosmogony. When we have happily got rid of the untenable idea of "empty space," there remains as the infinite "space-filling"-medium matter, in its two forms of ether and mass. So also we find a "time-filling" event in the eternal movement, or genetic energy, which reveals itself in the uninterrupted evolution of substance, in the _perpetuum mobile_ of the universe. As a body which has been set in motion continues to move as long as no external agency interferes with it, the idea was conceived long ago of constructing an apparatus which should illustrate perpetual motion. The fact was overlooked that every movement meets with external impediments and gradually ceases, unless a new impetus is given to it from without and a new force is introduced to counteract the impediments. Thus, for instance, a pendulum would swing backward and forward for an eternity at the same speed if the resistance of the atmosphere and the friction at the point it hangs from did not gradually deprive it of the mechanical kinetic energy of its motion and convert it into heat. We have to furnish it with fresh mechanical energy by a spring (or, as in the pendulum-clock, by the drag of a weight). Hence it is impossible to construct a machine that would produce, without external aid, a surplus of energy by which it could keep itself going. Every attempt to make such a _perpetuum mobile_ must necessarily fail; the discovery of the law of substance showed, in addition, the theoretical impossibility of it. The case is different, however, when we turn to the world at large, the boundless universe that is in eternal movement. The infinite matter, which fills it objectively, is what we call _space_ in our subjective impression of it; _time_ is our subjective conception of its eternal movement, which is, objectively, a periodic, cyclic evolution. These two "forms of perception" teach us the infinity and eternity of the universe. That is, moreover, equal to saying that the universe itself is a _perpetuum mobile_. This infinite and eternal "machine of the universe" sustains itself in eternal and uninterrupted movement, because every impediment is compensated by an "equivalence of energy," and the unlimited sum of kinetic and potential energy remains always the same. The law of the persistence of force proves also that the idea of a _perpetuum mobile_ is just as applicable to, and as significant for, the cosmos as a whole as it is impossible for the isolated action of any part of it. Hence the theory of _entropy_ is likewise untenable. The able founder of the mechanical theory of heat (1850), Clausius, embodied the momentous contents of this important theory in two theses. The first runs: "The energy of the universe is constant"--that is one-half of our law of substance, the principle of energy (_vide_ p. 230). The second thesis is: "The energy of the universe tends towards a maximum." In my opinion this second assertion is just as erroneous as the first is true. In the theory of Clausius the entire energy of the universe is of two kinds, one of which (heat of the higher degree, mechanical, electrical, chemical energy, etc.) is partly convertible into work, but the other is not; the latter energy, already converted into heat and distributed in the cooler masses, is irrevocably lost as far as any further work is concerned. Clausius calls this unconsumed energy, which is no longer available for mechanical work, _entropy_ (that is, force that is directed _inward_); it is continually increasing at the cost of the other half. As, therefore, the mechanical energy of the universe is daily being transformed into heat, and this cannot be reconverted into mechanical force, the sum of heat and energy in the universe must continually tend to be reduced and dissipated. All difference of temperature must ultimately disappear, and the completely latent heat must be equally distributed through one inert mass of motionless matter. All organic life and movement must cease when this maximum of _entropy_ has been reached. That would be a real "end of the world." If this theory of entropy were true, we should have a "beginning" corresponding to this assumed "end" of the world--a minimum of entropy, in which the differences in temperature of the various parts of the cosmos would be at a maximum. Both ideas are quite untenable in the light of our monistic and consistent theory of the eternal cosmogenetic process; both contradict the law of substance. There is neither beginning nor end of the world. The universe is infinite, and eternally in motion; the conversion of kinetic into potential energy, and _vicissim_, goes on uninterruptedly; and the sum of this actual and potential energy remains constant. The second thesis of the mechanical theory of heat contradicts the first, and so must be rejected. The representatives of the theory of entropy are quite correct as long as they confine themselves to distinct processes, in which, _under certain conditions_, the latent heat cannot be reconverted into work. Thus, for instance, in the steam-engine the heat can only be converted into mechanical work when it passes from a warmer body (steam) into a cooler (water); the process cannot be reversed. In the world at large, however, quite other conditions obtain--conditions which permit the reconversion of latent heat into mechanical work. For instance, in the collision of two heavenly bodies, which rush towards each other at inconceivable speed, enormous quantities of heat are liberated, while the pulverized masses are hurled and scattered about space. The eternal drama begins afresh--the rotating mass, the condensation of its parts, the formation of new meteorites, their combination into larger bodies, and so on. II.--MONISTIC GEOGENY The history of the earth, of which we are now going to make a brief survey, is only a minute section of the history of the cosmos. Like the latter, it has been the object of philosophic speculation and mythological fantasy for many thousand years. Its true scientific study, however, is much younger; it belongs, for the most part, to the nineteenth century. The fact that the earth is a planet revolving round the sun was determined by the system of Copernicus (1543); Galilei, Kepler, and other great astronomers, mathematically determined its distance from the sun, the laws of its motion, and so forth. Kant and Laplace indicated, in their cosmogony, the way in which the earth had been developed from the parent sun. But the later history of the earth, the formation of its crust, the origin of its seas and continents, its mountains and deserts, was rarely made the subject of serious scientific research in the eighteenth century, and in the first two decades of the nineteenth. As a rule, men were satisfied with unreliable conjectures or with the traditional story of creation; once more the Mosaic legend barred the way to an independent investigation. In 1822 an important work appeared, which followed the same method in the scientific investigation of the history of the earth that had already proved the most fertile--the _ontological_ method, or the principle of "actualism." It consists in a careful study and manipulation of _actual_ phenomena with a view to the elucidation of the analogous historical processes of the past. The Society of Science at Göttingen had offered a prize in 1818 for "the most searching and comprehensive inquiry into the changes in the earth's crust which are historically demonstrable, and the application which may be made of a knowledge of them in the investigation of the terrestrial revolutions which lie beyond the range of history." This prize was obtained by Karl Hoff, of Gotha, for his distinguished work, _History of the Natural Changes in the Crust of the Earth in the Light of Tradition_ (1822-34). Sir Charles Lyell then applied this _ontological_ or _actualistic_ method with great success to the whole province of geology; his _Principles of Geology_ (1830) laid the firm foundation on which the fabric of the history of the earth was so happily erected. The important geogenetic research of Alexander Humboldt, Leopold Buch, Gustav Bischof, Edward Süss, and other geologists, were wholly based on the empirical foundation and the speculative principles of Karl Hoff and Charles Lyell. They cleared the way for purely rational science in the field of geology; they removed the obstacles that had been put in the path by mythological fancy and religious tradition, especially by the Bible and its legends. I have already discussed the merits of Lyell, and his relations with his friend Charles Darwin, in the sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of my _Natural History of Creation_, and must refer the reader to the standard works on geology for a further acquaintance with the history of the earth and the great progress which dynamical and historical geology have made during the century. The first division of the history of the earth must be a separation of inorganic and organic geogeny; the latter begins with the first appearance of living things on our planet. The earlier section, the inorganic history of the earth, ran much the same course as that of the other planets of our system. They were all cast off as rings of nebula at the equator of the rotating solar mass, and gradually condensed into independent bodies. After cooling down a little, the glowing ball of the earth was formed out of the gaseous mass, and eventually, as the heat continued to radiate out into space, there was formed at its surface the thin solid crust on which we live. When the temperature at the surface had gone down to a certain point, the water descended upon it from the environing clouds of steam, and thus the first condition was secured for the rise of organic life. Many million years--certainly more than a hundred--have passed since this important process of the formation of water took place, introducing the third section of cosmogony, which we call _biogeny_. III.--MONISTIC BIOGENY The third phase of the evolution of the world opens with the advent of organisms on our planet, and continues uninterrupted from that point until the present day. The great problems which this most interesting part of the earth's history suggests to us were still thought insoluble at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or, at least, so difficult that their solution seemed to be extremely remote. Now, at the close of the century, we can affirm with legitimate pride that they have been substantially solved by modern biology and its theory of transformism; indeed, many of the phenomena of the organic world are now interpreted on physical principles as completely as the familiar physical phenomena of inorganic nature. The merit of making the first important step in this difficult path and of pointing out the way to the monistic solution of all the problems of biology must be accorded to the great French scientist, Jean Lamarck; it was in 1809, the year of the birth of Charles Darwin, that he published his famous _Philosophie Zoologique_. In this original work not only is a splendid effort made to interpret all the phenomena of organic life from a monistic and physical point of view, but the path is opened which alone leads to the solution of the greatest enigma of this branch of science--the problem of the natural origin of organic species. Lamarck, who had an equally extensive empirical acquaintance with zoology and botany, drew the first sketch of the theory of descent; he showed that all the countless members of the plant and animal kingdoms have arisen by slow transformation from simple, common ancestral types, and that it is the gradual modification of forms by _adaptation_, in reciprocal action with _heredity_, which has brought about this secular metamorphosis. I have fully appreciated the merit of Lamarck in the fifth chapter, and of Darwin in the sixth and seventh chapters, of the _Natural History of Creation_. Darwin, fifty years afterwards, not only gave a solid foundation to all the essential parts of the theory of descent, but he filled up the _lacunae_ of Lamarck's work by his theory of selection. Darwin reaped abundantly the success that Lamarck had never seen, with all his merit. His epoch-making work on _The Origin of Species by Natural Selection_ has transformed modern biology from its very foundations, in the course of the last forty years, and has raised it to a stage of development that yields to no other science in existence. Darwin is _the Copernicus of the organic world_, as I said in 1868, and E. du Bois-Reymond repeated fifteen years afterwards.[27] IV.--MONISTIC ANTHROPOGENY The fourth and last phase of the world's history must be for us men that latest period of time which has witnessed the development of our own race. Lamarck (1809) had already recognized that this evolution is only rationally conceivable as the outcome of a natural process, by "descent from the apes," our next of kin among the mammals. Huxley then proved, in his famous essay on _The Place of Man in Nature_, that this momentous thesis is an inevitable consequence of the theory of descent, and is thoroughly established by the facts of anatomy, embryology, and palæontology. He considered this "question of all questions" to be substantially answered. Darwin followed with a brilliant discussion of the question under many aspects in his _Descent of Man_ (1871). I had myself devoted a special chapter to this important problem of the science of evolution in my _General Morphology_ (1866). In 1874 I published my _Anthropogeny_, which contains the first attempt to trace the descent of man through the entire chain of his ancestry right up to the earliest archigonous monera; the attempt was based equally on the three great "documents" of evolutionary science--anatomy, embryology, and palæontology. The progress we have made in anthropogenetic research during the last few years is described in the paper which I read on "Our Present Knowledge of the Origin of Man" at the International Congress of Zoologists at Cambridge in 1898.[28] CHAPTER XIV THE UNITY OF NATURE The Monism of the Cosmos--Essential Unity of Organic and Inorganic Nature--Carbon-Theory--The Hypothesis of Abiogenesis--Mechanical and Purposive Causes--Mechanicism and Teleology in Kant's Works--Design in the Organic and Inorganic Worlds--Vitalism--Neovitalism--Dysteleology (the Moral of the Rudimentary Organs)--Absence of Design in, and Imperfection of, Nature--Telic Action in Organized Bodies--Its Absence in Ontogeny and Phylogeny--The Platonist "Ideas"--No Moral Order Discoverable in the History of the Organic World, of the Vertebrates, or of the Human Race--Prevision--Design and Chance One of the first things to be proved by the law of substance is the basic fact that any natural force can be directly or indirectly converted into any other. Mechanical and chemical energy, sound and heat, light and electricity, are mutually convertible; they seem to be but different modes of one and the same fundamental force or _energy_. Thence follows the important thesis of the unity of all natural forces, or, as it may also be expressed, the "monism of energy." This fundamental principle is now generally recognized in the entire province of physics and chemistry, as far as it applies to inorganic substances. It seems to be otherwise with the organic world and its wealth of color and form. It is, of course, obvious that a great part of the phenomena of life may be immediately traced to mechanical and chemical energy, and to the effects of electricity and light. For other vital processes, however, especially for psychic activity and consciousness, such an interpretation is vigorously contested. Yet the modern science of evolution has achieved the task of constructing a bridge between these two apparently irreconcilable provinces. We are now certain that all the phenomena of organic life are subject to the universal law of substance no less than the phenomena of the inorganic universe. The unity of nature which necessarily follows, and the demolition of the earlier dualism, are certainly among the most valuable results of modern evolution. Thirty-three years ago I made an exhaustive effort to establish this "monism of the cosmos" and the essential unity of organic and inorganic nature by a thorough, critical demonstration, and a comparison of the accordance of these two great divisions of nature with regard to matter, form, and force.[29] A short epitome of the result is given in the fifteenth chapter of my _Natural History of Creation_. The views I put forward are accepted by the majority of modern scientists, but an attempt has been made in many quarters lately to dispute them and to maintain the old antithesis of the two divisions of nature. The ablest of these is to be found in the recent _Welt als That_ of the botanist Reinke. It defends _pure cosmological_ dualism with admirable lucidity and consistency, and only goes to prove how utterly untenable the teleological system is that is connected therewith. According to the author, physical and chemical forces alone are at work in the entire field of inorganic nature, while in the organic world we find "intelligent forces," regulative or dominant forces. The law of substance is supposed to apply to the one, but not to the other. On the whole, it is a question of the old antithesis of a mechanical and a teleological system. But before we go more fully into it, let us glance briefly at two other theories, which seem to me to be of great importance in the decision of that controversy--the carbon-theory and the theory of spontaneous generation. Physiological chemistry has, after countless analyses, established the following five facts during the last forty years: I. No other elements are found in organic bodies than those of the inorganic world. II. The combinations of elements which are peculiar to organisms, and which are responsible for their vital phenomena, are compound protoplasmic substances, of the group of albuminates. III. Organic life itself is a chemico-physical process, based on the metabolism (or interchange of material) of these albuminates. IV. The only element which is capable of building up these compound albuminates, in combination with other elements (oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulphur), is carbon. V. These protoplasmic compounds of carbon are distinguished from most other chemical combinations by their very intricate molecular structure, their instability, and their jelly-like consistency. On the basis of these five fundamental facts the following "carbon-theory" was erected thirty-three years ago: "The peculiar chemico-physical properties of carbon--especially the fluidity and the facility of decomposition of the most elaborate albuminoid compounds of carbon--are the sole and the mechanical causes of the specific phenomena of movement, which distinguish organic from inorganic substances, and which are called life, in the usual sense of the word" (see _The Natural History of Creation_). Although this "carbon-theory" is warmly disputed in some quarters, no better monistic theory has yet appeared to replace it. We have now a much better and more thorough knowledge of the physiological relations of cell-life, and of the chemistry and physics of the living protoplasm, than we had thirty-three years ago, and so it is possible to make a more confident and effective defence of the carbon-theory. The old idea of spontaneous generation is now taken in many different senses. It is owing to this indistinctness of the idea, and its application to so many different hypotheses, that the problem is one of the most contentious and confused of the science of the day. I restrict the idea of spontaneous generation--also called abiogenesis or archigony--to the first development of living protoplasm out of inorganic carbonates, and distinguish two phases in this "beginning of biogenesis": (1) _autogony_, or the rise of the simplest protoplasmic substances in a formative fluid, and (2) _plasmogony_, the differentiation of individual primitive organisms out of these protoplasmic compounds, in the form of _monera_. I have treated this important, though difficult, problem so exhaustively in the fifteenth chapter of my _Natural History of Creation_ that I may content myself here with referring to it. There is also a very searching and severely scientific inquiry into it in my _General Morphology_ (1866). Naegeli has also treated the hypothesis in quite the same sense in his mechanico-physiological theory of descent (1884), and has represented it to be an indispensable thesis in any natural theory of evolution. I entirely agree with his assertion that "to reject abiogenesis is to admit a miracle." The hypothesis of spontaneous generation and the allied carbon-theory are of great importance in deciding the long-standing conflict between the _teleological_ (dualistic) and the _mechanical_ (monistic) interpretation of phenomena. Since Darwin gave us the key to the monistic explanation of organization in his theory of selection forty years ago, it has become possible for us to trace the splendid variety of orderly tendencies of the organic world to mechanical, natural causes, just as we could formerly in the inorganic world alone. Hence the supernatural and telic forces, to which the scientist had had recourse, have been rendered superfluous. Modern metaphysics, however, continues to regard the latter as indispensable and the former as inadequate. No philosopher has done more than Immanuel Kant in defining the profound distinction between efficient and final causes, with relation to the interpretation of the whole cosmos. In his well-known earlier work on _The General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens_ he made a bold attempt "to treat the constitution and the mechanical origin of the entire fabric of the universe according to Newtonian laws." This "cosmological nebular theory" was based entirely on the mechanical phenomena of gravitation. It was expanded and mathematically established later on by Laplace. When the famous French astronomer was asked by Napoleon I. where God, the creator and sustainer of all things, came in in his system, he clearly and honestly replied: "Sire, I have managed without that hypothesis." That indicated the atheistic character which this mechanical cosmogony shares with all the other inorganic sciences. This is the more noteworthy because the theory of Kant and Laplace is now almost universally accepted; every attempt to supersede it has failed. When atheism is denounced as a grave reproach, as it so often is, it is well to remember that the reproach extends to the whole of modern science, in so far as it gives a purely mechanical interpretation of the inorganic world. Mechanicism (in the Kantian sense) alone can give us a true explanation of natural phenomena, for it traces them to their real efficient causes, to blind and unconscious agencies, which are determined in their action only by the material constitution of the bodies we are investigating. Kant himself emphatically affirms that "there can be no science without this mechanicism of nature," and that the capacity of human reason to give a mechanical interpretation of phenomena is unlimited. But when he came subsequently to give an elucidation of the complex phenomena of organic nature in his _critique_ of the teleological system, he declared that these mechanical causes were inadequate; that in this we must call _final causes_ to our assistance. It is true, he said, that even here we must recognize the theoretical faculty of the mind to give a mechanical interpretation, but its actual competence to do so is restricted. He grants it this capacity to some extent; but for the majority of the vital processes (and especially for man's psychic activity) he thinks we are bound to postulate _final_ causes. The remarkable §79 of the _critique_ of judgment bears the characteristic heading: "On the Necessity for the Subordination of the Mechanical Principle to the Teleological in the Explanation of a Thing as a Natural End." It seemed to Kant so impossible to explain the orderly processes in the living organism without postulating supernatural final causes (that is, a purposive creative force) that he said: "It is quite certain that we cannot even satisfactorily understand, much less elucidate, the nature of an organism and its internal faculty on purely mechanical natural principles; it is so certain, indeed, that we may confidently say, 'It is absurd for a man to conceive the idea even that some day a Newton will arise who can explain the origin of a single blade of grass by natural laws which are uncontrolled by design'--such a hope is entirely forbidden us." Seventy years afterwards this impossible "Newton of the organic world" appeared in the person of Charles Darwin, and achieved the great task that Kant had deemed impracticable. Since Newton (1682) formulated the law of gravitation, and Kant (1755) established "the constitution and mechanical origin of the entire fabric of the world on Newtonian laws," and Laplace (1796) provided a mathematical foundation for this law of cosmic mechanicism, the whole of the inorganic sciences have become purely _mechanical_, and at the same time purely _atheistic_. Astronomy, cosmogony, geology, meteorology, and inorganic physics and chemistry are now absolutely ruled by mechanical laws on a mathematical foundation. The idea of "design" has wholly disappeared from this vast province of science. At the close of the nineteenth century, now that this monistic view has fought its way to general recognition, no scientist ever asks seriously of the "purpose" of any single phenomenon in the whole of this great field. Is any astronomer likely to inquire seriously to-day into the purpose of planetary motion, or a mineralogist to seek design in the structure of a crystal? Does the physicist investigate the purpose of electric force, or the chemist that of atomic weight? We may confidently answer in the negative--certainly not, in the sense that God, or a purposive natural force, had at some time created these fundamental laws of the mechanism of the universe with a definite design, and causes them to work daily in accordance with his rational will. The anthropomorphic notion of a deliberate architect and ruler of the world has gone forever from this field; the "eternal, iron laws of nature" have taken his place. But the idea of design has a very great significance and application in the _organic_ world. We do undeniably perceive a purpose in the structure and in the life of an organism. The plant and the animal seem to be controlled by a definite design in the combination of their several parts, just as clearly as we see in the machines which man invents and constructs; as long as life continues the functions of the several organs are directed to definite ends, just as is the operation of the various parts of a machine. Hence it was quite natural that the older naïve study of nature, in explaining the origin and activity of the living being, should postulate a creator who had "arranged all things with wisdom and understanding," and had constructed each plant and animal according to the special purpose of its life. The conception of this "almighty creator of heaven and earth" was usually quite anthropomorphic; he created "everything after its kind." As long as the creator seemed to man to be of human shape, to think with his brain, see with his eyes, and fashion with his hands, it was possible to form a definite picture of this "divine engineer" and his artistic work in the great workshop of creation. This was not so easy when the idea of God became refined, and man saw in his "invisible God" a creator without organs--a gaseous being. Still more unintelligible did these anthropomorphic ideas become when physiology substituted for the conscious, divine architect an unconscious, creative "vital force"--a mysterious, purposive, natural force, which differed from the familiar forces of physics and chemistry, and only took these in part, during life, into its service. This vitalism prevailed until about the middle of the nineteenth century. Johannes Müller, the great Berlin physiologist, was the first to menace it with a destructive dose of facts. It is true that the distinguished biologist had himself (like all others in the first half of the century) been educated in a belief in this vital force, and deemed it indispensable for an elucidation of the ultimate sources of life; nevertheless, in his classical and still unrivalled _Manual of Physiology_ (1833) he gave a demonstrative proof that there is really nothing to be said for this vital force. Müller himself, in a long series of remarkable observations and experiments, showed that most of the vital processes in the human organism (and in the other animals) take place according to physical and chemical laws, and that many of them are capable of mathematical determination. That was no less true of the animal functions of the muscles and nerves, and of both the higher and the lower sense-organs, than of the vegetal functions of digestion, assimilation, and circulation. Only two branches of the life of the organism, mental action and reproduction, retained any element of mystery, and seemed inexplicable without assuming a vital force. But immediately after Müller's death such important discoveries and advances were made in these two branches that the uneasy "phantom of vital force" was driven from its last refuge. By a very remarkable coincidence Johannes Müller died in the year 1858, which saw the publication of Darwin's first communication concerning his famous theory. The theory of selection solved the great problem that had mastered Müller--the question of the origin of orderly arrangements from purely mechanical causes. Darwin, as we have often said, had a twofold immortal merit in the field of philosophy--firstly, the reform of Lamarck's theory of descent, and its establishment on the mass of facts accumulated in the course of the half-century; secondly, the conception of the theory of selection, which first revealed to us the true causes of the gradual formation of species. Darwin was the first to point out that the "struggle for life" is the unconscious regulator which controls the reciprocal action of heredity and adaptation in the gradual transformation of species; it is the great "selective divinity" which, by a purely "natural choice," without preconceived design, creates new forms, just as selective man creates new types by an "artificial choice" with a definite design. That gave us the solution of the great philosophic problem: "How can purposive contrivances be produced by purely mechanical processes without design?" Kant held the problem to be insoluble, although Empedocles had pointed out the direction of the solution two thousand years before. His principle of "teleological mechanism" has become more and more accepted of late years, and has furnished a mechanical explanation even of the finest and most recondite processes of organic life by "the functional self-production of the purposive structure." Thus have we got rid of the transcendental "design" of the ideological philosophy of the schools, which was the greatest obstacle to the growth of a rational and monistic conception of nature. Very recently, however, this ancient phantom of a mystic vital force, which seemed to be effectually banished, has put in a fresh appearance; a number of distinguished biologists have attempted to reintroduce it under another name. The clearest presentation of it is to be found in the _Welt als That_, of the Kiel botanist, J. Reinke. He takes upon himself the defence of the notion of miracle, of theism, of the Mosaic story of creation, and of the constancy of species; he calls "vital forces," in opposition to physical forces, the directive or dominant forces. Other neovitalists prefer, in the good old anthropomorphic style, a "supreme" engineer, who has endowed organic substance with a purposive structure, directed to the realization of a definite plan. These curious teleological hypotheses, and the objections to Darwinism which generally accompany them, do not call for serious scientific refutation to-day. Thirty-three years ago I gave the title of "dysteleology" to the science of those extremely interesting and significant biological facts, which, in the most striking fashion, give a direct contradiction to the teleological idea "of the purposive arrangement of the living organism."[30] This "science of rudimentary, abortive, arrested, distorted, atrophied, and cataplastic individuals" is based on an immense quantity of remarkable phenomena, which were long familiar to zoologists and botanists, but were not properly interpreted, and their great philosophic significance appreciated, until Darwin. All the higher animals and plants, or, in general, all organisms which are not entirely simple in structure, but are made up of a number of organs in orderly co-operation, are found, on close examination, to possess a number of useless or inoperative members, sometimes, indeed, hurtful and dangerous. In the flowers of most plants we find, besides the actual sex-leaves that effect reproduction, a number of other leaf-organs which have no use or meaning (arrested or "miscarried" pistils, fruit, corona, and calix-leaves, etc.). In the two large and variegated classes of flying animals, birds and insects, there are, besides the forms which make constant use of their wings, a number of species which have undeveloped wings and cannot fly. In nearly every class of the higher animals which have eyes there are certain types that live in the dark; they have eyes, as a rule, but undeveloped and useless for vision. In our own human organism we have similar useless rudimentary structures in the muscles of the ear, in the eye-lid, in the nipple and milk-gland of the male, and in other parts of the body; indeed, the vermiform appendix of our cæcum is not only useless, but extremely dangerous, and inflammation of it is responsible for a number of deaths every year. Neither the old mystic vitalism nor the new, equally irrational, neovitalism can give any explanation of these and many other purposeless contrivances in the structure of the plant and the animal; but they are very simple in the light of the theory of descent. It shows that these rudimentary organs are atrophied, owing to disuse. Just as our muscles, nerves, and organs of sense are strengthened by exercise and frequent use, so, on the other hand, they are liable to degenerate more or less by disuse or suspended exercise. But, although the development of the organs is promoted by exercise and adaptation, they by no means disappear without leaving a trace after neglect; the force of heredity retains them for many generations, and only permits their gradual disappearance after the lapse of a considerable time. The blind "struggle for existence between the organs" determines their historical disappearance, just as it effected their first origin and development. There is no internal "purpose" whatever in the drama. The life of the animal and the plant bears the same universal character of incompleteness as the life of man. This is directly attributable to the circumstance that nature--organic as well as inorganic--is in a perennial state of evolution, change, and transformation. This evolution seems on the whole--at least as far as we can survey the development of organic life on our planet--to be a progressive improvement, an historical advance from the simple to the complex, the lower to the higher, the imperfect to the perfect. I have proved in my _General Morphology_ that this historical progress--or gradual perfecting (_teleosis_)--is the inevitable result of selection, and not the outcome of a preconceived design. That is clear from the fact that no organism is perfect; even if it does perfectly adapt itself to its environment at a given moment, this condition would not last very long; the conditions of existence of the environment are themselves subject to perpetual change and they thus necessitate a continuous adaptation on the part of the organism. Under the title of _Design in the Living Organism_, the famous embryologist, Karl Ernst Baer, published a work in 1876 which, together with the article on Darwinism which accompanied it, proved very acceptable to our opponents, and is still much quoted in opposition to evolution. It was a revival of the old teleological system under a new name, and we must devote a line of criticism to it. We must premise that, though Baer was a scientist of the highest order, his original monistic views were gradually marred by a tinge of mysticism with the advance of age, and he eventually became a thorough dualist. In his profound work on "the evolution of animals" (1828), which he himself entitled _Observation and Experiment_, these two methods of investigation are equally applied. By careful observation of the various phenomena of the development of the animal ovum Baer succeeded in giving the first consistent presentation of the remarkable changes which take place in the growth of the vertebrate from a simple egg-cell. At the same time he endeavored, by far-seeing comparison and keen reflection, to learn the causes of the transformation, and to reduce them to general constructive laws. He expressed the general result of his research in the following thesis: "The evolution of the individual is the story of the growth of individuality in every respect." He meant that "the one great thought that controls all the different aspects of animal evolution is the same that gathered the scattered fragments of space into spheres and linked them into solar systems. This thought is no other than life itself, and the words and syllables in which it finds utterance are the varied forms of living things." Baer, however, did not attain to a deeper knowledge of this great genetic truth and a clearer insight into the real efficient causes of organic evolution, because his attention was exclusively given to one half of evolutionary science, the science of the evolution of the individual, embryology, or, in a wider sense, _ontogeny_. The other half, the science of the evolution of species, _phylogeny_, was not yet in existence, although Lamarck had already pointed out the way to it in 1809. When it was established by Darwin in 1859, the aged Baer was no longer in a position to appreciate it; the fruitless struggle which he led against the theory of selection clearly proved that he understood neither its real meaning nor its philosophic importance. Teleological and, subsequently, theological speculations had incapacitated the ageing scientist from appreciating this greatest reform of biology. The teleological observations which he published against it in his _Species and Studies_ in his eighty-fourth year are mere repetitions of errors which the teleology of the dualists has opposed to the mechanical or monistic system for more than two thousand years. The "telic idea" which, according to Baer, controls the entire evolution of the animal from the ovum, is only another expression for the eternal "idea" of Plato and the _entelecheia_ of his pupil Aristotle. Our modern biogeny gives a purely physiological explanation of the facts of embryology, in assigning the functions of heredity and adaptation as their causes. The great biogenetic law, which Baer failed to appreciate, reveals the intimate causal connection between the _ontogenesis_ of the individual and the _phylogenesis_ of its ancestors; the former seems to be a recapitulation of the latter. Nowhere, however, in the evolution of animals and plants do we find any trace of design, but merely the inevitable outcome of the struggle for existence, the blind controller, instead of the provident God, that effects the changes of organic forms by a mutual action of the laws of heredity and adaptation. And there is no more trace of "design" in the embryology of the individual plant, animal, or man. This _ontogeny_ is but a brief epitome of _phylogeny_, an abbreviated and condensed recapitulation of it, determined by the physiological laws of heredity. Baer ended the preface to his classical _Evolution of Animals_ (1828) with these words: "The palm will be awarded to the fortunate scientist who succeeds in reducing the constructive forces of the animal body to the general forces or life-processes of the entire world. The tree has not yet been planted which is to make his cradle." The great embryologist erred once more. That very year, 1828, witnessed the arrival of Charles Darwin at Cambridge University (for the purpose of studying theology!)--the "fortunate scientist" who richly earned the palm thirty years afterwards by his theory of selection. In the philosophy of history--that is, in the general reflections which historians make on the destinies of nations and the complicated course of political evolution--there still prevails the notion of a "moral order of the universe." Historians seek in the vivid drama of history a leading design, an ideal purpose, which has ordained one or other race or state to a special triumph, and to dominion over the others. This teleological view of history has recently become more strongly contrasted with our monistic view in proportion as monism has proved to be the only possible interpretation of inorganic nature. Throughout the whole of astronomy, geology, physics, and chemistry there is no question to-day of a "moral order," or a personal God, whose "hand hath disposed all things in wisdom and understanding." And the same must be said of the entire field of biology, the whole constitution and history of organic nature, if we set aside the question of man for the moment. Darwin has not only proved by his theory of selection that the orderly processes in the life and structure of animals and plants have arisen by mechanical laws without any preconceived design, but he has shown us in the "struggle for life" the powerful natural force which has exerted supreme control over the entire course of organic evolution for millions of years. It may be said that the struggle for life is the "survival of the fittest" or the "victory of the best"; that is only correct when we regard the strongest as the best (in a moral sense). Moreover, the whole history of the organic world goes to prove that, besides the predominant advance towards perfection, there are at all times cases of retrogression to lower stages. Even Baer's notion of "design" has no moral feature whatever. Do we find a different state of things in the history of peoples, which man, in his anthropocentric presumption, loves to call "the history of the world"? Do we find in every phase of it a lofty moral principle or a wise ruler, guiding the destinies of nations? There can be but one answer in the present advanced stage of natural and human history: No. The fate of those branches of the human family, those nations and races which have struggled for existence and progress for thousands of years, is determined by the same "eternal laws of iron" as the history of the whole organic world which has peopled the earth for millions of years. Geologists distinguish three great epochs in the organic history of the earth, as far as we can read it in the monuments of the science of fossils--the primary, secondary, and tertiary epochs. According to a recent calculation, the first occupied at least thirty-four million, the second eleven million, and the third three million years. The history of the family of vertebrates, from which our own race has sprung, unfolds clearly before our eyes during this long period. Three different stages in the evolution of the vertebrate correspond to the three epochs; the _fishes_ characterized the primary (palæozoic) age, the _reptiles_ the secondary (mesozoic), and the _mammals_ the tertiary (cænozoic). Of the three groups the fishes rank lowest in organization, the reptiles come next, and the mammals take the highest place. We find, on nearer examination of the history of the three classes, that their various orders and families also advanced progressively during the three epochs towards a higher stage of perfection. May we consider this progressive development as the outcome of a conscious design or a moral order of the universe? Certainly not. The theory of selection teaches us that this organic progress, like the earlier organic differentiation, is an inevitable consequence of the struggle for existence. Thousands of beautiful and remarkable species of animals and plants have perished during those forty-eight million years, to give place to stronger competitors, and the victors in this struggle for life were not always the noblest or most perfect forms in a moral sense. It has been just the same with the history of humanity. The splendid civilization of classical antiquity perished because Christianity, with its faith in a loving God and its hope of a better life beyond the grave, gave a fresh, strong impetus to the soaring human mind. The Papal Church quickly degenerated into a pitiful caricature of real Christianity, and ruthlessly scattered the treasures of knowledge which the Hellenic philosophy had gathered; it gained the dominion of the world through the ignorance of the credulous masses. In time the Reformation broke the chains of this mental slavery, and assisted reason to secure its right once more. But in the new, as in the older, period the great struggle for existence went on in its eternal fluctuation, with no trace of a moral order. And it is just as impossible for the impartial and critical observer to detect a "wise providence" in the fate of individual human beings as a moral order in the history of peoples. Both are determined with iron necessity by a mechanical causality which connects every single phenomenon with one or more antecedent causes. Even the ancient Greeks recognized _ananke_, the blind _heimarmene_, the fate "that rules gods and men," as the supreme principle of the universe. Christianity replaced it by a conscious Providence, which is not blind, but sees, and which governs the world in patriarchal fashion. The anthropomorphic character of this notion, generally closely connected with belief in a personal God, is quite obvious. Belief in a "loving Father," who unceasingly guides the destinies of one billion five hundred million men on our planet, and is attentive at all times to their millions of contradictory prayers and pious wishes, is absolutely impossible; that is at once perceived on laying aside the colored spectacles of "faith" and reflecting rationally on the subject. As a rule, this belief in Providence and the tutelage of a "loving Father" is more intense in the modern civilized man--just as in the uncultured savage--when some good fortune has fallen him: an escape from peril of life, recovery from a severe illness, the winning of the first prize in a lottery, the birth of a long-delayed child, and so forth. When, on the other hand, a misfortune is met with, or an ardent wish is not fulfilled, "Providence" is forgotten. The wise ruler of the world slumbered--or refused his blessing. In the extraordinary development of commerce of the nineteenth century the number of catastrophes and accidents has necessarily increased beyond all imagination; of that the journal is a daily witness. Thousands are killed every year by shipwreck, railway accidents, mine accidents, etc. Thousands slay each other every year in war, and the preparation for this wholesale massacre absorbs much the greater part of the revenue in the highest civilized nations, the chief professors of "Christian charity." And among these hundreds of thousands of annual victims of modern civilization strong, industrious, courageous workers predominate. Yet the talk of a "moral order" goes on. Since impartial study of the evolution of the world teaches us that there is no definite aim and no special purpose to be traced in it, there seems to be no alternative but to leave everything to "blind chance." This reproach has been made to the transformism of Lamarck and Darwin, as it had been to the previous systems of Kant and Laplace; there are a number of dualist philosophers who lay great stress on it. It is, therefore, worth while to make a brief remark upon it. One group of philosophers affirms, in accordance with its teleological conception, that the whole cosmos is an orderly system, in which every phenomenon has its aim and purpose; there is no such thing as chance. The other group, holding a mechanical theory, expresses itself thus: The development of the universe is a monistic mechanical process, in which we discover no aim or purpose whatever; what we call design in the organic world is a special result of biological agencies; neither in the evolution of the heavenly bodies nor in that of the crust of our earth do we find any trace of a controlling purpose--all is the result of chance. Each party is right--according to its definition of chance. The general law of causality, taken in conjunction with the law of substance, teaches us that every phenomenon has a mechanical cause; in this sense there is no such thing as chance. Yet it is not only lawful, but necessary, to retain the term for the purpose of expressing the simultaneous occurrence of two phenomena, which are not causally related to each other, but of which each has its own mechanical cause, independent of that of the other. Everybody knows that chance, in its monistic sense, plays an important part in the life of man and in the universe at large. That, however, does not prevent us from recognizing in each "chance" event, as we do in the evolution of the entire cosmos, the universal sovereignty of nature's supreme law, _the law of substance_. CHAPTER XV GOD AND THE WORLD The Idea of God in General--Antithesis of God and the World; the Supernatural and Nature--Theism and Pantheism--Chief Forms of Theism--Polytheism--Triplotheism--Amphitheism--Monotheism--Religious Statistics--Naturalistic Monotheism--Solarism--Anthropistic Monotheism--The Three Great Mediterranean Religions--Mosaism--Christianity--The Cult of the Madonna and the Saints--Papal Polytheism--Islam--Mixotheism--Nature of Theism--An Extra-mundane and Anthropomorphic God; a Gaseous Vertebrate--Pantheism--Intramundane God (Nature)--The Hylozoism of the Ionic Monists (Anaximander)--Conflict of Pantheism and Christianity--Spinoza--Modern Monism--Atheism For thousands of years humanity has placed the last and supreme basis of all phenomena in an efficient cause, to which it gives the title of God (_deus_, _theos_). Like all general ideas, this notion of God has undergone a series of remarkable modifications and transformations in the course of the evolution of reason. Indeed, it may be said that no other idea has had so many metamorphoses; for no other belief affects in so high a degree the chief objects of the mind and of rational science, as well as the deepest interests of the emotion and poetic fancy of the believer. A comparative criticism of the many different forms of the idea of God would be extremely interesting and instructive; but we have not space for it in the present work. We must be content with a passing glance at the most important forms of the belief and their relation to the modern thought that has been evoked by a sound study of nature. For further information on this interesting question the reader would do well to consult the distinguished work of Adalbert Svoboda, _Forms of Faith_ (1897). When we pass over the finer shades and the variegated clothing of the God-idea and confine our attention to its chief element, we can distribute all the different presentations of it in two groups--the _theistic_ and _pantheistic_ group. The latter is closely connected with the monistic, or rational, view of things, and the former is associated with dualism and mysticism. I.--THEISM In this view God is distinct from, and opposed to, the world as its creator, sustainer, and ruler. He is always conceived in a more or less human form, as an organism which thinks and acts like a man--only on a much higher scale. This anthropomorphic God, polyphyletically evolved by the different races, assumes an infinity of shapes in their imagination, from fetichism to the refined monotheistic religions of the present day. The chief forms of theism are polytheism, triplotheism, amphitheism, and monotheism. The polytheist peoples the world with a variety of gods and goddesses, which enter into its machinery more or less independently. _Fetichism_ sees such subordinate deities in the lifeless body of nature, in rocks, in water, in the air, in human productions of every kind (pictures, statues, etc.). _Demonism_ sees gods in living organisms of every species--trees, animals, and men. This kind of polytheism is found in innumerable forms even in the lowest tribes. It reaches the highest stage in Hellenic polytheism, in the myths of ancient Greece, which still furnish the finest images to the modern poet and artist. At a much lower stage we have Catholic polytheism, in which innumerable "saints" (many of them of very equivocal repute) are venerated as subordinate divinities, and prayed to to exert their mediation with the supreme divinity. The dogma of the "Trinity," which still comprises three of the chief articles of faith in the creed of Christian peoples, culminates in the notion that the one God of Christianity is really made up of _three_ different persons: (1) God the Father, the omnipotent creator of heaven and earth (this untenable myth was refuted long ago by scientific cosmogony, astronomy, and geology); (2) Jesus Christ; and (3) the Holy Ghost, a mystical being, over whose incomprehensible relation to the Father and the Son millions of Christian theologians have racked their brains in vain for the last nineteen hundred years. The Gospels, which are the only clear sources of this _triplotheism_, are very obscure as to the relation of these three persons to each other, and do not give a satisfactory answer to the question of their unity. On the other hand, it must be carefully noted what confusion this obscure and mystic dogma of the Trinity must necessarily cause in the minds of our children even in the earlier years of instruction. One morning they learn (in their religious instruction) that three times one are one, and the very next hour they are told in their arithmetic class that three times one are three. I remember well the reflection that this confusion led me to in my early school-days. For the rest, the "Trinity" is not an original element in Christianity; like most of the other Christian dogmas, it has been borrowed from earlier religions. Out of the sun-worship of the Chaldean magi was evolved the Trinity of Ilu, the mysterious source of the world; its three manifestations were Anu, primeval chaos; Bel, the architect of the world; and Aa, the heavenly light, the all-enlightening wisdom. In the Brahmanic religion the Trimurti is also conceived as a "divine unity" made up of three persons--Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the sustainer), and Shiva (the destroyer). It would seem that in this and other ideas of a Trinity the "sacred number, three," as such--as a "symbolical number"--has counted for something. The three first Christian virtues--Faith, Hope, and Charity--form a similar _triad_. According to the _amphitheists_, the world is ruled by two different gods, a good and an evil principle, God and the Devil. They are engaged in a perpetual struggle, like rival emperors, or pope and anti-pope. The condition of the world is the result of this conflict. The loving God, or good principle, is the source of all that is good and beautiful, of joy and of peace. The world would be perfect if His work were not continually thwarted by the evil principle, the Devil; this being is the cause of all that is bad and hateful, of contradiction and of pain. Amphitheism is undoubtedly the most rational of all forms of belief in God, and the one which is least incompatible with a scientific view of the world. Hence we find it elaborated in many ancient peoples thousands of years before Christ. In ancient India Vishnu, the preserver, struggles with Shiva, the destroyer. In ancient Egypt the good Osiris is opposed by the wicked Typhon. The early Hebrews had a similar dualism of Aschera (or Keturah), the fertile mother-earth, and Elion (Moloch or Sethos), the stern heavenly father. In the Zend religion of the ancient Persians, founded by Zoroaster two thousand years before Christ, there is a perpetual struggle between Ormuzd, the good god of light, and Ahriman, the wicked god of darkness. In Christian mythology the Devil is scarcely less conspicuous as the adversary of the good deity, the tempter and seducer, the prince of hell, and lord of darkness. A personal devil was still an important element in the belief of most Christians at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Towards the middle of the century he was gradually eliminated by being progressively explained away, or he was restricted to the subordinate _rôle_ he plays as Mephistopheles in Goethe's great drama. To-day the majority of educated people look upon "belief in a personal devil" as a mediæval superstition, while "belief in God" (that is, the personal, good, and loving God) is retained as an indispensable element of religion. Yet the one belief is just as much (or as little) justified as the other. In any case, the much-lamented "imperfection of our earthly life," the "struggle for existence," and all that pertains to it, are explained much more simply and naturally by this struggle of a good and an evil god than by any other form of theism. The dogma of the unity of God may in some respects be regarded as the simplest and most natural type of theism; it is popularly supposed to be the most widely accepted element of religion, and to predominate in the ecclesiastical systems of civilized countries. In reality, that is not the case, because this alleged "monotheism" usually turns out on closer inquiry to be one of the other forms of theism we have examined, a number of subordinate deities being generally introduced besides the supreme one. Most of the religions which took a purely monotheistic stand-point have become more or less polytheistic in the course of time. Modern statistics assure us that of the one billion five hundred million men who people the earth the great majority are monotheists; of these, _nominally_, about six hundred millions are Brahma-Buddhists, five hundred millions are called Christians, two hundred millions are heathens (of various types), one hundred and eighty millions are Mohammedans, ten millions are Jews, and ten millions have no religion at all. However, the vast majority of these nominal monotheists have very confused ideas about the deity, or believe in a number of gods and goddesses besides the chief god--angels, devils, etc. The different forms which monotheism has assumed in the course of its polyphyletic development may be distributed in two groups--those of _naturalistic_ and _anthropistic_ monotheism. Naturalistic monotheism finds the embodiment of the deity in some lofty and dominating natural phenomenon. The sun, the deity of light and warmth, on whose influence all organic life insensibly and directly depends, was taken to be such a phenomenon many thousand years ago. Sun-worship (solarism, or heliotheism) seems to the modern scientist to be the best of all forms of theism, and the one which may be most easily reconciled with modern monism. For modern astrophysics and geogeny have taught us that the earth is a fragment detached from the sun, and that it will eventually return to the bosom of its parent. Modern physiology teaches us that the first source of organic life on the earth is the formation of protoplasm, and that this synthesis of simple inorganic substances, water, carbonic acid, and ammonia, only takes place under the influence of sunlight. On the primary evolution of the plasmodomous plants followed, secondarily, that of the plasmophagous animals, which directly or indirectly depend on them for nourishment; and the origin of the human race itself is only a later stage in the development of the animal kingdom. Indeed, the whole of our bodily and mental life depends, in the last resort, like all other organic life, on the light and heat rays of the sun. Hence in the light of pure reason, sun-worship, as a form of naturalistic monotheism, seems to have a much better foundation than the anthropistic worship of Christians and of other monotheists who conceive their god in human form. As a matter of fact, the sun-worshippers attained, thousands of years ago, a higher intellectual and moral standard than most of the other theists. When I was in Bombay, in 1881, I watched with the greatest sympathy the elevating rites of the pious Parsees, who, standing on the sea-shore, or kneeling on their prayer-rugs, offered their devotion to the sun at its rise and setting.[31] Moon-worship (lunarism and selenotheism) is of much less importance than sun-worship. There are a few uncivilized races that have adored the moon as their only deity, but it has generally been associated with a worship of the stars and the sun. The humanization of God, or the idea that the "Supreme Being" feels, thinks, and acts like man (though in a higher degree), has played a most important part, as _anthropomorphic monotheism_, in the history of civilization. The most prominent in this respect are the three great religions of the Mediterranean peoples--the old Mosaic religion, the intermediate Christian religion, and the younger Mohammedanism. These three great Mediterranean religions, all three arising on the east coast of the most interesting of all seas, and originating in an imaginative enthusiast of the Semitic race, are intimately connected, not only by this external circumstance of an analogous origin, but by many common features of their internal contents. Just as Christianity borrowed a good deal of its mythology directly from ancient Judaism, so Islam has inherited much from both its predecessors. All the three were originally monotheistic; all three were subsequently overlaid with a great variety of polytheistic features, in proportion as they extended, first along the coast of the Mediterranean with its heterogeneous population, and eventually into every part of the world. The Hebrew monotheism, as it was founded by Moses (about 1600 B.C.), is usually regarded as the ancient faith which has been of the greatest importance in the ethical and religious development of humanity. This high historical appreciation is certainly valid in the sense that the two other world-conquering Mediterranean religions issued from it; Christ was just as truly a pupil of Moses as Mohammed was afterwards of Christ. So also the New Testament, which has become the foundation of the belief of the highest civilized nations in the short space of nineteen hundred years, rests on the venerable basis of the Old Testament. The Bible, which the two compose, has had a greater influence and a wider circulation than any other book in the world. Even to-day the Bible--in spite of its curious mingling of the best and the worst elements--is in a certain sense the "book of books." Yet when we make an impartial and unprejudiced study of this notable historical source, we find it very different in several important respects from the popular impression. Here again modern criticism and history have come to certain conclusions which destroy the prevalent tradition in its very foundations. The monotheism which Moses endeavored to establish in the worship of Jehovah, and which the prophets--the philosophers of the Hebrew race--afterwards developed with great success, had at first to sustain a long and severe struggle with the dominant polytheism which was in possession. Jehovah, or Yahveh, was originally derived from the heaven-god, which, under the title of Moloch or Baal, was one of the most popular of the Oriental deities (the Sethos or Typhon of the Egyptians, and the Saturn or Cronos of the Greeks). There were, however, other gods in great favor with the Jewish people, and so the struggle with "idolatry" continued. Still, Jehovah was, in principle, the only God, explicitly claiming, in the first precept of the decalogue: "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods beside me." Christian monotheism shared the fate of its mother, Mosaism; it was generally only monotheistic in theory, while it degenerated practically into every kind of polytheism. In point of fact, monotheism was logically abandoned in the very dogma of the Trinity, which was adopted as an indispensable foundation of the Christian religion. The three persons, which are distinguished as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are three distinct individuals (and, indeed, anthropomorphic persons), just as truly as the three Indian deities of the Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva) or the Trinity of the ancient Hebrews (Anu, Bel, and Aa). Moreover, in the most widely distributed form of Christianity the "virgin" mother of Christ plays an important part as a fourth deity; in many Catholic countries she is practically taken to be much more powerful and influential than the three male persons of the celestial administration. The cult of the madonna has been developed to such an extent in these countries that we may oppose it to the usual masculine form of monotheism as one of a feminine type. The "Queen of Heaven" becomes so prominent, as is seen in so many pictures and legends of the madonna, that the three male persons practically disappear. In addition, the imagination of the pious Christian soon came to increase this celestial administration by a numerous company of "saints" of all kinds, and bands of musical angels, who should see that "eternal life" should not prove too dull. The popes--the greatest charlatans that any religion ever produced--have constantly studied to increase this band of celestial satellites by repeated canonizations. This curious company received its most interesting acquisition in 1870, when the Vatican Council pronounced the popes, as the vicars of Christ, to be infallible, and thus raised them to a divine dignity. When we add the "personal Devil" that they acknowledge, and the "bad angels" who form his court, we have in modern Catholicism, still the most extensive branch of Christianity, a rich and variegated polytheism that dwarfs the Olympic family of the Greeks. Islam, or the Mohammedan monotheism, is the youngest and purest form of monotheism. When the young Mohammed (born 570) learned to despise the polytheistic idolatry of his Arabian compatriots, and became acquainted with Nestorian Christianity, he adopted its chief doctrines in a general way; but he could not bring himself to see anything more than a prophet in Christ, like Moses. He found in the dogma of the Trinity what every emancipated thinker finds on impartial reflection--an absurd legend which is neither reconcilable with the first principles of reason nor of any value whatever for our religious advancement. He justly regarded the worship of the immaculate mother of God as a piece of pure idolatry, like the veneration of pictures and images. The longer he reflected on it, and the more he strove after a purified idea of deity, the clearer did the certitude of his great maxim appear: "God is the only God"--there are no other gods beside him. Yet Mohammed could not free himself from the anthropomorphism of the God-idea. His one only God was an idealized, almighty man, like the stern, vindictive God of Moses, and the gentle, loving God of Christ. Still, we must admit that the Mohammedan religion has preserved the character of pure monotheism throughout the course of its historical development and its inevitable division much more faithfully than the Mosaic and Christian religions. We see that to-day, even externally, in its forms of prayer and preaching, and in the architecture and adornment of its mosques. When I visited the East for the first time, in 1873, and admired the noble mosques of Cairo, Smyrna, Brussa, and Constantinople, I was inspired with a feeling of real devotion by the simple and tasteful decoration of the interior, and the lofty and beautiful architectural work of the exterior. How noble and inspiring do these mosques appear in comparison with the majority of Catholic churches, which are covered internally with gaudy pictures and gilt, and are outwardly disfigured by an immoderate crowd of human and animal figures! Not less elevated are the silent prayers and the simple devotional acts of the Koran when compared with the loud, unintelligible verbosity of the Catholic Mass and the blatant music of their theatrical processions. Under the title of _mixotheism_ we may embrace all the forms of theistic belief which contain mixtures of religious notions of different, sometimes contradictory, kinds. In theory this most widely diffused type of religion is not recognized at all; in the concrete it is the most important and most notable of all. The vast majority of men who have religious opinions have always been, and still are, _mixotheists_; their idea of God is picturesquely compounded from the impressions received in childhood from their own sect, and a number of other impressions which are received later on, from contact with members of other religions, and which modify the earlier notions. In educated people there is also sometimes the modifying influence of philosophic studies in maturer years, and especially the unprejudiced study of natural phenomena, which reveals the futility of the theistic idea. The conflict of these contradictory impressions, which is very painful to a sensitive soul, and which often remains undecided throughout life, clearly shows the immense power of the _heredity_ of ancient myths on the one hand and the early _adaptation_ to erroneous dogmas on the other. The particular faith in which the child has been brought up generally remains in power, unless a "conversion" takes place subsequently, owing to the stronger influence of some other religion. But even in this supersession of one faith by another the new name, like the old one, proves to be merely an outward label covering a mixture of the most diverse opinions and errors. The greater part of those who call themselves Christians are not monotheists (as they think), but amphitheists, triplotheists, or polytheists. And the same must be said of Islam and Mosaism, and other monotheistic religions. Everywhere we find associated with the original idea of a "sole and triune God" later beliefs in a number of subordinate deities--angels, devils, saints, etc.--a picturesque assortment of the most diverse theistic forms. All the above forms of theism, in the proper sense of the word--whether the belief assumes a naturalistic or an anthropistic form--represent God to be an extramundane or a supernatural being. He is always opposed to the world, or nature, as an independent being; generally as its creator, sustainer, and ruler. In most religions he has the additional character of personality, or, to put it more definitely still, God as a person is likened to man. "In his gods man paints himself." This anthropomorphic conception of God as one who thinks, feels, and acts like man prevails with the great majority of theists, sometimes in a cruder and more naïve form, sometimes in a more refined and abstract degree. In any case the form of theosophy we have described is sure to affirm that God, the supreme being, is infinite in perfection, and therefore far removed from the imperfection of humanity. Yet, when we examine closely, we always find the same psychic or mental activity in the two. God feels, thinks, and acts as man does, although it be in an infinitely more perfect form. The _personal anthropism_ of God has become so natural to the majority of believers that they experience no shock when they find God personified in human form in pictures and statues, and in the varied images of the poet, in which God takes human form--that is, is changed into a vertebrate. In some myths, even, God takes the form of other mammals (an ape, lion, bull, etc.), and more rarely of a bird (eagle, dove, or stork), or of some lower vertebrate (serpent, crocodile, dragon, etc.). In the higher and more abstract forms of religion this idea of bodily appearance is entirely abandoned, and God is adored as a "pure spirit" without a body. "God is a spirit, and they who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." Nevertheless, the psychic activity of this "pure spirit" remains just the same as that of the anthropomorphic God. In reality, even this immaterial spirit is not conceived to be incorporeal, but merely invisible, gaseous. We thus arrive at the paradoxical conception of God as a _gaseous vertebrate_. II.--PANTHEISM Pantheism teaches that God and the world are one. The idea of God is identical with that of nature or substance. This pantheistic view is sharply opposed in principle to all the systems we have described, and to all possible forms of theism although there have been many attempts made from both sides to bridge over the deep chasm that separates the two. There is always this fundamental contradiction between them, that in theism God is opposed to nature as an _extramundane_ being, as creating and sustaining the world, and acting upon it from without, while in pantheism God, as an _intramundane_ being, is everywhere identical with nature itself, and is operative _within_ the world as "force" or "energy." The latter view alone is compatible with our supreme law--the law of substance. It follows necessarily that pantheism is _the world-system of the modern scientist_. There are, it is true, still a few men of science who contest this, and think it possible to reconcile the old theistic theory of human nature with the pantheistic truth of the law of substance. All these efforts rest on confusion or sophistry--when they are honest. As pantheism is a result of an advanced conception of nature in the civilized mind, it is naturally much younger than theism, the crudest forms of which are found in great variety in the uncivilized races of ten thousand years ago. We do, indeed, find the germs of pantheism in different religions at the very dawn of philosophy in the earliest civilized peoples (in India, Egypt, China, and Japan), several thousand years before the time of Christ; still, we do not meet a definite philosophical expression of it until the hylozoism of the Ionic philosophers, in the first half of the sixth century before Christ. All the great thinkers of this flourishing period of Hellenic thought are surpassed by the famous Anaximander, of Miletus, who conceived the essential unity of the infinite universe (_apeiron_) more profoundly and more clearly than his master, Thales, or his pupil, Anaximenes. Not only the great thought of the original unity of the cosmos and the development of all phenomena out of the all-pervading primitive matter found expression in Anaximander, but he even enunciated the bold idea of countless worlds in a periodic alternation of birth and death. Many other great philosophers of classical antiquity, especially Democritus, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, had, in the same or an analogous sense, a profound conception of this unity of nature and God, of body and spirit, which has obtained its highest expression in the law of substance of our modern monism. The famous Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius Carus, has presented it in a highly poetic form in his poem "De Rerum Natura." However, this true pantheistic monism was soon entirely displaced by the mystic dualism of Plato, and especially by the powerful influence which the idealistic philosophy obtained by its blending with Christian dogmas. When the papacy attained to its spiritual despotism over the world, pantheism was hopelessly crushed; Giordano Bruno, its most gifted defender, was burned alive by the "Vicar of Christ" in the Campo dei Fiori at Rome on February 17, 1600. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that pantheism was exhibited in its purest form by the great Baruch Spinoza; he gave for the totality of things a definition of substance in which God and the world are inseparably united. The clearness, confidence, and consistency of Spinoza's monistic system are the more remarkable when we remember that this gifted thinker of two hundred and fifty years ago was without the support of all those sound empirical bases which have been obtained in the second half of the nineteenth century. We have already spoken, in the first chapter, of Spinoza's relation to the materialism of the eighteenth and the monism of the nineteenth century. The propagation of his views, especially in Germany, is due, above all, to the immortal works of our greatest poet and thinker, Wolfgang Goethe. His splendid _God and the World_, _Prometheus_, _Faust_, etc., embody the great thoughts of pantheism in the most perfect poetic creations. Atheism affirms that there are no gods or goddesses, assuming that god means a personal, extramundane entity. This "godless world-system" substantially agrees with the monism or pantheism of the modern scientist; it is only another expression for it, emphasizing its negative aspect, the non-existence of any supernatural deity. In this sense Schopenhauer justly remarks: "Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism. The truth of pantheism lies in its destruction of the dualist antithesis of God and the world, in its recognition that the world exists in virtue of its own inherent forces. The maxim of the pantheist, 'God and the world are one,' is merely a polite way of giving the Lord God his _congé_." During the whole of the Middle Ages, under the bloody despotism of the popes, atheism was persecuted with fire and sword as a most pernicious system. As the "godless" man is plainly identified with the "wicked" in the Gospel, and is threatened--simply on account of his "want of faith"--with the eternal fires of hell, it was very natural that every good Christian should be anxious to avoid the suspicion of atheism. Unfortunately, the idea still prevails very widely. The atheistic scientist who devotes his strength and his life to the search for the truth, is freely credited with all that is evil; the theistic church-goer, who thoughtlessly follows the empty ceremonies of Catholic worship, is at once assumed to be a good citizen, even if there be no meaning whatever in his faith and his morality be deplorable. This error will only be destroyed when, in the twentieth century, the prevalent superstition gives place to rational knowledge and to a monistic conception of the unity of God and the world. CHAPTER XVI KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF The Knowledge of the Truth and Its Sources: the Activity of the Senses and the Association of Presentations--Organs of Sense and Organs of Thought--Sense-Organs and their Specific Energy--Their Evolution--The Philosophy of Sensibility--Inestimable Value of the Senses--Limits of Sensitive Knowledge--Hypothesis and Faith--Theory and Faith--Essential Difference of Scientific (Natural) and Religious (Supernatural) Faith--Superstition of Savage and of Civilized Races--Confessions of Faith--Unsectarian Schools--The Faith of Our Fathers--Spiritism--Revelation Every effort of genuine science makes for a knowledge of the truth. Our only real and valuable knowledge is a knowledge of nature itself, and consists of presentations which correspond to external things. We are incompetent, it is true, to penetrate into the innermost nature of this real world--the "thing in itself"--but impartial critical observation and comparison inform us that, in the normal action of the brain and the organs of sense, the impressions received by them from the outer world are the same in all rational men, and that in the normal function of the organs of thought certain presentations are formed which are everywhere the same. These presentations we call _true_, and we are convinced that their content corresponds to the knowable aspect of things. We _know_ that these facts are not imaginary, but real. All knowledge of the truth depends on two different, but intimately connected, groups of human physiological functions: firstly, on the _sense-impressions_ of the object by means of sense-action, and, secondly, on the combination of these impressions by an association into _presentations_ in the subject. The instruments of sensation are the sense-organs (_sensilla_ or _aestheta_); the instruments which form and link together the presentations are the organs of thought (_phroneta_). The latter are part of the central, and the former part of the peripheral, nervous system--that important and elaborate system of organs in the higher animals which alone effects their entire psychic activity. Man's sense-activity, which is the starting-point of all knowledge, has been slowly and gradually developed from that of his nearest mammal relatives, the primates. The sense-organs are of substantially the same construction throughout this highest animal group, and their function takes place always according to the same physical and chemical laws. They have had the same historical development in all cases. In the mammals, as in the case of all other animals, the _sensilla_ were originally parts of the skin; the sensitive cells of the epidermis are the sources of all the different sense-organs, which have acquired their specific energy by adaptation to different stimuli (light, heat, sound, chemical action, etc.). The rod-cells in the retina of the eye, the auditory cells in the cochlea of the ear, the olfactory cells in the nose, and the taste-cells on the tongue, are all originally derived from the simple, indifferent cells of the epidermis, which cover the entire surface of the body. This significant fact can be directly proved by observation of the embryonic development of man or any of the higher animals. And from this ontogenetic fact we confidently infer, in virtue of the great biogenetic law, the important phylogenetic proposition, that in the long historical evolution of our ancestors, likewise, the higher sense-organs with their specific energies were originally derived from the epidermis of lower animals, from a simple layer of cells which had no trace of such differentiated sensilla. A particular importance attaches to the circumstance that different nerves are qualified to perceive different properties of the environment, and these only. The optic nerve accomplishes only the perception of light, the auditory nerve the perception of sound, the olfactory nerve the perception of smell, and so on. No matter what stimuli impinge on and irritate a given sense-organ, its reaction is always of the same character. From this specific energy of the sense-nerves, which was first fully appreciated by Johannes Müller, very erroneous inferences have been drawn, especially in favor of a dualistic and _à priori_ theory of knowledge. It has been affirmed that the brain, or the soul, only perceives a certain condition of the stimulated nerve, and that, consequently, no conclusion can be drawn from the process as to the existence and nature of the stimulating environment. Sceptical philosophy concluded that the very existence of an outer world is doubtful, and extreme idealism went on positively to deny it, contending that things only exist in our impressions of them. In opposition to these erroneous views, we must recall the fact that the "specific energy" was not originally an innate, special quality of the various nerves, but it has arisen by adaptation to the particular activity of the epidermic cells in which they terminate. In harmony with the great law of "division of labor" the originally indifferent "sense-cells of the skin" undertook different tasks, one group of them taking over the stimulus of the light rays, another the impress of the sound waves, a third the chemical impulse of odorous substances, and so on. In the course of a very long period these external stimuli effected a gradual change in the physiological, and later in the morphological, properties of these parts of the epidermis, and there was a correlative modification of the sensitive nerves which conduct the impressions they receive to the brain. Selection improved, step by step, such particular modifications as proved to be useful, and thus eventually, in the course of many million years, created those wonderful instruments, the eye and the ear, which we prize so highly; their structure is so remarkably purposive that they might well lead to the erroneous assumption of a "creation on a preconceived design." The peculiar character of each sense-organ and its specific nerve has thus been gradually evolved by use and exercise--that is, by _adaptation_--and has then been transmitted by _heredity_ from generation to generation. Albrecht Rau has thoroughly established this view in his excellent work on _Sensation and Thought_, a physiological inquiry into the nature of the human understanding (1896). It points out the correct significance of Müller's law of specific sense-energies, adding searching investigations into their relation to the brain, and in the last chapter there is an able "philosophy of sensitivity" based on the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach. I thoroughly agree with his convincing work. Critical comparison of sense-action in man and the other vertebrates has brought to light a number of extremely important facts, the knowledge of which we owe to the penetrating research of the nineteenth century, especially of the second half of the century. This is particularly true of the two most elaborate "æsthetic" organs, the eye and the ear. They present a different and more complicated structure in the vertebrates than in the other animals, and have also a characteristic development in the embryo. This typical ontogenesis and structure of the sensilla of all the vertebrates is only explained by _heredity_ from a common ancestor. Within the vertebrate group, however, we find a great variety of structure in points of detail, and this is due to _adaptation_ to their manner of life on the part of the various species, to the increasing or diminishing use of various parts. In respect of the structure of his sense-organs man is by no means the most perfect and most highly-developed vertebrate. The eye of the eagle is much keener, and can distinguish small objects at a distance much more clearly than the human eye. The hearing of many mammals, especially of the carnivora, ungulata, and rodentia of the desert, is much more sensitive than that of man, and perceives slight noises at a much greater distance; that may be seen at a glance by their large and very sensitive cochlea. Singing birds have attained a higher grade of development, even in respect of musical endowment, than the majority of men. The sense of smell is much more developed in most of the mammals, especially in the carnivora and the ungulata, than in man; if the dog could compare his own fine scent with that of man, he would look down on us with compassion. Even with regard to the lower senses--taste, sex-sense, touch, and temperature--man has by no means reached the highest stage in every respect. We can naturally only pass judgment on the sensations which we ourselves experience. However, anatomy informs us of the presence in the bodies of many animals of other senses than those we are familiar with. Thus fishes and other lower aquatic vertebrates have peculiar sensilla in the skin which are in connection with special sense-nerves. On the right and left sides of the fish's body there is a long canal, branching into a number of smaller canals at the head. In this "mucous canal" there are nerves with numerous branches, the terminations of which are connected with peculiar nerve-aggregates. This extensive epidermic sense-organ probably serves for the perception of changes in the pressure, or in other properties, of the water. Some groups are distinguished by the possession of other peculiar sensilla, the meaning of which is still unknown to us. But it is already clear from the above facts that our human sense-activity is limited, not only in quantity, but in quality also. We can thus only perceive with our senses, especially with the eye and the sense of touch, a part of the qualities of the objects in our environment. And even this partial perception is incomplete, in the sense that our organs are imperfect, and our sensory nerves, acting as interpreters, communicate to the brain only a translation of the impressions received. However, this acknowledged imperfection of our senses should not prevent us from recognizing their instruments, and especially the eye, to be organs of the highest type; together with the thought-organs in the brain, they are nature's most valuable gift to man. Very truly does Albrecht Rau say: "All science is sensitive knowledge in the ultimate analysis; it does not deny, but interpret, the data of the senses. The senses are our first and best friends. Long before the mind is developed the senses tell man what he must do and avoid. He who makes a general disavowal of the senses in order to meet their dangers acts as thoughtlessly and as foolishly as the man who plucks out his eyes because they once fell on shameful things, or the man who cuts off his hand lest at any time it should reach out to the goods of his neighbor." Hence Feuerbach is quite right in calling all philosophies, religions, and systems which oppose the principle of sense-action not only erroneous, but really pernicious. Without the senses there is no knowledge--"_Nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu_," as Locke said. Twenty years ago I pointed out, in my chapter "On the Origin and Development of the Sense-Organs,"[32] the great service of Darwinism in giving us a profounder knowledge and a juster appreciation of the senses. The thirst for knowledge of the educated mind is not contented with the defective acquaintance with the outer world which is obtained through our imperfect sense-organs. He endeavors to build up the sense-impressions which they have brought him into valuable knowledge. He transforms them into specific sense-perceptions in the sense-centres of the cortex of the brain, and combines them into presentations, by association, in the thought-centres. Finally, by a further concatenation of the groups of presentations he attains to connected knowledge. But this knowledge remains defective and unsatisfactory until the imagination supplements the inadequate power of combination of the intelligence, and, by the association of stored-up images, unites the isolated elements into a connected whole. Thus are produced new general presentative images, and these suffice to interpret the facts perceived and satisfy "reason's feeling of causality." The presentations which fill up the gaps in our knowledge, or take its place, may be called, in a broad sense, "faith." That is what happens continually in daily life. When we are not sure about a thing we say, I believe it. In this sense we are compelled to make use of faith even in science itself; we conjecture or assume that a certain relation exists between two phenomena, though we do not know it for certain. If it is a question of a _cause_, we form a _hypothesis_; though in science only such hypotheses are admitted as lie within the sphere of human cognizance, and do not contradict known facts. Such hypotheses are, for instance--in physics the theory of the vibratory movement of ether, in chemistry the hypothesis of atoms and their affinity, in biology the theory of the molecular structure of living protoplasm, and so forth. The explanation of a great number of connected phenomena by the assumption of a common cause is called a _theory_. Both in theory and hypothesis "faith" (in the scientific sense) is indispensable; for here again it is the imagination that fills up the gaps left by the intelligence in our knowledge of the connection of things. A theory, therefore, must always be regarded only as an approximation to the truth; it must be understood that it may be replaced in time by another and better-grounded theory. But, in spite of this admitted uncertainty, theory is indispensable for all true science; it elucidates facts by postulating a cause for them. The man who renounces theory altogether, and seeks to construct a pure science with certain facts alone (as often happens with wrong-headed representatives of our "exact sciences"), must give up the hope of any knowledge of causes, and, consequently, of the satisfaction of reason's demand for causality. The theory of gravitation in astronomy (Newton), the nebular theory in cosmogony (Kant and Laplace), the principle of energy in physics (Meyer and Helmholtz), the atomic theory in chemistry (Dalton), the vibratory theory in optics (Huyghens), the cellular theory in histology (Schleiden and Schwann), and the theory of descent in biology (Lamarck and Darwin), are all important theories of the first rank; they explain a whole world of natural phenomena by the assumption of a common cause for all the several facts of their respective provinces, and by showing that all the phenomena thereof are inter-connected and controlled by laws which issue from this common cause. Yet the cause itself may remain obscure in character, or be merely a "provisional hypothesis." The "force of gravity" in the theory of gravitation and in cosmogony, "energy" itself in its relation to matter, the "ether" of optics and electricity, the "atom" of the chemist, the living "protoplasm" of histology, the "heredity" of the evolutionist--these and similar conceptions of other great theories may be regarded by a sceptical philosophy as "mere hypotheses" and the outcome of scientific "faith," yet they are indispensable for us, until they are replaced by better hypotheses. The dogmas which are used for the explanation of phenomena in the various religions, and which go by the name of "faith" (in the narrower sense), are of a very different character from the forms of scientific faith we have enumerated. The two types, however--the "natural" faith of science and the "supernatural" faith of religion--are not infrequently confounded, so that we must point out their fundamental difference. Religious faith means always belief in a miracle, and as such is in hopeless contradiction with the natural faith of reason. In opposition to reason it postulates supernatural agencies, and, therefore, may be justly called superstition. The essential difference of this superstition from rational faith lies in the fact that it assumes supernatural forces and phenomena, which are unknown and inadmissible to science, and which are the outcome of illusion and fancy; moreover, superstition contradicts the well-known laws of nature, and is therefore _irrational_. Owing to the great progress of ethnology during the century, we have learned a vast quantity of different kinds and practices of superstition, as they still survive in uncivilized races. When they are compared with each other and with the mythological notion of earlier ages, a manifold analogy is discovered, frequently a common origin, and eventually one simple source for them all. This is found in the "demand of causality in reason," in the search for an explanation of obscure phenomena by the discovery of a cause. That applies particularly to such phenomena as threaten us with danger and excite fear, like thunder and lightning, earthquakes, eclipses, etc. The demand for a causal explanation of such phenomena is found in uncivilized races of the lowest grade, transmitted from their primate ancestors by heredity. It is even found in many other vertebrates. When a dog barks at the full moon, or at a ringing bell, of which it sees the hammer moving, or at a flag that flutters in the breeze, it expresses not only fear, but also the mysterious impulse to learn the cause of the obscure phenomenon. The crude beginnings of religion among primitive races spring partly from this hereditary superstition of their primate ancestors, and partly from the worship of ancestors, from various emotional impulses, and from habits which have become traditional. The religious notions of modern civilized peoples, which they esteem so highly, profess to be on a much higher level than the "crude superstition" of the savage; we are told of the great advance which civilization has made in sweeping it aside. That is a great mistake. Impartial comparison and analysis show that they only differ in their special "form of faith" and the outer shell of their creed. In the clear light of reason the refined faith of the most liberal ecclesiastical religion--inasmuch as it contradicts the known and inviolable laws of nature--is no less irrational a superstition than the crude spirit-faith of primitive fetichism on which it looks down with proud disdain. And if, from this impartial stand-point, we take a critical glance at the kinds of faith that prevail to-day in civilized countries, we find them everywhere saturated with traditional superstition. The Christian belief in Creation, the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Redemption, the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, and so forth, is just as purely imaginative as the belief in the various dogmas of the Mohammedan, Mosaic, Buddhistic, and Brahmanic religions, and is just as incapable of reconciliation with a rational knowledge of nature. Each of these religions is for the sincere believer an indisputable truth, and each regards the other as heresy and damnable error. The more confidently a particular sect considers itself "the only ark of salvation," and the more ardently this conviction is cherished, the more zealously does it contend against all other sects and give rise to the fearful religious wars that form the saddest pages in the book of history. And all the time the unprejudiced "critique of pure reason" teaches us that all these different forms of faith are equally false and irrational, mere creatures of poetic fancy and uncritical tradition. Rational science must reject them all alike as the outcome of superstition. The incalculable injury which irrational superstition has done to credulous humanity is conspicuously revealed in the ceaseless conflict of confessions of faith. Of all the wars which nations have waged against each other with fire and sword the religious wars have been the bloodiest; of all the forms of discord that have shattered the happiness of families and of individuals those that arise from religious differences are still the most painful. Think of the millions who have lost their lives in Christian persecutions, in the religious conflicts of Islam and of the Reformation, by the Inquisition, and under the charge of witchcraft. Or think of the still greater number of luckless men who, through religious differences, have been plunged into family troubles, have lost the esteem of their fellow-citizens and their position in the community, or have even been compelled to fly from their country. The official confession of faith becomes most pernicious of all when it is associated with the political aims of a modern state, and is enforced as "religious instruction" in our schools. The child's mind is thus early diverted from the pursuit of the truth and impregnated with superstition. Every friend of humanity should do all in his power to promote unsectarian schools as one of the most valuable institutions of the modern state. The great value which is, none the less, still very widely attached to sectarian instruction is not only due to the compulsion of a reactionary state and its dependence on a dominant clericalism, but also to the weight of old traditions and "emotional cravings" of various kinds. One of the strongest of these is the devout reverence which is extended everywhere to sectarian tradition, to the "faith of our fathers." In thousands of stories and poems fidelity to it is extolled as a spiritual treasure and a sacred duty. Yet a little impartial study of the history of faith suffices to show the absurdity of the notion. The dominant evangelical faith of the second half of the nineteenth century is essentially different from that of the first half, and this again from that of the eighteenth century. The faith of the eighteenth century diverges considerably from the "faith of our fathers" of the seventeenth, and still more from that of the sixteenth, century. The Reformation, releasing enslaved reason from the tyranny of the popes, is naturally regarded by them as darkest heresy; but even the faith of the papacy itself had been completely transformed in the course of a century. And how different is the faith of the Christian from that of his heathen ancestors. Every man with some degree of independent thought frames a more or less personal religion for himself, which is always different from that of his fathers; it depends largely on the general condition of thought in his day. The further we go back in the history of civilization, the more clearly do we find this esteemed "faith of our fathers" to be an indefensible superstition which is undergoing continual transformation. One of the most remarkable forms of superstition, which still takes a very active part in modern life, is _spiritism_. It is a surprising and a lamentable fact that millions of educated people are still dominated by this dreary superstition; even distinguished scientists are entangled in it. A number of spiritualist journals spread the faith far and wide, and our "superior circles" do not scruple to hold _séances_ in which "spirits" appear, rapping, writing, giving messages from "the beyond," and so on. It is a frequent boast of spiritists that even eminent men of science defend their superstition. In Germany, A. Zöllner and Fechner are quoted as instances; in England, Wallace and Crookes. The regrettable circumstance that physicists and biologists of such distinction have been led astray by spiritism is accounted for, partly by their excess of imagination and defect of critical faculty, and partly by the powerful influence of dogmas which a religious education imprinted on the brain in early youth. Moreover, it was precisely through the famous _séances_ at Leipzig, in which the physicists, Zöllner, Fechner, and Wilhelm Weber, were imposed on by the clever American conjuror, Slade, that the fraud of the latter was afterwards fully exposed; he was discovered to be a common impostor. In other cases, too, where the alleged marvels of spiritism have been thoroughly investigated, they have been traced to a more or less clever deception; the mediums (generally of the weaker sex) have been found to be either smart swindlers or nervous persons of abnormal irritability. Their supposed gift of "telepathy" (or "action at a distance of thought without material medium") has no more existence than the "voices" or the "groans" of spirits, etc. The vivid pictures which Carl du Prel, of Munich, and other spiritists give of their phenomena must be regarded as the outcome of a lively imagination, together with a lack of critical power and of knowledge of physiology. The majority of religions have, in spite of their great differences, one common feature, which is, at the same time, one of their strongest supports in many quarters. They declare that they can elucidate the problem of existence, the solution of which is beyond the natural power of reason, by the supernatural way of revelation; from that they derive the authority of the dogmas which in the guise of "divine laws" control morality and the practical conduct of life. "Divine" inspirations of that kind form the basis of many myths and legends, the human origin of which is perfectly clear. It is true that the God who reveals himself does not always appear in human shape, but in thunder and lightning, storm and earthquake, fiery bush or menacing cloud. But the revelation which he is supposed to bring to the credulous children of men is always anthropomorphic; it invariably takes the form of a communication of ideas or commands which are formulated and expressed precisely as is done in the normal action of the human brain and larynx. In the Indian and Egyptian religions, in the mythologies of Greece and Rome, in the Old and the New Testaments, the gods think, talk, and act just as men do; the revelations, in which they are supposed to unveil for us the secrets of existence and the solution of the great world-enigma, are creations of the human imagination. The "truth" which the credulous discover in them is a human invention; the "childlike faith" in these irrational revelations is mere superstition. The true revelation--that is, the true source of rational knowledge--is to be sought in nature alone. The rich heritage of truth which forms the most valuable part of human culture is derived exclusively from the experiences acquired in a searching study of nature, and from the rational conclusions which it has reached by the just association of these empirical presentations. Every intelligent man with normal brain and senses finds this true revelation in nature on impartial study, and thus frees himself from the superstition with which the "revelations" of religion had burdened him. CHAPTER XVII SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY Increasing Opposition between Modern Science and Christian Theology--The Old and the New Faith--Defence of Rational Science against the Attacks of Christian Superstition, especially against Catholicism--Four Periods in the Evolution of Christianity: I. Primitive Christianity (the First Three Centuries)--The Four Canonical Gospels--The Epistles of Paul--II. The Papacy (Ultramontane Christianity)--Retrogression of Civilization in the Middle Ages--Ultramontane Falsification of History--The Papacy and Science--The Papacy and Christianity--III. The Reformation--Luther and Calvin--The Year of Emancipation--IV. The Pseudo-Christianity of the Nineteenth Century--The Papal Declaration of War against Reason and Science: (_a_) Infallibility, (_b_) The Encyclica, (_c_) The Immaculate Conception One of the most distinctive features of the expiring century is the increasing vehemence of the opposition between science and Christianity. That is both natural and inevitable. In the same proportion in which the victorious progress of modern science has surpassed all the scientific achievements of earlier ages has the untenability been proved of those mystic views which would subdue reason under the yoke of an alleged revelation; and the Christian religion belongs to that group. The more solidly modern astronomy, physics, and chemistry have established the sole dominion of inflexible natural laws in the universe at large, and modern botany, zoology, and anthropology have proved the validity of those laws in the entire kingdom of organic nature, so much the more strenuously has the Christian religion, in association with dualistic metaphysics, striven to deny the application of these natural laws in the province of the so-called "spiritual life"--that is, in one section of the physiology of the brain. No one has more clearly, boldly, and unanswerably enunciated this open and irreconcilable opposition between the modern scientific and the outworn Christian view than David Friedrich Strauss, the greatest theologian of the nineteenth century. His last work, _The Old Faith and the New_, is a magnificent expression of the honest conviction of all educated people of the present day who understand this unavoidable conflict between the discredited, dominant doctrines of Christianity and the illuminating, rational revelation of modern science--all those who have the courage to defend the right of reason against the pretensions of superstition, and who are sensible of the philosophic demand for a unified system of thought. Strauss, as an honorable and courageous free-thinker, has expounded far better than I could the principal points of difference between "the old and the new faith." The absolute irreconcilability of the opponents and the inevitability of their struggle ("for life or death") have been ably presented on the philosophic side by E. Hartmann, in his interesting work on _The Self-Destruction of Christianity_. When the works of Strauss and Feuerbach and _The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science_ of J. W. Draper have been read, it may seem superfluous for us to devote a special chapter to the subject. Yet we think it useful, and even necessary for our purpose, to cast a critical glance at the historical course of this great struggle; especially seeing that the attacks of the "Church militant" on science in general, and on the theory of evolution in particular, have become extremely bitter and menacing of late years. Unfortunately, the mental relaxation which has lately set in, and the rising flood of reaction in the political, social, and ecclesiastical world, are only too well calculated to give point to those dangers. If any one doubts it, he has only to look over the conduct of Christian synods and of the German Reichstag during the last few years. Quite in harmony are the recent efforts of many secular governments to get on as good a footing as possible with the "spiritual regiment," their deadly enemy--that is, to submit to its yoke. The two forces find a common aim in the suppression of free thought and free scientific research, for the purpose of thus more easily securing a complete despotism. Let us first emphatically protest that it is a question for us of the necessary defence of science and reason against the vigorous attacks of the Christian Church and its vast army, not of an unprovoked attack of science on religion. And, in the first place, our defence must be prepared against Romanism or Ultramontanism. This "one ark of salvation," this Catholic Church "destined for all," is not only much larger and more powerful than the other Christian sects, but it has the exceptional advantage of a vast, centralized organization and an unrivalled political ability. Men of science are often heard to say that the Catholic superstition is no more astute than the other forms of supernatural faith, and that all these insidious institutions are equally inimical to reason and science. As a matter of general theoretical principle the statement may pass, but it is certainly wrong when we look to its practical side. The deliberate and indiscriminate attacks of the ultramontane Church on science, supported by the apathy and ignorance of the masses, are, on account of its powerful organization, much more severe and dangerous than those of other religions. In order to appreciate correctly the extreme importance of Christianity in regard to the entire history of civilization, and particularly its fundamental opposition to reason and science, we must briefly run over the principal stages of its historical evolution. It may be divided into four periods: (1) primitive Christianity (the first three centuries), (2) papal Christianity (twelve centuries, from the fourth to the fifteenth), (3) the Reformation (three centuries, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth), and (4) modern pseudo-Christianity. I.--PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY Primitive Christianity embraces the first three centuries. Christ himself, the noble prophet and enthusiast, so full of the love of humanity, was far below the level of classical culture; he knew nothing beyond the Jewish traditions; he has not left a single line of writing. He had, indeed, no suspicion of the advanced stage to which Greek philosophy and science had progressed five hundred years before. All that we know of him and of his original teaching is taken from the chief documents of the New Testament--the four gospels and the Pauline epistles. As to the four canonical gospels, we now know that they were selected from a host of contradictory and forged manuscripts of the first three centuries by the three hundred and eighteen bishops who assembled at the Council of Nicæa in 327. The entire list of gospels numbered forty; the canonical list contains four. As the contending and mutually abusive bishops could not agree about the choice, they determined to leave the selection to a miracle. They put all the books (according to the _Synodicon_ of Pappus) together underneath the altar, and prayed that the apocryphal books, of human origin, might remain there, and the genuine, inspired books might be miraculously placed on the table of the Lord. And that, says tradition, really occurred! The three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke--all written _after_ them, not _by_ them, at the beginning of the second century) and the very different fourth gospel (ostensibly "after" John, written about the middle of the second century) leaped on the table, and were thenceforth recognized as the inspired (with their thousand mutual contradictions) foundations of Christian doctrine. If any modern "unbeliever" finds this story of the "leap of the sacred books" incredible, we must remind him that it is just as credible as the table-turning and spirit-rapping that are believed to take place to-day by millions of educated people; and that hundreds of millions of Christians believe just as implicitly in their personal immortality, their "resurrection from the dead," and the Trinity of God--dogmas that contradict pure reason no more and no less than that miraculous bound of the gospel manuscripts. The most important sources after the gospels are the fourteen separate (and generally forged) epistles of Paul. The genuine Pauline epistles (_three_ in number, according to recent criticism--to the Romans, Galatians, and Corinthians) were written before the canonical gospels, and contain less incredible miraculous matter than they. They are also more concerned than the gospels to adjust themselves with a rational view of the world. Hence the advanced theology of modern times constructs its "ideal Christianity" rather on the base of the Pauline epistles than on the gospels, so that it has been called "Paulinism." The remarkable personality of Paul, who possessed much more culture and practical sense than Christ, is extremely interesting, from the anthropological point of view, from the fact that the racial origin of the two great religious founders is very much the same. Recent historical investigation teaches that Paul's father was of Greek nationality, and his mother of Jewish.[33] The half-breeds of these two races, which are so very distant in origin (although they are branches of the same species, the _homo mediterraneus_), are often distinguished by a happy blending of talents and temperament, as we find in many recent and actual instances. The plastic Oriental imagination and the critical Western reason often admirably combine and complete each other. That is visible in the Pauline teaching, which soon obtained a greater influence than the earliest Christian notions. Hence it is not incorrect to consider Paulinism a new phenomenon, of which the father was the philosophy of the Greeks, and the mother the religion of the Jews. Neoplatonism is an analogous combination. As to the real teaching and aims of Christ (and as to many important aspects of his life) the views of conflicting theologians diverge more and more, as historical criticism (Strauss, Feuerbach, Baur, Renan, etc.) puts the accessible facts in their true light, and draws impartial conclusions from them. Two things, certainly, remain beyond dispute--the lofty principle of universal charity and the fundamental maxim of ethics, the "golden rule," that issues therefrom; both, however, existed in theory and in practice centuries before the time of Christ (cf. chap. xix.). For the rest, the Christians of the early centuries were generally pure Communists, sometimes "Social Democrats," who, according to the prevailing theory in Germany to-day, ought to have been exterminated with fire and sword. II.--PAPAL CHRISTIANITY Latin Christianity, variously called Papistry, Romanism, Vaticanism, Ultramontanism, or the Roman Catholic Church, is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of civilized man; in spite of the storms that have swept over it, it still exerts a most powerful influence. Of the four hundred and ten million Christians who are scattered over the earth the majority--that is, two hundred and twenty-five millions--are Roman Catholics; there are seventy-five million Greek Catholics and one hundred and ten million Protestants. During a period of one thousand two hundred years, from the fourth to the sixteenth century, the papacy has almost absolutely controlled and tainted the spiritual life of Europe; on the other hand, it has won but little territory from the ancient religions of Asia and Africa. In Asia Buddhism still counts five hundred and three million followers, the Brahmanic religion one hundred and thirty-eight millions, and Islam one hundred and twenty millions. It is the despotism of the papacy that lent its darkest character to the Middle Ages; it meant death to all freedom of mental life, decay to all science, corruption to all morality. From the noble height to which the life of the human mind had attained in classical antiquity, in the centuries before Christ and the first century after Christ, it soon sank, under the rule of the papacy, to a level which, in respect of the knowledge of the truth, can only be termed barbarism. It is often protested that other aspects of mental life--poetry and architecture, scholastic learning and patristic philosophy--were richly developed in the Middle Ages. But this activity was in the service of the Church; it did not tend to the cultivation, but to the suppression, of free mental research. The exclusive preparing for an unknown eternity beyond the tomb, the contempt of nature, the withdrawal from the study of it, which are essential elements of Christianity, were urged as a sacred duty by the Roman hierarchy. It was not until the beginning of the sixteenth century that a change for the better came in with the Reformation. It is impossible for us here to describe the pitiful retrogression of culture and morality during the twelve centuries of the spiritual despotism of Rome. It is very pithily expressed in a saying of the greatest and the ablest of the Hohenzollerns; Frederick the Great condensed his judgment in the phrase that the study of history led one to think that from Constantine to the date of the Reformation the whole world was insane. L. Büchner has given us an admirable, brief description of this "period of insanity" in his work on _Religious and Scientific Systems_. The reader who desires a closer acquaintance with the subject would do well to consult the historical works of Ranke, Draper, Kolb, Svoboda, etc. The truthful description of the awful condition of the Christian Middle Ages, which is given by these and other unprejudiced historians, is confirmed by all the reliable sources of investigation, and by the historical monuments which have come down from the saddest period of human history. Educated Catholics, who are sincere truth-seekers, cannot be too frequently recommended to study these historical sources for themselves. This is the more necessary as ultramontane literature has still a considerable influence. The old trick of deceiving the faithful by a complete reversal of facts and an invention of miraculous circumstances is still worked by it with great success. We will only mention Lourdes and the "Holy Coat" of Trêves. The ultramontane professor of history at Frankfurt, Johannes Janssen, affords a striking example of the length they will go in distorting historical truth; his much-read works (especially his _History of the German People since the Middle Ages_) are marred by falsification to an incredible extent. The untruthfulness of these Jesuitical productions is on a level with the credulity and the uncritical judgment of the simple German nation that takes them for gospel. One of the most interesting of the historical facts which clearly prove the evil of the ultramontane despotism is its vigorous and consistent struggle with science. This was determined on, in principle, from the very beginning of Christianity, inasmuch as it set faith above reason and preached the blind subjection of the one to the other; that was natural, seeing that our whole life on earth was held to be only a preparation for the legendary life beyond, and thus scientific research was robbed of any real value. The deliberate and successful attack on science began in the early part of the fourth century, particularly after the Council of Nicæa (327), presided over by Constantine--called the "Great" because he raised Christianity to the position of a state religion, and founded Constantinople, though a worthless character, a false-hearted hypocrite, and a murderer. The success of the papacy in its conflict with independent scientific thought and inquiry is best seen in the distressing condition of science and its literature during the Middle Ages. Not only were the rich literary treasures that classical antiquity had bequeathed to the world destroyed for the most part, or withdrawn from circulation, but the rack and the stake insured the silence of every heretic--that is, every independent thinker. If he did not keep his thoughts to himself, he had to look forward to being burned alive, as was the fate of the great monistic philosopher, Giordano Bruno, the reformer, John Huss, and more than a hundred thousand other "witnesses to the truth." The history of science in the Middle Ages teaches us on every page that independent thought and empirical research were completely buried for twelve sad centuries under the oppression of the omnipotent papacy. All that we esteem in true Christianity, in the sense of its founder and of his noblest followers, and that we must endeavor to save from the inevitable wreck of this great world religion for our new monistic religion, lies on its ethical and social planes. The principles of true humanism, the golden rule, the spirit of tolerance, the love of man, in the best and highest sense of the word--all these true graces of Christianity were not, indeed, first discovered and given to the world by that religion, but were successfully developed in the critical period when classical antiquity was hastening to its doom. The papacy, however, has attempted to convert all those virtues into the direct contrary, and still to hang out the sign of the old firm. Instead of Christian charity, it introduced a fanatical hatred of the followers of all other religions; with fire and sword it has pursued, not only the heathen, but every Christian sect that dared resist the imposition of ultramontane dogma. Tribunals for heretics were erected all over Europe, yielding unnumbered victims, whose torments seemed only to fill their persecutors, with all their Christian charity, with a peculiar satisfaction. The power of Rome was directed mercilessly for centuries against everything that stood in its way. Under the notorious Torquemada (1481-98), in Spain alone eight thousand heretics were burned alive and ninety thousand punished with the confiscation of their goods and the most grievous ecclesiastical fines; in the Netherlands, under the rule of Charles V., at least fifty thousand men fell victims to the clerical bloodthirst. And while the heavens resounded with the cry of the martyrs, the wealth of half the world was pouring into Rome, to which the whole of Christianity paid tribute, and the self-styled representatives of God on earth and their accomplices (not infrequently Atheists themselves) wallowed in pleasure and vice of every description. "And all these privileges," said the frivolous, syphilitic Pope, Leo X., "have been secured to us by the fable of Jesus Christ." Yet, with all the discipline of the Church and the fear of God, the condition of European society was pitiable. Feudalism, serfdom, the grace of God, and the favor of the monks ruled the land; the poor helots were only too glad to be permitted to raise their miserable huts under the shadow of the castle or the cloister, their secular and spiritual oppressors and exploiters. Even to-day we suffer from the aftermath of these awful ages and conditions, in which there was no question of care for science or higher mental culture save in rare circumstances and in secret. Ignorance, poverty, and superstition combined with the immoral operation of the law of celibacy, which had been introduced in the eleventh century, to consolidate the ever-growing power of the papacy. It has been calculated that there were more than ten million victims of fanatical religious hatred during this "Golden Age" of papal domination; and how many more million human victims must be put to the account of celibacy, oral confession, and moral constraint, the most pernicious and accursed institutions of the papal despotism! Unbelieving philosophers, who have collected disproofs of the existence of God, have overlooked one of the strongest arguments in that sense--the fact that the Roman "Vicar of Christ" could for twelve centuries perpetrate with impunity the most shameful and horrible deeds "in the name of God." III.--THE REFORMATION The history of civilization, which we are so fond of calling "the history of the world," enters upon its third period with the Reformation of the Christian Church, just as its second period begins with the founding of Christianity. With the Reformation begins the new birth of fettered reason, the reawakening of science, which the iron hand of the Christian papacy had relentlessly crushed for twelve hundred years. At the same time the spread of general education had already commenced, owing to the invention of printing about the middle of the fifteenth century; and towards its close several great events occurred, especially the discovery of America in 1492, which prepared the way for the "renaissance" of science in company with that of art. Indeed, certain very important advances were made in the knowledge of nature during the first half of the sixteenth century, which shook the prevailing system to its very foundations. Such were the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan in 1522, which afforded empirical proof of its rotundity, and the founding of the new system of the world by Copernicus in 1543. Yet the 31st of October in the year 1517, the day on which Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the wooden door of Wittenburg Cathedral, must be regarded as the commencement of a new epoch; for on that day was forced the iron door of the prison in which the Papal Church had detained fettered reason for twelve hundred years. The merits of the great reformer have been partly exaggerated, partly underestimated. It has been justly pointed out that Luther, like all the other reformers, remained in manifold subjection to the deepest superstition. Thus he was throughout life a supporter of the rigid dogma of the verbal inspiration of the Bible; he zealously maintained the doctrines of the resurrection, original sin, predestination, justification by faith, etc. He rejected as folly the great discovery of Copernicus, because in the Bible "Joshua bade the sun, not the earth, stand still." He utterly failed to appreciate the great political revolutions of his time, especially the profound and just agitation of the peasantry. Worse still was the fanatical Calvin, of Geneva, who had the talented Spanish physician, Serveto, burned alive in 1553, because he rejected the absurd dogma of the Trinity. The fanatical "true believers" of the reformed Church followed only too frequently in the blood-stained footsteps of their papal enemies; as they do even in our own day. Deeds of unparalleled cruelty followed in the train of the Reformation--the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the persecution of the Huguenots in France, bloody heretic-hunts in Italy, civil war in England, and the Thirty Years War in Germany. Yet, in spite of those grave blemishes, to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries belongs the honor of once more opening a free path to the thoughtful mind, and delivering reason from the oppressive yoke of the papacy. Thus only was made possible that great development of different tendencies in critical philosophy and of new paths in science which won for the subsequent eighteenth century the honorable title of "the century of enlightenment." IV.--THE PSEUDO-CHRISTIANITY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY As the fourth and last stage in the history of Christianity we oppose our nineteenth century to all its predecessors. It is true that the enlightenment of preceding centuries had promoted critical thought in every direction, and the rise of science itself had furnished powerful empirical weapons; yet it seems to us that our progress along both lines has been quite phenomenal during the nineteenth century. It has inaugurated an entirely new period in the history of the human mind, characterized by the development of the monistic philosophy of nature. At its very commencement the foundations were laid of a new anthropology (by the comparative anatomy of Cuvier) and of a new biology (by the _Philosophie Zoologique_ of Lamarck). The two great French scientists were quickly succeeded by two contemporary German scholars--Baer, the founder of the science of evolution, and Johannes Müller, the founder of comparative morphology and physiology. A pupil of Müller, Theodor Schwann, created the far-reaching cellular theory in 1838, in conjunction with M. Schleiden. Lyell had already traced the evolution of the earth to natural causes, and thus proved the application to our planet of the mechanical cosmogony which Kant had sketched with so much insight in 1755. Finally, Robert Mayer and Helmholtz established the principle of energy in 1842--the second, complementary half of the great law of substance, the first half of which (the persistence of matter) had been previously discovered by Lavoisier. Forty years ago Charles Darwin crowned all these profound revelations of the intimate nature of the universe by his new theory of evolution, the greatest natural-philosophical achievement of our century. What is the relation of modern Christianity to this vast and unparalleled progress of science? In the first place, the deep gulf between its two great branches, conservative Romanism and progressive Protestantism, has naturally widened. The ultramontane clergy (and we must associate with them the orthodox "evangelical alliance") had naturally to offer a strenuous opposition to this rapid advance of the emancipated mind; they continued unmoved in their rigid literal belief, demanding the unconditional surrender of reason to dogma. Liberal Protestantism, on the other hand, took refuge in a kind of monistic pantheism, and sought a means of reconciling two contradictory principles. It endeavored to combine the unavoidable recognition of the established laws of nature, and the philosophic conclusions that followed from them, with a purified form of religion, in which scarcely anything remained of the distinctive teaching of faith. There were many attempts at compromise to be found between the two extremes; but the conviction rapidly spread that dogmatic Christianity had lost every foundation, and that only its valuable ethical contents should be saved for the new monistic religion of the twentieth century. As, however, the existing external forms of the dominant Christian religion remained unaltered, and as, in spite of a progressive political development, they are more intimately than ever connected with the practical needs of the State, there has arisen that widespread religious profession in educated spheres which we can only call "pseudo-Christianity"--at the bottom it is a "religious lie" of the worst character. The great dangers which attend this conflict between sincere conviction and the hypocritical profession of modern pseudo-Christians are admirably described in Max Nordau's interesting work on _The Conventional Lies of Civilization_. In the midst of this obvious falseness of prevalent pseudo-Christianity there is one favorable circumstance for the progress of a rational study of nature: its most powerful and bitterest enemy, the Roman Church, threw off its mask of ostensible concern for higher mental development about the middle of the nineteenth century, and declared a _guerre à l'outrance_ against independent science. This happened in three important challenges to reason, for the explicitness and resoluteness of which modern science and culture cannot but be grateful to the "Vicar of Christ." (1) In December, 1854, the pope promulgated the dogma of the immaculate conception of Mary. (2) Ten years afterwards--in December, 1864--the pope published, in his famous _encyclica_, an absolute condemnation of the whole of modern civilization and culture; in the _syllabus_ that accompanied it he enumerated and anathematized all the rational theses and philosophical principles which are regarded by modern science as lucid truths. (3) Finally, six years afterwards--on July 13, 1870--the militant head of the Church crowned his folly by claiming _infallibility_ for himself and all his predecessors in the papal chair. This triumph of the Roman _curia_ was communicated to the astonished world five days afterwards, on the very day on which France declared war with Prussia. Two months later the temporal power of the pope was taken from him in consequence of the war. These three stupendous acts of the papacy were such obvious assaults on the reason of the nineteenth century that they gave rise, from the very beginning, to a most heated discussion even within orthodox Catholic circles. When the Vatican Council proceeded to define the dogma of infallibility on July 13, 1870, only three-fourths of the bishops declared in its favor, 451 out of 601 assenting; many other bishops, who wished to keep clear of the perilous definition, were absent from the council. But the shrewd pontiff had calculated better than the timid "discreet Catholics": even this extraordinary dogma was blindly accepted by the credulous and uneducated masses of the faithful. The whole history of the papacy, as it is substantiated by a thousand reliable sources and accessible documents, appears to the impartial student as an unscrupulous tissue of lying and deceit, a reckless pursuit of absolute mental despotism and secular power, a frivolous contradiction of all the high moral precepts which true Christianity enunciates--charity and toleration, truth and chastity, poverty and self-denial. When we judge the long series of popes and of the Roman princes of the Church, from whom the pope is chosen, by the standard of pure Christian morality, it is clear that the great majority of them were pitiful impostors, many of them utterly worthless and vicious. These well-known historical facts, however, do not prevent millions of educated Catholics from admitting the infallibility which the pope has claimed for himself; they do not prevent Protestant princes from going to Rome, and doing reverence to the pontiff (their most dangerous enemy); they do not prevent the fate of the German people from being intrusted to-day to the hands of the servants and followers of this "pious impostor" in the Reichstag--thanks to the incredible political indolence and credulity of the nation. The most interesting of the three great events by which the papacy has endeavored to maintain and strengthen its despotism in the nineteenth century is the publication of the encyclica and the syllabus in December, 1864. In these remarkable documents all independent action was forbidden to reason and science, and they were commanded to submit implicitly to faith--that is, to the decrees of the infallible pope. The great excitement which followed this sublime piece of effrontery in educated and independent circles was in proportion with the stupendous contents of the encyclica. Draper has given us an excellent discussion of its educational and political significance in his _History of the Conflict between Science and Religion_. The dogma of the immaculate conception seems, perhaps, to be less audacious and significant than the encyclica and the dogma of the infallibility of the pope. Yet not only the Roman hierarchy, but even some of the orthodox Protestants (the Evangelical Alliance, for instance), attach great importance to this thesis. What is known as the "immaculate oath"--that is, the confirmation of faith by an oath taken on the immaculate conception of Mary--is still regarded by millions of Christians as a sacred obligation. Many believers take the dogma in a twofold application; they think that the mother of Mary was impregnated by the Holy Ghost as well as Mary herself. Comparative and critical theology has recently shown that this myth has no greater claim to originality than most of the other stories in the Christian mythology; it has been borrowed from older religions, especially Buddhism. Similar myths were widely circulated in India, Persia, Asia Minor, and Greece several centuries before the birth of Christ. Whenever a king's unwedded daughter, or some other maid of high degree, gave birth to a child, the father was always pronounced to be a god, or a demi-god; in the Christian case it was the Holy Ghost. The special endowments of mind or body which often distinguished these "children of love" above ordinary offspring were thus partly explained by "heredity." Distinguished "sons of God" of this kind were held in high esteem both in antiquity and during the Middle Ages, while the moral code of modern civilization reproaches them with their want of honorable parentage. This applies even more forcibly to "daughters of God," though the poor maidens are just as little to blame for their want of a father. For the rest, every one who is familiar with the beautiful mythology of classical antiquity knows that these sons and daughters of the Greek and Roman gods often approach nearest to the highest ideal of humanity. Recollect the large legitimate family, and the still more numerous illegitimate offspring, of Zeus. To return to the particular question of the impregnation of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost, we are referred to the gospels for testimony to the fact. The only two evangelists who speak of it, Matthew and Luke, relate in harmony that the Jewish maiden Mary was betrothed to the carpenter Joseph, but became pregnant without his co-operation, and, indeed, "by the Holy Ghost." As we have already related, the four canonical gospels which are regarded as the only genuine ones by the Christian Church, and adopted as the foundation of faith, were deliberately chosen from a much larger number of gospels, the details of which contradict each other sometimes just as freely as the assertions of the four. The fathers of the Church enumerate from forty to fifty of these spurious or apocryphal gospels; some of them are written both in Greek and Latin--for instance, the gospel of James, of Thomas, of Nicodemus, and so forth. The details which these apocryphal gospels give of the life of Christ, especially with regard to his birth and childhood, have just as much (or, on the whole, just as little) claim to historical validity as the four canonical gospels. Now we find in one of these documents an historical statement, confirmed, moreover, in the _Sepher Toldoth Jeschua_, which probably furnishes the simple and natural solution of the "world-riddle" of the supernatural conception and birth of Christ. The author curtly gives us in one sentence the remarkable statement which contains this solution: "Josephus Pandera, the Roman officer of a Calabrian legion which was in Judæa, seduced Miriam of Bethlehem, and was the father of Jesus." Other details given about Miriam (the Hebrew name for Mary) are far from being to the credit of the "Queen of Heaven." Naturally, these historical details are carefully avoided by the official theologian, but they assort badly with the traditional myth, and lift the veil from its mystery in a very simple and natural fashion. That makes it the more incumbent on impartial research and pure reason to make a critical examination of these statements. It must be admitted that they have much more title to credence than all the other statements about the birth of Christ. When, on familiar principles of science, we put aside the notion of supernatural conception through an "overshadowing of the Most High" as a pure myth, there only remains the widely accepted version of modern rational theology--that Joseph, the Jewish carpenter, was the true father of Christ. But this assumption is explicitly contradicted by many texts of the gospels; Christ himself was convinced that he was a "Son of God," and he never recognized his foster-father, Joseph, as his real parent. Joseph, indeed, wanted to leave his betrothed when he found her pregnant without his interference. He gave up this idea when an angel appeared to him in a dream and pacified him. As it is expressly stated in the first chapter of Matthew (vv. 24, 25), there was no sexual intercourse between Joseph and Mary until after Jesus was born. The statement of the apocryphal gospels, that the Roman officer, Pandera, was the true father of Christ, seems all the more credible when we make a careful anthropological study of the personality of Christ. He is generally regarded as purely Jewish. Yet the characteristics which distinguish his high and noble personality, and which give a distinct impress to his religion, are certainly not Semitical; they are rather features of the higher Arian race, and especially of its noblest branch, the Hellenes. Now, the name of Christ's real father, "Pandera," points unequivocally to a Greek origin; in one manuscript, in fact, it is written "Pandora." Pandora was, according to the Greek mythology, the first woman, born of the earth by Vulcan and adorned with every charm by the gods, who was espoused by Epimetheus, and sent by Zeus to men with the dread "Pandora-box," containing every evil, in punishment for the stealing of divine fire from heaven by Prometheus. And it is interesting to see the different reception that the love-story of Miriam has met with at the hands of the four great Christian nations of civilized Europe. The stern morality of the Teutonic races entirely repudiates it; the righteous German and the prudish Briton prefer to believe blindly in the impossible thesis of a conception "by the Holy Ghost." It is well known that this strenuous and carefully paraded prudery of the higher classes (especially in England) is by no means reflected in the true condition of sexual morality in high quarters. The revelations which the _Pall Mall Gazette_, for instance, made on the subject twelve years ago vividly recalled the condition of Babylon. The Romantic races, which ridicule this prudery and take sexual relations less seriously, find _Mary's Romance_ attractive enough; the special cult which "Our Lady" enjoys in France and Italy is often associated with this love-story with curious naïveté. Thus, for example, Paul de Regla (Dr. Desjardin), author of _Jesus of Nazareth considered from a Scientific, Historical, and Social Standpoint_ (1894), finds precisely in the illegitimate birth of Christ a special "title to the halo that irradiates his noble form." It seemed to me necessary to enter fully into this important question of the origin of Christ in the sense of impartial historical science, because the Church militant itself lays great emphasis on it, and because it regards the miraculous structure which has been founded on it as one of its strongest weapons against modern thought. The highest ethical value of pure primitive Christianity and the ennobling influence of this "religion of love" on the history of civilization are quite independent of those mythical dogmas. The so-called "revelations" on which these myths are based are incompatible with the firmest results of modern science. CHAPTER XVIII OUR MONISTIC RELIGION Monism as a Connecting Link between Religion and Science--The _Cultur-Kampf_--The Relations of Church and State--Principles of the Monistic Religion--Its Three-fold Ideal: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful--Contradiction between Scientific and Christian Truth--Harmony of the Monistic and the Christian Idea of Virtue--Opposition between Monistic and Christian Views of Art--Modern Expansion and Enrichment of Our Idea of the World--Landscape-Painting and the Modern Enjoyment of Nature--The Beauties of Nature--This World and Beyond--Monistic Churches Many distinguished scientists and philosophers of the day, who share our monistic views, consider that religion is generally played out. Their meaning is that the clear insight into the evolution of the world which the great scientific progress of the nineteenth century has afforded us will satisfy, not only the causal feeling of our reason, but even our highest emotional cravings. This view is correct in the sense that the two ideas, religion and science, would indeed blend into one if we had a perfectly clear and consecutive system of monism. However, there are but a few resolute thinkers who attain to this most pure and lofty conception of Spinoza and Goethe. Most of the educated people of our time (as distinct from the uncultured masses) remain in the conviction that religion is a separate branch of our mental life, independent of science, and not less valuable and indispensable. If we adopt this view, we can find a means of reconciling the two great and apparently quite distinct branches in the idea I put forward in "Monism, as a Connecting-Link between Religion and Science," in 1892. In the preface to this _Confession of Faith of a Man of Science_ I expressed myself in the following words with regard to its double object: "In the first place, I must give expression to the rational system which is logically forced upon us by the recent progress of science; it dwells in the intimate thoughts of nearly every impartial and thoughtful scientist, though few have the courage or the disposition to avow it. In the second place, I would make of it a connecting-link between religion and science, and thus do away with the antithesis which has been needlessly maintained between these two branches of the highest activity of the human mind. The ethical craving of our emotion is satisfied by monism no less than the logical demand for causality on the part of reason." The remarkable interest which the discourse enkindled is a proof that in this monistic profession of faith I expressed the feeling not only of many scientists, but of a large number of cultured men and women of very different circles. Not only was I rewarded by hundreds of sympathetic letters, but by a wide circulation of the printed address, of which six editions were required within six months. I had the more reason to be content with this unexpected success, as this "confession of faith" was originally merely an occasional speech which I delivered unprepared on October 9, 1892, at Altenburg, during the jubilee of the Scientific Society of East Germany. Naturally there was the usual demonstration on the other side; I was fiercely attacked, not only by the ultramontane press, the sworn defenders of superstition, but also by the "liberal" controversialists of evangelical Christianity, who profess to defend both scientific truth and purified faith. In the seven years that have ensued since that time the great struggle between modern science and orthodox Christianity has become more threatening; it has grown more dangerous for science in proportion as Christianity has found support in an increasing mental and political reaction. In some countries the Church has made such progress that the freedom of thought and conscience, which is guaranteed by the laws, is in practice gravely menaced (for instance, in Bavaria). The great historic struggle which Draper has so admirably depicted in his _Conflict between Religion and Science_ is to-day more acute and significant than ever. For the last twenty-seven years it has been rightly called the "_cultur-kampf_." The famous encyclica and syllabus which the militant pope, Pius IX., sent out into the entire world in 1864 were a declaration of war on the whole of modern science; they demanded the blind submission of reason to the dogmas of the infallible pope. The enormity of this crude assault on the highest treasures of civilization even roused many indolent minds from the slumber of belief. Together with the subsequent promulgation of the papal infallibility (1870), the encyclica provoked a deep wave of irritation and an energetic repulse which held out high hopes. In the new German empire, which had attained its indispensable national unity by the heavy sacrifices of the wars of 1866 and 1871, the insolent attacks of the pope were felt to be particularly offensive. On the one hand, Germany is the cradle of the Reformation and the modern emancipation of reason; on the other hand, it unfortunately has in its 18,000,000 Catholics a vast host of militant believers, who are unsurpassed by any other civilized people in blind obedience to their chief shepherd. The dangers of such a situation were clearly recognized by the great statesman who had solved the political "world-riddle" of the dismemberment of Germany, and had led us by a marvellous statecraft to the long-desired goal of national unity and power. Prince Bismarck began the famous struggle with the Vatican, which is known as the _cultur-kampf_, in 1872, and it was conducted with equal ability and energy by the distinguished Minister of Worship, Falk, author of the May laws of 1873. Unfortunately, Bismarck had to desist six years afterwards. Although the great statesman was a remarkable judge of men and a realistic politician of immense tact, he had underestimated the force of three powerful obstacles--first, the unsurpassed cunning and unscrupulous treachery of the Roman _curia_; secondly, the correlative ingratitude and credulity of the uneducated Catholic masses, on which the papacy built; and, thirdly, the power of apathy, the continuance of the irrational, simply because it is in possession. Hence, in 1878, when the abler Leo XIII. had ascended the pontifical throne, the fatal "To Canossa" was heard once more. From that time the newly established power of Rome grew in strength; partly through the unscrupulous intrigues and serpentine bends of its slippery Jesuitical politics, partly through the false Church-politics of the German government and the marvellous political incompetence of the German people. We have, therefore, at the close of the nineteenth century to endure the pitiful spectacle of the Catholic "Centre" being the most important section of the Reichstag, and the fate of our humiliated country depending on a papal party, which does not constitute numerically a third part of the nation. When the _cultur-kampf_ began in 1872, it was justly acclaimed by all independent thinkers as a political renewal of the Reformation, a vigorous attempt to free modern civilization from the yoke of papal despotism. The whole of the Liberal press hailed Bismarck as a "political Luther"--as the great hero, not only of the national unity, but also of the rational emancipation of Germany. Ten years afterwards, when the papacy had proved victorious, the same "Liberal press" changed its colors, and denounced the _cultur-kampf_ as a great mistake; and it does the same thing to-day. The facts show how short is the memory of our journalists, how defective their knowledge of history, and how poor their philosophic education. The so-called "Peace between Church and State" is never more than a suspension of hostilities. The modern papacy, true to the despotic principles it has followed for the last sixteen hundred years, is determined to wield sole dominion over the credulous souls of men; it must demand the absolute submission of the cultured State, which, as such, defends the rights of reason and science. True and enduring peace there cannot be until one of the combatants lies powerless on the ground. Either the Church wins, and then farewell to all "free science and free teaching"--then are our universities no better than jails, and our colleges become cloistral schools; or else the modern rational State proves victorious--then, in the twentieth century, human culture, freedom, and prosperity will continue their progressive development until they far surpass even the height of the nineteenth century. In order to compass these high aims, it is of the first importance that modern science not only shatter the false structures of superstition and sweep their ruins from the path, but that it also erect a new abode for human emotion on the ground it has cleared--a "palace of reason," in which, under the influence of our new monistic views, we do reverence to the real trinity of the nineteenth century--the trinity of "the true, the good, and the beautiful." In order to give a tangible shape to the cult of this divine ideal, we must first of all compare our position with the dominant forms of Christianity, and realize the changes that are involved in the substitution of the one for the other. For, in spite of its errors and defects, the Christian religion (in its primitive and purer form) has so high an ethical value, and has entered so deeply into the most important social and political movements of civilized history for the last fifteen hundred years, that we must appeal as much as possible to its existing institutions in the establishment of our monistic religion. We do not seek a mighty _revolution_, but a rational _reformation_, of our religious life. And just as, two thousand years ago, the classic poetry of the ancient Greeks incarnated their ideals of virtue in divine shapes, so may we, too, lend the character of noble goddesses to our three rational ideals. We must inquire into the features of the three goddesses of the monist--truth, beauty, and virtue; and we must study their relation to the three corresponding ideals of Christianity which they are to replace. I. The preceding inquiries (especially those of the first and third sections) have convinced us that truth unadulterated is only to be found in the temple of the study of nature, and that the only available paths to it are critical observation and reflection--the empirical investigation of facts and the rational study of their efficient causes. In this way we arrive, by means of pure reason, at true science, the highest treasure of civilized man. We must, in accordance with the arguments of our sixteenth chapter, reject what is called "revelation," the poetry of faith, that affirms the discovery of truth in a supernatural fashion, without the assistance of reason. And since the entire structure of the Judæo-Christian religion, like that of the Mohammedan and the Buddhistic, rests on these so-called revelations, and these mystic fruits of the imagination directly contradict the clear results of empirical research, it is obvious that we shall only attain to a knowledge of the truth by the rational activity of genuine science, not by the poetic imagining of a mystic faith. In this respect it is quite certain that the Christian system must give way to the monistic. The goddess of truth dwells in the temple of nature, in the green woods, on the blue sea, and on the snowy summits of the hills--not in the gloom of the cloister, nor in the narrow prisons of our jail-like schools, nor in the clouds of incense of the Christian churches. The paths which lead to the noble divinity of truth and knowledge are the loving study of nature and its laws, the observation of the infinitely great star-world with the aid of the telescope, and the infinitely tiny cell-world with the aid of the microscope--not senseless ceremonies and unthinking prayers, not alms and Peter's Pence. The rich gifts which the goddess of truth bestows on us are the noble fruits of the tree of knowledge and the inestimable treasure of a clear, unified view of the world--not belief in supernatural miracles and the illusion of an eternal life. II. It is otherwise with the divine ideal of eternal goodness. In our search for the truth we have entirely to exclude the "revelation" of the churches, and devote ourselves solely to the study of nature; but, on the other hand, the idea of the good, which we call virtue, in our monistic religion coincides for the most part with the Christian idea of virtue. We are speaking, naturally, of the primitive and pure Christianity of the first three centuries, as far as we learn its moral teaching from the gospels and the epistles of Paul; it does not apply to the Vatican caricature of that pure doctrine which has dominated European civilization, to its infinite prejudice, for twelve hundred years. The best part of Christian morality, to which we firmly adhere, is represented by the humanist precepts of charity and toleration, compassion and assistance. However, these noble commands, which are set down as "Christian" morality (in its best sense), are by no means original discoveries of Christianity; they are derived from earlier religions. The Golden Rule, which sums up these precepts in one sentence, is centuries older than Christianity. In the conduct of life this law of natural morality has been followed just as frequently by non-Christians and atheists as it has been neglected by pious believers. Moreover, Christian ethics was marred by the great defect of a narrow insistence on altruism and a denunciation of egoism. Our monistic ethics lays equal emphasis on the two, and finds perfect virtue in the just balance of love of self and love of one's neighbor (cf. chap. xix.). III. But monism enters into its strongest opposition to Christianity on the question of beauty. Primitive Christianity preached the worthlessness of earthly life, regarding it merely as a preparation for an eternal life beyond. Hence it immediately followed that all we find in the life of man here below, all that is beautiful in art and science, in public and in private life, is of no real value. The true Christian must avert his eyes from them; he must think only of a worthy preparation for the life beyond. Contempt of nature, aversion from all its inexhaustible charms, rejection of every kind of fine art, are Christian duties; and they are carried out to perfection when a man separates himself from his fellows, chastises his body, and spends all his time in prayer in the cloister or the hermit's cell. History teaches us that this ascetical morality that would scorn the whole of nature had, as a natural consequence, the very opposite effect to that it intended. Monasteries, the homes of chastity and discipline, soon became dens of the wildest orgies; the sexual commerce of monks and nuns has inspired shoals of novels, as it is so faithfully depicted in the literature of the Renaissance. The cult of the "beautiful," which was then practised, was in flagrant contradiction with the vaunted "abandonment of the world"; and the same must be said of the pomp and luxury which soon developed in the immoral private lives of the higher ecclesiastics and in the artistic decoration of Christian churches and monasteries. It may be objected that our view is refuted by the splendor of Christian art, which, especially in the best days of the Middle Ages, created works of undying beauty. The graceful Gothic cathedrals and Byzantine basilicas, the hundreds of magnificent chapels, the thousands of marble statues of saints and martyrs, the millions of fine pictures of saints, of profoundly conceived representations of Christ and the madonna--all are proofs of the development of a noble art in the Middle Ages, which is unique of its kind. All these splendid monuments of mediæval art are untouched in their high æsthetic value, whatever we say of their mixture of truth and fancy. Yes; but what has all that to do with the pure teaching of Christianity--with that religion of sacrifice that turned scornfully away from all earthly parade and glamour, from all material beauty and art; that made light of the life of the family and the love of woman; that urged an exclusive concern as to the immaterial goods of eternal life? The idea of a Christian art is a contradiction in terms--a _contradictio in adjecto_. The wealthy princes of the Church who fostered it were candidly aiming at very different ideals, and they completely attained them. In directing the whole interest and activity of the human mind in the Middle Ages to the Christian Church and its distinctive art they were diverting it _from nature_ and from the knowledge of the treasures that were hidden in it, and would have conducted to independent science. Moreover, the daily sight of the huge images of the saints and of the scenes of "sacred history" continually reminded the faithful of the vast collection of myths that the Church had made. The legends themselves were taught and believed to be true narratives, and the stories of miracles to be records of actual events. It cannot be doubted that in this respect Christian art has exercised an immense influence on general culture, and especially in the strengthening of Christian belief--an influence which still endures throughout the entire civilized world. The diametrical opposite of this dominant Christian art is the new artistic tendency which has been developed during the present century in connection with science. The remarkable expansion of our knowledge of nature, and the discovery of countless beautiful forms of life, which it includes, have awakened quite a new æsthetic sense in our generation, and thus given a new tone to painting and sculpture. Numerous scientific voyages and expeditions for the exploration of unknown lands and seas, partly in earlier centuries, but more especially in the nineteenth, have brought to light an undreamed abundance of new organic forms. The number of new species of animals and plants soon became enormous, and among them (especially among the lower groups that had been neglected before) there were thousands of forms of great beauty and interest, affording an entirely new inspiration for painting, sculpture, architecture, and technical art. In this respect a new world was revealed by the great advance of microscopic research in the second half of the century, and especially by the discovery of the marvellous inhabitants of the deep sea, which were first brought to light by the famous expedition of the _Challenger_ (1872-76). Thousands of graceful radiolaria and thalamophora, of pretty medusæ and corals, of extraordinary molluscs, and crabs, suddenly introduced us to a wealth of hidden organisms beyond all anticipation, the peculiar beauty and diversity of which far transcend all the creations of the human imagination. In the fifty large volumes of the account of the _Challenger_ expedition a vast number of these beautiful forms are delineated on three thousand plates; and there are millions of other lovely organisms described in other great works that are included in the fast-growing literature of zoology and botany of the last ten years. I began on a small scale to select a number of these beautiful forms for more popular description in my _Art Forms in Nature_ (1899). However, there is now no need for long voyages and costly works to appreciate the beauties of this world. A man needs only to keep his eyes open and his mind disciplined. Surrounding nature offers us everywhere a marvellous wealth of lovely and interesting objects of all kinds. In every bit of moss and blade of grass, in every beetle and butterfly, we find, when we examine it carefully, beauties which are usually overlooked. Above all, when we examine them with a powerful glass or, better still, with a good microscope, we find everywhere in nature a new world of inexhaustible charms. But the nineteenth century has not only opened our eyes to the æsthetic enjoyment of the microscopic world; it has shown us the beauty of the greater objects in nature. Even at its commencement it was the fashion to regard the mountains as magnificent but forbidding, and the sea as sublime but dreaded. At its close the majority of educated people--especially they who dwell in the great cities--are delighted to enjoy the glories of the Alps and the crystal splendor of the glacier world for a fortnight every year, or to drink in the majesty of the ocean and the lovely scenery of its coasts. All these sources of the keenest enjoyment of nature have only recently been revealed to us in all their splendor, and the remarkable progress we have made in facility and rapidity of conveyance has given even the less wealthy an opportunity of approaching them. All this progress in the æsthetic enjoyment of nature--and, proportionately, in the scientific understanding of nature--implies an equal advance in higher mental development and, consequently, in the direction of our monistic religion. The opposite character of our _naturalistic_ century to that of the _anthropistic_ centuries that preceded is especially noticeable in the different appreciation and spread of illustrations of the most diverse natural objects. In our own days a lively interest in artistic work of that kind has been developed, which did not exist in earlier ages; it has been supported by the remarkable progress of commerce and technical art which have facilitated a wide popularization of such illustrations. Countless illustrated periodicals convey along with their general information a sense of the inexhaustible beauty of nature in all its departments. In particular, landscape-painting has acquired an importance that surpassed all imagination. In the first half of the century one of our greatest and most erudite scientists, Alexander Humboldt, had pointed out that the development of modern landscape-painting is not only of great importance as an incentive to the study of nature and as a means of geographical description, but that it is to be commended in other respects as a noble educative medium. Since that time the taste for it has considerably increased. It should be the aim at every school to teach the children to enjoy scenery at an early age, and to give them the valuable art of imprinting on the memory by a drawing or water-color sketch. The infinite wealth of nature in what is beautiful and sublime offers every man with open eyes and an æsthetic sense an incalculable sum of choicest gifts. Still, however valuable and agreeable is the immediate enjoyment of each single gift, its worth is doubled by a knowledge of its meaning and its connection with the rest of nature. When Humboldt gave us the "outline of a physical description of the world" in his magnificent _Cosmos_ forty years ago, and when he combined scientific and æsthetic consideration so happily in his standard _Prospects of Nature_, he justly indicated how closely the higher enjoyment of nature is connected with the "scientific establishment of cosmic laws," and that the conjunction of the two serves to raise human nature to a higher stage of perfection. The astonishment with which we gaze upon the starry heavens and the microscopic life in a drop of water, the awe with which we trace the marvellous working of energy in the motion of matter, the reverence with which we grasp the universal dominance of the law of substance throughout the universe--all these are part of our emotional life, falling under the heading of "natural religion." This progress of modern times in knowledge of the true and enjoyment of the beautiful expresses, on the one hand, a valuable element of our monistic religion, but is, on the other hand, in fatal opposition to Christianity. For the human mind is thus made to live on this side of the grave; Christianity would have it ever gaze beyond. Monism teaches that we are perishable children of the earth, who for one or two, or, at the most, three generations, have the good fortune to enjoy the treasures of our planet, to drink of the inexhaustible fountain of its beauty, and to trace out the marvellous play of its forces. Christianity would teach us that the earth is "a vale of tears," in which we have but a brief period to chasten and torment ourselves in order to merit the life of eternal bliss beyond. Where this "beyond" is, and of what joys the glory of this eternal life is compacted, no revelation has ever told us. As long as "heaven" was thought to be the blue vault that hovers over the disk of our planet, and is illumined by the twinkling light of a few thousand stars, the human imagination could picture to itself the ambrosial banquets of the Olympic gods above or the laden tables of the happy dwellers in Valhalla. But now all these deities and the immortal souls that sat at their tables are "houseless and homeless," as David Strauss has so ably described; for we know from astrophysical science that the immeasurable depths of space are filled with a prosaic ether, and that millions of heavenly bodies, ruled by eternal laws of iron, rush hither and thither in the great ocean, in their eternal rhythm of life and death. The places of devotion, in which men seek the satisfaction of their religious emotions and worship the objects of their reverence, are regarded as sacred "churches." The pagodas of Buddhistic Asia, the Greek temples of classical antiquity, the synagogues of Palestine, the mosques of Egypt, the Catholic cathedrals of the south, and the Protestant cathedrals of the north, of Europe--all these "houses of God" serve to raise man above the misery and the prose of daily life, to lift him into the sacred, poetic atmosphere of a higher, ideal world. They attain this end in a thousand different ways, according to their various forms of worship and their age. The modern man who "has science and art"--and, therefore, "religion"--needs no special church, no narrow, enclosed portion of space. For through the length and breadth of free nature, wherever he turns his gaze, to the whole universe or to any single part of it, he finds, indeed, the grim "struggle for life," but by its side are ever "the good, the true, and the beautiful"; his church is commensurate with the whole of glorious nature. Still, there will always be men of special temperament who will desire to have decorated temples or churches as places of devotion to which they may withdraw. Just as the Catholics had to relinquish a number of churches to the Reformation in the sixteenth century, so a still larger number will pass over to "free societies" of monists in the coming years. CHAPTER XIX OUR MONISTIC ETHICS Monistic and Dualistic Ethics--Contradiction of Pure and Practical Reason in Kant--His Categorical Imperative--The Neo-Kantians--Herbert Spencer--Egoism and Altruism--Equivalence of the Two Instincts--The Fundamental Law of Ethics: the Golden Rule--Its Antiquity--Christian Ethics--Contempt of Self, the Body, Nature, Civilization, the Family, Woman--Roman Catholic Ethics--Immoral Results of Celibacy--Necessity for the Abolition of the Law of Celibacy, Oral Confession, and Indulgences--State and Church--Religion a Private Concern--Church and School--State and School--Need of School Reform The practical conduct of life makes a number of definite ethical claims on a man which can only be duly and naturally satisfied when they are in complete harmony with his view of the world. In accordance with this fundamental principle of our monistic philosophy, our whole system of ethics must be rationally connected with the unified conception of the cosmos which we have formed by our advanced knowledge of the laws of nature. Just as the infinite universe is one great whole in the light of our monistic teaching, so the spiritual and moral life of man is a part of this cosmos, and our naturalistic ordering of it must also be monistic. There are not two different, separate worlds--the one physical and material, and the other moral and immaterial. The great majority of philosophers and theologians still hold the contrary opinion. They affirm, with Kant, that the moral world is quite independent of the physical, and is subject to very different laws; hence a man's conscience, as the basis of his moral life, must also be quite independent of our scientific knowledge of the world, and must be based rather on his religious faith. On that theory the study of the moral world belongs to _practical_ reason, while that of nature, or of the physical world, is referred to _pure_ or theoretical reason. This unequivocal and conscious dualism of Kant's philosophy was its greatest defect; it has caused, and still causes, incalculable mischief. First of all the "critical Kant" had built up the splendid and marvellous palace of pure reason, and convincingly proved that the three great central dogmas of metaphysics--a personal God, free will, and the immortal soul--had no place whatever in it, and that no rational proof could be found of their reality. Afterwards, however, the "dogmatic Kant" superimposed on this true crystal palace of _pure_ reason the glittering, ideal castle in the air of _practical_ reason, in which three imposing church-naves were designed for the accommodation of those three great mystic divinities. When they had been put out at the front door by rational knowledge they returned by the back door under the guidance of irrational faith. The cupola of his great cathedral of faith was crowned by Kant with his curious idol, the famous "categorical imperative." According to it, the demand of the universal moral law is unconditional, independent of any regard to actuality or potentiality. It runs: "Act at all times in such wise that the maxim (or the subjective law of thy will) may hold good as a principle of a universal law." On that theory all normal men would have the same sense of duty. Modern anthropology has ruthlessly dissipated that pretty dream; it has shown that conceptions of duty differ even more among uncivilized than among civilized nations. All the actions and customs which we regard as sins or loathsome crimes (theft, fraud, murder, adultery, etc.) are considered by other nations in certain circumstances to be virtues, or even sacred duties. Although the obvious contradiction of the two forms of reason in Kant's teaching, the fundamental antagonism of pure and practical reason, was recognized and attacked at the very beginning of the century, it is still pretty widely accepted. The modern school of neo-Kantians urges a "return to Kant" so pressingly precisely on account of this agreeable dualism; the Church militant zealously supports it because it fits in admirably with its own mystic faith. But it met with an effective reverse at the hands of modern science in the second half of the nineteenth century, which entirely demolished the theses of the system of practical reason. Monistic cosmology proved, on the basis of the law of substance, that there is no personal God; comparative and genetic psychology showed that there cannot be an immortal soul; and monistic physiology proved the futility of the assumption of "free will." Finally, the science of evolution made it clear that the same eternal iron laws that rule in the inorganic world are valid too in the organic and moral world. But modern science gives not only a negative support to practical philosophy and ethics in demolishing the Kantian dualism, but it renders the positive service of substituting for it the new structure of ethical monism. It shows that the feeling of duty does not rest on an illusory "categorical imperative," but on the solid ground of _social instinct_, as we find in the case of all social animals. It regards as the highest aim of all morality the re-establishment of a sound harmony between egoism and altruism, between self-love and the love of one's neighbor. It is to the great English philosopher, Herbert Spencer, that we owe the founding of this monistic ethics on a basis of evolution. Man belongs to the social vertebrates, and has, therefore, like all social animals, two sets of duties--first to himself, and secondly to the society to which he belongs. The former are the behests of self-love or egoism, the latter of love for one's fellows or altruism. The two sets of precepts are equally just, equally natural, and equally indispensable. If a man desire to have the advantage of living in an organized community, he has to consult not only his own fortune, but also that of the society, and of the "neighbors" who form the society. He must realize that its prosperity is his own prosperity, and that it cannot suffer without his own injury. This fundamental law of society is so simple and so inevitable that one cannot understand how it can be contradicted in theory or in practice; yet that is done to-day, and has been done for thousands of years. The equal appreciation of these two natural impulses, or the moral equivalence of self-love and love of others, is the chief and the fundamental principle of our morality. Hence the highest aim of all ethics is very simple--it is the re-establishment of "the natural equality of egoism and altruism, of the love of one's self and the love of one's neighbor." The Golden Rule says: "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you." From this highest precept of Christianity it follows of itself that we have just as sacred duties towards ourselves as we have towards our fellows. I have explained my conception of this principle in my _Monism_, and laid down three important theses. (1) Both these concurrent impulses are natural laws, of equal importance and necessity for the preservation of the family and the society; egoism secures the self-preservation of the individual, altruism that of the species which is made up of the chain of perishable individuals. (2) The social duties which are imposed by the social structure of the associated individuals, and by means of which it secures its preservation, are merely higher evolutionary stages of the social instincts, which we find in all higher social animals (as "habits which have become hereditary"). (3) In the case of civilized man all ethics, theoretical or practical, being "a science of rules," is connected with his view of the world at large, and consequently with his religion. From the recognition of the fundamental principle of our morality we may immediately deduce its highest precept, that noble command, which is often called the Golden Rule of morals, or, briefly, the Golden Rule. Christ repeatedly expressed it in the simple phrase: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Mark adds that "there is no greater commandment than this," and Matthew says: "In these two commandments is the whole law and the prophets." In this greatest and highest commandment our monistic ethics is completely at one with Christianity. We must, however, recall the historical fact that the formulation of this supreme command is not an original merit of Christ, as the majority of Christian theologians affirm and their uncritical supporters blindly accept. The Golden Rule is five hundred years older than Christ; it was laid down as the highest moral principle by many Greek and Oriental sages. Pittacus, of Mylene, one of the seven wise men of Greece, said six hundred and twenty years before Christ: "Do not that to thy neighbor that thou wouldst not suffer from him." Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher and religious founder (who rejected the idea of a personal God and of the immortality of the soul), said five hundred years B.C.: "Do to every man as thou wouldst have him do to thee; and do not to another what thou wouldst not have him do to thee. This precept only dost thou need; it is the foundation of all other commandments." Aristotle taught about the middle of the fourth century B.C.: "We must act towards others as we wish others to act towards us." In the same sense, and partly in the same words, the Golden Rule was given by Thales, Isocrates, Aristippus, Sextus, the Pythagorean, and other philosophers of classic antiquity--several centuries before Christ. From this collection it is clear that the Golden Rule had a _polyphyletic_ origin--that is, it was formulated by a number of philosophers at different times and in different places, quite independently of each other. Otherwise it must be assumed that Jesus derived it from some other Oriental source, from ancient Semitic, Indian, Chinese, or especially Buddhistic traditions, as has been proved in the case of most of the other Christian doctrines. As the great ethical principle is thus twenty-five hundred years old, and as Christianity itself has put it at the head of its moral teaching as the highest and all-embracing commandment, it follows that our monistic ethics is in complete harmony on this important point, not only with the ethics of the ancient heathens, but also with that of Christianity. Unfortunately this harmony is disturbed by the fact that the gospels and the Pauline epistles contain many other points of moral teaching, which contradict our first and supreme commandment. Christian theologians have fruitlessly striven to explain away these striking and painful contradictions by their ingenious interpretations. We need not enter into that question now, but we must briefly consider those unfortunate aspects of Christian ethics which are incompatible with the better thought of the modern age, and which are distinctly injurious in their practical consequences. Of that character is the contempt which Christianity has shown for self, for the body, for nature, for civilization, for the family, and for woman. I. The supreme mistake of Christian ethics, and one which runs directly counter to the Golden Rule, is its exaggeration of love of one's neighbor at the expense of self-love. Christianity attacks and despises egoism on principle. Yet that natural impulse is absolutely indispensable in view of self-preservation; indeed, one may say that even altruism, its apparent opposite, is only an enlightened egoism. Nothing great or elevated has ever taken place without egoism, and without the passion that urges us to great sacrifices. It is only the excesses of the impulse that are injurious. One of the Christian precepts that were impressed upon us in our early youth as of great importance, and that are glorified in millions of sermons, is: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you." It is a very ideal precept, but as useless in practice as it is unnatural. So it is with the counsel, "If any man will take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also." Translated into the terms of modern life, that means: "When some unscrupulous scoundrel has defrauded thee of half thy goods, let him have the other half also." Or, again, in the language of modern politics: "When the pious English take from you simple Germans one after another of your new and valuable colonies in Africa, let them have all the rest of your colonies also--or, best of all, give them Germany itself." And, while we touch on the marvellous world-politics of modern England, we may note in passing its direct contradiction of every precept of Christian charity, which is more frequently on the lips of that great nation than of any other nation in the world. However, the glaring contradiction between the theoretical, _ideal_, altruistic morality of the human individual and the _real_, purely selfish morality of the human community, and especially of the civilized Christian state, is a familiar fact. It would be interesting to determine mathematically in what proportion among organized men the altruistic ethical ideal of the individual changes into its contrary, the purely egoistic "real politics" of the state and the nation. II. Since the Christian faith takes a wholly dualistic view of the human organism and attributes to the immortal soul only a temporary sojourn in the mortal frame, it very naturally sets a much greater value on the soul than on the body. Hence results that neglect of the care of the body, of training, and of cleanliness which contrasts the life of the Christian Middle Ages so unfavorably with that of pagan classical antiquity. Christian ethics contains none of those firm commands as to daily ablutions which are theoretically laid down and practically fulfilled in the Mohammedan, Hindoo, and other religions. In many monasteries the ideal of the pious Christian is the man who does not wash and clothe himself properly, who never changes his malodorous gown, and who, instead of regular work, fills up his useless life with mechanical prayers, senseless fasts, and so forth. As a special outgrowth of this contempt of the body we have the disgusting discipline of the flagellants and other ascetics. III. One source of countless theoretical errors and practical blemishes, of deplorable crudity and privation, is found in the false anthropism of Christianity--that is, in the unique position which it gives to man, as the image of God, in opposition to all the rest of nature. In this way it has contributed, not only to an extremely injurious isolation from our glorious mother "nature," but also to a regrettable contempt of all other organisms. Christianity has no place for that well-known love of animals, that sympathy with the nearly related and friendly mammals (dogs, horses, cattle, etc.), which is urged in the ethical teaching of many of the older religions, especially Buddhism. Whoever has spent much time in the south of Europe must have often witnessed those frightful sufferings of animals which fill us friends of animals with the deepest sympathy and indignation. And when one expostulates with these brutal "Christians" on their cruelty, the only answer is, with a laugh: "But the beasts are not Christians." Unfortunately Descartes gave some support to the error in teaching that man only has a sensitive soul, not the animal. How much more elevated is our monistic ethics than the Christian in this regard! Darwinism teaches us that we have descended immediately from the primates, and, in a secondary degree, from a long series of earlier mammals, and that, therefore, they are "our brothers"; physiology informs us that they have the same nerves and sense-organs as we, and the same feelings of pleasure and pain. No sympathetic monistic scientist would ever be guilty of that brutal treatment of animals which comes so lightly to the Christian in his anthropistic illusion--to the "child of the God of love." Moreover, this Christian contempt of nature on principle deprives man of an abundance of the highest earthly joys, especially of the keen, ennobling enjoyment of nature. IV. Since, according to Christ's teaching, our planet is "a vale of tears," and our earthly life is valueless and a mere preparation for a better life to come, it has succeeded in inducing men to sacrifice all happiness on this side of eternity and make light of all earthly goods. Among these "earthly goods," in the case of the modern civilized man, we must include the countless great and small conveniences of technical science, hygiene, commerce, etc., which have made modern life cheerful and comfortable; we must include all the gratifications of painting, sculpture, music, and poetry, which flourished exceedingly even during the Middle Ages (in spite of its principles), and which we esteem as "ideal pleasures"; we must include all that invaluable progress of science, especially the study of nature, of which the nineteenth century is justly proud. All these "earthly goods," that have so high a value in the eyes of the monist, are worthless--nay, injurious--for the most part, according to Christian teaching; the stern code of Christian morals should look just as unfavorably on the pursuit of these pleasures as our humanistic ethics fosters and encourages it. Once more, therefore, Christianity is found to be an enemy to civilization, and the struggle which modern thought and science are compelled to conduct with it is, in this additional sense, a "_cultur-kampf_." V. Another of the most deplorable aspects of Christian morality is its belittlement of the life of the family, of that natural living together with our next of kin which is just as necessary in the case of man as in the case of all the higher social animals. The family is justly regarded as the "foundation of society," and the healthy life of the family is a necessary condition of the prosperity of the State. Christ, however, was of a very different opinion: with his gaze ever directed to "the beyond," he thought as lightly of woman and the family as of all other goods of "this life." Of his infrequent contact with his parents and sisters the gospels have very little to say; but they are far from representing his relations with his mother to have been so tender and intimate as they are poetically depicted in so many thousands of pictures. He was not married himself. Sexual love, the first foundation of the family union, seems to have been regarded by Jesus as a necessary evil. His most enthusiastic apostle, Paul, went still farther in the same direction, declaring it to be better not to marry than to marry: "It is good for a man not to touch a woman." If humanity were to follow this excellent counsel, it would soon be rid of all earthly misery and suffering: it would be killed off by such a "radical cure" within half a century. VI. As Christ never knew the love of woman, he had no personal acquaintance with that refining of man's true nature that comes only from the intimate life of man with woman. The intimate sexual union, on which the preservation of the human race depends, is just as important on that account as the spiritual penetration of the two sexes, or the mutual complement which they bring to each other in the practical wants of daily life as well as in the highest ideal functions of the soul. For man and woman are two different organisms, equal in worth, each having its characteristic virtues and defects. As civilization advanced, this ideal value of sexual love was more appreciated, and woman held in higher honor, especially among the Teutonic races; she is the inspiring source of the highest achievements of art and poetry. But Christ was as far from this view as nearly the whole of antiquity; he shared the idea that prevailed everywhere in the East--that woman is subordinate to man, and intercourse with her is "unclean." Long-suffering nature has taken a fearful revenge for this blunder; its sad consequences are written in letters of blood in the history of the papal Middle Ages. The marvellous hierarchy of the Roman Church, that never disdained any means of strengthening its spiritual despotism, found an exceptionally powerful instrument in the manipulation of this "unclean" idea, and in the promotion of the ascetic notion that abstinence from intercourse with women is a virtue of itself. In the first few centuries after Christ a number of priests voluntarily abstained from marriage, and the supposed value of this celibacy soon rose to such a degree that it was made obligatory. In the Middle Ages the seduction of women of good repute and of their daughters by Catholic priests (the confessional was an active agency in the business) was a public scandal: many communities, in order to prevent such things, pressed for a license of concubinage to be given to the clergy. And it was done in many, and sometimes very romantic, ways. Thus, for instance, the canon law that the priest's cook should not be less than forty years old was very cleverly "explained" in the sense that the priest might have two cooks, one in the presbytery, another without; if one was twenty-four and the other eighteen, that made forty-two together--two years above the prescribed age. At the Christian councils, at which heretics were burned alive, the cardinals and bishops sat down with whole troops of prostitutes. The private and public debauchery of the Catholic clergy was so scandalous and dangerous to the commonwealth that there was a general rebellion against it before the time of Luther, and a loud demand for a "reformation of the church in head and members." It is well known that these immoral relations still continue in Roman Catholic lands, although more in secret. Formerly proposals were made from time to time for the definitive abrogation of celibacy, as was done, for instance, in the chambers of Baden, Bavaria, Hesse, Saxony, and other lands; but they have, unfortunately, hitherto proved unavailing. In the German Reichstag, in which the ultramontane Centre is now proposing the most ridiculous measures for the suppression of sexual immorality, there is now no party that will urge the abolition of celibacy in the interest of public morality. The so-called "Freethought" Party and the utopian social democracy coquette with the favor of the Centre. The modern state that would lift not only the material, but the moral, life of its people to a higher level is entitled, and indeed bound, to sweep away such unworthy and harmful conditions. The obligatory celibacy of the Catholic clergy is as pernicious and immoral as the practice of auricular confession or the sale of indulgences. All three have nothing whatever to do with primitive Christianity. All three are directly opposed to true Christian morality. All three are disreputable inventions of the papacy, designed for the sole purpose of strengthening its despotic rule over the credulous masses and making as much material profit as possible out of them. The Nemesis of history will sooner or later exact a terrible account of the Roman papacy, and the millions who have been robbed of their happiness by this degenerate religion will help to give it its death-blow in the coming twentieth century--at least, in every truly civilized state. It has been recently calculated that the number of men who lost their lives in the papal persecutions of heretics, the Inquisition, the Christian religious wars, etc., is much more than ten millions. But what is this in comparison with the tenfold greater number of the unfortunate _moral_ victims of the institutions and the priestly domination of the degenerate Christian Church--with the unnumbered millions whose higher mental life was extinguished, whose conscience was tortured, whose family life was destroyed, by the Church? We may with truth apply the words of Goethe in his _Bride of Corinth_: "Victims fall, nor lambs nor bulls, But human victims numberless." In the great _cultur-kampf_, which must go on as long as these sad conditions exist, the first aim must be the absolute separation of Church and State. There shall be "a free Church in a free State"--that is, every Church shall be free in the practice of its special worship and ceremonies, and in the construction of its fantastic poetry and superstitious dogmas--with the sole condition that they contain no danger to social order or morality. Then there will be equal rights for all. Free societies and monistic religious bodies shall be equally tolerated, and just as free in their movements as Liberal Protestant and orthodox ultramontane congregations. But for all these "faithful" of the most diverse sects religion will have to be a private concern. The state shall supervise them, and prevent excesses; but it must neither oppress nor support them. Above all, the ratepayers shall not be compelled to contribute to the support and spread of a "faith" which they honestly believe to be a harmful superstition. In the United States such a complete separation of Church and State has been long accomplished, greatly to the satisfaction of all parties. They have also the equally important separation of the Church from the school; that is, undoubtedly, a powerful element in the great advance which science and culture have recently made in America. It goes without saying that this exclusion of the Church from the school only refers to its sectarian principles, the particular form of belief which each Church has evolved in the course of its life. This sectarian education is purely a private concern, and should be left to parents and tutors, or to such priests or teachers as may have the personal confidence of the parents. Instead of the rejected sectarian instruction, two important branches of education will be introduced--monistic or humanist ethics and comparative religion. During the last thirty years an extensive literature has appeared dealing with the new system of ethics which has been raised on the basis of modern science--especially evolutionary science. Comparative religion will be a natural companion to the actual elementary instruction in "biblical history" and in the mythology of Greece and Rome. Both of these will remain in the curriculum. The reason for that is obvious enough; the whole of our painting and sculpture, the chief branches of monistic æsthetics, are intimately blended with the Christian, Greek, and Roman mythologies. There will only be this important difference--that the Christian myths and legends will not be taught as truths, but as poetic fancies, like the Greek and Roman myths; the high value of the ethical and æsthetical material they contain will not be lessened, but increased, by this means. As regards the Bible, the "book of books" will only be given to the children in carefully selected extracts (a sort of "school Bible"); in this way we shall avoid the besmirching of the child's imagination with the unclean stories and passages which are so numerous in the Old Testament. Once the modern State has freed itself and its schools from the fetters of the Church, it will be able to devote more attention to the improvement of education. The incalculable value of a good system of education has forced itself more and more upon us as the many aspects of modern civilized life have been enlarged and enriched in the course of the century. But the development of the educational methods has by no means kept pace with life in general. The necessity for a comprehensive reform of our schools is making itself felt more and more. On this question, too, a number of valuable works have appeared in the course of the last forty years. We shall restrict ourselves to making a few general observations which we think of special importance. 1. In all education up to the present time _man_ has played the chief part, and especially the grammatical study of his language; the study of _nature_ was entirely neglected. 2. In the school of the future nature will be the chief object of the study; a man shall learn a correct view of the world he lives in; he will not be made to stand outside of and opposed to nature, but be represented as its highest and noblest product. 3. The study of the classical tongues (Latin and Greek), which has hitherto absorbed most of the pupils' time and energy, is indeed valuable; but it will be much restricted, and confined to the mere elements (obligatory for Latin, optional for Greek). 4. In consequence, modern languages must be all the more cultivated in all the higher schools (English and French to be obligatory, Italian optional). 5. Historical instruction must pay more attention to the inner mental and spiritual life of a nation, and to the development of its civilization, and less to its external history (the vicissitudes of dynasties, wars, and so forth). 6. The elements of evolutionary science must be learned in conjunction with cosmology, geology must go with geography, and anthropology with biology. 7. The first principles of biology must be familiar to every educated man; the modern training in observation furnishes an attractive introduction to the biological sciences (anthropology, zoology, and botany). A start must be made with descriptive system (in conjunction with ætiology or bionomy); the elements of anatomy and physiology to be added later on. 8. The first principles of physics and chemistry must also be taught, and their exact establishment with the aid of mathematics. 9. Every pupil must be taught to draw well, and from nature; and, wherever it is possible, the use of water-colors. The execution of drawings and of water-color sketches from nature (of flowers, animals, landscapes, clouds, etc.) not only excites interest in nature and helps memory to enjoy objects, but it gives the pupil his first lesson in _seeing_ correctly and understanding what he has seen. 10. Much more care and time must be devoted than has been done hitherto to corporal exercise, to gymnastics and swimming; but it is especially important to have walks in common every week, and journeys on foot during the holidays. The lesson in observation which they obtain in this way is invaluable. The chief aim of higher education up to the present time, in most countries, has been a preparation for the subsequent profession, and the acquisition of a certain amount of information and direction for civic duties. The school of the twentieth century will have for its main object the formation of independent thought, the clear understanding of the knowledge acquired, and an insight into the natural connection of phenomena. If the modern state gives every citizen a vote, it should also give him the means of developing his reason by a proper education, in order to make a rational use of his vote for the commonweal. CHAPTER XX SOLUTION OF THE WORLD-PROBLEMS A Glance at the Progress of the Nineteenth Century in Solving Cosmic Problems--I. Progress of Astronomy and Cosmology--Physical and Chemical Unity of the Universe--Cosmic Metamorphoses--Evolution of the Planetary System--Analogy of the Phylogenetic Processes on the Earth and on Other Planets--Organic Inhabitants of Other Heavenly Bodies--Periodic Variation in the Making of Worlds--II. Progress of Geology and Palæontology--Neptunism and Vulcanism--Theory of Continuity--III. Progress of Physics and Chemistry--IV. Progress of Biology--Cellular Theory and Theory of Descent--V. Anthropology--Origin of Man--General Conclusion At the close of our philosophic study of the riddles of the universe we turn with confidence to the answer to the momentous question, How nearly have we approached to a solution of them? What is the value of the immense progress which the passing nineteenth century has made in the knowledge of nature? And what prospect does it open out to us for the future, for the further development of our system in the twentieth century, at the threshold of which we pause? Every unprejudiced thinker who impartially considers the solid progress of our empirical science, and the unity and clearness of our philosophic interpretation of it, will share our view: the nineteenth century has made greater progress in knowledge of the world and in grasp of its nature than all its predecessors; it has solved many great problems that seemed insoluble a hundred years ago; it has opened out to us new provinces of learning, the very existence of which was unsuspected at the beginning of the century. Above all, it has put clearly before our eyes the lofty aim of monistic cosmology, and has pointed out the path which alone will lead us towards it--the way of the exact empirical investigation of facts, and of the critical genetic study of their causes. The great abstract law of mechanical causality, of which our cosmological law--the law of substance--is but another and a concrete expression, now rules the entire universe, as it does the mind of man; it is the steady, immovable pole-star, whose clear light falls on our path through the dark labyrinth of the countless separate phenomena. To see the truth of this more clearly, let us cast a brief glance at the astonishing progress which the chief branches of science have made in this remarkable period. I.--PROGRESS OF ASTRONOMY The study of the heavens is the oldest, the study of man the youngest, of the sciences. With regard to himself and the character of his being man only obtained a clear knowledge in the second half of the present century; with regard to the starry heavens, the motions of the planets, and so on, he had acquired astonishing information forty-five hundred years ago. The ancient Chinese, Hindoos, Egyptians, and Chaldæans in the distant East knew more of the science of the spheres than the majority of educated Christians did in the West four thousand years after them. An eclipse of the sun was astronomically observed in China in the year 2697 B.C., and the plane of the ecliptic was determined by means of a gnome eleven hundred years B.C., while Christ himself had no knowledge whatever of astronomy--indeed, he looked out upon heaven and earth, nature and man, from the very narrowest geocentric and anthropocentric point of view. The greatest advance of astronomy is generally, and rightly, said to be the founding of the heliocentric system of Copernicus, whose famous work, _De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium_, of itself caused a profound revolution in the minds of thoughtful men. In overthrowing the Ptolemaic system, he destroyed the foundation of the Christian theory, which regarded the earth as the centre of the universe and man as the godlike ruler of the earth. It was natural, therefore, that the Christian clergy, with the pope at its head, should enter upon a fierce struggle with the invaluable discovery of Copernicus. Yet it soon cleared a path for itself, when Kepler and Galileo grounded on it their true "mechanics of the heavens," and Newton gave it a solid foundation by his theory of gravitation (1686). A further great advance, comprehending the entire universe, was the application of the idea of evolution to astronomy. It was done by the youthful Kant in 1755; in his famous general natural history and theory of the heavens he undertook the discussion, not only of the "constitution," but also of the "mechanical origin" of the whole world-structure on Newtonian principles. The splendid _Système du Monde_ of Laplace, who had independently come to the same conclusions as Kant on the world-problem, gave so firm a basis to this new _Mécanique Céleste_ in 1796 that it looked as if nothing entirely new of equal importance was left to be discovered in the nineteenth century. Yet here again it had the honor of opening out entirely new paths and infinitely enlarging our outlook on the universe. The invention of photography and photometry, and especially of spectral analysis (in 1860 by Bunsen and Kirchoff), introduced physics and chemistry into astronomy and led to cosmological conclusions of the utmost importance. It was now made perfectly clear that matter is the same throughout the universe, and that its physical and chemical properties in the most distant stars do not differ from those of the earth under our feet. The monistic conviction, which we thus arrived at, of the physical and chemical unity of the entire cosmos is certainly one of the most valuable general truths which we owe to astrophysics, the new branch of astronomy which is honorably associated with the name of Friedrich Zöllner. Not less important is the clear knowledge we have obtained that the same laws of mechanical development that we have on the earth rule throughout the infinite universe. A vast, all-embracing metamorphosis goes on continuously in all parts of the universe, just as it is found in the geological history of the earth; it can be traced in the evolution of its living inhabitants as surely as in the history of peoples or in the life of each human individual. In one part of space we perceive, with the aid of our best telescopes, vast nebulæ of glowing, infinitely attenuated gas; we see in them the embryos of heavenly bodies, billions of miles away, in the first stage of their development. In some of these "stellar embryos" the chemical elements do not seem to be differentiated yet, but still buried in the homogeneous primitive matter (_prothyl_) at an enormous temperature (calculated to run into millions of degrees); it is possible that the original basic "substance" (_vide_ p. 229) is not yet divided into ponderable and imponderable matter. In other parts of space we find stars that have cooled down into glowing fluid, and yet others that are cold and rigid; we can tell their stage of evolution approximately by their color. We find stars that are surrounded with rings and moons like Saturn; and we recognize in the luminous ring of the nebula the embryo of a new moon, which has detached itself from the mother-planet, just as the planet was released from the sun. Many of the stars, the light of which has taken thousands of years to reach us, are certainly suns like our own mother-sun, and are girt about with planets and moons, just as in our own solar system. We are justified in supposing that thousands of these planets are in a similar stage of development to that of our earth--that is, they have arrived at a period when the temperature at the surface lies between the freezing and boiling point of water, and so permits the existence of water in its liquid condition. That makes it possible that carbon has entered into the same complex combinations on those planets as it has done on our earth, and that from its nitrogenous compounds protoplasm has been evolved--that wonderful substance which alone, as far as our knowledge goes, is the possessor of organic life. The monera (for instance, chromacea and bacteria), which consist only of this primitive protoplasm, and which arise by spontaneous generation from these inorganic nitrocarbonates, may thus have entered upon the same course of evolution on many other planets as on our own; first of all, living cells of the simplest character would be formed from their homogeneous protoplasmic body by the separation of an inner nucleus from the outer cell body (cytostoma). Further, the analogy that we find in the life of all cells--whether plasmodomous plant-cells or plasmophagous animal-cells--justifies the inference that the further course of organic evolution on these other planets has been analogous to that of our own earth--always, of course, given the same limits of temperature which permit water in a liquid form. In the glowing liquid bodies of the stars, where water can only exist in the form of steam, and on the cold extinct suns, where it can only be in the shape of ice, such organic life as we know is impossible. The similarity of phylogeny, or the analogy of organic evolution, which we may thus assume in many stars which are at the same stage of biogenetic development, naturally opens out a wide field of brilliant speculation to the constructive imagination. A favorite subject for such speculation has long been the question whether there are men, or living beings like ourselves, perhaps much more highly developed, in other planets? Among the many works which have sought to answer the question, those of Camille Flammarion, the Parisian astronomer, have recently been extremely popular; they are equally distinguished by exuberant imagination and brilliant style, and by a deplorable lack of critical judgment and biological knowledge. We may condense in the following thesis the present condition of our knowledge on the subject: I. It is very probable that a similar biogenetic process to that of our own earth is taking place on some of the other planets of our solar system (Mars and Venus), and on many planets of other solar systems; first simple monera are formed by spontaneous generation, and from these arise unicellular protists (first plasmodomous primitive plants, and then plasmophagous primitive animals). II. It is very probable that from these unicellular protists arise, in the further course of evolution, first social cell-communities (coenobia), and subsequently tissue-forming plants and animals (metaphyta and metazoa). III. It is also very probable that thallophyta (algæ and fungi) were the first to appear in the plant-kingdom, then diaphyta (mosses and ferns), finally anthophyta (gymnosperm and angiosperm flowering plants). IV. It is equally probable that the biogenetic process took a similar course in the animal kingdom--that from the blastæads (catallacta) first gastræads were formed, and from these lower animal forms (coelenteria) higher organisms (coelomaria) were afterwards evolved. V. On the other hand, it is very questionable whether the different stems of these higher animals (and those of the higher plants as well) run through the same course of development on other planets as on our earth. VI. In particular, it is wholly uncertain whether there are vertebrates on other planets, and whether, in the course of their phyletic development, taking millions of years, mammals are formed as on earth, reaching their highest point in the formation of man; in such an event, millions of changes would have to be just the same in both cases. VII. It is much more probable, on the contrary, that other planets have produced other types of the higher plants and animals, which are unknown on our earth; perhaps from some higher animal stem, which is superior to the vertebrate in formation, higher beings have arisen who far transcend us earthly men in intelligence. VIII. The possibility of our ever entering into direct communication with such inhabitants of other planets seems to be excluded by the immense distance of our earth from the other heavenly bodies, and the absence of the requisite atmosphere in the intervening space, which contains only ether. But while many of the stars are probably in a similar stage of biogenetic development to that of our earth (for the last one hundred million years at least), others have advanced far beyond this stage, and, in their planetary old age, are hastening towards their end--the same end that inevitably awaits our own globe. The radiation of heat into space gradually lowers the temperature until all the water is turned into ice; that is the end of all organic life. The substance of the rotating mass contracts more and more; the rapidity of its motion gradually falls off. The orbits of the planets and of their moons grow narrower. At length the moons fall upon the planets, and the planets are drawn into the sun that gave them birth. The collision again produces an enormous quantity of heat. The pulverized mass of the colliding bodies is distributed freely through infinite space, and the eternal drama of sun-birth begins afresh. The sublime picture which modern astrophysics thus unveils before the mind's eye shows us an eternal birth and death of countless heavenly bodies, a periodic change from one to the other of the different cosmogenetic conditions, which we observe side by side in the universe. While the embryo of a new world is being formed from a nebula in one corner of the vast stage of the universe, another has already condensed into a rotating sphere of liquid fire in some far distant spot; a third has already cast off rings at its equator, which round themselves into planets; a fourth has become a vast sun whose planets have formed a secondary retinue of moons, and so on. And between them are floating about in space myriads of smaller bodies, meteorites, or shooting-stars, which cross and recross the paths of the planets apparently like lawless vagabonds, and of which a great number fall onto the planets every day. Thus there is a continuous but slow change in the velocities and the orbits of the revolving spheres. The frozen moons fall onto the planets, the planets onto their suns. Two distant suns, perhaps already stark and cold, rush together with inconceivable force and melt away into nebulous clouds. And such prodigious heat is generated by the collision that the nebula is once more raised to incandescence, and the old drama begins again. Yet in this "perpetual motion" the infinite substance of the universe, the sum total of its matter and energy, remains eternally unchanged, and we have an eternal repetition in infinite time of the periodic dance of the worlds, the metamorphosis of the cosmos that ever returns to its starting-point. Over all rules the law of substance. II.--PROGRESS OF GEOLOGY The earth and its origin were much later than the heavens in becoming the object of scientific investigation. The numerous ancient and modern cosmogonies do, indeed, profess to give us as good an insight into the origin of the earth as into that of the heavens; but the mythological raiment, in which all alike are clothed, betrays their origin in poetic fancy. Among the countless legends of creation which we find in the history of religions and of thought there is one that soon took precedence of all the rest--the Mosaic story of creation as told in the first book of the Hexateuch. It did not exist in its present form until long after the death of Moses (probably not until eight hundred years afterwards); but its sources are much older, and are to be found for the most part in Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hindoo legends. This Hebrew legend of creation obtained its great influence through its adoption into the Christian faith and its consecration as the "Word of God." Greek philosophers had already, five hundred years before Christ, explained the natural origin of the earth in the same way as that of other cosmic bodies. Xenophanes of Colophon had even recognized the true character of the fossils which were afterwards to prove of such moment; the great painter, Leonardo da Vinci, of the fifteenth century, also explained the fossils as the petrified remains of animals which had lived in earlier periods of the earth's history. But the authority of the Bible, especially the myth of the deluge, prevented any further progress in this direction, and insured the triumph of the Mosaic legend until about the middle of the last century. It survives even at the present day among orthodox theologians. However, in the second half of the eighteenth century, scientific inquiry into the structure of the crust of the earth set to work independently of the Mosaic story, and it soon led to certain conclusions as to the origin of the earth. The founder of geology, Werner of Freiberg, thought that all the rocks were formed in water, while Voigt and Hutton (1788) rightly contended that only the stratified, fossil-bearing rocks had had an aquatic origin, and that the Vulcanic or Plutonic mountain ranges had been formed by the cooling down of molten matter. The heated conflict of these "Neptunian" and "Plutonic" schools was still going on during the first three decades of the present century; it was only settled when Karl Hoff (1822) established the principle of "actualism," and Sir Charles Lyell applied it with signal success to the entire natural evolution of the earth. The _Principles of Geology_ of Lyell (1830) secured the full recognition of the supremely important theory of continuity in the formation of the earth's crust, as opposed to the catastrophic theory of Cuvier.[34] Palæontology, which had been founded by Cuvier's work on fossil bones (1812), was of the greatest service to geology; by the middle of the present century it had advanced so far that the chief periods in the history of the earth and its inhabitants could be established. The comparatively thin crust of the earth was now recognized with certainty to be the hard surface formed by the cooling of an incandescent fluid planet, which still continues its slow, unbroken course of refrigeration and condensation. The crumpling of the stiffened crust, "the reaction of the molten fiery contents on the cool surface," and especially the unceasing geological action of water, are the natural causes which are daily at work in the secular formation of the crust of the earth and its mountains. To the brilliant progress of modern geology we owe three extremely important results of general import. In the first place, it has excluded from the story of the earth all questions of miracle, all questions of supernatural agencies, in the building of the mountains and the shaping of the continents. In the second place, our idea of the length of the vast period of time which had been absorbed in their formation has been considerably enlarged. We now know that the huge mountains of the palæozoic, mesozoic, and cenozoic formations have taken, not thousands, but millions of years in their growth. In the third place, we now know that all the countless fossils that are found in those formations are not "sports of nature," as was believed one hundred and fifty years ago, but the petrified remains of organisms that lived in earlier periods of the earth's history, and arose by gradual transformation from a long series of ancestors. III.--PROGRESS OF PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY The many important discoveries which these fundamental sciences have made during the nineteenth century are so well known, and their practical application in every branch of modern life is so obvious, that we need not discuss them in detail here. In particular, the application of steam and electricity has given to our nineteenth century its characteristic "machinist-stamp." But the colossal progress of inorganic and organic chemistry is not less important. All branches of modern civilization--medicine and technology, industry and agriculture, mining and forestry, land and water transport--have been so much improved in the course of the century, especially in the second half, that our ancestors of the eighteenth century would find themselves in a new world, could they return. But more valuable and important still is the great theoretical expansion of our knowledge of nature, which we owe to the establishment of the law of substance. Once Lavoisier (1789) had established the law of the persistence of matter, and Dalton (1808) had founded his new atomic theory with its assistance, a way was open to modern chemistry along which it has advanced with a rapidity and success beyond all anticipation. The same must be said of physics in respect of the law of the conservation of energy. Its discovery by Robert Mayer (1842) and Hermann Helmholtz (1847) inaugurated for this science also a new epoch of the most fruitful development; for it put physics in a position to grasp the universal unity of the forces of nature and the eternal play of natural processes, in which one force may be converted into another at any moment. IV.--PROGRESS OF BIOLOGY The great discoveries which astronomy and geology have made during the nineteenth century, and which are of extreme importance to our whole system, are, nevertheless, far surpassed by those of biology. Indeed, we may say that the greater part of the many branches which this comprehensive science of organic life has recently produced have seen the light in the course of the present century. As we saw in the first section, during the century all branches of anatomy and physiology, botany and zoology, ontogeny and phylogeny, have been so marvellously enriched by countless discoveries that the present condition of biological science is immeasurably superior to its condition a hundred years ago. That applies first of all _quantitatively_ to the colossal growth of our positive information in all those provinces and their several parts. But it applies with even greater force _qualitatively_ to the deepening of our comprehension of biological phenomena, and our knowledge of their efficient causes. In this Charles Darwin (1859) takes the palm of victory; by his theory of selection he has solved the great problem of "organic creation," of the natural origin of the countless forms of life by gradual transformation. It is true that Lamarck had recognized fifty years earlier that the mode of this transformation lay in the reciprocal action of heredity and adaptation. However, Lamarck was hampered by his lack of the principle of selection, and of that deeper insight into the true nature of organization which was only rendered possible after the founding of the theory of evolution and the cellular theory. When we collated the results of these and other disciplines, and found the key to their harmonious interpretation in the ancestral development of living beings, we succeeded in establishing the monistic biology, the principles of which I have endeavored to lay down securely in my _General Morphology_. V.--PROGRESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY In a certain sense, the true science of man, rational anthropology, takes precedence of every other science. The saying of the ancient sage, "Man, know thyself," and that other famous maxim, "Man is the measure of all things," have been accepted and applied from all time. And yet this science--taking it in its widest sense--has languished longer than all other sciences in the fetters of tradition and superstition. We saw in the first section how slowly and how late the science of the human organism was developed. One of its chief branches--embryology--was not firmly established until 1828 (by Baer), and another, of equal importance--the cellular theory--until 1838 (by Schwann). And it was even later still when the answer was given to the "question of all questions," the great riddle of the origin of man. Although Lamarck had pointed out the only path to a correct solution of it in 1809, and had affirmed the descent of man from the ape, it fell to Darwin to establish the affirmation securely fifty years afterwards, and to Huxley to collect the most important proofs of it in 1863, in his _Place of Man in Nature_. I have myself made the first attempt, in my _Anthropogeny_ (1874), to present in their historical connection the entire series of ancestors through which our race has been slowly evolved from the animal kingdom in the course of many millions of years. CONCLUSION The number of world-riddles has been continually diminishing in the course of the nineteenth century through the aforesaid progress of a true knowledge of nature. Only one comprehensive riddle of the universe now remains--the problem of substance. What is the real character of this mighty world-wonder that the realistic scientist calls Nature or the Universe, the idealist philosopher calls Substance or the Cosmos, the pious believer calls Creator or God? Can we affirm to-day that the marvellous progress of modern cosmology has solved this "problem of substance," or at least that it has brought us nearer to the solution? The answer to this final question naturally varies considerably according to the stand-point of the philosophic inquirer and his empirical acquaintance with the real world. We grant at once that the innermost character of nature is just as little understood by us as it was by Anaximander and Empedocles twenty-four hundred years ago, by Spinoza and Newton two hundred years ago, and by Kant and Goethe one hundred years ago. We must even grant that this essence of substance becomes more mysterious and enigmatic the deeper we penetrate into the knowledge of its attributes, matter and energy, and the more thoroughly we study its countless phenomenal forms and their evolution. We do not know the "thing in itself" that lies behind these knowable phenomena. But why trouble about this enigmatic "thing in itself" when we have no means of investigating it, when we do not even clearly know whether it exists or not? Let us, then, leave the fruitless brooding over this ideal phantom to the "pure metaphysician," and let us instead, as "real physicists," rejoice in the immense progress which has been actually made by our monistic philosophy of nature. Towering above all the achievements and discoveries of the century we have the great, comprehensive "law of substance," the fundamental law of the constancy of matter and force. The fact that substance is everywhere subject to eternal movement and transformation gives it the character also of the universal law of evolution. As this supreme law has been firmly established, and all others are subordinate to it, we arrive at a conviction of the universal unity of nature and the eternal validity of its laws. From the gloomy _problem_ of substance we have evolved the clear _law_ of substance. The monism of the cosmos which we establish thereon proclaims the absolute dominion of "the great eternal iron laws" throughout the universe. It thus shatters, at the same time, the three central dogmas of the dualistic philosophy--the personality of God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will. Many of us certainly view with sharp regret, or even with a profound sorrow, the death of the gods that were so much to our parents and ancestors. We must console ourselves in the words of the poet: "The times are changed, old systems fall, And new life o'er their ruins dawns." The older view of idealistic dualism is breaking up with all its mystic and anthropistic dogmas; but upon the vast field of ruins rises, majestic and brilliant, the new sun of our realistic monism, which reveals to us the wonderful temple of nature in all its beauty. In the sincere cult of "the true, the good, and the beautiful," which is the heart of our new monistic religion, we find ample compensation for the anthropistic ideals of "God, freedom, and immortality" which we have lost. Throughout this discussion of the riddles of the universe I have clearly defined my consistent monistic position and its opposition to the still prevalent dualistic theory. In this I am supported by the agreement of nearly all modern scientists who have the courage to accept a rounded philosophical system. I must not, however, take leave of my readers without pointing out in a conciliatory way that this strenuous opposition may be toned down to a certain degree on clear and logical reflection--may, indeed, even be converted into a friendly harmony. In a thoroughly logical mind, applying the highest principles with equal force in the entire field of the cosmos--in both organic and inorganic nature--the antithetical positions of theism and pantheism, vitalism and mechanism, approach until they touch each other. Unfortunately, consecutive thought is a rare phenomenon in nature. The great majority of philosophers are content to grasp with the right hand the pure knowledge that is built on experience, but they will not part with the mystic faith based on revelation, to which they cling with the left. The best type of this contradictory dualism is the conflict of pure and practical reason in the critical philosophy of the most famous of modern thinkers, Immanuel Kant. On the other hand, the number is always small of the thinkers who will boldly reject dualism and embrace pure monism. That is equally true of consistent idealists and theists, and of logical realists and pantheists. However, the reconciliation of these apparent antitheses, and, consequently, the advance towards the solution of the fundamental riddle of the universe, is brought nearer to us every year in the ever-increasing growth of our knowledge of nature. We may, therefore, express a hope that the approaching twentieth century will complete the task of resolving the antitheses, and, by the construction of a system of pure monism, spread far and wide the long-desired unity of world-conception. Germany's greatest thinker and poet, whose one hundred and fiftieth anniversary will soon be upon us--Wolfgang Goethe--gave this "philosophy of unity" a perfect poetic expression, at the very beginning of the century, in his immortal poems, _Faust_, _Prometheus_, and _God and the World_: "By eternal laws Of iron ruled, Must all fulfil The cycle of Their destiny." FOOTNOTES: [1] There are two English translations, _The Evolution of Man_ (1879) and _The Pedigree of Man_ (1880). [2] The English translation, by Dr. Hans Gadow, bears the title of _The Last Link_. [3] English translation, by J. Gilchrist, with the title of _Monism_. [4] E. Haeckel, _Systematische Phylogenie_, 1895, vol. iii., pp. 646-50. (Anthropolatry means "A divine worship of human nature.") [5] Cf. my Cambridge lecture, _The Last Link_, "Geological Time and Evolution." [6] As to induction and deduction, _vide_ _The Natural History of Creation_. [7] Rudolph Virchow, _Die Gründung der Berliner Universität und der Uebergang aus dem Philosophischen in das naturwissenschaftliche Zeitalter_. (Berlin; 1893.) [8] Cf. chap. iv. of my _General Morphology_, 1866; _Kritik der naturwissenschaftlichen Methoden_. [9] _Systematische Phylogenie_, 1896, part iii., pp. 490, 494, and 496. [10] Translated in the International Science Series, 1872. [11] _Zell-Seelen und Seelen-Zellen._ Ernst Haeckel, _Gesammelte populäre Vorträge. I. Heft._ 1878. [12] Cf. E. Haeckel, _The Systems of Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck_. Lecture given at Eisenach in 1882. [13] _Vide_ the translation of Dr. Hans Gadow: _The Last Link_. (A. & C. Black.) [14] Cf. Max Verworn, _Psychophysiologische Protisten-Studien_, pp. 135, 140. [15] E. Haeckel, "General Natural History of the Radiolaria"; 1887. [16] _Vide Natural History of Creation_, E. Haeckel. [17] Law of individual variation. _Vide_ _Natural History of Creation_. [18] Cf. E. Haeckel, _Systematic Phylogeny_, vol. i. [19] Cf. _Anthropogeny_ and _Natural History of Creation_. [20] Cf. _Natural History of Creation_. [21] See chaps. xvi. and xvii. of my _Anthropogeny_. [22] E. Haeckel, _A Visit to Ceylon_. [23] Cf. _Monism_, by Ernst Haeckel. [24] Cf. _Monism_, by Ernst Haeckel. [25] Cf. _Monism_, by Ernst Haeckel. [26] Reinke, _Die Welt als That_ (1899). [27] Cf. _Monism_, by Ernst Haeckel. [28] _The Last Link_, translated by Dr. Gadow. [29] _General Morphology_, book 2, chap. v. [30] Cf. _General Morphology_, vol. ii., and _The Natural History of Creation._ [31] _Vide_ _A Visit to Ceylon_, E. Haeckel, translated by C. Bell. [32] _Collected Popular Lectures_; Bonn, 1878. [33] As to the Greek paternity of Christ, _vide_ p. 328. [34] Cf. _The Natural History of Creation_, chaps. iii., vi., xv., and xvi. INDEX Abiogenesis, 257, 369. Abortive organs, 264. Accidents, 216. Acrania, 166. Action at a distance, 217. Actualism, 249. Æsthesis, 225. Affinity, 224. Altruism, 350. Amphibia, 167. Amphimixis, 141. Ampitheism, 278. Ananke, 272. Anatomy, 22, etc. comparative, 24. Anaximander, 289, 379. Anthropism, 11. Anthropistic illusion, 14, etc. world-theory, 13. Anthropocentric dogma, 11, etc. Anthropogeny, 83. Anthropolatric dogma, 12. Anthropomorpha, 36. Anthropomorphic dogma, 12. Apes, 36, 37, 167. anthropoid, 37. Archæus, 43. Archigony, 257. Aristotle, 23, 268. Association, centres of, 183. of ideas, 121. of presentations, 121, 122. Astronomy, progress of, 366. Astro-physics, 368. Atavism, 142. Athanatism, 189. Athanatistic illusions, 205. Atheism, 290. Atheistic science, 260. Atom, the, 222. Atomism, 223. Atomistic consciousness, 187. Attributes of ether, 227. of substance, 216. Augustine of Hippo, 130. Auricular confession, 319, 359. Autogony, 257. Baer (Carl Ernst), 57. Bastian (Adolf), 103. Beginning of the world, 240, 247. Bible, the, 282, 362. Biogenesis, 257. Biogenetic law, 81, 143. Bismarck, 334. Blastoderm, 150, 155. Blastosphere, 153. Blastula, 153. Bruno (Giordano), 290, 317. Büchner (Ludwig), 93. Buddhism, 326, 355. Calvin, 130. Canonical gospels, 312. Carbon as creator, 256. theory, 257. Catarrhinæ, 35. Catastrophic theory, 74. Categorical imperative, 350. Causes, efficient, 258. final, 258. Celibacy, 358. Cell-love, 137. community, soul of the, 155. soul, 151. state, 157. Cellular pathology, 50. physiology, 48. psychology, 153, 177. theory, 26. Cenobitic soul, 155. Cenogenesis, 82. of the psyche, 144. Chance, 274. Chemicotropism, 64, 136. Chordula, 64. Chorion, 68. Christ, father of, 327. Christian art, 339. civilization, 356. contempt of the body, 354. animals, 355. nature, 355. self, 353. the family, 357. woman, 358. ethics, 352. Christianity, 347. Church and school, 362. state, 361. Cnidaria, 161. Conception, 64. Concubinage of the clergy, 358. Confession of faith, 302. Consciousness, 170. animal, 176. atomistic, 178. biological, 176. cellular, 177. development of, 185. dualistic, 182. human, 173. monistic, 182. neurological, 174. ontogeny of, 186. pathology of, 182. physiological, 180. transcendental, 180. Constancy of energy, 212, 231. matter, 212. Constantine the Great, 316. Constellations of substance, 218. Conventional lies, 323. Copernicus, 24, 320, 367. Cosmic immortality, 191. Cosmogonies, 234. Cosmological dualism, 257. creationism, 235. law, 211. perspective, 14. Cosmos, the, 229. Creation, 73, 79, 234. cosmological, 235. dualistic, 236. heptameral, 237. individual, 237. myths of, 236. periodic, 237. trialistic, 237. Cultur-kampf, 334. Cuvier, 74. Cyclostomata, 167. Cynopitheci, 46. Cytology, 26, etc. Cytopsyche, 151. Cytula, 64. Darwin (Charles), 78, etc. Decidua, 69. Deduction, 16. Demonism, 276. Descartes, 99, 355. Descent of the ape, 85, etc. of man, 87. theory of, 77. Design, 264, 266. in nature, 260. in organisms, 266. in selection, 261. Destruction of heavenly bodies, 243. Determinists, 130. Diaphragm, 31. Division of labor in matter, 229. Draper, 309, 333. Dualism, 20, etc. Du Bois-Reymond, 15 180, 235. Du Prel (Carl), 305. Duty, feeling of, 350. Dynamodes, 216. Dysteleology, 260. Echinodermata, 62. Ectoderm, 160. sense-cells in the, 293. Egoism, 350. Elements, chemical, 222. system of the, 222. Embryo, human, 64. Embryology, 54. Embryonic psychogeny, 144. sleep, 146. Empedocles, 23, 224. Encyclica (of Pius IX.), 323. End of the world, 247. Energy, kinetic, 231. potential, 231. principle of, 230. specific, 294. Entelecheia, 268. Entoderm, 160. Entropy of the universe, 247. Epigenesis, 56, 133. Ergonomy of matter, 229. Eternity of the world, 242. Ether, 225. Etheric souls, 199. Ethics, fundamental law of, 350. Evolution, theory of, 54, 239, 243. chief element in, 267. Experience, 16. Extra-mundane God, 288. Faith, confession of, 303. of our fathers, 304. Family, the, and Christianity, 357. Fate, 272. Fechner, 97, etc. Fecundation, 63. Fetishism, 276. Feuerbach (Ludwig), 295. Flechsig, 183. Foetal membranes, 66. Folk-psychology, 103. Forces, conversion of, 231. Frederick the Great, 194, 315. Galen, 23, 40. Gaseous souls, 199. vertebrates, 288. Gastræa, 160. theory of the, 60. Gastræads, 159. Gastrula, 61. Gegenbaur, 25, 30. Generation, theory of, 55. Genus, 73. Geology, periods of, 270. progress of, 373. Germinal disk, 57. Gills, 65. God, 275. the father, 277. the son, 277, 328. Goethe, 20, etc. Goethe's monism, 331. Golden Rule, the, 351. Gospels, 312. Gravitation, theory of, 217. Gut-layer, 159. Haller, 42. Harvey, 42. Helmholtz (Hermann), 213, 230. Heredity, psychic, 138. Hertz (Heinrich), 225. Hippocrates, 23. Histology, 26. Histopsyche, 156. Hoff (Carl), 250. Holbach (Paul), 193. Holy Ghost, 277, 326. Humboldt (Alexander), 343. Hydra, 161. Hylozoism, 289. Hypothesis, 299. Iatrochemicists, 45. Iatromechanicists, 45. Ideal of beauty, 338. of truth, 337. of virtue, 339. Ignorabimus, 180. Immaculate conception, 326. Immaterial substance, 221. Immortality of animals, 201. of the human soul, 188. of unicellular organisms, 190. personal, 192. Imperfection of nature, 264. Imponderable matter, 225. Impregnation, 64. Indeterminists, 130. Induction, 16. Indulgences, 359. Infallibility of the pope, 324. Instinct, 105, 123. Intellect, 125, etc. Intramundane God, 288. Introspective psychology, 95. Islam, 284. Janssen (Johannes), 316. Jehovah, 283. Journeys on foot, 364. Kant, 258, etc. Kant's metamorphosis, 92, etc. Kinetic energy, 231. theory of substance, 216. Kölliker, 26, 48. Lamarck, 76, etc. Lamettrie, 194. Landscape-painting, 343. Language, 126. study of, 363. Last judgment, 209. Lavoisier, 212. Leap of the gospels, miraculous, 312. Leydig, 27. Life, definition of, 39. Limits of our knowledge, 182. Love, 357. of animals, 355. of neighbor, 350. of self, 350. Lucretius Carus, 290. Lunarism, 281. Luther, 320. Lyell, 77, 250. Madonna, cult of the, 284, 327. Malphigi, 54. Mammals, 30, etc. Mammary glands, 31. Man, ancestors of, 82. Marsupials, 32, 86. Mass, 222. Materialism, 20. Mayer (Robert), 213, 377. Mechanical causality, 366. explanation, 259. theory of heat, 247. Mechanicism, 259. Mediterranean religions, the, 282. Memory, cellular, 12O. conscious, 121. histionic, 121. unconscious, 121. Mephistopheles, 279. Metabolism, 232. Metamorphoses of the cosmos, 372. of philosophers, 92. Metaphyta, 156. Metasitism, 153. Metazoa, 60, 157. Middle Ages, 315, 358. Mixotheism, 286. Mohammedanism, 284. Mohr (Friedrich), 213. Monera, 257, 369. Monism, 20, and _passim_. of energy, 254. of Spinoza, 331. of the cosmos, 255. Monistic anthropogeny, 252. art, 341. biogeny, 251. churches, 345. cosmology, 368. ethics, 347. geogeny, 248. Monotheism, 279. Monotrema, 32. Moon-worship, 281. Moral order of the universe, 269. Morula, 155. Mosaism, 283. Müller (Johannes), 25, 45, 262. Mythology of the soul, 135. Natural religion, 344. Navel-cord, 69. Neokantians, 349. Neovitalism, 264. Neptunian geology, 375. Neuro-muscular cells, 114. Neuroplasm, 91, 109. Neuropsyche, 162. Nomocracy, 9. Ontogenetic psychology, 103. Ontological creationism, 235. methods, 249. Orbits of the heavenly bodies, 241. Origin of movement, 15, 241. of feeling, 15, 241. Ovary, 63. Palingenesis, 82. of the psyche, 143. Pandera (the father of Christ), 328. Pantheism, 288. Papacy, 314. Papal ethics, 359. Papiomorpha, 37. Paul, 313, 357. epistles of, 312. Paulinism, 313. Pedicle of the allantois, 69. Perpetual motion, 245. Persistence of force, 212, 231. of matter, 212. Phroneta, 293. Phylogeny, 71, 81. of the apes, 51. systematic, 81. Physiology, 39. Phytopsyche, 157. Pithecanthropus, 87. Pithecoid theory, 82, etc. Pithecometra-thesis, 69, 85. Placenta, 32, 68. Placentals, 32, 86. Plasmodoma, 153. Plasmogony, 257. Plasmophaga, 154. Plato, 99, 197. Plato's theory of ideas, 269. Platodaria, 160. Platodes, 160. Platyrrhinæ, 35. Pneuma zoticon, 40. Polytheism, 276. Ponderable matter, 222. Preformation theory, 54. Primaria, 33. Primates, 33, 86. Primitive Christianity, 311. gut, 61, 161. Prodynamis, 216. Progaster, 161. Proplacentals, 85. Prosimiæ, 34. Prostoma, 161. Prothyl, 223. Protoplasm, 90. Protozoa, 60. Provertebræ, 166. Pseudo-Christianity, 321. Psychade theory, 178. Psyche, 88. Psychogeny, 135. phyletic, 149. post-embryonic, 146. Psychology, 88 et seqq. ontogenetic, 104. phylogenetic, 104. Psychomonism, 226. Psychophysics, 97. Psychoplasm, 91, 110. Pupa, sleep of the, 146. Pyknosis, 218. Pyknotic theory of substance, 218. Reason, 17, 125. Reflex action, 112. arches, 114. Reformation, the, 319. Religion a private concern, 361. Remak, 58. Revelation, 306. Reversion, 142. Romance of the Virgin Mary, 327. Romanes, 106. Rudimentary organs, 264. Saints, 284. Scale of emotion, 127. of memory, 120. of movement, 111. of presentation, 118. of reason, 122. of reflex action, 113. of will, 127. Scatulation theory, 55. Schleiden, 26, 47. School, and Church, 361. and State, 362. reform of the, 363. Schwann, 26, 47. Selachii, 166. Selection, theory of, 79. Self-consciousness, 171. Sense-knowledge, 297. organs, 293. Senses, philosophy of the, 295. Sentiment, 17, etc., 331. Siebold, 27. Simiæ, 34. Social duties, 351. instincts, 350. Solar systems, 241, 369. Solarism, 280. Soul, 88 _et seqq._ apparatus of the, 162. blending of the, 141. creation of the, 135. division of the, 135. etheric, 199. gaseous, 199. histionic, 157. history of the, 167. hydra, 161. life of the, 90. liquid, 200. mammal, 167. nerve, 162. origin of the, 135. of the plant, 157. personal, 162. solid, 201. substance of the, 198. transmigration of the, 135. Sources of knowledge, 293. Space and time, 244. infinity of, 242. reality of, 244. Species, 73. Spectral analysis, 241. Spermarium, 63. Spermatozoa, 58. Spinal cord, 165. Spinoza, 21, 215, 290. Spirit world, 221. Spirit-rapping, 305. Spiritism, 304. Spiritualism, 20. Sponge, soul of the, 161. Stem-cell, 63, 138, 151. Stimulated movement, 113, 116. Stimuli, conduction of, 158. Strauss (David), 309, 313. Struggle for life, 270. Substance, 215. law of, 211, etc. structure of, 229. Superstition, 301. Süss (Edward), 250. Syllabus, 323. Synodikon (of Pappus), 312. Table-turning, 305. Teleological explanation, 259. Teleology, 258. Tetrapoda, 29. Thanatism, 189. primary, 192. secondary, 192. Theism, 276. Theocracy, 9. Theory, 299. Thought, organs of, 126, 183, 293. Time and space, 244. reality of, 246. Tissue, theory of, 26. Tissue-forming animals, 157. plants, 156. Transformism, 76. Trimurti, 278. Trinity, dogma of the, 277. monistic, 336. Triplotheism, 277. Tropesis, 225. Tropismata, 128. Tunicata, 165. Turbellaria, 161. Ultramontanism, 310. Understanding, 125. Unity of natural forces, 231. of substance, 214. Universum perpetuum mobile, 245. Uterus, 34. Vaticanism, 314. Vertebrates, 27, _passim_. Verworn (Max), 48, 116. Vesalius, 24. Vibration, theory of, 216. Virchow, 26, 50. Virchow's metamorphosis, 93. Vital force, 42, 262. Vitalism, 43, 262. Vivisection, 41. Vogt (Carl), 93. Vogt (J.E.), 218. Water-color drawing, 364. Weismann, 190. Will, liberty of the, 129. scale of the, 128. Wolff (C.F.), 56. Woman and Christianity, 358. World-consciousness, 171. World-riddles, number of, 15. Wundt (Wilhelm), 100, 171. THE END Transcriber's notes: The following is a list of changes made to the original. The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one. (12) Consequently, the so-called history of the world" (12) Consequently, the so-called "history of the world" structure of the primates forces us to distingiush two structure of the primates forces us to distinguish two of the geneaology of our race; for man bears all the of the genealogy of our race; for man bears all the world of which we have direct and certain cognizanze world of which we have direct and certain cognizance the law of substance by Robert Mayer and Helmholz the law of substance by Robert Mayer and Helmholtz The more impotant of these works we owe to Romanes The more important of these works we owe to Romanes Formerly assistant and pupil of Helmholz, Wundt had early Formerly assistant and pupil of Helmholtz, Wundt had early all other viviporous animals, precisely because the complete all other viviparous animals, precisely because the complete recent students of the protists, afford conlcusive evidence recent students of the protists, afford conclusive evidence a thinker is very striking; in explaning it, it is not a thinker is very striking; in explaining it, it is not "have no individuals and no generations in the matazoic sense." "have no individuals and no generations in the metazoic sense." in his _Species and Studies_ in his eighty-fouth year in his _Species and Studies_ in his eighty-fourth year Chief Forms of Theism--Polytheism--Tritheism--Ampitheism Chief Forms of Theism--Polytheism--Triplotheism--Amphitheism faith, and that all these insiduous institutions are faith, and that all these insidious institutions are nor in the narnow prisons of our jail-like schools, nor in the narrow prisons of our jail-like schools, And it was done in many, and sometimes very romatic, ways. And it was done in many, and sometimes very romantic, ways. 
34019	----	[Transcriber's note] This is derived from a copy on the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/popesscienceOOwals Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book. Obvious spelling errors have been corrected but "inventive" and inconsistent spelling is left unchanged. Unusual use of quotation marks is also unchanged. Extended quotations and citations are indented. Two sections in the Table of Contents and several entries in the Index have been placed in the correct order. Footnotes have been renumbered to avoid ambiguity, and relocated to the end of the enclosing paragraph. [End Transcriber's note] SOME OPINIONS THE POPES AND SCIENCE--The story of the Papal Relations to Science from the Middle Ages down to the Nineteenth Century. By James J. Walsh, M. D., Ph. D., LL. D. 540 pp. Price, $2.00 net. Prof. Pagel, Professor of History at the University of Berlin: "This book represents the most serious contribution to the history of medicine that has ever come out of America." Sir Clifford Allbutt, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge (England): "The book as a whole is a fair as well as a scholarly argument." _The Evening Post_ (New York) says: "However strong the reader's prejudice * * * * he cannot lay down Prof. Walsh's volume without at least conceding that the author has driven his pen hard and deep into the 'academic superstition' about Papal Opposition to science." In a previous issue it had said: "We venture to prophesy that all who swear by Dr. Andrew D. White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom will find their hands full, if they attempt to answer Dr. James J. Walsh's The Popes and Science." _The Literary Digest_ said: "The book is well worth reading for its extensive learning and the vigor of its style." _The Southern Messenger_ says: "Books like this make it clear that it is ignorance alone that makes people, even supposedly educated people, still cling to the old calumnies." _The Nation_ (New York) says: "The learned Fordham Physician has at command an enormous mass of facts, and he orders them with logic, force and literary ease. Prof. Walsh convicts his opponents of hasty generalizing if not anti-clerical zeal." _The Pittsburg Post_ says: "With the fair attitude of mind and influenced only by the student's desire to procure knowledge, this book becomes at once something to fascinate. On every page authoritative facts confute the stereotyped statement of the purely theological publications." Prof. Welch, of Johns Hopkins, quoting Martial, said: "It is pleasant indeed to drink at the living fountain-heads of knowledge after previously having had only the stagnant pools of second-hand authority." Prof. Piersol, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, said: "I have been reading the book with the keenest interest, for it indeed presents many subjects in what to me at least is a new light. Every man of science looks to the beacon--truth--as his guiding mark, and every opportunity to replace even time-honored misconceptions by what is really the truth must be welcomed." _The Independent_ (New York) said: "Dr. Walsh's books should be read in connection with attacks upon the Popes in the matter of science by those who want to get both sides." BY THE SAME AUTHOR FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS SERIES MAKERS OF MODERN MEDICINE Lives of the men to whom nineteenth century medical science owes most. Second Edition. New York, 1910. $2.00 net. THE POPES AND SCIENCE The story of Papal patronage of the sciences and especially medicine. 45th thousand. New York, 1911. $2.00 net. MAKERS OF ELECTRICITY Lives of the men to whom important advances in electricity are due. In collaboration with Brother Potamian, F. S. C, Sc.D. (London), Professor of Physics at Manhattan College. New York, 1909. $2.00 net. EDUCATION, HOW OLD THE NEW Addresses in the history of education on various occasions. 3rd thousand. New York, 1911. $2.00 net. OLD-TIME MAKERS OF MEDICINE The story of the students and teachers of the sciences related to medicine during the Middle Ages. New York, 1911. $2.00 net. MODERN PROGRESS AND HISTORY Academic addresses on How Old the New. New York, 1912. $2.00 net. THE THIRTEENTH GREATEST OF CENTURIES 5th edition (50,000). 116 illustrations, 600 pages. Catholic Summer School Press, 1912. Postpaid $3.50. THE CENTURY OF COLUMBUS Why Columbus Discovered America in 1492. Catholic Summer School Press, 1914. Postpaid $3.50. THE DOLPHIN PRESS SERIES CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE First and second series, each $1.00 net. PSYCHOTHERAPY Lectures on The Influence of the Mind on the Body delivered at Fordham University School of Medicine. Appletons, New York, 1912. $6.00 net. [Illustration: Portrait] GUY DE CHAULIAC "The Prince of surgeons" (John Freund). "The Modern Hippocrates" (Fallopius). "His work is of infinite price" (Portal). "A masterpiece of learned and luminous writing" (Malgaigne). "It is rich, aphoristic, orderly, and precise" (Clifford Allbutt). "Chauliac laid the foundation of that primacy in surgery which the French maintained down to the nineteenth century" (Pagel). Chauliac is a good type of a medieval papal physician. Two of his well-known expressions were: "Sciences are made by addition and it is not possible that the same man should begin and finish them." "We are like infants at the neck of a giant, for we can see all that the giant sees and something more." [End Illustration] The Popes and Science THE HISTORY OF THE PAPAL RELATIONS TO SCIENCE DURING THE MIDDLE AGES AND DOWN TO OUR OWN TIME BY JAMES J. WALSH K.C. St.G., M.D., Ph.D., LL.D. Litt.D. (Georgetown), Sc. D. (Notre Dame) PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY AT THE CATHEDRAL COLLEGE, NEW YORK; MEMBER OF THE GERMAN, FRENCH AND ITALIAN SOCIETIES OF THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE, THE ST. LOUIS HISTORY CLUB, NEW ORLEANS PARISH MEDICAL SOCIETY, NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE, NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY, A.M.A., A.A.A.S., ETC. NOTRE DAME EDITION _ILLUSTRATED_ FIFTIETH THOUSAND NEW YORK FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS 1915 Copyright, 1908 James J. Walsh First edition, 2,000 copies. Second edition, 45,000 copies, 1910. Third (English) edition, 2,000 copies, 1912. Fourth (Notre Dame) edition, 1915, enlarged and illustrated. To Professor ETTORE MARCHIAFAVA _Papal Physician_ The worthy living representative of the great series of Papal Physicians, the most distinguished list of names connected by any bond in the history of science. "Great additions have of late been made to our knowledge of the past; the long conspiracy against the revelation of truth has gradually given way, and competing historians all over the civilized world have been zealous to take advantage of the change. The printing of archives has kept pace with the admission of enquirers; and the total mass of new matter, which the last half-century has accumulated, amounts to many thousands of volumes. In view of changes and of gains such as these, it has become impossible for the historical writer of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities. The honest student finds himself continually deserted, retarded, misled by the classics of historical literature, and has to hew his own way through multitudinous transactions, periodicals and official publications in order to reach the truth. "Ultimate history cannot be obtained in this generation; but, so far as documentary evidence is at command, conventional history can be discarded, and the point can be shown that has been reached on the road from one to the other." (Preface of _Cambridge Modern History_.) {iii} PREFACE _A new edition of this volume being called for, I take the occasion to place it under the aegis of the University of Notre Dame as a slight token of gratitude for the formal recognition of the work by the faculty of that institution, and bind this Notre Dame edition in the University colors, blue and gold._ There is much more readiness at the present time to accept the conclusions with regard to the relations of the Popes and science here suggested than there was when the book was first published. Knowledge of the general history of science has grown very materially in the last ten years. Every increase in historical knowledge has shown more and more clearly how utterly without foundation were many ideas which had been very commonly accepted, particularly in English-speaking countries, on the subjects here discussed. The supposed opposition to the development of science on the part of the Popes and the Church is now readily seen to have had no existence in reality, and popular notions on the subject were due entirely to ignorance of the history of science. There was supposed to be no scientific development and no nature study until quite recent times. The generations immediately preceding ours knew of none, and therefore concluded there must have been none. They went even farther, and felt that since there had been none, there must be some special reason for this lacuna in human progress. The Church and the Popes were the favorite scapegoats for human failings, so they were blamed. Now we know that there was a magnificent development of science, not only in the Renaissance period under the fostering care of the Popes and ecclesiastics, but also during the old university times. What has come above all to be recognized is that the medieval universities were _scientific universities_. They paid more attention to the ethical and philosophical sciences than we do, but they devoted a great deal of time to mathematics and the physical sciences. Mr. Huxley, in his inaugural address as Rector of the University of Aberdeen, declared thirty years ago that the curriculum of these old universities was better calculated to develop the many-sided mind of man than the curriculum of any modern university. Above all, in surgery and in medicine they did magnificent work. Anaesthesia, antisepsis, and the natural methods of cure were all anticipated in the medieval time. At the International Congress of Medicine last summer, a section on the history of medicine was organized because it has come to be recognized that very much that is even of practical value can be learned from medical history. The fact of the matter is that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was a great decadence of interest in scholarship and true education. There is a distinct descent in human culture at this time. Education was at its lowest ebb, hospitals {iv} were the worst ever built, art and architecture were neglected, and human liberty was so shackled that the French Revolution was needed to lift the fetters from men's minds as well as bodies. They, in their ignorance, spoke slightingly of old-time scholars. During the past century we have come to a better knowledge of the Middle Ages, and he is indeed a backward student of history who now thinks of them as "dark." Our millionaires have gathered, at immense expense, magnificent examples of the arts and crafts and beautiful books of the medieval and Renaissance periods. Our binders imitate their books, our artists study their works, we have revived their architecture and literature, are imitating their social ideas until, instead of "the dark ages," we have come to think of them as "the bright ages." What is not generally realized is that they are just as bright in science as they were in art, architecture, literature, and the arts and crafts. Literally, the Popes were as much the patrons of science as they were of the arts. Professor White's book, "The Warfare of Science with Theology," like Professor Draper's "History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science," are now seen to represent simply an interesting evidence of the lack of real knowledge of the history of science and, above all, complete ignorance of details as to the genuine accomplishment of the olden time on the part of the generation by which they were taken seriously. Being quite sure that there was no science to speak of in the older times, these writers gathered every possible reference, found anywhere in secondary authorities, for they almost never went to the original documents, as evidence for their preconceived conviction that the Church must have suppressed science whenever that was possible. The real history of science was ignored. As soon as that is known there is no further question of Church opposition, but, on the contrary, of the extent of ecclesiastical patronage and encouragement of science. Some of this very different story is told only too incompletely in this volume. It would take many volumes to give all the details of it. Readers will find here at least such references to the actual documentary history as will form a good basis for definite knowledge of the genuine relations of the Popes to science. The series of new appendices in this edition, especially those on Papal Physicians, Science in America, and the original Papal documents so often quoted, but seldom seen entire, is meant to supply material for the correction of many false notions that are unfortunately prevalent. They present historical matter that has not been readily available hitherto in English-speaking countries and that has nowhere been easy of access in the form here given. Appendix VII by Rev. Father Leahy on _The Fathers of The Church and Science_ presents a controverted point of history to persuasion. Appendix IX shows how amusing and amazing was Professor Draper's lack of knowledge of the history of science and above all of medicine and surgery when he wrote his "histories" that were so widely read and accepted because we in America knew no better for the moment. {v} PREFACE For years, as a student and physician, I listened to remarks from teachers and professional friends as to the opposition of the Popes to science, until finally, much against my will, I came to believe that there had been many Papal documents issued, which intentionally or otherwise hampered the progress of science. Interest in the history of medicine led me to investigate the subject for myself. To my surprise, I found that the supposed Papal opposition to science was practically all founded on an exaggeration of the significance of the Galileo incident. As a matter of history, the Popes were as liberal patrons of science as of art. In the Renaissance period, when their patronage of Raphael and Michel Angelo and other great artists did so much for art, similar relations to Columbus, Eustachius, and Caesalpinus, and later to Steno and Malpighi, our greatest medical discoverers, had like results for science. The Papal Medical School was for centuries the greatest medical school in Europe, and its professors were the most distinguished medical scientists of the time. This is a perfectly simple bit of history that anyone may find for himself in any reliable history of medicine. The medical schools were the scientific departments of the universities practically down to the nineteenth century. In them were studied botany, zoology and the biological sciences generally, chemistry, physics, mineralogy and even astronomy, because of the belief that the stars influenced human constitutions. The Popes in fostering medical schools (there were four of them in the Papal dominions, and two of them, Bologna and Rome, were the greatest medical schools for several centuries) were acting as wise and beneficent patrons of science. Many of the greatest scientists of the Middle Ages were clergymen. Some of the greatest of them were canonized as saints. Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas are typical examples. At least one Pope had been a distinguished scientist before being elected to the Papacy. For seven centuries the Popes selected as their physicians the greatest medical scientists of the {vi} time, and the list of Papal physicians is the worthiest series of names connected by any bond in the history of medicine, far surpassing in scientific import even the roll of the faculty of any medical school. In a word, I failed to find any trace of Papal opposition to true science in any form. On the contrary, I found abundant evidence of their having been just as liberal and judicious patrons of science as they were of art and education in all forms. I found also that those who write most emphatically about Papal opposition to science, know nothing at all of the history of science, and above all of medicine and of surgery, during three very precious centuries. Because they know nothing about it they think there was none, and go out of their way to find a reason for its absence, while all the time there is a wondrous series of chapters of science for those who care to look for them. This is the story that I have tried to tell in this book. This material is, I think, gathered into compact form for the first time. No one knows better than I do how many defects are probably in the volume. What I have tried to do is to present a large subject in a popular way, and at the same time with such references to readily available authorities as would make the collection of further information comparatively easy. I am sorry that the book has had to take on a controversial tone. No one feels more than I do that controversy seldom advances truth. There are certain false notions, however, which have the prestige of prominent names behind them, which simply must be flatly contradicted. I did not seek the controversy, for when I began to publish the original documents in the subject I mentioned no names. Controversy was forced on me, but not until I had made it a point to meet and spend many pleasant hours with the writer whose statements I must impugn, because they so flagrantly contradict the simple facts of medical history. {vii} CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. 1 May Catholics dissect? Supposed prohibition of dissection. Twenty medical schools in Catholic Europe. Medieval universities and medical education. Allbutt on medicine down to the sixteenth century. William of Salicet and Lanfranc, the great medieval surgeons. The nearer to Rome the better the medical school. The state of medical teaching and discovery. The relation of the Popes to medical progress. Supposed Papal prohibitions. Ignorance of medieval medicine the reason for misrepresentation. The Popes did not hamper medicine nor any other science. Galileo's case an incident, not the index of a policy. The Papal Medical School the greatest in the world. The Papal Physicians leaders in science. The Church did for science as much as for art and literature. History a conspiracy against the truth. (Cambridge Modern History.) THE SUPPOSED PAPAL PROHIBITION OF DISSECTION. 28 A new Catholic medical school and dissection. Supposed Papal prohibitions of anatomy and of chemistry. The bull of Pope Boniface VIII., De Sepulturis. Reason for the ball. Supposed misinterpretation. Misuse of word infallibility. Some history of dissection. Date of bull important in history. Mondino's work. Body-snatching. Dissections elsewhere. How Mondino prepared his bodies for dissection. Guy de Chauliac at Bologna sees many dissections. Mondino's assistants, Otto and Alessandra. Papal permissions to dissect. The Church granting anatomical privileges where civil authorities refused. How the tradition of this Papal prohibition originated. M. Daunou as an authority. Reply of Pope Benedict XIV. as to bull. This subject a type of certain kinds of history THE STORY OF ANATOMY DOWN TO THE RENAISSANCE. 61 Presumed failure of anatomy during the Middle Ages a myth. Famous Law of Frederick II. Dissections at Salerno. Taddeo and anatomy. Salicet and Lanfranc. A famous medico-legal autopsy. {viii} Mondino in the history of anatomy. Roth's story of dissection. Guy de Chauliac's experience at Bologna. The story of dissection during the fourteenth century without a break. Continued in next century. The work of Berengar of Carpi, Achillini, Matthew of Gradi. Pathological anatomy born with Benivieni. Pres. White's attitude to the evidence for dissection at this time. THE GOLDEN AGE OF ANATOMY.--VESALIUS. 90 The golden age of anatomy as of letters and art in Italy. Not origin, but wonderful development. Great predecessors of Raphael and Michel Angelo, as of Vesalius and Columbus. Legitimate culmination of anatomical development. The pre-Vesalians, Mondino, Bertrucci, Chauliac, Achillini, Berengar and Benivieni. The English students, Linacre, Caius, Phreas. Italy the Mecca of anatomical investigators. Harvey and Steno. Graduate work in Italy then as in Germany now. Vesalius's career. The University of Louvain. Vesalius in Paris, in Italy. The Father of Modern Anatomy. Royal Physician to Charles V. Some historical misconstructions. What the Popes did for anatomy in the sixteenth century. THE SUPPOSED PAPAL PROHIBITION OF CHEMISTRY. 120 False impression prevalent just as in anatomy. Striking similarity of history-lie. American writers. The Papal decree. Its purpose. The gold-brick industry. Fines to be distributed to the poor. Pope John's bull, _Super Illius specula._ Appeal to historians of chemistry. Chemistry in later Middle Ages. Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Raymond Lully, Arnold of Villanova, the two Hollanduses, Basil Valentine, Paracelsus and his ecclesiastical teachers. Pope John XXII. a patron of science and of education A PAPAL PATRON OF EDUCATION AND OF SCIENCE. 138 Pope John XXII. distinguished for his administrative abilities, his learning and his abstemiousness. Avarice and the Papal revenues. Educational foundations from Papal revenues. Modern educators and this old-time patron of education. All great Popes subject of slander. The personality of Pope John XXII. Pres. White's astonishing declarations as to the bull _Super Illius specula._ Pope John XXII. "a kindly and rational scholar." His bull for the University {ix} of Perugia. Perugia and the history of culture. Standards in education. Seven years for the doctorate in medicine. Foundation of the University of Cahors. Modern requirements. Why the Pope favored education THE CHURCH AND SURGERY DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. 167 Mistaken notions as to medieval surgery. Supposed Church discouragement of surgery. Misinterpreted ecclesiastical documents once more. Gurlt on surgery during the Middle Ages. Wonderful developments of surgery, when ignorantly said not to exist. Allbutt and Pagel on the great surgeons of the Middle Ages. Salicet. Lanfranc. Surprising anticipations of modern surgery. Mondeville. Surgical common sense. Yperman. Illustrations of surgical instruments. Hydrophobia. Chauliac the Father of Modern Surgery. Place in surgery. Chamberlain of the Pope. Technics of surgery. Chauliac's career. Ardern, the English surgeon. His works. False impressions with regard to surgical history. Professional jealousy not ecclesiastical persecution. The college of St. Côme and its lessons. False traditions as to the Church and surgery and their meaning PAPAL PHYSICIANS. 199 Belief in miracles and progress in medicine. Prayer and healing. The men the Popes chose as their medical advisers. Names greater than those of the medical faculty of any university. Guy of Montpelier, Richard the Englishman, Pope John XXI., Simon Januensis and the first medical dictionary. Arnold of Villanova. Guy de Chauliac. Cecco di Ascolo. Joannes de Tornamira. Francis of Siena. Baverius of Imola. John de Vigo. Columbus. Eustachius. Varolius. Piccolomini. Caesalpinus. Malpighi. Tozzi. Lancisi. Morgagni. Contributions to the biological sciences from Papal Physicians. THE POPES AND MEDICAL EDUCATION AND THE PAPAL MEDICAL SCHOOL. 222 Papal Medical School at Rome since 1300. Supported by revenues from Popes at Avignon. Previous Papal relations to medicine. Monte Cassino and Salerno. Pope Sylvester II. and medicine. Medical schools and the ecclesiastical authorities. A great physician made Pope. The Renaissance and the re-established Papal Medical School. Columbus original discoverer and practical teacher. Attendance at his lessons. His book dedicated to Pope. Other medical dedications to Popes. Eustachius's work. Piccolomini as a great teacher. Caesalpinus the probable discoverer of the circulation of the blood. Father Kircher's work at Rome. Malpighi the Father of Comparative Anatomy. Tozzi the best teacher of his time. Lancisi as a founder in clinical medicine. On Sudden Death. Morgagni's place as an adviser. Bologna in the Papal dominions. Medical schools at Ferrara and Perugia. Protestant traditions with regard to the Popes and medicine. {x} THE FOUNDATION OF CITY HOSPITALS. 248 Pope Innocent III., the Father of City Hospitals. Santo Spirito at Rome. Virchow on the effect of this in Germany. French hospitals and the Hotel Dieu. English hospitals. The five royal hospitals. Virchow's tribute to Pope Innocent III. Hospital regulation. Care for the poor. Longings of patients. Religious nurses and modern nursing. Virchow's opinion. Contemporaries on hospital accomplishment. Magnificent hospital building. Models for all future time. A modern architects's opinion. Hospital decoration. Siena Hospital. Hospital abuses. Problem of malingerers. Leper hospitals. The eradication of leprosy. Lesson for our generation as to tuberculosis. Special hospitals for erysipelas. Benefit of segregation. The religious dress and its anticipation of aseptic needs. Hospitals ruined when taken from the Church and the religious. THE CHURCH AND THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD. 281 The doubting mood so important for science supposed to preclude faith. Most great scientists Catholics. Francis Bacon, the supposed Father of Inductive Science. Only the popularizer of the experimental method. Bacon and Copernicus. Gilbert of Colchester before Bacon. Friar Bacon on the experimental method. Peregrinus and the value of experiments. Bacon's four grounds of human ignorance. Bacon's great teacher, Albertus Magnus, and the experimental method. Christian tradition as to scientific inquiry as begun by Augustine. Albert's place in the history of inductive science. Interest of the Middle Ages in physical science. {xi} CHURCHMEN AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES. 302 The Popes and the medieval universities. What the scholastic philosophers did for science. Scientific teaching at the early universities. "Foundations of knowledge for Galileo, Harvey, Newton and Darwin." (Allbutt.) Magnetics. Philosopher's stone and the transmutation of metals. Constitution of matter. Matter and form. Indestructibility of matter. Conservation of energy. Albertus Magnus on the antipodes. Humboldt's appreciation of Albert. Albert's scientific accomplishments. Astronomy, botany, geography and biological sciences. Roger Bacon and explosives; achievements in optics and astronomy. Aquinas and chemistry. The relations of these men to the Popes. Bacon's difficulties. Medieval accomplishments in applied science. Scientific applications in medieval cities (Kropotkin). Decadence in science after Middle Ages. The place of the reformation so-called. The first encyclopedia. Vincent of Beauvais and interest in his work. Thomas of Cantimprato and Bartholomaeus Anglicus. Craving for information in natural science. THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY MAN AND SCIENCE. 340 Dante a type of the medieval university student. His knowledge a proof of how he was taught. Dante as a student of nature. Ruskin's opinion. Trobridge's suggestions. Dante's early education. Azarias and Kropotkin on the public schools of Florence and Nuremberg. Kuhns on Dante's science. Optics. Astronomy. Humboldt's praise of Dante's scientific knowledge. Dante the observer, phosphorescence, flies, bees and ants. Dante knew more science than any modern poet. His contribution to the science of education. THE CHURCH AND THE MENTALLY AFFLICTED. 363 Disease and supernatural agency. Denial of disease. Scientists and spiritualism. Reaction in recent years. Anticipations in psychiatry. Supposed evolution of treatment of the mentally diseased. Medieval care of the insane. Psychopathic wards in hospitals. The open door treatment. After-care of the insane. The colony system. Religious suggestion and cure--ancient and modern. Prayer and mental disease. Care of the insane at Gheel. Neglect {xii} of insane not exclusively medieval. Milder measures quite modern. Spiritual agencies in life. Alfred Russell Wallace, Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, Prof. Charles Richet, Lombroso. APPENDIX I. OPPOSITION TO SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 390 The Popes as patrons of scientific education. Swift on genius and assinine opposition. Allston on truth in unusual form. "Nonsense" and "absurd" on scientists' tongues. Jordan on human conservatism. Galileo's letter to Kepler, on "logic" and science. Huxley on Galileo. De Morgan on other cases. Dogmatism and folly. Persecution of scientists. Harvey, Vesalius, Servetus, Steno. Not confined to old times, Jenner, Auenbrugger, Laennec, Thomas Young, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Semmelweiss. Opposition in other sciences. Ohm. Young men and discoveries. Pasteur and rabies. Our universities and economics. Conservatism still active. The lesson. APPENDIX II. LATIN TEXT OF PAPAL BULLS AND DECREES. 413 _De Sepulturis._ _De Crimine Falsi._ _Super Illius specula._ Bulls for erection of Universities of Perugia and Cahors. APPENDIX III. 419 Emperor Frederick's Law Regulating the Practice of Medicine (1231) APPENDIX IV. CHURCH DECREES RELATING TO MEDICINE. 424 Prohibition of the study and practice of medicine and law to members of religious orders. Text of the decrees. Significance of the prohibition. Not all priests, but only members of religious orders involved. Church decrees as to the physician's duty in securing the last rites of the Church for his patients when in danger of death. Text of the decrees. Misunderstanding. APPENDIX V. PAPAL PHYSICIANS. 431 The principal Papal Physicians, their careers, and their chief works. Ursus, Guy of Montpellier, Ricardus Anglicus, Taddeo {xiii} Florentinus, Simon Januensis, William of Brescia, Arnold of Villanova, Petrus Aichspadius, Gentilis Gentilis, Dino del Garbo, Guy de Chauliac, Jean de Tornemire, Francis Casinus, John Baptist Verallus, Ludovicus Scarampus, Bernard Garzonius, Laurentius Roverella, Joannes Serninus, Simon Tebaldi, Jacobus Gottifredus, Joannes Burgius, Sanctes Floccus, Sebastianus Veteranus, Onofrio de Onofriis, John Philip de Lignamine, Benedict of Nursia, Petrus Leonius, Alexander de Espinosa, Gaspar Torella, Petrus Pintor, Horatio and Scipio Lancillotti, Joannes Bodier, Samuel Sarfati, Antonius Petrutius, Dioscorides da Velletri, Bartholomeo of Pisa, Bernardinus Speronius, Jerome Sessa, Clementius Clementinus, Bartholomeo Montagnana, Giovanni Antracino, John de Vigo, Francesco Fusconi, Andreas Cibbo, Andrea Turini, Ludovico Augeni, Paulus Jovius, Matteo Corti (Curtius), Antonio Musa Brasavola, Silvius Zeffiri, Jacobus Bonacossus, Joannes Manovelli, Thomas Cadimustus, Tiberius Palella, Alfonso Ferri, Franciscus Frigimelica, Maggi, John Baptist Cananus, Augustino Ricchi, Altamare, Bianchi, Simon Pasqua, Pompeius Barba, Franciscus Gymnasius, Jerome Cardan, Mercurialis, Placidus Fuscus, Andreas Baccius, Demetrius Canevarius, Malpighi, Jerome Provenzalis, Jerome Rubeus, Jerome Cordella, Zecchius, Caesalpinus, Michael Mercatus, Nicholas Masinus, Jacobus Bonaventura, Julius de Angelis, Pompeius Caimus, Vincentius Crucius, Giovanni and Bernardino Castellani, Julius Mancinus, Sylvester and Thaddeus Collicola, Baldus Baldi, Paul Zacchias, Gabriel Fonseca, Matthias Naldius, Borelli, Lancisi, Salvatorius, Romulus Spezioli, Lucas Tozzi, Morgagni, Cotugno, Giambattista Bomba, Antonio Baccelli, Flajani, Paolo Baroni, Pier Luigi Valentini, Giuseppe Constantini, Castracane, Lapponi, Marchiafava. APPENDIX VI. ASTRONOMY AND THE CHURCH; SOME ROMAN ASTRONOMERS. 469 No formal list of Papal astronomers available. The roll of names in astronomy connected in some way with the Popes almost as distinguished as that of Papal Physicians: Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Nicholas of Cusa, Regiomontanus, Toscanelli, Archbishop Antoninus, Clavius, the Roman College, Scheiner, Ricci, Athanasius Kircher, Thomas Leseur, Franz Jacquier, Boscovitch, Le Maire, Gilii, Beccaria, Piazzi, Secchi, De Vico, Sestini, Denza, Lais, Rodriguez, Hagan. {xiv} APPENDIX VII. THE FATHERS OF THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 484 Supposed opposition of the Fathers of the Church to science. Father Leahy on the true relations. Defence of the Fathers. Supposed opposition to science. No opposition to true science. Position as regards astrology. What the Fathers did for science. APPENDIX VIII. SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 492 Spanish Catholic America far outdistanced English Protestant America in the cultivation of science before our time. Professor Bourne, on science at the Spanish-American Universities, "Spanish-American science of the sixteenth century only reached in English America in the nineteenth." Dr. Chanca's letter. Priority in medical education. Bourne on Spanish-American anticipations. Reasons for decadence. APPENDIX IX. THE DANGER OF A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE. 500 Professor Draper's "History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science." The tradition of Church opposition to science founded on ignorance of the Middle Ages. The "Bright," not the "Dark" Ages. Draper's career. "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe." Acceptance of his writings as authoritative. Lack of scholarship. Medieval achievements. "Lazy monks." Wonderful work of the monks. Monasteries as agricultural colleges. The Arabs in science. Medieval prophylaxis. Magnificent hospitals. Halley's comet. The Popes of the beginning of the Renaissance: Nicholas V, Calixtus III, Pius II (AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini). Draper's summaries of history, caricatures. Contrast between Spanish and English America. Professor Bourne. Sir Sidney Lee. Professor Draper's philosophy of history. The Church and social conditions. Draper's surprising ignorance of the history of medicine. Objections to the Church in her relations to science always founded on lack of knowledge. {xv} LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Guy de Chauliac _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE Guy de Chauliac's cauteries 182 Guy de Chauliac's cauteries 183 Guy de Chauliac's instruments 186 Guy de Chauliac's instruments 187 Hospital at Lübeck 252 Hospital at Tonnerre 268 Hospital, Mexico 272 Ferri's instruments _Page_ 447 Maggi's instruments _Page_ 448 Maggi's instruments _Page_ 449 Maggi's instruments _Page_ 450 Hospital, Mexico _Opp. Page_ 495 {1} INTRODUCTION. When, some years ago, the announcement of the prospective opening of the medical school at Fordham University, New York City, was made, the preliminary faculty were rather astonished to find that a number of intelligent physicians expressed surprise that there should be any question of the establishment of a medical school in connection with a Catholic institution of learning, since, as they understood, the Church forbade the practice of dissection, and in general was distinctly unfavorable to the development of medical science. Most of us had already known of the false persuasion existing in some minds, that by a Papal decree the practice of dissection had been forbidden during the Middle Ages, but it was hard to understand how men should think, in this day of general information, that Catholics were not free to pursue the study of any true science, and above all medical science, without let or hindrance from ecclesiastical authorities. In a word, though we live in what we are pleased to call an enlightened age with the schoolmaster abroad in the land, as is so proudly proclaimed, we encountered the most childish simplicity of belief in a number of old-time prejudices as to the position of the Church with regard to the study of science. We found such a curious state of positive ignorance and such an erroneous, pretentious knowledge with regard to the supposed attitude of the Church to medicine especially, that we realized that the first thing that the {2} new medical department would have to do would be to set about correcting authoritatively the false notions which existed with regard to the Popes and medical science. Most of the misinformation in this matter in American minds, we soon found, had its origin in Dr. Andrew D. White's volumes, "On the History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom." It is impossible for anyone to read Dr. White's chapter on from Miracles to Medicine in this work without coming to the conclusion that the constant policy of the Church for all the centuries down practically to our own time was to prevent the progress of medicine as far as possible. The reason for this policy, presumably, must be taken to be that it was to the interest of the ecclesiastics to have people apply to them for healing. Sufferers were to look to miracles rather than to drugs for their relief from ailments of any and every kind. Prayers were to be considered as much more efficacious than powders, and Masses much more likely to do good than the most careful nursing. These ecclesiastical offices had to be paid for. Accordingly, people had to be discouraged from applying to physicians, medical schools were kept under an ecclesiastical ban, "dissection was prohibited," anatomy declared "a sin against the Holy Ghost," "chemistry forbidden under the severest penalties," "the medieval miracles of healing checked medical science," "the practice of surgery was relegated mainly to the lowest orders of practitioners and confined strictly to them," "as the grasp of theology upon education tightened, medicine declined," and every possible means was employed to keep the popular mind in subjection to the clergy, and to prevent physicians from getting so much knowledge as would enable them {3} to help free the people from the bondage of superstition, of which they were the victims and the slaves. We do not think that we exaggerate the impression likely to be obtained from Dr. White's book in stating the ordinarily accepted opinions thus baldly, and as a matter of fact, as the quotation marks are intended to show, most of the strongest phrases that we have used are Dr. White's own. For those who can take such statements in good faith, it must be a very genuine surprise to learn a few facts from the history of medicine in the Middle Ages. Before the beginning of the sixteenth century, that is, before the religious revolt in Germany, which has been dignified by the name of reformation, altogether some twenty medical schools were founded in various parts of Europe. Of these, the best known in the order of their foundation were Salerno, Bologna, Naples, Montpelier, Paris, Padua and Pisa. Excellent schools, however, were established also at Oxford, Rome, Salamanca, Orleans and Coimbra. Even early in the fourteenth century such unimportant towns as Perugia, Cahors and Lerida had medical schools. These schools were usually established in connection with the universities. It was realized that this would make the teaching of medicine more serious and keep the practical side of medicine from obscuring too much the scientific and cultural aspects of the medical training. In modern times in America we made the mistake of having our medical schools independent of universities, but with the advance in education and culture we have come to imitate the custom of the thirteenth and the fourteenth century in this regard. The universities, as is well known, were the outgrowth of cathedral schools. Practically all those in authority {4} in them, by far the greater number of teachers and most of the pupils, were of the clerical order, that is, had assumed some ecclesiastical obligations and were considered to be churchmen. At these universities, if we can trust the example of England as applicable to the Continent also, there were, according to trustworthy, conservative statistics, more students in attendance in proportion to the population than there has been at any period since, or than there are even at the present time in the twentieth century in any country of the civilized world. From this we can readily appreciate the enthusiastic ardor of those seeking education. Of these large numbers, the medical schools had their due proportion. [Footnote 1] [Footnote 1: This subject of the attendance at the universities of the Middle Ages is discussed, and authorities quoted, in my book "The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries," published by the Catholic Summer School Press, N. Y.] Of course it will be said at once that though there were medical schools and medical professors and students, what was taught and studied at this time was so far distant from anything like practical knowledge of medicine, that it does not tell against the argument that medical education was practically non-existent. Some people will perhaps harbor the thought, if they do not frankly express it, that very probably these schools were organized under ecclesiastical authority, only in order to enable the Church and the clergy to maintain their control of medical education and keep the people from knowledge that might prove dangerous to Church authority. They were thus able to satisfy some of men's cravings for information in these matters, and yet prevent them from making such advances as would endanger the Church's policy of having them apply for prayers and Masses rather than for more physical remedies, {5} except possibly for certain minor ailments. We do not doubt that there are many educated people who would be quite satisfied to accept this as a complete explanation of the situation in medical education at the medieval universities. Those who have read Dr. White's "History of the Warfare of Theology with Science" and have placed any faith in his really amusing excursions into a realm of which apparently he knows nothing-- the history of medicine--must believe something like this. For them a little glance at even a few of the realities of medical teaching in the thirteenth century will show at once what a castle of the imagination they have been living in. Only those who are thoroughly and completely ignorant of the real status of medical teaching in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries continue to hold these absurd opinions as to the nullity of medieval medicine and surgery. The reading of a single short recent contribution to medical history, the address of Professor Clifford Allbutt, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, England, before the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the Exposition held in St. Louis in 1904, "On the Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery down to the Sixteenth Century," would suffice to eradicate completely such traditional errors. He pointed out some surprising anticipations of what is most modern in medicine and surgery in the teachings of William of Salicet and his pupil Lanfranc, Professors of Medicine and Surgery in the Italian Universities and in Paris during the thirteenth century. As these two professors were the most distinguished teachers of surgery of the period and the acknowledged leaders of thought in their time, their teaching may fairly be taken as {6} representative of the curricula of medieval medical schools. William of Salicet, according to Professor Allbutt, taught that dropsy was due to a hardening of the kidneys; _durities renum_ are his exact words. He insisted on the danger of wounds of the neck. He taught the suture of divided nerves and gave explicit directions how to find the severed ends. He made a special study of suppurative disease of the hip and taught many practical things with regard to it. He taught, though this is a bit of knowledge supposed to come three centuries later into medicine and history, the true origin of chancre and phagedena. Most surprising of all, however, remains. William substituted the use of the knife for the abuse of the cautery, which had been introduced by the Arabs because they feared hemorrhage, and he insisted that hemorrhage could be controlled by proper means without searing the tissues, and that the wounds made by the knife healed ever so much more kindly and with less danger to the patient. In the matter of wound healing, he investigated the causes of the failure of healing by first intention, and expressed on this subject some marvelous ideas that are supposed to be of late nineteenth century origin. While it is usually said that whatever teaching of science was done at medieval universities, was so entirely speculative or purely theoretic and so thoroughly impractical as not to be of any serious use for life and its problems, the utter falsity of such declarations can be seen from the fact that William of Salicet insisted on teaching medicine by clinical methods, always discussed cases with his students, and his medical and surgical works contain many case histories. This is just what pretentiously ignorant historians of medical education {7} have often emphatically declared that medieval teachers did not do, but should have done, in the Middle Ages. It is not surprising then to find that William himself, and his great pupil Lanfranc, insisted on the utter inadvisability of separating medicine and surgery in such a way that the physician would not have the opportunity to be present at operations, and thus gain more definite knowledge about the actual conditions of various organs which he had tried to investigate from the surface of the body. It is a very curious coincidence that both the Regius Professors of Physic in England at the present time, our own Professor Osler, now at Oxford, as well as his colleague, Professor Allbutt, of Cambridge, have within the last five years emphasized this same idea in almost the very words which were used by William and Lanfranc nearly seven hundred years ago. Lanfranc went even beyond his master in practical applications of important scientific principles to medicine and surgery. He added to the means of controlling hemorrhage. In arterial hemorrhage he suggested digital compression for an hour, or in severe cases ligature. His master had studied wounds of the neck. Lanfranc has a magnificent chapter on injuries of the head, which Professor Allbutt does not hesitate to call one of the classics of surgery. Lanfranc was thoroughly appreciated by his contemporaries. After years of study and teaching in Italy he was invited to Paris, where he became one of the lights of that great university. Both Salicet and Lanfranc did their wonderful work in scientific medicine down in Italy where ecclesiastical influence was strongest. Italy continued to be for the next six centuries always the home of the best medical schools in the world, to which the most ardent students from {8} all over the continent and even England went for the sake of the magnificent opportunities provided. It was literally true, in spite of the tradition of Church opposition to medical science, that the nearer to Rome the university the better its medical school; and as we shall see, Rome itself had the best medical school in the world for two centuries, while its greatest rival, often ahead of it in scientific achievement, always its peer, was the medical school of Bologna in the Papal States, directly under the control of the Popes since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Dr. White has said just the opposite of this in a well-known passage of his book, in which he assures his readers that "in proportion as the grasp of theology upon education tightened, medicine declined; and in proportion as that grasp relaxed, medicine has been developed." The reason for such a statement is that he knew nothing about the history of medicine and surgery in these medieval centuries and thought there was none. This is a characteristic example of his mode of writing the History of the (Supposed) Warfare of Theology with Science in Christendom. This much will give some idea of the value of his book as a work of reference. After knowing something of these wonderful developments of medieval medical science, it is to be hoped that no one will listen hereafter to the ignorant assertions of those who talk of the suppression of medical knowledge at this time. _William of Salicet and Lanfranc were both of them clerics,_ that is, they belonged to the ecclesiastical body and had taken minor orders, though they were not priests, as priests were for obvious reasons not allowed to do surgical operations, it being as repugnant to human feelings in the Middle Ages as it is now, that {9} the messenger of Divine Mercy should handle the knife and spill blood, or that the pastor of souls should come straight from the operating room to bring consolation to the afflicted and the dying. Much more might be said about the wonderful medical teaching of the thirteenth century. The men who made the universities what they have continued to be down to the present time, had open minds for any great advances that might come. Accordingly, when the histories of anesthesia tell us that there was a form of anesthesia introduced during the thirteenth century by Ugo da Lucca, and that even some method of inhalation was employed for this purpose, it will be a surprise only to those who have never properly realized all that our educational forefathers of the early university days succeeded in accomplishing. Down at Montpelier, Gilbert the Englishman taught that small-pox patients should be treated in rooms with red hangings, red curtains being especially advised for the doors and windows. This is what Finsen re-discovered in the nineteenth century, and for it was given the Nobel prize in the twentieth century. He found that small-pox patients suffered much less, that their fever was shorter, and that the after effects were much less marked when only red light was admitted to them. One may well ask what drugs did they employ, and perhaps conclude that because they knew very little of drugs, therefore they knew little of medicine. It is in the use of drugs, however, that medicine has always been at its weakest, and we scarcely need Oliver Wendel Holmes's declaration, that if all the drugs men used up to his time had been thrown into the sea, they would be better rather than worse off for it; nor Professor Osier's many {10} emphatic protests with regard to our ignorance of drugs, to make the world of the present day realize that a generation's use of them as a test would tell quite as severely against the eighteenth or the nineteenth century, as against the thirteenth or the fourteenth. They did use opium, however, the drug having been introduced into general practice, it is said, by a distinguished Papal physician, Simon Januensis. Mandrake was employed, and has not as yet gone entirely out of use. Various herbal decoctions were employed, and though these were used entirely on empiric grounds, some at least of them have continued in use with no better reason for their employment during most of the centuries since. The relation of the Popes to these advances in medicine may be best appreciated from the interest which they took in the hospitals. It was only in hospitals that cases could be properly studied, and the medieval hospitals were conducted with very nearly the same relations to the universities of that time as those that exist at the present day. In the chapter on the Foundation of City Hospitals we show that these institutions are all, as Virchow, who is surely an authority above suspicion in any matter relating to the Popes has declared, due to one great Pope. This is the best possible demonstration of supreme humanitarian interest in human ills, and their treatment. Innocent III., as we shall see, at the beginning of the thirteenth century summoned Guy from Montpelier, where he had been trained in the care of patients, and where the greatest medical school of the time existed, to come to Rome and organize the Hospital of the Holy Ghost in the Papal City, which was to be a model for hospitals of the same kind in every diocese throughout the Christian world. Literally hundreds of {11} these hospitals were founded during the thirteenth century as the result of this initiative. Patients were not left to die, with only the hope of prayers to relieve their sufferings, but they were cared for as skilfully as the rising science of the time knew how and with the tenderness that religious care has always been able to give. For added consolation in the midst of their sufferings and as a fortifier against the thought of death, they had religion and all its beautiful influences, for which even Virchow, himself utterly unbelieving, cannot suppress a tribute. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the University of the City of Rome was founded by Pope Boniface VIII. Only a year or two later the Popes removed their capital to Avignon. It has often been thought that, because of this removal of the Papal capital, this University of the City never came into existence; but we have definite records of salaries paid out of the Papal revenues to professors of law and medicine about the end of the first quarter of the fourteenth century. Down in the South of France, at Avignon itself, the Popes had for one of their chamberlains the famous Guy de Chauliac, who is always spoken of as the Father of Modern Surgery. One of the Popes of the Avignon period founded the College of Twelve Physicians at Montpelier, the foundation being sufficient to support twelve medical students, and by adding the prestige of the Pope's patronage to the reputation of the University, greatly encouraged attendance at it. Another of the Popes of the Avignon period, Pope John XXII., who is said by President White to have been most bitter in opposition to every form of science, actually helped in the foundation of two medical schools. {12} One of these was at Cahors, his birthplace, and the other was at Perugia, at that time in the Papal States. In founding the medical school at Perugia, Pope John insisted that its standards must be as high as those of Paris and Bologna, and required that the first teachers there should be graduates from Paris or Bologna, where were the two greatest medical schools of the time. Seven years of study, three in the undergraduate department and four in the graduate schools, were to be required, according to this bull of foundation (given in full in the appendix), before the degree of Doctor of Medicine could be conferred. If it is recalled that this standard of three years of undergraduate work and four in the graduate school, or at least of seven years of University work, is the ideal toward which our universities are struggling, and, it must be said, not with the entire success we would like, at the beginning of the twentieth century, then, it is surprising to think that the president of a modern university, deeply interested in education in all its features and himself a professor of history, should know so little of, and be so lacking in sympathy with these men who laid the deep foundations of our modern education. Perhaps the most striking feature of the relation of the Popes to medicine remains to be mentioned. If they really were the bitter opponents of things medical that Dr. White would have us believe, then we should expect that either there were no such officials as Papal physicians, or else that the men who occupied these posts were the veriest charlatans, who knew very little of medicine, and certainly did nothing to develop the science. As a matter of fact, there is no list of physicians connected by any common bond in history who are {13} so gloriously representative of scientific progress in medicine as the Papal physicians. The faculty of no medical school presents such a list of great names as those of the men who were chosen to be the official medical attendants of the Popes, and who were thus given a position of prominence where their discoveries in medicine had a vogue they otherwise could not have attained. The list of the Royal physicians of any reigning house of Europe for the last seven centuries looks trivial beside the roll of Papal physicians. Could the Popes possibly have done anything more than this for medicine, or shown their interest in its progress, or made people realize better, that while prayer might be of service, every possible human means must be taken to secure, maintain and recover health. To read even the headings of Dr. White's chapter on from Miracles to Medicine, in which he tells of how "the medieval miracles of healing checked medical science," how "pastoral medicine held back scientific effort," how "there was so much theological discouragement of medicine," and finally, how "the study of Anatomy was considered a sin against the Holy Ghost," in the light of this plain, matter-of-fact story of the wonderful development of medical science in the ecclesiastically founded and ruled universities of the thirteenth century, makes one realize into what a farcical state of mind as regards the realities of history such writers have forced themselves, and unfortunately have led many readers, by their excursions into the history of medicine and science. Probably there was never a more pretentious exhibition of ignorance of the facts of history than is displayed by these expressions and by the whole drift of this chapter. Dr. White would have us {14} believe that the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were so backward in medicine and surgery that they practically have no history in these departments, or so little as not to be worth talking about. The simple facts show us that this is one of three or four great periods in human history in which there was the most wonderful development of medicine and surgery. As we shall see in the course of this book, there was no bull or any other document issued by the Popes forbidding dissection or hampering the development of anatomy in any way. As a matter of fact, the ecclesiastics, instead of being behind their age in liberality of spirit with regard to the use of the human body after death for anatomical purposes, were always ahead of it. There has always existed a popular horror of dissection, and this has manifested itself from the earliest times in history down to and within the last half century, in refusal to enact such secular legislation as would properly provide for the practice of dissection. This was as true in the United States until within the memory of men still alive as it had always been hitherto in European history. Dissection came to be allowed so freely in the medieval universities founded under ecclesiastical influence and ruled by ecclesiastics, as the result of the intelligent realization on the part of churchmen that the study of the human body was necessary for a proper recognition and appreciation of the causes of the ills to which flesh is heir. They realized that the only way to lay the foundation of exact medical knowledge was not only to permit, but to encourage the practice of dissection, and accordingly this was done at everyone of a dozen medical schools of Italy during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and nowhere more so than at the {15} Papal University at Rome itself during the sixteenth century, at a time when, if we would believe Dr. White, the Church authorities were doing everything in their power to prevent dissection. None of the other sciences allied to medicine were hampered in any way, but, on the contrary, fostered and encouraged; and the devoted students of science were prominent churchmen, some of whom were honored with the title of saint after their deaths. In spite of declarations to the contrary, chemistry was not forbidden by a Papal decree or other document, though the practice of certain alchemists of pretending to make gold and silver out of baser metals and thus cheating people was condemned, just as we condemn the corresponding practice of selling "gold bricks" at the present time. As will be made very clear, the Pope who issued the decree that forbids such sharp practices was a distinguished and discriminating patron of medical education at the beginning of the fourteenth century, doing more for it than any ruler for three centuries after his time; yet in doing so he was only carrying out the policy which had been maintained by the Popes before his time and was to continue ever afterwards. Strange as it may appear when we recall how much has been said with regard to Papal, and Church, and theological opposition to science, the story that we have just told with regard to the Papal relations to medicine and medical schools must be retold with regard to science in every department, and the scientific studies at the great medieval universities. Most people will find it even more difficult to accept this than to reach a calm consideration of the Papal relations to the medical sciences. Medicine is supposed to be the sort of practical {16} subject that, in spite of prejudice, the ecclesiastical authorities could not neglect and were not able to suppress. Science in general, however, is supposed to be so distinctly opposed to what was at least considered religious truth, that the Church could not very well do anything else than prevent its development, or at least hamper its progress to such an extent that it was only with the lifting of the ecclesiastical incubus in our own day, that any great scientific advances came in the physical sciences. This is an entirely false impression emphasized by the ridiculous intolerance of writers who knew practically nothing of the real history of science in the Middle Ages, wrote their own prejudices large into the story of the times, and did great positive harm to the cause of truth by a pretense of knowledge they did not have, but which so many confidingly believed them to possess. But it will at once be said, what of Galileo? Does not his case show the anti-scientific temper of churchmen? Nearly half a century ago, Cardinal Newman in his Apologia characteristically observed that this very case sufficed to prove that the Church did not set herself against scientific progress, for this is the "one stock argument" to the contrary, "the exception which proves the rule." Commenting upon the Galileo incident, Professor Augustus de Morgan, in his article on the Motion of the Earth in the English Encyclopedia, has expressed exactly the same conclusion. He is an authority not likely to be suspected of Catholic sympathy. He says: "The Papal power must upon the whole have been moderately used in matters of philosophy, if we may judge by the great stress laid on this one case of Galileo. It is the standing proof that an authority which has {17} lasted a thousand years was all the time occupied in checking the progress of thought(!) There are certainly one or two other instances, but those who make most of the outcry do not know them." There is no doubt that Galileo was prosecuted by the Roman inquisition on account of his astronomical teachings. We would be the last to deny that this was a deplorable mistake made by persons in ecclesiastical authority, who endeavored to make a Church tribunal the judge of scientific truth, a function altogether alien to its character which it was not competent to exercise. The fact that this was practically the only time that this was done serves to show that it was an unfortunate incident, but not a policy. The mistake has been to conclude that this was a typical case--one of many, more flagrant than the others. This single incident has indeed made it impossible that anything of the same kind should ever occur again. It was rather because of the way in which Galileo urged his truths than because of the truths themselves that he was condemned. Even Professor Huxley, in a letter to Professor St. George Mivart, November 12th, 1885, said: "I gave some attention to the case of Galileo when I was in Italy, and I arrived at the conclusion that the Pope and the College of Cardinals had rather the best of it." Before as well as after Galileo's time scientific research was carried on ardently in the universities, especially in Italy. In the chapter on Science at the Medieval Universities, we call attention to the many advances then made with regard to scientific questions in which the world is very much interested at the present time. A hundred years before Galileo's time Copernicus went down to Italy to study astronomy and medicine, and {18} when his book was published it was dedicated to a Pope. Copernicus himself was a faithful churchman all his life, came near being made a bishop once, and kept the diocese in which he lived, and in which his personal friend was bishop, in the fold of the Church in spite of Luther and the religious revolt all around it in Germany. One of the great scientists of the seventeenth century whose name is stamped deeply on the history of science, Father Kircher, the Jesuit, was invited to Rome the very year after Galileo's condemnation, and for thirty years continued to _experiment_ and write in all branches of science, not only with the approbation of his own order, the Jesuits, which helped him in every way by the collection of specimens for his museum, but also with the hearty good will of many cardinals who were his personal friends, and with the constant patronage of the Popes, whose generous liberality enabled him to make Rome the greatest centre of scientific interest during this century. At this time and during the preceding century the Roman University had the greatest medical school in the world. The names of its professors during the preceding century need only be mentioned in order to emphasize this. They include such distinguished men as Eustachius and Varolius, whose names are forever enshrined in the history of anatomy; Columbus, who discovered and described the lesser or pulmonary circulation half a century before Harvey's publication with regard to the general circulation; Caesalpinus, to whom the Italians attribute the discovery of the greater circulation before Harvey. In the next century Malpighi was tempted to come to Rome to teach at the Papal University, and the great Father of Comparative Anatomy {19} ended his days in the Papal capital, amidst the friendship of all the high ecclesiastics and with the social intimacy of the Pope. From the beginning of the sixteenth century Bologna is a Papal city, but its medical school, far from declining after it came under Papal jurisdiction, was even more brilliant than before, and soon came even to outshine its previously successful rival, Padua. What we would say then, is that the story of the supposed opposition of the Church and the Popes and the ecclesiastical authorities to science in any of its branches, is founded entirely on mistaken notions. Most of it is quite imaginary. Much of it is due to the exaggeration of the significance of the Galileo incident. Only those who know nothing about the history of medicine and of science continue to harbor it. That Dr. White's book, contradicted as it is so directly by all our serious histories of medicine and of science, should have been read by so many thousands in this country, and should have been taken seriously by educated men, physicians, teachers, and even professors of science who want to know the history of their own sciences, only shows how easily even supposedly educated men may be led to follow their prejudices rather than their mental faculties, and emphasizes the fact that the tradition that there is no good that can possibly come out of the Nazareth of the times before the reformation, still dominates the intellects of many educated people who think that they are far from prejudice and have minds perfectly open to conviction. We would not leave the impression, moreover, that it was in medicine alone that the misunderstood Middle Ages made distinct progress in science. This is true in every department of what we now call natural science. {20} The reason for the false impression that science was not studied in the Middle Ages at the universities, is that the supposed historians of education and of science who have made such declarations have never taken the trouble to look into the works of the great writers of this period. Anyone who does so, at once changes his opinion in this matter. Humboldt, for instance, the great German natural philosopher, has given ample credit to these colleagues of his, who lived some six centuries before him, yet did such wonderful work in spite of their inadequate means and the fact that they were as yet only groping in the darkness of the beginnings of science. Whewell, the English historian of the inductive sciences, has also proved sympathetic to these old philosophers, and especially to Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon. Those who so ignorantly but with a pretense of knowledge make little of the science of the Middle Ages, know nothing of the real accomplishments of such men as Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Arnold of Villanova, nor Vincent of Beauvais, the encyclopedist. As is always the case, however, the ignorance of supposed historians of science and education in this matter, has only served to emphasize the presumptuous assurance of their declarations as to the intolerance of the Middle Ages toward scientific progress. It is ever the ignorant man who has the least doubt about his opinions. Unfortunately many students of science followed these writers apparently without a hint of the deception that was being practiced on them. Not infrequently the prestige or institutional position of the writers has been enough to carry their works into a vogue which has been heightened by the existence of religious prejudice and {21} intolerance. Usually such motives are supposed to be far distant from the scientific mind. In this case they have been, to some degree at least, unconsciously present. There has unfortunately been a definite persuasion that there could be nothing good in the Middle Ages, and therefore there has been no surprise that evil should be found there. Perhaps there is nothing sadder in present day education, than the fact that serious students and professors of science should thus have been led astray. Nothing shows more clearly the superficiality of our education than the fact that these unfounded statements with regard to the greatest period of education in history have been so universally accepted with so little question. A moment's consideration of the conditions in which the universities developed will show how unreasonable is the thought that the Church or the Popes were opposed to any phase of education. It has come to be universally conceded in recent years that the Church was the great patron of art and of letters during these centuries. Without the inspiration of her teachings there would have been no sublime subjects for artists; without the lives of her saints there would have been much less opportunity for artistic expression; without the patronage of the cathedral builders, the high ecclesiastics, and above all the monastic orders, on whom, with so little reason, so much contempt has been heaped, there would have been none of that great art which developed during the centuries before what is called the Renaissance. In literature, everyone of the great national poems that lie at the basis of modern literature is shot through and through with sublime thoughts that owe {22} their origin to the Church. We need only mention the Cid in Spain, the Arthur Legends in England, such works of the Meistersingers as Perceval and Arme Heinrich, the Golden Legend, the Romance of the Rose, and Dante,--all written during the thirteenth century alone, to illustrate Church influence in literature. This is, as we have said, admitted by all. It is supposed, however, that while the Church encouraged this side of human development, it effectually prevented the evolution of man's scientific interests. As a matter of fact, however, the Church did quite as much for science as for literature and art and charity, There has never been any question that under her fostering care philosophy developed in a very marvelous way. The scholastic philosophers are no longer held in the disrepute so ignorantly accorded them in the last century. It is recognized that scholastic philosophy represents a supremely great development of human thinking with regard to the relations of man to his Creator, to his fellow man, and to the universe. Even those who do not accept its conclusions now, if themselves educated men, no longer make little of those wonderful thinkers, but sympathize with their magnificent work. Only those who are ignorant of scholastic philosophy entirely, still continue to re-echo the expressions of critics whose opinions were founded on second-hand authorities and who confessedly had been unable to make anything out of the scholastics themselves. This field of philosophy was the real danger point for faith and the Church, yet its study was encouraged in every way, provided the philosophers kept within the bounds of their subject. Just exactly the same thing was true in the realm of natural science. Strange as it may seem to those {23} who have allowed themselves to be led into thinking that only for the last century or a little more have men made observations on nature, and only comparatively recently have the conclusions which they reached with regard to natural phenomena been of any real significance, there is no doubt at all that men made great achievements in physical science in the Middle Ages, some of which unfortunately were lost sight of later, but many of which remained to form the basis on which our modern scientific knowledge has been built. In order to obtain a proper appreciation of this, all that is necessary is to study the works of the investigating scholars of the early history of the universities, and see how much that is considered very modern they anticipated in their writings. They must be read for themselves, not be judged by excerpts chosen by prejudiced readers, much less by critics who were bent on not finding anything good in the Middle Ages. There is need of sympathetic interpretation to replace the ignorant contempt which has so far dominated this period of the history of education. The precious lesson that men may learn from the unfortunate misunderstanding, however, is how much old-time prejudice still dominates the attitude even of scholars--nay, even of scientists and educators, with regard to certain periods in history. To most people it will be utterly uncomprehensible, however, that after all that they have heard about Church opposition to science and Papal discouragement of education as dangerous to faith, there should now be an absolute denial of the supposed grounds for the assertions in this matter. Most readers, even among educated people, will be very prone to think that their impressions in these matters cannot be entirely wrong, and {24} that previous writers on the subject cannot have been either deceiving or deceived. In all that relates to the Roman Catholic Church, however, before the date of the so-called reformation, it is important to remember that there came into existence a definite body of Protestant tradition, the creation of the reformers who wished to blacken the memory of the Old Church as much as possible to justify their own apostasy, and who therefore spared no means to pervert the facts of history or to exaggerate the significance of historical details so as to produce this false impression. Subsequent generations were oftener deceived themselves than deceiving. They were sure that the Church was opposed to education and to science, and consequently it was not hard for them to read in certain incidents and documents a meaning quite other than their actual significance, because this added meaning agreed with their prejudices on these subjects. Every advance in modern history, every modification of view that has been brought about by the critical historical method of recent times, has emphasized this point of view almost without exception. The distinguished philosophic and historical writer, the Comte de Maistre, in his Soirées of St. Petersburg about a century ago, declared that "History for the last three centuries (1500-1800) has been a conspiracy against the truth." Just about a century later the editors of the Cambridge Modern History, in the preface to the first volume of their monumental work, re-echoed the words of the Comte de Maistre almost literally in a pregnant paragraph which deserves to be in the note-book of everyone who is trying to get at the real truth of history. They said: {25} "Great additions have of late been made to our knowledge of the past; _the long conspiracy against the revelation of truth has gradually given way,_ and competing historians all over the civilized world have been zealous to take advantage of the change. The printing of archives has kept pace with the admission of enquirers; and the total mass of new matter, which the last half-century has accumulated, amounts to many thousands of volumes. In view of changes and of gains such as these, it has become impossible for the historical writer of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities. The honest student finds himself continually deserted, retarded, _misled by the classics of historical literature_, and has to hew his own way through multitudinous transactions, periodicals and official publications in order to reach the truth. "Ultimate history cannot be obtained in this generation; _but, so far as documentary evidence is at command, conventional history can be discarded, and the point can be shown that has been reached on the road from one to the other._" The italics in this passage are ours, but the ideas they emphasize will serve to show how necessary it is for most of us to give up the supposed historical truth of the preceding generations and have an open mind for the newer ideas that are coming in as the result of the renewed consultation of original documents and primal sources of information. The present volume is written entirely with the idea of bringing out the facts of the relations of the Popes and the Church and the ecclesiastics, especially of the centuries before the reformation, to science and to scientific education. My own position as a professor of the history of medicine has necessarily made medical science very prominent in the book. This, however, far from being a disadvantage, is really an {26} advantage, since the physical sciences of the medieval times gathered mainly around medicine, and it was chiefly physicians and medical students who devoted most time to them. After a detailed study of the history of medical science in the Middle Ages as well of its allied sciences, it becomes very clear that there was no trace of Papal or Church opposition to science as science, and, on the contrary, liberal patronage, abundant encouragement, and even pecuniary aid for the development of scientific education in every way. What we have tried to give in this book, then, is the authoritative refutation of the supposed prohibition of the cultivation of certain departments of medical and allied sciences by the Popes, and sufficient information to enable students and teachers of science to realize that the ordinarily accepted notions with regard to opposition to science in the Middle Ages are founded on nothing more substantial than sublime ignorance of the facts of the history of science at that time. There was no bull against anatomy or dissection; no bull against chemistry; the Popes were the patrons of the great medical scientists and surgeons; the Papal Medical School was one of the best in the world and was sedulously fostered; the great scientists of the Middle Ages were clergymen, and many of them when they died were declared saints by the Church. The opposite impression is entirely a deduction from false premises with regard to the supposed attitude of the Church and churchmen. We shall furnish abundant authorities of the first rank and of value as absolute as there can be in present day history as to these questions. The consultation of these will furnish further material for those who desire to have real knowledge of {27} the history of science in a magnificently original and greatly fruitful period. {28} THE SUPPOSED PAPAL PROHIBITION OF DISSECTION. There is a very general impression that the Roman Catholic Church was, during the Middle Ages, opposed to the practice of dissection, and that various ecclesiastical regulations and even Papal decrees were issued which prohibited, or at least limited to a very great degree, this necessary adjunct of medical teaching. These ecclesiastical censures are supposed to be in force, to some extent at least, even at the present time. The persuasion as to the minatory attitude of the Church in regard to dissection is so widespread among even supposedly well-educated professional men, that, as we have said in the introductory chapter, when there was question some time ago of opening a medical school in New York City under Catholic auspices as a department of Fordham University, a number of more than ordinarily intelligent physicians asked: What would be done about the study of anatomy, since in the circumstances suggested dissection would not be allowed? This false impression has been produced by writers in the history of science who have emphasized very strenuously the supposed opposition of the Church to science, and as these writers had a certain prestige as scholars their works have been widely read and their assertions have been unquestioned, because it would naturally be presumed that they would not make them without thorough investigation of such important questions. Professional men are not to blame if they have taken such statements {29} seriously, even though they are absolutely without foundation. That statements of this kind should have been made by men of distinction in educational circles and should have passed current so long, is only additional evidence of an intolerant spirit in those who least suspect it in themselves and are most ready to deprecate intolerance in others. Take a single example. Most of what is said as to the opposition of the Church to medicine during the Middle Ages in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, by Andrew D. White (Appleton's, New York), is founded on a supposed Papal prohibition of anatomy and on a subsequent equally supposed Papal prohibition of chemistry. These two documents are emphasized so much, that most readers cannot but conclude that, even without further evidence, these are quite enough to prove the contention with regard to the unfortunate opposition of the Church to medical science. Without these two presumably solid pillars of actual Papal documents, what is said with regard to the Church and its relations to medical science in the Middle Ages amounts to very little. Much is made of the existence of superstitions in medicine as characteristic of the Middle Ages and as encouraged by clergymen, but medical superstitions of many kinds continue to have their hold on even the intelligent classes down to the present day in spite of the progress of education, and in countries where the Church has very little influence over the people. Dr. White quotes with great confidence and absolute assurance a Papal decree issued in the year 1300 by Pope Boniface VIII., which forbade the mutilation of the human body and consequently hampered all possibility of progress in anatomy for {30} several important centuries in the history of modern science. Indeed, this supposed Papal prohibition of dissection is definitely stated to have precluded all opportunity for the proper acquisition of anatomical knowledge until the first half of the sixteenth century, when the Golden Age of modern anatomy set in. This date being coincident with the spread of the movement known as the Protestant Reformation, many people at once conclude that somehow the liberality of spirit that then came into the world, and is supposed at least to have put an end to all intolerance, must have been the active factor in this development of anatomy, and that, as Dr. White has indeed declared, it was only because the Church was forced from her position of opposition that anatomical investigation was allowed. Since so serious an accusation is founded on a definite Papal document, it cannot but be a matter of surprise that those who have cited it so confidently as forbidding anatomy, and especially dissection, have never given the full text of the document. It is practically impossible for the ordinary reader, or even for the serious student of the history of medicine, to obtain a copy of this decree unless he has special library facilities at his command and the help of those who are familiar with this class of documents. Many references have been made to this prohibition by Pope Boniface VIII., but no one has thought it worth while to give, even in a footnote, the text of it. The reason for this is easy to understand as soon as one reads the actual text. It has nothing to say at all with regard to dissection. It has absolutely no reference to the cutting up of the human body for teaching purposes. Its purpose is very plain, and is stated so that there can be no possible {31} misapprehension of its meaning. Here we have an excellent illustration of what the editors of the Cambridge Modern History declared to be the breaking up of the long conspiracy against the truth by the consultation of original documents. Through the kindness of the Rev. D. A. Corbett, of the Seminary of St. Charles Borromeo, Overbrook, Pa., I have been able to secure a copy of Pope Boniface's decree, and this at once disposes of the assertion that dissection was forbidden or anatomy in any way hampered by it. Father Corbett writes: "The Bull De Sepulturis of Boniface VIII. is not found in the Collectio Bullarum of Coquelines, nor is it incorporated in the Liber Sextus Decretalium Divi Bonifacii Papae VIII., though it is from here that it is quoted in the Histoire Litteraire de la France (as referred to by President White). It appears in an appendix to this sixth book among the Extravagantes, a term that is used to signify that the documents contained under it were issued at a time somewhat apart from the period this special book of decretals was supposed to cover. The Liber Sextus was published in 1298. This 'Bull De Sepulturis' was not issued until 1300. It is to be found in the third book of the Extravagantes, Chapter I." Even a glance at the title would seem to be sufficient to show that this document did not refer even distantly to dissection, and this makes it all the harder to understand the misapprehension that ensued in the matter, if the document was quoted in good faith, for usually the compression necessary in the title is the source of such errors. The full text of the bull only confirms the absolute absence of any suggestion of forbidding dissection or discouraging the study of anatomy. {32} "Title--Concerning Burials.[Footnote 2] Boniface VIII. Persons cutting up the bodies of the dead, barbarously boiling them, in order that the bones, being separated from the flesh, may be carried for burial into their own countries, are by the very act excommunicated. [Footnote 2: See Latin text in full in appendix.] "As there exists a certain abuse, which is characterized by the most abominable savagery, but which nevertheless some of the faithful have stupidly adopted. We, prompted by motives of humanity, have decreed that all further mangling of the human body, the very mention of which fills the soul with horror, should be henceforth abolished. "The custom referred to is observed with regard to those who happen to be in any way distinguished by birth or position, who, when dying in foreign lands, have expressed a desire to be buried in their own country. The custom consists of disemboweling and dismembering the corpse, or chopping it into pieces and then boiling it so as to remove the flesh before sending the bones home to be buried--all from a distorted respect for the dead. Now, this is not only abominable in the sight of God, but extremely revolting under every human aspect. Wishing, therefore, as the duty of our office demands, to provide a remedy for this abuse, by which the custom, which is such an abomination, so inhuman and so impious, may be eradicated and no longer be practiced by anyone, We, by our apostolic authority, decree and ordain that no matter of what position or family or dignity they may be, no matter in what cities or lands or places in which the worship of the Catholic faith flourishes, the practice of this or any similar abuse with regard to the bodies of the dead should cease {33} forever, no longer be observed, and that the hands of the faithful should not be stained by such barbarities. "And in order that the bodies of the dead should not be thus impiously and barbarously treated and then transported to the places in which, while alive, they had selected to be buried, let them be given sepulture for the time either in the city or the camp or in the place where they have died, or in some neighboring place, so that, when finally their bodies have been reduced to ashes or otherwise, they may be brought to the place where they wish to be buried and there be interred. And, if the executor or executrix of the aforesaid defunct, or those of his household, or anyone else of whatever order, condition, state or grade he may be, even if he should be clothed with episcopal dignity, should presume to attempt anything against the tenor of this our statute and ordination, by inhumanly and barbarously treating the bodies of the dead, as we have described, let him know that by the very fact he incurs the sentence of excommunication, from which he cannot obtain absolution (unless at the moment of death), except from the Holy See. And besides, the body that has been thus barbarously treated shall be left without Christian burial. Let no one, therefore, etc. (Here follows the usual formula of condemnation for the violation of the prescriptions of a decree.) Given at the Lateran Palace, on the twelfth of the calends of March, in the sixth year of our pontificate." The reason for the bull is very well known. During the crusades, numbers of the nobility who died at a distance from their homes in infidel countries were prepared for transportation and burial in their own lands by dismemberment and boiling. The remains of {34} Louis IX., of France, and a number of his relatives who perished on the ill-fated crusade in Egypt in 1270, are said to have been brought back to France in this fashion. The body of the famous German Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, who was drowned in the river Saleph near Jerusalem, was also treated thus in order that the remains might be transported to Germany without serious decomposition being allowed to disturb the ceremonials of subsequent obsequies. Such examples were very likely to be imitated by many. The custom, as can be appreciated from these instances from different nations, was becoming so widespread as to constitute a serious source of danger to health, and might easily have furnished occasion for the conveyance of disease. It is almost needless to say to our generation that it was eminently unhygienic. Any modern authority in sanitation would at once declare against it, and the custom would be put an end to without more ado. There can be no doubt at all then that Pope Boniface VIII. accomplished good, not evil, by the publication of this bull. So anyone with modern views as to the danger of disease from the foolish custom which it abolished would at once have declared, and yet, by a perversion of its signification, it came to be connected with a supposed prohibition of dissection. For this misunderstanding Pope Boniface VIII. has had to suffer all sorts of reproaches and the Church has been branded as opposed to anatomy by historians(!) Is it possible, however, that this bull was misinterpreted so as to forbid dissection, or at least certain forms of anatomical preparation which were useful for the study and teaching of anatomy? That is what Dr. White asserts. He shows, moreover, in his History of {35} the Warfare of Science with Theology, that he knew that the document in question was perfectly inoffensive as regards any prohibition of dissection in itself, but insists that by a misinterpretation, easy to understand as he considers, because of the supposed opposition of ecclesiastics to medical science, it did actually prevent anatomical development. President White says: "As to the decretal of Pope Boniface VIII., the usual statement is that it forbade all dissections. While it was undoubtedly construed universally to prohibit dissection for anatomical purposes, its declared intent was as stated in the text; that it was constantly construed against anatomical investigations cannot for a moment be denied." If a misinterpretation were subsequently made, surely Pope Boniface VIII. must not be held responsible for it; yet in spite of the fact that Dr. White shows that he knew very well that this bull did not forbid the practice of dissection, he does not hesitate to use over and over again expressions which would imply that some formal decision against dissection itself had been made, though this is the only Papal document he refers to. He even goes so far as to say that "anatomical investigation was made a sin against the Holy Ghost." He frequently repeats that for three centuries after the issuance of this bull the development of anatomy was delayed and hampered, and insists that only that Vesalius at great personal risk broke through this Church opposition, modern anatomy would never have developed. He proceeds constantly on the theory that it was always this bull that was in fault, though he confesses that if so, it was by a misunderstanding; and the only fault he can find to attribute to the Pope is a lack of infallibility, as he {36} calls it, because he was not able to foresee that his bull would be so misunderstood. I suppose we are to understand from this that Dr. White considers that he knows the meaning of the word infallibility. It is not a hard word to understand if one wishes to understand it. The meaning that he gives it in this passage is so entirely different from its accepted meaning among Catholics, that any schoolboy in any of our parochial schools would tell him that the word was never used by Catholics in the sense in which he here employs it. It is so misunderstood popularly outside of the Church, and this Dr. White doubtless knew very well. When a man uses a term in medicine in a different sense to that which is ordinarily accepted, we consider him ignorant; but when he deliberately uses it in another sense for his own purposes because of a false significance attached to it in the popular mind, we have a special name for him. The whole matter, however, resolves itself into the simple question, "Was dissection prevented and anatomical investigation hampered after the issuance of the bull?" This is entirely a question of fact. The history of anatomy will show whether dissection ceased or not at this time. Now if those who so confidently make assertions in this matter had ever gone to a genuine history of anatomy, they would have learned at once that, far from this being the time when dissection ceased, the year 1300 is almost exactly the date for which we have the first definite evidence of the making of dissections and the gradual development of anatomical investigation by this means in connection with the Italian universities. This is such a curious coincidence that I always call it to the attention of medical students in lecturing on this subject. {37} The first dissection of which we have definite record, Roth tells us in his life of Vesalius, was a so-called private anatomy or dissection made for medico-legal purposes. Its date is the year 1302, within two years after the bull. A nobleman had died and there was a suspicion that he had been poisoned. The judge ordered that an autopsy be made in order to determine this question. Unfortunately we do not know what the decision of the doctors in the case was. We know only that the case was referred to them. Now it seems very clear that if this had not been a common practice before, the court would not have adopted this measure, apparently as a matter of judicial routine, as seems to have been the case in this instance. Had it been the first time that it was done instead of having the record of the transaction preserved only by chance, any mention of it at all would have appeared so striking to the narrator, that he would have been careful to tell the whole story, and especially the decision reached in the matter. After this, evidence of dissection accumulates rapidly. During the second decade of the century Mondino, the first writer on anatomy, was working at Bologna. We have the records of his having made some dissections in connection with his university teaching there, and eventually he published a text-book on dissection which became the guide for dissectors for the next two centuries. Within five years after this we have a story of students being haled to court for body-snatching for anatomical purposes, and about this time there was, according to Rashdall in his History of the Universities, a statute of the University of Bologna which required the teacher in anatomy to dissect a body, if the students brought it to him. More than ten years earlier than this, that is, {38} within ten years after the supposed Papal prohibition, there are records of dissections having been made at Venice in public, for the benefit of the doctors of the city, at the expense of the municipal treasury. During the first half of this century money was allowed at Bologna for wine, to be given to those who attended the public dissections, and if we recall the state in which the bodies must have been at a time when the use of preservatives was unknown, we can well understand the need for it. All this shows, as I have said, that the date of Boniface's bull (1300), far from representing the eclipse of anatomy, actually fixes the date of the dawn of modern practical anatomical study. The most interesting question in this whole discussion is as to how much dissection Mondino actually did during the second decade of the fourteenth century. His book became the manual of dissection that was in practically every dissector's hands for several centuries after. Probably no book of its kind has ever been more used, and none maintained its place as the standard work in this department for so long. No less than 25 printed editions of it appeared altogether. It would seem to be utterly improbable that the author of a text-book of this kind could have made only a few dissections. There are a number of historians who have claimed, nevertheless, that at most he did not dissect more than three or four bodies. This is all that we have absolute evidence for, that is to say, only these dissections are recorded. It is easy to understand, however, that a professor of anatomy might make even hundreds of dissections, and yet have something to say only about a very few which happened to present some special peculiarities. The absence of further records may readily be accounted for also in {39} other ways. The art of printing was not yet invented; paper had only just been discovered and was extremely expensive, and many factors conspired to destroy any records that may have been made. Outsiders dipping into the history of medicine have made much of our paucity of documentary evidence with regard to what Mondino actually did, and have, when it suited their purpose, insisted that this first author of a dissector's manual did but the three or four dissections explicitly mentioned. Those who are more familiar with the history of medicine, and especially of anatomy, are persuaded that he must have done many. In the first class of writers is Prof. White, for instance, who declares positively that Mondino did not dissect more bodies than those of which we have absolute records. According to his emphatically expressed opinion, the reason why the father of dissection did not dissect more was because of ecclesiastical opposition. Even these few dissections were due to some favoring chance or the laxity of the ecclesiastical authorities, or Mondino might have paid dear for his audacity. No one else, according to Prof. White, dared to encounter the awful penalties that might have been inflicted on Mondino until Vesalius, more than two centuries later, broke through "the ecclesiastical barrier" and gave liberty to anatomists. Prof. Lewis S. Pilcher, of Brooklyn, who has made a special study of Mondino and his times, who has consulted that author's original editions, who has searched out the traditions with regard to him in the very scene of his labors in Bologna, thinks quite differently. Prof. White has a purpose, that of minimizing the work done in anatomy during the fourteenth century; Prof. Pilcher's only purpose is to bring out the truth with regard to the history of {40} anatomy. In the Medical Library and Historical Journal for December, 1906, Prof. Pilcher has an article entitled The Mondino Myth, by which term he designates the idea that Mondino dissected but a few bodies. He says with regard to this subject: "The changes have been rung by medical historians upon a casual reference in Mondino's chapter on the uterus to the bodies of two women and one sow which he had dissected, as if these were the first and the only cadavers dissected by him. The context involved no such construction. He is enforcing a statement that the size of the uterus may vary, and to illustrate it remarks that, 'a woman whom I anatomized in the month of January last year (1315 Anno Christi), had a larger uterus than one whom I anatomized in the month of March of the same year.' And further, he says, 'the uterus of a sow which I dissected in 1316 (the year in which he was writing) was a hundred times greater than any I had seen in the human female, for she was pregnant, and contained thirteen pigs.' These happen to be the only references to specific bodies that he makes in his treatise. But it is a far cry to wring out of these references the conclusions that these are the only dissections he made. It is quite true that if we incline to enshroud his work in a cloud of mystery, and to figure it as an unprecedented, awe-inspiring feature to break down the prejudices of the ages, it is easy to think of him as having timidly profaned the human body in his anatomizing zeal in but one or two instances. His own language, however, throughout his book is that of a man who was familiar with the differing conditions of the organs found in many different bodies--a man who was habitually dissecting." {41} As I think must be clear to any one who knows Mondino's book, no other conclusion than this suggested by Prof. Pilcher can be drawn. This opinion has been frankly stated, by every historian of anatomy in recent years. Puschmann says it very clearly. Von Töply is evidently of the same opinion. These are the latest authorities in the history of anatomy. No other conclusion than this could well be reached by anyone who has studied the question seriously. Pilcher confirms this in the article already quoted in the following paragraph: "Salernum was not alone in its legalization of the dissection of human bodies before the first public work of Mondino, for, according to a document of the Maggiore Consiglio of Venice of 1308, it appears that there was a college of medicine in Venice, which was even then authorized to dissect a body once every year. Common experience tells us that the embodiment of such regulations into formal law would occur only after a considerable preceding period of discussion, and in this particular field, of clandestine practice. It is too much to ask us to believe that in all this period, from the date of the promulgation of Frederick's decree of 1241 to the first public demonstration by Mondino at Bologna in 1315, the decree had been a dead letter and no human body had been anatomized. It is true there is not, as far as I am aware, any record of any such work, and commentators and historians of a later date have, without exception, accepted the view that none was done, and thereby heightened the halo assigned to Mondino as the one who ushered a new era. Such a view seems to me to be incredible. Be that as it may, it is undeniable that at the beginning of the fourteenth century the idea of dissecting the human body was not a novel one; {42} the importance of a knowledge of the intimate structure of the body had already been appreciated by divers ruling bodies, and specific regulations prescribing its practice had been enacted. It is more reasonable to believe that in the era preceding immediately that of Mondino, human bodies were being opened and after a fashion anatomized. All that we know of the work of Mondino suggests that it was not a new enterprise in which he was a pioneer, but rather that he brought to an old practice a new enthusiasm and better methods, which, caught on the rising wave of interest in medical teaching at Bologna, and preserved by his own energy as a writer in the first original systematic treatise written since the time of Galen, created for him in subsequent uncritical times the reputation of being the restorer of the practice of anatomizing the human body, the first one to demonstrate and teach such knowledge since the time of the Ptolemaic anatomists, Erasistratus and Herophilus." In order to show that Mondino did not perform only the two or three dissections which he himself for special reasons mentions, but many more, Professor Pilcher has made a series of quotations from the Bolognese anatomist's manual of dissection. It is after all quite easy to understand that if dissections were common, there would be no records of most of them, as they would be too commonplace for chroniclers to mention. Only those that have some special feature are by chance mentioned in some accounts of doings at the university. The records of the actual number of dissections at most medical schools, even a century ago, are not now available in most cases. On the other hand, no one can read these quotations from Mondino's book without realizing that the man who wrote these passages had made many {43} dissections, and that it was a common practice for him to make anatomical preparations in many different ways, under many different circumstances and for many different purposes. The second quotation shows, in fact, that Mondino had the custom sometimes of boiling his bodies before dissecting them when he wished to demonstrate special features, and he promises to make such an anatomy for his students at another time. If the bull of Pope Boniface VIII. was misinterpreted in any way to prohibit dissection, this would surely be the practice supposed to fall under its provisions. Here we find Mondino, less than twenty years after the promulgation of the bull, writing about this very practice, however, and calmly suggesting that he follows it as a routine, in a book that was published without let or hindrance from the ecclesiastical authorities, and that became for the next two centuries the most used book in the teaching of anatomy in educational institutions that were directly under ecclesiastical authorities. If the bull was misinterpreted so as to forbid dissection, as has been said, surely this flagrant violation of it would not have been permitted. It is clear that, if there was a misinterpretation, it must have come later in the history of anatomy. But of that we shall find no trace any more than at this time. Here are the quotations from the Anatomy of Mondino which show that he practiced not one but many methods of making dissections, according to the purposes he had in view. The leaf and line references are to the Dryander Edition, Marburg, 1541. (Taken from Prof. Pilcher.) "I do not consider separately here the anatomy of component parts, because their anatomy does not appear {44} clearly in the fresh subject, but rather in those macerated in water." (Leaf 2, lines 8-13.) ".... these differences are more noticeable _in the cooked_ or perfectly dried body, and so you need not be concerned about them, as perhaps _I will make an anatomy upon such a one at another time_ and will write what I observe with my own senses, as I have proposed from the beginning." (Leaf 60, lines 14-17.) "What the members are to which these nerves come cannot well be seen in such dissection as this, but it should be liquified with rain water, and this is not contemplated in the present body." (Leaf 60, lines 31-33.) "After the veins you will note many muscles and many large and strong cords, the complete anatomy of which you will not endeavor to find in such a body, but in a body dried in the sun for three years, as I have demonstrated at another time; I also declared completely their number, and wrote the anatomy of the muscles of the arms, hands and feet in a lecture which I gave over the first, second, third and fourth subjects." As must be clear to anyone, many of these expressions are, as Professor Pilcher insists, intelligible only if we accept the conclusion that their author had done many dissections, under many and varying circumstances, during his career as an anatomist before writing this volume. We have other evidence, of a much more direct character, for this fact. Mondino uses the expression, that he had demonstrated many times a certain anatomical feature which could only be the subject of demonstration after dissection. The expression occurs in a description of the hypo-gastric region which he calls the sumen. Through this region, he says, there pass to the surface certain veins which transmit fluid in the fetus {45} during the time of its life in utero. For this reason they are better studied in the unborn than in the fully developed, since they lose their function as soon as complete development is reached. In this description Mondino uses the words "ego hoc modo multitotiens monstravi." As with regard to this, so as to another bit of evidence of Mondino's frequency of dissection, Professor Pilcher has supplied the material. He says in his article on the Mondino Myth, already cited: "Shortly after his (Mondino's) death, the young Guy de Chauliac, of Montpelier, came to Bologna to study anatomy under the tuition of Mondino's successor, Bertrucius. When he wrote his own treatise, 'La Grande Chirurgie,' thirty years later, he prefaced it with an appreciation of the study of anatomy, saying: 'It is necessary and useful to every physician to know first of all anatomy'; and that a knowledge of anatomy was to be acquired by two means; 'these are,' he says, 'the study of books, a means useful indeed, but not sufficient to explain those things which can only be appreciated by the senses; the other, experimentally on the dead body, according to the treatise of Mondinus, of Bologna, which he has written, and which (experimental anatomy on the cadaver) he (Mondinus) has done many times'--'_et ipsam fecit multitoties._'" Besides this evidence we have details of the lives of two of Mondino's assistants which furnish further proofs of the frequency of dissection at the University of Bologna during these first two decades of the fourteenth century, which, it will be recalled, are also the first two decades after the promulgation of Pope Boniface's bull. Curiously enough, one of these assistants was a young woman who, as was not infrequently the custom at this {46} time in the Italian universities, was matriculated as a student at Bologna. She took up first philosophy and afterwards anatomy under Mondino. While it is not generally realized, co-education was quite common at the Italian universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and at no time since the foundation of the universities has a century passed in Italy without distinguished women occupying professors' chairs at some of the Italian universities. This young woman, Alessandra Giliani, of Persiceto, a country district not far from Bologna, took up the study of anatomy with ardor and, strange as it may appear, became especially enthusiastic about dissection. She became so skilful that she was made the prosector of anatomy, that is, one who prepares bodies for demonstration by the professor. According to the Cronaca Persicetana, quoted by Medici in his History of the Anatomical School of Bologna: "She became most valuable to Mondino because she would cleanse most skilfully the smallest vein, the arteries, all ramifications of the vessels, without lacerating or dividing them, and to prepare them for demonstration she would fill them with various colored liquids, which, after having been driven into the vessels, would harden without destroying the vessels. Again, she would paint these same vessels to their minute branches so perfectly and color them so naturally that, added to the wonderful explanations and teachings of the master, they brought him great fame and credit." This whole passage shows a wonderful anticipation of all our most modern methods--injection, painting, hardening--of making anatomical preparations for class and demonstration purposes. Some of the details of the story have been doubted, but her memorial tablet, erected at the time of her death {47} in the Church of San Pietro e Marcellino of the Hospital of Santa Maria de Mareto, gives all the important facts, and tells also the story of the grief of her fiance, who was himself Mondino's other assistant. This was Otto Agenius, who had made for himself a name as an assistant to the chair of Anatomy in Bologna, and of whom there were great hopes entertained because he had already shown signs of genius as an investigator in anatomy. These hopes were destined to grievous disappointment, however, for Otto died suddenly, before he had reached his thirtieth year. The fact that both these assistants of Mondino died young and suddenly, would seem to point to the fact that probably dissection wounds in those early days proved even more fatal than they occasionally did a century or more ago, when the proper precautions against them were not so well understood. The death of Mondino's two prosectors in early years would seem to hint at some such unfortunate occurrence. As regards the evidence of what the young man had accomplished before his untimely death, probably the following quotation, which Medici has taken from one of the old chroniclers, will give the best idea. He said: "What advantage indeed might not Bologna have had from Otto Agenius Lustrolanus, whom Mondino had used as an assiduous prosector, if he had not been taken away by a swift and lamentable death before he had completed the sixth lustrum of his life!" Further absolute proof that dissections were very common about the time that Mondino made those which are recorded, and the mention of which has led to the false assumption as to the rarity of dissection, is to be found in the legal prosecution for body-snatching, which I have already mentioned and which took place within five {48} years after Mondino made the public demonstrations in dissection that are the subject of discussion. It will be conceded by everyone that such prosecutions for body-snatching are not likely to occur when only one or two graves are violated a year, but are usually the result of a series of such outrages, which arouse the community against them. We prefer to give this bit of history once more in the words of Professor Pilcher, who has argued this whole case for _the frequency of dissection within twenty years after the bull that is supposed to have forbidden it_ better than anyone else, and whose knowledge of Mondino and his times is such as to make him an authority on the subject. He has no interest in them, as I have said, either for or against the Popes. His only idea is to bring out the real meaning of whatever data we possess for the history of anatomy and dissection at this time. "An instructive and interesting side-light on the conditions attending the study of practical anatomy in the days of Mondino may be found in a record, still extant, of a legal procedure which occurred in Bologna in the year 1319, four years after Mondino had begun his public demonstrations and at a time when Otto and Alessandra were doubtless enthusiastically working with him. According to the record, four students, three from Milan and one from Piacenza, were accused of having gone at night time to the cemetery of the church of San Barnada, outside the San Felice gate, and to have sacrilegiously violated the grave in which was buried the body of a certain Pasino who had been hung on the gallows near the Ponte di Reno. It was charged that the students had taken up the body and carried it to the school of the parish of San Salvatore, near the pharmacy of {49} Giacomo de Guido, where Master Alberto (Zancari) was teaching. There were witnesses who affirmed that they had seen the body of Pasino in the school and the students and others intent upon dissecting it. It was the sixth of December when the arrests were made, but the final outcome of the trial is not stated." Surely all this must be considered sufficient evidence to show that Pope Boniface's bull neither forbade dissection, nor was misinterpreted as prohibiting any practice in connection with anatomical investigation. It is not enough for President White, however, for after the publication of my original article in the Medical Library and Historical Journal on The Popes and Anatomy, and another article on Pope John XXII. and the Supposed Bull against Chemistry, President White wrote thus in reply: "Dr. Walsh takes up the decretal of Boniface VIII., in 1300, and endeavors to show that, so far from forbidding dissection, it had quite a different tenor, and that at sundry universities in Italy and at the University at Montpelier, in France, dissection was permitted and most openly practiced. This seems to me very disingenuous. The decretal of Boniface was construed universally as prohibiting dissections for any purpose whatever." For President White, then, the publication of the text of the bull is only an _endeavor_ to show that, so far from forbidding dissection, it had quite a different tenor. This endeavor seems to him very disingenuous(!) It matters not what evidence there may be for dissection, or lack of evidence as to ecclesiastical opposition, the decretal of Boniface was _construed universally_ as prohibiting any dissections for any purpose whatever. All history must yield before the reiteration of the assertion {50} that the Popes did forbid dissection, and that there was no anatomy during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, except such as by chance, in some way or other, succeeded in evading the Church regulations. It simply must have been so. President White has said it. For anyone to deny it is to question his historical infallibility. Only those who are disingenuous will dare to do so. It is true, he grants there were some permits to dissect given, but these were wrung from the unwilling hands of the ecclesiastical authorities, and are only proofs of their opposition, not at all of their toleration of dissection. There is no limit to which Professor White will not go in order to maintain his proposition that the Popes did forbid anatomy, and that there was no anatomical investigation during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Here, for instance, is a paragraph from Professor White's answer which shows very strikingly one method of arguing with regard to a question of major significance in the history of education as well as of science, and especially of medicine, during the Middle Ages. Comments on it are entirely unnecessary: "And now, as to Dr. Walsh's statement that dissection was permitted by Popes and ecclesiastical authorities in universities. His argument in the matter is an excellent example of Jesuitism. It is true that under the pressure of the developing science of medicine, sundry civil and ecclesiastical authorities did, from time to time, issue permits allowing an occasional dissection, at rare intervals, here and there; as, for example, the permission given to the University of Lerida, in 1391, to dissect one dead criminal every three years, and to sundry other universities to dissect one or two human {51} bodies each year. It is a fact of which we have ample testimony, that Mundinus, the great anatomist preceding Vesalius, only dissected three human bodies with his classes during his entire career. So far from effectually helping anatomy, these permissions served really to fasten the idea upon the European mind that dissection to any considerable extent by anatomical investigators ought not to be allowed, and, as a matter of fact, it was not until Vesalius, _in spite of theological opposition, braved calumny, persecution, and possibly death, that this ecclesiastical barrier to investigation was broken through._" (Italics ours.) Since Professor White has insisted so much on the significance of these permissions, a discussion of them will not be out of place. There are records of a certain small number of permissions to dissect having been granted by the Popes to various universities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These are so few, however, that it would seem that if they represented the only opportunities afforded for dissection, then the development of anatomy must have been much hampered. With regard to this, it may be said that if the Popes gave permission for dissection, then this practice was not forbidden by them. Here is the proof of it out of the mouths of those who say the opposite. Why should a permission be necessary, however, will be asked? At the present moment such formal permissions are required quite as much in all civilized countries as they were during the Middle Ages. In certain parts of the United States a bond has to be filed by applicants before permission to dissect will be given. Dissection is recognized generally as a practice that needs definite regulation. Without such regulation all sorts of abuses {52} would creep in. During the Middle Ages popular feeling was all against dissection. It was difficult, in many places, for the university authorities to obtain permission for dissection from their immediate political rulers. As a consequence of this they reverted to the theory, very generally accepted at that time, that the university was independent of the political authorities of the place in which it was situated, in educational matters, and an appeal was made directly to the ecclesiastical authorities for permission to dissect, as coming under their jurisdiction in education. They had thus obtained many other educational privileges that would not have been allowed them by municipalities, and they were successful also in this. Anyone who knows the details of the struggle of the universities to maintain the rights of their students and faculties against the encroachments of municipal and state authorities, will appreciate how much this possibility of appeal to the Pope meant for the universities of that time. The permission to dissect was only another, but a very striking example, of ecclesiastical authority granting privileges to universities beyond those which they could have obtained from the local governments under which they existed. Such permissions, far from showing that the Popes were hampering or prohibiting dissection, prove, on the contrary, that they were securing for educational institutions what local popular prejudice would not have allowed them. That this is the proper way to view this question will be best appreciated by a review of the history of anatomy during the two centuries and a half in which ecclesiastical authorities are said to have prevented or discouraged its development. From this it will be seen very clearly that the nearer to Rome the {53} medical schools were, the more dissection was done in them; that dissection was most common in Rome, at least during the latter part of this period; that the golden age of anatomy developed most luxuriantly in Bologna when that was a Papal city, and in Rome itself; and that in general the Popes must be looked upon as having fostered and patronized the medical sciences and anatomy in every possible way, while there is not the slightest hint anywhere to be found of the ecclesiastical opposition that is supposed to have dominated these centuries of medical history. In concluding this chapter it has seemed worth while to trace the origin of the misinterpretation of Pope Boniface's decretal, which makes it forbid dissection for anatomical purposes as well as the cutting up and boiling of bodies in order to facilitate their removal for long distances for burial. Prof. White quotes with great confidence in the matter the Benedictine Literary History of France as his authority, which he declares to be a Catholic authority. Under ordinary circumstances, this would be quite sufficient to establish the fact that such a misinterpretation must have taken place, for the Benedictines were extremely careful in such matters and were not likely to admit an assertion of this kind, unless they had good foundation for it. The quotation on which Prof. White depends for his declarations in the matter is found in the Sixteenth Volume of the Histoire Litteraire de la France, which runs as follows: "But what was to retard still more (than the prohibition of surgery to the clergy mentioned in the preceding paragraph) was the very ancient prejudice which opposed anatomical dissection as sacrilegious. By a decree inserted in Le Sexte, Boniface VIII. forbade the boiling {54} of bodies in order to obtain skeletons. Anatomists were obliged to go back to Galen for information, and could not study the human body directly, and consequently could not advance the human science of bodily health and therapeutics." Had this been written by the Benedictines, there would have been every reason to think that though Boniface's decretal itself did not forbid dissection it had unfortunately been so misinterpreted. While the Histoire Litteraire de la France, however, was begun by the Benedictine Congregation of St. Maur, their work, like many another magnificent undertaking of the monks, was interrupted by the French Revolution. What they had accomplished up to this time showed the necessity for such work, and accordingly in the early part of the nineteenth century a continuation of it was undertaken by the members of the Institute of France. The Sixteenth Volume from which the quotation just cited comes was mainly written by Pierre Claude François Daunou, the French historian and politician. His life had not been such as to make him a sympathetic student of the Middle Ages. He had been a deputy to the Convention, 1792-1795, was elected the first President of the Council of 500 in this latter year, and became a member of the Tribunate in 1800. His contributions to history were made near the close of his life. While he is usually considered an authority in the political details of these centuries, it is easy to understand that he was not favorably situated for familiarity with the medical history of these times. Once it is understood that the paragraph in question was written by M. Daunou and not by the Benedictines, its adventitious prestige as a Catholic historical {55} authority, to which we shall see presently it has absolutely no right, vanishes. A word about M. Daunou will serve to show how carefully any declaration of his with regard to the Popes must be weighed. He belonged to that French school of Catholics who try to minimize in every way the influence of the Papacy in the Church, and who, as students of history know very well, do not hesitate even to twist historical events to suit their prejudices and give them a significance detrimental to the Popes. This was the principal purpose of Daunou's historical writing. There is a little volume called Outlines of a History of the Court of Rome and of the Temporal Power of the Popes, declared by the translator to be by Daunou, which was published in Philadelphia in 1837. The American edition was issued as a Protestant tract, and the translator states frankly that M. Daunou's purpose in composing it was to prove that "the temporal power of the Roman Pontiffs originated in fraud and usurpation; that its influence upon their pastoral ministry has been to mar and degrade it, and its continuation is dangerous to the peace and the liberties of Europe; and that its constant influence to these effects is to retard the advancement of civilization and knowledge." M. Daunou's title for the work as issued originally in French was An Historical Essay on the Temporal Power of the Popes and on the Abuses which they have made of their Spiritual Ministry. [Footnote 3] [Footnote 3: The time at which this little book was published furnishes the best possible commentary on its purpose. It was originally issued in 1810, the year after Pope Pius VII. had been carried off from Rome, and when Napoleon was using every effort to discredit the Pope and bring about a state of affairs in which the pontiff would be compelled to accept a Concordat that would deprive the Church of many of her former rights. It was then really a political pamphlet meant to curry favor with Napoleon, and issued anonymously, because even Daunou did not care to put his name to it under the circumstances. This will give a better idea of how much credence may be given to Daunou's assertions with regard to the Popes of the Middle Ages, than any reflections that we could make.] Everything that M. Daunou has to say with regard to the Popes is tinged by his political and Gallican {56} prejudices. This is why he states so definitely in the Histoire Litteraire de la France that the bull of Pope Boniface VIII., if it did not actually forbid dissection, at least was responsible for hampering the practice for two centuries. That M. Daunou's expressions on this subject have been taken so seriously, however, is to me at least a never-ending source of surprise. He himself must have known nothing at all of the history of dissection, while those who accepted his opinion must have carefully avoided consulting authorities on the history of anatomy, for it is actually just after this bull that the history of public dissection begins. It is clear to me, then, that this absurd assertion of M. Daunou never would have been swallowed so readily only that writers were over-anxious to find material to use against the Popes and the Church. Daunou found this bull of Boniface an excellent opportunity to discredit the Popes in their relations to science. It is true, the bull itself says nothing about dissection, nor is there anything in it that would tend to create even a distant impression that it was directed against anatomical preparations of any kind. We might expect, then, that his assertion in this matter would have been contradicted at once by some one who would read the bull. The bull is, however, not easy to find for consultation purposes. It does not occur, as we have said, in Le Sexte itself, that is, in the ordinary Sixth Book of Papal Decretals, published by Boniface VIII., though Daunou quotes it as from there and without a {57} hint as to where it may be really found. It is in an appendix to this work, added after Boniface's death. It would be rather difficult, then, and would require some special knowledge and no little patience on the part of a subsequent collator of historical sources to find the bull, unless he were determined on getting at the bottom of this whole question. As a consequence Daunou's assertion has remained practically unchallenged for the better part of a century, though many scholars who were familiar with Boniface's sixth book have doubtless realized its falsity, but owing to the fact that they would not ordinarily come across the bull in their direct reading of Boniface's famous volume, would not be in a position to contradict its misquotation. If looked at in this way, Daunou's passage in the Histoire Litteraire would seem to be a deliberate and very clever and, unfortunately, successful perversion of history. Daunou, who was a deep student of Papal affairs and whose knowledge of the history of the Papacy would not be likely to have missed so important a detail, might very well have known, that about a half a century before the time when he wrote asserting that this bull of Boniface VIII. had prevented dissection, someone who had a doubt on the subject asked the ecclesiastical authorities at Rome, whether this Papal document was to be considered as referring in any way to the practice of dissection, or the cutting up of human bodies for anatomical purposes. In reply to this question Pope Benedict XIV. made a very direct answer, absolutely in the negative. This is the only hint that I know of in serious history that Pope Boniface's bull was ever considered to have any reference to dissection for anatomical purposes. At the time when Pope Benedict XIV.'s answer {58} was published the Papal Medical School had been in existence for some five centuries and a half. For about two centuries and a half it had been distinguished in the annals of medicine, and as we shall see in the chapter on The Papal Medical School, some of the most distinguished anatomists of their time had been investigating and teaching by means of dissections, and their demonstrations had been attended by many of the high ecclesiastics, even many autopsies had been made on Cardinals. Pope Benedict's reply is quoted in full in Puschmann's Handbuch der Geschichte der Medizin. Vol. II., page 227, in Robert Ritter Von Töply's article on the History of Anatomy. It occurs in the midst of an abundance of material of great historical importance which shows the place that the Popes occupy as patrons of anatomy for several centuries. Von Töply has no illusions with regard to any supposed opposition of the Popes to medical science. He even says, that while the older writers have always told the story of the development of anatomy as if the Popes tried to prevent the study of it, as a matter of fact, there is scarcely any evidence for this, and copious evidence for their having done much to foster this branch of medical science which they consider so important for the healing of the ills of mankind. His reference to Boniface's answer with regard to the relation of Boniface's bull to dissection runs as follows: "Under the heading, Concerning the Dissection of Bodies in Public Institutions of Learning, and in reply to the question whether the bull of Boniface VIII. forbids the dissection of human bodies, Benedict XIV. said (Institute 64): "By the singular beneficence of God the study of medicine flourished in a very wonderful manner in this {59} city (Rome). Its professors are known for their supreme talents to the remotest parts of the earth. There is no doubt that they have greatly benefited by the diligent labor which they have devoted to dissection. From this practice beyond doubt they have gained a profound knowledge of their art and a proficiency that has enabled them to give advice for the benefit of the ailing as well as a skill in the curing of disease. Now such dissection of bodies is in no way contrary to the bull of Pope Boniface. He indeed imposed the penalty of excommunication, to be remitted only by the Sovereign Pontiff himself, upon all those who would dare to disembowel the body of any dead person and either dismember it or horribly cut it up, separating the flesh from the bones. From the rest of his bull, however, it is clear that this penalty was only to be inflicted upon those who took bodies already buried out of their graves and by an act horrible in itself, cut them in pieces in order that they might carry them elsewhere and place them in another tomb. It is very clear, however, that by this, the dissection of bodies, which has proved so necessary for those exercising the profession of medicine, is by no means forbidden." [Footnote 4] [Footnote 4: The original Latin taken from Puschmann runs thus: "De cadaverum sectione facienda in publicis Academiis, utrum constitutio Bonifacii VIII. sectioni humanorum cadaverum adversetur. Singulari dei beneficio medicinae studium in hac civitate (Roma) magnopere floret cujus etiam professores ob eximiam virtutem in remotissimis terrae partibus commendantur. Ipsis sane maxime profuit, quod incidendis mortuis corporibus diligentem operam contulerint, ex qua procul dubio praeclaram artis scientiam, in consultationibus obeundis pro aegrotorum salute praestantiam, morbisque eurandis peritiam consecuti sunt . . . . Porro haec membrorum incisio nullo modo adversatur Bonifacii Institutioni . . . . Ille quidem poenam excommunicationis indicit Pontifici solo remittendam, iis omnibus qui audeant cuiuscumque defuncti corpus exenterare, ac illud membratim vel in frustra immaniter concidere ab ossibus tegumentum carnis excutere. Tamen ex reliquis ejusdem constitutionis partibus clare deprehenditur, hanc poenam illis infligi qui sepulta corpora e tumulis eruentes ipsa nefario scelere in frustra secabant ut alio deferrent, alioque sepulchro collocarent. Quamobrem membrorum incisio minime interdicitur, quae adeo necessaria est medicinae facultatem exercentibus."] This whole subject of the Supposed Papal Prohibition of Anatomy is typical of a certain form of controversial writing against the Church. A document of some time or other from the Middle Ages is taken, twisted from its {60} original meaning and set up as a serious stumbling block to the development of science or education in some way. It is quoted confidently by some one without much authority. Others who are glad of the opportunity to have such an objection to urge against the Papacy, take it up eagerly, do not look it up in the original, absolutely fail to consider the circumstances in which it was issued, and then spread it broadcast. Of course it is accepted by unthinking readers, whose prejudices lead them to believe that this is what was to be expected anyhow. It maybe that history, as is the case in anatomy, absolutely contradicts the assertion. That makes no difference. History is ignored and treatises are written showing how much science would have developed only for Papal opposition, by people who know nothing at all about the real story of the development of science. The real history of anatomy, showing very clearly how much was done for the science by the Popes and ecclesiastics, will be told in the following chapters. {61} THE STORY OF ANATOMY DOWN TO THE RENAISSANCE. We have seen that the supposed prohibition of anatomy by the Popes has no existence in reality. In spite of this fact, which it was easy for anyone to ascertain who wished to consult the documents asserted to forbid, a number of historical writers have insisted on finding religious or ecclesiastical, or theological, opposition to anatomical studies. Professor White has been most emphatic in his assertions in this regard. He admits that the supposed bull of prohibition had quite a different purport, yet he still continued to assert its connection with the failure of anatomy to develop during the Middle Ages. This presumed failure of anatomy during the Middle Ages is a myth. It continues to secure credence only in the minds of those who know nothing of the history of medical science during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries and who have not consulted the serious histories of medicine that treat of this time, but flourishes vigorously in the minds of those who have a definite purpose in making out a story of theological or Church opposition to science in general. To counteract the false impression that has gained such wide acceptance in this matter, it has seemed advisable, in order to settle the question definitely once and for all, to trace the history of anatomical science from its beginning in the Middle Ages down to modern {62} times. It will not be hard to show that there was a constant development and an unfailing interest in this subject. This can be understood even more clearly from the story of the development of surgery in the Middle Ages and its relations to anatomy than from the history of anatomy itself. As is well known, materials with regard to practical and applied science interest men more at all times, and documents with regard to them are more likely to be preserved, and so the history of surgery is very full, while the history of anatomy may prove not quite so satisfactory. It is true of all sciences, that there are periods when they have much less attraction than at other times, and the success of investigators and original workers is not always the same. As in nearly everything else, the real advances in all science come when genius makes its mark, and not merely because a large number of men happen to be interested in the subject. This will be found as true in anatomy as in other sciences, and so there are periods when not much is doing, but nowhere is there a trace of ecclesiastical opposition to account for these variations of interest. There is no doubt at all that there was much popular opposition to the practice of dissection in the Middle Ages; that has existed at all times in the world's history. It was very pronounced among the old Pagans in Rome as well as in Greece, and it prevented anatomical study to a very great degree. It continued to exist in modern times until almost the present generation. Indeed, it has not yet entirely disappeared, as any physician who has tried to secure autopsies on interesting cases knows very well. The New York Academy of Medicine is only a little over a half century old, and yet nearly every one of its early presidents had thrilling {63} experiences in body-snatching as a young man, because no proper provision for the supplying of anatomical material had as yet been made by law, and bodies had to be obtained. The feeling of objection to having the bodies of friends anatomized is natural and not due to religion. It exists quite as strongly among the ignorant who have no religion as among the religiously inclined. It has not disappeared among the educated classes of our own time, religious or irreligious. If this is borne in mind, the history of the development of anatomy will be easier to understand. The first definite evidence in modern history for the existence of the practice of dissection is a famous law of the German Emperor, Frederick II., from the first half of the thirteenth century. This law was promulgated for the two Sicilies, that is, for Southern Italy and Sicily proper, very probably in the year 1240. It has often been vaguely referred to, but its actual significance can only be understood from the terms of the law itself, which has been literally translated by Von Töply in his Studien Zur Geschichte der Anatomie in Im Mittelalter. [Footnote 5] [Footnote 5: Deuticke Leipzig und Wien, 1893] The paragraph with regard to dissection runs as follows: "As an enactment that will surely prove beneficial to health, we decree that no surgeon will be allowed to practice, in case he has not a written testimonial, which he must present to the teachers in the medical faculty, that he has for at least a year applied himself to that department of medicine which is concerned with the teaching and practice of surgery, and that he has, above all, learned the anatomy of the human body in this manner, and that he is fully competent in this department {64} of medicine, without which neither surgery can be undertaken with success nor sufferers cured." [Footnote 6] [Footnote 6: The complete text of this law, which is a marvelous anticipation of all our efforts for the regulation of the practice of medicine down even to the present day, will be found in the appendix.] Such a regulation, as pointed out by Professor Pilcher in an article on the early history of dissection, [Footnote 7] and as we know by modern experience, does not come into force as a rule before the actual practice of what is prescribed, has been for some time the custom and its usefulness proved by the results attained. It seems very probable, then, that even at this early day the Emperor Frederick was only making into a law what had been at least a custom before this time. Lest anyone should think that this is a far-fetched assumption, certain other paragraphs of this law, which show very definitely the high degree to which the development of medical teaching had reached, must be recalled. Frederick declared that medicine could only be learned if there was a proper groundwork of logic. Only after three years devoted to logic, then, under which term is included the grammar and philosophy of an ordinary undergraduate course, could a man take up the study of medicine. After three years devoted to medicine, to which it is again specifically declared another year must be added if surgery were to be practiced, a man might be given his degree in medicine, but must spend a subsequent full year in the practical study of medicine under the supervision of an experienced physician. [Footnote 7: The Mondino Myth, Medical Library and Historical Journal, 1906] The law further decreed definite punishments for the practice of medicine without due warrant and violation of its regulations, and also regulated the practice of apothecaries. It is rather interesting to find that these {65} were forbidden to share their profits with physicians, and the physicians themselves were not allowed to distribute their own medicines. In a word, practically every one of the problems in the practice of medicine which medical societies are trying to solve at the present moment, were also occupying the attention of the civil authorities about seven centuries ago. Anyone who reads this law will not be loath to believe that it represents the culmination of a series of efforts to regulate medical practice, and especially medical education, and that it was not merely a chance legal utterance that happened to touch a single important question for the first time. One of the paragraphs of the law even contains some clauses that would prevent fake medical schools and that establishes a board of medical examiners. This consisted of certain state officials and some professors of the art of medicine. In a word, medical education had reached a high grade of development, and medical practice was legally established on a high plane of professional dignity. Salerno had already enjoyed a high reputation as a medical school for more than two centuries when Frederick's law was promulgated. It is true that we have no definite records of dissections done in the school. If these were not an uncommon occurrence, however, but came as did dissections later on, quite as a matter of course, the absence of such records, when we recall how liable to destruction were the meagre accounts of the university transactions of the time during the long period that has intervened and because of the many vicissitudes they were liable to, is not surprising. During the century following this decree there seems to be no doubt that dissections were done regularly, though {66} perhaps not very frequently from our modern standpoint, at Salerno. Salerno, as we shall see in the chapter on The Papal Medical School, was always closely in touch with the ecclesiastical authorities, and especially with the Papacy. There was no hint of friction of any kind, either before or after this law of Frederick's. The question of ecclesiastical interference with dissection does not seem to have arisen at all, much less to have proved an obstacle to the development of medical science. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the center of interest in anatomy and the matter of dissections shifts to Bologna. We have already discussed the question whether Mondino was the first to do public anatomies, and as to whether he performed only the few that by a narrow misunderstanding of certain of his own words have sometimes been ascribed to him. Professor Pilcher, in the article The Mondino Myth, already cited, is of the opinion, and gives excellent reasons for it, that Taddeo, the great Bolognese physician of the thirteenth century, who was Mondino's master, had done at least some dissections in Bologna. Personally I have long felt sure that Taddeo or Thaddeus, as he is sometimes called in the Latin form of his name, did not a few, but a number of dissections. Professor Pilcher's account of him does not exaggerate his merits. I may say that he was one of the great Papal physicians of whom we shall have more to tell hereafter. "Any comprehensive attempt to trace the real influences to which was due so great a step as a return to the practice of dissections of the human body, seems to me must be very defective if it failed to take into consideration the influence of such a man as Thaddeus (Italian Taddeo).{67} That he was able to impress himself in the way in which history records that he did, both upon the general public and upon the scholastic foundations of Bologna, shows a strength of character and a mastery of the peculiar conditions of the moment in the fields of science and philosophy which made him a master and an inspirer. If he is to be considered in his proper historical light, as one who declares that the knowledge of the structure of the human body to a most minute degree is the foundation upon which all rational medicine and surgery must be built, then it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the pivotal moment when, in the development of science, the human body began to be anatomized. Nor is any fault to be found with the custom which has crowned with the laurels of universal appreciation the names of those men who began and who continued anatomical study, who vulgarized the practice of dissection. "In my own investigations and reflections upon the conditions which led up to this happy renewal of scientific search into the composition of the body of man, it has seemed to me that writers have hitherto fallen short of tracing through to its ultimate source, the earlier spirit of enthusiasm for knowledge, of insight into the problems of disease, and of contempt for traditionary shackles, to the influence of which, as shown by the master, Taddeo, the latter work of the pupil, Mondino, was in great measure due." Medici, in his History of the School of Anatomy at Bologna, [Footnote 8] quotes Sarti on The Distinguished Professors of the University of Bologna for proof of Taddeo's familiarity with dissection. Von Töply does not think that {68} this quotation is enough absolutely to prove that Taddeo had done dissections, yet it would be hard to understand it unless some such interpretation is made. Taddeo was asked to decide a medico-legal question with regard to a pregnant woman. He refused, however, with a modesty that might well be commended to medico-legal experts of more modern times, to answer the question decisively, because he had never made a dissection of a pregnant woman. Sarti argues that it is evident from this that he had dissected other bodies more easy to obtain than those of pregnant women, or else that he had had the opportunity to make observations on them when dissected by others. [Footnote 8: Medici Compendio Storico Della Scuola Anatomica de Bologna, Bologna, 1857. ] Certain of Taddeo's contemporaries must have had the incentive of his example to help them to a knowledge of human anatomy, for they surely could not have accomplished all that they did in surgery without experience in dissection, yet Taddeo was looked up to as a master by all of them. Anyone who has read the contributions to surgery of William of Salicet and his great pupil Lanfranc, even if only what we give with regard to them in our chapter on Surgery during the Middle Ages, cannot but be impressed with the idea that they must have done human dissections. They do not mention this fact explicitly, but portions of their surgical works are taken up with the consideration of applied anatomy. They discuss the relations of various structures to one another, especially with reference to the surgery of them. Von Töply, in his Studies on the History of Anatomy in the Middle Ages, says that the anatomies written before William's chapters on applied anatomy, were most of them purely theoretic discussions meant to be guides for internal {69} medicine, or else they were very short directions for those who undertook the practical work of the dismemberment of bodies, usually, however, with reference to animals rather than to human bodies. In William of Salicet we encounter, he says, for the first time a treatise on anatomy made with the deliberate purpose of its application to practical surgery. Everywhere William gives hints for surgical operations with special reference to the anatomical relations. Puccinotti quotes from William of Salicet's surgery, written about 1270, a passage that shows how familiar this surgeon must have been with dissection. The nephew of Count Pallavicini received an arrow wound in the jugular vein and died within an hour. During his death agony he suffered from a peculiar form of rattle in his throat. It was thought that this might be due to the fact that the arrow had been poisoned. William was called in to decide this question, and found that there was nothing responsible for his death except the wound itself. He describes how he found the blood in the lungs and in the heart, and considers that the conditions that were present were due to the wound. Von Töply has suggested that William would have given more details had he actually examined these organs, but when the autopsy report is negative, such descriptive details are not usual even at the present time. If he had found reason for thinking that there was poison in the case, a careful description of the other organs would be necessary. The fact, however, that he was asked to decide such a question, would seem to indicate that he was supposed to have a knowledge of the normal appearances of human tissues when examined by dissection. In everything else Lanfranc went farther than his {70} master William, and he did so also in anatomy. Some of the details of his work will be found in our chapter on Surgery in the Middle Ages. He could not have been able to give the detailed instructions that he has for the treatment of every portion of the body only that he knew them by actual contact in the cadaver as well as the patient. His outlook upon scientific medicine and surgery would satisfy even the most exacting of modern experimental scientists. The famous aphorism of his runs as follows: "Every science which depends on operation is greatly strengthened by experience." More than anything else, however, surgery owes to Lanfranc the distinct advantage that he carried into the West as far as Paris, the methods which had come into existence in Italy, and were ever after to prove a precious heritage in the great French University. As Salicet's work was carried on by Lanfranc, at least as well was Lanfranc's work further advanced by his pupil and successor in the chair of surgery, Henri de Mondeville. This subject of surgical development will be treated in the chapter on Surgery in the Middle Ages. Here it is introduced only to emphasize the opportunity there must have been for anatomical study through dissection in the thirteenth century, or these men would not have made the marvelous progress they actually accomplished in this department. With regard to Mondino, Taddeo's successor at Bologna, enough has been said already in the preceding chapter. About this time, however, very definite evidence begins to accumulate of the frequent practice of dissection. Roth, whose life of Vesalius is a standard work in the history of anatomy, has summed up most of what we know with regard to dissections in the early {71} part of the fourteenth century, in his chapter on Dissection Before Vesalius's Time. Roth's work is well known and is frequently referred to in Dr. White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology. There can be no question, then, but that in taking what Roth has to say I shall be quoting from a work with regard to which there can be no hint even of partiality. Roth himself was a Swiss, with no leaning toward the Church. There are certain portions of his book, indeed, in which he is inclined not to allow that the Church did as much for education in these times as she actually did. His study of the rise of anatomy can be accepted with absolute assurance, that it is at least not written from the standpoint of one who wants to make the situation with regard to anatomy more favorable than it actually was during the fourteenth century, for the sake of showing any lack of opposition on the part of ecclesiastics. Some of the material that Roth has made use of has already been referred to in the preceding chapter, but it has seemed proper to repeat it here because this gives a connected account from a definite authority in the history of medicine, and especially of anatomy, with regard to the century immediately following the promulgation of Boniface's bull. Besides, it gives an opportunity for such comments on various features of the history of anatomy, as he details it, as will bring out the significance of his remarks. His account will make it very clear that, far from the Papal bull in question having been universally construed as prohibiting dissections, as Dr. White says it was, it never entered into the minds of medieval anatomists to consider it as having any such signification. The bull was never thought of in that sense at all. It does not refer to anatomy or dissection and it never had {72} any place in the history of anatomy until dragged into it without warrant by Daunou and other nineteenth century writers. Roth says: "In the pre-Vesalian period the dissection of the human body was practiced, according to the terms of Frederick's law, for the instruction of those about to become physicians and surgeons. The natural place for this school anatomy--for a dissection was called anatomia, or, erroneously, anatomia publica--was at the universities and the medical schools. Apart from teaching institutions, however, public anatomies were held in Strasburg and in Venice. Their purpose was the instruction of the practicing medical personnel of these towns. Dissections which were not made for general instruction were called private anatomies. They were performed for the benefit of a few physicians, or students, or magistrates, or artists. Private anatomies began to have special importance only toward the end of the pre-Vesalian period (this would be about the end of the fifteenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth century). It is a play of chance that the first historical reference to a dissection concerns a private anatomy, one undertaken for the purpose of making a legal autopsy. This was made in Bologna in the year 1302 (two years after the decretal supposed to forbid dissection). A certain Azzelino died with unexpected suddenness, after his physicians had visited him once. A magistrate suspected poison and commissioned two physicians and three surgeons to determine the cause of death. It was found that death resulted from natural causes. (As I have said, it would appear that this was not an unusual procedure, for unless medical autopsies had been done before, it does not seem probable that this method of {73} determining the cause of death would have been so readily taken up.) "Thirteen years later there is an account of the dissection of two female bodies, in January and March of the year 1315, performed by Mundinus." (We have already seen that the fact that the two female bodies should be especially mentioned, though taken by some historians of medicine to indicate that Mundinus had done but few dissections, will not stand such an interpretation, in the light of the evidence that he had dissected many male bodies at least, as his text-book of anatomy indeed makes very clear. These two dissections of females happened only to have special features that made them noteworthy.) "A few years later (1319) there is a remarkable document which tells the story of body-snatching for dissecting purposes." (This would seem to be sufficient of itself to show that a number of dissections were being done, and, indeed, as I have already said, Rashdall, in his History of the Universities, states that, according to the University statutes teachers were bound to dissect such bodies as students brought to them.) Roth concludes with the words (italics are mine): "_These are a few, but weighty testimonies for the zeal with which Bologna pursued anatomy in the fourteenth century._" (I may add that all of these concern the twenty years immediately following Pope Boniface's supposed prohibition.) Nor was the custom of making dissections any less active during the rest of the half century after the time when, if we are to believe Professor White, the decree of Boniface had been universally interpreted to forbid it. In a note to his history of dissection during this period in Bologna, Roth says: "Without doubt the passage in {74} Guy de Chauliac which tells of having very often (multitoties, many times, is the exact word) seen dissections must be considered as referring to Bologna." This passage runs as follows: "My master, Bertruccius, conducted the dissection very often after the following manner: The dead body having been placed upon a bench, he used to make four lessons on it. First, the nutritional portions were treated, because they are so likely to become putrified. In the second, he demonstrated the spiritual members; in the third, the animate members; in the fourth, the extremities." (Guy de Chauliac was at Bologna studying under Bertruccius just before the middle of the fourteenth century. It is evident beyond all doubt, from what he says, that dissections were quite common. This is during the first fifty years after the decree. I shall show a little later that there are records of dissections during the second half of this century. Roth, however, goes on to tell next of the fifteenth century.) Roth says nothing about the decree of Boniface VIII., nor of any possible effect that it had upon anatomy. The real historian, of course, does not mention things that have not happened. Roth confesses, as I have said, that he takes the material for his sketch of anatomy before Vesalius's time from Corradi. [Footnote 9] Corradi being an Italian, and knowing of the slander with regard to the Papal decree, explicitly denies it. Surely, here is material enough to convince anyone that all that Professor White has said with regard to the supposed effect of the misinterpretation of Boniface's decree is without foundation in the history of anatomy. Within twenty years {75} after the bull was issued dissection was practiced to such an extent, that body-snatching became so common that there were prosecutions for it, and public dissections seem to have been held every year in the universities of Italy during most of the fourteenth century. [Footnote 9: Corradi Dello Studio e dell' Insegnamento dell' Anatomia in Italia nel Medio Evo ed in parte del Cinquecento, Padova, 1873.] De Renzi [Footnote 10] gives an interesting account of the methods by which material was obtained for dissection purposes before governments made any special provision for this purpose. Naturally, the rifling of graves was resorted to by students intensely interested in the subject of anatomy. The first criminal prosecution for body-snatching on record is in 1319, when some students brought a body to one Master Albert, a lecturer in medicine at the University at Bologna, and he dissected it for them. At this time, according to the statutes of the university, teachers of anatomy were bound to make a dissection if the students supplied the body. The whole party were brought to trial for this offence, though they do not seem to have suffered any severe penalty for their violation of the laws. At this time, according to De Renzi, there was a rage for dissection and many bodies were yearly obtained surreptitiously for the purpose. [Footnote 10: De Renzi Storia della Medicina in Italia, Napoli. 1845-49, Vol. II., p. 247.] With regard to the bodies of condemned criminals, people began to countenance the procedure, and while unwilling as yet to give them freely, allowed the bodies to be taken. Corradi, quoted by Puschmann, says "that laws against the desecration of graves, without being abolished, became a dead letter. The authorities interfered only if decided violence had been used or a great scandal raised. Such consequences were likely to follow only if, in the ardor of their enthusiasm for anatomical knowledge, students rifled the graves of well-known {76} persons or took the bodies of those whose relatives discovered the desecration and proceeded against the marauders by legal measures." At the Italian universities after the middle of the fourteenth century there is abundant evidence for perfect freedom with regard to dissection. We have already shown by our quotation from Roth that Bertrucci was very active in dissection work and did many public dissections. He was followed by Pietro di Argelata, who died toward the end of the fourteenth century. These men followed Mondino in the chair of anatomy at Bologna, and Julius Pagel, in his chapter on Anatomy and Physiology in Puschmann's Handbuch der Geschichte der Medizin (Vol. I., p. 707), says that "the successors of Mondino were in a position, owing to the gradual enlightenment of the spirit of the time and the general realization of the importance of anatomy as well as the fostering liberality of the authorities, _to make regular, systematic dissections of the human body._" This would bring us down, then, to the end of the fourteenth century. To return now to Roth, who takes up the next century. He says: "For the fifteenth century, the university statutes of Bologna for the year 1405 furnish many sources of information. There is a special division which is concerned with the _annual anatomy or dissection_ that had to be made and the selection of the persons to be present, the payment of the expenses and other details. An addition to the statutes, made in the year 1442, determines the arrangement of the delivery of the body from the city to the university authorities. Every year two bodies, one male and one female, must be provided for the {77} medical school dissections. In default of a female body, a second male body was to be provided. In the presence of such detailed regulations, the absence almost entirely of details as to the actual performance of dissections can mean very little. Bologna reached its highest development as a medical school at the beginning of the sixteenth century when Alexander Achillinus and Jacob Berengarius had charge of the public dissections there. Of these I shall speak later." (All this is at the University of Bologna, where ecclesiastical influence was supreme and where the Popes exercised their jurisdiction as the ultimate authority to be appealed to in all disputed educational questions.) Roth continues: "Padua had, like Bologna, dissection in the fourteenth century. There is the record of a dissection made in the year 1341, in which Gentilis made the discovery of a gall-stone." (It is evidently not because the dissection was unusual, but because the discovery was unusual, that this incident is mentioned. The dissections were such ordinary occurrences as not to deserve special mention except for some particular reason.) "Much more is known about dissection at Padua in the fifteenth century, when the city had become Venetian." [Footnote 11] (It is significant to note that the previous occurrence was in pre-Venetian days, for Professor White insists that it was the Venetian authorities, in opposition to the Pope, who allowed dissection at Padua. Here is the rebuttal of any such theory.) "Bertapaglia, in his Surgery, has the record of the dissection of a criminal made under the direction of Master Hugo De Senis, on {78} the 8th of February, 1429. On the 4th of April, 1430, the dissection of a woman was made. In 1444 Professor Montagnana speaks of fourteen dissections at which he had been present." (This would seem to indicate that dissections were quite common and that the occasional records of them give no proper idea of their actual number.) [Footnote 11: Note that this is a full century before Vesalius's time, who, Professor White insists, reintroduced dissection.] I would not wish to produce the impression, however, that Italy was the only place in Europe in which dissections were freely done during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There is no doubt that anatomy and surgery and every branch of medicine was cultivated much more assiduously and with much better opportunities provided for students down in Italy, than anywhere else in the world. This of itself alone shows the utter absurdity of the declarations that the Church was opposed to medical progress in any way, since the nearer the center of Christendom, the more ardor there was for investigation and the more liberty to pursue original researches. Other countries also began to wake up to the spirit of progress in medical education that was abroad. In France there were two centers of interest in anatomy. One of these was at Montpelier, the other at Paris. It is interesting to note, however, that the men to whom anatomical progress is due at these universities obtained their training, or at least had taken advantage of the special opportunities provided for anatomical investigation to be had, in the Italian cities. Guy de Chauliac I have already mentioned. He is spoken of as the Father of Modern Surgery, and there is no doubt that he did much to set surgery on a very practical basis and to make anatomy a fundamental feature of the training for it. He declared that it was absurd to think that surgeons could do good work unless they knew their anatomy. {79} Under his fostering care the study of anatomy flourished to a remarkable degree at the University of Montpelier. The difficulty hitherto had been that it was very hard to procure bodies for dissecting purposes. It is easy to understand that friends of the dead would always prevent dissections as far as they could. They do so even at the present moment, and there are not many of us who find it in our hearts to blame them over much for it. Few of us are ready to make the sacrifice of our own dead. Even the poor in those days had friends who prevented the cutting up of their remains; for large alms-houses were not presided over by paid officials, but by religious, to whom their poor in their friendlessness appealed as kindred. There were not many prisons, and they were not needed because all felonies were punished by death. Guy de Chauliac realized that here was the best opportunity to procure bodies. Accordingly it was mainly through his instrumentality that a regulation was made handing over the dead bodies of malefactors to the medical school for dissecting purposes. It must be recalled that when he did this the Papal court was at Avignon, in the South of France, and exerted great influence over the University of Montpelier, situate not far away. The reputation of the University of Paris is such that we should not expect her to be backward in this important department of education. As a matter of fact, there is abundant evidence of dissection having been carried on here at the end of the thirteenth century, and the practice was not interrupted at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Lanfranc, the famous surgeon who had studied with William of Salicet in Italy (we have already mentioned both of them and we shall have much {80} to say of them hereafter), taught surgery from a very practical standpoint in Paris, and illustrated his teachings by means of dissections. Lanfranc was succeeded in Paris by Mondeville, whose name is also associated with the practice of dissection by most historians of medicine, and whose teaching was of such a practical character that there can be no doubt that he must have employed this valuable adjunct in his surgical training of students. In general, however, the records of dissecting work and of anatomical development are not near so satisfactory at Paris as in the Italian universities. As is the case in our own day and has always been true, universities were inclined to specialties in the Middle Ages, and the specialty of Paris was Philosophy and Theology. This was choice, however, not compulsion, any more than similar conditions in our own time. The medical school continued to be in spite of this one of the best in the world, though it was not famous for its original work, except in surgery, which is, however, the subject most nearly related to anatomy and the one whose development would seem necessarily to demand attention to anatomy. With the Renaissance, which is usually said to begin after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the consequent dispersion of Greek scholars throughout Italy, a new spirit entered into anatomy as into every other department of intellectual life at this time. The reason for it is not easy to explain. Perhaps the spread of Greek texts with regard to medicine inspired students and teachers to try out their problems for themselves, and so a new impetus was given to anatomical investigation. Whatever it was that caused it, the new movement came unhampered by the Church, and Italy {81} continued to be even to a greater degree than before the Mecca for medical students who wished to do original work in anatomy. During the last fifty years of the fifteenth century anatomy began its modern phase, and original work of a very high order was accomplished. There are five names that deserve to be mentioned in this period. They are Gabriele Zerbi, Achillini, Berengar of Carpi, Matthew of Gradi and Benivieni. Each of these men did work that was epoch-making in anatomy, and each has a place in the history of the science that will never be lost. Zerbi, who did his work at Verona, traced the olfactory nerves and describes the nerve supply of the special senses more completely than it had ever been done before. After his time it was only a question of filling in the details of this subject. Achillini added much to our knowledge of the anatomy of the head, being the first to describe the small bones of the ear and also to recognize the orifices of Wharton's ducts. Besides this, which would have been quite enough to have given him a place in the history of anatomy, he added important details to what had been previously known with regard to the intestines, and described very clearly the ileocecal valve and suggested its function. Matthew of Gradi, or De Gradibus, was the first, according to Professor Turner in his article on Anatomy in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, who represented the ovaries in the correct light as regards their anatomical relations and their function. The most important of these fifteenth century investigators in pure anatomy, however, is Berengarius or Berengar of Carpi, who did his work at Bologna at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth {82} century. His commentaries on Mondino's work show how much he added to that great teacher's instruction. If he had no other distinction than that of having been the first to undertake a systematic view of the several textures of which the body is composed, it would have been sufficient to stamp him as a great original worker in anatomy. He treats successively of the anatomical characters and properties of fat, of membrane in general, of flesh, of nerve, of villus or fibre, of ligament, of sinew or tendon, and of muscle in general. Almost needless to say, he must have made many dissections to obtain such clear details of information, and, as we shall see, he probably did make many hundreds. If he had done nothing else but be the first to mention the vermiform appendix, it would have been quite sufficient to give him a distinction in our day. Everything that he touched, however, he illuminated. His anatomy of the fetus was excellent. He was the first to note that the chest of the male was larger than in the female, while the capacity of the female pelvis was in the opposite ratio. In the larynx he discovered the two arytenoid cartilages. He recognized the opening of the common biliary duct, and was the first to give a good description of the thymus gland. All this, it must be remembered, before the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century, that is, almost before Vesalius was born. Berengar's work was done at Bologna. Some five years before his death Bologna became a Papal city. There is no sign, however, that this change in the political fortunes of the city made any difference in Berengar's application to his favorite studies in anatomy. As we shall see in the chapter on The Papal Medical School, already the Popes were laying the foundations {83} of their own great medical school in Rome, in which anatomy was to be cultivated above all the other sciences, so that there would be no reason to expect from other sources of historical knowledge any interruption of Berengar's work, and it did not come. A fifth great student of anatomy during the fifteenth century was Benivieni, who has been neglected in the ordinary histories of anatomy because his work concerned itself almost exclusively with pathological, not with normal anatomy. In our increasing interest in pathology during the nineteenth century, he has very properly come in for his due share of attention. Professor Allbutt, in his address on the Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery down to the Sixteenth Century, declares that Benivieni should be revered as the forerunner of Morgagni and as one of the greatest physicians of the late Middle Ages. Benivieni's life occupies almost exactly the second half of the fifteenth century, as he was born probably in 1448, and died in 1502. Allbutt says:-- "He was not a professor, but an eminent practitioner in Florence, at a period when, in spite of its Platonism, Florence on the whole was doing most for science; for as Bologna turned to law, Padua turned to humanism and philosophy. He was one of those fresh and independent observers who, like Mondeville, was oppressed by the authority neither of Arab nor Greek." We are not interested, however, at the present time in what he accomplished for surgery, though there are a number of features of his work, including the crushing of stone in the bladder and his puncture of the hymen for retained menses, as well as his methods of division and slow extension of the cicatricial contractions {84} resulting from burns near the elbow, which place him among the most ingenious and original of surgical thinkers. It is his interest in dissection that commends him to us here. He must have done a very great number of autopsies. His interest in the causes of disease was so great that he seems to have taken every possible opportunity to search out changes in organs which would account for symptoms that he had observed. His place in anatomy and the history of pathology has not been properly appreciated in this matter, and Professor Allbutt claims for him the title of Father of Pathology, rather than for those to whom it has been given, and demands for his work done in Florence during the second half of the fifteenth century the credit of laying the real foundation-stones of the great science of pathological anatomy. Unfortunately, he died comparatively young and without having had time properly to publish his own contributions to medical science. Professor Allbutt says:-- "The little book _De abditis causis morborum_ (brief title), was not published in any form by Antony Benivieni himself, but posthumously by his brother Jerome, who found these precious notes in Antony's desk after his death, and with the hearty cooperation of a friend competent in the subject, published them in 1506 in a form which no doubt justly merits our admiration. Benivieni's chief fame for us is far more than all this; it is that he was the founder of pathological anatomy. So far as I know, he was the first to make the custom and to declare the need of necropsy to reveal what he called not exactly "the secret causes," but the hidden causes of diseases. Before Vesalius, before Eustachius, he opened the bodies of the dead as {85} deliberately and clear-sightedly as any pathologist in the spacious time of Baillie, Bright and Addison. Virchow, in his address at Rome, said Morgagni was the first pathological anatomist who, instead of asking What is disease? asked Where is it?" But Benivieni asked this question plainly before Morgagni: "Not only," says he, "must we observe the disease, but also with more diligence search out the seat of it." The precept is so important, I will quote the original words: "Oportet igitur medicum non solum morbum cognoscere, sed et locum in quo fit, diligentius perscrutari." Among the pathological reports are morbus coxae (two cases); biliary calculus (two cases); abscess of the mesentery, thrombosis of the mesenteric vessels; stenosis of the intestine; some remarkable cardiac cases, several of "polypus" (clot, which was a will-of-the-wisp to the elder pathologists); scirrhus of the pylorus, and probably another case in the colon; ruptured bowel (two cases); caries of ribs with exposure of the heart. He gives a good description of senile gangrene which even Paré did not discriminate. He seems to have had remarkable success in obtaining necropsies; concerning one fatal case he says plaintively, "Sed nescio qua superstitione versi negantibus cognatis," etc. Of another he says, "cadavere publicae utilitatis gratia inciso" (the case of cancer of the stomach). With this admirable and original leader, Italian medicine of the fifteenth century closes gloriously, to slumber for some fifty years, till the dayspring of the new learning. Of his work Malpighi says, and apparently with truth, "up to now it is the only work in pathology which owes nothing to anyone." {86} This should be enough, it seems to me, to settle the question that anatomy was permitted very freely before Versalius's time. I have said it in other places, but it may be well to recall here, that Berengar did his dissection at Bologna just before and after the time it became a Papal city and when Papal influence was very strong. In spite of the fact that in 1512 Bologna passed under the dominion of the Popes, there is no question of any interruption or hampering of Berengar's work in anatomy, and as a matter of fact, this great anatomist did not succeed to the professorship of anatomy, which had been held up to this time by Achillini, until in the very year when Bologna came under Papal sway, and had his opportunity to do his independent work only after this. Professor Turner can scarcely find words strong enough to set down his admiration for Berengar and his work. Besides what we have already quoted he says that, "the science of anatomy boasts in Berengar of one of its most distinguished founders." The distinguished Edinburgh anatomist harbors no illusions with regard to any supposed opposition of the Church to dissection or to the development of anatomy. As a life-long student of anatomy who knew the history of his favorite science, he appreciated very well just who had been the great workers in it and where their work had been done. He says that "Italy long retained the distinction of giving birth to the first eminent anatomists in Europe, and the glory she acquired in the names of Mondino, Achillini, Berengar of Carpi, and Massa was destined to become more conspicuous in the labors of Columbus, Fallopius and Eustachius." These are the greatest names in the history of anatomy down to the beginning of the seventeenth century, with the single exception of Vesalius. {87} All this of anatomical development in Italy at universities that were directly under the ecclesiastical authorities would seem to settle all question of interference by the Popes or the Church with any phase of anatomical development. It does not seem sufficient for Dr. White, however. When I called attention to all these details of the history of anatomy, long before the reformation and before Vesalius, Dr. White's response was the following paragraph in which he explains how dissection came to be practiced at all, and reiterates not only his belief that Pope Boniface's bull prevented dissection, but even insists on what cannot but seem utterly absurd to any one who has read even the brief account I have given here, that except at one or two places, and then only to a very limited degree, dissection was not practiced at all. Here is how the history of dissection must be viewed according to Dr. White:-- "But Dr. Walsh elsewhere falls back on the fact that shortly after the decree of Pope Boniface VIII., which struck so severe a blow at dissection, the Venetian Senate passed a decree ordaining that a dissection of the human body should be made every year in the city of Venice, and he leaves his readers to conclude that this effectually proves that dissection had not really been discouraged by the Pope. The very opposite conclusion would be deduced by anyone familiar with the relations between the Republic of Venice and the Papacy. These two powers were always struggling against each other; again and again the Venetian Republic, in maintaining its rights, braved the Papal interdicts. The fact that it allowed dissections, so far from proving that the Pope allowed them, would seem to prove that in this case, and in so many other cases, and especially that of {88} Vesalius of Padua, the Venetian Senate sought to show the Vatican that it would yield none of its rights to clerical control. This very fact--that Venice refused to be bound with regard to anatomical investigation by an order from the Vatican--seems to be entirely in the line with all the other facts in the case, which show that the Roman court had committed itself, most unfortunately, against the main means of progress in anatomy and medicine." Here then is the answer that a modern historian and educator makes to all the representations with regard to the development of anatomy and the practice of dissection during the Middle Ages. If the practice of dissection was permitted it was in spite of the Popes. The fact that there were a dozen of medical schools in Italy at which dissection was carried on is ignored. The great anatomists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries simply did not exist--Dr. White knows nothing about them. There must be no admission that the Popes permitted dissection or any other form of science. Dr. White makes his last stand by a really marvelous tour d'esprit. It was Venice defying the Vatican that permitted dissection. This, he supposes, may help him, for anatomy did develop very wonderfully at Padua when it was Venetian territory. But, as pointed out by Roth, dissection was practiced very successfully, and the anatomical tradition established at Padua, before it came under the dominion of Venice. At all the other important cities of Italy dissection was carried on. We have given some of the evidence for Verona, for Pisa, for Naples, for Bologna, for Florence, and, be it remembered, even for Rome. Padua was the rival of Bologna in anatomy only for a comparatively short time. Bologna {89} always maintained a primacy in the field of anatomy, and never more so than after she became a Papal city at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Vesalius taught and demonstrated not at Padua alone, but also at Bologna and at Pisa. For two centuries Rome was the most successful rival of Bologna, _and hundreds of dissections were done in the Papal Medical School_. Of course, the appeal to Venetian opposition to the Papacy as an explanation for dissection being carried on in Italy in spite of ecclesiastical regulations to the contrary is only a subterfuge. It can only be found in histories written by those who refuse to see facts as they were, because those facts do not accord with pet theories as to Papal Opposition to Science, and the Warfare Between Theology and Science, which must be maintained at all costs, though with an air of apology always for having to tell such unpleasant truths of these old-time religious authorities. {90} THE GOLDEN AGE OF ANATOMY VESALIUS. The Golden Age of discovery in anatomy culminated during the first half of the sixteenth century. This will not be surprising if it is but recalled that this period represents the culmination also of that larger golden age of achievement in art and letters, which has been called the Renaissance. Columbus and Copernicus were giving men a new world and a new universe. Raphael, Michael Angelo, Lionardo da Vinci, the Bellinis and Titian were creating a new world of art. Most of these artists were deeply interested in anatomy. Every phase of human thought was being born anew. Unfortunately, this word Renaissance has given rise to many misunderstandings. Many people have taken its significance of re-birth to mean that art and letters, and with them education and thinking, were born again into the modern world at this time with the coming in of the New Learning, just as if there had been nothing worth while talking about in these lines of human accomplishment in the preceding centuries. Taken in this sense, the word Renaissance is entirely a misnomer. Magnificent achievements in art and letters and every form of education preceded the Renaissance by at least three or four centuries. The Gothic cathedrals and the enduring artistic development that took place in their making, the magnificent organization of technical education in the training of artist artisans by the guilds of the time (we would be glad if our technical schools could accomplish {91} anything like the same results, for evidently, though the name technical education is our invention, these medieval peoples had the reality to a high degree), and finally the universities, which have remained essentially the same down to our own day--all these serve to show how much was done for every form of education many centuries before the beginning of the Renaissance so-called. It is not surprising that with this much of education abroad in the land men succeeded in making enduring literature in every form and in every country in Europe, and in setting examples of style in prose and verse that succeeding generations have nearly always gone back to admire lovingly. Such an amount of education and development of thinking could not have come without profound attention to science, and, as a matter of fact, there was much more anticipation of even what is most modern in our scientific thinking than most scholars seem to have any idea of. Personally, I have found, in writing the history of The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries, more that interested me in the science of this century than in almost any other department of its wonderful educational development. We have already seen that while anatomy had during preceding centuries only the beginning of the development that it was destined to reach during the sixteenth century, it would be a serious mistake to think that the study of anatomy, having died in the old classical days, was not re-born until the sixteenth century. This would be to commit the error that many ardent devotees of the Renaissance make with regard to all the accomplishments of this period. In spite of the contrary almost universal impression, the Renaissance was not original {92} to any marked degree. With the touch of the Greek spirit that had come again into the world, it only carried the preceding work of great original thinkers to a high order of perfection. This happened as well in anatomy as in art and architecture and literature. Anatomical science was a lusty infant of great promise when Vesalius, the Father of Anatomy, came on the scene. The great painters, Raphael and Lionardo and Michael Angelo, owed much to Giotto and Fra Angelico, who had preceded them, but not more than Vesalius and his contemporaries, who did such magnificent work in original anatomical investigation, owed to Mondino, Bertrucci, Zerbi, Achillini, and above all to Berengar of Carpi and Benivieni, who did their work before and just after the sixteenth century opened. There is never a sudden development in the history of any department of man's knowledge or achievement, as there is nothing absolutely new under the sun, though it is still the custom of the young man in his graduation essay to talk of such things, and older men sometimes fail to realize the truth that in history as in biology, life always comes from preceding life--_omne vivum ex vivo_--and there is no such thing as spontaneous generation. If the achievements of this earlier period of scientific work, which affected anatomy even more than any of the other sciences, be kept in mind, the discussion of the Golden Age of Anatomy will find its proper place in the history of the relation of the Popes to science. Though the date of the Golden Age in Anatomy follows that of the so-called reformation, there is absolutely no connection between the two series of events, for the one took place in Germany and the other in Italy. The Golden Age of Anatomy was indeed a perfectly {93} legitimate and quite to be expected culmination of the anatomical interest which had been gradually rising to a climax in the Italian universities during the preceding century. It has a definite place in the evolution of science, and is not a sudden or unlooked for phenomenon. If there was any place in the world at the beginning of the sixteenth century in which the ecclesiastical authorities had much to say with regard to what should not be taught and what should not be studied in the universities, it was Italy. In spite of this fact, all medical men who wanted to do post-graduate work in medicine went down into Italy. This was especially true for those who desired to obtain ampler opportunities for anatomical study than were afforded by the rest of Europe. In his maturer years as a student of medicine, Vesalius went down to Italy in order to avail himself of the magnificent field for investigation that was provided there. This favorable state of affairs as regards research in anatomy had existed for more than a century before his time. It continued to be true for at least two centuries after his time. As a matter of fact, Italy was to the rest of the world of the fifteenth and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the home of post-graduate opportunities in all sciences as well as in medicine. These are not idle words, but are fully substantiated by the lives of the men who stand at the head of our modern medicine. More than a decade before Vesalius was born, Linacre, the distinguished English physician and founder of the Royal College of Physicians, went to Italy to complete his medical studies and incidentally also to round out his education in the midst of the new learning which was so thoroughly cultivated there. When Linacre was leaving Italy, with true classic spirit {94} he set up a little altar on the top of the Alps whence he could get his last view of the Italian plains, and greeted the charming country that he was leaving so reluctantly with the beautiful name of Alma Mater Studiorum. To him, after his return to England, English-speaking medical men owe the establishment of the institution which above all others has helped to uplift the dignity of the medical profession and make the practice of the healing art something more than a mere trade--the Royal College of Physicians. One of Vesalius's most distinguished fellow students at Padua was Dr. John Caius, who was later to become the worthy president of the Royal College of Physicians of England and the author of certain important medical works. Dr. Caius was the first to introduce the practice of public dissections into England. Caius and Vesalius were roommates, though at the time Vesalius was an instructor at the University, and the inspiration of his originality seems to have had a great effect upon young Caius. They were nearly of the same age, though Vesalius was a precocious genius, and Caius's greatness only showed itself in maturity. Caius was studying in Italy partly because the religious disturbances in England had made it uncomfortable for him to remain in his native country, for he was a firm adherent of the old Church and he hoped they would pass over, but mainly because he coveted the opportunities afforded by that country. Later in life, out of the revenues of his position as Royal Physician to Queen Mary and subsequently for some time to Queen Elizabeth, he founded the famous Caius College at Cambridge, usually called Key's College by Cantabrigians. Before either of these men there had been a third {95} distinguished English physician who had gone down to Italy for his education. This was the celebrated and learned John Phreas, who was born about the commencement of the fifteenth century. Very little is known of his career, but what we do know is of great interest. He was educated at Oxford and obtained a fellowship on the foundation of Balliol College. Afterward he seems to have studied medicine with a physician in England, but was not satisfied with the medical education thus obtained. He set the fashion for going down into Italy sometime during the first half of the fifteenth century, and after some years spent at Padua received the degree of doctor in medicine, which in those days carried with it, as the name implies, the right to teach. As not infrequently happens to the brilliant medical student, he settled down for practice in the university town in which he graduated, to take up both occupations, that of teacher and practitioner. He is said to have made a large fortune in the practice of physic. [Footnote 12] The best proof of his scholarship is to be found in some letters still preserved in the Bodleian and in the Library of Balliol College. Personally, I have considered that his career was interesting from another standpoint. I have often looked in history for the cases of appendicitis which occur so frequently in our day and with regard to which people ask how is it they did not occur in the past. The fact is, they did occur, but were unrecognized. People were taken suddenly ill, not infrequently a short time after a meal, and after considerable pain and fever, swelling and great tenderness in the abdomen {96} developed, and they died with all the signs of poisoning. They were actually poisoned, not by some extraneous material, but by the putrid contents of their own intestines which found a way out through the ruptured appendix. These cases were set down as poisoning cases, and usually some interested person was the subject of suspicion. Dr. Phreas's learning had obtained for him an appointment to a bishopric in England, a curious bit of evidence of the absence of opposition between medical science and religion in his time. He died shortly after this, under circumstances that raised a suspicion of poisoning in the minds of some of his contemporaries--but raises the thought of appendicitis in mine,--and one of his rivals was blamed for it. [Footnote 12: Like the other distinguished physicians of this time, John Phreas did not devote himself to medicine alone. He had a taste for literature, and besides being an accomplished scholar he was a poet.] Nor did the custom for English medical students to go down to Italy to complete their education cease with the so-called reformation. Some two generations after Vesalius's time another distinguished Englishman, Harvey, went down to Italy to complete the studies he had already made and eventually to lay the foundation of that knowledge on which he was twenty years later to construct his doctrine of the circulation of the blood. This doctrine, however, remained merely a theory until the distinguished Italian anatomist, Malpighi, after another half century, demonstrated the existence of the capillaries, the little blood vessels which connect the veins and arteries, and by thus showing the continuity of both the blood systems, proved beyond all doubt the certainty of the teaching that the blood does circulate. Students came, moreover, from even the distant North of Europe to the Italian schools of medicine during these centuries. Neil Stensen, or as he is perhaps better known by his Latin name, Nicholas Steno, the {97} discoverer of the duct of the parotid gland, which has been named after him, and of many other anatomical details, especially of the fact that the heart is a muscle, which stamp him as an original investigator of the highest order, after having made extensive studies in the Netherlands and in France to complete the medical education which he had begun in his native city of Copenhagen, went down into Italy to secure freer opportunities for original research than he could obtain anywhere else in Europe. [Footnote 13] [Footnote 13: It may perhaps be of interest to say that while doing investigation in anatomy and certain other sciences allied to medicine, Steno became a convert to the Catholic Church and after some years became a priest. Before his ordination, however, though after his conversion, he received the call to the chair of anatomy at Copenhagen. He accepted this and worked for several years at the Danish University, but was dissatisfied with the state of affairs around him as regards religion and went back to Italy. Eventually he was made a bishop--hence the curious picture of him in a Roman Catholic Bishop's robes in the collection of pictures of professors of anatomy at the University of Copenhagen. Not long after, at his own request, he was sent up to the Northern part of Germany in order to try to bring back to the Church as many of the Germans as might be won by his gentleness of disposition, his saintly character, his wonderful scientific knowledge, and his winning ways. He is the Father of Modern Geology as well as a great anatomist, and his little book on geology was published after he became a priest, yet did not hamper in any way his ecclesiastical preferment nor alienate him from his friends in the hierarchy. He was honored especially by the Popes. In a word, his career is the best possible disproof of any Papal or ecclesiastical opposition to science in his time.] We have mentioned that it was while he was pursuing his special investigations in various Italian universities that Stensen was honored with the invitation to become professor of anatomy at the University of Copenhagen. This was not a chance event, but a type of the point of view in university education at the time. Just as at the present time the prestige of research in a German university counts for much as a recommendation for professorships in our American universities, so in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was it with regard to study in Italy. It was felt that men who had spent {98} several years there could be reasonably expected to know all that there was to be known in the rising sciences of anatomy and physiology; at the same time there was a very general impression, quite justified by the results observed, that those who did their post-graduate work in Italy were nearly always sure to make discoveries that would add to the prestige of their universities later, and that would be a stimulus to students and to the other teachers around them such as could be provided in no other way. If read in the proper spirit, the history of the universities of those times is quite like our own, only for influence, the name of Italy must always be substituted for that of Germany. Yet Italy, if we were to believe some of the writers on the history of education and science, was at this time laboring under the incubus of ecclesiastical intolerance with regard to anatomy and an almost complete suppression of opportunities for dissection. Those who write thus know nothing at all of the actual facts of the history of science, or else they are blinding themselves for some reason to the real situation. Fortunately students of the facts of history, especially those who have devoted any serious attention to the history of medicine, make no such mistake. For them it is perfectly clear that there was a wonderful development in anatomy which took place down in Italy, beginning about the middle of the fifteenth century or even earlier, and which led to the provision of such opportunities for dissection and original research in medicine, that students from all over the world were attracted there. For instance, Professor Clifford Allbutt, in the address on the Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery to the end of the Sixteenth Century, already quoted, has a passage {99} in which, as an introduction to what he has to say about Galen, he sums up the history of anatomy from the return of the Popes from Avignon to Rome, which took place just about the beginning of the last quarter of the fourteenth century, down to the time of Vesalius. This expresses so well what I have been trying to say with regard to the gradual development that led up to the Golden Age of Anatomy and to Vesalius's work, that I quote it. "Meanwhile, however, the return of the Popes to Rome (1374) and the displacement of the Albucasis and Avicenna by the Greek texts renewed the shriveling body of medicine, and with the help of anatomy, Italian medicine awoke again; though until the days of Vesalius and Harvey the renascence came rather from men of letters than of medicine. The Arabs and Paris said: "Why dissect if you trust Galen? _But the Italian physicians insisted on verification; and therefore back to Italy again the earnest and clear-sighted students flocked from all regions._ Vesalius was a young man when he professed in Padua, yet, young or venerable, _where but in Italy would he have won, I would not say renown, but even sufferance!_ If normal anatomy was not directly a reformer of medicine, by way of anatomy came morbid anatomy, as conceived by the genius of Benivieni, of Morgagni, and of Valsalva; the galenical or humoral doctrine of pathology was sapped, and soaring in excelsis for the essence of disease gave place to grubbing for its roots." A sketch of Vesalius's career will give the best possible idea of the influences at work in science during this Golden Age of anatomical discovery, and will at the same time serve to show better than anything else, how {100} utterly unfounded is the opinion that there was opposition between religion, or theology and science, and above all medical science, at this time. On the other hand, it will demonstrate that the educational factors at work in Vesalius's time were not different from those of the preceding century, nor indeed from those that had existed for two or three centuries before his time; and though his magnificent original research introduced the new initiative which always comes after a genius has left his mark upon a scientific department, the spirit in which science was pursued after his time did not differ essentially from that which had prevailed before. He represents not a revolution in medical science, as has so often been said, though always with the purpose of demonstrating how much the so-called reformation accomplished in bringing about this great progress in anatomy, but only a striking epoch in that gradual evolution which had already advanced so far that his work was rendered easy and some such climax of progress as came in his time was inevitable. Vesalius's earlier education was received entirely in his native town of Louvain. There were certain preparatory schools in connection with the university at Louvain, and to one of these, called Paedagogium Castri because of the sign over the door, which was that of a fort, Vesalius was sent. Here he learned Latin and Greek and some Hebrew. How well he learned his Latin can be realized from the fact that at twenty-two he was ready to lecture in that language on anatomy in Italy. His knowledge of Greek can be estimated from the tradition that he could translate Galen at sight, and he was known to have corrected a number of errors in translations from that author made by preceding {101} translators. To those who know the traditions of that time in the teaching of the classic languages along the Rhine and in the Low Countries, these accomplishments of Vesalius will not be surprising. They knew how to teach in those pre-reformation days, and probably Latin and Greek have never been better taught than by the Brethren of the Common Life, whose schools for nearly a hundred years had been open in the Low Countries and Rhenish Germany for the children of all classes, but especially of the poor. Other schools in the same region could scarcely fail to be uplifted by such educational traditions. Altogether, Vesalius spent some nine years in the Paedagogium. As illustrating how men will find what interests them in spite of supposed lack of opportunities, it may be said that from his earliest years Vesalius was noted for his tendency to be inquisitive with regard to natural objects, and while still a mere boy his anatomical curiosity manifested itself in a very practical way. He recalls himself in later years, that the bladders with which he learned to swim, and which were also used by the children of the time as play-toys for making all sorts of noises, became in his hands objects of anatomical investigation. Anatomy means the cutting up of things, and this Vesalius literally did with the bladders. He noted particularly that they were composed of layers and fibres of various kinds, and later on when he was studying the veins in human and animal bodies he was reminded of these early observations, and pointed out that the vein walls were made up of structures not unlike those, though more delicate, of which the bladders of his childhood days had proven to be composed. His preparatory studies over, Vesalius entered the {102} University of Louvain, at that time one of the most important universities of Europe. At the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, Louvain probably had more students than any other university in Europe except that of Paris, and possibly Bologna. There are good grounds for saying that the number in attendance here during the first half of the sixteenth century was always in excess of 5,000. The university was especially famous for its teaching of jurisprudence and philology. The faculty of theology, however, was considered to be one of the strongest in Europe, and Louvain, as might be expected from its position in the heart of Catholic Belgium, was generally acknowledged to be one of the great intellectual bulwarks of Catholicity against the progress of Lutheranism in the Teutonic countries at this time. Vesalius's parents were, and his family always had been, ardent Catholics, so that, quite apart from his dwelling not far away, it was very natural that he should have been sent here. He seems to have spent five years in the university mainly engaged in the study of philosophy and philology, but also of the classics and languages so far as they were taught at that time. It may be noted as another instance in his life of how a student will find that which appeals to him even in the most unexpected sources, that Vesalius took special interest in certain treatises of Albertus Magnus and Michael Scotus, which treated of the human body in the vague, curious way of the medieval scholars, and yet with a precious amount of information, that this inquisitive youth eagerly drank in. More interesting for Vesalius himself were certain studies undertaken entirely independently of his university course. One of his {103} biographers tells that he dissected small animals, rats and mice, and occasionally even dogs and cats, in his eagerness to learn the details of anatomy for himself and at first hand. After graduating at Louvain in philosophy and philology, Vesalius went to Paris to study medicine. At this time at Paris, Sylvius, after whom one of the most important fissures of the brain, the sylvian, is named, was not only teaching anatomy in a very interesting way, but was also providing opportunities for original research in anatomy in connection with his own investigations. The interest that his teaching excited may be gathered from the fact that over 400 students were in attendance at his lectures. Besides Sylvius, Günther of Andernach in Switzerland was also teaching in Paris, and with both of these distinguished professors Vesalius became intimately associated. His deep interest in the subject of anatomy would of itself be quite sufficient to attract the attention of professors, but he had besides the added advantage of being known as the descendant of a family which had occupied prominent posts as medical attendants to the greatest ruling family of Europe. It was at Paris, then, that Vesalius first was able to devote himself with the intense ardor of his character to the study of anatomy. Nothing less than original research at first hand would satisfy his ardent desire for information and his thirst for accurate knowledge. His practical temper of mind was demonstrated by a revolution that he worked in the method of doing dissections at the time. The dissections in Paris used to be performed by the barber-surgeons, as a rule rather ignorant men, who knew little of their work beyond the barest outline of the technics of dissection. Teachers in {104} anatomy used to stand by and direct the operation and demonstrate the various parts. These teachers, however, considered it quite beneath them to use the knife themselves. The faultiness of this method can be readily understood. Vesalius began a new era in the history of anatomy by insisting on doing the dissections himself. It was not long, however, before he realized that Paris could not afford him such opportunities as he desired. Altogether he did not remain there more than a year, and then returned to the Low Countries. At Louvain he continued his anatomical work, finding it difficult enough to procure human material, but using such as might come to hand. The story is told of his first attempt to get a complete skeleton. A felon had been executed just outside the walls of Louvain, and his remains were, as was the custom at that time, allowed to swing on the gibbet until the birds of the air had eaten his flesh and the wind and rain had bleached his bones. As might be thought, these bones were a great temptation to Vesalius. Finally, one night he and a fellow student stole out of the town and robbed the gibbet of its treasure. In order to accomplish their task--no easy one, because the skeleton was fastened to the beams of the scaffold by iron shackles--they had to remain out all night. They buried it and later removed it piecemeal, and when they had finally assembled the parts again it was exhibited as a skeleton brought from Paris. Even this story has been made to do duty as showing the ecclesiastical opposition to dissection and the advancement of anatomical knowledge. It is hard to understand, however, why men will not look at such an incident from the standpoint of our own experience in {105} the modern time. There are men still alive in certain states of the Union who recall how much trouble they had to go to as medical students in order to procure a skeleton. If we go back fifty years, nearly every skeleton that physicians had in their offices was obtained in some way almost as surreptitious as that just described, or was purchased through some underhand channel. They were dug up from potter's field, or sometimes procured from complacent prison officials, or occasionally stolen from respectable cemeteries. In this respect Vesalius was not much worse off than were his medical colleagues for nearly three centuries and a half after his time in the northern countries. It was easier to procure such material in Italy. Vesalius had that precious quality that makes the investigator desire to see and know things for himself. He could not get opportunities for definite anatomical knowledge in the western part of Europe, so he gave up his practice, though Louvain, his native town, was a most promising place, having nearly 200,000 inhabitants and business relations with all the world at the moment, and went down into Italy where he knew that he could pursue his anatomical studies to his heart's content. The tradition of the work that Zerbi and Achillini had done, and especially what Benivieni and Berengar had accomplished within a few decades before this time, was commonly known in all the medical schools of Europe, and many an ardent young anatomist in the West yearned for the opportunities and the incentive that he could obtain down there. Church influence was predominant; the ecclesiastics were the actual rulers of the universities, but medical science, and above all anatomy, was being studied very ardently. Vesalius thus prompted, {106} came and found what he looked for. At the end of ten short years of work down there, he had completed his text-book of anatomy which was to earn for him deservedly the title of Father of Anatomy. At first Vesalius seems to have spent some time in Venice, where he attracted considerable attention by his thorough, practical anatomical knowledge and independent mode of thinking. After only a short period in Venice, however, he proceeded to Padua, where he spent some months in preparation for his doctor's examination. It is known that, having completed his examination in the early part of December, 1537, he was allowed within a few days to begin the teaching of anatomy, and, indeed, was given the title of professor by the university authorities. The next six years were spent in teaching at Padua, Bologna and Pisa, and in fruitful investigation. Every opportunity to make dissections was gladly seized, and Vesalius's influence enabled him to obtain a large amount of excellent anatomical material. He began at once the preparations for the publication of an important work on the anatomy of the human body. This was published in 1543 at Basel, at a time when its author was not yet thirty years of age. It is one of the classics of anatomical literature. Even at the present day it is often consulted by those who wish to see the illustrative details of Vesalius's wonderful dissections as given in the magnificent plates that the work contains. It has become one of the most precious of medical books, and is eagerly sought for by collectors. For ten years more Vesalius devoted himself to his favorite studies in anatomy and physiology, for it must not be forgotten that he was constantly applying his {107} knowledge of form and tissue to function, and came to be looked upon as the leading medical investigator of the world. It is apparently sometimes not realized, however, that Vesalius was no mere laboratory or dissecting room investigator. After the publication of his great work on anatomy he set himself seriously to the application of what he had discovered to practical medicine and surgery. He was an intensely practical man. As a consequence, it was not long before consultations began to pour in on him, and he came to be considered as one of the greatest medical practitioners of his time. Ruling princes in Italy, visitors of distinction, high ecclesiastics--all wished to have Vesalius's opinion when their cases became puzzling. This is a side of his character that many of his modern biographers have missed. Even Sir Michael Foster, whose knowledge of the history of medicine, and especially of physiology, makes one hesitate to disagree with him, seems not to have appreciated Vesalius's interest in practical medicine. A laboratory man himself, he was apparently not able to appreciate why Vesalius should have given up his scientific research in Italy to accept the post of Royal Physician to the Emperor Charles V. Professor Foster thinks it necessary, then, to find some other reason than the temptation of the importance of the position to account for Vesalius's acceptance of it. He concludes that it was because of discouragement in his purely scientific studies as a consequence of the opposition of the Galenists. Opposition on the part of the old conservative school of medicine there was, and some of it was rather serious. This was not enough, however, to have discouraged Vesalius. Professor Foster goes so far as to wax almost sentimental over the {108} fact that the acceptance of the post of physician to Charles V. ended Vesalius's scientific career; "for though in the years which followed the Father of Anatomy from time to time produced something original, and in 1555 brought out a new edition of his Fabrica, differing chiefly from the first one, so far as the circulation of the blood is concerned, in its bolder enunciation of its doubts about the Galenic doctrines touching the heart, he made no further solid addition to the advancement of knowledge. Henceforward his life was that of a court physician much sought after and much esteemed--a life lucrative and honorable and in many ways useful, but not a life conducive to original inquiry and thought. The change was a great and a strange one. At Padua he had lived amid dissections; not content with the public dissections in the theatre, he took parts, at least, of corpses to his own lodgings and continued his labors there. No wonder that he makes in his Fabrica some biting remarks to the effect that he who espouses science must not marry a wife; he cannot be true to both. A year after his arrival at the Court he sealed his divorce from science by marrying a wife; no more dissections at home, no more dissections indeed at all; at most, some few post-mortem examinations of patients whose lives his skill had failed to save. Henceforth his days were to be spent in courtly duties, in soothing the temporary ailments, the repeated gouty attacks of his imperial master, in healing the maladies of the nobles and others round his throne, and doubtless in giving advice to more humble folk, who were from time to time allowed to seek his aid. Whither his master went, he went too, and we may well imagine that in leisure moments he entertained the Emperor and {109} the Court with his intellectual talk, telling them some of the fairy tales of that realm of science which he had left, and of the later achievements of which news came to him, scantily, fitfully and from afar." Professor White has gone much farther than Sir Michael Foster. The English physiologist knew too much about the history of medicine in Italy even to hint at any ecclesiastical opposition with regard to Vesalius. President White, however, has no scruples in the matter. This makes an excellent opportunity to write the kind of history that is to be found in his book. Apparently forgetful of the thought that the Emperor Charles V. was not at all likely to take as his body physician a man who had been in trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities in Italy, he insists that the reason why Vesalius dedicated his great work on anatomy to the Emperor Charles V. was "to shield himself as far as possible in the battle which he foresaw must come." Later he suggests that it was only the favor of the Emperor saved him from the ecclesiastical authorities. All that has been said by historians with regard to the reasons for Vesalius's acceptance of the post of physician to the Emperor Charles V. can only have come from men who either did not know or had for the moment forgotten the story of Vesalius's ancestry. The family tradition of having one of its members as physician to the Court of the German Emperor was four generations old when Vesalius accepted the position. Vesalius's great-grandfather occupied the position of physician-in-ordinary to Marie of Burgundy, the wife of the German Emperor Maximilian I., the distinguished patron of letters in the Renaissance period. He lived to an advanced age as a professor of medicine at Louvain. {110} From this time on Vesalius's family always continued in official medical relation to the Austrian-Burgundy ruling family. His grandfather took his father's place as physician to Mary of Burgundy, and wrote a series of commentaries on the aphorisms of Hippocrates. Vesalius's father was the physician and apothecary to Charles V. for a while, and accompanied the Emperor on journeys and campaigns. What more natural than that his son, having reached the distinction of being the greatest medical scientist alive, should be offered, and as a matter of course accept the post of imperial physician! The simple facts of the matter are that Vesalius came down into Italy in order to study anatomy, because in that priest-ridden and ecclesiastically-ruled country he could get better opportunities for anatomical study and investigation than anywhere else in Europe. He spent ten years there and then wrote his classical work on anatomy. After that he spent some years applying anatomy to medicine. Then when he had come to be the acknowledged leader of the medical profession of the world, the Emperor Charles V., at that time the greatest ruler in Europe, asked him to become his court physician. Vesalius accepted, as would any other medical investigator that I have ever known, under the same circumstances. His position with Charles V. gave him opportunities to act as consultant for many of the most important personages of Europe, and it must not be forgotten that when the King of France was injured in a tournament Vesalius was summoned all the way from Madrid, and gave a bad prognosis in the case. In the light of this simple story of Vesalius's life in Italy, and of the reasons for his going there and his departure, it is intensely amusing to read the accounts of {111} this portion of Vesalius's life, written by those who must maintain at all costs the historical tradition that the Church was opposed to anatomy, that the Popes had forbidden dissection, and that the ecclesiastical authorities were constantly on the watch to hamper, as far as possible at least, if not absolutely to prevent, all anatomical investigation, and were even ready to put to death those who violated the ecclesiastical regulations in this matter. Dr. White, for instance, has made a great hero of Vesalius for daring to do dissection. He was only doing what hundreds of others were doing and had been doing in Italy for hundreds of years; but to confess this would be to admit that the Church was not opposed to anatomy or the practice of dissection, and so perforce Vesalius must be a hero as well as the Father of Anatomy. To read Dr. White's paragraph in the History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, one cannot but feel sure that Vesalius must practically have risked death over and over again in order to pursue his favorite practice of dissection and his original researches in anatomy. I would be the last one in the world to wish to minimize in any way Vesalius's merits. He was a genius, a great discoverer--above all an inspiration to methods of study that have been most fruitful in their results, and withal a devout Christian and firm adherent of the Roman Catholic Church. He was not a hero in the matter of dissection, however, for there was no necessity for heroism. Dissection had been practiced very assiduously before his time in all the universities of Italy, especially in Bologna, which was a Papal city from the beginning of the sixteenth century, and also in Rome at the medical college of the Roman University under the very eye of the Popes. {112} In the light of this knowledge read President White's paragraph with regard to Vesalius: "From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master. In the search for real knowledge he _risked the most terrible dangers, and especially the charge of sacrilege, founded upon the teachings of the Church for ages._ As we have seen, even such men in the early Church as Tertullian and St. Augustine held anatomy in abhorrence, and the decretal of Pope Boniface VIII. was _universally construed as forbidding all dissection, and as threatening excommunication against those practicing it. Through this sacred conventionalism Vesalius broke without fear; despite ecclesiastical censure,_ great opposition in his own profession and popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that could give useful results. No peril daunted him. To secure material for his investigations, he haunted gibbets and charnel-houses, _braving the fires of the Inquisition_ and the virus of the plague." (The italics are mine.) A very interesting commentary on the expressions of Professor White with regard to Vesalius is to be found in a paragraph of Von Töply's article on the History of Anatomy in the second volume of Puschmann's History of Medicine, already quoted. "Out of the fruitful soil so well cultivated in the two preceding centuries, there developed at the beginning of the sixteenth century the Renaissance of anatomy, with all the great and also with all the unpleasant features which belong to the important works of art of that period. One has only to think of Donatello, Mantegna, Michel Angelo, and Verochio to realize these. The Renaissance of anatomy developed in a field of human endeavor which, if it did not owe all, at least owed very much to the art-loving and {113} culture-fostering rulers, Popes and cardinals of the time. Older historians have told the story of the rise of anatomy in such a way that it seemed that the Papal Curia had set itself ever in utter hostility to the development of anatomy. As a matter of fact, the Papal Court placed scarcely any hindrances in its path. On the contrary, the Popes encouraged anatomy in every way." In the page and a half following this quotation Von Töply has condensed into brief form most of what the Popes did for medicine and the medical sciences, though more especially for anatomy, during the centuries from the sixteenth down to the beginning of the nineteenth. Some excerpts from this, with a running commentary, will form the best compendium of the history of the Papal relations to medical education and will show that they are strikingly different from what has usually been said. Von Töply begins with Paul III., who is known in history more especially for his issuance of the Bull founding the Jesuits. It might ordinarily be presumed by those who knew nothing of this Pope, that the Head of the Church, to whom is due an institution such as the Jesuits are supposed to be, would not be interested to the slightest degree in modern sciences, and would be one of the last ecclesiastical authorities from whom patronage of science could possibly be expected. It was he, however, who founded special departments for anatomy and botany and provided the funds for a salary for a prosector of anatomy at Rome. After this practically every Pope in this century has some special benefaction for anatomy to his credit. Pope Paul IV. (1555-59) called Columbus to Rome and gave him every opportunity for the development of his original genius in anatomical research. Columbus had {114} succeeded Vesalius at Padua and had been tempted from there to Pisa by the duke who wished to create in that city a university with the most prominent teachers in every department that there was in Italy, yet it was from this lucrative post that Pope Paul IV. succeeded in winning Columbus. Quite apart from what we know of Columbus's career at Rome and his successful investigation on the cadaver of many anatomical problems, perhaps the best evidence of the friendly relations of the Popes to him and to his work is to be found in the fact that, first Columbus himself, and then after his death his sons, in issuing their father's magnificent work De Re Anatomica, dedicated it to the successor of Pope Paul IV., the reigning Pope Pius IV. In the meantime Cardinal Della Rovere had brought Eustachius to Rome to succeed Columbus. Under Sixtus V., who was Pope from 1585 to 1590, the distinguished writer on medicine, and especially on anatomy, Piccolomini, published his lectures on anatomy with a dedication to that Pope. It is well known that the relations between the professor of anatomy at the Papal Medical School and the Pope were very friendly. As was the case with regard to Colombo or Columbus, so also with Caesalpinus. Columbus was the first to describe the pulmonary circulation. Caesalpinus is generally claimed by the Italians to have made the discovery of the circulation of the blood throughout the body before Harvey. Columbus had been at Pisa and was tempted to come to Rome. Caesalpinus had also been at Pisa until Clement VIII. held out inducements that brought him to Rome. Clement is the last Pope of the century, but Von Töply mentions five Popes in the next century who were in intimate relations with {115} distinguished investigators into medical subjects and whose names are in some way connected with some of the most noteworthy teaching and writing in medical matters during the seventeenth century. It will be readily seen what a caricature of the life of Vesalius is Prof. White's paragraph, if one compares it with the following paragraph taken from so readily available an historical source as the article on the History of Anatomy, by Prof. Turner, of Edinburgh, in the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The distinguished Scotch anatomist who so worthily filled the chair of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh says with regard to Berengar of Carpi, who was the professor of anatomy at Bologna thirty-five years before Vesalius's time, that, "In the annals of medicine Berengar's name will be remembered as one of the most zealous and eminent in cultivating the anatomy of the human body. It was long before the anatomists of the following age could boast of equalling him. His assiduity was indefatigable, and he declares that he dissected above one hundred human bodies." This should be enough, it seems to me, to settle the question that anatomy was permitted very freely before Vesalius's time. Professor Turner's authority in such a matter is above all suspicion. He knew the history of anatomy. If more evidence be needed, compare with President White's fantastic sketch of Vesalius the following sketch of his great contemporary, Columbus or Colombo, to whose anatomical investigations we owe the discovery of the pulmonary circulation: "The fame of Columbus as an anatomical teacher was exceedingly great and widespread. Students were attracted to the universities where he professed, from all {116} quarters and in large numbers. He was an ardent student of his favorite science and was imbued with the genius and enthusiasm of an original investigator. He was not satisfied with the critical examination of mere structure, but extended his researches into the more subtle, difficult and important investigation of the physiological function. He has been most aptly styled the Claude Bernard of the sixteenth century. The work of Columbus is a masterpiece of method and purity of style, as well as on account of its richness in facts and observations. He spent over forty years in these studies and researches. _He dissected an extraordinary number of human bodies. It must have been an age of remarkable tolerance for scientific investigation, for in a single year he dissected no less than fourteen bodies._ He also entered the crypts and catacombs of ancient churches, where the bones of the dead had been preserved and had accumulated century after century, and there, with unwearied care, he handled and compared over a half million of human skulls." This account was written by Dr. George Jackson Fisher in his "Historical and Bibliographical Notes" for the _Annals of Anatomy and Surgery_ (Brooklyn, 1878-1880). All the material that Dr. Fisher used in his sketch is to be found in Roth's "Life of Vesalius," p. 256. Now, Columbus was a contemporary of Vesalius, and worked with him at Bologna. The years of their lives correspond almost exactly. When Vesalius left Padua to become the royal physician to Charles V., it was Columbus who succeeded him. Later he taught also at Pisa. Then, strange as it may seem for those who have put any faith in Dr. White's excursion into medical science, he was invited to become Professor of {117} Anatomy at the Papal University at Rome, and it was while there that he had as many as three hundred students present at his demonstrations in anatomy and there that he did fourteen dissections in one year. The pretense that there was any ecclesiastical objection to dissection becomes absolutely farcical when one compares the life of Vesalius sketched by President White with a motive, and the life of his contemporary and successor, Columbus, by an unbiased physician, whose only idea was to bring out the facts. According to Prof. White's opinion, Vesalius dedicated his work to Charles V. to shield himself as far as possible, and after this gave up his anatomical studies in Italy to put himself under the protection of Charles V. Vesalius's successor, Columbus, did not have to do any such thing. Instead, he went down to Rome, and under the protection of the Popes continued to carry on his anatomical work there. When Charles V. died, however, according to President White, a new weapon was forged against Vesalius. Vesalius was charged with dissecting a living man. President White hints that "the forces of ecclesiasticism united against the innovators of anatomy, and either from direct persecution or from indirect influences Vesalius became a wanderer." Just what that means I do not know. President White does not say that he was exiled, though that idea is implied. There is a great deal of doubt about this charge of Vesalius having made an autopsy on a living person. Roth discusses various versions. The whole thing seems to be a trumped-up story; but supposing it true, would it not be only proper that a man who made an autopsy on a living person should be brought before the court? He certainly would {118} in our day in any civilized country. Professor Foster, of the University of Cambridge in England, following the lead of President White in this matter, blames the Inquisition for instituting the prosecution. If this were true, no more proof would be needed that the Inquisition was a civil and not a religious institution, since after all the killing of a man by a premature autopsy is a plain case of homicide. The fact of the matter seems to be that Vesalius, who had not been very well in the unsuitable climate of Madrid, made the trip to the Holy Land, partly for reasons of health, but partly also for reasons of piety. While returning he was shipwrecked on the island of Zante and died from exposure. Vesalius had been born in Brabant, at that time one of the most faithful Catholic countries in Europe. Like most of the other great men of his time, the reformation utterly failed to tempt him from his adhesion to the Catholic Church. His greatest colleagues in anatomy and in medicine were Italians, most of whom were in intimate relations with the Catholic ecclesiastics of the time and continued this intimacy in spite of the disturbing influences that were abroad. Many of these men will be mentioned in our account of the Papal Medical School and of the Papal Physicians during the next two or three centuries. The distinguished anatomists and physicians of France in Vesalius's time were quite as faithful Catholics as he was. Even Paracelsus, the Swiss, whose thorough-going independence of mind would, it might naturally seem, have tempted him to take up with the reformed doctrines, had no sympathy with them at all. He recognized the abuses in the Church, but said that Luther and the so-called reformers were doing much more harm {119} than good, and that until they were gotten rid of no improvement in ecclesiastical matters could be looked for. When Paracelsus came to die he left his money mainly to the Shrine of the Blessed Virgin in his native town of Einsiedeln and for masses for his soul. Since their time most of the distinguished medical scientists have been quite as faithful in their Catholicity as these two great medical colleagues of the Renaissance period. While medicine is supposed to be unorthodox in its tendencies, the really great thinkers in medicine, the men to whose names important discoveries in the science were attached, were not only faithful believers in the doctrines of Christianity, but were much more often than has been thought even devout Catholics. At the death of Vesalius the Golden Age of the development of anatomy was not at its close, but was just beginning. Eustachius, Caesalpinus, Harvey and Malpighi were during the course of the next century to make anatomy a science in the strict sense of that word. After Vesalius's time the history of anatomy in Italy centers around the Papal Medical School to a great extent. During Vesalius's lifetime his greatest rival became the professor of anatomy there. The anatomical school of Bologna, in connection with that city, became an important focus of anatomical investigation. At this time Bologna was a Papal city. It was in the dominions of the Popes, then, as we shall see, that anatomy was carried on with the most success and with the most ardor. Far from there being any opposition to the development of the science, every encouragement was given to it, and it was the patronage of the Popes and of the higher ecclesiastics that to a great degree made possible the glorious evolution of the science during the next century. {120} SUPPOSED PAPAL PROHIBITION OF CHEMISTRY. A false impression, exactly corresponding to that with regard to anatomy, has been created and fostered by just the same class of writers as exploited the anatomy question, with reference to the attitude of the Popes and the Church of the Middle Ages toward the study of chemistry. This is founded on a similar misrepresentation of a Papal document. When it was pointed out that this Papal document, like Pope Boniface's bull, had no such purport as was suggested, just the same subterfuge as with regard to anatomy was indulged in. If the Papal document did not forbid chemistry directly, as was said, at least it was so misinterpreted, and chemistry failed to develop because of the supposed Papal opposition. These expressions were used, in spite of the fact that, just as in the case of anatomy, it is not hard to trace the rise and development of chemistry, or its predecessor, alchemy, during the years when it is supposed to be in abeyance. Certainly there was no interruption of the progress of chemical science at the date of the supposed Papal prohibition, nor at any other time, as a consequence of Church opposition. The similarity of these two history lies is so striking as to indicate that they had their birth in the same desire to discredit the Popes at all cost, and to make out a case of opposition on the part of ecclesiastical authorities to scientific development, whether it actually existed or not. The surprise is, however, that the same form of invention should have been used in both cases. One {121} might reasonably have expected that the ingenuity of writers would have enabled them to find another basis for the story on the second occasion. Still more might it have been expected that when the error with regard to the tenor of the Papal document was pointed out to them, a different form of response would be made in the latter instance. The whole subject indicates a dearth of originality that would be amusing if it were on a less serious matter, and does very little credit either to those who are responsible for the first draft of the story, but still less to those who have swallowed it so readily and given it currency. The story of the Supposed Papal Prohibition of Chemistry was characteristically told by William J. Cruikshank, M. D., of Brooklyn, New York, in an address bearing the title, "Some Relations of the Church and Scientific Progress," published in The Medical Library and Historical Journal of Brooklyn for July, 1905. The writer called emphatic attention to the fact that chemistry, during the Middle Ages, had come under the particular ban of the ecclesiastical authorities, who effectually prevented its cultivation or development. "The chemist," Dr. Cruikshank says, "was called a miscreant, a sorcerer, and was feared because of his supposed partnership with the devil. He was denounced by Pope and priest and was persecuted to the full extent of Papal power. Pope John XXII. was especially energetic in this direction, and in the year 1317 A.D., issued a bull calling on all rulers, secular and ecclesiastical, to hunt down the miscreants who were afflicting the faithful, and he thereupon increased the power of the Inquisition in various parts of Europe for this purpose." At the suggestion of the editor of the Medical Library {122} and Historical Journal, I answered these assertions of Dr. Cruikshank, pointing out that the Papal document which he mentioned had no such purport as he declared, and that the history of chemistry or alchemy presented no such break as his assertions would demand. Dr. Cruikshank immediately appealed by letter to his authority on the subject, whose words, in the History of the Warfare of Theology with Science in Christendom, though I did not realize it at the time, he had repeated almost literally. In his chapter on From Magic to Chemistry and Physics, Dr. Andrew D. White says: "In 1317, Pope John XXII. issued his bull _Spondent pariter,_ levelled at the alchemists, but really dealing a terrible blow at the beginning of chemical science. He therefore called on all rulers, secular and ecclesiastical, to hunt down the miscreants who thus afflicted the faithful, and he especially increased the power of inquisitors in various parts of Europe for this purpose." It will be seen that, as I have said, Dr. Cruikshank's words are almost a verbatim quotation from this paragraph. It is true that he has strengthened the expressions quite a little and added some trimmings of his own, still I suppose his expressions could be justified if those of President White had a foundation in fact. A little comparison of the two sets of phrases will show how a history lie grows as it passes from pen to pen. _Crescit eundo_--like rumor, it increases in size as it goes. In defense of this passage in the History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Dr. White wrote a letter of reply to Dr. Cruikshank, which was incorporated into Dr. Cruikshank's response to my article in the Medical Library and Historical Journal. I presume that this was done with Dr. White's permission. {123} In this letter he admitted that Pope John's decretal had no such significance as he originally claimed for it, but he still maintained his previous opinion, that this decretal, like Boniface's bull for anatomy, had actually prevented, or at least greatly hampered the study of chemistry. To this I replied with a brief story of chemistry in the fourteenth century, and though that article was published more than a year ago, no admission has been made and nothing further has been published on the subject. The material of the reply to Dr. White, to which as yet there has been no answer, is comprised in this chapter. As I have already hinted, the most surprising thing about this citation of a Papal decree forbidding chemistry, is that it proves on investigation to be founded on just exactly the same sort of misinterpretation of a Papal document as happened with regard to anatomy. The bull of Pope Boniface VIII. forbidding the boiling of bodies and their dismemberment for burial in distant lands, did nothing to hinder the progress of anatomy, had no reference to any preparations required for dissection, and was not misinterpreted in any such sense until the nineteenth century, and then only for the purpose of discrediting the Popes and their relations to science. Pope Boniface's bull, far from being harmful in any way to education or to the people, was really beneficial, and constituted an excellent sanitary regulation which doubtless prevented, on a number of occasions, the carriage of disease from place to place. The decree of Pope John XXII., which has been falsely claimed to forbid chemistry, was another example of Papal care for Christendom, and not at all the obscurantist document it has been so loudly proclaimed. Pope {124} John learned how much imposition was being practiced on the people by certain so-called alchemists who claimed to be able to make silver and gold out of baser metals. In order to prevent this, within a year after his elevation to the pontificate he issued not a bull, but a very different form of document--a decretal--forbidding any "alchemies" of this kind. The punishment to be inflicted, however, instead of being the penalty of death, as Dr. Cruikshank, Dr. White and many others have declared, or at least let it be understood from their mode of expression, was that the person convicted of pretending to make gold and silver and selling it to other people, should pay into the public treasury an amount equal to the supposed amount of gold and silver that he had made. _The money thus paid into the public treasury was to be given to the poor._ The best way to show exactly what Pope John intended by his decree is to quote the decree. It does not occur in the ordinary collection of the bulls of John XXII., for it was not, as we have said, a bull in the canonical sense of the term, but a Papal document of minor importance. There is an important distinction between a decree and a bull, the former being but of lesser significance, usually referring only to passing matters of discipline. The decretal may be found in the Corpus Juris Canonica, Tome II., which was published at Lyons in 1779. It is among the decrees or constitutions known as Extravagantes. [Footnote 14] [Footnote 14: The meaning of this term we discussed in the previous chapter on Anatomy in relation to the bull of Boniface and Liber VI. The motto of the publisher of the volume in which it occurs deserves quotation because of its apt application in the present circumstance. It is in Latin: "Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris"--"What you would not have done to yourself, don't do to another." If writers about the Popes were as careful to substantiate accusations against them as fully as they would like any accusations against themselves to be corroborated before being accepted and circulated, we should hear much less of Papal intolerance and of Church opposition to science. Even a dead Pope must be considered as a man whose reputation one should not malign without good reason and substantial proof. I must add that, as with regard to the other Papal documents mentioned, I owe the copy of this decree to Father Corbett, of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, Overbrook, Pennsylvania, and am indebted to him besides for many helpful suggestions.] {125} We quote the decree as it is found in Canon Law: The Crime of Falsification. "Alchemies are here prohibited and those who practise them or procure their being done are punished. They must forfeit to the public treasury for the benefit of the poor as much genuine gold and silver as they have manufactured of the false or adulterate metal. If they have not sufficient means for this, the penalty may be changed to another at the discretion of the judge, and they shall be considered criminals. If they are clerics, they shall be deprived of any benefices that they hold and be declared incapable of holding others." (See also the Extravagant of the same John which begins with the word 'Providens' and is placed under the same title.) [Footnote 15] [Footnote 15: The decree referred to here was issued by John XXII. against the counterfeiting of the money of France. The fact that the two decrees should be considered by canonists as connected in subject shows just what was thought to be the purport of the first, namely, to prevent the debasement of the currency by the admixture of adulterate gold as well as to protect the ignorant from imposition.] "Poor themselves, the alchemists promise riches which are not forthcoming; wise also in their own conceit they fall into the ditch which they themselves have digged. For there is no doubt that the professors of this art of alchemy make fun of each other because, conscious of their own ignorance, they are surprised at those who say anything of this kind about themselves; when the truth sought does not come to them they fix on a day [for their experiment] and exhaust all their arts; then they dissimulate [their failure] so that finally, though there is no such thing in nature, they pretend to make genuine gold and silver by a sophistic transmutation; to such an extent does their damned and damnable temerity go that they stamp upon the base metal the characters of {126} public money for believing eyes, and it is only in this way that they deceive the ignorant populace as to the alchemic fire of their furnace. Wishing to banish such practices for all time, we have determined by this formal edict that whoever shall make gold or silver of this kind or shall order it made, provided the attempt actually follows, or whoever shall knowingly assist those engaged (actually) in such a process, or whoever shall knowingly make use of such gold or silver either by selling it or giving it for debt, shall be compelled as a penalty to pay into the public treasury, to be used for the poor, as much by weight of genuine gold and silver as there may be of alchemic metal, provided it be proved lawfully that they have been guilty in any of the aforesaid ways; for those who persist in making alchemic gold, or, as has been said, in using it knowingly, let them be branded with the mark of perpetual infamy. But if the means of the delinquents are not sufficient for the payment of the amount stated, then the good judgment of the justice may commute this penalty into some other (as, for example, imprisonment, or another punishment, according to the nature of the case, the difference of individuals, and other circumstances.) Those, however, who in their regrettable folly go so far as not only to sell moneys thus made but even despise the precepts of the natural law, pass the bounds of their art and violate the laws by deliberately coining or casting or having others coin or cast counterfeit money from alchemic gold or silver, we proclaim as coming under this animadversion, and their goods shall be confiscate, and they shall be considered as criminals. And if the delinquents are clerics, besides the aforesaid penalties they shall be deprived of any benefices they shall hold and shall be declared incapable of holding any further benefices." [Footnote 16] [Footnote 16: The Latin text of this decretal will be found entire in the appendix.] It is evident that John's decree against "The Crime of Falsification" did not directly forbid chemistry, nor alchemy in the proper sense of the word, nor did it in any way interfere with the study of substances to {127} determine their composition, or the synthesis of materials to produce others, provided there was no pretense of making gold and silver in order to obtain genuine gold and silver from ignorant dupes. There seems to be no doubt that had the famous scheme to obtain gold from sea water, which caused serious loss to so many foolish and even poor people a few years ago, come up during the time of John XXII., he would have prevented it from being so lucrative to its promoters, by publicly denouncing them and promulgating a law for their punishment. It may be considered that excommunication was not a very severe penalty for such dishonest practices, and that the sharpers who gave themselves to such a profession, which would be about that of the confidence or green goods men of our time, were not likely to be affected much by this merely religious deprivation. It must not be forgotten, however, that in those ages of faith, excommunication became an extremely telling social punishment. It was forbidden that anyone, even nearest and dearest friends, should have anything to do with the one excommunicated until the ban was removed. It was bad enough in a town where everyone belonged to the same church, and all went to church frequently, to be forbidden to go there; it was infinitely worse, however, to have everybody who passed refuse to greet you or have relations of any kind with you. President Hadley, of Yale, said, not long since, that social ostracism is the only effective punishment for such manifest extra legal irregularities, which are yet not so essentially criminal as to bring those guilty of them under legal punishment. The sentence of excommunication was an effective social ostracism--the {128} completest possible. This is an aspect of excommunications usually missed, but well deserving of study by those who resent the use of such an instrument by ecclesiastical authorities. Just as soon as the man repented of what he had done and promised to do so no more, he was received back into the Church, and the ostracism ceased, so long as he did not relapse into his forbidden ways. When the eminently beneficial character of this Papal document is thus appreciated, it is indeed painful to have to realize, that for its issuance John has been held up more to scorn and ridicule than perhaps has ever been the case for any other single formal document that has ever been issued by an ecclesiastical or political authority. He was simply correcting an abuse in his day, the existence of which we recognize and would like to be able to correct in ours. For this eminently proper exercise of the Papal power, however, his whole character has been called into question, and a distinguished modern educator has used every effort to place him in the pillory of history, as one of the men who have done most to hamper progress in science and education in all world history. The amusing thing is the utter inequality between the document itself and its supposed effects. Of course it had no such effect as President White claims for it, and, indeed, he seems never to have seen the document in its entirety before it was called forcibly to his attention long after his declarations with regard to it were published. The real attitude of Pope John XXII. with regard to education and the sciences, which was exactly the reverse of that predicated of him by his modern colleague in education, will be the subject of the next chapter. {129} There is another document of John XXII., the bull _Super Illius Specula_, that has been sometimes quoted, or rather misquoted, and which indeed at first I was inclined to think was the bull referred to by Dr. Cruikshank. This second Papal document, however, was not issued until 1326. It is concerned entirely with the practice of magic. The Pope knew that many people, by pretended intercourse with the devil or with spirits of various kinds, claimed to be able to injure, to obtain precious information, to interpret the future and the past, and to clear up most of the mysteries that bother mankind. We have them still with us--the palmist, the fortune-teller, the fake-spiritist. In order to prevent such impostures, John issued a bull forbidding such practices under pain of excommunication. It is almost needless to say that this Papal document must have effected quite as much good for the people at large as did the previous one forbidding "alchemies," which must have prevented the robbing of foolish dupes who were taken with the idea that the alchemists whom they employed could make gold and silver. Of this second Papal document, this time really a bull, we shall, because President White has given it an even falser construction than the one we have just been discussing, have more to say in the next chapter. We must return, however, to the decretal _Spondent pariter,_--the decree supposed to have forbidden chemistry; for as with regard to the bull of Boniface VIII., previously discussed, it seems that it is necessary not only to show that the decree was not actually intended by the Popes to prohibit chemistry, but also it will have to be made clear that it was not misinterpreted so as to hamper chemical investigation. This is indeed a very {130} curious state of affairs in history. First, it is solemnly declared, that certain bulls and Papal documents were directed deliberately against the sciences of anatomy and chemistry by the Head of the Church, who wished to prevent the development of these sciences lest they should lessen his power over his people. Then, when it is shown that the documents in question have no such tenor, but are simple Papal regulations for the prevention of abuses which had arisen, and that they actually did accomplish much good for generations for which they were issued, the reply is not an acknowledgement of error, but an insistence on the previous declaration, somewhat in this form: "Well, the Popes may not have intended it, but these sciences, as a consequence of their decrees, did not develop, and the Popes must be considered as to blame for that." Then, instead of showing that these sciences did not develop, this part is assumed and the whole case is supposed to be proved. Could anything well be more preposterous. And this is history! Nay, it is even the history of science. When I called attention to the fact that this decretal contained none of the things it was said to, and published the text of it, Dr. White very calmly replied: "Dr. Walsh has indeed correctly printed it, and I notice no flaw in his translation." Instead of conceding, however, that he had been mistaken, he seemed to consider it quite sufficient to add, "I have followed what I found to be the unanimous opinion of the standard historians of chemistry." He did not mention any of the historians, however. I asked him by letter to name some of the standard historians of chemistry who made this declaration, but though I received a courteous reply, it contained no names, and, indeed, avoided the question {131} of chemistry entirely. It is not too much to expect that an historian shall quote his authorities. Dr. White seems to be above this. Some documents that he quotes are distorted, and prove on examination, as we have seen, to have quite a different meaning to that which he gives them. As might be expected, his supposed facts prove to have as little foundation. It will be remembered that he completely ignored or was ignorant of the history of anatomy. He seems to have been just as ignorant of the history of chemistry, in spite of his confident assurance in making far-reaching statements with regard to it. In order to satisfy myself, I went through all of the standard histories of chemistry in German, English and French that are available in the libraries of New York City, and I failed to find a single one of them which contains anything that might be supposed even distantly to confirm President White's assertion. I may have missed it, and shall be glad to know if I have. I cannot do more than cite certain of them that should have it very prominently, if Dr. White's assertion is to be taken at its face value. Here are some standard historians whom I have searched in vain for the declaration that all of them should have. Kopp, who is the German historian of chemistry, mentions the fact that there was much less cultivation of chemistry during the fourteenth century than during the thirteenth, but makes no mention of the bull of Pope John as being responsible for it. There are curious cycles of interest in particular departments of science, with intervals of comparative lack of interest that can only be explained by the diversion of human mind to other departments of study. This seems to have happened with regard to chemistry in the fourteenth century. {132} Hoefer, the French historian of chemistry, mentions the fact that Pope John XXII. took severe measures against the alchemists who then wandered throughout the country, seeking to enrich themselves at the expense of the credulity of the people. He evidently knew of this decree then, but he says nothing of its forbidding or being misinterpreted, so as to seem to forbid chemical investigation. Thomson, the English historian of chemistry, has no mention of any break in the development of chemical science, caused by any action of the Popes, though, to the surprise doubtless of most readers, he devotes considerable space to the history of chemical investigation during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Ernst von Meyer mentions the fact that alchemy was abused by charlatans, in order to make pretended gold and silver, and notes that there was not so much interest in chemistry in the fourteenth as in the thirteenth century, but does not ascribe this fact to the bull of Pope John. I expected at least that I should find something with regard to the question of the possible influence of the bull in Berthelot's "History of Chemistry in the Middle Ages." [Footnote 17] But though there are various historical topics treated that would seem to imply the necessity for saying something about the bull, if it had any such effect as described, yet there is no mention of it. He mentions the Franciscan alchemists of northern Italy, who lived about this time, and discusses the "Rosarium," written very probably after the date of the bull by a Franciscan monk, but there is no suggestion as to any hampering of alchemy by Papal or other ecclesiastical restrictions. [Footnote 17: Berthelot's Histoire de la Chimie au Moyen Age. Paris, 1893.] {133} The French Grande Encyclopedie does not mention it, nor does a German encyclopaedia, also consulted. Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its article on alchemy, makes no mention of the prohibition of alchemy by Pope John XXII., and when the Encyclopaedia Britannica does not mention any scandal with regard to the Popes, then the scandal in question must have an extremely slight or no foundation. Of course this is what might be expected. Anyone who reads the Papal decree can see at once that it has nothing to do with, or say about, chemistry or chemical investigation. Since, however, an aspersion has been cast upon the progress of chemistry during the Middle Ages, and since it will surely be thought by many people that, if chemistry did not happen to interest mankind at that time, it must have been because the Pope was opposed to it (for such seems to be the curious chain of reasoning of certain scholars), it has seemed well to review briefly the story of chemistry during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. More will be said about it in the chapter on Science at the Medieval Universities, and here the only idea is to bring out the fact that men were interested in what we now call chemical problems; that whatever interest they had was absolutely unhampered by ecclesiastical opposition; that indeed the very men who did the best work in this line, and their work is by no means without significance in the history of science, were all clergymen; and that most of them were in high favor with the Popes, and some of them have since received the honor of being canonized as saints. Take for a moment the example of the great English medieval scientist who wrote near the end of the {134} thirteenth century a work on science, which was undertaken at the command of the Pope of his time, to show him the character of the teaching of science at the University of Oxford. Roger Bacon defined the limits of chemistry very accurately and showed that he understood exactly what the subject and methods of investigation must be, in order that advance should be made in it. Of chemistry he speaks in his "Opus Tertium" in the following words: "There is a science which treats of the generation of things from their elements and of all inanimate things, as of the elements and liquids, simple and compound, common stones, gems and marble, gold and other metals, sulphur, salts, pigments, lapis lazuli, minium and other colors, oils, bitumen, and infinite more of which we find nothing in the books of Aristotle; nor are the natural philosophers nor any of the Latins acquainted with these things." The thirteenth century saw the rise of a number of great physical scientists, who made observations that anticipated much more of our modern views on scientific problems than is usually thought. One of the greatest of the chemists of the thirteenth century was Albert the Great, or Albertus Magnus, as he is more familiarly called, who taught for many years at the University of Paris. He was a theologian as well as a physician and a scientist. His works have been published in twenty-one folio volumes, which will give some idea of the immense industry of the man. Those relating to chemistry are as follows: Concerning Metals and Minerals; Concerning Alchemy; A Treatise on the Secrets of Chemistry; A Brief Compend on the Origin of the Metals; A Concordance, that is, a Collection, of Observations from Many Sources, with Regard to the Philosopher's {135} Stone; A Treatise on Compounds; a book of eight chapters on the Philosopher's Stone. Most of these are to be found in his works under the general heading "Theatrum Chemicum." Thomson, in his "History of Chemistry," says, that they are, in general, plain and intelligible. Albertus Magnus's most famous pupil was the celebrated Thomas Aquinas. Three of his works are on chemistry: The Intimate Secrets of Alchemy; on the Essence and Substance of Minerals; and finally, later in life, the Wonders of Alchemy. It is in this last work, it is said, that the word _amalgam_ occurs for the first time. While Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus were working in France and Germany, Roger Bacon was doing work of similar nature at Oxford in England. Altogether, he has eighteen treatises on chemical problems. Some of these contain wonderful anticipations of modern chemistry. After Roger Bacon came Raymond Lully, who wrote, in all, sixteen treatises on chemical subjects. At about the same time, Arnold of Villanova was teaching medicine at Paris and paying special attention to chemistry. From him there are twenty-one treatises on chemical subjects still extant. Arnold of Villanova died on the way to visit Pope Clement V., the immediate predecessor of John, who lay sick unto death at Avignon. It is evident, then, that there was no spirit of opposition to chemistry gradually forming itself in ecclesiastical circles, and about to be expressed in a decree by John. The chemists of the thirteenth century had been among the most distinguished churchmen of the period. One of them at least, Thomas Aquinas, had been declared a saint. Another, Albertus Magnus, has been given the title of Blessed, signifying that his life and {136} works are worthy of all veneration. Pope John XXII. had as a young man been a student of these men at the University of Paris, and would surely have imbibed the tradition of their interest in the physical sciences. That he should have unlearned all their lessons seems out of the question. It remains, then, to see whether there was any diminution of the interest in chemistry after the issue of this decree by John. In the fourteenth century we find the two Hollanduses, probably father and son, whose lives run during most of the century, doing excellent work in science. They frequently refer to the writings of Arnold of Villanova, so that they certainly post-date him. From them altogether, we have some eleven treatises on various chemical subjects. Some of these, especially with regard to minerals, have very clear descriptions of processes of treatment which serve to show that their knowledge was by no means merely theoretical or acquired only from books. Probably before the end of the fourteenth century there was born a man who must be considered the father of modern pharmaceutical chemistry. This was Basil Valentine, the German Benedictine monk, whose best known work is the "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony." Its influence can be best appreciated from the fact that it introduced the use of antimony into medicine definitely, and that substance continued to be used for centuries, so that it was not until practically our own generation that the true limitations of its usefulness were found. Valentine described the process of making muriatic acid, which he called the spirit of salt, and taught how to obtain alcohol in concentrated form. Altogether, this monk-alchemist, who was really the {137} first of the chemists, left twenty-three treatises, some of them good-sized books, on various subjects in chemistry. [Footnote 18] It does not look, then, as though chemistry was much neglected during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. [Footnote 18: For a brief sketch of his career see my Catholic Churchmen in Science. Dolphin Press, Philadelphia. 1906.] One step more in the history remains to be taken, which brings us down to a man who is more familiar to modern physicians--Paracelsus. Paracelsus received his education just at the beginning of the sixteenth century, before the Reformation began. He was not a man, as those who know his character will thoroughly appreciate, to confess that he had received much assistance from others. He does mention, however, that he was helped in his chemical studies by the Abbot Trithemius, of Spanheim; by Bishop Scheit, of Stettbach; by Bishop Erhardt, of Lavanthol; by Bishop Nicholas, of Hippon; and by Bishop Matthew Schacht. We have been able to follow, then, the development of chemistry during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries down to the time of the Reformation, and find nowhere any lessening of the ardor for chemical studies, though most of the great names in the science continue to be, as they were before the decree was issued, those of distinguished ecclesiastics. John's decree, then, was neither intended to hamper the development of chemistry, nor did it accidentally prevent those who were most closely in touch with the ecclesiastical authorities from pursuing their studies. Those, of course, who knew anything of the character of the author, would not expect it to interfere with the true progress of science. As we shall see in the next chapter, Pope John XXII. was really one of the most liberal patrons of education and of science in history. {138} A PAPAL PATRON OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE. The question of the Papal bull supposed to forbid chemistry, or at least its mother science, alchemy, has necessarily brought into prominence in this volume the name of Pope John XXII. Few Popes in history have been the subject of more bitter denunciation than John. Writers on the history of the Papacy who were themselves not members of the Catholic Church, have been almost a unit in condemning him for many abuses of Papal power, especially such as were associated with the employment of Church privileges for the accumulation of money. Certain Catholic historians even have not found themselves able to rid their appreciation of the character of Pope John from similar objections. It is acknowledged that he was one of the most learned men of his time. It is confessed that he was one of the most abstemious of men. Indeed, in this respect he has been very appropriately compared with Pope Leo XIII. He did succeed in setting the Papacy on a firm foundation in Avignon, and did arrange the financial economy of the Church in such a way that large amounts of money were bound to accumulate in the Papal treasury. This has been the main element of the accusations against him. A prominent American encyclopaedia summed up his character very trenchantly as follows: "He was learned in Canon Law and was remarkable for avarice." Many have not hesitated to say that even his condemnation of alchemy had for its main purpose {139} the idea of added revenues for the Papal See, by the fines inflicted, and by the confiscation of the goods of those condemned as well as by the Court fees in the matter, though there is nothing in the decree to justify such an opinion, and we have pointed out that the fines collected were, according to the document itself, to be given to the poor. With the ecclesiastical aspects of Pope John's character we have nothing to do here. It would require a large volume by itself properly to tell the story of his life, for he was one of the most influential men of an important time, and though he ascended the Papal throne when he was past seventy, he lived to be ninety, and his pontificate is filled with evidence of his strenuous activity till the end of his life. There is no doubt that the regulations for which he is responsible with regard to the Papal finances eventually led to very serious abuses in the Church. It is easy to understand, however, how special arrangements had to be made for the support of the Holy See at Avignon. Pope John XXII.'s predecessor, Clement, was the first Pope who, because of the unsettled state of affairs in Italy and the influence of the French King, resolved to live at Avignon instead of Rome. Under these circumstances, the ordinary sources of revenue for the support of the Papal Court, which required comparatively as expensive an establishment then as now, were more or less cut off. During the first pontificate at Avignon, this proved a serious drawback to ecclesiastical efficiency. In Pope John's time the necessity for providing revenues became acute. Besides, he wished to make the new Papal City as worthy of the Holy See as the old one had been. To him is largely due the development of Avignon, which {140} occurred during the fourteenth century. The abuses which his regulations in this matter led to did not culminate in his time, but came later. The revenues obtained by him were, as we shall see, used to excellent purpose, and were applied to such educational and missionary uses as would eminently meet the approval of the most demanding of critics in modern times. John was a liberal and discriminating patron of learning and of education in his time. He helped colleges in various parts of the world, established a college in the East, and sent out many missionaries at his own expense. These missionaries proved as efficient as modern travelers in adding to the knowledge of the East at that time, and practically laid the foundations of the science of geography. [Footnote 19] [Footnote 19: Those who are interested in the wonderful things accomplished for geography by these missionary travelers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, will find a brief account of them in the chapter on Geography and Exploration in my book on The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries.] What is of special interest to us here, however, in this volume, is the fact that Pope John gave all the weight of the Papal authority, the most important influence of the time in Europe, to the encouragement of medical schools, the maintenance of a high standard in them, and the development of scientific medicine. At this time medicine included many of the physical sciences as we know them at the present time. Botany, mineralogy, climatology, even astrology, as astronomy was then called, were the subjects of study by physicians, the last named because of the supposed influence of the stars on the human constitution. Because of his encouragement of medical schools and his emphatic insistence on their maintaining high standards, Pope John must be commended as a patron of science and as {141} probably having exerted the most beneficial influence in his time on education. This is of course very different from what is usually said of this Pope, Prof. White can scarcely find words harsh enough to apply to him, because of his supposed superstition and the influence which he had upon his time in leading men's minds away from science and into the foolish absurdities of superstitious practices. Pope John XXII. is one of the special bêtes noires of the sometime President of Cornell. Yet, I am sure that when the formal documents which Pope John has left relating to education and science are read by modern educators, they cannot help but consider him as one of their most enterprising colleagues in the realm of education. Indeed, a number of his bulls read very much like the documents that issue occasionally from college presidents with regard to the maintenance of standards in education, and his encouragement of the giving of the best possible opportunities for scientific and literary studies, and especially that the smaller colleges shall be equal as far as possible to the greater institutions of learning, will arouse the sympathetic interest of every educator of the modern day. The documents that I shall quote in translations (the originals may be found in the appendix) will show that the Pope wanted the doctorates in philosophy and in medicine to be given only after seven years of study, at least four of which were to be devoted to the post-graduate work in the special branch selected. He wished, moreover, to insist on the necessity for preliminary education. He wanted the permission to teach these branches, which in that day was equivalent to our term of doctorate, to be given in all institutions for {142} the same amount of work and after similar tests. These are just the matters that have occupied the thoughts of university presidents for the last quarter of a century, and have been the subjects of discussion in the meetings of various college and university associations. Pope John's bulls would be interesting documents to have read before such associations even at the present time, and would form excellent suggestive material on which the discussion of the necessity for maintaining college standards might well be founded. This is so different from what is usually thought in the matter, that personally I have found it even rather amusing. It is not amusing, however, to think that this great progressive, yet conservative educator should have been so misrepresented by modern educators and historians, simply because they did not study the man in his own writings, but knew him only at second hand from those who judged his character from another standpoint. All this will show John as really one of the greatest Popes not only in the century in which he lived, but as distinguished as only a comparatively small number have been among the successors of Peter. Though he ascended the Papal throne at the age of seventy, the next twenty years were full of work of all kinds, and John's wonderful capacity for work stamps him as one of the great men of all time. It is a well-known rule, constantly kept in mind by Catholic students of history, that the Popes against whom the most objections are urged by non-Catholic historians are practically always found, on close and sympathetic study, to be striking examples of men who at least labored to accomplish much. As a rule, they strove to correct abuses, and as a consequence made bitter enemies, who left behind them {143} many contemporary expressions of disapproval. Any contemporary authority is somehow supposed to be infallible. We forget, when a man tries to do good he is likely to meet with bitter opposition from many. If their expressions are taken seriously by historians who write with the purpose of finding just as little good and just as much evil as possible in a particular character, the resulting appreciation is likely to be rather far from the truth. If some of the criticisms of our present President are only preserved long enough, how easy it will be for a future historian who may have the purpose of showing how much of evil began as the result of his policy, to find material on which to build up his thesis. Men who do nothing make no enemies and also make no mistakes. Fortunately, however, doing things is its own justification. John XXII. had had eminent opportunities for the acquisition of an education as thorough, and a culture as broad, as any that might be afforded even by our educational opportunities at the present time. He had been many years at the University of Paris; he had traveled in England, a rare occurrence in those days, and had spent most of his time while there at Oxford; he had also passed several years in Italy and was familiar with educational conditions down there. He certainly did more for education than any man of his generation. He had the greatest of opportunities, but it cannot but be said that he took them, very wonderfully. There are very few in all the history of education who have insisted as he on the important principles of the necessity for careful training, for the maintenance of high standards in examination and degree-giving, and for the endeavor to bring the large universities in intimate contact with the {144} small ones, to the benefit especially of the latter, though, as we know now, always also to the reactionary advantage of the important institutions. All this is to be found in the documentary history of a man who has been set up as an object of scorn and derision by modern educators, who surely, if they knew the actual facts, would be sympathetic, and not antipathetic as they have been. It seems too bad that it was just this man that should have been picked out for the slander that he had prevented the development of chemistry by a Papal decree, which proves on examination to be only an added evidence of his beneficent care for his people. But this is not the only charge that has been brought against Pope John XXII. President White has painted his character in the worst possible colors. Even after his attention was called to the fact that the document supposed to prohibit chemistry did not have any of the meaning which he attributed to it in his History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom, he still could find terms scarcely black enough in which to paint Pope John, and recurs to other documents issued by that Pope to prove his assertions. Strangely enough, especially after the warning of having had to acknowledge that one quotation from him was entirely wrong, he proceeds to quote another bull by the same Pope, that he has evidently never read, and his remarks with regard to it show that he never took the trouble to learn anything about this Pope by reading any of the original documents that he issued, but depends entirely on second-hand authorities. He says:-- "It is a pity that Dr. Walsh does not quote in full Pope John's other and much more interesting bull, _Super illius specula_, of 1326. One would suppose from the {145} doctor's account that this Pontiff was a kindly and rational scholar seeking to save the people from the clutch of superstition. The bull of 1326 shows Pope John himself, in spite of his infallibility, sunk in superstition, the most abject and debasing; for, in this bull, supposed to be inspired from wisdom from on high, Pope John complains that both he and his flock are in danger of their lives by the arts of the sorcerers. He declares that such sorcerers can shut up devils in mirrors, finger-rings and phials, and kill men and women by a magic word; that they had tried to kill him by piercing a waxen image of him with needles, in the name of the devil. He therefore, not only in this bull, but in brief after brief, urged bishops, inquisitors and other authorities, sacred and secular, to hunt down the miscreants who thus afflicted the faithful, and he especially increased the power of the inquisitors in various parts of Europe for this purpose. This bull it was indeed, and others to the same purpose, which stimulated that childish fear and hatred against the investigation of nature which was felt for centuries and which caused chemistry to be known more and more as one of the 'seven devilish arts.'" There can be no doubt that this is an awful arraignment of a Pope. The bull in question is quoted so confidently under its Latin title that anyone who reads this paragraph must necessarily conclude that it contains all that President White says, and that he was fresh from the reading of it. I may say that, though I had already found that two other Papal documents had been utterly misrepresented in President White's references, I could not bring myself to think that the same thing might be true with regard to this third Papal document cited by him. After having had two lessons in the necessity for {146} careful collation of his references to his authorities, I did not think it possible for him to make another misquotation, if possible, more serious than the preceding examples. Though I had by me, thanks to my good friend Father Corbett, of St. Charles Seminary, Overbrook, Pa., a copy of this bull at the time I wrote an answer to some of President White's curious wanderings into the history of anatomy and chemistry, I did not consult it, for I felt sure that it must contain the expressions which were so confidently quoted. My surprise can be better imagined than described when on reading the bull I found that it contained practically no foundation for the awful charges made by President White. I had been given another lesson in the difference between traditional and documentary history, the significance of which will, I hope, be appreciated by others. It led me to consult further bulls of John XXII., which bring out his character better than any modern historian possibly can, and which serve to show that, far from being an obscurantist in any sense of the word, he was deeply interested in education, expressed his appreciation for it on many occasions in the highest terms, encouraged his people to seek it, in any and every form, scientific as well as literary and philosophic, and stated confidently that education would surely redound to the benefit of the Church and deserved to be the special object of ecclesiastical favor. First, however, let me quote the bull _Super illius specula_, of which President White has said so much. I present a close, almost literal, translation of the document as it is to be found in the collections of Thomassetti and Coquelines. As President White conceded that my translation of the previous document of Pope John {147} with regard to alchemy was flawless, I shall be careful not to undo his compliment. [Footnote 20] [Footnote 20: The full Latin text of this bull will be found in the appendix.] "Seeking to discover how the sons of men know and serve God by the practice of the Christian religion, we look down from the watch-tower where, though unworthy, we have been placed by the favoring clemency of Him who made the first man after His own image and likeness; setting him over earthly things; adorning him with heavenly virtues; recalling him when a wanderer; bestowing on him a law; freeing him from slavery; finding him when he was lost; and finally ransoming him from captivity by the merit of His passion. With grief we discover, and the very thought of it wrings our soul with anguish, that there are many Christians only in name; many who turn away from the light which once was theirs, and allow their minds to be so clouded with the darkness of error as to enter into a league with death and a compact with hell. They sacrifice to demons and adore them, they make or cause to be made images, rings, mirrors, phials or some such things in which by the art of magic evil spirits are to be enclosed. From them they seek and receive replies, and ask aid in satisfying their evil desires. For a foul purpose they submit to the foulest slavery. Alas! this deadly malady is increasing more than usual in the world and inflicting greater and greater ravages on the flock of Christ. "Section I.--Since, therefore, we are bound by the duty of our pastoral office to bring back to the fold of Christ the sheep who are wandering through devious ways and to exclude from the Lord's flock those who are diseased lest they should infect the rest, We, by this edict, which, in accordance with the counsel of our brother bishops, is to remain in perpetual vigor, warn all and in virtue of holy obedience and under pain of anathema enjoin on all those who have been regenerated in the waters of baptism not to inculcate or study any of the perverse teachings we have mentioned, or, what is more to be condemned, practise them in any manner upon any one. {148} "Section II.--And because it is just that those who by their deeds make mockery of the Most High should meet with punishments worthy of their transgressions we pronounce the sentence of excommunication which it is our will they shall _ipso facto_ incur, who shall presume to act contrary to our salutary warnings and commands. And we firmly decree that in addition to the above penalties a process shall be begun before competent judges for the infliction of all and every penalty which heretics are subject to according to law, except confiscation of goods, against such as being duly admonished of the foregoing or any of the foregoing practices, have not within eight days from the time when the admonition was given amended their lives in the aforesaid matters. "Section III.--Moreover, since it is proper that no opportunity or occasion should be given for such flagitious practices, We, in conformity with the advice of our brother bishops, ordain and command that no one shall presume to have or to hold books or writing of any kind containing any of the before-mentioned errors or to make a study of them. On the contrary, we desire and in virtue of holy obedience we impose the precept upon all, that whoever shall have any of the aforesaid writings or books shall, within the space of eight days from their knowledge of our edict in this matter, destroy and burn them and every part thereof absolutely and completely; otherwise, we decree that they incur the sentence of excommunication _ipso facto_ and, when the evidence is clear, that other and greater penalties shall be inflicted upon culprits of this kind." Now here is a Papal document that, far from containing any of the superstitions that President White so outspokenly declares it to contain, is a worthy expression of the fatherly feelings of the head of Christendom that might well have been issued at even the most enlightened period of the world's history. The two sentences on which all of President White's serious accusation is founded are simple expressions of the Pope's solicitude for his flock on hearing of some of the practices that {149} some are said to give themselves up to. He does not say even that sorcerers can shut up devils in mirrors, finger-rings and phials, but uses the hypothetical expression that in these things, by magic art, evil spirits are to be enclosed. The bull has no reference at all to the killing of men and women by a magic word, and where President White found that Pope John declares in this bull that sorcerers had tried to kill him by piercing a waxen image of him with needles in the name of the devil, it is impossible to understand; I should like very much to know what his authority is, because then it could be refuted in its source. As it is, Dr. White said it was in the bull, and now every one can see for himself that it is not. Let us go a step further and take President White's single sentence, "One would suppose from the doctor's (Dr. Walsh's) account that this Pontiff was a kindly and rational scholar seeking to save the people from the clutch of superstition," and let us illustrate the phrase "a kindly and rational scholar" by some documents issued by Pope John XXII. Take for instance the special bull issued by him for the confirmation of the establishment of chairs in canon and civil law, and the founding of masterships in medicine and in arts in the University of Perugia by which he also conveyed the authority to confer the degrees of doctor and bachelor in all these faculties on those who were found worthy after careful examinations. In the preamble of this bull we shall find abundant evidence of Pope John's kindly and rational scholarship, of his eminent desire to encourage education in all its forms, literary and scientific, and to make the people of his time understand how valuable he considered education, not only for the sake of the {150} individuals who might acquire it, but also for the Church and for the cause of religion. This bull was issued Feb. 18, 1321: "While with deep feelings of solicitous consideration we mentally resolve how precious the gift of science is and how desirable and glorious is its possession, since through it the darkness of ignorance is put to flight and the clouds of error completely done away with so that the trained intelligence of students disposes and orders their acts and modes of life in the light of truth, we are moved by a very great desire that the study of letters in which the priceless pearl of knowledge is found should everywhere make praiseworthy progress, and should especially flourish more abundantly in such places as are considered to be more suitable and fitting for the multiplication of the seeds and salutary germs of right teaching. Whereas some time ago, Pope Clement of pious memory, our predecessor, considering the purity of faith and the excelling devotion which the city of Perugia belonging to our Papal states is recognized to have maintained for a long period towards the church, wishing that these might increase from good to better in the course of time, deemed it fitting and equitable that this same city, which had been endowed by Divine Grace with the prerogatives of many special favors, should be distinguished by the granting of university powers, in order that by the goodness of God men might be raised up in the city itself pre-eminent for their learning, decreed by the Apostolic authority that a university should be situated in the city and that it should flourish there for all future time with all those faculties that may be found more fully set forth in the letter of that same predecessor aforesaid. And whereas we subsequently, though unworthy, having been raised to the dignity of the Apostolic primacy, are desirous to reward with a still richer gift the same city of Perugia for the proofs of its devotion by which it has proven itself worthy of the favor of the Apostolic See, by our Apostolic authority and in accordance with the council of our brother bishops, we grant to our venerable brother the Bishop of Perugia and to those who may be his successors in {151} that diocese the right of conferring on persons who are worthy of it the license to teach (the Doctorate) in canon and civil law, according to that fixed method which is more fully described and regulated more at length in this our letter. "Considering, therefore, that this same city, because of its conveniences and its many favoring conditions, is altogether suitable for students and wishing on that account to amplify the educational concessions hitherto made because of the public benefits which we hope will flow from them, we decree by Apostolic authority that if there are any who in the course of time shall in that same university attain the goal of knowledge in medical science and the liberal arts and should ask for license to teach in order that they may be able to train others with more freedom, that they may be examined in that university in the aforesaid medical sciences and in the arts and be decorated with the title of Master in these same faculties. We further decree that as often as any are to receive the degree of Doctor in medicine and arts as aforesaid, they must be presented to the Bishop of Perugia, who rules the diocese at the time or to him whom the bishop shall have appointed for this purpose, who having selected teachers of the same faculty in which the examinations are to be made, who are at that time present in the university to the number of at least four, they shall come together without any charge to the candidate and, every difficulty being removed, should diligently endeavor that the candidate be examined in science, in eloquence, in his mode of lecturing, and anything else which is required for promotion to the degree of doctor or master. With regard to those who are found worthy their teachers should be further consulted privately, and any revelation of information obtained at such consultations as might redound to the disadvantage or injury of the consultors is strictly forbidden. If all is satisfactory the candidate should be approved and admitted and the license to teach granted. Those who are found unfit must not be admitted to the degree of doctor, all leniency or prejudice or favor being set aside. "In order that the said university may in the aforesaid studies of medicine and the arts so much more fully {152} grow in strength, according as the professors who actually begin the work and teaching there are more skillful, we have decided that until four or five years have passed some professors, two at least, who have secured their degree in the medical sciences at the University of Paris, under the auspices of the Cathedral of Paris, and who shall have taught or acted as masters in the before-mentioned University of Paris, shall be selected for the duties of the masterships and the professional chairs in said department in the University of Perugia and they shall continue their work in this last-mentioned university until noteworthy progress in the formation of good students shall have been made. "With regard to those who are to receive the degree of doctor in medical science, it must be especially observed that all those seeking the degree shall have heard lectures in all the books of this same science which are usually required to be heard by similar students at the universities of Bologna or of Paris and that this shall continue for seven years. Those, however, who have elsewhere received sufficient instruction in logic or philosophy having applied themselves to these studies for five years in the aforesaid universities, with the provision, however, that at least three years of the aforesaid five or seven-year term shall have been devoted to hearing lectures in medical science in some university, and according to custom, shall have been examined under duly authorized teachers and shall have, besides, read such books outside the regular course as may be required may, with due observation of all the regulations which are demanded for the taking of degrees in Paris or Bologna, also be allowed to take the examination at Perugia." Here is a bull issued within five years after the bull which President White so falsely impugns and which tells a very different story with regard to the relationship of the Popes to education in general, and especially to scientific education, from that which unfortunate misrepresentations have accorded to them. Perugia was a city of the Papal States, though really scarcely more {153} than under the dominion of the Popes in name. The citizens exercised a large freedom not only in all civic matters, but even in regard to their relationships with neighboring cities and political powers. One of the things which Pope John seems to have been especially solicitous about, however, as we shall see in a subsequent bull, was that the educational institutions in the Papal States should be maintained at a high standard. A university had been established at Perugia by his predecessor, and Pope John not only confirmed this establishment, but gave the additional privilege of conferring degrees in Canon and Civil Law as well as in Medicine and the Arts. Lest there should be any thought that the fact that the conferring of such privileges by the Pope might seem to be a limitation of university privilege, it may be said at once that practically all universities have at all times been under the supervision of Government and have derived their privileges from the political authorities. During the Middle Ages the universities were really developments of Cathedral schools, and as such were usually under the authority of the Chancellor of the Cathedral. As an ecclesiastical person he looked to the Pope as the source of his authority, and in order that uniformity of requirement for various degrees and of educational methods might be maintained, there was practically universal agreement that such centralization of the power to grant privileges for the erection of universities and the conferring of degrees was the most practical way. With regard to Perugia besides there was the additional reason that the Pope represented the political as well as the ecclesiastical authority in the matter, and that very naturally the {154} encouragement for the good educational work already being done in the Umbrian City should come from him. This premised, certain features of this bull are especially noteworthy in the light of modern educational experiences. The Pope was confirming the establishment of a new university. It was to be as he realized, a smaller university in size, but he did not want its standard of education to be lower than that of the great universities. For this reason he insists specifically in the bull that the license to teach--the equivalent of our modern doctorate in law, letters and science, shall not be given except after the completion of a course equivalent to those given in these subjects in Paris or Bologna, the great universities of the time, and that the examination shall be quite as rigid and shall be conducted under conditions that, as far as human foresight can arrange, shall preclude all possibility of favoritism of any kind entering into the promotion of candidates for these degrees. The fact that oaths were required in the hope that standards would be thus maintained shows how seriously the subject of education was taken at this time, when, if we would believe some of those who depreciate the Middle Ages, ecclesiastical efforts were mainly occupied with the attempt to keep the people as ignorant as possible. This phase of the Papal decree is all the more interesting when it is viewed in the light of some modern educational developments. A few years ago there was a very general complaint that the doctorate in philosophy was conferred too easily, especially by the minor universities, and that as a consequence this degree had come to mean very little. It required a distinct crusade of effort to raise standards in this matter, and even at {155} the present time the situation is not entirely satisfactory. A very curious element in the situation lies in the fact that, in comparison to the number of students, certain of the smaller universities confer this distinction much more frequently than the larger universities. This was found to be true even among the German universities, where I believe that according to statistics the little University of Rostock, in Mecklenberg, confers the degree proportionately oftener than any other German university. Pope John XXII. was evidently endeavoring to prevent any such development as this, or perhaps he was trying to remedy an abuse which he knew had already crept in, for all of his bulls on educational matters insist with no little emphasis on the necessity for the maintenance of a high standard of educational requirements as regards the length of time in years and the books to be read and lectures attended, as well as on the rigor, yet absolute fairness of examinations. I am sure that the bulls of John XXII. must never have come under President White's eyes, or he, as an experienced educator who has had to meet most of these problems in our time, would have been more sympathetic with this medieval ecclesiastic, who did all in his power to maintain university standards. Pope John's career deserves study by all modern educators for this reason, and the surprise of it will be that in education, as practically in everything else, in spite of our present-day self-complacency in the matter of educational progress, there is nothing new under the sun, certainly nothing new in the problems university authorities have to meet in order to maintain their standards. The best possible proof that Pope John XXII. was not opposed in any way to the development of science nor {156} to the study of sciences at the universities is to be found in his establishment of this medical school at Perugia. We may say at once that this is not the only medical school with whose encouragement he was concerned since the erection of the University of Cahors, his birthplace, and the establishment of a medical school there, as well as the provision of funds for certain medical chairs in the University at Rome, shows the reality and the breadth of his interest in medicine. It must be remembered that under the term medicine at this time most of the physical sciences as we know them now were included. It is the custom sometimes to think that the students of medicine in the Middle Ages knew very little about medicine itself or the sciences related to medicine. This thought was excusable some years ago when the old medical text-books of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had not as yet been printed. At the present time, such a mistake would be unpardonable for any scholar who pretends to first-hand knowledge of this period. In the chapter on Science at the Medieval Universities I call special attention to the fact that medicine and surgery developed in such a wonderful way at the medical schools of the universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that many presumed discoveries of much later times were marvelously anticipated. A short catalogue of them here may not be out of place, though the reader is referred to other chapters for further details. In the medical schools which Pope John XXII. was then fostering, they taught the ligature of arteries, the prevention of bleeding by pressure, the danger of wounds of the neck, the relation of dropsy to hardening of the kidneys, the true origins of the venereal diseases, the methods of treating {157} joint diseases, the suture of divided nerves, the use of the knife rather than the cautery because it made a cleaner wound which healed more readily, and even, wonder of wonders, healing by first intention. Anyone who was fostering this kind of education in medicine was advancing the cause of one of the applied sciences in a very wonderful way. If we add that, at this same time the proper use of opium in medicine was a feature of medical teaching which had just been introduced by a Papal physician, while a form of anaesthesia was being practically developed and very generally employed, the question will be why we, in the twentieth century, do not know ever so much more than we actually do, rather than why these earnest students of the thirteenth century knew so little, which is the absurd thought that most authorities in education seem to entertain at the present time with regard to our forbears of early university history. The student of medicine during the thirteenth century had to devote himself very nearly to the same department of science as those which occupy his colleagues of the present century. The prospectus of a medical school of the time would announce very probably some such program of studies as this. Besides learning something of astrology (the astronomy of the day) the student would be expected to know much about climate and its influence on disease, and about soil in its relation to pathology (these were supposed to be fruitful causes of disease). Certain minerals, among them very probably antimony, were beginning to be used in medical practice, and so mineralogy was a special subject of study. Of plants they were expected to know in a general way much more than the modern {158} medical student, to whom botany is not considered of much importance, and of zoology they probably had at least as great practical knowledge, since many of their dissections were made on animals, and the differences in structure between them and man were pointed out when the annual anatomies or human dissections at the universities were made. Of pharmacology and the allied subject, chemistry, they had to know all that would enable them to use properly the several hundred vegetable remedies then used in medicine. This will give an idea, then, what were in general the studies which Pope John was trying to foster with so much care in the University of Perugia. There is another phase of his regulations with regard to medical schools which cannot but prove of the greatest interest to members of our present-day medical faculties. It has been realized for some time, that what is needed more than anything else to make good physicians for the present generation is that medical students should have a better preliminary education than has been the case in the past. In order to secure this, various states have required evidence of a certain number of years spent at high school or college before a medical student's certificate allowing entrance into a medical school will be granted. Some of the most prominent medical schools have gone even farther than this, and have required that a degree in arts should be obtained in the undergraduate department before medical studies may be taken up. Something of this same kind was manifestly in Pope John's mind when he required that seven years should have been spent at a university, at least three years of which should have been entirely devoted to medical studies, before the candidate might {159} be allowed to go up for his examination for the doctor's degree. As we begin the twentieth century, we note that the presidents of our American universities are trying to secure just exactly the same number of years of study for candidates for the degree of Doctor of Medicine, as this medieval Pope insisted on as a prerequisite for the same degree in a university founded in the Papal States at the beginning of the fourteenth century. After the year 1910 most of the large universities in this country will not admit further students to their medical departments unless they have a college degree or its equivalent, that is, unless they have devoted four years to college undergraduate work. It is generally understood, that in the last year of his undergraduate course the student who intends to take up medicine may elect such scientific studies in the college department as will obtain for him an allowance of a year's work in the medical school. He will then be able to complete his medical course in three years, so that our modern institutions will, if our plans succeed, require just exactly the same amount of time for the doctorate in Medicine as Pope John demanded, and not only demanded, but required by legal regulation, for this bull was a law in the Papal States, just six centuries ago. The coincidence is so striking that, only that it is supported by documentary evidence of the best kind, we could scarcely believe it. Yet it is the Pope who encouraged devotion to science in all forms as it was studied in his day, who insisted that the standards of education in the universities of the Papal States, over which he had direct control, should be equal to those of Paris and Bologna, who suggested that teachers should be brought from the famous {160} universities for the purpose of introducing the best educational methods, who is now declared by President White to have "stimulated the childish fear and hatred against the investigation of nature which was felt for centuries, and whose decrees and briefs are said to have caused chemistry to be known more and more as one of the 'seven devilish arts.'" Here is the striking difference between traditional and documentary history. There are other bulls of Pope John which serve to bring out his interest in education quite as clearly as this one, and show that the ecclesiastics of the time were encouraged to think and act up to the thought, that education of all kinds was sure to be of benefit to the Church and her members. In extending the privileges of the University of Perugia on another occasion by the bull _Inter ceteras curas_, John declared that among the other cares which were enjoined on him from on high by his Apostolic office and amongst the many projects which were constantly in his mind for the betterment of religion, his thoughts were directed more frequently and more ardently to this conclusion than to any other, that the professors of the Catholic faith whom the true light of the true faith illuminates should be imbued with the deepest wisdom and should become erudite in all the studies that bring profitable knowledge. For, he adds, this gift cannot be bought by any price, but is divinely granted to minds that are of good will. For the possession of knowledge is evidently desirable, since by it the darkness of ignorance and the gloom of error are entirely done away with and the intelligence of students is increased so as to direct all their acts and deeds in the light of truth. "It is for this reason (and no wonder)," he adds, "that I am led to encourage the study of {161} letters in which the priceless pearl of knowledge is to be found, and especially in such places as may bear worthy fruit for the Church itself and for its members." The expressions that he here uses are almost word for word, though not quite the same as occur in other bulls, showing that a sort of formula was constantly used to express the opinion of the Holy See with regard to the desirableness of knowledge and the benefit that might be expected to flow from education. Not all of the bull, however, is a formula, since in the rest of it Pope John insists that at least five years must be required at the university for the study of Canon and Civil Law, and detailed injunctions are set forth as to the method of examination so as to secure two things, first that a proper standard shall be maintained and that those who have completed the course shall have the right to examinations without further payment of fees, and secondly, that such examinations shall be absolutely fair, without any favor being shown to the applicant in any way, and at the same time without any prejudice being allowed to influence his examiners against him. Lest readers should be tempted to think of Perugia as a town of very slight importance from a political and civil standpoint, and therefore consider anything done for it as amounting to very little in the culture or influence of the period, a short sketch of it will not be out of place. This little town has had the distinction of being the center of interest in at least four marvelous epochs of human development. Long before Roman civilization in Italy arose, the Etruscans did some of their greatest art-work in the country around Perugia, the remains of which have been unearthed in recent years. Seven centuries later, the Romans left some magnificent {162} architectural monuments of their occupation of this neighborhood. Somewhat more than a thousand years passed, and St. Francis breathed his profound spirit of love for nature in all its forms into the world almost within sight of its walls, and with him the Renaissance began. The great Umbrian school of painters in the Renaissance period came from this district, and they include such names as Raphael and his great master Perugino, who received his name from his birthplace. Before John XXII. did so much to make it a center of culture and education for this portion of Italy, it had been noted in the early part of the thirteenth century for possessing a library of Canon and Civil Law to which scholars often traveled from great distances for consultation purposes. The Pope, then, though in distant Avignon, was greatly helping on that movement which was to culminate and mean so much for Umbria, that great center of culture and influence in the Renaissance time. In erecting the University of Cahors, Pope John took occasion to say that he did so because the city promised to provide facilities and proper conditions for the university and he believed that the existence of such an institution would in very many ways be of benefit to the commonwealth. He wished, therefore, that in Cahors, "a copious, refreshing fountain of science should spring up and continue to flow, from whose abundance all the citizens might drink, and where those desirous of education might become imbued with knowledge so that the cultivators of wisdom might sow seed with success and all the student body become learned and eloquent and in every way distinguished, bearing abundant fruit which the Lord in His own good time would give them if they applied themselves with good will." He wished that {163} the erection of the university should be considered as a special reward for their devotion to the Holy See and should always stand as a memorial of that. The thought may possibly occur to some that Pope John, after having issued these noteworthy documents in the cause of education in the early years of his pontificate, might subsequently have changed his mind and considered with advancing years that the repression of the enthusiasm for learning would be better for his people from a spiritual standpoint. There is, however, no sign of this to be found in the important documents of his pontificate, nor would anyone think of it who realized that John became Pope at the age of 72, after having a very wide personal experience in political affairs as well as ecclesiastical matters, an experience which took him over many parts of Europe and must have greatly broadened his intellectual horizon, and that he remained in full possession of his wonderful intellectual powers until he was well past 90. Within two years before his death he issued the bull which laid the foundation of the University of Cahors, his native place. This he did at the request of the citizens of the town, who pleaded that no better memorial of their great fellow citizen who had become Pope could be raised among them than a university. In the light of these other bulls it is not surprising to find that John should also have endeavored to maintain the standard of the University of the City of Rome. It must be remembered that at this time the Popes were at Avignon, and that as a consequence the population of the city of Rome had greatly decreased and there were so many civic dissensions that very little attention could be given to educational matters. Pope John issued a {164} bull, however, from Avignon, confirming the erection of the University of the City of Rome by his predecessor of happy memory, Boniface VIII. (the same who is said, though falsely, to have hampered the development of anatomy), and further laying down regulations for the maintenance of the standard of education in the Roman University. In this bull John says that he considers that a Pope could confer no greater favor on the City of Cities so closely attached to the Roman Church, than to bring about the re-establishment of the university there, so that the inhabitants and the visitors to Rome might all have the opportunity and also the incitement to seek after wisdom, for this is a gift which comes from on high, which cannot be bought for a price, but which is only granted to those who seek it with good will. John proceeds to say that he hopes that the city of Rome shall, under the favor of Providence, produce men of pre-eminent worth in science, and that in order that the wishes of Pope Boniface VIII. in this matter may be fulfilled he confirms and extends all the privileges which had been originally granted. In the University at Rome there were also professors of medicine, and there is good historical authority for the assertion that John himself offered to pay out of the Papal revenues the salary of the professor of physic, in order that this department of the university might become established as firmly as were the other departments. In a word, in the documentary evidence so readily available to any one who wishes to consult it, we find John manifesting that he was "a kindly and rational scholar," to use President White's expression, "seeking," surely if education shall have any such effect, and in modern times we have been led {165} to believe that it can, "to save the people from the clutch of superstition." President White has employed the expression satirically. I think that any one who reads the contemporary documents in the case must acknowledge that it is literally true. The life of Pope John XXII. is a striking example of the difference between traditional and documentary history. According to the traditions that have gathered around his name, John has been declared by many to be one of the banes of civilization and education in the Middle Ages. A little study of the documents issued by him shows him in quite a different light. He was not only interested in educational matters of every kind, but he was deeply intent, and as far as the Papal power enabled him he succeeded in carrying out his intention, of making education thoroughly effective in every department. It is by a man's intentions that he must be judged. John meant to do everything for the best. Unfortunately, some of his actions in the matter of the provision of revenues became subject later to abuse. For this it is hard to understand how he should be held responsible. In the meantime, for educators, the study of the actual documents issued by him and their utterly different significance from what might be expected according to the usually accepted notion of his character, cannot but prove a lesson in historical values. It illustrates very well a phase of history that has recently been called to attention. As we have said, one hundred years ago De Maistre declared that history had been a conspiracy against the truth. At last a universal recognition is coming of the fact that history has been written entirely too much from the personal standpoint of the historian without {166} due reference to contemporary documents and authorities, or with the citation of only such references from these as would support the special contention of the writer. Even the writers of history whose reputation has been highest have suffered from this fault, and the consequence is that on disputed points it is more important to know what party a historian belongs to than what he writes. Is it not time that at least our educators should cease accepting this old traditional opinion with regard to the times before the reformation so-called, and get at the truth in the matter, or as near it as possible. These educators of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were zealous and earnest beyond cavil. That everyone admits. It is supposed, however, that they were ridiculously ignorant and superstitious. Only those who are themselves ridiculously ignorant and superstitious, for the real meaning of superstition is persistence in accepting a supposed truth that is a survival (_superstes_) from a previous state of knowledge, after the reasons for its acceptance have been shown to be groundless, will continue to believe this absurd proposition. If the educator of the modern day will only study with the sympathy they deserve, the lives of the earliest educators of modern times, the professors, the officials, and the ecclesiastical authorities as well as the Papal patrons of the universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we shall hear no more of the Church during the Middle Ages having been opposed to education, nor to science, nor to any other department of human knowledge. {167} THE CHURCH AND SURGERY DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. It is with regard to surgery that the opposition of the Church is sometimes supposed to have been most serious in its effects upon the progress of medical science and its applications for the relief of human suffering. President White has stated this, as usual, very emphatically in certain paragraphs of his chapter on From Miracles to Medicine, especially under the caption of Theological Discouragement of Medicine. He says, for instance:-- "As to surgery, this same amalgamation of theology with survivals of pagan beliefs continued to check the evolution of medical science down to the modern epoch. The nominal hostility of the Church to the shedding of blood withdrew, as we have seen, from surgical practice the great body of her educated men; hence surgery remained down to the fifteenth century a despised profession, its practice continued largely in the hands of charlatans, and down to a very recent period the name 'barber-surgeon' was a survival of this. In such surgery, the application of various ordures relieved fractures; the touch of the hangman cured sprains; the breath of a donkey expelled poison; friction with a dead man's tooth cured toothache." In another and earlier portion of the same chapter, under the heading "Theological Opposition to Anatomical Studies," he states the reasons why this low state of surgical practice existed. Once more it is declared to be {168} because of a prohibitory decree, or several of them, directed against the practice of surgery by ecclesiastical authorities. These decrees, we shall find, as was true of previous supposed prohibitions, are entirely perverted from their real meaning by President White, who has the happy faculty of lighting upon mares' nests of Papal decrees and decrees of councils and neglecting to pay any attention to the real history of the science of which he writes. President White says: "To those arguments against dissection was now added another one which may well fill us with amazement. It is the remark of the foremost of recent English philosophical historians, that of all organizations in human history, the Church of Rome has caused the greatest spilling of innocent blood. No one conversant with history, even though he admit all possible extenuating circumstances and honor the older Church for the great circumstances which can undoubtedly be claimed for her, can deny this statement. Strange is it, then, to note that one of the main objections developed in the Middle Ages against anatomical studies was the maxim that 'The Church abhors the shedding of blood.'" "On this ground, in 1248, the Council of Le Mans forbade surgery to monks. Many other councils did the same, and at the end of the thirteenth century came the most serious blow of all: for it was then that Pope Boniface VIII., without any of that foresight of consequences which might well have been expected in an infallible teacher, issued a decretal forbidding a practice which had come into use during the Crusades, namely, the separation of the flesh from the bones of the dead whose remains it was desired to carry back to their own country." Note always the return to Pope Boniface's {169} bull and always the perversion of the meaning of the word infallibility. I have already stated the real significance of Boniface's bull. It neither forbade, nor did its interpretation in any way hamper, the development of anatomy. Just exactly the same thing is true with regard to the Papal regulations or decrees of councils that are claimed to have hampered surgery. President White and others have insisted that the prohibition of surgery to monks and priests prevented the development of surgery or was responsible for the low state of surgical practice. Here once more we are in the presence of a deduction, and not of an induction that represents the actual facts in the case. Most students at the universities were clerks, that is, had the privileges of clergymen, and were, as a rule, in minor orders. All the great surgeons of this time, and they were many, were ecclesiastics. The climax of President White's treatment of the relationship of the Church to surgery and of the intense opposition manifested by ecclesiastics to surgical progress, and, I may add, the climax of absurdity as far as the real history of surgery is concerned, comes in the last paragraph of this portion of his chapter on From Miracles to Medicine, which President White has placed under the title Theological Opposition to Anatomical Studies. He says: "So deeply was the idea rooted in the mind of the Universal Church that for over a thousand years surgery was considered dishonorable; the greatest monarchs were often unable to secure an ordinary surgical operation; and it was only in 1406 that a better beginning was made, when the Emperor Wenzel of Germany ordered that dishonor should no longer attach to the surgical profession." {170} President White insists over and over again that whatever surgery there was, and especially whatever progress was made in surgery, was due to the Arabs, or at least to Arabian initiative. Gurlt, in his History of Surgery, [Footnote 21] which we have referred to elsewhere, is very far from sharing this view. I need scarcely say that Gurlt is one of our best authorities in the history of surgery. In his sketch of Roger, the first of the great Italian surgeons of the thirteenth century who came after the foundation of the universities, Gurlt says that, "though Arabian writings on surgery had been brought over to Italy by Constantine Africanus a hundred years before Roger's time, those exercised no influence over Italian surgery in the next century, and there is not a trace of the surgical knowledge of the Arabs to be found in Roger's work." His writing depends almost entirely upon the surgical traditions of his time, the experience of his teachers and colleagues, to whom in two places he has given due credit, and on the Greek writers. There are no traces of Arabisms to be found in Roger's writing, while they are full of Grecisms. Roger represents the first important writer on surgery in modern times, and his works have been printed several times because of their value as original documents. [Footnote 21: Geschichte der Chirurgie und ihrer Ausübung. Von Dr. E. Gurlt, Vol. I., p. 701.] It is wonderfully amusing to anyone who knows Gurlt's History of Surgery, [Footnote 22] that the distinguished old professor of the University of Berlin, looked up to as so well informed as to the history of the branch of medical science to which he had devoted a long life, should have wasted some three hundred pages of his first volume on the {171} History of Surgery in Middle and West Europe during the Middle Ages, for they are mainly taken up with the consideration of the period when President White asserts that there was no surgery in Europe. Gurlt even protests that he has not as much space as he would like to devote to these old-time masters of surgery, who did so much to lay the foundation of modern surgical practices. Those who have paid any attention to President White's assertion with regard to surgery at this time, should at least look over Gurlt. They will thus realize what a dangerous thing it is to attempt large conclusions in the history of a department of knowledge of which one knows nothing. They will also realize how easy it is for a writer with some prestige, to lead others astray in a matter of history, by simply making assertions without taking the trouble to see whether they are supported by the facts in the case or not. [Footnote 22: Geschichte der Chirurgie und ihrer Ausübung. Von Dr. K. Gurlt, Geh. Med. Rath, Prof, der Chirurgie an der Königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin. Berlin, 1898.] The modern American historian of Theology and Science says, "for over a thousand years surgery was considered dishonorable." For the sake of contrast with this opinion of President White's, read for a moment the following remarks which constitute the opening sentences of Pagel's paragraphs on Surgery from 1200 to 1500, in Puschmann's Handbuch of the History of Medicine, already referred to. Before making the quotation, let me recall attention to the fact that Professor Pagel is the best informed living writer on the history of medicine. This book was issued in 1902. It is universally conceded to contain the last words on the history of medical development. There is no doubt at all about its absolute authoritativeness. President White has been calling on his imagination; Professor Pagel has consulted original documents in the history of surgery. He says: {172} "A more favorable star shone during the whole Middle Ages over surgery than over practical medicine. The representatives of this specialty succeeded earlier than did the practical physicians in freeing themselves from the ban of scholasticism. In its development a more constant and more even progress cannot fail to be seen. The stream of literary works on surgery flows richer during this period. While the surgeons are far from being able to emancipate themselves from the ruling pathological theories, there is no doubt that in one department, that of manual technics, free observation came to occupy the first place in the effort for scientific progress. Investigation is less hampered and concerns itself with practical things and not with artificial theories. Experimental observation was in this not repressed by an unfortunate and iron-bound appeal to reasoning." I am tempted to add as a reflection, deduction was not allowed to replace attention to facts, though it has in some supposed surgical history of this period. Pagel continues: "Indeed, the lack of so-called scholarship, the freshness of view free from all prejudice with which surgery, uninfluenced by scholastic presumption, was forced to enter upon the objective consideration of things, while most of the surgeons brought with them to their calling an earnest vocation in union with great technical facility, caused surgery to enter upon ways in which it secured, as I have said, greater relative success than did practical medicine." President White has evidently never bothered to look into a history of surgery at all, or he would not have fallen into the egregious error of saying that the period from 1200 to 1400 was barren of surgery, for it is really one of the most important periods in the development of {173} modern surgery. Further evidence as to this is rather easy to obtain. I have cited two German authorities in the history of medicine and surgery. Here is an English writer who is quite as authoritative. In the address on The Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery to the end of the Sixteenth Century, which Professor Clifford Allbutt, the Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, delivered by special invitation at the Congress of Arts and Sciences of St. Louis in 1904, this distinguished authority in the history of medicine had much to say with regard to the wonderful development of surgery in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that is, during the period when, if we were to accept President White's declarations, surgery either did not exist, or else had been relegated to such mere handicraftsmen that no real scientific progress in it could possibly be expected. As Professor Allbutt was trying only to give a twentieth century audience some idea of the magnificent work that had been accomplished by fellow members of his profession of medicine seven centuries before, and had no idea of discussing the influence, favorable or otherwise, of the Church upon the progress of medical science, I have preferred to quote directly from this address for evidence of the surgery of these centuries, than to gather the details from many sources, when it might perhaps be thought that I was making out a more favorable case than actually existed, for the sake of the Church and the Popes. "Both for his own great merits as an original and independent observer and as the master of Lanfranc, William Salicet (Gugliemo Salicetti of Piacenza, in Latin G. Placentinus or de Saliceto--now Cadeo) was eminent {174} among the great Italian physicians of the latter half of the thirteenth century. Now, these great Italians were as distinguished in surgery as in medicine, and William was one of the protestants of the period against the division of surgery from inner medicine--a division which he regarded as a separation of medicine from intimate touch with nature. Like Lanfranc and the other great surgeons of the Italian tradition, and unlike Franco and Paré, he had the advantage of the liberal university education of Italy; but, like Paré and Würtz, he had large practical experience in hospital and in the battlefield. He practiced first at Bologna, afterwards in Verona. William fully recognized that surgery cannot be learned from books only. His surgery contains many case histories, for he rightly opined that good notes of cases are the soundest foundation of good practice; and in this opinion and method Lanfranc followed him. William discovered that dropsy may be due to a "durities renum"; he substituted the knife for the Arabist abuse of the cautery; he investigated the causes of the failure of healing by first intention; he described the danger of wounds of the neck; he sutured divided nerves; he forwarded the diagnosis of suppurative disease of the hip; and he referred chancre and phagedaena to "their proper causes." Anyone who knows the history of surgery and of supposed modern progress in medicine will recognize at once that many of these ideas of Salicet are anticipations of discoveries supposed to have been made in the nineteenth century. The connection between dropsy and hardening of the kidneys is a typical example of this. The fact that William should have insisted that surgery cannot be learned from books is an open contradiction {175} of what is so frequently said about scholasticism having invaded the realm of medicine, and the study of books having replaced the study of patients. It is not surprising that with his study of cases William should have recognized the danger of wounds of the neck, nor that he should have taught the suture of divided nerves. It cannot fail to be a matter of surprise, however, that he should have any hint of the possibility of union by first intention, for that is supposed to be quite recent, and the knowledge he displays of venereal diseases is supposed to have come into medicine and surgery at least two centuries later. Allbutt next takes up Salicet's great pupil Lanfranc. "Lanfranc's 'Chirurgia Magna' was a great work, written by a reverent but independent follower of Salicet. He distinguished between venous and arterial hemorrhage, and used styptics (rabbit's fur, aloes, and white of egg was a popular styptic in older surgery), digital compression for an hour, or in severe cases ligature. His chapter on injuries of the head is one of the classics of medieval surgery. _Clerk as he was_, Lanfranc nevertheless saw but the more clearly the danger of separating surgery from medicine. 'Good God!' he exclaims, 'why this abandoning of operations by physicians to lay persons, disdaining surgery, as I perceive, because they do not know how to operate ... an abuse which has reached such a point that the vulgar begin to think that the same man cannot know medicine and surgery... I say, however, that no man can be a good physician who has no knowledge of operative surgery; a knowledge of both branches is essential.' (Chir. Magna.) Is it not strange that this ancient was wiser than most of us are even yet." {176} Striking as all this is, much more that is of interest might be added to it from Pagel's account of Lanfranc's work. Pagel says that he has excellent chapters on the affections of the eyes, the ears and mouth, the nose, even the teeth, and treats of hernia in a very practical, common sense way. He warns against the radical operation, and says in phrases that have often been repeated even in our own time, that many surgeons decide on operations too easily, not for the sake of the patient, but for the sake of the money there is in them. He believes that most of the danger and inconvenience of the hernia can be removed by means of a properly fitting truss. He treats of stone in the kidney, but insists that the main thing for this affection is prophylaxis. He suggests that stone in the bladder should first be treated by internal remedies; but in severe cases advises extraction. Lanfranc's discussion of cystotomy, Pagel characterizes "as prudent, yet rational," for he considers that the operation should not be feared too much nor delayed too long. In patients suffering from the inconvenience which comes from large quantities of fluid in the abdomen, he advises _paracentesis abdominis_. He warns, however, against putting the patient in danger from such an operation without due consideration and only when symptoms absolutely demand it. Pagel says that Lanfranc must be considered as one of the greatest of the surgeons of the Middle Ages and the real founder of the French School of Surgery which continued to be the most prominent in the world down to the nineteenth century. Lanfranc had equalled, if not surpassed, his great master William Salicet. His own disciple, Mondeville, accomplished almost as much for surgery as his master, however. Both of them were {177} destined to be thrown into the shade for succeeding generations by another great French surgeon of the next half-century, Guy de Chauliac. Pagel can scarcely say enough of the capacity as a teacher of Lanfranc. The seeds of surgical doctrine which he sowed bore fruit richly. His important successors in French surgery walked for the most part in his tracks and thus furnished the best proof of the enduring character of his capacity as a teacher. The next great name in thirteenth century surgery, for we are not yet out of that fruitful period, is Henri de Mondeville. He was known by his contemporaries and immediate successors as the most cultured of the surgeons. Whatever he wrote bears the traces of his wide reading and of his respect for authority, yet shows also his power to make observations for himself, and his name is due much more to his independent work both in the technics and the diagnostics of surgery, than to his reputation for scholarship or the depth of his culture. Lanfranc (whose name was Lanfranchi) had been an Italian. Mondeville was born in Normandy sometime about the beginning of the last quarter of the thirteenth century. The place of his education is not absolutely sure, but there is good authority for saying that he was, for a time at least, in Bologna. On his return from Italy he passed some time, just at the beginning of the fourteenth century, in Montpelier. He seems to have looked for a professorship at Montpelier, but instead received the appointment as surgeon to the French king, Philip Le Bel. This brought him to Paris, where the first portion of his book on surgery was written about 1306. This was not completed until 1312. His work was interrupted by several campaigns on which he attended {178} the king along the Northern coast. When he again took up his work of writing, he revised what he had written at first by the light of the experience that he had acquired in the campaign. Pagel says that his style is lively and clear and often full of meat. Many of his own opinions and experiences are incorporated in his work, and in spite of his tendency to display his erudition by quotations, his originality is not seriously interfered with. Some of his remarks are very curiously interesting to the modern. He seems to have had the idea that portions of metal which had penetrated the body as the result of explosions, for gun-powder was already being used, might be removed by means of a magnet. He would not have been a distinguished surgeon without inventing a needle-holder, and accordingly we find that he was one of the first of a long line of such inventors. He invented certain instruments also for the removal of arrow-heads, which because of their form and hooks become firmly imbedded in the tissues. Mondeville had no such fear of trephining as Lanfranc had, though he did not hesitate to emphasize the value of expectant treatment in most of these cases of injury to the head that might seem at first to demand the trephine. Pagel notes the fact that when he prescribed drinks for his patients this medieval surgeon suggested that certain verses of the psalms which were usually recited, according to the custom of the times, whenever anything was administered to a patient, should be said. Pagel considers it quite natural that as a believing physician he should have realized how much his believing patients would be influenced for the better by such a procedure. He did not place any supreme faith in its efficacy, but {179} knew that it could do no harm, and had probably seen, as has many a physician and surgeon of the modern time, that such a practice does good, if not by the direct interference of Providence, then at least by the calmness of mind which it superinduces in the patient. In the same way Mondeville was not averse to his patients going on pilgrimages. He did not expect that they would all be cured miraculously, but according to Pagel, his discussion of this subject is quite modern. Travel and change of scene would do good anyhow in many cases, expectancy would help the patient's condition, and the hope aroused was also good. The best merit, however, of this French surgeon is undoubtedly the immense influence which he exerted over his great successor, Guy de Chauliac. We are really only beginning to accumulate knowledge with regard to the surgery of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Pagel has devoted three very full pages, in his compressed account of surgery, to John Yperman, a surgeon of the early fourteenth century of whom practically nothing was known until about twenty-five years ago, when the Belgian historian Broeck brought to light his works and gathered some details of his life. He was a pupil of Lanfranc's, and at the end of the thirteenth century studied at Paris on a scholarship provided by his native town of Ypres, which deliberately sent him in order that he might become expert in surgery. This may seem a strange thing for a medieval town to do, at least it may seem so to those who have been accustomed to think little of the Middle Ages, but it will not to anyone who knows anything about the wonderful civic spirit of the Free Towns. In the chapter on Science at the Medieval Universities I have quoted {180} from Prince Kropotkin's work on Mutual Aid in the Medieval Towns, and further consultation of that as a ready reference, would make all cause for ignorant surprise with regard to the culture and the enterprise of medieval towns disappear. Ypres, while a town of only fifteen thousand inhabitants now, was one of the most important towns of Flanders in the Middle Ages, noted for its manufacture of linens and fine laces, and has a handsome cathedral dating from the thirteenth century and a town hall, the famous Cloth Hall, from the same period, which is one of the most beautiful architectural monuments in Europe and one of the finest municipal buildings in the world. After his return Yperman settled down in his native town and practiced surgery until his death, which probably took place about 1330. He obtained a great renown, and this has been maintained so that in that part of the country even yet, an expert surgeon is spoken of as an Yperman. He is the author of two works in Flemish. One of these is what Pagel calls an unimportant compilation on internal medicine, but the headings of the chapters as he gives them can scarcely fail to attract the attention of the modern physician. He treats of dropsy, rheumatism, under which occur the terms coryza and catarrh, icterus, phthisis (he calls the tuberculous, tysiken), apoplexy, epilepsy, frenzy, lethargy, fallen palate, cough, shortness of breath, lung abscess, hemorrhage, blood-spitting, liver abscess, hardening of the spleen, affections of the kidney, bloody urine, diabetes, incontinence of urine, dysuria, strangury, gonorrhoea and involuntary seminal emissions--all these terms are quoted directly from Pagel. All this would seem to show that Yperman was a {181} thoroughly representative medical man. When I add that Pagel says he shows a well marked striving to free himself from the bondage of authority and that most of his therapeutic prescriptions rest upon his own experience, it will be seen that he deserves the greatest possible credit. His work in medicine, however, Pagel considers as nothing compared to his work in surgery. A special feature of this is the presence of seventy illustrations of instruments of the most various kinds, together with a plate showing the anatomical features of the stitching of a wound of the head. The work as we have it is only a fragment. The last part of it which treated of the extremities is defective. If anyone thinks for a moment that surgery was a neglected specialty at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, he should consult the text of this, or even Pagel's brief account of its contents. Some of the features of it are noteworthy. There is a chapter devoted to intoxications, which includes the effects of cantharides as well as alcohol, and treats of the bites of snakes, scorpions, and of hydrophobia due to the bites of mad hounds. There is scarcely a feature of modern surgery of the head that is not touched upon very sensibly in this work. The best proof, however, at once of the flourishing state of surgery during the fourteenth century and of the utter absurdity of saying that surgery did not develop because of the opposition of the Church or of ecclesiastics, and above all of the Popes, is to be found in the life of Guy de Chauliac, who has been deservedly called the Father of Modern Surgery and whose contributions to surgery occupy a prominent place in every history of medicine that one picks up. While the works of other {182} great writers in surgery of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries have as a rule only come to be commonly known during the latter part of the nineteenth century, Guy de Chauliac's position and the significance of his work and his writings have been a commonplace in the history of medicine for as long as it has been written seriously. We have already stated in several places in this volume his relations to the Popes. He was a chamberlain of the Papal Court while it was at Avignon, and while he was teaching and developing surgery at the University of Montpelier he was also body physician to three of the Popes, and the intimate friend and influential adviser to whom they turned for consultation in matters relating to medical education and to science generally. In the present chapter, then, we shall only discuss the contributions to surgery of this surgeon of the Popes, at a time when, according to President White, because of Church opposition, surgery was considered dishonorable; "_when the greatest monarchs were often unable to secure an ordinary surgical operation, and when it required an edict of the German Emperor in order that dishonor should no longer attach to the surgical profession._" This is what Chauliac accomplished, according to Professor Allbutt: "Of his substantial advances in surgery no sufficient account is possible; but some chief points, with the aid of Haeser, Malgaigne, and Nicaise, I may briefly sum up thus: He pointed out the dangers of surgery of the neck, among them that of injuring the voice by section of the recurrent laryngeal nerve, a precaution he probably learned from Paul. He urges a low diet for the wounded, as did Mondeville and many others. He uses sutures well and discreetly (p. 9), but with far too many salves. {183} On fractures of the skull he is at his best; he noted the escape of cerebro-spinal fluid, and the effect of pressure on the respiration. It is somewhat strange that in days of war the study of chest wounds had been rather neglected by Galen, Haly, and Avicenna; their practice, however, was to leave them open, lest pus should gather about the heart. Theodoric and Henry ordered chest wounds to be closed 'lest the vital spirits escape.' Guy also closed these wounds, unless there were any effusion to be removed. In empyema he objects to caustics and prefers the knife. For haemorrhages he used sutures--a little too closely perhaps--styptics, cautery or ligature. Sinuses he dilated with tents of gentian root, or he incised them upon a director. On ulcers his large experience is fully manifest. He describes the carcinomatous kind as hopeless, unless the mass can be excised at a very early stage and the incision followed by caustics. If in fractures and dislocations he tells us nothing new, these sections testify to a remarkable fulness of knowledge at a period when the Hippocratic treatises were unknown. Haeser says that in respect of position in fractured femur he was the best physician in the Middle Ages." [Illustration: Guy de Chauliac's Cauteries:--5, 6, 7, 8, cauteries called from their shapes: knife, sword, olive, date kernel; 9, cautery with protective nail to be inserted cold; 10, protective plate for cauteries.] [Illustration: Guy de Chauliac's Cauteries:--11, 12, long, smooth cautery and canula protector; 13, 14, ring cautery with five buttons and the protective plate with five openings.] This is the period, it must not be forgotten, when, according to President White, surgery was in such a state that _the application of various ordures relieved fractures; the touch of the hangman cured sprains; the breath of a donkey expelled poison; friction with a dead man's tooth cured a toothache._ [Footnote 23] [Footnote 23: Quite as curious notions as these which President White mentions still exist in popular medicine in our own day. I have myself known a man to blow the dried excrement of the dog into the throat of his child suffering from diphtheria, and _he assured me that it cured him_. In the country districts they still use ordure poultices for sprains of various kinds, and I have known doctors prescribe them. I have seen an intelligent woman smoking dried angleworms in a pipe for toothache. I sincerely hope, however, that no serious(!) historian of the twenty-fifth century will gather up side remarks like the present with regard to such curious customs--real superstitions that have nothing to do with religion, as most supersititions have not--and state them as showing the ignorance of our generation, and above all as indicating the low state of medicine in our time.] {184} Lest it should be thought that possibly Professor Allbutt had been rather partial to the great Father of Modern Surgery in his enthusiasm for these medieval surgeons, it seems worth while to compress here something of what Pagel has to say with regard to this great man, who represents in himself a full hundred years of progress in surgery. He wrote an immense text-book of surgery, from which his teaching may be learned with absolute authenticity. The great significance attached to Guy's writings by his contemporaries and successors will be readily appreciated from the immense number of manuscript copies, original editions in print, and the many translations which are extant. This monument of scientific surgery has for dedication a sentence that would alone and of itself obliterate all the nonsense that has been talked about Papal opposition to the development of surgery. It runs as follows:-- (I dedicate this work) "To you my masters, physicians of Montpelier, Bologna, Paris, and Avignon, especially you of the Papal Court with whom I have been associated in the service of the Roman Pontiffs. The exact words as given by Pagel are "Vobis dominis meis medicis Montispessulani, Bononiae, Parisiis atque Avinionis, praecipue papalibus, quibus me in servitio Romanorum pontificum associavi." Pagel has three closely printed pages in small type of titles alone of subjects which Chauliac treated with {185} distinction. His description of instruments and methods of operation is especially full and suggestive. He knew how to prescribe manipulations and set forth the principles on which they were founded. Scarcely anything was added to his method of taxis for hernia for five centuries after his time. He describes the passage of a catheter with the accuracy and complete technic of a man who knew all the difficulties of it in complicated conditions. He recognizes the dangers that arise for the surgeon from the presence of anatomical anomalies of various kinds, and describes certain of the more important of them. He did not hesitate to suggest some very serious operations. For instance, for empyema he advises opening of the chest. He has very exact indications for trephining. He recognizes the absolute fatality of wounds of the abdomen, in which the intestines were opened, if they were left untreated, and describes a method of suturing wounds of the intestines in order to save the patient's life. In a word, there is nothing that has been attempted in these modern times, with our aseptic precautions and the advantage of anaesthesia, which this father of surgery did not discuss very practically and with excellent common sense as well as surgical acumen. Chauliac's career is interesting because it is that of a self-made man of the Middle Ages, which brings out the fact that men do not differ so much as might be thought at this distance of time, and shows that there were chances for a man to rise by his own genius from a lowly to a lofty position at this time of the Middle Ages, when it is usually supposed that men were excluded from such opportunities. Allbutt says of him: "Still, Guy of Chauliac, who flourished in the second {186} half of the fourteenth century, was enabled to feed his virile and inquisitive spirit on rich sources of learning. While he succeeded to the stores of Arnold (of Villanova) and Gordon with his just and cautious reason and wealth of experience, he cast out of them much of the sorcery, jugglery, astrology and mysticism which were their reproach. Chauliac is a village in the Auvergne, and Guy was but a farmer's lad. It was by the aid of powerful friends that he studied at Toulouse and Montpelier, took orders and the degree of Master of Medicine; in his time there was no degree of Doctor of Medicine in France. Then he studied anatomy at Bologna under Bertruccio, the successor of Mondino, a study which, with Henry (de Mondeville) he regarded as the foundation of surgery. The surgeon ignorant of anatomy, he says, "carves the human body as a blind man carves wood." [Footnote 24] [Footnote 24: This is a very striking reflection on the necessity for the study of anatomy for the practice of surgery to have been made within a half century after the supposed prohibition of dissection by the Popes, and at a time when, according to President White, "even such serious matters as fractures, calculi and difficult parturition, in which modern science has achieved some of its greatest triumphs, were dealt with by relics," and when "there were religious scruples against dissection," and surgery "was denounced by the Church," and when "pastoral medicine had checked all scientific effort in medical science." And the reflection was made by a chamberlain of the Papal household.] "Thence he paid a brief visit to Paris, where for a moment, by the renown of Lanfranc, Jean Pitard, and Henry of Mondeville, surgery was in the ascendant. For the moment the Church and the faculty had not succeeded in paralyzing the scientific arm of medicine. [Footnote 25] {187} Guy began practice in Lyons, whence he was called to Avignon by Clement VI. as 'venerabilis et circumspectus vir, dominus Guido de Cauliaco, canonicus et propositus ecclesiae Sancti Justi Lugduni, medicusque domini nostri Papae.' In Avignon he stayed, while other physicians fled, to minister to the victims of the plague (A.D., 1348), and he may have attended Laura in spite of Petrarch's tirades against all physicians and even against Guy himself. His description of this epidemic is terrible in its naked simplicity. He did not, indeed, himself escape, for he had an attack with bubo, and was ill for six weeks. He gave succor also in a later epidemic in Avignon, in 1360. His 'Chirurgia Magna' or Inventarium seu Collectorium Artis Chirurgicalis Medicinae--so called in distinction to the meagre little handbooks or Chirurgiae Parvae compiled from the larger treatises--was in preparation in 1363. This great work I have studied carefully, and not without prejudice; and yet I cannot wonder that Fallopius compared the author to Hippocrates, or that John Freind calls him the Prince of Surgeons. It is rich, aphoristic, orderly and precise. _As a clerk_ he wrote in Latin, in the awkward hybrid tongue that medical Latin then was, containing many Arabian, Provençal and French words, but very little Greek." [Footnote 25: It is worthy of remark, how even Prof. Allbutt, in a passage like this, where he is providing abundant material for the contradiction of the English Protestant tradition of the supposed opposition of the Church to science, and especially to surgery, yet cannot break away from the influence of that tradition entirely. It has been bred in him, and even while showing its falsity he is not entirely convinced himself, because the old mode of view has so firm a hold on him that he is not open to conviction. A little later in this same passage he speaks of taking up the study of Chauliac, prejudiced against him, and being convinced of his greatness against his will. Verily history has been a conspiracy against the truth, in which many people have joined almost unconsciously, led astray by feeling, not intellect.] [Illustration: Guy de Chauliac's Instruments:--15, 16, cautery apparatus with canula for cauterizing the uvula and tonsils; 17, bistoury; 18, amputation knife; 19, small sickle knife for opening abscesses and fistulas.] [Illustration: Guy de Chauliac's Instruments:--21, bow for extracting arrows the head of which had penetrated a limb; 22, mechanical trephine revolved by up-and-down movement of cross-bar.] We have seen that there was great surgery in Italy, in France, and in the Netherlands, but it had also crossed the channel into England. There was a famous English surgeon during the {188} fourteenth century by the name of John Ardern. He was educated at Montpelier and practiced surgery for a time in France. About the middle of the century, however, according to Pagel, he went back to his native land and settled for some twenty years at Newark, in Nottinghamshire, and then for nearly thirty years longer, until nearly the end of the century, was in London. He is the chief representative of English surgery during the Middle Ages. His Practice, as yet unprinted, contains, according to Pagel, a short sketch of internal medicine, but is mainly devoted to surgery. Contrary to the usual impression with regard to works in medicine and surgery at this time, the book abounds in references to case histories which Ardern had gathered, partly from his own and partly from others' experience. The therapeutic measures that he suggests are usually very simple, in the majority of cases quite rational, though, of course, there are many superstitions among them; but Ardern always furnished a number of suggestions from which to choose. He must have been an expert operator, and had excellent success in the treatment of diseases of the rectum. He seems to have been the first operator who made statistics of his cases, and was quite as proud as any modern surgeon, of the large numbers that he had operated on, which he gives very exactly. He was the inventor of a new clyster apparatus. Daremberg, the medical historian, who saw a copy of Ardern's manuscript in St. John's College, Oxford, says that it contains numerous illustrations of instruments and operations. His work seems really to be a series of monographs or collection of special articles on different subjects, which Ardern had made at various times, rather than a connected work. Pagel bewails the fact {189} that a more thorough consideration of Ardern's work is impossible, because the greater part of what he wrote remains as yet unprinted. In general, when we consider how difficult was the task of making copies of works on surgery by hand, and especially such as contain numerous illustrations, the wonder grows that we should have so much about the surgery of these centuries rather than so little. Some of these works have been preserved for us by the merest chance. There have been many centuries since their time, when what these surgeons wrote would have been thought of very little value because physicians were not educated up to them. In spite of this liability to loss, which must have caused the destruction of many valuable works, we still have enough to show us what wonderful men were these surgeons of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, who anticipated our best thinking of the modern times in many of the most difficult problems. It is only during the last twenty-five years that anything like justice has been done them. The only way to know what these men did and taught is to read their own works, and these have been buried in manuscript or hidden away in large folio volumes, printed very early in the history of printing, and considered so valuable that consultation of them was almost resented by librarians. Anyone who talks about the lack of surgery in Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is supremely ignorant of the real course of history at this time, and when in addition he attributes the failure of surgery to develop to a trumped-up opposition of the Church or ecclesiastics, he is simply making a ridiculous exhibition of intolerance and of foolish readiness to accept anything, however groundless, that may {190} enable him to make out a case against the ecclesiastical authorities. It is curious to reflect that in spite of all this wonderful progress in surgery, somehow there has crept in the tradition which has been very generally accepted by historians not acquainted with the details of medical history, that surgery was neglected during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The existence of this tradition, and its acceptance by men who had no idea that they were being influenced by that peculiar state of mind which considers that nothing good can come out of the Nazareth of the times before the reformation so-called, is of itself a warning with regard to the way history has been written, especially for the Teutonic and English-speaking peoples, that should carry weight in other departments of history beside medicine and surgery. Even Pagel could not get entirely away from the old tradition which has existed for so long, that the Church, if she did not oppose, at least hampered the progress of surgery. While his first paragraph shows that he recognized the important advances that were made in the Middle Ages, he cannot rid himself of the prejudice that has existed so long and has tinged so much of the historical writing of the last four centuries. He furnishes an abundance of material himself to disprove the old opinion, and evidently has been influenced by this evidence, but cannot give up notions that have been part and parcel of his education from his earliest days in Protestant Germany. He says:-- "A set-back must also be recognized to some extent in surgery, especially attributable to the fact that as a consequence of the pressure of the Church upon scientific medicine, the representatives of medical {191} science felt themselves bound to neglect the practical art of surgical operation. Church regulations forbade the shedding of blood to churchmen, and not a few physicians were more than inclined to accept this prohibition as in accordance with their own feelings. For this reason the practice of surgery was left for the most part to the lower orders of those engaged in healing. This went to such an extent, that physicians even came to look upon surgery as an unworthy occupation. Even venesection, which was so commonly employed and which came to be indispensable to the practice of internal medicine, made it necessary to call for the services of a barber-surgeon." As we shall see, there were many other and much more important factors at work in the degradation of surgery than the supposed repression of the Church. The time to which Pagel refers is in the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages, and not the later ones; yet it is from these later centuries that the supposed prohibitory decrees are all quoted. The contempt for surgery was due rather to the general lack of culture before the foundation of the universities than to any ecclesiastical repression. Just as soon as the great medical schools were opened--and that at Salerno came into existence in the early part of the tenth century if not earlier--surgery began to be in honor. Pagel himself confesses this in the very next paragraph of this brief conspectus of surgery, and shows how generally was the uplift of surgery made possible by university education, though there still remained many drawbacks to progress because of the jealousy of physicians. "Gradually, however, a beneficial transformation of customs in this matter began to be manifest. Physicians {192} who were scientifically trained began to take up surgery with enthusiasm, and from that time (end of twelfth century) dates the visible uplift of this specialty. Eventually the most noteworthy literary events and remains of the representatives of the great schools of the Middle Ages--Salerno, Bologna, Paris and Montpelier--concern quite as much the department of surgery as of practical medicine. These medieval literary contributions constitute the principal steps in the historical development of scientific surgery. The Crusades represent an extremely important influence upon the perfecting of the surgery of wounds. Italian surgeons in large numbers took prominent parts therein. They took the abundant opportunities afforded them to gather experience, which they used to great advantage in their practice and in their teaching after their return home. From Roger, the first and most important of the representatives of the Salernitan school (whose life occupies the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century), and down to Guy de Chauliac (who died toward the end of the fourteenth century), in a space therefore of not quite two hundred years, a complete breach with the blood-fearing traditions of the Arabs was made. In no European land does one fail to find evidence of intense as well as successful scientific occupation with surgery." As a reflection that throws a brilliant light on the true conditions that brought about the diminished estimation in which surgery came to be held, Guy de Chauliac has an interesting passage in which he suggests an explanation for it, which is surely much nearer the truth than any modern explanation is likely to be. He says that, after the time of the Arabs, who were all both physicians and surgeons, either because of the lack of interest of {193} physicians or their laziness, for the practice of surgery is a difficult matter, or because they came to be too much occupied with the ills which they might hope to cure by medicines alone, surgery became separated from medicine and passed down into the hands of mere mechanics. This is a complaint not infrequently heard even at the present day, that medicine and surgery are drawing too much apart for the good of either specialty. Both the Regius Professors of medicine in England have recently insisted that physicians must oftener be present at operations if they would really appreciate the value of diagnosis, while there has been for many years a feeling that surgery would be benefitted if surgeons did not always wish to have recourse to the knife, but appreciated how much good might be accomplished by other remedial measures. The great French Father of Surgery, then, was only expressing what was to be a perennial complaint in the domain of medicine and surgery when he explained the separation of the two departments of healing. He has nothing whatever to say of the evil influence upon surgery of any Church regulations, though he must have been in a position to realize their significance very well in this respect if they actually had any. He was himself, as we have said, a member of the Papal household; he was even a cleric, and seems to have encountered no difficulty at all not only in devoting himself to surgery, but even in lifting up that department of medicine from the slough of neglect into which it had fallen because of the lack of initiative of preceding generations in his native land. It may be wondered, then, how the tradition of opposition to surgery, which is so common in history, had its origin. Nearly always for these exaggerated stories {194} there is some basis of truth. For instance, with regard to the opposition to Vesalius, the origin of the stories of persecution by the Church and ecclesiastical authorities is evidently the fact that he was very much opposed by the old-time physicians and surgeons, who believed in Galen and thought it worse than heresy to break with him. It is the opposition of scientists, or pseudo-scientists, to scientific progress that constitutes the real bar to advance, and has over and over again been attributed to religious motives, when it is really due to that very human overconservatism, which so constantly places men in the position of opponents to novelties of any kind, no matter how much of value they may eventually prove to have. There has always existed a certain prejudice against surgery on the part of physicians--meaning by that term, for the moment, those who devote themselves to internal medicine. This feeling has never quite died out. There were times in the Middle Ages when it was very marked. Not a little of the feeling is due to professional jealousy, and that, it is to be feared, like the poor, we shall have always with us. Professor Allbutt has in the address at St. Louis, already quoted from, a very interesting passage with regard to the College of St. Côme at Paris, in which this jealousy between physicians and surgeons is very well brought out. I quote it here in order to illustrate once more that opposition of scientists to scientific advance, for personal reasons, which has always existed, is still one of the features of the history of science, and will probably always continue to be a noteworthy phase of scientific progress. It will serve at the same time to furnish to those who cannot think that these stories with regard to the hampering of surgical development are {195} entirely without foundation, some basis for them that will account for their universality, but will only render clearer the intolerance of those who have constantly perverted the meaning of this opposition to persecution on the part of Church authorities. Ecclesiastics not only had nothing to do with this, but more often than not were the active factors in such amelioration of the conditions it brought about as very much to lessen its effects. Allbutt's story of the College of Surgeons of St. Côme at Paris is, as we have said, interesting from this standpoint. "Some of my readers may wonder how it is that in discoursing of medieval surgery I have not dwelt upon the Surgical College of St. Côme of Paris. Well, St. Côme did no great things for surgery. The truth is that, infected with the exclusiveness and dialectical conceits of all the schools of Paris, St. Côme was almost ready to sacrifice surgery itself if thereby it might choke off its parasites, the barbers. Lest they should be suspected of mixing their philosophy with facts, its members went about with their hands ostentatiously tied behind them. If perhaps Malgaigne speaks too contemptuously of St. Côme, it must be admitted that the college was in a false position throughout. In aping the Faculty of Medicine, it lost the touch of mother earth without gaining any harbourage in the deep waters of the proud. Nay, such is the Nemesis of pride, the barbers came to command the position. It did not suit the Faculty to see the barbers weakened; for in their weakness lay the strength of the surgeons of St. Côme, who sought incessantly to appear as lettered clerks, to attach their college to the university, and even to claim a place beside the Faculty itself. To bring St. Côme to its knees, and to check the presumptuous claims of this corporation on the {196} privileges of the Faculty of Medicine, on a liberal education in arts and medicine, on a place in the university, on the suppression of unqualified surgical practice, and less, honourably, on relief from handicraft and urgent calls, the Faculty had to coquette with the barbers. Medicine, proclaimed the Faculty when it suited its purpose, contains the theoretical and the practical side of surgery; a surgeon is therefore but the servant of a physician. If St. Côme sought to provide lectures in surgery, the Faculty, which kept possession of teaching licenses and desired in the surgeon a docile assistant, took the teaching from the college and invited the barbers to lectures of its own. In their duplicity and conceit of caste, physicians of the Faculty condescended even to publish books on surgery, books as arid and as insincere as their lectures. On the other hand, in the person of the King's Barber, the barbers had a secret and potent influence at Court. The Faculty persisted in denying to St. Côme all 'esoteric' teaching, all diagnosis, and all use of medical therapeutics. Aristotle was pronounced to be unfavorable to the 'vulgarizing of science.' Joubert was attacked for editing Guy, but replied with dignity (in the notes of his edition). While the Faculty thus tried to prevent the access to letters of a presumptuous body of artisans, St. Côme in mimic arrogance disdained the barbers, sought to deny them the name of surgeon, and was jealous of the diffusion of technical knowledge among them in the vernacular tongue." [Footnote 26] [Footnote 26: As showing how professional jealously may exist in such ways in the modern times as to hinder progress, the following paragraph, which is the opening portion of Professor Allbutt's address, has seemed to me to deserve quotation here. It will illustrate a phase of the subject that is probably utterly unexpected by those unfamiliar with the inner history of medicine in our time, but which is not so surprising to physicians who know the jealousy with which men guard their specialties from what they consider the interference of others, in hospital work and in teaching, though this exclusiveness often proves detrimental both to the breadth of development of the student and to the good health of the patient. "It was, I think, in the year 1864, when I was a novice on the Honorary Staff of the Leeds General Infirmary, that the unsurgical division of us was summoned in great solemnity to discuss a method of administration of drugs by means of a needle. This method having obtained some vogue, it behooved those who practiced 'pure' medicine to decide whether the operation were consistent with the traditions of purity. For my part, I answered that the method had come up early, if not originally, in St. George's Hospital, and in the hands of a house physician--Dr. C. Hunter; that I had accustomed myself already to the practice and proposed to continue it; moreover, that I had recently come from the classes of Professor Trousseau, who, when his cases demanded such treatment, did not hesitate himself to perform paracentesis of the pleura, or even incision of this sac, or of the pericardium. As, for lack not of will but of skill and nerve, I did not intend myself to perform even minor operations, my heresy, as one in thought only, was indulgently ignored, and we were set free to manipulate the drug needle if we felt disposed to this humble service."] {197} In conclusion, we may say that, in the Middle Ages, once men had lifted themselves up from the condition into which they had been plunged by the incursions of the barbarians, there was nothing like the neglect of surgery which is sometimes said to have existed. Surgery had its normal development, and reached as high a stage as medicine in that beginning Renaissance, which is the characteristic feature of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. The traditions of a low state of surgery at this time are all false and founded on insufficient knowledge of the real conditions, which have been so clearly revealed to us by the investigation of original documents in the last twenty-five years. This was, in fact, one of the greatest periods in the history of surgery that the world has ever known. Whatever of difficulty in development surgery encountered was due not to any Church opposition, but to unfortunate conditions that arose in the practice of medicine. Professional jealousy and shortsightedness was the main element in it. Even this, however, did not prevent the very wonderful development of surgery that came {198} during the Middle Ages, and that made this department of human knowledge quite as progressive and successful as any other, in that marvelous period when the universities came into existence in the form which they have maintained ever since. {199} PAPAL PHYSICIANS. Most of what historical writers generally, who follow the old traditions of the medieval eclipse of medicine, have to say with regard to the supposed Papal opposition to the development of medical science, is founded on the assumption that men who believed in miracles and in the efficacy of prayer for the relief of disease could not possibly be interested to any serious degree in scientific medicine. As Dr. White says, "out of all these inquiries came inevitably that question whose logical answer was especially injurious to the development of medical science: why should men seek to build up scientific medicine and surgery, when relics, pilgrimages, and sacred observances, according to an overwhelming mass of concurrent testimony, have cured and are curing hosts of sick folk in all parts of Europe." He goes even farther than this, however, when he suggests that "it would be expecting too much from human nature to imagine that Pontiffs who derived large revenues from the sale of the Agnus Dei, or priests who derived both wealth and honors from cures wrought at shrines under their care, or lay dignitaries who had invested heavily in relics, should favor the development of any science which undermined their interests." On the strength of assumptions such as these, that "medieval belief in miracles of healing must have checked medical science," and that therefore it did actually prevent the development of scientific medicine, statements are made with regard to the history of {200} medicine that are utterly at variance with the plain facts of history. Once more, as in the case of the supposed failure of surgery to develop during the Middle Ages, it is a deduction that has been made from certain supposed principles, and not an induction from the actual facts as we know them. Such historians would be the first to emphasize the narrowness of the schoolmen for their supposed dependence on deduction, but what they have to say on medical history is entirely deductive, and unfortunately from premises that will not stand in the presence of the story of the wonderful rise and development of medical science and medical education, mainly under the patronage of ecclesiastics, in the Middle Ages. The argument may be stated formally with perfect fairness as follows: When men believe in miracles they cannot build up scientific medicine and surgery; but men believed in miracles in the Middle Ages, therefore they did not build up scientific medicine and surgery. When stated thus baldly in formal scholastic form, the argument loses most of the glamor that has been thrown around it. This is one of the advantages of the old scholastic method--it strips argument to its naked significance. Logic asserts herself and rhetoric loses its force. With regard to the major premise that when men believe in miracles they will not successfully pursue investigations in the medical science, there are two answers. One of these concerns the actual attitude of mind towards scientific medicine of men who believe in miracles, for we have such men still with us, and have always had them all during the past seven centuries. The other portion of the answer concerns what men who were distinguished scientific investigators thought of {201} miracles, and how much they accomplished for the medical sciences while all the time maintaining their belief in the possibility of miraculous intervention for the cure of disease. Apparently the writers who insist on the incompatibility of the belief in miracles with devotion to scientific medicine do not realize that the greater number of thinking physicians during the last seven centuries, and quite down to our own day, have been ready to confess their belief in the possibility of miraculous healing, yet have tried to do everything in their power to relieve suffering and cure human ills by the natural means at their command. Their attitude has been very much that attributed to Ignatius of Loyola, who said to the members of his order: "Do everything that you can with the idea that everything depends on you, and then hope for results just as if everything depended on God." There is no lack of logic in this; and the physician of the present day who realizes his impotency in the presence of so many of the serious ailments of mankind is not a scoffer at the attitude of mind that looks for help from prayer; but if he is sensible, welcomes the placidity of mind this will give his patient, even if he does not, as many actually do, however, believe in the possible interposition of supernatural forces. If Prof. White knew anything about the lives of the men whose names are most distinguished in the history of medicine during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we would have heard nothing of his almost incomprehensible negation of the existence of scientific medicine, during centuries when so many men who have stamped their names indelibly on the history of the medical sciences were doing their work and {202} writing. If he had taken any pains to learn even a few details of the personal relations of these old-time makers of medicine to the Popes, we would have heard none of this utter absurdity of Papal opposition to medicine or ecclesiastical hampering of medical science. To answer Prof. White's argument, that "it would be expecting too much from human nature to imagine that Pontiffs should favor the development of any science which undermined their interests," the simple story of the men the Popes choose as their own medical advisers, and who because of the prestige of their appointment as Papal Physicians helped to raise up in the eyes of the people the dignity of the medical profession which they represented, will be quite enough. It will also serve to show how different is history founded on an assumption from history founded on actual facts. The best, most easily obtainable, and most impressive data for the inductive method of reaching the truth as regards the relation of the Popes to medical science and (because of the fact that physicians were the scientists _par excellence_ of the Middle Ages) to all science, will be found in a brief consideration of the lives of the men who occupied the position of Papal Physician during the last seven centuries. I do not think that this group of men has ever been treated together before; at least I have been unable to find any work on the subject. While I am able to present a considerable amount of interesting material in brief form with regard to them, I am sure that there are many of them whom I have omitted. Practically up to the day of going to press I have been finding new references that led to further precious information with regard to this most wonderful group of men in medical history. It will be well {203} understood, then, that impressive as the consideration of the work and character of the men whose names I have found must be, this does not represent all the truth in the matter, but can be supplemented without much difficulty from other sources. If the Popes had been interested only in the miraculous healing of disease, and had wished to teach the lesson that men should depend solely for their recovery from serious symptoms and ailments of all kinds on prayers and relics and pilgrimages, then they would either have had no physicians at all in regular attendance on them, or at least their physicians would not have been selected from among the men who were doing most to advance the cause of practical and scientific medicine and of medical education. The very opposite of this is the case. The Papal physicians were as a rule the most scientific medical men of their time. This is not a pious exaggeration, but is literally true for seven centuries of history, as we shall see presently. The wonder of it is that there were not some charlatans among them. The physicians whom educated people select are not, as physicians we'll know, always worthy examples of progressive medical men. Literary folk particularly seem to have a distinct tendency to want to be different from other people, and their physicians are often the veriest theorizers. A medical friend who occasionally quotes, but perverts the old line, "the people people have for friends are often very queer," says, half in jest of course, but alas! more than half in earnest, that "the people literary folk and the clergy have for doctors are the queerest ducks (docs.) of all." It is only too true that clergymen are especially prone to be erratic in the choice of their medical advisers and {204} lacking in a critical judgment as to the remedies and methods of treatment of which they become the willing recipients, and occasionally even the sponsors as regards other people, who look up to their judgment for other reasons with confidence. Prof. Osler once said that the nearer to the Council of Trent the clergyman, the nearer he was likely to be to truth and common sense in medical matters; but then perhaps all would not agree with him. It is all the more surprising under the circumstances, and very greatly to their credit, that the Popes should have had as their physicians a list of men whose names are the brightest on the roll of great contributors to medical literature and some of the most distinguished among the great discoverers in medical science. This fact alone constitutes the most absolute contradiction of the declarations as to supposed Church opposition to medicine that could possibly be given. No better means of encouraging, fostering, and patronizing medical science could be thought of than to give the prestige and the emoluments of physician to the head of the Church to important makers of medicine in every generation. The physicians to the rulers of Europe have not always been selected with as good judgment, and, as I have already said, there is no list of physicians to any European Court, nor indeed any list of names of medical men connected together by any bond in history--no list, for instance, of any medical faculty of a university--which can be compared for prestige in scientific medicine with the Papal Physicians. Before the beginning of the thirteenth century very little is known of the medical attendants of the Popes. We point out in the following chapter that the Papacy was closely in touch with the medical school at Salernum. {205} It seems not unlikely, and indeed there are some traditions to that effect, that in cases of severe illnesses of the Popes, important members of the medical faculty were sometimes summoned from the South of Italy to Rome. The relations of the Popes to the neighboring abbey of Monte Cassino might, as we have said, suggest this. We have, however, very few details in this matter. With the beginning of the great thirteenth century, however, the records of human achievement in every line are better kept, and at once we begin to know something definite about Papal Physicians. The first one of decided prominence was Guy or Guido of Montpelier, who was summoned to Rome by Pope Innocent III. in order that he might re-establish the hospital of the Santo Spirito at Rome, in accordance with what were considered to be the latest ideas in the matter of hospital building and the enlightened care of the sick. How well he accomplished this work, and how well he deserves to head the glorious roll of Papal Physicians, will be seen in the chapter on The Popes and City Hospitals. The next of the Papal Physicians of whom much is known in the history of medicine was Richard the Englishman, usually spoken of as Ricardus Anglicus. He was the physician to the famous Pope Gregory IX. (1237-1241). Richard, who was born in England not long before the beginning of the thirteenth century, died shortly after the middle of that century. For a time he was at Paris, and accordingly is sometimes spoken of as Ricardus Parisiensis. According to Gabriel Naudé he was at Paris after the death of his patient, Gregory IX., and towards the end of his life retired to the Abbey of St. Victor, to spend his last days in recollection and prayer. In this he anticipated another great English physician {206} with a European reputation--Linacre--who, three centuries later, after having been the royal physician for many years to King Henry VIII., became a clergyman. It is interesting to realize that, early in history as Richard's life occurs, some works attributed to him contain definite information with regard to anatomy. Most of this, it is true, is taken from Hippocrates, Galen, and the Arabs, but some of it seems to be the result of his own personal experience, on the living, if not on the dead. After Richard, the next of the physicians to the Popes who has an important place in the history of medicine is the famous Thaddeus Alderotti, who lived for more than eighty years during the thirteenth century. He has the added interest for this generation of having been a self-made man, for he was the son of very poor parents of the lowest rank. Up to his thirtieth year he remained without any special education. He made his living, it is said, by selling candles. Having acquired a little competency, at the age of thirty he began with great zeal the study of philosophy and of medicine, two sciences which in the old days were supposed to go very well together, though, unfortunately, they are often rigidly separated from each other in later times. Fifteen years after he began the study of medicine we hear of him as a medical teacher, and then ten years later he began to be famous as a writer on all sorts of medical topics. He became the physician of Pope Honorius IV., himself one of the most liberal and broadly educated of men, and as the result of the confidence awakened by his occupancy of this honorable position, he secured an immense success in practice and made an enormous fortune. Alderotti's work represents what is best in medicine for the whole of the thirteenth century. {207} A curiously interesting episode that deserves a place in the history of Papal Physicians occurred during Alderotti's life. One of the Popes elected to fill the Papal chair had been earlier in life a physician. This was the famous Peter of Spain, though he was really a Portuguese, who, under the name of John XXI., occupied the Papal throne during the years 1276-1277. Peter of Spain had been one of the most distinguished natural scientists of this interesting century. Dr. J. B. Petella, in an article published in Janus about ten years ago, entitled A Critical and Historical Study of the Knowledge of Ophthalmology of a Philosopher Physician who became Pope, gives an excellent account of the life of Pope John XXI. [Footnote 27] [Footnote 27: Janus, Archives International es pour l'histoire de la Medicine et pour la Geographie Medicale, paraissant tous les deux mois. Amsterdam, 1897-1898.] Petella does not hesitate to say of him that he was "one of the most renowned personages of Europe during the thirteenth century, from the point of view of the triple evolution of his extraordinary mind, which caused him to make his mark in the physical sciences, in the metaphysical sciences, and in the religious world. In him there was an incarnation of the savant of the time, and he must be considered the most perfect encyclopedist of the Middle Ages in their first renascence." Anyone who reads Dr. Petella's account of this book by Pope John XXI. will be surprised at how much was known about diseases of the eye at the middle of the thirteenth century. For instance, hardening of the eye is spoken of as a very serious affection, so that there seems to be no doubt that the condition now known as glaucoma was recognized and its bad prognosis appreciated. His account of the external anatomy of the eye, eight coats of which he describes, beginning with the {208} conjunctiva and ending with the retina, is quite complete. The eye is said to have eight muscles, the levator of the upper eyelid and the sphincter muscle of the eye being counted among them. The other muscles are picturesquely described as reins, that is, guiding ribbons for the eye. Cataract is described as water descending into the eye, and two forms of it are distinguished--one traumatic, due to external causes, and the other due to internal causes. Lachrimal fistula is described and its causes discussed. Various forms of blepharitis are touched upon. Many suggestions are made for the treatment of trichiasis. That a man who was as distinguished in medicine as Peter of Spain should have been elected Pope, is the best possible proof that there was no opposition between science and religion during the thirteenth century. But to return to the Papal Physicians in our original meaning of the term. Alderotti's successor as physician to the Papal Court was scarcely, if any, less distinguished. This was Simon Januensis, the medical attendant to Pope Nicholas IV., whose pontificate lasted from 1288-1292. Simon did much to make the use of opium more scientific than it had been, and he established definite rules for its administration. Before this the anodyne effects of the drug had been well known, but the difficulty had been to regulate its dosage properly and prevent the use of too large quantities, while at the same time securing the administration of sufficient of the drug to relieve pain. At the beginning there was much prejudice with regard to opium. Indeed, as every physician knows, this prejudice has not entirely died out even in our own day. How much of good, then, Simon was able to accomplish because the prestige of his position as {209} Papal Physician helped to break down this prejudice, and how much human suffering he saved as a consequence, it is easy to understand. Simon is best known in the history of medical science as the author of what was probably the first important dictionary of medicine. This was called the Synonyma Medicinae or Clavis Sanationis, the Key of Health. Steinschneider has declared this book to be one of the most important works in the field of Synonymies. Julius Pagel, in his chapter on Therapeutics in the Middle Ages, in Puschmann's Handbook of the History of Medicine, already quoted, says that this Papal Physician succeeded in solving very happily the problem which he set himself, of gathering together the information that had been collected during past centuries with regard to medical words, and especially those relating to the use of various remedial measures. The industry of the writer may be very well appreciated from the fact that his glossary contains some six thousand articles. Its place in the history of science, as given by Meyer, the German historian of botany, is that for the understanding of the older words in natural science, no better aid than this can be found. He considers it the best work of its kind until Caspar Bauhin's similar volume came to replace it, but that was not until well on in the seventeenth century. Simon was greatly encouraged in this work by Popes Nicholas IV. and Boniface VIII., to both of whom he was body physician and at the same time an intimate friend. The custom of having for medical attendant one of the leading physicians of the day, if not actually the most prominent medical scientist of the time, which had obtained at Rome during the thirteenth century, was maintained at Avignon during the three-quarters of a {210} century in which the Papal See had its seat there. Just who the regular medical attendant of Clement V., the first of the Avignon Popes, was is not very sure. When he became seriously ill toward the end of his life, however, Arnold of Villanova, one of the professors of physic at Paris and probably the most distinguished living physician of the time, was summoned in consultation, and began his journey down to Avignon. This summons attracted widespread attention, which was still further emphasized by the fact that Arnold of Villanova died on the journey. It is not difficult to appreciate even at this distance of time how much weight the summoning of a physician from a long distance to attend His Holiness would have on the minds of the people, and how much it would tend to call their attention to the important medical school from which the great man came. People generally, who heard the facts, would want at least to have in attendance on them, if possible, a physician who had been graduated at the school from which Arnold of Villanova was summoned on his important medical mission. How much this would mean for the encouragement of scientific medicine as it was developing at the University of Paris can scarcely be overestimated. The distinct tendency of the Popes to keep in touch with the best men in medicine and surgery in their time is well illustrated by the case of Guy de Chauliac. This great French surgeon and professor at the University of Montpelier is hailed by the modern medical world as the Father of Modern Surgery. There is no doubt at all of his intensely modern character as a teacher, nor of his enterprise as a progressive surgeon. Few men have done more for advance in medicine, and his name is {211} stamped on a number of original ideas that have never been eclipsed in surgery. After studying anatomy very faithfully, especially by means of dissections, in Italy, where he tells us that his master at Bologna, Bertrucci, made a larger number of dissections scarcely more than thirty years after the supposed Papal decree of prohibition, he returned to Montpelier to become the professor of surgery there, and introduced the Italian methods of investigation into the famous old university. At this time the Popes were at Avignon, not far distant from Montpelier. From them Guy received every encouragement in his scientific work. He insisted that no one could practice surgery with any hope of success unless he devoted himself to careful dissection of the human body. If we were to believe some of the things that have been said with regard to the Popes forbidding dissection, this should have been enough to keep the French surgeon from the favor of the Popes, but it did not. On the contrary, he was the intimate friend and consultant medical attendant of two of the Avignon Popes, and was the chamberlain to one of them. The good influence of Chauliac on the minds of the Popes is reflected in their interest in the medical department of the University of Montpelier. About this time Pope Urban VI. founded the College of Twelve Physicians at Montpelier. He was an alumnus of the university, and had been appealed to to enlarge the opportunities of his Alma Mater. He did so in the manner just related. One of the Papal Physicians of the Avignon times was unfortunate. This was the ill-fated Cecco di Ascolo, who was distinguished as a poet and a philosopher as well as a physician. But for his sad end, one might be tempted to say, that he had so many irons in the fire {212} that it was scarce to be wondered at that he suffered the fate of many another tender of too many irons, and eventually got his fingers burnt. He was body physician of Pope John XXII. during a good part of the long pontificate of that strenuous old man, who became Pope when over seventy, lived to be ninety, yet accomplished important work in every year of his career. After leaving Avignon Cecco went to Italy and became the Professor of Astrology at Bologna. The term astrology had none of the unfortunate or derisory signification that it has at the present time. It was, as the etymology of the word implies, the science of the stars, though it was cultivated with due reference to the influence of these heavenly bodies on human fate and human constitutions. Hence a physician's interest in it. This continued to be a characteristic of astrology down to the time of Tycho-Brahe, the Danish astronomer, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Cecco and another distinguished physician of the time, Dino de Garbo, became involved in a public controversy, as the result of which Cecco was denounced to the public authorities as undermining the basis of government and virtually teaching anarchy, though it was called heresy, and as a result of the bitter feud he suffered the penalty of death by fire. The last of the Papal Physicians connected with the Pontifical Court at Avignon was almost as illustrious as any of his predecessors. He was the well-known Joannes de Tornamira, who was the body physician to Gregory XI. until that Pontiff brought the Papal Court back to Rome. Then Tornamira became the chancellor of the University of Montpelier. He wrote an introduction to the study of medicine, meant for the use of students and young physicians, called a Clarificatorium, which, {213} according to Puschmann's History of Medicine, was the most used text-book of medicine during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Besides this he wrote a long and important work On Fevers and the Accidents of Fevers, in which he sums up all the medical knowledge of the time on these subjects. That the policy of the Popes did not change as regards the selection of their physicians on their return from Avignon to Rome, is to be seen from the physician of the Popes whose See was in both places. This was the famous Francis of Siena, who is known best in history as the intimate friend of Petrarch, and who was physician to Pope Gregory XI. and to his successor, Urban VI. He had been a professor of medicine at the University of Pisa, and by special invitation went to fill the same position in the University of the Papal City, and became at the same time the medical adviser of the Popes. His influence on medicine was not very important, but he occupied a very prominent position among the learned men of the time, and his personal prestige did much to add to the dignity of the profession. In our own time, the medical men who have been best known and whose membership in the profession has added greatly to its popular estimation, have at times not been distinguished for great things in medicine. Francis of Siena was such a man, and the fact that he was medical adviser to the Popes at the same time must be counted as an important factor in the evolution of medical dignity. One of the first writers on medical cases who did not indulge much in theory was Baverius de Baveriis, of Imola, who died about 1480, and who was the physician to Pope Nicholas V. shortly before and after the middle of the fifteenth century. In the light of the fact that a {214} recent Papal physician, Dr. Lapponi, has written a book on hypnotism and spiritism, it is interesting to find that his predecessor in the post of Papal Physician four centuries and a half ago, discussed the differential diagnosis of hysteria, catalepsy, epilepsy and syncope. He also discusses certain interesting cases of vertigo due to stomach trouble, and in general anticipates very unexpectedly neurotic conditions that are supposed to have been recognized in medicine much later than his time. Perhaps the most startling thing to be found in his works is his recommendation of iron for chlorosis, which he claimed to have treated with the greatest success by means of this remedy. Of course, there was no idea at the time that chlorosis was due in any sense to a lack of iron in the system, and its value as a therapeutic agent must have come entirely from empiric considerations; but then most of our advances in drug therapeutics have come by no better way. Another of the distinguished Papal Physicians of the fifteenth century was John of Vigo (1460-1520), who, as Professor Allbutt notes, was attached to the court of the fighting Pontiff, Julius II., and as a consequence saw much of field surgery. His text-book of surgery, printed at Rome in the early part of the sixteenth century, went through an enormous number of editions. No standard surgical treatise had appeared since that of Guy de Chauliac, and Vigo's continued to be the standard for the next full century. He was a shrewd and skilful as well as a learned physician. His surgical acumen deserves to be noted. He recognized that fracture of the inner table of the skull might take place without that of the outer, and made some very practical remarks with regard to gangrene and its causes. He attributed {215} gangrene in certain cases to faulty bandaging in fractures, and discussed its origin also as the result of severe cold. He treated syphilis with mercurial inunctions, a practice still followed by the best specialists in this line. His greatest claim to fame, however, is founded on the fact that he was the first to write a surgical treatise on wounds made by firearms. At this time, during the first half of the sixteenth century, the Papal Medical School begins to assume an importance in the history of medicine which it was to continue to hold for the next two centuries. After the refoundation of the Sapienza by Pope Alexander VI., and its development under Pope Leo X., special care was taken and no expense spared by their successors, to secure the greatest teachers in anatomy in the world for the medical department of the Papal University. At this time all the great physicians were distinguished for their attainments in anatomy, somewhat as in the nineteenth century great physicians obtained their prestige by original work in pathology. The situations in the two centuries had much more in common than the casual reader of history or even the ordinary student of medicine would appreciate. The list of Papal Physicians, then, becomes to a great extent the roll of the professors of anatomy at the Papal University Medical School. The Popes of this period were wise enough in their generation to realize that the men who devoted themselves to original research in increasing the knowledge of the human body, were also those likely to know most about the diseases of the body and their treatment. These scientific anatomists, with the chastening knowledge of the complexity of the human body before them, probably made less claims to power to cure diseases than many an {216} enthusiastic therapeutist of the time, who thought, as have representatives of this specialty in every generation, that he has many infallible remedies for the cure of disease, though subsequent generations have not agreed with him. The true significance of the lives of the men who occupied the post of Papal Physician after this time will be best appreciated from our treatment of them in the chapter on The Papal Medical School. It will be sufficient here simply to recall the names of the distinguished men who, besides being professors in the Papal Medical School, were the medical advisers of the Popes. The first and most important of the great Renaissance professors of anatomy of the Roman Medical School who were also Papal Physicians was Columbus. He had been Vesalius's assistant at Padua and later his successor. He had lectured also at Bologna. When a special effort was made to give prestige to the University of Pisa, he was tempted by particularly liberal offers to become the professor of anatomy in that city. It was from here, by still more generous patronage, that the Popes obtained him for their medical school. On treating of the Papal Medical School, we shall have more to say of him and his successor in the professorship of anatomy and medicine as well as in the post of Papal Physician, who was the third of the first anatomists of the time--Eustachius. He with Columbus and Vesalius constitute the trinity of great original investigators in anatomy about the middle of the sixteenth century. It is extremely interesting, with the traditions that exist in the matter, to find that the Popes secured two of these great anatomists for their personal physicians as well as for their medical school. The third one, Vesalius, became the body {217} physician first to the Emperor Charles V. and then to his son Philip II., whom many would declare to be as Catholic as the Popes themselves in religious tendencies. After Eustachius came Varolius, whose name is engraved in the history of medicine because the Pons Varolii or bridge of Varolius, an important structure in the brain now often simply called the pons, was named after him. To Varolius we owe one of the earliest detailed descriptions of the anatomy of the brain. He was the Papal Physician to Gregory XIII., who will be remembered as the Pope under whom the reform of the calendar was made by the great Jesuit mathematician and astronomer, Father Clavius. Pope Gregory's enlightened patronage of medicine in the person of Varolius will be better appreciated if we add that he was chosen as Papal Physician when he was not yet thirty years of age, though he had already given abundant evidence of his talent for original investigation in anatomy. He died at the early age of thirty-two, but not until after he had accomplished a life's work sufficient to give him an enduring place in the history of anatomy. After Varolius as Papal Physician came Piccolomini and then Caesalpinus, whom the Italians hail as the discoverer of the circulation of the blood before Harvey, and of whom we shall have much to say in the next chapter. Piccolomini was not as great an original thinker and worker as many of his predecessors and successors, but he was a man whose prestige in medicine was scarcely less than theirs. That this same liberal patronage of distinguished physicians was continued in the next century may be realized from the fact that Malpighi, the great founder of comparative anatomy, became one of the Papal Physicians. His intimate friend, Borelli, to whom we owe the {218} introduction of physics into medicine, had spent some years in Rome, where, having been robbed by his servants, with the consent of the Pope he took up his abode with the Society of the Pious Schools of San Pantaleone. Here he finished his important work De Motu Animalium, in which the principles of mechanics were first definitely introduced into anatomy and physiology. The preface to this book was written by an ecclesiastic, who praises the piety of Borelli during his stay in Rome and chronicles his encouragement by the Popes in his medical work. Malpighi was succeeded as Papal Physician by Tozzi, who is famous for his commentaries on the ancients rather than for original observation, but who was looked upon in his time as one of the most prominent physicians in Italy, and at this period that meant one of the most prominent physicians in the world. At the beginning of the next century, the eighteenth, Lancisi, by many considered the Father of Modern Clinical Medicine, became the Papal Physician. Among the consultant physicians to the Popes of the eighteenth century, though he never occupied the post of regular medical attendant, was Morgagni. His advice was often sought by a succession of Popes not only with regard to their personal health, but also with regard to the teaching of medicine and other questions of like nature. Virchow has called Morgagni the Father of Modern Pathology, because he was the first to point out, that for a knowledge of disease it is quite as important to know where the disease has been as to try to learn what it has been. All of the Popes, five in number, of the latter part of Morgagni's life were on terms of intimacy with him. Pope Benedict XIV., one of the very great Popes of the century, a native of Bologna, was {219} an intimate friend of Morgagni. His scarcely less famous successor, Pope Clement XIII., had known Morgagni before his elevation to the Papacy, and after his election he wrote assuring Morgagni of his continued esteem and friendship, and asks him to consider the Papal palace always open to him on his visits to Rome. In an extant letter Clement praises his wisdom, his culture, his courtesy, his piety toward God, his charity toward men, and holds him up as an example to all others for the special reason that, notwithstanding all his qualities, he had not aroused the enmity or envy of those around him, thus showing what a depth of humanity there was in him in addition to his scientific attainments. At this time Morgagni was looked upon by all the medical world as probably the greatest of living medical scientists. Visitors who came to Italy who were at all interested in science, always considered that their journey had not been quite complete unless they had had an opportunity of meeting Morgagni. He had more personal friends among the scientists of all the countries of Europe than any other man of his time. The fact that this leader in science should be at the same time a great personal friend of the Popes of his time is the best possible evidence of the more than amicable relations which existed between the Church and medicine during this century. Morgagni's life of nearly ninety years indeed, covers most of the eighteenth century, and is of itself, without more ado, an absolute proof that there was not only no friction between religion and medicine, but shows on the contrary that medical science encountered patronage and encouragement as far as ecclesiastics were concerned, while success in it brought honor and emolument. {220} Morgagni's personal relations to the Church are best brought out by the fact that, of his fifteen children, ten of whom lived to adult life, eight daughters became members of religious orders and one of his two surviving sons became a Jesuit. The great physician was very proud and very glad that his children should have chosen what he did not hesitate to call the better part. After Morgagni's time, the days of the French Revolution bring a cloud over the Papacy. There were political disturbances in Italy and the Popes were shorn of their temporal power. As a consequence their medical school loses in prestige and finally disappears. The Papal Physicians after this, while distinguished among their fellow members of the Roman medical profession, were no longer the world-known discoverers in medicine that had so often been the case before. So long as the Popes had the power and possessed the means, they used both to encourage medicine in every way, as the list of Papal Physicians shows better than anything else, and a study of this chapter of their history will undo all the false assertions with regard to the supposed opposition between the Church and science. We have already said, and it seems to deserve repetition here, that during most of these centuries in which the Papal Physicians were among the most distinguished discoverers in medicine, the term medicine included within itself most of what we now know as physical science. Botany was studied as a branch of medicine, and as we have seen, one of the Papal Physicians, Simon Januensis, compiled a dictionary that a modern German Historian of Botany finds excellent. Astrology, under which term astronomy was included, was studied for the sake of the supposed influence of the stars on {221} men's constitutions.--Chemistry was a branch of medical study. Mineralogy was considered a science allied to medicine, and the use of antimony and other metals in medicine originated with physicians trying to extend the domain of knowledge to minerals. Comparative anatomy was founded by a Papal Physician. These were the principal physical sciences. To talk of opposition between science and religion, then, with the most distinguished scientists of these centuries in friendly personal and official relations with the Popes, is to indulge in one of those absurdities common enough among those who must find matter for their condemnation of the Popes and the Church, but that every advance in modern history has pushed farther back into the rubbish chamber of outlived traditions. {222} THE POPES AND MEDICAL EDUCATION AND THE PAPAL MEDICAL SCHOOL. After the story of the Papal Physicians, the most important phase of the relations of the Popes to the medical sciences is to be found in the story of the Papal Medical School. While it seems to be generally ignored by those who are not especially familiar with the history of medical education, a medical school existed in connection with the Papal University at Rome during many centuries--according to excellent authorities, from the beginning of the fourteenth century--and this medical school had, as we have said elsewhere, during nearly two centuries some of the most distinguished professors of medicine in its ranks, and boasts among its faculty some of the greatest discoverers in the medical sciences, and especially in anatomy. For these two centuries it had but two important rivals, Padua and Bologna. Both of these were in Italy, and one, that of the University of Bologna, was in a Papal city, that is, was under the political dominion of the Popes. The best medical teaching, then, was to be found in the Papal States and under conditions such, that if there had been the slightest opposition, or indeed anything but the most cordial encouragement for medical study, the medical schools of Rome and Bologna would surely have languished instead of flourishing beyond all others. Just about the beginning of the fourteenth century {223} Pope Boniface VIII., who was himself one of the distinguished scholars of his time, determined that, besides the university of the Papal Court, which had existed for nearly a century at Rome, but which was mainly occupied with philosophy and theology and mainly attended by ecclesiastics, there should also be a university of the City of Rome for the people of his capital. This determination was reached only a short time before the culmination of the difficulty between Pope Boniface and the King of France, which eventually resulted in what has been called the outrage of Anagni and the subsequent death of the Pope within a short time. It has usually been thought, then, that in spite of certain extant Papal documents creating the University of the City of Rome, this university had not been organized before Pope Boniface's death, and as his successor did not take his seat at Rome, but at Avignon, it has usually been assumed that the University of the City came into existence at most only in an abortive form. Denifle, whose History of the Universities of the Middle Ages is looked upon as the best authority in such matters, however, insists that a complete university of the City of Rome did come into existence as a result of Boniface's decree. All during the time when the Popes were at Avignon this university continued to exist, and in spite of the fact that at one time, as a consequence of a great earthquake followed by a pestilence, and then serious political troubles because of the absence of the Popes, Rome had only something less than ten thousand inhabitants, the university continued its work. Denifle calls attention to the fact that there are letters of Pope John XXII. which show that he paid out of the Papal revenues {224} the salary of a teacher of physic at the University of the City of Rome while the Papal Court was at Avignon. It is rather interesting to find the names of the two Popes, Boniface VIII. and John XXII., whose Papal decrees are supposed to have prevented the study of anatomy and chemistry, thus cropping up on unquestionable authority as the founder and the patron of medical teaching in the City of Rome. Pope Boniface VIII. is now generally credited with having been the founder of the Sapienza, the medical school of which, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was to develop into one of the most important schools of its kind in Europe, and to have on its faculty list the greatest teachers of their time, who had been tempted to come to Rome because the Popes wished to enhance the prestige of the medical school of their capital. While it may be a surprise for those who have been accustomed to think of the Popes as inalterably opposed to all science, and especially to medical science, thus to find them encouraging and fostering medical teaching, it will only be what would naturally be expected by those who know anything of the real history of medicine in the earlier Middle Ages. There is no doubt at all, that during the so-called "dark ages," that is, when the invasion of the barbarians had put out the lights of the older civilizations, it was mainly ecclesiastics who preserved whatever traditions there were of the old medical learning and carried on whatever serious teaching of medicine, in the sense of medical science, that existed during this time. The monks were the most prominent in this; and the Benedictines, after their foundation in the sixth century, added to their duties of caring for the other temporal needs of the poor, who so {225} often appealed to them, that of helping them as far as they could in any bodily ailments with which they might be afflicted. There are even definite traditions that a certain amount of training in medicine, or at least in the care of the sick, was one of the features of the Benedictine monasteries. Dr. Payne in his article on the History of Medicine in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica said: "In civil history there is no real break. A continuous thread of learning and practice must have connected the last period of Roman medicine with the dawn of science in the Middle Ages. But the intellectual thread is naturally traced with greater difficulty than that which is the theme of civil history; and in periods such as that from the fifth to the tenth century in Europe, it is almost lost. The chief homes of medical as of other learning in these disturbed times were the monasteries. Though the science was certainly not advanced by their labors, it was saved from total oblivion, and many ancient medical works were preserved in Latin or the vernacular versions. It was among the Benedictines that the monastic studies of medicine first received a new direction and aimed at a higher standard. The study of Hippocrates, Galen, and other classics was recommended by Cassiodorus (sixth century), and in the original mother abbey of Monte Cassino medicine was studied, though there was probably not what could be called a medical school there; nor had this foundation any connection (as has been supposed) with the famous school of Salerno." A review of some of the interesting features of the early history of medical education will serve to show that, not only was there no ecclesiastical interference with the new developing science, but, on the contrary, {226} without the personal aid and the intelligent patronage of ecclesiastics of all degree, and especially of archbishops and Popes, the development of medical teaching that took place at Salerno would probably not have had the significance in history that it now enjoys. While there was no institutional connection between the medical school of Salerno and the Benedictine Monastery at Monte Cassino, it is known that at the end of the seventh century there was a branch Benedictine monastery at Salerno, and some of the prelates and higher clergy occupied posts as teachers in the school, and even became distinguished for medical acquirements. Though the Salernitan medical school proper was a secular institution, there is no doubt that the Benedictines had great influence in it and had fostered its formation. How close the monks of Monte Cassino were allied to the Popes, everyone knows. The Benedictines considered themselves the special wards of the Papacy, and a number of the Abbots of Monte Cassino, or monks belonging to the community, and of men who had been educated in the monastery, had been raised to the Papacy during the Middle Ages. The origin of modern medical teaching is thus closely associated not only with the Benedictines, but through them with the Popes, without whose encouragement and sanction the work would not have flourished as it did. In advance of the formal establishment of medical schools, in the modern sense of the word, two Popes were distinguished before their elevation to the Papacy for their attainments in all the sciences, and especially in medicine, one of whom actually founded an important school of thought in medicine, while the other was a professor at Salerno. The first of these is the famous {227} Gerbert, who, under the name of Sylvester II., was Pope at the end of the millenium and carried Christianity over what was supposed to be the perilous period of the completion of the first thousand years, when the end of the world was so universally looked for. Gerbert was famous for his attainments in every branch of science, and indeed so many wonderful traditions have collected around his name in this matter that one hesitates to accept most of them. There seems to be no doubt, however, that he was the beloved master of Fulbert of Chartres, who did much for medicine in France at the beginning of the eleventh century and who was the founder of the so-called school of Chartres and himself the teacher of John of Chartres, who became the physician to King Henry I., of France, and of Peter of Chartres and Hildier and Goisbert. Before the end of the eleventh century Pope Victor III., who had been the Abbot of Monte Cassino, was elected Pope much against his will. He occupied the Papal throne only for about a year and a half. He had been especially recommended by Pope Gregory VII., the famous Hildebrand, as a very suitable successor. Desiderius, as he was called before becoming Pope, was one of the best scholars of his time, and had taught for some years with great distinction at Salerno. It is not known absolutely that he taught medicine, but, as the university of Salerno is usually considered not to have been founded until the middle of the next century, and as before that time the main teaching faculty was that of the medical school and all other teaching was subordinated to it, Desiderius must surely be considered as a teacher at least of medical students. At that time a physician was expected to know something more than merely his {228} profession. Mathematics and philosophy were the two favorite subjects to which, besides medicine, they devoted themselves. The presence of the future Pope at Salerno is, moreover, the best possible index of the sympathy between the ecclesiastical authorities and the medical school. Besides there are definite records of the friendship which existed between Alphanus, Archbishop of Salerno, and Desiderius, while they were both members of the Benedictine Community of Monte Cassino. Alphanus subsequently taught medicine at Salerno, and some of his writings on medicine have been preserved for us. He was the author of a work bearing the title _De Quatuor Elementis Corporis Humani_, a treatise on the four elements of the human body, which is a compendium of most of the knowledge of anatomy and physiology of the time, though it also contains much more than the information with regard to the merely physical side of man's being. The fact that Alphanus should have been promoted from the professorship in the medical faculty to the Archbishopric of Salerno is only another proof of the entire sympathy which existed between the Church and the professors of medical science at that time. During the thirteenth century universities were founded in some twenty important cities in Europe, and in connection with most of them a medical school was established. These educational institutions were the result of the initiative of ecclesiastics; their officials all belonged to the clerical body, most of their students were considered as clerics--and indeed this was the one way to secure them against the calls for military service which would otherwise have disturbed the enthusiasm for study--and the Popes were considered the supreme {229} authority over all the universities. In spite of this thoroughly ecclesiastical character of the universities and educational institutions, there is not a hint of interference with the teaching of medical science and abundant evidence of its encouragement. Indeed, for anyone who knows the story of the universities of the thirteenth century, it is practically impossible to understand how there could have arisen any tradition of ecclesiastical opposition to education in any form, and there is not a trace of foundation for the stories with regard to ecclesiastical intolerance of science, which are supposed to be supported by certain Papal decrees. The best possible demonstration of the maintenance of the most amicable relations between churchmen and physicians during the century in which these decrees were issued is also the most interesting fact in the history of medicine during the thirteenth century. It is not generally known that one of the most distinguished physicians of the thirteenth century, one who wrote a book on the special subject of eye diseases that is still a classic, afterwards became Pope under the name of John. He is variously known as John XIX., John XX., or John XXI., according as certain occupants of the Papal throne are considered to be of authority or not. He was educated at Paris, and probably spent some time at Montpelier. Under the name of Peter of Spain, though he was what we should now call a Portuguese, he subsequently taught physic at the University of Sienna. Here he wrote the famous little work on the Diseases of the Eye, which was reviewed by Dr. Petella, physician-in-chief of the Royal Italian Marine, in Janus, the International Archives for the History of Medicine and for Medical Geography in 1898. Petella does not {230} hesitate to proclaim him one of the greatest men of his time. Daunou, one of the continuators of the Benedictines' literary history of France, [Footnote 28] says that this Peter of Spain was one of the most notable persons in Europe in his generation. [Footnote 28: Histoire Litteraire de la France, Vol. XVI. This is the famous work begun by the Benedictines of St. Maur.] Pope John XXI., before his accession to the Papacy, had certainly accomplished remarkable work in medicine, and of a kind that makes his writings of great interest even at the present day. There is scarcely an important pathological condition of the eye which does not receive some consideration in this little book, and it is a constant source of surprise in reading it to find, with their limited knowledge and lack of instruments, what good diagnosticians the ophthalmologists of the thirteenth century were. Cataract is described, for instance, under the name of "water that descends into the eye," and a distinction is made between cataract from internal and external causes. Hardening of the eye is mentioned and is declared to be very serious in its effects. There seems no doubt that this was glaucoma. Conditions of the lids, particularly, were differentiated and treated by rational measures, some of them quite modern in substance. A curious anticipation of modern therapeutics is the frequent recommendation of extracts of the livers of various fishes for external and internal use, that is a reminder of the present employment of cod-liver oil. The book is acknowledged to be a classic in medicine. The fact that its author should have become Pope later, is the best proof that instead of opposition there was the greatest sympathy between medicine and ecclesiasticism in his time. {231} With these thoroughly amicable relations between the Church and the medical schools during the thirteenth and preceeding centuries, it will not be so much of a surprise as it might otherwise be, to learn of the foundation of the Medical School of Rome and of the continuation of Papal patronage of it even while the Popes were absent at Avignon. University records do not say much about it during the next two centuries. With the coming of the Renaissance, however, and the entrance of a new spirit into education, the Popes also were touched by the educational time-spirit, and there came a rejuvenation of the University of the City, which now acquired a new name, that of the Sapienza, and became the home of some of the most distinguished teaching in Europe in every department. Early in the sixteenth century the medical department of the Sapienza, or Papal University at Rome, became one of the most noteworthy institutions of Europe because of the work in medicine accomplished there, and had among its faculty the most distinguished investigators in medical science, and especially in that department of medicine--anatomy--which by an unfortunate tradition the Popes are said to have hampered. The most important event in the history of the institution, after its foundation, was its establishment in the home which it was to occupy down to our own time. Its new habitation was prepared for it by the Pope who has probably been the most maligned in history--Alexander VI. A magnificent site was appropriated for it, and the construction of suitable buildings begun. A little more than a decade later, Leo X., another one of the misunderstood Popes, came to the conclusion that the two universities in Rome, that of the Papal Court and that of {232} the City, would do better work if combined into one, and accordingly this combination was effected. This made provision for one very strong teaching faculty in Rome. The final steps for the completion of the union of the two universities were taken by Pope Alexander VII., and the buildings which the new university was to occupy were finished in a manner worthy of the great institution of learning which it was hoped to create in Rome. The first of the great professors who made the Papal Medical School famous was Realdo Colombo, often spoken of as Columbus simply, who was invited to teach in Rome by Pope Paul III., the same Pope who issued the bull founding the Jesuits. Some people might consider the two actions as representing contrary tendencies in education, but they are not such as know either the history of the Jesuits, or of the constant endeavor of the Popes to foster education. Columbus came to Rome, as we have said, with the prestige of having succeeded Vesalius at Padua, and later having been specially tempted by the reigning prince in Pisa, who wanted to create a great medical school in connection with his university in that city, which he was at that moment trying to raise to distinction, to accept the professorship of anatomy there. Vesalius was still alive at this time, and the period when, if we would credit certain historians who emphasize the opposition between the Church and science, it was dangerous to dissect human bodies had not yet passed. It is interesting to read the account of Columbus's reception in Rome, and the interest manifested in his work by all classes in the Roman University at this time. His course in anatomy was so enthusiastically {233} attended that, as he himself tells in a letter to a friend, he often had several hundred persons in his audience when he gave his anatomical demonstrations on the cadaver. These were not all medical students, but many of them were ecclesiastics, and some of them important members of the hierarchy. Even cardinals manifested their interest in anatomy, and occasionally attended the public dissections--public, that is, as far as the University is concerned--which were made by Columbus. Columbus's enthusiasm for anatomy was such that, as Dr. Fisher said of him in the Annals of Anatomy and Surgery, Brooklyn, 1878-1880, "he dissected an extraordinary number of human bodies, and so devoted himself to the solution of problems in anatomy and physiology that he has been most aptly styled the Claude Bernard of the sixteenth century." In one year, for instance, he is said to have dissected no less than fourteen bodies, demonstrating, as Dr. Fisher has said, that "it was an age of remarkable tolerance for scientific investigation." Besides being an investigator, Columbus was a great teacher, and many of our modern methods of instruction in medical schools had their origin in the system of demonstrations introduced by him. His descriptions of the demonstrations for students upon living animals, show that some of the most recent ideas in medical teaching were anticipated by this Roman professor of anatomy and medicine in the Renaissance period. His demonstrations of the heart and blood-vessels and of the actions of the lungs are particularly complete, and must have given his students a very practical working knowledge of these important physiological functions. In a word, the medical teaching of the Roman {234} University, under him at this time, far from being merely theoretic and distant from actual experience and demonstration, was thoroughly modern in its methods. It is no wonder, then, that practically all the ecclesiastical visitors who came in such numbers to Rome, made it a custom at this time to attend one or more of Columbus's anatomical lectures. They were looked upon as one of the features of the Roman university life of the time. How much good was accomplished by this can scarcely be estimated. The example must have had great influence especially on members of faculties of various educational institutions who came to the Papal See. To some degree at least these interesting teaching methods must have aroused in such men the desire to see them emulated in their own teaching institutions, and therefore must have done much to advance medical education. The fact that these things were done in the Papal Medical School only emphasized the significance of them for ecclesiastics, and made them more ready to bring about their imitation in other teaching centers. How well the Popes were justified in their estimation of Columbus's genius as an anatomical investigator will be best appreciated from his discovery of the pulmonary circulation, which formed, as Harvey confesses at the beginning of his work on the circulation, the foundation on which Harvey's great discovery naturally arose. It is probable that Columbus would not have come to Rome, in spite of the flattering offers held out to him, only that he was already the personal friend of a number of high ecclesiastics, and even of the Pope who extended the invitation. How well the Popes continued to think of Columbus after his years of work in the {235} Roman Medical School will be well understood from the fact that, when his great work _De Re Anatomica_ was published after his death by his sons, Pope Pius IV. accepted the dedication of it. This was of course not an unusual thing, for many books on other sciences were dedicated to the Popes, and the example thus set was subsequently imitated. Twenty-five years later, Professor Piccolomini dedicated his Anatomical Lectures to Pope Sixtus V. Subsequent anatomical publications of the Papal Medical School were issued under like patronage. The famous edition of Eustachius's anatomical sketches, published under the editorship of Lancisi, is a notable example of this, and went to press mainly at the expense of Pope Clement XI., who realized how valuable they were likely to be for the teaching of anatomy. These two great discoverers in anatomy, Columbus and Eustachius, were succeeded, as is so often the case in the history of university faculties, by a man more capable of writing about great discoveries than of making them himself. This was Piccolomini, who devoted himself to showing how much the ancients had taught about anatomy, though at the same time he also made clear the place occupied by modern anatomical discoveries. While his name is not attached to any great discovery in the science of anatomy, he is generally acknowledged to have been one of the great teachers of his time and one who was needed just then in order to make people realize how the old and the new in anatomy must be coordinated. Piccolomini's successor in the chair of anatomy at Rome was another original genius and investigator whose name, however, and fame has never been as great among English-speaking people as in Italy, or among the Latin races generally. The fact that he was a rival {236} of Harvey's in the matter of the discovery of the circulation of the blood has always made the Italians exaggerate his position in medical history, while it has undoubtedly made English writers of medical history diminish the importance of his work. Historians of science consider him worthy to be called the greatest living scientist of his time--the end of the sixteenth century. He was not only a scientific physician, but he was an authority in all the sciences related to medicine, and indeed had profound interests in every branch of physical science. His contemporaries looked up to him as a leader in scientific thought. To anyone who examines the question of the discovery of the circulation of the blood with freedom from bias, there can be no doubt but that the honor for this discovery has been unduly taken away from Caesalpinus in English-speaking countries, to be conferred solely on Harvey. Not that there is any wish to lessen the value of Harvey's magnificent original work, nor make little of his wonderful powers of observation, nor of the marvelous experimental and logical method by which he followed out his thoughts to their legitimate conclusion, but that I would insist on giving honor where honor is due, though most writers in English refuse to give Caesalpinus's claims a proper share of attention. The Italians have always declared that Caesalpinus was the real discoverer of the circulation, and there is no doubt that his career occurs just at that point in the evolution of the medical sciences, and especially anatomy and physiology in Italy, where this discovery would naturally come. Lest it should be thought, however, that my interest in the Popes and the Papal Medical School has led me to exaggerate the claims of {237} Caesalpinus as a great naturalist and medical scientist, I prefer to quote the description of him given by Professor Michael Foster in his lectures on the History of Physiology, delivered in this country as the Lane Lectures, at the Cooper Medical College in San Francisco, and published by the Cambridge University Press, 1901. Professor Foster was not one to exaggerate the claims of any Italian, and least of all of any Italian who might be supposed to have a claim that would stand against Harvey's. The soupçon of Chauvinism in his treatment of Servetus and Columbus in this regard is indeed rather amusing. He said:-- "Of a very different stamp to Columbus was Andreas Caesalpinus. Born at Arezzo in 1519, he was for many years Professor of Medicine at Pisa, namely, from 1567 to 1592, when he passed to Rome, where he became Professor at the Sapienza University and Physician to Pope Clement VIII., and where at a ripe old age he died in 1603. "If Columbus lacked general culture, Caesalpinus was drowned in it. Learned in all the learning of the ancients and an enthusiastic Aristotelian, he also early laid hold of all the new learning of the time. Naturalist as well as physician, he taught at Pisa botany as well as medicine, being from 1555 to 1575 Professor of Botany, with charge of the Botanic garden founded there in 1543, the first of its kind--one remaining until the present day." Professor Foster admits that Caesalpinus had a wonderful power of synthetising knowledge already in hand and anticipating conclusions in science that were to be confirmed subsequently. In his Medical Questions, though the work is written in rambling, discursive vein, he enunciated views which, however he arrived at them, certainly foreshadowed or even anticipated those which {238} were later to be established on a sound basis. Foster quotes a passage in which Caesalpinus made it very clear that he thoroughly understood the mechanism of the circulation and grasped every detail essential to it. After quoting this passage, which it must be confessed is rambling, Foster thus sums up what Caesalpinus has to say with regard to the circulation:-- "He thus appears to have grasped the important truth, hidden, it would seem, from all before him, that the heart, at its systole, discharges its contents into the aorta (and pulmonary artery), and at its diastole receives blood from the vena cava (and pulmonary vein)." "Again, in his Medical Questions he seems to have grasped the facts of the flow from the arteries to the veins, and of the flow along the veins to the heart." That there was no change of Papal policy in the next century can be gathered from an interesting phase of Papal interest in science which, though not directly concerned with medicine, eventually resulted in important theoretic advances in medical science. This was the encouragement of Father Kircher's work at Rome. Father Kircher was the Jesuit who made the first scientific museum. As the result of his general interest in things scientific he wrote a little book on the pest. In this book he stated in very clear terms the modern doctrine of the origin of disease from little living things, which he called corpuscles. Because of this Tyndall attributes to Father Kircher the first realization of the role that bacteria play in disease. Even more wonderful than this, however, was Father Kircher's anticipation of modern ideas with regard to the conveyance of disease. He insisted that contagious diseases, as a rule, were not carried, as had been thought, by the air, but {239} were conveyed from one person to another, either directly, or by the intermediation of some living thing. He considered that cats and dogs were surely active in conveying diseases, and he even reached the conclusion that insects were also important in this matter. His expressions with regard to this are not of the indefinite character which one often encounters in the supposed anticipation of important principles in medicine, but are very precise and definite. Father Kircher is quoted by Dr. Howard Kelly, of Baltimore, in his life of Major Walter Reed, whose work in showing that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes is well known, as saying in one place, "Flies carry the plague," and in another place, "There can be no doubt that flies feed on the internal secretions of the diseased dying, then flying away they deposit their excretions on the food in neighboring dwellings, and persons who eat it are thus infected." It is interesting to find that the Professor of the Practice of Medicine in the Papal University at Rome when this book was published, far from resenting, as many professors of medicine might, the excursion of an outsider into his science, said Father Kircher's book "not only contains an excellent resume of all that is known about the pest or plague, but also many valuable hints and suggestions on the regional spread of the disease which had never before been made." He did not hesitate to add that it was marvelous for a man, not educated as a physician, to have reached such surprising conclusions, which seemed worthy of general acceptance. All this, it may be said in passing, was within a few years after the trial of Galileo. In this next century the Popes continued their special efforts to secure the greatest teachers of anatomy and physiology for their Roman medical school. One of the {240} results was the appointment of Malpighi, whose name has deservedly become attached to more structures in the human body because of tissues which he first studied in detail, than any other man in the history of medicine. Malpighi represents the beginning of most of the comparative biological sciences, and his original observations upon plants, upon the lower animals, on fishes and then on the anatomical structure of man and the higher animals, stamp him as an investigating genius of the highest order. He was the personal friend of Innocent XI., who wished to have him near him at Rome as his own medical adviser, and besides desired the prestige of his fame and the stimulating example of his investigating spirit for the students of the medical school of the Sapienza. The closing years of Malpighi's life were rendered happier, and his wonderful researches were as well rewarded as such work can be, by the estimation in which he was held at Rome. Malpighi was succeeded as Papal Physician and Professor in Rome by Tozzi, who is distinguished in the history of medicine for his commentaries on the ancients rather than for original observation, but who was looked upon in his time as one of the most prominent physicians in Italy. Tozzi had been the Professor of Medicine and Mathematics at the University of Naples, where he became famous. From here he received a flattering invitation to the chair of physic at Padua. In order that he might not desert Naples, his salary was raised and he was given the post of Protomedicus or Chief Physician to the Court. It was after this that the death of Malpighi left an important chair vacant in Rome, and there being no one apparently more worthy than this man for whom other important universities were contending, he {241} was offered the chair on such excellent conditions that he accepted it. It is another case of the Popes being not only willing and even anxious, but also able because of their position, to secure the best talent available for their medical school at the Roman University. Undoubtedly one of the greatest members of the faculty that the Papal Medical School ever had is Lancisi, one of the supreme medical teachers of history, who is usually considered one of the founders of modern clinical medicine. When at the beginning of the eighteenth century Boerhaave attracted the attention of the world by his bedside teaching of medicine at Leyden, there were two occupants of thrones in Europe who proved to have particular interest in this new departure. They were perhaps the last two who might ordinarily be expected to have much use for such improvements in medical education. One of them was the Empress Maria Theresa, of Austria, whose patronage of Boerhaave 's pupil, Van Swieten, secured the establishment of that system of clinical teaching which has since made the Vienna Medical School famous. The other was the Pope. With his approbation Lancisi established clinical teaching at Rome, and thus did much to maintain at Rome a great center of medical progress during the eighteenth century. Lancisi was graduated at the Sapienza, the Roman University, at the early age of eighteen. When only twenty-two he became assistant physician at the Santo Spirito Hospital and began to show the first hint of the brilliant genius he was to display later in life. Some ten years later, as the result of a competitive examination which still further demonstrated his talents, he was chosen Professor of Anatomy in his Alma Mater, {242} the Sapienza. He was only thirty-three at the time, and the fact that he should be chosen shows that the Papal University was ready to take advantage of talent wherever it found it and did not allow itself to be won only by notoriety at a distance. The excellence of the choice was demonstrated before long by Lancisi's brilliant career as a teacher and an original investigator. Some of the most distinguished medical men from all over the world came to listen to his lectures (according to Hirsch's Biographical Lexicon of the Most Prominent Physicians of All Times and Peoples), and even Malpighi and Tozzi, the Papal physicians during the time, were among his auditors. [Footnote 29] [Footnote 29: Most of these details are taken from Hirsch's Biographisches Lexicon der hervorragenden Aertzte aller Zeiten und Völker. Wien und Leipzig, 1886.] After the departure of Tozzi from Rome Lancisi became the Papal physician. He continued to be the medical adviser of Popes Innocent XI. and XII. and of Clement XI. until his death in 1720. It was under Clement that he had the new clinic built, in which teaching after the manner of Boerhaave was to be established. At his death Lancisi left his fortune and his library to Santo Spirito Hospital, on condition that a new portion of the hospital should be erected for women. There is no doubt that he belongs among the most distinguished of contributors to medical science, and Hirsch declares that anatomy, practical medicine, and hygiene are indebted to him for notable achievements. His books are still classics. The one on Sudden Death worked a revolution in the medical diseases of the brain and heart. His work _De Motu Cordis et Aneurysmatibus_ has been pronounced epoch-making, and his suggestion of percussion over the sternum in order to {243} determine the presence of an aneurysm, made him almost an anticipator of Auenbrugger and prompted Morgagni's famous book _De Sedibus et Causis Morborum_, which appeared after his death. Lancisi's work on Aneurysms was not published until after his death. Two others of his books deserve mention because they show how broad were the interests of the man in many phases of progress in medicine. Their titles are Diseases and Infections of Domestic Animals and The Climate of Rome. The next great name in Italian medicine is that of Morgagni. He was not a regular Papal physician, nor a member of the faculty of the Papal Medical School, but he was often consulted, as we told in the chapter on Papal Physicians, both as to the health of the Popes and the methods of teaching at the Roman Medical School. His life brings us down almost to the nineteenth century, and the cordial relations of the Popes to him, far from being an exception in the history of medicine, are only typical of the attitude of the Roman Pontiffs to medical and all other scientists from the dawn of the history of science in modern times. While the Papal Medical School at Rome, attached to the university of the city and directly under the control of the Papal Curia, more especially deserves the name thus given it, it must not be forgotten that there was in the Papal States a series of medical schools in various cities. One of these, at Perugia, founded by a bull of Pope John XXII., has come under consideration in the chapter on A Papal Patron of Medical Education. Another medical school, that of Ferrara, which also was in the Papal States, had considerable prestige. Some distinguished professors taught there before going to {244} Padua or Bologna. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Bologna, after having been during the preceding three centuries under the domination of one powerful family or another, from the Pepoli to the Bentivogli, and then to the Visconti and back again to the Bentivogli, was incorporated in the Papal States under Pope Julius II. At this time the Medical School of Bologna was at the height of its reputation and was one of the two greatest medical schools in Italy. Padua was its only rival. Shortly after this Rome became a serious competitor in medical education. Practically, then, this was a second Papal medical school, almost as directly under the control of the Popes as the Roman Medical School. Far from there being any diminution in the glory or the efficiency of the Bolognese Medical School, its reputation even became enhanced after the city came under the control of the Popes. This is all the more surprising because, as we have shown, just about this time the Popes began the work of making their Medical School at Rome the most important center for medical education, especially in the scientific phases of medicine--anatomy, physiology, and comparative anatomy--that there was at that time in the world. In spite of this rivalry, however, nothing was done directly to hurt the prestige of the school of Bologna, and indeed the rivalry seems to have been more of an encouraging competition than in any sense a destructive struggle for existence. When the Popes took possession of Bologna, Alexander Achillini was professor of anatomy and medicine in the Bolognese school, and his discoveries and methods of investigation attracted the attention of students from all over the world. His assistant for many years and his successor in the {245} post was Berengar of Carpi, of whom we have already said much in the chapter Anatomy Down to the Renaissance. For some time Vesalius lectured on medicine and anatomy at Bologna, and one of Berengar's most distinguished successors in the sixteenth century was Aranzi, who occupied the post of anatomical professor for thirty-two years and who corrected a number of errors in anatomical detail that had been made by Vesalius and others of the preceding generation. He confirmed Columbus's discoveries at Rome with regard to the course which the blood follows in passing from the right to the left side of the heart, and made many important additions to the knowledge of the anatomical relations of the cavities of the heart, the valves, and the great blood vessels. There are a number of important structures in the brain which owe their names to him, and his descriptions of them are better, according to Prof. Turner, than those of other anatomists for a century after his time. The tradition of great teachers thus carried on during the first century after the absorption of Bologna into the Papal States, continued uninterruptedly in the next century, when we find on the list of professors at Bologna such names as those of Malpighi, the greatest mind in the medical sciences of the seventeenth century, and his colleague Fracassati, who, though over-shrouded by Malpighi, still claims a prominent place in the history of medicine. Bologna has a special feature of medical development to its credit which, because of its importance for science in general as well as for medicine, deserves to be mentioned here. During the century after the Popes became the rulers of the city scientific societies were founded here, and as the professors and {246} students of the medical school were also the most interested in science in general, the membership of these societies was largely made up of individuals connected with the medical school. A special society for the cultivation of anatomical knowledge, the first of its kind ever founded, was established in Bologna scarcely more than a century after the city came under the Papal dominion. It was called the Coro Anatomico, or anatomical choir, and had at first only nine members. Among these, however, were such distinguished men as Malpighi, Fracassati, Capponi, and Massari, to the last of whom the initiative of the foundation of the society is said to have been due. Bologna was noted during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the number of foreign students of medicine who were attracted to its hospitable medical school and who carried the tradition of science for its own sake, so characteristic of this Papal Medical School, to all parts of the world. After this consideration of the relation of the Popes to medical science during many centuries when medicine practically included all the physical sciences, it may seem utterly inexplicable to any fair-minded person that the tradition of the opposition of the Popes to science and scientific educational development should have apparently become a commonplace in history. This will not be a surprise, however, to those who know how perversive and influential has been the Protestant tradition which from the beginning of the sixteenth century has devoted itself to blackening the reputation of the Church, the Popes, and Catholic ecclesiastics generally. Nowhere is this more true than in history as written for English-speaking people. Those who left the old Church and their immediate descendants, justified their {247} withdrawal to themselves as well as others, by taking every possible excuse and inventing every possible pretext, to show how unworthy of their continued allegiance the old Church had been. The point of view thus assumed was taken quite seriously by succeeding generations, until at length a whole body of historical traditions, utterly unfounded in fact, accumulated, especially in England, where it must be remembered that for several centuries Catholics were not in a position to impugn and eradicate it. This unfortunate state of affairs, and not real opposition on the part of the Popes to science, is the source of the tradition with regard to the supposed opposition between the Church and science. {248} THE FOUNDATION OF CITY HOSPITALS. Probably the most important work that the Popes did for medical science in the Middle Ages was their encouragement of the development of a hospital system throughout Christianity. The story of this movement is not only interesting because it represents a coordination of social effort for the relief of suffering humanity, but also because it represents the provision of opportunities for the study of disease and the skilled care of the ailing such as can come in no other way. Those who are familiar with the history of medicine, and especially of surgery, know that a great period of progress in these departments came during the thirteenth century. The next two centuries indeed represent an epoch of surgical advance such as was probably never surpassed and only equalled by the last century. This seems much to say of a medieval century 700 years ago, but our chapter on surgery will, I think, amply justify the assertion. The reasons for this great development in surgical knowledge are properly understood only when we come to realize that there was a corresponding development in hospital organization. These two features of medicine always go hand in hand. The hospitals, as might be expected, preceded the surgical development, and owed their great progress at this time mainly to the Popes. The city hospital as we have it at the present time, that is, the public institution meant for the reception of those suffering from accidents, from acute diseases of various kinds, and also for providing shelter for those {249} who have become ill and have no friends to take care of them, is an establishment dating from the beginning of the thirteenth century. It will doubtless be a surprise to most people to be told that the modern world owes this beneficent institution to the fatherly watchfulness, the kindly foresight, and the very practical charity of one of the greatest of the Popes, whose name is usually associated with ambitious schemes for making the Papacy a great political power in Europe, rather than as the prime mover in what was probably the most far-reaching good work of supreme social significance that was ever accomplished. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, mainly as the result of those much abused sources of many benefits to mankind in the Middle Ages, the Crusades, the people of Europe had begun to dwell together in towns much more than before. It is closeness of population that gives rise to the social needs. While people were scattered throughout the country diseases were not so prevalent, epidemics were not likely to spread, and the charitable spirit of the rural people themselves was quite sufficient to enable them to care for the few ailing persons to be found. With the advent of even small city life, however, came the demand for hospitals in the true sense of the word, and this need did not long escape the watchful eye of Innocent III. He recognized the necessity for a city hospital in Rome, and in accordance with his very practical character and wonderful activity, at once set about its foundation. As was to be expected from his wise foresight, he did not do so without due consideration. He consulted many visitors to Rome and many distinguished medical authorities as to what they considered to be the best conducted {250} and most ably managed institution for the care of the sick in Europe at that time. Almost by common consent he was assured that the most successful hospital management was to be found at Montpelier. This French town near the shores of the Mediterranean had succeeded to the medical prestige formerly held by Salerno, and was now the favorite place of pilgrimage for the nobility and reigning sovereigns of Europe, whenever they became so ill that their ordinary medical attendants seemed to be able to do nothing for them. Pope Innocent was further told that the institution at Montpelier which was best conducted was undoubtedly the Hospital of the Fathers of the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, the Pope extended an invitation which, under the circumstances, must have been practically a command, to Guy or Guido of Montpelier, the administrative head to whom the hospital there owed its successful organization, to come to Rome and establish a hospital of his order in the Papal capital. He provided the order with a sufficient foundation in what is now known as the Borgo, not far from the present Vatican. On this was erected, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, a hospital of the Holy Spirit, which still exists there, though, of course, the building has been many times renewed since the original foundation. This hospital of the Holy Spirit soon attained a world-wide reputation for careful nursing and medical attendance and for the discretion with which its surgical cases were treated. It was understood that all the ailing picked up on the streets should be brought to the hospital, and that all the wounded and injured would be welcomed there. Besides, certain of the attendants of the hospital went out every day to look for any patients who might {251} be neglected or be without sufficient care, especially in the poorer quarters of the city, and these were also transported to the hospital. This old Santo-Spirito hospital then was exactly the model of our modern city hospitals. Pope Innocent's idea, however, was not to establish a hospital at Rome alone, but his fatherly solicitude went out to every city in Christendom. In accordance with this pre-determined plan, by personal persuasion, by the display of an interest in hospital work, and by official Papal encouragement he succeeded in having, during his own pontificate, a number of hospitals established in all parts of the then civilized world on the model of this hospital of the Holy Ghost at Rome. The initiative thus given proved lasting, and even after the Pontiff's death hospitals of the Holy Ghost continued to multiply in various parts of Europe, until scarcely a city of any importance was without one. It is no less a person than Virchow, the greatest of modern medical scientists, who has traced the origins of the modern German city hospitals back to Innocent and given us a list of those which were established during the century following his pontificate. Here are the names of those towns from Virchow's list in which hospitals were founded during the thirteenth century in Germany alone, which will show very convincingly how widespread the hospital establishment movement was: Zurich, St. Gallen, Bern, Basel, Constanz, Villingen, Pfullendorf, Freiburg, Breisch, Stephansfelden, Oppenheim, Mainz, Speyer, Coblenz (an der Leer), Cologne, Crefeld, Ulm, Biberach, Rothenburg, Kirchheim, Mergentheim, Wimpfen, Reutlingen, Memmingen, Augsburg, Rothenburg a. Tauber, München, Frankfort a. M., {252} Hoxter, Dortmund, Brandenburg, Spandau, Salzwedel, Stendal, Berlin, Perleberg, Pritzwalk, Halberstadt, Halle, Quedlinburg, Helmstedt, Magdeburg, Sangerhauson, Eisenach, Naumburg, Hanover, Gottingen, Northeim, Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck, Parchim, Wismar, Rostock, Schwerin, Mollen, Oldeslo, Ratzelburg, Ribnitz, Stettin, Stralsund, Greifswald, Demmin, Anclam, Breslau, Bunzlau, Gorlitz, Brieg, Glatz, Sagan, Steinau, Glogau, Inowraclaw, Wien, Meran, Brixen, Sterzing, Elbing, Thorn, Königsberg, Danzig, Marienburg, Riga. Many of these towns were comparatively small. In fact, there were no cities that we moderns would call large in the thirteenth century. London had probably not more than some twenty thousand; Paris, even at the most flourishing period of the university, under fifty thousand. Most of the German towns had less than ten thousand, and of these which are the sites of hospital foundations mentioned by Virchow, probably not more than a dozen, if that many, had more than five thousand inhabitants. Since the movement spread even to such small towns, it can be readily understood how far-reaching in its effects was the policy initiated by Innocent III. and how thoroughly he laid the secure foundations of a great Christian hospital system. [Illustration: Holy Ghost Hospital (Lübeck)] Since the Papal example and recommendations produced so much effect upon Germany, which was not so closely united to the Holy See as were the Latin nations, it is easy to understand what an impetus to the hospital movement must have been given in the southern countries, even though we have not had the advantage of so patient a collector of information as Virchow to give us all the details. In the larger cities hospitals were already in existence, and these took on a new life because of the {253} hospital movement. In Paris, for instance, the Hotel Dieu, which had been in existence for some time, became so cramped for room in its original location, just beyond the Petit Pont, that at this time it had to be transferred to its present commodious quarters next to the Cathedral, on the square of Notre Dame. The hospital became a city hospital in the genuine sense of the word, and the citizens became interested in it to a noteworthy degree. It began to be the subject of bequests and benefactions of all kinds on the part of the clergy and laity, and many interesting details of these benefactions are still at hand in documents contained in the hospital archives of Paris. [Footnote 30] [Footnote 30: Bordier, Archives Hospitalières De Paris, Paris; Champion, Publications for the Society of the History of Paris, 1877.] There are some curious historical details in these old documents, since they serve to show the method in use for designating houses at that time when, it must be recalled, street numbers had not as yet been invented. Most of the houses had on their facades some image or figure by which they were known. The Hotel Dieu, for instance, acquired during the thirteenth century the houses with the image of St. Louis, with the sign of the golden lion of Flanders, with the image of the butterfly with that of the wolf, with the images of the three monkeys, with the image of the iron lion, with the cross of gold, with the three chimneys, etc. A certain amount for the support of the hospital was allowed out of the city revenues, and a favorite method was to permit, in times of special stress upon the hospital, the collection of a tax on all of a certain commodity that came into the city. For a time, for instance, during an epidemic or other period of necessity, a hospital would obtain {254} permission to collect a tax on all the salt, or, occasionally, on all the wheat that entered Paris. This serves to show the renewed interest in city hospital affairs that had arisen mainly as the result of Papal initiative and encouragement. In the smaller towns in France there was the same hospital movement as characterized the situation in Germany. In the south, the closeness of Montpelier made the example of the hospital of the Holy Ghost of that city especially forceful. In other portions of France it is well known that the Sisters of the Holy Ghost very early established separate hospitals from those founded by the Brothers of the Holy Ghost. There are records of such separate hospitals entirely under the control of Sisters in Bar-Sur-Aube, in Neuf-Chateau, and, according to Virchow, at many other places. At the same time, however, there still continued to be hospitals of the Holy Ghost as at Besancon, where the Brothers and Sisters of the Holy Ghost had their institutions in common, though there was a distinct separation of the communities and allotment of tasks. The Brothers cared rather for the surgical cases, while the care of the children and the pregnant women was confided to the Sisters. This of itself was rather an advantage, since the separation of the women and the children from the ordinary hospital patients, must have proved an important preventive of infection and an ameliorating factor as regards that hospital atmosphere especially likely to be unfavorable to these delicate, sensitive cases. We know now what hospitalism means for them. That the influence of the movement initiated by Innocent III. was felt even in distant England is very clear, from the fact that practically all of the famous old {255} British hospitals date their existence as institutions for the care of the ailing from the thirteenth century. The famous St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London had been a priory founded at the beginning of the twelfth century, which took care of the poor and the destitute sick, but at the beginning of the thirteenth century it became, in imitation of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit at Rome, frankly a hospital in the modern sense of the word. St. Thomas's Hospital, which continues to be down to the present time one of the great medical institutions of London, was founded by Richard, Prior of Bermondsey, in 1213. Bethlehem, or as the name was softened in the English speech of the people, Bedlam, was founded about the middle of the thirteenth century. Originally it was a general hospital for the care of the sick of all kinds, though in later times it became, as its name has come to signify in modern English, a place exclusively for the care of the insane. Bedlam, in the fourteenth century, and probably also in the later years of the thirteenth, made provision for a certain number of the insane in addition to other patients, so that it presented the accomplishment of that desideratum for which we are striving in the twentieth century--a city general hospital with psychopathic wards. This arrangement, as we have said in the chapter on the Church and the Mentally Afflicted, has many advantages over the special hospital for the insane, entrance to which, as a rule, requires tedious formalities. Bridewell and Christ's Hospital, the other two of the institutions long known as the five royal hospitals of London, were either actually founded or received a great stimulus and a thorough reorganization during the thirteenth century. In the succeeding centuries Bridewell {256} ceased to be a hospital and became a prison, while Christ's Hospital, though retaining its name, became a school. With some of these institutions the name of Edward VI. has become associated, but, as pointed out by Gairdner, the English historical writer, without any due warrant. Gairdner says in his History of the English Church in the Sixteenth Century, "Edward has left a name in connection with charities and education which critical scholars find to be little justified by fact." The supposed foundation of St. Thomas's Hospital, as he points out, was only the re-establishment of this institution, "and even when it was granted by Edward to the citizens of London, it was not without their paying for it." Many institutions, charitable and educational, had been destroyed by Henry VIII., and the crying need for them became so great under Edward's reign that the government was compelled to provide for their re-establishment. It is no wonder, with all this activity of the hospital foundation movement, that Virchow should have been unstinted in his praise of the Pontiff and of the Church responsible for the great charity. He said: "It may be recognized and admitted that it was reserved for the Roman Catholic Church, and above all for Innocent III., not only to open the bourse of Christian charity and mercy in all its fulness, but also to guide the life-giving stream into every branch of human life in an ordered manner. For this reason alone the interest in this man and in this time will never die out." Even this was not all that he felt bound to say, and in his admiration he quite forgot the constant opposition he manifested toward the Papacy on all other occasions. This happened to be the one feature of Papal influence {257} and endeavor that he had investigated most thoroughly, and one is tempted to wonder if like investigation in other directions would not have shown him the error of prejudiced views he harbored with regard to other phases of the beneficent influence of the Popes in history. More knowledge is all that is needed, as a rule, to overcome all the anti-Papal prejudices founded on supposed historical grounds. Indeed, Virchow's tribute to Pope Innocent III. as the initiator of all this humanitarian work is so frank and outspoken that, coming as it does from a man whose sympathies with the Papacy were well known to be the slightest, it deserves to be recalled in its completeness, in order that another factor for the vindication of Innocent's character may be better known. The great pathologist said: "The beginning of the history of all of these German hospitals is connected with the name of that Pope who made the boldest and farthest-reaching attempt to gather the sum of human interests into the organization of the Catholic Church. The hospitals of the Holy Ghost were one of the many means by which Innocent III. thought to hold humanity to the Holy See. And surely it was one of the most effective. Was it not calculated to create the most profound impression to see how the mighty Pope, who humbled emperors and deposed kings, who was the unrelenting adversary of the Albigenses, turned his eyes sympathetically upon the poor and sick, sought the helpless and the neglected upon the streets, and saved the illegitimate children from death in the waters! There is something at once conciliating and fascinating in the fact, that at the very time when the fourth crusade was inaugurated through his influence, the thought of founding a great {258} organization of an essentially humane character, which was eventually to extend throughout all Christendom, was also taking form in his soul; and that in the same year (1204) in which the new Latin Empire was founded in Constantinople, the newly erected hospital of the Holy Spirit, by the old bridge on the other side of the Tiber, was blessed and dedicated as the future centre of this organization." [Footnote 31] [Footnote 31: Virchow's article on the German hospitals is to be found in the second volume of his collection of essays on Public Medicine and the History of Epidemics, which is, unfortunately, not translated into English, so far as I know, but will have to be consulted in the original Gesammelte Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Oeffentlichen Medicin und der Seuchenlehre von Rudolf Virchow, Berlin, 1879. August Hirschwald.] The quotation from Virchow gives a good and quite comprehensive idea of the scope of these institutions. The ailing of all kinds were received beneath their hospitable roof. In many cases the regulations for the reception of pregnant women and for the care of the foundlings are still extant, besides the hospital rules for the care of the various kinds of patients. The department set aside for the foundlings was in most places rather an allied institution than an integral part of the hospital itself. While these were called findel or foundling houses in Germany, in Italy this harsh name was not used, but the institutions were termed hospitals for the innocents, thus emphasizing the most pitiable feature of the cases of the little patients, and not branding them for life with a name that suggested their having been abandoned by those who should have cared for them. The regulations for the admission and care of patients are interesting as showing how much these medieval institutions tried to fulfill the ideal of hospital work. The people of the Middle Ages had not as yet suffered all {259} the disillusionments that come from the abuse of charity at the hands of those who least deserve help, and besides, the attendants at the hospitals were expected to do their work for its own sake and from the highest motives of Christian benevolence rather than for any lesser reward. At the beginning, at least, there seems to be no doubt that this lofty purpose was accomplished very satisfactorily; but men and women are only human, and after a time there was deterioration. Even Virchow, however, was so struck by the ideal conditions that existed in these early hospitals that he discussed the necessity for having in modern times hospital attendants with as unselfish motives as those of the medieval period. It seems worth while then to give some of the details of this supremely Christian management of hospital work. In an article on the medieval hospitals in the Dublin Review for October, 1903, Elizabeth Speakman quotes from the statutes of various hospitals sufficient to show how the internal government of these charitable institutions was regulated. There was always a porter at the main door, usually one of the Brothers or Sisters, who had the power to receive patients applying for admission. At certain places, however, it seems to have been necessary to inform the superior; and the statutes of the French Hospital at Angers say, that the prioress is to go herself without delay to receive patients or to send one of the Sisters for that purpose, "not severe or hard, but kind of countenance." At the same place the statutes say, "the number of the sick is not to be defined, for the house is theirs, and so all indifferently shall be received as far as the resources of the house allow." From many of the hospitals members of the community were sent out from day to day to find out if there {260} were any lying sick who needed care and who should be sent to the hospital. They were expected also to pick up any of the infirm whom they might find along the streets and bring them to the hospital. The attitude which the religious attendants at the hospitals were to assume toward the patients upon whom they wait is clearly stated. In nearly all of the French hospitals of the thirteenth century, at least, the statutes in this matter do not differ much from this specimen: "When the patient arrives he shall be received thus: First, having confessed his sins to the priest, he shall be communicated religiously and afterward be carried to bed and treated there as our Lord, according to the resources of the house; each day, before the repast of the brethren, he shall be given food with charity, and each Sunday the epistle and gospel shall be read and aspersion with holy water made with procession." As is noted by Miss Speakman, all through the hospital statutes of these times the name of Masters or Lords is applied to the patients. The expression in Old French is Les Seignors Malades. The ordinary name for hospital was Maison Dieu, which has been well translated "God's Hostelry." It is evident, then, though the origin of the phrase "Our Lords the Poor," as applied to hospital patients, has been said to be obscure, that it is only a re-echo of the scriptural expression, "Whatsoever ye shall do, even to the least of these, behold ye do it unto Me." A quotation which was emphasized in the old rule of St. Benedict, promulgated for the treatment of those received into the hospitality of the Benedictine monasteries, "All guests shall be received as Christ, who Himself has said, 'I was a stranger and ye took Me in.'" {261} In modern times, the necessity for providing for patients whatever within reason they may long for has often been insisted on. It is curiously interesting to find a striking anticipation of this very modern rule in the customs of these old-time hospitals. As a result of the attitude of supreme good will toward patients, there is an injunction in many hospital statutes, that whatever the patient may desire, if it can be obtained and is not bad for him, shall be given to him until he is restored to health. The Knights Hospitalers of St. John of Jerusalem followed the injunction so carefully and endeavored to satisfy even whims of their patients that might seem unreasonable to such an extent, that their conduct in the matter became proverbial and gave rise to at least one pretty legend, the hero of which is no less a personage than the famous Eastern Sultan of the later Crusade period. "Saladin desiring to prove for himself this reputed indulgence of the knights to their patients, disguised himself as a pilgrim and was received among the sick in the hospital in Jerusalem. He refused all food, declaring that there was only one thing that he fancied, and that he knew they would not give him. On being pressed, he confessed that it was one of the feet of the horse of the Grand Master. The latter, on being acquainted with this fact, ordered that the noble animal should be killed and the sick stranger's desire satisfied. Saladin at this point, thinking the experiment had gone far enough, declared himself taken with a repugnance to it, so the animal was spared." Virchow studied very faithfully the management of these medieval hospitals, and was evidently quite impressed with the success with which difficulties had been {262} met and overcome. None knew better than he all the difficulties there were in hospital management, for during nearly fifty years he had been identified with many hospitals, from city charity institutions to the various kinds needed for war and those erected in connection with universities for teaching purposes. He had very little patience with religious formulas, and was indeed a typical agnostic. Notwithstanding this, he has been perfectly frank in confessing how much is accomplished by the religious management of the hospitals, and even did not hesitate to declare that if hospitals for the poor particularly, are to be successfully managed, there must be a change in the view-point of those who take up the work of hospital nursing, and the attendants must come from better social classes than is at present the custom. (This is of course for Germany.) The question as to whether secular or religious management of hospitals shall prevail has not been as yet absolutely decided, and this adds to the value of Virchow's opinion. No one knew better than he of the many sacrifices required if the patients are to be properly cared for. Himself, as I have said, utterly without religion, it is curious to see how he recognizes the benefit that religious motives confer upon the management of a hospital, and how much better the work is likely to be done by those who give themselves up to the care of the sick as a Christian duty. He says: "The general hospital is the real purpose of our time, and anyone who takes up service in it must give himself up to it from the purest of humanitarian motives. The hospital attendant must, at least morally and spiritually, see in the patient only the helpless and suffering man, his brother and his neighbor; and in order to be able to {263} do this he must have a warm heart, an earnest devotion, and a true sense of duty. There is in reality scarcely any human occupation that brings so immediately with it its own reward, or in which the feeling of personal contentment comes from thorough accomplishment of purpose. "But so far as the accomplishment of the task set one is concerned, the attendant in the hospital has ever and anon new demands made upon him and a new task imposed. One patient lies next the other, and when one departs another comes in his place. "From day to day, from week to week, from year to year, always the same work, over and over again, only forever for new patients. This tires out the hospital attendant. Then the custom of seeing suffering weakens the enthusiasm and lessens the sense of duty. There is need of a special stimulus in order to reawaken the old sympathy. Whence shall this be obtained--from religion or from some temporal reward? In trying to solve this problem we are standing before the most difficult problem of modern hospital management. Before us lie the paths of religious and simple care for the sick. We may say at once that the proper solution has not yet been found. "It may be easy, from an impartial but one-sided view of the subject, to say that the feeling of duty, of devotion, even of sacrifice, is by no means necessarily dependent on the hope of religious reward, nor the expectation of material remuneration. Such a point of view, however, I may say at once, such a freedom of good will, such a warmth of sympathy from purely human motives as would be expected in these conditions, are only to be found in very unaccustomed goodness of {264} disposition, or an extent of ethical education such as cannot be found in most of those who give themselves at the present time to the services of the sick in the hospitals. If pure humanity is to be a motive, then other circles of society must be induced to take part in the care of the sick. Our training schools for nurses must teach very differently to what they do at present, if the care of the sick in municipal hospitals shall compare favorably with that given them in religious institutions. Our hospitals must become transformed into true humanitarian institutions." While some of this striking opinion of Virchow's was derived from personal experience with hospitals managed by religious, it must not be forgotten that such hospitals are rarer in Germany, at least in the north, than almost anywhere else in the world. His opportunities then were limited, and undoubtedly much of his favorable persuasions in this regard was founded on his investigation of conditions as he had learned to know them in the old-time hospitals of the later Middle Ages. The traditions as to the treatment of patients in these early times are such as to make us believe that hospital attendants did take their work seriously from a very lofty motive, and that while medicine and surgery were much less effective than in more modern times, the tender care of patients did as much as was possible to make inevitable suffering more bearable, and to keep the sight of painfully approaching death from being a source of discouragement and even of despair. We have the best evidence, that of a contemporary, as to the conditions which obtained in these medieval hospitals, and the dispositions of the attendants as regards their religious duties would seem to be an unmistakable {265} index as to their willingness to sacrifice their own comfort for the sake of the patients. The well known Jacques de Vitry, who had been Bishop of Acre and afterwards Cardinal, and whose wide travel had given him many opportunities to judge for himself, said: "There are innumerable congregations, both of men and women, renouncing the world and living regularly in leper houses and hospitals of the poor, humbly and devoutly ministering to the poor and the infirm. They live according to the rule of St. Augustine, without property and in community and under obedience to one above them; and having assumed the regular habit, they promise to God perpetual continence. The men and women, with all reverence and chastity, eat and sleep apart. The canonical hours, as far as hospitality and the care of the poor of Christ allow, by day and night they attend. In houses where there is a large congregation of brethren and sisters, they congregate frequently in chapter for the correction of faults and other causes. Readings from Holy Scriptures are frequently made during meals, and silence is maintained during meals in the refectory and other fixed places and at certain times. .... Their chaplains, ministering in spiritual matters with all humility and devotion to the infirm, instruct the ignorant in the word of divine preaching, console the faint-hearted and weak, and exhort them to patience and to correspond to the action of grace. They celebrate divine office in the common chapel assiduously by day and night, so that the sick can hear from their beds. Confession and extreme unction and the other sacraments they administer diligently and solicitously to the sick, and to the dead they give due burial. These ministers of Christ, sober and sparing to themselves and {266} very strict and severe to their bodies, overflowing with charity to the poor and infirm and ministering with tender heart to their necessities according to their powers, are all the more lowly in the House of God as they were of high rank in the world. They bear for Christ's sake such unclean and almost intolerable things, that I do not think any other can be compared to this martyrdom, holy and precious in the sight of God." It might perhaps be thought that these hospitals of the Middle Ages would be of very little interest to the modern student of things social and medical except for the fact, surprising enough in itself at this time of supposed neglect of social duties, when the paternal spirit of the municipality is presumed scarcely to have developed as yet, that such institutions were provided. It would ordinarily be assumed that they were, in accordance with the lack of knowledge of the time as regards the influence of light and air on the ailing, dingy and unventilated, lacking most of the qualities that distinguish our modern hospital. As a matter of fact, however, just as our architects go back to the Middle Ages to get models for our churches and municipal buildings, and even our millionaires' palaces and public institutions, they also find that in the matter of hospitals much valuable guidance is to be obtained from what was accomplished by these people of the Middle Ages, of whom we ordinarily think so little. Mr. Arthur Dillon, an architect, writing in the "Mail and Express" for May 7th, 1904, described the hospital founded by Marguerite of Bourgogne, the sister of St. Louis, at Tanierre in France in 1293. It consisted of a ward, a building attached to it by a covered passage in which Marguerite herself lived for many years, and _separate buildings_ for {267} kitchens, for storage of provisions and for the lodging of the twenty monks and nuns who had charge of the sick. A feature that perhaps we would not admire very much, was that adjacent to the buildings there was a cemetery. They were not so fearful about death in the Middle Ages, however, as we are apt to be; and who shall say that the contemplation of it did not often give that restful sense of submission to whatever would come, that sometimes means so much in serious illness, and keeps the patient from still further exhausting vitality by worrying as to the outcome? The medicine was stronger than our degenerate generation might be able to bear, but then all their medicines were apt to be stronger in that time. The situation of the hospital might well be thought ideal. The princess had gardens about her lodging, and the whole property was surrounded by a high wall, along which flowed the branches of a small stream, which doubtless tempered the atmosphere and served as a carrier off of much undesirable material. The hospital ward itself was 55 feet wide and 270 feet long and had a high arched ceiling of wood. It was lighted by large pointed windows high up in the walls. At the level of the window-sills, some twelve feet from the floor, a narrow gallery ran along the wall, from which the ventilation through the windows might be readily regulated and on which convalescent patients might walk or be seated in the sunshine. The beds were placed each in a little room formed by low partitions. Privacy was thus secured much better than in the modern hospital wards, and as there were only forty beds, the ventilation was abundant. Mr. Dillon, from the standpoint of the architect, says of it: {268} "It was an admirable hospital in every way, and it is doubtful if we to-day surpass it. It was isolated, the ward was separated from the other buildings, it had the advantage we so often lose of being but one story high, and more space was given to each patient than we can now afford. "The ventilation by the great windows and ventilators in the ceiling was excellent; is was cheerfully lighted, and the arrangement of the gallery shielded the patients from dazzling light and from draughts from the windows and afforded an easy means of supervision, while the division by the roofless, low partitions isolated the sick and obviated the depression that comes from the sight of others in pain. "It was, moreover, in great contrast to the cheerless white wards of to-day. The vaulted ceiling was very beautiful; the woodwork was richly carved, and the great windows over the altars were filled with colored glass. Altogether, it was one of the best examples of the best period of Gothic architecture." Probably the most interesting feature of the early history of the hospital movement is the spirit of evolution to meet growing needs and developing ideals which it manifested. In spite of the judicious consideration devoted to the establishment of the original hospital of the Holy Ghost at Rome, it was not long before it proved inadequate for its purpose. One of the eminently noteworthy things that constantly repeat themselves in history is that where a social need is discovered and a remedy found for it, it is not long before the need increases to such a degree as to outstrip the original remedy. Before half a century had passed Innocent's successors declared in unmistakable terms that the original hospital was entirely too cramped and crowded. [Illustration: Hospital Ward of Tonnerre, France (_Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire de l' Architecture Française, XI au XVI Siècle_). This was built by the sister of Louis IX of France, Marguerite of Bourgogne, who retired to it herself to spend her life caring for the ailing poor.] {269} Accordingly, a much larger and handsomer building was erected. Visitors to Rome admired the new building, and it proved an incentive for larger plans for hospitals in other important cities. At the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries some really imposing edifices were erected as hospitals, especially in towns of Italy. It was at this time that the artistic Italian mind seems to have realized the truth, which has only come to be recognized again in quite recent times, that a hospital building should be as fine a structure as the finances of a city will permit. It was felt that nothing was too good for the ailing citizens and that the city honored itself by making its public buildings a monument of artistic purpose. The earliest example of how well this was accomplished is to be found at Siena, whose hospital continues to be down to the present time one of the most interesting objects of admiration for the visitor. Portions of this Siena hospital as it now exists were built as early as the last decade of the thirteenth and the first decade of the fourteenth century. It was during the first half of the fourteenth century that it was resolved to make the building as beautiful in the interior by means of great artistic decoration and frescoes as it was imposing on the exterior. It was not for a century and a half later that Milan's magnificent hospital took on its modern shape, though the city had been always famous for its care of the sick. The hospital movement of the thirteenth century, however, culminated in monuments as famous and as architecturally beautiful as any that have been built in recent years. To take, for example, that of Siena, a good {270} description of which may be found in The Story of Siena, by G. Gardner. (Dent, London, 1902.) The buildings occupy the whole side of the Piazzo del Duomo, directly opposite the facade. They constitute almost as striking a bit of architecture as any edifice of the period, and contain a magnificent set of frescoes, some of them of the fourteenth century, many others of later centuries. The Siena school of painting in the fourteenth century was doing some of the best art work of the time, and as a consequence the hospital has been of perennial interest. Artists and amateurs and dilettante visitors have gladly spent time in studying and admiring its artistic treasures at nearly all times, but more especially in recent years. The sympathetic admiration for its art has led to a better appreciation of the motives of the generation that built it, than even the sublime humanitarian purpose which dictated it or the work for suffering humanity which it accomplished. It is typical of the times in many ways. We have only just begun again in very modern times, as we have already said, to consider that some of the best of our buildings in any large city should be those intended for the sick and the poor of the community. The city must respond nobly to its civic duties. The idea, however, came so naturally to the medieval mind that apparently there was no question about it. Only in very recent years has come the additional thought that these buildings must be appropriately decorated, and that the work of the greatest artists of the time can have no better place for its display than the walls of a hospital or a great charitable institution. Bartolo's frescoes, on the walls of the hospital at Siena, tell the story of the work that was done for foundlings and pilgrims as well as for {271} the sick in the early days of its establishment. The first picture of the series represents the baptism of the children that had been picked up and brought to the hospital. It is characteristic of the times, too, that one of the greatest pictures on the hospital walls is not something that makes for the glory of the trustees or the founders, nor that is some fancy of the painter, some study of myth or landscape, in which he might have been especially interested. Probably the masterpiece of the old painters is the Scala del Paradiso (the stairs to heaven), by Vecchietta. The picture was evidently painted for the department of the foundlings, and its subject is the ascent of these little children to heaven and their welcome by the angels and saints and by the Heavenly Father. A more inspiring vision to be impressed upon the minds of these growing children who had been abandoned by their own, and who must have felt all of their loneliness in spite of their favorable surroundings, could scarcely have been imagined. The dedication of the hospital is expressed in terms very typical of the Middle Ages, or as they might better be called, "The Ages of Faith." It reminds one of the formal terms of wills, as they used to be worded in olden times: "In the Name of God, Amen. To the honor, praise and reverence of God and of His Mother, Madonna, Holy Mary Virgin, and of all the saints of God, and to the honor and exaltation of Holy Mother Church and of the Commune and of the people of the city of Siena, and to its good and pacific state, and to the increase of the Hospital of Madonna, Holy Mary Virgin, of Siena, which is placed in front of the chief church of the city, and to the recreation of the sick and {272} the foundlings of the said hospital." This dedication is to be found at the beginning of the statutes of the hospital as they were formulated in 1305. The hospital did excellent service, and most of the original building has remained down to our own day. It has seen many times of trial for the citizens of Siena, and has proved its usefulness. Twice during the fourteenth century it saw the coming of the Black Death, and its wards and corridors and every room were filled with the dead and the dying. During the fourteenth century St. Catherine of Siena spent much of her time in the hospital, and it was her work here that gave her the glorious prestige that came so unlooked for. The special confraternity with which she was associated met in one of the smaller rooms of the hospital. Attached to the hospital there was a special house for lepers, and this was one of the favorite places for St. Catherine's visitations. It is not surprising to find that she was, at the beginning at least, very much opposed by her family in her choice of such an occupation as this personal devotion to the poor and the sick. In reading the story, one is reminded of the opposition that is sometimes evoked at the present time when young women feel the necessity for some occupation other than so-called social duties, and take to slum visiting, or the care of the cancer poor, or some other form of practical aid for the needy, apart from the giving of money, or of doing a little sewing in a Lenten class, supposed to be the limit of their charitable work in their special social circle. [Illustration: HOSPITAL, MEXICO (FOUNDED BEFORE 1524) This hospital was founded by Cortez prior to 1524 "in recognition of the graces and mercies that God had bestowed upon him by the discovery and conquest of New Spain and as an exoneration or satisfaction for any forgotten fault or load which might weigh on his conscience and for which he could not make special or particular atonement." After his death the endowment was administered by a superintendent and has continued to be under private management. It now belongs to the Dukes of Terranova y Montaleone, Cortez' Italian descendants, who nominate and maintain an agent to supervise the hospital (_A History of Nursing, Nutting and Dock_).] It is of curious interest, though not surprising, to find that in the midst of the organization of new hospitals and reorganization of old hospital foundations in the thirteenth century, attempts were made to correct {273} abuses which still continue to be some of the thorny problems of hospital management. For instance, the danger was recognized of having the expenses of administration outrun those of the hospital proper, and of having the number of attendants, or at least of persons living upon the hospital revenues, greater than was absolutely needed for the care of patients. There are various Papal decrees and decisions of diocesan synods in this matter. Pope Honorius III., who occupied the Papal See from 1216 to 1227, and must be considered as a very worthy successor of the first great Pope of the century, Innocent III., in approving the union of two hospital foundations at Ghent, required that only a certain limited number of Brothers and Sisters for nursing purposes should be received, in order that the community expenses proper might not impair to too great a degree the resources of the hospital for its real purpose of taking care of patients. Previously, he had insisted by a decree that the number of Brothers and Sisters in the hospital community at Louvain should not exceed the proportion of more than one to nine of the patients. Synodal decrees in various bishoprics allowed only board and clothing, but nothing more, to attendants in hospitals. In the thirteenth century the personal satisfaction of accomplishing a charitable work in attendance upon the sick was expected to make up for any further remuneration. The other serious problem of hospital management was to keep those not really suffering from serious disease, malingerers of various kinds, from occupying beds and claiming attention, to the deprivation of those who were genuinely ill. Various regulations were made looking to the careful examinations of such persons, {274} though in most places with the affirmation of a standing rule, that all those complaining of illness were to be received into the hospital for at least one day, until their cases could be examined with sufficient care to decide how much of reality and how much of simulation there might be in their pretended symptoms. The tramp, of course, has always been in the world, and probably always will be, and so what are called the sturdy vagrants (validi vagrantes) received the special attention of those wishing to eliminate hospital abuses, and various decrees were made in order to prevent them from receiving sustenance from the hospitals, or in any other way abusing the privileges of these charitable institutions. A hospital movement, quite distinct from that of Innocent III., which attracted so much attention shortly after the general hospital became common as to deserve particular consideration, was the erection of the leproseries or special institutions for the care of lepers. Leprosy had become quite common in Europe during the Middle Ages, and the continued contact of the West with the East during the crusades had brought about a notable increase of the disease. It is not definitely known how much of what was called leprosy at that time, really belonged to the specific disease now known as lepra. There is no doubt that many affections, which have since come to be considered as quite harmless and non-contagious, were included under the designation leprosy by the populace and even physicians incapable as yet of making a proper differential diagnosis. Probably severe cases of eczema and other chronic skin diseases, especially when complicated by the results of wrongly directed treatment or of lack of cleansing, were not infrequently pronounced to be true leprosy. {275} There is no doubt at all, however, of the occurrence of real leprosy in many of the towns of the West from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and the erection of these hospitals proved the best possible prophylactic against the further spread of the disease. Leprosy is contagious, but only mildly so. Years of intimate association with a leper may, and usually do, bring about the communication of the disease to those around them, especially if they do not exercise rather carefully, certain precise precautions as to cleanliness after personal contact or after the handling of things which have previously been in the leper's possession. As the result of the existence of these houses of segregation, leprosy disappeared during the course of the next three centuries, and thus a great hygienic triumph was obtained by sanitary regulation. This successful sanitary and hygienic work, which brought about practically the complete obliteration of leprosy in the Middle Ages, furnished the first example of the possibility of eradicating a disease that has once become a serious scourge to mankind. That this should have been accomplished by a movement that had its greatest source in the thirteenth century is all the more surprising, since we are usually accustomed to think of the people of the times as sadly lacking in any interest in sanitary matters. The role of the Popes in the matter is another striking feature well worthy of note. The significance of the success of this segregation method was lost upon men down almost to our own time. This was unfortunately because it was considered that most of the epidemic diseases were conveyed by the air. They were thought infectious and due to a climatic condition rather than contagious, that is, conveyed by actual {276} contact with the person having the disease or something that had touched him, which is the view now held. With the beginning of the crusade against tuberculosis in the later nineteenth century, however, the most encouraging factor for those engaged in it was the history of the success of segregation methods and careful prevention of the spread of the disease, which had been pursued against leprosy. In a word, the lessons in sanitation and prophylaxis of the thirteenth century are only now bearing fruit because the intervening centuries did not have sufficient knowledge to realize their import and take advantage of them. Pope Innocent III. was not the only occupant of the Papal throne whose name deserves to be remembered with benedictions in connection with the hospital movement of the thirteenth century. His successor took up the work of encouragement where Innocent had left it at his death, and did much to bring about the successful accomplishment of his intentions in the ever wider spheres. Honorius III. is distinguished by having made into an order the Antonine Congregation of Vienna, which was especially devoted to the care of patients suffering from the "holy fire" and from various mutilations. The disease known as the holy fire seems to have been what is called in modern times erysipelas. During the Middle Ages it received various titles, such as St. Anthony's fire, St. Francis's fire, and the like, the latter part of the designation evidently being due to the striking redness which characterizes the disease, and which can be compared to nothing better than the intense erythema consequent upon a rather severe burn. This affection was much more common in the Middle Ages than in later times, though it must not be forgotten that its {277} disappearance has come mainly in the last twenty-five years. It is now known to be a contagious disease, and indeed, as Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out over half a century ago, may readily be carried from place to place by the physician in attendance. It does not always manifest itself as erysipelas when thus carried, however, and the merit of Dr. Holmes's work was in pointing out the fact that physicians who attended patients suffering from erysipelas and then waited on obstetrical cases, were especially likely to carry the affection, which manifested itself as puerperal fever. A number of cases of this kind were reported and discussed by him, and there is no doubt that his warning served to save many precious lives. Of course nothing of this was known in the thirteenth century; yet the encouragement given to this religious order which devoted itself practically exclusively to the care in special hospitals of erysipelas, must have had no little effect in bringing about a limitation of the spread of the disease. In such hospitals patients were not likely to come in contact with many persons, and consequently the contagion-radius of the disease was limited. In our own time, immediate segregation of cases when discovered has practically eradicated it, so that many a young physician, even though ten years in practice, has never seen a case of it. It was so common during the Civil War and for half a century before that here in America, that there were frequent epidemics of it in hospitals, and it was generally recognized that the disease was so contagious, that when it once gained a foothold in a hospital ward nearly every patient suffering from an open wound was likely to be affected by it. It is interesting then to learn that these people of the {278} Middle Ages attempted to control the disease by erecting special hospitals for it, though unfortunately we are not in a position to know just how much was accomplished by these means. A congregation devoted to the special care of the disease had been organized, as we have said, early in the thirteenth century. At the end of this century this was given the full weight of his amplest approval by Pope Boniface VIII., who conferred on it the privilege of having priests among its members It will be remembered that Pope Boniface VIII. is said to have issued the bull which forbade the practice of dissection. That bull only regulated, as I have shown, the abuse which had sprung up of dismembering bodies and boiling them in order to be able to carry them to a distance for burial, which was in itself an excellent hygienic measure. His encouragement of the special religious order for the care of erysipelas must be set down to his credit as another sanitary benefit conferred on his generation. Many orders for the care of special needs of humanity were established during the thirteenth century. It is from this period that most of the religious habits worn by women originate. They used to be considered rather cumbersome for such a serious work as the nursing and care of the sick, but in recent years quite a different view has been taken. The covering of the head, for instance, and the shearing of the hair must have been of distinct value in preventing the communication of contagious diseases. There has been a curious assimilation in the last few years of the dress required to be worn by nurses in operating rooms to that worn by most of the religious communities. The head must be completely covered and the garments worn are of material that can be washed. {279} It will be recalled that the head-dress of religious being, as a rule, of white, on which the slightest speck shows, must be renewed frequently, and therefore must be kept in a condition of what is practically surgical cleanliness. While this was not at all the intention of those who adopted the particular style of head-dress worn by religious, yet their choice has proved, in what may well be considered a Providential way, an excellent protective for the patients on whom they waited, against certain dangers that would inevitably have been present, if their dress had been the ordinary one of the women of their class, during these many centuries of hospital nursing by religious women. In a word, then, all the features which characterize our modern hospitals, found a place in the old-time institutions for the care of the ailing, which we owe to the initiative of the Church and religious orders, and above all, the Popes. While we are accustomed to hear these old-time institutions spoken of slightingly, that is because our knowledge of them was not as detailed as it should be, until the recent interest in things medieval revealed many details previously misunderstood. The hospitals of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were much better than those of subsequent centuries down practically to our own time. The reason for this decadence is rather complex, but it evidently occurred in spite of the Church and the Popes. Much of it was due to the fact that, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the political governments interfered in the work of charity and hospital management, and always to the detriment of it. The greatest triumph of the Church during the earlier centuries is to be found in the magnificent organization of the {280} hospital system and the anticipation of so many things in the organization of hospital work, the care of patients and even the prevention of contagious disease, that we are apt to think of as essentially modern. {281} THE CHURCH AND THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD. There is a very generally accepted false impression with regard to the attitude maintained by the Church during the Middle Ages, especially toward what is known as the experimental method in the gaining of knowledge, or as we would now say, in the study of science. It is commonly supposed that at least before the sixteenth century, though of course in modern times it has had to change its attitude to accord with the advances of modern science, the Church was decidedly opposed to the experimental method, and that the great ecclesiastical scholars of the wonderful period of the rise of the universities were all absolute in their confidence in authority and their dependence on the deductive method as the only means of arriving at truth. This widespread false impression owes its existence and persistence to many causes. It is supposed by many of those outside the Church that there is a distinct incompatibility between the state of mind which accepts things on faith and that other intellectual attitude which leads man to doubt about his knowledge and consequently to inquire. This doubting frame of mind, which is readily recognized to be absolutely necessary for the proper pursuit of experimental science, is supposed quite to preclude the idea of the peaceful settlement of the doubts that assail men's minds as to the significance of life, of the relation of man to man and to his Creator, and the hereafter, which comes {282} with the acceptance of what revelation has to say on these subjects. Somehow, it is assumed by many people that there is something mutually and essentially repellent in these two forms of assent. If a man is ready to accept certain propositions on authority and without being able to understand them, and still more, if he accept them, realizing that he cannot understand them, it is considered to be impossible for him to be able to assume such a mental attitude towards science as would make him an original investigator. It is almost needless to say to anyone who knows anything about the history of modern science--even nineteenth century science, that there is absolutely no foundation for this prejudice. Most of our greatest investigators even in nineteenth century science have been faithful believers not only in the ordinary religious truths, in a Providence, in a hereafter, and in this life as a preparation for another, but also in the great mysteries of revelation. I have shown this amply even with regard to what is usually considered so unorthodox a science as medicine, in my volume on the Makers of Modern Medicine. Most of the men who did the great original work in last century medicine were Catholics. The same thing is true for electricity, for example. All the men after whom modes and units of electricity are named--Galvani, Volta, Coulomb, Ampere, Ohm--were not only members of the Church, but what would be even called devout Catholics. A second and almost as important a reason for the superstition--for it is a supposed truth accepted without good reasons therefor--that somehow the Church was opposed to the inductive or experimental method, is the persistent belief which, in spite of frequent {283} contradictions, remains in the minds of so many scientists, that the inductive or experimental method was introduced to the world by Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Bacon himself was a Protestant; he did not do his writing until the reformation so-called had been at work in Europe for nearly a century, and somehow it is supposed that these facts are linked together as causes and effects. The reason why such a formulation of the inductive method had not come before was because this was forbidden ground! Nothing could be less true than that Lord Bacon had any serious influence in bringing about the introduction of the inductive method into science. At most he was a chronicler of tendencies that he saw in the science of his day. It is true that his writings served to give a certain popular vogue to the inductive method, or rather a certain exaggerated notion of the import of experiment to those who were not themselves scientists. Bacon was a popular writer on science, not an original thinker or worker in the experimental sciences. Popularizers in science, alas! have from Amerigo Vespucci down reaped the rewards due to the real discoverers. Induction in the genuine significance of the word had been recognized in the world long before Bacon's time and been used to much better effect than he was able to apply it. Personally, I have always felt that he has almost less right to all the praise that has been bestowed on him for what he is supposed to have done for science, than he has for any addition to his reputation because of the attribution to him by so many fanatics of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. It is rather difficult to understand how his reputation ever came about. Lord {284} Macaulay is much more responsible for it than is usually thought; his brilliancy often overreached itself or went far beyond truth; his favorite geese were nearly always swans, in his eyes. De Maistre, in his review of Bacon's Novum Organum, points out that this work is replete with prejudices; that Bacon makes glaring blunders in astronomy, in logic, in metaphysics, in physics, in natural history, and fills the pages of his work with childish observations, trifling experiments, and ridiculous explanations. Our own Professor Draper, in his Intellectual Development of Europe, has been even more severe, and has especially pointed out that Bacon never received the Copernican System, but "with the audacity of ignorance he presumed to criticise what he did not understand, and with a superb conceit disparaged the great Copernicus."--"The more closely we examine the writings of Lord Bacon," he says farther on, "the more unworthy does he seem to have been of the great reputation which has been awarded to him. . . The popular delusion, to which he owes so much, originated at a time when the history of science was unknown. This boasted founder of a new philosophy could not comprehend and would not accept the greatest of all scientific discoveries when it was plainly set before his eyes." As a student of the history of medicine, it has always been especially irritating to me to hear Francis Bacon's name heralded as the Father of Experimental Science. Literally hundreds of physicians had applied the experimental method in its perfect form to many problems in medicine and surgery during at least three centuries or more before Bacon's time. They did not need to have the principles of it set forth for them by this {285} publicist, who knew how to write about scientific method, but did not know how to apply it, so far as we know anything about him; and who was utterly unable to see the great discoveries that had been made by the experimental method in the century before his time, and refused to accept such great advances in science as were made by Copernicus and others. Some two score of years before Bacon wrote, in England itself, the great Gilbert of Colchester, who was elected the president of the Royal College of Physicians for the year 1600, and who was physician-in-ordinary to Queen Elizabeth, had applied the experimental method to such good purpose that he well deserves the title that has been conferred upon him of Father of Electricity. There was never a more purely experimental scientist than Gilbert. His work, De Magnete, is one of the great contributions to experimental science. Anyone who thinks that experiments came only after Lord Bacon's time should read this wonderful work, which is at the foundation of modern electricity. For twenty years, from 1580 to 1600, Gilbert spent all the leisure that he could snatch from his professional duties, in his laboratory. He notes down his experiments--his failures as well as his successes--discusses them very thoroughly, suggests explanations of success and failure, hits upon methods of control, but pursues the solution of the problems he has in hand ever further and further. As a biographer said of him, "we find him toiling in his work-shop at Colchester quite as Faraday toiled, more than two hundred years later, in the low dark rooms of the Royal Institution of Great Britain." Faraday was actuated by no more calm, persevering, inquiring spirit than was Gilbert. To say that any Englishman invented {286} or taught the world the application of the experimental method in science after Gilbert's time is to talk nonsense. Yet it was of this great scientific observer that Lord Bacon, carried away by ill-feeling and jealousy of a contemporary, went so far as to say in his _De Augmentis Scientiarum_, that Gilbert "had attempted to found a general system upon the magnet, and endeavored to build a ship out of materials not sufficient to make the rowing-pins of a boat." When Bacon refused to accept Copernicus's teachings, he did not commit a greater error, nor do a greater wrong to mankind, than when he made little of Gilbert of Colchester's work. Poggendorf called Gilbert the "Galileo of Magnetism" and Priestley hailed him as the "founder of modern electricity." When Gilbert did the work on which these titles are founded, however, he was only following out the methods which had been introduced into England long before, and which had been exemplified so thoroughly all during the life of Friar Bacon, and of Friar Bacon's great teacher, Albertus Magnus. One would expect that at least in science credit would be given properly, and that the false notions introduced by litterateurs and historians of politics should not be allowed to dominate the situation. The position popularly assigned to Bacon in the history of science is indeed one of those history lies, as the Germans so bluntly but frankly call them, which, though very generally accepted, is entirely due to a lack of knowledge of the state of education and of the progress of scientific investigation long before his time. The reason for this ignorance is the unfortunate tradition which has been so long fostered in educational circles, {287} that nothing worth while ever came out of the Nazareth of the Middle Ages, or the centuries before the so-called reformation and the Renaissance. The ridiculously utter falsity of this impression we shall be able properly to characterize at the end of the next chapter. As a matter of fact, it would have been much truer to have attributed the origin of experimental science to his great namesake, Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar, whose work was done at Paris and at Oxford during the latter half of that wonderful thirteenth century that saw the rise and the development of the universities to that condition in which they have practically remained ever since. Even Bacon, however, is not the real originator of the inductive method, since, as we shall see, the writings of his great teacher, the profoundest scholar of this great century, whose years are almost coincident with it, Albert Magnus, the Dominican, who afterwards became Bishop of Ratisbon, contained many distinct and definite anticipations of Bacon as regards the inductive method. The earlier Bacon, the Franciscan, laid down very distinctly the principle, that only by careful observation and experimental demonstration could any real knowledge with regard to natural phenomena be obtained. He not only laid down the principle, however, but in this, quite a contrast to his later namesake, he followed the route himself very wonderfully. It is for this reason that his name is deservedly attached to many important beginnings in modern science, which we shall have occasion to mention during the course of this and the next chapter. His general attitude of mind toward natural science can be best appreciated from the famous passage with regard to his friend, Petrus Peregrinus, {288} who did such excellent work in magnetism in the thirteenth century, and sent to Friar Bacon the details of it with the loving solicitude of a pupil to a master. In his Opus Tertium, Bacon thus praises the merits of Peregrinus: "I know of only one person who deserves praise for his work in experimental philosophy, for he does not care for the discourses of men and their wordy warfare, but quietly and diligently pursues the work of wisdom. Therefore, what others grope after blindly, as bats in the evening twilight, this man contemplates in all their brilliancy _because he is a master of experiment_. Hence, he knows all of natural science, whether pertaining to medicine and alchemy, or to matters celestial or terrestrial. He has worked diligently in the smelting of ores, as also in the working of minerals; he is thoroughly acquainted with all sorts of arms and implements used in military service and in hunting, besides which he is skilled in agriculture and in the measurement of lands. It is impossible to write a useful or correct treatise in experimental philosophy without mentioning this man's name. Moreover, he pursues knowledge for its own sake; for if he wished to obtain royal favor, he could easily find sovereigns who would honor and enrich him." Brother Potamian's reflections on this unexpected passage of Bacon are the best interpretation of it for the modern student of science. "This last statement is worthy of the best utterances of the twentieth century. Say what they will, the most ardent pleaders of our day for original work and laboratory methods, cannot surpass the Franciscan monk of the thirteenth century in his denunciation of mere book-learning, or in his advocacy of experiment and research; {289} while in Peregrinus, the medievalist, they have Bacon's impersonation of what a student of science ought to be. Peregrinus was a hard worker, not a mere theorizer, preferring, Procrusteanlike, to make theory fit the facts rather than facts fit the theory; he was a brilliant discoverer, who knew at the same time how to use his discoveries for the benefit of mankind; he was a pioneer of science and a leader in the progress of the world." [Footnote 32] [Footnote 32: The letter of Petrus Peregrinus on the Magnet, A. D. 1269, translated by Bro. Arnold, M. Sc, with an Introductory Note by Bro. Potamian, N.Y., 1904.] This letter of Roger Bacon contains every idea that the modern scientists contend for as significant in education. It counsels observation, not theory, and says very plainly what he thinks of much talk without a basis of observation. It commends a mastery in experiment as the most important thing for science. It suggests, of course, by implication at least, that a man should know all sciences and all applications of them; but surely no one will object to this medieval friar commending as great a breadth of mental development as possible, as the ideal of an educated man, and especially with regard to the experimental sciences. Finally, it has the surprising phrase, that Peregrinus pursues knowledge for its own sake. Friar Bacon evidently would have sympathized very heartily with Faraday, who at the beginning of the nineteenth century wanted to get out of trade and into science, because he thought it unworthy of man to spend all his life accumulating money, and considered that the only proper aim in life is to add to knowledge. He would have been in cordial accord with Pasteur, at the end of the century, who told the Empress Eugenie, when she asked him if he would not exploit his discoveries in fermentation for the purpose of building up a great {290} brewing industry in France, that he thought it unworthy of a French scientist to devote himself to a mere money-making industry. For a man of the modern time, perhaps the most interesting expression that ever fell from Roger Bacon's lips is his famous proclamation of the reasons why men do not obtain genuine knowledge more rapidly than would seem ought to be the case, from the care and time and amount of work which they have devoted to its cultivation. This expression occurs in Bacon's Opus Tertium, which, it may be recalled, the Franciscan friar wrote at the command of Pope Clement, because the Pope had heard many interesting accounts of all that the great thirteenth century teacher and experimenter was doing at the University of Oxford, and wished to learn for himself the details of his work. Friar Bacon starts out with the principle that there are four grounds of human ignorance. "These are: first, trust in adequate authority; second, that force of custom which leads men to accept too unquestioningly what has been accepted before their time; third, the placing of confidence in the opinion of the inexperienced; and fourth, the hiding of one's own ignorance with the parade of superficial knowledge." These reasons contain the very essence of the experimental method, and continue to be as important in the twentieth century as they were in the thirteenth. They could only have emanated from an eminently practical mind, accustomed to test by observation and by careful searching of authorities every proposition that came to him. It is very evident that modern scientists would have more of kinship and intellectual sympathy with Friar {291} Bacon than most of them are apt to think possible. A faithful student of his writings, who was at the same time in many ways a cordial admirer of medievalism, the late Professor Henry Morley, who held the chair of English literature at University College, London, whose contributions to the History of English Literature are probably the most important of the nineteenth century, has a striking paragraph with regard to this attitude of Bacon toward knowledge and science--two words that have the same meaning etymologically, though they have come to have quite different connotations. In the third volume of his English Writers, page 321, Professor Morley, after quoting Bacon's four grounds of human ignorance, said:-- "No part of that ground has yet been cut away from beneath the feet of students, although six centuries ago the Oxford friar clearly pointed out its character. We still make sheep walks of second, third and fourth and fiftieth-hand references to authority; still we are the slaves of habit; still we are found following too frequently the untaught crowd; still we flinch from the righteous and wholesome phrase, 'I do not know,' and acquiesce actively in the opinion of others, that we know what we appear to know. Substitute honest research, original and independent thought, strict truth in the comparison of only what we really know with what is really known by others, and the strong redoubt of ignorance is fallen." This attitude of mind of Friar Bacon toward the reasons for ignorance, is so different from what is usually predicated of the Middle Ages and of medieval scholars, that it seems worth while insisting on it. Authority is supposed to have meant everything for the scholastics, {292} and experiment is usually said to have counted for nothing. They are supposed to have been accustomed to swear to the words of the master--"_jurare in verba magistri_"--yet here is a great leader of medieval thought insisting on just the opposite. As clearly as ever it was proclaimed, Bacon announces that an authority is worth only the reasons that he advances. These thirteenth century teachers are supposed, above all, to have fairly bowed down and worshipped at the shrine of Aristotle. Many of them doubtless did. In every generation the great mass of mankind must find someone to follow. As often as not, their leaders are much more fallible than Aristotle. Bacon, however, had no undue reverence for Aristotle or anyone else, and he realized that the blind following of Aristotle had done much harm. In his sketch of Gilbert of Colchester, which was published in the "Popular Science Monthly" for August, 1901, Brother Potamian calls attention to this quality of Roger Bacon in a striking passage. "Roger Bacon, after absorbing the learning of Oxford and Paris, wrote to the reigning Pontiff, Clement IV., urging him to have the works of the Stagirite burnt in order to stop the propagation of error in the schools. The Franciscan monk of Ilchester has left us, in his Opus Majus, a lasting memorial of his practical genius. In the section entitled, "Scientia Experimentalis," he affirms that "Without experiment, nothing can be adequately known. An argument proves theoretically, but does not give the certitude necessary to remove all doubt; nor will the mind repose in the clear view of truth, unless it finds it by way of experiment." And in his Opus Tertium: "The strongest arguments prove nothing, so long as the conclusions are not verified by {293} experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation." Lest it should be thought that these expressions of laudatory appreciation of the great thirteenth century scientist are dictated more by the desire to magnify his work and to bring out the influence in science of the churchmen of the period, it seems well to quote an expression of opinion from the modern historian of the inductive sciences, whose praise is scarcely if any less outspoken than that of others whom we have quoted and who might be supposed to be somewhat partial in their judgment. This opinion will fortify the doubters who must have authority, and at the same time sums up very excellently the position which Roger Bacon occupies in the history of science. Dr. Whewell says that Roger Bacon's Opus Majus is "the encyclopedia and Novum Organon of the thirteenth century, a work equally wonderful with regard to its general scheme and to the special treatises with which the outlines of the plans are filled up. The professed object of the work is to urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of philosophizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not made a greater progress, to draw back attention to the sources of knowledge which had been unwisely neglected, to discover other sources which were yet almost untouched, and to animate men in the undertaking by a prospect of the best advantages which it offered. In the development of this plan all the leading portions of science are expanded in the most complete shape which they had at that time assumed; and improvements of a very wide and striking kind are proposed in some of the principal branches of study. Even if the work had no leading purposes it would have {294} been highly valuable as a treasure of the most solid knowledge and soundest speculations of the time; even if it had contained no such details, it would have been a work most remarkable for its general views and scope." The open and inquiring attitude of mind toward the truths of nature is supposed usually to be utterly at variance with the intellectual temper of the Middle Ages. We have heard so much about the submission to authority and the cultivation of tradition on the part of medieval scholars that we forget entirely how much they accomplished in adding to human knowledge, and though they had their limitations of conservatism, they were no more old fogies clinging to old-fashioned ruts than are the older men of each successive generation down even to our own time, in the minds of their younger colleagues. It might seem to be difficult to substantiate such a declaration. It may appear to be a paradox to talk thus. It is not hard to show good reasons for it, and far from being a far-fetched attempt to bolster up an opinion more favorable to the Middle Ages, it is really a very simple expression of what the history of these generations shows that they actually tried to accomplish. Roger Bacon must not be thought to be alone in this. On the contrary, he was only a leader with many followers. Even before his time, however, these ideas as to the necessity for observation had been very forcibly expressed by many, and by no one more than Roger's distinguished teacher, Albertus Magnus, whose name is now becoming familiar to scholars as Albert the Great. Albert's great pupil, Roger Bacon, is rightly looked upon as the true father of inductive science, an honor that history has unfortunately taken from him to confer {295} it undeservedly on his namesake of four centuries later; but the teaching out of which Roger Bacon was to develop the principles of experimental science can be found in many places in the master's writings. In Albert's tenth book, wherein he catalogues and describes all the trees, plants, and herbs known in his time, he observes: "All that is here set down is the result of our own experience, or has been borrowed from authors whom we know to have written what their personal experience has confirmed: for in these matters experience alone can give certainty"--_experimentum solum certificat in talibus_. "Such an expression," says his biographer, "which might have proceeded from the pen of (Francis) Bacon, argues in itself a prodigious scientific progress, and shows that the medieval friar was on the track so successfully pursued by modern natural philosophy. He had fairly shaken off the shackles which had hitherto tied up discovery, and was the slave neither of Pliny nor of Aristotle." Albert was a theologian rather than a scientist, and yet, deeply versed as he was in theology, he declared in a treatise concerning Heaven and Earth, [Footnote 33] that "in studying nature we have not to enquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power; we have rather to enquire what nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass." This can scarcely fail to seem a surprising declaration to those who have been accustomed to think of medieval philosophers as turning by preference to miraculous explanations of things, but such a notion is founded partly on false tradition, with regard to the real teaching of the medieval {296} scholars, and even more on the partisan declarations of those who thought it the proper thing to make as little as possible of the intelligence of the people of the Middle Ages, in order to account for their adhesion to the Catholic Church. [Footnote 33: De Coelo et Mundo, I. tr. iv., X.] As a matter of fact, Albert's declaration, far from being an innovation, was only in pursuance of the truly philosophic method which had characterized the writings of the great Christian thinkers from the earlier time. Unfortunately, the declarations of lesser minds are sometimes accepted as having represented the thoughts of men and the policy of the Church. It is not these lesser men, however, who have been in special honor. No one, for instance, can possibly be looked upon as representing Church teaching better than Augustine, who because of the depth of his teaching, yet his wonderful fidelity to Christian dogma, received the formal title of Father of the Church, which carried with it the approval of everything that he had written. There is a well-known quotation from St. Augustine which shows how much he deprecated the attempt to make Scriptures an authority in science, and how much he valued observation as compared with authority, in such matters as are really within the domain of investigation by experiment and observation. He says: "It very often happens that there is some question as to the earth or the sky, or the other elements of this world, respecting which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from most certain reasoning or observation" (that is, from the ordinary means at the command of an investigator in natural science), "and it is very disgraceful and mischievous, and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a {297} Christian speaking of such matters as being according to the Christian Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such nonsense that the unbeliever, perceiving him to be as wide from the mark as east from west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing." It is the opinions of such men as Augustine and Albert that must be taken as representing the real attitude of theologians and churchmen toward science, and not those of lesser men, whose zeal, as is ever true of the minor adherents of any cause, always is prone to carry them into unfortunate excesses. Albert the Great was indeed a thoroughgoing experimentalist in the best modern sense of the term. He says in the second book of his treatise On Minerals (De Mineralibus): "The aim of natural science is not simply to accept the statements of others, that is, what is narrated by people, but to investigate the causes that are at work in nature for themselves." When we take this expression in connection with the other, that "we must endeavor to find out what nature can naturally bring to pass," the complete foundation of experimentalism is laid. Albert held this principle not only in theory, but applied it in practice. It is often said that the scholastic philosophers, and notably Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, almost idolatrously worshipped at the shrine of Aristotle, and were ready to accept anything that this great Greek philosopher had taught. We have already quoted Roger Bacon's request to the Pope to forbid the study of the Stagirite. It is interesting to find in this regard, that while Albert declared that in questions of natural science he would prefer to follow Aristotle to St. Augustine--a declaration which may seem surprising to many people {298} who have been prone to think that what the Fathers of the Church said medieval scholars followed slavishly--he does not hesitate to point out errors made by the Greek philosopher, nor to criticise his conclusions very freely. In his Treatise on Physics, [Footnote 34] he says, "whoever believes that Aristotle was a god must also believe that he never erred. But if one believe that Aristotle was a man, then doubtless he was liable to err just as we are." In fact, as is pointed out by the Catholic Encyclopaedia in its article on Albertus Magnus, to which we are indebted for the exact reference of the quotations that we have made, Albert devotes a lengthy chapter in his Summa Theologiae [Footnote 35] to what he calls the errors of Aristotle. His appreciation of Aristotle is always critical. He deserves great credit not only for bringing the scientific teaching of the Stagirite to the attention of medieval scholars, but also for indicating the method and the spirit in which that teaching was to be received. [Footnote 34: Physica, lib. VIII., tr. i., xiv.] [Footnote 35: Summa Theologiae, Pars II., tr. i., Quaest iv.] With regard to Albert's devotion to the experimental method and to observation as the source of knowledge in what concerns natural phenomena, Julius Pagel, in his History of Medicine in the Middle Ages, which forms one of the parts of Puschmann's Handbook of the History of Medicine, has some very interesting remarks that are worth while quoting here: "Albert," he says, "shared with the naturalists of the scholastic period the quality of entering deeply and thoroughly into the objects of nature, and was not content with bare superficial details concerning them, which many of the writers of the period penetrated no further than to provide a nomenclature. While Albert was a churchman and an {299} ardent devotee of Aristotle in matters of natural phenomena, he was relatively unprejudiced and presented an open mind. He thought that he must follow Hippocrates and Galen rather than Aristotle and Augustine in medicine and in the natural sciences. We must concede it as a special subject of praise for Albert, that he distinguished very strictly between natural and supernatural phenomena. The former he considered as entirely the object of the investigation of nature. The latter he handed over to the realm of metaphysics." "Albert's efforts" Pagel says, "to set down the limits of natural science shows already the seeds of a more scientific treatment of natural phenomena, and a recognition of the necessity to know things in their causes--_rerum cognoscere causas_--and not to consider that everything must simply be attributed to the action of Providence. He must be considered as one of the more rational thinkers of his time, though the fetters of scholasticism still bound him quite enough, and his mastery of dialectics, which he had learned from the strenuous Dominican standpoint, still made him subordinate the laws of nature to the Church's teaching in ways that suggested the possibility of his being less free than might otherwise have been the case. His thoroughgoing piety, his profound scholarship, his boundless industry; the almost uncontrollable impulse of his mind after universality of knowledge; his many-sidedness in literary productivity; and finally the universal recognition which he received from his contemporaries and succeeding generations,--stamp him as one of the most imposing characters and one of the most wonderful phenomena of the Middle Ages." Perhaps in no department of the history of science {300} has more nonsense been talked, than with regard to the neglect of experiment and observation in the Middle Ages. The men who made the series of experiments necessary to enable them to raise the magnificent Gothic cathedrals; who built the fine old municipal buildings and abbeys and castles; who spanned wide rivers with bridges, and yet had the intelligence and the skill to decorate all of these buildings as effectively as they did,--cannot be considered either as impractical or lacking in powers of observation. As I show in the chapter The Medieval University Man and Science, Dante, the poet and literary man of the thirteenth century, had his mind stored with quite as much material information with regard to physical science and nature study, as any modern educated man. It is true that the men of the Middle Ages did not make observations on exactly the same things that we do, but to say either that they lacked powers of observation, or did not use their powers or failed to appreciate the value of such powers, is simply a display of ignorance of what they actually did. On the other hand, when it comes to the question of the principles of experimental science and the value they placed on them, these men of the medieval universities, when sympathetically studied, prove to have been quite as sensible as the scientists of our own time. The idea that Francis Bacon in any way laid the foundation of the experimental sciences, or indeed did anything more than give a literary statement of the philosophy of the experimental science, though he himself proved utterly unable to apply the principles that he discussed to the scientific discoveries of his own time, is one of the inexplicable absurdities of history that somehow get in and {301} cannot be got out. The great thinkers of the medieval period had not only reached the same conclusions as he did, but actually applied them three centuries before; and the great medieval universities were occupied with problems, even in physical science, not very different from those which have given food for thought for subsequent generations. We shall see in the next chapter how successfully they applied these great principles of the experimental method, and how much they anticipated many phases of science that we are apt to think of as distinctly modern. {302} CHURCHMEN AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE AT THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES. There can be no doubt at all in the minds of those who know anything about the early history of the universities, but that the Popes were entirely favorable to the great educational movement represented by these institutions. It is ordinarily supposed, however, that the medieval universities limited their attention to philosophy and theology, and that even these subjects were studied from such narrow religious standpoints, as to make them of very little value for the development of human knowledge or the evolution of the human mind. Any such supposition is the result of ignorance on the part of those who entertain it, as to the actual curriculum of studies at the early universities, though it is not surprising that it should be very common, because, unfortunately, it has been fostered by many writers on educational subjects, especially in English. Scholasticism is often said to have been the very acme of absurdity in teaching, and its real import is entirely missed. Students and professors are supposed to have been limited in their interests to dialectics and metaphysics in the narrowest sense of these terms, and much time was, according to even presumably good authorities, frittered away in idle speculations with regard to things that are absolutely unknowable. [Footnote 36] [Footnote 36: Much of the remainder of this chapter is taken from the chapter on What and How They Studied at the Universities, in my book The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries. (Catholic Summer School Press, N. Y.) Some of the sources from which the material is obtained will be found more fully referred to there, and further information with regard to scientific studies at these universities will be found in the chapter on Post-graduate Work in the same book, from which a certain amount of material is used again here.] {303} Anyone who studies the works of the professors at these medieval universities can scarcely fail to become entirely sympathetic toward these scholars, who devoted themselves with so much ardor to every form of learning that interested them, and who did not fail to accomplish at least as much for future generations, as any other generation of university men in history. Professor George Saintsbury in his book On the Rise of Romance and the Flourishing of Allegory, which is really the story of thirteenth century literature in Europe, in the series of Periods of European Literature, [Footnote 37] in summing up the contributions of these medieval professors to human knowledge, said: [Footnote 37: Scribners, 1896.] "Yet, there has always, in generous souls who have some tincture of philosophy, subsisted a curious kind of sympathy and yearning over the work of these generations of mainly disinterested scholars, who, whatever they were, were thorough, and whatever they could not do, could think. And there have been in these latter days some graceless ones who have asked whether the science of the nineteenth century, after an equal interval, will be of any more positive value--whether it will not have even less comparative interest than that which appertains to the Scholasticism of the thirteenth." Nothing could well be less true than the impression that philosophy and theology were the exclusive subjects of the medieval university curriculum. If because our modern universities devote a great amount of time to physical science in its various forms, and more of their publications concern this department of educational work than any other, it were to be said by some future generation that our universities occupied themselves {304} with nothing but physical science, it would be much more true than the expressions which stamp medieval university teaching as limited to dialectics and metaphysics. Besides science in the modern universities, philosophy in all its branches is the subject of ardent devotion, and the classics and languages are not neglected, and medicine and law are important post-graduate departments, and even theology comes in for a goodly share of attention and occupies the minds of many deep students. In the medieval universities, medicine particularly occupied a very large share of attention; but all the physical sciences were the subject not only of distant curiosity, but of careful investigation, many of them along lines that are supposed to be distinctly modern, yet which are really as old as the university movement. Turner in his History of Philosophy [Footnote 38] summed up the books most commonly used, the method of examination and of conferring degrees, in a way that shows the character of university teaching during the thirteenth century, and brings out not only its thoroughness, but also the fact that a good deal of time was devoted to what we now call physical or natural science, since the treatises on animals, on the earth and on meteors, under which all the phenomena of the Heavens were included, represent almost exactly those questions in physical science that most men who do not intend to devote themselves particularly to science care to know something about at the present time. He says: [Footnote 38: Ginn & Co., Boston and New York, 1903.] "By statutes issued at various times during the thirteenth century, it was provided that the professor should read, that is, expound, the text of certain standard {305} authors in philosophy and theology. In a document published by Denifle (the distinguished authority on medieval universities), and by him referred to the year 1252, we find the following works among those prescribed for the Faculty of Arts: Logica Vetus (the old Boethian text of a portion of the Organon, probably accompanied by Porphyry's Isagoge); Logica Nova (the new translation of the Organon); Gilbert's Liber Sex Principiorum; and Donatus's Barbarismus. A few years later (1255), the following works are prescribed: Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima, De Animalibus, De Caelo et Mundo, Meteorica, the minor psychological treatises and some Arabian or Jewish works, such as the Liber de Causis and De Differentia Spiritus et Animae." As time went on in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the attention to physical sciences was increased rather than diminished. Much of Albertus Magnus's work, and practically all of that of Aquinas and Roger Bacon, was done after the date here given (1255). The medieval workers at the universities were under the obligation of having to lay the foundations for modern thought, instead of being able to build up the magnificent superstructure which has risen in the seven centuries since the universities were founded. Without the foundation, however, the building would indeed not be worthy of admiration. Their work is concealed beneath the surfaces of things, but is not the less important for that, and is in most ways more significant than many portions of the structure that have risen above it. Unless one digs down to see how broad and deep and firm they laid the foundations, the modern critic will not be able to appreciate their work at its true value. Very few men are able to do this; still fewer have the time or the inclination. The consequence is a sad lack of sympathy with these old-time workers, who nevertheless did their work so well, and whose accomplishment meant so much for the modern time. It is not hard to {306} show that their minds were occupied with just the same problems that interest us, and the wonderful thing is that they anticipated so many of our conclusions, though these anticipations are wrapped up not infrequently in a terminology that obscures their meaning for any but the patient, sympathetic student. In his Harveian Lecture, Science and Medieval Thought, Professor Clifford Allbutt, of the University of Cambridge, England, said:-- "Each period of human achievement has its phases of spring, culmination, and decline; and it is in its decline that the leafless tree comes to judgment. In the unloveliness of decay, the Middle Ages are as other ages have been; as our own will be; but in those ages there was more than one outburst of life; more than once the enthusiasm of the youth of the West went out to explore the ways of the realm of ideas; and if we believe ourselves at last to have found the only thoroughfare, we owe this knowledge to those who before us traveled the uncharted seas. If we have inherited a great commerce and dominion of science, it is because their argosies had been on the ocean and their camels on the desert. _Discipulus est prioris posterior dies;_ man cannot know all at once; knowledge must be built up by laborious generations. In all times, as in our own, the advance of knowledge is very largely by elimination and negation; we ascertain what is not true, and we weed it out. To perceive and respect the limits of the knowable, we must have sought to transgress them. We can build our bridge over the chasm of ignorance with stored material in which the thirteenth century was poor indeed; we can fix our bearings where then was no foundation; yet man may be well engaged when he knows not the ends of his work; and the schoolmen in digging for treasure cultivated the field of knowledge, even for Galileo and Harvey, for Newton and Darwin. Their many errors came not of indolence, for they were passionate workers; not of hatred of light, for they were eager for the light; not of fickleness, for they wrought with unparalleled devotion; nor indeed of ignorance of particular things, {307} for they knew many things. They erred because they did not know, and they could not know the conditions of the problems which, as they emerged from the cauldron of war and from the wreck of letters and science, they were nevertheless bound to attack, if civil societies worthy of the name were to be constructed." We are very prone to think that the interests of the men of the Middle Ages were very different to our own, and that they had not the slightest inkling of what were to be the interests of the future centuries. Ordinarily students of science, for instance, would be sure to think that electricity and magnetism, interest in which is supposed to be a thing of comparatively recent years, or at most of the last two centuries, would not be mentioned at all in the thirteenth century. Such an idea is not only absolutely false to the history of science as we know it, but is utterly unjust to the powers of observation of men who have always noted, and almost necessarily tried to investigate, the phenomena which are now grouped under these sciences. Perhaps no better idea of the intense interest of this first century of university life in natural phenomena can be obtained, than will be gleaned at once from the following short paragraph, in which Brother Potamian, of Manhattan College, in his brief, striking introduction to the letter of Petrus Peregrinus describing the first conception of a dynamo, condenses the references to magnetic manifestions that are found in the literature of the time. [Footnote 39] [Footnote 39: The Letter of Petrus Peregrinus, N. Y., 1904.] Most of the writers he mentions were not scientists in the ordinary sense of the word, but were literary men; and the fact that these references occur, shows very clearly that there must have been widespread interest in such scientific phenomena, since they had attracted the {308} attention of literary writers, who would not have spoken of them doubtless, but that they knew that in this they would be satisfying as well as exciting public interest. "Abbot Neckam, the Augustinian (1157-1217), distinguished between the properties of the two ends of the lodestone, and gives in his De Utensilibus what is perhaps the earliest reference to the mariner's compass that we have. Albertus Magnus, the Dominican (1193-1230), in his treatise De Mineralibus, enumerates different kinds of natural magnets and states some of the properties commonly attributed to them; the minstrel, Guyot de Provins, in a famous satirical poem written about 1208, refers to the directive quality of the lodestone and its use in navigation, as do also Cardinal de Vitry in his Historia Orientalis (1215-1220); Brunetto Latini, poet, orator and philosopher (the teacher of Dante), in his Tresor des Sciences, a veritable library, written in Paris in 1260; Raymond Lully, the enlightened Doctor, in his treatise, De Contemplatione, begun in 1272; and Guido Guinicelli, the poet-priest of Bologna, who died in 1276." All of these writers, it may be said, with a single exception, were clergymen, and some of them were very prominent ecclesiastics in their time. The present generation has not as yet quite got over the bad habit of making fun of these medieval thinkers for having accepted the idea of the transmutation of metals and searched so assiduously for the philosopher's stone. This supposed absurdity has for most scientific minds during the nineteenth century been quite enough of itself, without more ado, to stamp the generations of the Middle Ages who accepted it, as utterly lacking, if not in common sense, at least in serious reasoning power. At the present moment, however, we are in the full tide of a set of opinions that tend to make us believe not {309} only in the possibility, but in the actual occurrence of the transmutation of metals. Observations made with regard to radium have revolutionized all the scientific thinking in this matter. Radium has apparently been demonstrated changing into helium, and so there is a transmutation of metals. On the strength of this and certain other recently investigated physical phenomena, there is a definite tendency in the minds of many serious students of physics and chemistry to consider that other metals possibly change into one another, and that all that is needed is careful observation to discover it, for this change is supposed to be going on around us all the time. Not very long since, a professor of physical science at an important American university suggested that it would be extremely interesting to take a large specimen of lead ore, say several tons, and having removed from it carefully all traces of silver that might be contained in it, put it away for twenty years, and then see whether any further traces of silver could be found. The idea that possibly lead occasionally changes into silver by some slow chemical process is evidently deep-seated in his mind. It would remind one of Newton's expression some two centuries ago, that he had seen copper and gold ores occurring together in specimens, and that he looked upon this as evidence that copper in the course of time changes into gold. Certain it is that lead ores constantly occur in connection with silver, or at least that silver is found wherever lead is; that a corresponding relationship between gold and copper has also been noted; and that Newton's idea was not near so absurd, in the light of what we now know, or still more, what we surmise on good scientific grounds, as the nineteenth century scientists would have had us believe. {310} As I go over this manuscript for the last time just before going to press, there comes the announcement that Sir William Ramsay has probably solved the problem of the transmutation of metals. He has shown apparently that lithium, when acted upon by radium emanations, changes to some extent to copper. It is true that the change is only in small quantities, and that there is no question as yet of any commercial value to the process; but we all know that it is by such small scientific announcements as this that the entering wedges of large industrial processes are introduced. The fact that this announcement should have been made before the British Association for the Advancement of Science and by a thoroughly conservative English chemist, probably settles forever the question of the transmutation of metals, in the way that the people of the Middle Ages looked at the problem rather than as the intervening centuries did. The old medieval thinkers, then, were only ridiculous to a few generations of nineteenth century scientists who, because they knew a little more about certain details in science than preceding generations had done, thought that they knew all that there was to be known about this immense subject, and made fun of thinkers quite as great as themselves in preceding centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, instead of making ourselves ludicrous by raising a laugh at the expense of these fellow students in science of the olden time, we should rather feel like congratulating them upon the perspicacity which enabled them to anticipate a great truth with regard to the relationships of chemical elements, especially the metals, to each other. The present-day idea of thinking physicists and chemists is {311} that the seventy odd elements described in our textbooks on chemistry, are not so many essentially independent forms of matter, but are rather examples of one kind of material exhibiting special dynamic energies which it possesses under varying conditions, as yet not well understood. This was exactly the idea that the old scholastic philosophers had of the constitution of matter. They said that matter was composed of two principles, prime matter and form. When this doctrine of theirs is properly elucidated, it proves to be an anticipation of what is most modern in the thoughts of twentieth century physicists. A re-statement of the old-time views would read not unlike many a contribution to a discussion of this subject at an annual meeting of the British or American Associations for the Advancement of Science. This doctrine of prime matter and form, which the scholastics adopted and adapted from the Greeks, and especially from Aristotle, cannot fail to be of interest even to modern scientists. According to it, prime matter was an indeterminate something which made up the underlying substratum of all material things. Form was the dynamic element which entered into the composition of matter and made it exhibit its specific qualities. We have heard much of ionization in recent times, and in many ways this would remind one even only slightly familiar with the old scholastics, of their theories of form entering into matter. Prime matter was supposed to be absolutely without distinguishing characteristics of its own. It was indifferent, and had no influence on other material unless when associated with form. Form was the dynamic and energizing element. This, of course, still remains in the realm of theory; {312} but it is interesting to realize that in the olden time they theorized about the constitution of matter at the universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries just as we do now, and most surprisingly came to conclusions quite like ours. Their thoughts not only concerned the same subject, but were worked out in the same way. It is idle to say that they knew nothing about it and hit on their theory by chance. As a matter of fact, they knew very little, if any less about it than we do, for our ignorance on this subject is monumental, and they anticipated our latest thinking by seven centuries. Many have been the divagations of thought since that time, but now we return to their conclusions. It is chastening to the modern mind, so confident of the advances that have been made by these latter generations, "the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time," to find that we are so little farther on in an important problem than these men of the thirteenth century. Other basic problems with regard to matter and force filled the minds of the medieval schoolmen quite as they do those of the modern generations. For instance, they occupied themselves with the question of the indestructibility of matter, and also, strange as it may seem, with the conservation of energy. We have presumably learned so much by experimental demonstration and original observation in the physical sciences in the modern times, and especially during the precious nineteenth century, that any thinking of the medieval mind along these lines might, in the opinion of those who know nothing of what they speak, be at once set aside without further question as preposterous, or at best nugatory. The opinions of medieval scholars in these matters would be presumed, without more ado, to have been so entirely {313} speculative as to deserve no further attention. Nothing could well be farther from the truth than this. Nowhere will more marvelous anticipations of what is most modern in science be found than in some of these considerations of basic principles in the physical sciences. For instance, Thomas Aquinas, usually known as St. Thomas, in a series of lectures given at the University of Paris toward the end of the third quarter of the thirteenth century, stated as the most important conclusion with regard to matter that _"Nihil omnino in nihilum redigetur._--Nothing at all will ever be reduced to nothingness." By this, as is very evident from the context, he meant to say that matter would never be annihilated and could never be destroyed. It might be changed in various ways, but it could never go back into the nothingness from which it had been taken by the creative act. Annihilation was pronounced as not being a part of the scheme of things as far as the human mind could hope to fathom its meaning. In this sentence, then, Thomas of Aquin was proclaiming the doctrine of the indestructibility of matter. It was not until well on in the nineteenth century that the chemists and physicists of modern times realized the truth of this great principle. The chemists had seen matter change its form in many ways, had seen it disappear apparently in the smoke of fire or evaporate under the influence of heat, but investigation proved that if care were taken in the collection of the gases that came off under these circumstances, of the ashes of combustion and of the residue of evaporation, all the original material that had been contained in the supposedly disappearing substance could be recovered, or at least {314} completely accounted for. The physicists on their part had realized this same truth, and finally there came the definite enunciation of the absolute indestructibility of matter. St. Thomas's conclusion, "Nothing at all will ever be reduced to nothingness," had anticipated this doctrine by nearly seven centuries. What happened in the nineteenth century was that there came an experimental demonstration of the truth of the principle. The principle itself, however, had been reached long before by the human mind, by speculative processes quite as inerrable in their way as the more modern method of investigation. When St. Thomas used the aphorism, "Nothing at all will ever be reduced to nothingness," there was another signification that he attached to the words quite as clearly as that by which they expressed the indestructibility of matter. For him _nihil_ or nothing meant neither matter nor form, that is, neither the material substance nor the energy which is contained in it. He meant, then, that no energy would ever be destroyed as well as no matter would ever be annihilated. He was teaching the conservation of energy as well as the indestructibility of matter. Here once more the experimental demonstration of the doctrine was delayed for over six centuries and a half. The truth itself, however, had been reached by this medieval master-mind, and was the subject of his teaching to the university students in Paris in the thirteenth century. These examples should, I think, serve to illustrate that the minds of medieval students were occupied with practically the same questions as those which are now taught to the university students of our day, and that the content of the teaching was identical with ours. {315} The scholars of the Middle Ages are usually said to have been profoundly ignorant as regards the shape of the earth, its size, and the number of its inhabitants, and to have cherished the queerest notions, when they really permitted themselves any ideas at all, as to the antipodes. This is very true if the ideas of the ignorant masses of the people and the second-rate authors and thinkers be taken as the standard of medieval thought. Unfortunately, such sources as these have only too often served as authorities for modern historians of education and modern essayists on the history of science. This state of affairs would painfully suggest the curiously inverted notion of the supposed ideas entertained with regard to science in our day, that would be obtained by some thirtieth century student, were he to judge our scientific opinions from some of the queer books written by pretentiously ignorant writers, who have pet scientific hobbies of their own and exploit them at the expense of a long-suffering world, if by some accident of fortune these books should be preserved and the really great contributions to science be either actually lost or lost to sight. It is from Albert the Great and such men, and not from their petty contemporaries, that the true spirit of the science of the age must be deduced. Albert's biographer said: "He treats as fabulous the commonly-received idea, in which Venerable Bede had acquiesced, that the region of the earth south of the equator was uninhabitable, and considers, that from the equator to the South Pole, the earth was not only habitable, but in all probability actually inhabited, except directly at the poles, where he imagines the cold to be excessive. If there be any animals there, he says, they must have very thick skins to defend them from the rigor of the climate, and they are probably of a white color. The intensity of cold is, {316} however, tempered by the action of the sea. He describes the antipodes and the countries they comprise, and divides the climate of the earth into seven zones. He smiles with a scholar's freedom at the simplicity of those who suppose that persons living at the opposite region of the earth must fall off, an opinion that can only rise out of the grossest ignorance, _'for when we speak of the lower hemisphere, this must be understood merely as relatively to ourselves.'_ "It is as a geographer that Albert's superiority to the writers of his own time chiefly appears. Bearing in mind the astonishing ignorance which then prevailed on this subject, it is truly admirable to find him correctly tracing the chief mountain chains of Europe, with the rivers which take their source in each; remarking on portions of coast which have in later times been submerged by the ocean, and islands which have been raised by volcanic action above the level of the sea; noticing the modification of climate caused by mountains, seas and forests, and the division of the human race, whose differences he ascribes to the effect upon them of the countries they inhabit. In speaking of the British Isles, he alludes to the commonly-received idea that another distant island called Thile, or Thule, existed far in the Western Ocean, uninhabitable by reason of its frightful climate, but which, he says, has perhaps not yet been visited by man." In only needs to be said in addition to this, that Albert had more than a vague hint of the possible existence of land on the other side of the globe. He gives an elaborate demonstration of the sphericity of the earth, and it has been suggested by more than one scholar that his views on this subject led eventually to the discovery of America. Humboldt, the distinguished German natural philosopher of the beginning of the nineteenth century, who was undoubtedly the most important figure in scientific thought in his own time, and whose own work was great enough to have an enduring influence even down to our {317} day, in spite of the immense progress made during the nineteenth century, has praised Albert's work very highly. Almost needless to say, Humboldt was possessed of a thorough critical faculty and had a very wide range of knowledge, so that he was in an eminently proper position to judge of Albert's work. He has summed up his appreciation briefly as follows: "Albertus Magnus was equally active and influential in promoting the study of natural science and of the Aristotelian philosophy. His works contain some exceedingly acute remarks on the organic structure and physiology of plants. One of his works, bearing the title of 'Liber Cosmographicus de Natura Locorum,' is a species of physical geography. I have found in it considerations on the dependence of temperature concurrently on latitude and elevation, and on the effect of different angles of incidence of the sun's rays in heating the ground, _which have excited my surprise._" I have thought that perhaps the best way to bring out properly Albert's knowledge in the physical sciences would be to take up Humboldt's headings in their order and illustrate them by quotations from the great scholar's writings--the only scholar to whom the epithet has been applied in all history--and from condensed accounts as they appear in his life written by Sighart. [Footnote 40] These will serve to show at once the extent of Albert's knowledge and the presumptuous ignorance of those who make little of the science of the medieval period. [Footnote 40: Sighart, Albertus Magnus: Sein Leben und Seine Wisenschaft, Ratisbon, 1857, or its translation by Dixon; Albert the Great, his life and scholastic labors. London, 1870.] When we have catalogued, for instance, the many facts with regard to astronomy and the physics of light that are supposed to be of much later entrance into the sphere of human knowledge that were grasped by {318} Albert, and evidently formed the subject of his teaching at various times at both Paris and Cologne, since they are found in his authentic works, we can scarcely help but be amused at the pretentious lack of knowledge that has relegated their author to a place in education so trivial as is that which is represented in many minds by the term scholastic. "He decides that the Milky Way is nothing but a vast assemblage of stars, but supposed, naturally enough, that they occupy the orbit which receives the light of the sun. The figures visible on the moon's disc are not, he says, as hitherto has been supposed, reflections of the seas and mountains of the earth, but configurations of her own surface. He notices, in order to correct it, the assertions of Aristotle that lunar rainbows appear only twice in fifty years; 'I myself,' he says, 'have observed two in a single year.' He has something to say on the refraction of a solar ray, notices certain crystals which have a power of refraction, and remarks that none of the ancients and few moderns were acquainted with the properties of mirrors." Botany is supposed to be a very modern science, and to most people Humboldt's expression that he found in Albertus Magnus's writings some "exceedingly acute remarks on the organic structure and physiology of plants," will come as an supreme surprise. A few details with regard to Albert's botanical knowledge, however, will serve to heighten that surprise, and to show that the foolish tirades of modern sciolists, who have often expressed their wonder that with all the beauties of nature around them these scholars of the Middle Ages did not devote themselves to nature study, are absurd; because if the critics but knew it, there was profound interest in nature and all her manifestations, and a series of discoveries that anticipated not a little of what we {319} consider most important in our modern science. The story of Albert's botanical knowledge has been told in a single very full paragraph by his biographer. Sighart also quotes an appreciative opinion from a modern German botanist, which will serve to dispel any doubts with regard to Albert's position in botany that modern students might perhaps continue to harbor, unless they had good authority to support their opinion, though, of course, it will be remembered that the main difference between the medieval and the modern mind is only too often said to be that the medieval required an authority, while the modern makes its opinion for itself. Even the most skeptical of modern minds, however, will probably be satisfied by the following paragraph: "He was acquainted with the sleep of plants, with the periodical opening and closing of blossoms, with the diminution of sap through evaporation from the cuticle of the leaves, and with the influence of the distribution of the bundles of vessels on the folial indentations. His minute observations on the forms and variety of plants intimate an exquisite sense of floral beauty. He distinguished the star from the bell-floral, tells us that a red rose will turn white when submitted to the vapor of sulphur, and makes some very sagacious observations on the subject of germination. . . . The extraordinary erudition and originality of this treatise (his tenth book) has drawn from M. Meyer the following comment: 'No botanist who lived before Albert can be compared to him, unless Theophrastus, with whom he was not acquainted; and after him none has painted nature in such living colors or studied it so profoundly until the time of Conrad Gesner and Caesalpino.' All honor, then, to the man who made such astonishing progress in the science of nature as to find no one, I will not say to surpass, but even to equal him for the space of three centuries." Pagel in Puschmann's History of Medicine gives a list {320} of the books written by Albert which are concerned with the physical sciences. These were: Physica, Books VIII., that is, eight treatises on Natural Science, consisting of commentaries on Aristotle's Physics and on the underlying principles of natural philosophy, and of energy and movement; four treatises concerning the Heavens and the Earth, which contain the general principles of the movement of the heavenly bodies. Besides there is a treatise On the Nature of Places, consisting of a description of climates and natural conditions. This volume contains, according to Pagel, numerous suggestions with regard to ethnography and physiology. There is a treatise on the causes of the properties of the elements, which takes up the specific peculiarities of the elements, according to their physical and geographical relations. To which must be added two treatises on generation and corruption; six books on meteors; five books on minerals; three books on the soul, in which is considered the vital principle; a treatise on nutrition and nutritives; a treatise on the senses; another on the memory and the imagination; two books on the intellect; a treatise on sleep and waking; a treatise on youth and old age; a treatise on breath and respiration; a treatise on the motion of animals, in two books, which concerns the voluntary and involuntary movements of animals; a treatise on life and death; a treatise in six books on vegetables and plants; a treatise on breathing things. His treatise on minerals contains, according to Pagel, besides an extensive presentation of the ordinary peculiarities of minerals, a description of ninety-five different kinds of precious stones, among them the pearl, of seven metals, of salt, vitriol, alum, arsenic, marcasite, nitre, tutia, and amber. Albert's {321} volumes on the vegetables and plants were reproduced under the editorship of Meyer, the historian of botany in Germany, and published in Berlin (1867). All Albert's books are available in modern editions. In a word, there was scarcely a subject in natural science which Albert did not treat, in what would now be considered a formal serious volume, and no department of science that he did not illuminate in some way, not only by the collection of information that had previously been in existence, but also by his own observations, and especially by his interpretations of the significance of the various phenomena that had been observed. His work is especially noteworthy for its lack of dependence on authority and the straightforward way in which the great pioneer of modern science made his observations. Some of Albert's contemporaries, and especially his pupils, were almost as distinguished as he was himself in the physical sciences. In a previous chapter we spoke particularly of Roger Bacon's attitude toward the physical sciences, above all in what concerns the experimental method. He was typically modern in the standpoint that he assumed, as the only one by which knowledge of the things of nature can be obtained. It will be interesting now to see the number of things which Friar Bacon succeeded in discovering by the application of the principle of testing everything by personal observation, of not accepting things on second-hand authorities, and of not being afraid to say, "I do not know," in trying to learn for himself. His discoveries will seem almost incredible to a modern student of science and of education who has known nothing before of the progress of science made {322} by this wonderful man, or who has known only vaguely that Friar Bacon was a great original thinker in science, in spite of the fact that his life-history is bounded by the thirteenth century. I may say that the material of what I have to say of him, and also of his great contemporaries, Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas, is taken almost literally from the chapter of my book, The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries, on What They Studied at the Universities. Roger Bacon has been declared to be the discoverer of gunpowder, but this is a mistake, since it was known many years before by the Arabs and by them introduced into Europe. He did study explosives very deeply, however, and besides learning many things about them, realized how much might be accomplished by their use in the after-time. He declares in his Opus Magnum: "That one may cause to burst forth from bronze, thunderbolts more formidable that those produced by nature. A small quantity of prepared matter occasions a terrible explosion accompanied by a brilliant light. One may multiply this phenomenon so far as to destroy a city or an army." Considering how little was know about gunpowder at this time, this was of itself a marvelous anticipation of what might be accomplished by it. Bacon anticipated, however, much more than merely destructive effects from the use of high explosives, and indeed it is almost amusing to see how closely he anticipated some of the most modern usages of high explosives for motor purposes. He seems to have realized that some time the apparently uncontrollable forces of explosion would come under the control of man and be harnessed by him for his own purposes. He foresaw that one of the great applications of such a force would be for transportation. Accordingly he said: "Art can construct instruments of navigation such that the largest vessels, governed by a single man, will traverse rivers and seas more rapidly than if they were filled with oarsmen. One may also make carriages which without the aid of any animal will run with remarkable swiftness." {323} When we recall that the very latest thing in transportation are motor-boats and automobiles driven by gasoline, a high explosive, Roger Bacon's prophecy becomes one of those weird anticipations of human progress which seem almost more than human. It was not with regard to explosives alone, however, that Roger Bacon was to make great advances and still more marvelous anticipations in physical science. He was not, as is sometimes claimed for him, either the inventor of the telescope or of the theory of lenses. He did more, however, than perhaps anyone else to make the principles of lenses clear and to establish them on a mathematical basis. His traditional connection with the telescope can probably be traced to the fact that he was very much interested in astronomy and the relations of the heavens to the earth. He pointed out very clearly the errors which had crept into the Julian calendar, calculated exactly how much of a correction was needed in order to restore the year to its proper place, and suggested the method by which future errors of this kind could be avoided. His ideas were too far beyond his century to be applied practically, but they were not to be without their effect, and it is said that they formed the basis of the subsequent correction of the calendar in the time of Pope Gregory XIII., about three centuries later. It is rather surprising to find how much besides the theory of lenses Friar Bacon had succeeded in finding out in the department of optics. He taught, for instance, the principle of the aberration of light, and, still more marvelous to consider, taught that light did not travel instantaneously, but had a definite rate of motion, though this was extremely rapid. It is rather difficult to understand how he reached this conclusion, since light travels so fast that, as far as regards any observation that can be made upon earth, the diffusion is practically instantaneous. It was not for over three centuries later that Römer, the German astronomer, demonstrated the motion of light and its rate by his observations upon the moons of Jupiter at different phases of the earth's orbit, which showed that the light of these moons took a definite and quite appreciable time to reach the earth after their eclipse by the planet was over. {324} Albertus Magnus's other great pupil besides Roger Bacon was St. Thomas Aquinas. If any suspicion were still left that Thomas did not appreciate just what the significance of his teachings in physics was, when he announced that neither matter nor force could ever be reduced to nothingness, it would surely be removed by the consideration that he had been for many years in intimate relations with Albert, and that he had probably also been close to Roger Bacon. In association with such men as these, he was not likely to stumble upon truths unawares, even though they might concern physical science. St. Thomas himself has left three treatises on chemical subjects, and it is said that the first occurrence of the word amalgam can be traced to one of these treatises. Everybody was as much interested then, as we are at the present time, in the transformation of metals and mercury with its silvery sheen; its facility to enter into metallic combinations of all kinds, and its elusive ways, naturally made it the center of scientific interest quite as radium is at the present moment. These three men, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Roger Bacon, were all closely associated with ecclesiastical authorities, and indeed all three of them had intimate personal relations with the Popes of their time. Albertus Magnus had been highly honored by the Dominican Order, to which he belonged. He had been chosen as Provincial--that is, the superior of a number of houses--in the German part of Europe at least once, and he had been constantly appealed to by his superiors for advice and counsel. Although it was almost a rule that members of religious orders should not be chosen as bishops, he was made Bishop of Ratisbon, and his appointment was considered to be due to his surpassing merit as a great scholar and teacher. In spite of his devotion to scientific studies during a long life, he lost nothing of the ardor of his faith, and is universally considered to have been a saint. He has been formally raised to the {325} altars of the Catholic Church, as the expression is--that is, he had the title of "Blessed" conferred on him, and his prayers may be invoked as one of those who are considered to stand high in the favor of Heaven. Of Thomas Aquinas the same story may be told only in much more emphatic words. He was honored by his own order, the Dominican, in many ways. Early in his life they recognized his talent and sent him to Cologne to study under the great Albert. When the Dominicans realized the necessity for not only making a significant exhibition of the talents of their order at the University of Paris, which had become the most prominent educational institution in the world, but also wished to influence as deeply as possible the cause of education, Albert was sent to Paris, and Thomas Aquinas accompanied him. When there were difficulties between Dominicans and the university, it was to Thomas that his order turned to defend them and maintain their rights. He did so not only with intellectual acumen, but with great tact and successfully. After this he was sent on business of his order to England and was for some time at Oxford. His reputation as a philosopher and a scientist had now spread over the world and he was invited to teach at various Italian universities where ecclesiastical influences were very strong. The Popes asked, and their request was practically a command, that he should teach for some time at least at their own university at Rome. Later he taught also at the University of Naples. While here, one of the Popes wishing to confer a supreme mark of favor on him, his name was selected for the vacant archbishopric of Naples. The bulls and formal documents creating him Archbishop were already on the way when Thomas was informed of it, and he asked {326} to be allowed to continue his studies rather than to have to take up the unwonted duties of an archbishop. His plea was evidently so sincere that the Pope relented and respected Thomas's humility and his desire for leisure to finish his great work, the Summa Theologiae. He continued to be the great friend of the Popes and their special counsellor. When the Council of Lyons was summoned, a number of important questions concerning the most serious theological problems were to be discussed. Thomas was asked to go to Lyons as the theologian for the Papacy. It was while fulfilling this duty that he came to his death, at a comparatively early age, though not until the Council, consisting of the bishops of all the world, had shown their respect for him, had listened to his words of wisdom, and had acknowledged that he was the greatest scholar of his time and worthy of the respect and admiration of all of them. Because of all that his kindness to them had meant for their uplift, the workmen of Lyons craved and obtained the permission to carry his coffin on their shoulders to his tomb. Like his great teacher Albert, Thomas was respected even more for his piety than for his learning. Not long after his death, people began to speak of him as a saint. Though he was the most learned man of his time, he was considered to have given an example of heroic virtue. A careful investigation of his life showed that there was nothing in it unworthy of the highest ideals as a man and a religious. Accordingly he was canonized, and has ever since been considered the special patron, helper and advocate of Catholic students. All down the centuries his teaching has been looked upon as the most important in the whole realm of theology. There has never been {327} a time when his works have not been considered the most authoritative sources of theological lore. At the end of the nineteenth century Leo XIII. crowned the tributes which many Popes had conferred upon Thomas by selecting him as the teacher to whom Catholic schools should ever turn by formulating the authoritative Papal opinion--the nearer to Thomas, the nearer to Catholic truth. When it is recalled that this is the man who gave the great modern impulse to the doctrine of matter and form, who taught the indestructibility of matter and the conservation of energy, and declared with St. Augustine that the Creator had made only the seeds of things, allowing these afterwards to develop for themselves, which is the essence of the doctrine of evolution, it is hard to understand how there should be question of opposition between the Church and science in his time. With regard to the third of these great physical scientists, the story of his relation to the ecclesiastical authorities is not quite so simple. Roger Bacon was in his younger years very much thought of by his own order, the Franciscans. They sent him to Paris and provided him opportunities to study under the great Albert, and then transferred him to Oxford, where he had a magnificent opportunity for teaching. Many years of his life were spent in peace and happiness in the cloister. A friend and fellow student at Paris became Pope Clement, and his command was the primary cause of the composition of Bacon's great works. All three of his books, and especially the Opus Majus, were written at the command of the Pope, and were highly praised by the Pontiff himself and by those who read them in Rome. Unfortunately, difficulties occurred within Friar Bacon's own order. It is not quite clear now just how these {328} came about. The Franciscans of the rigid observance of those early times took vows of the severest poverty. There had been some relaxation of the rule, however, and certain abuses crept in. The consequence was the re-assertion after a time of the original rule of absolute poverty in all its stringency. It was Friar Bacon himself who had chosen this mode of life and had taken the vows of poverty. Paper was a very dear commodity, if indeed it was invented early enough in the century for him to have used it. Vellum was even more expensive. Just what material Bacon employed for his writings is not now known. Whatever it was, it seems to have cost much money, and because of his violation of his vow of poverty Roger Bacon fell under the ban of his order. He was ordered to be confined to his cell in the monastery and to be fed on bread and water for a considerable period. It must not be forgotten that this was within a century after the foundation of the Franciscans, and to an ardent son of St. Francis the living on bread and water would not be a very difficult thing at this time, since his ordinary diet would, at least during certain portions of the year, be scarcely better than this. There is no account of how Roger Bacon took his punishment. He might easily have left his order. There were many others at that time who did. He wished to remain as a faithful son of St. Francis, and seems to have accepted his punishment with the idea that his example would influence others of the order to submit to the enforcement of the regulation with regard to poverty, which superiors now thought so important, if the original spirit of St. Francis was to be regained. It is sometimes said that Friar Bacon indulged in scientific speculations which seemed subversive of {329} Christian mysteries, and that this was one reason for his punishment. Recently he has been declared the first of the modernists since he attempted to rationalize religious mysteries. Whatever truth there may be in this, of one thing we are certain, that before his death Bacon deeply regretted some of his expressions and theories, and did not hesitate to confess humbly that he was sorry to have even seemed to hint at supposed science contrary to religious truth. Of course, it may well be said, even after all these communities of interest between the medieval and the modern teaching of the general principles of science have been pointed out, that the universities of the Middle Ages did not present the subjects under discussion in a practical way, and their teaching was not likely to lead to directly beneficial results in applied science. It might well be responded to this, that it is not the function of a university to teach applications of science, but only the great principles, the broad generalizations that underlie scientific thinking, leaving details to be filled in in whatever form of practical work the man may take up. Very few of those, however, who talk about the purely speculative character of medieval teaching, have manifestly ever made it their business to know anything about the actual facts of old-time university teaching by definite knowledge, but have rather allowed themselves to be guided by speculation and by inadequate second-hand authorities, whose dicta they have never taken the trouble to substantiate by a glance at contemporary authorities on medieval matters, much less by reading the old scholastics themselves. How much was accomplished in applied science during the Middle Ages, that is, in those departments of science {330} which are usually supposed to have been least cultivated, since educators are prone to ridicule the over-emphasis of speculation in education and the constant preoccupation of mind of the scholars of these generations with merely theoretic questions, may be appreciated from any history of the arts and architecture during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Some of the most difficult problems in mechanics as applied to the structural work of cathedrals, palaces, castles, fortresses, and bridges, were solved with a success that was only equaled by the audacity with which they were attempted. Men hesitated at nothing. There is no problem of mechanical engineering as applied to structural work which these men did not find an answer for in their wonderful buildings. This has been very well brought out by Prince Kropotkin in certain chapters of his book, Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution, [Footnote 41] in which he treats of mutual aid in the medieval cities. He says: [Footnote 41: New York, McClure, Philips & Co., 1902.] "At the beginning of the eleventh century the towns of Europe were small clusters of miserable huts, adorned with but low clumsy churches, the builders of which hardly knew how to make an arch; the arts, mostly consisting of some weaving and forging, were in their infancy; learning was found in but a few monasteries. Three hundred and fifty years later, the very face of Europe had been changed. The land was dotted with rich cities, surrounded by immense thick walls which were embellished by towers and gates, each of them a work of art itself. The cathedrals, conceived in a grand style and profusely decorated, lifted their bell-towers to the skies, displaying a purity of form and a boldness of imagination which we now vainly strive to attain. The {331} crafts and arts had risen to a degree of perfection which we can hardly boast of having superseded in many directions, if the inventive skill of the worker and the superior finish of his work be appreciated higher than rapidity of fabrication. The navies of the free cities furrowed in all directions the Northern Seas and the Southern Mediterranean; one effort more and they would cross the oceans. Over large tracts of land, well-being had taken the place of misery; learning had grown and spread; the methods of science had been elaborated; the basis of natural philosophy had been laid down; and the way had been paved for all the mechanical inventions of which our own times are so proud." The period for which Prince Kropotkin is thus enthusiastic in the matter of applied science, is all before the date usually given as the beginning of the Renaissance--the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The three centuries and a half from the beginning of the eleventh century represent just the time of the rise of scholasticism and the beginning of its decline. Few periods of history are so maligned as regards their intellectual feebleness, and in nothing is that quality supposed to be more marked than in applied science; yet here is what a special student of the time says of this very period in this particular department. Kropotkin has shown just what were the limitations of scientific progress in the Middle Ages while emphasizing how much these wonderful generations accomplished. In this I am inclined to the opinion that he does not allow as much to the Middle Ages as he should. I have been able to point out, I think, in this chapter many evidences of important principles in science that were fully reached during the Middle Ages. Because of {332} his more conservative opinion in this matter, however, Kropotkin's opinion should carry all the more weight with those who are now called upon to realize for the first time, how much these despised generations accomplished in matters that were to prove a precious heritage for subsequent generations, and the foundation-stones of that great edifice of science which has been built up in more recent years. Kropotkin says: "True that no new principle was illustrated by any of these discoveries, as Whewell said; but medieval science had done something more than the actual discovery of new principles. It had prepared the discovery of all the new principles which we know at the present time in mechanical sciences; it had accustomed the explorer to observe facts and to reason from them. It had inductive science, even though it had not yet fully grasped the importance and the powers of induction; and it had laid the foundations of both mechanical and natural philosophy. Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Copernicus were the direct descendants of a Roger Bacon and a Michael Scot, as the steam engine was a direct product of the researches carried on in the Italian universities on the weight of the atmosphere, and of the mathematical and technical learning which characterized Nuremberg." "But why should one take trouble to insist upon the advance of science and art in the medieval city? Is it not enough to point to the cathedrals in the domain of skill, and to the Italian language and the poem of Dante in the domain of thought, to give at once the measure of what the medieval city created during the four centuries it lived?" We are prone to think of evolution in human affairs as being the ruling principle. As a consequence of this, {333} we are apt to consider that since intervening periods between the nineteenth century and the Middle Ages were lacking in education, in applied science, and in interest in physical science to a great degree, beyond doubt, then, the Middle Ages must have been still more lacking in these desirable qualities of education and human knowledge. This is the sort of deduction that greets one constantly in so-called histories of education, and especially in such supposed contributions to the history of the relationship of science to religion or theology as have been made here in America. This deduction, as I have said before, is made by men who are the first to asperse the medieval scholars for having used deduction too freely, and who are ever ready to praise induction. The induction in this matter--that is, the story of the actual history of science in the Middle Ages--is the direct contradiction of the deduction from false principles. Intervening centuries not only failed to progress beyond the Middle Ages, but some of them were far behind the achievements of that unfortunately despised period. Once more Prince Kropotkin has touched this matter very suggestively. After describing the achievements of applied science in the Middle Ages, he says: "Such were the magic changes accomplished in Europe in less than four hundred years. And the losses which Europe sustained through the loss of its free cities can only be understood when we compare the seventeenth century with the fourteenth or thirteenth. The prosperity which formerly characterized Scotland, Germany, the plains of Italy, was gone. The roads had fallen into an abject state, the cities were depopulated, labor was brought into slavery, art had vanished, commerce itself was decaying." {334} In the meantime the reformation so-called had come, and had carried away with it in its course nearly everything precious that men had gained during the four centuries immediately preceding. Art, education, science, liberty, democracy--everything worth while had been hurt; most of them had been ruined for the time. Even the nineteenth century did not succeed in bringing us back to a level with the earlier centuries in all the intellectual and esthetic accomplishments. Another striking evidence of the deep interest of these generations in science of all kinds and in details of information with regard to which they are generally said to have been quite incurious, was the publication of the famous encyclopedia, the first work of its kind ever issued, which was written about the middle of the thirteenth century by Vincent of Beauvais. It is only when a generation actually calls for it, and when the want of it has been for a good while felt, that such a work is likely to be undertaken. This immense literary undertaking was completed under the patronage of King Louis IX. by Vincent, a Dominican friar, who died at the beginning of the last quarter of the thirteenth century. His Majus Speculum is not the first book of general information, but it is the first deserving the name of Encyclopedia in the full sense of the word that we have. It is divided into three parts--the Speculum Naturale, Doctrinale, and Historiale. The only one which interests us here is the Speculum Naturale, which fills a huge folio volume of nearly a thousand pages, closely printed in double columns. It is divided into 32 books and some 4,000 chapters. The Encyclopaedia Brittanica says of it:-- "It was, as it were, the great temple of medieval {335} science, whose floor and walls are inlaid with an enormous mosaic of skilfully arranged passages from Latin, Greek, Arabic, and even Hebrew authors. To each quotation, as he borrows it, Vincent prefixes the name of the book and the author from which it is taken, distinguishing, however, his own remarks by the word 'actor.'" The interest aroused by Vincent's compilation outside of professional and educational circles strictly so-called, can be very well appreciated from the fact that, besides King Louis's interest, his Queen Margaret, their son Philip and son-in-law, King Theobald V., of Champagne and Navarre, were, according to tradition, among those who encouraged him in the work and aided him in bearing the expenses of it. It is rather curious to find that the method of compilation was nearly the same as that employed at the present day. Young men, mainly members of Vincent's own order of the Dominicans, were engaged in collecting the material, collating references, and verifying quotations. The main burden of the work, however, fell upon Vincent himself, and he accordingly deserves the reputation for wonderful industry which he has enjoyed. Much as he wrote, however, it does not exceed much in amount what was written by others of the great scholastics, and theirs was original material and not merely the collection of information. If we had no other evidence of interest in nature and in natural science than this great work of Vincent of Beauvais, it would be ample to show the absurdity of the general impression that exists in the minds of most scientists, and, unfortunately, also in the minds of many educators, with regard to the barrenness of interest of {336} the Middle Age in natural phenomena. It might easily be imagined that this work of Vincent would have very little of interest for a modern scientist. Any such anticipation is entirely due, however, to the false impression that exists with regard to the supposed ridiculously absurd views in matters of science entertained by the medieval scholars. Those who do not take their opinions on theory, but actually consult the books with regard to which they are ready to express themselves, have no such opinion. There has been much more interest in this class of books and in the scientific side of the literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries during the last few years, and the consequence has been a complete reversal of opinions with regard to them, among German and French scholars. An excellent example of this is to be noted in Dr. Julius Pagel, who, in his chapter on Medicine in the Middle Ages, in Puschmann's Handbook of the History of Medicine, says: "There were three writers whose works were even more popular than those of Albertus Magnus. These three were: Bartholomew the Englishman, Thomas of Cantimprato, and Vincent of Beauvais, the last of whom must be considered as one of the most important contributors to the generalization of scientific knowledge, not alone in the thirteenth, but in the immediately succeeding centuries. His most important work was really an encyclopedia of the knowledge of his time. It was called the Greater Triple Mirror, and there is no doubt that it reflected very thoroughly the knowledge of his period. He had the true scientific spirit, and constantly cites the authorities from whom his information was derived. He cites hundreds of authors, and there is scarcely a subject that he does not {337} touch on. One book of his work is concerned with human anatomy, and the concluding portion of it is an abbreviation of history carried down to the year 1250." It might be considered that such a compend of information would be very dry-as-dust reading and that it would be fragmentary in character and little likely to be attractive except to a serious student. Dr. Pagel's opinion does not agree with this _a priori_ impression. He says with regard to Vincent's work: "The language is clear, readily intelligible, and the information is conveyed usually in an excellent, simple style. Through the introduction of interesting similes the contents do not lack a certain taking quality, so that the reading of the work easily becomes absorbing." This is, I suppose, almost the last thing that might be expected of a scientific teacher in the thirteenth century, because, after all, Vincent of Beauvais must be considered as one of the schoolmen, and they are supposed to be eminently arid, but evidently, since we must trust this testimony of a discerning modern German physician, only by those who have not taken the trouble to read them. Vincent of Beauvais was not the only one to occupy himself with work of an encyclopedic character during the thirteenth century. At least two other clergymen gave themselves up to the life-long work of collecting details of information so as to make them available for ready reference in their own times and for succeeding generations. The very fact that three men should have taken up such a task, shows that there must have been a loud call for this sort of writing, and that there must have been a veritable thirst for information among the educated classes of the time. Such books, as we have said, are not created without a demand for them, though {338} they undoubtedly serve in turn to awaken a greater thirst for the information which they purvey. The other two encyclopedists of the time are Thomas Cantipratano and Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the Englishman. Thomas of Cantimprato's work was probably published about 1260. Von Töply, in his Studies in Anatomy in the Middle Ages, has the most readily available information with regard to Thomas's work. [Footnote 42] The work of most interest to us is the De Natura Rerum, a single large volume in twenty books. It required some fifteen years of work, and for some fifteen years before he began his work on it Thomas had been writing various historical and biographical works. Thomas's encyclopedic volume contains one book with regard to anatomy, one with regard to human monsters, and books with regard to quadrupeds, birds, marine monsters, fishes, serpents, worms, ordinary trees, aromatic and medicinal plants and the virtues of herbs, and of curative waters of various kinds. Then there are books on precious stones and their cutting, on the seven regions and the humors of the air, on the earth and the seven planets, and on the four elements and the Heavens and eclipses of the sun and moon. When such a work was published for general reading, it is easy to understand that no phase of information with regard to nature failed to be of interest to readers of the thirteenth century. Much that is absurd is contained in the book. But when we compare it with books written in the early part of the eighteenth century, we are apt to wonder rather at how little advance had taken place in the four centuries of interval, than at the ignorance of the medieval writer. [Footnote 42: Studien zur Geschichte der Anatomie im Mittelalter von Robert Ritter von Töply, Leipzig und Wien. Franz Deuticke, 1898.] {339} We have been able, of course, in this limited space to give only a modicum of the evidence for the cultivation of the Physical Sciences at the Medieval Universities, and their records in monumental works still extant; but this will probably be enough to enable those who are interested in the subject to realize its significance and to gather further material if they so wish. The universities were ecclesiastical institutions. Most of them derived their authority to give degrees directly from the Popes. Appeals were frequently made to the Popes with regard to the discipline and the teaching at the universities. Most of the great teachers of physical science were ecclesiastics. Nearly all the students were clerics. Many of those who were most successful in science reached high preferment in the Church. Evidently the pursuit of science did not prejudice their advancement, either in their orders, when they belonged to any of the various religious orders, or in the Church itself. They were the near and dear friends of archbishops, cardinals and Popes. This is entirely contrary to the ordinary impression in the matter; but this is the plain truth, while the contrary opinions are founded on the false assumption of Church opposition to science. {340} THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY MAN AND SCIENCE. Even after the series of demonstrations which we have given that the great thinkers and teachers at the medieval universities were deeply interested in the problems of what we now call natural or physical science, most people will still not be open to conviction that interest in nature was quite as lively in the Middle Ages as at any subsequent period, even our own. In spite of the fact that the scholastics faced scientific questions in nearly the same mood as we do ourselves, and, curiously enough, anticipated very closely many of the doctrines now current in science, not a few of those who are most interested in the history of education will continue to think that science occupied the minds of the students at the medieval universities very little, and that while the great thinkers may have known something about it, the rank and file of the university men of the time gave scarcely any thought to it. Besides, they will be almost sure to conclude that, whatever they did think was likely to be inept, and in most cases quite ridiculous. Such thoughts are a part of that unfortunate educational tradition which stamps the Middle Ages as neglectful of nature study, as we would call it now, and as lacking in interest in natural phenomena. Nothing could well be less true, and it will require, I think, but the simple tracing of the life and erudition of a single well-known student of these medieval universities, to show how utterly absurd and unfounded is the popular belief. {341} I have chosen Dante for this purpose, mainly because so much more is known about the personal details of his life than of anyone else, and we are able to glean from his writings and the contemporary comments on them, a good idea of what the general information on scientific subjects of the educated man of his period was. The fact that Dante was a member of the Guild of the Apothecaries in Florence, an association that included also the physicians of the city, has added an adventitious interest to his attractions as one of the few greatest of poets of all time, and has made details of his career and evidence of the breadth of his education and culture of special import, so that I have frequently taken occasion to call the attention of physicians to the honor implied by Dante's fraternal relation to us. His membership in the Guild of the Apothecaries, however, did not call for any special knowledge of science on his part. He had nothing to do with the sale of drugs, much less with the science of medicine. Originally the Italian apothecaries, as the Greek origin of the word indicates, were shop-keepers selling all sorts of things--edible, adorning, or useful for personal service. They sold drugs also, and as some of these were imported from the East, they commonly added to their stock certain other Eastern specialties--perfumes, gems and the like. In this way they soon became wealthy, as a rule, and indeed the name of the rich Florentine family who came eventually to rule their native city--the Medici--is said to be derived from similar connections. It was the sons of these men who became the upper middle classes in Florence. Perhaps one should say they became the upper classes, for Florence had no nobility, in the proper sense of the word, and men made their own positions. Their {342} descendants became the men of culture, until finally the Florentine Guild of the Apothecaries represented the most intelligent class of the population of the city. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, then, most of the artists, the literary men, the architects, the sculptors, were members of the guild. Dante's occupation when he was a peaceful citizen of Florence was, according to tradition, that of architect, and one building designed by him is supposed to be still in existence in Florence. Dante should represent for us, then, what an architect in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century knew about natural science, as the result of his school and university training. In our time, architects are likely to know more about certain forms of physical science than most other people, and due allowance would have to be made for this in Dante's case. It will be found, though, as we discuss his erudition, that the sciences in which he was particularly interested--astronomy and various phases of biology with physical geography--were not those which appeal especially to an architect, and certainly have no relation to his occupation. His knowledge of flowers might be thought to be due to his wish to use floral forms for structural decorative purposes, but Dante is rather weak for a poet in the matter of the description of flowers, and it is only from the side of their color that they made any special appeal to him. Most people have been led to think of Dante as not a student of nature, because that impression would inevitably be gathered from certain passages of John Ruskin with regard to him. Ruskin was so faithful and loving a student of Dante that he would be expected not to be {343} mistaken in such a matter, nor is he; but he has dwelt overmuch on certain phases of Dante's lack of interest in nature, until the great Florentine's devotion to creation as he saw it around him is obscured. It is not difficult to show, from Dante's own writings, how much he was interested in nearly every phase of nature and natural phenomena. In the "Westminster Review" for July and August, 1907, Mr. George Trobridge, in articles on Dante as a Nature Poet, has furnished abundant evidence to prove his thesis, though he too has felt the necessity for apologizing for even apparently differing from so great a critic and such an enthusiastic Dante student as Ruskin. Dante's works, however, themselves can be the only appeal in this matter, and Mr. Trobridge has used them with good effect and in such a way as to carry to anyone the conviction that Dante was a profound student of nature in all her moods and tenses. Mr. Trobridge says in the introduction: "It will appear presumptuous in the present writer to differ from so great a critic and such an enthusiastic student of Dante as Ruskin, but it seems to him that the author of Modern Painters has done scant justice to the intense insight of the poet into the beauties of the world we live in and his wonderful power of expressing what he saw. There are few even modern poets who have taken so wide a view of the field of nature, and even Shakespeare himself scarcely excells the great Florentine in felicity and concentration of expression. The Divina Commedia is full of vivid pictures covering the whole range of natural phenomena. As these pass before our eyes, we can scarcely realize that the painter of them is not of our own day, so thoroughly does he enter into the spirit of modern landscape art. {344} Sometimes his pictures are momentary impressions--studies of effects painted with a large brush; at others his touch is of a Preraphaelitic nicety, and now and then he gives us a studied composition full of doubtful detail like one of Turner's landscapes. He was one with Wordsworth in his sincere delight in every form of natural beauty. Like him, he lived beneath the habitual sway of fountains, meadows, hills and groves; with him he saw the 'splendor in the grass' and the 'glory in the flower.' He could 'feel the gladness of the May' and rejoiced in 'the innocent brightness of a new day.'" In the matter of science as distinct from poetic interest in nature, quite as much can be said for Dante. This greatest of Italian poets is a fair example to take of the university man of the thirteenth century in this respect. He was thirty-five before the first century of university existence properly so-called closed. He may be considered a typical product of university life. It is true he had had the almost inestimable advantage of the schooling and culture of his native Florence, where at the end of the thirteenth century there were more children, it is said, in attendance at the schools to the number of the population than there is at the present moment even in most of our American cities. Brother Azarias in his Essays Educational, [Footnote 43] said: [Footnote 43: Essays Educational, by Brother Azarias, with Preface by His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons. Chicago, D. H. McBride & Co., 1906.] "In the thirteenth century, out of a population of 90,000 in Florence, we find 12,000 children attending the schools, a ratio of school attendance as large as existed in New York City, in the year of Grace 1893." This ratio, it may be said, is as great as is ordinarily to be found anywhere, and this fact alone may serve to show {345} how earnest were these medieval burghers for the education of their children. Dante had the advantage of this, and in addition, of the training at two or three of the universities at least of Italy, besides spending some time at Paris, and probably a visit at least to Oxford. Lest it should be thought that perhaps Brother Azarias gave too favorable an estimate in his account of the schools in Florence, though he quotes as his authority Villani, and other authorities are readily available, it seems worth while to give a very interesting reference to this subject of education in one of the notes in Prince Kropotkin's chapter on Mutual Aid in the Medieval City, from his book Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution, a work that we have placed under contribution a number of times already in this attempt to picture medieval conditions as they were in reality, and not in the foolish imaginings of outworn traditions. Kropotkin's studies in what the free cities accomplished by the union of the guilds for every fraternal purpose, and the coordination of their citizens for every detail of the commonweal, has made him realize that common or public school education was an important feature of medieval free city life, and strange as that fact may appear to many modern minds, that such public school education occupied at least as prominent a position as it does with us in our own time. In the quotation from him it will be seen that he considers that Florence was not alone in this matter, and he ventures to place Nüremberg on a level with her. Doubtless other German cities, as certainly other Italian cities, provided similar facilities for general education. Kropotkin says: "In 1336 it (Florence) had 8,000 to 10,000 boys and girls in its primary schools, 1,000 to {346} 1,200 boys in its seven middle schools, and from 550 to 600 students in its four universities. The thirty communal hospitals contained over 1,000 beds for a population of 90,000 inhabitants. (Capponi, ii. 249 seq.) It has more than once been suggested by authoritative writers, that education stood, as a rule, at a much higher level than is generally supposed. Certainly so in democratic Nüremberg." The content of this educational system is our main subject of interest at the present moment. "Seven hundred young men received the higher education. (This in a city of less than 100,000 inhabitants. How do our cities of 100,000 inhabitants compare with it?) The very spirit of the arts was scholastic in Dante's day. You read the story in the oratory of Orsanmichele, in which each art with its masterpiece receives a crown; you read it in the chapters of Santa Maria Novella, in Gaddi's painting of the Trivium and Quadrivium; you read it in Giotto's sculpture of the same subject upon this marvelous campanile. Here was the atmosphere in which Dante's boyhood and early manhood were passed." We shall not be surprised, then, to find in Dante, the typical product of this form of education, an interest in every form of erudition and in all details of information. I have preferred to take the evidence for Dante's knowledge of science from others, rather than attempt to supply it entirely by means of quotations from his works. This latter would be the most scholarly way, but Dante is not easy reading even in a good translation, and one needs to be familiar with his modes of expression and to be accustomed to the wonderful compression of his style to appreciate his full significance. There is {347} no lack of good authorities, however, who have made deep studies in Dante, to bring out for us the complete import of all the references to the science of his time, which Dante was tempted to make. We have perhaps been prone to think, in English-speaking countries, that no poets have ever kept more thoroughly in touch with the progress of science, or at least have ever used references to scientific details with more accuracy, than some of our own nineteenth century poets. A little study of the first great poet of modern times, in whom Carlyle said "ten silent centuries found a voice," though Dante by no means stands alone in the century, but is the culmination of a series of great poets, will show that he probably must be considered as taking the palm even from our most modern of poets in this respect. If the expressions in text-books of the history of education are to be accepted as evidence of the thoughts of educators with regard to the details of education in Dante's time, even a brief sketch of Dante's scientific knowledge will be a supreme surprise to them. As will be at once appreciated, Dante was not a specialist in science, but used the knowledge of science current in his day in order to drive home his thoughts by means of figures. It is surprising, however, what a marvelous display of scientific knowledge, entirely without pedantry, which anyone who knows his supreme compression of style will realize to be the fault Dante is least liable to, was thus made by this educated literary man of the thirteenth century. Dr. L. Oscar Kuhns, Professor in Wesleyan University, has in his little book The Treatment of Nature in Dante's Divina Commedia, suggested a comparison between Dante and Goethe. [Footnote 44 ] {348} Everyone realizes at once how profound a scientist was Goethe. Professor Kuhns' comparison, then, will bring out the scientific qualities of this great medieval poet, who is the representative scholar of the universities of his time. [Footnote 44: The Treatment of Nature in Dante's Divina Commedia, by L. Oscar Kuhns, Professor in Wesleyan University, Middletown, U. S. A. Edward Arnold, London and New York. 1897.] "There is perhaps no innate contradiction between science and poetry, but it is not often that they are found together in the same man. Dante, like Goethe, half a millennium later, was not only drawn by the beauty of nature, but he had likewise an unquenchable intellectual curiosity, and sought diligently to understand the meaning of the universe in which he lived. "No other poet has ever combined the loftiest poetry with the discussion of such complicated topics in all branches of learning. In one place we find a long discussion of the origin and development of life, which, naive and scholastic as it is, shows some lines of resemblance to the modern doctrines in biology; in another place there is a learned discussion between the poet and Beatrice concerning the cause of the spots in the moon, in which an actual experiment in optics is given." The first passage to which Professor Kuhns refers, while containing many speculative elements, is a discussion of certain important basic problems in biology that have always appealed to thinking men at every period of the history of science, and never more so than in our own day. They must still be considered undecided, though many volumes have been written on them in the last century. There are thoughts in Dante's exposition of the subject that are startling enough to the modern biologist, and that make it clear how much men's minds run along the same grooves in facing questions that we are prone to think have occurred to men only in the last {349} few generations. The other quotation to which Professor Kuhns refers deserves to be quoted entire. It is perhaps even more striking because of its actual description of an experiment in optics, which shows how much this great poetic intelligence of the medieval time, usually supposed to be so abstracted and occupied with things other-worldly and supernal, living his intellectual life quite beyond the domain of sense, still remembered the teachings of his university days, and even recalled the details of demonstrations that he had seen. The passage occurs in the II. canto of the Paradiso, beginning with line 97: "Take thou three mirrors, two of them remove From thee an equal distance, and the last Between the two, and further from thee move; And turned towards them let a light be cast, Behind thy back, upon those mirrors three, So that from all reflected rays are passed. Then, though the light which furthest stands from thee May not with them in magnitude compete, Yet will it shine in brightness equally." It is easy to understand, then, that Professor Kuhns should have been enthusiastic with regard to Dante's knowledge of science. He says: "The whole structure of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise shows a thorough knowledge of the Ptolemaic system; and we invariably find astronomical facts, mingled with classical quotations, in the description of stellar phenomena. But not only in specific passages do we find evidence of Dante's love for science, but in brief allusions to the various aspects of nature--metaphors, {350} figures, descriptions--a word or two is added, giving the cause of the phenomenon in question. Examples of this abound." It is with regard to astronomy, of course, that Dante has given us the most convincing evidence of his knowledge of science, his interest in nature and natural phenomena, his questioning spirit in nature study, and the wonderful anticipations of his generation with regard to knowledge that has usually been supposed to have been hidden from them. The stars appealed to his poetic spirit, and then besides, his great poem occupied itself with all the visible universe, and especially with the parts outside this world. Professor Kuhns has said: "One may confidently assert that no such perfect lines descriptive of the stars have ever been written. Shakespeare and others can furnish famous passages, but none, I think, equal to those of Dante. They have all the quality of his art--truth, clearness, possessing the power of touching deeply the imagination, yet terse and compact, containing not a word too much. We see the stars at all hours of the night, in all degrees of brilliancy, fading away at the approach of dawn, gradually appearing as twilight comes on, shining with splendor on a moonless night, keenly sparkling after the winds have cleared the atmosphere, or eclipsed by the greater effulgence of the moon. The motion of the constellations about the pole is referred to, those which are nearest to it never setting beneath the horizon." It is often thought that the proper idea of the explanation of the Milky Way was quite modern. Dante, however, discusses in his Convito the theories of it that had been suggested up to his time, and then gives his own {351} views, which he confesses are founded on Aristotle, but which are evidently the result also of his own thinking. Pythagoras, he said, attributed it to the scorching heat of the sun, as if somehow this left a trace of itself even after the sun had sunk. Other Greek philosophers, as for example Anaxagoras and Democritus, explained it as a reflection of the light of the sun which still found its way even though that luminary had passed from sight. Dante himself says that, following Aristotle, he cannot help but think that the Milky Way is composed of a multitude of minute stars which are gathered very closely together in this particular part of the heavens, and which are so small that they cannot be distinguished from one another, though their light causes that special white luminosity which we call the Milky Way. This explanation is the true one, only that the apparent smallness of the stars are due to their distance, and not to their actual minuteness of size. A brief list of the other astronomical phenomena mentioned by Dante has been made by Professor Kuhns. This serves to show very clearly that Dante's knowledge with regard to the heavens was quite as extensive as that of the modern educated man, indeed, probably more so, and that it was quite as exact. The little touch which shows that he knew, for instance, that August is the month when shooting stars are more frequent, is wonderfully illuminating. His powers of observation are brought out by his having seen them during the day as well as at night. In all this it must not be forgotten that Dante was no mere pedant making a display of his knowledge; that he was not one to parade his erudition for the sake of show; that indeed no one has ever written so compressedly as he; that every word that he {352} used counts in bringing out his meaning, and yet that we find all this wealth of information with regard to astronomy in a book that was meant to proclaim, and has, in the opinion of men for all time since, expressed more sublimely the significance of man's relations to the universe and his reflections on the infinite in lofty poetic thought, than any other that was ever written. Professor Kuhns says: "The other celestial phenomena mentioned by Dante may be dismissed briefly. We have references to the eclipse and its cause, and the Blessed in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars flame brightly, _a guisa di comete_ (in the guise of a comet). Shooting-stars are referred to several times, almost invariably as a conventional figure for rapidity. August is the month when they are the most frequent, and they are most seen to shoot with lightninglike swiftness across the serene blue sky or pierce the clouds that gather around the setting sun. One fine passage describes the spectator following them with his eyes as they lose themselves in the distance." It is no wonder, then, that Prof. Kuhns should be quite enthusiastic with regard to Dante's use of astronomical knowledge. He insists, however, that while it was his poetic soul and love for the stars that tempted him to allow his thoughts to wander so frequently into the realm of the celestial bodies, his interest was always profoundly scientific. His passage to this effect is worth while quoting _in extenso_, because it brings out this fact very clearly. As Prof. Kuhns' only idea in this was to show how marvelously the representative poet of the Middle Ages turned to nature in his poetry, and there was no thought of controverting the foolish notions of those who so lightly declare that the students of the {353} Middle Age universities knew nothing of science, the paragraph is a bit of very striking evidence in this matter. "Dante's love for the stars was largely scientific; he knew thoroughly the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, which forms the framework of the whole structure of the Paradiso. We find constant and accurate allusions to the constellations, their various shapes and positions in the heavens; while the hour of the day and the season of the year are often referred to in terms of astronomical science, frequently interwoven with mythology. But besides this scientific interest, he was deeply touched by the beauty, the mystery and the tranquilizing power of the celestial orbs. There is hardly a phase of them that he has not touched upon; many of his descriptions and allusions have a truth and vividness unsurpassed even in this present day of nature worship. Here, as elsewhere in the Divina Commedia, science and learning and poetry go hand in hand. We have no mere dry catalogue of facts, but the wonderful mechanism of the starry heavens is brought before our eyes, rolling its spheres in celestial harmony, radiant with light and splendour, while the innumerable company of angels and the 'spirits of just men made perfect' raise the chorus of praise to the Alto Fattore." We cannot but add the reflection that, as our own poets of the nineteenth century indulged themselves in figures drawn from science not only because of their own interest in the subject, but because they realized the interest of the men of their time in matters scientific and appreciated that figures drawn from them would add to the significance of their own thoughts, so Dante would not have used figures drawn from science only {354} that, closely in touch as he was with the educated men of his time in many cities and countries, he felt that he would thus not only be adding to the interest of his work, but would be making his own meaning clearer by a wealth of allusion from things scientific. This is indeed the side of this study of Dante that deserves the most thorough consideration by educators in our time, if they would understand what the real spirit of the teaching of science in the medieval universities was, and what the attitude of educated people of the time toward nature study, which has been so egregiously misrepresented by those who know nothing at all about it, must be considered to have been. All this we must judge, however, from contemporary sources, and not from subsequent supercilious misrepresentations. It must not be thought, however, that Dante's interest in science was exhausted by his excursions into astronomy. This has already been more than hinted at in some of the passages quoted, which show his interest in other phases of science. In the modern time, however, it is almost the rule, that if a scholar who is not a scientist, and especially if he happens to be, as Dante was, a literary man, indulges in some scientific pursuits, he has at most but an interest in one branch of science. Quite as often as not he rather prides himself on knowing nothing at all about this department of knowledge. Specialism has invaded even scientific education, and a man specializes in some favorite department of science for his avocation, and is apt to know very little about other departments. Dante was not thus constituted, however. It will be comparatively easy to show that every form of scientific thought interested him, and that his love of nature led him into nature study, in the {355} best sense of that very modern term, and caused him to make observations for himself, or so retain the observations of others that he had heard or read, that he was able to use them very forcibly and appropriately in the figurative language of his great poem. Alexander von Humboldt, the distinguished German naturalist and leader of scientific thought in the early nineteenth century, whose compliment to Albertus Magnus, quoted in the chapter on Science at the Medieval Universities, is probably a surprise to most people, but serves to show how wide was the reading of this great scientist, was also an attentive student of Dante, and has a passage with regard to the Florentine poet's knowledge of science quite as striking as that with regard to the great scholastic's excursions into the same field. In his Cosmos he has the following tribute to Dante as a student of nature and as a loving observer of natural phenomena: "When the story of the Arabic, Greek or Roman dominion--or, I might almost say, when the ancient world had passed away, we find in the great and inspired founder of a new era, Dante Alighieri, occasional manifestations of the deepest sensibility to the charms of the terrestrial life of nature, whenever he abstracts himself from the passionate and subjective control of that despondent mysticism which constituted the general circle of his ideas." With regard to the famous description of the river of light in the thirtieth canto of the Paradiso, Humboldt declared that the picture must have been suggested to Dante by the phosphorescence seen so beautifully and so luxuriantly in the Adriatic Sea at times. The passage itself is so beautiful and is so well worth the reading a {356} second time, even for those who have read it before, that I give it a place here, followed by Humboldt's comment. I saw a glory like a stream flow by, In brightness rushing, and on either shore Were banks that with spring's wondrous hues might vie. And from that river living sparks did soar, And sank on all sides on the floweret's bloom. Like precious rubies set in golden ore. Then, as if drunk with all the rich perfume, Back to the wondrous torrent did they roll, And as one sank another filled its room. Dean Plumptre says that Humboldt's suggestion with regard to this description has not been found elsewhere, and as it adds to the completeness of the idea conveyed by the figure, he gives it a place in his studies and estimates of Dante. Humboldt said: "It would almost seem as if this picture had its origin in the poet's recollection of that peculiar and rare phosphorescent condition of the ocean when luminous points appear to rise from the breaking waves, and, spreading themselves over the surface of the waters, convert the liquid plain into a moving sea of sparkling stars." It is with regard to the little things in life, particularly those that are so small that one would be tempted to think at first blush that Dante paid no attention to them at all, that his powers of observation as a student of nature, and his all-pervading love for every even smallest manifestation of her power, is especially made manifest. With regard to this subject, Prof. Kuhns, to whom I have already turned so often, has an illuminating {357} passage, which sums up a large amount of reading of the poet. He says: "The smallest members of the animal kingdom do not escape the observing eye of the poet, and such unpoetical insects as the flea, the gnat, and the fly are brought into use. By means of these latter he has accurately given the time of day and season of the year in one line, where, showing us the farmer lying on the hillside of a summer evening, looking down upon the valley alight with fire-flies, he says the time was that 'When the fly yields to the gnat.' Those pests of dogs, the flea and hornet, are referred to in a passage already given, where the dog is seen snapping and scratching in agony. The butterfly was symbolical, during the Middle Ages, of the death and resurrection of the body. The various phases of its development are referred to by Dante; the caterpillar state, the latter referring to the cocoon of the silk-worm, furnishing a figure for the souls in Paradise, swathed in light; in one passage, backsliding Christians are compared to insects in a state of arrested development." Dante's passage in the tenth canto of the Purgatorio, in which he compares man to the butterfly, who in this life passes through the caterpillar stage, passing in death, as it were, into the larval stage when in his coffin he is motionless and apparently dead, as the insect in its cocoon, yet finally reaching the glory of the resurrection in the winged butterfly stage, shows how well these medieval observers of nature had studied carefully aspects of nature which we are apt to think were holden entirely from their eyes. The passage would remind one of the story of the Jesuit, three centuries later, who, in {358} the early days of missionary work in this country, wondered how he would obtain a fitting word to express to the Indians the abstract idea of the resurrection of the body. The good Father finally recalled his Dante, and having found a caterpillar that had entered into the larval stage after having spun its cocoon and wrapped itself round with its shroud to lie down in what is a striking similitude of death, presented it to the Indians, and then having waited until the butterfly came out, asked them what they called this process, and applied the word for it to the resurrection. Dante says:-- "Perceive ye not we are of a wormlike kind, Born to bring forth the angel butterfly, That soars to Judgment, and no screen doth find? Why doth your soul lift up itself on high? Ye are as insects yet but half complete, As worms in whom their growth fails utterly." It is with regard to bees and ants, however, that Dante's observant love of nature and of natury study is especially to be admired. It is true, as has been often pointed out, that the older poets, of whom Dante was an assiduous and mindful reader, made use of figures with regard to bees, and Virgil, with all of whose works Dante was so intimately acquainted that nothing must have escaped him, devoted one of the four books of his Georgics to what is practically a treatise on Apiculture. In this most of the problems of bee raising are discussed. Lucretius, Lucan, and Ovid, all made use of this interesting insect for figures in their poetry. Dante might have obtained most of the references to the bee, then, from his reading. Prof. Kuhns is of the opinion, however, that some at {359} least of Dante's references to them are due to his observations, quite apart from his literary reminiscences with regard to their habits and instincts. He says:-- "There are certain touches in the Divina Commedia which seem to prove that Dante's use of them was not entirely conventional. In the wonderful passage where he stands contemplating 'La forma general di Paradiso,' he saw the Blessed in the shape of a great white rose on the banks of the river of light; and the white-robed angels, with wings of gold and faces of flame, as they fly unceasingly back and forth from the seats of the saints to the effulgent river, are compared to bees, following their inborn instinct to make honey, flying from flower to flower, burying themselves in the chalice, and then rising heavily to carry their burden to their hives. In another passage their buzzing noise is compared to the noise of a distant waterfall;"--a touch of nature that could only have come from familiarity with the insects. In is with regard to ants even more than bees that Dante's proclivities for nature study are most evident. When in the Purgatorio, in the twenty-sixth canto, Dante would describe the meeting of souls in Paradise who kiss each other as they speed on their way, he compares them to the ants who as they meet one another touch antennae, thus communicating various messages, and then go on their way. The passage is very striking because, as Dean Plumptre remarks, the picture drawn reminds one almost of Sir John Lubbock's ant studies, or the remarkable descriptions of ant life in Bishop Ken's Hymnotheo. Dante's lines are as follows:-- {360} "So oft, within their dusk brown host proceed This ant and that, till muzzle muzzle meet; Spying their way, or how affairs succeed." Thus did Dante know the whole round of science in his time better than any modern university man. People who take exception to his knowledge fail to realize its environment. They may smile a little scornfully now at his complacent acceptance of the Ptolemaic system without a question, but it must not be forgotten that for three centuries after his time educated men still continued to accept it, and that even the distinguished Jesuit astronomer, Clavius, to whom we owe the Gregorian reformation of the calendar and the restoration of the year to its proper place as regards the heavens, not only accepted it, but worked out his calendar reform problems by means of it. Clavius's great contemporary, Tycho-Brahe, the distinguished Danish astronomer, found no reason to reject it. Even Lord Bacon, who with perverted historical sense is still proclaimed the father of modern experimental science, also accepted the Ptolemaic system, and found that it thoroughly explained all the phenomena of the heavens, while he rejected the Copernican system, then nearly a century before the world, because he thought it did not. The surprise, however, is not in Dante's knowledge of astronomy, but in his familiarity with details of biology that enables him to reason, though in poetic language, with straightforward and logical directness with regard to basic thought in this science that is usually considered so thoroughly modern. Another surprising feature is the knowledge of the habits of birds and of insects. Our modern students of {361} nature are supposed to be the first who went deeply enough into these subjects to make them material for literature. Here, however, is Dante describing, in a few picturesque words, characteristic peculiarities of birds and insects, which our modern writers spend pages over, yet tell us scarcely more about them. A little knowledge of Dante is evidently the best antidote that our generation can have for that foolish persuasion that the Middle Ages were ignorant of science and that the universities taught nothing but nonsense about nature. I am tempted to add just a few paragraphs with regard to another aspect of Dante's scientific interests which assimilates him to the modern educated man. Education itself would seem to be one of the sciences the development of which was surely left to a late and more conscious age. There are, however, as has been pointed out by Brother Azarias, quite enough materials in Dante's works to show that a serious student who was, however, only a literary man and not an educator, had many thoughts with regard to the practical side of education, and had come to many conclusions with regard to how it should be carried on, that are anticipations of the most fruitful thoughts of our modern educators and that have formed the subject of many theses on education down to our own day. Education is, of course, scarcely one of the physical sciences, yet since its subject-matter is mainly the child and the developing human intellect, and in that sense it is nature study in its highest form, this aspect of Dante's thinking also deserves to be given due weight here. Brother Azarias says:-- "It is the mission of the poet to reflect in his work the predominant, all-pervading spirit and views of his age. Now, in his day, the universities were the {362} controlling element in thought, in art, in politics, moulding the thinkers and rulers of the age both in church and state. But Dante was a life-long student. He traveled from land to land and from school to school, and sat impatiently, yet humbly, at the feet of masters, imbibing whatever knowledge they could convey. He disputed in public. His bright eyes and strong, sombre, reserved features attracted the attention of fellow students as he wended his way, absorbed in his own thoughts, through the rue de Fouarre and entered the hall in which Siger was holding forth. Tradition has it that he was no less assiduous a frequenter of School Street in Oxford. He has left us no distinct treatise on education; but he who embodied all the science of his day, who was supreme in teaching so many other lessons, could not be silent in regard to pedagogy. From his writings a whole volume of rules and principles bearing upon education might be gleaned. In 'Il Convito' he expresses himself fully on the different ages of human growth and development; speaks of obedience as an essential requisite for the child; after his father he should obey his master and his elders. He should also be gentle and modest, reverent and eager to acquire knowledge; reserved, never forward; repentant of his faults to the extent of overcoming them. As our soul in all its operations makes use of a bodily organ, it behooves us to exercise the body, that it grow in grace and aptness, and be well ordained and disposed in order that the soul may control it to the best advantage. Thus it is that a noble nature seeks to have a sound mind in a sound body." {363} THE CHURCH AND THE MENTALLY AFFLICTED. It is especially with regard to the attitude of the churchmen, the people, and even the physicians of the Middle Ages toward insanity, that most opprobrium has been heaped upon the Church and her teachings in the so-called histories of the relations of science to theology or faith. Much of what has been said that has been supposed to tell worst against the Church, however, should not rest upon the shoulders of ecclesiastics, and should not be set down to the evil effect of theology. It is easy now to look back and blame men for the acceptance of supernatural agencies as causes in nearly all cases of mental and nervous diseases, but the reason for this is rather to be looked for in the nature of man than in his belief in religion. Ethnology shows us traces of it everywhere. Our American Indians, long before any tincture of Christianity, and before any hint of theology of any kind reached them, beyond that which develops spontaneously from the depths of their natural faculties, believed in the effect of the evil spirits in producing disease, and, of course, particularly the mental diseases which made men do things so contrary to their own interests, and often so harmful to the beings they loved best in the world. In the Middle Ages they had not yet outgrown this primitive way of looking at mental diseases. For that matter, we have not even as yet. The intelligent classes in the community are, as a rule, convinced of the physical basis of mental diseases, but there are a {364} great many people who still are inclined to think that some of them, at least, are manifestations of some punitive force outside of the patients themselves, or even some manifestation of ill-understood forces quite apart from matter. Not all the thinking people of the Middle Ages accepted all the absurd notions sometimes rehearsed in this matter, but as in our own time, foolish traditions and superstitions dominated the unthinking classes, which form still, unfortunately, the great mass of mankind. We have had just the opposite delusions forced upon our attention in our own day. Large numbers, supposedly of intelligent people, have pretended to believe or have definitely accepted the teaching that disease is nothing. This is quite as foolish as attributing to spiritual agencies what has come to be recognized as due to physical factors. It is to be hoped that our generation and its thinking shall not be judged by future generations to have been utterly foolish, just because a few millions of us accepted Eddyism,--and it must be remembered that these are not, as a rule, the uneducated. Another side of this question is even more interesting, or at least has become so during the last twenty years. A generation ago it was the custom to scoff not a little scornfully in scientific circles, at the idea of admitting even the possibility of the interference of immaterial or spiritual agencies, or of any other intelligences or wills at work in the ordinary affairs of this life, than those of men. This scornful attitude still continues to be the pose of many students and teachers of science. It is by no means so universal as it was, however. Strikingly enough, the converts from this attitude of mind have come, not from the lower ranks of teachers of science, but from among the very leaders in original {365} research and scientific investigation. We may still continue to laugh at and ridicule the medieval people for their admission of the activity of spirits in ordinary mundane affairs, but if we do so, we must also laugh at and ridicule just as much, such prominent leaders of scientific thought and progress as Sir William Crookes, Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor Charles Richet, the distinguished French physiologist, Flammarion the astronomer, and even of late years Professor Lombroso, the well-known Italian criminologist, whose special doctrines as to crime and criminals would apparently insure him against such theories as those of the spiritualists. All of these men have confessed their belief not only in the possibility of spiritual interference in this world of ours, but insist that they have seen such interference, and are absolutely convinced of its frequent occurrence. This is a decided reaction from previous states of the scientific mind on this subject, and represents a retroversion to medieval modes of thought that may be deprecated by scientific investigators of materialistic tendencies, but that cannot be neglected, and must not be despised. When the results of these recent investigations are taken into account, the opprobrium which has been heaped upon medieval scholars and churchmen for the facility with which they accepted the doctrine of the interference of spirits in human life, must be minimized to such a degree, or indeed eradicated so entirely, that a saner view of the whole situation as regards the relationship of the spiritual and material world seems likely to prevail. It is easy and cheap to reject without more ado and without serious consideration, such evidence of spiritual manifestations as has {366} convinced these leaders of scientific thought. But this rejection is not scientific, nor does it show an open mind. What is needed is a calm review of the situation, in order to see just where truth lies. It is not at either extreme. It is not in too great credulity with regard to spiritual interference, but certainly not at the opposite pole of the negation of all spiritual influence in human life, that genuine progress in knowledge is to come. This premised, we may take up the consideration of the actual accomplishment of the Middle Ages with regard to the insane, better prepared to appreciate their point of view and to get at the significance of their attitude toward the mentally diseased. There are two phases of this question of the attitude of even intelligent men of the Middle Ages toward nervous and mental diseases, that deserve to be studied, not superficially, but in their actual relationships to the men of that time, and to our opinions at the present day. These are: first, the question of the treatment of the mentally afflicted, and second, the mystery of demoniacal possession and its related phenomenon--mediumship, as we call it. Personally, I was very much surprised some years ago, while collecting material for a paper to be read before the International Guild for the Care of the Insane, to find how many things that are most modern in our methods of treating the insane, and that are among the desiderata which are universally conceded to be most necessary for the improvement of present conditions in our management of mental diseases, were anticipated by the generations of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. It is not hard, for instance, to show that such eminently desirable conditions as the {367} open door for mild cases, the combination of the ordinary hospital with a ward for psychic cases, the colony system for the treatment of those of lower mentality, were all in existence in the Middle Ages and did good work. The colony system particularly, as it comes to us from the Middle Ages, has recently been studied very carefully, and this has given us many valuable hints as to the methods that will have to be adopted in other countries in modern times. The conditions which developed at Gheel in Belgium have deservedly attracted much attention in recent times, and have been the subject of articles in the medical journals of nearly every country in the world, because of the poignant realization by our generation that large institutions, meaning by this large single buildings or closely associated groups of buildings, are very unfavorable for the care of the insane. In America, one of these articles was published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, and a second, written by my friend, Dr. Jelliffe, who is the Professor of Mental Diseases in Fordham University School of Medicine, was written after a special visit paid to Gheel by him, in order to investigate conditions there. Though the situation at Gheel now is practically identical with that which originated there at least five centuries ago, there are many who consider that similar conditions would be ideal for the treatment of certain classes of the insane even in our own day. It is this sort of interpretation of the work of these old-time philanthropists and physicians that we need, and not the cheap condemnation which makes it necessary for us to begin all over again in each generation. In the light of this unexpected revelation and the {368} consequent revolution of thought it suggests, a short review of the treatment of the insane will not be out of place. It is usual for our self-complacent generation to consider that it was not until our own time that rational measures for the care of the insane were taken. Most of the text-books on mental diseases that touch at all on the historical aspects of the treatment question, are apt to say that the evolution of methods for the treatment and cure of the insane might be divided into four historical periods: First, the era of exorcism, on the theory that insane patients were possessed of devils. Second, the chain and dungeon era, during which persons exhibiting signs of insanity were imprisoned and shackled in such a manner as to prevent the infliction of injury upon others. Third, the era of asylums. Fourth, the present era of psychopathic wards in general hospitals for the acutely insane in cities, and colonies for the chronic insane in the country, which is only just beginning to develop. From this classification, the ordinary reader would suppose that nothing at all was done for the insane during the first two periods, except exorcism in one and confinement in the other. As a matter of fact, the number of the harmlessly insane has always been much larger than the violent, and the latter, indeed, constitute only a very small portion of the mentally ailing at any period. Exorcism, as a rule, was applied only to the violent and to the hysterical. In the asylums at all times there were a number of patients who were not chained or confined to any great degree, and unless one had shown some special violent manifestation, severe measures were not taken. It is the treatment of the great mass of the insane rather than of the few {369} exceptional cases, that must be considered as representing the attitude of mind of the generations of the Middle Age toward the mentally afflicted, and not what they found themselves compelled to do because of their fear and dread of violence. For those who were mentally afflicted in a mild degree, abundant suitable provision was made by the generations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. When historical writers suggest the contrary, they are only making one of the usual assumptions from ignorance of the details. Because in some cases insanity was supposed to be due to possession by the devil, to say that, therefore, in all cases no provision was made for the insane is nonsense. It is comparatively easy to find, from records of the hospitals of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that there were what we now call psychopathic wards for the acutely insane in the cities, and some colonies for the chronic insane in country places. Knowing nothing of this, Prof. White, for instance, says: "The stream of Christian endeavor, so far as the insane were concerned, was almost entirely cut off. In all the beautiful provision during the Middle Ages for the alleviation of human suffering, there was for the insane almost no care. Some monasteries indeed gave them refuge. We hear of a charitable work done for them at the London Bethlehem Hospital in the thirteenth century, at Geneva in the fifteenth, at Marseilles in the sixteenth, by the Black Penitents in the South of France, by certain Franciscans in Northern France, by the Alexian Brothers on the Rhine, and by various agencies in other parts of Europe; but, curiously enough, the only really important effort in the Christian Church {370} was stimulated by the Mohammedans." This last clause is a slur on Christianity absolutely without justification. As is true for all broad generalizations, to ignore thus the work of caring for the insane and the methods employed in earlier times, amounts to deplorable injustice to generations whose provision for the sick of every class was not only much more abundant, but more rational and complete, than it has been our custom to recognize and acknowledge. The earliest city hospitals that we know of were due to the fatherly care and providence of that great Pope, Innocent III., whose pontificate (1198-1213) has been more misunderstood than perhaps any corresponding period of time in history. It was Virchow, the great German pathologist, whose sympathies with the Papacy were very slight, and whose attitude in the Kulturkampf in Germany showed him to be a strenuous opponent of the Papal policy, who paid the high tribute to Pope Innocent III. which we quote in the chapter on the Foundation of City Hospitals. It was in connection with these hospitals founded by Pope Innocent III., or the result of the movement initiated by him, that the insane were cared for at first. This may seem to have been an undesirable method, but at the present time there is an almost universal demand on the part of experts in mental diseases for wards for the mentally diseased in connection with city hospitals, because admission is thus facilitated, treatment is begun earlier, the patient is not left in unsuitable conditions so long, friends are readier to take measures to bring the patient under proper treatment and surveillance, and, as a consequence, more of the acutely insane have the course of their disease modified at once, and more cures take place than would otherwise be possible. Of course, this was {371} not the idea of the original founder of the medieval hospitals, or even the conscious plan of those who were in charge. They had to take the mentally infirm because there was nowhere else for them to go at that time. As a matter of fact, however, their simple method of procedure was better in the end for the patient than is our more complex method of admission to insane asylums, with its disturbing necessity for formal examination of the patient under circumstances that are likely to increase any excitement that he may be laboring under. And the transfer to an institution bearing the dreaded name of asylum, or even sanitarium (for that term has taken quite as ominous a meaning in recent years) is sure to aggravate the patient's irritated state, and to exaggerate symptoms which might otherwise be relieved by prompt, soothing care, and by the consciousness that his ailment is being treated rather than that he himself is being placed in durance. An examination of the methods for the care of the insane in the Middle Ages brings out clearly the fact, that the modern generation may learn from those old Catholic humanitarians, whose hearts and whose charity served so well to make up for any deficiencies of intellect or of science the moderns would presume them to have labored under. There are said to be three great desiderata for the intelligent care for the insane: First: The open door system, permitting patients who are not violent, and who can be trusted even though they have many queer notions, to come and go at will. Second: The after care treatment of those who have been insane, to the end that they may not be compelled to go back to strenuous lives of toil; and above all, that they {372} may not be forced into the too harrassing conditions of which their mental breakdown originally was born. Third: A colony system by which patients of lowered intelligence may be cared for in the country, far away from the stress of city life, and where, without the cares of existence pressing upon them, they may be surrounded by gentle, patient, kindly friends who will make every allowance for their peculiarities and strive to help them in their up-hill struggles. These desiderata are so absolutely modern that they have only been formulated definitely with the beginning of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding this apparent newness, I think that it will not be difficult to show that the old-time methods of caring for the insane partook, to a greater degree than would be suspected at the present time, of these desirable qualities that modern science has come to recognize as so indispensable for the rational care of the mentally unbalanced. In saying this I do not wish to claim for the Middle Ages accomplishments beyond their deserts. My idea is rather to write an interpretation; to make clear from what we know of the details of the care of the insane in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that unconsciously those generations, in their large-hearted charity, anticipated what is best in our present system. The first record in English medical literature of a home for the insane is that of Bethlehem Royal Hospital, London, which has become famous under the familiar shortened name of Bedlam, meaning a house or place of confusion. Bethlehem was a general hospital into which during the fourteenth century insane patients were admitted. There is a historical record to the effect that at the beginning of the fifteenth century a royal commission {373} investigated the methods of treating the insane in vogue there, because there had been complaint of abuses in the institution. Practically every century since there have been written corresponding records of similar investigations. The trouble seems always to have been that there were too few attendants properly to take care of insane patients, and thus they had to be placed in confinement in various ways, which inevitably led to abuses. For a generation or longer after each exposure by a committee of inspection, the evils of this system would be more or less tolerable; then they would become unbearable once more and another investigation would be demanded. I would like to feel that we have progressed in all respects beyond these hit and miss methods, but any one familiar with the present situation in the matter is quite well aware that there are still many abuses that need correction, and inspection committees find many suggestions to make and sometimes gross evils to stigmatize. Bedlam seems, however, to have always been as well and as humanely conducted as the spirit of the times demanded. It must not be forgotten that according to well authenticated tradition, a very large part of the hospital's income was obtained by the collection of fees for the admittance of visitors who came to be amused by the vagaries of the insane. The number visiting the asylum for this purpose must have been enormous, for, though only a penny was charged for admission, the resulting revenue is said to have amounted to four hundred pounds sterling a year, showing that nearly one hundred thousand persons had visited the institution. From generations that were pleased to derive morbid amusement out of the misfortunes of others, humanitarian {374} care of the insane could not be reasonably expected; but in view of this custom it is difficult to understand how there could have been at this period any great abuse of patients, in the matter of severe punishments or inhuman restraint. Some of the customs of the old-time hospitals were interesting. It was believed that the one chance for an insane patient to recover lay in trusting him somewhat, allowing him even to go unattended outside the walls at times. Patients in Bedlam were permitted to go out alone after they improved in health, and if they were poor they were allowed to obtain their living by means of begging. In order that they might more easily work upon public sympathy, they were permitted to wear tin plates fastened to their arms. The wearers of these were called "Bedlams," or "Bedlamites" or "Bedlam beggars," and tradition says that they received much more consideration than ordinary beggars. It may appear that this was dangerous liberty, but the ordinary person is apt to consider as dangerous the open door treatment of the insane which most alienists now hold to be the most commendable feature of present day treatment. It seems reasonable that to permit patients to go into the open air and sunshine was better than confining them in the hospital, and doubtless the insignia which they wore especially commended them to the care and alms and sympathy of the people. Much has been said with regard to the alleged neglect and abuse of the insane during the period of exorcism, because of the misunderstanding of the cause of the disease. There are persons who consider neurasthenia and major-hysteria as more or less modern forms of nervous diseases, but it is more than probable that they {375} existed with considerable frequency in the olden time. Many of these cases would be cured by strong suggestions, that is, by the treatment usually given to supposed possessed persons, and as we know that the best possible treatment for certain forms of major-hysteria is to frighten the patient (the earthquake at San Francisco cured a dozen persons who had not been regarded as able to walk, some of them for years), it is probable that a goodly number of the patients of the past were cured by the rather heroic measures sometimes devised. Sir Thomas More mentions such cases, and though himself eminently humane, commends this method of treatment "in which such patients were severely scourged and thoroughly aroused from their willfulness." When psychiatrists talk slightingly of the old-time methods of caring for the insane, it is well to recall that, considering the conditions and limitations of scientific knowledge, they seem to have done very well in those times. It has been the custom of critics to hold up to ridicule that insane patients were sometimes taken to special shrines in order that their ills might be cured by the direct interposition of Heaven; or that the devil supposed to possess them, might be driven out. It must not be forgotten, however, that such procedures were of supreme utility in mild cases viewed merely from the human standpoint, and without any appeal to the supernatural. The journey to a favorite shrine, undertaken under conditions that gave variety to life and new interests, together with the hope aroused while there, were sufficient to help the patient physically and, not infrequently, mentally. Some of the most distinguished specialists in mental diseases in Germany, France and England are on record {376} as believing that one of the most helpful agencies in the relief of certain symptoms of mental disturbance, and even the cure of milder forms of insanity, is confidence in the Almighty as expressed by prayer. At a meeting of the British Medical Association two years ago, this idea was expressed very forcibly by a distinguished specialist, and was concurred in by a number of those at the meeting of the Section on Mental Diseases. He said: "As an alienist and one whose life has been concerned with the suffering of the mind, I would state that of all hygienic measures to counteract disturbed sleep, depressed spirits and all of the miserable sequels of a distressed mind, I would undoubtedly give the first place to the simple habit of prayer. * * * Such a habit does more to calm the spirit and strengthen the soul to overcome mere incidental emotionalism than any other therapeutic agent known to me." The medieval peoples realized this, and finding it beneficial, used it to decided advantage in a large number of cases. Occasionally some very striking developments resulted from pilgrimages made for the cure of the insane. A typical instance is to be found at the shrine of St. Dympna in Belgium. Many persons in various stages and differing forms of mental derangement were accustomed to go or be taken to the shrine of this Irish girl missionary, whose martyrdom had so elevated her in the estimation of the people of the neighborhood that they thought her tomb worthy of special reverence. The sufferers who journeyed thither frequently lingered for some time in order to invoke the aid of the Saint, and, if possible, secure her intercession for the relief of their {377} ailments. Many of them were found to get along better in the quiet of the little village than they had done in their homes, and as they were simply quartered among the people of the village, their friends were able for a trifling pecuniary consideration to secure their maintenance there for an indefinite period, in the hope that what the Saint had not granted at the beginning might be obtained by more assiduous devotion at her shrine. At first the friends probably intended to come back and take the patients away, but after a time, finding that they got along so well near the shrine, they gradually learned to leave them there entirely. Thus originated the famous insane colony at Gheel which has in recent years been the subject of more attention on the part of alienists the world over than almost any other therapeutic method of our time. This medieval invention of caring for the non-violent insane, especially those of low grades of intelligence, in the midst of small families, where none of the cares of life burden them and where they have occupation of mind and body and certain human interests, such as might appeal to their weakened intelligence, is probably the ideal method of caring for such patients. Certain it is that it is much better than the large institutional system, the invention of succeeding centuries, from which we are now trying to get away as fast and as far as possible. The Gheel mode of caring for the insane is really the colony system that is now universally recognized as the most favorable mode of treatment for these patients. It seems not unlikely that there was much more of this practice during the Middle Ages in Europe than we have any idea of. With regard to the serious accusations so often made {378} against the people of the Middle Ages for their cruelty to the insane, not much apology will be needed by those who know anything about the treatment of the insane, even in quite recent times. Measures of rigid restraint were employed for dangerous cases. Patients who had shown manifestations of violence were likely to be chained. Severe and unusual punishments were sometimes inflicted. Of all this there is no doubt. Abuses crept into institutions. The insane were sometimes brutally treated or hideously neglected. These, however, are objections that can be urged against our system of taking care of the insane in many places even at the present day. In certain states, in order to lessen the expense of caring for the insane, they are kept in departments in the Poor Houses, and every now and then a legislative committee of investigation tells the story of appalling evils that have been discovered. It was not because they thought that possessed people deserved punishment, nor because they hoped thus to get the devils to go out of them, that the medieval generations allowed such things in their asylums, but because human nature will neglect its duties toward the ailing unless carefully superintended, and because regular attendants become hardened in their feelings sooner or later, when they serve only for pay, and the result always is the abuse of patients. In proportion to the number of patients cared for, there was much more need for restraint in those old days than at present. As a rule, during the Middle Ages prisons and asylums were few. Only the violently insane, who already had actually committed some serious crime or threatened to, were kept in the asylums. For these restraint is needed even at the present {379} time. We have learned to apply milder measures by employing many more attendants, but even that has come only in the last generation or two. The milder cases of insanity were not kept in asylums, but were allowed to wander about the country, or were cared for in their families with a devotion of which one finds no example at the present time; or if the insane person belonged to a noble family, very often the patient was kept in the house of a retainer and gently cared for. The fact that the milder cases were allowed to wander about the country might seem to be dangerous, but is not so serious as is ordinarily thought. Only a limited number of insane patients are likely to be violent, and these, as a rule, show manifestations of it early in the history of their affection. It was the frequent meeting with these harmless insane, as they were to be encountered in the many places through which he wandered professionally in England, that enabled Shakespeare to make his pictures of insane characters so true to life, that even at the present day we are able to recognize from his marvelous description exactly the form of insanity that was present. In a word, these generations of the Middle Ages builded better than they knew in this matter of the care of the mentally afflicted, as in everything else which they took up for serious consideration. They did only the most obvious things, and what they could not very well help, under the circumstances, and yet very often the solutions of grave problems which they hit upon so naturally, proved to be as efficient as, indeed sometimes practically identical with, those we have reached by much more elaborate methods. This story of the treatment of the insane in the Middle Ages {380} deserves careful study. I have given only a few suggestions for the interpretation of certain methods of action on their part, apparently very different from our ideas, yet in reality anticipating our most recent conclusions. What many people have not been able to forgive the generations of the Middle Ages, and especially the ecclesiastics of the centuries before our own, is that as educated men and leaders of the people they should have accepted the view that mental diseases may, in some of their forms at least, be due to possession by the devil or some other spiritual interference with the working of the human intellect. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, it became the custom among the educated to scoff at any possible manifestation of this kind. The interference of the spiritual world with any of man's actions came to be looked upon as absurd, except by those who still clung to old-time beliefs and thought that new fashions in opinion might very well prove almost as variable as do corresponding fads in the realm of dress or of interests. The difficulty in the matter was that the generations of the latter nineteenth century lost their faith, to a great extent, in the existence of a spiritual world, and consequently it was easy to laugh at those who had found the interference of such a world as not only possible, but actual, in a great many affairs in human life. As a matter of fact, when we realize how many utterly inexplicable phenomena the earlier centuries tried to explain this way, it is not surprising to find their explanation sometimes wrong. It is very easy, to my mind, for men of our generation to be too hard in their judgments of the men of {381} the Middle Ages with regard to the curious phenomena, psychic, spiritistic and occult, which, with all our advance in science, are still almost as obscure to the eye of the intellect as they were seven centuries ago. The medieval generations saw a great many things that they could not explain happening round them, and attributed them to spiritual agencies. We have learned since that many of these things are merely natural, and must not be considered as due to anything else than the ordinary laws of nature. We have not eliminated belief in the spiritual world, however, and there is still a large proportion of mankind who think that they see, even in the matter-of-fact world around them of the present day, many signs of interference in human affairs by agencies distinct from those of human beings and quite independent of matter. It is easy to dismiss this side of the question with a shrug of the shoulders and say that it need not be taken into account. A man who does this easily succeeds in convincing himself that there are no evidences for spiritual manifestations in our life, and that the stories with regard to them are all nonsense. It is curious, however, that anyone who investigates and does not merely dismiss at once, is very prone to come to a contrary conclusion, even though all his training and the traditions of his education are opposed to such an admission. There are many prominent scientists who have allowed themselves to be drawn into the investigation of spiritualistic manifestations so-called. Very few of them have come away from their investigations entirely convinced that there was nothing in them. Frauds they have found; sleight-of-hand impositions they have exposed; but apart from all these, there {382} is a residue of phenomena which they cannot explain and which convinces many of them of the existence and the mundane action of forces independent of matter. The men who come to these conclusions are not only the ignorant, nor the over-credulous, but frequently representative leaders in scientific thought--men who are known to be thoroughly capable of weighing evidence, prominent lawyers and judges, above all, men who are accustomed to investigation as most painstaking scientists and faithful students of nature. A few examples will illustrate this. Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, has a name in the scientific world that places him among the leaders of scientific thought. For many years he has been convinced that spiritualism contains in itself truths that deserve careful investigation, and he for one is persuaded that the neglect of investigation of this subject, on the part of recent generations, is one of the most serious mistakes, from a purely scientific standpoint, that they have made. Sir William Crookes, whose brilliant theories with regard to the fourth stage of matter, radiant matter, would seem to have quite appropriately prepared him for the proper investigation of existences even beyond the domain of the attenuated substances with which he had been so much concerned, is another of the prominent scientists of the day who confesses to a belief in the truth of spiritualistic phenomena. He made his first publication on the subject more than a quarter of a century ago. When a score of years after this he was elected as the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the most prominent scientific body in Great Britain, and, it may be said, in the {383} English-speaking world, he recurred in his Presidential address to the subject of spiritualism, and said that in the meantime he not only had not changed his mind with regard to the truth of certain spiritualistic phenomena, but had even become more convinced than he was originally. These are prominent English scientists, and Englishmen are supposed to be more conservative, less likely to be influenced by personal motives, and less prone to be led astray by imaginative influences, than their colleagues on the Continent. Besides these two whom we have mentioned, there is a third one, of quite as great prominence, Sir Oliver Lodge, who is also a convert to belief in the reality of certain spiritual manifestations, and other names might readily be mentioned. Over in France, the most prominent of living physiologists, Professor Charles Richet, who is well known for investigating work of a high order and successful original research that has made his name familiar throughout the medical world at least, is another modern scientist who cannot but think that there is something in spiritualistic manifestations. The latest convert to these notions is an even more surprising addition to such a group of witnesses to the possibility of the interference of spirits with human affairs. This is no less a person than Lombroso, the well-known writer on criminology, who has recently confessed that certain tests made by him showed beyond all doubt that there were influences at work quite independent of human powers, and showing the existence of a world apart from matter. This immaterial world evidently interpenetrates, and may interfere with things in the material world as we know it. {384} In a word, it may be said that if a man wants to keep the spiritual side of things out of his purview of life, he may do so by refusing to investigate any evidence that would demonstrate the existence of spiritual forces in the world around him. The heavy price, however, that he pays for absolute certainty and peace of mind in this matter--is peremptory refusal to investigate. If he gives himself up to investigations, he comes inevitably to the conclusion that there is something in the belief in the existence of spirits all round us, and of the possibility of their interference in the ordinary affairs of life. It is true that after he has come to this conclusion he may not be able to demonstrate it to others. His conviction of it, however, will be none the less absolute because of this. His adhesion to the new belief may seem to many people absurd. He will accept this view of his state of mind quite calmly, and apparently enjoy the compensation of finding the absurdity to be in the other point of view. It matters not how distinguished a scientist he may be, he comes out of investigation of spiritual phenomena persuaded of the existence of a spiritual world. This persuasion seems to come by some form of intuition not quite dependent on the ordinary processes of intelligence. It is as if spirit called to spirit across the abyss, from the immaterial to the material, as if somehow we obtained a conviction of the existence of spirits around us by the very sympathy of our natures and their relationship to the immaterial world, rather than by the ordinary avenues of intelligence. It is, in a word, a telepathy, the other agent in which is not material, but quite independent of matter, yet somehow is able to set up those vibrations in the ether which {385} affect brain cells, and thus bring about communications, as Sir William Crookes explains the curious phenomena in this line that occur between human beings. Such an explanation may easily be dismissed as highly imaginative and altogether theoretic. As a student of psychology now for many years, it has appealed to me, however, as the only possible hypothesis that gives any plausible explanation of the curious conversions which so inevitably result from sympathetic attempts at investigation of the possibility of spirit interference in mundane affairs. How far this persuasion of spiritual interference in ordinary human affairs has gone, will not be realized except by those who are familiar with some of the literature which has been made in the last twenty years on the subject of psychical research. Not long since, a distinguished European professor of physical science went so far as to warn people of the dangers there might be in dismissing the opinion that other intelligences than those of men could interfere for the abrogation of certain natural laws. This may be scoffed at as the height of credulity, and may be received in sceptical mood by those who refuse to look into such matters, because they know _a priori_ that they _cannot be true!_ It is hard, however, to differentiate the attitude of mind of such persons from that which Galileo deprecated so much, in that letter of complaint to Kepler, in which he said so bitterly that they refused to look through his telescope and demolished, as they thought, his observations by logical conclusions from what they knew already. It is to be remarked that it was not ecclesiastics of whom he was talking at this time, but professors of science at the University of {386} Pisa, who were quite as unsympathetic towards certain of his astronomical discoveries as were any of the ecclesiastics of his time. Alfred Russell Wallace has summed up this matter in a well-known chapter on psychic research, which he places among what he calls the failures of A Wonderful Century--the nineteenth. While personally viewing this matter from a very different standpoint to that from which it is viewed by Mr. Wallace, I cannot help but think that the position he occupies is much nearer the truth than the absolute refusal to credit stories of supra-natural or ultra-natural, if not supernatural interferences in human affairs. When Mr. Wallace has an opinion he is likely to express it very forcibly, and he has done so in this case. He does not hesitate to attribute a great many marvelous happenings to practically the same forces as the medieval people formulated for them, though they would disagree utterly in the purposes attributed to these events. Mr. Wallace says: "The still more extraordinary phenomena--veridical hallucinations, warnings, detailed predictions of future events, phantoms, voices or knockings, visible or audible to numerous individuals, bell-ringing, the playing on musical instruments, stone-throwing and various movements of solid bodies, all without human contact or any discoverable physical cause, still occur among us as they have occurred in all ages. These are now being investigated, and slowly but surely are proved to be realities, although the majority of scientific men and of writers for the press still ignore the cumulative evidence and ridicule the inquirers. These phenomena being comparatively rare, are as yet known to but a limited number of persons; but the evidence for their reality is {387} also very extensive, and it is absolutely certain that during the coming century they too will be accepted as realities by all impartial students and by the majority of educated men and women." Mr. Wallace has insisted further on the utterly unscientific position of many of those who refuse to look into the evidence for these phenomena, so plainly beyond the power of the ordinary forces of nature as we know them, or of the human intelligences in the body, that are immediately around us. He deprecates, as does Galileo, the method by which this subject has been kept from receiving its due meed of attention. He points out that it is because of intellectual intolerance that this subject has been relegated to the background of scientific attention. He even contends that a great lesson is to be learned from this neglect, and one which will help men to free themselves from that burden of overconservatism which, much more than religion or theology, has impeded the progress of knowledge and the advance of science. He says: "The great lesson to be learnt from our review of this subject is, distrust of all _a priori_ judgments as to facts; for the whole history of the progress of human knowledge, and especially of that department of knowledge now known as psychical research, renders it certain that whenever the scientific men or popular teachers of any age have denied, on _a priori_ grounds of impossibility or opposition to the 'laws of nature,' the facts observed and recorded by numerous investigators of average honesty and intelligence, these deniers have always been wrong." "Future ages will, I believe, be astonished at the vast amount of energy and ignorance displayed by so many {388} of the great men of this century in opposing unpalatable truths, and in supposing that _a priori_ arguments, accusations of imposture or insanity, or personal abuse, were the proper means of determining matters of fact and of observation in any department of human knowledge." If these hard-headed scientists, whose training has been obtained in what physical scientists themselves, at least, are fain to call the rigid school of the logic of facts, and under the severe mental discipline of the inductive method, accept on the evidence afforded them, the manifestations of the spiritual world and its influences in this as true, surely we will not condemn these men of the Middle Ages, who approached the subject in such a different temper, if they came to the same conclusion. We recognize that the modern scientist, with his trained powers of observation and his elaborate facilities for eliminating the adventitious in his experiments, is in a position to judge impartially with regard to such subjects. More than this, his life has usually been spent in making such syntheses of evidence for and against the significance of facts, as should enable him to be a proper judge. If, then, whenever he seriously devotes himself to such an investigation, he comes almost inevitably to the conclusion that spirits do intervene in our affairs, yet we refuse to believe with him, it is hard to know on what principle we shall accept his scientific conclusions. If we cannot bring ourselves to think his conclusions are of equal value in both cases, we place ourselves in a strange dilemma. The medieval scholars were prone, because of the faith to which they had given their whole-hearted adhesion, to see spiritual powers at work in many things. In this they were {389} sometimes sadly mistaken, but not so much mistaken as certain generations of the nineteenth century, who absolutely refused to accept any possibility of spiritual interference in things mundane. Both the extremes are mistakes. It is manifestly more of a mistake, however, to deny spiritual influence entirely (I talk now from the standpoint of the scientist and not the believer), than to accept so much of spiritual interference as the medieval generations permitted themselves to be convinced of. This whole subject is one that cannot be dismissed as the conclusion of a bit of vapid superficial argumentation. It is one of the great mysteries of life and of the significance of man in the world. The medieval peoples did much harm by accepting the position, that many persons suffering from ordinary nervous and mental diseases as we now know them were really possessed by the devil. The treatment accorded these supposedly possessed (for the moment we lay aside the question as to the possibility of the reality of diabolic possession) was not any worse than has frequently been accorded to sufferers from mental and nervous disease in presumably much more intelligent times, either because of fear of them, or neglect on account of the absence of a sufficient number of keepers, or because of curious theories of medical science. Mankind, it is hoped, is progressing, but the amount of progress from generation to generation is not enough, that any succeeding age should criticise severely the well-intentioned though mistaken efforts of their predecessors to meet, according to the best of their ability, problems that are as deep as those involved in nervous and mental diseases. {390} APPENDIX. "The truth seeker has had to struggle for his physical life. Each acquisition of truth has been resisted by the full force of the inertia of satisfaction with preconceived ideas. Just as a new thought comes to us with a shock which rouses the resistance of our personal conservatism, so a new idea is met and repelled by the conservatism of society." (_Jordan, The Struggle for Realities, in Footsteps of Evolution._) I. OPPOSITION TO SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. The main purpose of this book has not been accomplished unless it has been shown that the Church, the Popes, and ecclesiastics generally during the Middle Ages, and especially during the three centuries before the reformation so-called, far from opposing scientific advance or investigation, were constantly in the position of encouraging and fostering science, even if the meaning of that term be limited, as it has come to be in modern times, to the physical or natural sciences. The Popes and the great ecclesiastics were patrons of learning of every kind, and that they not only encouraged, but aided very materially the institutions of learning in which the problems of science with which we are now engaged, were discussed in very much the same way as we discuss them at the present time, is evident from the story of the foundation of the universities. It will be a source of wonder to many people how, with all this as a matter of simple educational history, the traditions with regard to the supposed opposition of the Church and the Popes to science have grown up. This is not so difficult to understand, however, as might be thought, {391} and a few words of explanation will serve to show that there was opposition to science, but that this was not due to religious intolerance in any proper sense of the term. Those who give the religious element a prominent place in this, forget how much natural opposition to the introduction of new ideas there is in men's minds, quite apart from their religious convictions. Nearly two centuries ago Dean Swift said, in his own bitter frame of mind of course, but still with an approach to truth that has made the expression one of the oft-quoted passages from his works: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign--that all the asses are in confederacy against him." I suppose the Dean himself would have been the first to insist that some of his colleagues in the ministry eminently deserved the opprobrious substantive epithet he employed. It would be too much to expect that there should not be as many foolish ones among the clergy of the olden times as in any other of the professions. Occasionally one of these foolish clergymen rose up in opposition to science. Whenever he did, especially if he belonged to the class mentioned by Dean Swift, then he surely made his religion the principal reason for his opposition. That gave an added prestige in his mind and in the minds of those who accepted his teachings, to whatever he had to say on the subject. This no more involved the Church itself, nor ecclesiastics generally, in the condemnation of the particular scientific doctrine, than does the frequent opposition of peculiar members of medical societies to real progress in medicine, involve the organization to which they belong in the old-fogyism which would prevent advance. It must not be forgotten that small minds are always prone to find very respectable reasons for their opposition to something that has been hitherto unknown to them. While novelty is supposed to attract, and does when it comes in a form not too unfamiliar, and when men are not asked to give up old convictions for its sake, real newness always evokes opposition. Washington Allston once said very well with regard to this, that "An original mind is rarely understood until it has been reflected from some half-dozen congenial with it, so {392} averse are men to admitting the true in an unusual form; whilst any novelty, however fantastic, however false, is greedily swallowed." This principle will be of great service in making clear the real significance of many incidents in the history of science, in which not only intelligent men without special scientific training have been found in opposition to real scientific progress, but in which men having had the advantage of long experience in scientific investigation, having themselves sometimes as younger men done original work of value, have yet placed themselves squarely in opposition to scientific advance that eventually proved of the highest possible significance. Scientific men have, as a rule, been quite ready at all times to argue that an announced new discovery could not be true, that indeed it was absurd to think of it. The word nonsense is perhaps oftener on scientists' tongues than on any others'. It is not because he is deliberately opposed to scientific progress that this is the case with the scientist, but that he is so convinced of the ultimate significance of many things that he knows already, that he cannot readily bring himself to admit the idea of progress along lines with which he is familiar. To do so, indeed, supposes that he himself has been lacking in perspicacity and in powers of observation. The fact that it is usually a young man who makes the new observation, not infrequently a young man who does not know the great body of science that the older acknowledged scientist does, only adds to the readiness with which the senior is apt to consider the new proposition as absurd. Ecclesiastics have done this same thing, but not nearly so frequently as scientists. There was a time when the majority of educated men belonged to the clerical order, and then it seemed as though it must be religion that prompted some of the conservatism which led them to oppose what proved eventually to be new truths. It was not, however, but only human nature asserting itself in spite of education. Prof. David Starr Jordan in reviewing briefly the history of the Struggle for Realities in one of the essays in his Foot-notes to Evolution, [Footnote 45] has summed up the genuine {393} significance of this supposed opposition of science and theology in some striking paragraphs. To my mind, he places the whole subject on its proper foundation, and properly disposes of the supposed conflict between religion or theology and science. He says:-- [Footnote 45: N. Y., Appleton, 1902.] "But as I have said before, the real essence of conservatism lies not in theology. The whole conflict is a struggle in the mind of man. It exists in human psychology before it is wrought out in human history. It is the struggle of realities against tradition and suggestion. The progress of civilization would still have been just such a struggle had religion or theology or churches or worship never existed. But such a conception is impossible, because the need for all these is part of the actual development of man. Intolerance and prejudice is, moreover, not confined to religious organizations. The same spirit that burned Michael Servetus and Giordano Bruno for the heresies of science, led the atheist "liberal" mob of Paris to send to the scaffold the great chemist Lavoisier, with the sneer that "the republic has no need of savants." The same spirit that leads the orthodox Gladstone to reject natural selection because it "relieves God of the labor of creation," causes the heterodox Haecekel to condemn Weismann's theories of heredity, not because they are at variance with facts, but because such questions are settled once for all by the great philosophic dictum (his own) "of monism." This very natural ultra-conservative mood of scientists is well illustrated by a passage from Galileo's life, in which he himself describes in a letter to Kepler, the great mathematician and astronomer of his time, the reception that his new invention, the telescope, met with from distinguished men of science, their colleagues of the moment. The Italian astronomer encountered the well-known tendency of men to reason from what they already know, that certain advances in knowledge are impossible or absurd. The favorite expression is that the thoughts suggested by some new discovery are illogical. Men have always reasoned thus, and apparently they always will. Knowledge that they learn before they are forty constitutes, consciously or unconsciously, for them the possible sum of human knowledge, and {394} they can only think that apparent progress that contradicts their previous convictions must be founded on false premises or faulty observation. We cannot help sympathizing with Galileo, though it must be a consolation for others who are struggling to have ideas of theirs adopted, to read the words addressed to his great contemporary and sympathetic fellow worker by the Italian astronomer. "What wilt thou say," he writes, "of the first teachers at the University at Padua, who when I offered to them the opportunity, would look neither at the planets nor the moon through the telescope? This sort of men look on philosophy as a book like the AEneid or Odyssey, and believe the truth is to be sought not in the world of nature, but only in comparison of texts. How wouldst thou have laughed, when at Pisa the leading Professor of the University there endeavored, in the presence of the Grand Duke, to tear away the new planets from Heaven with logical arguments, like magical exorcisms!" This gives the key to the real explanation of the Galileo incident better than would a whole volume of explanation of it. It is now realized that very few of those who have been most ready to quote the example of Galileo's condemnation as an argument for Church intolerance in the matter of science, know anything at all about the details of his case. The bitter intolerance of many men of science of his time, including even that supposed apostle of the experimental method--Bacon--to the Copernican system, is an important but ignored phase of the case of Galileo, as it came before the Roman inquisition. The peculiar position occupied by Galileo caused Prof. Huxley, writing to Prof. St. George Mivart, November 12th, 1885, to say that, after looking into the case of Galileo when he was in Italy, he had arrived at the conclusion "that the Pope and the College of Cardinals had rather the best of it." In our own time, M. Bertrand, the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, declared that "the great lesson for those who would wish to oppose reason with violence was clearly to be read in Galileo's story, and the scandal of his condemnation was learned _without any profound sorrow to Galileo himself; and his long life, considered as a whole, must be looked upon as the most serene and enviable in the history of science."_ {395} Certain historical incidents in which Church authorities and ecclesiastics assumed an attitude distinctly opposed to true scientific advance can be found. They are, however, ever so much rarer than is thought. Let those who accept unquestioningly the supposed opposition of Church to science, count over for themselves the definite cases of this in history which they know for certain, and they will be surprised, as a rule, on what slight grounds their persuasion in this matter is founded. We have detailed the policy of the Church with regard to education and science. Such incidents of opposition as can be gathered were breaks away from that policy. They were not due so much to faith or theology, though these were often made excuses for them, as to the natural opposition to novelty, so common in man. With regard to this matter, as with regard to opposition in general to science, President Jordan has once more set forth the realities of the situation so as to make it clear that, even when it was the dogmatic spirit that was behind the refusal to accept certain scientific truths, not only was there the best of intentions in this in all cases, but in nearly all, the results were such as to benefit mankind, and even to help rather than hinder science. He says: "The desire of dogmatism to control action is in its essence the desire to save men from their own folly. The great historic churches have existed 'for the benefit of the weak and the poor.' By their observances they have stimulated the spirit of devotion. By their commands they have protected men from unwise action. By their condemnations they have saved men from the grasp of vice and crime." The ultra-conservatism which is the real factor at fault in these cases exists in all men beyond middle life. It is a wise provision of nature very probably to prevent the young and headstrong from running away with the race. We would be plunged into all sorts of curious experimental conditions only for the fact that those beyond middle life act as a brake on the initiative of their juniors. While it does some harm, there is no doubt of its supremely beneficial effects in the long run. {396} For one announced great discovery that proves its actual right to the title, there are at least a hundred that are proclaimed with loud blare of trumpet, yet prove nonentities. This sometimes becomes a very troublesome brake on progress, however. Some three hundred years ago, Harvey said with regard to his epoch-making discovery of the circulation of the blood, that he did not expect any of his contemporaries who was over forty years of age to accept it. His premonition in this matter was fully confirmed by the event. Darwin, I believe, once remarked that he did not think that men of his own age in his own generation would accept his theory, and most of them did not. The opposition which, as a consequence of this natural conservatism, is so constantly ready to manifest itself, is as human as the envy which, much as we may bewail the fact, accompanies all individual success. A history of this phase of scientific progress is of itself very interesting and of great psychological importance. A short sketch of it will serve the purpose of placing the opposition of churchmen to science in the category where it belongs, and will make this subject appear in its true light of a very natural and universal psychic manifestation, not a religious or supposed theological phenomenon. As a matter of fact, it is comparatively easy to show that there are many more incidents of opposition to the progress of science on the part of scientists because of their conservatism, than on the part of ecclesiastics because of religion or theology. There has scarcely ever been a really important advance made in science, a really new discovery announced, which has not met with such bitter opposition on the part of the men who were most prominent in the science concerned at the time, as to make things very uncomfortable for the discoverer, and on many occasions this opposition has taken on the character of real persecution. It will be at once said that this is very different from the formal condemnation by organized bodies of truths in science, with all that this implies of ostracization and of discouragement on the part of scientific workers. The history of science is full of stories showing that formal scientific bodies refused to consider seriously what were {397} really great discoveries, or that scientific editors not only rejected papers representing valuable original research, but even did not hesitate to discredit their authors in such a way as to make it extremely difficult for them to pursue their studies in science successfully, and still more to prevent them from securing such positions as would enable them to carry on their scientific investigations under favorable circumstances. In a word, persecution was carried out just as far as possible, and the result was quite as much discouragement as if the opposition were more formal. It is not hard to show, on the other hand, that while formal opposition by Church authorities was very rare, rejection by medical and scientific societies and by the scientific authorities for the moment of new discoveries was so common, as to be almost the rule in the history of progress in science. This is so different from what is ordinarily supposed to be the calm course of scientific evolution, that it will need a series of illustrative cases to support it. In recent years, however, the cultivation of the history of science has been more ardent than in the past, and the result has been that many more know of this curious anomaly and paradox in scientific history than was the case a few years ago, and it is comparatively easy to obtain the material to demonstrate it. One of the most striking instances is that of Harvey. Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, at a time and under circumstances that would surely lead us to expect its immediate acceptance and the hailing of him as a great original thinker in science. He first expounded it to his class, very probably in 1616, which will be remembered as the year of Shakespeare's death. The glory of the great Elizabethan era in England was not yet passed. Men's minds had been opened to great advances in every department of thought during the preceding century, by the Renaissance movement and the New Learning in England. Probably no greater group of original thinkers has ever existed than were alive in England during the preceding twenty-five years. Four years after Harvey had sufficiently elaborated his ideas on the circulation to present them to his class, and the very year after he wrote his treatise on the {398} subject, though he dared not publish it as yet, Lord Bacon published his Novum Organum, in which he advocated the use in science of the very principles of induction on which Harvey's great discovery was founded. What happened is interesting for our purpose. Harvey was so well acquainted with the intolerant temper of men as regards new discoveries, that he hesitated to publish his book on the subject until men had been prepared for it, by his ideas gradually filtering out among the medical profession through the members of his class. He waited nearly fifteen years after his first formal lesson on the subject, before he dared to commit it to print. Shakespeare had made Brutus say to Portia: "You are my true and honorable wife, As dear to me as are the ruddy drops That visit my sad heart;" but men were not yet ready to accept the great principle of the blood movement. There seems to be good authority for saying that Harvey had more than suspected his great truth for twenty-five years before he dared print it. He realized that it would surely meet with opposition and would make serious unpleasantness between him and his friends. He was not deceived in anticipation. Many of his friends fell away from him, and according to tradition, he lost more than half of his consulting practice, because physicians could not and would not believe that a man who evolved such a strange idea as the constant movement of the blood all over the body, from heart to surface and back, could possibly be in his right mind, and, above all, be a suitable person to consult with in difficult cases. Harvey's case is a lively picture of what happened to Vesalius the century before in Italy, which we have already discussed at length in the chapter on the Golden Age of Anatomy. President White insists that this persecution was due to ecclesiastical opposition to dissection, but of this there is not a trace to be found. Dissection was carried on with perfect freedom at all of the Italian universities, though they were all under ecclesiastical influence, and in none was there more freedom than in the Papal University of Rome, at the {399} very time when Vesalius was doing his work in Northern Italy. At this time, too, Bologna was famous for its work in anatomy. Berengar of Carpi did a very large number of dissections, though Bologna was at the moment a Papal city and the University was directly under the Popes. It is clear, then, that the opposition to Vesalius arose entirely from the conservatism of fellow scientists in medicine, who thought that what had been taught for many hundreds of years in the universities, and had been accepted by men quite as good as Vesalius or any of their generation for over a thousand years, must surely be nearer absolute truth than what this young investigator wished them to accept. It is scarcely to be wondered that they resented, as men always do, what must have seemed the intrusive rashness of this young medical student, who was not yet thirty when he began to claim the right to teach his teachers, and who wanted to tell them that the medical world had all been wrong not only for many years, but for many centuries, and that he had been born to set them right. This is, after all, the attitude of mind which naturally develops in these cases, and it is no wonder that the old men use whatever means they have in their power to prevent rash young men from leading, as they think, the world astray. The cases of Harvey and Vesalius are by no means exceptional, nor was the opposition limited to England and Italy, but examples of it may be found in every country in Europe. Nor was it only with regard to anatomy and anatomical discoveries and problems that such opposition manifested itself. In this matter the story of Servetus is very interesting. He made some new discoveries in anatomy, but these had nothing to do with the bitter opposition which some of his ideas encountered in Paris, quite apart from any question of theology or religion. We do not know just when he discovered the circulation in the lungs, which he described so clearly in the volume on the renewal of Christianity, for which he was burned at Geneva by Calvin. While at the University of Paris, he had been mainly occupied with the department of therapeutics rather than of anatomy or physiology. He had suggested especially certain changes in the mode of {400} giving drugs. He had much to do with the general introduction of syrups to replace more nauseating preparations of medicine. He was probably the first one to realize that elegant prescribing, that is, the choice of drugs and their combination in such a way as to make them less unpleasant to the patient, was a consummation eminently to be desired in medical practice. His ideas on this subject met, as novelties always do, no matter how good in themselves, with the most rancorous opposition. Factions were formed in the University. There were riots in the streets. Students were wounded in the fights which took place. Some even were killed apparently. All this over the question whether medicine as given to patients should be pleasant or unpleasant. As we have had examples from England, France and Italy, we may quote one from the Netherlands. We do so only to emphasize the fact that everywhere, no matter what the character of the people, nor the religion which they happened to profess, their conservatism set them in opposition at once to novelties in science. England was Protestant in Harvey's time, and the Netherlands mainly so at the period of which we are about to speak. When Stensen, or as he is more familiarly known by his Latin name, Steno, discovered and announced the fact that the heart is a muscle, he was looked upon with very much the same suspicion as to his sanity as Harvey, a half-century before, when the great English physiologist proclaimed the circulation of the blood, and such suspicions were rather openly expressed by those who were too conservative to accept this new teaching. The heart had been considered, not figuratively as we now speak, but seriously and very literally, as the seat of the emotions. Over and over again, all men had had the experience that in times of emotional stress the heart was disturbed. They could feel their emotions welling up from their hearts, therefore there was no doubt in their minds of the truth of the old teaching. Into the midst of this perfectly harmonious concord of scientific opinion, without a dissenting voice anywhere in the world, comes a young man not yet twenty-five, who almost sacrilegiously declares that the heart is merely a muscle and not a secreter of emotions. Fortunately for him, he was of gentler disposition than most of the other {401} men who have had the independence of mind to make discoveries, and so no very bitter opposition was aroused against him. He was considered too harmless to be taken very seriously, but at least when the announcement first came, most of those who knew anything about medicine, or thought they did, and this is much more serious in these cases, recognized that young Stensen had somehow allowed himself to be led astray into a very foolish notion, and one that could only emanate from a mind not quite capable of realizing truth as it was; and they did not hesitate to say so. After this Stensen found the Netherlands quite an unsympathetic place for his studies, and so moved down into Italy, where he could find more freedom of thought for research and more appreciation, and continue his original investigations with less scorn for his new discoveries. Here he continued to hit upon original ideas that were likely to make things quite uncomfortable for him, not because of religious intolerance, but because of the more or less hide-bound conservatism that always characterizes mediocre minds. Far from coming into disrespect here, however, he acquired many and very close friends. He laid the foundation of modern geology and wrote a little book that is a very wonderful anticipation of supposedly nineteenth century ideas in that science. He had come down into Italy a Protestant, having been raised in that religion in his native Denmark. He found so much of sympathy with every phase of intellectual activity among the ecclesiastics in Italy, that he not only became a convert to Catholicity, but after a time a Catholic priest. His reputation spread to Rome, and the Pope not only sent for and received this innovator in anatomy and the founder of geology very courteously, but treated him with every mark of appreciation, and this within a half a century after Galileo's condemnation. Stensen eventually went back to Northern Europe as a bishop, in the hope of being able to convert to Catholicity those among the Teutonic nations who had been led away during the religious revolt. It might be thought that such examples of persecution were of course rather frequent in the distant centuries, and must not be taken too seriously, since they come in times before men had learned to respect one another's {402} opinions and to realize that the assertions of an authority in science are only to be considered as worth the reasons he advances for them. Most people will be quite ready to congratulate themselves on the fact that our modern time has outlived this unfortunate state of mind, which served to hamper scientific investigation. They will probably even be quite self-complacent over the supposed fact that, ever since the study of natural science was taken up seriously at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, this unfortunate temper has disappeared. Those who think so, however, know nothing of the history of nineteenth century science, and especially not of nineteenth century medicine. Jenner's great discovery of the value of vaccination against small-pox came just before the nineteenth century opened. It met with the bitterest kind of opposition. This was especially the case in England. There is a doubt whether Germany did not eventually do more to bring about the recognition of the immense value of Jenner's discovery than his native England. Anyone who has read Jenner's life knows how much he was made to suffer from the bitterness of opponents' expressions with regard to him. [Footnote 46] It is true that he was eventually rewarded quite liberally, and that honors were showered upon him, but only after a preliminary series of trials that must have made him regret, if possible, that he had ever devoted himself to the propaganda of a great truth. Nor did the dawn of the vaunted nineteenth century bring in a better state of affairs in this regard. [Footnote 46: See my sketch of his life in Makers of Modern Medicine. Fordham University Press, N. Y., 1907.] It might perhaps be thought that this almost constant tendency to oppose new developments in science was not recognized for what it really is, the ultra-conservatism of human nature as men grow older, until comparatively modern times. Anyone who knows some of the intimate details of the history of medicine is sure to be better informed in this matter, and to be well aware that, like Harvey, most discoverers in medicine anticipated this opposition. Usually they have had no experience of it before, but they realize from the way men {403} think around them, and very probably also from their own prompt reaction of opposition to whatever is novel, that men are sure to be ready to oppose the introduction of whatever is new. One of the quietest, gentlest and most lovable characters among the geniuses in medicine was Auenbrugger, who, in Vienna, about 150 years ago, discovered the method of percussion of the chest, which is so helpful in the diagnosis of chest diseases. He perfected his discovery when he was a young man of about 25. He did not publish it until he was nearly 40 years of age. Like Harvey, he waited nearly a score of years before giving it to the world. The reason for the delay is given in the preface in the following words: "I foresee very well that I shall encounter no little opposition to my views, and I put my invention before the public with that anticipation. _I realize, however, that envy and blame and even hatred and calumny have never failed to come to men who have illuminated art or science by their discoveries or have added to their perfection. I expect to have to submit to this danger myself,_ but I think that no one will be able to call any of my observations to account. I have written only what I have myself learned by personal observation over and over again, and what my senses have taught me during long hours of work and toil. I have never permitted myself to add or subtract anything from my observations because of the seductions of preconceived theory." Nearly fifty years after the publication of Auenbrugger's book, Laennec completed the development of the diagnostic methods necessary for the differentiation of chest diseases by the discovery of auscultation. His was the greatest work ever done in clinical medicine. The solution of the meaning of the multitude of sounds that can be heard in the human chest required a genius for observation, and almost infinite patience. Laennec spent twelve years at the task, and then published his books on the subject. Practically nothing of importance has been added to his methods and results in the more than three-quarters of a century of active attention that has been given to medicine since that time. Laennec did not expect that his discovery would be taken up by his contemporaries. He even refers to the cool reception which had been given to {404} Auenbrugger's work, and deprecates the fact that a man who had done so much for mankind should have met with such neglect and lack of appreciation, and even the contempt of his colleagues in medicine, who could not bring themselves to think that his method of "drumming on the chest," as they called it, could ever mean much for the recognition of disease. [Footnote 47] [Footnote 47: Makers of Modern Medicine, by James J. Walsh, M.D., Ph.D., LL.D. Fordham University Press, New York, 1907.] In the preface of his book Laennec, like Auenbrugger, prophesies that his work will not receive the attention that it deserves, and attempts to lessen the effect of the derision that will be meted out to it by calmly stating his expectation of it. It is curious that both of these men, one of them a German and the other a Frenchman, one of them a rather stolid Styrian, the other of the lively Celtic nature of the Bretons, should in turn have realized, at a distance of a thousand miles and more than half a century from one another, just what the attitude of the men of science was to be toward their discoveries, even though those are of a kind that were eventually to be hailed as among the most important steps in medical progress ever made. Certain words of Laennec's preface are an echo of Auenbrugger's expressions. He said: "For our generation is not inquisitive as to what is being accomplished by its sons. Claims of new discoveries made by contemporaries are likely, for the most part, to be met by smiles and mocking remarks. It is always easier to condemn than to test by actual experience." Many people are accustomed to think that, after the spirit that came into the world with the French Revolution, men were less prone to listen to authority or cling to old-fashioned notions, and that liberalism of mind is to be found written large on many pages of nineteenth century scientific history. One of the great scientists of the first part of the last century was Dr. Thomas Young, to whom we owe so much with regard to the theory of light waves and the existence of the ether to carry them. Men absolutely refused to listen to this idea at all at the beginning, though now it is the {405} groundwork of most of our thinking and of nearly all of our mathematical demonstrations with regard to the movement of light. They not only refused, however, but they expressed their scorn of the man who invented such a cumbrous theory. Dr. George M. Gould, in one of the volumes of his Biographic Clinics, has told the story of Dr. Young's career, and I prefer to present it in his words rather than my own. "A practicing physician, Young, as early as 1801, hit upon the true theory of the luminiferous ether, and of light and color, which nearly a century before had been discovered by Robert Hooke. But his scientific contemporaries would not see it, and to avoid persecution and deprivation of practice, Dr. Young was compelled to publish his grand discoveries and papers anonymously. Published finally by the Royal Society (one can imagine the editor's smile of superior wisdom over such trash), they were as utterly ignored as were those of Mitchell, Thompson and Martin as to eyestrain, two or three generations later. Arago finally championed Dr. Young's theory in the French Academy, but the leaders, LaPlace, Poissin, Biot, etc., denounced and conquered, and not until 1823 would the Academy allow the publication of Fresnel's papers on the subject; in about twenty-five years the silencers were themselves silenced. But Young had been silenced too; his disgust was so great that he resigned from the Royal Society, and devoted himself to his poor medical practice and to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics." (In which, by the way, as might be expected I suppose, he made a distinguished name for himself.) Many another important medical discoverer in the nineteenth century found the truth of Auenbrugger's and Laennec's expressions, and met the fate of Jenner and Young. Next to vaccination for small-pox, probably the most important advance in nineteenth century medicine was the discovery of the cause of puerperal fever, and the consequent diminution of the death-rate from that very fatal disease. At one time in the nineteenth century, it was much more dangerous for a woman to have a child in a lying-in hospital in Europe than to go through an attack of typhoid fever. The death-rate was at least 10 per cent. When it was {406} reduced to five per cent, the hospital authorities felt quite self-complacent about it. Shortly after the beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, there began to come glimmerings of the real cause of the affection. It was not due to something from within the patient, but was caused by a _materies morbi_ introduced from without. Usually the physician in attendance was responsible for the introduction of it. He came to these patients after contact with septic cases of various kinds improperly cleansed. The consequence was that he infected them, and puerperal fever was contracted. It would seem as though the medical profession would be very ready and willing to test any such simple explanation of the origin of a serious disease, and if possible secure its diminution. On the contrary, the old men proved to be so wedded to the notion that the physician could not possibly be the cause of this serious condition, that they were very bitter in their denunciation of those who tried to introduce the new idea. One distinguished old professor of midwifery declared very superciliously that, of course, it was a very charming thing for a young poet to insist on the notion that these serious diseases were not associated necessarily with the beautiful function of maternity itself, but were extraneous factors quite apart from it; but there was no doubt, he declared, that the affection came from within, all the same, and that the youthful poet's idea was only a pleasant fiction. The poet in the case was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and, needless to say now, though he was laboring under the heinous crime of being a young man, and did indulge in occasional poetry, he was entirely in the right, and the distinguished old professor entirely in the wrong. No little denunciation was heaped upon the devoted head of Holmes, however, for his strenuous humanitarian work with regard to this subject. It cost Holmes some of his medical friends and not a little practice for some time. Even in America, then the land of the free, there was a strong conservatism that made the introduction of new ideas a very difficult and almost a dangerous thing. The man who worked out the same idea to a practical {407} effect in Europe met with even more determined opposition than did our own Dr. Holmes. I refer, of course, to Semmelweiss, who, while teaching obstetrics in Vienna, realized that it was the students and doctors engaged in pathological work at the same time that they were taking out their courses in obstetrics, who caused the havoc among the patients in his (obstetrical) department in the hospital. The death-rate in the hands of these obstetrical attendants, who came directly to the lying-in department from their work in pathology, was sometimes as high as one in five. Semmelweiss insisted that this state of affairs must cease, and that while the students were doing the pathological work they must not be allowed to attend obstetrical cases. This at once raised a storm of opposition in the university. Poor Semmelweiss lost his position as a consequence of it. In the midst of the rancorous discussion that followed, Semmelweiss lost his reason also for a time, and had to be cared for in an insane asylum. It is well recognized that his beneficent discovery was for him the cause of many years of unhappiness. Nor must it be thought that it is only with regard to medical discoveries that such opposition--bitter, personal, rancorous and persecutory--can be aroused. While it might be thought that the great minds in the ordinary natural sciences would have no reason for the personal element which more or less necessarily enters into medical discussion because men had been applying for gain the notions that now are proved to be incorrect, and their reputations have been made on such applications, to think that all was placid and quiet in the physical sciences would be a serious mistake. Long ago Virgil asked in a famous line, "Is it possible that there can be such great wrath in divine minds?"--"_tantaene animae celestibus irae_"--and we might be tempted to ask, can there be such foolish intolerance on the part of scientific teachers? but the answer would be the same in each case. Virgil found that the gods were very human in this respect, and anyone who knows the history of science knows the scientists are like the pagan dieties, when their conservative spirit is aroused, and when they are up in arms, as they fondly think, to protect their beloved science from foolish innovators. {408} A typical example of the sort of opposition which a modern discoverer in science meets with is to be found in the life of Ohm, after whom, because of his discovery of the law of electrical resistance, the unit of resistance is called. When he made his discovery Ohm was working in the Gymnasium at Cologne. The leading physicists of the day could not bring themselves to believe that this comparatively young man--he was scarcely forty at the time--could have made a discovery that went far beyond their knowledge. His paper on the subject was discussed rather coldly and without any recognition of the far-reaching significance of the work that he had accomplished. A distinguished representative of the University of Berlin criticised it severely. As the law was advanced on mathematical as well as experimental grounds, the opinion of the university authorities at Berlin was looked upon as extremely important, since at the time mathematics was the _forte_ there. The minister of education took his cue from the authorities at Berlin. Ohm and his friends urged his appointment to a university position. This was not only refused, but was rejected in such terms that Ohm offered his resignation as a teacher. His resignation was accepted with regrets by the ministry, but with a distinct expression that Ohm must not expect other than a gymnasium position. The consequence of this misunderstanding was that other teaching institutions in Germany would not give him a place on their staff, because of the danger of misunderstanding with the ministry of education. Ohm had to accept a private tutorship in mathematics in Berlin and a few hours of teaching in a military school, for which he was paid three hundred thalers a year. This would be something over $200 in our money, though money was worth, in buying power, probably two or three times as much as it is at the present time. Six precious years of Ohm's life, at the very acme of his powers as an investigator, were thus spent away from the larger educational institutions and their opportunities for research, because men would not accept the great discovery that he had made, and could not be brought to understand that a genius might come along to revolutionize all their thinking, though he did his work from an obscure position, and practically attracted no attention {409} before he found this wonderful clue to the maze of electrical science, which meant so much for the elucidation of difficulties hitherto insoluble. Always men find some excuse other than their own unwillingness to confess that they were wrong. It is to this that they object, and not the acceptance of the new truth. In the course of writing the biographies of the Makers of Modern Medicine, published last year, and the Makers of Electricity, which is now preparing for the press, one fact proved to be very striking. It is that discoverers of really great truths are practically always what we would call young men, and what older men are apt to think of as scarcely more than mere boys. Such men as Morgagni, the Father of Pathology; Laennec, the Father of Pulmonary Diagnosis; Stokes, who taught us so much about the lungs; and Corrigan, who laid the foundation of exact knowledge in heart diseases,--were under twenty-five when they made their primal discovery, and some of them scarcely more than twenty. Vesalius published his great work on anatomy when he was not yet thirty, and Stensen did his best work under twenty-five. When such men attempt to teach their elders, of course they are properly put in their places by their elders, and this often includes a good deal of bitter satire and discouragement. It is the eternal conflict between youth and age that constitutes the main reason for opposition to progress in any form of knowledge, for youth will be progressive and age will be conservative. Unfortunately age often dissembles the reasons for its opposition even to itself, and religion and common sense and supposedly established principles of science are all appealed to as contradicted by the new doctrine introduced by young men, the truth of which their elders cannot see. Nor must it be thought that the second half of the nineteenth century was free from this tendency to persecute those who made advances in medicine. There is probably no form of treatment which, in the minds of those who know most about the disease, that has done more to save awful suffering in mankind than the Pasteur treatment for rabies. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the introduction of that treatment will not be likely to forget how much of pain {410} and suffering the discovery and introduction of it cost its author. Nothing too bitter could be said by the medical profession of Germany for many years after the treatment was first broached. One of the most distinguished of German medical discoverers in the nineteenth century said, in a very climax of satire, "that the distinguished Frenchman deserved to be well known as one who treated diseases of which he knew nothing by remedies of which he knew less." His good faith was impugned, his statistics scorned, his results laughed at, even his friends hesitated to say anything on the subject. Those who were close to Pasteur know that he suffered, for his nature was of the most sensitive, veritable torment because of this bitter opposition, which at one time, because his French colleagues also were sceptical of his treatment, threatened to impair the usefulness of our greatest discoverer in nineteenth century medicine and leave him without that support which would enable him to go on with his precious investigation. The more recent furore against antitoxin is still in many persons' minds. Physicians who used it, and in whose cases serious results took place, not the consequence of the antitoxin, but the consequence of factors of the disease over which they had no control, sometimes suffered seriously in their practice. All forms of opposition were aroused against it. Even at the present time one still hears of the crime, as some do not hesitate to call it, of injecting the serum of a diseased animal into the veins of the human being, and above all a little child. There are men (intelligent men!) who do not stop short of tracing all sorts of disease incidents that happen after such an injection, even many years later, to the evil effects of the horse serum employed. Such people are exercising that superstitious fanatic faculty which at all times has caused the obstinately conservative to seek and find the most serious objections to any new doctrine, careless of the consequences that they might bring on the discoverer or the benefit they might prevent for the mass of humanity. Originally vaccination was opposed by certain clergymen on the grounds of theological objection to its use. At the present time most of such objection has ceased, {411} It is still clergymen, however, who are the most prominent among the anti-vaccinationists, though now they usually find biological and pathological, instead of theological reasons. They proclaim it a crime against nature, from the biological standpoint, that the disease of an animal should be conveyed to man, even for protective purposes. At the present time one can find just as bitter objections to vaccination in anti-vaccination journals as when the subject was first brought under discussion. Men must find some reason for their opposition, and they take the weapon that is handiest and that they are able to use with best effect. In an era when theological ideas were dominant, theology was ready at hand for this purpose, but any other ology will do just as well, and the history of science, even in the present day, will show that always some ology, regardless of human feelings, is used quite as ruthlessly and as cruelly as in the olden days. There are tortures of spirit that are worse than prison or even fire. When we recall how few examples there are of opposition to science on the part of ecclesiastics, and how most of these prove on careful examination to be due to misunderstandings rather than to actual desire to prevent the development of science, the stories of the way in which discoveries in science were received in more modern times become a striking lesson that makes us appreciate the broad-mindedness and liberal policy of ecclesiastical educators in the olden time. They were evidently much more ready to accept novel ideas, and much less prone to set themselves up in opposition to them, than the educational authorities of more modern times. This is the phase of the history of education in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that deserves the most careful study, and that should make modern educators feel proud of their kinship with these old founders and patrons in education, who at the same time furnish an example of liberality of mind that it would be very beneficial to have in our modern supposedly free universities. For while we are prone to be proud of our academic freedom, we have had more than one example in recent times of how dangerous it is for a man, even though he may be recognized as an authority in his department, {412} to treat certain economic questions from a standpoint that is not favored by the rest of the faculty, or by the Board of Governors, or, above all, by certain munificent patrons of the particular educational institution. Much has been said about religious educational institutions, about the middle of the nineteenth century, so hampering the work of men in the physical sciences, especially with regard to problems in geology and evolution, as to nullify progress. Just this same thing, however, is true with regard to many economic questions, because of the attitude of educational interests with regard to free trade and protection, single tax, and socialism and the like. No professor of science at a religious institution ever felt himself more in the grip of old-fashioned notions than do certain professors in departments of finance and sociology with regard to problems that are now of the most profound interest. Men have changed the reason for their conservatism, but the conservatism itself remains, and apparently always will remain. This is what must be realized when the stories of ecclesiastical opposition to progress are told. {413} APPENDIX II. Latin text of the Papal bulls and decrees which are given in English in the body of this book. These documents are taken from Tomassetti's Bullarium, except the decree of John XXII. with regard to alchemies, which is taken from the Corpus Juris Canonici, Tome II., Lyons, 1779. I. Bull of Pope Boniface VIII. with regard to burials, which is supposed to have been misconstrued into a prohibition of dissection. De Sepulturis, Bonifacius VIII. Corpora defunctorum exenternantes, et ea immaniter decoquentes, ut ossa a carnibus separata ferant sepelienda in terram suam, ipso facto sunt excommunicati. Cap. I. Detestandae feritatis abusum, quem ex quodam more (Alias, _modo_) horribili nonnulli fideles improvide prosequuntur, nos piae intentionis ducti proposito, ne abusus praedicti saevitia ulterius corpora humana dilaceret, mentesque fidelium horrore commoveat, et perturbet auditum, digue decrevimus abolendum. Praefati namque fideles hujus suae improbandae utique consuetudinis vitio intendentes, si quisquam ex eis genere nobilis, vel dignitatis titulo insignitus, praesertim extra suarum partium limites debitum naturae persolvat, in suis, vel alienis remotis partibus sepultura electa; defuncti corpus ex quodam impiae pietatis affectu truculenter exenterant, ae illud membratim, vel in frusta immaniter concidentes, ea subsequenter aquis immersa exponunt ignibus decoquenda. Et tandem (ab ossibus tegumento carnis excusso) eadem ad partes praedictas mittunt, seu deferunt tumulanda. Quod non solum Divinae majestatis conspectui abominabile plurimum redditur, sed etiam humanae considerationis obtutibus occurrit vehementius abhorrendum. Volentes igitur (prout officii nostri debitum exigit), illud in hac parte remedium adhibere, per quod tantae abominationis, tantaeque immanitatis, et impietatis abusus penitus deleatur, nec extendatur ad alios; Apostolica auctoritate statuimus, et ordinamus, ut cum quis cujuscumque status, aut generis, seu dignitatis exstitent: in civitatibus, terris, seu locis, in quibus catholicae fidei cultus viget, diem de caetero claudet extremum circa corpora defunctorum hujusmodi abusus, vel similis nullatenus observetur, nec fidelium manus tanta immanitate foedentur. Sed ut defunctorum corpora sic impie, ac crudeliter non tractentur, et deferantur ad loca in quibus viventes eligerint sepeliri, aut in civitate, castro, vel loco ubi decesserint, vel loco vicino ecclesiasticae sepulturae tradantur ad tempus, ita, quod demum incineratis corporibus, aut alias ad loca ubi sepulturam eligerint, deportentur, et sepeliantur in eis. Nos enim si praedicti defuncti executor, vel executores, aut familiares ejus, seu quivis alii cujuscumque ordinis, conditionis, status aut gradus fuerint etiam si pontificali dignitate praefulgeant, aliquid contra hujusmodi nostri statuti, et ordinationis tenorem praesumpserint attentare defunctorum corpora sic inhumaniter et crudeliter pertractando, vel faciendo pertractari {414} excommunicationis sententiam (quam exnunc in ipsos plurimos) ipso facto se moverint incursuros, a qua non nisi per Apostolicam sedem (praeterquam in mortis articulo) possint absolutionis beneficium obtinere. Et nihilominus ille, cujus corpus sic inhumane tractatum fuerit, ecclesiastica careat sepultura. Nulli ergo, etc. Datum Latera. XII. Calen. Martii, Pontificatus nostri anno VI. II. Decree of Pope John XXII. forbidding alchemies, by which he prohibited the pretended making of gold and silver, but is claimed to have hampered the progress of chemistry. De Crimine Falsi Titulus VI. I Joannis XXII. [circa annum 1317 Avenioni] Alkimiae hic prohibentur, et puniuntur facientes et fieri procurantes: quoniam tantum de vero auro et argento debent inferre in publicum, ut pauperibus erogetur quantum de falso et adulterino posuerunt. Et si eorum facultates non sufficiunt, poena per judicis discretionem in aliam commutabitur, et infames fiunt. Et si sint clerici beneficiis habitis privantur et ad habenda inhabiles efficiuntur. (Vide Extravagantem ejusdem Joannis quae incipit "Providens" et est sub eodem titulo collocata.) Spondent quas non exhibent divitias, pauperes Alchimistae; pariter qui se sapientes existimamt in foveam incidunt quam fecerunt. Nam haud dubie hujus artis Alchimiae alterutrum se professores ludificant; cum suae ignorantiae conscii, eos, qui supra ipsos aliquid hujusmodi dixerint, admirentur: quibus cum veritas quaesita non suppetat, diem cernunt, facultates exhauriunt; idemque verbis dissimulant falsitatem, ut tandem quod non est in rerum natura, esse verum aurum vel argentum sophistica transmutatione confingant; eoque interdum eorum temeritas damnata et damnanda progreditur, ut fictis metallis cudant publicae monetae characteres fidis oculis, et non alias Alchimicum fornacis ignem vulgum ignorantem eludant. Haec itaque perpetuis volentes exulare temporibus, hac edictali constitutione sancimus, ut quicumque hujusmodi aurum vel argentum fecerint, vel fieri secuto facto mandaverint, vel ad hoc scienter (dum id fieret) facientibus ministraverint, aut scienter vel auro vel argento usi fuerint vendendo vel dando in solutum: [illegible letter or or mark] verum tanti ponderis aurum vel argentum poenae nomine inferre cogantur in publicum pauperibus erogandum, quanti Alchimicum existat; circa quod eos aliquo praedictorum modorum legitime constiterit deliquisse: facientibus nihilominus aurum vel argentum Alchimicum aut ipso, praemittitur, scienter utentibus perpetuae, infamiae nota respersis. Quod si ad praefatam poenam pecuniarum exsolvendam deliquentium ipsorum facultates non sufficiant, poterit discreti moderatio judicis poenam hanc in aliam (puta carceris, vel alteram juxta qualitatem negotii personarum differentiam aliasque attendendo circumstantias) commutare. Illos vero qui in tantae ignorantiam infelicitatis proruperint, ut nedum nummos vedunt, sed naturalis juris praacepta contemnant, artis excedant metas, legumque violant interdieta scienter videlicet adulterinam ex auro et argento Alchimico cudendo seu fundendo, cudi seu fundi faciendo monetam; hac animadversione percelli jubemus, ut ipsorum bona deserantur carceri, ipsique perpetuo sint infames. Et si clerici fuerint delinquentes, ipsi ultra praedictas poenas priventur beneficiis habitis et prorsus reddantur inhabiles ad habenda. III. Bull of Pope John XXII. forbidding certain magical practices, which, like the prohibition of alchemies, protected his flock from {415} sharpers of various kinds, sooth-sayers, pretended sorcerers, magicians, _et id genus omne_. This is the bull which Pres. White quotes under its Latin title, _Super illius specula_, as if he had it under his eye at the moment of writing, and which he says "shows Pope John himself, in spite of his infallibility, sunk in superstition the most abject and debasing; for in this bull, supposed to be inspired from wisdom from on high, Pope John complains that both he and his flock are in danger of their lives by the arts of the sorcerers. He (the Pope) declares that such sorcerers can shut up devils in mirrors and finger-rings and phials and kill men and women by a magic word; _that they had tried to kill him by piercing a waxen image of him with needles in the name of the devil."_ Contra immolantes daemonibus, aut responsa et auxilia ab eis postulantes; sive tenentes libros de eiusmodi erroribus tractantes. Ioannes episcopus servus servorum Dei, ad perpetuam rei memoriam. Super illius specula, quamvis immeriti, Eius favente clementia qui primum hominem humani quidem generis protoplastum, terrenis praclatum, divinis virtutibus adornatum, conformem et consimilem imagini suea fecit, revocavit profugum, legem dando; ac demum liberavit captivum, reinvenit perditum, et redemit venditum, merito suae Passionis, ut contemplaremur ex illa super filios hominum, qui christianae religionis culta Deum intelligunt et requirunt: dolenter advertimus, quod etiam cum nostrorum turbatione viscerum cogitamus quamplures esse solo nomine christianos, qui relicto primo veritatis lumine, tanto erroris caligine obnubilantur, quod cum morte foedus ineunt, et pactum faciunt cum inferno: daemonibus namque immolant, hos adorant, fabricant ac fabricari procurant imagines, annulum vel speculum, vel phialam, vel rem quamcumque aliam magice ad daemones inibi alligandos, ab his petunt responsa, ab his recipiunt, et pro implendis pravis suis desideriis auxilia postulant, pro re faet idissima faetidam exhibent servitutem: Proh dolor! hujusmodi morbus pestifer, nunc per mundum solito amplius convalescens, eccessive gravius inficit Christi gregem. 1. Cum igitur, ex debito suscepti pastoralis officii, oves aberrantes per devia teneamur ad caulas Christi reducere, et excludere a grege dominico morbidas, ne alias corrumpant: hoc edicto in perpetuum valituro, de consilio fratrum nostrorum, monemus omnes et singulos renatos fonte baptismatis, in virtute sanctae obedientiae, et sub interminatione anathematis, praecipientes eisdem, quod nullus ipsorum aliquid de perversis dictis dogmatibus docere ac addiscere audeat: vel, quod execrabilius est, quomodolibet alio modo, in aliquo illis uti. 2. Et quia dignum est, quod hi, qui per sua opera perversa spernunt Altissimum, poenis suis pro culpis debitis percellantur: nos in omnes et singulos, qui contra nostra saluberrima monita et mandata facere de praedictis quicquam praesumpserint, excommunicationis sententiam promulgamus, quam ipsos incurrere volumus ipso facto. Statuentes firmiter, quod praeter poenas praedictas, contra tales, qui admoniti de praedictis seu praedictorum aliquo infra octo dies a monitione computandos praefata, a praefatis non se correxerint, ad infligendas poenas omnes et singulas, praeter bonorum [Transcriber: might be "ponorum"] confiscationem dumtaxat, quas de iure merentur haeretici, per suos competentes iudices procedetur. 3. Verum cum sit expediens, quod ad haec tam nefanda omnis via omnisque occasio praecludatur, de dictorum nostrorum fratrum consilio, universis praecipimus et mandamus, quod nullus eorum libellos, scripturas quascumque ex praefatis damnatis errobus quicquam continentes, habere aut tenere vel in ipsis studere praesumat; quin {416} potius volumus, et in virtute sanctae obedientiae cunctis praecipimus, quod quicumque de scripturis praefatis vel libellis quicquam habuerint, infra octo dierum spatium ab huiusmodi edicti nostri notitia computandum, totum et in toto et in qualibet sui parte abolere et comburere teneantur: alioquin volumus, quod incurrant sententiam excommunicationis ipso facto, processuri contra contemptores huiusmodi (cum constiterit) ad poenas alias graviores. Datum Avenione, etc. IV. Bull of Pope John XXII. authorizing the institution of chairs of medicine and arts in the University of Perugia. The bull shows John's care for the maintenance of standards in education, and is a revelation by its anticipation of requirements for the Doctor's Degree that we are only now coming to enforce once more. Erectio cathedrarum medicinae et artium in Perusino Studio, data insuper facultate episcopo licentiandi et laureandi in utraque facultate idoneos, pro quorum examine nonullae sanciuntur leges. Ioannes episcopus servus servorum Dei, ad perpetuam rei memoriam. Dum solicitae considerationis indagine in mente revolvimus, quam sit donum scientiae pretiosum, quamque illius desiderabilis et gloriosa possessio, per quam profugandur ignorantiae tenebrae, et eliminata funditus erroris caligine, studentium curiosa solertia cursus et actus disponit et ordinat in lumine veritatis; magno nimirum desidero ducimur, ut literarum studia, in quibus impretiabilis margarita scientiae reperitur, laudanda ubilibet incrementa suscipiant: sed in illis praesertim locis propensius vigeant, quae ad multiplicanda doctrinae semina et germina salutari producenda fore magis accommoda et idonea dignoscuntur. 1. Dudum siquidem felicis recordationis Clemens Papa praedecessor noster, attendens fidei puritatem et devotionem eximiam, quam civitas Perusina, terra peculiaris Romanae Ecclesiae, ad ipsam Ecclesiam ab olim habuisse dignoscitur, et quod illas ad eam successibus temporum de bono in melius augumentarat, dignum duxit et aequitati consonum existimavit, ut civitatem eamdem, quam divina gratia multarum praerogativa bonitatum gratiose dotaverat, concessione generalis Studii insigniret: et ut auctore Deo ex civitate ipsa producerentur viri scientia praepollentes auctoritate apostolica statuit, ut in ea esset Studium generale, illudque vigeret ibidem perpetuis futuris temporibus in qualibet facultate, prout in literis praedecessoris eiusdem inde confectis plenius dicitur contineri. 2. Ac subsequenter nos, licet immeriti, ad apicem Summi Apostolatus assumpti, civitatem eamdem propter suae devotionis insignia quibus se dignam Apostolicae Sedis gratia exhibebat, uberiore dono gratiae prosequi cupientes, auctoritate apostolica de fratrum nostrorum consilio, venerabili fratri nostro episcopo Perusino et successoribus eius episcopus _Perusinis_, qui essent pro tempore, impertiendi personis ad hoc idoneis docendi licentiam in iure canonico et civili iuxta certum modum in literis nostris expressum, liberam concessimus potestatem, prout in eisdem literis nostris plenius et seriosius continetur. 3. Considerantes igitur, quod eadem civitas propter eius commoditates et conditiones quamplurimas est non modicum apta studentibus, ac propterea concessiones huiusmodi ob profectus publicos, quos exinde provenire speramus, ampliare volentes, apostolica auctoritate statuimus ut si qui processu temporis in eodem Studio fuerint, qui etiam in medicinali scientia et liberalibus artibus scientiae bravium assecuti, sibi docendi licentiam, ut alios liberius erudire valeant, petierint in perpetuum, in praedictis medicinali scientia et artibus examinari possint ibidem et in eisdem facultatibus {417} titulo magisterii decorari: statuentes, ut quotiens aliqui in praedictis medicina et artibus fuerint doctorandi, praesententur episcopo Perusino, qui pro tempore fuerit, vel ei, quern ad hoe praedictus episcopus duxerit deputandum, qui magistris huiusmodi facultatis, in qua examinatio fuerit facienda, in studio eodem praesentibus, qui ad minus quatuor numero in examinatione huiusmodi esse debeant, convocatis eos gratis, et difficultate quacumque sublata, de scientia, facundia, modo legendi, et aliis, quae in promovendis ad doctoratus seu magistratus officium requiruntur, examinari studeat diligenter; et illos, quos idoneos repererit, petito secrete magistrorum eorumdem consilio, quod utique consilium in ipsorum consulentium dispendium vel iacturam revelare quomodolibet districtius prohibemus, approbet et admittat, eisque petitam licentiam largiatur: alios minus idoneos nullatenus admittendo, postpositis gratia, odio vel favore. 4. Ut autem in praedictis medicina et artibus praefatum Studium tanto plenius coalescat, quanto peritiores doctores in huiusmodi suis primitiis ibidem caeperint actu regere etdocere, statuimus, quod usque ad triennium vel quatriennium aliqui doctores, duo ad minus, qui in medicinali scientia in Parisien, vel Bononien, aut aliis famosis generalibus Studiis honorem receperint doctoratus, ad docendum et regendum in scientia medicinae et tres vel duo ad minus, qui in artibus in Parisien. Studio apud maiorem Parisien. Ecclesiam docendi licentiam fuerint assecuti, et saltem per annum rexerint, sue docuerint in Parisien. Studio memorato, ad regendum et docendum in dictis artibus in praefato Perusin. Studio assumantur, qui usque ad quatriennium vel quinquennium, donec praefatum Studium in bonis studentibus laudabiliter progressum acceperit, regant et doceant in eodem. 5. Circa doctorandos vero in scientia medicinae hoc praecipue observetur, ut huiusmodi decorandi audiverint omnes libros eiusdem scientiae, qui in Bononien. vel Parisien. Studio a studentibus promovendis consueverunt audiri, per septennium, vel qui in logicalibus aut philosophia alias forent sufficienter instructi saltem per quinquennium in scientia praedicta studerint, ita quod saltem tribus annis eiusdem septennii vel quinquenni, ut praedicitur, in medicinali scientia audierint in aliquo Studio generali, et ut moris est, responderint sub doctoribus et extraordinarie legerint libros legi extraordinarie consuetos, servato circa examinationem ipsius in medicinae scientia promovendi more laudabili, qui in talibus erga eos, qui promoventur in Parisien. vel Bononien. Studio observatur. 6. Circa doctorandos vero in artibus liberalibus etiam observetur, quod studuerint per quatuor vel quinque annos, de quibus saltem duobus annis audierint in aliquo Studio generali: ita videlicet ut in grammatica Priscianum maiorem et minorem, et in dialectica Logicam novam et veterem Aristotelis, ac in philosophia librum de anima, et saltem quatuor libros Ethicorum; et tarn in iis, quam in caeteris aliis liberalibus artibus illos alios libros audierint, qui in Parisien. Studio per promovendos in dicta facultate artium consueverint audiri, servato circa examinationem tarn in communibus quam in propriis ipsius artibus promovendi more laudabili, qui in talibus erga eos, qui promoventur, apud praefatam maiorem Ecclesiam Parisien. observatur. 7. Verum quia non passim reperiuntur in Studiis, qui omnes huiusmodi libros audierint, praefato Perusin, episcopo suisque successoribus Perusin episcopis, qui pro tempore fuerint, indulgemus, ut in auditione aliorum praefatorum librorum de forma circa licentiandos ipsos in artibus, prout sufficientia eorumdem licentiandorum exegerit et sibi videbitur expedire, auctoritate nostra valeat dispensare. 8. Illi autem, qui in dicta civitate Perusin, taliter examinati et approbati fuerint, ac docendi licentiam obtinuerint, ut est dictum, ex tunc, absque examinatione vel approbatione alia, regendi et docendi ubique plenam et liberam habeant auctoritate praesentium facultatem, nec a quoquam valeant prohiberi. 9. Sane ut rite in praefatis examinationibus procedatur, praecipimus, ut tarn {418} episcopus Perusin., qui pro tempore fuerit quam ille, cui praefatus episcopus ex causa rationabili impeditus in hac parte commiserit vices suas, eidem episcopo, propositis tamen, sed non tactis Evangeliis, ab aliis vero corporaliter tactis iurent, quod in hac parte officium suum fideliter exequentur. Volumus autem quod personis, quae per examinationem huiusmodi repertae fuerint idoneae, huiusmodi licentia debeatur impertiri, et quod idem episcopus personaliter, non per vicarium vel substitutum examinationi huiusmodi interesse debeat: nisi esset ex aliqua rationabili causa adeo impeditus quod suam non posset examinationi praedictae personalem praesentiam exhibere: in quo casu eidem episcopo interessendi examinationi huiusmodi per vicarium, vel alium ad hoc idoneum substitutum, tenore praesentium indulgemus: et quod nomini huiusmodi impartietur licentia, nisi, ei, quern omnis vel maior pars doctorum, qui huiusmodi examinationi intererint, approbabunt. 10. Magistri quoque, regere in eodem Studio cupientes, vel alias inibi residentes, antequam incipiant, praestent in manibus dicti episcopi iuramentum, quod ipsi vocatio ad examinationes easdem venient, nisi fuerint legitime impediti, et gratis sine difficultate dabunt examinatori fidele consilium, qui de examinatis ut digni approbari debeant, aut indigni merito non admitti. Qui vero iuramentum huiusmodi praestare noluerint, nec ad examinationes eorumdem, nec etiam ad aliqua ipsius Studii commoda vel beneficia ullatenus admittantur. 11. Nulli ergo omnino hominum liceat hanc paginam nostrarum constitutionis, prohibitionis, concessionis, praecepti et voluntatis infringere, etc. Datum Avenioni, duodecimo kalendas martii, pontificatus nostri anno v. Dat. die 18 februarii 1321, pontif. anno v. V. Bull of Pope John XXII. in which he authorizes the foundation of a University in the City of Cahors, his birthplace, as a memorial of his interest in the townspeople and a monument of his zeal for education. Confirmatio erectionis Universitatis studiorum in civitate Cadurcensi. Ioannes episcopus servus servorum Dei, ad perpetuam rei memoriam. Cum civitas Cadurcensis, quam excellentiae divinae bonitas multiplicium gratiarum bonis et dotibus decoravit, propter ipsius commoditates et conditiones quamplurimas apta non modicum generali Studio censeatur, nos reipublicae multipliciter expedire credentes, quod in civitate praefata fiat et emanet fons scientiarum irriguus, de cuius plenitudine hauriant universi, litteralibus cupientes imbui documentis, et etiam cultores sapientiae inserantur et provehantur diversarum facultatum dogmatibus eruditi, facundi et undique illustrati, fructum uberem, largiente Domino, suo tempore producturi; attendentes quoque sincerae fidei puritatem, ac eximiae devotionis affectum, quos dilecti filii consules et Universitas eiusdem civitatis ad nos et Romanam Ecclesiam habere noscuntur: ex praedictis causis, porrectis etiam nobis pro parte consulum et Universitatis praedictae humilibus et devotis supplicationibus inclinati, auctoritate apostolica statuimus et ordinamus, quod in civitate praedicta perpetuis futuris temporibus generale. Studium habeatur et vigeat in qualibet licita facultate, quodque praefatum Studium, ac eius Universitas, ac doctores, magistri, licentiati, baccalaurei et scholares pro tempore commorantes causa studiorum ibidem, omnibus privilegiis, liberatibus et immunitatibus, concessis Studio Tholosamensi ac Universitati eius, plene et libere gaudeant et utantur. Nulli ergo omnino hominum etc. Datum Avenione vii idus iunii, pontificatus nostri anno xvi. Dat. die 7 iunii 1332, pont. anno xvi. {419} APPENDIX III. MEDIEVAL LAW FOR THE REGULATION OF THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE. It is usually presumed that the practice of medicine was on a very low plane during the Middle Ages, and that while only little was known about medical science, the methods of practicing the medical art were crude, as befitted an earlier time in evolution before modern advances had come. Any such impression is founded entirely on ignorance of the conditions which actually existed. In his studies in the history of anatomy in the Middle Ages, Von Töply [Footnote 48] quotes the law for the regulation of the practice of medicine issued by the Emperor Frederick II. in 1240 or 1241. The Law was binding on the two Sicilies, and shows exactly the state of medical practice in the southern part of Italy at this time. Everything that we think we have gained by magnificent advances in modern times is to be found in this law. A physician must have a diploma from a university and a license from the government; he must have studied three years before taking up medicine--then three years in a medical school, and then must have practiced with a physician for a year before he will be allowed to take up the practice of medicine on his own account. If he is to take up surgery, he must have made special studies in anatomy. The law is especially interesting because of its regulation of the purity of drugs, in which it anticipates by nearly seven centuries our Pure Drug Law of last year. (This law was published in the form here given in the "Journal of the American Medical Association," January, 1908.) [Footnote 48: Studien zur Geschichte der Anatomie im Mittelalter von Robert Ritter Von Töply. Leipzig, 1898.] "While we are bent upon making regulations for the commonweal of our loyal subjects, we keep ever under our observation the health of the individual. In consideration of the serious damage and the irreparable suffering which may occur as a consequence of the inexperience of physicians, we decree that in future no one who claims the title of physician shall exercise the art of healing or dare {420} to treat the ailing, except such as have beforehand, in our University of Salerno, passed a public examination under a regular teacher of medicine, and been given a certificate not only by the professor of medicine, but also by one of our civil officials, which declares his trustworthiness and sufficient knowledge. This document must be presented to us, or in our absence from the kingdom to the person who remains behind in our stead, and must be followed by the obtaining of a license to practice medicine either from us or from our representative aforesaid. Violation of this law is to be punished by confiscation of goods and a year in prison for all those who in future dare to practice medicine without such permission from our authority. "Since students cannot be expected to learn medical science unless they have previously been grounded in logic, we further decree that no one be permitted to take up the study of medical science without beforehand having devoted at least three full years to the study of logic." (Under logic at this time was included the study of practically all the subjects that are now taken up in the arts department of our universities. Huxley, in his address before the University of Aberdeen on the occasion of his inauguration as Rector of that University, said that "the scholars [of the early days of the universities] studied Grammar and Rhetoric; Arithmetic and Geometry; Astronomy, Theology and Music." He added: "Thus their work, however imperfect and faulty, judged by modern lights, it may have been, brought them face to face with all the leading aspects of the many-sided mind of man. For these studies did really contain, at any rate, in embryo--sometimes, it may be, in caricature--what we now call Philosophy, Mathematical and Physical Science, and Art. And I doubt if the curriculum of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture as the old Trivium and Quadrivium does." Huxley, Science and Education Essays, page 197. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1896.--J. J. W.) "After three years devoted to these studies, he (the student) may, if he will, proceed to the study of medicine, provided always that during the prescribed time he devotes himself also to surgery, which is a part of medicine. After this, and not before, will he be given the license to practice, provided he has passed an examination in legal form as well as obtained a certificate from his teacher as to his {421} studies in the preceding time. After having spent five years in study, he shall not practice medicine until he has during a full year devoted himself to medical practise with the advice and under the direction of an experienced physician. In the medical schools the professors shall during these five years devote themselves to the recognized books, both those of Hippocrates as well as those of Galen, and shall teach not only theoretic, but also practical medicine. "We also decree, as a measure intended for the furtherance of Public Health, that no surgeon shall be allowed to practice, unless he has a written certificate, which he must present to the professor in the medical faculty, stating that he has spent at least a year at that part of medicine which is necessary as a guide to the practice of surgery, and that, above all, he has learned the anatomy of the human body at the medical school, and is fully equipped in this department of medicine, without which neither operations of any kind can be undertaken with success nor fractures be properly treated. "In every province of our Kingdom which is under our legal authority, we decree that two prudent and trustworthy men, whose names must be sent to our court, shall be appointed and bound by a formal oath, under whose inspection electuaries and syrups and other medicines be prepared according to law and only be sold after such inspection. In Salerno in particular, we decree that this inspectorship shall be limited to those who have taken their degrees as Masters in Physic. "We also decree by the present law, that no one in the Kingdom, except in Salerno or in Naples (in which were the two universities of the Kingdom), shall undertake to give lectures on medicine or surgery, or presume to assume the name of teacher, unless he shall have been very thoroughly examined in the presence of a Government official and of a professor in the art of medicine. "Every physician given a license to practice must take an oath that he shall faithfully fulfil all the requirements of the law, and in addition, whenever it comes to his knowledge that any apothecary has for sale drugs that are of less than normal strength, he shall report him to the court, and besides he shall give his advice to the poor without asking for any compensation. A physician shall visit his patient at least twice a day, and at the wish of his patient once also at night, and shall charge him, in case the visit does not {422} require him to go out of the village or beyond the walls of the city, not more than one-half tarrene in gold for each day's service." (A tarrene in gold was equal to about thirty cents of our money. Money had at least twenty times the purchasing power at that time that it has now. At the end of the thirteenth century, according to an Act of the English Parliament, a workman received 4d [eight cents] a day for his labor, and according to the same Act of Parliament the following prices were charged for commodities: A pair of shoes cost eight cents, that is, a day's wages. A fat goose cost seven cents, less than a day's wages. A fat sheep unshorn cost thirty-five cents; shorn, about twenty-five cents. For four days pay a man could get enough meat for himself and family to live on for a week, besides material out of which his wife could make excellent garments for the family. A fat hog cost twice as much as a fat sheep, and a bullock about six times as much.--J. J. W.) "From a patient whom he visits outside of the village or the wall of the town, the physician has a right to demand for a day's service not more than three tarrenes, to which maybe added, however, his expenses, provided that he does not demand more than four tarrenes altogether. "He (the regularly licensed physician) must not enter into any business relations with the apothecary, nor must he take any of them under his protection nor incur any money obligations in their regard." (Apparently many different ways of getting round this regulation had already been invented, and the idea of these expressions seemed to be to make it very clear in the law that any such business relationship, no matter what the excuse or method of it, is forbidden.--J. J. W.) "Nor must any licensed physician keep an apothecary's shop himself. Apothecaries must conduct their business with a certificate from a physician, according to the regulations and upon their own credit and responsibility, and they shall not be permitted to sell their products without having taken an oath that all their drugs have been prepared in the prescribed form, without any fraud. The apothecary may derive the following profits from his sales: Such extracts and simples as he need not keep in stock for more than a year before they may be employed may be charged for at the rate of three tarrenes an ounce." (90 cents an ounce seems very dear, but this is the maximum.) "Other medicines, however, which in consequence of the special conditions required for their preparation or for any other reason the apothecary has to have in {423} stock for more than a year, he may charge for at the rate of six tarrenes an ounce. Stations for the preparation of medicines may not be located anywhere, but only in certain communities in the Kingdom, as we prescribe below. "We decree also that the growers of plants meant for medical purpose shall be bound by a solemn oath that they shall prepare medicines conscientiously, according to the rules of their art, and as far as it is humanely possible that they shall prepare them in the presence of the inspectors. Violations of this law shall be punished by the confiscation of their movable goods. If the inspectors, however, to whose fidelity to duty the keeping of these regulations is committed, should allow any fraud in the matters that are entrusted to them, they shall be condemned to punishment by death." {424} APPENDIX IV. CHURCH DECREES RELATING TO MEDICINE. Besides the Papal documents referred to in the body of this book and quoted in the original in the Appendix to the first edition immediately preceding this, there is a series of decrees of Councils and Synods of the Church which are sometimes referred to as representing a distinct policy of opposition on the part of the Church to science and particularly medical and surgical practice, as if their purpose had been to force people to have recourse to prayers and relics and pilgrimages and masses rather than to take advantage of medical knowledge and surgical experience for the relief of their ills. The Papal documents quoted and discussed in the previous edition of this book proved to have no such meaning as was attributed to them and the history of the medical sciences as traced, shows that these Church regulations were not misconstrued either in their own or subsequent generations in such a way as to have the effect of interfering with the development of medical science or medical education as has been claimed. Their citation in support of the thesis of Church opposition to science, theoretic or applied, is entirely without justification. Exactly this same thing is true with regard to the other documents that are referred to as having a parallel and confirmatory significance of Church opposition to medical science, or medical or surgical practice, or medical teaching. It requires no lengthy explanation to see that the decrees referred to are simply ecclesiastical disciplinary regulations, aimed at putting an end to certain abuses that had arisen in religious matters, and well calculated to prevent their further occurrence. The Church authorities recognized as will anyone who understands the circumstances that men who had devoted their lives in religious orders exclusively to the work of religion, should not be permitted to neglect their religious vocations because of devotion to some secular profession. They were forbidden to practice and to study medicine, but the practice of law was forbidden to them quite as well and for the same reason. There was no question of limiting the number of persons who might take up medical study, but all those who had bound themselves for life to religious duties must not withdraw from these to take up secular occupations. The case against the Church as opposed to science, and above all medicine and surgery, must indeed be weak {425} when it has to be bolstered up by recondite references to documents such as these, the purport of which is so clear and the good sense of which is as evident now as it was when they were issued. Everyone recognizes that absorbing professional occupations such as the practice of medicine or of law keeps men from devoting themselves to the intellectual or the spiritual life. The opposite is also felt to be the case and there is still a profound distrust of the lawyer or the physician who devotes himself to literature or to any intellectual avocation, for the feeling is that he cannot be practically successful at his profession. This feeling is often a mere prejudice and great lawyers and great physicians have often been litterateurs of distinction, but as a rule there is incompatibility between the two modes of occupation. In the medieval period it was felt that there was the same incompatibility between proper devotion to the spiritual life and the professions, and as members of religious orders had given up worldly affairs and interests in order to devote themselves to other-worldliness and had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for that purpose, it was sincerely felt that they should not engage in gainful occupations and professional work that distracted them from the religious profession which they had taken up. Hence these decrees. The only way to make perfectly clear the meaning of these decrees in their proper place in history both as regards education in general and medical education, is to give the text of the documents in the accompanying translation. I owe the text of them to Father Corbett of the Seminary of St. Charles Borromeo at Overbrook, Pa., who supplied me with the similar documents for the first edition of this work. The translations are made from the recognized authoritative edition of the decrees of the Church councils and synods issued at Paris in 1671, the title page of which reads as follows: "Sacrosancta concilia ad regiam editionem exacta quae nunc quarta parte prodit auctior studio Philip. Labaei et Gab. Cossartii, Soc. Jesu Prebyterorum, Tomus Decimus, 1053--1197, Lutetiae Parisiorum 1671." [Footnote 49] [Footnote 49: I feel that I should say that when there was question of publishing these documents I consulted Dr. Garrison, the Assistant Librarian of the Surgeon General's Library at Washington and the author of the best history or medicine in English, as to the Church decrees that ought to be published in their entirety in order to make their meaning perfectly clear. I have followed the list suggested by him.] _The Council of Rheims held under Pope Innocent II, A.D. 1131,_ Canon VI, forbidding monks or regular canons to study law or medicine for the sake of gain. {426} "An evil custom as we consider it and detestable has grown up by which monks and regular canons after having received the habit and made their profession, spurning the rule of their blessed masters Benedict and Augustine, learn secular law and medicine for the sake of temporal gain. Inflamed by the fire of avarice they make themselves the patrons of causes [that is the attorneys of legal proceedings] and when they ought to be devoting themselves to psalmody and hymns, confiding in the support of a fine voice and the variety of their pleas, they confound justice and injustice, right and wrong. Imperial constitutions attest that it is absurd, nay even an opprobrium, for members of the clerical order to wish to be skilled in forensic disputation. We decree that violators of the religious life of this kind should fall under the severe judgment of the apostolical authority, for as they have neglected the cure of souls and in no way attend to the purpose of their order, promising health for filthy lucre, they make themselves guardians of human bodies. And since an impure eye is the index of an impure heart and since religion ought not to deal with those things even to talk about which brings the blush of shame to the cheek of honesty, in order therefore that the monastic and canonical order should be preserved inviolably pleasing to God in its holy purpose, we interdict by the apostolical authority that any such proceeding should be allowed hereafter. Bishops therefore and abbots and priors who consent to such an enormity shall be deprived of their own dignities." _The Council of Tours held under Pope Alexander III, A.D. 1163,_ Canon VIII. That religious should avoid secular studies. "Not only does the envy of the old enemy of mankind bring him to labor greatly to destroy the infirm members of the Church, but he also puts his hand to securing the desirable members of the Church and strives even to supplant the elect according to the saying of the Scriptures 'for the elect are his food.' He plumes himself if he can bring about the fall of many, but especially if he can bring down some more distinguished member of the Church by making him lukewarm. Hence it is that he knows how to transfigure himself after his usual fashion into an angel of light, so that under the pretext of caring for the health of ailing brethren and more faithfully carrying out ecclesiastical business he leads members of the regular religious orders to the study of law and of physical problems which have to be given attention outside of the cloister. For this reason, so that spiritual men under the pretext of science may not again become involved in mundane affairs and themselves lose their interior life while they are thinking to provide for others in the exterior, we have decreed by the assent of the present council in the endeavor to meet this evil, that no one at all after taking the vows of religion or the making of religious profession should be allowed to absent himself from the cloister for the study of medicine and physic. If however he has already absented himself and shall not have returned to his cloister within the space of two months he is to be avoided by all as excommunicate, and if he should presume to try the effect of patronage in no case should {427} he be heard. On his return to the cloister he must always be the last of the brothers in the choir and unless by the special indult or permission of the Holy See must lose hope of all promotion." _The Council of Paris, A.D. 1212,_ Second Part, Canon XX. "Since certain of the members of the regular orders under the pretense of caring for the bodies of ailing brother members and of more faithfully managing ecclesiastical affairs, to use the words of the Lateran Council, have not hesitated to go out of their cloisters to learn mundane law and give themselves to the study of physical problems in order to give their time to jurisprudence and medicine and on account of that are lacking in the interior life because they are devoting themselves to care for external things, we walking closely in the footsteps of that council decree that unless within the space of two months such students of law and medicine return to their cloisters, in spite of the permission of their abbot, which he is not empowered to give, they are to be excommunicated and avoided by all; and in no case if they should endeavor to use patronage to aid them are they to be admitted. "We prohibit also anyone who enters the cloister for the sake of religion to go out of it in order to go to school; whatever a student may wish he should learn in the cloister. Those who are now in the schools should within two months return to the cloister." _Decree of the Council of Montpellier held under Pope Alexander III, 1162._ Since the proceedings of this Council are not extant the records of it are preserved in two monuments. One an Epistle of Pope Alexander to the Bishop of Verona and the other the decrees of the Council of Montpellier held in 1195 which enacted similar legislation. Cap. 15. "The Council prohibited besides under the full severity of ecclesiastical discipline any monk or canon regular or other member of a religious order to take up the study of secular laws or medicine. Anyone violating this statute must be canonically published by the diocesan Bishops according to the decree promulgated in this matter under Pope Alexander in the Council of Montpellier." It has been suggested that this exclusion of monks and religious from the study of medicine by Church ordinance practically shut out all the clerics, that is, all the educated men of the medieval period, from the medical profession. Any such idea, however, could only have occurred to one who does not realize that at any given time there are only a comparatively few religious and a great many secular clergymen. Practically all those who could read and write in the Middle Ages were known as clerks, that is clerics, and were under the protection of the Church, most of them indeed receiving minor orders, and if all the clergy were to have been excluded {428} from the medical profession this contention would be true. So far is it from the truth, however, that a number of the great physicians and surgeons of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries belonged to the clerical orders, not a few of them were priests and some of the greatest of them, like Theodoric, were actually bishops. It was only the religious, that is the men who had specially devoted their lives to monasticism, who were forbidden to take up the study of medicine because it did not comport with their monastic vocation. A second series of ecclesiastical decrees that are often referred to in the history of medicine are those which concern the relations of the physician and his patient whenever there is danger of death. The Church's duty was to secure the proper dispositions on the part of those who were in danger of death. Physicians sometimes did not let patients and their friends know how serious the illness was and as a consequence patients died without the sacraments and rites of the Church. In order to prevent this the Church regulation was promulgated that a physician was bound to have a patient take care of his soul at the same time that his body was being treated. Physicians of the present day, even when they are not themselves Catholics, know how much of good, even physical good, is done to patients almost without exception by the consolations of religion. Instead of being perturbed as is sometimes thought by those who have not had experience with the custom, exactly the opposite effect is produced, and patients often drop their anxieties and solicitudes and begin to improve immediately after the reception of the sacraments. They usually submit themselves to whatever Providence has in store for them, put off their worries, and this factor of itself is eminently therapeutic. Many a non-Catholic physician obeys these decrees of the Church with regard to the summoning of a priest to an ailing Catholic patient without knowing anything about them. He does it because of his experience that his patients are benefited by the consolations of religion. The wisdom of the Church in the decrees is seen very well by the paragraph in which it is suggested that the reason for having the physician always advise the calling in of a priest is that if this advice is given only when there is serious danger of death many patients knowing this will be thrown into a state of depression very harmful to them when the suggestion is made. How such decrees could be thought in any way to interfere with medicine or its practice, or with the physician and his duties, or, above all, represent any effort on the part of the Church to hamper medical science or discourage patients from having physicians, I {429} cannot for the life of me imagine. The idea sometimes suggested that the real reason for this legislation was that the Church did not want patients to die before priests were given an opportunity to secure money for services in the administration of the last rites or for masses for the recovery of the patient and the like, would only enter into the mind of someone who not only did not understand the Church and had no experience of Catholics and Catholic life, but who had no proper recognition of the place of religion in life as a great source of consolation and strength in the face of the mystery of death and the hereafter. Those who think religion a mere hypocrisy imposed on people by designing clergy are so lacking in the knowledge that would enable them to judge of the meaning of such decrees that their opinion is not worth while considering. It must not be forgotten that these decrees are still binding on a Catholic physician, and far from resenting them we welcome them as helps in securing the aid of the consolations of religion for our patients. Many a worried business man suffering from some severe disease like pneumonia or typhoid fever, goes on to develop a much more favorable mental attitude toward himself and his affection after he has seen the priest. The last paragraph of the first decree also emphasizes the wisdom of the Church and shows how much of an aid her legislation was in the support of ethical standards, for it forbids under the severest penalties that a physician should ever advise a patient to anything contrary to his conscience. This paragraph is also still binding on Catholic physicians. _The Fourth Lateran Council held under Pope Innocent III, A.D. 1215,_ Canon XII. That the sick should rather provide for the soul than the body. "Since bodily infirmity sometimes proceeds from sin, the Lord himself saying to the ailing man whom he had cured 'Go now and sin no more lest something worse should happen to you,' we declare by the present decree and distinctly impose upon physicians of the body that whenever it shall happen that they are called to ailing persons, they must before all warn and persuade the ailing that they should call in physicians of the soul so that after the spiritual safety of the sick has been provided for he may proceed more healthfully to the remedy of corporeal medicine, since the cause ceasing the effect shall also cease. "This among other things gave cause for this edict that certain people lying on a bed of sickness when persuaded by physicians that they should dispose things for the safety of their souls fall into a condition of despair whence the more easily they incur the danger of death. {430} "If any one of the physicians after this constitution of ours shall have been published should transgress it he should be kept from entrance to the Church until he shall have satisfied competently for the transgression. "Besides, since the soul is by far more precious than the body, we prohibit under dire anathema that any physician should ever advise a patient to do anything for his corporal welfare that would bring him into danger of losing his soul." _The Synodal Statutes of the Church of Mans (the chief town of the Province of Main), A.D. 1247._ On Communion for the Sick. "It was decreed in the general session and distinctly enjoined on physicians of the body that when they happen to be called to the ailing they must before everything else warn and persuade their patients to call physicians of the soul, in order that after the spiritual safety of the sick one may be provided for they may proceed with more assurance to the remedy of corporal ills. If any physician should transgress this constitution let him be kept from entrance to the Church until he shall have made competent satisfaction. "Besides since the soul is much more important than the body it is prohibited under anathema that any physician should advise a patient anything for his bodily health which might bring his soul into peril." {431} APPENDIX V. PAPAL PHYSICIANS. To make many sources of information with regard to this vexed question of the relation of the Popes to Science more readily available, a series of authoritative references to Papal Physicians so far as we know them and their work during the past seven centuries has seemed to me especially needed. Physicians at all times have been interested in phases of science besides medicine and have not infrequently made important discoveries in the non-medical sciences. Their constant occupation with scientific subjects in their professional capacity has always given them an open mind for scientific advances. As the Papal Physicians were at all times men chosen because they had reached distinction in medicine, they were usually scholars who thought for themselves and were ready to recognize the new in science in any department from which it might be presented. Many of the Papal Physicians made important contributions to other sciences and not a few of them laid important foundations, especially in the biological sciences. The fact that the Popes constantly had near them, in the confidential capacity so inevitable between a man and his physician, scientists of prestige in their chosen profession, so often the teachers of their generation in medicine and almost as a rule interested in the sciences related to medicine and not infrequently in physical science generally, is the best possible evidence not only that there could not be opposition, but on the contrary that there must have been, so far as human assumption may go, a constant favorable attitude of mind of the Popes toward science. In my chapter on Papal Physicians in the first edition of this volume I gathered such references as would enable me to bring out the valuable services of many of the medical attendants of the Popes to medical and physical science. I was not aware then that a more or less complete list of Papal Physicians for some five centuries at least had been published, giving an excellent idea of what they had done and written in scientific matters. There was no copy of the work in this country so far as I could learn and it was only after considerable difficulty that I was able to secure the volumes through the kind offices of Rev. Father Hagan, S.J., who is the Papal Astronomer in Rome at the present time. From that {432} work the History of the Papal Physicians, originally written by Mandosio at the end of the seventeenth century and extended and annotated by Marini at the end of the eighteenth, [Footnote 50] it has seemed worth while to present such abstracts as will supply ample material for the consultation of those interested in Papal relations to science yet who have not the longer work available for reference. This will show that many of the Papal Physicians were, as I have said, leaders in the science of their time, not only in medicine and also the biological sciences generally, but in all departments of physical science. [Footnote 50: _Degli Archiatri Pontifici_, Roma, Pagliarini, 1784.] Nicholas I the Great (858-67).--Almost needless to say the available list of the Papal Physicians does not go back much beyond the thirteenth century, though we have the name of one Ursus who is mentioned in a very old manuscript, No. 5696 (Fol. 184) of the Vatican Library. The author of this manuscript work is Anastasius the Abbot and he dedicates it to Ursus, Physician, Domestic Prelate of Pope Nicholas I. Beyond a mention of Ursus by Fioravante Martinello in his work, _Roma ex Ethnica Sacra_, (p. 414), nothing else is known of this old-time physician. Even this mention, however, seems to make it clear that there was a physician formally attached to the Papal See thus early in the Middle Ages. Sylvester II (999-1003), Victor III (1086-87).--In the tenth century Gerbert, who became Pope under the name of Sylvester II, was famous for his knowledge of medicine as well as other sciences and the close personal friend of men who did much for medical education in France, as we have noted in the body of the book. Before the end of the eleventh century the Abbot Desiderius, as we have said, became Pope after having been for years the intimate friend of Constantine Africanus, to whom we owe the earliest serious development of the medical school of Salerno and the first important medical writings in modern Europe. We owe much of Constantine's writing to Desiderius' inspiration. Innocent III (1198-1216), Gregory IX (1227-41), Martin IV (1281-85).--With the beginning of the thirteenth century the documents for the history of culture in Europe are better preserved and the list of Papal Physicians begins to be more complete. Guy of Montpellier was summoned to Rome to establish the Hospital of Santo Spirito by Innocent III just at the opening of the thirteenth century. Richard the Englishman was the physician to the famous Pope Gregory IX, one of Innocent's successors in the first half {433} of this century. Another Englishman, Hugo Atratus or Atractus, said to have been from Evesham, became the physician of Pope Martin II, 1281. Oldoino in his _Athenaeo Romano_ mentions a series of books written by this Hugh of Evesham, as he is called in English. They bear the titles _Medicinales Canones_, Medical Canons, and _De Genealogiis Humanis_ and there is besides an _opusculum_ by him on the work of Isaac the well-known Jewish physician of the Middle Ages "On Fevers." The physicians of Pope Honorius IV, Taddeo the Florentine, and of Nicholas IV, Simon a Corde, or as he is better known, Simon Januensis, are mentioned in the body of the book. Boniface VIII (1294-1303), Benedict XI (1303-04), Clement V (1305-14).--In the preface of his great text-book of surgery, written in the first half of the fourteenth century, Henry of Mondeville, whose work represents an important landmark in the history of surgery that has been reissued in our own generation in at least two editions, one in Germany, the other in France, declares that "I began to write this work ... on the proposal and request of Master William of Brescia, distinguished professor in the science of medicine and formerly physician to Pope Boniface VIII, and Benedict XI, and Clement V, the present Pope." This is almost all that we know of William, and he is not mentioned in Mandosio's list of Papal Physicians nor in Marini's additions to Mandosio. This is not so hard to understand because no printed edition of Mondeville, who died untimely from tuberculosis and whose work was left unfinished, was issued until our time. If William had done nothing else, however, than stimulate his younger colleague Mondeville to write his great book, which Pagel thought it worth while to edit in our generation and to which Gurlt, in his History of Surgery, devotes some forty pages, he would have a right to a distinctive place in the history of surgery. As it is we have Mondeville's praise of him and as the French professor of surgery was himself one of the most scholarly men of that important period, his opinion is of great value. Another of the physicians of Pope Boniface VIII, Angelus Camerinensis, is called by Oldoino "a most learned doctor of medicine (medicus absolutissimus) who made a fortune out of his profession and for many years not only pleased but benefited the students who crowded to hear him." The two books from him that we know are on "The Regimen for Preservation from the Pest" and on "Protection against Poisons." One of the most distinguished of the Papal Physicians was Arnold {434} of Villanova, who, after having been protected by Pope Benedict XI from enemies who insisted that his scientific writings were heretical, afterwards became the friend and physician of Pope Clement V at Avignon. He is the author of a great many writings which have gone through a number of editions. His works have proved a treasure house of quotations from a number of his colleagues in medicine and surgery who lived before his time, from whom nothing has been preserved except these quotations in Villanova. The edition of his works published at Lyons in 1504 contains some fifty-five different treatises. One of the physicians of Pope Clement V, at least he seems to have been summoned in consultation when the Pope was suffering from a severe illness, the cure of which was attributed to him, was Petrus Aichspadius. He appears to have been a very Admirable Crichton of various learning, for Mandosius says of him that "he was distinguished for his knowledge of the best literature, and as a theologian as well as for his virtues, an excellent physician whose reputation had made medicine respected in his time." With all this he was the Bishop of Basel and after Pope Clement's recovery he was transferred to the See of Moguntum by the Pope, who declared that as he was such a happy curer of bodies it seemed only appropriate that he should be given a larger cure of souls. Pope John (XXI) XXII (1314-16).--Gentilis Gentilis, said to have been the son of another Papal Physician of the name of Gentilis, was the medical attendant of John (XXI) XXII. His death was due to his faithful devotion to the citizens of Perugia during a time of pestilence. He is the author of a volume of Commentaries on Avicenna, of "The Best Councils for every Form of Disease of the Whole Body," of a volume "On Fevers," of a treatise "On Leprosy," a monograph "On Baths," and of a book that went through many editions after printing was introduced on "The Proportions of Medicine and the Method of Investigating their Composition and of Knowing the Appropriate Dose of Each Medicine." This was printed at Padua more than a century after his death and later at Lyons, and there seems to have been another edition in the Low Countries. He wrote a series of smaller medical treatises on "The Activity of Medicines," on "Phthisis" and on "Medical Dosage." He also wrote "On the Pulse and on Urine" in a volume of which editions were issued at Venice and at Lyons. Another of the physicians of Pope John XXII was Dino del Garbo, a Florentine, the son of Bruno del Garbo, a skilful surgeon and the disciple of Taddeo of Florence. He is sometimes known as {435} Dino the Expounder because of his successful devotion to the exposition of Galen and Avicenna. Like many of the physicians of his time he had degrees in both medicine and philosophy and was celebrated for his scholarliness. According to Van der Linden, he wrote _De Caena et Prandio Epistola_, which was published by Jerome of Cartularius in 1545; Commentaries on Hippocrates' Nature of the Foetus, Venice, 1502; a treatise on surgery which was published at Ferrara in 1485 and a subsequent edition at Venice in 1536. His Commentaries on Avicenna and the General Practice of Medicine were published at Venice in 1495 and his book on The Virtues of Simple Medicines, a commentary on the Second Canon of Avicenna, was published at Venice the same year. Dino is usually looked upon as one of the most distinguished contributors to medicine in the fourteenth century. His son Thomas is said also to have been in the service of the Popes and has written books on The Reduction of Medicines, a Commentary on Avicenna and a commentary on Galen's work "On Fevers." John XXII (1316-34), Clement VI (1342-52), Innocent VI (1352-62), St. Urban V (1362-70).--Of Guy de Chauliac, physician to the Popes at Avignon, enough has been said in the text of this book to make clear how important was his place in the surgery of his time and, indeed, of all the modern time. I have written on him more at length in my Old Time Makers of Medicine (Fordham University Press), and during the ten years that have elapsed since the writing of the original edition of this volume on The Popes and Science, Guy de Chauliac's fame and merits have come to be recognized everywhere. Gregory XI (1370-78).--One of the well-known physicians of the Popes at Avignon was Jean de Tornemire, known by his Latin name of Tornamira, the physician of Pope Gregory XI, who on the death of that Pope went to Montpellier, where he became Dean and Chancellor of the Medical Faculty. Gurlt, in his History of Surgery, says that he must be "counted among the most learned and expert physicians of his time." He wrote a commentary on Rhazes and some notes of his on stone in the kidney and bladder show how careful an observer he was. His Rhazes was published at Lyons, 1490. His collected works were published in many editions in the sixteenth century. Urban VI (1378-89), Innocent VII (1404-06), Martin V (1417-31).--Francis Casinus, the son of a noble family of Siena, one of the best-known of the physicians of North Italy in the fourteenth century, was chosen physician to Urban VI in 1378. His son {436} Francis was physician to Pope Martin V, 1417. A brother of Francis Casinus, John by name, was Papal Physician to Pope Innocent VII. Isadoras Ugurgerius in his work _"Le Pompe Sanesi"_ says, "The Casini among the philosophers and physicians of their time held easily the first place. John lectured on the theory of medicine at Siena about the year 1370 and afterwards was summoned to Rome by Pope Innocent VII, by whom he was admitted among his most intimate friends and declared the guardian and conserver of his health." One of John Casinus' sons became Cardinal Antonius Casinus, and another, Bartholomeus, was the Abbot of Valombrosa, while the son of Francis Casinus, his brother, became Bishop of Massa and is famous for a collection of manuscripts made during the first half of the fifteenth century. Another of the physicians of Pope Martin V was Andrew Gamuccius, who had also been physician to Pope John XXIII. He was a descendant of a noble family of San Gemignano, well known for scholarship and for the number of distinguished men who came from it. Eugene IV (1431-47) chose as his physician John Baptist Verallus, doctor of medicine and philosophy, to whom he gave besides the title of archiater to the Pope that of chief physician of the city. Verallus is famous for his work in improving the health of Rome itself and represents one of the pioneers in public hygiene. At various times most of our modern hygienic regulations were anticipated at Rome. The ancient Romans had brought in water from a distance, because they had experienced the seriousness of contamination and during the early Renaissance the aqueducts which had fallen out of repair were gradually restored. The contagiousness of tuberculosis began to be suspected at this time and the idea of intimate contact with patients suffering from disease as a definite cause took shape. In a chapter of "The Century of Columbus," Catholic Summer School Press, N. Y., 1914, I reviewed some of these anticipations in Italy of our modern hygiene due to thinking physicians, of whom Verallus was one of the pioneers. Another of the physicians of Pope Eugene IV was Ludovicus Scarampus. His fame was for surgery rather than medicine, so that it is interesting to learn in spite of the supposed ecclesiastical opposition to surgery that Pope Eugene learned to think so much of him that he made him a Bishop and then Archbishop of Florence, and afterwards Patriarch of Aquilea with the rank of Cardinal. More than one distinguished medieval surgeon in Italy had been a colleague in the episcopal dignity. Practically all the historical {437} writers of Scarampus' time give him a prominent place in their histories. Nicholas V (1448-55).--One of the physicians of Pope Nicholas V, the Renaissance patron of learning, was Bernard Garzonius, distinguished for his knowledge of philosophy and medicine, who had been professor in the medical school at Bologna before being summoned to Rome. Alidosio in his volume _I Dottori Bolognesi di Teologia, Filosofia, Medicina, ed Arti Liberali_ (page 29) gives an interesting account of the hours and subjects of his teaching at Bologna. At nine in the morning Garzonius lectured on the Theory of Medicine, and in the afternoon on the Practice of Medicine. Besides there were special lectures on Moral Philosophy probably setting forth the moral principles of medical practice on the festival days. Garzonius died in Rome of the pest in 1454, having devoted himself to the care of those suffering from the disease, though the mortality was so high that most of those who could, including even not a few of his colleagues in medicine, had left the city. Another of the physicians of Pope Nicholas V was Laurentius Roverella of Ferrara, of whom his contemporaries speak in the highest praise for his erudition, his ability to teach and the piety and charity of his life. He was for a time professor at the University of Ferrara, but afterwards was called to Padua, where his lectures attracted a great deal of attention. He was recalled to Ferrara by the D'Estes in order to secure his prestige for his native city and it was from here that he was summoned to Rome to become the chamberlain and physician of Pope Nicholas V. After the death of Nicholas V he went to Paris, lectured there for a time and was crowned with the doctorate. After this he returned to Ferrara and was frequently sent as ambassador to diverse European princes by the Duke of Ferrara. He was also sent as ambassador for the Popes into France and Hungary. He died at the Monastery of Monte Oliveto in the arms of his brother, who was the Prior of the monastery, but his body was brought for burial to the Church of St. George in Ferrara. Roverella finds a significant place in all the histories of the time. Calixtus III (1455-58).--The physician of Pope Calixtus III and Pius II was Joannes Serninus. He was a native of Siena, practised for a time in his native city, was offered the position with a good salary of public physician to Città di Castella, then went to Ancona in a similar position with such success, according to tradition, that his cures were considered almost miracles. From here he was summoned by Pope Calixtus III, and after his death {438} was retained as his physician by Pope Pius II, himself one of the Piccolomini family of Siena. After his death his body was transferred to Siena because the city considered that the remains of so great a son should rest in her soil. It is significant that this physician of wide experience in public health matters, whose successful career in helping various Italian towns to make conditions more healthy for their citizens gave him a wide reputation, should be the chosen physician of Pope Calixtus III, to whom is attributed a famous Bull, that has never been found however, against Halley's comet on its appearance in 1456. The selection of such a man as Serninus as Papal Physician makes it extremely improbable that the Pope should have issued any such document as is attributed to him. Its issue has been accepted only with the thought that in the middle of the fifteenth century the Pope and his court were buried in ignorance of science and above all of medicine and the cause of disease. [Footnote 51] [Footnote 51: The whole subject of the supposed Papal Bull against the comet is discussed in my sketch of Regiomontanus the father of modern astronomy, as he is sometimes called, in "Catholic Churchmen in Science," second series, Phila., Dolphin Press, 1909.] Another of the physicians of Pope Nicholas V and Calixtus III was Simon Tebaldi, who came of a distinguished family, one of whom was a Cardinal. He is called by the historians of the time an illustrious philosopher and physician of the period. Paul II (1464-71).--Christopher of Verona is mentioned by Platina in his life of Paul II as the physician of that Pope, but nothing more is known of him. Jacobus Gottifredus, another of Paul's physicians, is better known. He taught medicine for a time at Rome, which was his native city, and devoted himself particularly to the practice of his profession. According to tradition he became the most sought after physician of the city and made a large fortune. He had many archaeological interests, collected curiosities of all kinds and generally used the fortune which he made in medicine for cultural purposes. Another of the physicians of Pope Paul II was Joannes Burgius, who was also a bishop. He is highly praised by his contemporaries, and Mandosius describes a huge manuscript volume by him preserved in one of the libraries in Rome, bearing the title _Secreta Verissima ad Varios Curandos Morbos_--The Truest Secrets for Curing Various Diseases. The fourth of the physicians of Paul II of whom there is record was Sanctes Floccus, whose activities as writer and physician are summed up in the inscription on his tombstone. {439} _"Flocca Domus, nomen mihi Sanctes, Patria Firmum, Scriptor eram, et medicus Paule Secunde tuus."_ The fifth of the physicians of Paul II was Sebastianus Veteranus, who was also the archiater or chief physician of the city of Rome according to the list given in the appendix of the statutes of the Roman College, called _Nomenclatura Medicorum._ He is mentioned by his contemporaries as "well versed in the serious disciplines of philosophy and medicine and as constantly a diligent, fruitful cultivator of them, devoting his life to his studies." Sixtus IV (1471-84).--One of the physicians of Pope Sixtus IV was Onofrio de Onofriis. Oldoinus declares him "a celebrated physician greatly esteemed for the success which he had in the treatment of patients and the very large practice which he consequently enjoyed." He had been a professor of philosophy and of medicine--the two nearly always went together in these days, unfortunately they do not so often any more--at the University of Perugia, where he achieved great success. It was from here that he was summoned to be the physician of Pope Sixtus. He wrote a series of books on medicine and some of his lectures were published, though these are not now extant. Another of the physicians of Pope Sixtus IV, to whom he dedicated his important work on food, was John Philip de Lignamine, who had been professor of medicine at Perugia, where his lectures attracted a large following. His book, which appeared at Rome after his office of Papal Physician secured him the leisure for its completion, is "On Every Kind of Food and Drink Useful and Harmful For Man with a Consideration of Their Prime Qualities" (_De Unoquoque Cibo, et Potu Utili Homini, et Novivo, Eorumque Primis Qualitatibus_). [Footnote 52] [Footnote 52: Lignamine interested himself in the new art of printing and was the publisher of a well-known series of finely printed _incunabula_.] One of the important medical scientists of the end of the fifteenth century was Benedict of Nursia, whose book _De Conservatione Sanitatis_ is really an important contribution to medical botany. He is placed in the list of Papal Physicians by Mandosius, whose authority is usually unquestioned. Giacobilli is his authority. Marini in his comments on Mandosius' work declares that Benedict was not a Papal Physician but the ducal physician at Milan, and tells the story of his exile from his native country Nursia. He was so distinguished for his medical learning that he became almost at once one of the most prominent of the physicians in Milan. There is no doubt, however, that Benedict dedicated his book, {440} which is now looked upon as basic in the history of medical botany, to Sixtus IV, and the suggestion that he was a Papal Physician seems to have come from the fact that though remaining in the service of the Duke of Milan he was summoned in consultation to see this Pope during an illness. Innocent VIII (1484-92).--Petrus Leonius, one of the physicians of Innocent VIII, finds a place among Paul Jovius' "Eulogies of Learned Men" and is the author of a commentary on medicine and mathematics and a treatise, _De Urinis_. He had been a professor of medicine at several of the important Italian universities and was very well known throughout Italy. He was summoned to treat Lorenzo de Medici and the early death of that illustrious Florentine gave occasion for a good deal of opprobrium for his physician, though the most careful investigation has shown that there was no reason for criticism of him. The fact that Petrus Leonius had been called as the consultant in Lorenzo's case shows how thoroughly he was appreciated. One of his biographers suggests of him that he was "a learned rather than a lucky physician." Physicians will probably appreciate that distinction, better than others. Alexander VI (1492-1503).--The first of the Papal Physicians of Pope Alexander VI (Alexander de Espinosa) was like that Pontiff himself of a family of Castilian origin though long enough in Italy to have become thoroughly Italianized and even to have received the Roman citizenship. He is mentioned in terms of praise by Baldus Baldi in his work on "The Oriental Opobalsam." Mandosius speaks of him as "a man of great erudition endowed with high intelligence and with a great zeal for promoting the health of humanity." Gaspar Torella, also a Spaniard, was another of the physicians of Pope Alexander VI, and wrote a series of books on the venereal diseases which attracted so much attention in Italy about this time, and which are supposed to have been imported from America, though there is no doubt now of their existence in Europe and in Asia long before. He also wrote a book on "Portents, Prodigies and Prophecies" and another "On Diet or the Preservation of Health" in the form of a dialogue on eating and drinking which became rather popular. Torella was made a bishop under Pope Julius II and his volume on diet is dedicated to that Pope. Another of the Papal Physicians of the end of the fifteenth century was Petrus Pintor, a Spaniard from Valencia, who was "the beloved friend and physician" of Pope Alexander VI. He wrote a {441} "Compilation of the Opinions of All the Doctors on the Prevention and Cure of the Pestilence" (under the word pestilence was included at that time any form of epidemic) which was published at Rome in 1499 and was very well known by his contemporaries. Julius II (1503-13).--One of the Papal Physicians of Pope Julius II was Horatio Lancillotti, of whom it is declared that his whole delight was in books. "Constantly he was occupied with the thought of helping his patients and he practised medicine with liberality and good will, kindly caring for the infirmities of the poor and of friends so that he rendered himself worthy of every praise." He is spoken of as a man of sublime intellect who gave himself to medicine with his whole heart, but whose prudence, wisdom and conduct gave him a reputation even beyond that which he enjoyed as a physician. His son was made a Cardinal by Gregory XIII and other sons of his reached distinction. Another of the physicians of Pope Julius II was Scipio Lancillotti, the brother of Horatio just mentioned. It is related of him that once when the Pope was severely ailing and on the fourth day of his illness was overcome by so deep a coma that for some hours he was considered dead, Scipio Lancillotti administered some medicine, and not only brought the Pontiff back to consciousness, but freed him from danger of death and restored him sufficiently to take up his work again. Another of the physicians of Julius II was Joannes Bodier, whose tomb in the Church of Saint Sebastian on the _Via Appia_ outside the Porta Capena is well known. He was a scholarly ecclesiastic who because of his intellectual and religious distinction was made the Abbot of the Monastery of San Sebastiano by the Pope. One hears much of Jewish physicians in attendance on the Popes, but the records do not bear out the generally received opinion that there were many of them. Occasionally there is mention of one and usually he is some distinguished medical scientist well known in his time whose services were asked also for the Pope. Evidently even the Christian intolerance toward the Jews at this time was not sufficient to prevent such relations on the part of the Popes. Indeed the tradition of the frequency of Jewish physicians to Popes is probably due to the reaction produced by the surprise of finding that there were any Jewish physicians in attendance at the Papal Court. One of those who attended Pope Julius II was Samuel Sarfadi or Sarfati, a Spanish Rabbi who was looked upon as a leader of his people in Rome. It was he who as their {442} representative greeted Pope Julius during the procession when the Pontiff took possession of the city and in accordance with the ancient usage presented him with a copy of the Old Testament. Julius' reply was in the formula of the Roman Ordo commending the Law but condemning the religious practice that did not go beyond the Old Testament, which had reached completion in the New. The Pope and the rabbi continued on terms of intimate friendship and as Papal Physician he was able to protect his people and secure them in the rights that were more freely granted them at Rome than elsewhere in Europe. Pius III.--One of the Papal Physicians of Pius III was Antonius Petrutius, Doctor of Philosophy and of Medicine, of whom Mandosius in his Lives of the Papal Physicians says that "he was the most excellent physician of his time." Leo X (1513-21).--One of the physicians of Pope Leo X who served also in the conclave after his death was Dioscorides da Velletri, to whom we owe a series of monographs on medicine that are of special interest. He wrote on diet, _De Ordine Cibandi;_ on diagnosis, _De Cognitione Naturae Aegritudinis_ (literally on the recognition of the nature of disease), and on stone in the kidney, _De Lapide Renum._ Another of the physicians of Pope Leo X was Bartholomeo of Pisa. He is mentioned by Carolus Cartharius in the _Athenaeo Romano_ as a physician of great skill. He was professor in the Roman Archigymnasium and is the author of an Epitome of the Theory and Practice of Medicine issued at Florence early in the sixteenth century. This epitome is said to have been of special service because it contained in brief a great deal of information gathered from books and illustrated by Bartholomeo's own experience. Still another of the physicians of Pope Leo X was Bernardinus Speronius, a Paduan by birth and a professor of high esteem in the University of Padua. Angelus Portenarius in his work _Della Felicità di Padova_ says of him that he was a physician of such great skill and reputation that Pope Leo selected him for his physician while he was lecturing at Padua, and Bernardinus felt himself highly honored by the selection and accepted the post. The fourth of the physicians of Pope Leo X was Jerome Sessa, Doctor of Philosophy and Medicine, who was afterwards the particular friend and physician of Pope Paul IV. He is the author of a treatise on medical matters, _De Re Medica_, and was singularly respected for his kindness to the poor, and for the {443} self-sacrifice with which he gave himself to the more difficult duties of his profession. The fifth physician of Pope Leo X was Clementius Clementinus, noted in distinction from many of his colleagues as a Doctor of Arts and Medicine instead of the usual combination with philosophy. Van der Linden declares that "he was second to none in the opinion of Rome and the whole of Italy in his knowledge of medicine though he was at the same time a very celebrated astronomer." He had been professor of philosophy and mathematics at Padua. He is the author of a work on The Precepts of Medicine published by Jacob Mazzocchium at Rome, 1512. He also wrote a work on astronomy, and a monograph on fevers. Adrian VI (1522-23), the distinguished Belgian scholar elected to the Papacy to succeed Leo X, had the honor of having dedicated to him a monograph, _De Pestilentia_, written by the well-known Bartholomeo Montagnana, who is one of the great Renaissance physicians of Italy. The almost equally famous John Battista Elisio dedicated to him his work _De Praesagiis Sapientum,_ On the Prognosis of the Wise. Some of Adrian's physicians were among the most widely known members of the medical profession at this time. To one of them, Giovanni Antracino, John De Vigo dedicated his treatise _De Morbo Gallico_ in words of the highest praise. Latin dedications lend themselves to flattery, but with even all due discount for this, Vigo's expressions show how much Antracino must have been appreciated at the time. He praises him for "his singular wisdom, marvellous perspicacity, rightness of judgment and serious purpose," and recalls that in many consultations where they had been present together Antracino had excelled not only in medical theory, but in medical practice. Another of the physicians of Pope Adrian VI was Francesco Fusconi, whose name is sometimes wrongly given as Frasconi. Amato Lusitano calls him "a most famous physician," and Marsilio Cagnati in his work _De Aeris Romani Salubritate_ notes that Francesco was the first to recognize that starving a fever and especially the malarial fevers of the neighborhood of Rome, though it had been the custom for a long time for physicians to advise it, did much more harm than good. He insisted that the ailing should be more richly nourished and that above all they should be fed on chopped meats which would make it easier for them to ingest such quantities as would be good for them. Cagnati says that many Roman physicians followed this teaching and saved much {444} suffering and many lives. Fusconi is the physician whom Benvenuto Cellini praises for having saved his life. The famous sculptor was taken with a very severe fever and the "first physicians" of Rome were called to see him, among them Master Francesco (Fusconi) Da Norcia, who was a very old man, but of great reputation. The fever increased to such a degree that the professors held the disease for desperate, but not Norcia. He took charge of the case and by the most careful treatment succeeded in freeing Benvenuto from an illness which did not seem as though it could possibly come to an end without fatal issue. Clement VII (1523-34), who was of the Medici family, had a number of physicians and on one occasion when ill no less than eight were in attendance on him. This gave occasion to the satiric poet Berni to declare in verse that when the Pope after his recovery went to make his thanksgiving to Our Lady he might indeed have felt that it was a miraculous event to have been saved from the hands of eight physicians all at once. At least three of these physicians of Pope Clement are famous in the history of medicine; that is to say, they wrote books frequently referred to by their medical colleagues. One of these, Andrea Cibo, or Andreas Cibbo, was also physician to Pope Paul III and will be mentioned under his name. Cibo had been a professor at the University of Perugia before being made Papal Physician. One of his contemporaries refers to him as "the secure health of the sick." Another of Clement's physicians was Andrea Turini, who had been a professor at Pisa. He seems afterwards to have been royal physician to Louis XII, King of France. There are two books of his, _De Embrochia_ and _De Curatione Pleuritidis_ published at Lyons in 1537, in which Andrea gives himself the titles of physician and counsellor of the Pope and the King. Andrea was something of a wit and is quoted in the _Facetiae_ of Domenichi. After a visit to Pisa he declared that "Pisa was a maritime city without fish, having a handsome Cathedral without a sacristy, a leaning tower which did not fall, a well without any buckets, and a university without professors." Ludovico Augeni, another of the physicians of Pope Clement VII, taught for a while at Perugia and is said to have written a book on the use of wines in health and disease, but he is famous principally as the father of Orazio Augeni, professor at the Sapienza at Rome, who dedicated to his father his commentary on the nine books of Rhazes. A nephew of his, Sabastiano, issued a volume, _De Catarrho_, which he dedicated to Paul IV. {445} One of the most famous of the Papal Physicians, though he is known much more for his work in history and literature than in medicine, is Paulus Jovius, another of the physicians to Clement VII. His "Histories of Illustrious Men" and his "Eulogies of Men Distinguished in Letters and in War," as well as his other writings, are well-known sources of historical material. He is besides the author of a series of volumes on natural history that are not so widely known, but deserve a place in the history of science. They include a book on Roman fishes and another on marine fishes and shellfish as well as descriptions of Lake Como, of England, Scotland and Ireland and the Orkney Islands that have a niche of their own in natural history. He had been the intimate friend of Pope Leo X, Pope Adrian VI made him a canon of the Cathedral of Como and he was one of the close associates and a domestic prelate of Clement VII, who assigned him apartments in the Vatican. Jovius made a magnificent collection of memorials of the illustrious men whose lives he wrote, and we owe to him the preservation of many historical materials that would otherwise almost inevitably have been lost. Still another of the physicians of Clement VII was Matteo Corti, of whom Aller declares that "he was as great in speech as with the scalpel, read the Greek authors and taught his colleagues to prefer them to the Arabs and recalled Galen into the schools." He was summoned from Venice to be physician to Pope Clement because of "the great reputation for knowledge of disease and skill in the treatment of patients that he had gained." He is noted for having modified the habits of the Romans by advising them to take less food in the middle of the day and to take a better meal at night. This putting back of the principal meal gradually spread in the cities of the world until the present custom of evening dinner became established. He wrote a series of books, but his constant insistence was on the avoidance of disease by careful attention to diet and mode of living rather than by the cure of it. He made it his special boast that many of those who followed his directions were either not ill for years or else were afflicted with but minor ailments. After the death of Pope Clement he was professor of medicine in Bologna and then the physician of Cosimo de Medici in Florence and at the end of his life held a professor's chair in medicine at Pisa. Ghilinus in his work The Theatre of Literary Men (_Teatro d'Uomini Letterati_) talks of Matteo Corti (in Latin, Matthaeus Curtius), as "a very celebrated doctor of medicine who as a professor was the peer of all and the superior {446} of most of his colleagues and who revived with benefit to his students and their patients the true manner of treating illness according to Hippocrates and Galen." He was looked upon as one of the distinguished physicians of his time. He wrote concerning the manner of dining and supping, (_De Prandio et Coena_), a commentary on Mondino's anatomy and a book On Venesection and another On Dosage. Paul III (1534-49).--One of the distinguished consultant physicians of the mid-sixteenth century was Antonio Musa Brasavola (sometimes written Brasovola), whose years run with the century. His studies were made with the famous Leonicenus at Ferrara. He became the physician in ordinary and personal friend of Hercules II, Duke of Este, and accompanied him to France when the Duke espoused the daughter of Louis XII. He was at various times the physician to four Popes and was called in consultation to Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France. He devoted himself particularly to medical botany and pharmacology and was one of the first to hold a professorship in these subjects. He was well known for his life-saving practice of tracheotomy and he restored _paracentesis thoracis_ as a standard remedy. He introduced the use of _radix chinae_, a kind of smilax related to sarsaparilla, and put _lignum guiaci_ into the pharmacology of the day. He wrote a series of monographs on botanical subjects which have given him an enduring place in the history of that time. A distinguished group of men were near the Popes in Rome at this time with whom Brasavola was in close relations. They included Eustachius the great anatomist, Columbus, discoverer of the circulation in the lungs, Caesalpinus and Fallopius, who was a professor at the University of Bologna, that city being at this time in the Papal States. One of the great Renaissance physicians and surgeons well known in our histories of medicine for an important contribution to the treatment of gunshot wounds, is Alfonso Ferri, a Neapolitan, who, after some years of professorship in surgery in Naples, became the physician of Pope Paul III. His book, which is founded on his "experience at home and at war," went through a number of editions at Rome, at Antwerp and Frankfurt and other places, and he was evidently widely read and considered an important authority. He invented some instruments for the removal of bullets and has many practical hints with regard to the treatment of gunshot wounds. He was the professor of surgery at the Sapienza, {447} Rome, and has written a volume on the carunculae, or hard multiplex tumors, which arise at the vesical neck. Silvius Zeffiri, another of the physicians of Pope Paul III, is the author of a volume on "Putrefaction or The Best Method of Protracting Life," which was published at Rome in 1536. Zeffiri seems to have anticipated the modern popular notion of the putrefactive conditions in the human system as one of the most important factors in shortening life, and he discusses various means of preventing them. [Illustration: Ferri's Instruments:--20 a, hollow probe or canula with screw; b, canula with rounded end alone; c, screw; 21, 22, Alphonsinum or grasping instrument for the removal of foreign bodies; 23, curved needle.] Another of the physicians of Pope Paul III was Andreas Cibbo, Doctor of Arts and Medicine, of whom Caesar Crispoltus in his work on distinguished Perugians called _Perugia Augusta_ (Book III, P. 335) tells that having lectured for many years on medicine at the University of Perugia and practised his profession with great reputation, Andreas was called to Rome by Clement VII as Papal Physician, and also occupied that post under Pope Paul III. He accompanied Pope Paul on a journey to Nice on the occasion {448} when the Emperor Charles V and King Francis I of France met, and he was chosen by special honor to assist at the banquet given these sovereigns. [Illustration: Maggi's Bullet Extractors and Needles:--10, 11, 12, shot borer (canula with screw); 11, screw alone; 12, canula alone; 13, protective tube for the introduction of boring instrument; 14, 15, lance needles; 16, 17, fistula scalpels.] Another of the physicians of Pope Paul III was Jacobus Bonacossus, of whom Mandosius says that "he was famous for his wide knowledge not only in science, but on all culture subjects, as well as for his magnanimity, his affability of manners and his careful attention in his professional work to the poor as well as to the rich." He came of a distinguished family of Ferrara and is given an important place in the list of "Illustrious Men of the City of Ferrara" published by Augustin Superbo. Another of the physicians of Pope Paul III was Joannes {449} Franciscus Emanuelis, also called Manovelli. He is mentioned in the volume of Statutes of the College of Physicians of Florence and was looked upon by his contemporaries, according to Baldo Baldi, as a very learned man whose knowledge was only surpassed by his cultivation of the social virtues. He was a professor at Florence when he was summoned to Rome to become Papal Physician. [Illustration: Maggi's Instruments for Gunshot Wounds:--6 a, b, c, separable bullet forceps; 7, bullet spatula; 8, 9, anserine bullet forceps, separable and with a screw-crushing arrangement.] A very distinguished man who also occupied the post of physician to Pope Paul III was Thomas Cadimustus, a Belgian, who, after securing the doctorate in medicine and philosophy with distinction at Louvain, came to Rome and soon secured a place among the {450} teachers there and attained a reputation for great learning and successful care of his patients. He became Secretary Apostolic as well as physician to the Pope, and evidently enjoyed the close friendship of the Pontiff. [Illustration: Some Instruments of Maggi:--1, surgical hook; 2, double hook for the extraction of bullets; 3, concave toothed forceps; 4, straight-toothed forceps; 5, crow-beak forceps.] Another of the physicians of Pope Paul III was Tiberius Palella, famous for his knowledge of medicine and with a special reputation for information with regard to plants. He is known for his many friendships with men of learning and left behind {451} him the reputation, according to Mandosius, of being "a physician of the highest integrity interested above all in the health of the poor as well as the rich, without envy for others and a constant diligent seeker of the right." Another of the physicians of Pope Paul III who as the great friend of the Jesuits might possibly be expected by those who misunderstand that Order to be opposed to Science, but proves to have been a great patron and friend of a whole series of the most prominent scientists of the time, was Joannes Aquilinus, or John of Aquila, a noted Neapolitan physician, who, after acquiring a great reputation in Naples, was called to the Professorship of Medicine at Pisa when that University was at the climax of its development. There he achieved so great a reputation that his contemporaries referred to him as a "second AEsculapius." Lacuna, who published a famous edition of Galen in 1548 which went through a series of editions, dedicated one portion of the edition to Aquilinus out of deference to his "love for good literature." Another of the physicians to Pope Paul III was Franciscus Frigimelica, who, after having acquired extraordinary fame as a teacher, having been made professor at the University of Padua at the early age of twenty-eight, received offers from many of the Italian princes to become their physician. De Renzi in his _Storia della Medicina in Italia_ says that he refused them all, but yielded to the solicitation of Pope Paul III, and seems to have been tempted by the atmosphere of intense medical science that had been created at Rome at this time. Frigimelica is famous for his study of baths and his treatise on the making of artificial baths with metallic salts. _De Balneis Metallicis Artificio Parandis_ is an early classic in balneology. He also wrote a volume "On Various Medical Questions," a _Pathologia Parva_, and a number of his consultations were published. Julius III (1550-55).--A very important Papal Physician is Maggi, who had been the professor of anatomy and surgery at Bologna, the uncle and teacher of the celebrated anatomist Aranzi. He became physician to Pope Julius III about 1550. His book on gunshot wounds is dedicated to Prince Giovanni Battista De Monte, nephew of Pope Julius and General-in-Chief of the Papal Army. Gurlt, in his great History of Surgery, declares that Maggi was the first who showed very clearly that shot wounds neither caused burning nor poisoning. To demonstrate this he made a series of carefully planned, most ingenious experiments and {452} observations which were repeated hundreds of years afterwards, but only to confirm his conclusions. His method of handling gunshot wounds was very simple, and he laid the greatest weight on treatment directed to permitting the free exit of pus. He was the inventor of a series of instruments, the pictures of which we have and some of which are here reproduced. They show his ingenuity and anticipate a good many ideas that are supposed to be much more modern than his time. Gurlt has devoted more than eight pages of rather small type to a summarization of Maggi's work so that there is no doubt about its great importance in the history of surgery. Another of the physicians of Pope Julius III was Hippolytus Salvianus, a doctor of medicine and of philosophy, of whom one of his contemporaries said that it was doubtful in which of these sciences he was the more learned and whether Hippolytus deserved more praise for his science or his faith or his diligence in caring for the sick. He wrote a volume in folio on fishes, illustrated by copper plate engravings (Rome, 1555), a volume On Crises as a commentary on Galen (Rome, 1558), and a book on aquatic animals (Venice, 1600). He has the distinction also of having ventured successfully in literature and he published poems and comedies which went through a number of editions. One of his sons became a popular Roman physician, the other a poet. One of the great Italian anatomists, a pioneer in the development of the biological sciences, was John Baptist Cananus, who was one of the medical attendants of Pope Julius III. His well-known work "Illustrated Dissections of the Muscles of the Human Body," _Musculorum Humani Corporis, Picturata Dissectio_, Ferrara, 1572, in quarto, is one of the precious bibliographic treasures in medicine. He was the first to discover valves in veins, finding them in the azygos, and he made a series of original observations on the sense organs which gave a great stimulus to the development of the minute anatomy of these structures at this time. Another of the physicians of Pope Julius III was Augustin Ricchi, one of the scholarly medical writers of the sixteenth century, whose erudite translations enriched the medicine of that time and of subsequent generations. Van der Linden notes that he translated a number of the books of Galen, adding annotations. They were published in Venice shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century. He had a wide acquaintance and friendship with the most learned men of his time. {453} Paul IV (1555-59).--One of the physicians to Pope Paul IV, of whom it is noted that he was also an intimate friend whom the Pontiff loved very dearly, was Jerome Cessa, doctor of medicine and philosophy, who wrote a work on medicine and a treatise on religion, and who is said to have refused the dignity of cardinal which was offered him because he felt that others worthier might be chosen. One of the distinguished physicians of this time was Professor Altamare of Naples, of whom De Renzi in his _Storia della Medicina in Italia_ tells that when he was compelled to fly from his native country by political disturbance, he was given a refuge by Pope Paul IV, under whose "wise and benevolent protection" he was able to continue his medical work for a time and through whose patronage he was restored to his professorship at Naples. As a mark of gratitude Altamare dedicated to Pope Paul IV his book _De Medendis Humani Corporis Malts, Ars Medica._ Pius IV (1559-65).--Alidosius, in his work on "The Foreign Doctors Who Have Been Professors of Theology, Philosophy, Medicine and The Liberal Arts in Bologna" (_Li Dottori Forestieri, che in Bologna hanno Letto Teologia, Filosofia, Medicina ed Arti Liberali_), mentions John Andrew Bianchi, a doctor of medicine and the liberal arts, famous for his learning, who taught in the University of Bologna from 1525 to 1561 with great success and then was summoned to Rome to be the physician to Pope Pius IV to the satisfaction of everyone, for it was felt that he had achieved the highest place in his profession of medicine. Simon Pasqua, a physician to Pope Pius IV, was the author of a book On The Gout and of a description of his Embassy to Great Britain from Genoa in the time of Queen Mary and Philip, but this, unfortunately, was only in manuscript and seems to have been lost. Pompeius Barba, or dalla Barba, was another of the physicians of Pope Pius IV. He wrote a volume on "The Immortality of the Soul according to the Peripatetic Philosophers" which was published at Florence in 1553. Two years later he wrote a commentary on some of the writings of Pico della Mirandola and nearly twenty-five years later there appeared at Venice a dialogue of his "On Arms and Letters." He left in manuscript a book On Baths as well as some poems. Still another of the physicians of Pope Pius IV was Franciscus Gymnasius, described by a contemporary (Caesar Mezamici in his _Notizie Istoriche_) as "so distinguished in the profession of {454} medicine that while he was professor in Bologna many of the princes of Italy called him in consultation when they were seriously ill and constantly with a happy issue." Pius IV called him to Rome, honored him with one of the principal chairs in the Papal University of the Sapienza, providing a special stipend for him, and made him his personal physician. Gymnasius added to his fame and obtained universal esteem in the Curia. His tomb is in the Church of the Minerva at Rome. A very interesting character at Rome during the later Renaissance was Jerome Cardan, who though not a papal physician by formal appointment, after wandering all over the world in various capacities, lived his last years at Rome, enjoying a pension from the Pope. He is a type of the many-sided, many-minded man of the Renaissance. In 1524 he received his degree of doctor in medicine at Padua, practised for ten years and then became professor of mathematics in Milan, and a few years later taught medicine at Pavia, refused the corresponding professorship at Copenhagen, spent nearly a year with Archbishop Hamilton of St. Andrews, the primate of Scotland, returned to Italy to practise once more, refusing many offers of professorships in foreign universities, taught for some years at Pavia and then at Bologna and spent the last five years of this varied, and at the end rather stormy career, at Rome living on the Papal bounty. He is one of the great geniuses of the time whose "vanity, boastfulness, childish credulity, superstitiousness was bound up with a genius that opened up many new paths in science" (Gurlt). His work meant more for philosophy and, above all, for mathematics than for medicine, but he has an important place in the history of science. Another genius who spent some years in Rome about the same time, and evidently found it eminently favorable for his work, was Jerome Mercurialis, who was sent by his native city to Rome on a mission to Pope Pius IV, when about 32, and secured opportunities for study in Rome so much to his desires that he spent seven years in medical and philological studies there. After this he was invited to be Trincavella's successor at Padua and from here was summoned by the Emperor Maximilian II on a consultation to Vienna and richly rewarded for his services. After seven years of medical professorship at Padua he was for some twelve years in a similar capacity at Bologna, which was then a Papal University, and then accepted the call of the Grand Duke Cosimo I to Pisa. The Medici were laboring at this time to make Pisa an important rival in education of Padua and Bologna and {455} were offering alluring salaries and special inducements to the most distinguished teachers in every department. Mercurialis' books on skin diseases, on women's diseases, on the diseases of children and on gymnastics, went through many editions and now sell for good prices in auction rooms, for he is considered one of the classics of medicine. Pius V (1564-72).--One of the physicians and intimate friends of Pope St. Pius V was Placidus Fuscus, who wrote a volume "On the Use and Abuse of Astrology in Medicine." Fuscus, according to the inscription on his tomb, was "distinguished for his social service, his work at the hospital of the Santo Spirito and among the poor of Rome and especially those in prison." Gregory XIII (1572-85).--As might be expected, the physician of Pope Gregory XIII, the Pope to whom we owe the correction of the calendar, was a distinguished medical scientist who had been earlier an intimate friend as well as physician to St. Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Jesuits. His name was Alessandro Trajano Petronio of Castiglione, and he is often mentioned in the medical literature of the time and wrote a book, _De Victu Romanorum et de Sanitate Tuenda_, "On The Diet of the Romans and the Preservation of Health," which he dedicated to Pope Gregory XIII. He also wrote a work on "The Water of the Tiber" and a series of dialogues on medicine as well as "Medical Aphorisms" (Venice, 1535.) Sixtus V (1585-90).--The principal physician of Pope Sixtus V was Andreas Baccius, "who was famous not only as a physician but as a philosopher and a man of erudite and polished intellect." Pope Sixtus occupied himself with bringing fresh supplies of water into Rome and we have a series of studies of these waters made by his physician. He also wrote on baths and especially on those in the neighborhood of Rome. There is also a book by him on "The Wines of Italy and The Banquets of the Ancients." He was much more than an amateur as an antiquary and wrote a book on "The Origin of the Old City of Cluana." There is also a book of his on "Gems and Precious Stones," a volume on "Poisons and their Antidotes," as well as a series of shorter writings. De Renzi in his _Storia della Medicina in Italia_ tells the story of the earlier career of Baccio. As a younger man he became so deeply interested in his scientific studies at Rome that he did not succeed in practising medicine and was in danger even of starving because he had not practical ways. He was rescued by Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, who became his patron and provided him with the {456} opportunity to devote himself to scientific studies without the necessity of thinking about the obligation of gaining his daily bread. Baccio became celebrated for his learning so that according to De Renzi his "profound erudition passed into a proverb in his time." His great opportunity came, adds De Renzi, when he was made Papal Physician to Pope Sixtus V. Castor Durantes, a skilled physician and poet, was another of the medical attendants of Pope Sixtus V. In Giacobilli's catalogue the following works are noted--"Treasure of Health," "On the Nature of Food," which ran through many editions, the New Herbarium, and _Theatrum Plantarum, Animalium, Piscium, et Petrarum_, Venetiis, 1636. His Herbarium was done in verse and besides he wrote a series of poems in Virgilian metre which attracted favorable attention from his contemporaries. Urban VII (1590-91).--The physician of Pope Urban VII was Demetrius Canevarius, who was in his time, according to contemporary authorities, the leading physician of Genoa when he was called to Rome. He made a magnificent success at Rome, became very wealthy, but was famous for his hospitality, his many friends and the magnificent library which he collected, "filled with all the best books." We have from him a book on "The Practice of Medicine," another on the "Diagnosis, Prognosis and Cure of Fevers" and a third on "The Procreation of Man." Like most of the physicians of his time he was a philosopher as well as a medical scientist and so we have two philosophic monographs from him, one on "The Origin and Destruction of Natural Things," another on "First Principles." Canevari, to use his more familiar Italian name, is famous as one of the great bibliophiles of history. He had a series of the most beautiful bindings made for his books and these have been the precious treasures of collectors ever since. To own a Canevari binding is a much-prized distinction in the world of rare books. Innocent IX (1591).--Malpighi, one of the Papal Physicians of this Pope, is one of the greatest of medical scientists. His career is sketched earlier in this book. Another of his scarcely less distinguished physicians was Lucas Tozzius, who succeeded Malpighi. It would indeed have been difficult to have filled adequately the room of so great a predecessor, but while Tozzi's powers of observation and scientific genius were not so penetrating as those of Malpighi, his books probably influenced his own generation of physicians almost more than those of his great scientific predecessor. He wrote a volume on the theory and another on the practice of {457} medicine, wrote commentaries on the aphorisms of Hippocrates and on the medical art of Galen, as well as some volumes on philosophy and even lighter subjects. He was looked upon as one of the most talented men in Italy of his time and his scholarly erudition made him the friend of learned visitors to Italy from every country in Europe. Clement VIII (1592).--Jerome Provenzalis, "a philosopher of distinction, most expert physician, theologian of great name and yet a practical genius of the highest ability who had scarcely his equal in his generation in Italy" (Mandosius), was the medical attendant of Pope Clement VIII. One of his books, a treatise on the senses (Rome, 1597), attracted wide attention in his time and still has a place in the bibliography of the sensations. Another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII was Jerome Rubeus, who wrote books on history as well as medicine. He is well known as the author of a history of Ravenna and its neighborhood and people which contains an account of the Goths, the Lombards and the Italians of the earlier Middle Ages from the materials then at hand. He is best known in medicine for his "Annotations on Cornelius Celsus' De Re Medica." He wrote a treatise on Destination and a monograph on The Dietetic Value of Melons. His book on Destination appeared in editions at Venice, at Basel, at Ravenna and probably also at Rome. Rubeus has a place in most of the histories written at this time. Another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII was Jerome Cordella. While he is highly praised for his knowledge of philosophy and his skill in medicine he is better known for his intimate friendship with St. Philip Neri, of whom Cardinal Newman, in the nineteenth century, was so proud to proclaim himself the spiritual son. Jerome was of assistance to St. Philip particularly in the magnificent social work which meant so much for the correction of social abuses at this time and, above all, the occupation of youthful minds with higher thoughts. Among Zecchius' books, who was another of the physicians to Pope Clement VIII, is one on "The Means of Curing Especially Such Fevers as Arise from Putrid Humors." Another is called "Medical Consultations or The Whole Practice of Medicine Briefly Treated," a third is on "The Use of Italian Waters," and then besides there are a series of shorter papers on Hippocrates' Aphorisms, on Digestion, on Purgation, on The Letting of Blood, on Critical Days and on the Morbus Gallicus. Caesalpinus the Botanist.--Caesalpinus is mentioned in the {458} text of the previous edition of this work as a professor at the Papal Medical School, the Sapienza, and physician to Pope Clement VIII. In the history of science, however, he should rather be counted among the botanists than the physicians, though there is no doubt that he was the first fully to describe the systemic circulation. Edward Lee Greene, in his Landmarks of Botanical History, which is "A Study of Certain Epochs in the Development of the Science of Botany" (part of volume 54 of the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Washington, 1909), mentions that "The Caesalpinus system of plant arrangement seemed incomparably superior to every one that had preceded it." Linnaeus in the warmth of zeal for the great Caesalpino had pronounced him "first in the order of time among real systematists." Caesalpinus is then one of the great founders of modern botany and his work _De Plantis_ is a foundation stone of the science. Gurlt talks of him as the greatest botanist of his century and his work as director of the botanical garden of Pisa did much both for medicine and botany. A little practical work of his was a Manual of the Practice of Medicine, which attracted much attention and is in line with the efforts of Papal Physicians as a rule to make knowledge available for the use of physicians generally. Still another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII was Michael Mercatus, an intimate personal friend of the well-known social reformer St. Philip Neri, whose profound influence on the social life of Rome is a matter of history and to whom such men as Newman and Faber and the English Oratorians turned with the loving name of Father in the nineteenth century. Mercatus wrote a series of instructions on the Pest and his medical volume contains also articles on antidotes against poisons, the gout and paralysis. Like many of the physicians of his century he was interested in Oriental problems and wrote a volume on the obelisks of Rome which was published in 1589 and dedicated to Pope Sixtus V. This led to a controversy with Latino Latini during which Mercatus published another volume on the obelisks. Mercatus came of a well-known scholarly family, for his grandfather had been a close friend of Marsilio Ficino and a member of the famous Platonic Academy. Another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII, at least he received the honor of the appointment as Papal Physician, though he could not come to Rome to fulfil its duties because of the approach of age, was Nicholas Masinus. He is well known for his work on "The Abuse of Cold Drinks," which was published in {459} 1587. The custom of gathering snow on the mountains and using it in their wine and other drinks during the summer time, which had been practised by the ancient Romans, was revived at the time of the Renaissance and Masinus was sure that it was productive of harm to the digestive system. Still another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII who deserves mention was Jacobus Bonaventura, to whom Athenius of Brussels dedicated his edition of the "Medical Consultations of Jerome Mercurialis," calling him "a very distinguished man." He was a particular friend of Mercurialis, who expressed his opinion of him in the highest terms. He made a great many friends among the nobility of Italy and was very dear to the Sovereign Pontiff. Still another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII was Julius De Angelis, who came of a well-known academic family with many members distinguished in law and medicine. He was professor at Padua for years and afterwards at the Sapienza in Rome and was chosen by the Pope to give special lessons for the benefit of physicians and medical attendants at the Santo Spirito Hospital in Saxia as it was called. He is mentioned in a number of medical works of the time, and in the book of the Statutes of the College of Physicians of the City of Rome. Paul V (1605-21).--One of the physicians of Pope Paul V, though at first he had refused the honor because it is said that as an astrologer he had found the stars unfavorable to his acceptance of it, was Pompeius Caimus, from whom we have a number of medical writings. Van der Linden, in _De Scriptis Medicis_, and others furnish the list of them. He wrote "On Congenital Heat," on "The Indications of Putrid Fevers," on "The Recognition and Cure of Melancholia," on "The Nature of Science and Its Acquisition," "On Grief," a "Treatise on Human Longevity and the Climacteric Years," as well as "Dissertations on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna," which had been delivered as lectures at Padua, on "The Nature and Differences of Winds," and on "The Early Recognition and the Lengthening of Old Age," besides translating and annotating a number of the works of the old Greek philosophers and physicians in Latin. It may seem strange that a man of such wide erudition and scholarship should still cling to the delusion of astrology, but about this same time Galileo and Kepler were drawing up horoscopes, and in the middle of the eighteenth century Mesmer's astrological essay was accepted for the degree of Doctor of Medicine at the University of Vienna. Caimus, after refusing the chair of {460} medicine at the University of Pisa, to which a magnificent salary was attached, became the physician to Pope Gregory XV. Gregory XV (1621-23).--Vincentius Crucius was another of the physicians of Pope Gregory XV. He had been a professor at Bologna and we have from him his lectures at Bologna on "Epilepsy or The Comitial Disease," published at Venice in 1603. Books of his "On Catarrh," published at Ravenna, on "The More Frequent Diseases of The Head; Catarrh, Phrenitis, Lethargy and Epilepsy," published at Rome, 1617, and "The More Frequent Diseases of the Chest; Phthisis, Haemoptysis, Asthma, Peri-pneumonia, and Pluritis," issued also at Rome, a volume on "The Diseases of The Stomach" and a series of volumes of Consultations on Medicine, were well known to his contemporaries and to succeeding generations. He wrote besides a commentary on Lucretius, another on Hippocrates, a book on Prophylaxis, a volume on Vesuvius and a popular work in Italian, all his other works having been in Latin, meant to be of assistance to ordinary people in avoiding disease and especially the infectious diseases. Two of the Papal Physicians of Gregory XV are the brothers Giovanni and Bernardino Castellani. John is the better known and was for years the director of the Hospital of Santo Spirito and received the much coveted title of Roman Citizen for his work for Roman citizens there. He succeeded Elpidiano as lecturer on anatomy and surgery at the University of the Sapienza and left a large anatomical work in manuscript with many copper plate engravings, which were never published. The book of his by which he is known is a volume of directions for venesection from the standpoint of the anatomist. It was the custom then for nearly everyone to have himself let blood several times a year and especially in the spring, somewhat as in our time many people take purgatives. The practices are about equally foolish unless there is some special indication for them. In many families the barber-surgeon was called in almost as regularly for this and with quite as little anxiety about it as for the cutting of the hair. Naturally there had been many mishaps in this practice because the barbers were expert enough but ignorant, and venesection was done from blood vessels all over the body because one patient thought his head ought to be relieved, another his foot, another his chest, and the like. Castellani's book then, called _Phylacterium_, which I suppose might be translated The Protective, was meant to indicate the anatomical landmarks that should guide the barber-surgeon so as to avoid the danger points. Like so many other of the works of the {461} Papal Physicians it was directed to the correction of popular practices that were the source of injury and suffering to the people. Castellani's book contained directions for the application of cups, dry and wet, which was also a popular practice confided to the barber-surgeons at this time, and like blood-letting had been subject to many abuses. Urban VIII (1623-44).--One of the scholarly Papal Physicians was Julius Mancinus of Siena, who secured the much coveted position of physician to the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome by competition. He obtained a great reputation for his ability to make the prognosis of disease and acquired an extensive practice as a consequence. He accumulated a great fortune from his practice but lived very modestly and used his income partly for the education of ambitious youths of talent who were without the means of securing an education and partly in the collection of works of art. He wrote a book on "The Pictures of Rome." A number of books were dedicated to him, and Antonio Recchi in his scientific work expresses his gratitude to him for the help afforded in the collection of plants, animals, and minerals from Mexico. Two of the Papal Physicians of Pope Urban VIII were the uncle and nephew Sylvester and Thaddeus Collicola. Sylvester taught medicine at the Sapienza and was a very popular teacher mentioned in a number of books of the time. Thaddeus had studied law before taking up medicine, but devoted himself entirely to the second profession and Mandosius speaks of him as "the greatest physician of his time, dear to all the learned men who knew him and to all the good men who were brought in contact with him." Thaddeus was evidently a friend of the literary men of his time, for he is often mentioned by poets and writers. Several books were dedicated to him by scientific and literary admirers. Innocent X (1644-55).--One of the copious writers among the Papal Physicians was Baldus Baldi, who was the medical attendant of Innocent X. We have a series of books from him, one On Contagious Diseases, a treatise on Hippocrates' Suggestions concerning Air, Water and Habitation, a book On Pleurisy, a detailed account of the fatal illness and the autopsy on the body of Cardinal Bevilacqua and academic lectures on poisons as well as a book on the Opobalsamo Orientate. A distinguished Papal Physician under Pope Innocent X was Paul Zacchias, "a most learned philosopher and physician who had a very versatile genius and whose deep interest in every form of intellectual work, not only such serious studies as philosophy, {462} medicine, theology and jurisprudence, but also the lighter arts of poetry, music, painting and so forth, made him distinguished among his contemporaries." Zacchias is best known as the author of a book on medico-legal questions which went through a series of editions, was published originally at Rome and afterwards at Lyons in at least two editions there. Zacchias wrote a volume on the keeping of Lent in which he discussed various questions of the relationship of fasting and health, which went through several editions and is often referred to by the moralists. He also wrote a book on Hypochondriasis. Some of his writings that were widely circulated in manuscript are On Sudden and Unexpected Death, On Macules Contracted from the Foetus _in Utero_, on Rest in the Cure of Disease, on Laughter and Grief, on a Physical Consideration of The Miracles of Holy Scriptures, and other subjects that might be expected to interest a medico-legal expert who was occupied particularly with the psychology of many human problems. The Papal Physicians were not all Italians, indeed Italian as a national designation was almost unused, men were Neopolitans, Genoese, Venetians, Paduans, Bolognese, Sicilians, Milanese quite as distinctly as now they are French, English, Spanish or whatever else it may be. The Popes usually chose physicians from their own cities but not to the exclusion of others and not a few Papal Physicians were from outside of Italy. Pope Innocent X chose Gabriel Fonseca, a Portuguese, whose father had been a teacher of medicine at Pisa and at Padua, and who himself held chairs in medicine at both of these universities before he was invited to Rome to be a lecturer at the Sapienza and Papal Physician. Van der Linden notes among his writings a work on medical economy, _Medici Oeconomia_, and a series of lectures on Contagious Fevers, as well as a book on Medical Banquets. Fonseca came to be looked upon as one of the most distinguished teachers of medicine in Italy in his time. Alexander VII (1655-67).--One of the physicians of Pope Alexander VII was Matthias Naldius, Doctor of Medicine and of Philosophy and a man of great erudition, a scholar in Latin and in Greek, who knew Hebrew, Chaldaic and Arabic. He was sent by the Duke of Etruria on a medical mission of consultation to the Prince of Damascus, who was suffering from what seemed to his attending physicians an incurable disease, and Naldius was able to relieve him. The incident called attention to him all over Italy and he was sent for in consultations to most of the Italian cities. He taught at the medical school of Siena, his birthplace, and wrote {463} a series of volumes on medical subjects. One of these is the rather well-known "Pamphilia or Friendship of the Whole World," the subtitle of which is "The Conciliation of the Opinions of Disagreeing Philosophers." This was published at Siena in 1647 in quarto. He issued a small volume of "Rules for the Cure of Contagious Diseases," Rome, 1656. His great work is the _Rei Medicae Prodromi_, or introduction to medical science, which has for subtitle "Treatise on the Principal Problems of Physiology." A distinguished scientist of the seventeenth century who found Rome a refuge and place of opportunity for his studies at this time when beset with difficulties elsewhere, was Borelli, the first to apply mechanical principles to the explanation of physiological problems in his work _De Motu Animalium_. Borelli had been a professor of science in Messina, visited Florence for a time in order to be with Galileo shortly before the great astronomer's death, accepted the call of the Duke of Tuscany to Pisa, where he had as colleagues Redi and Malpighi, with whom he founded the Accademia del Cimento. He left Pisa, not long after, to return to Messina, whence however he had to flee, having fallen under the suspicion of taking part in a conspiracy against the government, and now found a refuge in Rome. He was pensioned by Queen Christina of Sweden, who was then living in the Papal Capital, but after a time he retired to the monastery of San Pantaleone in Rome, where two years later he died. Professor Foster, in his Lectures on the History of Physiology, which were delivered at a number of universities in this country and subsequently published in the Cambridge Biological Series, devotes a whole lecture, some thirty pages, to "Borelli and the Influence of the New Physics." He does not hesitate to say at the conclusion of the lecture that "when we consider the effect which a perusal of Borelli's book has upon the reader now, we can easily understand how he was the founder of a great school which flourished long after him. He was so successful in his mechanical solutions of physiological problems that many coming after him readily rushed to the conclusion that all such problems could be solved by the same method. And as is often the case the less qualified alike as regards mechanical as well as physiological knowledge and insight to follow in Borelli's path were the men of succeeding times the more loudly did they often proclaim the might of Borelli's method." It has always been thus and doubtless always will be. The smaller men who come after the great masters are quite sure that they can go farther than the master himself and push his system, as did the Darwinians in {464} our time, to silly exaggerations. When the question of the attitude of the Popes to science is under consideration, however, it is well to recall that Borelli's revolutionary work was completed under the aegis of the Popes and a religious order in Rome and the account of it was not actually published in its completed form until after Borelli's death, and then at the expense of ecclesiastics. It is the knowledge of details of this kind that gives us a real insight into the significance of ecclesiastical relations to science. Innocent XI (1676-89).--The Papal Physician of this Pope was Floridus Salvatorius, to whom the Provost, the Trustees and his Colleagues of the College of Physicians of Rome dedicated, in an Introductory Epistle, a volume of the Statutes of the College of Physicians of the City, in which they praised him very highly. He seems to have been a great favorite with the members of the medical profession in his time at Rome, and other books on medicine were also dedicated to him. Another of this Pope's physicians was Lancisi, one of the most important in the list, whose place in the history of medicine is pointed out in the body of this book. Alexander VIII (1689-91).--The physician to this Pope was Romulus Spezioli, doctor of philosophy and of medicine of the University of Firmo, who acquired a great reputation at Rome as physician and finally was selected as Papal Physician. He became professor at the Sapienza, the Roman University, and was very popular as a teacher. After the death of the Pope he gave up his profession of medicine and, like Linacre a century before, became a priest, but his scientific knowledge was taken advantage of to enable him to give lectures on subjects in the borderland between religion and medicine, what has come to be called in our time pastoral medicine, to the theological students at the Roman University, and his medical experience was used in the causes of canonization in order to pass on miracles. Innocent XII (1691-1700).--Both of the physicians of Innocent XII, Malpighi and Lucas Tozzi, are very well known. Malpighi deserves in medical history a place beside Harvey as one of the greatest of the contributors to the medical sciences and probably even a niche higher than the Englishman because of the number of original observations that he made. I dealt with him earlier in this volume. Lucas Tozzi is the author of a series of books on The Theory and Practice of Medicine that are classics. One of these was issued at Lyons in 1731, another at Paris in 1737, and a commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates at Naples, 1743. He {465} wrote also a commentary on the _Ars Medicinalis Galeni_, besides smaller contributions to medical theory and practice. One of his books, with the title _De Anima Mundi_, The Soul of the World, in which he brings together a large number of the fallacies of philosophic writers before his time regarding the universe and man and their origin and destiny, was widely read. He suggests not only how little there is that we know, but how much there is that we think we know that is not so. Pope Innocent XII died in 1700, and with the beginning of the eighteenth century we feel that we are in our own times. Whatever of direct opposition there has been supposed to be between the Popes and science has always been traced to the older times. It was nearly always shrouded in the mists of medieval history. It does not seem so important then, to follow out the lives of the Papal Physicians in detail in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For anyone who wishes really to know, the information is readily available. There is abundant evidence, moreover, of the favorable attitude of the Popes towards the medical sciences and a number of distinguished men are among their physicians. The great Morgagni, who in his time was undoubtedly the greatest of living physicians, was the intimate friend of a number of Popes and was frequently consulted on all scientific as well as medical matters. Both Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58) and his successor Clement XIII (1758-69) insisted, as we have said in the body of this volume, on having the great pathologist consider the Papal Palace always open to him as a place of residence, whenever he visited Rome. Almost needless to say this same favorable attitude has continued during the nineteenth century. Pius VI (1775-99).--Among the physicians who treated Pius VI during the severe physical trials of a stormy pontificate was Professor Cotugno of Naples, to whom we owe a number of important discoveries in medicine. He was the first to point out the presence of the cerebro-spinal fluid and ably supplemented the investigations of Valsalva on the ear which did so much to clear up many problems in connection with that organ, most of whose anatomy we owe to Italians. He made a careful study of sciatica, _De Ischiada Nervosa_, Vienna, 1770, which is the classic foundation of our modern knowledge of that affection. He made a series of _post-mortem_ observations on typhoid fever in which he demonstrated very clearly the intestinal lesions of that affection and came very near solving the important problem of the pathological basis of the disease. Like a number of others about the middle of {466} the eighteenth century, in spite of acute observations on intestinal lesions, he could not get away from the theory of fevers being constitutional and so was unable to separate abdominal typhus from dysentery on the one hand, nor true typhus on the other. The constitutional nature of the disease we have come to recognize to some extent again after the pendulum had swung very far in the direction of the declaration of its local character. Pius VII (1800-23).--One of the physicians of Pope Pius VII was Professor Giambattista Bomba, who was professor of physiology at the Sapienza or Roman University of that time. One of the surgeons in attendance at the Papal Court was Antonio Baccelli, the father of Professor Guido Baccelli, the distinguished Italian scientist and statesman of the modern time. Another of the physicians of Pius VII was Flajani, to whom we owe the first description of the affection known as Graves' Disease in English-speaking countries, and often as Basedow's Disease on the Continent, though the English physician Parry anticipated both of these in 1822. Graves' description did not come until 1835, Flajani's had been published in 1802; Basedow did not write the more complete description in which he called attention not only to the goitre and the rapid heart action as his Irish and Italian predecessors had done, but also to the exophthalmos, which is so common an accompaniment, until 1850. Flajani was distinguished for his ability as a clinical observer as his priority in this matter would well suggest. Gregory XVI (1831-46).--The two of Gregory XVI's physicians who were best known were Professor Paolo Baroni, the distinguished Professor of Surgery, the University of Bologna, and Pier Luigi Valentini, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Roman University. At the conclave which followed his death for the election of his successor, Professor Giusseppe Constantini, the Professor of the Institutes of Surgery at the Roman University, was in attendance. [Footnote 53] [Footnote 63: When the material of the famous Challenger expedition was being assigned for investigation to those who were expected to use it to the best advantage of science, the diatoms were handed over to the study of Francesco Castracane degli Anteminelli. He discovered in the material submitted to him three new genera of diatoms, 225 new species and some thirty varieties. Altogether he had written some 112 papers on the biology of his favorite microscopic plants. Castracane was a Catholic priest living at Rome in high favor with the ecclesiastical authorities and directly encouraged by the Pope in his work.] Leo XIII (1878-1903) was so situated in his relations to the Italian government that it would have been almost impossible for him to have selected one of the distinguished professors at the {467} University at Rome, which was, after all, a government institution. His physician then was chosen from distant Ancona and proved to be a man of distinct intellectual capacity, who impressed himself upon the science of Rome in certain ways. This was Dr. Joseph Lapponi, whom those of us who had the privilege of meeting remember with special pleasure. He was professor of practical anthropology at the Academy of the Historico-Juridical Conferences of Rome and the author of a book on "Hypnotism and Spiritism; A Critical and Medical Study," which ran through two or more editions in the original Italian and was translated into several foreign languages. The English edition published by Longmans is well known. Pius X (1903-14).--Dr. Lapponi continued as the Papal Physician of Leo XIII's successor until his death. Political conditions in Rome having been modified somewhat Professor Marchiafava of the Roman University, now in the hands of the Italian government, became the consultant Papal Physician, the latest of a long line of distinguished men. Marchiafava has done some excellent work with regard to malaria, working out the life cycle of the malarial parasite and demonstrating that the organisms of pernicious malaria and the tertian and quartan malarial fevers are quite different. In recent years Marchiafava has been particularly interested in the pathology of alcoholism, being a prominent factor in that movement in Europe which during our time has made it very clear that alcohol is never a stimulant but only a narcotic and that in practically all cases where it is used regularly, even though not consumed to excess, it produces definite pathological changes in human tissues. With this list before him, the reader will have all the material necessary to understand the declaration that there is no series of men whose names are connected together by any bond in the history of medicine, even as members of the faculty of our oldest medical schools, that represent so much achievement and original investigation in medical matters as the Papal Physicians. With these men beside them as advisers and very often as intimate friends, it would have been quite impossible for the Popes to have been deliberate opponents of scientific progress. We all know that by a curious irony of fate physicians are sometimes found ranged against the line of advance in medical science, but this is inevitable with human frailty and the incidents of opposition have not done nearly so much harm as their conservative refusal to listen to enthusiastic discoverers, whose discovery was of no significance, has done of {468} good. No medical society in the world has an unblemished record of constant readiness to accept genuine new discoveries and all of them have sometime or other been in opposition to what proved eventually to be significant scientific progress. There are no striking incidents in the lives of the Papal Physicians in this regard though their admiration for Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen sometimes kept them over conservative. As a rule, however, they were ready to welcome every new step in medical advance that was made. We all know how much a man's physician usually means in influencing him with regard to the attitude that he shall assume towards scientific advances generally and particularly announced progress in the biological sciences. The Popes could scarcely have had better advisers in this matter than the men who were actually chosen as Papal Physicians. They came from every part of Italy and sometimes even from other countries. A library consisting of their works alone would contain an extremely valuable collection of books illustrating nearly every phase of advance in medicine. {469} APPENDIX VI. ASTRONOMY AND THE CHURCH. _Some Roman Astronomers_. A formal list of Papal Astronomers in any way comparable to that of the Papal Physicians cannot be given. Astronomy is not so compelling in its interests as medicine and while man's first serious scientific interest is his body, and the first modern university, that of Salerno, was founded around a medical school, the development of astronomy as a science was practically delayed until the Renaissance. Though a formal list of Papal Astronomers is not available, there is, however, a long series of names of workers in astronomy at Rome, some of whom occupied positions in the Papal capital actually called by that name, with many others who merited it for the work they did with Papal aid and encouragement. A large number of astronomical investigators conducted their researches under the patronage of the Popes, often dedicated their books, with permission, to them, were frequently supported by Papal revenues and had their observatories supplied by the Papal government, or else they were in intimate relations with the Papacy and received every stimulus for their researches. For special purposes, as the correction of the calendar, distinguished astronomers were summoned from long distances to Rome. At the Sapienza Papal University and later at the Roman College directly under the control of the Jesuits, but with the entire approval and constant effective good-will of the Popes, men of great distinction in astronomy and mathematics have frequently been professors. Some of the very greatest contributions to the science of astronomy have been issued not only with dedications to the Popes, as I have said, but not infrequently have been printed at the expense of the Holy See. In the chapter on Papal Physicians I have suggested that no list of men connected by any bond in the history of medicine are so distinguished as the roll of the Papal Physicians. The faculty of no medical school, for instance, no matter how long it may be able to trace its history, contains so many distinguished names. This same thing might well be said of the list of men who have done distinguished work in astronomy whose names are in some way {470} connected with the Papacy and whose relations to the Popes make it very clear that far from a determined course of opposition there was, on the contrary, a definite policy of encouragement and patronage for astronomical workers and that this greatly helped the diffusion of valuable scientific information with regard to the heavens and made the ecclesiastics of the world particularly interested in these important advances in human knowledge. In this appendix, then, as a complement to the appendix on the Papal Physicians, I have brought together some of the names and the achievements of astronomers who worked at Rome or were in some way connected with the Popes. I know that it is incomplete, but even as it stands it is a strong confirmation of that principle so surprising to many presumably well-informed people that the Popes were, as far as conditions permitted, always the patrons, not the persecutors, of scientists in all departments of the purely physical as well as biological, theoretic and applied sciences. It is sometimes assumed in the modern time, and it used to be the custom a generation ago for nearly everyone in English-speaking countries to assume, that because we knew very little about science in the medieval period it must be because there was very little to know. We have learned the fallacy of that supposition to our cost, by the republication of the great text-books of medicine and surgery of the medieval period and by the deeper study of such great scholars as Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas. Even the scanty records that we have show us the Popes following the same sort of policy with regard to education and science as at the present time. Men who collected scientific information for academic or popular diffusion, as Isidore of Seville, Albertus Magnus, Thomas of Aquin, were not infrequently raised to ecclesiastical dignities during life and placed among the saints after death. Occasionally a distinguished scientist like Gerbert, who became Pope Sylvester II, or Petrus Hispanus the well-known physician, who became Pope John XXI, were even made Popes. It is easy to understand that their attitude as Supreme Pontiffs towards science would be not only not one of opposition but of sympathy and helpful patronage. While as I have said astronomy as a formal science practically did not develop until the Renaissance, there were a series of important discussions of the relations of the earth to the other heavenly bodies and of the size and shape of the earth itself among the professors of the medieval universities, and the perfect freedom with which these discussions were carried on shows how unshackled {471} was human thought. Albertus Magnus discussed the antipodes, dismissed the notion that if there were men on the other side of the earth they would surely fall off by the thoroughly Socratic remark that we ourselves were on the other side from them yet did not fall off, and understood and taught very definitely the rotundity of the earth and other doctrines that are usually supposed to be much more recent, and that are often said to have brought their holders into ecclesiastical odium. Far from this, Albert was always in high favor and was made a bishop and canonized as a saint after his death. Roger Bacon studied light, declared that it moved with a definite velocity and gathered and made good use in his teaching of an immense amount of information in the departments of knowledge that we now call astronomy and geography. Humboldt declared that it was a passage from Roger Bacon which more than anything else, even the Toscanelli letters, roused Columbus to his life purpose of sailing westwards. Roger Bacon's books, the one with the paragraph now famous because of its connection with Columbus among the number, were issued at the request of the Pope and it seems very probable that we would have had no idea of his marvellous anticipation of many modern scientific truths only for the definitely expressed wish of the Pope to know the English Franciscan's thought. We have just celebrated the seventh centenary of Roger Bacon's birth, and this has brought home to us how much of a loss to the history of human culture would have been the missing of Bacon's works. Bacon's difficulties in life were with his Order and were personal matters not directly connected with his science. With the beginning of the Renaissance the stimulating effect of the study of Greek science on the men of the fifteenth century was exerted and one of those who was most deeply touched by the Greek spirit was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, or Cusanus, as he is called from the Latin name of his birthplace. He wrote a series of books touching many matters in science and treating various phases of mathematics. He dwelt particularly on certain problems relating to geography and astronomy. I have summed up his scientific career in a chapter of "Old Time Makers of Medicine" (N. Y., 1911). He taught the rotundity of the earth and that the earth was the same sort of a body as the other stars in the heavens, that it was not and could not be the centre of the universe and that it had a movement of its own. Far from such revolutionary teaching leading to his persecution or bringing him under the suspicion {472} of the ecclesiastical authorities he was, on the contrary, looked up to for his scholarship, received successive ecclesiastical preferments, became Bishop of Brixen and then Papal Legate to Germany for the reform of abuses, and finally a Cardinal. He did much to encourage interest in mathematical, geographical and astronomical science, provided opportunities for students, encouraged Puerbach and Regiomontanus in their significant pioneer work in mathematics and astronomy, and generally showed himself the enlightened patron of every movement related to the physical sciences, and all the workers with the experimental method. The first epoch-making astronomer who was brought into intimate relations with the Pope of whom we have definite knowledge was Regiomontanus. He is deservedly known as the Father of Modern Astronomy for his initiation of series of calculations and publications with regard to the heavens and his establishment at Nuremburg of a regular observatory. He was summoned to Rome to direct the calculations for the correction of the calendar, but unfortunately died there at the early age of forty. His invitation to Rome for this purpose came within the same decade when, if we were to trust certain modern historians of the relations of the Popes to science, Pope Calixtus III issued his supposed bull against Halley's comet. The bull has never been found. The attitude of the Popes towards science is much better illustrated by the invitation to Regiomontanus and the encouragement of astronomical research thus afforded than by the fictitious bull against the comet. The supposed bull has, however, played a large role in convincing a number of people of Church opposition to science, some of them being professors of science who knew nothing about the almost simultaneous appointment of Regiomontanus as Papal Astronomer. Toscanelli, over the question of whose influence on Columbus an as yet unsettled controversy is waged, was a lifelong friend of Nicholas of Cusa, they had been schoolmates at College and undoubtedly the great cardinal doctor of laws or of decrees as they said at that time, owed much of his progressive advanced views on scientific subjects to his Florentine friend "the doctor of physic, Paul Toscanelli." Cusanus at the height of his fame dedicated his book on Geometrical Transformations "to Paul the Florentine physician." Regiomontanus, as well as Cusa, often sought Toscanelli's opinion on abstruse questions of mathematics and quoted him with confidence. The intimate relations of Cusanus and Regiomontanus with the Popes of the middle of the fifteenth century are very well known. Toscanelli's services to astronomy are only {473} less famous than those to cosmography. A series of his careful and painstaking observations and calculations of the orbits of the comets of 1433, 1449-50, of Halley's comet of 1456 and of the comets of 1457 and 1472 are preserved in manuscript. They demonstrate his profound and successful interest in astronomical subject and it is easy to see that they must have cost him, as indeed he tells in his letters, many a night's watching of the stars. The relations between the ecclesiastical authorities and Toscanelli are very well illustrated by that well-known monument to his astronomical skill which still interests visitors so much in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore at Florence. This is the gnomon arranged in the dome of the Cathedral by the shadow of which it is said that he could determine midday to within half a second. The use of the Cathedral for this purpose is interesting testimony to the cordial relations of science and religion at this time. It may be said in passing that Toscanelli's gnomon was later improved by Cardinal Ximenes of Spain, showing that these cordial ecclesiastical relations with science were not confined to Italy. While Toscanelli was making his observations Antoninus of Florence was for some thirteen years the Archbishop of the city and was one of the learned members of the Dominican Order at this time, who had made his novitiate among the Dominicans with Fra Angelico and Fra Bartholomeo the great Renaissance painters. Antoninus was greatly influenced evidently by his associations with Toscanelli and formed one of a group of men containing the Florentine physician astronomer, Cardinal Cusanus and Regiomontanus, himself afterwards a bishop, who were on terms of intimate relationship at least in scholarly matters at this period. Archbishop Antoninus, who is the author of a _Summa Theologica Moralis_ of which no less than fifteen editions were printed after his death, wrote also a series of histories in which he shows this influence by insisting that comets are celestial bodies like the others in the heavens and had no effect on the physical or moral conditions of the world and, quite contrary to popular beliefs, were not responsible for war or pestilence nor prophetic of evil to mankind. There had been a number of brilliant comets in the heavens about this time and there was consequently a widespread interest in them and much popular superstition with regard to them. Antoninus was on terms of familiar intimacy with Pope Eugene IV, who insisted on his becoming Archbishop of Florence, though Antoninus would have preferred to have remained a simple Dominican and keep his leisure for his scholarly work. When the Pope felt his end {474} approaching he called Antoninus to Rome to administer the last rites of the Church to him and be by his side during his last hours. Antoninus was frequently consulted by Pope Eugene's successors, Nicholas V and Pius II, both of whom were among the scholarly patrons of learning and art at this time. Some fifty years after his death Antoninus was canonized by Pope Hadrian VI, the scholarly Pope from Utrecht in Holland. His whole career then shows clearly the relations of the ecclesiastics and particularly the Popes of the time to science in a most favorable light. The relationship with the rising science of the Renaissance period thus initiated was continued during the following century. At the end of the fifteenth century Copernicus studied for ten years in Italy and felt so thoroughly the interest of Italians in advances in science as well as scholarship that when some years later he came to formulate his great new hypothesis of the heavens, he sent an abstract of his theory to some of the Roman teachers with whom he had become intimate during his stay and it was taught publicly in the city to crowded audiences. This may well seem surprising to many whose only knowledge of the relations of the Popes to astronomy is the Galileo incident, but it must not be forgotten that Copernicus' great work in which he elaborated his theory, was dedicated, with permission, to the Pope, and not only received no censure until Galileo's time, nearly a century later, but was welcomed as a great contribution to science and thought. It was looked upon as a theory, to be discussed as any other. When Galileo, at the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, insisted on teaching it as absolute science, it must not be forgotten that there were no astronomers in Europe who looked upon Copernicanism as an accepted scientific doctrine. Even the reasons advanced by Galileo for its acceptance have all since been rejected. Owing to the discussions of it far and wide in the time of Galileo, certain expressions in Copernicus' great work were required by the Church authorities to be corrected so that his explanation of the heavens should be presented as the theory that it was and not as an absolute doctrine of science. Toward the end of the sixteenth century the necessity for the correction of the calendar became more urgently manifest and Pope Gregory XIII invited Father Clavius, S.J., to take up the subject. At this time also, as is described by Pope Leo XIII in his _Motu Proprio_ of 1891, "Gregory XIII [nearly half a century before the condemnation of Galileo] ordered a tower to be erected in a convenient part of the Vatican buildings and to be fitted out with {475} the greatest and best instruments of the time. There he held the meetings of the learned men to whom the reform of the calendar had been entrusted. The tower stands to this day a witness to the munificence of its founder. It contains a meridian line by Ignazio Danti of Perugia, with a round marble plate in the centre, adorned with scientific designs. When touched by the rays of the sun that are allowed to enter from above, the designs demonstrate the error of the old reckoning and the correctness of the reform." It was evidently the intention of the Pope that there should be, as a permanent institution in Rome, an astronomical observatory fully equipped and supported by the revenues of the Holy See and with a prominent scientist at its head. This purpose has been constantly kept in mind by the Popes ever since, though not long after Gregory's time, but not at all because of any opposition to science, the observatory founded by him came for more than a century not to be used for the purpose intended because its place was supplied by another Roman institution directly under the patronage of the Popes. This was the Roman College, the great central school of the Jesuits, in the capital of Christendom. That Order was scarcely fifty years in existence in Pope Gregory XIII's time, yet it was to a member of it that the Pope turned for expert scientific direction in the correction of the calendar. During the next three centuries science as patronized by the Popes in Rome was mainly in the hands of the Jesuits. When it is recalled that this Order is directly under the control of the Pope, the professed members taking a special vow of obedience to him, it will be understood that the Jesuit policy with regard to science must be taken as representing the Papal position in its regard. If it is further recalled that Poggendorff in his Biographical Lexicon of Men Eminent in Science gives the names of some 500 Jesuits, though the Order was not in a position to do any work in science until 1550, it will be readily appreciated that the Popes acted wisely to encourage an institute so prolific in _eminent_ scientists in its scientific work at the Roman College, rather than maintain a separate scientific department at the Vatican. The second institution would only have been unnecessary duplication of staffs and the connection between teaching and research at the Roman College was better for both functions. Father Christopher Clavius, to whom more than to any other is due the Gregorian reform of the calendar, a magnificent practical application of astronomy and mathematics, is an excellent example {476} of the men who were near the Popes as counsellors and scientific advisers just before Galileo's time. Indeed Galileo and he were on the most friendly terms until his death in 1612. The circle of his friends included such men as Kepler, Tycho-Brahe and other great scientists of his time and he was called "the Euclid of the sixteenth century." His works were published at Mainz, in five huge folio volumes in a collective edition. The third of these is a commentary upon the _Sphaera_ of John Holywood (Joannes de Sacro Bosco, the great medieval mathematician) and a dissertation upon the Astrolabe. The fourth volume contains a very full discussion of Gnomonics, that is, the art of constructing instruments of all kinds for determining the time by means of the sun. The fifth volume contains his papers with regard to the reform of the calendar. Most of these books were issued in many editions before and after his death, and their publication over and over again shows very clearly how much the men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were interested in scientific subjects and how often and quite properly they looked to great clerical teachers as their leaders in science. Just about the time that the Galileo matter was disturbing scientific and ecclesiastical circles at Rome, Father Scheiner, the Jesuit mathematician and astronomer became Professor of Mathematics in the Roman College. He is the inventor of the pantograph or copying instrument for drawings, and, being of an ingenious inventive disposition, constructed a number of instruments for astronomical investigation. He studied the sun carefully through colored glasses in a helioscope and then conceived the idea of projecting the sun's image on a screen in order to study its surface. Kepler used this same method, but Scheiner is said to have the right of priority in it. In March, 1611, he discovered by this method spots on the sun and while the priority of discovery was disputed by Galileo, three men, Fabricius, Galileo and Scheiner, seem all to have done their work independently in this matter, Fabricius being probably the first in time. For nearly a score of years Father Scheiner continued his observations on the sun and published his great work, which in the fashion of the day was called by the somewhat fantastic title, _Rosa Ursina_. He had the true scientific spirit and devoted himself to other subjects besides astronomy. He made important researches on the eye, showing that the retina is the seat of vision, and devised the optical experiment which bears his name. One of Clavius' pupils was Father Matteo Ricci, S.J., founder of the Catholic missions of China, who in the midst of his successful {477} studies of mathematics and astronomy at the Roman College asked, at the age of twenty-five, to be sent on the missions in farthest Asia and was allowed to go the following year. He was selected to found missions in China and succeeded in breaking through the Oriental reserve and contempt for everything Occidental of the Chinese, and thus gained a foothold for Christianity in the country. It was Father Ricci's learning, particularly in cosmology, mathematics, astronomy and geography, that attracted the attention of the Chinese. He introduced astronomical studies at Pekin and brought over a series of instruments for an observatory which were so well thought of that they were preserved until our own time and some of them are said to have been taken from the Chinese capital by the allied troops, after the capture of the city following the Boxer Rebellion. He not only taught the Chinese European science, but he sent back to Europe true accounts of China and, above all, encouraged scientific studies among the missionaries. The example he thus set has always been followed and there has scarcely been a generation since when some Christian missionary has not been making original observations in natural history and collecting curious specimens to be sent home to scientists in Europe, while at the same time faithfully pursuing his missionary work. Early in the seventeenth century, indeed just at the time when the Galileo case was most prominent at Rome, Father Athanasius Kircher was summoned to Rome and began his scientific work there, which included contributions to every department of physical and even some of the biological sciences. For some five years about the middle of the seventeenth century Father Kircher devoted himself to astronomy and the result was the publication, in 1656, of an astronomical treatise called _Iter Celeste_. A second volume on astronomy appeared in 1660. Anyone who is inclined to think that these contributions of the great professor of science at the Roman College were only reviews of the passing scientific opinions of the time, is not fully acquainted with Father Kircher's work. He never failed to illuminate anything that he set himself to study. His book on astronomy is of course a text-book, but it is magnificently illustrated; it is a very large work which shows the author's familiarity with the scientific literature of the time, but at the same time reveals his own scientific genius. Father Kircher was encouraged in every way by the Popes and high ecclesiastics of Rome and by his own Order, and his great text-books are among the bibliographic treasures of the history of science. Some idea of {478} his industry may be gathered from the fact that he wrote altogether some forty volumes folio on scientific subjects. He made many original observations, invented a number of valuable scientific instruments that are still in use, among others the vernier and magic lantern, and was productively occupied with nearly every branch of science in his time. During the eighteenth century, before the suppression of the Jesuits, another distinguished mathematician and astronomer, famous throughout Europe, was working at the Roman College. This was Father Boscovitch, to whom we owe the plans for the erection of an observatory above the great pillars of the Church of the Gesu at Rome, which were not destined to be executed until the middle of the nineteenth century. Boscovitch is famous for a series of important works in mathematics and astronomy. He wrote books on Sun Spots, the Transit of Mercury, the Aurora Borealis, the Figure of the Earth, the Various Effects of Gravity, the Aberration of the Fixed Stars, and other astronomical problems. Pope Benedict XIV commissioned him and his brother Jesuit, Father Le Maire, to carry out several precise meridian arc measurements. He is the inventor of the rock crystal prismatic micrometer, the ring micrometer. After the suppression of the Jesuits Father Boscovitch was made Director of Optics for the Marine, a post created for him in order to secure his services for France. During the second period of the history of the Vatican Observatory at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the upper story of the Gregorian tower was fitted up with meteorological and magnetic instruments with a seismograph, a Dolland telescope, a small transit instrument and a pendulum clock and a series of very careful observations on a number of subjects made. From 1800 to 1821 Gilii made an uninterrupted series of meteorological observations, reading the instruments twice a day, at 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. The observations are published for seven years and the rest are preserved as manuscripts in the Vatican Library. There are also deposited astronomical observations of eclipses, comets, Jupiter's satellites and of a transit of Mercury. Gilii laid down the meridian line in front of St. Peter's with the obelisk as a gnomon and the readings of the seasons by the length of the shadow. To him are due also the bronze marks on the floor of St. Peters, giving the comparative lengths of the greatest churches of the world. It was he who placed the first lightning rod on the cupola of St. Peter's. The {479} heavens, the weather, the lightning are supposed often to be set by religiously inclined persons particularly under the care of Providence, to be influenced by prayer, yet these are exactly the three departments of science that were faithfully followed in their detailed scientific aspects during all the centuries by the Papal Astronomers under the patronage and with the approval of the Popes, with the avowed purpose of discovering the natural laws under which they occur. Two of the distinguished teachers of mathematics and astronomy of the end of the eighteenth century at Rome were Father Thomas Leseur, professor at the Sapienza, and Professor Franz Jacquier, professor at the Roman College, who wrote a commentary on Isaac Newton's _Principia_ which did much to popularize Newton's work. When, because political influence was brought to bear very strongly on the Pope, the Jesuits were suppressed in 1773, the Roman College passed from their hands and the real reason for allowing the Vatican Observatory on the Papal grounds to fall into disuse was manifest, for the Popes at once took up the question of re-establishing their own observatory. Not long after the suppression we find Monsignor Filippo Luigi Gilii placed in charge of the reorganized Roman Observatory by Cardinal Zelada, who had been appointed Vatican Librarian in 1780, and who found the old Gregorian tower available as a centre of astronomical observation and investigation of which Rome had been deprived since the suppression of the Roman College. After the restoration of the Jesuits early in the nineteenth century, the Roman College was opened once more and distinguished Jesuits, some of them with world-wide reputations, did their work there. With the occupation of Rome by the Italian government in 1870 the Jesuits were banished, the Roman College with its observatory was once more deprived of the learned expert direction of the Fathers of the Order, and once more efforts were made for the re-establishment of a Vatican observatory which is now in existence and under the direction of a Jesuit. Another of the distinguished scientists of the eighteenth century who taught for a time at Rome was Father Beccaria, whose name is well known in the history of electricity. When not yet forty years of age he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London, always a much envied distinction, and as a consequence of his election some of his important papers relating to electricity and various astronomical subjects were sent to the Royal Society {480} and published by them. While no great discovery in physical science is attached to his name, few men did as much as he to awaken enthusiasm and experimental investigation into science in his time. He was one of the pioneers of the great scientific movement of the nineteenth century. Priestley called him one of the most eminent of all the workers in electricity on the Continent, and Professor Chrystal, in his article on electricity, in the Encyclopedia Britannica (ninth edition), gives him an important place. He had been trained to be a professor of experimental physics for his Order, and at this time every one of the teaching orders with colleges at Rome had distinguished men among their faculties. The well-known astronomer, Father Piazzi, whose discovery of Ceres, the first of the planetoids found in the space between Mars and Jupiter, caused great excitement among astronomers, and whose subsequent work in astronomy brought him membership in many of the scientific academies of Europe, had been for some time a student and a teacher in Rome. While there he was a colleague of Professor Chiaramonti, who later became Pope Pius VII. During all his subsequent brilliant scientific career his special friendship with the Pope continued, and with all his many memberships in scientific bodies he remained a member also of the Theatine religious order which he had entered at a very early age. After the restoration of the Jesuits the work in the sciences reverted once more to the Jesuits at the Roman College and the Vatican Observatory was discontinued. The interest of the Popes in science, however, was very well illustrated by the apostolic letter of Leo XII, _Quod divina sapientia_, which gave instructions to all Catholic educational institutions, as to observatories, publications and intercourse with foreign scientists. The Jesuits at the Roman College reached noteworthy distinction for their astronomical work during the nineteenth century. Father Secchi came to be looked upon as probably one of the most distinguished astronomers in Europe. He received many prizes for his observations, for his invention of instruments and for important discoveries. His work on the sun, published in his book, _Le Soleil_, represents some of the most important contributions ever made to this department. It was translated into most modern languages. His observations on the corona of the sun during eclipses and especially photographs of the corona, place him among the great original contributors to modern astronomical knowledge. He made a critical examination and classification of the spectra of four thousand stars entailing an enormous amount of {481} work. He believed firmly that it was no use making observations unless they were thoroughly recorded and made available for others. His literary work in astronomy is almost incredible. He sent nearly 700 communications to 42 scientific journals, over 300 of which appeared in the _Comptes Rendues_ and in the _Astronomische Nachrichten_, the French and German journals of astronomy that are the authoritative records of contemporary scientific work. In this country Newcomb and Langley quote from Secchi frequently and use his illustrations. He was the founder of a new branch of astronomy, Stellar Spectroscopy, and Secchi's types of solar spectra will probably ever remain an essential illustration in astronomical text-books. Another of the astronomers who did excellent work among the Jesuits at the Roman College during the nineteenth century was Father De Vico, whose determination of the rotation period of Venus and the inclination of its axis was considered so exhaustive that it was not questioned for half a century. He also measured the eccentric position of Saturn in his rings and observed the motions of the two inner moons of this planet which had not been seen before this time except by Herschel. Father De Vico also discovered eight comets, one of them being the well-known comet with a period of rotation of five and a half years which bears his name. Father De Vico and Father Secchi were driven from Rome by the Revolution of 1848, but were brought back to continue their work just as soon as it was possible. In the meantime they continued to be personal friends of successive Popes, encouraged in every way, aided in their work and looked upon as ornaments of the Church. They were thoroughly respected by their Order and there was never the slightest question of any possibility of all their studies in science and all their profound investigation of the deepest scientific subjects disturbing their faith in any way. One of the well-known contributors to astronomy during the nineteenth century was Father Benedict Sestini, who for his mathematical ability was appointed assistant to Father De Vico of the Roman Observatory. He was banished from Rome with his brother Jesuits by the Revolution of 1848, and taught at Georgetown College, Washington, D. C, for many years. His principal work is his catalogue of star colors, published in the Memoirs of the Roman College, 1845-47. He had very keen vision and fine skill with the brush, so that his catalogue, which embodies the entire B.A.C. Star Catalogue, from the North Pole to thirty degrees south of the equator, will be invaluable for deciding the question {482} whether there are stars variable in color. He made a series of sunspot drawings which were engraved and published as appendix A of the United States Naval Observatory volume for 1847, printed in 1853. He was the teacher of mathematics and astronomy to the American Jesuit students and wrote a series of text-books for that purpose. As we have said, the Italian government suppressed the Roman College, declaring it State property and this prevented further work in the observatory there, which had been for nearly half a century under Father Secchi and Father De Vico, one of the most important centres in the world of astronomical advance. Beggared by the Roman confiscations which compelled the Popes to cut off all their support of scientific and educational work except what related closely to clerical education, it was not until 1888 that Pope Leo XIII found himself in a position to re-establish a Roman observatory in connection with the Vatican. In 1888 the Italian clergy, for the celebration of the Golden Jubilee of Pope Leo XIII, presented to him, knowing from his interest in science how agreeable such a gift would be to him, a collection of astronomical instruments and the Gregorian tower was selected once more for its former purposes and the Barnabite, Father Denza, the well-known founder of the Italian Meteorological Society, became the official head. Pope Leo XIII ceded to the Vatican Observatory a second tower more than 400 metres distant from the Gregorian. As this was of immense strength, the lower walls being some five yards in thickness, it seemed strong and firm enough to support the thirteen-inch photographic refractor which was ordered from Gauthier. Seven volumes of observations were published during the next fifteen years, four under Father Denza, a fifth under Father Lais and the last two under Father Rodriguez, an Augustinian, who was a specialist in meteorology. The last Pope, Pius X, encouraged the Vatican Observatory in every way. The Gregorian tower being near the Vatican Library and too distant from the observatory was restored to its original library purpose and given over to the housing of the collection of Historical Archives. The second round tower of the old Leonine Fortress, together with the adjoining summer residence of Leo XIII, was devoted to astronomical work. Father Hagan, S.J., who had been distinguished for mathematical studies in connection with astronomy here in America, was chosen as the director, and there has been a magnificent development of the astronomical work. There is a new sixteen-inch visual telescope in the second tower, {483} called the _Torre Pio X_. There are four rotary domes covering the astrographic refractor in the Leonine Tower, and some excellent work is being accomplished. Every encouragement is given to it as far as the limited means of the Pope will permit, and a fine library is being collected for future workers. {484} APPENDIX VII. THE FATHERS OF THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. There is a very general impression in many minds in our time that from the very beginning of Christianity the interest of Church men in the other world was so great that human attention was diverted just as far as possible from concerns of all kinds with the stage of existence through which man is passing here and now. As a consequence, there has been the feeling that from the earliest time the Church was opposed to science and scientific education, partly because this represented a rather compelling diversion from other-worldly interests, but mainly because it gave men control over natural forces which made life more comfortable, raised men up in their own estimation and was opposed to the spirit of humble faith best suited to the adherents of Christianity. Hence it is concluded that there was always a Church policy of deliberate opposition to science and indeed to all intellectual development. This attitude is often declared to be best represented by the expression attributed to one of the Fathers of the Church, "Heaven lies open to the simple of mind, the little ones of the earth, and the ignorant bear it away better than those who are proud of intellect." Any such impression with regard to the Fathers of the Church as to the establishment of a policy of opposition to science and education is quite erroneous and entirely contrary to the general trend of their writings, even though it may be apparently substantiated by expressions taken at random from the writings of the Fathers at moments when they were emphasizing the truth that has always been so manifest, that from the knowing ones of earth,--and our use of the word knowing in the phrase is not complimentary,--especially from those who are conceited in their knowingness, many things are concealed that are revealed to those who are simple of heart and mind. It has seemed worth while, however, to devote an appendix to this subject of the real attitude of the Fathers to science. As Father Leahy, in his "Astronomical Essays," Boston (Washington Press, 1910), has answered Professor White's assumptions on this subject with a knowledge of the Fathers I could not hope to emulate, I have preferred to avail myself of his permission to quote him at length. {485} "By the Fathers we understand in general the Christian writers in the Church's early history. In the West the period may be held to have terminated with Isidore of Seville of the seventh century, and in the East with John of Damascus of the eighth. The important writers of this epoch number between fifty and a hundred, and their works constitute, as may be imagined, a body of literature of vast extent. Our only present concern is to learn, if possible, what was the general attitude of this army of ecclesiastical writers towards the physical sciences, especially the science of astronomy. Explicit treatises on astronomy we shall not, indeed, expect them to supply. For their works when massed are seen to constitute a library of theology, and in such a collection we should no more look for scientific treatises than in a modern library for law. But inasmuch as the Fathers of the Church have been accused, by Andrew D. White and others, of having stayed and even thwarted the advance of science, it becomes the interest and the duty of the apologist to hunt up their scientific allusions that we may learn to what extent the charges made are true. _The Standstill of Science_.--It has often been alleged as derogatory to the accomplishments of the Fathers, that they contributed nothing to the progress of scientific knowledge. From our modern standpoint we may be tempted to esteem this failure of theirs as a cardinal sin. But it would be wrong in this instance, as in every other, to render a verdict of guilt too hastily. We of the twentieth century are prone to forget that there are other fields of profitable intellectual exploration besides the physical, and that there may be objects of research and thought worthier of study than the material world. The Fathers of the Church were philosophers and theologians occupied with the problems of the world's origin and destiny, higher themes, surely, than any with which physical science is concerned. It is the fashion of the day to praise the ancient Greeks at the expense of the patristic and medieval theologians. But the distinction is to a large extent inconsistent, since both bodies of writers were at work upon the selfsame themes. Philosophers like the Greeks, the Fathers were like them moralists as well, engaged in the elaboration of right rules of conduct. Finally, unlike the Greeks, the Fathers were Scriptural scholars, many of them of extensive erudition, in homily and commentary expounding with wonderful assiduity the Sacred Books in which they believed that God had given His revelation to man. _Analogous Examples_.--Should we be surprised, then, if men so occupied failed to add much to the world's store of scientific knowledge? Though it were admitted, as it cannot be in its entirety, that they left physical science just where they found it, could not an explanation be discovered that would exonerate them from all blame? To justify such an apology, we do not even need to transport ourselves in spirit back to their time, a process which, however, strict fairness would demand. But in our own era we can think easily of dozens and hundreds of men of highest respectability and most beneficent accomplishment, men of books and men of affairs, jurists, statesmen, historians and others, who have {486} themselves done little or nothing for the onward march of Science. That the careers of these men are profitless, who shall allege? Again, the present writer has often thought of the almost parallel example of the ancient Romans. It makes their history but little less illustrious to learn that this conquering people did nothing for Science's advance. Till Pliny of the first century after Christ, what Roman was a scientist? They were a nation of soldiers, statesmen, orators and jurists, and for seven hundred years they pursued through such avenues their triumphant course. Yet what writer of to-day rises to charge them with a cardinal sin, because Science remained at a standstill among them for seven full centuries? With these seven centuries can we not properly compare the later seven in which the Christian Fathers were the teachers of the civilized world? _Heritage from the Greeks_.--Objection will be made, no doubt, that the Fathers began their career with fairer start than the Romans, forasmuch as they were the direct heirs of the astronomy and physics of ancient Hellas. And they will be incriminated with having abused their precious heritage, by not merely letting it lie fallow but by raising every possible obstruction to its further cultivation. Such is the tenor of Andrew D. White's accusations against them. This well-known writer smiles at the puerilities of patristic science. He cites from among them Cosmas of Egypt as having propounded a perfectly childish theory of the structure of the earth and grafted it on the science of theology. The ready answer to this particular charge is that Cosmas' conception of the universe belonged to cosmogony and not theology, and further that it had no influence on subsequent thought. Returning to the general arraignment, White rebukes the Fathers for having clung so tenaciously to false opinions regarding the shape of the earth, the motion of the heavens, and the nature of the firmament. And, most seriously of all, he charges the Fathers with indifference and even hostility to the study of science itself. In a few short paragraphs it is impossible to give an adequate rejoinder to these damaging complaints. But they demand some sort of reply, however inadequate it be, as emanating from an American scholar and statesman of high rank, and embodied in a work that has free and wide circulation among our college students. _Defence of Their Doctrine_.--The first palliation for the reputed offence of the Fathers is that whatever false science they retail, was practically all of it derived from the very sources which it is the fashion of the day to laud in the highest degree. As far as was consistent with their faith, the Christian Fathers were the pupils of the Greeks. It was the latter and not the patristic writers who invented the false theories of a solid firmament and a motionless earth. If Europe and Arabia down to the Renaissance believed in the Geocentric system, it was because they trusted Ptolemy the Greek, till then admittedly the greatest of astronomers. And a similar ancestry could be traced, we venture to say, for all or the major part of their scientific errors as far as these may have extended. _Restrictions Made by the Fathers_.--But if the Fathers were in {487} general the heirs of the Greeks, they were not guilty of the mistake of accepting the inheritance in its entirety. To a large extent they could discern the chaff from the wheat, and were actually at pains to make the separation. It ought to be known that the scientific literature of the Grecians is teeming with the wildest and vainest of speculations regarding all matters within the scope of astronomical science. Here as elsewhere, the Greeks speculated endlessly, contradictorily, emptily, and almost aimlessly. In unfounded speculation they discoursed on all manner of astronomical subjects, the shape and size and distance of the sun, its nature and that of the moon and stars, and so on almost indefinitely, with scarcely any agreement or concomitance of opinion. There were almost as many diverse opinions as there were men. To this motley assemblage of groundless and conflicting theories the Fathers had full access through the medium of Plutarch, the Greek compiler. Eusebius, for example, the Father of Church History, quotes Plutarch on just these topics for over thirty pages. If Eusebius and the other Fathers grew impatient with all this ill-assorted mass of _soi-disant_ science, shall we charge them as Dr. White does with having been false to the interest of science? Should we not rather maintain that they helped save science from its enemies? _Opposition to Science_.--It is only in the light of these indisputable facts that we can understand the sayings of the Fathers in which, as quoted by White, they upbraid science for its inutility. Be it noted in passing that White is wont to quote them not literally but freely, and apart from their context. Lactantius, Eusebius, Augustine, and Basil, these are the four whom he selects as representative. They are truly representative, and indeed any one of them might stand for all. Let Eusebius be our particular choice, for he discusses astronomy more completely than the others. White alleges (_Warfare_, Vol. I, p. 91) that Eusebius endeavored to bring scientific studies into contempt, and quotes him as saying, "It is not through ignorance of the things admired by them [scientific investigators], but through contempt of their useless labor, that we think little of these matters, turning our souls to better things." Who would guess from this brief epitome of Eusebius' views that the latter had devoted to the subject more than thirty pages? Who could possibly surmise that he had taken pains to write out, under the guidance of Plutarch, all the known opinions of the Greeks on some thirty-nine problems, all but two or three of them astronomical? Let the curious read Eusebius for themselves in the fifteenth book of his _Praelectio Evangelica_. They will there discover what White might have well acknowledged, that on not one of the problems are the Greek philosophers in agreement. On the nature of the sun there are nine opinions, on its size four, on its shape an equal number, on the moon's nature seven. And this discrepancy of judgment continues to the end. Moreover a large proportion of the theories are of the most fantastic sort. In the face of this chaotic wilderness of diverse, fluctuating and contradictory teachings, what could Eusebius do but turn away in impatience, and take up in their stead the only truth of which he {488} felt certain, the truth of the Gospel? Such was his actual procedure. "Does it not seem to you that we have rightly and deservedly departed from the curiosity of all these men, so idle and so full of error?" He confesses frankly that he can see no fruit or utility for man in the teachings he has quoted. And he appeals for his complete justification to Socrates, the wisest of the Greeks, who in his day had adopted precisely the same stand. This and no other is the argument and spirit of Eusebius. _No Opposition to True Science_.--This was the temper, also, that actuated the other Fathers named, Lactantius, Basil, and Augustine. No doubt these men valued spiritual knowledge above material. But it by no means follows from this that they undervalued Science. They were scholars of extensive culture, Basil a graduate of Athens, Augustine of Carthage, and Lactantius styled because of his proficiency the Christian Cicero. They were well acquainted with the learning of the Greeks. That they rebelled against the scientific fantasies of the latter, is not a proof that they were hostile to the advance of Science itself. In the Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis expresses a sentiment quite similar to theirs. "Surely a humble husbandman that serveth God, is better than a proud philosopher who, neglecting himself, is occupied in studying the course of the heavens." Like the Fathers, à Kempis had reason to be disgusted with the astronomy of his time, for it was beginning to be impregnated again with the virus of Astrology. By refusing to follow such pseudo-scientific teachings, both à Kempis and the Fathers did a real if seemingly negative service to the science of astronomy. "He was born under a lucky star." Language of this sort, used now only in pleasantry, recalls a form of superstition which was once accepted seriously by all men throughout the civilized world. In many a period, mankind has believed literally that the stars and planets exercised a real influence in shaping human lives. And there have been many epochs, ancient, medieval, and even modern, when astrology, the telling of fortunes by the stars, was given a rank among the learned professions. Even now there occur occasional sporadic outbreaks of the same superstition. Along with other quacks and necromancers, astrologers are still occasionally in evidence, advertising their trade through the columns of the press. Indeed it is affirmed by the Catholic Encyclopedia that the growth of occultistic ideas is reintroducing astrology into society. _Errors of Astrology_.--Whatever the popularity of this practice in the past, and whatever its prospective vogue in the near future, it is to be set down without qualification or hesitation as a delusion and a snare. To suppose that the heavenly bodies have an influence on human conduct is in its origin a pagan error, closely allied with the pagan myth that the sun, moon and stars are presided over by as many separate deities. Only thus could have originated the delusion that Jupiter and Venus would procure a blessed destiny, and Mars and Saturn a troubled one, for the children born at the time of their rising. Nor can the cult be justified by an array of the names of those who have been its votaries. It is true that many astronomers in the {489} past, including the great Kepler himself, have practised the astrological art, casting horoscopes for their clients. But in most cases it would be found, at least in the modern period, that these scientists merely yielded through tolerance to the weakness of their age. In true astronomy there is no place whatever for astrology. Besides being groundless the practice is to be condemned for its perilous moral tendencies. Distracting the soul from the worship of the spiritual God, who alone governs the universe, it substitutes for His action that of mere material objects, stars and planets, which it thus elevates to the rank of lesser gods or demons. Pretending to forecast from birth what each man's course in life shall be, it robs the will of its proper share in moulding human conduct. _The Christian Fathers_.--An interesting testimony to the former prevalence of this erroneous belief is found in one of Sir Walter Scott's novels, "Guy Mannering," whose whole plot turns upon the fulfilment of an astrological prediction. Reading the history at hand the novelist had learned what complete sway the cult had formerly exercised, almost down to the time of his writing. It would have interested the celebrated author to know that there was, however, one long period in which astrology was absolutely and effectually excluded from Christian Europe. For over a thousand years Christendom remained free from this blight, thanks to the teachings of the Fathers of the Church. In discussing the relations of the Fathers towards the astral science, we have already shown how they purged it of some of its grossest errors. But their principal service to the science remains now to be told. For amongst all the vagaries of the science of the heavens, astrology is both in theory and in practice the most deplorable. That the Fathers placed the weight of their great authority in the scale against this superstition, is one of the most praiseworthy of their achievements. _First Efforts at Reform_.--At the time that the Fathers began to write, in the century just following the labors of the Apostles, astrology formed everywhere an integral part of the science of astronomy. It was taught in all the schools, Chaldean, Jewish, Grecian and Roman. Almost from the beginning the defenders of the Christian faith proceeded to attack this pernicious error, realizing how inimical it was to the spread of truth which Christ had come to impart. Already in his address to the Greeks, Tatian was heard denouncing the absurdities of Grecian astronomy and astrology. This was in the middle of the second century, just at the close of what is called the Apostolic Period. A little later, Tertullian, the famed apologist of the then flourishing African Church, placed himself on record as the uncompromising enemy of astrology. With his usual vehemence of language he declared that "of astrologers there should be no speaking even" among Christians; and went to the length of saying that "he cannot hope for heaven whose finger or wand abuses the heavens." These and many similar utterances may be found in his Treatise on Idolatry. _Respect for True Astrology_.--With this denunciation of magic and idolatry there went hand in hand, however, a genuine respect {490} for the proper science of the heavens. Contemporary with Tertullian, and like him one of the great Christian masters of the period, was Clement Alexandria. To the Catholic astronomer of to-day it is gratifying to find this Father of the Egyptian Church giving generous testimony to the worth of astronomical science. With just discrimination he praises astronomy as "leading the soul nearer to the creative power, as helpful to navigation and husbandry, and as making the soul in the highest degree observant, capable of perceiving the true and detecting the false." Another contemporary, Hippolytus, was indeed unsparing in his denunciation of astrology. In a treatise of eleven quarto pages, contained in his "Refutation of All Heresies," he riddled with merciless logic the vain pretensions of the Greek astrologers. But he showed that he had no quarrel with a well ordered study of the heavens, by giving liberal praise to Ptolemy, the ablest of the astronomers. _A Universal Teaching_.--In far distant Syria, then a choice realm in the Church's patrimony, there was at the beginning of the third century another school of Christian philosophers who joined with their brethren in West and East in waging war on the same dread enemy. A Syrian work, called the Book of the Astrologers, has two quarto pages of excellent quality recounting and scoring the absurdities of current astrological practices. It is so like Hippolytus' work that one seems an echo of the other. Perhaps the most interesting of all these concordant denunciations is that found in the "Recognitions of Clement," a patristic writing probably of the third century. Here the treatises on astrology run to full ten chapters, a sign that the author had abundant knowledge of the subject. In this work astrology is refuted particularly from the moral point of view. It is convicted of the double charge of being fatalistic in its tendency and subversive of all morality. "Men's conduct," says the author's thesis, "is due to their own free will and not to the configuration of the planets." _Golden Age of Patristic Literature_.--So ran on in perfect unity and harmony the steady flow of patristic teaching. It reached its climax, as we should expect to find, in the heroic writers of the fourth century, the golden era of patrology. Lactantius, the Christian Cicero, re-echoed the voices of the past in pronouncing astrology the work of demons. An Augustine, the greatest of the Fathers, confirmed the decision of his predecessors by protesting against the amalgamation of astrology with the true science of nature. So effectual indeed was the opposition to astrology of the earlier Christian writers, confirmed by the masters of the post-Nicene period, that the practice came to be regarded by all the faithful as a superstition and a danger, and continued to be so esteemed down to the time of the Crusades. For a full millennium, Christian Europe midst all its vicissitudes was spared the absurdities of astrological belief and practice, thanks to the patristic school of writers. _A Surprising Omission_.--We have thought it well to bring to light these none too well-known facts regarding one important part of the astronomical teachings of the Fathers. How they could have {491} escaped the attention of Andrew D. White, or how he could have failed to find place for them in his voluminous work, it is difficult to understand. His book bristles with accounts of superstitions, always telling against the theologians, and in favor of the scientists. But astrology is absent even from the index of his work. Had he allotted it a chapter, his numerous readers would have learned that one great school of theological writers, enduring for a thousand years, did wage war on a certain sort of science, to wit, the pseudo-science of astrology. {492} APPENDIX VIII. SCIENCE IN AMERICA. For Americans it is very probable that the chapter in the history of science which will demonstrate most clearly that there was not only no opposition on the part of the Popes or the Church authorities to the teachings of science or its development, but on the contrary encouragement and patronage, in spite of our English traditions to the contrary, is that which gives even very briefly the story of the evolution of science and its teaching on the American continent. Notwithstanding the very prevalent impression, indeed we might say the practically universal persuasion, that there was nothing worth while talking about in any department of education in America before the nineteenth century, except what little there was in the English colonies, and while it is confidently assumed that above all science received no attention from our Southern neighbors, Spanish America not only surpassed English America in education, but far outdistanced English America in what was accomplished for scientific research and the evolution of the knowledge of a large number of scientific subjects in a great many ways. Even those among us who thought themselves well read in American history have, as a rule, known almost nothing of this until comparatively recent years. Professor Bourne of Yale, whose untimely death deprived the United States of a distinguished historical scholar, was the first to point out emphatically how far ahead of the English were the Spanish colonies in every mode of education, but particularly in the cultivation of science. In many places Prescott had more than hinted at this, but the materials for the whole story were not available until our time. Some of Bourne's paragraphs represent a severe arraignment of the ignorance that has characterized so much of our supposed knowledge of the Spanish Americans and their culture in the past. After reading them it is easy to realize the truth of the expression that another distinguished university man from the United States made use of not long ago, after having visited the South American countries. He declared that it was time for North Americans to wake up and _discover_ South America. Literally we have known almost nothing about it, indeed in a certain sense we have known much less than nothing, since we were quite sure that we knew {493} practically all there was to know while failing to know much that as Americans we ought to have known. Two Spanish-American universities were founded under Papal charters almost a full century before Harvard as our first small college in English America began its career. Harvard was not to be a university in any proper sense of the term for a full century and a half after its foundation, while the universities of Mexico and Peru, largely under the influence of the ecclesiastical authorities and owing nearly everything to Church patronage under the Spanish Crown, had all the essential university faculties before the close of the sixteenth century. In spite of the predominant Church influence, which, if we were to credit former English traditions, must have been fatal to the evolution of science, Professor Bourne's researches show that in _the sixteenth century_ the Spanish-American universities were already doing such scientific work as the students in English America became interested in only during the _nineteenth century_. Obviously I prefer to quote Professor Bourne's own words for such startling assertions. He said in his chapter on "The Transmission of Culture" in his volume in The American Nation Series, "Spain in America": "Not all the institutions of learning founded in Mexico in the _sixteenth century_ can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments by the officers _they surpassed anything existing in English America until the nineteenth century_. Mexican scholars made distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and anthropology. Dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and histories of the Mexican institutions are an imposing proof of their scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. Conspicuous are Toribio de Motolinia's '_Historia de las Indias de Nueva España,_' Duran's '_Historia de las Indias de Nueva España_' but most important of all Sahagun's great work on Mexican life and religion." Indeed, it is with regard to science in various forms that one finds the most surprising contributions from these old-time scholars. While the English in America were paying practically no attention to science, the Spaniards were deeply interested in it. Dr. Chanca, a physician who had been for several years physician-in-ordinary to the King and Queen (Ferdinand and Isabella) and was looked upon as one of the leaders of his profession in Spain, was appointed by the Crown to accompany Columbus on his second expedition, partly for the sake of the health of those who went, but also in order to make scientific notes on American subjects. The report {494} of this scientific excursion is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the state of science of the time and furnishes precious information with regard to Indian medicine, Indian customs, Spanish knowledge of and interest in botany and metallurgy, as well as certain phases of zoology and other scientific departments, which serves to show how wide was the training in science of this Spanish physician of over four hundred years ago. Dr. Chanca's epistle was republished as one of the Miscellaneous Publications of the Smithsonian Institution and a series of articles with regard to him from the pen of Dr. Fernandez de Ybarra has appeared in medical and other journals of the United States. Chanca is the author of a medical work on the Treatment of Pleurisy, published after his return in 1506, and a commentary on Arnold of Villanova's _De conservanda juventute et retardanda senectute_, "The Conservation of Youth and the Retardation of Old Age." Such a work is all the more interesting at this time because we know of De Soto's search for a "Fountain of Youth" in Florida and the popular belief in the existence of some such fabled miracle-worker for the old. Indeed most people seem inclined to think that such an idea represented very characteristically the naive medical science of the time. The Fountain of Youth was only like the many wonderful remedies--nearly always they are announced to have come from long distances--that are supposed to renew youthful vigor and which are sold so plentifully in our time. To take such popular notions as an index of the medical science of either that time or our own is quite absurd. The genuine medical science of this period is, as I have shown in my volume "The Century of Columbus," a never-ending source of surprise by its anticipation of many ideas that are usually supposed to be much later in origin and not a few of which are fondly supposed to be original discoveries of our time. Evidently Spanish interest in science was broad and deep and this is confirmed by the story of the medical schools in connection with these Spanish-American universities which is of special significance. My own medical _alma mater_, the University of Pennsylvania, whose medical school was the first in the United States, erected a tablet some years ago in which it was at least hinted that this was the oldest medical school in America. A few years later, on the erection of a second tablet to the earliest medical faculty, additional knowledge having come in the meantime, the inscription on this was worded so as to refer to the first school of medicine in North America. [Illustration: HOSPITAL, MEXICO (ANOTHER VIEW) This hospital, as was noted in the caption to the other view of it (opp. page 272), is the oldest foundation of this kind in America (1524) and is still in existence supported by the original endowment. The second oldest hospital in America was that of Santa Fé (in Mexico) founded in 1531 by a remarkable man who became Bishop of Michoacan, and who supported it at his own expense, besides forming at Santa Fe a community of thirty thousand Indians who lived like monks, practising hospitality and all the works of charity (_A History of Nursing, Nutting and Dock, New York_).] {495} The medical school of the University of Lima, founded before the end of the sixteenth century, had meanwhile been discovered. Subsequently the medical school of the University of Mexico came to be known and the next tablet will have to be worded with due reference to that. The first chair in medicine was founded at the University of Mexico about 1580, almost two centuries before our first formal academic medical teaching in the United States was organized about 1770. During the course of a generation altogether seven chairs in medicine were founded in Mexico, including a chair of anatomy and surgery, a special chair of dissection, a chair of therapeutics and one of prognostics. The medical school of the University of Lima was organized about the same time. With our rather complacent modern method of belittling the past and our disinclination to admit that the Spaniards were doing anything in science that the English Americans were not to think of for nearly two centuries, it would be easy to conclude that the teaching at these medical schools must have been altogether trivial and of no significance. When it is learned that most of the teaching was founded on Hippocrates and Galen some of our generation might think it hopelessly backward, but it would be well for those who think so, to be reminded that during the century following the sixteenth, Sydenham in England, and Boerhaave in Holland, the most distinguished medical men of their time who are deservedly looked up to with great reverence by most of the distinguished teachers of ours, were both of them pleading for a return to the broad, sane views and insistence on clinical observation of Hippocrates and Galen. As a matter of fact the medical schools of both the University of Mexico and of Lima were furnishing quite as good a medical training as the average medical school of Europe at that time. They were modelled closely after the Spanish universities and were in intimate relations with them, even exchanging professors and students, and at the middle of the seventeenth century at least maintaining excellent standards. From the very beginning, then, the Spanish Americans made a definite attempt to develop scientific knowledge in America. In medicine, in botany, in pharmacology, as well as in geography, philology, ethnology, and anthropology, there are magnificent contributions made by Spanish scholars. Many a Spanish university student and teacher spent time in this country investigating the properties of plants, especially their relations to medicine, and laying precious foundations in botany. Besides there were university scholars at home in Spain taking advantage of these field investigations to {496} compile works of serious character which are well known by those who are familiar with the history of botany and pharmacology. What the Spaniards were doing in America the Portuguese were doing in India and South Africa, and a very serious attempt was made during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to bring to Europe every possible material, plant or mineral, that might be of value for human health and at the same time to increase the bounds of human knowledge by careful investigation. Nor was this thoroughly scientific and practical education confined only to the upper classes nor exclusively to those of Spanish birth and blood. Even "the wild Indians," as Bourne tells us, "were successfully gathered together in a village called a Mission where, under the increasing supervision of the friars, they were taught the elements of letters and trained to peaceful, industrious and religious lives. In fact every mission was an industrial school, where the simple arts were taught by the friars, themselves in origin plain Spanish peasants." He continues, "Spanish America, from California and Texas, to Paraguay and Chili, was fringed with such establishments, the outposts of civilization, where many thousands of Indians went through a schooling which ended only with their lives." Bourne goes so far as to say "every town, Indian as well, as Spanish, was by law required to have its church, hospital, and school for teaching Indian children Spanish and the elements of religion." The Spaniards were actually anticipating for the young Indians some of the modes of vocational education, interest in which is only just being aroused among us at the present time. No wonder that the work of conversion in Mexico followed hard upon the heels of conquest, and to quote Bourne's words farther, "The Aztec priesthood relaxed its bonds and the masses were relieved from the earlier burdens of the faith. In the old world the progress from actual to vicarious sacrifice for sin had been slow and painful through the ages; in the new it was accomplished in but a single generation. The old religion had inculcated a relatively high morality, but its dreadful rites overhung the present life like a black cloud and for the future it offered little consolation." ..."The work of the Church was rapidly adapted to the new field of labor." The triumph of the Church's influence was the preservation of the natives and their gradual uplift. This was a slow process and required almost divine patience, but it was infinitely better than the method by which the English-speaking colonies, in a chapter of history that is almost untellable in its {497} completeness, brought the natives of the country that they had invaded to ruin and practically obliteration. This experiment in applied sociology so successfully accomplished must be placed to the credit of the Spaniards also, and it stands out with all the more interest by contrast with English neglect of duty. While seeing so clearly all that was accomplished in Mexico under the influence of the Church for education and social progress and scientific teaching and training in the arts and crafts and trades, Professor Bourne cannot quite bring himself to condemn entirely the almost complete failure that characterized all the relations of the English-speaking peoples to the natives here in America and he even seems to find some justification for their harsh treatment of the Indians. I think that our point of view generally has changed a great deal in this matter even in the last ten or fifteen years since we have come to recognize our social obligations more clearly and, above all, have come to appreciate better what is meant by "the white man's burden" in his relations to the dark-skinned peoples who are lower in the scale of civilization than we are. The Civil War did much to correct American notions on this point, but our attention to problems in the Philippines has done even more. I shall leave Professor Bourne's paragraph to speak for itself and each reader to say for himself whether the English method of dealing with the Indian is justified by comparison with the ruthless processes of nature as Professor Bourne would hint. "Far different was the advancing frontier in English America with its clean sweep, its clash of elemental human forces. Our own method prepared a home for a more advanced civilization and a less variously mixed population and its present fruits seem to justify it as the ruthless processes of nature are justified; but a comparison of the two systems does not warrant self-righteousness on the part of the English in America." Indeed we might well say far from it, for the almost literal obliteration of the Indian in North America as of the natives in Australia and New Zealand, only so much more complete there, represents ever to be regretted blots on the history of civilization for which there can be no possible justification. Professor Bourne does not hesitate to continue the comparison of Spanish and English America down even to our own time and in doing so points out that our advances which have for the time being put us so far ahead of the Spanish Americans are mostly the gains of the age of steam and are due to the fact that it was hard for their mixed population with so many barbarous elements {498} in them to keep up with our comparatively homogeneous population, homogeneous at least in the sense of coming from the same strata and civilization in Europe. While our Indians have been almost entirely obliterated there are more Indians alive in Mexico and in South America to-day than there were when Columbus landed. With this fact in mind Professor Bourne's comparison and contrast takes on renewed interest and his apology for the Spanish Americans is all the more telling. "If we compare Spanish America with the United States a hundred years ago we must recognize that while in the North there was a sounder body politic, a purer social life and a more general dissemination of elementary education, yet in Spanish America there were both vastly greater wealth and greater poverty, _more imposing monuments of civilization, such as public buildings, institutions of learning and hospitals, more populous and richer cities, a higher attainment in certain branches of science_. No one can read Humboldt's account of the City of Mexico and its establishments for the promotion of science and the fine arts without realizing that whatever may be the superiorities of the United States over Mexico in these respects, they have been mostly the gains of the age of steam." If one reads Champlain's account of the City of Mexico as he saw it at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, as I have quoted it in the chapter "America in Columbus' Century," in "The Century of Columbus" (_Catholic Summer School Press. New York, 1914_), it will be quite clear that Humboldt was only seeing the natural development of culture and artistic progress that was already in evidence in the early sixteenth century. "During the first half-century," Bourne continues, "after the application of steam to transportation Mexico weltered in domestic turmoils arising out of the crash of the old regime. If the rule of Spain could have lasted half a century longer, being progressively as it was during the reign of Charles III; if a succession of such viceroys as Revilla Gigedo, in Mexico, and De Croix and De Taboaday Lemos, in Peru, could have borne sway in America until railroads could have been built, intercolonial intercourse ramified, a distinctly Spanish-American federal State might possibly have been created, capable of self-defence against Europe, and inviting cooperation rather than aggression from the neighbor in the North." If the effort to understand Spanish America now so manifest will only go to the extent of having our people realize the full truth that until the nineteenth century English America was far behind Spanish America in facilities for higher education, in culture and literature, in the application of the arts to municipal life and, above {499} all, in interest in science, then the prevalent impression that the Popes and the Catholic Church are opposed to genuine progress and true science will disappear. Catholic America was far ahead of Protestant America in scientific education and research until the untimely break from Spain left the Spanish-American countries the prey of political disturbances. {500} APPENDIX IX. THE DANGER OF A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE. _Professor Draper's "The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science."_ What I have tried to emphasize in this volume is that the arguments advanced to show the opposition of the Catholic Church to science are founded on actual ignorance of the history of science or misunderstandings of particular incidents of that history. Not only was there no policy of opposition to science, but on the contrary encouragement of interest in scientific subjects, patronage of scientific workers and even definite endowment of scientific research by the ecclesiastical authorities. The tradition of Church opposition to science is founded especially on lack of knowledge of what was done for science in the medieval period and a misunderstanding of the medieval universities. This tradition owed its origin partly to the Renaissance, which, having rediscovered Greek, despised whatever Western Europe had accomplished during the preceding centuries and spoke of all that was done as Gothic, as if only worthy of barbarous Gothic ancestors. Another large factor, however, in the creation of this tradition and one which meant more for us here in America than the Renaissance, was the religious revolt of the sixteenth century in Germany which has been called the Reformation. The reformers made it a point to minimize, if not actually to misrepresent, what had been accomplished under the old Church regime, and this Protestant tradition lived on here in America with much more vitality even than in Europe. The consequence was the bringing up of a series of generations, who, if not actually believing as so many absurdly did, that the Pope of Rome was the Scarlet Woman and the Church the Babylon of the Apocalypse, were quite sure at least that no good could possibly have come out of the Nazareth of pre-Reformation times. It is only in recent years that we have come to recognize that all the talk about the Dark Ages is, as John Fiske said, simply due to ignorance of the time and its accomplishment. The later medieval period might well be called the "Bright Ages" for its art and architecture, its magnificent literature, its interest in education and {501} in scholarship, its development of democracy and its formulation of the great laws and constitutions by which the rights of men were guaranteed in practically every country in Europe. Just as soon as this true state of affairs with regard to the medieval period is recognized, then all question of any policy of Church opposition to education and science disappears. I have illustrated the lack of knowledge of the true history of science as the basis of the arguments for the thesis of Church opposition to science in the present volume by impugning what President White advances as facts. It can be illustrated still better, however, from another book written twenty years before President White's, even a little consideration of which shows how the whole status of the arguments with regard to the relations of Church and science has changed during a single generation. Our growing knowledge of history has literally taken away all the ground on which the older controversialists used to stand. This is the "History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science" by Professor John W. Draper, which was issued in 1874, just forty years ago, and already in 1875 had entered its third edition, so that the book sold almost as a popular novel at that time and evidently attracted wide attention. The volume was accorded the privilege of publication in the International Scientific Series, and as this set is among the recognized serious books of the time, some of them classics in science and most of them representing important contributions to knowledge, no wonder most readers never thought of doubting its authority or above all questioning its "facts." Some of Dr. Draper's work made him deservedly one of the best-known biological scientists of the United States in his time. He had had a very striking career. As a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania he reported in his thesis for the doctorate in medicine, which had become at this time usually such a commonplace statement of conventional science that it was shortly after given up as a requirement, a series of observations on absorption through membranes, using bubbles for his experimental work, that attracted the special commendation of the faculty and the attention of the scientific world. He was not yet thirty years of age when he made the first photograph of a human being--that of his sister--ever made and in 1840 successfully secured the first photographs of the moon. During the next ten years he made a series of observations on the spectrum which attracted deserved attention and anticipated not a little of Kirchoff's work. Melloni, himself a distinguished Italian physicist, reported these observations {502} to the academy of Naples. Draper's text-book of physiology was without doubt the best medical text-book issued in America up to that time and deservedly held its place for many years in our medical schools. It was no wonder then that Draper received many distinctions in the shape of membership in foreign scientific societies, honorable mentions, and prizes. His works were translated into many of the European languages. Late in life he gave up his experimental and scientific work to devote himself to the writing of history. His history of the Civil War was widely read both in Europe and America. His "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," which only a little reading now in the light of recent knowledge of the Middle Ages shows us to be a caricature of the philosophy of history, was translated into several foreign languages and was probably more widely read than any serious work by an American author up to that time. What was very rare for an American book at that period it was read by a great many European teachers and students. All this gave added distinction to his writing on the subject of the relations of science and religion, and so it is easy to understand that he was considered by many to have made an almost final summary of this important controversy. Professor Draper's book then became a sort of bible, that is a book of books, for a great many American teachers of science and, above all, for the younger generation of university lecturers who were to have the shaping of opinions among the students of scientific departments of our colleges and universities during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It does not seem too much to assume that most of the maturer scientists who are now teaching in the university scientific departments of this country, read Professor Draper's book and were led by it to an almost unshakeable conviction that religion and, above all, the Catholic Church, fearful lest science should take men away from her influence, had been constantly opposed to all true scientific progress, and what was more unpardonable, that religion as represented by the Church had been for the same reason a bitter enemy of any and every social progress that might lead to the real development of mankind. For them under Draper's inspiration it seemed that the deliberate Church policy was that if men were not happy here they would look with all the more eagerness to happiness hereafter and take all the means offered by the Church to secure it. That such a conclusion impugned the motives of millions of men whom their own generation had thoroughly respected and yielded to the most {503} dangerous of human ideas, suspicion, made no difference. No good could come out of the Nazareth of the Catholic Church. It is quite certain that a great many of the younger teachers of science of that time who are still alive, even when not entirely conscious of the source of their opinions as to the relations of science and religion and the Church and education, have at the back of their minds certain prejudices, founded on the influence produced on them during their plastic, formative state of mind by the reading of Professor Draper's book. Indeed, so firm is the feeling in many of these men, that this whole subject is settled for them beyond the possibility of any modification, that they have insulated their minds from any further currents of information. Controversy is distasteful at best; to find out that one has been cherishing a mistaken notion for years, is always disturbing as one grows older, and so it is not surprising that many of these men frequently use expressions with regard to the supposed relations of Church and science that are quite incompatible with what is now very generally known of the history of science. Their minds are made up, and they simply refuse to bring for a second time any of these subjects before the bar of judgment. Besides, though they would resent any such imputation as to their own state of mind, they have the feeling that people with religious convictions are prone to see only one side, and, therefore, anything that may be said on the other side is only a bit of special pleading for a conviction that no reasoning and no argument would change. They argue, as a consequence, that it would be quite useless for them to read the other side with any reasonable hope of getting at the real facts. This attitude of scientists is very different from the open-mindedness that is supposed to be characteristic of the devotees of science; but it is very human. Now the interesting fact with regard to Professor Draper's books is that Professor Draper, a scientist, did not know the history of science at all. He was entirely ignorant of the great advances that were even then being made, with regard to our knowledge of the growth of science during the medieval period. He thought that there was very little, indeed practically no science, during that period. Looking about for a reason, he made the Church a scapegoat. The publication during the past generation of many German volumes on the history of the different sciences--and these German students went straight to the original documents--has shown us that there were magnificent developments of science during the medieval and early Renaissance periods, when the Church was in control of the educational institutions and of every phase of {504} academic work. The story of the opposition between religion and science falls to the ground at once when these facts are known. Some of them were already in process of publication even in Draper's time, but he knew nothing of them. He was so sure that there was nothing to know in this matter, that he probably did not bother his head very much about trying to get the latest results of scholarship in the matter. Professor Draper's summary of the relations of the Church to science or learning, and his declaration of her absolute refusal to recognize anything as scholarship, except what was deduced from the Scriptures, shows how far a man can go in his assumption of knowledge when he knows literally nothing about a subject. For him the Dark Ages knew nothing because he knows nothing about them. If they knew anything, he would know it, but he does not. Of one or two men he knows something, but they are exceptions to the general rule of absolute negation of intellectual interests and developments. Draper said: [Footnote 64] [Footnote 64: Page 250.] "In the annals of Christianity, the most ill-omened day is that in which she separated herself from science. She compelled Origen, at that time (A.D. 231) its chief representative and supporter in the Church, to abandon his charge in Alexandria, and retire to Caesarea. In vain through many subsequent centuries did her leading men spend themselves in--as the phrase then went--drawing forth the internal juice and marrow of the Scriptures for the explaining of things. Universal history from the third to the sixteenth century shows with what result. The Dark Ages owe their darkness to this fatal policy. Here and there, it is true, there were great men, such as Frederick II and Alphonso X, who, standing at a very elevated and general point of view, had detected the value of learning to civilization, and, in the midst of the dreary prospect that ecclesiasticism had created around them, had recognized that science alone can improve the social condition of man." Of course the man who wrote that either knew nothing at all about a whole series of triumphs of human intelligence, or else he deliberately put them out of his mind. One wonders if he had ever even heard of Dante, of whom more has been written than of any man who ever lived. Those triumphs of art, architecture, the arts and crafts, engineering, construction work of the highest genius, the Gothic cathedrals and the great public buildings, town halls, hospitals, university buildings, would surely have appeared to him as representing magnificent intellectual--and social--accomplishments, had he appreciated anything of their real significance or allowed himself for a moment to get out of the narrow circle of {505} interests in which he was unfortunately placed. Our architecture in his time was cheap; our art absent; our crafts lacked development; our civic and university architecture of the quarter century before he wrote was literally a disgrace, and of course Professor Draper could not be expected to appreciate the achievements of the Middle Ages in those departments in which his own generation lacked so much. It is especially striking to take a paragraph of Professor Draper's, in which he sums up a whole movement, and place beside it a paragraph of a serious and informed student of the same subject. Professor Draper inherited the old traditions of lazy monks, living in idleness, a drain on the country, of absolutely no benefit to themselves or to others. Professor Draper wrote: [Footnote 65] [Footnote 65: Page 267.] "While thus the higher clergy secured every political appointment worth having, and abbots vied with counts, in the herds of slaves they possessed--some, it is said, owned not fewer than twenty thousand--begging friars pervaded society in all directions, picking up a share of what still remained to the poor. There was a vast body of non-producers, living in idleness and owning a foreign allegiance, who were subsisting on the fruits of the toil of the laborers. It could not be otherwise than that small farms should be unceasingly merged into the larger estates; that the poor should steadily become poorer; that society far from improving, should exhibit a continually increasing demoralization." As a commentary on this, read the following paragraph from Mr. Ralph Adams Cram's book on "The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain," in which he describes what the monasteries actually did for the people. Mr. Cram has made a special study of the subject in connection with the magnificent architecture which these medieval monks developed, and which he would like to have our people appreciate and emulate. Professor Draper is much more positive, but Mr. Cram is much more convincing. [Footnote 66] [Footnote 66: _The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain_. New York: The Churchman Co., 1905, p. 458.] "At the height of monastic glory the religious houses were actually the chief centres of industry and civilization, and around them grew up the eager villages, many of which now exist, even though their impulse and original inspiration have long since departed. Of course, the possessions of the abbey reached far away from the walls in every direction, including many farms even at a great distance, for the abbeys were then the great landowners, and beneficent landlords they were as well; even in their last days, for we have many records of the cruelty and hardships that came to {506} the tenants the moment the stolen lands came into the hands of laymen." Or, almost better still, read the following paragraph from an address at the summer meeting of the State Board of Agriculture of Massachusetts, delivered by Dr. Henry Goodell, the President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, on the general subject of the influence of the monks in agriculture: "Agriculture was sunk to a low ebb at the decadence of the Roman Empire. Marshes covered once fertile fields, and the men who should have tilled the land spurned the plow as degrading. The monks left their cells and their prayers to dig ditches and plow fields. The effort was magical. Men once more turned back to a noble but despised industry, and peace and plenty supplanted war and poverty. So well recognized were the blessings they brought, that an old German proverb among the peasants runs, 'It is good to live under the crozier.' They ennobled manual labor, which, in a degenerate Roman world, had been performed exclusively by slaves, and among the barbarians by women. For the monks it is no exaggeration to say that the cultivation of the soil was like an immense alms spread over a whole country. The abbots and superiors set the example, and stripping off their sacerdotal robes, toiled as common laborers. Like the good parson whom Chaucer portrays in the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales": "'This noble ensample unto his scheep he gaf That first he wroughte and after that he taughte.' "When a Papal messenger came in haste to consult the Abbot Equutius on important matters of the Church, he was not to be found anywhere, but was finally discovered in the valley cutting hay. Under such guidance and such example the monks upheld and taught everywhere the dignity of labor, first, by consecrating to agriculture the energy and intelligent activity of freemen often of high birth, and clothed with the double authority of the priesthood and of hereditary nobility, and, second, by associating under the Benedictine habit sons of kings, princes, and nobles with the rudest labors of peasants and serfs." President Goodell has told the story of how the monks cleared and reclaimed the land, transformed fens into forests, marshes into gardens, and swamps into beautiful domains. As he says: "A swamp was of no value. It was a source of pestilence. But it was just the place for a monastery because it made life especially hard, and so the monks carried in earth and stone and made a foundation, and built their convent, and then set to work to dyke and drain and fill up the swamp, till they had turned it into fertile plow land and the pestilence had ceased." {507} President Goodell did not hesitate to proclaim that the monasteries were the early representatives of our agricultural colleges. They taught the peasantry of the surrounding country how best to grow their crops and what to grow. Because of their wide affiliations they were enabled to secure seeds of various kinds, and stock for breeding purposes, and so were able to teach the people what was best for particular neighborhoods, and not only show them how to raise it, but actually supply them with the necessary initial materials. It became a proverb that the monks and their people were the best farmers. When we ourselves were ignorant of scientific farming, we did not appreciate what the monks had done for agriculture. Now that our soil is becoming exhausted by unscientific and wasteful farming, the foundation of agricultural colleges leads the men who have studied the subject to appreciate what the monks really accomplished. Professor Draper not only cannot find anything good to say of the monks, but he can scarcely find anything bitter enough to say of them. On the other hand President Goodell, who has studied the situation from his point of view very carefully, can scarcely find words strong enough to praise them. He concluded his address as follows: "My friends, I have outlined to you in briefest manner to-day the work of these grand old monks during the period of 1500 years. They saved agriculture when no one else would save it, they practised it under a new life and new conditions when no one else dared undertake it. They advanced it along every line of theory and practice, and when they perished they left a void which generations have not filled." In the light of these few quotations even it is easy to see that Professor Draper's book is really quite an amazing work to have come from the hand of a man widely read, acknowledged as an authority in certain subjects by his contemporaries and, above all, because the author seems to have thought that he had quite exhausted his subject. Here, for instance, is a portion of the paragraph in which he summarizes the beginnings of science in modern Europe (page 298). "The science of the Arabians followed the invading track of their literature, which had come into Christendom by two routes--the south of France and Sicily. Favored by the exile of the Popes to Avignon, and by the Great Schism, it made good its foothold in upper Italy. The Aristotelian or Inductive philosophy, clad in the Saracenic costume that Averroes had given it, made many secret and not a few open friends. It found many minds eager to receive {508} and able to appreciate it. Among these were Leonardo da Vinci, who proclaimed the fundamental principle that experiment and observation are the only reliable foundations of reasoning in science, that experiment is the only trustworthy interpreter of Nature, and is essential to the ascertainment of laws. He showed that the action of two perpendicular forces upon a point is the same as that denoted by the diagonal of a rectangle, of which they represent the sides, etc." We must suppose that the scientific readers of this book, for they were mainly scientists, and it had a place in the International Scientific Series, agreed with this marvellous exhibition of ignorance. Here is a man summarizing modern European science and leaving out all mention of Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, the great medical school of Salerno in the twelfth century, and the great medical schools of Italy farther north during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. This lack of knowledge of the history of medicine deserves, above all, to be emphasized because Draper as a professor in a medical school would naturally be supposed to know something about his own branch of science. He attributes all the initiative of modern science to the impulse derived from the Arabs. This used to be a favorite way of looking at the history of culture for those who wanted to minimize just as far as possible all Christian influence. The facts of history are in constant contradiction with this. Modern European science began at the University of Salerno. It has often been stated that Arabian influence must have largely impelled Salerno's work, situated as it was in the southern part of Italy, but the use of any such expression means that the writer must forget that this southern part of Italy had been a Greek colony, was indeed called Magna Graecia and that Greek influence persisted there, and when the revival came after the Barbarians who had invaded Italy had gradually been brought by religious influence into a state where culture and science and civilization were to mean something for them, the influence of the old Greek authors was first felt here. Gurlt, in his History of Surgery, emphasizes the fact, for instance, that the first important modern (or medieval) writers on surgery, the Four Masters of Salerno, were not influenced by the Arabs. Their books contain no Arabisms but many Graecisms. They obtained their inspiration from the old Greeks and carried on the torch of learning in their own department magnificently as recent studies of the School of Salerno have shown. They corrected the polypharmacy of the Arabs and restored natural modes of cure to their proper place. {509} For Professor Draper, until after the Reformation there was practically no development of medicine. "It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his arts; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines." Professor Draper either knew nothing of the great series of Papal physicians and surgeons or else he ignored what they had done deliberately. It seems reasonably certain that he knew nothing about them, for if he had done so he would surely have mentioned them in order to minimize the significance of their work--for that is his way. He is emphatic in his declaration of the medieval neglect of sanitation and care for the ailing, and sets it down to the deliberate purpose to secure more money for prayers. "From cities wreaking with putrefying filth it was thought that the plague might be staid by the prayers of the priests." He knows nothing apparently of the well-directed attempts to organize sanitary control, of the appointment of archiaters or medical directors in Italian cities, of the recognition of the contagiousness of tuberculosis, and the effort to control it, and seems even to have missed the significance of the successful obliteration of leprosy by segregation methods, for that was one of the greatest triumphs of preventive medicine ever attained. Leprosy was probably as common in the thirteenth century in Europe as consumption is now with us or very nearly so, and yet in two centuries it had been practically eradicated. Well for us if we shall accomplish as much for our folk scourge of disease--the White Plague. Above all, Professor Draper seems to know nothing of the magnificent hospitals of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, beautiful architecturally, well planned for ventilation and the disposal of waste material, with abundant water supply, with large open wards, windows high in the wall, tiled floors that could be thoroughly cleansed and which, alas! were to be replaced hundreds of years later by the awful hospitals of the first half of the nineteenth century, which with their small windows, narrow corridors, cell-like apartments and little doors, were to be more like jails than refuges. Some of the worst hospitals ever built in modern history had been erected in Professor Draper's own lifetime. Some of the most beautiful hospitals in the world had been erected in Italy and other countries during the later medieval and Renaissance period, before the Reformation, under religious influence,--but Professor Draper knows nothing of them. The history of hospitals here in America is as largely religious as it was in other countries and times. {510} Professor Draper seems to have known nothing of the fine hospitals and foundling institutions and the great surgery of the later Middle Ages, but he thinks he knows enough to be quite sure that any such developments were impossible. Certain incidents that he accepts as historical showed him what fools the Popes and all near them were in matters of science, and, therefore, it would be quite impossible that they could have any sympathy for scientific progress and quite easy to understand their opposition. It is from conclusions and assumptions in history that we need to be saved. A hundred years ago it used to be said with pride that if you gave a zoologist a single bone he could reconstruct the entire animal for you. We know that such reconstruction worked much harm to science. Many of the animals possess structures that even important portions of their anatomy in other parts of the body would give no hint of. History that is built up from single incidents is likely to be even more false because human conduct is much more complex than any animal body. What could be expected of the zoologist's reconstruction, however, if the original bone handed to him was factitious, what a curious result might be expected from his deduced skeleton. This is what happened with Professor Draper's reconstruction of history from certain incidents that he accepted. The story of the Papal Bull against Halley's comet seemed enough to him to make it quite clear that for centuries the Popes must have been buried in the profoundest ignorance of science,--but then the story of the Papal Bull against Halley's comet is all a modern invention. Draper said: "But when Halley's comet came in 1456 so tremendous was its apparition that it was necessary for the Pope himself to interfere. He exorcised and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of space terror-stricken by the maledictions of Calixtus III, and did not venture back again for seventy-five years!" Of course this bit of supposed information is all nonsense; Calixtus did no such thing, and just at that time the Popes were encouraging Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in his great mathematical work and astronomical speculations, were inviting Regiomontanus, "the Father of modern astronomy," down to Rome to do his work there and help in the correction of the calendar, while Cardinal Bessarion, one of the most intimate friends of the Pope at this time, was encouraging Purbach at Vienna and Regiomontanus to translate Ptolemy and providing them with manuscripts and putting them in touch with Greek science in every way. {511} Halley's comet is a favorite reference with Professor Draper. How well his readers must have remembered all about it! He says, for instance, on page 320: "The step that European intellect had made between 1456 and 1759 was illustrated by Halley's comet. When it appeared in the former year, it was considered as the harbinger of the vengeance of God, the dispenser of the most dreadful of his retributions, war, pestilence, famine. By order of the Pope, all the church-bells in Europe were rung to scare it away, the faithful were commanded to add each day another prayer; and, as their prayers had often in so marked a manner been answered in eclipses and droughts and rains, so on this occasion it was declared that a victory over the comet had been vouchsafed to the Pope. But, in the meantime, Halley, guided by revelations of Kepler and Newton, had discovered that its motions, so far from being controlled by the supplications of Christendom, were guided in an elliptic orbit by destiny. Knowing that Nature had denied to him an opportunity of witnessing the fulfilment of his daring prophecy, he besought the astronomers of the succeeding generation to watch for its return in 1759, and in that year it came." All this is of course mere persiflage once it is known that the story of the Papal Bull against the comet has no foundation in history. It is the sort of nonsense that a great many serious men permit themselves to indulge in when they think they are convicting some past century of sublime foolishness. Not infrequently they make themselves out just as absurd as they would like to present the men of former generations, because they show how credulous a modern scholar can be when his prejudices influence him. Unfortunately such passages have a particularly lamentable effect upon young minds. For them ridicule means much more than argument. For a young man to be ridiculous seems the worst thing that can possibly happen and when anything is made ridiculous for him he loses his respect for it. Ridicule is, as is well known, an extremely dangerous argument, however. Professor Draper and, indeed, many another teacher of history and, above all, lecturer and writer on the history of science, have made themselves supremely ridiculous by their ready acceptance of a legend for which there is not the slightest authority. It was made up to serve the purpose of exhibiting Papal ignorance and superstition, but it so happens that in serious history the Popes of the time when this is supposed to have occurred are among the most intelligent and scholarly men of history. It seems worth while to go over the list of Popes who came during the twenty years just before and after the date given for the issuance of this supposed bull. Eugene IV, elected Pope in 1431, {512} whatever may have been his faults of lack of tact, was scholarly and unselfish. At an early age he distributed what was really an immense fortune in his time to the poor, and entered the monastery. When political troubles drove him from Rome he resided at Florence and the presence of the Papal Court there did much to foster the humanistic movement which was just then beginning. It was he who consecrated the beautiful church just finished by Brunelleschi. His successor in 1447 was Pope Nicholas V, a man of wide education and deep interest in the revival of classical literature and Christian antiquities. He was the founder of the Vatican Library and brought Fra Angelico to Rome for the great decorative work at the Vatican. Pope Calixtus III, who succeeded Nicholas in 1455, was a man of cultivated mind, scholarly tastes and shared with his predecessor the honor of having founded the Vatican Library. He encouraged the Greek scholars in Italy and added greatly to the collections of precious manuscripts. His desire to prevent the further destruction of Greek culture by the Turks who had just captured Constantinople, led him to devote himself mainly to the fulfilment of a vow that he had made to wrest Constantinople from the Moslem. To his influence is largely due the victory gained by the Christians at Belgrade at this time which prevented the further spread of Mohammedan power. Pope Calixtus had the Angelus Bell rung every day at noon to implore the aid of the heavenly powers against the Turks. There is absolutely no question of any reference in this matter to the comet, but here is where the story comes in. Pope Calixtus' successor was the famous Renaissance scholar AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini. He was just beginning some of the reforms, the need of which had been pointed out by his friend, the scholarly Nicholas of Cusa, when his death occurred as a consequence of his fatigue in journeys undertaken to rouse the Christians of the West against the Turks so as to preserve Christian civilization. His successor was Pope Paul II. He found it necessary to suppress some of the academies of Rome whose privileges were being abused by fostering a pagan attitude toward philosophy and religion, and in revenge Platina wrote a bitter biography of him, but no one has ever doubted of his scholarliness. He built the Palace of St. Marco in Rome, now known as the Venezia, and organized relief work among the poor while encouraging printing, protecting universities, and showing himself a judicious collector of works of ancient art. Professor Draper's summaries of periods of history are amusing {513} caricatures of the reality. I know no easier way to make a comic history of progress in Europe, so-called, than to take a series of excerpts from Draper's book and string them together. He ignores completely the wonderful work done for scholarship, he knows nothing apparently of the great series of books printed for us during the Renaissance, usually in magnificent editions, which preserve scholarly works of the Middle Ages, he utterly neglects the painting, the architecture, the sculpture, even the great engineering feats in the making of bridges and constructive work of all kinds, and then in order to explain why there was nothing done by mankind puts all the blame on the Church. As I have said before, in a period in which even well-read men knew nothing about the Middle Ages, self-complacency tempted them to conclude that such a gap in their knowledge could only be because there was nothing to know about them. They looked for some reason for the absence of accomplishment that made this blank in human history. With their feelings, the Church was just the one that must be responsible. Progress would surely have been made only that some factor was keeping it back. Professor Draper makes an especially strong appeal to American readers by contrasting all the accomplishments of our material civilization here in the United States, with the results in Mexico and in South America. Our progress has been all beneficent, while the influence of the Spaniard was everywhere absolutely maleficent. He seems to forget all about our treatment of the Indian, with its awful injustice. He proclaims our increase in wealth as the surest sign of our intellectual superiority. He says: [Footnote 67] [Footnote 67: Page 289.] "Let us contrast with this the results of the invasion of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards, who in those countries overthrew a wonderful civilization, in many respects superior to their own, a civilization that had been accomplished without iron and gunpowder--a civilization resting on an agriculture that had neither horse, nor ox, nor plow. The Spaniards had a clear base to start from, and no obstruction whatever in their advance. They ruined all that the aboriginal children of America had accomplished. Millions of those unfortunates were destroyed by their cruelty. Nations that for many centuries had been living in contentment and prosperity, under institutions shown by their history to be suitable to them, were plunged into anarchy; the people fell into a baneful superstition, and a greater part of their land and other property found its way into the possession of the Roman Church." Place beside that a paragraph from the late lamented Professor Bourne of Yale, who having made special studies in {514} Spanish-American culture and education, as well as in its intellectual life, contrasts it quite unfavorably with what was accomplished in the English colonies. Professor Bourne was, like Draper, a professor at an American university, but he had made special studies in the subject, and knew something about it. Professor Draper talked out of the depths of his assumption of knowledge; Professor Bourne out of an intimate acquaintance that had been obtained by years of serious research work. Professor Bourne said: "Both the Crown and the Church were solicitous for education in the Spanish colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a far greater scale than was possible or even attempted in the English colonies. The early Franciscan missionaries built a school beside each church, and in their teaching abundant use was made of signs, drawings, and paintings. The native languages were reduced to writing, and in a few years Indians were learning to read and write. Pedro de Gante, a Flemish lay brother, and a relative of Charles V, founded and conducted in the Indian quarter in Mexico a great school, attended by over a thousand Indian boys, which combined instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and fine arts. In its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and painters." Sir Sidney Lee, the editor of the "National Dictionary of Biography of England," and the author of a series of works on Shakespeare, which has gained for him recognition as probably the best living authority on the history of the Elizabethan times, without deliberate intent, answered Draper almost directly, in the following paragraphs from his work, "The Call of The West," which appeared originally in _Scribner's Magazine_, but has since been published in book form. Since Mr. Lee cannot be suspected of national or creed affinities with the Spaniards, and his knowledge of the subject is unquestionable, his direct contradictions of Draper are all the more weighty: "Especially has theological bias justified neglect or facilitated misconception of Spain's role in the sixteenth century drama of American history. Spain's initial adventures in the New World are often consciously or unconsciously overlooked or underrated, in order that she may figure on the stage of history as the benighted champion of a false and obsolete faith, which was vanquished under a divine protecting Providence by English defenders of the true religion. Many are the hostile critics who have painted sixteenth century Spain as the avaricious accumulator of American gold and silver, to which she had no right, as the monopolist of American trade, of which she robbed others, and as the oppressor and exterminator of the weak and innocent aborigines of the new continent, who deplored her presence among {515} them. Cruelty in all its hideous forms is, indeed, commonly set forth as Spain's only instrument of rule in her sixteenth century empire. On the other hand, the English adventurer has been credited by the same pens with a touching humanity, with the purest religious aspirations, with a romantic courage which was always at the disposal of the oppressed native. "No such picture is recognized when we apply the touchstone of the oral traditions, printed books, maps, and manuscripts concerning America which circulated in Shakespeare's England. There a predilection for romantic adventure is found to sway the Spaniards in even greater degree than it swayed the Elizabethan Englishman. Religious zeal is seen to inspirit the Spaniards more constantly and conspicuously than it stimulated his English contemporary. The motives of each nation are barely distinguishable one from another. Neither deserves to be credited with any monopoly of virtue or vice. Above all, the study of contemporary authorities brings into a dazzling light, which illumes every corner of the picture, the commanding facts of the Spaniard's priority as explorer, as scientific navigator, as conqueror, as settler." When an Englishman will admit this much in a comparison of his own countrymen with the Spaniards, it is easy to understand how great must be the actual historical contrast between the settlers of Spanish and English America. Professor Draper's philosophy of history is, indeed, something to make one pause. He says on page 291, "The result of the Crusades had shaken the faith of all Christendom." As a matter of easily ascertainable history, the faith of Christendom was never so strong as during the century immediately following the Crusades. This was the thirteenth century, with the glorious Gothic cathedrals; the great Latin hymns; the magnificent musical development; the wondrous tribute of painting to religion, from Cimabue and Duccio to Giotto and Orcagna, and of sculpture from the Pisani to the great designers of some of the doors of the baptistry of Florence, of the finest arts and crafts in gold and silver, in woodwork, in needle-work, in illuminated books--all precious tributes to religious belief. In the hundred years after the Crusades, the Popes secured a position of influence in Europe greater than they had ever had before or have ever enjoyed since, which they used to secure the foundation of hospitals everywhere throughout Europe, the establishment of universities, the organization of religious orders for teaching and nursing purposes, and the finest development of social life and social happiness that the world had ever known. According to Professor Draper, the removal of the Papal Court to Avignon in France gave opportunity for "the memorable intellectual movement that soon manifested itself in the great commercial {516} cities of Upper Italy." For him the earlier Renaissance begins with the fourteenth century, the thirteenth is entirely neglected, and a period that is really one of decadence is proclaimed a triumphant era of progress, because forsooth the removal from Rome of the Papacy and the abandonment by some of Christianity itself, gives him an opportunity to explain, thus from his prejudiced point of view, how the first stirrings of the Renaissance began. Verily indeed Professor Draper has written a joke book of history. Everything is along the same line. It is very rare, indeed, that by some chance he states a genuine historical truth, and when he does he usually disfigures it in some way or other. For him the Moors are the source of chivalry, of respect for women(!), and of the noble sentiment of personal honor. Everything else that is of any value in Christendom, must be referred to some source not Christian, lest by any chance religion should seem to have done any good in the world. _And let us not forget that this book was taken seriously, and not by the ignorant, but by university men, college graduates, professors, and teachers in many parts of the country._ Above all Professor Draper can scarcely be too bitter in his denunciation of the way that the poor were imposed upon, their ignorance encouraged, their rights refused, and all opportunities denied them. All this was due, according to Professor Draper, to the tyranny of the Church. President Woodrow Wilson, after making a special study of that subject, suggested in a passage in his book, which may be found in "The New Freedom," exactly the opposite of this. He knew something of the subject. Professor Draper was quite sure that he knew all about it, and that no good could have possibly come out of the Church. President Wilson's expressions are interesting to those who do not know them: "The only reason why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the aristocratic systems which then prevailed, was that the men who were efficient instruments of government were drawn from the Church--from that great Church, that body we now distinguish from other Church bodies as the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church then, as now, was a great democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become a Pope of Christendom, and every chancellory in Europe was ruled by those learned, trained and accomplished men--the priesthood of that great and then dominant Church; and so, what kept government alive in the Middle Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the Roman Catholic priesthood." {517} The greatest surprise is to be found in Professor Draper's ignorance of the history of his own profession. He says, "It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his art; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines." Professor Draper apparently knew nothing of the magnificent medical schools attached to the universities in the medieval period, whose professors wrote great medical and surgical text-books, which have come down to us, and whose faculties required a far higher standard of medical education than was demanded in America in Professor Draper's own day. For about 1871 anyone who wished might enter an American medical school practically anywhere in the country, without any preliminary education, and having taken two terms of ungraded lectures, that is, having listened to the same set of lectures two years in succession, might receive his degree of doctor of medicine. In the Middle Ages he could enter the medical school only after having completed three years of preliminary work in the undergraduate department, and then he was required to give four years to the study of medicine, and spend a year as assistant with another physician before he was allowed to practise for himself. This is the standard to which our university medical schools gradually climbed back at the beginning of the twentieth century--a full generation after Draper's time. We know now that in those earlier centuries they had thorough clinical teaching in the hospitals, that is, physicians learned to practise medicine at the bedside of the patient, and not merely out of books and by theoretic lectures. Clinical teaching had not developed in Professor Draper's day to any extent. The medieval hospitals had trained nurses and magnificent quarters, while the trained nurse was only introduced into America in 1871, and our hospitals at that time were almost without exception a disgrace to civilization, according to our present standards of hospital construction. Our surgery was most discouraging, because there were so many deaths in the unclean hospital conditions. The medieval hospital surgeons operating under anesthesia, boasted of getting union by first intention, and were in many ways doing better work than their colleagues of 1870, Professor Draper's own time, before Lister's great discovery. Of all this Professor Draper had no inkling. Draper's position is very like that of the specialist at all times. Dean West of Princeton once said, I believe, that a specialist is a man who knows so much more about one thing than he knows about anything else that he is inclined to think that he knows more about that than anyone else does. To which I once ventured {518} to add that the specialist is also a man who thinks because of his recognized attainments in one line, that if, for any reason, he should pay any serious attention to any other subject he would know more about that than anyone else does. Draper's views on universal history correspond exactly to such a definition. He jumped to conclusions in a way that he would surely have resented most bitterly and quite properly in anyone who attempted after slight acquaintance with his own department of science to express ultimate conclusions with regard to it, but he himself with the most scanty information gleaned only for the purpose of confirming some preconceived ideas, gathered entirely from secondary authorities without even an attempt to confirm his views by consultation of original documents, proceeded to tell the world just what it ought to think about questions of all kinds that have sometimes occupied historians for centuries and are by no means clear even yet. Above all, he failed to realize the relations of whatever knowledge he had to the other facts of history. Deeply interested in science himself to the exclusion of nearly everything else, he could not understand how any generation and scarcely how any individual could live a deeply intellectual life without an absorbing interest in physical science. He seems to have had no conception of the fact that physical science is only a passing phase of man's interest, and that interests in philosophy, in art, in poetry, in literature are not only quite equal to science as a mental discipline, but must probably be considered to surpass it. Nothing can be so narrow as physical science pursued alone,--as Draper himself furnishes the best possible proof, but of this he seems to have had no hint. Fortunately humanity has drawn away from that exaggerated idea of the value of physical science as ultimate truth and we are able to judge a little more dispassionately. Professor Draper's prestige, and the fact that his book was published in the International Scientific Series, led a great many people to read it, and it found its way into many of the public libraries of the country, on whose shelves it may still be found. Many of its readers thought it could never be effectively answered. Scientists were affected by it, or at least those interested in science, and it represented one phase of that pronounced opposition to religion which characterized what has been so well called the "silly seventies." And if the seriously educated were willing to accept the ignorant and prejudiced views of Professor Draper, what was to be expected of the general reader? What has helped the position of the Church {519} in this country during the past generations is knowledge, and ever more knowledge. When those who are not of the fold know even a little of the history of the Church, know a reasonable amount of the other side of controversial problems, and, above all, when they have been brought into personal touch with the Church itself, her pastors and the hierarchy and religious men and women, prejudice disappears and understanding grows. We still have the monks and nuns of the olden time with us, but no one who knows them personally ever thinks for a moment of lazy monks and idle nuns. After a man has met scholarly Catholic clergymen, he has quite a different view of the relations of the Church to education. That is all that the Church has ever needed--to be known in order to be appreciated. Nothing emphasizes this so much as the change that has come over the opinions of those outside the Church as a result of growth in knowledge of the Church and her institutions during the generation that separates us from the writing of Professor Draper's book. {520} {521} INDEX A A.A.A.S. 311 _Abditis de causis morborum_ 84 Accident of fevers 213 Achievement, human 306 Achillini 76, 86, 92, 105, 244 Achillinus (see above) Addison 85 After-care of insane 371 Agenius, Otto 47 Agnostic 262 Agnus Dei 199 Albert (see Albertus) Albertus Magnus 102, 134, 287, 295, 305, 324; botany 318; physical geography 318; science 299; scientific treatises 319; scientific works 319 Albigenses 257 Albucasis 99 Alchemy 134, 135 Alderotti, Thaddeus 206 Alexander VI. 215, 231 Allbutt 83, 173, 185, 194, 196, 214, 506 Allston, Washington 391 Alma Mater Studiorum 94 Alphanus 228 America, discovery of 316 Amerigo Vespucci 283 Amalgam 135 Ampère 281 Anatomical preparations 46; work at Rome 117 Anatomy, history of 114, 62; Father of 111; Golden Age 30; myths 61; Renaissance of 112; supposed prohibition 28 Anaxagoras 351 Aneurysms 243 Angelico 92 Angelo 90, 112 Angel butterfly 358 Angleworms dried 184 Annals of Anatomy and Surgery 116, 233 Annihilation 313 Anomalies 185 Antimony, Triumphal Chariot of 136 Antipodes 316 Ants 358 Applied science 329 Aquinas 135, 305, 323, 325 Arabisms 170 Arabs, surgical knowledge of 170, 192 Aranzi 245 Archives, Hospitaliêres 253 Ardern, John 188 Argelata 76 Aristotle 218, 292; a man 298; errors of 298 Arnold of Villanova 135, 186, 210 Arts and architecture 329; seven devilish 145 Arts and Sciences, Congress of 173 Astrology 158, 212 Astronomy 140 Auenbrugger 243, 403 Augsburg 251 Augustine, St. 112, 296, 327 Authors, second-rate 315 Autopsy on a living person 117; on Cardinals 58 Autopsy, legal 72 Avicenna 99, 183 Avignon 79, 164, 182, 211; development of 139 Azarias, Brother 344 B B. A. A. S. 311 Bacon, Francis 283, 332, 360 Bacon, Roger 134, 305, 321, 323, 327, 332 Baillie 85 Balliol College 95 Bartholomaeus Anglicus 338 Bartholomew the Englishman 336 Bartolo 270 Basel 105 Basil, Valentine 136 Bauhin 209 Baunette 308 Baverius de Baveriis 213 Bede 315 Bedlam 255, 372; visitors' fees 373 Bedlamites 374 Bedlams 374 Bees 358 Belgium, Catholic 102 Bellinis 90 Benedict XIV. 218, 223 Benedictines and medicine 224; of St. Maur 53, 54 Benivieni 83, 85, 99, 105 Berengar of Carpi 82, 86, 105, 115, 245, 399 Berengarius 77 Bertapaglia 77 Berthelot 132 Bertrand, M. 394 Bertrucci 92, 186 Besancon 254 Bethlehem Hospital 369, 372 Black Death 272 Blepharitis 208 Blood, shedding of 168, 191 {522} Bodleian 95 Body-snatching 37, 75 Boerhaave 244 Bologna 19, 119, 152, 158, 174, 192, 222; a Papal City 82 Bolognese Medical School 244 Boniface VIII. 56, 112 Boniface's, Pope, Bull 29; Bull, meaning of 59; misinterpretation 35; reason for 32; text 31; where found 31 Books, medical, dedicated to Popes 235 Borelli 217 Botany 140, 158; medieval 318 Brethren of the Common Life 97 Bridewell 255 Bright 85 Broeck 178 Brother Potamian 288 Brothers 254 Butterfly 358 C Caesalpino 319 Caesalpinus 18, 113, 119, 217, 236 Cahors 156, 162, appendix Caius, John 94; College 94 Calendar, correction of 323 Cambridge Modern History 24 Cantharides 181 Carlyle 347 Cassiodorus 225 Catalepsy 214 Cataract 208, 230 Catarrh 180 Catherei 185 Catherine of Siena 272 Cecco di Ascolo 211 Charles V. 108, 116, 217 Chartres 228 Chauliac 45, 74, 176, 180, 181, 210; self-made man 210 Chauvinism 237 Chemicum Theatrum 135 Chemistry, story of 134 Children attending schools 344 Chirurgia Magna 175, 187 Chirurgia Parva 187 Chlorosis, iron for 214 Christ's Hospital 255 Church and art 21; education 21; letters 22; science 22 Church, pressure of 190 Circulation of the blood 238 City Hospitals 248, 370 Classic histories misleading 25 Claude Bernard 233 Clavis Sanationis 209 Clavius, S. J., Father 217, 360 Cleanliness, surgical 279 Clement V. 135, 150, 210; VIII. 237; XI. 242; XIII. 219 Climate at Rome 243 Climatology 140 Cod liver oil 230 Cologne 251, 318, 325 Colony system 367, 372 Columbus 86, 90, 113, 216, 232 St. Côme College 195 Committee of inspection 373; of investigation 378 Concordance 134 Conflict, supposed, between religion and science 393 Congregation of St. Maur 54 Conspiracy against the Truth 24 Constantine Africanus 170 Conservation of energy 312 Consultation, Vesalius's 107 Constanz 251 Contact, without human 386 Content of medieval teaching 314 Copenhagen, University of 97 Copper and gold 309 Coquelines 146 Coro Anatomico 246 Corpus Juris Canonici 124 Corradi 74 Coryza 180 Cosmos 355 Coulomb 282 Cruikshank 121 Crusades of surgery 192 Cycles of interest 131 D Dante 341; as a nature student 343; architect 342; like Goethe 348; on education 361; treatment of nature 347 Daremberg 188 Darwin 396 Daunou 54, 230; Protestant tract 55 Decretals, sixth book of 56 Deduction 169, 200 Deductions in history 26 _De Magnete_ 285 DeMaistre 24, 165, 284 Democritus 351 Demonical possession 366 _De Motu Cordis_ 242 _De Natura rerum_ 338 Denifle 305 _De Re Anatomica_ 235 Desiderata for insane 371 Desiderius 227 Development of anatomy 63 Diabetes 180 Dillon, Arthur 266 Dino de Garbo 212 Director, surgical 183 Disease, eradication 275; What, Where 85 nothing 364 Disinterested scholars 302 Dissection at Rome 59; at Venice 38; first 1302 37; numerous 77; hero of 111; in public 58; permissions 51; practice of 63; Rashdall on 37; supposed prohibition 29; systematic 76; was it hampered? 36; wounds 47 Documentary evidence 25 Doctorates 154 Dogmatism 395 Donatello 112 Donatus 305 Donkey, breath of 167, 183 Draper, Dr. 284 Dropsy, cause 174 Ducks, queerest 203 _Durities renum_ 174 {523} Dungeon era 368 Dympna, St. 376 Dysuria 180 E Earth, shape-size 315 Ecclesiastical institutions 339 Economics 412 Eddyism 364 Education and Popes 19; medical 65; preliminary 141, 158; Pope John XXII. and 141 Edward VI. 256 _Elementis, De Quatuor_ 208 Elizabeth, Queen 94, 285 Empyema 185 Encyclopedia, first 334; Britannica 133 Energy, conservation 314 Engineering, mechanical 330 Epilepsy 214 Epochs, four marvelous 161 Era of asylums 368 Erhardt 137 Erysipelas 276 Essays, educational 344 Etruscans 151 Eugenie, Empress 289 Eustachius 18, 86, 114, 119, 216 Evolution, footsteps of 390; in human affairs 332; of science 93 Exaggeration, pious 203 Experimentalism 297 Experiment in optics 348 Exorcism 368, 374 Extravagantes 31, 124 Eye diseases 229 F Fabrica, corporis humani 108 Fallopius 187 Falsification, crime of 125 Faraday 285 Father of electricity 265 Ferrara 243 Fevers 213 Finance 412 Firearms, wounds made by 215 Fisher, Dr. 233 Flies carry the plague 239 Florence 83 Fordham University Medical School 28, 267 Form 311 Fortune-teller 129 Foster, Sir Michael 107; Prof. Med. 237 Fouarre, rue de 362 Foundation for modern thought 305 Foundling House 258 Fracassate 245 France 174 Franciscans 132, 287, 288, 290, 292, 327, 328, 369, 471, 514 Francis of Siena 213 Francis, Saint 328 Francis Speretis 381 Frankfort 251 Frederick II., body 34, 63 Free cities 333 Freind 187 Fulbert of Chartres 227 G Gairdner 256 Galen 183, 194 Galileo 16, 19, 239, 306, 332, 385 Galvani 282 Gardner 270 Generation, spontaneous 92 Gentilis 77 Geography 140 Geology, foundation 401 Gerbert 227 Gesner 319 Gheel 367 Ghent 273 Gilbert 305; of Colchester 285 Giordano Bruno 393 Giliani, Alessandra 46 Giotto 92 Gladstone 393 Glaucoma 230 God's hostelry 260 Goisbert 227 Gold, bricks 15; from sea water 127 Gonorrhoea 180 Gordon 185 Gould, Dr. Geo. M. 405 Government interfered 279 Grandfather of Vesalius 110 Graves rifled 75 Grecisms 170 Gregory VII. 227; IX. 205; XI. 212 Guido, or Guy of Montpelier 250 Guinicelli 308 Guyot de Provins 308 Günther of Andernach 103 H Habits, religious 278; of prayer 376 Haeckel 393 Haeser 182 Haly 183 Hangman, touch of 183 Harvey 96, 119, 234, 306, 396, 397 Health, Key of 209 Heart as a muscle 400 Hildebrand 227 Hildier 227 Hirsch's Biographical Lexicon 242 Histoire Litteraire de la France 31, 53, 54 History lies 120, 122, 286 History of Science 16; of the Court of Rome 55 Hoefer 132 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 277, 405 Holy Ghost, sin against 35 Honorius III. 273; IV. 274 Hooke, Robert 405 Hospital organization 248; of Holy Spirit 250; nursing 262; community 273; Siena 269; for erysipelas 277 Hounds, bites of mad 181 House of God 266 House signs 253 Hugo De Senis 77 Humanitarian institutions 264 Humboldt 316; on medical science 20, 355 Huxley on Galileo 17; Prof. 394 Hydrophobia 181 Hypodermics 197 Hysteria 214 {524} I Icterus 180 Ignatius Loyola 201 Ignorance, sublime 26; four grounds of 290 Il Convito 362 Image, waxen 145, 169 Indestructibility of matter 312 Induction 169 Infallibility 35, 143, 169 Ionization 311 Innocent III. 249, 273, 276, 370; XI. 240; XII. 242 Inquisition 112, 118 Insane colony 377; non-violent 377; brutally treated 378; in the poor houses 378; harmless 379 Insanity in Middle Ages 363 _Inter ceteras curas_ 160 Interference, spiritual 380, 385 Intestines 185 Institutions, large 367 Institutional system 377 Instruments, illustrations of 181, 185 Intuition 384 Inunctions, mercurial 215 Investigations by experiment 296 Italy, post-graduate work in 96 J Jackson, Dr. Geo. 116 Jacques de Vitry 265 Janus 207, 228 Jelliffe 367 Jenner 402 Jesuitism 50 Jesuits 232 Joannes de Tornamira 212 John XXII. 121; and education 143, 207, 223 John of Chartres 227 John of Vigo 214 Jordan, David Starr 390 Jordan, Pres. 395 Joubert 197 Julius II. 214 K Kelly, Dr. Howard 239 Ken, Bishop 359 Kepler 385 Kircher 18, 238 Knights Hospitalers 261 Knowledge, advance 306 Kopp 131 Kropotkin 180, 332 Kuhns, Prof. L. Oscar 347 L Lachrimal fistula 208 Laennec 403 Lancisi 241 Lane lectures 237 Lanfranc 68, 79, 173, 175 La Place 405 Lapponi, Dr. 214 Latin Empire 258 Lavoisier 393 Lead into silver 309 Leo XIII. 138, 327; X. 215 Leproseries 274 Le Sexte 56 Leyden 241 Liber Cosmographicus 317 Library of Canon and Civil Law 162 Linacre 93 Lionardo da Vinci 90 Lithium into copper 310 Livers, extracts 230 Lodge, Sir Oliver 383 Logic, groundwork of 64 Lombroso 383 Lords the Poor 260 Louis IX. 334; body 34 Louvain 100; University of 102 Lubbock, Sir John 359 Lucan 358 Lucretius 358 Lully, Raymond 308 Lunar rainbows 318 Lung Abscess 180 Lutheranism 102 Lyons Council 326 M Macaulay 284 Magnet in surgery 178 Mail and Express 266 Maison Dieu 260 Malgaigne 182, 194 Malingerers 273 Malpighi 18, 85, 96, 119, 217, 240 Manipulations, surgical 185 Mantegna 112 Marguerite of Burgogne 266 Marie of Burgundy 109 Mary, Queen 94 Massa 86 Massari 246 Maximilian I. 109 Medical Library and Hist. Journal 40, 121 Medical Schools of Rome 222 Medieval scientific books 23 Mental and nervous diseases 363 Method, deductive 281; inductive 283 Meyer, Ernest von 132 Meyer 209 Michel Angelo 90 Milan's magnificent hospital 269 Mineralogy 140, 157 Minerals 135 Miracles to medicine 167; belief in 199 Mitchell 405 Mivart, St. George 394 Mondino 37 Montagnano 78 Monte Cassino 205, 225 Montpelier, University of 79, 177, 182, 192 Morgagni 99, 219; forerunner of 83; eighth daughter of 222; son a Jesuit 221 Morgan, Augustus de, on Galileo 16 Morley, Henry 291 München 251 {525} N Naples 325 Natural phenomena 340; science 340 Nature, interest in 335; laws of 387 Naudé 205 Neckam, Abbot 308 Necropsies 85 Newark 188 Newman, Cardinal, on Galileo 16 Newton 306 Nicaise 182 Nicholas, Pope 137; IV. 208; V. 213 Nothingness 313 Novelty 392 Novum Organum 284, 293 Nüremberg 332 O Observation, powers of 300 Ohm 282, 408 Open door 367, 371, 374 Opposition, ecclesiastical 62; popular 62 Opposition to the progress of science 396 Opus Tertium 134, 288; Majus 292 Ordures 183 Ovid 358 Oxford 324 P Padua 77, 83, 106; University at 394 Palmist 129 Pagel 171, 177, 190, 319 Papal Medical School 26, 66, 89, 119, 222 Papal bulls 26; Curia 113; Physicians 118, 202 Paracelsus 118, 137 Paré 174 Paris 152, 158, 192, 317, 325 Pasteur 289, 409 Pathology, father of 84 Patients scourged 375 Patron of students 331 Paul III. 113, 232; IV. 113, 114 Peregrinus 307 Permissions to dissect 51 Perugia University 149, 156, 161 Perugino 162, 243 Petella 207, 229 Peter of Chartres 227 Peter of Spain 207, 208 Pharmacology 158 Phenomena, psychic 381; occult 381 Philip Le Bel 177 Philip II. 217 Philosopher's stone 135, 308 Philosophy encouraged 22 Phosphorescence 355 Phreas, John 95 Phthisis 180 Physicians, Royal College of 93 Physicians, thinking 201; of educated people 203 Physical geography 317 Physics, treatise on 298 Piccolomini 216, 235 Pilcher, Prof., on Mondino 89, 45, 48, 64, 66 Pilgrimage for insane 375, 376 Pious Schools, Society of 218 Pius IV. 235 Poggendorf 286 Poissin 405 Polypus 85 Pope Clement 327 Popes encouraged anatomy and medical sciences 113 (For separate Popes see names) Pope John and education 141 Popularizers in science 283 Possessed 368 Possession 380 Potamian, Brother 307 Practice of medicine 65 Prayer for mental diseases 376 Prerequisite for degree 159 President, our 143 Priestley 286 Prime matter 311 Prince Kropotkin 330, 345 Prospectus of Medical School 157 Protestant tradition 24 Psalms 178 Psychopathic wards 368 Ptolemaic 353 Public buildings 269 Puccinotti 69, 75 Puschmann 41, 58, 75, 171, 298, 819 Pythagoras 351 Q Questions, medical 237 R Rabies, treatment for 409 Ramsay, Sir Wm. 310 Raphael 90, 162 Rashdall 73; History of Universities 37 Ratisbon, Bishop of 324 Reason for false tradition 24 Reed, Major Walter 239 Reformation, so-called 166, 190 Reform of philosophizing 293 Regius professors 193 Regulation of medical practice 65 Religious care for the sick 263 Renaissance 80 Renaissance of science 91 Resurrection of 91 Ricardus Anglicus 205 Ricardus Paresiensis 205 Richard the Englishman 205 Richet 383 Roger 170, 192 Rome 325; Roman University 164 Rosarium 132 Rostock, University of 155 Roth 70, 76 Rovere, Cardinal Della 14 Ruskin 342 S Saintsbury 303 Saladin 261 Salerno 65; history of 130 {526} Salicet 173, 221 Sanitarium 371 Sapienza 215 Sarti 67 Schacht 137 Scheit 137 Scholasticism 302, 303 Scholarship, profound 299 School street in Oxford 362 Science, Medieval 301, 335 Science in modern universities 304; chemical 120 Scientia Experimentalis 292 Scientists believers 282 Scirrhus 85 Scotus, Michael 102 Segregation, leprosy 275 Semmelweiss 407 Servetus 393, 399, 400 Shrines 375 Sicilies, dissection in 63 Siena, story of 270 Sighart 317 Simon Januensis 203 Sir Wm. Crookes 382 Sister of Holy Ghost 254 Skeleton of felon 104 Skeletons 105 Snake, bite of 181 Social ostracism 127 Sociology 412 South Pole 315 Speakman, Eliz. 259 Speculum Naturale 334 Sphericity of the earth 316 Spirit interference 385 Spiritist 129 Spiritual manifestations 381 Spiritual interference 366 Spiritual interference in human life 366 Spiritual world 380 Spondent pariter 122 St. Anthony's fire 272 St. Bartholomew's 255 St. Catherine of Siena 272 St. Charles Seminary 146 St. Côme 194 St. Dympna 376 St. Francis 162, 328 St. Francis's fire 276 St. Gallen 251 St. Thomas's Hospital 256 St. Victor 205 Stagirite 292 Stars, shooting 351; fixed 352 Steinschneider 209 Steno 96, 400 Stensen 96 Stenosis 85 Stone, philosopher's 125 Strangury 180 Strasburg 72 Structural work 330 Students clerics 339; of medicine 157 Sturdy vagrants 274 Sudden Death 242 Suggestions, strong 375 Summa Theologiae 298 Super Illius specula 128 Superficiality of our education 21 Superstition 184 Surgeons ecclesiastics 169; dishonorable 171 Surgeons, Middle Ages 172 Surgery, history of 68; prohibition of 169 Surgery, father of 193; prejudice against 194 Swift, Dean 391 Sylvester II. 227 Syncope 214 Synonyma Medicinae 209 Synonymies 209 T Taxes 185 Telepathy 384 Temporal power 55 Tents 183 Tertullian 112 Thaddeus 206 Theobald V., King 335 Theodoric 183 Theological discouragement 167 Theological opposition 167 Theophastus 319 Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries 322 Thomas of Cantimprato 336 Thomson 132, 135, 405 Thrombosis of the mesenteric vein 85 Thule 315 Tolerance for scientific investigation 116 Thomassetti 146 Tooth, dead man's 167, 183 Töply 58, 67; von 41 Tozzi 218, 240 Traditions, blood-fearing 192 Tramp 274 Transmutation of metals 309 Trent, Council of 204 Trephining 185 Trithemius 137 Trowbridge 343 Tuberculosis, crusade against 276 Turner 86, 115, 245, 304 Twelve, College of, Physicians 211 Tycho-Brahe 360 Tyndall 238 U Ulcers, carcinomatous 183 Umbrian School 162 University curriculus, medieval 301, 303 University books 304; teaching 329 University, Papal 15 University of the City of Rome 223 Urban VI. 211 V Valentine 136 Valsalva 99, 194 Van Swieten 241 Varolius 217 Vatican 88 Vecchetta 271 Venice 72, 88, 106 Verocchio 112 Verona 174 {527} Vesalius 35, 51, 100; great-grandfather 109; inquisitive 101; ancestry 109; father 110; as consultant 112; life of 116, 216 Vibrations in the ether 384 Vienna Medical School 241 Villani 345 Villanova, Arnold of 210 Vincent of Beauvais 334 Virchow 251, 256 Virgil 407 Visitor's fees, Bedlam 373 Vitry 308 W Wallace, Alfred Russell 386 Walsh 144 Wards, cheerless, white 268 Ward for psychic cases 367 Warfare, Theology, Science 29 Weismann 393 Wenzel, Emperor 169 Whewell 293 White, Andrew D. 29; on dissection 49; universal prohibition 20, 112, 122, 128, 130, 171, 199, 369 William of Salicet 68, 79 Workmen of Lyons 326 World, immaterial 383 Wurz 174 Y Young, Dr. Thomas 404 Yperman 178 Ypres 178 Z Zerbi 105 Zoology 158 Zurich 251 
19566	----	public domain works from the University of Michigan Digital Libraries.) [Illustration: Robert Patterson] FABLES OF INFIDELITY AND FACTS OF FAITH: BEING AN EXAMINATION OF THE EVIDENCES OF INFIDELITY. BY REV. ROBERT PATTERSON, D. D. REVISED AND ENLARGED. CINCINNATI: WESTERN TRACT SOCIETY. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by WESTERN TRACT SOCIETY, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, Washington, D. C. Stereotyped by OGDEN, CAMPBELL & CO., 176 Elm St., Cincinnati. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE. Did the World Make Itself? 7 Eternity of Matter. Disproved by its Composite Nature. Disproved by its Motion. Evolution only a big Perpetual Motion Humbug. Work of a Designer in the structure of the Eye. The Eye-Maker sees over a wide Field and far. The Eye-Maker sees Perfectly. CHAPTER II. Was Your Mother a Monkey? 34 The Divine Fact of Evolution Quite Different from the Atheistic Theory. State the Question Sharply--Why? Darwin's Answer. The Ancestral Monkey, Fish, Squirt. Natural Selection. Intended to Exclude God. 1. _The History of the Theory._ Indian; Phoenician; Greek; Popish; La Place's Theory; The Vestiges of Creation. Herbert Spencer's Contradictory Theory. The Evolutionists' Hell. Spontaneous Generation--two Theories; the Conflicting Theories of Progress; Tremaux; Lamarck; the Climatal; Darwin's; Huxley's; Parson's; Mivart's; Hyatt's; Cope's; Wallace's; the Gods; Denounced by the Princes of Science. Agassiz's Deliverance Against it. Imperfection of the Theory Eked out. Huxley's Protoplasm. Tyndall's Potency of Life in Matter. Buchner's Matter and Force. Lubbock's Origin of Civilization. Consequences of the Brutal Origin of Man. Propagandism of Atheism. 2. _The Theory Illogical and Incoherent._ Darwin Admits Insufficiency of Proof. Useless as an Explanation of Nature. Self-Contradictory; _e. g._, Protoplasm. Wallace's Self-Contradictions. Incoherency of the Denial of Design with the Assertion of Progress. Failure of Alleged Facts to Sustain the Theory. Does not Account for the Origin of Anything. Wild Assumptions Made by Darwin. Erroneous Assumption of the Tendency of Natural Selection to Improve Breeds. Assumption of Infinite Possibility of Progress in Finite Creatures. 3. _An Unfounded Theory._ No Evidence of the Facts Possible. None Ever Alleged, save Gulliver's. Domestication Disproves Transmutation--Horses; Pigeons; Dogs. The Egyptian Monuments. The Mummied Animals. The Geological Record. The Limits of Geological Time. 4. _Embryology._ Testimony of Scientists: 1. Embryology Only Analogical. 2. Embryos _not_ all Alike. 3. Four Distinct Plans of Structure. 4. Germs Always True to the Breed. 5. _Gradations of Species._ Lamarck's Statement. Birth Descent not Inferable from Gradation. No such Imperceptible Blending in Nature. The Fact of the Present Existence of Distinct Species. Sterility of Hybrids. Geological Species Distinct. The Intermediate Forms not Found. The Gradation Does not Begin with the Lowest Forms. Four Kingdoms from the Beginning. The New Species Began with the Giants. The Gaps Fatal to the Theory. The Abyss Between Death and Life. The Gulf Between the Plant and the Animal. The Gaps Between Species Which will not Breed Together. The Gaps Between Air Breathers and Water Breathers, &c. The Great Gulf Between the Brute and the Man. Natural Selection Could not Have Deprived a Monkey of Hair. Nor Have Given a Human Brain. The Brain-Worker Contravenes Natural Selection at Every Step. Civilization the Contradiction of Natural Selection. Morality and Religion the Direct Contraries of Natural Selection. Tendency Immoral, Degrading, and Atheistic. CHAPTER III. Is God Everybody, and Everybody God? 91 Pantheism Described. An Antiquated Hindooism. A Jesuitical Atheism. Grossly Immoral. A Practical Atheism. CHAPTER IV. Have We Any Need of the Bible? 112 Civilization and the Bible. Revelation Not Impossible. The Mythical Theory. The Inner Light. Many Ignorant of God. Heathen Morality--Plato's. Infidel Morality--Paine's. CHAPTER V. Who Wrote the New Testament? 147 The Bible Not Just Like Any Other Book. Two Modes of Investigation. Did the Council of Nice Make the Bible? The Mythical Theory. The Evidence of Celsus. The Fragment Hypothesis. The Bank Signature Book. Could the New Testament be Corrupted? CHAPTER VI. Is the Gospel Fact or Fable? 169 The Nature of Historical Evidence; Letters; Monuments. Contemporary Letters of Peter, Pliny and John. Prove the Existence of Churches. And Their Worship, Holiness, and Sufferings. CHAPTER VII. Can We Believe Christ and His Apostles? 190 The Gospel a Unit; Must Take or Refuse it All. Apostles' Testimony Circumstantial. Witnesses Numerous and Independent. Confirm Their Testimony with Their Blood. CHAPTER VIII. Prophecy, 210 Political--Napoleon's--Wrong. Presidential Candidates. Draper's Dogma of Youth and Decrepitude of Nations. Statesmen Prophets. General Claim for All Genius. Instances of Secular Prediction: Cayotte's of the French Revolution. The Oracles of Apollo. Vettius Valens' Twelve Vultures. Spencer's of the Disruption of the American Union. Saint Malachi's Prophecies. Mohammed's Prophecies. Seneca's of the Discovery of America. Dante's of the Reformation. Plato's of Shakespeare. Symbolical Language of Prophecy. Anybody may Predict Downfall of Nations. An Awful Truth if it be True. But Bible Predictions Circumstantial--Egypt; Babylon; Nineveh; Judea. Predict Life and Resurrection. The Arabs; Jews; Seven Churches; Messiah. CHAPTER IX. Moses and the Prophets, 266 God the Author of the Bible. Every Other Book Inspired? Connection of Bible History and Morality. Hume's Sophism. Miracles Being Violations of Laws of Nature, Contrary to an Unalterable Experience. No Testimony can Reach to the Supernatural. Records of Facts Not Judged by Your Notions. Rationalistic Explanation of the Miracles. Bible Account of Creation Unscientific. Antiquity of Man. The Anachronisms of the Pentateuch. Bishop Colenso's Blunders: The Universality of the Deluge. Joshua Causing the Sun to Stand Still. Cain's Wife. Increase of Jacob's Family in Egypt. The Number of the First-Born. The Fourth Generation. The Bishop's Blunders in Camp Life. Sterility of the Wilderness. Population of the Promised Land. Modern Discoveries in Bible Lands. Egyptian Monuments of Joseph. Assyrian Ethnology and Genesis, Chaps. x. and xi. Sennacherib's Conquest of Palestine. Belshazzar's Kingship. The Moabitic Inscriptions, and Omri and Ahab. The Samaritan Pentateuch. The Character of the Books--Austere. Variety of Writers and Unity of Plan. Contained the Surveys, and the Laws of the Nation. Introduced New and Republican Usages. Moses' Law in Advance of Modern Social Science. Testimony of the Jewish Nation. Testimony of Christ. The Lost Books. The Law Abolished by the Gospel. The Imperfect Morality of Old Testament. Polygamy, Slavery, and Divorce. The Education of the World a Gradual Process. The Imprecations of Scripture. CHAPTER X. Infidelity Among the Stars, 335 Scientific Objections to the Bible. The Infinity and Self-Existence of the Universe. Disproved by Its Evident Limits. Its Composite Materials. Its Steady Loss of Heat. Buffon's Explosion of Planets. The Nebular Theories. The Fiction of Homogeneous Matter. The Contradictory Theories. The Perpetual Motion Machine. Contrary to Facts of Astronomy. Contradicted by Astronomers. Impossibility of any Cosmogony. CHAPTER XI. Daylight Before Sunrise, 378 Infidel Objections to Genesis. The Hindoo Chronology. The Egyptian Chronology. The Bible Age of the Earth. The Solid Firmament. Light Before the Sun. CHAPTER XII. Telescopic Views of Scripture, 423 The Source of the Water of the Deluge. The Stars Fighting Against Sisera. The Astronomers of the Great Pyramid. The Grand Motion of the Sun. The Formation of Dew. The Multitude of the Stars. The Descent of the Heavenly City. CHAPTER XIII. Science or Faith? 466 Must Faith Fade Before Science? Scientists as Partial as Other People. Have no Such Certainty as is Claimed. 1. _Mathematical Errors._ The Infinite Half Inch, Etc. The Doctrine of Chances. No Mathematical Figures in Nature. The French Metric System. The Lowell Turbine Wheel. 2. _Errors of Astronomy._ Kant's Predictions; Le Verrier's. Herschel's Enumeration of Errors. Sun's Distance; Other Measurements. The Moon's Structure and Influence. La Place's Proposed Improvement. The Sun's Structure, Heat, Etc. The Sizes, Distances, and Densities of the Planets. Errors About the Nebulæ. Errors About Comets. The Cosmical Ether. The Cold of Infinite Space. From This Chaos Springs the Theory of Development. 3. _Errors of Geology._ No _Fact_ of Geology Anti-Biblical. All Anti-Biblical Theories Based on an _If_. No Geological Measure of _Time_. All Calculations of Time by Geologists, which Have Been Tested, Have Proved Erroneous--the Danish Bogs; the Swiss Lake Villager; Horner's Nile Pottery; the Raised Beaches of Scotland; Lyell's Blunder in the Delta of the Mississippi; Sir Wm. Thompson's Exposure of the Absurdity of the Evolutionists' Demands for Time. Conflicting Geological Theories--the Wernerian, Huttonian, and Diluvian Theories; the Catastrophists and Progressionists; Eleven Theories of Earthquakes; Nine Theories of Mountains; False Geology of America; Scotland Kicked About Too. 4. _Errors of Zoology._ Lamarck's Vestiges; Tremaux; Darwin's Contradictions; Huxley; Mivart, and Wallace. Blunders of the French Academy, Denouncing Quinine, Vaccination, Lightning Rods, and Steam Engines. Uncertainty of Science Increases in Human Concerns. Second-hand Science Founded on Somebody's Say So. 5. _All Science Founded on Faith._ Reason Also Based on Faith. This Life Depends on Faith. We Demand Truths of which Science is Ignorant. All Our Chief Concerns in the Domain of Faith. Religion the Most Experimental of the Sciences. The Only Science which can Make You Happy. Try for Yourself. PREFACE. This is not so much a volume upon the Evidences of Christianity, as an examination of the Evidences of Infidelity. When the Infidel tells us that Christianity is false, and asks us to reject it, he is bound of course to provide us with something better and truer instead; under penalty of being considered a knave trying to swindle us out of our birthright, and laughed at as a fool, for imagining that he could persuade mankind to live and die without religion. Suppose he had proved to the world's satisfaction that all religion is a hoax, and all men professing it are liars, how does that comfort me in my hour of sorrow? Scoffing will not sustain a man in his solitude, when he has nobody to scoff at; and disbelief is only a bottomless tub, which will not float me across the dark river. If Infidels intend to convert the world, they must give us some positive system of truth which we can believe, and venerate, and trust. A glimmering idea of this necessity seems lately to have dawned upon some of them. It is quite possible that they have also felt the want of something for their own souls to believe; for an Infidel has a soul, a poor, hungry, starved soul, just like other men. At any rate, having grown tired of pelting the Church with the dirtballs of Voltaire and Paine, they begin to acknowledge that it is, after all, an institution; and that the Bible is an influential book, both popular and useful in its way. Mankind, it seems, will have a Church and a Bible of some sort; why not go to work and make a Church and a Bible of their own? Accordingly they have gone to work, and in a very short time have prepared a variety of ungodly religions, so various that the worldly-minded man who can not be suited with one to his taste must be very hard to please. Discordant and contradictory in their positive statements, they are agreed only in negatives; denying the God of the Bible, the resurrection of the dead, and judgment to come. Nevertheless each discoverer or constructor presents his system to the world with great confidence, large claims to superior benevolence, vast pretensions to learning and science, and no little cant about duty and piety. Wonderful to tell, some of them are very fond of clothing their ungodliness in the language of Scripture. No pains are spared to secure the wide spread of these notions. Prominent Infidels are invited to deliver courses of scientific lectures, in which the science is made the medium of conveying the Infidelity. Scientific books, novels, magazines, daily newspapers, and common school books, are all enlisted in the work. The disciples of Infidelity are numerous and zealous. It would be hard to find a factory, boarding-house, steamboat or hotel where twelve persons are employed, without an Infidel; and harder still to find an Infidel who will not use his influence to poison his associates. These systems are well adapted to the depraved tastes of the age. The business man, whose whole soul is set on money-making and spending, is right glad to meet the Secularist, who will prove to him on scientific principles, that a man is much profited by gaining the whole world, even at the risk of his soul, if he has such a thing. The young and ill-instructed professor of Christianity, whose longings for forbidden joys are strong, has a natural kindliness toward nationalism, which befogs the serene light of God's holy law, and gives the directing power to his own inner liking. The sentimental young lady, who would recoil from the grossness of the Deist, is attracted by the poetry of Pantheism. Infidelity has had, in consequence, a degree of success very little suspected by simple-minded pastors and parents, and which is often discovered too late for remedy. This book is written to expose the _folly_ of some of these novel systems of Infidelity--leaving others to show their wickedness. It may surprise some who would glory in being esteemed fiends, to learn that they are only fools. If they should be awakened now to a sense of the absurdities which they cherish as philosophy, it might save them from awaking another day to the shame and everlasting contempt of the universe. I have not taken up all the cavils of Infidelity. Their name is Legion. Nor have I troubled my readers with any which they are not likely to hear. Leaving the sleeping dogs to lie, I have noticed only such as I have known to bark and bite in my own neighborhood, and know to be rife here in the West. They are stated, as nearly as possible, in the words in which I have heard them in public debate, or in private conversation with gentlemen of Infidel principles. I have made no references to books or writers on that side, save to such as I am assured were the sources of their sentiments. In such cases I have named and quoted the authors. Where no such quotations are noticed it will be understood that I am responsible for the fairness with which I have represented the opinions which are examined. It is not my design to fight men of straw. Every historical or scientific fact adduced in support of the arguments here used is confirmed by reference to the proper authority. But it has not been deemed needful to crowd the pages with references to the works of Christian apologists. The Christian scholar does not need such references; while to those for whose benefit I write, their names carry no authority, and their arguments are generally quite unknown. One great object of my labor will be gained if I shall succeed in awaking the spirit of inquiry among my readers, to such an extent as to load them to a prayerful and patient perusal of several of the works named on the next page. They have heard only one side of the question, and will be surprised at their own ignorance of matters which they ought to have known. Books on the Evidences are not generally circulated. Ministers perhaps have some volumes in their libraries; but in a hundred houses, it would be hard to find half a dozen containing as many as would give an inquiring youth a fair view of the historical evidences of the truth of the gospel. Nor, where they are to be found, are they generally read. Being deemed heavy reading, the magazine, or the newspaper is preferred. Ministers do not in general devote enough of their time to such sound teaching as will stop the mouths of gainsayers. I have been assured by skeptical gentlemen, who in the early part of their lives had attended church regularly for twenty-two years, that during all that time they had never heard a single discourse on the Evidences. Moreover, the protean forms of Infidelity are so various, and many of its present positions so novel, that books or discourses prepared only twenty years ago miss the mark; and rather expose to the charge of misrepresentation, than produce conviction. New books on Infidelity are needed for every generation. The lectures expanded into this volume were delivered in Cincinnati, in 1858. Replying to different, and discordant systems of error, whose only bond is opposition to the gospel, they are necessarily somewhat disconnected. No attempt was made to mold them into a suit of royal armor, but merely to select a few smooth pebbles from the brook of truth, which any Christian lad might sling at the giant defiers of the armies of the living God. Having proved acceptable for this purpose, and a steadily increasing demand for repeated editions wearing out the original plates, the author has been requested by British and American publishers to revise the work in the light of the recent discoveries of science. This he has attempted; with what success the reader will judge. Conscious of its many defects, yet grateful to God for the good which he has done to many souls by its instrumentality, the author again commends the book to the Father of Lights, praying him to use it as a mirror to flash such a ray of light into many dark souls as may lead them into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. SAN FRANCISCO, March 30, 1875. * * * * * The author having been repeatedly asked by inquirers for the names of books on the Evidences of Christianity, subjoins a list of those easily accessible in the West. It is not supposed that any one inquirer will read all these; but it is well to read more than one, since the evidence is cumulative, and it is impossible for any writer to present the whole. Having a list of several works, the inquirer who can not obtain one may be able to procure another. There are many other works on the Evidences on the shelves of all our principal booksellers. _Modern Atheism_, by James Buchanan, LL. D. _Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation_, by James McCosh, LL. D., and George Dickie, M. D. _Religion and Geology_, Edward Hitchcock, LL. D. _The Architecture of the Heavens_, J. P. Nichol, LL. D. _The Christian Philosopher_, Thomas Dick, LL. D. _Natural Theology_, William Paley, D. D. _The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature_, Joseph Butler, D. C. L. _The Bridgewater Treatises_, Whewell, Chalmers, Kidd, &c. _The Comprehensive Commentary_, William Jenks, D. D. _The Cause and Cure of Infidelity_, Rev. David Nelson. _A View of the Evidences of Christianity_, William Paley, D. D. _The Eclipse of Faith_, ascribed to Henry Rogers. _The Restoration of Belief_, ascribed to Isaac Taylor. _Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity_, University of Virginia. _The Divine Authority of the Old and New Testaments Asserted_, J. Leland, D. D. _The Bible Commentary._ _An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters to Thomas Paine_, R. Watson. _A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion_, S. Jenyns. _A Letter to G. West, Esq., on the Conversion of St. Paul_, Lord Lyttleton. _Observations on the History and Evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ_, Gilbert West, Esq. _Difficulties of Infidelity_, Faber. _Dissertations on the Prophecies_, Thos. Newton, D. D. _An Introduction to the Critical Study of the Scriptures_, T. H. Horne, Vol. I. _The Evidences of Christianity_, Charles Petit McIlvaine, D. D. _Rawlinson's Historical Evidences._ _Modern Skepticism_, by Joseph Barker. _Haley's Discrepancies of the Bible_, W. G. Holmes, Chicago. _The Superhuman Origin of the Bible_, Rogers. _Christianity and Positivism_, McCosh. _The Supernatural in Relation to the Natural_, McCosh. _Aids to Faith_, Appleton & Co. _Modern Skepticism_, Randolph & Son. _Modern Doubt_, Christlieb. _Alexander's Evidences of Christianity._ CHAPTER I. DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? _Understand, ye brutish among the people; And, ye fools, when will ye be wise? He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? He that chastiseth the heathen, shall he be not correct? He that teacheth man knowledge, shall he not know?_--PSALM xciv. 8, 9. Has the Creator of the world common sense? Did he know what he was about in making it? Had he any object in view in forming it? Does he know what is going on in it? Does he care whether it answers any purpose or not? Strange questions you will say; yet we need to ask a stranger question: Had the world a Creator, or did it make itself? There are persons who say it did, and who declare that the Bible sets out with a lie when it says, that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Whereas, say they, "We know that matter is eternal, and the world is wholly composed of matter; therefore, the heavens and the earth are eternal, never had a beginning nor a Creator." But, however fully the atheist may know that matter is eternal, we do not know any such thing, and must be allowed to ask, How do _you_ know? As you are not eternal, we can not take it on your word. The only reason which anybody ever ventured for this amazing assertion is this, that "all philosophers agree that matter is naturally indestructible by any human power. You may boil water into steam, but it is all there in the steam; or burn coal into gas, ashes, and tar, but it is all in the gas, ashes, and tar; you may change the outward form as much as you please, but you can not destroy the substance of anything. Wherefore, as matter is indestructible, it must be eternal." Profound reasoning! Here is a brick fresh from the kiln. It will last for a thousand years to come; therefore, it has existed for a thousand years past! The foundation of the argument is as rotten as the superstructure. It is not agreed among all philosophers that matter is naturally indestructible, for the very satisfactory reason that none of them can tell what matter in its own nature is. All that they can undertake to say is, that they have observed certain properties of matter, and, among these, that "it is indestructible by any operation to which it can be subjected in the ordinary course of circumstances observed at the surface of the globe."[1] The very utmost which any man can assert in this matter is a negative, a want of knowledge, or a want of power. He can say, "Human power can not destroy matter;" and, if he pleases, he may reason thence that human power did not create it. But to assert that matter is eternal because man can not destroy it, is as if a child should try to beat the cylinder of a steam engine to pieces, and, failing in the attempt, should say, "I am sure this cylinder existed from eternity, because I am unable to destroy it." But not only is the assertion of the eternity of matter unproven, and impossible to be proved, it is capable of the most demonstrable refutation, by one of the recent discoveries of science. The principle of the argument is so plain that a child of four years old can understand it. It is simply this, that all substances in heaven and earth are compounded of several elements; but no compound can be eternal. We say to our would-be philosophers, When you tell us that matter is eternal, how does that account for the formation of this world? What is this matter you speak of? This world consists not of a philosophical abstraction called matter, nor yet of one substance known by that name, but of a great variety of material substances, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, sulphur, iron, aluminum, and some fifty others already discovered.[2] Now, which of these is the eterna-matter you speak of? Is it iron, or sulphur, or clay, or oxygen? If it is any one of them, where did the others come from? Did a mass of iron, becoming discontented with its gravity, suddenly metamorphose itself into a cloud of gas, or into a pail of water? Or are they all eternal? Have we fifty-seven eternal beings? Are they all eternal in their present combinations? or is it only the single elements that are eternal? You see that your hypothesis--that matter is eternal--gives me no light on the formation of this world, which is not a shapeless mass of a philosophical abstraction called matter, but a regular and beautiful building, composed of a great variety of matters. Was it so from eternity? No man who was ever in a quarry, or a gravel pit, will say so, much less one who has the least smattering of chemistry or geology. Do you assert the eternity of the fifty-seven single substances, either separate or combined in some other way than we now find them in the rocks, and rivers, and atmosphere of the earth? Then how came they to get together at all, and particularly how did they put themselves in their present shapes? Each of them is a piece of matter of which _inertia_ is a primary and inseparable property. Matter _of itself_ can not begin to move, or assume a quiescent state after being put in motion. Will you tell us that the fifty-seven primary elements danced about till the air, and sea, and earth, somehow jumbled themselves together into the present shape of this glorious and beautiful world, with all its regularity of day and night, and summer and winter, with all its beautiful flowers and lofty trees, with all its variety of birds, and beasts, and fishes? To bring the matter down to the level of the intellect of the most stupid pantheist, tell us in plain English, _Did the paving stones make themselves?_ For the paving stones are _made_ out of a dozen different chemical constituents, and each one is built up more ingeniously than the house you live in. _Now, did the paving stones make themselves?_ No conviction of the human mind is more certain than the belief that every combination of matter proves the existence of a combiner, that every house has had a builder, and that every machine has had a maker. No matter how simple the combination, if it be only two laths fastened together by a nail, or two bricks cemented with mortar, or the sole of an old pegged boot, all the atheists in the world could not convince you that those two laths, or those two bricks, or those two bits of leather existed in such a combination from all eternity. If any wise philosopher tried to persuade you that for anything you could tell they might have been always so, you would reply, "No, sir! You can't cram such stuff down my throat. Even a child's common sense shows him that those two laths were not always so nailed together; that those two bricks were not always so placed, one on the top of the other; and that those two pieces of old sole leather were not always pegged together in the sole of a boot." There is no conviction more irresistible than our belief that _no compound can possibly be eternal_. But the universe is the greatest of all compounds. Everything in it is compound. Chemists speak of simple substances, or elements of matter, and it is well enough to separate the elements of things in our thoughts, for the sake of distinct consideration, and to speak of the properties of pure oxygen, or of pure hydrogen, or of pure carbon, or of pure gold, or of pure iron, or of pure silver. But then we should always remember that there is nothing pure in the world, that there is no such thing in nature as any substance consisting only of a single element, pure and uncombined with others. Just as your gold eagle is not pure gold, but alloyed with copper, everything in nature is alloyed. Everything in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth, is compound. The air you breathe, simple as it seems, is composed of three gases, and is besides full of what Huxley calls "a stirabout" of millions of seeds of animalculæ and motes of dust visible in the sunbeam. That hydrant water you are about to swallow is a rich aquarium full of all manner of monsters, which the oxy-hydrogen microscope will exhibit to your terrified gaze, devouring each other alive. Should you get rid of them by evaporating your water, your chemist will tell you that still your pure water must be a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. There is no help for it. Many years ago some astronomers fancied they had found clouds, or nebulæ, of gas, quite simple and uncompounded with anything else, a great many millions of miles away in the sky. They were so very far away that they thought nobody would ever be able to fly so far to bottle up a specimen of that gas and bring it back here to earth and analyze it, to find out whether it was pure and simple, or compound. So they felt quite safe in affirming that there was the genuine, simple, homogeneous gas, in the nebulæ, with which Almighty God had nothing whatever to do, but which had first made itself and then had condensed into our present world. But unfortunately for this brilliant discovery the spectroscope opened windows into the nebulæ, and showed very plainly that they were on fire; and fire is a compound; it can not burn without fuel and something to support the combustion; so that settled the alleged simplicity of the nebulæ. It is now demonstrated, therefore, that every known substance existing in nature is a compound, and therefore can not be eternal. And the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. No number of finite existences can be eternal. The universe, then, can not be eternal. Suppose, however, that, for the sake of argument, we should grant our atheistic world-builder his materials, away off beyond the rings of Saturn, or the orbit of Uranus (since he seems to like to have his quarries a good way off from his building), would he be any nearer the completion of his world-making? As Cornwallis declared that the conquest of India resolved itself ultimately into a question of bullocks, the prime consideration in the construction of the world, after you have got your materials, is that of transportation. When one beholds the three great stones in the temple of Baalbec, each weighing eleven hundred tons, built into the wall twenty feet high, and a fourth in the quarry, a mile away, nearly ready for removal, he asks, "How did the builders move those immense stones, and raise them to their places?" And when we behold the quarry out of which these stones were taken, and all the other quarries of the world, and all the everlasting mountains, and the whole of this solid earth, and boundless sea, brought, as our theorists affirm, from far beyond the orbit of the most distant planet, we raise the question of transportation, and demand some account of the wagon and team which hauled them to their places. We can not get rid of the necessity for transportation by evaporating the building stones into gas, for a world of gas weighs just as many tons as the world made out of it. Before we can make a world we must have _power_; but we can never get power out of the world to build itself. The atheists' world is only a great machine. The first law of mechanics is that action and reaction are equal; consequently machinery can never create power. You will never lift yourself by pulling at your boot-straps; much less can a machine lift and carry itself. It is no matter how big you make the wheels of your machine, as big as the orbits of the planets if you like, still it is only a machine, unless it has a mind in it; and your big machine can no more create power than a little machine as small as a lady's watch. Nor does it make the least difference in respect to making power, of what materials your perpetual motion peddler makes his machine--whether of a skein of silk on a reel in a bottle, or of steel and zinc electro magnets running upon diamond points, or whether he melts up his steel, and zinc, and diamonds into red hot fire mist; it is still only a machine, made of these materials, as destitute of power as the smaller machines made out of it. The atheists' universe is only a big machine, and no machine can create power, no more than a paving stone. It has been, however, proposed to manufacture power by the law of gravitation, according to which all bodies attract each other, directly in proportion to their mass, and inversely as the square of their distances. This law appears to prevail as far as our observation extends through space; and our world builders affirm that it must have operated eternally, and that not only were the separate parts of our earth thus drawn together, but that all the orbs of heaven were caused to revolve under its influence. Suppose, however, we grant that matter was eternal, and the force of gravitation eternally operating upon it, would that sufficiently account for the building up of even our own little planetary system? By no means. The unresisted force of gravitation would, in far less than an eternity, draw all things together toward the center of gravity of the universe. We should not have separate stars, and suns, and planets, and moons, revolving in orderly orbits, but one vast mass of matter, in which all motion had long since ceased. There must be some power of resistance to gravitation, and nicely balanced against it, a centrifugal force--no matter whether you call it heat, light, or electricity, or by any other name--from which balance of power the movements of the universe are regulated. But here again we arrive at the same conclusion from the balance of power to which we were before driven by the combination of matter--regulated power proclaims a regulator, a governor. Power belongeth unto God. In world-building we need not only a quarry of materials, and power for transportation, but a head to plan their arrangement. For, as ten thousand loads of brick and stone dumped down higgledy piggledy will not build a house, neither will ten thousand millions of materials poured into a chaos make a world like this earth, arranged in order and beauty. It is grossly absurd to imagine that the inanimate materials of the earth arranged themselves in their present orderly structure. Absurd as it seems to every man of common sense, there are persons claiming to be philosophers who not only assert that they did, but will tell you how they did it. One class of them think they have found it out by supposing every thing in the universe reduced to very fine powder, consisting of very small grains, which they call atoms; or, if that is not fine enough, into gas, of which it is supposed the particles are too fine to be perceived; and then by different arrangements of these atoms, according to the laws of attraction and electricity, the various elements of the world were made, and arranged in its present form. Suppose we grant this gassy supposition, that the world millions of ages ago existed as a cloud of atoms, does that bring us any nearer the object of getting rid of a Creator than before? The atoms must be material, if a material world is to be made from them; and so they must be extended; each one of them must have length, breadth and thickness. The atheist, then, has only multiplied his difficulties a million times, by pounding up the world into atoms, which are only little bits of the paving stones he intends to make out of them. Each bit of the paving stone, no matter how small you break it, remains just as incapable of making itself, or moving itself, as was the whole stone composed of all these bits. So we are landed back again at the sublime question, _Did the paving stones make themselves, and move themselves?_ Others will tell you that millions of years ago the world existed as a vast cloud of fire mist, which, after a long time, cooled down into granite, and the granite, by dint of earthquakes, got broken up on the surface, and washed with rain into clay and soil, whence plants sprang up of their own accord, and the plants gradually grew into animals of various kinds, and some of the animals grew into monkeys, and finally the monkeys into men. The fire mist they stoutly affirm to have existed from eternity. They do not allege that they remember that (and yet as they themselves are, as they say, composed body and soul of this eternal fire mist, they ought to remember), but only that there are certain comets which occasionally come within fifty or sixty millions of miles of this earth, which they suppose may be composed of the fire mist which they _suppose_ this world is made of. A solid basis, truly, on which to build a world! A cloud in the sky, fifty million of miles away, may possibly be fire mist, may possibly cool down and condense into a solid globe; therefore, this fire mist is eternal, and had no need of a Creator; and our world, and all other worlds, may possibly have been like it; therefore, they also were never created by Almighty God. Such is the atheist's ground of faith. The thinnest vapor or the merest supposition will suffice to risk his eternal salvation upon; provided only it contradicts the Bible and gets rid of God. We can not avoid asking with as much gravity as we can command, Where did the mist come from? Did the mist make itself? Where did the fire come from? Did it kindle of its own accord? Who put the fire and mist together? Was it red hot enough from all eternity to melt granite? Then why is it any cooler now? How could an eternal red heat cool down? If it existed as a red hot fire mist from eternity, until our atheist began to observe it beginning to cool, why should it ever begin to cool at all, and why begin to cool just then? Fill it as full of electricity, magnetism and odyle as you please; do these afford any _reason_ for its very extraordinary conduct? The utmost they do is to show you _how_ such a change took place, but they neither tell you _where the original matter came from_, nor _why its form was changed_. Change is an effect, and every effect requires a cause. There could be no cause outside of the fire mist; for they say there was nothing else in the universe. Then the cause must be in the mist itself. Had it a mind, and a will, and a perception of propriety? Did the mist become sensible of the lightness of its behavior, and the fire resolve to cool off a little, and both consult together on the propriety of dropping their erratic blazing through infinite space, and resolve to settle down into orderly, well-behaved suns and planets? In the division of the property, _what became of the mind_? Did it go to the sun, or to the moon, or to the pole star, or to this earth? Or, was it clipped up into little pieces and divided among the stars in proportion to their respective magnitudes; so that the sun may have, say the hundredth part of an idea, and the moon a faint perception of it? Did the fire mist's mind die under this cruel clipping and dissecting process; or is it of the nature of a polypus, each piece alive and growing up to perfection in its own way? Has each of the planets and fixed stars a great "soul of the world" as well as this earth, and are they looking down intelligently and compassionately on the little globe of ours? Had we not better build altars to all the host of heaven and return to the religion of our acorn-fed ancestors, who burned their children alive, in honor of the sun, on Sun-days? An aqueous solution of this difficulty of getting rid of Almighty God, is frequently proposed. It is known that certain chemical solutions, when mixed together, deposit a sediment, or precipitate, as chemists call it. And it is supposed that the universe was all once in a state of solution, in primeval oceans, and that the mingling of the waters of these oceans caused them to deposit the various salts and earths which form the worlds in the form of mud, which afterward hardened into rock, or vegetated into trees and men. Thus, it is clearly demonstrated that there is no need for the Creator if--if--if--we only had somebody to make these primeval oceans--and somebody to mix them together![3] The development theory of the production of the human race from the mud, through the mushroom, the snail, the tortoise, the greyhound, the monkey and the man, which is now such a favorite with atheists, if it were fully proved to be a fact, would only increase the difficulty of getting rid of God. For either the primeval mud had all the germs of the future plants and monkeys, and men's bodies and souls, in itself originally, or it had not. If it had not, where did it get them? If it had all the life and intelligence in the universe in itself, it was a very extraordinary kind of God. We shall call it the _mud-god_. Our atheists then believe in a god of muddy body and intelligent mind. But if they deny intelligence to the mud, then we are back to our original difficulty, with a large appendix, viz: _The paving stones made themselves first and all atheists afterward._ The whole theory of development is utterly false in its first principles. From the beginning of the world to the present day, no man has ever observed an instance of the spontaneous generation of life. There is no law of nature, whether electric, magnetic, odylic, or any other, which can produce a living plant or animal, save from the germ or seed of some previous plant or animal of the same species. Nor has a single instance of the transmutation of species ever been proved. Every beast, bird, fish, insect and plant brings forth after its kind, and has done so since its creation. No law of Natural Philosophy is more firmly established than this, _That there is no spontaneous generation, nor transmutation of species._ It is true there is a regular gradation of the various orders of animal and vegetable life, rising like the steps of a staircase, one above the other; but gradation is no more caused by transmutation than a staircase is made by an ambitious lower step changing itself into all the upper ones. To refer the origin of the world to the laws of nature is absurd. Law, as Johnson defines it, is a rule of action. It necessarily requires an acting agent, an object designed in the action, means to attain it, and authoritative enforcement of the use of those means by a lawgiver. Are the laws of nature laws given by some supposed intelligent being, worshiped by the heathen of old, and by the atheists of modern times, under that name? Or do they signify the orderly and regular sequence of cause and effect, which is so manifest in the course of all events? If, as atheists say, the latter, this is the very thing we want them to account for. How came the world to be under law without a lawgiver? Where there is law, there must be design. Chance is utterly inconsistent with the idea of law. Where there is design there must, of necessity, be a designer. Matter in any shape, stones or lightnings, mud or magnets, can not think, contrive, design, give law to itself, or to any thing else, much less bring itself into existence. There is no conceivable way of accounting for this orderly world we live in but one or other of these two: Either an intelligent being created the world, or--_the paving stones made themselves_. "Here are two hypotheses, of which the oldest is admitted to offer a full and consistent explanation of all the facts of science. There can be no better cause for any given formation than that God created it so. Men of science, however, allege that creation (out of nothing) is 'scientifically inconceivable;' but this is only throwing dust in our eyes; of course, science can not _verify_ it, neither can it verify any other theory of causation. The question is whether reason can accept the fact, though science can not even imagine the process? If not, there is nothing for us but the _eternity of matter_, for evolution itself has to face the very same difficulty when asked to account for its primal germ. It is surely more conceivable that God created the first matter out of nothing, than that nothing evolved something out of itself, by an imminent law of its nature. This point, however, our scientific men are sadly given to shirking. They profess in general not to hold the eternity of matter, but they have nothing to suggest for its origin. They accept it as the starting point of evolution, and decline to speculate on its cause. This, as Dr. Christlieb observes of Bauer's kindred system of criticism, is 'beginning without a beginning--everything is already extant'. We may as well start with species, as with protoplasm, if the inquiry is not to be pushed beyond the fact. The evolutionist is bound to answer whether the process is eternal, or how it began to be. Either it had a beginning or it had not; if it had, creation out of nothing is conceded, and there is nothing left to dispute. It is puerile to except to the _frequency_ of creative acts on the ordinary hypothesis of specific origin, because it is freely open to science to reduce the several 'kinds' to the lowest _minimum_ it can experimentally establish. Moreover--besides the utter inconsequence of such purely relative ideas as _often_ and _rare_--it is far more reasonable that an eternal, personal author of creation should watch over his work to shape and diversify it at his pleasure, than that, after a single act, he should relapse into _inertia_ like the Hindu Brahmin. To concentrate the whole evidence of design in one original act, ages upon ages ago, with no opening for after interference, undermines belief in a personal designer, simply because it leaves him nothing to do."[4] Leaving these brutish among the people who assert the latter, to the enjoyment of their folly, let us ascertain what we can know of the great Creator of the heavens and the earth. God refers the atheists of the Psalmist's days to their own bodies for proofs of his intelligence, to their own minds for proofs of his personality, and to their own observation of the judgments of his providence against evil-doers for proofs of his moral government. Our text ascribes for him perception and intelligence: _He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?_ It does not say, he has an eye or an ear, but that he has the knowledge we acquire by those organs. And the argument is from the designed organ to the designing maker of it, and is perfectly irresistible. A blind god could not make a seeing man. Let us look for a little at a few of the many marks of design in this organ to which God thus refers us. We shall first observe the mechanical skill displayed in the formation of the eye, and then the optical arrangements, or rather a few of them, for there are more than eight hundred distinct contrivances already observed by anatomists in the dead eye, while the great contrivance of all, the power of seeing, is utterly beyond their ken. I hold in my hand a box made of several pieces of wood glued together, and covered on the outside with leather. Inside it is lined with cotton, and the cotton has a lining of fine white silk. You at once observe that it is intended to protect some delicate and precious article of jewelry, and that the maker of this box must have been acquainted with the strength of wood, the toughness of leather, the adhesiveness of glue, the softness and elasticity of cotton, the tenacity of silk, and the mode of spinning and weaving it, the form of the jewel to be placed in it, and the danger against which this box would protect it--ten entirely distinct branches of knowledge, which every child who should pick up such a box in the street would unhesitatingly ascribe to its maker. Now, the box in which the eye is placed is composed of seven bones glued together internally, and covered with skin on the outside, lined with the softest fat, enveloped in a tissue compared with which the finest silk is only canvas, and the cavity is shaped so as exactly to fit the eye, while the brow projects over like a roof of a veranda, to keep off falling dust and rain from injuring it while the lid is open; and the eyebrows, like a thatch sloping outward, conduct the sweat of the brow, by which a man earns his bread, away around the outer cover, that it may not enter the eye and destroy the sight. If it were preposterous nonsense to say that electricity, or magnetism, or odyle, contrived and made a little bracelet box, how much more absurd to ascribe the making of the cavity of the eye to any such cause. Let us next look at the shape of the eye. You observe it is nearly round in its section across, and rather oval in its other direction, and the cavity it lies in is shaped exactly to fit it. Now there are eyes in the world angular and triangular, and even square; and as you may readily suppose, the creatures which have them can not move them; to compensate for such inconvenience, some of them, as the common fly, have several hundred. But, unless our heads were as large as sugar hogsheads, we could not be so furnished, and we must either have movable eyes or see only in one direction. Accordingly, the Contriver of the eye has hung it with a hinge. Now there are various kinds of hinges, moving in one direction, and the Maker of the eye might have made a hinge on which the eye would move up and down, or he might have given us a hinge that would bend right and left, in which case we should have been able merely to squint a little in two directions. But to enable one to see in every direction, there is only one kind of hinge that would answer the purpose--the ball and socket joint--and the Former of the eye has hung it with such a hinge, retaining it in its place partly by the projection of the bones of the face, and partly by the muscles and the optic nerve, which is about as thick as a candlewick, and as tough as leather. Most of you have seen a ship, and know the way the yards are moved, and turned, and squared by ropes and pulleys. The rigging of the eye, though not so large, is fully as curious. There is a tackle, called a muscle, to pull it down when you want to look down; another tackle to pull it up when you have done; one to pull it to the right, and another to the left; there is one fastened to the eyeball in two places, and geared through a pulley which will make it move in any direction, as when we roll our eyes; and the sixth, fastened to the under side of the eye, keeps it steady when we do not need to move it. Then the eyelids are each provided with appropriate gearing, and need to have it durable too, for it is used thirty thousand times a day; in fact every time we wink. If God had neglected to place these little cords to pull up the eyelash, we should all have been in the condition of the unfortunate gentleman described by Dr. Nieuwentyt, who was obliged to pull up his eyelashes with his fingers whenever he wanted to see. There is, too, another admirable piece of forethought and skill displayed by the Former of the eye, in providing a liquid to wash it, and a sponge to wipe it with, and a waste pipe, through the bone of the nose, to carry off the tears which have been used in washing and moistening the eye. Now what absurdity to say that a law of nature, say gravity, or electricity, or magnetism has such knowledge of the principles of mechanics as the eye proclaims its Former to have--that it could make a choice among multitudes of shapes of eyes and kinds of joints, and this choice the very best for our convenience; and that having known and chosen, it could have manufactured the various parts of this complicated machine. Such a machine requires an intelligent manufacturer; and yet we have only as yet been looking at the dead eye, paying no regard to sight at all. Even a blind man's eye prove an intelligent Creator. Let us now turn our thoughts to the instrument of sight. The optic nerve is the part of the eye which conveys visions to the mind. Suppose, instead of being where you observe it, at the back part of the eye, it had been brought out to the front, and that reflections from objects had fallen directly upon it. It is obvious that it would have been exposed to injury from every floating particle of dust, and you would always have felt such a sensation as is caused by a burn or scald when the skin peels off, and leaves the ends of the nerves exposed to the air. The tender points of the fibers of the optic nerve, too, would soon become blunted and broken, and the eye, of course, useless. How, then, is the nerve to be protected, and yet the sight not obstructed? If it were covered with skin, as the other nerves are, you could not see through it. For thousands of years after men had eyes and used them, they knew no substance, at once hard and transparent, which could answer the double purpose of protection and vision. And to this day they know none hard enough for protection, clear enough for vision, and elastic enough to resume its form after a blow. But men did the best they could, and put a round piece of brittle but transparent glass in a ring of tougher metal for the protection of the hands of a watch; and he who first invented the watch crystal thought he had made a discovery. Now, observe in the eye, that forward part is the watch glass; the cornea, made of a substance at once hard, transparent and elastic--which man has never been able to imitate--set into the sclerotica, that white, muscular coat which constitutes the white of your eye, acts as a frame for the cornea, and answers another important purpose, as we shall presently see. [Illustration: Structure of the Human Eye] But, supposing the end of the nerve protected by the glass, we might have had it brought up to the glass without any interposing lenses or humors, as, in fact, is nearly the case with some crustacea. We can not well imagine all the inconveniences of such an eye to us. If we could see distinctly at all, we could not see much farther or wider than the breadth of the end of the nerve at once. Our sight would then be very like that faculty of perceiving colors by the points of the fingers, which some persons are said to possess. In that case, seeing would only be a nicer kind of groping, and our eyes would be more conveniently fixed on the points of our fingers; or, as with many insects, on the ends of long antennae. Such a form of eye is precisely suited to the wants of an animal which has not an idea beyond its food, which has no business with any object too large for its mouth, and whose great concern is to stick to a rock and catch whatever animalculæ the water floats within the grasp of its feelers. But for a being whose intercourse should be with all the works of God, and whose chief end in such intercourse should be to behold the Creator reflected in his works, it was manifestly necessary to have a wider and larger range of vision; and, therefore, a different form of eye. Both these objects, breadth of field combined with length of range, are obtained by placing the optic nerve at the back of the eye, and interposing several lenses, through which objects are observed. By this arrangement a visual angle is secured, and all objects lying within it are distinctly visible at the same time. This faculty of perceiving several objects at the same time is a special property of sight which tends greatly to enlarge our conceptions of the knowledge of Him who gave it. A man who never saw can have no idea of it. He can not taste two separate tastes at once, nor smell two distinct smells at once; nor feel more than one object with each hand at once; and if he hears several sounds at the same time, they either flow into each other, making a harmony, or confuse him with their discord. Yet we are all conscious that we see a vast variety of distinct and separate objects at one glance of our eyes. I think it is manifest that the Former of such an eye not only intended its owner to observe such a vast variety of objects, but from the capacity of his own sight to infer the vastly wider range of vision of Him who gave it. Besides the breadth of the field of vision, we also require length of range for the purpose of life. The thousand inconveniences which the short-sighted man so painfully feels are obvious to all. Yet it may tend to reconcile such to their lot to know that thousands of the liveliest and merriest of God's creatures can not see an inch before them. Small birds and insects, which feed on very minute insects, need eyes like microscopes to find them; while the eagle and the fish hawk, which soar up till they are almost out of sight, can distinctly see the hare or the herring a mile below them, and so must have eyes like telescopes. We, too, need to observe minute objects very closely, as when we read fine print, or when a lady threads a fine needle at microscope range; but, if confined to that range, we could not see our friends across the room, or find our way to the next street. Again, in traveling we need to see objects miles away, and at night we see the stars millions of miles away; but then, if confined to the long range, we should be strangers at home, and never get within a mile of any acquaintance. Now, how to combine these two powers, of seeing near objects and distant ones with the same eye, is the problem which the Maker of the eye had to solve. Let us look how man tried to solve it. A magnifying lens will collect the rays from any distant object, and convey them to a point called the focus. Then suppose we put this glass in the tube of an opera-glass, or pocket spy-glass, and look through the eye-hole and the concave lens, properly adjusted, in front of it, we shall see the image of the object considerably magnified. But suppose the object draws very near, we see nothing distinctly; for the rays reflected from it, which were nearly parallel while it was at a distance, are no longer so when it comes near, but scatter in all directions, and those which fall on the lens are collected at a point much nearer to the lens than before, and the eye-glass must be pushed forward to that focus. Accordingly, you know that the spy-glass is made to slide back and forward, and the telescope has a screw to lengthen or shorten the tube according to the distance of the objects observed. Another way of meeting the case would be by taking out the lens, and putting in one of less magnifying power, a flatter lens, for the nearer object. Now, at first sight, it would seem a very inconvenient thing to have eyes drawing out and in several inches like spy-glasses, and still more inconvenient to have twenty or thirty pairs of eyes, and to need to take out our eyes, and put in a new set twenty times a day. The ingenuity of man has been at work hundreds of years to discover some other method of adapting an optical instrument to long and short range, but without success. Now, the Former of the eye knew the properties of light and the properties of lenses before the first eye was made; he knew the mode of adjusting them for any distance, from the thousands of millions of miles between the eye and the star, to the half-inch distance of the mote in the sunbeam; and he had not only availed himself of both the principles which opticians discovered, but has executed his work with an infinite perfection which bungling men may admire, but can never imitate. The sclerotic coat of the eye, and the choroid which lies next it are full of muscles which, by their contraction, both press back the crystalline lens nearer the retina, and also flatten it; the vitreous humor, in which the crystalline lens lies, a fine, transparent humor, about as thick as the white of an egg, giving way behind it, and also slightly altering its form and power of refraction to suit the case. Thus, that which the astronomer, or the microscopist, performs by a tedious process, and then very imperfectly, we perform perfectly, easily, instantly, and almost involuntarily, with that perfect compound microscope and telescope invented by the Former of the human eye. Surely, in giving us an instrument so admirably fitted for observing the lofty grandeur of the heavens and the lowlier beauties of the earth, he meant to allure us to the discovery of the perfections of the great Designer and Former of all these wondrous works. But there is another contrivance in the eye, adapted to lead us further to the consideration of the extent of the knowledge of its power. We are placed in a world of variable lights, of day and night, and of all the variations between light and darkness. We can not see in the full blaze of light, nor yet in utter darkness. Had the eye been formed to bear only the noonday glare, we had been half blind in the afternoon, and wholly so in the evening. If the eye were formed so as to see at night, we had been helpless as owls in the day. But the variations of light in the atmosphere may be in some measure compensated, as we know, by regulating the quantity admitted to our houses--shutting up the windows. When we wish to regulate the admission of light to our rooms, we have recourse to various clumsy contrivances; paper blinds, perpetually tearing, sunblind rollers that will not roll, venetian blinds continually in need of mending, awnings blowing away with every storm, or shutters, which shut up and leave us in entire darkness. A self-acting window, which shall expand with the opening of light in the mornings and evenings, and close up of its own accord as the light increases toward noon, has never been manufactured by man. But the Former of the eye took note of the necessities and conveniences of the case, and besides giving a pair of shutters to close up when we go to sleep, he has given the most admirable sunblinds ever invented. The nerve of the eye at the back of its chamber can not see without light, and its light comes through the little round window called the pupil, or black of the eye--which is simply a hole in the iris, or colored part. Now this iris is formed of two sets of muscles: one set of elastic rings, which, when left to themselves, contract the opening; and another set at right angles to them, like the spokes of a wheel, pulling the inner edge of the iris in all directions to the outside. In fact it is not so much a sunblind, as a self-acting window, opening and closing the aperture according to our need of light, and doing this so instantaneously that we are not sensible of the process. It is self-evident that the Maker of such an eye was acquainted with the properties of light, and the alternations of night and day, as well as with the mechanical contrivances for adjusting the eye to these variable circumstances. He has given us an eye capable of seeking knowledge among partial darkness, and of availing itself for this purpose of imperfect light; an apt symbol of our mental constitution and moral situation in a world where good and evil, light and darkness, mix and alternate. Perhaps some one is ready to ask, What is the use of so many lenses in the eye? It seems as if the crystalline lens and the optic nerve were sufficient for the purpose of sight, with the cornea simply to protect them. What is the use of the aqueous humor and the vitreous humor? Light, when refracted through the lens, becomes separated into its component colors--red, yellow, green, blue, and violet; and the greater the magnifying power of the lens, and the brighter the object viewed, the greater the dispersion of the rays. So that if the crystalline lens of the eye alone were used, we should see every white object bluish in the middle, and yellowish and reddish at the edges; or, in vulgar language, we should see starlight. This difficulty perplexed Sir Isaac Newton all his life, and he never discovered the mode of making a refracting telescope which would obviate it. But M. Dolland, an optician, reflecting that the very same difficulty must have presented itself to the Maker of the eye, determined to ascertain how he had obviated it. He found that the Maker of the eye had a knowledge of the fact that different substances have different powers of refracting or bending the rays of light which pass through them, and that liquids have generally a different power of refraction from solids. For instance, if you put a straight stick in water, the part under water will seem bent at a considerable angle, while if you put the stick through a little hole in a pane of glass it will not seem so much bent. He further discovered that oil of cassia had a different power of refraction from water, and the white of an egg still a different power. He discovered also that the first lens of the eye, the aqueous humor, is very like water; that the crystalline lens is a firm jelly, and that the vitreous humor is about the consistency of the white of an egg. The combination of these three lenses, of different powers of refraction, secures the correction of their separate errors. He could not make telescope lenses of jelly, nor water; therefore, he could not make a perfect achromatic telescope, but he learned the lesson of mutual compensations of difficulties which the Maker of the eye teaches the reflecting anatomist, and procuring flint and crown glass of different degrees of refraction, he arranged them in the achromatic lens so as nearly to remedy the defect. I think that you will at once admit that Dolland's attempt to remedy the evils of confused sight in the telescope indicated a desire to obtain a precise and correct view of the objects; and that his success in constructing an instrument, nearly perfect, for the use of astronomers, gave evidence that he himself had a clear idea of that perfect and accurate vision which he thus attempted to bestow on them. Shall we then imagine any inaccuracy in the sight of Him, who not only desired, but executed and bestowed on us, an instrument so perfectly adapted to the imperfections of this lower world, and whose very imperfections are the materials from which he produces clear and perfect vision? No! in God's eye there are no chromatic refractions of passions, or prejudice, or party feeling, or self-love. He sees no reflected or refracted light. O Father of Light! with whom is no variableness, or shadow of turning, open our eyes to behold Thee clearly! Our text thus leads us to a knowledge of God's character, from the structure of the bodies he has given us. He that formed my eye sees. Though my feeble vision is by no means a standard or limit for his Omniscience, yet I may conclude that every perfection of the power of sight he has given me existed previously in him. Has he endowed me, a poor puny mortal, the permanent tenant of only two yards of earth, with an eye capable of ranging over earth's broad plains and lofty mountains, of traversing her beauteous lakes and lovely rivers, of scanning her crowded cities, and inspecting all their curious productions, and specially delighting to investigate the bodily forms of men, and their mental characters displayed on the printed page? Has he given me the principle of curiosity, without which such an endowment were useless? Then most undoubtedly he has Himself both the desire to observe all the works of his hands, and the power to gratify that desire. The Former of the eye must of necessity be the great Observer. Wheresoever an eye is found of his handiwork, and wheresoever sight is preserved by his skill, let the owner of such an instrument know that if he can see, God can, and as surely as he sees, God does. If it is possible for us to behold many objects distinctly at once, it is not impossible for God to behold more. If he has given us an eye to look from earth to heaven, then his eye sees from heaven to earth. If I can see accurately, God's inspection is much more impartial. And if he has given me the power of adjusting my imperfect vision to the varying lights and shades of this changing scene, let me not dream for a moment that he is destitute of a corresponding power of investigating difficulties, and penetrating darknesses, and bringing to light hidden works and secret things. God is light. In him is no darkness at all. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight, but all things are naked and opened to the eyes of him with whom I have to do. He has seen all my past life--my faults, my follies, and my crimes. When I thought myself in darkness and privacy, God's eye was upon me there. In the turmoil of business, God's eye was upon me. In the crowd of my ungodly companions, God's eye was upon me. In the darkness and solitude of night, God's eye was upon me. And God's eye is on me now, and will follow me from this house, and will watch me and observe all my actions, on--on--on--while God lives, and wheresoever God's creation extends. "O God, Thou has searched and known me; Thou knowest my down sitting and mine uprising; Thou understandest my thoughts afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, And art acquainted with all my ways For there is not a word in my tongue, But, lo! O Lord, Thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me! It is high, I can not attain unto it; Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? And whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there, If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there! If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there shall thy hand lead me, And thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall cover me,' Even the night shall be light about me; Yea the darkness hideth not from thee, But the night shineth as the day, The darkness and the light are both alike to Thee." FOOTNOTES: [1] Reid's Chemistry, II. § 37. [2] Johnson's Turner's Chemistry, § 341. [3] It might be supposed that such a theory is too palpably absurd to be believed by any save the inmates of a lunatic asylum, had not the writer, and hundreds of the citizens of Cincinnati, seen a lecturer perform the ordinary experiment of producing colored precipitates by mixing colorless solutions, as a demonstration of the self-acting powers of matter. Common sense, being a gift of God, is righteously withdrawn from those who deny him. [4] John Bull. CHAPTER II. WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY? In the previous chapter we saw the evidences of God's skill and wisdom in the adaptations of nature, fitting the organs of animals for hearing, walking, and eating, and especially in the structure of the human eye. This has long been owned by candid minds as an unanswerable argument, demonstrating the being of God by the works of his hands. But since that chapter was written a school of scientists has arisen, of whom Mr. Darwin is at present the most popular, claiming to be able to show how all the species of living things can evolve, not only their eyes, but their legs and wings and lungs, and every part of them, from a little bit of primeval life stuff, called protoplasm, by the influence of Natural Selection. Mr. Darwin owns that the formation of an eye is rather a tough job for a little pin point germ of protoplasm; but he has no doubt that it has been done, and he writes several books to show us how. We propose to look into this self-evolving process, as he and his brother evolutionists describe their theory. It is necessary, right here at the outset, to distinguish the theory of the evolutionists from the great fact of evolution. Almighty God created the world, not only for his own pleasure, but also for his own glory, that men and angels might learn to know him by his works. Creation is thus God's great object lesson for men and angels to learn. But learning is a process, gradual, slow, from one step to another. Therefore the object lesson must not be precipitated all in a heap upon the infantile intellects of the learners, but unfolded by degrees. Geologists assure us that so it was in the past; that first the lifeless strata were deposited; next, light was evolved; afterward, fishes, and marine reptiles, and birds; then came the carboniferous or plant era; afterward the mammalia; last of all man. You observe here an ascending scale of creation, beginning with first principles and simple forms, and ascending to the most complicated; a series of experiments in God's great lecture-room, illustrative of the various steps of the evolution of the divine idea. But six thousand years before geology was born Moses described this same evolution of creation, in the first chapter of Genesis. As he could not have learned it from any science known in his day, God Himself must have shown it to him. The divine idea is still in process of evolution for our instruction. We behold it in the continual formation of new strata by the destruction of the old; in the chemical combinations of the elements of the air, sea, and earth; in the evolution of the grass from the seed, and of the oak from the acorn; in the development of the insect germ into the caterpillar, and the butterfly; in the hatching of the egg into the chicken; and in the growth of the infant into the man. We observe also a divine development of society, an advance of civilization, a providential guidance of history, and a fall and disorder among mankind, with a process of redemption, medical, educational, political and religious, for the human race. The whole process, therefore, of the creation, natural history, and moral government of the world, is the development of a divine idea, according to a divine plan, by the direct or mediate efficacy of divine power, for the accomplishment of the divine purpose as revealed to us in the divine word, the Holy Scriptures. Galen taught that the study of physiology was a divine hymn. This divine development is to be clearly and sharply distinguished from the atheistic theory of evolution. They differ in the following particulars: 1. The divine development of the world is a great fact; the theory of atheistic evolution is only a baseless theory, a fiction. 2. The divine development begins in the beginning, with God, creating the heavens and the earth; but the theory of atheistic evolution has no beginning, asserting the eternal existence of a changing world. 3. The divine development is the unfolding of an intelligent plan, showing the adaptation of means to ends for the accomplishment of a purpose; the atheistic theory of evolution denies plan, purpose, adaptation and final cause. 4. The divine development is conducted, and continually reinforced by the will of the Omnipotent God; the atheistic development evolves only the forces of matter. 5. The divine development has a moral character, and terminates in the highest holiness and happiness of all obedient men and angels; but the atheistic development contemplates and promises only the evolution of animal instinct and passions, the eternal death of the individual, and, for the universe, only purposeless cycles of progress, and catastrophies of ruin. In this chapter we discuss only the theory of atheistic evolution. In the discussion of all questions affecting human life it is advantageous to trace them to their origin, and to follow them out to their practical results. Thus we get a clear view of the whole subject, and are enabled to assign to it its proper influence. It is also a great benefit to the mass of mankind to conduct such discussions in plain language, and to translate the roundabout phrases, and the Latinized words of scientific men, as much as we can, into the vulgar tongue; to state the subjects of discussion so as to be understood of the people. So we shall put the whole business of Darwinism and development before you, reader, in a nutshell, by simply asking you the question at the head of this chapter, "Was your mother a monkey?" What a question! Well, then, your grandmother? her grandmother? or does it seem less offensive, or more likely to you to go back some thousands of years, and say your forefathers were apes? That is exactly what Mr. Darwin says when we translate his scientific language into the vulgar tongue: "The early progenitors of man were no doubt once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were pointed and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail having the proper muscles. The foot, judging from the condition of the great toe in the foetus, was then prehensile, and our progenitors, no doubt, were arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm forest-clad land. The males were provided with great canine teeth, which served them as formidable weapons."[5] This ancient form "if seen by a naturalist, would undoubtedly have been ranked as an ape or a monkey. And as man, under a genealogical point of view, belongs to the CATARHINE or Old World stock (of monkeys), we must conclude, however much the conclusion may revolt our pride, that our early progenitors would have been properly thus designated."[6] So here you have your genealogy, name and thing fully described. Mr. Darwin thinks it is quite an honorable pedigree: "Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality. * * * Unless we willfully close our eyes, we may, with our present knowledge, approximately recognize our parentage, nor need we feel ashamed of it. The most humble organism is something much higher than the inorganic dust under our feet; and no one with an unbiased mind can study any living creature, however humble, without being struck with enthusiasm at its marvelous structure and properties."[A] There are people, however, who do not grow enthusiastic at the idea of their long-tailed progenitors; but there is no accounting for taste in such matters! For elderly people, who do not take so enthusiastically to monkeys as his junior readers, Mr. Darwin has provided a rather less gymnastic ancestry. How would you like to have a fish for your forefather? If it were one of Neptune's noble tritons, or the Philistine fish-god, Dagon, or a mermaid, it might not be so repulsive as the ape; or even a twenty-pound salmon, flashing its silver and blue in the sunlight as it spins the line off the reel, might not be so utterly disgusting as the monkey burlesque of humanity. But, alas! Mr. Darwin has been sent to this proud nineteenth century as the prophet to teach us humility, and here is the scientific statement of the structure of our fishy forefathers: "At a still earlier period the progenitors of man must have been aquatic in their habits, for morphology plainly tells us that our lungs consist of a modified swim bladder which once served as a float. These early predecessors of man thus seen in the dim recesses of time must have been as lowly organized as the lancelot or amphibioxus, or even still more lowly organized."[7] That certainly is a very humble origin. We are not, however, by any means to the end of our pedigree. Mr. Darwin says that your codfish aristocracy are descended from a race of squirts--the squirts which you picked up on the shore and squeezed, when you were a boy, discharging these primitive Babcock Extinguishers upon your playfellows, irreverently regardless of the harm done the poor squirt, the ancestor of the human race. If you doubt it, here is the latest deliverance of infallible science upon the subject. He describes the Ascidians: "They hardly appear like animals, and consist of a simple tough leathery sack, with two small projecting orifices. They belong to the Molluscoida of Huxley, a lower division of the great family of the Mollusca; but they have recently been placed by some naturalists among the vermes or worms. Their larvæ somewhat resemble tadpoles in shape, and have the power of swimming freely about. * * * We should thus be justified in believing that, at an extremely remote period, a group of animals existed resembling in many respects the larvæ of our present Ascidians, which diverged into two great branches, the one retrograding in development and producing the present class of Ascidians, the other rising to the crown and summit of the animal kingdom, by giving birth to the vertebrata."[8] Thus it appears that Mr. Darwin deduces his origin, and that of mankind in general, from one of these Ascidians, or, in plain English, makes them a race of squirts. The notion of evolution is a belief that all living beings, plants as well as animals, have not been created, but, like Topsy, just grew, from the very smallest germs or spores. Evolutionists inform us that all kinds of organisms have been evolved from four or five primeval germs or spores; or more consistently with their great principle, that the simple gave birth to the differentiated, from one primeval germ or egg. Mr. Darwin alleges four or five primal forms, acknowledging that analogy would lead him up to one. But other members of this school consistently and boldly follow up the stream to its fountain, and allege a single primeval living seed as the origin of all living things, and that this must have been a microscopic animalcule, or plant spore, of the very lowest order, which, multiplying its kind, gave birth to improved and enlarged offspring; and they, in their turn, grew, and multiplied, and differentiated into varieties; and so, in the course of endless ages, the poorer sorts perishing and the better sorts prospering, the world became filled with its existing populations, without any new creative acts of God, and without any particular providential care over the new species. The particular process according to which this multiplication and improvement took place, Mr. Darwin calls Natural Selection. Every creature tends to increase and multiply; and the very slowest breeders would soon fill the earth, were their multiplication not checked by hunger, by the attacks of enemies, and by the struggle for existence. But all are not born alike strong, or swift, or of the same color; some of the same brood are better fitted to escape enemies, or to fight the battle of life, than others. These will survive, while the weak ones perish. This Mr. Wallace calls, the survival of the fittest. They will transmit their superior size, or swiftness, or better color, or whatever superiority they possess, to their offspring. The process will go on in successive generations, each adding an infinitesimal quantity to the stock gained by the past generation; just as breeders of improved stock increase the weight of cattle by breeding from the largest; or breeders of race-horses increase the speed by breeding from the swiftest. In this way varieties from the same family will grow into different species. And, as only those differences which are beneficial to the animal are preserved, they will grow into improved species; and, as variations of all sorts take place, so all sorts of varieties and species arise in process of time. All will thus tend to perfect themselves according to the laws of nature, and without any special oversight or care of God, or of anybody but Natural Selection; which Mr. Darwin takes special care to describe as an unintelligent selector. He defines the nature which selects to be "the aggregate action and product of natural laws," and these laws are "the sequences of events as ascertained by us." He ridicules the idea of God's special endowment of the fantail pigeon with additional feathers, or of the bull dog's jaws with strength, and says, "But if we give up the principle in the one case, if we do not admit that the variations of the primeval dog were intentionally guided in order, for instance, that the greyhound, that perfect image of symmetry and vigor, might be formed; no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations alike in nature, and the results of the same general laws which have been the groundwork through Natural Selection of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided."[9] This, then, is the grand distinctive difference of Mr. Darwin's mode of producing the various animals; namely, that it is unintelligent, their variations are not designed nor intended by the Creator, but they are the results of a method of trial and error, producing a hit-and-miss pattern. The failures all perish, and the successes live and prosper; but there is no intentional or special guidance of God in the business. And the business includes the whole process of peopling the globe, from the creation of the first four or five germs down to the last formation of human society. God is thus dismissed from the greatest part of the world's life, including all human affairs. This is not exactly atheism in theory, but practically it amounts to much the same thing. It is this excommunication of God's agency from the management of the world, and especially from human affairs, by Mr. Darwin's method, which has so commended his books to the ungodly world. There is a general agreement among this class of writers, that Mr. Darwin has destroyed the basis of the argument for the being of God from design as displayed in the adaptations of birds and beasts to their conditions. Mr. Huxley says that "when he first read Mr. Darwin's book, what struck him most forcibly was the conviction that teleology, as commonly understood, had received its death blow at Mr. Darwin's hands."[10] "For the notion that every organism has been created as it is, and launched straight at a purpose, Mr. Darwin substitutes the conception of something which may fairly be termed a method of trial and error. Organisms vary incessantly; of these variations the few meet with surrounding conditions which suit them and thrive; the many are unsuited and become extinguished. * * * For the teleologist (the Christian) an organism exists, because it was made for the conditions in which it was found. For the Darwinian an organism exists, because out of many of its kind it is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which it was found. * * * If we apprehend the spirit of the Origin of Species rightly, then nothing can be more entirely and absolutely opposed to teleology, as it is commonly understood, than the Darwinian theory."[11] Prof. Haeckel argues to the same purpose that Darwin's theory leads inevitably to Atheism and Materialism. Dr. Buchner says of Darwin's theory, "It is the most thoroughly naturalistic that can be imagined, and far more atheistic than that of his decried predecessor, Lamarck." Carl Vogt also commends it because "It turns the Creator, and his occasional intervention in the revolution of the earth and in the production of species, without any hesitation out of doors, inasmuch as it does not leave the smallest room for the agency of such a Being. The first living germ being granted, out of it the creation develops itself progressively by Natural Selection, through all the geologic periods of our planet, by the simple law of descent. No new species arise by creation, and none perishes by annihilation; the natural cause of things, the process of evolution of all organisms, and of the earth itself, is of itself sufficient for the production of all we see. Thus man is not a special creation, produced in a different way, and distinct from other animals, endowed with an individual soul, and animated by the breath of God; on the contrary, man is only the highest product of the progressive evolution of animal life, springing from the group of apes next below him."[12] Whether, therefore, Mr. Darwin himself intends his theory to be atheistic or not, it has had the misfortune to be so viewed by the greater number of its supporters; and, accordingly, it is this view of it which we shall keep prominent in the following discussion. Mr. Darwin does undoubtedly intend his theory to be antagonistic to the Bible account of creation and providence, and an improvement upon it; and, whether atheistic or not, it is undoubtedly anti-Christian. _I. The History of the Theory._ The first thing which strikes a common person on first hearing this theory is that it is a very queer notion for any Christian man to invent. We are naturally curious to know how a man, educated in a Christian country, could have fallen into it. But it is, in fact, no new discovery, but an old heathen superstition. Some four hundred years before Christ, when the world had almost wholly apostatized into idolatry, Democritus, among the Greeks, became offended with the vulgar heathen gods, and set himself to invent a plan of the world without them. From Eastern travelers the Greeks knew that the Brahmins, in India, had a theory of the world developing itself from a primeval egg. He set himself to refine upon it, and imagined virtually the Nebular Hypothesis. He said that all matter consisted of very small atoms, dancing about in all directions, from all eternity, and which at last happened into the various forms of the present world. The ancient Phoenicians held a theory that all life was from the sea; and that, as the wet mud produces all sorts of herbs in spring now, so originally it produced all manner of animals. They worshiped it as a god, and called it Mot, or Mud. Anaximander took up the theory and carried it out in true Darwinian style, alleging that the first men sprang from the ground watered by the sea, and that they had spines like sea urchins; evidently deriving them from the Radiates. Lucretius still further developed the theory in a poem in six books. The spread of Christianity, however, hindered the spread of the doctrine, as Mr. Tyndall feelingly laments, until the Saracens overspread the East, when some of them, it seems, favored it. But it seems to be an unlucky dogma, since, with the downfall of the power of the false prophet, the anti-Christian form of science went down again. The dogma of the transmutation of species reappeared, however, in the Romish Church in a religious form; the old heathenism, which had never been wholly banished from the minds of men, thus reasserting itself. About the tenth century some began to teach that the bread of the communion of the Lord's Supper was transubstantiated, and the wine also, into the body, and blood, and soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is probably the most complete transmutation of species which has ever been imagined or described. The evolution of bread into Deity is only equaled by Mr. Tyndall's endowment of matter with all the potencies of life and thought; a miracle differing from the popish transubstantiation only in the element of time, but in its essential nature equally supernatural. The dogma excited great discussion for centuries, and produced as many theories of transubstantiation as we now observe of evolution, keeping philosophic minds and pens busy till the dawn of modern science after the Reformation. La Place threw out the Nebular Hypothesis, which is substantially Democritus' concourse of atoms, only La Place endeavored to substitute circular motions under the law of gravitation, instead of Democritus' chance arrangement, as a sufficient cause for the formation and motions of planets. Herschel's discovery of the nebulæ was hastily laid hold of by a number of writers, and notably by the author of the Vestiges of Creation, as furnishing the primeval matter necessary for world-making; and till the spectroscopic discoveries of the composite nature of gaseous nebulæ, they were claimed as specimens of worlds in process of formation. La Place supposed his nebulous matter to be gas in a state of white-heat combustion, compared with which the heat of the hottest fire would be a cool bath. In no other way could he dissipate the world's substance into sufficient thinness for his vortices. But Spencer saw that this tremendous heat would be fatal to all forms of life, and especially to sensitive beings; and Tyndall shows us that this original matter must have had all the potencies of life and sensation, and a potency of sensation means being able to feel. Now the worst fate threatened against sinners in the Bible is a place in the lake burning with fire and brimstone, which burns at 500° Fahrenheit; but the temperature of the original fire-mist was a thousand times hotter. Some of these scientists call such a fate as the Bible threatens against the wicked, cruel. But here is a hell manufactured by the evolutionists infinitely worse than that of the Bible; for the hell of the Bible is only for the wicked, but the evolutionists' hell is indiscriminately for all, saints and sinners, and all sorts of creatures, innocent as babes unborn of any crime; yet they, or, which is the same thing, the matter containing all the potency of their sensations, that is their power of feeling, were born in this hell, and kept in it from all eternity, until it pleased the evolutionists to begin to cool it down a little. However, it was rather scientific than benevolent reasons which induced Mr. Spencer to reverse the order of procedure, and make his star dust cold to begin with, and to heat it up by condensation and pressure to about the temperature of molten iron; which was still an uncomfortably warm lodging for Mr. Tyndall's potencies of sensation for some millions of years. The division of opinion about the original nebulæ, however, still prevails; some evolutionists of the old-fashioned order still taking their nebulæ hot, while others, with Spencer, prefer it cold, with star dust. As to the Spontaneous Generation of life, there has been less progress of opinion, though great variety has been exhibited. Ovid and Virgil describe the way in which a carcass produces bees. It was generally believed that putrid meat produced the maggots, till the blow-flies were discovered laying their eggs. Then it was alleged that the entozoa, the worms found in the bodies of animals, were self-produced, without eggs, until the microscope discovered that one could lay 60,000 eggs. Strauss, however, adhered to the idea that as the tapeworm, as he supposed, was self-produced, so man was originated by the primeval slime. So also Professor Vogt, and M. Tremaux develop their animals from the land, and the latter accounts for their various qualities from the various qualities of their respective birthplaces, the crop being conditioned by the soil. But Mr. Darwin derives all his organisms from the sea. Electricity in its galvanic form was for a while the agent to fire the earthly or marine mud with the vital spark; and Mr. Crosse's experiments were supposed instances of the creation of acarii or mites in the battery bath, until it was found that the bath contained eggs and the electricity only hatched them. Some English evolutionists still adhere to the theory of Spontaneous Generation, but the leading Germans deny any instance of it being known. Huxley denies that any case of it has been established as now practicable; but supposes that if we could have been present at the beginning of the world, when all the elements were young and vigorous, we should have seen the chemical elements of the earth and air combining to form living beings, by the mere powers of their nature. If that were the fact, it would be a fact unique and unparalleled, utterly out of the course of nature, and so as contrary to the theory of evolution as if these living beings had been inspired with life by Almighty God. So the theory here again is divided. Two utterly irreconcilable ideas of the origin of life claim our belief--the theories of Biogenesis, and of Abiogenesis, the one says all life is from the egg, and has always been so; and so we have an eternal begetting of finite creatures; the other alleges the spontaneous beginning of plants and animals; a fact, if it be a fact, as unparalleled as creation, and far more miraculous. As to the history of the progress of the germs of plants and animals thus produced, we find still greater diversities of opinion, not only as to details, but as to principles. Each inventor has added to, or altered, the original idea of evolution, until it has been burdened with more improvements and new patents than the sewing machine; only the evolutionary improvements bid fair to improve the theory out of existence. We have seen M. Tremaux, with the autochthonic Athenians, deriving the powers of improvement of plants and animals from their native soils. Lamarck on the contrary, inspired all his plants and animals--fungi and frogs, and elephants and apes--with the desire of getting on in the world and improving their limbs by exercise; so the greyhound grew slim and fleet by running; the giraffe's neck elongated by reaching up to the branches of the trees on which it browsed, and the duck acquired web feet by swimming. Others attributed the evolution of differences to external conditions. The negro became black by exposure to the tropical sun; the arctic hare received its coat of thick white fur from the cold climate, and the buffalo and camel their humps of fat from the sterility of their pastures at certain seasons, and the consequent need of a reserved store of fat for food for the rest of the body. Mr. Darwin's doctrine of Natural Selection refuses Lamarck's notion of any conscious attempt of the plant or animal at improvement; and equally denies the power of external nature to improve anything, except by killing off poor specimens, save in that very limited range where good pastures make fat animals for a season or two. An innate power of accidental variation to a very small amount, and the slow but constant adding up of profitable variations during countless generations, with the killing off of the unimproved breeds by Natural Selection, is his patent populator and improver. But this theory is too slow for the nineteenth century, and so neither Huxley, nor Parsons, nor Mivart, nor even Wallace, accepts the doctrine as Darwin propounds it. It is, in fact, already becoming unpopular among scientific men. Lyell proposed the origination of new species by leaps; as we see great geniuses born of commonplace parents; and Huxley supports that opinion, and Parsons, Owen and Mivart coincide in this inexplicable explanation. The author of the Vestiges of Creation accounts for improved species from a prolongation of the period of gestation. But Hyatt and Cope derive them from quite the contrary process--accelerated development of gestation. MM. Ferris and Kolliker derive them from parthenogenesis, a mode of genesis of which our world offers no example whatever. The origin of man, with all his mental powers and religious aspirations, is the great difficulty. Mr. Mivart excludes man wholly from the influence of Natural Selection, from the time he acquired a soul. Mr. Wallace, rejecting the action of one Supreme Intelligence for everything but the origin of universal forces and laws, "Contemplates the possibility that the development of the essentially human portions of man's structure and intellect may have been determined by the directing influence of some higher intelligent beings acting through natural and universal laws;"[13] _i. e._, the gods of the old heathen nations. And so after twenty-two centuries wandering over the world, we have got back to where Democritus started from--to pure old heathenism. After such a history of the theory of evolution, and in presence of such contradictory presentations by its advocates, I need scarcely say that it is by no means an established scientific principle, were it not for the insolent manner in which some of them assert it as scientifically demonstrated; and denounce the Bible doctrine of creation as mere superstition, "A feather bed of respectable and respected tradition," and warn off Christians from any attempt to investigate theories of cosmogony; and overbear the ignorant by the array of the names of men of science who give their sanction to some phase of the theory. But let it be borne in mind that no well-established scientific principle, no demonstrated law, exhibits such contradictory and conflicting phases as those we have just witnessed. The laws of gravitation, or of chemical affinity, for instance, offer no such contradictions of their adherents; because they are founded on facts, while evolution is a mere notion, founded on ignorance and error, as we shall presently see. Accordingly, by far the greater number of the greatest scientists oppose it, as utterly unscientific, and have recorded their opposition, and the reasons for it. Sir John Herschel and Sir Wm. Thompson, among astronomers, have proclaimed its antagonism to the facts of physical astronomy. No new facts subversive of the foundations of faith in God as recognized in the universe by Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Descartes, Leibnitz, Pascal, Paley and Bell, have been discovered by such scientists as Whewell, Sedgwick, Brewster, Faraday, Hugh Miller, or our American geologists, Dawson, Hitchcock, and Dana. Nor have the deliberate and expanded demonstrations of its unscientific character by the late lamented Agassiz been ever fairly met, much less overturned. I refer to these honored names for the benefit of that large class who must take their science upon faith in some scientific prophet or apostle, in default of any possibility of personal investigation of the facts. Indeed, to the great majority, even of so-called scientific men, their science must be founded upon faith in the dogma of some scientific pope and council. And to such it may be reassuring, amidst the evolutionists' cries of Science! Science! to know that a great many of the greatest scientists, in spite of all these confused assertions, do still believe in Almighty God, do call their souls their own, and hope when they die to go to heaven. As a specimen of the contempt in which this theory is held by the princes of science, read the following extract of an address by Agassiz, at a recent meeting of the Academy of Science:[14] "As I grow older in the ranks of science," said the professor, "I feel more and more the danger of stretching inferences from a few observations to a wide field. I see that the younger generation among naturalists are at this moment falling into the mistake of making assertions and presenting views as scientific principles which are not even based upon real observation. I think it is time that some positive remonstrance be made against that tendency. The manner in which the evolution theory in zoology is treated would lead those who are not special zoologists to suppose that observations have been made by which it can be inferred that there is in nature such a thing as change among organized beings actually taking place. _There is no such thing on record._ It is shifting the ground from one field of observation to another to make this statement, and when the assertions go so far as to exclude from the domain of science those who will not be dragged into this mire of mere assertion, then it is time to protest. "He thought it was intolerant to say he was not on scientific grounds because he was not falling into the path which was occupied by those who maintain that all organized beings have been derived from a few original progenitors. Other supporters of the transmutation doctrine assume that they can demonstrate the changes to have taken place by showing certain degrees of resemblance; but what they never touch is the quality and condition of those few first progenitors from which they were evolved. They assume that they contained all that is necessary to evolve what exists now. That is begging the question at the outset; for if these first prototypes contained the principle of evolution, we should know something about them from observation, and it should be shown that there are such organized beings as are capable of evolution. "I ask, Whence came these properties? If this power and capacity of change is not inherent to the first progenitors, then I ask, Whence came the impulses by which those progenitors which have not this power of change in themselves acquire them? What is the power by which they are started in directions which are not determined by their primitive nature? From the total silence of the supporters of the transmutation theory on these and other points, _he did not think it worth their while to take the slightest notice of this doctrine of evolution in his scientific considerations_. He acknowledged what the evolutionists had done incidentally in scientific research; none had done more than Mr. Darwin. He believed he had been injured woefully by his adherents. He was a far better man than most of his school made him." It is to be acknowledged, however, that many scientists are evolutionists. Mr. Darwin is not alone in his belief. If he were, it would not be worth while to spend time in examining it. Quite a number of scientific men have fallen into it, and lecture and write commendations of it; and it has become quite popular among a certain class who do not like to accept the Bible doctrine that God created man, with its necessary consequence that the creature ought to obey his Creator; and they have proceeded to patch it out into completeness--for, as you observe, it is a little defective; like its own primeval squirt, it lacks a head and a tail--it has neither a beginning nor an end properly fitted to it. It takes a piece out of the middle of the universe from the management of God, but it leaves the beginning and the end totally unaccounted for; telling us neither whence came the first germs, nor whither tends the final fully developed angel. Mr. Darwin, though he calls one of his works, the Origin of Species, really avoids the question of origin. He admits the miracle of the creation of the four or five original germs of life, which, according to the evolutionists, is as unscientific as if he admitted four or five hundred. They desire to escape the operation of God altogether. Moreover, he gives no account of the origin of the law of heredity, by which each being produces its like; nor yet of the origin of the power of variation, according to which profitable variations occur. Here, then, is still a field in which God reigns. But it is specially with Mr. Darwin's admission of the Creator to bestow the origin of life that evolutionists are displeased. If they admit God at the beginning of the world they see plainly that there is no possibility of getting rid of him afterward. Messrs. Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall, Buchner, Haeckel and Vogt combine their forces accordingly to evolve the world as we find it without God's intervention. Mr. Huxley, perceiving that to make either man, or monkey, or nomad, you must have materials, kindly brings a little pitcher of protoplasm, which he calls the physical basis of life. It is the meat our Cæsar feeds on, and indeed, for that matter, all living things. All vegetable and animal tissues are made up mostly of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen; and as the materials of which all living beings are built are the same originally, and are simply these chemical substances with a little iron, salt and lime, with their properties, he will have it that all life, including man's life and thought, is merely a development of protoplasm. This is the clay out of which all the various bricks, and tiles, and tea cups, and porcelain vases of the great world building are built. We don't need to begin with monkeys, nor fish, or pollywogs, now to develop into men, for we go down to the very bottom, since we have the stuff they all are made of, namely, protoplasm. Still this clay needs a potter to mold and bake it. The difficulty about the protoplasm is that it must be _alive_. You can not get a living pollywog, no more than a living elephant, out of dead protoplasm. Mr. Huxley shows very well that all protoplasm consists of the same materials; in fact, that all flesh is grass, as the Scripture says. The difficulty is how to convert the grass into flesh, unless by some animal eating it; or to convert the nitrogen, carbon and water into grass or grain, or any other form of protein or protoplasm, without the previous action of some plant. In short, how are we to make the chemical materials live? Here Mr. Tyndall comes in and endows the matter of the universe with life, and with all the potency of producing bodies and souls. In his famous Belfast Address he says: "Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to make before you is that I prolong the vision backward, beyond the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in this matter, which we in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of life." Yet, after all this marvelous endowment of matter with all potency, we have not got quite back to the beginning. For still the questions arise, Where did this almighty matter come from? Who endowed it with these wonderful potencies? And how does it happen to work so well, in such orderly and regular evolution of star dust, suns, planets, pollywogs, monkeys, men and maggots, in eternal cycles, ever advancing higher and doing better and better for the race, though poorly enough, it appears, for the miserable individuals? Here Buchner, Vogt, Spencer and other materialists come in and perfect that which was lacking; showing how the star dust made itself, and how the paving stones made themselves, and are under no obligations to any Creator but themselves. Matter and force are all they need, and endless time in which to work, and they will account for the universe without any Creator at all. Everything and every person must be just as it is, according to the regular operation of the laws of Nature. As Buchner, Vogt and Spencer have given the system a head, Lubbock, Evans and others have supplied it with a tail, and demonstrated how society, and morals, and religion have been excogitated by the apes out of their meditations in the forests. It is a fearful and wonderful account they give us of the origin of marriage from the battles of the baboons, of the rights of property established by terrible fights for groves of good chestnuts, of the beginnings of morals from the instincts of brutes, and of the dawnings of religion, or rather of superstition, from the dreams of these animals; the result of the whole being that civilization, and society, and law, and order, and religion, are all simply the evolution of the instincts of the brutes, and that there is no necessity for invoking any supernatural interference to produce them. The termination of the whole, as far as you and I are concerned, is that "We shall fade away as the faint cloud melts into the blue ether," into the eternal sleep of death. It thus appears that there is an orderly succession and attempted adjustment of one part of the doctrine of evolution to another, and that all the various workers are cooperating toward one grand result. It is true they differ widely in their professed religious creeds and political partialities. Mr. Darwin avows his belief in a Creator. Mr. Huxley votes on the London School Board for the introduction of the Bible into the public schools. Mr. Spencer is willing to allow the existence of some great unknowable mystery. Some of the French and German evolutionists dispense with any reference to God, as an unnecessary hypothesis. Others oppose the idea of God altogether, as inimical to progress. M. Comte proposed a worship of humanity. M. Strauss would worship the universe. But with all this variety of uniform, and armor, and tactics, the evolutionists are all soldiers of the same army, and are all fighting the same great battle, for the brutal origin of man, and his independence of God. From which independence of God, and brutal origin of mankind, result very important consequences. For the belief of this notion necessarily destroys all faith in the Bible, and in the Christianity which it reveals, and revolutionizes the basis of the civilization founded upon it, and all the laws protecting life, property, marriage and religion; which laws are based upon the belief of mankind in the dignity of man, the sacredness of human life, and the sanction of morality by the All-seeing Judge of all the earth, who will reward every man according to his works. For all practical purposes it makes no great difference whether a man denies that there is any God at all, or admits that there is some kind of a god who created the world millions of years ago, and just set it a spinning to work out its destiny as best it might, but never after concerned himself about it, or its people, and never will; for nobody will ever trouble his head about a god who never troubles his head about him. Most of the evolutionists are zealous advocates of their system. These propagandists have had such a degree of success in attracting public attention, in inspiring a large proportion of the secular press, besides scientific journals, as advocates of their notions, and in obtaining entrance for them into the common school books, put into the hands of our children, and into massive quartos published by State legislatures with the money of Christian people, and in the prevalent corruption of public morals and breach of private trusts necessarily resulting from the evolution of these principles, that we are compelled, in self-defense, to examine the doctrine of evolution. It is all very well for Mr. Tyndall to warn off everybody, but evolutionists, from any investigations into cosmogony; about which he owns that they know very little now, and will not know much for some millions of years to come. But common people, who will not live so long, but who in the meantime have to live and make money, and save it, who have children to rear, and houses which they do not want burned over their heads, who have taxes to pay, increasing every year, and public plunderers to prosecute and whose ballots may be asked one of these days for the substitution of the communes of the original apes, and the Red Republic for these United States, all upon the alleged scientific proof for the truth of the doctrine of evolution, and the consequent abolishment of Christianity--common people, I maintain, by whose money and votes this dogma is to be established, will not be debarred from asking the why and the wherefore, neither by Mr. Tyndall, nor by any other scientific pope. It is a little too late in the day for men who do not know their own mind from the Alps to Belfast, and who doubt whether God made them whenever they are dyspeptic, to stand up before the public demanding that we shut our eyes and open our mouths, and swallow every preposterous notion they think proper to proclaim as science, to the destruction of our faith in the God who made us, of our respect for our brethren of mankind, and of our hope of heaven. _II. The Illogical Structure of the Theory._ When men come before the world with a dogma freighted with such wide-reaching revolutions, they ought to be prepared to furnish the most irrefragable proofs of its truth, and of its obligation and authority. We should be able to establish it beyond all controversy as based on a series of facts which take their place historically in the line of the inductive sciences; about which all men of science are agreed, as all astronomers, for instance, are agreed about gravitation; and we should be able to show that each of the alleged consequences flows inevitably and logically from these established facts. Ignorance, hypothesis, assumption of facts, sophisms, begging the question, and the like, are wholly impertinent in any such discussion. Were they even tolerable in the field of metaphysical discussion, they must, by the rules of the Positive Philosophy itself, banishing all but ascertained facts from the halls of science, be excluded from this discussion of an alleged general law of nature. But when we enter on the examination of the dogma of evolution, we find its parentage among ignoble superstitions; its fundamental facts still lie in the darkness of ignorance and assumption; and its reasoning is illogical and absurd. The most prominent feature which arrests our notice as we look closely at the theory of evolution, as presented by any of its prominent atheistical advocates is, _its illogical and incoherent structure_. The writer contradicts himself. The various parts of the theory do not hang together. The alleged facts do not sustain the conclusions deduced from them. Mr. Darwin's books especially abound in the most intolerable assumptions of principles and facts, not only without proof, but in the face of unanswered and unanswerable objections. And the theory is useless for the purpose of its proposal. All this is utterly at variance with the method of true science. None but a mind debauched by bigoted attachment to a preconceived theory could overlook these fatal defects in the system. Indeed both Darwin and Huxley admit that acceptance of the evidence must be preceded by belief in the principle of evolution. It is marvelous that any properly educated student of mental science should accept a theory so incoherent, in which the rents are scarcely held together by the patches. We can only exhibit a few specimens of the multitude of these fatal inconsistencies and deficiencies. The theory is useless as an explanation of the arcana of Nature. Mr. Darwin is, by his own acknowledgment, a very ignorant man--ignorant of the very things necessary for him to know before he can construct a method of creation, and unable to explain to us what he sets out to explain. He confesses himself ignorant of the origin and laws of inheritance, by which his whole system hangs together; of the common ancestors from which he alleges all creatures are derived; of the laws of correlation of parts, though these are indispensable to development; of the reasons of the extinction of species, which is the great business, the very trade of his great agent, Natural Selection. He has no knowledge of the duration of past ages, though that duration is an essential element of his calculations. The spontaneous variations of plants and animals are the very mainspring of his machine; but he tells us he knows nothing of the laws governing them; nor has he any information about the creation of the primordial forms, nor about the date of beginning, or rate of progress.[15] All which are necessary to be known in order to the formation of a correct theory. Again and again, when confronted with facts which his theory can not explain, he takes refuge in confessions of ignorance. When he meets facts which flatly contradict his theory of the imperceptible beneficial acquirement of organs, or of properties by inheritance--such as the sterility of hybrids, the instincts of neuter bees, the battery of the electric eel, the human eye, and the eye of the cuttle-fish, he owns that "_it is impossible to conceive_ by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced." When asked for the missing links between existing species, he refers us to the undiscovered fossiliferous strata below the Silurian. So Sir C. Lyell refers us for a view of the apes, which developed the first men, to the unexplored geological regions of Central Africa! And Rev. Baden Powell refers us, for the missing links of the chain of development, to "that enormous period of which we are, from the conditions, _precluded from knowing any thing whatever_." And as to the Origin of Species, the very thing the title of his book proclaims, and how the original germs varied into the four or five primeval forms, and these into the next, he says: "_Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound!_" And that is science! The Christian acknowledges his ignorance of the method of creation; but he presents a sufficient cause for the existence of the facts. The evolutionist ridicules the Bible account of creation as incomprehensible, and then he gives us an account which he himself owns to be incomprehensible, and which we, besides, perceive to be absurd. He proposes to explain to us the origin of species, and locates it in the geological strata of an unexplored continent, and in those remote ages of which by the conditions _we are precluded from knowing any thing whatever_! Objecting to the idea of the God of the Bible, as a self-existent, infinite, intelligent, omnipotent, good Spirit, because of its unthinkability, Messrs. Spencer, Tyndall, and the rest assure us of the eternal self existence of an intelligent cloud of gas, endowed with all promises and potencies, of life and thought, as a simple and intelligible substitute! Belief in God Almighty is only superstition, but faith in Mr. Tyndall's gas-god is science. Mr. Spencer honestly lands in the unknowable. Well, then, what science have we gained of the mysteries of our origin? Of the self-contradictions of evolutionists, we have an instance in Huxley's treatment of the fundamental fact of his system--protoplasm. The grand question is: How does the protoplasm become alive? In his famous lecture on the subject, Physical Basis of Life, he argues throughout, that life is a property of protoplasm; that protoplasm owes its properties to the nature and arrangement of its molecules; that there is no more need to infer or allege a faculty called vitality, to account for the production of these various properties of the protoplasm from its chemical constituents, than to infer a power called aquosity, to account for the generation of water from oxygen and hydrogen; and that our thoughts are the expression of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena. Briefly, our minds are manufactured by our bodies. But in his more recent work, the Classification of Animals, 1869, without any retraction of his previous error, or acknowledgment that he has changed his mind, he flatly contradicts his Physical Basis, accepting and indorsing "the well-founded doctrine that life is the cause and not the consequence of organization." A still more ridiculous incoherency of the same sort is displayed in the logical department of Huxley's Physical Basis of Life; where, after trying to persuade us to put our feet on the ladder which leads in the reverse direction from Jacob's, and to descend with him into the slough of materialism, and affirming that "our thoughts are the expression of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena;" he goes on to say, that he does not believe in materialism. And he tries to vindicate himself by asserting that "we know nothing about the composition of any body whatever as it is." And this after deducing our thoughts from the molecular changes of the protoplasm! A pretty story truly, and an impudent one! Here is a man who will tell you all about how your body made your soul out of protoplasm, and in the next page acknowledges that he knows nothing about the composition of either the body or soul as it is! And yet this man will mock the believers in the Bible as "smothering their minds under a respectable feather bed of tradition," because they hesitate to shut their eyes, and swallow his contradictions. Mr. Wallace gives us a specimen of this logical incoherence affecting if possible still more deeply the foundations of philosophic faith.[16] He heads his paragraph _Matter is Force_, and goes on to argue that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that matter, as popularly understood, does not exist. Then in a couple of pages he goes on to argue "that the whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actually _is_, the will of higher intelligences, or of one Supreme Intelligence." But the whole tenor of his book is thus demolished; since evolution, if it means anything, means the interposition of natural law between the will of the one Supreme Intelligence and the universe. And on this theory Mr. Wallace's criticisms on Mr. Darwin and others are impious, being criticisms upon parts of the will of the one Supreme Intelligence. Similar instances of self-contradiction could be given, did space permit, from almost every advocate of evolution. Our space permits the exhibition of but a single instance of the inherent incoherency of the theory. There is nothing in which all the atheistic evolutionists are more emphatic than in the exclusion of design from the universe. All their arguments and sneers are leveled against the idea, that the adaptations of Nature were designed or intended by an intelligent mind; and the theory of evolution is welcomed chiefly because it enables them to give some account of the order of the world, without any acknowledgment of a providence guiding it to some end or purpose. But yet all these same evolutionists proclaim progress as the great law of Nature, and expend themselves with wonderful eloquence in tracing the progress of nebulæ into worlds, and of worms into men. They glory in progress of the past, and prophesy progress in the future, apparently in the most childish unconsciousness, that the very idea of progress involves design, and that the fact of progress asserts providence. Nor is there any escape by alleging necessity of Nature, which is merely endowing the designer of progress with omnipotence as well as omniscience. The illogical character of the theory is still further manifested by the failure of its alleged facts to sustain the consequences deduced from them. Suppose all the facts alleged by the atheistic evolutionists were granted, how would they do away with the evidence of the being and government of God? as they loudly allege they do. Let it be granted that all men grew up from monkeys, and the monkeys from worms, and all worms grew from invisible animalculæ, and that the animalculæ flashed into life by the chemical contact of the materials of the protoplasm, and that the protoplasm was a natural crop of the cooling globe, and that the cooling globe condensed itself out of fire mist or nebulæ or star dust, I demand to know how does all that enable me to get rid of the law of causation? It is a necessary law of my nature to believe that every effect demands an adequate cause. It is equally a law of my nature to believe that every compound, or composite substance, is an effect, that the compound did not compound itself. Here is a great effect--a universe in solution, with all the chemical constituents of our globe and solar system floating in it, and all their laws of chemical affinity and proportion, and all their electrical attractions and repulsions, in full operation (else we would never get a universe to thicken down out of it); and besides, all the potencies of vegetable and animal life, and all the great powers of the human mind, in a rather vaporous condition, it is true, but still all there--Socrates, Seneca and Solomon, Moses, Solon and Blackstone, Homer, Milton and Shakespeare, Demosthenes, Cicero and Daniel Webster, Watt, Stephenson, Fulton and Morse, popes, puritans and evolutionists, universities and newspapers and congresses, the United States and the British Empire, and the rest of mankind--all boiled up into Mr. Tyndall's potencies, but all there in potency, just as truly as they ever were here in fact. Well! here is a great effect just as imperatively demanding a great First Cause as the world afterward formed out of it. These substances did not make themselves then, any more than the resulting persons or paving stones make themselves now, and they did not endow themselves with these potencies, nor calculate and establish these laws of chemical combination in exact proportion, nor determine scientifically the laws of gravitation and electricity and light and heat, before they came into being; which must have all been established before a single particle of the star dust could begin to cool, or to approach another. The very first idea of matter or of force we can form demands law, and law is merely another name for the divine order of Nature. Whatever foundation for Natural Religion, for faith in God as the Creator and Governor of the world, is afforded by the existing order of the world, it is in no degree logically weakened (though it may be practically) by viewing that order as reached by a process of evolution, since that process also must have been designed, planned, adapted to its purpose, and divinely superintended. Accordingly, we find that many philosophers, and some divines, acknowledge a process of the evolution of God's great idea, and adore him for the growth alike of forests and firmaments, regarding evolution, thus conditioned, as profoundly religious. St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas, of old, and many modern speculators, have assented to the theory of evolution as perfectly consistent with belief in God, as its Author. It is utterly illogical to allege that evolution has banished final causes. Grant it all its facts, and these facts proclaim God. It is evident, however, that evolutionists are not confident of the ability of the facts which they are able to allege to sustain their theory, since they are perpetually postulating assumptions necessary to their argument, but which are utterly unproved, and incapable of proof. Mr. Darwin is the most notorious offender against inductive science in this respect. I have now before me a list of eighty-six assumptions of this sort in the Origin of Species alone. Those in his other works are too numerous to mention. He continually mistakes his own assertions, or even his own mere conjectures, for proof, and refers back to them, and builds further assumptions upon them accordingly; and he assumes facts unproven and incapable of proof; and principles which he must know are denied by his opponents. We can only take a few instances at random. He assumes that all dogs are developed from wolves (Descent of Man, page 48); that the instincts of animals are developed (page 38); that language was developed (page 53); that there is a wider interval between the lamprey and the ape than between the ape and the man, thus begging the question of man's brutality (page 34); that the savage is the original state of man (page 63); that parental instincts are the result of Natural Selection, after owning utter ignorance of their origin (page 77); that the ideas of glory and infamy are the workings of sympathy (page 82); the heredity of moral tastes (page 98); that the standard of morality has been rising since the giving of the ten commandments (page 99); that our ancestors were quadrupeds (page 116); that there have been thousands of generations (page 125); that breeds have the character of species (Origin of Species, page 411); that rudimentary organs are inherited abortions (page 424); that there are four or five original progenitors, and distant evidence of only one (page 425); he assumes descent to prove his geology (page 428); and perpetual progress toward perfection (pages 59, 140, 176, 428), in the face of his own facts of retrogression. Then look at the outrageous character of the assumption that beneficial variations may be added up indefinitely, that is, to infinity. Because a gymnast can leap over two horses, can his son leap over three? and his son over four? and his son over five? and can we in time breed a man who will leap to the moon? And yet the whole theory is based upon forgetfulness of the maxim, that there is a limit to all things, and of the fact, that in creatures of flesh and blood this limit is very soon reached. Look again at the utterly erroneous assumption that the tendency of the struggle for life is to improve the combatants; an assumption contradicted by the whole history of famine, war, pauperism, and disease, among brutes and men. Were the survivors of the Irish famine of 1847, or those of the Persian, or Bengali famines improved by their struggle for life? It is true the fittest survived; but that was all; they were miserably emaciated and demoralized. Were the peasantry of Europe improved by the wars of the French Revolution? On the contrary, though the fittest survived, France was obliged to lower the recruiting standard three inches. In all cases the struggle for life injures all concerned. And yet upon these two fundamental assumptions the theory is built; of which that of the indefinite accumulation of small profitable variations is outrageously impossible and absurd; and the other, of the improvement of breeds by starvation and hardships, is contrary to all observation and experience! Take away these two assumptions, and the whole theory of the gradual improvement of plants and animals by such agency vanishes. There is no such power of indefinite improvement by Natural Selection, as Mr. Darwin asserts. The utmost it can do is to keep breeds up to the natural standard, or near to it, by destroying the weakest; but at the same time it weakens the strongest also. Were there no other objection, this one would be fatal, that Mr. Darwin assigns an elevating power to a depressing agency, and asserts war, famine, hardship, and disease as his holy angels perfecting progress. Mr. Darwin presents the most preposterous assumptions with such coolness and apparent unconsciousness of their utter improbability to his readers, and with such an entire ignoring of the necessity of any further attestation than his own _ipse dixit_, as to warrant serious suspicions of his sanity. Take, for instance, his bear and whale story. Hearne reports having seen in the Arctic regions a bear swimming in the water for hours, with his mouth wide open, catching flies; and Mr. Darwin says if the supply of flies were constant (where the winter lasts eight months of the year 40° below zero) _he can see no difficulty in the production at length of an animal as monstrous as a whale_! M. Comte's disciples never suspected their master's sanity till he invented a religion for them. 2. This theory, it should be remembered, is _merely a theory_, _a mere notion_, _a hypothesis_. It is not even alleged that it is based upon facts actually discovered. The alleged facts of the cooling of the nebulæ, the chemical origin of life upon our globe, and the development of the original Ascidian into the fish, and that into the monkey, and of the monkey into the man, never were witnessed by anybody, nor could they be witnessed. La Place was honest enough to call his part of the theory, The Nebular _Hypothesis_. He had no idea of claiming for it the rank of a fact of science upon which he, or anybody else, might build a system. Nor are the modern assertors of evolution able to establish a single instance of the chemical origin of life at the present day; though thousands of experiments have been made attempting that exploit, by English, French, and German chemists during the last forty years. Nor has a single case of the transmutation of species ever been observed in wild animals or plants; nor has any change of species been produced in tame ones by domestication or culture. No naturalist has seen a community of apes in the process of improvement toward manhood; nor has any philologist described the first attempts of the monkeys toward the articulation of language, or the manufacture of clothing, unless we except Mr. Lemuel Gulliver's interesting account of the Yahoos. It must be acknowledged that the animals described by that accurate observer, and graphic describer, approach more nearly to those required by Mr. Darwin's theory than any ever seen before, or since. Hence it is greatly to be desired that some scientific evolutionists should thoroughly explore those regions, investigate the manners and customs of the Yahoos with the enthusiasm of a true Darwinian, and minutely describe those interesting features which would enable us to decide whether they are monkeys progressing to manhood, or men brutalizing into apehood; but which Mr. Gulliver's lack of scientific enthusiasm for evolution prevented him from closely examining. But until the scientific standing of Mr. Gulliver's Yahoos is determined, the theory of evolution must be assigned to the mountains of speculations, big with expectation, but which yet await the birth of their first fact. Mr. Darwin indeed alleges the results of domestication upon animals and plants, as producing permanent varieties as different in appearance as many which are ranked by naturalists as different species, and he alleges that Natural Selection carries on a similar process of improvement among wild animals and plants. But the facts of domestication are most emphatic in refusing to acknowledge any change of species of the most carefully bred animals. The efforts of breeders have been exerted for thousands of years upon the dog, the ox, the goat, the sheep, and the ass, the horse, and the camel, among animals; and upon the goose, the duck, and the pigeon, and for a shorter time, but still for two thousand years, upon the common barn-door poultry. Farmers in all lands, since the deluge, have used their best exertions to improve the cereals, the fruit trees, the vines, and root crops, and vegetables, and the result has been some valuable modifications of size, shape, flavor, and fertility; but in no case whatever has any change of species been effected. All the efforts of breeders have not succeeded in making the horse specifically different from the noble animal described in the Book of Job four thousand years ago. The sheep has not become a goat, nor the goat a sheep, by all the pains of all the shepherds since the days of Abel. The ass displays not the least tendency to become a horse, nor the goat to become a cow. Mr. Darwin makes great capital out of pigeons, enumerating all the varieties owned by fanciers, and showing how the Indian emperors bred them a thousand years before Christ. But it is strange that he does not see that this makes against his theory; since in all that time this most variable of birds has never been transmuted into any other species. The pigeon has never been changed into a crow, or a magpie, or a woodpecker, or a chicken; has never, in fact, become anything else than a pigeon. Dogs are also somewhat variable in their varieties, and Mr. Darwin relies greatly upon supposed variations from some one assumed ancestral pair of dogs, into the greyhound, mastiff, terrier, and lapdog. But granting all these unproven variations, no instance is alleged of a dog ever becoming a cat or a lion by any care or culture. It will not do to allege, that, for anything we know to the contrary, our present breeds of domestic animals and plants may be so different from those called by the same names in ancient times as to be really different species. We do know many things to the contrary. In the tombs of the Egyptians, and the sculptures of the Assyrians, we have pictures of the various plants, birds, and animals, from three to four thousand years old, as well as of man, the most domestic animal of the whole. These paintings and sculptures assure us that in all those millenniums domestication has not produced the slightest change in the races of animals, plants, or men. The Ethiopian has not changed his skin, nor the leopard his spots. The negro was then the same black-skinned, woolly-headed, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, long-heeled person he is to-day, as pompous, good-humored, and fond of finery. The Assyrian statues are good, recognizable likenesses of eminent living Jewish merchants, in London and New Orleans. The old Pharaohs of the monuments can be matched for face and figure any day in the bazars of Cairo. The greyhound of the tombs is the same variety now used for coursing hares in the desert. The camel, the ass, and the Arab, and Assyrian breeds of horses, have not been at all improved in forty centuries. Even Mr. Darwin's favorite pigeons would seem to have ceased to vary; for the carrier-pigeons let loose by Sesostris, to carry the news of his coronation to all the cities of Egypt, do not differ a feather from the modern Egyptian carrier-pigeons. The various wild animals, and many of the plants, are represented on these monuments in great variety. Among these I have noted the lotus, the papyrus, the leek, the palm, wheat, barley, and millet; the crocodile, the frog, the crane, the flamingo, the ibis, the goose, the owl, the ostrich, the peacock; and of beasts the now famous ancestral ape, Ptolemy's tame lion, the leopard, the gazelle, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, and the wild boar, and many others. But there is not the least perceptible change in the corresponding species now inhabiting Egypt and the desert. We can go further than the mere external appearance; for we can actually dissect specimens of the various animals, and thus satisfy ourselves whether any physiological change, amounting to a transmutation of species, has occurred, or was in progress; and the investigation has been conducted by no less a physiologist and zoologist than Cuvier, whose authority in such matters no naturalist will dispute. And this is what he says: "It might seem as if the ancient Egyptians had been inspired by nature, for the purpose of transmitting to after ages a monument of her natural history. That strange and whimsical people, by embalming with so much care the brutes which were the objects of their stupid adoration, have left us in their sacred grottoes cabinets of zoology almost complete. Climate has conspired with art to preserve the bodies from corruption, and we can now assure ourselves with our own eyes what was the state of a good number of species three thousand years ago. * * * I have endeavored to collect all the ancient documents respecting the forms of animals, and there are none equal to those furnished by the Egyptians, both in regard to their antiquity and abundance. I have examined with the greatest care the engraved figures of quadrupeds and birds upon the obelisks brought from Egypt to ancient Rome; and all these figures, one with another, have a perfect resemblance to their intended objects, such as they still are in our days. My learned friend, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, convinced me of the importance of this research, and carefully collected in the tombs and temples of Upper and Lower Egypt as many mummies of animals as he could procure. He has brought home the mummies of cats, ibises, birds of prey, dogs, crocodiles, and the head of a bull. After the most attentive and detailed examination, not the smallest difference is to be perceived between these animals and those of the same species which we now see, any more than between human mummies and skeletons of men of the present day."[17] There is then not the first fact, or appearance of a fact, to be adduced in proof of the change of species either by domestication, or Natural Selection, or any other process known to man. That any such evolution of any animal, or plant, into one of another species ever occurred, is a mere empty notion, in support of which no facts can be adduced. All the animals and plants of which we know anything have remained unchanged since the beginning of man's observation of them. The theory endeavors to account for a change which never happened. It is a mere empty dream, unworthy of a serious consideration by any mind imbued with the first principle of inductive science--namely, that all science is the orderly knowledge of facts; and whose first rule is, _first ascertain your facts_. But it is urged, that though such a change has not occurred during the brief period of human history, it may have been practicable in the lengthened periods revealed by geology, and while the forces of nature were more vigorous during the youth of our planet. This, in fact, is the grand resource of the modern evolutionists--the almost infinite periods and possibilities of geology. We refuse, however, to follow Mr. Powell into those unexplored realms of the infinite past and discuss the possibilities of ages, of which "by the conditions we can not know anything whatever." We will go as far as the geological strata furnish us with any facts, any evidences of life, any traces of plants or animals of which corresponding species still exist, and will unhesitatingly affirm, on the authority of the most eminent geologists, that such geological representatives of existing species furnish no evidence whatever of evolution into higher forms. On the contrary, we shall show that many species have existed without the slightest change for many thousands, aye, and millions of years, sufficiently long to establish the fact of the permanence of species during the geologic ages known to man. Geologists are generally agreed that the first Florida Coral Reef is at least 30,000 years old; but Agassiz asserts, uncontradicted, that the insect which built it has not altered in the least in that period, and he says regarding it: "These facts furnish evidence, as direct as we can obtain in any branch of physical inquiry, that some at least of the species of animals now existing have been in existence 30,000 years, and have not undergone the slightest change in that period." But we can go still further back, and demonstrate the permanence of vegetable structure. Hugh Miller says: "The oak, the birch, the hazel, the Scotch fir, all lived, I repeat, in what is now Britain, ere the last great depression of the land. The gigantic northern elephant and rhinoceros, extinct for untold ages, forced their way through the tangled branches; and the British tiger and hyena harbored in their thickets. Cuvier framed an argument for the fixity of species on the fact that the birds and beasts of the catacombs were identical in every respect with the animals of the same kind that live now. But what, it has been asked, is a brief period of 3,000 years, when compared with the geologic ages? Or how could any such argument be founded on a basis so little extended? It is, however, to no such narrow basis that we can refer in the case of these woods. All human history is comprised in the nearer corner of the immense period they measure out; and yet from their first appearance in creation till now, they have not altered a single fiber. And such on this point is the invariable testimony of Paleontologic science, testimony so invariable that no great Paleontologist was ever yet an asserter of the Development Hypothesis."[18] To the same purpose let us hear Huxley's testimony, since no one will suspect him of undue respect for Moses: "Obviously if the earliest fossiliferous rocks now known are coeval with the commencement of life, and if their contents give us any just conception of the earliest fauna and flora, the insignificant amount of modification which can be demonstrated to have taken place in any one group of animals and plants, is quite incompatible with the hypothesis that all living forms are the results of a process of necessary progressive development entirely comprised within the time represented by the fossiliferous rocks."[19] We are fully warranted, then, in alleging, that no such transmutation of species is known to science, as an existing fact, or as having ever occurred. As to the supposition on which the evolutionists fall back, that such a miracle might have happened thousands of millions of years before the formation of the lowest rocks known to us, we might well decline the discussion of may-be's as facts of science. But there is a positive denial of unimaginable periods of time for Mr. Darwin's evolution to try its blundering experiments. We are empowered to say positively, No! There is no such length of time for you, Mr. Darwin, on this little globe at least. This rotating world had a beginning; so had our moon; and our sun, too, began to burn one day. And there are data of the revolution of these bodies, and of the secular cooling of the earth, and of the gradual combustion of the sun, and of the retardation of the earth's motions, from which Sir Wm. Thompson (in his Treatise on Geological Time) calculates, that our earth has not been in a fit state for plants and animals for more than a hundred millions of years; and he demonstrates the absurdity of the demand for unlimited time, as contradictory to the facts of physical astronomy. Hence we deny the possibility of evolution in the infinite ages of the past. There never were any such ages on this world of ours. 4. Failing to find facts, evolutionists fall back upon analogies, and support their hypothesis by the supposed analogy of the _growth of the embryos of all plants and animals from germs alleged to be originally perfectly similar_--simple protoplasm cells, which by subsequent evolution, differentiate themselves as widely as the moss from the man. The subject is too obscure for popular discussion. I can only announce the results of the latest and most authoritative researches.[20] 1. Analogy is a very unsafe guide here, because the differences between the limited life of the individual, and the alleged unlimited life of the race, are precisely those of which we have no analogy. 2. It is not true that "the original substratum or material is in every instance alike," nor that the "primordial cell is in every instance the same," whether of the "lichen or the man;"[21] nor as others allege, "that chemical reagents detect no differences between them." Chemical reagents are very clumsy instruments for the analysis of living beings, and their properties and powers; which are the antagonists of chemical reactions. Nevertheless, heat is a well-known chemical agent, and the application of heat to a fertilized, and to an unfertilized, germ develops a whole world of difference between them. The one becomes a chicken, the other an addled egg. Moreover, the application of different degrees of heat to different germs produces the most various reactions. The germs of trout are speedily killed by the moderate temperature of 65° Fahrenheit, while the germs of most animalculæ and plants develop rapidly at that temperature. Such instances might be multiplied, but these are sufficient to contradict the rash assertion of sameness, because a hasty observer did not take pains to discover differences. 3. There are four distinct plans of structure in the animal kingdom, and at least three, perhaps more, in the vegetable kingdom; and every germ, from the first instant when its evolution can be seen at all, is seen to develop only according to its own proper method. There is no more confusion of germs, or embryos, than of plants or animals. 4. No instance has ever been known of a germ producing an animal, or plant, of another species, by any process of stopping short of ripening, or undue prolongation of it. Every seed breeds true to its kind, or not at all, or produces a deformity. Embryology utterly refuses the notion of the transmutation of species. Mr. Darwin's various references to rudimentary organs, like the bones of a hand in the flipper of the whale, or the teats of male animals, and the like, can hardly be called arguments. He tries to account for them and fails; acknowledging ignorance of the laws of heredity. Some of them he will have to be young organs in process of evolution, others organs aborted for want of exercise. In this category he ought to place the tail which he ought to have inherited from his ancestors, as he is greatly exercised to know what became of it. But it is evident that his attempts to build arguments on such things, and to account for occasional variations by atarism, are in contradiction to his principles. Most of the known instances of the origination of permanent varieties were not the result of infinitesimal improvements, but were sudden and complete at once. The Japan peacocks, the short-legged sheep, the porcupine man and his family, and the six-fingered men, were not at all the results of a slow process of evolution; on the contrary, they were born so, complete at once, in utter contradiction of the theory. 5. The only other line of argument, which has any show of probability, is that based upon _the gradations of the various orders of plants and animals_. Not but that there are many other arguments adduced, but they are of too technical a character to be intelligible to any but zoologists, and of too little weight to demand consideration after the leading arguments are overturned. But this argument from gradation, though logically unsound, is plausibly specious, and therefore demands notice. By far the ablest exhibition of this argument is that made by Lamarck, and we give it as he presents it: "The greater the abundance of natural objects assembled together, the more do we discover proofs that everything passes by insensible shades into something else; that even the more remarkable differences are evanescent, and that nature has for the most part left us nothing at our disposal for establishing distinctions, save trifling, and in some respects puerile particularities. We find that many genera among plants and animals are of such an extent, in consequence of the number of species referred to them, that the study and determination of these last have become almost impracticable. When the species are arranged in a series, and placed near to each other, with a due regard to their natural affinities, they each differ in so minute a degree from those next adjoining, that they almost melt into each other, and are in a manner confounded together. If we see isolated species, we may presume the absence of some more closely connected, and which have not yet been discovered. Already there are genera, and even entire orders, nay, whole classes which present this state of things." He then goes on to present, "as a guide to conjecture," what his successors now assert as a fact: "In the first place, if we examine the whole series of known animals, from one extremity to the other, when they are arranged in the order of their natural relations, we find that we may pass progressively, or at least with very few interruptions, from beings of more simple to those of more compound structure; and in proportion as the complexity of their organization increases, the number and dignity of their faculties increase also. Among plants a similar approximation to a graduated scale of being is apparent. Secondly, it appears, from geological observations, that plants and animals of more simple organization existed on the globe before the appearance of those of more compound structure, and the latter were successively formed at more modern periods, each new race being more fully developed than the most perfect of the preceding one."[22] From this gradation of nature, thus stated, the evolutionists go on to infer genealogy, the birth descent of the larger from the smaller, and of the more complex from the simpler forms, as the only scientific explanation. But it is by no means the only scientific explanation of the order of nature. The best naturalists, from Moses to Agassiz, have regarded the order of nature as the development of the divine idea, have prosecuted their researches on that view, and have regarded that as a sufficient and scientific explanation of the gradation of plants and animals, as they actually exist. The idea of birth descent can not be logically connected with that of gradation; especially with a gradation upward. Were the order of nature such as Lamarck describes, how could any man logically infer the birth descent of each of its classes from the next below? Here is an ironmonger's sample card of wood screws, beginning with those one-quarter of an inch long, and proceeding by gradations of one-sixteenth of an inch to those of four inches. Does the gradation show that the little ones begot the big ones? It may be said the wood screws do not beget progeny. Well, here is a hill containing twenty-three potatoes, weighing from half an ounce to half a pound, and quite regularly graded. Did the small potatoes beget the big ones? The inference of birth descent from gradation is utterly illogical, and of a piece with the incoherency which we have seen in the other parts of the theory. It never could be inferred from the facts stated, even did nature correspond to Lamarck's description. But nature does not correspond to Lamarck's description. That description corresponded moderately, perhaps, to the science of his day, which was based chiefly upon external resemblances; but no scientific naturalist of the present day would accept it as a correct statement of the facts revealed by modern science. In the first place there is no such imperceptible blending and shading off of species as the description would imply, obliterating all distinctions of species, and rendering it impossible even for a naturalist to distinguish one species from another. Since the time of Lamarck, structure and physiology have been more studied than mere external appearances; so that from a tooth or bone Cuvier or Agassiz could reconstruct an animal, and indicate its internal organization, as well as its form and habits. But even in Lamarck's days, and even to the most uneducated, there was no such imperceptible shading and blending as the theory requires. It is well to look here at its requirements, for they are not fully presented by its friends. Mr. Darwin gives us a diagram exhibiting the variation of an original species into a score or so of varieties, ending in distinct species. But this is very far, indeed, below the necessities of the case. The horse hair worm lays 8,000,000 of eggs; and the primeval germ, whatever it was, could hardly be less fertile, since fertility increases with simplicity of structure. But, taking 8,000,000 to begin with, here were as many varieties; since no two of them, or of any creature, could be exactly alike. The next generation would give 8,000,000 times as many varieties, and so on till Natural Selection began to thin off the feeble. But here we have, instead of a few well-marked varieties, an infinite multitude of imperceptible variations, rendering classification impossible. And as all these were only varieties of the same breed, they would breed together, and thus still more confuse the complexity, and render distinction of species impossible. For, in spite of all Mr. Darwin has to say about the extinction of the weaker varieties, the fact is, they are not at all extinguished, but keep their ground as well as the higher classes, or perhaps better. And if a snail, or a worm, can contrive to live now in an unimproved condition, why should its improving cousin die off? Did its improvement kill it? And so of improving mollusks, and well-doing radiates, and aspiring rabbits, and all the rest. The world ought to be so full of them that no man could sort them off into species, or tell which was fish, which was flesh, and which red herring; and no pork packer could distinguish hog from dog. But instead of any such horrible confusion of a world full of mongrels, we discover a clear and well defined distinction of species, known even to the poor animals themselves, and by their instincts made known to all mankind. The Creator, who created all creatures after their kind, implanted in them an instinct of breeding only with their own species; and placed a bar in the way of man's vain attempts to work confusion of species, by rendering the hybrid offspring of different species sterile, or only capable of breeding back to the pure blood. Innumerable attempts have been made by fraud and force to procure cross breeds of different species of plants and animals, but always with the same result--the extinction of the progeny of the hybrid, unless bred back to nature. While a mingling of various breeds of the same species--horses, sheep, or cattle--generally increases fertility, the attempt to mingle different species, as the horse and the ass, though so similar, always produces sterile offspring. It is impossible to conceive any form in which the Creator could more emphatically protest against the attempt to confuse the distinctions of species He established. God has fixed a barrier against the mixture or confusion of species by cross breeding, by ordaining the sterility of hybrids. Mr. Darwin labors in vain to explain away this great fact. It can not be explained into conformity with the evolution theory; for in that theory all species are only breeds or varieties of one species, and ought to increase their fertility by cross breeding. With all scientific naturalists, as with all people of common sense, this proves that species have a distinct existence in nature, and that the Creator has ordained the continuance of their distinct existence; which is the denial of evolution. When Mr. Darwin retreats into the geologic ages, and confessing that his principle has ceased to be operative now in our world, and refers us to them for such evolution of one species from another, he abandons the fundamental principle of his school--the uniformity of nature--and falls back on Christian ground the necessity for supernatural origins. He virtually admits the death or superannuation of Natural Selection, since it has retired from the business of species-making. But when we go back to those old geologic ages, we find that species were then not only as distinct as now, but that the distinctions were even bolder and more visible. Many of them have ceased to exist, but they have left their shells, their petrified casts, and their bones, by which we can see that they stood apart in well-defined groups, without any such blending and confusion as the evolution theory asserts. Over three thousand species are already classified. Between every two of them there ought to be, on Mr. Darwin's showing, a hundred intermediate variations at the least; and between some of the more widely separated forms there ought to be thousands of intermediate varieties; as for instance between the bear and the whale; and a still greater number between the mollusk with its external shell, and the vertebrate with its internal skeleton. And we ought to find these intermediate forms closely connected with their parents and their children. For intermediate forms in another continent could not be the connecting links between the mollusks and vertebrates of a distant country, say of England. In the same strata in which we find the two ends of the chain, and lying between the two ends of the chain, we ought to find the connecting links. And we ought to find a hundred connecting links for every specimen of distinct species, since Mr. Darwin alleges that they must have lived and died somewhere; and we have seen they must have lived and died right there where they were born, and where they begot their progeny. The geological strata ought to be full of connecting links. But when we come to look for them they are not there. Geology knows nothing about them. It has plenty of distinct, well-defined species--trilobites, and ammonites, and echinoderms, palms, ferns, firs, and mosses, all sorts of quadrupeds from a mouse to a mastodon, and all just as clean-cut and well-defined as the species of existing animals. Mr. Darwin can not find his connecting links between the species, which ought to have been a hundred times more plentiful than the species they connected. These connecting links are missing links. He ought to be able to overwhelm his opponents, and bury them under mountains of the bones of intermediate species. But all his friends can do is to suggest about half a dozen, while he needs three hundred thousand. He can not pay half a cent on the dollar. In his grief he turns round and abuses the defectiveness of the geological record, which he says he could never have suspected of being so defective but for this failure to meet his drafts. But he need not blame the geological record for not preserving bones of animals which never lived. Geology says there never was any such confusion of species as evolution asserts. But not only does the general structure of the web of nature present a clearly striped pattern, instead of the mottled gray of the theory--neither the beginning, nor the middle, nor the end is like what the evolution theory would produce. The gradation does not begin, as the theory asserts and demands, with the monads. On the contrary, we find that there are four kingdoms of animal life--in an ascending scale--the radiate, or starfish; the mollusk or oyster; the articulate, or insect; and the vertebrate, or animals with backbones. Now the evolution ought to have begun at the bottom, with the radiate, the coral, and the starfish; it should have gone upward, the coral developing into the oyster, and the oyster into the lobster, and the lobster into the salmon, and so on. But instead of that we discover, away down in the Silurian strata, at the very beginning of life, _all the four kingdoms_--the radiates, the mollusks, the articulates, and the fish! Evidently, then, there was no such beginning of the world as evolutionists suppose. Then as we work upward along the line of march, and of the development of the divine idea, we observe that when new species were introduced, they did not work up slowly from small and weak beginnings; beginning with dwarfs and growing up to giants; but, on the contrary, the giants head the column. The geological books are full of them--sharks forty feet long, frogs as big as oxen, ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus of fabulous proportions--were not their skeletons preserved--pterodactyles, or bats, as big as a dog, the mastodon giganteus, beside which an ordinary modern elephant is like a Shetland pony beside a dray horse, ferns as big as oak trees, and mosses eighteen inches in diameter, shell fish of the nautilus order the size of dinner plates, and crustaceans, cousins to the lobster, three feet long. And all this at the very first start in life of these respective families, and in overwhelming multitudes. That was no age of small beginnings, and small progressive improvements. On the contrary, these old families, like some other old families, seem to have rather lost rank, and bulk, and influence; at least their modern representatives cut no such figure in the world as their predecessors. As we proceed along the line we meet gaps which slay the theory of genealogical descent altogether. A gap is fatal to it. If a family dies out, that is the end of it. You can not resuscitate it after a few centuries, and go on with that breed; much less can you pick up a breed quite different, and attach it to your old genealogy. But in the line of evolution we meet these fatal gaps; and no evolutionist has bridged them, because they can not possibly be bridged. The first great gap is the abyss between death and life. No human power can cross it. How could the chemical actions of dead matter infuse vitality into the first germ, or bud of a plant? For chemical actions are the antagonists of life, and constantly laboring to destroy the living organism, and finally they succeed. There is no process of evolution known to man which can carry evolution across this abyss. But till evolution crosses this gulf it can not even begin to operate. This first abyss is its grave. But, supposing life begun in the plant first, as the theory requires, there is another gap between the life of the plant and that of the animal; for all animal life is sustained by another sort of food than that which feeds the vegetable. The vegetable feeds solely on chemical, unorganized matters; the animal solely on matter organized, on some plant, or on some other animal which feeds on plants. No animal can live on the food of plants. Here then is another gap which can not be bridged over, nor crossed; for the plant in process of conversion into an animal is in process of starvation, and when the process is about to be completed, it will end like the miser's horse, whose master diminished his oats Darwinianly, a single grain a day, until he had brought him to live on just one grain per day, when, alas! the victim of the experiment died. And so ends evolution experiment No. 2. Then we come on a multitude of gaps, breaks in the uniformity of nature, called for by the evolutionists, between the species which will not breed together. There ought to be no such species on the theory; or, if there are, there ought to be a multitude of intervening varieties toning down the interval; for instance, between the horse and the cow, and between the sheep and the hog. All the ingenuity of all the evolutionists has been tasked in vain to produce any instance of the confusion of two such species, or of the production of a new true species by the intermixture of blood. But they might just as well try to convert iron into gold, or sulphur into carbon. In fact, evolution is the modern physiological form of the old chemical superstition, alchemy, substituting for the transmutation of metals the problem of the transmutation of animals. It were endless to attempt to exhibit the impossibilities of crossing the gaps between the water-breathing fish and the air-breathing animal; between the flying-bird and the quadruped; between instinct and education; between brute selfishness and maternal affection; between the habits of the solitary and those of the gregarious, and those of the colonial insects and animals. No one of these is accounted for satisfactorily by the theory of evolution. But space forbids the attempt. We only cite one other gulf which the theory can not cross: the gulf between the brute and the man. We should rather say the three gulfs; for between man's body and that of the brute there is a gap which Natural Selection can not cross; another between man's intellectual powers and those of brutes; and the third, and widest of all, between his conscience and their brutal appetites. The gulf between man's body and that of any brute is marked along the whole line, from the solid basis of the feet, enabling him to stand erect, look upward and behold the stars; along the line of the stiff backbone, maintaining the dignified posture; to the hands, on which treatises have been written, displaying their wonderful superiority over those of all other creatures, and enabling man to do what no other animal has done, to fill the world with his handiworks, and alter the very face of nature with his ax, and spade, and steam engine. His tongue and organs of articulate speech alone, were there no other characteristic, proclaim him different from all other animals; none of those resembling him in outward form making the slightest attempts toward articulate language or being able to do so. Man alone, of all the animals, possesses no natural covering, but is exposed naked to the inclemency of the elements. What little hair he possesses is chiefly on the breast, where it is of little use as a covering, and on the head, which in other animals is never better protected than the body. Mr. Darwin alleges that the first men were hairy, like apes. Well, how did they lose their hair? Not by Natural Selection, which only perpetuates _profitable_ variations; but the loss of hair to an ape would be as unprofitable as the loss of your clothes to you. Not by Sexual Selection, for there is not the slightest evidence that nudity was ever popular in apedom. We have undoubted evidence, in the two bone needles found with the bones of the man of Mentone, that the primeval men were naked, and complete proof that Natural Selection could not effect such a disadvantageous change had they been hairy. Here, then, we have an _inferiority_ to other animals in the animal structure, strangely at variance with the general superiority, and only to be accounted for as an educational provision. But chiefly in the human head does the great outward distinction appear. The brain is the great instrument with which the mind works. You can gauge the strength of Ulysses by his bow, and the bulk of the giant by the staff of his spear, which was like a weaver's beam. The brain of the largest ape is about thirty two cubic inches. The brains of the wildest Australians are more than double that capacity. They measure from seventy-five inches to ninety. Europeans' brains measure from ninety to one hundred inches. There are instances of Esquimaux measuring over ninety. Even the brain of an idiot is double the size of that of the orang-otang. But how did man get this extraordinary development of brain, far beyond his necessities? For the cave man of Mentone, who hunted the bison, had as good a head as Bismarck. Natural Selection could not develop an ape's brain in advance of his necessities. But here we have a prophetic structure; man's head developed far in advance of his necessities. Here is a power at work superior to Natural Selection. With such an instrument man has gone to work and supplied his deficiencies. Inferior to many animals in strength and speed, he has manufactured weapons, and subdued them all, asserting himself as the lord of creation, conquering even the mighty mastodon, and piercing the huge Caledonian whale with his reindeer harpoon. He has remedied his want of hair by the manufacture of clothing from the spoils of his victims. He has rendered himself independent of the weather by the shelter of his house. He has ceased to be dependent on the spontaneous fruits of the forest by the cultivation of the soil, and so has become a cosmopolite, confined to no province of creation. He has constructed ships, and provisioned them for long voyages, and visited, and colonized every coast of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australia. He has formed civilized societies with laws, government, and religion. He has leveled roads, navigated rivers, tunneled mountains, dug navigable canals, constructed steamboats, built railroads, invented electric telegraphs, and steam printing presses; and generally he has developed ideas of society, nationality, and of the universal brotherhood of man, not only not possible under the laws of Natural Selection, but in the most direct contrariety to those laws, which work only for the benefit of the individual. Never under those laws could any great community of animals be formed, never could they obtain the notion of representative government, never combine their powers for any national enterprise, nor could the most hairy and muscular-tailed of Mr. Darwin's ancestors secure subscribers sufficient to warrant him in starting even a county newspaper. But it is in the moral sense which enables man to distinguish right from wrong, the conscience, which forbids and reproves the unbridled indulgence of the animal appetites, that we observe the grand distinction between man and the brute. There is nothing in the writings of evolutionists more pitiable than their attempts to degrade conscience into a mere gregarious instinct, an outcome of utility to the tribe, and to pleasurable sensations, resulting from the exercise of the social instincts. It would appear that these writers had so sophisticated their own minds that they have ceased to understand the fundamental, world-wide difference between right and gain, between duty and pleasure. "Do justice, though the heavens fall," could never be evolved by Natural Selection. That is the law of the sharpest tooth, and the longest claws, and the biggest bull; the Napoleonic theology, whose god is always on the side of the strongest battalions; the law of the perdition of the weak, and the survival of the strongest. In obedience to its laws the birds forsake their parents as soon as they can shift for themselves; the herd tramples down the wounded deer; the wolves devour their wounded brothers; the queen bee puts her sisters to death, and the neuters sacrifice all the males of the hive. In obedience to the laws of Natural Selection, the males fight for the most attractive females, and keep as many as they can, and form societies on that basis. But man has a sense of justice, and mercy, and gratitude, and love. Here is an animal who knows he ought to tell truth, and do right, and honor his parents, and respect and love his brethren. Whether he always does his duty or not, he feels and owns he ought to do it. Justice, and mercy, and the fear of God, are not at all the attributes of brutes, and never could have been produced by the evolution of their instincts. No animal possesses any knowledge of God, nor practices any form of religious worship. Religion, then, could not be the evolution of what has no existence. We have now considered the theory of the atheistical evolution of man, and of all plants and animals from one primeval germ, by the unintelligent operation of the powers of nature. We have seen that there are as many contradictory applications of the theory as there are advocates of it; that in any shape it is incoherent, illogical, and absurd; that it is destitute of any support from facts; that the alleged analogy of embryology fails to give it countenance; that the order of nature in its gradations is contradictory of the theory; that it utterly fails to account for the origin of life, for the distinctness of the four classes of the animal kingdom, for the distinctness of species which refuse to breed together, for the absence of the intermediate forms necessary to the theory; and, above all, that it can give no satisfactory account of man's bodily, mental, and moral superiority to all other animals, nor for his possession of a knowledge of God. Its tendency, moreover, is inevitably to degrade man, to destroy that sense of his dignity which is the principal security of human life, to obliterate a belief in the divine origin and sanction of morality, and in the existence of a future life of rewards and punishments, and so to promote the disorganization of society, and the degradation of men to the level of brutes, living only under the laws of their brutal instincts. For all these reasons we reject the theory as unscientific, absurd, degrading to man, and offensive to the God who made him. FOOTNOTES: [5] The Descent of Man, p. 198, American Edition. [6] The Descent of Man, p. 191, Am. Ed. [7] Descent of Man, p. 199, Am. Ed. [8] Descent of Man, 197, Am. Ed. [9] The Variations of Animals, etc., Vol. II. page 515. [10] Lay Sermons, p. 30. [11] Lay Sermons, 303. [12] Cited by Hodge in "What is Darwinism?" Page 73, etc. [13] Natural Selection, 372 A., Am. Ed. [14] From the _Presbyterian_, December 7, 1872. [15] Origin of Species, 4, 10, 127, 9, 97, 100, 409, 410, 415, 423. Descent of Man, 192, 204, and II.--15, 257. [16] Natural Selection, p. 365. Am. Ed. [17] Theory of the Earth, 123. [18] Testimony of the Rocks, 77. [19] Address at Annual Meeting of the Geological Society, 1862. [20] Agassiz's Methods of Study. [21] Draper's Human Physiology, 506. [22] Lyell's Principles of Geology, Book III., Chapter 33. CHAPTER III. IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD? Pantheism is that perversion of reason and language which denies God's personality, and calls some imaginary soul of the world, or the world itself, by his name. While Pantheists are fully agreed upon the propriety of getting rid of a God who could note their conduct, and call them to account for it hereafter, and who would claim to exercise any authority over them here, they are by no means agreed, either in India, Germany, or America, as to what they shall call by his name. Public opinion necessitates them to say they believe in a God, but almost every one has his own private opinion as to what it is. We shall speak of it as we hear it pronounced from the lips of its prophets, here, as well as in the writings of its expounders, in Europe, and Asia. Some of them declare, that it is some absolutely unknown cause of all the phenomena of the universe, and others, that it is the universe itself. A large class speak of it as the great soul of the world, while the more materialistic regard it as the world itself, body and soul; the soul being the sum of all the imponderable forces, such as gravitation, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, galvanism, vegetable and animal life, and especially the mesmeric influence, of which many of them regard intellect as a modification; and the body being the sum of all the ponderable substances, such as air, water, earth, minerals, vegetables, and bodies of animals and men. This creed is popularly expressed in the sentence so often heard, "God is everything, and everything is God." But this vast generalization of all things into the higher unity--this exalting of monkeys, men, snails, and paving stones to the same level of divinity--by no means meets the views of the more unphilosophical and aspiring gods and goddesses, for the very reason that it is so impartial. To deify a man and his cat by the same process is not much of a distinction to the former; and of what advantage is it to be made a god, if he does not thereby obtain some distinction? This leveling apotheosis is generally confined to the German Pantheists; their more ambitious American brethren ascribe the contented humility which accepts it to the continual influence of the fumes of tobacco and lager beer. Man is the great deity of the other class. Renan boldly says: "For myself, I believe there is not in the universe an intelligence superior to that of man; the absolute of justice and reason manifests itself only in humanity; regarded apart from humanity that absolute exists only as an abstraction. The infinite exists only when it clothes itself in form."[23] And as the soul of man is, rather inconsistently for people who believe everything God, supposed to be superior to the rest of him, they go off into great rhapsodies of adoration of their own souls. "The doctrine of the soul--first _soul_, and second _soul_, and evermore _soul_"[24]--is the doctrine which is to regenerate the world. God, in their view, is nothing till he attains self-consciousness in man. "The universal does not attract us till housed in the individual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mere egotism vanishes. The currents of the universal being circulate through me. I am part or particle of God." "I stand here to say, 'Let us worship the mighty and transcendent soul.'" "God attains to self-consciousness only in the human soul." "Honor yourself." "Reverence your own individuality." "The soul of man is the highest intelligence in the universe." Such are the dogmas which, under the name of Philosophy, are poured forth oracularly, unsupported by reason or argument, by the prophets of the new dispensation--the last and highest achievement of the human intellect. It is very unfortunate, however, for the honor of the prophets of the nineteenth century, that this profound discovery was invented, and illustrated, patented, and peddled, by the Hindoos, among the people of India, two thousand years before the divinity had struggled into self consciousness in the mighty and transcendent souls of Schelling, Hegel, and Strauss, of Atkinson, Parker, or Emerson. We mean to show in this lecture, that it is an _Antiquated, Hypocritical, Demoralizing Atheism_. 1. _Pantheism is an Antiquated Heresy._--It has rotted and putrefied among the worshipers of cats, and monkeys, and holy bulls, and bits of sticks and stones, on the banks of the Ganges, for more than two thousand years; yet it is now hooked up out of its dunghill, and hawked about among Christian people, as a prime new discovery of modern philosophy for getting rid of Almighty God. As the Hindoo Shasters are undoubtedly the sources from which French, German, and American philosophers have borrowed their dogmas, and as they have not had time to take the whole system, we shall edify the public by a view of this sublime theology as exhibited in the writings of the Pantheistic philosophers of India, as follows: "When existing in the temporary imperfect state of _Sagun_, Brahm (the Pantheist deity) wills to manifest the universe. For this purpose he puts forth his omnipotent energy, which is variously styled in the different systems now under review. He puts forth his energy for what? For the effecting of a creation out of nothing? 'No,' says one of the Shasters, but to '_produce from his own divine substance a multiform universe_.' By the spontaneous exertion of this energy he sends forth, from his own divine substance, a countless host of essences, like innumerable sparks issuing from the blazing fire, or myriads of rays from the resplendent sun. These detached portions of Brahm--these separated divine essences--soon become individuated systems, destined, in time, to occupy different forms prepared for their reception; whether these be fixed or movable, animate or inanimate, forms of gods or men, forms of animal, vegetable, or mineral existences. "Having been separated from Brahm in his imperfect state of _Sagun_, they carry along with them a share of those principles, qualities, and attributes that characterize that state, though predominating in very different degrees and proportions; either according to their respective capacities, or the retributive awards of an eternal ordination. Among others it is specially noted, that as Brahm at that time had awakened into a consciousness of his own existence, there does inhere in each separated soul a notion, or a conviction, of its own _distinct_, independent, individual existence. Laboring under this delusive notion, or conviction, the soul has lost the knowledge of its own proper nature--its divine origin, and ultimate destiny. It ignorantly regards itself as an inferior entity, instead of knowing itself to be what it truly is, a consubstantial, though it may be an infinitesimally minute portion of the great whole, a universal spirit. "Each individual soul being thus a portion of Brahm, even as a spark is of fire, it is again and again declared that the relation between them is not that of master and servant, ruler and ruled, but that of whole and part! The soul is pronounced to be eternal _a parte ante_; in itself it has had no beginning or birth, though its separate individuality originated in time. It is eternal _a parte post_; it will have no end--no death; though its separate individuality will terminate in time. Its manifestation in time is not a creation; it is an effluence from the eternal fount of spirit. Its disappearance from the stage of time is not an extinction of essence--a reduction to nonentity; it is only a refluence into its original source. As an emanation from the supreme, eternal spirit, it is from everlasting to everlasting. Neither can it be said to be of finite dimensions; on the contrary, says the sacred oracle, 'being identified with the Supreme Brahm, it participates in his infinity.' "After having enumerated all the elementary principles, atoms, and qualities successively evolved from Brahm, one of the sacred writings states, that though each of these had distinct powers, yet they existed separate and disunited, without order or harmonious adaptation of parts; that until they were duly combined together, it was impossible to produce this universe, or animated beings; and that therefore it was requisite to adopt other means than fortuitous chance for giving them an appropriate combination, and symmetrical arrangement. The Supreme, accordingly, produced an egg, in which the elementary principles might be deposited, and nurtured into maturity." "All the primary atoms, qualities, and principles--the seeds of future worlds--that had been evolved from the substance of Brahm, were now collected together, and deposited in the newly produced egg. And into it, along with them, entered the self-existent himself, under the assumed form of Brahm; and then he sat vivifying, expanding, and combining the elements, a whole year of the creation, or four thousand three hundred millions of solar years! During this amazing period, the wondrous egg floated like a bubble on the abyss of primeval waters, increasing in size, and blazing refulgent as a thousand suns. At length the Supreme, who dwelt therein, burst the shell of the stupendous egg, and issued forth under a new form, with a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, and a thousand arms. Along with him there issued forth another form, huge and measureless. What could that be? All the elementary principles having now been matured, and disposed into an endless variety of orderly collocations, and combined into one harmonious whole, they darted into visible manifestation under the form of the present glorious universe! A universe now finished, and ready made, with its entire apparatus, of earth, sun, moon, and stars. What, then, is this multiform universe? It is but a harmoniously arranged expansion of primordial principles and qualities. And whence are these? Educed or evolved from the divine substance of Brahm. Hence it is that the universe is so constantly spoken of, even by mythologists, as a manifested form of Brahm himself, the supreme, invisible spirit. Hence, too, under the notion that it is the manifestation of a being who may assume every variety of corporeal form, is the universe often personified, or described as if its different parts were only the different members of a person, of prodigious magnitude, in human form. It is declared that the hairs of his body are the trees of the forest; of his head, the clouds; of his beard, the lightning. His breath is the circling atmosphere; his voice, the thunder; his eyes, the sun and moon; his veins, the rivers; his nails, the rocks; his bones, the lofty mountains![25] "The substantial fabrics of all worlds having now been framed and fitted up as the destined abodes of different orders of being, celestial, terrestrial, and infernal, the question next arises, How or by whom were produced the various organized forms which these orders of being were designed to animate? Though hosts of subtle essences or souls flowed forth from Brahm, all of these remain inactive till united to some form of materialism. From this necessity the gods themselves are not exempted. While the souls of men, and other inferior spirits, must be encased in tabernacles fashioned out of the grosser elements, the souls of the gods, and all other superior spirits, must be made to inhabit material forms, composed of one or other of the infinitely attenuated and invisible rudimental atoms that spring direct from the principle of consciousness. "Interminable as are the incoherencies, inconsistencies, and extravagancies of the Hindoo sacred writings, on no subject, perhaps, is the multiplicity of varying accounts and discrepancies more astonishing than on the present. Volumes could not suffice to retail them all. Brahma's first attempts at the production of the forms of animated beings were as eminently unsuccessful as they were various. At one time he is said to have performed a long and severe course of ascetic devotions, to enable him to accomplish his wish; but in vain; at another, inflamed by anger and passion at his repeated failures, he sat down and wept; and from the streaming tear drops sprang into being, as his first boon, a progeny of ghosts and goblins, of an aspect so loathsome and dreadful, that he was ready to faint away. At one time, after profound meditation, different beings spring forth: one from his thumb, another from his breath, a third from his ear, a fourth from his side. But enough of such monstrous legends."[26] There now, reader, you have the original of the Development Theory, with Vestiges of Creation enough to make half a dozen new infidel cosmogonies, besides the genuine original of Pantheism, from its native soil. Our western Pantheists will doubtless reverence their venerable progenitors; and, should the remainder of the family find their way here in a year or two, via Germany, the public will be better prepared to give a fitting reception to such distinguished visitors, including their suite of divine bulls and holy monkeys, their lustrations of cow dung, ecstatic hook swingings, burning of widows, and drowning of children, and other Pantheistic Philosophies, from the banks of the Ganges. What an outrage of decency for such men to call themselves philosophers and Christians! The relationship of American Pantheism with that of India is unblushingly acknowledged by the recent Pantheistic writers: "When ancient sages came to believe in the absolute goodness, justice, love, and wisdom of the deity, or providence, they fell into that peace which needed nothing, feared nothing, and therefore worshiped nothing. Nothing to blame, nothing to praise; the perfect whole became one great divinity. It was so in Magadha and Benares; it is so in Concord and Boston."[27] 2. _Pantheism is a System of Deception and Hypocrisy._--Has any man a right to pervert the English language, by fixing new meanings to words, entirely different from and contrary to those in common use? If he knows the meaning of the words he uses, and uses them to convey a contrary meaning, he is a deceiver. The name God, used as a proper name, in the English tongue, means "the Supreme Being; Jehovah; the Eternal and Infinite Spirit, the Creator and Sovereign of the Universe."[28] If, then, a man says he believes in God, but when forced to explain what he means by that name, says he means steam, heat, electricity, galvanism, magnetism, mesmeric force, odyle, animal life, the soul of man, or the sum of all the intelligences in the universe, he is a deceiver, and vain talker, abusing language to conceal his impiety. Pantheism is simply Jesuitical Atheism. Willing to dethrone Jehovah, but unable and unwilling to place any other being in his stead, as Creator and Ruler of the universe, yet conscious that mankind will never embrace open Atheism, Pantheists profess to believe in God, only that they may steal his name to cloak their Atheism. We, in common with all who believe in God, demand, that, as their divinity is, by their own confession, essentially different from God, they shall use a different word to describe it. Let them call it Brahm, as their brethren in India do, or any other name not appropriated to any existing being in heaven or earth, or under the earth; and let them cease to profane religion, and insult common sense, by affixing the holy name of the Supreme to their thousand-headed monster. But the very perfection of Jesuitism is reached, when Pantheists profess their high respect for the Christian religion. They do not generally speak of it as a superstition, though some of the vulgar sort do; nor do they decry its mysteries, as Deists are in the habit of doing; nor, as Socinians, and Unitarians, and Rationalists, do they attempt to reduce it to a mere code of morals. They grant it to be the highest development of humanity yet reached by the majority of the human race. The brute, the savage, the polytheistic idolater, the star worshiper, the monotheist, the Christian, are all, in their scheme, so many successive developments of humanity in its upward progress. There is only one step higher than Christianity, and that is Pantheism. Well knowing that Christianity is diametrically opposed to their falsehoods, and that the Bible, everywhere, teaches that the natural progress of man has ever been down from a state of holiness to idolatry and barbarism, they have yet the hardihood to profess respect for it, as a system of concealed Pantheism, and to clothe their abominations in Scripture language. They speak, for instance, of the "beauty of holiness in the mind, that has surmounted every idea of a personal God;" and of "God dwelling in us, and his love perfected in us," when they believe that he dwells as really in every creature: in that hog, for instance. Then they will readily acknowledge that the Bible is inspired. They _can accept_--that is the phrase--they can accept the Book which denounces death upon those fools who, "professing themselves to be wise, change the truth of God into a lie, and worship and serve the creature more than the Creator," as merely a mystic revelation of the Pantheism which leaves man to "erect everything into a God, provided it is none: sun, moon, stars, a cat, a monkey, an onion, uncouth idols, sculptured marble; nay, a shapeless trunk, which the devout impatience of the idolater does not stay to fashion into the likeness of a man, but gives its apotheosis at once." Oh, yes; they accept the Bible as inspired--a God inspired Book--inasmuch as _every_ product of the human mind is a development of Deity. The Bible, then, when we have the matter fully explained, is quite on a level with Gulliver's Travels, or Emerson's Address to a Senior Class of Divinity. There is nothing, however, in this vast system of monstrosities, which fills the soul of a Christian with such loathing and detestation, as to hear Pantheists profess their veneration for the Lord Jesus, and claim him as a teacher of Pantheism. If there is one object which they detest with all their hearts, it is the Judge of the quick and dead, and the vengeance which he shall take upon them that know not God, and obey not the gospel. Any allusion to the judgment seat of Christ fills them with fury, and causes them to pour forth awful blasphemies. They know that the Lord Jesus repeatedly declared himself the Judge of the living and the dead--that "the hour is coming in which all that are in their graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth: they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation;" and that the very last sentence of his public discourses is, "And these" (the wicked) "shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal." When they drop the mask for a moment, they can accuse apostles and disciples with "dwelling with noxious exaggeration about the _person_ of Christ."[29] Christ, as revealed in the gospel, they hate with a perfect hatred. But when it becomes necessary to address Christians, and beguile them into the deceitfulness of Pantheism, the tune is changed. Christ becomes the model man--"one conceived in conditions favorable to the highest perfectibility of the individual consciousness; and so possessed of powers of generalization far in advance of the age in which he lived. They can listen to and honor one of the best expounders of God and nature in the Man of Nazareth."[30] The vilest falsehoods of Pantheism are ascribed to Jesus, that those who, ignorant of his doctrine, yet respect his name, may be seduced to receive them. Of him who declared, "Out of the heart of man proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, thefts, false witness, blasphemies," they have the hardihood to declare, "He saw with open eyes the mystery of the soul; alone, in all history, he estimated the greatness of man." Calculating upon that ignorance of the teaching of Christ which is so general among their audiences, they dare to represent the only begotten Son of God as teaching Pantheism: "One man was true to what is in you and me; he saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am divine. Through me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee when thou also thinkest as I now think.' Because the indwelling Supreme Spirit can not wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury." Yes, truly, the divine nature is emphatically denied to all unregenerated men, and denied, too, by that divine teacher thus eulogized. Hear him: "Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God. Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me; for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye can not hear my word. Ye are of your father, the devil; and the works of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh it of his own; for he is a liar, and the father of it." Let Pantheists, then, cease to wind their serpent coils around Christianity, and to defile the Bible with their filthy lickings. The Lord Jesus will not suffer such persons to bear even a true testimony to him, and his followers will not permit them to ascribe their falsehoods to him, without reproof. Let them stand out and avow themselves the enemies of Christ and his gospel, as they are, and cease their abominable pretenses of giving to the world the ultimate development of Christianity. What concord hath Christ with Belial? 3. _Pantheism is a System of Immorality._--It loosens all the sanctions of moral law. If there is anything upon which all Pantheists are agreed, it is in the denial of the resurrection, the judgment, and the future punishment of the wicked. Their whole system, in all its range, from Spiritualism to Phrenology, is expressly invented to get rid of God's moral government. If man is the highest intelligence in the universe, to whom should he render an account of his conduct? Or who would have any right to call him to account? Then, if we are developments of deity, deity can not offend against itself. Further, if our development, both of body and mind, be the inevitable result of the laws of nature--of our organization and our position--man is but the creature of circumstances, and, therefore, as is abundantly argued, can not be made responsible for laws and their results, over which he has no control. "I am what I am. I can not alter my will, or be other than what I am, and can not deserve either reward or punishment."[31] Before hundreds of the citizens of Cincinnati, a lecturer publicly denied the right of either God or man to invade his individuality, by taking vengeance upon him for any crime whatever. Thousands, who are not yet Pantheists, are so far infected with the poison that they utterly deny any right of vindictive punishment to God or man. But this is not all. Again and again have we listened with astonishment to men, declaring that there was no moral law--no standard of right and wrong, but the will of the community. Of course it was quite natural, after such a declaration, to assert that a wife who should remain with a husband of inferior intellectuality, or unsuitable emotions, was committing adultery; that private property is a legalized robbery; and that when a citizen becomes mentally or physically unfit for the business of life, he confers the highest obligation on society, and performs the highest duty to himself, by committing suicide, and thus returning to the great ocean of being! We might think that confusion of right and wrong could not be worse confounded than this; yet there is a blacker darkness still. _The distinction between good and evil is absolutely denied._ The Hindoo Pantheists declare that they can not sin, because they are God, and God can not offend against himself; there is no sin--it is all _maya_--delusion. So the American and English school tells us it lives only in the obsolete theology. Evil, we are told, "is good in another way we are not skilled in."[32] So says the author of "Representative Men." "Evil," according to old philosophers, "is good in the making; that pure malignity can exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent. It is Atheism; it is the last profanation." "The divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself into grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true."[33] Emerson, in a lecture in Cincinnati, is reported by the editor of _The Central Herald_, as saying in his hearing: "To say that the majority of men are wicked, is only to say that they are young." "Every man is indebted to his vices--virtues grow out of them as a thrifty and fruitful plant grows out of manure." "There is hope even for the reprobate, and the ruffian, in the fullness of time." If these were only the ravings of lunatics, or the dreamings of philosophers, we should never have hunted them from their hiding-places to scare your visions; but these doctrines are weekly propounded in your own city, and throughout our land, from platform and press, to thousands of your children and their school-teachers, of your work, men and your lawgivers, to your wives and daughters. Again and again have our ears been confounded in the squares of New York, and the streets of Philadelphia, and the market-places of Cincinnati, by the boisterous cry, _What is sin? There is no sin. It is all an old story._ Let men who fear no God, but who have lives, and wives, and property to lose, look to it, and say if they act wisely in giving their influence to a system which lands in such consequences. Let them devise some religion for the people which will preserve the rights of man, while giving license to trample upon the rights of God; or, failing in the effort, let them acknowledge that the enemy of God is, and of necessity must be, the foe of all that constitutes the happiness of man. Impiety and immorality are wedded in heaven's decree, and man can not sunder them. 4. _Pantheism is Virtually Atheism._--It may scarce seem needful to multiply proofs on this head. How can any one imagine a being composed of the sum of all the intelligences of the universe? Such a thing, or combination of things, never was distinctly conceived of by any intelligent being. Can intelligences be compounded, or like bricks and mortar, piled upon each other? If they could, did these finite intelligences create themselves? If the soul of man is the highest intelligence in the universe, did the soul of man create, or does the soul of man govern it? Shall we adore his soul? Some Pantheists have got just to this length. M. Comte declares, that "At this present time, for minds properly familiarized with true astronomical philosophy, the heavens display no other glory than that of Hipparchus, or Kepler, or Newton, and of all who have helped to establish these laws." _Establish_ these laws! Laws by which the heavenly bodies were guided thousands of years before Kepler or Newton were born. Shall we then adore the souls of Kepler and Newton? M. Comte has invented a religion, which he is much displeased that the admirers of his Positive Philosophy will not accept, in which the children are to be taught to worship idols, the youth to believe in one God, if they can, after such a training in infancy, and the full-grown men are to adore a Grand Etre, "the continuous resultant of all the forces capable of voluntarily concurring in the universal perfectioning of the world, _not forgetting our worthy auxiliaries, the animals_."[34] Our Anglo-Saxon Pantheists, however, are not quite philosophical enough yet to adore the mules and oxen, and therefore refuse worship altogether. "Work is worship," constitutes their liturgy. "As soon as the man is as one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action."[35] "Labor wide as earth has its summit in heaven. Sweat of the brow, and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart; which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all sciences, all spoken epics, all acted heroisms, martyrdoms, up to that agony of bloody sweat, which all men have accounted divine! Oh, brother, if this is not worship, then I say, the more pity for worship; for this is the noblest thing yet discovered under God's sky." "No man has worked, or can work, except religiously."[36] "Adieu, O Church! Thy road is that way, mine is this. In God's name, adieu!"[37] Such is the theory. How faithfully acted out, you can learn from the thousands who are now, publicly, upon God's holy Sabbath, working religiously upon the bridge that is to span the river, or less ostentatiously in their shops and workrooms throughout the city. Within a circle of three miles' radius of the spot you now occupy, one hundred thousand intelligent beings in this Christian city worship no God. The abstraction, which the Pantheist calls God, is no object of worship. It is not to be loved. If it does good, it could not help it, and did not intend it. It is not to be thanked for benefits. It, the sum of all the intelligence of the universe, can not be collected from the seven spheres to receive any such acknowledgment. It can not deviate from its fated course of proceeding; therefore, says the Pantheist, why should I pray? It neither sees his conduct, nor cares for it; and he denies any right to call him to account. It did not create him, does not govern him, will not judge him, can not punish him. It is no object of love, fear, worship, or obedience. It is no god. He is an Atheist. He believes not in any God. HEAR, O ISRAEL! THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD. He is distinct from, and supreme over all his works. He now rules, and will hereafter judge all intelligent creatures, and will render to every one according to his works. 1. _Reason declares it._ The world did not make itself. The soul of man did not make itself. The body of man did not make itself. They must have had an intelligent Creator, who is God. God is known by his works to be distinct from them, and superior to them. The work is not the workman. The house is not the builder. The watch is not the watchmaker. The sum of all the works of any worker is not the agent who produced them. Let an architect spend his life in building a city, yet the city is not the builder. The maker is always distinct from, and superior to, the thing made. You and I, and the universe, are made. Our Maker, then, is distinct from, and superior to us. One plan gives order to the universe; therefore, one mind originated it. The Creator is over all his creatures. 2. _Our consciousness confirms it._ If a blind god could not make a seeing man, a god destitute of the principle of self-consciousness (if such an abuse of language may be tolerated for a moment) could not impart to man the conviction, _I am_,--the ineradicable belief that I am not the world, nor any other person; much less, everybody; but that I am a person, possessed of powers of knowing, thinking, liking and disliking, judging, approving of right, and disapproving of wrong, and choosing and willing my conduct. My Maker has at least as much common sense as he has given me. He that teacheth man knowledge, shall he not know? 3. _Our ignorance and weakness demand a Governor of the world wiser than ourselves._ The soul of man is not the highest intelligence in the universe. It can not know the mode of its own operation on the body it inhabits, much less the plan of the world's management. Man may know much about what does not concern him, and about things over which he has no control; but it is the will of God that his pride should feel the curb of ignorance and impotence where his dearest interests are concerned, that so he may be compelled to acknowledge that God is greater than man. He may be able to tell the place of the distant planets a thousand years hence, but he can not tell where himself shall be next year. He can calculate for years to come the motions of the tides, which he can not control, but can not tell how his own pulse shall beat, or whether it shall beat at all, to-morrow. Ever as his knowledge of the laws by which God governs the world increases, his conviction of his impotence grows; and he sees and feels that a wiser head and stronger hand than that of any creature, planned and administered them. Ever as he reaches some ultimate truth, such as the mystery of electricity, of light, of life, of gravitation, which he can not explain, and beyond which he can not penetrate, he hears the voice of God therein, demanding him to acknowledge his impotence. "Where is the way where light dwelleth, And as for darkness, what is the place thereof? Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, Or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his seasons? Or canst thou guide Arcturus, with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, That abundance of waters may cover thee? Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go And say unto thee, 'Here we are?'" 4. _Our consciences convince us that God is a Moral Governor._ The distinction between brutes and men is, that man has a sense of the distinction between right and wrong. If we find a tribe of savages, or individuals who indulge their appetites without rule, and who do wrong without any apparent remorse or shame, we designate them brutes. Even those who in words deny any difference between right and wrong, do in fact admit its existence, by their attempts to justify that opinion. Though weaker, or less regarded in some than in others, every man is conscious of a faculty in himself which sits in judgment on his own conduct, and that of others, approving or condemning it as right or wrong. In all lands, and in all ages, the common sense of mankind has acknowledged the existence and moral authority of conscience, as distinct from and superior to mere intellect. No language of man is destitute of words conveying the ideas of virtue and vice, of goodness and wickedness. When one attempts to deceive you by a willful lie, you are sensible not only of an intellectual process of reason detecting the error, but of a distinct judgment of disapprobation of the crime. When one who has received kindness from a benefactor, neglects to make any acknowledgment of it, cherishes no feelings of gratitude, and insults and abuses the friend who succored him, we are conscious, not merely of the facts, as phenomena to be observed, but of the ingratitude, as a crime to be detested. And we are irresistibly constrained to believe that he who taught us this knowledge of a difference between right and wrong, does himself know such a distinction; and that he who implanted this feeling of approval of right, and condemnation of wrong, in us, does himself approve the right, and condemn the wrong. And as we can form no notion of right or wrong unconnected with the idea that approbation of right conduct should be suitably expressed, and that disapprobation of wrong conduct ought also to be suitably expressed--in other words, that right ought to be rewarded, and wrong ought to be punished--so we are constrained to trace such a connection from our minds to the mind of him who framed them. This conviction is God's law, written in our hearts. When we do wrong, we become conscious of a feeling of remorse in our consciences, as truly as the eye becomes conscious of the darkness. We may blind the eye, and we may sear the conscience, that the one shall not see, nor the other feel; but light and darkness, right and wrong, will exist. The awful fact which conscience reveals to us, that we sin against God, that we know the right, and do the wrong, and are conscious of it, and of God's disapprobation of it, is conclusive proof that we are not only distinct from God, but separate from him--that we oppose our wills against his. And every pang of remorse is a premonition of God's judgment, and every sorrow and suffering which the Governor of the world has connected with sin--as the drunkard's loss of character and property, of peace and happiness, the frenzy of his soul, and the destruction of his body--is a type and teaching of the curse which he has denounced against sin. 5. _The World's History is the record of man's crimes, and God's punishments._ Once God swept the human race from earth with a flood of water, because the wickedness of man was great on the earth. Again, he testified his displeasure against the ungodly sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah, by consuming their cities with fire from heaven, and leaving the Dead Sea to roll its solemn waves of warning to all ungodly sinners, to the end of time. By the ordinary course of his providence, he has ever secured the destruction of ungodly nations. No learning, commerce, arms, territories, or skill, has ever secured a rebellious nation against the sword of God's justice. Ask the black record of a rebel world's history for an instance. Egypt, Canaan, Nineveh, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Where are they now? Tyre had ships, colonies, and commerce; Rome an empire on which the sun never set; Greece had philosophy, arts, and liberty secured by a confederation of republics; Spain the treasures of earth's gold and silver, and the possession of half the globe. Did these secure them against the moral government of God? No! God's law sways the universe; that law which, with the brazen fetters of eternal justice, binds together sin and misery, crime and punishment, and lays the burden on the backs of all ungodly nations, irresistibly forcing them down--down--down the road to ruin. The vain imagination that refuses to glorify God as God, leads to darkness of heart, thence to Atheism, thence to gross idolatry, onward to selfish gratification, violent rapacity, lust of conquest, and luxury, licentiousness, and effeminacy begotten of its spoils; then military tyranny, civil war, servile revolt, anarchy, famine and pestilence, and the sword of less debauched neighbors, Christ's iron scepter, hurl them down from the pinnacle of greatness, to dash them in pieces against each other, in the valley of destruction; and there they lie, wrecks of nations, ruins of empires, naught remaining, save some shivered potsherds of former greatness, to show that once they were, and were the enemies of God. Oh, America, take warning ere it be too late! God rules the nations. "He that chastiseth the heathen, shall he not correct you?" A day of retribution, reader, comes to you, as an individual. Neither your insignificance nor your unbelief can hide you from his eye, nor can your puny arm shield you from his righteous judgment. His hand shall find out his enemies. Oh, fly from the wrath to come! "Seek the Lord while he may be found." He is not far from every one of us. His breath is in our nostrils. His Word is in our hands. "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved." FOOTNOTES: [23] Cited in Pressense's _Jesus Christ, His Life and Times_. Page 10. [24] Emerson. [25] Duff's India, pages 99-114. [26] Duff's India, page 119. [27] Man's Origin and Destiny, 293. [28] Webster's Dictionary. [29] Emerson's Address to a Senior Class in Divinity. [30] Hennell's Christian Theism, which shows how Theists of every nation--Christian, Jew, Mohammedan, or Chinese--can meet upon common ground. [31] Atkinson's Letters, page 190. [32] Festus, page 48. [33] Swedenborg, or the Mystic (quoted by Pierson, 41), p. 68. [34] Politique Positive, Vol. II. page 60. [35] Emerson. [36] Carlyle--Past and Present. [37] Carlyle--Life of Sterling. CHAPTER IV. HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? Religion consists of the knowledge of a number of great facts, and of a course of life suitable to them. We have seen three of these: that God created the world; that he governs it; and that he is able to conquer his enemies. There are others of the same sort as needful to be known. Our knowledge of these facts, or our ignorance of them, makes not the slightest difference in the facts themselves. God is, and heaven is, and hell is, and sin leads to it, whether anybody believes these things or not. It makes no sort of difference in the beetling cliff and swollen flood that sweeps below it, that the drunken man declares there is no danger, and, refusing the proffered lantern, gallops on toward it in the darkness of the night. But when the mangled corpse is washed ashore, every one sees how foolish this man was, to be so confident in his ignorance as to refuse the lantern, which would have shown him his danger, and guided him to the bridge where he might have crossed in safety. Some of the facts of religion lie at the evening end of life's journey; the darkness of death's night hides them from mortal eye; and living men might guide their steps the better by asking counsel of one who knows the way. If they get along no better by their own counsel in the next world than most of them do in this, they will have small cause to bless their teacher. Who can tell that ignorance, and wickedness, and wretchedness are not as tightly tied together in the world to come, as we see them here? Solomon was a knowing man and wise; and better than that, in the esteem of most people, he made money, and tells you how to make it, and keep it. You will make a hundred dollars by reading his Proverbs and acting on them. They would have saved some of you many a thousand. Of course such a man knew something of the world. He was a wide-awake trader. His ships coasted the shores of Asia, and Africa, from Madagascar to Japan; and the overland mail caravans from India and China drew up in the depots he built for them in the heart of the desert. He knew the well-doing people with whom trade was profitable, and the savages who could only send apes and peacocks. He was a philosopher as well as a trader, and could not help being deeply impressed with _the great fact_, that there was a wide difference among the nations of the world. Some were enlightened, enterprising, civilized, and flourishing; others were naked savages, living in ignorance, poverty, vice, and starvation, perpetually murdering one another, and dying out of the earth. Solomon noticed _another great fact_. In his own country, and in Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and some others, God had revealed his will to certain persons for the benefit of their neighbors. He did so generally by opening the eyes of these prophets to see future events, and the great facts of the unseen world, and by giving them messages of warning and instruction to the nations. From this mode of revelation, by opening the prophets eyes to see realities invisible to others, they were called seers, and the revelations they were commissioned to make were called visions; and revelation from God was called, in general, vision. Solomon was struck with the fact that some nations were thus favored by God, and other nations were not. The question would naturally arise, What difference does it make, or does it make any difference, whether men have any revelation of God's will or not? Solomon was led to observe a _third great fact_. The nations which were favored with these revelations were the civilized, enterprising, and comparatively prosperous nations. In proportion to the amount of divine revelation they had, and their obedience to it, they prospered. The nations that had no revelation from God were the idolatrous savages, who were sinking down to the level of brutes, and perishing off the face of the earth. He daguerreotypes these three great facts in the proverb: "Where there is no vision the people perish; but he that keepeth the law, happy is he." Oh, says the Rationalist, the world is wiser now than it was in Solomon's days. He lived in the old mythological period, when men attributed everything extraordinary to the gods. But the world is too wise now to believe in any supernatural revelation. "The Hebrew and Christian religions like all others have their myths." "The fact is, the pure historic idea was never developed among the Hebrews during the whole of their political existence." "When, therefore, we meet with an account of certain phenomena, or events of which it is expressly stated or implied that they were produced immediately by God himself (such as divine apparitions, voices from heaven, and the like), or by human beings possessed of supernatural powers (miracles, prophecies, etc.), such an account is so far to be considered not historical." "Indeed, no just notion of the true nature of history is possible without a perception of the inviolability of the chain of finite causes, and of the impossibility of miracles."[38] A narrative is to be deemed mythical, 1st. "When it proceeds from an age in which there were no written records, but events were transmitted by tradition; 2d. When it presents, as historical, accounts of events which were beyond the reach of experience, as occurrences connected with the spiritual world; or 3d. When it deals in the marvelous, and is couched in symbolical language."[39] So also a host of others, who pass for biblical expositors, lay it down as an axiom, that all records of supernatural events are mythical, viz: fables, falsehoods, because miracles are impossible. Of course, from such premises the conclusion is easy. A revelation from God to man is a supernatural event, and supernatural events are impossible; therefore, a revelation from God is impossible. But it would have been much easier, and quite as logical, to have laid down the axiom in plain words at first, that a revelation from God is impossible, as to argue it from such premises; for it is just as easy to _say_, that a revelation from God is impossible, as to _say_ that miracles are impossible; and as for _proof_ of either one or the other, we must just take their word for it. One can not help being amazed at the cool impudence with which these men take for granted the very point to be proved, and set aside, as unworthy of serious examination, the most authentic records of history, simply because they do not coincide with their so-called philosophy; and at the credulity with which their followers swallow this arrogant dogmatism, as if it were self-evident truth. Let us look at it for a moment. Other religions have their myths, or fables, therefore, the Hebrew and Christian records are fables, says the Rationalist. Profundity of logic! Counterfeit bank bills are common, therefore none are genuine. "The fact is, the pure historic idea was never developed among the Hebrews," _i. e._, Moses and the prophets were all liars. That is the fact, you may take my word for it. "Indeed, no just notion of the true nature of history is possible without a perception of the inviolability of the chain of finite causes, and of the impossibility of miracles" which translated into plain words is simply this: No man can understand history who believes in God Almighty. "A narrative is to be deemed fabulous when it proceeds from an age in which there were no written records," such, for instance, as any account of the creation of the first man--for no event could possibly happen unless there was a scribe there to write it. Or, of the fall of man--we do not know that Adam was able to write, and no man can tell truth unless he writes a history. "A narrative is to be deemed fabulous when it presents, as historical, accounts of events which were beyond the reach of experience, as events connected with the spiritual world." Is it not self-evident that you and I have had experience of everything in the whole universe, and whoever tells us anything which we have never seen is a liar. "When a narrative deals in the marvelous," such as Xenophon's Retreat of the Ten Thousand, Herodotus' History, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, dealing as it does in such marvelous accounts as the death of half the inhabitants of the empire in the reign of Galerius, or any other history of wonderful occurrence--it is of course a myth. Does not every one know that nothing marvelous ever happened, or, if it did, would any historian trouble himself to record a prodigy? "Or, if it is couched in symbolical language," as is every eloquent passage in Thucydides, Robertson, Gibbon, or Guizot, the records of China, and of India, the picture-writing of the Peruvians, and especially the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were fondly expected to do such good service against the Bible--it must be at once rejected, without further examination, as mythological and unworthy of any credit whatever. Thus we are conclusively rid forever of the Bible, for sure enough it is couched in symbolical language. Blessed deliverance to the world! But then, alas! this great deliverance is accompanied with several little inconveniences. All poetry, three-fourths of the world's history, and the largest part of its philosophy, is couched in symbolical language, and especially the whole of the science of metaphysics, from which these very learned writers have deduced such edifying conclusions, is, from the beginning to the end, nothing but a symbolical application of the terms which describe material objects, to the phenomena of mind. Alas! we must forever relinquish "the absolute," and "the infinite," and "the conditioned," with all their "affinities and potencies," up to "higher unity," and "the rhythm of universal existence," and all the rest of those perspicuous German hieroglyphics, whether entombed in their native pyramids for the amazement of succeeding generations, by Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel, or "worshiping in the great cathedral of the immensities," "with their heads uplifted into infinite space," or "lying on the plane of their own consciousness," in the writings of Carlyle, Emerson, and Parker. They are myths, the whole of them, for they "are couched in symbolical language;" and Bauer, De Wette, and Strauss have pronounced every thing couched in symbolical language to be mythical. Let us henceforth deliver our minds from all anxiety about history, philosophy, or religion, and stick to the price current and the multiplication table, the only accounts that are not "couched in symbolical language." Such is the sort of trash that passes for profound philosophy when once it is made unintelligible, and such are the canons of interpretation with which men calling themselves philosophers and Christians sit down to investigate the claims of the Bible as a revelation from God. If they would speak out their true sentiments, they would say, "There can not be any revelation from God, because there is no God." But they could not call themselves professors of Christian colleges, and pastors of Christian churches, and reap the emoluments of such situations, if they would honestly avow their Atheism. Besides, the world would see too plainly the drift of their teaching; therefore it is cloaked under a profession of belief in God, the Creator, who however is to be carefully prevented from ever showing himself again in the world he has made. No proof is attempted for the declaration that miracles are impossible. Yet, surely, if it implies a contradiction to say so, that contradiction could be shown. That it is not self-evident is shown by the general belief of mankind that miracles have occurred. No man who believes in a supernatural being can deny the possibility of supernatural actings. The creation of the world is the most stupendous of all miracles, utterly beyond the power of any finite causes, and entirely beyond the reach of our experience, yet some of these men admit that this miracle occurred. Supernatural events then are not impossible, nor unprecedented. The vain notion that God, having created the world at first, left it for ever after to the operation of natural laws, is conclusively demolished by the discoveries of geology. These discoveries established the fact recorded in Scripture, that in bringing the world into its present form there were several distinct and successive interpositions of supernatural power, in the distinct and successive creations of different species of vegetable and animal life. In former periods, they tell us, the earth was so warm that the present races of men and animals could not have lived on it, and the plants and animals of that age could not live now. These very men are profuse in proving that the earth existed for ages before _man_ made his appearance upon it. This being the case, we are compelled to acknowledge the creating power of God above the laws of nature, for there is no law of nature which can either create a new species of plants or animals, nor yet change one kind into another, make an oak into a larch, or an ox into a sheep, or a goose into a turkey, or a megatherium into an elephant, much less into a man. Some men have dreamed of such changes as these, but no instance of such a change has ever been alleged in proof of the notion. The most distinguished anatomists and geologists are fully agreed that no such change of one animal into another ever took place; much less that any animal ever was changed into a man. Cuvier, from his comprehensive survey of the fossils of former periods, establishes the fact, "that the species now living are not mere varieties of the species which are lost." And Agassiz says, "I have the conviction that species have been created successively, at distinct intervals."[40] Revelations of God's special interpositions in the affairs of this world are thus written by his own finger in the fossils and coal, and engraved on the everlasting granite of the earth's foundation stones. Dumb beasts and dead reptiles start forward to give their irrefutable testimony to the repeated supernatural acts of their Creator in this world which he had made. Every distinct species of plants and animals is proof of a distinct supernatural overruling of the present laws of nature. The experience of man is not the limit of knowledge. His own existence is a proof that the chain of finite causes is not inviolable. Geology sweeps away the very foundations of skepticism, by demonstrating that certain phenomena produced immediately by God himself--the phenomena of the creation of life--have occurred repeatedly in the history of our globe. Revelation is not impossible because supernatural. The world is just as full of supernatural works as of natural. Nor is it incredible because it records miracles. The miracles recorded in the coal measures are as astonishing as any recorded in the Bible. The Rationalist next assures us, however, that any external revelation from God to man is _useless_, because man is wise enough without it. The vulgar exposition of this sentiment is familiar to every reader. "You need not begin to preach Bible to me. I know my duty well enough without the Bible." The more educated attempt to reason the matter after this fashion: "Miraculous phenomena will never prove the goodness and veracity of God, if we do not know these qualities in him without a miracle."[41] We may remark, in passing, that there are some other attributes of God besides goodness and veracity--holiness and justice for instance--which are proved by miracles. "Can thunder from the thirty-two azimuths, repeated daily for centuries, make God's laws more godlike to me? Brother, no. Perhaps I am grown to be a man now, and do not need the thunder and the terror any longer. Perhaps I am above being frightened. Perhaps it is not fear but reverence that shall now lead me! Revelation! Inspirations! And thy own god-created soul, dost thou not call that a revelation?"[42] It is manifest, however, that if Mr. Carlyle needs not the Sinai thunder to assure him that the law given on Sinai was from God, there were then, and are now, many who do, and some of his own sect who doubt in spite of it. If he is above the weakness of fearing God, all the world is not so. The claims of a divine teacher are as unceremoniously rejected as those of a divine revelation. "If it depends on Jesus it is not eternally true, and if it is not eternally true it is no truth at all," says Parker. As if eternally true, and sufficiently known, were just the same thing; or as if because vaccination would always have prevented the smallpox, the world is under no obligation to Jenner for informing us of the fact. In the same tone Emerson despises instruction: "It is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing." Again says Parker, "Christianity is dependent on no outside authority. We verify its eternal truth in our soul."[43] His aim is "to separate religion from whatever is finite--Church, book, person--and let it rest on its absolute truth."[44] "It bows to no idols, neither the Church, nor the Bible, nor yet Jesus, but God only; its Redeemer is within; its salvation within; its heaven and its oracle of God."[45] The whole strain of this school of writers and their disciples is one of depreciation of external revelation, and of exaltation of the inner light which every man is supposed to carry within him. Religion is "no Morrison's pill from without," but a "clearing of the inner light," a "reawakening of our own selves from within."[46] So Mr. Newman[47] abundantly argues that an authoritative book revelation of moral and spiritual truth is impossible, that God reveals himself within us and not without us, and that a revelation of all moral and religious truth necessary for us to know is to be obtained by _insight_, or gazing into the depths of our own consciousness. The sum of the whole business is, that neither God nor man can reveal any religious truth to our minds, or as Parker felicitously expresses it, "on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing." Now, we are tempted to ask, Who are these wonderful prodigies, so incapable of receiving instruction from anybody? And to our amazement we learn, that some forty odd years ago they made their appearance among mankind as little squalling babies, without insight enough to know their own names, or where they came from, and were actually dependent on an external revelation, from their nurses, for sense enough to find their mothers' breasts. And as they grew a little larger, they obtained the power of speaking articulate sounds by external revelation, hearing and imitating the sounds made by others. Further, upon a memorable day, they had a "book revelation" made to them, in the shape of a penny primer, and were initiated into the mysteries of A, B, C, by "the instructions of another, be he who he may." There was absolutely not the least "insight," or "spiritual faculty," or "self-consciousness" in one of them, by which they then could, or ever to this hour did, "find true within them" any sort of necessary connection between the signs, c, a, t--d, o, g--and the sounds _cat_, _dog_, or any other sounds represented by any other letters of the alphabet. Faith in the word of their teachers is absolutely the sole foundation and only source of their ability to read and write. On "the word of another, and as his second, be he who he may," every one of them has accepted every intelligible word he speaks or writes. There is living on Martha's Vineyard an old man who has never been off the island, and the extent of his knowledge is bounded by the confines of his home. He has been told of a war between the North and South, but as he had never heard the din of battle, nor seen any soldiers, he considered it a hoax. He is utterly unable to read, and is ignorant to the last degree. A good story is told of his first and only day at school. He was quite a lad when a lady came to the district, where his father lived, to teach school. He was sent, and as the teacher was classifying the school, he was called upon in turn and interrogated as to his studies. Of course he had to say he had never been to school, and knew none of his letters. The schoolmistress gave him a seat on one side until she had finished the preliminary examination of the rest of the scholars. She then called him to her and drew on the blackboard the letter A, and told him what it was, and asked him to remember how it looked. He looked at it a moment, and then inquired: "H-h-how do you know it's A?" The teacher replied that when she was a little girl she had been to school to an old gentleman, who told her so. The boy eyed the A for a moment and then asked: "H-h-how do you know but he l-l-lied?" The teacher could not get over this obstacle, and the poor boy was sent home as incorrigible. Mr. Emerson, and the whole school of those who despise instruction, had better appoint this man their prophet of the inner light, and endow Martha's Vineyard as the Penikese of skepticism. But the knowledge of letters is not half of their indebtedness to external revelation. For they will not deny that a Fiji cannibal has just the same "insight," "spiritual faculty," "mighty and transcendent soul," "self-consciousness," or any other name by which they may dignify our common humanity, which they themselves possess. How does it happen, then, that these writers are not assembled around the cannibal's oven, smearing their faces with the blood, and feasting themselves on the limbs of women and children? The inner nature of the cannibal and of the Rationalist is the same--whence comes the difference of character and conduct? And the inner light, too, is the same; for they assure us that "inspiration, like God's omnipresence, is coextensive with the race." Is it not, after all, mere external revelation, in the shape of education--aye, moral and religious teaching that makes the whole difference between the civilized American and his inspired Fiji brother? These gentlemen not only acknowledge, but try to repay their obligations to external revelation. As it is impossible for God to give the world a book revelation of moral and religious truth, they modestly propose to come to his assistance, it being quite possible for some men to do what is impossible for God. Accordingly, we have a book revelation of moral and religious truth, from one, in his treatise on "The Soul," an "external revelation" from another, in his "Discourse Concerning Religion," a "Morrison's pill from the outside," from a third, in his "Past and Present," and "announcements" from a fourth, which assuredly the great mass of mankind never "found true within them," else his orations and publications had not been needed to convert them. It is to be understood, then, that an "external revelation," or a "book revelation" of spiritual truth is impossible, only when it comes from God, but that these gentlemen have proved it quite possible for themselves to deliver one. In so doing they have undoubtedly attempted to meet the wishes of the greater part of mankind, who have in all lands and in all ages longed for some outward revelation from God, and testified their desire by running after all sorts of omens, auguries, and oracles, consulting witches, and treasuring Sibylline leaves, employing writing mediums, and listening to spirit-rappers. The "inspiration which is limited to no sect, age, or nation--which is wide as the world, and common as God,"[48] has never produced a nation of Rationalists; a fact very unaccountable, if Rationalism be true; and one which might well lead these writers to acknowledge at least one kind of total depravity, namely, that inspired men should love the darkness of external revelations, and even of book revelations, and read Bibles, and Korans, and Vedas, and "Discourses Concerning Religion," and "Phases of Faith," while yet "everything that is of use to man lies in the plane of our own consciousness." Surely, such a universal craving after an external revelation testifies to a felt necessity for it, and renders it probable, or at least desirable, that God would supply the deficiency. Is the religious appetite the only one for which God has provided no supply? The fact is undeniable, that the grand distinction between man and the brutes presents itself right at this point. God guides animals by direct revelation--by their instincts; but having given man reason, and free will, he gives him the whole field of life for their exercise upon the indirect revelations he makes to us through the mediation of others. For all that we know of history, geography, politics, mechanics, agriculture, poetry, philosophy, or any of the common business of life, from the baking of a loaf of bread, or the sewing of a shirt, to the following of a funeral, and the digging of a grave, we are indebted to education, not to inspiration. All analogy then induces the belief that religion also will be taught to mankind by the ministry of human teachers, rather than by the direct inspiration of every individual. But we are instructed, that, "as we have bodily senses to lay hold on matter, and supply bodily wants, through which we obtain naturally all needed material things, so we have spiritual faculties to lay hold on God, and supply spiritual wants; through them we obtain all needed spiritual things." That we have both bodily senses and spiritual faculties is doubtless true; but whether either the one or the other obtain all needed things is somewhat doubtful. I can not tell how it is with mankind in Boston, for I am not there; and this being a matter in which religious truth is concerned, Mr. Emerson will not allow me to receive instruction about it from any other soul; but I see from my window a poor widow, with five children, who has bodily senses to lay hold on matter, and supply bodily wants; yet in my opinion she has not obtained naturally all needed material things; and if there be a truth which lies emphatically in the plane of her own consciousness, it is, that she is in great need of a cord of wood, and a barrel of flour, for her starving children. I know, also, a man, to whom God gave bodily senses to lay hold on matter, and supply bodily wants, who, by his drunkenness, has destroyed these bodily senses, and brought his family to utter destitution of all needed material things. From one cause or another, I find multitudes here in poverty and destitution, notwithstanding they have bodily senses. It is reported, also, that there is a poor-house in Boston, and poverty in Ireland, and starvation in Madeira, and famine in the inundated provinces of France, and misery and destitution in London; which, if true, completely overturns this beautiful theory. For, if, notwithstanding the possession of bodily senses, men do starve in this world for want of needful food and clothing, it is very possible that they may have spiritual faculties also, and yet not obtain through them all needed spiritual things. The second part of the theory is as baseless as the first. All men have spiritual faculties, and have not obtained by them all needed spiritual things. They have not in their own opinion, and surely they are competent judges of "what lies wholly in the plane of their own consciousness." In proof of the fact that mankind have not, in their own opinion, obtained all needed spiritual things by the use of their spiritual faculties, without the aid of external revelation, we appeal to all the religions of mankind, Heathen, Mohammedan, and Christian. Every one of these appeals to revelations from God. Every lawgiver of note professed to have communication with heaven, Zoroaster, Minos, Pythagoras, Solon, Lycurgus, Numa, Mohammed, down to the chief of the recent revolution in China. "Whatever becomes of the real truth of these relations," says Strabo of those before his day, "_it is certain that men did believe and think them true_." If mankind has found the supply of all their spiritual wants within themselves, would they have clung in this way to the pretense of external revelations? Is not the abundance of quack doctors conclusive proof of the existence of disease, and of the need of physicians? Not only was the need of an external revelation of some sort acknowledged by all mankind, but the insufficiency of the pretended oracles which they enjoyed was deplored by the wisest part of them. We never find men amidst the dim moonlight of tradition, and the light of nature, vaunting the sufficiency of their inward light; it is only amidst the full blaze of noonday Christianity that philosophers can stand up and declare that they have no need of God's teaching. Had such men lived in Athens of old, they would have found men possessed of spiritual faculties, and those of no mean order, engaged in erecting an altar with this inscription, "_To the Unknown God._" One of the wisest of the heathen (Socrates) acknowledged that he could attain to no certainty respecting religious truth or moral duty, in these memorable words, "We must of necessity wait, till some one from him who careth for us, shall come and instruct us how we ought to behave toward God and toward man." The chief of the Academy, whose philosophy concerning the eternity of matter occupies a conspicuous place in the creed of American heathens, had no such confidence in the sufficiency of his own powers of discovering religious truth. "We can not know of ourselves what petition will be pleasing to God, or what worship we should pay to him; but it is necessary that a lawgiver should be sent from heaven to instruct us." "Oh how greatly do I long to see that man!" He further declares that "_this lawgiver must be more than man, that he may teach us the things man can not know by his own nature_."[49] Whether this want of a revelation from God was real, or merely imaginary, will appear by a brief review of the opinions and practices of those who never enjoyed, and of those who reject the light of God's revelation. _They knew not God._ If there is any article of religion fundamental, and indispensable to its very existence, it is the knowledge of God. It is admitted by Rationalists that the spiritual faculties are designed to lay hold on God. It has been proved in the previous chapter, and it will be admitted by all but Atheists, that God is an Intelligent Being. And further it has been proved that God is not everything and everybody, but distinct from and supreme over all his works. Besides, in this country at least, there will not be much difference of opinion as to the propriety of a rational being adoring a brute, or a log of wood, or a lump of stone. It will be allowed that such stupidity shows both ignorance and folly. Now let us inquire into the knowledge of God possessed by the people who have no vision. The Chaldeans, the most ancient people of whom we have any account, and who had among them the immediate descendants of Noah, and whatever traditions of Noah's prophecies they preserved, were probably the best instructed of the heathen. Yet we find that they gave up the worship of God, adored the sun, and moon, and stars of heaven, and in process of time degenerated still further, and worshiped dumb idols. From this rock we were hewn; the common names of the days of the week, and especially of the first day of the week, will forever keep up a testimony to the necessity of that revelation which delivered our forefathers and us from burning our children upon the devil's altars on Sun-days. The Egyptians were reputed the most learned of mankind, and Egypt was considered the cradle of the arts and sciences. In her existing monuments, hieroglyphic inscriptions, and tomb paintings, we have presented to us the materials for forming a more correct opinion of the religion and life of the Egyptians than of any other ancient people; and the investigation of these monuments is still adding to our information. Infidel writers and lecturers have not hesitated to allege that Moses merely taught the Israelites the religion of Egypt; and some have had the hardihood to allege that the ten commandments are found written on the pyramids, as an argument against the necessity of a revelation. If the statement were true, it would by no means prove the conclusion. Egypt was favored with divine revelations to several of her kings, and enjoyed occasional visits from, or the permanent teachings of, such prophets as Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses, for four hundred years; a fact quite sufficient to account for her superiority to other heathen nations, as well as for the existence of some traces of true religion on her monuments. But the alleged fact is a falsehood. Some good moral precepts are found on the Egyptian monuments, but the ten commandments are not there. It may be charitably supposed that those who allege the contrary never learned the ten commandments, or have forgotten them, else they would have remembered that the first commandment is, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me;" and that Pharaoh indignantly asks, "Who is Jehovah that I should obey his voice? I know not God:" and that the second is, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image," etc., and would have paused before alleging that these commands were engraved on the very temples of idols, and by the priests of the birds, and beasts, and images of creeping things which they adored. It is very doubtful if they believed in the existence of one supreme God, as most of the heathen did; but if they did, "they did not under any form, symbol, or hieroglyphic, represent the idea of the unity of God," as is fully proved by Wilkinson.[50] On the contrary, the monuments confirm the satirical sketch of the poet,[51] as to the "monsters mad Egypt worshiped; here a sea-fish, there a river-fish; whole towns adore a dog. This place fears an ibis saturated with serpents; that adores a crocodile. It is a sin to violate a leek or onion, or break them with a bite." Cruel wars were waged between different towns, as Plutarch tells us, because the people of Cynopolis would eat a fish held sacred by the citizens of Latopolis. Bulls, and dogs, and cats, and rats, and reptiles, and dung beetles, were devoutly adored by the learned Egyptians. A Roman soldier, who had accidentally killed one of their gods, a cat, was put to death for sacrilege.[52] Whenever a dog died, every person in the house went into mourning, and fasted till night. So low had the "great, the mighty and transcendent soul," been degraded that there is a picture extant of one of the kings of Egypt worshiping his own coffin! Such is man's knowledge of God without a revelation from him. The Greeks, from their early intercourse with Egypt, borrowed from them most of their religion; but by later connections with the Hebrews, about the time of Aristotle and Alexander, they gathered a few grains of truth to throw into the heap of error. After the translation of the Scriptures into Greek, in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, any of their philosophers who desired might easily have learned the knowledge of the true God. But before this period we find little or no sense or truth in their religion. And the same remarks will apply to the Romans. Their gods were as detestable as they were numerous. Hesiod tells us they had thirty thousand. Temples were erected to all the passions, fears, and diseases to which humanity is subject. Their supreme god, Jupiter, was an adulterer, Mars a murderer, Mercury a thief, Bacchus a drunkard, Venus a harlot; and they attributed other crimes to their gods too horrible to be mentioned. Such gods were worshiped, with appropriate ceremonies, of lust, drunkenness, and bloodshed. Their most sacred mysteries, carried on under the patronage of these licentious deities, were so abominable and infamous, that it was found necessary, for the preservation of any remnant of good order, to prohibit them. It may be supposed that the human race is grown wiser now than in the days of Socrates and Cicero, and that such abominations are no longer possible. Turn your eyes, then, to India, and behold one hundred and fifty millions of rational beings, possessed of "spiritual faculties," "insight," and "the religious sentiment," worshiping three hundred and thirty millions of gods, in the forms of hills, and trees, and rivers, and rocks, elephants, tigers, monkeys, and rats, crocodiles, serpents, beetles, and ants, and monsters like to nothing in heaven or earth, or under the earth. Take one specimen of all. There is "the lord of the world," Juggernath. "When you think of the monster block of the idol, with its frightfully grim and distorted visage, so justly styled the Moloch of the East, sitting enthroned amid thousands of massive sculptures, the representative emblems of that cruelty and vice which constitute the very essence of his worship; when you think of the countless multitudes that annually congregate there, from all parts of India, many of them measuring the whole distance of their weary pilgrimage with their own bodies; when you think of the merit-earning assiduities constantly practiced by crowds of devotees and religious mendicants, around the holy city, some remaining all day with their head on the ground, and their feet in the air; others with their bodies entirely covered with earth; some cramming their eyes with mud, and their mouths with straw, while others lie extended in a puddle of water; here one man lying with his foot tied to his neck, another with a pot of fire on his breast, a third enveloped in a network of ropes; when, besides these self-inflicted torments, you think of the frightful amount of involuntary suffering and wretchedness arising from the exhaustion of toilsome pilgrimages, the cravings of famine, and the scourgings of pestilence; when you think of the day of the high festival--how the horrid king is dragged forth from his temple, and mounted on his lofty car, in the presence of hundreds of thousands, that cause the very earth to shake with shouts of 'Victory to Juggernath, our Lord;' how the officiating high priest, stationed in front of the elevated idol, commences the public service by a loathsome pantomimic exhibition, accompanied with the utterance of filthy, blasphemous songs, to which the vast multitude at intervals respond, not in the strains of tuneful melody, but in loud yells of approbation, united with a kind of hissing applause; when you think of the carnage that ensues, in the name of sacred offering--how, as the ponderous machine rolls on, grating harsh thunder, one and another of the more enthusiastic devotees throw themselves beneath the wheels, and are instantly crushed to pieces, the infatuated victims of hellish superstition; when you think of the numerous Golgothas that bestud the neighboring plain, where the dogs, jackals and vultures seem to live on human prey; and of those bleak and barren sands that are forever whitened with the skulls and bones of deluded pilgrims which lie bleaching in the sun,"[53] you will be able to see an awful force of meaning in the words of our text, and to realize more fully the necessity of a revelation from God, for the preservation of animal life to man. Literally, where there is no vision the people _perish_. Man doth not live by bread only, but by every word which proceedeth from the mouth of God. Take one other illustration of ignorance of God in the minds of those who close their eyes against the light of revelation--the heathen of Europe and America, possessing that inspiration which is wide as the world, looking abroad upon all the glorious works of the great Creator, and declaring there is no God. On the other hand, we have men, possessed of this same inspiration, deifying everything, and outrunning even the Hindoos in the multitude of their divinities, declaring that every stick, and stone, and serpent, and snail that crawls on the earth is God, and making professions of holding spiritual communings with them all. To crown the monument of folly, the chief of the Positive Philosophy comes forth with a revelation from his spiritual faculties, in which by way of improving on the proverb "both are best," and of being sure of the truth, he unites Atheism, and Pantheism, and Idolatry--teaches his child to worship idols, the youth to believe in one God, and himself and other full-grown men to adore the "resultant of all the forces capable of voluntarily contributing to the perfectioning of the universe, _not forgetting his worthy friends, the animals_." To such darkness are men justly condemned who shut their eyes against the light of God's revelation. Where there is no vision the people perish intellectually. He who turns away his ears from the truth must be turned unto fables. "Hear ye and give ear, be not proud, for the Lord hath spoken. Give glory to the Lord your God before he cause darkness, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains, and while ye look for light, he turn it into the shadow of death, and make it gross darkness." _Without a revelation from God, the mind of man can attain to no certainty regarding the most important of all his interests, the destiny of his immortal soul._ He knows well--for every sickness, and sorrow, and calamity declares it, and quick returning troubles will not allow him to forget--that the Ruler of the world is offended with him; and conscience tells him why. The sense of guilt is common to the human race. This is, indeed, "the inspiration which knows no sect, no country, no religion, no age; which is as wide as humanity." Reason asks herself, Will God be always thus angry with me? Shall I always feel these pangs of remorse for my sins? Will misery follow me forever, as I see and feel that it does here? Or shall my soul exist under God's frowns, or perish under his just sentence, even as my body perishes? Does the grave hide forever all that I loved? Have they ceased to be? Shall we ever meet again? Or must I say, "Farewell, farewell! An eternal farewell!" And in a few days myself also cease to be? The only answer Reason gives is--solemn silence. The wisest of men could not tell. Who has not dropped a tear over the dying words of Socrates, "I am going out of the world, and you are to continue in it, but which of us has the better part is a secret to every one but God." Cicero contended for the immortality of the soul against the multitudes of philosophers who denied it in his day; yet, after recounting their various opinions, he is obliged to say, "Which of these is true, God alone knows; and which is most probable, a very great question."[54] And Seneca, on a review of this subject, says: "Immortality, however desirable, was rather promised than proved by these great men."[55] The multitude had but two ideas on the subject. Either their ghosts would wander eternally in the land of shadows, or else they would pass into a succession of other bodies, of animals or men. From the nakedness and desolation of unclothed spirit, and the possibility which this notion held out of some close contact with a holy and just judge, the soul shrank back to the hope of the metempsychosis, and hoped rather to dwell in the body of a brute, than be utterly unclothed and mingle with spirits. This is the delusion cherished by the people of India and many other lands to this day. How unsatisfactory to the dying sinner this uncertainty. "Tell me," said a wealthy Hindoo, who had given all his wealth to the Brahmins who surrounded his dying bed, that they might obtain pardon for his sins, "Tell me what will become of my soul when I die?" "Your soul will go into the body of a holy cow." "And after that?" "It will pass into the body of the divine peacock." "And after that?" "It will pass into a flower." "Tell me, oh! tell me," cried the dying man, "where will it go last of all?" Where will it go last of all? Aye, that is the question Reason can not answer. The rejectors of the Bible here are as uncertain on this all-important subject as the heathen of India. They have every variety of oracles, and conjectures, and suppositions about the other world; but for their guesses they offer no proof. When they give us their oracles as if they were known truths, we are compelled to ask, How do you know? The only thing in which they are agreed among themselves is in denying the resurrection of the body; a point which they gathered from their heathen classics. A poor, empty, naked, shivering, table-rapping spirit, obliged to fly over the world at the sigh of any silly sewing girl, or the bidding of some brazen-faced strumpet, is all that ever shall exist of Washington, or Newton, in the scheme of one class of Bible rejectors. To obtain rest from such a doom, others fly to the eternal tomb, and inform us that the soul is simply an acting of the brain, and when the brain ceases to act, the soul ceases also. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. But even this hog philosophy is reasonable, compared with the dogma of the large majority, that a man may blaspheme, swear, lie, steal, murder, and commit adultery, and go straight to heaven--that "many a swarthy Indian who bowed down to wood and stone--many a grim-faced Calmuck who worshiped the great god of storms--many a Grecian peasant who did homage to Phoebus Apollo when the sun rose or went down--many a savage, his hands smeared all over with human sacrifice--shall sit down with Moses and Jesus in the kingdom of God."[56] To such wild unreason does the mind of man descend when it rejects the Bible. Life and immortality are brought to light by the gospel. Where there is no vision, hope perishes. The only plausible creed for him who rejects it is the eternal tomb, and the heart-chilling inscription: "Death is an eternal sleep!" _Without a revelation from God, men are as ignorant how to live, as how to die._ They have no rule of life having either truth or authority to direct them. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, of the purity of whose blood we are so proud, trusted to their magical incantations for the cure of diseases, for the success of their tillage, for the discovery of lost property, for uncharming cattle and the prevention of casualties. One day was useful for all things; another, though good to tame animals, was baleful to sow seed. One day was favorable to the commencement of business, another to let blood, and others wore a forbidding aspect to these and other things. On this day they were to buy, on a second to sell, on a third to hunt, on a fourth to do nothing. If a child was born on such a day, it would live; if on another, its life would be sickly; if on another, it would perish early.[57] Their descendants who reject the Bible are fully as superstitious. Astrologers, and Mediums, and Clairvoyants, in multitudes, find a profitable trade among them; and one prominent anti-Bible lecturer will cure you of any disease you have, if you will only inclose, in a letter, a lock of hair from the right temple, and--a--five dollar bill. The precepts of even the wisest men, and the laws of the best regulated States, commanded or approved of vice. In Babylon prostitution was compulsory on every female. The Carthaginian law required human sacrifices. When Agathoclas besieged Carthage, two hundred children, of the most noble families, were murdered by the command of the senate, and three hundred citizens voluntarily sacrificed themselves to Saturn.[58] The laws of Sparta required theft, and the murder of unhealthy children. Those of ancient Rome allowed parents the power of killing their children, if they pleased. At Athens, the capital of heathen literature and philosophy, it was enacted "that infants which appeared to be maimed should either be killed or exposed."[59] Plato, dissatisfied with the constitution, made a scheme of one much better, which he has left us in his Republic. In this great advance of society, this heathen millennium, we find that there was to be a community of women and of property, just as among our modern heathens. Women's rights were to be maintained by having the women trained to war. Children were still to be murdered, if convenience called for it. And the young children were to be led to battle at a safe distance, "that the young whelps might early scent carnage, and be inured to slaughter." The teachings of all these philosophers were immoral. He may lie, says Plato, who knows how to do it. Pride and the love of popular applause were esteemed the best motives to virtue. Profane swearing was commanded by the example of all their best writers and moralists. Oaths are frequent in the writings of Plato and Seneca. The gratification of the sensual appetites was openly taught. Aristippus taught that a wise man might steal and commit adultery when he could. Unnatural crimes were vindicated. The last dread crime--suicide--was pleaded for by Cicero and Seneca as the mark of a hero; and Demosthenes, Cato, Brutus, and Cassius, carried the means of self-destruction about them, that they might not fall alive into the hands of their enemies. The daily lives of these wisest of the heathen corresponded to their teachings, so far at least as vice was concerned. The most notorious vices, and even unnatural crimes, were practiced by them. The reader of the classics does not need to be reminded that such vices are lauded in the poems of Ovid, and Horace, and Virgil; that the poets were rewarded and honored for songs which would not be tolerated for a moment in the vilest theater of New York. Recently some daily papers and broad-church preachers have taken to the canonization of heathen saints; they denounce vigorously the bigotry of any who will not open to them the gates of heaven, or who will, in general, deny salvation to good heathens. But we do not deny salvation to good heathens, or to good Jews, or to good Mohammedans, or to anybody who is good. God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of him. Nor are we about to usurp Peter's keys, and lock anybody out of heaven, or into it either; we are only acting as jurymen upon the life and conduct of men held up to our children as noble examples of a good life, in their classics, by heathens like themselves, and recommended now by Christian clergymen, as fitter for the kingdom of God, than bad Christians; which last may be very true, and so much the worse for the bad Christians. But the question is not to be thus decided by comparisons, or by generalities; we must have specified individual heathen saints. When, however, we come to look for them, these saints and heroes prove to be only fit for the penitentiary, according to the laws of any of our States; and were they living now, and behaving themselves according to their accustomed habits, the best of them would be fortunate if they got there before they were tarred and feathered by an outraged public. Socrates, Seneca, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, form the stock specimens trotted out of the stables of heathen morality, for the admiration and reverence of Christians in this nineteenth century. But it has been well remarked of Socrates, that no American lady would live with him a year without applying for a divorce, and getting it, too, upon very sufficient grounds. Seneca, who wrote so beautifully upon morals, was an adulterer; and, moreover, prostituted his pen to write a defense of a man who murdered his mother. And Marcus Aurelius directed the murder of thousands of innocent men and women, causing young ladies to be stripped naked and torn to pieces by wild beasts, in the public amphitheater, and others to be roasted alive in red-hot iron chairs, for no other offense but that they avowed themselves Christians. Such are these boasted saints and heroes of heathendom. What, then, must the lives of the vulgar have been? In the very height of Roman civilization, Trajan caused ten thousand men to hew each other to pieces for the amusement of the Roman people; and noble ladies feasted their eyes on the spectacle. In the Augustan age, when the invincible armies of Rome gave law to half the world, fathers were in the habit of mutilating their sons rather than see them subjected to the slavery and terrible despotism of their officers. What, then, must the state of the people of the vanquished countries have been? Whole provinces were frequently given over to fire and sword by generals not reputed inhuman; and such was the progress of war and anarchy, and their never-failing accompaniments, famine and pestilence, that, in the reign of Gallienus, large cities were left utterly desolate, the public roads became unsafe from immense packs of wolves, _and it was computed that one-half of the human race perished_. This was just before the toleration of Christianity. God would allow the wisest and bravest of mankind to try the experiment of neglecting his gospel and living without his revelation, until all mankind might be convinced that such a course is suicidal to nations. "Where there is no vision, the people perish." A brief reference to the codes of morals which the modern opposers of the Bible would substitute for it in Christian lands shall conclude our proof of the necessity of such a revelation of God's law to man, as shall guide his life to peace and happiness. The family is the basis of the commonwealth. Destroy family confidence and family government, and you destroy society, subvert civil government, and bring destruction on the human race. Mankind are so generally agreed on this subject, that adultery, even among heathens, is regarded and punished as a crime. The whole school of Infidel writers and anti-Bible lecturers, male and female, apologize for, and vindicate this crime. Lord Herbert, the first of the English Deists, taught that the indulgence of lust and anger is no more to be blamed than the thirst occasioned by the dropsy, or the drowsiness produced by lethargy. Mr. Hobbes asserted that every man has a right to all things, and may lawfully get them if he can. Bolingbroke taught that man is merely a superior animal, which is just the modern development theory, and that his chief end is to gratify the appetites and inclinations of the flesh. Hume, whose argument against miracles is so frequently in the mouths of American Infidels, taught that adultery must be practiced, if men would obtain all the advantages of life, and that if practiced frequently, it would by degrees come to be thought no crime at all--a prediction as true as Holy Writ; the fulfillment of which hundreds of the citizens of Cincinnati can attest, who have heard a lecturer publicly denounce the Bible as an immoral book, and in the same address declare that if a woman was married to a man, in her opinion of inferior development, it was her duty to leave him and live with another. This duty is by no means neglected, as the numerous divorces, spiritual marriages, separations, and elopements among this class of persons, testify. Voltaire held that it was not agreeable to policy to regard it as a vice in a moral sense. Rousseau, a liar, a thief, and a debauched profligate, according to his own printed "Confessions," held the same high opinion of the inner light as our American Spiritualists. "_I have only to consult myself_," said he, "_concerning what I do. All that I feel to be right, is right._"[60] In fact, the purport of this inner light doctrine is exactly as Rousseau expressed it, and amounts simply to this, _Do what you like._ On this lawless principle these men acted. Take, for example, the chief saint on the calendar of American Infidelity, whose birthday is annually celebrated by a festival in this city, and in whose honor hundreds of men, who would like to be reputed decent citizens, parade the streets of Cincinnati in solemn procession--Thomas Paine--the author of "The Age of Reason," as his character is depicted by one who was his helper in the work of blaspheming God and seducing men, and whose testimony, therefore, in the eyes of an Infidel, is unimpeachable--William Carver. "MR. THOMAS PAINE: I received your letter, dated the 25th ult., in answer to mine, dated November 21, and after minutely examining its contents, I found that you had taken to the pitiful subterfuge of _lying_ for your defense. You say that you paid me four dollars per week for your board and lodging, during the time you were with me, prior to the first of June last; which was the day that I went up, by your order, to bring you to York, from New Rochelle. It is fortunate for me that I have a living evidence that saw you give me five guineas, and no more, in my shop, at your departure at that time; but you said you would have given me more, but that you had no more with you at present. You say, also, that you found your own liquors during the time you boarded with me; but you should have said, 'I found only a small part of the liquor I drank during my stay with you; this part I purchased of John Fellows, which was a demi-john of brandy, containing four gallons,' and this did not serve you three weeks. This can be proved, and I mean not to say anything I can not prove, for I hold truth as a precious jewel. It is a well-known fact that you drank one quart of brandy per day, at my expense, during the different times you boarded with me; the demi-john above mentioned excepted, and the last fourteen weeks you were sick. Is not this a supply of liquor for dinner and supper." * * * "I have often wondered that a French woman and three children should leave France and all their connections, to follow Thomas Paine to America. Suppose I were to go to my native country, England, and take another man's wife and three children of his, and leave my wife and children in this country, what would be the natural conclusion in the minds of the people, but that there was some criminal connection between the woman and myself?"[61] The death of this man was horrible. The Philadelphia _Presbyterian_ says: "There is now in Philadelphia a lady who saw Paine on his dying-bed. She informs us that Paine's physician also attended her father's family in the city of New York, where in her youth she resided, and that on one occasion whilst at their house, he proposed to her to accompany him to the Infidel's dwelling, which she did. It was a miserable hovel in what was then Raisin Street. She had often seen Paine before, a drunken profligate, wandering about the streets, from whom the children always fled in terror. On entering his room she found him stretched on his miserable bed. His visage was lean and haggard, and wore the expression of great agony. He expressed himself without reserve as to his fears of death, and repeatedly called on the name of Jesus, begging for mercy. The scene was appalling, and so deeply engraven on her mind, that nothing could obliterate it."--_Philadelphia Presbyterian_, March 17, 1857. The physician's statement has been common, many years, and corresponds with the above. So do Grant Thorburn's representations agree with both. And the piece published by Rev. Jas. Inglis in his "Waymarks in the Wilderness," which has proved so distasteful to the Paineites here, substantially agrees with all the others. It is only the truthfulness of it which is so offensive. It may be of interest to state, that the facts therein named are the recollections of old Dr. McClay, a Baptist minister of known power and veracity. The fact of Paine's miserable, and cowardly, and man-forsaken end is too true. Let no one be foolhardy enough to follow them, rejecting to do it, a fourfold cord of strong testimony; nay, we may add, a stronger cord of fivefold testimony, as Paine's nurse testifies like the rest. In the East these facts are so notorious that even Infidels disown allegiance or attachment to Paine, if they wish to be considered respectable. Some of the severest denunciations against him, which we ever heard, have been from Infidels. Indeed this is more than plain from the very fact of all the Infidels having forsaken Paine on his death-bed. Who was his doctor? A Christian. Who was his nurse? A Christian? Who were his most constant visitors and sympathizers? Thorburn, McClay, etc., Christians. They went, for mercy's sake; Infidels, having no "bowels of mercies," kept away. Carver, Jefferson, etc., were far from him in his extreme hour. The testimony of Mons. Tronchin, a Protestant physician from Geneva, who attended Voltaire on his death-bed, was: That to see all the furies of Orestes, one only had to be present at the death of Voltaire. ("_Pour voir toutes les furies d'Oreste, il n'y avait qu'a se trouver a la mort de Voltaire._") "Such a spectacle," he adds, "would benefit the young, who are in danger of losing the precious helps of religion." The Marechal de Richelieu, too, was so terrified at what he saw that he left the bedside of Voltaire, declaring that "the sight was too horrible for endurance."[62] And these are the saints, and apostles, and heroes of Infidelity, to whose memories Infidels make orations and festivals, and whose writings are reprinted in scores of editions, not only over Christendom, but even in India, to teach mankind how to live and how to die! Such are the lives and deaths of those who denounce the Bible as an immoral Book, and blaspheme the God of the Bible as too unholy to be reverenced or adored! "But, beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ; how that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts. These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit." In the Free Love Institute about to be established in our vicinity, we shall have the full development of these filthy principles and practices. Let fathers and husbands look to this matter. Especially let ungodly men set to work and devise some law of man capable of binding those who renounce the law of God, and with it all human authority. For there can be no law of man, unless there is a revealed law of God. "What right," says the Pantheist, the Fourierist, the Spiritualist, the Atheist, "what right have you to command me? Right and wrong are only matters of feeling, and your feelings are no rule to me. The will of the majority is only the law of might, and if I can evade it, or overcome it, my will is as good as theirs. Oaths are only an idle superstition; there is no judge, no judgment, no punishment for the false swearer." Take away the moral sanction of law, and the sacredness of oaths, and what basis have you left for any government, save the point of the bayonet? Take away the revealed law of God, and you leave not a vestige of any authority to any human law. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," said the immortal framers of the basis of the American Confederation, "that all men are created equal; that they are _endowed by their Creator_ with certain unalienable rights." It was well said. The rights of God are the only basis of the rights of man. One of the most sagacious of modern statesmen has borne his testimony to this fundamental truth--that religion is the only basis of social order--in words as trenchant as the guillotine which suggested them. "It is not," says Napoleon, "the mystery of incarnation which I perceive in religion, but the mystery of social order. It attaches to heaven an idea of equality which prevents the rich from being massacred by the poor."[63] Once in modern times, the rejectors of the Bible had opportunity to try the experiment of ruling a people on a large scale, and giving the world a specimen of an Infidel Republic. You have heard one of them here express his admiration of that government, and declare his intention to present a public vindication of it. Of course, as soon as practicable, that which they admire they will imitate, and the scenes of Paris and Lyons will be re-enacted in Louisville and Cincinnati. Our Bibles will be collected and burned on a dung-heap. Death will be declared an eternal sleep. God will be declared a fiction. Religious worship will be renounced; the Sabbath abolished; and a prostitute, crowned with garlands, will receive the adorations of the mayors and councilmen of Cincinnati and Newport. The reign of terror will commence. The guillotine shall take its place on the Fifth Street Market place. Proscription will follow proscription. Women will denounce their husbands, and children their parents, as bad citizens, and lead them to the ax; and well-dressed ladies, filled with savage ferocity, will seize the mangled bodies of their murdered countrymen between their teeth. The Licking will be choked with the bodies of men, and the Ohio dyed with their blood; and those whose infancy has sheltered them from the fire of the rabble soldiery will be bayoneted as they cling to the knees of their destroyers.[64] The common doom of man commuted for the violence of the sword, the bayonet, the sucking boat, and the guillotine, the knell of the nation tolled, and the world summoned to its execution and funeral, will need no preacher to expound the text, _Where there is no vision, the people perish._ FOOTNOTES: [38] Strauss' Life of Jesus, 64, 74, 87. [39] Bauer's Hebrew Mythology. [40] See Pearson on Infidelity, page 93, 40th edition; and Agassiz's Penikese lectures. [41] Newman's Phases of Faith, 157. [42] Carlyle's Past and Present, 307. [43] Discourse on Religion, p. 209. [44] Carlyle's Past and Present, p. 312. [45] Ib. p. 37. [46] The Soul, p. 342. [47] Ib. p. 359. [48] Parker's Discourses, 171, 33. [49] Plato. Republic. Books IV. and VI., and Alcibiades II. [50] Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians, Second Series, Vol. II. page 176, et passim. [51] Juvenal, Satire XV. [52] Diodorus Siculus, Book I. [53] Duff's India, page 222. [54] Tusc. Quæst. lib. 1. [55] Seneca, Ep. 102. [56] Parker's Discourse, 83. [57] Turner's Anglo-Saxons, b. vii. chap. 13. [58] Diodorus Siculus, b. xx. chap. 14. [59] Aristotle, Polit. lib. vii. chap. 17. [60] Horne's Introduction of the Scriptures, Vol. I. page 25. [61] Printed repeatedly in New York newspapers, and given entire in the report of the discussion between Dr. Berg and Mr. Barker. W. S. Young, Philadelphia, 1854. [62] _The Occident_, 20th August, 1874, San Francisco. [63] Ardeches' Life of Napoleon I. 222. [64] Horne's Introduction to the Scriptures, Vol. I. page 26, where ample references to contemporary French writers are given. CHAPTER V. WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT? "The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle: so I write. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen."--2 Thess. iii. 17. Religion rests not on dogmas, but on a number of great facts. In a previous chapter we found one of these to be, that people destitute of a revelation of God's will ever have been, and now are, ignorant, miserable, and wicked. If it were at all needful, we might go on to show that there are people in the world, who have decent clothing and comfortable houses, who work well-tilled farms and sub-soil plows, and reaping machinery, who yoke powerful streams to the mill wheel, and harness the iron horse to the market wagon, who career their floating palaces up the opposing floods, line their coasts with flocks of white-winged schooners, and show their flags on every coast of earth, who invent and make everything that man will buy, from the brass button, dear to the barbarian, to the folio of the philosopher, erect churches in all their towns, and schools in every village, who make their blacksmiths more learned than the priests of Egypt, their Sabbath scholars wiser than the philosophers of Greece, and even the criminals in their jails more decent characters than the sages, heroes, and gods of the lands without the Bible; and that these people are the people who possess a Book, which they think contains a revelation from God, teaching them how to live well; which Book they call the Bible. This is the book about which we make our present inquiry, Who wrote it? The fact being utterly undeniable, that these blessings are found among the people who possess the Bible, and only among them, we at once, and summarily, dismiss the arrogant falsehood presented to prevent any inquiry about the Book, namely, that "Christianity is just like any other superstition, and its sacred books like the impositions of Chinese, Indian, or Mohammedan impostors. They, too, are religious, and have their sacred books, which they believe to be divine." A profound generalization indeed! Is a peach-tree just like a horse-chestnut, or a scrub-oak, or a honey-locust? They are all trees, and have leaves on them. The Bible is just as like the Yi King, or the Vedas, or the Koran, as a Christian American is like a Chinaman, a Turk, or a Hindoo. But it is too absurd to begin any discussion with these learned Thebans of the relative merits of the Bible as compared with the Vedas, and the Chinese Classics, of which they have never read a single page. Let them stick to what they pretend to know. The Bible is a great fact in the world's history, known alike to the prince and the peasant, the simple and the sage. It is perused with pleasure by the child, and pondered with patience by the philosopher. Its psalms are caroled on the school green, cheer the chamber of sickness, and are chanted by the mother over her cradle, by the orphan over the tomb. Here, thousands of miles away from the land of its birth, in a world undiscovered for centuries after it was finished, in a language unknown alike at Athens and Jerusalem, it rules as lovingly and as powerfully as in its native soil. To show that its power is not derived from race or clime, it converts the Sandwich Islands into a civilized nation, and transforms the New Zealand cannibal into a British shipowner, the Indian warrior into an American editor, and the Negro slave into the President of a free African Republic. It has inspired the Caffirs of Africa to build telegraphs, and to print associated press dispatches in their newspapers; while the Zulus, one of whom would have converted Bishop Colenso from Christianity, if he had been a Christian, are importing steel plows by hundreds every year. It has captured the enemy's fortresses, and turned his guns. Lord Chesterfield's parlor, where an infidel club met to sneer at religion, is now a vestry, where the prayers of the penitent are offered to Christ. Gibbon's house, at Lake Lemon, is now a hotel; one room of which is devoted to the sale of Bibles. Voltaire's printing press, from which he issued his infidel tracts, has been appropriated to printing the Word of God.[65] It does not look as if it had finished its course and ceased from its triumphs. Translated into the hundred and fifty languages spoken by nine hundred millions of men, carried by ten thousand heralds to every corner of the globe, sustained by the cheerful contributions and fervent prayers of hundreds of thousands of ardent disciples, it is still going forth conquering and to conquer. Is there any other book so generally read, so greatly loved, so zealously propagated, so widely diffused, so uniform in its results, and so powerful and blessed in its influences? Do you know any? If you can not name any book, no, nor any thousand books, which in these respects equal the Bible--then it stands out clear and distinct, and separate from all other authorship; and with an increased emphasis comes our question, Who wrote it? With all these palpable facts in view, to come to the examination of this question as if we knew nothing about them, or as if knowing them well, we cared nothing at all about them, and were determined to deny them their natural influence in begetting within us a very strong presumption in favor of its divine origin, were to declare that our heads and hearts were alike closed against light and love. But to enter on this inquiry into the origin of the Book which has produced such results, with a preconceived opinion that it must be a forgery, and an imposition, the fruit of a depraved heart, and a lying tongue, implies so much home-born deceit that, till the heart capable of such a prejudice be completely changed, no reasoning can have any solid fulcrum of truth or goodness to rest on. It is sheer folly to talk of one's being wholly unprejudiced in such an inquiry. No man ever was, or could be so. As his sympathies are toward goodness and virtue, and the happiness of mankind, or toward pride and deceit, and selfishness and savageness, so will his prejudices be for or against the Bible. On looking at the Bible, we find it composed of a number of separate treatises, written by different writers, at various times; some parts fifteen hundred years before the others. We find, also, that it treats of the very beginning of the world, before man was made, and of other matters of which we have no other authentic history to compare with it. Again, we find portions which treat of events connected in a thousand places with the affairs of the Roman Empire, of which we have several credible histories. Now, there are two modes of investigation open to us, the dogmatic and the inductive. We may take either. We may construct for ourselves, from the most flimsy suppositions, a metaphysical balloon, inflated with self-conceit into the rotundity of a cosmogony, according to which, in our opinion, the world should have been made, and we may paint it over with the figures of the various animals and noble savages which ought to have sprung up out of its fornea, and we may stripe its history to suit our notions of the progress of such a world, and soaring high into the clouds, after a little preliminary amusement in the discovery of eternal red-hot fire-mists, and condensing comets, and so forth, we may come down upon the summit of some of this earth's mountains, say Ararat, and take a survey of the Bible process of world-making. Finding that the Creator of the world had to make his materials--a business in which no other world-maker ever did engage--and, further, that God's plan of making it by no means corresponds to our patent process and that the article is not at all like what we intend to produce when we go into the business, and that it does not work according to our expectations, we can denounce the whole as a very mean affair, and the Book which describes it as not worth reading. If one wants some new subject for merriment, and does not mind making a fool of himself, and is not to be terrified by old-fashioned notions about God Almighty, and is perfectly confident that God can tell him nothing that he does not know better already, and merely wants to see whether he is not trying to pass off old fables upon wide-awake people for facts--this dogmatic plan will suit him. On the other hand, if one is tolerably convinced that he does not know everything, not much of the world he lives in, less of its history, and nothing at all about the best way of making it, and that when it needs mending it will not be sent to his workshop; that he knows nothing about what happened before he was born unless what other people tell him, and that, though men do err, yet all men are not liars, that all the blessings of education, civilization, law and liberty, from the penny primer to the Constitution of the United States, came to him solely through the channel of abundant, reliable testimony; that the only way in which he can ever know anything beyond his eyesight with certainty, is to gather testimony about it, and compare the evidence, and inquire into the character of the witnesses; that when one has done so, he becomes so satisfied of the truth of the report that he would rather risk his life upon it than upon the certainty of any mathematical problem, or of any scientific truth, whatever--that ninety-nine out of every hundred citizens of the United States are a thousand times more certain that the Yankees whipped the British in 1776, declared the Colonies free and independent States, and made Washington President, than they ever will be that all bodies attract each other directly as their mass, and inversely as the squares of their distances, that the sum of the angles of any triangle is equal to two right angles, or that the earth is nearer the sun in winter than in summer--and that certainty about the Bible history is just as attainable, and just as reliable, as certainty about American history, if he will seek it in the same way--and if he is really desirous to know how this Book was written, which alone in the world teaches men how to obtain peace with God, how to live well, and how to die with a firm and joyful hope of a resurrection to life eternal, and what part of it is easiest to prove either true or false--then he will take the inductive mode. He will begin at the present time, and trace the history up to the times in which the Book was written. He will ascertain what he can about that part of it which was last written--the New Testament--and begin with that part of it which lies nearest him--the Epistles. By the comparison of the documents themselves, with all kinds of history and monuments which throw light on the period, he will try to ascertain whether they are genuine or not. And from one well-ascertained position he will proceed to another, until he has traversed the whole ground of the genuineness of the writings, the truth of the story, and the divine authority of the doctrine. This is my plan of investigation; one thing at a time, and the nearest first. It is not worth while to inquire whether it be inspired by God, if it be really a forgery of impostors; nor whether the gospel story is worthy of credit, if the only book which contains it be a religious novel of the third or fourth century. We dismiss then the questions of the inspiration, or even the truth of the New Testament, till we have ascertained its authors. We take up the Book, and find that it purports to be a relation of the planting of the Church of Christ, of its laws and ordinances, and of the life, death and resurrection of its Founder, written by eight of his companions, at various periods and places, toward the close of the first century. There is a general opinion among all Christians that the Book was composed then, and by these persons. We want to know why they think so? In short, is it a genuine book, or merely a collection of myths with the apostles' names appended to them by some lying monks? Is it a fact, or a forgery? In any historical inquiry, we want some fixed point of time from which to take our departure; and in this case we want to know if there is any period of antiquity in which undeniably this Book was in existence, and received as genuine by Christian societies. For I will not suppose my readers as ignorant as some of those Infidels who allege that it was made by the Bible Society. It used to be the fashion with those of them who pretended to learning, to affirm that it was made by the Council of Laodicea, in A. D. 364; because, in order to guard the churches against spurious epistles and gospels, that Council published a list of those which the apostles did actually write, which thenceforth were generally bound in one volume. Before that time, the four Gospels were always bound in one volume and called "The Gospel." The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles universally and undoubtedly known to be written by Paul, to the churches of Thessalonica, Galatia, Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Colosse, and to Philemon, a well-known resident of that city, and those to Timothy and Titus, missionaries of world-wide celebrity, the First General Epistle of Peter, and the First General Epistle of John, which were at once widely circulated to check prevailing heresies--were bound in another volume and called "The Apostle." The Epistle to the Hebrews, being general, and anonymous, _i. e._, not bearing the name of any particular church, or person, to whom anybody who merely looked at it could refer for proof of its genuineness, as in the case of the other Epistles--was not so soon known by the European churches to be written by Paul. The General Epistles of James, Jude, and the Second General Epistle of Peter, lying under the same difficulty, and besides being very disagreeable to easy-going Christians, from their sharp rebukes of hypocrisy, and the Second and Third Epistles of John, from their brevity, and the Revelation of John, being one of the last written of all the books of the New Testament, and the most mysterious--were not so generally known beyond the churches where the originals were deposited, until the other two collections had been formed. They were accordingly kept as separate books, and sometimes bound up in a third volume of apostolical writings. Besides these, at the time of the Council of Laodicea, and for a long time before, other books, written by Barnabas, Clement, Polycarp, and other companions and disciples of the apostles, and forged gospels and epistles attributed by heretics to the apostles, were circulated through the churches, and read by Christians. The Council of Laodicea did, what many learned men had done before them; it investigated the evidence upon which any of these books was attributed to an apostle; and finding evidence to satisfy them, that the Gospel written by Luke had the sanction of the Apostle Paul, that the Gospel of Mark was revised by the Apostle Peter, that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by Paul, and the other Epistles by John, Jude, James, and Peter, respectively, and not finding evidence to satisfy them about the Revelation of John, they expressed their opinion, and the grounds of it, for the information of the world.[66] Into these reasons we will hereafter inquire, for our faith in Holy Scripture does not rest on their canons. We are not now asking what they _thought_, but what they _did_; and we find that they did criticise certain books, reported to be written by the apostles of Jesus Christ some three hundred years before, approve some, and reject others as spurious, and publish a list of those they thought genuine. Infidels admit this, and on the strength of it long asserted that the Council of Laodicea made the New Testament. At length they became ashamed of the stupid absurdity of alleging that men could criticise the claims, and catalogue the names of books before they were written; and they now shift back the writing--or the authentication of the New Testament--for they are not quite sure which, though the majority incline to the former--to the Emperor Constantine, and the Council of Nice which met in the year 325. Why they have fixed on the Council of Nice is more than I can tell. They might as well say the Council of Trent, or the Westminster Assembly, either of which had just as much to do with the Canon of Scripture. However, on some vague hearsay that the Council of Nice and the Emperor Constantine made the Bible, hundreds in this city are now risking the salvation of their souls. We have in this assertion, nevertheless, as many facts admitted as will serve our present purpose. There did exist, then, undeniably, in the year 325, large numbers of Christian churches in the Roman Empire, sufficiently numerous to make it politic, in the opinion of Infidels, for a candidate for the empire to profess Christianity; sufficiently powerful to secure his success, notwithstanding the desperate struggles of the heathen party; and sufficiently religious, or if you like superstitious, to make it politic for an emperor and his politicians to give up the senate, the court, the camp, the chase, and the theater, and weary themselves with long prayers, and longer speeches, of preachers about Bible religion. Now that is certainly a remarkable fact, and all the more remarkable if we inquire, How came it so? For these men, preachers, prince, and people, were brought up to worship Jupiter and the thirty thousand gods of Olympus, after the heathen fashion, and to leave the care of religion to heathen priests, who never troubled their heads about books or doctrines after they had offered their sacrifices. In all the records of the world there is no instance of a general council of heathen priests to settle the religion of their people. How happens it then that the human race has of a sudden waked up to such a strange sense of the folly of idolatry and the value of religion? The Council of Nice, and the Emperor Constantine, and his counselors, making a Bible is a proof of a wonderful revolution in the world's religion; a phenomenon far more surprising than if the Secretaries of State, and the Senate, and President Grant should leave the Capital to post off to London, to attend the meetings of a Methodist Conference, assembled to make a hymn book. Now what is the cause of this remarkable conversion of prince, priests, and people? How did they all get religion? How did they get it so suddenly? How did they get so much of it? The Infidel gives no answer, except to tell us[67] that the austerity, purity, and zeal of the first Christians, their good discipline, their belief in the resurrection of the body and the general judgment, and their persuasion that Christ and his apostles wrought miracles, had made a great many converts. This is just as if I inquired how a great fire originated, and you should tell me that it burned fast because it was very hot. What I want to know is, how it happened that these licentious Greeks, and Romans, and Asiatics, became austere and pure; how these frivolous philosophers suddenly became so zealous about religion; what implanted the belief of the resurrection of the body and of the judgment to come in the skeptical minds of these heathen scoffers; and how did the pagans of Italy, Egypt, Spain, Germany, Britain, come to believe in the miracles of one who lived hundreds of years before, and thousands of miles away, or to care a straw whether the written accounts of them were true or false? According to the Infidel account, the Council of Nice, and the Emperor Constantine's Bible-making, is a most extraordinary business--a phenomenon without any natural cause, and they will allow no supernatural--a greater miracle than any recorded in the Bible. If we inquire, however, of the parties attending that Council, what the state of the case is, we shall learn that they believed--whether truly or erroneously we are not now inquiring--but they believed, that a teacher sent from God, had appeared in Palestine two hundred and ninety years before, and had taught this religion which they had embraced; had performed wonderful miracles, such as opening the eyes of the blind, healing lepers, and raising the dead; that he had been put to death by the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, had risen again from the dead, had spoken to hundreds of people, and had gone out and in among them for six weeks after his resurrection; that he had ascended up through the air, to heaven, in the sight of numbers of witnesses, and had promised that he would come again in the clouds of heaven, to raise the dead, and to judge every man according to his works; that before he went away he appointed twelve of his intimate companions to teach his religion to the world, giving them power to work miracles in proof of their divine commission, and requiring mankind to hear them as they would hear him; that they and their followers did so, in spite of persecutions, sufferings, and death, with so much success, that immense numbers were persuaded to give up idolatry and its filthiness, and to profess Christianity and its holiness, and to brave the fury of the heathen mob, and the vengeance of the Roman law; that a difference of opinion having arisen among them as to whether this teacher was an angel from heaven, or God, whether they should pray and sing psalms to Him, as Athanasius and his party believed, or only give Him some lesser honor as Arius and his party believed, and this difference making all the difference between idolatry on the one hand, and impiety on the other, and so involving their everlasting salvation or damnation, they had embraced the first opportunity after the cessation of persecution, and the accession of the first Christian Emperor, to assemble three hundred and eighteen of their most learned clergymen, of both sides, and from all countries between Spain and Persia, to discuss these solemn questions; and that, through the whole of the discussions, both sides appealed to the writings of the apostles, as being then well known, and of unquestioned authority with every one who held the Christian name. These facts, being utterly indisputable, are acknowledged by all persons, Infidel or Christian, at all acquainted with history.[68] Here, then, we have the books of the New Testament at the Council of Nice well known to the whole world; and the Council, so far from _giving_ any authority to them, _bowing to theirs_--both Arian and Orthodox with one consent acknowledging that the whole Christian world received them as the writings of the apostles of Christ. There were venerable men of fourscore and ten at that Council; if these books had been first introduced in their lifetime, they must have known it. There were men there whose parents had heard the Scriptures read in church from their childhood, and so could not be imposed upon with a new Bible. The New Testament could not be less than three generations old, else one or other of the disputants would have exposed the novelty of its introduction, from his own information. The Council of Nice, then, did not make the New Testament. It was a book well known, ancient, and of undoubted authority among all Christians, ages before that Council. _The existence of the New Testament Scriptures, then, ages before the Council of Nice, is a great fact._ We next take up the assertions, propounded with a show of learning, that the books of the New Testament, and especially the Gospels, were not in use, and were not known till the third century; that they are not the productions of contemporary writers; that the alleged ocular testimony or proximity in point of time of the sacred historians to the events recorded is mere assumption, originating in the titles which Biblical books bear in our canon; that we stand here (in the gospel history), upon purely mythical and poetical ground; and that the Gospels and Epistles are a gradually formed collection of myths, having little or no historic reality. So Strauss, Eichorn, De Wette, and their disciples here, attempt to set aside the New Testament. In plain English, it is a collection of forgeries. These assertions are absurd. In the hundred years between the death of the apostles, and the beginning of the third century, there was not time to form a mythology. The times of Trajan's persecution, and that of the philosophic Aurelius, and the busy bustling age of Severus, were not the times for such a business. Bigoted Jews would not, and could not, have made such a character as Jesus of Nazareth; and the philosophers of that day, Celsus and Porphyry, for instance, hated it when presented to them as heartily as either Strauss or Paine. There were not wanting thousands of enemies, able and willing, to expose such a forgery. The aspect and character of the gospel narrative are totally unlike those of mythologies. Hear the verdict of one who confessedly stands at the head of the roll of oriental historians: "In no single respect--if we except the fact that it is miraculous--has that story a mythical character. It is a single story, told without variations; whereas myths are fluctuating and multiform: it is blended inextricably with the civil history of the times, which it everywhere reports with extraordinary accuracy; whereas myths distort or supersede civil history: it is full of prosaic detail, which myths studiously eschew: it abounds with practical instruction of the simplest and purest kind; whereas myths teach by allegory. Even in its miraculous element it stands to some extent in contrast with all mythologies, where the marvelous has ever a predominant character of grotesqueness which is absent from New Testament miracles. (This Strauss himself admits, _Leben Jesu_, 1-67.) Simple earnestness, fidelity, painstaking accuracy, pure love of truth, are the most patent characteristics of the New Testament writers, who evidently deal with facts, not with fancies, and are employed in relating a history, not in developing an idea. They write that 'we may know the certainty of the things which are most surely believed' in their day. They 'bear record of what they have seen and heard.' I know not how stronger words could have been used to prevent the notion of that plastic, growing myth which Strauss conceives to have been in apostolic times."[69] The character of Christ exhibited in the Gospels is the contrary of that of the heroes of mythology; as contrary as holiness is to sin. The invention of such a character by any man, or by the wisest set of men who ever lived, would have been a miracle nearly as great as the existence of such a person. When the character of Christ was presented to the wisest men of the Greeks, and Romans, and Hebrews, so far from admiring him as a hero, they crucified him as an impostor, and persecuted the preachers of his gospel. There was nothing mythical in the ten persecutions; these at least were hard historical facts. Every line of examination of time, place, and circumstances proves the falsehood of the mythical theory, and establishes the truth of the gospel history. The authenticity of the gospel history, and of the Apostolic Epistles is confirmed by the testimony of their enemies. It is a well-authenticated and undeniable fact, that, in the close of the second century, Celsus, an Epicurean philosopher, wrote a work against Christianity, entitled, "The Word of Truth," in which he quotes passages from the New Testament, and so many of them, that from the fragments of his work which remain, we could gather all the principal facts of the birth, teaching, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, if the New Testament should be lost. If Paine quotes the New Testament to ridicule it, no man can deny that such a book was in existence at the time he wrote. If he takes the pains to write a book to confute it, it is self-evident that it is in circulation, and possessed of influence. So Celsus' attempt to reply to the Gospels, and his quotations from them, are conclusive proofs that these books were generally circulated and believed, and held to be of authority at the time he wrote. Further, he shows every disposition to present every argument which could possibly damage the Christian cause. In fact, our modern Infidels have done little more than serve up his old objections. Now nothing could have served his purpose better than to prove that the records of the history of Christ were forgeries of a late date. This would have saved him all further trouble, and settled the fate of Christianity conclusively. He had every opportunity of ascertaining the fact, living, as he did, so near the times and scenes of the gospel history, and surrounded by heretics and false Christians, who would gladly have given him every information. But he never once intimates the least suspicion of such a thing--never questions the Gospels as books of history--nor denies the miracles recorded in them, but attributes them to magic.[70] Here, then, we have testimony as acceptable to an Infidel as that of Strauss or Voltaire--in fact, utterly undeniable by any man of common sense--that the New Testament was well known and generally received by Christians as authoritative, when Celsus wrote his reply to it, in the end of the second century. If it was a forgery, it was undoubtedly a forgery of old standing, if he could not detect it. But we will go back a step farther, and prove the antiquity of the New Testament by the testimony of another enemy, two generations older than Celsus. The celebrated heretic, Marcion, lived in the beginning of the second century, when he had the best opportunity of discovering a forgery in the writings of the New Testament, if any such existed; he was excommunicated by the Church, and being greatly enraged thereat, had every disposition to say the worst he could about it. He traveled all the way from Sinope on the Black Sea, to Rome, and through Galatia, Bithynia, Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, the countries where the apostles preached, and the churches to which they wrote, but never found any one to suggest the idea of a forgery to him. He affirmed that the Gospel of Matthew, the Epistle to the Hebrews, those of James and Peter, and the whole of the Old Testament, were books only for Jews, and published a new and altered edition of the Gospel of Luke, and ten Epistles of Paul, for the use of his sect.[71] We have thus the most undoubted evidence, even the testimony of an enemy, that these books were in existence, and generally received as apostolical and authoritative by Christians, at the beginning of the second century, or within twenty years of the last of the apostles, and by the churches to which they had preached and written. The only remaining conceivable cavil against the genuineness of the books of the New Testament is: "That they bear internal evidence of being collections of fragments written by different persons--and are probably merely traditions committed to writing by various unknown writers, and afterward collected and issued to the churches under the names of the apostles, for the sake of greater authority." This theory being received as gospel by several learned men, has furnished matter for lengthy discussions as to the sources of the four Gospels. Translated into English, it amounts to this, that Brown, Smith, and Jones wrote out a number of essays and anecdotes, and persuaded the churches of Ephesus, Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, and the rest, to receive them as the writings of their ministers, who had lived for years, or were then living, among them; and on the strength of that notion of their being the writings of the apostles, to govern their whole lives by these essays, and lay down their lives and peril their souls' salvation on the truth of these anecdotes. As though they could not tell whether such documents were forgeries or not! It is almost incredible how ignorant dreaming book-worms are of the common business of life. Most of my readers will laugh at the idea of a serious answer to such a quibble. Nevertheless, for the sake of those whose inexperience may be abused by the authority of learned names, I will show them that the primitive Christians, supposing them able to read, could know whether their ministers did really write the books and letters which they received from them. If you go into the Citizens' Bank, you will find a large folio volume lying on the counter, and on looking at it you will see that it is filled with men's names, in their own handwriting, and that no two of them are exactly alike. Every person who has any business to transact with the bank is requested to write his name in the book; and when his check comes afterward for payment, the clerk can tell at a glance if the signature is the same as that of which he has a single specimen. If there has been no opportunity for him to become personally acquainted with the bank, as in case of a foreigner newly arrived, he brings letters of introduction from some well-known mutual friend, or is accompanied by some respectable citizen, who attests his identity. Business men have no difficulty whatever in ascertaining the genuineness of documents. It is only when people want to dispute Holy Scripture that they give up common sense. Holy Scripture was known to be the genuine writing of the apostles, just in the same way as any other writing was known to be genuine; only the churches who received the writings of the apostles had ten thousand times better security against forgery than any bank in the Union. In one of the first letters Paul writes to the churches--the second letter to the Thessalonians--to whom he had been preaching only a few weeks before, sent from Athens, distant only some two days' journey, full of allusions to their affairs, commands how to conduct themselves in the business of their workshops, as well as in the devotions of the church, and explanations of some misunderstood parts of a former letter sent by the hand of a mutual friend--he formally gives them his signature, for the purpose of future reference, and comparison of any document which might purport to come from him, with that specimen of his autograph. He gives not the name merely, but his apostolic benediction also, in his own handwriting: _The salutation of me Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle: so I write. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen._ It shows the heart of an apostle of Christ; but what concerns the present question is the remark, which every business man will in a moment appreciate, how immensely the addition of these two lines adds to the security against forgery. It is a very hard thing to forge a signature, but give a business man two lines of any man's writing besides that, and he is perfectly secure against imposition.[72] The churches to which the Epistles were written, and to which the Gospels were delivered, consisted largely of business men, of merchants and traders, tent makers and coppersmiths, city chamberlains, and officers of Cæsar's household, and the like. Does any one think such men could not tell the handwriting of their minister, who had lived among them for years; or that men who were risking their lives for the instructions he wrote them, would care less about the genuineness of the documents, than you do about the genuineness of a ten dollar check? I am not as long in this city as Paul was in Ephesus, nor one fourth of the time that John lived there, yet I defy all the advocates of the mythical theory of Germany, and all their disciples here, to write a myth half as long as this essay, and impose it on the elders and members of my church as my writing. Let it only be presented in manuscript to the congregation--there was no printing in Paul's days--and in five minutes a dozen members of the church will detect the forgery, even if I should hold my peace. And were I to leave on a mission to China or India, and write letters to the church, would any of these business men, who have seen my writing, have the least hesitation in recognizing it again? Do you think anybody could forge a letter as from me, and impose it on them? What an absurdity, then, to suppose that anybody could write a gospel or epistle, and get all the members of a large church to believe that an Apostle wrote it. The first Christians, then, were absolutely certain that the documents which they received as apostolic, were really so. The Church of Rome could attest the Epistle to them, and the Gospels of Mark and Luke written there. The Church of Ephesus could attest the Epistle to them, and the Gospel, and Letters, and Revelation of John written there. And so on of all the other churches; and these veritable autographs were long preserved. Says Tertullian, who was ordained A. D. 192: "Well, if you be willing to exercise your curiosity profitably in the business of your salvation, visit the apostolical churches in which the very chairs of the apostles still preside--in which their authentic letters themselves are recited (apud quæ _ipsæ authenticæ literæ_ eorum recitantur), sounding forth the voice and representing the countenance of each one of them. Is Achaia near you, you have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi, you have Thessalonica. If you can go to Asia, you have Ephesus; but if you are near to Italy, you have Rome." There can not be the least doubt about the preservation of documents for a far longer time than from Paul to Tertullian--one hundred and fifty years. I hold in my hand a Bible, the family Bible of the Gibsons--printed in 1599--two hundred and fifty-seven years old, in perfect preservation; and we have manuscripts of the Scriptures twelve to fourteen hundred years old, like the Sinaitic Codex, perfectly legible. They were moreover directed to be publicly read in the churches, and they were publicly read every Lord's day. Is it credible that an impostor would direct his forgery to be publicly read? If the epistle was publicly read during Paul's lifetime, that public reading in the hearing of the men who could so easily disprove its genuineness, was conclusive proof to all who heard it, that they knew it to be the genuine writing of the Apostle. The primitive churches then had conclusive proof of the genuineness of the Apostolic Epistles and Gospels. The only difficulty which now remains is the objection that they might have been corrupted by alterations and interpolations by monks, in later times. We have two securities against such corruptions, in the way these documents were given, and the nature of their contents. They were sacred heirlooms, and they were public documents. Could you, or could any man, have permission to alter the original copy of Washington's Farewell Address? Would not the man who should attempt such sacrilege be torn in a thousand pieces? But Washington will never be an object of such veneration as John, nor will his Farewell Address ever compare in importance with Paul's Farewell Letter to the Philippians. Besides, these Gospels and Letters were public documents, containing the records of laws, in obedience to which men are daily crossing their inclinations, enduring the mockery of their neighbors, losing their money, and endangering their lives. They contained the proofs and promises of that religious faith in God and hope of heaven, for the sake of which they suffered such things. Is it credible that they would allow them to be altered and corrupted? You might far more rationally talk of altering the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States. Translated into different languages--transported into Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Carthage, Egypt, Parthia, Persia, India, and China--committed to memory by children, and quoted in the writings of Christian authors of the first three centuries, to such an extent, that we can gather the whole of the New Testament, except twenty-six verses, from their writings--appealed to as authority by heretics and orthodox in controversy--and publicly read in the hearing of tens of hundreds of thousands every Sabbath day in worship--we are a thousand times more certain that the New Testament has not been corrupted, than we are that the Declaration of Independence is genuine. On this ground then we plant ourselves. The whole story of a late and gradual formation of the New Testament, or, in plain English, of its forgery, stands out as an unmitigated falsehood in the eyes of every man capable of writing his own name. The first churches could not be deceived with forgeries for apostolic writings. Nor could they, if they would, allow these writings to be corrupted. Be they true or false, fact or fiction, the books of the New Testament are the words of the Apostles of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In the next chapter we will inquire into the truth of their story. FOOTNOTES: [65] The Family Christian Almanac for 1859, p. 57, American Tract Society, New York. [66] Acta Concitia, sub voce Laodicea, Canon iv. Lardner vi. p. 368. [67] Gibbon's Decline and Fall, II. p. 267. [68] The original authorities may be found collected in the fourth volume of Lardner's Credibility of the Gospel History; abstracts of them, with ample references, in Mosheim and Neander's Ecclesiastical Histories, and in Stanley's Eastern Church. [69] Rawlinson's _Historical Evidences_, page 227. [70] Origen Contra Celsum, passim. [71] Lardner, Vol. IX. page 358. [72] In fact, some persons were trying to impose a letter, "as from us," containing declarations, that the day of Christ was upon them. CHAPTER VI. IS THE GOSPEL FACT OR FABLE? "For they themselves show of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come."--1 Thess. i. 9, 10. In the last chapter we ascertained that the Gospels and Epistles were not forgeries of some nameless monks of the third century--that the shopkeepers, silversmiths, tent-makers, coppersmiths, tanners, physicians, senators, town councilors, officers of customs, city treasurers, and nobles of Cæsar's household, in Rome, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Athens, and Alexandria, could no more be imposed upon in the matter of documents, attested by the well-known signatures of their beloved ministers, than you could by forged letters or sermons purporting to come from your own pastor--and that the documents which they believed to contain the directory of their lives, and the charter of that salvation which they valued more than their lives, which they read in their churches, recited at their tables, quoted in their writings, appealed to in their controversies, translated into many languages, and dispersed into every part of the known world, they neither would, nor could, corrupt or falsify. The genuineness of the copies of the New Testament, which we now possess, is abundantly proved by the comparison of over two thousand manuscripts, from all parts of the world; scrutinized during a period of nearly a hundred years, by the most critical scholars, so accurately that the variations of such things as would correspond to the crossing of a t, or the dotting of an i, in English, have been carefully enumerated; yet the result of the whole of this searching scrutiny has been merely the suggestion of a score of unimportant alterations in the received text of the seven thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine verses of the New Testament. This is a fact utterly unexampled in the history of manuscripts. There are but six manuscripts of the Comedies of Terence, and these have not been copied once for every thousand times the New Testament has been transcribed, yet there are thirty thousand variations found in these six manuscripts, or an average of five thousand for each, and many of them seriously affect the sense. The average number of variations in the manuscripts of the New Testament examined, is not quite thirty for each, including all the trivialities already noticed. We are, then, by the special providence of God, now as undoubtedly in possession of genuine copies of the Gospels and Epistles, written by the companions of Jesus, as we are of genuine copies of the Constitution of the United States, and of the Declaration of Independence. These are historic documents, of well-established genuineness and antiquity, which we now proceed to examine as to their truthfulness. There is no history so trustworthy as that prepared by contemporary writers, especially by those who have themselves been actively engaged in the events which they relate. Such history never loses its interest, nor does the lapse of ages, in the least degree, impair its credibility. While the documents can be preserved, Xenophon's Retreat of the Ten Thousand, Cæsar's Gallic War, and the Dispatches of the Duke of Wellington, will be as trustworthy as on the day they were written. Yet some suspicion may arise in our minds, that these commanders and historians might have kept back some important events which would have dimmed their reputation with posterity, or might have colored those they have related, so as to add to their fame. Of the great facts related in memoirs addressed to their companions in arms, able at a glance to detect a falsehood, we never entertain the least suspicion. If, to this be added, the correspondence of monuments, architecture, painting, statuary, coins, heraldry, and a thousand changes in the manners and customs of a people, we become as absolutely convinced of the truth of the narrative thus confirmed by these silent witnesses as if we had seen the events described. No man who visits the disinterred city of Pompeii, and sees the pavements marked by the wheel ruts, has any doubt that the Romans used wheeled carriages. When he sees the court-yards adorned with mosaic figures, and the walls with paintings of the gods, and of the manners of the people who worshiped them, he is profoundly impressed with the conviction that they excelled in the fine arts, and in the coarse vices of heathenism. When he visits the Coliseum, that vast ruin declares that the wealth of an empire, once devoted to the gratification of the most savage passions, has been diverted into some other channel. When he visits the catacombs, and reads long lines of heathen epitaphs, with their despairing symbols of broken columns, extinguished torches, and their heart-breaking "Farewell! an eternal farewell!" and then turns to the monuments of only two centuries later, and reads, "He sleeps in the Lord," "He waits the resurrection to life eternal," recording the hopes of whole generations of survivors, he can not doubt the truth of the written records of the conversion of the Roman Empire. There is, moreover, another kind of contemporary history not so connected and regular as the formal diary or journal, which does not even propose to relate history at all, but is for that very reason entirely removed from the suspicion of giving a coloring to it; which, at the cost of a little patience and industry, gives us the most convincing confirmations of the truth, or exposures of the mistakes of historians, by the undesigned and incidental way in which the use of a name, a date, a proverb, a jest, an expletive, a quotation, an allusion, flashes conviction upon the reader's mind. I mean contemporary correspondence. If we have the private letters of celebrated men laid before us, we are enabled to look right into them, and see their true character. Thus Macaulay exhibits to the world the proud, lying, stupid tyrant, James, displayed in his own letters. Thus Voltaire records himself an adulterer, and begs his friend, D'Alembert, to lie for him; his friend replies that he has done so. Thus the correspondence of the great American herald of the Age of Reason exhibits him drinking a quart of brandy daily at his friend's expense, and refusing to pay his bill for boarding. In the unguarded freedom of confidential correspondence the vail is taken from the heart. We see men as they are. The true man stands out in his native dignity, and the gilding is rubbed off the hypocrite. Give the world their letters, and let the grave silence the plaudits and the clamors which deafened the generation among whom they lived, and no man will hesitate whether or not to pronounce Hume a sensualist, or Washington the noblest work of God--an honest man. If we add another test of truthfulness, by increasing the number of the witnesses, comparing a number of letters referring to the same events, written by persons of various degrees of education, and of different occupations and ranks of life, resident in different countries, acting independently of each other, and find them all agree in their allusions to, or direct mention of, some central facts concerning which they are all interested, no one can rightfully doubt that this undesigned agreement declares the truth. But if, in addition to all these undesigned coincidences, we happen upon the correspondence of persons whose interests and passions were diametrically opposed to those of our correspondents, and find that, when they have occasion to refer to them, they also confirm the great facts already ascertained, then our belief becomes conviction which can not be overturned by any sophistry, that these things did occur. If Whig and Tory agree in relating the facts of James' flight, and William's accession, if the letters of his Jacobite friends and those of the French ambassador confirm the statements of the English historian, and if we are put in possession of the letters which James himself wrote from France and Ireland to his friends in England, does any man in his common sense doubt that the Revolution of 1688 did actually occur? When, in addition to all this concentration and convergence of testimony, one finds that the matters related, being of public concern, and the changes effected for the public weal, the people have ever since observed, and do to this day celebrate, by religious worship and public rejoicings, the anniversaries of the principal events of that Revolution, and that he himself has been present, and has heard the thanksgivings, and witnessed the rejoicings on those anniversaries, the facts of the history come out from the domains of learned curiosity, and take their stand on the market-place of the busy world's engagements. We become at once conscious that this is a practical question--a great fact which concerns us--that the whole of the law and government of a vast empire has felt its impress--that our ancestors and ourselves have been molded under its influence, and that the religion of Europe and America, under whose guardianship we have grown to a prominent place among the people of earth, and may arrive at a better prominence among the nations of the saved, has been secured by that Revolution. We could scarcely know whether most to pity or contemn the man who should labor to persuade us that such a Revolution had never occurred, or that the facts had been essentially misrepresented. Now it is precisely on this kind of evidence that we believe the great facts of the Christian Revolution. We have contemporary histories, formal and informal; letters, public and private, from the principal agents in it, and opposers of it, dispersed from Babylon to Rome, and addressed to Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Asiatics, written by physicians, fishermen, proconsuls, emperors, and apostles. We have miles of monuments, paintings, statuary, cabinets of coins, and all the heraldry of Christendom. And these great facts stand out more prominently on the theater of the world's business as effecting changes on our laws and lives, and their introduction as authenticated by public commemorations, more solemn and more numerous than those resulting from the English or the American Revolution. Our main difficulty lies in selecting, from the vast mass of materials, a portion sufficiently distinct and manageable to be handled in a single essay. We shall be guided by the motto already announced as the rule of inductive research. One thing at a time; and the nearest first. The Epistles, being nearer our own times than the Gospels, claim our first notice, and first among these, those which stand latest on the page of sacred history, the letters of John; two from Peter to the Christians of Asia; and those which Paul, in chains for the gospel, dictated from imperial Rome. From the abundant notices of the early Christians by historians and philosophers, satirists and comedians, martyrs and magistrates, Jewish, Christian, and heathen, I shall select only two for comparison with the Epistles and of the apostles; and both those heathen--the celebrated letter of Pliny to Trajan, and the well-established history of Tacitus; both utterly undeniable, and admitted by the most skeptical to be above suspicion. Not that I suppose that the testimony of men who do not take the trouble of making any inquiry into the reality of the facts of the Christian religion is more accurate than that of those whose lives were devoted to its study; or that we have any just reason to attach as much weight to the assertions of persons, who, by their own showing, tortured and murdered men and women convicted of no crime but that of bearing the name of Christ, as to those of these martyrs, whose characters they acknowledged to be blameless, and who sealed their testimony with the last and highest attestation of sincerity--their blood. Considered merely as a historian, whether, as regards means of knowledge, or tests of truthfulness, by every unprejudiced mind, Peter will always be preferred to Pliny. But because the world will ever love its own, and hate the disciples of the Lord, there will always be a large class to whom the history of Tacitus will seem more veritable than that of Luke, and the letters of Pliny more reliable than those of Peter. For their sakes we avail ourselves of that most convincing of all attestations--the testimony of an enemy. What friends and foes unite in attesting must be accepted as true. The facts which we shall thus establish are not, in the first instance, those called miraculous. We are now ascertaining the general character for truthfulness of our letter writers and historians. If we find that their general historic narrative is contradicted by that of other credible historians, then we suspect their story. But if we find that, in all essential matters of public notoriety, they are supported by the concurred testimony of their foes, and that the narrative of the miracles they relate bears the seals of thousands who from foes became friends, from conviction of its truth, then we receive their witness as true. Even in Paul's day, heathen Greek writers bore testimony to the apostles, what manner of entering in they had unto the converts of Thessalonica; and how they turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead--even Jesus, who delivered us from the wrath to come. Pliny wrote forty years later. Pliny, the younger, was born A. D. 61, was prætor under Domitian, consul in the third year of Trajan, A. D. 100, was exceedingly desirous to add to his other honors that of the priesthood; was accordingly consecrated an augur, and built temples, bought images, and consecrated them on his estates; was, in A. D. 106, appointed Governor of the Roman Provinces of Pontus and Bithynia[73]--a vast tract of Asia Minor, lying along the shores of the Black Sea and the Propontis; and including the province anciently called Mysia, in which were situated Pergamos and Thyatira, and in the immediate vicinity of Sardis and Philadelphia. Pliny reached his province by the usual route, the port of Ephesus; where John had lived for many years, and indited his letters, A. D. 96, scarcely ten years before. The letters of Peter to the strangers scattered through Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, bring us to the same mountainous region, eight hundred miles distant from Judea; whence, in earlier days, our savage ancestors received those Phoenician priests of Baal, whose round towers mark the coasts of Ireland nearest to the setting sun; and whence, about the period under consideration, came the heralds of the Sun of Righteousness, who brought the "_Leabhar Eoin_"[74] which tells their children of him in whom is the life and the light of men. Natives of these countries had been in Jerusalem during the crucifixion of Jesus, and, though only strangers, had witnessed the darkness, and the earthquake, and had heard the rumors of what had come to pass in those days; and on the day of Pentecost had mingled with the curious crowd around the apostles, and heard them speak, in their own mother tongues, of the wonderful works of God. The remainder of the story of their conversion we gather from the letters of Peter, John, and Pliny. "Pliny, to the Emperor Trajan, wisheth health and happiness:[75] "It is my constant custom, Sire, to refer myself to you in all matters concerning which I have any doubt. For who can better direct me when I hesitate, or instruct me when I am ignorant? "I have never been present at any trials of Christians, so that I know not well what is the subject matter of punishment, or of inquiry, or what strictures ought to be used in either. Nor have I been a little perplexed to determine whether any difference ought to be made upon account of age, or whether the young and tender, and the full grown and robust, ought to be treated all alike; whether repentance should entitle to pardon, or whether all who have once been Christians ought to be punished, though they are now no longer so; whether the name itself, although no crimes be detected, or crimes only belonging to the name ought to be punished. "In the meantime, I have taken this course with all who have been brought before me, and have been accused as Christians. I have put the question to them, whether they were Christians. Upon their confessing to me that they were, I repeated the question a second and a third time, threatening also to punish them with death. Such as still persisted, I ordered away to be punished; for it was no doubt with me, whatever might be the nature of their opinion, that contumacy and inflexible obstinacy ought to be punished. There were others of the same infatuation, whom, because they are Roman citizens, I have noted down to be sent to the city. "In a short time the crime spreading itself, even whilst under persecution, as is usual in such cases, divers sorts of people came in my way. An information was presented to me, without mentioning the author, containing the names of many persons, who, upon examination, denied that they were Christians, or had even been so; who repeated after me an invocation of the gods, and with wine and frankincense made supplication to your image, which, for that purpose, I have caused to be brought and set before them, together with the statues of the deities. Moreover, they reviled the name of Christ. None of which things, as is said, they who are really Christians can by any means be compelled to do. These, therefore, I thought proper to discharge. "Others were named by an informer, who at first confessed themselves Christians, and afterward denied it. The rest said they had been Christians, but had left them; some three years ago, some longer, and one or more above twenty years. They all worshiped your image, and the statues of the gods; these also reviled Christ. They affirmed that the whole of their fault or error lay in this: that they were wont to meet together, on a stated day, before it was light, and sing among themselves alternately, a hymn to Christ as a God, and bind themselves by a sacrament, not to the commission of any wickedness, but not to be guilty of theft, or robbery, or adultery; never to falsify their word, nor to deny a pledge committed to them, when called upon to return it. When these things were performed, it was their custom to separate, and then to come together again to a meal, which they ate in common, without any disorder; but this they had forborne since the publication of my edict, by which, according to your command, I prohibited assemblies. After receiving this account, I judged it the more necessary to examine two maid servants, which were called ministers, by torture. But I have discovered nothing besides a bad and excessive superstition. "Suspending, therefore, all judicial proceedings, I have recourse to you for advice; for it has appeared to me a matter highly deserving consideration, especially upon account of the great number of persons who are in danger of suffering. For many of all ages, and every rank, of both sexes likewise, are accused, and will be accused. Nor has the contagion of this superstition seized cities only, but the lesser towns also, and the open country. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it may be restrained and arrested. It is certain that the temples, which were almost forsaken, begin to be frequented. And the sacred solemnities, after a long intermission, are revived. Victims, likewise, are everywhere brought up, whereas, for some time, there were few purchasers. Whence, it is easy to imagine, what numbers of men might be reclaimed, if pardon were granted to those who shall repent." * * * * * "Trajan to Pliny, wisheth health and happiness:[76] "You have taken the right course, my Pliny, in your proceedings with those who have been brought before you as Christians; for it is impossible to establish any one rule that shall hold universally. They are not to be sought after. If any are brought before you, and are convicted, they ought to be punished. However, he that denies his being a Christian, and makes it evident in fact, that is, by supplicating to our gods, though he be suspected to have been so formerly, let him be pardoned upon repentance. But in no case, of any crime whatever, may a bill of information be received without being signed by him who presents it, for that would be a dangerous precedent, and unworthy of my government." I must request my reader now to procure a New Testament, and read, at one reading, the First General Epistle of Peter, the First General Epistle of John, and the Seven Epistles to the Churches in Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea--only about as much matter as four pages of _Harper's Magazine_, or half a page of the _Commercial_--that he may be able to do the same justice to the apostles as to the governor. He will thus be able to see the force of the various allusions to the numbers, doctrines, morals, persecutions, and perseverance of the Christians, contained in those letters; the object which I have in view being, to establish their authenticity by proving the truthfulness of their allusions to these things. If you think this too much trouble, please lay down the book, and dismiss the consideration of religion from your thoughts. If the letters of the apostles are not worth a careful reading, it is of no consequence whether they are true or false. 1. These letters take for granted, that the fact of the existence of large numbers of Christians, organized into churches, and meeting regularly for religious worship, at the close of the first century, is a matter of public notoriety to the world. Here, in countries eight hundred miles distant from its birthplace, in the lifetime of those who had seen its founder crucified, we find Christians scattered over Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia--churches in seven provincial cities, the sect well known to Pliny, before he left Italy, as a proscribed and persecuted religion, the professors of which were customarily brought before courts for trial and punishment--though he had not himself been present at such trials--and now so numerous in his provinces, that a great number of persons, of both sexes, young and old, of all ranks, natives and Roman citizens, professed Christianity. Others, influenced by their example and instruction, renounced idolatry; victims were not led to sacrifice; the sacred rites of the gods were suspended, and their temples forsaken. The existence, then, of churches of Christ, consisting of vast numbers of converted heathens, at the close of the first century, is in no wise mythological or dubious. It is an established historical fact. The Epistles of the apostles stand confirmed by the Epistles of the governor and the emperor. 2. The second great fact presented in the Epistles, and confirmed by the letters of the governor and the emperor, is, that the worship of the Christian Church then was essentially the same which it is now. We find these Christians of the first century commemorating the death and resurrection of Christ, and rendering divine honors to him; the "stated day" on which they assembled for worship, and the "common meal," are as plain a description of the "disciples coming together upon the first day of the week, to break bread," as a heathen could give in few words. Their terms of communion too, to which they pledged their members by a sacrament, "not to be guilty of theft, robbery, or adultery; never to falsify their word, or deny a pledge committed to them," find their counterpart in every well-regulated church at this day. The articles of the Christian faith, then, are not the "gradual accretions of centuries," nor is the "redemptive idea, as attaching to Christ, a dogma of the post-Augustine period." The churches of the first century commemorated the death and resurrection of Jesus, as that of a divine person, "singing the hymn to him as a God," which their descendants sing at this day around his table: "Forever and forever is, O God, thy throne of might, The scepter of thy kingdom is a scepter that is right, Thou lovest right, and hatest ill; for God, thy God, Most High, Above thy fellows hath with th' oil of joy anointed thee." And the question will force itself upon our minds, and can not be evaded, How did these apostles persuade such multitudes of heathens to believe their repeated assertions of the death, resurrection, and glory of Jesus? In the space of three octavo pages, Peter refers to these facts eighteen times. John, in like manner, repeatedly affirms them. The Christian religion consists in the belief of these facts, and a life corresponding to them. Now, how did the apostles persuade such multitudes of heathens to believe a report so wonderful, profess a religion so novel, renounce the gods they had worshiped from their childhood, and all the ceremonies of an attractive, sensual religion; "temples of splendid architecture, statues of exquisite sculpture, priests and victims superbly adorned, attendant beauteous youth of both sexes, performing all the sacred rites with gracefulness; religious dances, illuminations, concerts of the sweetest music, perfumes of the rarest fragrance," and other more licentious enjoyments, inseparable from heathen worship. How did they persuade them to exchange all this for the assembly before daybreak, the frugal common meal, the psalm to Christ, and the commemoration of the death of a crucified malefactor? If we add, that they commemorated his resurrection, by observing the Lord's day, the question comes up, How did they come to believe that he was risen from the dead? Could a few despised strangers, or a few citizens if you will, persuade such a community, purely by natural means, to believe such a report, to care whether the Syrian Jew died or rose, or to commemorate weekly, by a solemn religious service, either his death or resurrection? It is evident they believed what they commemorated. How did they come to do so? But whether we can answer the question or not, the fact stands out as indisputable, that not merely the writers of the Epistles and Gospels, and a few enthusiasts, but an immense multitude of all ages, of both sexes, and of every rank--the whole membership of the primitive churches--did believe in the death, resurrection, and glory of the Lord Jesus, and did render to him divine worship. The second great fact, affirmed in the Epistles, stands confirmed by the testimony of the heathen governor, and of the Roman emperor. 3. A mere theory of a new religion, unconnected with practice, may be easily received by those who care little about any, so long as it brings no suffering or inconvenience. But the religion of these Christians was, as you see, a practical religion. If their new worship required a great departure from the worship of their childhood, their Christian morals required a still greater departure from their former mode of life. I need not remind you of the moral codes of Socrates, Plato, and Aristides, who taught that lying, thieving, adultery, and murder were lawful; nor how much worse than the theory of the best of the heathen were the lives of the worst; nor how unpopular to persons so educated would be such teaching as this--"Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind: for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin: that he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God. For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revelings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries; wherein they think it strange that ye run not with them to the same excess of riot, speaking evil of you: who shall give account to him that is ready to judge the living and the dead." "Lay aside all malice, and guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings." "Whosoever abideth in Christ sinneth not. Whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him. Little children, let no man deceive you. He that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous. He that committeth sin is of the devil." So sharp, and stern, and strictly virtuous is apostolic religion, as displayed in these letters. Is it possible then that these converted heathens did really even approach this standard of morality? Did this gospel of Christ actually produce any such reformation of their lives? You have the testimony of apostates, eager to save their lives by giving such information as they knew would be acceptable to the persecutor; you have the testimony of the two aged deaconesses, under torture; you have the unwilling, but yet express, testimony of their torturer and murderer, that all his cruel ingenuity could discover nothing worse than an excessive superstition and culpable obstinacy. What, then, does this philosophic inspector of entrails, and adorer of idols, call an excessive superstition and culpable obstinacy? Why, they bound themselves by the most solemn religious services, not to be guilty of theft, robbery, or adultery; not to falsify their word, nor deny a pledge committed to them; and when some senseless blocks of brass were carried on men's shoulders, into the court-house, to represent a mortal man, they would not adore them, nor pray to them; no, not though this philosopher compiled the liturgy, and set the example. For this refusal, and this alone, he ordered them away to death. Doubtless they heard, in their hearts, the well-known words, "Let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evil-doer, or as a busybody in other men's matters. But if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God on this behalf." The morality of the Epistles, then, was not a merely a fine theory, but an actual rule of life. The moral codes of the apostles were received as actually binding on the members of the churches of the first century. In this all-important matter of the rule of a good life--the fruits by which the tree is known--the integrity, authority, and success of the apostles, in turning licentious heathens into moral Christians, is authenticated by the unwilling testimony of their persecutors. The Epistles of the apostles stand confirmed, as to their ethics, by the letters of Trajan and Pliny. 4. The only other fact to which I call your attention, from among the multitude alluded to in these letters, is the cost at which these converts from heathenism embraced this new religion. Every one who renounced heathenism, and professed the name of Christ, knew very well that he must suffer for it. "Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you, but rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings, that when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad with exceeding joy;" this was the welcome of the Bithynian convert into the Church of Christ. Persecution by fire and sword was then the common lot of the Church. "I have never been present at any trials of the Christians," says the governor. Such trials were well known to him it seems. He was not sure whether he should murder all who ever had borne the name of Christ, or only those who proved themselves to be really his disciples, by refusing to revile him, and return to idolatry; and the merciful emperor commands him to spare the apostates. Above twenty years before--in A. D. 86--there were apostates from the persecuted religion. In A. D. 90, John had written, "they went out from us, that it might be made manifest they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us; but they went out that it might be made manifest that they were not all of us." So it seems Pliny thought: "They all worshiped your image, and other statues of the gods; these also reviled Christ. None of which things, as is said, they who are really Christians can by any means be compelled to do." What these means were he tells us: "I put the question to them, whether they were Christians. Upon their confessing to me that they were, I repeated the question a second and a third time, threatening, also, to punish them with death. Such as still persisted, I ordered away to be punished." What is very remarkable, it was, it seems, "usual in such cases, for the crime to spread itself, even whilst under persecution." In the face of such dangers, these heathen would still profess faith in Christ, and when they might have saved their lives by reviling him, refused to do so. From the published rescript of the emperor, approving of Pliny's course, and condemning to death all who were convicted of being really Christians; from the public circulars of the apostles, warning them of "fiery trials," "Satan casting some of them into prison," and exhorting them to "be faithful unto death;" and from such comments on these as the torture and public execution of aged women as well as men--the terms of discipleship were well known to the whole world. Yet we see that in the face of all this, "great numbers of persons, of both sexes, and of all ages, and of every rank," in Pliny's opinion, were so steadfast in their faith, that "they were in great danger of suffering." Here, then, is another well-attested fact, in which the testimony of the apostles stands confirmed by the signatures of the Bithynian governor, and the Roman emperor--a fact which stands forth clear, prominent, most undoubted, without the smallest trace of anything mythological or misty about it--that, in A. D. 106, great numbers of converted heathens did suffer exile, torture, and death itself, rather than renounce Christ; and that it was well known that the Christian faith enabled its professor to overcome the world. These four great facts of the later Epistles, being thus established beyond dispute, in pursuance of our plan, we ascend the stream of history some forty years, to the time of the earlier Epistles, when Paul lay in the Prætorian prison, and his faithful companion, Luke, wrote the continuation of his narrative of the things most surely believed among the Christians; when "apostles were made as the filth of the world, and the offscouring of all things;" and Christians "were made a gazing stock both by reproaches and afflictions;" "were brought before kings and rulers, and hated of all nations for Christ's name sake;" "endured a great fight of afflictions;" were "for his sake killed all the day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter;" "were made a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men." We remove the field of our investigation from a remote province of Asia, to one equally remote from Judea, and far more unfavorable for the growth of the religion of a crucified Jew, to the proud capital of the world, imperial Rome. The time shall be shortly after the burning of the city, in A. D. 64, and during the raging of the first of those systematic, imperial, and savage persecutions through which the Church of Christ waded, in the bloody footsteps of her Lord, to world-wide influence, and undying fame. Our historian shall be the well-known Tacitus; and the single extract from his history, one of which the infidel Gibbon says:[77] "The most skeptical criticism is obliged to respect the truth of this important fact, and the integrity of this celebrated passage of Tacitus." I shall not insert quotations from Paul or Luke; that were merely to transcribe large portions of the Epistles and Gospels, which whoever will not carefully peruse, disqualifies himself for forming a judgment of their veracity. The confirmation of the four facts already established, of the existence, worship, morals, and sufferings of the disciples of Christ; and these facts as well known within thirty years after his death, will sufficiently appear by the perusal of the following testimony of Tacitus.[78] After relating the burning of the city, and Nero's attempt to transfer the odium of it to the sect "commonly known by the name of Christians," he says: "The author of that name was Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, was put to death as a criminal, under the procurator, Pontius Pilate. But this pestilent superstition, checked for a while, broke out afresh, and spread not only over Judea, where the evil originated, but also in Rome, where all that is evil on the earth finds its way, and is practiced. At first, those only were apprehended who confessed themselves of that sect; afterward, _a vast multitude_ discovered by them; all of whom were condemned, not so much for the crime of burning the city, as for their enmity to mankind. Their executions were so contrived, as to expose them to derision and contempt. Some were covered over with the skins of wild beasts, that they might be torn to pieces by dogs; some were crucified; while others, having been daubed over with combustible materials, were set up for lights in the night time, and thus burned to death. For these spectacles Nero gave his own gardens, and, at the same time, exhibited there the diversions of the circus; sometimes standing in the crowd as a spectator, in the habit of a charioteer; and, at other times, driving a chariot himself; until at length these men, though really criminal, and deserving of exemplary punishment, began to be commiserated, as people who were destroyed, not out of regard to the public welfare, but only to gratify the cruelty of one man." We add no comment on this remarkable passage. Take up your New Testament and read the contemporary history--Acts xxii. to the end of the book--and the letters of Paul from Rome, to Philemon, Titus, the Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and the Second to Timothy, written when the aged prisoner was ready to be offered, and the time of his departure, amidst such scenes and sufferings, was at hand. Then form your own opinion as to the origin and nature of that faith in Jesus which enabled him to say: "None of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto me, that I may finish my course with joy, and the testimony which I have received of the Lord Jesus." "I know in whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed to him against that day." Whatever may be your opinion of the apostle's hope for the future, you must acknowledge that we have ascertained, beyond contradiction, these four facts of the past: 1. That without the power of force, or the help of governments, and in spite of them, the apostles did convert vast multitudes of idolaters from a senseless worship of stocks and stones, to the worship of the one living and true God; a thing never done by the preachers of any other religion before or since. 2. That without the help of power or civil law, and solely by moral and spiritual means, they did persuade multitudes of licentious heathens to give up their vices, and obey the pure precepts of the morality contained in their Epistles; a thing never done by the preachers of any other religion before or since. 3. That these converts were so firmly persuaded of the truth of their new religion, that, with the choice of life and worldly honor, or a death of infamy and torture before them, multitudes deliberately chose to suffer torture and death rather than renounce the belief in one God, obedience to his laws, and the hope of eternal life through Jesus Christ, which they had learned from the sermons and letters of these apostles; a thing never done by the professors of any other religion before or since.[79] 4. The faith which produced such an illumination of their minds; which caused such a blessed change in their lives; which filled them with joy and hope, and enabled them even to despise torture and death, was briefly this: "That Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again on the third day, according to the Scriptures; that he ascended up into heaven, and will come again to judge the world, and reward every man according to his works; and that whosoever believes these things in his heart, and confesses them with his mouth, shall be saved; and he that believeth them not shall be damned." It is a fact, then, indisputably proven by history, that the New Testament does teach a religion which can enlighten men's minds, reform their lives, give peace to their consciences, and enable them to meet death with a joyful hope of life eternal. It has done these things in times past, and is doing them now. These are its undoubted fruits. Reader, this faith may be yours. It will work the same results in you as it has done in others. Like causes ever produce like effects. Jesus waits to deliver you from your sins, to fill you with joy and peace in believing, and make you abound in hope, by the power of the Holy Ghost. He has promised, if you will ask it, "I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord." FOOTNOTES: [73] Lardner VII. page 18, _et seq._ [74] Pronounced Laar Owen--John's Book. [75] Lib. X. Ep. 97, Lardner VII. 22. [76] Lib. X. Ep. 98, Lardner VII. 24. [77] Decline and Fall, Vol. II. page 407. [78] Lib. XV. chap. 44. [79] The sufferings of the Jews, under Antiochus, are no exception. They suffered for their faith in the true God, the Messiah to come, and a resurrection to life eternal. CHAPTER VII. CAN WE BELIEVE CHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES? "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life * * * that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you."--1 John i. 1. We have seen that the companions of Jesus wrote the books of the New Testament; that their statements of the existence, worship, morals, and faith of the Christian Church are confirmed by their enemies, and that multitudes of heathens were turned from vice to virtue by the belief of the testimony of these men. They testified that Jesus Christ did many wonderful miracles, died for our sins, and rose again from the dead; that they saw, and felt his body, and ate, and drank, and conversed with him for forty days after his resurrection; that he ascended up to heaven in their sight; that he sent them to tell the world that he will come again in the clouds of heaven, with his mighty angels, to judge the living and the dead; that he who believes these things and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned. This is their statement. The question is, Can we believe them? 1. The first thing which strikes us in their testimony is, that it stands out utterly different from all other religions. There is nothing in the world like it, not even its counterfeits. The great central fact of Christianity--that Christ died for our sins, and rose again from the dead--stands absolutely alone in the history of religions. The priests of Baal, Brahma, or Jupiter, never dreamed of such a thing. The prophets of Mohammedanism, Mormonism, or Pantheism, have never attempted to imitate it. The great object of all counterfeit Christianity is to deny it. There is no instance in the whole world's history of any other religion ever producing the same effects. We demand an instance of men destitute of wealth, arms, power, and learning, converting multitudes of lying, lustful, murdering idolaters, into honest, peaceable, virtuous men simply by prayer and preaching. When the Infidel tells us of the rapid spread of Mohammedanism and Mormonism--impostures which enlist disciples by promising free license to lust, robbery, and murder, and retain them by the terror of the scimeter and the rifle ball; which reduce mankind to the most abject servitude, and womanhood to the most debasing concubinage; which have turned the fairest regions of the earth to a wilderness, and under whose blighting influence commerce, arts, science, industry, comfort, and the human race itself, have withered away--he simply insults our common sense, by ignoring the difference between backgoing vice and ongoing virtue; or acknowledges that he knows as little about Mohammedanism, as he does about Christianity. The gospel stands alone in its doctrines, singular in its operation, unequaled in its success. 2. The next important point for consideration is, that the Christianity preached by Christ and his apostles is a whole--a single system, which we must either take or leave--believe entirely, or entirely reject it as an imposture. There is no middle ground for you to occupy. It is all true, or all false. For instance, you can not take one of Paul's Epistles and say, "this is true," and take another of the same man's letters, containing the very same religion, and say, "this is false." If you accept the very briefest of Paul's Letters, that to Philemon, containing only thirteen sentences on private business, you accept eleven distinct assertions of the authority, grace, love, and divinity of our Lord. Nor can you say you will accept Peter's Letters and reject Paul's; for you will find the very same facts asserted by the one as by the other; and moreover, Peter indorses "all the epistles of our beloved brother Paul" as on the same pedestal of authority with the other Scriptures. You can not say, "I will accept the letters and reject the history," for the letters have no meaning without the history. They are founded upon it, and assume or allege its facts on every page. Were the gospels lost, we could collect a good account of the birth, teaching, death, resurrection, ascension, and almighty power of the Lord Christ from Paul's Epistles; and these letters are just as confident in alleging the miraculous part of the history as the gospels themselves. Neither can you gain any advantage by saying, "I accept the gospels, but reject the letters," for there is not a doctrine of the New Testament which is not taught in the very first of them, the Gospel by Matthew. Further, the gospels contain the most solemn authentication of the commissions of the apostles, so that whoever rejects their teaching, brings upon himself guilt equal to that of rejecting Christ himself. "Lo, I am with you alway"--"He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me"--"Whosoever will not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city." It is, if possible, more absurd to attempt to dissect the morality of the gospel from its history, and to say, "We are willing to receive the Christian code of morals as a very excellent rule of life, and to regard Jesus as a rare example of almost superhuman virtue, but we must consider the narrative of supernatural events interwoven with it as mythological," _i. e._, false. Which is much the same as to say, "We will be very happy to receive your friend if he will only cut his head off." Of what possible use would the Christian code of morals be without the authority of Christ, the lawgiver? If he possessed no divine authority, what right has he to control your inclination or mine? And if he will never return to inquire whether men obey or disobey his law, who will regard it? Do you suppose the world will be turned upside down, and reformed, by a little good advice? Nay, verily, the world has had trial of that vanity long enough. "We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in the body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. Knowing, therefore, _the terrors of the Lord_, we persuade men." Take away the miraculous and supernatural from the gospel history, and there is nothing left for you to accept. There is no political economy nor worldly morality in it. It is wholly the history of a supernatural person, and every precept of his morality comes with a divine sanction. Further, you know nothing of either his life or his morality but from the gospel history, and if the record of the miracles which occupy three-fourths of the gospels be false, what reason have you to give any credit to the remainder? For, as the German commentator, De Wette, well says, "The only means of acquaintance with a history is the narrative we possess concerning it, and beyond that narrative the interpreter can not go. In these Bible records, the narrative reports to us only a supernatural course of events, which we must either receive or reject. If we reject the narrative, we know nothing at all about the event, and we are not justified in allowing ourselves to invent a natural course of events of which the narrative is totally silent." So, you see, you can not make a Christ to suit your taste, but must just take the Christ of the gospel, or reject him. If you reject the testimony of Christ and his apostles as false, and say you can not believe them in matters of fact, how can you respect their morality? Of all the absurdities of modern Infidelity, the respectful language generally used by its advocates in speaking of Christ and his apostles is the most inconsistent. He claimed to be a Divine Person, and professed to work miracles. The Infidel says he was not a Divine Person, and wrought no miracles. The consequence is unavoidable--such a pretender is a blasphemous impostor. And yet they speak of him as a "model man," an "exemplar of every virtue." What! an impostor a model man? A blasphemer and liar an exemplar of every virtue? Is that the Infidel's notion of virtue? Why, the devils were more consistent in their commendations of his character, "We know thee who thou art, THE HOLY ONE OF GOD." Let our modern enemies of Christ learn consistency from their ancient allies. We have also learned from our Master to refuse all hypocritical, half-way professions of respect for his character and teachings from those whose business is to prove him a deceiver, and whose object in speaking respectfully of such a One can only be to gain a larger audience, and a readier entrance for their blasphemy among his professed disciples. From every man who professes respect for Christ's character, and for the morality which he and his apostles taught, we demand a straightforward answer to the questions: "When he declared himself the Son of God, the Judge of the living and the dead, did he tell the truth, or did he lie? When he promised to attest his divine commission by rising from the dead on the third day, had he any such power, or did he only mean to play a juggling imposture? Is Jesus the Christ the Son of the Living God, or a deceiver?" There is no middle ground. He that is not with him is against him. The case is just the same with regard to the witnesses of his miracles, death, and resurrection. They either give a true relation of these things, or they have manufactured a series of falsehoods. How can we believe anything from persons so habituated to lying as the narrators of the mighty works of Jesus must be, if those mighty works never were performed? How can we accept their code of morals if we refuse to believe them when they speak of matters of fact? Is it possible to respect men as moral teachers, whom we have convicted of forging stories of miracles that never occurred, and confederating together to impose a lying superstition on the world? For this is plainly the very point and center of the question about the truth of the Bible, and I am anxious you should see it clearly. A fair statement of this question is half the argument. The question then is simply this, Was Jesus really the Divine Person he claimed to be, or was he a blasphemous impostor? When the apostles unitedly and solemnly testified that they had seen him after he was risen from the dead, that they ate and drank with him, that their hands had handled his body, that they conversed with him for forty days, and that they saw him go up to heaven, did they tell the truth or were they a confederated band of liars? There is no reason for any other supposition. They could not possibly be deceived themselves in the matters they relate. They knew perfectly whether they were true or not. We are not talking about matters of dogma, about which there might be room for difference of opinion, but about matters of fact--about what men say they saw, and heard, and felt--about which no man of common sense could possibly be mistaken. "That which we have seen with our eyes, which we have heard, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life * * * that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you." Such is their language. We must either take it as truth, or reject it as falsehood. It is utter nonsense to talk of the intense subjectivity of the Jewish mind, and the belief of the apostles that the Messiah would do wonders when he came, and the powerful impressions produced by the teaching of Jesus on their minds. We are not talking about impressions on their minds, but about impressions produced on their eyes, and ears, and hands. Did these men tell the truth when they told the world that they did eat and drink with Jesus after he rose from the dead, or did they lie? That is the question. 3. It is a hard matter to lie well. A liar has need of a good memory, else he will contradict himself before he writes far. And he needs to be very well posted up in the matters of names, dates, places, manners and customs, else he will contradict some well-known facts, and so expose his forgery to the world. Therefore writers of forgeries avoid all such things as much as possible, and as surely as they venture on specifications of that sort they are detected. A man who is conscious of writing a book of falsehoods does not begin on this wise: "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, Pontius Pilate being Governor of Judea, and Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip Tetrarch of Iturea and of the regions of Trachonitis, and Lysanias Tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiphas being high priests, the Word of God came unto John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness." Here in one sentence are twenty historical, geographical, political, and genealogical references, every one of which we can confirm by references to secular historians. The enemies of the Lord have utterly failed in their attempts to disprove one out of the hundreds of such statements in the New Testament. The only instance of any _public political event_ recorded in the gospel, said not to be confirmed by the fragments of secular history we possess, is Luke's account of a census of the Roman Empire, ordered by Augustus Cæsar. Were it so that Luke stood alone in his mention of this, surely his credit as a historian would be as good for this fact, as the credit of Tacitus, when he states matters of which Suetonius makes no mention, or of Pliny, when he relates things not recorded by Tacitus. But we can account for the want of corroborative history in this instance, when we know that all the history of Dion Cassius, from the consulships of Antistius and Balbus to those of Messala and Cinna--that is, for five years before and five years after the birth of Christ--is lost; as also Livy's history of the same period. It is certain that some one did record the fact, for Suidas, in his lexicon upon the word _apographe_, says, "that Augustus sent twenty select men into all the provinces of the empire to take a census, both of men and property, and commanded that a just proportion of the latter should be brought into the imperial treasury. And this was the first census." To object to the gospel history, that everything contained in it of the doings of Christ and his apostles in Judea, is not recorded by the historians of Greece and Italy, is much the same as to say that there are a multitude of facts recorded in D'Aubigne's History of the Reformation in Germany, of which Hume and Macaulay make no mention in their histories of England. How should they?--treating of different countries, and for the most part of different periods, and writing civil and not church history? Does anybody go to Macaulay to look for the history of the Westminster Assembly, or to Bancroft for an account of the Great Revival in New England? Or is the veracity of Baillie, or Edwards suspected, because political history does not concern itself much about religion? It is enough that not a single statement of the gospel history has ever been disproved. I might give you quotations from the enemies of the Christian faith, from Josephus the Jew, and Celsus, and Porphyry, heathen philosophers, and from the Emperor Julian, the apostate--who, having been raised a Christian, became a heathen, and used all his ingenuity to overturn the religion of Christ--expressly admitting the principal miracles recorded in the gospel. But I attach no such importance to the testimony of this class of persons as to suppose that it should be placed, for one moment, on a level with the testimony of the apostles, or that their testimony to the facts of the life and death of Christ needs any confirmation from such witnesses. We have such overwhelming evidence of the sincerity and truth of the witnesses chosen by God to bear testimony to the resurrection of Christ, as we never can have of the credibility of any secular historian whatever. You will remember that these are the writers whose accounts of the existence, the faith and worship, the numbers and morals of the Christian Church, we have seen so strikingly confirmed by their enemies; and we now inquire, Can we believe the other part of their history to be as true? These are the men who taught the heathen a pure Christian morality, one principal article of which was, "Lie not one to another, seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds"--"All liars shall have their portion in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone"--and we are to inquire if they themselves lied; lied publicly, lied repeatedly, if the very business of their lives was to propagate falsehood, and if they died with a lie in their right hands. You will remember that we proved conclusively that the belief of the death and resurrection of Jesus did turn immense multitudes of wicked men to a life of virtue, and now we are to inquire if the belief of a lie produced this blessed result, and whether, if so, there be any such thing as truth in the world, or any use in it? 4. Of no other series of events of ancient history do we possess the same number of records by contemporary historians, as of the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. We have four direct systematic memoirs of him by four of his companions; and we have a collection of letters by four others, in which the events of the memoirs are continually referred to. At the mouth of two or three witnesses any man's property and life will be disposed of in a court of justice, but here we have the testimony of eight eye-witnesses of the facts they relate, and they refer to five hundred other persons, the greater part of whom were then alive, who had also seen and heard Christ after his resurrection. These eight persons give us their separate and independent statements of those things they deemed worthy of record in the life and death of Christ, and of the sayings and doings of several of his friends and enemies. Now every person knows that it is impossible to make two crooked boughs tally, or two false witnesses agree. You never saw two lying reports of any considerable number of transactions agree, unless the one was copied from the other. It is evident that the gospels were not copied from each other, for they often relate different events, and when they relate the same occurrence, each man relates those parts of it which he saw himself, and which impressed him most. Yet the utmost ingenuity of infidelity has utterly failed to make them contradict each other in any particular. Here are eight witnesses to the truth of the same story, four of whom in their letters make occasional allusions to the facts of the history as being perfectly well known, and therefore needing only to be alluded to, yet these cursory references fit into the history with every mark of truthfulness. Does the history of Matthew, written at Jerusalem, tell us that Jesus took Peter, and James, and John up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them? Peter, in his letter, written from Babylon, says, "We were eye-witnesses of his majesty. We were with him in the holy mount."--2 Peter ii. 10. If the history tells how Paul was beaten and cast into prison at Philippi, and his feet made fast in the stocks, and that, nevertheless, he manfully defended his birthright as a Roman citizen, and made the tyrannical magistrates humble themselves, and apologize for their illegal conduct, we find Paul himself, in a letter to a neighboring church, appealing to their knowledge of the facts, "that after we had suffered before, and were shamefully entreated, as ye know, at Philippi, we were bold in our God to speak unto you the gospel of God with much contention. For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile. For neither at any time used we flattering words, as ye know, nor a cloak for covetousness."--1 Thessalonians ii. 2. Hundreds of such undesigned coincidences may be found in the New Testament, confirming the veracity of the several historians and letter writers, and giving that impression of the naturalness and truth of the story, which can neither be described nor disputed. The reader who desires to prosecute this interesting branch of the evidences of Christianity will find an ample collection of these coincidences in Paley's Horæ Paulinæ. This agreement of independent writers is the more remarkable, as the writers were persons of very various degrees of education, of different professions and ranks of life, born in different countries, and writing from various places in Italy, Greece, Palestine, and Assyria, without any communication with each other. Matthew was an officer of customs in Galilee; Mark a Hebrew citizen of Jerusalem; Luke a Greek physician of Antioch; James and John owned and sailed a fishing smack on Lake Tiberias; Jude left his thirty-nine acres of land, worth nine thousand denarii, to be farmed by his children when he went forth to preach the gospel; and college-bred Paul carried his sturdy independence in his breast, and his sail needles in his pocket, and dictated epistles, and cut out marquees and lug-sails in the tent factory of Aquila, Paul & Co., at Corinth. Several of his letters were written in a dungeon in Rome; the last of Peter's is dated at Babylon; Matthew's Gospel was penned at Jerusalem, and John's Gospel and Epistles were written at Ephesus. The agreement of eight such witnesses, of such different pursuits, and so scattered over the world, in the relation of the same story, in all its leading particulars, together with their variety of style and manner, and their various relations of minor incidents, yet without a single contradiction, are most convincing proofs that they all tell truth. Nothing but truth could be thus told without contradiction. The fact that some considerable difficulties and many minor obscurities in these brief though pregnant narratives, prevent the combination of eight accounts so independent in their sources, and various in their style, and design, and auditors, into a flowing historical novel, a homogeneous mass, rounded and squared to our ideas of mathematical precision, is only an additional proof of their truth to nature, which abhors mathematical, as much as truth does rhetorical figures. Like the variety of expression used by American, German, French, and Polish witnesses in our courts of justice, testifying the same facts in their native idioms, though in English words, the apparent discrepancy, but actual harmony, becomes the most decisive test of the absence of any collusion, and consequently of the verity of the facts which such various witnesses unite in testifying. Especially will any such apparent discrepancy resolve itself into our own unskillfulness or ignorance, when we remember that the mists of ages, and the drapery of a strange language, and world-wide removal of residence, and the turning of the world upside down by the progress of Christian civilization, and our consequent ignorance of the thousand little details of every-day life, well known to the writer and his immediate readers, and of the force of expressive idioms, perfectly familiar to them--have rendered us not near so capable of detecting inaccuracies, as those contemporary writers and opponents, who allowed them--if they existed--to pass unchallenged. Like those antique coins, whose rust-dimmed and abbreviated inscriptions exercise the patience and historic lore of the antiquarian, though neither are needed to declare the precious material, this very rust of antiquity, through which his patience has penetrated, becomes one of the inimitable marks of historic verity. Every year throws some new light on texts difficult to us from our ignorance of those manners, customs, names, and places, which Infidel malice and Christian piety have combined to explore; and from the ruins of Nineveh and the sepulchers of Egypt we receive unlooked-for testimonies to the minute accuracy of the penmen of the Bible. 5. The manner in which the apostles published their testimony to the world bears every mark of truthfulness. Deception and forgery skulk, and try to spread themselves at first in holes and corners, but he that doeth truth cometh to the light. Had the apostles been conscious of falsehood, would they have dared to assert that Jesus was risen from the dead in the very streets of the city where he was crucified? in the temple, the most public place of resort of the Jews who saw him crucified? and to the teeth of the very men who put him to death? If conscious of falsehood, would they have dared, before the chief priests, and the council, and all the senate of Israel, to assert that "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree. Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a Savior, to give repentance to Israel, and remission of sins. And we are his witnesses of these things, and so is also the Holy Ghost which God hath given to them that obey him."--Acts v. 30. Would Paul, had he been conscious that he was relating falsehood, have dared to appeal to the judge, before whom he was on trial for his life, as to one who knew the notoriety of these facts, "For the king knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely; for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him: for this thing was not done in a corner."--Acts xxvi. 26. Would such appeals have been suffered to pass uncontradicted had the statements of the apostles been false? The boldness of their manner, however, of telling their story, is little, compared with the boldness of the design which they had in view in telling it; which was nothing less than to convert the world. Now the idea of proselyting other nations to a new religion was absolutely unknown to the world at that time. The Greeks and Romans never dreamed of any such thing. They would sometimes add a new god to their old Pantheon, but the idea of turning a nation to the worship of new deities was never before heard of. The Jews were so indignant at the project, that when Paul hinted it to them, they cried, "Away with such a fellow from the earth, for it is not fit that he should live." And this new and strange idea, of conquering the world for a crucified man, is taken up by a few private citizens, who resolve to overturn the craft by which priests have their wealth, and to bring the kingdoms of the world to become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. Impostors would never have appealed to their power of working miracles as the apostles did; nor could enthusiasts have done so without instant exposure. It is remarkable, that while in addressing those who believed their divine commission, they rarely allude to it (fourteen of the epistles make no allusion to apostolic miracles), but dwell on a subject of far greater importance--a holy life--they never hesitate to confront a Simon Magus, or a schismatical church at Corinth, or a persecuting high priest and sanhedrim with this power of the Holy Ghost. "Tongues," says Paul, "are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not;" and this is true of all other miracles. This marks the difference between real miracles and those of pretenders; who have never attempted to establish a new religion by them, or to convert unbelievers hostile to their claims and able to examine them, without immediate exposure. But you never heard of an impostor standing up before the tribunal of his judges and alleging the miraculous cure of a well-known public beggar, lame from his mother's womb, whom they had seen at the church gate every Sabbath for forty years, and bringing the man into court after such a fashion as this, "If we this day be examined of the good deed done unto the impotent man, by what means he is made whole, be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand before you whole." Such an appeal was unanswerable. "Beholding the man that was healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it." Nay, they were compelled to acknowledge "that indeed a notable miracle hath been done by them is manifest to all them that dwell in Jerusalem--we can not deny it."--Acts iv. The denial of the miracles of the gospel is a modern invention of the enemy. The scribes, and priests, emperors, and philosophers of the first centuries, who had the best opportunity of proving their falsehood, were unable to do so. The persecutors and apostates, whose malice against the Church knew no bounds, never dared to utter a charge of deception against the apostles. Why, then, you ask, did they not all become Christians? Because miracles can not convert any man against his will. Christianity is not merely a belief in miracles, but the love of Christ, and a life of holiness. There are many readers of this book who would not turn from their sins if all the dead in Spring Grove Cemetery would rise to-morrow to warn them from hell. God does not intend to force any man to become a Christian. He just gives evidence enough to try you, whether you will deal honestly and fairly with your own soul and your God, and if you are determined to hate Christ and his holy religion, you shall never want a plausible excuse for unbelief; as it is written, "Unto them which are disobedient, Christ is a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense." These ancient enemies of Christ acknowledged the reality of his miracles, but attributed them to magical power, or the help of Satan. The Jews said that he had acquired the power of miracles by learning to pronounce the incommunicable name of God. Modern Infidels deny all his miracles save the greatest--the turning of men from their sins. They can not deny that; they can not ascribe it to the power of Satan or of magic, for they do not believe in either; but they follow as nearly in the footsteps of their fathers as possible, when they tell us that multitudes of men, in every age, and in every land, have been turned from falsehood to truth by the belief of a lie, and from vice to virtue by the example of an impostor! 6. But the strongest proof of the truth of the facts of the gospel is the existence, the labors and sufferings of the apostles themselves. Nobody denies that such men lived, and preached, and were persecuted on account of their preaching that Jesus died and rose again. Now, if this was a falsehood, what motive had they to tell it? It was very displeasing to their rulers who had crucified him, and who had every inclination to give them the same treatment. To preach another king, one Jesus, to the Romans, was to bring down the power of the empire upon them. Nothing could be more absurd in the eyes of the Grecian philosophers than to speak of the resurrection of the body. Nor could any plan be devised more certain to arouse the fury of the pagan priesthood, than to denounce the craft by which they had their wealth, and to preach that they are no gods which are made by hands. The most degraded wretch, who perishes by the hand of the hangman is not so contemptible in our eyes, as the crucified malefactor was in the eyes of the Roman people; nor could anything more disagreeable to the Jewish nation be invented than the declaration, that the Gentiles should become partakers of the kingdom of God. What then should induce any man in his senses to provoke such an opposition to a new religion, and to make it so contemptible and disagreeable to those whom he sought to convert, if he were manufacturing a lie to gain power and popularity? The religion they preached was not adapted to please sensual men, nor to allow its preachers in sensual gratifications. "Our exhortation," says Paul--and every reader of the New Testament knows that he says truth--"Our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor of guile." Infidels admit that they preached a pure morality. But it is a long time since men learned the proverb, "Physician, heal thyself." "Thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege?" It could not, then, be to obtain license for lust that these men preached holiness. There is only one other conceivable motive which should induce men to confederate together for the propagation of falsehood--the design of making money by it. But their new religion made no provision for any such thing. One of their first acts was to desire the church to elect deacons who might manage its money matters, and allow them to give themselves wholly to prayer and to the ministry of the word. Twenty-five years after that they could appeal to the world that "Even to this present hour, we" (the Apostles) "both hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling-place, and labor working with our hands; being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it: we are counted as the filth of the world, and the offscouring of all things to this day." Their book opens with the story of their Master's birth in a stable, with the manger for his cradle, and one of its last pictures is that of his venerable apostle chained in a dungeon, and begging his friend to bring his old cloak from Troas, and to do his diligence to come before winter. Unpopular, pure, and penniless, if the gospel story were not true, how could it have had preachers? They at least believed it. The last and most convincing testimony which any man can give to the truth of a statement of fact is to suffer rather than deny it. Many have wondered why God allowed his dear servants to suffer so much persecution in the first ages of the Church. One principal reason was to give future ages an irresistible proof of the sincerity and faithfulness of the witnesses for Christ. The apostles lived lives of persecution and suffering for the name of Jesus; sufferings which they might have avoided if they had only abstained from preaching any more in this name. But, said they, "We can not but speak of the things which we have seen and heard." One who had no personal acquaintance with Jesus, and whose first interview with him was while he was breathing out threatening and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, is converted and called to be an apostle; and behold the prospect Jesus presents to him, "I will show him _how great things he must suffer for my name_." "The Holy Ghost testifieth," says Paul, "that in every city bonds and afflictions abide me. Yet none of these things move me." That at least was a true prophecy. "Seven times," says Clement, "he was in bonds, he was whipt, he was stoned; he preached both in the East and West, leaving behind him the glorious report of his faith, and so having taught the whole world righteousness, and for that end traveled even to the utmost bounds of the West, he at last suffered martyrdom by the command of the governors, and went to his holy place, having become a most eminent pattern of patience to all ages."[80] Hear his own appeal to those who envied his authority in the church, "Are they ministers of Christ, I am more: in labors more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths often. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep: in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by my own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness."--1 Corinthians ii. 23. Man can give no higher proof of his veracity, than a life such as this, unless it is to seal it with his blood; and this crowning testimony to the truth the apostles gave. Save the aged disciple, who, after torments worse than death, survived to address the persecuted church as, "Your companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ," they all suffered martyrdom for the truth of the gospel history. Let me again remind you that the gospel is not a collection of dogmas, but a relation of facts; that these twelve men did not preach the death and resurrection of Jesus, because they had read them in a creed, but because they had seen them with their own eyes; that they lived holy lives of toil, and hardship, and poverty, and suffering, in preaching these facts to the world; and that they died painful and shameful deaths as martyrs for their truth. You admit these things. Then I demand of you, "What more could either God or man do to convince you of their truthfulness?" The faithful and true witness himself has given you this last, undeniable test of veracity. With the certainty of an ignominious death before him, he solemnly swears to the truth of this fact, and dies for it. "And the high priest answered and said unto him, I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God? Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said. Hereafter ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." Unbeliever, are you prepared to meet him there, and prove him a perjured impostor? FOOTNOTES: [80] Wake's Trans. of Clement, Ep. ad Cor. v. CHAPTER VIII. PROPHECY. "In fifty years all Europe will be either Cossack, or Republican." So prophesied the most sagacious of modern politicians, by the inspiration of genius, calculating the prospects of the future by the light of his past experience. This prediction of Napoleon's is a very fair specimen of the oracles of human sagacity; which always overlooks the most stupendous facts--such as the conversion of an empire--and the commonest experiences--such as the birth of a brace of conflicting twins from the womb of the Rachel of revolution, when history happens to predict the failure of the self-elected conquering savior. Man learns to believe whatever he fondly desires, to expect what he believes, and to predict what he expects. His predictions are the mirrors which photograph his own moods of mind, rather than views through a telescope directed to the distant cloud-capped mountains of futurity. But it is confidently asserted that the science of party politics is simply the exercise of the gift of prophetic vision on the theater of civil life; and that a sagacious politician is, within his own sphere, a prophet. He applies the conditions of the past, so far as he knows them, to the calculation of the future. His success proves his sagacity, not his supernatural inspiration. Why should religious predictions be attributed to a different power? For the very simple and satisfactory reason, that the great majority of the calculations of party politicians are failures, while the predictions of the Bible are verified by the event. Name a dozen leaders of American politics during the last half century, and you name half a score of disappointed presidential candidates, whose unfinished monuments prevent the kindly green sward of oblivion from vailing their disappointments, and check the prayer of the passing pilgrim that they may rest in peace; while of the last half dozen who have occupied the presidential chair, and guided the destinies of the most progressive half of the world, not a single man had been suggested by the political leaders even ten years before his election. No wonder politicians become shy of prediction. But it is alleged, that while on a field so contracted as to become the arena of mere personal partialities it is confessedly difficult to predict the future, on the wider field of the world's great interests, the well-known uniformity of human passions and interests render their results calculable to the sagacious statesman. Thus Draper argues, that nations, like the individuals composing them, have fixed periods of growth, manhood, decay, decrepitude, and death--more or less rapid, according to the stock and situation. Those who accept that dogma argue that all that is necessary in order to predict the fate of a nation is a correct calculation of its present age; whether of childhood, manhood, or senility. It is wonderful how rashly men will risk their reputation for common sense on the sound of a plausible analogy, which, even were it valid, would not justify the inference drawn from it. For, suppose that there were as fixed laws of national as of individual life, can any man predict the period of the life of any individual, much less his destiny? May not the life of the nation be as liable to accidents and diseases as that of the individual? But the claim has been actually made, that the skillful statesman, or philosophic observer, is able to foresee, and foretell, even such accidents. Dean Stanley quotes Mill as suggesting an ordinary sign of statesmanship in modern times: "To have made predictions often verified by the event, seldom or never falsified by it." Others give a still wider range to prophetic inspiration. They tell us that all genius is prophetic, inasmuch as it grasps general laws, universal in their range, and unvariable in their operation, the application of which to particular events constitutes prediction. The Hebrew prophets were sagacious observers of human nature, and made very shrewd calculations of the future progress of events by a careful induction of the invariable laws of nature from the history of the past. But there was nothing supernatural in that. Every poet, philosopher, and statesman is more or less of a prophet. Indeed foresight, like insight, is common to all men: a superior degree of this common possession constitutes the prophet. Men of profound insight, or of extensive foresight, are equally rare in all departments of science. Ignorance ascribes to supernatural inspiration the sagacity derived from extensive observation of nature and history; while philosophy traces to the same source the inspiration of Moses and Mohammed, of Isaiah and Apollo, of the Principia, Paradise Lost, and the Apocalypse, of Rothschild, Napoleon, and Bismarck. Some geniuses expend themselves in poems, some in paintings, others in predictions. All are alike imperfect and fallible. Once in centuries, perhaps, we are astonished by the advent of a master, while occasional less perfect attempts and shrewd guesses keep the fires of ambition alive in the human breast. But if this were a correct account of the case we should have our best prophets as the result of our widest observations of nature and history; the best should come last. The prophets of this nineteenth century should be far ahead of Moses in prophetic foresight, standing as they do on the summit of the observatory built by the experience of forty centuries. Whereas, as a matter of fact, the world knows nothing about these modern prophets, or their predictions. The instances alleged by Rationalists are contemptibly trivial when compared with the Bible predictions. Contrast, for instance, Cayotte's alleged prediction, that the fate of Charles would befall Louis XVI., and that the rabble would fill Paris with anarchy--with Daniel's grand historic outline of the four great empires; or with our Savior's detailed prediction of the siege of Jerusalem. Cayotte's guess commanded no respect, even while the coming event cast its shadow before it; nor did he profess to utter it in the name of the Great Disposer of all events as the seal and authentication of a revelation of moral duty to man; and so it was of no value to those threatened by the calamity. But our Lord's predictions were so authoritative in their tone, and so definite in their details, that they enabled his disciples to escape the impending destruction at that time; and their fulfillment has furnished a decisive proof of his divine foresight to all generations. We are told by men who could not read one of Apollo's oracles to save their lives, nor recite one of Isaiah's prophecies to save their souls, that Apollo's oracles, no less than Isaiah's, were inspired. Could such persons be prevailed upon to read carefully any single prophetic book of Scripture, with the historic facts to which it refers, or even the briefest abridgment of these facts, such as that contained in The Comprehensive Commentary, they would not thus expose their ignorance alike of heathen and Christian oracles. The differences between them are too numerous to be easily enumerated. The oracles of the heathen are always sources of gain to their prophets. The ancient Pythoness must have a hecatomb, the writing medium a dollar, and the modern Pythoness of the platform a dime. But under the inspiration of God even a Balaam becomes honest, and the leprosy of Naaman marks the sordid Gehazi and his seed forever. The oracles of the heathen are always immoral in their tendency. From the first spiritual communication through the serpent medium in the tree of knowledge, down to the last spiritual marriage rapped out by the oracle, they are all in favor of pride, ambition, lying, lust, and murder. The oracles of God begin with a prohibition of curiosity, pride, covetousness, and theft: "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." And they are uniformly of the same tenor, forbidding, reproving, threatening vice, and encouraging virtue, down to the last: "Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city; for without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." This last mark--falsehood--belongs to all heathen oracles, from the first utterance by the serpent, down to the last response rapped out by the medium. Take any one heathen oracle of which we have any definite account--and the number is very small--and you will find that, if it is not "as equivocal as Apollo," _it is false_. For instance, Dean Stanley very confidently refers to certain heathen oracles, "the fulfillment of which, according to Cicero, could not be denied without a perversion of all history. Such was the foreshadowing of the twelve centuries of Roman dominion, by the legend of the apparition of the twelve vultures to Romulus, which was so understood 400 years before its accomplishment." Comparing the prophetic predictions with such fables, he says: "_It is not that they are more exact in particulars of time and place_; none can be more so than that of the twelve centuries of the Roman Empire."[81] The oracle thus exalted to a level with the predictions of our Lord and his apostles is quoted by Censorinus,[82] A. D. 238, from Varro, who died B. C. 28. Varro stated that he had heard Vettius, no common augur, of great genius in disputing, a match with any of the most learned, say, "If it was so, as the historians related, as to the auguries of the founding of the city of Romulus and the twelve vultures, since the Roman people had passed 120 years safe, it would reach 1,200." Dean Stanley misquotes the oracle, and does injustice to the old heathen prophet. He spake no word whatever about _dominion_; all he dared conjecture for his city was _safety_. Even that is put in a highly hypothetical mood. The augury begins with an "if," regarding the apocryphal story of Romulus and the twelve vultures. But whether the fable of the vultures be true or not, the augury of twelve centuries of safety deduced from it is undeniably false, whether it refers to the material city, or to the political constitution then established. The city then built was burnt by Brennus, the Gaul. Its successor was taken and plundered by Alaric, in A. D. 410; again by Genseric, and the Vandals, in 455; and again by the Ostrogoths, in 546. Thus the material city was repeatedly taken and destroyed during the twelve centuries succeeding its founding. If the augury referred to the duration of the political constitution then instituted, every school-boy knows that half a dozen revolutions falsified the prediction. If, however, it be alleged that it referred to the ultimate fate of the city of Rome, that it should cease to exist after twelve centuries, it is self-evidently false; for now, after the lapse of twenty-six centuries, Rome is larger, its people more numerous, and its territory wider than it was for centuries after Romulus saw the twelve vultures. Thus God "frustrateth the tokens of the liars." Yet men who have read Roman history, and whose business it is to read their Bibles, continue to cite Vettius Valens as a prophet, and to compare his false auguries with the predictions of the Scriptures of truth! This is only one of a number of such secular predictions confidently cited by the learned Dean as having been as minute and specific as those of Scripture, and undeniably fulfilled. But a scholar of his own church has examined his references and alleged facts, and the result is, that not a single instance remains of the fulfillment of any definite prediction given by the original writers; and where the transcriber and the Dean have helped them out to a more definite prediction, it has proved a false prophecy, as in the case of Sterling's and Spence's prediction of the year of the disruption of the Union of the United States. Dr. Pusey summarizes this discussion in his work on Daniel (p. 637), from which we extract and condense the following paragraphs on this subject: "Dean Stanley produces a certain number of alleged predictions in secular history, as counterparts of the predictions of _the political events_ of their own, and the surrounding nations," in the Hebrew prophets, _i. e._ (in religious language), "of God's judgments upon both for their sins against himself and their fellow-men." He says, "Every one knows instances, both in ancient and modern times, of predictions which have been uttered, and fulfilled, in regard to events of this kind. Sometimes such predictions have been the results of political foresight. Many instances will occur to students of history. Even within our own memory the great catastrophe of the disruption of the United States of America _was foretold, even with the exact date, several years beforehand_. Sometimes there has been an anticipation of some future epoch in the pregnant sayings of eminent philosophers and poets; as for example the intimation of the discovery of America by Seneca; or of Shakespeare by Plato; or the Reformation by Dante. Sometimes the result has been produced by the power of divination, granted in some inexplicable manner to ordinary men. Of such a kind were many of the ancient oracles, the fulfillment of which, according to Cicero, could not be denied without a perversion of history. Such was the foreshadowing of the twelve centuries of Roman dominion by the legend of the apparition of the twelve vultures to Romulus, which was so understood 400 years before its actual accomplishment. Such, but with less certainty, was the traditional prediction of the conquest of Constantinople by the Mussulmans; the alleged predictions by Archbishop Malachi, whether composed in the eleventh or sixteenth centuries, of the series of popes down to the present time; not to speak of the well-known instances which are recorded both in French and English history. But there are several points which at once place the prophetic predictions on a different level from any of these. _It is not that they are more exact in particulars of time and place_; none can be more so than that of the twelve centuries of the Roman Empire; and our Lord himself has excluded the precise knowledge of times and seasons from the widest and highest range of prophetic vision." (Jewish Church, 463. The Bible: its Form and Substance, pages 80, 82.) "It might safely be admitted," says Dr. Pusey, "that the outward predictions of time and place are of the body, rather than of the soul of prophecy, yet as indications that he revealed himself, who alone could know long before what he willed to bring to pass by his Providence, the predictions of the Hebrew prophets are not to be paralleled by any human history. "Definite predictions of the Hebrew prophets have been instanced above. Dr. Stanley's instances of secular fulfillment are unhappy." He then proceeds to examine in their turn the political, poetic, Popish, Mohammedan, and heathen oracles quoted by Dean Stanley. _I. The Political Predictions._ Sterling, as quoted by Mr. Spence, so far from predicting the great catastrophe of the disruption of the United States _at the end_ of the four years, says that no wise man would predict anything even within those four years. "It appears to me that amid so many elements of uncertainty as to the future, both from the excited state of men's minds in the States themselves, and the complication of surrounding circumstances, no wise man would venture to foretell the probable issue of American affairs during the next four years." (On the American Union, page 14.) And this was written amid all the heavings which preceded the bursting of the volcano. It followed, after statesmen had, one after another, seen the elements of that disruption. The probability of the severance of the North and South has been a speculation to which the older of us have long been familiar. And now [1864] who would venture to predict the time of the close of that sad war? (First edition.) Now [1865] that it has come to an end Americans taunt Europeans with their want of foresight in their anticipations as to its issue. The _Times_ correspondent retorts as to false anticipations of Americans--(1) that the issue would not interfere with slavery; (2) that there would be separation without bloodshed; (3) that the war would last only some ninety days; (4) that the United States would break up into fragments (Northern); (5) they contemplated that the interests of trade would suffice for the harmony of North and South when separated, etc., etc. June 6, 1865. Europeans almost universally anticipated the success of the South. So little did the human sagacity of men really sagacious, with intimate knowledge of the strength of the different parties, their numbers, resources, and all the calculations as to modern warfare, enable them to anticipate within half a year the result of a war, which, through the vivid description of it, and clear knowledge, was carried on almost under their eyes. And these men would have us to suppose that Hebrew prophets, living in the center of a small people, could, with mere human knowledge, foretell with absolute certainty the overthrow of flourishing empires, when at the acme of their power! _II. The So-called Prophecies of S. Malachi._ These have long been recognized to be a forgery, unmeaning except for the immediate purpose for which they were "forged by the partisans of the Cardinal Simoncelli, one of the candidates for the tiara, who was designated by the words 'de antiquitate orbis,' because he was of Orvieto, in Latin, 'orbs vetus.'" (Biog. Unv'l v. Wion.) Menestrier published a refutation of the pretended prophecies of S. Malachi, Paris, 1689, written with much solidity. Don Feijoo also refuted these pretended prophecies in his _Teatro Critico_. The Noveau Dictionnaire Historique, by MM. Chaudon and Delaudine, speaks of the "errors and anachronisms with which this impertinent list swarms." "The forgetfulness of common sense makes itself felt in a few pages. Those who have set themselves to explain these too noted insipidities, always find some allusion, forced or probable, in the country, name, arms, birth, talents of the popes, the cardinalatory dignities they had borne, etc.; _e. g._, the prophecy which related to Urban the Eighth was, _Lilium et Rosæ_." It was fulfilled to the very letter, say these absurd interpreters, for that pope had in his coat of arms bees, which suck lilies and roses. (Art. Malachi and Wion.) III. Dr. Pusey proceeds to examine the process by which a prediction of _the conquest of Constantinople_ has been manufactured for the false prophet, Mohammed. "In the mosque of Sultan Mohammed the Second," says V. Hammer, "which was finished A. D. 1469, there stands, to the right of the main door, on a marble slab, on an azure field, in gold raised characters, the tradition of the prophet relating to Constantinople. 'They _will conquer_ Constantinople; and blessed the prince, blessed the army which shall fulfill this.'" (Constant v. d. Bosporos I. 393.) Or (as he renders more exactly in Gesch d. Osm. Reich, p. 523), "the best prince is he who conquers it, and the best army, his army." This tradition, being above eight centuries after Mohammed, has, of course, no value. It reappears in a different form in Ockley, the conquest being presupposed, rather than prophesied. Ockley says (History of Saracens, II. 128), "Mohammed having said, 'The sins of the first army which takes the city of the Cæsar are forgiven.'" Ockley referring only vaguely to Bokhari, who, early in the third century, after Mohammed selected 7,000 traditions which he held to be genuine, out of some 267,000, I applied to my friend, M. Reinaud, professor of Arabic at Paris, and member of the Institute, not doubting that with his large knowledge he would be able to point out to me the passage in the _Sahih_. This, with his well-known kindness, he has done, amid his many labors. It puts an end to all questions about prophecy. The passage is this: As Omm Heram has related to us that she heard the prophet say, "The first army of my people which shall war by sea will acquire merits with God, Omm Heram said, 'I said, O Apostle of God, I will be among them.' He said, 'Thou shalt be among them.' Then the prophet said, 'The first army of my people which shall attack the city of the Cæsar, their sins shall be forgiven them.' Then I said, 'I will be with them, O Apostle of God.' He said, 'No!'" M. Reinaud adds, "There is no question but that Mohammed conceived the idea of the invasion of the Roman Empire, and of the kingdom of Persia by his disciples. He himself shortly before his death tried his strength against the Roman forces in Syria. But the passage does not say what Ockley makes him say. It does not say that Constantinople would be taken." The other prophecy referred to by Von Hammer is as follows: "Have you heard of a city of which one side is land, the two others sea? They said, 'Yea, O Apostle of God.' He said, 'The last hour will not come without its being conquered by 70,000 sons of Isaac. When they come to it they will not fight against it with weapons and engines of war, but with the word, There is no god but God, and God is great!' Then will one side of the sea walls fall; and at the second time the second; and at the third time the wall on the land side; and they will enter in with gladness." The framer of this prophesy expected the walls of Constantinople to fall like those of Jericho, which he must have had in mind. He expected it to fall before Arabs, "sons of Isaac," not before Turks. * * * Yet, contrary to the expectation, and the prophecy, it did fall before the Turks, after having been seven times besieged by the Arabs, and four times by the Turks; by whom it was taken A. D. 1453. The framer of the prediction anticipated that the representatives of the followers of the prophet would be Arabs to some indefinite period, near the last hour; he expected a miraculous destruction of Constantinople; it was besieged seven times by those before whose war-cry he expected it to fall. It did not fall before those before whom he said it would fall; it fell in an ordinary way, not in that predicted; it was besieged in the way in which he said it would not be besieged; lastly, it fell, but its walls fell not. _Every detail of the prediction is contrary to the fact._ As for the mere capture, it befalls all great cities in turn; so that a prediction of the capture of any great city would be the safest of all prophecies. But the prediction did not anticipate, what is now certain, that as soon as Christian jealousies permit, before the end of the world, it will be wrested from its captors. IV. The legend of Romulus and the vultures, and the falsehood of the prediction based upon it, have been exposed on a previous page. V. In regard to Seneca's alleged prediction of the discovery of America, it was exceedingly vague; and was wholly based on the undoubted knowledge of its existence by the ancient Egyptians, and by Plato, Proclus, Marcellus, Ammianus, Marcellinus, Diodorus, Aristotle, and Plutarch; whose assertions influenced Columbus to undertake the search for it. Nothing could be more certain than that such a continent would be rediscovered. But in the only indication which Seneca gives us of its location he erred; for Thule is still the utmost land northward, no new continent having been discovered, nor remaining to be discovered, toward the North Pole. VI. As to the heathen oracles we have already spoken enough. VII. "The anticipation of Shakespeare by Plato amounts to this, that he makes Socrates compel his friends to admit, 'that it belongs to the same man, how to compose comedy and tragedy, and that he who is by skill a composer of tragedies is also a composer of comedies.' (Sympos fin.) * * * But it is mere confusion to speak of this as _anticipation_. Plato does not say that there would be any greater combination of the two talents than there had been; he does not even say that the highest excellence in one involved excellence in the other; he simply says that the two faculties belonged to the same mind. According to his maxims, if true, it would be rather marvelous that they were not more frequently combined than that they were remarkably in one mind." VIII. "Those best read in Dante are at a loss to find in him any trace of a prediction of the Reformation. Dante, with his firm faith in all Roman doctrine, could not have imagined or anticipated such a disruption as Luther's. Dean Stanley corrects an unimportant misprint or two in the second edition of his book, on the ground of the above statements. He does not even attempt to supply a passage from Dante. I have looked for one in vain." Yet such a collection of errors, absurdities, falsehoods, and impostures is gravely presented, in this nineteenth century, by a learned clergyman, as comparable in regard to exact fulfillment with the oracles of God. It is not intended here to discuss the question of the continuance of prophetic powers in the Church. If, as many believe, the promise in Joel ii. 28--"It shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, that your sons and your daughters shall prophesy," etc.--is a promise not yet exhausted, predictions given by the Holy Spirit may have been given through Christians in former times, and may still be given. But if such be the fact, these are not secular predictions; but spiritual and supernatural, and of the same class with those of Scripture; they are therefore not to be cited by Rationalists as examples of secular prediction. But it is objected that "the prophecies of Scripture are as obscure as the oracles; are all wrapped up in symbolical language; that many of them have a double meaning; that no two interpreters are agreed as to the meaning of the unfulfilled predictions; and that no man can certainly foretell any future event by means of them." The objection proceeds on a total mistake of the nature and design of prophecy, which is not to unvail the future for the gratification of your curiosity, but to give you direction in your present duty; precisely the reverse of the oracles referred to, which proposed to tell their votaries what should happen, but rarely condescended to direct them how to behave themselves so that things might happen well. The larger part of the prophecies of Scripture is taken up with directions to men how to regulate their conduct, rather than with information how God means to regulate his. There is just as much of the latter as is sufficient to show us that the God who gave the Bible governs the world, and even that always urges the same moral lesson: "Say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with him, for he shall eat the fruit of his doings." "Woe to the wicked; it shall be ill with him, for the reward of his hands shall be given him." Whenever a vision relates to what God will do in the distant future, it is dark and mysterious; but whenever any directions are given necessary for our immediate duty, then the "vision is written and made plain on tables, _that he may run that readeth it_." The possessors of a clearly engrossed title-deed have surely no reason to complain that the president has chosen that his seal appended to it shall consist of a device, which, by reason of its being hard to read, and harder to imitate, secures both himself and them against forgery. The double meaning of some prophecies is a double check. So far from resembling the equivocations of heathen oracles, by taking either of two opposite events for a fulfillment, they require both of two corresponding ones; and some prophecies, like a master key, open several successive events, and thus show that the same mind planned both locks and key. When the prediction is fulfilled all mystery vanishes, and men see plainly that thus it was written; that is to say, men who look; for the man who will not open his eyes will never see anything that it concerns him to know. But the man who thinks that it concerns him so much to know what God will do with the world a hundred years after he is dead, that unless the prophecies of the Bible are all made plain to him, he will neither read God's word, nor obey his law, may go on his own way. We expound no mysteries to such persons; for it is written, "None of the wicked shall understand." As to the objection taken from the symbolical language of prophecy, and which seems to a number of our modern critics so weighty that they remove to the purely mythologic ground everything "couched in symbolical language," and account nothing to be prediction unless "literal history written in advance"--I would merely ask, How is it possible to reveal heavenly things to earth-born men but by earthly figures? Do you know a single word in your own, or any other language to express a spiritual state, or mental operation, that is not the name of some material state, or physical operation, used symbolically? Heart, soul, spirit, idea, memory, imagination, inclination, etc., every one of them a figure of speech--a symbol. Nay, is there a letter in your own, or in any other alphabet, that was not originally a picture of something? I demand to know in what way God or man could teach you to know anything you have never seen, but by either showing you a picture of it, or telling you what it is like? That is simply by type or symbol; these are the only possible media of conveying heavenly truth, or future history to our minds. When, therefore, the skeptic insists that prophecy be given literally, in the style of history written in advance, he simply requires that God would make it utterly unintelligible. We can gather clear and definite ideas from the significant hieroglyphics of symbolical language, but the literalities of history written in advance would be worse to decipher than the arrow-headed inscriptions of Nineveh. Just imagine to yourself Alexander the Great reading Guizot, instead of Daniel; or Hildreth, as being less mysterious than Ezekiel; and meeting, for instance, such a record as this: "In the year of Christ, 1847, the United States conquered Mexico and annexed California." "In the year of Christ--what new Olympiad may be that?" he would say. "The United States of course means the States of the Achæn League, but on what shore of the Euxine may Mexico and California be found?" What information could Aristotle gather from the record that, "In 1857, the Transatlantic Telegraph was in operation?" Could all the augurs in the seven-hilled city have expounded to Julius Cæsar the famous dispatch, if intercepted in prophetic vision, "Sebastopol was evacuated last night, after enduring for three days an infernal fire of shot and shell?" Nay, to diminish the vista to even two or three centuries, what could Oliver Cromwell, aided by the whole Westminster Assembly, have made of a prophetic vision of a single newspaper paragraph of history written in advance, to inform them that, "Three companies of dragoons came down last night from Berwick to Southampton, by a special train, traveling 54-1/2 miles an hour, including stoppages, and embarked immediately on arrival. The fleet put to sea at noon, in the face of a full gale from the S. W.?" Why, the intelligible part of this single paragraph would seem to them more impossible, and the unintelligible part more absurd, than all the mysterious symbols of the Apocalypse. The world has accepted God's symbols thousands of years ago, and it is too late in the day for our reformers to propose new laws of thought, and forms of speech, to the human race. David's prophetic lyrics, Christ's graphic parables, Isaiah's celestial anthems, Ezekiel's glorious symbols, and Solomon's terse proverbs, will be recited and admired, ages after the foggy abstractions of mystified metaphysicians have vanished from the earth. The Thirst of Passion, the Cup of Pleasure, the Fountain of the Water of Life, the Blood of Murder, the Rod of Chastisement, the Iron Scepter, the Fire of Wrath, the Balance of Righteousness, the Sword of Justice, the Wheels of Providence, the Conservative Mountains, the Raging Seas of Anarchy, and the Golden, Brazen, and Iron Ages, will reflect their images in truth's mirror, and photograph their lessons on memory's tablet, while the mists of the "positive philosophy," "the absolute," and "the conditioned," float past unheeded, to the land of forgetfulness. God's prophetic symbols are the glorious embodiments of living truths, while man's philosophic abstractions are the melancholy ghosts of expiring nonsense. The prophetic symbols are sufficiently plain to be distinctly intelligible _after_ the fulfillment, as we shall presently see; sufficiently obscure to baffle presumptuous curiosity before it. Had they been so written as to be fully intelligible beforehand, they must have interfered with man's free agency, by causing their own fulfillment. They hide the future sufficiently to make man feel his ignorance; they reveal enough to encourage faith in the God who rules futurity. The revelation of future events, however, is not the principal design of the prophecies of the Bible; they bear witness to God's powerful present influence over the world now. For God's prophecy is not merely his foretelling something which will certainly happen at some future time, but over which he has no control--as an astronomer foretells an eclipse of the sun, but can neither hasten nor hinder it--but it is his revealing of a part of his plan of this world's affairs, to show that God, and not man, is the sovereign of this world. For this purpose he tells beforehand the actions which wicked men, of their own free will, will commit, contrary to his law, and the measures he will take to thwart their designs, and fulfill his own. Nay, he declares he will so manage matters that, without their knowledge, and even contrary to their intentions, heathen armies, and infidel scoffers shall serve his purposes, and show his power; while yet they are as perfectly voluntary in all their movements as if they, and not God, governed the world. Every fulfilled prophecy thus becomes an instance and evidence of a supernatural government; and is, to a thinking mind, a greater miracle than casting mountains into the sea. The style of prophecy corresponds to this design. It is not by any means apologetic, or supplicating; but, on the contrary, majestic, convincing, and terrifying to the ungodly. "_Remember this and show yourselves men. Bring it again to mind, O ye transgressors. For I am God, and there is none else. I am God, and there is none like me. Declaring the end from the beginning, And from, ancient times the things that are not yet done, Saying_, 'MY COUNSEL SHALL STAND, AND I WILL DO ALL MY PLEASURE.'"[83] Infidels feel the power of this manifestation of God in his word; and are driven to every possible denial of the fact, and evasion of the argument drawn from it. They feel instinctively that Bible prophecies are far more than mere predictions. They would rather endow every human being on earth with the power of predicting the future than allow the God of heaven that power of ruling the present which these prophecies assert. Hence the attempt to admit their predictive truth, and yet deny their divine authority, by ascribing them to human sagacity. Transatlantic steam navigation has produced a remarkable change in the tone of Infidel writers and speakers in regard to the prophecies of the Bible. You could not converse long with an Infidel on this subject, a few years ago, until he would assure you, with all confidence, that the prophecies were all written after their fulfillment, and so were not prophecies at all. But now that travelers of all classes, scoffers, sailors, and doctors in divinity, scientific expeditions, and correspondents of daily papers, have flooded the world with undeniable attestations that many of them are receiving their fulfillment at this day, none but the most grossly ignorant and stupid attempt to deny that the prophecies of the Bible were written thousands of years since, and that many of them have since been accomplished; and that so many have been fulfilled that their accomplishment can not be ascribed to chance. But the force of the argument for the divine inspiration of the prophets is met by the assertion, that there is nothing supernatural in prophecy, and that it is only one form of the inspiration of genius applying the general laws of nature. Calculating securely on that profound ignorance of the Bible which characterizes their followers, modern writers inform them that "none of the prophets ever uttered any distinct, definite, unambiguous prediction of any future event which has since taken place, which a man without a miracle could not equally well predict." It is alleged that the prophecies, in predicting the overthrow of the nations of antiquity, predicted nothing beyond the ken of human sagacity, enlightened by a careful study of the experience of the past, and the invariable laws of nature; that it requires no inspiration to foretell the decay of perishing things; that the invariable progress of all things, empires as well as individuals, is first upward, through a period of youthful vigor and energy, then onward through a period of ripe maturity, and then downward, through a gradual decay, and final dissolution, to the inevitable grave. The world's history is but a history of the decline and fall of nations. 1. Now, if this be true, it is an awful truth for the Infidel, for _it sweeps away the last vestige of a foundation of his hope for eternity_. The only reason any unbeliever in Revelation could ever give, or that modern Rationalists do give, for their hope of a happy eternity, is the analogy of nature--the alleged constant progress of all things toward perfection in this world. It is an awkward truth that individually we must die, and the worms crawl over us; but then the wretched fate of the individual was to be compensated by the glorious progress of the race onward and ever onward and upward; from the fungus to the frog, and from the frog to the monkey, from the monkey to the man, from the noble savage wild in woods, to the pastoral tribe, thence to the empire and the federal republic, and finally to the reign of individual and passional attraction, and union with the sum of all the intelligences of the universe, through a constant progress toward infinite perfection. But, alas! it seems it was a false analogy, an ill-observed fact, a delusion; the course of nature is all the other way. The tendency of all perishing things is not to perfection, but to perdition; and it needs no inspiration to tell that man's loftiest towers, and strongest cities, and proudest empires will come to ruin; or that the most polished, powerful, and populous nations of antiquity will dwindle down into Turks, Moors, and Egyptians. Here is a fact of awful omen. Death reigns in this world of ours; death moral, social, political, and physical, has ever trampled upon man, proud man, learned man, civilized man, over all the plans of man, over every man, and over every association of men, even the largest, the widest, the mightiest. And now the Infidel, having taken away our hope of help from heaven, comes with the serpent's hiss, and fiendish sneer, to taunt the perishing world with this miserable truism--that the tendency of everything on earth is to perdition, and that it needs no inspiration to tell it. Truly it does not. Were that all the prophets of God had to tell us--as it is all the prophets of Infidelity can prophecy--we had as little need for the one as for the other. Earthquake and hurricane, volcano and valley flood, autumn frosts and winter blasts, fever, consumption, war, and pestilence, the grave-yard and the charnel-house, the Parthenon and the Pyramids, the silent cities of Colorado, and the buried palaces of Assyria, unite to attest this awful doom. But what reason has the skeptic to believe that this invariable law of nature shall ever be repealed, and this inevitable progress of all things to perdition be arrested? Why may not men be as selfish, and filthy, and grasping, and murderous in the other world, as they are in this? Why may not the course of nature be as fatal to the sinner's prosperity there as it is here? Why may not the progress of the proud empires and spheres of futurity be such as the skeptic declares the progress of the past to have been, so invariably toward dissolution and death, that it shall need no inspiration to predict its course downward, downward, ever downward, to endless perdition? Stand forward, skeptic, and point the world to an instance in which an ungodly nation has stemmed this all-destroying torrent of ruin; or acknowledge that all you can promise the nations of the world to come, from your experience of the invariable laws of nature, is _perdition, endless perdition_. 2. It is manifest, however, that this destruction of nations and desolation of empires must have had a beginning some time or other. Nations could not perish before they had grown, nor empires be destroyed till they had accumulated; and during all this period of their growth and vigor the experience of mankind would never lead them to predict their ruin. The sagacious observer, beholding Babylon, Nineveh, Damascus, and Tyre, growing and flourishing during a period of a thousand years past, could have had no reason from such an experience to expect anything else than a thousand years of prosperity to come. Especially impossible is it for human sagacity, enlightened by experience, to predict _unexampled_ desolations, destructions such as the world had never witnessed. _Now the predictions of the Bible are predictions of unexampled desolations, and unparalleled ruin of empires._ The desolation of any extensive region of the earth, or the overthrow of any great nation, was an event absolutely unknown to the world when the prophets of the Bible began to utter their predictions; unless the skeptic will allow the truth of the Bible record of the prediction and execution of the deluge, and the destruction of Sodom. War and conquest had indeed caused some provinces to change masters; one nation had made marauding invasions on others, and carried off cattle and slaves; but the result of the greatest military operation of which we have any record, at the commencement of the prophetic era--the conquest of Palestine by the Israelites--so far from desolating the region, or exterminating the people, had been merely to increase its productiveness, and to drive its former occupants to new settlements, where at that era they were fully able to cope with their former conquerors. Whatever the experience of thirty centuries may have since taught the nations concerning the certainty of the connection between national crime and national ruin, a long-suffering God had not then given any such signal examples of it, as those of which he gave warning by the prophets. The course of the nations and cities founded after the deluge had been regularly onward and prosperous, and they were just rising to the maturity of their power and splendor when Jonah, Micah, Hosea, and Isaiah, began to pronounce their sentences. They denounced desolation and solitude against nations more populous than this continent, one of whose cities enumerated more citizens than some of our proud commonwealths, and displayed buildings, a sight of whose crumbling ruins is deemed sufficient recompense for the perils of a journey of six thousand miles. The hundred churches of Cincinnati could all have been conveniently arranged in the basement of the temple of Belus; on the first floor our hundred thousand non-church-going citizens might have assembled to listen to a lecture on spiritualism from some eloquent Chaldean soothsayer; and the remaining seven stories would have still been open for the accommodation of the natives of the original Queen City. Every product of earth was trafficked in the markets of Tyre; a single Jewish house imported annually more gold than all the banks of this continent possess; and the whole coinage of the United States since 1793 would want a hundred millions of dollars of the value of the golden furniture of a single temple in Babylon. In fact, in the suburbs of Babylon or Nineveh, Washington or Cincinnati would have been insignificant villages; and the stone-fronted brick palaces of Broadway and the Fifth Avenue would make passable stables and haylofts for the mansions of Thebes or Petra. So far, therefore, from being the teaching of experience, there was nothing more utterly unexampled and unparalleled than the complete desolation of any nation at the time the prophets of Israel predicted such things. If the world has grown wiser since regarding the decline and fall of empires, it has gathered the best part of its sagacity from the prophecies. The degradation of the seed of Ham, and the colonization of Asia by the descendants of Japhet, were however undeniably predicted by Noah long before any examples or experiences of such things had occurred. Centuries after the degradation of Canaan had been predicted, his descendants were powerful, prosperous, and colonizing the shores of the world. But God foresaw, and compelled their ancestor to foretell, the corruption of the blood which would reduce his descendants to be servants of servants to their brethren; and now the ruins of their cities, and of the people descended from Canaan, are proverbial alike in the libraries and slave markets of the world. But on the other hand, the colonization of the world by the descendants of Japhet was as particularly predicted by Noah as the degradation of the Canaanites; and this can not be called a prediction of destruction, but rather of great prosperity: "God shall enlarge Japhet." Every emigrant ship which discharges its cargo at New York, and every new prairie farm in America, and every sheep ranch in Australia, and every new cattle kraal in South Africa fulfills the prediction: "He shall dwell in the tents of Shem." The various Greek, Roman, English, and Russian Empires of Asia attest the truth. From the Volga to the Amour, and from Hong Kong to Singapore, and from the Ganges to the Indus, Japhet to-day dwells in the tents of Shem. 3. The prophecies of the Bible are not vague general denunciations of natural decline and extinction to all the nations of the world, which, if they were merely the exposition of a universal _natural_ law of national death, they would be; nor yet the application of any such natural and inevitable law to some particular nation, denouncing its destruction, without any specification of time, manner, instrument, or cause of its infliction. They are all the applications of _moral law_--sentences pronounced on account of national wickedness. In every case the prophecy charges the crimes, and specifies the punishment, selected by the Judge of all the earth. The nations selected as examples of divine justice are as various as their sentences are different; covering a space as long as from Eastport to San Francisco, and climes as various as those between Canada and Cuba; peopled by men of every shade of color and degree of capacity, from the negro servant of servants, to the builders of the Coliseum, and the Pyramids. They minutely describe, in their own expressive symbols, the nations yet unfounded, and kings unborn, who should ignorantly execute the judgments of the Lord. They predict the futures of over thirty States, _no two of which are alike_; each prediction embracing a large number of minute particulars, any one of which was utterly beyond the range of human sagacity. To predict that a man will die may require no great sagacity; but to tell the year of his death, that he will die as a criminal, allege the crime for which he will be sentenced, the time, place, and manner of his execution, and the name of the sheriff who will execute the sentence, is plainly beyond the skill of man. Such is the character of Bible predictions. Zedekiah's sentence was thus pronounced; and thus, too, the sentences of nations doomed to ruin for their crimes are recorded in the Bible, that men may know that the mouth of the Lord hath spoken them. If, for instance, a prophet should declare that New York should be overturned, and become a little fishing village, and that her stones and timber, and her very dust, should be scraped off and thrown into the East River; that Philadelphia should become a swamp, and never be inhabited, from generation to generation; that Columbus should be deserted, and become a hog-pen; that Louisville should become a dry, barren desert; and New Orleans be utterly consumed with fire, and never be built again; that learning should depart from Boston, and no travelers ever pass through it any more; that New England should become the basest of the nations, and no native American ever be President of the Union, but that it should be a spoil and a prey to the most savage tribes; and that the Russians should tread Washington under foot for a thousand years; but that God would preserve Pittsburg in the midst of destruction--and if all these things should come to pass, would any man dare to deny that the prophet spake not the dictates of human sagacity, or the calculations of genius, but the words of God? To attempt to illustrate the divine wisdom displayed in a system of connected predictions, covering the destiny of the nations of the world, and extending from the dawn of history to the end of time, by presenting two or three instances of the fulfillment of specific predictions, would be something like exhibiting a fragment of a column as a monument of the skill of the architect of a temple; yet, as such a fragment may excite the curiosity of the traveler to visit the structure whence it was taken, I shall present two or three prophecies in which specific predictions are given, concerning the _geographical, political, social, and religious condition_ of three of the great nations of antiquity--_Egypt, Judea, and Babylon_--the fulfillment of which is spread over the surface of empires and the ruins of cities, patent to all travelers at the present hour, and abundantly attested in many volumes.[84] Could human sagacity have calculated that Egypt--the most defensible country in the world, bounded on the south by inaccessible mountains, on the east by the Red Sea, on the west by the trackless, burning desert; able to defend the mouths of her river with a powerful navy, and to drown an invading army every year by the inundation of the Nile; which had not only maintained her independence, but extended her conquests for a thousand years past, whose victorious king, Apries, had just sent an expedition against Cyprus, besieged and taken Gaza and Sidon, vanquished the Tyrians by sea, mastered Phoenicia and Palestine, and boasted that not even a god could deprive him of his possessions--Egypt, which had given arts, sciences, and idolatry to half the world, and which had not risen to the full height of its world-wide fame, or the extent of its influence for twenty-five years after the prediction[85]--that Egypt should be invaded, conquered, spoiled, become a prey to strangers and evermore to strangers, never have a native prince, sink into barbarism, renounce idolatry, and become famous for her desolations? Yet the Bible predictions are specific on all these matters: "_I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of the wicked: and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by the hand of strangers: I the Lord have spoken it. Thus saith the Lord God; I will also destroy the idols, and I will cause the images to cease out of Noph; and there shall be no more a prince of the land of Egypt._"[86] Let Infidels read the fulfillment of these predictions, as described by Infidels: "Such is the state of Egypt. Deprived twenty-three centuries ago of her natural proprietors, she has seen her fertile fields successively a prey to the Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Georgians, and at length the race of Tartars distinguished by the name of the Ottoman Turks. The Mamelukes, purchased as slaves and introduced as soldiers, soon usurped the power and selected a leader. If their first establishment was a singular event, their continuance is not less extraordinary; they are replaced by slaves brought from their original country."[87] Says Gibbon: "A more unjust and absurd constitution can not be devised than that which condemns the natives of the country to perpetual servitude under the arbitrary dominion of strangers and slaves. Yet such has been the state of Egypt about five hundred years. The most illustrious sultans of the Baharite and Beyite dynasties were themselves promoted from the Tartar and Circassian bands; and the four and twenty beys, or military chiefs, have ever been succeeded, not by their sons, but by their servants."[88] Mehemet Ali cut off the Mamelukes, but still Egypt is ruled by the Turks, and the present ruler (Ibrahim Pasha) is a foreigner. It is needless to remind the reader that the idols are cut off. Neither the nominal Christians of Egypt, nor the iconoclastic Moslem, allow images to appear among them. The rivers, too, are drying up. In one day's travel forty dry water-courses will be crossed in the Delta; and water-skins are needed now around the ruined cities whose walls were blockaded by Greek and Roman navies. "_It shall be the basest of the kingdoms; neither shall it exalt itself any more above the nations: for I will diminish them, that they shall no more bear rule over the nations._"[89] Every traveler will attest the truth of this prediction. The wretched peasantry are rejoiced to labor for any who will pay them five cents a day, and eager to hide the treasure in the ground from the rapacious tax-gatherer. I have seen British horses refuse to eat the meal ground from the mixture of wheat, barley, oats, lentiles, millet, and a hundred unknown seeds of weeds and collections of filth, which forms the produce of their fields. For poverty, vermin, and disease, Egypt is proverbial. Let us hear a scoffer's testimony, however: "In Egypt there is no middle class, neither nobility, clergy, merchants, nor landholders. A universal air of misery in all the traveler meets points out to him the rapacity of oppression, and the distrust attendant upon slavery. The profound ignorance of the inhabitants equally prevents them from perceiving the causes of their evils, or applying the necessary remedies. Ignorance, diffused through every class, extends its effects to every species of moral and physical knowledge. Nothing is talked of but intestine troubles, the public misery, pecuniary extortions, and bastinadoes."[90] The objector perhaps will allege in extenuation the modern improvements now in progress, the Suez Canal, the railroads, the steamboats on the Nile, the bridge across the Nile at Cairo, and the sugar and cotton plantations. But if these were as evident tokens of progress in Egypt, as they would be in America, they would not in the least invalidate the facts of the past degradation of Egypt for centuries. But these speculations of the Khedive are of no advantage to the people; rather, on the contrary, do they afford him additional opportunities of exacting forced labor from the miserable peasants. I have seen the population of several villages, forced to leave their own fields in the spring, to march down to an old, filthy canal, near Cairo, and almost within sight of the gate of the palace, men, and women, and little boys, and girls, like those of our Sabbath-schools, scooping up the stinking mud and water with their hands, into baskets, carrying them on their heads up the steep bank, beaten with long sticks by the taskmasters to hasten their steps; while steam dredges lay unused within sight. Egypt is still the basest of the nations. Here, then, we have conclusive proof of the fulfillment at this day of four distinct, specific, and improbable Bible predictions: concerning the country, the rulers, the religion, and the people of Egypt. Let us note now a distinct and totally different judgment pronounced against the transgressors of another land. Pre-eminent in inflicting destruction on others, her retribution was to be extreme. Degradation and slavery were to be the portion of the learned Egyptians, but utter extinction is the doom of mighty Babylon. It is written in the Bible concerning the land where the farmer was accustomed to reap two hundred-fold: "_Cut off the sower from Babylon, and him that handleth the sickle in the time of harvest. * * * Every purpose of the Lord shall be performed against Babylon, to make the land of Babylon a desolation without an inhabitant. * * * Behold the hindermost of the nations shall be a wilderness, a dry land, and a desert. * * * Because of the wrath of the Lord it shall not be inhabited, but it shall be wholly desolate._"[91] Proofs in abundance of the fulfillment of these predictions present themselves in every volume of travels in Assyria and Chaldea. "Those splendid accounts of the Babylonian lands yielding crops of grain of two and three hundred fold, compared with the modern face of the country, afford a remarkable proof of the _singular desolation_ to which it has been subjected. The canals at present can only be traced by their decayed banks. The soil of this desert consists of a hard clay, mixed with mud, which at noon becomes so heated with the sun's rays, that I found it too hot to walk over it with any degree of comfort."[92] "That it was at some former period in a far different state is evident from the number of canals by which it is traversed, now dry and neglected; and the quantity of heaps of earth, covered with fragments of brick and broken tiles, which are seen in every direction--the indisputable traces of former cultivation."[93] "The abundance of the country has vanished as clean away as if the besom of desolation had swept it from north to south; the whole land, from the outskirts of Babylon to the farthest stretch of sight, lying a melancholy waste. _Not a habitable spot appears for countless miles._"[94] As the desolation of the country was to be extraordinary, so the desolation of the city of Babylon was to be remarkable. When the prophet wrote, its walls had been raised to the height of three hundred and fifty feet, and made broad enough for six chariots to drive upon them abreast. From its hundred brazen gates issued the armies which trampled under foot the liberties of mankind, and presented their lives to the nod of a despot, who slew whom he would, and whom he would allowed to live. Twenty years' provisions were collected within its walls, and the world would not believe that an enemy could enter its gates. Nevertheless, the prophets of God pronounced against it a doom of destruction as extraordinary as the pride and wickedness which procured it. Tyre, the London of Asia, was to _become a place for the spreading of nets_,[95] and the Infidel Volney tells us its commerce had declined to _a trifling fishery_; but even that implies some few resident inhabitants. Rabbah, of Ammon, was to become _a stable for camels and a couching place for flocks_.[96] Lord Lindsay reports that "he could not sleep amidst its ruins for the bleating of sheep, that the dung of camels covers the ruins of its palaces, and that the only building left entire in its Acropolis is used as a sheepfold."[97] Yet sheepfolds imply that the tents of their Arab owners are near, and that some human beings would occasionally reside near its ruins. But desolation, solitude, and utter abandonment to the wild beasts of the desert is the specific and clearly predicted doom of the world's proud capital. The most expressive symbols are selected from the desert to portray its desertion. "_Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there: but wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces._"[98] Every traveler attests the fulfillment of this strange prediction. "It is a tenantless and desolate metropolis," says Mignon; who, though fully armed, and attended by six Arabs, could not induce them by any reward to pass the night among its ruins, from the apprehension of evil spirits. So completely fulfilled is the prophecy, "_The Arabian shall not pitch his tent there._" The same voice which called camels and flocks to the palaces of Rabbah, summoned a very different class of tenants for the palaces of Babylon. Rabbah was to be a sheepfold, Babylon a menagerie of wild beasts; a very specific difference, and very improbable. One of the later Persian kings, however, after it was destroyed and deserted, repaired its walls, converted it into a vast hunting-ground, and stocked it with all manner of wild beasts; and to this day the apes of the Spice Islands, and the lions of the African deserts, meet in its palaces, and howl their testimony to the truth of God's Word. Sir R. K. Porter saw two majestic lions in the Mujelibe (the ruins of the palace), and Fraser thus describes the chambers of fallen Babylon: "There were dens of wild beasts in various places, and Mr. Rich perceived in some a strong smell, like that of a lion. Bones of sheep and other animals were seen in the cavities, with numbers of bats and owls." Various destructions were predicted for Babylon. "_I will make it a habitation for the bittern, and pools of water_,"[99] says one prophecy. "_Her cities are a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness_,"[100] says another. How can such contradictions be true? says the scoffer. But the scoffer's contradiction is a fact. God can cause the most discordant agencies to agree in effecting his purpose. Babylon is alternately an overflowed swamp, from the inundations of the obstructed Euphrates, and an arid desert, under the scorching rays of an Eastern sun. Says Mignon: "Morasses and ponds tracked the ground in various places. For a long time after the subsiding of the Euphrates great part of this place is little better than a swamp." At another season it was "a dry waste and burning plain." Even at the same period, "one part on the western side is low and marshy, and another an arid desert."[101] Another, and widely different agent, to be employed in the destruction of the great center of tyranny and idolatry, is thus specifically and definitely indicated in the prediction: "_Behold, I am against thee, O destroying mountain, saith the Lord, which destroyest all the earth: and I will stretch out my hand upon thee, and roll thee down from the rocks, and will make thee a burnt mountain. And they shall not take of thee a stone for a corner, nor a stone for foundations; but thou shalt be desolate forever, saith the Lord._"[102] "There is one fact," says Fraser, "in connection with the most remarkable of these relics (the Birs Nimrod), which we can not dismiss without a few more observations. All travelers who have ascended the Birs have taken notice of the singular heaps of brick-work scattered on the summit of this mound, at the foot of the remnant of the wall still standing. To the writer they appeared the most striking of all the ruins. That they have undergone the most violent action of fire is evident from the complete vitrification which has taken place in many of the masses. Yet how a heat sufficient to produce such an effect could have been applied at such a height from the ground is unaccountable. They now lie on a spot elevated two hundred feet above the plain, and must have fallen from some much more lofty position, for the structure which still remains, and of which they may be supposed originally to have formed a part, bears no marks of fire. The building originally can not have contained any great proportion of combustible materials, and to produce so intense a heat by substances carried to such an elevation would have been almost impossible, for want of space to pile them on. Nothing, we should be inclined to say, short of the most powerful action of electric fire, could have produced the complete, yet circumscribed, fusion which is here observed. Although fused into a solid mass, the courses of bricks are still visible, identifying them with the standing pile above, but so hardened by the power of heat, that it is almost impossible to break off the smallest piece; and, though porous in texture, and full of air-holes and cavities, like other bricks, they require, on being submitted to the stone-cutter's lathe, the same machinery as is used to dress the hardest pebbles."[103] The doom of Nineveh, the great rival and predecessor of Babylon, was also predicted as the result of two apparently contradictory agencies--an overrunning flood and a consuming fire. But both these antagonistic elements conspired to devour her. The river, with an overrunning flood, swept away a large portion of the walls. The besiegers entered through the breach, and set the city on fire. The charcoal, burnt beans, and slabs of half-calcined alabaster, in the British Museum, demonstrate the fulfillment of the prediction. Egypt was to be reduced to slavery and degradation. Babylonia to utter barrenness and desolation; but a different and still more incredible doom is pronounced in the Bible upon Judea and its people. The land was to be emptied of its people, and remain uncultivated, retaining all its former fertility, while the people were to be scattered over all the earth, yet never to lose their distinct nationality, nor be amalgamated with their neighbors: "_I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savor of your sweet odors. And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste. Then shall the land enjoy her Sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies' land; even then shall the land rest, and enjoy her Sabbaths._"[104] "_Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate, and the Lord have removed men far away, and there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land. But yet in it shall be a tenth, and it shall return, and shall be eaten: as a teil-tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when they cast their leaves._"[105] "_The generation to come, of your children that shall rise up after you, and the stranger that shall come from a far land, shall say, * * * Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this land? What meaneth the heat of this great anger?_"[106] It is superfluous to adduce proof of the undeniable and acknowledged fulfillment of these predictions, but as an example of the way in which God causes scoffers to fulfill the prophecies, let us again hear Volney: "I journeyed in the empire of the Ottomans, and traversed the provinces which were formerly the kingdoms of Egypt and Syria. I enumerated the kingdoms of Damascus and Idumea, of Jerusalem and Samaria. This Syria, said I to myself, now almost depopulated, then contained a hundred flourishing cities, and abounded with towns, villages, and hamlets. What has become of so many productions of the hand of man? What has become of those ages of abundance and of life? _Great God! from whence proceed such melancholy revolutions? For what cause is the fortune of these countries so strikingly changed? Why are so many cities destroyed?_ Why is not that ancient population reproduced and perpetuated? A mysterious God exercises his incomprehensible judgments. He has doubtless pronounced a secret malediction against the earth. He has struck with a curse the present race of men in revenge of past generations."[107] The malediction is no secret to any who will read the twenty ninth chapter of Deuteronomy; nor is the avenging of the quarrel of God's covenant confined to the sins of past generations. The philosopher who would understand the fates of cities and empires should read the prophecies. The Word of God specifies no less distinctly and definitely the destiny of the Jewish than of the Babylonian capital, but fixes on a widely different kind of destruction. Babylon was never to be built again, but devoted to solitude; busy Tyre to become a place for spreading nets; the caravans, which once brought the wealth of India through Petra, were to cease, and the doom was to "cut off him that passeth by and him that returneth." But Jerusalem, it was predicted, should long feel the miseries of a multitude of oppressors, should never enjoy the luxury of a solitary woe, but "_be trodden down of the Gentiles_."[108] Saracens, Tartars, Turks, and Crusaders, Gentiles from every nation of the earth, fulfilled the prediction of old, even as hosts of pilgrims from all parts of the earth do at this day. So minute and specific are the predictions of Scripture, that the fate of particular buildings is accurately defined. One temple to the living God, and only one, raised its walls in this world, which he had made for his worship. Its frequenters perverted it from its proper use of leading them to confess their sinfulness, to seek pardon through the promised Savior to whom its ceremonies pointed, and to learn to be holy, as the God of that temple was holy. They hoped that the holiness of the place would screen them in the indulgence of pride, formality, and wickedness. The temple of the Lord, instead of the Lord of the temple, was the object of their veneration. But the doom went forth. "_Therefore for your sakes shall Zion be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become as heaps, and the mountain of the house like the high places of the forest._" History has preserved, and the Jews to this day curse the name of the soldier, Terentius Rufus, who plowed up the foundations of the temple. It long continued in this state. But the Emperor Julian the Apostate conceived the idea of falsifying the prediction of Jesus, "_Behold your house is left unto you desolate_,"[109] and sent his friend Alypius, with a Roman army, and abundant treasure, to rebuild it. The Jews flocked from all parts to assist in the work. Spades and pickaxes of silver were provided by the vanity of the rich, and the rubbish was transported in mantles of silk and purple. But they were obliged to desist from the attempt, for "horrible balls of fire breaking out from the foundations with repeated attacks, rendered the place inaccessible to the scorched workmen, and the element driving them to a distance from time to time, the enterprise was dropped."[110] Such is the testimony of a heathen, confirmed by Jews and Christians. The inclosures of the mosque of Omar, forbidding them all access to the spot on which it stood, leave it desolate to the Jews to this day. I have seen them (in 1872) kissing a few large stones, supposed to belong to its foundations or sub-structures, from the outside; for which miserable privilege they were obliged to pay their oppressors. On approaching the spot from the Zion gate, right across Mount Zion to the temple ruins, our way lay through a plowed field of young barley, and gardens of cauliflowers hedged with enormous rows of cactus. To this day Zion is plowed as a field. 4. No sane man can believe that such minute and accurate predictions of various and improbable events could be the result of human calculations; yet there is another feature of the Bible prophesies still farther removed beyond the reach of human sagacity, and that is, remarkable and unaccountable _preservation amidst the general ruin_. If, as skeptics allege, destruction is the natural and inevitable doom, then preservation is supernatural and miraculous--a miracle of divine power controlling nature; and its prediction is a miracle of divine wisdom. Now the prophecies of the Bible contain several very definite, and widely different predictions of the preservation of people and cities from the general destruction. We shall refer in this case also to those of whose fulfillment there can be no manner of doubt, for the facts are palpable and undeniable at the present day. The prediction of the character and fate of the Arabs stands out a remarkable contrast to the predictions of the destruction of the surrounding nations. Of their ancestor, Ishmael, it was predicted: "He will be a wild man; his hand shall be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren."[111] The nomad and warlike habits of the sons of Ishmael are here distinctly predicted; and the singular anomaly which exempts them alone, of all the people of the earth, from the law, "They that take the sword, shall perish by the sword." The unconquered Arab laughs alike at the Persian, Greek, Roman, Turkish, and French invaders of his deserts, levies tribute on all who enter his territory, and dwells to-day, a free man, in the presence of all his brethren, as God foretold. Of the Israelitish nation God predicted, that it should be a peculiar, distinct people, separate from the other nations of the world: "_Lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations._"[112] In apparent contradiction to this separation, he further threatened to punish them for their sins, by dispersing them over the world: "_I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you._"[113] "_For lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the last grain fall upon the earth._"[114] It was further threatened, as if to make sure of their national destruction: "_And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest: but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind: and thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shall have none assurance of thy life._"[115] Contrary to all appearances, and in spite of all this dispersion and persecution, it is predicted that Israel shall still exist as a nation, and be restored to the favor of God, and that prosperity which ever accompanies it: "_And yet for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break my covenant with them: for I am the Lord their God._"[116] Here are four distinct predictions, of national peculiarity, universal dispersion, grievous oppression, and remarkable preservation. The fulfillment is obvious, and undeniable. You need no commentary to explain it. Go into any clothing-store on Western Row, or into the synagogue in Broadway, and you will see it. The Infidel is sorely perplexed to give any account of this great phenomenon. How does it happen that this singular people is dispersed over all the earth, and yet distinct and unamalgamated with any other? How does it happen that for eighteen hundred years they have resisted all the influences of nature, and all the customs of society, and all the powers of persecution, driving them toward amalgamation, and irresistible in all other instances? In the face of the power of the Chinese Empire, in spite of the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition, amid the chaos of African nationalities, and the fusion of American democracy, in the plains of Australia, and in the streets of San Francisco, the religion, customs, and physiognomy of the children of Israel are as distinct this day as they were three thousand years ago, when Moses wrote them in the Pentateuch, and Shishak painted them on the tombs of Medinet Abou. How does the Infidel account for it? It will not do to allege the favorite story about purity of blood and Caucasian race; for the question is, How does it happen that this people, and this people alone, have kept the blood pure; while all other races are so mingled that no other race can be found pure on earth? Besides, lest any should suppose such a cause sufficient for their preservation, another nation, descended from the same father and the same mother--the children of Jacob's twin brother--has utterly perished, and there is not any remaining of the house of Esau. Human sagacity, with all the facts before its face, can not give any rational account of the causes of this anomaly. It can not tell to-day why this people exists separate from, and scattered through all nations, from Kamschatka to New Zealand; how, then, could it foretell, three thousand years ago, this singular exception to all the laws of national existence? While the sun and moon endure, the nation of Israel shall exist as God's witness to God's word, an undeniable proof that the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. A very peculiar feature of the desolation of Israel was the _desolation_, but not the _destruction_ of the cities. In most cases of the desolations of war, the cities have been burned and the buildings destroyed. There is no shelter for man or beast in the mounds of rubbish which cover the ruined cities of Assyria. Where the buildings have not been destroyed, or have been rebuilt, they have again been inhabited; as we see in the cases of Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and many others. But on the cities of Israel it was written that God's curse should go forth "till the cities should be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be left utterly desolate." But for a long time the literal fulfillment of this prediction was not witnessed, as the cities on this side the Jordan had been mostly reduced to ruins. The richest and most populous part of the land, however, was the land of Bashan; where, in a territory of about thirty miles by twenty, sixty cities still remain standing to attest the wonderful fertility of the soil and industry of the people. "And though the vast majority of them are deserted, _they are not ruined_. * * * Many of the houses in the ancient cities of Bashan are perfect, as if only finished yesterday. The walls are sound, the roofs unbroken, the doors, and even the window shutters in their places."[117] From two hundred to five hundred houses have been found perfect in some of these cities; and from the roof of the Castle of Salcah, Dr. Porter counted thirty towns and villages dotting the plain, many of them perfect as when first built; "yet for more than five centuries there has not been an inhabitant in one of them." So sure is every word of God. Take another instance of preservation, so remarkable amid the surrounding destruction, that it arrested the attention and admiration of the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, skeptic and scoffer though he was. The seven churches of seven of the most considerable cities of Asia were then, as the churches of Christ still are, the salt of the earth. Ten righteous men would have averted God's judgments from Sodom. Jesus pronounced the sentences of these churches seventeen hundred and sixty years ago, and the present condition of the cities attests the divine authority of the record containing them. They are various and specific. Three were to be utterly destroyed. Against two no special threatening is denounced. To the remaining two promises of life and blessing are given. Ephesus, famous for its magnificence, the busy avenue of travel, the seat of the temple of Diana, long the residence of an apostle, and afterward of Christian bishops--"one of the eyes of Asia"--as it stood first on the roll of cities, first receives the doom of abused privileges: "_I will remove thy candlestick out of its place, unless thou repent._" Says Gibbon: "The captivity and ruin of the seven churches of Asia was consummated (by the Ottomans) A. D. 1312; and the barbarous lords of Ionia and Lydia still trample on the monuments of classic and Christian antiquity. In the loss of Ephesus the Christians deplored the fall of the first angel, and the extinction of the first candlestick of the Revelation. _The desolation is complete_, and the temple of Diana or the church of Mary will equally elude the search of the curious traveler."[118] Since Gibbon's day the foundations of the temple have been discovered twelve to fourteen feet below the soil; but no church of Christ remains to illuminate the minds of the few squalid and lazy dwellers in the village of Aisayalouk. One cobbler's stall represented the whole manufacturing industry of Ephesus; and four boys playing a game like drafts, with pebbles, in front of it seemed the only public likely to patronize its theater, as I took note of its people and their occupations, in 1872. Then leaving the storks in their nests, on the top of the ruined arches of its great aqueduct, to proceed toward the ruins of the great theater, we tried in vain to procure horses or asses for the ladies; found the only road so filled with water from the recent rains as to be impassable, and were fain to plunge on foot through the plowed fields till we reached the elevation on which it was erected. Here we surveyed its rock-hewn seats, capable of accommodating an audience larger than that of all the theaters of New York; but there was no longer a voice to cry, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" The sea has forsaken the harbor, which is now a pestilential morass. We passed through the ruins of the custom-house, now miles inland, and found a single Turkish soldier on guard. The peasants who cultivate some parts of the plain come from distant villages, and fever, filth, and beggary reign in Ephesus. Had the twenty thousand patrons of the drama, in the thirty-one theaters of New York, honored the theater of Laodicea with their presence, its polite citizens would have accommodated them all on the reserved seats, retiring themselves to ten thousand less commodious sittings, and to two less gigantic theaters. While yet busy in the erection of their splendid places of public amusement, Jesus said, "_I will spew thee out of my mouth._" "The circus, and three stately theaters of Laodicea, are peopled with wolves and foxes," says Gibbon. The church was spewed out of Christ's mouth, and the city too. It has been overturned by earthquakes, and is now nothing but a series of magnificent ruins, from which, however, ample evidence may be collected of its former magnificence. Those of the aqueduct, the theater, and the amphitheater, are remarkable; in the latter an inscription has been found showing that it was in course of erection when the Lord dictated the warning to its people. But the warning was unheeded, and now the whole space inside the city walls is strewn with fragments of columns and pedestals. A Lydian capitalist once deposited in the vaults of Sardis more specie than is now in circulation in this whole continent. But Jesus said, "_Thou hast a name that thou livest and art dead. If, therefore, thou shalt not watch, I will come upon thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee._" "Sardis," says Gibbon, "is a miserable village." A later writer (Durbin) tells us that the Turks say, "Every one who builds a house in Sardis dies soon, and avoid the spot." Arundell, in his account of his visit to the seven churches, says: "If I were asked what impresses the mind most strongly on beholding Sardis, I should say, its indescribable _solitude_, like the darkness of Egypt, that could be felt. So deep the solitude of the spot, once the lady of kingdoms, produces a feeling of desolate abandonment in the mind which can never be forgotten." Connect this feeling with the message of the Apocalypse to the church of Sardis, "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and _art dead_, and then look around and ask, Where are the churches? Where are the Christians of Sardis? The tumuli beyond the Hermus reply, '_All dead!_'--suffering the infliction of the threatened judgment of God for the abuse of their privileges. Let the unbeliever, then, be asked, Is there no truth in prophecy?--no reality in religion?" Only twenty-seven miles north of this desolate metropolis, the manufactories of Thyatira dispatch weekly to Smyrna, cloths, as famous over Asia for the brilliancy and durability of their hues as those which Lydia displayed to the admiration of the ladies of Philippi. Two thousand two hundred Greek Christians, two hundred Armenian, and a Protestant Church under the care of the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, assemble every Sabbath to commemorate the resurrection of Him who said to the church of Thyatira: "_I will put upon you no other burden; but that which ye have already hold fast till I come._" The fragrant citron (_Bergamot_) still flourishes around the birthplace of Galen; but the ruins of the famous library of 200,000 manuscripts are far less durable memorials of the city of booksellers than those beautifully dressed skins, which, taking their name (_Pergamena_) from the place of their manufacture, will preserve the name and fame of Pergamos as long as parchment can preserve man's memorials, or God's predictions. Though famous for fragrance, physic, and philosophy, Pergamos was infamous for idolatry, licentiousness, and persecution; yet still endeared to Jesus as the scene of the martyrdom of faithful Antipas, and the dwelling-place of a hidden church; and widely different sentences are recorded against those opposite classes. The public memorials are to perish, but the hidden word to endure. "The fanes of Jupiter and Diana, and Venus and Esculapius (worshiped under the symbol of a live snake), were prostrate in the dust, and where they had not been carried away by the Turks to cut up into tombstones or pounded into mortar, the Corinthian columns and the Ionic, the splendid capitals, the cornices and the pediments, all in the highest ornament, were thrown in unsightly heaps,"[119] is the comment on the threatening of Jesus, "_I will fight against them_--the idolaters--_with the sword of my mouth_." The 3,000 Greek and 300 Armenian Christians, and even the 10,000 Turkish inhabitants of the modern Pergamos, have received hundreds of copies of the promise, "_To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth, saving he that receiveth it._" But whether the hidden church of Pergamos shine forth or not, Gibbon was inaccurate in stating, in the face of facts, that "the god of Mohammed without a rival is invoked in the mosques of Pergamos and Thyatira." God's providence is as discriminating as his prophecy, though unbelief may overlook both. We have noted here instances of the prediction of remarkable destruction to Sardis, Ephesus, and Laodicea; of continued existence to Pergamos and Thyatira; let us now note a prediction of remarkable escape and preservation from the universal doom. If it requires no inspiration to prophecy destruction--the universal fate of humanity, according to the Infidel--surely it requires more than human skill to say that any city shall escape this universal fate, and more than human power to avert this destruction. Of Philadelphia, but twenty-five miles distant from the ruins of Sardis, Jesus said, and the Bible records the prophecy: "_I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name. Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee. Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I will also keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth. Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown. Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God; and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is New Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon him my new name._" "Philadelphia alone," says Gibbon, "has been saved by prophecy, or courage. At a distance from the sea, forgotten by the emperors, encompassed on all sides by the Turks, her valiant sons defended their religion and their freedom alone for fourscore years, and at length capitulated with the proudest of the Ottomans. Among the Greek colonies and churches of Asia, Philadelphia is still erect--_a column in a scene of ruins_--a pleasing example that the paths of honor and safety may be the same." In the pages of this eloquent writer it would be hard to discover another instance of unqualified hearty commendation of soldiers or sufferers for Christianity and liberty, such as Gibbon here bestows on Philadelphia's valiant sons. But it was written, "_I will make them come and worship before thy feet_," and the skeptic and scoffer must fulfill the word of Jesus; even as the unbelieving Mohammedan also does, when he writes upon it the modern name, Allah Sehr--_The City of God._ _A majestic solitary pillar_, of high antiquity, arrests the eye of the traveler, and reminds the worshipers in the six modern churches of Philadelphia of the beauty and faithfulness of the prophetic symbol. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but Jesus' word shall not pass away. Improbable to human sagacity as this preservation must have seemed, the resurrection of a fallen city is more utterly beyond man's vision. In the Bible, however, tribulation and recovery were foretold to Smyrna: "_Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days. Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life._" "The populousness of Smyrna is owing to the foreign trade of the Franks and Armenians," says the scoffer. No matter to what it is owing, he who dictated the Bible foresaw it, and made no mistake in foretelling it. Says Arundell: This, the other eye of Asia, is still a very flourishing commercial city, one of the very first in the present Turkish empire in wealth and population, containing 130,000 inhabitants. The continued importance of Smyrna may be estimated from the fact that it is the seat of a consul from every nation in Europe. The prosperity of Smyrna is now rather on the increase than the decline, and the houses of painted wood, which were most unworthy of its ancient fame and present importance, are rapidly giving way to palaces of stone rising in all directions; and, probably, ere many years have passed, the modern town may not unworthily represent the ancient city, which the ancients delighted to call the crown of Ionia. Commercial activity and architectural beauty, however, are but a small part of the glorious destiny of the community to which Jesus says, "I will give thee a crown of life." Mark Twain suggests that the prophecy refers to the church, rather than to the city; but forgets to remind us that the Church of Christ is well represented and crowned with life in Smyrna. God's predictions regard the vital part of communities, the spiritual forces; these, vigorous and outspreading, secure the material progress. Close the Bible House, printing presses, and schools of America, and real estate would not be worth much more than in Asia. The Lord Christ rules this world. His blessing has revived both the church and the city of Smyrna, according to his promise. In 1872 I found its harbor busy with coasting craft and ocean steamers, and its railroad doing a brisk business. Smyrna is a live city. Deliverance from the curse of sin, and communion with the Lord of Life, alone can secure either a nation's or an individual's immortality. Smyrna possesses the gospel of salvation. Several devoted English and American missionaries proclaim salvation to its citizens. From its printing presses thousands of copies of the Word of Life issue to all the various populations of the Turkish Empire. A living Church of Christ in Smyrna holds forth, for the acceptance of the dying nations around her, that crown of life promised and granted by the Word of God, not to her only, but to all who love his appearing and his kingdom. 5. This is the grand distinction of God's word of prophecy, _that it is the Word of Life_. It is the only word which promises life, the only word which bestows it on fallen humanity. Recognizing no inevitable law of destruction but the sentence of God, no invariable law of nature superior to the counsel of Jehovah, nor any progress of events which his Almighty arm can not arrest and reverse, it points a despairing world to sin as the cause of all destruction, to Satan as the author of sin, to ungodly men in league with him as the foes of God and man, and to Christ pledged to perpetual warfare with such until the last enemy be destroyed. This word of prophecy tells us, that the battle-fields Messiah has won are earnests of that great victory; points to the columns which he has preserved erect amid scenes of ruin, as assurances that he is able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by him; goes to the graveyards where fallen Smyrnas, idolatrous Saxons, debased Sandwich Islanders, and cannibal New Zealanders have buried the image of the living God, and in Jesus' name proclaims, "_I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live_;" and, amid the very ruins of destroyed cities, and the crumbling heaps of their perished memorials, beholds the assurances that Satan's rule of ruin shall not be perpetual, anticipates the day when the course of sin and misery shall be reversed, and teaches Adam's sons to face the foe, and chant forth that heaven-born note of victorious faith, "_Oh, thou enemy! destructions are come to a perpetual end._" Come forth, trembling skeptic, from the cave of thy dark invariable experience of death and destruction, and from the vain sparks of thy misgiving hopes of an ungodly eternity to come less miserable than the past, and lift thine eyes to this heavenly sunrising on the dark mountain tops of futurity, the like of which thou didst never dream of in all thy Pantheistic reveries. Search over all the religions of the world--the hieroglyphics of Egypt, the arrow-headed inscriptions of Assyria, the classic mythologies of graceful Greece and iron Rome, the monstrous shasters of thine Indian Pundits, or the more chaotic clouds of thy German philosophies--in none of them wilt thou ever find this divine thought, _an end of destructions--a perpetual end_. Cycles of ruin and renovation, and of renovation and ruin, vast cycles, if you will, but evermore ending in dire catastrophies to gods and men--an everlasting succession of death and destructions--is the fearful vista which all the religions of man, and thine own irreligion, present to thy terrified vision. But thou wast created in the image of the living God, and durst not rest satisfied with any such prospect. Now I come in the name of the Lord to tell thee, that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him _should not perish, but have everlasting life_;" and I demand of thee that thou acknowledge this promise of life everlasting to be the word of that living God, and to show cause, if any thou hast, why thou dost relinquish thy birthright, and spurn the gift of everlasting life which is in Christ Jesus our Lord? But, if thou hast no sufficient cause why thou shouldest choose death rather than life, then hear, and your soul shall live, while I relate the promise which God hath made of old to our fathers, and hath fulfilled to us, their children, by raising up his Son, Jesus Christ, from the dead, and sending him to bless you, by turning away every one of you from your iniquities. For there can be no deliverance from misery and destruction but by means of delivery from sin and Satan. It is quite in agreement with the manner of our deliverance from any of the evils of our fallen condition, that our deliverance from the power of sin and Satan be effected by the agency of a deliverer. Our ignorance is removed by the knowledge of a teacher, our sickness by the skill of a physician, the oppressed nation hails the advent of a patriotic leader, and oppressed humanity acknowledges the fitness and need of a divine Deliverer, even by the ready welcome it has given to pretenders to this character, and by the longing desire of the wisest and best of men for a divinely commissioned Savior; a desire implanted by the great prophecy, which stands at the portal of hope for mankind, in the very earliest period of our history, that "_the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head_," and so leave man triumphant over the great destroyer. The prophecies regarding the Messiah are so numerous, pointed, various, and improbable, as to set human sagacity utterly at defiance; while they are also connected so as to form a scheme of prophecy, which gradually unrolls before us the advent, the ministry, the death, resurrection, and ascension of the Lord, the progress of his gospel over all the world, and the blessed effects it should produce on individuals, families, and nations. It closes with a view of the second coming of Jesus to conquer the last of his enemies, and take possession of the earth as his inheritance. I can only lop off a twig or two from this blessed tree of life, in the hope that the fragrance of the leaves may allure you to take up the Bible, and eat abundantly of its life-giving promises. As I have in the previous chapters abundantly proved the veracity of the New Testament history, I shall now with all confidence refer to its account of the birth, life, and death of Jesus, as illustrating the prophecies. The time, the place, the manner of his birth, his parentage and reception, were plainly declared, hundreds of years before he appeared. When Herod had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born, and they said unto him, "In Bethlehem of Judea, for thus it is written by the prophet: _And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, art not the least among the princes of Judah: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel._" The first verse of this chapter records the fact, "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea." The throne of Judah was to be occupied by strangers, and the line of native princes was to cease upon the coming of this Governor, and not till his coming: "_The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh shall come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be._" On the day of his crucifixion the rulers of the Jews made this formal and public announcement of the fact, "We have no king but Cæsar." He was to address a class of people whom no other religious teacher had condescended to notice before, and very few save those sent by Him ever since: "_The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek: he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound._" Hear Jesus' words: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, _and the poor have the gospel preached to them_. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me." Yet, notwithstanding his feeding of thousands, and healing of multitudes, and teaching of the lowest of the people, it was foretold he should be unpopular: "_He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not._" The brief records are: "Then all the disciples forsook him and fled." "Then began Peter to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man." "Pilate saith unto them, Ye have a custom, that I should release unto you one at the passover: will ye therefore that I release unto you the King of the Jews? Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber." All the prophets agree in predicting that for the sins of his people, and to atone for their guilt, he should be put to death by a shameful public execution: "_In the midst of the week Messiah shall be cut off, but not for himself. He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. He was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. They pierced my hands and my feet._" The record says: "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many." "And when they were come to the place which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, _Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do._" The one grand unparalleled fact, one which demands the hope of dying men for a victory over the great destroyer, and a resurrection from the tomb--the fact that one man born of a woman died, and did not see corruption, but rose again from the dead and went up into heaven, and dieth no more--forms the theme of many a prophetic psalm of triumph: "_Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, nor wilt thou give thine Holy One to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life. Thou wilt make me full of joy with thy countenance. Thou hast ascended on high. Thou hast led captivity captive._" Often did Jesus predict this prodigy before friend and foe: "_Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, when he was yet alive, After three days I will rise again._" The last chapters of the gospels relate the proofs by which he convinced his incredulous disciples that the prophecy was fulfilled: "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. And when he had thus spoken, he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he saith unto them, Have ye here any meat? And they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and of an honey comb. And he took it and did eat before them; and said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day; and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And ye are witnesses of these things. And behold I send the promise of my Father upon you, but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high. And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands and blessed them. And while he was blessing them he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven. And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven, as he went up, behold two men stood by them in white apparel, which said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven." With your own eyes you shall see the fulfillment of this prophecy. Every eye shall see him. The clouds of heaven shall then reveal the vision now sketched on the page of revelation: "And I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the Book of Life; and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them; and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God, out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven, saying, Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying: neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, _Behold, I make all things new._ And he said unto me, WRITE, FOR THESE WORDS ARE TRUE AND FAITHFUL." FOOTNOTES: [81] Jewish Church, 463, 4. The Bible, 80. [82] De Die Natali, c. 17, cited in Pusey on Daniel, 642. [83] Isaiah, chap. xlvi. 8-11. [84] Newton on the Prophecies, and Keith on the Prophecies, are to be found in all respectable libraries. The former contains valuable extracts from ancient historians; the latter from the journals and engravings of travelers. [85] Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians, I. 169. Herodotus, II. 169. [86] Ezekiel, chap. xxx. [87] Volney's Travels, I. 74, 103. [88] Decline and Fall, chap. lix. [89] Ezekiel, chap. xxix. [90] Volney, I. 190. [91] Jeremiah, chaps. l. and li. [92] Mignon's Travels, 31. [93] Trans. Bombay Lit. Soc. I. 123. [94] Porter's Babylonia, II. 285. [95] Ezekiel, chap. xxvi. [96] Ezekiel, chap. xxv. [97] Lindsay's Travels, II. 78, 117. [98] Isaiah, chap. xiii. [99] Isaiah, chap. xiv. [100] Jeremiah, chap. li. [101] Mignon, 139. [102] Jeremiah, chap. li. [103] Fraser's Mesopotamia, page 145. [104] Leviticus, chap. xxvi. [105] Isaiah, chap. vi. [106] Deuteronomy, chap. xxix. [107] Volney's Ruins of Empires, Book I. [108] Luke, chap. xxi. [109] Micah, chap. iii. Matthew, chap. xxii. [110] Ammianus Marcellus, 23d chap. I. [111] Genesis, chap. xvi. 12. [112] Numbers, chap. xxiii. [113] Leviticus, chap. xxvi. [114] Amos, chap. ix. [115] Deuteronomy, chap. xxviii. [116] Leviticus, chap. xxvi. [117] Porter's Giant Cities of Bashan, passim. [118] Decline and Fall, chap. lxiv. [119] Macfarlane's Seven Apocalyptic Churches. CHAPTER IX. MOSES AND THE PROPHETS. In the foregoing chapters we have found, that we have great need of God's teaching; that he has sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to show us the way of life; that the gospel preached by him and his apostles has proved itself the power of God, by saving men from their sins; and that this gospel is truly recorded in the New Testament. From these facts, already settled, we proceed, according to our plan of investigation, to examine those which may be more obscure; to examine the Old Testament by the light of the New. The great majority of Jews and Christians have always believed, that the world was in as great need of God's teaching before the coming of Christ as it has been since; that God did put his words into the mouths of certain persons, called prophets; and that he caused them to tell them truly to their neighbors; that he enabled these prophets to make predictions of future events beyond the skill of man to calculate, and to do miracles which the power of man could not perform, as proofs that they spake the Word of God; that he caused them truly to record in writing a great many of these revelations, and so much of the history of the times in which, and of the people to whom, they were given, as was needful for a right understanding of them; that he has so managed matters since, as that these revelations and narratives have been faithfully preserved in the books of the Old Testament; that we are bound to believe these revelations to be true, not because we can otherwise demonstrate their truth, but because God, who can not lie, has declared it; and that we are bound to do the things they command, not merely because we see them to be right, but because God commands us. It is needful to consider the divine authority of the Old Testament distinctly from that of the New, not only because it is a distinct subject in itself, and because our plan of investigation leads us backward from the known and established fact of the divine authority of the New Testament to the discovery or disproof of the like character in the Old; but because a great many persons admit, in words at least, that Christ was a teacher sent from God, who, either in so many words, or in effect, deny the divine authority of the Old Testament. Some of the modern Rationalists have revived the creed of the Gnostics of the first century--that the Hebrew Jehovah was a being of very different character from the Deity revealed by Jesus Christ. They will extol to the skies the world-wide benevolence, compassion and kindness of the gospel of Christ, in contrast with the alleged national pride, bigotry, and exclusiveness of the Hebrew prophets. Others are desirous of appearing remarkably candid in bestowing on the Old Testament a liberal commendation as a collection of religious tracts of merely human origin, and of various degrees of merit; some of them of extraordinary literary excellence, well suited to the infancy of the human intellect, and highly useful in their time in raising men from fetichism and idolatry to the worship of one God; but which, containing many errors along with this grand truth, have been set aside by the more perfect teachings of Christ and his apostles, much in the same way as the old Ptolemaic astronomy was displaced by the discoveries of Newton. Others still are willing to acknowledge the Old Testament as inspired, provided we will allow Shakespeare and the Koran to be inspired also. Besides all these, there are several scores of scholars anxious to conceal its nakedness under theories of inspiration made and trimmed in a great many styles, but all cut from the same doctrine, to wit, that God revealed his truth aright to Moses and the prophets, but they went wrong in the telling of it. Now, all these notions are refuted by the fact, that God is the Author of the Bible. When we say that God is the Author of the Bible, and that it carries with it a divine authority because it is the Word of God, we do not mean that God is the Author of every saying in it, and that every sentiment recorded in it is God's mind, any more than we mean to make D'Aubigne responsible for every sentiment of priests, popes and monks which he has faithfully recorded in his History of the Reformation. On the contrary, we find, in the very beginning of the Bible, a very full expression of the devil's sentiments recorded in the devil's own words--_Ye shall not surely die_--and they are not one whit less devilish and lying, though recorded in the Bible, than when expounded by any modern Universalist preacher. But we mean that it is very true that the devil was the preacher of that first Universalist sermon: and that God thought it needful to let mankind know the shape of the doctrine, the character of the preacher, and the consequences of listening to error; and therefore directed Moses to record it truly for the information of all whom it may concern. So there are many other sayings of wicked men, and even of good men, recorded in the Bible, which are very false; but the Bible gives a true record of them, by God's direction, that we may not be ignorant of Satan's devices. Nor, when we say that God directed the prophets what to write, and how to write it, so that they did not go wrong in the writing of his word, do we mean that he also so guided every piece of their behavior, as that they never went wrong in doing their own actions; nor that the sins of the saints, recorded in the Bible, are anything the less sinful for being recorded there, or for being performed by men who ought to have known better. There is not a perfect man upon the earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not. If the Bible had left the faults of its writers undiscovered it would not have been a true history. But these very writers of the Bible tell us their own transgressions, under the direction of the Spirit of God; a thing writers in general are very shy about. Moses tells us how he spake unadvisedly with his lips, and was punished for it. David's penitential psalms record the bitter tears he wept over his transgression; tears which could not wash out the sentence against the man after God's own heart--_the sword shall never depart from thy house_. An overburdened people, a rotten court, a falling empire, continual strife, a family of scolding women, and a foolish son--might have been considered sufficient marks of God's displeasure, without causing the wisest of men to pen, and publish to the world, such a minute record of his madness, folly and misery, as we find in Ecclesiastes. But these shipwrecked mariners were divinely directed to pile up the sad memorials of their errors on the reefs where they were wrecked, as beacons of warning to all inexperienced voyagers on life's treacherous sea. The light-house is built by the same authority as the custom-house, and is even more necessary. Now let us take note of the objects of our investigation. We are not in search of the literary beauty or poetic inspiration of the Bible; but we inquire by what right does it command our obedience? Nor are we about to inquire whether, when we have tried the Bible at the tribunal of our reason, we shall give it a diploma to commend it to the patronage of other critics; but whether it comes to us attested by such evidence of being the Word of God, that our reason shall reverently bow down before it as a higher authority, and seek light from it by which to judge of all spiritual and moral matters. Attempts are continually made to confuse these great questions, by concessions of the literary excellence of the Bible, on the part of those who deny its divine authority. For instance, one of the modern oracles of infidelity says, and his admirers incessantly repeat the grand discovery: "The writings of the Prophets contain nothing above the reach of the human faculties. Here are noble and spirit-stirring appeals to men's conscience, patriotism, honor and religion; beautiful poetic descriptions, odes, hymns, expressions of faith almost beyond praise. But the mark of human infirmity is on them all, and proofs or signs of miraculous inspiration are not found in them."[120] But what do the toiling millions of earth care about beautiful poetic descriptions of a heaven and a hell that have no reality? Or what does it signify to you or me, reader, that the Bible raises its head far above the other cedars of earthly literature? If its top reaches not to heaven, can it make a ladder long enough to carry us there? The Bible contains predictions beyond the reach of the human faculties, as we have fully proved. These predictions at least are from God, and have no mark of human infirmity on them. It does not at all meet this question to grant that the Bible is inspired, just as every work of genius is inspired; nor to profess that they believe the Bible to be from God, just as every pure and holy thought, and every good work, proceed from him. When the assertors of the divine authority of the Bible speak of it as inspired, they mean that it is so as no other book is; and when they speak of it as coming from God, they mean that it does not come simply as a gift of God's bounty, as the soldier's land-warrant comes from the government; but that it comes like the laws of Congress, carrying authority with it to command our obedience. We feel no interest whatever in the discussion of an inspiration, "like God's omnipotence, not limited to the few writers claimed by the Jews, Christians and Mohammedans, but as extensive as the race;"[121] or perhaps as extensive as all creation, and leading us to regard even "the solemn notes of the screech owl" as inspired.[122] What manner of use could the Bible be to an ignorant soul groping its way to truth and holiness, or to a dying sinner hastening to the judgment seat of God, if it were true, that "the Bible's own teaching on the subject is that everything good in any book, person or thing, is inspired? Milton and Shakespeare, and Bacon and the Canticles, the Apocalypse and the Sermon on the Mount, and the Eighth Chapter of the Romans are all inspired. How much inspiration they respectively contain must be gathered from their results."[123] This liberal grant of inspiration, alike to Moses and Mohammed, to Christ and to Shakespeare, is evidently a denial of divine authority to any of them. If Hamlet, and the Sermon on the Mount, and the Koran, are all of a like divine authority, or all alike without any, it is merely a matter of taste whether I worship at Niblo's or the Tabernacle, or keep a harem in my house or a prayer-meeting. Most men, however, find it hard to believe that Christ and Mohammed taught exactly the same religion, or that the church and the theater are precisely equal and alike in their influences on the heart and life; and so they reject several of these inspired men, and cleave to the one they like best. Whereas, if this theory be true, they ought not to act in such a disrespectful way toward any inspired man; but ought to attend the church, the theater and the harem with equal regularity, and serve God, Mammon and Belial with equal diligence. "Oh," it is replied, "they are not all inspired in the same degree. It does not follow that because Byron, and Shakespeare, and Paul are all inspired, that their writings will produce exactly the same results, or that they are alike suitable for every constitution and temper. How much inspiration they severally possess must be determined by their results. The tree is known by its fruits; and experience is the price of truth." But truth may be bought too dear. I am sick and need some medicine, but know not exactly what kind, or how much to take. "Here," says my Rationalist friend, "is a whole drug store for you. Every drawer, and pot, and bottle is full of medicine. Help yourself." But, my good sir, how am I to know what kind will suit me? There are poisons here, as well as medicines; and I can not tell the difference between arsenic and calomel. One of my neighbors died the other day from swallowing oxalic acid instead of Glauber's salts. Be kind enough to put the poisons on one shelf, and the medicines on the other, or, at least, to label them, so that I may know which to choose and which to refuse. "Oh," says my Rationalist friend, "this distinction between medicines and poisons is all an antiquated, vulgar prejudice. What you call poisons are really medicines. Medical virtue is not confined to the few specifics recognized by the Homeopathics, the Regular Faculty, or the Hydropathics, but is as extensive as the world. Everything on earth has a medical virtue; but how much, and of what sort, must be determined by experience. In fact, you must try for yourself whether any particular drug will kill you, or cure you. So here is the whole drug store to begin your cure with." A valuable gift, truly! "In the day we eat thereof, our eyes will be opened, and we shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." I think, reader, you and I will let somebody else try that experiment. "Why should men throw away their common sense, and swallow everything as inspired?" says another friend of the Rationalistic school. "God has given us reason to discern between good and evil, and commanded us to use it. _Prove the spirits, whether they be of God._ _I spake as to wise men._ _Judge ye what I say_, is the language of Scripture. The right of private judgment is the inalienable inheritance of Protestants. I am for examining the Bible according to the principles of reason and truth. 'That only is to be regarded as true and valid which is matter of personal conviction.' The Old Testament is in many places contrary to my convictions of truth and reason. I find that it consists of a great variety of treatises of various degrees of merit. Even in the same book it presents often strange contrasts--sublime moral precepts on one page; on the next, solemn requirements of frivolous ceremonies, utterly unworthy of God; or solemn narrations of miraculous interferences with the established course of nature, which, taken literally, are absolutely incredible. The judicious reader must therefore discriminate between those divine precepts of morality which were infused into the minds of the Hebrew sages, and those Jewish prejudices which their education and character inclined them to regard as equally important; and he must divest the narrative of facts as they actually occurred, from the national legends and traditions which the compilers of the Pentateuch added to adorn the history." This, it will be seen, at once raises another and very important question, namely: By what standard are the writings of the Old Testament to be judged? Or rather it settles the question by taking it for granted, that every inquirer is to judge them according to his own notions of reason and truth. But this does not help me out of my difficulty; for it supposes me already to possess the knowledge, and the virtue, which a revelation from God is needed to communicate. If I am able, by my own reason, to construct a perfect standard of morals to judge the Bible by, what need have I for the Bible revelation? And if I have the right to refuse obedience to any commands I may judge frivolous or unreasonable, before I know whether they came from God or not, and am bound to obey only those which agree with my notions of right, what authority has the law of God? A revelation from God which should submit its truths to be judged by the ignorance, and its commands by the inclinations, of sinful men, would by that very submission declare its worthlessness. The use of a divine revelation is either to tell us some truth of which we are ignorant, or to enjoin some duty to which we are disinclined. Besides, it is not possible to make any such dissection of the moral precepts of the Bible, from the miraculous history which forms their skeleton, as will leave them either truth or authority. It is the miraculous history that gives sanction to the divine morality, and without it the ten commandments would have no more hold on any man's conscience than the wise saws which Poor Richard says. Take, for instance, one of the first and most important of the Bible moralities--the sacredness of marriage--which is wholly based upon a narrative of events utterly unparalleled; and, if judged by the usual course of nature, perfectly incredible. The original difference in the formation of man and woman, and God's making at first one man and one woman, and joining them together with his blessing, constitute the reasons, and consecrate the pledge of marriage. "_For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother_--although the claims of the parental relation are very strong--_and cleave to his wife_--with whom it may be he has but a few weeks' acquaintance--_and they two shall be one flesh_. _What therefore God hath joined together let no man put asunder._" But if the cause had no existence, save in the brain of some antediluvian novel-writer, and God did not so unite them, the consequence is only a notion also, and any man may leave his wife whenever he likes. By far the most incredible narrative in the Bible is contained in the first verse: "_In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth._" All the other miracles recorded in it sink into familiarity compared with this stupendous display of the supernatural. To the believer of this first great miracle none of its subsequent narratives can seem incredible. But it is precisely upon this unexampled and incredible narrative that the whole structure of Bible morality is built. If this extraordinary narrative be rejected as false, all the moral precepts of the Bible are not worth a feather. The morality of the Bible, then, stands or falls with its history of God's supernatural works among men. It has been argued, that no amount of testimony can authenticate accounts of miracles; since a miracle, being a violation of the laws of nature, is contradicted by an unalterable experience, but only supported by fallible human testimony. But every step of this sophism is in error. A miracle can not be proven to be any more a violation of the laws of nature, than the existence of the nature regulated by laws. It may be more unusual, but not more supernatural. The restoration of life to a dead man is no greater violation of the laws of nature than the first bestowal of life on dead matter. Were the resurrections as common as childbirths nobody would consider them violations of the laws of nature. Moreover, our knowledge of the laws of nature is not based upon my experience, or yours, but upon the testimony of our teachers; which, so far from being uniform and invariable as to the supremacy of the commonplace in nature, is perfectly conclusive as to the repeated occurrence of the miraculous. The miracles of Scripture are better authenticated than the facts of science. Scientific men talk a great deal of nonsense about the laws of nature, as if they were the only agents known in this world. But every man knows that he himself possesses the power to control the laws of nature, by bringing a higher law to arrest a lower; as when the power of vegetation arrests the law of gravitation, and sends the drop of rain which had trickled down the outside of the bark of the pine, climbing up again a hundred feet; or as when the power of animal life converts a hundred weight of grass into a leg of mutton; or as when the power of the human intellect transforms a pound of zinc into telegrams, or a ton of niter and sulphur into death and destruction. Now if man can thus control and use the laws of nature for human purposes, why can not the God who made him so cunning do as much? Aye, and as much more as God is greater than man? But we are told that no testimony can prove that any wonderful work has been wrought by God. "No testimony can reach to the supernatural; testimony can apply only to apparent sensible facts; testimony can only prove an extraordinary, and perhaps inexplicable, phenomenon or occurrence; that it is due to supernatural causes is entirely dependent on the previous belief or assumption of the parties."[124] But when Christ said, "If I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you;" or when he said, at the grave of Lazarus, to Martha, "Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldest believe thou shouldest see the glory of God?" can we not believe our Lord's testimony, that he cast out devils, and raised the dead, by the direct intervention of God? He appeals to his miracles as evidences of his divine authority: "The works that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of me." "If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do though ye believe not me, believe the works; that ye may know and believe that the Father is in me, and I in him."[125] Now I demand to know whether this testimony of our Lord is not to be believed? And whether he does not directly claim to work miracles by the immediate power of God? The testimony of the man whom God authenticates, by enabling him to do such miracles as those of Moses and of Christ, is conclusive as to the power by which they are wrought. So you read in Exodus iii. that God commissioned Moses to work miracles as signs of his divine commission, and seals of his testimony recorded in the Bible. If we proceed now to examine the facts of this history, it is evident, that neither your reason or mine, nor our personal convictions, can be any rule of what is true and valid. The most that reason can say about history is, that the story seems probable; but so does any well-written novel; or that it is improbable; but truth is often stranger than fiction; and every genuine history relates wonderful events. Neither does our personal knowledge enable us to tell what was the original historical fact, how much was added by the Hebrew prejudices of Moses, and which are the legends with which it was afterward adorned; for neither you nor I were there to see. Nor can any two of those critics, who have undertaken to divide the facts from the fables according to their personal convictions of what is true and valid, agree upon any common principle of gleaning, or in gathering in their results. And if they could, the crop would not be worth barn-room; for the only conclusion in which they seem at all likely to agree is, that the story of creation in the beginning of the Book is a myth, like one of Ovid's Metamorphoses; and that the prophecy of the resurrection, at the end, is another; and that there are a great many legends in the middle. Now, if so, why winnow such chaff? But while the Jewish people exist as a distinct race, it is impossible rationally to deny some extraordinary origin of their extraordinary character and customs; and the Bible is the only history which pretends to tell it. The utter failure of Rationalistic criticism to give any rational account of the facts which must be admitted to account for the existence of the Jews as a distinct people, is ludicrously apparent in the attempts generally made to explain the miraculous narratives of the Bible. The tree of good and evil was a poisonous plant, like the poison oak, or the machineal tree, under which our first parents fell asleep, and dreamed about the temptation, and the fall. The shining face of Moses was the natural effect of electricity. Zechariah's vision was the smoke of the lamps of the golden candlestick in the temple. The wise men of the East were some peddlers who presented toys to the child Jesus; and the star which went before, their servant carrying a torch. The angels who ministered to Christ in his temptation were a caravan bearing provisions. The transfiguration was an electric storm. The plagues of Egypt, the passage of the Red Sea, and the miracles of the desert, were merely natural phenomena, dextrously used by Moses and Aaron to suit their purpose. It is alleged that these enthusiastic patriots, full of the superstitions of an early age, which attributed all prodigies to God, and placed all heroes under his guidance, succeeded by their fiery eloquence in inspiring their captive countrymen with the love of liberty; and had political dexterity enough to create a faction in their favor in the Egypt cabinet. Then taking advantage of a fortunate succession of calamities arising from natural causes--such as an extraordinary rising of the Nile, in consequence of which it was more deeply colored than usual with the red mud of Nubia, and overflowed the country to a greater extent than usual, leaving on its retreat numerous ponds, which, of course, bred swarms of frogs and gnats, and raised malaria, spreading various sicknesses over the land, both to man and beast; a devastating visit of locusts, the well-known scourge of Africa; a remarkable thunder-storm, accompanied with hail, causing great havoc of growing crops, as such hail-storms always do; followed by the chamsin, or dust-storm from the desert, darkening the air with clouds of dust and sand; and by an extraordinary mortality, the natural result of these various causes--they persuaded the superstitious Egyptians that these calamities were tokens of the displeasure of the God of the Hebrews, and improved the opportunity to escape, while the resources of the Egyptians were exhausted, and their minds confounded by these various misfortunes. Leading them to that part of the Red Sea south of Suez, where a succession of shoals stretch across from the Egyptian to the Arabian side, they crossed safely at low water, while the Egyptian army perished by the rising of the tide; and the Israelites betaking themselves to a wandering, pastoral life in the wilderness of Arabia, lived, as the Bedouins do at this day, on the milk of their flocks and the manna which was spontaneously produced by the tamarisk trees of Sinai; where they remained until they had framed a civil and religious code, and whence they prosecuted their conquests in various directions for fifty years, until their invasion of Palestine. This is the sum of what, with various modifications, Rationalist writers and preachers present us, as the genuine historic basis of the Mosaic narrative. It really does seem to have been very fortunate for the Israelites that so many misfortunes should happen to fall upon their oppressors, all in one season, and just at the time that men of such cleverness as Moses and Aaron were among them; and that the Egyptians should luckily have imbibed the superstition, that all nature was under the direction of a Supreme Moral Governor, who was able and willing to wield all the elements for the punishment of oppressors. It was also very lucky for these poor, overworked, and oppressed slaves--the class which in all other ages and countries suffers most from hard times--that they should have escaped unhurt by these calamities; for if they had suffered by them as well as the Egyptians, they could not have persuaded them that God favored Israel. Here one can not but wonder that these learned Egyptians, whose colleges of priests were planted on the banks of the Nile, and who had made the climate, soil, and productions of their native land their constant study, should have been so ignorant of these natural causes of the plagues--so easily discovered nowadays by anybody who makes a summer trip to Egypt--as to be terrified into emancipating their slaves by a stormy season. Just imagine to yourself a couple of abolitionist lecturers proceeding to Lexington and commanding the slaveholders of Kentucky to liberate their slaves immediately, on pain of the Ohio being muddy during high water, and the swamps of the river-bottom being full of frogs and musquitoes! But this interpretation does not reach the climax of absurdity till our Rationalist Punch, by way of signalizing his deliverance from Egyptian bondage, makes Pharaoh and his army forget that the tide ebbs and flows in the Red Sea, raises the tide over a shoal faster than cavalry could gallop from it, gathers an annual crop of twenty millions of bushels of manna from the thorn-bushes of Sinai, and feeds three millions of men, women, and children for forty years upon purgative medicine!!! "We must then give up the problem as insoluble; for if reason be insufficient to give authority to the Bible, and criticism fails to discover its truth, how are we to know that it possesses either?" Just as you would discover the truth of any other history, or the authority of any other law. You do not say, "The tale of the successive swellings of the Catawba, the Yadkin, and the Dan--three times in a fortnight, in February, 1781, immediately after the American army had retreated across these rivers, preventing Cornwallis and the British forces from crossing till the little handful of weary and famished patriots had escaped--savors of the marvelous and leans so much toward the superstition of a special providence, that it must be rejected as not historical." You inquire if there be sufficient testimony to the fact. You do not say, "The Revised Statutes present internal evidence of being a collection of political tracts by various authors, written at different times, differing also in style, and of various degrees of merit, many of them contrary to my inmost personal convictions; therefore I can not acknowledge them as true and valid." You simply ask if this be a true copy of the laws passed by the legislature and signed by the governor? Our inquiry about the truth of the history, and the authority of the laws of the Bible, must be of the same kind--an inquiry after testimony. Is this Book genuine or a forgery? Is it a true history or a lying romance? Have we any testimony on the subject? But it is alleged that the Book contains in itself evidence of having been written in an unscientific age, and in an unhistorical manner; and, particularly, that its statements of the creation of the world, and of mankind, only six thousand years ago, are refuted by the discoveries of geology; which show us, that the world is many millions of years old, and that man has been on this world at least one hundred thousand years. In support of this last assertion, geologists refer to the remains of the lake dwellings in Switzerland; to skeletons of men found in caves, with bones of animals now extinct; to flint tools and weapons found in gravel beds, said to be of remote antiquity; to bones found deep in the Mississippi bottom; and to the monuments of Egypt. In replying to this objection, we have first to say that we have elsewhere, in this volume, shown that the Bible nowhere alleges that God created the earth only six thousand years ago, but in many places emphatically affirms the contrary. In the second place, as to the antiquity of man, the Bible nowhere says, that Adam was the first human being whom God created; nor that he and his posterity were the only intelligent beings occupying this world before our tenancy of it; nor that we are even now the exclusive occupants. On the contrary, it makes very distinct allusions to other races, capable of assuming serpentine, swinish, and human bodies, and of meddling disastrously in earthly affairs in former times; though, as it does not profess to teach us truths which do not concern us, it gives us no narration of the creation or history of pre-Adamite animals or men. But there is no more ground of objection against the Bible for neglecting to give us a history of pre-Adamite men, if there were such men, than for neglecting to describe the pre-Adamite animals, or the coal measures, or the nebulæ, or the climate, soil, population, and politics of Jupiter. The Bible has one great object--to teach men how to be holy and happy; and it can not be shown that the chronicles of the pre-Adamites, if they kept chronicles of their alleged savage state, would help us in the acquisition of holiness. No discoveries, then, which geologists may make of pre-Adamite races of men, can at all affect the credit of Moses' account of the creation of Adam, and of the history of his family. They may fill museums, if they please, with their flint arrow-heads and axes, they may pile up pyramids of stone mortars, they may perhaps some day discover an old-world bronze railroad, and bronze-clad or copper-bottomed steamboats, they may produce pre-Adamic electric, aeronautic engines, and magnetic sewing machines, or bone needles, we care not which; and we will admire them, and confess that they are very curious, and perhaps very old; but unless they can show that Adam was descended from these old-world folks, we have no biblical quarrel with them. Like Moses, we will let them rest in peace. But we would remark, thirdly, that no such discoveries have yet been made. No human bone, implement, or monument, has yet been discovered which can be proved to be more ancient than Adam, or nearly so ancient. There is not a single indisputable fact to show, that any of the tools, bones, or monuments; alleged in this discussion, is of any specific date whatever, save that the Danish bogs came down to the date of the Danish invasion of Ireland in the eleventh century; the burnt corn of the Swiss lake dwellings was probably that which Julius Cæsar describes the Helvetians as burning preparatory to their invasion of Gaul; and the monuments of Egypt, for which Bunsen claimed twenty thousand years, are now acknowledged by the best Egyptologists to reach not quite to 3000 B. C. As to the bone found at the base of the bluff at Memphis, it was not found _in situ_, and probably was washed out of some Indian grave at the top, and buried in the _debris_. The Abbeville skull[126] _had a fresh tooth in it_, for which thirty-five thousand years was claimed, until examination by a competent committee exposed the deception. Where there is a good paying demand for pre-Adamite skulls, there will always be a good supply. Dr. Dowler calculates the age of a skeleton of an Indian, found at the depth of sixteen feet in digging the gas works at New Orleans, at fifty thousand years; while the U. S. Coast Surveying Department show that the whole Delta is not more than four thousand four hundred years old. These gross errors, which affront our common sense, wherever we are able to test geological calculations, fill us with mistrust of their allegations of evidence, which, from the nature of the case, we can not test. Of this class is the discovery of human bones in caves containing the bones of cave bears, rhinocerii, mammoths, and other extinct animals. The argument is that man and these animals lived at the same time. Very well, what time was that? There is no evidence to show that it was a hundred thousand years ago. The Siberian hunters fed their dogs on the flesh of a mammoth they found frozen in mud bluffs at the mouth of the Lena, and its hair and wool are now in the museum of St. Petersburg. Dr. Warren's _mastodon giganteus_ had some bushels of pine and maple twigs, in excellent preservation, in its stomach, when exhumed in Orange County, New York; and you may see for yourself the vegetable fiber found in its teeth in his museum in Boston.[127] Does any one believe that the vegetable fiber and maple twigs have kept their shape one hundred thousand years? The mammoth found in the ditch of the Tezcucoco road must have fallen in after the Incas had dug that ditch. The Indians have a tradition that their fathers hunted a huge deer with a hand on his face, which slept leaning against the trees. And there is good geological reason for believing that the final extinction of the mammoth, the European rhinoceros, and their contemporaries, was caused by the change of climate in Northern Europe, Asia, and America, caused by the elevation of these northern lands, which has been going on since the tenth century, and which, about three centuries ago, closed the Polar Sea, rendering Greenland uninhabitable. The juxtaposition, then, of the bones of man and extinct animals is no proof of the remote antiquity of either. And no proof has been made from the nature or depth of the overlying deposits. The shape, size, and general character of the skulls alleged to be of such remote antiquity give no countenance to the theory of man's brutal origin; which is the great thing to be gained by giving him a remote antiquity. The Enghis skull is in no way inferior to many good modern Indian skulls; and the man of Mentone stood six feet one in his stocking soles (if he wore stockings), having a good John Bull head between his shoulders, with a facial angle equal to that of Generals Grant or Von Moltke; and in fact being a fine old Gallic gentleman, all of the good old times. Geologists, however, lay stress on the cumulative character of the evidence they produce; owning that no single fact is conclusive, but claiming that credence should be given to the accumulation of facts. But no accumulation of ciphers will amount to anything. All the alleged facts are found to be fatally defective either in authenticity or definiteness. No multitude of doubts can assure us of the certainty of a fact or assertion. The evidence for the pre-Adamite antiquity of man is only a gathering of facts doubtful, and wholly indeterminate, without any element of proof of remote antiquity.[128] But there is a source of evidence of the most undeniable character, to which we may appeal for a decision of the subject. The law of population is as certain as any other law of nature; and it tends to the regular increase of mankind. Population tends to double itself every twenty-five years, as we see in the United States. In less favored countries the rate is not so rapid. In Europe it doubles every fifty years; and nowhere in less than two centuries. And the result is, that if the human race had existed on this earth under existing laws of nature, as the evolutionists allege, for one hundred thousand years, not only must they have multiplied until their bones would have covered the earth, and filled the sea, but, as Sir John Herschel shows, they would have formed a vertical column, having for its base the whole surface of the earth, and for its height three thousand six hundred and seventy-four times the sun's distance from the earth![129] The existing population of the globe corresponds pretty well to the natural increase of three pairs in forty centuries, which is something near to the Bible chronology. The laws of population, then, inexorably refuse the indefinite, or even the remote antiquity of mankind, and vindicate Moses as a writer of truthful history. The alleged anachronisms of the Pentateuch have been adduced as testimony that it could not have been written till long after the time of Moses. These alleged anachronisms are generally the insertion of a modern name of a city instead of the ancient name, or an explanatory addition which would not have been necessary in the days of Moses. Now if all these cases could be proved, they would at most only show that the scribes who copied the manuscripts in later ages had inserted these explanatory changes or additions, under proper authority. Everybody's common sense will tell him, that Moses did not narrate his own death in the last chapter of Deuteronomy; but it is none the less true though Joshua, or some other prophet, added that postscript. But Hengstenberg has[130] examined these alleged anachronisms in detail, and shown that the objectors allow themselves to interpolate into the text a meaning of their own in order to show the inaccuracy of the Bible. For instance, Genesis xii. 6, "The Canaanite was then in the land," they maintain could only be written after the Canaanites had been driven out. They interpolate _still_, which is not in the text. But they entirely mistake the meaning of the passage, which refers to an earlier statement of the same fact, chapter x. 15, to show that Abraham, the heir of the promise, came as a stranger and a pilgrim to a land preoccupied by a powerful people, who are again mentioned, chapter xiii. 7, for the purpose of showing how Lot and Abraham came to be so crowded as to separate. Another of the prominent instances is the name of the ancient city of Hebron, which, in the book of Joshua, is said to have been anciently called Kirjath-arba. But Numbers xiii. 22, which states that Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt, and was the residence of Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the sons of Anak, shows that the writer was well acquainted with the history of the place, and Genesis xxxv. 27 shows that Hebron was the first name, and that it had two other names added to it, both after the time of Abraham, since Mamre was his contemporary, and the Anakim lived centuries later. This may stand for a specimen of the alleged anachronisms of the Pentateuch. But now comes Bishop Colenso with his slate and pencil to demonstrate to us that, no matter who wrote it, or by what external authority it is commended, the Pentateuch is so full of arithmetical errors, and of impossible narratives, in its accounts of common affairs, as well as in its miraculous stories, that not only is it not the Word of God, but that it is not even a truthful history, and stands self-convicted of being a collection of fables. Of course, if that can be proved, there is an end of the matter, though it would still seem strange that it should have been left for the bishop to discover Moses' ignorance of arithmetic, and of camp-life among the Arabs. Nevertheless the very novelty of a bishop assaulting the Bible in such a style has secured for him a large number of readers, many of them ignorant enough to believe his assertions, though too indolent to test his calculations, or even to read the passages he criticises. This renders some notice of his criticisms necessary according to our plan of considering objections according to their popularity, rather than according to their merit. For, on examining the bishop's objections to the Bible, they are all found to arise from want of science, want of sense, or ignorance of Scripture--an inability to read the Scriptures in their original Hebrew, or even to cite them correctly in English. In some criticisms he contrives to compile these three kind of blunders into a single chapter, making a mosaic of very amusing reading indeed. Of course we can only give specimens of his peculiar style of attack on the Bible; for to expose all his blunders would require some volumes as large as his own. But we shall select illustrative instances of the bishop's blunders from each of the departments indicated above. As a specimen of the bishop's blunders in science, let us take the first which he offers--his attempt to convict Moses of a contradiction to geology in his account of the deluge. Bishop Colenso declares that the Bible teaches that the deluge was universal, and that this is contradicted, among other things, by certain geological discoveries, in Auvergne, of volcanic cones of light cinders, which would have been swept away by any such flood. Aye, if they had only been there at that time! But Eli de Beaumont, a learned geologist, not convicted of so many blunders as the bishop, alleges that the whole of the system of Teanarus, including the elevation of Stromboli, and Ætna, has been formed since the catastrophe of the principal Alps; and that the volcanoes of Auvergne and the Vivarrus are of post-Adamic origin.[131] So the bishop's geology does not contradict what he thinks the Bible says after all. On the contrary, so far from geology contradicting a universal deluge, the best geologists speak of every part of the earth having been repeatedly under the sea, and they collect its fossils on the tops of the mountains. But the bishop ought to know that hundreds of years ago, before geology was born, some of the most learned bishops and theologians of his own Church, as well as some of the chief scholars of the dissenters, following the most learned of the Hebrew rabbis, did not believe that the Bible taught that the deluge was universal. For instance, Bishop Stillingfleet, in his great work, _Origines Sacra_, says: "I can not see any urgent necessity from the Scriptures to assert that the flood did spread over all the surface of the earth. That all mankind, those in the ark excepted, were destroyed by it, is most certain, according to the Scriptures. The flood was universal as to mankind, but from thence follows no necessity at all of asserting the universality of it as to the globe of the earth, unless it be sufficiently proved that the whole earth was peopled before the flood; which I despair of ever seeing proved." Matthew Poole says: "Where was the need of overwhelming those regions of the earth in which there were no human beings? It would be highly unreasonable to suppose that mankind had so increased before the deluge as to have penetrated to all the corners of the earth. It is indeed not probable that they had extended themselves beyond the limits of Syria and Mesopotamia. Absurd it would be to affirm that the effects of the punishment, inflicted upon men alone, applied to those places in which there were no men. If, then, we should entertain the belief that not so much as the hundredth part of the globe was overspread with water, still the deluge would be universal; because the extirpation took effect upon all the part of the globe then inhabited." Nor does the language of the Bible necessarily convey the idea that the whole surface of the globe was covered with water. Dathe, professor of Hebrew (in his _Opuscala ad Crisin_, edited by Rosenmuller, 1795), says: "Interpreters do not agree whether the deluge inundated the whole earth or only the regions then inhabited. I adopt the latter opinion. The phrase _all_ does not prove the inundation to have been universal. It appears that in many places _kol_ is to be understood as limited to the thing or place spoken of. Hence all the animals introduced into the ark were only those of the region inundated." But the most literal rendering of the language of Moses does not necessitate our belief that when he says that the waters covered the whole earth, _arets_, he meant the whole globe. The common Bible meaning of this word is land, country, or region, as the perpetually recurring phrases, the land, _arets_, of Havilah, the land of Nod, the land of Ethiopia, the land of Goshen, the land of Egypt, the land of Canaan, which occurs three hundred and ninety times, may convince every reader beyond the possibility of mistake. How now, from this word being used by Moses, could this learned bishop conclude that he necessarily meant to describe the globe? Moses says, "The waters prevailed upon and covered the whole country." The bishop translates, "covered the whole globe;" evidently in order to make Moses commit a blunder. But reference is made to the expression, "All the high hills under the whole heavens were covered;" which the bishop will have it meant all the mountains under the moon. But the popular use of the word "heavens," in Moses' day, had as little reference to universal space, as the word earth, or land, had to the whole globe. It meant simply the visible heavens over any place; and its extent was defined by the extent of the earth those visible heavens covered. Thus Moses himself defines it, Deuteronomy iv. 32: "Ask from the one side of heaven unto the other." Deuteronomy xxviii. 8: "Thy heaven over thee shall be as brass." Deuteronomy ii. 25: "This day I will begin to put the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven." And so commonly throughout the Bible, "the clouds of heaven," "the fowls of heaven," refer to the optical heavens. Such is the meaning in Genesis. Noah describes the deluge as it appeared to him, as covering all the hills within the horizon of observation, and Moses copies Noah's log-book. The geologist adds his testimony to the existing evidences of the recent submergence of a large region of Persia and Turkey around the Caspian Sea, and its subsequent elevation. But it is no part of our business to show in what way God produced the deluge. Geology shows us, however, that the submergence of parts of the earth beneath the sea, and their subsequent elevation, is the most common of all geological phenomena; almost all existing continents and islands having been submerged. The bishop is as far behind the age in his astronomy as in his geology. He blindly follows the Infidels of the last century in their attack on Joshua's miracle, arresting the sun and moon, as inconsistent with their science; which taught the immobility of the sun and moon, it seems, and was entirely ignorant of the modern discovery of the grand motions of the fixed stars, including our sun, and of the dependence of all the planets, including our earth and moon, upon that grand motion for the motive power of their revolutions.[132] One wonders from what college the bishop came out ignorant of facts known to the boys of American common schools. A great many of the bishop's blunders are occasioned by want of sense. The process is very simple. The sacred history is very brief. Only the headings of things are recorded. Much must be supplied by the common sense of the reader. The manners of the East are very different from ours. Three thousand years have greatly changed the face of the country. Ignore all this, and interpret the Pentateuch as though it consisted of the letters of Our Own Correspondent, and you will find difficulties on every page. Such is the style of Colenso's criticism. Assume that Moses gives a full and complete chronicle of all events which have happened since the creation, and then dispute the recorded facts because it can easily be shown he omitted many. But the bishop has not the honor of discovering this method, or of founding this school of criticism. We have heard village critics of the loom and the forge discuss such questions as are handled by Colenso, and the Essays and Reviews, and often with much more acuteness and penetration. With what _eclat_ has our village critic unhorsed the itinerant preacher with the inquiry, What became of the forks belonging to the nine and twenty knives which Ezra brought back from Babylon? but was, alas! himself routed in the moment of triumph by the inquiry as to the sex of the odd clean beasts of Noah's sevens. How often has our village blacksmith critic requested a sermon upon the genealogy of Melchizedek, which the minister agreed to furnish when our blacksmith could tell him the foundry which manufactured Tubal Cain's hammer and anvil. Lot's wife, the witch of Endor, Jonah's whale, the sundial of Ahaz, and the population of Nineveh, were all duly discussed, together with the bodies in which the angels dined with Abraham. Did the loaves and fishes miraculously multiply in numbers, or increase in size? Where did the angel get the flour to bake the cake for Elijah? Did our Lord catch the fish by net, or by miracle, which he used in the Lord's Dinner on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. But _the_ question--which we marvel beyond measure that the bishop overlooks--always was, Where did Cain get his wife? This is the fundamental question for such critics. The difficulty, it will be perceived, lies across the very threshold of the history. How did he stumble over it without record of his misadventure? It recurs, however, on every page. If the bishop will only answer that question, and introduce us politely to Cain's wife, I will engage that she will answer most of these other difficult questions. Had Seth a wife? How could Noah and his three sons build a ship larger than the Great Eastern? We can imagine the roars of laughter with which the bigger school-boys will greet the serious exhibition of their old tests of dullness, in a printed book, and by a learned bishop, as objections to the inspiration of the Bible. But the bishop does actually devote Chapter V. to the impossibility of Moses addressing all Israel; Chapter VI. to the extent of the camp compared with the priest's duties; Chapter XX. to the grave difficulty of the three priestly families consuming the offerings of some millions of people; which surely to a bishop of the Church of England should not be an unparalleled feat. Such chapters enable us to appreciate the mental caliber of our critic, and excuse us from argument with a man incapable of interpreting popular phrases. He would prove the associated press dispatches all a myth, because it is impossible for the House of Commons to appear at the bar of the House of Lords--six hundred men to stand on four square yards of floor; for McClellan to address the Army of the Potomac, which extended along a line of thirty miles; for Grant and Sherman--two men--to capture Vicksburg and thirty thousand prisoners! Manifestly impossible. The most specious of all the sophistry spread over the volume is that contained in the Seventeenth Chapter, regarding the increase of Jacob's family, of seventy persons, to a nation of two or three millions, in Egypt, during the two hundred and fifteen years to which he confines the bondage. But it is only another case of Cain's wife. The Pentateuch gives us the list of Jacob's children and their wives, but makes no formal mention in that place of their servants and retainers. These, in Abraham's times, amounted to three hundred fencible men, or a population of fifteen hundred; who would have increased in Jacob's time to several thousands, capable of defending the border land of Goshen against the marauding Bedouin. And this population could easily increase to the three millions of the Exodus, at the same ratio in which the population of the United States is now increasing; so that it is a mere superfluity of naughtiness for the bishop to deny what the sacred historian so emphatically asserts: "That the people were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and the land was filled with them." But the bishop utterly ignores the people of the _clan_, and taking his slate and pencil ciphers out the impossibility of Jacob's _family_ amounting to so many. And yet it is not impossible that in the four hundred and thirty years which the sacred historian so precisely asserts as the period of their sojourn in Egypt, Exodus xii. 40, the family alone might have multiplied as fast as the family of the famous Jonathan Edwards, which, in a hundred years after his death, numbered two thousand souls. Peter Cartwright, the venerable Methodist minister, celebrated his eighty-seventh birthday on the first of September, 1871, at Pleasant Plains, Sangamon County, Illinois, surrounded by one hundred and twenty children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Now, if this family of two persons could so increase in eighty-seven years, why could not Jacob's family, of seventy persons, increase in equal ratio? In that case, even in the two hundred and fifteen years to which the bishop limits the sojourn in Egypt, the Israelites would have amounted to over eight millions. If it be objected that this was a case of special blessing, we answer that the Israelites are expressly asserted to have been specially and wonderfully multiplied. There is, therefore, no improbability in Moses' numbers. The bishop ascribes to Moses another of his own blunders; this time, however, in reading his Bible in plain English, which correctly translates the Hebrew--Exodus xiii. 2. The Lord commands Moses and Israel to "Sanctify to him every male that openeth the womb, both of man and beast," from the time of the death of the first-born of the Egyptians. The impropriety of _ex post facto_ legislation, the reason assigned for this law, and the grammatical meaning of the language in the present tense, all combine to show that the law is prospective; and the number of the first-born, twenty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-five, afterward given in Numbers, shows plainly that this is the meaning, being about the proper increase of thirteen months. But the bishop strangely blunders into the notion that this is the number of all the first-born of Israel; only about one in forty-five or fifty, and therefore argues against the historical veracity of the Pentateuch. A good many of the bishop's blunders arise in this way from misreading his Bible. He makes another blunder of this kind, and as usual charges it on Moses, in his misreading of Leviticus xxiii. 40, as if directing Israel to make booths of palm branches and willows at the feast of tabernacles, instead of bearing the palms of victory in triumph into the temple of God. The son of the chief rabbi of London ridicules the bishop's Hebrew scholarship here, saying that any Jewish child could have set him right; but had he read even his English translation carefully he need not have blundered here. In connection with the subject of the numbers of the people we notice his tacit assumption--that Moses records everything necessary for a statistical table--in his criticisms on the numbers of the Danites and Levites, Chapters XVIII. and XVI.; and on Judah's family, Chapter II. He takes it for granted that because the Exodus took place in the lifetime of the fourth generation of some of the sons of Jacob, therefore there were none but four generations born in the two hundred and fifteen years to which he confines the bondage, and none but those whose names are recorded. This is a blunder of the same sort as if he should mistake the list of the British peerage for a census of all the families of Great Britain, and calculate the average duration of human life by the ages of the Duke of Wellington and Lord Palmerston. But here we have a wonderful instance of the providence which often makes objectors refute themselves. The chapter on Judah's family (II.) shows that in forty-two years Judah had grandchildren ten or twelve years old; as many Syrians, Persians, and Hindoos have at this day. But if six generations could thus be born in Syria, or India, in a century, why not in Egypt? And 1 Chronicles vii. 20, 21 enumerates ten generations of the sons of Ephraim; giving ample opportunity for the biblical increase. Another set of the bishop's blunders is occasioned by his utter ignorance of camp-life, especially among the Arabs. In Chapter VIII. he assumes that all the people had tents, and the bishop orders them made of leather. But he concludes they could not possibly get them, nor if they had them could they carry them. By and by he provides them with two millions of cattle, however; and it is likely each of them had a skin, and was able to carry it for a while, while the Hebrews dwelt in the booths of the encampments they still commemorate in the feast of tabernacles. But the word "tents" is the common phrase for any kind of shelter in Scripture, including even houses in the expression, "To your tents, O Israel," used in the days of David. In Chapter IX. he discusses the probability of their obtaining arms in Egypt. A week with one of the Union armies would show him how speedily freedmen can provide themselves with arms and learn tactics; and a short residence in Ireland would teach him the utter impossibility of preventing a discontented people from arming themselves even with firearms; much more when every grove furnished artillery. He protests that all Egypt could not furnish lambs enough for the passover; because in Natal an acre will only graze one sheep, forgetting that Moses was not raising sheep in Natal, but in the best of the land of Goshen, which, if as fertile as the county of Dorset in England, would easily keep five millions of sheep. In Chapter X. he insists on the impossibility of giving warning of the passover, and subsequent march, in one day, to a population as large as London, scattered over two or three counties. Has he forgotten the straws carried over all Ireland in one night, and the Chupatties of the Indian Mutiny? The negro insurrection of Charleston was known by the negroes of Louisiana two days before their masters received the intelligence by mail. Critics know little of the power of the love of freedom. But there is no reason for the bishop's supposition that all the preparations for leaving were made in one day, save his own mistake of the Hebrew of Exodus xii. 12, as referring to the night of the day on which God spake to Moses, instead of the night of the day of which he was speaking, as the slightest reflection on the context shows. In Chapter XI. the bishop assumes the functions of Major-General, and masses his army--rank, and file, wagon train, hospital, commissariat, contrabands, droves of cattle, and camp followers--into a mass of fifty front and twenty-two miles long. Very naturally he gets into a tremendous jam, out of which we have no intention of extricating him; merely remarking that bishops do not make good generals, and that Arab Sheikhs do not march in that way. They scatter themselves and their cattle over the whole country for forty or fifty miles, and have no confusion; and attend moreover to Moses' sanitary camp regulations, in their several encampments. In Chapter XII. he exerts himself to starve the cattle for want of pasture and water; garbling Moses' account of the wilderness for that purpose, Deuteronomy viii. 15, "Beware that thou forget not Jehovah, thy God, who led thee through the great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, _where there was no water_." Here he stops, as if this was all that referred to the subject. But when we turn to the passage, we find that he omits the most material part of the speech. For Moses goes on to say, in the hearing of all Israel, who could certainly have contradicted him had the fact not been well known to them, "Who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint." Moses' account is quite self-consistent, and the bishop's garbling of it is dishonest. There were districts of Arabia so dry and sterile that but for this miraculous supply both men and beasts had perished; but the greater part of the country was simply uninhabited pasture land, sufficiently productive even now to support several Arab tribes; and much better wooded and watered then. The monuments of Egypt abundantly testify the number and power of its shepherd kings, who pastured their flocks upon it in their successive invasions of Egypt. The bishop says, Chapter XIII., that the climax of inconsistencies between facts and figures is reached when we come to the notice by the Lord to Israel, contained in Exodus xxiii. 29, "I will not drive them, the Canaanites, out from before thee in one year, lest the land become desolate, and the beasts of the field multiply against thee." The argument is that a population of two millions was assigned to a territory of only eleven thousand square miles; and consequently would be more dense than the population of the agricultural region of England, where there is no danger of wild beasts multiplying. But the objection is again based on a blunder, and a garbling of the text of Scripture. Had the bishop done himself and his readers the justice to complete the passage which he has half cited, by inserting the next two verses, he could have read verse thirty-one: "And I will set thy bounds from the Red Sea even to the Sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river," _i. e._, the Euphrates, as other passages show, Genesis xv. 18. That is to say, a territory five hundred miles long by one hundred miles broad, or fifty thousand square miles, was to be occupied by two millions of people. That is about the present population, and all travelers testify that three-fourths of it lies desolate. Prof. Porter saw seventy deserted towns and villages in Bashan alone. But for the rifle and gunpowder the wild beasts would now overpower the inhabitants. By a wonderful providence, contemporaneously with these attacks, the Lord has raised up an army of scholars, travelers, and archæologists, whose explorations illustrate the Bible in a remarkable manner, throwing new light upon its history, poetry, and prophecy. It is refreshing to turn from the cavils of ignorant criticism to the clear light of discovered facts and imperishable monuments. The Bible history has recently received a wonderful amount of illustration and confirmation from the researches of scholars and discoverers amid the ruins of Egypt, Persia, and Assyria; completely exploding the theory that this history was a comparatively recent composition, written long after the events which it records, and betraying its want of genuineness by the anachronisms and errors of description of historical and natural events with which it abounds. Wherever it differed from the statements of any Greek, or other heathen historian, it was forthwith alleged that Moses was wrong, and the profane author was right; and for a long time nobody could bring any evidence on the other side, because there were no contemporary records; the oldest heathen historian being a thousand years later than Moses. But by some strange inspiration, the Lord set a multitude of explorers to work upon the monuments of Egypt, deciphering the hieroglyphics which had so long puzzled the world, digging into the mounds which had for centuries covered the ruined palaces and cities of Persia and Assyria, and bringing to Europe ship-loads of recovered statues, marbles, cylinders, mummies, obelisks, papyrii, covered with all manner of pictures and inscriptions, civil, religious, and political, contemporary with the Bible history, and setting the best scholars of Europe to decipher and translate them. They are only, as yet, in the middle of their labors, but already so much has been discovered as to warrant the assertion that before they have finished they will furnish full corroboration of all the great outlines of Old Testament history. Egypt was the first to come forward in furnishing her quota of commentary to the corroboration of the Books of Moses. Hengstenberg's _Egypt and the Books of Moses_, Wilkinson's _Ancient Egyptians_, and Osburn's _Monumental History of Egypt_, furnish almost a commentary upon Moses' account of Egyptian affairs, confirming every biblical allusion to Egypt as historically correct, and revealing to us even the natural causes of the seven years high Nile and plenteous harvests; in the overflow of the great central lake in Nubia wearing away the embankment; and of the seven years subsequent low Nile and famine, by the drought consequent on this immense drainage. The very titles of Joseph as, "Director of the Full and Empty Irrigating Canals," "Steward of the Granaries," etc. etc., are still to be read on his tomb at Sakkarah,[133] and much more of the same sort. F. Newman ridicules the Bible narrative of Shishak's expedition against Rehoboam as a mere fictitious embellishment of an otherwise tame narrative;[134] but Egyptologists, like Stuart, Poole, and Brugsch, have examined the inscription of Shishak, at Karnak, and allege that it fully corroborates the Scripture history.[135] Some of the most obscure portions of the Bible, which have long been stumbling-blocks to commentators and historians, are now thus illuminated by the light of modern discoveries of monuments and inscriptions found in the ruins of the ancient cities of Persia and Assyria, upon which they in turn cast such light as to enable the discoveries of Layard and Rawlinson to assume an intelligible coherency. The tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis, written a thousand years before Herodotus or Manetho, and which Rationalistic commentators were so long "unable to verify by their own consciousness," and which were therefore consigned to the realm of mythology, are now acknowledged by the first scholars and discoverers to stand at the head of the page of reliable history, and to form the basis of all scientific ethnography. The diversity of languages among mankind seems not to have attracted the attention of the Greek philosophers. When modern inquirers began to investigate the matter, they were well-nigh confounded by the multitude of dialects and languages. The labor of three generations of scholars has been expended upon philology, the most ancient monument of mankind. And the result is that all the various languages of earth have at length been classified under three tongues--the Shemitic, the Aryan, and the Turanian. But this most recent discovery of comparative philology was narrated by Moses thirty centuries ago, with the historical account of the origin of the division of the primeval family into three separate colonies, colonizing the earth after their families and after their tongues.--Genesis x. 32. The discovery of this coincidence fills Bunsen with astonishment. "Comparative philology," he says, "would have been compelled to set forth as a postulate the supposition of some such division of languages in Asia, especially on the ground of the relation of the Egyptian language to the Shemitic, even if the Bible had not assured us of the truth of this great historical event. It is truly wonderful; it is a matter of astonishment; it is more than a mere astounding fact that something so purely historical, and yet divinely fixed--something so conformable to reason, and yet not to be conceived of as a mere natural development--is here related to us out of the oldest primeval period, and which now for the first time, through the new science of philology, has become capable of being historically and philosophically explained." The brief, yet definite, assertions of the Hamitic origin of the old empire of Babylon, and of an Asiatic Cush or Ethiopia, which have been so repeatedly charged against the Bible as blunders, even by some profound scholars, have been vindicated by the recent discoveries in the mounds of Chaldea Proper of multitudes of inscriptions in a language which Sir H. Rawlinson affirms "is decidedly Cushite or Ethiopian," and the modern languages to which it makes the nearest approaches are those of Southern Arabia and Abyssinia. The old traditions have then been confirmed by comparative philology, and both are side lights to Scripture. * * * "The primitive race which bore sway in Chaldea Proper is demonstrated to have belonged to this Ethnic type."[136] "The conquest of Palestine is recorded on the annals of Sennacherib, and the cylinder of Tiglath-Pileser describes his invasion of Palestine. The names of Jehu, of Amaziah, of Hezekiah, of Omri, Ahaz, and Uzziah have been made out. _The very clay which sealed the treaty between the kings of Judah and Assyria, with the impresses of their joint seals upon it, is preserved in the Nineveh gallery._ The library of Assurbanipal, in twenty thousand fragments, contains among other scientific treatises, such as astronomical notices, grammatical essays, tables of verbs, genealogies, etc., an historico-geographical account of Babylonia and the surrounding countries. As far as these fragments have been translated, the district and tribal names given in the Bible correspond very closely with them."[137] But this is not the only illustration and confirmation which these old Assyrian monuments offer to the Sacred Writings. From the first invasion of the Assyrians, under Tiglath-Pileser, to the restoration of Israel from Babylon, and the rebuilding of the temple, under Darius, the Bible history is full of references to the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian monarchies, and their affairs with Israel and Judah. And the inscribed tablets, cylinders, and temple tablets, and statues, are full of references which directly or indirectly elucidate and corroborate the Bible history, attesting to skeptics the truthfulness of its wonderful narrative; the very stones of Nineveh, and the ruined palaces of Babylon and Assyria, crying out in vindication of the veracity of the Bible. Already so much has been discovered as to fill several volumes, to which we must refer the reader for details.[138] One of the alleged historical errors greatly insisted on by Rationalistic commentators was the statement by Daniel, that Belshazzar was King of Babylon when it was taken by the Medo-Persians, and that he was slain at the storming of the city. Herodotus and Berosus had stated that Nabonnidus was king, and that he was not in the city then, but was afterward taken prisoner and treated generously by Cyrus. These accounts seemed contradictory; and as Herodotus and Berosus were generally esteemed respectable historians, the Rationalists ridicule Daniel as an erroneous writer of history. But one of Sir H. Rawlinson's discoveries has vindicated the prophet, and also explained how the historians were truthful too. W. Taylor, one of Rawlinson's assistants, discovered an inscribed cylinder in Ur of the Chaldees containing an account of the reign of this very Nabonnidus, which Sir Henry describes in a letter to the _Athenæum_, (1854, page 341): "The most important facts, however, which they disclose are that the eldest son of Nabonnidus was named Bel-shar-ezar, and that he was admitted by his father to a share in the government." This name is undoubtedly the Belshazzar of Daniel, and thus furnishes a key to the explanation of that great historical problem which has hitherto defied solution. We can now understand how Belshazzar, as _joint-king_ with his father, may have been Governor of Babylon when the city was attacked by the combined forces of the Medes and Persians, and may have perished in the assault which followed; while Nabonnidus, leading a force to the relief of the place, was defeated, and was obliged to take refuge in Borsippa, capitulating after a short resistance, and being subsequently assigned, according to Berosus, to an honorable retirement in Carmania. A minute coincidence also is thus brought to light, showing the accuracy of the inspired historian in one of the details of his narrative. Belshazzar elevates him to the position of Grand Vizier, or Prime Minister, which, under ordinary circumstances, would be the _second_ place of dignity in the empire. But Daniel represents the king as raising him to the _third_ place, which we now see to be strictly correct, since Belshazzar himself was the second in rank. Thus the weapons discharged against the Bible ever recoil upon the heads of its assailants. Not only among the monuments of the great historic nations do we now discover corroborations of Scripture, the records and monuments of even obscure nations are most strangely turning up and being discovered, after lying unnoticed for centuries, as if God had reserved their testimony for the time when it would be needed and valued. The Bible does not refer to the history of the surrounding nations, save in connection with their relations to Israel; but it is surprising to see how many of these references are corroborated by recent discoveries. The Bible, for instance, describes[139] Omri as establishing a kingdom with his capital at Samaria, and he and his son, Ahab, making war on Mesha, King of Moab, conquering him and making him pay an annual tribute of one hundred thousand lambs and one hundred thousand rams, with the wool. But it came to pass that when Ahab was dead that the King of Moab rebelled against the King of Israel. Now amid the perpetual wars of the petty kingdoms of Asia, and after the utter extirpation of the Moabitish nation, the chances were millions to one against our recovering any historical monuments whatever of that people; and almost infinite against recovering any which should coincide with the half dozen allusions to them in the Bible. But Mr. Klein discovered in the ruins of Dibon, one of the ancient cities of Moab, and Capt. Warren recovered, the fragments of the now famous Moabite Stone, on which, in the old Samaritan characters, we read: "I, Mesha, son of Jobin, King of Moab. My father reigned over Moab thirty years, and I reigned after my father. I erected this altar unto Chemosh, who granted me victory over mine enemies, the people of Omri, King of Israel, who, together with his son, Ahab, oppressed Moab a long time--even forty years,"[140] etc. But space forbids even the enumeration of the corroborations of Bible history from the days of Abraham to the time of the first census of the Roman Empire, when Cyrenius was Governor of Syria the second time. In every instance where its monuments have spoken of biblical affairs they have confirmed the accuracy of the Bible history. The history of Great Britain, or of the United States, is not more authentic than, and not so accurate as, the long line of history recorded in the Bible. No important error has been proven in any of its historical statements of the world's history for forty centuries. This accuracy contrasted with the acknowledged errors of the best historians, is proof to every candid mind of divine direction and help to the sacred writers. Sweeping away, then, these cobwebs, we open the volume and form our opinion of its genuineness and authenticity from its own internal evidences--its nature and contents--and from the way in which it was used by the Hebrew nation. It is important at the outset to know how long these documents have undoubtedly existed. No one denies that they were in existence eighteen hundred years ago. Indeed, the first literary attack on them which has been recorded was made about that time; and Josephus' defense of the Scriptures against Apion still exists. The very same writings which the Protestant churches now acknowledge as canonical, and none other, were then acknowledged to be of divine authority by the Jews. It is true they bound their Bibles differently from ours, but the contents were the very same. They made up their parchments of the thirty-nine books in twenty-two rolls or volumes, one for every letter of their alphabet; putting Judges and Ruth, the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings, the two books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, Jeremiah's Prophecy and Lamentations, and the twelve minor prophets, in one volume respectively. They also distinguished the five books of Moses as, _The Law_; the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon as, _The Psalms_; and all the remainder as, _The Prophets_.[141] Moreover, it is well known that two hundred and eighty-two years before the Christian era, these writings were translated into Greek and widely circulated in all parts of the world. They were, in fact, not only popular, but received as of divine authority by the Jews at that time, read in their synagogues in public worship, and regarded with sacred reverence. How did they come to receive them in this manner? These writings were not only acknowledged by the Jews; their bitterest enemies--the Samaritans--owned the divine authority of the five books of Moses, and preserve an ancient copy of them, differing in no essential particular from the Hebrew version, to this day. The Samaritans always bore to the Hebrews such a relation as Mohammedans do to Christians, and the Hebrews returned the grudge with interest: "For the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans." These heathen Babylonians, four centuries or more before the Christian era, were somehow induced to receive the Pentateuch as of divine authority, and to frame some sort of religion upon it. Their enmity to the Jews is conclusive proof that, since that time, neither Jews nor Samaritans have altered the text; else the manuscripts would show the discrepancy. These books are not such as any person would forge to gain popularity, or to make money by. There is nothing in them to bribe the good opinion of influential people, or catch the favor of the multitude. On the contrary, their stern severity, and unsparing denunciation of popular vice and profitable sin must have secured their rejection by the Jewish people, had they not been constrained by undeniable evidence to acknowledge their divine authority. They set out with the assertion of the divine authority of the law of Moses, and everywhere sharply reprove princes, priests, and people for breaking it. The prophets, so far from seeking popularity, are foolhardy enough to denounce the bonnets, hoops, and flounces of the ladies, and to cry, Woe! against the regular business of the most respectable note-shavers,[142] to croak against the march of intellect, and shake public confidence in the prosperity of their great country,[143] to ally themselves with fanatic abolitionists, and introduce agitating political questions into the pulpit; crying, _Woe to him that useth his neighbor's service without wages, and giveth him not for his work._[144] To crown all, they organized abolition clubs to procure immediate emancipation, and published incendiary proclamations in the cities of the slaveholders,[145] and, strange to say, they were allowed to escape with their lives; and their writings were held sacred by the children of those very men and women they so unsparingly denounced; a conclusive proof that the calamities they predicted had compelled them to acknowledge these prophets as the heralds of God. The proof must have been conclusive, indeed, which compelled the Jews to acknowledge the writings of the prophets as sacred. Another very striking feature of these writings is, their mutual connection with each other. They were written at various intervals, during a period of a thousand years' duration, by shepherds and kings, by prophets and priests, by governors of States and gatherers of sycamore fruit; in deserts and in palaces, in camps and in cities, in Egypt and Syria, in Arabia and Babylon; under the iron heel of despotic oppression, and amid the liberty of the most democratic republic the world ever saw; yet, circumstances, and lapse of time, they ever hold to one great theme, always assert the same great principles, and perpetually claim connection with the writers who have preceded them. There is nothing like this in the histories of other nations. Two centuries will work such changes of opinion, that you can not find nowadays any historian who approves the sentiments of Pepys or Clarendon, whatever use he may make of their facts. But the historians of the Bible not only refer to their predecessors' writings, but refer to them as of acknowledged divine authority. Thus the very latest of these books gives the weight of its testimony to the first--"_And they set the priests in their divisions, and the Levites in their courses for the service of God, which is at Jerusalem, as it is written in the book of Moses._"[146] And Daniel spake of the books of Moses as well known when he says, "_Therefore the curse is poured upon us, and the oath that is written in the law of Moses the servant of God._"[147] The shortest book in the Old Testament--the prophecy of Obadiah, consisting only of twenty sentences--contains twenty-five allusions to the preceding histories and laws. The last of the prophets shuts up the volume with a command to "_Remember the law of Moses._" In fact, just as the epistles prove the existence and acknowledged authority of the gospels; so do the prophets prove the existence and acknowledged authority of the law of Moses. They were acknowledged not merely by one generation of the Jewish people, but by the nation during the whole period of its national existence; and they are of such a character, that they must then, and now, be taken as one whole--all accepted, or all rejected together. The reader of the Old Testament will speedily find that these writings are not merely a connected history of the nation, of great general interest, like Bancroft's or Macaulay's, but of no such special interest to any individual as to force him, by a sense of self-interest, or the danger of loss of liberty or property, to correct their errors. On the contrary, every farmer in Palestine was deeply concerned in the truth and accuracy of the Bible; for it contained not only the general boundaries of the country, and of the particular tribes, like the survey of the Maine boundary, or of Mason and Dixon's line, but it delineated particular estates, also, and was, in fact, the report of the Surveyor-General, deposited in the county court for reference, in case of any litigation about sale or inheritance of property.[148] The genealogies of the tribes and families were also preserved in these writings; and on the authenticity and correctness of these records, the inheritance of every farm in the land depended; for as no lease ran more than fifty years, every farm returned to the heirs of the original settler at the year of jubilee.[149] Thus every Jewish farmer had a direct interest in these sacred records; and it would be just as hard to forge records for the county courts of Ohio, and pass them off upon the citizens as genuine, and plead them in the courts as valid, as to impose at first, or falsify afterward, the records of the commonwealth of Israel. This will appear more clearly when we consider that they contained also the laws of the land--the Constitution of the United States of Israel, with the statutes at large--according to which every house, and farm, and garden in the whole country was possessed, every court of justice was guided,[150] every election was held, from the election of a petty constable, to that of Governor of the State,[151] and the militia enrolled, mustered, officered, and called out to the field of battle.[152] These laws prescribed the way in which every house must be built, regulated the weaver in weaving his cloth, and the tailor in making it, and the cooking of every breakfast, dinner and supper eaten by an Israelite over the world, from that day to this.[153] Now, let any one who thinks it would be an easy matter to forge such a series of documents, and get people to receive and obey them, try his hand in making a volume of Acts of Assembly, and passing it off upon the people of Ohio for genuine. Let him bring an action into one of the courts, and persuade the judges to give a decision in his favor, upon the strength of his forged or falsified statutes, and then he may hope to convince us that the laws of Moses are simply a collection of religious tracts, which came to be held sacred through lapse of time, nobody knows how or why. Nor were these laws, and the usages thus established, common, and such as the people would be ready easily to adopt. On the contrary, Moses repeatedly asserts, and all ancient history shows, that they were quite peculiar to the Hebrew people then; and they are to this day confined to the republics which, like our own, have drawn their ideas from the Bible. It is enough to name the common law and trial by jury; the armed nation; the right of free public assembly, free speech, free passport, and free trade; the election of civil, judicial, and military officers by universal suffrage; the division of the land in fee-simple among the whole people; the rights of women to hold real estate in their own right, to speak in public assemblies, and to prophetic functions; and the support of religion by the voluntary offerings of the people. Our own republic resembles Israel as a daughter her mother. The land of liberty was the Bible country. The first republic which the world ever saw was designed by Almighty God, and revealed to the world in the Bible, and by the example of the United States of Israel. From that pattern our forefathers copied all the grand features of our glorious republic--the equitable distribution of the land, in fee-simple, among the people; securing them, by the jubilee, against the introduction of feudal tenure, and landlordism; the abolition of a standing army, and the defense of the country by the militia; the election of all officers, civil and military, from the town constable, and the justice of the peace, up to the president of the republic, the Lord Jehovah himself, by universal suffrage--and the Federal Union of the twelve tribes into one nation, with township, county, and state governments, with a common law, common schools, and the equality of all citizens before the law; the right of naturalization; sanitary and social institutions, such as modern philanthropists are only beginning to dream of, for the elevation of the people; and all this avowedly held in trust for all mankind, as a fountain of blessings for all the families of the earth. No such ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, ever existed among the wisest heathen nations--the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, or Romans. On the face of the whole earth there never was, and there is not to-day, a free republic outside of the light and liberty of the Bible. The so-called republics of Athens and Rome were hideous aristocracies, and tyrannies. From the Bible the men of the Continental Congress learned the grand truth, which they emblazoned on the forefront of their immortal Declaration of Independence, "That all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;" thus planting the rights of man upon the only immovable basis--the throne of the eternal God. But there were other features of the Mosaic legislation so far in advance of the ideas of our modern Materialism as not to have been even yet suggested in our social congresses, nor even dreamt of by our most advanced Christian philanthropists, in their endeavors after the elevation of the masses. Moses' idea was the prevention of pauperism, and of the conflict between labor and capital, and of the gambling speculating fever, and the formation of an independent, intelligent, joyous, religious, healthy, and thrifty people, well-bred, well-fed, well-lodged, able to fight their foes on the battle-field, to reap their ridge on the harvest-field, to enjoy the blessings of healthy families, and to rejoice before the Lord. A volume would be needed to develop the social bearings of the laws of the Hebrews. We can only suggest for consideration the laws regarding inalienability of the homestead, and the bankrupt law; the laws of marriage and inheritance; the laws of servitude and wages; the sanitary laws regarding building, clothing, bathing, eating, and contagion; the protection of the rights of animals; the dispersion of the educated class; and the three great national festivals, during which the whole people were released from the labors of the field, and of the kitchen, and enjoyed during the eight summer days of each picnic such an excitement of social enjoyment, religious fervor, and political patriotism, as modern Christendom anticipates in the millennium, but which neither Church nor State has, as yet, systematically attempted to nurture. That the Hebrews did not obey the law, and so did not enjoy the happiness obedience would have secured, is only what God foresaw, and foretold repeatedly, with solemn warning of the disastrous degradation to which disobedience to God's laws must ever reduce man. Nevertheless, even their very imperfect conformity to these institutions gave them such superiority of blood and breeding to their ungodly neighbors, that they have survived the most powerful nations, and, in spite of dispersion, exile, disfranchisement, and persecution, they exist as a distinct people, superior intellectually, commercially, and morally to all the heathen nations at this day. How much higher had been their position had they fully obeyed the law. Our argument is, that this law of liberty, equality, fraternity, and religion, was worthy of our Father in heaven, and a seed of blessing to all the families of the earth. To a Jew living before the coming of Christ, the unanimous testimony of his nation, confirmed by all the commemorative observances of the sacrifices, the passover, the Sabbath, and the jubilee, by the reading of the law and the prophets, and the singing of the historical psalms in the temple and the synagogues, by the execution of the laws of Moses in the courts, and by the very existence of his nation as a distinct people, separate from all the other nations--could leave no doubt that laws so peculiar and beneficent must have been enacted by a wisdom superior to that of man, and their observance imposed by divine authority; nor that the miracles by which these laws were authenticated, and the national existence of the people of Israel was secured, were genuine, and divine. The chain of historical and internal evidence is too strong to be broken, while the Jewish nation exists. But yet this historical and internal evidence of the authority of the Old Testament is but the smallest part of that which we possess, who have the testimony of Christ on this subject. For this testimony removes the question from the mists of antiquity, and even from the debatable ground of historic certainty, and resolves the whole process of searching for, and comparing and examining a host of second-hand witnesses, into the easy and certain one of hearing the Author himself say, whether he acknowledges this Book to be his or not. Christians receive the Old Testament as the Word of God, because Jesus says so. Now, reader, it is of the utmost importance that you should stop just here, and give a plain, confident answer to these questions: Dost thou believe upon the Son of God? Is Jesus the Messiah of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write? Are you perfectly satisfied of the truth of the New Testament, and willing to venture your eternal salvation upon the words of Christ contained in it? For, if not, of what use is it for you to trouble yourself about the Old Testament? You might as well waste your time in examining the genuineness of the bills of a broken bank; they may be genuine or they may be forgeries; but who cares? They will never be paid. If the first promises of the bank of heaven, to send the Messiah eighteen hundred years ago, have been fulfilled, its other paper may be also valuable; if not, it must be equally worthless. If the New Testament be not of divine authority, you may place the prophets on the same shelf with the Poems of Ossian; and then follows the serious consequence, that there is not a grain of hope left for you or for any man on earth. If Jesus be indeed an Almighty Savior, and if he has indeed risen from the dead, then, through the power of his mighty love, your filthy soul may be washed from its sins, and your mortal body may be raised from the rottenness of the grave. But if Christ be not risen, you are yet in your sins. You have no notion that any of the gods of the heathen, or the precepts of the Koran, can purify your heart. You know well that Infidelity never sanctified any of your comrades. Conscience tells you that you are not any better now than you were a year ago, but worse. You are yet in your sins; and in them you must live and die! Aye, while your immortal soul lives, while the laws of human nature continue, you must carry those brands of infamy on your character, and daily progress from bad to worse; sinking deeper and deeper in the contempt of all intelligent beings; and, were there no other avenger, in the remorse and despair of your own mind, you must experience the horrors of perdition. Jesus, able to save to the uttermost, all that come unto God by him, is your only hope. There is none other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved. If his gospel be true, you may be saved; if it is false, you must be damned. If you have the shadow of a doubt of the truth of the New Testament, go over the subject again; re-read the former chapters of this book; pray to God for light and truth; above all, read the Book again and again; and if, in your case, as in that of one of the most famous teachers of German Neology--De Wette--the careful study of the New Testament impels you to rush through all the mists of doubt to the higher standpoint of a lofty faith, and the sunshine of real religion; and if with him you can now say, "Only this one thing I know, that in no other name is there salvation than in the name of Jesus Christ the crucified, and that for humanity there is nothing higher than the incarnation of Deity set before us in him, and the kingdom of God established by him,"[154] you may then go on with your inquiry into the divine authority of the Old Testament. With the Master himself before you, the Author, the Inspirer, by whom, and for whom, the prophets spake, and to whom all the Scriptures point, you will not think of wasting time in examining second-hand evidence; but go direct to Jesus himself. His testimony will not be merely so much additional testimony--another candle added to the chandelier by whose light you have perused the evidences of the Scriptures; it will shine out on your soul as the light of the Sun of Righteousness with healing on his wings. Every word from his lips will awaken in your heart the voice from heaven, "_This is my beloved Son. Hear him._" What saith Christ, then, respecting the Old Testament? The moment you open the New Testament to make this inquiry, you are met by a reference to the Old. "_The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham_," is its formal title; and the most cursory perusal tells you that you have taken up, not a separate and independent work, which you can profitably peruse and understand without much reference to some foregoing volumes--as one might read Abbott's Life of Napoleon without needing at the same time to study the History of the Crusades--but that you have taken up a continuation of some former work--the last volume in fact of the Old Testament--and that you can not understand even the first chapter without a careful reading of the foregoing volumes. Before you have finished the first chapter you meet with the most unequivocal assertion of the harmony of the gospels and the prophecies, and of the divine authority of both--"_Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet_," etc. The whole tenor of the New Testament corresponds to this beginning, teaching that the birth, doctrine, miracles, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming of the Lord, are the fulfillments of the Old Testament promises and prophecies; of which no less than a hundred and thirty-nine are expressly quoted, beginning with Moses and ending with Malachi. We can not explain this by saying, with the mythical school of interpreters, that this was merely the opinion of the writers of the gospels and of the Jews of their age; whose longings for the Messiah led them to imagine some curious coincidences between the events of Christ's life and the utterances of these ancient oracles to be ready fulfillments; and that Christ did not deem it needful in all cases to undeceive them. For to suppose that Christ--the Truth--would sanction or connive at any such sacrilegious deception, is at once to deprive him, not only of his divine character, but of all claim to common honesty. So far from the Jews longing for any such events as those which fulfilled the prophecies, they despised the Messiah in whom they were fulfilled, and refused to believe in him; and his disciples were as far from the gospel ideal of the Messiah, when Jesus needed to reproach them with, "_O fools, and slow of heart, to believe all that the prophets have spoken._"[155] It was not the Jews, nor yet the disciples, but the Lord himself who perpetually insisted on the divine authority of the Old Testament as the _Word_ of his Father, and the sufficient attestation of his own divine character, after this manner: "_Ye have not his word abiding in you; for whom he hath sent, him ye believe not. Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. * * * Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?_"[156] His first recorded sermon contains a remarkable and solemn attestation to the divine authority of the Old Testament, and of his own relation to it as its substance and supporter, "_Think not that I am come to destroy the law, and the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled._"[157] The whole of this discourse is an exposition of the true principles of the Old Testament, stripping off the rubbish by which tradition had made void the law of God, and enforcing its precepts by the sanction of his divine authority. And in one of his last discourses after his resurrection: "_Beginning at Moses, and the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. * * * And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me. Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures._"[158] In this distinct enumeration of the whole of the Scriptures of the Old Testament; in the assertion that they all treated of him, and that their principal predictions were fulfilled in him; and in his bestowal of divine illumination to enable them to understand these divine oracles--we have such an indorsement of their character by the Truth himself, as must command the faith and obedience of every believer in him. Had no objections been raised against particular doctrines or features of the Old Testament, we should stop here; perfectly satisfied with the attestations to the truth of its history, given by the continual references, and to the authority of its precepts, by the solemn formal declarations of the Son of God. But some popular objections to its completeness and perfection demand a brief notice. 1. The general character of the Old Testament being then ascertained beyond doubt, our first inquiry must be as to the integrity and completeness of the collection. For it is manifest that their divine authority being admitted, any attempt to add to them any human writings, or to take away those which were from God, would be a crime so serious in its consequences, that it could not escape the notice of him who severely rebuked even the verbal traditions by which the Jews made void the law of God. Now we are told by some that a great many inspired books have been lost; and they enumerate the prophecy of Enoch; the book of the Wars of the Lord; the book of Joshua; the book of Iddo the seer; the book of Nathan the prophet; the acts of Rehoboam; the book of Jehu, the son of Hanani; and the five books of Solomon, on trees, beasts, fowls, serpents, and fishes; which are alluded to in the Bible. If the case were so, it is difficult to see what objection could be raised against the divine authority of the books we have, because of the divine authority of those we have not; for it is not supposed that one divinely inspired book would contradict another. Nor yet can we see how the loss of these books should disprove their inspiration, much less the inspiration of those which remain, any more than the want of a record of the multitude of words and works of Jesus himself which were never committed to writing,[159] should be an argument against the divine authority of the Sermon on the Mount. It will hardly be asserted that God is bound to reveal to us everything that the human race ever did, and to preserve such records through all time, or lose his right to demand our obedience to a plain revelation of his will; or that we do well to neglect the salvation of our own souls until we obtain an infallible knowledge of the acts of Rehoboam. But there is not the shadow of a proof that any of these were inspired books, or that some of them were books at all. The Bible nowhere says that Enoch wrote his prophecy, or that Solomon read his discourses on natural history; nor of what religious interest they would have been to us any more than the hard questions of the Queen of Sheba, and his answers to them. Though the loss of these ancient chronicles may be regretted by the antiquarian, the Christian feels not at all concerned about it; knowing as he does, on the testimony of Christ, that the Holy Scriptures, as he and his apostles delivered them to us, contain all that we need to know in order to repent of our sins, lead holy lives, and go to heaven; and that we have the very same Bible of which Jesus said: "_They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. * * * If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead._"[160] 2. Another objection is, that the religion of the Old Testament was essentially different from that of the New. It is at once acknowledged, that the light which Christ shed on our relations to God, and to our brethren of mankind, is so much clearer than that of the Old Testament that we see our duties more plainly, and are more inexcusable for neglecting them, than those who had not the benefit of Christ's teaching. And no objection can be raised against God for not sending his Son sooner, or for not giving more light to the world before his coming, unless it can be shown that he is debtor to mankind, and that they were making a good use of the light he gave them. So that the question is not, Did God give as full and expanded instructions to the Church in her infancy as he has given in her maturity? but, Did he give instructions of a different character? It is not, Did Christ reveal more than Moses? but, Did Christ contradict Moses? And here, at the very outset, we are met by Christ's own solemn formal disclaimer of any such intention: "_Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill._" And as to the actual working of the Christian religion, when Paul is asked, "_Is the law then against the promises of God?_"[161] he indignantly replies, "_God forbid!_" But it is urged, "Judaism is not Christianity. You have changed the Sabbath, abolished the sacrifices, trampled upon the rules of living, eating, and visiting only with the peculiar people, you neglect the passover, and drop circumcision, the seal of the covenant, all on the authority of Christ. Do you mean to say that these are not essential elements of the Old Testament religion?" Undoubtedly. Outward ceremonies of any kind never were essential parts of religion. "_I will have mercy and not sacrifice_," is an Old Testament proverb, which clearly tells us that outward ceremonies are merely means toward the great end of all religion. "_The law_," says the Holy Ghost, by the pen of Paul, "_was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ_." The bread of heavenly truth is served out to God's children now on ten thousand wooden tables, instead of one brazen altar; but it is made of the same corn of heaven, it is dispensed by the same hand of love, to a larger family, it is true, but received and eaten in the exercise of the very same religious feelings, by any hearer of the gospel in New York, as by Abraham on Moriah. By faith in Christ the sinner now is justified, "_Even as Abraham believed God, and it was imputed to him for righteousness._" So says one who knew both law and gospel well. "_Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid! Yea, we establish the law!_" The Epistles to the Romans and to the Hebrews are just demonstrations of this truth, that the law was the blossom, the gospel the fruit. But it is alleged that the religion of the Old Testament could not but be defective, as it wanted the doctrines of immortality and the resurrection; of which, it is alleged, the Old Testament saints were ignorant. It were easy to prove, from their own words and conduct, that Job, Abraham, David, and Daniel, were not ignorant of these great doctrines.[162] But the manner in which our Lord proves the truth of the resurrection, by a reference to it as undeniably taught in the Old Testament, must ever silence this objection. "_But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living._"[163] 3. But it is objected the Hebrew Jehovah tolerated and approved polygamy, slavery, and divorce; and, in general, a low code of morals among the Hebrews. But we demand to know what standard of morals our objectors adopt? That of the ancient oriental world in which Israel lived? Then the laws of Jehovah were very far in advance of that age. The slave had his blessed Sabbath rest secured to him; which is more than modern civilization can secure for her railway slaves; his master was forbidden to treat him cruelly; and the maid-servant's honor was protected by the best means then known; while the Sacred Writings held up for example the primitive example of marriage, interposed the formality of a legal document before divorce, and elevated the family far above the degraded state of the heathen around them. But the objector falls back on the morals of Christendom, the civilization of the nineteenth century, and judges the laws of Moses by that standard. Very well. This is simply to say that our ideas have been raised to the standard of Christianity; and then the objection is that the laws of Moses are not so spiritual and elevated as the precepts of Christ. Our Lord himself asserts the same thing. He says Moses tolerated divorce because of the hardness of the people's hearts; but from the beginning it was not so. And Paul (Hebrews viii. 6, 7) alleges the imperfection of Moses' law as a good reason for the introduction of a better covenant. The Bible itself then recognizes an advance from good to better, the path of the just shining more and more unto the perfect day. But then it is asked, Is God the Author of an imperfect law? Could God give a defective code of morals? The question entirely misses the design of God's revelation as a process of educating his children. Suppose we ask, Could God speak Hebrew--a language so defective in philosophical terms? God must condescend to the mental, and even, in some degree, to the moral level of mankind if he is to reach us at all. All education must begin low, and rise from step to step. The A, B, C of morals must be first learned. The whole analogy of providence shows this to be God's method of procedure. The kingdom of God is like the growing seed; first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. Gradual, and even slow, progress is the law of nature. Our modern civilization, which is so proudly invoked, is very far indeed from any such perfection as might enable us to look down upon Moses' legislation with contempt. We have only to name our standing armies and conscriptions; our national promises to pay debts, which no one ever expects to pay; our laws regarding drunkenness, and our revenues derived from the licenses for the sale of liquors; the utter failure of our attempts to put down betting, gambling, and stock and gold speculations, prostitution, bribery, frauds, and plundering of the public funds; to convince ourselves that there are many things law can not do, even in this nineteenth century of civilization. Our little progress, such as it is, has not been made all at once, or by one great advance. God gives mankind blessings by degrees. He gave the mariner's compass to the fourteenth century, the printing press and America to the fifteenth, the Bible in the vulgar tongue to the sixteenth, parliamentary government to the seventeenth, the steam engine to the eighteenth, railroads and the telegraph to the nineteenth. One might as well cavil at his providence for not giving the Hebrews sewing machines, Hoe's printing presses, and daily newspapers, when they entered into Canaan, as for delaying to give them the elements of Christian civil law, and social life, before they were able to value and to use them. As it was, Moses' law was so far in advance of their own ideas of propriety, and so far in advance of those of all the people around them, that they were continually falling back from it, and rebelling against it, and subjecting themselves to the discipline which God had threatened for disobedience. Thus they were kept ever looking upward to a higher model. Their transgressions must be confessed as sins, and atoned for by bloody sacrifices, declaring the transgressor worthy of death. Their consciences were educated to the idea of holiness, an idea utterly wanting among the heathen; and the law became a powerful motive power, urging them to higher and holier lives, and preparing them to receive the higher and holier example and precepts of Christ. The imperfection, then, of the law of Moses, so far from being an evidence of the human origin of the Bible, is a mark of the infinite wisdom of the great Lawgiver in adapting his legislation to the condition of his people; and while tolerating for the time then present an imperfect state of society, just as at this time he tolerates a Christendom far below the gospel standard, yet implanting in the minds of his people principles of righteousness and love which were certain eventually to raise them to the high level of the kingdom of God. This, then, is simply an instance of the general law of divine development. 4. Again, however, it is contended, "that the morality of the Old Testament was narrow and bigoted; requiring, indeed, the observance of charity to the covenant people, but allowing Israel to hate all others as enemies, and as well expressed in the text, _Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy._"[164] But let it be noticed, that this is no text of Scripture, nor does our Lord so quote it. He does not say it is so written, but, _ye have heard it said by them of old time_. The first part is God's truth; the second is the devil's addition to it, which Christ clears away and denounces. It were easy to quote multitudes of passages from the Old Testament, commanding Israel to show kindness to the stranger, and a whole host of promises, that in them all the families of the earth should be blessed; any one of which would sufficiently refute the foolish notion, that the morality of the Old Testament was geographical, and its charity merely national. But the simple fact, that the most sublime sanction of world-wide benevolence which ever fell even from the lips of Christ himself, was uttered by him as the sum and substance of the teachings of the Old Testament, conclusively confutes this dogma. The Golden Rule was no new discovery, unless its Author was mistaken, for he says: "_Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them_: FOR THIS IS THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS."[165] He declares the very basis and foundation of the whole Old Testament religion to be those eternal principles of godliness and charity, which he quotes in the very words of the law: "_Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets._"[166] The law and the prophets, then, taught genuine world-wide benevolence, Christ being witness; and the moral law of the Old Testament is the moral law of the New Testament, if we may believe the Lawgiver. 5. Still, it is alleged, "it can not be denied that the writers of the Old Testament breathed a spirit of vindictiveness, and imprecated curses on their enemies, utterly at variance with the precepts of the gospel, which command us to bless and curse not; and even in their solemn devotions uttered sentiments unfit for the mouth of any Christian; nor that their views of the character of God were stern and gloomy, and that they represented the Hebrew Jehovah as an unforgiving and vengeful being, utterly different from the kind and loving Father whom Christ delighted to reveal." This, if the truth were told, is the grand objection to the Old Testament. The holy and righteous sin-hating God, presented in its history, is the object of dislike. The God who drowned the old world, destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah by fire from heaven, commanded the extermination of the lewd and bloody Canaanites, thundered his curses against sinners of every land and every age, saying, "_Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them_," requiring all the people to say _Amen_,[167] is not the God whom Universalists can find in their hearts to adore. A mild, easy, good-natured being, who would allow men to live and die in sin without any punishment, would suit them better. They try to think that he is altogether such an one as themselves, and an approver of their sin. But it is worth while to inquire whether the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ be in this respect anything different from the Hebrew Jehovah, or whether the gospel has in the least degree lessened his displeasure against iniquity. Paul thought not that he was a different person, when he said: "_We know him who hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord._"[168] Jesus thought not that he was more lenient to sinners when he cried, "_Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto thee, Bethsaida! * * * Thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell * * * It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee._"[169] It is not in the Old Testament, but in the New, that we are told that Jesus himself shall come "_In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power._"[170] It is not an old, bigoted Hebrew prophet giving a vision of the Hebrew Jehovah, but the beloved disciple who leaned on Jesus' breast, picturing the Savior himself, who says: "_He was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood; and his name is called the Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations; and he shall rule them with a rod of iron; and he treadeth the wine-press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God._"[171] Let no man imagine that the New Testament offers impunity to the wicked, or that the Old Testament denies mercy to the repenting sinner, or that Christ exhibited any other God than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob--the same Hebrew Jehovah who _commands the wicked to forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and to return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon_.[172] It is exceedingly strange that those who dwell upon the paternal character of God, as a distinctive feature of Christ's personal teaching, should have forgotten that the hymns of the Old Testament church, a thousand years before his coming, were full of this endearing relation; that it was by the first Hebrew prophet that the Hebrew Jehovah declared, "_Israel is my son, even my first-born; and I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me_;"[173] and that by the last of them he urges Israel to obedience by this tender appeal: "_If I be a father, where is mine honor?_"[174] It was not Christ, but David--one of those gloomy, stern, Hebrew prophets--who penned that noble hymn to our Father in heaven, which Christ illustrated in his Sermon on the Mount: "The Lord is merciful and gracious, Slow to anger and plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide, Neither will he keep his anger forever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins, Nor rewarded us according to our iniquities; For as the heaven is high above the earth, So great is his mercy to them that fear him; As far as the East is from the West, So far hath he removed our transgressions from us. Like as a father pitieth his children, So the Lord pitieth them that fear him."--Psalm ciii. It is utter ignorance of the Old Testament which prompts any one to imagine that it presents any other character of God than "_The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty._"[175] This is the name which God proclaimed to Moses, and this is the character which he proclaimed in Christ, when he cried on the cross: "_My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel._"[176] Justice and mercy are united in Christ dying for the ungodly. It is untrue to say that the prophets of the Old Testament were actuated by a spirit of malice, or of revenge for personal injuries as such, in praying for, or prophesying destruction on the inveterate enemies of God and his cause.[177] Of all Scripture characters, David has been most defamed for vindictiveness; but surely never was man more free from any such spirit, than the persecuted fugitive, who, with his enemy in his hand in the cave, and his confidential advisers urging him to take his life, cut off his skirt instead of his head; and on another occasion prevented the stroke which would have smitten the sleeping Saul to the earth, and sent back even the spear and the cruse of water, the trophies of his generosity. When cursed himself, and defamed as a vengeful shedder of blood by the Benjamite, he could restrain the fury of his followers, protect the life of the ruffianly traitor, and thus appeal to God as the witness of his innocence: "O Lord, my God! if I have done this, If there be iniquity in my hands, If I have rewarded evil to him that was at peace with me, Yea I have delivered him that without cause was mine enemy."[178] It is true that he does bitterly curse several living persons; of whom it is observable that some had done him no sort of personal injury; as Doeg the Edomite--the Nana Sahib of his day--who anticipated the scenes of Cawnpore, in the streets of Nob, by mercilessly butchering unoffending men, helpless women, and innocent babes. But surely no friend of humanity can imagine that it is improper that the chief magistrate of Israel, anointed for the very purpose of being a terror to evil doers, should express his righteous indignation against such atrocities; nor confound such public execration with the petty gnawings of private revenge. Still less can the fearer of God doubt the propriety of his expressing by the mouth of his prophet, that displeasure he signally displayed by his providence, scathing and blasting the accursed wretch into a terror to all bloody and deceitful men who shall read their own warning in his doom. "God shall likewise destroy thee forever, He shall take thee away and pluck thee from thy dwelling, And root thee out of the land of the living."[179] We have the most solemn assurance, that every one of the historical incidents of Scripture is recorded for our instruction, and that every prophecy gives a lesson to all ages. "_Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come._"[180] The imprecations of the Bible against individual sinners are the gibbets on which these malefactors are hung up for warning to all men to flee the crimes that brought them to that fate. It is put beyond the possibility of doubt, by the combined testimony of the Lord and his apostles, that by far the greater number of the curses which David uttered, he spoke in the person of Christ himself, of whom he was a type; and with direct reference to the crimes and punishment of his enemies. Thus the Sixty-ninth Psalm, and the One hundred and ninth, pre-eminently the cursing Psalms, are most explicitly and repeatedly asserted by Christ, by Peter, and by John, to belong to Christ, and to express his very words: "_This scripture must needs have been fulfilled, which the Holy Ghost by the mouth of David spake before concerning Judas, which was guide to them that took Jesus. * * * For it is written in the book of Psalms, Let his habitation be desolate, and let no man dwell therein. And, His bishopric let another take._"[181] If any one feels reluctant to imagine that such cursings should fall from the lips of the merciful Savior, let him remember that the most awful curse which shall ever fall on the ears of terrified men shall be pronounced by Jesus himself, "_Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels._"[182] The solemn facts of the Bible will not accommodate themselves to our likes and dislikes. Christ loves righteousness and hates iniquity; in the Bible he takes leave to say so, and he expects his people to share his feelings, and to be willing to express them on fit occasions. Personal revenge, and curses for mere personal injuries, are forbidden in the New Testament as well as in the Old. But it was an apostle of Jesus Christ who cried, "_If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be accursed. Though we or an angel from heaven bring any other gospel unto you, let him be accursed._"[183] Nor until we can in some measure feel this holy indignation against sin, and this burning desire to see all tyranny, superstition, bribery, licentiousness, and profanity, crushed and banished from the earth, can we pray in truth "_Thy kingdom come._" Still less can we be prepared for the rejoicings of heaven over the conquest of the enemies of God and man: "_Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath avenged you on her._" Reader, you hope to go to heaven; but it may be a different place from what you dream of. Did you ever study the employment of the saints there? Are you washed from your sins? Is your mind purified from your carnal notions? Unless a man be born again he can not see the kingdom of God. Are your likes and dislikes, your sentiments and sympathies, your understanding and your will, all brought into subjection to Christ? Can you heartily love and adore a sin-hating, sin-avenging God? Or do you shrink back in terror or dislike from God's denunciations of wrath against the wicked? Would your benevolence lead you to deal alike with the righteous and the wicked; and to abhor the thought of destroying them that destroy the earth? Then how will you join in the hallelujahs of heaven; for God's judgments are the themes of thanksgiving and praise from saints and angels there, and this is their song: "_Hallelujah, salvation, and glory, and honor, and power, unto the Lord, our God, for true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hands. And again they said, Hallelujah! And her smoke rose up for ever and ever. And the four and twenty elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshiped God that sat on the throne, saying, Amen! Hallelujah! And a voice came out of the throne, saying, Praise our God, all ye his servants; and ye that fear him, both small and great. And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Hallelujah!_ FOR THE LORD GOD OMNIPOTENT REIGNETH."[184] And now, if this be the character of God, if he be indeed one who hates iniquity, and punishes impenitent sinners, we need not wonder that those who spake his word should utter imprecations, either in the Old Testament or in the New; but rather bless the mercy which warns before justice strikes, which hangs the red lantern over the abyss, and which seeks by the terrors of the Lord to persuade men from perdition. The curses of the Bible are denounced against the enemies of God, with the design of showing sinners their danger, and leading them to repentance. The conclusion, then, of our investigation is, that the Old Testament is the Word of God no less than the New; that it is in no respect contrary to it; that all its parts--the law and the prophets, and the Psalms--are of divine authority; that all its contents were written by divine direction, whether prophecy or history, ceremony or morality, promise or threatening, curses or blessings. It is of the Old Testament principally that the Holy Ghost declares: "_All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works._"[185] FOOTNOTES: [120] Parker's Absolute Religion, p. 205. [121] Parker's Discourses on Religion, p. 161. [122] Macknight's Doctrine of Inspiration, p. 161, and seq. [123] Macknight's Doctrine of Inspiration, p. 192, etc. [124] Essays and Reviews, page 121. [125] John, chap. x. 25, 38. [126] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1864, p. 254. Annual Cyclopædia, 1863, p. 377. [127] Mastodon Giganteus, Boston, 1855, p. 199. [128] For a fuller discussion of the subject, and references to the authorities, which our space here forbids, I must refer the curious reader to the _Princeton Review_, Vol. XL. No. 4, where I have noticed every fact bearing on the subject up to that date; merely adding that no new fact, establishing man's remote antiquity, has been established up to this date, September 21, 1874. [129] Familiar Lectures, page 456. [130] Authenticity of the Pentateuch, II. 150. [131] Creation's Testimony to its God. London, 1867, page 338. [132] See this subject more fully discussed in chapter XII., Telescopic Views of Scripture. [133] Osburn's Monumental History. [134] Hebrew Monarchy, 160. [135] Prof. Rawlinson's Modern Skepticism, 285. [136] Ancient Monarchies I. 65. [137] W. R. Cooper, Secretary Biblical Archæological Society, in _Faith and Free Thought_, page 257. [138] Rawlinson's Illustrations of Scripture. [139] 2 Kings, chap. iv. 2 Chronicles, chap. xx. [140] Recovery of Jerusalem, page 496, Gunsberg's Essay. [141] Josephus against Apion, Book I. Sect. 8. Horne's Introduction Chap. ii. Sect. 1. [142] Isaiah, chap. iii. 16. Ezekiel, chap. xviii. 12. [143] Jeremiah, chaps. xxi., and xxii. 16. [144] Jeremiah, chap. xxii. 13. [145] Jeremiah, chap. xxxiv. [146] Ezra, chap. vi. 18. [147] Daniel, chap. ix. 11. [148] Joshua, chaps. xiii.-xix. [149] 1 Chronicles, chaps. i.-ix. Leviticus, chap. xxv. [150] Exodus, chap. xxi. 6. Deuteronomy, chap. i. 16; chap. xix. [151] Exodus, chap. xviii. 21. [152] Deuteronomy, chap. xx. Numbers, chap. x. 9. [153] Deuteronomy, chap. xxii. 8, 11, 12. Leviticus, chap. xi. [154] Preface to Exposition of the Apocalypse. [155] Luke, chap. xxiv. 25. [156] John, chap. v. 38, 39, 46, 47. [157] Matthew, chap. v. 17, 18. [158] Luke, chap. xxiv. throughout. [159] John, chap. xx. 30. [160] Luke, chap. xvi. 29. [161] Galatians, chap. iii. 21. [162] Job, chap. xix. 25. Psalm xvi. 10. Hebrews, chap. xi. 13-16. Daniel, chap. xii. 2, 3. [163] Matthew, chap. xxii. 31, 32. [164] Matthew, chap. v. 43. [165] Matthew, chap. vii. 12. [166] Matthew, chap. xxii. 35-40. [167] Deuteronomy, chap. xxvii. 26. [168] Hebrews, chap. x. 30. [169] Matthew, chap. xi. [170] 2 Thessalonians, chap. i. [171] Revelation, chap. xix. [172] Isaiah, chap. lv. [173] Exodus, chap. iv. 22. [174] Malachi, chap. i. [175] Exodus, chap. xxxiv. [176] Psalm xxii. [177] 2 Timothy, chap. iv. 14. [178] Psalm vii. [179] Psalms vii. and lii. and 2 Samuel, chaps. xvi., xxi. and xxii. [180] 1 Corinthians, chap. x. [181] John, chap. ii. 17; chap. xv. 25; chap. xix. 28. Acts, chap. i. 20. [182] Matthew, chap. xxv. 41. [183] Galatians, chap. i. 9. 1 Corinthians, chap. xvi. 22. Revelation, chaps. xix., xx. and xxi. [184] Revelation, chaps. xix., xx. and xxi. [185] 2 Timothy, chap. iii. 16, 17. CHAPTER X. INFIDELITY AMONG THE STARS. A little or superficial knowledge of philosophy may incline a man's mind to Atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.--BACON. When skeptics, who are determined not to believe in the Bible, find the historical evidences of its genuineness, authority, and inspiration, impregnable against the assaults of criticism, they turn their attention to some other mode of attack, and of late years have selected their weapons from the physical sciences. The argument thus raised is, that the Bible can not be the Word of God, because it asserts facts contrary to the teachings of science. Of this warfare Voltaire may be considered the leader, in his celebrated attack on the chemical processes recorded in Scripture; in which he exposed himself to the ridicule of all the chemists and metallurgists in Europe, by denying the possibility of dissolving the golden calf; the solution of gold being actually found in every gilder's shop in Paris, and known even to coiners and forgers, for hundreds of years before he made this notable discovery. The result was ominous. The whole circle of the sciences has been ransacked for such arguments, and especially has every new discovery been hailed by skeptics as an ally to their cause, until further acquaintance has demonstrated that the stranger, too, was in alliance with religion. Thus, when a few years ago, Geology began to upheave his titanic form, he was eagerly greeted as a being undoubtedly not of celestial, but rather of subterranean, or even of infernal origin, willing to employ his gigantic powers in the assault upon heaven, and able to overwhelm the Bible and the Church under the ruins of former worlds. But now that skeptics have discovered the proofs he gives of the presence of the Almighty on this world of ours, they are getting shy of his acquaintance, and are cultivating the society of some still more juvenile visitors from the chambers of animal magnetism and biology. The same scene will doubtless be acted over again; and these infantile strangers, when able to give distinct utterance to the facts of their developed consciousness, will bear testimony to the truth of God. Such objections to the Bible are very rarely brought forward by truly scientific men. It is a phenomenon, like the advent of a great comet, to find a man profoundly versed in science attack the Bible. Your third or fourth rate men of learning attain distinction in this field. An anti-Bible writer or lecturer has generally been promoted to that high eminence from the school-room, or the editorial sanctum of an unsuccessful newspaper; or his patients have not sufficiently appreciated his physic; or he has failed in getting a patent right for his wonderful perpetual motion; or possibly he has enlarged his practical knowledge of science in the laboratory of some college, or has had his head turned by being asked to hear the mathematical recitations during the sickness of some professor. But to hear of men like Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and Leibnitz, or Lyell, Mantell, Herschel, Agassiz, Hitchcock, Faraday, Balbo, Nichol, or Rosse, heading an attack upon Christianity, would be an unprecedented phenomenon. Such men are profoundly impressed with the thorough agreement between the facts of nature rightly observed, and the declarations of the Bible rightly interpreted. It is equally rare to hear of a specialist in any department of science assume Atheistic ground in that department; though a few of that class are willing to believe that some other department of science, of which they have no personal knowledge, favors Infidelity. Even Huxley, with all his nonsense about the identical composition of the protoplasm of the mutton chop, and that of the lecturer, denies, and disproves, spontaneous generation, and votes in the London School Board for the reading of the Bible. The leading Infidel writers, such as Comte and Spencer, are not distinguished by any personal scientific researches and discoveries; they are merely collectors and retailers, at second-hand, of other men's discoveries. The original scientific explorers and discoverers are few and modest. Nevertheless, the other class, being both the most numerous and the most noisy, make up by loquacity for their deficiency of science, and counterbalance their ignorance by their assurance. Such writers, assuming that they have outstripped all the philosophers of former days, will tell you how foolishly David, and Kepler, and Bacon, and Newton, and Herschel dreamed of the heavens declaring the glory of the Lord, and the firmament showing his handiwork; "while at the present time, and for minds properly familiarized with true astronomical philosophy, the heavens display no other powers than those of natural laws, and no other glory than that of Hipparchus, of Kepler, of Newton, and of all who have helped to discover them." Theology belongs only to the infancy of the human intellect; metaphysical philosophy is the amusement of youth; but the full-grown man has learned to relinquish both religion and reason, and comes to the "positive state of science in which the human mind, acknowledging the impossibility of obtaining absolute knowledge, abandons the search after the origin and destination of the universe, and the knowledge of the secret causes of phenomena." The crown of modern science is ultimately to be placed upon the brow of Atheism; but long before that eagerly desired achievement, the old Bible theology is to be buried beyond the possibility of a resurrection, under mountains of natural laws, and monuments of scientific discovery. These assertions, confidently made, and perseveringly reiterated in the ears of ungodly men ignorant of the facts, of impetuous youths eager to throw off the restraints of religion, of Christians weak in the faith, and even poured into the unsuspecting mind of childhood, produce the most painful results; and it becomes the imperative duty of the bishops of the Church of Christ not to allow them to pass unchallenged, but to convince the gainsayers, and stop the mouths of these unruly and vain talkers; or, if that be not possible, to make their folly manifest to all men. The implements for such a service are well tried and abundant, and the difficulty lies only in making a proper selection. At first view, the extinction of religion by science seems very unlikely. It is as unlikely that any thing that an Infidel says about religion should be true, as that a blind man should describe the sun correctly, or even read a chapter accurately, with the book open before him? I shall show you presently that learned Infidels make the grossest blunders respecting the plainest Scripture records of scientific facts. It is very unlikely that Infidels, who lay no claim to prophetic inspiration, should make any predictions about religion more reliable than those they have been telling so abundantly for two hundred years past, respecting the immediate overthrow of Christianity and the Bible; which, nevertheless, has been going on conquering new kingdoms every year, its missionaries outstripping scientific ardor in exploring the mysteries of African geography, honorably receiving the prizes which the Infidel Volney instituted for philological proficiency, and printing Bibles from Voltaire's printing-press. And it is very unlikely that these physical sciences, so long worshipers in the temple of God, should now become impious; as unlikely as that Hitchcock, or McCosh, or Hodge, or Barnes should now, in their old days, renounce the Bible, and blaspheme God. What! astronomy, and zoology, and botany, and ethnography, that were suckled at the breast of the Bible, raise their hands against the mother that bore them! Incredible! These sciences made an early profession of religion; taught Sabbath-school in the days of Job, Zophar, and Elihu; wrote sacred poetry, and were licensed to preach, in the days of Solomon; poured forth prophetic raptures in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah; wrote volumes on the politics of Christianity in Babylon, and painted glorious visions of the victories of the Lamb of God, and dazzling views of the landscapes of paradise restored, in Patmos; employed the gigantic intellect of Newton, the elegant pen of Paley, the eloquence of Chalmers, Herschel's heaven-piercing eye, and Miller's muscular arm, to guard the outer courts of the sanctuary, while they sung sublime anthems to the music of David's harp within. Have they now, after such a life of devotion, relinquished all these sublimities and beatitudes, taken lodgings in the sty, and renounced their faith in God, and hope of heaven, for the Infidel maxim, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die?" God forbid! On the contrary, all matured science glorifies its Creator. As a specimen of the testimony of matured science to religion, let us look at the progress of astronomy, as it has successively swept away one Atheistic theory after another, answered anti-Bible objections, and illustrated promises couched in heavenly figures, long incomprehensible to the Church. If, in order to present something like a fair outline of the bearings of astronomy on modern Atheism, we should have occasion to repeat, expand, and illustrate some things already introduced in previous chapters, the repetition won't hurt us. A good story is nothing the worse for being twice told; and the story of our opponents is nothing but a ceaseless repetition of the Atheism of twenty centuries. The progress of astronomical science has swept away the alleged facts on which all systems of Atheism have been based. 1. _It has refuted the fundamental dogma of Atheism, that the universe is infinite, and therefore self-existent._ The assertion is confidently made by Atheists and Pantheists, that the universe has no boundaries; not merely none which we can see, but that it actually fills all immensity; suns succeeding suns, and firmament clustering beyond firmament, throughout infinite space. It is indispensable for the Atheist not only to assert, but to prove this to be the fact, if he would convince himself, or any other person, that the universe had no Creator, but exists by the necessity of its own nature; for that which exists by the necessity of its own nature must exist in all time, and in every place. No reason can be given why self-existent suns, planets, and moons should exist in any one portion of space, and not exist in any other similar portion of space. For if such a reason could be given, that reason must show a cause for their existence in the one place, and their non-existence in another; and that cause must have existed before the universe, and must have been a cause sufficient to produce the effect. This sufficient cause includes ability to produce, wisdom to arrange, and force to put in motion all the powers of the universe; qualities which reside only in an intelligent being. This is the cause which the Bible asserts when it says, "In the beginning GOD created the heavens and the earth," and which Atheists deny when they assert that "the universe is eternal and infinite." Now, this fundamental article of the creed of Infidels is utterly incapable of proof. If the fact were really so, they never could prove it. They acknowledge no revelation from an infinite understanding, but found their belief on the knowledge of a number of finite and ignorant beings. Before they are competent to pronounce upon the extent of the universe, they must explore it thoroughly; which, when they shall have done, they will have demonstrated that it has boundaries, seeing they have discovered them; but, if they have not thoroughly explored the universe, they can not say that it is infinite, because they do not know. The very utmost, then, which could possibly be asserted on the matter would be, not that the universe has no boundaries, but that man has never reached them. As in the case of ocean soundings, if we can not find bottom, we are not therefore to conclude that there is none, but that our line is not long enough, or our lead not heavy enough to reach it. It were a logical absurdity to say, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts--that any number of finite parts could compose an infinite universe. Each sun or planet is a finite object, and any possible number of them can be counted in a sufficient time. It is impossible that any number can be infinite; for we are not using the word infinite here in the loose sense in which it is used by mathematicians, when they speak of an infinite series; that is, a series which, though it has no end, has a beginning; but in the strict sense of something having neither beginning nor end. A beginning of the universe, either in space or time, is the very thing the Atheist denies. The same objection applies to the allegation, that infinite space is full of ether, air, gas, nebulæ, or any other kind of matter. It is an assertion incapable of proof; and therefore thoroughly unscientific; as all Infidel theories are. But if it could be proven that every part of space accessible to our telescopes is full of an ether whose undulations transmit light, as we believe it can, that would be only a proof of the finitude of matter. That ether consists of parts whose movements can be measured and numbered; and no possible multitude of such parts can amount to the infinite. While reason thus enables us to show this dogma of the infinity of the universe to be theoretically improbable, and logically irrational, science has lately taken a more decisive step, and demonstrated it to be actually false. The universe has boundaries, and we have seen them. The proof is simple, and easily demonstrable. That broad band of luminous cloud which stretches across the heaven, called the Milky Way, consists of millions of stars, so small and distant that we can not see the individual stars, and so numerous that we can not help seeing the light of the mass; just as you see the outline of the forest at a distance, but are unable to distinguish the individual trees. Besides this mass of stars to which our solar system belongs, there are thousands of smaller similar clouds in various parts of the heavens, which have successively been shown to consist of multitudes of stars. But all around these star-clouds the clear blue sky is discovered by the naked eye. Now, it is easy to perceive, that if all the regions of infinite space were filled either with self-luminous suns, or planets capable of reflecting light, or luminous nebulæ, or comets of gaseous consistency, at such distances as the Milky Way, or any other star-cloud demonstrates to be safe and practicable, we should see no blue sky at all; but the whole vault of heaven would present that whitish light resulting from the mingling of the rays of multitudes of stars, planets, and comets, which the Milky Way does actually exhibit. No matter how small or how distant these stars, _if they were only infinitely numerous_, it is impossible that there could be any point in the heavens unilluminated by their rays, even although the stars themselves were invisible to our eyes, or even to our telescopes. The whole heaven would be one vast Milky Way. Or rather, as Humboldt reasons, "If the entire vault of heaven were covered with innumerable strata of stars, one behind the other, as with a widespread starry canopy, and light were undiminished in its passage through space, the sun would be distinguished only by its spots, the moon would appear as a dark disc, and amid the general blaze not a constellation would be visible."[186] It would appear also to follow, as a necessary consequence, that such an infinite multitude of blazing suns must generate a heat compared with which the general conflagration would be cool and comfortable. But the telescope shows us a state of matters vastly different from this. It shows us, in fact, that space, so far from being occupied with suns and stars, is mostly empty. Our universe is only a little island in the great ocean of infinite space. Though the telescope discovers multitudes of stars where the naked eye sees none, yet they are, in far the greater number of instances, "_seen projected on a perfectly dark heaven, without any appearance of intermixed nebulosity_."[187] And even through the Milky Way, and the other nebulæ, the telescope penetrates, through "_intervals absolutely dark, and completely void of any star, of the smallest telescopic magnitude_."[188] It may assist us to understand the full import of this declaration, to remember that Lord Rosse's large telescope clearly defines any object on the moon's surface as large as the Custom House. Its power of penetrating space surpasses our power of imagination, but is represented by saying, that light, which flashes from San Francisco to London quicker than you can close your eye and open it again, requires _millions of years_ to travel to our earth from the most distant star-cloud discoverable by this telescope.[189] If a galaxy like this of ours existed anywhere within this amazing distance, that telescope would discover its existence. It has, in fact, augmented the universe visible to us, 125,000,000 times, and thus made us feel that not merely this world, which constitutes our earthly all, and yon glorious sun, which shines upon it, but all the host of heaven's suns, and planets, and moons, and firmaments, which our unaided eyes behold, are but as a handful of the sand of the ocean shore compared with the immensity of the universe. But ever, and along with this, it has shown us the ocean as well as the shore, and revealed boundless regions of darkness and solitude stretching around and far away beyond these islands of existence. The telescope, then, enlarges and confirms our views of the extent of the unoccupied portions of space. If there were only one dark point of the heavens no larger than the apparent magnitude of the smallest star, this one unoccupied space would sufficiently disprove the infinity of the universe, inasmuch as there would be a portion of space of boundless length, and of a diameter not less than the diameter of the earth's orbit, say 190,000,000 miles, in which stars might exist, as they do in its borders, but yet do not. But the argument becomes utterly overwhelming, when the attempt is made to calculate the proportion of space occupied by the stars to that left unoccupied. Whether we take Herschel's computation, that the nebulæ cover one two hundred and seventieth part of the superficies of the visible heaven,[190] or Struve's supposition of the existence of a star subtending no measurable angle, in every part of the visible sky as large as the surface of the moon, the vast disproportion of the universe, to the space in which it is placed, forces itself upon our notice. For, upon the largest of these computations, the proportion of existence to empty space is mathematically proved to be not greater than as the cube of one to the cube of two hundred and sixty-nine; that is to say, there is room for 19,395,109 such universes as this of ours in that small part of infinite space open to the view of Herschel's telescopes. But when we come to consider the vastness of these regions of darkness, over which no light has traveled for twenty millions of years, and remember also that astronomers have looked clear through the nebulæ, and find that they bear no more cubical proportion to the infinite darkness behind them than the sparks of a chimney do to the extent of the sky against which they seem projected, so far from imagining the universe to be infinite, we stand confounded at its relative insignificance, and are convinced that it bears no more proportion to infinite space than a fishing-boat does to the Atlantic Ocean. There is no possible evasion of this great fact, by any contradictory hypothesis. It can not be objected "that stars may exist at infinite distances, whose light has not yet reached the limits of our universe." If they do, they did not exist from eternity, for there is no possible distance over which light could not have traveled, during eternal duration. But their eternal existence is the very thing which the Atheist is concerned to prove. Grant that infinite space is filled with worlds _which had a beginning_, and their necessary existence instantly falls, and we are compelled to seek for a cause of their beginning of existence; that is to say, a Creator. Nor will it answer the purpose to say, "that for anything we know to the contrary, these dark regions may be filled with dark stars." If the fact were so, it is equally fatal to the dogma of self-existence. Some stars shine; others are dark. Why so? Wherefore this difference? Variety is an effect, and demands a prior cause. Were there only two stars in the sky, or two substances on the earth, and those unlike in any particular, that plurality, and that variety, would prove that they could not be infinite or self-existent, but dependent upon some cause for their existence, and for their variety of form. But we do know many things contrary to the notion that the dark regions of infinite space may be full of dark stars. Light is not the only indication of the presence of a star. The attraction of gravity, which is wholly independent of light, is a proof quite as certain and satisfactory to the astronomer. The presence of stars and planets too faint to be discovered by the naked eye, and of one, the planet Neptune,[191] as far distant from the planet disturbed by its attraction as the earth is from the sun, was ascertained, and its place pointed out by Adams and Le Verrier, _before it was seen_. If the dark interplanetary spaces, then, were full of dark attracting bodies, the perturbations of the other planets would discover their existence. So the presence of some invisible stars at much greater distances from their visible associates has been discovered by Bessel,[192] and it is quite possible that a dark firmament may yet be discovered, containing as great a number of dark stars as we now behold of luminaries; another group of islets in the ocean of infinite space. But the very facts which will prove their existence will disprove their infinity; for we can know their presence only by their perturbation of the proper motions of the visible stars; but if infinite space were full of dark bodies, the visible stars would have no room to move at all. It is easily demonstrable, that if infinite space were filled with dark stars, the equilibrium and coherence of our galaxy, and of all other clusters of stars, would be destroyed. The existence of nebulæ, and clusters, and the revolutions of the binary stars, are conclusive proof that the dark parts of infinite space are not full of dark attracting bodies. Nor can the Atheist here raise his usual argument from unknown facts, and say that, "far beyond the range of our most powerful telescopes, a boundless expanse of firmaments may exist." It concerns not our present argument whether such exist or not. Whatsoever discoveries may be made to eternity, of firmaments, ten thousand times ten thousand times larger than we now behold, _they can never bear the smallest proportion to the infinite space in which they exist_. Beyond these islets will extend gulfs and oceans immeasurable. Our argument, however, has no concern with the unknown possible, but with the actual fact--visible to the naked eye and confirmed by the telescope--that there is a portion of space in which millions of universes such as this might exist with safety, yet they do not. Worlds, therefore, do not exist by the necessity of their own nature, wherever there is room for them, but must have had some pre-existent, external, and supernatural cause of their existence in this place and not in other places. This implies choice--will--God. The physical refutation of the self-existence of the universe is completed by the discovery, _that all the orbs of heaven, as well as the earth, are in motion, and that an orderly and regulated motion_.[193] The fact need not be illustrated, for it is not denied. The consequence is inevitable. That which is self-existent must be unchangeable; for change is an effect, and demands a cause; and the cause must exist before the effect, and produce it. Whatsoever is changeable, then, is a product of a prior cause, and so not self-existent. But every part of the universe is changeable, for it is in motion, which is a change of place; and, therefore, is not self-existent, but the product of a prior cause. Professor Fick, who was some time since called from Zurich to fill the professorship of physiology at Wurzburg, and who is known by his experiments on muscular physics, in a recent work on the transformation of force, brings out the argument in proof of the non-eternity of our universe in a new form. He shows that heat is continually being lost by radiation; and when mechanical force is converted into heat _some_ of that heat can never be brought back to be mechanical force. And as this change from mechanical force to heat is ever going on, all force must at last turn into heat, in which case all difference of temperature would be lost and universal stagnation and death would be the result. He then concludes in the following words, which we quote from _Nature_, Macmillan's weekly: "We are come to this alternative; either in our highest, or most general, our most fundamental scientific abstractions some great point has been overlooked; or the universe will have an end, and must have had a beginning; could not have existed from eternity, but must at some date, not infinitely distant, have arisen from something not forming part of the chain of natural causes, _i. e._, must have been created."[194] To this it has been replied, that motion is the normal condition of matter; arising from the force of gravitation, acting in and upon the various bodies composing the universe; and mathematical calculations have been attempted to show how vortices, and spiral motions, could be produced by the force of gravitation, and the mutual resistances of the atoms originally composing the universe. But this attempt is easily seen to be a failure. The attraction of gravitation alone can not possibly produce any such motion as we behold in the heavens; nor can it originate, nor sustain, any kind of eternal motion whatever. For the attraction of gravitation is always in right lines; but there is no rectilinear motion in the heavens; all celestial motions are curvilinear. Nor can the attraction of gravitation account for the maintenance of any kind of eternal motion. Its tendency is to draw all bodies to the center of gravity, and to keep them there, in one vast heap, by the force of their mutual attraction; thus bringing all motion to an eternal rest. To this it is now replied that motion is the equivalent of light, heat, electricity, and chemical reaction; all of which are convertible into motion. These are properties of matter, and inseparable from it, and so as eternal as itself. We have already disproved the eternity of matter; but if, for the sake of argument, it were granted, yet would not the regulated and orderly motions of the universe be thereby accounted for. For these forces either exactly balance the force of gravitation, or they do not. If they do not, and their repulsion prevails, by even the slightest degree, the particles of matter had been driven away into infinite space millions of years ago, and suns, and planets, and atheistic philosophers, would have vanished like the baseless fabric of a vision. But if the attraction of gravitation had prevailed, by even the weight of an ounce, long ages ago sun, moon and stars would have rushed together into one vast mountain mass, whose attraction would have been so great, that no living creature could move upon its surface, and whose parts would be compressed into a density compared with which quicksilver would be lighter than cork. But if, on the other hand, it be alleged, that these inherent forces of matter exactly balance its power of gravitation--with which they have no other apparent relation--then the argument is irresistible, that these grains of sand and drops of water and globes of granite being unequal to such calculations, there was some calculating engineer at work arranging the motions of the stars. No mechanical law is a sufficient cause for this motion. To allege that a power of orderly, regulated motion--and there is no other sort of motion in heaven or earth--is an inherent property of matter, is simply to insult our common sense, and overturn the foundation of all reason. For we have no knowledge of matter, and can have none, more certain than we have of the constitution of our own minds, which requires us to trace up every change among material objects to _the energy and will of a person_ capable of planning and effecting the change. To refer us to the law of gravity is not to give us a cause for the motions of the heavenly bodies, but only a _name_; for law is only _a rule of action_. We demand a lawgiver--an agent--a _force_, capable of producing effects. When the law of projectiles makes a cannon-ball, and projects it, we will believe that the law of gravity made the worlds, and moves them. "Descending within the mind's interior chambers, I find no conviction so sure of the existence of an external world, as is my belief in the reality of _power_--of something that sustains succession, and causes order. Again, then, whence this idea, and what is it? What this attribute with which I endow material laws, and raise them into _forces_? Now, in my apprehension, the strictest scrutiny can not obtain for these inquiries any reply save one; we _primarily_ connect the idea of _power_ with no change or movement, except an act or determination of the FREE WILL; but from such acts, that idea is inseparable. If, therefore, in order to explain the progress of material things, we require the agency of _efficient causes_, is not this a direct and solemn recognition--through all form and transiency--of the necessity of an _ever-present creative power_; a power requisite and necessary to uphold--to renew the universe every moment--or, rather, to prolong creation by the persistence of the creative act? And, in very truth, startling though it be, such is the only and ultimate scientific idea of the divine omnipresence. Law is not even the Almighty's minister; the order of the material world, however close and firm, is not merely the Almighty's ordinance. The _forces_, if so we name them, which express that order, are not powers which he has evolved from the silences, and to whose guardianship he has committed all things, so that he himself might repose. No! above, below, around, _there_ is God; there his universal presence, speaking to finite creatures, in finite forms, a language which only the living heart can understand. In the rain and sunshine; in the soft zephyrs; in the cloud, the torrent, and the thunder; in the bursting blossom, and the fading branch; in the revolving season, and the rolling star; there is the infinite essence, and the mystic development of HIS WILL."[195] 2. _Scientific astronomy inexorably demolishes the Atheistic scheme for the arrangement of the solar system by accident, commonly known as Buffon's cosmogony._ "Buffon supposed that the force of a comet falling obliquely on the sun has projected to a distance a torrent of the matter of which it is composed, as a stone thrown into a basin causes the water which it contains to splash out. This torrent of matter, in a state of fusion, has broken into several parts, which have been arrested at different distances from the sun, according to their density, or the impetus they received. They then united in spheres, by the effect of the motion of rotation, and condensing by cold, have become opaque and solid planets and satellites."[196] This formation of worlds by accident, it is true, gave no reason for the form of their orbits, for their rotation on their axes, in one direction, and that, too, the direction of their motion, nor for several other matters, of which Infidels make little account, but about which plain men like to ask, namely: Where did the sun come from? What melted it down into a fluid state, fit to be splashed about? Where did the comet come from? And who threw it with so correct an aim through infinite space as exactly to hit the sun _in an oblique direction_. Creation, it seems, was nearly missed, after all. This chaotic theory never gained much respect from men of science, though its simplicity speedily opened its way among the vulgar, and it has ever been a favorite with the most ignorant class of Infidels, numbering thousands of warm advocates, even at the present day. It was thought to be very much corroborated by the discovery of the asteroids, and their supposed formation by the explosion of a larger body. There is a certain proportion observed in the distances of the orbits of the planets from each other--a breadth or gauge, as it were, on the celestial railroad. But there was the breadth of a track between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter on which no train ran, and this vacancy excited the curiosity of astronomers. In the first seven years of this century, three very small planets were discovered, running near this track; and Dr. Olbers, the discoverer of Pallas, finding that they were nearly in the same track, and sometimes crossed each other, and that they were diminutively small--bearing about the same proportion to a regular planet which a hand-car does to a freight train--imagined that they were formed by the explosion of a large planet; that the boiler of the large locomotive had burst, the fragments had all lighted upon the track again, in the shape of hand-cars, and the hand-cars had magnanimously resolved to keep running, and do the business of the line; and that, as there must have been material enough in the original planet to make some thousands of them, more would be discovered by watching two depots, at the crossings of the tracks, in the constellations Virgo and the Whale, where they must all pass. In fact, he did himself find another, very near one of these nodes; more recently many others have been found; and astronomers now expect to hear of one or two more every year. At first sight his theory seemed strengthened by every new discovery. It is true, reflecting men could not help wondering at such a marvelously regular explosion as would produce beautiful little orderly planets, going so regularly too, and all by accident. They never heard of the blowing up of a palace producing cottages, or the explosion of a steamboat throwing off the hurricane deck in the shape of whaleboats, or the bursting of a locomotive producing model engines, or even hand-cars. However, as the theory removed God out of sight, it was generally accepted and freely used by Infidels, to show that the world had no need of a Creator. But astronomers saw, that as each new asteroid had a track of its own, and ran to a different terminus, and the roads in which they ran were of different gauges and grades--one little asteroid, Pallas, running up and down a track inclined thirty-five degrees, just as speedily as the others--every new discovery increased the difficulty of accounting for their origin by explosion. But the discovery of the planet Hygeia, at a vast distance from the others, utterly overturned the explosion theory. Loomis says: "The difficulties in the way of our regarding these small planets, as fragments of a single body, were well nigh-insuperable before the discovery of Hygeia. This last discovery has probably given the death-blow to the theory of Olbers. The orbit of Hygeia completely incloses the orbits of several of the asteroids, its perihelion distance--that is, its least distance from the sun--exceeding the aphelion--or greatest distance--of Flora by _twenty-five millions of miles_. _No change of position of the orbits could, therefore, bring these orbits to a coincidence._"[197] The matter has been finally settled by the greatest of modern mathematicians, Le Verrier, who has subjected the eccentricities, distances, and inclinations of the orbits of the asteroids to a mathematical investigation, the result of which is as follows: "In the present state of things, these eccentricities and these inclinations are totally incompatible with Olbers' hypothesis, which supposed that the small planets--some of which were discovered even in his day--were produced from the wreck of a larger star, which had exploded. The forces necessary to launch the fragments of a given body in such different routes (whose existence we should be obliged to suppose) would be of such an improbable intensity, that the most limited mathematical knowledge could not but see its absurdity." He concludes the memoir by advancing four propositions, "which forever annihilate Olbers' hypothesis."[198] 3. _The progress of astronomical discovery has utterly refuted the notion of creation by natural law, known as the Development Theory, or the Nebular Hypothesis._ Scientific Infidels knew that there was too much order and regularity in the motions of the planets to allow any rational mind to ascribe these motions to accident, according to Buffon's notion. They saw that these movements must be regulated by law. La Place, an eminent mathematician, saw that there are at least five great regularities pervading the system, for which Buffon's theory gave no reason: 1. The planets all move in elliptical orbits, nearly circular. They might, on the contrary, have been as elongated as those of comets. 2. They revolve in orbits nearly in the plane of the sun's equator. They might have revolved in orbits inclined to it at any angle, or even in the plane of his poles. 3. They revolve around the sun all in the same direction, which is the direction of his rotation on his axis. 4. They rotate on their axes, also, so far as known, in the same direction. 5. The satellites (with the exception of those of Uranus) revolve around their primary planets, and also rotate on their axes, in the same normal direction. It was evident, even to the believers in chance, that so many regularities were not produced by accident. La Place found, by computing the chances by the formula of probabilities, that the chances were two millions to one against these regularities happening by chance, _and four millions to one in favor of these motions having a common origin_. The grand phenomenon being a motion of rotation in the whole system, of which the rotation of the sun is the central part, he thought if he could account for this, he could explain all the rest. He set out by supposing, that the sun and planets originally existed as a vast cloud of gaseous matter, intensely heated--a vast fire-mist--placed in a region of space much cooler, and that this cloud, by gradual cooling, and the pressure of its parts, settled down into solid forms. It was supposed that some portions of this cloud would begin to cool sooner than others, and so become solid sooner, and that the hot gas, rushing to the solid part, would form a vortex, which would set the cloud in motion around its center. As the speed of its rotation would increase, and the outside condense and grow solid before the inside, the cloud would whirl off the rings of solid matter, which would keep revolving in the same orbits in which they were cast off, and would revolve faster and faster as they grew cooler and more solid, till they broke up, by the force of their velocity, into smaller pieces; which fragments, in their turn, repeated the process, until the present number of planets and their satellites was produced.[199] This theory differs from Buffon's much as a low pressure engine, deriving most of its power from the condenser, differs from one of high pressure. La Place does not explode the boiler to make his planets, but merely runs his train so fast as to break an axle every now and then, when the wheel runs off with the velocity it has got, and keeps its track as well as if it had an engineer to guide it, grows into a little locomotive by dint of running, and after a while breaks an axle too--breaking is a hereditary failing of these suns and planets that had no God to make them--and the wheels thus thrown off supply it with moons and rings, like Saturn's. The illustration is not nearly so absurd as the theory, inasmuch as a locomotive is an incomparably less complicated contrivance than a planet. However the nonsense was cradled in the halls of philosophy by means of antiquity, and distance. As no fiction was too marvelous for the credence of the Greek, if it were only a hundred years old, or located beyond the Euxine, so to our development philosopher any impossibility may be accepted, if it can only be dissolved into gas, and located a good many millions of miles away; and to make it an article of faith on which he will risk his soul, it is only necessary to give it a remote antiquity. No Papist ever insisted more on antiquity as the solvent of all absurdity. Antiquity, distance, and expansion are his trinity, with which all absurdities become scientific facts. Herschel had discovered numbers of nebulæ, or luminous clouds, in the distant heavens shining with a distinct light, but which, with the highest magnifying power he could apply, presented no trace of stars. Some nebulæ, it is true, his largest telescope resolved, like our own Milky Way, into beds of distinct stars; but there were others--for instance, one in the belt of Orion--visible to the naked eye as a cloud, but which his forty feet telescope only displayed as a larger cloud, without any shape of stars. Now, reasoning upon the matter, he found that if these nebulæ were composed of stars as large as those distinctly visible, they must be immensely distant to be indistinguishable by his telescope, and exceedingly numerous and close together to give a cloud of light visible to the naked eye. In fact, the suns of those firmaments must be so close to each other as to present a blaze of glory, and complexities of revolution inconceivable to the dwellers on earth. But as this daring idea seemed incredible, even to his giant mind, he thought the appearance of these nebulæ might be more rationally accounted for by supposing that they were not stars at all, but simply clouds of gaseous matter, like the matter of comets, from which he supposed that stars were formed by a long process of condensation and solidification. He thought this theory was favored by the fact, that nebulæ are generally seen in those portions of the heavens that are not thickly strewn with stars; and also by the various forms of these clouds. Some were merely loose clouds, without any definite form; others seemed gathering toward the center. In some, of a roundish, or oval form, the central mass seemed well defined. In a few, the process seemed nearly complete, a bright star shining in the midst of a faint nebulous halo. Here, then, it was said, we see the whole progress of the growth of stars; their development from the gaseous nebulous fluid into solid, brilliant suns. La Place accepted Herschel's discoveries as conclusive proof of the truth of his theory, and it was generally accepted by the scientific world. Oddly enough, Infidels seem not to have noticed that those appearances of _condensation toward the center_, which seemed to Herschel so strongly in favor of his theory of the nebulous fluid, were diametrically opposed to La Place's requirements of _condensation at the circumference_; and these two contradictory notions were supposed to support each other, and to furnish a solid basis for the development hypothesis. This theory, as stated by Herschel, and expounded by Nichol, Dick, and other Christian writers, _is not necessarily Atheistical_. On the contrary, they allege that it furnishes us with greater evidences of the power of God, and gives us higher ideas of his wisdom, to suppose a system of creation by development, under natural law, than by a direct exercise of his will. Undoubtedly, had God so pleased he could have made suns from fire-mists, according to some plan which his infinite wisdom could devise, and his omnipotent power could execute; but it is beyond the possibilities even of omniscience and omnipotence to make worlds, or to make anything but nonsense, according to La Place's plan. Had God so pleased, to make firmaments grow as forests do, and if he should please to enable us to discover such celestial growth in some distant part of heaven, we should have the same kind of evidence of his being, power, wisdom, and goodness in this creation by natural law which we now have from his providence by natural law, in the growth of the fruits of the earth, and as much greater an amount of it as the heavens are greater than the earth. The first beginning of primeval elements demands a Creator. The contrivance of the law of development proclaims a Contriver. The force by which it operates--whether that of gravity or chemical reaction--must be the force of an Agent. _The development theory, then, fails to account for the origin of the universe, or even of our own world._ Herbert Spencer, its most eloquent expounder, admits this. He says: "It remains only to point out that while the genesis of the solar system, and of countless other systems like it, is thus rendered comprehensible, the ultimate mystery continues as great as ever. The problem of existence is not solved; it is simply removed farther back. The Nebular Hypothesis throws no light on the origin of diffused matter; and diffused matter as much needs accounting for as concrete matter. The genesis of an atom is not easier to conceive than the genesis of a planet. Nay, indeed, so far from making the universe a less mystery than before, it makes it a greater mystery. Creation by manufacture is a much lower thing than creation by evolution. A man can put together a machine, but he can not make a machine develop itself. The ingenious artisan, able as some have been, so far to imitate vitality as to produce a mechanical piano-forte player, may in some sort conceive how, by greater skill, a complete man might be artificially produced; but he is unable to conceive how such a complex organism gradually arises out of a minute, structureless germ. That our harmonious universe once existed potentially as formless, diffused matter, and has slowly grown into its present organized state, is a far more astonishing fact than would have been its formation after the artificial method vulgarly supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to argue from phenomena to noumena, may rightly contend that the Nebular Hypothesis implies a First Cause as much transcending 'the mechanical god of Paley,' as this does the fetish of a savage."[200] The Nebular Hypothesis, then, can not exist without God. However, as it seems to remove him to a great distance from this present world, both in space and time, it has become popular with Atheists. The Nebular Hypothesis, as presented by Atheists, _imagines a state of primeval matter as simple, or homogeneous, of which science presents no example, in heaven or on earth_. This homogeneous condition of matter is the very foundation of the theory. Spencer reasons at great length, that all progress is from the simple to the differentiated. And it is indispensable for the Atheists to prove that the primeval world was composed of matter perfectly simple and homogeneous. If they alleged that it was composed of several ingredients, nobody would believe them that this compound was eternal. There is no conviction of common sense stronger than that every compound has been put together by some compounder. They could not persuade a child that a plum pudding made itself, or that a steamship filled with passengers existed so from eternity, much less a planet with a much larger crew and company. They therefore alleged that the first matter of the universe was perfectly homogeneous and simple. When common people objected that no such thing was to be seen in this world nowadays, since all things here--stones, water, air, earth, plants, animals--are compounded and built up out of a great variety of matters, they claimed that this is the result of the growth of our planet; but that the nebulæ, which astronomers see far away in the sky, are young suns and planets, just beginning to condense, and that the gas they consist of is the genuine, simple, homogeneous matter out of which this world, and all worlds, originally made themselves. They thought the nebulæ were so very far away that nobody would ever go there to see and come back to contradict them; and so they were quite safe in pointing to them as examples of homogeneous matter. Now one does not see, if the nebula had been exactly what the development men assert--_simple, homogeneous matter_--_how they could ever have made such a composite world as this out of it_, or indeed how they could make anything but itself out of it. No chemical actions or reactions can begin in a simple substance; there must always be at least two simple substances to make a compound. Heating or cooling a simple substance will never make it a compound. You may heat water in a boiler and cool it again as often as you please, but your heating and cooling will never make coffee out of it, unless you put coffee into it. So you may heat and cool your simple nebula to all eternity, but you will never get coffee out of it, much less coffee and coffee-pot, china and company, with the biscuits and butter; all which, and a great deal more, our philosophers contrive to churn out of the primeval homogeneous nebula. But the progress of science has enabled us to show that the nebulæ, far from being simple, homogeneous matter, are compounded of as many ingredients as the flame of your lamp or gas light, which is combined of half a score of different substances. By the discovery of Spectrum Analysis we are able to analyze the chemical composition of the most distant flames, to tell whether they proceed from solids or gases in a state of combustion, and what are the gases and minerals consumed in them. As space forbids the details of this discovery here, I can only state the results, namely that some of the nebulæ consist of clouds of small solid stars, of which the nebula in Orion is an instance; but others consist of flames of gases, in all cases compound, and showing, besides the oxygenated flame, the lines which declare the presence of hydrogen, and of several metals. Thus it is proved, that no such eternal, homogeneous nebulæ are to be found in heaven, and consequently nobody could ever make worlds out of a substance which had no existence. This theory of development was always _a mere notion, a castle in the air_, and never could be anything more. To say that it was mere moonshine would be to give it far too respectable a standing; for moonshine has a real existence, and may be seen and felt. But nobody ever saw or felt a homogeneous nebula. Indeed, its inventor never pretended that he, or anybody else, ever saw one; or saw it sailing off into moons, and planets, and suns, or ever would see any such thing. No scientific man has ever pretended that it was an established fact, or anything more than a theory, a notion. Young people, who are invited to hazard their souls on the strength of this miscalled scientific theory, should remember that it is not science, which means something a man knows, but merely a theory, which is some notion which he imagines. _It is an unsatisfactory notion._ It does not answer the purpose of its inventors. As we have already seen, it gives us no account of the origin of the homogeneous matter of the nebula. It gives no answer to the questions, How did it get to be so hot, while all the space around it was so cold? Is the fire that heated it burning still, or is it exhausted for want of fuel? Were the germs of all the plants and animals in it while it was blazing at a white heat? If they were, how did they escape being burnt to ashes? If they were not, where did they come from? For there was nothing but that nebula then in existence. Did it contain within itself all the principles of things, all the forces now found in the worlds which grew out of it? If so, how came they there? If not, how did attraction, and repulsion, vegetable life, animal life, intellect, and free will, work themselves into that cloud of homogeneous gas? Professor Tyndall thus exposes the absurdity of the supposition that the nebula contained the elements of mind: "For what are the core and essence of this hypothesis? Strip it naked and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the noble forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanisms of the human body, but the human mind itself--emotion, intellect, will, and all these phenomena, were once latent in a fiery cloud. Surely the mere statement of such a notion is more than a refutation."[201] _It was only one of several contradictory notions._ Thus a writer in the _Atlantic Monthly_, so far from accepting the notion that the sun and earth are solidifying and cooling down, as explanatory of the facts revealed by astronomy and geology, infers the very contrary from the acknowledged facts, namely, that we are coming up to the nebular condition, rather than developing from it. He writes as follows: "The earth is progressing by excessively slow changes toward the solar and nebulous condition. Its history is a repetition of the solar, and a time must arrive when the surface, becoming incandescent, will be obscured only by casual dark pits in a brilliant atmosphere, a _souvenir_ of the present darkness of the crust; yet during a certain period, within fixed limits of gravitating force and heat of mass, the human race may continue to exist; progressing, we may suppose, in force and fineness of organization. The race will perish, perhaps, in the order of nature, by failure or insufficient number of offspring, a principal cause of the extinction of superior races. The earth must become lone and voiceless long before the incandescence of the crust. Science may follow it into the condition of an attendant star, and then of an expanding nebula. "In the cosmos all movements are cyclical, and recurrent, without change, save interchange among forms of motion. A universe which is, in its total, the same to-day as yesterday, and always, would appear idle and dull if it were not the footstool of divine force, upon which the creative will maintains a certain equipoise, necessary to the continued production of spiritual forms." _It is an impracticable notion, contrary to the first principle of mechanics, that action and reaction are equal._ The grand requirement of the system--power to work the engine--can never be raised by La Place's, nor by any other mechanical plan. The cooling cloud of fire-mist is simply a very big machine, and no machine can generate power to work itself. If La Place could have somehow or other got power for the motion of rotation outside of his cloud, he might have made it revolve, and scatter off great lumps of the lightest outside stuffs, as your grindstone scatters off drops of water when you turn it rapidly; but, having no such power, his theory is a plan to make the grindstone turn itself. It is, therefore, precisely of the same value as any one of the hundred of ingenious schemes for creating power by machinery, of the perpetual motion men, in defiance of the first law of mechanics, that action and reaction are equal. Moreover, he proposes to raise the power by making the gas cool at one part of the surface faster than at another, and so to make a vortex around that spot, which would set the whole mass to revolving. But no conceivable reason can be alleged why the homogeneous mass should begin to cool at one place faster than another, or indeed why an eternally hot mass should ever begin to cool at all. But, letting that pass, to make the required vortex for the rotation of the whole mass, it should not begin to cool at any part of the surface, but at the center, where, as every engine driver who ever saw a condenser, and every woman who ever cooled a dish of mush knows, it could not possibly begin to cool till the outside mass had become cold; and so no motion could be produced. This is so well known in the machine shops that it is rare to find a machinist own the theory. But even a more fatal objection has been raised by one of the most eloquent expounders of the theory. Mr. Spencer shows us that the mass, condensing under the influence of gravitation, so far from cooling _must necessarily evolve heat_. He is perfectly clear and decided on this matter, _that the condensing mass could never, by any possibility, begin to cool, but must begin to heat, and go on heating till it burst out in a blaze_. He says: "Heat must inevitably be generated by the aggregation of diffused matter into a concrete form; and throughout our reasonings we have assumed that such generation of heat has been an accompaniment of nebular condensation."[202] "While the condensation and the rate of rotation are progressively increasing, the approach of the atoms necessarily generates _a progressively increasing temperature_. As this temperature rises light begins to be evolved, and ultimately there results a revolving sphere of fluid matter radiating intense light and heat--a sun."[203] This, it will be perceived, is exactly the reverse of the original nebular theory of a cooling globe, or spheroid of homogeneous nebular matter, diffused by intense heat, and cooling down into suns, and moons, and planets. So far as the Spencer system is accepted, it displaces La Place's theory, and the inventor accordingly works out a new theory of his own, and equally inconsistent with known facts and principles. But as Mr. Spencer candidly owns that his scheme can neither generate matter nor force, as we have already seen, it needs no further discussion in this connection. The fact is simply this, a chemical perpetual motion is as impossible as a mechanical one. The discovery of the convertibility of forces shows this. The development theory of the generation of motion by processes of the self-heating or the self-cooling of the machine, or by chemical actions and reactions, is, in its last analysis, only a big perpetual motion humbug. Even were the rotation, and the cooling process, to take place, as is supposed, _no such results would proceed from these combined operations as the case requires_; for, according to the theory, as the cooling and contracting rings revolve in the verge of a vortex of fluid less dense than themselves, one of these two results must take place: either, as is most probable, from their exceeding tenuity, the rings will break at once into fragments, when, instead of flying outward, they will sink toward the center, and, as long as they are heavier than the surrounding fluid, _they will stay there_; and, as the cooling goes on on the outside, so will the concentration of the heavier matter, till we have _one_ great spheroid, with a solid center, liquid covering, and gaseous atmosphere. A vortex will never make, nor allow to exist beyond its center, planets heavier than the fluid of which it is composed. The other alternative, and the one which La Place selected, was the supposition that the cooling and contracting rings did not at first break up into pieces, but retained their continuity; but, contrary to all experience and reason, he supposed that these cooling rings kept contracting and widening out from the heated mass, at the same time. The only fluid planetary rings which we can examine--those of Saturn--have been closing in on the planet since the days of Huygens, and eventually will be united with the body of the planet. Every boy who has seen a blacksmith hoop a cart-wheel has learned the principle, that a heated ring contracts as it cools, and in doing so presses in upon the mass around which it clings. But, according to this nebular notion, the fire-mist keeps cooling and shrinking up, while the rings, of the very same heat and material, keep cooling faster, and widening out from it; a piece of schismatical behavior without a parallel among solids or fluids, either in heaven or earth, or under the earth. Plateau's illustration of the mode in which centrifugal force acts in overcoming molecular attraction, has been cited as a demonstration of the truth of the nebular hypothesis. The conditions, however, are entirely different. By means of clock-work he caused a globule of oil to rotate in a mixture of alcohol and water _of the same density_, thus entirely getting rid of the power of gravitation; and by increasing the velocity he caused it to flatten out into a disc, and finally to project a multitude of minute drops, which continued their revolutions so long as the fluid in which they floated kept revolving by the motion of the rotating spindle, _the divergent drops, the central mass, and the surrounding fluid, being all the while of the same density_. But the essential conditions of the nebular theory are, that _the central mass_ exert an attraction of gravitation upon all its parts, and _therefore be denser than the surrounding ether or empty space_, and that _the cooling and contracting rings be of a different density from the rest of the mass_. Their divergence from the more fluid portion is supposed to arise from their growing denser. And Reclus shows[204] that the divergent drops owe their existence to the _expansion_, not to the _contraction_, of the globule of oil. This experiment, then, contradicts the theory, so far as it is applicable. Plateau himself never adduced this experiment in support of the nebular theory; but having, by way of illustration, spoken of the revolving drops as satellites, and finding that expression misunderstood, he corrected the error in a subsequent paper. He says: "It is clear that this mode of formation is entirely foreign to La Place's cosmogonic hypothesis; therefore we have no idea of deducing from this little experiment, which only refers _to the effects of molecular attraction_, and _not to those of gravitation_, any argument in favor of the hypothesis in question; an hypothesis which _in other respects we do not adopt_."[205] _It was always contrary to the facts of astronomical science._ It has accordingly been repudiated by the most eminent astronomers. Sir John Herschel declares that the appearance of those groups, or clusters, of stars, supposed to be formed by the condensation of nebulæ is quite different from that depicted by this theory, and that no traces of the ring-making process is visible among them. He thus describes the appearances of these groups; exactly the contrary of that demanded by the theory, which he emphatically disclaims, from the presidential chair of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "If it is to be regarded as demonstrated truth, or as receiving the smallest support from any observed numerical relations which actually hold good among the elements of the primary orbits, I beg leave to demur. Assuredly it receives no support from the observation of the effects of sidereal aggregation as exemplified in the formation of globular and elliptic clusters, supposing them to have resulted from such aggregation. For we see this cause working out in thousands of instances, to have resulted, _not_ in the formation of a single large central body, surrounded by a few smaller attendants disposed in one plane around it, but in systems of infinitely greater complexity, consisting of multitudes of nearly equal luminaries, grouped together in a solid elliptic or globular form. So far then as any conclusions from our observations of nebulæ can go, the result of agglomerative tendencies _may_ indeed be the formation of families of stars of a general and very striking character, but we see nothing to lead us to presume its further result to be the surrounding of those stars with planetary adherents."[206] _This theory is contradicted by the peculiarities of our solar system._ The orbits of the comets being inclined at all angles to the sun's equator, are often out of the plane of his rotation, and so in the way of the theory. The moons of Uranus revolve in a direction contrary to all the other bodies, and fly right into the face of the theory. According to the nebular theory, the outer planets, first cast off from the sun, ought to be lighter than those nearer him, as these had longer pressing near the middle of the mass; and the sun himself, having been pressed by the weight of all the rest of the system, should be the densest body of the whole. And the author of _The Vestiges of Creation_, in expounding the theory, manufactures a set of facts to suit it, and tells his readers that the planets exhibit a progressive diminution in density from the one nearest the sun to that which is most distant. Our solar system could not have lasted thirty years had that been the case. The Earth, Venus, and Mars, are nearly of the same density. Uranus is more dense than Saturn, which is nearer the sun. Neptune is more dense than either. The sun, which ought to be the heaviest of all, according to the theory, is only one-fourth the density of the earth. La Place himself has demonstrated that these densities and arrangements are indispensable to the stability of the system. But they are plainly contradictory to his theory of its formation.[207] The palpable difference of luminosity between the sun and the planets, which, as they are all made of the very same materials, and by the same process, according to this theory, ought to be equally self-luminous, is in itself a self-evident refutation of the nebular hypothesis, or of any other process of creation by mere mechanical law. "The same power, whether natural or supernatural, which placed the sun in the center of the six primary planets, placed Saturn in the center of the orb of his five secondary planets; and Jupiter in the center of his four secondary planets; and the earth in the center of the moon's orbit; and, therefore, had this cause been a blind one, _without contrivance or design_, the sun would have been a body of the same kind with Saturn, Jupiter, and the Earth; that is, _without light or heat_. Why there is one body in our system qualified to give light and heat to all the rest, I know no reason, but because the Author of the system thought it convenient." So says the immortal Newton.[208] The great expounder of modern science--Humboldt--is equally explicit in enumerating the decisive marks of choice and will in the construction of the solar system, and in contemptuously dismissing the notion of development and creation by natural law from the halls of science. "Up to the present time, _we are ignorant, as I have already remarked, of any internal necessity--any mechanical law of nature_--which (like the beautiful law which connects the square of the periods of revolution with the cube of the major axis) represents the above-named elements--the absolute magnitude of the planets, their density, flattening at the poles, velocity of rotation, and presence or absence of moons--of the order of succession of the individual planetary bodies of each group, in their dependence upon the distances. Although the planet which is nearest the sun is densest--even six or eight times denser than some of the exterior planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune--the order of succession in the case of Venus, the Earth, and Mars, is very irregular. The absolute magnitudes do, generally, as Kepler has already observed, increase with the distances; but this does not hold good when the planets are considered individually. Mars is smaller than the Earth; Uranus smaller than Saturn; Saturn smaller than Jupiter, and succeeds immediately to a host of planets, which, on account of their smallness, are almost immeasurable. It is true, the period of rotation generally increases with the distance from the sun; but it is in the case of Mars slower than in that of the Earth, and slower in Saturn than in Jupiter."[209] "_Our knowledge of the primeval ages of the world's physical history does not extend sufficiently far to allow of our depicting the present condition of things as one of development._"[210] Sir David Brewster adds his testimony as follows: "Geology does not pretend to give us any information respecting the process by which the nucleus of the earth was formed. Some speculative astronomers indeed have presumptuously embarked in such an inquiry; but there is not a trace of evidence that the solid nucleus of the globe was formed by secondary causes, such as the aggregation of attenuated matter diffused through space; and the _nebular theory_, as it has been called, though maintained by a few distinguished names, has, we think, been overturned by arguments which have never been answered. Sir Isaac Newton, in his four celebrated letters to Dr. Bentley, has demonstrated that the planets of the solar system could not have been thus formed and put in motion round a central sun."[211] 4. _Astronomy not only exposes the folly of past cosmogonies, but demonstrates the impossibility of framing any true theory of creation, and thus refutes all future cosmogonies._ The grand error of all cosmogonies lies in the arrogant assumption, on which every one of them must be founded, _that the theorist is acquainted with all substances, and all forces in the universe_, and with all the modes of their operation; not only at the present period, and on this earth, but in all past ages, and in worlds in widely different, and utterly unknown situations; for, if he be ignorant of any substance, or of any active force in the universe, his generalization is avowedly imperfect, and necessarily erroneous. That unknown force must have had its influence in framing the world. Its omission, then, is fatal to the theory which neglects it. A theory of creation, for instance, which would neglect the attraction of gravitation would be manifestly false. But there are other forces as far reaching, whose omission must be equally fatal; for instance, the power of repulsion. A conviction of this truth has given rise to a constant effort to simplify matters down to the level of our ignorance, by reducing all substances to one, or at most two simple elements, and all forces to the form of one universal law; but the progress of science utterly blasts the attempt. Instead of simplifying matters, the very chemical processes undertaken with that view revealed new substances, and every year increases our knowledge of nature's variety. No scientific man now dreams of one primeval element. In the same way, astronomy, which, it was boasted, would enable us to account for all the operations of the universe, by reducing all motion to one mechanical law, has revealed to us the existence of other forces as far reaching as the attraction of gravitation, and more powerful; and substances whose nature and combinations are utterly unknown. But every cosmogony is just an attempt to simplify matters, by ignoring the existence of these unknown substances, and mysterious forces; a process which science condemns, as utterly unphilosophical and absurd. Astronomy has shown us _our ignorance of the substances_, or _materials_, _of our own little globe_. It has demonstrated that the whole body of the earth must have an average density equal to iron. As the rocks near the surface are much lighter, those toward the center must be heavier than iron, to make up this density. Of what, then, do they consist? The geologist says he does not know. No geologist ever saw them. No mortal ever will see them, and report their chemical constitution, their dip, and the arrangement of their strata, to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The very utmost "we can say is that they are unlike anything with which we are acquainted." Very well; then be pleased to have the decency to abstain from telling us how the world was made, when you don't know what it is made of. The sun's heat, at its surface, is 300,000 times greater than at the surface of the earth, but a tenth of this amount, collected in the focus of a lens, dissipates gold and platinum in vapor. When the most vivid flames which we can produce are held up in the blaze of his rays, they disappear. If a cataract of icebergs, a mile high, and wider than the Atlantic Ocean, were launched into the sun with the velocity of a cannon-ball, the small portion of the sun's heat expended on our earth would convert that vast mass into steam as fast as it entered his atmosphere without cooling its surface in the least degree. "The great mystery, however, is to conceive how so enormous a conflagration (if such it be) can be kept up. Every discovery in chemical science here leaves us completely at a loss, or rather seems to remove farther the prospect of probable explanation."[212] Yet, the sun is the nearest of the fixed stars, and by far the best known, and most nearly related to us. In fact, we are dependent on his influences for life and health. But if the theorist _can not tell his substance, or the nature and cause of the light and heat he sends us_, how can he presume so far on the world's credulity as to present a theory of his formation? "Astronomical problems accumulate unsolved upon our hands, because we can not, as mechanicians, chemists, or physiologists, experiment on the stars. Are they built of the same material as our planet? Are Saturn's rings solid, or liquid? Has the moon an atmosphere? Are the atmospheres of the planets like ours? Are the light and heat of the sun begotten of combustion? And what is the fuel which feeds these unquenchable fires? These are questions, which we ask, and variously answer, _but leave unanswered after all_."[213] But, till he can answer these, and a thousand questions like these, let no man presume to describe the formation of these unknown orbs. Comets constitute by far the greatest number of the bodies of our solar system. Arago says seven millions frequent it, within the orbit of Uranus.[214] They are the largest bodies known to us, stretching across hundreds of millions of miles. They approach nearer to this earth than any other bodies, sometimes even involving it in their tails, and generally exciting great alarm among its inhabitants. But the nature of the transparent luminous matter of which they are composed is utterly unknown. As they approach the sun, they come under an influence directly the opposite of attraction. The tail streams away from the sun, over a distance of millions of miles, _and yet the rate of the comet's motion toward the sun is quickened_, as though it were an immense rocket, driven forward by its own explosion. Further, while the body of the comet travels toward the sun, sometimes with a velocity nearly one-third of that of light, the tail sends forth coruscations in the opposite direction, with a much greater velocity. The greatest velocity with which we are acquainted on earth is the velocity of light, which travels a million of times faster than a cannon-ball, or at the rate of 195,000 miles per second; but here is a substance capable of traveling twenty-three times faster, and here is a force propelling it, twenty-three times greater than any which exists on earth. Its existence was first discovered by the coruscations of the comet of 1807. "In less than one second, streamers shot forth, to two and a half degrees in length; they as rapidly disappeared, and issued out again, sometimes in proportions, and interrupted, like our northern lights. Afterward the tail varied, both in length and breadth; and in some of the observations, the streamers shot forth from the whole expanded end of the tail, sometimes here, sometimes there, in an instant, two and a half degrees long; _so that within a single second they must have shot out a distance of 4,600,000 miles_."[215] Similar exhibitions of this unknown force were made by the comet of 1811, by Halley's comet, and several others. In these amazing disclosures of the unknown forces of the heavens, do we not hear a voice rebuking the presumption of ignorant theorists, with the questions, Knowest _thou_ the ordinances of heaven? Canst _thou_ set the dominion thereof in the earth? Hear one of the most distinguished of modern astronomers expound the moral bearings of such a discovery: "The intimation of a new cosmical power--I mean of one so unsuspected before, but which yet can follow a planet through all its wanderings--throws us back once more into the indefinite obscure, and checks all dogmatism. How many influences, hitherto undiscovered by our ruder senses, may be ever streaming toward us, and modifying every terrestrial action. And yet, because we had traced one of these, we have deemed our astronomy complete! Deeper far, and nearer to the root of things, is that world with which man's destiny is entwined."[216] We can have no reason, save our own self-sufficient arrogance, to believe that the discovery of these two forces exhausts the treasures of infinite wisdom. Humboldt thus well refutes the folly of such an imagination: "The imperfectibility of all empirical science, and the boundlessness of the sphere of observation, render the task of explaining the forces of matter by that which is variable in matter, an impracticable one. What has been already perceived, by no means exhausts that which is perceptible. If, simply referring to the progress of science in our own times, we compare the imperfect physical knowledge of Robert Boyle, Gilbert, and Hales, with that of the present day, and remember that every few years are characterized by an increasing rapidity of advance, we shall be better able to imagine _the periodical and endless changes which all physical sciences are destined to undergo. New substances and new forces will be discovered._"[217] Thus, all true science, conscious of its ignorance, ever leads the mind to the region of faith. Its first lesson, and its last lesson, is humility. It tells us that every cosmogony, which the children of theory so laboriously scratch in the sand, must be swept away by the rising tide of science. When we seek information on the great questions of our origin and destiny, and cry, "Where shall wisdom be found, and what is the place of understanding?" The high priests of science answer, in her name, "It is not in me; the measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea." We receive this honest acknowledgment as an inestimable boon. We are saved thereby the wearying labor of a vain and useless search after knowledge which lies not in her domain. We come down to the Bible with the profound conviction that science can give us no definite information of our origin, no certainty of our destiny, and but an imperfect acquaintance with the laws which govern this present world. If the Bible can not inform us on these all-important questions, we must remain ignorant. Science declares she can not teach us. The Word of God remains, not merely the best, but absolutely the only, the last resource of the anxious soul. The Bible gives us no theory of creation. It simply asserts the fact, that "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," but does not tell us _how_ he did so. The knowledge could be of no use to us, for he never means to employ us as his assistants in the work of creation. Nor could we understand the matter. The force by which he called the worlds into being, and upholds them in it, exists in no creature. "He stretcheth forth the heavens alone. He spreadeth abroad the earth by himself." "He upholdeth all things by the word of his power." But it presents anxious, careworn, humbled souls with something infinitely more precious than cosmogonies; even an explicit declaration of the love toward them of him who made these worlds. "Thus saith the Lord, THY REDEEMER, And he who formed thee from the womb: I am the Lord, who maketh all things; Who stretcheth forth the heavens alone, And spreadeth abroad the earth, by myself." "He healeth the broken in heart, And bindeth up their wounds. He telleth the number of the stars, And calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power; His wisdom is infinite!" Yes, the Creator of heaven and earth, who upholds all things by the word of his power, became a man like you, and dwelt on earth, and suffered the sorrow, the shame, the pain, the death, that sinful man deserved; and when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. From that heavenly throne his voice now sounds, reader, in your ear, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and _I will give you rest_." FOOTNOTES: [186] Cosmos III. 138. [187] Herschel's Outlines, chap. xvii. sec. 887. [188] Cosmos III. 197. [189] Nichol's Architecture of the Heavens, 9th ed. p. 180. [190] Cosmos IV. 292. [191] Nichol's Contemplations on the Solar System, xxx. [192] Cosmos III. 253. [193] Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy, chap. xvi. [194] _New York Evangelist_, May 5, 1870. [195] Nichol's Architecture of the Heavens, 9th edition, 272. [196] Pontecoulant in _System of the World_, p. 70. [197] Progress of Astronomy, 70. [198] Memoirs of the French Academy, by M. Le Verrier; from _The Annual of Scientific Discovery_, for 1855, p. 376. [199] Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy, p. 558, ed. of 1853. [200] Illustrations of Universal Progress, page 298. [201] Fragments of Science and Scientific Thought, p. 163. [202] Illustrations of Progress, page 292. [203] Illustrations of Progress, page 34. [204] The Earth, page 256. [205] Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, Vol. V., cited in McCosh's Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, p. 403. [206] Opening Address to the British Association, 1845. [207] Taking water as the unit of density, Mercury is 6.71; Venus, 5.11; Earth, 5.44; Mars, 5.21; Saturn, 0.76; Uranus, 0.97; Neptune, 1.25; the Sun, 1.37.--Cosmos IV. p. 447. [208] Newton's Optics, IV. p. 438. [209] Cosmos, IV. p. 425. [210] Cosmos, III. p. 28. [211] More Worlds Than One, p. 45. [212] Herschel's Outlines, VI. Sect. 400. [213] Dr. George Wilson, F. R. S. E., in Edinburgh Phil. Journal, V. p. 53. [214] Somerville's Connection of the Physical Sciences, p. 360. [215] Dick's Sidereal Heavens, chap. xx. [216] Nichol's Solar System, p. 76. [217] Cosmos, III. p. 27. CHAPTER XI. DAYLIGHT BEFORE SUNRISE. In the last chapter we saw astronomy demonstrating our need of a revelation from God. In this we shall see how it illustrates and confirms that revelation. Seen through the telescope, the Bible glows with celestial splendor. Even its cloudy mysteries are displayed as clouds of light, and its long misunderstood phrases are resolved, by a scientific investigation, into galaxies of brilliant truths, proclaiming to the philosopher that the Book which describes them is as truly the Word of God as the heavens which it describes are his handiwork. If, once in a century, a profound practical astronomer is found denying the inspiration of the Bible, he will either acknowledge, or discover himself, not familiar with its contents. For the most part, the charges brought against the Bible, of contradicting the facts of astronomy, are based upon misstatements and mistakes of its teachings, and so do not fall within the range of the telescope, or the department of the observatory. The Sabbath-school teacher, and not the astronomer, is the proper person to correct such errors. A few months' instruction in the Bible class of any well-conducted Sabbath-school would save some of our popular anti-Bible lecturers from the sin of misrepresenting the Word of God, and the shame of hearing children laugh at their blunders. A favorite field for the display of their knowledge of science, and ignorance of the art of reading, by our modern Infidels, is the Bible account of creation, in the first chapter of Genesis, which is alleged to be utterly irreconcilable with the known facts of astronomy and geology. Leaving the latter out of view, for the present, the astronomical objections may all be arranged under four heads. First: that the Bible account of the creation of man, only some six or seven thousand years ago, must be false; because the records of astronomical observations, taken more than seventeen thousand years ago, by the Hindoos and Egyptians, are still in existence, and have been verified. Second: that the light of some of the stars, now shining upon us, and especially of some of the distant nebulæ, must have left them millions of years ago, to have traveled over the vast space which separates them from us, and be visible on our globe now; whereas, the Bible teaches that the universe was created only some six or seven thousand years ago. Third: that the Bible represents God as creating the sky a solid crystal, or metallic sphere, or hemisphere (they are not agreed which), to which the stars are fastened, and with which they revolve around the earth; which every school-boy knows to be absurd. Fourth: that the Bible represents God as creating the sun and moon only two days before Adam, and as creating light before the sun, which is also held to be absurd. 1. The first of these objections--that the Hindoos and Egyptians made astronomical observations thousands of years before Adam, and that the accuracy of these observations has been verified by modern calculations--_is simply untrue_. No such observations were ever made. The pretended records of such have been proved, in the case of the Hindoo astronomy, to be forgeries, and in the case of the Egyptian records, blunders of the discoverers. There is not an authentic uninspired astronomical observation extant for two thousand years after Adam. The objection, however, is worth noticing, and its history worth remembering, as a specimen of the way in which ignorant men swallow impudent falsehoods, if they only seem to contradict the Word of Truth. When the labors of oriental scholars had made the Vedas and Shasters--the sacred books of the Hindoos--accessible to European philosophers, a wonderful shout was raised among Infidels. "Here," it was said, "is the true chronology. We always knew that man was not a degenerate creature, fallen from a higher estate, some few thousand years ago, but that he has existed from eternity, in a constant progress toward his present lofty position; and now we have the most authentic records of the most ancient and civilized people in the world--the people of India--reaching back for millions of years before the Mosaic cosmogony, and allowing ample time for the development of the noble savage into the cultivated philosopher. These records have every mark of truth, giving minute details of events, and histories of successive lines of princes; and, moreover, record the principal astronomical facts of the successive periods--eclipses, comets, positions of stars, etc.--which attest their veracity. Henceforth, the Hebrew records must hide their heads. Neither as poetry nor history can they pretend to compare with the Vedas." The Hindoo Shasters were accordingly, for a time, in high repute, among people who knew very little about them. Even Dr. Adam Clarke was so far led away with the spirit of the age, as to pollute his valuable commentary by the insertion of the _Gitagovinda_, after the Chaldee Targum on the Song of Solomon; where the curious reader can satisfy himself as to the scientific value of such Pantheistic dotings. By the Infidels of Britain and America they were appealed to as standard works of undoubted authority; and hundreds, who declared that it was irrational credulity to believe in the Bible, risked their souls on the faith of the Vedas, _of which they never had read a single sentence_! Now, when we remember that these veracious chronicles reach back through _maha yugs_ of 4,320,000 years of mortals, a thousand of which, or 4,320,000,000, make a _kalpa_ or one day of the life of Brahma, while his night is of the same duration, and his life consists of a hundred years of such days and nights, about the middle of which period the little span of our existence is placed; that among the facts of the history are the records of the seven great continents of the world, separated by seven rivers, and seven chains of mountains, four hundred thousand miles high (reaching only to the moon); of the families of their kings, one of whom had a hundred sons, another only ten thousand, another sixty thousand, who were born in a pumpkin, nourished in pans of milk, reduced to ashes by the curse of a sage, and restored to life by the waters of the Ganges; and that among the astronomical observations, by which the accuracy of these extraordinary facts is confirmed, are accounts of deluges, in which the waters not only rose above the tops of earth's mountains, but above the seven inferior and three superior worlds, _reaching even to the Pole Star_[218]--we may well wonder at the faith which could receive all this as so true, that on the strength of it they rejected the miracles of the Bible as false. Even Voltaire ridiculed these stories. But a visionary man, named Baillie, calculated the alleged observations backward, and found them sufficiently correct to satisfy him that all the rest of the story was equally true. It never seems to have occurred to him, that if he could calculate eclipses _backward_, so could the Hindoos. It is just as easy to calculate an eclipse, or the position of a planet, backward as forward. If I watch the motion of the hands of a clock accurately, and find that the little hand moves over the twelfth of a circle every hour, and the large hand around the circle in the same time, and that the large hand, now at noon, covers the little one, I can calculate, that at sixteen minutes and a quarter past three it will nearly cover it again; but then, it is just as easy to count that the two hands were covered at sixteen minutes and a quarter before nine that morning, or that they were exactly in line at 6 A. M. If my clock would keep going at the same rate for a thousand years, I could predict the position of the hands at any hour of the twenty-ninth of March, of the year 2857; but it is evident that the very same calculation applied the other way would show the position that the hands would have had a thousand years ago, or five thousand years ago, just as well. And if I were to allege that my clock was made by Tubal Cain, before the flood, and for proof of the fact declare, that on the first of January, 3857 B. C., at 6 o'clock P. M., I had seen the two hands directly in line, and some wiseacre were to calculate the time, and find that at that hour the hands ought to have been just in that position, and conclude thence that I was undoubtedly one of the antediluvians, and the clock no less certainly a specimen of the craft of the first artificer in brass and iron, the argument would be precisely parallel to the Infidel's argument from the Tirvalore Tables, and the astronomy of the Vedas. But suppose my clock ran a little slow; say half a minute in the month, or so; or that it was made to keep sidereal time, which differs by a little from solar time, and that I did not know exactly what the difference was; it is evident that on a long stretch of some hundreds or thousands of years, I would get out of my reckoning, and the hands would not have been in the positions I had calculated. Now, this was just what happened with the Brahmins and their calculations. The clock of the heavens keeps a uniform rate of going, but they made a slight mistake in the counting of it; and so did their Infidel friends. But our modern astronomers have got the true time, set their clocks, and made their tables by it; and on applying these tables to the pretended Hindoo observations, find that they are all wrong, and that no such eclipses as they allege ever did occur or possibly could have happened in our solar system.[219] So the Hindoo astronomy is now consigned to the same tomb with the Hindoo chronology and cosmogony, except when a missionary, on the banks of the Ganges, exhibits it to the pupils of his English school, as a specimen of the falsehoods which have formed the swaddling bands of Pantheism. Failing in the attempt to substitute Brahminism for Christianity, Infidels beat a retreat from India, and went down into Egypt for help. Here they made prodigious discoveries of the scientific and religious truths believed by the worshipers of dogs and dung beetles, recorded upon the coffins of holy bulls, and the temples sacred to crows and crocodiles. The age was favorable for such discoveries. Napoleon and his savans cut out of the ceiling of a temple, at Denderah, in Egypt, a stone covered with uncouth astronomical, astrological, and hieroglyphic figures, which they insisted was a representation of the sky at the time the temple was built; and finding a division made between the signs of the crab and the lion, and marks for the sun and moon there, they took it into their heads that the sun must have entered the Zodiac at that spot, on the year this Zodiac was made; and, calculating back, found that must be at least seventeen thousand years ago. Hundreds of thousands visited the wonderful antediluvian monument, in the National Library, in Paris, where it had been brought; and where Infidel commentators were never wanting to inform them that this remarkable stone proved the whole Bible to be a series of lies. A professor of the University of Breslau published a pamphlet, entitled _Invincible Proof that the Earth is at least ten times older than is taught by the Bible_. Scores of such publications followed, and for forty years Infidel newspapers, magazines, and reviews kept trumpeting this great refutation of the Bible. From these it descended to the vulgar, with additions and improvements; and it is now frequently alleged as proving that "ten thousand years before Adam was born, the priests of Egypt were carving astronomy on the pyramids." There is scarcely one of my French or German readers who has not heard of it. It did not shake the Skeptic's credulity in the least that no two of the savans were agreed, by some thousands of years, how old it was--that they could not tell what the Egyptian system of astronomy was--_and that none of them could read the hieroglyphics which explained it_. Whatever might be doubtful, of one thing they were all perfectly sure, that it was far older than the creation. But in 1832 the curious Egyptian astronomy was studied, and it appeared that the sun and moon were so placed on the Zodiac to mark the beginning of the year there; and the dividing line fenced off one half of the sky under the care of the sun, while the other was placed under the moon's patronage. Then it was discovered that the positions of the stars were represented by the pictures of the gods whose names they bore--Jupiter, Saturn, etc.--and by calculating the places of these pictures back, it was found that this Zodiac represented their places in the year of our Lord 37; the year of the birth of Nero, a great temple-builder and repairer. Finally, Champollion learned to read the hieroglyphics, and the names, surnames, and titles of the emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and Domitian were found on the temple of Denderah; and on the portico of the temple of Esneh, which had been declared to be a few thousand years older than that of Denderah, were found the names of Claudius and Antoninus Pius; while the whole workmanship and style of building have satisfied all antiquarians that these buildings were erected during the declining days of art in the Roman Empire. The Roman title, _autocrat_, engraved on the Zodiac itself, attests its antiquity to be not quite two thousand, instead of seventeen thousand years. But, not satisfied with merely demolishing the batteries of Infidelity, astronomy has been employed to ascertain the dates of numbers of events recorded on Egyptian monuments to have happened to one or other of the Pharaohs, "beloved of Ammon, and brother of the sun," when such a star was in such a position. Mr. Poole has spent years in gathering such inscriptions, and in calculating the dates thus furnished. The astronomer royal, at Greenwich, Mr. Airy, has reviewed the calculations, and finds them correct. Wilkinson, the great Egyptologist, agrees with their conclusions. And the result is, that _the astronomical chronology of the Egyptian monuments sustains the Bible chronology_.[220] Geology comes forward to confirm the testimony of her elder sister, and assures us, that the alleged vast antiquity of the Egyptian monuments is impossible, as it is not more than 5,000 years since the soil of Egypt first appeared above water, as a muddy morass.[221] The learned Adrian Balbo thus sums up the whole question: "No monument, either astronomical or historical, has yet been able to prove the books of Moses false; _but with them, on the contrary, agree, in the most remarkable manner, the results obtained by the most learned philologists and the profoundest geometricians_."[222] 2. To the second objection--that astronomers have discovered stars whose light must have been millions of years traveling to this earth, and that consequently these stars must have existed millions of years ago, and therefore the Bible makes a false declaration when it says the universe was created only some six or seven thousand years ago--I reply by asking, _Where does the Bible say so?_ "What," says our objector, "is not that the good old orthodox doctrine of Christians and commentators? Do they not unanimously denounce geologists and astronomers as heretics, for asserting the vast antiquity of the earth?" We shall see presently that no such unanimity of denunciation has ever existed, and that some of the most ancient and learned Christian commentators taught the antiquity of the earth, from the Bible, before geology was born. But that is not the question before us just now. We are not asking what the good old orthodox doctrine of Christians, or the unanimous opinion of commentators may have been; but what is the reading of the Bible--_What does this Book say?_--not, "What does somebody think?" "Well," replies our objector, "does not the Bible say, in the first of Genesis, that God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and Adam on the sixth; and are not chronologists agreed that that was not more than seven thousand years ago, at the very utmost?" If the Bible had said that God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and that the end of that period was only seven thousand years ago, it would by no means follow that the beginning of it was only a few hours before that; for every Bible reader knows, that the most common use of the word _day_, in Scripture, is to denote, not a period of twenty-four hours, but a period of time which may be of various lengths.[223] In this very narrative (Genesis ii. 5) it is used to denote the whole period of the six days' work: "In the day the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." Does it mean just twenty-four hours there? In the first of Genesis, its duration is defined to consist of "the evening and the morning." Before our Infidel chronologist finds out the Bible date of creation, he must be able to tell us _of what length was the evening which preceded the first morning_, and with it constituted the first day? God has of set purpose placed stumbling-blocks for scoffers at the entrance and the exit of the Bible, as a rebuke to pride and vain curiosity.[224] The duration of the seventh day is also hidden from man. It is God's Sabbath, on which he entered when he ceased from the work of creation, a rest which still continues, and which he invites us to enter into (Hebrews iv. 1-5) as a preparation for the eternal rest. God's rest day has already lasted six thousand years, and no man can tell how much longer it may last. Perhaps his working days were each as long. But if our objector had read the Bible attentively, he would have seen that it _does not say that God created the heavens and the earth in six days_. Before it begins to give any account of the six days' work, it tells us of a previous state of disorder; and going back beyond that again, it says: "_In the beginning_, God created the heavens and the earth." It is as self-evident that this _beginning_ was before the six days' work, as that the world must have existed before it could be adjusted to its present form. How long before, the Bible does not say, nor does the objector pretend to know. It may have been as many millions of years as he assigns to the stars, or twice as many, for anything he knows to the contrary. He must have overlooked the first two verses of the Bible, else he had never made this objection; which is simply a blunder, arising from incapacity to read a few verses of Scripture correctly. But it is replied, "Does not the Bible say, in the fourth commandment, 'In six days the Lord made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all that in them is,'" etc.? True. But we are speaking just now of a very different work--the work of _creation_. If any one does not know the difference between _create_ and _make_, let him turn to his dictionary, and Webster will inform him that the primary literal meaning of _create_ is, "To produce; to bring into being from nothing; to cause to exist." The example he gives to illustrate his definition is this verse, "In the beginning God _created_ the heavens and the earth." But the primary meaning of _make_ is, "To compel; to constrain;" thence, "to form of materials;" and he illustrates the generic difference between these two words by a quotation from Dwight: "God not only _made_, but _created_; he not only made the work, but the materials." Both words are as good translations of the Hebrew originals, _bra_, and _oshe_, as can be given. If any of my readers has not a dictionary he can satisfy himself thoroughly as to the different meanings of these two words, and of their equivalents in the original Hebrew, by looking at their use in his Bible. Thus, he will find _create_ applied to the creation of the heavens and the earth, in the beginning, when there could have been no pre-existent materials to make them from; unless we adopt the Atheistic absurdity, of the eternity of matter--that is to say, _that the paving stones made themselves_.[225] Then it is applied to the production of animal life--verse twenty-one--which is not a product or combination of any lifeless matter, but a direct and constant resistance to the chemical and mechanical laws which govern lifeless matter: "God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth."[226] Next it is applied to the production of the human race, as a species distinct from all other living creatures, and not derived from any of them. "God _created_ man in his own image."[227] It is in like manner applied to all God's subsequent bestowals of animal life and rational souls, which are directly bestowed by God, and are not in the power of any creature to give. "Thou sendest forth thy spirit: they are _created_." "Remember now thy _Creator_, in the days of thy youth."[228] In all these instances, the use of the word determines its literal meaning to be what Webster defines it: "To bring into being from nothing." The metaphorical use of the word is equally expressive of its literal meaning, for it is applied to the production of new dispositions of mind and soul utterly opposite to those previously existing. "Create in me a clean heart;" which God thus explains: "A new heart will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh."[229] The Hebrew word _bra_ has as many derivative meanings as our English word _create_; as we speak of "creating a peer," "long abstinence creating uneasiness," etc.; but these no more change the primitive idea in the one case than in the other. From this word _create_, the Bible very plainly distinguishes the words _make_ and _form_, using them as the complement of the former, in many passages which speak of both creation and making. Thus, man was both created and made. His life and soul are spoken of as a creation; his body as a formation from the dust; his deputed authority over the earth also implies a primal creation, and subsequent investiture; and so both terms are applied to it. So the words _make_ and _form_ are applied to the production of the bodies of animals from pre-existing materials, while animal life is ever spoken of as a product of creative power. But, that we may see that these processes are distinct, and that the words which express them have distinctive meanings, _the Author of the Bible takes care to use them both_ in reference to this very work, in such a way that we can not fail to perceive he intends some distinction, unless we suppose that he fills the Bible with useless tautologies. For instance, "On the seventh day, God rested from all his work, which God _created_ and _made_." "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth, when they were _created_; in the day the Lord God _made_ the earth and the heavens." "But now thus saith the Lord that _created_ thee, Jacob, and he that _formed_ thee, O Israel." "For thus saith the Lord that _created_ the heavens, God himself, that _formed_ the earth, and _made_ it; he hath established it; he _created_ it not in confusion; he _formed_ it to be inhabited."[230] In all these passages _creation_ is clearly distinguished from _formation_ and _making_, if the Bible is not a mass of senseless repetitions. If _create_, and _make_, and _form_, have all the same meaning, why use them all in the same verse? These, and many similar passages, show that the Bible teaches the work of _creation_--calling things into being--to be previous to and distinct from the work of _making_--forming of materials already created. Between these two widely different processes--of the original creation of the universe, and the subsequent preparation of the habitable earth, by the six days' work--two intervening periods are indicated by Scripture, both of indefinite length. The first of these is that which intervened between the original creation and the period of disorder indicated in the second verse. The second is that disordered period during which the earth continued without form and void. That original chaos which some would find in the second verse, never had any existence, save in the brains of Atheistic philosophers. It is purely absurd. God never created a chaos. Man never saw it. The crystals of the smallest grain of sand, the sporules of the humblest fungus on the rotten tree, the animalculæ in the filthiest pool of mud, are as orderly in their arrangements, as perfect after their kind, and as wisely adapted to their station, as the angels before the throne of God. And as man never saw, so he has no language to describe, a state of original disorder; for every word he can use implies a previous state of regularity; as disorder tells of order dissolved; confusion of previous forms melted together. So the poets who have tried to describe a chaos have been obliged to represent it as the wreck of a former state. Both the Bible language and the Bible narrative correspond to the philosophy and philology of the case; for, by the use of the substantive verb, in the past tense, implying progressive being, according to the usual force of the word in Hebrew, we are told literally, "the earth _became_ without form and void." God did not create it so, but after it was created, and by a series of revolutions not recorded, it became disordered and empty. The Holy Spirit takes care to explain this verse, by quoting it in Jeremiah iv. 23, as the appropriate symbolical description of the state of a previously existing and regularly constituted body politic, reduced to confusion by the calamities of war. Again, he explains both the terms used in it in Isaiah xxxiv. 11, by using them to describe, not the rude and undigested mass of the heathen poet, but the wilderness condition of a ravaged country, and the desolate ruins of once beautiful and populous cities: "He will stretch out upon it the line of _confusion_, and the stones of _emptiness_." In both these cases the previous existence of an orderly and populous state is implied. And finally, we are expressly assured, that the state of disorder mentioned in the second verse of Genesis i., was not the original condition of the earth--Isaiah xlv. 18--where the very same word is used as in Genesis i. 2, "He created it not, _teu_, _disordered_, in _confusion_." The period of the earth's previous existence in an orderly state, or that occupied by the revolutions and catastrophes which disordered its surface, is not recorded in Scripture. The second period is that of disorder, which must have been of some duration, more or less, and is plainly implied to have been of considerable length, in the declaration that "the Spirit of the Lord moved"--literally, _was brooding_ (a figure taken from the incubation of fowls)--"upon the face of the waters." But no portion of Scripture gives any intimation of the length of this period. If, then, astronomers and geologists assert that the earth was millions, or hundreds of millions of years in process of preparation for its present state, by a long series of successive destructions and renovations, and gradual formations, _there is not one word in the Bible to contradict that opinion_; but, on the contrary, very many texts which fully and unequivocally imply its truth. But, as the knowledge of the exact age of the earth is by no means necessary to any man's present happiness, or the salvation of his soul, it is nowhere taught in the Bible. God has given us the stars to teach us astronomy, the earth to teach us geology, and the Bible to teach us religion, and neither contradicts the other. This is no new interpretation evoked to meet the necessities of modern science. The Jewish Rabbins, and those of the early Christian Fathers who gave any attention to criticism, are perfectly explicit in recognizing these distinctions. The doctrine of the creation of the world only six or seven thousand years ago is a product of monkish ignorance of the original language of the Bible. But Clement of Alexandria, Chrysostom, and Gregory Nazianzen, after Justin Martyr, teach the existence of an indefinite period between the creation and the formation of all things. Basil and Origen account for the existence of light before the sun, by alleging that the sun existed, but that the chaotic atmosphere prevented his rays from being visible till the first day, and his light till the third.[231] Augustine, in his first homily, represents the first state of the earth, in Genesis i. 1, as bearing the same relation to its finished state, that the seed of a tree does to the trunk, branches, leaves, and fruit. Horsley, Edward King, Jennings, Baxter, and many others, who wrote during the last two centuries, but before the period of geological discovery, explained the second verse substantially as did Bishop Patrick, a hundred and fifty years ago. "How long all things continued in confusion, we are not told. _It might have been, for anything that is here revealed, a very great while._"[232] Some persons, however, have supposed that the chaos of the second verse succeeded immediately to the creation of the first, and that the six days' work in like manner followed that instantaneously, or at least after a very brief interval, because the records of these cycles are connected by the word _and_, which, they think, precludes the idea of any lengthened periods or intervals. But the slightest reflection upon the meaning of the word will show that _and_ can not of itself be any _measure_ of time, its use being to indicate merely _sequence_ and _connection_. When used historically, it always implies an interval of time; for there can be no succession without an interval; but the length of that interval must be determined from the context, or some other source. A very cursory perusal of the Bible, either in English or Hebrew, will show that very often in its brief narratives, the interval indicated by _and_, and its Hebrew originals, is a very long time. The descent of Jacob and his children into Egypt is connected with the record of their deaths, in the very next verse, by this word _and_, which thus includes nearly the lifetime of a generation. That event, again, is connected with a change of dynasty in Egypt, and the oppression and multiplication of the Israelites there, recorded in the next verse, by the same word, _vau_, _and_; while the period over which it reaches was over two hundred years.[233] So in the brief record of the family of Adam, after reciting the birth of Seth, the historian adds, in the next verse, "And to Seth also was born a son, and he called his name Enos;" while the interval thus indicated by the word _and_ was a hundred and five years. The command to build the ark, recorded in the last verse of the sixth chapter of Genesis, is connected with the command to enter into it, in the first verse of the seventh chapter, by this same word _and_, although we know, from the nature of the case, that the interval required for the construction of such a huge vessel must have been considerable; and from the third verse of the sixth chapter, we learn that it was a hundred and twenty years. So the births and deaths of the antediluvians are connected by this same word _and_, throughout the fifth chapter of Genesis; while the interval, as we see from the narrative, was often eight or nine hundred years. The descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ, to qualify him for judging the world, is connected with the actual discharge of that office, in the destruction of Antichrist by the breath of his mouth, by this word _and_,[234] although the interval has been over eighteen hundred years. If in the records of the generations of mortal men, the word _and_ is customarily employed as a connecting link in the narrations of events separated by an interval of hundreds of years, it is quite consistent with the strictest propriety of language to employ it, with an enlargement proportioned to the duration of the subject of discourse, to connect intervals of millions, in the narrative of the generations of the heavens and the earth. The Bible uniformly attributes the most remote antiquity to the work of creation. So far from supposing man to be even approximately coeval with it, the emphatic reproof of human presumption is couched in the remarkable words, "Where wast thou, when I laid the foundations of the earth?" In majestic contrast with the frail human race, Moses glances at the primeval monuments of God's antiquity, as though by them he could form some faint conceptions even of eternity, and sings, "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the universe, even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God."[235] The very word here used, _the beginning_, is in itself an emphatic refutation of the notion that the work of creation is only some six or seven thousand years old. Geologists have been unable to invent a better, and have borrowed from the Bible this very form of speech, to designate those strata beyond which human knowledge can not penetrate--_the primary formations_. But, with far greater propriety, the Holy Spirit uses this word with regard to ages, compared with which the utmost range of the astronomer's or geologist's reasonings is but as the tale of yesterday. For this word, in Bible usage, marks the last promontory on the boundless ocean of eternity; the only positive word by which we can express the most remote period of past duration. It is not a date--a point of duration. It is a period--a vast cycle. It has but one boundary; that where creation rises from its abyss. Created eye has never seen the other shore. It is that vast period which the Bible assigns to the manifestations of the Word of God, "whose goings forth have been of old, from everlasting." Carrying our astonished gaze far back beyond the era of his creature, man, and ages before the "all things" that were made by Him, the Bible places this _beginning_ on the very shore of the eternity of God, when it declares, "_In the beginning_ was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."[236] Thus, both by the use of the imperfect tense, _was_, denoting continued existence, and by the connection of this _beginning_ with the eternity of the Word, does the Bible teach us to dismiss from our thoughts all narrow views of the period of duration employed in manifesting the glory of the self-existent Eternal One, and to raise our conceptions to the highest possible pitch, and then to feel, that far beyond the grasp of human calculation lies that _beginning_ which includes the years of the right hand of the Most High, and is even used as one of the names of the Eternal: "I AM THE BEGINNING _and the Ending, saith the Lord, who is, and who was, and who is to come_--THE ALMIGHTY."[237] In another Bible exhibition of the eternity of the Son of God, we are conducted from that _beginning_, downward, stage by stage, from those periods of remote antiquity prior to the formation of water, the upheaval of the mountains, the alluvial deposits, the subsidence of the existing sea basins, and the adornment of the habitable parts of the earth, to that comparatively recent event, the existence of the sons of men. Our ideas of the eternity of the love of Christ are thus enhanced, by the vastness of the ages which stretch out between the human race and that beginning when He was, as it were, "The Lamb slain from before the foundations of the world." "The Lord possessed me _in the beginning of his way_, _Before his works of old_. I was set up from everlasting, _From the beginning, or ever the earth was_. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; When there were no fountains, abounding with water; Before the mountains were settled, Before the hills, was I brought forth; While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, Nor the highest part of the dust of the world When he prepared the heavens, I was there; When he described a circle upon the face of the deep; When he established the clouds above; When he strengthened the fountains of the deep; When he gave to the sea his decree, That the waters should not pass his commandment; When he appointed the foundations of the earth: Then was I by him, as one brought up with him; And I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him: Rejoicing in the habitable parts of his earth; And my delights were with the sons of men."[238] Let the geologist, then, penetrate as deeply as he can into the profundities of the foundations of the earth, and bring forth the monuments of their hoary antiquities: we will follow with the most unfaltering faith, and receive with joy these proofs of his eternal power and Godhead. Let the astronomer raise his telescope, and reflect on our astonished eyes the light which flashed from morning stars, on the day of this earth's first existence, or even the rays which began to travel from distant suns, millions of years ere the first morning dawned on our planet: we will place them as jewels in the crown of Him who is the bright and morning star. They shall shed a sacred luster over the pages of the Bible, and give new beauties of illustration to its majestic symbols. But never will geologist penetrate, much less exhaust, the profundity of its mysteries, nor astronomer attain, much less explore, the sublimity of that beginning revealed in its pages; for eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, either the antiquity, or the nature, or the duration of the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. Human science will never be able to reach the Bible era of creation. It is placed in an antiquity beyond the power of human calculation, in that sublime sentence with which it introduces mortals to the Eternal: "_In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth._" 3. The third objection we have named is equally unfounded. _The Bible nowhere teaches that the sky is a solid sphere, to which the stars are fixed, and which revolves with them around the earth._ I know that Infidels allege that the word _firmament_, in the first chapter of Genesis, conveys this meaning. It does not. Neither the English word, nor the Hebrew original, has any such meaning. As to the meaning of the English word, I adhere to the dictionary. Infidels must not be allowed to coin uncouth meanings for words, different from the known usage of the English tongue, for which Webster is undeniable authority. His definition of _firmament_ is, "The region of the air; the sky, or heavens. In Scripture, the word denotes an expanse--a wide extent; for such is the signification of the Hebrew word, coinciding with _regio_, _region_, and _reach_. The original, therefore, does not convey the sense of solidity, but of stretching--extension. The great arch or expanse over our heads, in which are placed the atmosphere and the clouds, and in which the stars _appear_ to be placed, and are _really_ seen." The word _firmament_, then, conveys no such meaning as the Infidel alleges, to any man who understands the English tongue. No Hebrew speaking man or woman ever did, or ever could understand the original Hebrew word _reqo_ in any other sense than that of _expanse_; for the verb from which it is formed means to extend, or spread out, as even the English reader may see, by a few examples of its use, in the following passages of Scripture; where the English words by which the verb _reqo_ is expressed, are marked in italics. "Then did I beat them small as the dust of the earth, and did stamp them as the mire of the street, and _did spread them abroad_." "The goldsmith _spreadeth it over_ with gold." "Thus saith the Lord: he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that _spread forth_ the earth." "I am the Lord, that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, and _spreadeth abroad_ the earth by myself." "To him that _stretcheth out_ the earth above the waters." "The censers of these sinners against their own souls, let them _make them broad_ plates, for a covering for the altar. _And they were made broad._" "Hast thou with him _spread out_ the sky;"[239] or, in Humboldt's elegant rendering, "the pure ether, _spread_ (during the scorching heat of the south wind) as a melted mirror over the parched desert."[240] We might refer to the opinions of lexicographers, all unanimous in ascribing the same idea to the word; but the authorities given above are conclusive. The meaning, then, of the Hebrew word rendered firmament is so utterly removed from the notion of compactness, or solidity, or metallic or crystalline spheres, that it is derived from the very opposite; the fineness or tenuity produced by processes of expansion. Science has not been able to this day to invent a better word for the regions of space than the literal rendering of the original Hebrew word used by Moses--_the expanse_. The inspired writers of the New Testament, though they found the world full of all the absurdities of the Greek philosophy, and their Greek translations of the Bible continually using the word _stereoma_, which expressed these notions, _never used it_ but once, and then not for the sky, but for the _steadfastness of faith_ in Christ. Their thus using it once shows that they were acquainted with the word, and its proper meaning, and that their disuse of it was intentional; while their disuse of it, and choice of another word to denote the heavens, proves decisively that they disapproved of the absurdity which it was understood to express. Now, whether you account for this fact by admitting their inspiration, or by alleging that they drew their language from the Hebrew original, and not from the Greek translation, it is in either case perfectly conclusive as to the scriptural meaning of the word. Indeed, it is marvelous how any man who is familiar with his Bible, and knows that the Scriptures usually describe the sky by metaphors conveying the very opposite ideas to those of solidity or permanence--as, "stretched out like a curtain," "spread abroad like a tent to dwell in," "folded up like a vesture," and the like--should allow himself to be imposed on by the impudent falsehood of Voltaire, that the Bible teaches us that the sky is a solid metallic or crystal hemisphere, supported by pillars. Those beautiful figures of sacred poetry in which the universe is represented as the palace of the Great King, adorned with majestic "pillars," and "windows of heaven," whence he scatters his gifts among his expectant subjects in the courts below, have been grossly abused for the support of this miserable falsehood. We are assured, that so ignorant was Moses of the true nature of the atmosphere, and of the origin of rain, that he believed and taught that there was an ocean of fresh water on _the outside_ of this metal hemisphere, which covered the earth like a great sugar-kettle, bottom upward, and was supported on pillars; and at the bottom of the ocean were trap-doors, to let the rain through; which trap-doors in the metal firmament are to be understood, when the Bible speaks of the windows of heaven. Now, the bottom of an ocean is an odd place for windows, and a trap-door is rather a strange kind of watering-pot; and if Moses put the ocean of fresh water on the _outside_ of his metal hemisphere, he must have changed his notions of gravity materially from the time he planned the brazen hemisphere for the tabernacle, which he turned mouth upward, and put the water in the _inside_. While such writers are quite clear about the metal trap-doors and the ocean, they have not yet fully fathomed the construction and arrangement of the pillars. Whether the Bible teaches that they are "pillars of salt," like Lot's wife, or of flesh and blood, like "James, Cephas, and John," or such "iron pillars and brazen walls" as Jeremiah was against the house of Israel--whether they consisted of "cloud and fire," like the pillar Moses describes in the next book as floating in the sky over the camp of Israel, or are "pillars of smoke," such as ascend out of the wilderness--whether they are those "pillars of the earth which tremble" when God shakes it, or "the pillars of heaven which are astonished at his reproof"--whether they are the pillars of the earth and its anarchical inhabitants, which Asaph bore up, or are composed of the same materials as Paul's "pillar and basis of the truth," or the pillars of victory which Christ erects "in the temple of God"[241]--they have not yet decided. Whether the Hebrews understood these pillars to be arranged on the outside of the metal hemisphere, and if so, to imagine any use for them there; or in the inside, and in that case whether they kept the sky from falling upon the earth, or only supported the earth from falling into the sky, these learned men are by no means agreed. Having trampled the pearl into fragments, their attempts to combine them into another shape are more amusing than successful; and it is hard to say which of the seven opinions ascribed to the Bible by Infidel commentators is least probable. That opinion, however, will, doubtless, after more vigorous and protracted rooting, be discovered and greedily swallowed amid grunts of satisfaction; an appropriate reward of such laborious stupidity. The absurdities of the Greek philosophers were not drawn from the Bible. Had the Greeks read the Bible more, they would have preserved the common sense God gave them a great deal longer, and would not, while professing themselves to be wise, have become such fools as to adore blocks and stones, and dream of metal firmaments. But they turned away their ears from the truth, and were turned unto such fables as Infidels falsely ascribe to the Bible. A thousand years before the cycles and epicycles of the Ptolemaic astronomy were invented, and before learned Greeks had learned to talk nonsense about crystal spheres, and trap-doors in the bottom of celestial oceans, the writers of the Bible were recording those conversations of pious philosophers concerning stars, and clouds, and rain, from which Galileo derived the first hints of the causes of barometrical phenomena. The origin of rain, its proportion to the amount of evaporation, and the mode of its distribution by condensation, could not be propounded by Humboldt himself with more brevity and perspicuity than they are expressed by the Idumean philosopher: "He maketh small the drops of water; they pour down rain according to the vapor thereof, which the clouds do drop and distill upon man abundantly. Also, can any understand the spreadings of the clouds, or the noise of his tabernacles?"[242] The cause of this rarefaction of _cold water_ is as much a mystery to the British Association as it was to Elihu; and even were all the mysteries of the electrical tension of vapors disclosed, "the balancings of the clouds" would only be more clearly discovered to be, as the Bible declares, "the wonderful works of Him who is perfect in wisdom." But the gravity of the atmosphere, the comparative density of floating water, and its increased density by discharges of electricity, were as well known to Job and his friends as they are to the wisest of our modern philosophers. "He looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven, _to make weight to air, and regulate waters by measure, in his making a law for the rain, and a path for the lightning of thunder_."[243] Three thousand years before the theory of the trade winds was demonstrated, or before Maury had discovered the rotation and revolutions of the wind-currents, it was written in the Bible, "The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about to the north. _And the wind returneth again, according to his circuits._"[244] Thousands of years before Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus were born, Isaiah was writing about the "orbit of the earth," and its insignificance in the eyes of the Creator of the host of heaven.[245] Job was conversing with his friends on the inclination of its axis, and its equilibrium in space: "He spreadeth out the north over the empty space, and hangeth the earth upon nothing."[246] So far from entertaining the least idea of the waters of the atmosphere being contained either on the outside or the inside of a metal or solid hemisphere, the writers of the Bible never once use, even figuratively, any expression conveying it. On the contrary, the well-known scriptural figures for the fountains of the rain, are the soft, elastic, leathern waterskins of the east, "the bottles of the clouds," or the wide, flowing shawl or upper garment wherein the people of the east are accustomed to tie up loose, scattering substances.[247] "He bindeth up the waters in his thick cloud, and the cloud is not rent under them." "Who hath bound the waters in a garment;" "As a vesture thou shalt change them;" or the loose, flowing curtains of a royal pavilion; or the extended covering of a tent: "his pavilion around him were dark waters, and thick clouds of the skies;" "the spreadings of the clouds, and the noise of his tabernacle;" "he spread a cloud for a covering."[248] Instead of the notion of a single ocean, the "number of the clouds" is proverbial in the Scriptures[249] for a multitude; and in direct opposition to the permanence of a vast metallic arch, the chosen emblems of instability and transitoriness, and of the utmost rapidity of motion, suitable even for the chariot of Jehovah, are selected from the heavens.[250] In short, there is not the slightest vestige of any foundation in Scripture for the notions long afterward introduced by the Greek philosophers. Yet Christians, who have read these passages of Scripture over and over again, allow themselves to give heed to Infidels, who have not, asserting, without the shadow of proof, that Moses taught absurdities which were not invented for a thousand years after his death. The Bible gives hints of many profound scientific truths; it teaches no absurdities; _and, instead of countenancing the notion that the sky is a solid metal hemisphere, it teaches, both literally and figuratively, directly the contrary_. 4. We come now to the fourth objection, _that the Bible represents God as creating light before the sun_, which is supposed to be an absurdity, _and as creating the sun, moon, and stars only two days before Adam_. This is the only astronomical objection to the Bible account of creation which has any foundation of Scripture statement to rest upon; but we shall soon see that here, also, Infidels have not done themselves the justice of reading the Bible with attention. I have already corrected that confusion of ideas and carelessness of perusal which confounds the two distinct and different words, _create_ and _make_, so as to make both mean the same thing. God _created_ the heavens, as well as the earth, _in the beginning_; a period of such remote antiquity that, in Bible language, it stands next to eternity. The sun and moon then came into being. Through what changes they passed, or when they were endowed with the power of giving light to the universe, the Bible nowhere declares; but on the fourth day, it tells us, they _were made lights_, or, literally, _light-bearers_, to this earth. The comparatively insignificant place allotted to the stars, in the narrative of this earth's formation, corresponds, with the strictest propriety, to the nature of the discourse; which is not an account of the system of the universe, but of the process of preparation of this earth for the abode of man. Compared with the influences of "the two great light-bearers," those of the stars are very insignificant; since the sun sheds more light and heat on the earth in one day, than all the fixed stars have done since the creation of Adam. It is evident, from the words, that Moses is not speaking either of their original creation, or of their actual magnitude, but of their appointment and use in relation to us, when he says, "And God made two great light-bearers (the greater light-bearer to rule the day, and the lesser light bearer to rule the night), and the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens, to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and the night, and to divide the light from the darkness." Neither here nor elsewhere does he say they were _created_ at this time, but in all the subsequent references uses other words, such as "prepared," "divided," "made," "appropriated," "made for ruling," "gave;" a studious omission, which shows that the Author of the Bible had not forgotten how long it was since he had called them into being. _The Bible, then, does not say that God created the sun and stars only two days before Adam._ Another correction of careless Bible reading is necessary, that we may be satisfied about what the Bible _does not say_, ere we begin to defend what it does say. The Bible does not say, nor lead us to believe, that the darkness spoken of in the second verse of the first of Genesis had existed from eternity. Darkness is not eternal; it requires the exercise of creative power for its production. Light is the eternal dwelling of the Word of God.[251] The darkness which brooded over our earth, at the period of its formation, is very plainly described in the Bible as a temporary phenomenon, incident to, and necessary for, the birth of ocean. It is confined by the adverb of time, _when_, to the period of condensation, upheaval, and subsidence, occupied by the birth of that gigantic infant, "_when_ it burst forth as though it had issued from the womb; _when_ I made the cloud a garment for it, and thick darkness a swaddling band for it, and broke up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors."[252] The sun may have shone for millions of years before upon the earth, or might have been shining with all his brilliance at that very time, while not a single ray penetrated the thick darkness of the vapors in which earth was clothed. But whether or not, darkness must, from its very nature, be limited, both in space and time. To speak of infinite and eternal darkness is as unscriptural as it is absurd. The source of light is Uncreated and Eternal.[253] Further--if my readers are not tired with these perpetual corrections of careless reading and mistaken meaning--the light called into existence in the third verse of the first chapter of Genesis is as evidently a different word from _the two lights_ spoken of in the fourteenth verse, as the singular is different from the plural; and the thing signified by it is as distinct from the things spoken of in the fourteenth verse, as the abstract is from the concrete; as, when I say of the first, "light travels 195,000 miles per second," but mean a totally distinct subject when I say, "Extinguish the lights." The Hebrew words are even more palpably different, the word for _light_, in the third verse, being _aur_, while the words for _the lights_, in the fourth day's work, are _maurt_ and _at emaur_; words as distinct in shape and sense as our English words, _light_ and _the lighthouses_. The locality of the light of the third verse is, moreover, wholly different from that of the light-bearers of the fourteenth verse. That was placed on earth--these in heaven. It was of the earth alone the writer was speaking, in the second verse; the earth alone is the subject of the following verses. It was the darkness of earth that needed to be illuminated; but there is not the remotest hint, in any portion of Scripture, that any other planet or star was shrouded in gloom at this time. But, on the contrary, we are most distinctly informed that the wonders which God was performing in this world at that very time were distinctly visible amid the cheerful illumination of other orbs, "when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy,"[254] as this earth emerged from its temporary darkness. It was not from the light of heaven, but out of this darkness of earth, that God, who still draws the lightning's flash from the black thunder-cloud, commanded the light to shine.[255] And it was upon this earth, and not throughout the universe, that it produced alternate day and night. To extend this command for the illumination of the darkened earth, so as to mean the production of light in general, and the lighting of the most distant telescopic, and even invisible stars--which are neither specified in the command itself, nor by any necessity of language or Scripture implied in it, but, on the contrary, excluded, by the express Scripture declarations of the pre-existence of light, and of morning stars--is an outrage alike against all canons of criticism, laws of grammar, and dictates of common sense. The command, "Let there be light," had respect to this earth only. The Bible does represent this earth as illuminated at a time when the sun was not visible from its surface--perhaps not visible at all. Now, if any one will undertake to scoff at the Bible for speaking of light without sunshine, or of the sun shining upon a dark earth--as Infidels abundantly do--we demand that he tell us, What is light, and how is it connected with the sun? If he can not, let him cease to scoff at matters too high for him. If he can tell us, he knows that the retardation of Encke's comet, which every year falls nearer and nearer the sun, has discovered the existence of an attenuated ether in the expanse or firmament; and that the experiments of Arago on the polarization of light have finally demonstrated that our sensation of light is exerted by a series of vibrations or undulations of this fluid,[256] he will then be able to perceive the propriety with which the Author of light and of the Bible speaks, not of _creating_ light, as if it were a material substance, but of _forming_ or commanding its display. And he will be better able to comprehend the beauty and scientific propriety with which he selected the active participle of the verb _to flow_, as the name for the undulations of this fluid; for the primary meaning of the Hebrew verb _ar_ is, _to flow_, or, when used as a noun, _a flood_. "It shall be cast out and drowned, as by the _flood_ of Egypt."[257] And of the like import are the nouns, _iar_ and _aur_, formed from it. "Who is this that covereth up like a _flood_, whose waters are moved like the rivers?"[258] The philosopher, even though he be a skeptic, will cease to mock the Bible when he reads there, that 6000 years ago its Author termed light _the flowing--the undulation_. "In the words of the 'Son of God,' and the 'Son of Man,' no less than in his works, with all their adaptation to the circumstances of the times and persons to whom they were originally delivered, are things inexplicable--concealed germs of an infinite development, reserved for future ages to unfold."[259] To the man of learning and reflection, this progressive fullness, and unfathomable depth of the Scripture, is a most conclusive proof that it was dictated by Him in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. But the ignorant scoffers--the great majority--will mock on, and speak evil of the things they know not. Their mockery is founded on two assumptions, which they believe to be irrefutable; that the sun is the only possible source of light to the earth; and that it is impossible for the sun to exist without illuminating the earth. Unless they can _prove_ both of these assumptions to be true, they can not prove the Bible account of creation to be false, nor even show it to be impossible. Neither of these assumptions can possibly be proved true; for none of them can explore the universe, to discover the sources of light, nor put the sun through every possible experiment, to discover that his light is an inseparable quality. The only thing Infidels can truly allege against the Bible account of the origin of light is, _their ignorance of the process_. The argument is simply this: "God could not cause light without sunshine, _because I don't know how he did it_. Nor _can I understand_ how the sun shone on a dark earth; therefore, it is impossible." These arguments from ignorance need no other answer than the questions, Do you know how the sun shines at all? Is your ignorance the measure of God's wisdom? But I shall demonstrate the utter falsehood of both these assumptions, by showing the actual existence of many sources of light besides the sun, and the perfect possibility of the existence of the sun without sunshine, and of sunshine without any light reaching the earth. Thus, both the alleged _impossibilities_ upon which the argument against the truth of the Bible is based will be removed, and the gross ignorance of natural science displayed by professedly scientific scoffers at the Bible exposed. Light, so far from being solely derived from the sun, exists in, and can be educed from, almost any known substance. Even children are familiar with the light produced by the friction of two pieces of quartz; and no one needs to be informed how light may be produced by the combustion of inflammable substances. But the number of these substances is far greater than is generally supposed, and light can be produced by processes to which we do not generally apply the idea of burning. Resins, wool, silks, wood, and all kinds of earths and alkalies, are capable of emitting light in suitable electrical conditions; so that the surface of our earth may have been a source of light in past ages, as it even now is,[260] near the poles and the equator, flashing its Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis, and sending out its belts of Zodiacal light,[261] far into the surrounding darkness. Schubert, quoted by Kurtz, says: "May not that polar light, which is called the Aurora of the North, be the last glittering light of a departed age of the world, in which the earth was inclosed in an expanse of aerial fluid, from which, through the agency of electric magnetic forces, streamed forth an incomparably greater degree of light, accompanied with animating warmth, almost in a similar mode to what still occurs in the luminous atmosphere of our sun?" Again, the metallic bases of all the earths are highly inflammable. A brilliant flame can be produced by the combustion of water. All the metals can be made to flash forth lightnings, under suitable electric and magnetic excitements. The crystals of several rocks give out light during the process of crystallization. Thousands of miles of the earth's surface must once have presented the lurid glow of a vast furnace full of igneous rocks. Even now, the copper color of the moon during an ellipse shows us that the earth is a source of light.[262] The mountains on the surface of Venus and the moon, and the continents and oceans of Mars, attest the existence of upheaval and subsidence, and of volcanic fires, capable of producing such phenomena, and of course of sources of light in those planets, such as exist on the earth. We know, then, most certainly, that there are many other bodies capable of producing light besides the sun. That God could command the light to shine out of darkness, and convert the very ocean into a magnificent illumination, the following facts clearly prove. "Capt. Bonnycastle, coming up the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the seventh of September, 1826, was roused by the mate of the vessel, in great alarm, from an unusual appearance. It was a starlight night, when suddenly the sky became overcast, in the direction of the high land of Cornwallis County, _and an instantaneous and intensely vivid light, resembling the Aurora, shot out of the hitherto gloomy and dark sea_, on the lee bow, which was so brilliant that it lighted everything distinctly, even to the mast-head. The light spread over the whole sea, between the two shores, and the waves, which before had been tranquil, now began to be agitated. Capt. Bonnycastle describes the scene as that of _a blazing sheet of awful and most brilliant light_. A long and vivid line of light, superior in brightness to the parts of the sea not immediately near the vessel, showed the base of the high, frowning, and dark land abreast; the sky became lowering, and more intensely obscure. Long tortuous lines of light showed immense numbers of large fish, darting about as if in consternation. The topsail yard and mizzen boom were lighted by the glare, as if gas-lights had been burning directly below them; and until just before daybreak, at four o'clock, the most minute objects were distinctly visible."[263] The other assumption, that the sun could not possibly have existed without giving light to the earth, is contradicted by the most familiar facts. The earth and each of the planets might have been, and most probably were, surrounded by a dense atmosphere, through which the sun's rays could not penetrate. It is not at all necessary to prove that such was the fact. I am only concerned to prove the _possibility_; for the Infidel's objection is founded on the presumed _impossibility_ of the coexistence of a dark earth and a shining sun. Any person who has ever been in Pittsburg, Glasgow, or the manufacturing districts of England, and has seen how the smoke of even a hundred factory chimneys will shroud the heavens, can easily comprehend how a similar discharge, on a larger scale, from the thousands of primeval volcanoes,[264] would cover the earth with the pall of darkness. By the eruption of a single volcano, in the island of Sumbawa, in 1815, the air was filled with ashes, from Java to Celebes, darkening an area of more than 200,000 square miles; and the darkness was so profound in Java, three hundred miles distant from the volcano, that nothing equal to it was ever witnessed in the darkest night.[265] Those who have witnessed the fogs raised on the Banks of Newfoundland, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and in the Bay of San Francisco, by the mingling of currents of water of slightly different temperatures, can be at no loss to conceive the density of the vapors produced by the boiling of the sea around and over the multitude of volcanoes[266] which have produced the countless _atolls_ of the Pacific, and by the vast upheavals of thousands of miles of heated rocks of the primary formations into the beds of primeval oceans. While such processes were in progress, it was impossible but that darkness should be upon the face of the deep.[267] Even now, a slight change of atmospheric density and temperature would vail the earth with darkness. We see this substantially done every time that God "covereth the light with clouds, and commandeth it not to shine by the cloud that cometh betwixt," although the sun continues to shine with all his usual splendor. To understand how there may be a day without sunshine, we need only conceive the whole earth temporarily enveloped in the vapors of the unastronomical atmosphere of Peru, thus described by Humboldt: "A thick mist obscures the firmament in this region for many months, during the period called _tiempo de la garua_. Not a planet--not the most brilliant stars of the southern hemisphere--are visible. It is frequently almost impossible to distinguish the position of the moon. If, by chance, the outline of the sun's disc be visible during the day, it appears devoid of rays, as if seen through colored glasses. According to what modern geology has taught us to conjecture concerning the ancient history of our atmosphere, its primitive condition in respect to its mixture and density _must have been unfavorable to the transmission of light_. When we consider the numerous processes which, in the primary world, may have led to the separation of the solids, fluids, and gases around the earth's surface, the thought involuntarily arises, _how narrowly the human race escaped being surrounded with an untransparent atmosphere_, which, though not greatly prejudicial to some classes of vegetation, would yet have completely vailed the whole of the starry canopy. All knowledge of the structure of the universe could then have been withheld from the inquiring spirit of man."[268] The sun, then, may have shone with all his brilliancy, for thousands of years, and a single ray never have penetrated the darkness upon the face of the deep. But we will go further, and show that so far from light being an essential property of suns, it is a very variable attribute, and that in several cases suns have ceased, and others begun, to shine, before our eyes. The fixed stars are self-luminous bodies, similar to our sun, only immensely distant from us. Their numbers, magnitudes, and places, are known and recorded. But new stars have frequently flashed into view, where none were previously seen to exist; and others have gradually grown dim and disappeared, without changing their place; and a few which had disappeared have reappeared in the same spot they formerly occupied; while others have changed their color since the era of astronomical observation. In short, there is no permanence in the heavens, any more than on the earth; but a perpetual progress and change is the destiny of suns and stars, of which the most conspicuous indication is the variability of their powers of giving light, of which I shall transcribe a few instances. "On the eleventh of November, 1572, as the illustrious Danish astronomer, Tycho, was walking through the fields, he was astonished to observe a new star in the constellation Cassiopea, beaming with a radiance quite unwonted in that part of the heavens. Suspecting some delusion about his eyes, he went to a group of peasants, to ascertain if they saw it, and found them gazing at it with as much astonishment as himself. He went to his instrument, and fixed its place, from which it never after appeared to deviate. For some time it increased in brightness--greatly surpassed Sirius in luster, and even Jupiter. It was seen by good eyes in the daytime; a thing which happens only to Venus, under very favorable circumstances; and at night it pierced through clouds which obscured the rest of the stars. After reaching its fullest brightness, it again diminished, passed through all degrees of visible magnitude, assuming in succession the hues of a dying conflagration, and then finally disappeared." "It is impossible to imagine anything more tremendous than a conflagration that could be visible at such a distance."[269] Astronomers now recognize a class of such _Temporary Stars_, which have appeared from time to time in different parts of the heavens, blazing forth with extraordinary luster, and after remaining awhile, apparently immovable, have died away, and left no trace.[270] Twenty-one of such appearances of new suns are on record.[271] Still further, many familiar suns have ceased to shine. "On a careful re-examination of the heavens, _many stars are found to be missing_."[272] "There are many well authenticated cases of the disappearance of old stars, whose places had been fixed with a degree of certainty not to be doubted. In October, 1781, Sir William Herschel observed a star, No. 55 in Flamstead's Catalogue, in the constellation Hercules. In 1790 the same star was observed by the same astronomer, but since that time no search has been able to detect it. The stars 80 and 81 of the same catalogue, both of the fourth magnitude, have likewise disappeared. In May, 1828, Sir John Herschel missed the star No. 42, in the constellation Virgo, which has never since been seen. Examples might be multiplied, but it is unnecessary."[273] The demonstration of the variableness of the light-giving power of suns is completed by the phenomena of the class called _Variable Stars_; though the best astronomers are now agreed that _variability, and not uniformity_, in the emission of light, is the general character of the stars.[274] But the variations which occur before our eyes impress us more deeply than those which require centuries for their completion. Sir John Herschel has observed, and graphically described, one such instance of variation of light. "The star Eta Argus has always hitherto been regarded as a star of the second magnitude; and I never had reason to regard it as variable. In November, 1837, _I saw it, as usual_. Judge of my surprise to find, on the sixteenth of December, that _it had suddenly become a star of the first magnitude_, and almost equal to Rigel. It continued to increase. Rigel is now not to be compared with it. It exceeds Arcturus, and is very near equal to Alpha Centauri, being, at the moment I write, the fourth star in the heavens, in the order of brightness."[275] It has since passed through several variations of luster. Humboldt gives a catalogue of twenty-four of such stars whose variations have been recorded. "A strange field of speculation is opened by this phenomenon. Here we have a star fitfully variable to an astonishing extent, and whose fluctuations are spread over centuries, apparently in no settled period, and with no regularity of progression. What origin can we ascribe to these sudden flashes and relapses? What conclusions are we to draw as to the comfort or habitability of a system depending for its supply of light and heat on such an uncertain source? Speculations of this kind can hardly be termed visionary, when we consider that, from what has been before said, we are compelled to admit a community of nature between the fixed stars and our own sun; and when we reflect, that geology testifies to the fact of extensive changes having taken place, at epochs of the most remote antiquity, in the climate and temperature of our globe; changes difficult to reconcile with the operation of secondary causes, such as a different distribution of sea and land, but which would find an easy and natural explanation in a slow variation of the supply of light and heat afforded by the sun himself."[276] "I can not otherwise understand alterations of heat and cold so extensive as at one period to have clothed high northern latitudes with a more than tropical luxuriance of vegetation, and at another to have buried vast tracts of Europe, now enjoying a genial climate, and smiling with fertility, under a glacier crust of enormous thickness. Such changes seem to point to causes more powerful than the mere local distribution of land and water can well be supposed to have been. In the slow secular variations of our supply of light and heat from the sun, _which, in the immensity of time, may have gone to any extent, and succeeded each other in any order, without violating the analogy of sidereal phenomena which we know to have taken place_, we have a cause, not indeed established as a fact, but readily admissible as something beyond a bare possibility, fully adequate to the utmost requirements of geology. A change of half a magnitude on the luster of our sun, regarded as a fixed star, spread over successive geological epochs--now progressive, now receding, now stationary--_is what no astronomer would now hesitate to admit as a perfectly reasonable and not improbable supposition_."[277] The most eminent astronomers are perfectly unanimous in their deductions from these facts. They regard _variability as the general characteristic of suns and stars, our own sun not exempted_. "We are led," says Humboldt, "by analogy to infer, that as the fixed stars _universally_ have not merely an apparent, but a real motion of their own, so their surfaces or luminous atmospheres are generally subject to those changes (in their "light process") which recur, in the great majority, in extremely long, and therefore unmeasured, and probably undeterminable periods, or which, in a few, recur without being periodical, as it were, by a sudden revolution, either for a longer or a shorter time." And he asks, _Why should our sun differ from other suns?_ In reference to the extinction of suns, he says: "What we no longer see is not necessarily annihilated. It is merely the transition of matter into new forms--into combinations which are subject to new processes. Dark cosmical bodies may, by a renewed process of light, again become luminous."[278] In confirmation of the fact adduced in support of this view, by La Place, "that those stars which have become invisible, after having surpassed Jupiter in brilliancy, have not changed their place during the time they continued visible," he adds, "The luminous process has simply ceased." Bessel asserts[279] that, "_No reason exists for considering luminosity an essential property of these bodies._" And Nichol sums up the matter in the following emphatic words: "No more is light _inherent_ in the sun than in Tycho's vanished star; and with it and other orbs, a time may come when, through the consent of all the powers of nature, he shall cease to be required to shine. _The womb which contains the future is that which bore the past._"[280] Here, then we behold astronomy presenting to our observation facts and processes so similar to those which revelation presents to our faith, that all those men who are most profoundly versed in her lore, reasoning solely from the facts of science, and without any reference to the Bible, unanimously conclude that there was such a state of darkness and confusion before our era, as the Bible declares--that its causes were most probably such as the Bible implies--and that the sudden illuminating of dark bodies, and their extinction, and even re-illumination, are facts so perfectly well authenticated as matters of observation in regard to other suns, that no reasonable man can hesitate to believe any credible assurance that our sun has passed through such a process. With what feelings, then, are we to regard men who, in defiance of the most common facts, and in contradiction to the demonstrations of science, blaspheme the God of truth as a teacher of falsehood, because he speaks of light distinct from that of the sun? Surely, such men are those whom he describes as "having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their hearts. In whom the God of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not."[281] These facts, of the sudden kindling of stars, their gradual passage through all the hues of a dying conflagration, and their final extinction, and present blackness of darkness, are facts of fearful omen to the enemies of God. They are the original threatenings of Heaven, whence the fearful language of Bible warning is derived. They attest its truth, and illustrate its import. The favorite theory of the unbeliever is the uniformity of nature. "Where," says he, "is the promise of Christ's coming to judgment; for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were since the beginning of the world?" But the telescope dispels the illusion, exhibits the course of nature as a succession of catastrophes, displays the conflagration of other worlds, and the extinction of their suns, before our eyes, and asks, _Why should our sun differ from other suns?_ It is not the preacher, but the philosopher, who has turned prophet, when--looking back on the period when the Siberian elephant and rhinoceros were frozen amid their native jungle, and icebergs visited the plains of India--he proclaims, "_The womb that bore the past contains the future._" The threatenings of God's Word are invested with a mantle of terrible literality by the facts we have been contemplating. Raised at the day of resurrection, in these bodies, and with these senses, and this capability of rejoicing in the light, and shuddering and pining amid outward gloom, physical darkness will be the terrible prison of those who chose darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. The Father of Lights shall withdraw his blessed influences from the hearts, the dwellings, the eyes, of those who say to him, "Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways." The sun shall cease to vivify God's corn, and wine, and oil, which ungodly men consume upon their lusts. The moon shall cease to shine upon the robber's toil, and the stars to illumine the adulterer's path. The light of heaven shall cease to gild the field of carnage, where men perform the work of hell. In the very midst of your worldliness and business, unbeliever, when you are in all the engrossment of buying and selling, and planting and building, and marrying and giving in marriage, without warning or expectation, "the sun shall go down at noon, and the stars shall be darkened in the clear day." As in the warning and example given to the enemies of the Lord in Egypt, thick darkness, that may be felt, shall wind its inevitable chains around you, preventing your escape from the judgment of the great day, and giving you a fearful foretaste of that "blackness of darkness for ever" of which you are now forewarned in the Word of Truth. "The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars shall fall from the heavens, And the powers of the heavens shall be shaken; And then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in the heavens, And then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn; And they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, With power and great glory." "Cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness; There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." "Hear ye, and give ear; be not proud, For the Lord hath spoken. Give glory to the Lord, your God, Before he cause darkness, And before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains; And while ye look for light, He turn it into the shadow of death, And make it gross darkness." "I am the light of the world; He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, But shall have the light of life."[282] FOOTNOTES: [218] Duff's India, 127. [219] Somerville's Connection of the Physical Sciences, p. 83. [220] Poole's Horæ Egyptiacæ. [221] Henri L'Egypte Pharonique. [222] Atlas Ethnographique, Eth. I. [223] See Cruden's Concordance, Art. _Day_. [224] Dan., chap. xii. 10. Job, chap. xxxviii. 4. Col., chap. ii. 18. [225] Chap. I. _Did the World Make Itself?_ [226] Genesis, chap. i. 21. [227] Genesis, chap. i. 27. [228] Psalm civ. 30. Eccl., chap. xii. 1. [229] Psalm li. 10. Ezekiel, chap. xxxvi. 26. [230] Genesis, chap. ii. 1-5. Isaiah, chap. xliii. 1-7; chap. xlv. 1, 2. [231] Wiseman's Lectures on the Connection of Science and Revealed Religion, 1-297. [232] Commentary on Genesis, i. 2. [233] Exodus, chap. i. 5, 8. [234] Isaiah, chap. xi. 3, 4. [235] Psalm xc. [236] John, chap. i. 1. [237] Revelation, chap. i. 8. [238] Proverbs, chap. viii. 22. [239] Samuel, chap. xxii. 43. Isaiah, chap. xl. 19; chap. xliv. 24; chap. xlii. 5. Psalm cxxxvi. 6. Numbers, chap. xvii. 38. Job, chap. xxxvii. 18. [240] Cosmos v. 2, p. 60. [241] Genesis, chap. xix. 26. Exodus, chap. xiii. 20; chap. xxxiii. 10. Jeremiah, chap. i. 18. Galatians, chap. ii. 7. Song, chap. iii. 6. Job, chap. ix. 6; chap. xxvi. 11. Psalm lxxv. 3. 1 Timothy, chap. iii. 15. Revelation, chap. iii. 12. [242] Job, chap. xxxvi. 27. [243] Job, chap. xxviii. 24--literal reading. [244] Ecclesiastes, chap. i. 6. [245] Isaiah, chap. xl. [246] Job, chap. xxvi. 7. [247] Ruth, chap. iii. 15. [248] Job, chap. xxxviii. 37; chap. xxvi. 8; chap. xxxviii. 9; chap. xxxvi. 29. Psalm cv. 39; lxxvii. 17. [249] Isaiah, chap. xliv. 22. Jeremiah, chap. iv. 13. Job, chap. xxxviii. 37. Proverbs, chap. xxx. 4. [250] Ecclesiastes, chap. xi. 4. Psalm civ. 3. Matthew, chap. xxix. 30. [251] Isaiah, chap. xlv. 7. 1 John, chap. i. 5. Daniel, chap. ii. 22. 1 Timothy, chap. vi. 16. [252] Job, chap. xxxviii. 9, 10. Literally, _In my making_, etc. [253] Revelation, chap. xxi. 23; chap. xxii. 5. Isaiah, chap. lx. 19. [254] Job, chap. xxxviii. 7. [255] 2 Corinthians, chap. iv. 6. [256] Somerville's Connection of the Physical Sciences, Sec. 19-23. [257] Amos, chap. viii. 8. [258] Jeremiah, chap. xlvi. 7. Genesis, chap. xli. 1-18. See Parkhurst's Hebrew Lexicon, sub voce. [259] Neander. [260] Cosmos, Vol. I. p. 196. [261] Annual of Scientific Discovery. 1856. [262] Cosmos, Vol. I. p. 196. Nichol's Solar System, 184. [263] Somerville's Connection of Physical Sciences, 288. [264] Cosmos, Vol. I. p. 250. [265] Lyell's Principles of Geology, 465. [266] Cosmos, Vol. I. p. 250. [267] Cosmos, Vol. I. pp. 198, 216. [268] Cosmos, Vol. III. p. 139. [269] Nichol's Solar System, 188. Connection of Physical Sciences, 363. [270] Herschel's Outlines, Sec. 827. [271] Cosmos, Vol. VIII. p. 210. [272] Herschel's Outlines, Sec. 832. [273] Mitchell's Planetary and Stellar Worlds, 294. [274] Cosmos, Vol. III. p. 253. [275] Astronomical Observations, 351. [276] Herschel's Outlines, Sec. 830. [277] Astronomical Observations, 351. [278] Cosmos, Vol. III. pp. 222-232. [279] Cosmos, Vol. III. p. 246. [280] Solar System, 190. [281] Ephesians, chap. iv. 18. 2 Corinthians, chap. iv. 4. [282] Matthew, chap. xxiv. 29. John, chap. viii. 12. Jeremiah, chap. xiii. 15. Matthew, chap. xxii. 13 and chap. xxv. 30. CHAPTER XII. TELESCOPIC VIEWS OF SCRIPTURE. No kind of knowledge is more useful to man than the knowledge of his own ignorance; and no instrument has done more to give him such knowledge than the telescope. Faith is the believing of facts we do not know, upon the word of one who does. If any one knows everything, or thinks he does, he can have no faith. A deep conviction of our own ignorance is, therefore, indispensable to faith. The telescope gives us this conviction in two ways. It shows us that we see a great many things we do not perceive, tells us the size and the distances of those little sparks that adorn the sky, and leads us to reason out their true relations to our earth. Then it tells us, that what we see is little of what is to be seen; that our knowledge is but a drop from the great ocean, a rush-light sparkling in the vast darkness of the unknown. It tells us, that we do not see right, and that we do not see far; and that there may be things, both in heaven and earth, not dreamed of in our philosophy. Further, it confirms the Bible testimony concerning the facts of its own province, by removing all improbability from some of its most wonderful narratives, attesting the accuracy of its language, and confirming, by some of its most recent discoveries the truth of its statements. Our space will only allow us to select five illustrations of the tendency of faith in the telescope, to produce faith in the Bible. 1. One of the latest astronomical discoveries throws light upon one of the most ancient scientific allusions of the Bible, and one which has perplexed both commentators and geologists; _that which hints at the second causes of the deluge_. Not that it is at all needful for us to be able to tell where God Almighty procured the water to drown the ungodly sinners of the old world, before we believe his word that he did so; unless, indeed, somebody has explored the universe, and knows that there is not water enough in it for that purpose, or that it is so far away that he could not fetch it; for, as to the fact itself, geology assures us that all the dry land on earth has been drowned, not only once, but many times. It is not the province of the commentator, but of the geologist, to account for the phenomenon. Several solutions of the difficulty of finding water enough for the purpose have been proposed. One of these supposes that some of the internal caverns of the earth are filled with water, which, when heated by neighboring volcanic fires, would expand one twenty-third of its bulk, and flow out, and raise the ocean. When the volcanic fire was burnt out, and the water cooled, it would of course contract to its former dimensions, and the ocean recede. These caverns they suppose to be meant by "the fountains of the great deep," in Genesis vii. 11. But the Bible describes another, and plainly a very important source of the waters of the deluge, in the rain which fell for forty days and forty nights. At present, all the water in our atmosphere comes from the sea, by evaporation; and the quantity is too insignificant to cover the globe to any considerable depth. Divines and philosophers were perplexed to give any adequate explanation of this language, and considered it simply as Noah's description of the appearance of things as viewed from the ark, rather than an accurate explanation of the actual causes of the deluge. Now, it is certainly true, that the Bible does describe things as they appear to men. It is, however, beginning to be discovered, that these popular appearances are closely connected with philosophical reality. Our purblind astronomy and prattling geology may be as inadequate to expound the mysteries of the Bible philosophy as was the incoherent science of Strabo and Ptolemy. The experience of another planet, now transacting before our eyes, admonishes us not to limit the resources of Omnipotence by our narrow experience, or to suppose that our young science has catalogued all the weapons in the arsenal of the Almighty. The planet Saturn is surrounded by a revolving belt, consisting of several distinct rings, containing an area a hundred and forty-six times greater than the surface of our globe, with a thickness of a hundred miles. From mechanical considerations it had been proved, that these rings could not be of a uniform thickness all around, else when a majority of his seven moons were on the same side, the attraction would draw them in upon him, on the opposite side; and once attracted to his surface, they could never get loose again, if they were solid.[283] It was next ascertained that the motions of the moons and of the rings were such, that if the inequality was always in the same place, the same result must follow; so that the ring must be capable of changing its thickness, according to circumstances. It must be either composed of an immense number of small solid bodies, capable of shifting freely about among themselves, or else be fluid. Finally, it has been demonstrated that this last is the fact; that the density of this celestial ocean is nearly that of water; and that the inner portion, at least, is so transparent, that the planet has been seen through it.[284] "The ring of Saturn is, then, a stream or streams of fluid, rather denser than water, flowing about the primary."[285] The extraordinary fact, which shows us how God can deluge a planet when he pleases, I give not in the words of a divine, but of a philosopher, whose thoughtless illustration of Scripture is all the more valuable, that it is evidently unintentional. "M. Otto Struve, Mr. Bond, and Sir David Brewster, are agreed that Saturn's third ring is fluid, that this is not of very recent formation, and that it is not subject to rapid change. And they have come to the extraordinary conclusion, that the inner border of the ring has, since the day of Huygens, been gradually approaching to the body of Saturn, and that we may expect, sooner or later--perhaps in some dozen years--to see the rings united with the body of the planet. _With this deluge impending, Saturn would scarcely be a very eligible residence for men, whatever it might be for dolphins._"[286] Knowing, as we most certainly do, that the fluid envelopes of our own planet were once exceedingly different from the present,[287] here is a possibility quite sufficient to stop the mouth of the scoffer. Let him show that God did not, or prove that he could not, suspend a similar series of oceans over the earth, or cease to pronounce a universal deluge impossible. 2. That sublime ode, in which Deborah describes _the stars in their courses as fighting against Sisera_[288] has been rescued from the grasp of modern scoffers, by the progress of astronomy. It has been alleged as lending its support to the delusions of judicial astrology; by one class desiring to damage the Bible as a teacher of superstition, and by another to help their trade. The Bible reader will doubtless be greatly surprised to hear it asserted, that the Bible lends its sanction to this antiquated, and, as he thinks, exploded superstition. He knows how expressly the Bible forbids God's people to have anything to do with it, or with its heathenish professors. "Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven, for the heathen are dismayed at them."[289] And they will be still more surprised to learn, that those who object against the Bible, that it ascribes a controlling influence to the stars, are firm believers in Reichenbach's discovery of _odyle_; an influence from the heavenly bodies so spiritual and powerful, that they imagine it able to govern the world, instead of God Almighty.[290] The passage thus variously abused is a description, in highly poetic strains, of the battle between the troops of Israel and those of Sisera; of the defeat of the latter, and of an earthquake and tempest, which completed the destruction of his exhausted troops. The glory of the victory is wholly ascribed to the Lord God of Israel; while the rain, the thunder, lightning, swollen river, and "the stars in their courses," are all described, in their subordinate places, as only his instruments--the weapons of his arsenal. "Lord, when thou wentest out of Seir, When thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, The earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, The clouds also dropped down water; The mountains also melted from before the Lord, Even that Sinai, from before the Lord God of Israel." Then, after describing the battle, she alludes to the celestial artillery, and to the effects of the storm in swelling the river, and sweeping away the fugitives who had sought the fords: "They fought from heaven; The stars in their courses fought against Sisera; The river Kishon swept them away; That ancient river, the river Kishon."[291] After describing some further particulars the hymn concludes with an allusion to the clearing away of the tempest and the appearance of the unclouded sun over the field of victory: "So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord; But let them that love thee be as the sun, when he goeth forth in his might." Where is there the least allusion here to any controlling influence of the stars? You might just as well say, "The Bible ascribes a controlling influence over the destinies of men, to the river Kishon;" for they are both spoken of, in the same language, as instruments in God's hand for the destruction of his enemies. But it is objected, "Even by this explanation you have the Bible representing the stars as causing the rain." Not so fast. If a man were very ignorant, and had never heard of anything falling from the sky but rain, he might think so. And if the Bible did attribute to the stars some such influence over the vapors of the atmosphere, as experience shows the moon to possess over the ocean, are you able to demonstrate its absurdity? Deborah, however, when she sang of the stars _in their courses_ fighting against Sisera, was describing a phenomenon very different from a fall of rain--was, in fact, describing a fall of ærolites upon the army of Sisera. Multitudes of stones have fallen from the sky, and not less than five hundred such falls are recorded. "On September 1, 1814, a few minutes before midday, while the sky was perfectly serene, a violent detonation was heard in the department of the Lot and Garonne. This was followed by three or four others, and finally by a rolling noise, at first resembling a discharge of musketry, afterward the rumbling of carriages, and lastly that of a large building falling down. Stones were immediately after precipitated to the ground, some of which weighed eighteen pounds, and sunk into a compact soil, to the depth of eight or nine inches; and one of them rebounded three or four feet from the ground." "A great shower of stones fell at Barbatan, near Roquefort, in the vicinity of Bordeaux, on July 24, 1790. A mass fifteen inches in diameter penetrated a hut and killed a herdsman and bullock. Some of the stones weighed twenty-five pounds, and others thirty pounds." "In July, 1810, a large ball of fire fell from the clouds, at Shahabad, which burned five villages, destroyed the crops, and killed several men and women."[292] Astronomers are perfectly agreed as to the character of these masses, and the source whence they come. "It appears from recent astronomical observations that the sun numbers among his attendants not only planets, asteroids, and comets, but also immense multitudes of meteoric stones, and shooting stars."[293] Ærolites are, then, really stars. They are composed of materials similar to those of our earth; the only other star whose materials we can compare with them. They have a proper motion around the sun, in orbits distinct from that of the earth. They are capable of emitting the most brilliant light, in favorable circumstances. Some of them are as large as the asteroids. One, of 600,000 tons weight, passed within twenty-five miles of the earth, at the rate of twenty miles a second. A fragment of it reached the earth.[294] "That ærolites were called _stars_ by the ancients is indisputable. Indeed, Anaxagoras considered the stars to be only stony masses, torn from the earth by the violence of rotation. Democritus tells us, that invisible dark masses of stone move with the visible stars, and remain on that account unknown, but sometimes fall upon the earth, and are extinguished, as happened with the stony star which fell near Aegos Potamos."[295] When Deborah, therefore, describes the _stars in their courses_ as fighting against Sisera, it is an utterly unfounded assumption to suppose that she has any allusion to the baseless fancies of an astrology everywhere condemned by the religion she professed, when a simple and natural explanation is afforded by the fact, that stars do fall from the heavens to the earth, and _that they do so in their courses_, and just by reason of their orbital motion; and that the ancients both knew the fact, and gave the right name to those bodies. Let no reasonable man delude himself with the notion that God has no weapons more formidable than the dotings of astrology, till he has taken a view of the arsenals of God's artillery, which he has treasured up against the day of battle and of war. Here it may be well to notice the illustration which the remarkable showers of meteors, particularly those of November, 1833, shed upon several much ridiculed texts of Scripture. Scientific observation has fully confirmed and illustrated the scientific accuracy of the Bible in such expressions as, "the stars shall fall from heaven;" "there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp;" "and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind." Whatever political or ecclesiastical events these symbols may signify, there can be no question, now, that the astronomical phenomenon used to prefigure them is correctly described in the Bible. Most of my readers have seen some of these remarkable exhibitions; but for the sake of those who have not, I give a brief account of one. "By much the most splendid meteoric shower on record, began at nine o'clock, on the evening of the twelfth of November, 1833, and lasted till sunrise next morning. It extended from Niagara and the northern lakes of America, to the south of Jamaica, and from 61° of longitude, in the Atlantic, to 100° of longitude in Central Mexico. Shooting stars and meteors of the apparent size of Jupiter, Venus, and even the full moon, darted in myriads toward the horizon, _as if every star in the heavens had darted from their spheres_." They are described as having been as frequent as the flakes of snow in a snow-storm, and to have been seen with equal brilliancy over the greater part of the continent of North America.[296] The source whence these meteors proceed is distinctly ascertained to be, as was already remarked with regard to the ærolites, a belt of small planetoids, revolving around the sun in a little less than a year, and in an orbit intersecting that of the earth, at such an angle, that every thirty-three years, or thereabouts, the earth meets the full tide on the twelfth of November. These meteors are true and proper stars. "All the observations made during the year 1853 agree with those of previous years, and confirm what may be regarded as sufficiently well established: the cosmical origin of shooting stars."[297] 3. The language of the Bible with respect to _the circuit of the sun_ is found to have anticipated one of the most sublime discoveries of modern astronomy. True to the reality, as well as to the appearance of things, it is scientifically correct, without becoming popularly unintelligible. There is a class of aspirants to gentility who refuse to recognize any person not dressed in the style which they suppose to be fashionable among the higher classes. A Glasgow butcher's wife, in the Highlands, attired in all the magnificence of her satins, laces, and jewelry, returned the courteous salute of the little woman in the gingham dress and gray shawl with a contemptuous toss of the head, and flounced past, to learn, to her great mortification, that she had missed an opportunity of forming an acquaintance with the Queen. So a large class of pretenders to science refuse to become acquainted with Bible truth, because it is not shrouded in the technicalities of science, but displays itself in the plain speech of the common people to whom it was given. They will have it, that because its author used common language, it was because he could not afford any other; and as he did not contradict every vulgar error believed by the people to whom he spoke, it was because he knew no better; and because the Hebrews knew nothing of modern discoveries in astronomy, geology, and the other sciences, and the Bible does not contain lectures on these subjects, the God of the Hebrews must have been equally ignorant, and the Bible consequently beneath the notice of a philosopher. You will hear such persons most pertinaciously assert, that Moses believed all the absurdities of the Ptolemaic astronomy; that the earth is the immovable center, around which revolve the crystal sphere of the firmament, and the sun, and moon, and stars, which are attached to it, after the manner of lamps to a ceiling; and that he, and the world generally in his day, had not emerged from the grossest barbarism and ignorance of all matters of natural science. Yet these very people will probably tell you, in the same conversation, of the wonderful astronomical observations made by the Egyptians, ten thousand years before the days of Adam! So beautiful is the consistency of Infidel science. But when you inquire into the source of their knowledge of the philosophy of the ancients, you discover that they did not draw it from the writings of Moses, of which they betray the grossest ignorance, nor of any one who lived within a thousand years of Moses' time. Voltaire is their authority for all such matters. He transferred to the early Asiatics all the absurdities of the later Greek philosophers, and would have us believe that Moses, who wrote before these Greeks had learned to read, was indebted to them for his philosophy. Of the learning of the ancient patriarchs Voltaire does not tell them much, for a satisfactory reason. Yet it might not have required much learning to infer, that the eyes, and ears, and nerves of men who lived ten times as long as we can, must have been more perfect than ours; that a man who could observe nature with such eyes, under a sky where Stoddart now sees the ring of Saturn, the crescent of Venus, and the moons of Jupiter, with the naked eye,[298] and continue his observations for eight hundred years, would certainly acquire a better knowledge of the appearance of things than any number of generations of short-lived men, called away by death before they have well learned how to observe, and able only to leave the shell of their discoveries to their successors; that unless we have some good reason for believing that the mind of man was greatly inferior, before the flood, to what it is now, the antediluvians must have made a progress in the knowledge of the physical sciences, during the three thousand years which elapsed from the creation to the deluge, much greater than the nations of Europe have effected since they began to learn their A, B, C, about the same number of years ago; and that though Noah and his sons might not have preserved all the learning of their drowned contemporaries, they would still have enough to preserve them from the reproach of ignorance and barbarism; at least until their sons have succeeded in building a larger ship than the ark, or a monument equal to the Great Pyramid. The Astronomer Royal of Scotland[299] has demonstrated, that in this imperishable monument, erected four thousand years ago, the builders, who took care to keep it alone, of all the buildings of Egypt, free from idolatrous images or inscriptions, recorded with most laborious care, in multiples of the earth's polar diameter, a metric system, including linear and liquid measures, and a system of weights based on a cubical measure of water of uniform temperature; which uniform temperature they took the utmost care to preserve. He shows further, that they were acquainted with the precession of the equinoxes, with the density of the earth, and with the earth's distance from the sun; or at least calculated it at what proves to be nearly a mean of our discordant calculations; and that they were acquainted with problems just beginning to attract the attention of the science of Europe. When we know that the Chaldeans taught the Egyptians the expansive power of steam, and the induction of electricity by pointed conductors; that from the most remote antiquity the Chinese were acquainted with decimal fractions, electro-magnetism, the mariner's compass, and the art of making glass; that lenses have been found in the ruins of Nineveh, and that an artificial currency was in circulation in the first cities built after the flood;[300] that astronomical observations were made in China, with so much accuracy, from the deluge till the days of Yau, B. C. 2357, that the necessary intercalations were made for harmonizing the solar with the lunar year, and fixing the true period of 365-1/4 days; and that similar observations were conducted to a like result within a few years of the same remote period, in Babylon;--if the reader does not conclude that the world may have forgotten as much ancient lore during eighteen hundred years of idolatrous barbarism before the coming of Christ, as it has learned in the same number since, he will, at least, satisfy himself that the ancient patriarchs were not ignorant savages.[301] "Whole nations," says La Place, "have been swept from the earth, with their languages, arts, and sciences, leaving but confused masses of ruins to mark the place where mighty cities stood. Their history, with a few doubtful traditions, has perished; _but the perfection of their astronomical observations marks their high antiquity, fixes the periods of their existence, and proves that even at that early time they must have made considerable progress in science_."[302] The Infidel theory, that the first men were savages, is a pure fiction, refuted by every known fact of their history. That, however, is not the matter under discussion. We are not inquiring now, what Moses and the prophets _thought_, but what the Author of the Bible _told them to say_. The scribe writes as his employer dictates. "I will put my words in thy mouth," said God to Jeremiah. "My tongue is as the pen of a ready writer," said David. The prophets began, not with "Thus saith Isaiah," but "Thus saith the Lord." Unless the Word of God was utterly different from all his other works, it must transcend the comprehension of man in some respects. The profoundest philosopher is as ignorant of the cause of the vegetation of wheat as the mower who cuts it down; but their ignorance of the mysteries of organic force is no reason why the one may not harvest, and the other eat and live. Just so God's prophets conveyed previous mysteries to the Church, of the full import of which they themselves were ignorant; even as Daniel heard but understood not. The prophets, to whom it was revealed, that they did not minister to themselves, but to us, inquired and searched diligently into the meaning of their own prophecies; which meaning, nevertheless, continued hid for ages and generations.[303] If the prophets of the old economy might be ignorant of the privileges of the gospel day, of which they prophesied, at God's dictation, they might very well be ignorant, also, of the philosophy of creation, and yet write a true account of the facts, from his mouth. Let us suppose, then, that the ancient Hebrews and their prophets were, if not quite as ignorant of natural science as modern Infidels are pleased to represent them, yet unacquainted with the discoveries of Herschel and Newton; and, as a necessary consequence, that their language was the adequate medium of conveying their imperfect ideas, containing none of the technicalities invented by philosophers to mark modern scientific discoveries; and that God desired to convey to them some religious instruction, through the medium of language; must we suppose it indispensable for this purpose that he should use strange words, and scientific phrases, the meaning of which would not be discovered for thirty-three hundred years? Could not Dr. Alexander write a Sabbath-school book, without filling it full of such phrases as "right ascension," "declination," "precession of the equinoxes," "radius vector," and the like? Or, if some wiseacre did prepare such a book, would it be very useful to children? Perhaps even we, learned philosophers of the nineteenth century, are not out of school yet. How many discoveries are yet to be made in all the sciences; discoveries which will doubtless render our fancied perfection as utterly childish to the philosophers of a thousand years hence as the astronomy of the Greeks seems to us; and demand the use of technical language, which would be as unintelligible to us as our scientific nomenclature would have been to Aristotle. If God may not use popular speech in speaking to the people of any given period, but must needs speak the technical language of perfect science, and if science is now, and always will be, of necessity, imperfect, we are led to the sage conclusion, that every revelation from God to man must always be unintelligible! Does it necessarily follow, that because the Author of the Bible uses the common phrases, "sun rising," and "sun setting," in a popular treatise upon religion, that therefore he was ignorant of the rotation of the earth, and intended to teach that the sun revolved around it? He is certainly under no more obligation to depart from the common language of mankind, and introduce the technicalities of science into such a discourse, than mankind in general, and our objectors in particular, are to do the like in their common conversation. Now, I demand to know whether they are aware that the earth's rotation on its axis is the cause of day and night? But do you ever hear any of them use such phrases as "earth rising," and "earth setting?" But if an Infidel's daily use of the phrases, "_sun rising_," "_sun setting_," and the like, does not prove, either that he is ignorant of the earth's rotation as the cause of that appearance, or that he intends to deceive the world by those phrases, why may not Almighty God be as well informed and as honest as the Infidel, though he also condescends to use the common language of mankind? Do you ever hear astronomers, in common discourse, use any other language? I suppose Lieut. Maury, and Herschel, and Le Verrier, and Mitchell, know a little of the earth's rotation; but they, too, use the English tongue very much like other people, and speak of sunrise and sunset; yet nobody accuses them of believing in the Ptolemaic astronomy. Hear the immortal Kepler, the discoverer of the laws of planetary revolution: "We astronomers do not pursue this science with the view of altering common language; but we wish to open the gates of truth, without affecting the vulgar modes of speech. We say with the common people, 'The planets stand still, or go down;' 'the sun rises, or sets;' meaning only that so the thing appears to us, although it is not truly so, as all astronomers are agreed. How much less should we require that the Scriptures of divine inspiration, setting aside the common modes of speech, should shape their words according to the model of the natural sciences, and by employing a dark and inappropriate phraseology about things which surpass the comprehension of those whom it designs to instruct, perplex the simple people of God, and thus obstruct its own way toward the attainment of the far more exalted end to which it aims." It is evident, then, that God not only may, _but must_, use popular language in addressing the people, in a work not professedly scientific; and that if this popular language be scientifically incorrect, such use of it neither implies his ignorance nor approval of the error. But it may be worthy of inquiry whether this popular language of mankind, used in the Bible, be scientifically erroneous. If the language be intended to express an absolute reality, no doubt it is erroneous to say the sun rises and sets; but if it be only intended to describe an appearance, and the words themselves declare that intention, it can not be shown to be false to the fact. Now, when the matter is critically investigated, these phrases are found to be far more accurate than those of "earth rising," and "earth setting," which Infidels say the Author of the Bible should have used. For, as up and down have no existence in nature, save with reference to a spectator, and as the earth is always down with respect to a spectator on its surface, neither rising toward him, nor sinking from him, in reality, nor appearing to do so, unless in an earthquake, the improved phrases are false, both to the appearance of things, and to the cause of it. Whereas, our common speech, making no pretensions to describe the causes of appearances, can not contradict any scientific discovery of these causes, and therefore can not be false to the fact; while it truly describes all that it pretends to describe--the appearance of things to our senses. And so, after all the outcry raised against it by sciolists, the vulgar speech of mankind, used by the Author of the Bible, must be allowed to be philosophical enough for his purpose, and theirs; at least till somebody favors both with a better. Though we are in no way concerned, then, to prove that every poetical figure in Scripture, and every popular illustration taken from nature, corresponds to the accuracy of scientific investigation, before we believe the Bible to be a revelation of our duty to God and man, yet it may be worth while to inquire, further, whether we really find upon its sacred pages such crude and egregious scientific errors as Infidels allege. We have seen in the last chapter, that they are not able to read even its first chapter without blundering. Indeed, they generally boast of their ignorance of its contents. It is a very good rule to take them at their word, and when they quote Scripture, to take it for granted _that they quote it wrong_, unless you know the contrary. The first thing for you to do when an Infidel tells you the Bible says so and so, is to get the Book, and see whether it does or not. You will generally find that he has either misquoted the words, or mistaken their meaning, from a neglect of the context; or perhaps has both misquoted and mistaken. Then, when you are satisfied of the correct meaning of the text, and he tells you that it is contrary to the discoveries of science, the next point is to ask him, _How do you know?_ You will find his knowledge of science and Scripture about equal. Both these tests should be applied to scientific objections to the Bible, as they are all composed of equal parts of biblical blunders, and philosophical fallacies. In the objection under consideration, for instance, both statements are wrong. The Bible does not represent the earth as the immovable center of the universe, or as immovable in space at all. It does not represent the sun and stars as revolving around it. Nor are the facts of astronomy more correctly stated. It is not the Bible, but our objector, that is a little behind the age in his knowledge of science. If we inquire for those texts of Scripture which represent the earth as the immovable center of the universe, we shall be referred to the figurative language of the Psalms, the book of Job, and other poetical parts of Scripture, which speak of the "foundations of the earth," "the earth being established," "abiding for ever," and the like, when the slightest attention to the language would show _that it is intended to be figurative_. The accumulation of metaphors and poetical images in some of these passages is beautiful and grand in the highest degree; but none, save the most stupid reader, would ever dream of interpreting them literally. Take, for instance, Psalm civ. 1-6, where, in one line, the world is described as God's house, with beams, and chambers, and foundations; but in the very next line the figure is changed, and it is viewed as an infant, covered with the deep, as with a garment. "Bless, the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God, thou art very great; Thou art clothed with honor and majesty: Who coverest thyself with light, as with a garment; Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain; _Who layeth the beams of his chambers upon the waters_: Who walketh upon the wings of the wind: Who maketh his angels spirits: His ministers a flaming fire: _Who laid the foundations of the earth, That it should not be removed for ever_. Thou coveredst it with the deep, as with a garment: The waters stood above the mountains." But if any one is so gross as to insist on the literality of such a passage, and to allege that it teaches the absolute immobility of the earth, let him tell us what sort of immobility the third verse teaches, and how a building could be stable, the beams of whose chambers are _laid upon the waters_--the chosen emblems of instability. "He hath founded it upon the seas: he hath established it upon the floods," says the same poet, in another Psalm--xxiv 1. This, and all other expressions quoted as declaring the immobility of the earth _in space_, are clearly proved, both by the words used, and the sense of the context, to refer to an entirely different idea: namely, _its duration in time_. Thus, Ecclesiastes i. 4, "One generation passeth away, and another cometh; but the earth abideth forever," is manifestly contrasting the duration of earth with the generations of short-lived men, and has no reference to motion in space at all. Again, in Psalm cxix. 89-91, our objectors find another Bible declaration of the immobility of the earth in space: "For ever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven; Thy faithfulness is unto all generations; Thou hast established the earth, and it abideth. _They continue to this day_, according to thine ordinances." The same permanence is here ascribed to the heavens (to which, as our objectors argue, the Bible ascribes a perpetual revolution) as to the earth. The next verse explains this permanence to be _continuance to this day_; durability, not immobility. That the word _establish_ does not necessarily imply fixture, is evident from its application, in Proverbs viii. 28: "He _established_ the clouds," the most fleeting of all things. Nor is the Hebrew word _kun_ (whence our English word, cunning), inconsistent with motion; else, the Psalmist had not said that "a good man's footsteps are _established_ by the Lord."[304] "He _established_ my goings." Wise arrangement is the idea, not permanent fixture. The same remarks apply to Psalm xciii. 1; xcvi. 10; 1 Chronicles xvi. 30, and many other similar passages. "The world is established, that it can not be moved; Thy throne is established of old: Thou art from everlasting." Where the establishment, which is contrasted with the impossible removal, and which explains its import, is evidently not a local fixing of some material seat, in one place, but the everlasting duration of God's authority. The idea is not that of position in space, at all, but of continued duration. Space does not allow us to quote all the passages which refer to this subject; but after an examination of every passage in the Bible usually referred to in this connection, and of a multitude of others bearing upon it, I have no hesitation in saying, that it does not contain a single text which asserts or implies the immobility of the earth in space. The notion was drawn from the absurdities of the Greek philosophy, and the superstitions of popery, but was never gathered from the Word of God. But it is alleged that other passages of Scripture do plainly and unequivocally express the motion of the sun, and his course in a circuit; as, for instance, the Nineteenth Psalm: "In them he hath set a tabernacle for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, And rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of heaven, And his circuit unto the ends of it." And again, in the account of Joshua's miracle, in the tenth chapter of his book, it is quite evident that the writer supposed the sun to be in motion, in the same way as the moon, for he commanded them both to stand still: "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies." Now, it is said, if the writer had known what he was about, he would have known that the sun was already standing still, and would have told the earth to stop its rotation. And if the earth had obeyed the command, we should never have heard of the miracle; for, as the earth rotates at the rate of a thousand miles an hour, the concussion produced by such a stoppage would have projected Joshua, and Israelites, and Amorites, beyond the moon, to pursue their quarrel among the fixed stars. When we hear men of some respectability bring forward such stuff, we are constrained to wonder, not merely were they ever at school, but if they ever traveled in a railroad car, or whether they suppose their hearers to be so ignorant of the most common facts as to believe that there is no way of bringing a carriage to a stand but by a sudden jerk, or that God is more stupid than the brakeman of an express train. We will do them the justice, however, to say, that they did not invent it, but merely shut their eyes, and opened their mouths, and swallowed it for philosophy, because they found it in the writings of an Infidel scoffer, and of a Neological professor of theology[305]--an edifying example of Infidel credulity! Let it be noticed, that in neither of these texts, nor in any other portion of Scripture, does the Bible say a single word about the revolution of the sun _round the earth_, as the common center of the universe; on which, however, the whole stress of the objection is laid. The passages do not prove what they are adduced to prove. They speak of the sun's motion, and of the sun's orbit, _but they do not say that the earth is the center of that orbit_. These texts, then, do not prove the Author of the Bible ignorant of the system of the universe. The objection is based upon utter ignorance of one of the most important and best attested discoveries of modern astronomy; the grand motion of the sun and solar system through the regions of space, and the dependence of the rotation of all the orbs composing it, upon that motion. It is not the Author of the Bible who is ignorant of the discoveries of modern astronomy--when he speaks of the orbit of the sun, and his race from one end of the heavens to the other, and of the need of a miraculous interposition to stop his course for a single day--but his correctors, who have ventured to decry the statements of a Book which commands the respect of such astronomers as Herschel and Rosse, while ignorant of those elements of astronomy which they might have learned from a perusal of the books used by their children in our common schools. For the benefit of such, however, I will present a brief explanation of the grounds upon which astronomers are as universally agreed upon the belief of the sun's motion around a center of the firmament, as they are upon the belief of the revolution of the earth round the sun. When you are passing in a carriage, at night, through the street of a city lighted up by gas-lamps in the streets, and lights irregularly dispersed in the windows, or passing in a ferry-boat, from one such city to another, at a short distance from it, you observe that the lights which you are leaving appear to draw closer and closer together, while those toward which you are approaching widen out, and seem to separate from each other. If the night were perfectly dark, so that you could see nothing but the lights, you could certainly know not only that you were in motion, but also to what point you were moving, by carefully watching their appearances. So, if all the fixed stars were absolutely fixed, and the sun and planets, including our earth, were moving in any direction--say to the north--then the stars toward which we were moving would seem to widen out from each other, and those which we were leaving would seem to close up; so that the space which appeared between any two stars in the south, in a correct map of the heavens, a hundred years ago, would be smaller, and that between any two stars in the north would be larger, than the space between the same stars upon a correct map now. Now, such changes in the apparent positions of stars are actually observed. The stars do not appear in the same places now as they did a hundred years ago. The fixed stars, then, are either drifting past our solar system, which alone remains fixed; or, the fixed stars are all actually at rest, and our sun is drifting through them; or, our solar system and the so-called fixed stars are both in motion. One or other of these suppositions must be the fact. The first is simply the old Ptolemaic absurdity, only transferring the center of the universe to the sun. The second is contrary to the observed fact, that multitudes of the stars, which were supposed to be fixed, are actually revolving around each other, in systems of double, triple and multiple suns. And both are contrary to the first principles of gravitation; for, as every particle of matter attracts every other, directly as the mass, and inversely as the square of the distance, if any one particle of matter in the universe is in motion, the square of its distance from every other particle varies, and its attraction is increased in one direction, and diminished in another; and so every particle of matter in free space, as far as the force of gravitation extends, will be put in motion too. But our earth, and the planets, and the double and triple stars, are in motion, and the law of gravitation extends to every known part of the universe; therefore every known particle of matter in the universe is in motion too, our sun included. The third supposition, then, is most indisputably true; our solar system, and all the heavenly bodies, are in motion. To this conclusion all the observed facts conform. The Bible does say that the sun moves, and moves in a curve. All mathematicians prove that it must of necessity do so. All astronomers assert that it does so. The unanimous verdict of the scientific world is thus rendered by Nichol: "_As to the subject itself, the grand motion of the sun, as well as its present direction, must be received now as an established doctrine of astronomy._"[306] But the discovery was anticipated, three thousand years ago, by the Author of the Bible. But, as will readily be perceived, the difficulty of determining either the direction or the rate of this motion is immensely increased in this case; for we are now not like persons riding in a carriage, watching the fixed lights in the street to determine our direction and rate of progress; but we are watching the lamps of a multitude of carriages, moving at various distances, and with various velocities, and, for anything we can tell at first sight, in various directions. We are on board a steamer, and are watching the lights of a multitude of other steamers, also in motion; and it is not easy to find out, in the darkness, how either they or we are going. If each were pursuing its own independent course, without any common object or destination, the confusion would be so great that we could learn nothing of the rate or direction either of our own motion or theirs. But astronomers are not content to believe that the universe is governed by accident. The whole science is based upon the assumption, that a presiding mind has impressed the stamp of order and regularity upon the whole cosmos. They are deeply convinced that God's law extends to all God's creation; that all his works display his intelligence, as well as his power, and proceed according to a wise plan. Having seen that all the stellar motions previously known are orderly motions, in circular or elliptical orbits, and that the most of the solid bodies belonging to our own system revolve in one direction, they reasoned from analogy, that this might be the case with the sun and the fixed stars, and went to work with great diligence, to see whether it was or not; and, by comparing a great multitude of observations, ancient and modern, made both in the northern and southern hemispheres, and on all sorts of stars, they have come to the conclusion, that our sun, and all the bodies of the solar system, are flying northward, at the rate of three millions three hundred and thirty-six thousand geographical miles a day--five thousand times faster than a railway express train--toward the constellation Hercules, in R. A. 259° Dec. 35°. Further, as the direction of this motion is slowly and regularly changing, just as the direction of the head of a steamer in wearing, or of a railway train running a curve, it is certain that the sun is moving, not in a straight line, but in a curve. The revolution of the sun in such an orbit was known to the Author of the Bible when he wrote, "_his circuit_ is to the end of heaven." The direction of the circumference of a circle being known, that of its center can be found; for the radius is always a tangent to the circumference, and the intersection of two of these radii will be the center; so that, if we certainly knew the sun's orbit to be circular, or nearly so, we could calculate the center. But as we do not certainly know its form, we can not certainly calculate the center; we can only come near it. And as we know that the line which connects the circumference with the center of the sun's orbit, runs through the group of stars known as the Pleiades, or the Cluster; and as all the stars along that line seem to move in the same direction--a different direction from that of the stars in other regions, just as they must do if they and we were revolving around that group--Argelander and others have concluded, with a high degree of probability, that the grand center around which the sun and our firmament revolve, is that constellation which the Author of the Bible, more than three thousand years ago, called _kyme_--_the pivot_. It would require a greater knowledge of electro-magnetism than most of my readers possess, to explain the connection of the earth's rotation with the sun's grand movement. I will merely state the facts. Electro-magnetism is induced by friction. The regions of space are not empty, but filled with an ether, whose undulations produce light; and this ether is sufficiently dense to retard the motions of comets. The friction, produced by the rapid passage of the sun and solar system through this ether, must be immense, and is one source of electricity, and the principal source of electro-magnetism. This kind of electricity differs from the other kinds, in that _its action is always at right angles to the current, and tends to produce rotation in any wheel, cylinder, or sphere, along whose axis it flows_.[307] The sun, and all the planets, traveling in the direction of their poles, the current is of course in the direction of the axis; and the result is, that while the sun moves along his grand course, he and all the bodies of the system will rotate, by the influence of the electro-magnetism generated by that motion; and if he stops, his and their rotation stops too. Day and night on earth are produced by the sun's motion causing the earth's rotation. You can see the principle illustrated by the child who runs along the street with his windmill, to create a current, which will make it revolve. The Author of the Bible made no mistake when, desiring to lengthen the day, he commanded the sun to stand still. It is not the Creator, but his correctors, who are ignorant of the mechanism of the universe. Thus, these long-misunderstood and much-assailed Scriptures are not only vindicated, but far more than vindicated, by the progress of astronomical discovery. It not only proves the language of the Bible to be correct; it assures us that it is divine. The same Hand which formed the stars to guide the simple peasant to his dwelling, at the close of day, and to lead the mighty intellects of Newton and of Herschel among the mysteries of the universe, formed those expressions which, to the peasant's eye, describe the apparent reality, and, to the astronomer's reason, demonstrate the reality of the appearance of the heavens, and are thus, alike to peasant and philosopher, the _oracles of God_. Nor is this the only instance of such Bible oracles. Thousands of years before philosophers knew anything of the formation of dew, Moses described it exactly, and noticed how it differed from the rain which drops down, while the dew evaporates. "My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall _distill_ as the dew."--Deuteronomy xxxii. 2. Solomon described the cycloidal course of the wind, and recorded it in Ecclesiastes long before Admiral Fitzroy's discovery; as he also anticipated the doctrine of aqueous circulation in his pregnant proverb: "Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again."--Ecclesiastes i. 7. Job declared the law of pneumatics when he declared that "God maketh _weight_ for the winds." Long before Madler, the celebrated Russian astronomer, published his remarkable opinion: "I regard the Pleiades as the central group to the whole astral system, and the fixed stars, even to its outer limits, marked by the Milky Way; and I regard Alcyone as that star of all others, composing the group which is favored by most of the probabilities as being the true central sun of the universe," Moses tells us they were known as "the hinge, or pivot," of the heavens; and God asks, "Canst thou bind the secret influences of the Pleiades?" Though Peter was no geologist, and probably incapable of calculating the ratio of the central heat, he tells us that the heavens and the earth are "reserved unto fire," literally, "stored with fire." Equally in advance of modern medical science, thousands of years before our modern discoveries, the Author of the Bible declared that "the life is in the blood," and spoke of the slow combustion of starvation exactly in the language of the most recent physiology, "they shall be _burnt_ with hunger, and devoured with burning heat."--Deuteronomy xxxii. 24. Here we have scientific truth not discovered for centuries by our men of science, but revealed by prophets--scientific discovery, in advance of science--predictions of the future progress of the human intellect, no less than revelations of the existing motions of the stars. He who wrote these oracles knew that the creatures to whom he gave them would one day unfold their hidden meaning (else he had not so written them), and in the light of scientific discovery, see them to be as truly divine predictions of the advance of science, as the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, read among the ruins of Thebes or Babylon, are seen to be predictions of the ruin of empires. Man's discoveries fade into insignificance in the presence of such unfolding mysteries; and we are led to our Bibles, with the prayer, "Open mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law." 4. The ancient charter of the Church was written in the language of one of the most recent astronomical discoveries, thirty-six hundred years before Herschel and Rosse enabled us to understand its full significance: "He brought him forth abroad, and said unto him, _Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be._"[308] The scenery was well calculated to impress Abraham's mind with a sense of the ability of Christ to fulfill a very glorious promise, by a very improbable event; but the illustration was as well calculated as the promise to test the character of that faith which takes God's Word as sufficient evidence of things not seen; for, if the promise was a trying test of faith, so was the illustration. Before this, God had promised that his seed should be as the dust of the earth; and afterward he declared it should be as the sand of the seashore; the well-known symbol of a multitude beyond all power of calculation. To couple the stars of heaven with the sand upon the seashore in any such connection as to imply that the stars too were innumerable, or that their number came within any degree of comparison with the ocean sands, must have seemed to Abraham in the highest degree mysterious, even as it has appeared to scoffers, in modern times, utterly ridiculous; for, though the first glance at the sky conveys the impression that the stars are really innumerable, the investigations of our imperfect astronomy seem to assure us that this is by no means the case. And, as the patriarch sat, night after night, at his tent door, and, in obedience to the command of Christ, counted the stars, and made such a catalogue of them as his Chaldean preceptors had used, he would very speedily come to the conclusion, that so far as he could see, they were by no means innumerable; for the catalogue of Hipparchus reckons only one thousand and twenty-two as visible to one observer, and the whole number visible in both hemispheres by the naked eye does not exceed eight thousand.[309] And even if we suppose, that these old patriarchs had better eyes, as we know they had a clearer sky, than modern western observers, and that Abraham saw the moons of Jupiter, and stars as small, still the number would not seem in the least degree comparable with the number of the sands upon the seashore--whereof a million are contained in a cubic inch,[310] a number greater than the population of the globe in a square foot,[311] while the sum total of the human race, from Adam to this hour, would not approach to the aggregate of the sands of a single mile. Though the stars of a size too small to be visible to our eyes, are much more numerous than the larger stars, yet even up to the range of view possessed by ordinary telescopes, they are by no means innumerable. In fact, they are counted and registered, and the number of the stars of the ninth magnitude, which are four times as distant as the most distant visible to our eyes--so distant that their light is five hundred and eighty-six years in traveling toward us--is declared to be exactly thirty-seven thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine. Abraham's sense and Abraham's faith must have had many a conflict on this promise, as the faith and the sense of many of his children, especially the scientific portion of them, have since, when reading such portions as this; and those other Scriptures which represent it as an achievement of Omniscience, that "he telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names."[312] It is indeed remarkable how God delights to test the faith of his people, and to stumble the pride of fools, by presenting this mysterious truth, of the innumerable multitude of the stars, in every announcement of the wonderful works of Him who is perfect in wisdom. Infant astronomy stretched out her hands to catch the stars, and count them. Many a proud Infidel wondered that Moses could be so silly as to suppose he could not count the stars, and the believer often wondered what these words could mean. But faith rests in the persuasion of two great truths: "God is very wise," and "I am very ignorant." The increase of knowledge, by widening the boundaries of our ignorance, seemed for a time to render the difficulty even greater. The increased power of Herschel's telescope, and his discovery of the constitution of the Milky Way, mark an era in the progress of astronomy, and enlarge our views of the extent of the universe, to an extent inconceivable by those who have not studied the science. Where we see only a faint whitish cloud stretching across the sky, Herschel's telescope disclosed a vast bed of stars. At one time he counted five hundred and eighty-eight stars in the field of his telescope. In a quarter of an hour, one hundred and sixteen thousand passed before his eye. In another portion, he found three hundred and thirty-one thousand stars in a single cluster.[313] He found the whole structure of that vast luminous cloud which spans the sky, "to consist entirely of stars, _scattered by millions, like glittering dust_, on the background of the general heavens." Yet still it was not supposed to be at all impossible to estimate their numbers. Even this distinguished astronomer, a few years ago, computed it at eight or ten millions. Schroeter allowed twenty degrees of it to pass before him, and withdrew from the majestic spectacle, exclaiming, "What Omnipotence!" He calculated, however, that the number of the stars visible through one of the best telescopes in Europe, in 1840, was twelve millions; a number equaled by a single generation of Abraham's descendants, far below the power of computation, and utterly insignificant, as compared with the sands of the sea. Had our powers of observation stopped here, the great promise must still have seemed as mysterious to the astronomer, as it once seemed to the Patriarch. But if either the Father of the Faithful, or the Father of Sidereal Astronomy, had deluded himself with the notion, that he fully comprehended either the words or the works of Him who is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working, and argued thence that, because the revealed words and the visible works seemed not to correspond, they were really contradictory, he would have committed the blunder of modern Infidels, who assume that they know everything, and that as God's knowledge can not be any greater than theirs, every Scripture which their science can not comprehend must be erroneous. The grandest truths, imperfectly perceived in the twilight of incipient science, serve as stumbling-blocks for conceited speculators, as well as landmarks on the boundaries of knowledge to true philosophers, who will ever imbibe the spirit of Newton's celebrated saying: "I seem to myself like a child gathering pebbles on the shore, while the great ocean of knowledge lies unexplored before me;" or the profound remark of Humboldt: "What is seen does not exhaust that which is perceptible." But the progress of science was not destined merely to coast the shore of this ocean. In 1845, Lord Rosse, and a band of accomplished astronomers, commenced a voyage through the immensities, with a telescope which has enlarged our view of the visible universe to one hundred and twenty-five million times the extent before perceived, and displayed far more accurately the real form and nature of objects previously seen. Herschel's researches into the Architecture of the Heavens, which have justly rendered his name immortal as the science he illustrated, had revealed the existence of great numbers of _nebulæ_--clouds of light--faint, yet distinct. He supposed many of these to consist of a luminous fluid, pretty near to us; at least, comparatively so; for to believe that they were stars, so far away as to be severally invisible in his forty feet telescope, while yet several of these clouds are distinctly seen by the naked eye, involved the belief of distances so astounding, and of multitudes so incredible, and of a degree of closeness of the several stars so unparalleled by anything which even he had observed, that his imagination and reason failed to meet the requirements of such a problem. The supposition was, however, thrown out by this gigantic intellect, that these clouds might be firmaments; that the Bible word _heavens_ might be literally plural; and more than that, he labored in the accumulation of facts which tended to confirm it. He disclosed the fact, that several of these apparent clouds, which, to very excellent telescopes, displayed only a larger surface of cloudy matter, did, in the reflector of his largest telescope, display themselves in their true character, as globular clusters, consisting of innumerable multitudes of glorious stars; and, moreover, that, stretching away far beyond star, or Milky Way, or nebulæ, he had seen, in some parts of the heavens, "a stippling," or uniform dotting of the field of view, by points of light too small to admit of any one being steadily or fixedly examined, _and too numerous for counting_, were it possible so to view them! What are these? Millions upon millions of years must have elapsed ere that faint light could reach our globe, from those profundities of space, though it travels like the lightning's flash. If they are stars, the sands of the seashore are as inferior in numbers as the surface of earth is inferior in dimensions to the arch of heaven. But if these faint dots and stipplings are not single stars!--if they are star-clouds--galaxies--firmaments, like our Milky Way--our infinity is multiplied by millions upon millions! Imagination pants, reason grows dizzy, arithmetic fails to fathom, and human eyes fear to look into the abyss. No wonder that this profound astronomer, when a glimpse of infinity flashed on his eye, retired from the telescope, trembling in every nerve, afraid to behold. And yet this astounding supposition is a literal truth; and the light of those suns, whose twilight thus bowed down that mighty intellect in reverent adoration, now shines before human eyes in all its noonday refulgence. One of the most remarkable of these nebulæ--one which is visible to a good eye in the belt of Orion--has been disclosed to the observers at Parsontown as a firmament; and minute points, scarce perceptible to common telescopes, blaze forth as magnificent clusters of glorious stars, so close and crowded, that no figure can adequately describe them, save the twin symbol of the promise, "the sand by the seashore," or "the dust of the earth." "There is a minute point, near Polaris," says Nichol, "so minute, that it requires a good telescope to discern its being. I have seen it as represented by a good mirror, blazing like a star of the first magnitude; and though examined by a potent microscope, clear and definite as the distinctest of these our nearest orbs, when beheld through an atmosphere not disturbed. Nay, through distances of an order I shall scarcely name, I have seen a mass of orbs compressed and brilliant, so that each touched on each other, _like the separate grains of a handful of sand_, and yet there seemed no melting or fusion of any one of the points into the surrounding mass. Each sparkled individually its light pure and apart, like that of any constituent of the cluster of the Pleiades."[314] "The larger and nearer masses are seen with sufficient distinctness to reveal the grand fact decisive of their character, viz: that they consist of multitudes of closely related orbs, forming an independent system. In other cases we find the individual stars by no means so clearly defined. Through effect, in all probability, of distance, the intervals between them appear much less, the shining points themselves being also fainter; while the masses still further off _may be best likened to a handful of golden sand, or, as it is aptly termed, star dust_; beyond which no stars, or any vestige of them, are seen, but only a patch or streak of milky light, similar to the unresolved portions of our surrounding zone."[315] To say, then, that the stars of the sky are actually innumerable is only a cold statement of the plainest fact. Hear it in the language of one privileged to behold the glories of one out of the thousands of similar firmaments: "The mottled region forming the lighter part of the mass (the nebula in Orion) is a very blaze of stars. But that stellar creation, now that we are freed from all dubiety concerning the significance of those hazes that float numberless in space, how glorious, how endless! Behold, amid that limitless ocean, every speck, however remote or dim, a noble galaxy. Lustrous they are, too; in manifold instances beyond all neighboring reality--beyond the loftiest dream which ever exercised the imagination. The great cluster in Hercules has long dazzled the heart with its splendors, but we have learned now that among circular and compact galaxies, a class to which the nebulous stars belong, there are multitudes which infinitely surpass it--nay, that schemes of being rise above it, sun becoming nearer to sun, until their skies must be one blaze of light--a throng of burning activities! But, far aloft stands Orion, the pre-eminent glory and wonder of the starry universe! Judged by the only criticism yet applicable, it is perhaps so remote that its light does not reach us in less than fifty or sixty thousand years; and as at the same time it occupies so large an apparent portion of the heavens, how stupendous must be the extent of the nebula. It would seem almost as if all the other clusters hitherto gauged were collected and compressed into one, they would not surpass this mighty group, _in which every wisp--every wrinkle--is a sand-heap of stars_. There are cases in which, though imagination has quailed, reason may still adventure inquiry, and prolong its speculations; but at times we are brought to a limit across which no human faculty has the strength to penetrate, and where, as now, at the very footstool of the secret THRONE, we can only bend our heads, and silently _adore_. And from the inner Adyta--the invisible shrine of what alone is and endures--a voice is heard: "Hast thou an arm like God? Canst thou thunder with a voice like Him? Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, Or loosen the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his seasons? Canst thou guide Arcturus and his sons?[316] He telleth the number of the stars: He calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power; His understanding is infinite."[317] Thus, nobly does science vindicate Scripture, and display the wisdom and power of the Lord of Hosts, whose kingdom extends through all space, and endures through all duration. He who called these countless hosts of glorious orbs into being is abundantly able to multiply, to an equally incalculable number, the humble sands which line the oceans of terrestrial grace, the brilliant stars which shall yet adorn the heavens of celestial glory. All, of every nation, who shall partake of Abraham's faith, are Abraham's children. They are Christ's, and so Abraham's seed, and heirs, according to this promise.[318] When the great multitude, which no man can number, out of every nation, and tongue, and people, stand before the throne of God, and cause the many mansions of our Father's house to re-echo the shout, "Salvation to our God which sitteth on the throne, and to the Lamb," the answering hallelujahs of the most distant orbs shall expound the purport of that solemn oath to Abraham and Abraham's seed: "By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, that in blessing I will bless thee, and _in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore_."[319] 5. It is not probable that the mysteries of the distant heavens, _or of those future glories of the redeemed which the Bible employs them to symbolize_, will ever be fully explored by man, or adequately apprehended in the present state of being. But it is most certain that God would not have employed the mysteries of astronomy so frequently as the symbols of the mysteries of the glory to be revealed, had there not been some correspondence between the things which eye hath not seen, and these patterns shown in the mount. So habitual, indeed, is the Scripture use of these visible heavens as the types of all that is exalted, pure, cheering, and glorious, that, to most Christians, the word has lost its primary meaning, and the idea first suggested to their minds by the word _heaven_ is that of future glory; yet their views of the locality and physical adornments of the many mansions of their Father's house are dim and shadowy, just because they do not acquaint themselves sufficiently with the divine descriptions in the Bible, and the divine illustrations in the sky. The Bible would be better understood were the heavens better explored. "I go," said Jesus, "to prepare a _place_ for you." The bodies of the saints, raised on the resurrection morn, will need a _place_ on which to stand. The body of the Lord, which his disciples handled, and "saw that a spirit had not flesh and bones, as they saw him have," is now resident in a place. Where He is, there shall his people be also. Why, then, when the Bible employs all that is beauteous in earth, and glorious in heaven, to describe the adornments of the palace of the King of kings, should we hesitate to believe that the power and wisdom of God are not exhausted in this little earth of ours, but that other worlds may as far transcend ours in glory, as many of them do in magnitude?--or, to allow that the glorious visions of Ezekiel and John were not views of nonentities, or mere visions of clouds, or of some incomprehensible symbols of more incomprehensible spiritualities, but actual views of the existing glories of some portion of the universe, presented to us as vividly as the dullness of our minds and the earthliness of our speech will permit? It is certain that the recent progress of astronomical discovery has revealed celestial scenery which illustrates some of the most mysterious of these visions. It has long been known, that "one star differeth from another star in glory," and that the orbs of heaven shine with various colors. Sirius is white, Arcturus red, and Procyon yellow. The telescope shows all the smaller stars in various colors. Under the clear skies of Syria their brilliance is vastly greater than in our climate. "_One star shines like a ruby, another as an emerald, and the whole heavens sparkle as with various gems._"[320] But the discovery of the double and triple stars has added a new harmony of colors to these coronets of celestial jewels. These stars generally display the complementary colors. If the one star displays a color from the red end of the spectrum, the other is generally of the corresponding shade, from the violet end. For instance, in O2 Cygni, the large star is yellow, and the two smaller stars are blue; and so in others, through all the colors of the rainbow. "It may be easier suggested in words," says Sir John Herschel, "than conceived in imagination, what a variety of illumination two stars--a red and a green, or a yellow and a blue one--must afford a planet circulating around either, and what cheering contrasts and grateful vicissitudes a red and a green day, for instance, alternating with a white one, and with darkness, must arise from the presence or absence of one, or other, or both, from the horizon."[321] But suppose one of the globular clusters--for instance, that in the constellation Hercules--thus constituted; its unnumbered thousands of suns, wheeling round central worlds, and exhibiting their glories to their inhabitants; "skies blazing, with grand orbs scattered regularly around, and with a profusion to which our darker heavens are strangers;" the overhead sky, seen from the interior regions of the cluster, _must appear gorgeous beyond description_. In the strictest literality it might be said to the dwellers in such a cluster, "Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw herself." The surrounding walls of such a celestial palace must seem indeed "garnished with all manner of precious stones." Sapphire, emerald, sardius, chrysolite, and pearl, must seem but dim mirrors of its glorious refulgence. Under its ever rising suns the gates need not be shut at all by day, "for there shall be no night there." That glorious place now exists, though far away. But the Lord of these hosts has said, "Behold, I come quickly." He will not tarry. A thousand times faster than the swiftest chariot, our solar system and the surrounding firmament wing their flight toward that same glorious cluster in Hercules. As our firmament approaches, under the guidance of Omnipotent wisdom, it too must fly to meet our sun, with a velocity increasing with an incalculable ratio. The celestial city will then be seen to descend from heaven. Once within the sphere of its attractions, our sun and surrounding planets will feel their power. Their ancient orbits and accustomed revolutions must give way to the higher power. Old things must pass away, and all things become new. A new heaven, no less than a new earth, will form the dwelling of righteousness. These are no longer the visions of prophecy merely, but the sober calculations of mathematical science, based upon a foundation as solid as the attraction of gravitation, and as wide as the existence of that ether whose undulations convey the light of the most distant stars; for, so surely as that attraction is efficient, must all the firmaments of the heavens be drawn more closely together; and as certainly as they revolve not in empty space, but in a medium capable of retarding Encke's comet three days in every revolution, must that retarding medium bring their revolutions to a close. "And so," said Herschel, casting his eye fearlessly toward future infinities, "we may be certain that the stars in the Milky Way will be gradually compressed, through successive stages of accumulation, until they come up to what may be called the ripening period of the globular cluster." Unnumbered ages may be occupied with such a grand evolution of celestial progress, beyond our power of calculation; but will the changes of created things, even then, have come to an end? Hear again the voice, not of the prophet, but of the astronomer: "Around us lie stabilities of every order; but it is _stability_ only that we see, not _permanence_." As the course of our inquiry has already amply illustrated, even majestic systems, that at first appear final and complete, are found to resolve themselves into mere steps or phases of still loftier progress. Verily, it is an astonishing world! Change rising above change--cycle growing out of cycle, in majestic progression--each new one ever widening, like the circles that wreathe from a spark of flame, enlarging as they ascend, finally to become lost in the empyrean! And if all that we see, from earth to sun, and from sun to universal star-work--that wherein we best behold images of eternity, immortality and God--if that is only a state or space of a course of being rolling onward evermore, what must be the Creator, the Preserver, the Guide of all!--He at whose bidding these phantasms came from nothingness, and shall again disappear;--whose name, amid all things, alone is _Existence_--I AM THAT I AM? "Of old hast thou laid the foundations of the earth, And the heavens are the works of thy hands; They shall perish, But thou shalt endure; Yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment: As a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed; But thou art the same, And thy years shall have no end. The children of thy servants shall continue, And their seed shall be established before thee." Psalm cii. 25 "And I saw a new heaven, and a new earth; For the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, And there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, Coming down from God out of heaven, Prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven, saying, Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, And he will dwell with them, And they shall be his people, And God himself shall be with them, and be their God." Revelation xxi. * * * * * Reader, is this glorious heaven your inheritance? Is this unchangeable Jehovah your God? Are you looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God? Is it your daily prayer, Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly? FOOTNOTES: [283] Kendall's Uranography, 268. [284] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1856, p. 380. [285] Ibid. 1852, p. 376. [286] Ibid. 1856, p. 377. [287] Cosmos, Vol. I. pp. 198-215. [288] Judges, chap. v. [289] Jeremiah, chap. x. [290] Some of my readers may deem any notice of such a subject, in the nineteenth century, entirely unnecessary; but having lived for some years within sight of the dwelling of a woman who publicly advertised herself in the newspapers as a professor of astrology, and seen the continual flow of troubled minds to the promised light--the humble serving-girl stealing up the side entrance, and the princely chariot discharging its willing dupes at the door, and rolling hastily away, to await them at the corner--I know of a certainty that folly is not yet dead. There are women, aye, and men too, who are above the folly of reading the Bible, but just wise enough to pay five dollars for, and spend hours in the study of an uncouth astrological picture, representing a collocation of the stars, which was never witnessed by any astronomer. There are men who would not give way to the superstition of supposing that their destiny was regulated by the will of Almighty God, yet who believe that every living creature's fate is regulated by the aspect of the stars at the hour of his nativity; the same stars always causing the same period of life and mode of death; though every day's experience testifies the contrary. The same stars presided over the birth of the poor soldier, who perished in an instant at Austerlitz; of his imperial master, who pined for years in St. Helena; of the old gentleman who died in his own bed, of gout; and of the batch of puppies, whereof old Towser was the only surviving representative, the other nine having found their fate in the horse-pond, in defiance of the controlling stars. They were all born at the same hour, and under the same auspices, and destined to the same fate, by the laws of astrology. Yet half a dozen professors of astrology find patrons enough in each of our great cities to enable them to live and to pay for advertising in the daily papers. [291] Judges, chap. v. [292] Dick's Celestial Scenery, p. 57, Applegate's edition, where many such instances are related. [293] Vaughn's Report to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Annual of Scientific Discovery for 1855, p. 364. [294] Somerville's Connection of the Physical Sciences, 382. [295] Cosmos, Vol. I. p. 122; Vol. IV. p. 569. [296] Somerville's Connection of the Physical Sciences, 383. [297] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1854, p. 361. [298] Letter to Herschel, from Oroomiah, in Persia--Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1854, p. 367. [299] _Life and Work in the Great Pyramid_, by Piazzi Smyth, F. R. S., LL. D. [300] "These tablets (of unbaked clay, with inscriptions, found in the tombs of Erech, the city of Nimrod--Genesis, chap. x. 10--and deciphered by Rawlinson) were, in point of fact, the equivalent of our bank notes, and prove that a system of artificial currency prevailed in Babylon and Persia at an unprecedentedly early age; centuries before the introduction of paper and writing." _Rawlinson, in News of the Churches, February, 1858, p. 50._ [301] Wilkinson's Manners and Customs of the Egyptians, Vol. III. p. 106; Cosmos, Vol. I. pp. 173, 182; Chinese Repository, Vol. IX. p. 573; Williams' Middle Kingdom, Vol. II. p. 147. [302] Somerville's Connection of Physical Sciences, 82. [303] Daniel, chap. xii. 8. 1 Peter, chap. i. 10. Ephesians, chap. i. 3. [304] Psalm xl. 1, and xxxvii. 23, margin. [305] M. Voltaire; M. Cheneviere; Theol. Essays, Vol. I. p. 456. [306] Humboldt's Cosmos, Vol. I. p. 139; Herschel's Outlines, 380; Kendall's Uranography, 205. [307] Somerville's Connection of the Physical Sciences, 171, 337, 315; Architecture of the Heavens, 286. [308] Genesis, chap. xv. 5. [309] Cosmos I. 140. [310] Ehrenberg computes that there are forty-one millions of the shells of animalculæ in a cubic inch of Bilier Slate. [311] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1860, p. 341. [312] Psalm cxlvii. 4. [313] Dick's Sidereal Heavens, 59; Herschel's Outlines. [314] Architecture of the Heavens, 62. [315] Architecture of the Heavens, 64. These unresolved milky streaks and patches have since been discovered to be true nebulæ, or phosphoric clouds, in some way connected with their adjacent stars. [316] Architecture of the Heavens, 144. [317] Job, chap. xxxviii. 31. Psalm cxlvii. 4. [318] Genesis, chap. xxii. 16. [319] Galatians, chap. iii. 14, 29. Gen. xxii. 16, 17. [320] Architecture of the Heavens, 217. [321] Architecture of the Heavens, 77, 130. CHAPTER XIII. SCIENCE, OR FAITH? "Faith is destined to be left behind in the onward march of the human intellect. It belongs to an infantile stage of intellectual development, when experience, dependent on testimony, becomes the slave of credulity. Children and childish nations are prone to superstition. Religion belongs properly to such. Hence the endless controversies of religious sects. But as man advances into the knowledge of the physical sciences, and becomes familiarized with mathematical demonstration and scientific experiment, he demands substantial proofs for all kinds of knowledge, and rejects that which is merely matter of faith. The certainties of science succeed the controversies of creeds. Science thus becomes the grave of religion, as religion is vulgarly understood. But science gives a new and better religion to the world. Instead of filling men's minds with the vague terrors of an unknown futurity, it directs us to the best modes of improving this life."--"This life being the first in certainty, give it the first place in importance; and by giving human duties in reference to men the _precedence_, secure that all interpretations of spiritual duty shall be in harmony with human progress."--"Nature refers us to science for help, and to humanity for sympathy; love to the lovely is our only homage, study our only praise, quiet submission to the inevitable our duty; and truth is our only worship."--"Our _knowledge_ is confined to this life; and _testimony_, and _conjecture_, and _probability_, are all that can be set forth in regard to another."--"Preach nature and science, morality and art; _nature, the only subject of knowledge_; morality, the harmony of action; art, the culture of the individual and society."[322] Or, if you will insist upon preaching religion, support it "with such proofs as accompany physical science. This I have always loved; for I never find it deceives me. I rest upon it with entire conviction. There is no mistake, and can be no dispute in mathematics. And if a revelation comes from God, why have we not such evidence for it as mathematical demonstration?" Such is the language now used by a large class of half-educated people, who, deriving their philosophy from Comte, and their religion from the _Westminster Review_, invite us to spend our Sabbaths in the study of nature in the fields and museums, turn our churches into laboratories, exchange our Bibles for encyclopedias, give ourselves no more trouble about religion, but try hard to learn as much science, make as much money, and enjoy as much pleasure in this life as we can; because we _know_ that we live now, and can only _believe_ that we shall live hereafter. I do not propose to take any notice here of the proposal of Secularism--for that is the new name of this ungodliness--to deliver men from their lusts by scientific lectures, and keep them moral by overturning religion. That experiment has been tried already. But it is worth while to inquire, Is science really so positive, and religion so uncertain, as these persons allege? Is a knowledge of the physical sciences so all-sufficient for our present happiness, so attainable by all mankind, and so certain and infallible, that we should barter our immortality for it? And, on the other hand, are the great facts of religious experience, and the foundations of our religious faith, so dim, and vague, and utterly uncertain, that we may safely consign them to oblivion, or that we can so get rid of them if we would? The object of this chapter is to refute both parts of the Secularist's statement; to show some of the uncertainties, errors, contradictions, and blunders of the scientific men on whose testimony they receive their science; and to exhibit a few of the facts of religious experience which give a sufficient warrant for the Christian's faith. Scientific observations are made by fallible men exposed to every description of error, prejudice and mistake; men who can not possibly divest themselves of their preconceived opinions in observing facts, and framing theories. Lord Bacon long ago observed that "the eye of the human intellect is not dry, but receives a suffusion from the will and the affections, so that it may be almost said to engender any science it pleases. For what a man wishes to be true, that he prefers believing." "If the human intellect hath once taken a liking to any doctrine, either because received and credited, or because otherwise pleasing, it draws everything else into harmony with that doctrine, and to its support; and albeit there may be found a more powerful array of contradictory instances, these, however, it does not observe, or it contemns, or by distinction extenuates, and rejects."[323] A prejudiced observer sees the facts distorted and exaggerated. "Thus it is that men will not see in the phenomena what alone is to be seen; in their observations they interpolate and expunge; and this mutilated and adulterated product they call a fact. And why? Because the real phenomena, if admitted, would spoil the pleasant music of their thoughts, and convert its factitious harmony into a discord. In consequence of this many a system professing to be reared exclusively on observation and fact, rests, in reality, mainly upon hypothesis and fiction. A pretended experience is indeed the screen behind which every illusive doctrine regularly retires. 'There are more false facts,' says Cullen, 'current in the world than false theories.' Fact, observation, induction, have always been the watchwords of those who have dealt most extensively in fancy."[324] We propose, therefore, to show that, _I. The students of the physical sciences have no such certain knowledge of their facts and theories as Secularists pretend._ 1. Mathematical science relating merely to abstract truth is supposed to possess powers of demonstration, and capability of scientific certainty superior to all other kinds of knowledge, but the moment we begin to apply it to any existing facts we enter the domain of liability to errors as numerous as our fallible observations of these facts; and when we attempt to apply mathematical demonstration to the infinite, and to enter the domain of faith, in which as immortals we are chiefly concerned, it baffles, deceives, and insults our reason. Take the following illustrations: Let an infinite whole be divided into halves; the parts must be either finite or infinite. But they can not be finite, else an infinite whole would consist of a finite number of parts; neither can they be infinite, being each less than the infinite whole. Again: it is mathematically demonstrable, that any piece of matter is infinitely divisible. A line therefore of half an inch long is infinitely divisible, or divisible into an infinite number of parts. Thus we have an infinite half inch. Further, for a moving body to pass a given point requires some time; and to pass an infinite number of points must require an infinite number of portions of time, or an eternity; therefore, as half an inch contains an infinite number of points, it will require eternity to pass half an inch. Again: it is mathematically demonstrable, that a straight line, the asymptote of a hyperbola, may _eternally approach_ the curve of the hyperbola and _never meet_ it. But no axiom can be plainer than that if two lines continually approach each other they must at length meet. Here is a demonstration contradicting an axiom; and no man has ever yet shown the possibilities of reconciling them, nor yet of denying either side of the contradiction. Again: it is a fundamental axiom, contained in the definition of a circle, that it must have a center; but the non-existence of this center is mathematically demonstrable, as follows: Let the diameter of the circle be bisected into two equal parts; the center must be in one, or the other, of these parts, or between them. It can not be in one of these parts, for they are equal; and, therefore, if it is in the one, it must also be in the other, and thus the circle would have two centers, which is absurd. Neither can it be between them, for they are in contact. Therefore the center must be a point, destitute of extension, something which does not occupy or exist in space. But as all existences exist in space, and this supposed center does not, it can not be an existence; therefore it is a non-existence. In like manner it has been mathematically demonstrated,[325] that motion, or any change in the rate of progress in a moving body, is impossible; because in passing from any one degree of rapidity to another, all the intermediate degrees must be passed through. As when a train of cars moving four miles an hour strikes a train at rest, the resulting instantaneous motion is two miles an hour; and the first train must therefore be moving at the rate of four, and at the rate of two miles an hour at the same time, which is impossible. And so the ancients demonstrated the impossibility of motion. Thus the non-existence of the most undeniable truths, and the impossibilities of the most common facts are mathematically demonstrable; and the proper refutation of such reasoning is, not the scientific, but the common sensible; as when Plato refuted the demonstration of the impossibility of motion, by getting up and walking across the floor. In the hyperbola we have the mathematical demonstration of the error of an axiom. In the infinite inch we behold an absurdity mathematically demonstrated. So that it appears we can give mathematical demonstration in support of untruth, impossibilities and absurdities; and our reason can not discover the error of the reasoning! Alas, for poor humanity, if an endless destiny depended upon such scientific certainty! Yet mathematical reasoning about abstract truth is universally conceded to be less liable to error than any other form of scientific analysis. This line, then, is too short to fathom the ocean of destiny; too weak to bear inferences from even the facts of common life. Attempts have indeed been made to apply mathematics to the facts of life in what is called the doctrine of chances. By this kind of calculation it can be shown, that the chances were a thousand millions to one that you and I should never have been born. Yet here we are. But when we begin to apply mathematics to the affairs of every-day life, we immediately multiply our chances of error by the number and complexity of these facts. The proper field of mathematics is that of magnitude and numbers. But very few subjects are capable of a mathematical demonstration. _No fact_ whatever which depends on the will of God or man can be so proved. For mathematical demonstration is founded on necessary and eternal relations, and admits of no contingencies in its premises. The mathematician may demonstrate the size and properties of a triangle, but he can not demonstrate the continuance of any actual triangle for one hour, or one minute, after his demonstration. And if he could, how many of my most important affairs can I submit to the multiplication table, or lay off in squares and triangles? It deals with purely ideal figures, which never did or could exist. There is not a mathematical line--length without breadth--in the universe. When we come to the application of mathematics, we are met at once by the fact that there are no mathematical figures in nature. It is true we speak of the orbits of the planets as elliptical or circular, but it is only in a general way, as we speak of a circular saw, the outline of its teeth being regularity itself compared with the perturbations of the planets. We speak of the earth as a spheroid, but it is a spheroid pitted with hollows as deep as the ocean, and crusted with irregular protuberances as vast as the Himalaya and the Andes, in every conceivable irregularity of form. Its seas, coasts, and rivers follow no straight lines nor geometrical curves. There is not an acre of absolutely level ground on the face of the earth; and even its waters will pile themselves up in waves, or dash into breakers, rather than remain perfectly level for a single hour. Its minuter formations present the same regular irregularity of form. Even the crystals, which approach the nearest of any natural productions to mathematical figures, break with compound irregular fractures at their bases of attachment. The surface of the pearl is proportionally rougher than the surface of the earth, and the dew-drop is not more spherical than a pear. As nature then gives no mathematical figures, mathematical measurements of such figures can be only approximately applied to natural objects. The utter absence of any regularity, or assimilation to the spheroidal figure, either in meridianal, equatorial, or parallel lines, mountain ranges, sea beaches, or courses of rivers, is fatal to mathematical accuracy in the more extended geographical measurements. It is only by taking the mean of a great many measurements that an approximate accuracy can be obtained. Where this is not possible, as in the case of the measurements of high mountains, the truth remains undetermined by hundreds of feet; or, as in the case of the earth's spheroidal axis, Bessel's measurement differs from Newton's, by fully eleven miles.[326] The smaller measures are proportionately as inaccurate. No field, hill, or lake, has an absolute mathematical figure; but its outline is composed of an infinite multitude of irregular curves too minute for man's vision to discover, and too numerous for his intellect to estimate. No natural figure was ever measured with absolute accuracy. All the resources of mathematical science were employed by the constructors of the French Metric System; but the progress of science in seventy years has shown that _every element_ of their calculations was erroneous. They tried to measure a quadrant of the earth's circumference, supposing the meridian to be circular; but Schubert has shown that that is far from being the case; and that no two meridians are alike; and Sir John Herschel, and the best geologists, show cause to believe that the form of the globe is constantly changing; so that the ancient Egyptians acted wisely in selecting the axis of the earth's rotation, which is invariable, and not the changing surface of the earth, as their standard of measure. The Astronomer Royal, Piazzi Smyth, thus enumerates the errors of practice, which they added to those of their erroneous theory: "Their trigonometrical survey for their meter length has been found erroneous, so that their meter is no longer sensibly a meter; and their standard temperature of 0° centigrade is upset one way for the length of their scale, and another way for the density of the water employed; and their mode of computing the temperature correction is proved erroneous; and their favorite natural reference of a quadrant of the earth is not found a scientific feature capable of serving the purpose they have been employing it for; and even their own sons show some dislike to adopt it fully, and adhere to as much of the ancient system as they can."[327] But coming down to more practical and every-day calculations, in which money is invested, how very erroneous are the calculations of our best engineers, and how fatal their results. Nineteen serious errors were discovered in an edition of _Taylor's Logarithms_, printed in 1796; some of which might have led to the most dangerous results in calculating a ship's place, and were current for thirty-six years. In 1832 the _Nautical Almanac_ published a correction which was itself erroneous by one second, and a new correction was necessary the next year. But in making this correction a _new error was committed of ten degrees_.[328] Who knows how many ships were run ashore by that error? Nor can our American mathematicians boast of superior infallibility to the French or British. In computing the experiments which were made at Lowell (for a new turbine wheel), it was found that when the gate was fully open, the quantity of water discharged through the guides was _seventy per cent. of the theoretical discharge_. (An error of thirty per cent.) The effect of the wheel during these experiments was eighty-one and a half per cent. of the power expended; but when the gate was half open the effect was sixty-seven per cent. of the power, while the discharge through the guides eleven per cent. more than the theoretical discharge. But when the opening of the gate was still further reduced to one-fourth of the full opening, the effect was also reduced to forty-five per cent. of the power, while the discharging velocity was raised to _forty-nine per cent. more than that given by the theory_.[329] An unscientific man would hardly call that good guessing; but it was the best result of labored and expensive scientific calculation. No wonder the _London Mechanics' Magazine_ says: "More can be learned in this way (testing engines in the workshop) in half an hour, than can be derived from the theoretical instructions, however good, in a year." So much for the infallibility of a mathematical demonstration. In regard even to the very limited circle of our relations which can be measured by the foot rule, and the small number of our anxieties which may be resolved by an equation, if by mathematical accuracy be meant anything more than tolerable correctness, or by mathematical demonstration a very high degree of probability, mathematical certainty is all a fable. 2. _Astronomy._ The omniscience and prescience of the human intellect have been largely glorified by some Infidel lecturers, upon the strength of the accuracy with which it is possible to calculate and predict eclipses, and to the disparagement of Bible predictions. And this glorification has been amazingly swollen by Le Verrier's prediction in 1846 of the discovery of the planet Neptune. But the prediction of some unknown motion would form a more correct basis for a comparison of the prophecies of science with those of Scripture; such, for instance, as Immanuel Kant's prediction of the period of Saturn's rotation at six hours twenty-three minutes fifty-three seconds; "which mathematical calculation of an unknown motion of a heavenly body," he says, "_is the only prediction of that kind in pure Natural Philosophy_, and awaits confirmation at a future period." It is a pity that this unique scientific prediction should not have had better luck, for the encouragement of other guessers; but after waiting long and vainly, for the expected confirmation, it was finally falsified by Herschel's discovery of spots on the surface of the planet, and observation of the true time, ten hours sixteen minutes forty-four seconds.[330] This, however, was not his only astronomical prediction. He predicted that immense bodies in a transition state between planets and comets, and of very eccentric orbits, would be found beyond the orbit of Saturn, and intersecting it, but no such bodies have been discovered. Uranus and Neptune have no cometary character whatever, their orbits are less eccentric than others and do not intersect, nor approach within millions of miles of Saturn's orbit. The verification of Le Verrier's prediction affords even a more satisfactory proof of the necessarily conjectural character of astronomical computations of unknown quantities and distances. The planet Neptune has not one-half the mass which he had calculated; his orbit, which was calculated as very elliptical, is nearly circular; and the error of the calculation of his distance is three hundred millions of miles![331] "Let us then be candid," says Loomis, "and claim no more for astronomy than is reasonably due. When in 1846 Le Verrier announced the existence of a planet hitherto unseen, and when he assigned it its exact position in the heavens, and declared that it shone like a star of the eighth magnitude, and with a perceptible disc, _not an astronomer of France, and scarce an astronomer in Europe, had sufficient faith in the prediction to prompt him to point his telescope to the heavens_. But when it was announced that the planet had been seen at Berlin, that it was found within one degree of the computed place, that it was indeed a star of the eighth magnitude, and had a sensible disc--then the enthusiasm not only of the public generally, but of astronomers also, was even more wonderful than their former apathy. The sagacity of Le Verrier was felt to be almost superhuman. Language could scarce be found strong enough to express the general admiration. The praise then lavished upon Le Verrier was somewhat extravagant. _The singularly close agreement between the observed and computed places of the planet was accidental._ So exact a coincidence could not reasonably have been anticipated. If the planet had been found even ten degrees from what Le Verrier assigned as its probable place, _this discrepancy would have surprised no astronomer_. The discovery would still have been one of the most remarkable events in the history of astronomy, and Le Verrier would have merited the title of First Astronomer of the age."[332] Nevertheless, astronomy from the comparative simplicity of the bodies and forces with which it has to deal, and the approximate regularity of the paths of the heavenly bodies, may be regarded as the science in which the greatest possible certainty is attainable. It opens at once the widest field to the imagination, and the noblest range to the reason; it has attracted the most exalted intellects to its pursuit, and has rewarded their toils with the grandest discoveries. These discoveries have been grossly abused by inferior minds, ascribing to the discoverers of the laws of the universe the glory due to their Creator; and boasting of the power of the human mind, as if it were capable of exploring the infinite in space, and of calculating the movements of the stars through eternity. Persons who could not calculate an eclipse to save their souls, have risked them upon the notion that, because astronomers can do so with considerable accuracy, farmers ought to reject the Bible, unless its predictions can be calculated by algebra. It may do such persons good, or at least prevent them from doing others harm, to take a cursory view of the errors of astronomers; errors necessary as well as accidental. Sir John Herschel, than whom none has a better right to speak on this subject, and whose devotion to that noble science precludes all supposition of prejudice against it, devotes a chapter to _The Errors of Astronomy_,[333] which he classifies and enumerates: "I. External causes of error, comprehending such as depend on external uncontrollable circumstances; such as fluctuations of weather, which disturb the amount of refraction from its tabulated value, and being reducible to no fixed laws, induce uncertainty to the amount of their own possible magnitude. "II. Errors of observation; such as arise for instance from inexpertness, defective vision, slowness in seizing the exact instant of the occurrence of a phenomenon, or precipitancy in anticipating it; from atmospheric indistinctness, insufficient optical power in the instrument, and the like. "III. The third, and by far the most numerous class of errors, arise from causes which may be deemed instrumental, and which may be divided into two classes. "The first arises from an instrument not being what it professes to be, which is _error of workmanship_. Thus if an axis or pivot, instead of being as it ought, exactly cylindrical, be slightly flattened or elliptical--if it be not exactly concentric with the circle which it carries--if this circle so called be in reality not exactly circular--or not in one plane--if its divisions, intended to be precisely equidistant, shall be in reality at unequal intervals--_and a hundred other things of the same sort_. "The other subdivision of instrumental errors comprehends such as arise from an instrument not being placed in the position it ought to have; and from those of its parts which are made purposely movable not being properly disposed, _inter se_. These are _errors of adjustment_. Some are unavoidable, as they arise from a general unsteadiness of the soil or building in which the instruments are placed.[334] Others again are consequences of imperfect workmanship; as when an instrument, once well adjusted, will not remain so. But the most important of this class of errors arise from the non-existence of natural indications other than those afforded by astronomical observations themselves, whether an instrument has, or has not, the exact position with respect to the horizon, and the cardinal points, etc., which it ought to have, properly to fulfill its object. "Now, with regard to the first two classes of error, it must be observed, that in so far as they can not be reduced to known laws, and thereby become the subjects of calculation and due allowance, _they actually vitiate in their full extent the results of any observations in which they subsist_. With regard to errors of adjustment, not only the possibility, _but the certainty of their existence in every imaginable form, in all instruments_, must be contemplated. _Human hands or machines never formed a circle, drew a straight line, or executed a perpendicular, nor ever placed an instrument in perfect adjustment, unless accidentally, and then only during an instant of time._" The bearing of these important and candid admissions of error in astronomical observations upon all kinds of other observations made by mortal eyes, and with instruments framed by human hands, in every department of science, is obvious. No philosophical observation or experiment is absolutely accurate, or can possibly be more than tolerably near the truth. The error of a thousandth part of an inch in an instrument will multiply itself into thousands, and millions of miles, according to the distance of the object, or the profundity of the calculation. Our faith in the absolute infallibility of scientific observers, and consequently in the absolute certainty of science, being thus rudely upheaved from its very foundations by Sir John Herschel's crowbar, we are prepared to learn that scientific men have made errors great and numerous. To begin at home, with our own little globe, where certainty is much more attainable than among distant stars, we have seen that astronomers of the very highest rank are by no means agreed as to its diameter. Its precise form is equally difficult to determine. Newton showed that an ellipsoid of revolution should differ from a sphere by a compression of 1/230. The mean of a number of varying measurements of arcs, in five different places, would give 1/299. The pendulum measurement differs very considerably from both, and "no two sets of pendulum experiments give the same result."[335] The same liability to error, and uncertainty of the actual truth, attends the other modes of ascertaining this fundamental measurement. A very small error here will vitiate all other astronomical calculations; for the earth's radius, and the radius of its orbit, are the foot-rule and surveyor's chain with which the astronomer measures the heavens. But this last and most used standard is uncertain; and of the nine different estimates, it is certain that eight must be wrong; and probably that all are erroneous. For example, Encke, in 1761, gives the earth's distance from the sun at 95,141,830 Encke, in 1769, 95,820,610 Lacaille, 76,927,900 Henderson, 90,164,110 Gillies and Gould, 96,160,000 Mayer, 104,097,100 Le Verrier, 91,066,350 Sir John Herschel, 91,718,000 Humboldt, 82,728,000[336] Here now is the fundamental standard measure of astronomy; and nine first-class astronomers are set to determine its length; but their measurements range all the way from seventy-seven to one hundred and four millions of miles--a difference of nearly one-fourth. Why the old-fashioned finger and thumb measure used before the carpenter's two-foot rule was invented never made such discrepancies; it could always make a foot within an inch more or less; but our scientific measurers, it seems, can not guess within two inches on the foot. Their smaller measurements are equally inaccurate. Lias says the Aurora Borealis is only two and a half miles high; Hood and Richardson make its height double that, or five miles; Olmsted and Twining run it up to forty-two, one hundred, and one hundred and sixty miles![337] When they are thus inaccurate in the measurement of a phenomenon so near the earth, how can we believe in the infallibility of their measurements of the distances of the stars and the nebulæ in the distant heavens? The moon is the nearest to us of all the heavenly bodies, and exercises the greatest influence of any, save the sun, upon our crops, ships, health and lives, and consequently has had a larger share of astronomical attention than any other celestial body. But the most conflicting statements are made by astronomers regarding her state and influences. There is no end to the controversy whether the moon influences the weather; though one would think that question, being rather a terrestrial one, could easily be decided. Schwabe says Herschel is wrong in saying that the years of most solar spots were fruitful; but Wolf looks up the Zurich meteorological tables, and confirms Herschel. In _Ferguson's Astronomy_, the standard text-book of its day, we are informed that "Some of her mountains (the moon's) by comparing their height with her diameter, are found to be three times higher than the highest hills on earth." They would thus be over fifteen miles high. But Sir Wm. Herschel assures us that "The generality do not exceed half a mile in their general elevation." _Transactions of the Royal Society_, May 11, 1780. Beer and Madler have measured thirty-nine whose height they assure us exceed Mont Blanc. But M. Gussew, of the Imperial Observatory at Wilna, describes to us, "a mountain mass in the form of a meniscus lens, rising in the middle to a height of seventy-nine English miles."[338] As this makes the moon lopsided, with the heavy side toward the earth, the question of an atmosphere, and of the moon's inhabitability is reopened; and the discussion seems to favor the man in the moon; only he keeps on the other side always, so that we can not see him. The best astronomers have gravely calculated the most absurd problems--for instance the projection of meteorites from lunar volcanoes; Poisson calculated that they would require an initial velocity of projection of seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-five feet per second; others demanded eight thousand two hundred and eighty-two; Olbers demanded fourteen times as much; but La Place, the great inventor of the nebular theory, after thirty years' study fixed it definitely at seven thousand eight hundred and sixty-two! It appears that the absurdity of the discharging force of a part greater than the attracting force of the whole never occurred to him.[339] This same La Place supposed, that he could have placed the moon in a much better position for giving light than she now occupies; and that this was the only object of her existence. As this was not done he argued that her waxing and waning light was a proof that she was not located by an Omniscient Creator. He says he would have placed her in the beginning in opposition to the sun, in the plane of the ecliptic, and about four times her present distance from us, with such a motion as would ever maintain that position, thus securing full moon from sunset to sunrise, without possibility of eclipse. But Lionville demonstrates that "if the moon had occupied at the beginning the position assigned her, by the illustrious author of the _Mecanique Celeste_, she could not have maintained it but a very short time."[340] In short, La Place's hypothetical calculations generally have proved erroneous when applied to any existing facts; and we have no reason to attach more value to his nebular theory calculations. The sun is the principal orb of our system, and by far the most conspicuous, and the most observed of all observers, astronomers included. But we have seen already how contradictory their measurements of his distance, and their observations of the influence of his spots. Far more conflicting are the theories as to his constitution, of which indeed we may truly say very little was known before the application of photography and the spectroscope to heliography within the last seven years. One astronomer fixed the period of his rotation at twenty-five days, fourteen hours, and eight minutes; another at twenty-six days, forty-six minutes; another at twenty-four days, twenty-eight minutes.[341] In regard to the sun's heat, a matter fundamental to the nebular theory, the calculations differ widely, and some of them must be grossly erroneous. M. Vicaire called the attention of the French Academy, at a recent meeting, to this unsatisfactory condition of science. Father Secchi estimates it at eighteen million Fahrenheit; while Pouillet says it ranges from two thousand six hundred and sixty-two to three thousand two hundred and one; and others range from two hundred thousand downward. The most singular thing is that these results are derived from observations or radiations made by apparatus identical in principle.[342] But Waterston calculates the temperature of the solar surface at above ten, and probably twelve million Fahrenheit.[343] Now what feeds these enormous fires? The old opinion of astronomy, that the sun was a mass of fire, was assailed by Sir Wm. Herschel, who maintained that it was in the condition of a perpetual magnetic storm. This notion was altered into the belief of a central dark body, surrounded by a stratum of clouds, outside of which is a photosphere of light and heat; which some made one thousand five hundred miles in depth, others four thousand. Outside of this was another layer of rose-colored clouds. To this theory Arago, Sir John Herschel and Humboldt assented. But Le Verrier declares that the facts observed during late eclipses are contrary to this theory, and a new theory is slow in process of construction, to be demolished in its turn by later observations.[344] One of the most recent theories is that the fuel is furnished by a stream of meteorites, planetoids, and comets, falling in by the power of attraction, and being speedily converted into gas flames; a process the very reverse of the theory of the evolution of the solid celestial bodies from gas. But it is pretty evident from these conflicting theories that nobody knows anything certainly as to the materials of the sun, or the fuel which feeds his flames. But if the very best astronomers do not know of what he is made, is it not too great a demand upon our credulity to ask us to believe that they can tell how he was made? The size, density, and distances of the planets, which form such essential elements in the calculations of the nebular theory of evolution, are equally uncertain. Ten or twelve years ago Mercury was believed to be nearly three times as dense as the earth (2.94); and the theory of evolution was partly based upon this assumed fact. But Hausen now finds that it is not half so dense; that, as compared with the earth, it is only 1.22; and that its mass is less than half (5/12) of what had been confidently calculated.[345] Corrections of the masses and densities of other planets are also offered. Still wider differences prevail in calculating the velocities of these bodies; velocities _calculated_ and found to correspond with the theory of evolution. Bianchini gives the period of the rotation of Venus at twenty-four days, eight hours; but Schroeter says it is not as many hours as Bianchini gives days; that it is only twenty-three hours and twenty minutes. Sir Wm. Herschel can not tell which is right, or whether both are wrong.[346] From such imperfect and erroneous calculations astronomers have deduced what they called a _law_, which holds the same place in nature that the Blue Laws of Connecticut maintain in history; and which like them have imposed upon the credulous. Titius and Bode imagined that they had discovered that, "When the distances of the planets are examined, it is found that they are almost all removed from each other by distances which are in the same proportion as their magnitudes increase." And this _law_ played an important part in introducing the theory of evolution, which, it was alleged, exactly corresponded with such an arrangement. But more accurate calculations and recent discoveries have dissipated the supposed order of progression. Humboldt says of it, it is "a law which scarcely deserves this name, and which is called by Lalande and Delambre a play of numbers; by others a help for the memory. * * * In reality the distances between Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus approximate very closely to the duplication. Nevertheless, since the discovery of Neptune, which is much too near Uranus, the defectiveness in the progression has become strikingly evident." And Olbers rejects it, as "contrary to the nature of all truths which merit the name of laws; it agrees only approximately with observed facts in the case of most planets, and what does not appear to have been once observed, not at all in the case of Mercury. It is evident that the series, 4, 4+3, 4+6, 4+12, 4+48, 4+96, 4+192, with which the distances should correspond, is not a continuous series at all. The number which precedes 4+3 should not be 4; _i. e._, 4+0, but 4+3/2. Therefore between 4 and 4+3 there should be an infinite number, or as Wurm expresses it, for _n_=1, there is obtained from 4+2^{n-2}.3; not 4, but 5-1/2."[347] Thus this so-called law is erroneous in both ends, and defective in the middle. Finally it has been utterly abolished by the discovery of the planet Vulcan, which does not correspond to any such law.[348] If the theory of evolution then corresponds to Bode's law, as its advocates alleged, it corresponds to a myth. About the nebulæ which have played so large a part in the atheistic world building, our astronomers are utterly at variance. Sir John Herschel says they are far away beyond the stars in space. But the Melbourne astronomer, M. Le Seur, suggests that the star Eta and the nebulous matter are neighbors; that the nebulous matter formerly around it, which has recently disappeared, while the star has blazed up into flames, is being absorbed and digested by the star. This has happened before, thirty years ago, to that star. Why may not our sun also absorb and burn up nebulæ. But if so, what becomes of the rings of the nebular theory? The light of the stars is almost the only medium through which we can observe them, and it would naturally be supposed that astronomers would be at pains to have clear views of light. But the most surprising differences of statement regarding it exist among the very first astronomers. They do not see it alike. Herschel says a Herculis is red; Struve says it is yellow. They dispute about its nature, motion, and quantity. Some astronomers believe the sun to be the great source of light, at least to our system. But Nasmyth informs the Royal Astronomical Society that "the true source of latent light is not in the solar orb, but in space itself, and that the grand function of the sun is to act as an agent for the bringing forth into existence the luciferous element, which element I suppose to be diffused throughout the boundless regions of space."[349] The nature of light is however still as great a mystery as when Job demanded, "Where is the way where light dwelleth?" The undulatory theory of light, now generally accepted, assumes that light is caused by the vibrations of the ether in a plane transverse to the direction of propagation. In order to transmit motions of this kind, the parts of the luminiferous medium must resist compression and distortion, like those of an elastic solid body; its transverse elasticity being great enough to transmit one of the most powerful kinds of physical energy, with a speed in comparison with which that of the swiftest planets of our system is inappreciable, and its longitudinal elasticity immensely greater--both of these elasticities being at the same time so weak as to offer no perceptible resistance to the motion of the planets, and other visible bodies.[350] Is the velocity of light uniform? Or, if variable, is the variation caused by the original difference of the projectile force of the different suns, stars, comets, etc.? or by the different media through which it passes? Arago alleges that light moves more rapidly through water than through air; but Brequet asserts that the fact is just the reverse.[351] Both admit that its velocity varies with the medium. Jacobs alleges that during the trigonometrical survey of India he observed the _extinction_ of light reflected through sixty miles of horizontal atmosphere.[352] How, then, can astronomers make any reliable calculations of the velocity of light reaching us through regions of space filled with unknown media? Newton calculated the velocity of light at one hundred and fifty-five thousand five hundred and fifty-five and five-ninth miles a second; but Encke shows he erred thirty per cent. Other eminent astronomers make the time of the passage of light from the sun all the way from eleven to fourteen minutes, instead of Newton's seven or eight. Busch reckons its velocity at one hundred and sixty-seven thousand nine hundred and seventy-six miles; Draper one hundred and ninety-two thousand; Struve two hundred and fifteen thousand eight hundred and fifty-four. Wheatstone alleges that electric light travels at the rate of two hundred and eighty-eight thousand miles a second; but Frizeau's calculations and measurements give only one hundred and sixty-seven thousand five hundred and twenty-eight for the light of Oxygen and hydrogen.[353] Thus we have a variation of one hundred and twenty thousand miles a second in all calculations of sidereal distances. Humboldt tries to reconcile these differences by the suggestion, that no one will deny, that lights of different magnetic or electric processes may have different velocities; a fact which throws all sidereal astronomy into inextricable confusion, and sets aside all existing time tables on sidereal railroads. They are no more agreed as to its composition after it reaches us than as to its velocity. Newton taught that it consisted of seven colors; Wallaston denies more than four; Brewster reduces the number to three--red, yellow, and blue. Newton measures the yellow and violet, and finds them as forty to eighty. Fraunhofer makes the proportion twenty-seven to one hundred and nine. Wallaston's spectrum differs from both. Field says, "No one has ventured to alter either estimate, and no one who is familiar with the spectrum will put much faith in any measurement of it, by whosoever and with what care soever made."[354] He says white light is composed of five parts red, three yellow, and eight blue; which differs wholly from Brewster, who gives it three parts red, five yellow, and two of blue. Equally wild are their calculations of the quantity of light emitted by particular stars. Radeau calculates Vulcan's light at 2.25 that of Mercury; Lias, from the same observations, at 7.36, nearly three times as much.[355] Sir John Herschel calculates that _Alpha Centauri_ emits more light than the sun; that the light of Sirius is four times as great, and its parallax much less; so that by such a calculation Sirius would have an intrinsic splendor sixty-three times that of the sun. But Wallaston only calculates his light at one-fourth of this amount; and Steinheil makes it only one two-hundredth part of the former estimate.[356] Astronomers have lately been comforting the world with the assurance that we have little to fear from comets; that the superstitious fear of the comets prevalent in the past was ill founded, because comets are so very thin that we might pass through one without its breaking up anything. But that, as Principal Leitch shows us, is not the only question. "We know that the most deadly miasmata are so subtle that it is impossible to detect them by any chemical tests, and a very homeopathic dose of a comet, in addition to the elements of our own atmosphere, might produce the most fatal effects."[357] The phenomena indicative of cosmical processes are out of the range of astronomical observation. We can only observe those indicated by light, and gravitation; but how small a proportion of the formative processes of our own world indicate themselves by these two classes of phenomena! How few of the chemical, vegetative, animal, moral, social, or even geological processes, now progressing under our own observation, could give us notice of their existence by the two channels of light and gravitation? How, then, can philosophers ever learn the process of building worlds like our own in which many other powers are at work? Astronomers are not all agreed as to the existence of a cosmical ether; nor do those who assert it agree as to its properties. What is its nature, density, power of refraction and reflection of light, and resistance to motion? What is its temperature? Is it uniform, or like our atmosphere, ever varying? These are manifestly questions indispensable to be answered before any theory of the development of worlds is even conceivable. But of the properties of this all-extending cosmical atmosphere, which is the very breath of life of the development theory, astronomers present the most conflicting statements. Professor Vaughan says, "If such a body exists, it is beyond our estimation of all that is material. It has no weight, according to our idea of weight; no resistance, according to our idea of calculating resistance by mechanical tests; no volume, on our views of volume; no chemical activity, according to our experimental and absolute knowledge of chemical action. In plain terms, it presents no known re-agency by which it can be isolated from surrounding or intervening matter."[358] Or, in plainer terms, we know nothing about it. The only fact about it which astronomers have ventured to specify and calculate is its temperature; for upon this all the power of the development world-making process depends. But they are very far from any agreement; indeed, they are much farther apart than the equator from the poles. Stanley finds the temperature of absolute space--58°; Arago--70°; Humboldt--85°; Herschel--132°; Saigey--107°; Pouillet, to be exact to a fraction--223-6/10° below the freezing point; though when it gets to be so cold as that one would think he would hardly stay out of doors to measure fractions of a degree. But Poisson thinks he is over 200° too cold, and fixes the temperature accurately, in his own opinion, 8-6/10°. Moreover, he alleges that there is no more uniformity in the temperature of the heavens than in that of our own atmosphere, owing to the unequal radiations of heat from the stars; and that the earth, and the whole solar system, receive their internal heat from without, while passing through hot regions of space.[359] From this chaos of conflicting assertions of unknown facts the theory of development develops itself. Its fundamental postulate is the difference of temperature between the nebulæ and the surrounding space. But the fact is that nobody knows what is the temperature of either space or nebulæ, nor is anybody likely ever to know enough of either to base any scientific theory upon. Astronomy will never teach men how to make worlds; nor is it of the least consequence that it does not; since we could not make them, even if we knew how. From these specimens of the errors and contradictions of the best astronomers, the teachers upon whose accuracy we depend for our faith in science, we can see, that though the Pope and the Infidel savans may claim infallibility, yet after all the savant is just as infallible as the Pope, viz: he is right when he is right, and he is wrong when he is wrong, and that happens frequently and common folks can not always tell when. There is no such thing, then, as infallible science upon faith, in which I can venture to reject God's Bible, and risk my soul's salvation. Science is founded on faith in very fallible men. 3. _Geology_, one of the most recent of the sciences, and in the hands of Infidel nurses one of the most noisy, has been supposed to be anti-Christian. The supposition is utterly unfounded. Such of its facts as have been well ascertained have demonstrated the being, wisdom, and goodness of an Almighty Creator, with irresistible evidence. Nor, though a wonderful outcry has been raised about the opposition between the records of the rocks and the records of the Bible, regarding the antiquity of the earth, has any one yet succeeded in proving such an opposition, for the plain reason that neither the Bible nor geology says how old it is. They both say it is very old. The Bible says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth;" and by the use which it makes of the word _beginning_, leaves us to infer that it was long before the existence of the human race.[360] If the geologist could prove that the earth was six thousand millions of years older than Adam, it would contradict no statement of the Bible. The Bible reader, therefore, has no reason to question any well ascertained fact of geology. But when Infidels come to us with their geological _theories_ about the mode in which God made the earth, or in which the earth made itself, and how long it took to do it, and tell us that they have got scientific demonstration from the rocks that the Bible account is false, and that our old traditions can not stand before the irresistible evidence of science, we are surely bound to look at the foundation of facts, and the logical superstructure, which sustain such startling conclusions. Now it is remarkable that every Infidel argument against the statements of the Bible, or rather against what they suppose to be the statements of the Bible, is based, not on the _facts_, but upon the _theories_, of geology. I do not know one which is based solely on facts and inductions from facts. Every one of them has a wooden leg, and goes hobbling upon an _if_. Take for example the argument most commonly used--that which asserts the vast antiquity of the earth--a thing in itself every way likely, and not at all contrary to Scripture, if it could be scientifically proved. But how does our Infidel geologist set about his work of proving that the earth is any given age, say six thousand millions of years? A scientific demonstration must rest upon _facts_--well ascertained facts. It admits of _no suppositions_. Now what are the facts given to solve the problem of the earth's age? The geologist finds a great many layers of rocks, one above the other, evidently formed below the water, some of them out of the fragments of former rocks, containing bones, shells, and casts of fishes, and tracks of the feet of birds, made when these rocks were in the state of soft mud, and altogether several miles thick. He has a great multitude of such facts before him, but they are all of this character. Not one of them gives him the element of _time_. They announce to him a succession of events, such as successive generations of fishes and plants; but not one of them tells how long these generations lived. The condition of the world was so utterly different then, from what it is now, that no inference can be drawn from the length of the lives of existing races, which are generally also of different species. The utmost any man can say, in such a case, is, _I suppose_, for there is no determinate element of time in the statement of the problems, and so no certain time can appear in the solution. Here is a problem exactly similar. A certain house is found to be built with ten courses of hewn stone in the basement, forty courses of brick in the first story, thirty-six courses in the second, thirty-two in the third; with a roof of nine inch rafters covered with inch boards, and an inch and a half layer of coal tar and gravel; how long was it in building? Would not any school-boy laugh at the absurdity of attempting such a problem? He would say, "How can I tell unless I know whence the materials came, how they were conveyed, how many workmen were employed, and how much each could do in a day? If the brick had to be made by hand, the lumber all dressed with the hand-saw and jack-plane, the materials all hauled fifty miles in an ox-cart, the brick carried up by an Irishman in a hod, and the work done by an old, slow-going, jobbing contractor, who could only afford to pay three or four men at a time, they would not get through in a year. But if the building stone and sand were found in excavating the cellar, if the brick were made by steam and came by railroad, a good master builder, with steam saw and planing mills, steam hoists, and a strong force of workmen, would run it up in three weeks." So our geologist ought to say; "I do not know either the source of the materials of the earth's strata, nor the means by which they were conveyed to their present positions; therefore I can not tell the time required for their formation. If the crust of the earth was created originally of solid granite, and the materials of the strata were ground down by the slow action of frost and rain, and conveyed to the ocean by the still slower agencies of rivers and torrents--hundreds of millions of ages would not effect the work. But if the earth was created in such a shape as would rationally be considered the best adapted for future stratification; if its crust consisted of the various elements of which granite and other rocks are composed; if these materials were ejected in a granular or comminuted form, and in vast quantities by submarine volcanoes generated by the chemical action of these elements upon each other; and if, after being diffused by the currents of the ocean, and consolidated by its vast pressure, the underlying strata were baked and melted and crystallized into granite[361]--a very few centuries would suffice. Until these indispensable preliminaries are settled, geology can make no calculations of the length of time occupied by the formation of the strata." But instead of saying so, he _imagines_ that God chose to make the earth out of the most impossible materials, by the most unsuitable agencies, and with the most inadequate forces; and that therefore a long time was needed for the work. In short, to revert to our illustration of the house-building, he _supposes_ that Almighty God built the earth with the ox-team, and employed only the same force in erecting the building, which he now uses for doing little jobbing repairs. Almost all geological computations of time are made upon the supposition that only the same agents were at work then which we see now, that they only wrought with the same degree of force, and that they produced just the same effects in such a widely different condition of the earth as then prevailed. It takes a year say to deposit mud enough at the bottom of the sea to make an inch of rock now; _and if mud was deposited no faster_ when the geological strata were formed, they are as many years old as there are inches in eight or nine miles depth of strata. But this is not the scientific proof we were promised. How does he prove that mud was deposited at just the same rate then as now? The very utmost he can say is that it is a very probable supposition. I can prove it a very improbable supposition. But it is enough for my present purpose to point out that, probable or improbable, it is _only supposition_. No proof is given or can possibly be given for it. Any conclusion drawn from such premises can be only a _supposition_ too. And so the whole fabric of geological chronology, upon the stability of which so many Infidels are risking the salvation of their souls, and beneath which they are boasting that they will bury the Bible beyond the possibility of a resurrection, vanishes into a mere _unproved notion_, based upon an _if_. It is truly astonishing, that any sober-minded person should allow himself to be shaken in his religious convictions by the alleged results of a science so unformed and imperfect, as geologists themselves acknowledge their favorite science to be. "The dry land upon our globe occupies only _one-fourth_ of its whole superficies. All the rest is sea. How much of this fourth part have geologists been able to examine? and how small seems to be the area of stratification which they have explored? We venture to say not one _fiftieth part of the whole_."[362] "Abstract or speculative geology, were it a perfect science, would present a history of the globe from its origin and formation, through all the changes it has undergone, up to the present time; describing its external appearance, its plants and animals at each successive period. _As yet, geology is the mere aim to arrive at such knowledge_; and when we consider how difficult it is to trace the history of a nation, even over a few centuries, we can not be surprised at the small progress geologists have made in tracing the history of the earth through the lapse of ages. To ascertain the history of a nation possessed of written records is comparatively easy; but when these are wanting, we must examine the ruins of their cities and monuments, and judge of them as a people from the size and structure of their buildings, and from the remains of art found in them. This is often a perplexing, always an arduous task; _much more so is it to decipher the earth's history_."[363] "The canoes, for example, and stone hatchets found in our peat bogs afford an insight into the rude arts and manners of the earliest inhabitants of our island; the buried coin fixes the date of some Roman emperor; the ancient encampments indicate the districts once occupied by invading armies, and the former method of constructing military defenses; the Egyptian mummies throw light on the art of embalming, the rites of sepulture, or the average stature of ancient Egypt. This class of memorials yields to no other in authenticity, but it constitutes a small part only of the resources on which the historian relies; whereas in geology it forms the only kind of evidence which is at our command. For this reason _we must not expect to obtain a full and connected account of any series of events beyond the reach of history_."[364] "There are no calculations more doubtful than those of the geologist."[365] In fact, no truly scientific geologist pretends that it stands on the same level with any authentic history, much less with the Bible record; inasmuch as the discovery of a single new fact may overturn the whole theory. "It furnishes us with no clew by which to unravel the unapproachable mysteries of creation. These mysteries belong to the wondrous Creator, and to him only. We attempt to theorize upon them, and to reduce them to law, and all nature rises up against us in our presumptuous rebellion. A stray splinter of cone bearing wood--a fish's skull or tooth--the vertebra of a reptile--the humerus of a bird--the jaw of a quadruped--_all_, _any_ of these things, weak and insignificant as they may seem, become in such a quarrel too strong for us and our theory--the puny fragment in the grasp of truth forms as irresistible a weapon as the dry bone did in that of Samson of old; and our slaughtered sophisms lie piled up, 'heaps upon heaps,' before it."[366] The history of the progress of geology furnishes abundant proof of the truth of these admissions of weakness and fallibility. In almost every instance when we have had the opportunity of testing geological calculations of time they have proved to be erroneous; and sometimes grossly erroneous. The lake dwellings of Switzerland, which were once alleged to be at least fifteen thousand years old, are found surrounded by heaps of burnt corn; illustrating Cæsar's account of the burning of their corn by the Helvetians, preparatory to the invasion of Gaul, which he repelled. The peat bogs of Denmark, surrounding stumps of oak, beech, and pine, claimed to be successive growths, and at least twelve thousand five hundred years old, have been compared with a piece of primeval bog and forest, on the Earl of Arran's estate, in Scotland, which corresponds perfectly to the Danish bog; but which shows the three growths not successive, but contemporaneous, at different levels; the bog growing as well as the trees. And the frequent discovery of Danish remains of the stone and bronze ages in the old Danish forts and battle-fields of Ireland fixes their historical period at the era of the Danish invasion; some of these stone and bronze weapons being found on the battle-field of Clontarf, dating A. D. 827. Skeletons of warriors with gold collars, bronze battle-axes, and flint arrow heads are quite common in the Irish bogs. The absence of iron, on which so great a theory of the stone, bronze, and iron ages as successive developments of civilization has been raised, is easily accounted for by the perishable nature of iron when exposed to moisture. But that this Celtic race used iron also, as well as bronze and stone, is proved incontestably by the discovery, in 1863, of the slag of their iron furnaces, among a number of flint weapons, and Celtic skulls, at Linhope, in Northumberland; the iron itself having perished by rust.[367] The pottery, glass, and handmills found beside these skulls show that their owners were by no means the degraded savages supposed to represent the so-called stone age. Horner's Nile pottery, discovered at a depth of sixty feet, and calculated to be twelve thousand years old, and fragments found still deeper in this deposit, and calculated at thirty thousand years, were found to be underlaid by still deeper layers, producing Roman pottery; and in the deepest boring of all, at the foot of the statue of Rameses II., the discovery of the Grecian honeysuckle, marked on some of these mysterious fragments, which they had claimed as pre-historic, proved that it could not be older than the Greek conquest of Egypt. Sir Robert Stephenson found in the neighborhood of Damietta, at a greater depth than Mr. Horner reached, a brick bearing the stamp of Mohammed Ali.[368] The shifting currents of all rivers flowing through alluvial deposits bury such things in a single season of high water. The raised beaches of Scotland are quite conspicuous geological features of the Highlands, and have furnished themes for calculations of their vast antiquity. Here and there human remains had been discovered in them, but no link could be had to connect them otherwise than geologically with history. Geologists, accordingly, with their visual generosity of time, assigned them to the pre-Adamite period. But recently the missing link has been found, and these progenitors of Tubal Cain, and the pre-Adamites generally, are found to have been in the habit of supping their broth out of Roman pottery! Lyell, the acknowledged prince of geologists, is famous for his chronological blundering; of which his calculations of the age of the delta of the Mississippi is a very good American example. He calculates the quantity of mud in suspension in the water, and the area and depth of the delta, and says it must have taken sixty-seven thousand years for the formation of the whole; and if the alluvial matter of the plain above be two hundred and sixty-four feet deep, or half that of the delta, it must have required thirty-three thousand five hundred years more for its accumulation, even if its area be estimated at only equal to the delta, whereas it is in fact larger.[369] He makes no allowance for tidal deposits. But Brig. Gen. Humphrey, of the United States Surveying Department, goes over Lyell's calculations, and shows that instead of 3,702,758,400 cubic feet of mud brought down by the Mississippi, as estimated by Lyell, the actual amount is 19,500,750,000,000; that the rate at which the delta is now advancing into the gulf is fifty feet per annum, and that the age of the delta and alluvial deposit is four thousand four hundred, instead of Lyell's one hundred thousand five hundred years.[370] We might go on and give a dozen such instances of geological miscalculations of time did space permit; but these are enough to disabuse us of any faith in such calculations. With such specimens before us of the miscalculations of the smaller periods by geologists, we are not surprised to find that they grossly exaggerate the larger cycles of time. The necessities of the evolution of the ascidian into the snail, of the snail into the fish, and of the fish into the lizard, of the lizard into the monkey, and of the monkey into the man, by slow and imperceptible changes, demanded an almost infinite length of time; and the geologists of that school accordingly asserted the existence of animal life upon our globe for hundreds of thousands of millions of years. But Sir Wm. Thompson, one of the first mathematicians, demonstrates[371] the impossibility of any such length of time being spent in the process of cooling our little globe. Beginning with their own assumption, of a globe of molten granite cooling down to the present state, he proves that the earth can not have been in existence longer than a hundred millions of years; and of course that plants and animals have existed on it a much shorter time; as for the greater part of that period it was too hot for them. The geologists are now becoming ashamed of their poetical cycles, and some acknowledge that their chiefs blundered egregiously in their calculations. The principles of geology seem to be as unsettled as its facts. There is no agreement upon any of its theories. The history of its theories, like that of their framers, begins with their birth, and ends with their burial. Each new theory placed the tombstone upon the preceding, and inscribed it with the brief record of the antediluvian, "and he died." A busy time they must have had with their Wernerian, Huttonian, and Diluvian hypotheses; not to mention the Hutchinsonian theory, the animal spirits flowing from the sun, the vegetative power of stories, and other sage and serious facts and theories, theological and philosophical, invented to account for the world's creation. "No theory," says Lyell, "could be so far-fetched or fantastical as not to attract some followers, provided it fell in with the popular notion." "Some of the most extravagant systems were invented or controverted by men of acknowledged talent." A more amusing exhibition of philosophical absurdity can not be found than those chapters which he devotes to "The Historical Progress of Geology,"[372] unless perhaps the scientific discussions of the erudite acquaintances of Lemuel Gulliver. Let it not be supposed that the progress of inductive science, and the prevalence of the Baconian philosophy have banished absurdities and contradictions from the sphere of geology. It would require a man of considerable learning to find three geologists agreed, either in their facts, or in their theories. In a general way, indeed, we have the Catastrophists, with Hugh Miller, overwhelming the earth with dire convulsions in the geological eras, and upheaving the more conservative Lyell and the Progressionists; who affirm that all things continue as they were from the beginning of the world. And there is perhaps a general agreement now that the underlying _primitive_ rocks, so called, are not primitive at all, as geologists thought twenty years ago; but, like the foundations of a Chicago house, have been put in long after the building was finished and occupied. But then comes the question how they were inserted--whether as Elie de Beaumont thinks, the mountains were upheaved by starts, lever fashion, or, as Lyell affirms, very gradually, and imperceptibly, like the elevation of a brick house by screws.[373] Nor is there the least likelihood of any future agreement among them; inasmuch as they can not agree either as to the thickness of the earth's solid crust which is to be lifted, or the force by which it is to be done? Hopkins proves by astronomical observation that it is eight hundred miles thick. Lyell affirms that at twenty-four miles deep there can be no solid crust, for the temperature of the earth increases one degree for every forty-five feet, and at that depth the heat is great enough to melt iron and almost every known substance. But then there is a difference between philosophers about this last test of solidity--those who believe in Wedgewood's Pyrometer, which was the infallible standard twenty years ago, asserting that the heat of melted iron is 21,000° Fahrenheit; while Professor Daniells demonstrates by another infallible instrument that it is only 2,786° Fahrenheit;[374] which is rather a difference. In one case the earth's crust would be over two hundred miles thick, in the other twenty-four. But then comes the great question, What is below the granite? and a very important one for any theory of the earth. It evidently underlies the whole foundation of speculative geology, whether we assume with De Beaumont and Humboldt, that "the whole globe, with the exception of a thin envelope, much thinner in proportion than the shell of an egg, is a fused mass, kept fluid by heat--a heat of 450,000° Fahrenheit, at the center, Cordier calculates--but constantly cooling, and contracting its dimensions;" and occasionally cracking and falling in, and "squeezing upward large portions of the mass;" "thus producing those folds or wrinkles which we call mountain chains;" or, with Davy and Lyell, that the heat of such a boiling ocean below would melt the solid crust, like ice from the surface of boiling water--and with it the whole theory of the primeval existence of the earth in a state of igneous fusion, its gradual cooling down into continents and mountains of granite, the gradual abrasion of the granite into the mud and sand which formed the stratified rocks, and all the other brilliant hypotheses which have sparked out of this great internal fire. Instead of an original central heat he supposes that "we may _perhaps_ refer the heat of the interior to chemical changes constantly going on in the earth's crust."[375] Now if the very foundations of the science are in such a state of fusion, and floating on a _perhaps_, would it not be wise to allow them to solidify a little before a man risks the salvation of his soul upon them? The various theories are contradictions. The igneous theory assault the aqueous theory with the greatest heat; while the aqueous theorists pour cold water, in torrents, upon the igneous men. The shocks of conflicting glacier theories have shaken the Alps and convulsed all North America; and have not yet ceased. There are eleven theories of earthquakes, which have been, and are still, such energetic agents in geology; and the whole eleven afford not the least rational idea of their causes; nor of any means of preventing, predicting, or escaping their ravages. The best geologists have described fossil tracks as the footprints of gigantic birds, which others equally as authoritative pronounce the tracks of frogs and lizards. Indeed, a good part of every geological treatise, and of the time of every association of geologists, is taken up with refutations of the errors of their predecessors. There are no less than nine theories of the causes of the elevation of mountains; some scoop out the valleys by water; others by ice; others heave up the mountains by fire; and some by the chemical expansion of their rocks; while others still upheave them by the pressure of molten lava from beneath; and others again make them out to be the wrinkles of the contraction of the supposed crust of the liquid interior. Of all these theories an able geologist says: "The many proposed theories of mountain elevation are based upon assumptions which unfortunately are not true; but that is an unimportant matter to the majority of our speculating geologists; and one never seen by the inventors of the theories, who allow themselves to be led captive by a poetic imagination, instead of building their inductions upon field observations. "Thus, to suppose that mountains are elevated by a wedge like intrusion of melted matter is to give to a fluid functions incompatible with its dynamic properties. So also the supposition that the igneous rocks were intruded, as solid wedges separating and lifting the crust, is opposed to the fact that no apparent abrasion, but generally the closest adhesion, exists at the line of contact of the igneous and stratified rocks. Equally fatal objections may be advanced against the other theories."[376] Multitudes of the alleged facts of Infidel geologists are as apocryphal as their theories. Thus in a recent ponderous quarto volume, the production of half a dozen philosophers, this identical impossible theory--of the cooling of the earth's crust down to solidity, while an irresistible central heat remains below--is presented to the world as an ascertained fact; we are informed of the discovery of a human skull fifty-seven thousand years old, _in good preservation_; asked to believe that two tiers of cypress snags could not be deposited in the delta of the Mississippi in less than eleven thousand four hundred years; and to calculate that the delta of the Nile must have been a great many ages in growing to its present size, because it is quite certain that for the last three thousand years _it has never grown at all_.[377] It were easy to fill a volume with such mistakes of geologists, but my limits restrict me to a few specimens. Silliman's Journal, in a review of "_The Geology of North America_, by Julius Marcoe, U. S. Geologist, and Professor of Geology in the Federal Polytechnic School of Switzerland; quarto, with maps and plates," says: "The author describes the mountain systems of north America as _he supposes they must be_, according to the theoretical views of Elie de Beaumont." "Thus one single fossil--that one a species of pine, and only very much resembling the _Pinites Fleurotti_ of Dr. Monguett--_establishes_ a connection between the New Red of France, and that of America. This is a very strong word for a geologist to use on evidence so small, _and so uncertain_, with the fate of four thousand or five thousand feet of rock at stake, and the beds beneath, containing 'perhaps Belemnites.' The prudent observer would have said, _establishes nothing_; and such is the fact." "_On such evidence_ a region over the Rocky Mountains, which is one thousand miles from north to south, and eight hundred miles from east to west, is for the most part colored in the maps as Triassic. Such a region would take in quite a respectable part of the continent of Europe." "We now know beyond any reasonable doubt, that all the country from the Platte to the British Possessions, and from the Mississippi to the Black Hills, is occupied by Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks. And as regards the region from the Platte southward to the Red River, very far the largest part _is known to be not Triassic_, while it is possible the Trias may occur in some parts of it." "It is unfortunate in its bearing on the progress of geological science to have false views about some five hundred thousand miles of territory, and much more besides, spread widely abroad through respectable journals, and transactions of distinguished European Societies."[378] One can not but sympathize with the poor abused Rocky Mountains, tormented and misrepresented for a thousand miles by this French geologist. But our American patriotism may be partially pacified when we find that Europe fares no better; and that Great Britain, and Old Scotland, Hugh Miller's own cradle, which has been the very lecture room of geologists, has nevertheless been most grossly misrepresented in all books and maps, up till the last decade. The _Edinburgh Review_, a competent authority, says (No. cxxvii.): "The new light which has been thus thrown on the history of the geological series of Scotland (by Sir Roderick Murchison), showing that great masses of crystalline rocks, called primary, and supposed to be much more ancient than the Silurian system, are here simply metamorphosed strata of that age, may with justice be looked upon as one of the most valuable results which have been attained by British geologists for many years." A very just remark indeed! If only geologists would learn a little modesty from this discovery, which completely turns upside down their old world-building process of grinding down all the upper strata out of the molten granite, and gives us, instead, the baking of the strata into crystalline rocks; a process exactly the reverse of the former, and of that asserted by the theory of evolution. There is no prospect of any cessation of the war of geological theories. 4. _Zoology._ Equally hostile to each other are the expounders of the development of man from the monkey. As Ishmaelites their hand is against every man. Each is a law in theorizing unto himself. Their contendings may well teach us caution. Lamarck set those right who preceded him. The author of the _Vestiges of Creation_ outstripped Lamarck, and Mr. Darwin sets both aside; while he in his turn is severely censured by M. Tremaux, and has all his reasoning controverted in favor of the new theory. Lamarck believed in spontaneous generation; Darwin does not. The author of the _Vestiges of Creation_ expounded a law of development, and Mr. Darwin replaces it by Natural Selection. M. Tremaux has repudiated the origin which Mr. Darwin has assumed, and insists on our believing that, not water, but the _soil_, is the origin of all life, and therefore of man. With him there is no progress; all creatures have reached their resting place. But man rises or sinks, according to the more ancient or recent soil he dwells upon. Professor Huxley is unwilling to abandon his idea that life may come from dead matter, and is not disposed to accept of Mr. Darwin's explanation of the origin of life by the Creator having, at first, breathed it into one or more forms. While accepting of Mr. Darwin's theory of a common descent for man with all other creatures, he not only differs from him as to the beginning, but he admits that there is no gradual transition from the one to the other. He acknowledges that the structural differences between man and even the highest apes are great and significant; and yet because there is no sign of gradual transition between the gorilla, and the orang, and the gibbon, he infers that they all had a common origin; whereas the more natural conclusion from the facts would be that they had separate beginnings. Mr. Wallace, whose claims are admitted to be equal to these of Mr. Darwin, as the propounder of the theory of the origin of species by Natural Selection, has firmly asserted that, with all its resources, Natural Selection is utterly inadequate to account for the origin and structure of the human race.[379] Thus they go, biting and devouring each other, until at last it becomes a reproduction of the Kilkenny cats, and there is nothing left but the tails. We have only to wait, and the current Infidel theory will certainly be exposed and demolished next year, by the author of some equally impossible theory. Not merely individual scientists, but the most learned societies have blundered. "Has not the French Academy pronounced against the use of quinine and vaccination, against lightning rods and steam engines? Has not Reaumer suppressed Peysonnel's 'Essay on Corals,' because he thought it was madness to maintain their animal nature? Had not his learned brethren decreed, in 1802, that there were no meteors, although a short time later two thousand fell in one department alone; and had they not more recently still received the news of ether being useful as an anæsthetic with sure and unanimous condemnation?"[380] If space permitted we could go over the circle of the sciences, and show that a similar state of uncertainty and exposure to error exists in them all. We have, however, confined our attention to those whose certainty is now most loudly vaunted, and whose theories are most largely used as the basis of Infidelity. Nor have we by any means exhausted the list of errors and contradictions of these. A volume as large as this would be required to present the list of several hundred errors, absurdities, contradictions, and mutual refutations of scientists, in the physical sciences, now before me; errors not sought after, but incidentally observed and noted in the spare hours' reading of a busy professional life. It is worthy of notice, that the uncertainties of science increase just in proportion to our interest in it. It is very uncertain about all my dearest concerns, and very positive about what does not concern me. The greatest certainty is attainable in pure mathematics, which regards only ideal quantities and figures; but biology--the science of life--is utterly obscure. The astronomer can calculate with considerable accuracy the movements of distant planets, with which we have no intercourse; but where is the meteorologist bold enough to predict the wind and weather of next week, on which my crops, my ships, my life may depend? Heat, light, and electricity may be pretty accurately measured and registered, but what physician can measure the strength of the malignant virus which is sapping the life of his patient? The chemist can thoroughly analyze any foreign substance, but the disease of his own body which is bringing him to the grave, he can neither weigh, measure nor remove. Science is very positive about distant stars and remote ages, but stammers and hesitates about the very life of its professors. 4. Such, then, are a few of the uncertainties, imperfections, and positive and egregious errors of science at its fountain head. To the actual investigator infallible certainty of any scientific fact is hardly possible, error exceedingly probable, and gross blunders in fact and theory by no means uncommon. But how greatly diluted must the modified and hesitating conviction possible to an actual observer become, when, as is generally the case, a man is not an actual observer himself, but _learns his science at school_. Such a person leaves the ground of demonstrative science, and stands upon faith. The first question then to be proposed to one whose demonstrative certainty of the truths of physical science has disgusted him with a religion received on testimony and faith, is, How have you reached this demonstrative certainty in matters of science? Are you quite sure that your certainty rests not upon the testimony of fallible and erring philosophers, but solely upon your own personal observations and experiments? To take only the initial standard of astronomical measurements--the earth's distance from the sun. Have you personally measured the earth's radius, observed the transit of Venus in 1769, from Lapland to Tahiti at the same time, calculated the sun's parallax, and the eccentricity of the earth's orbit? Would you profess yourself competent to take even the preliminary observation for fixing the instruments for such a reckoning? Were you ever within a thousand miles of the proper positions for making such observations? Or have you been necessitated to accept this primary measure, upon the accuracy of which all subsequent astronomical measurers depend, merely upon hearsay and testimony, and subject to all those contingencies of error and prejudice, and mistakes of copyists, which, in your opinion, render the Bible so unreliable in matters of religion? Or to come down to earth. You are a student of the stone book, with its enduring records graven in the rock forever; and perhaps have satisfied yourself that "under the ponderous strata of geological science the traditionary mythology and cosmogony of the Hebrew poet has found an everlasting tomb." But how many volumes of this stone book have you perused personally? You are quite indignant perhaps that theologians and divines, who have no practical or personal knowledge of geology, should presume to investigate its claims. Have you personally visited the various localities in South America, Siberia, Australia, India, Britain, Italy, and the South Seas, where the various formations are exhibited; and have you personally excavated from their matrices the various fossils which form the hieroglyphics of the science? Have you, in fact, ever seen one in a thousand of these minerals and fossils _in situ_? Or are you dependent on the tales of travelers, the specimens of collectors, the veracity of authors, the accuracy of lecturers, aided by maps of ideal stratifications, in rose-pink, brimstone-yellow, and indigo-blue, for your profound and glowing convictions of the irresistible force of experimental science, and of the shadowy vagueness of a religion dependent upon human testimony? To come down considerably in our demands, and confine ourselves to the narrow limits of the laboratory. You are a chemist perhaps, and proud, as most chemists justly are, of the accuracy attainable in that most palpable and demonstrative science. But how much of it is experimental science _to you_? How many of the nine hundred and forty-two substances treated of in Turner's Chemistry have you analyzed? One-half? One-tenth? Would you face the laughter of a college class to-morrow upon the experiment of taking nine out of the nine hundred, reducing them to their primitive elements, giving an accurate analysis of their component parts, and combining them in the various forms described in that, or any other book, whose statements, because experimentally certain, have filled you with a dislike of Bible truths, which you must receive upon testimony? In fact, do you know anything worth mention of the facts of science upon your own knowledge, except those of the profession by which you make your living? Or, after all your boasting about scientific and demonstrative certainty, have you been obliged to receive the certainties of science "upon faith, and at second-hand, and upon the word of another;" and to save your life you could not tell half the time who that other is, by naming the discoverers of half the scientific truths you believe? What! are you dependent on hearsay, and probability, for any little science you possess, having in fact never obtained any personal demonstration or experience of its first principles and measurements, nor being capable of doing so? Then let us hear no more cant about the uncertainty of a religion dependent upon testimony, and the certainties of experimental science. Whatever certainty may be attainable by scientific men--and we have seen that is not much--it is very certain you have got none of it. The very best you can have to wrap yourself in is a second-hand assurance, grievously torn by rival schools, and needing to be patched every month by later discoveries. Your science, such as it is, _rests solely upon faith_ in the testimony of philosophers, often contradictory and improbable, and always fallible and uncertain. 5. Nor would you cease to be dependent upon faith could you personally make all the observations and calculations of demonstrative science. The knowledge of these facts does not constitute science; it is merely the brick pile containing the materials for the building of science. Science is knowledge systematized. But if the parts of nature were not arranged after a plan, the knowledge of them could not be formed into a system. Chaos is unintelligible. Our minds are so constituted that we look for order and regularity, and can not comprehend confusion. We possess this expectation of order before we begin to learn science, and without it would never begin the search after a system of knowledge. All scientific experiment is but a search after order, and order is only another name for intelligence--for God. Deprive us of this fundamental faith in cause and effect, order and regularity--of reason, in short--and science becomes as impossible to man as to the orang-outang. _All science, even in its first principles, rests upon faith._ Not only science, reason, also, is founded upon faith; for we can not prove by reason the truths which form the data of reasoning. The intuitions of the mind, which form the postulates necessary to the first process of reasoning, are believed, not proven. When the wise fool attempted to prove his own existence by the celebrated sophism, "I think, therefore I exist," he necessarily postulated his existence in order to prove it. How did he know that there was an "I" to think? And how did he know that the "I" thought? Certainly not by any process of reasoning, but by faith. He believed these truths; but could never reason them into his consciousness. Faith, then, underlies reason itself. We may now proceed to inquire whether or not faith, which we have found so prevalent even among those who repudiate it, is a thing to be ashamed of; or if it be a sufficiently certain and reliable basis for human life and conduct. 1. We are met at the very outset by the great fact that God has so constituted the world and everything in it, that _in all the great concerns of life we are necessitated to depend on faith_; without any possibility of reaching absolute certainty regarding the result of any ordinary duty. We sow without any certainty of a crop, or that we may live to reap it. We harvest, but our barns may be burned down. We sell our property for bank-bills, but who dare say they will ever be paid in specie? We start on a journey to a distant city, but even though you insure your life, who will insure that fire, or flood, or railroad collision may not send you to the land whence there is no return? Science is the child of yesterday; but from the beginning of the world men have lived by faith. Before science was born, Cain tilled his ground without any mathematical demonstration that he should reap a crop. Abel fed his flock without any scientific certainty that he should live to enjoy its produce; and Tubal Cain forged axes and swords without any assurance that he should not be plundered of his wages. All the experience of mankind proves that experimental certainty regarding the most important business of this life is impossible. By what process of philosophical induction is religion alone put beyond the sphere of faith and hope? If religious duties are not binding on us, unless religion be scientifically demonstrated, then neither are moral obligations; for these two can not be separated. Is it really so, that none but scientific men are bound to tell the truth, and pay their debts; and that a person may not fear God, and go to heaven, unless he has graduated at college? The common sense of mankind declares that we live by faith, not by science. 2. _We demand the knowledge of truths of which science is profoundly ignorant._ Science is but an outlying nook of my farm, which I may neglect and yet have bread to eat. Faith is my house in which all my dearest interests are treasured. Of all the great problems and precious interests which belong to me as a mortal and an immortal, science knows nothing. I ask her whence I came? and she points to her pinions scorched over the abyss of primeval fire, her eyes blinded by its awful glare, and remains silent. I inquire what I am? but the strange and questioning _I_ is a mystery which she can neither analyze nor measure. I tell her of the voice of conscience within me--she never heard it, and does not pretend to understand its oracles. I tell her of my anxieties about the future--she is learned only in the past. I inquire how I may be happy hereafter--but happiness is not a scientific term, and she can not tell me how to be happy here! Poor, blind science! 3. _All our dearest interests lie beyond the domains of science, in the regions of faith._ Science treats of things--faith is confidence in persons. Take away the persons, and of what value are the things? The world becomes at once a vast desert, a dreary solitude, and more miserable than any of its former inhabitants the lonely wretch who is left to mourn over the graves of all his former companions--the last man. Solitary science were awful. Could I prosecute the toils of study alone, without companion or friend to share my labors? Would I study eternally with no object, and for no use; none to be benefited, none to be gratified by my discoveries? Though you hung maps on every tree, made every mountain range a museum, bored mines in every valley, and covered every plain with specimens, made Vesuvius my crucible, and opened the foundations of the earth to my view--yet would the discovery of a single fresh human footprint in the sand fill my heart with more true hope of happiness, than an endless eternity of solitary science. I can live, and love, and be happy without science, _but not without companionship, whose bond is faith_. Faith is the condition of all the happiness you can know on earth. Law, order, government, civilization, and family life, depend not upon science, but upon confidence in moral character--upon faith. In its sunshine alone can happiness grow. It is faith sends you out in the morning to your work, nerves your arms through the toils of the day, brings you home in the evening, gathers your wife and your children around your table, inspires the oft-repeated efforts of the little prattler to ascend your knee, clasps his chubby arms around your neck, looks with most confiding innocence in your eye, and puts forth his little hand to catch your bread, and share your cup. Undoubting faith is happiness even here below. Need you marvel, then, that you must be converted from your pride of empty, barren science, and casting yourself with all your powers into the arms of faith, become as a little child before you can enter into the kingdom of heaven? 4. But religion is not founded upon faith as distinct from observation and experiment. _It is the most experimental of all the sciences._ There is less of theory, and more of experience in it than in any other science. Its faith is all practical. It is a great mistake to suppose that faith is the opposite pole of experience. On the contrary, experience is the fruit which ripens from the blossom of faith. We have seen how an underlying conviction of the existence of an intelligent planner and upholder of the laws of nature is the source of all scientific experiment, and systematized knowledge. A similar underlying conviction of the existence of a moral governor of the world is the source of all religious experience. _He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is the rewarder of those that diligently seek him._ But this fundamental axiom believed, long trains of experience follow; of every one of which you can be, and actually are, infinitely more certain than of any fact of physical science. Your eyes, your ears, your touch, your instruments, your reason, may be deceived; but your consciousness can not. If your soul is filled with joy, that is a _fact_. You know it, and are as sure of it as you are that the sun shines. If you feel miserable, you are so. A sense of neglected duty, a consciousness that you have done wrong, and are displeased with yourself for it; a certainty that God is displeased with you for wrong-doing, and that he will show his displeasure by suitable punishment; the tenacious grasp of vicious habits on your body and soul, and the fearful thought that by the law of your nature these vipers, which you vainly struggle to shake off, will forever keep involving you more closely in their cursed coils--these are _facts of your experience_. You are as certain that they give you disquiet of mind, when you entertain them, as that the sea rages in a tempest; and that you can no more prevent their entrance, nor compel their departure, nor calm nor drown the anxiety they occasion, than you can prevent the rising of the tempest, dismiss the thunder-storm, or drown Etna in your wine-glass. Of these primary facts of moral science, and of others like them, you possess the most absolute and infallible certainty from your own consciousness. They result from the inertia of moral matter, which, when put into a state of disturbance, has no power of bringing itself to rest; as expressed in the formula, _There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked._[381] Let us now go out of your own experience, as you must do in every other science, into the region of observation, and study a few of the other phenomena of religion. Your comrade, Jones, has taken to drinking of late, and also to going with you to Sunday lectures, and in the evening to other places of amusement. He has, however, been warned that the next time he comes drunk to the workshop he will be discharged; and as he is a clever young fellow, and knows more about the Bible than you, having gone to Sabbath-school when a boy, and is able to use up the saints cleverly, you would be sorry to lose his company. So you set on him to go with you to hear a temperance lecture, hoping that he may be induced to take the pledge; for if he does not you fear he will soon lie in the gutter. He curses you, and himself too, if ever he listens to any such stuff; and refuses to go. You can easily gather a hundred other illustrations of the great law of the moral repulsion between vice and truth, expressed in the following formula: "_This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved._"[382] Your life, however, is but a long illustration of this principle. Have you not willingly remained in ignorance of the contents of the Bible, because you dislike its commands? There is another fact of the same science--there, in the gutter before you, wallowing in his own vomit, covered with rags, besmeared with mud, smelling worse than a hog, his bruised and bleeding mouth unable to articulate the obscenities and curses he tries to utter. "Is it possible that can be Bill Brown! Why, only three years ago we worked at the same bench. It was he who introduced me to the Sunday Institute; as clever a workman and as jovial a comrade as I ever knew, but would get on a spree now and again. He had a good father and mother, got considerable schooling, had good wages, got married to a clever girl, and had two fine children. Is it possible he could make such a beast of himself in such a short time?" Yes, quite possible, and more, quite certain. Not only in his case, but in all others, the law of moral gravitation is universal and infallible. "_Evil men and seducers wax worse and worse._"[383] The degradation may not always be in this precise form, nor always as speedy; as all heavy bodies do not fall to the same place, nor with like rapidity. But it is always as certain and always as deep, and will one day be far more public. Fix it firmly in your mind. It concerns you more than all the science you will ever know. You, too, are in the course of sin, and you know it. You have already begun to fall. Come again into this room. "What, into a prayer-meeting? I don't go to such places." But, if you want to study the phenomena of religion scientifically, you should go to such places; just as if you want to study geology, you should go to the places where the strata are exposed to view. I do not ask you to speak, and to ask people to pray for you, but only to look on and listen. If you are a philosopher I wish you to cease dogmatizing about fanaticism, and enthusiasm, and the ignorance, and credulity of believers, at least until you philosophically examine the evidence upon which they believe. You can set aside, if you please, their unfounded beliefs concerning matters beyond their capacity, and also their confident hopes for futurity. What I wish you to examine is their _actual experience of religion_, as they severally relate it. For as we have seen, the facts of consciousness are just as certain, and as ascertainable, as the facts discovered by our senses; and there is no reason in the world why we should not pursue the study of religion in the same way that we gain a knowledge of science; namely, by collecting and studying the facts accumulated by those who have made experiments, and have obtained a practical knowledge of the matter. There are here, as you see, a great number of religious experimenters. They are also of very various conditions of life, and of various degrees of education. Many of them are moreover well known to you, so that you are in a favorable position for forming a fair judgment of their discoveries. There is your comrade Smith, Hopkins who does the hauling for your establishment, Lawyer Hammond, Professor Edwards, whose chemical lectures you attend, Dr. Lawrence, who lectured before the Lyceum last winter, Mr. Heidenberger, who wrote a series of articles on Comte's Positive Philosophy for the Investigator, Mrs. Bridgman, your Aunt Polly, who nursed you during your typhoid fever, and a great many others whom you know quite well. Professor Edwards leads in prayer, and gives a brief address. You never dreamt that he was hoaxing you when he told you of his chemical experience; have you any reason to offer for believing that he now solemnly, and in the presence of God, lies to you and to this assembly, when he tells you of the peace he has found in believing in Christ, and the happiness he experiences in uniting with his brethren in the worship of God? Or is he more liable to error in noting the fact of his mental joy or sorrow, than in observing the effect of the extraordinary ray in double refraction? If not, the fact that he has felt this religious experience, is just as certain as the fact, that he has seen polarized light. There is your comrade Smith, whom you have known for years, actually got up to speak in meeting. You are surprised; but listen: "Neighbors and friends, most of you know I never cared much about religion, and was often given to take more liquor than was good for me, and then I would fight and curse awful bad. I knew as well as anybody that it wasn't right, and always felt bad after a spree, and many a time I said I would turn over a new leaf, and be good. But it was all no use, for as soon as any of the fellows would come around after me, I always went along with them, till at last I gave it up and said it was no use to try. Still, whenever any of my acquaintances died, I felt scared like; and I kept away as far as I could from churches and preachers and such like, because I could not bear to think about God and judgment to come. Well, about five weeks ago my little Minnie set on me one Sabbath morning to carry her to church, and to please the little creature--for she is as pert a darling as you could see anywhere--I told my wife to get her ready, and we would go. She seemed as if she would cry, and kept talking to herself all the way. When we got into the church the singing almost upset me, for I had not been to a church since I was a little fellow, just before father and mother died. But it seemed as if it was the same tune, and as if the tune brought them all back, and as if I saw them again and all the family, and heard mother sing as she used to, and I forgot church and everything, and thought I was a little fellow playing about on the floor just as I used to do when I was a happy child. When they stopped I was so sorry, and wished I could just be as innocent and as happy as I was then. Well, it seemed like the preacher had been reading my thoughts, for he gave out for his text, '_Verily, verily, I say unto you, unless a man be born again he can not see the kingdom of God._' He began to preach how Jesus can give us new hearts, and save us from our sins; that his blood cleanses from all sin; that he is able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God through him. The tears came into my eyes, and I could hardly keep my mouth shut till I got out. When I got home I knelt down, and cried to Jesus to save me from my sins; and my wife prayed too, and we cried for mercy. The Lord heard us, and I felt light and happy, and I went to church again, and sung with the rest. And the best of it is, the Lord delivered me from the drink; as I told a man who asked where I was going to-day, and I told him I was going to prayer-meeting, for I had got religion now. He said there were a great many religions, and most of them wrong, and a great many people said all religion was only a notion, and preaching only nonsense. I says to him, 'Look here, stranger, do you see that tavern there?' 'Yes,' says he. 'Well,' says I, 'do you see me?' 'I do, of course,' says he. 'Well,' says I, 'every little fellow in these parts knows that so long as Tom Smith had a quarter in his pocket he could never pass that tavern without having a drink. All the men in Jefferson could not stop him. Now look here,' says I, 'there is my week's wages, and I can go past, and thank God I don't feel the least like drinking, for the Lord Jesus has saved me from it. If you call that a notion, it is a mighty powerful notion, and it is a notion that has put clothes on my children's backs, and plenty of good food on my table, and songs of praise to the Lord in my mouth. _That's a fact, stranger._ Glory be to God for it. And I would recommend you to come to prayer-meeting with me, and maybe you would get religion too. A great many people are getting religion now.'" His last remark is certainly very true. There are so many, and of such various characters and grades of life, and in so many places, that every reader can easily find several Tom Smiths of his own acquaintance, whose conversions display all the essential facts of this case, and prove that: 5. The facts of religious experience _are better attested, and more unobjectionable_ than those of any other science. Unless they can be shown to be unreasonable or impossible, we are bound to receive them, when presented by the experimentists who have discovered them, though personally we may not have any such experience; just as we believe the chemists, or the astronomers who relate their discoveries which personally we have not observed. But the facts of religion are _by no means unreasonable_. They can not be shown to contradict any known law of the human mind. It is true they are mysterious. But so are the facts of physical science--heat, light, electricity, gravitation. Of either, we may be quite certain that such phenomena exist, and utterly ignorant of the mode of their operation. It were as utterly unphilosophical to deny that Almighty God could impart nervous energy to the languid limbs of your sick neighbor, because you are ignorant of its origin and means of transmission, as to deny that God could impart spiritual electricity to his paralyzed soul, because you are ignorant of the mode in which he bestows it. And ignorance is all that you can plead in this case. You must just admit that having tried an experiment which you have not, your religious friend has a right to know more than you. Moreover, the facts of religion are presented for belief upon _the most abundant and reliable testimony_. In physical science you must rely on the testimony of a very few observers--the great bulk even of scientific men having no opportunity of testing the facts themselves, and being well satisfied if any fact is confirmed by the testimony of two or three philosophers--and this testimony often contradictory, and always fallible, as the discordant results of their experiments prove. But here you have a great multitude of experimentists, in every city and village of the land, of every variety of intellect and education, prosecuting the same course of experiments, and all arriving at the same results. They do not all confess the _same_ sins, but they all felt the power of _some_ sin, and felt miserable in their guilt. And however they may differ in their external circumstances, their inward constitution, or in their views of the outward part of religion, there is no difference among them about the great facts of their religious experience. They all believed the faithful saying that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, cried to God for mercy through him, and received peace of mind, grace to live a new life, and to delight in the worship of God. Do you know any science which has been prosecuted by one-hundredth part of this number of inquirers? Which has been confirmed by one-thousandth part of this number of experimenters? Or any experiment tried with such uniform and unfailing success as this, "_Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved?_"[384] Why then do you hesitate to admit the correctness of these facts? Is it because you perceive they lead to results which you dislike? They do lead to results. They are effects and tell us of a cause. They are powerful effects, and proclaim a powerful cause. They are moral and spiritual effects, and assure us of the existence of a moral and spiritual agent who has caused them. They are holy effects, and convince your sinful soul that they are produced by a holy being. But they are also benevolent, life-giving, blessed effects, and proclaim that God is love. The Lord, the Spirit, is as plainly declared in the facts of religious experience, as the Creator is in the creation of the universe; and it were as rank Atheism to attribute these orderly and blessed results to chance or to evil passions, as to attribute the Cosmos to blind fate, or to the beasts that perish. He is as much an enemy to his happiness who denies the one, as a foe to his reason who rejects the other. Dear reader, why should you not believe in, 6. _The only science which can make you happy?_ which can bestow peace of mind, nerve you to conquer your evil habits, enable you to live a holy and happy life, and to die with a blessed hope of a glorious resurrection? You know there is no science which makes any such offers, or which you would believe if it did. But the Bible unfolds a science which does, and enables you to believe it too. The facts of religious experience give most convincing evidence of the reality and power of the grace of God. It were as easy to persuade a Christian that he had produced this change of heart and life by the excitement of his own feelings, as that he had kindled the sun with a lucifer match. And the character of the work and the worker assures him that it will not be left unfinished. His faith receives these facts of religious experience as the first installments upon God's bonds, and as pledges for the payment of the remainder of his promises. The joy and peace which God gives him now, prove most satisfactorily his ability and willingness to give him larger measures of these enjoyments when he is capable of receiving them. Just as we have good reason to believe that he who has made the sun to rise out of darkness will guide him onward in his course to perfect day, have we also good reason to believe that he that hath begun the good work of his grace in us will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. Christ is in us the hope of glory. This eternal life, which is begun in our souls, is so much superior to mere animal vitality, that we can not doubt that he who has given us the greater, will also give us the lesser, and quicken our mortal bodies also, by his Spirit which dwelleth in us. We know that our Redeemer liveth. 7. And now, in conclusion, dear reader, we ask you not to take these things on our testimony, nor yet on our experience; _but to try for yourself_. Oh taste and see that the Lord is good. Come see the Savior who has saved us, and be saved by him too. There is nothing more dangerous, unless resisting the evidence of the truth as it is in Jesus, than acknowledging this to be truth without immediately obeying the gospel. God requires your immediate and cordial acceptance of Christ to save you from your sins. He tells you that the only way of escape from your sins now and from hell hereafter is through him; for there is none other name given under heaven or among men whereby you must be saved. He promises to hear your prayer and give you his Holy Spirit to work in you the work of faith with power, if you will only and earnestly ask. "_Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: What man is there of you whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?_"[385] Thus you will come to possess an actual experimental knowledge of the most excellent of the sciences. In the present begun enjoyment of eternal life you will, not merely believe in, but positively _know_, its Author, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent. You will rest in no fallible and erring testimony of man's wisdom, but your faith will stand in the power of God. You will be able to say, "_Now we believe not because of thy sayings: for we have heard him ourselves, and_ KNOW _that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the World._"[386] Hear God's own warrant and invitation to your poor, thirsty soul, to forsake your vanities and come and be eternally blessed in Christ. Have the witness in yourself and be a living proof of the blessed reality of religion. "Ho every one that thirsteth! Come ye to the waters! And he who hath no money! Come ye, buy and eat! Yea, come! Buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? And your labor for that which satisfieth not? Hearken diligently unto me and eat ye that which is good, And let your soul delight itself in fatness. Incline your ear and come unto me: Hear and your soul shall live: And I will make an everlasting covenant with you, Even the sure mercies of David. Behold! I have given him for a witness to the people, A leader and a commander to the people: Behold! thou shall call nations that thou knowest not, And nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee, Because of the Lord thy God, And for the Holy One of Israel, for he hath glorified thee. "Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, Call ye upon him while he is near: Let the wicked forsake his way, And the unrighteous man his thoughts; And let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him, And to our God for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, Neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are my ways higher than your ways, And my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, And return not thither again, But water the earth, and cause it to bring forth and bud, That it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater; So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: It shall not return unto me void, But it shall accomplish that which I please, And it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace. The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, And all the trees of the fields shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, And instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: _And it shall be to the Lord for a name, For an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off._" FOOTNOTES: [322] Holyoak's Discussion with Grant and Tonney. [323] Bacon Novum Organum, I. xlix. xlvi. [324] Sir W. Hamilton's Lectures, I. 53. [325] Journal of Speculative Philosophy, I. 20. [326] Humboldt, _Cosmos_, Vol. I. p. 7, 156. [327] Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, 356. [328] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1852. [329] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1852. [330] _Cosmos_, 4, 518. Dick's _Celestial Scenery_, chap. III. Sec. 7. [331] _Cosmos_, 1, 75. Loomis' _Progress of Astronomy_, pp. 34, 40 [332] Loomis' _Progress of Astronomy_, p. 34, etc. [333] _Outlines of Astronomy_, III. Sec. 13, 140. [334] Thus several of the best telescopes in the world are rendered nearly useless by the passage of heavy railroad trains in their vicinity. [335] Somerville's Physical Sciences, VI. [336] Cosmos IV. 477. Phillips' Address to the British Association, 1865. [337] North British Review, LXV. [338] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1864, 158. [339] Cosmos I. 109. [340] Cosmos IV. 501. [341] Cosmos IV. 378. [342] Harper's Magazine, June, 1872, p. 149. [343] Annual Scientific Discovery, 1864, 134. [344] Cosmos III. 40; IV. 363. Annual, 1861, 395, 396. [345] Cosmos IV. 474. [346] Kendall's Uranography, p. 11. [347] Cosmos, 443-5. [348] North British Review, No. LXV. [349] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1852, 119. [350] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1854, 150. [351] Cosmos III. 115. [352] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1860. [353] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1852, 139. [354] Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1864, 166. [355] Plurality of Worlds, XII. [356] North British Review, LXV. [357] God's Glory in the Heavens, 168. [358] Annual Scientific Discovery, 1863, 324. [359] Cosmos IV. 378. [360] See this proved chapter XI., _Daylight Before Sunrise_. [361] See the possibility of such a source of volcanic action, of such a formation of plutonic rocks, proved by Lyell. _Principles_, chaps. XXXII. and XII. [362] Sir David Brewster, K. H., D. C. L., F. R. S., _More Worlds than One_, p. 56. [363] _Rudiments of Geology_, W. & R. Chambers, p. 10. [364] Lyell's _Principles of Geology_, p. 3. [365] Miller, _Old Red Sandstone_, p. 25. [366] Hugh Miller, _Footprints of the Creator_, p. 313. [367] American Cyclopædia, 1863, p. 374. Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1861, p. 351. [368] London Quarterly Review, 1866, No. 51, p. 240. [369] Lyell's Second Visit to the United States. [370] _The Advance_, Chicago, May 28, 1868. [371] Geological Time. [372] _Principles_, Chaps. III. and IV. [373] _Principles_, chap. XI. [374] _Principles_, p. 530. [375] _Principles_, chap. XXXI. [376] Chambers' Cyclopædia Art. Appalachians. [377] Types of Mankind, 329, 335, 338. [378] The American Journal of Science and Art, edited by Profs. Silliman and Dana, XXVI. 235, 300. [379] Frazer--Blending Lights, p. 113. [380] De Vore's _Modern Magic_, 58. [381] Isaiah, chap. xlviii. 22. [382] John, chap. iii. [383] 2 Timothy, chap. iii. Read the whole chapter. [384] Romans, chap. x. Read the chapter. [385] The Sermon on the Mount. Read it all. [386] John, chap. iv. [THE END.] Transcriber's Notes: Missing punctuation, including periods, hyphens, and commas, has been added. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Variations in spelling have been left as in the original in the following words: coveredst coverest orang-otang orang-outang water-skin waterskin The following words use an oe ligature in the original: foetus Phoenician Phoebus Phoenicians Phoenicia The spelling of the last name of Scottish astronomer John Pringle Nichol has been corrected throughout the text. The spelling of the last name of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck has been corrected throughout the text. The spelling of the last name of French physicist Claude-Servais-Mathias Pouillet has been corrected throughout the text. The spelling of the last name of Hellenistic astrologer Vettius Valens has been corrected throughout the text. The spelling of the last name of French mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier has been corrected throughout the text. A series of three asterisks * * * represents an ellipsis in the text. Shorter and longer rows of asterisks have been standardized to three asterisks. The carat ^ character indicates that the following numbers (enclosed in {} brackets) are superscripted in the original. The mathematical formula 4+3/2 is rendered 4 + 1-1/2 in the original. Footnote 15 reads "Origin of Species, 4, 10, 127, 9, 97, 100, 409, 410, 415, 423. Descent of Man, 192, 204, and II.--15, 257." The page number "9" is probably a typographical error, but it has been left as in the original. 
35408	----	THE RELIGION OF GEOLOGY AND ITS CONNECTED SCIENCES. [Illustration: SECTION OF THE EARTH'S CRUST.] THE RELIGION OF GEOLOGY AND ITS CONNECTED SCIENCES. BY EDWARD HITCHCOCK, D. D., LL. D., PRESIDENT OF AMHERST COLLEGE, AND PROFESSOR OF NATURAL THEOLOGY AND GEOLOGY. "Science has a foundation, and so has religion; let them unite their foundations, and the basis will be broader, and they will be two compartments of one great fabric reared to the glory of God. Let the one be the outer and the other the inner court. In the one, let all look, and admire, and adore; and in the other, let those who have faith kneel, and pray, and praise. Let the one be the sanctuary where human learning may present its richest incense as an offering to God; and the other the holiest of all, separated from it by a veil now rent in twain, and in which, on a blood sprinkled mercy seat, we pour out the love of a reconciled heart, and hear the oracles of the living God."--_M'Cosh._ EIGHTH THOUSAND. BOSTON: PHILLIPS, SAMPSON, AND COMPANY. 1854. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851, by PHILLIPS, SAMPSON, & CO., In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts. STEREOTYPED AT THE BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY. TO MY BELOVED WIFE. Both gratitude and affection prompt me to dedicate these lectures to you. To your kindness and self-denying labors I have been mainly indebted for the ability and leisure to give any successful attention to scientific pursuits. Early should I have sunk under the pressure of feeble health, nervous despondency, poverty, and blighted hopes, had not your sympathies and cheering counsels sustained me. And during the last thirty years of professional labors, how little could I have done in the cause of science, had you not, in a great measure, relieved me of the cares of a numerous family! Furthermore, while I have described scientific facts with the pen only, how much more vividly have they been portrayed by your pencil! And it is peculiarly appropriate that your name should be associated with mine in any literary effort where the theme is geology; since your artistic skill has done more than my voice to render that science attractive to the young men whom I have instructed. I love especially to connect your name with an effort to defend and illustrate that religion which I am sure is dearer to you than every thing else. I know that you would forbid this public allusion to your labors and sacrifices, did I not send it forth to the world before it meets your eye. But I am unwilling to lose this opportunity of bearing a testimony which both justice and affection urge me to give. In a world where much is said of female deception and inconstancy, I desire to testify that one man at least has placed implicit confidence in woman, and has not been disappointed. Through many checkered scenes have we passed together, both on the land and the sea, at home and in foreign countries; and now the voyage of life is almost ended. The ties of earthly affection, which have so long united us in uninterrupted harmony and happiness, will soon be sundered. But there are ties which death cannot break; and we indulge the hope that by them we shall be linked together and to the throne of God through eternal ages. In life and in death I abide Your affectionate husband, EDWARD HITCHCOCK. PREFACE. Most of the following lectures were written as much as eight or ten years ago, though additions and alterations have been made, from time to time, to adapt them to the progress of science. They were undertaken at the suggestion of my friend, Rev. Henry Neill, then of Hatfield, now of Lenox. I had no definite intention as to the use to be made of the lectures; but having for many years turned my attention to the bearings of science, and especially of geology, upon religion, I felt a desire to put upon paper the final results of my examinations. I threw them into the lecture form, that I might, if best, deliver them to the geological classes which I should instruct in the college with which I am connected. This I have done for many years, and also have used them in various places before lyceums. They are at length published, from a conviction that something of the kind, from some quarter, is needed. Many of the thoughts, indeed, which, at the time they were put upon paper, were original, have since been brought out by other writers. Yet enough of this description probably remain to expose me to severe criticism. I beg the intelligent Christian, however, before he condemns my views, to settle it in his mind what he can substitute for them that will be more honorable to religion. It is much easier to find fault with a mode of defending the truth than to invent a better method. We may not be pleased with certain views in vindication of religion, and yet the alternative of rejecting them may be so much worse as to lead us at least to be silent. Would that Christian critics had always kept this fact in mind when writing upon the views of geologists! They would find often that they are straining at a gnat and must swallow a camel. If my views are erroneous, as exhibited in these lectures, I cannot plead that they have been hastily adopted. Most of them, indeed, have been the subjects of thought occasionally for thirty years. I hope, however, that all my suggestions will not be thought of equal importance in my own estimation; since some of them are merely hypothetical hints thrown out for the consideration of abler minds. This work does not exhibit quite so much of logical exactness as I could wish. But my leading object has been fully carried out, viz., to exhibit all the religious bearings of geology. Several of the lectures, however, have been written as if independent of all the rest; and, therefore, the reader will find some leading thoughts repeated, but always in different connections. After acknowledging that more than a quarter of a century has elapsed since this subject first engaged my attention, it may be useless for me to ask any indulgence from criticism. But really, I feel less prepared to write upon it than I did during the first five years in which I studied it. I have learnt that it is a most difficult subject. It requires, in order to master it, an acquaintance with three distinct branches of knowledge, not apt to go together. First, an acquaintance with geology in all its details, and with the general principles of zoölogy, botany, and comparative anatomy; secondly, a knowledge of sacred hermeneutics, or the principles of interpreting the Scriptures; thirdly, a clear conception of the principles of natural and revealed religion. As examples of efforts made by men who were deficient in a knowledge of some of these branches, I am compelled to quote a large proportion of the works which, within the last thirty or forty years, have been written on the religion of geology; especially on its connection with revealed religion. I am happy to except such writers as Dr. J. Pye Smith, Dr. Chalmers, Dr. Harris, Dr. Buckland, Professor Sedgwick, Professor Whewell, Dr. King, Dr. Anderson, and Hugh Miller; for they, to a greater or less extent, acquainted themselves with all the subjects named above, before they undertook to write. But a still larger number of authors, although men of talents, and familiar, it may be, with the Bible and theology, had no accurate knowledge of geology. The results have been, first, that, by resorting to denunciation and charges of infidelity, to answer arguments from geology which they did not understand, they have excited unreasonable prejudices and alarm among common Christians respecting that science and its cultivators; secondly, they have awakened disgust, and even contempt, among scientific men, especially those of sceptical tendencies, who have inferred that a cause which resorts to such defences must be very weak. They have felt very much as a good Greek scholar would, who should read a severe critique upon the style of Isocrates, or Demosthenes, and, before he had finished the review, should discover internal evidence that the writer had never learnt the Greek alphabet. On the other hand, prejudices and disgust equally strong have been produced in the mind of many a man well versed in theology and biblical exegesis by some productions of scientific men upon the religious bearings of geology, because they advanced principles which the merest tyro in divinity would know to be false and fatal to religion, and which they advocated only because they had never studied the Bible or theology. And here I would remark that it does not follow, because a man is eminent in geology, that his opinion is of any value upon the religion of geology. For the two subjects are quite distinct, and a man may be a Coryphæus in the principles of geology, who is an ignoramus in its religious applications. Indeed, many of the ablest writers upon geology take the ground that its religious bearings do not belong to the science. These statements, instead of pleading my apology for the following work, may only show my temerity and vanity. Nevertheless, they afford me an opportunity of calling the attention of the religious public to the great inadequacy of the means now possessed of acquiring a knowledge of the different branches of natural science. I refer especially to comparative anatomy, zoölogy, botany, and geology, in our literary and theological seminaries. The latter, so far as I know, do not pretend to give any instruction in these branches. And in our colleges that instruction is confined almost entirely to a few brief courses of lectures; often so few that the students scarcely find out how ignorant they are of the subjects; and hence those who are expecting to enter the sacred ministry vainly imagine that, at almost any period of their future course, they can, in a few weeks, become sufficiently acquainted with physical science to meet and refute the sceptic. In all our seminaries, however, abundant provision is made, as it ought to be, for the study of intellectual philosophy and biblical interpretation. So well satisfied are two of the most enlightened and efficient Christian denominations in Great Britain--the Congregationalists and the Scottish Free Church--of the need of more extensive acquaintance with the natural sciences in ministers of the gospel, that they have attached a professorship of natural history to their theological seminaries. That in the New College in Edinburgh is filled by the venerable Dr. Fleming; that in the New College in London by Dr. Lankester. From a syllabus of Dr. Fleming's course of lectures, which he put into my hands last summer, I perceive that it differs little from the instruction in natural science in the colleges of our country. This being the case, it strikes me that this is not exactly the professorship that is needed in the theological seminaries of our country. But they do need, it seems to me, professorships of natural theology, to be filled by men who are practically familiar with the natural sciences. If any such chairs exist in these seminaries, I do not know it. They are amply provided with instruction in the metaphysics of theology, hermeneutics, and ecclesiastical history; and I should be sorry to see these departments less amply provided for. But here is the wide field of natural theology, large enough for several professorships, which finds no place, save a nook in the chair of dogmatics. This might have answered well enough when the battle-field with scepticism lay in the region of metaphysics, or history, or biblical interpretation. But the enemy have, within a few years past, intrenched themselves within the dominions of natural science; and there, for a long time to come, must be the tug of the war. And since they have substituted skeletons, and trees, and stones, as weapons, in the place of abstractions, so must Christians do, if they would not be defeated. Let me refer to a few examples to show how inadequately furnished the minister must be for such a contest, who has used only the means of instruction provided in our existing seminaries, literary and theological. Take the leading points discussed in the following lectures. How can a man who has heard only a brief and hurried course of thirty lectures on chemistry, twenty on anatomy and physiology, fifteen upon zoölogy, ten upon botany, ten upon mineralogy, and twenty upon geology, at the college, with no additional instruction at the theological seminary,--how can he judge correctly of points and reasoning difficult to be mastered by adepts in these sciences? How certain to be worsted in an argument with an accomplished naturalist who is a sceptic! Suppose the sceptic takes the ground advocated by Oken and the author of the "Vestiges." Let the clergyman, whom I have supposed, read the works of Miller and Sedgwick in reply to the development hypothesis, and see whether he can even understand their arguments without a more careful study of the sciences on which they rest. A subject of no small importance in its religious bearings has recently excited a good deal of sharp discussion in this country. I refer to the questions of the specific unity and unity of origin of the human race. To a person who has never studied the subject, it seems a matter easy to settle; yet, in fact, it demands extensive research even to understand. And we have seen one of the most accomplished zoölogists and anatomists of the present age take ground on these points in opposition to the almost universal opinion. The result has been that not a few talented replies to his arguments have appeared, mostly, I believe, from ministers. I have not seen them all. But in respect to those which I have read it has seemed to me, without having the least sympathy with the views of Professor Agassiz, that the authors have not the most remote conception of the principal arguments on which he relies, derived from zoölogy and comparative anatomy; nor do I believe that they can understand and appreciate them until they have studied those sciences.[1] Although I fear that theologians are not aware of the fact, yet probably the doctrines of materialism are more widely embraced at this day than almost any other religious error. But in which of our schools, save the medical, is there any instruction given in physiology and zoölogy, that will prepare a man to make the least headway against such delusions? The arguments by which materialism is defended are among the most subtle in the whole range of theology and natural science; and without a knowledge of the latter they can neither be appreciated nor refuted. The mere metaphysical abstractions by which they are usually met excite only the contempt of the acute physiologist who is a materialist. I might refer, in this connection, to the whole subject of pantheism, in its chameleon forms. The rhapsodies of spiritual pantheism must, indeed, be met by metaphysics equally transcendental. But, after all, it is from biology that the pantheist derives his choicest weapons. He appeals, also, to astronomy, zoölogy, and geology; nor is it the superficial naturalist that can show how hollow is the foundation on which he rests. These are only a few examples of the points of physical science on which scepticism at this moment has batteries erected with which to assail spiritual religion. Will the minister but slightly familiar with the ground chosen by the enemy be able not only to silence his guns, but, as every able defender of the truth ought to do, to turn them against its foes? Surely it needs a professor of natural theology in our theological seminaries, (and if such chairs existed in our colleges they would be serviceable,) to teach those who expect to be officers in the sacramental host how to carry on the holy war. I do not see how much more time can be given to the natural sciences in our colleges than is usually done, without encroaching upon other indispensable branches. If, therefore, provision be not made for studying the religious bearings of these sciences in our theological seminaries, our youthful evangelists must go forth to their work without the ability to vindicate the cause of religion against the assaults of the sceptical naturalist. Would not, then, those wealthy and benevolent individuals be great public benefactors, who should endow professorships of natural religion in our schools of the prophets? But I must not pursue this subject farther. I commit my work to the public with no raised expectations of its welcome reception. I have a high opinion of the enlightened candor of, the educated classes of our country, especially those in the ministry. Yet I know that many prejudices exist against science in its connections with religion. And, therefore, my only hope of any measure of success in this effort rests upon the divine blessing. But if the work be not pleasing to Infinite Wisdom and Benevolence, why should I desire for it an ephemeral success among men? AMHERST COLLEGE, May 1, 1851. EXPLANATION OF THE FRONTISPIECE. This section of the earth's crust is intended to bring under the eye the leading features of geology. 1. _The relative Position of the Stratified and the Unstratified Rocks._ The unstratified rocks, viz., granite, sienite, porphyry, trap, and lava, are represented as lying beneath the stratified class, for the most part, yet piercing through them in the centre of the section, and by several dikes or veins, through which masses have been protruded to the surface. The unstratified class are all colored red, to indicate their igneous origin. Granite seems to have been first melted and protruded, and it continued to be pushed upward till the close of the secondary period of the stratified rocks, as is shown by the vein of granite on the section. Sienite and porphyry seem to have been next thrust up, from below the granite; next, the varieties of trap were protruded from beneath the porphyry; and last, the lava, which still continues to be poured out upon the surface from beneath all the rest. 2. _The Stratified Rocks._ The stratified rocks represented on both flanks of the granite peak in the section, appear to have been deposited from water, and subsequently more or less lifted up, fractured, and bent. An attempt is made, on the right hand side of the section, to exhibit the foldings and inclination of the strata. The lowest are bent the most, and their dip is the greatest; and, as a general fact, there is a gradual approach to horizontality as we rise on the scale. 3. _The right hand side of the Section._ The strata on the right hand are divided into five classes: first and lowest, the _crystalline_, or _primary_, destitute of organic remains, and probably metamorphosed from a sedimentary to a crystalline state, by the action of subjacent heat. 2. The _palæozoic class_, or those containing the earliest types of animals and plants, and of vast thickness, mostly deposited in the ocean. 3. _The secondary class_, reaching from the top of the lower new red or Permian system, to the top of the chalk. 4. _The tertiary strata_, partially consolidated, and differing entirely from the rocks below by their organic contents. 5. _Alluvium_, or strata now in a course of deposition. This classification is sometimes convenient, and frequently used by geologists. 4. _The left hand Side._ On the left hand side of the section the strata are so divided as to correspond to the six great groups of animals and plants that have appeared on the globe. The names attached to the groups are derived from [Greek: zôos] (_vivus_, living,) with the Greek numerals prefixed. The lowest group, being destitute of organic remains, is called _azoic_, (from [Greek: a] privitive and [Greek: zôos],) that is, wanting in the traces of life; and corresponds to the crystalline group on the other side of the section, embracing gneiss, mica slate, limestone, and clay slate, of unknown thickness. The _protozoic group_ corresponds to the palæozoic of the right hand side, and embraces lower and upper Silurian, Devonian, or old red sandstone, the carboniferous group, and the Permian, or lower new red; the whole in Great Britain not less than thirty-three thousand feet thick. The _deutozoic group_ consists only of the triassic, or upper new red sandstone, and is only nine hundred feet thick, but marks a distinct period of life. The _tritozoic_ embraces the lias and oölite, with the Wealden, and is three thousand six hundred feet thick. The _tetrazoic_ consists of the chalk and green sand, one thousand five hundred feet thick. The _pentezoic_ embraces the tertiary strata of the thickness of two thousand feet. The _hectozoic_ is confined to the modern deposits, only a few hundred feet thick, but entombing all the existing species of animals. 5. _Characteristic Organic Remains._ Had space permitted, I should have put upon the section a reference to the most characteristic and peculiar mineral, animal, or plant, in the different groups. Thus the azoic group is _crystalliferous_, or crystal-bearing. The lower or Silurian part of the protozoic group is _brachiopodiferous_, _trilobiferous_, _polypiferous_, and _cephalopodiferous_; that is, abounding in brachiopod and cephalopod shells; in polypifers, or corals; and in trilobites, a family of crustaceans. The middle part, or the Devonian, is _thaumichthiferous_, or containing remarkable fish. The upper part, or the coal measures, is _carboniferous_; that is, abounding in coal. _The deutozoic group_ is _ichniferous_, or track-bearing, from the multitude of its fossil footmarks. The _tritozoic group_ is _reptiliferous_, or reptile-bearing, from the extraordinary lizards which abound in it. The _tetrazoic_ is _foraminiferous_, from the abundance of coral animalcula, called foraminifera, or polythalmia, which it contains. The _pentezoic_ is _mammaliferous_, because it contains the remains of mammalia, or quadrupeds. The _hectozoic_ is _homoniferous_, or man-bearing, because it embraces human remains. There is no one place on earth where all the facts exhibited on this section are presented before us together. Yet all the facts occur somewhere, and this section merely brings them into systematic arrangement. CONTENTS. Page LECTURE I. REVELATION ILLUSTRATED BY SCIENCE, 1 LECTURE II. THE EPOCH OF THE EARTH'S CREATION UNREVEALED, 33 LECTURE III. DEATH A UNIVERSAL LAW OF ORGANIC BEINGS ON THIS GLOBE FROM THE BEGINNING, 71 LECTURE IV. THE NOACHIAN DELUGE COMPARED WITH THE GEOLOGICAL DELUGES, 112 LECTURE V. THE WORLD'S SUPPOSED ETERNITY, 146 LECTURE VI. GEOLOGICAL PROOFS OF THE DIVINE BENEVOLENCE, 179 LECTURE VII. DIVINE BENEVOLENCE AS EXHIBITED IN A FALLEN WORLD, 219 LECTURE VIII. UNITY OF THE DIVINE PLAN AND OPERATION IN ALL AGES OF THE WORLD'S HISTORY, 252 LECTURE IX. THE HYPOTHESIS OF CREATION BY LAW, 285 LECTURE X. SPECIAL AND MIRACULOUS PROVIDENCE, 327 LECTURE XI. THE FUTURE CONDITION AND DESTINY OF THE EARTH, 370 LECTURE XII. THE TELEGRAPHIC SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE, 409 LECTURE XIII. THE VAST PLANS OF JEHOVAH, 445 LECTURE XIV. SCIENTIFIC TRUTH, RIGHTLY APPLIED, IS RELIGIOUS TRUTH, 476 THE RELIGION OF GEOLOGY. LECTURE I. REVELATION ILLUSTRATED BY SCIENCE. The leading object, which I propose in the course of lectures which I now commence, is to develop the relations between geology and religion. This cannot be done fully and fairly, however, without exhibiting also many of the religious bearings of several other sciences. I shall, therefore, feel justified in drawing illustrations and arguments from any department of human knowledge which may afford them. I place geology first and most conspicuous on the list, because I know of no other branch of physical science so prolific in its religious applications. In treating of this subject, I shall first exhibit the relations between science and revealed religion, and afterwards between science and natural religion; though in a few cases these two great branches cannot be kept entirely distinct. Geology is usually regarded as having only an unfavorable bearing upon revealed religion; and writers are generally satisfied if they can reconcile apparent discrepancies. But I regard this as an unfair representation; for if geology, or any other science, proves to us that we have not fairly understood the meaning of any passage of Scripture, it merely illustrates, but does not oppose, revelation. A fundamental principle of Protestant Christianity is, that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the only infallible standard of religious truth; and I desire to hold up this principle prominently at the outset, as one to which I cordially subscribe. The mass of evidence in favor of the divine inspiration of the Bible is too great to be set aside by any thing short of scientific demonstration. Were the Scriptures to teach that the whole is not equal to its parts, the mind could not, indeed, believe it. But if it taught a truth which was only contrary to the probable deductions of science, science, I say, must yield to Scripture; for it would be more reasonable to doubt the probabilities of a single science, than the various and most satisfactory evidence on which revelation rests. I do not believe that even the probabilities of any science are in collision with Scripture. But the supposition is made to show how strong are my convictions of the evidence and paramount authority of the Bible. But does it follow, from these positions, that science can throw no light upon the truths of Scripture? By no means; and it will be my leading object, in this lecture, to show how this may be done by science in general, and by geology in particular. In discussing this subject, we ought to bear in mind the object of science, and the object of revelation. And by the term science I refer mainly to physical science. Its grand aim is, by an induction from facts, to discover the laws by which the material universe is governed. Those laws do, indeed, lead the mind almost necessarily to their divine Author. But this is rather the incidental than the direct result of scientific investigations, and belongs rather to natural theology than to natural science. On the other hand, the exclusive object of revelation is of a moral character. It is a development of the divine character and the divine government; especially that part of it which discloses a plan for the reconciliation of a lost and wicked world to the favor of God by the death of his Son. Every other subject mentioned in Scripture is incidental, and would not have been noticed had it not some connection with the plan of salvation. The creation of the world and the Noachian deluge, for instance, are intimately related to the divine character and government, and therefore they are described; and the same is true of the various phenomena of nature which are touched upon in the Bible. If these positions be correct, it follows, that as we ought not to expect to find the doctrines of religion in treatises on science, so it is unreasonable to look for the principles of philosophy in the Bible. Nay, we ought not to expect to find the terms used by the Sacred writers employed in their strict scientific sense, but in their popular acceptation. Indeed, as the Scriptures were generally addressed to men in the earliest and most simple states of society, with very limited views of the extent of creation, we ought to suppose that, in all cases where no new fact is revealed, the language was adapted to the narrow ideas which then prevailed. When, for instance, the sacred writers speak of the rising and setting of the sun, we cannot suppose they used language with astronomical correctness, but only according to appearances. Hence we ought not to be very confident, that when they employ the term _earth_, they meant that spherical, vast globe which astronomy proves the earth to be, but rather that part of it which was inhabited, which was all the idea that entered into the mind of a Jew. God might, indeed, have revealed new scientific as well as religious truth. But there is no evidence that in this way he has anticipated a single modern discovery. This would have been turning aside from the much more important object he had in view, viz., to teach the world religious truth. Such being the case, the language employed to describe natural phenomena must have been adapted to the state of knowledge among the people to whom the Scriptures were addressed. Another inference from these premises is, that there may be an apparent contradiction between the statements of science and revelation. Revelation may describe phenomena according to apparent truth, as when it speaks of the rising and setting of the sun, and the immobility of the earth; but science describes the same according to the actual truth, as when it gives a real motion to the earth, and only an apparent motion to the heavens. Had the language of revelation been scientifically accurate, it would have defeated the object for which the Scriptures were given; for it must have anticipated scientific discovery, and therefore have been unintelligible to those ignorant of such discoveries. Or if these had been explained by inspiration, the Bible would have become a text-book in natural science, rather than a guide to eternal life. The final conclusion from these principles is, that since science and revelation treat of the same subjects only incidentally, we ought only to expect that the facts of science, rightly understood, should not contradict the statements of revelation, correctly interpreted. Apparent discrepancies there may be; and it would not be strange, if for a time they should seem to be real; either because science has not fully and accurately disclosed the facts, or the Bible is not correctly interpreted; but if both records are from God, there can be no real contradiction between them. But, on the other hand, we have no reason to expect any remarkable coincidences, because the general subject and object of the two records are so unlike. Should such coincidences occur, however, they will render it less probable that any apparent disagreement is real. If the positions taken in these preliminary remarks be correct, it will follow, that in judging of the agreement or disagreement between revelation and science, it is important, in the first place, that we rightly understand the Bible; and, in the second place, that we carefully ascertain what are the settled and demonstrated principles of science. An examination of these points will constitute the remainder of this lecture. The meaning of the Scriptures is to be determined in the same way as the meaning of any other book written in similar circumstances. Its inspiration puts no bar in the way of the most rigid application of the rules of criticism, nor renders it unnecessary to seek for light in whatever quarter it can be obtained. The rules of grammatical and rhetorical construction, the study of contemporary writers, a knowledge of the history, customs, opinions, and prejudices of the times, and other circumstances that need not be mentioned, become important means of attaining the true _usus loquendi_, or principle of interpretation. But I pass by all these on the present occasion, because no one doubts their importance in rightly understanding the Bible. I maintain that scientific discoveries furnish us with another means of its correct interpretation, where it describes natural phenomena. And in this position we shall not probably find an entire unanimity of opinion. Let us, therefore, proceed to examine its truth. It will not be denied that modern science has corrected the opinions of men in regard to very many natural phenomena. The same term that conveyed one idea to an ancient reader, or hearer, of the Bible, often conveys an opposite meaning to a modern ear. And yet that term may be very proper to use in modern times, if understood to express only apparent, and not real truth. The Jew understood it to mean the latter; and it would seem as if we might employ modern scientific discovery to enable us to decide in which sense the Bible did use the term. For if we admit the Jew to have been correct in his interpretation, then we bring revelation into direct collision with the demonstrations of physics. But facts are vastly more satisfactory in deciding this question than reasoning, and I shall now proceed to adduce some examples in which modern scientific discovery has thrown light upon the meaning of the Bible. For one or two examples I appeal to chemistry. In the book of Proverbs, (chap. 25, v. 20,) we find it said, that _as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to a heavy heart_. We should expect from this statement that when we put vinegar upon what we call nitre, it would produce some commotion analogous to the excitement of song-singing. But we should try the experiment in vain; for no effect whatever would be produced. Again, it is said by the prophet Jeremiah, (chap. 2, v. 22,) _Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord._ Here, too, we should expect that the use of the nitre would increase the purifying power of the soap; but the experiment would prove rather the reverse. The chemist, however, informs us that there is a substance, viz., the _carbonate of soda_, which, if substituted for the nitre, would effervesce with vinegar, and aid the purifying power of soap, and thus strikingly illustrate the thought both of Solomon and Jeremiah. And on recurring to the original, we find that [Hebrew] (nether, _nitrum_, _natrum_) does not necessarily mean the salt which we call nitre, but rather a fossil alkali, the _natron_ of the ancients, and the carbonate of soda of the moderns. It is probably the prevailing opinion among intelligent Christians at this time, and has been the opinion of many commentators, that when Peter describes the future destruction of the world, he means that its solid substance, and indeed that of the whole material universe, will be utterly consumed or annihilated by fire. This opinion rests upon the common belief that such is the effect of combustion. But chemistry informs us, that no case of combustion, how fiercely soever the fire may rage, annihilates the least particle of matter; and that fire only changes the form of substances. Nay, there is no reason whatever to suppose that one particle of matter has been annihilated since the world began. The chemist moreover asserts that all the solid parts of the globe have already undergone combustion, and that although heat may melt them, it cannot burn them. Nor is there any thing upon or within the earth capable of combustion, but vegetables, and animals, and a few gases. Has Peter, then, made a mistake because he did not understand modern chemistry? We have only to examine his language carefully, as it seems to me, in order to be satisfied that he means only, that whatsoever upon, or within, the earth, is combustible, will be burned up at the final conflagration; and that the whole globe, the _elements_, _will melt with fervent heat_. He nowhere asserts, or implies, that one particle of matter will be annihilated by that catastrophe. Thus science, instead of proving his statements to be erroneous, only enables us more correctly to understand them. Scarcely any truth seems more clearly taught in the Bible than the future resurrection of the body. Yet this doctrine has always been met by a most formidable objection. It is said that the body laid in the grave is ere long decomposed into its elements, which are scattered over the face of the earth, and enter into new combinations, even forming a part of other human bodies. Hence not even Omnipotence can raise from the grave the identical body laid there, because the particles may enter successively into a multitude of other human bodies. I am not aware that any successful reply has ever been given to this objection, until chemistry and natural history taught us the true nature of bodily identity; and until recently the objector has felt sure that he had triumphed. But these sciences teach us that the identity of the body consists, not in a sameness of particles, but in the same kinds of elementary matter, combined in the same proportion, and having the same form and structure. Hence it is not necessary that the resurrection body should contain a single particle of the matter laid in the grave, in order to be the same body; which it will be if it consist of the same kinds of matter combined in the same proportions, and has the same form and structure. For the particles of our bodies are often totally changed during our lives; yet no one imagines that the old man has not the same body as in infancy.[2] What but the principles of science could have thus vindicated a precious doctrine of revelation? In the description which Paul gives of the spiritual body, a naturalist,--and I fancy no one but a naturalist,--will discover its specific identity. By this I mean that it will possess peculiarities that distinguish it from every thing else, but which are so closely related to the characteristics of the natural body in this world, from which it was derived, that one acquainted with the latter would recognize the former. Hence the Christian's friends in another world may be recognized by him from their external characters, just as we identify the plants and animals of spring with those that seemed to perish in the preceding autumn. There is neither time nor room for the proof of this exegesis, which is founded chiefly upon the principles of natural history; but for their elucidation, I must refer to another place.[3] I take my next example from meteorology. It was the opinion of the ancients that the earth, at a certain height, was surrounded by a transparent hollow sphere of solid matter, which they called the firmament. When rain descended, they supposed it was through windows, or holes, made in this crystalline curtain suspended in mid heaven. To these notions the language of the Bible is frequently conformed. In the account of the creation, in Genesis, we have a description of the formation of this firmament, and how it divided the waters below it, viz., the ocean, lakes, and rivers, from the waters above it, viz., the clouds. Again, in the account of the deluge, the windows of heaven are said to have been opened. But it is hardly necessary to say, that meteorology has shown that no such solid firmament exists over our heads; that, in fact, nothing but one homogeneous, transparent atmosphere encloses the earth, in which the clouds float at different altitudes at different times. Are we, then, to suppose that the sacred writers meant to teach as certain truth, the fiction of a solid firmament; or that on this subject they conformed their language to the prevailing belief, because it was not their object to teach philosophy, meaning neither to assert nor to deny the existence of a solid firmament, but using language that was optically, although not physically, correct, and which, therefore, conformed to the general belief? It is doubtful whether any thing but scientific discovery could enable us to decide this question. But since it is certain that the solid firmament does not exist, we must admit that the Bible did not intend to teach its existence, or allow it to teach a falsehood; and since we know that it does often speak, in natural things, according to apparent, and not real truth, it is most reasonable to give such a construction to its language in the present instance. But the most decisive example I have to give on this subject is derived from astronomy. Until the time of Copernicus, no opinion respecting natural phenomena was thought more firmly established, than that the earth is fixed immovably in the centre of the universe, and that the heavenly bodies move diurnally around it. To sustain this view, the most decided language of Scripture could be quoted. God is there said to have _established the foundations of the earth, so that they could not be removed forever_; and the sacred writers expressly declare that the sun and other heavenly bodies _arise and set_, and nowhere allude to any proper motion in the earth. And those statements corresponded exactly to the testimony of the senses. Men felt the earth to be immovably firm under their feet, and when they looked up, they saw the heavenly bodies in motion. What bold impiety, therefore, did it seem, even to men of liberal and enlightened minds, for any one to rise up and assert that all this testimony of the Bible and of the senses was to be set aside! It is easy to conceive with what strong jealousy the friends of the Bible would look upon the new science which was thus arraying itself in bold defiance of inspiration, and how its votaries would be branded as infidels in disguise. We need not resort to Catholic intolerance to explain how it was, that the new doctrine of the earth's motion should be denounced as the most fatal heresy, as alike contrary to Scripture and sound philosophy, and that even the venerable Galileo should be forced to recant it upon his knees. What though the astronomer stood ready with his diagrams and formulas to demonstrate the motion of the earth; who would calmly and impartially examine the claims of a scientific discovery, which, by its very announcement, threw discredit upon the Bible and the senses, and contradicted the unanimous opinion of the wise and good,--of all mankind, indeed,--through all past centuries? Rather would the distinguished theologians of the day set their ingenuity at work to frame an argument in opposition to the dangerous neology, that should fall upon it like an avalanche, and grind it to powder. And to show you how firm and irresistible such an argument would seem, we need no longer tax the imagination; for Francis Turretin, a distinguished Protestant professor of theology, whose writings have even to the present day sustained no mean reputation, has left us an argument on the subject, compacted and arranged according to the nicest rules of logic, and which he supposed would stand unrefuted as long as the authority of the Bible should be regarded among men. He propounds the inquiry, "Do the sun and moon move in the heavens and revolve around the earth, while the earth remains at rest?" This he affirms, "in opposition to certain philosophers," and sustains his position by the following arguments: "First. The sun is said [in Scripture] to move in the heavens, and to rise and set. (Ps. 19, v. 5.) The sun is _as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race_. (Ps. 104, v. 19.) _The sun knoweth his going down._ (Eccles. 1, v. 5.) _The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down._ Secondly. The sun, by a miracle, stood still in the time of Joshua. (Joshua, ch. 10, v. 12, 13, 14,) and by a miracle it went back in the time of Hezekiah. (Isa. ch. 38, v. 8.) Thirdly. The earth is said to be _fixed immovably_. (Ps. 93, v. 1.) _The world also is established, that it cannot be moved._ (Ps. 104, v. 5.) _Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed forever._ (Ps. 119, v. 90, 91.) _Thou hast established the earth, and it abideth. They continue this day according to thine ordinances._ Fourthly. Neither could birds, which often fly off through an hour's circuit, be able to return to their nests; for in the mean time the earth would move four hundred and fifty of our miles. Fifthly. Whatever flies or is suspended in the air ought [by this theory] to move from west to east; but this is proved not to be true from birds, arrows shot forth, atoms made manifest in the sun, and down floating in the atmosphere." If it be replied to this reasoning that the Scripture, in natural things, speaks according to the common opinion, Turretin answers, "First, that the spirit of God best understands natural things; secondly, that, in giving instruction in religion, he meant these things should be used, not abused; thirdly, that he is not the author of any error; fourthly, neither is he to be corrected on this pretence by our blind reason." If it be replied that birds, the air, and all things are moved with the earth, he answers, "First, that this is a mere fiction, since air is a fluid body; and secondly, if so, by what force would birds be able to go from east to west."--_Compendium Theologicæ Didactico-Elencticæ_, (Amsterdam, 1695.) In the present state of knowledge we may smile at some of these arguments; but to men who had been taught to believe, as in a self-evident principle, that the earth was immovable and the heavenly bodies in motion, the most of them must have been entirely satisfactory; and especially must the Scriptures have seemed in _point blank_ opposition to the astronomical heresy. What, then, has so completely annihilated this argument, that now the merest schoolboy would be ashamed to advocate it? The clear demonstrations of science have done it. Not only has the motion of the earth been established, but it has been made equally obvious that this truth is in entire harmony with the language of Scripture; so that neither the infidel nor the Christian ever suspect, on this ground, any collision between the two records. So soon as the philologist perceived that there was no escape from the astronomical demonstration, he was led to reexamine his interpretation of Scripture, and found that the whole difficulty lay in his assuming that the sacred writers intended to teach scientific instead of popular truth. Only admitting that they spoke of astronomical phenomena, according to appearances and in conformity to common opinion, and their language became perfectly proper. It conveyed no error, and is in fact as well adapted now as ever to the common intercourse of life. Yet, in consequence of the scientific discovery, that language conveys quite a different meaning to our minds from what it did to those who supposed it to teach a scientific truth. Hence it strikingly illustrates the value of scientific discovery in enabling us rightly to understand the Bible. Is it necessary to quote any more examples to establish the principle that scientific discovery is one of the means which the philologist should employ in the interpretation of Scripture? And if the principle has been found of service in chemistry, meteorology, and astronomy, why should it be neglected in the case of geology? Why should not this science also, which has probably more important religious bearings than any other, be appealed to in illustration of the meaning of Scripture, when phenomena are described of which geology takes cognizance? I know that some will reply, that the principles of geology are yet too unsettled to be allowed to modify the interpretation of the Bible. This brings me to the second part of my subject, in which I am to inquire whether the principles of physical science, and of geology in particular, are so far settled that we can feel ourselves upon firm ground as we compare them with the principles of revelation. Before proceeding to this part of the subject, however, I must pause a moment, in order to point out another mode, in which science may contribute to elucidate Scripture. In the way just described, it may enable the interpreter more correctly to understand the language, but it may also give a fuller illustration to the sentiments of the Bible. Revelation, for instance, represents God as benevolent. Now, if we can derive from the records of geology striking and hitherto unthought-of manifestations of this attribute, we shall make the doctrine of Scripture more impressive; or, if we appeal to the numerous changes which the earth has undergone, and the vast periods which they have occupied, we find that the unsearchableness of divine wisdom, and the vastness of the divine plans, are brought more vividly before the mind, and task its power of comprehension more than illustrations from any other quarter. In short, the principles of religion that derive important elucidation from science, and especially from geology, are very numerous, as I hope to show in subsequent lectures. But I now return to the inquiry, whether the principles of science, and especially of geology, are so well settled that we can employ them in this manner. As to the more mathematical sciences, there will be no one to doubt but some of their principles must be admitted as infallible truth; for our minds are so constituted that they are incapable of resisting a fair presentation of mathematical demonstration. Now, there is scarcely any physical science that is not based more or less upon mathematical truth; and as to the facts in those sciences, some of them are so multiplied, and speak so uniformly the same language, that we doubt them no more than we do a mathematical demonstration. Other classes of facts are less decided; and in some cases they are so insulated as to be regarded as anomalies, to be set aside until better understood. The same grades of certainty exist in respect to inferences from the facts of science. Some theories are scarcely less doubtful than mathematics; others are as strong as probable reasoning can make them; and others are merely plausible. Hypotheses are still less to be trusted, though sometimes extremely probable. Now, most of the physical sciences embrace facts, theories, and hypotheses, that range widely along the scale of probability, from decided demonstration to ingenious conjecture. It is easy, however, in general, to distinguish the demonstrated and the permanent from the conjectural and the fanciful; and when we bring the principles of any science into comparison with religion, it is chiefly the former that should be considered, although scientific hypothesis may sometimes be made to illustrate religious hypothesis. But, passing by all other sciences, it is my desire to present before you, on this occasion, the claims of geology, as having fundamental principles so well settled that they claim attention from the interpreter of the Bible. I ought, however, to remark, that there exists a strange jealousy of this science even among intelligent men; a suspicion that its votaries have jumped at strange and dangerous conclusions through the influence of hypothesis, and that in fact the whole science is little else but hypothesis, and that there is almost no agreement even among its ablest cultivators. It is indeed a comparatively recent science, and its remarkable developments have succeeded one another so rapidly, as to leave men in doubt whether it would not prove a dazzling meteor, instead of a steady and permanent luminary. When the men who are now in the full maturity of judgment and reason, (and whose favorable opinion I am, therefore, anxious above that of all others to secure,) when these were young, geology did not constitute a branch of finished education; and amid the pressure of the cares and duties of middle life, how few find the leisure, to say nothing of the disposition, carefully to investigate a new and extensive science! Even though younger men should be found standing forth as the advocates of geology, yet how natural for those more advanced to impute this to the ardor and love of novelty, characteristic of youth! There is another difficulty, in relation to this subject, that embarrasses me. It is not even yet generally understood that geology is a branch of knowledge which requires long and careful study fully to understand; that a previous knowledge of many other sciences is indispensable in order to comprehend its reasonings; that its reasonings are in fact, for the most part, to be mastered only by long and patient consideration; and finally, and more especially, that they will appear inconclusive and feeble, unless a man has become somewhat familiar with specimens of rocks and fossils, and has examined strata as they lie in the earth. How very imperfect must be the most intelligent man's knowledge of botany, who had never examined any plants; or of chemistry, who had not seen any of the simple substances, nor experiments upon them in the laboratory; or of crystallography, whose eyes had perhaps never rested upon a crystal. No less important is it that he, who would reason correctly about rocks and their organic contents, should have studied rocks. But upon such an amount of knowledge it is no disparagement to say we have no right to presume in all, even of publicly educated men. Before such a state of preparation can exist, it is necessary that practical geology, at least, should be introduced into our schools of every grade, as it might be with great success. It ought to be mentioned, in this connection, that, within a few years past, geology has experienced several severe attacks of a peculiar character. Men of respectable ability, and decided friends of revelation, having got fully impressed with the belief that the views of geologists are hostile to the Bible, have set themselves to an examination of their writings, not so much with a view of understanding the subject, as of finding contradictions and untenable positions. The next step has been to write a book against geology, abounding, as we might expect from men of warm temperament, of such prejudices, and without a practical knowledge of geology, with striking misapprehensions of facts and opinions, with positive and dogmatic assertions, with severe personal insinuations, great ignorance of correct reasoning in geology, and the substitution of wild and extravagant hypotheses for geological theories. Hence English literature has been prolific of such works as "A Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaic Geologies," by Granville Penn; the "Geology of Scripture," by Fairholme; "Scriptural Geology," by Dr. Young; "Popular Geology subversive of Divine Revelation," by Rev. Henry Cole; "Strictures on Geology and Astronomy," by Rev. R. Wilson; "Scripture Evidences of Creation, and Geology, and Scripture Cosmogony," by anonymous authors; and many other similar productions that might be named. The warm zeal displayed, and doubtless felt, by these writers for the Bible; their familiar reference to eminent geological authors, as if they understood them; the skill in philology, which they frequently exhibit; and the want of a wide-spread and accurate knowledge of geology in the community,--have given to these works a far more extensive circulation than those works have had, which view geology as illustrating and not opposing revelation. Foremost among these is the lectures of the venerable and learned Dr. John Pye Smith, late principal of the Homerton Divinity College, London, "On the Relations between the Holy Scriptures and some Parts of Geological Science."[4] This work, the result of long and patient research, and emanating from a man of eminent piety as well as learning, affords a full refutation of all the works that have been named, and in the kindness and candor of its spirit exhibits a fine contrast to their intolerance and dogmatism. In the profound works of Dr. Harris, entitled "The Pre-Adamite Earth," and "Man Primeval," the connections of geology and revelation are briefly but ably treated, and also its connection with natural religion. Quite recently, a small and more popular work on this subject has been published by Rev. David King, LL. D., of Glasgow, well worthy of attention. "The Course of Creation," by Rev. John Anderson, D.D. of recent publication, displays much learning and candor. But the causes that have been mentioned have secured a much wider circulation for the class of works first named, than for the latter, among the religious community generally. The consequence is, that the public mind is possessed of many prejudices unfavorable to the religious bearings of geology, and unfavorable to an impartial examination of its claims. Under these circumstances, all that I can do is to state definitely what I apprehend to be the established principles of the science that have a bearing upon religious truth, and refer my hearers to standard works on the subject for the proof that they are true. If any will not take the trouble to examine the proofs, I trust they will have candor and impartiality enough not to deny my positions. The first important conclusion, to which every careful observer will come, is, that the rocks of all sorts, which compose the present crust of the globe, so far as it has been explored, at least to the depth of several miles, appear to have been the result of second causes; that is, they are now in a different state from that in which they were originally created. It is indeed a favorite idea with some, that all the rocks and their contents were created just as we now meet them, in a moment of time; that the supposed remains of animals and plants, which many of them contain, and which occur in all states, from an animal or plant little changed, to a complete conversion into stone, were never real animals and plants, but only resemblances; and that the marks of fusion and of the wearing of water, exhibited by the rocks, are not to be taken as evidences that they have undergone such processes, but only that it has pleased God to give them that appearance and that in fact it was as easy for God to create them just as they now are as in any other form. It is a presumption against such a supposition, that no men, who have carefully examined rocks and organic remains, are its advocates. Not that they doubt the power of God to produce such effects, but they deny the probability that He has exerted it in this manner; for throughout nature, wherever they have an opportunity to witness her operations, they find that when substances appear to have undergone changes, by means of secondary agencies, they have in fact undergone them; and, therefore, the whole analogy of nature goes to prove that the rocks have experienced great changes since their deposition. If rocks are an exception to the rest of nature,--that is, if they are the effect of miraculous agency,--there is no proof of it; and to admit it without proof is to destroy all grounds of analogical reasoning in natural operations; in other words, it is to remove the entire basis of reasoning in physical science. Every reasonable man, therefore, who has examined rocks, will admit that they have undergone important changes since their original formation. In the second place, the same general laws appear to have always prevailed on the globe, and to have controlled the changes which have taken place upon and within it. We come to no spot, in the history of the rocks, in which a system different from that which now prevails appears to have existed. Great peculiarities in the structure of animals and plants do indeed occur, as well as changes on a scale of magnitude unknown at present; but this was only a wise adaptation to peculiar circumstances, and not an infringement of the general laws. In the third place, the geological changes which the earth has undergone, and is now undergoing, appear to have been the result of the same agencies, viz., heat and water. Fourthly. It is demonstrated that the present continents of the globe, with perhaps the exception of some of their highest mountains, have for a long period constituted the bottom of the ocean, and have been subsequently either elevated into their present position, or the waters have been drained off from their surface. This is probably the most important principle in geology; and though regarded with much scepticism by many, it is as satisfactorily proved as any principle of physical science not resting on mathematical demonstration. Fifthly. The internal parts of the earth are found to possess a very high temperature; nor can it be doubted that at least oceans of melted matter exist beneath the crust, and perhaps even all the deep-seated interior is in a state of fusion. Sixthly. The fossiliferous rocks, or such as contain animals and plants, are not less than six or seven miles in perpendicular thickness, and are composed of hundreds of alternating layers of different kinds, all of which appear to have been deposited, just as rocks are now forming, at the bottom of lakes and seas; and hence their deposition must have occupied an immense period of time. Even if we admit that this deposition went on in particular places much faster than at present, a variety of facts forbids the supposition that this was the general mode of their formation. Seventhly. The remains of animals and plants found in the earth are not mingled confusedly together, but are found arranged, for the most part, in as much order as the drawers of a well-regulated cabinet. In general, they appear to have lived and died on or near the spots where they are now found; and as countless millions of these remains are often found piled together, so as to form almost entire mountains, the periods requisite for their formation must have been immensely long, as was taught in the preceding proposition. Eighthly. Still further confirmation of the same important principle is found in the well-established fact, that there have been upon the globe, previous to the existing races, not less than five distinct periods of organized existence; that is, five great groups of animals and plants, so completely independent that no species whatever is found in more than one of them, have lived and successively passed away before the creation of the races that now occupy the surface. Other standard writers make the number of these periods of existence as many as twelve. Comparative anatomy testifies that so unlike in structure were these different groups, that they could not have coëxisted in the same climate and other external circumstances. Ninthly. In the earliest times in which animals and plants lived, the climate over the whole globe appears to have been as warm as, or even warmer than, it is now between the tropics. And the slow change from warmer to colder appears to have been the chief cause of the successive destruction of the different races; and new ones were created, better adapted to the altered condition of the globe; and yet each group seems to have occupied the globe through a period of great length, so that we have here another evidence of the vast cycles of duration that must have rolled away even since the earth became a habitable globe. Tenthly. There is no small reason to suppose that the globe underwent numerous changes previous to the time when animals were placed upon it; that, in fact, the time was when the whole matter of the earth was in a melted state, and not improbably also even in a gaseous state. These points, indeed, are not as well established as the others that have been mentioned; but, if admitted, they give to the globe an incalculable antiquity. Eleventhly. It appears that the present condition of the earth's crust and surface was of comparatively recent commencement; otherwise the steep flanks of mountains would have ceased to crumble down, and wide oceans would have been filled with alluvial deposits. Twelfthly. Among the thirty thousand species of animals and plants found in the rocks,[5] very few living species have been detected; and even these few occur in the most recent rocks, while in the secondary group, not less than six miles thick, not a single species now on the globe has been discovered. Hence the present races did not exist till after those in the secondary rocks had died. No human remains have been found below those alluvial deposits which are now forming by rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Hence geology infers that man was one of the latest animals that was placed on the globe. Thirteenthly. The surface of the earth has undergone an enormous amount of erosion by the action of the ocean, the rivers, and the atmosphere. The ocean has worn away the solid rock, in some parts of the world, not less than ten thousand feet in depth, and rivers have cut channels through the hardest strata, hundreds of feet deep and several miles long; both of which effects demand periods inconceivably long. Fourteenthly. At a comparatively recent date, northern and southern regions have been swept over and worn down by the joint action of ice and water, the force in general having been directed towards the equator. This is called the _drift_ period. Fifteenthly. Since the drift period, the ocean has stood some thousands of feet above its present level in many countries. Sixteenthly. There is evidence, in regard to some parts of the world, that the continents are now experiencing slow vertical movements--some places sinking, and others rising. And hence a presumption is derived that, in early times, such changes may have been often repeated, and on a great scale. Seventeenthly. Every successive change of importance on the earth's surface appears to have been an improvement of its condition, adapting it to beings of a higher organization, and to man at last, the most perfect of all. Finally. The present races of animals and plants on the globe are for the most part disposed in groups, occupying particular districts, beyond whose limits the species peculiar to those provinces usually droop and die. The same is true, to some extent, as to the animals and plants found in the rocks; though the much greater uniformity of climate, that prevailed in early times, permitted organized beings to take a much wider range than at present; so that the zoölogical and botanical districts were then probably much wider. But the general conclusion, in respect to living and extinct animals, is, that there must have been several centres of creation, from which they emigrated as far as their natures would allow them to range. It would be easy to state more principles of geology of considerable importance; but I have now named the principal ones that bear upon the subject of religion. A brief statement of the leading truths of theology, whether natural or revealed, which these principles affect, and on which they cast light, will give an idea of the subjects which I propose to discuss in these lectures. The first point relates to the age of the world. For while it has been the usual interpretation of the Mosaic account, that the world was brought into existence nearly at the same time with man and the other existing animals, geology throws back its creation to a period indefinitely but immeasurably remote. The question is not whether man has existed on the globe longer than the common interpretation of Genesis requires,--for here geology and the Bible speak the same language,--but whether the globe itself did not exist long before his creation; that is, long before the six days' work, so definitely described in the Mosaic account? In other words, is not this a case in which the discoveries of science enable us more accurately to understand the Scriptures? The introduction of death into the world, and the specific character of that death described in Scripture as the consequence of sin, are the next points where geology touches the subject of religion. Here, too, the general interpretation of Scripture is at variance with the facts of geology, which distinctly testify to the occurrence of death among animals long before the existence of man. Shall geology here, also, be permitted to modify our exposition of the Bible? The subject of deluges, and especially that of Noah, will next claim our attention. For though it is now generally agreed that geology cannot detect traces of such a deluge as the Scriptures describe, yet upon some other bearings of that subject it does cast light; and so remarkable is the history of opinions concerning the Noachian deluge, that it could not on that account alone be properly passed in silence. It is well known that the philosophy of antiquity, almost without exception, regarded matter as eternal; and in modern times, metaphysical theology has done its utmost to refute the supposed dangerous dogma. Geology affords us some new views of the subject; and although it does not directly refute the doctrine, it brings before us facts of such a nature as to show, that, so far as religion is concerned, such a refutation is of little importance. This will furnish another theme of discussion. It may be thought extravagant, but I hazard the assertion, that no science is so prolific of direct testimony to the benevolence of the Deity as geology; and some of its facts bear strongly upon the objections to this doctrine. So important a subject will, therefore, occupy at least one or two lectures. In all ages, philosophers have, in one form or another, endeavored to explain the origin and the phenomena of creation by a power inherent in nature, independent of a personal Deity, usually denominated _natural law_. And in modern times this hypothesis has assumed a popular form and a plausible dress. Not less than one lecture is demanded for its examination, especially as its advocates appeal with special confidence to geology for its support. In existing nature, no one fact stands out more prominently than unity of design; and it is an interesting inquiry, whether the same general system prevailed through the vast periods of geological history as that which now adorns our globe. This question I shall endeavor to answer in the affirmative, by appealing to a multitude of facts. Another question of deep interest in theology is, whether the Deity exercises over the world any special providence; whether he ever interferes with the usual order of things by introducing change; or whether he has committed nature to the control of unalterable laws, without any direct efficiency. Light is thrown on these points by the researches of geology, if I mistake not; and I shall not fail to attempt its development. This science also discloses to us many new views of the vast plans of the Deity, and thus enlarges our conceptions of his wisdom and knowledge. In this field we must allow ourselves to wander in search of the golden fruit. In the course of the discussion, we shall direct our attention to the new heavens and the new earth described in the Bible, and inquire whether geology does not cast a glimpse of light upon that difficult subject. In approaching the close of our subject, we shall introduce a few lectures having a wider range, and deriving less elucidation from geology than from other sciences. One is a consideration of the physical effects of human actions upon the universe. And in conclusion of the whole subject, we shall endeavor to show that the bearings of all science, when rightly understood, are eminently favorable to religion, both in this world and the next. With a few miscellaneous inferences from the principles advanced, I shall close this lecture. In the first place, we see that the points of connection between geology and religion are numerous and important. A few years since, geology, instead of being appealed to for the illustration of religious truth, was regarded with great jealousy, as a repository of views favorable to infidelity, and even to atheism. But if the summary which I have exhibited of its religious relations be correct, from what other science can we obtain so many illustrations of natural and revealed religion? Distinguished Christian writers are beginning to gather fruit in this new field, and the clusters already presented us by such men as Dr. Chalmers, Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. Buckland, Dr. Harris, and Dr. King, are an earnest of an abundant harvest. I hazard the prediction that the time is not far distant when it will be said of this, as of another noble science, "The undevout _geologist_ is mad." Secondly. I would bespeak the candid attention of those sceptical minds, that are ever ready to imagine discrepancies between science and religion, to the views which I am about to present. The number of such is indeed comparatively small; yet there are still some prepared to seize upon every new scientific fact, before it is fully developed, that can be made to assume the appearance of opposition to religion. It is strange that they should not ere this time despair of making any serious impression upon the citadel of Christianity. For of all the numerous assaults of this kind that have been made, not one has destroyed even an outpost of religion. Just so soon as the subject was fully understood, every one of them has been abandoned; and even the most violent unbeliever never thinks, at the present day, of arraying them against the Bible. One needs no prophetic inspiration to be confident that every geological objection to Christianity, which perhaps now and then an unbeliever of limited knowledge still employs, will pass into the same limbo of forgetfulness. Finally. I would throw out a caution to those friends of religion who are very fearful that the discoveries of science will prove injurious to Christianity. Why should the enlightened Christian, who has a correct idea of the firm foundation on which the Bible rests, fear that any disclosures of the arcana of nature should shake its authority or weaken its influence? Is not the God of revelation the God of nature also? and must not his varied works tend to sustain and elucidate, instead of weakening and darkening, one another? Has Christianity suffered because the Copernican system of astronomy has proved true, or because chemistry has demonstrated that the earth is already for the most part oxidized, and therefore cannot literally be burned hereafter? Just as much as gold suffers by passing through the furnace. Yet how many fears agitated the hearts of pious men when these scientific truths were first announced! The very men who felt so strong a conviction of the truth of the Bible, that they were ready to go to the stake in its defence, have trembled and uttered loud notes of warning when the votaries of science have brought out some new fact, that seemed perhaps at first, or when partially understood, to contravene some statement of revelation. The effect has been to make sceptical minds look with suspicion, and sometimes with contempt, upon Christianity itself. It has built up a wall of separation between science and religion, which is yet hardly broken down. For notwithstanding the instructive history of the past on this subject, although every supposed discrepancy between philosophy and religion has vanished as soon as both were thoroughly understood, yet so soon as geology began to develop her marvellous truths, the cry of danger to religion became again the watchword, and the precursor of a more extended and severe attack upon that science than any other has ever experienced, and the prelude, I am sorry to say, of severe personal charges of infidelity against many an honest friend of religion. In contrast to the contracted views and groundless fears that have been described, it is refreshing to meet with such sentiments as the following, from men eminent for learning, and some of them veterans in theological science. With these I close this lecture. "Those rocks which stand forth in the order of their formation," says Dr. Chalmers, "and are each imprinted with their own peculiar fossil remains, have been termed the archives of nature, where she hath recorded the changes that have taken place in the history of the globe. They are made to serve the purpose of scrolls or inscriptions, on which we might read of those great steps and successions by which the earth has been brought into its present state; and should these archives of nature be but truly deciphered, we are not afraid of their being openly confronted with the archives of revelation. It is unmanly to blink the approach of light, from whatever quarter of observation it may fall upon us; and those are not the best friends of Christianity, who feel either dislike or alarm when the torch of science, or the torch of history, is held up to the Bible. For ourselves, we are not afraid when the eye of an intrepid, if it be only a sound philosophy, scrutinizes, however jealously, all its pages. We have no dread of any apprehended conflict between the doctrines of Scripture and the discoveries of science, persuaded, as we are, that whatever story the geologists of our day shall find engraven on the volume of nature, it will only accredit that story which is graven on the volume of revelation."--_Chalmers's Works_, vol. ii. p. 227. "For our own part," says Rev. Henry Melville, "we have no fears that any discoveries of science will really militate against the disclosures of Scripture. We remember how, in darker days, ecclesiastics set themselves against philosophers who were investigating the motions of the heavenly bodies, apprehensive that the new theories were at variance with the Bible, and therefore resolved to denounce them as heresies, and stop their spread by persecution. But truth triumphed; bigotry and ignorance could not long prevail to the hiding from the world the harmonious walkings of stars and planets; and ever since, the philosophy which laid open the wonders of the universe hath proved herself the handmaid of revelation, which divulged secrets far beyond her gaze. And thus, we are persuaded, shall it always be; science may scale new heights and explore new depths, but she shall bring back nothing from her daring and successful excursions which will not, when rightly understood, yield a fresh tribute of testimony to the Bible. Infidelity may watch her progress with eagerness, exulting in the thought that she is furnishing facts with which the Christian system may be strongly assailed; but the champions of revelation may confidently attend her in every march, assured that she will find nothing which contradicts, if it do not actually confirm, the word which they know to be divine."--_Sermons, 2d Am. edit._ vol. ii. p. 298. "Shall it then any longer be said," says Dr. Buckland, "that a science, which unfolds such abundant evidence of the being and attributes of God, can reasonably be viewed in any other light than as the efficient auxiliary and handmaid of religion? Some few there still may be, whom timidity, or prejudice, or want of opportunity, allow not to examine its evidence; who are alarmed by the novelty, or surprised by the extent and magnitude, of the views which geology forces on their attention, and who would rather have kept closed the volume of witness, which has been sealed up for ages, beneath the surface of the earth, than impose upon the student in natural theology the duty of studying its contents;--a duty in which, for lack of experience, they may anticipate a hazardous or a laborious task, but which, by those engaged in it, is found to afford a rational, and righteous, and delightful exercise of their highest faculties, in multiplying the evidences of the existence, and attributes, and providence of God." "It follows then," says Dr. J. Pye Smith, "as a universal truth, that the Bible, faithfully interpreted, erects no bar against the most free and extensive investigation, the most comprehensive and searching induction. Let but the investigation be sufficient, and the induction honest; let observation take its farthest flight; let experiment penetrate into all the recesses of nature; let the veil of ages be lifted up from all that has been hitherto unknown,--if such a course were possible, religion need not fear; Christianity is secure, and true science will always pay homage to the divine Creator and Sovereign, _of whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things; and unto whom be glory forever_."--_Lectures on Scripture and Geology, 4th London edit._ p. 223. LECTURE II. THE EPOCH OF THE EARTH'S CREATION UNREVEALED. The Mosaic account of the creation of the universe has always been celebrated for its sublime simplicity. Though the subject be one of unparalleled grandeur, the writer makes not the slightest effort at rhetorical embellishment, but employs language which a mere child cannot misapprehend. How different, in this respect, is this inspired record from all uninspired efforts that have been made to describe the origin of the world! But notwithstanding the great simplicity and clearness of this description, its precise meaning has occasioned as much discussion as almost any passage of Scripture. This results chiefly from its great brevity. Men with different views of inspiration, cosmogony, and philosophy, engage in its examination, not so much to ascertain its meaning, as to find out whether it teaches their favorite speculative views; and because it says nothing about them, they attempt to fasten those views upon it, and thus make it teach a great deal more than the mind of the Spirit. My simple object, at this time, is to ascertain whether the Bible fixes the time when the universe was created out of nothing. The prevalent opinion, until recently, has been, that we are there taught that the world began to exist on the first of the six days of creation, or about six thousand years ago. Geologists, however, with one voice, declare that their science indicates the earth to have been of far higher antiquity. The question becomes, therefore, of deep interest, whether the common interpretation of the Mosaic record is correct. Let us, in the first place, examine carefully the terms of that record; without reference to any of the conclusions of science. A preliminary inquiry, however, will here demand attention, to which I have already given some thoughts in the first lecture. The inquiry relates to the mode in which the sacred writers describe natural phenomena. Do they adapt their descriptions to the views and feelings of philosophers, or even the common people, in the nineteenth century, or to the state of knowledge and the prevalent opinions of a people but slightly removed from barbarism? Do they write as if they meant to correct the notions of men on natural subjects, when they knew them to be wrong; or as if they did not mean to decide whether the popular opinion were true or false? These points have been examined with great skill and candor by a venerable clergyman of England, whose praise is in all the American churches, and whose skill in sacred philology, and profound acquaintance with the Bible, none will question, any more than they will his deep-toned piety and enlarged and liberal views of men and things. I refer to Dr. J. Pye Smith, lately at the head of the Homerton Divinity College, near London.[6] He first examines the style in which the Old Testament describes the character and operations of Jehovah, and shows that it is done "in language borrowed from the bodily and mental constitution of man, and from those opinions concerning the works of God in the natural world, which were generally received by the people to whom the blessings of revelation were granted." Constant reference is made to material images, and to human feelings and conduct, as if the people addressed were almost incapable of spiritual and abstract ideas. This, of course, gives a notion of God infinitely beneath the glories of his character; but to uncultivated minds it was the only representation of his character that would give them any idea of it. Nay, even in this enlightened age, such descriptions are far more impressive than any other upon the mass of mankind; while those, whose minds are more enlightened, find no difficulty in inculcating the pure truth respecting God from these comparatively gross descriptions. Now, if, upon a point of such vast importance as the divine character, revelation, thus condescends to human weakness and ignorance, much more might we expect it, in regard to the less important subject of natural phenomena. We find, accordingly, that they are described as they appear to the common eye, and not in their real nature; or, in the language of Rosenmuller, the Scriptures speak "according to optical, and not physical truth." They make no effort to correct even the grossest errors, on these subjects, that then prevailed. The earth, as we have seen on a former occasion, is described as immovable, in the centre of the universe, and the heavenly bodies as revolving round it diurnally. The firmament over us is represented as a solid, extended substance, sustaining an ocean above it, with openings, or windows, through which the waters may descend. In respect to the human system, the Scriptures refer intellectual operations to the reins, or the region of the kidneys, and pain to the bones. In short, the descriptions of natural things are adapted to the very erroneous notions which prevailed in the earliest ages of society and among the common people. But it is as easy to interpret such descriptions in conformity to the present state of physical science, as it is to divest the scriptural representations of the Deity of their material dress, and make them conform to the spiritual views that now prevail. No one regards it as any objection to the Old Testament, that it gives a description of the divine character so much less spiritual than the views adopted by the theologians of the nineteenth century; why then should they regard it as derogatory to inspiration to adopt the same method as to natural objects? These considerations will afford us some assistance in rightly interpreting the description of the creation, in the first chapter of Genesis, to which we will now turn our attention. _In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness, and the light he called day, and the darkness he called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day._ The first question that arises, on reading this passage, is, whether the creation here described was a creation out of nothing, or out of preëxisting materials. The latter opinion has been maintained by some able, and generally judicious commentators and theologians, such as Doederlin and Dathe in Germany, Milton in England, and Bush and Schmucker in this country. They do not deny that the Bible, in other places, teaches distinctly the creation of the universe out of nothing. But they contend that the word translated _to create_, in the first verse of Genesis, teaches only a renovation, or remodelling, of the universe from matter already in existence. That there is a degree of ambiguity in all languages, in the words that signify to _create_, to _make_, to _form_, and the like, cannot be doubted; that is, these words may be properly used to describe the production of a substance out of matter already in existence, as well as out of nothing; and, therefore, we must resort to the context, or the nature of the subject, to ascertain in which of those senses such words are used. The same word, for instance, (_bawraw_,) that is used in the first verse of Genesis, to describe the creation of the universe, is employed in the 27th verse of the same chapter, to describe the formation of man out of the dust of the earth. There was, however, no peculiar ambiguity in the use of the Hebrew words _bawraw_ and _awsaw_, which correspond to our words _create_ and _make_; and, therefore, it is not necessary to be an adept in Hebrew literature to judge of the question under consideration. We have only to determine whether the translation of the Mosaic account of the creation most reasonably teaches a production of the matter of the universe from nothing, or only its renovation, and we have decided what is taught in the original. Now, there can hardly be a doubt but Moses intended to teach, in this passage, that the universe owed its origin to Jehovah, and not to the idols of the heathen; and since all acknowledge that other parts of Scripture teach, that, when the world was made, it was produced out of nothing, why should we not conclude that the same truth is taught in this passage? The language certainly will bear that meaning; indeed, it is almost as strong as language can be to express such a meaning; and does not the passage look like a distinct avowal of this great truth, at the very commencement of the inspired record, in order to refute the opinion, so prevalent in early times, that the world is eternal? The next inquiry concerning the passage relates to the phrase _the heavens and the earth_. Does it comprehend the universe? So it must have been understood by the Jews; for their language could not furnish a more comprehensive phrase to designate the universe. True, these words, like those already considered, are used sometimes in a limited sense. But in this place their broadest signification is in perfect accordance with the scope of the passage and with the whole tenor of the Scripture. We may, therefore, conclude with much certainty, that God intended in this place to declare the great truth, that there was a time in past eternity when the whole material universe came into existence at his irresistible fiat:--a truth eminently proper to stand at the head of a divine revelation. But when did this stupendous event occur? Does the phrase _in the beginning_ show us when? Surely not; for no language can be more indefinite as to time. Whenever it is used in the Bible, it merely designates the commencement of the series of events, or the periods of time, that are described. _In the beginning was the word_; that is, at the commencement of things the word was in existence; consequently was from eternity. But in Genesis the act of creation is represented by this phrase simply as the commencement of the material universe, at a certain point of time in past eternity, which is not chronologically fixed. The first verse merely informs us, that the first act of the Deity in relation to the universe was the creation of the heavens and the earth out of nothing. It is contended, however, that the first verse is so connected with the six days' work of creation, related in the subsequent verse, that we must understand the phrase _in the beginning_ as the commencement of the first day. This is the main point to be examined in relation to the passage, and therefore deserves a careful consideration. If the first verse must be understood as a summary account of the six days' work which follows in detail, then _the beginning_ was the commencement of the first day, and of course only about six thousand years ago. But if it may be understood as an announcement of the act of creation at some indefinite point in past duration, then a period may have intervened between that first creative act and the subsequent six days' work. I contend that the passage admits of either interpretation, without any violence to the language or the narration. The first of these interpretations is the one usually received, and, therefore, it will be hardly necessary to attempt to show that it is admissible. The second has had fewer advocates, and will, therefore, need to be examined. The particle _and_, which is used in our translation of this passage to connect the successive sentences, furnishes an argument to the English reader against this second mode of interpretation, which has far less force with one acquainted with the original Hebrew. The particle thus translated is the general connecting particle of the Hebrew language, and "may be copulative, or disjunctive, or adversative; or it may express a mere annexation to a former topic of discourse,--the connection being only that of the subject matter, or the continuation of the composition. This continuative use forms one of the most marked peculiarities of the Hebrew idiom, and it comprehends every variety of mode in which one train of sentiment may be appended to another."--J. Pye Smith, _Scrip. and Geol._ p. 195, 4th edit. In the English Bible this particle is usually rendered by the copulative conjunction _and_; in the Septuagint, and in Josephus, however, it sometimes has the sense of _but_. And some able commentators are of opinion that it admits of a similar translation in the passage under consideration. The elder Rosenmuller says we might read it thus: "_In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Afterwards the earth was desolate_," &c. Or the particle _afterwards_ may be placed at the beginning of any of the succeeding verses. Thus, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was desolate, and darkness was upon the face of the waters. _Afterwards_ the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Dr. Dathe, who has been styled, by good authority, (Dr. Smith,) "a cautious and judicious critic," renders the first two verses in this manner: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; but afterwards the earth became waste and desolate." If such translations as these be admissible, the passage not only allows, but expressly teaches, that a period intervened between the first act of creation and the six days' work. And if such an interval be allowed, it is all that geology requires to reconcile its facts to revelation. For during that time, all the changes of mineral constitution and organic life, which that science teaches to have taken place on the globe, previous to the existence of man, may have occurred. It is a presumption in favor of such an interpretation that the second verse describes the state of the globe after its creation and before the creation of light. For if there were no interval between the fiat that called matter into existence, and that which said, _Let there be light_, why should such a description of the earth's waste and desolate condition be given? But if there had been such an intervening period, it is perfectly natural that such a description should precede the history of successive creative acts, by which the world was adorned with light and beauty, and filled with inhabitants. But, after all, would such an interpretation have ever been thought of, had not the discoveries of geology seemed to demand it? This can be answered by inquiring whether any of the writers on the Bible, who lived before geology existed, or had laid claims for a longer period previous to man's creation, whether any of these adopted such an interpretation. We have abundant evidence that they did. Many of the early fathers of the church were very explicit on this subject. Augustin, Theodoret, and others, supposed that the first verse of Genesis describes the creation of matter distinct from, and prior to, the work of six days. Justin Martyr and Gregory Nazianzen believed in an indefinite period between the creation of matter and the subsequent arrangement of all things. Still more explicit are Basil, Cæsarius, and Origen. It would be easy to quote similar opinions from more modern writers, who lived previous to the developments of geology. But I will give a paragraph from Bishop Patrick only, who wrote one hundred and fifty years ago. "How long," says he, "all things continued in mere confusion after the chaos was created, before light was extracted from it, we are not told. It might have been, for any thing that is here revealed, a great while; and all that time the mighty Spirit was making such motions in it, as prepared, disposed, and ripened every part of it for such productions as were to appear successively in such spaces of time as are here afterwards mentioned by Moses, who informs us, that after things were digested and made ready (by long fermentation perhaps) to be wrought into form, God produced every day, for six days together, some creature or other, till all was finished, of which light was the very first."--_Commentary, in loco._ Such evidence as this is very satisfactory. For at the present day one cannot but fear that the discoveries of geology may too much influence him insensibly to put a meaning upon Scripture which would never have been thought of, if not suggested by those discoveries, and which the language cannot bear. But those fathers of the church cannot be supposed under the influence of any such bias; and, therefore, we may suppose the passage in itself to admit of the existence of a long period between the beginning and the first demiurgic day. Against these views philologists have urged several objections not to be despised. One is, that light did not exist till the first day, and the sun and other luminaries not till the fourth day; whereas the animals and plants dug from the rocks could not have existed without light. They could not, therefore, have lived in the supposed long period previous to the six days. If it be indeed true, that light was not called into existence till the first day, nor the sun till the fourth, this objection is probably insuperable. But it would be easy to cite the opinions of many distinguished and most judicious expounders of the Bible, showing that the words of the Hebrew original do not signify a literal creation of the sun, moon, and stars, on the fourth day, but only constituting or appointing them, at that time, to be luminaries, and to furnish standards for the division of time and other purposes. The word used is not the same as that employed in the first verse to describe the creation of the world; and the passage, rightly understood, implies the previous existence of the heavenly bodies. "The words [Hebrew] are not to be separated from the rest," says Rosenmuller, "or to be rendered _fiant luminaria_, let there be light; i. e., _let light be made_; but rather, _let lights be_; that is, serve, in the expanse of heaven, for distinguishing between day and night; and let them be, or serve, for signs," &c. "The historian speaks (v. 16, end) of the determination of the stars to certain uses, which they were to render to the earth, and not of their first formation." In like manner we may suppose that the production of light was only rendering it visible to the earth, over which darkness hitherto brooded; not because no light was in existence, but because it did not shine upon the earth. Another objection to this interpretation is, that the fourth commandment of the decalogue expressly declares, that _in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is_, &c., and thus cuts off the idea of a long period intervening between the _beginning_ and the six days. I acknowledge that this argument carries upon the face of it a good deal of strength; but there are some considerations that seem to me to show it to be not entirely demonstrative. In the first place, it is a correct principle of interpreting language, that when a writer describes an event in more than one place, the briefer statement is to be explained by the more extended one. Thus, in the second chapter of Genesis, we have this brief account of the creation: _These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens._ Now, if this were the only description of the work of creation on record, the inference would be very fair that it was all completed in a single day. Yet when we turn to the first chapter, we find the work prolonged through six days. The two statements are not contradictory; but the briefer one would not be understood without the more detailed. In like manner, if we should find it distinctly stated in the particular account of the creation of the universe, in the first chapter of Genesis, that a long period actually intervened between the beginning and the six days, who would suppose the statement a contradiction to the fourth commandment? It is true, we do not find such a fact distinctly announced in the Mosaic account of the creation. But suppose we first learn that it did exist from geology; why should we not be as ready to admit it as if stated in Genesis, provided it does not contradict any thing therein recorded? For illustration: let us refer to the account given in Exodus of the parents of Moses and their family. _And there went a man of the name of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi. And the woman conceived and bare a son,_ (that is, Moses,) _and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months._ (Ex. ii. 12.) Suppose, now, that no other account existed in the Bible of the family of this Levite; we could not surely have suspected that Moses had an elder brother and sister. But imagine the Bible silent on the subject, and that the fact was first brought to light in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics in the nineteenth century; who could hesitate to admit its truth because omitted in the Pentateuch? or who would regard it in opposition to the sacred record? With equal propriety may we admit, on proper geological evidence, the intercalation of a long period between the beginning and the six days, if satisfied that it does not contradict the Mosaic account. Hence all that is necessary, in this connection, for me to show, is, that such contradictions would not be made out by such a discovery. Once more: if this long period had existed, we should hardly have expected an allusion to it in the fourth commandment, if the views we have taken are correct as to the manner in which the Old Testament treats of natural events. It is literally true, that all which the Jews understood by the heavens and the earth, was made, (_awsaw_,) that is, renovated, arranged, and constituted,--for so the word often means,--in six literal days. Had the sacred writer alluded to the earth while without form and void, or to the heavenly bodies as any thing more than shining points in the firmament, placed there on the fourth day, he could not have been understood by the Hebrews, without going into a detailed description, and thus violating what seems to have been settled principles in writing the Bible, viz., not to treat of natural phenomena with scientific accuracy, nor to anticipate any scientific discovery. I wish it to be distinctly understood, that I am endeavoring to show, only, that the language of Scripture will admit of an indefinite interval between the first creation of matter and the six demiurgic days. I am willing to admit, at least for the sake of argument, that the common interpretation, which makes matter only six thousand years old, is the most natural. But I contend that no violence is done to the language by admitting the other interpretation. And in further proof of this position, I appeal to the testimony of distinguished modern theologians and philologists, as I have to several of the ancients. This point cannot, indeed, be settled by the authority of names. But I cannot believe that any will suppose such men as I shall mention were led to adopt this view simply because geologists asked for it, while their judgments told them that the language of the Bible would not bear such a meaning. When such men, therefore, avow their acquiescence in such an interpretation, it cannot but strengthen our confidence in its correctness. "The interval," says Bishop Horsley, "between the production of the matter of the chaos and the formation of light, is undescribed and unknown." "Were we to concede to naturalists," says Baumgarten Crusius, "all the reasonings which they advance in favor of the earth's early existence, the conclusion would only be, that the earth itself has existed much more than six thousand years, and that it had then already suffered many great and important revolutions. But if this were so, would the relation of Moses thereby become false and untenable? I cannot think so." "By the phrase _in the beginning_," says Doederlin, "the time is declared when something began to be. But when God produced this remarkable work, Moses does not precisely define." "We do not know," says Sharon Turner, "and we have no means of knowing, at what point of the ever-flowing eternity of that which is alone eternal,--the divine subsistence,--the creation of our earth, or any part of the universe, began." "All that we can learn explicitly from revelation is, that nearly six thousand years have passed since our first parents began to be." "The words in the text," says Dr. Wiseman, "do not merely express a momentary pause between the first fiat of creation and the production of light; for the participial form of the verb, whereby the Spirit of God, the creative energy, is represented as brooding over the abyss, and communicating to it the productive virtue, naturally expresses a continuous, and not a passing action." "I am strongly inclined to believe," says Bishop Gleig, "that the matter of the corporeal universe was all created at once; though different portions of it may have been reduced to form at very different periods. When the universe was created, or how long the solar system remained in a chaotic state, are vain inquiries, to which no answer can be given." "The detailed history of creation in the first chapter of Genesis," says Dr. Chalmers, "begins at the middle of the second verse; and what precedes might be understood as an introductory sentence, by which we are most appositely told, both that God created all things at the first, and that afterwards--by what interval of time it is not specified--the earth lapsed into a chaos, from the darkness and disorder of which the present system or economy of things was made to arise. Between the initial act and the details of Genesis, the world, for aught we know, might have been the theatre of many revolutions, the traces of which geology may still investigate," &c. "A philological survey of the initial sections of the Bible, (Gen. i. 1 to ii. 3,)" says Dr. Pye Smith, "brings out the result;" 1. "That the first sentence is a simple, independent, all-comprehending axiom, to this effect,--that _matter_, elementary or combined, aggregated only or organized, and _dependent, sentient, and intellectual beings_ have not existed from eternity, either in self-continuity or succession, but had a beginning; that their beginning took place by the all-powerful will of one Being; the self-existent, independent and infinite in all perfection; and that the date of that beginning is not made known." 2. "That at a recent epoch, our planet was brought into a state of disorganization, detritus, or ruin, (perhaps we have no perfectly appropriate term,) from a former condition." 3. "That it pleased the Almighty, wise and benevolent Supreme, out of that state of ruin to adjust the surface of the earth to its now existing condition,--the whole extending through the period of six natural days." "I am forming," continues Dr. Smith, "no hypotheses in geology; I only plead that _the ground is clear_, and that the dictates of the Scripture _interpose no bar_ to observation and reasoning upon the mineralogical constitution of the earth, and the remains of organized creatures which its strata disclose. If those investigations should lead us to attribute to the earth and to the other planets and astral spheres an antiquity which millions or ten thousand millions of years might fail to represent, _the divine records forbid not their deduction_."--_Script. and Geol._ p. 502. Says Dr. Bedford, "We ought to understand Moses as saying, _indefinitely far back, and concealed from us in the mystery of eternal ages, prior to the first moment of mundane time_, God created the heavens and the earth."--Smith, _Script. and Geol._ 4th edit. "My firm persuasion is," says Dr. Harris, "that the first verse of Genesis was designed, by the divine Spirit, to announce the absolute origination of the material universe by the Almighty Creator; and that it is so understood in the other parts of holy writ; that, passing by an indefinite interval, the second verse describes the state of our planet immediately prior to the Adamic creation, and, that the third verse begins the account of the six days' work." "If I am reminded, in a tone of animadversion, that I am making science, in this instance, the interpreter of Scripture, my reply is, that I am simply making the works of God illustrate his word in a department in which they speak with a distinct and authoritative voice; that "it is all the same whether our geological or theological investigations have been prior, if we have not forced the one into accordance with the other."--(Davidson, _Sacred Hermeneutics_.) "And that it might be deserving consideration, whether or not the conduct of those is not open to just animadversion, who first undertake to pronounce on the meaning of a passage of Scripture, irrespective of all the appropriate evidence, and who then, when that evidence is explored and produced, insist on their _a priori_ interpretation as the only true one."--_Pre-Adamite Earth_, p. 280. "Our best expositors of Scripture," says Dr. Daniel King, of Glasgow, "seem to be now pretty generally agreed, that the opening verse in Genesis has no necessary connection with the verses which follow. They think it may be understood as making a separate and independent statement regarding the creation proper, and that the phrase 'in the beginning' may be expressive of an indefinitely remote antiquity. On this principle the Bible recognizes, in the first instance, the great age of the earth, and then tells us of the changes it underwent at a period long subsequent, in order to render it a fit abode for the family of man. The work of the six days was not, according to this view, a creation in the strict sense of the term, but a renovation, a remodelling of preëxisting materials."--_Principles of Geology explained_, &c. p. 40, 1st edit. "Whether the Mosaic creation," says Dr. Schmucker, of the Lutheran church in this country, "refers to the present organization of matter, or to the formation of its primary elements, it is not easy to decide. The question is certainly not determined by the usage of the original words, [Hebrew] which are frequently employed to designate mediate formation. Should the future investigations of physical science bring to light any facts, indisputably proving the anterior existence of the matter of this earth, such facts would not militate against the Christian Scriptures." "That a very long period," says Dr. Pond,--"how long no being but God can tell,--intervened between the creation of the world and the commencement of the six days' work recorded in the following verses of the first chapter of Genesis, there can, I think, be no reasonable doubt." But I need not adduce any more advocates of the interpretation of Genesis, for which I contend. Men more respected and confided in by the Christian world I could not quote, though I might enlarge the number; but I trust it is unnecessary. I trust that all who hear me are satisfied that the Mosaic history of the creation of the world does fairly admit of an interpretation which leaves an undefined interval between the creation of matter and the six days' work. Let it be recollected that I do not maintain that this is the most natural interpretation, but only that the passage will fairly admit it by the strict rules of exegesis. The question still remains to be considered, whether there is sufficient reason to adopt it as the true interpretation. To show that there is, I now make my appeal to geology. This is a case, it seems to me, in which we may call in the aid of science to ascertain the true meaning of Scripture. The question is, Does geology teach, distinctly and uncontrovertibly, that the world must have existed during a long period prior to the existence of the races of organized beings that now occupy its surface? To give a popular view of the evidence sustaining the affirmative of this question is no easy task. It needs a full and accurate acquaintance with the multiplied facts of geology, and, what is still more rare, a familiarity with geological reasoning, in order to feel the full force of the arguments that prove the high antiquity of the globe. Yet I know that I have a right to presume upon a high degree of scientific knowledge, and an accurate acquaintance with geology, among those whom I address. In the first place, I must recur to a principle already briefly stated in a former lecture, viz., that a careful examination of the rocks presents irresistible evidence, that, in their present condition, they are all the result of second causes; in other words, they are not now in the condition in which they were originally created. Some of them have been melted and reconsolidated, and crowded in between others, or spread over them. Others have been worn down into mud, sand, and gravel, by water and other agents, and again cemented together, after having enveloped multitudes of animals and plants, which are now imbedded as organic remains. In short, all known rocks appear to have been brought into their present state by chemical or mechanical agencies. It is indeed easy to say that these appearances are deceptive, and that these rocks may, with perfect ease, have been created just as we now find them. But it is not easy to retain this opinion, after having carefully examined them. For the evidence that they are of secondary origin is nearly as strong, and of the same kind too, as it is that the remains of edifices lately discovered in Central America are the work of man, and were not created in their present condition. In the second place, processes are going on by which rocks are formed on a small scale, of the same character as those which constitute the great mass of the earth. Hence it is fair to infer, that all the rocks were formed in a similar manner. Beds of gravel, for instance, are sometimes cemented together by heat, or iron, or lime, so as to resemble exactly the conglomerates found in mountain masses among the ancient rocks. Clay is sometimes converted into slate by heat, as is soft marl into limestone, by the same cause. In fact, we find causes now in operation that produce all the varieties of known rocks, except some of the oldest, which seem to need only a greater intensity in some of the causes now at work to produce them. By ascertaining the rate at which rocks are now forming, therefore, we can form some opinion as to the time requisite to produce those constituting the crust of the globe. If, for instance, we can determine how fast ponds, lakes, and oceans are filling up with mud, sand, and gravel, conveyed to their bottoms, we can judge of the period necessary to produce those rocks which appear to have been formed in a similar manner; and if there is any evidence that the process was more rapid in early times, we can make due allowance. In the third place, all the stratified rocks appear to have been formed out of the fragments of other rocks, worn down by the action of water and atmospheric agencies. This is particularly true of that large proportion of these rocks which contain the remains of animals and plants. The mud, sand, and gravel of which these are mostly composed, must have been worn from rocks previously existing, and have been transported into lakes, and the ocean, as the same process is now going on. There the animals and plants, which died in the waters, and were transported thither by rivers, must have been buried; next, the rocks must have been hardened into stone, by admixture with lime, or iron, or by internal heat; and, finally, have been raised above the waters, so as to become dry land. Beds of limestone are interstratified with those of shale, sandstone, and conglomerate; but these form only a small proportion of the whole, and, besides, were mostly formed in an analogous manner, though by agencies more decidedly chemical. Now, for the most part, this process of forming rocks by the accumulation of mud, sand, and gravel is very slow. In general, such accumulations, at the bottom of lakes and the ocean, do not increase more than a few inches in a century. During violent floods, indeed, and in a few limited spots, the accumulation is much more rapid; as in the Lake of Geneva, through which the Rhone, loaded with detritus from the Alps, passes, where a delta has been formed two miles long and nine hundred feet thick, within eight hundred years.[7] And occasionally such rapid depositions probably took place while the older rocks were in the course of formation. But in general, the work seems to have gone on as slowly as it usually does at present. Yet, in the fourth place, there must have been time enough since the creation to deposit at least ten miles of rocks in perpendicular thickness, in the manner that has been described. For the stratified rocks are at least of that thickness in Europe, and in this country much thicker; or, if we regard only the fossiliferous strata as thus deposited, (since some geologists might hesitate to admit that the non-fossiliferous rocks were thus produced,) these are six and a half miles thick in Europe, and still thicker in this country. How immense a period was requisite for such a work! Some do, indeed, contend that the work, in all cases, as we have allowed it in a few, may have been vastly more rapid than at the present day. But the manner in which the materials are arranged, and especially the preservation of the most delicate parts of the organic remains, often in the very position in which the animals died, show the quiet and slow manner in which the process went on. In the fifth place, it is certain that, since man existed on the globe, materials for the production of rocks have not accumulated to the average thickness of more than one hundred or two hundred feet; although in particular places, as already mentioned, the accumulations are thicker. The evidence of this position is, that neither the works nor the remains of man have been found any deeper in the earth than in the upper part of that superficial deposit called _alluvium_. But had man existed while the other deposits were going on, no possible reason can be given why his bones and the fruits of his labors should not be found mixed with those of other animals, so abundant in the rocks, to the depth of six or seven miles. In the last six thousand years, then, only one five hundredth part of the stratified rocks has been accumulated. I mention this fact, not as by any means an exact, but only an approximate, measure of the time in which the older rocks were deposited; for the precise age of the world is probably a problem which science never can solve. All the means of comparison within our reach enable us to say, only, that its duration must have been immense. In the sixth place, during the deposition of the stratified rocks, a great number of changes must have occurred in the matter of which they are composed. Hundreds of such changes can be easily counted, and they often imply great changes in the waters holding the materials in solution or suspension; such changes, indeed, as must have required different oceans over the same spot. Such events could not have taken place without extensive elevations and subsidences of the earth's crust; nor could such vertical movements have happened without much intervening time, as many facts, too technical to be here detailed, show. Here, then, we have another evidence of vast periods of time occupied in the secondary production and arrangements of the earth's crust. In the seventh place, numerous races of animals and plants must have occupied the globe previous to those which now inhabit it, and have successively passed away, as catastrophes occurred, or the climate became unfit for their residence. Not less than thirty thousand species have already been dug out of the rocks; and excepting a few hundred species, mostly of sea shells, occurring in the uppermost rocks, none of them correspond to those now living on the globe. In Europe, they are found to the depth of about six and a half miles; and in this country, deeper; and no living species is found more than one twelfth of this depth. All the rest are specifically and often generically unlike living species; and the conclusion seems irresistible, that they must have lived and died before the creation of the present species. Indeed, so different was the climate in those early times,--it having been much warmer than at present in most parts of the world,--that but few of the present races could have lived then. Still further: it appears that, during the whole period since organized beings first appeared on the globe, not less than four, or five, and probably more--some think as many as ten or twelve--entire races have passed away, and been succeeded by recent ones; so that the globe has actually changed all its inhabitants half a dozen times. Yet each of the successive groups occupied it long enough to leave immense quantities of their remains, which sometimes constitute almost entire mountains. And in general, these groups became extinct in consequence of a change of climate; which, if imputed to any known cause, must have been an extremely slow process. Now, these results are no longer to be regarded as the dreams of fancy, but the legitimate deductions from long and careful observation of facts. And can any reasonable man conceive how such changes can have taken place since the six days of creation, or within the last six thousand years? In order to reconcile them with such a supposition, we must admit of hypotheses and absurdities more wild and extravagant than have ever been charged upon geology. But admit of a long period between the first creative act and the six days, and all difficulties vanish. In the eighth place, the denudations and erosions that have taken place on the earth's surface indicate a far higher antiquity to the globe, even since it assumed essentially its present condition, than the common interpretation of Genesis admits. The geologist can prove that in many cases the rocks have been worn away, by the slow action of the ocean, more than two miles in depth in some regions, and those very wide; as in South Wales, in England. As the continents rose from the ocean, the slow drainage by the rivers has excavated numerous long and deep gorges, requiring periods incalculably extended. I do not wonder that, when the sceptic stands upon the banks of Niagara River, and sees how obviously the splendid cataract has worn out the deep gorge extending to Lake Ontario, he should feel that there is a standing proof that the common opinion, as to the age of the world, cannot be true; and hence be led to discard the Bible, if he supposes that to be a true interpretation. But the Niagara gorge is only one among a multitude of examples of erosion that might be quoted; and some of them far more striking to a geologist. On Oak Orchard Creek, and the Genesee River, between Rochester and Lake Ontario, are similar erosions, seven miles long. On the latter river, south of Rochester, we find a cut from Mount Morris to Portage, sometimes four hundred feet deep. On many of our south-western rivers we have what are called _canons_, or gorges, often two hundred and fifty feet deep, and several miles long. Near the source of Missouri River are what are called the Gates of the Rocky Mountains, where there is a gorge six miles long and twelve hundred feet deep. Similar cuts occur on the Columbia River, hundreds of feet deep, through the hard trap rock, for hundreds of miles, between the American Falls and the Dalles. At St. Anthony's Falls, on the Mississippi, that river has worn a passage in limestone seven miles long, which distance the cataract has receded. On the Potomac, ten miles west of Washington, the Great Falls have worn back a passage sixty to sixty-five feet deep, four miles, continuously--a greater work, considering the nature of the rock, than has been done by the Niagara. The passage for the Hudson, through the highlands, is probably an example of river erosion; as is also that of the Connecticut at Brattleboro' and Bellows Falls. In these places, it can be proved that the river was once at least seven hundred feet above its present bed. On the Deerfield River, a tributary of the Connecticut, we have a gulf called the _Ghor_, eight miles long and several hundred feet deep, cut crosswise through the mica slate and gneiss by the stream. On the eastern continent I might quote a multitude of analogous cases. There is, for instance, the Wady el Jeib, in soft limestone, within the Wady Arabah, south of the Dead Sea. The defile is one hundred and fifty feet deep, half a mile wide, and forty miles long. In Mount Lebanon, several remarkable chasms in limestone have been described by American missionaries, as that on Dog River, (Lycus of the ancients,) six miles long, seventy or eighty feet deep, and from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and sixty feet wide; also, Wady Barida, whose walls are six hundred to eight hundred feet high. On the River Ravendoor, in Kurdistan, is a gorge, described in a letter from Dr. Perkins, one thousand feet deep. Another on the Euphrates, near Diadeen, is seventy feet deep, and is spanned by a natural bridge one hundred feet long. On the River Terek, in the Dariel Caucasus, is a pass one hundred and twenty miles long, whose walls rise from one thousand to three thousand feet high. In Africa, the River Zaire has cut a passage, forty miles long, through mica slate, quartz, and syenite; and in New South Wales, Cox River passes through a gorge twenty-two hundred yards wide and eight hundred feet high. Ninthly. Since the geological period now passing commenced, called the _alluvial_, or pleistocene period, certain changes have been going on, which indicate a very great antiquity to the drift period, which was the commencement of the alluvial period, and has been considered among the most recent of geological events. I refer to the formation of deltas and of terraces. Of the deltas I will mention but a single example, to which, however, many others correspond. The Mississippi carries down to its mouth 28,188,803,892 cubic feet of sediment yearly, which it deposits; or one cubic mile in five years and eighty-one days. Now, as the whole delta contains twenty-seven hundred and twenty cubic miles, it must have required fourteen thousand two hundred and four years to form it in this manner. Terraces occur along some of the rivers of our country from four hundred to five hundred feet above their present beds, and around our lakes to the height of nearly one thousand feet. They are composed of gravel, sand, clay, and loam, that have been comminuted, and sorted, and deposited, by water chiefly. At a height two or three times greater, on the same rivers and lakes, we find what seem to be ancient sea beaches, of the same materials, deposited earlier, and less comminuted. The same facts also occur in Europe, and probably in Asia. Now, it seems quite certain, that these beaches and terraces were formed as the continents were being drained of the waters of the ocean, and the rivers were cutting down their beds; which last process has been going on in many places to the present day. Yet scarcely nowhere, since the memory of man, have even the lowest of these terraces and beaches been formed, save on a very limited scale, and of a few feet in height. The lowest of them have been the sites of towns and cities, ever since the settlement of our country, and on the eastern continent much longer. Yet we see the processes by which they have been formed now in operation; but they have scarcely made any progress during the period of human history. How vast the period, then, since the work was first commenced! Yet even its commencement seems to have been no farther back than the drift epoch, since that deposit lies beneath the terraces. But the drift period was comparatively a very recent one on the geological scale. How do such facts impress us with the vast duration of the globe since the first series of changes commenced! Finally. There is no little reason to believe that, previous to the formation of the stratified rocks, the earth passed through changes that required vast periods of time, by which it was gradually brought into a habitable state. It is even believed that one of its earliest conditions was that of vapor; that, gradually condensing, it became a melted globe of fire, and then, as it gradually cooled, a crust formed over its surface; and so at last it became habitable. All this is indeed hypothesis; and, therefore, I do not place it in the same rank as the other proofs of the earth's antiquity, already adduced. Still this hypothesis has so much evidence in its favor, that not a few of the ablest and most cautious philosophers of the present day have adopted it. And if it be indeed true, it throws back the creation of the universe to a period remote beyond calculation or conception. Now, let this imperfect summary of evidence in favor of the earth's high antiquity be candidly weighed, and can any one think it strange that every man, who has carefully and extensively examined the rocks in their native beds, is entirely convinced of its validity? Men of all professions, and of diverse opinions concerning the Bible, have been geologists; but on this point they are unanimous, however they may differ as to other points in the science. Must we not, then, regard this fact as one of the settled principles of science? If so, who will hesitate to say that it ought to settle the interpretation of the first verse of Genesis, in favor of that meaning which allows an intervening period between the creation of matter and the creation of light? This is the grand point which I have aimed to establish; and, in conclusion, I beg leave to make a few remarks by way of inference. First. This interpretation of Genesis is entirely sufficient to remove all apparent collision between geology and revelation. It gives the geologist full scope for his largest speculations concerning the age of the world. It permits him to maintain that its first condition was as unlike to the present as possible, and allows him time enough for all the changes of mineral constitution and organic life which its strata reveal. It supposes that all these are passed over in silence by the sacred writers, because irrelevant to the object of revelation, but full of interest and instruction to the men of science, who should afterwards take pleasure in exploring the works of God. It supposes the six days' work of creation to have been confined entirely to the fitting up the world in its present condition, and furnishing it with its present inhabitants. Thus, while it gives the widest scope to the geologist, it does not encroach upon the literalities of the Bible; and hence it is not strange that it should be almost universally adopted by geologists as well as by many eminent divines. I would not forget to notice in this connection, however, a recent proposed extension of this interpretation by Dr. John Pye Smith, founded on the principle already illustrated, that the sacred writers adapted their language to the state of knowledge among the Jews. By the term _earth_, in Genesis, he supposes, was designed not the whole terraqueous globe, but "the part of our world which God was adapting for the dwelling-place of man and animals connected with him." And the narrative of the six days' work is a description adapted to the ideas and capacities of mankind in the earliest ages, of a series of operations, by which the Being of omnipotent wisdom and goodness adjusted and furnished, not the earth generally, but, as the particular subject under consideration here, a PORTION of its surface for most glorious purposes. This portion of the earth he conceives to have been a large part of Asia, lying between the Caucasian ridge, the Caspian Sea and Tartary on the north, the Persian and Indian Seas on the south, and the high mountain ridges which run at considerable distance on their eastern and western flanks. This region was first, by atmospheric and geological causes of previous operation, under the will of the Almighty, brought into a condition of superficial ruin, or some kind of general disorder, probably by volcanic agency; it was submerged, covered with fogs and clouds, and subsequently elevated, and the atmosphere, by the fourth day, rendered pellucid.--_Script. and Geol._ p. 275, 2d edit. Without professing to adopt fully this view of my learned and venerable friend, I cannot but remark, that it explains one or two difficulties on this subject, which I shall more fully explain farther on. One is, the difficulty of conceiving how the inferior animals could have been distributed to their present places of residence from a single centre of creation without a miracle. Certain it is, that, as the climate and position of land and water now are, they could not thus migrate without certain destruction to many of them. But by this theory they might have been created within the districts which they now occupy. Another difficulty solved by this theory is, that several hundred species of animals, that were created long before man, as their remains found in the tertiary strata show, still survive, and there is no evidence that they ever became extinct; nor need they have been destroyed and recreated, if Dr. Smith's theory be true. Nevertheless, it does not appear to me essential to a satisfactory reconciliation of geology and revelation, that we should adopt it. But coming from such high authority, and sustained as it is by powerful arguments, it commends itself to our candid examination. Secondly. I remark, that it is not necessary that we should be perfectly sure that the method which has been described, or any other, of bringing geology into harmony with the Bible, is infallibly true. It is only necessary that it should be sustained by probable evidence; that it should fairly meet the geological difficulty on the one hand, and do no violence to the language or spirit of the Bible on the other. This is sufficient, surely, to satisfy every philosophical mind, that there is no collision between geology and revelation. But should it appear hereafter, either from the discoveries of the geologist or the philologist, that our views must be somewhat modified, it would not show that the previous views had been insufficient to harmonize the two subjects; but only that here, as in every other department of human knowledge, perfection is not attained, except by long-continued efforts. I make these remarks, because it is well known that other modes, besides that which I have defended, have been proposed to accomplish the same object; and it is probable that, even to this day, one or two of these modes may be defended, although the general opinion of geologists is in favor of that which I have exhibited. Some, for instance, have supposed that the fossiliferous strata may all have been deposited in the sixteen hundred years between the creation and the deluge, and by that catastrophe have been lifted out of the ocean. Others have imagined them all produced by that event. But the most plausible theory regards the six days of creation as periods of great, though indefinite length, during which all the changes exhibited by the strata of rocks took place. The arguments in defence of this view are the following: 1. The word _day_ is often used in Scripture to express a period of indefinite length. (Luke xvii. 24. John viii. 56. Job xiv. 6.) 2. The sun, moon, and stars were not created till the fourth day; so that the revolution of the earth on its axis, in twenty-four hours, may not have existed previously, and the light and darkness that alternated may have had reference to some other standard. 3. The Sabbath, or seventh day, in which God rested from his work, has not yet terminated; and there is reason to suppose the demiurgic days may have been at least of equal length. 4. This interpretation corresponds remarkably with the traditional cosmogonies of some heathen nations, as the ancient Etruscans and modern Hindoos; and it was also adopted by Philo and other Jewish writers. 5. The order of creation, as described in Genesis, corresponds to that developed by geology. This order, according to Cuvier and Professor Jameson, is as follows: 1. The earth was covered with the sea without inhabitants. 2. Plants were created on the third day, and are found abundantly in the coal measures. 3. On the fifth day, the inhabitants of the waters, then flying things, then great reptiles, and then mammiferous animals, were created. 4. On the sixth day, man was created. The following are the objections to this interpretation: 1. The word _day_ is not used figuratively in other places of Genesis, (unless perhaps Gen. ii. 4,) though it is sometimes so used in other parts of Scripture. 2. In the fourth commandment, where the days of creation are referred to, (Exod. xx. 9, 10, 11,) no one can doubt but that the six days of labor and the Sabbath, spoken of in the ninth and tenth verses, are literal days. By what rule of interpretation can the same word in the next verse be made to mean indefinite periods? 3. From Gen. ii. 5, compared with Gen. i. 11, 12, it seems that it had not rained on the earth till the third day--a fact altogether probable if the days were of twenty-four hours, but absurd if they were long periods. 4. Such a meaning is forced and unnatural, and, therefore, not to be adopted without urgent necessity. 5. This hypothesis assumes that Moses describes the creation of all the animals and plants that have ever lived on the globe. But geology decides that the species now living, since they are not found in the rocks any lower down than man is, (with a few exceptions,) could not have been contemporaries with those in the rocks, but must have been created when man was; that is, on the sixth day. Of such a creation no mention is made in Genesis. The inference is, that Moses does not describe the creation of the existing races, but only of those that lived thousands of years earlier, and whose existence was scarcely suspected till modern times. Who will admit such an absurdity? If any one takes the ground that the existing races were created with the fossil ones, on the third and fifth days, then he must show, what no one can, why the remains of the former are not found mixed with the latter. 6. Though there is a general resemblance between the order of creation, as described in Genesis and by geology, yet when we look at the details of the creation of the organic world, as required by this hypothesis, we find manifest discrepancy, instead of the coincidence asserted by some distinguished advocates of these views. Thus the Bible represents plants only to have been created on the third day, and animals not till the fifth; and hence, at least, the lower half of the fossiliferous rocks ought to contain nothing but vegetables. Whereas, in fact, the lower half of these rocks, all below the carboniferous, although abounding in animals, contain scarcely any plants, and those in the lowest strata, fucoids, or sea-weeds. But the Mosaic account of the third day's work evidently describes flowering and seed-bearing plants, not flowerless and seedless algæ. Again: reptiles are described in Genesis as created on the fifth day; but reptilia and batrachians existed as early as the time when the lower carboniferous, and even old red sandstone strata, were in a course of deposition, as their tracks on those rocks in Nova Scotia and Pennsylvania evince. In short, if we maintain that Moses describes fossil as well as living species, we find discrepancy, instead of correspondence, between his order of creation and that of geology. But admit that he describes only existing species, and all difficulties vanish. It appears, then, that the objections to this interpretation of the word _day_ are more geological than exegetical. It has accordingly been mostly abandoned by men, who, from their knowledge both of geology and scriptural exegesis, were best qualified to judge. And even those who are inclined to adopt it do also believe in the existence of a long period between the beginning and the demiurgic days. From the earliest times, however, in which we have writings upon the Scriptures, we find men doubting whether the demiurgic days of Moses are to be taken in a strictly literal sense. Josephus and Philo regarded the six days' work as metaphorical. Origen took a similar view, and St. Augustin says, "It is difficult, if not impossible, for us to conceive what sort of days these were." In more modern times, we find many able writers, as Hahn, Hensler, De Luc, Professors Lee and Wait, of the University of Cambridge, Faber, &c., adopting modifications of the same views. Mr. Faber, however, a few years since, abandoned this opinion; and for the most part, geologists and theologians prefer to regard the six days as literal days of twenty-four hours. But, generally, they would not regard the opposite opinion to be as unreasonable as it would be to reject the Bible from any supposed collision with geology. Yet, in general, they suppose it sufficient, to meet all difficulties, to allow of an indefinite interval between the "beginning" and the six days' work of creation. In the truly scientific system of theology by the venerable Dr. Knapp, we find a proposed interpretation of the Mosaic account of the creation, that would bring it into harmony with geology. "If we would form a clear and distinct notion of this whole description of creation," says he, "we must conceive of six separate _pictures_, in which this great work is represented in each successive stage of its progress towards completion. And as the performance of the painter, though it must have natural truth for its foundation, must not be considered, or judged of, as a delineation of mathematical or scientific accuracy, so neither must this pictorial representation of the creation be regarded as literally and exactly true." He then alludes to the various hypotheses respecting the early state of the matter of the globe, and says, "Any of these hypotheses of the naturalist may be adopted or rejected, the Mosaic geogony notwithstanding."[8] Thirdly. The interpretation of Genesis, for which I have contended in this lecture, does not affect injuriously any doctrine of revelation. The community have, indeed, been taught to believe that the universe was all brought into existence about six thousand years ago; and it always produces a temporary evil to change the interpretation of a passage of the Bible, even though, as in this case, it be the result of new light shed upon it; because it is apt to make individuals of narrow views lose their confidence in the rules of interpretation. But when the change is once made, it increases men's confidence in the Word of God, which is only purified, but not shaken, by all the discoveries of modern science. In the present case, it does not seem to be of the least consequence, so far as the great doctrines of the Bible are concerned, whether the world has stood six thousand, or six hundred thousand years. Nor can I conceive of any truth of the Bible, which does not shine with at least equal brightness and glory, if the longest chronological dates be adopted. Yet, fourthly. I maintain that several of these doctrines are far more strikingly and profitably exhibited, if the high antiquity of the globe be admitted. The common interpretation limits the operations of the Deity, so far as the material universe is concerned, to the last six thousand years. But the geological view carries the mind back along the flow of countless ages, and exhibits the wisdom of the Deity carrying forward, with infinite skill, a vast series of operations, each successive link springing out of that before it, and becoming more and more beautiful, until the glorious universe in which we live comes forth, not only the last, but the best of all. All this while, too, we perceive the heart of infinite Benevolence at work, either in fitting up the world for its future races of inhabitants, or in placing upon it creatures exactly adapted to its varying condition; until man, at last, the crown of all, makes it his delightful abode, with nothing to lament but his own apostasy,--with every thing perfect but himself. Can the mind enter such an almost boundless field of contemplation as this, and not feel itself refreshed, and expanded, and filled with more exalted conceptions of the divine plans and divine benevolence than could possibly be obtained within the narrow limits of six thousand years? But I will not enlarge; for I hope I may be allowed, in future lectures, to enter this rich field of thought, when we have more leisure to survey its beautiful prospects, and pluck its golden fruit. Finally. If the geological interpretation of Genesis be true, then it should be taught to all classes of the community. It is, indeed, unwise to alter received interpretations of Scripture without very strong reasons. We should be satisfied that the new light, which has come to us, is not that of a transient meteor, but of a permanent luminary. We should, also, be satisfied, that the proposed change is consistent with the established rules of philology. If we introduce change of this sort before these points are settled, even upon passages that have no connection with fundamental moral principles, we shall distress many an honest and pious heart, and expose ourselves to the necessity of further change. But on the other hand, if we delay the change long after these points are fairly settled, we shall excite the suspicion that we dread to have the light of science fall upon the Bible. Nor let it be forgotten how disastrous has ever been the influence of the opinion that theologians teach one thing, and men of science another. Now, in the case under consideration, is there any reason to doubt the high antiquity of the globe, as demonstrated by geology? If any point, not capable of mathematical demonstration in physical science, is proved, surely this truth is established. And how easily reconciled to the inspired record, by an interpretation entirely consistent with the rules of philology, and with the scope of the passage, and the tenor of the Bible! It seems to me far more natural, and easy to understand, than that interpretation which it became necessary to introduce when the Copernican system was demonstrated to be true. The latter must have seemed to conflict strongly with the natural and most obvious meaning of certain passages of the Bible, at a time when men's minds were ignorant of astronomy, and, I may add, of the true mode of interpreting the language of Scripture respecting natural phenomena. Nevertheless, the astronomical exegesis prevailed, and every child can now see its reasonableness. So it seems to me that the child can easily apprehend the geological interpretation and its reasons. Why, then, should it not be taught to children, that they may not be liable to distrust the whole Bible, when they come to the study of geology? I rejoice, however, that the fears and prejudices of the pious and the learned are so fast yielding to evidence; and I anticipate the period, when, on this subject, the child will learn the same thing in the Sabbath school and the literary institution. Nay, I anticipate the time as not distant, when the high antiquity of the globe will be regarded as no more opposed to the Bible than the earth's revolution round the sun and on its axis. Soon shall the horizon, where geology and revelation meet, be cleared of every cloud, and present only an unbroken and magnificent circle of truth. LECTURE III. DEATH A UNIVERSAL LAW OF ORGANIC BEINGS ON THIS GLOBE FROM THE BEGINNING. Death has always been regarded by man as the king of terrors, and the climax of all mortal evils; and by Christians its introduction into the world has generally been imputed to the apostasy of our first parents. For the threatening announced to them in Eden was, _In the day thou eatest of the forbidden fruit thou shalt surely die_, implying that if they did not eat thereof they might live. But _when the woman saw the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also to her husband with her, and he did eat_. As the result, it is generally supposed that a great change took place in animals and plants, and from being immortal, they became mortal, in consequence of this fatal deed. But geology asserts that death existed in the world untold ages before man's creation, while physiology declares it to be a universal law of nature, and a wise and benevolent provision in such a world as ours. Now, the question is, Do not these different statements conflict with one another? and if so, is the discrepancy apparent only, or real? These are the questions which I now propose to examine, by all the light which we can obtain from the Bible and from science. _The first point to be ascertained in this investigation will be, what the Bible teaches on this subject._ In the first place, it distinctly informs us that the death which man experiences, came upon him in consequence of sin. The declaration of Paul on this subject is as distinct as language can be. _By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned._ This corresponds with the original threatening respecting the forbidden fruit. We know that our first parents ate of it; we know, also, that they died; and the apostle places these two facts in the relation of cause and effect. In the second place, the Bible does not inform us whether the death of the inferior animals and plants is the consequence of man's transgression. In order to prove this statement, it is necessary to show that the language of the Bible, which distinctly ascribes the introduction of death into the world, is limited to man. The first part of the sentence from Paul, just quoted, is indeed very general, and may include all organic natures. _By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin._ What terms more general or explicit than these could be used? Yet the remainder of the sentence shows that the apostle had man mainly in his eye; _and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned_. The death here spoken of is limited expressly to man; and, therefore, it is not necessary to show that the same terms, in the first part of the sentence, had a more extended meaning. Death is spoken of here as the result of sin, and cannot, therefore, embrace animals and plants, which are incapable of sin. But after all, the first part of the sentence may intend to teach a general truth respecting the origin of every kind of death in the world. It will be seen in the sequel, that to such a meaning I have no objection, if it can be established. Another very explicit passage on the introduction of death into the world is found in Corinthians: _Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead._ Here, too, the last clause of the sentence limits the meaning to the human family. For no one will doubt that Christ is the man here spoken of, by whom came the resurrection of the dead. Now, unless the inferior animals and plants will share in a resurrection in consequence of what Christ has done, and in the redemption wrought out by him too, they cannot be included in this passage. And if neither of the texts now quoted extend in their application beyond the human race, I know of no other passage in the Bible that teaches, directly or inferentially, that death among the inferior animals or plants resulted from man's apostasy. I do not deny that there may be a connection between these events; certainly the Scriptures do not teach the contrary. But they appear to me rather to leave the question of such a connection undecided, and open for the examination of philosophers. If so, we may reason concerning the dissolution of animals, except men, without reference to the Scriptures. _Under the second part of this investigation, I shall endeavor to show that geology proves violent and painful death to have existed in the world long before man's creation._ In the oldest of the sedimentary rocks, the remains of animals occur in vast numbers; nor will any one, I trust, of ordinary intelligence, doubt but these relics once constituted living beings. Through the whole series of rocks, six miles in thickness, we find similar remains, even increasing in numbers as we ascend; but it is not till we reach the very highest stratum, the mere superficial coat of alluvium, that we find the remains of man. The vast multitudes, then, of organized beings that lie entombed in rocks below alluvium, must have yielded to death long before man received his sentence, _Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return._ Will any one maintain that none of these animals preceded man in the period of their existence? Then why are the remains of men not found with theirs? for his bony skeleton is as likely to be preserved and petrified as theirs. Moreover, so unlike to man and other existing tenants of the globe are many of these ancient animals, that the sure laws of comparative anatomy show us, that both races could not live and flourish in a world adapted to the one or the other. If the temperature had been warm enough for the fossil tribes, and all the circumstances of food and climate congenial to their natures, they would have been unsuited to the present races; and if adapted to the latter, the former must have perished. The difference between the animals and plants dug out of the rocks in this latitude, and those now inhabiting the same region of country, is certainly as great as that between the animals and plants of the torrid and temperate zones; in most cases it is greater. Now, suppose that the animals and plants of the temperate zones were to change places with those between the tropics. A few species might survive, but the greater part would be destroyed. Hence, _a fortiori_, had the living beings now entombed in the rocks been placed in the same climate with those now alive upon the globe, the like result would have followed. I say _a fortiori_; that is, for a stronger reason, the greater number must have perished; and the stronger reason is, the greater difference between fossil and living species, than between the latter in torrid and temperate latitudes. It is true that man is among the species capable of being acclimated to great extremes. And yet no physiologist will imagine that even his nature could have long survived in such a climate as formerly existed, when probably the atmosphere was loaded with carbonic acid and other mephitic gases, and with moisture and miasms, the result of a rank vegetation, and of a temperature higher than now exists in equatorial countries. This argument, furnished by comparative anatomy, to show that man and the fossil animals could not have been contemporaries, will probably seem to have little force to those who are not familiar with the history of organic life on the globe, and the distribution of species. It is not generally known that both animals and plants are usually confined to a particular district, and that a removal beyond its boundaries, or the access of a few more degrees of cold, or heat, than is common in the place assigned them by nature, will destroy them. To him who understands this curious history, the argument under consideration is perfectly satisfactory, to prove the existence and consequent dissolution of myriads of living beings, anterior to man. "Judging by these indications of the habits of the animals," says the distinguished anatomist, Sir Charles Bell, "we acquire a knowledge of the condition of the earth during their period of existence; that it was suited at one time to the scaly tribe of the lacertæ, with languid motion; at another, to animals of higher organization, with more varied and lively habits; and finally, we learn that at any period previous to man's creation, the surface of the earth would have been unsuitable to him. Any other hypothesis than that of a new creation of animals, suited to the successive changes in the inorganic matter of the globe, the condition of the water, atmosphere, and temperature, brings with it only an accumulation of difficulties."--_The Hand, its Mech._, &c. pp. 31 and 115. But when arguing with those who do not feel the force of this argument, I would fall back upon that derived from the fact, that of the ten thousand species of animals dug out of the rocks beneath alluvium, no relic of man has been found; and ask them whether they can explain such a fact, except by the supposition that man was not their contemporary. In his admirable Bridgewater Treatise, Dr. Buckland has conclusively shown that the same great system of organization and adaptation has always prevailed on the globe. It was the same in those immensely remote ages, when the fossil animals lived, as it now is. And there is one feature of that system which deserves notice in this argument. At present, we know that there exist large tribes of animals, called carnivorous, provided with organs expressly designed to enable them to destroy other animals, and of course to inflict on them violent and painful death. Exactly similar tribes, and in a like proportion, are found among the fossil animals. They were not always the same tribes; but when one class of carnivora disappeared, another was created to take their place, in order to keep down the excessive multiplication of other races, which appears to be the grand object accomplished by the carnivorous races. And that animals of such an organization not only lived in the ages preceding man's creation, but actually destroyed contemporary species, we have the evidence in the remains of the one animal enclosed in the body of another, by whom it was devoured for food and both are now converted into rock, and will testify to the most sceptical, that death among animals existed in the world before man's transgression. _Under the third part of this investigation, I shall attempt to show that physiology teaches us that death is a general law of organic natures._ It is not confined to animals, but embraces also plants. As they correspond in a striking manner to animals in their reproduction and growth, so they do in their decay and dissolution. In short, wherever in nature we find life and organization, death is inevitable. The amount of vital energy varies in different species, and in individuals; but in them all, it at length becomes exhausted, and the functions cease. After a certain period, the vessels which convey the nutritive materials, and elaborate the proximate principles, become choked with excrementitious matter, assimilation is performed imperfectly, and gradually the vital energies are overpowered, and yield up their charge to the disorganizing power of chemical agencies. We can hardly see why the delicate machinery cannot hold out longer than it does, or even indefinitely. But experience shows us that an irresistible law of nature has fixed the period of its operations. In the expressive language of Scripture, which applies to plants as well as animals, _there is no discharge in that war_. A little reflection will convince any one, that in such a system as exists in the world, this universal decay and dissolution are indispensable. For dead organic matter is essential to the support and nourishment of living beings. Admit, for the sake of the argument, (although it is obviously absurd in respect to the carnivorous races,) that animals might be supported by vegetable food. Yet, if plants must furnish nourishment for their successors, as well as for animals, the organic matter must at length be exhausted. And, furthermore, how could animals feed on plants without destroying, as they now do, multitudes of minute insects and animalcules? It is obvious, also, that, for a variety of reasons, the multiplication of animals must soon be arrested, or famine would be the result, or the world would be more than full. In short, it would require an entirely different system in nature from the present, in order to exclude death from the world. To the existing system it is as essential as gravitation, and apparently just as much a law of nature. To strengthen this argument still further, comparative anatomy testifies that large classes of animals have a structure evidently intended to enable them to feed on other tribes. The teeth of the more perfect carnivorous animals are adapted for seizing and tearing their prey, while those which feed on vegetables have cutting and grinding teeth, but not the canine. So the whole digestive apparatus in the carnivora is more simple, and of less extent, than in the herbivorous tribes, while in the former the gastric juice acts more readily upon flesh, and in the latter upon vegetables. The muscular apparatus, also, is developed in greater power in the former than in the latter, especially in the neck and fore paw. Throughout all the classes of animals, those which feed on flesh are armed with poisonous fangs, or talons, or beaks, or other formidable weapons, while the vegetable feeders are usually in a great measure defenceless. In short, in the one class we find a perfect adaptation, in all the organs, for destroying, digesting, and assimilating other animals, and in the other class, an arrangement, equally obvious, for procuring and digesting vegetables. Indeed, you need only show the anatomist the skeleton, or even a very small part of the skeleton, of an unknown animal, to enable him, in most cases, to decide, what is the food of that animal, with almost as much certainty as if he had for years observed its habits. Who can doubt, then, that when a carnivorous animal employs the weapons with which nature has furnished it for the destruction of another animal, in order to satisfy its hunger, that it acts in obedience to a law of its being, originally impressed upon its constitution by the Creator? It is true, that even the flesh-eating animals may be taught for a time to subsist upon vegetable products. But this is unnatural; and such an animal usually pays the price of thus inverting its original instinct, by disease and premature decay. In a state of nature, an animal would starve rather than thus violate its instinctive desires. I will allude to only one other fact, that shows death to be inseparable from organized beings, without a constant miraculous interference, in such a world as ours. Animal organization, in all conceivable circumstances, must be liable to accident, from mere mechanical force, by which life would be destroyed. It may be possible, perhaps, to conceive of a material tenement for the soul, which should be unaffected by all forms of mechanical violence and chemical action; if, for instance, its constitution were analogous to that supposed medium through which light, heat, and electricity, and perhaps gravitation, act. But, surely, our present bodies are far enough removed from such conditions, being of all terrestrial things the most liable to ruin from the causes above mentioned. The conclusions from all these facts and reasonings are, that death is an essential feature of the present system of organized nature; that it must have entered into the plan of creation in the divine mind originally, and consequently must have existed in the world before the apostasy of man. Whether the entire system of death had any connection with that event, or whether there is any thing peculiar in the death endured by the human family, will be questions for examination in a subsequent part of my lecture. In opposition to these conclusions, however, the common theory of death maintains that, when man transgressed, there was an entire change throughout all organic nature; so that animals and plants, which before contained a principle of immortal life, were smitten with the hereditary contagion of disease and death. Those animals which, before that event, were gentle and herbivorous, or frugivorous, suddenly became ferocious or carnivorous. The climate, too, changed, and the sterile soil sent forth the thorn and the thistle, in the place of the rich flowers and fruits of Eden. The great English poet, in his Paradise Lost, has clothed this hypothesis in a most graphic and philosophical dress; and probably his descriptions have done more than the Bible to give it currency. Indeed, could the truth be known, I fancy that, on many points of secondary importance, the current theology of the day has been shaped quite as much by the ingenious machinery of Paradise Lost as by the Scriptures; the theologians having so mixed up the ideas of Milton with those derived from inspiration, that they find it difficult to distinguish between them. In the case under consideration, Milton does not limit the change induced by man's apostasy to sublunary things, but, like a sagacious philosopher, perceives, also, that the heavenly bodies must have been diverted from their paths. "At that tasted fruit, The sun, as from Thyestian banquet, turned His course intended; else-how had the world Inhabited, though sinless, more than now, Avoided pinching cold and scorching heat?" This change of the sun's path, as the poet well knew, could be effected only by some change in the motion of the earth. "Some say he bid the angels turn askance The poles of earth, twice ten degrees and more, From the sun's axle; they with labor pushed Oblique the centric globe." Next we have the effect upon the lower orders of animals described. "Discord first, Daughter of sin, among the irrational Death introduced: through fierce antipathy, Beast now with beast 'gan war, and fowl with fowl, And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving, Devoured each other." The question arises here, whether such views are sustained by the Bible and by science. Few, I presume, would seriously maintain that the act of our first parents, which produced what Dr. Chalmers calls "an unhingement" of the human race, resulted likewise in a change in the motion of the earth and the heavenly bodies; since the Bible so clearly describes the previous ordination of days, years, and seasons, on the fourth day of creation. And is there any thing in the language of the Bible that will justify the opinion that such changes as this theory supposes took place in the productions of the earth, and in the nature of its animals? No anatomist can surely be made to believe that, without a constant miracle, our carnivorous animals can have become herbivorous, without such a change in their organization as must have amounted to a new creation. And such a metamorphosis can hardly have passed unnoticed by the sacred writer. True, only the gramineous and herbaceous substances are in the Bible given to the inferior animals for food, while the fruits are assigned to man. But this passage seems only to be a designation of one part of vegetable productions to men, and another to other animals, and can hardly be supposed to preclude the idea that there might be other tribes requiring animal food. The sentence pronounced upon the serpent for his agency in man's apostasy seems, at first view, favorable to the opinion that animal natures experienced at the same time important changes; for he is supposed to have been deprived of limbs, and condemned henceforth to crawl upon the earth, and to make the dust his food. But is it the most probable interpretation of this passage, which makes the tempter a literal serpent, or only a symbolical one? The naturalist does not surely find that serpents live upon dust, for they all are carnivorous, and they are as perfectly adapted to crawl upon the ground as other animals to different modes of progression; and though _cursed above all cattle_, they are apparently as happy as other animals. Hence the probability is, that an evil spirit is described in Genesis under the name and figure of a serpent. This conclusion is supported by other parts of Scripture, where the tempter is in several places declared to be _the devil_, _the old serpent_, and _the great dragon_. A part of the sentence passed upon man seems, also, at first view, to imply an important change in the vegetable productions of the earth; for the ground is cursed for man's sake: it would henceforth produce to him thorns and thistles, and in the sweat of his brow must he eat of the fruits of it, all the days of his life. Now, will not the condition and character of Adam show how this curse might be fulfilled, without any change in the productions of the soil? The garden of Eden, where man had lived in his innocence, was doubtless some sunny and balmy spot, where the air was delicious, and the earth poured forth her abundant fruits spontaneously; and although he was called to keep and dress that garden, yet, with a contented and holy heart, and with no factitious wants, the work was neither labor nor sorrow. But now he is driven from that garden into regions far less fertile, where the sterile soil can be made to yield its fruits only by the sweat of the brow, and where the thorn and the thistle dispute their right of soil with salutary plants; and in his heart, too, unholy and unsubdued passions have place, which will infuse sorrow into all his labors. As I have remarked in another place, I cannot see why the functions of animal and vegetable organization might not have gone on forever without decay and death, if such had been the Creator's will. In other words, I do not see why the operation of the organs should at length be impeded and cease, as we know they do universally. Hence I can conceive that it might have been otherwise originally; and in the case of man it is possible, as we shall see farther on, that a change of this sort may have taken place at the time of his apostasy. But, after all, it strikes me that the Bible furnishes very clear evidence that the same system of decay and death prevailed before the apostasy which now prevails. The command given, both to animals and to man, to be fruitful and multiply, implies the removal of successive races by death; otherwise the world would ere long be overstocked. A system of death is certainly a necessary counterpart to a system of reproduction; and hence, where we know the one to exist, the presumption is very strong that the other exists also. There is no escape from this inference, except to call in the aid of miraculous power to preserve the proper balance among different races of animals, by preventing their multiplication. Such an interference I am always ready to admit, where the Scriptures assert it. But to imagine a miracle without proof, merely to escape a fair conclusion, is, to say the least, very wretched logic. God never introduces a miracle where he can employ the ordinary agency of nature for accomplishing his purposes. Nor should we resort to one without the express testimony of the Bible, which, on this subject, is our only source of evidence. We have in Scripture the same kind of proof that plants were subject to decay and death, before the fall, as we have in respect to animals. For in the account of the creation of plants on the third day, we find them described as bearing seeds; and does not this clearly imply the same system of reproduction which now exists throughout the vegetable kingdom? In short, an unprejudiced mind, in reading the history of the world in Genesis, before and after the fall, can hardly fail of the conviction, that animals and plants were originally created on the same plan, as to reproduction, decay, and death, which now prevails. Great, indeed, must have been the change at the fall, if, previous to that time, their structure excluded all the organs and means of reproduction; as must have been the case if decay and death were also excluded. And it is strange that the sacred writer should take no notice of such a change. He states the effect of sin upon the three parties directly concerned in it, viz., the tempter, Adam, and Eve; and if a transformation of all vegetable and animal natures, great enough almost to constitute a new creation, did take place, it could hardly have been passed in silence. Even in the case of man, we have no remarkable physical change. The effect seems to have been chiefly confined to his intellectual constitution, where we should expect the effect of sin to be primarily felt. There, indeed, in man's noblest part, has the havoc been the most terrific, and powerfully has its operation there reacted upon the body, so as to make death, in the case of man, the king of terrors. We find, then, insuperable objections to the prevalent notion that an entire revolution took place at the fall in the material world, and especially in organic nature. Those passages of Scripture which, literally interpreted, seem to imply some changes of this sort, are easily understood as vivid figurative representations of the effects of sin upon men, while their literal interpretation would involve us in inextricable difficulties. We rest, therefore, in the conclusion, that, whatever connection there may be between death and the existing system of organic and inorganic nature, no important change took place at the time of man's first transgression; in other Words, the present system is that which was originally determined upon in the divine mind, and not the original plan altered after man's transgression. _The fourth step in the investigation of this subject leads me to attempt to show that, in the present system of the world, death, to the inferior animals, is a benevolent provision, and to man, also, when not aggravated or converted into a curse by his own sin._ In examining this point, as well as many others in natural theology, where the existence of evil is concerned, we must assume that the present system of the world is the best which infinite wisdom and benevolence could devise. And this we may consistently do. For the prominent design throughout nature appears to be beneficial to animal natures, and suffering is only incidental, and happiness, moreover, is superadded to the functions of animals, where it is unnecessary to the perfect performance of the function. We may be certain, therefore, that the Author of such a system can neither be malevolent nor indifferent to the happiness of animals, but must be benevolent; and, therefore, the system must be the best possible, since such a Being could constitute no other. Now, death being an essential feature of such a system, we should expect to find it, as a whole, a benevolent provision. But, in the case of man, the Bible represents it as a penal infliction, and such is its general aspect in the human family. So far as the mere extinction of life is concerned, it is the same in man as in other animals; but sin arms it with a deadly sting, by pointing the offender to a world of retribution, as he sees the menacing dart of the great destroyer aimed at his heart. And, indeed, through all his days, man's power of anticipation keeps death ever before him, as the end of all his present enjoyments, and the commencement, it may be, of unmitigated suffering. But the inferior animals, being incapable of sin, find none of these aggravations to give keenness to their final sufferings. No anticipation of death keeps it ever in view, as a terrific enemy. No guilty conscience points them to a righteous throne of judgment, where they must be arraigned. But when the stroke comes, it falls unexpectedly, and the mere physical suffering is all that gives severity to their dissolution. In the case of man, too, there is the sundering of ties too strong for any thing but death to break;--ties which bind him to kindred, friends, and country; and often this separation constitutes the most painful part of the closing scene. But in the case of animals, we have no reason to suppose these attachments, so far as they exist, to be very strong; nay, in most cases they are certainly very weak. And even did they exist, the brute would not be conscious that death would remove him from the society of his beloved companions. The inferior animals, also, usually die either a violent and sudden death, inflicted by some carnivorous enemy, or in extreme old age, by mere decay of the natural powers, without disease. The violent death can usually have in it little of suffering; and the slow decay still less. But although some men die violent deaths, how few survive to extreme old age, and sink at last almost unconsciously into the grave, because the vital energies are exhausted! Were this the case, the physical terrors of death would be almost taken away, and we should pass as quietly into eternity as a lamp goes out when the oil is exhausted. But in general we see a constitution yet unbroken, struggling with fierce disease, and yielding to its fate only with terrific agonies; because sin has early implanted the seeds of disease in the constitution. Imagine, now, that death should come upon a man in the course of nature; that is, without disease, and with little suffering, and with no painful forebodings of conscience. Suppose, moreover, that the dying individual should feel that the change passing upon him would assuredly introduce him to a new and spiritual body, undecaying, and adapted to the operations of the mind; that it would, in fact, be _the building of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens_; and that the soul, after death, would enter into free and full communion with all that is great and ennobling in the universe; and that joys, inconceivable and eternal, would henceforth be its portion: O, how different would such a death be from what we usually witness! Yet, were men all to accept of the offered ransom from sin and death, and, under the guidance of pure religious principle, were to pay a strict regard to hygienic laws, such would be, for the most part, the character of the death they would experience. The excepted cases would be those of violent and sudden death from accident, or of disease from unavoidable exposure, and they would be comparatively few. So that, in fact, an observance of the laws, physical and moral, which God has ordained, would change almost the entire aspect of death, even in this fallen world. These remarks seem necessary in order to obtain a correct idea of the character of death, when not aggravated by the sins of men. For those aggravations seem superadded, in the case of men, as penal inflictions for their sins; and we ought to leave them out of the account, when we are considering death as a benevolent provision. I do not contend that death, even in its mildest forms, is no evil; nor that the apostasy of man was not the cause of its introduction into the world. These points I shall consider in another place. But I contend that, in the present system of the world, death, when not aggravated by the sins of men, is to be regarded as a benevolent provision, bringing with it more happiness than misery; although, had sin never existed, a system productive of still greater enjoyment might have been adopted in this world. But as the arrangements of the world now are, death affords the following evidences of infinite benevolence and wisdom. In the _first place_, it is a transfer from a lower to a higher state of existence. Let me here be understood distinctly as speaking only of the death of those accountable beings, who, by the transforming power of grace, have become prepared for a higher and perfectly holy state of being. For the death of all others can be looked on only in the light of a terrible penal infliction. But the righteous, when they die,--and all may, if they will, become righteous,--have before them the certain prospect of immortal happiness, such as _eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered the heart of man to conceive_. They enter upon _fulness of joy, and pleasures forevermore_; and therefore death to them is infinite gain. Whether the inferior animals will exist again after death is a more doubtful point. There is certainly nothing in Scripture decisive against their future existence; for the passage in Psalms which says, that _man that is in honor and abideth not is like the brutes that perish_, if understood to mean the annihilation of animals, would prove also the annihilation of wicked men. And while most men of learning and piety have suspended their opinion on the existence of the inferior animals after death, for want of evidence, some have been decided advocates of the future happy existence of all beings, who exhibit a spark of intelligence. Not a few distinguished German theologians and philosophers regard the whole visible creation, both animate and inanimate, as at present in a confined and depressed state, and struggling for freedom. On this principle Tholuck explains that most difficult passage in Romans, which declares _that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now_. He supposes this "bound or fettered state of nature," both animate and inanimate, to have a casual connection with sin, and the death accompanying it among men; and, therefore, when men are freed from sin and death, _the creation itself, also, shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God_. The kingdom of God, according to Tholuck, Martin Luther, and many other distinguished theologians, will not be transferred to heaven at the end of the world, but be established on earth, where all these transformations of the animate and inanimate creation will take place. This exposition surely carries with it a great deal of naturalness and probability; and if it be true, death to the inferior animals must surely be an indication of great benevolence on the part of the Deity, since it introduces them to a higher state of existence. But if it be rejected, still the general principle is eminently applicable to the case of man. In the _second place_, the system of a succession of races of animals on earth, which death alone would render possible, secures a much greater collective amount of happiness than a single race of animals, endowed with earthly immortality. I sustain this position by three arguments. The first is, that young animals enjoy more, in the same period of time, than those more advanced in age. This may result, in part, in the present organization of animals, from the superior health and vigor enjoyed by the young. But it is due, also, in part, and largely, to the novelty of the scenes presented in early life. And so far as it results from the latter cause, it proves that a succession of races would enjoy more than a single race continued indefinitely, because the successive races would always be comparatively young. A single continuous race might, indeed, be supposed always possessed of the unabated vigor and health of youth; but, of necessity, objects must soon lose the charm of novelty, and, therefore, produce less of enjoyment. The second argument is, that a succession of races admits of the contemporaneous existence of a greater number of species than could coexist were none removed by death. If only one undying race occupied the globe, it must subsist exclusively on vegetable food. Whereas much the largest part of the species that now live are carnivorous or omnivorous. All the enjoyment of these flesh-eating animals is, therefore, so much clear gain to the stock of happiness, with the exception of the suffering which death inflicts. Now, but few of the inferior animals perish by disease. Some die by old age, and these suffer almost nothing. But the greater part are suddenly destroyed by the violent assault of the carnivorous races. And as the pangs of death are momentary, and there are no anticipations of its approach, nor sunderings of the ties of affection, nor dread of an hereafter, the suffering endured must be an exceedingly small drawback upon the enjoyment of the whole life. It is far less than it would be, if animals were left to perish by famine, or by slow degrees, from deficient nourishment; so that the existence of the carnivorous races, seeming at first view intended to convert the world into a vast Golgotha, does in fact add greatly to the amount of enjoyment, because it so prodigiously multiplies the number of species of animals, and lessens the sufferings of death. In the third place, death exerts a salutary moral influence upon man, and, as a consequence, swells the amount of his happiness. And although this consideration affects only one species, yet man's position on the scale of being makes his happiness an object of no small importance. The final conclusions at which we arrive, then, are, first, that death is a fixed and universal law of nature, essential to the existence of the present system of the world; and secondly, that, like all other laws of nature, it exhibits marks of benevolence, and wise adaptation on the part of the Author of nature. The question will indeed arise in every reflecting mind, why a Being of infinite power and wisdom could not have secured to his creatures the benefits resulting from a system of death, without the attendant suffering. But this question resolves itself into the inquiry, why evil exists at all; and although, in my own view, it exists most probably as a means of greater happiness to the universe, yet on this point the wisest minds have differed and been baffled, and equally perplexing is it to every form of religion. Hence it is no objection to any views we may adopt, that they leave this question where they found it. _The fifth and last step in our investigation of this subject is to show how science, experience, and revelation may be reconciled on the subject of death._ We have seen that geology is not alone in proving death to be a law of nature, essential to the present system of the world, and, indeed, indicative of divine wisdom and benevolence. For anatomy and physiology, as well as experience, teach us the same truths. And natural theology shows that, if death is a law of organic nature, it must have entered into the plan of the universe in the divine mind, and was not the result of any change of organic nature subsequent to the fall of man. Can these views be reconciled with the declarations of Scripture, which certainly represent death among the human family, if not among the lower animals, to be the consequence of sin? There are three suppositions by which all apparent discrepancy between science and revelation, on this subject, may be removed. I shall present them, with the arguments in their favor, leaving to others to decide which is most reasonable. For they are independent of one another, though not inconsistent; and, therefore, even though different persons should prefer different theories, they need not be regarded as in opposition to one another. The first theory proceeds on the supposition that death is a universal law of organic nature, from which man was exempted so long as he obeyed the law of God. But I will present it in the language of its distinguished author. "In the state of pristine purity," says Dr. J. Pye Smith, "the bodily constitution of man was exempted from the law of progress towards dissolution, which belonged to the inferior animals. It must have been maintained in that distinguished peculiarity by means to us unknown; and it would seem probable that, had not man fallen by his transgression, he, and each of his posterity, would, after faithfully sustaining an individual probation, have passed through a change without dying, and have been exalted to a more perfect state of existence."--_Scrip. and Geol._ 4th ed. p. 208. According to this theory of Dr. Smith, man saw all other organic beings around him subject to decay and death, while he, as a special favor, remained unaffected by the general law. The penalty of disobedience was, that he would forfeit this enviable distinction, and be subjected to death more revolting than the brutes. The reward of obedience was a continued immunity from evil, and a final translation, without suffering, to a more exalted condition. And certainly the nature of the case furnishes a strong presumptive argument to show that man did thus stand exempted from the decay and death which reigned all around him. If not, what weight or meaning would there be in the penalty? If he had not seen death in other animals, how could he have any idea of the nature of the threatening? And we may be sure that God never promulgates a penalty without affording his subjects the means of comprehending it. I have already intimated that I could hardly see why there exists in all organic natures a tendency to decay and death, except in the will of the Creator. May not that tendency result, like the varieties among men, from some slightly modifying cause implanted by the Deity in the nature of the animal or plant? And if so, might not an opposite tendency be imparted to one or more species, so that the decay and death of the one, and the continued existence of the other, might be equally well explained on physiological principles? If this suggestion be admitted, it would not be necessary to resort to any supernatural or miraculous agency to show how sinless man in paradise might have stood unaffected by decay, the common lot of all other races. It must be confessed, however, that it is not as easy to see how, by any natural law, he could have been proof against mechanical violence and chemical agencies; there we must admit miraculous protection, or a self-restoring power more wonderful than that possessed by the polypi. These views receive strong confirmation from the history of the tree of life, that grew in the garden of Eden. The very name implies that it was intended to give or preserve life. That it had in it a power to preserve life is evident from the sentence pronounced on man. _And the Lord God saith, Behold, the man hath become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he should put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and live forever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden._ Now, it appears to me to be in perfect harmony with the principles of physiology to suppose that there might be a virtue in the tree of life--either in its fruit or some other part--to arrest that tendency to decay and dissolution which we now find in all animal bodies. It does seem that it would require only some slight modification of the present functions of the human frame to keep the wheels of life in motion indefinitely. When in Eden, man had access to this sure defence against disease. But after he had sinned, he must forfeit this privilege, and, like the plants and inferior animals, submit to the universal law of dissolution. Surely, of all the expositions that have been given of the meaning of this passage, this is the most rational, and it does throw an air of great plausibility over Dr. Smith's views. It will occur to every reflecting mind that we have in Scripture a few interesting examples of that change, without dying, from the present to a higher state of being, which the theory of Dr. Smith supposes would have been the happy lot of all mankind had they not sinned. _By faith Enoch was translated, that he should not see death. He walked with God, and he was not; for God took him._ Gladly would philosophys here interpose a thousand questions as to the manner in which this wonderful change took place; but the Scriptures are silent. It was enough for the heart of piety that God was the author of the change. And so, in the case of Elijah, we have the sublimely simple description only--_And it came to pass, as they still went on and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven._ Except the transfiguration of Christ, which appears to have been of an analogous character, these are all the actual examples of translation on record. But the apostle declares that, in the closing scene of this world's history, this same change shall pass upon multitudes. _Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed._ Abundant evidence is, therefore, before us, that the great change which death now causes us to pass through with fear and dread, might as easily have been, for the whole human family, a transition delightful in anticipation and joyful in experience. The second theory which will reconcile science and revelation on the subject of death, is one long since illustrated by Jeremy Taylor. And since he could have had no reference to geology in proposing it, because geology did not exist in his day, we may be sure, either that he learnt it from the Bible, or that other branches of knowledge teach the existence of death as a general law of nature, as well as geology. "That death, therefore," says Taylor, "which God threatened to Adam, and which passed upon his posterity, is not the going out of this world, but the manner of going. If he had staid in innocence, he should have gone placidly and fairly, without vexatious and afflictive circumstances; he should not have died by sickness, defect, misfortune, or unwillingness. But when he fell, then he began to die; the same day, (God said,) and that must needs be true; and, therefore, it must mean upon that very day he fell into an evil and dangerous condition, a state of change and affliction; then death began; that is, man began to die by a natural diminution, and aptness to disease and misery. Change or separation of soul and body is but accidental to death; death may be with or without either; but the formality, the curse, and the sting,--that is, misery, sorrow, fear, diminution, defect, anguish, dishonor, and whatsoever is miserable and afflictive in nature,--that is death. Death is not an action, but a whole state and condition; and this was first brought in upon us by the offence of one man." In more recent times, the essential features of these views of Taylor have been adopted by the ablest commentators and theologians, and sustained by an appeal to Scripture.[9] The position which they take is, that the death threatened as the penalty of disobedience has a more extended meaning than physical death. It is a generic term, including all penal evils; so that when death is spoken of as the penalty of sin, we may substitute the word _curse_, _wrath_, _destruction_, and the like. Thus, in Gen. ii. 17, we might read, _In the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely be cursed_: and in Rom. v. 12, _By one man sin entered into the world, and the curse by sin_, &c. In his commentary on this passage, Professor Stuart says, "I see no _philological_ escape from the conclusion that death, in the sense of _penalty for sin in its full measure_, must be regarded as the meaning of the writer here." The same may be said of many other passages of Scripture, where the term _death_ is used. According to this exposition, the death threatened as the penalty of transgression embraces all the evils we suffer in this life and in eternity; among which the dissolution of the body is not one of the worst. Indeed, some writers will not admit that this was included at all in the penalty. Such, of course, find no difficulty in the geological statement that literal death preceded man's existence. But from the declaration in 1 Cor. xv. 22, _As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive_, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion, that the death of the body was brought in upon the race by Adam's transgression. According to Taylor's view, however, we might reasonably suppose that what constituted the death threatened to Adam was not the going out of the world, but the manner of going, and that, had he continued holy, a change of worlds might have taken place, but it would not have been death. Now, there are some facts, both in experience and revelation, that give to these views an air of probability. One is, the mild character of death in many cases, when attended by only a few of the circumstances above enumerated, as constituting its essence. I believe that experience sustains the conclusion already drawn as to the inferior animals, when not aggravated by human cruelty. Pain is about the only circumstance that gives it the character of severity; and this is usually short, and not anticipated. Nor can it be doubted, as a general fact, that, as we descend along the scale of animals, we find the sensibility to suffering diminish. But in the human family we find examples still more to the point. In all those cases in which there is little or no disease, and a man in venerable old age feels the powers of life gradually give way, and the functions are feebly performed, until the heart at length ceases to beat, and the lungs to heave, death is merely the quiet and unconscious termination of the scene, so far as the physical nature is concerned. The brain partakes of the gradual decay, and thus the man is scarcely conscious of the failure of his powers, because his sensibilities are so blunted; and therefore, apart from sin, his mind feels little of the anguish of dissolution, and he quietly resigns himself into the arms of death,-- "As sweetly as a child, Whom neither thought disturbs, nor care encumbers, Tired with long play, at close of summer's day, Lies down and slumbers." If now, in addition to this physical preparation for his departure, the man possesses a deep consciousness of forgiven sin, and a firm hope of future and eternal joy, this change, which we call death, becomes only a joyful translation from earth to heaven; and though the man passes from our view,-- "He sets, As sets the morning star, which goes not down Behind the darkened west, nor hides obscured Among the tempests of the sky, but melts away Into the light of heaven." Nay, when such faith and hope form an anchor to the soul, it is not necessary that the physical preparation, which I have described, should exist. The poor body may be torn by fierce disease, nay, by the infernal cruelties of martyrdom, and yet faith can rise--often has risen--over the pains of nature, in joyful triumph; and in the midst of the tempest, with her anchor fastened to the eternal Rock, she can exclaim, _O death, where is thy sting! O grave, where is thy victory! Thanks be to God, which giveth me the victory through my Lord Jesus Christ._ Surely such a dissolution as this cannot mean the death mentioned in the primeval curse. Look now at the contrast. Behold a man writhing in the fangs of unrelenting disease, and feeling at the same time the scorpion sting of a guilty conscience. His present suffering is terrible, but that in prospect is more so; yet he cannot bribe the king of terrors to delay the fatal stroke. "The foe, Like a stanch murderer, steady to his purpose, Urges the soul through every nook and lane of life." It were enough for an unruffled mind to bear the bodily anguish of that dying hour. But the unpardoned sins of a whole life, and the awful retributions of a whole eternity, come crowding into that point of time; and no human fortitude can stand under the crushing load. This, this is emphatically death; the genuine fruit of sin, and therefore in correspondence with the original threatening. If we turn now to the Scriptures, we shall find some passages in striking agreement with the opinion that the death threatened to man was not the mere dissolution of the body and soul; not a mere going out of the world, but the manner of going. This is, indeed, made exceedingly probable by the facts already stated respecting the translation of Enoch and Elijah, and those alive at the coming of Christ. For the sacred writers do not call this death, although it be a removal out of the world, and a transformation of the natural into the spiritual body. Hence, upon the material part of men, the same effects were produced as result from ordinary death, and the subsequent resurrection. If we recur to the original threatening of death as the consequence of sin, we shall find a peculiarity in the form of expression, which our English translators have rendered by the phrase _thou shalt surely die_; but literally it should be, _dying thou shalt die_. This mode of expression is indeed very common in the Hebrew language; but it certainly was meant to indicate an intensity in the meaning, as in the phrase _blessing I will bless thee, and multiplying I will multiply thee_; that is, I will greatly multiply thee. Must it not imply, in the case under consideration, at least that the death which would be the consequence of transgression, would possess an aggravated character? May it not imply as much as Taylor's theory supposes? Might it not be intended to teach Adam that, when he died, his death should not be simply the dissolution of the animal fabric, and the loss of animal life, as he witnessed it in the inferior creatures around him; but a change far more agonizing, in which the mental suffering should so much outweigh the corporeal as to constitute, in fact, its essence? I do not assert that this passage has such an extended meaning, but I suggest it. And I confess that I do not see why its peculiarity of form is understood in our common translation to imply certainty rather than intensity. There is another part of the threatening that deserves consideration. It says, that man should not only die, but die the very day of the offence. Now, if by death we understood merely a removal out of the world, or a separation of soul and body, the threatening was not executed after the forbidden fruit was tasted. But if it meant also, and chiefly, a state of sorrow, pain, and suffering, a liability to disease and fatal accident, the goadings of a guilty conscience, and the consequent fear of punishment beyond the grave, then death began on the very day when man sinned, and the dissolution of the soul and body was but the closing scene of the tragedy. The beautiful passage in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, already quoted, where the Christian, in view of death, exultingly exclaims, _O death, where is thy sting! O grave, where is thy victory!_ will doubtless occur to all who hear me, in this connection. Here the sting of death is expressly declared to be sin, and that the pardoned Christian obtains the victory over it. To him all that renders this king of terrors formidable is gone. Its physical sufferings may indeed be left, but these are hardly worth naming, when that which constitutes the sting of this great enemy--unpardoned guilt--is taken away. Little more than his harmless shadow is left. Worlds, indeed, are to be exchanged, and so they must have been if Adam had never been driven from paradise. The eyes, too, must close on beloved friends; but how soon to open them upon the bright glories of heaven! In short, the strong impression of this passage upon the mind is, that the essential thing in death is unpardoned sin; and therefore the death threatened to Adam may have been only the terrible aggravations of a departure out of this world, which have followed in the train of transgression. Another striking passage, bearing upon the same point, is the declaration of Paul, that _Jesus Christ hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel_. The apostle does not surely mean that Christians are freed from what is commonly called death, since universal experience shows that animal life in them is as sure to be extinguished, and the soul to be separated from the body, as in others. But so different is death now, since Christ has brought to light a future and an immortal life, and by the sacrifice of himself shown how the heart may be reconciled to God, and sin forgiven, and faith inspired, that, in fact, while the shadow of death still occupies the passage to eternity, its substance is gone. That death, which sin introduced, Christ has abolished, because, by his sacrifice and his grace, he has conquered sin. Upon the whole, though we may not be convinced that either of the theories that have been explained is directly taught in the Scriptures, or can be shown to be infallibly true, yet they are sustained by probable evidence enough to remove the apprehension that there is any real discrepancy between geology and revelation on the subject of death. Between these theories there is but a slight difference. They are in fact but modifications of the same general principles; and I say it would be more philosophical to admit the truth of either of them, than a disagreement between science and Scripture, since the truth of both geology and revelation is sustained by such a mass of independent evidence. An objection, however, may be stated against both of these theories, on the ground that they seem to imply that death would have existed in the world, irrespective of the sin of man, and therefore they lessen our sense of the evil of sin. It may be doubted, I think, whether these theories do necessarily imply that there was no connection between the sin of man and the introduction of death into the world. But, admitting that they do, is it certain that inadequate views of sin are the result? For poetic effect, we admire the sublime sentimentalism of Milton:-- "Earth felt the wound; and Nature, from her seat, Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost." But, after all, the deepest impression we get of the evil of sin is derived from contemplating its effects upon man, and especially the immortal mind. Witness its lofty powers bowed down in ignominious servitude to base corporeal appetites and furious and debasing passions. See how the understanding is darkened, the will perverted, and the heart alienated from all that is holy. See reason and conscience dethroned, and selfishness reigning in gloomy and undisputed tyranny over the immortal mind, while appetite and passion have become its obsequious panders. See how the affections turn away with loathing from God, and what a wall of separation has sprung up between man and his Maker; how deeply and universally he has revolted from his rightful sovereign, and has chosen other gods to rule over him. Consider, too, what havoc has been made in the body, that curious and wonderful workmanship of the Almighty; how the unbridled appetites have sown the seeds of disease therein, and how pain, languor, and decay assail the constitution as soon as we begin to live, and cease not their attacks till they triumph over the citadel of life. Consult the history of the world, and what a lazar-house and a Golgotha has it been! What land has not been drenched in human blood, poured out in ferocious war! What oceans of tears has the thirsty soil drank up! What breeze has ever blown over the land which has not been loaded with sighs, and groans, and the story of wrong and oppression, of treachery and murder, of suicide and assassination, of blasted hopes and despairing hearts! These, therefore, are the genuine fruits of sin. This, this is death. And, need I add that these are but the precursors of the second death? The third theory respecting death takes a more comprehensive view of the subject, and traces its origin to the divine plan of the creation. In creating this world, God did not act without a plan previously determined upon in all its details. Of course, man's character and condition formed prominent items in that plan. His apostasy, too, however some would hesitate to regard it as predetermined, all will allow to have been foreknown. Now, I maintain that God, in the beginning, adapted every other being and event in the world to man's character and condition, so that there should be entire harmony in its system. And since, either in the divine appointment, or in the nature of things, there is an inseparable connection between sin and death, the latter must constitute a feature of the system of the world, because a free agent would introduce the former. Death would ultimately exist in the world, and, therefore, all creatures placed in such a world must be made mortal, at whatever period created. For mortal and immortal natures could not exist in the same natural constitution, nor could a condition adapted to undying creatures be changed into a state of decay and death without an entirely new creation. Death, therefore, entered into the original plan of the world in the divine mind, and was endured by the animals and plants that lived anterior to man. Yet, as the constitution of the world is, doubtless, very different from what it would have been if sin had not existed in it, and as man alone was capable of sin, it is proper to regard man's transgression as the occasion of all the suffering and death that existed on the globe since its creation. It will probably be objected to this theory, that it is unjust to make animals suffer for man's apostasy, especially before it took place. I do not see why such suffering is any more unjust before than after man's transgression; and we know that they do now suffer in consequence of his sin. But this suffering is not to be regarded in the light of punishment; and if it can only be proved that benevolence predominates in the condition of animals, notwithstanding their sufferings, divine justice and benevolence are vindicated; and can there be any doubt that such is the fact? Death is not necessarily an evil to any animals. It may be a great blessing, by removing them to a higher state of existence. In the case of the inferior animals, it is but a small drawback upon the pleasure of life, even though they do not exist hereafter. We have endeavored to show that even the existence of carnivorous races is a benevolent provision. That animals are placed in an inferior condition, in consequence of man's apostasy, is no more cause of complaint than that man is made a little lower than the angels. Another objection to these views is, that it makes the effect precede the cause; for it-represents the pre-Adamic animals as dying in consequence of man's transgression. I do not maintain that the death of animals, before or after Adam, was the direct and natural consequence of his transgression. Nay, I am endeavoring to show directly the contrary. But, then, the certainty of man's apostasy might have been the grand reason in the divine mind for giving to the world its present constitution, and subjecting animals to death. Not that God altered his plan upon a prospective knowledge that man would sin; but he made this plan originally, that is from eternity, with that event in view, and he made it different from what it would have been, if such an event had not been certain. If this be true, then was there a connection between man's sin and the death that reigned before his existence; though, in strict accuracy of speech, one can hardly be called the cause of the other. And yet it was, as I maintain, occasioned by man's sin, and shows the wide-spread influence of that occurrence, even more strikingly than the ordinary theory of death. A third objection to this theory is, that it represents God as putting man in a place of punishment before he had sinned; or, at least, in a state where death was the universal law, and where he must die, though he should keep the law of God. There are three suppositions, either of which will meet this difficulty. We may suppose, with Jeremy Taylor, that the death threatened to Adam consisted, not in going out of the world, but in the manner of going. If he had not sinned, the exchange of worlds would have been without fear or suffering, and an object of desire rather than aversion. Christ has not secured to the believer the privilege of an earthly immortality, but has taken away from a removal out of the world all that constitutes death. Or we may suppose, with Dr. J. Pye Smith, that, while man should continue to keep the divine law, he would be secured from that tendency to decay and dissolution, which was the common lot of all other creatures, until the time should come for his removal, without suffering or dread, to a higher state of existence. And that a means of immunity from death existed in the garden of Eden we learn from the Scriptures. For there stood the tree of life, whose fruit had the power to make man live forever, and, therefore, he must be banished from the spot where it grew. Or, finally, we may suppose that God fitted up for man some balmy spot, where neither decay nor death could enter, and where every thing was adapted for a being of perfect holiness and happiness. His privilege was to dwell there, so long as he could preserve his innocence, but no longer. And surely this supposition seems to accord with the description of the garden of Eden, man's first dwelling-place. There every thing seems to have been adapted to his happiness; but sin drove him out among the thorns and thistles, and a cherubim and a flaming sword forbade his return to the tree of life. Either of these suppositions will meet the difficulty suggested by the objection; or they may all be combined consistently. Let us now look at some of the advantages of the third theory above advanced. In the first place, it satisfactorily harmonizes revelation with geology, physiology, and experience, on the subject of death. It agrees with physiology and experience in representing death to be a law of organic being on the globe. Yet it accords with revelation, in showing how this law may be a result of man's apostasy; and with geology, also, in showing how death might have reigned over animals and plants before man's existence. To remove so many apparent discrepancies is surely a presumption in favor of any theory. In the second place, the fundamental principle of this theory is also a fundamental principle of natural and revealed theology, viz., that all events in this world entered originally into the plan or purpose of the Deity. To suppose that God made the world without a plan previously determined upon, is to make him less wise than a human architect, who would be charged with great folly to attempt building even a house without a plan. And to suppose that plan not to extend to every event, is to rob God of his infinite attributes. In the third place, this theory falls in with the common interpretation of Scripture, which refers the whole system of suffering, decay, and death in this world to man's apostasy. And although the general reception of any exegesis of Scripture does not prove it to be correct, it is certainly gratifying when a thorough examination proves the obvious sense of a passage to be the true one. For to disturb the popular interpretation is, with many, equivalent to a denial of Scripture. In the fourth place, this theory shows us the infinite skill and benevolence of Jehovah in educing good from evil. The free agency of man was an object in the highest degree desirable. Yet such a character made him liable to fall; and God knew that he would fall. To human sagacity that act would seem to seal up his fate forever. But infinite wisdom saw that the case was not hopeless. It placed him in a state of temporal suffering and temporal death, that he might still have a chance of escaping eternal suffering and eternal death. The discipline of such a world was eminently adapted to restore his lost purity, and death was probably the only means by which a fallen being could pass to a higher state of existence. That discipline, indeed, if rightly improved, would probably fit him for a higher degree of holiness and happiness than if he had never sinned; so as to make true the paradoxical sentiment of the poet,-- "Death gives us more than was in Eden lost." Misimproved, this discipline would result in an infinite loss, far greater than if man never passed through it. But this is all the fault of man; while all the benefit of a state of probation is the result of God's infinite wisdom and benevolence. In the fifth place, this theory relieves us from the absurdity of supposing that God was compelled to alter the plan of creation after man's apostasy. The common theory does convey an idea not much different from this. It makes the impression that God was disappointed when man sinned, and being thereby thwarted in his original purpose, he did the best he could by changing his plan, just as men do when some unexpected occurrence interferes with their short-sighted contrivances. Now, such an anthropomorphic view of God is inexcusable in the nineteenth century. It was necessary to use such representations in the early ages of the world, when pure spiritual ideas were unknown; and hence the Bible describes God as repenting and grieved that he had made man. But with the light of the New Testament and of modern science, we ought to be able to enucleate the true spiritual idea from such descriptions. The theory under consideration does not reduce God to any after-thought expedients, but makes provision for every occurrence in his original plan; and, of course, shows that every event takes place as he would have it, when viewed in its relations to the great system of the universe. In the sixth place, this theory sheds some light upon the important question, why God permitted the introduction of death into the world. It is difficult for some persons to conceive why God, when he foresaw Adam's apostasy, did not change his plan of creation, and exclude so terrible an evil as death. But according to this theory, he permitted it, because it was a necessary part of a great system of restoration, by which the human race might, if not recreant to their true interests, be restored to more than their primeval blessedness. It was not introduced as a mere punishment, but as a necessary means of raising a fallen being into a higher state of life and blessedness; or, if he perversely spurned the offered boon, of sinking him down to the deeper wretchedness which is the just consequence of unrepented sin, without even the sympathy of any part of the created universe. Finally. This subject throws some light upon that strange mixture of good and evil, which exists in the present world. We have seen, indeed, that benevolence decidedly predominates in all the arrangements of nature; and we are called upon continually to admire the adaptation of external nature to the human constitution. A large portion of our sufferings here may also be imputed to our own sins, or the sins of others; and these we cannot charge upon God. But, after all, it seems difficult to conceive how even a sinless man could escape a large amount of suffering here; enough, indeed, to make him often sigh for deliverance and for a better state. How many sources of sufferings there are in unhealthy climates, mechanical violence, and chemical agents; in a sterile soil, in the excessive heats of the tropical regions, and extreme cold of high latitudes; in the encroachments and ferocity of the inferior animals; in poisons, mineral, vegetable, and animal; in food unfitted to the digestive and assimilating organs; in the damps and miasms of night; and in the frequent necessity for over-exertion of body and mind! And then, how many hinderances to the exercise of the mental powers, in all the causes that have been mentioned! and how does the soul feel that she is imprisoned in flesh and blood, and her energies cramped, and her vision clouded, by a gross corporeal medium! And thus it is, to a great extent, with all nature, especially animal nature; and I cannot but believe, as already intimated, that Paul had these very things in mind when he said, _The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now, and waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God_; that is, for emancipation from its present depressed and fettered condition. In short, while there is so much in this world to call forth our admiration and gratitude to God, there is enough to make us feel, also, that it is a fallen condition. It is not such a world as infinite benevolence would provide for perfectly holy beings, whom he desired to make perfectly happy, but rather such a world as is adapted for a condition of trial and preparation for a higher state, when both mind and body would be delivered from the fetters that now cramp their exercise. Now, the theory which I advocate asserts that this peculiar condition of the world resulted from the divine determination, upon a prospective view of man's transgression. It may, therefore, be properly regarded as occasioned by man's transgression, but not in the common meaning attached to that phrase, which is, that, before man's apostasy, the constitution of the world was different from what it now is, and death did not exist. This theory supposes God to have devised the present peculiar mixed condition of the world, as to good and evil, in eternity, in order to give man an opportunity to rescue himself from the penalty and misery of sin; and in order to introduce those who should do this into a higher state of existence. The plan, therefore, is founded in infinite wisdom and benevolence, while it brings out man's guilt, and the evil of sin, in appalling distinctness and magnitude. But, after all, how little idea would a man have of the entire plot of a play, who had heard only a part of the first act! How little could he judge of the bearing of the first scene upon the final development! Yet we are now only in the first act of the great drama of human existence. Death shows us that we shall ere long be introduced into a second act, and affords a presumption that other acts--it may be in an endless series--will succeed, before the whole plot shall have passed before us; and not till then can we be certain what are all the objects to be accomplished by the introduction of sin and death into our world. And if thus early we can catch glimpses of great benefit to result from these evils, what full conviction, that infinite benevolence has planned and consummated the whole, will be forced upon the mind, when the vast panorama of God's dispensations shall lie spread out in the memory! For that time shall Faith wait, in confident hope that all her doubts and darkness shall be converted into noonday brightness. LECTURE IV. THE NOACHIAN DELUGE COMPARED WITH THE GEOLOGICAL DELUGES. The history of opinions respecting the deluge of Noah is one of the most curious and instructive in the annals of man. In this field, Christians have often broken lances with infidels, and also with one another. The unbeliever has confidently maintained that the Bible history of the deluge is at war with the facts and reasonings of science. Equally confident has been the believer that nature bears strong testimony to its occurrence. Some Christians, however, have asserted, with the infidel, that no trace remains on the face of nature of such an event. And as this is a subject which men are apt to suppose themselves masters of, when they have only skimmed the surface, the contest between these different parties has been severe and protracted. Almost every geological change which the earth has undergone, from its centre to its circumference, has, at one time or another, been ascribed to this deluge. And so plain has this seemed to those who had only a partial view of the facts, that those who doubted it were often denounced as enemies of revelation. But most of these opinions and this dogmatism are now abandoned, because both Nature and Scripture are better understood. And among well-informed geologists, at least, the opinion is almost universal, that there are no facts in their science which can be clearly referred to the Noachian deluge; that is, no traces in nature of that event; and on the other hand, that there is nothing in the Mosaic account of the deluge which would necessarily lead is to expect permanent marks of such a catastrophe within or upon the earth. If such be the case, you will doubtless inquire, what connection there is between geology and the revealed history of the deluge, and why the subject should be introduced into this series of lectures. I reply, that so recently have correct views been entertained on this subject, and so little understood are they; that they need to be defined and explained. And if the distribution of animals and plants on the globe come within the province of geology, then this science has a very important point of connection with the history of the deluge, as will appear in the sequel. And finally, the history of opinions on this subject is full of instruction to those who undertake to reason on the connection between science and religion. Obviously, then, my first object should be to give a brief history of the views that have been entertained respecting the deluge of Noah, so far as they have been supposed to have any connection with geology. It is well known, that in the written and unwritten traditions of almost every nation and tribe under heaven, the story of a general deluge has been prominent; and probably, in all these cases, some attempt has been made to explain the manner in which the waters were brought over the land. But most of these reasonings, especially in ancient times, are too absurd to deserve even to be recited. Indeed, it is not till the beginning of the sixteenth century, that we find any discussions on the subject worthy of notice. At that time, some excavations at Verona, in Italy, brought to light many fossil shells, and awakened a question as to their origin. Some maintained that they were only _simulacra_, or resemblances to animals, but never had a real existence. They were supposed to have been produced by a certain "_materia pinguis_," or "fatty matter," existing in the earth. Others maintained that they were deposited by the deluge of Noah. Such, indeed, was the general opinion; but Fracastoro and a few others maintained that they were once real animals, and could not have been brought into their present condition by the last deluge. For more than three hundred years have these questions been more or less discussed; and though decided many years ago by all geologists, not a few intelligent men still maintain, that petrified shells are mere abortive resemblances of real beings, or that they were deposited by the deluge. The advocates of the diluvial origin of petrifactions soon found themselves hard pressed with the question, how these relics could be scattered through strata many thousand feet thick, by one transient flood. They, therefore, came to the conclusion, in the words of Woodward, a distinguished cosmogonist of the eighteenth century, that the "whole terrestrial globe was taken to pieces and dissolved at the flood, and the strata settled down from this promiscuous mass, as any earthy sediment from a fluid." During that century, many works appeared upon cosmogony, defending similar views, by such men as Burnet, Scheuchzer, and Catcott. Some of these works exhibited no little ability, mixed, however, with hypotheses so extravagant that they have ever since been the butt of ridicule. The very title of Burnet's work cannot but provoke a smile. It is called "The Sacred Theory of the Earth, containing an Account of the Original of the Earth, and of all the general Changes it bath already undergone, or is to undergo, till the Consummation of all Things." He maintained that the primitive earth was only "an orbicular crust, smooth, regular, and uniform, without mountains and without a sea." This crust rested on the surface of a watery abyss, and, being heated by the sun, became chinky; and in consequence of the rarefaction of the included vapors, it burst asunder, and fell down into the waters, and so was comminuted and dissolved, while the inhabitants perished. Catcott's work was confined exclusively to the deluge, and exhibited a good deal of ability. He endeavored to show, that this dissolution of the earth by the deluge was taught in the Scriptures, and his reasoning on that point is a fine example of the state of biblical interpretation in his day. "As there are other texts," says he, "which mention the dissolution of the earth, it may be proper to cite them. Ps. xlvi. 2. _God is our refuge; therefore will we not fear though the earth be removed_, [be changed, be quite altered, as it was at the deluge.] _God uttered his voice, the earth melted_, [flowed, dissolved to atoms.] Again, Job xxviii. 9. _He sent his hand_ [the expansion, his instrument, or the agent by which he worked] _against the rock, he overturned the mountains by the roots, he caused the rivers to burst forth from between the rocks_, [or broke open the fountains of the abyss.] _His eye_ [symbolically placed for light] _saw_ [passed through, or between] _every minute thing_, [every-atom, and so dissolved the whole.] _He_ [at last] _bound up the waters from weeping_, [i. e. from pressing through the shell of the earth, as tears make their way through the orb of the eye; or, as it is related, (Gen. viii. 2,) _He stopped the fountains of the abyss and the windows of heaven_,] _and brought out the light from its hiding-place_, [i. e., from the inward parts of the earth, from between every atom where it lay hid, and kept each atom separate from the other, and so the whole in a state of dissolution; his bringing out those parts of the light which caused the dissolution would of course permit the agents to act in their usual way, and so reform the earth."]--_Treatise on the Deluge_, p. 43, (London, 1761.) We can hardly believe at the present day, that a logical and scientific mind, like that of Catcott, could satisfy itself, by such a dreamy exegesis, that the Scriptures teach the earth's dissolution at the deluge; especially when they so distinctly describe the waters of the deluge, as first rising over the land, and then sinking back to their original position. Still more strange is it how Burnet could have thought it consistent with Scripture to suppose the earth, before the flood, "to have been covered with an orbicular crust, smooth, regular, and uniform, without mountains and without a sea," when the Bible so distinctly states, as the work of the third day, that _the waters under the heavens were gathered together unto one place, and the dry land appeared_; and that _God called the dry land earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called seas_; and further, that, by the deluge, _all the high hills were covered_. Yet these men doubtless supposed that, by the views which they advocated, they were defending the Holy Scriptures. Nay, their views were long regarded as exclusively the orthodox views, and opposition to them was considered, for one or two centuries, as virtual opposition to the Bible. Truly, this, in biblical interpretation, was straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. It is quite convenient to explain such anomalies in human belief, by referring them to the spirit of the age, or to the want of the light of modern science. But in the present case, we cannot thus easily dispose of the difficulty. For in our own day, we have seen these same absurdities of opinion maintained by a really scientific man, selected to write one of the Bridgewater Treatises, as one of the most learned men in Great Britain. I refer to Rev. William Kirby, evidently a thorough entomologist and a sincere Christian. But he adopts the opinion, not only that there exists a subterranean abyss of waters, but a subterranean metropolis of animals, where the huge leviathians, the gigantic saurians, dug out of the rocks by the geologist, still survive; and this he endeavors to prove from the Bible. For this purpose he quotes the passage in Psalms, _though thou hast sore broken us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death_. His exposition of this text is much in the style of that already given from Catcott. Following that writer and Hutchinson, he endeavors to show, by a still more fanciful interpretation, that the phrase "windows of heaven," in Genesis, means cracks and volcanic rents in the earth, through which air and water rushed inwardly and outwardly with such violence as to tear the crust to pieces. This was the effect of the increasing waters of the deluge; the bringing together of these comminuted particles, so as to form the present strata, was the work of the subsiding waters. These views will seem very strange to those not familiar with the history of geology. But we shall find their origin, if a few facts be stated respecting what has been called the physico-theological school of writers, that originated with one Hutchinson, in the beginning of the eighteenth century. He was a disciple of the distinguished cosmogonist Woodward. But he attacked the views of his master, as well as those of Sir Isaac Newton on gravitation, in a work which he published in twelve octavo volumes, entitled "_Moses's Principia_." He there maintains that the Scriptures, when rightly understood, contain a complete system of natural philosophy. This dogma, advocated by Hutchinson with the most intolerant spirit, constitutes the leading peculiarity of the physico-theological school, and has been very widely adopted, and has exerted a most pernicious influence both upon religion and upon science. It is painful, therefore, to find so learned and excellent a man as Mr. Kirby so deeply imbued with it, so long after its absurdity has been shown again and again. It is devoutly to be wished that the cabalistic dreams of Hutchinsonianism are not to be extensively revived in our day. And, indeed, such is the advanced state of hermeneutical knowledge, that we have little reason to fear it. Nevertheless, its leaven is yet by no means thoroughly purged out from the literary community. It was one of the settled principles of the physico-theological school, that, since the creation, the earth has undergone no important change beneath the surface, except at the deluge, because it was supposed that the Bible mentions no other event that could produce any important change. Hence all marks of changes in the rocks since their original creation must be referred to the deluge. And especially when it was found that most of the petrifactions in the rocks were of marine origin, not only were they supposed to be the result of the deluge, but a most conclusive proof of that event. And this opinion is even yet very widely received by the Christian world. The argument in its favor, when stated in a popular manner to those not familiar with geology, is indeed quite imposing. For if the land, almost every where, even to the tops of some of its highest mountains, abounds in sea shells, this is just what we should expect, if the sea flowed over those mountains at the deluge. But the moment we come to examine the details respecting marine petrifactions, we see that nothing can be more absurd than to suppose them the result of a transient deluge. Yet this view is maintained in nearly all the popular commentaries of the present day upon Genesis, and in many respectable periodicals. It is taught, therefore, in the Sabbath school and in the family; and the child, as he grows up, is shocked to find the geologist assailing it; and when he finds it false, he is in danger of becoming jealous of the other evidences of Christianity which he has been taught. Another branch of the modern physico-theological school, embracing men who have read too much on the subject of geology to be able to believe in the dissolution of the globe by the deluge, have adopted a more plausible hypothesis. They suppose that between the creation and the deluge, or in sixteen hundred and fifty-six years, according to the received chronology, all the present fossiliferous rocks of our continents, more than six miles in thickness, were deposited at the bottom of the ocean. By that event, they were raised from beneath the waters, and the continents previously existing sunk down and disappeared; so that the land now inhabited was formerly the ocean's bed. To prove that such a change took place at the deluge, Granville Penn and Fairholme quote the declaration of God, in Genesis, respecting the flood--_I will destroy them_, (i. e., men,) _and the earth, or with the earth_; also the statement of Peter--_The world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished_. The terms _earth_ and _world_ may mean either the solid globe, or the animals and plants upon it. If in these passages they have the latter meaning, then they simply teach that the deluge destroyed the natural life of organic beings. If they have the former meaning, then the inquiry arises, What are we to understand by the destruction here described? It may mean annihilation, or it may imply ruin in some respects. That annihilation did not result from the deluge is evident from the case of men, who suffered only temporal death, and even this was not universal; and we know, also, that the matter of the earth did not perish. We must resort, therefore, to the sacred history to learn how far the destruction extended That history seems very plain. There was a rain of forty days, and the fountains of the great deep were broken up; that is, as Professor Stuart happily expresses it, "The ocean overflowed while the rain descended in vast quantities." The waters gradually rose over the dry land, and after a hundred and fifty days, began to subside, and at the end of a year and a few days they were gone. Such an overflowing could not take place without producing the almost entire destruction of organic life, and making extensive havoc with the soil, especially as a wind assisted in driving these waters from the land. But there is nothing in the narrative that would lead us to suppose either a comminution or dissolution of the earth, or the elevation of the ocean's bed. The same land which was overflowed is described as again emerging. Indeed, a part of the rivers proceeding out of the garden of Eden are the same as those now existing on the globe. We must then admit that our present continents--certainly the Asiatic,--are the same as the antediluvian, or deny that the account of Eden, in Genesis, is a part of the Bible. The latter alternative is preferred by Penn and Fairholme. Surely such men ought to be cautious how they censure geologists for modifying the meaning of some verses in Genesis, when they thus, without any evidence of its spuriousness, unceremoniously erase so important a passage. I might add to all this that the facts of geology forbid the idea that our present continents formed the bed of the ocean at so recent a date as that of Noah's deluge, and that the supposition that all organic remains were deposited during the two thousand years between the six days' work and the deluge is totally irreconcilable with all correct philosophy. Why, during the time when the fossiliferous rocks were in a course of formation, four or five entirely distinct races of animals and plants successively occupied the land and the waters, and passed away in regular order; and these races were so unlike, that they could not have been contemporaneous. Who will maintain that all this took place in the short period of two thousand years? I am sure that no geologist will. But modern geologists have, until recently, supposed that the traces of Noah's deluge might still be seen upon the earth's surface. I say its surface; for none of them imagined those effects could have reached to a great depth. Over a large part of the northern hemisphere they found extensive accumulations of gravel and bowlders, which had been removed often a great distance from their parent rocks, while the ledges beneath were smoothed and striated, obviously by the grating over them of these piles of detritus. How very natural to refer these effects to the agency of currents of water; just such currents as might have resulted from a universal deluge. But the inference was a hasty one For when geologists came to study the phenomena of drift or diluvium, as these accumulations of travelled matter are called, they found that currents of water alone would not explain them all. Some other agency must have been concerned; and the general opinion now is, that drift has been the result of the joint action of water and ice; and nearly all geologists suppose that this action took place before man's existence on the globe. Some suppose it to have been the result of oceanic currents, while yet our continents were beneath the waters; others think that the northern ocean may have been thrown southerly over the dry land by the elevation of its bed; and others maintain that vast masses of ice may formerly have encircled high latitudes, whose glaciers, melting away, may have driven towards the equator the great quantities of drift and bowlders which have been carried in that direction. In short, it is now found that this is one of the most difficult problems in geology; and while most geologists agree that both ice and water have been concerned in producing the phenomena, the time and manner of their action are not yet very satisfactorily determined. They may have acted at different periods and in divers manners; but all the phenomena could not have been the result of one transient deluge. From the facts that have now been detailed, it appears that on no subject of science connected with religion have men been more positive and dogmatical than in respect to Noah's deluge, and that on no subject has there been greater change of opinion. From a belief in the complete destruction and dissolution of the globe by that event, those best qualified to judge now doubt whether it be possible to identify one mark of that event in nature. I shall now proceed to state, in a more definite form, the views of this subject entertained by the most enlightened judges of its merits at the present day. _In the first place, most of the cases of accumulations of drift, the dispersion of bowlders, and the polish and striæ upon rocks in place, occurred previous to man's existence upon the globe, and cannot have been the result of Noah's deluge._ From the arguments for sustaining this position I shall select only a part. The first is, that the organic remains found in the alluvium considerably above the drift, which always lies below the alluvium, are many of them of extinct species. Whether the genuine drift--a heterogeneous mass of fragments, driven pellmell together--contains any organic relics, is to me very doubtful. But if the stratified deposits subsequent to the drift present us with beings no longer alive on the globe, much more would the drift. Now, the presumption is, that extinct animals and plants belong to a creation anterior to man, especially if they exhibit a tropical character,--as those do which are usually assigned to the drift,--since we have no evidence of a tropical climate in northern latitudes till we get back to a period far anterior to man. Secondly. No remains of man or his works have been found in drift, nor indeed till we rise almost to the top of the alluvial deposit. Even ancient Armenia has now been examined geologically, with sufficient care to make it almost certain that human remains do not exist there in drift, if drift is found there at all; of which there may be a question. Thirdly. The agency producing drift must have operated during a vastly longer period than the three hundred and eighty days of Noah's deluge. It would be easy to show to a geologist that the extensive erosions which are referrible to that agency, and the huge masses of detritus which have been the result, must have demanded centuries, and even decades of years. Nor will any supposed increase of power in the agency explain the results, without admitting a long period for their action. Fourthly. Water appears to have been the principal agent in the Noachian deluge; but in the production of drift, ice was at least equally concerned. Finally. The phenomena of deltas, terraces, and ancient sea-beaches, make the period of the drift immensely more remote than the deluge of Noah, since these phenomena are all posterior to the drift period. I need not go into the details of this argument here, since I have drawn them out in my second lecture. But of all the arguments ever adduced to prove the great length of time occupied in geological changes, this--which, so far as the terraces are concerned, has never before, I believe, been adduced--seems to me the most convincing to those who carefully examine the subject. We may be sure, then, that the commencement of the drift period, and the deluge of Noah, cannot have been synchronous. But the drift agency, connected, as nearly all geologists seem now to be ready to admit, with the vertical movements of continents, may have operated, and undoubtedly has, at various periods, and very possibly, in some parts of the world, long posterior to the period usually called the drift period. I agree, therefore, in opinion with one of the most eminent and judicious of the European geologists, Professor Sedgwick of Cambridge, when he says, "If we have the clearest proofs of great oscillations of sea level, and have a right to make use of them, while we seek to explain some of the latest phenomena of geology, may we not reasonably suppose, that, within the period of human history, similar oscillations have taken place in those parts of Asia which were the cradle of our race, and may have produced that destruction among the early families of men, which is described in our sacred books, and of which so many traditions have been brought down to us through all the streams of authentic history?"--_Geology of the Lake District_, p. 14. _Secondly. Admitting the deluge to have been universal over the globe, it could not have deposited the fossil remains in the rocks._ This position is too plain to the practical geologist to need a formal argument to sustain it. But there are many intelligent men, who do not see clearly why the remains of marine animals and plants may not be referred to the deluge. And if they could be, then all the demands of the geologist for long periods anterior to man are without foundation. But they cannot be, for the following reasons:-- First. On this supposition the organic remains ought to be confusedly mingled together, since they must have been brought over the land promiscuously by the waters of the deluge; but they are in fact arranged in as much order as the specimens of a well-regulated cabinet. The different rocks that lie above one another do, indeed, contain some species that are common; but the most are peculiar. It is impossible to explain such a fact if they were deposited by the deluge. Secondly. On this theory, at least, a part of the organic remains ought to correspond with living animals and plants, since the deluge took place so long after the six days of creation. But with the exception of a few species near the top of the series, the fossil species are wholly unlike those now alive. Thirdly. How, by this theory, can we explain the fact, that there are found in the rocks at least five distinct races of animals and plants, so unlike that they could not have been contemporaries? or for the fact, that most of them are of a highly tropical character? or for the fact, that as we rise higher in the rocks, there is a nearer and nearer approach to existing species? Fourthly. This theory requires us to admit, that in three hundred and eighty days the waters of the deluge deposited rocks at least six miles in thickness, over half or two thirds of our existing continents; and these rocks made up of hundreds of thick beds, exceedingly unlike one another in composition and organic contents. Will any reasonable man believe this possible without a miracle? But I need not multiply arguments on this point. It is a theory which no reasonable man can long maintain after studying the subject. And if it be indeed true, that neither in the drift, nor in the fossiliferous rocks, can we discover any traces of the deluge, then we shall find them nowhere on the globe. But _Thirdly. There are no facts in geology that afford any presumption against the occurrence of the Noachian deluge, but rather the contrary._ The geologist says only, that if any traces of it exist, he cannot distinguish them from the effects of other analogous agencies that have operated on the globe at various periods. Some parts of the globe do not exhibit marks of any powerful aqueous action, such as high northern and southern latitudes do exhibit. But the sacred record, in its account of the access and subsidence of diluvial waters, does not require us to suppose any great degree of violence in their action on the surface; and although currents somewhat powerful must have been the result, yet they may not have existed every where, nor have always left traces of their passage where they did exist. On the other hand, the geologist will admit, as we have already seen, that in the elevation and subsidence of mountains and continents, and in volcanic agency generally, of which geology contains so many examples, we have an adequate cause for extensive, if not universal, deluges; nor can he say how recently this cause may have operated beneath certain oceans, sufficiently to produce the deluge of the Scriptures. So that, in fact, we have in geology a presumption in favor of, rather than against, such a deluge. Nay, some, who have examined Armenia, have thought they found there a deposit which could be referred to the deluge of Noah; but I have no access to any facts on this point. _Fourthly. There are reasons, both in natural history and in the Scriptures, for supposing that the deluge may not have been universal over the globe, but only over the region inhabited by man._ This is a position of no small importance, and will, therefore, require our careful examination. And in the beginning, I wish to premise, that I assume the deluge to have been brought about by natural operations, or in conformity with the laws of nature. I feel no reluctance in admitting it to have been strictly miraculous, provided the narrative will allow of such a conclusion. But if it was miraculous, then we must give up the idea of philosophizing about it, and believe the facts simply on the divine testimony. For how can we philosophize upon an event that is brought about by the direct efficiency of God, and without reference to existing natural laws, and, it may be, in contravention of them, unless, indeed, the history contains such contradictions as even infinite power and wisdom could not make harmonious? Some writers endeavor to show the conformity of the sacred history of the deluge to established natural laws, until they meet with some objection too strong to be answered, when they turn round and declare the whole occurrence to have been miraculous. This I conceive to be absurd, and I shall accordingly proceed on the supposition that the whole event was a penal infliction, brought about by natural laws; or, at least, if there was any thing miraculous, it consisted in giving greater power to natural operations, without interfering with the regular sequence of cause and effect. And does not the narrative leave the impression on the mind of the reader, that it was brought about by natural means? The sacred writer distinctly assigns two natural causes of the increase of the waters, viz., a rain of forty days and the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep, which doubtless means an overflow of the ocean; and, to hasten the subsidence of the waters, it is said that God made a wind to blow over the surface. It is no proof of miraculous agency, that the whole work is referred to the immediate power of God, for it is well known that this is the usual mode in which the sacred writers speak of natural events. The first difficulty in the way of supposing the flood to have been literally universal, is the great quantity of water that would have been requisite. The amount necessary to cover the earth to the tops of the highest mountains, or about five miles above the present oceans, would be eight times greater than that existing on the globe at this time. From whence could this immense volume of water have been derived? A great deal of ingenuity has been devoted to give an answer to this inquiry. By some it has been supposed, that most of the earth's interior is occupied by water, and the theorist had only to devise means for forcing it to the surface. One does this by the forcible compression of the crust; another, by the expansive power of internal heat; another, by the generation of various gases through galvanic action. Others have maintained that the antediluvian continents were sunk beneath the ocean at that time, though such find it hard to tell us why there was a rain of forty days upon land that was ready to subside beneath the ocean. Others have resort to a comet's impinging against the earth, and throwing the waters of the ocean over the land. But they were not aware that comets are mere vapor. Others suppose (and surely theirs is the most plausible theory) that the elevation of the bed of some ocean, by volcanic agency, threw its waters over the adjoining continents, and the mighty wave thus produced would not stop till it had swept over all other continents and islands. But in this case, it is evident that the continent first overflowed must have been left dry before the wave had reached other continents, so that, in fact, all parts of the earth would not have been enveloped simultaneously; and besides, how unlike such a violent rushing of the waters over the land is the scriptural account! In short, so unsatisfactory have been most of the theories to account for the water requisite to produce a universal deluge, that most writers have resorted, in the end, to miraculous agency to obtain it. And that, in fact, is the most satisfactory mode of getting over this difficulty, if the Scriptures unequivocally teach the universality of the deluge. A second objection to such a universality is, the difficulty of providing for the animals in the ark. Calculations have indeed been made, which seemed to show that the ark was capacious enough to hold the pairs and septuples of all the species. But, unfortunately, the number of species assumed to exist by the calculators was vastly below the truth. It amounted only to three or four hundred; whereas the actual number already described by zoölogists is not less than one hundred and fifty thousand; and the probable number existing on the globe is not less than half a million. And for the greater part of these must provision have been made, since most of them inhabit either the air or the dry land. A thousand species of mammalia, six thousand species of birds, two thousand species of reptiles, and one hundred and twenty thousand species of insects are already described, and must have been provided with space and food. Will any one believe this possible, in a vessel not more than four hundred and fifty feet long, seventy-five feet broad, and forty-five feet high? The third and most important objection to this universality of the deluge is derived from the facts brought to light by modern science, respecting the distribution of animals and plants on the globe. It was the opinion of Linnæus that all animals and plants had their commencement in a particular region of the earth, from whence they migrated into all other parts of its surface. And had no new facts come to light since his day, to change the aspect of the subject, one would hesitate long before adopting views opposed to so distinguished a naturalist. But new facts, in vast numbers, have been multiplying ever since his day, and zoölogists and botanists now almost universally adopt the opinion, early promulgated by Dr. Prichard, in his admirable work on the Physical History of Man, that there must have been several centres of creation, from which the animals and plants radiated only so far as the climate and food were adapted to their natures, except a few species endowed with the power of accommodating themselves to all climates. Certain it is that they are now thus distributed; and it is inevitable death for most species to venture beyond certain limits. If tropical animals and plants, for instance, were to migrate to the temperate zones, and especially to the frigid regions, they could not long survive; and almost equally fatal would it be for the animals and plants of high latitudes to take up their abode near the equator. But even within the tropics we find distinct species of animals and plants on opposite continents. Indeed, naturalists reckon a large number of botanical and zoölogical districts, or provinces, as they are called, within which they find certain peculiar groups of animals and plants, with natures exactly adapted to that particular district, but incapable of enduring the different climate of adjoining districts. They differ considerably as to the number of these districts, because the plants and animals of our globe are by no means yet fully described, and because the districts assigned to the different classes do not fully coincide; but as to the existence of such a distribution, they are of one opinion. The most reliable divisions of this kind make twenty-five botanical provinces, and five kingdoms and fourteen provinces among animals.[10] The fact that man, and some of the domesticated animals, and a few plants, are found in almost every climate, has, until recently, blinded the eyes of naturalists to the manner in which the great mass of animals and plants are confined within certain prescribed limits. But so soon as the general fact is stated, we immediately recur to abundant proof of its truth. We should be disposed to question the veracity of that traveller who should visit a new and remote country, and describe its vegetable and animal productions as essentially the same as in our own; and all because the analogy of other portions of the globe leads us to expect that a new geographical province shall present us with a peculiar _fauna_ and _flora_; that is, with peculiar groups of animals and plants. It is obvious that the facts which have been stated have an important bearing upon the mode in which the animals were brought together to enter the ark, and were afterwards distributed through the earth, if the deluge were universal. Certain it is that, without miraculous preservation, they could never have been brought together, nor again dispersed. We have reason to suppose that the ark was constructed in some part of the temperate zone. Now, suppose the animals of the torrid zone at the present day to attempt, by natural means, to reach the temperate zone; who does not know that nearly all of them must perish? Nor is it any easier to conceive how, after the flood, they could have migrated into all continents, and islands, and climates, and how each species should have found the place exactly fitted to its constitution, as we now find them. Indeed, the idea of their collection and dispersion in a natural way is altogether too absurd to be believed. And we must, therefore, resort to a miracle, or suppose a new creation to have taken place after the deluge, or admit the flood to have been limited. If the latter supposition be not inconsistent with the Bible, it completely relieves the difficulty. If we suppose the limited region of Central Asia, where man existed, to have been deluged, and pairs and septuples of the most common animals in that region only to have been kept alive in the ark, the entire account will harmonize with natural history. The question, then, whether such a view is consistent with the Bible, becomes of great interest; and to this point I beg leave next to direct your attention. If we understand the scriptural account to denote a literal universality, it is certainly very natural to inquire why such universality was necessary, since the deluge is represented as a penal infliction upon man. For it seems difficult to believe as some writers have attempted to prove, that the human family had become very numerous, or had extended far beyond the spot where they were first planted, in less than two thousand years; especially when we recollect how few were the children of patriarchs whose age amounted to many centuries, and how very probable it is that the extreme wickedness of most of the antediluvians tended to their extinction rather than their multiplication. Why, then, for the sake of destroying man, occupying probably only a limited portion of one continent, was it necessary to depopulate all other continents and islands, inhabited only by irresponsible animals, who had no connection with man? If the Scriptures unequivocally declare that such was the fact, we are bound to believe it on divine testimony. But if their language admits of a different interpretation, it seems reasonable to adopt it. And here I am willing to acknowledge that the language of the Bible on this subject seems, at first view, to teach the universality of the flood, unequivocally. _The waters_, say they, _prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered._ Again: _Behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die._ If such language be interpreted by the same rules which we should apply to a modern composition, it could in no way be understood to teach a limited deluge or a partial destruction. But in respect to this ancient record, two considerations are to be carefully weighed. In the first place, the terms employed are not to be judged of by the state of knowledge in the nineteenth century, but by its state among the people to whom this revelation was first addressed. When the earth was spoken of to that people, (the ancient Jews,) they could not have understood it to embrace a much wider region than that inhabited by man, because they could not have had any idea of what lay beyond those limits. And so of the phrase _heaven_; it must have been coëxtensive with the inhabited earth only. And when it was said that all animals would die by the deluge, they could not have supposed the declaration to embrace creatures far beyond the dwellings of men, because they knew nothing of such regions. Why, then, may we not attach the same limited meaning to these declarations? Why should we suppose that the Holy Spirit used terms, adapted, indeed, to the astronomy and geography of the nineteenth century, but conveying only a false idea to those to whom they were addressed? In the second place, in all ages and nations, and especially among ancient ones, "universal terms are often used to signify only a very large amount in number or quantity."--Dr. Smith, _Scrip. and Geol._ p. 212, 4th ed.--The Hebrew [Hebrew], (_kol_,) the [Greek: pas], and the English _all_, are alike employed in this manner, to signify _many_. There are some very striking cases of this sort in the Bible. Thus in Genesis it is said that _all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn, because the famine was sore in all lands_. This certainly could apply only to the well-known countries around Egypt; for transportation would have been impossible to the remotest parts of the habitable globe. In the account of the plagues that came upon Egypt, it is said that _the hail smote every herb of the field, and brake every tree of the field_; but, in a few days afterwards, it is said of the locusts that _they did eat every herb of the land and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left_. _This day_, said God to the Israelites, while yet in their journeyings, _will I begin to put the fear of thee and the dread of thee upon the face of the nations under all the heavens_. But it is obvious that only the nations contiguous to the Israelites, chiefly the Canaanites, are here meant. In the New Testament, it is said that, at the time of the pentecost, there were dwelling at Jerusalem _Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven_. Yet, in the enumeration, which follows this passage, of the different places from which those Jews had come, we find only a region extending from Italy to Persia, and from Egypt to the Black Sea. It could have been a district of only about that size which Paul meant, when he said to the Colossians that the _gospel was preached to every creature which is under heaven_. In the First Book of Kings, it is said that _all the earth sought the presence of Solomon, to hear his wisdom_;--a passage which requires as much limitation as the others above quoted. A similar mode of expression is employed by Christ, when he says of the queen of Sheba that she came from _the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon_; for her residence, being probably on the Arabian Gulf, could not have been more than twelve or fourteen hundred miles from Jerusalem. A like figurative mode of speech is employed in the description of Peter's vision, in which he saw a great sheet let down to the earth, _wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air_. Who will suppose, since it is wholly unnecessary for the object, which was to convince Peter that the Mosaic distinction into clean and unclean beasts was abolished, that he here had a vision of all the species of terrestrial vertebral animals on the globe? It would be easy to multiply similar passages. In many of them we should find that the phrase _all the earth_ signifies the land of Palestine; in a few, the Chaldean empire; and in one, that of Alexander of Macedon. Now, so similar is the phraseology of the passages just quoted to that descriptive of the deluge, so universal are the terms, while we are sure that their meaning must be limited, that we are abundantly justified in considering the deluge as limited, if other parts of the Bible, or the facts of natural history, require such a limitation. Indeed, so obviously analogous are the passages quoted to the Mosaic account of the deluge, that distinguished writers have regarded the deluge as limited, long before geology existed, or natural history had learned the manner in which organic life is distributed on the globe; nay, at a period when naturalists, with Linnæus at their head, supposed animals and plants to have proceeded from one centre:--an opinion that seemed to sustain the notion of the universality of the flood. The inference, then, that it was limited, must have been made chiefly on exegetical grounds. "I cannot see," says Bishop Stillingfleet, more than a century ago, "any urgent necessity from the Scripture to assert that the flood did spread over all the surface of the earth. That all mankind, those in the ark excepted, were destroyed by it, is most certain, according to the Scriptures. The flood was universal as to mankind; but from thence follows no necessity at all of asserting the universality of it as to the globe of the earth, unless it be sufficiently proved that the whole earth was peopled before the flood, which I despair of ever seeing proved."--_Origines Sacræ_, B. III. chap. 4, p. 337, ed. 1709. Matthew Poole, well known for his valuable and extensive commentaries on the Bible, thus expresses himself: "It is not to be supposed that the entire globe of the earth was covered with water. Where was the need of overwhelming those regions in which there were no human beings? It would be highly unreasonable to suppose that mankind had so increased before the deluge as to have penetrated to all the corners of the earth. It is, indeed, not probable that they had extended themselves beyond the limits of Syria and Mesopotamia. Absurd it would be to affirm that the effects of the punishment inflicted upon men alone applied to places in which there were no men. If, then, we should entertain the belief that not so much as the hundredth part of the globe was overspread with water, still the deluge would be universal, because the extirpation took effect upon all the part of the globe which was inhabited. If we take this ground, the difficulties which some have raised about the deluge fall away as inapplicable, and mere cavils; and irreligious persons have no reason left them for doubting the truth of the Holy Scriptures."--_Synopsis on Gen._ vii. 19. Poole wrote nearly two centuries ago. In more recent times, we find authorities equally eminent for learning and candor adopting the same views. "Interpreters," says Dathe, "do not agree whether the deluge inundated the whole earth, or only those regions then inhabited. I adopt the latter opinion. The phrase _all_ does not prove the inundation to have been universal. It appears that in many places [Hebrew] (_kol_) is to be understood as limited to the thing or place spoken of. Hence all the animals said to have been introduced into the ark were only those of the region inundated. So, also, only those mountains are to be understood, which were surmounted by the waters."--_Pentateuchus a Dathio_, p. 63. But no modern writer has treated this subject with so much candor and ability--and the same may be said of his whole work on the "Relation of the Holy Scriptures to some Parts of Geological Science"--as Dr. John Pye Smith. We can say of him, what we can say of very few men, that he is accurately acquainted with all the branches of the subject. Eminent as a theologian and a philologist, and fully possessed of all the facts in geology and natural history, he gives us his opinion, not as a young man, fond of novelties, but in the full maturity of judgment and of years. "From these instances," says he, "of the scriptural idiom in the application of phraseology similar to that in the narrative concerning the flood, I humbly think that those terms do not oblige us to understand a literal universality; so that we are exonerated from some otherwise insuperable difficulties in natural history and geology. If so much of the earth was overflowed as was occupied by the human race, both the physical and the moral ends of that awful visitation were answered."--_Scrip. and Geol._ p. 214, 4th ed. "Let us now take the seat of the antediluvian population," continues Dr. Smith, "to have been in Western Asia, in which a large district, even at the present day, lies considerably below the level of the sea. It must not be forgotten that six weeks of continued rain would not give an amount of water forty times that which fell on the first, or a subsequent day, for evaporation would be continually carrying up the water to be condensed, and to fall again; so that the same mass of water would return many times. If, then, in addition to the tremendous rain, we suppose an elevation of the bed of the Persian and Indian Seas, or a subsidence of the inhabited land towards the south, we shall have sufficient cause in the hands of almighty justice for submerging the district, covering its hills, and destroying all living beings within its limits, except those whom divine mercy preserved in the ark. The drawing off of the waters would be effected by a return of the bed of the sea to a lower level, or by the elevation of some tracts of land, which would leave channels and slopes for the larger part of the water to flow back into the Indian Ocean, while the lower part remained a great lake, or an inland sea, the Caspian."--p. 217. It is a circumstance favoring the above suggestions of Dr. Smith, that there is a tract of country ten degrees of latitude in breadth, embracing most of Asia Minor, ancient Armenia and Georgia, and part of Persia, extending at least as far east as the Caspian Sea, and probably much farther, in which volcanic agency has been in operation at a comparatively recent period. I am not aware that we have evidence of any eruption of lava in those regions, within historic times, except, perhaps, some mud volcanoes in the Caucasian range. The Katekekaumene, or Burnt District, of Asia Minor, and Mount Ararat, probably experienced eruptions at a date somewhat earlier, though at a comparatively recent date. Yet important changes of level may have been the result of volcanic agency in Central Asia, as recently as the Noachian deluge, without leaving any traces which would be obvious, without more careful observation than has yet been made in those regions. Especially might a subsidence of the surface have taken place, and not have left any striking evidence of its occurrence. Still more difficult would it now be to discover the marks of vertical movements in the bed of the Indian Ocean at the time of the deluge. I will venture to add another suggestion. If the bed of the Indian Ocean was uplifted by volcanic matter, struggling to get vent, vapor enough might have been liberated to account, on natural principles, for the forty days' rain of the deluge. For it is well known that in volcanic eruptions drenching rains are often the result of the sudden condensation of the aqueous vapor. We are here met, however, by a serious objection to the hypothesis, which gives only a limited extent to the deluge. If the present Mount Ararat, in Armenia, is the mountain on which the ark first rested, a deluge which covered its top must, by its flux and reflux, have overspread nearly all other portions of the globe, for that mountain rises seventeen thousand seven hundred feet above the ocean. But we are informed by Jerome, that the name Ararat was given generally to the mountains of Armenia; (indeed, that is the meaning of the name;) and long before geology existed, Shuckford suggested that some spot farther east corresponds better with the scriptural account of the place where the ark rested. For it is said of the families of the sons of Noah, that, as they journeyed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar. Now, Shinar, or Babylonia, lies nearly south of the Armenian Ararat, and the probability, therefore, is, that the true Ararat, from whose vicinity the descendants of Noah probably emigrated, lay much farther to the south. Again, if the ark rested upon the present Ararat, it is impossible, except by a miracle, that those who came out of it could have reached the plain below; for so exceedingly difficult of access is it, that it is doubtful whether, since the deluge, any one ever succeeded in reaching its summit, till the year 1829. Indeed, it is an article in the creed of the Armenian church that its ascent is impossible. That the almost universal tradition of Eastern nations should have fixed upon that mountain as the resting-place of the ark is not strange, considering that there is no mountain in all Asia so striking to behold. But upon the whole, the probability is strong that some other elevation, less lofty and steep, was the radiating point of the postdiluvian races of man and other animals. The fact of Noah's sending forth a dove from the ark, which came back in the evening with an olive leaf in her mouth, strengthens the preceding view. For neither upon the present Ararat, nor around it, does the olive grow, because it is too cold. Indeed, all its upper part is covered with perpetual ice. But if the Ararat of Scripture lay nearer the tropics, the olive might find upon it a congenial spot. A distinguished botanist adduced the fact about the olive as evidence against the Bible. But how easily refuted, if the theory now under examination be true! In favor of this supposition, I might have urged another consideration, which, in my mind, has no little weight. It is impossible that the waters of the deluge should have covered the earth for a year, without destroying nearly all the existing vegetation. Yet nothing is said of the preservation of seeds in the ark; and if they had been preserved, certainly nothing but miraculous power, and that of the most remarkable kind, could have scattered them through the remotest continents and islands, so as to form distinct botanical districts, such as have been described. The olive, from which a leaf was plucked by the dove sent out of the ark, was probably situated upon elevated ground, and where it remained but a short time beneath the waters, and therefore did not lose its vitality. It is probable that the theory which makes the deluge limited in extent will meet with more favor than any other, with candid and intelligent men, to meet the suggested difficulties of the case. But some, who are unwilling to abandon the idea of the universality of the deluge, avoid these difficulties by supposing a new creation to have taken place at that epoch. That such a new creation occurred at the commencement of several geological periods can hardly admit a doubt. And a presumption is hence derived in favor of a similar act at the beginning of the postdiluvian period, preceded as it was, like the other geological periods, by an almost entire destruction of organic life. The principal objection to this view is, that no notice is taken of such a new creation in the Bible. And it would seem that an event of so much importance would hardly be passed in silence; and yet the bringing into existence new races of the inferior animals and plants could have but little bearing upon the object of revelation, which respects almost exclusively the spiritual condition of man. One, however, can hardly see why pairs and septuples of the animals, even in a limited district, need to have been preserved in the ark, if a new creation were to follow the coming catastrophe; nor why the creation of the antediluvian animals, so soon to perish, should have been so particularly described, while no notice was taken of the postdiluvian races, which were to occupy the earth so much longer time. A third theory has been suggested by some, embracing both those which have been described. They admit the deluge to have been of limited extent, but suppose this limitation not to be sufficient to explain all the facts of revelation and of science, without a new creation also, at the commencement of the postdiluvian period. They suppose, indeed, that geology and natural history teach the occasional extinction of species, and the creation of others, even in our own times. And in regard to this latter view, it may at least be said that it is not contradicted by the Bible. Nay, one would almost suppose that the Psalmist were describing such a state of things when he says, _Thou hidest thy face; they_ [animals] _are troubled. Thou takest away their breath; they die and return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy spirit; they are created; and thou renewest the face of the earth._ The resemblance between this language and that employed to describe the original creation is striking. Indeed, the same word (_bawraw_) is used. Without attempting to decide which of these theories has the highest claim upon our belief, it is sufficient to remark, that either of them reconciles the facts of geology and natural history with the inspired record; nor does the adoption of either of them require us to put a forced and unnatural construction upon the language of the Bible. Even then, if we should admit that a construction agreeing with these theories is not the most natural meaning, yet if the facts of natural history unequivocally require such an interpretation to harmonize the Bible with nature, it is assuredly one of those cases where science must be allowed to modify our exegesis of Scripture. In the view of sound philosophy, such modification at once disarms scepticism of its cavils. With two remarks of a practical character, I close the discussion of this subject. First. The history of opinions respecting the Noachian deluge furnishes a salutary lesson to those employed in the examination of analogous subjects. We have seen these opinions assume almost every possible shape; yet, until recently they have all been maintained with the most positive and dogmatic assurance; and each particular theory has been regarded as involving the essence of the Bible, as being the _articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiæ_, and whoever denied it virtually denied the Bible. But all reasonable and truly scientific men are fast coming to the conclusion, that the deluge has had very little to do with the present configuration of the globe, and that it is doubtful whether any trace of its occurrence will ever be found in nature; so that, on the one hand, all the alarms and denunciations of misguided Christians on this subject might have been spared; and, on the other hand, if the hasty exultation of the infidel, in his supposed discovery of discrepancy between nature and Moses, had been suppressed until the subject was understood, he would not have experienced the mortification of entire defeat. It is, indeed, very humiliating to human nature to find so many of the wise, the talented, and the religious so confident and zealous, yet so erroneous. But it is a salutary lesson. It shows us the vast importance of being thoroughly acquainted with a subject before we dogmatize upon it. It should not, indeed, discourage us, and produce a universal scepticism on all subjects not admitting a mathematical demonstration; but it should make us cautious in examining the grounds of our conclusions, and modest in maintaining them. Secondly. It is interesting to observe how, amid all the diversities and fluctuations of opinion on this subject, the Bible has remained unaffected. The infidel felt confident that the arrows which he drew from this quiver would certainly pierce Christianity to the heart. But they rebounded from her adamantine breastplate, blunted and broken; and no one will have the courage to pick them up and hurl them again. The physico-theological school at one time felt certain, that no other theory but an entire dissolution of the crust of the globe at the deluge, could possibly be made consistent with the Bible. More recently, it has been supposed equally necessary, to reconcile geology and revelation, that we should admit the antediluvian continents to have sunk beneath the ocean at that time. Still later, it has been thought quite certain that the surface of the earth bore the most striking marks of a universal deluge, probably identical with that of Scripture. At length, the extreme opinion is now generally reached, that no trace of the deluge of Noah remains. And equally wide and well established is the belief that, amid all these fluctuations of theory, the Bible has stood as an immovable rock amid the conflicting waves. The final result is, that we have only slightly to modify the interpretation of the Mosaic account, in conformity with the laws of language, to make it entirely consistent with the notion that all traces of the deluge have disappeared. Thus, in the midst of human opinions, veering to every point of the compass, the Bible has ever remained fixed to one point. Not so with false systems of religion. The Hindoo religion contains a false astronomy, as well as anatomy and physiology; and the Mohammedan Koran distinctly advances the Ptolemaic hypothesis of the universe; so that you have only to prove these religions false in science in order to destroy their claim to infallibility. But the Bible, stating only facts, does not interfere with, neither is affected by, the hypotheses of philosophy. Often, indeed, in past ages, have men set up their hypotheses as oracles in the temple of nature, to be consulted rather than the Bible. But, like Dagon before the ark, they have fallen to the earth, and been broken in pieces before the Word of God; while this has ever stood and ever shall stand, in sublime simplicity and undecaying strength, amid the wrecks of every false system of philosophy and religion. LECTURE V. THE WORLD'S SUPPOSED ETERNITY. In our attempts thus far to elucidate the religion of geology, our attention has been directed to those points where this science has been supposed to conflict with revelation; and I trust it has been made manifest that the collision was rather with the interpretation than with the meaning of Scripture; and that, in fact, geology, instead of coming into collision with the Bible, affords us important aid in understanding it aright. We now advance to a part of the subject which has a more direct bearing upon natural religion. And here, if I mistake not, we shall find the illustration of religious truth from this science, as we might expect, more direct and palpable. The subject to which I wish first to call your attention is the world's eternity, or the eternal existence of matter. This was the universal belief of the philosophers of antiquity, and, indeed, of most reasoning minds where the Bible has not been known. The grand argument by which this opinion was sustained is the well-known _ex nihilo nihil fit_, (nothing produces nothing.) Hence men inferred that not even the Deity could create matter out of nothing; and, therefore, it must be eternal. Most of the ancient philosophers, however, did not hence infer the non-existence of the Deity. But they endeavored to reconcile the existence of eternal matter with an eternal Spirit. They supposed both to be self-existent and coëxistent. From this rational thinking principle they supposed all good to be derived; while from the material irrational principle all evil sprung. Plato taught that God, of his own will, united himself with matter, although he did not create it, and out of it produced the present world; so that it was proper to speak of the world as created, although the matter was from eternity. Aristotle and Zeno taught that God's union with matter was necessary; and hence they considered the world eternal. In the opinion of Epicurus, God was entirely separated from matter, which consisted of innumerable atoms, floating about from eternity, like dust in the air, until at last they assumed the present form of the world. In modern times, the belief in the eternity of matter has usually been connected with, or made the basis of, a refined and popular system of atheism. I refer to the pantheism of Spinoza. He maintains that there exists in the universe but one substance, variously modified, whose two principal attributes are infinite extension and infinite intelligence. This substance, the [Greek: to pan] of Spinoza, he regarded as God; and hence his system is called _Pantheism_. Under various modifications, it has been adopted by many sceptical minds, and is, undoubtedly, the most common and plausible system of atheism extant. Other modern writers, among whom may be mentioned that anomalous philosopher Bayle, have advocated the views of the ancients respecting the eternity of matter. It may seem strange, but it is true, that some Christian philosophers and divines have been, in ancient and modern times, the advocates of the eternity of matter. The ancient Christians adopted it from Plato. Thus we find Justin Martyr maintaining that God formed the world from an eternal, unorganized material. And the schoolmen, who followed Aristotle, taught that "God had created the world from eternity." On this ground, even some Protestant theologians have asserted that it was absurd to speak of an eternal God who is not an eternal Creator. A principle which has thus been adopted by so many acute minds unenlightened by revelation, and by some who possessed that divine testimony, must be sustained by some plausible arguments. The principal one relied on is, that the changes which are going on in the material world are proved to be only transmutations, which follow one another in series that return into themselves, and which may, therefore, have been going on from eternity; and if this be admitted, it is as easy to suppose matter to be self-sustained, and to have fallen into its present order of itself, as to suppose the interference of an infinite Spirit. "How do we know," says Dr. Chalmers, in stating the atheistic argument, "that the world is a consequent at all? Is there any greater absurdity in supposing it to have existed, as it now is, at any specified point of time, throughout the millions of ages that are past, than that it should so exist at this moment? Does what we suppose might have been then, imply any greater absurdity, than what we actually see to be at present? Now, might not the same question be carried back to any point or period of duration, however remote? or, in other words, might we not dispense with a beginning for the world altogether?" "For aught we can know _a priori_," says Hume, "matter may contain the source or spring of order originally within itself as well as mind does; and there is no more difficulty in conceiving that the several elements, from an internal, unknown cause, may fall into the most exquisite arrangement, than to conceive that their ideas, in the great universal mind, from a like internal cause, fall into that arrangement. If this material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other, and so on without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that divine Being, so much the better." Now, in what manner have these ingenious arguments been met? Until quite recently, no one has supposed that any light on this subject could be derived from geology. Indeed, even now, by many, that science is regarded as favoring the idea of the world's eternity. Neither has it been thought that, on a question of natural theology, like this, it was proper to appeal to the Bible. Philosophers and divines, however, have attempted to reply to these arguments, irrespective of geology and revelation; and they have generally convinced themselves that they have been successful. But to my mind, I must confess, this has always appeared the weakest spot in natural religion. Some of the arguments to prove the world not eternal do, indeed, appear, at first statement, very profound; but they rather silence than convince; and the longer we reflect upon them, the more apt are we to doubt their force. And here I am constrained to bear testimony to the masterly manner in which this subject has been treated by Dr. Chalmers. Perceiving that the defences of natural religion on this subject were weak, in spite of much show of strength, he has laid out his giant force of intellect in clearing away the rubbish and building a rampart of rock. His remarkable skill in seizing upon and bringing out prominently the great principles of a difficult subject, and turning them round and round till they fill every eye, is here most happily exerted. Let us now proceed, in the first place, to examine the arguments that have been adduced to prove the non-eternity of the world, independent of geology and revelation; and in the second place, to derive from these two sources of evidence the true ground on which that proposition rests. The first supposed proof that the world has not eternally existed is derived from what is called the _a priori_ argument for the existence of the Deity, originally proposed by the monk Anselmus, and afterwards more fully illustrated in England by Dr. Samuel Clarke. Take the following brief summary of this argument, as applied to the eternity of matter, in the words of Dr. Crombie. "Whatever has existed from eternity, independent and without any external cause, must be self-existent. Whatever is self-existent must exist necessarily, by an absolute necessity in the nature of the thing. This is also self-evident. It follows, therefore, that unless the material world exist necessarily, by an absolute necessity in its own nature, so that it must be a contradiction to suppose it not to exist, it cannot be independent and eternal. In order to disprove this absolute necessity, he [Dr. Clarke] reasoned thus: If matter be supposed to exist necessarily, then in that necessary existence is included the power of gravitation, or it is not. If not, then in a world merely material, and in which no intelligent being presides, there never could have been any motion. But if the power of gravitation be included in the pretended necessary existence of matter, then it follows necessarily, that there must be a vacuum; it follows, likewise, that matter is not a necessary being. For if a vacuum actually be, then it is plainly more than possible for matter not to be." Is it not passing strange that such a dreamy argumentation as this--and it is a fair sample of Dr. Clarke's extended work on the existence of the Deity--should have been regarded as sound logic by many of the acutest minds, and that a majority even of the ablest metaphysicians, up almost to the present day, should have felt satisfied with it? A few minds, indeed, long ago perceived its fallacy, among whom was Alexander Pope, who thus sarcastically describes it:-- "Be that my task, replies a gloomy Clarke, Sworn foe to mystery, yet divinely dark. Let others creep by timid steps and slow, On plain experience lay foundation low, By common sense to common notions bred, And last to nature's cause through nature led, All-seeing in thy mists, we need no guide, Mother of arrogance, and source of pride! We nobly take the high _priori_ road, And reason downward till we doubt of God." _Dunciad_, Book IV. It is impossible, on this occasion, to go into a formal refutation of this famous argument. But this is unnecessary; since, as Dr. Chalmers says, it "has fallen into utter disesteem and desuetude." Indeed, the language of Dr. Thomas Brown on this subject is not too severe, when he says, that he "conceives the abstract arguments that have been adduced to show that it is impossible for matter to have existed from eternity, by reasoning on what has been termed necessary existence, and the incompatibility of this necessary existence with the qualities of matter, to be relics of the mere verbal logic of the schools, as little capable of producing conviction as any of the wildest and most absurd of the technical scholastic reasonings on the properties, or supposed properties, of entity and nonentity." In the second place, it has been argued with much apparent plausibility, by Dr. Paley, that wherever we find a complicated organic structure, adapted to produce beneficial results, its origin must be sought beyond itself; and since the world abounds with such organisms, it cannot be eternal; that is, the mere existence of animals and plants proves their non-eternity. Now, without asserting that there is no force in this argument, I have two remarks to make upon it. The first is, to quote the reply to it, which such a writer as David Hume has given, in language which I have just repeated. "For aught we can know _a priori_," says he, "matter may contain the source or spring of order originally within itself, as well as mind does; and there is no more difficulty in conceiving that the several elements, from an internal unknown cause, may fall into the most exquisite arrangement, than to conceive that their ideas in the great universal mind, from a like internal unknown cause, fall into that arrangement. To say that the different ideas, which compose the reason of the Supreme, fall into order of themselves, and by their own nature, is really to talk without any precise meaning. If it has a meaning, I would fain know why it is not as good sense to say, that the parts of the material world fall into order of themselves and by their own nature. Can the one opinion be intelligible while the other is not so?" Fairly to meet this reasoning of the prince of sceptics is not an achievement of dulness or ignorance. In order to do it triumphantly, we want, what Dr. Paley could not find, a distinct example of the creation of numerous organic beings by some cause independent of themselves. I say, he could not find such an example; for on a question of natural theology, he did not think it proper to appeal to the Bible; nor had geology, when he wrote, revealed her astonishing record on this subject. But as it is now developed, it puts an end to all controversy as to the origin of the organic world. My second remark, however, on this argument is, that even admitting its correctness, it only proves the commencement of organic natures, but does not show that the matter of which they are composed may not have been eternal. In the third place, an argument against the eternal existence of matter has been derived by Sir John Herschel, one of the most distinguished natural philosophers of the day, from the atomic constitution of bodies, as made known to us by chemistry. This science makes it certainly probable, that even the infinitesimal particles of matter have a definite and peculiar shape, and size, and weight, in each of the elements. "Now," says this writer, "when we see a great number of things precisely alike, we do not believe this similarity to have originated, except from a common principle independent of them." "The discoveries alluded to effectually destroy the idea of an external self-existent matter, by giving to each of its atoms the essential characters at once of a manufactured article and a subordinate agent." To this argument the atheist's reply would be essentially the same as that last considered; and in one respect it would even be more forcible, because the atomic constitution of bodies, being less complex, is less obviously the result of foreign agency, and may more easily be regarded as the necessary property of eternal matter. On the other hand, however, it is more obviously an attribute of the original constitution of matter than organic structure; and if it does require an independent agency for its production, it seems difficult to conceive of the existence of matter in a previous state. So that, in this point of view, this argument is more forcible than the last; and it is no small evidence that it has real strength, that it comes to us from one of the most acute and impartial minds in Europe. In the fourth place, it is maintained that the idea of an eternal succession, or chain of being, which the atheistic advocates of the world's eternity defend, is highly absurd, and even mathematically false. The atheist mainly relies upon this notion of an eternal series of things; for if he can defend that opinion, he will overturn the main argument of the Theist for the divine existence, viz., that from design in the works of creation. On this ground, therefore, he should be fairly met. Has he been so met by the reasoning that has usually been employed to refute his opinion? As a fair sample of it, I will here quote the leading points of the argument, as given by one of the most popular and able theologians of our country. "It is asserted by atheists," says Dr. Dwight, "that there has been an eternal series of things. The absurdity of this assertion may be shown in many ways." "First. Each individual in a series is a unit. But every collection of units, however great, is with intuitive certainty numerable, and, therefore, cannot be infinite." "Secondly. Every individual in the series (take for example a series of men) had a beginning. But a collection of beings must, however long the series, have had a beginning. This, likewise, is intuitively evident." "Thirdly. It is justly observed by the learned and acute Dr. Bentley, that in the supposed infinite series, as the number of individual men is alleged to be infinite, the number of their eyes must have been twice, the number of their fingers ten times, and the number of the hairs on their heads many thousand times, as great as the number of men." "Fourthly. It is also observed by the same excellent writer, that all these generations of men were once present."--_Dwight's Theology_, vol. ii. p. 24. How is it possible that such reasoning should have satisfied logical and philosophical minds? Would it not be equally good to disprove the demonstrated principles of mathematics which relate to infinite quantities? For in mathematics an infinite series of units is a familiar phrase; and it is also common to speak of one infinite quantity as twice, or ten times, or many thousand times, greater than another, and that, too, in just such cases as the one referred to above. True, mathematical infinites are in some respects different from metaphysical infinites; but it is the former that belong to this argument, since the supposed infinite succession of organic beings forms a mathematical series. An acute writer in our own country, however, has recently attempted to show that "there can be no number actually infinite, and therefore no infinite number of generations."[11] That the mathematician cannot actually present before us the whole of an infinite series, is indeed most certain; for such, power belongs only to an Infinite Being. But does the fact that man's faculties are limited, prove that an arithmetical process cannot be carried on from eternity to eternity? Because man cannot put upon paper the series of numbers representing the miles in infinite space, or the hours in infinite duration, is there, therefore, no such thing as infinite space, or infinite duration? Certainly not, if this reasoning be correct. In spite, however, of such mathematical metaphysics, is it not an intelligible statement of the atheist, when he says of any generation of men and animals in past time, that there was another that preceded it and unless you have matter-of-fact proof to the contrary, how will you disprove this assertion? You may show him that practically he can never exhibit a series, even of numbers, extending eternally backward; but he may, in return, challenge you to put your finger upon the first link of the chain of organic nature. If you attempt it, he will reply that other links preceded the one you have named, and that, as far as you choose to run backward, he can go farther; in other words, by the very supposition which he makes, he excludes a beginning to organic nature, and, therefore, all reasoning which assumes such a beginning is of no force against his conclusions. If a series which may thus be extended indefinitely backward be not infinite in a metaphysical sense, it is to common sense. Let me not be thought to be an advocate in any sense for the unsupported notion of an infinite series of organic beings. But the question is, whether those who, in spite of common sense, have maintained this opinion, have been fairly refuted by such metaphysical evasions as I have quoted. The truth is, that, in order to end this dispute, the Theist needs to bring forward at least one example in which the commencement of some race of animals can be fairly pointed out; and I know not where such an example can be found, save in the Bible and geology. In the fifth place, the changing state of the world has been regarded as incompatible with the world's eternity. This argument is thus stated by Bishop Sumner: "If the universe itself is the first eternal being, its existence is necessary, as metaphysicians speak; and it must be possessed of all those qualities which are inseparable from necessary existence. Of this nature are immutability and perfection. For change is the attribute of imperfection, and imperfection is incompatible with that Being, which is, as the hypothesis affirms, independent, and, therefore, can have no source of imperfection. To suppose, therefore, of the first independent Being, that it could have existed otherwise than it is, is no less contrary to the idea of necessity, with which we set out, than to suppose it not to exist at all." This reasoning is not destitute of plausibility. For there is scarcely any lesson more forcibly impressed on short-lived man than the mutability of the world. And it is indeed true that change is its most striking attribute. But when we look at the subject philosophically, we find that all this mutability is consistent with the most perfect ultimate stability; nay, that the change is essential to secure the stability. Apart from what revelation and geology teach, these changes in nature form cycles, which, like those in astronomy, are perfectly consistent with the eternal permanence of the general system to which they belong. In the motions of the heavenly bodies, a considerable amount of irregularity and oscillation about a mean state does not tend to the ruin, but rather to the preservation, of the system, provided the anomalies do not extend beyond certain limits. It is just so with other changes that are going on around us. All of them are, in fact, as much regulated by mathematical laws as the perturbations of the heavenly bodies; although those laws are more complicated and difficult to bring out in distinct formulæ in the former case than in the latter. Yet even in astronomy, it is not many years since the mutual disturbances among the heavenly bodies were supposed to be the certain precursors of ruin to the system. It was not till the famous problem of the three bodies was solved, by the use of the most refined mathematical analysis, that astronomers learnt the true operation of those causes of disturbance among the heavenly bodies which exist in their mutual attractions. It was then found that, so balanced are they in their action, and so narrow their limits, that they can never affect the stability of the system; or, rather, they secure that stability. It is, indeed, true, that when changes in nature go on increasing or decreasing in magnitude indefinitely, they clearly indicate a beginning and an end to the system to which they belong. And it was on this principle that the earlier astronomers predicted that the celestial perturbations would ultimately bring the universe to a state of chaos. They found, for instance, that the moon's orbit was decreasing in size, and they inferred that, ultimately, that luminary must come to the earth. But they now know it to be mathematically certain that, after a long period, the diminution of the orbit will cease; it will begin to expand, and go on expanding,-until the opposite point of oscillation is reached, when it will again diminish; and in this manner, if God's will permit, perform its eternal round. Just so it is with all the irregularities of the solar system. "Yonder starry sphere Of planets, and of fixed, in all her wheels, Resembles nearest mazes intricate, Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular; Then most, when most irregular they seem." And so it is with all the natural changes which we witness around us, and with all which science shows us to have taken place on the globe, excepting some which geology discloses, and perhaps one which astronomy renders probable. Let us look at some of those changes which the argument under consideration regards as inconsistent with the world's eternity. Nearly all the changes in nature with which we are acquainted belong to three classes,--the mechanical, the chemical, and the organic. Astronomical changes are purely mechanical; and hence the ease with which they may be calculated by mathematics. The universal system of death, which reigns over all animals and plants, is the result of organic laws; and it is this which probably gives to man the strongest impression of the transient nature of sublunary things. But just consider the antagonist agencies to this universal destroyer. I refer to the equally universal system of reproduction, and to the law by which permanence of species is secured. The consequence is, that, while every individual animal and plant dies, the species survives. In the whole history of the animals and plants now existing on the globe, only eight or ten certain examples are on record in which a species has become extinct, and those are some large birds, such as the dinornis and dodo, once inhabitants of the Isle of Bourbon and New Zealand. Every one of the human family, every elephant, every ox, every lion, &c., die, but man, as a species, still lives; and so does the elephant, the ox, and the lion; and most obviously this is a law of nature. How easy, then, for the atheist to evade the force of your argument against the world's eternity, drawn from the ravages of death! He has only to suppose the havoc of individuals by death always to have been repaired by the equivalent operation of reproduction, and that these two agencies have been balanced against each other from eternity; and how will you prove this impossible, except by the absurd metaphysical arguments already considered? Atmospheric and aqueous changes often, and, indeed, generally, appear more chaotic and destitute of a controlling force than any others in nature. When the winds are let loose from their prison-house; when the heavens become dark, and the clouds, rent by the lightnings, pour down their contents, and the swollen torrents carry desolation down the mountain's side and over the wide plain; when the ocean rolls in upon the land its giant waves; when the tornado sweeps all before it, in rich tropical regions; or when the sirocco sends its hot blast, loaded with sand, over the devoted surface,--in all these cases, how difficult for us to conceive that all this uproar among the elements is limited and controlled by laws as fixed and unalterable as those which regulate the heavenly bodies! Nevertheless, it must be so; and although the winds and the waters seem to be rioting at their pleasure, there are, in fact, at work antagonist agencies; which will confine their wild war to a narrow field, and soon bring them again into peaceful submission. For such has always been the case, and the limits of their irregularities are no wider now than six thousand years ago. In other words, the repressing agency has always been superior to the destroying force, when the latter has risen to a certain limit; and I doubt not but the profounder mathematics of angelic minds might as easily calculate the anomalies and perturbations of winds and waves as the formulas of La Place can determine those of the solar system. And if such constancy has existed for six thousand years in meteorological changes,--of all others in nature apparently the most irregular,--why, the atheist will ask, may not that constancy have been eternal? And with equal reason may he ask the same in respect to all changes resulting from mechanical, chemical, and organic laws, which we witness in nature, except those which come within the province of geology, and even concerning some of those; and what changes in the material world do not result, directly or remotely, from one or two, or all of these laws? Yet, in regard to all these changes, there is no inconsistency in supposing them to have gone on in an eternal series; and hence they furnish no proof of the non-eternity of the world. In the seventh and last place, the recent origin of society, as shown by historical monuments, is regarded as evidence of the recent origin of the world. This argument was well understood as long ago as the days of Lucretius, who states it very clearly in the oft-quoted lines,-- "Si nulla fuit genitalis origo, Terrarum et coeli, semperque eterna fuit, Cur, supra bellum Thebanum et funera Trojæ, Non alias alii quoque res cecinere poetæ?" This argument, though it has been met by a plausible reply, is certainly of great importance in its bearing upon the recent origin of the human race, which, as we shall shortly see, is a point of much interest. But it is obvious that it proves nothing respecting the origin of matter, since this might have had an eternal existence before man was placed upon it. We need not, therefore, be delayed by its discussion. Such is a fair summary, as I believe, of the arguments usually adduced, aside from the Bible and geology, to prove the non-eternity of the world. I am not prepared to say that they amount to nothing; but I do believe that they perplex, rather than convince, and that some of them are mere metaphysical quibbles. They do not produce that instantaneous conviction which most of the arguments of natural theology force upon the mind; and it is easy to see how a man of a sceptical turn should rise from their examination entirely unaffected, or affected unfavorably. Let us now, therefore, turn to geology, and inquire whether its archives will afford us any clearer light upon the subject. And here we must confess, at the outset, that geology furnishes us no more evidence than the other sciences of the creation of the matter of the universe out of nothing. But it does furnish us with examples of such modifications of matter as could be effected only by a Deity. Suppose, then, we should be obliged to acknowledge to the atheist, that we yield to him the point of matter's eternal existence, if he pleases, because we can find nowhere in nature decisive evidence of its creation, and then take our stand upon the arrangements and metamorphoses of matter. Or, rather, suppose we say to him, that we shall not contend with him as to the origin of matter, but challenge him to explain, if he can, without a Deity, its modifications, as taught by geology. If that science does disclose to us such changes on the globe as no power and wisdom but those of an infinite God could produce, then of what consequence is it, so far as religion is concerned, whether we can, or cannot, demonstrate the first creation of matter? I can conceive of no religious truth that would be unfavorably affected, though we should admit that this point cannot be settled. Let us, then, at least for the sake of argument, admit that it cannot be, and proceed to inquire whether, aside from this point, geology does not teach us all that is necessary to establish the most perfect system of Theism. I shall select four examples from that science, each of which is independent of the others in its bearing upon the subject, since in this way the argument will become cumulative; and if some are not satisfied with one example, the others may produce conviction. In the first place, geology teaches that the time has been when the earth existed as a molten mass of matter, and, therefore, all the animals and plants now existing upon its surface, and all those buried in its rocky strata, must have had a beginning, or have been created. I should be sustained by many probabilities, were I to go farther, and maintain that the time was when the globe existed in a gaseous state--an opinion very widely adopted by able philosophers of the present day. But as this view is more hypothetical than my first position, which makes the earth a liquid mass, and as nothing would be gained to the argument by supposing it in a gaseous state, I shall not press that point. That it was once in a state of fusion is probable from the very great heat still remaining in its interior. But more direct proof of this results from the facts, now admitted by almost all geologists, that the unstratified rocks have all been melted, and that the stratified class have all, or nearly all, been the result of disintegration and abrasion of the unstratified masses. A striking confirmation of this opinion is the spheroidal figure of the earth,--a figure precisely such as the globe would have assumed in consequence of rotation, had it been in a fluid state. In fine, so many and so decisive are the facts which point to the original igneous fluidity of the globe, that no competent judge thinks of doubting that all the matter of which it is composed, certainly its crust, has some time or other been in that state. It is, however, the opinion of some geologists of distinction, that the whole of it was not in fusion at the same time, and that its different portions have passed successively through the furnace. But this view of the subject scarcely affects my argument, since at whatever period the fusion of any part took place, the destruction of organic life, if it existed, must have been the consequence. The essential thing is, to show that such was once the state of the earth that animals and plants could not have existed on it. For if such was the case, their creation must have been a subsequent operation; and if this did not require an infinite Being to accomplish it, no result in nature would demand his agency. To prove the original igneous fluidity of the globe, we might have adopted another course of argument. All will admit that the present temperature of the interior of the earth is far more elevated than that of the surrounding planetary spaces. The inevitable result is, from the known laws of heat, that its radiation into the celestial spaces is constantly going on, and consequently the earth's temperature is being constantly lowered. Who can tell us now when this process of refrigeration commenced? If no one, then there must have been a time when the heat was great enough to fuse the whole globe. And the facts already stated confirm such an inference. For all the efforts hitherto made to show that the earth may be passing through regions of various temperatures, in its march around the centre of centres, amount to nothing more than dreamy conjecture. In order to feel the force of the argument, sustained by so many facts in geology, just picture to yourselves this vast globe as a mass of liquid fire. From such a world every thing organic must have been excluded, and every thing combustible consumed, and only such combinations of matter have existed as incandescent heat could not decompose. Compare such a world with that now teeming with life, and beauty, and glory, which we inhabit; and say, must not the transition to its present condition have demanded the exercise of infinite power, infinite wisdom, and infinite benevolence? You can, indeed, conceive how a solid crust might have formed over the vast fiery ocean, by the simple radiation of heat; and then, too, by natural laws, might the vapors have been condensed into oceans and clouds, while volcanic force within might have lifted up our continents and mountains above the flood. But what a picture of desolation and ruin would such a world present, while unadorned with vegetation, and with no voice of life to break the stillness of universal death! Here is, then, the precise point where we need the interference of a Deity. Admit, if you please, that atheism, with its eternal matter and the laws of nature at command, might form a world without inhabitants. Who does not see, that to bestow organization, and life, and instinct, to say nothing of intellect, upon brute matter, is the loftiest prerogative of Jehovah? especially to fill so vast a world as ours with its teeming millions, exhibiting ten thousand diversities of size, form, and structure. Let the atheist then exult in the belief of an eternal world. Geology shows him that it must have been without inhabitants; and that, therefore, the most wonderful part of the creation still remains to be accounted for; while physiology teaches that the interference of an infinite Deity can alone solve the enigma. My second example from geology to disprove the notion of an eternal series of animals and plants on the globe, is derived from the history of organic remains. That history shows us clearly, that the earth, since its creation, has been the seat of several distinct economies of life, each occupying long periods, and successively passing away. During each of these periods, distinct groups of animals and plants have occupied the earth, the air, and the waters. Each successive group has been entirely distinct from that which preceded it, though each group was exactly adapted to the existing state of the climate and the food provided; so that, had the different groups changed places with one another, they must have perished, because their constitutions were adapted only to the state of things during the period in which they actually lived. A distinguished naturalist has recently declared that "he has discovered, in surveying the entire series of fossil animal remains, five great groups, so completely independent that no species whatever is found in more than one of them."--_Deshayes._ Including the existing races, this would give us six entirely distinct groups of organic beings that have lived in succession upon this globe since it became a habitable world. But even if it should be found that a few species are common to adjoining groups, the great truth would still remain, that the different groups were too much unlike to be contemporaries, and that consequently a new creation must have taken place whenever each new group commenced its course. It is probable the earth has changed its inhabitants more than the six times that have been mentioned; some think as many as twelve times. But a larger number cannot yet be proved so clearly; and could they be, they would add nothing to this argument; for it rests mainly on the fact that this change of organic life has even once been complete. We may, however, very safely assume that the present animals and plants are the sixth group that have occupied the globe.[12] These facts being admitted, and who does not see the necessity of divine interference, whenever one race of animals and plants passed from the earth in order to repeople it? It is not difficult to conceive how volcanic fires, or aqueous inundations, may have carried universal destruction over the globe, and bereft it of inhabitants. But where, save in the fiat of an infinite Deity, is the power that can make this universe of death teem again with life and beauty? In the powerful language of Dr. Chalmers, we may inquire, "Is there aught in the rude and boisterous play of a great physical catastrophe that can germinate those exquisite structures, which, during our yet undisturbed economy, have been transmitted in pacific succession to the present day? What is there in the rush, and turbulence, and mighty clamor of such great elements, of ocean heaved from its old resting-place, and lifting its billows above the Alps and the Andes of a former continent,--what is there in this to charm into being the embryo of an infant family, wherewith to stock and to repeople a now desolate world? We see in the sweeping energy and uproar of this elemental war enough to account for the disappearance of all the old generations, but nothing that might cradle any new generations into existence, so as to have effloresced on ocean's deserted bed the life and loveliness which are now before our eyes. At no juncture, we apprehend, in the history of the world, is the interposition of the Deity more manifest than at this; nor can we better account for so goodly a creation emerging again into new forms of animation and beauty from the wreck of the old one, than that the spirit of God moved on the face of chaos, and that nature, turned by the last catastrophe into a wilderness, was again repeopled at the utterance of his word." Sir Isaac Newton has said, that "the growth of new systems out of old ones, without the mediation of a divine power, seems to me apparently absurd." He seems in this passage to have referred only to the arrangements of matter, "with respect to size, figure, proportions, and properties," and not to the principle of life, of instinct, or of intellect. But when the latter are taken into the account, it must be superlatively absurd to suppose new systems can grow out of old ones by merely natural operations. He, indeed, who can bring himself to believe, with a certain writer, that "the instincts of animals are nothing more than inert and passive attractions, derived from the power of sensation, and the instinctive operations of animals nothing more than crystallizations produced through the agency of that power,"--such a man could probably easily persuade himself that, by the help of galvanism, animals and plants might be the result of natural operations. Such doctrines, however, we shall examine in another lecture. My third example from geology, showing the non-eternity of the present condition of the globe, is the fact of the disappearance of several large species of animals since the commencement of the most recent or alluvial geological period. Certain large pachydermatous and other animals, such as the fossil elephant, the mastodon, the megatherium, the mylodon, the megalonyx, the glyptodon, the fossil horse, ox, deer, &c., also nine or ten species of huge birds--the dinornis, the palapteryx, aptornis, notornis, and nestor of New Zealand, the dodo of Mauritius and Bourbon, and the pezohaps or solitaire of Rodriguez,--have ceased to exist since the tertiary period; some of them--the birds, for instance--since man's creation. Now, if any important species of animals from time to time disappear from any system of organic life, it shows a tendency to ruin in that system; for such is the intimate dependence of different beings upon one another, that you cannot blot out one, certainly not a large number, without disturbing the healthy balance between the whole, and probably bringing the whole to ultimate ruin. At any rate, if several species die out by natural processes, no reason can be given why others should not, in like manner, disappear. And to prove that any organic system shows a tendency to ruin is to show that it had a beginning. My third example from geology, demonstrating the special interference of the Deity in the affairs of this world, is the fact of the comparatively recent commencement of the human race. That man was among the very last of the animals created is made certain by the fact that his remains are found only in the highest part of alluvium. This is rarely more than one hundred feet in thickness, while the other fossiliferous strata, lying beneath the alluvium, are six miles thick. Hence man was not in existence during all the period in which these six miles of strata were in a course of deposition, and he has existed only during the comparatively short period in which the one hundred feet of alluvium have been formed; nay, during only a small part of the alluvial period. His bones, having the same chemical composition as the bones of other animals, are no more liable to decay; and, therefore, had he lived and died in any of the periods preceding the alluvial, his bones must have been mixed with those of other animals belonging to those periods. But they are not thus found in a single well-authenticated instance, and, therefore, his existence has been limited to the alluvial period. Hence he must have been created and placed upon the globe--such is the testimony of geology--during the latter part of the alluvial period. I might include in this example nearly all the other species of existing animals and plants, since it is only a very few of these that are found fossil, and such species are limited to the tertiary strata. But since this might make some confusion in the argument, and since man is confessedly at the head of the existing creation, I prefer to let his case stand out alone, and to regard it _instar omnium_. Here, then, we have a case in which geology can lay her finger upon the precise epoch, in the revolutions of our globe, in which the most complicated, perfect, and exalted being that ever dwelt upon its surface first began to be. It was not the commencement of a mere zoöphyte, or cryptogamean plant, in which we see but little superiority to unorganized matter, except in their possession of a low degree of vitality. But we have a being complicated enough to contain a million of parts, endowed with the two great attributes of life, sensibility and contractility, in the highest degree, and, above all, possessing intellect and moral powers far more wonderful than organization and animal life. As to the period when the creation of such a being, by the most astonishing of all miracles, took place, I believe there is no diversity of opinion. At least, all agree that it was very recent; nay, although geology can rarely give chronological dates, but only a succession of events, she is able to say, from the monuments she deciphers, that man cannot have occupied the globe more than six thousand years. Now, if it was difficult to conceive how successive races of the inferior animals and plants could have originated in the laws of nature, without the special interference of the Deity, that difficulty increases in a rapid ratio as we ascend on the scale of organization and intellect, and attempt in the same manner to account for the origin of man without the miraculous agency of Deity. The thorough-going materialist, however, does not shrink from the effort. "Thought," says Bory de St. Vincent, "being the necessary result of a certain kind of organization, wherever this order is established, thought is necessarily derived from it; and it is no more possible for the molecules of matter, arranged in a certain manner, not to produce thought, than for brass, when smitten, not to return a sound, or for creatures formed by this matter, after such and such laws, not to walk, not to breathe, not to reproduce; in a word, not to exercise any of the faculties which result from their peculiar mechanism of organization."--Dict. Clas. _D. Hist. Nat._ art. _Matière_. This may seem, upon a superficial view, to be settling this matter at once. But it merely shifts the difficulty from one part of the subject to another. Admitting the premises of the materialist to be correct, it does indeed show us the proximate cause of thought. But the mind immediately inquires how a certain organization became possessed of such wonderful power. Is it inherent in matter, or is it a power communicated to organization by a supreme Being? If the latter, it is just what the Theist contends for; if the former, then there is just as much necessity for the original interposition of the Deity, in order to give matter such an astonishing power, as there is, on the theory of the immaterialist, to impart a spiritual and immortal principle to matter. The materialist will, indeed, say that matter has possessed this power from eternity. But this supposition, evidently absurd, does in fact invest matter with the attributes of Deity; since those attributes, and those alone, are sufficient to account for the phenomena. And besides, how is the fact to be explained that this power was not exerted till six thousand years ago? But with the exception of the materialist, I am sure that most reasoning minds will feel as if the creation of the human family was one of the most stupendous, perhaps the most stupendous, exercise of infinite power and wisdom which the universe exhibits. If any change whatever demands a Deity for its accomplishment, it must be this; and, therefore, geology presents, in the case of man, the most striking example which nature could furnish of a beginning of organic and intellectual life on the globe. It shows us that there was a time, and that not remote, when the first link of the curious chain of the human family, now constantly lengthening by inflexible laws, was created. I might now refer to certain recent discoveries in astronomy, which have the same bearing upon the general argument as the examples that have been quoted from geology, although less decisive. After the famous demonstration of the eternity of the universe by La Grange, provided the present laws of gravity alone control it, we could hardly expect that, so soon, even astronomy would furnish proof of a disturbing cause, which must ultimately and inevitably bring ruin among the heavenly bodies, if some counteracting agency be not exerted. Yet such a source of derangement exists in the supposed medium extending through all space, which has already shown its retarding influence upon Enke's, Biela's, and Halley's comets. And who can say that some of the vast periods which geology discloses may not have been commensurate with those intervening between catastrophes among the heavenly bodies as the result of the universal resisting ether? At present, however, we can say only that we know such long periods have existed in geology, and probably in astronomy. And their mere existence is fatal to the idea of the eternity of the world in its present state. If, then, geology can clearly demonstrate the present state of the globe to have had a beginning; if she can show us the period, by fair induction, when one liquid, fiery ocean enveloped the whole earth; if she can show us five or six economies of organic life successively flourishing and passing away; if she can trace man back to his origin at a comparatively recent date; if, in fact, she can show us that the most important operations on the globe, and the most complicated and exalted organic races, had a beginning; and if astronomy affords glimpses of similar changes,--then why may we not safely leave the subject of the world's eternity an undecided question, consistently with the most perfect Theism? If we can prove that the power, the wisdom, and the benevolence of the Deity have again and again interfered with the regular sequence of nature's operations, and introduced new conditions and new and more perfect beings, by using the matter already in existence, what though we cannot, by the light of science, run back to the first production of matter itself? What though the atheist should here be allowed to maintain his favorite theory that matter never had a beginning? What doctrine of natural religion is thereby unfavorably affected, if we can only show the interposition of the Deity in all of matter's important modifications? Such an admission would not prove matter to be eternal, but only that science has not yet placed within the reach of man the means of proving its non-eternity. And really, such an admission would be far more favorable to the cause of truth than to rely, as theologians have done, on metaphysical subtilties to prove that matter had a beginning. For the sceptical mind will not merely remain unconvinced by such arguments, but be very apt to draw the sweeping inference that all the doctrines of natural and revealed religion rest on similar dreamy abstractions. But is natural theology in fact destitute of all satisfactory proof that the matter of the universe had a beginning? Such proof, it seems to me, she will seek in vain in the wide fields of physical and mathematical science; and the solution of the question which metaphysics offers, as we have seen, does not satisfy. But there are sources of evidence on this point which seem to me of the most satisfactory kind. In the first place, we may derive from science some presumptive proof of a commencement of the matter of the universe. The fact that the organic races on the globe had a beginning affords such proof. For matter could not have originated itself; nor is there any proof of its eternal existence; and to assume that it did eternally exist, without proof, is far more unphilosophical than to admit its origination in the divine will. For since God has complete control over matter, it is probable that he created it with such properties as he wished it to possess. And furthermore, to the power and wisdom that could set in motion the heavenly bodies, and create and adapt existing organisms out of preëxistent matter, we can assign no limits, and hence conclude them to be infinite. Therefore they are sufficient to the production of matter, which could not have demanded more than infinite wisdom and power. Now, in confirmation of these presumptions, we may appeal to the Bible. It is true that writers have been accustomed to consider it contrary to sound logic to draw from revelation any support or illustrations of natural religion. But why should an historical fact possess less value, if transmitted to us through the channel of sacred, rather than profane, writers? Now, it would be regarded as perfectly good reasoning to seize upon any facts stated by heathen philosophers and historians, illustrative of natural religion. But the Scriptures carry with them, to say the least, quite as strong evidence of their authenticity and claims to be credited, as any ancient uninspired writer. We place them on the same ground as any other history, and demand for them only that they should be believed so far as we have testimony to their authenticity. If a man, after careful examination of their evidences, comes to the conclusion that they are mere fables, then to him their testimony is of no value to prove or illustrate any truth of natural religion. But if he is convinced that they are worthy of credence, then their statements may decide a point about which the light of nature leaves him in uncertainty. In this way the Bible is used by the natural theologian, just as he would employ any curious object in nature--say, the human hand, or the eye. These organs exist, and their mechanism is to be accounted for either with or without a God. And so the Bible exists, and its contents are to be accounted for; and if they clearly evince the agency of a Deity, then we may use them, just as we would use the eye or the hand, to prove or illustrate important truths in natural theology. But the testimony of the Bible, as to the origin of the world, is most explicit and decided. It declares that _in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; and that the worlds were formed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear_. The obvious meaning of this latter passage is, that the material universe was created out of nothing. ([Greek: ta mê phainomena].) How much more satisfactory this simple and consistent statement, than a volume of abstract argument to prove the non-eternity of the world! Now, if the testimony of the Scriptures on all other points has been found correct, why should we not receive with unhesitating credence, and even with joy, the sublime announcement with which that volume opens? True, we are not compelled to admit this statement, in order to save Theism from refutation, because geology shows us the commencement of several economies on the globe, which point us to a divine Author. But the doctrine of matter's creation out of nothing gives a desirable completeness to the system. In looking back upon the subject, which has thus been discussed, too briefly for its merits, but too prolixly for your patience, several important inferences force themselves upon our attention. And first, it furnishes a satisfactory reply to a well-known objection, otherwise unanswerable, against the argument from design in nature to prove the existence of a Deity. We present ten thousand examples of exquisite design and adaptation in nature to the atheist. He admits them all; but says, it was always so, and therefore requires no other Deity but the power eternally inherent in nature. At your metaphysical replies to his objections he laughs; but when you take him back on geological wings, and bid him gaze on man, just springing, with his lofty powers, from the plastic hands of his Creator, and then, still earlier, you point him to system after system of organic life starting up in glorious variety and beauty on the changing earth, and even still nearer the birth of time, you show him the globe, a glowing ocean of fire, swept of all organic life, he is forced to exclaim, "A God! a personal God! an infinitely wise and powerful God!" What though he still clings to the notion of matter's eternity? you have forced him to see the hand of Deity in its wonderful arrangements and metamorphoses; the hand of such a Deity as might have brought it into existence in a moment, by the word of his power.[13] Secondly. The subject presents us with a new argument for the existence of a God, or rather a satisfactory modification of the argument from design. In that argument, as derived from other sciences, the Theist finds, indeed, multiplied and beautiful proofs of adaptation and apparent design; but then he cannot, as already observed, from those sciences derive proof of the commencement either of matter or its arrangements; and then, too, the sceptic, with plausible ingenuity, can take his stand upon law as the efficient agent in nature's movements and harmonies. But when geology shows us, not the commencement of matter, but of organism, and presents us with full systems of animals and plants springing out of inorganic elements, where is the law that exhibits even a tendency to such results? Nothing can explain them but the law of miracles; that is, creation by divine interposition. Thus is the idea of a Deity forced nakedly upon us, as the only possible solution of the enigmas of creation. The metaphysical Theist must waste half his strength in battling the questions about the beginning of matter, and the laws of matter; nor can he ever entirely dislodge the enemy from these strongholds of atheism. But the geological Theist takes us at once into a field where work has been done, which neither eternal law, nor eternal matter, but an infinite personal Deity only, could accomplish. In conclusion, I would merely refer to the interesting fact, that geology should prove almost the only science that presents us with exigencies demanding the interposition of creating power. And yet, up to the present time, geology has been looked upon by many Christian writers with jealous eye, because it was supposed to teach the world's eternity, and so to account for natural changes by catastrophes and the gradual operation of existing agencies, as to render a Deity unnecessary, either for the creation or regulation of the world. One of these writers has even most uncharitably and unreasonably said, that "the mineral geology, considered as a science, can do as well without God (though in a question concerning the origin of the earth) as Lucretius did."--Granville Penn, _Comparative Estimate_, &c.--How much ground there is for such an allegation, let the developments made in this lecture answer. Surely, in this case, geology has followed the directions of the Oriental poet:-- "Learn from yon Orient shell to love thy foe, And strew with pearls the hand that brings thee woe; Free, like yon rock, from base, vindictive pride, Emblaze with gems the wrist that rends thy side. Mark where yon tree rewards the stony shower With fruit nectareous or the balmy flower. All nature calls aloud,--'Shall man do less Than heal the smiter, and the railer bless?'" Misunderstood or misinterpreted though this science has been, she now offers her aid to fortify some of the weakest outposts of religion. And thus shall it ever be with all true science. Twin sister of natural and revealed religion, and of heavenly birth, she will never belie her celestial origin, nor cease to sympathize with all that emanates from the same pure home. Human ignorance and prejudice may for a time seem to have divorced what God has joined together. But human ignorance and prejudice shall at length pass away, and then science and religion shall be seen blending their parti-colored rays into one beautiful bow of light, linking heaven to earth and earth to heaven. LECTURE VI. GEOLOGICAL PROOFS OF THE DIVINE BENEVOLENCE. The subject of the present lecture is the divine benevolence, as taught by geology. But what connection, it will be asked, can there be between the history of rocks and the benevolence of God? Do not the leading points of that history consist of terrible catastrophes, aqueous or igneous, by which the crust of the earth has been dislocated and upheaved, mountains lifted up and overturned, the dry land inundated, now by scorching lava, and now by the ocean, sweeping from its face all organic life, and entombing its inhabitants in a stony grave? Who can find the traces of benevolence in the midst of such desolation and death? Is it not the very place where the objector would find arguments to prove the malevolence, certainly the vindictive justice, of the Deity? This, I am aware, is a not unnatural _prima facie_ view of this subject. But it is a false one. Geology does furnish some very striking evidence of divine benevolence; and if I can show this, and from so unpromising a field gather decisive arguments on this subject, they will be so much clear gain to the cause of Theism. This is what, therefore, I shall now attempt to do. _In the first place, I derive an argument for the divine benevolence from the manner in which soils are formed by the disintegration and decomposition of rocks._ Chemical analysis shows us that the mineral constituents of rocks are essentially the same as those of soils; and that the latter differ from the former, in a pulverized state, only in containing animal and vegetable matter. Hence we cannot doubt but the soils originated from the rocks. And, in fact, the process of their production is continually going on under our eyes. Wherever the rocks are exposed to atmospheric agencies, they are seen to crumble down; and, in fact, most of them, having been long exposed, are now covered with a deposit of their own ruins, forming a soil over them. This process is in part decomposition and in part disintegration; and as we look upon rocks thus wasting away, we are apt to be impressed with the idea that it is an instance of decay in nature's works, which, instead of indicating benevolence, can hardly be reconciled with divine wisdom. But when we learn that this is the principal mode in which soils are produced, that without it vegetation could not be sustained, and that a world like ours without plants must also be without animals, this apparent ruin puts on the aspect of benevolence and wise design. _My second argument in proof of the divine benevolence is derived from the disturbed, broken, and overturned condition of the earth's crust._ To the casual observer, the rocks have the appearance of being lifted up, shattered, and overturned. But it is only the geologist who knows the vast extent of this disturbance. He never finds crystalline, non-fossiliferous rocks, which have not been more or less removed from their original position; and usually he finds them to have been thrown up by some powerful agency into almost every possible position. The older fossiliferous strata exhibit almost equal evidence of the operation of a powerful disturbing force, though sometimes found in their original horizontal position. The newer rocks have experienced less of this agency, though but few of them have not been elevated or dislocated. Mountainous countries exhibit this action most strikingly. There it is shown sometimes on a magnificent scale. Entire mountains in the Alps, for instance, appear not only to have been lifted up from the ocean's depths, but to have been actually thrown over, so as to bring the lowest and oldest rocks at the top of the series. The extensive range of mountains in this country, commencing in Canada, and embracing the Green Mountains of Vermont, the Highlands of New York, and most of the Alleghany chain as far as Alabama, a distance of some twelve hundred miles, has also been lifted up, and some of the strata, by a lateral force, folded together, and then thrown over, so as now to occupy an inverted position. Let us now see wherein this agency exhibits benevolence. If these strata had remained horizontal, as they were originally deposited, it is obvious that all the valuable ores, minerals, and rocks, which man could not have discovered by direct excavation, must have remained forever unknown to him. Now, man has very seldom penetrated the rocks below the depth of half a mile, and rarely so deep as that; whereas, by the elevations, dislocations, and overturnings that have been described, he obtains access to all deposits of useful substances that lie within fifteen or twenty miles of the surface; and many are thus probably brought to light from a greater depth. He is indebted, then, to this disturbing agency for nearly all the useful metals, coal, rock salt, marble, gypsum, and other useful minerals; and when we consider how necessary these substances are to civilized society, who will doubt that it was a striking act of benevolence which thus introduced disturbance, dislocation, and apparent ruin into the earth's crust? Another decided advantage resulting from this disturbing agency is the formation of valleys. If we suppose the strata spread uniformly over the earth's entire surface, then the ocean must envelop the whole globe. But, admitting such interruptions in the strata to exist as would leave cavities, where the waters might be gathered together into one place, and the dry land appear, still that dry land must form only an unbroken level. Streams of water could not exist on such a continent, because they depend upon inequalities of surface; and whatever water existed must have formed only stagnant ponds, and the morasses which would be the consequence would load the air with miasms fatal to life; so that we may safely pronounce the world uninhabitable by natures adapted to the present earth. But such, essentially, must have been the state of things, had not internal forces elevated and fractured the earth's crust. For that was the origin of most of our valleys--of all the larger valleys, indeed, which checker the surface of primary countries. Most of them have been modified by subsequent agencies; but their leading features, their outlines, have been the result of those internal disturbances which spread desolation over the surface. We are apt to look upon such an agency as an exhibition of retributive justice, rather than of benevolence. And yet that admirable system for the circulation of water, whereby the rain that falls upon the surface is conveyed to the ocean, whence it is returned by evaporation, depends upon it. It imparts, to all organic nature, life, health, and activity; and had it not thus ridged up the surface, stagnation and death must have reigned over all the earth. In the unhealthiness of low, flat countries, at present, we see the terrible condition of things in a world without valleys. Can we doubt, then, that it was the hand of benevolence that drove the ploughshare of ruin through the earth's crust, and ridged up its surface into a thousand fantastic forms? It will more deeply impress us with this benevolence to remember that most of the sublime and the beautiful in the scenery of a country depends upon this disturbing agency. Beautiful as vegetable nature is, how tame is a landscape where only a dead level is covered with it, and no swelling hills, or jutting rocks, or murmuring waters, relieve the monotonous scene! And how does the interest increase with the wildness and ruggedness of the surface, and reach its maximum only where the disturbance and dislocation have been most violent! Some may, perhaps, doubt whether it can have been one of the objects of divine benevolence and wisdom, in arranging the surface of this world, so to construct and adorn it as to gratify a taste for fine scenery. But I cannot doubt it. I see not else why nature every where is fitted up in a lavish manner with all the elements of the sublime and beautiful, nor why there are powers in the human soul so intensely gratified in contact with those elements, unless they were expressly adapted for one another by the Creator. Surely natural scenery does afford to the unsophisticated soul one of the richest and purest sources of enjoyment to be found on earth. If this be doubted by any one, it must be because he has never been placed in circumstances to call into exercise his natural love of the beautiful and the sublime in creation. Let me persuade such a one, at least in imagination, to break away from the slavish routine of business or pleasure, and in the height of balmy summer to accompany me to a few spots, where his soul will swell with new and strong emotions, if his natural sensibilities to the grand and beautiful have not become thoroughly dead within him. We might profitably pause for a moment at this enchanting season of the year, (June,) and look abroad from that gentle elevation on which we dwell, now all mantled over with a flowery carpet, wafting its balmy odors into our studies. Can any thing be more delightful than the waving forests, with their dense and deep green foliage, interspersed with grassy and sunny fields and murmuring streamlets, which spread all around us? How rich the graceful slopes of yonder distant mountains, which bound the Connecticut on either side! How imposing Mount Sugar Loaf on the north, with its red-belted and green-tufted crown, and Mettawampe too, with its rocky terraces on the one side, and its broad slopes of unbroken forest on the other! Especially, how beautifully and even majestically does the indented summit of Mount Holyoke repose against the summer sky! What sunrises and sunsets do we here witness, and what a multitude of permutations and combinations pass before us during the day, as we watch from hour to hour one of the loveliest landscapes of New England! Let us now turn our steps to that huge pile of mountains called the White Hills of New Hampshire. We will approach them through the valley of the Saco River, and at the distance of thirty miles they will be seen looming up in the horizon, with the clouds reposing beneath their naked heads. As the observer approaches them, the sides of the valley will gradually close in upon him, and rise higher and higher, until he will find their naked granitic summits almost jutting over his path, to the height of several thousand feet, seeming to form the very battlements of heaven. Now and then will he see the cataract leaping hundreds of feet down their sides, and the naked path of some recent landslip, which carried death and desolation in its track. From this deep and wild chasm he will at length emerge, and climb the vast ridge, until he has seen the forest trees dwindle, and at length disappear; and standing upon the naked summit, immensity seems stretched out before him. But he has not yet reached the highest point; and far in the distance, and far above him, Mount Washington seems to repose in awful majesty against the heavens. Turning his course thither, he follows the narrow and naked ridge over one peak after another, first rising upon Mount Pleasant, then Mount Franklin, and then Mount Monroe, each lifting him higher, and making the sea of mountains around him more wide and billowy, and the yawning gulfs on either side more profound and awful, so that every moment his interest deepens, and reaches not its climax till he stands upon Mount Washington, when the vast panorama is completed, and the world seems spread out at his feet. Yet it does not seem to be a peopled world, for no mighty city lies beneath him. Indeed, were it there, he would pass it almost unnoticed. For why should he regard so small an object as a city, when the world is before him?--a world of mountains, bearing the impress of God's own hand, standing in solitary grandeur, just as he piled them up in primeval ages, and stretching away on every side as far as the eye can reach. On that pinnacle of the northern regions no sound of man or beast breaks in upon the awful stillness which reigns there, and which seems to bring the soul into near communion with the Deity. It is, indeed, the impressive Sabbath of nature; and the soul feels a delightful awe, which can never be forgotten. Gladly would it linger there for hours, and converse with the mighty and the holy thoughts which come crowding into it; and it is only when the man looks at the rapidly declining sun that he is roused from his revery and commences his descending march. Let such a man next accompany me to Niagara. We will pass by all minor cataracts, and place ourselves at once on the margin of one that knows no rival. Let not the man take a hasty glance, and in disappointment conclude that he shall find no interest and no sublimity there. Let him go to the edge of the precipice, and watch the deep waters as they roll over, and, changing their sea-green brightness for a fleecy white, pour down upon the rocks beneath, and dash back again in spray high in the air. Let him go to the foot of the sheet, and look upward till the cataract swells into its proper size. Let him, on the Canada shore, take in the whole breadth of the cataract at once; and as he stands musing, let him listen to the deep thunderings of the falling sheet. Let him go to Table Rock, and creep forward to its jutting edge, and gaze steadily into the foaming and eddying waters so far beneath him, until his nerves thrill and vibrate, and he involuntarily shrinks back, exclaiming,-- "How dreadful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low! I'll look no more, Lest my brain turn." Next, let him stand upon that rock till the sun approaches so near the western horizon that a glorious bow, forming an almost entire circle on the cataract and the spray, shall clothe the scene with unearthly beauty, and, in connection with the emerald green of the waters, give it a brilliancy fully equal to its sublimity. And finally, if he would add the emotions of moral to natural sublimity, let him follow to Ontario, the deep gulf through which all these waters flow, and, gathering up the evidence, which he will find too strong to resist, that they themselves have worn that gulf backward seven miles, let him try the rules of geological arithmetic to see if he can reach the period of its commencement. Surely, when he reviews the emotions of that day, he will never again doubt that the magnificent scenery of our world is the result of benevolent design on the part of the Creator. If, now, we cross the Atlantic, we shall easily find scenes of natural beauty and sublimity, that have long elicited the wonder and delight of thousands of genuine taste. Shall we turn our steps first to the valleys and mountains of Wales? To an American eye, indeed, they lack one important feature, in being so destitute of trees. But then their wild aspect, their ragged and rocky outlines, present a picture of the sublimity of desolation rarely equalled. And as you ascend the mountains,--Snowdon, for instance, the highest of them all,--you find their summits, not rounded, as our American mountains, by former drift agency, nor forming continuous ridges, but shooting up in ragged peaks and edges, as if they formed the teeth of mother earth; although, in fact, it was the tooth of time that has gnawed them into their present forms. As you approach the summit, you feel animated in anticipation of the splendid prospect about to open upon you. But the clouds begin to gather, and soon envelop the mountain top; and though you reach the pinnacle, the dense mist limits your vision to a circle of a few rods in diameter. But ere long the vapor begins to break away, and the lofty cliffs and deep caverns around you are revealed. Now and then, the lake, so often found in the recesses of these mountains, is half seen through the opening cloud, and, magnified by the obscurity, it seems more distant and grand than if distinctly visible. Gradually the clouds open in various directions, disclosing gulf after gulf, lake after lake, mountain after mountain, and, finally, the Irish Channel, dotted with sails; and the whole scene lies spread out before you in glories that cannot be described. You are standing upon the pinnacle of England, and you feel as if almost the whole of it lay within the circle of vision. After enjoying so splendid a scene, you are thankful that the cloud hid it at first from your sight, and so much enhanced your pleasure by opening vista after vista, till the whole became one magnificent circle of picturesque beauty and sublimity.[14] To relieve the mind after gazing long on such scenes of rugged grandeur, let us turn our course southerly, and follow down the romantic banks of the Wye, where every turn presents some new beauties, occasionally disclosing the ruins of some old castle, or magnificent abbey, (Tinton,) and at length Bristol, with its aristocratic adjunct, Clifton, turns your thoughts from the works of nature to those of man. And yet, even Clifton's elegant Crescent is but a meagre show by the side of the magnificent gorge which the Avon has cut in the rocks just before it enters Bristol Channel. Passing over to the Isle of Wight, and traversing its shores, we shall witness many unique examples of natural beauty, swelling sometimes into sublimity,--such are the chalk cliffs near its western extremity, from two hundred to six hundred feet high,--sometimes hollowed out into magnificent domes, and the pillars of chalk, called _Needles_, in the midst of the sea, alive with sea gulls and cormorants, and forming the remnants of the chalk bridge that once united the island to England. There, too, Alum Bay, with its many-colored strata of clay, unites the interesting in geology with the picturesque in scenery. Along the southern coast, also, are the stupendous cliffs and the romantic under-cliffs, as well as the ragged _chines_, where an almost tropical climate attracts the invalid, while the cool sea breezes draw thither the wealthy and the fashionable. But if sublime scenery pleases us more, we must traverse the Highlands of Scotland,-- "Land of brown heath and shaggy furze," land of lofty and naked mountains, embosoming lakes of great beauty, and full of historic and poetic interest. Passing over Loch Lomond, the queen of Scottish lakes, you go through the long shadow of Ben Lomond, propped by many lesser mountains. Rising into the Highlands, the sterility and wildness increase, and reach their maximum in Glencoe, whose wildness and sublimity are indeed indescribable; but if seen, they can never be forgotten. Still farther north, Ben Nevis lifts its uncovered head above all other mountains in the British Isles; so high, indeed, that often, during the whole summer, it retains a portion of its snowy, wintry mantle. Yet farther north, we come to the unique terraces, called the _Parallel Roads of Glen Roy_, formerly supposed to be the work of giants; but now, that they are known to be the product of nature, proving not only objects of great scenographical interest, but a problem of special importance and difficulty in geology. If we should pass from Scotland to the north-east part of Ireland, taking Staffa in our way, we should find in the basaltic columns of Fingal's Cave, and the Giant's Causeway, what seems, at first view, to be stupendous human structures, or rather the architecture of giants. But you soon find it to be only an example-- "Where nature works as if defying art, And, in defiance of her rival powers, By these fortuitous and random strokes, Performing such inimitable feats, As she, with all her rules, can never reach." Let any one sail along the coast for a few miles at the Giant's Causeway, enter some of the deep and echoing caverns, overhung by the basaltic mass, and see the columns rising tier above tier, sometimes four hundred feet in height, and assuming every wild and fantastic shape; or let him walk over the acres of columns, whose tops are as perfectly polygonal and as accurately fitted to one another as the most skilful architect could make them, and he will confess how superior Nature is, when she would present a model for human imitation; and how with accurate system she can combine the wildest disorder, and thus delight by symmetry, while she awes by sublimity. Let us next pass over to continental Europe. We have reached the Rhine at Bonn, and the steamboat takes us at once into the midst of the romantic Drachenfels, or seven mountains, the result of volcanic agency, and still presenting more or less of the conical outline peculiar almost to modern volcanoes. These are the commencement of the romantic scenery of the Rhine. From thence to Bingen, some sixty or seventy miles, that river has cut its way through hills and mountains, sometimes rising one thousand feet. Along their base, the inhabitants have planted many a well-known town, while old castles, half crumbled down, recall continually the history of feudal ages; and here, too, springs up a multitude of remembrances of startling events in more recent times. The mind, indeed, finds itself drawn at one moment to some historical monument, and the next to scenery of surpassing beauty or sublimity; now the bold, overhanging rock, now the deep recess, now the towering mountain, now the quiet dell with its romantic villages; while every where on the north bank, the vine-clad terraces show us what wonders human industry can accomplish. Nor does the Rhine lose its interest when we have emerged from its _Ghor_ into its more open valley, from Bingen to Basle, in Switzerland. On its right bank, the Vosges Mountains, and on its left, the Black Forest, with not infrequent volcanic summits, afford a fine resting-place for the eye, as the rail car bears us rapidly over the rich intervening level. Or if we turn aside,--as to Heidelberg, on the Neckar,--what can be a more splendid sight than to stand by the old castle above the town, and look down the valley as the sun is sinking in the west! But after all, it is in Switzerland, and there only, that we meet with the climax of scenographical wonders. Nowhere else can we find such lakes in the midst of such mountains; such pleasant valleys bordered by such stupendous hills; such gorges, and precipices, and passes, and especially such glaciers; such avalanches, such snow-capped mountains, while vegetation at their base, and far up their sides, is fresh and luxuriant. Embark, for instance, at Zurich, and, crossing its beautiful lake, direct your course towards Mount Righi. As the heavy diligence lifts you above the lake, you begin to catch glimpses of the grandeur of the Swiss mountains to the south, piercing the clouds far off. Passing the romantic Zug, you come to the valley between the Rossberg and the Righi, and the denuded face of the former tells you whence came the mass of ruins over which you clamber, and which buried the villages of Goldau, Bussingen, and Rothen several hundred feet deep with blocks of stone and soil. Long and steep is your ascent of Righi, nearly six thousand feet above the sea. But the views you obtain by the way become wider and grander at every step. Reaching the summit near sunset, you may be gratified by a panoramic view of a large part of Switzerland, embracing its wildest and grandest scenery. Yet, if the clouds prevent, you wait for the morning, in the hope of being more fortunate. With the earliest dawn you awake, and proceed to the summit of the mountain, where hundreds, perhaps, from all civilized lands, are congregated, to witness the rising of the sun. But a dense cloud envelops the mountain, and hope almost dies within you. Wait, however, a few moments, and the rising sun will depress the clouds below the mountain's summit, and a scene of glory shall open upon you, which can never be erased from your memory. Look now, for the sun's first rays have shed a flood of glory over the clouds which now fill the valleys beneath your feet. A fleecy white predominates; but the colors of the prism tinge the edges of the clouds, and no part of the solid earth rises above them, save the pinnacle on which you stand, and to the south the higher peaks of the Bernese Alps,--the Jungfrau, the Eiger, the Shreckhorn, and the Wetterhorn,--covered with snow and glaciers, and seeming too pure to belong to earth. Indeed, the whole scene seemed to me to be unearthly; the fittest emblem that my eyes ever rested upon of celestial scenes; and one cannot repress the desire, when looking upon it, to be borne away on wings over the glorious scene, and to repose for a time upon the gorgeous bed, forgetful of the lower world. Yet when, at length, the clouds begin to break away, and disclose the deep valleys and blue lakes,--places made immortal by the deeds of such patriots and reformers as Tell and Zuinglius,--we feel again the attractions of earth; and as we descend to Lake Lucerne, we have before us such scenery as scarcely any other part of the world can furnish. And these scenes continue, in ever-changing aspects, wherever we wander along this enchanting lake; and though the exhausted brain fails at length, the objects of interest do not. From this lake we might turn our course easterly, and soon find ourselves amid the glacial regions of the Oberland Alps--scenes full of deep and thrilling interest. But let us rather turn southerly, and, following down the great valley of Switzerland, find our way among the Alps of Savoy, where the same phenomena attain their maximum of interest and sublimity, and the great monarch of the Alps is seen, wearing his hoary crown. As we pass along towards Lake Lehman, if the air be clear, the Bernese Alps loom up in unrivalled majesty; and as we sail over Lake Lehman, Mont Blanc, with some of its nearly equal associates, shows its distant yet impressive form. Passing without notice the almost unrivalled beauties of Lehman, and following up the Arve through its stupendous gorges, we catch views of Mont Blanc, as we approach it, that possess overpowering sublimity. At length, Chamouny is reached--a lovely vale in the midst of Alpine wonders. From thence we first ascend the Flegère, thirty-five hundred feet above the valley, and sixty-five hundred above the ocean; and there we get a fine view of Mont Blanc and the Aiguilles, or Needles. Here distances are vastly diminished to the eye, and you seem in near proximity even with Mont Blanc; and, in fact, should any adventurous visitors have reached the top of that mountain, a good spy-glass will show them from this spot.[15] On the opposite side of the valley from the Flegère, and at about the same height, is Montanvert, the most convenient spot for traversing the glacier called the Mer de Glace. If, however, one would see the lower extremity of that glacier, and the Arveron issuing from it, he must pass along the right hand side of the stream, and then he can follow up the glacier to Montanvert; and strange would it be if, in doing this, he should not hear and see the frequent avalanche. We have now reached the field where everlasting war is carried on between heat and cold, summer and winter. Below us, verdure clothes the valleys, and climbs up the slopes of the hills; and there the shepherd watches his flocks. Above us there are fields of ice stretching many a league, save where some needle-shaped summit of naked rock, too steep for snow to rest upon, shoots up in lonely grandeur thousands of feet, and defies the raging elements. From these oceans of ice shoot forth down the valleys enormous glaciers, appearing like vast rivers of ice, winding among the hills, and pushing, at the rate of a few inches each day, far into regions of vegetation; one year encroaching upon the shepherd's pasture ground, and anon, by the access of heat, driven back towards the summit; hurling down, from time to time, as they push forward, the thundering avalanche. Without difficulty at Montanvert we can enter upon the glacier, and in spite of the deep _crevasse_, and the elemental war, which always rages in those lofty regions, we may make our way to their source. Nay, human feet, as already suggested, have pressed even the top of Mont Blanc; and should we reach this summit of the Alps, we should stand upon the loftiest point of Europe, and behold a scene which but few eyes ever have, or ever will, rest upon. We should "breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top, Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite." We should, in fact, have reached the climax of the sublime in natural scenery. Thus far I have described, almost without exception, only what I have seen. But let us now venture into regions where we have only the description of others to guide us. Let us enter the region of ancient Armenia, a country composed of wide plains, bounded and intersected by precipitous mountains. As we journeyed south-easterly over one of these plains, a remarkable conical summit would arrest our attention, at the distance of sixty miles. Day after day, as we approached, it would creep up higher and higher above the horizon, developing its commanding features, and rivetting more intensely the attention upon it. As we came near its base, we should see that its top rose far into the region of eternal ice, whose glassy surface would reflect the light like a mirror, and whose lower edge had shot forth enormous glaciers as far as the heat would allow them to descend. In the plain below, we should be sweltering in a tropical heat; but the same sun that melted us would make no impression upon the wintry crown of the mountain. We could not keep our eyes or thoughts turned away from an object so sublime. And it would deepen the impression to learn that this gigantic cone, shooting up three and a half miles, was once a volcano; and still more would it deepen our interest to learn that this is the mountain which universal tradition in that region regards as the Mount Ararat, the resting-place of the ark. It would strike us forcibly to realize that what seems to us now to be a pillar of heaven, was the patriarch's stepping-stone from the antediluvian into the postdiluvian world. One more example may suffice. Go with me to the Sandwich Islands, and we shall get an impressive glimpse of the principal agency by which the earth's crust has been ridged, furrowed, and dislocated. As we land upon Hawaii, we perceive it to be composed mainly of lava of no very ancient date. We ascend a lofty _plateau_, and many a league in advance of us we see a column of smoke rising from a vast plain. Directing our course thither, while yet some miles from it, we descend a steep slope to a broad terrace, and then another slope to a second terrace. These slopes and terraces extend circularly around the pillar of smoke like the seats of a vast amphitheatre. Coming near to this column, our steps are arrested on the margin of a vast gulf, fifteen hundred feet deep, and from eight to ten miles in circumference, whose bottom is the seat of the most remarkable volcano on the globe;--I mean Kilauea. Wait here till night closes around us, and we shall witness a scene of awful sublimity. Over the immense area of that gulf will the volcanic agency beneath be exerted. Ever and anon, and mingling in strange discord, will hissings and groanings, mutterings and thunderings, be heard rolling from side to side, and making the earth tremble around. Then from one and another volcanic cone--perhaps from fifty--will the glowing lava burst forth; red-hot stones will be driven furiously upward; vapor, and smoke, and flames will be poured out, and the dark and jagged sides of that vast furnace will glow with unearthly splendor; and here and there will lakes of liquid lava appear, one or two miles in extent, heaving up their billows, and dashing their fiery spray high into the air. O, there is not on earth a livelier emblem of the world of despair; and yet we know it is not the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, nor the abode of lost spirits. We know it to be only one of the safety-valves of our globe, and an exhibition of that mighty agency within the globe which has heaved and dislocated its crust; and, therefore, as we gaze upon the scene, and forget our fatigue and sleep, we experience only the emotions of awful sublimity, which can hardly fail to rise into adoration of that infinite Being who can say, even to this agency, Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther. These are samples only of those delightful emotions which he experiences, who possesses a taste for natural scenery. And kindred emotions will be awakened within him, wherever he wanders among the works of God. They form some of the purest and most satisfying pleasures which this world affords. They constitute pleasant oases along the dreary journey of life; and so deeply does memory engrave them on her tablet, that no change of time or circumstances can hide them from our view. Now, it is obvious that if the Author of nature and of the human soul had been malevolent, instead of making every thing which man meets in creation "beauty to his eye, and music to his ear," he would have made all offensive and painful. Instead of the delightful emotions of beauty and sublimity which now rise within us as we open our eyes upon nature, feelings of aversion and fear would haunt us. Every sound would have been discordant, and every sight terrific. He could not have been even indifferent to our happiness, when he commissioned those desolating agencies of nature, fire and water, to ridge up and furrow out the earth's surface as the groundwork of the future landscape. For he has taken care that the result should be a scene productive of pleasure only to the soul that is in a healthy state. Benevolence only, infinite benevolence, could have done this. _My third argument in favor of the divine benevolence is founded on the arrangements for the distribution of water on the globe._ We should expect on so uneven a surface as the earth presents, that this element, which forms the liquid nourishment of all organic life, and which in many other ways seems indispensable, must be very unequally distributed, and fail entirely in many places; and yet we find it in almost every spot where man erects his habitation. And those places where there is a deficiency are usually extended plains; not, as we should expect, the mountainous regions. The latter are usually well watered; and this is accomplished in three ways. In the first place, in most mountainous countries, the strata are so much tilted up, as to prevent the water from running off. In the second place, the pervious strata are frequently interrupted by faults sometimes filled by impervious matter. In the third place, the comminuted materials that cover the rocks as soils, are often so fine, or of such a nature, as to prevent the passage of water; and thus much of the water that falls upon elevated land remains there, while enough percolates through the pervious materials to water the valleys and supply the streams. These carry it to the lakes and the ocean, where it is returned by evaporation in the form of clouds, and thus an admirable system of circulation is kept up, whereby this essential element is purified, and conveyed to every part of the surface where man or beast require it. There is one recent discovery, which deserves notice here, because it depends upon the geological structure of the earth. When pervious and impervious strata alternate, and are considerably inclined, water may be brought from great depths by hydrostatic pressure, if the impervious stratum be bored through and the water-bearing deposit be reached. A perpetual fountain may thus be produced, and water be obtained in a region naturally deficient in it. An Artesian fountain of this description, in the suburbs of Paris, has been brought from the enormous depth of eighteen hundred feet![16] Now, just consider that to deprive the earth of water is to deprive it of inhabitants, and you cannot but see in the means by which it is so widely, nay, almost universally, diffused, and made to circulate for purification,--the most decided marks of divine benevolence. Why is it not as striking as the curious means by which the blood and the sap of animals and plants are sent to every part of the system to supply its waste, and give it greater development? _I derive a fourth geological argument for the benevolence of the Deity, from the manner in which the metallic ores are distributed through the earth's crust._ It can hardly be doubted, by the geologist, that nearly every part of the earth's crust, and its interior too, have been some time or other in a melted state. Now, as the metals and their ores are usually heavier than other rocks, we should expect that they would have accumulated at the centre of the globe, and have been enveloped by the rocks so as to have been forever inaccessible to man. And the very great weight of the central parts of the earth--almost twice that of granite--leads naturally to the conclusion that the heavier metals may be accumulated there, though this is by no means a certain conclusion; since at the depth of thirty-four miles air would be so condensed by the pressure of the superincumbent mass as to be as heavy as water; water at the depth of three hundred and sixty-two miles would become as heavy as quick-silver; and at the centre steel would be compressed into one fourth, and stone into one eighth, of its bulk at the surface. Still it is most probable that the materials naturally the heaviest would first seek the centre. And yet, by means of sublimation, and expansion by internal heat, or the segregating power of galvanic action, or of some other agents, enough of the metals is protruded towards the surface, and diffused through the rocks in beds, or veins, so as to be accessible to human industry. Here, then, we find divine benevolence, apparently in opposition to gravity, providing for human comfort. I have said that these metals were accessible to human industry. And it does require a great deal of labor, and calls into exercise man's highest ingenuity to obtain them. They might have been spread in immense masses over the surface; they might all have been reduced to a metallic state in the great furnace, which we have reason to suppose is always in blast, within the earth. But then there would have been no requisition upon the exertion and energy of man. And to have these called into exercise is an object of greater importance to society than to supply it with the metals. God, therefore, has so distributed the ores as to stimulate man to explore and reduce them, while he has placed so many difficulties in the way as to demand much mental and physical effort for their removal. Man now, therefore, receives a double benefit. While the metals themselves are of immense service, the discipline of body and mind requisite for obtaining them is of still greater value. This is the combined result of infinite wisdom and benevolence. If I mistake not, there is such a relation between the amount of useful metals and the wants of society as could have resulted only from divine benevolence. The metal most widely diffused, and the only one occurring in all the rock formations, from the oldest to the newest, is iron;--the metal by far the most important to civilized society. This is also by far the most abundant, and easily obtained. It often forms extensive beds, or even mountain masses upon the surface. All the other metals are confined almost exclusively to the older rocks. Among them, lead, copper, and zinc are probably most needed, and accordingly they are next in quantity and in the facility with which they may be explored. Manganese, mercury, chrome, antimony, cobalt, arsenic, and bismuth are more difficult to obtain; but the supply is always equal to the demand. In the case of tin, silver, platinum, and gold, we find some interesting properties to compensate in a great measure for their scarcity. Gold and platinum possess a remarkable power of resisting those powerful agents of chemical change which destroy every thing else. They are never oxidized in the earth, and with a very few exceptions, the most powerful reagents leave them untouched, while platinum will not yield in the most powerful heat of the furnace. Gold, silver, and tin are capable of an astonishing extension, whereby they may be spread over the surface of the more abundant metals to protect and adorn them; and since the discovery of the galvanic mode of accomplishing this, so easily is it done, that I know not but a gold or silver surface is to become as common as metallic articles. _My fifth geological argument for the divine benevolence is derived from the joint and desolating effects of ice and water upon the earth's surface, both before and after man's creation._ In northern countries, and perhaps in high southern latitudes, it seems that after the deposition of the tertiary rocks, and after the surface had assumed essentially its present shape, it was subjected for a long time to a powerful agency, whereby the rough and salient parts were worn down and rounded, the rocks in place smoothed and furrowed, valleys scooped out, huge blocks of stone transported far from the parent bed, piled up, and thick accumulations of bowlders, sand, and gravel, strewn promiscuously over the surface. At the commencement of this process, the ocean, probably loaded with ice, stood above a large part of the present continents. It soon began to subside, or the land to rise, and a more quiet action succeeded. The joint action of the ocean and the glaciers on the land ground down into sand, clay, and loam, the coarser drift, and sorted it in the form of beaches, terraces, and alluvial deposits. All this while, both the land and the water seem to have been, for the most part, destitute of inhabitants. But these were the very processes needed for man and his contemporary races, who were to appear during the latter part of the pleistocene period. In other words, the soils were thus got ready for nourishing the vegetation necessary to sustain the new creation, which would convert these desolate and deserted sea-beds into regions of fertility and happiness to teeming millions. Now, just consider what must have been the effect of these mighty aqueous and glacial agencies upon the earth's surface. Over the level regions they strewed the finer materials; and where the rocks had been thrown up into ridges and displaced by numerous fissures, or subsequently worn into bluffs and precipices by the ocean, it needed just such an agency to smooth down those irregularities, to fill up those gulfs, to give to the hills and valleys a graceful outline, and to cover all the surface with those comminuted materials that would need only cultivation to make them a fertile soil. Some rocks do, indeed, decompose and form soils; but this process would be too slow, unless in moist and warm regions, where it is easier to find a footing for plants than in climes more uncongenial to their growth. We cannot then hesitate to regard this tremendous agency of ice and water in northern and high southern regions as decidedly beneficial in its influence. It must, indeed, have spread terrible destruction over those regions. But it seems that a time was chosen for its operation when the globe was almost destitute of organic life, and not long before the time when a new and nobler creation than those previously occupying the earth was to be placed upon it. Desolating as this agency must have appeared, and actually was, at the time, yet who can doubt, when we see the ultimate fruits of it, that its origin was divine benevolence? In the ultimate results of aqueous inundations at the present day, we can trace the same benevolent design. Those floods do, indeed, produce partial evils; nay, life, as well as property, often falls a prey to them. But they produce those alluvial soils which are more prolific of vegetation than any other on the globe. Who has not heard of the fertility of the banks of the Nile, the Niger, the Ganges, the Amazon, and the Mississippi? all of them the fruit of inundations. Truly, such floods as these may be said _to clap their hands_ in praise of the divine goodness. _My sixth geological argument for the divine benevolence is derived from the existence of volcanoes._ The first impression made on the mind by the history of volcanic action is, that its effects are examples rather of vindictive justice than of benevolence. And such is the light in which they are regarded by Mr. Gisborne, an able English divine, in his "Testimony of Natural to Revealed Religion." He looks, indeed, upon all the disturbances that have taken place in the earth's crust as evidence of a fallen condition of the world, as mementoes of a former penal infliction upon a guilty race. And aside from the light which geology casts upon the subject, this would be a not improbable conclusion. Take for an example the case of volcanoes and earthquakes. A volcano is an opening made in the earth's crust by internal heat, which has forced melted or heated matter through the vent. An earthquake is the effect of the confined gases and vapors, produced by the heat upon the crust. When the volcano, therefore, gets vent, the earthquake always ceases. But the latter has generally been more destructive of life and property than the former. Where one city has been destroyed by lava, like Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiæ, twenty have been shaken down by the rocking and heaving of earthquakes. The records of ancient as well as modern times abound with examples of these tremendous catastrophes. Preëminent on the list is the city of Antioch. Imagine the inhabitants of that great city, crowded with strangers on a festival occasion, suddenly arrested on a calm day, by the earth heaving and rocking beneath their feet; and in a few moments two hundred and fifty thousand of them are buried by falling houses, or the earth opening and swallowing them up. Such was the scene which that city presented in the year 526; and several times before and since that period has the like calamity fallen upon it; and twenty, forty, and sixty thousand of its inhabitants have been destroyed at each time. In the year 17 after Christ, no less than thirteen cities of Asia Minor were in like manner overwhelmed in a single night. Think of the terrible destruction that came upon Lisbon in 1755. The sun had just dissipated the fog in a warm, calm morning, when suddenly the subterranean thundering and heaving began; and in six minutes the city was a heap of ruins, and sixty thousand of the inhabitants were numbered among the dead. Hundreds had crowded upon a new quay surrounded by vessels. In a moment the earth opened beneath them, and the wharf, the vessels, and the crowd went down into its bosom; the gulf closed, the sea rolled over the spot, and no vestige of wharf, vessels, or man ever floated to the surface. How thrilling is the account left us by Kircher, who was near, of the destruction of Euphemia, in Calabria, a city of about five thousand inhabitants, in the year 1638! "After some time," says he, "the violent paroxysm of the earthquake ceasing, I stood up, and, turning my eyes to look for Euphemia, saw only a frightful black cloud. We waited till it had passed away, when nothing but a dismal and putrid lake was to be seen where the city once stood." In like manner did Port Royal, in the West Indies, sink beneath the waters, with nearly all its inhabitants, in less than one minute, in the year 1692. Still more awful, though usually less destructive, is often the scene presented by a volcanic eruption. Imagine yourselves, for instance, upon one of the wide, elevated plains of Mexico, far from the fear of volcanoes. The earth begins to quake under your feet, and the most alarming subterranean noises admonish you of a mighty power within the earth that must soon have vent. You flee to the surrounding mountains in time to look back and see ten square miles of the plain swell up, like a bladder, to the height of five hundred feet, while numerous smaller cones rise from the surface still higher, and emit smoke; and in their midst, six mountains are thrown up to the height, some of them at least, of sixteen hundred feet, and pour forth melted lava, turning rivers out of their course, and spreading terrific desolation over a late fertile plain, and forever excluding its former inhabitants. Such was the eruption, by which Jorullo, in Mexico, was suddenly thrown up, in 1759. Still more terrific have been some of the eruptions in Iceland. In 1783, earthquakes of tremendous power shook the whole island, and flames burst forth from the ocean. In June these ceased, and Skaptar Jokul opened its mouth; nor did it close till it had poured forth two streams of lava, one sixty miles long, twelve miles broad, and the other forty miles long, and seven broad, and both with an average thickness of one hundred feet. During that summer the inhabitants saw the sun no more, and all Europe was covered with a haze. Around the Papandayang, one of the loftiest mountains in Java, no less than forty villages were reposing in peace. But in August, 1772, a remarkable luminous cloud enveloping its top aroused them from their security. But it was too late. For at once the mountain began to sink into the earth, and soon it had disappeared with the forty villages, and most of the inhabitants, over a space fifteen miles long and six broad. Still more extraordinary--the most remarkable on record--was an eruption in Sumbawa, one of the Molucca Islands, in 1815. It began on the fifth day of April, and did not cease till July. The explosions were heard in one direction nine hundred and seventy miles, and in another seven hundred and twenty miles. So heavy was the fall of ashes at the distance of forty miles that houses were crushed and destroyed. The floating cinders in the ocean, hundreds of miles distant, were two feet thick, and vessels were forced through them with difficulty. The darkness in Java, three hundred miles distant, was deeper than the blackest night; and finally, out of the twelve thousand inhabitants of the island, only twenty-six survived the catastrophe. Now, if we confine our views to such facts as these, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that earthquakes and volcanoes are terrific exhibitions of God's displeasure towards a fallen and guilty world. But if it can be shown that the volcanic agency exerts a salutary influence in preserving the globe from ruin, nay, is essential to such preservation, we must regard its incidental destruction of property and life as no evidence of a vindictive infliction, nor of the want of benevolence in its operation. And the remarkable proofs which modern geology has presented of vast accumulations of heated and melted matter beneath the earth's crust, do make such an agent as volcanoes essential to the preservation of the globe. In order to make out this position, I shall not contend that all the earth's interior, beneath fifty or one hundred miles, is in a state of fusion. For even the most able and decided of those geologists who object to such an inference, admit that oceans of melted matter do exist beneath the surface. And if so, how liable would vast accumulations of heat be, if there were no safety-valves through the crust, to rend asunder even a whole continent? Volcanoes are those safety-valves, and more than two hundred of them are scattered over the earth's surface, forming vent-holes into the heated interior. Most of them, indeed, have the valves loaded, and the effort of the confined gases and vapors to lift the load produces the terrific phenomena of earthquakes and volcanoes. But if no such passages into the interior existed, what could prevent the pent-up gases from accumulating till they had gained strength enough to rend a whole continent, and perhaps the whole globe, into fragments? Is it not, then, benevolence by which this agency prevents so dreadful a catastrophe, even by means that bring some incidental evils along with them? Some able writers do, indeed, object to the idea that volcanoes are safety-valves to the globe, deriving their objections from certain facts respecting the position of volcanic craters in the Sandwich Islands, if I do not misrecollect. Without going into the details of that case, for want of time and space, it seems to me that the facts respecting the connection between earthquakes and volcanoes, admitted by all, will justify such a view of the latter as is expressed by the term "safety-valves." For earthquakes are but the incipient effects of the volcanic force within the globe; and if these effects have been so terrible at the beginning, what must be the full exhibition of that force, if not able to find a passage for the struggling gases and lava through the strata above them? Who can say that it might not rend a continent asunder, and, if deep enough seated, even the whole globe? The question will undoubtedly be asked by every reflecting mind, why infinite wisdom and benevolence could not have devised a plan for securing the good resulting from volcanoes and earthquakes without the attendant evils. The same question meets us at almost every step of our examination of the present system of the world. For we every where meet with evil, incidentally connected with agencies whose predominant effects are beneficial. I incline to the opinion, that the true answer to this question is, that the evil is permitted that thereby greater good may be secured to the universe. Still the subject of the origin of evil is one whose full solution can hardly be expected in the present world, because we cannot here master all its elements. When it can be solved, we can tell why so much desolation and suffering are permitted to accompany the earthquake and the volcano. But if we can show that benefits far outweighing the evil are the result of this terrific agency, we gather from it decided evidence of the divine benevolence;--the same evidence which we gain from any other operations of nature; for in them all there is only a preponderance of good, not unmixed good. The desolation of this fair world by volcanic agency, and especially the destruction of life, do, indeed, teach us that this present system of nature is adapted to a state of probation and death, instead of a state of rewards and immortal life. It is adapted to sinful and fallen beings, rather than to those who are perfect in holiness and in happiness. In short, it is earth, not heaven. It is not such a world as heaven must be, to secure unalloyed and eternal happiness. Nevertheless, benevolence decidedly predominates in the arrangements of the present system, even in the desolating agency under consideration. I do not deny that God may sometimes employ this agency, as he may every other in nature, for the punishment of the guilty. But before we infer that this is the general use and design of volcanoes and earthquakes, we should ponder well the questions put by our Savior _to some that told him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices_. _Suppose ye_, answered the Savior, _that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you nay. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you nay._ Let us follow the example of Jesus Christ, and take a more enlarged view of these startling and distressing events. Let us inquire whether they are not the incidental effects of agencies essential to the permanence and happiness of the great system of the universe. This is certainly the case in regard to volcanoes. We have strong reason to believe that they are essential to the preservation of the globe; and of how much higher consequence is this than the comparatively small amount of property and life which they destroy! If we can only rise to these higher views, and not suffer our judgment to be warped by the immediate terrors of the earthquake and the volcano, we shall see the smile of infinite benevolence where most men see only the wrath of an offended Deity. _My seventh geological argument for the divine benevolence is derived from the manner in which coal, rock salt, marble, gypsum, and other valuable materials were prepared for the use of man, long before his existence._ If a created and intelligent being from some other sphere had alighted on this globe during that remote period when the vegetation now dug out of the coal formation covered the surface with its gigantic growth, he might have felt as if here was a waste of creative power. Vast forests of sigillaria, lepidodendra, coniferæ, cycadeæ, and tree ferns would have waved over his head, with their imposing though sombre foliage, while the lesser tribes of calamites and equisetaceæ would have filled the intervening spaces; but no vertebral animal would have been there to enjoy and enliven the almost universal solitude. Why, then, he must have inquired, is there such a profusion of vegetable forms, and such a colossal development of individual plants? To what use can such vast forests be applied? But let ages roll by, and that same being revisit our world at the present time. Let him traverse the little Island of Britain, and see there fifteen thousand steam engines moved by coal dug out of the earth, and produced by these same ancient forests. Let him see these engines performing the work of two millions of men, and moving machinery which accomplishes what would require the unaided labors of three or four hundred millions of men, and he could not doubt but such a result was one of the objects of that rank vegetation which covered the earth ere it was fit for the residence of such natures as now dwell upon it. Let him go to the coal fields of other countries, and especially those of the United States, stretching over one hundred and fifty thousand square miles, containing a quantity absolutely inexhaustible, and already imparting comfort to millions of the inhabitants, and giving life and energy to every variety of manufacture through the almost entire length of this country, and destined to pour out their wealth through all coming time, long after the forests shall all have been levelled,--and irresistible must be the conviction upon his mind, that here is a beautiful example of prospective benevolence on the part of the Deity. In those remote ages, while yet the earth was unfitted for the higher races of animals that now dwell upon it, it was eminently adapted to nourish that gigantic flora which would produce the future fuel of the human race, when that crown of all God's works should be placed upon the earth. Ere that time, those forests must sink beneath the ocean, be buried beneath deposits of rock thousands of feet thick. But during all that period, all those chemical changes which are essential to convert them into coal would be accomplished, and, at last, man would find access, by his ingenuity and industry, to the deep-seated beds whence his fuel might be drawn. Nor would these vast repositories fail him till the consummation of all things. Surely there was no waste, but there was a far-reaching plan of benevolence in the profusion of vegetable life in the earlier periods of our planet. Essentially the same remark will apply to the limestone, gypsum, rock salt, and several other mineral products of the earth, which are almost indispensable to man in a civilized state. For these, too, were produced by slow processes, during those vast periods of duration that preceded man's existence. Limestone has been chiefly elaborated by the organs of animals, many of them of microscopic littleness. Yet lofty ranges of mountains and immense deposits in the intervening valleys have been the result. Nearly one seventh part of the crust of the globe, it has been said, is thus constituted of the works or remains of animals. And can we doubt but that these rocks are thus spread over the surface of the globe because they are needed by all mankind, like air and water? It must have been benevolence that so arranged the agencies by which they were produced, during the revolution of primeval ages, that they have this wide diffusion. Gypsum and fossil salt are more sparingly diffused; but still enough is always to be found to meet the demand. Nor is it reasonable to doubt that the same prospective goodness which provided for coal and limestone, commissioned other agencies to lay up a store of gypsum, salt, bitumen, clay, and other substances dug out of the earth for man's benefit. _My eighth geological argument for the divine benevolence is based upon the perfect adaptation of the natures of animals and plants to the varying condition of the globe through all the periods of its past history._ The very slight changes in climate, situation, and food, that will destroy most species of animals and plants, is hard to be realized by man, whose nature will sustain very great changes of this kind. So will most of the animals and plants that have been domesticated by man, and which accompany him into every soil and climate. But the great mass of animals and plants would perish by such a transplantation. They are adapted to a particular region, often of narrow limits; and to remove them from thence, even to one slightly diverse, is to cause their deterioration and final destruction. In other words, their natures are exactly adapted to the place of habitation assigned them. And it must have required infinite wisdom thus to fit the delicate machinery of animal and vegetable organization to the great variety of circumstances on the globe in which it is placed. But we find that same wisdom to have been manifested in all the vast periods of organic life. We have the most unequivocal evidence that the condition of the earth has undergone important changes. We cannot examine the remarkable flora and fauna of the older rocks, the gigantic sauroid fishes, the huge orthoceratites and ammonites, the heteroclitic trilobites, and the strange sigillaria and lepidodendra, calamites and asterophyllites, the lofty coniferæ, and the anomalous cycadeæ,--we cannot examine these without realizing that a state of the globe very different from the present must have existed when they had possession of it. And when we contemplate also the enormous saurians and batrachians of the middle secondary rocks, and the colossal quadrupeds of the tertiary strata, we cannot doubt that a tropical or an ultra-tropical climate must have prevailed in high northern latitudes during their existence. We perceive that there has been a gradual decrease of temperature on the surface from the earliest times. In each successive race of organized beings which have been placed on the globe, there must have been, therefore, some change of constitution to adapt them to the altered state of the climate and productions of the earth. And we find this alteration to have been always made with consummate skill, so as to secure the most complete development of organic beings, and the greatest enjoyment to sensitive natures. Malevolence would not have done this; for it might with infinite knowledge at command, have filled each successive period of the world with natures unadapted to the mutable condition of things, capable, indeed, of a prolonged existence, not to enjoy, but only to suffer. But infinite benevolence was fitting up this world by slow secondary agencies for the elevated races which now occupy it, especially for one species, rational and immortal; and it lavished its kindness and wisdom by filling the world, during those preparatory ages, with multitudes of happy beings, fitted exactly to each altered condition of the air, the water, and the soil. _My ninth and last geological argument for the divine benevolence is founded upon the permanence and security of the world, in spite of the mighty changes it has undergone, and the powerful agencies to which it is now subject._ When we learn from the records of geology, as they are inscribed upon the rocks, how numerous and thorough have been the revolutions of the surface and the crust of the globe in past ages; how often and how long the present dry land has been alternately above and beneath the ocean; how frequently the crust of the globe has been fractured, bent, and dislocated,--now lifted upward, and now thrown downward, and now folded by lateral pressure; how frequently melted matter has been forced through its strata and through its fissures to the surface; in short, how every particle of the accessible portions of the globe has undergone entire metamorphoses; and especially when we recollect what strong evidence there is that oceans of liquid matter exist beneath the solid crust, and that probably the whole interior of the earth is in that condition, with expansive energy sufficient to rend the globe into fragments,--when we review all these facts, we cannot but feel that the condition of the surface of the globe must be one of great insecurity and liability to change. But it is not so. On the contrary, the present state of the globe is one of permanent uniformity and entire security, except those comparatively slight catastrophes which result from earthquakes, volcanoes, and local deluges. Even the climate has experienced no general change within historic times, and the profound mathematical researches of Baron Fourier have demonstrated that, even though the internal parts of the globe are in an incandescent state, beneath a crust thirty or forty miles, the temperature at the surface has long since ceased to be affected by the melted central mass; that it is not now more than one seventeenth of a degree higher than it would be if the interior were ice; and that hundreds of thousands of years will not see it lowered, from this cause, more than the seventeenth part of a degree. And as to the apprehension that the entire crust of the globe may be broken through, and fall into the melted matter beneath, just reflect what solidity and strength there must be in a mass of hard rock from fifty to one hundred miles in thickness, and your fears of such a catastrophe will probably vanish. Now, such a uniformity of climate and security from general ruin are essential to the comfort and existence of animal nature. But it must have required infinite wisdom and benevolence so to arrange and balance the mighty elements of change and ruin which exist in the earth, that they should hold one another in check, and make the world a quiet, unchanged, and secure dwelling-place for so many thousands of years. Surely that wisdom must have been guided by infinite benevolence. And it would seem from geology that the same union of wisdom and benevolence have always arranged the past conditions of the earth. For, during each of the periods of organic existence, uniformity and security seem to have prevailed so long as the purposes of the Deity required. In early times, indeed, when animals were mostly confined to the waters, it was not necessary that the dry land should be as exempt as at present from catastrophes; and probably they were then more frequent; and it may be that, while there were uniformity and security in one portion of the globe, or in one element, there might have been disturbance and desolation in others. And it is doubtful whether such general quiet has ever prevailed for so long a time as during the present, or historic period. We see a reason for this in the fact that never before were so many animals in existence, with a structure so delicate and complicated. Such are the evidences of divine benevolence, drawn from a field at first view most unpromising. And yet, when we come to look beyond the surface, where do we find more decisive or more numerous indications of God's beneficence? They are not like many hasty generalizations, which superficial examination has often brought from natural phenomena in proof of this same truth, but which, although beautiful at first view, must be abandoned upon careful research. But these, though repulsive at first, gain solidity and beauty by examination. And they are the more interesting because they come from an unexpected quarter. Men have been accustomed to search among the drift piled up by water and ice, among dislocated and rent strata of rocks, among mountains overturned and fields made desolate by volcanic eruptions, for the mementoes of penal inflictions; but they have not imagined that divine benevolence might be seen among these disturbances and desolations; and that simply because they confined their views to the immediate effect of geological agencies, and did not enlarge their views to take in their connection with the great system of the universe. But now that we find the stamp of benevolence even here, we learn an instructive lesson. Every reflecting mind is aware that the doctrine of divine benevolence lies at the foundation of all natural and revealed religion, and that until this be established we labor in vain to erect a superstructure. It is well known, also, that the existence of natural and moral evil has been considered a strong objection to this great truth. Now, geology furnishes us with many examples, in which agencies, often fraught with terrific evils, are nevertheless eminently beneficial when the whole extent of their operation is taken into account. Why is it not a fair inference that, in all other cases where evils stand out prominently, they are only incidental results of some wide system of operations, of which our limited vision embraces only a part, but whose tendencies as a whole are eminently salutary, and whose incidental evils do, in fact, increase the salutary effects? If so, what reason have we to believe that, when the light of eternity shall clarify our mental eye, and enlarge our knowledge of the present system of the universe, we shall find all "partial evil to be universal good," and that our narrow views alone threw obscurity and difficulty over this subject in this life? O, if even here so many rays of divine love find their way into our narrow prison-house, what will be their brightness when they pour in upon us from the unveiled glories of the heavenly world! LECTURE VII. DIVINE BENEVOLENCE AS EXHIBITED IN A FALLEN WORLD. The geological proofs of the divine benevolence considered in the last lecture present only a partial view of that glorious characteristic of Jehovah. I am tempted, therefore, to exhibit it in its more general aspect and broader relations. This will necessarily bring into view other important religious truths respecting man's fallen condition and character, and, as a consequence, the modified aspect of the divine goodness in such a world. To those destitute of a revelation this world has, indeed, ever seemed an inextricable maze, an enigma too dark for human wisdom to solve. Nor have those favored with the Bible agreed in their modes of clearing up the mystery. Having endeavored to explain all by following out some leading and favorite idea, their theories have varied as these predominant conceptions differed. One, for instance, fixes his gaze so intently upon the divine benevolence that he is blind to every manifestation of Jehovah's sterner attributes. Another, deeply impressed with the story of man's original apostasy, sees only vindictive justice, and penal infliction, and disordered action, in all the movements of nature and the trials and sufferings of man. A third, captivated by the discoveries of modern geology, relative to the existence of suffering and death in the world before man's creation, and learning, moreover, from physiology, that death is a general law of all organized natures, vegetable as well as animal, is led to doubt whether the disorders of the world have any important connection with man's apostasy. Now, it were easy to show that our views on these subjects have a most important bearing upon our entire system of theology; and, therefore, they deserve our most thorough and candid examination. To such an examination I now invite your serious attention. It is not my object to appeal to the Scriptures to prove the divine benevolence. That were an easy task. So, were this an unfallen world, every object and event would be redolent of God's goodness. But where sin and death abound, that goodness must assume a different aspect, since its unmixed manifestation would work mischief. Now, the point aimed at in this lecture is to ascertain whether natural religion can point out decisive evidence of divine benevolence. We can conceive it quite possible that in a fallen world God might find it necessary so to mingle displays of justice with those of goodness, that man might be in doubt which predominated. There is another reason for considering this subject apart from scriptural evidence. We need to establish the doctrine of divine benevolence as a basis on which to rest the evidences of inspiration; or, rather, we want to be able to assume God's benevolence, in arguing for the truth of the Bible, and in judging of its contents. This doctrine, therefore, is one of the most important, as it is certainly the most difficult, in natural theology. Obviously the first step in this investigation must be to ascertain what is the real state of this world, as a manifestation of the benevolence and justice of God. In other words, we need to ascertain what exhibitions of these attributes are presented to us in nature, and in the economy of Providence, and how much of the evil in the world is to be imputed to man's perversion of the gifts of God. I shall proceed, therefore, to state the main points on this subject which fair and candid reasoning seems to me to sustain. When these points are before us, with a summary of the evidence by which they are supported, we shall be prepared to deduce important conclusions respecting God's character and dispensations, and man's position and destiny. _In the first place, then, I maintain that benevolence decidedly predominates in the present system of the world._ Let this proposition be fully understood. It does not mean that there is no mixture of evil in the operations of nature, but only that good decidedly overbalances the evil. And by the operations of nature I mean those processes resulting from natural laws, which are uninfluenced by the perverseness of man. How much of evil may be imputed to his perversion of the gifts of Providence will be considered in another place, as will also those cases in which evil seems inseparable from the original arrangements of the world. All that I am now concerned to prove is, that, in a vast majority of instances, we see the marks of benevolent design and benevolent operation in the arrangements of nature. This position is established, in the first place, by the fact that the design of every natural contrivance is to produce happiness. To show that such is the case, by an appeal to facts, would be, in truth, to write the history of every natural process, and show its design. But it will be sufficient to consider only such cases as appear most decidedly to militate against my position, and to show that even these are not designed to cause evil or suffering. How does it happen, then, you may inquire, that evil is the result of a multitude of contrivances and processes in nature? It is an incidental effect, I answer; that is, an effect happening aside from the main design of the contrivance. Take a few illustrations. No one can doubt that the law of gravity is essential to the preservation and comfort of the world, and to the harmonious motions of the heavenly bodies. Yet how often does it give rise to frightful accidents to men and animals! But when they are crushed by falling bodies, or by falling themselves, who imagines this to be the design of gravitation? How clear that its real object is beneficial, and that the evil resulting from it is unavoidable in a world constituted like ours! Why the world is not constituted differently, is an inquiry which men may try to answer; but an answer is not important to my present object. Take an example from the organic world. Every one is aware that without a nervous system in animals there would be no sensibility, nor sensation, and, of course, no enjoyment; and without these, animals would be unconscious of danger, and would not guard against it, nor withdraw from it. We are sure, therefore, that these two objects are the grand design of the nervous system, and, of course, it is a benevolent design. But the nervous system causes a great deal of suffering as well as pleasure. Obviously, however, this is only an incidental effect, which could not be prevented without a miracle; while the main design is to produce happiness and guard against evil. It may be asked, however, by what principle we can determine what is the design of a contrivance, and what the incidental effect. Why select a part of the effects, and call them the object aimed at by the contriver, while we regard others as incidental, and merely permitted, not intended? The principle on which we make this distinction is very clear. We judge of the design of a contrivance by its predominant tendencies and effects. If evil as often results as good, misery as often as happiness, we could not decide whether the design was benevolent or malevolent, or an indifference to both. But the benevolent tendency and effects of every natural contrivance are so obvious, and so immensely outweigh all its evil results, that we are compelled to admit the design of the Author of nature to be benevolent. And, therefore, when we see evil occasionally result from such contrivances, we are authorized to say that this is only an incidental effect; not, indeed, wholly undesigned, for we cannot doubt that God has a design in the permission of all evil. But for each particular arrangement and movement in nature we can discover a predominant and benevolent object. Take another example from the human frame. In that frame we find a multitude of organs, nearly all of which are obviously adapted to a particular use. Now, the anatomist cannot lay his finger upon one of them, and say, This was intended to produce derangement and suffering in the system. Here is a muscle contrived to clog the operations of its neighbors; here a blood-vessel adapted to corrupt the blood and produce disease; here a gland whose object is to secrete a poisonous fluid, to contaminate the whole system; here a nerve made to produce pain; here a plexus of vessels suited to bring on disease. On the contrary, this anatomist perceives at once that all the organs of the animal system, and their collocation, are fitted in the best possible manner to produce health. It is obvious at a glance that this is their design. But if such be the fact, how happens it that so few persons pass through life without disease? Is it all to be imputed to an abuse and perversion of the organs and powers of life? Not so, in my opinion. But those organs are all liable to disease; and when we see how delicate and complicated they are, we ought not to wonder that even the unavoidable causes of derangement should often bring it on. Yet, after all, health is the rule and the object, and disease only the exception. But I shall say more on this subject in another part of the argument. Some one, however, who hears me, has doubtless ere this had his thoughts recur to the organs of carnivorous animals, the poisonous fangs of serpents, and the organs of the scorpion, the tarantula, and of insects, for the generation and protrusion of deadly poison. Here we have organs expressly provided for the destruction of other animals. That such is their design, no physiologist can doubt; and hence they are intended to produce suffering, and not happiness. Is this an exactly correct statement of the case? True, suffering is the result of such organs; but the arrangement is intended to accomplish still higher purposes. The leading one is to procure food for sustenance, the other is self-defence. Both of these are essential to the animal's continued existence. That suffering should be incidentally connected with instruments or organs so important, is no more difficult to explain than is the existence of evil any where. The object even of these contrivances, then, is beneficial. And if so, I know of no other example in nature so seemingly adverse to the position I have laid down, that the main object of every natural contrivance is benevolent in its origin and results. If this be so, how clearly does it indicate the character of the contriver to be benevolent! My second argument is derived from the fact that the organic functions often produce pleasure where suffering was just as consistent with their most perfect action; or I might say that such are the arrangements of the natural world, that pleasure often results to sentient beings from its operations, when they might have been as perfectly performed with the production of pain. A few illustrations will render the meaning of this position obvious. As we look abroad upon nature, one of the most striking traits we discover is its unbounded variety. With the Psalmist we involuntarily exclaim, _O Lord, how manifold are thy works!_ It is not merely variety as to form, texture, attitude, and arrangement; but who can describe the countless tints of coloring which are spread over the heavens and the earth? Now, there is in the human soul an aptitude to be pleased with variety; nay, there is a craving for it. Nor can there be a more terrible infliction than unvarying monotony and sameness of appearance, arrangement, and action. If, therefore, the Creator had been malevolent, or indifferent to the happiness of man and other sentient beings, he might have gratified this disposition most perfectly by giving to the human soul its present love of variety, and then spreading over the face of nature a dead uniformity of figure, position, arrangement, and coloring; forming every thing upon the same model. And this might have been done without impairing at all the perfect operation of all her laws that are essential. Every thing might have been as systematic and harmonious as it now is; but sentient beings would have been miserable; and this must have been supremely gratifying to infinite malevolence. He might also have so constructed the organs of hearing, sight, and smell, that every sound might have been ungrateful and grating, every odor repulsive, and every prospect disgusting. While hunger would have urged animals, as it now does, to seek food, its reception might have been painful, or utterly void of gustatory enjoyment. So in regard to social enjoyments; we might have been irresistibly drawn towards our fellow-men, and yet their society might have been hateful in the extreme. Had such a state of things existed, how very clearly we should have inferred the malevolence of the Author of nature! Or if such a state had been witnessed about as often as its opposite, we might reasonably have said that he was indifferent to the happiness of his creatures. Why, then, may we not, with equal reason, infer his benevolence, when we find, in a vast majority of cases,--nay, for aught I know, universally,--that pleasure is superadded to animal enjoyment where it was wholly unnecessary to the perfect operation of nature's laws? The fact is, God has made all nature "beauty to our eye and music to our ear," when it was wholly unnecessary for the perfect operation of her laws; and the inference is irresistible, that he delights in the happiness of his creatures. Nor can the fact that evil exists in the world destroy the force of this argument, unless that evil is so general as to be obviously the design of the Creator in devising and arranging the system of the world. While we admit its existence, we say that it is only incidental, and that pleasure is so often superadded unnecessarily, as to prove happiness to be the design, and evil the exception. The two arguments above presented are the evidence on which Dr. Paley relies to prove the divine benevolence. They are, indeed, as it seems to me, unanswerable. But if I mistake not, they do by no means exhaust the storehouse of nature's proofs of this fundamental principle of natural and revealed religion. I derive a third argument for the predominance of benevolence in the works of nature from the variety of means often provided for the performance of important functions; so that animals and plants can adapt themselves to different circumstances, and prolong their existence. The examples which I have in mind to illustrate this argument are all derived from the organic world. I refer, for instance, to the fact that nearly all our muscles, and many other important organs, as the hands, the feet, the eyes, and the lungs, are in pairs, so that if one meets with an injury, or is destroyed, the other can, to some extent, perform the office of both. The brain has two hemispheres, and one of them may be seriously wounded without destroying the healthy action of the other. But perhaps the most appropriate example is in the blood-vessels, whose inosculations are so numerous that even though large arteries and veins be tied, the blood will find its way through the smaller ones, which ultimately will so enlarge as to keep up the circulation nearly as well as before the injury. And, in fact, almost every one of the large blood-vessels has been tied by the surgeon with little ultimate injury to the patient. In the process of deglutition, or swallowing the nourishment essential to the existence of all the more perfect animals,--since the food and the air for respiration pass for a time through a common opening, the pharynx,--it is extremely important that the passage to the lungs should be most vigilantly guarded; since strangulation would follow the introduction there of any thing but air. Accordingly, the entrance of the glottis is so sensitive, that the approach of the food causes it to close. But lest this security should sometimes fail, we have an additional guard in the epiglottis, which shuts down like a valve upon the orifice. Even with this double precaution, strangulation sometimes follows the act of deglutition. How much oftener would it occur, had not benevolence thus multiplied its vigilant sentinels at the point of danger! Another illustration of this argument lies in the fact, that many of the organs of animals and plants possess the power, when an exigency requires it, of greatly increasing their action. When, for instance, an unusual quantity of osseous matter is requisite to repair a broken bone, the glands, whose office it is to elaborate that matter, are capable of secreting an extraordinary quantity, until the injury is repaired. Of an analogous character is the sympathy existing between the different organs, so that when one has an unusual amount of labor to perform, the rest impart of their nervous energy to sustain their overtasked companion. Thus, and thus only, could animals be carried through many of the severe exigencies of their existence. Their organs help one another, just as if they were conscious of one another's necessities, and were prompted by benevolence to aid the weakest. In like manner, some of the organs possess the power of vicarious secretion; that is, of producing, in peculiar circumstances, secretions that are usually made by other glands. How they can do this, and how they can know when to do it, are among the mysteries of physiology. Nevertheless, the object of this arrangement is most obvious, viz., the continuance of health and life in spite of accidents, which would otherwise prove fatal. The same vicarious system is manifest in the well-known examples, where the loss of one or more of the senses gives increased acuteness to the rest. The sense of touch, for instance, in the blind man, has sometimes proved no mean substitute for eyes; and, indeed, any of the senses by cultivation, in peculiar exigencies, may be prodigiously strengthened. Now, in all these cases, where the vicarious principle is brought into operation, or sympathy concentrates the power of many organs in one, or the loss of one organ or sense quickens the sensibility of the rest, do we not recognize the prospective care and kindness of infinite benevolence? Do you say that it merely shows infinite wisdom, which adjusts means to ends with consummate skill, in order to be sure of success in its designs? Why, then, I inquire, should these provisions for trying exigencies in the animal system always tend to the happiness of the creature? Surely there were other means at the command of infinite wisdom for securing the existence of the animal, which would bring misery upon it instead of happiness. The benevolent tendency of the design, therefore, proves the benevolent feelings of the designer. The extraordinary provisions that are made in some cases for the multiplication of animals and plants, in order to prevent the extinction of any races, and to give life and happiness to as many animals as can be sustained, is another indication of benevolent care on the part of the Creator. Not less than five modes of reproduction are known to exist, viz., the viviparous, the ovo-viviparous, the oviparous, the gemmiparous, and the fissiparous; and among the lowest families of animals several of these modes exist in the same species, so that their extinction, or even deficient multiplication, is scarcely possible. The same benevolence is manifested in the power possessed by animals and plants to adapt themselves to different circumstances. Often are they thrown into conditions widely diverse as to food, temperature, and exposure to chemical and mechanical agencies, with no possibility on their part of avoiding them. This is eminently true of man; and were not animals able to adapt themselves to these various states, they must perish. True, there are limits to this adaptation; but they are wide enough to accomplish the great purposes of existence, and to make us comfortable and happy amid great changes in our condition. Nor is this power of adaptation among animals limited to their physical nature. Their mental habits admit of an oscillation equally wide, so that, ere long, we become happy in a condition which at first was painful in the extreme. New habits take the place of the old ones so gradually that we scarcely realize the change. Now, if this power were not possessed in such a world as ours, could organic natures not bend at all to circumstances, constant suffering and premature dissolution would be the result. The power of adaptation, therefore, looks like the benevolent provision of a kind Father, who wishes to make his creatures as happy as he can in the circumstances in which his wisdom has placed them. Certainly, malevolence, or indifference to their happiness, would not have introduced this power of adaptation into their natures; for it is certain that their continued existence might have been secured in some other way, had no reference been had to their happiness. I base my fourth argument for the predominance of benevolence, in the arrangements of nature, upon the aggregate results of the most destructive and terrific agencies which she employs. The immediate effects of these agencies are often so appalling and so unmixed with good, that men view them only as penal inflictions; or, when the sufferers are unconscious of guilt, as mysterious dispensations of evil, which need the light of another world to reconcile with infinite benevolence. When the tornado or sirocco's hot breath sweeps over the devoted land; when the river overflows its banks, and ingulfs the defenceless inhabitants along its course, or the giant waves of the ocean roll in upon the devoted shore; when the heaving earthquake overturns in a moment vast cities, and the earth swallows them in its bosom; or when the volcano pours out its suffocating smoke and its scorching lava, and obliterates from earth the defenceless town, as once Herculaneum and Pompeii were converted into petrified cities,--in the midst of such desolating agencies, where can we discover a gleam of benevolence? Not surely in the immediate effects. But suppose the tornado, the flood, the earthquake, and the volcano are essential to the preservation of the earth from a far wider ruin, so that, in fact, while they destroy some property and life, they preserve a far greater amount, and are essential to such preservation,--why is it not benevolence that gives a slight play to these terrific elements, while it checks their wild war so soon as the requisite security has been obtained? When the storm has sufficiently purified the atmosphere, when the flood has enriched the wide alluvial fields, and the earthquake and the volcano have given vent to the pent-up fires in the earth, so that they no longer threaten to rend a continent asunder, then a restraining power is put upon them, and they are allowed no more range than is essential to the general good. We may not, indeed, see why the good could not be secured without the evil. But this question leads to the inquiry, whether the present system of the universe is the best possible; and that it is so we have the guaranty of the divine perfections. Those perfections admit the existence of evil; but at the same time they take care that the aggregate result of the greatest evils should be beneficial. Nor would we limit this position to evils springing out of the nature or the changes of the inanimate world; for some of the severest evils are dependent upon the organization or operation of animate nature. Man, for instance, finds himself often grossly annoyed by some species of the inferior animals, in his comfort, property, and even life. And he wonders why infinite wisdom and benevolence should permit certain species to exist, when they seem fitted only to annoy the rest. But he knows not what he desires when he wishes their extinction. For such is the balance of organic nature, that to strike out even one species, is like removing a link from a chain. Once broken, every other link is affected, and the whole chain lies useless upon the ground. Or, to speak without a figure, if you blot out certain species of animals or plants, you disturb the balance of the whole system of organic nature; nor can you tell where the disturbance thus introduced will end. It may lead to the excessive multiplication of species still more injurious than those you have destroyed. At any rate, since the perfections of the Deity lead to the conclusion that the existing proportion between different species is the best, all things considered, and change in the balance must be injurious, we may conclude, that though noxious animals and plants may produce individual inconvenience and injury, the aggregate effects upon the whole of organic nature are salutary, and, therefore, indicative of benevolence. Similar reasoning will, I think, apply to the existence of that large class of animals called carnivorous. These are evidently intended to prey upon other animals; and for this purpose they are provided with weapons for seizing and destroying their prey. It is often extremely painful to a man of kind feelings to witness the scenes of blood and havoc which these flesh-eating animals produce. But we forget two things. The first is, that in order to keep the numbers of animated beings full in the different tribes, it is necessary that there should be a great excess of numbers created, to meet all the casualties to which they are exposed; and that excess must in some way or other be removed from life. Secondly, all the enjoyment of the carnivorous races is so much clear gain to the sum of animal happiness; for the excess of numbers in the tribes of vegetable feeders suffer no more in being destroyed by the carnivorous races, than if they died in some other way; not so much, indeed, as if they perished by famine. We may safely conclude, then, that even this system of mutual slaughter, when viewed in all its relations, is the means, in such a world as ours, of increasing the amount of enjoyment, and is, therefore, a benevolent provision. This course of reasoning may be extended, as I judge, to the greatest of all mortal evils,--I mean death. In the case of the inferior animals, the amount of physical or mental suffering from this cause is comparatively small. And if they survive the change of death, surely there is benevolence in so easy a translation. Or, if they do not exist hereafter, the stroke of death is a small deduction from the happiness of a whole life. In man's case, we must not take into the account the aggravations of death which his own misconduct produces. And aside from these, what a blessing it would be to be transferred to a more exalted state of being, by an experience no more painful than that of a Christian dying what may be called a natural death, by mere decay! Then, too, how much greater happiness is the result of a succession of beings on earth, than one undying race would enjoy, both because the successive races would be ever passing through novel scenes, which would soon become monotonous to a continuous race, and because, as we have already suggested, a succession of races admits of the existence, at any one time, of a far greater number of species! Then, too, we must not forget the salutary moral influence which man experiences from the expectation of death; so great, indeed, that without it, it seems doubtful whether the world would be any thing better than a Pandemonium. In making indissoluble the connection between sin and death, therefore, in such a system as the present, benevolence presided with wisdom and justice in the councils of Jehovah. But in the third lecture I have treated this whole subject so much more fully, that I need not add any thing further in this connection. I base my fifth and last argument, to prove the predominance of benevolence in the present system of nature, on the fact that good so often results from evil as a natural consequence. Or, to state the argument in another form, good seems generally to be the object or final cause of evil, whereas evil flows only incidentally from good. This argument scarcely differs from the last, except in the more general form of its statement. That brings forward certain prominent and appalling evils, and endeavors to show that, in striking the balance of their effects, the preponderance is on the side of benevolence. This advances a step farther, and attempts to show that the direct object of evil is to produce good. It follows, hence, that the examples adduced and elucidated under the last argument are not inappropriate to sustain and illustrate the present. Yet others should be added. Almost the entire history of medicine and surgery illustrates the manner in which physical evils result in physical good. Indeed, men never resort to the physician, or the surgeon, because their remedies and operations are desirable, but only because they are the necessary means of health and comfort. These means are, indeed, for the most part, of human invention, but not, therefore, the less indicative of the divine intention; for they are founded upon such a constitution in nature as makes it possible to discover remedies for disease and accidents. And the characteristics of nature's constitution are an index of the intentions of its Author. The severe mental discipline through which the youth must pass, who would attain distinction in learning, affords us an example of intellectual evil resulting in intellectual wealth and happiness. The trial is too severe for many irresolute minds, and they give over the effort, and sink down into a state of indolence and neglect. But he who bears manfully the discipline will at length gather the golden fruit. And he will be satisfied, too, of the wisdom and benevolence of that law of mental progress, which makes it impossible ever to find a royal road to the temple of learning, and which shuts out from that temple all who shrink from the preparatory discipline. Still more strikingly illustrative of this argument are the evils which men suffer as necessary precursors of moral good. These may be physical or mental; embracing all those experiences that take the name of trials, afflictions, and disappointments. These are often intensely bitter, and they constitute, indeed, the master evils of life. We shudder when we see them coming; and we often writhe in agony when in the furnace. But how many have come out of that furnace purified from base alloy, and ready for the service of God and the world! To do good is henceforth their delight; and they thank God for the severe discipline. When his heavy blows fell upon them, one after another, they felt as if they were the strokes of an incensed Deity. But now they see that they were only the necessary inflictions of infinite love. And they admire the wisdom that could thus educe so much good out of so great evil. I do not contend that good is always educed from evil in this world, or could be; but only that, in a plurality of cases, if men improve the evils they suffer as they might, such would be the effect. And if this be admitted, it is sufficient to establish the general principle, that one of the direct objects of evil in this world is to produce individual benefit. But the converse of this proposition cannot be maintained. We cannot, indeed, deny that evil sometimes results from good; but never as the direct object of the latter. The effect is only incidental; that is, not as the main object; and so a few cases of this sort cannot invalidate the proposition which I defend. I might multiply much more the arguments furnished by nature to prove a predominance of benevolence in the arrangements and operations of the present system of things. But I see no way of escaping the force of those presented, and cannot doubt that all will admit the conclusion. I advance, therefore to a second proposition, and maintain that _the benevolence exhibited in the present system of nature is not unmixed_. I mean, by this statement, that the divine benevolence exhibited in this world is modified by other perfections. While there is a predominance of benevolence, there are also indications of God's displeasure; or, at least, his dealings seem to be adapted to restrain and amend a wicked race, rather than to make an innocent and holy race happy; so that the condition of the human family is far less happy than unmixed benevolence would confer. In proof of this assertion, I maintain, first, that evil is incidental to every process and event in nature. This is preëminently true of all those actions which we call vicious. Indeed, they are in themselves evils of the worst kind; and not only so, but they are connected incidentally with scarcely any thing but evil, though sometimes, as theologians say, overruled for good. Take next the common operations of nature, which, of course, have no moral character. Their leading design, as we have already seen, is to produce good to sentient beings; but incidentally they bring much evil. Food is intended for gustatory enjoyment and for nourishment; but it is often the occasion of severe suffering, and becomes an active poison. Gravity is intended to hold the material universe in a proper balance, and to attach every moving thing on earth to the surface; but it occasions a vast number of accidents, and a vast amount of suffering. Water and fire are of immense direct benefit; yet the first buries a vast amount of property and life in its bosom, and the latter is scarcely less injurious in its incidental effects. Indeed, what natural agency can be named, that is not armed with the power to do evil? But the same principle extends also to benevolent actions. With our views of divine benevolence, we might expect that virtuous conduct would never be coupled with evil. But this notion does not accord with facts; for the incidental evils connected with benevolent action are often the most painful in life. Indeed, in how many instances has doing good been rewarded by the loss of life, and under all the aggravations of suffering which malignant ingenuity could invent! And the fact has been, that those whose motives in doing good were the purest have suffered the most. Witness the life and the death of Him who knew no sin, and yet was led as a lamb to the slaughter. Since wickedness in this world is sometimes allowed to have the power of annoying goodness we might expect that the more disinterested the latter, the more malignant and persecuting would be the former, because its own deformity is made more manifest. But the incidental evils connected with benevolent action are not limited to those resulting from the malice of the wicked. If, for instance, some huge system of iniquity has become incorporated into the very texture of society, benevolence cannot root it out without producing many a severe laceration of individuals, who are incidentally connected with the system, but to whom no blame attaches. The history of the efforts that have been made to substitute Christianity for heathenism and other false religions, is full of examples illustrative of this principle, in conformity with the remarkable declaration of Christ, _Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword._ Alike prolific of illustrations are all the great attempted reforms which the world has witnessed, whether for delivering religion from human corruptions, or eradicating slavery, or intemperance, or breaking the political yoke of the oppressor. In fine, no reasonable man ought to expect to do much good in this world, without suffering much himself and bringing some incidental suffering upon others. Now, although the evils that have been described are incidental, they belong to the constitution of this world, and, therefore, show the feelings and intentions of its Author, as much as those effects of his works which appear to be their final causes. But do not such evils, incidental to every event, indicate a feeling in the divine mind different from unmixed benevolence? Strictly speaking, these evils are not penal inflictions. But they certainly do not show in the Creator a simple desire to promote the happiness of men, by directly conferring it. They rather indicate a necessity, on account of some peculiarity in the character of man, of mingling severity with goodness in the divine conduct towards him. In thus representing incidental effects as indicative of the feelings of the Deity, I may seem to contradict my reasoning under the first head, where I gave, as proof of God's benevolence, the fact that the direct object of every contrivance is beneficial, and evil only incidental. But I did not mean to intimate that the incidental effects of a contrivance are no index of the feelings of its author, but only that the direct effects show more clearly than the incidental what are his wishes and intentions, especially if the former are the most numerous, important, and striking. Still, incidental effects are never without an object; and where they are evil, as in the case supposed, they indicate other feelings towards men, in the divine mind, than unmixed benevolence. For it is a strange limitation of God's wisdom and power to say, as some do, that the evils could not be prevented. It may be said, however, that if men only conform to the laws of nature, they will escape all the evils they suffer. On the other hand, I maintain,--and this constitutes my second argument to show that the divine benevolence is not unmixed,--I maintain that the highest virtue and the most consummate prudence cannot avoid all the evils of life. Such prudence and virtue will not secure any one against many destructive natural agencies and operations to which he is exposed. Miasms productive of fatal disease may contaminate the atmosphere we breathe, unperceived by us; poison may exist in the food which we take as our necessary sustenance; the mechanical violence of the elements, or of gravity, may crush us; the lightning may smite us to the earth; the wild beast may rush from his unnoticed lair as we pass; or the deadly insect, or serpent, may inject its poison into our blood at an unexpected moment; or the floods may overwhelm, or the fire consume us. Now, although prudence and virtue may defend us against many evils, they afford no security against such as I have named, in very many instances. We are often ignorant of their existence or proximity till we become their victims, and suffering, often intense, is the consequence. Indeed, the greatest of all physical evils--I mean death--is as sure to visit every son and daughter of Adam as any event can be; and nothing but insanity, or its religious synonyme, fanaticism, has ever pretended to be proof against disease and death. You cannot, indeed, point out any particular organ or agency, whose direct object is to produce disease and death; but they are nevertheless the inevitable result of organic operations and agencies in such a world as this. It will be said, perhaps, that the good resulting to the whole from even the most severe of these sufferings, overbalances the evil, and therefore they are indications of benevolence in such a world as ours. True, as things are, this may be so. But the question is, Why is there such a constitution given to nature as made it necessary to introduce disease, accident, and death? Would not unmixed benevolence have conferred the good, but have withheld the evil? Had there not been something in man's character requiring the discipline of trials, would pure benevolence have sent them? At least, we should suppose that they might all have been avoided by prudence and virtue. Why should benevolence make such severe drawbacks upon the happiness even of the virtuous, if something were not radically wrong in the human constitution? Thirdly. The great sterility of so large a part of the earth, and the necessity of severe bodily labor to secure sustenance from it, show us that the benevolence exhibited in nature and in man's condition is not unmixed. Though some limited regions are exuberantly fertile, the larger part of the earth yields up even a mere sustenance only after the severest labor. And the vast majority of the race can do nothing more than to obtain food for the body. The artificial state of most societies does, indeed, keep the lower classes much more depressed than a better state of the world would bring them into; but at the best, nature unites with revelation in attesting the truth of the sentence passed upon man--_In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread._ Nor is this necessity for severe labor confined to the cultivation of the earth, but extends to all kinds of human pursuits. Success, as a general fact, can be secured only by vigorous industry; and often, in spite of their most honest and persevering efforts, men fail of securing even a competence for the support of themselves and their dependants. Some will say that all this arises from a necessity in the very nature of the case. But does not such a view limit the divine power and wisdom? Could not God have prepared a world more paradisiacal than the present, where the earth should spontaneously yield her fruits, and pour out her hidden treasures at man's feet? Who will deny this? Why, then, has he not done it? Because obviously a race so prone to evil as man, so incapable of maintaining his integrity in the lap of ease and indulgence, needs all this severe discipline to keep him where he ought to be. Here, then, we see a reason why God must mingle seeming severity with benevolence. The same thing is seen, in the fourth place, in the confined and depressed condition of the human mind in this world, and in the multiplied obstacles in the way of its cultivation and enlargement. What a clog to the intellect is a body governed by gross appetites, and often stopping the ingress of truth, or perverting its aspect, by disordered and imperfect senses! Nearly one third of the time must that intellect sink into oblivion, while sleep recruits the physical powers. And nearly another third of life must be given to the wants of the body; and as we have seen, the great mass of men are obliged to devote nearly their whole time to serve the necessary wants of the body. What an incalculable waste of mind does the world exhibit! And even when all artificial and unnecessary obstructions are taken out of the way, what an immense waste must it always present, while in so gross a corporeal tenement! for were it free to exhibit its true nature, we cannot doubt its power of unwearied and incessant activity. And such might have been its condition here, had it pleased infinite wisdom and benevolence. But what unmixed benevolence would have prompted, perfect wisdom would not permit to fallen man. I feel confident that my first two propositions are established, viz., that there is a predominance of benevolence in the arrangements and operations of the present world, and yet that it is not unmixed benevolence. I advance to a third proposition, which asserts that _the same mixed system of good and evil, which now exists, has always prevailed since the earth was inhabited_. Geology shows us the true succession of events since the first appearance of organic beings on the globe, but no chronological dates are registered on the rocks. And it is only by observing processes in existing nature, analogous to those whose record is engraven on the solid strata, that we can infer that the years since life first appeared on the surface must have been very many. But however far back in the hoary past that event occurred, we have indisputable evidence that the same laws then controlled the operations of nature as now, and the result was the same mixture of good and evil. In the crystalline structure, and in the perfect crystals of the older rocks, we learn the laws which predominated at their production. And we find that the same chemical, electrical, and electro-magnetical influences presided over their formation as are now exhibited in the laboratory of the chemist or the laboratory of nature. Now, these crystals conduct us back much farther than the dawn of terrestrial life, though similar ones, and produced by the same laws, are found through the whole series of rocks, from the oldest to the newest. And I might appeal to many other facts in the earth's history, which demonstrate an identity between the physical laws that have controlled nature's processes in every period of past time. We have evidence, also, of the same identity in the laws of life, or organic laws. In the anatomical structure of the earliest animals and plants we find the same general type that pervades the present creation, modified only, as it now is, to meet peculiar circumstances. This is true not only of the osseous, but also of the muscular, circulatory, nervous, lymphatic, and nutritive organs. Hence, as we might expect, we have evidence of the prevalence of the same functional or physiological laws then, as now. Respiration was performed, as it now is, and with the same effects. Vegetable and animal food was then, as now, masticated, digested, and assimilated; and since animals possessed the same senses, we infer that their habits were essentially the same. There is not, indeed, any evidence that ancient animals and plants exhibited any peculiarities of structure or function, save those necessary to adapt them to the circumstances, so unlike the present, in many respects, in which they lived. We are sure, also, that death has ever reigned over all organic nature. It has always been produced by the same causes, and attended by the same suffering. And its ravages were repaired by the same system of reproduction as now exists. All this we might presume would be the case, upon the discovery of an identity of laws, mechanical, chemical, and organic; but we have direct evidence, also, in the countless remains of animals and plants entombed in the rocks, more than twenty thousand species of which have been disinterred by naturalists and described. I might multiply facts almost without number to sustain the position, that the same mixed system has ever prevailed upon the globe; for geology is full of the details. But in a subsequent lecture, the subject will be more amply discussed. Such are the facts respecting the divine benevolence, as they are presented in the volume of nature. Though benevolence decidedly predominates, it is modified by other divine attributes, and ever has been, since organic existence began upon the globe. Let us now, _in the fourth place, see what inferences are fairly deducible from the whole subject_. For those inferences, if I mistake not, will not only clear away every cloud from the divine benevolence, but throw much light upon man's condition. In the first place, the subject shows us that the world is not in a state of retribution. As a general fact, virtue is to some extent rewarded, and vice to some extent punished. But it is not always so. Indeed, the picture is sometimes reversed apparently; and the good are afflicted because they do good, and the wicked triumph because they do evil. Evil abounds, but it is not so distributed as righteous retribution would award it; neither is good. Since, therefore, God's justice must be infinitely perfect, there must be some other object for the prevalence of good and evil in the world besides righteous retribution. Secondly. We learn from the subject that the world is in a fallen condition. I mean, that man has fallen from holiness and happiness. For the world is evidently not such a world as infinite wisdom and benevolence would prepare for a being perfectly holy and happy. Philosophize as we may, we cannot discover any reason why the abode of such a being should be filled with evils of almost every name--evils which the most consummate prudence and the most elevated virtue cannot wholly avoid--evils which often come upon the good man because he is eminent for holiness. But if man has fallen from original holiness and happiness by transgression, we might expect just such a world to be fitted up for his residence, because evil is indissolubly linked to sin, perhaps in the very nature of things, certainly by divine appointment. We know that it brings a curse upon every thing with which it is connected; and here we see a reason for the blight that has marred some of the fairest features of nature, and introduced pain and suffering into the animal frame, and brought a cloud over man's noble intellect, and hebetude over his moral powers. Such a fallen condition will explain what no other supposition can, viz., the clouded, fettered, and depressed condition of all organic nature. Yet, thirdly. We should not infer that man's condition was hopeless, but rather that mercy might be in store for him. The very fact that the world is not in a state of retribution would seem to afford hope that God had other purposes than punishment in allowing evil to be introduced. And then the vast predominance of benevolence and happiness around us cannot but inspire hope for the fallen. This will be still more manifest if we infer, and can show, fourthly, that the world is in a state of probation or trial. By this I mean that men are placed in a condition for the trial and discipline of their characters, in order to fit them for a higher state. If fallen and depraved, they need to pass through such a discipline before they can be prepared for that higher condition. And surely no one can observe the scenes through which all pass, without being struck with their eminent adaptedness to train man to virtue and holiness. Until we have been pupils for a time in this school, we are not fit even for the successive states in this life into which we pass; much less for a higher condition. But there is a marvellous power in this discipline to prepare us for both, as vast multitudes have testified while they lived and when they died. Even death seems, so far as we can see, to be the only means by which a sinful being can be delivered from his stains; and the dread of this terrific evil is one of the most powerful restraints upon vice, and stimulants to virtue. There is, in fact, no condition in which man is placed, no good or evil that he meets, which is not eminently adapted, if rightly improved, to discipline and strengthen his virtue. Hence we cannot doubt that this is the grand object of the present arrangements of the world. True, if misimproved, the same means become only a discipline in vice. But this is only in conformity with a general principle of the divine government, that the things which rightly used are highly salutary, are proportionably injurious when perverted. Fifthly. The subject shows us a reason why suffering and death prevailed in this world long before man's existence. God foresaw--I will not say foreordained, though he certainly permitted it--that man would transgress; and, therefore, he made a world adapted to a sinful fallen being, rather than to one pure and holy. If he had adapted it to an unfallen being, and then changed it upon his apostasy, that change must have amounted to a new creation. For, as I have endeavored to show in a previous lecture, (Lecture III.,) the whole constitution of our world, and even its relations to other worlds, must have been altered to fit it for a being who had sinned. To have introduced such a one into a world fitted up for the perfectly holy, would have been a curse instead of a blessing. It was benevolence on the part of God to allow evil to abound in a world which was to be the residence of a sinful creature; for the discipline of such a state was the only chance of his being rescued from the power of sin, and restored to the divine favor. It may be thought, however, inconsistent with divine benevolence to place the inferior, irrational animals in a condition of suffering because man would transgress, and thus punish creatures incapable of sinning for his transgression. Animals do, indeed, suffer in such a world as ours; but not as a punishment for their own or man's sin. The only question is, Do they suffer so much that their existence is not a blessing? Surely experience will decide, without inquiring as to their future existence, that their enjoyments, as a general fact, vastly outweigh their sufferings; and hence their existence indicates benevolence. It should also be recollected that their natures are adapted to a world of sin and death, and they are doubtless more happy here than they would be in a different condition, which might be more favorable to unfallen accountable beings. Finally. This subject harmonizes infinite and perfect benevolence in God with the existence of evil on earth. This is the grand problem of theology; and though I would not say that our reasoning clears it of all difficulties, yet it does seem to me that, by letting the light of this subject fall upon the question, we come nearer to its solution than by viewing it in any other aspect. For this subject shows us that benevolence decidedly predominates in all the arrangements of the material universe, and then it assigns good reasons why this benevolence is not unmixed; in other words, why severity is sometimes mingled with goodness. It shows us that God, with a prospective view of man's sin, adapted the world to a fallen being; making it, instead of a place of unmingled happiness, a state of trial and discipline; not as a full punishment, (for that is reserved to a future state,) but as an essential means of delivering this immortal being from his ruin and misery, and of fitting him for future and endless holiness and happiness. Thus, instead of indicating indifference or malevolence in God, because he introduced evil into the world, it is a striking evidence of his benevolence. Such a plan is, in fact, the conjoint result of infinite wisdom and benevolence for rescuing the miserable and the lost. Had God placed such a being in a world adapted to one perfectly holy, his sufferings would have been vastly greater, and his rescue hopeless. Thus far do both reason and revelation conduct us in a plain path; and that, probably, is as far as is necessary for all the purposes of religion. Up to this point, infinite benevolence pours its radiance upon the path, and we see good reasons for the evils incident to this life; nay, we see that they are the result of that same benevolence which strews the way with blessings; that, in fact, they are only necessary means of the greatest blessings. I am aware that there is a question lying farther back, in the outskirts of metaphysical theology, which still remains unanswered, and probably never can be settled in this world, because some of its elements are beyond our reach. The inquisitive mind asks why it was necessary for infinite wisdom and power to introduce evil, or allow it to be introduced, into any system of created things. Could not such natures have been bestowed upon creatures, that good only might have been their portion? A plausible answer is, that evil exists because it can ultimately be made subservient of greater good, taking the whole universe into account, than another system. Certainly to fallen man we have reason to believe natural evils are the grand means of his highest good; and hence we derive an argument for the same conclusion in respect to the whole system of evil. Indeed, such are the divine attributes, that it is absurd to suppose God would create any system which was not the best possible in existing circumstances. But even though we cannot solve these questions in their abstract form, and as applied to the whole creation, it is sufficient for every practical purpose of religion if we can show, as we have endeavored to do in this lecture, how the present system of the world for a fallen being illustrates, instead of disproving, the divine benevolence. Here, then, is the resolution of some of the darkest enigmas of human existence, which philosophy, unaided by revelation, has never solved. Here we get hold of the thread that conducts us through the most crooked labyrinths of life, and enables us to let into the deepest dungeons of despondency and doubt, the light of hope and of heaven. Here, too, we find the powerful glass by which we can pierce the clouds that have so long obscured the full-orbed splendors of the divine benevolence. To some, indeed,--and they sagacious philosophers,--that cloud has seemed surcharged only with vengeance. And even to those who have caught occasional glimpses of the noble orb behind, the cloud over its face has always seemed to be tinged with some angry rays. Indeed, so long as this is a sinful state, justice will not allow all the glories of the divine goodness to be revealed. And yet, through the glass which philosophy and faith have put into our hands, we can see that the disk is a full-orbed circle, and that no spots mar and darken its clear surface. How gloriously, then, when all those clouds shall have passed away, and the last taint of evil shall have been blotted out by the final conflagration, shall that sun, in the new heavens, send down its light and heat upon the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness! On the other hand, how sad the prospect which the analogies of this subject open before him who misimproves his earthly probation, and goes out of the world unprepared for a higher and purer state of existence! If we can see reasons why on earth God should mingle goodness and severity in this man's lot, we can also see reasons why the manifestations of benevolence should all be withdrawn when he passes into a state of retribution. For if an individual can resist the mighty influences for good which the present state of discipline affords, and only become worse under them all, his case is utterly hopeless, and Heaven can do no more, consistently with the eternal principles of the divine government, to save him. Infinite benevolence gives him over, and no longer holds back the sword of retributive justice. Nay, the justice which inflicts the punishment is only benevolence in another form. And this it is that makes the infliction intolerable. How much more terrible to the wayward child are the blows inflicted by a weeping, affectionate father, than if received from an enemy! God is that affectionate Father; and he punishes only because he loves the universe more than the individual; and he has exhausted the stores of infinite mercy in vain to save him. Wicked men sometimes tell us that they are not afraid to trust themselves in the hands of infinite benevolence; whereas it is eminently this quality of the divine character which, above all others, they have reason to fear. For if, even in this world of probation and hope, God finds it necessary to mingle so much severity with goodness, what but a cup of unmingled bitterness shall be put into his hands who goes into eternity unrenewed and unpardoned, and finds that even infinite benevolence has become his eternal enemy! LECTURE VIII. UNITY OF THE DIVINE PLAN AND OPERATION IN ALL AGES OF THE WORLD'S HISTORY. Contrivance, adaptation, and design are some of the most striking features of the natural world. They are obvious throughout the whole range of creation, in the minutest as well as in the most magnificent objects; in the most complicated as well as in the most simple. So universally present are they, that whenever we meet with any thing in nature which seems imperfectly adapted to other objects, as the organ of an animal or plant, which exhibits malformation, it excites general attention, and the mere child need not be told that, in its want of adaptation to other objects, it is an exception in the natural world. In order to illustrate what I mean by contrivance, adaptation, and design, let me refer to a familiar example--the human eye. Made up of three coats and three humors, of solids and fluids, of nerves, blood-vessels, and muscles, and rivalling the most perfect optical instrument, it must have required the most consummate contrivance to give the requisite quantity and position to parts so numerous and unlike, for producing the phenomena of vision. Yet how perfectly it is done! How few, out of the hundreds of millions of eyes of men and other animals, fail of vision through any natural defect! No less marvellous are the adaptations of the eye. In order to be adapted to the wonderful effect which we call light, its coats and humors must be transparent, and possess a certain density and opacity, that the rays may form an image on the retina. Yet to prevent confusion in the image, the transparency must be confined to the central parts of the eye, and a dark plexus of veins and muscles must be so situated as to absorb the scattering rays. In order to adapt the eye to different distances, and to the greater or less intensity of the light, delicate muscles must be so situated as to contract and dilate the pupil, and lengthen and shorten the axis. That the eye might be directed to different objects, strong muscles must be attached to its posterior surface; and that the eyelid might defend it from injuries in front, a very peculiar muscle must give it power to close. No less perfect is the adaptation of the eye to the atmosphere, or, rather, there is a mutual adaptation; and it is as proper to say that the atmosphere is adapted to the eye, as that the eye is adapted to the atmosphere. In like manner, there is a striking relation between the eye and the sun and other heavenly bodies, and between the eye and day and night; so that we cannot doubt but they were made for one another. We might, indeed, extend the relations of the eye to every object in the universe; and the same may be said of every organ of plants and animals. The adaptation between them is as wide as creation. And it is the wonderful harmony between so many millions of objects that makes us feel that infinite wisdom alone could have produced it. The design of the multiplied contrivances and adaptations exhibited by the eye is too obvious to need a formal statement. Comparatively few understand the wonderful mechanism of the eye; but we should consider it proof of idiotism, or insanity, for the weakest mind to doubt what is the object of the eye. This is, to be sure, a striking example. But out of the many organs of animals, how few are there of which we do not see the design! And as the subject is more examined, the few excepted cases are made still fewer. They are more numerous in plants, because we cannot so well understand them, and because of their microscopic littleness. They are so few, however, throughout all nature, that they never produce a doubt that, for every individual thing in creation, there is a distinct object. If we confine our views to the most simple parts of matter, we can see design in them. If we take a wider view, and examine those minor systems which are produced by the grouping of the elements of matter, we shall see design there; and if we rise still higher in our examination, and compare systems still more extensive, until we group all material things, wise and beautiful design is still inscribed upon all. In fine, creation is but a series of harmonies, wheel within wheel, in countless variety, yet all forming one vast and perfect machine. Examine nature as widely and as minutely as we may, we never find one part clashing with another part; no laws, governing one portion of creation, different from those governing the others. Amid nature's infinitely diversified productions and operations we find but one original model or pattern. As Dr. Paley finely expresses it, "We never get amongst such original or totally different modes of existence as to indicate that we are come into the province of a different Creator, or under the direction of a different will." All appears to have been the work of one mighty mind, capable of devising and creating the vast system so perfectly that every part shall beautifully harmonize with every other part; a mind capable of holding in its capacious grasp at once the entire system, and seeing the relation and dependence of all its parts, from the minutest atom up to the mightiest world. In short, the unity of design which pervades all creation is perfect, more so than we witness in the most finished machine of human construction; for "In human works, though labored on with pain, A thousand movements scarce one object gain; In God's, one single can its end produce, Yet serves to second too some other use." Such are the wonderful contrivance, adaptation, and design which the material world every where exhibits. But the geologist carries us back through periods of immense antiquity, and digs out from the deep strata evidences of other systems of organic life, which have flourished and passed away; other economies, which have existed on the globe anterior to the present. And how was it with these? Had they any relation to the existing system? Were they governed by different laws, or are they all but parts of one great and harmonious system, embracing the whole of the earth's past duration? We could not decide these questions beforehand; but geology brings to light unequivocal evidence that the latter supposition is the true one; that is, in the language of the poet,-- "All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul." To present the evidence of this conclusion will be my object in this lecture. _In the first place, the laws of chemistry and crystallography, electricity and magnetism, have ever been the same in all past conditions of the earth._ Chemistry has attained to such a degree of perfection that the analyst can now determine the composition of the various vegetable, animal, and mineral substances which he meets, with an extreme degree of accuracy. In many instances, he can do this in two ways. He can always separate the elements which exist in a compound, and ascertain their relative quantity; and this is called _analysis_. And sometimes he can take those elements and cause them to unite, so as to form a particular compound; and this is called _synthesis_. By these methods he has ascertained that, amid the vast variety of substances in nature, there are only about sixty-four which cannot be reduced to a more simple form, and are therefore called _elements_, or simple substances. Now, the chemist finds that, when these elements unite to form compounds, certain fixed laws are invariably followed. They combine in definite quantities, which are always the same, or some multiple of the same weight; so that each element has its peculiar and invariable combining weight; and it cannot be made to combine in any other proportion. You may mix two or more elements together in any proportion, but it is only a certain definite quantity of each that will combine, while the rest will remain in excess. Hence the same compound substance, from whatever part of the world it comes, or under however diverse circumstances produced, consists of the same ingredients in the same proportion. These laws are followed with mathematical precision, and we have reason to believe that the same compound substance, produced in different parts of the world, never differs in its composition by the smallest conceivable particle. Indeed, with the exception of the planetary motions and crystallography, chemical combination is the most perfect example of practical mathematics to be found in nature. Such are the laws which the chemist finds invariably to regulate all the changes that now take place in the constitution of bodies. What evidence is there that the same laws have ever prevailed? In the rocks we have chemical compounds, produced in all ages of the world's history, since fire and water began to form solid masses. Now, these may be, and have been, analyzed; and the same laws of definite proportion in the ingredients, which now operate, are found to have controlled their formation. The oldest granite and gneiss, which must have been the earliest rocks produced, are just as invariable in their composition as the most recent salt formed in the laboratory. And the same is true of the silicates, the carbonates, the sulphates, the oxides, chlorides, fluorides, and other compounds which constitute the rocks of different ages. We never find any produced under the operation of different laws. Now, the almost invariable opinion among chemists is, that the reason why the elements unite thus definitely is, that they are in different electrical states, and therefore attract one another. Hence the most important laws of electricity have been coeval with those of chemistry; indeed, they are identical; nor can we doubt, if such be the fact, that every other electrical law has remained unchanged from the beginning. And from the intimate connection, if not complete identity, between electricity and magnetism, it is impossible to doubt that the laws which regulate the latter are of equal antiquity with those of the former. Indeed, we find evidence in all the rocks, especially those which are prismatic and concretionary, of the active influence of galvanism and electro-magnetism in their production. The reasoning is equally decisive to prove the unchanging character of the laws which regulate the formation of crystals. The chemist finds that the same substance, when it crystallizes, invariably takes the same geometrical forms. The nucleus or primary form, with a few exceptions, of no importance in the present argument, to which all these secondary forms may be reduced by change, is one particular solid, with unvarying angles; and all the secondary forms, built upon the primary, correspond in their angles. In short, in crystallography we have another example of perfect practical mathematics, as perfect as the theory. Now, the oldest rocks in the globe contain crystals, and so do the rocks of all ages, sometimes of the same kind as those produced in the chemist's laboratory. And they are found to correspond precisely. It matters not whether they were the produce of nature's laboratory countless ages ago, or of the skill of the nineteenth century,--the same mathematics ruled in their formation with a precision which infinite wisdom alone could secure. _In the second place, the laws of meteorology have ever been the same as at present._ Under meteorological laws I include all atmospheric phenomena. And although we have no direct proof from geology in respect to the more rare of these phenomena, such as the aurora borealis and australis, and transient meteors, yet in respect to the existence of clouds, wind, and rain, the evidence is quite striking. In several places in Europe, and in many in this country, are found, upon layers of the new red sandstone, the distinct impressions of rain drops, made when the rock was fine mud. They correspond precisely with the indentations which falling rain-drops now make upon mud, and they show us that the phenomena of clouds and storms existed in that remote period, and that the vapor was condensed as at present. In the fact that the animals entombed in the rocks of various ages are found to have had organs of respiration, we also infer the existence of an atmosphere analogous to that which we now breathe. The rain-drops enable us to proceed one step farther; for often they are elongated in one direction, showing that they struck the ground obliquely, doubtless in consequence of wind. In short, the facts stated enable us to infer, with strong probability, that atmospheric phenomena were then essentially the same as at present; and analogy leads us to a similar conclusion as to all the past periods of the world's history, certainly since animals were placed upon it. What a curious register do these rain-drops present us! an engraving on stone of a shower that fell thousands and thousands of ages ago! They often become, too, an anemoscope, pointing out the direction of the wind, while the petrified surface shows us just how many drops fell, quite as accurately as the most delicate pluviameter. What events in the earth's pre-Adamic history would seem less likely to come down to us than the pattering of a shower? _In the third place, the agents of geological change appear to have been always the same on the earth._ Whoever goes into a careful examination of the rocks will soon become satisfied that no fragment of them all remains in the condition in which it was originally created. Whatever was the original form in which matter was produced, there is no longer any example of it to be found. The evidence of these changes is as strong almost as that constant changes are going on in human society. And we find them constantly progressing among the rocks, as well as among men; nor do the agents by which they are produced appear to have been ever different from those now in operation. The two most important are heat and water; and it is doubtful whether there is a single particle of the globe which has not experienced the metamorphic action of the one or the other. Indeed, it is nearly certain that every portion of the globe has been melted, if not volatilized. All the unstratified rocks have certainly been fused, and probably all the stratified rocks originated from the unstratified, and have been modified by water and heat. In many of these rocks, especially the oldest, we perceive evidence of the joint action of both these agents. Evidently they were once aqueous deposits; but they appear to have been subsequently subjected to powerful heat. As we ascend on the scale of the stratified rocks, the marks of fire diminish, and those of water multiply, so that the latest are mere mechanical or chemical depositions from water. In these facts, then, we see proof that heat and water have been the chief agents of geological change since the first formation of a solid crust on the globe; for some of the rocks now accessible, as already stated, date their origin at that early period. We might also trace back the agency of heat much farther, if the hypothesis adopted by not a few eminent geologists be true, which supposes the earth to have been once in a gaseous state from intense heat. But to press this point will add very little to my argument, even could I sustain it by plausible reasoning. I will only say, that, so far as we know any thing of the state of the earth previous to the consolidation of its crust, heat appears to have been the chief agent concerned in its geological changes. Among other agencies of less importance, that have always operated geologically, is gravity. Its chief effect, at present is to bring the earth's surface nearer and nearer to a level, by causing the materials, which other agencies have loosened from its salient parts, to subside into its cavities and valleys. It also condenses many substances from a gaseous to a liquid or solid state, especially those deep in the earth's crust, and thus brings the particles more within the reach of cohesive attraction and chemical affinity, often changing the constitution, and always the solidity, of bodies. And in the position of the ancient mechanical rocks, occupying as they do the former basins of the surface, and in the superior consolidation of the earlier strata, we find proof of the action of gravity in all past geological time. Electricity too, in the form of galvanism, has never been idle. We have reason to think that it operates at this moment in accumulating metallic ores in veins; and this segregation appears to have operated in all ages, not only in filling veins, but also, probably, in giving a laminated character and jointed structure to mountains of slate, as well as a concretionary and prismatic form to others. Last, though not least, we may reckon among the agents of geological change the forces of cohesion and affinity. When water and heat, gravity and galvanism, have brought the atoms of bodies into a proper state, these agents are always ready to change their form and constitution; and they have ever been at hand to operate by the same laws, and we witness their effects in the oldest as well as the newest rocks found in the earth's crust. This point, however, has been sufficiently considered, when treating of the unvarying uniformity of the laws of chemistry and crystallography. But though the nature of the agencies above considered has never changed, the intensity or amount of their action has varied; how much is a point not yet settled among geologists. Some regard that intensity, as it has existed during the present or alluvial period, as a standard for all preceding periods; that is, the intensity of these forces has never varied more during any period of the earth's history than it has since the alluvial period commenced. Most geologists, however, regard this as an extreme opinion, and think they see evidence in geology of a far greater intensity in these agencies in past periods than exists at present. They think they have proof that the world was once only a molten mass of matter, and some evidence that previously it was in a state of vapor. They believe that vast mountains, and even continents, have sometimes been thrown up from the ocean's bed by a single mighty paroxysmal effort; and such effects they know to be far greater than the causes of change now in operation can produce, without a vast increase of their intensity. But this question need neither be discussed nor decided for the sake of my present argument, since my object is to prove an identity in the nature and laws, not in the intensity, of geological agencies. _In the fourth place, the laws of zoölogy and botany have always been the same on the globe._ An examination of the animals now living, amounting to some hundred thousand species, perhaps to one or two millions, shows that they may be arranged in four great classes. The first class embraces the vertebral animals, distinguished by having a vertebral column, or back-bone, a regular skeleton, and a regular nervous system. It comprehends all the quadrupeds and bipeds, with man at their head, and is much superior to all other classes in complexity of organization and strength of the mental powers. The second class embraces the mollusks, or animals inhabiting shells. They are destitute of a spinal marrow, and for the most part their muscles are attached to the external covering, called the shell, although this shell is sometimes internal. The third class are called articulated animals, having envelopes connected by annulated plates, or rings. It includes such animals as the lobster, bloodsucker, spider, and insects generally. The fourth class have a radiated structure, and often resemble plants, or their habitation is a stony structure. Hence they are sometimes called zoöphytes, which means _animal plants_; or lithophytes, which means _stony plants_. They swarm in the ocean, and some of them build up those extensive stony structures called coral reefs. Now, if we examine the descriptions of the organic remains in the rocks, we find that in all ages of the world these four great classes of animals have existed. But in the earliest times, the three last classes--the mollusks, the articulated, and the radiated tribes--vastly preponderated, while the vertebral class had only a few representatives; and it is not till we rise as high as the new red sandstone, that we meet with any, except fishes, save a few batrachians in the old red sandstone, and the carboniferous group, detected alone by their tracks. Then the reptiles began to appear in abundance, with tortoises and enormous birds of a low organization, but no mammiferous animal is found, until we reach the oölite; and scarcely any till we rise to the tertiary strata, when they became abundant; but not so numerous as at present, though for the most part of larger size. Thus we find that the more perfect animals have been developed gradually, becoming more and more complex as we rise on the scale of the rocks. But in the three other classes, there does not appear to have been much advance upon the original types, although in numbers and variety there has been a great increase. The plants now growing upon the globe, amounting probably to nearly one hundred thousand species, are divided into two great classes, by a very decided character. Some of them have distinct flowers, and others are destitute of them. The former are called phenogamian, or flowering plants; and the latter cryptogamian, or flowerless plants. At present, the flowering plants very much predominate in the flora of every country. But in the earliest periods of organic existence, the reverse was the case. We find, indeed but very few flowering plants, and these of a character somewhat intermediate between flowering and flowerless; such as the coniferæ and cycadeæ, including the pine tribe. A few palms appeared almost as early, and some other monocotyledons. But most of the dicotyledons did not appear till the tertiary period, where more than two hundred species have been found. Of the three hundred species found in and beneath the carboniferous group, two thirds are tree ferns, or gigantic equisetaceæ. More than one third of the entire flora of the secondary formation consists of cycadeæ; whereas, this family of plants forms not more than the two thousandth part of the existing flora. In short, we find the more perfect plants as well as animals to be few in the earliest periods, and to have been gradually introduced up to the present time. But as to the flowerless plants, most of them seem to have been as perfect at first as they now are. These facts teach us conclusively that the outlines of organic life on the globe have always been the same; that the great classes of animals and plants have always had their representatives, and that the variations which have been introduced, have been merely adaptations to the varying condition of the earth's surface. The higher and more complex natures, both of animals and plants, were not introduced at first, because the surface was not adapted to their existence; and they were brought in only as circumstances, favorable to their development, prepared the way. There is another fact of great interest on this subject. Even a cursory examination of the animals and plants now on the globe, shows such a gradation of their characters that they form a sort of chain, extending from the most to the least perfect species. But we see at once that the links of this chain are of very unequal length; or, rather, that there are in some instances wide intervals between the nearest species, as if one or more links had dropped out. How remarkable that some of these lost links should be found among the fossil species! I will refer to a few examples. Among existing animals no genera or tribes are more widely separated than those with thick skins, denominated pachydermata; such as the rhinoceros and the elephant. But among the fossil animals of the tertiary strata, this tribe of animals was much more common; and many of them fill up the blanks in the existing families, and thus render more perfect and uniform the great chain of being which binds together into one great system the present and past periods of organic life. A similar case occurs among fossil plants. In tropical climates we find a few species--not much over twenty--of a singular family of plants, the cycadeæ connecting the great families of coniferæ, or dicotyledons, with the palms, which are monocotyledonous, and the ferns, which are acotyledonous. The chasm, however, between those great and dissimilar classes of plants is but imperfectly filled by the few living species of cycadeæ. But of the fossil species hitherto found above the coal formation, almost one half are cycadeæ; so that here, too, the lost links of the chain are supplied. "Facts like these," says Dr. Buckland, "are inestimably precious to the natural theologian, for they identify, as it were, the Artificer, by details of manipulation throughout his works. They appeal to the physiologist, in language more commanding than human eloquence; the voice of very stocks and stones, that have been buried for countless ages in the deep recesses of the earth, proclaiming the universal agency of one all-directing, all-sustaining Creator, in whose will and power these harmonious systems originated, and by whose universal providence they are, and have at all times been, maintained."--_Bridgewater Treatise_, vol. i. p. 502. One other fact, showing the identity of former zoölogical laws with those which now prevail, must not be omitted. I refer to the existence on the globe in all past periods of organic life of the two great classes of carnivorous and herbivorous animals; and they have always existed, too, in about the same proportion. To the harmony and happiness of the present system, we know that the existence and proper relative number of these different classes are indispensable. For in order that the greatest possible number of animals that live on vegetable food should exist, they must possess the power of rapid multiplication, so that there should be born a much larger number than is necessary to people the earth. But if there existed no carnivorous races to keep in check this redundancy of population, the world would soon become so filled with the herbivorous races that famine would be the consequence, and thus a much greater amount of suffering result than the sudden death inflicted by carnivorous races now produces. To preserve, then, a proper balance between the different species is, doubtless, the object of the creation of the carnivorous. This system has been aptly denominated "the police of nature." And we find it to have always existed. The earliest vertebral animals--the sauroid fishes and sharks--were of this description. The sharks have always lived, but the sauroid fishes became less numerous when other marine saurians were created; and when they both nearly disappeared, during the tertiary period, other predaceous families were introduced, more like those now in existence. The history of the mollusks, or animals inhabiting shells, furnishes us with an example still more striking. These animals, as they now exist, are divisible into the two great classes of carnivorous and herbivorous species, being distinguished by their anatomical structure; and so has it ever been. In the fossiliferous rocks below the tertiary, we find immense numbers of nautili, ammonites, and other kindred genera of polythalamous shells, called cephalopods, which were all carnivorous. And when they nearly disappeared with the cretaceous period, there was created another race with carnivorous propensities and organs, called trachelipods; and those continue still to swarm in the ocean. Had they not appeared when the cephalopods passed away, the herbivorous tribes would have multiplied to such an extent as ultimately to destroy marine vegetation, and bring on famine among themselves. These examples are sufficient to prove the existence of the carnivorous and herbivorous races in all ages and in about the same relative numbers. And it certainly furnishes most decisive evidence of the oneness of all these systems of organic life on the globe. _In the fifth place, the laws of anatomy have always been the same since organic structures began to exist._ It had long been known that the organs of animals were beautifully adapted to perform the functions for which they were intended. But it was not till the investigations of Baron Cuvier, within the last half century, that it was known how mathematically exact is the relation between the different parts of the animal frame, nor how precise are the laws of variation in the different species, by which they are fitted to different elements, climates, and food. It is now well known, that each animal structure contains a perfect system of correlation, and yet the whole forms a harmonious part of the entire animal system on the globe. But the language of Cuvier himself will best elucidate this subject, so far as it is capable of popular explanation. "Every organized individual," says he, "forms an entire system of its own; all the parts of which mutually correspond, and concur to produce a certain definite purpose, by reciprocal reaction, or by combining towards the same end. Hence none of these separate parts can change their forms without a corresponding change in the other parts of the same animal, and consequently each of these parts, taken separately, indicates all the other parts to which it has belonged. Thus, if the viscera of any animal are so organized as only to be fitted for the digestion of recent flesh, it is also requisite that the jaws should be so constructed as to fit them for devouring prey; the claws must be constructed for seizing and tearing it to pieces; the teeth for cutting and dividing its flesh; the entire system of the limbs, or organs of motion, for pursuing and overtaking it; and the organs of sense, for discovering it at a distance. Nature, also, must have endowed the brain of the animal with instinct sufficient for concealing itself, and for laying plans to catch its necessary victims. "In order that the jaw may be well adapted for laying hold of objects, it is necessary that its condyle should have a certain form; that the resistance, the moving power, and the fulcrum, should have a certain relative position with respect to each other, and that the temporal muscles should be of a certain size; the hollow, or depression, too, in which these muscles are lodged, must have a certain depth; and the zygomatic arch, under which they pass, must not only have a certain degree of convexity, but it must be sufficiently strong to support the action of the masseter. "To enable the animal to carry of its prey when seized, a corresponding force is requisite in the muscles which elevate the head; and this necessarily gives rise to a determinate form of the vertebræ, to which these muscles are attached, and of the occiput into which they are inserted. "In order that the teeth of a carnivorous animal may be able to cut the flesh, they require to be sharp, more or less so in proportion to the greater or less quantity of flesh which they have to cut. It is requisite that their roots should be solid and strong, in proportion to the greater quantity and size of the bones which they have to break to pieces. The whole of these circumstances must necessarily influence the development and form of all the parts which contribute to move the jaws. "To enable the claws of a carnivorous animal to seize its prey, a considerable degree of mobility is necessary in their paws and toes, and a considerable strength in the claws themselves. From these circumstances, there necessarily result certain determinate forms in all the bones of their paws, and in the distribution of the muscles and tendons by which they are moved. The fore arm must possess a certain facility of moving in various directions, and consequently requires certain determinate forms in the bones of which it is composed. As the bones of the fore arm are articulated with the arm bone, or humerus, no change can take place in the form or structure of the former, without occasioning correspondent changes in the form of the latter. The shoulder-blade, also, or scapula, requires a correspondent degree of strength in all animals destined for catching prey, by which it likewise must necessarily have an appropriate form. The play and action of all these parts require certain proportions in the muscles which set them in motion, and the impressions formed by these muscles must still farther determine the form of all these bones. "After these observations it will easily be seen that similar conclusions may be drawn with respect to the hinder limbs of carnivorous animals, which require particular conformations to fit them for rapidity of motion in general; and that similar considerations must influence the forms and connections of the vertebræ and other bones constituting the trunk of the body, and to fit them for flexibility and readiness of motion in all directions. The bones, also, of the nose, of the orbit, and of the ears, require certain forms and structures to fit them for giving perfection to the senses of smell, sight, and hearing, so necessary to animals of prey. In short, the shape and structure of the teeth regulate the forms of the condyle, of the shoulder-blade, and the claws, in the same manner as the equation of a curve regulates all its other properties; and as, in regard to a particular curve, all its properties may be ascertained by assuming each separate property as the foundation of a particular equation, in the same manner a claw, a shoulder-blade, a condyle, a leg, an arm bone, or any other bone, separately considered, enables us to discover the description of teeth to which they have belonged; and so, also, reciprocally, we may determine the form of the other bones from the teeth. Thus commencing our investigations by a careful survey of any one bone by itself, a person who is sufficiently master of the laws of organic structure may, as it were, reconstruct the whole animal to which that bone had belonged." After applying the same principle to animals with hoofs, Cuvier comes to a conclusion even more surprising. "Hence," says he, "any one who observes merely the print of a cloven hoof, may conclude that it has been left by a ruminant animal, and regard the conclusion as equally certain with any other in physics or in morals. Consequently this single footmark clearly indicates to the observer the forms of the teeth, of all the leg bones, thighs, shoulders, and of the trunk of the body of the animal which left the mark. It is much surer than all the marks of Zadig. "By thus employing the method of observation, where theory is no longer able to direct our views, we procure astonishing, results. The smallest fragment of bone, even the most apparently insignificant apophysis, possesses a fixed and determinate character relative to the class, order, genus, and species of the animal to which it belonged; insomuch that when we find merely the extremity of a well-preserved bone, we are able, by a careful examination, assisted by analogy and exact comparison, to determine the species to which it once belonged, as certainly as if we had the entire animal before us. Before venturing to put entire confidence in this method of investigation, in regard to fossil bones, I have very frequently tried it with portions of bones belonging to well-known animals, and always with such complete success, that I now entertain no doubts with regard to the results which it affords." The remarkable correlation between the parts of existing animals having been thus proved by the most rigid and satisfactory tests, we shall inquire with interest for the result, when Cuvier applied the same principles to the fossil animals. If the laws of anatomical structure were the same when these extinct races lived as they now are, these principles will apply equally well to the bones found in the rocks; and though often only scattered fragments are brought to light, the anatomist will be able to reconstruct the whole animal, and present him to our view. Cuvier was the first who solved this problem. The quarries around Paris had furnished a vast number of bones of strange animals, and these were thrown promiscuously into the collections of that city. Well prepared by previous study, this distinguished anatomist went among them with the inquiry, _Can these bones live?_ The spirit of scientific prophecy was upon him, and, as he uttered his inspirations, _there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them._ "I found myself," says he, "as if placed in a charnel-house, surrounded by mutilated fragments of many hundred skeletons of more than twenty kinds of animals, piled confusedly around me. The task assigned me was to restore them all to their original position. At the voice of comparative anatomy, every bone and fragment of a bone resumed its place. I cannot find words to express the pleasure I experienced in seeing, as I discovered one character, how all the consequences which I predicted from it were successively confirmed; the feet were found in accordance with the characters announced by the teeth; the teeth in harmony with those indicated beforehand by the feet; the bones of the legs and thighs, and every connecting portion of the extremities, were found set together precisely as I had arranged them, before my conjectures were verified by the discovery of the parts entire; in short, each species was, as it were, reconstructed from a single one of its component elements." It is hardly necessary to say that, since this first successful experiment, the same principles have been more thoroughly investigated and extended with the same success into every department of fossil organic nature. The results which have crowned the labors of such men as Agassiz, Ehrenberg, Kaup, Goldfuss, Bronn, Blainville, Brongniart, Deshayes, and D'Orbigny, on the continent of Europe, and of Conybeare, Buckland, Mantell, Lindley, and Hutton, and eminently of Owen, in Great Britain, although sustained by the most rigid principles of science, are nevertheless but little short of miraculous; and they demonstrate most clearly the identity of anatomical laws, in all ages, among animals and plants of every size and character, from the lofty lepidodendra and sigillaria to the humblest moss or sea-weed, and from the gigantic dinotherium, mastodon, megatherium, and iguanodon, to the infinitesimal infusoria. _In the sixth place, physiological laws have always been the same upon the globe._ That death has reigned in all past ages over all animated tribes, as it now reigns, so that in that war there has never been a discharge, I need not attempt formally to prove. For the preserved and petrified relics of all the former races, that now lie entombed in the rocks, furnish a silent but impressive demonstration of the former triumph of that great physiological law, which is stamped by the signet of Jehovah upon all existing organic natures--_Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return._ Scarcely more necessary is it to attempt to show that the same system of reproduction for filling the chasms which death occasions, and which is now universal in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, has always existed. Indeed, such a system is a necessary counterpart to a system of dissolution. And we find the same phases to this reproductive system in ancient and in modern periods. Organic remains clearly teach us that there have always been viviparous as well as oviparous creatures, and gemmiparous as well as fissiparous animals and plants. The second great physiological law of existing nature has, then, always been the same. The character of the nourishment by which animals and plants have been sustained has never varied. The latter have ever been nourished by inorganic, and the former by organic, matter. Some animals have ever fed upon the flesh of other animals, as their petrified remains, enclosing the masticated and half-digested fragments of other animals, testify. Other tribes have fed only upon herbs or fruits; and some were omnivorous; just, in fact, as we find the habits of existing animals. No less certain are we that the processes of digestion and assimilation have ever been unchanged. We find the same organs for these purposes as in existing animals, viz., the mouth, the stomach, the intestines, and the blood-vessels, as the coprolites and the cololites abundantly testify. We infer, therefore, with great confidence, the existence of gastric juice and bile for completing the transformation of the food into blood. Indeed, the discovery by a lady (Miss Mary Anning, of England) of that singular secretion from which the color called _India ink_ is prepared, with the ink-bag of the sepia, or loligo, in a petrified state, shows that the process of secretion existed in these ancient animals; and when we find that in all respects their structure was like that of existing animals, although some of the softer vessels have not been preserved, we cannot doubt but the entire process of digestion, and the conversion of blood into bone, nerve, and muscle, was precisely the same as it now is. In the fact, also, that we find in fossil specimens organs of respiration, such as lungs, gills, and trachea, we learn that the process of a circulation of blood, and its purification by means of the oxygen of the atmosphere, have never varied. Animal heat, too, dependent as it is essentially upon this oxygenating process, was always derived from the same source as at present. The perfectly preserved minute vessels of vegetables enable us, by means of the microscope, to identify them with the plants now alive; and they prove, too, incontestably, that the nourishment of vegetables has always been of the same kind, and has been converted into the various proximate principles of plants by the same processes. Again. We have evidence that these ancient animals possessed the same senses as their congeneric races now on the globe. We have one good example in which that most delicate organ, the eye, is most perfectly preserved. It is well known that the visual organ of insects and of crustaceans is composed of a multitude--often several hundreds or thousands--of eyes, united into one, so as to serve the purpose of a multiplying glass; each eye producing a separate image of the object observed. Such an eye had the trilobite. Each contained at least four hundred nearly spherical lenses on the surface of the cornea, united into one organ; revealing to us the interesting fact, that the relations of light to animal organization were the same in that remote era as they now are. But I need not multiply proof of the functional identity of organic nature in all ages. It may, however, be inquired, how this identity, as well as that of anatomical structure, is reconciled with the great anomalies, both in size and form, which have confessedly prevailed among ancient animals. Compare the plants and animals which now occupy the northern parts of the globe with those which flourished there in the remote periods of geological history, and can we believe them to be portions of one great system of organic nature? Compare, for instance, the thirty or forty species of ferns now growing to the height of a few inches, or one or two feet, in Europe and this country, with the more than two hundred species already dug out of the coal mines, many of which were forty to forty-five feet in height; or the diminutive ground pines, and equiseta, now scarcely noticed in our forests, with the gigantic lepidodendron, sigillaria, calamites, and equiseta, of the carboniferous period; and who will not be struck with the great difference between them? Or go to Germany, and imagine the bones of the dinotherium to start out of the soil, and become clothed with flesh and instinct with life. You have before you a quadruped eighteen feet in length, and of proportional height, much larger than the elephant, and with curved tusks reaching two or three feet below its lower jaw, while no other living animal would be found there larger than the ox, or the horse--mere pygmies by the side of such a monster, and evidently unfit to be his contemporaries. Again. Let the megatherium be brought back to life on the pampas of South America, and you have an animal twelve feet long and eight feet high, with proportions perfectly colossal. Its fore feet were a yard long, its thigh bone three times thicker than that of the elephant, its width across the haunches five feet, its spinal marrow a foot in diameter, and its tail, where it was inserted into the body, two feet in diameter. What a giant in comparison with the sloth, the anteater, and the armadillo, to which it was allied by anatomical structure! Still more unequal in size, as compared with living batrachians, was the labyrinthidon, once common in England and Germany, if, indeed, the tracks on sandstone were made by that animal. It was, in fact, a frog as large as an ox, and perhaps as large as an elephant. Think of such animals swarming in our morasses at the present day! But coming back from Europe, and turning our thoughts to the animals that trod along the shores of the estuary that once washed the base of Mount Holyoke, in New England, we shall encounter an animal, probably of the batrachian family, of more gigantic proportions. It was the _Otozoum Moodii_, a biped, with feet twenty inches long, more than twice the size of those of the labyrinthidon; yet its tracks on the imperishable sandstone show that such a giant once trod upon the muddy shore of that ancient estuary. Along that same shore, also, enormous struthious birds moved in flocks, making strides from three to five feet long, with feet eighteen inches long, lifting their heads, it may be, from twelve to eighteen feet above the ground, surpassing, as it appears, even the gigantic dinornis of New Zealand, now that the feet of the latter have been discovered. I refer to the _Brontozoum giganteum_, whose tracks are so common on the new red sandstone of the Connecticut valley. What dwarfs are we in comparison, who now consider ourselves lords of that valley! Still more remarkable for peculiarities of structure was the tribe of saurians, which were once so numerous in the northern parts of Europe and America. The ichthyosaurus, a carnivorous marine reptile, sometimes thirty feet long, had the snout of a porpoise, the teeth of a crocodile, the head of a lizard, the vertebræ of a fish, the sternum of an ornithorhynchus, and the paddles of a whale. Those paddles, corresponding to the fins of a fish, or the web feet of water birds, were composed, each of them, of more than one hundred bones. In short, we find in this animal a combination of mechanical contrivances, which are now found among three distinct classes of the animal kingdom. Its eye, also, having an orbital cavity, in one species, of fourteen inches in its longest diameter, was proportionally larger than that of any living animal. The plesiosaurus had the general structure of the ichthyosaurus; but its neck was nearly as long as its whole body--longer, in proportion to its size, than even that of the swan. The iguanodon was an herbivorous terrestrial reptile that formerly inhabited England. It approaches nearest in structure to the iguana, a reptile four or five feet long, inhabiting the marine parts of this continent. Yet the iguanodon was thirty feet long, with a thigh six feet, and a body fourteen feet in circumference. What an alarm would it now produce, to have such a monster start into life in the forests of England, where no analogous animal could be found more than half a foot in length! Surely this must have been one of the fabulous monsters of antiquity. Still more heteroclitic and unlike existing nature was the pterodactyle, a small lizard, contemporary with the ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus. At one time anatomists regarded it as a bird, at another as a bat, and finally as a reptile, having the head and neck of a bird, the body and tail of a quadruped, the wings of a bat, and the teeth of a saurian reptile. With its wings it could fly or swim; it could walk on two feet or four; with its claws it could climb or creep. "Thus," says Dr. Buckland, "like Milton's fiend, all qualified for all services, and all elements, the pterodactyle was a fit companion for the kindred reptiles that swarmed in the seas, or crawled on the shores of a turbulent planet." "The fiend, O'er bog, or steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way, And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies." Now, when the details of such facts are brought before us, it is very natural to feel that it is the history of monsters, and that the Centaurs, the Gorgons, and Chimeras of the ancients, are no more unlike existing animals than these resurrections from the rocks. But further examination rectifies our mistake, and we recognize them as parts of one great system. All the peculiarities of size, and structure, and form, which we meet, we find to be only wise and benevolent adaptations to the different circumstances in which animals have been placed. The gigantic size of many of them, compared with existing races, may be explained by the tropical, or even ultra tropical character of the climate; and not a single anomaly of structure and form can be pointed out, which did not contribute to the convenience and happiness of the species, in the circumstances in which they were placed. It is our ignorance and narrow views alone that give any of them the aspect of monsters. Listen to the opinion of Sir Charles Bell, one of the ablest of modern anatomists. "The animals of the antediluvian world," says he, "were not monsters; there is no _lusus_, or extravagance. Hideous as they appear to us, and like the phantoms of a dream, they were adapted to the condition of the earth when they existed." "Judging by these indications of the habits of the animals, we acquire a knowledge of the condition of the earth during their period of existence; that it was suited at one time to the scaly tribe of the lacertæ, with languid motion; at another, to animals of higher organization, with more varied and lively habits; and, finally, we learn that, at any period previous to man's creation, the surface of the earth would have been unsuitable to him."--_Bridgewater Treatise_, pp. 35 and 31. A similar view is given of this subject by England's geological poet, (Rev. Mr. Wilks,) in whose playful verses we find more of true science and just inference than in many a ponderous tome of grave prose. In one of his poems he says,-- "Seamy coal, Limestone, or oölite, and other sections, Give us strange tidings of our old connections; Our arborescent ferns, of climate torrid, With unknown shapes of names and natures horrid; Strange ichthyosaurus, or iguanodon, With many more I cannot verse upon,-- Lost species and lost genera; some whose bias Is chalk, marl, sandstone, gravel, or blue lias; Birds, beasts, fish, insects, reptiles; fresh, marine, Perfect as yesterday among us seen In rock or cave; 'tis passing strange to me How such incongruous mixture e'er could be. And yet no medley was it: each its station Once occupied in wise and meet location. God is a God of order, though to scan His works may pose the feeble powers of man." The facts and reasonings which have now been presented will sustain the following important inferences:-- _In the first place, we learn that the notions which have so widely prevailed, in ancient and modern times, respecting a chaos, are without foundation._ Among all heathen nations of antiquity, the belief in a primeval chaos was almost universal; and from the heathen philosophers it was transmitted to the Christian world, and incorporated with the Mosaic cosmogony. It is not, indeed, easy to ascertain what is the precise idea which has been attached to a chaos. It is generally described, however, as "a confused assemblage of elements," "an unformed and undigested mass of heterogeneous matter;" not, of course, subject to those laws which now govern it, and which have arranged it all in beautiful order, even if we leave out of the account vegetable and animal organization. Now, I have attempted to show that there never was a period on the globe when these laws, with the exception of the organic, did not operate as they now do. Nay, the geologist, when he examines the oldest rocks, finds the results of these laws at the supposed period when chaos reigned; that is, in the earliest times of our planet. And what are these results? The most splendid crystallizations which nature furnishes. The emerald, the topaz, the sapphire, and other kindred gems, were elaborated during the supposed chaotic state of the globe; for no earlier products have yet been discovered than these most perfect illustrations of crystallographical, chemical, and electrical laws. If, indeed, any should say, that by a chaos they mean only that state of the world when no animals or plants existed,--in other words, when no organic laws had been established,--to such a chaos I have no objection. And this is the chaos described in the Bible, where it is said that, before the creation of animals and plants, the earth was _without form and void_. The _tohu vau bohu_ of Moses, which is thus translated in our English Bible, means, simply and literally, _invisible and unfurnished_--_invisible_, both because the ocean covered the present land, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and _unfurnished_, because as yet no organic natures had been called into existence. This is the meaning which the old Jewish writers, as Philo and Josephus, attached to these words; and they have been followed by some of the ablest modern commentators. "It is wonderful," says Rosenmuller the elder, "that so many interpreters could have persuaded themselves that it was possible to detect a chaos in the words [Hebrew]. That notion unquestionably derived its origin from the fictions of the Greek and Latin poets, which were transferred by those interpreters to Moses. If we follow the practice of the language, the Hebrew phrase has this signification: _The earth was waste and desert_, or, as others prefer, _empty and vacuous_; that is, _uncultured and unfurnished_ with those things with which the Creator afterwards adorned it."--_Antiquiss. Tell. Hist._ p. 19-23. Upon the whole, there is no evidence whatever, either in nature or revelation, that the earth has ever been in a state corresponding to the common notions of a chaos; while, on the other hand, there is strong proof that the present laws of nature have been in operation from the beginning. These laws have varied in the intensity of their action, and we have strong reason to believe that organic laws did not always exist; but none of these laws have ever been suspended, to leave the elements to mix in wild disorder in a formless mass. It is high time that religion was freed from the indescribable incubus of a chaos. _Finally, the most important conclusion to which the mind is conducted by this subject is, that the present and past conditions of this world are only parts of one and the same great system of infinite wisdom and benevolence._ We have seen that the same wise and benevolent laws, organic and inorganic, have always controlled, as they now control, this lower world. It is true we find modified conditions of the globe in its past history; but they were always the foreseen result of the same laws, and in harmony with the same great plan. And the modifications of organic structure, which were great in the successive economies, were always in perfect correspondence with the earth's physical changes. Nowhere do we meet with conflicting plans; but throughout all nature, from the earliest zoöphyte and sea-weed of the silurian rocks to the young animals and plants that came into existence to-day, and from the choice gems that were produced when the earth was without form and void, to the crystals which are now forming in the chemist's laboratory, one golden chain of harmony links all together, and identifies all as the work of the same infinite mind. "In all the numerous examples of design which we have selected from the various animal and vegetable remains that occur in a fossil state," says Dr. Buckland, "there is such a never-failing identity in the fundamental principles of their construction, and such uniform adoption of analogous means to produce various ends, with so much only of departure from one common type of mechanism as was requisite to adapt each instrument to its own especial function, and to fit each species to its peculiar place and office in the scale of created beings, that we can scarcely fail to acknowledge in all these facts a demonstration of the unity of the intelligence in which such transcendent harmony originated; and we may almost dare to assert that neither atheism nor polytheism would ever have found acceptance in the world, had the evidences of high intelligence and unity of design which have been disclosed by modern discoveries in physical science been fully known to the authors or the abetters of systems to which they are so diametrically opposed. It is the same handwriting that we read, the same system and contrivance that we trace, the same unity of object and relation to final causes which we see maintained throughout, and constantly proclaiming the unity of the great divine original."--_Bridgewater Treatise_, p. 584. "The earth, from her deep foundations, unites with the celestial orbs, that roll throughout boundless space, to declare the glory and show forth the praise of their common Author and Preserver; and the voice of natural religion accords harmoniously with the testimonies of revelation, in ascribing the origin of the universe to the will of one eternal and dominant intelligence, the almighty Lord and supreme First Cause of all things that subsist; _the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, God from everlasting and without end_."--_Bridgewater Treatise_, p. 596. LECTURE IX. THE HYPOTHESIS OF CREATION BY LAW. In all ages of the world, where men have been enlightened enough to reason upon the causes of phenomena, a mysterious and a mighty power has been imputed to the laws of nature. A large portion of the most enlightened men have felt as if those laws not only explain, but possess an inherent potency to continue, the ordinary operations of nature. Most men of this description, however, have thought that to originate nature must have demanded the special exercise of an infinite and all-wise Being. But a few, in every age, have endeavored to exalt law into a Creator, as well as Controller, of the world. The hypothesis has assumed a great variety of forms, and until recently few have attempted to draw it out in all its details, and apply it to all nature. Among the ancient philosophers it was based on the eternity of matter, and made the foundation of a system of rank atheism. Starting with the position, as an axiom, that nothing produces nothing,--in other words, that creation out of nothing is impossible,--Democritus maintained that all existence was the result of two necessary and self-existent principles, viz., space, infinite in extent, and atoms, infinite in number. The latter have been eternally in motion, in directions varying from right lines; and their necessary collisions have produced the various forms of organic and inorganic nature. To produce animals and plants, it was only necessary that the atoms should be suitably arranged. The only animating principle was the rapid agitation of atoms. In modern times, very few philosophers have ventured to solve the whole problem of the universe by any self-acting, self-producing power in nature. La Place limited himself to the mode in which the great bodies of the universe were produced by the vertical movements of nebulous matter; although his object, equally with that of Democritus and Epicurus, was to dispense with an intelligent, personal Deity. Lamarck, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, and Bory St. Vincent, assuming the existence of matter and its laws, have endeavored to show, by the inherent vitality of some parts of matter, how the first or lowest classes of animals and plants may have been produced; and how, from these, by the theory of development and the force of circumstances, all the higher families, with their instincts and intellects, may have been evolved. A still more recent, but anonymous, writer has had the boldness to unite these nebular hypotheses, with those of spontaneous generation and transmutation, into a single system, and to attempt to clothe it with the garb of philosophy; nay, to do this in consistency, not only with Theism, but with a belief in revelation. This theory is what I denominate the _hypothesis of creation by law_. And judging from its wide reception, we should be led to infer that it had strong probabilities in its favor. It should, therefore, at least receive a careful and candid examination. For though many of its statements and conclusions are absurd, and some of them are highly ridiculous, the hypothesis, at least in some of its parts, falls in with certain loose notions that have got possession of the public mind, and which nothing but cogent reasoning can eradicate. Before entering upon such an examination, however, it seems necessary to go somewhat more into detail in illustration of the nature of this hypothesis. It may conveniently be described under the heads of _cosmogony_, which attempts to account for the origin of the world; _zoögony_, which explains the origin of animals; and _zoönomy_, which describes the laws of animal life.[17] The cosmogony of this theory is embraced in what is denominated the nebular hypothesis, propounded by the eminent mathematician La Place. He supposes that, originally, the whole solar system constituted only one vast mass of nebulous matter, being expanded into the thinnest vapor and gas by heat, and more than filling the space at present occupied by the planets. This vapor, he still further supposes, had a revolution from west to east on an axis. As the heat diminished by radiation, the nebulous matter must condense, and consequently the velocity of rotation must increase, and an exterior zone of vapor might be detached; since the central attraction might not be able to overcome the increased centrifugal force. This ring of vapor might sometimes retain its original form, as in the case of Saturn's ring; but the tendency would be, in general, to divide into several masses, which, by coalescing again, would form a single mass, having a revolution about the sun, and on its axis. This would constitute a planet in a state of vapor; and by the detachment of successive rings might all the planets be produced. As they went on contracting, by the same law, satellites might be formed to each; and the ultimate result would be solid planets and satellites, revolving around the sun in nearly the same plane, and in the same direction, and also on their axes. Although this hypothesis has been regarded with favor by many philosophers, who were Theists, and even Christians, yet the object of La Place in proposing it was to sustain atheism. Sir Isaac Newton had expressed the conviction that "the admirable arrangement of the solar system cannot but be the work of an intelligent and most powerful Being." La Place declared that, in this statement, Newton "had deviated from the method of true philosophy," and brought forward these views to sustain his declaration. Whether they do sustain it, will be considered in another place. But since it is one of those modes in which men have attempted to account for the universe without a Deity, it is a proper subject of examination in this lecture, in which we are inquiring whether law alone will account for the creation and sustentation of the universe. The zoögony of this hypothesis undertakes to show how animals and plants may be produced without any special exercise of creating power on the part of the Deity. It supposes matter to be endowed with certain laws, whose operation alone will determine life in brute matter, or, rather, whose operation constitutes life. Some would have it that a part of matter is essentially vital; that is, endowed with inherent life; and that this matter, like leaven, communicates life to dead matter arranged in a certain order. But the more modern view is, that life is produced by electrical agency. It is found that the fundamental form of organic beings is a globule, having another globule forming within it. It is also found that globules may be produced in albumen by electricity; and if we could discover how nature produces albumen, it is thought that the whole process by which living organisms are produced would be distinctly before us. It seems to be simply the operation of electricity, and requires no intervention of special creating energy. If the question arises, Whence came such marvellous laws to exist in nature? the atheist replies that matter and its laws are eternal, having neither beginning nor end; while the Theist, who maintains this hypothesis, asserts that, when God created matter, he endowed it with such laws, having an inherent, self-executing power. Having thus ascertained, as it supposes, how life and organization in the simplest forms may be produced, the next inquiry is, how the more perfect and complicated forms of organic beings may be developed by laws, without divine power. This constitutes the zoönomy of the subject. The French zoölogist, Lamarck, first drew out and formally defended this hypothesis, aided by others, as Geoffroy St. Hilaire and Bory St. Vincent. Their supposition was, that there is a power in nature, which they sometimes denominated the Deity, yet did not allow it to be intelligent and independent, but a mere blind, instrumental force. This power, they supposed, was able to produce what they called _monads_, or rough draughts of animals and plants. These monads were the simplest of all organic beings, mere aggregations of matter, some of them supposed to be inherently vital. And such monads are the only things ever produced directly by this blind deity. But in these monads there was supposed to reside an inherent tendency to progressive improvement. The wants of this living mass of jelly were supposed to produce such effects as would gradually form new organs, as the hands, the feet, and the mouth. These changes would be aided by another principle, which they called the _force of external circumstances_, by which they meant the influence upon its development of its peculiar condition; as, for instance, a conatus for flying, produced by the internal principle, would form wings in birds; a conatus for swimming in water would form the fins and tails of fishes; and a conatus for walking would form the feet and legs of quadrupeds. Thus the organs were not formed to meet the wants, but by the wants, of the animal and plant. Of course, new wants would produce new organs; and thus have animals been growing more and more complicated and perfect from the earliest periods of geological history. Man began his course as a monad, but, by the force of Lamarck's two principles, has reached the most elevated rank on the scale of animals. His last condition before his present was that of the monkey tribe, especially that of the orang-outang. The advocates of this hypothesis generally, however, suppose that there are from three to fifteen species of men, and that the different races are not mere varieties of one species. The most perfect species, the Caucasian, after leaving the monkey state, has gradually risen through the inferior species, and is still making progress; so that we cannot tell where they will stop. In general, the advocates of this hypothesis are materialists; that is, they do not suppose that there is a soul in man, distinct from the body, but that thought is one of the functions of the brain. They usually also regard moral qualities as mainly dependent upon organization, agreeably to the opinions of ultra phrenologists; and hence that they are more to be pitied than blamed for their deviations from rectitude. Such is the hypothesis. Let us now, in the first place, assume it to be proved, and see what inferences follow. _I remark, first, that the occurrence of events according to law does not remove the necessity of a divine contriving, superintending, and sustaining Power._ That every event in the universe takes place according to fixed laws I am ready to admit. For what is a natural law? Nothing more nor less than the uniform mode in which divine power acts. In the case of miracles, it may be that the ordinary laws of nature are suspended or counteracted; at least, they are increased or diminished in their power. Yet from what we know of the divine perfections, we must conclude that God has certain fixed rules by which he is regulated in the performance of miracles; and, of course, in the same circumstances we should expect the same miracles. So that we may reasonably admit that even miracles are regulated and controlled by law, like common events; though, from the infrequency of the former, men cannot understand the laws that regulate them. Now, if the advocates of this hypothesis mean simply that every event is regulated by law,--in other words, that with like antecedents like consequents will be connected,--I have no controversy with them; and such is the precise statement of a modern anonymous popular writer on the subject. He declares that his "purpose is, to show that the whole revelation of the works of God presented to our senses and reason is a system based on what we are compelled, for want of a better term, to call _law_; by which, however, is not meant a system independent or exclusive of the Deity, but one which only proposes _a certain mode of his working_."--_Sequel to the Vestiges of Nat. Hist. of Creation_, p. 2.--But this is by no means all that is meant by this hypothesis. Nay, the grand object of the writer above quoted is, to show that there is no such thing as miraculous interference in the creation or preservation of the universe. He admits only the ordinary laws of nature, but denies all special and extraordinary laws; and says that it does not "appear necessary that God should exercise an immediately superintending power over the mundane economy."--_Vestiges_, p. 273.--Nay, he denies that the original creation of the universe and of animals and plants required any thing but the operation of natural laws; of such laws as we see and understand. The thought does not seem to have occurred to him, that special and miraculous acts of the Deity may be as truly governed by law as the motions of planets. Every thing of that sort he seems to regard as a violation of law,--a stepping aside from fixed principles,--a sort of afterthought with Jehovah,--a remedy for some defect in his original plans. True, the law of miracles and of special providence is very different from the common course of nature; and, therefore, the one may for a time supersede the others. But this does not prove that the former is not regulated by laws; nor that it did not enter into the original plan of the universe in the divine mind. It must have been a part of that plan; every thing was a part of it, and there can be with him no afterthought, no improvement, no alteration of his eternal designs. Admitting that every event, miraculous as well as common, is under law, it by no means renders a present directing and energizing Deity unnecessary. This hypothesis admits that organic life had a beginning, for its grand object is to show how it began by law alone. Now, who gave to matter, in a gaseous state, such wonderful laws that this fair world should be the result of their operation? If it would require infinite wisdom as well as power to create the present universe at once out of nothing, would it demand less of contrivance and skill to impart such powers to brute matter? It was not merely a power to produce organic natures, to form their complicated organs, to give life, and instinct, and intellect; but to adapt each particle, each organ, each animal, and each plant, most exactly and most wonderfully to its place in the vast system, so that every single thing should most beautifully harmonize with every other thing. Again. What is a natural law without the presence and energizing power of the lawgiver? How easily are men bewildered by words! and none has led more astray than this word _law_. We talk about its power to produce certain effects; but who can point out any inherent power of this sort which it possesses? Who can show how a law operates but through the energizing influence of the lawgiver? How unphilosophical then to separate a law of nature from the Deity, and to imagine him to have withdrawn from his works! For to do this would be to annihilate the law. He must be present every moment, and direct every movement of the universe, just as really as the mind of man must be in the body to produce its movements. Take away God from the universe, or let him cease to act mentally upon it, and every movement would as instantly and certainly cease, as would every movement of the human frame, were the mind to be withdrawn, or cease to will. We realize the necessity of the divine presence and energy to produce a miracle. But if miracles are performed according to law, as much as common events,--and we surely cannot prove they are not,--why is a present Deity any more necessary in the one case than in the other? The Bible considers common and miraculous events exactly alike in this respect. And true philosophy teaches the same. I see not, then, why this law hypothesis does not require an infinite Deity, just as much as the ordinary belief, which supposes that God originally created the universe by his fiat, and sustains it constantly by his power, and from time to time interferes with the regular sequence of cause and effect by miracles. The only difference seems to be this: While the common view represents God as always watching over his works, and ready, whenever necessary, to make special interpositions, the law hypothesis introduces him only at the very dawn of the universe, exerting his infinite wisdom and power to devise and endow matter with exquisite laws, capable, by their inherent self-executing power, of originating all organic natures, and producing the infinite variety of nature, and keeping in play her countless and unceasing agencies. It was only necessary that he should impress attenuated matter with these laws, and then put the machine in motion, and it would go on forever, without any need of God's presence or agency; so that he might henceforward give himself up to undisturbed repose. I know, indeed, that La Place, and some other advocates of this latter hypothesis, do not admit any necessity for a Deity even to originate matter or its laws; and to prove this was the object of the nebular hypothesis. But how evident that in this he signally failed! For even though he could show how nebulous matter, placed in a certain position, and having a revolution, might be separated into sun and planets, by merely mechanical laws, yet where, save in an infinite Deity, lie the power and the wisdom to originate that matter, and to bring it into such a condition, that, by blind laws alone, it would produce such a universe--so harmonious, so varied, so nicely adjusted in its parts and relations as the one we inhabit? Especially, how does this hypothesis show in what manner these worlds could be peopled by countless myriads of organic natures, most exquisitely contrived, and fitted to their condition? The atheist may say that matter is eternal. But if so, what but an infinite mind could in time begin the work of organic creation? If the matter existed for eternal ages without being brought into order, and into organic structures, why did it not continue in the same state forever? Does the atheist say, All is the result of laws inherent in matter? But how could those laws remain dormant through all past eternity,--that is, through a period literally infinite,--and then at length be aroused into intense action? Besides, to impute the present wise arrangements and organic creations of the world to law, is to endow that law with all the attributes with which the Theist invests the Deity. Nothing short of intelligence, and wisdom, and benevolence, and power, infinitely above what man possesses, will account for the present world. If there is, then, a power inherent in matter adequate to the production of such effects, that power must be the same as the Deity; and, therefore, it is truly the Deity, by whatever name we call it. In short, the fact that La Place did not see that his hypothesis utterly failed to account for the universe without a Deity, strikingly shows us, that a man may be a giant in mathematics, while he is only a pygmy in moral reasoning; or, to make the statement more general, how a man, by an exclusive cultivation of one faculty of the soul, may shrivel all the rest into a nutshell. From these views and reasonings, it is clear, I think, that the hypothesis of creation by law does not necessarily destroy the theory of religion. For if we admit that every thing in the world of matter and of mind, not excepting miracles and special providences, is regulated, if not produced, by law, it does not take away the necessity of a contriving, sustaining, and energizing Deity. Even though we admit that God has communicated to nature's laws, at the beginning, a power to execute themselves, (though the supposition is quite unphilosophical,) no event is any the less God's work, than if all were miraculous. In consistency with this conclusion, we find that while some advocates of this hypothesis evidently intended it to sustain atheism, its most plausible advocate, as we have seen, fully admits, not only the divine existence, but the reality of revelation. It may, indeed, be doubted whether this anonymous writer has not virtually taken away the Deity, and even moral accountability, by his materialism and his ultra-phrenology; yet we do not see but he may assert his law system without denying God's existence or attributes. It must be admitted, however, that the influence of this hypothesis upon practical religion is disastrous. It does, apparently, so remove the Deity from all concern in the affairs of the world, and so foists law into his place, that practically there is no God. If his agency is acknowledged, as having put the vast machine in motion, in some indefinitely remote period of past duration, yet the feeling is, that since then he has given up the reins into the hands of law, so that man has nothing to do with him, but only with nature's laws; that he has only to submit to these, and not expect any interposition for his relief, however earnestly he cry for it. Now, it is obviously the intention and desire of the advocates of this hypothesis thus to remove God away from his works, and from their thoughts; else why should they so strenuously resist the notion of miracles? For these may just as properly be referred to law as common events. Yet it is one of the most striking features of the hypothesis, that it opposes strongly the idea of any special oversight and interposition on the part of the Deity. True, when we look at the subject philosophically, we must acknowledge that an event is just as really the work of God, when brought about by laws which he ordains and energizes, as by miraculous interposition. Still the practical influence of these two views of Providence is quite different. Whoever the author of the Vestiges may be, he has evidently lived in a religious community, and felt the influence of a religious atmosphere; for he tries to conform his system as much as possible to the principles of Protestant Christianity. In other words, he feels so much the power of practical piety around him, that he does not suffer the influence of the system which he advocates to exhibit itself fully, nor to drive him into those extravagances of belief which naturally result from it. In order to see what is its natural tendency, we need to go to such a country as Germany, or Switzerland, where there is little to restrain the wildest vagaries of belief. In the works of Professor Lorenz Oken, of Zurich, we see fully developed the tendencies and results of this hypothesis of development by law, combined with the unintelligible idealism of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, &c. In his Physio-philosophy, translated by the Ray Society for the edification of sober, matter-of-fact Anglo-Saxons, we find a man, of strong mind and extensive knowledge, taking the most ridiculous positions with the stoutest dogmatism, and the most imperturbable gravity, yet whose blasphemy is equalled only by their absurdity. Let a few quotations illustrate and confirm this statement. "The highest mathematical idea, or the fundamental principle of all mathematics, is the zero == 0. "Zero is in itself nothing. Mathematics is based upon nothing, and consequently arises out of nothing. "Real and ideal are no more different from each other than ice and water: both of these, as is well known, are essentially one and the same, and yet are different, the diversity consisting in the form. Every real is absolutely nothing else than a number. "The Eternal is the nothing of nature. "There is no other science than that which treats of nothing. "There exists nothing but nothing--nothing but the Eternal. "Every thing in the world is endowed with life; the world itself is alive, and continues only, maintains itself by virtue of its life. "Man is God wholly manifested. God has become man, zero has become + --. Man is the whole of arithmetic, compacted, however, out of all numbers; he can, therefore, produce numbers out of himself. "Animals are men who never imagine. They are beings who never attain to consciousness concerning themselves. They are single accounts; man is the whole of mathematics. "Arithmetic is the truly absolute or divine science. Theology is arithmetic personified. "For God to become real, he must appear under the form of the sphere. There is no other form for God. God manifesting is an infinite sphere. "God is a rotating globe; the world is God rotating. "The whole universe is material, is nothing but matter; for it is the primary act repeating itself eternally in the centre. The universe is a rotating globe of matter. "There is no dead matter; it is alive through its being, through the Eternal that is in it. Matter has no existence in itself, but it is the Eternal only that exists in it. Every thing is God that is there, and without God there is absolutely nothing. "Every thing that is is material. Now, however, there is nothing that is not; consequently there is every where nothing immaterial. "Fire is the totality of ether, is God manifested in his totality. "Every thing that is has originated out of fire; every thing is only cooled, rigidified fire. "God being in himself is gravity; acting, self-emergent light; both together, or returning into himself, heat. "God only is monocentral. The world is the bicentral God, God the monocentral world, which is the same with the monas and dyas. Self-consciousness is a living ellipse. "God is a threefold trinity; at first the eternal, then the ethereal, and finally the terrestrial, where it is completely divided. "The symbolical doctrine of the colors is correct according to the philosophy of nature. Red is fire, love--Father. Blue is air, truth, and belief--Son. Green is water, formation, hope--Ghost. These are the three cardinal virtues. Yellow is earth, the immovable, inexorable falsity, the only vice--Satan. There are three virtues, but only one vice. A result obtained by physio-philosophy, whereof pneumato-philosophy as yet augurs nothing. "The primary mucus, out of which every thing organic has been created, is the sea mucus. "The whole sea is alive. It is a fluctuating, ever self-elevating, and ever self-depressing organism. "If the organic fundamental substance consist of infusoria, so must the whole organic world originate from infusoria. Plants and animals can be only metamorphoses of infusoria. No organism has consequently been created of larger size than an infusorial point; whatever is larger has not been created, but developed. "The mind, just as the body, must be developed out of these animals, (infusoria.) The human body has been formed by an extreme separation of the neuro-protoplasmic or mucous mass; so must the human mind be a separation, a memberment of infusorial sensation. The highest mind is an anatomized or dismembered mesmerism, each member whereof has been constituted independent in itself. "The liver is the soul in a state of sleep, the brain is the soul active and awakening. "Circumspection and forethought appear to be the thoughts of the bivalve mollusca, and snails. "Gazing upon a snail, one believes that he finds the prophesying goddess sitting upon the tripod. What majesty is in a creeping snail, what reflection, what earnestness, what timidity, and yet at the same time what firm confidence! Surely a snail is an exalted symbol of mind slumbering deeply within itself." It is difficult for an Anglo-Saxon mind to believe that a man who could write thus was not out of his senses. Yet Oken is an eminent physiologist, and has made, it is said, important discoveries in respect to the cranial homologies, which have been developed in Professor Owen's work on the Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton. Nay, Oken declares himself to have written his Physio-philosophy "in a kind of inspiration"--from what world the religious man might be in doubt. These extravagant notions show what is the natural tendency of the law hypothesis. Yet it does not necessarily convert a man into an atheist. And if any of its advocates declare themselves Theists, and even Christians, we need not regard them as hypocrites, though we may consider them as in an eminently dangerous position; and that, when they shall act consistently, they will swing off into utter irreligion. But my arguments against the hypothesis will be based on the position that _it is not sustained by facts_; and this is the second position of my lecture. The nebular hypothesis is a part of the foundation on which the doctrine of creation by law rests. And the high scientific reputation of its author, as well as its apparent coincidence with some of the deductions of geology respecting the earliest condition of the earth, have made philosophers look upon it with considerable favor. Yet very few have been ready to give it implicit credence. And of late the most plausible evidence in its favor seems to be fast vanishing away. The ablest mechanicians are unable to see how a rotary motion should be produced in nebulous matter by refrigeration; or, if this be assumed, how the successive portions, detached by superior centrifugal force, should form spherical masses. But a still more formidable objection lies in the fact that, as improvements are made in telescopes, one and another of the nebulæ, on which the hypothesis rests, have been resolved into stars; and the presumption hence arising is very strong that all are resolvable. In the present aspect of the subject, no sagacious philosopher would dare to rest even an hypothesis upon the unresolved nebulæ. If, however, the nebular hypothesis were shown to be true, it would prove nothing in regard to the production of animals and plants by mere law, without the special agency of the Deity. The essential and inherent vitality of some kinds of matter is another doctrine on which this hypothesis rests. "In vain," says Bory St. Vincent, "has matter been considered as eminently brute. Many observations prove that, if it is not all active, by its very nature, a part of it is essentially so; and the presence of this, operating according to certain laws, is able to produce life in an agglomeration of the molecules; and since these laws will always be imperfectly known, it will at least be rash to maintain that an infinite intelligence did not impose them; since they are manifested by their results."--_Dictionnaire Classique d'Histoire Naturelle_, art. _Materie_. The "observations" to which this writer refers to sustain his hypothesis are those which had been made upon certain vegetable infusions, which, in certain circumstances, exhibited minute particles in motion, apparently by vital forces. These were called _monads_, and were not supposed to be distinct animals, but only atoms, ready to be organized. The more modern and accurate researches of Ehrenberg and others, however, have shown, beyond all doubt, that these monads are true animals, the minutest of all living beings hitherto discovered. Not less than twenty-six species of them have been described and figured by microscopists, the smallest of which never exceeds the twelve thousandth of an inch in diameter. The vegetable physiologists have described certain peculiar motions in the minute vessels of plants, that might readily be regarded as matter essentially vital. I refer to what they call _rotation_ and _cyclosis_. But these are never seen save in the living plant; and, therefore, seem dependent on the general life of the vegetable. There is, however, danger of mistaking certain motions of the particles of matter, by chemical agency, for the effect of vitality. A curious example is thus described by Ehrenberg, which was discovered by Professor Bornsdorff. "If a solution of the chloride of aluminum be dropped into a solution of potassa, by the alternate precipitation and solution of the aluminum, in the excess of the alkali, an appearance will be given to the drop of aluminate matter, by the chemical changes and reactions which take place, as if the _Amoeba diffluens_ were actually present, both as to its form and evolutions, and will seem to be alive. Such appearance is considered by its able discoverer as bearing the same relationship to the real animalcule as a doll, or a figure moved by mechanism, does to a living child." We see, then, that the supports on which rests the doctrine of the essential vitality of matter, give way before better instruments and more careful research. Another statement, however, of much higher pretensions, has lately been made, and on no mean authority. Able electricians declare that, by passing currents of galvanism through solutions of silicate or ferrocyanate of potassa, or some analogous substance, after a time, sometimes several years, numerous small insects have been developed, belonging to the _acari_ family. These experiments appear to have been conducted with fairness and skill; and that the insects showed themselves at the pole of the battery, around which the gelatinous silex collected, cannot be doubted. It is true, however, that, when the solution was exposed to the atmosphere, the insects appeared much sooner and more numerous than when care was taken to exclude every thing but oxygen enough to sustain life. This fact leads to the suspicion that the ova of the insect might have been communicated through the air, and that, even when an attempt was made to exclude the atmosphere, some ova were still present. This conclusion is rendered still more probable by some experiments made by Professor Schulz, of Berlin, on the production of infusoria. Having first boiled the vegetable and animal infusions, so as to destroy all germs of organic life, and expelled all the atmosphere, he attached an apparatus in such a manner that, whatever air entered afterwards, must pass through sulphuric acid, or a solution of potash. The result was, that no infusoria or vegetable forms appeared during two months; but in the same infusion, placed in the open air, and exposed to the same light and heat as that enclosed in the glass vessel, numerous animalcula and fungi appeared in a day or two. It will need, therefore, very long and patient experiments to establish the assertion that galvanism alone can produce living animals without the presence of germs. Not many years since, the equivocal or casual production of animalcula, without any other parentage than law, was thought to be made out by a multitude of facts. For these minute creatures appeared almost every where, and in places where it seemed impossible that their ova should be found. But the researches of Ehrenberg have cleared up the difficulties of their origination in the ordinary modes of reproduction, in nearly every instance, and the advocates of the law hypothesis have been fairly driven from this stronghold of their argument. In describing the various modes of reproduction with which nature has provided the infusoria, Professor Owen says, "Thus each leaves, by the last act of its life, the means of perpetuating and diffusing its species by thousands of fertile germs. When once the thickly tenanted pool is dried up, and its bottom converted into a layer of dust, these inconceivably minute and light ova will be raised with the dust by the first puff of wind, diffused through the atmosphere, and may there remain long suspended; forming, perhaps, their share of the particles which we see flickering in the sunbeam, ready to fall into any collection of water, beaten down by every summer shower into the streams or pools which receive or may be formed by such showers, and, by virtue of their tenacity of life, ready to develop themselves whenever they may find the requisite conditions of their existence. The possibility, or, rather, the high probability, that such is the design of the oviparous generation of the infusoria, and such the common mode of the diffusion of their ova, renders the hypothesis of equivocal generation, which has been so frequently invoked to explain their origin in new-formed natural or artificial infusions, quite gratuitous."--_Lectures on Comp. Anat._ vol. ii. p. 31. No longer able to maintain a foothold among the animalcula, the defenders of this hypothesis have of late attempted to take a stand among animals of a somewhat higher grade, viz., the entozoa, or animals inhabiting other animals. These being considerably larger than the infusoria, their ova could not float in the atmosphere; but they possess a wonderful tenacity of life; some of them exhibiting signs of life after having been in boiling water for an hour; others have revived after having been packed for a long time in ice, and frozen; others have revived after lying in a dried state for six or seven years. Their power of reproduction, in the ordinary modes, is also prodigious, exceeding even that of the infusoria. It will, then, demand very strong evidence to prove that such animals possess also the power of spontaneous production, without parentage, or that their existence within other animals cannot be explained without such a supposition. For, if capable of being produced without parentage, why should such extraordinary care have been taken for their multiplication, in almost all the ordinary modes in which animals are reproduced? The extraordinary facts that have been discovered by Professors Steenstrup, Owen, and others, within a few years, respecting what they call _alternate generation_, or _parthenogenesis_, have been thought favorable to the hypothesis of development. Among the mollusca, the polyparia, the entozoa, and infusoria, it is found that, in some species, the result of sexual union is the production of a larva without sex, and, therefore, incapable of propagating in the usual way. Yet that larva can of itself produce another larva quite different from itself, and this larva another, and so on, sometimes for eight or ten generations, when the spermatic force seems to be exhausted, and a progeny exactly like the original parents that started the series is produced, capable of giving rise to another and a similar series. Here, then, we find a succession of progeny for several generations, and all quite unlike one another, yet without any immediate parental agency. Why is it not an example of spontaneous generation? and why may not new species be produced in this manner? There are two facts prominent on this subject which afford a full answer to such questions. One is, that these generations of larvæ always begin with the spermatozoon and the ovum of parents; the other is, that the series always closes, if allowed to run its natural course, in individuals with sex, exactly identical with those that started it; so that the species always remains entire. The whole process is simply one of the infinitely varied modes which nature employs to preserve and perfect the species. The process never stops with any of the larvæ intervening between the fertile parents at the beginning, and the fertile individuals at the end of the series. Professor Owen supposes--certainly with much plausibility--that some of the original germ-cells, not wanted for the production of the first larva, pass on to form the successive generations, till the series is complete; so that, after all, the case is not an exception to the general law of reproduction by parental agency; and instead of sustaining, it certainly goes against, the notion of spontaneous generation and of transmutation of species; because it shows how far parental influence may reach, and how tenacious nature is of specific distinctions. For the same reasons, the case affords a presumption against other alleged cases of equivocal generation and metamorphoses of species.[18] Appeal has also been made to the vegetable kingdom for examples of the production of organic beings, viz., plants without seeds. Who has not observed, for instance, how the clearing up and burning over of a piece of land will often cause an entirely new tribe of plants to spring up and flourish? Whence came the seeds? We have seen, for instance, (in Richmond, Virginia,) a thick growth of pines upon a spot where from six to ten feet of soil had been removed a few years previously. It is very possible, in some cases of this kind, that the soil, having been produced by aqueous agencies, may contain seeds to a considerable depth, and that their vitality may have been preserved for centuries; for we know that seeds three thousand years old, taken from Egyptian catacombs, have germinated, in favorable circumstances. In most cases of this sort, however, the winds have probably supplied the seed, it may be, long before. We were one day wandering over Mount Holyoke, where a spot recently cleared was covered with the fire-weed, a species of senecio; and as we were musing upon its origin, a strong blast of wind swept over the plants, just ready to throw off their seeds. Sustained by their light egrets, they floated away on the air in numbers sufficient to cover half the mountain with the plant, when it should be cleared and burnt over. Yet their existence would never be suspected till those circumstances should be developed. At least, until we can prove that the soil contains no seeds by the most careful examination, it will be premature to infer the equivocal production of the plants growing upon it. Vegetable physiology furnishes another fact, which seems to me to look still more favorable to this law hypothesis than the preceding, although it has not been noticed, so far as I know, by the advocates of that hypothesis. Speaking of the matter of which certain flowerless plants are composed, Dr. Lindlay says, "It is even uncertain whether this matter will produce its like, and whether it is not a mere representation of the vital principle of vegetation, capable of being called into action, either as a fungus, or algæ, or lichen, according to the particular conditions of heat, light, and moisture, and the medium in which it is placed; producing fungi upon dead or putrid organic beings, lichens upon living vegetables, earth, or stones, and algæ where water is the medium in which it is developed." Again, in speaking of that green slime which often covers the soil, rocks, walls, and glass in damp places, he says, "The slime resembles a layer of albumen, spread with a brush; it exfoliates in drying, and finally becomes visible by the manner in which it colors green or deep brown. One might call it a provisional creation, waiting to be organized, and then assuming different forms according to the nature of the corpuscles which penetrate it, or develop among it. It may further be said to be the origin of two very distinct existences, the one certainly animal, the other purely vegetable."--_Natural System_, pp. 326, 328, 334. Now, admitting all the facts that have been detailed respecting the production of infusoria, entozoa, acari, and cryptogamian plants to be true, although most of them are far from being proved, it seems to me that they do not show us how vitality is produced by mere law, without the special agency of the Deity. Writers on the subject seem to overlook the distinction between organization and life. The first may be present in its highest perfection without the latter, as it is in animals and plants recently killed. The organization is merely a preparation to receive the mysterious principles which we call _life_ and _intellect_. Light, heat, and electricity may be the essential agents in producing the organization, but they do not explain the nature, or account for the presence, of life. That must, so far as we know, come from some other and a higher source. Galvanism may bring gelatinous matter into the form of an insect, or infusoria, or entozoa; but there is no evidence that it can impart life, however exquisite the organization. It may be, and we have reason to suppose it is, the divine will to bestow life whenever a certain organization exists; but this does not show that his special agency is not concerned in it. He may will that the peculiar life of a lichen shall be given to the same elementary matter which, in another situation, he constitutes an alga, or a fungus, or even an animal. But this would not prove that natural law alone could produce life. There is nowhere any evidence that sensibility, contractility, and especially intellect and volition, are the result of any natural operations. In their properties they are so entirely diverse from all known physical effects, that we must impute them to some other than a natural cause. We must call in the power of a supreme intelligent Being. The laws of affinity, light, heat, and electricity, of endosmose and exosmose, may prepare the organization, but their power ends there; and hence true philosophy requires us to impute the phenomena of life and intellect to an extraneous and infinitely higher cause. The case, then, stands thus: In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, we are certain that organization requires the previous existence and agency of a being similarly organized, which we call the parent. But suppose that, in a very few cases, the laws of nature can produce the organization. It still demands another and a higher power--not a blind impulse, but an intelligent cause--to bestow life and intellect. To prove the existence of a natural cause for the arrangement of the atoms into an organic structure, does by no means prove the same for those higher and mysterious principles that make that structure a living, thinking being. Such, however, are the strongest arguments by which the advocates of the law hypothesis sustain their views of the origin of organism, life, and intellect. The next step in their reasoning is to show how animals and plants may be transmuted from one species, or genus, or family, to another; so that the existing vast variety can be traced to a few original germs. They maintain that these developments of the more from the less perfect have proceeded along certain parallel lines; one series of developments, for instance, taking the line of the fishes, another of the reptiles, another of the birds, another of quadrupeds, and so on. To prove these developments or transmutations, they appeal first to the physiological history of the mammalian embryo. In its earliest stages, it can hardly be distinguished, except in size, from the unborn polygastric infusoria. The brain of a human embryo appears at first like that of an invertebrate animal; next like that of a fish; then successively like that of a reptile, a bird, a rodent mammal, a ruminant, and a monkey. So the heart, at an early stage, looks like that of an insect; then it has two chambers, like that of a fish; then it becomes three chambered, like that of a reptile; and finally, four chambered, as in the mammalia. The inference which these theorists would draw from such facts is, that man actually begins his existence as an animalcule, and passes successively through the mould or condition of other animals, before he reaches the highest. And the reasons why he does become a man, rather than an echinoderm, or a fish, or a monkey, is only some slightly modifying circumstance, as, for instance, a longer gestation. It appears to me, however, that the inferences sound philosophy should derive from such facts are, first, that, while there is a seeming resemblance between the human embryo and that of lower animals, there is, in fact, a real and a wide diversity; so that the one infallibly becomes an inferior animal, and the other a man. Could a single example be produced in which a human embryo stopped at and became an insect, or a fish, or a monkey, there might be some plausibility in the supposition. But it is as certain to become a man as the sun is to rise and set; and, therefore, the human condition results from laws as fixed as those that regulate the movements of the heavenly bodies. That is a very superficial philosophy which infers identity of nature from mere external resemblance. The phenomena of hybridity furnish another ground of argument in favor of the transmutation of species, and of course in favor of the law hypothesis; for that hybrids are sometimes the result of the union of different species will not be denied. There is, however, a natural repugnance to union between different species; and in a state of nature this can very rarely be overcome. But domestication changes and almost obliterates many natural instincts, and hence hybridity is far more common among domesticated animals and plants. As a general fact, also, the hybrid offspring is incapable of propagating its own race, without union with one of the original species by which it was produced; and this inability to continue this mixed race has been generally regarded among naturalists as the best characteristic of species. Some, however, attempt to show that some hybrid races do continue from generation to generation to propagate their kind. But in most cases the hybrid race ere long runs out, and there is always a strong tendency to revert to the original stock; and were it not for the influence of man, probably such a thing as hybridity would scarcely ever have been heard of. Nature seems to have established strong barriers around species, so that an identity should be preserved; and even if we admit the possibility of their coalescence in some cases, yet we have evidence that almost always they are preserved distinct from century to century; and the same is true even of the more prominent varieties, for we find not only the same species, but the same varieties of animals and plants, preserved some three thousand years in the Egyptian catacombs, that are now alive in the same country. How idle, then, to suppose that the laws of hybridity will account for such radical and entire transmutations as this hypothesis supposes! To accomplish this, it would need as strong a tendency in nature to a union of species, genera, and families, as now exists against it. But a special appeal has been made on this subject to geology. The history of organic remains, it is thought, corresponds to what we might expect, if the hypothesis of development is true. In the oldest rocks we find chiefly the more simple invertebrate animals, and the vertebrated tribes appear at first in the form of fish, then of reptiles, then of birds, then of mammals, and last of all of man. What better confirmation could we wish than this gradually expanding series? True, all the great classes of organic beings, vegetable and animal, are found nearly at the earliest epoch, and continue through the entire series of rocks. But we have only to suppose a distinct stirps for each of the classes, and that the developments took place along parallel lines, in order to harmonize the facts with the hypothesis. Such a general view of the subject of organic remains seems to give plausibility to the hypothesis of organic development. But the tables are turned when we descend to particulars. The idea of a distinct stirps or germ for each great class of animals and plants seems to me to destroy an essential feature of the hypothesis. It supposes that law produces at once a vertebral animal and a flowering plant; for the first, certainly, we find in the very lowest of the fossiliferous rocks. "The lower silurian," says Sir Roderick Murchison, in 1847, "is no longer to be viewed as an invertebrate period, for the onchus (a genus of fish) has been found in the Llandeilo Flags, and in the lower silurian rocks of Bala." It is also a most important fact, that this fish of the oldest rock was not, as the development scheme would require, of a low organization, but quite high on the scale of fishes. The same is true of all the earliest species of this class. "All our most ancient fossil fishes," says Professor Sedgwick, "belong to a high organic type; and the very oldest species that are well determined fall naturally into an order of fishes which Owen and Müller place, not at the bottom, but at the top of the whole class."--_Discourse on the Studies of the University_, &c. 5th edit. p. lxiv. pref. This point has been fully and ably discussed by Hugh Miller, Esq., in his late work, "The Footprints of the Creator, or the Asterolepis of Stromness." The asterolepis was one of these fishes found in the old red sandstone, sometimes over twenty feet long; yet, says Mr. Miller, "instead of being, as the development hypothesis would require, a fish low in its organization, it seems to have ranged on the level of the highest ichthyic-reptilian families ever called into existence." Another point which Mr. Miller has labored hard to establish, and of which there seems to be no reasonable doubt, is, that in many families of animals, not only were the first species that appeared of high organization, but there was a gradual degradation among those that were created afterwards. Of the fishes generally, he says, that "the progress of the race, as a whole, though it still retains not a few of the higher forms, has been a progress, not of development from the low to the high, but of degradation from the high to the low." Again he says, "We know, as geologists, that the dynasty of the fish was succeeded by that of the reptile; that the dynasty of the reptile was succeeded by that of the mammiferous quadruped; and that the dynasty of the mammiferous quadruped was succeeded by that of man, as man now exists--a creature of a mixed character, and subject, in all conditions, to wide alternations of enjoyment and suffering. We know further,--so far, at least, as we have succeeded in deciphering the record,--that the several dynasties were introduced, not in their lower, but in their higher forms; that, in short, in the imposing programme of creation, it was arranged as a general rule, that in each of the great divisions of the procession the magnates should walk first. We recognize yet further the fact of degradation specially exemplified in the fish and the reptile." "Among these degraded races, that of the footless serpent, which _goeth upon its belly_, has long been noted by the theologian as a race typical, in its condition and nature, of an order of hopelessly degraded beings, borne down to the dust by a clinging curse; and curiously enough, when the first comparative anatomists in the world give _their_ readiest and most prominent instance of degradation among the divisions of the natural world, it is this very order of footless reptiles that they select." Among the invertebrate animals are numerous examples of the deterioration of a race. M. Alcide D'Orbigny, one of the most accomplished of living paleontologists, in his _Cours Elementaire de Paleontologie et de Geologie_, speaks as follows of the cephalopods found in the oldest rocks: "See, then, the result; the cephalopods, the most perfect of the mollusks, which lived in the early period of the world, show a progress of degradation in their generic forms. We insist on this fact relative to the cephalopods, which we shall hereafter compare with the less perfect classes of mollusks, since it must lead to the conclusion that the mollusks, as to their classes, have certainly retrograded from the compound to the simple, or from the more to the less perfect." Such facts as these are absolutely fatal to the hypothesis of development; and geology abounds with them. Indeed, through all her archives, we search in vain for facts that show any thing like a passage of one species, genus, or family, into another. Certain distinct types characterize the different formations up to a certain period, when there is a sudden change; and in the subsequent strata we find animals and plants entirely different from those that have disappeared. The new races are, indeed, often of a higher grade than those that preceded them, but could not have sprung from them. The true theory of animal and vegetable existence on our globe appears to be this: Such natures were placed upon the earth as were adapted to its varying condition. When the earliest group was created, such were the climate, the atmosphere, the waters, and the means of subsistence, that the lower tribes were best adapted to the condition of things. That group occupied the earth till such changes had occurred as to make it unsuited to their natures, and consequently they died out, and new races were brought in; not by mere law, but by divine benevolence, power, and wisdom. These tribes also passed away, when the condition of things was so changed as to be uncongenial to their natures, to give place to a third group, and these again to a fourth, and so on to the present races, which, in their turn, perhaps, are destined to become extinct. From the first, however, the changes which the earth has undergone, as to temperature, soil, and climate, have been an improvement of its condition; so that each successive group of animals and plants could be more and more complicated and perfect; and therefore we find an increase and development of flowering plants and vertebral animals. And yet, from the beginning, all the great classes seem to have existed, so that the changes have been only in the proportion of the more and less perfect at different periods. In short, we have only to suppose that the Creator exactly adapted organic natures to the several geological periods, and we perfectly explain the phenomena of organic remains. But the doctrine of development by law corresponds only in a loose and general way to the facts, and cannot be reconciled to the details. If that hypothesis cannot get a better foothold somewhere else, it will soon find its way into the limbo of things abortive and forgotten. I have now noticed, I believe, the principal sources of evidence in which the law hypothesis rests; and at the best, we find only a possibility, but rarely, if ever, a probability, that such a power exists in nature. I turn now, for a few moments, to the arguments on the other side; that is, against the hypothesis. _And first, it cannot explain the wonderful adaptation of animals and plants to their condition and to one another._ There is not a more striking thing in nature than that adaptation; and geology shows us that it has always been so. Now, if any thing requires the exercise of infinite wisdom and power, it is this feature of creation. But according to this hypothesis, the laws of nature may be so arranged as to create every animal and plant just at the right time, and place them in the right spot, and adjust every thing around them to their nature and wants. In other words, it supposes law capable of doing what only infinite wisdom and power can do. What is this but ascribing infinite perfection to law, and imputing to it effects which only an infinite intelligence could bring about? In other words, it is making a Deity of the laws which he ordains. Theoretically it may be of little importance by what name men call the Deity; but practically to impute natural effects to law, as an independent power, is to put a blind, unintelligent agency in the place of Jehovah. _In the second place, where one fact in nature looks favorable to this hypothesis, a thousand facts teach the contrary._ Take for example the reproduction of animals. Out of every thousand individuals we have certain evidence that nine hundred and ninety-nine are brought into existence by the ordinary modes of generation; that is, they depend upon progenitors. Still, if in the thousandth case the animal's existence was clearly casual, if we could see an elephant, or an ox, start into life without parental agency, that single case would prove the hypothesis. But never do its advocates pretend that any of the larger animals are produced in this way. Nor is it till they get among the smaller and obscure animals, whose habits are very difficult to trace out, that we find any examples where a suspicion even can exist of the communication of vitality irrespective of parental agency. Is not a strong presumption hence produced that further and more scrutinizing observation will show the few excepted cases not to be real exceptions? Does not sound philosophy demand that the proof of the casual production of the thousandth case shall be as decided as that of the normal generation of the nine hundred and ninety-nine? But no one, it seems to me, will pretend that any thing like such certainty exists in a single example throughout all nature. The presumption, then, is really more than a thousand to one against the hypothesis. Take an example from hybridity. While a thousand species retain from age to age their individuality, not more than one coalesces with its neighbor, and loses its identity. And even here, all admit that there is a constant tendency in the hybrid race to revert to the original stock; and there is strong reason to believe that this will sooner or later take place, and that it would speedily occur in every case, were it not for the influence of domestication. Such facts make the presumption very strong, that species are permanent, and any extensive metamorphosis impossible. Hybridity appears to be in a measure unnatural; and the old proverb true in respect to it-- "Si furca naturam expellas, Usque recurret." By the hypothesis under consideration, we ought to expect at least a few examples of the formation of new organs in animals, in the efforts of nature to advance towards a more perfect state. It has usually been said that the time since animals were first described is too short for such development. But we have examples, from the catacombs of Egypt, of animals and plants that lived in that country three thousand years ago; and yet, according to Cuvier,--and who is a better judge?--they are precisely like the living species. Strange that this great length of time should not have produced even one new organ, or the marks of a conatus to produce one. We are, indeed, pointed to the different varieties of the human species, as examples of this progress. But these diversities, also, can be shown to be the same now as at the earliest date of historical records; and where, then, is the evidence that they ever have undergone, or ever will undergo, any change of importance? There may indeed be examples of amalgamation, but under favorable circumstances the original varieties are again developed. _In the third place, geology contradicts this hypothesis._ We have seen that it offers no satisfactory explanation of the gradual increase of the more perfect animals and plants, as we rise higher in the rocks. That fact is most perfectly explained by supposing that divine wisdom and benevolence adapted the new species, which from time to time were created, to the changing and improving condition of the earth. A multitude of species have been dug from the rocks; but not one exhibits evidence of the development of new organs in the manner described by this hypothesis. New species often appear, but they differ as decidedly from the previous ones as species now do; and at the beginning of each formation there is often a very decided advance in the organic beings from those found in the top of the subjacent formation. How can this hypothesis explain such sudden changes, when its essential principle is, that the progress of the development is uniform? Nothing can explain them surely but special creating interposition. Geology also shows us that for a vast period the world existed without inhabitants. Now, what was it that gave the laws of nature power, after so long an operation unproductive of vitality, to produce organic natures? Who can conceive of any inherent force that should thus enable them, all at once, to do what true philosophy shows to have demanded infinite skill? In short, of all the sciences, geology most clearly shows special divine interference to explain its phenomena. It presents us with such stupendous changes, after long periods of repose, such sudden exhibitions of life, springing forth from the bosom of universal death, that nothing but divine, special, miraculous agency can explain the results. And of all the vast domains of nature, it seems to me no part is so barren of facts to sustain this hypothesis as the rocks; nor so full of facts for its refutation. These, however, have been so fully detailed in a previous part of this lecture that they need not be here repeated. _In the fourth place, the prodigious increase of the power and the means of reproduction, which we find among the lower tribes of animals, affords a strong presumption against this hypothesis._ The animals highest on the scale, and most perfect in their organization, have only one mode of reproduction, viz., the viviparous. Descending a little lower, we come to the oviparous and ovoviviparous tribes. Passing to the invertebrate animals, we meet with two other modes of reproduction, the gemmiparous and fissiparous. In the first mode, the animal is propagated by buds, like some plants, as the tiger lily; by the second mode, a spontaneous division of the animal takes place. Now, in some of the lowest of the invertebrate tribes, we find most of the modes of propagation that have been enumerated in operation; so that the same individual in one set of circumstances is oviparous, in another gemmiparous or fissiparous. The consequence is, a power of multiplication inconceivably great. Mr. Owen calculates that the _ascaris lumbricoides_, the most common intestinal worm, is capable of producing sixty-four millions of young; and Ehrenberg asserts that the _hydatina senta_, one of the infusoria, increased in twelve days to sixteen millions, and another species, in four days, to one hundred and seventy billions. Why, now, are these astonishing powers of reproduction given to these minute animals, if it be true that they can also be produced without parentage, and by mere law? This latter mode would supersede the necessity of the former; and therefore, the care taken by Providence to provide the former is a strong presumption that the latter does not exist. _In the fifth place, it is an instructive fact on this subject that, as instruments have been improved, and observations have become more searching, the supposed cases of spontaneous generation have diminished_, until it is not pretended now that it takes place except in a very few tribes, and those the most obscure and difficult to observe of all living things. A hundred years ago, naturalists, and especially other men, might easily have been made to believe that many of the smaller insects had a casual origin. But long since, save in the matter of the acari, the entomological field has been abandoned by the advocates of the law hypothesis, and they have been driven from one tribe after another, till at length some of the obscure hiding-places of the entozoa and infusoria are now the only spots where the light is not too strong for the large-pupiled eyes of this hypothesis. Is not the presumption hence arising very strong that it will need only a little further improvement in instruments and care in observation to carry daylight into these recesses, and demonstrate the parentage and normal development of all organic beings? _Finally. The gross materialism inseparable from this hypothesis is a strong argument against it._ I am not aware that any one, except Oken, perhaps, has ever attempted to show that mind, as a spiritual essence, distinct from matter, has been created by natural laws; in other words, that there is in nature a power to produce mind. All such maintain that intellect is material, or, rather, the result of organization, the mere function of the brain, as are also life and instinct. Generally, also, they contend--and, indeed, consistency seems to require it--that the moral powers depend chiefly upon different developments of the brain; so that a disposition to do wrong results more from organization than from punishable mental obliquity; indeed, the worst of criminals are often, on this account, more to be pitied than blamed, and the physician is of more importance than the moralist and the divine for their reformation. Now, if this system of materialism is true, we ought to embrace it, without any fear of ultimate bad effects. But a philosopher will hesitate long before he adopts a system which thus seems to degrade man from his lofty standing as a spiritual, accountable, and immortal being, and makes his intellectual and moral powers dependent upon the structure of the brain, and, therefore, destined to perish with the material organization, with no hope of future existence, unless God chooses to recreate the man. Nay, if there be no distinct spirit in man, what evidence have we that there is one in Jehovah? A true philosopher, I say, will demand very strong evidence before he adopts any hypothesis that leads a logical mind to such conclusions; and I see not how the one under consideration can terminate in any thing else. Such are the reasons that lead me to reject the hypothesis of creation by law. I have endeavored to treat the subject in a candid and philosophical manner, not charging atheism upon its advocates when they declare themselves Theists and Christians. Neither have I called in the aid of ridicule, as might easily be done, and as, in fact, has been done by almost every opponent of the system who has written upon it. I have endeavored to show that the hypothesis, tried in the balances of sound philosophy, is found wanting; because, in the first place, the facts adduced to sustain it are insufficient; and secondly, because, where one fact seems to favor it, a thousand testify against it. Is not the conclusion a fair one, that the hypothesis has no solid foundation? Is not the evidence against it overwhelming? Yet it has many advocates, and I must think--I hope not uncharitably--that these are the reasons: First, because men do not like the idea of a personal, present, overruling Deity; and secondly, because there is very little profound and thorough knowledge of natural history in the community. It is just such an hypothesis as chimes in with the taste of that part of the world who have a smattering of science, and who do not wish to live without some form of religion, but who still desire to free themselves from the inspection of a holy God, and from the responsibility which his existence and presence would impose. Depend upon it, gentlemen, you will meet these delusions not unfrequently among the cultivated classes of society, where they have already done immense mischief. You will, indeed, find all the eminent comparative anatomists and physiologists, such as Cuvier and Owen; such chemists as Liebig; such zoölogists as Agassiz and Edward Forbes; such botanists as Hooker, Henslow, Lindley, Torrey, and Gray; and such geologists as De la Beche, Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, D'Orbigny, Buckland, and Miller, decided in their rejection of these views. But when even educated men obtain only a smattering of natural science, they find something very fascinating in this hypothesis; and this is just the religion, or, rather, the irreligion, that suits the superficial, selfish, and pleasure-seeking exquisites of fashionable drawing-rooms, theatres, and watering-places. You will find, therefore, the need of thoroughly studying this subject, or you will not be able, as you would wish, to vindicate the cause of true science and true religion. I cannot terminate this discussion without referring to an ingenious analogy, suggested by Hugh Miller, in his "Footprints of the Creator," and drawn from the facts he had stated respecting the degradation of species. No one who has thoroughly studied Bishop Butler's Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion to the Course of Nature will venture to say that Mr. Miller's suggestions are mere fancy. As the ideas are entirely original with him, I give them in his own words. Having spoken of the several dynasties of animals that have succeeded one another on the globe, in a passage which we have already quoted, he says, "Passing on to the revealed record, we learn that the dynasty of man in the mixed state and character is not the final one; but that there is to be yet another creation, or, more properly, re-creation, known theologically as the resurrection, which shall be connected in its physical components, by bonds of mysterious paternity, with the dynasty which now reigns, and be bound to it mentally by the chain of identity, conscious and actual; but which, in all that constitutes superiority, shall be as vastly its superior as the dynasty of responsible man is superior to even the lowest of the preliminary dynasties. We are further taught that, at the commencement of this last of the dynasties, there will be a re-creation of not only elevated, but also of degraded beings--a re-creation of the lost. We are taught yet further that, though the present dynasty be that of a lapsed race, which at their first introduction were placed on higher ground than that on which they now stand, and sank by their own act, it was yet part of the original design, from the beginning of all things, that they should occupy the existing platform; and that redemption is thus no afterthought, rendered necessary by the fall, but, on the contrary, part of a general scheme, for which provision had been made from the beginning; so that the divine Man, through whom the work of restoration has been effected, was in reality, in reference to the purposes of the Eternal, what he is designated in the remarkable text, _the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world_. Slain from the foundation of the world! Could the assertors of the stony science ask for language more express? By piecing the two records together,--that revealed in Scripture and that revealed in the rocks,--records which, however widely geologists may mistake the one, or commentators misunderstand the other, have emanated from the same great Author,--we learn that in slow and solemn majesty has period succeeded period, each in succession, ushering in a higher and yet higher scene of existence; that fish, reptiles, mammiferous quadrupeds, have reigned in turn; that responsible man, 'made in the image of God,' and with dominion over all creatures, ultimately entered into a world ripened for his reception; but, further, that this passing scene, in which he forms the prominent figure, is not the final one in the long series, but merely the last of the _preliminary_ scenes; and that that period to which the by-gone ages, incalculable in amount, with all their well-proportioned gradations of being, form the imposing vestibule, shall have perfection for its occupant and eternity for its duration. I know not how it may appear to others, but for my own part I cannot avoid thinking that there would be a lack of proportion in the series of being, were the period of perfect and glorified humanity abruptly connected, without the introduction of an intermediate creation of _responsible_ imperfection with that of the dying, irresponsible brute. That scene of things in which God became man, and suffered, _seems_, as it no doubt _is_, a necessary link in the chain." A single concluding thought forces itself upon my mind. It is this: How ingenious and persevering men are in deluding themselves on the subject of religion! Since the time of Christ, what countless devices have they framed to escape from the lofty truths and spiritual piety of his gospel! Nor are they satisfied with this; for the gospel has shed so much light upon the religion of nature, that even this is more than men like; and, therefore, every science is ransacked for facts to neutralize all religion. Men's consciences do not permit them to throw off all the forms of religion; and, therefore, they are satisfied if they can only tear out its heart. They like to preserve and to embalm its external covering, as the naturalist does the skin of an animal for his cabinet. And as the latter fills his specimen with straw and arsenic, and fits glass eyes into it, so do men fill up their religious specimen with error and vain speculation, and fit into its head the eyes of false philosophy, and then claim for it intellectual worship. It is the business of educated men to show that such caricatures are neither science nor religion. May you, gentlemen, have your full share in this most useful and noble work.[19] LECTURE X. SPECIAL AND MIRACULOUS PROVIDENCE. Next in importance to the question whether the Deity exists, is the inquiry whether he exerts any direct agency in upholding the universe and in controlling its events. This point has been discussed in all ages in which there have been philosophers or theologians, and the current of opinion has fallen principally into three channels. In the first place, some have removed the Deity entirely from his works into a fancied extra-mundane sphere, where in solitude he might enjoy the blessedness of his own infinite nature, without the trouble of directing the events of the universe, or watching over the works of his hand. Forgetful of the great principle, that the intellectual powers produce happiness only when called into exercise, they have fancied that the care of the universe must be a burden to its Creator, and that it would derogate from his dignity. It is supposed, therefore, that the world has been given up to the rule of fate or chance. In the second place, a more numerous class have maintained that the Supreme Being, after creating the world, committed its preservation and government either to a subordinate agent, or to the laws which he impressed upon matter and mind, which possess an inherent power to execute themselves; so that, in fact, God exercises no direct and immediate agency in natural operations. The learned and usually profound Cudworth adopted the hypothesis of a _plastic nature_, as he terms it, by which he means a vital, spiritual, and unintelligent, yet subordinate agent, by whose agency the world is governed and its operations carried on. At first view, this hypothesis would seem to lead inevitably to atheism; but such was not the intention of its author. Still, it is obviously so clumsy, that had it not been the product of a great mind, it never would have received so much notice, or called forth such mighty efforts for its refutation, as have been bestowed upon it. Two varieties of opinion exist among those who believe the world governed and sustained by natural laws, established by the Deity. Some maintain that these laws are general, not particular; not extending to minor events, but only the more important; not providing for species, but only for families. Hence they suppose that these general cases may interfere with one another, and produce results apparently repugnant to the intention of their Author. Others, shocked at the absurdity of such conclusions, believe the laws of nature to extend to every event, and never to interfere with one another, and always to act in accordance with the divine will and appointment, but without any direct agency exerted by the Deity. They suppose these laws--in other words, secondary agencies--to have the power of producing all natural phenomena. In the third place, there are others who believe that a law can have no efficiency without the presence and agency of the lawgiver. They, therefore, suppose every event in the natural world to be the result of the direct and immediate agency of God. What we call laws are only the uniform mode of his operation. They agree with the advocates of the last-named theory in supposing the laws of nature to extend to every event, and to be in accordance with the ordination of the Deity; but they differ in maintaining that the presence and direct efficiency of a lawgiver are essential to the operation of natural laws. I should then define a Special Providence to be an event brought about apparently by natural laws, yet, in fact, the result of a special agency, on the part of the Deity, to meet a particular exigency, either by an original arrangement of natural laws, or by a modification of second causes, out of sight at the time. The doctrine, which supposes the Deity to exercise a superintendence and direction over all the affairs of the universe, in any of the modes that have been mentioned, whether by a subordinate agent, or by laws, general or particular, with inherent self-executing power, or by the direct efficiency of the divine will, is called the doctrine of divine providence. If the superintendence extend only to general laws, it is called a general providence. If those laws reach every possible case, it is called a particular or universal providence. By a _Miraculous Providence_ is meant a superintendence over the world that interferes, when desirable, with the regular operations of nature, and brings about events, either in opposition to natural laws, or by giving them a less or greater power than usual. In either of these cases, the events cannot be explained by natural laws; they are above, or contrary to, nature, and, therefore, are called miracles, or prodigies. There may be, and, as I believe, there is, another class of occurrences, intermediate between miracles and events strictly natural. These take place in perfect accordance with the natural laws within human view, and appear to us to be perfectly accounted for by those laws; and yet, in some way or other, we learn that they required some special exercise of divine power, out of human view, for their production. Thus, according to the views of most Christian denominations, conversion takes place in the human heart in perfect accordance with the laws of mind, and could be philosophically explained by them; yet revelation assures that it _is not of blood,_ [natural descent,] _nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God_. Divine power, therefore, is essential to the change, although we see only the operation of natural causes. So a storm may appear to us to be perfectly accounted for by natural laws; and yet divine efficiency might have produced a change in some of those laws out of our sight, and thus meet a particular exigency. Such events I call _special providence_; and I maintain that we cannot tell how frequently they may occur. It is chiefly the bearings of science, especially of geology, upon the doctrine of miraculous and special providence, which I wish to consider. But it may form a useful introduction, to state the evidence, which goes to show that the agency of the Deity, in the ordinary operations of nature, is a direct efficiency; or, in other words, that the laws of nature are only the modes in which divine agency operates. In the first place, if we suppose ever so many secondary causes to be concerned in natural events, the efficiency must, after all, be referred to God. What is a secondary cause? or, in other words, what is a law of nature considered as a cause? It is simply a uniform mode of operation. We find that heavy bodies uniformly tend towards the earth's centre, and that we call the law of gravity; but if those bodies sometimes ascended, and sometimes moved horizontally, under the same circumstances, we could not infer the existence of such a law. Now, there must be some cause for uniformity of operation in nature. There must be some foreign power, which gives the uniformity, since it is certain that the law itself can possess no efficiency. We may, indeed, find one law dependent upon a second law, and this upon a third, and so on. But the inquiry still arises, What gives the efficiency to this second and third law? and still the answer must be, Something out of itself. So that if we run back on the chain of causes ever so far, we must still resort to the power of the Deity to find any efficiency that will produce the final result. In most cases, we can trace back only one or two links on the chain. For instance, we account for the falling of all bodies by the law of gravity. But philosophers have wearied themselves in vain to find any cause for gravity, except in the will of God. The failure of every other hypothesis, though invented by such men as Newton and Le Sage, has been signal. Sound philosophy, then, requires us to infer that gravity owes its efficiency to the direct exertion of divine power. And so in all cases, when we can no longer discover second causes for any phenomenon, why should we imagine their existence, rather than refer it to the agency of God? For go back as far as we may, and discover a thousand intervening causes, the efficiency resides alone in God. We have no evidence that even infinite power can communicate that efficiency to the laws of nature, so that they can act without the presence and agency of God. The common idea, which endows those laws with independent power, will not bear examination. In the second place, if natural operations do not depend upon the exercise of divine power, no other efficient cause can be assigned for their production. We have seen that in the laws of nature, independently of the Deity, there is no efficiency; and I know not where else we can resort for any agency to carry forward the operations of nature, except to the same infinite Being. The fate and chance of the ancients, the plastic nature of Cudworth, the delegated nature of Lamarck, are indeed names invented by men to designate a certain imaginary efficiency residing somewhere, independent of the Deity, by which the phenomena of nature have been supposed to be produced. But the moment they are described, they are found to be mere imaginary agencies, meaning nothing more than the course of nature, or the laws of nature, which we have seen possess no independent efficiency. To a divine agency, therefore, we must resort, or be left without any adequate cause for the complicated and wonderful processes of nature. In the third place, this view of the subject is strongly confirmed by the Christian Scriptures. How universal is the divine agency represented in the well-known passage--_for of him, and through him, and to him, are all things_. Equally vivid is Paul's statement on Mars Hill--_In him we live, and move, and have our being._ How graphic a description is the 147th Psalm of God's agency in the natural world! Not only is all good ascribed to God, but evil also. By the mouth of Isaiah he says, _I form light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things._ In short, no event in the material or spiritual world is by the sacred writers ascribed to chance, or to nature, or the laws of nature, as it is among men; but to the direct efficiency of God. Nor is there any difference in this respect between miracles and common events. The one class is represented as originating in the agency of God, just as much as the other. Finally. It will hardly be thought strange, in view of the preceding considerations, that a large proportion of the most acute and philosophical minds in modern times have preferred this view of divine providence to any other. Sir Isaac Newton declares that the various parts of the world, organic and inorganic, "can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful, ever-living Agent, who, being in all places, is more able by his will to move the bodies within his boundless, uniform _sensorium_, thereby to form and reform the parts of the universe, than we are by our will to move the parts of our own bodies." Says Dr. Clarke, the friend and disciple of Newton, "All things which we commonly say are the effects of the natural powers of matter, and laws of motion, are, indeed, if we will speak strictly and properly, the effects of God's action upon matter continually, and at every moment, either immediately by himself, or mediately by some created, intelligent being. Consequently there is no such thing as the course of nature, or the power of nature, independent of the effects produced by the will of God." In speaking of the principle of vegetable life, Sir James Edward Smith, the eminent botanist, says, "I humbly conceive that, if the human understanding can in any case flatter itself with obtaining, in the natural world, a glimpse of the _immediate agency_ of the Deity, it is in the contemplation of this _vital principle_, which seems independent of material organization, and an impulse, of his own divine energy."--_Introduction to Botany_, p. 26, (Boston edition.) "We would no way be understood," says Sir John Herschel, "to deny the constant exercise of this [God's] direct power in maintaining the system of nature, or the ultimate emanation of every energy, which material agents exert, from his immediate will, acting in conformity with his own laws."--_Discourse on Nat. Philosophy._ "A law," says Professor Whewell, "supposes an agent and a power; for it is the mode according to which the agent proceeds, the order according to which the power acts. Without the presence of such an agent, of such a power, conscious of the relations on which the law depends, producing the effects which the law prescribes, the law can have no efficiency, no existence. Hence we infer that the intelligence by which the law is ordained, the power by which it is put in action, must be present at all times and in all places where the effects of the law occur; that thus the knowledge and the agency of the divine Being pervades every portion of the universe, producing all action and passion, all permanence and change. The laws of nature are the laws which He, in his wisdom, prescribes to his own acts; his universal presence is the necessary condition of any course of events; his universal agency the only origin of any efficient force."--_Bridgewater Treatise_, p. 270. "The student in natural philosophy," observes the Bishop of London, "will find rest from all those perplexities, which are occasioned by the obscurity of causation, in the proposition which, although it was discredited by the patronage of Malebranche and the Cartesians, has been adopted by Clarke and Dugald Stewart, and which is by far the most simple and sublime account of the matter--that all events which are continually taking place in the different parts of the material universe are the _immediate_ effects of the divine agency."--_Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise_, p. 273. "Jonathan Edwards," says M'Cosh in his Method of the Divine Government, "somewhere illustrates the manner in which God upholds the universe, by the way in which an image is upheld in a mirror. That image is maintained by a continual flow of rays of light, each succeeding pencil of which does not differ from that by which the image was first produced. He conceives that the universe is, in every part of it, supported in a similar way by a continual succession of acts of the divine will, and these not differing from that which at first caused the world to spring into existence. Now, it may be safely said of this theory that it cannot be disproved. Several considerations may be urged in support of it." Which of the views respecting divine providence that have been stated has the best practical tendency, seems hardly to admit of doubt. If we believe that God has submitted the direction and government of this world to a subordinate agent, a plastic nature; or if we suppose he has impressed matter and mind with certain general laws, which have the power of executing themselves without his agency, and especially if in their operation they do sometimes actually clash with one another, or even if those laws extend to every movement of matter and mind,--still, if they do not require divine efficiency, men cannot but feel that God is removed from his works, and that the laws of nature, and not his agency, are their security. But if they believe that every movement of matter or mind requires a direct exercise of divine power or efficiency, just as much as if every event was a miracle, it cannot but bring God near to us, and make us realize his presence. If we obtain a timepiece from London or Paris, which contains all the springs and wheels requisite to keep it in operation, by occasionally winding it up, how little do we think of the artist who constructed it, except, perhaps, occasionally to admire his ingenuity! But if it had been necessary for that artist to accompany the chronometer, and actually to put forth the strength of his own arm every moment to keep it in motion, how much more should we think of him and realize his presence! The same effect, in a greater or less degree, will attend the belief that God must be not only virtually, but substantially, present every where, and be constantly exercising his power to keep in operation the vast machine of the universe. It cannot but deeply impress the heart, and exert a most salutary influence upon the affections, to realize that every event around us is brought about by the immediate agency of the supreme Being. But notwithstanding the salutary influence of this view of Providence upon our moral feelings, and though philosophy pronounces it decidedly the most reasonable, still it meets with strong opposition. I need not stop to notice the objections, that it makes God the author of evil as well as good, and that it represents man as a mere machine in the hands of the Deity, and therefore takes away human responsibility. I say I need not stop to answer such objections, because they lie equally strong against any system which makes God the original author of the universe. But a more plausible objection is, that it makes all events miraculous. This objection is based on the supposition that every event which takes place through the direct and immediate agency of God is a miracle. But is this the true meaning of a miracle? Is the term ever applied to any but extraordinary events? It may or it may not imply a contravention of the laws of nature. But it does always imply something which the laws of nature cannot produce, and which, of course, they cannot explain. It is always the result of some new force coming in to the aid of the laws of nature, or in the place of them, or even sometimes, perhaps, in opposition to them; as when the _sun stood still upon Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon_. Hence an event may take place through the direct and immediate agency of God, and yet not be a miracle. If it be neither above, nor independent of, nor in opposition to the laws of nature, then it forms a part of the ordinary providence of God; it is a part of the usual, the fixed and uniform course of nature, and can be explained by known and unalterable laws. The nature of the event is not affected at all by the question whether it is produced by the direct efficiency of God, or by a power inherent in those laws. We, who believe that the direct efficiency of God is necessary to the operation, and even to the existence, of the laws of nature, are just as firm believers in the constancy of those laws as he who supposes them possessed of inherent powers. When that constancy is interrupted in any way, we call it a miracle. Hence it appears that our views of the nature of a miracle are the same as his, viz., an event which takes place out of the ordinary course of nature; and, therefore, our system is no more liable to the objection that all events are made miracles than his system. The way is now prepared for inquiring what geology teaches respecting the ordinary and extraordinary providence of God over this world. The evidences of ordinary providence, which are common to geology and other sources of proof, I shall pass by; both because they are familiar to all, and because I have, in a former lecture, shown the existence and operation of the present laws of nature in all past ages. But there is one feature of the past condition of the world taught by geology to which I would call your attention, as exhibiting a more impressive view of the wisdom and skill of ordinary providence than almost any other department of nature presents. When the heavenly bodies are once put under the control of the two great forces that guide them, viz., the centrifugal and centripetal, we see no reason why they may not move on forever in their accustomed paths. But the two great agents of geological change, fire and water, have an aspect of great irregularity and violence, and are apparently less under the control of mathematical laws. In the mighty intensity of their action in early times, we can hardly see how there could have been much of security or permanence in the state of the globe, without the constant restraining energy of Jehovah. We feel as if the earth's crust must have been constantly liable to be torn in pieces by volcanic fires, or drenched by sweeping deluges. And yet the various economies of life on the globe, that have preceded the present, have all been seasons of profound repose and uniformity. The truth is, these mighty agencies have been just as much under the divine control as those which regulate the heavenly bodies; and I doubt not but the laws that regulate their action are as fixed and mathematical as those which guide the sun, moon, and planets. Still, it must have required infinite wisdom and power so to arrange the agencies of nature that the desolating action of fire and water should take place only at those epochs when every thing was in readiness for the ruin of an old economy and the introduction of a new one. Geological agencies differ from astronomical in this--that the former must be allowed an irregular action within certain limits; whereas the latter act with unvarying uniformity in all circumstances. If the former had not some room for irregular action, they would not act at all; but if allowed too much liberty, they will destroy what they were intended to preserve. And God does restrain, and always has restrained them, just at the point where desolation would be the result of their more powerful operation. I do not, indeed, contend that it requires more power or wisdom to bind those mighty agencies within proper limits than to control the heavenly bodies. But to our limited faculties it certainly seems a more difficult work; and, therefore, the geological history of the globe gives us a more impressive idea of the ordinary providence of God than we see in the calm and uniform movements of nature around us. _In the second place, geology furnishes us with some very striking examples of miraculous providence._ In disproving the eternity of the organic world, in a former lecture, I adduced and illustrated these examples so fully, that I shall do little more in this place than give a recapitulation of that argument. If we suppose the earth originally to have been merely a diffused mass of vapor, like comets, or nebulæ, I can conceive how, by the operation of such natural laws as now exist, it might have been condensed into a solid globe; into a melted state, indeed, from the amount of heat extricated in the condensation. Those same laws might subsequently form over the molten mass a solid crust, which, at length, might be ridged and furrowed by the action of internal heat, so as to form the basis of continents and the beds of oceans. In due time, the vapors might condense, so as to fill those basins with water; and, by the mutual and alternate action of the waters above and the heat beneath, the rocks might be comminuted, so as to form the basis of soils. So far might the arrangements of the world have proceeded by natural laws; in other words, by the ordinary providence of God. But at this point we must bring in an extraordinary agency of the Deity, or the world would have remained, in the expressive language of revelation, _without form and void_; that is, invisible and unfurnished. You have, indeed, the framework of a world, but the most difficult and complicated part of the work, the creation of plants and animals, remains yet to be performed. Here, then, is the precise point where you must call in the miraculous agency of the Deity, or the earth would forever remain an uninhabited waste. For if it does not require miraculous agency to bring into existence animals and plants, I know not what can require it, or prove its operation. I can almost as easily conceive how matter might spring from nothing fortuitously, certainly I can as easily conceive of its eternity, as that organism and life can result from the ordinary laws of nature. It may be, however, that I shall here be met by the statement, that some distinguished geologists maintain the probable existence of organized beings on the globe at an indefinitely earlier period than that in which their remains first appear in the rocks. They contend that the extreme heat which has melted the older rocks has obliterated all traces of organic existence below a certain line. Now, in order to meet this difficulty, it is not necessary to show this opinion to be erroneous. We have only to advance another step in our general argument, which brings us upon ground admitted to be good by the geologists above alluded to. They all of them believe that many new animals and plants have from time to time appeared on the globe; that, in fact, there have been several almost entire changes in its inhabitants. Most of them suppose these new races to have been introduced in large numbers at particular epochs, though some prefer the theory which supposes the new species to have been introduced one by one, as the old ones became extinct. But even this supposition does not essentially affect my argument; because they all allow that these successive species were really new, and could not have been the result of any metamorphosis of the old species. And it is the fact that new organic beings have, from time to time, been created, that is alone essential to my argument. Whether they were created by groups or singly, is an interesting geological question; but, in either case, miraculous power must have been put forth as really and as efficiently to call into existence a single new species of animalcula, or sea-weed, as to introduce an entirely new race. The successive economies of organic life that have existed on the earth, and passed from it, do most unequivocally demonstrate the extraordinary or miraculous providence of God. But we might abandon even this strong ground of our argument, and still geology would afford us a most unequivocal example of the creative agency of the Deity. That science shows, beyond all question, that man, and most of his contemporary races of animals and plants, have not always occupied this globe; and, indeed, that they were not placed upon it till nearly every form buried in the rocks had passed away. And since those races which now inhabit the globe have among them a larger proportion of highly organized and more complicated species than have ever before been contemporaries,--especially since man is among them, confessedly the most perfect in organization and in intellect of all the beings that ever occupied this planet,--we can here point to the highest exercise of creative power ever exhibited in this lower world, as a certain memento of God's extraordinary or miraculous providence. Indeed, who, that has any adequate idea of the wonders of man's intellectual, moral, and immortal nature, and of the strange extremes that meet and harmonize in his physical and intellectual constitution, will believe that any loftier miracle has ever been exhibited on this globe than his creation? But I have already dwelt so long upon this whole argument in a former lecture, that I will add no more in this place. If the facts which I have stated do not prove the miraculous agency of the Deity in past ages, I know not how it can be proved. But assuming this position to be established, and several inferences of importance will follow. _In the first place, this subject removes all philosophical presumption against a special revelation from heaven._ If we can prove that the Deity has often so interfered with the course of nature as to introduce new species, nay, whole races of animals and plants upon the globe,--if, in a comparatively recent period, he has created a moral and immortal being, endowed with all the powers of a free and an accountable agent,--it would surely be no more wonderful if he should communicate to that being his will by a written revelation. Indeed, the benevolence of the Deity, as we learn it from nature, would create a presumption that such a revelation would be given, if it appear, as we know it does, that no sufficient knowledge is inherent in his nature to guide him in the path of duty; since such a revelation would be no greater miracle than to people the world, originally destitute of life, and then to repeople it again and again, with so vast a variety of organic natures. Philosophy has sometimes been disinclined to admit the claims of revelation, because it implies a supernatural agency of the Deity; and, until recently, revelation seemed to be a solitary example of special interference on the part of Jehovah. But geology adds other examples, long anterior to revelation--examples registered, like the laws of Sinai, on tables of stone. And the admission of the geological evidence of special interference with the regular sequence of nature's operations ought to predispose the mind for listening to the appropriate proofs of a moral communication to ignorant and erring man. _In the second place, the subject shows us how groundless is the famous objection to the miracles recorded in Scripture, founded on the position that they are contrary to experience._ "It is," says Mr. Hume, "a maxim worthy of our attention, that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." Hence he asserts, that "the evidence of testimony, when applied to a miracle, carries falsehood on the very face of it, and is more properly a subject of derision than of argument," and that "whoever believes the Christian religion is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience." At the time when Mr. Hume wrote, and with his great skill in weaving together metaphysical subtilties, such an argument might deceive superficial minds; for then a miracle was supposed to be contrary to all experience. But geology has disclosed many new chapters in the world's history, and shown the existence of miracles earlier than chronological dates. Even Mr. Hume would hardly deny that the creation of whole series of animals and plants was miraculous; and yet, in proof of that creation, we need not depend upon testimony; for we can read it with our own eyes upon the solid rocks. Such proof appeals directly to our common sense; nor can any ingenious quibble, concerning the nature of human testimony, weaken its influence in producing conviction. And if God has wrought stupendous miracles of creation in order to people the world, who does not see that it is still more probable he would perform other miracles when they were needed to substantiate a revelation of his will to those moral and accountable beings, who needed its special teachings to make them acquainted with their God, their duty, and their destiny? _Finally. The subject removes all presumption against the exercise of a special and miraculous providence in the divine government of the world._ In all ages of the world, philosophers, and even many theologians, have been strenuous opposers of special and miraculous providence. If they have admitted, as most of the latter class have done, that some miracles were performed in ancient times, they have strenuously maintained that the doctrine of special providence in these days is absurd, and that God cannot, without a miracle, bestow any special favors upon the virtuous in answer to their prayers, or inflict any special punishments upon the wicked; and that it is fanaticism to expect any other retributions than such as the ordinary and unmodified course of nature brings along with it. The unvarying constancy of nature, in consequence of being governed by fixed laws, is the grand argument which they adduce in opposition to any supposed special providence. _Since the fathers fell asleep_, say they, _all things continue as they were from the beginning._ God has subjected the world to the government of laws, and he will not interfere with, counteract, set aside, or give a supernatural force to those laws, to meet particular exigencies. For the adjustment of all apparent inequalities of good and evil, suffering and enjoyment here, we must wait for the disclosure of eternity, when strict retributive Justice will hold her even scales. When natural evils come upon us, therefore, it is idle to expect their removal, except so far as they may be mitigated or overcome by natural means; and hence it is useless to pray for their removal, or to expect God will deliver us from them in any other way. When the heavens over us become brass, and the earth under our feet iron, and the rain of our land is powder and dust, and want, and famine, as the consequence, stalk forth among the inhabitants, of what use to pray to God for rain, since to give it would require a miracle, and the age of miracles has passed? When the pestilence is scouring through the land, and our neighbors and nearest friends are within its grasp, and we may next become its victims,--nay, when we, too, are on the borders of the grave,--why should we expect relief by prayer, since sickness is the result of natural causes, and God will not interpose to save us from the effects of natural evils, because that would be contrary to a fixed rule of his government? When dangers cluster around the good man in the discharge of trying duties, it would be enthusiasm in him to expect any special protection against his enemies, though he pray ever so fervently, and trust in divine deliverance with ever so much confidence. He must look to another world for his reward, if called to suffer here. Nor has the daringly wicked man any reason to fear that God will punish his violations of the divine law by any unusual display of his power; not in any way, indeed, but by the evils which naturally flow from a wicked life. In short, it will be useless to pray for any blessing that requires the least interference with natural laws, or for the removal of any evil which depends upon those laws. And since our minds are controlled as much by laws as the functions of our bodies, we are not to expect any blessings in our souls, which require the least infringement of intellectual laws. In fine, the effect of prayer is limited almost entirely to its influence upon our own hearts, in preparing them to receive with a proper spirit natural blessings, and to bear aright natural evils; to stimulate us to use with more diligence the means of avoiding or removing the latter, and securing the former. Not a few philosophers of distinction, and some theologians, have adopted these views. Even Dr. Thomas Brown uses the following language: "It is quite evident that even Omnipotence, which cannot do what is contradictory, cannot combine both advantages--the advantage of regular order in the sequences of nature, and the advantages of a uniform adaptation of the particular circumstances of the individual. We may take our choice, but we cannot think of a combination of both; and if, as is very obvious, the greater advantage be that of uniformity of operation, we must not complain of the evils to which that very uniformity which we cannot fail to prefer--if the option had been allowed us--has been the very circumstance that gave rise."--_Lecture 94._ "Science," says George Combe, "has banished from the minds of profound thinkers belief in the exercise by the Deity, in our day, of special acts of supernatural power, as a means of influencing human affairs; and it has presented a systematic order of nature, which man may study, comprehend, and follow, as a guide to his practical conduct. Many educated laymen, and also a number of the clergy, have declined to recognize fasts, humiliations, and prayers, as means adapted, according to their views, to avert the recurrence of the evil, [the potato blight.] Indeed, these observances, inasmuch as they mislead the public mind with respect to its causes, are regarded by such persons as positive evils." "The most irreligious of all religious notions, as it seems to us," says the North American Review, "is a belief in special providences; for if the doctrine has any weight at all, it is gained at the expense of a general providence. To assume to detect God as nearer to us on some occasions is to put him farther off from us on other occasions. To have him in special incidents is to forget him in the common tenor of events. The doctrine of special providences evidently has no other foundation than this, that men _think they can detect_ God's purpose and presence more signally in some incidents than in others; so that the doctrine, after all, is only a compliment to man's power of detection, instead of an acknowledgment of God's special presence." Such views and reasonings seem, upon a superficial examination, to be very plausible. But when we look into the Bible, we cannot but see that the main drift of it is directly opposed to such notions. That book does encourage man to pray to God for the removal of evils of every kind; evils as much dependent upon natural laws as the daily course of the sun through the heavens. It does teach us to look to God in every trying situation for deliverance, if it is best for us to be delivered. It does represent the wicked man as in danger of special punishment. It exhibits a multitude of examples, in which God has thus delivered those who trusted in him, and punished those who violated his laws. In every age, too, the most devotedly pious men have testified, that they have found deliverance and support in circumstances in which mere natural laws could afford them no relief. Moreover, when men are brought into great peril or suffering of any kind, they involuntarily cry to God for help. When the vessel founders in the fury of the storm, the hardened sailor employs that breath in ardent prayer which just before had been poured out in blasphemies. And when the widowed mother hears the tempest howling around her dwelling at night, she cannot but pray for the protection of her child upon the treacherous sea. When violent disease racks the frame, and we feel ourselves rapidly sinking into the grave, it is scarcely in human nature to omit crying to God with a feeling that he can save us. In short, it is a dictate of nature to call upon God in times of trouble. Our reasoning about the constancy of nature, which appears to us while in safety so clearly to show prayer for the removal of natural evils to be useless, loses its power, and the feelings of the heart triumph. It now becomes, therefore, an important practical question, which of these views of the providence of God is correct. Is it those which our reasoning derives from the constancy of nature, or those inspired by piety and the Bible? I have already said, that the subject of this lecture removes all presumption against the latter view; and I now proceed to show how God can exercise a special providence over the world, so as to meet the case of every individual, whether for blessing or punishment, and that, too, without miracles. Whoever believes that geology discloses stupendous miracles of creation, at various epochs, will not doubt that all presumption against miraculous agency at any other time is thus removed. For we are thus shown that the law of miracles forms a part of the divine plan in the government of the world. But this does not prove the same to be the fact in respect to a law of special providence. It is indeed true that geology gives us no distinct examples of special providence, in the sense which we have attached to that term in the present lecture. But it does furnish a multitude of instances in which changes of physical condition in the earth were met by most wisely adapted changes of organic nature. And even though these changes were the result of miraculous agency, they disclose this principle of the divine government, viz., that peculiarities of condition are to be met by special arrangements, so that every exigency shall be provided for in the manner infinite wisdom sees to be best. Now, this principle constitutes the essence of special providence; and, therefore, geology, in showing its past operation in the world's early organic history, affords a presumption that the same unchanging God may still employ it in his natural and moral government. But does not this principle of special adaptation to individual exigencies demand miraculous agency in all cases? Can the wants of individuals be met in any other way than by miracles, or by the ordinary and settled laws of nature? I maintain that there are other modes in which this can be done; in which, in fact, every case requiring special interference can be met exactly and fully. _This can be done, in the first place, by a divine influence exerted upon the human mind, unperceived by the individual._ If it were perceived, it would constitute a miracle. But can we doubt that the Author of mind should be able to influence it directly and indirectly, unperceived by the man so acted upon? Even man can do this to his fellow; and shall such a power be denied to God? Now, in many cases,--I do not say all,--it only needs that the minds of others should be inclined to do so and so towards a man, in order to place him in circumstances most unlike those that would have surrounded him without such an influence. Even the very elements, being to some extent under human control, can thus be made subservient, or adverse, to an individual; and, indeed, by a change in the feelings and conduct of others towards us, by an unseen influence upon their minds, our whole outward condition may be changed. In this way, therefore, can God, in many instances, confer blessings on the virtuous, or execute punishment upon the wicked, or give special answers to special prayer; and yet there shall be no miracle about it, nor even the slightest violation of a law of matter or of mind. The result may seem to us only the natural effect of those laws, and yet the divine influence may have modified the effect to any extent. _In the second place, God can so modify the second causes of events out of our sight, as to change wholly, or in part, the final result, and yet not disturb the usual order of nature within sight, so that there shall be no miracle._ A miracle requires that the usual order of nature, as man sees it, be interrupted, or some force superadded to her agency. But if such change take place out of our sight, it might not disturb that order within sight; and, therefore, to us it would be no miracle. The mode in which this can be done depends upon the fact that in nature we often find several causes, essential to produce an effect, connected together, as it were, in a chain; so that each link depends upon that which precedes it. Thus the power of vision depends upon the optic nerve, in the bottom of the eye. But this would be useless, were not the coats and humors of the eye of a certain consistence and curvature, in order to bring the rays together to form an image on the retina. Again, these coats and humors depend upon light, and light depends for its transmission, probably, upon that exceedingly elastic medium called the _luminiferous ether_. This is as far back as we can trace the series of causes concerned in producing vision. And yet this elastic ether may depend upon something else, and this cause of the movement of the ether upon another cause; and we know not how long the chain may be before we reach the great First Cause. Now, if any one of this series of second causes be modified, the effect will be a modification of the final result. This supposed modification may take place in that part of the chain of causes within our view, or in that part concealed from us. If it took place within sight, it would constitute a miracle; because the regular sequence of cause and effect would be broken off, or an unnatural power be imparted to the cause producing the ultimate effect. If the modification took place in that part of the chain of second causes out of our sight, the final effect would be no miracle; because it would be brought about by natural laws, and these would perfectly explain it. Nevertheless, this ultimate effect would be different from what it would be if God had not touched and modified that link of causation which lies out of our sight, back among the secret agencies of his will. And I see not but in this way he might modify the ultimate effect as much as he pleased, and still preserve the unvarying constancy of nature. For in all these cases we should see only the links of the chain of causes nearest to us; and, provided they operated in their usual order, how could we know that any change had taken place in the region beyond our knowledge? If the whole chain of causation were open to our inspection, then, indeed, would the transaction be an obvious miracle; but now we see nothing but the unchanging operation of natural laws. To illustrate this principle, let us imagine a few examples. Suppose the land visited by drought, and its pious inhabitants assemble to pray for rain. We know very well that the causes on which a storm of rain depend are very complicated. How easy for the divine Being, in answer to those prayers, to modify one or more of these secret agencies of meteorological change, that are concealed from our sight, so as to bring together the vapors over the land and condense them into rain! And yet that storm shall have nothing about it unusual, and it results from the same laws which we have before seen to be in operation. Still, it may have been the result of a special agency exerted by Jehovah in answer to prayer, yet in such a manner that no known law of nature is infringed upon, or even rendered more powerful in its action. Equally intricate and complicated are the causes of disease, and especially of those pestilences that sometimes march over a whole continent, with the angel of death in their train; and alike easy is it for God, in answer to earnest prayer, to avert their progress, or to cripple their power, or turn them aside from a particular district, without the least interference with the visible connection of cause and effect. The beloved father of a family lies upon a bed of sickness, and disease is fast gaining upon the powers of life. His numerous and desolate family, in spite of the cold suggestion that it will be of no avail, will earnestly beseech the Being in whose hands is the power of disease, to arrest the fatal malady. And could not their Father in heaven, in the way I have pointed out, give them their request, and yet their parent's recovery be the natural result of careful nursing and medical skill? imposing, however, upon that family as great an obligation as if a manifest miracle had been wrought to save him. The widow's only son, in spite of her counsels and entreaties, becomes a vagabond upon the seas, and, at length, one of the crew of the battle ship. The perils of the deep and of vicious companions are enough to make that widow a daily and most earnest suppliant at the mercy-seat of her heavenly Father, for his protection and salvation. But, at length, war breaks out, and the perils of battle render his fate more doubtful. Still, faith in God buoys up her heart, and she cannot abandon the hope of yet seeing her son returned, reformed, and becoming a useful man. And at length, rescued from the storm and shipwreck, and the carnage of battle, and the yet more dangerous snares of sin, that youth returns, a renovated man, and cheers that mother's setting sun by an eminently useful life. Now, all this may have happened simply by the operation of natural laws. But it may also have been the result of divine interference in answer to prayer; and hard will you find it to convince that rejoicing mother that the hand of God's extraordinary providence was not in it. The devoted missionary, at the promptings of a voice within, quits a land of safety and peace, and finds himself in the midst of dangers and sufferings of almost every name; _in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in weariness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness_. The furnace of persecution is heated, and he performs his duties with his life constantly in his hand. But he uses no weapon save faith and prayer. He feels that "he is immortal till his work is done." And, in fact, he outlives all his dangers, and, in venerable old age, surrounded by the fruits of his labor,--a reformed and affectionate people,--he passes quietly into the abodes of the blessed. Here, again, why should we hesitate to refer his protection and deliverance to the special interposition of his heavenly Father, in the manner I have pointed out? On the other hand, the history of dreadfully wicked men is full of terrible examples of calamity and suffering, as the consequence of their sins. True, the evil came upon them apparently by the operation of natural laws; but shall we hence infer that God in no case has so modified these laws, by an agency among the hidden causes of events, as to make the result certain? He certainly could do this; and to say that he never has done it, is to remove one of the most powerful restraints that operate upon the wicked. In several examples recorded in the Bible, both of deliverance for the virtuous and of punishment for the wicked, so many natural agencies are concerned, that we are left in doubt whether the events are to be regarded as miraculous or not. Let the deluge, the destruction of Sodom, and the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea, serve as examples. In the first, we find the flood imputed to a forty days' rain and the overflowing of the ocean; and its reduction to a wind. In the destruction of the cities of the plain, the phenomena described correspond very well with the effects of volcanic agency; and we find accordingly that the region where those cities stood shows marks of that agency. In the passage of the Red Sea, the removal of the waters, to allow the Israelites to pass, is imputed to a strong east wind all night. Nevertheless, the pillar of a cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night were a manifest and standing miracle in this transaction. Now, may it not be that, in all these cases, so far as natural agencies were concerned, they were made to conspire with the miraculous in the manner which I have described, viz., by such a modification of some of the remote causes by which they were brought into action, as exactly to answer the divine purpose in the catastrophe of the deluge, of Sodom, and in the passage of the Red Sea? _A third mode by which the purposes of special providence can be brought about without miracles is by such an adjustment of the direct and lateral influences on which events depend, that the time and manner of their occurrence shall exactly meet every exigency._ Although it expresses a truth to represent the second causes of events as constituting the links of a chain, it is not the whole truth. For, in fact, those causes are connected together in the form of a network, or, more exactly still, by a sphere filled with interlocked meshes; or, to speak more mathematically, the forces by which events are produced are both direct and indirect. It would be easy to calculate the effect of a single direct force; but if, in its progress, it meets with a multitude of oblique impulses, striking it at every possible angle, what human mathematics can make out the final resultant? Yet, in fact, such is the history of almost every event. The lateral influences, which meet and modify the direct force, are so numerous, and unexpected often, that men are amazed at the result, sometimes as unexpected as a miracle. "When an individual," says Isaac Taylor, "receives an answer to his prayer, the interposition may be made, not in the line which he himself is describing, but in one of those which are to meet him on his path; and at a point, therefore, where, even though the visible constancy of nature should be violated, yet, as being at the time beyond the sphere of his observation, it is a violation not visible to him." "And herein is especially manifested the perfection of divine wisdom, that the most surprising conjunctions of events are brought about by the simplest means, and in a manner that is perfectly in harmony with the ordinary course of human affairs. This is, in fact, the great miracle of providence, that no miracles are needed to accomplish its purposes."--_Nat. History of Enthusiasm_, p. 128. This complication of causes does not merely give variety to the works and operations of nature, but it enables God to produce effects which could never have resulted from each law acting singly; nor is there a scarcely conceivable limit to these modifications. Indeed, in this way can Providence accomplish all his beneficent purposes, and meet every individual case, just as infinite wisdom would have it met. "By this agency," says M'Cosh, "God can at one time increase, and at another time lessen, or completely nullify, the spontaneous efforts of the fixed properties of matter. Now he can make the most powerful agents in nature--such as wind, fire, and disease--coincide and cooperate to produce effects of such a tremendous magnitude as none of them separately could accomplish; and again, he can arrest their influence by counteracting agencies, or, rather, by making them counteract each other. He can, for instance, by a concurrence of natural laws, bring a person, who is in the enjoyment of health at present, to the very borders of death, an hour or an instant hence; and he can, by a like means, suddenly restore the same or another individual to health, after he has been on the very verge of the grave. By the confluence of two or more streams, he can bring agencies of tremendous potency to bear upon the production of a given effect, such as a war, a pestilence, or a revolution; and, on the other hand, by drawing aside the stream into another channel, he can arrest, at any given instant, the awful effects that would otherwise follow from these agencies, and save an individual, a family, or a nation, from the evils which seem ready to burst upon them. "Guided by these principles and guarded by sound sense, the inquiring mind will discover many and wonderful designed connections between the various events of divine providence. Read in the spirit of faith, striking coincidences will every where manifest themselves. What singular unions of two streams at the proper place to help on the exertions of the great and good! What curious intersections of cords to catch the wicked as in a net, when they are prowling as wild beasts! By strange but most apposite correspondences, human strength, when set against the will of God, is made to waste away under God's indignation burning against it, as, in heathen story, Meleager wasted away as the stick burned which his mother held in the fire."--_Method of the Divine Government_, pp. 176, 203. In many cases, the lateral streams of influence that flow in and bring unexpected relief to the pious man, and unexpected punishment to the wicked, or a marked answer to prayer, seem to the individuals little short of miraculous. Yet, after all, they can see no violation of the natural order of cause and effect. But the wonder is, how the modifying influence should come in just at the right moment. It may, indeed, have received a commission to do this very thing from the immediate impulse of Jehovah; yet, being unperceived by us, it is no miracle. Or the whole plan may have been so arranged at the beginning that its development will meet every case of special providence exactly. Which of these views may be most accordant with truth, may admit of discussion. Yet we think that all the modes that have been pointed out, by which miraculous and special providences are brought about, may be referred to one general proposition, which we now proceed to state. _In the fourth place, the plan of the universe in the divine mind, at the beginning, must have embraced every case of miracles and of special providence._ From the nature of the divine attributes we infer with certainty that every event occurring in the universe must have entered into the original plan of creation in the mind of God. Surely no one will deny that he must have foreseen the operation of every law which he established, and, consequently, every event which it would produce. But there must be some ground for foreknowledge to rest upon; otherwise it is conjecture, not knowledge. And what could that basis be but the divine plan? Equally clear is it that, whatever plans existed in the mind of God, when he brought the universe into existence, must always have been there. For to suppose that there was a point of duration when the plan was first conceived, would imply new knowledge in one confessedly omniscient; and that destroys the idea of omniscience. Similar reasoning from the nature of the divine attributes leads us to the conclusion that God always acts according to law. That he does this in the ordinary operations of nature, all admit. But even when he introduces a miracle,--perhaps by a counteraction of ordinary laws,--he may still act by some rule; so that, were precisely the same circumstances to occur again, the same miracle would be repeated. Beforehand, we could not say whether God would conduct the affairs of the universe by one unvarying system of natural laws, or occasionally interfere with the regular sequence of cause and effect by miracle. But though the latter course should be adopted, as we have reason to think it is, even the special interference must be according to law; so that, in fact, there is a law of miracles as well as of common events. Again, if God sometimes alters one or more of the links out of sight, in a chain of second causes, in order to meet a providential exigency, or if he modifies for the same purpose some of the oblique influences by which events are affected, all this must be done by rule; that is, by law. Indeed, to suppose him ever to act without law, is to represent him as less wise than men, who, if judicious, are always governed by settled principles, which produce the same conduct in the same circumstances. From this reasoning we may safely infer two things: first, that the laws regulating miracles and special providences are as fixed and certain as those of ordinary events; and secondly, that those laws must have formed a part of the plan of creation originally existing in the divine mind. And hence, thirdly, we must admit that every case of miracle and special providence must have entered into that plan. When he formed it, he foresaw every possible event that would result from its operation to the end of the world. He saw distinctly the condition of every individual of the human family, from the beginning to the close of life; all his dangers and trials, his sufferings and his sins; and he knew just when and where every prayer would be offered up. Nor can it be any more doubtful that, with infinite wisdom to guide him, and infinite power to execute his will, God could so have arranged and constituted the laws of nature, as to meet exactly every case that should ever occur, just in the way he would wish to have it met. Those laws might have been so framed and disposed that, after running on in one unvarying course for ages, a new one might come in, or the old ones be modified, and at once produce effects quite different, and then the first laws resume again their usual course. And the new or modified law might be made to produce its extraordinary or peculiar effects just at the moment when some miracle or special providence would be needed. Thus what would be to us a special or miraculous interposition of divine power, might be the foreseen and foreordained result of God's original purpose. And if we can conceive how such an effect could be produced once, we cannot doubt that infinite wisdom and power could in like manner meet every possible case in which what we call special and miraculous providence would be needed. With our limited powers, we are obliged, after constructing a complicated machine, to put it into operation before we can judge certainly of its effects; and then, if our wishes are not met, we must alter the parts, or in some other way meet the new cases that occur; and hence we find it difficult to conceive how it can be otherwise with God. But he saw the operation of the vast machine of the universe just as clearly at the beginning as at any subsequent period. He, therefore, can do at the beginning what we can do only after experience, viz., adapt the parts to every variety of circumstances. If I mistake not, we are indebted to Bishop Butler for the germ of these views; but Professor Babbage has illustrated them by reference to an extraordinary machine of his own invention, called "The Calculating Engine." It is adapted to perform the most extensive and complicated numerical calculations, of course with absolute certainty, because its parts are arranged by certain laws. And he finds that precisely such effects, on a small scale, can be produced by this machine, as have been imputed above to the divine agency in creation. It is moved by a weight and a wheel which turns at a short interval around its axis, and prints a series of natural numbers,--1, 2, 3, 4, 5, &c.,--each exceeding its antecedent by unity. "Now, reader, let me ask you," says Professor Babbage, "how long you will have counted before you are firmly convinced that the engine, supposing its adjustments to remain unaltered, will continue, whilst its motion is maintained, to produce the same series of natural numbers. Some minds, perhaps, are so constituted that, after passing the first hundred terms, they will be satisfied that they are acquainted with the law. After seeing five hundred terms, few will doubt; and after the fifty thousandth term, the propensity to believe the succeeding term will be fifty thousand and one, will be almost irresistible. That term will be fifty thousand and one; the same regular succession will continue; the five millionth and the fifty millionth term will appear in their expected order, and one unbroken chain of numbers will pass before you, from one up to one hundred millions. True to the vast induction which has thus been made, the next succeeding term will be one hundred millions and one; but after that, the next number presented by the rim of the wheel, instead of being one hundred millions and two, is one hundred millions ten thousand and two. "The law which seemed to govern this series fails at the one hundred million and second term. That term is larger than we expected by ten thousand. The next term is larger than was anticipated by thirty thousand. If we still continue to observe the numbers presented by the wheel, we shall find that for a hundred, or even for a thousand terms, they continue to follow the new law relating to the triangular numbers; but after watching them for twenty-seven hundred and sixty-one terms, we find that this law fails in the case of the twenty-seven hundred and sixty-second term. If we continue to observe, another law then comes into action. This will continue through fourteen hundred and thirty terms, when a new law is again introduced, which extends over about nine hundred and fifty terms; and this, too, like all its predecessors, fails, and gives place to other laws, which appear at different intervals. It is also possible so to arrange the engine, that at any periods, however remote, the first law shall be interrupted for one or more times, and be superseded by any other laws, after which the original law shall be again produced, and no other deviation shall ever take place. "Now, it must be remarked that the law that each number presented by the engine is greater by unity than the preceding number, which law the observer had deduced from an induction of a hundred million of instances, was not the true law that regulated its action; and that the occurrence of the number one hundred million ten thousand and two at the one hundred million and second term was as necessary a consequence of the original adjustment as was the regular succession of any one of the intermediate numbers to its immediate antecedent. The same remark applies to the next apparent deviation from the new law, which was founded on an induction of two thousand seven hundred and sixty-one terms; and to all the succeeding laws, with this limitation only, that whilst their consecutive introduction at various definite intervals is a necessary consequence of the mechanical structure of the engine, our knowledge of analysis does not yet enable us to predict the periods at which the more distant laws will be introduced."--_Ninth Bridgewater Treatise._ The application of these statements to the doctrine of special as well as of miraculous providence is very obvious. If human ingenuity can construct a machine which shall exhibit the introduction of new laws, after the old ones had been established by an induction of a hundred million of examples, and these new ones be succeeded by others, how much easier for the infinite God to construct the vast and more complicated machine of the universe, so that new laws, or modifications of the old ones, shall be introduced at various periods of its history, to meet every exigency! How easy for him so to adjust this machine at the beginning, that the new laws and new modes of action should be introduced, precisely at those points where a special providence would be desirable, to reward the virtuous and to punish the wicked, and then the old law again assume its dominion! And how easily, in this way, could the case of every individual be met, from the beginning to the end of the world! I mean, how easy would this work be to infinite wisdom and power! But if all events, miraculous as well as common, may depend upon unbending law, how does such a view differ from the one I am now opposing, viz., that the constancy of nature's laws precludes the idea of any special interference on the part of God, in human affairs? The main point of difference, I reply, is, that the advocates of the latter view will not admit any such thing at the present day as special interference, on the part of the Deity, with nature. They admit only uniform and ordinary laws, which they suppose are never interrupted. This I deny; and endeavor to show, not only that the contrary may be a fact, but that God purposed it originally, and determined the laws by which it might be accomplished. The fact that he did this beforehand, even from eternity, no more precludes his agency, than the special interference of a father to help his child through a dangerous pass is disproved, because he foresaw the danger and provided the means of defence even before the child was born. If the father was actually with the child, as he went through the danger, and held out to him the requisite help, what difference could it make, though the father purposed to do so a long time previously? And if we admit that God's efficiency alone gives power to the ordinary laws of nature, we shall admit that in every special law he is as really present with his energy, as a father who should lead his child by the hand through the dangerous path. So that, practically at least, the difference between these two views of the subject is very great; the one removing God far away, and putting law in his place; and the other bringing him near, and making him the actual and constant agent in every event. The one view is practical atheism, although often adopted by religious men; the other is practical Christianity. By the principles of physical science, then, the scriptural doctrines of miraculous and special providence are proved to be in accordance with philosophy. The miracles of revelation are shown to have been preceded by the miracles of geology; and are, therefore, in conformity with the principles of the divine government. The modifications which God can make in the causes of events out of human view, or the changes which he can produce by lateral influences upon the final result,--all, it may be, in conformity to an eternal plan, reaching the minutest of human affairs,--enable him to execute every purpose of special providence so as to satisfy every exigency. The sceptic may say, that we cannot prove by facts that God does so modify and arrange the laws and operations of nature as to adapt his dealings to the case of individuals. But, on the other hand, neither can he show that God does not thus interfere with nature's uniformity. It is enough to show that he can do it without a miracle, in order to establish the doctrine of special providence. How often he exercises this power, we cannot know; but we may be sure as often as is desirable. A most important application of these principles may be made to the subject of prayer. For in answering prayer, God is, in fact, merely executing some of the purposes of his special providence; and it is gratifying to the pious heart to see how he can give an answer to the humblest petitioner. No matter though all the laws of nature seem in the way of an answer,--God can so modify their action as to conform them to the case of every petitioner. War, famine, and pestilence may all be upon us, yet humble prayer may turn them all aside, and every other physical evil; and that without a miracle, if best for us and for the universe. Tell a man that the only effect of prayer is its reflex influence upon himself, in leading him to conform more strictly to nature's laws, and you send a paralysis and a death chill into all his moral sensibilities. Indeed, he cannot pray; but tell him that God will be influenced, as is any earthly friend, by his supplications, and his heart beats full and strong, the current of life goes bounding through his whole system, the glow of health mantles his cheek, and all his senses are roused into intense and delightful action. The sad influence of a perversion and misunderstanding of the doctrine of nature's constancy upon the youthful mind is well exhibited by a late able writer. "Early trained to it under the domestic roof," says M'Cosh, "the person regularly engaged in prayer during childhood and opening manhood. But as he became introduced to general society, and began to feel his independence of the guardians of his youth, he was tempted to look upon the father's commands, in this respect, as proceeding from sourness and sternness, and the mother's advice as originating in an amiable weakness and timidity. He is now careless in the performance of acts which in time past had been punctually attended to. How short, how hurried, how cold are the prayers which he now utters! Then there come to be mornings on which he is snatched away to some very important or enticing work without engaging in his customary devotions. There are evenings, too, following days of mad excitement or sinful pleasure, in which he feels utterly indisposed to go into the presence of God, and to be left alone with him. He feels that there is an utter incongruity between the ball-room, or the theatre, which he has just left, and the throne of grace, to which he should now go. What can he say to God, when he would pray to him? Confess his sins? No; he does not at present feel the act to be sinful. Thank God for giving him access to such follies? He has his doubts whether God approves of all that has been done. But he may ask God's blessing? No; he is scarcely disposed to acknowledge that he needs a blessing, or he doubts whether the blessing would be given. The practical conclusion to which he comes is, that it may be as consistent in him to betake himself to sleep without offering to God what he feels would only be a mockery. What is he to do the following morning? It is a critical time. Confess his error? No; cherishing as he does the recollection of the gay scene in which he mingled, and with the taste and relish of it yet upon his palate, he is not prepared to acknowledge his folly. Morning and evening now go and return, and bring new gifts from God, and new manifestations of his goodness; but no acknowledgment of the divine bounty on the part of him who is yet ever receiving it. No doubt there are times when he is prompted to prayer by powerful feelings, called up by outward trials or inward convictions; but ever when the storms of human life would drive him to the shore, there is a tide beating him back. His course continues to be a very vacillating one--now seeming to approach to God, and anon driven farther from him, till he obtains from books, or from lectures, a smattering of half-understood science. He now learns that all things are governed by laws, regular and fixed, over which the breath of prayer can exert as little influence, as they move on in their allotted course, as the passing breeze of the earth over the sun in his circuit. False philosophy has now come to the aid of guilty feelings, and hardens their cold waters into an icicle lying at his very heart, cooling all his ardor, and damping all his enthusiasm. He looks back, at times, no doubt, to the simple faith of his childhood with a sigh; but it is as to a pleasing dream, or illusion, from which he has been awakened, and into which, the spell being broken, he can never again fall."--_Method of the Divine Government_, p. 224. O, what a change would this world exhibit, were the whole Christian church to exercise full faith in God's ability to answer prayer without a miracle, only to the extent pointed out by philosophy, to say nothing of the Bible; for, in fact, a large proportion of that church, confounded by the specious argument derived from nature's constancy, have virtually yielded this most important principle to the demands of scepticism. When natural evils, such as war, famine, drought, and pestilence, came upon our forefathers, they, taking the Bible for their guide, observed days of fasting and prayer for their removal. But how seldom do their descendants follow their example! And yet even physical science testifies that the fathers acted in conformity to the true principles of philosophy. Would that the Christian church would consent to be led back to the Bible doctrine on this subject by philosophy. That same philosophy, also, should lead the good man, when struggling through difficulties, to exercise unshaken confidence in the divine protection, even though all nature's laws seem arrayed against him; for at the unseen touch of God's efficiency, the iron bars of law shall melt away like wax, and deliverance be given in the midst of appalling dangers, if best for the man and for the universe; and if not best, he will not desire it. Science, too, bids the wicked man not to fancy that the constancy of nature will shield him from the infliction of merited and special punishment, should God choose to make bare the rod of his justice; for the blow may come as certainly in the course of nature as against it. Let modern Christian theology, then, receive meekly the rebuke administered on this important point by physical science. For how lame and halting a defence of the Scripture doctrine of special providence and prayer has that theology been able to make! How few of our systems of theology contain a manful vindication of truths so important! Let not the Christian divine, therefore, refuse the aid thus offered by physical science. Let him no longer indulge groundless jealousies against true philosophy, as if adverse to religion. Especially let him not spurn the aid of geology, which alone, of all the sciences, discloses stupendous miracles of creation in early times, and thus removes all presumption against the miracles of Christianity and special providence at any time. It is, indeed, an instructive fact, that a science which has been thought so full of danger to Christianity should thus early be found vindicating some of the most peculiar and long-contested doctrines of revelation. And yet it ought not to surprise us, for geology is as really the work of God as revelation. And though, when ill understood and perverted, she may have seemed recreant to her celestial origin, yet the more fully her proportions are developed, and her features brought into daylight, the more clearly do we recognize her alliance to every thing pure and noble in the universe. "And surely," says a late writer, "it must be gratifying thus to see a science, formerly classed, and not perhaps unjustly, amongst the most pernicious to faith, once more become her handmaid; to see her now, after so many years of wandering from theory to theory, or rather from vision to vision, return once more to the home where she was born, and to the altar at which she made her first simple offerings; no longer, as she first went forth, a wilful, dreamy, empty-handed child, but with a matronly dignity, and a priest-like step, and a bosom full of well-earned gifts, to pile upon its sacred hearth. For it was religion which gave geology birth, and to the sanctuary she hath once more returned."--_Wiseman's Lectures on Science and Revealed Religion_, p. 192, Am. ed. LECTURE XI. THE FUTURE CONDITION AND DESTINY OF THE EARTH. Man has a stronger desire to penetrate the future than the past. And yet the details of most future events are wisely concealed from him. There are two, and only two, sources of evidence from which he can obtain some glimpses of what will be hereafter. The one is revelation, the other analogy. So far as God has thought proper to reveal the future, our information is precise and certain. But it does not embrace a multitude of events about which we have strong curiosity. By analogy is meant a prediction of the future from the past. On the principle that nature is constant, we infer what will be from what has been. If, however, new laws are hereafter to come into operation, or if present agencies will then operate very differently from what they now do, it is obvious that analogy can be only an imperfect guide. Still, in respect to many important events, its conclusions are infallible. Judging, for instance, from the past, we are absolutely certain that no living thing will escape the great law of dissolution, which, thus far, apart from the few exceptions made known to us by revelation, has been universal. The future changes in the condition of the earth, as they are taught us by revelation and analogy, or, rather, by geology, will form the subject of my present lecture. And my first object will be, to ascertain, if possible, precisely what the Bible teaches us concerning these changes. We find in the Scriptures several descriptions, more or less definite, of the changes which this globe will hereafter undergo. Some of them, however, are couched in the figurative language of prophecy, and others are incidental allusions; and concerning the precise meaning of such descriptions, there will, of course, be a diversity of opinion. There are, however, some passages on this subject as literal and as precise in their meaning as language can be. Now, it is one of the rules for interpreting language, that, where a work contains several accounts of the same event, the description which is most simple and literal ought to be made the index for obtaining the meaning of those passages which are figurative, or, on any account, obscure. I shall, therefore, select the passage of Scripture which all acknowledge to be most plain and definite, respecting the future destruction of the earth, and the new heavens and earth that are to succeed, and first inquire into its precise meaning; after which, we shall be better prepared to ascertain what modification of that meaning other passages of sacred writ demand. It needs but a cursory examination of the Bible to convince any one that the description in the Second Epistle of Peter of the future destruction and renovation of the earth and heavens, is eminently the passage first to be examined, because the fullest and clearest on this subject. It is the apostle's object directly and literally to describe these great changes, apart from all embellishments of language. _There shall come_, says he, _in the last days, scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water; whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire, against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness, but is long suffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth, also, and the works that are therein, shall be burned up. Seeing, then, that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness? Looking for, and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless, we, according to his promise, look for new heavens, and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness._ It would require too much time, and, moreover, is not necessary to the object I have in view, to enter into minute verbal criticism upon this passage. I will only remark that the phrase translated _the earth and the works that are therein_, might with equal propriety be rendered "the earth and the works that are _thereon_;" and yet the difference of meaning between the two modes of expression is of no great importance. Again, by the term _heavens_, in this passage, we are evidently to understand the atmosphere, or region immediately surrounding the earth; as in the first chapter of Genesis, where it is said that _God called the firmament heavens_; the plural form being used in the Hebrew, though not in the English translation. What, now, by a fair exegesis, is taught in this passage concerning the destruction and renovation of the world? The following train of remark may conduct us to the true answer to this inquiry:-- In the first place, this passage is to be understood literally. It would seem as if it could hardly be necessary to present any formal proof of this position to any person of common sense, who had read the passage. But the fact is, that men of no mean reputation as commentators have maintained that the whole of it is only a vivid figurative prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem. Others suppose the new heavens and new earth here described to exist before the conflagration of the world. But these new heavens and earth are represented as the residence of the righteous, after the burning and melting of the earth, which, according to other parts of Scripture, is to take place at the end of the world, or at the general judgment. How strange that, in order to sustain a favorite theory, able men should thus invert the obvious order of these great events, so clearly described in the Bible! Still more absurd is it to attempt to fasten a figurative character upon this most simple statement of inspiration. It is, indeed, true, that the prophets have sometimes set forth great political and moral changes, the downfall of empires, or of distinguished men, by the destruction of the heavens and the earth, and the growing pale and darkening of the sun and moon. But in all these cases the figurative character of the description is most obvious; while in the passage from Peter its literal character is equally obvious. Take, for example, this statement--_By the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth, standing out of the water and in the water; whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire, against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men._ I believe no one has ever doubted that the destruction of the world by water, here described, refers to Noah's deluge. Now, how absurd to admit that this is a literal description of that event, and then to maintain the remainder of the sentence, which declares the future destruction of that same world by fire, to be figurative in the highest degree! For if this destruction mean only the destruction of Jerusalem, or any other great political or moral revolution, the language is one of the boldest figures which can be framed. Who, that knows any thing of the laws of language, does not see the supreme absurdity of thus coupling in the same sentence the most simple and certain literality with the strongest of all figures? What mark is given us, by which we may know where the boundary is between the literal and the metaphorical sense? From what part of the Bible, or from what uninspired author, can a parallel example be adduced? What but the strongest necessity, the most decided _exigentia loci_, would justify such an anomalous interpretation of any author? Nay, I do not believe any necessity could justify it. It would be more reasonable to infer that the passage had no meaning, or an absurd one. But surely no such necessity exists in the present case. Understood literally, the passage teaches only what is often expressed, though less fully, in many other parts of Scripture; and even though some of these other passages should be involved in a degree of obscurity,--and I am not disposed to deny that some obscurity rests upon one or two of them,--it would be no good reason for transforming so plain a description into a highly-wrought figurative representation; especially when by no ingenuity can we thus alter more than one part of the sentence. I conclude, therefore, that, if any part of the Bible is literal, we are thus to consider this chapter of Peter. In the second place, this passage does not teach that the earth will be annihilated. The prevailing opinion in this country, probably, has been, and still is, that the destruction of the world described by Peter will amount to annihilation--that the matter of the globe will cease to be. But in all ages there have been many who believe that the destruction will be only the ruin of the present economy of the world, but not its utter extinction. And surely Peter's description does not imply annihilation of the matter of the globe. He makes fire the agent of the destruction, and, in order to ascertain the extent of the ruin that will follow, we have only to inquire what effect combustion will have upon matter. The common opinion is, that intense combustion actually destroys or annihilates matter, because it is thereby dissipated. But the chemist knows that not one particle of matter has ever been thus deprived of existence; that fire only changes the form of matter, but never annihilates it. When solid matter is changed into gas, as in most cases of combustion, it seems to be annihilated, because it disappears; but it has only assumed a new form, and exists as really as before. Since, therefore, biblical and scientific truth must agree, we may be sure that the apostle never meant to teach that the matter of the globe would cease to be, through the action of fire upon it; nor is there any thing in his language that implies such a result, but most obviously the reverse. If these things be so, then, in the third place, we may infer that Peter did not mean to teach that the matter of the globe would be in the least diminished by the final conflagration. I doubt not the sufficiency of divine power partially or wholly to annihilate the material universe. But heat, however intense, has no tendency to do this; it only gives matter a new form. And heat is the only agency which the apostle represents as employed. In short, we have no evidence, either from science or revelation, that the minutest atom of matter has ever been destroyed since the original creation; nor have we any more evidence that any of it ever will be reduced to the nothingness from which it sprang. The prevalent ideas upon this subject all result from erroneous notions of the effect of intense heat. In the fourth place, the passage under consideration teaches us that whatever upon or within the earth is capable of combustion will undergo that change, and that the entire globe will be melted. The language of Peter has always seemed to me extremely interesting. He says that _the heavens_ [or atmosphere] _will pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth, also, and the works that are therein, shall be burned up; looking for, and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat_. This language approaches nearer to an anticipation of the scientific discoveries of modern times than any other part of Scripture. And yet, at the time it was written, it would not have enabled any one to understand the chemistry of the great changes which it describes. But, now that their chemistry is understood, we perceive that the language is adapted to it, in a manner which no uninspired writer would have done. The atmosphere is represented as passing away with a great noise--an effect which the chemist would predict by the union of its oxygen with the hydrogen and other gases liberated by the intense heat. Yet what uninspired writer of the first century would have imagined such a result? Again, when we consider the notions which then prevailed, and which are still widely diffused, why should the apostle add to the simple statement that the earth would be burnt up, the declaration that its elements would be melted? For the impression was, that the combustion would entirely destroy the matter of the globe. But the chemist finds that the greater part of the earth has already been oxidized, or burnt, and on this matter the only effect of the heat, unless intense enough to dissipate it, would be to melt it. If, therefore, the apostle had said only that the world would be burnt up, the sceptical chemist would have inferred that he had made a mistake through ignorance of chemistry. But he cannot now draw such an inference; for the apostle's language clearly implies that only the combustible matter of the globe will be burnt, while the elements, or first principles of things, will be melted; so that the final result will be an entire liquid, fiery globe. Such a wonderful adaptation of his description to modern science could not surely have resulted from human sagacity, but must be the fruit of divine inspiration. And this adaptation is the more wonderful when we find it running through the whole Bible wherever the sacred writers come in contact with scientific subjects. In this respect, the Bible differs from every other system of religion professedly from heaven. Whenever other systems have treated of the works of nature, they have sanctioned some error, and thus put into the hands of modern science the means of detecting the imposture. The Vedas of India adopt the absurd notions of an ignorant and polytheistic age respecting astronomy, and the Koran adopts as infallible truth the absurdities of the Ptolemaic system. But hitherto the Bible has never been proved to come into collision with any scientific discovery, although many of its books were written in the rudest and most ignorant ages. It does not, indeed, anticipate scientific discovery. But the remarkable adaptation of its language to such discoveries, when they are made, seems to me a more striking mark of its divine origin than if it had contained a revelation of the whole system of modern science. In the fifth place, the passage under consideration teaches that this earth will be renovated by the final conflagration, and become the abode of the righteous. After describing the day of God, _wherein the heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat_, Peter adds, _Nevertheless, we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness._ Now, the apostle does not here, in so many words, declare that the new heavens and earth will be the present world and its atmosphere, purified and renovated by fire. But it is certainly a natural inference that such was his meaning. For if he intended some other remote and quite different place, why should he call it _earth_, and, especially, why should he surround it with an atmosphere? The natural and most obvious meaning of the passage surely is, that the future residence of the righteous will be this present terraqueous globe, after its entire organic and combustible matter shall have been destroyed, and its whole mass reduced by heat to a liquid state, and then a new economy reared up on its surface, not adapted to sinful, but to sinless beings, and, therefore, quite different from its present condition--probably more perfect, but still the same earth and surrounding heavens. There are, indeed, some difficulties in the way of such a meaning to this passage, and objections to a material heaven; and these I shall notice in the proper place. But I have given what seems to me the natural and obvious meaning of the passage. Such, as I conceive, are the fair inferences from the apostle's description of the end of the world. Let us now inquire whether any other passages of Scripture require us to modify this meaning. The idea of a future destruction of the world by fire is recognized in various places, both in the Old and New Testaments. Christ speaks more than once of heaven and earth as passing away. Paul speaks of Christ as descending, at the end of the world, in flaming fire. And the Psalmist describes the destruction of the heavens and the earth as a renovation. _They shall perish,_ says he, _but thou_ [God] _shalt endure; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment, and as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed._ In Revelation, after the apostle had given a vivid description of the final judgment and its retributions, he says, _And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea._ He then proceeds to give a minute and glowing description of what he calls the New Jerusalem, coming down from God, out of heaven. It is scarcely possible to understand the whole of this description as literally true. We must rather regard it as a figurative representation of the heavenly state. And hence the first verse, which speaks of the new heavens and the new earth, in almost the same language which Peter uses, may be also figurative, indicating merely a more exalted condition than the present world. Hence, I would not use this passage to sustain the interpretation given of the literal description by Peter. And yet it is by no means improbable that the figurative language of John may have for its basis the same truths which are taught by Peter. Nor ought we to infer, because a figure is built upon that basis in the apocalyptic vision, that the simple statements of Peter are metaphorical. In the passage quoted from Peter, it is said, _Nevertheless, we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness._ Most writers have supposed the apostle to refer either to the promise made to Abraham, that his seed should inherit the land, or to a prophecy in Isaiah, which says, _Behold, I create new heavens, and a new earth, and the former shall not be remembered, or come into mind. But be you glad and rejoice forever in that which I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people; and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying. There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days; for the child shall die a hundred years old; but the sinner, being a hundred years old, shall be accursed. And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the works of their hands. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock; and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord._ Now, it seems highly probable that the new heavens and earth, here described, represent a state of things on the present earth before the day of judgment, and not a heavenly and immortal state; for sin and death are spoken of as existing in it; both which, we are assured, will be excluded from heaven. Hence able biblical writers refer this prophecy to the millennial state, or the period when there will be a general prevalence of Christianity. In this they are probably correct. But some of these writers, as Low and Whitby, proceed a step farther, and infer that Peter's description of the new heavens and new earth belong also to the millennial period; first, because they presume that the apostle referred to this promise in Isaiah; and secondly, because he uses the same terms, namely, "new heavens and new earth." But are these grounds sufficient to justify so important a conclusion? How common it is to find the same words and phrases in the Bible applied by different writers to different subjects, especially by the prophets! Even if we can suppose Peter to place the new heavens and the new earth before the judgment, in despite of his plain declaration to the contrary, yet there are few who will doubt that the new heavens and earth described in revelation are subsequent to the judgment day, so vividly described in the verses immediately preceding. And as to the promise referred to by Peter, if he really describes the heavenly state, surely it may be found in a multitude of places; wherever, indeed, immortal life and blessedness are offered to faith and obedience. Isaiah, therefore, may be giving a figurative description of a glorious state of the church in this world, under the terms "new heavens and new earth," emblematical of those real new heavens and new earth beyond the grave, described by Peter. And hence, it seems to me, the language of the prophet should not be allowed to set aside, or modify, the plain meaning of the apostle. I shall quote only one other passage of the Bible on this subject. I refer to that difficult text in Romans, which represents the whole creation as groaning and travailing together in pain until now; and that it will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. I have stated in a former lecture, that Tholuck, the distinguished German theologian, considers this a description of the present bound and fettered condition of all nature, and that the deliverance refers to the future renovation of the earth. Such an exposition chimes in perfectly with the views on this subject which have long and extensively prevailed in Germany. And it certainly does give a consistent meaning to a passage which has been to commentators a perfect labyrinth of difficulties. If this be not its meaning, then I may safely say that its meaning has not yet been found out. In view, then, of all the important passages of Scripture concerning the future destruction and renovation of the earth, I think we may fairly conclude that none of them require us to modify the natural and obvious meaning of Peter which has been given. In general, they all coincide with the views presented by that apostle; or if, in any case, there is a slight apparent difference, the figurative character of all other statements besides his require us to receive his views as the true standard, and to modify the meaning of the others. We may, therefore, conclude that the Bible does plainly and distinctly teach us that this earth will hereafter be burned up; in other words, that all upon or within it, capable of combustion, will be consumed, and the entire mass, the elements, without the loss of one particle of the matter now existing, will be melted; and then, that the world, thus purified from the contamination of sin, and surrounded by a new atmosphere, or heavens, and adapted in all respects to the nature and wants of spiritual and sinless beings, will become the residence of the righteous. Of the precise nature of that new dispensation, and of the mode of existence there, the Scriptures are indeed silent. But that, like the present world, it will be material,--that there will be a solid globe, and a transparent expanse around it,--seems most clearly indicated in the sacred record. The wide-spread opinion that heaven will be a sort of airy Elysium, where the present laws of nature will be unknown, and where matter, if it exist, can exist only in its most attenuated form, is a notion to which the Bible is a stranger. The resurrection of the body, as well as the language of Peter, most clearly show us that the future world will be a solid, material world, purified indeed, and beautified, but retaining its materialism. Let us now see whether, in coming to these conclusions from Scripture language, we are influenced by scientific considerations, or whether many discerning minds have not, in all ages, attached a similar meaning to the inspired record. Among all nations, the history of whose opinions have come down to us, and especially among the Greeks, the belief has prevailed that a catastrophe by fire awaited the earth, corresponding to, or rather the counterpart of, a previous destruction by water. These catastrophes they denominated the _cataclysm_, or destruction by water, and the _ecpyrosis_, or destruction by fire. The ruin was supposed to be followed, in each case, by the regeneration of the earth in an improved form, which gradually deteriorated; the first age after the catastrophe, constituting the golden age; the next, the silver age; and so on to the iron age, which preceded another cataclysm, or ecpyrosis. The intervals between these convulsions were regarded as of various lengths, but all of them of great duration. These opinions the Greeks derived from the Egyptians. The belief in the future conflagration of the world also prevailed among the ancient Jews. Philo says that "the earth, after this purification, shall appear new again, even as it was after its first creation."--_De Vita Mosis_, tom. ii.--Among the Jews, these ideas may have been, in part, derived from the Old Testament; though its language, as we have seen, is far less explicit on this subject than the New Testament. That distinguished Christian writers, in all ages since the advent of Christ, have understood the language of Peter as we have explained it, would be easy to show. I have room, however, to quote only the opinions of a few distinguished modern writers. Dr. Knapp, one of the most scientific and judicious of theologians, thus remarks upon the passage of Peter already examined: "It cannot be thought that what is here said respecting the burning of the world is to be understood figuratively, as Wettstein supposes; because the fire is here too directly opposed to the literal water of the flood to be so understood. It is the object of Peter to refute the boast of scoffers, that all things had remained unchanged from the beginning, and that, therefore, no day of judgment and no end of the world could be expected. And so he says that originally, at the time of the creation, the whole earth was covered and overflowed with water, (Gen. i.,) and that from hence the dry land appeared; and the same was true at the time of Noah's flood. But there is yet to come a great fire revolution. The heavens and the earth (the earth with its atmosphere) are reserved, or kept in store, for the fire, until the day of judgment, (v. 10.) At that time the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will be dissolved by fervent heat, and every thing upon the earth will be burnt up. The same thing is taught in verse 12. But in verse 13 Peter gives the design of this revolution. It will not be annihilation, but we expect a new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, _i. e._, an entirely new, altered, and beautiful abode for man, to be built from the ruins of his former dwelling-place, as the future habitation of the pious, (Rev. xxi. 1.) This will be very much in the same way as a more perfect and an immortal body will be reared from the body which we now possess."--_Theology_, vol. ii. p. 649. From Dr. Chalmers my extracts will be longer than are necessary to show his opinion upon this subject, because he felicitously refutes certain erroneous ideas, widely prevalent, respecting matter, and spirit. "We know historically," says he, "that earth, that a solid, material earth, may form the dwelling of sinless creatures, in full converse and friendship with the Being who made them." "Man, at the first, had for his place this world, and, at the same time, for his privilege an unclouded fellowship with God, and for his prospect an immortality, which death was neither to intercept nor put an end to. He was terrestrial in respect to condition, and yet celestial, both in respect of character and enjoyments. "The common imagination that we have of paradise on the other side of death, is that of a lofty aerial region, where the inmates float in ether, or are mysteriously suspended upon nothing; where all the warm and sensible accompaniments, which give such an expression of strength, and life, and coloring to our present habitation, are attenuated into a sort of spiritual element, that is meagre and imperceptible, and utterly uninviting to the eye of mortals here below; where every vestige of materialism is done away, and nothing left but certain unearthly scenes, that have no power of allurement, and certain unearthly ecstasies with which it is felt impossible to sympathize. The holders of this imagination forget all the while that there is no necessary connection between materialism and sin; that the world which we now inhabit had all the solidity and amplitude of its present materialism before sin entered into it; that God, so far, on that account, from looking slightly upon it, after it had received the last touch of his creating hand, reviewed the earth, and the waters, and the firmament, and all the green herbage, with the living creatures, and the man whom he had raised in dominion over them, and _he saw every thing that he had made, and behold, it was all very good_. They forget that, on the birth of materialism, when it stood out in the freshness of those glories which the great Architect of nature had impressed upon it, that _the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy_. They forget the appeals that are every where made in the Bible to his material workmanship, and how, from the face of these visible heavens, and the garniture of this earth which we tread upon, the greatness and goodness of God are reflected on the view of his worshippers. No, my brethren, the object of the administration we sit under is to extirpate sin, but it is not to sweep away materialism. By the convulsions of the last day it may be shaken and broken down from its present arrangement, and thrown into such fitful agitations as that the whole of its existing framework shall fall to pieces; and with a heat so fervent as to melt the most solid elements, may it be utterly dissolved. And thus may the earth again become without form and void, but without one particle of its substance going into annihilation. Out of the ruins of this second chaos may another heaven and another earth be made to arise, and a new materialism, with other aspects of magnificence and beauty, emerge from the wreck of this mighty transformation, and the world be peopled, as before, with the varieties of material loveliness, and space be again lighted up into a firmament of material splendor. "It is, indeed, a homage to that materialism, which many are for expunging from the future state of the universe altogether, that, ere the immaterial soul of man has reached the ultimate glory and blessedness designed for it, it must return and knock at the very grave where lie the mouldered remains of the body which it wore, and there inquisition must be made for the flesh, and the sinews, and the bones which the power of corruption has, perhaps centuries before, assimilated to the earth around them, and then the minute atoms must be reassembled into a structure that bears upon it the form, and lineaments, and general aspect of a man, and the soul passes into this material framework, which is hereafter to be its lodging-place forever; and that not as its prison, but as its pleasant and befitting habitation; not to be trammelled, as some would have it, in a hold of materialism, but to be therein equipped for the services of eternity; to walk embodied among the bowers of our second paradise; to stand embodied in the presence of our God." "The glorification of the visible creation," says Tholuck, the distinguished German divine, "is more definitely declared in Rev. xxi. 1, although it must be borne in mind that a prophetic vision is there described. Still more definitely do we find the belief of a transformation of the material world declared in 2 Peter, iii. 7-12. The idea that the perfected kingdom of Christ is to be transferred to heaven, is properly a modern notion. According to Paul and the Revelation of John, the kingdom of God is placed upon the earth, in so far as this itself has part in the universal transformation. This exposition has been adopted and defended by most of the oldest commentators; _e. g._, Chrysostom, Theodoret, Hieronymus, Augustine, Luther, Koppe, and others. Luther says, in his lively way, 'God will make, not the earth only, but the heavens also, much more beautiful than they are at present. At present, we see the world in its working clothes; but hereafter it will be arrayed in its Easter and Whitsuntide robes.'" "I cannot but feel astonishment," says Dr. John Pye Smith, "that any serious and intelligent man should have his mind fettered with the common, I might call it the vulgar, notion of a proper destruction of the earth; and some seem to extend the notion to the whole solar system, and even the entire material universe; applying the idea of an extinction of being, a reducing to nothingness. This notion has, indeed, been often used to aid impassioned description in sermons and poetry; and thus it has gained so strong a hold upon the feelings of many pious persons, that they have made it an article of their faith. But I confess myself unable to find any evidence for it in nature, reason, or Scripture. We can discover nothing like destruction in the matter of the universe as subjected to our senses. Masses are disintegrated, forms are changed, compounds are decomposed; but not an atom is annihilated. Neither have we the shadow of reason to assert that mind, the seat of intelligence, ever was, or ever will be, in a single instance, destroyed. The declaration in Scripture that _the heavens and the earth shall flee away, and no more place be found for them_, is undoubtedly figurative, and denotes the most momentous changes in the scenes of the divine moral government. If it be the purpose of God that the earth shall be subjected to a total conflagration, we perfectly well know that the instruments of such an event lie close at hand, and wait only the divine volition to burst out in a moment. But that would not be a destruction; it would be a mere change of form, and, no doubt, would be subservient to the most glorious results. _We, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness._"--_Lectures on Geology and Revelation_, p. 161, (4th London edition.) Says Dr. Griffin, one of the ablest of the American divines, "A question here arises, whether the new heavens and new earth will be created out of the ruins of the old; that is, whether the old will be renovated and restored in a more glorious form, or whether the old will be annihilated, and the new made out of nothing. The idea of the annihilation of so many immense and glorious bodies, organized with inimitable skill, and declarative of infinite wisdom, is gloomy and forbidding. Indeed, it is scarcely credible that God should annihilate any of his works, much less so many and so glorious works. It ought not to be believed without the most decisive proof. On the other hand, it is a most animating thought that this visible creation, which sin has marred, which the polluted breath of men and devils has defiled, and which by sin will be reduced to utter ruin, will be restored by our Jesus, will arise from its ruins in tenfold splendor, and shine with more illustrious glory than before it was defaced by sin. "After a laborious and anxious search on this interesting subject, I must pronounce the latter to be my decided opinion. And the same, I find, has been the more common opinion of the Christian fathers, of the divines of the reformation, and of the critics and annotators who have since flourished. I could produce on this side a catalogue of names which would convince you that this has certainly been the common opinion of the Christian church in every age, as it was also of the Jewish. "The words which are employed to express the destruction of the world do not necessarily imply annihilation. Is it said that the world shall perish? The same word is used to express the ancient destruction of the world by the flood, when certainly it was not annihilated. Is it said that the world shall have an end, and be no more? This may be understood only of the present form and organization of the visible system? Is it said that the heavens and the earth shall be dissolved by fire? But the natural power of fire is not to annihilate, but only to dissolve the composition and change the form of substances."--_Sermons_, vol. ii. p. 450. We have now examined the most important testimony respecting the future destruction and renovation of the earth; for inspiration only can certainly determine its future condition. But science may throw some light upon the changes through which it is to pass. And I now proceed to inquire whether geology affords us any glimpses of its future condition. In the first place, geology shows us that the earth contains within itself all the agencies necessary for its future destruction in the manner pointed out in the Bible. Some author has remarked that, from the earliest times, there has been a loud cry of fire. We have seen that it began with the ancient Egyptians, and was continued by the Greeks. But in recent times it has waxed louder and far more distinct. The ancient notions about the existence of fire within the earth were almost entirely conjectural, but within the present century the matter has been put to the test of experiment. Wherever, in Europe and America, the temperature of the air, the waters, and the rocks in deep excavations has been ascertained, it has been found higher than the mean temperature of the climate at the surface; and the experiment has been made in hundreds of places. It is found, too, that the heat increases rapidly as we descend below that point in the earth's crust to which the sun's heat extends. The mean rate of increase has been stated by the British Association to be one degree of Fahrenheit for every forty-five feet. At this rate, all known rocks would be melted at the depth of about sixty miles. Shall we hence conclude that all the matter of the globe below this thickness (or, rather, for the sake of round numbers, below one hundred miles) is actually in a melted state? Most geologists have not seen how such a conclusion is to be avoided. And yet this would leave only about one eight hundredth part of the earth's diameter, and about one fourteenth of its contents, or bulk, in a solid state. How easy, then, should God give permission, for this vast internal fiery ocean to break through its envelope, and so to bury the solid crust that it should all be burnt up and melted! It is conceivable that such a result might take place even by natural operations. And certainly it would be easy for a special divine agency to accomplish it. It may be thought, however, that the igneous fluidity of the internal part of the globe is too mighty and improbable a conclusion to be based upon the increase of temperature, observed only to the depth of two or three thousand feet. But this is not the only evidence of such a condition of the earth's interior. Three hundred active volcanoes, and still more numerous extinct ones, have opened their mouths and poured forth their molten contents from a great depth, to bear witness to the existence of vast masses of melted rock beneath the earth's crust. The globe, too, is flattened at the poles, just to the amount it would be by rotation on its axis, had it been a liquid mass; and, therefore, there is every probability that it was once liquid; and if so once, its interior is probably still so, because the period for cooling it, when once surrounded by a solid crust, must be incalculably long. That this solid crust has once been liquid from heat, is most obvious to all who carefully examine it. For the unstratified rocks have certainly once been melted, and most of the stratified series were derived from the unstratified. Again, the organic remains dug out from the deep-seated strata prove that, when they were alive, the surface, even in high latitudes, must have been subject to a tropical, or even an ultra-tropical heat; thus showing us that the temperature of the globe has gradually diminished, as we should expect from the theory of original igneous fluidity. And, finally, no other hypothesis but the gradual cooling of the earth's crust, and the powerful volcanic agency that must from time to time have torn and ridged up that crust, will account for the present fractured and overturned condition of the strata, and the elevation of our continent from the ocean's bed. But this supposition does most satisfactorily explain all these phenomena, and also those of earthquakes and volcanoes. I must acknowledge, however, that all these arguments fail of convincing a few geologists of the doctrine of internal igneous fluidity, to the extent above described. But they all admit that the facts do prove the existence of vast oceans of melted matter beneath the earth's crust. Nor do even these geologists doubt but the globe contains within itself the agencies requisite for a universal conflagration. Mr. Lyell says that "there must exist below enormous masses of matter, intensely heated, and in many instances in a constant state of fusion." He says, also, "When we consider the combustible nature of the elements of the earth, so far as they are known to us, the facility with which their compounds may be decomposed and made to enter into new combinations, the quantity of heat which they evolve during those processes; when we recollect the expansive power of steam, and that water itself is composed of two gases, which, by their union, produce intense heat; when we call to mind the number of explosive and detonating compounds which have been already discovered,--we may be allowed to share the astonishment of Pliny, that a single day should pass without a general conflagration. '_Excedit profecto omnia miracula, ullum diem fuisse quo non cuncta conflagrarent._'"--Lyell's _Principles of Geology_, b. ii. chap. xx. vol. ii. "As a consequence of the refrigeration of the centre and crust of the globe," says D'Orbigny, "the withdrawment of matter has produced elevations and depressions on the consolidated crust; to which movements, in connection with those of the waters, we must impute the complete destruction of the existing fauna. These dislocations have brought about at each epoch changes of level in the consolidated beds and in the seas. And after a period of agitation, more or less prolonged, after each of these geological revolutions, different beings have been created to cover anew and enliven the surface of the earth."--_Cours Elementaire Paleontologie_, p. 148. All geologists, then, agree that the elements of the earth's final conflagration are contained within its bosom or upon its surface. At present, these elements are so bound down by counteracting agencies, that all is quiet and security. But let the fiat of the Almighty go forth for their liberation, and the scenes of the last day, as described in the Bible, will commence. The ploughshare of ruin will be driven onward, until this fair world is all ingulfed, and no trace of organic life remains. Yet to him who realizes that the destruction is only a necessary preparation for a brighter world, which will emerge from the ruins of the present; that, when the matter of the globe has been purified, its surface shall be covered with new and lovelier forms of beauty, surrounded by a still more bland and balmy atmosphere, and inhabited by sinless and immortal beings,--to him who realizes all this, the desolation will put on the aspect of a glorious transformation. In the second place, still deeper will be this impression, when we recollect that similar transmutations have already been experienced by the earth with an improvement of its condition. There is no evidence that the entire surface of the earth has ever undergone a complete fusion since organic life first appeared upon it. But we have reason to think that, frequently, at least, when one race of animals and plants has disappeared from the earth, it has been the result of violent catastrophes, proceeding from the elevation or subsidence of continents or chains of mountains. Says Agassiz, "A very remarkable, and perhaps the most surprising fact is, that the appearance of the chains of mountains, and the inequalities of the surface resulting from it, seem to have coincided generally with the epochs of the renewal of organized beings."--_Ed. Journal of Science_, Oct. 1842, p. 394.--These vertical movements of such large portions of the earth's crust could have resulted only from the direct or indirect agency of volcanic power, though the destruction of organic life, which must have been the consequence, may have resulted as often from aqueous as igneous inundations. But usually both agencies were probably concerned, and the predominance of one or the other of these agencies is of little consequence to the argument; for if such wide-spread ruin has already repeatedly passed over the earth, a still wider desolation may be presumed possible, if only a little wider play shall be given to the agents of destruction. Already have the changes of this sort which the earth, or portions of it, have undergone, resulted in an improved condition of its surface. In other words, at each successive epoch, animals and plants of a higher and more perfect organization have appeared, because the temperature, the air, and the earth's general condition have been better adapted to their happy existence. The amount of limestone seems to have been constantly increasing, and, as a consequence, the fertility of the soil; probably, also, the amount of carbonic acid has diminished in the atmosphere, as animals with lungs have been multiplied. In short, there is a prodigious increase, among the present inhabitants of the globe, of animals and plants possessing complicated and delicate organization and loftier intellectual powers, over all former conditions of the globe. But we have reason to believe, from the Christian Scriptures, that the next economy of life which shall be placed upon the globe will far transcend all those that have gone before. Every vestige of sin, suffering, decay, and death will disappear. Says the Bible, _There shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away. And there shall in no wise enter it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie._ In short, the change is no other than the conversion of this world into heaven. Reasonably, therefore, might we anticipate a most thorough destruction of the present world, to prepare the way for the introduction of such a glorious state. The Scriptures describe that state by the most splendid imagery that can be derived from existing nature. It is represented, figuratively, no doubt, as a splendid city, prepared of God, and let down to the earth. Its twelve foundations are all precious stones, its gates pearls, its wall jasper, and its streets pure gold, as it were, transparent glass. The Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of that city. Instead of the sun and the moon, the glory of God enlightens it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. From out of their throne proceeds the water of life, clear as crystal, and along its banks grows the tree of life, with its twelve manner of fruits, yielding its fruit every month. Here, then, we have the most splendid and enchanting objects in nature brought before us as representatives of the new heavens and the new earth. Yet we cannot learn from the Bible, or science, what material dress nature will then put on. We are taught only that it will far exceed, in splendor and perfection, the drapery which she now wears. We may be assured that it will be eminently adapted to a spirit that is henceforth to be perfectly holy, happy, incorruptible, and immortal. Both revelation and geology agree in assuring us that the new earth, which will emerge from the ruins of the present, will be improved in its condition; but the particulars of that condition are not described--probably because we could not, in our present state, understand them. Such are the views concerning the earth's future destruction and renovation, which appear to me to be taught by a fair interpretation of Scripture, and which harmonize with the teachings of geology. But we are met here by two formidable difficulties. In the first place, if the present earth is to be burnt up and melted at the last day, it must require thousands of years before another solid crust shall be formed upon its surface, capable of sustaining organic natures which are material. But the Bible represents the righteous, at the day of judgment, as reunited to their bodies, which they left in the grave, and entering at once into their residence upon the new earth. Where, then, can we find the thousands of years which, by this theory, are essential to prepare this residence for their reception? Into what intermediate place, what new Hades, shall they pass, until verdure shall clothe the new earth, and more than the primeval beauty of Eden take the place of the volcanic desolation which must reign over a world just beginning to cool from incandescent heat? I freely acknowledge that this is a serious objection to my theory; and perhaps it is insuperable, unless we resort to miraculous interference. It were easy to say, that God can, in a moment, convert a globe of fire into a paradise of beauty, and make its landscapes smile with charms transcending the bowers of paradise lost. Indeed, the Scriptures represent the New Jerusalem as prepared by God's own hands, and let down at once upon the earth to form the metropolitan abode of the righteous. But, after all, I am unwilling thus to dispose of the difficulty. For it is a clumsy way to meet objections, when we undertake to philosophize upon events, either past, present, or future, to foist in a miracle, in order to eke out our hypothesis. We thus make an image of as incoherent parts as that in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and as easily broken in pieces. There is a second mode by which the difficulty under consideration can be completely obviated, could we only admit the theory on which it rests. Some theological writers have maintained that the day of judgment will occupy a long period,--thousands and tens of thousands of years perhaps,--in order that every individual may experience a literal trial before the universe for all his conduct on earth, so that the conscience of every one in that vast assembly shall approve the final sentence. They appeal to various texts of Scripture, where it is strongly stated that rigid inquisition will be made on that solemn day into the conduct and motives of every individual. And it may be, indeed, that such descriptions are to have a literal fulfilment; and if so, we should have a period long enough for the new earth to be recovered by natural means from its volcanic desolation, and to be covered over with new forms of beauty. But I confess the theory of such a long period of judgment does not seem to me to be sustained by the most approved rules of exegesis, and therefore I am unwilling to rest upon it to sustain my own hypothesis. But is it not possible that our difficulty of conceiving how the spiritual body can enter at once upon its residence in the new heavens and earth, while yet the globe is only a shoreless ocean of fire, results from a mistaken conception of the nature of the spiritual body? Do we not judge of it by our own present bodies, and imagine that it must necessarily possess such an organization as would be destroyed by the extremes of heat and cold? And are we authorized to draw such an inference? The Scriptures have, indeed, left us very much in the dark as to the specific nature of the future glorified body, which Paul calls a spiritual body. He does not mean that it is composed of spirit, for then it would not differ from the soul itself, by which it is to be animated. He certainly means that it is composed of matter; unless, indeed, there be in the universe a third substance, distinct both from matter and spirit. But of the existence of such a substance we have no positive evidence; and, therefore, must conclude the spiritual body to be matter; called spiritual, probably, because eminently adapted to form the immortal residence of pure spirit. Yet we learn from the apostle's description that it is not composed of flesh and blood, which, he says, cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither is it capable of decay, like our present bodies. Indeed, the illustration which he derives from the decay and germination of a kernel of wheat shows us that the future body will be as much unlike the present as a stalk of wheat is different from the seed whence it sprang; and, in appearance, scarcely any two things are more unlike. Hence we may suppose the resurrection body of the righteous to be as different from that which the soul now animates as matter can be, in its most diverse forms. Now, the question arises, Do we know of any form of matter in the present world which remains the same at all temperatures, and in all circumstances, which no chemical or mechanical agencies can alter?--a substance which remains unchanged in the very heart of the ice around the poles, and in the focus of a volcano; which remains untouched by the most powerful reagents which the chemist can apply, and by the mightiest forces which the mechanician can bring to bear upon it? It seems to me that modern science does render the existence of such a substance probable, though not cognizable by the senses. It is the luminiferous ether, that attenuated medium by which light, and heat, and electricity are transmitted from one part of the universe to another, by undulations of inconceivable velocity. This strange fluid, whose existence and action seems all but demonstrated by the phenomena of light, heat, and electricity, and perhaps, too, by the resistance experienced by Encke's, Biela's, and Halley's comets, must possess the extraordinary characteristic above pointed out. It must exist and act wherever we find light, heat, or electricity; and where do we not find them? They penetrate through what has been called empty space; and, therefore, this ether exists there, propagating its undulations at the astonishing rate of two hundred thousand miles per second. They emanate in constant succession from every intensely heated focus, such as the sun, the volcano, and the chemical furnace; and, therefore, this strange medium is neither dissipated nor affected by the strongest known heat. Both light and heat are transmitted through ice; and, therefore, this ether cannot be congealed. The same is true of glass, and every transparent substance, however dense; and even the most solid metals convey heat and electricity with remarkable facility; and, therefore, this ether exists and acts with equal facility in the most solid masses as in a vacuum. In short, it seems to be independent of chemical or mechanical changes, and to act unobstructed in all possible modifications of matter. And, though too evanescent to be cognizable by the senses, or the most delicate chemical and mechanical tests, it possesses, nevertheless, a most astonishing activity. Now, I am not going to assert that the spiritual body will be composed of this luminiferous ether. But, since we know not the composition of that body, it is lawful to suppose that such may be its constitution. This is surely possible, and that is all which is essential to my present argument. Admitting its truth, the following interesting conclusions follow:-- In the first place, the spiritual body would be unaffected by all possible changes of temperature. It might exist as well in the midst of fire, or of ice, as in any intermediate temperature. Hence it might pass from one extreme of temperature to another, and be at home in them all; and this is what we might hope for in a future world. Some, indeed, have imagined that the sun will be the future heaven of the righteous; and on this supposition there is no absurdity in the theory. Nor would there be in the hypothesis which should locate heaven in solid ice, or in the centre of the earth. In the second place, on this supposition, the spiritual body would be unharmed by those chemical and mechanical agencies which matter in no other form can resist. The question has often arisen, how the glorified body, if material, would be able to escape all sources of injury, so as to be immortal as the soul. In this hypothesis, we see how it is possible; for though the whole globe should change its chemical constitution, though worlds should dash upon worlds, the spiritual body, though present at the very point where the terrible collision took place, would feel no injury; and safe in its immortal habitation, the soul might smile amid "the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds." In the third place, on this supposition, the soul might communicate its thoughts and receive a knowledge of events and of other minds, through distances inconceivably great, with the speed of lightning. If we suppose the soul, in such a tenement, could transmit its thoughts and desires, and receive impressions, through the luminiferous ether, with only the same velocity as light, it might communicate with other beings upon the sun, at the distance of one hundred million miles, in eight minutes; and such a power we may reasonably expect the soul will hereafter possess, whether derived from this or some other agency. We cannot believe that, in another world, the soul's communication with the rest of the universe will be as limited as in the present state. On this supposition, she need not wander through the universe to learn the events transpiring in other spheres, for the intelligence would be borne on the morning's ray or the lightning's wing. Finally, on this supposition, the germ of the future spiritual body may, even in this world, be attached to the soul; and it may be this which she will come seeking after on the resurrection morning. I know not but this wonderful medium, in some unknown form, may attach itself to the sleeping dust; and though that dust be scattered upon the winds, or diffused in the waters of the ocean, and transformed into other animal bodies, still that germ may not be lost. The chemist has often been perplexed, when he thinks how the bodies of men are decomposed after death, and how every particle must, in some cases, pass into other bodies; he has been perplexed, I say, to see how the resurrection body should be identified, and especially how those particles could become a part of different bodies. Perhaps the hypothesis under consideration may relieve the difficulty. Perhaps, too, it may teach us how the soul exists and acts, when separated from the body. It may act through this universal medium, though in a manner less perfect than after it has united itself to the spiritual body raised from the grave.[20] But I fear I am venturing too far into the region of conjecture. My only object is, to show that we do know of a substance which might form a spiritual body which should be in its element upon the new earth, even though it were in the condition of a fiery ocean. It could not, indeed, be an organic body of such a kind as heat would destroy; though I see no reason why it may not possess an organism far more delicate and wonderful than that of our present bodies, and yet be unaffected by heat or cold, or mechanical or chemical agencies. I do not feel, therefore, that the objection which I am considering is insuperable. It results, I apprehend, from the false assumption that the spiritual body will be subject to those influences by which our present comparatively gross bodies are so powerfully affected. Shall I be pardoned if I say that, in the experiments of an incipient and maltreated science, we have, perhaps, a glimpse of the manner in which the soul will act in the future spiritual body? for if those experiments be not all delusion,--and how can we reasonably infer that experiments so multiplied, so various, and in many cases, when not in the hands of itinerant jugglers, so fairly performed,--I say, how can we regard all these as mere trickery? and if not, they are best explained by supposing the soul to act independently of the bodily organs, and through the same medium which we have supposed to constitute the future spiritual body. In this view, mesmerism assumes a most interesting aspect, forming, as it were, a link between the present and the future world. The theory which I have advanced does not, indeed, fall to the ground, though mesmerism should be found a delusion; yet it is but justice to say, that it first came under my eye in that most classical, philosophical, and attractive work, Townsend's "Facts in Mesmerism." A similar view, however, was presented several years earlier, in a work by Isaac Taylor, no less ingenious and profound, the "Physical Theory of Another Life," a work, however, which makes not the slightest allusion to mesmerism. The author supposes such a state of things as I have imagined in another life to be in existence even now. "The sensation of light," says he, "is now believed to result from the vibrations, not the emanations, of an elastic fluid, or ether; but this same element may be capable of another species of vibrations; or the electric or the magnetic fluids may be susceptible of some such vibrations; or an element as universally diffused as light through the universe may be the medium of sonorous undulations, equally rapid and distinct, and serving to connect the most remote regions of the universe by the conveyance of sounds, just as the most remote are actually connected by the passage of light. Yet the sonorous vibrations of this supposed element may be far too delicate to awaken the ear of man, or, in fact, of a kind not perceptible by the human auditory nerve." "We refuse to allow that a conjecture of this sort is extravagant, or destitute of philosophical probability; on the contrary, consider it as borne out, in a positive sense, by the discoveries of modern science. Might we then rest for a moment upon an animating conception (aided by the actual analogy of light) such as this, viz., that the field of the visible universe is the theatre of a vast social economy, holding rational intercourse at great distances? Let us claim leave to indulge the belief, when we contemplate the starry heavens, that speech, inquiry and response, commands and petitions, debate and instruction, are passing to and fro; or shall the imagination catch the pealing anthems of praise, at stated seasons, arising from worshippers in all quarters, and flowing on with thundering power, like the noise of many waters, until it meet and shake the courts of the central heavens?"--_Physical Theory of Another Life_, p. 202, 3d Am. ed. The second objection to the view which I have presented of the future destruction and renovation of the earth, as an abode of the righteous, may be thus stated: Heaven is an unchanging state; but a world which has been burned up and melted, even if we might suppose spiritual beings to dwell upon it, must undergo still further change. The radiation of its heat would form a crust over its surface; the waters, dissipated into vapor, would be recondensed; volcanic agency would ridge up the crust into mountains and valleys; and, in short, geological agencies would at length form such a surface, so far as rocks and soil are concerned, as we now tread upon. And even though organic beings should not be again placed upon it, those changes would proceed, till, perhaps, another and another great catastrophe by fire might pass over it; nor can we say where these mutations would end. Can we believe such a world to be heaven? Here, again, as in the last objection, it appears to me, the main difficulty lies in our judging of the future spiritual body by that organism which we now inhabit. Heaven is, indeed, an unchanging state of happiness and holiness. But does it, therefore, follow that there can be no change in its material form and aspect? I have already shown that the spiritual body may be of such a composition that no change of temperature, of place or constitution, in surrounding bodies, can at all affect it. If the soul could be happy in one set of physical circumstances while in such a tenement, it might be happy in any other circumstances with which we are acquainted. But it does not follow that the happiness of the soul might not be increased by the changes of the material world around it. What is it on earth that affords the greatest amount of happiness derived from the external world? It is the immense variety of creation, produced chiefly by chemical and mechanical agencies. These changes afford us the most striking exhibitions of the wisdom, power, and benevolence of the Deity, within our knowledge; and why may not analogous, or still more wonderful changes, and greater variety, give still higher conceptions of the divine character to the inhabitants of heaven, and excite a purer and a stronger love? And to study that character will form, I doubt not, the grand employment of heaven. Who can tell what depths of knowledge may there be laid open into the internal constitution of matter, and its combinations, and especially its union with spirit! And what surer means of bringing out these developments than change, constant and everlasting change? For who can set limits to those mutations which an infinite God can produce upon the matter of this vast universe? It is easy to see that they may be literally infinite. Once more. We have seen that the geological changes which our world has hitherto undergone have been an improvement of its condition, and that each successive economy has been a brighter exhibition of divine wisdom and benevolence: Shall this progress be arrested when the present economy closes? We know that the righteous will forever advance in holiness and happiness. Why may not a part of that increase depend upon their introduction into higher and higher economies through eternal ages? May not this be one of the modes in which new developments of the character of God will open upon them in the world of bliss? The Scriptures represent the material aspect of the new heavens and the new earth, when first the righteous enter upon them, to be one of surpassing glory. But why may not other developments await them in the round of eternal ages, as their expanding faculties are able to understand and appreciate them? The greater the variety of new scenes in the material world which shall be presented to the mind, such as an infinite Deity shall devise, the more intense the happiness of their contemplations; and who can set limits to the permutations which such a being can produce, even upon matter? I can form no conjecture as to the nature of those new developments; nor do I believe they could be understood in our present state. I feel as if those formed too low an estimate of the new heavens and the new earth, who imagine a repetition there of the most curious organic structures, the most splendid flowers and fruits, and the most enchanting landscapes of the present world: I fancy that scenes far more enchanting, and objects far more glorious, will meet the soul at its first entrance upon the new earth, even though to mortal vision it should present only an ocean of fire. I imagine a thousand new inlets into the soul--nay, I think of it as all eye, all ear, all sensation; now plunging deeper into the infinitesimal parts of matter than the microscope can carry us, and now soaring away, perhaps on the waves of the mysterious ether, far beyond the ken of the telescope. And if such is the first entrance into heaven, who can conjecture what new fields and new glories shall open before the mind, and fill it with ecstasy, as it flies onward without end! But I dare not indulge further in these hypothetical, yet fascinating thoughts; yet let us never forget, that in a very short time, far shorter than we imagine, all the scenes of futurity will be to us a thrilling reality. We shall then know in a moment how much of truth there is in these speculations. But if they all prove false, fully confident am I that the scenes which will open upon us will surpass our liveliest conceptions. The glass through which we now see darkly will be removed, and face to face shall we meet eternal glories. Then shall we learn that our present bodily organs, however admirably adapted to our condition here, were in fact clogs upon the soul, intended to fetter its free range, that we might the more richly enjoy the liberty of the sons of God, and expatiate in the spiritual body, _the building of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens_. Let us, then, live continually under the influence of the scenes that await us beyond the grave. They will thus become familiar to us and we shall appreciate their infinite superiority to the objects that so deeply interest us on earth. We shall be led to look forward even with strong desire, in spite of the repulsive aspect of death, to that state where the soul will be freed from her prison-house of flesh and blood, and can range in untiring freedom through the boundless fields of knowledge and happiness that are in prospect. Then shall we learn to despise the low aims and contracted views of the sensualist, the demagogue, and the worldling. High and noble thoughts and aspirations will lift our souls above the murky atmosphere of this world, and, while yet in the body, we shall begin to breathe the empyreal air of the new heavens, and to gather the fruits of the tree of life in the new earth, where righteousness only shall forever dwell. LECTURE XII. THE TELEGRAPHIC SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE. In order to impress some important truth or transaction, men have sometimes represented surrounding inanimate objects as looking on and witnessing the scene, or listening to the words, and ready ever afterwards to open their mouth to testify to the facts, should man deny them. I know of no writings from which to derive so striking an illustration of these strong figurative representations as the sacred Scriptures. Take, for a first example, the solemn covenant entered into between Jehovah and the Israelites, in the time of Joshua. To fix the transaction as firmly as possible in the minds of the fickle people, _he took a great stone and set it up there under an oak that was by the sanctuary of the Lord. And Joshua said unto all the people, Behold, this stone shall be a witness unto us. For it hath heard all the words of the Lord which he spake unto us. It shall, therefore, be a witness unto you, lest ye deny your God._ In a second example, the prophet Habakkuk describes the insatiable wickedness of the Chaldeans; and addressing the nation as an individual, he says, _Thou hast consulted shame to thy house by cutting off many people, and hast sinned against thy soul. For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it._ Such abominations had aroused even the most insensible part of creation, the very timber and the stone, to life and indignation. In a third example, the whole multitude of Jews had just spread their garments upon the ground for Christ to ride over, they meanwhile crying out, _Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest._ But some of the Pharisees said, _Master, rebuke thy disciples; and he answered and said unto them, If these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out._ If man refused to do homage to the King of glory, when he came among them, the rocks, more sensible, would break forth in his praises. The discoveries of modern science, however, show us that there is a literal sense in which the material creation receives an impression from all our words and actions that can never be effaced; and that nature, through all time, is ever ready to bear testimony of what we have said and done. Men fancy that the wave of oblivion passes over the greater part of their actions. But physical science shows us that those actions have been transfused into the very texture of the universe, so that no waters can wash them out, and no erosions, comminution, or metamorphoses, can obliterate them. The principle which I advance in its naked form is this: _Our words, our actions, and even our thoughts, make an indelible impression on the universe._ Thrown into a poetic form, this principle converts creation Into a vast sounding gallery; Into a vast picture gallery; And into a universal telegraph. This proposition I shall endeavor to sustain by an appeal to well-established principles of science. Yet, since some of these principles are not the most common and familiar, and have not been applied, except in part, to this subject, I must be more technical in their explanation than I could wish, and more minute in the details. The grand point, however, on which the whole subject turns, is the doctrine of reaction. By this is meant the mutual or reciprocal action of different things upon one another. Thus, if a body fall to the earth, the earth reacts upon it, and stops it, or throws it back. If sulphuric acid be poured upon limestone, a mutual action ensues; the acid acts on the stone, and the stone reacts upon the acid, and a new compound is produced. If light fall upon a solid body, the body reacts upon the light, which it sends back to the eye with an image of itself. These are examples of what is meant by reaction, or the reciprocal action of different substances upon one another. But it is not every kind of reaction that will prove a permanent impression to be made upon the universe by our conduct. Hence we must be more specific. _In the first place, the principle is proved and illustrated by the doctrine of mechanical reaction._ From the principle, long since settled in mechanics, that action and reaction are equal, it will follow that every impression which man makes by his words, or his movements, upon the air, the waters, or the solid earth, will produce a series of changes in each of those elements which will never end. The word which is now going out of my mouth causes pulsations or waves in the air, and these, though invisible to human eyes, expand in every direction until they have passed around the whole globe, and produced a change in the whole atmosphere; nor will a single circumgyration complete the effect; but the sentence which I am now uttering shall alter the whole atmosphere through all future time. So that, as Professor Babbage remarks, to whom we are indebted for the first moral application of this mechanical principle, "the air is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said, or woman whispered." Not a word has ever escaped from mortal lips, whether for the defence of virtue or the perversion of the truth, not a cry of agony has ever been uttered by the oppressed, not a mandate of cruelty by the oppressor, not a false and flattering word by the deceiver, but it is registered indelibly upon the atmosphere we breathe. And could man command the mathematics of superior minds, every particle of air thus set in motion could be traced through all its changes, with as much precision as the astronomer can point out the path of the heavenly bodies. No matter how many storms have raised the atmosphere into wild commotion, and whirled it into countless forms; no matter how many conflicting waves have mixed and crossed one another; the path of each pulsation is definite, and subject to the laws of mathematics. To follow it requires, indeed, a power of analysis superior to human; but we can conceive it to be far inferior to the divine. The same thing is true of the waters. No wave has ever been raised on their bosom, no keel has ever ploughed their surface, which has not sent an influence and a change into every ocean, and modified every wave, that has rolled in upon the farthest shores. As the vessel crosses the deep, the parted waves close in, and every trace of disturbance soon disappears from human vision. Nevertheless, it is certain that every track thus furrowed in the waters has sent an influence through their entire mass, such as is calculable by distinct formulæ; and it may be that glorified minds, by the principles of celestial mathematics, can as easily trace out the paths of the unnumbered vessels that have crossed the waters, as the astronomer can the paths of the planets or the comets. The solid earth, too, is alike tenacious of every impression we make upon it; not a footprint of man or beast is marked upon its surface, that does not permanently change the whole globe. Every one of its countless atoms will retain and exhibit an infinitesimal, but a real, effect through all coming time. It is too minute, indeed, for the cognizance of the human senses. But in a higher sphere there may be inlets of perception acute enough to trace it through all its bearings, and thus render every atom of the globe a living witness to the actions of every living being. In view of these facts, we cannot regard the glowing language of Babbage an exaggeration, when he says, "The soul of the negro, whose fettered body, surviving the living charnel-house of his infected prison, was thrown into the sea to lighten the ship, that his Christian master might escape the limited justice at length assigned by civilized man to crimes whose profit had long gilded their atrocity, will need, at the last great day of human accounts, no living witness of his earthly agony: when man and all his race shall have disappeared from the face of our planet, ask every particle of air still floating over the unpeopled earth, and it will record the cruel mandate of the tyrant. Interrogate every wave which breaks unimpeded on ten thousand desolate shores, and it will give evidence of the last gurgle of the waters which closed over the head of his dying victim. Confront the murderer with every corporeal atom of his immolated slave, and in its still quivering movements he will read the prophet's denunciation of the prophet king." The distinguished mathematical professor from whom I have just quoted limits the effects of this mathematical reaction to this globe and its atmosphere. But if, as the philosophers now generally admit, there is a subtile and extremely elastic medium pervading all space, why must they not extend to other worlds, yea, to the whole universe? Without an accurate acquaintance with the facts, indeed, it will seem a mere extravagant imagination to say that our most trivial word or action sends a thrill throughout the whole material universe; but I see not why sober and legitimate science does not conduct us to this conclusion. Nay, still further, it teaches us that the vibrations and changes which our words and actions produce upon the universe shall never cease their action and reaction till materialism be no more. We venture, then, to push this thought of the ingenious mathematician into another sphere, which he did not enter. The majority, probably, of the ablest expounders of the Bible have maintained, as previously shown, that the apostle Peter most unequivocally teaches us that the new heavens, or atmosphere, and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, are merely our present earth and atmosphere, melted and burnt by the fires of the last day, and fitted up anew,--a second and a lovelier paradise,--to be the everlasting abode of holiness and happiness. Indeed, to attempt to fix any other meaning upon Peter's language makes of it a most absurd jumble of literal and figurative expressions, and produces an inversion of chronological events. But, admitting the literal meaning of the apostle to be the true one, then those reactions, produced by our words and conduct upon the present world, shall not be destroyed by the fires of the last day, but reappear in the new economy, and modify the pulsations of the new heavens and the new earth through all eternity. But even though heaven should be in some other part of the universe, and not this earth refitted, yet, if it be a material residence, why, on the principles already explained, should it not be reached and affected by those vibrations which the laws of mathematics assure us are now spreading from each individual, as a centre, through the whole universe? The conflagration of the earth will alter its chemical constitution, and convert matter into new forms; but the mechanical character of the atoms will not be destroyed; and when they emerge from the final catastrophe, in new and brighter forms, they may still bear and exhibit the impress of every word and every action which they now receive. Such representations as these, I am aware, will, upon first thought, seem to most minds little better than the dreams of fancy, although founded upon the laws of mathematics. For how soon does every trace disappear from the earth of the most terrible convulsions and the mightiest human efforts! The shout of countless multitudes, the thunder and the crash of battle, and even the volcano's bellowing, are soon succeeded by unbroken silence; and we cannot discover a trace of any of those countless scenes of noise and convulsion that have been acted upon the world's busy stage. How practically absurd, then, to imagine that any influence goes out from the feeble efforts of individuals, that can be recognized, either now or hereafter, on the wide field of the universe! Such objections as these, however, are based upon the impression, of which it is hard to divest ourselves, that our present means of distinguishing the effects of physical forces are as perfect as we can hope for in eternity. And yet, who will doubt that, when our present gross bodies shall be laid aside, the soul, looking forth from a spiritual body, with quickened powers and unobstructed vision, shall penetrate a new world in the infinitesimal parts of creation? What absurdity in the supposition that then the minutest movement among the atoms, which can now be discovered only by the mathematics of quantities infinitely small, may then stand out as distinctly to our inspection as do now the features of the landscape? What absurdity in the supposition that, even now, there are finite minds in the universe who possess this quickened power of perception, and, though in distant worlds, do actually know what is passing here by the vibrations which our words and actions produce upon elastic matter? Thus far I have spoken of the influence of our words and actions only upon the material universe, although the principle with which I started includes thoughts also. But are not actions merely the external manifestation of thoughts and purposes? and, therefore, is not thought the efficient agency that impresses the universe? I shall also attempt to show that there are other modes in which the intellect may do this, aside from ordinary words and actions. But I proceed to the second proof of the general principle. _And I derive it from what may be called optical reactions; that is, the reaction of light and the substances on which it impinges._ These exert such an influence upon it, that, when it is thrown back from them, and enters the organs of vision, or even a transparent lens, with a screen behind it, it produces an image of those objects; in other words, what we call vision. Now, it is this fact, in connection with the progressive motion of light, that forms the basis of this branch of the argument. Though light moves with such immense velocity, that, for all practical purposes on earth, it is instantaneous, yet, in fact, it does occupy a little more than a second for every two hundred thousand miles which it passes over. Hence a flash of lightning occurring on earth would not be visible on the moon till a second and a quarter afterwards; on the sun, till eight minutes; at the planet Jupiter, when at its greatest distance from us, till fifty-two minutes; on Uranus, till two hours; on Neptune, till four hours and a quarter; on the star of Vega, of the first magnitude, till forty-five years; on a star of the eighth magnitude, till one hundred and eighty years; and on a star of the twelfth magnitude, till four thousand years; and stars of this magnitude are visible through telescopes; nor can we doubt that, with better instruments, stars of far less magnitude might be seen; so that we may confidently say that this flash of lightning would not reach the remotest heavenly body till more than six thousand years--a period equal to that which has elapsed since man's creation. Now, suppose that, on these different heavenly bodies, beings exist with organs of vision sufficiently acute to discern a flash of lightning on earth, or, rather, to see all the scenes on that hemisphere of our world that is turned towards them; it is obvious that, on the remotest star, the earth would be seen, at this moment, just coming forth from the Creator's hand, in all the freshness of Eden's glories, with our first parents in the beauty of innocence and happiness, and all the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air playing around them. On a star of the twelfth magnitude would be seen the world as it showed itself four thousand years ago; on a star of the eighth magnitude, as it appeared one hundred and eighty years ago; and so on to the moon, where would be seen the occurrences of the present moment. And since there are ten thousand times ten thousand worlds, scattered through these extremes of distance, is it not clear that, taking them all together, they do at this moment contain a vast panorama of the world's entire history, since the hour when the morning stars sang together, and the sons of God shouted for joy on creation's morning? "Thus," says the unknown author of a little work entitled "The Stars and the Earth," in which these ideas were first developed--"thus the universe encloses the _pictures_ of the past, like an indestructible and incorruptible record, containing the purest and the clearest truth; and as sound propagates itself in the air, wave after wave, or, to take a still clearer example, as thunder and lightning are in reality simultaneous, but in the storm the distant thunder follows at the interval of minutes [seconds?] after the flash, so, in like manner, according to our ideas, the pictures of every occurrence propagate themselves into the distant ether, upon the wings of the ray of light; and although they become weaker and smaller, yet, in immeasurable distance, they still have color and form; and as every thing possessing color and form is visible, so must these pictures also be said to be visible, however impossible it may be for the human eye to perceive it with the hitherto discovered optical instruments." This last statement of the writer every one will acknowledge is true when applied to God; for who will doubt that his eye can take in at a glance that universe which he has made? And to do that is to have before him the entire daily history of our globe; nay, probably, also, of every other world. Indeed, such a supposition affords us a lively conception of the divine omniscience, since we have only to suppose this panorama of the indefinite past to extend indefinitely into the future, and the infinite picture will also be present at this moment before the divine mind. But is the supposition an absurdity, that there may be in the universe created beings, with powers of vision acute enough to take in all these pictures of our world's history, as they make the circuit of the numberless suns and planets that lie embosomed in boundless space? Suppose such a being at this moment upon a star of the twelfth magnitude, with an eye turned toward the earth. He might see the deluge of Noah, just sweeping over the surface. Advancing to a nearer star, he would see the patriarch Abraham going out, not knowing whither he went. Coming still nearer, the vision of the crucified Redeemer would meet his gaze. Coming nearer still, he might alight upon worlds where all the revolutions and convulsions of modern times would fall upon his eye. Indeed, there are worlds enough and at the right distances, in the vast empyrean, to show him every event in human history. We may proceed a step farther, and inquire whether such an exaltation of vision as we have supposed may not be hereafter enjoyed by the glorified human mind when it passes into the spiritual body. We can hardly believe such a transformation possible. But suppose an individual born blind to grow up to manhood and intelligence without ever having been told any thing about vision. Then suppose the oculist to attempt an operation for the restoration of his sight, and, to prepare him for the transition, let the wonders of human vision be described to him, and he be told that, by a few moments of suffering, he can be put in possession of this astonishing faculty; would it not appear as improbable to him as it now does to us, to imagine that our vision can be so clarified and exalted, that we can discern the events which are passing in distant worlds as easily as we now do those immediately around us. But if such a power of reading human history, from its panorama spread out on the face of the universe, be now possessed by unfallen beings in other spheres, what idea must they form of the character of man? At one time, they must regard the race as given up to hopeless rebellion, and the inflictions of vindictive justice. And then, anon, they would see the sceptre of mercy stretched out, and a few faithful soldiers marching under the banner of virtue and fighting the battles of the Lord. Surely they would need a revelation to understand the anomalies and solve the paradoxes which passed under their eyes. They would wonder why a world so filled with tokens of divine goodness, yet so disfigured by wickedness in every form, had not long since been struck from its orbit by the hand of divine justice. Thus far, in the present argument, I have been following, for the most part, in the track marked out by others. But I now venture to advance into regions hitherto untrodden for any such purpose; yet I trust that the light which we may find to guide our steps may not prove the bewildering gleam of an _ignis fatuus_, but the lamp of true science. _My third argument is based upon electric reactions._ Whatever may be the true nature of electricity, it is convenient, and probably leads to no error, to speak of it as a fluid, or rather two fluids. For we find two kinds of electricity, denominated positive and negative; and it is a general fact, that, when a body is brought into one electrical state, it throws other bodies around it into the opposite state, by a power called induction. Those bodies, whose electrical condition has been thus altered, will act on others lying in a remoter circle, and these upon others, and so on, we cannot tell how widely, for we have reason to suppose that electricity is a power that extends through all nature. It can hardly be doubted that is the force which constitutes what we call chemical affinity by which the constituent parts of all compound bodies are held together; and in those stony and metallic masses, that occasionally fall from the heavens, we have proof that this same power holds sway in other worlds; for the most reasonable supposition is, that these meteors move like the planets through the regions of celestial space, and give us some idea of the constitution of planetary worlds. If so, the same chemical laws, and, of course, the same chemical forces, prevail there as in our planet. Indeed, the uniformity of nature would lead us to such a conclusion were there no facts like those of meteors to teach it directly. It follows, from these principles, that, whenever we change the electrical condition of bodies around us, we start a movement to whose onward march we can assign no limits but the material universe. These waves of influence consist of a series of attractions and repulsions, and are independent of the mechanical reactions already considered, which are produced by onward impulses alone. Now, a change in the electric condition of bodies is produced often by the slightest mechanical, chemical, thermal, physiological, and probably even mental change in man. The usual way of exciting currents of electricity is by friction. But chemical action, as in the galvanic battery, produces a still more energetic and uninterrupted current. The slightest change of temperature, also, may disturb the electric equilibrium perceptibly. It has been of late ascertained, likewise, that a change of physiological condition--that is, a change as to healthy and normal action--affects the electricity of the parts of the system, and consequently of surrounding bodies. Substitute a man in the place of a galvanic battery, making his two hands the electrodes, and there will go out from him an electric current, that shall sensibly deflect the needle of a galvanometer, an instrument employed for showing the presence of small portions of electricity. Nay, further, it seems to be most probably established as a fact in science, that a man, in the condition above specified, by a simple act of his will upon his muscles, by which those of one arm only shall be braced, will thereby send an electrical current of one sort through the galvanometer, while a like volition, which shall brace the muscles of the other arm will set in motion an opposite current. It is also ascertained, that of the two sorts of nerves which supply every muscle, the nerve of sensibility is a positive pole of a Voltaic circuit, while the nerve of motion, or the muscle into which it passes, is a negative pole. So that the sensor nerves act as electric telegraphs to carry the sensations to the brain, and inform it what is needed, while the motor nerves bring back the volition to the muscles--the brain acting as a galvanic battery, very much like the electric organs of certain fishes. From these statements it clearly follows, that, besides the mechanical effects produced by our actions, there is also an electric influence excited and propagated by almost every muscular effort, every chemical change within us, every variation in the state of health, or vigor, and especially by every mental effort; for no thought, probably, can pass through the mind which does not alter the physiological, chemical, and electric condition of the brain, and consequently of the whole system. The stronger the emotion, the greater the change; so that those great mental efforts, and those great decisions of the will, which bring along important moral effects, do also make the strongest impression upon the material universe. We cannot say how widely, by means of electric force, they reach; but if so subtile a power does, as we have reason to suppose, permeate all space, and all solid matter, there may be no spot in the whole universe where the knowledge of our most secret thoughts and purposes, as well as our most trivial outward act, may not be transmitted on the lightning's wing; and it may be, that, out of this darkened world, there may not be found any spot where beings do not exist with sensibilities keen enough to learn, through electric changes, what we are doing and thinking. If there be no absurdity in supposing that even the mechanical influence of our actions may be felt throughout the universe, still less is it absurd to infer the same results from electric agencies. It would seem, from recent discoveries, that electricity has a more intimate connection with mental operations than any other physical force. If not identical with the nervous influence, it seems to be employed by the mind to accompany that influence to every part of the system; and the greater the mental excitement, the more energetic the electric movement. It seems to us a marvellous discovery, which enables man to convey and register his thoughts at the distance of thousands of miles by the electric wires. Should it excite any higher wonder to be told, that, by means of this same power, all our thoughts are transmitted to every part of the universe, and can be read there by the neuter perceptions of other beings as easily as we can read the types or hieroglyphics of the electric telegraph? Yet what a startling thought is it, that the most secret workings of our minds and hearts are momentarily spread out in legible characters over the whole material universe! nay, that they are so woven into the texture of the universe, that they will constitute a part of its web and woof forever! To believe and realize this is difficult; to deny it is to go in the face of physical science. How many things we do believe that are sustained by evidence far less substantial! _My fourth argument in support of the general principle is based upon odylic reaction._ And what is odylic reaction? What is odyle? you will doubtless inquire. It is, indeed, a branch of science emphatically new. I know of no account of it, save what appears in a late work, of nearly five hundred pages, by Baron Reichenbach, of Vienna, entitled "Researches on Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallization, and Chemical Attraction, in their Relations to the Vital Force," translated by William Gregory, professor of chemistry in the University of Edinburgh. This writer endeavors to show, by a great number of experiments, that there exists in all bodies, and throughout the universe, a peculiar principle, analogous to magnetism, electricity, light, and heat, yet distinct from them all, to which he gives the name of _odyle_. It is most manifest in powerful magnets; next in crystals, and exists in the human body, the sun, moon, stars, heat, electricity, chemical action, and, in fact, the whole material universe. Those who are most sensitive to this influence are persons of feeble health, especially somnambulists; but it is found that about one third of individuals, taken promiscuously, and many in good health, are sensible of it; and it was by a series of observations on persons of all classes and conditions for years, that the facts have been elicited. The inquiry seems to have been conducted with great fairness and scientific skill, and the author has the confidence of several of the most distinguished scientific men in Europe. If there be no mistake in the results, they promise to explain philosophically many popular superstitions, and also the phenomena of mesmerism, without a resort to superhuman agency, either satanic or angelic. They yield, also, an interesting support to the principle of this lecture. Says Baron Reichenbach, "There is nothing in these observations [which he had just detailed] that, after the contents of the preceding treatises, can much surprise us; but they are certainly a fine additional confirmation of what has been stated in regard to the sun and moon, and also of the fact that the whole material universe, even beyond our earth, acts on us with the very same kind of influence which resides in all terrestrial objects; and lastly, it shows that we stand in a connection of mutual influence, hitherto unsuspected, with the universe; so that, in fact, the stars are not altogether devoid of action on our sublunary, perhaps even on our practical, world, and on the mental processes of some heads."--P. 162. By the experiments here referred to by this author, he had endeavored to show, that even the light of the stars exerted an odylic influence upon the human system; that is, certain effects independent altogether of their light; and if there be no mistake in the experiments, they certainly do show this. Such a fact almost realizes the suggestions already made, that beings in other spheres may possess such an exaltation of sensibilities as to be able to learn what is going on in this world, and that it is easy to conceive how our sensorium may be raised to the same exalted pitch. _My fifth argument, illustrative of the general principle, is based upon chemical reaction._ Mechanical reaction changes the form and position of bodies; chemical reaction alters their constitution. By the decomposition of some compounds, the elements are obtained for forming others; and such changes are going on around us and within us in great numbers unperceived. In the worlds above us, and in the earth beneath us, from its circumference to its centre, the transmutations of chemistry are in progress, and many of them are modified by the agency of man; so that here is another channel through which human actions exert an influence upon the material universe, and to an extent which we cannot measure. Let us look at some of the modes in which this is done. Take, in the first place, the facts respecting photography, or the art of obtaining sketches of objects by means of the action of light. This is strictly a chemical process. In a beam of light, that comes to us from the sun, we find not only rays of light and heat, but chemical rays, which act upon some bodies to change their constitution. When these rays are reflected from a human countenance, and fall upon a silvered plate, that has been coated with iodine and bromine, they leave an impression, which is fixed and brought out as a portrait by the vapor of mercury and some other agents. Here the chemical changes produced by these rays are exceedingly perfect; but they produce effects upon many other substances, artificially or naturally prepared; such as paper, for instance, immersed in a solution of bichromate of potash, or upon vegetation, whose green color is probably the result of this action, (as is obvious from the fact that plants growing in the dark are destitute of color.) Indeed, a large part of the changes of color in nature depend upon these invisible rays. It seems, then, that this photographic influence pervades all nature; nor can we say where it stops. We do not know but it may imprint upon the world around us our features, as they are modified by various passions, and thus fill nature with daguerreotype impressions of all our actions that are performed in daylight. It may be, too, that there are tests by which nature, more skilfully than any human photographist, can bring out and fix those portraits, so that acuter senses than ours shall see them, as on a great canvas, spread over the material universe. Perhaps, too, they may never fade from that canvas, but become specimens in the great picture gallery of eternity. The thought may perhaps cross some mind, that, though those human actions which are performed in sunlight may be imprinted upon the universe, yet no deed of darkness can thus reveal its author, and remain an eternal stigma upon his name. But there is another phase to this subject. What is the evidence that the chemical rays of a sunbeam are rays of light? We know that they are unequally diffused through the spectrum, being most energetic at its violet extremity; but there is no proof that they are visible. They may, like heat, exert their appropriate influence, which seems to be mainly that of deoxidation, and yet not be colorific. If so, we might expect them to operate in the dark; and experiment proves that they do. An engraving on paper, placed between an iodized silver plate and an amalgamated copper plate, was left in the dark for fifteen hours. On exposing the amalgamated plate to the vapor of mercury, "a very nice impression of the engraving was brought out--it having been effected through the thickness of the paper."--Mr. Hunt, _"On the Changes which Bodies are capable of undergoing in Darkness," Phil. Mag._ vol. xxii. p. 277.--Many like experiments prove the existence; among bodies, of a power analogous to, if not identical with, that which accompanies light, and is the basis of the photographic process. Some philosophers do not regard them as identical. But this is of little consequence in my present argument. For all agree that there is a power in nature capable of impressing the outlines of some objects upon others in total darkness. In respect to such cases, there are one or two facts deserving of special notice. And, first. We must not infer, because man has yet been able to bring out to human view but a few examples of this sort, that they are, therefore, few in nature. Rather should the discovery of a few lead to the conclusion that nature may be full of them, and that a more delicate and refined chemistry may yet disclose them. For the few known cases give us a glimpse of a recondite law of nature, which most likely pervades creation. Some regard these dark rays as neither light, nor heat, nor chemical rays, but a new element; but, whatever its nature, no reason can be given why it should operate only in a few cases, and those of artificial preparation. More probably, through this influence, all bodies brought into contact, or proximity, impress their images upon one another; and the time may come, when, touched by a more subtile chemistry than man now wields, these images shall take a place among obvious and permanent things in the universe, to the honor and glory of some, but to the amazement and everlasting contempt of more. Of more, I say; for wickedness has oftener sought the concealment of darkness than modest virtue. The foulest enormities of human conduct have always striven to cover themselves with the shroud of night. The thief, the counterfeiter, the assassin, the robber, the murderer, and the seducer, feel comparatively safe in the midnight darkness, because no human eye can scrutinize their actions. But what if it should turn out that sable night, to speak paradoxically, is an unerring photographist! What if wicked men, as they open their eyes from the sleep of death, in another world, should find the universe hung round with faithful pictures of their earthly enormities, which they had supposed forever lost in the oblivion of night! What scenes for them to gaze at forever! They may now, indeed, smile incredulously at such a suggestion; but the disclosures of chemistry may well make them tremble. Analogy does make it a scientific probability that every action of man, however deep the darkness in which it was performed, has imprinted its image upon nature, and that there may be tests which shall draw it into daylight, and make it permanent so long as materialism endures. There is another chemical principle, called _catalysis_, through which human actions may make powerful and permanent impressions on the universe, and that, too, unperceived by man. In some cases, the mere presence of a certain agent, in a small quantity, will produce extensive changes of constitution in other bodies, while the agent itself remains unaltered. Thus a strip of platinum will determine the union of oxygen and hydrogen in the platinum lamp; and sulphuric acid, in a solution of starch, will change it first into gum, and then into sugar; while neither the platinum nor the acid experiences any change. These are called _catalytic_ changes. More often, however, the catalytic agent is itself in the process of change, and it produces an analogous change in other bodies. A familiar example is yeast, or ferment. This substance contains a principle called _diastase_, one part of which is capable of converting two thousand parts of starch into sugar; and this is what is done in the familiar process of fermentation, when we always see verified the scriptural declaration, _A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump._ The precise manner in which the diastase operates in these cases we may not be able to explain. The particles of the diastase, being themselves in motion, possess the power of putting in motion the particles of other bodies; and these, again, operate upon others, and so on, often to an astonishing extent. In the case of the platinum and the acid, however, no change takes place in their molecules, and we can only state it, as an unexplained fact, that they do produce changes in other bodies. We have other examples of catalytic influences in nature, exhibiting an agency still more subtile and energetic. I refer to contagious and epidemic diseases in animals and plants. An influence goes abroad, and seems to be propagated through the atmosphere, traversing whole continents, and crossing wide oceans, powerful and deadly in its effects, yet inappreciable by the most delicate mechanical or chemical tests. But the phenomena admit of explanation by supposing a movement, either in the particles of the atmosphere, or of the still more subtile and elastic medium that pervades all space; a movement started at a particular spot, as the cholera in India, and the small-pox or some epidemic from some focus, and communicating an unhealthy movement from atom to atom, till it has encircled the earth and mowed down its hecatombs. Now, when we look at such facts, who can suppose it improbable that man, who can hardly lift a finger without producing some chemical change, should start some of these movements, that may reach far beyond his imagination? And here, as in the cases that have preceded, we must not estimate the actual change in the constitution of bodies by the apparent; for we know that multitudes of such changes are passing within us and around us, without our cognizance; and yet there may be chemical eyes in the universe quick enough to see them all, and to follow them onward to the final result; for there must be a final resultant of all such forces; nor can we doubt that, some time or other, and to some beings, if not to ourselves, it will be manifest. Here, then, is another mode in which a chemical influence may go forth from us, reaching the utmost limits of matter and of time; nay, perhaps extending into eternity, and revealing our actions to the finer sensibilities of exalted beings. _I derive my sixth argument in support of the general principle from organic reaction._ Few persons, save the zoölogist and comparative anatomist, have any idea of the great nicety and delicacy of the relations that exist between all the species of animals and plants, so that what affects one affects all the rest. Perhaps the subject may be illustrated by supposing all the species of organic beings to be distributed at different distances through a hollow sphere, while between them all there is a mutual repulsion, and the whole are retained in the form of a sphere by an attracting force directed to the centre. By such an arrangement, if one species be taken out of the sphere, or its repellency become stronger or weaker, the relative position of all the rest would be altered. No matter how many millions of species there are, the movements of one will cause a reaction among all the rest. Now, this illustration, although an approximation, falls short of representing the actual state of things in nature. It is no exaggeration to say that a relation similar to the supposed one exists throughout the vast dominions of animate beings; so that you cannot obliterate or change one species without affecting all the rest. Often the change is effected so slowly and indirectly that the beings experiencing it are unconscious of it; or they may realize some slight disturbance of the balance in organic nature, and yet be unconscious of the cause. By the illustration above given, when one or more species is removed from the supposed sphere, or its repellent force weakened or strengthened, although an influence will reach all the other species, yet a new equilibrium will soon be established, and no permanently bad effects seem to follow. But not so in nature. There the balance originally fixed between different beings by infinite wisdom is the best possible; and every change, not intended by Providence, must be for the worse. It was intended, for instance, that man should subdue forests and extirpate noxious plants, as well as ferocious and noxious animals; and, therefore, such a change operates to his advantage, but to the injury of the inferior animals. Yet often he pushes this exterminating process so far as to injure himself also. Thus the farmer wages a relentless war against certain birds, because of some slight evils which they occasion. But when they are extirpated, opportunity is given for noxious insects to multiply, and to bring upon the farmer evils much greater than those he thus escapes. To prevent an excessive multiplication of some species is one of the grand objects of the present balance established among the whole. Such an increase is an inevitable effect of the extinction of a species, and it often occasions great mischief. The carnivorous species, especially, were intended to act as nature's police, to prevent a too great increase of the herbivorous races, which are rendered excessively fruitful to keep the world full. If, then, a carnivorous species become extinct, the species on which it has fed will so multiply as to prove great nuisances, and to produce wide disorder among many species, not only of animals, but of plants. And often has man, in this way, by the extermination of species, in particular districts, unwittingly brought a powerful reaction on himself. On the Island of New Zealand, within one or two hundred years past, eight or ten species of gigantic birds--the dinornis and palapteryx--have become extinct, probably through the persecution of man. The natives, without doubt, hunted them down for food, until all disappeared: and as no quadruped of much size inhabits the island, we think there is no little plausibility in the suggestion of Professor Owen, that when the birds were all gone, or nearly gone, the natives were tempted to the practice of cannibalism, as the only means of gratifying their passion for meat. What a terrible retribution for disturbing the equilibrium of organic nature! The records of zoölogy and botany afford endless illustration of this subject. But the great truth which they all teach is, that so intimately are we related to other beings, that almost every action of ours reacts upon them for good or evil; for good, upon the whole, when we conform to the laws which God has established; and for evil, when by their violation we disturb the equilibrium of organized nature, and produce irregular action. In this latter case, we cannot tell where the disturbance, thus introduced, will end; for it is not a periodical oscillation, like the perturbations of the heavenly bodies, nor a mere change of position and intensity by mechanical forces. But does not this law of mutual influence between organic beings extend to other worlds? Why should it not be transmitted by means of the luminiferous ether to the limits of the universe? Who knows but a blow struck upon a single link of organic beings here may be felt through the whole circle of animate existence in all worlds? That is a narrow view of God's work, which isolates the organic races on this globe from the rest of the universe. The more philosophical view throws the golden chain of influence around the whole animal creation, whether small or great, near or remote. Reverting to the reasoning which we employed in tracing out the extent of mechanical reaction, we shall see that organic reaction may extend not only to other worlds, but also into eternity. For if the matter of the universe is to survive the conflagration of the last day, the future economy of life must have some connection with the present, whether this earth or some other part of the universe be the theatre of its development. I speak here not of moral influences, which we know will pass over from time into eternity, but of a physical reaction, which may also reach beyond the same gulf. For at least a part of those creatures, who in this world have felt the modifying power of other beings, will survive the world's final catastrophe, and occupy material, though spiritual bodies, whose germ is represented as derived from their bodies on earth. We have reason, then, to suppose some connection and modifying influence between them. And we might show, also, that moral causes, which so affect the physical character here, may exert a like power in eternity. But time will not permit the argument to be followed out. The conclusion, then, from this argument also, is, that probably every action of ours on earth modifies the condition and destiny of every other created being in this and other worlds through time and eternity. What though human experience, dependent on the bluntness of mortal sensibilities, cannot demonstrate such an influence? Shall the gross perceptions of this disordered world be made the standard of all that exists? Rather let us listen to the suggestions of science, which tell us of the possibility of senses far more acute in other worlds, and in a future state of being--senses that can trace out and feel the vibrations of the delicate web of organic influence that binds together the great and the small, the past, the present, and the future, throughout the universe. _My seventh argument in support of the general principle depends upon mental reaction._ Mental reaction operates in two ways--indirectly and directly; indirectly through matter, directly by the influence of mind upon mind, without an intervening medium. When describing electric reactions, I have shown how our thoughts and volitions change the electric, chemical, and even mechanical condition of the body, and, through these media, that of all the material universe; and I need not repeat that argument. But to modify the inanimate world through these agencies necessarily affects all other intellects, which are connected with matter; and since man in a future world is to assume a spiritual body, we may reasonably suppose that all created beings are in some way connected with matter; and, therefore, by means of materialism, through the subtile agencies that have been named, we may be sure that an influence goes out from every thought and volition of ours, and reaches every other intellect in the wide creation. I know not whether, in other worlds, their inhabitants possess sensibilities acute enough to be conscious of this influence; certainly, in this world, it is only to a limited extent that men are conscious of it. Yet we must admit that it exists and acts, or deny the demonstrated verities of science. But is there not evidence that mind sometimes acts directly upon other minds, without any gross, intervening media? It may, indeed, be doubted whether any created intellect operates, except in connection with some form of matter. Yet there are certain facts in the history of individuals in an abnormal state, which show that one mind acts upon another, independent of the senses, or any other material means or intercommunication discoverable by the senses. Take the details of sleep-waking, or somnambulism; and do not they present us with numerous cases in which impressions are made by one mind upon another, even when separated beyond the sphere of the senses? Take the facts respecting double consciousness, and those where the power was possessed of reading the thoughts, of others, or the facts relating to prevision; and surely they cannot be explained but by the supposition of a direct influence of one mind upon another. Still more decided in this respect are the most familiar facts of artificial somnambulism, called mesmerism. Whatever may be our views of this unsettled branch of knowledge as a whole, it would seem as if we could not doubt that its facts prove the action of mind upon mind, independently of bodily organization, without rejecting evidence which would prove any thing else. Now, if we admit that mind does operate upon other minds while we are in the body, independent of the body, can we tell how far the influence extends? If electricity, or some other subtile agent, be essential to this action, it would indeed transfer this example to electric reaction, but it would still be real. Yet, in the absence of all certain proof of the electric power in this case, and with certain proof of the existence of such an influence, we may place it among those marvellous means by which man makes an impression, wide beyond our present knowledge, upon the universe, material and mental; and it ought to make us feel that our lightest thoughts and feeblest volitions may reach the outer limit of intellectual life, and its consequences meet us in distant worlds, and far down the track of eternity. _Finally. I derive an argument in support of the general principle from geological reaction._ By this expression, I mean those reactions of whose existence geology furnishes the proof. They are, in fact, the reactions already considered; but geology proves that they have actually operated in past time in many instances, by evidence registered on the rocks, and thus tends to confirm our reasoning derived from other sources. I do not mean that the proof is before us of precisely such an action as our reasoning has supposed, but so analogous to that supposed as to lend it confirmation. A few examples will illustrate the argument. The effects of mechanical reaction are, perhaps, most frequent and striking in the rocks, especially those deposited from water. Here we have, for instance, the _ripple marks_, which present us with a faithful register of the slightest movement of the waters, and also of the motions of the atmosphere, or of the currents in it, that agitated the waters. In the almost impalpable powder that sometimes constitutes the rocks, we can trace the slightest erosion and comminution of the strata from which the deposit was worn. In the petrified rain drops we find an indelible trace of the most gentle shower. And here, too, we can see the direction of the wind. Such facts, also, imply the operation of electricity and gravity, of heat and cold, collecting and condensing the rain, and bringing it down; and so similar to present meteorological phenomena do these ancient showers appear to have been, that we may conclude that electrical reactions, in all respects, were the same as at present. The preservation of the tracks of numerous animals in some of the sandstones shows us how deep and permanent an impression the most trivial action of a living being may make. In these footmarks we sometimes notice a change in the direction of the animal along the surface; and, of course, an impression deeper or more shallow than usual, of parts of the foot, by the action of the muscles employed in changing the animal's course. Here, then, we have the register of so slight an action as an increased or diminished action of a particular muscle of the leg. Nay, further, such a movement affords us an infallible register of an act of the animal's will, since that must have preceded the change; and that implies an electric current, first inward along the sensor nerves, and then outward along the motor nerves. Geology lays open before us a map of the changes in organic nature from the apparent commencement of life on the globe, and thus enables us to see examples of this kind of reaction. We find different economies of life to have appeared, but all of them most wisely adapted to existing circumstances. In each economy we perceive the balance between the different tribes provided for. If, for instance, one race of carnivorous species died out, new races were created to occupy their place, so that the herbivorous species should not overrun the globe. Thus, when the early sauroid fishes diminished, the gigantic and carnivorous marine saurian reptiles were introduced. And when the chambered shells, whose occupants were carnivorous, disappeared with the secondary period, numerous univalve mollusks were created to feed on other animals; although previously that family were herbivorous. It would seem, however, as if each successive economy of organic life had contained within itself the seeds of extinction. It was, indeed, mainly a change of climate which first caused some species to disappear. But their destruction so disturbed the balance of creation that others followed, until total extinction was the result, which, however, was often hastened by catastrophes. Thus we have in the stony volume of the earth's history actual examples of effects resulting from the acts, and even volitions, of the inferior animals, which can never be erased while the rocks endure. If, therefore, with our imperfect senses, we can see these results so distinctly, we may safely infer that human conduct, and thought, and volition impress upon the globe, nay, upon the universe, marks which nothing can obliterate. The thoughts which press upon the mind, in view of such a conclusion, are numerous and interesting. A few we can hardly help noticing. _In the first place, what a centre of influence does man occupy!_ It is just as if the universe were a tremulous mass of jelly which every movement of his made to vibrate from the centre to the circumference. It is as if the universe were one vast picture gallery, in some part of which the entire history of this world, and of each individual, is shown on canvas, sketched by countless artists, with unerring skill. It is as if each man had his foot upon the point where ten thousand telegraphic wires meet from every part of the universe, and he were able, with each volition, to send abroad an influence along these wires, so as to reach every created being in heaven and in earth. It is as if we had the more than Gorgon power of transmuting every object around us into forms beautiful or hideous, and of sending that transmuting process forward through time and through eternity. It is as if we were linked to every created being by a golden chain, and every pulsation of our heart or movement of our mind modified the pulsation of every other heart and the movements of every other intellect. Wonderful, wonderful is the position man occupies, and the part he acts! And yet it is not a dream, but the deliberate conclusion of true science. _Secondly. We see in this subject the probability that our minutest actions, and perhaps our thoughts, from day to day, are known throughout the universe._ I speak not here of the divine omniscience, which we know reaches every thought and action; but I refer to created beings. Science shows us how, in a variety of modes, such knowledge may be conveyed to them by natural agencies; and we have only to suppose them to be possessed of far more acute sensibilities than man's, in order to be affected by these agencies as we are by more powerful impressions. And when we consider how fettered and depressed a condition this world obviously is in, because of its sinfulness, who will doubt but the unfallen beings of other spheres may enjoy those keener perceptions that will bring our whole history distinctly before them, day by day? The thought is, indeed, startling, but not unphilosophical. If this suggestion be true, then may we indulge the thought as highly probable that our friends, who have gone before us into the eternal world, may be as familiar with our conduct, our words, and even our thoughts, as we are ourselves. If we are acting as we ought, and so as will please them, this must be an animating idea; but if we are not, let it serve to stimulate us to our duty, if a sense of the divine omniscience is not sufficient. _We infer from this subject, thirdly, the probability that, in a future state, the power of reading the past history of the world, and of individuals, may be possessed by man._ The nature of the future spiritual body, and of the heavenly state and employments, impresses the mind with the belief that it will be a condition far more exalted than the present, and that the inlets to the soul will be cleared of all obstructions; so that no impression made on such a sensorium shall fail to give the mind a distinct perception. In heaven, such extreme sensibility might become a source of richest pleasure; in the world of despair, an instrument of severe punishment; yet in both cases it might be the natural result of a man's earthly course. Now, such an indefinite exaltation of the perceptions in futurity scarcely any one will doubt. Why should we doubt any more that it may rise so high that man will be able to read, through the agencies we have pointed out, the minutest action and thought in human experience? If, as we have reason to suppose, angels can do it now, the Bible informs us that we shall be like the angels. If this view be admitted, then it may be that the present world is the only spot in the universe where deeds of wickedness can be concealed. In a sinful world we can see reasons why the power of concealment should exist to some extent. For though no man should do or think any thing which he is ashamed to have known, yet, if all the plans of men for the promotion of good objects were fully known from their inception, the wicked could generally defeat them. But in a world of perfect holiness no such necessity would exist, since the universal desire would be to promote every worthy object; and, therefore, it may be that every soul will lie perfectly open to the inspection of all other souls--an arrangement that seems appropriate to such a world. In what an aspect does this principle present the conduct of the suicide! Tired of earthly scenes, he rushes unbidden into eternity to escape them. But instead of escaping them, he goes where every one of these mortal evils--yea, and multiplied, too, a thousand fold--shall start up in his path with a distinctness of which he had no conception. And henceforth he can never find, as in this world, even a partial deliverance from their terrible vividness. It is as if, to avoid the moonlight, because too bright, a man should plunge into the sun. Again, if this principle be true, how annoying will it be, to the man who has not acted well his part in this world, to meet in eternity the ever-recurring mementoes of his evil deeds! He will hardly be able to open his eyes without seeing some plague-spot on creation as the result of his conduct; and although infinite wisdom and power have stayed the plague, no thanks are due to him. The tendencies of his conduct on earth will be most distressing to look upon; and these shall not cease to lie open before him till the last sand in the glass of eternity is run out. But, on the other hand, how does this principle strew the path of eternity with flowers to that man who, in this world, finds his highest pleasure in doing good! Not merely his highest and noblest deeds of benevolence here shall loom up in bright perspective there, but a thousand acts of private beneficence, unknown to the world and forgotten by himself, shall stand out distinctly on the moving panorama of that better world; and he will be amazed to see what a wide and blessed influence they have exerted, and will exert, as the catalytic influence moves on and widens in its endless march. It might have ruined him to see these fruits in this world, by exciting pride and vain glory; but it will awaken there only gratitude and love to the grace that enabled him thus, in time, to sow the seeds which should fill eternity with flowers, and fragrance, and golden fruit. _Finally. What new and astonishing avenues of knowledge_ does this subject show us will probably open upon the soul in eternity! I do not now speak of the new knowledge of the divine character which will then astonish and delight the soul by direct intuition, but rather of those new channels that will be thrown open, through which a knowledge of other worlds, and of other created beings, can be conveyed to the soul almost illimitably. And just consider what a field that will be. At present we know nothing of the inhabitants of other worlds, and it is only by analogy that we make their existence probable. Nor, with our present senses, could we learn any thing respecting them but by an actual visit to each world. But let the suggestions to which our reasonings have conducted us prove true,--let our sensorium be so modified and spiritualized that every thought, word, and action in those worlds shall come to us through pulsations falling upon the organ of vision, or by an electric current through the nerve of sensation, or by some transmitted chemical change,--and on what vantage ground should we be placed! Without leaving the spot of our residence, supposing the universe constituted as it now is, we might study out the character and constitution of the countless inhabitants of at least one hundred millions of worlds, which we know to exist; nay, of ten thousand times that number, which probably exist. Every movement of matter around us, however infinitesimal, would be freighted with new knowledge, perhaps from distant spheres. Every ray of light that met our gaze from the broad heavens above us would print an image upon our visual organs of events transpiring in distant worlds, while every electrical flash might convey some idea to our mind never before thought of. Every chemical ray, too, might inform us of scenes far off in the regions of night; and then who can calculate what organic and mental influences might be transmitted to us from beings of all ranks and scattered through all worlds? To speak of organs, indeed, as the medium of perceptions in another world, may be absurd; but we mean only, by that term, whatever may be substituted for our present organs; and we assume that the properties of matter will exist forever; and, therefore, we may presume that light, and electricity, and chemical affinity, and corporeal and mental influences will, under modified forms, be the modes by which knowledge shall ever be transmitted. At least, assuming that they will be, and the magnificent conceptions we have now traced out may be hereafter realized. And surely, if they be only slightly probable, the anticipation is full of thrilling interest, and the moral effect of dwelling upon it must be salutary. It spreads out before us fields of knowledge which eternity can never exhaust, and attractive so immeasurably above all the knowledge of earth that we almost wait impatiently for the summons to break from our prison-house below, and to rise on our new pinions to celestial scenes. If such rich means of knowledge of created things be enjoyed by celestial minds, and they can drink it in to the full measure of their faculties, then one inevitable effect must be to make them unite, ever and anon, in adoration and praise to the infinite Being who created and sustains all, and whose glory is illustrated by all his works. And we can conceive that there may be stated periods, when, from every part of the universe, the anthem of praise comes rolling onwards towards some central spot, where the divine presence is most felt. O, how gladly will each happy soul, animated by every new accession of knowledge, join in the swelling pæan as it mounts up to the third heavens! Who knows but this is the hour when the peal is beginning? O, let not this world be the only spot in the universe where it shall be unheard and unheeded. Surely we see enough of the divine glory here to begin the song, which we hope to pour forth in loftier notes on high, _unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God; to whom be honor and glory, forever and ever. Amen._ LECTURE XIII. THE VAST PLANS OF JEHOVAH. It is interesting and instructive to trace the history of man's progress in the knowledge of the existence, character, and plans of Jehovah. We shall find that progress to have been marked by epochs, rather than continuous advancement. Some new revelation from heaven, or some new discovery in science, has given a sudden expansion to his views of the Deity, which have then remained in a good degree stationary for a long period. My chief object in this lecture is to show what accessions to our knowledge of the divine plans have been derived from science, especially from geology. But it will give greater distinctness and impressiveness to the subject to take a review of the principal steps by which the human mind has reached its present accurate spiritual and enlarged views of the Deity. _We will first look at man in the rudest condition in society, in which he has any idea of the existence of beings superior to himself._ For there is a state of his being in which no such ideas exist in his mind; tribes of men, and especially individuals, who have lived in a wild state, away from all human intercourse, have been found with no idea of a superior being of any sort. Other tribes have existed a little more elevated above the irrational animals, and these have an impression, derived perhaps from their moral sense, or growing out of their superstitious fears, that some power exists in the universe greater than themselves. But having never entertained an abstract idea on any other subject, and depending alone upon their senses for their knowledge, they identify God with the most remarkable objects of nature. They listen to his voice in the wind and the thunder, in the ocean's roar, and the volcano's bellowing; and they see him in the sun, moon, and stars. They feel that he must be superior to themselves; but how much superior, they know not. They never think of him as infinite, because the idea of infinity on any subject never enters their mind. They conceive of the earth only as a plain of considerable extent, bounded by a circle, beyond which their thoughts never wander; and they look up to the heavens as a dome, perhaps solid, studded by luminous bodies, it may be a few feet or yards in diameter. They suppose that, somehow or other, this superior Being has the control of their destinies; but the idea of any thing like worship is too spiritual to be conceived of, except, perhaps, some superstitious rite, performed to deprecate the divine displeasure. In short, every thing in their notion of God is indefinite, gross, and confined to the narrow sphere of the senses. _In the second place, polytheism, especially among nations somewhat civilized, is an advance in man's conceptions of the Supreme Being._ Polytheism probably originated in the deification of distinguished men. Superior minds, who had been the leaders or the benefactors of mankind, were suddenly torn from an admiring world by death. Their bodies were left behind, but the animating principle, the immortal mind, had vanished in a moment; and it was a most natural inquiry, even among the most ignorant, whether some undying principle had not escaped and gone to a higher sphere; for it would be difficult to conceive how so much intelligence and virtue should be quenched in a moment in eternal night. It would be a most natural and gratifying conclusion with survivors, that their departed leaders and benefactors still lived, and were in some way concerned in watching over their interests, and in controlling their destinies. Conjectures of this sort would, in a few generations, settle into positive belief. Now, this would be a most important advance upon the gross materialism, and indefinite ideas, which identified divinity with striking objects of nature; for if distinguished warriors and statesmen were still alive after their bodies were laid in the grave, there must have escaped, at the moment of death, some principle too subtile to be cognizable by the senses, or by chemical, mechanical, or electrical agencies; and which, therefore, may have been immaterial. At least, by such a belief, men would be led insensibly to form an idea of the human soul as an extremely tenuous, if not immaterial, principle. Especially would educated men--those devoted to philosophical pursuits--come at length to have a clear conception of a spiritual being, neither visible by the senses, nor dependent upon the senses for the exercise of its faculties. Very soon would the imagination fill the universe with such beings, and conceive them as holding intercourse with one another, and as presiding over all the objects of this lower world, and directing all its destinies. It would be very natural, however, to endow these superior beings with human characteristics, and to suppose them actuated by human passions; and thus would the celestial society be represented as a counterpart of that on earth, deformed by the same vices and crimes. This would lead to the idea of a gradation in rank, power, and intellect among the gods, and to the conception of one as supreme. In the popular mythology, however, even Jupiter was represented as acting under the influence of selfishness, pride, lust, and passion; and as sometimes brought into peril by his powerful inferiors. Some of the philosophers of Greece and Rome did, indeed, give descriptions of their supreme divinity not unworthy the biblical views of Jehovah. It may be that they got the clew to these just and elevated conceptions from the Bible. But it is not difficult to conceive that, in the manner which I have described, they might, by reasoning, with, perhaps, some hints derived from revelation, have gradually attained to these just and noble conceptions of the supreme divinity. Yet it ought not to be forgotten that these exalted views of the philosophers were not shared at all by the common people, and that even the philosophers themselves were for the most part polytheists. The next step in man's knowledge of God was an immeasurable advance upon polytheism. _I refer to the revelation which God made of himself to the Jews in the Old Testament._ Most of this revelation did, indeed, precede the writings of the Greek and Roman philosophers, but it was confined to a rude and almost unknown people, until the days of their glory had gone by, and did not spread over the globe till an opportunity had been afforded to prove that _the world by wisdom knew not God_. You may, indeed, find, in the writings of a few philosophers, passages descriptive of the natural attributes of the Deity that will compare favorably with those of the Old Testament. But his moral attributes, his benevolence, mercy, justice, and holiness, are brought out in the Old Testament in a far more distinct and impressive manner than in all other ancient writings. Another point, and a vital one, with the writers of the Old Testament, in which that inspired volume goes infinitely beyond the philosophers, is the unity of God. They teach, as a fundamental principle, and with all the earnestness which inspiration can bestow, not only that Jehovah is supreme, but that he is God alone, and that no other gods exist. You may, indeed, find statements to this effect in the works of the philosophers; but the conduct of Socrates, the most enlightened of them all,--in his dying moments,--in directing a sacrifice to be made to Æsculapius, is a good practical commentary upon their doctrine of the divine unity. It shows that, with some correct notions of the supreme divinity, they believed in the existence of inferior deities; or, at least, they did not regard the popular error on this subject of importance enough to require them boldly to testify against it. But such testimony constitutes the burden of the Old Testament, as if all other religious truths were of little importance without it. And so far as these inspired books succeeded in fixing this doctrine in the minds of the Jews, they performed an immense service for religion. They swept at once from the universe the thirty thousand divinities of Greece and Rome, and placed Jehovah only on the throne. But, for some reason or other, polytheism has always been a doctrine most congenial to human nature; especially to the uncultivated mind; and the probability is, that the great mass of the Jews, while they believed in the supremacy of Jehovah, still supposed that the gods of the heathen had a real existence. This certainly was the case before the Babylonish exile, though doubtless the patriarchs had more correct notions. This fact explains the otherwise unaccountable disposition of the Jews to fall away to idolatry, in spite of all which Jehovah did to preserve among them his true worship. On the subject, also, of the divine spirituality, we have evidence that the notions of the great mass of the Jewish nation were low and confused. They distinguished, it is true, very clearly between the body and the soul. But they probably conceived of the latter as a very subtile, invisible, corporeal essence, and not that pure, immaterial substance which is understood by that term in metaphysics. The abstract ideas attached to the soul in the nineteenth century probably never entered their minds; and though in strict language they might be called materialists, they were by no means such materialists as modern times have produced, who understandingly deny the existence of the soul, and regard it as a function of the brain. The Jews thought of God as the most subtile essence of which they could form any idea; but whether he were material, or immaterial, probably they never inquired. And it cannot escape the notice of a reader of the Old Testament how frequently God is represented by figures derived from material objects. This was in accommodation to the rude and uncultivated state of most minds in those early days. Purely abstract truths would have conveyed no ideas to minds which had never been accustomed to abstractions. Hence it is, that we meet in the Bible with so many descriptions of the Deity, which theologians and philosophers denominate _anthropopathic_ and _anthropomorphic_. It was in accommodation to the uncultivated state of common minds, which could form no conceptions of God that were not founded on some property belonging to man. The language of the sacred writers does, indeed, when correctly interpreted, convey the idea of the most perfectly simple, spiritual, and immaterial substance as constituting the divine essence; and minds accustomed to abstract ideas find no difficulty in enucleating the spiritual meaning of Scripture. But had the divine Being been described by abstract terms, the great mass of men, even at the present day, would receive no impressive conception of the Godhead. God, therefore, in the Old Testament, revealed as much concerning himself and his plans, as men would understand. But other revelations and developments would follow, when the human mind should be prepared to receive and appreciate them. _The revelations of Christianity have brought to light so much respecting the moral character and moral government of Jehovah, as to leave little further to be desired or expected in this world._ The natural attributes of the Deity have a more spiritual and less anthropopathic aspect in the New Testament than in the Old. We are told in the former distinctly, that _God is a spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth_. But God's moral character, as developed in the New Testament, in the plan of redemption and salvation, presents us with a perfection and a glory unknown in all previous revelations. We have, it is true, in the Old Testament intimations and predictions of the plan, which is fully developed and exemplified in the new dispensation. But these were only shadows of Jesus Christ and him crucified. When he appeared, and by his sufferings, as a substitute for man, reconciled divine justice and mercy, and made a clear exposition of the moral law, and a disclosure of a future state of retributions, a flood of light was thrown upon God's moral character. Every cloud that had rested upon it was cleared away, and immaculate holiness covered it with unapproachable splendor. In short, the human mind is incapable of forming a more correct estimate of moral excellence than is exhibited in the scriptural plan of salvation. The more it is meditated upon, and the more we experience its practical influence, the higher will be our conceptions of the moral glory of the divine character; nor have we reason to suppose that any further revelations would increase our apprehensions of it. For benevolence, mercy, justice, and grace are here exhibited in unlimited, that is, in infinite, glory and perfection, and therefore can never be exceeded. But though the exhibitions of the divine character and plans contained in the Bible are thus perfect and excellent, they are not the only exhibitions which the universe contains, and which man is capable of understanding. _Lo, these are a part of his ways._ The Bible has left the wonders of the natural world where it found them, to be examined and developed by philosophy. Some have thought that it has anticipated a few scientific discoveries; but if it had done this in one instance, it must have carried the same plan through the whole circle of science; else how could readers determine when the sacred writers were describing phenomena according to appearances and general belief, and when according to real scientific truth? But the fact is, scientific discoveries are left to man's ingenuity; and as they are made from time to time, they bring out new and splendid illustrations of the character and plans of Jehovah. Let us now recur to some of these discoveries, that have opened the widest vistas into the arcana of nature. _The discoveries in modern astronomy constitute the fifth step in man's knowledge of God._ In order to see how much man's conceptions of the universe have been enlarged by these discoveries, compare the opinions which prevailed before the introduction of the Copernican system with what is now certain knowledge, founded upon physico-mathematics, respecting the extent of the universe. Then this earth was thought to be the centre and the principal body of the creation, immovably fixed, with the heavenly bodies, generally thought to be of diminutive size, revolving around it every twenty-four hours. The earth, too, except in the opinion of a few sagacious philosophers, was not imagined to be that vast globe which we now understand it to be, but a flat surface, perhaps a few hundred or thousand miles in extent, bounded by a circle, and resting on an imaginary foundation. The heavenly bodies were looked upon as little more than shining points, or at most a few yards, or by the most daring fancies a few miles, in extent. What a change have the telescope, the quadrant, and the transit instrument, aided by profound mathematics, and the talismanic power of the Newtonian theory of gravitation, produced! Every schoolboy now knows that this globe, enormous though it be compared with what the eye can take in from the loftiest eminence, is but a mere speck in creation, and, with the exception of the moon, appearing from other worlds only as one of the smallest stars in their heavens; so small that its extinction would not be noticed. To the ignorant mind, distances and magnitudes exceeding a hundred miles are conceived of only with great difficulty. But the astronomer, when he conceives of magnitudes, must make a thousand miles his shortest unit, and a million of miles when he conceives of distances in the solar system. And when he attempts to go beyond the sun and the planets, the shortest division on his measuring line must be the diameter of the earth's orbit; and even then he will be borne onward so far, not on the wings of imagination, but of mathematics, that this enormous distance has vanished to a point. Even then he has only reached the nearest fixed star, and, of course, has only just entered upon the outer limit of creation. He must prepare himself for a still loftier flight. He must give up the diameter of the earth's orbit as the unit of his measurements, because too short, and take as his standard the passage of light, at the rate of two hundred thousand miles per second. With that speed can he go on, until his mind has reckoned up six thousand years of seconds, and he will reach fixed stars whose light has not yet arrived at the earth, because it did not commence its journey till the time of man's creation. But it is not merely in respect to distance and magnitude that astronomy has enlarged our knowledge of the universe. Numerically it has opened a field equally wide. Think of two thousand worlds rolling nightly around us, visible to the naked eye. Take the telescope, and see those two thousand multiply to fifty or one hundred millions, and then recollect how very improbable it is that the keenest optics of earth can reach more than an infinitesimal part of creation. Surely the mind is as much confounded and lost, when it attempts to conceive of the number of the worlds in the universe, as when it contemplates their distances and magnitudes. In respect to number and distance, at least, we find no resting-place but in infinity. Now, when we turn our thoughts to the Author of such a universe, our conceptions of his power, wisdom, and benevolence cannot but enlarge in the same ratio as our views of his works. They must, therefore, experience a prodigious expansion. And, indeed, the merest child in a Christian land, in the nineteenth century, has a far wider and nobler conception of the perfections of Jehovah than the wisest philosopher who lived before astronomy had gone forth on her circumnavigation of the universe. From the fact, also, which astronomy discloses, that worlds are in widely different chemical and geological conditions, some gaseous and transparent, some solid and opaque, and some liquid and incandescent, the mind can hardly avoid the inference that they are fulfilling the vast and varied plans of Jehovah. _The sixth step in man's knowledge of Jehovah has been made by the microscope._ To give any correct idea of the boundless field which that instrument has opened into the infinitesimal parts of creation, it would be necessary to go into details too extended for the present occasion. Perhaps the animalcula or infusoria furnish the best example. "In the clearest waters," says an able writer, "and also in the strongly-troubled acid and salt fluids of the various zones of the earth; in springs, rivers, lakes, and seas; in the internal moisture of living plants and animal bodies; and probably, at times, carried about in the vapor and dust of the whole atmosphere of the earth, exists a world, by the common senses of mankind unperceived, of very minute living beings, which have been called, for the last seventy years, _infusoria_. In the ordinary pursuits of life, this mysterious and infinite kingdom of living creatures is passed by without our knowledge of, or interest in, its wonders. But to the quiet observer how astonishing do these become, when he brings to his aid those optical powers by which his faculty of vision is so much strengthened! In every drop of dirty, stagnant water, we are generally, if not always, able to perceive, by means of the microscope, moving bodies, of from one eleven hundred and fiftieth to one twenty-five thousandth of an inch in diameter, and which often lie packed so closely together that the space between each individual scarcely equals that of their diameter."--Prichard, _History of Infusoria_, p. 2, 1841. Again says he, "It is hardly conceivable that, within the narrow space, [of a grain of mustard-seed,] eight millions of living, active creatures can exist, all richly endowed with the organs and faculties of animal life. Such, however, is the astonishing fact."--_Ib._ p. 3. In short, whoever will thoroughly study this subject will be satisfied that Dr. Ehrenberg does not exceed the truth when he asserts, as the result of his inquiries, that "experience shows an unfathomableness of organic creations, when attention is directed to the smallest space, as it does of stars, when revealing the most immense."--_Prichard_, p. 8. He who follows out the revelations of the telescope, as it penetrates deeper and deeper into space, will feel, when he has seen the remotest object which its power discloses, that there must certainly be a vast unknown region beyond, infinitely exceeding that one over which he has passed. Just so is it with the microscope. It penetrates to an astonishing distance into the infinitesimal forms of organic and inorganic matter; but every improvement in the instrument reaches a new and equally interesting field; and the conclusion forces itself upon the mind that there are regions beyond of indefinite extent, teeming with countless millions even of organic beings, of a size much more diminutive than those yet discovered, and with inorganic forms too minute for the imagination to conceive. Indeed, we can no more set limits to creation in the direction pointed out by the microscope than in that laid open by the telescope. We hence get a most impressive conception of divine wisdom and benevolence, which could thus bestow exquisite organization and life upon atoms minute beyond the power of the imagination to conceive. Indeed, it seems to me that the lesson is even more striking than the contemplation of vast worlds in rapid and harmonious motion; because the latter seem to demand only infinite power, but the former requires infinite wisdom to direct infinite power. _In the seventh and last place, geology has given great enlargement to our knowledge of the divine plans and operations in the universe, and in the following particulars_:-- 1. It expands our ideas of the time in which the material universe has been in existence as much as astronomy does in regard to its extent. To those not familiar with the details of geology, this will probably seem a startling and extravagant assertion. There has been, and still is, an extreme sensitiveness in the minds of intelligent men on this subject. And I highly respect the ground from which their apprehensions spring, viz., a fear that to admit the great antiquity of the globe would bring discredit upon revelation. And yet I believe the most candid and able theologians of the present day do not fear that to admit the existence of the matter of the world previous to the six days' work of creation, is inconsistent with the Mosaic statement. But if we allow any period between its creation and the six demiurgic days, it is no more derogatory to Scripture to make that period ten millions of years than ten years. For if the sacred writer would pass over ten years in silence, he could, with the same propriety, pass over ten millions. Now, the longer I study geology, the nearer do my ideas approximate to the latter number as a measure of the earth's duration. Let us contemplate a few facts. We are able to trace the geological changes that have taken place on the earth since man's existence upon it with a good deal of accuracy. For since his remains are found only in alluvium, we must regard all changes that took place previous to the deposition of that formation to have been of an earlier date than his creation. Now, what are the changes which the last six thousand years have witnessed? In some places, the agency of rivers and other causes have made an accumulation of alluvial matter to the depth of not more than one or two hundred feet, although in particular places it is several hundred feet. These deposits have been pushed forward at the mouths of some large rivers, so as to cover hundreds, and even thousands, of square miles. Oceanic currents have also made deposits in the bottom of wide seas of considerable extent; and in some limited spots these deposits have been consolidated into rock. The action of frost and gravity, also, has crumbled from precipitous ledges angular fragments enough to form a slope of detritus sometimes a hundred feet high. The polyparia, or coral builders, have advanced their work only a few feet in thickness during this period, and soils have accumulated in some places about as much. Volcanic action has occasionally thrown up a new island from the ocean's bed; but only a few of them have been permanent. Some tracts of country, in no case more than a few hundred miles in extent, have, by the same agency, been raised a few feet, or sunk down the same amount. But after all, the earth's surface remains essentially the same as when man was placed upon it. Now, compare these slight changes with those which have preceded it, through the operation of the same agencies, since the first existence of animals upon the globe. I will not contend, with some distinguished geologists, that these same changes have always operated with the same intensity as at present. But there are several circumstances which show that the depositions from water could not have been essentially different in ancient and modern times. Now, just compare six or eight miles in thickness of the fossiliferous deposits of the previous periods with the two hundred feet of alluvium accumulated during the historic period; and, after you have made all reasonable allowance for the greater intensity of action in former times, you will still find yourselves confounded by the incalculable time requisite to pile up such an immense thickness of materials, and then to harden most of them into stone; especially when you call to mind the numerous changes of organic life, and the vast amount of animal remains which they exhibit. A superficial observer might lump such a work, and crowd it into a few thousand years. But the more its details are studied, the longer does the period appear that is requisite for its production. Each successive investigation discovers new evidence of changes in composition, or organic contents, or of vertical movements effected by extremely slow agencies, so as to make the whole work immeasurably long. But when we have gone back to the commencement of animal existence on the globe, we have taken but one step in our review of its early history. The next backward step embraces that wide period during which the stratified, non-fossiliferous rocks--far thicker than the fossiliferous--were deposited; probably by the agency of fire and water. Or if we adopt the metamorphic theory of Mr. Lyell, we shall be still more deeply impressed by the length of that period, during which these rocks were in a course of deposition, consolidation, and metamorphosis. For he supposes them originally deposited from water, just as mud, sand, and gravel now are accumulating in the ocean's bed, and to have enveloped organic beings, as similar materials now do. Next the whole were consolidated, so as to form the exact prototype of the existing fossiliferous rocks; and finally it underwent almost complete fusion, by the slow propagation of internal heat upwards, until all the organic contents were obliterated, and a crystalline structure was substituted. Nay, according to this theory, other systems of rocks, of an analogous character, may have preceded the present primary stratified ones, and have been at length entirely melted into the unstratified; so that we cannot say when organic life first began on the globe. But I will not press this theory, because most of the ablest geologists reject it, at least in its full extent. And we have a period long enough to confound the imagination, if we take the common view, which supposes the non-fossiliferous rocks to have been deposited from water, at a temperature too high to admit the existence of organic beings. We have now gone back to that point in the earth's history when a crust had begun to form over the shoreless ocean of melted matter, of which we have reason to suppose it was then composed. Shall we attempt to trace back that history any farther? The light does, indeed, grow dim, and the clew more and more uncertain, the farther we recede along the track of the earth's existence. Still there are some scattered rays that seem to recall to us a condition of the earth still earlier than that in which it constituted a molten globe. It may have been dissipated into vapor, like a comet, or a nebula; and subsequently, by the slow radiation of its heat, have been condensed into an opaque, though a melted, incandescent mass. Several analogies certainly throw an air of plausibility over this hypothesis. And if such was, indeed, the earliest condition of the earth, the time requisite to condense it into melted matter must have been longer than any other period of its history. Who, now, at all familiar with the dynamics of geological agencies, shall undertake to give an arithmetical expression to the periods that make up the world's entire history? Not only does the reasoning faculty fail to grasp the entire sum, but even imagination, as she flies backwards through period after period, tires in the effort, and brings back not even a conjectural result. The same feeling does, in fact, come over the mind, which she experiences when astronomy has hurried her from world to world, from sun to sun, from system to system, from nebula to nebula, and yet she seems no nearer to the limits of creation than when she started. We know certainly that there are limits; because matter cannot be infinite. But we cannot conjecture where they are fixed. We know, also that there was a time when this world did not exist, an epoch when its entire mass was spoken into existence by the fiat of Jehovah; because the Bible expressly declares it. But that epoch is unrevealed. If there is any truth in geology, it was certainly more than six thousand years ago. Nay, that science carries us as far back into the arcana of time as astronomy does into the arcana of space. Neither the distance in the one case, nor the duration in the other, can be estimated. But there is a sublime inspiration in the effort to grasp the subject; and I see not why there is not as much grandeur and high gratification in the idea of vast duration as of vast expansion. And I see not why we do not gain as much enlargement of our conceptions of the plans of Jehovah respecting the universe in the one case as in the other. We cannot but infer, from the pre-Adamic state of our world, that it must have subserved other purposes than to sustain its present inhabitants. 2. In the second place, geology gives us impressive examples of the extent of organic life on the globe since its creation. I shall not contend, with some geologists, that even the primary crystalline rocks may once have been filled with organic remains, which have been obliterated by heat; and that, in this way, there may have been a number of creations of organized beings on the globe, of which no trace now remains. I take as the basis of my argument only the relics of animals and plants actually found in the rocks. And when one sees mountain masses, often of small shells, and spread over wide areas, he is amazed to learn how prolific nature has been. What a countless number of vegetables, too, must have been required to produce beds of coal from one to fifty feet thick, and extending over thousands of square miles, and alternating several times with sandstone in the same basin! There is reason to believe, too, that the number of animals preserved in the strata bears only a small proportion to those which have been utterly destroyed and decomposed into their original elements. For example, in the sandstone along Connecticut River, the tracks of more than forty species of bipeds and quadrupeds have been found most distinctly marked. Some of these bipeds must have been of colossal size--as much as twelve or fifteen feet in height. And yet scarcely any other vestige of their existence has been discovered. They were the giant rulers of that valley for centuries; but they have all vanished. How numerous, then, may have been the softer animals of the ancient world, which have not left even a footmark to certify their existence to coming generations! But the facts recently brought to light respecting infusoria and polythalamia fill us with the greatest admiration of the extent of organic life upon the globe. We have already seen that some of these animals are so minute that eight millions of them are found in a space not larger than a mustard-seed; and yet they had skeletons of silex, lime, and iron; and, of course, these skeletons have been preserved; and, though of the smallest size, it requires not less than forty-one billions to make a single cubic inch; yet deposits of them, or of species not much larger, occur, several feet in thickness, and extending over several square miles. Nay, the chalk of Northern Europe, and also of Western Asia, where it constitutes most of Mount Lebanon, and extends southerly through Palestine into Arabia and Egypt, and also deposits in North and South America, thousands of miles in extent,--this rock, I say, is nearly half composed of microscopic shells. The oölite, also, contains them; and, indeed, infusorial remains occur in flint and opal; and, as instruments and observations are perfected, more and more of the solid rocks are found to have once constituted the framework of animals. It is hardly to be doubted that such was the fact with nearly all the limestone on the globe, occupying at least a seventh part of its surface. In fact, we seem fast coming to regard as sober truth the ancient adage, apparently so extravagant--_Omnis calx e vermibus; omne ferrum e vermibus; omnis silex e vermibus._ Indeed, it is the opinion of so competent a geologist as Dr. Mantell that "probably there is not an atom of the solid materials of the globe which has not passed through the complex and wonderful laboratory of life."--_Wond. of Geology_, vol. ii. p. 670.--What a vast field here opens before us to contemplate the far-reaching plans, the benevolence, and the wisdom of the Deity! In the third place, geology shows us that the present system of organic life on the globe is but one link of a series, extending very far backward and infinitely forward. Revelation describes only the existing species, leaving to science the task and the privilege to lift up the veil that hangs over the past, and to disclose other economies that have passed away. How many of them have existed we do not certainly know. If, with Agassiz, we characterize them by their predominant tribes, we might say that all the period previous to the new red sandstone constituted the reign of fishes; from thence to the chalk, the reign of reptiles; from thence to the drift, the reign of mammifera. But this is a less philosophical view than that of Deshayes, who finds five great groups of animals, specifically independent of one another. But who will attempt to fix the chronological limits of these systems? We can only say that they must have been exceedingly long, if we can place any dependence upon existing analogies; and we know that each one of them is made up of numerous subdivisions, or minor groups, widely, though not entirely, different in composition and organic contents. We know that the more we examine the whole series, the deeper does our conviction become that its commencement runs back far, very far, into the depths of past eternity. We know, also, from the joint testimony of Scripture and geology, that another change is to pass over the world, to prepare it for inhabitants far more elevated than those now living upon it, and in possession of perfect holiness and perfect happiness. And it may be it will experience far greater changes, adapting it for higher and higher grades of being, through periods of duration to which we can assign no limits. O, what a vast chain of being is here spread out before the imagination, reaching immeasurably far into the depths of the eternity which is past, and into the eternity which is to come! What a field for the display of God's infinite perfections! What a vista does it open to us into the vast plans and purposes of Jehovah! In the fourth place, geology reveals to us a curious series of improvements in the condition of worlds, as they pass through successive changes. If the earth began its existence in the state of vapor, we can hardly imagine it in that state capable of sustaining any organic natures, formed upon the general type of those now existing. Nor, when the vapor was condensed into a molten globe, could such natures inhabit it, till a crust had formed over its surface, and the heat had been so reduced as not to decompose animals and plants. Even then, the natures placed upon it must have been of a peculiar and low type of organization, capable of enduring the high temperature and catastrophes which would destroy those of more delicate and complicated organization. But gradually did the temperature diminish, while aqueous and atmospheric agencies were accumulating a deeper and a richer soil, so that the next change of inhabitants would allow natures of a higher organization and a denser population to occupy the surface. Their remains, buried in the earth, would increase the quantity of carbonate of lime in a form available for the use of animals and plants; that is, lime would gradually be eliminated, by plants and animals, from its more concealed combinations in the crystalline rocks, and be converted into carbonates, sulphates, and humates. A larger amount of organic matter would also be converted into humus. Now, limestone soils are of all others most favorable to vegetation, when there is a sufficient supply of organic matter. Hence every successive change becomes more and more adapted for animals and plants, because the lime and the organic matter in a state favorable for their support have been increasing; and the present state of the surface is more favorable than any conditions which have preceded it, and accordingly it is peopled with more perfect and more numerous organic natures. Can we doubt but that, if another change passes over the earth, this same great principle of progressive improvement will be manifested in the renovated world? I am not prepared to maintain, however, that this future change will be, like the past ones, an improvement as to soil and climate; for the change, as Scripture teaches, will be accomplished by fire; and so different will be the state of existence in the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, that we cannot say how far the present system of nature will be introduced. But that it will be an improved condition, we can hardly doubt, if we infer any thing from the splendid figures by which it is described in the Bible, and from the character of those who are to be its denizens. Some of the facts of modern astronomy impress us with the idea that this principle of progress may extend to other worlds. Some of these are in a gaseous state, some condensed into fiery liquid globes, some covered with a crust of solidified volcanic matter, and some surrounded by a liquid, like water. Do not these facts justify the supposition, that the changes which our earth has undergone are merely a single example of a great principle in God's government of the natural world? If so, it presents the divine wisdom in an interesting aspect. We see the Deity employing the same matter for different purposes. Instead of creating it for one single economy of organic beings, he seems to have made it the theatre for the display of his benevolence through successive periods; but at the same time not losing sight of the highest use he intended to make of it, by the introduction of rational and immortal natures upon it. Human wisdom would have pronounced this impossible; but divine wisdom, prompted by divine benevolence, could accomplish it. Finally, geology discloses to us chemical change as a great animating, controlling, and conservative principle of the material universe. When Newton brought to light the principle of gravitation, and showed how it controls and keeps in harmonious movement the heavenly bodies, he developed the great mechanical power by which the universe is governed. And this power was supposed for a long time to be superior to all others. But geology has brought out a second great controlling and conservative agency,--the chemical power,--"the second right hand of the Creator," as Dr. McCulloch expressively calls it. Suppose matter under the control of gravity, and let it be balanced by a centrifugal force. You have, indeed, harmonious motions among the celestial bodies, and, if no disturbing cause come in, you have endless motion. But until you introduce chemical agencies, every thing in the individual worlds would be compacted by gravity into one dead mass of matter, destined to no resurrection. But let chemical agencies leaven that mass, let affinity and cohesion commence their segregating processes, and constant motion and change would follow, with a thousand new and splendid forms. Especially when the Deity had infused the living principle into portions of that matter, and put chemistry, and her handmaid electricity, under the control of the vital power, would these worlds teem with animation, and countless exhibitions of beauty. And in all known worlds, these chemical changes are at work unceasingly. We know not whether those worlds are all inhabited, but we have evidence that all are undergoing the transmutations of chemistry; not on their surface merely, but in their deep interior. The consequence is, universal change; change often upon a vast scale; change extending through thousands and millions of years, and through the entire mass of immense worlds. We have glanced, in these lectures, at the most important of those changes which this world has undergone, and we have seen it to be almost universal. We have found that the entire crust of the globe, many miles in thickness, and probably to its centre, has been dissolved by heat, and much of it also by water; that a large part of it, at least, has, by the same chemistry, been made to constitute portions of the animal frame; that, even now, much of its interior is held in igneous solution, and that probably the time was when its entire mass was a molten, self-luminous world. Indeed, the conjecture is not without some foundation, which carries back this chemical action one step farther, and makes the world originally a diffused mass of nebula. At this point of the argument, geology appeals to astronomy, to show how widely this principle of chemical change has operated, and still operates, in the universe. We look first at the nebulæ; for here we probably find matter in its most chaotic and attenuated form, constituting self-luminous, diffused masses of vapor. In some of them, however, that matter has begun to condense, doubtless by the radiation of its heat. In the comets, we find probably similar matter, some of it still farther advanced in the process of condensation, so that perhaps a nearly solid nucleus may exist. In the sun and fixed stars, the condensation has gone on so far that cohesive attraction begins to operate, the latent heat of the vapor is extricated, and melted luminous worlds are the result. Around them, however, there probably still floats a wide atmosphere of the more elastic materials, which the heat dissipates, of which the zodiacal light, perhaps, furnishes us with an example. The nebulosity which surrounds the asteroids, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, and Astrea, renders it probable that, though they have advanced so far in the process of refrigeration as to become opaque, they may still retain heat enough to dissipate much of their substance. Still farther advanced towards the condition of a habitable world is the moon; and yet volcanic desolation covers its surface. Not improbably Jupiter is nearly surrounded with a fluid like water, and Saturn by a fluid lighter than water--being still farther advanced towards the condition of the earth. I acknowledge that these are but slight glimpses of the geology and chemistry of other worlds. And yet, taken in connection with the geological history of our own globe, do they not furnish us with some extremely probable examples of those changes to which our earth has been subject? They show us that worlds may exist in the form of vapor, and that some are actually at this time in the various conditions through which geology supposes this world to have passed. Do we not, in these examples, gather strong intimations of a great law of chemical change in the universe? Gaseous matter, so far as we know, appears to have been the earliest state of the universe; and then, by the agency of heat, it passes through the successive changes of liquid and solid, which have been described. The chemical changes that take place on the earth, under our immediate cognizance, through the agency of water, usually proceed, under favorable circumstances, in a cycle; that is, the substance, after passing through a series of changes, returns at length into the same condition from which it started. Thus aqueous vapor, by the loss of heat, is first converted into water, next into ice, and then, by the access of heat, into water again, and at last into vapor. The question naturally arises, whether those mutations, through which worlds are passing, may not form a similar cycle. We are able to trace them through several steps, from gaseous to liquid, and from the liquid to the solid; and we are assured, on the testimony of Scripture, that the next change of the earth will be from solid to liquid. And in those stars which in past ages have suddenly broken forth with remarkable splendor, and then disappeared, may we not have examples of other worlds burnt up,--not annihilated,--but deluged by fire, and either dissipated or again cooled? What changes, if any, will succeed the final conflagration of the globe, neither science nor revelation informs us. Yet, if the laws of nature respecting heat are not entirely altered, other changes must follow; and we have seen, in a former lecture, that those changes are perfectly consistent with our ideas of heaven, and that they may, in fact, enhance the happiness of heaven. They may go on forever; in which case, we can hardly doubt but they would form a cycle, though how wide the circuit we cannot conjecture; or they may, at least, reach an unchanging state. I confess, however, that the idea of perpetual change corresponds best with the analogies of the existing universe; and in eternity, as well as in time, it may form an essential element of happiness. In this world, too, this unceasing change, though it presents at first view a strong tendency to ruin, is, in fact, the grand conservative principle of material things. In a world of life and motion like ours, it is impossible that bodies, especially organic bodies, should not be sometimes subject to violent disarrangements and destruction from the mechanical agencies which exist; and were no chemical changes possible, ultimate and irremediable ruin must be the result. But the chemical powers, inherent in matter, soon bring forth new forms of beauty from the ruins; and, in fact, throughout all nature, the process of renovation usually counterbalances that of destruction; and thus far, indeed, the former has done more than this; for every time nature has changed her dress in past ages, she has put on more lovely robes, and a fresher countenance. Can we doubt that this same principle of change, operating, as it does, on a stupendous scale through the universe, is one of the great means of its preservation? It seems, indeed, paradoxical to say that instability is the basis of stability. But I see not why it is not literally true; and I can hardly doubt but this principle is superior to the laws of gravity--superior to every other law, in fact, for giving permanence and security to the universe. It is true that, in the case of man, connected as diminution and decay are with the curse denounced on sin, they assume, in his view, a melancholy aspect; and the perishable nature of all created things has ever been viewed by the sentimentalist with sad emotions. "What does not fade? The tower that long had stood The crush of thunder, and the warring winds, Shook by the slow but sure destroyer Time, Now hangs in doubtful ruins o'er its base; And flinty pyramids and walls of brass Descend; the Babylonian spires are sunk; Achaia, Rome, and Egypt moulder down. Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones; And tottering empires rush by their own weight. This huge rotundity we tread grows old, And all those worlds that roll around the sun. The sun himself shall die, and ancient night Again involve the desolate abyss."--_Akenside._ If we turn now our thoughts away from man's dissolution, and think how speedily chemical power will raise nature out of her grave, in renovated and increased beauty, this universal tendency to decay puts on the aspect of a glorious transformation. We connect the changes around us with those which have taken place in the great bodies of the universe; we see them all to be but parts of a far-reaching plan of the Deity, by which the stability of the world is maintained, and its progressive improvement secured. When we look forward, fancy kindles at the developments of divine power, wisdom, and benevolence which will in this manner be made in the round of eternal ages. We see that what our ignorance had mistaken for a defect in nature is, in fact, a great conservative principle of the universe, which Newton did not discover because geology had not yet unfolded her record. Such are the developments of the divine character and plans unfolded to us by geology. Compare them now with the views which have hitherto prevailed. The common opinion has been, and still, indeed, is, that about six thousand years ago this earth, and, in fact, the whole material universe, were spoken into existence in a moment of time; and that, in a few thousand more, they will, by a similar fiat, be swept from existence, and be no more. On the other hand, geology places the time when the matter of the universe was created out of nothing at an epoch indefinitely but immensely remote. Since that epoch, this matter has passed through a multitude of changes, and been the seat of numerous systems of organic life, unlike one another, yet all linked together into one great system by a most perfect unity; each minor system being most beautifully adapted to its place in the great chain, and yet each successive link becoming more and more perfect. Nor does geology admit that any evidence exists of the future annihilation of the material universe; but rather of other changes, by which new and brighter displays of divine wisdom and benevolence shall be brought out, it may be in endless succession. Geology is not, indeed, insensible to the displays of the divine character which are exhibited on the present theatre of the world. Indeed, she distinctly recognizes the act which is now passing as the most perfect of all. Yet this scene of the great drama she regards as only one of the units of a similar series of changes that have gone by or will hereafter come; the chain stretching so far into the eternity that is past and the eternity that is to come, that the extremities are lost to mortal vision. Do any shrink back from these immense conclusions, because they so much surpass the views they have been accustomed to entertain respecting the beginning and the end of the material universe? But why should they be unwilling to have geology liberalize their minds as much in respect to duration as astronomy has done in respect to space? Perhaps it is a lingering fear that the geological views conflict with revelation. Such fears formerly kept back many from giving up their souls to the noble truths of astronomy. But they learnt, at length, that astronomy merely illustrates, and does not oppose, revelation. It showed men how to understand certain passages of sacred writ respecting the earth and heavenly bodies which they had before misinterpreted. Just so is it with geology. There is no collision between its statements and revelation. It only enables us more correctly to interpret some portions of the Bible; and then, when we have admitted the new interpretation, it brings a flood of light upon the plans and attributes of Jehovah. Geology, therefore, should be viewed, as it really is, the auxiliary both of natural and revealed religion. And when its religious relations are fully understood, theology, I doubt not, will be as anxious to cultivate its alliance as she has been fearful of it in days past. "Shall it any longer be said," remarks Dr. Buckland, "that a science which unfolds such abundant evidence of the being and attributes of God, can reasonably be viewed in any other light than as the efficient auxiliary and handmaid of religion? Some few there still may be whom timidity, or prejudice, or want of opportunity, allow not to examine its evidence; who are alarmed by the novelty, or surprised by the magnitude and extent, of the views which geology forces on their attention; and who would rather have kept closed the volume of witness which has been sealed up for ages beneath the surface of the earth than to impose on the student in natural theology the duty of studying its contents--a duty in which, for lack of experience, they may anticipate a hazardous or laborious task, but which, by those engaged in it, is found to be a rational, and righteous, and delightful exercise of the highest faculties in multiplying the evidence of the existence, and attributes, and providence of God. The alarm, however, which was excited by the novelty of its first discoveries, has well nigh passed away; and those to whom it has been permitted to be the humble instruments of their promulgation, and who have steadily persevered, under the firm conviction that 'truth can never be opposed to truth,' and that the works of God, when rightly understood, and viewed in their true relations, and from a right position, would at length be found to be in perfect accordance with his word, are now receiving their high reward in finding difficulties vanish, objections gradually withdrawn, and in seeing the evidences of geology admitted into the list of witnesses to the truth of the great fundamental doctrines of theology."--_Bridgewater Treatise_, vol. i. p. 593. Such, then, in conclusion of the subject, is the religion of geology. It has been described as a region divided between the barren mountains of scepticism and the putrid fens and quagmires of infidelity and atheism; producing only a gloomy and a poisonous vegetation; covered with fogs, and swept over by pestilential blasts. But this report was made by those who saw it at a distance. We have found it to be a land abounding in rich landscapes, warmed by a bright sun, blest with a balmy atmosphere, covered by noble forests and sweet flowers, with fruits savory and healthful. We have ascended its lofty mountains, and there have we been greeted with prospects of surpassing loveliness and overwhelming sublimity. In short, nowhere in the whole world of science do we find regions where more of the Deity is seen in his works. To him whose heart is warmed by true piety, and whose mind has broken the narrow shell of prejudice, and can grasp noble thoughts, these are delightful fields through which to wander. More and more they must become the favorite haunts of such hearts and such minds. For there do views open upon the soul, respecting the character and plans of the Deity, as large and refreshing as those which astronomy presents. Nay, in their practical bearing, these views are far more important. Mechanical philosophy introduces an unbending and unvarying law between the Creator and his works; but geology unveils his providential hand, cutting asunder that law at intervals, and planting the seeds of a new economy upon a renovated world. We thus seem to be brought into near communion with the infinite mind. We are prepared to listen to his voice when it speaks in revelation. We recognize his guiding and sustaining agency at every step of our pilgrimage. And we await in confident hope and joyful anticipation those sublime manifestations of his character and plans, and those higher enjoyments which will greet the pure soul in the round of eternal ages. LECTURE XIV. SCIENTIFIC TRUTH, RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD, IS RELIGIOUS TRUTH. The connection between science and religion has ever been a subject of deep interest to enlightened and reflecting minds. Too often, however, up to the present time, has the theologian, on the one hand, looked with jealousy upon science, fearful that its influence was hurtful to the cause of true religion; while, on the other hand, the philosopher, in the pride of a sceptical spirit, has scorned an alliance between science and theology, and even fancied many a discrepancy. Both these opinions are erroneous; and disastrously have they operated, as well upon science as upon religion. The position which I take, and which I shall endeavor to maintain, is, that _scientific truth, rightly understood, is religious truth_. The proposition may be misunderstood at its first announcement, but I hope, ere its examination be finished, to satisfy you that it is true; and if so, that it ought to reconcile religion to science, and science to religion. In arriving at correct conclusions concerning this statement, much will depend on the meaning which we attach to the phrase _religious truth_. Religion is properly defined to be piety towards God. This piety implies two things: first, a correct knowledge of God; and secondly, the exercise of proper affections in view of that knowledge. The former constitutes the theoretic part of religion, and is investigated solely by the understanding. The latter constitutes the practical part of religion, and depends much upon the will, the heart, or the moral powers of man. All truth, therefore, which illustrates the divine character or government, or which tends to produce right affections towards God, is properly denominated religious truth. If, then, I can show that all scientific truth, rightly understood, has one or both of these effects, it will follow that it is strictly religious truth. Scientific truth is but another name for the laws of nature. And a law of nature is merely the uniform mode in which the Deity operates in the created universe. It follows, then, that science is only a history of the divine operations in matter and mind. In order to avoid mistake, we must make a distinction between the principles of science, and the application of those principles to the useful arts of life. The principles themselves are an illustration of the divine wisdom and benevolence, but their application to the arts illustrates the ingenuity and wisdom of man. At the most, therefore, the latter only indirectly and remotely exhibits the character of the Deity, while the former directly shows forth his perfections. I now proceed to establish my general proposition, by showing, in the first place, that _all scientific truth is adapted to prove the existence or to illustrate the perfections of the Deity_. After all that has been written on the subject of natural theology, by such men as Newintyt, Ray, Derham, Wollaston, Clarke, Butler, Tucker, Paley, Chalmers, Crombie, Brown, Brougham, Harris, M'Cosh, and the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises, I need not surely go into details to prove that science in general is a great storehouse of facts to illustrate the divine perfections and government. It is, indeed, a vast repository, from which materials have been drawn on which to build the argument for the divine existence and character. Efforts have been made, it is true, in modern times, to show that the whole argument from design is inconclusive. It is said, that though the operations of nature seem to show design and contrivance, they need no higher powers than those that exist in nature itself. They do not prove the existence of an independent personal agent, separate from the material world. Animals, and even plants, possess an inherent power of adapting themselves to circumstances; and may not a higher exercise of this same power explain all the operations of nature without any other Deity? This argument appears to me to be utterly set aside by the following considerations: In the first place, there is no power inherent in vegetable or animal natures which can properly be called the power of contrivance and design, except so far as it exists in their minds. All other examples show merely the operation of impulse, or instinct, and will not at all explain that wide-reaching contrivance and design which cause all the operations of nature to conspire to certain great results, and to constitute one, and only one, great system. In the second place, the operations of intellect furnish us with the only examples in nature of that kind of contrivance and design which must have arranged and adapted the parts of the universe. But in the third place, no intellect, within our knowledge, is capacious enough to have contrived and arranged the universe. Indeed, to the capacity of that mind which could have done this we can assign no limits, and, therefore, infer it to be infinite. In other words, we infer the existence of the Deity. In the fourth place, the whole force of this argument rests upon the supposed uniformity of nature. For no one imagines that there exists at present, in nature, any power of contrivance and design sufficient to work a miracle; in other words, to introduce new races of animals and plants. "Could this uniformity once be broken up," says an ingenious expositor of this atheistic argument, "could this rigid order be once infringed for a good and manifest reason, it would change the whole face of the argument. Could we see the sun stand still in heaven, that the wicked might be overthrown, then should we be assured of a personal power with a distinct will, whose agents and ministers these laws were. Such an event would be a miracle. But if such events have happened, they are not a part of nature; it is not nature that tells us of them, and it is only with her that we are at present concerned."--_President Hopkins, Quarterly Observer_, Oct. 1833, p. 309. Geology, however, does reveal to us miracles of stupendous, import, miracles of creation, which infinite power and wisdom alone could have produced. Hence, if the testimony of that science be admitted, this reasoning can no longer stand the test of examination, and it must be acknowledged that the argument for God's existence from design, which has ever been so satisfactory to every mind not clouded by metaphysics, is left standing on an immovable foundation. To return to the point from which we started: it is not necessary, I say, to go into a detailed examination of each particular science, and show how its principles prove and illustrate the being and attributes of the Deity, for the work has already been done more ably and thoroughly than I can do it, and admitted by all, save the few who reject the argument from design altogether. There are a few sciences, however, which have been hitherto chiefly passed by, because they were not supposed capable of throwing any light of consequence upon theology. Let us see whether these sciences are as barren of religious interest as has been supposed. Geology is a branch of knowledge, which, a few years ago, would have been at once selected as not only destitute of any important religious applications, but as of a positively injurious tendency; and even now, such is the feeling probably of a majority of the religious world. True, it touches religion, natural and revealed, at many points; but so novel and startling are its conclusions, that they are thought to unsettle more minds than they confirm. They fall in with many of the views of scepticism, and especially confirm its doubts concerning the age of the world, and compel the religious man to give up long-cherished opinions upon this point, and on other collateral subjects. But we have gone into a careful examination of the religious applications of this science, and have we not found it most fertile in its illustrations both of natural and revealed religion? Let us just recapitulate the conclusions at which we have arrived. In the first place, geology furnishes important illustrations of revealed religion. It confirms the statement that the present continents of our globe were once, and for an indefinite time, beneath the ocean, and that they were subsequently lifted above the waters by internal agencies. It agrees with revelation in making water and heat the two great agents of geological change upon and within the earth, and that the work of creation, after the production of matter, was progressive. It shows us equally with revelation, that the existing races of animals and plants on the globe were created at a comparatively recent epoch, and that man commenced his existence not more than six thousand years ago. It shows us, also, that the earth contains within itself the volcanic agency necessary for its future destruction by combustion, as described in the Bible. But, perhaps, the most important illustration of revealed truth, which geology affords, is the light which it casts upon certain passages of the Bible relating to the creation. As those texts which represent the earth as immovable, and the heavenly bodies as moving diurnally around it, were not rightly understood, until astronomy had discovered the true theory of the solar system, so those passages which relate to the period of the creation of the universe, the introduction of death into the world, and the extent and operation of the deluge, were misinterpreted till geology disclosed their true meaning. It is still customary, indeed, to speak of geology and revelation as in collision with each other on these subjects; but this is a false view of the case. Revelation is illustrated, not opposed, by geology. Who thinks, at this day, of any discrepancy between astronomy and revelation? And yet, two hundred years ago, the evidence of such discrepancy was far more striking than any which can now be offered to show geology at variance with the Scriptures. We ought, therefore, to look upon that science as illustrating, instead of opposing, the Scriptures. Having once admitted the conclusions of geology as to the great age of the world, and a flood of light is shed upon some of the most difficult points both of natural and revealed religion. It shows the occurrence of numerous changes on the globe which nothing but the power of God could have produced, and which in fact were most striking and stupendous miracles. Hence the arguments which have so long been employed to show that the world is eternal are rendered nugatory; for if we can point to epochs when entire races of animals and plants began to exist on the globe, we prove the agency of a Deity quite as strikingly as if we could show the moment when the matter of the world was summoned into existence out of nothing. In the same manner, also, we silence the argument against the giving of a revelation from heaven, as well as the miracles by which it is substantiated, on the ground that we have no example of a special interference with the established course of nature. Here we have interpositions long anterior to man's existence, as well as by his creation, which take away all improbability from those which are implied in a revelation. We hence likewise establish the doctrine of a special providence over the world--a doctrine proved with great difficulty by any other reasoning of natural theology. Still more abundant is the evidence derived from geology of the divine benevolence. And this evidence comes mostly from the operations and final effect of the most desolating agencies, heretofore regarded as a proof of malevolence, or, at least, of vindictive justice; and we may reasonably infer, that could we look through the whole system of divine government, we should find that all evil is only a necessary means of the greatest good. No one can examine existing nature without being convinced that all its parts and operations belong to one great system. Geology makes other economies of wide extent to pass before us, opening a vista indefinitely backward into the hoary past; and it is gratifying to witness that same unity of design pervading all preceding periods of the world's history, linking the whole into one mighty scheme, worthy its infinite Contriver. How much, also, does this science enlarge our conceptions of the plans and operations of Jehovah! We had been accustomed to limit our views of the creative agency of God to the few thousand years of man's existence, and to anticipate the destruction of the material universe in a few thousand years more. But geology makes the period of man's existence on the globe only one short link of a chain of revolutions which preceded his existence, and which reaches forward immeasurably far into the future. We see the same matter in the hands of infinite wisdom, and by means of the great conservative principle of chemical change, passing through a multitude of stupendous revolutions, sustaining countless and varied forms of organic life, and presenting an almost illimitable panorama of the plans of an infinite God. If such is the fruit which geology pours into the lap of religion, how misunderstood have been its principles! In many a mind there is still an anxious fear lest its discoveries should prove unfavorable to religion; and they would feel greatly relieved could they only be assured that no influence injurious to piety would emanate from that science. But we can give them far more than this assurance. We can draw from this science more to illustrate and confirm religion than from any other; and we believe that the history of the past justifies the general conclusion, that those sciences whose early developments excited most apprehensions of a collision with religion, have ultimately furnished the most abundant illustrations of its principles. Another science regarded as barren of religious applications, and even as sometimes positively injurious, is mathematics. Its principles are, indeed, of so abstruse a nature, that it is not easy to frame out of them a religious argument that is capable of popular illustration. But, in fact, mathematical laws form the basis of nearly all the operations of nature. They constitute, as it were, the very framework of the material world. When we look up to the heavenly bodies, we see them directed and controlled, along with the earth, by those laws, which vary not, by an iota, from century to century. The infinity of changes, which are going on in the constitution of bodies upon and within the earth, chemistry reduces to mathematical laws. So far as organic operations depend upon chemical changes,--and this is very far,--mathematics is the controlling power. I will not say, that life and intellect are in a strict sense under the guidance of mathematics; and yet I doubt not that their operations are limited and controlled by its principles. Confident am I that atmospheric changes, apparently quite as anomalous and irregular as the movements of the vital and intellectual principles, rest on mathematics as certainly as do the revolutions of the heavenly bodies. It seems, then, that this science forms the very foundation of all arguments for Theism, from the arrangements and operations of the material universe. We do, indeed, neglect the foundation, and point only to the superstructure, when we state these arguments. But suppose mathematical laws to be at once struck from existence, and what a hideous chaos would the universe present! What then would become of the marks of design and unity in nature, and of the Theist's argument for the being of a God? But mathematical principles furnish several interesting illustrations of truth, of no small importance. In a former lecture, we have seen how the doctrine of miracles stands forth completely vindicated by an appeal to mathematical laws; how, in fact, they might have formed a part of the original plan of the universe, when first it was conceived in the divine mind, and how their occurrence may be as much the result of a fixed law as the most common operations of nature; so that in this way all improbability of their occurrence, on the ground that nature is constant, is removed. These views are illustrated in that singular, yet original work of Professor Babbage, called the "Ninth Bridgewater Treatise," a work written, it is true, in part, under the influence of exasperated feelings, but yet full of original and ingenious suggestions. But these views have been so fully presented in the Lecture on Special and Miraculous Providence, and in that upon the Telegraphic System of the Universe, that they need not here be repeated. Mathematics, also, aids our conceptions of truths of religion difficult or impossible, from their nature, of being understood by finite beings. All the attributes of the Deity, being infinite, are of this description. But it seems to me that the contemplation of a mathematical series, either increasing or decreasing, gives us the strongest apprehension of infinity which we can attain. It puts into our hands a thread by which we can find our way, as far as our powers will carry us, towards infinity. True, after we have followed the series till the mind stops exhausted, we are no nearer infinity than when we started; yet we do get most deeply impressed with the unfathomableness of the abyss that separates the finite from the infinite. To many minds all statements of the biblical doctrine of the Trinity appear so absurd and contradictory as to be incapable of belief. Yet let it be stated to a man, for the first time, that two lines may approach each other forever without meeting, and it must appear equally absurd. But after you have demonstrated to him the properties of the hyperbola and its asymptote, the apparent absurdity vanishes. So, when the theologian has stated, that by the divine unity he means only a numerical unity,--in other words, that there is but one Supreme Being, and that the three persons of the Godhead are one in this sense, and three only in those respects not inconsistent with this unity,--every philosophical mind, whether it admits that the Scriptures teach this doctrine or not, must see that there is no absurdity or contradiction in it. And thus it may happen, that the solution of a man's difficulties on this subject may come from a proposition of conic sections, as in fact we know to have been the case. It is said, however, that mathematicians have been unusually prone to scepticism concerning religious truth. If it be so, it probably originates from the absurd attempt to apply mathematical reasoning to moral subjects; or, rather, the devotees of this science often become so attached to its demonstrations, that they will not admit any evidence of a less certain character. They do not realize the total difference between moral and mathematical reasonings, and absurdly endeavor to stretch religion on the Procrustean bed of mathematics. No wonder they become sceptics. But the fault is in themselves, not in this science, whose natural tendencies, upon a pure and exalted mind, are favorable to religion, because its principles illustrate religion. There are several other sciences, whose earlier developments were supposed for a time to be unfavorable to religion; and hence has originated a ground of apprehension respecting science generally. When the Copernican system of astronomy was introduced, it was thought impossible ever to reconcile it to the plain declarations of Scripture; and hence at least one venerable astronomer was obliged to recant that system upon his knees. Similar fears of collision between science and revelation were excited when chemistry announced that the main part of the earth has already been oxidized, and, therefore, could not hereafter be literally burnt. Because some physiologists have been materialists, it has been inferred that physiology was favorable to materialism. But it is now found that they were materialists in spite of physiology, rather than from a correct interpretation of its facts. Strong apprehensions have also been excited respecting phrenology and mesmerism. And, indeed, in their present aspect, these sciences are probably made to exert a more unfriendly influence upon vital religion than any other. Those who profess to understand and teach them have been, for the most part, decided opponents of special providence and special grace, and many of them materialists. But this is not because there are any special grounds for such opinions in phrenology or mesmerism. The latter branch, indeed, affords such decided proofs of immaterialism, as to have led several able materialists to change their views. Nor does phrenology afford any stronger proof that law governs the natural world, than do the other sciences. But when a man who is sceptical becomes deeply interested in any branch of knowledge, and fancies himself to be an oracle respecting it, he will torture its principles till they are made to give testimony in favor of his previous sceptical views, although, in fact, the tones are as unnatural as those of ventriloquism, and as deceptive. When true philosophy shall at length determine what are the genuine principles of phrenology and mesmerism, we can judge of their bearing upon religion; but the history of other sciences shows us that we need have no fears of any collision, when the whole subject is brought fairly into the daylight. Upon the whole, every part of science, which has been supposed, by the fears of friends or malice of foes, to conflict with religion, has been found, at length, when fully understood, to be in perfect harmony with its principles, and even to illustrate them. It is high time, therefore, for the friends of religion to cease fearing any injury to the cause of religion from science; and high time, also, for the enemies of religion to cease expecting any such collision. In conclusion of this argument, we may safely challenge any one to point out a single principle of science which does not in some way illustrate the perfections of the Deity; and if he cannot, scientific truth may be appropriately called religious truth, especially since such illustrations are the highest use to which science can be applied. It is no drawback on the argument because so few make this use of science, nor because some attempt to array science against religion; for this only shows how men may neglect the most important use to which science can be applied, or how they can pervert the richest gifts. I derive a second argument in support of the general position, that scientific truth is religious truth, from the fact that _it will survive the present world, and its examination become a part of the employments and enjoyments of heaven_. The Scriptures are, indeed, sparing in their details of the specific employments of the heavenly world, except so far as worship and praise are concerned. But that worship will undoubtedly be the spontaneous impulse of the heart, (as it is in this world when acceptable,) in view of some manifestations of the divine character. Accordingly, the first sentence of the future song of Moses and the Lamb, as the saints stand with the harps of God upon the sea of glass, is, _Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty._ The works of God, then, will be studied in the future world; and what is that but the study of the sciences? It is, indeed, said by the apostle, that _whether there be tongues, they shall cease_, [that is, in a future world;] _whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away_; and hence it has sometimes been inferred that all the knowledge which we acquire in this world will disappear with this world. But this cannot be the meaning of the passage, for in a variety of places the Bible represents both the righteous and wicked in another world as conscious of what took place on earth; and, unless the nature of the mind be changed at death, it is not possible to conceive that the knowledge we acquire here should be lost. This passage may refer to one of those gifts of inspiration peculiar to apostolic times, called by the sacred writer _the word of knowledge_. But more probably he meant to teach that, so much brighter and clearer will be the disclosures of another world, that most of our present knowledge will be eclipsed and forgotten. But this does not imply that our future knowledge will be essentially different in nature from that which we acquire on earth. The grand difference is, that now _we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face_. We can, also, see why some branches of science cultivated on earth should be very much modified in a future world. There are several, for instance, dependent mainly upon the present organic constitution of nature; and of such branches only the general principles can survive the destruction of the existing framework of animals and plants. Take, for an example, anatomy and physiology. We believe, indeed, that the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, will be material, and that the bodies of men will also be material. But even though these bodies should be organized, we learn from the Scriptures that this organization will be very different from our present bodies. _They_, says Christ, _who shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage, neither can they die any more; for they are equal unto the angels._ Paul's vivid description of the future spiritual body leaves the impression on the mind that it must be very dissimilar to our present bodies. He does not attempt to define the spiritual body, probably because we could not understand the definition, since it would be so unlike any thing on earth. He represents it as incorruptible, powerful, and glorious, entirely in contrast with our present bodies, and declares that it is not flesh and blood, and that it is not organized like our present bodies. It seems, then, that we have no certain evidence that the future spiritual body will be organized; and in a former lecture we have seen that it is not necessary to suppose it endowed with organs. If not, it is obvious that the sciences of anatomy and physiology can have no existence in a future world, except in the memory. On the other hand, however, there are some things in Paul's description of the future body that make it quite probable that its organization will be much more exquisite than any thing in existence on earth. He represents it as springing from our present bodies as a germ from a seed; and this would seem to imply organization; though we must not infer too much from a mere rhetorical similitude. But he also represents the spiritual body as far transcending the natural body in glory and in power; and, since the latter is fearfully and wonderfully made, we know of nothing but the most exquisite organization that can give the spiritual body such a superiority over the natural. Admitting that such will be its structure, and, although the nomenclature of anatomy and physiology, which is adapted to flesh and blood, shall pass away and be forgotten, yet analogous sciences shall be substituted, based on facts and principles far more interesting, and developing relations and harmonies far more beautiful. It may be thought, indeed, that, so different will be these sciences from any thing on earth, that there can be no common principles and no link of connection. But the longer a man studies the works of God, the more inclined will he be to regard the universe, material and immaterial, as founded on eternal principles; as, in fact, a transcript of the divine nature; and that all the changes in nature are only new developments of unchanging fundamental laws, not the introduction of new laws. Hence the philosopher would infer that in existing nature we have the prototype of new heavens and a new earth; and although a future condition of things may be as different from the present as the plant is from the seed out of which it springs, still, as the seed contains the embryo of a future plant, so the future world may, as it were, lie coiled up in the present. If in these suggestions there is any truth, there may be a germ in the anatomy and physiology of the present world, which shall survive the destruction of the present economy, and unfold, in far higher beauty and glory, in the more congenial climate of the new heavens and the new earth. If so, the great principles of these sciences which are acquired on earth, and which are so prolific in exhibitions of divine skill, may not prove to be lost knowledge. They shall be recognized as types of those far higher and richer developments of organization which the spiritual body shall exhibit. It may be still more difficult to show that such a science as botany will have a place in the new earth; simply because we have no certain knowledge of the existence of vegetation there. We can infer nothing on this subject from the figurative representations of the new Jerusalem in Revelation, since the drapery is all derived from this world. But, on the general principle already stated, that the universe constitutes but one vast and harmonious system, and all the economies upon it, past, present, and future, are only different developments of eternal principles, this consideration, I say, should make us hesitate before we infer the annihilation of the vast vegetable kingdom upon the destruction of the present economy of the world. And it does give us an aspect of extreme barrenness and cheerlessness to think of the new earth entirely swept of every thing analogous to the existing foliage, flowers, and fruits. We have attempted to show, however, in another place, that the spiritual body may be of such a nature that it might exist in a temperature so high, or so low, as to prevent the existence of such organic natures as now exist. But how easy for the Deity to create such natures as are adapted to extremes of temperature as wide as we now are acquainted with; and that, too, on the same type as existing nature; so that the new earth, while yet an incandescent, glowing ocean, might teem with animals and plants, organized on the same general principles as those of the present earth! But there is another supposition. I have endeavored to show that change ever has been, and probably ever will be, one of the grand means by which mind is introduced to higher spheres of enjoyment; and even though the new earth at first should be destitute of organic natures, both animal and vegetable, they might be introduced in successive and more perfect economies, as a means of increased happiness, especially to rational natures. These are, indeed, only conjectures; but the balance of probabilities seems to me to incline the mind to the belief that there may be a botany as well as zoölogy in the future world, far transcending their prototypes on earth. Among the things that we may be certain will pass away with the present world is the mode of communicating our ideas by language. This the apostle expressly declares when he says, _Whether there be tongues_, [that is, languages,] _they shall cease._ Now, the acquisition of languages, and the right use of language, or rhetoric and oratory, constitute a large part of what men call learning on earth. And the question is, whether there are any principles on which these branches of knowledge are based that will become the elements of new and higher modes of communicating thought in a future world. These branches are, indeed, rather to be regarded as arts than sciences. Language is the drapery for clothing our thoughts, and, unless we have thoughts to clothe, it becomes useless; and rhetoric and oratory merely show us how to arrange that drapery in the most attractive and impressive style. But there is such a thing as the philosophy of language and the philosophy of rhetoric, whose principles are derived chiefly from moral and intellectual philosophy. And these, we have reason to believe, are eternal. Different as will be the mode of communicating thoughts hereafter from the present, we shall find the same philosophical principles lying at its foundation. Hence we may expect that there will be a celestial language, a celestial rhetoric, and a celestial oratory, in whose beauty and splendor those of earth will be forgotten. I now proceed briefly to consider those sciences which, having little connection with material organization, we may more confidently maintain will have an existence on the new earth. It will be hardly necessary to spend much time in proving that intellectual philosophy will be one of the subjects of investigation in a future world. For it would be strange if the noblest part of God's workmanship, for which materialism was created, should cease to be an object of inquiry in that world where alone it can be investigated with much success. When we consider that the whole train of mental phenomena is constantly passing under the mind's own observation, and that a vast amount of time and talent has been devoted to the subject ever since man began to philosophize,--that is, for more than two thousand years,--it would seem as if psychology ere this must have attained the precision and certainty of mathematics. But how different is the fact! I speak not of a want of agreement in opinion on subordinate points, for these minor diversities must be expected in any science not strictly demonstrative. Even astronomy abounds with them. But metaphysical philosophers have not yet been able to settle fundamental principles. They are not yet agreed as to the existence of many of the most familiar and important intellectual powers and principles of action. The systems of Locke and Hume, constructed with great ability, were overthrown by Reid; Stewart differed much from Reid; and Dr. Thomas Brown has powerfully attacked the fabric erected by Stewart. And lastly, the phrenologists, with no mean ability, have endeavored to show that all these philosophers are heaven-wide of the truth, because they have so much neglected the influence of the material organs on the mental powers. Now, this diversity of result, arrived at by men of such profound abilities, shows that there are peculiar difficulties in the study of mind, originating, probably, in the fact that, in this world, we never see the operation of mind apart from a gross material organization. But in another state, where no organization will exist, or one far better adapted to mental operations, we may hope for such a clarification of the mental eye that the laws of mind will assume the precision and certainty of mathematics, and the relations between mind and matter, now so obscure, be fully developed. Then, I doubt not, the principles of mental science will furnish a more splendid illustration of the divine perfections than any which can now be derived from the material world. Will any one believe that the principles of moral science and mathematics will be altered or annihilated by the conflagration of the globe? We believe them no more dependent upon the external universe than is the divine existence. God exists by a necessity of nature, and these principles have the same unchanging and eternal origin. If so, no changes in the material world can affect them. So far as we understand them here, we shall find them true hereafter; and we shall doubtless find that our present knowledge is but the mere twilight of that bright day which will there pour its full light upon these subjects. Mathematical and moral truths, which we now suppose to be general laws, we shalt then find to be, in many cases, only the ramifications of principles far wider, which we cannot now discover, and which we could not comprehend were they open to inspection. And we shall also find that moral laws are as certain and demonstrable as those of mathematics; and that they form the adamantine chain which holds together the spiritual world, and gives it symmetry and beauty, as mathematics links together the material universe. Among men who understand biblical interpretation, and also the principles of science, the belief in the annihilation of the material universe at the close of man's probationary state is fast disappearing, and the more scriptural, philosophical, and animating doctrine is embraced, that there will be only a change of form and condition of our earth and its atmosphere, and that the matter of the universe will survive, and successively assume new and more beautiful forms, it may be eternally. If so, all those physical sciences, which do not depend upon organic structure, will form subjects of investigation in the heavenly world. There will be the heavenly bodies, governed by the same laws as at present, and offering a noble field for examination. Nor will the heavenly inhabitants need, as on earth, visual organs and optical instruments, which, at best, afford us only glimpses of the material universe. For there, if we rightly conjecture, will they possess the power of learning, with almost intuitive certainty and intuitive rapidity, the character and movements of the most distant worlds. Nay, it may be that they can pass from world to world with the velocity of light, and thus become better acquainted with their more intimate condition. Thus will the astronomy of the celestial world surpass, beyond conception, that science which even now is regarded as unequalled for its sublimity. We cannot be sure through what material medium the mind will act in a future world. But the manner in which we know heat, light, and electricity to be transmitted, makes it not impossible that the same or a similar medium may be the vehicle through which thought shall be hereafter transmitted. If so, we can easily understand how the mind will be able to penetrate into the most recondite nature of bodies, and learn the mode in which they act upon one another; for the curious medium which conveys light and heat does penetrate all bodies, whether they be solid or gaseous, cold or hot. Hence we may learn at a glance, in a future world, more of the internal constitution of bodies, and of their mutual action, than a whole life on earth, spent in the study of chemistry, will unfold. Then, too, shall we doubtless find chemical laws operating on a scale of grandeur and extent, limited only by the material universe. Universally diffused as light, heat, and electricity are, and diligently as their phenomena have been studied, yet what mystery hangs over their nature and operations! They seem to be too subtile, and to approximate too nearly to immaterial substances, to be apprehended by our beclouded intellects. When, therefore, our means of perception shall be vastly improved, as we have reason to believe they will be in eternity, these will become noble themes for examination. For who can doubt that agents so ethereal in their nature, and apparently indestructible, and even unchanged by any means with which we are acquainted, will survive the final catastrophe of our world? Probably, indeed, we are allowed to catch only glimpses of their nature and operations on earth, so that we may safely anticipate an immense expansion of the electricity and optics which will form a part of the science of heaven. We have endeavored to show, in a former lecture, that the future residence of the righteous will be material; that it will, in fact, be the present earth, purified by the fires of the last day, and rising from the final ruin in renovated splendor. We have shown that this is the doctrine of Scripture, of philosophy, and of a majority of the Christian church. A solid world, then, will exist, whose geology can be studied by glorified minds far more accurately and successfully than the globe which we inhabit; for those minds will doubtless be able to penetrate the entire mass of the globe, and learn its whole structure. The final conflagration may, indeed, for the most part, obliterate the traces of present and past organic beings. But according to the doctrine of action and reaction in mechanics, in chemistry, in electricity, and in organization, every change that has ever passed over the earth has left traces of its occurrence which can never be blotted out; and it is not improbable that glorified minds will possess the power of discovering and reading these records of the past, if not on the principle just specified, yet in some other way; so that the entire geological history of our planet will probably pass in clear light before them. Points which we see only through a glass darkly will then stand forth in full daylight; and from the glimpses we are able to obtain in this world of its present geological changes, what a mighty and interesting series will be seen by celestial minds! If, even by the colored rays which come upon us through the twilight of this world, we are able to see so many striking illustrations of the divine character engraven on the solid rocks, what a noble volume of religious truth shall be found written there, when the light of heaven shall penetrate the earth's deep foundations! Those foundations, figuratively described in revelation as so many precious stones, bearing up a city of pure gold, clear as glass, will then reflect a richer light than the costliest literal gems which the rocks now yield. The geology of heaven will be resplendent with divine glory. We see, then, with a few probable exceptions, resulting from a difference between the organism of heaven and earth, that science will survive the ruin of this world, and in a nobler form engage the minds, and interest the hearts, of heaven's inhabitants. It will, indeed, form a vast storehouse, whence pious minds can draw fuel to kindle into a purer and brighter flame their love and their devotion; for thence will they derive new and higher developments of the divine character. Shall we not, then, admit that to be religious truth on earth which in heaven will form the food of perfectly holy minds? The position which I laid down, at the outset, that scientific truth, rightly applied, is religious truth, seems to me most clearly established. If admitted, there flow from it several inferences of no small interest, which I am constrained to present to your consideration. _In the first place, I infer from this discussion that the principles of science are a transcript of the Divine Character._ I mean by this, that the laws of nature, which are synonymous with the principles of science, are not the result of any arbitrary and special enactment on the part of the Deity, but flow naturally from his perfections; so that, in fact, the varied principles of science are but so many expressions of the perfections of Jehovah. If the universe had only a transient existence, we might suppose the laws that govern it to be the result of a special ordination of the Deity, and destined to perish with the annihilation of matter. But since we have no evidence that matter will ever perish, and at least probable evidence that it will exist forever, the more rational supposition is, that its laws result from the nature of things, and are only a development of so many features of the divine character. If so, then the most important inquiry in the study of the sciences is to learn from them the phases in which they present the divine perfections. _In the second place, it does not follow from this subject that the most extensive acquisitions in science necessarily imply the possession of true piety._ Piety consists in the exercise of right affections of heart towards God, excited by religious truth. Now, I have attempted to show only, that the natural tendency of scientific truth is to excite such religious affections; but that tendency, like all other good influences, may be, and often is, resisted. Hence a man may reach the loftiest pinnacle of scientific glory whose heart has never heaved with one religious emotion. He may penetrate to the very holy of holies in nature's temple, and yet retain his atheism, in spite of the hallowed influences that surround him. Nothing is plainer in theory, and, alas! nothing has been more surely confirmed by experience, than that the possession of science is not the possession of religion. _In the third place, what a perversion of science it is to employ it against religion!_ Rightly understood, and fairly interpreted, there is not a single scientific truth that does not harmoniously accord with revealed as well as natural religion; and yet, by superficial minds, almost every one of these principles has, at one time or another, been regarded as in collision with religion, and especially with revelation. One after another have these apparent discrepancies melted away before the clearer light of further examination. And yet, up to the present day, not a few, closing their eyes against the lessons of experience, still fancy that the responses of science are not in unison with those from revelation. But this is a sentiment which finds no place with the profound and unprejudiced philosopher; for he has seen too much of the harmony between the works and the word of God to doubt the identity of their origin. He knows it to be a sad perversion of scientific truth to use it for the discredit of religion. He knows that the inspiration of the Almighty breathed the same spirit into science as into religion; and if they utter discordant tones, it must be because one or the other has been forced to speak in an unnatural dialect. _In the fourth place, how entirely have the natural tendencies of science been misunderstood, when they have been represented as leading to religious scepticism!_ I do not deny the fact that many scientific men have been sceptical. But I maintain that this has been in spite of science, rather than the result of its natural tendency; for we have shown that tendency in all cases to be favorable to piety. Other more powerful causes, therefore, must have operated to counteract the natural influence of scientific truth in those cases where men eminent for science have spurned away from them the authority of religion. Among these causes, the pride of knowledge is one of the most powerful; and before the mind has attained to very profound views of science, this pride does often exert a most disastrous influence upon a man's religious feelings. He is looked up to as an oracle on other subjects, and why should he not be equally wise concerning religion? It is natural for him to feel desirous, in such circumstances, of rising above all vulgar and superstitious views, and of convincing his fellow-men that he has made as great discoveries in religion as in science. He, therefore, calls in question the prevailing religious opinions. Having once taken his stand against the truth, pride does not allow him to recede, and he endeavors to convert scientific truth into weapons against religion. And this perversion produces the impression, with those not familiar with its natural tendency, that science fosters scepticism. Another cause of this scepticism is a superficial acquaintance with the religious bearings of scientific truth. It is one thing to master the principles of science in an abstract form, and quite a different thing to understand their religious bearings. Moral reasoning is so different from physical and mathematical, that often a mind which is a prodigy for the latter, is a mere Lilliput in the former. And yet that mind may fancy itself as profound in the one as in the other, and may, therefore, be as tenacious of its errors in religion as of its demonstrated verities in science. In the following extract it will be seen that Dr. Chalmers imputes the religious scepticism connected with science chiefly to a superficial acquaintance with science. His remarks may seem unreasonably severe and sweeping; nevertheless, they deserve consideration. And they accord with the idea of Lord Bacon, who says, "A smattering of philosophy leads to atheism; whereas a thorough acquaintance with it brings him back again to religion." "We have heard," Dr. Chalmers remarks, "that the study of natural science disposes to infidelity. But we feel persuaded that this is a danger associated only with a slight and partial, never with a deep, and adequate, and comprehensive, view of its principles. It is very possible that the conjunction between science and scepticism may at present be more frequently realized than in former days; but this is only because, in spite of all that is alleged about this our more enlightened day and more enlightened public, our science is neither so deeply founded, nor of such firm and thorough staple, as it was wont to be. We have lost in depth what we have gained in diffusion; having neither the massive erudition, nor the gigantic scholarship, nor the profound and well-laid philosophy of a period that has now gone by; and it is to this that Infidelity stands indebted for her triumphs among the scoffers and superficialists of a half-learned generation."--_Chalmers's Works_, vol. vii. p. 262. Briefly, but nobly, has Sir John Herschel vindicated science from the charge of sceptical tendencies. "Nothing can be more unfounded than the objection which has been taken _in limine_ by persons, well meaning, perhaps, certainly of narrow minds, against the study of natural philosophy, and, indeed, against all science, that it fosters in its cultivators an undue and overweening self-conceit, leads them to doubt the immortality of the soul, and to scoff at revealed religion. Its natural effect, we may confidently assert, on every well-constituted mind, is and must be the direct contrary. No doubt the testimony of natural reason, on whatever exercised, must, of course, stop short of those truths which it is the object of revelation to make known; but while it places the existence and principal attributes of a Deity on such grounds as to render doubt absurd, and atheism ridiculous, it unquestionably opposes no natural or necessary obstacle to further progress; on the contrary, by cherishing as a vital principle an unbounded spirit of inquiry and ardency of expectation, it unfetters the mind from prejudices of every kind, and leaves it open to every impression of a higher nature, which it is susceptible of receiving; guarding only against enthusiasm and self-deception by a habit of strict investigation, but encouraging, rather than suppressing, every thing that can offer a prospect or hope beyond the present obscure and unsatisfactory state. The character of the true philosopher is to hope all things not impossible, and to believe all things not unreasonable."--_Diss. on Study of Nat. Phil._ In speaking of geology and revelation, Sir John says, "There cannot be two truths in contradiction to one another, and a man must have a mind fitted neither for scientific nor for religious truth, whose religion can be disturbed by geology, or whose geology can be distorted from its character of an inductive science by a determination to accommodate its results to preconceived interpretations of the Mosaic cosmogony."--_Dr. J. P. Smith's Lectures_, p. viii. 4th edition. "We have often mourned," says M'Cosh, "over the attempts made to set the works of God against the word of God, and thereby excite, propagate, and perpetuate jealousies fitted to separate parties that ought to live in closest union. In particular, we have always regretted that endeavors should have been made to depreciate nature with a view of exalting revelation; it has always appeared to us to be nothing else than the degrading of one part of God's works in the hope thereby of exalting and recommending another." "Perilous as it is at all times for the friends of religion to set themselves against natural science, it is especially dangerous in an age like the present. "It is no profane work that is engaged in by those who, in all humility, would endeavor to remove jealousies between parties whom God has joined together, and whom man is not at liberty to put asunder. We are not lowering the dignity of science when we command it to do what all the objects which it looks at and admires do--when we command it to worship God. Nor are we detracting from the honor which is due to religion when we press it to take science into its service, and accept the homage which it is able to pay. We are seeking to exalt both when we show how nature conducts man to the threshold of religion, and when from this point we bid him look abroad on the wide territories of nature. We would aid at the same time both religion and science, by removing those prejudices against sacred truth which nature has been employed to foster; and we would accomplish this not by casting aside and discarding nature, but by rightly interpreting it. "Let not science and religion be reckoned as opposing citadels, frowning defiance upon each other, and their troops brandishing their armor in hostile attitude. They have too many common foes, if they would but think of it, in ignorance and prejudice, in passion and vice, under all their forms, to admit of their lawfully wasting their strength in a useless warfare with each other. Science has a foundation, and so has religion; let them unite their foundations, and the basis will be broader, and they will be two compartments of one great fabric reared to the glory of God. Let the one be the outer and the other the inner court. In the one, let all look, and admire, and adore; and in the other, let those who have faith kneel, and pray, and praise. Let the one be the sanctuary where human learning may present its richest incense as an offering to God, and the other the holiest of all, separated from it by a veil now rent in twain, and in which, on a blood-sprinkled mercy-seat, we pour out the love of a reconciled heart, and hear the oracles of the living God."--_Method of the Divine Government_, p. 449, _et seq._ _In the fifth place, scientific men and religious men may learn from this subject to regard each other as engaged in a common cause._ If it be indeed true that scientific truth, rightly applied, is religious truth, then may the religious man be sure that every scientific discovery will ultimately contribute to the illustration of the character or government of the Deity; and therefore should he encourage and rejoice in all such investigations, and bid God speed to the votaries of science. Even though he cannot see how the new discovery will illustrate religion, and though, when imperfectly developed, it may seem to have an unfavorable aspect, he need not fear to confide in the general principle that science and religion are alike of divine origin, and must be in harmony. On the other hand, the votary of science should remember that the state of society most favorable to his pursuits is one in which religion exerts the strongest influence. It is for his interest, therefore, merely as a lover of science, and much more as a moral and accountable agent, to have pure religion prevail. Scientific and religious men should, therefore, look upon each other as co-laborers in a most noble cause--in illustrating the divine character and government. All jealousy and narrow-minded exclusiveness should be banished, and side by side should they labor in warm-hearted and generous sympathy. Alas! how different from this has been the history of the past! and, to a great extent, how different it is at present! "A study of the natural world," says Professor Sedgwick, "teaches not the truths of revealed religion, nor do the truths of religion inform us of the inductions of physical science. Hence it is that men, whose studies are too much confined to one branch of knowledge, often learn to overrate themselves, and so become narrow minded. Bigotry is a besetting sin of our nature. Too often has it been the attendant of religious zeal; but it is perhaps the most bitter and unsparing when found among the irreligious. A philosopher, not understanding one atom of their spirit, will sometimes scoff at the labors of religious men; and one who calls himself religious will, perhaps, return a like harsh judgment, and thank God that he is not as the philosophers; forgetting, all the while, that man can ascend to no knowledge except by faculties given to him by his Creator's hand, and that all natural knowledge is but a reflection of the will of God. In harsh judgments, such as these, there is not only much folly, but much sin. True wisdom consists in seeing how all the faculties of the mind and all parts of knowledge bear upon each other, so as to work together to a common end; ministering at once to the happiness of man and his Maker's glory."--_Discourse on the Studies of the University_, 5th edition, p. 105, appendix. _In the sixth place, the subject shows us what is the most important use to be derived from science._ It does not consist, as men have been supposing, in its application to the useful arts, whereby civilization, and human comfort and happiness are so greatly promoted; although men have thereby been raised from a state of barbarism and advanced to a high point on the scale of refinement. It is not the application of science as a means of enlarging and disciplining the mind; although this would be a noble result of scientific study. But it is its application for the illustration of religion. This, I say, is its most important use. For what higher or nobler purpose can any pursuit subserve than in developing the character, government, and will of that infinite Being, who is the sum and centre of all perfection and happiness? Other objects accomplished by science are important, and in the bustle of life they may seem to be its chief end. But in the calmness of mature years, when we begin to estimate things according to their real value, we shall see that the religious bearings of any pursuit far transcend in importance all its other relations; for all its other tendencies and uses are limited to this world, and will, therefore, be transient; but every thing which bears the stamp of religion is immortal, and every thing which concerns the Deity is infinite. It is true that but few who are engaged in scientific pursuits make much account of their bearings upon man's highest interests; but very different will it be in heaven. There, so far as we know, all the applications of science to the useful arts will be unknown, and the great object of its cultivation will be to gain new and clearer views of the perfections and plans of Jehovah, and thus to awaken towards him a deeper reverence and a warmer love. And such should be the richest fruit of scientific researches on earth. _In the seventh place, the subject shows us that those who are the most eminent in science ought to be the most eminent in piety._ I am far from maintaining that science is a sufficient guide in religion. On the other hand, if left to itself, as I fully admit,-- "It leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind." Nor do I maintain that scientific truth, even when properly appreciated, will compare at all, in its influence upon the human mind, with those peculiar and higher truths disclosed by revelation. All I contend for is, that scientific truth, illustrating as it does the divine character, plans, and government, ought to fan and feed the flame of true piety in the hearts of its cultivators. He, therefore, who knows the most of science ought most powerfully to feel this religious influence. He is not confined, like the great mass of men, to the outer court of nature's magnificent temple, but he is admitted to the interior, and allowed to trace its long halls, aisles, and galleries, and gaze upon its lofty domes and arches; nay, as a priest he enters the _penetralia_, the holy of holies, where sacred fire is always burning upon the altars, where hovers the glorious Schekinah, and where, from a full orchestra, the anthem of praise is ever ascending. Petrified, indeed, must be his heart, if it catches none of the inspiration of such a spot. He ought to go forth from it among his fellow-men with radiant glory on his face, like Moses from the holy mount. He who sees most of God in his works ought to show the stamp of divinity upon his character, and lead an eminently holy life. _Finally, the subject gives great interest and dignity to the study of science._ It is not strange that the religious man should sometimes find his ardor damped in the pursuit of some branches of knowledge, by the melancholy reflection that they can be of no use beyond this world, and will exist only as objects of memory in eternity. He may have devoted many a toilsome year to the details and manipulations of the arts; and, so far as this world is concerned, his labors have been eminently salutary and interesting. But all his labors and researches can be of no avail on the other side of the grave; and he cannot but feel sad that so much study and efforts should leave results no more permanent. Or he may have given his best days to loading his memory with those tongues which the Scriptures assure us shall cease; or to those details of material organization which can have no place or antitype in the future world. Interesting, therefore, as such pursuits have been on earth, nay, indispensable as they are to the well being and progress of human society, it is melancholy to realize that they form a part of that knowledge which will vanish away. The mind delights in the prospect of again turning its attention to those branches of knowledge which have engrossed and interested it on earth, and of doing this under circumstances far more favorable to their investigation. And such an anticipation he may reasonably indulge, who devotes himself on earth to any branch of knowledge not dependent on arrangements and organizations peculiar to this world. He may be confident that he is investigating those principles which will form a part of the science of heaven. Should he ever reach that pure world, he knows that the clogs which now weigh down his mind will drop off, and the clouds that obscure his vision will clear away, and that a brighter sun will pour its radiance upon his path. He is filling his mind with principles that are immortal. He is engaged in pursuits to which glorified and angelic minds are devoting their lofty powers. Other branches of knowledge, highly esteemed among men, shall pass away with the destruction of this world. The baseless hypotheses of science, falsely so called, whether moral, intellectual, or physical, and the airy phantoms of a light and fictitious literature, shall all pass into the limbo of forgetfulness. But the principles of true science, constituting, as they do, the pillars of the universe, shall bear up that universe forever. How many questions of deep interest, respecting his favorite science, must the philosopher in this world leave unanswered, how many points unsettled! But when he stands upon the vantage-ground of another world, all these points shall be seen in the bright transparencies of heaven. In this world, the votaries of science may be compared with the aborigines who dwell around some one of the principal sources of the River Amazon. They have been able, perhaps, to trace one or two, or it may be a dozen, of its tributaries, from their commencement in some mountain spring, and to follow them onwards as they enlarge by uniting, so as to bear along the frail canoes, in which, perhaps, they pass a few hundred miles towards the ocean. On the right and on the left, a multitude of other tributaries swell the stream which carries them onward, until it seems to them a mighty river. But they are ignorant of the hundred other tributaries which drain the vast eastern slope of the Andes, and sweep over the wide plains, till their united waters have formed the majestic Amazon. Of that river in its full glory, and especially of the immense ocean that lies beyond, the natives have no conception; unless, perhaps, some individual, more daring than the rest, has floated onward till his astonished eye could scarcely discern the shore on either hand, and before him he saw the illimitable Atlantic, whitened by the mariner's sail and the crested waves; and he may have gone back to tell his unbelieving countrymen the marvellous story. Just so is it with men of science. They are able to trace with clearness a few rills of truth from the fountain head, and to follow them onward till they unite in a great principle, which at first men fancy is the chief law of the universe. But as they venture still farther onward, they find new tributary truths coming in on either side, to form a principle or law still more broad and comprehensive. Yet it is only a few gifted and adventurous minds that are able, from some advanced mountain top, to catch a glimpse of the entire stream of truth, formed by the harmonious union of all principles, and flowing on majestically into the boundless ocean of all knowledge, the Infinite Mind. But when the Christian philosopher shall be permitted to resume the study of science in a future world, with powers of investigation enlarged and clarified, and all obstacles removed, he will be able to trace onward the various ramifications of truth, till they unite into higher and higher principles, and become one in that centre of centres, the Divine Mind. That is the Ocean from which all truth originally sprang, and to which it ultimately returns. To trace out the shores of that shoreless Sea, to measure its measureless extent, and to fathom its unfathomable depths, will be the noble and the joyous work of eternal ages. And yet eternal ages may pass by and see the work only begun. Footnotes: [1] I ought surely to except the work of Professor Bachman, which I have not read, but which was certainly written by an able naturalist. [2] I am not aware that this reply to the objection was ever advanced, till the publication, by myself, last year, of a sermon on the Resurrections of Spring, in a small volume of sermons, entitled Religious Lectures on some peculiar Phenomena in the Four Seasons. I may be mistaken; but I cannot see why this reply does not completely meet the difficulty, and free an important doctrine from an incubus under which it has long lain half smothered. [3] I hope it is not vanity to say that this subject, also, was first suggested in the sermon referred to in the preceding note. If correct, it opens an animating prospect to the afflicted Christian. [4] The first edition of this work was republished in this country. In England it has reached the fifth edition, much enlarged. [5] Two or three years since Professor Bronn described twenty-six thousand six hundred and seventy-eight species; and, upon an average, one thousand species are discovered every year. M. Alcide D'Orbigny, in 1850, stated the number of mollusks and radiated animals alone at seventeen thousand nine hundred and forty-seven species. [6] The news has just reached us that this venerable man is no more. I was present last summer at Homerton, when he resigned the charge of that beloved institution. From his addresses and his prayers, so redolent of the spirit of heaven, I might have known that he was pluming his wings for his upward flight. I am thankful that I was permitted to see the man, whom, of all others in Europe, I most desired to see. But Dr. Buckland I did not meet; for he was in an insane hospital, with no prospect of recovery. Alas! how sad to think of such Christian philosophers, so soon removed from the world, or from all concern in it! Could I dare to hope that I shall meet them and kindred spirits before the throne of our common Redeemer, how should I exclaim with Cicero, "_O preclarum diem, quum in illud animorum concilium coelumque proficiscar, ut quum ex hac turba et colluvione discedam!_" [7] This had always seemed to me a very strong case, as I had seen it described. But a recent visit to the spot (September, 1850) did not make so strong an impression upon me as I expected. In the first place, I found the head of Lake Lehman, where the Rhone enters, to be so narrow, that the detritus brought down by the river cannot spread itself out very far laterally. Secondly, I found, on ascending the Rhone, that it is every where a very rapid stream; and, on account of the origination of its branches from glaciers, it is always loaded with mud. So that the process of deposition must be going on continually. This cannot be the case in one in ten of other rivers, whose waters, for most of the year, are clear. This case, then, is only a quite unusual exception, and cannot be regarded as a standard by which to judge of the rate of deposition at present, or in past times. [8] For a much more minute and extended account of the different modes proposed to reconcile geology and revelation, and indeed of their entire connection, I would refer to several papers in the American Biblical Repository, especially to the number for October, 1835, p. 261. The progress of science has, indeed, rendered it desirable to change a few sentences in those articles; but all their essential principles I still maintain. [9] See Stuart and Hodge on Rom. v. 12; also Chalmers's Lectures on Romans, Lecture 26; and Harris's Man Primeval, p. 178. [10] Johnston's Physical Atlas, pp. 66, 76, (Philadelphia edition, 1850.) [11] Rev. Joseph Tracy, Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1850, p. 614. [12] See the Frontispiece. [13] The subject of this inference is treated with great ability and candor in the _Biblotheca Sacra_ for November, 1849, by my friend and colleague, Rev. Joseph Haven, Jr., professor of intellectual and moral philosophy in Amherst College. [14] In this description I have attempted to give exactly the experience of myself and John Tappan, Esq., with our wives, who ascended Snowdon in June, 1850. A few days after, we ascended Cader Idris, another mountain of Wales, near Dolgelly, where the views were perhaps equally wild and sublime, with the addition of a vast number of trap columns, and a pseudo-crater, with its jagged and frowning sides. [15] When I visited this spot, in September, 1850, I was so fortunate as to get sight of a party that had just commenced the descent from the summit of Mont Blanc. To the naked eye they were invisible, but the whole train could be distinctly seen through a telescope. This was the third party that had ascended that mountain in the summer of 1850. I doubt not that the dangers have been exaggerated, and that the excursion will become common. There are other points of great interest around Chamouny, which I have not noticed, some of which I visited, but not all. I have mentioned only the most common. [16] In September, 1850, I visited this well, and found the water running still, at the rate of six hundred and sixty gallons per minute at the surface, and half that amount at the top of a tube one hundred and twelve feet high, from whence it could be carried to any part of Paris; and, in fact, does supply some of the streets. I tasted the water, and found it pleasant, though warm, (84 deg. Fahrenheit.) [17] I adopt this division from an able American review of the "Vestiges." [18] For the details of this remarkable subject, see the "Parthenogenesis" of Professor Owen, p. 76, (London, 1849;) Steenstrup's "Alternation of Generations," published by the Ray Society in 1845, and Sedgwick's "Discourse on the Studies of the University," Supplement, p. 193, (London, 1850.) [19] The subject of this lecture has been ably discussed, within a few years, in most of the leading periodicals in Europe and America, though I must say not always with the candor calculated to do the most good. The two most able volumes that have fallen into my hands, on the subject, are Professor Sedgwick's "Discourse on the Studies of the University," &c., (fifth ed., London, 1850,) and Hugh Miller's "Footprints of the Creator," now republished in this country. [20] This subject has been treated more fully, and I hope more satisfactorily, in a little work of mine, which has just reached its second edition, entitled Religious Lectures on Peculiar Phenomena in the Four Seasons, (Amherst, 1851.) See the first Lecture, on the Resurrections of Spring. UNION BOOK STORE ALLEN & SPÏER IMPORTERS AND DEALERS IN SCHOOL, LAW, MEDICAL & MISCELLANEOUS BOOKS; Paper, Blank Books; American, English and French Staple and Fancy Stationery, No. 148 CLAY STREET, Just below Montgomery, SAN FRANCISCO. UNION SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY. This department embraces the latest editions of the most approved text books in various languages. SPELLERS AND READERS. Abbot's, McGuffey's, Heman's, Swan's, Sanders', Town's, Webster's, &c. ARITHMETIC. Adams', Colburn's, Davie's, Greenleaf's, Ray's, Smith's, Thompson's, &c. GEOGRAPHY. Mitchell's, Morse's, Olney's, Smith's, &c. GRAMMAR. Brown's, Bullion's, Kirkham's, Smith's, Weld's, &c. HISTORY. 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47314	----	images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) Transcriber's Note The author's classification of footnotes has been preserved, but footnotes have been located at the end of chapters THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURAL THEOLOGY. AN ESSAY, IN CONFUTATION OF THE SCEPTICISM OF THE PRESENT DAY, WHICH OBTAINED A PRIZE AT OXFORD, NOV. 26TH, 1872. BY THE REVEREND WILLIAM JACKSON, M.A., F.S.A., FORMERLY FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, AUTHOR OF "POSITIVISM," "RIGHT AND WRONG," "THE GOLDEN SPELL," ETC. NEW YORK: A. D. F. RANDOLPH & CO., BROADWAY. MDCCCLXXV. TO THE MOST NOBLE THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY, CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, &c., &c., &c., THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE, WITH HIS LORDSHIP'S PERMISSION, RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED BY THEIR AUTHOR. _From the "Oxford University Gazette" of June 14th, 1870._ PRIZE ESSAY. Circumstances have induced an Individual, who wishes to remain unknown, to offer a Prize of £100, to be competed for by Members of the University of Oxford of not less standing than Master of Arts, and by any above that standing, for the best Essay in confutation of the Materialism of the present day by arguments derived from Evidences of Intelligence, Design, Contrivance, and Adaptation of Means to Ends, in the Universe, and especially in Man considered in his Moral Nature, his Religious Aptitudes, and his Intellectual Powers; and in all Organic Nature. The observation also to be made and supported in the course of the Essay that the Will and Wisdom of the Creator may be a sufficient cause for deviations from the established course of nature, and that the Free-will of man, in things within his power and influence, may be a cause of similar deviations. It is desired that all arguments used against Materialism should be independent of those of Hegel, and of what is called the Spiritual Philosophy, which had its rise in Germany. A period of two years will be allowed after the Public Announcement of the subject before the competing Essays will be required to be sent in to the Judges: and it is a condition of the competition that the Copyright of the successful Essay shall be the property of the Donor of the Prize; but that if published, the profits (if any) shall belong to the Writer. The Very Reverend the Dean of St. Paul's, the Regius Professor of Divinity, and the Rev. C. Pritchard, Savilian Professor of Astronomy, have consented to act as Judges. Essays must be sent to the Registrar of the University on or before the 12th of June, 1872. The Essays are to be distinguished by mottoes, the writer's name being sent at the same time in a sealed envelope, in the manner prescribed for the Chancellor's Prizes. F. K. LEIGHTON, Vice-Chancellor. ALL SOULS COLLEGE, _June 13, 1870_. After the decease of Dean Mansel the last clause but one of the above notice was thus modified in the _Gazette_ for Dec. 5th, 1871:-- The Very Reverend the Dean of Canterbury, the Regius Professor of Divinity, and the Rev. C. Pritchard, Savilian Professor of Astronomy, have consented to act as Judges. The following announcement appeared in the _Gazette_ for Nov. 26th, 1872:-- PRIZE ESSAY. The Judges appointed to award a Prize of £100 offered for the best Essay in confutation of Materialism have adjudged the Prize to the Rev. W. JACKSON, M.A., F.S.A., late Fellow of Worcester College. H. G. LIDDELL, Vice-Chancellor. _November 25, 1872._ In a letter dated Dec. 26th, 1872, the Donor of the Prize surrendered any claim that he might have upon the Copyright of the Essay, and requested the Author to proceed with its publication. PREFACE. The Essay now published is the expansion of a thin volume by the present writer, which was printed more than four years ago.[1] Natural Theology, considered as a science, had been at that time pronounced extinct and impossible by very eminent authorities. From this decision I felt myself constrained to differ; and thought it worth while to put on record a plea for what appeared to me an unduly neglected branch of Philosophy. Such contempt of a pursuit possessing so many claims on the favourable attention of educated minds, seemed a fact to be accounted for in some way. After considerable thought, I ventured on asserting that the method latterly employed in treatises on this once popular science, furnished the true reason of its decline and fall. That method I could not avoid condemning as both inadequate and suicidal. The publication of my Sermon in 1870, was followed by a number of letters and critiques from scientific and literary men. Not one amongst them alleged any worse fault than novelty against the matter of my book, and undue compression against its manner. Many of their remarks were of the most encouraging description, and affected me deeply by reason of the celebrity of their writers, whom I had previously known only by their works and their reputation. One most generous letter from the Author who, above all others, had called my own intellectual life into active energy, excited, in my mind, a warmth of feeling absolutely indescribable. When, therefore, a Prize on this subject was offered for adjudication subject to the appointment of my own University, I felt glad to embrace an occasion which might be called in the truest sense an "Opportunity." What I have produced is to be found in the following pages. When engaged in writing them, it was my most anxious wish and endeavour to be _honest_: to advocate what I thought and still think true, without disguising the difficulties of my own conclusion, or assailing its antagonists by gratuitous insinuations or unfairnesses of any sort. Should such a meanness appear, I would earnestly desire the leaf on which it is printed to be torn from my book. The delays which have befallen these pages since they were first sent to press in the former half of 1873, have caused much regret to both author and publishers. Our troubles began with a singular misadventure to a quantity of MS.; which, together with other circumstances, delayed printing till after the time originally fixed for publication. The next season was lost in consequence of severe domestic affliction. Those of my readers who have ever gone into print, will most readily commiserate the anxiety caused by such unlooked for disappointments. * * * * * The ensuing line of argument was suggested to my mind when a young Oxonian, in consequence of circumstances with which it is needless to trouble my readers. What I then thought its special strength, lay in the point of its combining two totally different kinds of proof:--one, drawn from a survey of the world we live in,--the other, from what is nearer to ourselves--the moral truth given us by our personal consciousness. I also thought that any particular weakness alleged against one proof, could not be incident to the other; and, therefore, that since both lines of evidence, (kept apart while under examination), met at last in one and the same result, my inquiry had arrived at a demonstrably certain conclusion. At the same time, I could not but feel a wholesome distrust of my reasonings on a subject, which, though often discussed, had never, as I then believed, been looked at exactly from my own point of view. Somewhat later in life, I learned from Paley's commentators and continuators, that the attack and defence of Natural Theology had for years been conformed to the position taken up by the Archdeacon, so far at least as the popular science of this country was concerned. But the sceptical tactics of Hume shewed me a much wider plan of assault; and in studying his great German antagonist I saw that a double line of defence had been contemplated by him. I have since observed that no part of Kant's philosophy is less commonly known to English readers than his method and results in those most priceless of his critical investigations, the treatises forming a ground-work of Moral Science. As may at once be supposed, the discovery that I really had a sort of sympathiser in Kant, was the greatest possible encouragement to my mind. Yet there remained a very heavy discouragement. Evidently, any one who should try to pursue two very separate but convergent lines of reasoning, must undergo a most toilsome task, and one little likely to be performed without long and continued effort. And, harder yet to answer was the question next following: Who will read your patiently obtained results, to say nothing of the collateral topics which must in logical fairness be argued by the way? After all, the inevitable drawback to Natural Theology lies in the fact that, in order to be held a valid science, it must necessarily become a complex one. This last difficulty remains my chiefest apprehension still. Neither in the Essay itself, nor yet in the additions made to it, have I introduced any one point which it seemed permissible to omit with justice to the real issue. Yet I dare not hope that many eyes, except those of the practised student, will easily perceive how germane to that issue are several among the subjects discussed. One class of thinkers will, however, welcome the whole of these inquiries; and this class contains the earnest men for whom above all others I have written. The amount of MS. sent to the Registrar was much less in compass than the present volume. But Notes and Illustrations were intended from the first, and, had there existed a doubt as to their propriety, it would have been at once removed by the counsel of competent advisers. The risks attaching to the Essay in its smaller shape were said to be two: (1) An evident appearance of unwilling brevity, and (2) a possible charge of novel thought, bordering on paradox. In attempting to overcome these obstacles to favourable attention, I have pursued the following course:-- The text of the Essay is printed as originally written, with only a very few verbal changes for the sake of improved clearness. A number of foot-notes belonging to its first draft, remain distinguished by the ordinary marks of reference.[2] In reperusing the text, I set myself to consider how many sympathisers I could find. The best answer to any possible charge of Paradox, seemed to be a roll-call of thinkers who, for their own purposes, have asserted positions more or less approaching those I had attempted to maintain. The number of auxiliaries I have thus succeeded in assembling, is, I confess, a matter of considerable self-gratulation. Yet, I do not appeal to such opinions as _authorities_, in any other sense than so far forth as they are the decisions of _experts_ in different provinces of knowledge. In whatever concerns his own department, each scientific worker has assuredly a right to be heard. The weight of confirmation thus given to my own previous results, is enhanced by the fact that most of the authors cited, pursued different objects from mine, and wrote without any bias favourable to Natural Theology. Respecting more than one of them, I feel inclined to repeat the ancient adage, "My antagonist has become my helper." The Quotations themselves have been divided into separate classes. The greatest number illustrate particular expressions, sentences, and paragraphs. These are arranged as foot-notes on the several pages of Text, and are referred to by the _small_ letters of the alphabet. Others, explaining or confirming principles, of general importance to the argument, have been distinguished by _capital_ letters, and placed at the end of the chapters to which they appertain. With this latter division are classed a third set of extracts, which aim at expounding certain special thoughts, and opening out to the real student useful paths of prolonged investigation. One circumstance connected with the Additional Notes, is alluded to at the bottom of page 27. Originally, I had made only a few citations from thoroughly sceptical writers. But, against this plan were urged the following objections. (1.) In arguing questions of all kinds, definite points are present to the mind of every disputant, and against them he directs his argument. His expressions are always antithetic to these points, and should they be left in the shadow, all antithesis is lost, and the real force of the argument obscured. Sometimes it is even mistaken;--a truth which may be illustrated by comparing the positions of great leaders in politics or theology with the positions occupied by their disciples. The former always speak by way of antithesis,--the latter seldom construe their leaders' words antithetically. Hence, the disciples never fail to outrun their teachers. Antithesis is in truth a verbal counterpoise; and where it disappears, balance is not seldom overthrown. Thus, said my advisers, your reasoning must necessarily suffer by a general loss of clear definition. Again, (2) they continued;--Since the time when you began your Essay, Scepticism in general, Materialism and Mechanism in particular, or, to speak briefly, the various denials of Theism, have ceased to be subjects on which reticence is feasible. An Address of Mr. Gladstone's delivered in a room, and spoken to a company of youths, soon became world-wide; it has been, and will be read, quoted, and commented on, wheresoever the English language is understood. One daily newspaper attractively written, devotes many of its clever pages to making known in a forensic manner the many different phases of sceptical opinion. And some religious journals explain, with complete freedom, what the disbeliefs are which they consider most reprehensible. Reticence, therefore, is simply thrown away. Some may desire to see it practised towards young people, but such "economizers" are, in effect, theoretical. They forget that the Battle of Thought comes to educated young minds along with the Battle of Life; and woe to the unprepared either way! They become, one and all, bewildered. These reasons have satisfied my own judgment up to a certain point. I have consequently added _such_ quotations from sceptical authors, as seemed desirable for the purpose of _limiting_ my several positions with antithetic distinctness; a kind of definition which I admit to be the most distinct of all. And to these extracts I have appended some others, plainly expressing the conclusions which the opponents of Theism _ought_ to reach, provided their views are carried out with fairness and consistency. Conclusions of this kind can only be obtained from Sceptics themselves. In what are called "logical consequences" put by an author into the mouth of his adversaries, I, for one, have no confidence whatever. To draw such inferences and glory in their wrong-headedness, is like inventing both sides of a controversial dialogue, defeating the party destined to defeat, and then laying claim to a philosophic victory. Or, we may take the reverse supposition. A writer is too honest for such ill-gotten triumph. This same quality of candour will, most probably, induce him to put the case he opposes in a light so advantageous, as to throw fresh doubt upon his own. If, then, I have erred in over-quoting upon these accounts, I cannot plead that the error is committed unadvisedly. It seems right to say, that, in mustering auxiliaries, I found the best friends to my argument were the most truly philosophic Biologists. It would indeed be strange and sad, should the genuine leaders of thought in any among the Natural Sciences be reckoned real adversaries of Natural Theology. But, in order to convey an exact impression to the reader's mind, I must beg him to peruse, in connection with this statement, the note on Materialism appended to Chapter III.; and, more particularly, its concluding pages. Towards the hybrid class mentioned p. 246, I cannot help entertaining a sentiment the reverse of complimentary. To several distinguished persons who have bestowed upon this undertaking the aids of advice or sympathy, I offer a tribute of respectful gratitude. In one particular they will, I hope, think their kindness not utterly thrown away; since, unlike many recipients of good counsel, I have followed the opinions given me. It is with a deep solemnity of emotion, I thus venture on recording my heartfelt indebtedness. One, who was glad that words of his had helped me, now adorns no longer the noblest of assemblies by his eloquence. To my personal sorrow, he will not cast a glance on the pages over which his favour threw a ray of encouragement. That same last change, O half-sceptical yet whole-earnest Reader, awaits both thee and myself. To thee, I am no more than the unseen utterer of certain thoughts, nourished through a period of blended hope and anxiety. It is now thine, to take unto thyself such reasonings as may fairly lay claim to some serious consideration. It is mine to accept the mixed consequences of their utterance;--the kindness and contempt which follow believing advocacy always. Through all, and above all, there will remain with me--and perchance with thee also--the sense of a new Responsibility. These two shares in this slight book on the largest of subjects, belong in a fashion to earnest reader and anxious author for the time present. Soon they will be ours, and not ours. As days pass by, thought and utterance will bring less to both of us. We shall both have tinctured our lives more deeply with the Divine, or the Not-Divine; we shall both have sealed the secret fountains of our hearts, in readiness for the Grave and its inevitable Futurities. * * * * * [asterism] "Natural Theology attempts to demonstrate the existence of a personal First Cause, supreme Reason, and Will. The relations of mankind towards such a Being, are called natural religion. * * * * * We look upon the starry heavens and say, _as_ man creates within his own soul, and gives to airy nothing a thought, a name, a purpose, and a reality, _so_ Almighty God created the Divine poem of this universal frame; His will is its substance, His majestic thought and purpose shine out in its adornment, and we--we are hidden in the hollow of His hand. Every marvel of the visible raises our sense of the infinite variety and beauty of the invisible, until, attracted by Him Who is the first mover of the outward and the inward alike, we make of this wonderful orb we tread upon a solid ground of support from which to mount, to fly to God and be at rest." These paragraphs are taken from the Appendix to my little volume on Natural Theology alluded to in the beginning of this Preface. They were intended as comments on the words with which the Sermon itself concluded:-- "I have only to add that time could not permit my carrying this fruitful subject beyond its obscure and dry first principles. There is a brighter district of thought, an upland territory, as it were, rising towards our highest inheritance; a border country where Natural Theology melts into Spiritual Religion, and where the true offspring of God learn the lineaments of their Father's divine love. I turn with regret from this land of living light." Such, then, were the feelings with which I could not help regarding the scientific limits of Natural Theology. I felt it nothing less than a disappointment to traverse the paths of positive fact and argument, and to close just at the very point where the human head gains a response from the human heart. It seemed like the task of a landscape painter, who, after depicting successive plains made shadowy by tangled brushwood and dark forest-growth, should be compelled to lay down his pencil, and forbear transferring to his canvas the beautiful downs and sun-lighted hills overlooking those more obscure regions. Compared with the painter's regrets, were mine, I asked, less natural? The attributes of Deity already dwelt upon through the chain of my argument, were not only fitted to bring His existence home to Reason, but also to move earnest spirits by a strong sense of elevated hopes and duties, devotion and aspiration. These religious sentiments might have yielded the purest lights of my landscape. All that had gone before seemed more negative than affirmative;--rather to have been sketched in neutral tints than in radiant and glowing colours. A similar feeling of deep concern attended the conclusion of the present Essay; increased by an inevitable thought that the reiterated disappointment seemed likely to be a disappointment always. It was, therefore, a very great gratification to find in the honour of an election to the Bampton Lectureship for 1875, the possibility of adding a crown and completion to all my foregone work. The scheme of these Lectures enables me to treat of Natural Religion; to penetrate the upland territory, the border country where Man may view, as he walks heavenwards, the lineaments of his Father's Divine love. * * * * * Before this time next year, I may, therefore, hope to have realized my purpose. The volume of Bampton Lectures for 1875, may then have become the appropriate conclusion of this present book. OXFORD, _Nov., 1874_. FOOTNOTES: [1] Right and Wrong. A Sermon upon the Question Under what Conditions is a Science of Natural Theology possible? Preached before the University of Oxford, March 6, 1870. [2] All citations made in the original draft, or in the foot-notes belonging to it, have been revised and altered to suit later editions of the authorities cited. Thus there are several extracts from books which may appear to be recent publications, but are, in fact, authorized _rifaccimenti_. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGES I.--INTRODUCTORY: MOTIVES OF ESSAY--DIVISION INTO CHAPTERS--METHOD OF STUDY--CONSILIENT PROOFS 1-18 ADDITIONAL NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 18-39 II.--PHILOSOPHY OF DESIGN: HOSTILE CRITICISMS EXAMINED--EXPLANATIONS AND RESTATEMENTS 41-82 ADDITIONAL NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 83-138 III.--CONDITIONS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE: ITS DISABILITIES AND FIRST PRINCIPLES--IDEALISM--POSITIVISM--MATERIALISM--WE MUST ACCEPT ULTIMATE TRUTHS 139-181 ADDITIONAL NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 182-248 IV.--BELIEFS OF REASON: PRINCIPLE OF INDUCTION --THEISM--CONFIRMATIONS AND ILLUSTRATIONS 249-289 V.--PRODUCTION AND ITS LAW: CONDITIONS OF ACTIVITY--WILL AND REASON IN CONTRAST WITH MATERIALISM AND MECHANISM--CREATIVE MIND CHARACTERISED BY VISIBLE PRODUCTS 291-348 ADDITIONAL NOTE 349 VI.--CAUSATION: LIMITS OF PHYSICAL LAW--THE BEGINNING--CAUSE AND WILL--MIRACLES 351-373 VII.--RESPONSIBILITY: RIGHT AND WRONG--A FUTURE STATE--SUPREME WILL AND PERSONALITY-- POSSIBLE RELATIONS OF THE DIVINE BEING WITH MANKIND--EXPECTATION OF SUPERNATURAL AIDS TO KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE--THE BALANCE 375-396 L'ENVOY 396-398 LIST OF ADDITIONAL NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE The Right Honourable W. E. Gladstone and others on Modern Scepticism 19 On Corruption of the Judgment by misdirected Moral Sentiments 28 Special Pleading in History and Morals 29 The Method employed throughout this Essay 31 On the Effect of Consilient Proofs 37 The abstract reasonings involved in Natural Theology 83 On the phrase "Design implies a Designer" 98 Hume on the Analogies of Art and Nature 101 The Pantheistic consequences charged upon Physical Speculations 103 The extent and divisions of the Science of Natural Theology 104 On Teleology 107 Account of some theories respecting our Personal Identity 182 Helmholtz, Popular Lectures on Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision 190 Helmholtz on Specialties of Sensibility 199 Popular account of Pure Idealism with critical remarks 204 On the Relations of Fact and Theory 215 On the "Unknowable" 217 Mr. J. S. Mill as an Independent Moralist 223 Archebiosis, or Spontaneous Generation 226 On Materialism 237 The Doctrine of Chances applied to the Structural Development of the Eye 349 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURAL THEOLOGY. "Finis vitæ in primis noscendus est, ut ad eum actiones omnes dirigere valeamus; non minus quàm naviganti portus ad quem deveniat ante omnia statuendus." _Ficinus in Platonis Philebum_, Cap. I. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. "Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies;-- Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower--but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is." _Tennyson._ "I have written under the conviction that no Philosophy of the Universe can satisfy the minds of thoughtful men which does not deal with such questions as inevitably force themselves on our notice, respecting the Author and the Object of the Universe; and also under the conviction that every Philosophy of the Universe which has any consistency, must suggest answers, at least conjectural, to such questions. No _Cosmos_ is complete from which the question of Deity is excluded; and all Cosmology has a side turned towards Theology."--_Whewell, Philosophy of Discovery_, Preface, p. vi. "All science is but the intercalation, each more comprehensive than that which it endeavours to explain, between the great Primal Cause and the ultimate effect."--_Professor Allman's Address to the British Association at Bradford_, 1873. "Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom, Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom. Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet,-- Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet." _Tennyson._ SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER I. This Introductory Chapter consists of three parts. The first lays down the questions proposed, and shows the necessity of asking them. The second illustrates what may be termed in Art-phrase the _motives_ of the Essay. The third briefly describes its method, and explains the readiest mode of studying Natural Theology. _Analysis_--Inquiries underlying Natural Theology--Way in which they are answered by our Instinctive Persuasions--How far this answer is sufficing; how far influential. Phases of Doubt; undeclared Scepticism and Indifferentism--Origin and leaders of the modern Sceptical and Materialistic Schools--Doubts of Intellect distinguished from Scepticism of Immorality--Social dangers and alarms exemplified. Method of this Essay, and requests as to the mode of reading it--Divisions of Argument; their separate and consilient effect. _Additional Notes and Illustrations._ A.--The Right Honourable W. E. Gladstone and others on Modern Scepticism. B.--On Corruption of the Judgment by misdirected Moral Sentiments. C.--On Special Pleading in History and Morals. D.--On the Method employed throughout this Essay. E.--On the Effect of Consilient Proofs. THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURAL THEOLOGY. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. No subjects of thought have ever been proposed more essential to the culture and happiness of mankind than the two following inquiries. Upon the first, human minds dwell unweariedly through every change of circumstance from childhood to advanced age. It is this:--What reason have we to look for a future life after that hour of dissolution which inevitably awaits us all? The second question unites itself closely, as by indissoluble links, to the first. We always proceed to ask, Is there sufficient ground for believing in the existence of a Supreme Moral Being, to whose righteous care and kindness we can calmly commit ourselves when we come to die? Suppose any man to maintain that the universe we inhabit,--and we who are a portion of its occupants--came into existence by chance, he renounces at once every right and title to expect a life succeeding his bodily death. Chance--if the word means anything--means absolute uncertainty; and from that which is in its own nature uncertain, what continuing effects, what conclusive expectation, can be drawn? Neither is the prospect improved by Materialists[a], in whose opinion the being of man comprehends no element differing essentially, and in kind, from the natural world he rules over. We see actually consequent upon every death-bed the decay of our material frame; if, therefore, that frame be not the casket of a brighter jewel, we can assuredly affirm no hope higher or happier than corruption. The feelings of most human beings revolt from a destiny so ignoble. And many persons are satisfied that this revolt of feeling is in itself a sufficient ground for some belief in Immortality. Why, they ask, should so powerful an instinct dwell in the breast of our race with only a misleading issue? The higher instincts of creatures below us do not mislead them regarding that which is to come. Insects innumerable make provision for the certain sustenance of a progeny they never can live to behold. They also anticipate for themselves a futurity of life and development. The caterpillar invests himself with the web he has spun, and sinks into a chrysalid-sepulchre, to emerge from it in sun-lighted beauty. Can any valid reason be assigned why the intuitive aspirations of man should be more fallacious than such practical foresights of the merely animal world below him? So far as the writer of these pages is aware, no one has ever alleged a reason why mankind should be thus deluded. And without going further than our own country, it seems probable that this instinctive persuasion is seldom wanting amongst the greater part of our people. Although the moral consequences of such a persuasion, sometimes merely passive, may be far less than good men could desire, yet they are frequently strong enough to assist the weak and wavering when exposed to sudden temptations. In the "short and simple annals of the poor," may be read countless instances of the fact. Neglected men and women, the scorned outcasts of society, have been often held back by it from greater criminality. They have found themselves unable to acquiesce in the belief of _their_ world's opinion--the opinion of their evil friends and companions--that death must be to all creatures the certain end of all things. If, on the other hand, absolute knowledge of a future state were the natural gift of each person's understanding, there are thousands amongst our educated classes to whom the trial and terror of their own hearts would be incalculably mitigated. Numbers feel that speculative doubts concerning the Being of a God, and life after death, are sources of a continual perplexity and distress, under which they find little or no sympathy. In every fresh affliction or anxiety, such a mind has to sustain a double burden of sorrow, and concerning such it seems emphatically true, that "the heart knoweth his own bitterness." There may, however, be suggested one alleviation for every similar instance of despondency. The same rule holds in this respect as in all human pursuits,--labour is, and will always continue, the appointed path by which we must attain. The more noble the object sought, the more arduous the task and toil,--and what can be nobler than a well-grounded belief in God and Immortality? Another very large class of educated persons bear their doubts with stoical composure, account them an inevitable burden, and consider it lost time to ask questions concerning "the Unknowable." This class is sustained in its attitude by the prevalence[b] of really sceptical writings;--writings (that is) which deny the possibility of knowledge beyond the circle of positive phenomena. Maxims to this effect are not uncommonly disseminated through the periodical press, books of fiction, and other kinds of light literature. The rapidity of modern life leads men to take opinions upon trust, and keeps them back from serious investigation. An ephemeral satirist becomes in their eyes as valuable an authority as the most deeply-thinking reasoner. Much work is saved by this valuation, to say nothing of the great gain in self-complacency. And, no doubt, many persons feel particularly complacent in taking their tone from minds which are evidently no better informed, and no more finely strung than their own[c]. The class of sceptics just described, cannot be reckoned in figures. They make up multitudes never enumerated apart in any religious census. They live and die and make no sign,--and how can quiet unavowed disbelief obtain a separate place in the columns of the Registrar-General? Among the audible tones of respectable people it finds no utterance, and therefore occupies no position. Every one experienced in the world knows that this species of Indifferentism is usually regular at public worship, and reticent where sceptical phrases pass current. The only sure test is a moral one--of very slow application, since it takes time for a decent sceptic to balance the pleasures against the risks of immorality. Meantime, there remains some possible hope for a happier choice during the period of indecision. Far fewer, because far more strongly declared, are the literary lodestars of that harbourless sea, where all beyond the horizon of cloud and billow seems veiled and uncertain. Some amongst them may, after all, be but wandering lights themselves[d], floating and drifting like meteors which glimmer at nightfall across shadowy waters. Others appear really fixed in a dim and joyless firmament where the Present only is true, the remote Past a conjecture, and the Future altogether inscrutable. According to them this bounded prospect is the true goal and real aim of our transitory life,--within it the trials and griefs of humanity assume their proper dimensions and pale their ineffectual terrors, while peace, like a river of Eden, flows out over the once martyred but now ransomed race of man. Even in our own imperfect struggling day, the human creature may be happy who certainly knows that this mixed existence is his All--that outside it he can live no life except in the memory of his fellow-men--that there is no God, no futurity of individual progress or perfection; but that one thing happens equally to the good and the bad--the wise and the unwise. This knowledge brings happiness, because it chases from the breast self-centred hope and fear: the man who accepts this blank beholds himself, as he really is, an atom of the Universal Whole--borne now by the irresistible tide of force into sunlight--borne soon by the same irresistible tide into a darkness of the shadow of death. Compared with this creed, the martyrs of Monotheism were self-loving--for did not they hope? Compared with this simple creed, all who have stopped short on the threshold of frightful crimes, and hesitated to stain their souls, were also self-loving--for did they not fear? A great variety of remonstrances have been addressed to writers of this latter type[e]. Social consequences have been eloquently urged against hypotheses which, if realised, would weaken, or perhaps destroy, self-control, foresight, and self-improvement. In reply we are told that these objects of pursuit still appear good and useful to benevolent eyes. But it should be remembered that our age is one of transition--half-developed as it were in Doubt. Our benevolent men have not yet been fully disciplined in the coming school. Who, therefore, shall safely predict for us the effects of its proposed discipline? Add that, looking at the civilised world in general, certain ideas (illusions, as they are sometimes called) respecting a Futurity influenced by our present right and wrong-doing, are ingrained in cultured man, and may perhaps be described as connate with his nineteenth-century existence[f]. Is it possible, then, for any one to say beforehand what may or may not be the consequence of uprooting cherished principles fitted in their own nature to exercise so practical an influence? Remonstrances of this kind, however truthful and valuable in themselves, would be out of place in the ensuing pages. A contribution to the constructive science of Natural Theology must rest its arguments upon the reason of the case, to the exclusion of many interesting and persuasive considerations. All questions of Sociology, have, however, a special fascination for numerous thinkers who are unlikely to overlook negative conclusions lying close upon the confines of their own science, and to them the treatment of such questions must be remitted. That these phases of thought have not, in fact, escaped the consideration of benevolent observers, may be inferred from the special circumstances under which this Essay is composed. Into every condition (each being required by the exigencies of the subject) the present writer enters with honest cordiality. His wish and aim is to place before those who, while they doubt, still debate, certain reasonable considerations which have appeared convincing to other speculative minds. And he may defend himself from any possible charge of causeless intermeddling with other men's concerns, in the words of one amongst our most genuinely English poets:-- "'Twere well, says one sage, erudite, profound, Terribly arch'd and aquiline his nose, And overbuilt with most impending brows, 'Twere well could you permit the World to live As the World pleases: what's the World to you? Much. I was born of woman, and drew milk As sweet as charity from human breasts. I think, articulate, I laugh and weep, And exercise all functions of a man. How then should I and any man that lives Be strangers to each other?"[3] There are, however, doubters whom the writer can scarcely desire to address--human beings in whose hearts to deny God kindles a vivid delight, because belief in Him would compel the renunciation of some darling wickedness. The true spring of their Materialism, Pantheism,--or whatever else happens to be the adopted form of Negation--lies within the will[g] itself. And, therefore, the wish to be better must precede the wish to hear any one who reasons of righteousness, temperance, or judgment to come. To those who doubt, yet desire that Truth--whichever way Truth may incline--shall distinctly prevail, the ensuing pages are dedicated. And one main endeavour to be kept in view by both writer and reader is, that, laying aside passion and prejudice, these questions may be discussed under the _siccum lumen_--the purified ray--of Right Reason. To argue for victory may be allowed an advocate who pleads subject to the intervention of a judge. But here we have no arbiter to say what is or is not allowable; here, too, the matter is in itself something graver than corporeal life, or death, or all else beneath the sky; here, finally, the case is personal, since each reasoner first settles an account with his own heart; next, tries and decides a conclusive issue, and by his own sentence, accepts more than any human foresight can declare. Here, then, special pleading[4] is altogether out of place on either side, and we must, if we aim at what is best, argue for nothing more or less than the plain and simple truth. There must, of course, be difficulties in keeping this straight and honest road. Few men like making admissions apparently at variance with their own conclusions; fewer still like to forego pleas which, though in their own judgment unsound, are certainly specious, and to many minds persuasive. Such, however, is the wish and aim of the present essayist. And, that he may bind himself the more firmly to his own resolution, he requests his readers to believe that any over-statement or other error of which he may fairly be found guilty, is occasioned by the unpleasantly common cause of ignorance,--a cause which Dr. Johnson confessed was his reason for defining "_pastern_" as a "horse's knee." "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance," he replied, to the surprise of his fair critic, who expected an elaborate defence. _Per contra_, the essayist may equitably claim that he shall not be convicted by a too summary and inconsiderate process. At the first blush, there will certainly appear in the eyes of many readers numerous seeming mistakes, which, if carefully scrutinized, may afterwards be held the reverse. At all events, plain dealing and honest purpose demand that, when Truth is the issue truly sought, those who approach it from opposite sides must (if they desire to do right) sift their objections and difficulties as well as their favourite arguments. Reasoning on Natural Theology falls necessarily into two divisions. The _first_ is made up of arguments drawn from the world without us. The _second_, of arguments drawn from the world within[h]. Each path of reasoning is subject to a cross division. We may argue affirmatively to a definite conclusion. We may also argue negatively with the same end in view;--we may show how much more difficult and less tenable is the contradictory hypothesis. It would be an awkward and almost impracticable task to keep these kinds of reasoning far apart. The natural procedure of thought, is to combine, rather than to dissever, when we marshal facts for the purpose of a full and wide generalization. Yet it does seem practicable to mark every transition of thought distinctly; and, if clearly marked, the distinction may easily be kept in mind. With this precaution, it may appear allowable to treat Natural Theology in a more discursive manner than could otherwise be permitted. The object of so doing will be to divest discussion as much as possible of a dry, logical stiffness; and, by ranging round each topic[i] to look at it in various lights; a process which generally discovers both the weakness and the strength of reasoning. Any one who has read Plato will understand the advantage of Dialogue in this respect. A more familiar book, Coleridge's "Friend," is another apt illustration. Each of its series of essays takes a sweep of the kind; and each "landing-place" affords a rest to the reader, and a fresh beginning to the intellectual tour. Without venturing to copy the quaint invention of landing-places, the present writer intends making every Chapter the occasion of a fresh _start_. The separate trains of thought will thus proceed from distinct points, and travel by separate routes, so as to admit of full inspection in their progress. Each argument allowed by the reader to be valid, will finally link itself to its neighbours; and all thoughtful persons know how to estimate the strength of convergent conclusions. The writer trusts, also, that he may be allowed to escape the two alternatives,--either circumlocution, or the use of an objectionable pronoun _singular_, by employing the plural "_we_." This word may perhaps have a further good effect; it may remind both reader and writer that they are engaged as pilgrim-companions on a journey of joint exploration. At the head of all their reasonings, Natural Theologians usually place the celebrated argument from Design. It would be impossible, in discussing it, to reproduce here the many illustrative examples of Design which have been collected. It would likewise be useless; partly, because they are all easily accessible and mostly well known; partly, because their appositeness as _illustrations_ is now fully admitted; and the controversy turns upon questions of another and more abstract kind. It is asked whether the analogy founded on these instances is relevant?--whether it proves too little, or too much?--and, how far the inferences drawn from such examples really go? Our plan will, therefore, be to devote our second Chapter to the examination of such objections; to the review and elucidation of the argument from Design. But if the reader wishes really to study the various questions closely connected with this celebrated line of thought, and to view the reasoning in a shape so complete as to be at once relevant and satisfactory, he may be pleased to bestow a leisure hour on the consecutive perusal of Chapters II., V., and VI., with their appended notes and illustrations. The _third_ Chapter is intended as a critical propædeutic or foundation for the constructive science of Natural Theology. So far as our experience of men in great cities teaches anything with respect to the speculative difficulties which keep them from God, it seems to teach one undoubted fact. There is grounded in their minds a persuasion (underlying all further objections), that, whatever else we can know, little or nothing is to be learned concerning God. The idea of Theism is thus isolated from every other idea; and there is a presumption against all reasoning which in any way leads up to a determinate thought of the Divine Being or the Divine attributes. Some such doubters allege the necessary limitation of human knowledge in general:-- "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man." But, is not one chief object in knowing man, to acquaint ourselves with God? In this spirit Quarles says:-- "Man is man's A B C; there's none that can Read God aright, unless he first spell man." We may be perfectly sure that every human being, who (as Pope continues) hangs between the sceptic and the stoic,-- "In doubt to deem himself a god or beast," will never arrive at any knowledge of God whatsoever. Others, again, who suppose mankind to know a great deal, conceive all special thought which transcends the every-day human circle, to be encompassed by a number of difficulties exceptionally its own. If, it is said, there are angelic natures, they must needs pity our poor attempts to survey _super_-human or _extra_-human spheres of existence:-- "Superior beings, when of late they saw A mortal man unfold all nature's law, Admir'd such wisdom in an earthly shape, And show'd a Newton as we show an ape."[5] Pope's cynicism has been lately re-echoed in various comparisons. A death-watch has been supposed to speculate on the final end of a clock; a timepiece on the nature of its makers. Writers who use similitudes may be asked to remember that if Man really possesses reason (to say nothing of an immortal spirit), he cannot be ranged in analogy with apes, death-watches, and timepieces. The moment brute organisms, or inorganic constructions, are represented as _reasoning_, they cease to be what they are--a Thing suddenly becomes a Person. If this were all, the speech and faculties of Man would be represented as intact, though veiled beneath some shape worthy of the invention of a Babrias or an Æsop. But this is not all. The monstrous shape is at once both Thing and Person, and its thinkings in this double character are supposed to show by their grotesque failures the absurdity of our human endeavour to reason concerning God or Immortality. To this whole kind of preoccupation the third Chapter is addressed. There are really no special difficulties in the way of Theism. It argues from the known to the unknown; so do all the inductive sciences. It accepts more than it can explain; so do we, each and all, in accepting the truth of our own individuality and personal identity, of the world outside us, and the mind within, which scrutinizes that changing world. The more thoroughly questions relating to our first sources of knowledge are debated, the more surely shall we perceive how safe is the starting-point of Natural Theology. Against Materialism, on the other hand, there may be urged a series of difficulties properly its own, and this may be most easily seen by placing it in contrast with pure Idealism. The Materialistic starting-point is from an unauthorized postulate--in common parlance, an unfounded assumption; each step it takes is attended with a fresh need of postulation, amounting at last to the gravest burden of improbability. And when the materializing goal is reached we gain nothing--no treasure is discovered--no vista opened into new realms of intellectual or moral empire. We are only told that our supposed insight was but a dream. We are only warned to dream no more. Materialism has murdered insight. With the argument of this Chapter there arises a very important question, which the reader is entreated to put to himself more than once, and bestow upon it from time to time a pause of serious thought. In a negative form the question runs thus: Since the difficulties supposed to bar the _first_ march of Natural Theology are in no wise peculiar to it, but attach themselves equally to a multitude of our daily grounds of thinking and acting, must we not, _if_, on account of such difficulties, we deny Natural Theism, also deny those persuasions of ordinary life? How else can we maintain our critical consistency? Let no man henceforward be confident that there exists an outward world of either men or things--let him not carelessly suppose that he has even an individual mind to speak of as his own--let all that concerns _other_ness--all that concerns _self_ness be relegated along with the Divine Being to the region of the Unknown and the Unknowable. But we may imagine that, instead of denying these truths of common life, many men will be hardy enough to affirm them. If so, in accepting these they clearly accept a great deal more. To be consistent they must accept also the reasonable beliefs and first principles upon which reposes Theism. The question thus put is therefore a dilemma or choice between two alternatives. And there may seem to remain no great doubt as to which alternative most practical reasoners will accept. This kind of dilemma will recur at many several steps of our inquiry, but having been illustrated in one instance at considerable length, its examination on other occasions may be safely left to the intelligence of the thoughtful reader. The _four_ following chapters argue for the truth of Theism on four several and independent grounds. These arguments are purely constructive; and each is so far apart from the other three as to stand or fall upon its own merits. But, when each of these four arguments has been separately examined, if admitted either wholly or in a modified shape, their consilient and conjoint effect must be taken into consideration[j]. To minimize impediments in the way of true knowledge; and to rise into clearness;--_these_ should be the hopes and aims of us all. Life is full of foiled endeavours; but let us onward now with the hopeful! ADDITIONAL NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER I. A.--THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE AND OTHERS ON MODERN SCEPTICISM. _Extract from Mr. Gladstone's Address delivered at the Liverpool Collegiate Institution, December 21st, 1872._ "It is not now only the Christian Church, or only the Holy Scripture, or only Christianity, which is attacked. The disposition is boldly proclaimed to deal alike with root and branch, and to snap utterly the ties which, under the still venerable name of Religion, unite man with the unseen world, and lighten the struggles and the woes of life by the hope of a better land. "These things are done as the professed results and the newest triumphs of Modern Thought and Modern Science; but I believe that neither Science nor Thought is responsible, any more than Liberty is responsible, for the misdeeds committed in their names. Upon the ground of what is termed evolution, God is relieved of the labour of creation; in the name of unchangeable laws, He is discharged from governing the world; and His function of judgment is also dispensed with, as justice and benevolence are held to forbid that men should hereafter be called to strict account for actions, which under these unchangeable laws they may have committed. But these are only the initial stages of the process. Next we are introduced to the doctrine of the Absolute and the Unconditioned; and under the authority of these phrases (to which, and many other phrases, in their proper places, I have no objection) we are instructed that we can know nothing about God, and therefore can have no practical relations with Him. One writer--or, as it is now termed, thinker--announces with pleasure that he has found the means of reconciling Religion and Science. The mode is in principle most equitable. He divides the field of thought between them. To Science he awards all that of which we know, or may know, something; to Religion he leaves a far wider domain,--that of which we know, and can know, nothing. This sounds like jest, but it is melancholy earnest; and I doubt whether any such noxious crop has been gathered in such rank abundance from the press of England in any former year of our literary history as in this present year of our redemption, eighteen hundred and seventy-two." (pp. 22-3.) The writer, or thinker, mentioned by Mr. Gladstone is thus described at the end of the address, p. 33:--"My reference is to Mr. Herbert Spencer. See his 'First Principles,' and especially the chapter on the 'Reconciliation of Science and Religion.' It is needless to cite particular passages. It would be difficult to mistake its meaning, for it is written with great ability and clearness, as well as with every indication of sincerity. Still it vividly recalls to mind an old story of the man who, wishing to be rid of one who was in his house, said, 'Sir, there are two sides to my house, and we will divide them; you shall take the outside.' "I believe Mr. Spencer has been described in one of our daily journals as the first thinker of the age." To some people the Premier will appear more than reasonably disturbed by the journal's description. There is (as we have remarked) a very advanced type of the genus journalist in England, and its anonymous zealots are liberal in distributing titles of honour--that is, among their friends. _Per contra_, upon authors of Mr. Gladstone's calibre and lofty mode of thought they bestow epithets very much the reverse of complimentary. They seem, in fact, somewhat to resemble those critics of whom Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, that "though excellent fellows in their way, there are no gentlemen in the world less sensible of any sanctity in a book, or less likely to recognize an author's heart in it." So far, however, as Mr. Herbert Spencer is concerned, the journal censured might observe in justification of its approval that his system seems a good deal read by the students of more than one school in our Premier's own University--a proud distinction shared by Mr. Spencer with several other eminent thinkers of the same speculative tendencies as himself. The eloquent speaker next passes under brief review two other typical books,--one by a German, the second by an Englishman. Respecting the opinions of the former author (Strauss[6]) Mr. Gladstone writes thus (Authentic Report, p. 24):--"In his first chapter he puts the question, 'Are we still Christians?' and, after a detailed examination, he concludes, always speaking on behalf of Modern Thought, that if we wish our yea to be yea, and our nay nay, if we are to think and speak our thoughts as honourable, upright men, we must reply that we are Christians no longer. This question and answer, however, he observes, are insufficient. The essential and fundamental inquiry is, whether we are or are not still to have a Religion? "To this inquiry he devotes his second chapter. In this second chapter he finds that there is no personal God; there is no future state; the dead live in the recollection of survivors--this is enough for them. After this he has little difficulty in answering the question he has put. All religious worship ought to be abolished. The very name of 'Divine Service' is an indignity to man. Therefore, in the sense in which religion has been heretofore understood, his answer is that we ought to have no religion any more. But proceeding, as he always does, with commendable frankness, he admits that he ought to fill with something the void which he has made. This he accordingly proceeds to do. Instead of God, he offers to us the All, or Universum. This All, or Universum, possesses, he tells us, neither consciousness nor reason. But it presents to us order and law. He thinks it fitted, therefore, to be the object of a new and true piety, which he claims for his Universum, as the devout of the old style did for their God. If any one repudiates this doctrine, to Dr. Strauss's reason the repudiation is absurdity, and to his feelings blasphemy."[7] Many readers will agree with the Premier in calling these "astonishing assertions." Many will also speak of Strauss's positions as something worse than astonishing when they read in the Illustrative Passages (Address, p. 34) a declaration which he holds it his duty as well as his right to make without any kind of reserve.[8] Most persons will likewise agree with the Premier's further observation (p. 38):--"I have made a statement that these ideas are not a mere German brood, though I fear that we owe much of their seed to Germany, as France owed to England the seed of her great Voltairian movement, so far as it was a movement grounded in the region of thought." In illustration of the statement that "there are many writers of kindred sympathies in England, and some of as outspoken courage" (Address, p. 26), Mr. Gladstone quotes four passages from Mr. Winwood Reade's "Martyrdom of Man." The three first cited possess a painful interest for the Natural Theologian. They are as follows:--(1.) "When the faith in a personal God is extinguished; when prayer and praise are no longer to be heard; when the belief is universal that with the body dies the soul; then the false morals of theology will no longer lead the human mind astray." (2.) "We teach that the soul is immortal; we teach that there is a future life; we teach that there is a Heaven in the ages far away: but not for us single corpuscles, not for us dots of animated jelly, but for the One of whom we are the elements, and who, though we perish, never dies." (3.) "God is so great that He does not deign to have personal relations with us human atoms that are called men. Those who desire to worship their Creator must worship Him through mankind. Such, it is plain, is the scheme of Nature." (pp. 38-9.) On account of his Address and _pièces justificatives_, Mr. Gladstone has been already (like a prophet of old) "wounded in the house of his friends." It may therefore be well to support his judgment by some additional testimony. Now the _Pall Mall Gazette_, whatever faults may be imputed to it by its adversaries, cannot be justly charged with harshness or discourtesy towards materializing writers. And it so happens that both Dr. Strauss and Mr. Reade have lately been criticised in its columns. From these notices, therefore, I shall venture on making some extracts. Strauss's "Der Alte und der Neue Glaube" was reviewed at considerable length in the number for November 27, 1872. I quote two passages only. After an interesting introduction the reviewer proceeds thus:-- "As the title of the book indicates, the work to be effected divides itself into two main parts. First, it is necessary to settle the relations to be adopted towards the old Church faith, or Christianity. That accomplished, the outlines at least of the new views that take its place must be sketched out. Of course, before that can be done it must be settled whether or not there is anything to put in place of Christianity. It is logically correct to ask, first, whether 'we'--meaning 'the thinking minority,' who have grown dissatisfied with 'the old faith'--'are still Christians' in any sense. Having answered that question in the negative, it is in order to ask next 'whether we have any religion,'--which cannot be answered by a simple negative or affirmative, or without further explanations as to the nature of religion. We must see 'how we regard the world,' or the system of existing things; what results we are led to by modern researches as to its origin, purpose, and destiny. Although in the light that flows from these, Strauss maintains that the old idea of a personal God must disappear, he finds a Divinity in the All or totality of nature, whose forces and course exhibit purpose or design--subjectively speaking--and order, and to which we are bound, recognizing the wisdom that regulates them, piously to resign ourselves, seeking to fulfil that order of which we ourselves are a part." The following extract concludes the notice:--"We have seen that Strauss refuses to acknowledge Christianity because on examination its assertions appear to him incredible, and its claims therefore inadmissible. That is the result of an examination of the nature of Christianity, in which we have nothing new, as it is substantially a synopsis of the fuller process of reasoning contained in 'The Life of Jesus.' But it is not Christianity alone that must be dispensed with. In accordance with the old declaration that miracles are impossible, the supernatural also disappears. It is not merely relegated, as by Herbert Spencer and Comte, to the sphere of the Unknowable; it is not recognized in any manner whatsoever. In place of creation, we have in these pages a process of continuous development through immense periods of time; instead of God, as the source of law and authority and order, nature proceeding harmoniously in an unending process; instead of individual immortality, the conclusion that every individual fulfils his destiny in this world. The divinities and the after life of man are, as with Feuerbach, declared to be simply his own desires. 'What man might be but is not, he makes his god; what he might possess but cannot win for himself, that shall his god bestow upon him.' In reference to the argument that man must somewhere realize all the possibilities that are in him, and as he does not do so in this life there must be a future one, Strauss asks whether all seeds in nature come to maturity. Having dispensed, then, with the supernatural, are we necessarily without any religion? We have seen that Strauss answers in the negative, though not very confidently. The fundamental views on human life, the existence of the world, and so forth, are without doubt a religion, or the theoretical side of one. If in order to a religion it be necessary to believe that the universe fulfils a rational purpose through a rational order, we have that presented to us. There is constant process and continuous development. There is an ascent, as it were, of the forces of nature which perform their mighty cycles through the ages, and a consequent descent and vanishing away. The All remains ever the same, is at no moment more complete than in the preceding, nor _vice versâ_, but there is a process of becoming and disappearing which goes on, or may go on _ad infinitum_. The design or purpose of every part is being fulfilled at every moment, for at every moment there is the richest possible unfolding of life in the total system of things. The highest idea to which we can attain is that of the universe. "Many people were scandalized when a few years ago Mr. Mill maintained that the idea of a God was not indispensable to a religion. Comte's 'Religion of Humanity' was then in view. Strauss's religion, though equally without a God, is deformed by no such crudities of thought and feeling as Comte's. Rather is his book a representation in brief compass of the views to which, whether we regret it or not, the majority of educated and thinking men are in our day more and more attracted." One remarkable circumstance dwelt upon in this notice, as well as in Mr. Gladstone's Address, is that Strauss, like Comte, finds a substitute for the worship of a Deity--a something which both are pleased to call a Religion. Strauss takes the theoretical, Comte the sentimental view. According to the Frenchman, men are to worship "Humanity" with a leaning to the female side. The un-deformed religion of the German centres upon an Optimistic theory of the All or Universum.[9] Both would seem practically to confess the real necessity of some Religion to mankind, and the question naturally occurs whether these _succedanea_ are more wholesome and elevating than Theism, or whether (it may be added) they are as likely to be true after all. Mr. Winwood Reade's "Martyrdom of Man" had been criticised four days earlier (_Pall Mall Gazette_, Nov. 23). As he is an English writer, I take the liberty of making more copious extracts, but would recommend such of my readers as have not perused the article to bestow half an hour's steady thought upon it. "Mr. Reade," writes the critic, "puts forth his book as a sort of review, or survey, or abridgement of the general history of the human race, and he has given to it the strange title it bears because he is of opinion that 'the supreme and mysterious Power by whom the universe has been created, and by whom it has been appointed to run its course under fixed and invariable law; that awful One to whom it is profanity to pray, of whom it is idle and irreverent to argue and debate, of whom we should never presume to think save with humility and awe; that Unknown God has ordained that mankind should be elevated by misfortune, and that happiness should grow out of misery and pain.' But, although the work is in the main historical, it is also partly cosmological, partly physiological, and partly polemical. It deals with the past, the present, and the future of the world as well as of humanity.... "In what he has to say on the present occasion Mr. Reade lays no claim to originality. On the contrary, he warns us that he has borrowed, 'not only facts and ideas, but phrases and even paragraphs from other writers.' The purpose he has in view is to illustrate the investigations and enforce the conclusions within a moderate compass of higher and more voluminous authorities. But still there is quite enough of his own handiwork in the volume to entitle him to be regarded as far more than a mere compiler; and we venture to think that many readers will find those portions of it which are the fruits of Mr. Reade's personal experience as an African explorer, and his reflections upon that which he has himself seen, among the most interesting and instructive of all. "In the writings of Mr. Darwin, Mr. Mill, Dr. Draper, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, the authors to whom Mr. Reade seems to be chiefly indebted, the assumed antagonism between the conclusions of modern science and the premisses of popular theology is latent rather than manifest. With them it is left as a matter of inference, and is nowhere forced upon the attention as a matter of fact. Mr. Reade endeavours to supply this deficiency, and he does so distinctly and abruptly enough.... In order to build we must destroy. Not only the Syrian superstition must be attacked, but the belief in a 'personal God,' which engenders a slavish and oriental condition of the mind, and the belief in a posthumous reward which engenders a selfish and solitary condition of the heart.... What Mr. Reade is pleased to designate 'the Syrian superstition' is still the direct or indirect source of all the really practical sympathy existing both between the higher and lower classes of society and the higher and lower races of mankind. As to the belief in a personal God, the passage we have quoted above from Mr. Reade seems to show that he shares it, or the language he uses is mere nonsense. It would be absurd to talk about anything except a personal God creating the universe, appointing fixed and invariable laws, and ordaining the destiny of mankind. And if Mr. Reade is referring merely to force collectively or in the abstract, we cannot perceive why it 'should be idle and irreverent to argue and debate about' it, or why 'we should never presume to think, save with humility and awe' about it, more than about its particular and concrete manifestations; for instance, light, heat, or electricity. Moreover, if we admit that the universe is in any sense the work of a supreme and mysterious Power who has in any sense predestined an unalterable course for it to run, we cannot understand how such a belief is fitted to remove the 'slavish and oriental condition of mind' of which Mr. Reade complains. We should have thought rather that the unmitigated fatalism it implies would be far likelier to generate such an intellectual state than reliance on providential superintendence and interposition carried to no matter what extravagant lengths. Mr. Reade's proposition that the belief in a posthumous reward engenders a selfish and solitary condition of the heart appears to us likewise wide of the mark. As long as we continue to be individual beings, our conduct will continue to be the result of our individual feelings, present or anticipated. Practically, at all events, the Stoic, the Sadducee, and the Christian equally will fulfil instead of neglecting their duty--first, because they are conscious that it is their duty, and secondly, because they know that fulfilling it will bring them satisfaction, and that to neglect it will bring them remorse. The only difference is that the Christian trusts that his satisfaction in the one case, and fears that his remorse in the other case, will be infinitely prolonged." Mr. Reade's reviewer concludes his critique with a piece of wit from Voltaire, which he views as enunciating a pretty fair summary of the moral contained in the "Martyrdom of Man." Voltaire compares the Creator of the world to the builder of a great house, and men to the mice who inhabit its chinks and crannies. The Divine builder has not enlightened us mice. This comparison has often since been repeated in new and improved shapes by sceptical moderns, who treat a considerate Death-watch as a typical thinker on problems of reason, such as Design and Final Causation. As author of a Lecture on Positivism in 1871, I cannot but be gratified to perceive that Mr. Gladstone's views of Comte's character and system are coincident with my own. (Authentic Report, pp. 25 and 36.) This note began with extracts furnished by one Premier--it may not inaptly close with quotations from the writings of another. Mr. Disraeli, in his preface to the new edition of "Lothair," expresses himself as follows (p. xv., seq.):-- "It cannot be denied that the aspect of the world and this country, to those who have faith in the spiritual nature of man, is at this time dark and distressful. They listen to doubts, and even denials, of an active Providence; what is styled Materialism is in the ascendant. To those who believe that an atheistical society, though it may be polished and amiable, involves the seeds of anarchy, the prospect is full of gloom. "This disturbance in the mind of nations has been occasioned by two causes: firstly, by the powerful assault on the divinity of the Semitic literature by the Germans; and, secondly, by recent discoveries of science, which are hastily supposed to be inconsistent with our long-received convictions as to the relations between the Creator and the created." On the first cause of disturbance, Mr. Disraeli continues:--"Man brings to the study of the oracles more learning and more criticism than of yore: and it is well that it should be so. The documents will yet bear a greater amount both of erudition and examination than they have received; but the word of God is eternal, and will survive the spheres." On the second, he observes:--"Scientific, like spiritual truth, has ever from the beginning been descending from Heaven to man. He is a being who organically demands direct relations with his Creator, and he would not have been so organised if his requirements could not be satisfied. We may analyse the sun and penetrate the stars, but man is conscious that he is made in God's own image, and in his perplexity he will ever appeal to 'our Father which art in Heaven.'" Both these sources of doubt and denial have been exemplified in the preceding note. I might indeed have hesitated to exemplify them so fully were it not for the considerations mentioned in my preface to this essay. B.--ON CORRUPTION OF THE JUDGMENT BY MISDIRECTED MORAL SENTIMENTS. Talfourd--then Mr. Serjeant Talfourd--thus describes what passed in his own mind when viewing the site of Gibbon's abode at Lausanne:--"That garden in which the Historian took his evening walk, after writing the last lines of the work to which many years had been devoted;--a walk which alone would have hallowed the spot, if, alas! there had not been those intimations in the work itself of a purpose which, tending to desecrate the world, must deprive all associations attendant on its accomplishment of a claim to be dwelt on as holy! How melancholy is it to feel that intellectual congratulation which attends the serene triumph of a life of studious toil chilled by the consciousness that the labour, the research, the Asiatic splendour of illustration, have been devoted, in part at least, to obtain a wicked end--not in the headlong wantonness of youth, or the wild sportiveness of animal spirits, but urged by the deliberate, hearted purpose of crushing the light of human hope--all that is worth living for, and all that is worth dying for--and substituting for them nothing but a rayless scepticism. That evening walk is an awful thing to meditate on; the walk of a man of rare capacities, tending to his own physical decline, among the serenities of loveliest nature, enjoying the thought that, in the chief work of his life, just accomplished, he had embodied a hatred to the doctrines which teach men to love one another, to forgive injuries, and to hope for a diviner life beyond the grave; and exulting in the conviction that this work would survive to teach its deadly lesson to young ingenuous students, when he should be dust. One may derive consolation from reflecting that the style is too meretricious, and the attempt too elaborate and too subtle, to achieve the proposed evil; and in hoping that there were some passages in the secret history of the author's heart, which may extenuate its melancholy error; but our personal veneration for successful toil is destroyed in the sense of the strange malignity which blended with its impulses, and we feel no desire to linger over the spot where so painful a contradiction is presented as a charm."--_Vacation Rambles._ Ed. 2, p. 238. We may gladly give Gibbon the benefit of the doubt with which the great judge closes. But surely most attempts to address the mental state depicted must needs be found impotent. There is great force in a dictum of Schelling's ("Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre") to the following effect--"The medium by which spirits understand each other is not the ambient air, but the deep-stirred sympathetic vibrations propagated by a community of spiritual freedom. When a soul is not pervaded by this atmosphere of conscious freedom, all inward communion with self or with another is broken,--what wonder, then, if such a one remain unintelligible to himself and to others, and in his fearful wilderness of spirit wearies himself by idle words, to which no friendly echo responds, either from his own or from another's breast? "To remain unintelligible to such an one is glory and honour before God and man. _Barbarus huic ego sim, nec tali intelligar ulli._ This," concludes Schelling, "is a wish and prayer from which no man can keep himself."--_Sämmtliche Werke_, I. 443. C.--ON SPECIAL PLEADING IN HISTORY AND MORALS. A few emphatic sentences from Lord Macaulay's strictures on historical special pleading will repay perusal:--"This species of misrepresentation abounds in the most valuable works of modern historians. Herodotus tells his story like a slovenly witness, who, heated by partialities and prejudices, unacquainted with the established rules of evidence, and uninstructed as to the obligations of his oath, confounds what he imagines with what he has seen and heard, and brings out facts, reports, conjectures, and fancies in one mass. Hume is an accomplished advocate. Without positively asserting much more than he can prove, he gives prominence to all the circumstances which support his case; he glides lightly over those which are unfavourable to it; his own witnesses are applauded and encouraged; the statements which seem to throw discredit on them are controverted; the contradictions into which they fall are explained away; a clear and connected abstract of their evidence is given. Everything that is offered on the other side is scrutinised with the utmost severity; every suspicious circumstance is a ground for comment and invective; what cannot be denied is extenuated, or passed by without notice; concessions even are sometimes made; but this insidious candour only increases the effect of the vast mass of sophistry. "We have mentioned Hume as the ablest and most popular writer of his class; but the charge which we have brought against him is one to which all our most distinguished historians are in some degree obnoxious. Gibbon, in particular, deserves very severe censure."--_Macaulay's Miscellaneous Writings--History._ The reader may very advantageously carry along with him the above quoted just remarks, if he has occasion to travel into Hume's sceptical writings. Respecting these, where every feature of the author's character appears with intensified distinctness of expression, it is not too much to say that their influence, which had suffered suspended animation,[10] is now felt in almost every cultivated circle in Europe. Checked for a time under the empire of Kant and his successors, it has been revived by the German Darwinists (so-called), who are bent on evolving all that can be got from the theory of Evolution. Comte speaks of Hume as his own master--an intellectual debt all the more readily acknowledged, because Hume's treatment of most subjects leans towards the French, rather than the Teutonic, side of English speculation. The master's influence over numbers who, without being Comte's disciples, are addicted to thinking Positively upon questions connected with Mind and Morality, was never greater than at present. Here, therefore, the disciplined inquirer will obtain a prolific field of discovery, if he wishes to convince himself how little originality pervades the set of opinions just now in fashion. But the student of Hume ought surely to be a disciplined inquirer. Many senior residents at our Universities will, therefore, join me in regretting that his sceptical treatises should be so commonly found in the hands of very young men. So far as such readers are concerned, it does not much signify whether Hume's fallacies are due to onesidedness of intellect or (as has been said by a critic, once himself a doubter) whether he was influenced "by vanity, appetite, and the ambition of forming a sect of _arguescents_." An opinion scarcely libellous, considering what Hume has said respecting the validity of his own paradoxes. However this may appear, the fallacies remain fallacies, and are less easy of detection than they would have been were their author a systematic thinker, instead of a philosophical _dilletante_. Under any circumstances, it is not every aspirant to the "Round Table" for whom the quest after secret spells is fitted. The youthful knight has his own ward to keep, and needs help--not hindrance, much less betrayal--inasmuch as:-- "Tis his to struggle with that perilous age Which claims for manhood's vice the privilege Of boyhood;--when young Dionysus seems All glorious as he burst upon the east, A jocund and a welcome conqueror; And Aphrodite, sweet as from the sea She rose and floated in her pearly shell, A laughing girl;--when lawless will erects Honour's gay temple on the mount of God, And meek obedience bears the coward's brand; While Satan, in celestial panoply, With Sin, his lady, smiling by his side, Defies all heaven to arms!" _Hartley Coleridge's Poems_, Vol. II., p. 202. D.--ON THE METHOD EMPLOYED IN THIS ESSAY. The advantages which ensue from this mode of "ranging round each topic" are well described by the late Sir B. Brodie (Psychological Inquiries, 1st series, p. 18). "Our minds are so constructed that we can keep the attention fixed on a particular object until we have, as it were, looked all around it; and the mind that possesses this faculty in the greatest degree of perfection will take cognisance of relations of which another mind has no perception. It is this, much more than any difference in the abstract power of reasoning, which constitutes the vast difference which exists between the minds of different individuals; which distinguishes the far-sighted statesman from the shallow politician; the sagacious and accomplished general from the mere disciplinarian. Such also is the history, not only of the poetic genius, but also of the genius of discovery in science. 'I keep the subject,' said Sir Isaac Newton, 'constantly before me, and wait until the first dawnings open by little and little into a full light.' It was thus that, after long meditation, he was led to the invention of fluxions, and to the anticipation of the modern discovery of the combustibility of the diamond. It was thus that Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; and that those views were suggested to Davy, which are propounded in the Bakerian lecture of 1806, and which laid the foundation of that grand series of experimental researches which terminated in the decomposition of the earths and alkalies." Dr. Tyndall also considers the case of Newton ("Fragments of Science," p. 60). "Newton pondered all these things. He had a great power of pondering. He could look into the darkest subject until it became entirely luminous. How this light arises we cannot explain; but, as a matter of fact, it does arise." Dr. Tyndall had before remarked on the question thus suggested, that "There is much in this process of pondering and its results which it is impossible to analyse. It is by a kind of inspiration that we rise from the wise and sedulous contemplation of facts to the principles on which they depend. The mind is, as it were, a photographic plate, which is gradually cleansed by the effort to think rightly, and which when so cleansed, and not before, receives impressions from the light of truth. This passage from facts to principles is called induction, which in its highest form is inspiration; but, to make it sure, the inward sight must be shown to be in accordance with outward fact. To prove or disprove the induction, we must resort to deduction and experiment."--Ibid, p. 57-8. This last remark concerns the process of verification which the accomplished writer discusses through several subsequent pages. Notwithstanding a passing observation of Dr. Tyndall's that "this power of pondering facts is one with which the ancients could be but imperfectly acquainted," some readers will be struck by the thought that it forms the nearest approach which can be made by any inductive discoverer to the old philosophical method of Dialectic. Janet says, in a volume to which those who have not encountered it will thank me for introducing them, "La dialectique logique dans Platon est parfaitement conforme aux lois de la raison. Elle ne sert qu'à réfuter les idées fausses, ou à éclaircir les idées données antérieurement par une sorte de synthèse, qui, suivant les uns, n'est que le progrès de la généralisation, et, selon nous, est le progrès de l'intuition." (Études sur la Dialectique dans Platon et dans Hegel, p. 393.) For a more complete appreciation of what is here stated in few words, the student should peruse pp. 244, seq. The account given by Janet appears in some measure to coincide with Dr. Tyndall's idea, though perhaps the word "Intuition" might be more entirely approved by Schelling or Coleridge than by any Physicist. Be this as it may, Dr. Tyndall's outline of the Inductive process in its highest form is evidently one which describes the prerogative of Genius--the exercise of Imagination as distinguished from Fancy--the child, that is, of Reason, rather than a stray bantling of sportive wit. To bring his general conception within the grasp of every-day workers, and describe a procedure which may be adopted as a kind of practical rule or maxim, let us look at this subject in the following manner. Suppose we take the example of a great idea; that, for instance, of the constitution of Great Britain, or any other nation which subsists in tolerable freedom from revolutionary change. There are clearly two elements involved--one, Permanence; the other, Progress. These, in the actual working constitution, form its factors, or moments (as they may be better termed); and in the idea or mental representation of the same, we may liken them to complementary colours in the spectrum, which appear separately contrasted in tint, but blend together in a wave of white light. Now, our analysing faculty of mind is, in point of fact, our intellectual prism. It separates each bright and strong idea into elements so antagonistic as to be apparently incompatible. Like clear yellow and shadowy violet, one component seems excellent in beauty, another its foil or opposite. To one class of minds truth consists in Permanence, and Progress is a note of evil omen. Of another class the contradictory is true. The real statesman alone knows that their blending is a question of measure and degree, of human affairs,--time, circumstance, and opportunity. We may ask with reason what gain accrues to the statesman by looking at his country's constitution from this point of sight? Evidently a good deal. He will soon discern that practically it cannot exist in vigour if either factor be eliminated. Each is given in the analysis of his prolific idea, and, however great may seem the apparent incompatibility, both must be capable of co-existence and correlation. Now, there could be no synthesis if, on the one hand, Progress did not imply a something which remains identical and in unity with itself, while it flourishes and grows;--or, on the other hand, if Permanence were not safest, when its strength is manifested by its vital increase. Consequently, to grow is to continue essentially the same;--to be permanent is to live and bear fresh fruit every passing year. A precisely similar advantage accrues to the Ethical Philosopher from a process of the like description. He considers (it may be) the concrete idea of moral activity. Obviously, there must be found in it an unfettered power of choice, and a conformity to the rule of moral law. Submitted to the analytic prism, the two elements come out at opposite poles in very decided contrast. At the pole of necessary conformity we find what looks like Determinism;--at the pole of choice appears its irreconcilable antagonist, a sense of Responsibility, logically unexplained, but inalienable from our moral nature. And our Ethical inquirer finds the only possible synthesis of his two contrasted moments of morality in the deep truth that each righteous man is a Law unto himself. And hence it is, that the righteous shines out over the lower world of mechanical arrangement--a faint, it may be, but still a visible image of the God who made him what he is.[11] By the same process of analysis and reconstruction the Natural Theologian arrives (as may be shown) at a synthesis of Faith and Reason. Yet these two are antagonistic in the eyes both of the sceptic and the superstitious. _Les extrêmes se touchent_, and by both extremes faith is relegated to the region of sentimental æsthetics. Reason, say both, is Faith's natural enemy; and must fail to yield any expectation of future happiness in the presence of a righteous God, together with its long train of present hopes and fears. Our plain answer is that the true synthesis of Natural Theism lies in the chief primary fact of our human nature--the undeniable existence of its Reasonable Beliefs. They originate deep down, and we may affirm respecting the birth of each and all, as Dr. Tyndall affirms of the inward vision which dawns upon the philosophic mind when photographically cleansed by its own efforts to think rightly,--"how this light arises we cannot explain, but as a matter of fact it does arise." In its degree it may be (to use Dr. Tyndall's word) "a kind of inspiration." And what endowment has a higher claim to such a representative kinship?--what nobler gift can be conceived from God to man than a Belief of Reason? Dr. Tyndall's further requirement that "the inward sight must be shown to be in accordance with the outward fact," a Natural Theologian may hope to meet by a sufficient verification. He may meet it in the case of this particular Belief by showing, as we shall try to show, our actual human experience of its working and its worth. We might pursue similar examples through the regions of Discovery and Production, but the three instances already adduced may fairly suffice. It is, perhaps, more interesting to observe the real gains which accrue from pondering over an idea in the manner exemplified. How much political _charlatanerie_ is at once disposed of when men distinctly acknowledge that two reputed incompatibilities, however useful as war-cries, are essentially conjoint elements in all truly statesmanlike action: what countless angry controversies die in the moral principle that each righteous man is a Law unto himself! And not only to Natural Theology, but to other parts of knowledge, it is of the greatest utility to perceive with equal distinctness that Reason has its beliefs as well as Unreason; and that when we accept reasonable beliefs as the basis of scientific investigation, we affirm their value for the conduct and government of life. The true amount of that value as a mainspring of our hopeful activities is estimated on another page. Meantime, we may remark from the three examples above discussed, how regularly an idea of Reason, analysed into its complementary factors, resumes a concrete form when we employ it as a maxim of practical life. The politician who separates progress from stability is really preparing his country for revolution. The man on whose heart the law is not written (like the necessity laid upon St. Paul[12]) is as yet imperfectly righteous. And so too, if in our Beliefs we lose sight of the gift that makes us human, we are likely to ring the changes between superstition, atheism, and effeminate sentimentality. When, from results, we pass to the easiest method for attaining them, there seems but little to add to the extracts with which this note commenced. And if the object be clearly defined, the labour of the mental workshop need not be a severe discouragement. It is true that no man can take his Thought--the offspring of his inward Light--pull it to pieces, and reconstruct it, as he would deal with a thing of brass or iron. But every earnest ponderer may keep his prolific idea steadily in view, and hold conversations with himself respecting it. This is the well-known method by which Aristotle virtually obtains his conclusions before he finally proceeds to deduce them. From the same conception of Method, real thinking appears to Plato as a Dialogue without speech. And, doubtless, actual discussion between two or more living men would be the surest way of arriving at the goal of insight, provided those most uncommon of all endowments, common sense and common honesty, could be assured to the dialecticians.[13] Thus much, then, may serve as an illustration of the task we are attempting, and of the means by which we hope to accomplish it. If achieved, it will form a contribution to the great work thus characterised by the Rector of Lincoln College from the University pulpit, as reported in the _Oxford Undergraduates' Journal_ for October 26, 1871: "The Natural Theology of the last century is no longer found to be satisfactory in presence of the geological and biological sciences as they now stand. The answer that the sciences are wrong and the theologians are right does not admit of being discussed or refuted, for it is the answer of ignorance. The answer of the Catholic Church, which is to take refuge in its own authority, can only be practically tendered where there is an infallible living authority, as in the chair of S. Peter. It seems to be the business of the English Church especially--a Church which has never yet broken with reason or proscribed education--to fairly face these questions, to resume the Natural Theology of the past age, and to re-establish the synthesis of Science and Faith." E.--ON THE EFFECT OF CONSILIENT PROOFS. The expressive word "_Consilience_" has been adopted on the authority of Dr. Whewell and Professor Pritchard, both of whom employ it in preference to the commoner expression _convergence_. Upon the force of consilient proofs, Dr. Whewell writes thus:-- "The cases in which inductions from classes of facts altogether different have _jumped together_, belong only to the best established theories which the history of science contains. And as I shall have occasion to refer to this peculiar feature in their evidence, I will take the liberty of describing it by a particular phrase, and will term it the _Consilience of Inductions_. "It is exemplified principally in some of the greatest discoveries. Thus it was found by Newton that the doctrine of the attraction of the sun varying according to the inverse square of the distance, which explained Kepler's _Third Law_ of the proportionality of the cubes of the distances to the squares of the periodic times of the planets, explained also his _First_ and _Second Laws_ of the elliptical motion of each planet; although no connexion of these laws had been visible before. Again, it appeared that the force of universal gravitation, which had been inferred from the _perturbations_ of the moon and planets by the sun and by each other, also accounted for the fact, apparently altogether dissimilar and remote, of the _precession of the equinoxes_. Here was a most striking and surprising coincidence, which gave to the theory a stamp of truth beyond the power of ingenuity to counterfeit.... ... The theory of universal gravitation, and of the undulatory theory of light, are indeed full of examples of this consilience of inductions. With regard to the latter, it has been justly asserted by Herschel, that the history of the undulatory theory was a succession of _felicities_. And it is precisely the unexpected coincidences of results drawn from distant parts of the subject which are properly thus described." ("Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences," B. XI., chap. v., s. 3.) And again, "It is true, the explanation of one set of facts may be of the same nature as the explanation of the other class; but then, that the cause explains _both_ classes, gives it a very different claim upon our attention and assent from that which it would have if it explained one class only. The very circumstance that the two explanations coincide, is a most weighty presumption in their favour. It is the testimony of two witnesses in behalf of the hypothesis; and in proportion as these two witnesses are separate and independent, the conviction produced by their agreement is more and more complete. When the explanation of two kinds of phenomena, distinct, and not apparently connected, leads us to the same cause, such a coincidence does give a reality to the cause, which it has not while it merely accounts for those appearances which suggested the supposition. This coincidence of propositions inferred from separate classes of facts, is exactly what we noticed in the last book, as one of the most decisive characteristics of a true theory, under the name of _Consilience of Inductions_. "That Newton's first rule of philosophizing, so understood, authorizes the inferences which he himself made, is really the ground on which they are so firmly believed by philosophers. Thus, when the doctrine of a gravity varying inversely as the square of the distance from the body, accounted at the same time for the relations of times and distances in the planetary orbits and for the amount of the moon's deflection from the tangent of her orbit, such a doctrine became most convincing: or, again, when the doctrine of the universal gravitation of all parts of matter, which explained so admirably the inequalities of the moon's motions, also gave a satisfactory account of a phenomenon utterly different--the precession of the equinoxes. And of the same kind is the evidence in favour of the undulatory theory of light, when the assumption of the length of an undulation, to which we are led by the colours of thin plates, is found to be identical with that length which explains the phenomena of diffraction; or when the hypothesis of transverse vibrations, suggested by the facts of polarization, explains also the laws of double refraction. When such a convergence of two trains of induction points to the same spot, we can no longer suspect that we are wrong. Such an accumulation of proof really persuades us that we have to do with a _vera causa_. And if this kind of proof be multiplied,--if we again find other facts of a sort uncontemplated in framing our hypothesis, but yet clearly accounted for when we have adopted the supposition,--we are still further confirmed in our belief, and by such accumulation of proof we may be so far satisfied as to believe without conceiving it possible to doubt. In this case, when the validity of the opinion adopted by us has been repeatedly confirmed by its sufficiency in unforeseen cases, so that all doubt is removed and forgotten, the theoretical cause takes its place among the realities of the world, and becomes _a true cause_." (Ibid. B. XII., chap. xiii., art. 10.) The reader of this Essay will be pleased to remark as he proceeds that its argument is made up of a diversity of proofs (very many among them being inductive), and that they all lend each other mutual support and become consilient at last. FOOTNOTES: [a] The language of this paragraph is the language of ordinary life. In Coleridge's "Table Talk," for example, the subject of Man's distinguishing prerogative of Immortality is discussed by the great speaker, and his nephew's note of the discussion is headed "Materialism." There appears, indeed, considerable difficulty in finding a precise expression for the form of belief, or unbelief, commonly called Materialism. Most people speak of it as of some clear and well-defined theory until they begin seriously to investigate its _rationale_. Investigators are then apt to become loud in their complaints of its inexactness. Take by way of instance the following example. Speaking of "the doctrines of Materialism," Lord Brougham remarks: "The vague and indistinct form of the propositions in which they are conveyed affords one strong argument against their truth. It is not easy to annex a definite meaning to the proposition that mind is inseparably connected with a particular arrangement of the particles of matter; it is more difficult to say what they mean who call it a modification of matter; but to consider it as consisting in a combination of matter, as coming into existence the instant that the particles of matter assume a given arrangement, appears to be a wholly unintelligible collocation of words."--(_Discourse of Natural Theology_, p. 102). Under such circumstances it may seem difficult for many a Materialist to describe himself as the adherent of a distinct or closely reasoned system. The main point we would submit for his earnest consideration is the question whether his hypothesis lands him in certain subtle refinements concerning the nature and connection of Force, Mind, and those generalized facts which have been called the primary properties of Matter,--or whether it leads him onward to the opinions described in the text. Looking at the subject in this light, we might feel inclined to draw a broad distinction between mere scientific Materialism and the Materialistic doctrines of sceptical philosophy. [b] "I doubt," said Mr. Gladstone at Liverpool on December 21, 1872,--"I doubt whether any such noxious crop has been gathered in such rank abundance from the press of England in any former year of our literary history as in this present year of our redemption, eighteen hundred and seventy-two." The Premier had before remarked: "I believe that neither Science nor Thought is responsible, any more than Liberty is responsible, for the misdeeds committed in their names." The passage from which these brief extracts are made is given at greater length in the additional note to this Section (A). [c] Since writing the above, my attention has been called to Paley's censure of the "disingenuous _form_" under which Scepticism was placed before the public in his day. He says (_Moral Philosophy_, B. v. Sect. 9): "Infidelity is served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination; in a fable, a tale, a novel, a poem; in interspersed and broken hints, remote and oblique surmises; in books of travels, of philosophy, of natural history; in a word, in any form rather than the right one,--that of a professed and regular disquisition. And because the coarse buffoonery and broad laugh of the old and rude adversaries of the Christian faith would offend the taste, perhaps, rather than the virtue of this cultivated age, a graver irony, a more skilful and delicate banter, is substituted in their place." [d] "Atheists," says the _Pall Mall Gazette_ of January 18, 1873, "write Atheism because they are Atheists, but Alexandre Dumas writes Atheism, though a good Catholic, who goes to church every Sunday." [e] Pre-eminent amongst these remonstrants is Mr. Gladstone. In the speech before cited, he says, p. 25: "It is to be hoped that they will cause a shock and a reaction, and will compel many, who may have too lightly valued the inheritance so dearly bought for them, and may have entered upon dangerous paths, to consider, while there is yet time, whither those paths will lead them. In no part of his writings, perhaps, has Strauss been so effective, as where he assails the inconsistency of those who adopt his premises, but decline to follow him to their conclusions. Suffice it to say, these opinions are by no means a merely German brood; there are many writers of kindred sympathies in England, and some of as outspoken courage." (Compare the extracts from this class of writers given along with the Premier's remarks in Note A.) [f] Die Zustände eines Volkes hängen hauptsächlich von seiner Denkweise ab: diese ist der wichtigste und einflussreichste Zustand. Alle andern können nur nach und in ihr begriffen werden. Sie ist es, die den Menschen zu einem solchen macht; und in ihrer Ausbildung entwickelt sich erst die Menschlichkeit.--(Wilhelm H. J. Bleek, "Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache," p. 12). [3] Cowper, "The Task," B. III.--It must be confessed that the honest-minded humanitarian may often find in the reception he encounters ample reason and motive enough for taking up Teufelsdroeckh's parable:--"'In vain thou deniest it,' says the Professor; 'thou _art_ my Brother. Thy very hatred, thy very envy, those foolish lies thou tellest of me in thy splenetic humour: what is all this but an inverted sympathy? Were I a steam-engine, wouldst thou take the trouble to tell lies of me? Not thou! I should grind all unheeded, whether badly or well,'"--(_Sartor Resartus_, B. III. c. 7). And when the bigotry of Unbelief is not content with persecuting the honest-minded humanitarian--when he hears some shallow, half-animalized specimen of humanity shouting for a red-handed communism and the blood of the innocent--_then_ he may not irrationally exclaim with the same philosopher:--"Wert thou, my little Brotherkin, suddenly covered up within the largest imaginable glass-bell,--what a thing it were, not for thyself only, but for the world!" [g] I am indebted to Mr. Gladstone's appendix (p. 40) for the following apposite quotations from Sir George Cornewall Lewis's very scarce work, "On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion." Speaking of "Authority, and its place not as an antagonist of Reason, but as an instrument of Reason for the attainment of Truth," Sir George remarks, in page 35 of his book: "'It is commonly said that the belief is independent of the will,' and that no man can change it 'by merely wishing it to be otherwise.' But 'the operation of a personal interest may cause a man insensibly to adopt prejudices or partial and unexamined opinions.' In page 38 he adds: 'Napoleon affords a striking instance of the corruption of the judgment in consequence of the misdirection of the moral sentiments.'" All friends, and many casual readers, of S. T. Coleridge will remember that he asserted the same, or perhaps a stronger, conclusion upon metaphysical grounds, and with a force of language not easily surpassed. This--one of Coleridge's bursts of gorgeous eloquence and imagery--will be found in "The Friend," a book which, according to C. Lamb, contains "his best talk." The subject commences on page 260 of Vol. III., Ed. 2, and page 211, seq., Vol. III., Ed. 4. In the latter place it is amplified by a summary of his arguments, pages 213, 214. The position propounded, that true insight cannot exist apart from moral rectitude, receives considerable light from the doctrine of philosophical postulates maintained in the "Biographia Literaria," Vol. I. c. 12, and chiefly borrowed from Schelling, to whom there is an honest reference in the first Edition, I. 250. I mention this circumstance because Coleridge has been held guilty of unjustifiable pillage by writers who have noted his borrowing, but omitted to observe such acknowledgments as he makes, together with the additions and alterations which he introduces. The corruption of a naturally acute understanding has seldom been more graphically painted than by Judge Talfourd. (See Additional Note, B.) [4] Compare Lord Macaulay on "Special Pleading in History," Additional Note, C. [h] These divisions have been sometimes called Physico-Theology and Ethico-Theology; but the latter designation is far too restricted for the line of thought pursued in the latter portion of this Essay. [i] See Additional Note, D. [5] Pope, "Essay on Man," Ep. II. Compare Mr. Pattison's notes, pp. 87, 88, and 90. We may remark that the Aphorism "Know thyself" has been often employed to convey a lesson the most distant possible from Pope's,--_e.g._, "Know thyself; and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to a creature, and in God all things." [j] See Additional Note, E. [6] The work referred to, "Der alte und der neue Glaube," appeared in the latter half of 1872. [7] Compare an illustrative passage, B. III. p. 34. "We have been seeking to determine, whether our point of view, from which the law-governed All, full of life and intelligence, is the summit of thought (die höchste Idee), can still be called a religious point of view, and we have animadverted upon Schopenhauer, who loses no opportunity of flying in the face of this which is our Idea. As I have said, such outbreaks impress our understanding as absurdities; to our feelings, they are blasphemies. It appears to us rash and reckless, on the part of a mere human individual, so boldly to set himself up against the All, out of which he grows, and from which he has the morsel of intelligence that he misuses. We see in this an abnegation of that feeling of dependence, which we admit to belong to all men. We demand the same piety towards our Universum, as the devout man of the old fashion did for his God." [8] This declaration we quote in its native German. Its first sentence, together with the sentences immediately preceding, are those passages selected for translation by Mr. Gladstone. "Historisch genommen, d. h. die ungeheuren Wirkungen dieses Glaubens mit seiner völligen Grundlosigkeit zusammengehalten, lässt sich die Geschichte von der Auferstehung Jesu nur als ein weit historischer Humbug bezeichnen. Es mag demüthigend sein für den menschlichen Stolz, aber es ist so; Jesus könnte all das Wahre und Gute, auch all das Einseitige und Schroffe das ja doch auf die Massen immer den stärksten Eindruck macht, gelehrt und im Leben bethätigt haben; gleichwohl würden seine Lehren wie einzelne Blätter im Winde verweht und zerstreut worden sein, wären diese Blätter nicht von dem Wahnglauben an seine Auferstehung als von einem derben handfesten Einbände zusammengefasst und dadurch erhalten worden." (p. 72.) [9] As a consequence of the difference in standpoint, the use made by the two men of their several conclusions is marked by very considerable contrast. Comte's Humanity was to be served by a ritual as well as a social set of ordinances. Strauss looks quite another way. Considering the outrage which would be committed upon philosophy and feeling should his Universum find irreverent treatment in the words and writings of men; our emotion, he says, on such occasions becomes thoroughly religious. If then it be asked in express terms whether he and his fellow-thinkers really have a Religion or no, they cannot answer roundly as they will when questioned on Christianity; they must rather say yes or no according to the meaning of the word Religion in the mind of their questioner. (See Strauss, p. 143.) [10] In the Livraison of the Deux Mondes for November, 1856, M. Cucheval-Clarigny wrote thus: "Personne plus que David Hume n'a éprouvé l'inconstance des jugemens humains. Après avoir été mis au rang des esprits qui ont fait le plus d'honneur à l'humanité, on le compte volontiers aujourd'hui parmi les corrupteurs de la raison et les apôtres du mal." That another kind of interest has been more recently felt in Hume is evidenced by the republication of his works in America and England. While writing this note I learn that a new edition of the seldom-read Treatise on Human Nature will shortly appear, with notes by two well-known members of Balliol College. [11] Compare with this the subjoined orison for a special gift of moral rectitude penned by Professor Huxley (Lay Sermons, p. 373). "I protest that if some great power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer. The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me." It seems wonderful that the talented writer fails to perceive that should his terms be granted the bargain would be dear indeed--it must take place at the expense of his Personality. He would have no choice left, consequently no rightness of choice. With the loss of his volition his manhood would be forfeited; and the Huxley of our praise and blame must needs sink at once and for ever from a Person to a Thing-- "Rolled round in Earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees." After all, we may trust that this outpouring of soul after mechanical goodness, is neither more nor less than a fresh rehearsal of the popular fallacy or fable of a learned and intelligent, but somewhat over-hasty, death-watch. The difference between the two myths is not great, and both owe their existence to the prolific fancy of Professor Huxley. About three years ago the teleological beetle speculated in a manner which would have grieved the soul of Aldrich or Whately respecting the purpose of a kitchen clock. The death-watch concluded, like a death-watch, and not like a logician, that the clock's final end was to tick. Man, as Bacon tells us, is the servant and interpreter of nature. Does any one feel sure that a death-watch is the servant and interpreter of kitchen timepieces? Yet his inconsequent thinking served as an implement of Fate to "quail, crush, conclude, and quell" Teleology in general, and the Design argument for Natural Theism in particular. _Now_, a human Huxley clock always going morally right _because it must_, is equally conclusive against all freedom and all Conscience. Equally conclusive, we know, because equally true to Nature and to Fact. As conclusive as arguments against received biological tenets drawn from those great natural curiosities the Gorgon, the dragon of St. George, and the fire-breathing Chimæra, who united in her own fair person a lion, a dragon, and a goat. This latter well-known phenomenon may seem nearly as striking as any right-minded clock imaginable, and not much more incongruous. Many readers may be reminded of Amurath's Ring. But few probably will know, and fewer still recollect, Miss Edgeworth's clever comment upon it in "Rosamond." The book is unfortunately scarce, not having been reprinted along with "Early Lessons," therefore we add the extract ("Rosamond," vol. i., p. 148):-- "Do you remember, brother," said Laura, "your wish when you were reading that story in the 'Adventurer,' last week?" "Not I. What wish?" said Godfrey. "What story?" "Don't you remember," said Laura, "when you were reading the story of Amurath and his ring, which always pressed his finger when he was going to do anything wrong?" "Yes; I wished to have such a ring," said Godfrey. "Well, a friend is as good as such a ring," said Rosamond; "for a friend is, as somebody observed, a _second conscience_; I may call Laura my _second conscience_." "Mighty fine! but I don't like secondary conscience; a first conscience is, in my opinion, a better thing," said Godfrey. "You may have that too," said Rosamond. "Too! but I'd rather have it alone," said Godfrey. "There is something so cowardly in not daring to stand alone." The lesson seems to be that second-hand goodness falls short of true goodness, and that the impulse to moral action must arise from within--so unmanly is every endeavour at shaking off, either by cowardice or by unreflectiveness, the human burden and birthright of Responsibility. Amurath's ring was a mechanical conscience. Professor Huxley's clock is a mechanism in the outward form of a man. These two imaginations convey the useful lessons that neither Conscience nor Mankind are mere machines. A clock goes because it must go its hourly round; a man chooses which way, when, and whither he will go. [12] 1 Corinthians ix. 16. [13] For a useful account of Plato's Dialogue in connection with Plato's philosophy, see "Introduction to the Republic," by Davies and Vaughan, pp. xxi.-xxiv. Cambridge, 1852. CHAPTER II. PHILOSOPHY OF DESIGN. "It is an assured truth, and a conclusion of experience, that a little or superficial knowledge of Philosophy may incline the mind of Man to Atheism, but a farther proceeding therein doth bring the mind back again to Religion: for in the entrance of Philosophy, when the second causes, which are next unto the senses, do offer themselves to the mind of man, if it dwell and stay there it may induce some oblivion of the highest Cause; but when a man passeth on farther, and seeth the dependence of causes and the works of Providence; then, according to the allegory of the poets, he will easily believe that the highest link of Nature's chain must needs be tied to the foot of _Jupiter's_ chair." _Lord Bacon's Advancement of Learning,_ Book I. "Deus sine dominio, providentiâ, et causis finalibus nihil aliud est quam fatum et natura. A cæcâ necessitate metaphysicâ, quæ eadem est et semper et ubique, nulla oritur variatio. Tota rerum conditarum pro locis ac temporibus diversitas, ab ideis et voluntate entis necessario existentis solummodo oriri potuit."--_Sir Isaac Newton, Scholium at close of Principia._ "Tax not my sloth that I Fold my arms beside the brook; Each cloud that floated in the sky Writes a letter in my book. "There was never mystery But 'tis figured in the flowers; Was never secret history But birds tell it in the bowers." _Emerson's Poems.--The Apology._ SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER II. This Chapter enters upon an examination of the kind of reasoning involved in the Argument from Design, and an inquiry into its special force. These investigations are accompanied by illustrative examples of Analogy in different shapes. The most powerful objections against this argument, and the various modes of stating it, are then described and criticised. A re-statement of the whole line of thought is followed by the outline of a proposed method for the constructive science of Natural Theology. The Chapter closes with a corollary on Efficient and Final Causes. _Analysis_--Argument from Design--Its Popular Form, and the Popular Objections raised against it--Art and Nature dissimilar--Organic and Inorganic Worlds, their Unlikeness and their Likenesses--Difference between Similitude and Analogy, whether the latter be Illustrative or Illative, and easiest ways of stating both Analogies. Scientific Difficulties--Charge of proving too much--Anthropomorphism and Dualism--Physical and Moral Antithesis--Was Paley to blame for introducing these Questions?--Answer to the charge of proving too much--On how many points need Analogy rest?--Examples. Charge of proving too little--Design assumes Designer as a Foregone Conclusion--Process observed is test of Designer in Art, but fails in Nature--Criticism on these Objections. Baden Powell compared with Paley--Wide Views and Inductions--Argument analysed into _Gradations_ of Proof, Order, and Intelligence--Means, Ends, and Foresight--Physical and Moral Causation--Argument analysed into various _Lines_ of Proof--Their Separate and Consilient Force. Value of Powell's views on Causation--Objections against some peculiarities of his language--Natural Theology and Natural Religion distinguished--Professor Newman--Use of Words on subject of Design. Statement of the Constructive Method now to be employed--Corollary on Efficient and Final Causes. _Additional Notes and Illustrations_:-- A.--On the abstract reasonings involved in Natural Theology. B.--On the phrase "Design implies a Designer." C.--Hume on the analogies of Art and Nature. D.--The Pantheistic consequences charged upon Physical Speculation. E.--The extent and divisions of the Science of Natural Theology. F.--On Teleology. CHAPTER II. PHILOSOPHY OF DESIGN. The argument from Design in Nature has been made familiar to most readers in Natural Theology by Paley's well-known book. It is probable that no argument has ever been more praised, and at the same time more strongly controverted. Our business lies, of course, with the controversy; and we must say a few words on our present mode of dealing with it. Nothing could be more useless than to repeat illustrative examples of Design already thrice told by an endless variety of treatises. Of so wide a subject everything may be quoted as an illustration, from a pebble to a world, if only the principle illustrated--the pivot on which the argument turns--be understood and admitted. In modern times, this turning-point is precisely the centre of the dispute. Untrained minds misapprehend the meaning of the word Design, and are further still from apprehending the real force of argument from analogy. And when these subjects come to be discussed by skilled writers, various questions are always raised which generally issue in irreconcilable differences of opinion. Our plan here will be to take the argument in its best-known shape, and examine it from the points of view occupied by several classes of objectors, beginning, as is reasonable, with the most popular difficulties and misapprehensions. It does not seem necessary to load the page with references to controversialists of the ordinary sort, particularly as we endeavour to look at the whole question through their eyes. Respecting the more philosophic questions it is necessary to observe, that the Evolution-theory will not form a topic of the present chapter. It is excluded for two reasons. One, that we are now trying to put a value on the argument from Design _per se_, and not to compare it with rival theories. The other reason springs from the subject of Evolution itself--it is too extensive to be thus briefly treated--and the sum of this Essay must be taken together as furnishing a counter statement to the manner in which it has been employed by certain of its ardent advocates.[14] We hope for a further advantage from the method proposed. The cause of truth ought to gain from being looked at on more than one side; and, whatever be the worth and true effect of reasoning from Design, we may expect by this method to display it adequately. The word itself, like all figurative terms--or words used in a secondary sense--is by no means free from ambiguity. It has, in common parlance, several shades of signification. Design being the centre of Paley's argument, and containing the one idea which gives force to all the rest: his first object was to fix the sense in which he employed it. He did so by using an illustration. To explain by comparison is always a popular resource, some serious drawbacks notwithstanding. Almost every one prefers that an author should use a sparkling similitude which tells a great deal, rather than write what looks like a grammar and dictionary of his science. Analysis and induction require thought on the part of him who employs them--thought also on the part of a reader determined to understand what he reads. Paley saw all this thoroughly, and at the beginning of his book employed the now celebrated comparison taken from a watchmaker and a watch. His judgment received support from the popularity he enjoyed, and from the way in which everybody borrowed his illustration.[15] Yet Paley's deference to the popular understanding gave rise to the first general misapprehension of his treatise. He sets out from a kind of surprise--the surprise his readers would feel at finding a watch upon a heath. Now this feeling was immediately alleged as a conclusive objection against Paley's comparison, and as a ground for distrusting the whole argument founded upon it. The world, it was said, cannot be likened to a watch, nor yet to any other sort of mechanism. Between things natural, and the things which men make, the difference is not a mere contrast of perfection with imperfection. The real reason why we are surprised to see Paley's watch lying on a moor--and not at all surprised to see Paley's stone lying beside it--springs from this very difference. And though the history of a stone, common, coarse, and worthless, is really more wonderful than the history of any watch, and though the stone has an infinitely longer pedigree, we should never speak or think of it in the same way. We feel that the objects are dissimilar, and our surprise testifies the fact. A heath is given up to nature, a watchmaker's shop to art. The watch is out of place among stones, the stone among watches. The idea raised at the outset, therefore, is that Art and Nature would seem to be thoroughly unlike. At a first view of the subject, these remarks appear open to one obvious rejoinder. The sort of surprised feeling which Paley describes, is not in itself a proof of real unlikeness. A weed is a plant out of place; we do not expect thriving crops of cabbage or teazle in a carefully kept rose-garden, nor gooseberry bushes amongst azaleas. The proudest flower that blossoms is a weed in a vineyard, in a plot of opium-poppies, or mixed with other herbs medicinal. So, too, a rough diamond would not be out of place in a watchmaker's shop; but if we saw a stone of no selling value inside a case of watches we should certainly experience some surprise. And the feeling would remain even though we were quite unable to explain how the poor pebble differed chemically from the priceless gem. We know that the latter would appear to a jeweller's customers like a rose among flowers, but the former worthless as a weed. The jeweller would consider it a trespasser fit only to be turned out of doors. But does this rejoinder satisfactorily dispose of the difficulty? Is not the true reason why we might observe with some wonder a watch lying upon a moor resolvable into the fact of our knowing its use and being quite sure that some one had dropped it there?[k] A savage might not feel in the least surprised, unless, indeed, he happened to suppose that the watch was a kind of animal he had never seen before, and took notice of the singular sound it made. In this event he would probably break it to pieces without discovering the purpose or mode of its contrivance. Throughout all disputatious matter, a thought on one side leads to a thought upon the other--at least, amongst tolerably fair people. The idea which we have just imagined our savage to entertain respecting a watch suggests a further question. What effect ought in reason to be produced upon cultured minds by the contemplation of some unknown or half-comprehended phenomenon?--a question this, closely bearing upon the whole subject under discussion. Now surely it is from intelligent wonder--a contrast of the unknown with what we already know--a feeling of mystery to be solved by us, that inquiry and science perpetually spring. A fossil-shell, the former habitation of a marine animal, found upon some mountain top, presents a contrast and a mystery of this kind. Moreover, the highest triumph of inquiring science is the discovery, not of difference anywhere, but rather of resemblances in objects apparently diverse. An uninquiring mind will never perceive any common attribute, either ideal or structural, between a stone and a watch. But did Paley himself perceive any such community of attribute? So far does he appear from the perception that he speaks of the stone as an "unorganised, unmechanised substance, without mark or indication of contrivance," and adds, "It might be difficult to show that such substance could not have existed from eternity." Paley's day was meagre in natural science, and Paley was as meagrely acquainted with its results as he was with metaphysical philosophy. Few people, however, even now-a-days, know enough of the laws which govern inorganic products to find their investigation a slight or easy task. For a purpose of comparison with any human work or mechanism, most inquirers will prefer having recourse with Paley to the world of organisation. The flower and fructification of a plant or shrub growing on the heath beside Paley's watch, though carelessly passed over a thousand times, and exciting no surprise from anything unusual in its _habitat_, will, when observed, raise the most sincere admiration. And the same may be said of the bony skeleton of the lizard[16] racing round plant and shrub, the forehand of the mole which burrows beneath them, and the wing of the bat circling nightly in upper air. Take, then, replies the objector, an organism, vegetable or animal, whichever you or Paley may prefer. The difficulty formerly urged at once recurs, slightly altered in shape, but with augmented point and force. Your organisms are not put together like the parts of a watch (_undique collatis membris_)--brass from this place, steel from that, and so on, with china dial-plate, covering-glass, and gold case. All these things were apart in nature, they were severally chosen, manipulated, and brought together. What we see is a successful union of materials possessing inherent adaptation to definite purposes--such as the freedom of brass from rust, or the superior elasticity of steel, qualities indicating the skill and workmanlike knowledge of some human artificer, and showing by their utilization the truth of what was before asserted. Watches and worlds, the products of Art and of Nature, are obviously and thoroughly unlike. By way of answer, it might be observed that in organization we do really see very distinct constituents combined. In a plant, for instance, there is the combination of a growing point, a humus or pabulum that feeds it, and the stimuli, air, water, light, and all the "skiey influences" by which its passive vitality is excited and sustained. We see plant life, by reason of these concurrent adaptations, swelling into leaf, stem, bud, corolla, and fruit, throughout all the brighter tribes of vegetable beauty that bloom apparent to the unassisted eye. And the like holds true respecting animals, but with increased variety and complication of conditions, made necessary by their higher mode of existence. The marvels of their many powers, habits, and perfections of form and movement are great, but greater still the vast multitude of ministering aids put in requisition to ensure their earliest appearance and after continuance in life and enjoyment. When we contemplate microscopic Nature, a like sweep of combination is again evident to the skilful naturalist, and excites his constant wonder, especially when observed in connection with the exquisite finish of minute creatures and their infinitesimal parts, both alike unperceived by our ordinary human senses. And a similar idea of invisible, and perhaps almost incomprehensible, harmony might be raised by a consideration of the elements, metallic and non-metallic, brought together in numberless inorganic productions, as well as of the forces which bind them in hard cohesion, and give them such properties as we may discover in the commonest block of granite. And what if we could extend our field of view to a world--to the universe? The answer suggested by this last paragraph has its value, and the principle involved in it will occur for our scrutiny further on. But at present this train of thought, if pursued, might be likened to the weed we spoke of,--it would not be altogether in place here. The truth is that the whole objection thus parried appears more out of place still, and is therefore itself not a flower, but a weed of popular rhetoric. And the reason of its irrelevancy is plain. Paley's argument does not really turn upon the similitude of any two objects of simple apprehension, but upon an analogical comparison; the discovery, that is, of the likeness between two ratios, a process known in common life under the name of Proportion. Hence it is from the illative force of analogy that this topic of Design derives its value. The analogy does, in fact, serve a double purpose,--- _first_ to explain, and _secondly_ to prove. We had better look at it from both points of view. The easiest method for making an _illustrative_ analogy intelligible is to state it in old-fashioned style as a rule of three sum; the fourth term being the conclusion which completes it. "As a watch is to the watchmaker, so is creation, (exemplified by such and such a specimen,) to its Creator." That is to say, there exists some ratio or relation connecting the watch and the watchmaker, which exists also between the world and its Creator. To see its _illative_ force used as an argument, we need only alter the position of the four terms, and state our proportion as is more usual in modern day. "As the watch is to such and such specimens of creation, so is the watchmaker to the Author of any and all of these things." In the _first_ statement Paley's similitude is displayed in full as an asserted illustration of Design. The watch is a thing contrived--that is, a design realized, and the maker is its contriver. Just so, is the world a Design realized by its Creator. And it appears plainly implied in the assertion, that even as the little watch shows the limited power and intelligence of its maker, so the vast and unfathomable universe illustrates the infinite power and wisdom of its incomprehensible Author. The _second_ mode of statement displays the force of Paley's analogy viewed as a chain of reasoning. The watch is _not like_ the world, but there is something in common between them, and this something it is Paley's purpose, and the purpose of his various continuators, to show at the greatest convenient length. Now such community of character must be sufficient to establish a further community still. When we see a watch we are sure it had a designer,--the watchmaker; and here, again, Paley means to argue that from every example of contrivance which we can adduce and examine, the same inference ensues, and always must ensue. Therefore (he concludes) from the immeasurable designed world we infer the world's omnipotent Designer. The chief Divine attributes (as, for example, omnipotence) are dwelt upon by Paley towards the close of his treatise. But it seems well to insert the adjective at once. Most thinking persons admit that whoever believes in a Creator may find from the physical Cosmos and its "Mysterious worlds untravelled by the sun," ample reason for justifying the noblest of such adjectives. They generally go further, and allow that any Theist finds in these endless marvels a full confirmation of his faith--there is, as Coleridge says, a whole universe at hand to ratify the decision. But what many educated people who concede thus much disallow, is the sufficient witness of Design standing by itself to prove what it may fairly corroborate or even extend. To illustrate, confirm, or widen what is already held a truth is one thing; to serve as its sole sufficient witness is another. This conclusiveness some deny, and more scruple to affirm. And one of the drawbacks in arguing from analogy seems to be, that all except the most philosophically trained minds experience a sort of hesitation in estimating its force--a hesitation which they are at a loss to define in words. Consequently, the attack upon its adequacy is always difficult to answer; so many various shades of negation must be classed together for brevity's sake, and met by one or two general lines of defence. The safest way, probably, is to make the negative classes as wide as possible, and to put the scientific doubts in their most fatal form of expression. And it appears hard to imagine anything really destructive of evidence which may not be brought under one of the two following heads. There may be, first, a failure of evidence when it is not strong enough in its facts and circumstances to justify the conclusion drawn--when, in short, it proves too little. Secondly, it is worthless, if its acceptance so damages the position occupied by those who employ it, that their purpose is thereby destroyed, their _locus standi_ demolished--in other words, they have proved too much. May we not, then, presume it impossible to bring worse charges against any argument than whatever can be urged in support of these two accusations? And we will _first_ put the well-known analogy on its trial for proving too much, because it is from anxiety to avoid this charge that most analogical reasoners are apt to risk proving too little. Admit, say Paley's most decided antagonists, the relevancy of an argument from human art. It must be taken to show the Creator of the Universe as Theists conceive and acknowledge Him. Let us at once ask in what light He is thereby represented? Is it not, so to speak, as a supreme Anthropomorphic[l] Craftsman sketching a vast plan or design, and moulding the materials necessary for its realization? We begin with the remark that His work--the world--must show some traces of that plastic process and the hand of its Moulder. The requirement seems just and reasonable, and is commonly answered by an appeal to what have been termed the records of creation, the structure of the heavens, and the structure of the earth. Thus, for example, we are referred to Geology and Palæontology, and are led from age to age, and type to type. In passing from one formation to another we seem (as Goethe said) to catch Nature in the fact. At all events the plastic process is everywhere traceable, and to its evidences the Theist points with triumph. But no intelligent objector can stop here. He will next inquire what on theistic principles was the origin of this material substance so constantly undergoing transformation. Most sceptical thinkers put the inquiry in a trenchant manner; they not only demand to be answered, but they prescribe beforehand the sort of answer to be returned. It is useless, they tell us, to speak of archetypes existing in the Divine mind, and to illustrate them by the creative thought of musician or sculptor, of painter or of poet. The hard, coarse world must be looked at as it is: an actual material habitation for sorrowing and sinful human creatures; its physical conditions, imperfect in that respect, unhappily corresponding too well with the low moralities of its tenants. Now, they say, if we examine Paley's common-sense analogy no one can at all doubt what answer is suggested there. The steel of the watch-spring, the brass of the wheel-work, and other materials for all the curious mechanical contrivances required, were taken into account by the watch-designer when he formed his design. Had it been otherwise he could not have calculated on finding the necessary strength, elasticity, resistance to rust, and other properties on which Paley dwells so distinctly. In like manner, it has been said by some physical science Christians since Paley's time: "Let matter and its primary properties be presupposed, and the argument from Design is easy." True, but it seems quite as easy to suppose the world itself eternal. And we know that this supposition was adopted by pagan philosophers, to whom it appeared the easiest of all beliefs. But other philosophic pagans, holding clearly that the world had a beginning, conceived its First Cause to be like Paley's Designer--analogous to an earthly workman. They carried out the analogy thoroughly--more thoroughly than modern writers, and believed both Artificer and the matter from which He shaped the visible universe, self-subsistent, indestructible, and co-eternal. In this eternity of matter and its native inflexibilities, these great heathen thinkers found an apology for what they considered the failure of creative power--misshapen things, monstrosities, and imperfections. The Creator never desired them, but His will was thwarted by the material He worked in. Against this dualism the early Fathers protested. Will the modern Theist (his assailants ask) deny himself, and affirm two independent and self-existent principles; or will he deny the parallelism asserted in Paley's analogy? Can he conscientiously believe that its issue is a worthy representation of the Divine and omnipotent Creator? If not, it has failed by proving too much[m]. raised. Who can help seeing that several of them lie equally against all rational theories which have ever been suggested to account for the origin of that sorrow and evil which we see and acknowledge everywhere? And does not the same remark apply to every attempt at solving the antithesis of mind and matter? Some thoughtful men have believed that they could see their way to a solution; others believe it altogether above human reason, and point with a kind of triumph to the failures of philosophy. However this may be, the mournful moral enigma,[17] and the unexplained antithesis underlying our knowledge of nature, attach themselves equally to every possible conception of the universe, religious or irreligious, common-sense or metaphysical. They have no special connection with our argument from Design, and ought not in fairness to be brought as objections against it. The more real question just now is, whether Paley's mechanical analogy was to blame for introducing the problem of cosmical matter into the discussion. On this question the opinions of competent and unprejudiced judges disagree. By an eminent and accomplished writer the case is summed up as follows, in the Harveian Oration for 1865. Having previously included the material factor under mechanical adaptation as distinguished from art in the highest sense, Dr. Acland goes on to say (page 13): "The illustration of the watch so quaintly employed by Nieuwentyt, and so entirely appropriated by Paley, only in a coarse way suggests the parallel between infinite art and common mechanical skill. It has done some mischief to the cause it advocates, by making familiar a rude illustration, which minds without imagination, or void of constructive power, have accepted as a recognised explanation of the _method of operation_ by an Infinite Creative Will." Paley's critics should however observe, that he did not himself intend the objectionable inference. Probably he never even perceived that it might be drawn from his comparison. Abstract inquiries connected with Theism, he banished to the end of his book, where they are discussed in a manner little calculated to satisfy any readers who have ever felt them as substantial difficulties.[18] But then, he would most likely have referred these persons to the writings of professed metaphysicians. It may be wise for us to take warning both by what Paley did and by what he left undone. Some deeper questions are indispensable to the argument from Design, but we shall follow his example so far as to avoid such disquisitions as were current in his day under the name of metaphysics. On the other hand we shall draw the required data from that critical Fact-philosophy of Mind and Human Nature, which forms to so many thinkers the birth-star of a new science, one amongst the rising hopes of our nineteenth century. Meantime, our business on hand is to rebut the present accusation of proving too much, brought against Paley's analogy. We shall try to complete our answer by setting his argument in the point of view under which he evidently meant it to be looked at. Either as an illustration or as a means of proof, Analogy need not hold in more than a single point; provided only that this single point is clear and well-established--resting, for example, on a moral law or a causal _nexus_. Any one who desires to make an analytical investigation into this law of inference will receive valuable aid from Ueberweg's Logic, §§ 131 and 2, particularly if compared with § 129. To a common-sense mind we may give sufficient satisfaction by adducing one or two good analogies. Thus, for instance, the duties of a religious minister are often explained by saying that he ought to be the shepherd of his flock; that is, his relation to his people ought to resemble that of the shepherd to his sheep. We all understand how truly is here expressed a world of watchful care. But are all points of the relation to be implied? May the spiritual pastor ever become the slayer or the salesman of his flock? Again,--writers upon political subjects some years ago used very commonly to quote from the days of Alfred the Great supposed precedents for our most modern constitutional _dicta_. In many cases the thing defended was a legitimate outgrowth of the precedent cited; but to pronounce the two _identical_ seemed sufficiently absurd. In confutation of some such absurdities, clever men argued that the body corporate has, like the individual body, its childhood, growth, and maturity. The argument became generally accepted, and got extended to the distinctions between healthy increase and sickly degeneration, with other like inferences. The further conclusion was next drawn, that every national body resembles the human frame in a necessary decay, and inevitable mortality. Now, whatever opinion may be entertained as to the fact of a death-rate of nationalities, nothing seems more certain than that those who first employed the comparison never contemplated this particular corollary. Whether their first use of it was wise or unwise, has been, like Paley's Watch-analogy, a matter of some considerable dispute. The general subject of Analogy, rightly or wrongly extended, admits of wider illustration. Simile and metaphor are often compressed analogies, and many of them gain in beauty from expansion. Pope's celebrated comparison of the traveller ascending the Alps with the student who scales the heights of literature; and how "Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise;" is a good example of a poet's successfully expanding his own thought. Still more exquisitively true to nature is the final parallel drawn in Coleridge's description of the divided friends who stood apart,-- "Like cliffs which had been rent asunder," while the marks of a former union lingered indestructible. Perhaps few readers of "Christabel" ever looked at Lodore, and "its scars remaining," without feeling how aptly they represent traces of thought and affection engraved upon the soul of man, deeper and more imperishable than the primæval rocks between which the "dreary sea" now flows. The wonderful force of many among Shakespeare's metaphors is derived from compressed analogy. But by expanding "The slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune," we should form no better conception of the goddess; and the next line, "Or to take arms against a sea of troubles," might easily be turned into nonsense! Like Paley's "watch," the "sea" holds true only in one point. Shakespeare had before his eye the image of multitudinous vastness. But what arms could we take up to stem the billows of a swelling tide? No one can read many commentators on the Scripture without feeling how groundless are numberless conclusions arrived at by extending Scriptural analogies beyond their just limits. Preachers and platform speakers are still more guilty. Not content with straining Holy Writ, they add to the mischief by pressing into their service comparisons of double meaning. The above quoted word "sea," has long been a much-enduring similitude in its relation to the countries and islands of the earth. What is it really to us, the earth's inhabitants? Our highway and bond of union? or a waste of waters given to divide rivals, as Horace phrases it, "_Oceano dissociabili_"? The last is the oldest metaphor.[19] Enough has been said upon various analogies to show how frequently even in their widest use (that of illustration), the effect of extending them beyond their one salient point, is utter confusion. And with respect to illative analogy, this rule becomes obviously more stringent still. Paley meant it to be observed strictly as regards his own analogous reasoning. But the caution itself must be cautiously applied, where the salient point on which the inference turns is too superficial, or too weak to stand alone. And this is the very thing we have to discuss next,--because a _second_ accusation brought against the argument from Design is, that by reason of weakness in its pivot, it proves far too little. This second charge is less usual amongst popular than scientific writers, and most of us may learn something by sifting it. Their position may be described in few words as standing thus:-- All examples which men can, of their own knowledge, connect with Design, fall under one sole class, and from this class alone they can argue. It contains the products of human workmanship and manufacture--and nothing else. By its characteristic processes (which together with their result make the sum of what we know about this class) it is so essentially dissociated from the products of Nature, that any appearance of design common between them must be pronounced superficial in the absence of stronger _nexus_. But since proof of such _nexus_ remains wanting, Paley's analogy is worthless. It will be observed that the effect of this position is to sever between human works and natural things quite as completely as did the popular objection which we put first in our list of assaults upon Paley. Yet, though these conclusions may seem suspiciously coincident, the grounds of argument are really distinct. Scientific persons do not compare two objects natural and artificial, nor yet their two sets of constituents, and say, "These are unlike." They argue rather that the relative or proportionate likeness asserted is insufficiently made out, and that when it is said "Design implies a designer," people are speaking of design worked out in the known way of workmen. We (they observe) need not _deny_ a designer of the world, but we desiderate evidence of his actual workmanship. By this we shall know that he first conceived and then realized the alleged design. We do not feel convinced by being shown certain organic _somethings_ in their perfect state, and being told to observe how very like contrivances they are. They may be very like, certainly, but we want assurances that they can be nothing else. We want to have shown us some work _being_ done, and to ascertain that it is carried on in a workmanlike manner. Then we shall say with confidence, Here is the active hand of a designer. To compress our requisition into a single sentence,--We want not only to catch Nature in the fact, but also to ascertain that Nature's way of performing the fact has something essentially humanlike about it. To see our meaning clearly (add these objectors) take the instance of some marvellous work of man's art previously unknown to us. We could, if we perceived the _marks_ of human fabrication, reason from a watch, or some other well known machine, to the conclusion that some person had designed it. In other words, we should feel sure that we were looking at a new product of skill, which differed from what we had seen before in the degree of excellence attained. The difference we feel in our transition from Art to Nature appears, on the contrary, to be a difference not only between more or less perfect products or processes, but a thorough difference of kind in the whole _manner_ of bringing about the results placed before our eyes. Or put the case (they continue) as a piece of circumstantial evidence. We say positively of this or that machine, They are contrivances, things designed, because we know the _history_ of their manufacture. We feel positive, because we are arguing from a plain patent fact to a hidden but absolutely essential condition, without which the fact could not exist. As regards natural products we have not got the fact--we do not know the history of their production. We cannot say, Here is the process, because the processes of Nature are mostly unknown to us. Paley therefore would have us assume the fact and argue from it; first to design, next, to something more hidden still,--a Designer. Yet what we _do_ know of natural processes is not encouraging; there is visible about them more unlikeness than likeness to the processes employed by man. The truth may be surmised, that Paley was always seeing in his own examples the footprints, as he thought, of a Designer. Hence he affirmed Design, and then argued back again in a never-ending circle. There is really no reason why he should have travelled round such a circuit. If his argument shows anything, it shows a Designer at once.[n] With some risk of tediousness, this last attack on Paley has been detailed at great length, and placed (as the present writer believes) in several of its most formidable shapes[o]. But for additional security of fair dealing with the strongest of all objections--one which, if established, would be a death-blow to all argument on the subject (since its _ultimatum_ is unconditional surrender)--for these reasons, then, and in order to satisfy the most rigorous understanding, let it be finally rehearsed in the words of a most eminent physicist whom no one will accuse of haste, oversight, or credulity. To this rehearsal the Professor adds what is to us more important still,--his judgment on the point at issue. But before quoting Professor Baden Powell, it may be worth while to make two short notes on the few preceding paragraphs. Let us take the last paragraph first. It really does appear that marks of Design and the footprints of a Designer are in common sense very nearly one and the same thing. If we concentrate our attention on the former, we are looking at an object on the side of certain properties,--that is, of certain subjectively perceived relations. For instance, we may think of the eye only as an optical instrument wonderfully constituted, and enumerate the parts of its visual apparatus. But the moment we speak of this apparatus as a provision _intentionally_ made for sight, we have introduced the idea of a Designer in the strongest sense of the word. Now, it is difficult to think of anything as an example of intelligent arrangement, and at the same time give no hint even to our own thoughts of arranging Intelligence. We can hardly look through a pane of glass and admire the perfect transparency of _one_ surface to the exclusion of the _other_! We are not now speaking of what _might_ be done, if attempted by a man so profoundly skilled in analytics that "He could distinguish, and divide A hair 'twixt south and south-west side." We are rather speaking of what it is _natural_ to do. And it may be doubted whether anybody thinks of a design _as_ design very long without thinking also of the Designer. One other remark is suggested by the reference to _process_ as contradistinguished from _product_. Here, again, the real question is, How far is such a distinction maintainable in fact? Does it rest upon any definite separation in Nature? The exact contradictory is the truth; taking the world as it is, the distinction, though clear in thought, becomes essentially fluent when objectively regarded. What we call a production one moment, we say is a process the next. You have, for example, a galvanic current, produced by certain chemical combinations, and often a product _per se_ of some importance. Yet the current itself is a part of the electrotyping process. Suppose this done, you have your electrotype--your coin,--a hard fact,--a solid production, bright, beautiful, admirable! But we will suppose you, while devising all this, to have a further view;--the coin is to be employed in the process of imposture. Here again comes a result--a great fraud committed; but this is not all. The fraudulent procedure turns out a very useful police-trap, and your chemical combination sends the last actor on the scene to Portland, for at least ten years. Consider in this brief history the scientific arrangements, material conditions, and workmanlike execution, discernible in its earlier parts; then, see how mind becomes gradually predominant, and how Law, based on ideas of corrective justice, enters the series. Add the judge and jury, and you admit the force of intellect,--deliberating, deciding, putting further activities in motion; till, perhaps, if the reformatory process succeeds, Portland may have the honour of giving to society the welcome product of (as times go) a passably honest man. We might really frame a curious inquiry as respects this flowing tide of process and production, production and process, with its commingling currents and waves which seem to interrupt each other like circles of diffracted light. We might ask which of all these parts of the moving diorama is most distinctly human. I believe most people would say, those scenes in which mind, not mere workmanship, is most evidently discernible. Professor Powell seems to have thought so too. The difficulty we have been discussing he states as an objection requiring solution.[20] "In those cases most nearly approaching the nature of human works, such as the varied and endless changes in matter going on in the _laboratory of nature_, the results, even when most analogous to those obtained in human laboratories, yet present no marks of the process or of the means employed, by which to recognise the analogous workman; and in all the grander productions, the incessant evolutions of vegetable and animal life, which no human laboratory can produce,--in the structure of earth and ocean, or the infinite expanse of the heavens and their transcendent mechanism, still further must we be from finding any analogy to the works of man, or, by consequence, any analogy to a personal individual artificer." The next paragraph contains his own judgment. "But the more just view of the case is that which arises from the consideration that the real evidence is that of _mind_ and _intelligence_; for here we have a proper and strict analogy. _Mind_ directing the operations of the laboratory or the workshop, is no part of the _visible apparatus_, nor are its operations seen in _themselves_--they are visible only in their _effects_;--and from effects, however dissimilar in magnitude or in kind, yet agreeing in the one grand condition of _order_, _adjustment_, profound and recondite connexion and dependence, there is the same evidence and outward manifestation of INVISIBLE INTELLIGENCE, as vast and illimitable as the universe throughout which those manifestations are seen." This second extract may be analysed into distinct propositions somewhat as follows:-- In a manufactory,-- Mind is no part of the visible apparatus--nor are its operations visible,-- But the effects make the operations manifest.-- In the universe,-- Effects may be seen differing from Human productions in many ways,--but agreeing in one common characteristic,--order--adjustment--hidden interdependence. Such effects make manifest the operation of an Invisible Intelligence as vast as the Universe itself. The majority of people might suppose this a conclusive inference from Nature to the Being of a Personal God. But Professor Powell does not so intend it; and therefore some readers may feel disposed to blame his use of words. It is, however, only fair that before so doing, they should carefully consider his whole mode of apprehending the subject in its completeness. And the easiest way of understanding Powell is, most probably, to compare him with Paley. The latter is confident that when he has derived the design and arrangement of the world from a mind analogous to the mind of man, but immeasurably vast as the Universe which man inhabits,--little more need be said. He thinks the infinite intelligence thus demonstrated, is clearly no other than the Great First Cause, and Creator of all things. "Contrivance, if established, appears to me to prove everything which we wish to prove." This sentence begins Chap. xxiii., and the rest of Paley's Natural Theology is intended to demonstrate and verify its correctness. Powell thinks that the step from a mind or intelligence, even if conceived illimitable as the Universe, to a First Cause, Supreme Mind, or Moral Cause, is a very much longer ascent[p] than Paley thought it. By these latter terms he meant--as Paley did--the Divine Personality believed in by Theists, and evidenced, _first_, as mind by a reign of law, order, and arrangement, so far as the world can evidence Him;--but manifest, _secondly_, in His higher nature as the fountain and originator of law--that is, a true Cause, a manifestation due to the causal structure of our own human minds. The point of difference is the length of the step to be taken from Law to Causation; but Powell agrees with his predecessor in asserting it, though arduous, to be absolutely safe. The point he insists on is that we cannot take it by a contemplation of the world without us only. "Ever-present _mind_" he says,[21] "is a direct inference from the universal order of nature, or rather only another mode of expressing it. But of the _mode_ of existence of that mind we can infer nothing." From this view he draws conclusions in opposite directions. Pantheism,[22] the co-existence or identification of mind with matter, "is at best a mere gratuitous hypothesis, and as such wholly unphilosophical in itself, and leading to many preposterous consequences." There are also grounds on which Theism appears certain and Pantheism extravagant, absurd, and contradictory.[23] To see these grounds we are to carry out the analogy given us by the common characteristics of order, adjustment, and interdependence visible through their effects as in the human workshop or laboratory, so, too, in the vast illimitable Universe, and described in our second extract as manifestations of Mind or invisible Intelligence. In the paragraph immediately following that extract,[24] he continues:-- "It is by _analogy_ with the exercise of intellect, and the volition, or power of moral causation, of which we are conscious within ourselves, that we speak of the _Supreme Mind_ and _Moral Cause_ of the Universe, of whose operation, order, arrangement and adaptation, are the external manifestations. _Order_ implies what by _analogy_ we call _intelligence_; subserviency to an observed end implies intelligence _foreseeing_ which by analogy, we call _Design_." The last sentence of the paragraph now quoted is very remarkable. The eminent writer directs attention to a distinction between two several inferences which can be drawn from the observed manifestations of Order, and of Foresight. From the first, he says, we infer Intelligence, from the latter we infer Design. It seems singular that Powell should have defined this distinction so clearly, and made no further use of it. He might naturally have insisted upon the separate and diverse evidences thus afforded by the physical world. Amid the variety of human minds, some may feel impressed by the contemplation of Nature in one of these ways, some in the other. To many persons the magnificent spectacle of a law-governed Universe, infinitely manifold yet everywhere harmonious, appears to justify the belief in one supreme Reason and sovereign Will. Separate parts of this same Universe--or the whole in its entirety of vastness--when considered as manifesting purpose--that is, intentional adaptation to separate ends or to one end--are to other minds a more convincing line of thought. With many writers on Natural Theology the different shades of meaning implied in the word Design[25] may prevent clearness of conception in this respect. But our author (like Paley) appears to use this word in its strongest signification. And this usage of Powell's brings into view another point in his reasoning even more singular than the one to which we have just adverted. Surely, if in the natural world we observe the manifestations of an Intelligence foreseeing an End, and employing means in subserviency to that end, it seems strange to conclude that respecting the mode of existence of such Intelligence we can infer nothing, yet the words occur on the very next page. It would seem almost an impossibility to suppose such a mind existing as anything less than a Personality under the twofold aspect of a Reason and a Will. Paley's common sense drew this conclusion at once, and very profound thinkers have agreed with Paley on the topic. "That," says F. H. Jacobi, "which, in opposition to Fate, makes God into a true God, is called Foresight. Where it is, there alone is Reason; and where Reason is, there also is Foresight. Foresight in itself is Spirit, and to that only which is of Spirit do those feelings of admiration, awe, and love, which announce its existence, correspond. We can indeed declare of any object that it is beautiful or perfect, without previously knowing how it became so, whether with or without the operation of Foresight;--but the power which caused it so to be, _that_ we cannot admire, if it produced the object, without aim or purpose, according to laws of mere Necessity of Nature."[26] In point of fact Professor Powell was himself of the same opinion, for in another place he writes thus:-- "Now, the bare fact of order and arrangement is on all hands undisputed, though commonly most inadequately understood and appreciated. "The inference of design, intention, forethought, is something _beyond_ the last mentioned truth, and not to be _confounded with it_. This implies intelligent agency, or moral causation. Hence again, we advance to the notion of distinct existence, or what is sometimes called personality; and thence proceed to ascribe the other Divine attributes and perfections as centring in that independent Being."[27] It appears only just to the Archdeacon that we should notice this variation of language on the part of his censor.[28] Of this variation itself the true account seems undoubtedly to be as follows. The writer was engaged in tracing the progress of conviction in his own mind. He first observes order, adjustment, interdependence, throughout the Universe. Hence he is penetrated by the impression of pervading Intelligence. Next, he perceives that these results could never have taken place unless foreseen and provided for by a designed subserviency of means to ends, and this convinces him of the Personality of that universal Mind. Finally, he draws, from the analysis of Causation, a full definition of the great Originator of all things. The fact, however, remains that each of these gradations of reasoning may be stated just as easily and more logically as separate and convergent lines of thought, because each can be rested on a separate combination of proofs. But the elucidation of this subject cannot be compressed into few words, and must be deferred to our fifth and sixth chapters. Still there is a very peculiar and special satisfaction in following the path of argument which persuaded an acute and practised reasoner, accomplished in several departments of knowledge, and himself of a turn of mind which would appear naturally adapted to the utmost refinements of sceptical investigation. We shall, therefore, now return to our comparison of Powell with his predecessor. These two distinguished writers do, in fact, come at last to the same conclusion. But they reach it through a difference in the paths travelled over by such logic of evidence as may after all seem natural enough to a theological pleader on one side, and on the other to a scientific physicist. Professor Powell, of course, leads us more deeply than his predecessor into the thorny thickets surrounding Natural Theology. No one can read his essays without remarking the subtlety of his thought, which to many readers appears over refined, and to some as employed on points in themselves unimportant. Mr. Baden Powell's own deliberate judgment was the other way, as we find from the last[29] of his considerable performances on our subject. "Points," he writes, "which may be seen to involve the greatest difficulty to more profound inquirers, are often such as do not occasion the least perplexity to ordinary minds, but are allowed to pass without hesitation.... On the other hand, exceptions held forth as fatal by the shallow caviller are seen by the more deeply reflecting in all their actual littleness and fallacy." We may add that a subtle argument is often like a sharp thin blade, cutting clean into the very heart of a question. If it indeed prove a home thrust, few things ought to be more fearlessly and cheerfully welcomed by those who desire to dissect out the naked, intrinsic truth. We will, therefore, dissect a little deeper, following the Professor's track of demonstration. We find him, then, reaching down to a _septum_, or, as botanists prefer to speak, a strong dissepiment between a _law of Nature_ or _physical causation_, and a _true Cause_ in the highest and most emphatic sense[q]. Such a separation is not to be sought from a writer of Paley's date, when the modern notion of law was unformed, or rather was in process of formation. Thus Newton's discoveries were thought by many persons irreligious, because the stability of the heavens appeared like something necessarily determined. Respecting this opinion, Powell observes (and from his point of view with truth), that "such necessity of reason is the highest proof of design." Paley, on the contrary, felt inclined to despair of discovering much evidence of Design in Astronomy, but he looked upon the starry heavens as affording the most ample and glorious confirmation of the agency of an intelligent Creator, when proved from some other source. In his next chapter (the 23rd) he proceeds to reprehend the mistaken sense of law, growing up amongst physicists in his own day. "It will," he says, "be made to take the place of power, and still more, of intelligent power," and will "be assigned for the cause of anything or of any property of anything that exists." In this remark he shows his accustomed penetration. Law, antecedent and consequent, with their series of physical evolutions, have been talked of by men who confuse physics and metaphysics, as if they could thereby account for a whole universe.[30] Now, from this cloudy confusion[r], Professor Powell is exempt. He accepts (as obviously he must accept) the natural-science idea of law, which looks at it as an orderly expression of force, and tells us that "law and order, physical causation and uniformity of action are the elevated manifestations of Divinity, creation and providence."[31] But from the conception of Mind or Intelligence thus given us, which, though invisible to the eye, is yet, in its effects, plainly visible, he distinguishes, over and over again, the idea of a true originating first Cause.[32] We see the necessity of a moral Cause as distinguished from a physical antecedent, when we survey Nature. But Nature does not contain the idea in an explicit shape. She only necessitates its acceptance. This idea, we find, he tells us, manifest in our own moral nature,--by analogy we discern it in the Divine. He likewise severely blames those who commingle in words the two contrasted thoughts and lines of inference, and mentions Coleridge and Sterling[33] by way of example. As concerns his own mode of establishing the idea of causation in its proper and peculiar force, Professor Powell agrees with a large number of metaphysicians, ancient and modern. It might seem superfluous to name as an instance the late Dean Mansel, were not a passage in his "Prolegomena" so full of good matter on the topic.[34] In this view of causation, then, Powell advanced nothing new. But what he did advance was really valuable. The man who can rise no higher than law or succession as he sees it impressed on outward nature, stands in a totally different position from the man whose insight into Reason and Will has shown him the idea of true Causation. For, he has seen that whoever is the author of his own act, does something which puts in movement a new series of antecedence and consequence,--a new train of events, the issue of which no man can foresee;--though of what has come, and is coming, he, the individual man, is the truly responsible cause[s]. But if _he_ can introduce into the order of the outward world a new antecedent carrying after it a chain of new consequents, what shall he think respecting the absolute Cause of all worlds, things and beings, the thinker himself included? Who shall persuade him to deny the reasonableness of a Providence following creation? Who can reprove the man when he feels and asserts his own moral power, for a belief in Miracles? Above all, who will demonstrate that prayer is inefficacious, if we can rise (as Baden Powell says we can rise) "by _analogy_ with the exercise of intellect, and the volition, or power of moral causation, of which we are conscious within ourselves, to the Supreme Mind and Moral Cause of the universe?" It is no slight praise to say that Professor Powell clearly saw, and no less clearly expressed, a truth not always apprehended among physicists. By giving it expression, he rendered a substantial service to Natural Theology. It is, indeed, a serious drawback and impediment to Natural Theologians that their argument requires some acquaintance with more than one wide field of knowledge. They have to reason from the material world,--they have also to reason from the world of mind; and in countries like England, France, and Germany, where division of labour penetrates every calling, literary as well as manufacturing, a combination of this sort is a matter of infrequent occurrence. To this retarding circumstance may be ascribed the want of progress in several mixed sciences,[35] which, like the subject we are treating, occupy two distinct tracts of border-land territory. The separating wall between Law and Cause built up by Professor Powell, was founded on fact, and will probably remain unshaken. But he added to it a theoretical limitation of the term, Natural Theology, which, like many changes in verbal usage, does not appear defensible,--particularly as its bad effects are plainly shown in Professor Powell's own book. Within two pages of the passage on Causation last quoted, he startles the unwary reader by saying (p. 173) that "Natural Theology confessedly 'proves too little,' because it cannot rise to the metaphysical idea or scriptural representation of God." It is generally vain to inquire what may be meant by "Metaphysical." Few people are aware that everybody, learned or unlearned, talks metaphysics either well or ill; and usually (as M. Jourdain talked prose) without knowing it. The epithet "metaphysical" figures often enough as another name for what is unintelligible;--and most Englishmen apply it to all "ideas" not strictly commercial or practical. Here it seems to stand along with Scripture, in opposition to Natural Theology; while the latter term is in turn opposed to the science of the human mind. Yet does not Powell distinctly trace a Mind and Intelligence analogous to the mind and intelligence of Man, throughout the world of outward Nature; and does he not further determine that this same analogy, fairly carried out, leads to what he _now_ calls "the metaphysical idea, or scriptural representation of God?" In other words, when discussing the question of Evidence, he finds Mind pervading outward Nature,--he treats Mind as the ordering and sovereign part of the Natural world, which visibly shows the effect of its invisible direction, and bids us follow up this higher nature in its analogies to God, of Whose operation the order and arrangement of the Universe are external manifestations. But, when he speaks of Natural Theology, that higher nature seems to disappear; intellect, volition, and the power of moral causation, slip out of sight, and are blotted from his catalogue of natural facts. Human nature must thus be treated as no part of universal Nature, in order that a needlessly narrow and purely theoretical fence may be drawn round the science of Natural Theology! Natural Theology and Natural Religion are, in truth, terms originally adopted as mere antitheses to Revelation. The _first_ signifies what mankind might have known, or may know, of the Divine Being, prior to, or apart from, any direct message sent by Himself. The _second_ is intended to comprehend those relations between that Divine Being and ourselves, which must ensue immediately upon the acceptance of Theism.[36] The _ideas_ expressed by these two terms are as old as Revelation itself,--a strong reason why their meaning should not be lightly altered.[37] But this antithetic usage was never intended to prejudge the question whether the results of Natural Theology and Religion do not coincide to a very great extent with the teaching of revelation. Much less was there any idea of answering this question in the negative, as a hasty reader of certain isolated passages in Professor Powell's book might easily be led to answer it.[38] Our strictures may be aptly concluded by a quotation taken from another recent writer. Professor Newman understands the evidence of Design in the same breadth of meaning which we have attached to it. Under it he comprehends the evidence of Mind naturally known to us, as may be seen by the following extracts:-- "A lung," says Mr. Newman,[39] "bears a certain relation to the air, a gill to the water, the eye to light, the mind to truth, human hearts to one another: is it gratuitous and puerile to say that these relations imply design? There is no undue specification here, no antagonist argument, no intrusion of human artifice: we take the things fresh from nature. In saying that lungs _were intended_ to breathe, and eyes to see, we imply an argument from Fitness to Design, which carries conviction to the overwhelming majority of cultivated as well as uncultivated minds.... If such a fact stood alone in the universe, and no other existences _spoke of Design_, it would probably remain a mere enigma to us; but when the whole human world is pervaded by similar instances, not to see a Universal Mind in nature appears almost a brutal insensibility.... Of the physical structure of mind, no one pretends to know anything; but this does not weaken our conviction that the mind was meant to discern truth. Why should any philosopher resist this judgment? One thing might justify him; namely, if there were strong _à priori_ reasons for disbelieving that Mind exists anywhere except in man. But the case is just the reverse. That puny beings who are but of yesterday, and presently disappear, should alone possess that which of all things is highest and most wonderful, is _à priori_ exceedingly unplausible. As Socrates and Cicero have pointedly asked: 'Whence have we picked it up?' Its source is not in ourselves: there must surely be a source beyond us. Thus the tables are turned: we must _primâ facie_ expect to find Mind in the Universe, acting on some stupendous scale, and of course imperfectly understood by us. Consequently, such Fitnesses as meet our view on all sides bring a reasonable conviction that Design lies beneath them. To confess this, is to confess the doctrine of an _intelligent Creator_, although we pretend not to understand anything concerning the mode, stages, or time of Creation. _Adding now the conclusions drawn from the Order of the universe_, we have testimony, adapted to the cultivated judgment, that there is a Boundless, Eternal, Unchangeable, Designing Mind, not without whom this system of things coheres: and this Mind we call GOD." To take stumbling-blocks out of the reader's way has been the main object of this Chapter. It has discussed the meaning and force of several words. The discussion may have seemed somewhat intricate,--but if honest, and, so far as it goes, thorough, no one will deny its utility. For facts are known to us as words, and words are facts to our intellect, since they express our apprehension of objects. They are, in brief, the interpreters of a world-wide human consciousness. And in the strength of consciousness our knowledge stands, if it does stand;--unfaithful to consciousness, it must fall, and ought to die the death of a traitor.[40] The word most discussed has been that one upon which turns the best known argument by Natural Theology--"Design." We trust also, that it may hereafter gain additional clearness under sidelights from other trains of thought.[41] And what next follows will be essentially a discussion of thoughts and things--in which words are to be treated less as their representatives, and more as our servants and implements. For this Chapter will have been written to very little purpose if the reader has failed to perceive that Natural Theology[42] includes at the very least two distinct elements--two separate sets of premises drawn from different sources. One of these factors rests upon our human knowledge of the natural world we live in--the other requires a deeper kind of knowledge, and one far less cultivated upon inductive principles--the knowledge, that is to say, of our own nature--our essential humanity and self-ness. The investigation of this last element is of paramount importance for the purpose we have in hand, since, without some ascertained principles and conditions of truth, men may fold their hands and view all behind and above the moving diorama of present impressions as ideas sublime but hopeless[43]--too high for us, who surely can never attain to them. The plan, therefore, of this essay is to take from the point now reached a fresh start--to set out, not from a consideration of what we may desire to know, but of how much or how little can be known, and the conditions of our knowing it. An honest wish to be sure of one single thing soon shows us the impediments we meet in making quite sure of anything. Soon, also, we painfully learn that these impediments arise from _two_ persistent sets of causes. Difficulties on the one hand occasioned by the obscurity, complication, or many-sidedness of objects actually existing _in rerum naturâ_. Difficulties on the other hand, which, like barnacles and remoræ attached to a good ship's wooden bottom, act as drags and retardations on our own apprehending faculties. Barnacle-like, they can only be kept at a distance or detached by carefully-devised contrivances. And these again give rise to troubles of other kinds,--just as copper-sheathed keels or iron vessels are not without their drawbacks. The inquiry we propose will have a great collateral advantage, both to him who doubts and to him who accepts Theism. For we shall at least get rid of what may fairly be termed a stupid prejudice. Persons who read and think little, are apt to base upon their own ignorance a vague presumption that the path of knowledge is plain and easy, until men try to know God. _Then_ all is hard; the pleasant path becomes a rough and toilsome road. Others who read, but think less than they read, are aware that very real obstacles beset all deep inquiry, yet form hazy and imperfect notions as to the true extent of those obstacles. They little think how often we are all obliged to accept and maintain first truths;--difficulties objective, and difficulties subjective, notwithstanding. Of one practical conclusion resulting from these difficulties, we may feel assured beforehand. Many objects of the greatest interest and importance to truth can never be truly known as they are in themselves;--our utmost hope is to know, not them, but as much as we can discover respecting them. And sometimes this limited knowledge is invaluable. If it does not gratify our natural desire for speculation, it may often guide and govern our lives. Unspeakably important, for example, in itself and in its consequences, must be an affirmative answer to our anxious question concerning the existence of a God. * * * * * COROLLARY.--It plainly appears from what has been said, that the knowledge of an "efficient cause" (in physics) does not, and cannot, at all preclude the inquiry after a purpose or "final cause"; but, on the contrary, leads to its investigation. In a watch's action, the former is represented by the moving power--that is, the spring; the latter, by the watch's function--that of indicating hours, minutes, and seconds. Would any uninformed person, examining a watch for the first time, and knowing no more than what he sees,--be able to give to himself any real account of the watch, if spring, train of wheel-work, and pointers, were shown him; but _no_ hint given of the purpose and object of the _whole_ construction? Now, to tell him this, would be to convey the _idea_,--a principle which resides in Mind, and in Mind alone;--and, so residing, leads to intelligent adaptation;--that is, a law or laws apprehended by the active exercise of certain mental faculties. Let the intelligent reader ask himself whether _any_ functional structure can be comprehended on _any_ lower terms?--As however this latter question will be fully discussed further on, it is unnecessary to say more respecting it at present. ADDITIONAL NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER II. A.--ON THE ABSTRACT REASONINGS INVOLVED IN NATURAL THEOLOGY. In his discourse on Natural Theology, Lord Brougham writes thus (p. 78):--"The whole reasoning proceeds necessarily upon the assumption that there exists a being or thing separate from, and independent of, matter, and conscious of its own existence, which we call _mind_. For the argument is, 'Had I to accomplish this purpose, I should have used some such means'; or, 'Had I used these means, I should have thought I was accomplishing some such purpose.' Perceiving the adaptation of the means to the end, the inference is, that some being has acted as we should ourselves act, and with the same views. But when we so speak, and so reason, we are all the while referring to an intelligent principle or existence; we are referring to our mind, and not to our bodily frame."... "The belief that mind exists is essential to the whole argument by which we infer that the Deity exists. This belief ... is the foundation of Natural Theology in all its branches; and upon the scheme of materialism no rational, indeed no intelligible, account can be given of a first cause, or of the creation or government of the universe." In a foot-note, Lord Brougham adds:--"It is worthy of observation that not the least allusion is made in Dr. Paley's work to the argument here stated, although it is the foundation of the whole of Natural Theology. Not only does this author leave entirely untouched the argument _à priori_ (as it is called), and also all the inductive arguments derived from the phenomena of mind, but he does not even advert to the argument upon which the inference of design must of necessity rest--that design which is the whole subject of his book. Nothing can more evince his distaste or incapacity for metaphysical researches. He assumes the very position which alone sceptics dispute. In combating him they would assert that he begged the whole question; for certainly they do not deny, at least in modern times, the _fact_ of adaptation. As to the fundamental doctrine of causation, not the least allusion is ever made to it in any of his writings,--even in his Moral Philosophy." It is when reviewing this last-named treatise that Dr. Whewell remarks (History of Moral Philosophy, p. 169):-- "The fact is that Paley had no taste, and therefore we may be allowed to say that he had little aptitude, for metaphysical disquisitions. In this there would have been no blame, if he had not entered into speculations which, if they were not metaphysically right, must be altogether wrong. We often hear persons declare that they have no esteem for metaphysics, and intend to shun all metaphysical reasonings; and this is usually the prelude to some specimen of very _bad_ metaphysics: for I know no better term by which to designate the process of misunderstanding and confounding those elements of truth which are supplied by the relations of our own ideas. That Paley had no turn or talent for the reasoning which depends on such relations, is plain enough." The reader may with little trouble collect for himself what is meant by bad metaphysics from the following extracts. The first is Lord Macaulay's criticism on the metaphysics of the Schools, which he introduces into his essay on Francis Bacon, as follows:-- "By stimulating men to the discovery of useful truth, he" (Bacon) "furnished them with a motive to perform the inductive process well and carefully. His predecessors had been, in his phrase, not interpreters, but anticipators of nature. They had been content with the first principles at which they had arrived by the most scanty and slovenly induction. And why was this? It was, we conceive, because their philosophy proposed to itself no practical end--because it was merely an exercise of the mind. A man who wants to contrive a new machine or a new medicine has a strong motive to observe accurately and patiently, and to try experiment after experiment. But a man who merely wants a theme for disputation or declamation has no such motive. He is therefore content with premises grounded on assumption, or on the most scanty and hasty induction. Thus, we conceive, the schoolmen acted. On their foolish premises they often argued with great ability; and as their object was "assensum subjugare, non res" (Nov. Org. I. Aph. 29), to be victorious in controversy, not to be victorious over nature, they were consistent. For just as much logical skill could be shown in reasoning on false as on true premises."[44] Of course, if any genuine metaphysical philosophy exists at all, its right and real object must be to try and discover true premises of the more abstract sort--premises, the truth of which affects the procedure of all the ancillary series.[45] Our next quotation contains Hume's sentence of execution rather than critique upon metaphysics as he saw them in connection with dogmatic theology. First, for his fiery anathema:-- "When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or School metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, _Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?_ No. _Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence?_ No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." (Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, § XII.) Alas for certain of Hume's own speculations! The student of Positivism knows how this fierce invective was echoed and re-echoed by Comte and his followers. They, however, omitted the qualifying word "School," which Hume prefixed to metaphysics. With Comte, metaphysic of every kind was "anathema maranatha"; and even psychology got excommunicated, by way of making "a clean sweep." Hume, on the contrary, had an idea of what philosophy ought to be, and thus outlined his preparation for a Metaphysic of the Future:-- "The only method of freeing learning, at once, from these abstruse questions, is to inquire seriously into the nature of human understanding, and show, from an exact analysis of its powers and capacity, that it is by no means fitted for such remote and abstruse subjects. We must submit to this fatigue in order to live at ease ever after: and must cultivate true metaphysics with some care, in order to destroy the false and adulterate. Indolence, which, to some persons, affords a safeguard against this deceitful philosophy, is, with others, overbalanced by curiosity; and despair, which at some moments prevails, may give place afterwards to sanguine hopes and expectations. Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons and all dispositions; and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom. "Besides this advantage of rejecting, after deliberate inquiry, the most uncertain and disagreeable part of learning, there are many positive advantages, which result from an accurate scrutiny into the powers and faculties of human nature. It is remarkable concerning the operations of the mind, that though most intimately present to us, yet, whenever they become the object of reflection, they seem involved in obscurity; nor can the eye readily find those lines and boundaries which discriminate and distinguish them. The objects are too fine to remain long in the same aspect or situation, and must be apprehended, in an instant, by a superior penetration, derived from nature, and improved by habit and reflection. It becomes, therefore, no inconsiderable part of science barely to know the different operations of the mind, to separate them from each other, to class them under their proper heads, and to correct all that seeming disorder in which they lie involved, when made the object of reflection and inquiry. This task of ordering and distinguishing, which has no merit when performed with regard to external bodies, the objects of our senses, rises in its value when directed towards the operations of the mind, in proportion to the difficulty and labour which we meet with in performing it. And if we can go no farther than this mental geography, or delineation of the distinct parts and powers of the mind, it is at least a satisfaction to go so far; and the more obvious this science may appear (and it is by no means obvious), the more contemptible still must the ignorance of it be esteemed, in all pretenders to learning and philosophy." Ibid. Section I. It seems worth while to consider what the effects might have been, had Hume been faithful to his own idea.[46] In the first place he would have remedied the weakness pointed out by Macaulay in the premises of the schoolmen, which were in fact little better than sententious maxims often derived from mistranslated passages of Scripture, one-sided opinions of the Fathers, and other sources of doubtful value. These, Hume would have abscided altogether, and rested his "true metaphysics" upon such principles as survived a searching inquiry into the conditions of Human knowledge. Hence, secondly, he would have rendered a great service to Divinity itself, which can never be benefited by such arguments as have been described, but must look for a safe alliance to a synthesis of Faith and Reason. And in the third place he might have probably given to his country a critical Philosophy adapted to English modes of Thought. Kant's mind was fired by a spark of Hume's kindling, but when we think what might have been the shape and acceptance of Kant in this country had Hume heralded him by a critique of Reason, it is impossible to read the great Scotchman's writings without a feeling of disappointment.[47] It would however be unjust to omit the fact that Hume did really entertain a serious intention of dealing with these difficult questions. Thus much is expressed in his earliest work, and we may conjecture that literary disappointment was at least one cause of that later preference for "easy philosophy" which contrasts so strongly with the programme of his treatise on Human Nature. Few programmes were ever more vigorously outlined, than the ensuing. "From hence," he says, "in my opinion, arises that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings of all kinds, even amongst those who profess themselves scholars, and have a just value for every other part of literature. By metaphysical reasonings, they do not understand those on any particular branch of science, but every kind of argument, which is any way abstruse, and requires some attention to be comprehended. We have so often lost our labour in such researches, that we commonly reject them without hesitation, and resolve, if we must for ever be a prey to errors and delusions, that they shall at least be natural and entertaining. And, indeed, nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics. For, if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, 'tis certain it must lie very deep and abstruse; and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous. I pretend to no such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem it a strong presumption against it, were it so very easy and obvious."--Treatise on Human Nature, Introduction, p. 12. In these sentences Hume has sufficiently condemned the vulgar objections brought against abstract reasoning. Deep and difficult questions can be discussed in no other manner; and what is often called a popular treatise on some subject of philosophic inquiry can never be more than a statement of its writer's opinions, or possibly of his sentimental prejudices. The next paragraph contains Hume's earliest[48] sketch of that critical inquiry into Human Nature on which he proposed to base all future philosophy. It is of course deeply interesting. "'Tis evident that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and that however wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another. Even _Mathematics_, _Natural Philosophy_, and _Natural Religion_, are in some measure dependent on the science of MAN; since they lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties. "'Tis impossible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding, and could explain the nature of the ideas we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reasonings. And these improvements are the more to be hoped for in natural religion, as it is not content with instructing us in the nature of superior powers, but carries its views further, to their disposition towards us, and our duties towards them; and consequently we ourselves are not only the beings that reason, but also one of the objects concerning which we reason." "If, therefore, the sciences of mathematics, natural philosophy, and natural religion, have such a dependence on the knowledge of man, what may be expected in the other sciences, whose connection with human nature is more close and intimate?... In these four sciences of _Logic_, _Morals_, _Criticism_, and _Politics_, is comprehended almost everything which it can any way import us to be acquainted with, or which can tend either to the improvement or ornament of the human mind. "Here then is the only expedient, from which we can hope for success in our philosophical researches, to leave the tedious lingering method, which we have hitherto followed, and instead of taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier, to march up directly to the capital or centre of these sciences, to human nature itself; which being once masters of, we may everywhere else hope for an easy victory. From this station we may extend our conquests over all those sciences which more intimately concern human life, and may afterwards proceed at leisure to discover more fully those which are the objects of pure curiosity. There is no question of importance, whose decision is not comprised in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science. In pretending, therefore, to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a complete system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security."[49] Ibid. pp. 13-14. The present writer has a special interest in citing these passages, because they do in fact defend as well as describe the procedure of his very next chapter. Such then at an early age was Hume's keen-edged critical appreciation of those intellectual conditions required for a Philosophy of the Sciences, or as he calls it, the "true Metaphysics." In order to supplement his clever and clear idea by a very practical delineation of the metaphysical territory, we turn to another great thinker, the founder of our modern natural science, the great Lord Verulam.[50] Bacon divides Philosophy according to its objects, which are three,--God, Nature, Man. Take, then, Natural Philosophy; it is well said that the truth of nature lies deeply hidden, and it is also well said that the Producer imitates Nature. Natural Philosophy divides itself accordingly into the inquisition of causes and the production of effects; it is both speculative and operative. There is indeed an intercourse between causes and effects, and both these kinds of knowledge. All true and fruitful Natural Philosophy has a double scale or ladder,--ascendent and descendent; ascending from experiment to first causes; descending thence to fresh experiment and always fresh productiveness.[51] The ascending half is divided into two moieties, of which one is the science of Physics, the other of Metaphysics. In distinguishing these two, Bacon so far agrees with antiquity as to say,--"That Physic supposes in nature only a being and moving and natural necessity; whereas Metaphysic supposes also a Mind and Idea. For that which I shall say comes perhaps to this."[52] Or, to put it in another light, he writes elsewhere:--"Physique, taking it according to the derivation, and not according to our idiom for medicine, is situate in a middle term or distance between natural history and Metaphysique. For natural history describeth the variety of things; Physique, the causes, but variable or respective causes; and Metaphysique, the fixed and constant causes."[53] In order to clear the way for _his_ Metaphysic of the future, Bacon subjects what had been called by that name to a critical process. He separates from it a kind of theoretical philosophy, the attainment of which he considered doubtful, though he desired that it should be attempted, as the ultimate goal of human wisdom. The object of the separation is, therefore, to leave his metaphysical science within the limits of what is certainly attainable,--a fact not to be lost sight of in its relation to the abstract subjects in which we are now specially interested. The separated realm of knowledge Bacon calls "First and Summary Philosophy"; it is a "common ancestor to all knowledge,"[54] whereas Metaphysic belongs to the philosophy of Nature. It is at the apex of his pyramid of knowledges,[55]--the basis being a collection of natural facts--the "stage next the basis," (an investigation of causes variable and immersed in material existence,) is called "Physique--the stage next the vertical point is Metaphysique."[56] To enter clearly into Bacon's meaning, two questions should be answered: one, what was the wisdom that older Metaphysicians pursued, respecting which he did not himself feel sanguine? and the other, what remained in his thought the province of practical Metaphysique? It is obvious that a wisdom which shall gather up all that every other realm of wisdom produces, cast it into Thought's winepress, and extract the rarest vintage of Truth, has been the vision of every age since men began to inquire and to reason. If this wisdom were possible, it would become to us an alphabet of the Universe; we should obtain a clear insight into the world as it is, and the foregone work of its Creator. Each of us might truthfully say:-- "Der du die Welt umschweifst, Geschäftiger Geist, wie nah' fühl ich mich dir!" It needs but a glance at Bacon's indefinite outline of a First and Summary Philosophy,[57] to see that it must always be greeted by two opposite sentences of condemnation. A large section of its censors will pronounce the meagreness of its contents "a gentle riddance," or perhaps describe the contents themselves still more harshly as "rubbish shot here." Another section may compare all that it leaves for Metaphysics to the year without its spring, or Shakespeare's masterpiece of philosophy with the part of Hamlet left out. Let us see then how the reserved province was parcelled out.--Bacon himself remarks:--"It may fairly therefore now be asked, what is left remaining for Metaphysic? Certainly nothing beyond nature; but of nature itself much the most excellent part." Most excellent because "Physic handles that which is most inherent in matter and therefore transitory, and Metaphysic that which is more abstracted and fixed. And again, that Physic supposes in nature only a being and moving and natural necessity: whereas Metaphysic supposes also a mind and idea."[58] This search into the Mind of Nature is divided into the investigation of _two_ kinds of causes, still called the Formal and the Final. Bacon's doctrine of Forms--the Philosophy in which is embraced "Natura naturans"--nature engendering nature--the Queen of Art--and the Regent of Production, constitutes one of the most difficult parts of the Novum Organum, the Advancement, and the De Augmentis; and may have been one chief provocative to King James' irreverent similitude. It might, according to some writers, even now prove a veritable "peace of God" could we only grasp its full meaning. "From the discovery of Forms," says Bacon, "results truth in speculation and freedom in operation."[59] And his latest commentator believes that this field of discovery has not been truly explored, because its very idea has been only imperfectly apprehended. The whole question, however, belongs to a future Chapter of this Essay, where we propose examining the Law of Production in its most refined and abstract shape. Yet one further remark may be allowed here. According to Francis Bacon, one "respect which ennobles this part of Metaphysic, is that it enfranchises the power of men to the greatest liberty, and leads it to the widest and most extensive field of operation.... For physical causes give light and direction to new inventions in similar matter. But whosoever knows any Form, knows also the utmost possibility of superinducing that nature upon every variety of matter, and so is less restrained and tied in operation, either to the basis of the matter or to the condition of the efficient."[60] We are more concerned, at the present stage of this Essay, with the _second_ portion of Bacon's Metaphysique--the Inquiry into Final Causes. They are described in the Advancement as not having been neglected before its great Author's time, but as having been "misplaced." "For they are," he writes in the De Augm. (E. & S. iv. p. 363) "generally sought for in Physic, and not in Metaphysic. And yet if it were but a fault in order I should not think so much of it; for order is matter of illustration, but pertains not to the substance of sciences. But this misplacing has caused a notable deficience, and been a great misfortune to Philosophy. For the handling of final causes in Physics has driven away and overthrown the diligent inquiry of physical causes."... "And I say this, not because those final causes are not true and worthy to be inquired in metaphysical speculations; but because their excursions and irruptions into the limits of physical causes has bred a waste and solitude in that track. For otherwise, if they be but kept within their proper bounds, men are extremely deceived if they think there is any enmity or repugnancy at all between the two." (Ibid. p. 364.) Bacon's meaning is indeed clear enough to those who consider his examples. We do not learn how clouds are produced by being told they serve for watering the earth. It is no history of our earth itself, to say that its "solidness is for the station and mansion of living creatures." "To know the actual nature of a thing," observes an Oxford commentator on the Organum, "we must investigate it in and for itself, not for its results."[61] Perhaps one of the most curious facts relating to the "misplacement" of Final Causes is that few more flagrant instances of that abuse can be found than some which occur in the field, not of physical but of moral science. The following remarkable example is from an argument framed by Mr. James Mill against Sir J. Macintosh, which appears all the more worthy of quotation, because it is reproduced and approved by Mr. J. Stuart Mill. The whole argument deserves perusal as showing how easily an acquired and customary kind of association will sometimes predominate over free thought; but for our present object a few passages will suffice. The italics are not Mr. Mill's, but are here marked for the purpose of guiding the reader's eye to those steps which lead from _final cause_ (or motive) to _interest_, from interest to Utility in its grossest form, the artificial creation, namely, of our spur to interested action, dignified by this author with the sacred name of Morality, both in essence, _i.e._, what makes an act to be moral--and in respect of our moral sense, _i.e._, what are the sentiments with which we regard our own actions and those of other persons. "Men make classifications, as they do everything else, for some end. Now, for what _end_ was it that men, out of their innumerable acts, selected a class, to which they gave the name of moral, and another class, to which they gave the name of immoral? What was the motive of this act? What its final cause? "Assuredly the answer to this question is the first step, though Sir James saw it not, towards the solution of his two questions, comprehending the _whole_ of ethical science; first, what _makes_ an act to be _moral?_ and, secondly, what are the _sentiments_ with which we _regard_ it? "We may also be assured, that it was some very obvious _interest_ which recommended this classification; for it was performed, in a certain rough way, in the _very rudest_ states of society. "Farther, we may easily see how, even in very rude states, men were led to it, by little less than necessity.... They had no stronger interest than to obtain the repetition of the one sort, and to prevent the repetition of the other.... And here we clearly perceive the origin of that important case of classification, the classification of acts as _moral_ and _immoral_. The acts, which it was _important_ to other men that each individual should _perform_, but in which the individual had not a sufficient _interest_ to secure the performance of them, were constituted one class. The acts, which it was _important_ to other men that each individual should _abstain from_, but in regard to which he had not a personal _interest_ sufficiently strong to secure his abstaining from them, were constituted another class. The first class were distinguished by the name _moral_ acts; the second by the name _immoral_. "The _interest_ which men had in securing the performance of the one set of acts, the non-performance of the other, led them by a sort of necessity to think of the _means_. They had to _create_ an interest, which the actor would not otherwise have, in the performance of the one sort, the non-performance of the other. And in proceeding to this end, they could not easily miss their way. They had two powers applicable to the purpose. They had a certain quantity of good at their disposal, and they had a certain quantity of evil.... And this is the scheme which they adopted; and which, in every situation, they have invariably pursued. _The whole business of the moral sentiments_, moral approbation, and disapprobation, has this for its _object_,--the distribution of the good and evil we have at command, for the _production_ of acts of the _useful_ sort, the _prevention_ of acts of the _contrary_ sort. Can there be a nobler _object_?"[62] Some people may think that all nobleness is here taken away from moral distinctions. Others may wonder how such refined calculation could take place "in the very rudest states of Society." Many more will feel that _this_ factitious interest is _not_ the moral sentiment of which they are themselves conscious. We defer these points, however, to a future chapter, and are satisfied now with calling attention to the "misplacement" of final causes. To any modern versed (as Bacon was) in the wisdom of the mediæval schools, the following parallel might appear complete. Ask two questions--what are clouds?--what are moral distinctions?--let a "why" be substituted for the "what." Both are classified by men, both may be defined by their subserviency to _human interests_,--it is sufficient to discover some use in each. Moral distinctions exist for the benefit of society, clouds are for watering the earth. An earth-watering contrivance describes not only one use but the whole nature of a cloud; and for morality can a nobler definition be found than that of a notion invented and named on Utilitarian principles and promoting a public interest?[63] Doubtless morality does benefit mankind--doubtless clouds do water the earth. But in either case is the good effect its full and comprehensive "why?"--to say nothing of the desiderated "what?" Francis Bacon (as we have seen) strongly affirmed that between Physical Causes and Final Causes "kept within their proper bounds, men are extremely deceived if they think there is any enmity or repugnancy at all." The manner in which, according to the Baconian doctrine, these two sets of causes harmonize and supplement each other, so as conjointly to subserve the highest purpose of Natural Theology, cannot be better explained than in the words of Bacon's late lamented Editor, Mr. R. Leslie Ellis:-- "It is not sufficiently remarked that final causes have often been spoken of without any reference to a benevolent intention. When it is said that the final cause of a stone's falling is 'locus deorsum,' the remark is at least but remotely connected with the doctrine of an intelligent providence. We are to remember that Bacon has expressly censured Aristotle for having made use of final causes without referring to the fountain from which they flow, namely the providence of the Creator. And in this censure he has found many to concur. "Again, in any case in which the benevolent intention can be perceived, we are at liberty to ask by what means and according to what laws this benevolent intention is manifested and made efficient. If this question is not to be asked, there is in the first place an end of physical science, so far as relates to every case in which a benevolent intention has been or can be recognised; and in the second, the argument à posteriori founded on the contrivance displayed in the works of creation is entirely taken away. "This is, in effect, what Bacon says in the passage of the _De Augmentis_, in which he complains of the abuse of final causes. If, he affirms, the physical cause of any phenomenon can be assigned as well as the final, so far is this from derogating from our idea of the divine wisdom, that on the contrary it does but confirm and exalt it."[64] Before passing from this subject the reader's attention may be drawn to two notes by the same eminent commentator. Bacon remarks (Nov. Org. I. 48) that Final Causes are "ex naturâ hominis" _i.e._, have relation to the nature of Man. "It is difficult," writes Mr. Ellis, "to assent to the assertion that the notion of the final cause, considered generally, is more ex naturâ hominis than that of the efficient. The subject is one of which it is difficult to speak accurately; but it may be said that wherever we think that we recognise a tendency towards a fulfilment or realisation of an idea, there the notion of the final cause comes in. It can only be from inadvertence that Professor Owen has set the doctrine of the final cause as it were in antithesis to that of the unity of type: by the former he means the doctrine that the suitability of an animal to its mode of life is the one thing aimed at or intended in its structure. It cannot be doubted that Aristotle would have recognised the preservation of the type as not less truly a final cause than the preservation of the species or than the well-being of the individual. The final cause connects itself with what in the language of modern German philosophy is expressed by the phrase 'the Idea in Nature.'"[65] The epigrammatic comparison of a Final Cause to a consecrated Virgin[66] has been reviewed by numberless disciples as well as critics of our author. Mr. Ellis annotates the Latin text thus:--"_Nihil parit_, means simply, _non parit opera_, which though it would have been a more precise mode of expression would have destroyed the appositeness of the illustration. No one who fairly considers the context can, I think, have any doubts as to the limitation with which the sentence in question is to be taken. But it is often the misfortune of a pointed saying to be quoted apart from any context, and consequently to be misunderstood." And this seems to be a scholarly explanation.[67] To complete the sketch of Baconian Metaphysic it appears only needful to add that his respect for the science of Quantity is sufficient to make him class under this higher philosophy--this near approach to the apex of his Pyramid--the whole circle of Mathematics. Our long note will not have been written in vain if the reader bears its contents in mind when considering the abstract arguments advanced throughout this Essay. It is well to see what very great authorities have thought concerning the true use of Metaphysics;--it is well also to see how they ought to be applied in questions of physical science, and for the purpose of grounding a science of Natural Theology. B.--ON THE PHRASE "DESIGN IMPLIES A DESIGNER." "It has been contended," says Professor Baden Powell, "that in one sense it is mere tautology to say that Design implies a Designer." (Connexion of Natural and Divine Truth, p. 183.) As a matter of fact there can be no doubt that verbal-sounding phrases, however useful in a system of Mnemonics, and much in favour as political war-cries, always tend to discredit the sober course of a philosophic argument. But Paley, though writing popularly, did not intend a mere _ad captandum_ effect, as may be seen by a reference to his second chapter. He meant by Design and Contrivance to express in brief the conditions he had laid down as _characteristic_ of the intentional adaptation of means to definitely purposed ends,--with which conditions he appears to have been fully satisfied. In his 23rd and 24th chapters, where some hasty writer might have said "law implies a lawgiver," the Archdeacon prefers to state that "a law pre-supposes an agent," and proceeds to argue the statement on its merits. "Law," he says, "is only the mode according to which an agent proceeds: it implies a power, for it is the order according to which that power acts. Without this agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself, the 'law' does nothing; is nothing." (Chapter 23.) He is well satisfied with this argument also, and repeats it (slightly varied in form) during the course of his next chapter. In our comparison of Powell with Paley we were led to remark on the diverse meanings of the word Design, and the facility with which some authors have glided from one to another among its significations. If any thinker believes that the examples he adduces are _distinctly_ instances of Foresight, Intention, and Will, he has the Designer full in mind before he employs the term Design. But if his instances fall short of thus much _implicit_ force, the argument founded on them is a worthless verbality.[68] Those who protest against the popular phrase, "Design proves a Designer," say it is a temptation to assume this point--(the one point at issue)--over which it skims with such secure ease. But to any person in earnest, few things are more irritating than a piece of cool, thorough-going assumption. It is like catching a cat and persistently calling it a hare. Many visitors at certain Roman Hotels are aware that when deprived of ears and tail _more Italico_ and well roasted, the resemblance between these two animals may give rise to questions of disputed identity. Imagine, now, a party of cat-catchers, who not only assume the Identity, but persevere in calling their mongrel curs harehounds, and themselves huntsmen. No truer claim in reality do a multitude of Design-hunters possess to any higher title than the _leguleii_ of Natural Theology. And the blame of their discredit must in a great degree be laid upon their words. It is easy to say, "A thrown-stone implies a thrower." But suppose the stone about which you and I are talking was thrown by the fiery force of a volcano? Must we hence infer the existence of a Cyclops or a Titan? This mode of popular speech reached the climax of absurdity when it was gravely argued that "Evolution implies an Evolver." So it might appear to the peculiar mind of the speaker; but how about the mind of him who promulgated the evolution-hypothesis? Stones (as we may observe) fly from more than one cause, and there is more than one account to be given of the theory of Evolution. Enough has been said to show that the phrase commented on in this note, prejudices the argument it is intended to assist. It wears the appearance of embodying a foregone conclusion; and gives trouble to the honest inquirer, who, in order to estimate reasonings at their true value, must translate them into accurate forms of speech. We may aptly finish these remarks by a quotation from Whewell's Aphorisms on the Language of Science. (Aphorism I., Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, II. 483.) "Words borrowed from common language, and converted by scientific writers into technical terms, have some advantages and some disadvantages. They possess this great convenience, that they are understood after a very short explanation, and retained in the memory without effort. On the other hand they lead to some inconvenience; for since they have a meaning in common language, a careless reader is prone to disregard the technical limitation of this meaning, and to attempt to collect their import in scientific books, in the same vague and conjectural manner in which he collects the purpose of words in common cases. Hence the language of science, when thus resembling common language, is liable to be employed with an absence of that scientific precision which alone gives it value. Popular writers and talkers, when they speak of _force_, _momentum_, _action_, _and reaction_, and the like, often afford examples of the inaccuracy thus arising from the scientific appropriation of common terms." A similar line of reflection led Coleridge to remark (Biog. Lit., Chap. x.) that "the language of the market would be in the schools as _pedantic_, though it might not be reprobated by that name, as the language of the schools in the market. The mere man of the world, who insists that no other terms but such as occur in common conversation should be employed in a scientific disquisition, and with no greater precision, is as truly a _pedant_ as the man of letters, who, either over-rating the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by his own familiarity with technical or scholastic terms, converses at the wine-table with his mind fixed on his museum or laboratory." And such pedantry is, we may add, not uncommonly just as perspicuous as the definition which, says old Glanvill, "was lately given of a _Thought_ in a _University Sermon_--viz. _A Repentine Prosiliency jumping into Being_." (_Defence of the Vanity of Dogmatizing_, Actio Decima, p. 61, ed. 1.) C.--HUME ON THE ANALOGIES OF ART AND NATURE. [_Referred to in footnote (e) in the preceding Chapter._] The statement in the text is shaped as a not unfairly urged scientific objection of the kind which might be raised by some actual craftsman or producer. An objection identical in essence is thrown by Hume into a refined semi-metaphysical shape, and made to turn upon our general acquaintance with Human nature contrasted with our general ignorance of the Divine. It runs as follows:-- "The infinite difference of the subjects, replied he," (Hume's dramatic Epicurus,) "is a sufficient foundation for this difference in my conclusions. In works of _human_ art and contrivance, it is allowable to advance from the effect to the cause, and returning back from the cause, to form new inferences concerning the effect, and examine the alterations which it has probably undergone, or may still undergo. But what is the foundation of this method of reasoning? Plainly this; that man is a being, whom we know by experience, whose motives and designs we are acquainted with, and whose projects and inclinations have a certain connection and coherence, according to the laws which nature has established for the government of such a creature. When, therefore, we find that any work has proceeded from the skill and industry of man; as we are otherwise acquainted with the nature of the animal, we can draw a hundred inferences concerning what may be expected from him; and these inferences will all be founded in experience and observation. But did we know man only from the single work or production which we examine, it were impossible for us to argue in this manner; because our knowledge of all the qualities, which we ascribe to him, being in that case derived from the production, it is impossible they could point to anything farther, or be the foundation of any new inference.... "The case is not the same with our reasonings from the works of nature. The Deity is known to us only by his productions, and is a single being in the universe, not comprehended under any species or genus, from whose experienced attributes or qualities, we can, by analogy, infer any attribute or quality in him." (Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Section xi.) Hume himself gives in his own character a reply partially veiled by the same half-metaphysical style which characterises the objection:-- "There occurs to me (continued I), with regard to your main topic, a difficulty which I shall just propose to you without insisting on it, lest it lead into reasonings of too nice and delicate a nature. In a word, I much doubt whether it be possible for a cause to be known only by its effect (as you have all along supposed), or to be of so singular and particular a nature, as to have no parallel and no similarity with any other cause or object that has ever fallen under our observation. It is only when two _species_ of objects are found to be constantly conjoined, that we can infer the one from the other: and were an effect presented which was entirely singular, and could not be comprehended under any known _species_, I do not see, that we could form any conjecture or inference at all concerning its cause. If experience and observation and analogy be, indeed, the only guides which we can reasonably follow in inferences of this nature; both the effect and cause must bear a similarity and resemblance to other effects and causes which we know, and which we have found, in many instances, to be conjoined with each other. I leave it to your own reflection to pursue the consequences of this principle." (Ibid.) The consequences which ought in fairness to be deduced may be stated thus. The effect we contemplate, (_i.e._ Nature,) is _not_ singular but can be compared with other effects--those of Art. The comparison is made in respect of certain specific attributes or properties upon which the Design analogy turns, so that we may reason upwards to certain specific analogies of Causation. Art manifests the foreseeing attributes of the human artist, and from comparison of these we infer in the Creator like attributes,--what Hume elsewhere calls the _natural_ attributes of the Deity. But this likeness is properly termed _analogical_, because of the vast difference in the magnitude of the effects _from_ which we thus reason, and of the causes _to_ which we reason. As our wisdom and power are proportionable to our earthly works, so are the Divine wisdom and power proportionable to the whole majestic Universe. There is, then, a comparison in _species_, but not in grandeur--the attributes are not _similar_, but _analogical_. As the Heavens are high above the Earth, so are His thoughts higher than our thoughts. D.--THE PANTHEISTIC CONSEQUENCES CHARGED UPON PHYSICAL SPECULATIONS. The following is the passage from Professor Baden Powell referred to in note (_h_) of the preceding chapter. Some short extracts were also made from it on a previous page. "Nothing but the common confused and mistaken notions as to laws and causes, could give any colour to the assertion that ... physical speculations tend to substitute general physical laws in the place of the Deity; and that scientific statements of the conclusions of Natural Theology are nothing but ill-disguised Pantheism. "The utter futility of such inferences is at once seen, when the smallest attention is given to the plain distinctions above laid down between 'moral' and 'physical' causation; and to the proper force of the conclusions from natural science establishing the former by means of the latter. "This distinction obviously points to the _very reverse_ of the assertion that physical action is identical with its moral cause; the essential difference and contrast between them is the very point which the whole argument upholds and enforces. "Of all forms of philosophical mysticism, the idea of Pantheism seems to me one of the most extravagant. Ever-present _mind_ is a direct inference from the universal order of nature, or rather only another mode of expressing it. But of the _mode_ of existence of that mind we can infer nothing. "To assert, then, that this universally manifested mind is _co-existent_, or even to be _identified_, with _matter_, is at best a mere gratuitous hypothesis, and as such wholly unphilosophical in itself, and leading to many preposterous consequences. But if further supposed to apply in any higher sense as to an object of worship, trust, love, obedience, or the like (as is implied in the term Pan_theism_), it appears to involve moral contradictions of the most startling kind. "There are, however, many who, though rejecting Pantheism as _untrue_, do not conceive it _absurd_ or _contradictory_. Much, however, will, in all such cases, depend on the precise _sense_ in which it is maintained. With some it seems to have been upheld on a fanciful analogy with the conception of the human frame animated by an indwelling spirit; as if in a somewhat similar manner the supreme mind might animate nature. Without disputing this in a certain sense, the cases surely cannot be considered at all parallel: we do not infer the existence of the human mind, from the arrangement and adaptation of the bodily organs, nor is it the moral cause of their organisation. "If Pantheism were asserted merely in the sense of a kind of vital or animating principle pervading the material world, I would admit that such an idea involves _no absurdity_, or _contradiction_, but still I should regard it as visionary and unphilosophical. I could but class it with the 'vital forces' which Kepler fancied necessary for keeping up the motions of the planets, with the 'plastic powers of nature,' 'her abhorrence of a vacuum,' and the like chimæras. But it is when men elevate such a supposed animating principle into a _Deity_, a being of supreme wisdom, power, beneficence, and goodness, yet residing in every atom of matter, and _participating directly_ in every form and case of material action, that the contradiction arises." _Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy_, pp. 176-9. E.--THE EXTENT AND DIVISIONS OF THE SCIENCE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY. The following passages from Professor Powell's Essay "on the Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy" will go far to justify the praise and blame bestowed upon his mode of procedure in the text of the foregoing chapter. But we would recommend his own pages to the student's discriminative perusal. In extract No. 1, Baden Powell shows with equal truth and force that universal Law must be contemplated as a manifestation of one supreme Intelligence presiding over the whole Universe. A philosopher who looks on Nature with this majestic breadth of view does not need for his own deepest convictions to follow Design through a multitude of smaller evidences. If extract No. 2 could be admitted as a _full_ account of the conditions and limitations of Natural Theology, our science would seem to result in an obscuration of the magnificently Supreme Power already accepted. So far as its _letter_ goes, the Creator of the Universe might appear to be shut out from the world which He has made. We cannot (as has been said) consent to this narrow consideration of Natural Theology, nor yet of Powell's meaning. Extract No. 3 acknowledges what all physical investigators ought to acknowledge,--that although their sciences contribute very much towards solving the problem of the Universe, and although their results readily harmonize with the solution maintained by the Theist--yet there rests over that vast problem a cloud which the physical sciences cannot completely dispel. This (as we shall see in Chapter V.) is indeed the confession of the greatest minds at present engaged upon the philosophy of Natural Science. _Extract_ No. 1.--"From the inductive philosophy we derive our belief in the harmony, order, and uniformity of natural causes, perpetually maintained in a universally connected chain of dependence. And hence it is, that we arrive at those sublime ideas of a presiding Intelligence of which _law_ and _uniformity_, universal mechanism once for all adjusted, are the proper _external manifestations_. "To the truly inductive philosopher, _fate_ and _chance_, _necessity_ and _accident_, are words without meaning. To him, the world is made up of recondite combinations of physical laws, and the existence and maintenance of those laws are the very indication of a Supreme Mind. But chance is irreconcilable with laws, fate with mind, regulated and fixed order with blind destiny, fortuitous accident, or arbitrary interruption. "All rational natural theology advances by tracing the immediate mechanical steps and particular processes in detail, and the physical causes in which the influences of the Great Moral Cause or Supreme Mind are manifested. The greater the number and extent of such secondary steps and intermediate processes through which we can trace it, the greater the complexity and wider the ramifications of the chain of causes, the more powerful and convincing the instruction they convey as to the existence and operation of the Divine wisdom and power. "Yet it is a common mode of illustration to speak of the _chain_ of secondary causes reaching up to the First Cause. Or, again, fears are entertained of tracing secondary causes too far, so as to intrench on the supremacy of the First Cause. But this is an erroneous analogy: the maker or designer of a chain is no more at one end of it than at the other. The length of the chain in no way alters our conviction of its skilful structure, except to enhance it. If the number of links were truly _infinite_, so much the more infinite the skill of its framer. "Mr. F. Newman observes,[69] I think most truly, that the _common_ arguments from what are called 'secondary causes' to the 'First Cause' are unsatisfactory: and I would trace this to the confused sense in which those terms are commonly used, as already explained; and which, I think, might be entirely removed by attention to the distinctions above laid down. While, on the other hand, I fully acknowledge that those arguments, when correctly understood, lead only to a _very limited_ conclusion; and one which falls infinitely _short_ of those high moral and spiritual intuitions on which Mr. F. Newman grounds his religious system, yet in no way discredits or supersedes them." _Essay_, pp. 151-4. _Extract_ No. 2.--"In the present state of knowledge, law and order, physical causation and uniformity of action, are the elevated manifestations of Divinity, creation and providence. Interruptions of such order (if for a moment they could be admitted as such) could only produce a sort of temporary concealment of such manifestations, and involve the beautiful light shed over the natural world in a passing cloud. We do not indeed _doubt_ that the sun exists behind the cloud, but we certainly do not see it; still less can we call the obscuration a special _proof_ of its presence. The main point in the system of order and law is its absolute _universality_. Exceptions, if real, must _pro tanto_ imply a deficiency in the chain of connexion, and might, to a sceptical disposition, offer a ground of doubt. "But so overwhelming is the mass and body of proof, that no philosophic mind would allow such exceptions for a moment to weigh against it; they would be as dust in the balance. A supreme moral cause manifested through law, order, and physical causes, is the confession of science: conflicting operations, arbitrary interruptions, abrupt discontinuities, are the idols of ignorance, and, if they really prevailed, would so far be to the philosopher only the exponents of chaos and atheism; the obscuration (as far as they extend) of the sensible manifestation of the Supreme Intelligence." _Ibid._ 165, 6. _Extract_ No. 3.--"The whole tenor of the preceding argument is directed to show that the inference and assertion of a _Supreme Moral Cause_, distinct from and above nature, results immediately from the recognition of the eternal and universal maintenance of the order of _physical causes_, which are its essential _external manifestations_. "Of the _mode of action or operation_ by which the Supreme Moral Cause influences the universal order of physical causes, _we confess our utter ignorance_. But the _evidence_ of such operation, where nature exists, can never be lost or interrupted. And in proportion as our more extended researches exhibit these indications more fully and more gloriously displayed, we cannot but believe that our contemplations are more nearly and truly approaching their SOURCE." _Ibid._ 179. The reader will not grudge the time he may have bestowed upon this note if it leads him to a distinct apprehension of the true breadth and compass of our science. "Natural Theology," says Kant, "infers the attributes and the existence of an author of the world, from the constitution of, the order and unity observable in this world, in which two modes of Causality, together with their laws, must be accepted--that is to say, Nature and Freedom. Thus Natural Theology rises from this world to a supreme Intelligence, whether as to the principle of all natural or of all moral order and perfection. In the former case it is termed Physico-Theology, in the latter Ethical or Moral Theology." This last term he explains by adding, "Not theological ethics; for this latter science contains ethical laws, which _presuppose_ the existence of a Supreme Governor of the world; while Moral Theology, on the contrary, is an evidence of the existence of a Supreme Being, an evidence founded upon ethical laws." _Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft Transscendental Elementarlehre_, s. 7. It was from the fulness and depth of a personal conviction on this topic that the present writer ventured to assert in 1870 that "The conditions under which Natural Theology becomes scientifically possible, are found when it supplements Natural Science by a science of Right and Wrong," and also that "for the future Natural Theology ought to follow this path and no other--unless it wishes to commit suicide." These assertions were made in a University Sermon[70] on the question, "Under what Conditions is a Science of Natural Theology possible?" and they were censured as novel and unprecedented by critics who ought to have known better. F.--ON TELEOLOGY. One consequence of the principle on which this Essay has been framed is an endeavour to place before the reader's eye different modes of reasoning in the language of their several authors. The method of looking at any subject-matter in a diversity of lights naturally leads to copiousness of quotation. There can, it is evident, be no varieties of thought so undeniably distinct as those which are the actual products of diverse minds. The maxim which has governed the following selection is what Bacon would call a marshalling Idea. They posit one central thought and throw light upon it from a circle of separate reflectors. Let it be observed that such a collection of opinions implies no appeal to authority in the narrow sense of the word. There is indeed a manifest distinction between authority and authorities--and our present appeal is to the latter. No man's _ipse dixit_ can dogmatically settle questions which belong to an inquirer's responsible self; but it is surely the wisdom of every one who acknowledges the awful sense of accountability attendant on the determination of questions affecting his central beliefs, to weigh the reasonings of others who have felt the same deep impression of their paramount importance. If any one is reluctant so to do from an idea that by doing thus much he pays a wrongful deference to prejudices, he has in truth assumed the whole issue which he is bound to examine. How otherwise can he certainly allege that the prejudice is not inherent within himself? Reluctance of this kind would on the present occasion be thoroughly misplaced. Authorities as here quoted are neither more nor less than the opinions of experts who have a title to be heard each in his own proper department. Throughout the practical conduct of life we all experience the benefit of laying aside our private spectacles from time to time and of looking through the glasses of other men. And in questions such as the one now before us, is it possible to do better than try whether we can see for ourselves what has been pronounced discernible by men who contemplated this world of ours with more than ordinary powers of vision? The present writer has a personal interest in bringing together the reflections of many who have reached the same resting-place along various lines of approach, and who have expressed their conclusions with some diversity of language. He has ventured himself on viewing the evidences of Natural Theology from a position by no means identical with that most commonly occupied by Natural Theologians. The student, therefore, who takes a wide survey of the field will be the critic best prepared to examine the latter part of this Essay. The first authority quoted among our ample citations is Hume, whose appearance as a witness for Natural Theology may surprise some readers. As, however, is remarked by an eminent writer in the _Quarterly_, Hume's hard common sense "enabled him when he liked, to control the excesses of a speculative imagination and subject it to practical reason, as he understood reason's verdict." He even went so far as to say that "The whole frame of Nature bespeaks an Intelligent Author; and no rational inquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion." (_Natural History of Religion_, Introduction.) Indeed, according to Cucheval Clarigny,[71] Hume was an "almost Christian" at certain periods of his life. The repellant forces that kept him back, are "not far to seek." The following passages refer to the illative analogy which forms the proper shape of the argument from Design. "That the works of Nature bear a great analogy to the productions of art, is evident; and according to all the rules of good reasoning, we ought to infer, if we argue at all concerning them, that their causes have a proportional analogy. But as there are also considerable differences, we have reason to suppose a proportional difference in the causes; and in particular ought to attribute a much higher degree of power and energy to the supreme cause than any we have ever observed in mankind. Here then the existence of a DEITY is plainly ascertained by reason: and if we make it a question whether, on account of these analogies, we can properly call him a _mind_ or _intelligence_, notwithstanding the vast difference which may reasonably be supposed between him and human minds; what is this but a mere verbal controversy? No man can deny the analogies between the effects: To restrain ourselves from inquiring concerning the causes, is scarcely possible: From this inquiry, the legitimate conclusion is, that the causes have also an analogy: And if we are not contented with calling the first and supreme cause a GOD or DEITY, but desire to vary the expression; what can we call him but MIND or THOUGHT, to which he is justly supposed to bear a considerable resemblance?" _Dialogues concerning Natural Religion_, Part xii. in Essays, Vol. II. p. 526.[72] "If the whole of Natural Theology, as some people seem to maintain, resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined proposition, _That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence_. If this proposition be not capable of extension, variation, or more particular explication; if it affords no inference that affects human life, or can be the source of any action or forbearance; and if the analogy, imperfect as it is, can be carried no farther than to the human intelligence, and cannot be transferred, with any appearance of probability, to the other qualities of the mind: If this really be the case, what can the most inquisitive, contemplative, and religious man do more than give a plain, philosophical assent to the proposition, as often as it occurs; and believe that the arguments on which it is established, exceed the objections which lie against it?" _Ibid._ p. 538. The following is the opinion of Cleanthes, upon whom Hume confers the palm in the dialogue;--"Take care, Philo, replied Cleanthes; take care; push not matters too far: allow not your zeal against false religion to undermine your veneration for the true. Forfeit not this principle, the chief, the only great comfort in life; and our principal support amidst all the attacks of adverse fortune. The most agreeable reflection, which it is possible for human imagination to suggest, is that of genuine Theism, which represents us as the workmanship of a Being perfectly good, wise, and powerful; who created us for happiness; and who, having implanted in us immeasurable desires of good, will prolong our existence to all eternity, and will transfer us into an infinite variety of scenes, in order to satisfy those desires, and render our felicity complete and durable. Next to such a Being himself (if the comparison be allowed), the happiest lot which we can imagine, is that of being under his guardianship and protection." _Ibid._ p.535.[73] The next three extracts give Hume's opinion on the prevailing principle disclosed by the analogy--design, purpose, and the recognition of final causes:-- "Though the stupidity of men, barbarous and uninstructed, be so great, that they may not see a sovereign author in the more obvious works of nature, to which they are so much familiarized; yet it scarce seems possible, that any one of good understanding should reject that idea, when once it is suggested to him. A purpose, an intention, a design is evident in everything; and when our comprehension is so far enlarged as to contemplate the first rise of this visible system, we must adopt, with the strongest conviction, the idea of some intelligent cause or author. The uniform maxims, too, which prevail throughout the whole frame of the universe, naturally, if not necessarily, lead us to conceive this intelligence as single and undivided, where the prejudices of education oppose not so reasonable a theory. Even the contrarieties of nature, by discovering themselves everywhere, become proofs of some consistent plan, and establish one single purpose or intention, however inexplicable and incomprehensible." _Natural History of Religion_ XV.--General Corollary, in _Essays_ II. pp. 422, 3. "In many views of the universe, and of its parts, particularly the latter, the beauty and fitness of final causes strike us with such irresistible force that all objections appear (what I believe they really are) mere cavils and sophisms; nor can we then imagine how it was ever possible for us to repose any weight on them." _Dialogues concerning Natural Religion_, Part X. in _Essays_, II. 509. "The order and arrangement of nature, the curious adjustment of final causes, the plain use and intention of every part and organ; all these bespeak in the clearest language an intelligent cause or author. The heavens and the earth join in the same testimony. The whole chorus of nature raises one hymn to the praises of its Creator.... I have found a Deity; and here I stop my enquiry. Let those go farther who are wiser or more enterprising." _Ibid._ Part IV. p. 467. Hume is conspicuous amongst reasoners on Natural Theology for having distinctly comprehended Human Nature along with Nature in the cycle of its evidences. "This sentence at least," he writes, "Reason will venture to pronounce, That a mental world, or universe of ideas, requires a cause as much as does a material world, or universe of objects; and, if similar in its arrangement, must require a similar cause. For what is there in this subject which should occasion a different conclusion or inference? In an abstract view, they are entirely alike; and no difficulty attends the one supposition which is not common to both of them." _Ibid._ Part IV. p. 464. This statement brings us to the impediments which withheld Hume from forming a sublime idea of the Divine Being, such an idea as kindles the enthusiasm of devout men, and inspires even timidly sensitive souls with deathless confidence in the final triumph of a self-sacrificing virtue destined to survive the grave. These causes were the opinions he maintained respecting human nature. We may lay it down as a universal rule that every one who sees the animal, but not the heaven-aspiring moral element in his own nature, and in our common nature, will fail to represent to himself the lineaments or reflection of the Divine attributes. An acknowledged kinship with brutal passions, the lowering of society and wedlock to animal gregariousness, of moral principle and the rule of Right and Wrong to a perception of Utility, are fatal hindrances in the search after God;--a search arduous to the best of us, since deep as the far translucent heavens, are the majestic thoughts of Him after Whom we strive to feel. Now Hume failed to discern the Godlike in Man. "Human life," he remarks in his _Sceptic_, "is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular humour than by general principles." Morality is no fixed star in Hume's firmament. To omit the laxity of many moral maxims he lays down, the very nature and foundations of morality were imperilled by his analytics.[74] "He has," writes Mackintosh, "altogether omitted the circumstance on which depends the difference of our sentiments regarding moral and intellectual qualities. We _admire_ intellectual excellence, but we bestow no moral _approbation_ on it." And again--"He entirely overlooks that consciousness of the _rightful supremacy of the moral faculty_ over every other principle of human action, without an explanation of which, ethical theory is wanting in one of its vital organs." _Ethical Philosophy_, pp. 182, 4. "If," says Hume in the _Sceptic_, "we can depend upon any principle which we learn from philosophy, this, I think, may be considered as certain and undoubted, that there is nothing in itself valuable or despicable, desirable or hateful, beautiful or deformed; but that these attributes arise from the particular constitution and fabric of human sentiment and affection." And half a dozen pages afterwards--"Good and ill, both natural and moral, are entirely relative to human sentiment and affection." So too, "The necessity of justice to the support of society is," he tells us, "the SOLE foundation of that virtue;" usefulness, he explains, "is the SOLE source of the moral approbation paid to fidelity, justice, veracity, integrity, and those other estimable and useful qualities and principles." It is also "the source of a considerable part of the merit ascribed to humanity, benevolence, friendship, public spirit, and other social virtues of that stamp." _Principles of Morals_, Sect. III. _sub fin._ With these sentiments it is not surprising that while he insists on the analogy between human workmanship and the natural universe he cannot argue analogically from moral Truth to the Divine attributes--and even goes so far as to decide that the first causes of the Universe "have neither goodness nor malice." The student of Natural Theology cannot direct his attention too soon or too steadily to the vast share possessed by our moral sentiments in our apprehension of the Divine nature. It is from our sense of Responsibility attached to each act of Will and Choice that we deduce the idea of causation. It is from our intuitions of immutable moral truth and the irreconcilable antithesis between Right and Wrong that we behold the Martyr as one who has not lived in vain, but lives truly and for ever; and are sure that there exists a God who has regard to the righteous, the oppressed, the fatherless, and the widow. Clear moral insight appears in Socrates, who chose to die rather than offend against the eternal laws. But ought the man to be styled moral or immoral who should balance together two comparative utilities,--that of preserving his father's life and that of acquiring by a judicious neglect, without risk to himself, a property which he resolved to expend usefully? Of one thing we may be sure, God could not be in all his thoughts whilst making such a calculation. It is thus that a pure Morality and an elevated conception of the Divine Being act and react upon each other. And in this way our speculative and practical Reason become interlaced--the former giving to the logical understanding an account of those ideas which form the essential sublimity and moving influence of our practical beliefs--the springs of our daily and hourly behaviour. There is no more certain characteristic of a mind so ordered than its ability to deal with a moral doubt which casuists might long debate, to solve the enigma within the compass of a moment's thought, and to defend the solution by fair and honest argument. As regards our present question it makes no difference by what means such a condition of mind may have been brought about, but it is plain that a sense of accountability has much to do with this condition. And the connexion between Responsibility and our belief in a life immortal, and in a just and veracious God, will form a subject for future consideration. Meantime, the reader must take Hume's acceptance of the doctrine of final causes and the Design-analogy, for what it is worth. No candid person ought to condemn Hume as he has often been condemned without remembering the allowance to be made for his excessive vanity,[75] his extreme love of paradoxical speculation, and the dramatic irony which runs throughout his writings. These are in fact some of the qualities which make him an unfit schoolmaster for the young, and a shrewd exercise for elder men. One useful lesson we gather just now is learned from the fact that he places a wide gulf between the natural and moral attributes of the Deity, and draws a veil over the latter, because the alleged poverty of our moral ideas precludes any analogy to reason upon, however remote that analogy may appear. Hence Hume's God of Nature becomes a shadow like Wordsworth's Laodamia, scarce fit for the Elysian bowers; He is no longer felt by us to be the God of Human Nature. We cannot here omit to observe that Hume had no thought of worshipping the Order of the World, or of erecting a temple to immutable Laws, blind Force, or any other blank impersonal Necessity. The limit of his inquiry was what to human reason might appear the easiest and most probable interpretation of nature.[76] This question he asked and answered. Whether modern science has added important data on which to found a more conclusive reply is a further inquiry which we shall have to consider, but meantime it appears certain that _if_ the most sceptical theory of the most sceptical scientist were held true, there would still remain the same necessity for asking Hume's question. For neither our life, nor the world we live in, nor the wide universe, have any real cause or aim scientifically assigned them. We should still have to inquire by what agency and to what purpose we and the All exist? That we really _are_ is a fact for you, O reader, and for me; and we cannot but want to discover _whether_ we shall yet _be_, when this brief yet tedious life is done; and if so, whether our present acts and choosings must influence our Hereafter? Science has said nothing to annihilate our interest concerning these topics, nor yet to finally decide them. For the truth of what is contained in this last paragraph, we may cite as witness amongst scientific men, the distinguished President of the British Association for 1872. Dr. Carpenter spoke at Brighton in these words:--"There is a great deal of what I cannot but regard as fallacious and misleading Philosophy--'oppositions of Science falsely so called'--abroad in the world at the present time. And I hope to satisfy you, that those who set up _their own conceptions_ of the Orderly Sequence which they discern in the Phenomena of Nature, as fixed and determinate _Laws_, by which those phenomena not only _are_ within all Human experience, but always _have been_, and always _must be_, invariably governed, are really guilty of the Intellectual arrogance they condemn in the Systems of the Ancients, and place themselves in diametrical antagonism to those real Philosophers, by whose comprehensive grasp and penetrating insight that Order has been so far disclosed." And again towards the close of his Address:--"With the growth of the Scientific Study of Nature, the conception of its Harmony and Unity gained ever-increasing strength. And so among the most enlightened of the Greek and Roman Philosophers, we find a distinct recognition of the idea of the Unity of the Directing Mind from which the Order of Nature proceeds; for they obviously believed that, as our modern Poet has expressed it-- "All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the Soul." The Science of Modern times, however, has taken a more special direction. Fixing its attention exclusively on the _Order_ of Nature, it has separated itself wholly from Theology, whose function it is to seek after its _Cause_. In this, Science is fully justified, alike by the entire independence of its objects, and by the historical fact that it has been continually hampered and impeded in its search for the Truth as it is in Nature, by the restraints which Theologians have attempted to impose upon its inquiries. But when Science, passing beyond its own limits, assumes to take the place of Theology, and sets up its own conception of the _Order_ of Nature as a sufficient account of its _Cause_, it is invading a province of Thought to which it has no claim, and not unreasonably provokes the hostility of those who ought to be its best friends." Our next extract is from Sir Benjamin Brodie, and it, too, considers the absolute permanence of the laws of Nature in relation to Design:-- Crites. "There have been sceptics who have believed that the laws of nature were, if I may use the expression, self-existent; and that what we now see around us is but a continuation of a system that has been going on from all eternity--thus dispensing with the notion of a great creative Intelligence altogether." Eubulus. "Under any view of the subject, it seems to me that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for any of us practically to separate the marks of design, and of the adaptation of means to ends, which the universe affords, but which are more especially conspicuous in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, from the notion of an intelligent Cause. There is not one of the sceptics to whom you have alluded, who would not, if he were asked the question, "What is the use of the eye?" answer, "that it is intended to be the organ of vision, as the ear is intended to be that of hearing, and as the nostrils are constructed for the purpose of smell." But what I said just now requires some further explanation. When I stated that at the present time there is no evidence of any deviation from certain established laws of nature--that if we could thoroughly know and thoroughly appreciate what those laws really are, we should be able to account for all the phenomena around us--I was far from intending to say that there has never been a period when other laws than those which are now in force were in operation, or that the time may not arrive when the present order of things will be in a similar manner superseded. Looking at the structure of the globe, and the changes in its surface which have been disclosed to the observation of geologists, we recognize the probability that there was a time when this planet of ours was no better than a huge aërolite, and in a state quite incompatible with animal or even vegetable life. The existence of living beings, then, must have had a beginning; yet we have no evidence of any law now in force which will account for this marvellous creation."[77] Psychological Inquiries, Part II., pp. 193-4-5. The great surgeon next discusses the question of "Equivocal Generation" now known by the terms Archebiosis and Abiogenesis. His opinion, together with some later information on the topic, will be found in our additional notes to Chapter III. When writing his first series of "Inquiries" Sir Benjamin recorded his judgment regarding our knowledge and conception of the Divine Existence and in terms which show how closely he connected the general subject of Mind and its Essence with his idea of the Creator. Eubulus. "When I contemplate the evidence of intention and design which present themselves everywhere around us, but which, to our limited comprehensions, is more especially manifested in the vegetable and animal creations, I cannot avoid attributing the construction and order of the universe to an intelligent being, whose power and knowledge are such that it is impossible for me to form any adequate conception of them, any more than I can avoid referring the motions of the planets and stars to the same law of gravitation as that which directs the motions of our own globe. But no one, I apprehend, will maintain that the mind of the Deity depends on a certain construction of brain and nerves; and Dr. Priestley, the most philosophical of the advocates of the system of materialism, ventures no further than to say that we have no knowledge on the subject. But, to use the words of Sir Isaac Newton, 'This powerful ever-living agent being in all places, is more able to move the bodies within his boundless uniform sensorium, and thereby to form and reform the parts of the universe, than we are, by our will, to move the parts of our own bodies.' The remainder of the passage from which I have made this quotation, is not without interest, as indicating the view which Newton took of the matter in question:--'And yet we are not to consider the world as the body of God, or the several parts thereof as the parts of God. He is an uniform being, void of organs, members, or parts, and they are his creatures, subordinate to him, and subservient to him, and he is no more the soul of them than the soul of man is the soul of the species carried through the organs of sense into the place of its sensation, where it perceives them by its immediate presence, without the intervention of any third thing. The organs of sense are not for enabling the soul to perceive the species of things in its sensorium, but only for conveying them thither; and God has no need of any such organs, he being everywhere present to the things themselves.'" Ergates. "I entirely agree with you in the opinion that we must admit the existence of the Deity as a fact as well established as that of the law of gravitation, and that in doing so we must further admit that mind may and does exist, independently of bodily organization. Be it also remembered that _mind_, in its humblest form, is still _mind_, and that, immeasurable as the distance between them may be, it must nevertheless be regarded as being of the same essence with that of the Deity himself. For my own part I find no difficulty in conceiving the existence of mind independently of corporeal organs." (p. 39, seq.) Those who have read Professor Huxley's article on the Metaphysics of Sensation,[78] will feel much interested in the passages selected from Newton by Sir Benjamin. It seems almost a pity that the accomplished Professor did not cite any of Dr. Clarke's explanatory remarks addressed to Leibniz respecting Sir Isaac Newton's expressions. The similitude above quoted, Clarke explains thus:--"Mr. Newton considère le cerveau et les organes des sens, comme le moyen par lequel ces images sont Formées et non comme le moyen par lequel l'âme voit ou aperçoit ces images, lorsqu'elles sont ainsi formées. Et dans l'Univers, il ne considère pas les choses, comme si elles étaient des images formées par un certain moyen ou par des organes; mais comme des choses réelles, que Dieu lui-même a formées, et qu'il voit dans tous les lieux où elles sont, sans l'intervention d'aucun moyen. C'est tout ce que Mr. Newton a voulu dire par la comparaison, dont il s'est servi, lorsqu'il suppose que l'Espace infini est, pour ainsi dire, le Sensorium de l'Etre qui est présent partout." A simpler way of putting the case may be to point out that the comparison of a Sensorium is intended, like other similitudes we have reviewed, to hold in only one point. Newton uses it apparently to localize the idea of _immediate intuition_. In this way all Space, the whole Universe, with its moving contents, which transcend the farthest flight of human imagination are,--not distantly,--but immediately present to the mind of God. * * * * * Passing from these thoughts which may illustrate, but cannot explain, a subject dark with excess of splendour, we now enter on a series of extracts so chosen as to furnish an ample examination of the several _ideas_ involved in the philosophy of Design, and an estimate of their several values. It is evidently important that the reader should possess some means of forming clear conceptions respecting the nature of these ideas, and the collection now appended, aims at saving him the trouble of a tedious search. Any points which may have appeared perplexing or obscure in the preceding Chapter will, it is hoped, be made sufficiently plain by a perusal of the following pages. The first in this class of passages is taken from Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. No one probably was ever much better fitted by training and attainment than that eminent writer for the investigation he here undertakes. We must, however, caution the reader against supposing that Dr. Whewell means to introduce him into a world of Platonism. The ideas he speaks of may be illustrated in this way. Suppose a person constructs a right line according to Euclid's definition and draws it evenly between its extreme points, his mind has immediately an impression of rightness or straightness, which he attaches to all lines actually so constructed or conceived of as theoretically possible. This idea of straightness is absolute and universal. So, again, looking at two such lines, he knows that they, cannot, in the nature of things inclose a space, and this idea likewise is universal and absolutely true. With the nature of these ideas as a psychological question, the reader need not concern himself for our present purpose. It is sufficient to observe they are brought into activity by a practical occasion. Whether they were wholly or partially pre-existent--or whether they represent a state of our Reason evoked by the occasion--are points which make no difference to their exact strength of validity. We find as a matter of fact in going through life that this particular class of ideas is so very true that it enables us to gauge the material universe. Yet notably enough, Hume in his Treatise (I. 247, seq.) reduces applied mathematics to a species of probability. Other ideas having various degrees of validity and practical necessity are involved in the diverse processes which pertain to the inductive sciences. Dr. Whewell's work was written for the purpose of elucidating them, which he does at great length. To some such ideas, principles, and beliefs we shall advert by and bye. All that seems now necessary is to remark that the distinguished author's general division (Book IX.) where our extract will be found, is concerned with the Philosophy of Biology, and that the paragraphs quoted are sections of its chapter VI., "On the Idea of Final Causes." "1. By an examination of those notions which enter into all our reasonings and judgments on living things, it appears that we conceive animal life as a vortex or cycle of moving matter in which the form of the vortex determines the motions, and these motions again support the form of the vortex: the stationary parts circulate the fluids, and the fluids nourish the permanent parts. Each portion ministers to the others, each depends upon the other. The parts make up the whole, but the existence of the whole is essential to the preservation of the parts. But parts existing under such conditions are _organs_, and the whole is _organized_. This is the fundamental conception of organization. 'Organized beings,' says the physiologist,[79] 'are composed of a number of essential and mutually dependent parts.'--'An organized product of nature,' says the great metaphysician,[80] 'is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.' "2. It will be observed that we do not content ourselves with saying that in such a whole, all the parts are _mutually dependent_. This might be true even of a mechanical structure; it would be easy to imagine a framework in which each part should be necessary to the support of each of the others; for example, an arch of several stones. But in such a structure the parts have no properties which they derive from the whole. They are beams or stones when separate; they are no more when joined. But the same is not the case in an organized whole. The limb of an animal separated from the body, loses the properties of a limb and soon ceases to retain even its form. "3. Nor do we content ourselves with saying that the parts are _mutually causes and effects_. This is the case in machinery. In a clock, the pendulum by means of the escapement causes the descent of the weight, the weight by the same escapement keeps up the motion of the pendulum. But things of this kind may happen by accident. Stones slide from a rock down the side of a hill and cause it to be smooth; the smoothness of the slope causes stones still to slide. Yet no one would call such a slide an organized system. The system is organized, when the effects which take place among the parts are _essential to our conception of the whole_; when the whole would not _be_ a whole, nor the parts, parts, except these effects were produced; when the effects not only happen in fact, but are included in the idea of the object; when they are not only seen, but foreseen; not only expected, but intended: in short when, instead of being causes and effects, they are _ends_ and _means_, as they are termed in the above definition. "Thus we necessarily include, in our idea of Organization, the notion of an End, a Purpose, a Design; or, to use another phrase which has been peculiarly appropriated in this case, a _Final Cause_. This idea of a Final Cause is an essential condition in order to the pursuing our researches respecting organized bodies.... "5. This has already been confirmed by reference to fact; in the History of Physiology, I have shown that those who studied the structure of animals were irresistibly led to the conviction that the parts of this structure have each its end or purpose;--that each member and organ not merely produces a certain effect or answers a certain use, but is so framed as to impress us with the persuasion that it was constructed _for_ that use;--that it was _intended_ to produce the effect. It was there seen that this persuasion was repeatedly expressed in the most emphatic manner by Galen;--that it directed the researches and led to the discoveries of Harvey;--that it has always been dwelt upon as a favourite contemplation, and followed as a certain guide, by the best anatomists;--and that it is inculcated by the physiologists of the profoundest views and most extensive knowledge of our own time. All these persons have deemed it a most certain and important principle of physiology, that in every organized structure, plant or animal, each intelligible part has its allotted office:--each organ is designed for its appropriate function:--that nature, in these cases, produces nothing in vain: that, in short, each portion of the whole arrangement has its _final cause_; an end to which it is adapted, and in this end, the reason that it is where and what it is. "6. This Notion of Design in organized bodies must, I say, be supplied by the student of organization out of his own mind: a truth which will become clearer if we attend to the most conspicuous and acknowledged instances of _design_. The structure of the eye, in which the parts are curiously adjusted so as to produce a distinct image on the retina, as in an optical instrument;--the trochlear muscle of the eye, in which the tendon passes round a support and turns back, like a rope round a pulley;--the prospective contrivances for the preservation of animals, provided long before they are wanted, as the milk of the mother, the teeth of the child, the eyes and the lungs of the foetus:--these arrangements, and innumerable others, call up in us a persuasion that Design has entered into the plan of animal form and progress. And if we bring in our minds this conception of Design, nothing can more fully square with and fit it, than such instances as these. But if we did not already possess the Idea of Design;--if we had not had our notion of mechanical contrivance awakened by inspection of optical instruments, or pulleys, or in some other way;--if we had never been conscious ourselves of providing for the future;--if this were the case, we could not recognize contrivance and prospectiveness in such instances as we have referred to. The facts are, indeed, admirably in accordance with these conceptions, when the two are brought together: but the facts and the conceptions come together from different quarters--from without and from within. "7. We may further illustrate this point by referring to the relations of travellers who tell us that when consummate examples of human mechanical contrivance have been set before savages, they have appeared incapable of apprehending them as proofs of design. This shows that in such cases the Idea of Design had not been developed in the minds of the people who were thus unintelligent: but it no more proves that such an idea does not naturally and necessarily arise, in the progress of men's minds, than the confused manner in which the same savages apprehend the relations of space, or number, or cause, proves that these ideas do not naturally belong to their intellects. All men have these ideas; and it is because they cannot help referring their sensations to such ideas, that they apprehend the world as existing in time and space, and as a series of causes and effects. It would be very erroneous to say that the belief of such truths is obtained by logical reasoning from facts. And in like manner we cannot logically deduce design from the contemplation of organic structures; although it is impossible for us, when the facts are clearly before us, not to find a reference to design operating in our minds." It seems well to add here the practical comments made by Müller and Kant on the passages quoted from them by Dr. Whewell in his first Paragraph. Professor Müller writes thus (Baly's translation, Vol. I., p. 19):--"The manner in which their elements are combined, is not the only difference between organic and inorganic bodies; there is in living organic matter a principle constantly in action, the operations of which are in accordance with a rational plan, so that the individual parts which it creates in the body, are adapted to the design of the whole; and this it is which distinguishes organism. Kant says, 'The cause of the particular mode of existence of each part of a living body resides in the whole, while in dead masses each part contains this cause within itself.' This explains why a mere part separated from an organized whole generally does not continue to live; why, in fact, an organized body appears to be one and indivisible." Before proceeding to the great Metaphysician, it may be interesting to place in connection with this extract from Müller, certain views of other distinguished physiologists. Sir C. Bell states his own opinions on the connection of Life and Organization in this manner (_Appendix to Paley's Natural Theology_ by Sir Charles Bell, commencing with pp. 211-13):--"Archdeacon Paley has, in these two introductory chapters, given us the advantage of simple, but forcible language, with extreme ingenuity, in illustration. But for his example, we should have felt some hesitation in making so close a comparison between design, as exhibited by the Creator in the animal structure, and the mere mechanism, the operose and imperfect contrivances of human art. "Certainly, there may be a comparison; for a superficial and rapid survey of the animal body may convey the notion of an apparatus of levers, pulleys, and ropes--which maybe compared with the spring, barrel, and fusee, the wheels and pinions, of a watch. But if we study the texture of animal bodies more curiously, and especially if we compare animals with each other--for example, the simple structure of the lower creatures with the complicated structure of those higher in the scale of existence--we shall see, that in the lowest links of the chain animals are so simple, that we should almost call them homogeneous; and yet in these we find life, sensibility, and motion. It is in the animals higher in the scale that we discover parts having distinct endowments, and exhibiting complex mechanical relations. The mechanical contrivances which are so obvious in man, for instance, are the provisions for the agency and dominion of an intellectual power over the materials around him. "We mark this early, because there are authors who, looking upon this complexity of mechanism, confound it with the presence of life itself, and think it a necessary adjunct--nay, even that life proceeds from it: whereas the mechanism which we have to examine in the animal body is formed with reference to the necessity of acting upon or receiving impressions from, things external to the body--a necessary condition of our state of existence in a material world. "Many have expressed their opinion very boldly on the necessary relation between organization and life, who have never extended their views to the system of nature. To place man, an intelligent and active being, in this world of matter, he must have properties bearing relation to that matter. The existence of matter implies an agency of certain forces;--the particles of bodies must suffer attraction and repulsion; and the bodies formed by the balance of these influences upon their atoms or particles must have weight or gravity, and possess mechanical properties. So must the living body, independently of its peculiar endowments, have similar composition and qualities, and have certain relations to the solids, fluids, gases, heat, light, electricity, or galvanism, which are around it. "Without these, the intellectual principle could receive no impulse--could have no agency and no relation to the material world. The whole body must gravitate or have weight; without which it could neither stand securely, nor exert its powers on the bodies around it. But for this, muscular power itself, and all the appliances which are related to that power, would be useless. When, therefore, it is affirmed that organization or construction is necessary to life, we may at least pause in giving assent, under the certainty that we see another and a different reason for the construction of the body. Thus we perceive, that as the body must have weight to have power, so must it have mechanical contrivance, or arrangement of its parts. As it must have weight, so must it be sustained by a skeleton; and when we examine the bones, which give the body height and shape, we find each column (for in that sense a bone may be first taken) adjusted with the finest attention to the perpendicular weight that it has to bear, as well as to the lateral thrusts to which it is subject in the motions of the body."... Again p. 405, seq. .... "Mr. Hunter illustrated the subject thus:--Death is apparent or real. A man dragged out of the water, and to appearance dead, is, notwithstanding, alive, according to the definition we have given. The living endowments of the individual parts are not exhausted. The sensibility may be yet roused; the nerves which convey the impression may yet so far retain their property, that other motor nerves may be influenced through them; the muscles may be once more concatenated, and drawn into a simultaneous action. That vibratory motion which we have just said may be witnessed in a muscle recently cut out of the body, may be so excited in a class of muscles--for example, in the muscles of inspiration--that the apparently dead draws an inspiration. Here is the first of a series of vital motions which excites the others, and the heart beats, and the blood circulates, and the sensibilities are restored; and the mind, which was in the condition of one asleep, is roused into activity and volition, and all the common phenomena of life are resuscitated. Such is the series of phenomena which is presented in apparent death from suffocation; but, if the death has been from an injury of some vital part, the sensibilities and properties of action in the rest of the body, though resident for a time, have lost their relations, and there is a link wanting in that chain of vital actions which restores animation. Here, then, there can be no resuscitation; and the death of the individual parts of the body rapidly succeeds the apparent death of the body. "We perceive now that our original conception of life and the terms we use respecting it, in common parlance, are but ill-adapted to this subject when philosophically considered. We early associate life and motion so intimately that the one stands for the other. If we then investigate by anatomy, we find a curious and minute mechanism in operation, an engine and tubes for circulation, and, in short, an internal motion of every particle of the frame; and the anatomist is also led into the error of associating in his mind life with motion and organization. But when we consider the subject more closely, and divest ourselves of habits and prejudices associated with words, we perceive that, without making any vain and even dangerous attempt at definition, life is first to be contemplated as the peculiarity distinguishing one of two classes into which all matter must be arranged; the one class, which embraces all living matter, is subject to a controlling influence which resists the chemical agents, and produces a series of revolutions, in an order and at periods prescribed; the other, dead matter, is subject to lapse and change under chemical agency and the common laws of matter. "Let us examine the body of a perfect or a complicated animal. We find each organ possessed of a different power. But there is as yet no conventional language adapted to our discourse on this subject, and that is the source of many mistakes; for when a man even like Mr. Hunter had his mind illuminated upon this science, how was he to frame his language, when every word that he used had already a meaning which had no reference to the discovery he had made--to the distinct qualities which he had ascertained to belong to the living parts?... "The difference between dead and living matter will appear to be, that in the one instance the particles are permanently arranged and continue to exhibit their proper character, as we term it, until by ingenuity and practice some means are found to withdraw the arranging or uniting influence; and then the matter is chemically dissolved: resolves into its elements, and forms new combinations: whilst the life continues, not simply to arrange the particles, and to give them the order or organization of the animal body, but to whirl them in a series of revolutions, during all which the material is passive, the law being in the life. The order and succession of these changes and their duration do not result from the material of the frame, which is the same in all animals, but from that influence which we term life, and which is superadded to the material." (_Ibid._ 408.) Writing on Function Mr. Herbert Spencer discusses the following question. Its interest to our argument is unmistakable. "Does Structure originate Function, or does Function originate Structure? is a question about which there has been disagreement. Using the word Function in its widest signification, as the totality of all vital actions, the question amounts to this--Does Life produce Organization, or does Organization produce Life? "To answer this question is not easy, since we habitually find the two so associated that neither seems possible without the other; and they appear uniformly to increase and decrease together.... There is, however, one fact implying that Function must be regarded as taking precedence of Structure. Of the lowest Rhizopods, which present no distinctions of parts, and nevertheless feed and grow and move about, Prof. Huxley has remarked that they exhibit Life without Organization.... "It may be argued that on the hypothesis of Evolution, Life necessarily comes before organization. On this hypothesis, organic matter in a state of homogeneous aggregation, must precede organic matter in a state of heterogeneous aggregation. But since the passing from a structureless state to a structured state, is itself a vital process, it follows that vital activity must have existed while there was yet no structure: structure could not else arise. That function takes precedence of structure, seems also implied in the definition of Life. If Life consists of inner actions so adjusted as to balance outer actions--if the actions are the _substance_ of Life, while the adjustment of them constitutes its _form_; then, may we not say that the actions to be formed must come before that which forms them--that the continuous change which is the basis of function, must come before the structure which brings function into shape? Or again, since throughout all phases of Life up to the highest, every advance is the effecting of some better adjustment of inner to outer actions; and since the accompanying new complexity of structure is simply a means of making possible this better adjustment; it follows that function is from beginning to end the determining cause of structure."--_Principles of Biology_, by Mr. Herbert Spencer, p. 153, seq. We now return to Kant, from whom Dr. Whewell quoted the sentence--"An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means." Passing by a metaphysical paragraph expressed in a manner too technical for the general reader, Kant's practical comment on this sentence runs as follows:-- "Dass die Zergliederer der Gewächse und Thiere, um ihre Structur zu erforschen und die Gründe einsehen zu können, warum und zu welchem Ende solche Theile, warum eine solche Lage und Verbindung der Theile und gerade diese innere Form ihnen gegeben worden, jene Maxime: dass nichts in einem solchen Geschöpf UMSONST sey, als unumgänglich nothwendig annehmen und sie eben so, als den Grundsatz der allgemeinen Naturlehre: dass NICHTS VON UNGEFÄHR geschehe, geltend machen, ist bekannt. In der That können sie sich auch von diesem teleologischen Grundsatze eben so wenig lossagen, als dem allgemeinen physischen, weil, so wie bei Veranlassung des letzteren gar keine Erfahrung überhaupt, so bei der des ersteren Grundsatzes kein Leitfaden für die Beobachtung einer Art von Naturdinge, die wir einmal teleologisch unter dem Begriffe der Naturzwecke gedacht haben, übrig bleiben würde. "Denn dieser Begriff führt die Vernunft in eine ganz andere Ordnung der Dinge, als die eines blossen Mechanism der Natur, der uns hier nicht mehr genug thun will. Eine Idee soll der Möglichkeit des Naturproducts zum Grunde liegen. Weil diese aber ein absolute Einheit der Vorstellung ist, statt dessen die Materie eine Vielheit der Dinge ist, die für sich keine bestimmte Einheit der Zusammensetzung an die Hand geben kann, so muss, wenn jene Einheit der Idee, sogar als Bestimmungsgrund _a priori_ eines Naturgesetzes der Causalität einer solchen Form des Zusammengesetzten dienen soll, der Zweck der Natur auf ALLES, was in ihrem Producte liegt, erstreckt werden; weil, wenn wir einmal dergleichen Wirkung im GANZEN auf einen übersinnlichen Bestimmungsgrund über den blinden Mechanism der Natur hinaus beziehen, wir sie auch ganz nach diesem Princip beurtheilen müssen und kein Grund da ist, die Form eines solchen Dinges noch zum Theil vom letzteren als abhängig anzunehmen, da alsdann bei der Vermischung ungleichartiger Principien, gar keine sichere Regel der Beurtheilung übrig bleiben würde." _Kritik der Urtheilskraft_, Section 65. For the benefit of those who find Kant's German difficult we subjoin a neat French Translation from the pen of M. Barni. "On sait que ceux qui dissèquent les plantes et les animaux pour en étudier la structure, et pouvoir reconnaître pourquoi et à quelle fin telles parties leur ont été données, pourquoi telle disposition et tel arrangement des parties, et précisément cette forme intérieure, admettent comme indispensablement nécessaire cette maxime que rien n'existe _en vain_ dans ces créatures, et lui accordent une valeur égale à celle de ce principe de la physique générale, que _rien n'arrive par hasard_. Et en effet ils ne peuvent pas plus rejeter ce principe téléologique que le principe universel de la physique; car, de même qu'en l'absence de ce dernier il n'y aurait plus d'expérience possible en général, de même, sans le premier, il n'y aurait plus de fil conducteur pour l'observation d'une espèce de choses de la nature, que nous avons une fois conçues téléologiquement sous le concept des fins de la nature. "En effet ce concept introduit la raison dans un tout autre ordre de choses que celui du pur mécanisme de la nature, qui ne peut plus ici nous satisfaire. Il faut qu'une idée serve de principe à la possibilité de la production de la nature. Mais comme une idée est une unité absolue de réprésentation, tandis que la matière est une pluralité de choses qui par elle-même ne peut fournir aucune unité déterminée de composition, si cette unité de l'idée doit servir, comme principe _a priori_, à déterminer une loi naturelle à la production d'une forme de ce genre, il faut que la fin de la nature s'étende _à tout_ ce qui est contenu dans sa production. En effet, dès que pour expliquer un certain effet, nous cherchons, au-dessus de l'aveugle mécanisme de la nature, un principe supra-sensible et que nous l'y rapportons _en général_, nous devons le juger tout entier d'après ce principe; et il n'y a pas de raison pour regarder la forme de cette chose comme dépendant encore en partie de l'autre principe, car alors, dans le mélange de principes hétérogènes, il ne resterait plus de règle sûre pour le jugement." _Critique du Jugement_, Section 65. Kant is not in any dress the easiest of thinkers to follow--a result possibly consequent upon the resemblance which his writings bear to trains of reasoning as they pass from the lips of one who thinks aloud. The following paragraph from another work of Dr. Whewell's may be useful to some minds as a comment upon this portion of Kant's teleology. "There is yet one other Idea which I shall mention, though it is one about which difficulties have been raised, since the consideration of such difficulties may be instructive: the Idea of a purpose, or as it is often termed, a _Final Cause_, in organized bodies. It has been held, and rightly, that the assumption of a Final Cause of each part of animals and plants is as inevitable as the assumption of an efficient cause of every event. The maxim, that in organized bodies nothing is _in vain_, is as necessarily true as the maxim that nothing happens _by chance_. I have elsewhere shown fully that this Idea is not deduced from any special facts, but is assumed as a law governing all facts in organic nature, directing the researches and interpreting the observations of physiologists. I have also remarked that it is not at variance with that other law, that plants and that animals are constructed upon general plans, of which plans, it may be, we do not see the necessity, though we see how wide is their generality. This Idea of a purpose,--of a Final Cause,--then, thus supplied by our minds, is found to be applicable throughout the organic world. It is in virtue of this Idea that we conceive animals and plants as subject to _disease_; for disease takes place when the parts do not fully answer their _purpose_; when they do not do what they _ought_ to do. How is it then that we thus find an Idea which is _supplied_ by our own minds, but which is _exemplified_ in every part of the organic world? Here perhaps the answer will be readily allowed. It is because this Idea is an Idea of the Divine Mind. There _is_ a Final Cause in the constitution of these parts of the universe, and therefore we can interpret them by means of the Idea of Final Cause. We can _see_ a purpose, because there _is_ a purpose. Is it too presumptuous to suppose that we can thus enter into the Ends and Purposes of the Divine Mind? We willingly grant and declare that it would be presumptuous to suppose that we can enter into them to any but a very small degree. They doubtless go immeasurably beyond our mode of understanding or conceiving them. But to a certain extent we _can_ go. We can go so far as to see that they _are_ Ends and Purposes. It is _not_ a vain presumption in us to suppose that we know that the eye was made for seeing and the ear for hearing. In this the most pious of men see nothing impious: the most cautious philosophers see nothing rash. And that we can see thus far into the designs of the Divine Mind, arises, we hold, from this:--that we have an Idea of Design and of Purpose which, so far as it is merely _that_, is true; and so far, is Design and Purpose in the same sense in the one case and in the other."[81] * * * * * It will be well worth while to close this present series of illustrations by a review of Professor Huxley's last published and best considered positions on Teleology. He printed, in 1871, an article on Haeckel's "Natürliche Schöpfungs Geschichte," and has now entitled it "The Genealogy of Animals," and included it in his recent volume of Critiques. We may therefore assume that we here find the distinguished Biologist's deliberate opinions. He says, p. 305, "The Teleology which supposes that the eye, such as we see it in man or one of the higher _Vertebrata_,[82] was made with the precise structure which it exhibits, for the purpose of enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow. Nevertheless it is necessary to remember that there is a wider Teleology, which is not touched by the doctrine of Evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of Evolution. That proposition is, that the whole world, living and not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed. If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay, potentially, in the cosmic vapour; and that a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say the state of the Fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapour of the breath on a cold winter's day. "Consider a kitchen clock, which ticks loudly, shows the hours, minutes, and seconds, strikes, cries 'cuckoo!' and perhaps shows the phases of the moon. When the clock is wound up, all the phenomena which it exhibits are potentially contained in its mechanism, and a clever clockmaker could predict all it will do after an examination of its structure. "If the evolution theory is correct, the molecular structure of the cosmic gas stands in the same relation to the phenomena of the world as the structure of the clock to its phenomena." Mr. Huxley's comparisons[83] are always amusing, partly because they are of an unlooked for description. They also keep up the attention of his readers or hearers. But they have one great fault--the fault we noticed in explaining the nature of analogical argument--they carry away the mind too far, and lead the reader often, sometimes the writer himself, into very serious oversights. Let us take notice how the Professor carries out his present similitude. "Now let us suppose a death-watch, living in the clock-case, to be a learned and intelligent student of its works. He might say, 'I find here nothing but matter and force and pure mechanism from beginning to end,' and he would be quite right. But if he drew the conclusion that the clock was not contrived for a purpose, he would be quite wrong. On the other hand, imagine another death-watch of a different turn of mind. He, listening to the monotonous 'tick! tick!' so exactly like his own, might arrive at the conclusion that the clock was itself a monstrous sort of death-watch, and that its final cause and purpose was to tick. How easy to point to the clear relation of the whole mechanism to the pendulum, to the fact that the one thing the clock did always and without intermission was to tick, and that all the rest of its phenomena were intermittent and subordinate to ticking! For all this, it is certain that kitchen clocks are not contrived for the purpose of making a ticking noise. "Thus the teleological theorist would be as wrong as the mechanical theorist, among our death-watches; and, probably, the only death-watch who would be right would be the one who should maintain that the sole thing death-watches could be sure about was the nature of the clock-works and the way they move; and that the purpose of the clock lay wholly beyond the purview of beetle faculties. "Substitute 'cosmic vapour' for 'clock,' and 'molecules' for 'works,' and the application of the argument is obvious." (pp. 306, 7.) One thing is very obvious here--and that is a flaw. State the case as a proposition thus--One or both of the two beetles is to the clock and its maker, as man is to the world and its Maker. A tremendous assumption--surely as sufficient to have startled Francis Bacon as the apparition of a new Idol. Is there any possible reason for elevating a death-watch--thinking in character as a death-watch--into a capable interpreter of clocks? Moreover, the ground principle of our human Teleology is that Man holds a lofty relation, not to the Universe only, but to its Maker likewise. He claims, in a word, the most sublime of all earthly kinships. The very fact that he can look with intelligent and admiring appreciation upon the works of God, justifies his belief that he has a real insight into their excellence, and is so far at least akin to the mind of God. If Mr. Huxley meant that a proportionate degree of insight into clock-making was possessed by his beetles, they would surely have been able to read the clock's dial-plate and understand the lesson conveyed by its pointers. The death-watch would at least say "_labuntur horæ_"--and comprehend that time was being registered--although he might even then fall far short of our human belief "_pereunt et imputantur_," and fail of knowing that time registers itself in a record of moral good and evil. The truth is that all mixing up manlike attributes with brute animality, and what seems ten times worse, with machines of wood and metal, can be nothing better than an attempt to produce a sound and prolific offspring from some ill-assorted and heterogeneous hybridism. We have adverted to this peculiarity of style before and venture upon doing so again, because all admirers of Mr. Huxley's great powers (and who can read his writings without such admiration?) may surely be justified in wishing that he would discard it at once and for ever. Its practical effect is apparently to assume the real point at issue and to cover up the tacit assumption. That he is really no chance offender in this respect may be gathered from a few instances noted at random. We have just had a couple of philosophic death-watches[84]--one a Teleologist, the other a Mechanicist--the lucubrations of both being neither exactly human, nor yet Coleopterous. We observed before a righteous clock[85]--regularly moral if regularly wound up. He has besides a machine, undescribed but endued with a gift of ratiocination[86]--and more curious still a piano[87] which listens when it is played upon, and though possessed of only one sense (hearing) succeeds in building up "endless ideas" of a certain cast and cogency. From this self-educated instrument much may of course be looked for, and accordingly we find "Its cogitative faculties immersed In cogibundity of cogitation," till it evolves from the depth of its consciousness something like an idealistic theory of sound. This hypothesis, Mr. Huxley in reply to his piano, refutes, first by an appeal to the material substance of the instrument itself; and secondly to the existence of a musician who plays upon it. Will he permit us to accept in like manner the fact of our own nobler subsistence, and also the being of One Who attunes its secret heart-strings to notes of sublime melody? The monsters aforecited irresistibly remind us of a repartee of Goldsmith's. He wittily said that Dr. Johnson would make little fishes talk like great whales. Had they done so it may be doubted whether the Doctor's idolatrous biographer would have discovered a minnowy mind beneath their Johnsonian utterances. And we confess to a difficulty of our own. The righteous clock is indeed genuinely Huxleian, but what shall we say of his mechanical logic, his piano, and his death-watches? By way of illustrating our perplexity let us suppose some rural sexton to mix up his own instincts with those of a biological burying beetle. The destiny of all flesh would naturally be determined in the first place by a decent covering of earth. But what about its final end? Would that be an aldermanic beetle feast or a _Resurgam_? Think again how a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals might breathe a benevolent spirit into a much employed dissecting knife. The sharp thing would certainly entertain a repugnance to the horrors of vivisection. There might also be a denial of its utility based on the scalpel's personal experience, or perhaps a moral doubt as to whether such means are justified by the ends proposed. Would Mr. Huxley listen to the remonstrance and undertake to lift up his powerful voice at Paris or at Berlin besides a few other remote places which need not be particularized? Or finally what ear would he lend to a magnifying glass accustomed to habits of observation and possessed by the soul of Spurzheim. Suppose it should affirm that a slice of Destructiveness is recognizably different in structure from a section of Benevolence; and Acquisitiveness in like manner distinguishable from Ideality! Yet a humanitarian scalpel or Spurzheim magnifying glass may be thought a Huxleian phenomenon. A truce to such mongrel meditations. We gladly turn away from them and continue our quotations from the Professor's sentiments delivered _in propria persona_, recommencing at the place where our last extract broke off. (p. 307.) "The teleological and the mechanical views of nature, are not necessarily, mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences; and the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of the teleologist who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe." We quite agree with Mr. Huxley that Mechanism never can exclude final causes, and that a thorough-going theory of Evolution (taken apart from its excrescences) disables the theorist from all real disproof of intention or Design. As we said before, the question of how the theorist's primordial arrangement began, is left unprovided for. And if a beginning, so certainly an _end_. The more steadily the first state of the Universe conceivable by Science is contemplated, the wider and more determinate the view thus taken, the more evident it becomes that the ground occupied by Natural Theology is not fenced off by the iron pale of Mechanism. The fencer is (as Huxley says) "at the mercy of the Teleologist." The Professor's next sentence deserves careful consideration--"On the other hand, if the teleologists assert that this, that, or the other result of the working of any part of the mechanism of the universe is its purpose and final cause, the mechanist can always inquire how he knows that it is more than an unessential incident--the mere ticking of the clock, which he mistakes for its function." How far this criticism holds good of many well-meant treatises filled with special instances of Design is a question for candid consideration. Meantime the whole sentence amounts to this conclusion:--We must distinguish between such wide arguments as Baden Powell's, and the details of certain writers who have dealt with what they thought good examples and illustrations of a grand universal principle. And that such is Mr. Huxley's meaning we may perceive from another paragraph immediately preceding our first extract. (p. 305.) "In more than one place, Professor Haeckel enlarges upon the service which the _Origin of Species_ has done, in favouring what he terms the 'causal or mechanical' view of living nature as opposed to the 'teleological or vitalistic' view. And no doubt it is quite true that the doctrine of Evolution is the most formidable opponent of all the commoner and coarser forms of Teleology. But perhaps the most remarkable service to the philosophy of Biology rendered by Mr. Darwin is the reconciliation of Teleology and Morphology, and the explanation of the facts of both which his views offer." Now, such being the state of facts, we may refuse to say with Huxley that the following question (asked p. 307) is "not irrational." "Why trouble oneself about matters which are out of reach, when the working of the mechanism itself, which is of infinite practical importance, affords scope for all our energies?" We cannot forego our trouble, for two reasons. _First_, according to the statements before quoted, Mr. Darwin's researches have improved the case for Teleology. Advocates of Design may therefore take courage, they have gained a potent alliance. _Secondly_, "the practical working of the Mechanism itself" is very far, we think, from being our All--so far, indeed, that it sinks into insignificance compared with the hope of Immortality. Our highest interest lies in gathering such information as we can regarding Him with Whom we have to do as the Arbiter of our future existence. Above all things, we desire Him to be our Father and our Friend. Perchance His attributes are not matters out of reach. He may be very near to every one of us, if we are indeed His Offspring. Another opinion of Professor Huxley's is of great auxiliary value to the argument from Design. The structures mentioned have to some minds appeared as its most serious difficulties. "Professor Haeckel," he explains, "has invented a new and convenient name, 'Dysteleology,' for the study of the 'purposelessnesses' which are observable in living organisms--such as the multitudinous cases of rudimentary and apparently useless structures. I confess, however, that it has often appeared to me that the facts of Dysteleology cut two ways. If we are to assume, as evolutionists in general do, that useless organs atrophy, such cases as the existence of lateral rudiments of toes, in the foot of a horse, place us in a dilemma. For, either these rudiments are of no use to the animal, in which case, considering that the horse has existed in its present form since the Pliocene epoch, they surely ought to have disappeared; or they are of some use to the animal, in which case they are of no use as arguments against Teleology." (p. 307.) It would be hard to overestimate the value of this opinion, still more hard to overrate its genuine and outspoken honesty. Mr. Huxley places at the end of his recent volume a passage from Bishop Berkeley which we will venture to borrow by way of conclusion to this lengthy note:-- "You see, Hylas, the water of yonder fountain, how it is forced upwards in a round column to a certain height, at which it breaks and falls back into the basin from whence it rose; its ascent as well as its descent proceeding from the same uniform law or principle of gravitation. Just so, the same principles which, at first view, lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense." _Adsit omen!_ May it be even thus with our large-minded Professor and with all other sovereign princes of Biology--[Greek: Hileôs' Asklêpios]! FOOTNOTES: [14] See more particularly Chapter V., "Production and its Law." [15] Most literary people are aware that it was borrowed by Paley himself. A reference very accessible to ordinary readers may be made to Knight's English Cyclopædia, Article _Nieuwentyt_. "A work," says the biographer, "was published by him at Amsterdam in 1715, in one volume 4to, entitled 'The right use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator': the object of the author is first to convince atheists of the existence of a supreme and benevolent Creator, by contemplating the mechanism of the heavens, the structure of animals, etc.; and, secondly, to remove the doubts of deists concerning revealed religion. It was originally published in Dutch, but has passed through several editions, in German, French, and English. The English editions, translated by Chamberlayne, under the title of the 'Religious Philosopher,' appeared at London in 1718-19 and 1730, in three vols. 8vo. This work, as was first pointed out in the _Athenæum_ for 1848, pp. 803, 907, 930, served as the basis for Paley's 'Natural Theology,' the general argument and many of the illustrations in that remarkable work being directly copied--and without the slightest acknowledgment, though Paley was acquainted with the book--from the 'Religious Philosopher.'" Lord Brougham, who does not appear to have seen Bernard Nieuwentyt's book, believes that Derham supplied the fountain from which Paley drank so freely. Apparently he used both. To this note it may be added that the want of Natural Philosophy under which the Archdeacon himself laboured, has been recently commented on in the following terms:-- "Paley kicked his foot unconcernedly against the stone he found on the heath; for anything he knew, he says, it might have been there for ever. Geology was then a practically unknown science, or he might have found epochs of history in the stone, and evidence of all manner of special creations for man's benefit. But Paley was no natural philosopher, only a half-learned theologian, who skimmed over all difficulties, and produced a book which has done immense harm in leading Englishmen to anthropomorphic conceptions of God."--_Report of an Address by A. J. Ellis, President of the Philological Society, in an American Newspaper_ (_the Index_) _for August 10th, 1872_. [k] So Hume (Inquiry, Section IV.): "A man, finding a watch or any other machine in a desert island, would conclude that there had once been men in that island." And again (Id. Section V.): "A man who should find in a desert country the remains of pompous buildings, would conclude that the country had in ancient times been cultivated by civilized inhabitants but did nothing of this nature occur to him, he could never form such an inference." The inference is, as Hume says, from effect to cause--a subject which he is here investigating _more suo_. To the nature of this inference I have found reason for recurring more than once. [16] A striking peculiarity of this skeleton is thus described by Professor Huxley ("Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals," p. 217). "In many _Lacertilia_ (_Lacertæ_, _Iguanæ_, _Geckos_) the caudal vertebræ have a very singular structure, the middle of each being traversed by a thin, unossified, transverse septum. The vertebra naturally breaks with great readiness through the plane of the septum, and when such lizards are seized by the tail, that appendage is pretty certain to part at one of these weak points." [l] "God," says Dogberry, "is a good Man." So others besides Dogberry. Curiously enough, the charge of Anthropomorphism has been brought by a most eminent naturalist against the greatest authorities on Natural Selection. M. Edouard Claparède writes as follows in the "Archives des Sciences Physiques et Naturelles" for 1870:-- "Mon but est seulement de montrer que les armes dont M. Wallace se sert victorieusement pour attaquer le duc d'Argyll, se retournent contre lui-même. Sans doute, c'est un pur anthropomorphisme que de supposer chez un Créateur un sentiment du Beau entièrement semblable au nôtre, et une telle hypothèse n'a rien à faire avec la science. Mais cet autre anthropomorphisme par lequel les Darwinistes supposent chez les oiseaux un sens du Beau identique au nôtre, est il plus justifié? Soit M. Darwin, soit M. Wallace, expliquent la formation de la belle voix et du beau plumage chez les oiseaux mâles par sélection sexuelle. Les femelles sont censées donner toujours la préférence aux mâles, qui, au point de vue humain, ont la plus belle voix et les plus brillantes couleurs. Au contraire, chez toutes les espèces à cri désagrèable pour l'oreille humaine et à couleur sombre, la nature du cri comme de la couleur a dû sa formation à une autre forme de sélection que la sélection sexuelle. Quel oubli de l'antique dicton: _De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum_! Si ce dicton a été reconnu vrai chez toutes les nations civilisées, il acquiert une force bien autrement grande lorsqu'il s'agit de son application à des oiseaux. Serait il absurde de supposer chez certains oiseaux un goût prononcé pour les couleurs sombres, comme ce goût existe chez beaucoup d'hommes? Et alors ne devient-il pas possible, contrairement à MM. Darwin et Wallace, d'expliquer la couleur terne de certaines espèces par sélection sexuelle? N'en peut-il pas être de même pour la voix criarde de tel ou tel volatile? Certes, il est dangereux de baser un édifice sur quelque chose d'aussi subjectif qu'un sentiment, quelque soit du reste la nature de l'être chez lequel on le suppose plus ou moins gratuitement, oiseau ou Créateur!" (pp. 175-6.) [m] If any one desires to see how early and how persistently this difficulty attached itself to the Design Analogy, I may be permitted to refer him to a thin volume of my own, entitled "Right and Wrong," pp. 17-22 (text and notes), and Appendix, pp. 58-60. A similar Dualism (coupled with the charge of Anthropomorphism) is frequently urged against Natural Theology at the present day. The alternative proposed has been called Monism. The fixed unyielding realm of Abiology (inorganic nature) is taken as the type of the universe. The sole supposable Divine principle (or Spirit) is identified with its law, which is in turn pronounced identical with philosophical necessity--that is to say, a necessity not imposed by or flowing from the Divine will, but a necessity which annihilates the possibility of all will. The Divine principle thus supposed is simply that law or force which is embodied in the mechanism of the universe. Professor Haeckel of Jena is the author of a book which has been styled in Germany, "The Bible of Darwinism." The following passages will show how he treats the subject under consideration in the text. He writes (Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, Book II. cap. vi. sec. 2, "On Creation") to the following effect:-- "THE CONCEPTION OF CREATION is either altogether unimaginable, or at least perfectly inconsistent with that pure intuition of Nature founded on an empirical basis. In Abiology a creation is no longer anywhere spoken of at all, and it is in Biology only that people are still closely wrapped up in this error. The conception of creation is perfectly unimaginable, if by it is understood 'an origination of something out of nothing.' This acceptation is quite incompatible with one of the first and chiefest of Nature's laws--one, indeed, universally acknowledged--namely, with the great law, that ALL MATTER IS ETERNAL." (Vol. i. p. 171.) There is one general reflection which may fairly strike the honest and ingenuous mind respecting the difficulties thus "Now if the conception of such an immaterial force, discoverable exterior to matter, independent of, yet nevertheless acting upon it, is absolutely inadmissible and inconceivable in itself, then so, too, becomes the conception of a creative power from our point of view; and all the more so, since with it are united the most untenable teleological conceptions, and the most palpable Anthropomorphism."... "In all these teleological conceptions, and similarly in all histories of creation which the poetical phantasy of men has produced, gross Anthropomorphism is so evident, that we may leave the denial of this Creation-idea to the insight of any general reader who thinks for himself, and is not too far involved in traditional prejudices."... "A creation of organisms is, therefore, partly quite unimaginable, partly in such complete contradiction to all knowledge of nature empirically gained, that we cannot in any case allow ourselves to end by accepting this hypothesis. There remains, consequently, nothing else but to suppose a spontaneous origination of the simplest organisms, from which all more perfect ones developed themselves by gradual metamorphosis--that is to say, a self-forming or self-configuration of matter into organization, which is generally called primordial production or spontaneous generation (_generatio æquivoca_). (Ibid. 173-4.) Haeckel commences his section upon Dualism and Monism (Book I. cap. iv. section 6), with the following quotation from August Schleicher (die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft: Weimar, 1863, p. 8):-- "The tendency of modern thought is undeniably towards _Monism_. _Dualism_--whether you are pleased to define it as the contrast of spirit and nature, of contents and form, of appearance and reality--is no longer a firm ground to stand upon, if we wish to survey the field of modern science. To the latter there is no matter without spirit (_i.e._ without the unavoidable necessity that governs it), nor, on the other hand, is there any spirit without matter. We might say, perhaps, that there is neither matter nor spirit in the usual acceptation of the words, but only a something which is the one and the other at the same time. To charge this view--which is founded on observation--with materialism, is equally unjust as to lay it at the door of spiritualism." Haeckel concludes this section by avowing an unalterable conviction of the truth of Monism, with which his mind is thoroughly penetrated. The extracts above given will explain the value of those distinctions respecting Law and Causation, which are drawn in the latter part of this chapter. The wider subject pertains, however, to Chapter V., where it is discussed at some length. [17] Many readers may be pleased by a perusal of Lord Brougham's "Dissertation on the Origin of Evil." It gives an account of various hypotheses, and ends with some interesting remarks. See his "Dissertations on Subjects of Science connected with Natural Theology," vol. ii. [18] Even Lord Brougham, whom no one will accuse of a too ardent addiction to metaphysical pursuits, chides Paley very severely for this neglect. Dr. Whewell's censure is more grave. Passages from these criticisms are given in Additional Note A, with some explanations which may conduce to a clear insight of what is meant by bad metaphysics, particularly in relation to the subject before us. [19] Compare the figure employed in Rev. xxi. 1. [n] There seems little doubt that the popular phrase "Design proves a Designer" has given rise to an extensive distrust of the Design argument _in toto_. Compare Additional Note B. [o] Another shape of the objection is stated and examined in Additional Note C. [20] Essay on the "Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy," Ed. 2, p. 174. The italics and capitals are Professor Powell's. [p] Were Paley now alive, he might plead the example of Mr. Darwin, whose practice it is to speak of any incidental chasm occasioned by the link sometimes missing from his premises, as "not a long step." "Mr. Darwin's argument," says a reviewer of his "Descent of Man," "is a continuous conjugation of the potential mood. It rings the changes on 'can have been,' 'might have been,' 'would have been,' 'should have been,' until it leaps with a wide bound into 'must have been.'" (_Times_, April 8, 1871.) Any similarity between the reasonings of the Archdeacon and the Naturalist may appear noteworthy. But the coincidence ends here. Paley, though reproved by a Lord Chancellor, had the good fortune to be excused by a Bishop. There is a short account of both censure and defence in the notes to Powell's "Connection of Natural and Divine Truth," pp. 287-9. [21] P. 177. [22] Ibid. [23] Ibid. [24] Pp. 175-6. [25] Putting aside workmanship exercised on given material, we may perceive a gliding of thought from the idea of plan, form, or fashion, to adaptation, and so onwards to purpose and intention--that is, conscious adaptation to a designed end. [26] "Sämmtliche Werke," vol. II., pp. 51, 52. [27] "Connexion of Natural and Divine Truth," pp. 183-4. [28] See the work last quoted, pp. 287-9. The Professor substantially agrees with Lord Brougham's censure before referred to, and considers Dr. Turton's defence of Paley an insufficient apology. [29] "Essays and Reviews," 8vo. p. 125. [q] The general reader may reasonably feel a difficulty in assigning their proper meaning to terms used in senses so technical. He may possibly be assisted by looking over the field of view thus:--A Force is visible to us as a movement in Nature;--when we try to formulate it intelligently to ourselves, its mental equivalent is Law. If, then, we wish to describe an intelligent præ-conception of Law (such as distinctly involves the Foresight of its operation) we call the Law a Creative Idea, or (less definitely) a Design. Tracing the chain of causation in the reverse or downward direction, the Idea when put in movement appears to our mind's eye as Law; and when we wish to include its actual working upon the realm of Nature we term it a Force. Both James Mill and his son (a truly affectionate annotator), are careful to point out that the essence of moral causation involves Intention--that is (as Mr. Mill explains), Foresight, or expectation of consequences.--"Analysis of the Human Mind," II., 400, 401. It should be observed that in many branches of Natural Science the word Law is so employed as to include the conception of Force. Law is in this usage not merely a logical formula expressive of realized facts, but it involves the idea of the coercion or impellent motion which brought those facts into being. "Thus, then," says Dr. Carpenter, "whilst no Law, which is simply _a generalisation of phenomena_, can be considered as having any _coercive_ action, we may assign that value to Laws which express _the universal conditions of the action of a Force_, the existence of which we learn from the testimony of our own consciousness." He had before remarked that "it is the substitution of the Dynamical for the mere Phenomenal idea, which gives their highest value to our conceptions of the Order of Nature."--_Address to British Association at Brighton, August, 1872._ This _Order_ of Nature, as the learned President says in conclusion, is no "sufficient account of its _Cause_." [30] See how the matter appears to a Satirist:--"By the great variety of theories here alluded to, every one of which, if thoroughly examined, will be found surprisingly consistent in all its parts; my unlearned readers will perhaps be led to conclude that the creation of a world is not so difficult a task as they at first imagined. I have shown at least a score of ingenious methods in which a world could be constructed; and I have no doubt that had any of the philosophers above quoted the use of a good manageable comet, and the philosophical warehouse, _chaos_, at his command, he would engage to manufacture a planet as good, or, if you will take his word for it, better than this we inhabit." Such is the dictum of the profound Knickerbocker,--"History of New York," 8vo, p. 16. His variety of theories concludes with that of "the renowned Dr. Darwin," of Lichfield. If the history were brought down to our day, additional variety might be given to this part of it. [r] It is upon this confusion that Powell charges Pantheistic theories in which physical speculations are mistakenly supposed to have their natural termination. See Additional Note D, where the passage to which more than one reference has already been made, is given _in extenso_. Compare also our Chapter VI. on Causation. [31] Essay as above, p. 165. [32] The signification attached by the Professor to Law and Cause may be most readily explained by a similitude. Let the physical series of antecedents and consequents be represented by a chain of which we see the present links, but both its beginning and its end are invisible. Physical law is this chain. Cause must not be considered its first link, for Cause differs in _kind_ from the series, is in truth _sui generis_, and can be illustrated by no physical phenomenon, but by the fact of our own Moral Volition. Cause, therefore, is external to the chain, and originates, not only the first, but every link of it. Each and all--nay, the universal chain in its entirety--may be viewed as owing its existence to one single fiat of an absolute moral Cause. Compare on this subject Chapters VI. and VII. ensuing. [33] Essay, pp. 155, 173. It should, however, be observed that Sterling's language has been interpreted two opposite ways, and therefore the obscurity may be verbal. Coleridge's expressions have regard to certain "so-called _Demonstrations_." His own judgment as to the cumulative proofs of Theism was that "there are so many convincing reasons for it, within and without--a grain of sand sufficing, and a whole universe at hand to echo the decision!--that for every mind not devoid of all reason, and desperately conscience-proof, the Truth which it is the least possible to prove, it is little less than impossible not to believe; only indeed just so much short of impossible, as to leave some room for the will and the moral election, and thereby to keep it a truth of religion, and the possible subject of a commandment."--_Aids to Reflection_, Edition 1843, Vol. I. p. 135. First and rare edition, p. 177. [34] "There is thus no alternative, but either to abandon the inquiry after an immediate intuition of power, or to seek for it in _mind as determining its own modifications_; a course open to those who admit an immediate consciousness of self, and to them only. My first and only presentation of power or causality is thus to be found in my consciousness of _myself as willing_. In every act of volition, I am fully conscious that it is in my power to form the resolution or to abstain; and this constitutes the presentative consciousness of free-will and of power. Like any other simple idea, it cannot be defined; and hence the difficulty of verbally distinguishing causation from mere succession. But every man who has been conscious of an act of will, has been conscious of power therein; and to one who has not been so conscious, no verbal description can supply the deficiency."--_Prolegomena Logica_, p. 151. [s] It seems singular that this rise of thought has of late years seldom been explicitly put forward as the natural continuation and necessary extension of the argument from Design. "He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see?... He that teacheth man knowledge, _shall not He know?_" In other words, if we may argue from the structure of the eye and ear to an Intelligence which comprehends our sense-perceptions, their conditions, and their activities, may we not always argue from the reason of man to an Intelligence comprehending our highest human endowments? If so, we reflect these attributes back upon our explanation of the natural world. We say, further, that such a Creator would never make a mere _machine_. Humanity was a necessary complement of all that is set under Man. And thus Francis Bacon's aphorism may be applied in a double sense,--Man not only interprets Nature to himself--but he affords in himself a text for her more complete interpretation. Nature and Human Nature are two correlatives. [35] Take, as example, the scientific theories on Insanity and its melancholy accompaniments. How many theorizers seem to justify Sir William Ellis's old observation, that few of his medical brethren ever got much notion of Mind? [36] "Natural Theology attempts to demonstrate the existence of a personal First Cause, supreme Reason, and Will. The relations of mankind towards such a Being are called Natural Religion."--_Right and Wrong_, p. 58. [37] If any one wishes to convince himself that other meanings proposed are open to serious objections, let him peruse Max Müller's first Lecture on the Science of Religion. [38] Compare Additional Note E, on the extent and divisions of the Science of Natural Theology. [39] The Soul, p. 32, seq. [40] Any strictures of ours on the language employed by Natural Theologians must be understood as appeals from individual or peculiar usage to world-wide acceptation and old established custom:-- "Quem penes arbitrium est et jus et norma loquendi." [41] As regards another important word illustrated in this chapter, it may be useful to add that the term Analogy is often employed in a wide or rather vague signification; not only by careless writers, but by philosophers. There is an important passage in Bacon's Plan of the Instauratio (prefixed to the Novum Organon) which Wood translates thus:--"The testimony and information of the senses bears always a relation to man, and not to the universe, and it is altogether a great mistake to assert that our senses are the measure of things. The Latin original for "bears a relation" is "est ex analogiâ," but Mr. Ellis prefers rendering it by "has reference to," and confirms his decision by comparing two other Latin phrases;--one, "Materia non est cognoscibilis nisi _ex analogiâ_ formæ"--the other, "Materia non est scibilis nisi _in ordine_ ad formam;--ut dicit" (adds Thomas Aquinas) "Philosophus in primo Physicorum." Mr. Ellis subjoins "That the meaning of the word Analogy was misconceived by S. Thomas, by Duns Scotus, and by the schoolmen in general, is pointed out by Zabarella, _De prim. rerum materiâ_, I. 4." "Philosophus" means Aristotle, who, however, in the passage referred to is faithful to his own correct definition of Analogy, and his instance may readily be stated in four terms, as will appear on reference to the passage (Ed. Bekker 191, a. 8). Argyropylus translates by "similitudine rationis," and St. Hilaire explains "analogia" for the benefit of the general reader by "rapport proportionnel"--(Leçons de Physique I. 8, s. 18). That Bacon was really thus vague in his use of "ex analogiâ" may be gathered from his substitution of "in ordine ad" as an equivalent in the closely related passage, Nov. Org. II. 20. Such being the case with so great a writer, some little allowance may be made for difference of phrase employed by ordinary reasoners on Natural Theology. [42] By way of assisting the young student to a clear perception of what is involved in our Science, we illustrate its ground-work at considerable length in an additional note (marked F) on Teleology. [43] "Die rechte Erkenntniss kann sich erst dann einfinden wenn man weiss wie man erkennt d. h. wenn man seine eigene Natur begriffen hat." Page 5 of "Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache," von W. H. J. Bleek. [44] Macaulay's Essays. Ed. 1852, p. 401. [45] The division of Sciences into ancillary and "architectonic" is Aristotelian. It seems also founded in the nature of things. That real science tends to ground itself, strives after unification with kindred sciences, and, by so doing, rises into philosophy, is a fact visible in every line and letter of Faraday; and the general reader will find it exemplified throughout many fascinating pages of Dr. Tyndall's _Fragments of Science for Unscientific People_, particularly in his articles on Vitality, the use of the Imagination, and the life of Faraday, not to mention his own book on the great inductive philosopher. [46] It is interesting to compare the French-Scotch, and German-Scotch types of intellect. The former flowered in the Stuart men and in David Hume. The latter produced such diversely graven characters as Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Carlyle. Hume's natural acuteness received a subtle refinement from his Jesuit educators at La Flêche. But his intellectual bent and determination was given by the French parlour-philosophy, which heralded Rousseau and Robespierre. Hume's well-known face is a truthful index to his mind. If compared with Kant's, the lesson is obvious to even an unskilled physiognomist. Self-complacency beams over every feature. [47] No doubt the actual course of Hume's philosophising was determined by his zeal against everything he deemed superstitious. It was this dominant motive which made him less a calm philosopher than a skilful advocate, and laid him open to the influences of the French Deism of his period. How strong the tendency was we may infer from the following anecdote, which occurs in an account of his declining days by his friend and admirer, Dr. Adam Smith (pp. 47-50):-- Hume had been "reading a few days before, Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead: among all the excuses which are alleged to Charon for not entering readily into his boat, he could not find one that fitted him. He then diverted himself with inventing several jocular excuses, which he supposed he might make to Charon, and with imagining the very surly answers which it might suit the character of Charon to return to them. 'Upon further consideration,' said he, 'I thought I might say to him, Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition. Allow me a little time that I may see how the Public receives the alterations.' But Charon would answer, 'When you have seen the effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses; so, honest friend, please step into the boat.' But I might still urge, 'Have a little patience, good Charon; I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the Public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.' But Charon would then lose all temper and decency. 'You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy loitering rogue!'" [48] The "Treatise" was written during his youthful three years' residence in France, chiefly at La Flêche. Hume was twenty-seven years old when he published it. See "Life," pp. 6 and 7, and Burton's _Life of Hume_, Vol. I. pp. 57-124. [49] This work, the least known of all Hume's writings, but not the least original, is here cited in the not uncommon reprint 2 vols. 8vo, 1817. [50] It is curious to compare with both Hume and Bacon a brief dictum of S. T. Coleridge. Biog. Lit., last chapter. "Poor unlucky Metaphysics! And what are they? A single sentence expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science. [Greek: Gnôthi seauton]: et Deum quantum licet et in Deo omnia scibis. Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to a creature, and in God all things. Surely there is a strange--nay, rather a too natural--aversion in many to know themselves." "People," says Guesses at Truth, "can seldom brook contradiction, except within themselves." [51] Compare Advancement. B. II. with De Augmentis. B. III. Chap. iii. [52] De Augmentis. B. III. Chap. iv. [53] Advancement. B. II. (Ed. Basil Montague, Vol. II. p. 134). It is generally an advantage to quote from the enlarged Treatise, the De Augmentis, but in some places the Advancement is more simple and more full. [54] De Augmentis. B. III. Chap. iv. init. [55] De Augmentis. B. III. Chap. iv. Ellis and Spedding, iv. 362. [56] "The cone and vertical point" itself is "the work which God worketh,"--("summariam nempe Naturæ legem")--and "it may fairly be doubted whether man's inquiry can attain to it. But these three are the true stages of knowledge." De Augmentis, as before. So too in his _Valerius_ he speaks of this "highest generality of motion or summary law of Nature" as reserved by God "within His own curtain." [57] The great thinker speaks of it as made up in part "of the common principles and axioms which are promiscuous and indifferent to several Sciences;" in part "of the inquiry touching the operation of the relative and adventitious conditions of Essences, as quantity, similitude, diversity, possibility, and the rest." These he terms "Transcendentals," and they form a highest kind of philosophical arrangements, "with this distinction and provision, that they be handled as they have efficiency in Nature and not logically." His instances of common principles show how very vaguely this idea of the first division floated before his mind. Some of them are axioms mathematically certain and true in more than one province of philosophy, others are generalized truths obtained by experience or by comparison of objects diverse in appearance, but to his mind identical or very similar. Among these latter occurs his celebrated saying, that "the delight of the quavering upon a stop in music is the same with the playing of light upon the water";--a thought that haunts us by the seaside and on the shore of mountain lakes while listening to some sweet voice or clear-toned instrument. From his philosophical arrangements Bacon takes away inquiries into the One, the Good, and the Divine, and assigns them to Natural Theology. [58] Translation of the De Augmentis in Ellis and Spedding. Vol. iv. p. 346. [59] Nov. Org. E. and S., iv. 120. [60] De Augmentis. E. and S., iv. 362. [61] Kitchin. Nov. Org. p. 134. But Mr. Kitchin believes that could Bacon have witnessed the actual progress of science, it would have led him to recognize the usefulness of Final Causes, in the field of physical inquiry, and by way of illustration proceeds to quote "the famous case of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood from the consideration of the Final Causes of the valves in the veins of the animal body." (Ibid. p. 135.) [62] Mill's Analysis of the Human Mind. Vol. ii. pp. 310, 11. [63] In a volume of philosophical Romance some unknown Gulliver of the 19th century bestows many pages of pleasant satire on the Utilitarian principle, assumed as a maxim of social life and pushed to its ultimate conclusions. The author travels into the country of Nowhere (Erewhon), and learns by personal experience, first in a prison, and next in the house of a princely swindler Senoj Nosnibor (_alias_ Jones Robinson) those true laws of Sociology which best subserve the great final end--the noble object laid down by Mr. Mill. Ill-health is made criminal. Immorality counts as being out of sorts. The former is an object of penal justice, the latter of condolence joined with alterative discipline. The swindler sends for his family "straightener," and gets well amidst the sympathy of his friends; the consumptive is condemned to imprisonment and hard labour for the rest of his miserable days. And this is reasonable in itself, and justified by the results,--the Erewhonians possess the finest physique in the world, and rob and embezzle only when they happen to feel tempted. Our traveller himself, though full of old-fashioned moral prejudices, becomes convinced by contemplating the great final cause. "That dislike," he observes, "and even disgust should be felt by the fortunate for the unfortunate, or at any rate for those who have been discovered to have met with any of the more serious and less familiar misfortunes, is not only natural, but desirable for any society, whether of man or brute: what progress either of body or soul had been otherwise possible?"--and again, "I write with great diffidence, but it seems to me that there is no unfairness in punishing people for their misfortunes or rewarding them for their sheer good luck: it is the normal condition of human life that this should be done, and no right-minded person will complain at being subjected to the common treatment. There is no alternative open to us. It is idle to say that men are not responsible for their misfortunes. What is responsibility? Surely to be responsible means to be liable to have to give an answer should it be demanded, and all things which live are responsible for their lives and actions, should society see fit to question them through the mouth of its authorised agent. What is the offence of a lamb that we should rear it, and tend it, and lull it into security, for the express purpose of killing it? Its offence is the misfortune of being something which society wants to eat, and which cannot defend itself. This is ample. Who shall limit the right of society except society itself? And what consideration for the individual is tolerable unless society be the gainer thereby?" Erewhon, pp. 85, 86, and 100, 101. These sentiments considered, the reader will not be surprised to learn that our author, after a preparatory college training in the main doctrines of Self-interest--to wit, Evasion and Inconsistency--ends happily and usefully for himself by the successful abduction of his host's daughter--and by advertising a propaganda of certain European manners and observances unknown in Erewhon, to be carried out by kidnapping its healthy inhabitants and training them properly on our sugar plantations. What genuine disciple of Utilitarianism can conceive a brighter moral triumph than the union of private self-interest with the interested aims of a great sugar-growing people? Matter-of-fact Baconians may argue that Utility substitutes a misplaced and one-sided "why" for the "what" required by Moralists,--but our traveller's answer is plain--he argues on _data_;--given the premises--his is the inevitable conclusion. The defence of the former will be an interest to plenty of people--philosophic and unphilosophic. Leave the data to them; or if necessary make a further appeal to the religious aims of society. In Erewhon the great feminine Divinity Ydgrun is supreme; she is sovereign amongst ourselves also;--only we twist her name and call the Goddess "Grundy." [64] Preface to the Philosophical Works. pp. 56, 57. [65] Works. Vol. i. p. 167. [66] De Augmentis. iii. 5. init. [67] Dr. Whewell rises into poetry--yet is not more poetical than the philosopher on whom he thus comments. "If he" (Bacon) "had had occasion to develop his simile, full of latent meaning as his similes so often are, he would probably have said, that to these final causes barrenness was no reproach, seeing they ought to be, not the mothers but the daughters of our natural sciences; and that they were barren, not by imperfection of their nature, but in order that they might be kept pure and undefiled, and so fit ministers in the temple of God."--_Bridgewater Treatise._ B. III. Ch. vii. sub. fin. [68] It is a pleasure to confirm this paragraph by a definition of Design taken from a writer who must be frequently quoted in these pages, because his philosophy is of unusually wide scope, and embraces the mixed sciences employed by a natural theologian:--"We direct our thoughts to an action which we are about to perform; we _intend_ to do it: we make it our _aim_: we place it before us, and act with _purpose_ (_propositum_): we _design_ it, or mark it out beforehand (_designo_)."--_Whewell's Elements of Morality_, Book I., Chap. i., p. 7. [69] The Soul, p. 35. [70] _Right and Wrong_, p. 31. [71] Dans plusieurs passages de ses écrits, quand il insiste avec le plus de force sur l'impossibilité où est la raison humaine d'atteindre à la certitude, il semble tout près d'accepter la révélation divine comme source de certaines grandes verités que nous ne saurions repousser, quoiqu'il ne nous soit pas possible de les démontrer. Un soir qu'à Paris il soupait chez le baron d'Holbach, on vint à parler de la religion naturelle; Hume déclara que pour sa part il n'avait jamais rencontré d'athée. On sait la réponse de son hôte. "Parbleu, vous avez de la chance; pour la première fois vous en rencontrez dix-sept du même coup." Hume ne demanda point à être compté comme le dix-huitième. Dix ans auparavant, il se trouvait à Londres lorsque lui arriva la nouvelle de la mort de sa mère; son ami Boyle, frère du comte de Glasgow, témoin de la douleur profonde où le jeta cette perte, exprima le regret qu'il ne pût trouver de consolation dans les croyances chrétiennes sur la destinée des justes et sur la vie future. "Ah! mon ami," dit Hume en sanglotant, "je peux bien publier mes spéculations pour occuper les savans et les métaphysiciens; mais ne croyez pas que je sois si loin que vous le supposez de penser comme le reste des hommes." _Deux Mondes_, 1856, Vol. VI., pp. 118, 19. The latter anecdote will be found in _Burton_ at rather greater length. Vol. I. 293, 4. [72] These Dialogues were posthumously published in obedience to their author's will. Hume had kept the MS. by him for twenty-seven years, and had corrected it from time to time, yet had delayed publication from deference to the judgment of his friends. He directed his literary executor, Adam Smith, to publish the Dialogues within two years of his death; but, in consequence of Smith's distaste for the task, this duty devolved upon Hume's nephew. They were printed in 1779 translated into German in 1781, and commented on by Jacobi in 1787. Lowndes states that these Dialogues were not republished with the "Essays," but is mistaken in saying so. They appear at the end of Vol. II. in the 8vo. Edition of 1788. As this is not an uncommon or expensive book, I quote its paging. The quantity of matter extends only through 113 8vo. pages, and reference will not be difficult in any other Edition. It seems true that the Dialogues were withdrawn from later reprints of the Essays. They appear to have been considered particularly objectionable; but there is no doubt that they express Hume's most deliberate and matured convictions, and thus become to fair inquirers particularly valuable. It must, however, be added that Hume valued himself on a conservatism of opinion. Comparing, when forty years old, his recent Essays with his Treatise "planned before I was twenty-one and composed before twenty-five," he says, "The philosophical principles are the same in both; but I was carried away by the heat of youth and invention to publish too precipitately." _Burton_, I. 337. [73] There can be no doubt that Cleanthes is meant for the representative man, both from the tenor of the Dialogue itself and from a letter to Sir Gilbert Elliot, of Minto, given by _Burton_, I. 331-6. The following extracts may be acceptable to the reader:--"You would perceive by the sample I have given you, that I make Cleanthes the hero of the dialogue: whatever you can think of, to strengthen that side of the argument, will be most acceptable to me. Any propensity you imagine I have to the other side, crept in upon me against my will; and 'tis not long ago that I burned an old manuscript book, wrote before I was twenty, which contained, page after page, the gradual progress of my thoughts on that head. It began with an anxious search after arguments, to confirm the common opinion; doubts stole in, dissipated, returned; were again dissipated, returned again; and it was a perpetual struggle of a restless imagination against inclination, perhaps against reason.... I could wish Cleanthes' argument could be so analyzed, as to be rendered quite formal and regular. The propensity of the mind towards it,--unless that propensity were as strong and universal as that to believe in our senses and experience,--will still, I am afraid, be esteemed a suspicious foundation. 'Tis here I wish for your assistance; we must endeavour to prove that this propensity is somewhat different from our inclination to find our own figures in the clouds, our faces in the moon, our passions and sentiments even in inanimate matter. Such an inclination may, and ought to be controlled, and can never be a legitimate ground of assent. "The instances I have chosen for Cleanthes are, I hope, tolerably happy, and the confusion in which I represent the sceptic seems natural, but--si quid novisti rectius, etc.... He (Cleanthes) allows, indeed, in part 2nd, that all our inference is founded on the similitude of the works of nature to the usual effects of mind, otherwise they must appear a mere chaos. The only difficulty is, why the other assimilations do not weaken the argument; and indeed it would seem from experience and feeling, that they do not weaken it so much as we might naturally expect." It seems clear on the whole, that, so far as _Physico-Theology_ went, Hume was not ill qualified for a Natural Theologian. All the more so perhaps, because, while seeing the difficulties which attach themselves to this kind of argument, he pronounced it to hold conclusively at last. [74] The following quotation is from the _Treatise_ "composed before twenty-five":--"Nor does this reasoning only prove, that morality consists not in any relations, that are the objects of science; but if examined, will prove with equal certainty, that it consists not in any _matter of fact_, which can be discovered by the understanding. This is the _second_ part of our argument; and if it can be made evident, we may conclude, that morality is not an object of reason. But can there be any difficulty in proving, that vice and virtue are not matters of fact, whose existence we can infer by reason?... So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compared to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind: and this discovery in morals, like that other in physics, is to be regarded as a considerable advancement of the speculative sciences; though, like that too, it has little or no influence on practice." _Treatise_, Book III., part 1, Vol. II., 170, 1. This 3rd Book of the _Treatise_ was not printed till Hume was in his 30th year; and he felt some hesitation respecting the latter paragraph. "Is not this," he asks Hutcheson, "laid a little too strong? I desire your opinion of it, though I cannot entirely promise to conform myself to it. I wish from my heart I could avoid concluding, that since morality, according to your opinion, as well as mine, is determined merely by sentiment, it regards only human nature and human life.... If morality were determined by reason, that is the same to all rational beings; but nothing but experience can assure us that the sentiments are the same. What experience have we with regard to superior beings? How can we ascribe to them any sentiments at all? They have implanted those sentiments in us for the conduct of life like our bodily sensations, which they possess not themselves." (_Burton_, I. 119.) The paragraph was, however, published; and helped by consequence to foster in its author's mind that Utilitarian theory of morals respecting which many late writers have been only Hume's copyists. In this very _Treatise_ he did in fact apply that theory to the most important of Social questions (see same Bk., Pt. II. Sec. 12, more especially p. 299), and was thus led into lax conclusions respecting those bonds between Man and Woman which underlie the other foundations of Society. Hume shares this blame with his disciples; for leading Utilitarians are apt to shew by their own domestic relations that the principle, _when applied_, results in maxims lower than our present English tone of thought upon this subject. But let us suppose that Hume had lived to analyze Rousseau's Confessions. Would he not have urged with the force of truth, that to animalize a Man is to destroy his Manhood, to weaken his judgment and impair his Moral sense? Would he not have argued from Rousseau the depraved boy, to Rousseau the shopman and footman, and pointed out that in such cases Truth, Honesty, and Gratitude become mere names and shadows?--No one could have replied that Hume was wrong in fact and experience, but some might have said that _all_ which lowers the supremacy of the Moral sense lowers the Manhood of Man. As Hume admitted the fact of a Moral sense, he might possibly have felt the cogency of this argument. [75] No one who reads Hume's account of his own motives on various occasions will think it untrue to say that his judgment was largely influenced by his vanity. Compare for example his well-known letter to Dr. Blair of December 20th, 1765, with another to the same, dated 1st July, 1766;--the first a panegyric on the "celebrated Rousseau," the second a fierce invective against that "blackest and most atrocious villain." Who can help seeing that the motives of the eulogy are derived from a series of self-gratulations;--while the cause of the invective is a sharp wound given to the philosopher's self-love? [76] In the _Inquiry concerning Human Understanding_, Section XI., he puts this case: "As the universe shows wisdom and goodness, we infer wisdom and goodness. As it shows a particular degree of these perfections, we infer a particular degree of them, precisely adapted to the effect which we examine. But farther attributes or farther degrees of the same attributes, we can never be authorized to infer or suppose, by any rules of just reasoning." The argument of this section upon which Hume's limitations are based, is put into the mouth of a representative Epicurus; it is acute even to extreme subtlety, but it is also suicidal. The restraints applied to what he explains as the argument from effects to cause, and conversely down again from cause to other effects, cannot be maintained without dealing a death blow at the Inductive Philosophy. How little do we know of the material Universe, yet we apply the principle of gravitation to the Whole, seen and unseen. By its aid we find masses of radiant matter previously unknown, and predict events long before they are phenomenally apparent. The vast power of _extending_ knowledge which the Inductive principle asserts, will occur for our investigation in Chapter IV. Another Epicurean position contained in this same Section XI. has been quoted in a previous note, together with Hume's own reply to it; see pp. 101, 2 _ante_. A criticism of Hume's Tenth and Eleventh sections occupies a long note appended by Lord Brougham to his "Discourse on Natural Theology"--a volume I suppose accessible to almost all students of the science. [77] The word Creation must here be construed strictly, so as to signify a true Beginning;--the idea that is of a law-governed _materies mundi_, a substantial force, and movement evoked into primary Existence. The prospect of final change yet to be, is thus similarly connected by a living philosopher (Helmholtz) with the history of our world's Past:-- "We estimate the duration of human History at 6,000 years; but immeasurable as this time may appear to us, what is it in comparison with the time during which the earth carried successive series of rank plants and mighty animals, and no men; during which in our neighbourhood the amber-tree bloomed, and dropped its costly gum on the earth and in the sea; when in Siberia, Europe, and North America groves of tropical palms flourished; where gigantic lizards, and after them elephants, whose mighty remains we still find buried in the earth, found a home? Different geologists, proceeding from different premises, have sought to estimate the duration of the above-named creative period, and vary from a million to nine million years.----The time during which the earth generated organic beings is again small when compared with the ages during which the world was a ball of fused rocks. For the duration of its cooling from 2,000° to 200° Centigrade the experiments of Bishop upon basalt show that about 350 millions of years would be necessary.----And with regard to the time during which the first nebulous mass condensed into our planetary system, our most daring conjectures must cease. The history of man, therefore, is but a short ripple in the ocean of time.----For a much longer series of years than that during which he has already occupied this world, the existence of the present state of inorganic nature favourable to the duration of man seems to be secured, so that for ourselves and for long generations after us we have nothing to fear. But the same forces of air and water, and of the volcanic interior, which produced former geological revolutions, and buried one series of living forms after another, act still upon the earth's crust. They more probably will bring about the last day of the human race than those distant cosmical alterations of which we have spoken, forcing us perhaps to make way for new and more complete living forms, as the lizards and the mammoth have given place to us and our fellow-creatures which now exist. "Thus the thread which was spun in darkness by those who sought a perpetual motion has conducted us to a universal law of nature, which radiates light into the distant nights of the beginning and of the end of the history of the universe. To our own race it permits a long but not an endless existence; it threatens it with a day of judgment, the dawn of which is still happily obscured. As each of us singly must endure the thought of his death, the race must endure the same. But above the forms of life gone by, the human race has higher moral problems before it, the bearer of which it is, and in the completion of which it fulfils its destiny." Helmholtz, _Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects_, p. 191, seq. The distinguished German had just before observed, "Even though the force store of our planetary system is so immensely great ... still the inexorable laws of mechanics indicate that this store of force, which can only suffer loss and not gain, must be finally exhausted." On the subject of such vast cosmical changes, the reader may like to peruse the remarks of _Littré_ in his most recent volume--"Les choses, ou, pour mieux dire, nos choses sont d'hier, dût cet hier comporter de prodigieuses durées. "Cette nouveauté est un témoignage que notre monde, notre univers, auront une fin. Ce qui a commencé doit finir, la raison le dit, et toutes nos connaissances physiques le confirment. Le soleil et les étoiles se refroidissent incessamment, versant dans les espaces une chaleur qui ne leur revient jamais. Quelque chauds qu'ils soient, ils le sont chaque jour un peu moins, le calorique s'y épuisera; ils s'éteindront, comme déjà leurs planètes se sont éteintes. Que deviendront ces masses animées d'un mouvement rapide? Nul ne peut le dire. Mais il suffirait d'un choc entre elles pour y transformer un prodigieux mouvement en une prodigieuse incandescence, et y renouveler un cycle de chaleur et d'expansion. "Ce serait se perdre en vaines et gratuites hypothèses, que de spéculer sur ce que deviendra notre univers quand il aura pris fin, comme de spéculer sur ce qu'il fut avant qu'il eût pris commencement." Littré, _La Science_, pp. 560, 1. There are thinkers who believe that these cycles, immeasurable to Man, took their governing laws from a supreme Designer. They will be aided by Helmholtz and Littré in shaping their ideas of His far-reaching wisdom and power. There are also thinkers who find within their own inward Being a consciousness of kinship with the Source of Causation, so infinitely beyond cycles apparently infinite. How great then the value of human Spirits bearing His likeness, and with it a promise of surviving the period when our world's cycles shall vanish away in Space--to be replaced by other hereditary cycles, or to be remembered no more for ever! [78] This article has been lately reprinted in a volume of "Critiques and Addresses," and Leibniz's censure of Newton will be found on p. 323. It may be convenient for some readers to be informed that the Correspondence between Clarke and Leibniz to which I have referred will be found at the end of Erdmann's Opera Leibnitii (Berlin, 1840), a portable and useful Edition. The sentences quoted by me are on page 747. [79] J. Müller. [80] Kant. [81] Philosophy of Discovery, Chap. XXX. 23, pp. 369-70. [82] It is necessary to observe the Professor's limitations. [83] They have been noted before. In this place it is necessary to examine the following instances. [84] Critiques, p. 306. [85] Lay Sermons, p. 373. [86] Critiques, p. 281. [87] Ibid. 349. CHAPTER III. CONDITIONS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. "The words which the great German poet put into the mouth of Mephistopheles when describing himself to Faust, afford perhaps the most concise and forcible statement of what we may call the anti-scientific spirit:-- 'Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint, Dem alles, was entsteht, zuwider ist.' The true spirit of science is certainly affirmative, not negative; for, as I mentioned just now, its history teaches us that the development of our knowledge usually takes place through two or more simultaneous ideas of the same phenomenon, quite different from one another, both of which ultimately prove to be parts of some more general truth; so that a confident belief in one of those ideas does not involve or justify a denial of the others."--_Address of the President of the British Association_, 1873-4. p. 13. "Philosophy is but wise and disciplined thought upon the subjects on which all men think. The minds of men, left to their own natural working, will never cease to think on these things; and if Philosophy should cease to attempt to think wisely on them, she abandons her position as a guide. She has been to blame for the carelessness of her procedure, for the overweeningness of her pretensions. But the remedy is soberness, not scepticism. Is it, after all, an evil, that in some directions we fail to attain certainty by mere thinking?... As in nature, the picture you see is not broad light and dark, but a thousand tender tones and hues melting into each other, and vibrating together between the light and dark: so is the mind of man." Archbishop of York--on _The limits of Philosophical Inquiry_, pp. 25-26. "To the _knowledge_ of the most contemptible _effect_ in nature, 'tis necessary to know the whole _Syntax_ of Causes, and their particular _circumstances_, and _modes_ of action. Nay, we _know nothing_, till we _know ourselves_, which are the summary of all the world without us, and the _Index_ of the Creation." Glanvill, _Vanity of Dogmatizing_, Chap. xxii. Ed. 1. p. 217. "A branching channel, with a mazy flood? The purple stream that through my vessels glides, Dull and unconscious flows, like common tides: The pipes through which the circling juices stray, Are not that thinking I, no more than they: This frame compacted with transcendent skill, Of moving joints obedient to my will, Nurs'd from the fruitful glebe, like yonder tree, Waxes and wastes; I call it mine, not me." _Dr. Arbuthnot._ "'To the eye of vulgar Logic,' says he, 'what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Clothes. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition. Round his mysterious Me, there lies, under all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the Loom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for himself a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of Years. Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds and Colours and Forms, as it were, swathed in, and inextricably over-shrouded: yet it is skywoven, and worthy of a God. Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities? He feels; power has been given him to Know, to Believe; nay does not the spirit of Love, free in its celestial primeval brightness, even here, though but for moments, look through? Well said Saint Chrysostom, with his lips of gold, "the true SHEKINAH is Man:" where else is the GOD'S-PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in our fellow man?'"--_Sartor Resartus_, Chap. x. Pure Reason. SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER III. This Chapter may be characterized as a parallel between the difficulties alleged to be fatal against Theism, and the difficulties attaching to very various departments of human knowledge, embracing its most necessary and its most certainly accepted kinds. From this parallel the conclusion becomes evident, that whoever accepts one set of truths cannot be debarred by these or similar difficulties from accepting the higher truth likewise. That such an acceptance is natural and valid appears further evident from the fact that a knowledge of God belongs to the class of Practical beliefs, and is enforced by the same reasonable necessity. This topic forms the transition to Chapter IV. on "Our Reasonable Beliefs." The same inferences are also stated in a _destructive_ form, _e.g._, Should a thinker choose to deny the possibility of Theism, he ought (if consistent) to deny all those truths which stand or fall by a parallel set of reasonings. But by doing this he lands himself in a state of doubt, so extreme and thorough, that the whole Universe becomes a rayless blank. A corollary is added on Materialism. _Analysis_--Man the interpreter of Nature. Nature _gives_ by answering our interrogations; these must depend on our powers of assimilating knowledge. Some questions inevitable, _e.g._, What are the first grounds of Truth? Has Man any faculty of apprehending the Infinite? Can we know our own Personality or that of others?--or any Thing in itself? Inference against Scepticism based on human ignorance. Fallacy of the Unthinkable or Inconceivable. Ideas of Self and not-Self, inexplicable, yet undoubted. From things as they are, let us turn to things as they appear. How do we perceive, hear, see? Perception as an instrument of Intelligence, inscrutable. We acknowledge the insoluble mystery but accept the fact. Marvels of eyesight, and their problems. How much and what do we see? Comparison with Sound;--Form, Colour, Tone. Evidence on which we receive sense impressions. Comparison between healthy and diseased sensations,--between our organs of sense and those of animals. We soon arrive at a twilight territory of knowledge and can explain no more. Imperfections in our powers of Verification. How great is the subjective Element in our perceptions? Idealism,--most difficult to answer when most extreme. Philosophic denial of all proof of external things as distinguished from Mind (_e.g._, by Mill). Fact-knowledge, and absurdities involved in the ordinary method of defining and alleging Facts. Polar tendencies of Phenomenalism which take the shapes of Idealism and Positivism, resulting in Nihilism or Indifferentism. The end of these things! Mr. Herbert Spencer on Theology, compared with Mr. Huxley, and criticized by Mr. J. Martineau, who denies that the Unknowable can be any object of religious feeling,--a protest strongly maintained by Mr. J. S. Mill. The difficulties attending every kind of knowledge paralleled with the difficulties alleged against Theism. If the Inexplicable be also the Unknowable, there is an end to all knowledge. We cannot predicate veracity of our human Mind, we cannot even know that we know anything. Mr. J. S. Mill accepts Mind as an inexplicable Fact underlying all other Facts and Beliefs. We _must_ accept _ultimate_ Truths. Transition to Chapter IV. on the affirmative evidence for our Reasonable Beliefs. Corollary on Materialism. Far more difficult than its antithesis. Conclusion to be drawn from these difficulties. _Additional Notes and Illustrations._ A.--Account of some theories respecting our Personal Identity. B.--Helmholtz, Popular Lectures on Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision. C.--Helmholtz on Specialties of Sensibility. D.--Popular account of Pure Idealism with critical remarks. E.--On the Relations of Fact and Theory. F.--On the "Unknowable." G.--Mr. J. S. Mill as an Independent Moralist. _Additions to Corollary._ Note H.--Archebiosis, or Spontaneous Generation. I.--On Materialism. CHAPTER III. CONDITIONS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. Is the great Book of Nature--the world we live in--a closed or open book to Man? On this question all have thought often,--and many have written much,--students--men of science--religious teachers--poets, and philosophers. We ask this question of ourselves variously circumstanced, and under various impulses. We ask it if, like Æschylus' watchman, we contemplate "The congress of the nightly stars Bright potentates, set proudly in the sky." Or when we sail upon a sea made solemn by its vastness, dying in far distance, with no boundary except itself, as each swelling wave rises against the sky. We ask it, on some stately mountain top looking down over light and shadow,--over the rest and the motion of the landscape. More earnestly still, perhaps, while from the depth of a twilight valley we admire the sunset lingering upon inapproachable alpine snows;--rosy heights unveiling their loveliness, yet soon to be hidden till the Light of this lower world shall shine afresh amongst their clefts and pinnacles. And who is not in earnest, as sunset and sunrise remind him how the majestic clock of Time moves on? Yonder glorious luminary has warmed with form and life countless organisms, scattered over mountain summits, in ocean depths, through wild savannahs and forests;--organisms throughout regions of earth, water, air, so remote and inaccessible that their wonderful excellence of beauty has never been beheld by Man's perishable eye. Knowing, as we cannot but know, how soon our own eyelids must close beneath the sun, we yearn within our soul, longing for a truer insight into the great Universe above and beyond us; and for a firmer feeling that we ourselves are an imperishable part of it. Somewhere in this Universe, must surely be contained things brighter and better than those we now possess. Else, why is it clothed so lavishly with half-revealed charms, adapted to touch our most delicate sympathies, to win us from our worse selves, and allure us on like willing captives to its loveliness? Awakened in our senses, awakened in our souls, we desire to know, to feel, and to attain;--these three impulses become our fixed and enduring aspirations. But, how? We all remember that Undine sought a soul and found a sorrow;--a sorrow the more intolerable, because through its burden she first realized her hard-earned dower of coveted immortality. Yet, as she truly says, every creature cannot but strive after that which is naturally higher than itself. _One_ secret of progress we soon discover. What Nature can give us depends on what she can tell us. And here is a prevailing motive for the endeavour to unclose fair Nature's book. _Another_ step in thought is early taken in our day, though the civilized world was slow in reaching it. We soon perceive that Nature's answers must catch their tone and compass from our interrogations. In numerous sciences, this axiom carries the whole theory and practice of experiment;--that grand distinction between Bacon's inductive process, and the induction of the ancient world. In other walks of inquiry, intellectual and moral, the same truth has grown up and blossomed with a ruling idea of the crucial or prerogative question: slow in being framed, and difficult often in the asking, but, when asked, certain to elicit a reply. A _third_ postulate is also quickly apparent. Our inquiries must be subject, for utility's sake, to our power of assimilating knowledge. And thus our faculty for asking questions is governed by our faculties for apprehending answers. The _last_ and paramount requirement is _forced_ upon us. Beyond and over all, comes the pressure of our own need and private anxiety. There are many truths which we discern afar off, like features of a smiling land of promise; and, knowing that they must become one day the heritage of mankind, we tend towards them without haste, yet without forgetfulness, and in this temper of mind wait contentedly. But, there are some truths for which we cannot afford to wait. They concern our destinies too closely; they are too near our hearts; too influential on our lives and happiness. The old question asked in the youth of human philosophy, is the one we all begin by asking in our first confidence and eagerness of pursuit. Ask it in what words we may, it always comes to much the same thing; and if we could answer it, we should answer all questions in one. For, though we clothe our query with various shapes, and seldom put it in the form following, its true meaning is, "what are the realities of the Universe, and what the essential ground of all we see and think?" It is always worth a thinker's while to look this human problem more than once in the face. Suppose a faculty[88] for such insight granted, it must be different in kind, rather than degree, from our logic of ordinary life. It cannot proceed discursively, abstracting, generalizing, connecting, deducing. It must know--or look at its object directly, just as genius knows, images and conveys to other minds, not through a train of explanatory definition, but by kindling within them a spark of its own light. If there be such a faculty, it will work, (as Aristotle[89] says of the Supreme Intellect,) by what seems to us most like an act of touch; a figure half-shadowed out when we say we grasp or apprehend a truth; and much as St. Paul speaks, in bidding men to seek and feel after and find the Lord. We are not all conscious of such a faculty. But if dim to some, is it certainly dim to all? Did Plato see farther than Herschel could when he burst the barriers of the sky? Did Schelling at any time behold what Hamilton pronounced invisible?[90] Or again, if not actually ours now,--if those who have asserted it have spoken in error,--is there a hope that in the Future of Man individual or collective, he will ever grow up to it? The thought is not unknown to physicists as well as moralists. In both camps hopeful minds have conceived the possibility. And, _then_ Mankind will look the secret of the Universe face to face. Meanwhile, thinking men have laid siege to the absolute Truth by aid of such powers as they commonly call into action. For centuries past, the nature of things in themselves,--and along with (or perhaps above) all other natures, the "_Self_" within every man has been among the most fascinating of objects pursued by human thought. Yet, how far do we really know the life throbbing in every pulse? Can we tell the secret of our own individuality? We feel it every day;--it endues us with a separate existence, distinctly several, and apart from others, and so intensely vivid to ourselves, that we seem in our own eyes like small centres of the Universe, with men and women,--nay, worlds and stars,--revolving round us.[91] Yet, strange to say, our bodies are at all times undergoing change, sufficient in a few years to eliminate their present frame, and remould a future compound of gradually assimilated elements. And it seems stranger still, that while the law of Change rules supreme in these fabrics,--(built to be continually dissolved and continually built again),--each rude mark and scar maintains its place; no old wound forgets to ache; no cicatrice even, nor superficial blemish, dies quite away. We are always changing, always being transformed; yet, to each of our bodies continues its one individual configuration; within each of our minds its self-collection, its memories, its expectations, and its individual consciousness.[t] Weighing these inconsistencies together, shall we say that, in any proper sense, we _know_ our own selves? And, if not, can we expect truly to know the _self_ of anything? May we not travel further, and inquire whether we can conceive a _self-ness_ of any kind,--whether the very idea is not to us absolutely inconceivable? And, when this question is answered as it must be answered, need we feel surprised if we fall short of conceiving the self-subsistent God? At what value, therefore, shall we rate sceptical arguments drawn from our failure; and resting on the fallacious consequence, that the inconceivable (or unthinkable as some prefer to call it) is likewise the impossible?[u] That a fallacy really lurks beneath these words,--that the contrary is true, we know as a matter of fact.[92] We entertain really no doubt whatever of our own continued sameness, and individual existence. We are quite sure that our _self-ness_ has, gone on throughout the years of our natural life. How it first became clear to our inward sense, is a point confessedly disputable. Some suppose that it existed as a principle of consciousness,--a kind of primordial instinct in our minds. Others--that our internal impressions, one and all, formed a panoramic scene; impressions from without and impressions from within evenly painted on the retina of the mental eye. Time and comparison were needful to give us the true distinction. Those who think thus usually take another step; and add that _resistance_ to our _self-ness_ first informs us of its being. There is resistance to a muscular sense, somewhat akin to touch, but specialized to feel the kind of impact given by things impenetrable. There is also a resistance which thwarts our desires, endeavours, and determinations. Be this as it may, we never doubt our own identity of being; we never doubt the _other-ness_ and _outer-ness_ of beings like ourselves, and of objects beyond number. Yet, that which makes ourselves and them, what we and they are,--_our_ self-ness and _their_ self-ness--raises a question we cannot answer; here is, we feel, a something which overpasses our means of investigation. Men, however, do not stay to discuss such questions, or to test the origin and limits of intellectual conceptions before accepting the fact. They do not even ask whether Philosophical victory sits on the banner of Idealism, pure or constructive; Realism materialistic or natural;--or whether it crowns any other imaginable variety of cosmological theorem. We are perfectly sure of our facts; and no array of possible difficulties whatsoever can prevail to shake our assurance. Let us leave for the present, in its native shadows, the central point of our own self; the original centre of our earliest apparent universe. Yet, if we cannot _know_ this first growing-point of our individual life, it may be useful to inquire what can we know _about_ it? can we learn, for example, how that inner vitality, once begun, is maintained and fed?--By a process of receiving into itself, (we are told), the aliment which flows through our senses. We are also told, (as appeared in the last chapter), how very requisite is a knowledge of _natural_ processes. Let us, then, look at this process of sense-alimentation, narrowing the problem as much as possible. We have already cut off _one_ end of it--the germ-point of the _self_-stimulated; and will now cut off _another_ piece--the assimilation of mental ideas when elaborated. We simply ask how does this food from without, get _into_ us? The widest avenue of entrance is proverbially our sense of eyesight. Its information, (as people in general agree, from Horace down to Mr. Mill), being gathered through many definite impressions, and received from all distances, is at once the most significant, and the most commanding. The first step is clear. We see by impinging rays of light,--movements in a luminiferous ether, making images on the sensitive network of the eye; a circumstance ascertained by the same sense of sight which receives the image. From this delicate surface, begins a second series of movements;--they take place this time in an organized nerve-material, and are carried, like telegraph-currents, to the Sensory. Arrived there, we may next suppose that they excite some new motions, or corpuscular changes. Do we know--_can_ we know any more? Is the grammar or dictionary written which translates them into the language of the mind; or teaches us how we have, since our infancy, worked a perpetual miracle of speech respecting each of them? The eye, as an optical instrument,[v] is a marvel of science displayed; the eye as an instrument of intelligence, especially of human intelligence, is a marvel of inscrutable mystery. The mysteries of every-day life are the last things dreamed of in every-day philosophy. When we wake up to their existence, it is astonishing to find how continually, without being able to explain things, we can feel, and know them;--know them that is in the sense of acting intelligently (without theorizing) upon them. The example we have taken, teaches us several good and important lessons. There is in it much we can understand; much that we cannot understand; and a twilight territory between the intelligible and the non-intelligible. All three are, of course, mixed together when we speak of sight,--in itself, a matter of every-day experience. So far as the mechanical construction of an optical chamber goes, everything seems obvious. We can, likewise, perceive how well contrived is the apparatus for washing and wiping the outside transparent surface. Also, the value of its arched hedge against irritants dropping upon the eyeball from above; and of the arrangements for altering both axis and focus instantaneously. But what does this instrument enable us to see? _Not_ the rays of light themselves,--only objects which they illuminate. The space traversed by rays from all suns and all stars, remains itself unseen. The ether which fills space is invisible,--yet its motions make the light of the world.[93] Then, too, the nervous screen on which these ray movements are received, is not sensitive to all transmitted undulations. Red excites the optic nerve by striking it with four hundred and seventy-four _millions of millions_ of wave-impacts in a single second. Violet strikes it in the same time with six hundred and ninety-nine _millions of millions_ of impulses.[94] These two colours are the extremes of the light octave. In an octave of sound, the highest note vibrates twice as quickly as the lowest. So too, the shortest wave of violet is half the length of the longest red wave, and its motion is twice as rapid. But the curious point is that the human ear receives eleven octaves in the scale of sound;[95]--the human eye has a range over only one octave in the scale of light. Our remarks have carried us over the borders of the twilight territory,--a circumstance we may ascertain by putting into words what we think we know, and our reasons for thinking that we know it. If the eye be in focus, (but not otherwise), a line of light--that is to say moving imponderable matter of extreme tenuity--so passes through its transparent liquids as to strike a sensitive spot, and there produce what is called an image. We apprehend in our minds this image-producing function as a relation between light and the effect realized. A relation definite and exact,--in scientific language a "constant"; which we can formulate into optical laws, and thus express with useful nicety. Taking advantage of the laws thus obtained, and employing that light-power which everywhere blesses our world, we reproduce the _like_, image upon a screen. Its likeness we gather from comparison, by looking into an eye from without. Both images, thus seen by us, are in point of fact similar sensations. A philosophic reader may at once perceive what the Idealist will infer respecting this act of comparison. Neither image--on retina or on screen--exists apart from the eye. So far as we know, if there were no eyes there would be no images; and some writers (_e.g._, Schleiden) have positively affirmed that without eyes all would be, not only to us, but _in itself_, darkness;--the world absolutely void of Light. But the truth may be summed in a sentence. Light is not for the eye in the same sense that the eye is for light. Light is for other things besides. It exerts its activity on life, animal and vegetable;--on inorganic substances;--and in other ways likewise.--Going no further than our screen, we can so manage matters as to engrave and otherwise fix the image thrown upon it;--in other words our moving line of imponderable matter will produce further effects, chemical and mechanical, visible and palpable. Proceeding to a cross-examination of the knowledge with which we have credited ourselves, our next business is to try whether we can verify the objectivity of our optical image. Now it impresses sight in two respects,--as superficial form--and as colour. The family of forms is, we are aware widely connected. Sound evokes them. Draw a violin bow across a string stretched over finely silted sand, and the different notes will be correlated by a diversity of shapes,[96] into which the sand will arrange itself. Therefore, we ought to find means of verifying Form without much difficulty. Indeed we do so every day satisfactorily; our hands are perpetually demonstrating the general accuracy of our eyes, and even those delicate instruments our finger-ends, do not always add much to the information sight has given us. But about colour? Distinct colour-waves have (as we said before) distinct velocities, and are therefore objectively distinguished even in the inorganic universe. They also act differently upon the growth of animals and plants,--and other distinctions might be added. The _sensation_ is, however, our point,--the special thing called colour both by careful speakers and in child parlance,--what do we really know about this? Little indeed except as an impression received by sight. The man born in complete blindness taking a piece of red cloth to examine, described the fabric minutely; but, when asked if he could say anything about its redness, likened that "hue angry and brave" to the sound of a trumpet. A simile most conclusive,--suggested probably by his having often heard of certain "scarlet-coated gentry";--and proving beyond doubt that colour is non-existent in the sensory of a person affected from birth by a deep-seated lesion. To one less thoroughly blind, spectra are possible, and red light may be produced under pressure. It thus appears, that colour must be perceived by a nervous _substratum_, called the rod and cone layer; and hence we explain our power of distinctly seeing the blood-vessels of the retina lying immediately before that structure.[97] These curiosities, of vision shew that our powers of verifying shape are superior to our powers of verifying colour;[98] add, too, that the latter sensation, (as an idealist might maintain,) is known to be sometimes unreal, since it occurs without a coloured object. We can produce it, for instance, by gazing at the sun--a phenomenon mentioned by Aristotle. But then, this ideal sense-affection ranges with a variety of others, which taken together constitute a very much wider law. Not to mention many superinduced mental states, we see light under the influence of a touch or blow,--of electricity,--of chemicals, such as narcotic medicines, which attack the nervous system. We hear sound under like appliances stimulating the auditory nerve. And the whole of these affections are to be explained by another Aristotelian doctrine, extended and pushed to its consequences. Special senses have their own proper faculties, and when called into action each exerts its power within its special province. Had Aristotle dissected out nerve-fibres, he might have discovered the larger empire of specialty now known to our anatomists.[99] Idealism easily widens its doubt, to correspond with the dimensions of the wider nervous law. Does not an aptitude for special impressions, so stringently determined as to translate the antecedent "blow" into the consequent, "light" or "sound," disqualify our senses for giving evidence respecting supposed facts of the outer world? As for the "distinctive impressibility of the eye," as Mr. Bain[100] describes colour, it need not be held real except for our own sensorium,[w] and if colour be a questionable reality, other alleged realities become questionable too. The world we live in, may be a totally different world from what we are taught, generation after generation, to believe it. Who can lay down the limits of what our minds create for themselves outside us?[101] The mental disease of the madman causes his eye to see that which is not. Guilt and sickness fill bedchambers with unreal spectres. Putting disease aside, and taking the case of healthy eye and healthy mind, it is confessedly difficult to define the exact province of each. A boy couched by Cheselden[102] saw all things in one plane; there was no perspective, and objects in the room seemed to touch his eyeballs. The mind creates perspective, how much then may it not create? The mind also refuses to surrender its own associations at the bidding of optical laws. Mr, Wheatstone's ingenious instrument called the Pseudoscope, brings into play laws which reverse the impressions of solidity and hollowness. A person looking through it steadily at the face of a statue sees a hollow mask. The convexity of feature is gone, and a concave set of features (representing the bust reversed) is perceived in its stead. But, let the same person gaze through his pseudoscope ever so long at the face of a human being, and he will look for a like reversal in vain. The flesh and blood features refuse to change;--in other words, the mind refuses to yield its _long-accustomed_ impression.[103] If these things and others like them are fairly considered, what becomes of our readings in the unclosed book of Nature? The nature we see is our own thought reflected back again. Nature's answers take not only tone and compass, but meaning and utterance from our own interrogations. We think that we are assimilating knowledge, when we are actually engaged in manufacturing aliments to suit our own intellectual digestions. The most inward of all things,--our essential _self_,--at once retired into shadow when we pursued it; and now, in trying to show how _self_ is fed by substance from without, we have learned to suspect that all its food is unsubstantial.[x] We may henceforth consider ourselves face to face with Sphinx; and it is well to take the true measure of her lineaments. If the above reasoning be sound, to know, is to make a mirror and reflect ourselves back from it. To verify, is to put ourselves in new postures before our infallible mirror. Each fresh item of induction, is a freshly reflected phantom. At all events, the contrary position will never be established. Ignorant as we are, respecting the true centre of our mental firmament, we must necessarily be always more ignorant respecting all _possibilities_ which seemingly outlie its glowing horizon. No one who rationally weighs the worth of a fact, or who decomposes it into its elementary constituents, will ever be absurd enough to imagine that he can disprove the ideal theory by proving the truth of its opposite. The strongest strain of Idealism comes upon the _last_ sentence. Some years ago, English philosophers had agreed in the conclusion that all debates must for the future be settled by an appeal to facts. Could there be a more happily chosen ground for arbitration?--or one better suited to the calibre of everybody concerning whose business-like reflections we might say, with King Henry,-- "His thinkings are below the moon"? Some inquiring spirits preferred "law," but then they agreed with all others, (except transcendentalists,) that a law to be valid must also be a fact. A belief in this settlement still pervades most non-philosophic circles. A fact is now-a-days an infallible remedy for the disturbed mind; just as once "the sovereign'st thing on earth Was parmaceti for an inward bruise." A mind too disturbed to abstain from logical litigation when this receipt is administered, must certainly be afflicted with monomania. Nobody, of course, (whether Idealist or Transcendentalist,) need feel much aggrieved by being called mad. At some time or other, it is the common lot of all, from a murderer proud of being caught red-handed in our day, to a Jewish Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee, long ago departed to his rest. Besides, some madnesses are so fortunate as to justify themselves, an event now happening to Idealists.[104] In Germany, France and England, the persuasion gains ground that no tasks are so difficult as first to define, and secondly to establish a fact. Now the task of a Natural Theologian, is to establish, (if he can), the greatest and most solemn of all facts. In order to do his work honestly, he must ascertain as far as possible the conditions of proof, the ground on which fact-knowledge reposes. And it will be admitted that the problem of evidence raised by Idealism, is difficult, crucial, and underlies all other problems. "The most fundamental questions in philosophy," says Mr. Mill, "are those which seek to determine what we are able to know of external objects, and by what evidence we know it."[105] This field of inquiry is therefore of the most supreme interest to us. Idealism possesses an additional attraction for any one who argues under a belief in the final victory of truth. Both sides of the argument may be placed in high relief, without incurring the imputation of bad faith, or worse morality; and thus Idealism furnishes what used to be sought for during the days of tournaments,--a strictly neutral, ground. In this ordeal let no one think a single effort directed "To crush a butterfly or brain a gnat." Reasoners on "hard texts" seldom commit any error between premises and conclusion;--granted the former, the other will surely follow. Most oversights occur--or are slipped in--over the first postulates.[106] These generally appear very simple and very true, and pass unquestioned. Yet, no primary truth can ever be very simple to man, else why so many conscientious doubters? What indeed can seem more _simply_ true than the admission of a fact? Yet facts are often inspissated theories, while many theories are merely explained facts. One of the greatest authorities on Inductive Philosophy writes thus (Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Ed. 2. Vol. I. p. 45)--"We are often told that such a thing is _a Fact_; A FACT and not a Theory, with all the emphasis which, in speaking or writing, tone or italics or capitals can give. We see from what has been said, that when this is urged, before we can estimate the truth, or the value of the assertion, we must ask to whom is it a Fact? what habits of thought, what previous information, what Ideas does it imply, to conceive the Fact as a Fact? Does not the apprehension of the Fact imply assumptions which may with equal justice be called Theory and which are perhaps false Theory? in which case, the Fact is no Fact. Did not the ancients assert it as a Fact, that the earth stood still, and the stars moved? and can any Fact have stronger apparent evidence to justify persons in asserting it emphatically than this had?" The generality of English jurymen might be expected to give an affirmative verdict. For have they not seen with their own eyes the Sun rise up in the East, ascend to the top of the sky, and go down in the West? And is not seeing, believing? The question, what elements are required to yield the product of trustworthy perception, phenomenon, or fact, is investigated by Dr. Whewell through several pages preceding the one from which we have quoted. After discussing it at length, he writes (p. 42): "And thus, we have an intelligible distinction of Fact and Theory, if we consider Theory as a conscious, and Fact as an _un_conscious inference, from the phenomena which are presented to our senses." The subject is in itself so singularly interesting that a few more extracts are added in our Additional Notes.[y] Let the reader, while perusing them, remember that Idealism once so sovereign in its empire, is only the other pole of a line of thought which just now happens to be in the ascendant. Both poles strongly resemble half-truths. And what is more delusive in evidence than a half-truth, or more perilously sophisticating to the mind of him who utters it? The thorough-paced Idealist deals with the presentations of his inner consciousness, precisely as the Positivist deals with the presentations of his outer senses. They are _his_ phenomena, his facts. Beyond the circumstances of their inward occurrence and succession he knows and can know nothing. You may arrange them into series of antecedents and consequents,--and then the observation becomes a law,--a law of association, uniform order, or necessary connection: whichever you may choose to call it. In one respect, he has an advantage over the Positivist. No thinker equidistant from both, is likely to deny that primary facts are for every man, the phenomena most immediately apparent to his own consciousness. Amongst ordinary men, however, the reasoning Idealist seldom appears; the Idealist in feeling and temper is by no means rare. A man weary and worn by sorrow or old age, thinks and speaks of his life as very like a dream. And numbers who have exhausted the strength of self-controlling will, loiter along their way, regardless whether a moving panorama on each hand is or is not, an unreality. Like travel-tired travellers down the Danube, or the Rhine, they interweave scenes bright and dark, as they float by, in one endless train of dimly felt reverie. The same characteristic holds good in regard to many a Positivist. Very few people have ever examined those iron wheels, on which the conclusions of Positively-inclined writers seem to run so rapidly. They may be flawed--they may be true--hardly any one has thought of sounding them. But common life has its Positivism, as well as its Chemistry; and the Positivism of common life is everywhere. It saves labour,--you may take facts as you find them. It troubles no one,--a Pyrrhonic posture is the easiest of attitudes. It frees busy people from moral anxieties, ideal terrors, the shadows of futurity. In short, to men of the world it is neither more nor less than Indifferentism. The comparison between these two Nihilistic tendencies might be pushed farther, but it has been carried far enough for our purpose. Both sorts, when viewed as principles of practical life, coincide in yielding the conclusion we now wish to deduce. It is folly to be deterred from the pursuit of ultimate truth, by any amount of speculative difficulty whatsoever. And the reason is plain. Practical truths--the beliefs which affect our hearts and lives--are always ultimate truths. To give them up, is to give up our highest and best,--perhaps our all. It is worse than useless to quail before intellectual obstacles. The Difficult soon begins to appear the Impossible. And soon the result ensues, which might naturally be expected. Is it possible to imagine any discouragement heavier, than the feeling that we can effect little to acquire a knowledge of truth, goodness, and God;--a feeling, that do what we will, all we want most--all that is truly Divine--must remain to us a darkness or a dream? Let any man think in his heart, that what ought to rule his life, and raise him higher than his lower self, is a secret unknowable, and he loses the fear of doing wrong;--for how can he help it?--and the hope of a brighter and better future;--for how shall he attain it? Then, he sits down to wrap himself in cynical self-sufficingness. Inevitable ignorance is soon developed into intellectual Pessimism. The death of hope and fear, makes the man himself a moral Pessimist. Our conscience, sympathy, devotion, happiness in higher and in lower things alike,--if unstirred by vivid emotions--must become dull and blunted. Next follows "The waveless calm, the slumber of the dead;"-- a state of suspended animation, broken only by fierce stimulants--the galvanisms of, our lower life. These are succeeded, in due course, by spasmodic susceptibilities, which demand at no distant day the anodyne and the narcotic. And-- "Oh, that way madness lies!"-- Therefore we repeat it,--and it cannot too often or too earnestly be repeated,--let no man excuse himself from the pursuit of practical truth[z] by any amount of speculative difficulty whatsoever. It would be a false optimism to say there is no difficulty in thinking truly;--to represent its difficulties as trifles;--or to forget the painful fact that they beset our age of cold erudite criticism, like pitfalls in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. But, must not all things really great and good be toilsome to men who are neither very good nor very great? And have we not, every one of us, who tries to be good, our proper fields of hard yet repaying work? The bee gathers honey where one idle schoolboy sees only thorns and briers--and where another sucks poison. In our days, Doubt is thorough. So thorough, that it soon ceases to be doubt, and the mind passes quickly from its dim twilight to a rayless blank. Mr. Herbert Spencer puts the case of Theology as follows (First Principles p. 43): "Criticising the essential conceptions involved in the different orders of beliefs, we find no one of them to be logically defensible. Passing over the consideration of credibility, and confining ourselves to that of conceivability, we see that Atheism, Pantheism, and Theism, when rigorously analysed, severally prove to be absolutely unthinkable." These three conceptions the writer does in fact analyse after his own fashion,--briefly first, pp. 30-36,--and further on argues the whole question _in extenso_. The result, of course, is that all three "beliefs" must finally be abandoned. What then becomes of the Absolute ground, or First Cause of all things? Spencer is too clear-sighted not to acknowledge that there must in reason be a First, and an Absolute. "M. Herbert Spencer," says Ravaisson,[107] "en proclamant la grande maxime que nous ne connaissons rien que de relatif, a fait cependant une réserve importante. L'idée même du relatif, remarque-t-il, ne saurait se comprendre sans celle à laquelle elle est opposée. Et nous concevons, en effet, au delà de toutes les relations de phénomènes, l'absolu: c'est ce quelque chose qui est placé au delà de toute science, et qui est l'objet de la religion; quelque chose seulement de mystérieux, d'obscur, sur quoi on ne peut avoir, selon M. Spencer, aucune lumière." The last negative clause is amply justified on p. 113 of "First Principles." "By continually seeking to know, and being continually thrown back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may keep alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as The Unknowable." And this closing word becomes with Spencer, the constant name of a Power, the consciousness, of which is "manifested to us through all phenomena."[108] Such a position, maintained by such a writer, has of course met with ample consideration. Mr. Huxley appears to have arrived at a somewhat similar conclusion. Of Religion he says,[109] "Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action and interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism. With these, and their relative merits and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my purpose to say, that if the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it is because the theology of the present has become more scientific than that of the past; because it has not only renounced idols of wood and idols of stone, but begins to see the necessity of breaking in pieces the idols built up of books and traditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs, and of cherishing the noblest and most human of man's emotions, by worship 'for the most part of the silent sort' at the altar of the Unknown and Unknowable." Concerning this general idea (or negation of Idea) Mr. J. Martineau has made antagonistic observations, by way of criticism on Mr. Spencer's book. "To say," he writes,[110] "that the First Cause is wholly removed from our apprehension is not simply a disclaimer of faculty on our part; it is a charge of inability against the First Cause too.... And in the very act of declaring the First Cause incognizable, you do not permit it to remain unknown. For that only is unknown, of which you can neither affirm nor deny any predicate; here you deny the power of self-disclosure to the 'Absolute,' of which therefore something is known;--viz., that nothing can be known," And again with much force,[111] "You cannot constitute a religion out of mystery alone, any more than out of knowledge alone; nor can you measure the relation of doctrines to humility and piety by the mere amount of conscious darkness which they leave. All worship, being directed to what is _above_ us and transcends our comprehension, stands in presence of a mystery. But not all that stands before a mystery is worship."[aa] Mr. Mill (doing battle with another antagonist) denies every attribute claiming faith and worship, to the idea of a _morally Unknowable_ God. The passage occurs in his Examination of Hamilton, pp. 123-4. "If, instead of the 'glad tidings' that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive, exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that 'the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving' does not sanction them; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him."[ab] Now, suppose that instead of siding on this occasion with Mill and Martineau, we were to accept the alternative offered by Spencer and Huxley. Would this surrender of Natural Theology--or rather of all Theology--necessitate in reason any _other_ vast surrender also? We have already answered in the affirmative. The surrender would penetrate every field of knowledge and of thought. We have already shewn this. For, the thread binding the present section into a connected whole runs thus: Survey the conditions of interrogating, _first_, nature; _secondly_, our own highest nature; _next_, our senses; _finally_, our consciousness; and _add_ to them the enormous difficulties which attend every step taken in compliance with those indispensable _conditions_. Indispensable, that is, to our knowing anything, of any sort, in any way whatsoever. You have, then, no right to isolate Theism. It is false logic, to speak of the intellectual difficulties attaching to our apprehension of the Deity, as if they were substantial objections. In this respect, Theism stands within the same category of speculative perplexity, and reasonable necessity, as do other supreme truths.[112] Put the case to the judgment of Reason, once for all. If we agreed to accept Herbert Spencer's position, we should consent to deny that anything can be known of an Absolute. And the denial would proceed upon _this_ maxim:--"whatsoever is inexplicable is also unknowable." Consider, now, what other ultimate truths would fall into the same tomb-like Category. We must silence all human utterance respecting all first grounds;--our own individuality;--and every object of reason which becomes inconceivable, when we attempt to define it by the processes of ordinary logic. All utterance respecting our own senses and sensations;--our own existence, as beings distinct from a world of beings and things really existing outside us. In fine, we could never know that we _know_ either anything or nothing; for, we should have silenced the deepest of all utterances,--_the_ one upon which all truth and reason depend. We should have relegated our Mind along with our God, to the same abysmal gulf of the Unknowable. Henceforth, we could predicate of Mind nothing essential to purposes of knowledge,--and least of all essentials,--Veracity. Mr. Mill closes his laborious endeavours to explain our natural belief in Mind as follows: "The truth is, that we are here face to face with that final inexplicability, at which, as Sir W. Hamilton observes, we inevitably arrive when we reach ultimate facts; and in general, one mode of stating it only appears more incomprehensible than another, because the whole of human language is accommodated to the one, and is so incongruous with the other, that it cannot be expressed in any terms which do not deny its truth. The real stumbling-block is perhaps not in any theory of the fact, but in the fact itself. The true incomprehensibility perhaps is, that something which has ceased, or is not yet in existence, can still be in a manner, present: that a series of feelings, the infinitely greater part of which is past or future, can be gathered up, as it were, into a single present conception, accompanied by a belief of reality. I think, by far the wisest thing we can do, is to accept the inexplicable fact, without any theory of how it takes place; and when we are obliged to speak of it in terms which assume a theory, to use them with a reservation as to their meaning."[113] Two pages further he ingenuously adds: "I do not profess to have adequately accounted for the belief in Mind." In other words, the perplexities remain on Mill's system as they do on all systems. But the Belief and the Fact remain likewise. It is the same with our belief of other ultimate facts. We live an individual life,--we know not what. We see and perceive,--we know not how. Yet such are the facts, and we thoroughly believe and act upon them. The pivot on which these and similar beliefs turn is a subject of the greatest interest and importance. On this same pivot turns our primary affirmative Argument for Natural Theism. To establish it will be the purpose of the next Chapter, and a succession of affirmative arguments, separate but convergent, will occupy the remainder of this Essay. * * * * * COROLLARY:--If any reader of these pages has felt the fascination of some one among the many materializing hypotheses now in vogue, let him remember that, in fair debate, Materialism can never have the slightest chance against Idealism. All materializing theories labour under an enormous weight of unverified postulates. They set out from neither the most _natural_, nor yet the _surest_, sources of our knowledge. Naturally, we start from _self-ness_, and learn to put outer things and beings in opposition to our own primary self-consciousness. In after life, when we ask _why_ we are sure of any kind of knowledge; the primary truths upon which _all_ our reasonings proceed, are always the presentations of our own mind. If we proceed to analyse accepted relativities, we soon perceive that Mind enters into our facts, and also into our sense-presentations. In particular, an examination of the noblest of all senses--the sense of sight--will convince any careful analyst that such is undeniably the case. The reader may recal Mr. Mill's words,[114]--"I do not believe that the real externality to us of anything, except other minds, is capable of proof." "For ourselves," says Professor Fraser, "we can conceive only--(1) An externality to our present and transient experience in _our own_ possible experience past and future, and (2) An externality to our own conscious experience, in the contemporaneous, as well as in the past or future experience of _other minds_"[115] In this view Mr. Mill (who quotes Fraser), entirely acquiesces, and in this same spirit he writes, "Matter may be defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation;"[116]--and adds that he can accept no other definition. Whether the reader can or cannot define Matter otherwise; he will, at all events, perceive that the Materialist assumes as _his_ primary postulate, that which is by no means _the_ primary fact accepted by Mankind. He starts with taking Matter for granted;--but, if he inquires, he will discover that Matter is known to him in the _second_ place only; he really _first_ knew Mind. When he questions sensation, or consciousness, he questions Mind; and, throughout his whole life, theoretical as well as practical, Mind is _nearer_ to him, and more _strongly_ evidenced, than any other "Possibility" whatsoever. Such, then, is the _first_ heavy burden of unauthorized postulation, which the Materialist's theory binds upon him. But, in the task of postulating without authority from Nature, it seems impossible to stop short. Mind, being an absolute necessity, must be got in some way--(from Matter of course)--evolved, correlated, secreted. No account is given _how_ Matter could have been thus transformed and glorified. Yet, in default of such account, it is impossible to divine _why_ that primary postulate ever existed at all. The highest attenuation of Matter can no more help to explain Life or Mind, than to say that brain, (deprived of its vitality,) is composed of cerebrin, lecythin, and cholesterin, explains its sensibility, and other vital and intellectual endowments. And we encounter the same unbridged gulf at every turn of the materialistic hypothesis. There is a wide gap between the inorganic world and all organisms, vegetable or animal. We are, however, told that when certain inorganic elements are combined, under certain conditions, they form protoplasm,--a substance manifesting phenomena of vitality. The elements are known,--the conditions are unknown,--and until protoplasm has been produced by a chemical experimenter, instead of within a living laboratory, we may safely believe that the unknown conditions form the essential cause of the production. And we are given to understand by Professor Huxley,[117] that on this subject speculation has been premature. The gap between Body and Mind is wider still. Body has its known properties,--measurable figure, weight, and other like specialties. Mind has its properties also,--such as intelligence, emotion, reason, will. _Thinking_ has never been shown to be a property of Body; nor have _weight_ and _measure_ been applied to Mind. The laws of each differ as decisively as their properties. Body obeys gravitation, cohesion, and chemical affinity. Mind has its laws of reasoning, mathematically, logically, analogically. Now, what resemblance is here visible?[118] Body cannot compel Will,--but is moved by it; and there is no more verisimilitude known to us of Body to Will, than there exists between the noble thought of a high-souled Man and the paving-stone he walks upon. The foregoing is, as every honest materialist will acknowledge, but a slight specimen of the many difficulties of Materialism. So little does any materializing process of "resolution" really resolve anything, that _any_--even the most plausible--can only be pronounced an abortive attempt to bring something near and familiar to us, out of something unknowably remote. The materialist's allegation is generally, that he wishes to accept as little as possible. But the accusation of the natural Theologian against Materialism, is that it accepts far too much. Mind being a necessary and indispensable fact, the one fact underlying all other facts,--whoever is bent on simplifying his beliefs, had better begin by believing in his own Soul. And if further bent on viewing all things as "resolvable," his surest wisdom will be to resolve Matter into Mind. It is really the easier alternative, and has a double merit,--it starts from the best-known fact, and it satisfies his desire for "simplification." At all events, the consequences resulting from Materialism, are too serious to permit a disregard of Probability. We must, surely, find and follow the very best guide we can:-- "These are no school-points; nice philosophy May tolerate unlikely arguments, But heaven admits no jests." Mr. Huxley,[119] who sees advantages (simplicity and unification) in employing a materialistic terminology, adds the very striking caution--"But the man of science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry, slides from these" (materialistic) "formulæ and symbols into what is commonly understood by materialism, seems to me to place himself on a level with the mathematician, who should _mistake_ the x's and y's, with which he works his problems, _for real entities_--and with this further disadvantage, as compared with the mathematician, that the blunders of the latter are of no practical consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism may paralyse the energies and destroy the beauty of a life." The words italicized are remarkable. The materializing _façons de parler_ do not embody a knowledge of "real entities" after all. And such is the language of one[120] who stands in the foremost rank of European Biologists. ADDITIONAL NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER III. A.--ACCOUNT OF SOME THEORIES RESPECTING OUR PERSONAL IDENTITY. In a sentence worthy of the pen of Glanvill or of Sir T. Browne, Locke remarked "The _Ideas_, as well as Children of our Youth, often die before us: And our Minds represent to us those Tombs, to which we are approaching; where, though the Brass and Marble remain, yet the Inscriptions are effaced by Time, and the Imagery moulders away. _The Pictures drawn in our Minds, are laid in fading Colours_, and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear." _On Retention_, B. II., chap. x. 5. This truly human feeling did not hinder Locke from writing (chap, xxvii.) on the subject of Self-ness in a manner which appeared to imply that Consciousness, or Consciousness _plus_ Memory "_made_" Personal Identity;--or to use Reid's words "whatever hath the consciousness of present and past actions, is the same person to whom they belong." Bishop Butler's strictures on the topic are known to most students: but, as Sir William Hamilton observes (Foot-note on Reid, pp. 350, 351), "Long before Butler, to whom the merit is usually ascribed, Locke's doctrine of Personal Identity had been attacked and refuted. This was done even by his earliest critic, John Sergeant, whose words, as he is an author wholly unknown to all historians of philosophy, and his works of the rarest, I shall quote. He thus argues:--'The former distinction forelaid, he (Locke) proceeds to make _personal identity in man to consist in the consciousness that we are the same thinking thing in different times and places_. He proves it, because consciousness is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to him, _essential_ to it.... But, to speak to the point: Consciousness of any action or other accident we have now, or have had, is nothing but our knowledge that it belonged to us; and, since we both agree that we have no innate knowledges, it follows, that all, both actual and habitual knowledges, which we have, are acquired or accidental to the subject or knower. _Wherefore, the man, or that thing which is to be the knower, must have had individuality or personality, from other principles, antecedently to this knowledge, called consciousness: and, consequently, he will retain his identity, or continue the same man, or (which is equivalent) the same person, as long as he has those individuating principles...._ It being then most evident, _that a man must be the same, ere he can know or be conscious that he is the same_, all his laborious descants and extravagant consequences which are built upon this supposition, that consciousness individuates the person, can need no farther refutation.' "The same objection was also made by Leibnitz in his strictures on Locke's Essay.... "For the best criticism of Locke's doctrine of Personal Identity, I may, however, refer the reader to M. Cousin's '_Cours de Philosophie_.'" One of Locke's arguments is worthy of attention from its oddity. He says (chap. xxvii. 20), "But if it be possible for the same Man to have distinct incommunicable Consciousnesses at different Times, it is past doubt the same Man would at different Times make different Persons; which, we see, is the Sense of Mankind in the solemnest Declaration of their Opinions, Human Laws not punishing the _Mad Man_ for the _Sober Man's_ Actions, nor the _Sober Man_ for what the _Mad Man_ did, thereby making them two Persons; which is somewhat explained by our Way of speaking in _English_, when we say, such a one _is not himself_, or is _besides himself_; in which Phrases it is insinuated, as if those who now, or at least, first used them, thought that _Self_ was changed, the _self_ same Person was no longer in that Man." It appears strange that so acute a writer should not have perceived the true consequences to be deduced from his observation. We never really treat a man who goes mad as becoming another personage. But if he has lost his self-control from causes by himself uncontrollable, we do not punish his criminalities, and we do divest him of his social powers; he can neither vote for Parliament, bequeath property, nor do many other acts, during the period of his affliction. But we use all means for his cure, and rejoice at his return to health and society. If a man "beside himself" were "a different person," then "tipsy he" would certainly not be "ipse he."--Yet the father of ethical science decided that the criminal drunkard deserves double meed of punishment. To Locke's theory of Personal Identity Hamilton dedicates one more note. He gives (_Reid_, p. 353), an extract from Lord Kames (_Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion_), who pronounces his own opinion and appends some unpublished remarks of Dr. Reid. "Mr. Locke, writing on personal identity, has fallen short of his usual accuracy. He inadvertently jumbles together the identity that is nature's work, with our knowledge of it. Nay, he expresses himself sometimes as if identity had no other foundation than that knowledge. I am favoured by Dr. Reid with the following thoughts on personal identity:-- "'All men agree that personality is indivisible; a part of a person is an absurdity. A man who loses his estate, his health, an arm, or a leg, continues still to be the same person. My personal identity, therefore, is the continued existence of that indivisible thing which I call myself. I am not thought; I am not action; I am not feeling; but I think, and act, and feel. Thoughts, actions, feelings, change every moment; but _self_, to which they belong, is permanent. If it be asked how I know that it is permanent, the answer is, that I know it from memory. Everything I remember to have seen, or heard, or done, or suffered, convinces me that I existed at the time remembered. But, though it is from memory that I have the knowledge of my personal identity, yet personal identity must exist in nature, independent of memory; otherwise, I should only be the same person as far as my memory serves me; and what would become of my existence during the intervals wherein my memory has failed me? My remembrance of any of my actions does not make me to be the person who did the action, but only makes me know that I was the person who did it. And yet it was Mr. Locke's opinion, that my remembrance of an action is what makes me to be the person who did it; a pregnant instance that even men of the greatest genius may sometimes fall into an absurdity. Is it not an obvious corollary, from Mr. Locke's opinion, that he never was born? He could not remember his birth; and, therefore, was not the person born at such a place and at such a time.'" When we come to Hume, the case is considerably altered. He opens the question after his own manner by asking _how_ the fact commonly stated can be; and using the difficulty of explaining this "how" as a sufficient objection against the fact asserted. "There are some philosophers," he writes (_Treatise_, B. I., Part iv., Sect. 6), "who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our _self_; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity.... "Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience, which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of _self_, after the manner it is here explained. For from what impression could this idea he derived?... If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives; since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot therefore be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and consequently there is no such idea.... For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call _myself_, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch _myself_ at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.... The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no _simplicity_ in it at one time, nor _identity_ in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is composed." It is curious that Hume wishing to represent Mind as a melting mist of successive perceptions, should be driven into the use of a word which implied a something continuing and permanent as affording the _stage_ on which all passing scenes called "impressions" are enacted. Hume next discusses the laws of association; and then proceeds (same Section sub fin.) "As memory alone acquaints us with the continuance and extent of this succession of perceptions, 'tis to be considered, upon that account chiefly, as the source of personal identity. Had we no memory, we never should have any notion of causation, nor consequently of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person. But having once acquired this notion of causation from the memory, we can extend the same chain of causes, and consequently the identity of our persons beyond our memory, and can comprehend times, and circumstances, and actions, which we have entirely forgot, but suppose in general to have existed. For how few of our past actions are there, of which we have any memory? Who can tell me, for instance, what were his thoughts and actions on the first of January, 1715, the eleventh of March, 1719, and the third of August, 1733? Or will he affirm, because he has entirely forgot the incidents of these days, that the present self is not the same person with the self of that time; and by that means overturn all the most established notions of personal identity? In this view therefore memory does not so much _produce_ as _discover_ personal identity, by shewing us the relation of cause and effect among our different perceptions. 'Twill be incumbent on those who affirm that memory produces entirely our personal identity, to give a reason why we can thus extend our identity beyond our memory. "The whole of this doctrine leads us to a conclusion, which is of great importance in the present affair, viz., that all the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties. Identity depends on the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity, by means of that easy transition they occasion. But as the relations, and the easiness of the transition may diminish by insensible degrees, we have no just standard by which we can decide any dispute concerning the time, when they acquire or lose a title to the name of identity. All the disputes concerning the identity of connected objects are merely verbal, except so far as the relation of parts gives rise to some fiction or imaginary principle of union, as we have already observed." If any one feels dissatisfied with these conclusions our author is ready with his apology--"The _intense_ view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty. "Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther." (Part iv., Section 7.) Is not this good-humoured? Is it not a piece of pleasant bantering, to be equalled only by certain French philosophers? The real conclusion, however, winds up his First Book and runs as follows:--"A true sceptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical conviction; and will never refuse any innocent satisfaction, which offers itself, upon account of either of them. "Nor is it only proper we should in general indulge our inclination in the most elaborate philosophical researches, notwithstanding our sceptical principles, but also that we should yield (sic) to that propensity, which inclines us to be positive and certain in _particular points_, according to the light, in which we survey them in any _particular instant_. 'Tis easier to forbear all examination and inquiry, than to check ourselves in so natural a propensity, and guard against that assurance, which always arises from an exact and full survey of an object. On such an occasion we are apt not only to forget our scepticism, but even our modesty too; and make use of such terms as these, _'tis evident_, _'tis certain_, _'tis undeniable_; which a due deference to the public ought, perhaps, to prevent. I may have fallen into this fault after the example of others; but I here enter a _caveat_ against any objections, which may be offered on that head; and declare that such expressions were extorted from me by the present view of the object, and imply no dogmatical spirit, nor conceited idea of my own judgment, which are sentiments that I am sensible can become nobody, and a sceptic still less than any other.[121] * * * * * It is obvious to remark that no amount of easiness would maintain most minds in this balanced position of the pleasant know-nothing man. The general tendency would be to acknowledge the negative side alone. And it would be well if an absence of serious convictions, seriously asserted, and acted on, did not gradually weaken the sense of Responsibility by making Truth appear indifferent because unattainable. We, however, are just now more concerned with two other equally obvious comments. One, that Hume appears to take for granted the point at issue. Suppose it for argument's sake to be true that impressions and ideas (as described by him) make up our whole ordinary consciousness; does this shew that no latent power or entity exists by which we _become_ conscious of those passing trains? When impressed by colours, are we conscious of an optic nerve, retina, crystalline lens and other instrumental powers of vision? Can we, if we try, perceive by sense the nerve-currents brainwards, or the sensory which receives and compares them? In both cases (eye and inward eye) pathology affords an evidence of consciousness which happy health refuses us. The brainsick sense sees colours and phantoms which are not--the disordered mind dwells on impressions and ideas absolutely unreal, and acts on them as stern realities. And thus our own purely subjective states reveal to us our own subjectivity. 'Tis so in fevers, in lunacies, in vices--'tis so to the drowning or the desperate man. These mournful changes which pass over ourselves issue from an interior activity of self-ness and form one of its commonest verifications. This first comment admits of extension. If we endeavour to introduce experiment (as well as experience) into Mental Science, must we not ask a previous question:--Shall this or that experiment be tried? In other words, by what inner law shall we shape our inquiries so as to gain useful facts for our intended induction?--Nay, we may further ask: What inner Being is to settle the questions, criticize them, and judge the final issue? And if we seem to see our way on these topics, we may feel pretty sure that whenever our psychology comes to practical trial, we proceed as being sure of a Self, more or less _self-conscious of Self_, and are quite confident that its self-ness will continue during the whole time of our investigations. Our second comment may be simply summed, but the consideration given to it ought to be minute and careful. Suppose instead of successive perceptions, impressions, or ideas, we substitute a succession of phenomena, and then apply to them Hume's line of thought, we have an acute statement of the modern teachings which relegate the noblest part of our Nature, our reasonings and our beliefs to the territory of the Unknowable. In a word, all knowledge thus seems to be gained by "looking on," none by "looking in." Truth within ourselves especially if it manifests a Truth above ourselves is made to appear hopeless. And so far does the process of Elimination extend, that principles involved even in our "looking on" must not be drawn out of their latency, for fear they should become accepted parts of knowledge. Let any thinker repeat with this substitution the Personal Identity argument in his own mind, and he will soon see what a shadow is cast over an infinitely wider world of thought.[122] The same process of repetition ought in fairness to produce another effect. Are not these philosophic _argutiæ_, these Pyrrhonic subtilties closely akin to the difficulties raised against _all_ first principles; and more particularly all Theistic principles? But does anybody on their account doubt his own Self-ness or Identity? Or does any one refuse to act on the supposition of _other-ness_, and _outer-ness_, or ignore his world of fellow-men and hard objectivities which press upon him from every side? Why then should anybody ignore on their account the great First-Cause? In the text of Chapter III. the elements of our reasonable belief in our own Personal self-ness and sameness have been shortly mentioned;--of such work-day belief, that is to say, as suffices for actual life, and gains from it, and throughout it, a perpetual verification. If any one wishes to go deeper than this, he must inquire upon what evidence first principles are accepted by reasoning men; what difficulties attach to such principles; and under what conditions these difficulties are held to be nugatory. This inquiry is troublesome but promises real satisfaction. We have not, therefore, declined it, as may be seen in the ensuing Chapter. One fact is manifest beforehand--that whatever evidence is presupposed valid by those first principles of every-day knowledge, may be safely presupposed, accepted, and reasoned upon, in the ground-work of Natural Theology. It was Hume's object to push his scepticism to its most extreme verge. Thus pushed, it "so wrought upon" him that he was "ready to reject all belief and reasoning" till a return to every-day life made his speculations appear in his own eyes "cold and strained and ridiculous." What then was the inference Hume himself intended? Which was really groundless--every-day belief or scepticism? Will his useful dilemma induce the reader to receive Kant's excuse for the celebrated doubter, when he bids us let the man alone because he is but trying the strength of human reason? At all events, Hume's way of stating his case seems to justify the old remark, that, while Superstition is refuted by Reason, Nature itself refutes the Sceptic. B.--EXTRACTS FROM POPULAR LECTURES, BY PROFESSOR HELMHOLTZ, ON THE RECENT PROGRESS OF THE THEORY OF VISION. "If now we compare the eye with other optical instruments, we observe the advantage it has over them in its very large field of vision. This for each eye separately is 160° (nearly two right angles) laterally, and 120° vertically, and for both together somewhat more than two right angles from right to left. The field of view of instruments made by art is usually very small, and becomes smaller with the increased size of the image. "But we must also admit, that we are accustomed to expect in these instruments complete precision of the image in its entire extent, while it is only necessary for the image on the retina to be exact over a very small surface, namely, that of the yellow spot. The diameter of the central pit corresponds in the field of vision to an angular magnitude which can be covered by the nail of one's forefinger when the hand is stretched out as far as possible. In this small part of the field our power of vision is so accurate that it can distinguish the distance between two points, of only _one minute_ angular magnitude, _i.e._ a distance equal to the sixtieth part of the diameter of the finger-nail. This distance corresponds to the width of one of the cones of the retina. All the other parts of the retinal image are seen imperfectly, and the more so the nearer to the limit of the retina they fall. So that the image which we receive by the eye is like a picture, minutely and elaborately finished in the centre, but only roughly sketched in at the borders. But although at each instant we only see a very small part of the field of vision accurately, we see this in combination with what surrounds it, and enough of this outer and larger part of the field, to notice any striking object, and particularly any change that takes place in it. All of this is unattainable in a telescope. "But if the objects are too small, we cannot discern them at all with the greater part of the retina. 'When, lost in boundless blue on high, The lark pours forth his thrilling song,' the 'ethereal minstrel' is lost until we can bring her image to a focus upon the central pit of our retina. Then only are we able to _see_ her. "To _look_ at anything means to place the eye in such a position that the image of the object falls on the small region of perfectly clear vision. This we may call _direct_ vision, applying the term _indirect_ to that exercised with the lateral parts of the retina--indeed with all except the yellow spot. "The defects which result from the inexactness of vision and the smaller number of cones in the greater part of the retina are compensated by the rapidity with which we can turn the eye to one point after another of the field of vision, and it is this rapidity of movement which really constitutes the chief advantage of the eye over other optical instruments.... "A great part of the importance of the eye as an organ of expression depends on the same fact; for the movements of the eyeball--its glances--are among the most direct signs of the movement of the attention, of the movements of the mind, of the person who is looking at us." _Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects_, pp. 212-214. The great German next proceeds to catalogue some principal defects of the Eye. 1. Chromatic aberration connected with 2. spherical aberration and defective centering of the cornea and lens, together producing the imperfection known as astigmatism, and 3. irregular radiation round the images of illuminated points. "Now," adds Helmholtz, "it is not too much to say that if an optician wanted to sell me an instrument which had all these defects, I should think myself quite justified in blaming his carelessness in the strongest terms, and giving him back his instrument. Of course, I shall not do this with my eyes, and shall be only too glad to keep them as long as I can--defects and all. Still, the fact that, however bad they may be, I can get no others, does not at all diminish their defects, so long as I maintain the narrow but indisputable position of a critic on purely optical grounds." (p. 219.) He then goes on to other faults. 4. Defective transparency. 5. Floating corpuscules (Muscæ Volitantes). 6. The "blind spot" with other gaps in the field of vision. "So much," he concludes, "for the physical properties of the Eye. If I am asked why I have spent so much time in explaining its imperfection to my readers, I answer, as I said at first, that I have not done so in order to depreciate the performances of this wonderful organ, or to diminish our admiration of its construction. It was my object to make the reader understand, at the first step of our inquiry, that it is not any mechanical perfection of the organs of our senses which secures for us such wonderfully true and exact impressions of the outer world. The next section of this inquiry will introduce much bolder and more paradoxical conclusions than any I have yet stated. We have now seen that the eye in itself is not by any means so complete an optical instrument as it first appears: its extraordinary value depends upon the way in which we use it: its perfection is practical, not absolute.... Wherever we scrutinise the construction of physiological organs, we find the same character of practical adaptation to the wants of the organism; although, perhaps, there is no instance which we can follow out so minutely as that of the eye. "For the eye has every possible defect that can be found in an optical instrument, and even some which are peculiar to itself; but they are all so counteracted, that the inexactness of the image which results from their presence very little exceeds, under ordinary conditions of illumination, the limits which are set to the delicacy of sensation by the dimensions of the retinal cones.... "The adaptation of the eye to its function is, therefore, most complete, and is seen in the very limits which are set to its defects. Here the result which may be reached by innumerable generations working under the Darwinian law of inheritance, coincides with what the wisest Wisdom may have devised beforehand. A sensible man will not cut firewood with a razor, and so we may assume that each step in the elaboration of the eye must have made the organ more vulnerable and more slow in its development. We must also bear in mind that soft, watery animal textures must always be unfavourable and difficult material for an instrument of the mind.... "But, apparently, we are not yet come much nearer to understanding sight. We have only made one step: we have learnt how the optical arrangement of the eye renders it possible to separate the rays of light which come in from all parts of the field of vision, and to bring together again all those that have proceeded from a single point, so that they may produce their effect upon a single fibre of the optic nerve. "Let us see, therefore, how much we know of the sensations of the eye, and how far this will bring us towards the solution of the problem." P. 226, seq. From the Professor's mention of "much bolder and more paradoxical conclusions," the final result of his next inquiry may be anticipated. Sensation is so far from making evident the truth of our visual knowledge that it increases our perplexities tenfold. "The inaccuracies," he tells us, "and imperfections of the eye as an optical instrument, and those which belong to the image on the retina, now appear insignificant in comparison with the incongruities which we have met with in the field of sensation. One might almost believe that Nature had here contradicted herself on purpose, in order to destroy any dream of a pre-existing harmony between the outer and the inner world. "And what progress have we made in our task of explaining Sight? It might seem that we are farther off than ever; the riddle only more complicated, and less hope than ever of finding out the answer. The reader may perhaps feel inclined to reproach Science with only knowing how to break up with fruitless criticism the fair world presented to us by our senses, in order to annihilate the fragments." (p. 269.) How triumphant does Idealism now appear! How little trustworthy that boasted sense of which mankind have constantly said, "seeing is believing," although an apostle and philosophers innumerable have put the two in opposition! Perhaps, however, instead of leading to a "triumph of Idealism," the paradoxes and incongruities--in a word, the vast accumulation of the Unknowable--belonging to eyesight _considered as a Sensation_, must be allowed to land us on the shore of a far-stretching Scepticism illimitable to the mind's eye. And this seems to be the eminent writer's own final opinion.[123] So, too, it will always appear when the case is fairly argued out; and that for the reasons adduced in our text. The course of argument there pursued was adopted before the Professor's book came to hand; but we have now added some extracts from his pages in the shape of footnotes, and have given references to other interesting topics touched upon by him. For our purpose, however, it is necessary in some degree to disregard the variety of those topics, and fix our attention upon the conclusive issue. It is plain, that respecting our senses, as well as our other primary sources of information, the limits of what we can completely explain are very narrow. Yet each for himself and all of us for our race must needs every day accept and act upon this limited and imperfect kind of knowledge about what most essentially concerns our actions as well as our speculations. Several strong examples of such incompleteness are given by Helmholtz in his scientific inquiry into the rationale of the visual sense-impressions. We observe, for instance, in his chapter on Sensation (p. 236 seq.) that all light-waves are the same in kind of movement, but differ in size as widely as the ripples on a sea-beach (round which happy children play) differ from the vast Atlantic ship-engulfing billows sixty or a hundred feet apart. All these undulations are similar in respect of reflection, refraction, interference, diffraction, and polarisation, as well as in their production of heat.[124] Now, it is the interpretation of such movements into its own language by which our eye gives us the sensation of colour. Yet this power of interpretation is curiously limited--it does not appreciate the gentler ripples of the light-waves--it does not reach to their mightier undulations. Consequently, there may be tender colour-delicacies adorning the Universe, completely incognisable by us, and there may be also glows and intensities of light-beams magnificently resplendent, and unspeakably grand in tone, of which we can through our visual apparatus form no possible conception. Thus, our eye translates some waves into a language which we call colour, but its scholarship is limited. A certain number of signs it catches and interprets, the rest lie altogether outside its ken. The Sun's softer light-harmonies, and his most awful emanations of beauty remain equally unknown. And another limitation has been imposed upon our optical apparatus. For a perception of heating powers belonging to colour-waves the eye refers us to the skin;--and as to their chemical powers we are only just now discovering the instruments fitted for their true appreciation. Skilful, too, and yet at the same time very skill-less, is the divination into sunlight given us by our human eyes;--sunlight, that is to say, as a general resultant in its whiteness. For, if our eyes, keen and susceptible to us perfect clearness, attempt to analyze white light into its factors and elements, their resolving faculty manifests still more blank inabilities. And they fail also in examining certain colours:-- "The most striking difference," writes Helmholtz, "between the mixture of pigments and that of coloured light is, that while painters make green by mixing blue and yellow pigments, the union of blue and yellow rays of light, produces white.... In general, then, light, which consists of undulations of different wave-lengths, produces different impressions upon our eye, namely, those of different colours. But the number of hues which we can recognise is much smaller than that of the various possible combinations of rays with different wave-lengths which external objects can convey to our eyes. The retina cannot distinguish between the white which is produced by the union of scarlet and bluish-green light, and that which is composed of yellowish-green and violet, or of yellow and ultramarine blue, or of red, green, and violet, or of all the colours of the spectrum united. All these combinations appear identically as white; and yet, from a physical point of view, they are very different. In fact, the only resemblance between the several combinations just mentioned is, that they are indistinguishable to the human eye. For instance, a surface illuminated with red and bluish-green light would come out black in a photograph; while another lighted with yellowish-green and violet would appear very bright, although both surfaces alike seem to the eye to be simply white. Again, if we successively illuminate coloured objects with white beams of light of various composition, they will appear differently coloured. And whenever we decompose two such beams by a prism, or look at them through a coloured glass, the difference between them at once becomes evident. "Other colours, also, especially when they are not strongly pronounced, may, like pure white light, be composed of very different mixtures, and yet appear indistinguishable to the eye, while in every other property, physical or chemical, they are entirely distinct." (pp. 239-241.) We may speak of visual Sensation, then, as a _limited_ power of _translating_ light. And what relation does visual _Perception_ bear to this Power? Probably the simplest way of expressing it, is to say that it is neither more nor less than the _translation of a translation_. The mind thus construes to itself what the visual sense is every moment busied with expressing in its own special language--the interpretation of movement, into colour, light and shadow. And from these data--these colours, lights and shadows, the mind draws its own inferences. Now these inferences thus drawn from preceding Sense inferences,--limited in range, as we have seen, and defective in analytic power;--these inferences, such as they are, constitute the boasted certainty of eyesight; and of all things apprehended by its means,--all --quæ sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus et quæ Ipse sibi _tradit_ spectator. It needs but a statement of the mode in which our final mind-interpretations are constructed,--of these translated translations,--obscure in grammar and imperfect in vocabulary--to prove how very difficult is the position of the Realist. In view of this Empire of the Unknowable proclaimed by Science over the surest of our perceiving powers, the firmest foundations of our experimental knowledge, Helmholtz suggests that his reader "may feel determined to stick fast to the 'sound common sense' of mankind, and believe his own senses more than physiology." (p. 270.) And such, no doubt, is the conclusion of the matter to the greater part of mankind. But we will in the first place prefer hearing the last word of the physiologist. From page 270 to page 313 of his work, he argues out the great question of _how_ we perceive under the full impression of its vast importance to psychology, metaphysics, and the first principles upon which all science and all reasonings repose. "We have," he says (p. 281), "already learned enough to see that the questions which have here to be decided are of fundamental importance, not only for the physiology of sight, but for a correct understanding of the true nature and limits of human knowledge generally." The Physiologist's last word is this--Sense impressions are signs, the meaning of which we learn inductively by a process of self education. "Illusions obviously depend upon mental processes which may be described as false inductions.... There appears to me to be in reality only a superficial difference between the 'conclusions' of logicians and those inductive conclusions of which we recognise the result in the conceptions we gain of the outer world through our sensations. The difference chiefly depends upon the former conclusions being capable of expression in words, while the latter are not; because, instead of words, they only deal with sensations and the memory of sensations. Indeed, it is just the impossibility of describing sensations, whether actual or remembered, in words, which makes it so difficult to discuss this department of psychology at all." (pp. 307, 8.) And again (p. 314), "There is a most striking analogy between the entire range of processes which we have been discussing, and another System of Signs, which is not given by nature but arbitrarily chosen, and which must undoubtedly be learned before it is understood. I mean the words of our mother tongue. "Learning how to speak is obviously a much more difficult task than acquiring a foreign language in after-life. First, the child has to guess that the sounds it hears are intended to be signs at all; next, the meaning of each separate sound must be found out, by the same kind of induction as the meaning of the sensations of sight or touch; and yet we see children by the end of their first year already understanding certain words and phrases, even if they are not yet able to repeat them. We may sometimes observe the same in dogs. "Now this connection between Names and Objects, which demonstrably must be _learnt_, becomes just as firm and indestructible as that between Sensations and the Objects which produce them. We cannot help thinking of the usual signification of a word, even when it is used exceptionally in some other sense; we cannot help feeling the mental emotions which a fictitious narrative calls forth, even when we know that it is not true; just in the same way as we cannot get rid of the normal signification of the sensations produced by any illusion of the senses, even when we know that they are not real. "There is one other point of comparison which is worth notice. The elementary signs of language are only twenty-six letters, and yet what wonderfully varied meanings can we express and communicate by their combination! Consider, in comparison with this, the enormous number of elementary signs with which the machinery of sight is provided. We may take the number of fibres in the optic nerves as two hundred and fifty thousand. Each of these is capable of innumerable different degrees of sensation of one, two, or three primary colours. It follows that it is possible to construct an immeasurably greater number of combinations here than with the few letters which build up our words. Nor must we forget the extremely rapid changes of which the images of sight are capable. No wonder, then, if our senses speak to us in language which can express far more delicate distinctions and richer varieties than can be conveyed by words." Finally (pp. 315, 16), "The correspondence, therefore, between the external world and the Perceptions of Sight rests, either in whole or in part, upon the same foundation as all our knowledge of the actual world,--on _experience_, and on constant _verification_ of its accuracy by experiments which we perform with every movement of our body. It follows, of course, that we are only warranted in accepting the reality of this correspondence so far as these means of verification extend, which is really as far as for practical purposes we need. "Beyond these limits, as, for example, in the region of Qualities, we are in some instances able to prove conclusively that there is no correspondence at all between sensations and their objects. "Only the relations of time, of space, of equality, and those which are derived from them, of number, size, regularity of co-existence and of sequence--'mathematical relations' in short, are common to the outer and the inner world, and here we may indeed look for a complete correspondence between our conceptions and the objects which excite them. "But it seems to me that we should not quarrel with the bounty of nature because the greatness, and also the emptiness, of these abstract relations have been concealed from us by the manifold brilliance of a system of signs; since thus they can be the more easily surveyed and used for practical ends, while yet traces enough remain visible to guide the philosophical spirit aright, in its search after the meaning of sensible Images and Signs." Let therefore this account of visual Perception be accepted by us, as it will probably be by three-fourths of scientific men throughout Europe. And, next, let us ask, as every real thinker will proceed to ask, on _what_ grounds of _certitude_ rests our assurance as regards the daily and hourly information received through this avenue of perception, reasoned and acted upon with unswerving confidence by us all? For an examination of the ground principle of Induction, the reader must be referred to our next chapter. But it is at once clear that no human _experience_ can possess the attribute of universality, otherwise it would cease to be human. We have then in this present appeal to the veracity of Experience, no _absolute_ knowledge to deal with, only knowledge as relative to mankind. Nay, we must go a little further still in our limitation, and say to the _generality_ of mankind. For our eyes do not all see perfectly alike--a North-American Indian sees what a Cockney cannot discover; the trained eye discerns differently from the untrained. On the differences of power in eye and ear rest the differences in many kinds of theorising--amongst which art-perceptions yield an obvious and familiar set of examples. And if we try for a more precise estimate of the value of our limited human relativity, and proceed by way of comparison between _our own_ diverse endowments, who shall venture to say that the eye of our body interpreted by our understanding, tells our inmost self more truly than the eye of our human soul, informing us directly of the facts of its intuitive vision? So far as our actual means of valuing these two modes of beholding can go, there is no knowledge so perfect as the product of pure intuition, the glorious fabric of Mathematical Science. And to pure Science it matters not whether the requisite Schematism is drawn upon a sheet of white paper or on the clear tablet of the imagining faculty of a philosopher. The purely inward view is in truth generally the farthest reaching, and the most unclouded. When, therefore, it is, and has been for centuries, apparent to the inmost eye of the generality of our race that there _really_ exists a spiritual world within themselves--above them, and in the far distant future beyond us all, permanent while we change, and the evidence of our own ultimate permanency,--such knowledge may undeniably be human, the very flower and distinction of our human nature; and it may on that account be received by us as true. If, again, our ordinary human soul is so far a Christian as to exclaim with Tertullian, "O good God," by what logical process shall we confute its utterance, while we maintain the utterance of our commonest sense-perceptions? That we all see in frames, that we all think in frames, no rational thinker or perceiver will deny. If, however, any of us chooses to be an Idealist or Nihilist, let him at least be consistent;--if he will assert the necessity of Doubt, let him maintain its empire by doubting his own assertion. But let no man think that Doubt leads him any whither except to an abnegation of thought, a mistrust alike of Sense and Soul, and an abdication of every human prerogative:-- "Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall, And universal Darkness buries all." So sang the witty rhymer, but we may add in prose that Doubt if thoroughly real, invariably commits suicide, and becomes first doubtful, after that, a non-entity at last. C.--HELMHOLTZ ON SPECIALTIES OF SENSIBILITY. The following passages from this interesting writer will be found in his Chapter "on the Sensations of Sight," between pp. 232 and 236. They will, it is hoped, be thoroughly intelligible if read in connection with the part of our last Chapter (pp. 158, 9) where a reference to this note was made. "The nerve-fibres have been often compared with telegraphic wires traversing a country, and the comparison is well fitted to illustrate this striking and important peculiarity of their mode of action. In the network of telegraphs we find everywhere the same copper or iron wires carrying the same kind of movement, a stream of electricity, but producing the most different results in the various stations according to the auxiliary apparatus with which they are connected. At one station the effect is the ringing of a bell, at another a signal is moved, and at a third a recording instrument is set to work.... Nerve-fibres and telegraphic wires are equally striking examples to illustrate the doctrine that the same causes may, under different conditions, produce different results.... As motor nerves, when irritated, produce movement, because they are connected with muscles, and glandular nerves secretion, because they lead to glands, so do sensitive nerves, when they are irritated, produce sensation, because they are connected with sensitive organs.... Whether by the irritation of a nerve we produce a muscular movement, a secretion or a sensation depends upon whether we are handling a motor, a glandular, or a sensitive nerve, and not at all upon what means of irritation we may use. It may be an electrical shock, or tearing the nerve, or cutting it through, or moistening it with a solution of salt, or touching it with a hot wire. In the same way (and this great step in advance was due to Johannes Müller) the _kind_ of sensation which will ensue when we irritate a sensitive nerve, whether an impression of light, or of sound, or of feeling, or of smell, or of taste, will be produced, depends entirely upon which sense the excited nerve subserves, and not at all upon the method of excitation we adopt. "Let us now apply this to the optic nerve, which is the object of our present enquiry. In the first place, we know that no kind of action upon any part of the body except the eye and the nerve which belongs to it, can ever produce the sensation of light. The stories of somnambulists, which are the only arguments that can be adduced against this belief, we may be allowed to disbelieve. But, on the other hand, it is not light alone which can produce the sensation of light upon the eye, but also any other power which can excite the optic nerve. If the weakest electrical currents are passed through the eye they produce flashes of light. A blow, or even a slight pressure made upon the side of the eyeball with the finger, makes an impression of light in the darkest room, and, under favourable circumstances, this may become intense. In these cases it is important to remember that there is no objective light produced in the retina, as some of the older physiologists assumed, for the sensation of light may be so strong that a second observer could not fail to see through the pupil the illumination of the retina which would follow, if the sensation were really produced by an actual development of light within the eye. But nothing of the sort has ever been seen. Pressure or the electric current excites the optic nerve, and therefore, according to Müller's law, a sensation of light results, but under these circumstances, at least, there is not the smallest spark of actual light. "In the same way, increased pressure of blood, its abnormal constitution in fevers, or its contamination with intoxicating or narcotic drugs, can produce sensations of light to which no actual light corresponds. Even in cases in which an eye is entirely lost by accident or by an operation, the irritation of the stump of the optic nerve while it is healing is capable of producing similar subjective effects. It follows from these facts that the peculiarity in kind which distinguishes the sensation of light from all others, does not depend upon any peculiar qualities of light itself. Every action which is capable of exciting the optic nerve is capable of producing the impression of light; and the purely subjective sensation thus produced is so precisely similar to that caused by external light, that persons unacquainted with these phenomena readily suppose that the rays they see are real objective beams. "Thus we see that external light produces no other effects in the optic nerve than other agents of an entirely different nature. In one respect only does light differ from the other causes which are capable of exciting this nerve: namely, that the retina, being placed at the back of the firm globe of the eye, and further protected by the bony orbit, is almost entirely withdrawn from other exciting agents, and is thus only exceptionally affected by them, while it is continually receiving the rays of light which stream in upon it through the transparent media of the eye. "On the other hand, the optic nerve, by reason of the peculiar structures in connection with the ends of its fibres, the rods and cones of the retina, is incomparably more sensitive to rays of light than any other nervous apparatus of the body, since the rest can only be affected by rays which are concentrated enough to produce noticeable elevation of temperature. "This explains why the sensations of the optic nerve are for us the ordinary sensible sign of the presence of light in the field of vision, and why we always connect the sensation of light with light itself, even where they are really unconnected. But we must never forget that a survey of all the facts in their natural connection puts it beyond doubt that external light is only _one_ of the exciting causes capable of bringing the optic nerve into functional activity, and therefore that there is no exclusive relation between the sensation of light and light itself." Some of the quotations just made direct attention to illusions of Sight which (as we have seen in our last note) Helmholtz elsewhere calls "false inductions." Now one curious fact relative to these impressions is that in many instances the objective consequent is due to a subjective antecedent. Some readers may like to peruse a short account of five variously caused sight-illusions taken from an Oration on _Positivism_ delivered by the present writer at St. George's Hall in May 1871. The particulars here given of the fifth illusion should be compared with the foot-note on page 158 _ante_. "I will mention five instances in which people believe they see something, and do not see it; in other words, the objective antecedent is wanting, and the impression is produced partly by the sensory apparatus, partly by the mind itself. As I describe these instances one by one, let my hearers ask themselves, How does this illusion come about? Is it produced by our optic instrument or by our mental activity? "First, then, Take a lighted stick, and whirl it rapidly round and round. You believe you see a circle of sparks--in reality it is no more than a simple train, and on a like illusion the Catherine-wheel is constructed. Again, put yourself in the hands of an optically inclined friend, and let him operate upon you thus. He shall place a cardboard down the middle axis of your face, quite close against your nose--one side of his board, say the right, coloured a brilliant red, the left a vivid green. After an instant or two let him suddenly substitute another board, white on both sides. Do my young friends guess what will follow? Your right eye will see green, your left red--the reverse of what they saw before; yet neither will see correctly, for both eyes are looking at uncoloured surfaces. "Thirdly, Watch the full moon rising--how large and round she looks, resting as it were upon that eastern hill, and seen amidst the tops of its forest trees! How much larger and broader than when she hangs aloft in upper sky! Has every one here learned the true reason why? If not, look at her through a slit in a card, and her diameter will be the same. "Fourthly, A schoolboy is crossing his bedroom in the deep dark night, anxiously hoping that his head may not come into collision with the bed-post. Though carefully and successfully avoiding it, he imagines of a sudden that the blow is imminent. Quick as thought he stops to save his head, and, behold, the room is as quickly filled with sparks or flames of fire. Another moment, and all becomes dark once more. I have heard many a schoolboy exclaim over this phenomenon, but never knew one who could explain it. Finally, did you ever, on opening your eyes in a morning, close them quickly again, and keep them shut, directing them as if to look straight forwards? Most persons of active nervous power, after a few trials--say a dozen, or a score--are surprised to see colours appear and flit before the sight. Some years ago, Germany's greatest poet tried, at the suggestion of her greatest physiologist, a series of experiments on these coloured images. He found that by an effort of will he could cause them to come and go, govern their movement, march, and succession. And this took place under no conditions of impaired sensation, nor any hallucination of a diseased mind. A thoroughly healthy will succeeded in impressing itself upon physical instruments, controlling their law, and creating at its own pleasure an unfailingly bright phantasmagoria. "Some here may, others may not, have apprehended the distinctions between our five cases. The first two are due to the sensory apparatus, its optical laws of continued impression and complementary colour. In the latter three, mind intervenes. The enlarged size of the moon occurs through rapid comparison, the fiery lights in a dark room through instinctive apprehension, both influences of mind on the sensory system. The fifth and most interesting of all is no bad example of interference between moral and material law. The will truly causative (you may remark) overrules the natural process of physical impression, alters it, and creates a designed effect. I wish I could induce my young friends to devise a number of experiments on similar mixed cases, and, having tried them, to dissect out their real laws. These sharpenings of the critical faculty are exceedingly useful--they cultivate clearness; and most people know that two-thirds among our mistakes in life are caused by confusion of thought. "Besides all other uses, such lessons teach at once the necessity, as we said before, of observing your own observations. And as, first, the real witness of every observation is our mind; every fact which comes through our bodily senses being to us a mental impression, it seems but common sense to hear above all things what mind has to say for and about itself. Then, secondly, where would be the benefit derived from our observations, if we could not reason upon them, or could place no confidence in our own reasonings? Yet the art of reasoning is so purely a mental process, that it can be represented by symbols as abstract and free from material meaning as if they were bare algebraic signs. Thirdly, in the most accurate of sciences mind extends our knowledge far beyond the circle of observation, and gives us axiomatic assurance of its own accuracy. Who ever saw, or ever can see, all straight lines in all conceivable positions, yet who doubts that throughout the whole universe no two straight lines ever did inclose or can inclose a space? And, fourthly, can it be a matter of indifference to any of us what evidence the mind offers concerning its own moral nature, and what is the value of that evidence, and the laws deducible therefrom? How true it thus appears that 'know thyself' lies at the root of all knowledge, and that the man who receives no witness from within can know nothing as he ought to know it!" D.--POPULAR ACCOUNT OF PURE IDEALISM WITH CRITICAL REMARKS. "A classification of systems of philosophy according to the cosmological conceptions governing them has actually been made. It is founded on a consideration of the differences among philosophers as to what that totality of existence is which is to be accepted as really vouched for by Mind. All agree, as we have said, that Mind is the sole voucher for anything; but philosophers are divisible into schools according to the various views they have taken of the constitution of that phenomenal Universe, that Cosmos, that total round of things, of which we have a recurring assurance in every act of perception, and which is orbed forth more or less fully for each man in his wider contemplations. "The popular or habitual conception of mankind in general is that there are two distinct worlds mixed up in the phenomenal Cosmos--a world of Mind, consisting of multitudes of individual minds, and a world of Matter, consisting of all the extended immensity and variety of material objects. Neither of these worlds is thought of as begotten of the other, but each of them as existing independently in its own proper nature and within its own definite bounds, though they traffic with each other at present. Sweep away all existing minds, and the deserted Earth would continue to spin round all the same, still whirling its rocks, trees, clouds, and all the rest of its material pomp and garniture, alternately in the sunshine and in the depths of the starry stillness. Though no eye should behold, and no ear should hear, there would be evenings of silver moonlight on the ocean-marge, and the waves would roar as they broke and retired. On the other hand, suppose the entire fabric of the material Universe abolished and dissolved, and the dishoused population of spirits would still somehow survive in the imaginable vacancy. If this second notion is not so easy or common as the first, it still virtually belongs to the popular conception of the contents or constitution of the Cosmos. The conception is that of a Natural Dualism, or of the contact in every act of perception of two distinct spheres, one an internal perceiving mind, and the other an external world composed of the actual and identical objects which this mind perceives. "On the first exercise of philosophic thought, however, this conception is blurred. An immense quantity of what we all instinctively think of as really existing out of ourselves turns out, on investigation, not to exist at all as we fancy it existing, but to consist only of affections of the perceiving mind. The redness of the rose is not a real external thing, immutably the same in itself; it is only a certain peculiar action on my physiology which the presence of an external cause or object seems to determine. Were my physiology different, the action would be different, though the cause or object remained the same. Indeed, there _are_ persons in whom the presence of a rose occasions no sensation of redness such as is known to me, but a much vaguer sensation, not distinguishable from what I should at once distinguish as greenness. And, as colour is thus at once detected as no external independently-existing reality, but only a recurring physiological affection of myself and other sentient beings like myself, so with a thousand other things which, by habit or instinct, I suppose as externally and independently existing. When I imagine the depopulated Earth still wheeling its inanimate rotundity through the daily sunshine and the nocturnal shadow, or one of its bays still resonant in moonlit evenings with the roar of the breaking waves, it is because, in spite of myself, I intrude into the fancy the supposition of a listening ear, and a beholding eye analogous to my own. It is only by a strong effort that I can realize that a great deal at least of what I thus think of as the goings-on of things by themselves is not and cannot be their goings-on by themselves, but consists at the utmost of effects interbred between them and a particular sentiency in the midst of them. But the effort may be made; and, when it is made repeatedly, in a great many directions, and with reference to a great many of the so-called properties of matter, the inevitable result for the philosophic mind is that the popularly-imagined substance of a real external world finds itself eaten away or corroded, at least to a certain depth. So far philosophers are agreed. It is when they proceed to consider to _what_ depth the popularly-imagined substance of the real external world is thus eaten away, or accounted for, that they begin to differ. "Some philosophers, departing as little as may be from the popular judgment, suppose that, however much of the apparent external world may be resolved into affections of the subjective sentiency, there still remains an objective residue of such primary qualities as extension, figure, divisibility, mobility, etc., belonging to external matter itself, and by the direct and immediate cognizance of which the mind is brought face to face with external substance, and knows something of its real goings-on. Philosophers of this school are known generally as REALISTS. More numerous, however, are those who, not allowing an objective and independent reality even to the so-called primary qualities of matter, but believing them as well as colour, odour, or savour, to be only affections of the sentiency, deny that the mind is in any sense brought face to face with real external things such as they seem in the act of perception. To thinkers of this school there has been given the general name of IDEALISTS. This broad distinction of Philosophers cosmologically into REALISTS and IDEALISTS is so far convenient enough. Cosmologically, or in respect of this present Universe of ours, with its dualism of Mind and Matter, every man must declare himself either a REALIST or an IDEALIST, if he understands the meanings attached to these terms. The distinction has reference solely to his notion of the so-called external or material world in its relations to the perceiving mind. If he abides, though only in part, by the popular conception, and regards the material world as a substantial reality independent of the perceiving mind, and which the mind, according to its powers, presses against and directly apprehends in every act of perception, then he is a REALIST. If, on the other hand, he cannot see that there need be asserted any external material world with such characters as we attribute to it, but supposes that our unanimous agreement in the imagination of such an external world is merely a habit of our own sentiency, projecting its own ideas or affections outwards, and giving them a body, then he is an IDEALIST." Masson, "_Recent British Philosophy_," pp. 58-64. Again p. 69, seq., "There is the system of _Constructive Idealism_. It may be so called to distinguish it from the more developed and extreme Idealism presently to be spoken of. According to this system, we do not perceive the real external world immediately, but only mediately--that is, the objects which we take as the things actually perceived are not the real objects at all, but only vicarious assurances, representatives, or nuntii of real unknown objects. The hills, the rocks, the trees, the stars, all the choir of heaven and earth, are not, in any of their qualities, primary, secondary, or whatever we choose to call them, the actual existences out of us, but only the addresses of a 'something' to our physiology, or eductions by our physiology out of a 'something.' They are all Thoughts or Ideas, with only this peculiarity involved in them, that they will not rest in themselves, but compel a reference to objects out of self, with which, by some arrangement or other, they stand in relation. Difficult as this system may be to understand, and violently as it wrenches the popular common sense, it is yet the system into which the great majority of philosophers in all ages and countries hitherto are seen, more or less distinctly, to have been carried by their speculations. While the Natural Realists among philosophers have been very few, and even these have been Realists in a sense unintelligible to the popular mind, quite a host of philosophers have been Constructive Idealists. These might be farther subdivided according to particular variations in the form of their Idealism. Thus, there have been many Constructive Idealists who have regarded the objects rising to the mind in external perception, and taken to be representative of real unknown objects, as something more than modifications of the mind itself--as having their origin without. Among these have been reckoned Malebranche, Berkeley, Clarke, Sir Isaac Newton, Tucker, and possibly Locke. But there have been other Constructive Idealists, who have supposed the objects rising in the mind in external perception to be only modifications of the mind itself, but yet, by some arrangement, vicarious of real unknown objects, and intimating their existence. Among such have been reckoned Descartes, Leibnitz, Condillac, Kant, and most Platonists. The general name 'Idealists' it will be seen properly enough includes both the classes as distinct from the Natural Realists, inasmuch as both classes hold that what the mind is directly cognizant of in external perception is only ideas. But, inasmuch as these ideas are held by both classes, though under divers hypotheses, to refer to real existences beyond themselves, and distinct from the perceiving mind, the thinkers in question may also properly enough be called Realists or Dualists, though not 'Natural' Realists or Dualists. They occupy a midway place between the Natural Realists and the philosophers next to be mentioned. "There is the system of _Pure Idealism_, which abolishes matter as a distinct or independent existence in any sense, and resolves it completely into mind. Though this system is named in the scheme, for the sake of symmetry, and as the exact antithesis to Materialism, it is difficult to cite representatives that could be certainly discriminated from the merely Constructive Idealists just mentioned on the one hand, and from the school of philosophers next following on the other. Fichte is, perhaps, the purest example." _Ibid._ pp. 69-72. For perfect clearness we must put together two other passages from Professor Masson's interesting volume:-- "There is the system of _Nihilism_, or, as it may be better called, _Non-Substantialism_. According to this system, the Phænomenal Cosmos, whether regarded as consisting of two parallel successions of phænomena (Mind and Matter), or of only one (Mind or Matter), resolves itself, on analysis, into an absolute Nothingness,--mere appearances with no credible substratum of Reality; a play of phantasms in a void. If there have been no positive or dogmatic Nihilists, yet both Hume for one purpose, and Fichte for another, have propounded Nihilism as the ultimate issue of all reasoning that does not start with some _à priori_ postulate." Masson, "_Recent British Philosophy_," p. 66.... If any one could assert "There is no Absolute," surely it might be the Nihilist, who has analysed away both Matter and Thought, and attenuated the Cosmos into vapour and non-significance. Yet, from the abyss of a speculatively reasoned Nihilism more void than Hume's, Fichte returned, by a convulsive act of soul,--which he termed _faith_--an intense, a burning, a blazing Ontologist. _Ibid._ p. 81."[125] This is certainly an eloquent account of philosophic Idealism as it may in its various phases be represented to the world of general readers. It turns, as every such speculation must turn, on the great principle, that our Sensations are so many series of signs and symbols.[126] They may be preordained, and our apprehension of them innate;--they may be arbitrary, and their interpretation the work of man's intelligence. To decide this question, is to decide something as to the extent of their _relativity_; but will any one pronounce their information absolutely true? At this point occurs a wide divergence between two great schools of Idealism--the Psychological, and the Theological thinkers. These schools inosculate in respect of some of their arguments, and of their objections against ordinary modes of thought. They disagree, however, in their aims--the ports at which they land themselves and their disciples. Psychological Idealism is best known to most readers through Mr. J. S. Mill. The Theological view, so far as this country goes, seems to have made scant progress beyond Berkeley and a few of his clever followers. For ordinary Englishmen, a reference to continental writers on this question seems useless;--Theology being discussed by them in so _ab extrâ_ a manner as to put them out of court with even the most metaphysical of our theologians. Regarding the subject in a psychological light, Mr. O'Hanlon made the following common-sense remarks amongst others of a more abstract nature:[127]-- "To come now to Mr. Mill's Idealism. He, as all the world of thinkers knows, following the steps of Berkeley and Hume, claims, by means of his power of analysis, and by the aid of the formidable psychological instrument furnished him by the doctrine of the Association of Ideas, to have got rid of all other existences save and except states of consciousness, actual and possible.... I propose to try and answer his arguments" (_i.e._ within certain expressed limitations)-- "Let A = all my sensations. " B = the group of sensations and of permanent possibilities of sensation I call my body. " C = the group of permanent possibilities of sensation I call my friend Smith. "Now I find B always related to A in a very peculiar manner. B has in perpetual conjunction with it a long series of manifold states of consciousness, A. C resembles B in very many particulars, but it is not so related to A. I hence conclude, if I follow Mr. Mill, that C is so related to some other A, that is, to some other consciousness. In drawing this conclusion, in extending to C, which so closely resembles B, my experience of B, I, according to Mr. Mill, do but extend the principles of inductive evidence, which experience shews hold good of my states of consciousness, to _a sphere without my consciousness_." The italicized words sound simple enough to the ordinary reader, but argument upon them involves (as Mr. O'Hanlon observes) two serious postulates. "(a) That there is a sphere beyond my consciousness; the very thing to be proved, (b) That the laws, which obtain in my consciousness, also obtain in the sphere beyond it." But;-- "'Such an inference'" he goes on to quote from Mill "'would only be warrantable if we could know _à priori_ that we must have been created capable of conceiving whatever is capable of existing: that the universe of thought and that of reality, the microcosm and the macrocosm (as they once were called) must have been framed in complete correspondence with one another. That this is really the case has been laid down expressly by some systems of philosophy, by implication in more, and is the foundation (among others) of the systems of Schelling and Hegel; but _an assumption_ more destitute of evidence could scarcely be made, nor can one easily imagine any evidence that could prove it unless it were revealed from above.'" Mill on Hamilton, chap. VI. p. 65. The reader will probably see at once where the abstract difficulty lies, and how it runs up into the higher metaphysics. Now, as Mr. O'Hanlon puts the case, taking all this for granted; "A boy cuts his finger and screams.... Yet if I was not by, the boy, the knife, the blood, the scream, would only exist potentially." Or on the other hand if I sacrifice consistency and substitute 'actually' for 'potentially,' "I thereby reject the validity of the Psychological method" which asserts "that the belief in an external cause of our sensations" is not original but "generated 'so early as to have become inseparable from our consciousness before the time at which memory commences.'... Nevertheless, it afterwards admits that the belief in the case of persons, has an external cause. Hereby the method commits suicide, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus." Finally, he remarks, "the psychological method professes very little regard for our natural beliefs. Now I can, by a vigorous effort, regard matter as mere states or possible states of my consciousness (at least I can do so for the moment), but I can also look on other persons in the same light. Why should one natural belief be treated more tenderly than another?... In short, if I refuse to postulate a _non ego_, and if I hold that, supposing the states of consciousness I call the _ego_ can be shewn capable of producing the notion of the _non ego_, then they did produce it, and if I hold that they can be shewn to be so capable, such a theory is equally applicable to external consciousnesses as to external matter. In both cases, I cannot get out of the sphere of my own feelings; there may be something beyond or there may not, but if there is, it is at all events incognisable by me, and to all intents and purposes I am alone in the universe."[128] In drift and true meaning Bishop Berkeley's Idealism differed _toto cælo_ from Mill's, as well as from Hume's idealistic Scepticism. His belief in a world outside us all was as firm as that of the firmest Realist, and by a world outside us he meant a world which neither we nor our conceptions can alter. His reasoning was also of the most common-sense description. Sensation is (as before said) a _sign_ between us and things outside. But the sign tells us nothing of any _substratum_ on which the things signified depend for their sign-giving powers. Matter (as commonly understood[129]) is a figment devised by certain philosophers;--the true subsistence of the outward world is in and for mind, and apart from thought it does not subsist at all. But my mind, nay the human mind, is limited. There is One whose thoughts are not as our thoughts;--in Him the world subsists, and in Him we also have our Being continually. The world is what it is to us, in and through Him, and it appeals not to our so-called material frames but to our minds. Berkeley's argument was simply this. Take away gross matter--and the world is still perfectly Real. It is real because God is real. Real for us, real in Him; and by this we _know_ His Reality.[130] By comparing this phase of Idealism with the modern doctrine of what is called the "Conditioned," its Theological interest becomes still more obvious. Suppose we naturally know only what is conditioned (_i.e._ dependent on some Absolute reality to us unknown), what ought, asks Dr. Mansel, to be the inference? The right inference is that the Divine Absolute did not leave our world in ignorance, but did really reveal Himself to Man. The fate of arguments framed in special interests, however noble those interests may be, is usually the same. Some clever antagonist allows their destructive force, but refuses their affirmative conclusions. Berkeley's denial of the unknown substratum called matter was approved by sceptics, who scoffed at his unknown God. His idealism was pronounced unanswerable, his divinity needed no answer. Therefore, the Reason remained without satisfaction of any kind, "Most of the writings" says Hume "of that very ingenious author form the best lessons of scepticism which are to be found either among the ancient or modern philosophers, Bayle not excepted. He professes, however, in his title-page (and undoubtedly with great truth,) to have composed his book against the sceptics as well as against the atheists and freethinkers. But that all his arguments, though otherwise intended, are, in reality, merely sceptical, appears from this, _that they admit of no answer, and produce no conviction_." (_Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding._ Section XII.) And be it remarked that this final clause forms a skilled definition of Scepticism--its essential notion--given by an expert. Dean Mansel himself who left at his death an unfinished article upon Berkeley, suffered under a charge of promoting what he desired to discourage. So dangerous is it to deal with wide questions by narrowing their sweep to a point; yet on the other hand how few students are prepared to read and think widely? Shall we attribute to a growing width of Thought, the increased breadth of view under which Idealism has of late years been represented? The German Philosopher, with whom Schwegler closes his philosophic history writes "This ideality or non-substantiality of the finite is the chief maxim of philosophy; and for that reason every true philosophy is idealistic" (Idealismus).[131] In England Mr. Green of Balliol signalises Berkeley's "true proposition--there is nothing real apart from thought--" and carefully distinguishes it from the one so often substituted for it--the fatal flaw of the Berkeleian argument.[132] Another influential thinker, Mr. Herbert Spencer,--who, like Professor Huxley, uses materialistic symbols treating them as symbols only,--has been for some time labouring after a "reconciliation of Realism and Idealism," which again is considered by an able critic, Mr. Henry Sidgwick, "an impossible compromise."--Mr. Spencer's answer to Mr. Sidgwick, on this particular point, will be found in his recently published volume of "Essays" (III. 282 seq.). A very instructive sentence occurs on p. 290. "Should it be said that this regarding of everything constituting experience and thought as symbolic, has a very shadowy aspect; I reply that these which I speak of as symbols, are real relatively to our consciousness; and are symbolic only in their relation to the Ultimate Reality." So much then for a question which in a variety of shapes has exercised the human intellect throughout countless generations, and in all countries from India to the United States. It has also pervaded all spheres of Thought from physical science, (on which compare further, Additional Note I., and our next chapter), to the great philosophico-theological domain as we have already seen in certain specimens of Western thought. It would be easy to illustrate its empire far more extensively from those wonderful Eastern systems brought home to English readers thirty-six years ago by the translation of Ritters' Ancient Philosophy, but very imperfectly comprehended even now, notwithstanding the agreeable reception which Professor Max Müller has provided for them. To his writings we will gladly refer the curious student. E.--ON THE RELATIONS OF FACT AND THEORY. "The distinction between Theory (that is, true Theory) and Fact is this: that in Theory the Ideas are considered as distinct from the Facts: in Facts, though Ideas may be involved, they are not, in our apprehension, separated from the sensations. In a Fact, the Ideas are applied so readily and familiarly, and incorporated with the sensations so entirely, that we do not see _them_, we see _through them_. A person who carefully notes the motion of a star all night, sees the circle which it describes as he sees the star, though the circle is, in fact a result of his own Ideas. A person who has in his mind the measures of different lines and countries on the earth's surface, and who can put them together into one conception, finds that they can make no figure but a globular one: to him, the earth's globular form is a Fact, as much as the square form of his chamber. A person to whom the grounds of believing the earth to travel round the sun are as familiar as the grounds for believing the movements of the mail coaches in this country, looks upon the former event as a Fact, just as he looks upon the latter events as Facts. And a person who, knowing the Fact of the earth's annual motion, refers it distinctly to its mechanical cause, conceives the sun's attraction as a Fact, just as he conceives as a Fact, the action of the wind which turns the sails of a mill. He cannot _see_ the force in either case; he supplies it out of his own Ideas. And thus, a true Theory is a Fact; a Fact is a familiar Theory. That which is a Fact under one aspect, is a Theory under another. The most recondite Theories when firmly established are Facts; the simplest Facts involve something of the nature of Theory. Theory and Fact correspond, in a certain degree, with Ideas and Sensations, as to the nature of their opposition. But the Facts are Facts, so far as the Ideas have been combined with the Sensations and absorbed in them: the Theories are Theories, so far as the Ideas are kept distinct from the Sensations, and so far as it is considered still a question whether those can be made to agree with these. "We may, as I have said, illustrate this matter by considering man as _interpreting_ the phenomena which he sees. He often interprets without being aware that he does so. Thus when we see the needle move towards the magnet, we assert that the magnet exercises an attractive force on the needle. But it is only by an interpretative act of our own minds that we ascribe this motion to attraction. That, in this case, a force is exerted--something of the nature of the pull which we could apply by our own volition--is our interpretation of the phenomena; although we may be conscious of the act of interpretation, and may then regard the attraction as a Fact. "Nor is it in such cases only that we interpret phenomena in our own way, without being conscious of what we do. We see a tree at a distance, and judge it to be a chestnut or a lime; yet this is only an inference from the colour or form of the mass according to preconceived classifications of our own. Our lives are full of such unconscious interpretations. The farmer recognizes a good or a bad soil; the artist a picture of a favourite master; the geologist a rock of a known locality, as we recognize the faces and voices of our friends; that is, by judgments formed on what we see and hear; but judgments in which we do not analyze the steps, or distinguish the inference from the appearance. And in these mixtures of observation and inference, we speak of the judgment thus formed, as a Fact directly observed. "Even in the case in which our perceptions appear to be most direct, and least to involve any interpretations of our own,--in the simple process of seeing,--who does not know how much we, by an act of the mind, add to that which our senses receive? Does any one fancy that he sees a solid cube? It is easy to show that the solidity of the figure, the relative position of its faces and edges to each other, are inferences of the spectator; no more conveyed to his conviction by the eye alone, than they would be if he were looking at a painted representation of a cube. The scene of nature is a picture without depth of substance, no less than the scene of art; and in the one case as in the other, it is the mind which, by an act of its own, discovers that colour and shape denote distance and solidity. Most men are unconscious of this perpetual habit of reading the language of the external world, and translating as they read. The draughtsman, indeed, is compelled, for his purposes, to return back in thought from the solid bodies which he has inferred, to the shapes of surface which he really sees. He knows that there is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature, if it be _theory_ to infer more than we _see_. But other men, unaware of this masquerade, hold it to be a fact that they see cubes and spheres, spacious apartments and winding avenues. And these things are facts to them, because they are unconscious of the mental operation by which they have penetrated nature's disguise. "And thus, we still have an intelligible distinction of Fact and Theory, if we consider Theory as a conscious, and Fact as an unconscious inference, from the phenomena which are presented to our senses."--Whewell, _Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences_, B. I. Chap. ii. Sect. 10. F.--ON THE "UNKNOWABLE." If the word which heads this note could be accepted in the sense understood by Mr. Spencer's American critic, as a truthful and in all respects complete description of the First Ground of all things, there must of course be an end of all Theology, natural, and supernatural; Theism, Pantheism, and Atheism, would together become what Comte thought them,--equally unfounded, equally unmeaning, and therefore equally to be opposed, condemned, and ostracized. Between Humanity and all that is Superhuman the gulf would appear hopelessly impassable. "To be consistent," says the Editor of the American _Index_, "Empiricism must utterly sink the soul in its material surroundings...." Mr. Spencer makes his election in Empiricism, but shrinks from the acceptance of its necessary implications, and thereby forfeits his title to rank among the great leaders of philosophy. Teaching that every faculty of the mind is the effect of impressions made by the Environment upon the Organism, he should also teach that the mind is nothing distinct from the organism, and that the mind's faculties will perish at the disintegration of the organism; that, as fire is a mere phenomenon of chemical combination, ceasing with it, so life is a mere phenomenon of organic "re-arrangement of parts," and will cease when the Dissolution which is the converse and sequel of Evolution has become complete; and that the "theory of a 'soul' is as completely exploded as the theory of 'phlogiston.'" Such is the opinion of an unsympathising reviewer, who calls himself a Positivist of the latest development. He despises Comte, praises Hamilton, and preaches the truth of Dualism. "If," he writes, "physical science sneeringly objects that mental science proceeds on a sheer assumption of mind, the retort is crushing and cogent that physical science proceeds on the sheer assumption of matter. Who ever yet demonstrated the existence of either?... Only by admitting what can neither be demonstrated without a begging of the question, nor doubted without a _reductio ad absurdam_ of all intelligence,--namely, the natural veracity of the intuitive and cognitive powers,--is a truly positive science possible." From this dualistic Positivism he predicts the rise of a new Theology. "We believe that Theism must be re-theologized on the basis of pure Positivism, as the absolute condition of its future growth." From the same point of view, Mr. Spencer's "reconciliation of Science and Religion" is "pretended"; and his "philosophy is chiefly valuable as indicating the rapid spread of the true spirit of Positivism," but, "like Comtism, it possesses little or no value as an exposition of Positivism in the highest departments of science." This censure of Spencer was combated in a subsequent number of the _Index_, by a writer signing himself "Evolutionist." The Editor prints his letter, and replies to it briefly:--"1. The 'unknowable' must be an absolute blank to every intelligence. It surely cannot be held legitimate to make _any predicate_ of it whatever, as Mr. Spencer himself admits. Yet he does make predicates of it which are 'derived from our own natures' and thus violates his own principle. 'Omnipresence' is simply _presence throughout all space_; and what do we know of 'presence' at all but by our own experience? Mr. Spencer does the very thing he forbids us to do, in making this predication. "2. The difference between him and us is briefly this. He denies that we know anything of Force; we affirm that we know it just so far as it perceptibly acts. The Cause of Nature we maintain to be known _in its effects_. Hence Force is not to us the 'Unknowable,' but is rather the 'God of Science,' known just so far as Nature is known." Here follow some stringent criticisms of the distinction between phenomena and noumena accepted by Mill as well as Spencer, which we pass over as being somewhat unintelligible without a longer discussion than can here be given to them. On the subject of our first quotation--Empiricism--many readers may like to peruse the opinion of a writer far removed from Mr. Abbott in philosophy. The following is Hegel's dictum:-- "In Empiricism lies the great principle that whatever is true must be in the actual world and present to sensation.... Touching this principle it has been justly observed that, in what we call Experience, as distinct from the individual sensation of individual facts, there are two elements. First, there is the infinitely complex matter, which so far as itself is concerned is individualised: secondly, there is the form, as seen in the characteristics of universality and necessity. Empiricism no doubt can point to many, almost innumerable, similar perceptions: but, after all, no multitude, however great, can be the same thing as universality. Similarly, Empiricism reaches so far as the perception of changes in succession and of objects in juxtaposition or co-existence; but it presents no necessary connexion. If sensation, therefore, is to maintain its claim to be the sole basis of what men hold for truth, universality and necessity can have no right to exist: they become an accident of our minds, a mere custom, the content of which might be otherwise constituted than it is. "It is an important corollary of this theory, that in the empirical mode of treatment the truths and rules of justice and morality, as well as the body of religion, are exhibited as the work of chance, and stripped of their objective character and inner truth."[133] Considering how far Hegel confirms the American Positivist's opinion respecting the inevitable conclusions of consistent Empiricism, Mr. Spencer may with reason be congratulated on his very happy inconsistency. The subject of quotation No. 2--Spencer's position in regard of the Unknowable--contains a censure which unites in alliance many widely differing authorities on this side the Atlantic. Some of these assail it from an extremely hostile point of view; but the criticism of others is conceived in a half-friendly, half-indifferent spirit. Mr. Spencer has very lately published a third volume of "Essays," and devotes Articles X. and XI. to his reviewers.[134] It need hardly be said that these pages will repay perusal. We shall here venture on giving a brief account of his defence as it presents itself to our own understanding. The most salient difference between him and his critics _generally_, seems to lie in this circumstance;--they begin by taking the word "Unknowable" in its strict (_i.e._ its proper) signification. Hence they appear to assume that by "Absolute" he means--or _ought_ to mean even when seeming to say the contrary--"_absolutely_ abstract." Now of a mere, that is, a pure and complete abstraction, nothing can be predicated, because the idea is perfectly empty. It is in fact a Nothingness. But suppose we say of this Absolute, (as Spencer does), it exists;--we _have_ predicated something already;--something which destroys its complete emptiness. And again, if we are asked or, (what is better), ask ourselves how we _know_ that an Absolute does exist, and proceed to reply, as Spencer himself replies, because it _must_ exist; we shall have made respecting our Absolute this highest of all possible predications. It is not only Being, but necessary Being, or, in other words, it is a Self-Existent. Still more, since it is so in contradistinction from the universe of relativities, it is The Self-Existent, a totally different idea from that which the American editor dissects. But now comes the question, who or what is answerable for the Reviewer's misconception,--Spencer or his critics? Is it the poverty of language, or the law of controversial sequency,--a law under which every thought arises as antagonistic to some other thought, and afterwards, when arisen and firmly established so as to become the subject of analysis, is found to yield more than was at first conceived. Then, of course, another antithesis arises respecting it, and we have to decide how much and what is truly meant, a question which often comes before us in this shape:--Is our thought merely the _not_ so and so, or is it a real _substantive_ idea? In the former case it is one-sided and negative; in the latter it is many-sided and affirmative. At the first blush, it seems natural to blame Mr. Herbert Spencer. Every one must feel astonished to find how much he himself knows of the Unknowable. The following sentences, however, contain a good account of one amongst his principal explanations of this apparent incongruity. Speaking of Mr. Martineau's conception of the Creator,[135] he writes (_Essays_, Vol. III. p. 299):-- "Finding, as just shewn, that it leaves the essential mystery unsolved; I do not see that it has an advantage over the doctrine of the Unknowable in its unqualified shape. There cannot, I think, be more than temporary rest in a proximate solution which takes for its basis the ultimately insoluble. Just as thought cannot be prevented from passing beyond Appearance, and trying to conceive the Cause behind; so, following out the interpretation Mr. Martineau offers, thought cannot be prevented from asking what Cause it is which restricts the Cause he assigns. And if we must admit that the question under this eventual form cannot be answered, may we not as well confess that the question under its immediate form cannot be answered? Is it not better candidly to acknowledge the incompetence of our intelligence, rather than to persist in calling that an explanation which does but disguise the inexplicable? Whatever answer each may give to this question, he cannot rightly blame those who, finding in themselves an indestructible consciousness of an ultimate Cause, whence proceed alike what we call the Material Universe and what we call Mind, refrain from affirming anything respecting it; because they find it as inscrutable in nature, as it is inconceivable in extent and duration." There will be to many people much force in this plea for leaving inscrutables amidst their primary obscurities. But it is open to a rejoinder suggested by Mr. Spencer himself,--you cannot prevent the Mind from inquiring; and, in point of fact, Spencer in person leads the way. He places before us the ultimate idea of a self-existent First Cause. Now surely he might reflect that such an Idea not only permits but invites analysis;--it is no empty abstraction, but a substantive thought and a full one. But he bars analysis to his own satisfaction, by saying that the Idea is in its own Nature inscrutable. Respecting this position two questions arise. First, if inscrutable as to its ultimate nature--its highest essence, and deepest thought,--is it so in its attributes? Next, if Spencer's special walk in philosophy ends with the bare positing of this Idea, must _all_ Philosophy do the same? Suppose the Physicist says--"Here I learn to know the Fact of a self-existent universal First Cause," may not the investigator of our Practical human Reason try to discover whether an Ethical view ought or ought not to be taken of this Self-Existent? To answer "No," is either to make physical philosophy the _sole_ philosophy; or it is to dismember and disjoint the universal Body of Truth into departmental carcase-fragments;--a process which never can begin till all Life has been effectually crushed out of the Whole.[136] For every one who takes wide views of Philosophy;--for every inquirer into First Principles;--above all, if Mr. Spencer will permit us to say so, for every Encyclopædic writer like himself, a question must arise the answer to which it is incumbent on all and each to ascertain, "Can we have any conscious idea whatever of a First Cause without including that very fact of Personality from which Spencer appears to shrink?" Nay we may rather put the point thus: "Is not our idea and definition of _Causality_ derived from Personal existence, and apart from this source of derivation, does not the derived idea perish?"--If so, to speak of a non-personal First Cause both of the outside world and of mind itself is to use words to which no thinker can consciously attach any real meaning. There must, says Mr. Spencer, be Power behind Appearance;--in other words, Phenomena imply a Cause behind them,--but to add that this Power or Cause is conceivably impersonal, seems nothing better than to imagine (Hibernicè) at the beginning of the phenomenal chain, a _prior_ phenomenon which in its own nature and _ex vi verborum_ cannot account for a Beginning[137] at all;--cannot, to use Mr. Spencer's expression, be "ultimate"; and, in short, requires to be accounted for, itself. The truth is, that such ideas as First, Ultimate, Power accounting for appearance, or Cause underlying phenomena, cannot be spoken of as altogether Unknowable; because they imply and contain within themselves certain knowable and strongly defined characteristics. Pressed by his critics, Mr. Spencer becomes painfully aware of this truth; and is fearful of being driven by logic and philosophical consistency to plead guilty of believing in a Personal Author of the Universe, and of making Theism the ultimate word of Science. We see on pp. 292 and 302 of Vol. III. how he manifests a preference for the phrase non-relative, _vice_ Absolute; meaning thereby (if he means anything new) to replace an affirmative idea by a negational abstract, empty enough to land him at once in American Positivism. For, _if_ the non-relative means _more_ than to say that he is unable to predicate _relativity_ of the _whole_ Universe of things--if it means _more_ than an avowal of Positivist ignorance--it really does mean a true Absolute after all; and very few students of Mr. Spencer will doubt that in the sense of an Absolute (not necessarily Hegelian), this ground idea of his must be accepted. As courteous antagonists, we will endeavour to abstain from joining with Mr. Sidgwick in the severest censure which has yet befallen Mr. Spencer,--the imputation of a "mazy inconsistency," a "fundamental incoherence," and an "inability to harmonize different lines of thought." We rather wish to congratulate him on presenting such an appearance before the eye of a critic so accomplished, and so equitable; it is a sign that we have not as yet heard Mr. Spencer's final utterance. He is, we are quite sure, divided by a wide tract of thought from the American Positivists;--but we are _not_ sure that he may not ultimately be found amid the ranks of Scientific Theists. This at the present moment appears the most natural development of the thoughts maintained in his recently published volume. That the nature of GOD, considered as the "ultimate cause of what we call the material universe and what we call mind," is to us at present inscrutable;--that clouds and darkness are round about Him;--that His ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts, no meditative Theist will deny. But, though the Heavens are higher than the Earth, though beatified spirits worship in humble adoration of the Incomprehensible, yet the measureless distance does not hinder us from knowing Him as a Spirit, and therefore as a PERSON; nor yet from confidently affirming that Righteousness and Judgment are the habitation of His throne. G.--MR. J. S. MILL AS AN INDEPENDENT MORALIST. Few passages of Mr. Mill's writings are better worth reading than pages 123, 4, of his "Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy." In these pages the eminent writer asserts his own strong moral sentiments, and throws to the winds that inconsistent Utilitarianism with which he had trained his mind to associate them. He will worship no Unknowable Being whose supreme moral nature does not affirm our human morality. "Why is this?" an opponent might fairly ask; "is it not useful so to do? is not such worship conducive to that noblest final end, the interest of mankind?" By saying "No" you affirm two things: one, the _dissociation_ of Religion from Utility; a second, the indivisible _association_ of Religion with absolute Morality. Some antagonists may consider the first of these two propositions inadmissible, the second objectionable, or at all events, exceedingly doubtful. Every one who maintains that Natural Theology has, in addition to its other elements, a firm and moral ground, will accept with ready assent the second proposition, and will say that the truth or falsehood of the first depends on the meaning attached to an ambiguous word. We are equally sure that "Godliness is profitable for all things," and that "Honesty is the best policy." But then we are quite sure also, that the final cause of Godliness is not profit, nor its essential nature a love of gain; and that policy is not a true description of honesty, nor the being politic the true and proper aim of the honest man. And Mr. Mill, when his moral sentiments asserted themselves, felt these certainties as elements of his inner life. Rather than worship a Being whose unknown moral attributes fell beneath, not the dictates of Utility, but the purest instincts of his own inmost morality, Mr. Mill goes on to declare that he is willing to suffer the horrors of Eternal death.[138] Hell is better than a violation of his own moral nature. Can this be a declaration deduced from the supreme law of Interest,--is it not rather a foundation maxim of independent morality? Violate such foundation maxims, says the independent moralist, and you need not even speak of "Going to hell," hell will come to you. Sooner or later you will find its undying torments within you. In an article on the death of Mr. Mill, the _Pall Mall Gazette_ expresses its perception of his leading inconsistency as follows:-- "It is impossible to read Mr. Mill's works with any attention, and in particular to look with intelligence on the later part of his career, without seeing that by temperament he was essentially religious, but that as far as positive doctrine went his mind was an absolute blank. We believe that it was this sharp contrast between theory and feeling which drove him into the schemes for the improvement of the world which have been exposed to so many, and, in some respects, to such well-founded objections. Having to love something, and being, as it were, chained down by his own logic to this world and this life, past, present, and future, he struggled to make a sort of religion out of man as he might come to be after centuries or millenniums. Humanity, progress, a realization of all the ideals at which his theories pointed--these were his divinities, for he was a man who could not do without some divinity, and he could find no other. We do not think that his life or his thoughts were triumphant. If he had consistently followed out his own views, if he had carried out his Benthamism with perfect consistency, the result would have been too hard, too grim, too dismal for his eager and sensitive heart. Hence came the faltering, the inconsistency, the romance of his later days. It is a spectacle which may well humble every one who looks on it with intelligence and sympathy. From us, at least, it shall never draw one word of sarcasm, or one thought which is not full of deep respect, regret, and pity. He bore a burden common to many. If he bent under it, it was not because his strength was less, but because his sensibility was greater. When he died one of the tenderest and most passionate hearts that ever set to work an intellect of iron was laid to rest. May he rest in peace, and find, if it be possible, that his knowledge was less complete than he perhaps supposed, and that there was more to be known than was acknowledged in his philosophy." (_Pall Mall Gazette_, Saturday, May, 10, 1873.) A little earlier in the same article we find another paragraph worthy of careful consideration:--"No succession of writers ever exercised greater power over the fortunes of this nation, we might say of any nation, than Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Mr. Mill. What may be described as the theory of modern life has been thought out by them, and translated into its practical equivalents with a persistency, a precision, a degree of method and calmness unequalled in the history of thought. We do not say that their results are complete, but we do say that their teaching has been successful to an unexampled degree; and that, however unpopular it may be with ardent and enthusiastic persons, it is impossible to believe that it could have done what it has done without possessing a very strong hold on human nature." Viewing this extract by the light of the one before cited, we cannot help asking what side of human nature is it to which the Benthamite doctrines attach themselves? Shall we not regret that the hard, the grim, and the dismal, should characterize our 19th century philosophy? Philosophy that is falsely so called; for the true is "not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose." The text of this Essay and its earlier notes were completed while Mr. Mill was in the ripeness of his powers, and when the present writer never expected to outlive him. Death softens our view of one who has passed away--the bygone life becomes like a moonlighted landscape--asperities hidden in shadow, and a soft radiance poured over each grander eminence. So may it be felt by the critic of every great departed! If, indeed, it prove otherwise with Mr. Mill, the preventing cause will probably be found in certain pages of his published "Autobiography." H.--ARCHEBIOSIS, OR SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. The origin of Life is a question that naturally excites much interest, and consequently has been much discussed. It is obviously a problem that presents difficulties of no ordinary kind, and therefore it is by no means astonishing that many theories have been started and statements made which have in turn been quickly contradicted. It is now known that the whole cycle of phenomena--collectively denoted by the term "_Life_,"--is manifested by a substance possessing definite physical and chemical properties, and by no other. This substance constitutes the entire organism of the lower forms of life, whether animal or vegetable, and also of the higher in their earliest stage, while from it by various metamorphoses are developed the different histological elements composing the complex tissues of higher animals and plants. Its name Protoplasm is in consequence exceedingly apt, when properly understood. As to the origin of Protoplasm (or apparent Life) it is clear from a little consideration that two questions may be asked: first, how did Protoplasm arise? and secondly, when once this substance had come into being are we to suppose that from that time to this all Protoplasm has been derived by unbroken descent from the first Protoplasm, or does fresh Protoplasm even now arise in the same way as did the first?--in other words, does the transition from the inorganic to the organic, from what has never lived to what is living, still take place as it must have taken place at some period or another? To neither of these questions can Physical Science return a perfectly certain and definite answer. And it must be confessed that as far as our knowledge of Nature goes, those have the best of it who maintain first, that all existing Protoplasm implies pre-existing Protoplasm; secondly, that as to the method, the conditions of the real origin of Protoplasm nothing whatsoever is known; and thirdly, that, notwithstanding all assertions and experiments to the contrary, the origin of living things from dead and decaying organic matter (_i.e._, matter that has lived), or from inorganic matter under given conditions (spontaneous generation, generatio æquivoca, archebiosis) has never been proved and demonstrated in such a manner as to allow us no room for hesitation, no place for doubt. The difficulties and dangers besetting this thorny and much-vexed subject will be better understood if we institute a short examination into the history and present condition of the doctrine of Spontaneous Generation. It is certain from the results of astronomical and geological investigation, that at an exceedingly remote epoch, estimated by untold millions of years, the earth's surface was absolutely unfitted for the presence of life; nay, more, that even the laws of chemical combination were suspended, and in abeyance. After the glowing spheroid cooled down, and various chemical compounds were formed, life as a matter of fact made its appearance on the earth. Throughout the inorganic world the continuity is unbroken--the present is truly the child of the past. But in the organic world it is not so. Whether life arose in the natural course of universal law, or how it did arise, we cannot tell, scientifically, that is to say; no assertion, one way or the other, admits either of proof or disproof. There are absolutely no data to proceed upon. The very first organic remains discovered belong to a comparatively high type. It is as though in a garden every plant and bush burst at once into full flower, and never showed the flower in the bud. These points are very well put in a passage of Littré:[139] "Jusqu'à ce moment, nous avons cheminé de phénomènes en phénomènes qui se passaient tous sous le régime des lois chimiques et physiques. Leur succession ne présentait aucune solution de continuité; les degrés tenaient l'un à l'autre; et c'est cette déduction qui satisfait l'esprit humain, et qu'il nomme explication. Une fois que l'on reconnait une dissémination première, dans l'espace, d'une matière douée de gravitation et de mouvement, tout en ignorant absolument d'où vient cette matière and d'où procèdent son mouvement et sa dissémination, le reste s'ensuit. Des amas qu'on appelle soleils se forment par condensation; cette condensation développe une immense chaleur; le refroidissement graduel sépare les amas primordiaux en amas secondaires et plus petits qui se meuvent comme lui, se refroidissent comme lui, et représentent nos planètes, nos satellites, et en particulier notre terre. On a l'univers, on passe au monde, et du monde au globe terrestre. "Mais là, sur le monde terrestre, un hiatus se présente. Un phénomène nouveau, une force nouvelle apparaît, et la vie se développe en végétalité et animalité. Ce phénomène nouveau, cette force nouvelle, cette vie ne succèdent point par une action continue aux actions continues dont le soleil et la terre sont le théâtre; du moins, en l'état actuel de nos connaissances, la continuité nous échappe. On conçoit, grâce à des faits expérimentaux recueillis de toutes parts et transformés en lois, comment notre globe se refroidit, comment, en se refroidissant, il prend sa forme, comment l'atmosphère, les continents, la mer se constituent; mais on ne conçoit plus comment la vie y parait à un moment donné. Et ce fut bien à un moment donné: pendant des millions de siècles, la terre, vu son incandescence, fut impropre à toute vie. Quand la température y eut baissé au degré compatible avec les existences vivantes, ces existences se montrèrent; mais comment? par quel procédé? "Il ne faut pourtant pas faire valoir outre mesure cette discontinuité. Une discontinuité, autre que celle qui appartient à l'apparition de la vie, est survenue dans le cours du développement de la terre. Quand les particules qui la composent, étaient animées d'une immense chaleur, une dissociation complète y régnait; elles n'obéissaient qu'aux lois du mouvement, de la gravitation, de la chaleur et de la lumière; les lois chimiques, c'est-à-dire de combinaison et de décombinaison, n'y étaient qu'à l'état virtuel. Elles passèrent à l'état effectif, dès que l'abaissement de la température le permit. Je sais bien qu'une différence considérable existe entre ces deux discontinuités: en effet, depuis lors, il a toujours été possible de reproduire à volonté les faits chimiques; et, toutes les fois que nous en avons besoin, nous répétons le phénomène d'origine qui se produisit dans les combinaisons et décombinaisons. Pour la vie, c'est autre chose; elle a été une fois émise, et, depuis le phénomène d'origine, elle ne se propage que par génération. Un être vivant est necessaire pour produire un être vivant; et, ni par les procédés de la nature, ni par ceux de la science, ce qui se fit au moment créateur ne se refait. Malgré cette considérable différence, il demeure que la terre a possédé des forces virtuelles qui sont entrées en action, quand les conditions générales, se modifiant graduellement, l'ont permis." A little further on he continues:--"Au point de vue d'origine, on abandonnera la question comme toutes les questions qui impliquent une cause première. La philosophie positive s'exprime là-dessus comme elle s'exprime touchant toutes les choses hyperphysiques, c'est-à-dire placées au delà de l'expérience. Quand elle entend les matérialistes prononcer que la vie est le résultat des forces physiques et chimiques dont on connaît l'action, elle refuse d'accepter une solution qui dépasse les prémisses. Mais elle n'écarte pas la solution matérialiste au profit de la solution théologique; l'intervention d'un Dieu créateur est également invérifiable par l'expérience, et, partant, atteinte de la même fin de non-recevoir. Maintenant, si on demande à la philosophie positive quelle est, à elle, sa solution entre la génération matérialiste et la création surnaturelle, elle répond qu'elle n'a aucune solution à proposer, que rien ne peut la forcer à croire ce qui n'est pas démontré, et qu'elle accepte, avec autant de fermeté que d'humilité, une ignorance invincible sur tout ce qui est indemontrable." In the first passage certain salient points are strikingly brought out, above all the vast difference between the worlds organic and inorganic; but, next, how much soever a Positivist may be pleased to believe only that which admits of phenomenal verification, it is not every one, especially if given to thought, who would willingly endorse the second paragraph. If we know only what we can verify, many beliefs must needs be abandoned, and amongst them some which have received the almost universal assent of mankind. Knowledge (in the sense of verifiable knowledge) and Belief may appear two widely different things; but it should never be forgotten that we often accept the one as surely as the other. The ancients held that living things arose from the earth at any time, engendered by the warmth of the sun and moisture. Absurd as it may seem, the belief that blue-bottle flies, etc., were a natural result of the decay of meat and other organic matter obtained credence even in comparatively modern times. Redi, an eminent Italian, first demonstrated experimentally the falsehood of this doctrine, and for some time the hypothesis of spontaneous generation appeared to have received a death-blow. And by degrees the conviction that every living thing proceeded from a germ gained strength, and was confirmed by the rapidly extending use of the microscope. Yet in the eighteenth century certain experiments of Needham seemed to establish the fact that in boiled infusions where presumably all germs were destroyed, small Infusoria made their appearance even when means were taken to exclude the entrance of fresh germs. Buffon lent the authority of his great name. These experiments were repeated by the Abbé Spallanzani, who showed by more careful methods the fallacy of the conclusions drawn. A passage in Sir B. Brodie[140] which alludes to these facts may be worth quoting:-- "Crites. Then am I to understand that you would reject altogether the hypothesis of equivocal generation, which supposes that under certain circumstances, even at the present time, particles of inorganic matter are brought together, and so united as to become endowed with organization and life? "Eubulus. The question is one of great interest, and I will refer you to Ergates for an answer, knowing at the same time pretty well what that answer will be. "Ergates. Of course Crites refers to the production of those minute creatures, known by the name of _Infusoria_, in the experiments of Walter Needham, and some others. "It is true that in these experiments certain vegetable and animal infusions, after no very long period of time, when examined by the microscope, are found to contain a multitude of minute creatures, of various forms, exhibiting signs of spontaneous motion, and multiplying their species in the usual manner. Some of these are even of a complicated structure, much beyond what might, _à priori_, be expected as the result of the first attempt of inorganic matter to enter into the realms of organic life. The subject has been so frequently discussed, that I need not trouble you with the details of the arguments which have led the most eminent naturalists to believe that these creatures are not really spontaneously engendered, but that they are derived from minute ova which are present in the air, and which, when placed under circumstances favourable to their development, burst into life: in the same way as the egg undergoes those changes which convert its contents into a bird, when placed under the influence of the animal heat of the parent. But even if this view of the matter be not correct, the case is not really altered; for, after all, the _Infusoria_ are never detected except in vegetable and animal infusions, which necessarily presuppose the existence of organic life." But it is one thing to demolish the theory and statements of an antagonist, and another to erect a structure in their place. However completely Spallanzani had demonstrated the faults and untrustworthiness of Needham's results, he had not established the opposite doctrine, and to many it seemed that the very conditions under which his experimentation was conducted, were sufficient to prevent the development of life. But the work begun by Schulze and Schwann and ended by Pasteur apparently has supplied what was wanting in Spallanzani's researches. The evidence is thus admirably summed by Professor Huxley:[141]-- "It is demonstrable, that a fluid eminently fit for the development of the lowest forms of life, but which contains neither germs, nor any protein compound, gives rise to living things in great abundance, if it is exposed to ordinary air; while no such development takes place, if the air with which it is in contact is mechanically freed from the solid particles, which ordinarily float in it and which maybe made visible by appropriate means. "It is demonstrable, that the great majority of these particles are destructible by heat, and that some of them are germs, or living particles, capable of giving rise to the same forms of life as those which appear when the fluid is exposed to unpurified air. "It is demonstrable, that inoculation of the experimental fluid with a drop of liquid known to contain living particles, gives rise to the same phenomena as exposure to unpurified air. "And it is further certain that these living particles are so minute that the assumption of their suspension in ordinary air presents not the slightest difficulty. On the contrary, considering their lightness and the wide diffusion of the organisms which produce them, it is impossible to conceive that they should not be suspended in the atmosphere in myriads." The experimental means by which these facts are proved may be briefly stated:-- I. The air contains solid particles. Professor Tyndall has shown, as all who have read "Dust and Disease" know to their own discomfort, that the purest common air, when submitted to a beam of electric light, renders the track of that beam visible. Ergo, it must contain solid particles capable of scattering light. II. These particles are mostly destructible by heat, or may be mechanically strained off. He has shown this by the fact that common air which has passed through a red-hot tube, or through a filter of cotton-wool, will no longer render the track of the electric beam visible. III. Many of these particles are germs. Schulze and Schwann proved that when air is passed through red-hot tubes, then through a fluid which is capable of affording a nidus to the germs, if present, no development of life takes place. Similarly Schr[oe]der established the same fact by using a strainer of cotton-wool. Further, Pasteur gave an additional proof by microscopical examination, as well as by a direct experiment. He passed air through gun-cotton, dissolved this in ether; and in the collodion germs were clearly recognizable. Also he plunged a piece of cotton-wool through which air had been strained into an experimental fluid. This fluid soon swarmed with forms of life. IV. The experimental fluid may be inoculated by simple exposure to air as well as by any fluids known to contain living forms; _e.g._, if the fluid be placed in an open vessel, living forms soon make their appearance. Yet supposing the aperture of the vessel, instead of pointing vertically upwards, be turned obliquely or downwards, the fluid will remain clear for an indefinite time. Similarly a drop of an infusion containing living forms added to the experimental fluid soon causes it to swarm with life. The forms that appear are the same in either case. V. The experimental fluid cannot give rise itself to these forms. It is known as Pasteur's solution, and consists of water, ammonium, tartrate, sugar, and yeast ash. Hence there is no organic matter in it. If proper care be taken, it may be kept for an indefinite time. VI. The germs are so minute that in many cases, even when known to be present, they are scarcely visible to the highest microscopic powers. They must be universally diffused, as any organic infusion left exposed soon swarms with the forms to which they give rise. Such an array of facts, proved experimentally over and over again, must convince the most tenacious sceptic, and he may feel inclined to agree with the opinion expressed in the following passage from Sir B. Brodie:[142]-- "Crites. Then, if I understand you rightly, you have arrived at these conclusions. First, that there was a time when this earth was not in a fit state for the maintenance of either animal or vegetable life. Secondly, that in its present condition there is no evidence of any law being in operation which would account for any living beings being called into existence except as the offspring of other living beings which previously existed; and that from these premises we cannot fail to arrive at this further conclusion, that the first introduction of life on earth must have been by some special act of the creative power, of which we have no experience at present. "Eubulus. I suspect that this, really and truly, is all we actually know on the subject." Notwithstanding this apparently irresistible amount of evidence, the question of abiogenesis has recently been revived by Dr. C. Bastian in a well-known book, "The Beginnings of Life." Dr. Bastian believes that he has demonstrated the origin of living organisms from organic infusions as well as from solutions of salts containing no organic matter: nay, even more wonderful facts than these which it is unnecessary to specify. His experiments are so numerous, his assertions and figures so clear and definite, and his reputation for previous good scientific work once so high, that the book has caused no small stir and discussion. Could Dr. Bastian's facts be only established, they would inevitably revolutionize the whole science of Biology. However, the same fate which has overtaken his predecessors has befallen Dr. Bastian himself. A nearly universal verdict of "Not proven" has been returned: and not only is the accuracy of his experimentation denied, but even worse accusations have been brought. To enter into details of his experiments would require too much space, but it may not be uninteresting to detail some of the peculiarities and difficulties which attend on the investigation of such a subject as Spontaneous Generation. At the very threshold of the inquiry stands a grand difficulty. Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless true, that notwithstanding the many years, the immense labour bestowed by illustrious men on this subject, next to nothing is known of the relations existing between the lowest forms of life, animal or vegetable (especially the latter), as well as their germs, and varying physical and chemical conditions. Heat, light, cold and darkness, alkalies and acids with other chemical compounds, one would imagine to be not without their influence. Yet what this influence may be in a given case, none can tell. Enough is known in the way of a few detached facts to make it certain that these agents have very decided effects. It might be thought that any one who wished to attack the problem of Spontaneous Generation anew would first try to obtain some connected knowledge on this point. Indeed, until it has been cleared up somewhat, it is not very evident what good Experimentation on Heterogenesis can do. It is much as if a chemist were to throw a handful of stuff (what he knew not) into a crucible, and then expect a valuable result. It can scarcely be doubted that many of these lower organisms live and grow under conditions which _à priori_ might seem incompatible with vitality. It is clear also that the work of one experimenter ought to be such as may admit of repetition by another with the same result. Now no one who attempts the study of this subject of Spontaneous Generation, can fail to be struck with the immense mass of conflicting evidence. Some mischievous spirit appears to have purposely thrown confusion over the whole. Facts are alternately stated and denied. It is very hard to be sure of the right road, even for an experienced person. Another point relates to the value of the evidence when obtained. It can scarcely be doubted that out of a given number of experiments undertaken to establish a case of Heterogenesis or Archebiosis, great value should be attached to the negative evidence afforded by those that disprove the supposed fact. A little consideration will show the reason. The precautions to be taken against the intrusion of germs are innumerable: a slight exposure to the air, accidental contact of an unheated rod or tube, or neglect of some other particulars may inoculate the experimental fluid. Hence even with care the chances are many in favour of some such accidental intrusion, and great caution should always be exercised before an affirmative result can be regarded as firmly established. And further there is the experimentalist himself to be taken into account. The task requires an intimate knowledge of many minute organisms, and the different forms they assume; an acquaintance, wide and accurate, with various experimental methods; a clear view of the end and the various precautions required to attain that end; a mind ready to contrive, prone to doubt and to hesitate, rather than to be convinced. Men vary much in the amount of what is scientifically termed their personal equation, and one difficulty in accepting the results of a piece of work is the danger of misplaced confidence. As was said before, Dr. Bastian's attempt to demonstrate the reality of Spontaneous Generation has been a failure. His experiments have been repeated, and failed to give the like results in the hands of competent men. Witness the following quotation from a careful review of his book in the Microscopical Journal.[143] It relates to the now celebrated cheese and turnip solution. "Nevertheless in consequence of the interest which Dr. Bastian's work has excited, we have made the experiment (and that repeatedly) as directed by him. This is not the occasion on which to give the details of the experiments in question. It will, however, perhaps add some value to the remarks which it has been our duty to make when we state that, carefully following Dr. Bastian's directions, using at the same time great care as to cleanliness and due boiling, we have obtained results which _in every single instance_, out of more than forty tubes closed on four separate occasions, simply contradict Dr. Bastian. We believe, then, that Dr. Bastian's last dogma in archebiosis,--his belief in turnip solution with a fragment of cheese--must be placed in the same category as his colloidal urea, his spontaneously generated bog-moss, his fungi born in crystals, his unmistakable processes of heterogenesis, and his 'watching' and 'experimentation' in general." The reviewer proceeds to question whether Dr. Bastian has even the knowledge requisite for so delicate an investigation. It would be supposed that he was intimately acquainted with various microscopical structures; but we read,[144] "Professor Huxley gives a contribution towards the determination of the personal value in Dr. Bastian's researches. 'He (Dr. Bastian) will recollect that he wrote to me asking permission to bring for my examination certain preparations of organic structures, which he declared he had clear and positive evidence to prove to have been developed in his closed and digested tubes. Dr. Bastian will remember that when the first of these wonderful specimens was put under my microscope I told him at once that it was nothing but a fragment of the leaf of the common bog-moss (Sphagnum), and he will recollect that I had to fetch Schacht's book "Die Pflanzenzelle" and show him a figure which fitted very well with what we had under the microscope before I could get him to listen to my suggestion, and that only actual comparison with Sphagnum, after he had left my house, forced him to admit the astounding blunder which he had made.' "Of these three pieces of evidence, the last is the most important, for, whilst it places us on our guard with regard to Dr. Bastian's accuracy generally, it at the same time furnishes a key to the explanation of a number of his experiments in which, according to that precipitate discoverer, 'organisms' were found on opening tubes containing infusions which had been boiled and sealed hermetically." How then are we to sum up the case? for or against Dr. Bastian? Can any thoughtful person admit the conclusions of one apparently so unfit for his task? The best answer is in the words of his Reviewer.[145] "Briefly it is to be said that the chapters in this book on heterogenesis, contain a reckless attempt to revolutionize biological doctrine without a single demonstration of fact to justify it, even if it be admitted that the observations and drawings cited are accurate. Revolution in science as in politics can only be justified by success--a wanton attempt in either sphere must deserve the severest condemnation. Dr. Bastian by his exhibition of himself in dealing with heterogenesis writes himself down as incapable--as inadmissible in the character of a witness in a scientific investigation. The Sphagnum delusion is now explained, for it becomes evident that we have to deal with an individual with whom such delusions are no rare exceptions. "We should indeed be sorry to believe that Dr. Bastian is himself aware of the injury which he is doing to the cause of science, by promulgating these rash assertions as to the beginnings and changes of living things; we altogether decline to entertain the notion that he is himself conscious of the baselessness and flimsy character of his startling discoveries, and is nevertheless willing at the expense of injury to the cause of intellectual progress, to obtain for himself a temporary notoriety. On the contrary, we believe that he is under the influence of a delusion, similar to those which from time to time obtain notoriety in the case of 'spiritualists,' 'circle-squarers,' and such victims of belief in the marvellous. The origin and mode of growth of such delusions form a very interesting psychological study, and it is only when we have obtained a proper conception of Dr. Bastian as an abnormal psychological phenomenon that we can hope rightly to appreciate the whole of the statements made in his book. "Delusion and self-deception are much commoner than the world is generally accustomed to consider them. In a very well-known and often quoted remark we have a recognition of the wide-spread occurrence of delusions and an attempt to explain their origin; the saying to which we allude is, 'The wish was father to the thought.' There cannot be the least doubt that men are unconsciously hindered or misdirected in their estimate of fact by previously formed desires. Such a desire acts on the mind like the suggestion of the mesmerist to an individual who has allowed himself to be brought into the hypnotic condition. In this way many misconceptions and strange contradictions of testimony are to be explained." The importance of the subject is sufficient apology for so long a quotation. But our quotations allow us to draw one conclusion; that so far as Spontaneous Generation is concerned human knowledge is exactly _in statu quo_. Up to this time there is no evidence, worth consideration, that establishes a single good case of heterogenesis; nay, rather all evidence points to the conclusion that Protoplasm is invariably derived from pre-existing Protoplasm, at least under existing conditions. Then too there is no fact known which enables us to say how Protoplasm arose in the first instance. On this point we are in the darkness of complete scientific ignorance. The whole discussion may be well closed by a striking passage from Professor Huxley's before quoted address.[146] "But though I cannot express this conviction of mine too strongly, I must carefully guard myself against the supposition that I intend to suggest that no such thing as abiogenesis ever has taken place in the past, or ever will take place in the future. With organic chemistry, molecular physics, and physiology yet in their infancy, and every day making prodigious strides, I think it would be the height of presumption for any man to say that the conditions under which matter assumes the properties we call 'vital' may not, some day, be artificially brought together. All I feel justified in affirming is, that I see no reason for believing that the feat has been performed yet. "And, looking back through the prodigious vista of the past, I find no record of the commencement of life, and therefore I am devoid of any means of forming a definite conclusion as to the conditions of its appearance. Belief, in the scientific sense of the word, is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which the existing forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man can recal his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not living matter. I should expect to see it appear under forms of great simplicity, endowed, like existing Fungi, with the power of determining the formation of new protoplasm from such matters as ammonium carbonates, oxalates and tartrates, alkaline and earthy phosphates, and water, without the aid of light. That is the expectation to which analogical reasoning leads me; but I beg you once more to recollect that I have no right to call my opinion anything but an act of philosophical faith." Obviously, as Professor Huxley points out, between philosophical faith and philosophical knowledge there is a chasm to be bridged over. But should the hypothesis ever be verified, it would make no difference to the reasonings of the Natural Theologian--since the concurrence of conditions necessary for the production of the phænomenon would manifestly ensue upon some definite though recondite law, at present beyond our ken. I.--ON MATERIALISM. The ambiguities attaching to this term were mentioned in a foot-note on our very first page. Since that note was written, the tendency of scientific men has been to increase the number of hypotheses respecting the nature and laws of the material world, and by consequence to multiply the shades of signification conveyed by the word Materialism. So long as such distinctions are confined to the territory of pure science, whether that of the Physicist or of the Biologist, they do not in themselves affect the religious (or ethico-religious) position of any thinker; and need not, therefore, occasion any trouble to the Natural Theologian. But it is worth while to observe how rashly, on account of some such scientific discussion, a writer is said to be a Materialist or no Materialist, by persons who (understanding little or nothing of science themselves) drag the unhappy author outside the pale of his own domain, and affix to him some religious or irreligious epithet which he has neither desired nor deserved. The philosophic idealist often escapes; he is pronounced "no Materialist," because he doubts the substantive existence of Matter, yet he may and often does hold that the ideal thing he calls his soul, has a life inextricably bound up with that other ideal thing he calls his body, and must perish with it, never to live again. We may add the useful remark that so far as Ethico-religious Materialism is concerned it is much more easily tested by the Doctrine of Soul than the Doctrine of Body. For example, consistent Materializers will always maintain that the reasoning human soul differs from the animal soul of brutes, not in quality, but in quantity. Dr. L. Büchner (sometimes called a "crass Materialist") makes this assertion repeatedly, and explains it by adding--"Man has no absolute advantage above the animal; his mental superiority being merely relative. There is not one intellectual faculty which belongs to man _exclusively_; his superiority is merely the result of the greater intensity, and the proper combination, of his capacities. The enlarged human faculties are, as we have already seen, the natural and necessary result of the higher and more perfect development of his material organ of thought."[147] Turning to a more refined species of Materialism, we find a similar value always placed on the dogma that whatever differences exist between man and brute, they amount to a distinction not of kind, but only of degree. The consequences hence deduced are of the very greatest importance, and they run much as follows. No one will venture to assert that the power of what has been hastily called Volition is, or can be, an endowment of mere animal nature. We do not lay upon the tiger (as we do popularly lay upon the tyrant) a moral responsibility on account of his savage appetites. Their indulgence does not flow from any reasoning faculty of Will. His cruelty is the movement of automatic instincts, governed by laws like those which rule over the inanimate world; more complicated probably, but no-ways different in their essence. The fall of a stone, and the spring of a tiger, are both consequences of determining laws inherent in their several modes of existence, and moving both as machinery is moved by a steam engine. Now, a difference in degree only, argues no difference in those essential laws which rule equally the greater and the less. The giant and the dwarf are alike subject to the same laws of body and mind; and man is (as we have seen) but a mentally taller brute. The tyrant, therefore, resembles the tiger; the human animal is moved as the other animals are moved, and, like them, is subject to the determining law, just as the lifeless world is so subjected. In plain words, then, this human machine is moved like other machines. What we call Reason, spontaneity, volition, are, when analysed, no exceptions to the law-governed mechanism of the world we live in. Our motives make us, not we our motives. The faculty we exercise under the name of Choice, is really neither more nor less than a determined, unalterable, impulsion; the result of a mechanical law. And this law has formed and now constitutes the Universe.[148] Refined Materialism proceeds to ask in the next place, what more do we know of Matter than its rigid undeviating reign of Law?--The great Globe itself obeys the same Laws as the falling stone: they pervade and direct the mechanism of the starry heavens. Life does not exempt either vegetable or animal from the same rule of law. We have just seen that Mankind is _not_ so made to differ, as to permit a plea of exemption from the same empire. Ascend from Protoplasm to the highest human intelligence,--one heritage devolves through brute to man. The same mechanical law accounts for the "Psychogeny" of both. Mechanical Law, in its ramifications, is (as has been said) all we really know of Matter. It now turns out that all Mind has been developed by this same ever-ramifying law; may be analyzed back into its elements; is most truly expressed by its symbols; and can never be exempted from its determinations. Mind, therefore, and Matter are resolvable into this sole unity--the Law of ultimate mechanical movement and impulsion. We have called this system a refined Materialism; but another name for one of its most influential shapes has appeared and made considerable progress, particularly on the continent of Europe. This name is Monism; and is intended to declare that every other belief must be at best a Dualism.[149] What then is the true human meaning of this Monistic creed? Our souls (if we have souls), possess the image, not of Absolute Being and Personality, but of abstract Fate, and rayless, eyeless Necessity. We live machines; those supposed moralities we commonly miscall our Volitions, spring out from beneath the moving wheels. We die, as machines go to pieces when the wheels get out of gear; and no other account need be asked of the broken clock-work. Here lies a man, close beside him moulders a dog. They are now what they always were,--copartners in the same inexorable destiny. Inexorable:--yes; for, standing beside these two graves, we see where our higher Philosophy and our religious hopes alike lie buried. What is Mechanical Law to us? The antithesis of Providence; therefore, with the edict which proclaims its sway, all our prayers are ended. And what is Man, compared with the equal dog who bears him company? One event befals them both; yet we may ask whether before or after that one event, Man has or can have any preeminence above the beast? Let him be spoken of as statesman, warrior, orator, poet, painter, sculptor, musician; none of these epithets convey any truth. He may possibly be a speaking, striking, weaving, drawing, colouring, sound-producing machine. But the Designer of the Universe and the human artist have disappeared together. What we took for the author of immortal works, an original genius, an inspired hero of his kind, "a man and a leader of men," was a piece of wheel-work driven by unalterable law. There was the same "must be" to him as to his dog. There never was and never could have been, nor yet ever will be any _essential_ difference; two spirits are gone downwards to the earth. Man has not even the sad preeminence of Sin. Where can he find or make room for wrong-doing, when impelling Mechanism determines all? And where Sin is not, Repentance cannot come. Hope is shut out along with Remorse and its unmeaning pains. Man has no ladder of ascent left him; and why should he wish to climb? If there were such a ladder as Jacob dreamed, its base must rest on lifeless Law, and at its summit there would only be this same Law, enthroned and Deified. Thus, when the primæval Nebula arose in Space (how or why it arose is not told us), its vapoury Law contained all that is, and all that can be:--Plato and Shakespeare, Moses and St. John glimmered in its tremulous twilight. Worlds inanimate and animate scintillated from its fires. What we call Heaven and Earth are its dumb children, its law-determined Evolutions. Thou and I, O reader, have harboured strange fancies;--let them go;--we are but parts of the Whole; and the Whole is a mechanical Unity. Now that we find ourselves disabused and illuminated, our great difficulty may perhaps be to fall down, Strauss-like, and worship this _Universum_. Can such worship, or such an object of worship, bless and satisfy our high aspiring race? Eyes that have watched for Righteousness, hearts that have yearned after it, let the answer come from you! In this answer lives or dies the twofold belief of the Natural Theologian, the twofold hope resulting to Mankind. The belief, that is to say, in a personal Immortality, the belief in a personal God. It may now seem plain that the readiest test of moral or religious Materialism is its doctrine, not of Body but of Soul. There is no charm in such a word as Matter to differentiate the character of a philosophy. Looking at the material world, any thinker may be a Natural Realist or a Pure Idealist; yet being either or neither, he may materialize, or the reverse, so far as Morals and Religion are concerned. The simple question ought rather to be; Is man mechanically governed by the Law which rules the world of Abiology (the lifeless inorganic world), or is he, can he become, a Law unto himself?[150] It would be unfair to omit impressing upon the reader's mind that physical science _per se_ is by no means answerable for ethico-religious Materialism. As a question of fact, it does not seem established that students of Nature, whether physicists or biologists, have, as such, been the chief offenders. On the contrary, for every single instance of the kind, it seems quite probable that at least _two_ metaphysical writers might be found guilty. Obviously, some such large proportion may reasonably be expected, when we consider that Determinism, (the word Mill and others prefer to Necessity), is a theory involving a certain kind of metaphysics. But the really largest crop of materializers arises from a Debateable Land. There is a hybrid class of "thinkers," concerning whom the best physical-science authorities allege that "such nebulous rascals are mere metaphysicians," while metaphysical speculators, pure and simple, feel quite sure that "though under a cloud, the gentlemen must be Physicists."[151] So far as Biology[152] is concerned, let the reader compare Mr. Herbert Spencer's latest utterances already referred to, (in _Essays_, Vol. III. _sub. fin._, especially pp. 249-50), with the following passages from Mr. Huxley. "I suppose if there be an 'iron' law, it is that of gravitation; and if there be a physical necessity, it is that a stone, unsupported, must fall to the ground. But what is all we really know and can know about the latter phenomenon? Simply, that, in all human experience, stones have fallen to the ground under these conditions; that we have not the smallest reason for believing that any stone so circumstanced will not fall to the ground; and that we have, on the contrary, every reason to believe that it will so fall. It is very convenient to indicate that all the conditions of belief have been fulfilled in this case, by calling the statement that unsupported stones will fall to the ground, 'a law of nature.' But when, as commonly happens, we change _will_ into _must_, we introduce an idea of necessity which most assuredly does not lie in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I can discover elsewhere. For my part, I utterly repudiate and anathematize the intruder. Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing? But if it is certain that we can have no knowledge of the nature of either matter or spirit, and that the notion of necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the perfectly legitimate conception of law, the materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the most baseless of theological dogmas." ("On the Physical Basis of Life," _Lay Sermons_, pp. 157-8.) * * * * * And again (pp. 159-60):-- "We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it. To do this effectually it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs: the first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events. "Each of these beliefs can be verified experimentally, as often as we like to try. Each, therefore, stands upon the strongest foundation upon which any belief can rest, and forms one of our highest truths. If we find that the ascertainment of the order of nature is facilitated by using one terminology, or one set of symbols, rather than another, it is our clear duty to use the former; and no harm can accrue, so long as we bear in mind, that we are dealing merely with terms and symbols." Symbols, are to the true philosopher like old-fashioned copper "tokens," privately impressed with letters and devices, but lacking the Royal image and superscription. They are, as Spencer and Huxley agree, "unknown quantities;"--relativities not entities. They are employable enough where they suit,[153] provided Mr. Huxley's _caveat_ (p. 161) is steadily kept in mind. "The errors of systematic materialism may paralyze the energies and destroy the beauty of a life." The reader may be pleased to put the subject of Materialism before himself in a compendious shape as follows:--If the question asked be, "_What_ is Matter?" the answer appears little likely to be of moment to morals or Natural Theology, except so far as human ignorance is made a plea for Scepticism. But, if it is inquired, "whether the _Mechanical_ Laws of Matter are the laws of Universal Nature, including human nature? the issue becomes most momentous. The reply made, answers another question of the deepest interest:--"Are there any conditions under which a Science of Natural Theology is possible?" If Mechanism be the law of the Universe, Natural Theology is plainly impossible. FOOTNOTES: [88] Professor Max Müller writes as follows.--"If philosophy has to explain what is, not what ought to be, there will be and can be no rest till we admit, what cannot be denied, that there is in man a (third) faculty, which I call simply the faculty of apprehending the Infinite, not only in religion, but in all things; a power independent of sense and reason, a power in a certain sense contradicted by sense and reason, but yet a very real power, which has held its own from the beginning of the world, neither sense nor reason being able to overcome it, while it alone is able to overcome both reason and sense." _Max Muller's Lectures on the Science of Religion_.--Lect. I. New Ed. p. 20. The use of the word faculty is defended in a note. I quote this passage with pleasure, because one main objection brought against the possible existence of such a faculty is taken from the _negative form_ of the word Infinite. The Professor maintains that, as a question of Philology, Infinite signifies an affirmative idea. In his Lectures on Language, second series, p. 576. he writes thus. "There is no Infinite, we are told, for as there is a Finite, the Infinite has its limit in the Finite, it cannot be Infinite. Now all this is mere playing on words without thoughts. Why is infinite a negative idea? Because _infinite_ is derived from _finite_ by means of the negative particle _in_! But this is a mere accident, it is a fact in the history of language, and no more. The same idea may be expressed by the Perfect, the Eternal, the Self-existing, which are positive terms, or contain at least no negative element. That negative words may express positive ideas was known perfectly to Greek philosophers such as Chrysippus, and they would as little have thought of calling _immortal_ a negative idea as they would have considered _blind_ positive. The true idea of the Infinite is neither a negation nor a modification of any other idea. The Finite, on the contrary, is in reality the limitation or modification of the Infinite, nor is it possible, if we reason in good earnest, to conceive of the Finite in any other sense than as the shadow of the Infinite. Even Language will confess to this, if we cross-examine her properly." He adds a happy quotation from Roger Bacon: "'et dicitur infinitum non per privationem terminorum quantitatis, sed per negationem corruptionis et non esse.' Oxford of the nineteenth century need not be ashamed, as far as metaphysics are concerned, of Oxford of the thirteenth." Coleridge's theory of the Intuitive reason is well known to most readers. [89] Metaph. XII. 7. [90] Hamilton's Discussions, vol. 1. Art. 1. [91] Very few people have ever sate down and sturdily endeavoured to realize before their mind's eye, the distinct idea of any _other_ mind separate from themselves and independently subsistent. A short trial will shew the difficulty, perhaps impossibility of the proposed realization. Any one who tries and fails, may be glad to learn that eminent metaphysicians have retreated in despair from the task of justifying, by _argument_, our belief in any minds other than our own. To common sense, it may seem a natural inquiry whether this metaphysical failure holds _morally, in foro conscientiæ_, as a valid excuse for most men's neglect of other men's rights and interests? If _not_, it would appear that morality is a more delicate test of certainty, than some sorts of metaphysics. [t] For the information of some readers, and the entertainment of others, a few of the less popularized theories respecting Self-ness or Personal Identity are thrown into Additional Note A. [u] Nothing is more common in conversation than for a talker to affirm that such and such a position must be _untrue_ "because it is inconceivable." The assertor ought in return to be asked one or two questions, _e.g._, "Do you mean inconceivable to yourself or to the generality of Mankind?" If the latter, "Is the contradictory also inconceivable?" Again, "Do you mean by the word inconceivable, _unthinkable_ or _unimaginable_?" Few people clearly consider this last distinction. Further, "If unthinkable, is it absolutely so, or only very difficult to think?" And it seems likewise important to deliberate whether any position ought to be pronounced absolutely unthinkable, unless the human mind lies under a stern necessity of thinking and accepting its contradictory. [92] "Conceivable" and other like expressions are always relative to conceiving minds; and what appears either conceivable or inconceivable to one mind, may be the contrary to another. A painter not only conceives,--but draws a Centaur, and places him feeding on a wide plain or sloping hill side. But, can the Physiologist conceive such a monstrosity? The solution is easy; the painter thinks of his figure, the physiologist of the structure; and this example furnishes a good caution as to the use of similar words. From words we may pass to ideas. Take any conception involving the condition of Time or Space,--(those two optical tubes of our mind's perceiving eye),--and place it before the understanding; first as a _Finite_ and next as an _Infinite_. The result is a conflict of arguments, ending in a contradiction of all possibility that _either_ way the conception can be true. Any one moderately acquainted with Kant's best-known work, is aware that, by thus treating the world's existence, he raises overwhelming difficulties against its being _either_ limited or unlimited in extent;--eternal _or_ having a commencement in duration;--(p. 338. Ed. Rosenkranz) yet, the world _does_ exist in fact. Kant goes on to subject other cosmological ideas to the same enigmatical reasoning, with the same consequences. Some readers of purely modern science, may illustrate this question of the "_conceivable_" by what has been written on that extraordinary riddle, the "_four_ dimensions of space." They will see opinions _pro_ and _con_ in an article by Professor Sylvester in Nature vol. 1. A note (p. 238) contains one conclusion of the Professor's, interesting as _his_ answer to a question asked by us a few paragraphs back. He says, "If an Aristotle, or Descartes, or Kant assures me that he recognises God in the conscience, I accuse my own blindness if I fail to see with him.... I acknowledge two separate sources of authority,--the collective sense of mankind, and the illumination of privileged intellects." Plato then may have really _seen_ more than Lucretius--Coleridge more than Comte or Littré. [v] The advantages and defects of the optical structure of our human eyes have been carefully estimated by Helmholtz. He has also discussed the difficulties attending eyesight considered as a sensation and perception. Extracts from his clear yet popular Lectures are given in Additional Note B. [93] _Proceedings of the Royal Institution._ V. 456. [94] All theories of light require these immense numbers. Sir J. Herschel says there is no "mode of conceiving the subject which does not call upon us to admit the exertion of mechanical forces which may well be termed infinite." The numeration in the text is a rough and ready shape of statement at once intelligible. But it is interesting to view the subject more exactly.--Light travels in one second 192,000 miles. Each mile contains 63,360 inches, and in each inch are 39,000 waves of red light, calculated at their _mean_ length. Now, multiply these three sets of figures together, and we get a rate of 474,439,680,000,000 red waves per second. The mean length of a violet wave is the 1/57500th part of an inch; and by a like multiplication we find a product of 699,494,400,000,000 of violet light-strokes thrown upon the retina in each second. The phrase "_millions of millions_" is used in the text, because few people realize the idea of any arithmetical whole beyond a million. [95] "What we hear" writes Professor Max Müller "when listening to a chorus or a symphony is a commotion of elastic air, of which the wildest sea would give a very inadequate image. The lowest tone which the ear perceives is due to about 30 vibrations in one second, the highest to about 4,000. Consider then what happens in a _Presto_ when thousands of voices and instruments are simultaneously producing waves of air, each wave crossing the other, not only like the surface waves of the water, but like spherical bodies, and, as it would seem, without any perceptible disturbance; consider that each tone is accompanied by secondary tones, that each instrument has its peculiar _timbre_, due to secondary vibrations; and, lastly, let us remember that all this cross-fire of waves, all this whirlpool of sound, is moderated by laws which determine what we call harmony, and by certain traditions or habits which determine what we call melody--both these elements being absent in the songs of birds--that all this must be reflected like a microscopic photograph on the two small organs of hearing, and there excite not only perception, but perception followed by a new feeling even more mysterious, which we call either pleasure or pain; and it will be clear that we are surrounded on all sides by miracles transcending all we are accustomed to call miraculous, and yet disclosing to the genius of an Euler or a Newton laws which admit of the most minute mathematical determination." _Science of Language_, Second Series, p. 115. [96] There is a much more scientific mode of trying this experiment. A description of the instrument (Kaleidophone), and cuts of the figures produced, may be seen in Tyndall on Sound, pp. 132. seq. [97] There is reason for believing that a large proportion of animal eyes see much as ours do when in a normal state. Colour blindness is frequent in Man and occurs between red and green, yet a bull distinguishes the two like a _healthy_, human being. He is allured by the sight of a green field, and lashes himself into fury when a red rag is waved before him. The eyes of insects are very far removed in structure from ours. A butterfly's compound eye contains 17,000 tubes, that of the Mordella beetle 25,000. Their perception of colours appears vivid and distinct. They resemble birds, reptiles, and other creatures in choosing for their lairs and resting-places objects _coloured like themselves_. It is not difficult to mount one of these compound eyes, so as to look through it by aid of a lens placed in focus. Leeuwenhoeck looked through the eye of a dragon fly (made up of 12,544 tubes), "and viewed the steeple of a church which was 299 feet high, and 750 feet from the place where he stood. He could plainly see the steeple, though not apparently larger than the point of a fine needle. He also viewed a house in the same manner, and could discern the front, distinguish the doors and windows, and perceive whether they were open or shut." See _Insect Miscellanies_, p. 129. [98] Two points connected with colour admit of being easily experimented on, and deserve from their interest to be made the subjects of repeated observations. The first has relation to the question of _primary_ colours;--are they alike in man and in _all_ the lower animals?--In birds and reptiles there are anatomical reasons for believing the primaries to be red, yellow, and blue. But are they the same in our race?--may they not more probably be red, green, and violet? In this case yellow is the transition from red to green, blue from green to violet. As colour blindness consists in an insensibility to red, and as the outer circle of the field of vision is feeble in its reds, the number of experiments which might be suggested is evidently considerable. Let a person place two threads respectively red and green near the bridge of the nose, so as to be seen by the inner angle of the pupil only. If dexterously moved, both seem green;--if not, both will in time become black. Where the want of sensitive appreciation of red is great, the same result follows in every part of the field of sight. Thus reverend gentlemen in former times have been induced to wear scarlet hose under the impression that they had put on black silk; and in these railroad days many persons find themselves unable to distinguish between the safety and the danger signal lights. It seems strange indeed that any scientific advisers of railway Boards should have recommended for use the two colours, above all others, most likely to get confounded. The theory which supposes red, green, and violet to be Man's three primary colours is the hypothesis of our great countryman Dr. Thomas Young, and deserves much more consideration than was for a long time awarded it. If we may judge of his theory by his appreciation of pictures it must have been excellent;--the present writer saw with admiration in 1845 the grand series of Reynolds' portraits which Dr. Young had left behind him. The second topic of interest is the inquiry into the number and tone of subjective colours. A perfect theory of colour ought, of course, to embrace all possible human sensations of the kind. Now many persons are able to see in dreams a rich amber light far softer and more pure than any tint ever beheld by the Eye. It generally appears to irradiate Space, and silvery figures, most often the celestial orbs, float within it. A still more beautiful production of reflex energy exerted after tranquil rest is the blending of delicate green with a hyacinthine hue quite strange to this world, and indescribably lovely in its tender shadings off. By means of this subjective activity the experiments of Goethe and J. Müller may be varied almost _ad libitum_. The easiest plan is on first waking to keep the eyelids steadily closed, and watch for the unbidden rise of tints. Persons of strong pictorial and poetic powers can, after some practice, control their appearance and succession; and much diversity may be produced by slightly separating the fringe of eyelashes and looking between the loosely pressed fingers. The remarkable point in these and similar experiments seems to be that we are thus enabled to gaze upon beauties more marvellous than the outward eye ever beheld--yet we _see_ them. Another and a painful source of knowledge on this subject consists in registering the visual impressions of persons bodily or mentally diseased. The difference between these and the normal impressions of healthy people would seem to arise from reflex action, the disordered sensory or mind reacting upon the optic apparatus; or, as it may be said, the centre of our being is through these aberrations made manifest in its control of the circumference. Now, it will be obvious to any reflective person how very important all information we can acquire respecting this central empire over the impressions of our sense-nerves may become when we try to estimate the conditions of human knowledge. If it be true that the Mind imposes laws of activity on the nervous system even when receiving impressions from it, then the necessity we are under of _thinking_ in accordance with certain inly imposed laws receives a most striking illustration. And the inference from it carries an _a fortiori_ probability since our thoughts lie nearer to our mental centre than any of our sense-impressions. [99] Nerves of common feeling are acutely sensitive when divided, and the patient animal under a Majendie or a dentist utters a sharp shriek. The case is different with motor nerves, with those of the sympathetic system, and with (what is more to our purpose) nerves of sensation. It seems clear that mechanical injuries, or even touches, excite them in the direction of their own special functions. Auditory nerves feel a shock as a sound,--optic nerves receive it as a sudden and brilliant light. We are doubly assured from these effects of the true functions belonging to the several sets of nerves. Disease and injury are great discoverers of what ought to be healthy susceptibilities. In such cases, however, they prove also something more agreeable to think upon. They prove that suffering is confined within definite limits, and that _economy_ of pain forms part of the universal design, for the sensitive animal as well as the sensitive man. If all our nerves shrank equally with equal tenderness, life would be a history of protracted agony. Yet one might have expected, _primâ facie_, that a fibre which telegraphs shapes and colours with their blendings, would eloquently tell the story of its own occasional anguish. And our whole nervous framework might have been conceived as an instrument of torture. It has not been so constituted. _Per contra_, the nerves of common feeling assert their own vocation.--"A brazen canstick turned" sets the teeth on edge, and troubles the skin with horripilation. Believers in ghosts--and also disbelievers--are aware that some sights "Make knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end." For extended information on this subject compare Additional Note C. [100] Aristotle so described it before Mr. Bain and other modern writers, "[Greek: to gar horaton esti chrôma]," De Anima II. 7. 1. As Kampe carefully observes, "so ist die Farbe (nicht die gefärbten Körper) das Eigenthümliche des Gesichtssinns." See also his note, Erkenntnisstheorie des Aristoteles, p. 88. [w] Compare Helmholtz on "The Sensation of Sight," _Lectures_, pp. 256, 7, and 259. "We have already seen enough to answer the question whether it is possible to maintain the natural and innate conviction that the quality of our sensations, and especially our sensations of sight, give us a true impression of corresponding qualities in the outer world. It is clear that they do not. The question was really decided by Johannes Müller's deduction from well ascertained facts of the law of specific nervous energy. Whether the rays of the sun appear to us as colour, or as warmth, does not at all depend upon their own properties, but simply upon whether they excite the fibres of the optic nerve, or those of the skin. Pressure upon the eyeball, a feeble current of electricity passed through it, a narcotic drug carried to the retina by the blood, are capable of exciting the sensation of light just as well as the sunbeams. The most complete difference offered by our several sensations, that namely between those of sight, of hearing, of taste, of smell, and of touch--this deepest of all distinctions, so deep that it is impossible to draw any comparison of likeness, or unlikeness, between the sensations of colour and of musical tones--does not, as we now see, at all depend upon the nature of the external object, but solely upon the central connections of the nerves which are affected.... But not only uneducated persons, who are accustomed to trust blindly to their senses, even the educated, who know that their senses may be deceived, are inclined to demur to so complete a want of any closer correspondence in kind between actual objects and the sensations they produce than the law I have just expounded. For instance, natural philosophers long hesitated to admit the identity of the rays of light and of heat, and exhausted all possible means of escaping a conclusion which seemed to contradict the evidence of their senses. "Another example is that of Goethe, as I have endeavoured to show elsewhere. He was led to contradict Newton's theory of colours, because he could not persuade himself that white, which appears to our sensation as the purest manifestation of the brightest light, could be composed of darker colours. It was Newton's discovery of the composition of light that was the first germ of the modern doctrine of the true functions of the senses; and in the writings of his contemporary, Locke, were correctly laid down the most important principles on which the right interpretation of sensible qualities depends. But, however clearly we may feel that here lies the difficulty for a large number of people, I have never found the opposite conviction of certainty derived from the senses so distinctly expressed that it is possible to lay hold of the point of error: and the reason seems to me to lie in the fact that beneath the popular notions on the subject lie other and more fundamentally erroneous conceptions." [101] Is there, asks Idealistic Scepticism, any outside world at all? We have all of us always believed in the veritable existence of this outside world from our childhood. So have we believed always in our own real and continued personal existence. The unyielding objectivities concerning which our senses inform us--the identical Self which receives their information--are entities no man ordinarily thinks of calling in question. Let any one sit down and try to imagine himself a human animal let loose upon life without a firm belief in either of these two primary convictions. What could life be to him? to his descendants? to the world of men if similarly unbelieving? Yet what are the conditions or evidences of veracity upon which his and his fellows' present convictions must necessarily repose? Can he and others help believing them true? and why?--This "why" is a safe answer to the most plausible as well as the most refined objection against such primary beliefs as those premised by Natural Theology. [102] Cheselden's case is reported in the Philosophical Transactions for 1728, and also in his Anatomy. Respecting the point above quoted he is confirmed by Mr. Nunneley, "_On the Organs of Vision_," 1858. [103] See Dr. Carpenter's Principles of Human Physiology. Ed. 7. p. 713. § 635. [x] The following quaint apology for our senses at the expense of our understanding may be new to the majority of my readers:-- "We have seen two notorious instances of _sensitive deception_, which justifie the charge of _Petron. Arbiter_. Fallunt nos oculi, vagique sensus Oppressâ ratione mentiuntur. And yet to speak properly, and to do our _senses_ right, simply they are not deceived, but only administer an occasion to our forward _understandings_ to deceive themselves: and so though they are some way accessory to our delusion; yet the more principal faculties are the _Capital offenders_. Thus if the _Senses_ represent the _Earth_ as _fixt_ and _immoveable_; they give us the truth of their _Sentiments_: To _sense_ it is _so_, and it would be deceit to present it otherwise. For (as we have shewn) though it do _move_ in itself; it _rests_ to us, who are carry'd with it.... But if hence our Understandings falsely deduct, that there is the same quality in the _external impressor_; 'tis, it is _criminal_, our _sense_ is _innocent_. When the _Ear_ tingles, we really hear a _sound_: If we judge it without us, it's the fallacy of our _Judgments_. The _apparitions_ of our frighted _Phancies_ are real _sensibles_: But if we translate them without the compass of our Brains, and apprehend them as external objects; it's the unwary rashness of our _Understanding_ deludes us. And if our disaffected Palates resent nought but bitterness from our choicest viands, we truly tast the unpleasing quality, though falsely conceive it in that, which is no more then the occasion of its production. If any find fault with the novelty of the notion; the learned St. _Austin_ stands ready to confute the charge: and they who revere _Antiquity_, will derive satisfaction from so venerable a suffrage. He tells us, _Si quis remum frangi in aquâ opinatur, et, cum_ _aufertur, integrari; non malum habet internuncium, sed malus est Judex_. And onward to this purpose, The sense could not otherwise perceive it in the _water_, neither ought it: For since the _Water_ is one thing, and the _Air_ another; 'tis requisite and necessary, that the _sense_ should be as different as the _medium_: Wherefore the Eye sees aright; if there be a mistake, 'tis the Judgement's the Deceiver. Elsewhere he saith, that our Eyes misinform us not, but faithfully transmit their resentment to the mind. And against the _Scepticks_, That it's a piece of injustice to complain of our _senses_, and to exact from them an account, which is beyond the sphear of their notice: and resolutely determines, _Quicquid possunt videre oculi, verum vident_. So that what we have said of the _senses deceptions_, is rigidly to be charg'd only on our careless Understandings, misleading us through the ill management of sensible informations." Glanvill, _Vanity of Dogmatizing_. Chap. x. First Ed. p. 91, seq. The reader may like to consider how far Glanvill's apology for the senses is removed from the following propositions laid down by a recent writer just quoted who thus defends while he limits the veracity of sense-impressions:-- "What we directly apprehend," writes Professor Helmholtz, "is not the immediate action of the external exciting cause upon the ends of our nerves, but only the changed condition of the nervous fibres which we call the state of _excitation_ or functional activity." And further on:--"The simple rule for all illusions of sight is this: _we always believe that we see such objects as would, under conditions of normal vision, produce the retinal image of which we are actually conscious_. If these images are such as could not be produced by any normal kind of observation, we judge of them according to their nearest resemblance; and in forming this judgment, we more easily neglect the parts of sensation which are imperfectly than those which are perfectly apprehended. When more than one interpretation is possible, we usually waver involuntarily between them; but it is possible to end this uncertainty by bringing the idea of any of the possible interpretations we choose as vividly as possible before the mind by a conscious effort of the will." Helmholtz on _The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision_. pp. 230, 31 and p. 307. [104] Two acute reasoners, who will be alternately acquitted of madness by contending schools of thought, have arrived at conclusions very favourable to the sanity of idealizing men. In his first lecture at the Royal Institution, Professor Masson spoke in the following terms of _Hume_ and _Fichte_. "There is the system of Nihilism, or, as it may be better called, Non-Substantialism. According to this system, the Phænomenal Cosmos, whether regarded as consisting of two parallel successions of phænomena (Mind _and_ Matter), or of only one (Mind _or_ Matter), resolves itself, on analysis, into an absolute Nothingness,--mere appearances with no credible substratum of Reality; a play of phantasms in a void. If there have been no positive or dogmatic Nihilists, yet both Hume for one purpose, and Fichte for another, have propounded Nihilism as the ultimate issue of all reasoning that does not start with some _à priori_ postulate."--Recent British Philosophy, p. 66. The reader will observe that to raise the question fully, we have spoken of the special form of Idealism to which Mr. Mill gives the first place in his description, (Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, p. 8.) "According to one of the forms, the sensations which, in common parlance, we are said to receive from objects, are not only all that we can possibly know of the objects, but are all that we have any ground for believing to exist.----Those who hold this opinion are said to doubt or deny the existence of matter. They are sometimes called by the name Idealists, sometimes by that of Sceptics, according to the other opinions which they hold. They include the followers of Berkeley and those of Hume. Among recent thinkers, the acute and accomplished Professor Ferrier, though by a circuitous path, and expressing himself in a very different phraseology, seems to have arrived at essentially the same point of view. These philosophers maintain the Relativity of our knowledge in the most extreme form in which the doctrine can be understood, since they contend, not merely that all we can possibly know of anything is the manner in which it affects the human faculties, but that there is nothing else to be known; that affections of human or of some other minds are all that we can know to exist." Mr. Mill's own position will be found in his 11th Chapter. After defining Matter to be a "Permanent Possibility of Sensation," (p. 227) and explaining his definition, he writes in a note (p. 232), the following decisive sentences: "My able American critic, Dr. H. B. Smith, contends through several pages that these facts afford no proofs that objects _are_ external to us. I never pretended that they do. I am accounting for our conceiving, or representing to ourselves, the Permanent Possibilities as real objects external to us. I do not believe that the real externality to us of anything, except other minds, is capable of proof." Mr. O'Hanlon's pamphlet entitled "A Criticism of John Stuart Mill's Pure Idealism; and an attempt to shew that, if logically carried out, it is Pure Nihilism," seems less known than it deserves to be. Mr. Mill noticed and answered it in his 3rd Edition--chiefly among the criticisms commencing p. 244.----Mr. O'Hanlon's early decease has given a painful interest to his promising labours. Some paragraphs from his now scarce pamphlet are placed at the end of Additional Note D, on "Pure Idealism." [105] _On Hamilton._ p. 6. Mill is thus echoed from across the broad Atlantic;--"The profoundest question of philosophy turns on the relation of Thought to Being, Mind to Matter, Subject to Object, or (in empiricistic phrase) Organism to Environment. Is the Organism purely the product of the Environment? Then we have Empiricism, Sensationalism, Materialism, whose motto is that of Destutt-Tracy,--"_Penser c'est sentir_." Is the Environment the product of the Organism? Then we have Transcendentalism, Egoism, Idealism, whose motto is that of Berkeley,--"The _esse_ of objects is _percipi_." F. E. Abbot, in _The Index_ (American), for July 27, 1872. [106] Lord Macaulay has some pertinent and characteristic remarks concerning this topic in his literary estimate of Dr. Johnson. "How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature. The same inconsistency may be observed in the schoolmen of the middle ages. Those writers show so much acuteness and force of mind in arguing on their wretched data, that a modern reader is perpetually at a loss to comprehend how such minds came by such data. Not a flaw in the superstructure of the theory which they are rearing escapes their vigilance. Yet they are blind to the obvious unsoundness of the foundation. It is the same with some eminent lawyers. Their legal arguments are intellectual prodigies, abounding with the happiest analogies and the most refined distinctions. The principles of their arbitrary science being once admitted, the statute-book and the reports being once assumed as the foundations of reasoning, these men must be allowed to be perfect masters of logic. But if a question arises as to the postulates on which their whole system rests, if they are called upon to vindicate the fundamental maxims of that system which they have passed their lives in studying, these very men often talk the language of savages or of children." (_Essays_, Ed. 1852. p. 175.) As to the schoolmen, any one who wishes to form a fair idea of their acuteness with little trouble to himself, may consult the "Synopsis Distinctionum" of H. L. Castanæus, a book found in most learned libraries. [y] See Additional Note E.--The great interest of this subject for our purpose lies in the circumstance that the relation of Theory to Fact is in effect a question most closely akin to the one already mooted concerning the relation of our Sensations to our Perceptions (compare Additional Note B). These two questions are indeed so very similar as to be in the main identical. What we want to learn regarding both relations, is, _first_, the _extent_ of the relativity to our human nature; in other words how _much we_ have _mentally put_ into our Theories and Sensations _before_ we treat them as Facts and Perceptions. _Secondly_, what reason we have for believing _any_ of our knowledge comprehended under either or both of these relativities (Perception and Fact) to be true _beyond_ our human sphere; and, above all, whether we are able to assert, on good grounds, that such and such parts of either kind of our knowledge are absolutely and immutably true?-- If, for example, we ask--Is it thus true that there are real objects external to ourselves? "I do not believe," Mr. Mill has told us, "that the real externality to us of anything, except other minds, is capable of proof." And a few lines further, "The view I take of externality, in the sense in which I acknowledge it as real, could not be more accurately expressed than in Professor Fraser's words." These are "For ourselves we can conceive only--(1) An externality to our present and transient experience in _our own_ possible experience past and future, and (2) An externality to our own conscious experience, in the contemporaneous, as well as in the past or future experience of _other minds_." (_On Hamilton._ p. 232, note.) This explanation, Mill had just before observed, is an externality in the only sense we need care about; and it means in plain words, that we possess no absolutely true but only some utilitarian knowledge of the real existence of an outside world. We must, however, and do care infinitely more for another kind of answer to quite another kind of question. Is the antithesis between Right and Wrong,--the Moral Imperative "Do this and live, transgress and die,"--absolutely and immutably true? If not, who would calculate profit and loss as they are calculated in the Gospel; who would or could believe in a Righteous that is to say, a Real and True God? Many minds, appalled by the vastness of these issues, and finding no satisfactory answer to questions of such infinite importance, have fallen back on the position of Dr. Newman in his _Grammar of Assent_. But the unsatisfactory characteristic attaching to this position, is that there seems to be no _limit_ to such Assents, because there appears no Reasonable canon or maxim to explain, defend, and regulate them. To the far larger number of minds the problem states itself as a dilemma. There are exactly two alternatives open to Man. His choice lies between two contrasted positions--the most antagonistic conceivable, yet both resulting from one common supposed fact. Ignorance and impotence are the truest characters inscribed upon our Reason. Man must decide either for an unlimited Doubt such as that which Hume delineates, wide as the universal whole of our human Existence; or else yield the kind of Assent to which Dr. Newman invites as being the sole secure refuge for any soul driven by despair into a recoil from utter absence of belief and hope--the want of everything to trust and love. Now, let it be observed that an assent transcending reasonable proof is, in effect, a confession that Reason falls short of establishing those transcendental truths to which the mind has thus assented. And contrariwise, limitless Doubt making all else uncertain, affirms with unmistakeable decisiveness the impotence of human Reason.--"The observation of human blindness and weakness," says Hume, "is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it." Hence, we see that Hume's conclusion is identical with that underlying a position directly antagonistic to his own, and in this respect _les extrêmes se touchent_. It follows, then, with equal clearness, that any Dilemma which restricts human choice to the two alternatives above stated, rests upon a denial that Man's Reason can guide Mankind to truth--(and by consequence that he can ever feel after and find his God);--whilst, conversely, this same denial, if posited as a basis of speculation, permits no human choice beyond the two horns of a Dilemma thus made necessarily imperative upon us all. Neither alternative, however, can be accepted by the Natural Theologian, nor can he possibly receive any such Dilemma as founded in Truth or Reason. On the one hand the Superhuman, and Supernatural lie outside his science which has for its sphere Nature, including Man's Nature; and which steadily endeavours to attain the true interpretation and evidence yielded by both Natures, to a belief extending beyond their present territory and fluent conditions. On the other hand, his science becomes impossible if unlimited Doubt is the sole dreary prospect open to the philosophic inquirer. And with his science all other sciences must perish. Doubt saps the foundations of them all; common-sense facts, scientific theories, and practical every-day beliefs, are all impartially shewn to be baseless. So far as our realities are concerned "We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep." Science is therefore an alien from Man's world; the soul an outcast amid her own:-- "As in strange lands a traveller walking slow, In doubt and great perplexity, A little before moon-rise hears the low Moan of an unknown sea; "And knows not if it be thunder or a sound Of stones thrown down, or one deep cry Of great wild beasts; then thinketh, 'I have found A new land, but I die.'" "Not for this," says the same reflective poet-- "Not for this Was common clay ta'en from the common earth, Moulded by God, and tempered with the tears Of angels to the perfect shape of man." Let it be observed in conclusion, that the mode in which common-sense people are accustomed to treat the primary tenets of most sciences, and the validity of their own ordinary beliefs, may be placed in curious contrast with their attitude towards the proofs of Natural Theology. In the former case, acceptance is easy and wholesale; in the latter, every mind seems to bristle with objections. Now there are evidently thousands who _must_ surrender their judgments to the demands of a present and pressing utility, and must take upon trust a multitude of maxims which they can never hope to investigate. The difficulties necessarily involved in each and all of these easy acceptations thus remain unsuspected, and cannot therefore be placed side by side with the difficulties of Theism. But, next arises a serious question. How far can a similar facility of wholesale acceptance and a similar absence of comparison with deeper truths, be considered a philosophic or even a fair procedure in the case of men and women who _think_ themselves into Atheism? [z] Neither can it be too often repeated that practical truth involves an enormous amount of speculative difficulty, and is received as the daily basis of human action in the face of doubts, which speculatively considered are absolutely insoluble. There is (as will appear in Chapter IV.) reason to extend this remark beyond what is commonly called practical truth far into the realm of speculative knowledge, or to speak more exactly, of all knowledge whatsoever. Suppose, for instance, the continuity of our inward power of receiving sense-impressions, of knowing, and reasoning; (our personal Identity) is a groundless belief;--Suppose too that our sense-impressions are reflections from self-created shadows and not from objective realities;--_where_ can any knowledge be truly subsistent save in that place of exile now generally termed "the Unknowable"? Compare Additional Notes A and B appended to this present Chapter. [107] La Philosophie en France. IX. p. 66. [108] First Principles, p. 108. [109] Lay Sermon delivered on Sunday, Jan. 7, 1866; in the collected vol. pp. 19, 20. [110] Essays I. p. 190. [111] Ibid. p. 211. [aa] Mr. Herbert Spencer has been freely criticized by Americans, in part as not being sufficiently thorough--in part as being untrue to his own position. A few quotations will be found in Additional Note F, on "The Unknowable." [ab] The paragraph, taken in its entireness, is pervaded with the vivid sense of a Moral Law which can neither change nor perish--a Law at once human and Divine. This strong protest is both in thought and expression a complete contrast to the ordinary tone of Mr. Mill's disquisitions, attempered as they generally are between benevolence and expediency. Instead of pondering the Utilities of a race which, comparatively speaking, began to exist yesterday, it appeals with decisive sternness, once and for ever, to the Immutable and the Absolute. It reminds one of a torch-bearing Prometheus pitted against the selfish despot of a new and morally enfeebled Olympus. See Additional Note G. [112] This sentence contains two propositions; the question of speculative perplexity has been treated in this Chapter--that of reasonable necessity is reserved for our next. [113] On Hamilton, p. 242. [114] Mill on Hamilton, p. 232, note. [115] Ibid. p. 233, note. [116] Ibid. p. 227. [117] British Association Report, 1870. lxxvii. lxxxiv. [118] The remark above made respecting a "_living laboratory_" will be readily understood by every one who remembers the great mistakes committed, some years ago, in treating the stomach as a mere chemical workshop;--forgetful of its all-important endowment,--vitality. That oversight has been alluded to here because it may yield a lesson to Psychologists; for may not a far higher kind of endowment in like manner be forgotten when men materialize the principles one and all on which is conditioned the transforming power of mental assimilation? [119] Lay Sermons, p. 160. [120] And of more than one as we shall see hereafter. Its point will be best understood upon a perusal of Additional Notes F and I. [121] All these quotations will be found between pp. 332 and 360 of the Treatise. Ed. 1817. [122] Compare Mr. Green's Introduction to Hume's _Treatise on Human Nature_, Vol. I., pp. 263, seq., where he discusses the bearing of this subject upon Hume's doctrine of Cause and Effect. [123] He sums up in the words of Goethe, thus given in the translation of his lectures from which we have quoted-- "Woe! woe! Thou hast destroyed The beautiful world With powerful fist; In ruin 'tis hurled, By the blow of a demigod shattered. The scattered Fragments into the void we carry, Deploring The beauty perished beyond restoring." [124] "All the different sorts of rays which I have mentioned produce one effect in common. They raise the temperature of the objects on which they fall, and accordingly are all felt by our skin as rays of heat." (p. 237.) [125] The former of these two latter quotations has been cited already in a foot-note on p. 164 _ante_. It is repeated here for the sake of bringing together Masson's classification of Fichte, first as "_Pure_ Idealist," and secondly as "Nihilist." Mr. O'Hanlon's criticism of Mill reaches exactly the same goal as regards that subtle controversialist. His position is that Mill's Pure Idealism when analysed, turns out to be Pure Nihilism. [126] Compare Note B preceding. [127] In the pamphlet referred to p. 165 _ante_, note. The quotations in our text commence on its 5th page. The subject will be most easily comprehended after a reperusal of the argument of Chap. III. pp. 164-172 inclusive. [128] On p. 14 the ingenious writer adds a further argument based on Mill's admissions. "If the fire apart from my consciousness be some positive condition or conditions of warmth and light, if the corn be some positive condition or conditions of food, my thesis is made out, and your Pure Idealism falls to the ground. If, on the other hand, 'the fire' be nothing positive apart from my consciousness, then, since it is nothing at all when so apart, you can have no right to speak of 'modifications' taking place in it, whether we are asleep or awake, present or absent." [129] It is worth observing how truly our Bishop anticipated the vulgar objection against his theory. Towards the end of his Dialogues Hylas (who clings to the olden elemental nature) speaks thus: "To say, There is no Matter in the World, is still shocking to me. Whereas to say--There is no Matter, if by that Term be meant an unthinking Substance existing without the Mind; but if by Matter is meant some sensible Thing, whose Existence consists in being perceived, then there is Matter:--this Distinction gives it quite another Turn; and Men will come into your Notions with small Difficulty, when they are proposed in that manner." Lord Byron condescended to repeat the "coxcombs' grin"-- "When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, And prov'd it--'twas no matter what he said." [130] Read for example the following eloquent passages from Berkeley's "Three Dialogues." Philonous, who represents Berkeley himself, says: "To me it is evident, for the Reasons you allow of, that sensible Things cannot exist otherwise than in a Mind or Spirit. Whence I conclude, not that they have no real Existence, but that seeing they depend not on my Thought, and have an Existence distinct from being perceived by me, _there must be some other Mind wherein they exist_. As sure, therefore, as the sensible World really exists, so sure is there an infinite omnipresent Spirit who contains and supports it. "Hylas. What! This is no more than I and all Christians hold; nay, and all others too who believe there is a God, and that he knows and comprehends all Things. "Phil. Ay, but here lies the Difference. Men commonly believe that all Things are known or perceived by God, because they believed the Being of a God, whereas I, on the other side, immediately and necessarily conclude the Being of a God, because all sensible Things must be perceived by Him. "Hylas. But so long as we all believe the same thing, what matter is it how we come by that Belief? "Phil. But neither do we agree in the same Opinion. For Philosophers, tho' they acknowledge all corporeal Beings to be perceived by God, yet they attribute to them an absolute Subsistence distinct from their being perceived by any Mind whatever, which I do not. Besides, is there no Difference between saying, _There is a God, therefore he perceives all Things_: and saying, _Sensible Things do really exist: and if they really exist, they are necessarily perceived by an infinite Mind: therefore there is an infinite Mind, or God?_ This furnishes you with a direct and immediate Demonstration, from a most evident Principle, of the _Being of a God_.... Hylas. It cannot be denied, there is something highly serviceable to Religion in what you advance. But do you not think it looks very like a Notion entertained by some eminent Moderns, of _seeing all things in God_? Phil. I would gladly know that Opinion; pray explain it to me. Hylas. They conceive that the Soul, being immaterial, is incapable of being united with material Things, so as to perceive them in themselves, but that she perceives them by her Union with the Substance of God, which being spiritual, is therefore purely intelligible, or capable of being the immediate Object of a Spirit's Thought. Besides, the Divine Essence contains in it Perfections correspondent to each created Being; and which are, for that Reason, proper to exhibit or represent them to the Mind. Phil. I do not understand how our Ideas, which are Things altogether passive and inert, can be the Essence, or any Part (or like any Part) of the Essence or Substance of God, who is an impassive, indivisible, purely active Being. Many more Difficulties and Objections there are, which occur at first View against this Hypothesis, but I shall only add, that it is liable to all the Absurdities of the common Hypotheses in making a created World exist otherwise than in the Mind of a Spirit. Beside all which it has this peculiar to itself; that it makes that material World serve to no Purpose. And if it pass for a good Argument against other Hypotheses in the Sciences, that they suppose Nature or the Divine Wisdom to make something in vain, or do that by tedious round-about Methods, which might have been performed in a much more easy and compendious way, what shall we think of that Hypothesis which supposes the whole World made in vain? Hylas. But what say you, are not you too of Opinion that we see all Things in God? If I mistake not, what you advance comes near it. Phil. I entirely agree with what the Holy Scripture saith, _That in God we live, and move, and have our Being_. But that we see Things in his Essence after the manner above set forth, I am far from believing. Take here in brief my Meaning. It is evident that the Things I perceive are my own Ideas, and that no Idea can exist, unless it be in a Mind. Nor is it less plain that these Ideas or Things by me perceived, either themselves or their Archetypes exist independently of my Mind, since I know myself not to be their Author, it being out of my Power to determine at Pleasure what particular Ideas I shall be affected with upon opening my Eyes or Ears. They must therefore exist in some other Mind, whose Will it is they should be exhibited to me. The Things, I say, immediately perceived, are Ideas or Sensations, call them which you will. But how can any Idea or Sensation exist in, or be produced by, anything but a Mind or Spirit? This, indeed, is inconceivable: and to assert that which is inconceivable, is to talk Nonsense: Is it not?. Hylas. Without doubt. Phil. But on the other hand, it is very conceivable that they should exist in, and be produced by, a Spirit; since this is no more than I daily experience in myself, inasmuch as I perceive numberless Ideas; and by an Act of my Will can form a great Variety of them, and raise them up in my Imagination: Tho' it must be confessed, these Creatures of the Fancy are not altogether so distinct, so strong, vivid, and permanent, as those perceived by my Senses, which latter are called _Real Things_. From all which I conclude, _there is a Mind which affects me every Moment with all the sensible Impressions I perceive_. And from the Variety, Order, and Manner of these, I conclude the Author of them to be _wise, powerful, and good, beyond comprehension_. Mark it well, I do not say, I see Things by perceiving that which represents them in the intelligible Substance of God. This I do not understand; but I say, The Things by me perceived are known by the Understanding, and produced by the Will, of an infinite Spirit. And is not all this most plain and evident? Is there any more in it, than what a little Observation of our own Minds, and that which passes in them not only enables us to conceive, but also obliges us to acknowledge?" Numberless charming quotations might be added from the "Principles" as well as the Dialogues, but those already given may suffice, and they have been chosen now because not very commonly quoted. [131] Hegel Encyklopädie T. i. S. 95. (Werke VI. 189.) The quotation above is from Mr. Wallace's translation p. 153. Compare his Index. [132] In the just published Edition of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, I. p. 140. We must all regret the loss of Dean Mansel's ultimate thoughts on "The real error of Berkeley's Idealism." Letters &c. p. 391. But more than a dozen years earlier, he wrote, (_Prolegomena Logica_, Chap. V.) "The fault of Berkeley did not consist in doubting the existence of matter, but in asserting its non-existence." How far Mansel himself went in the direction of this same doubt may be judged from the following passage, which occurs in the Prolegomena one page before. "Beyond the range of conscious beings, we can have only a negative idea of substance. The name is applied in relation to certain collections of sensible phenomena, natural or artificial, connected with each other in various ways; by locomotion, by vegetation, by contributing to a common end, by certain positions in space. But here we have no positive notion of substance distinct from phenomena. I do not attribute to the billiard ball a consciousness of its own figure, colour, and motion; but, in denying consciousness, I deny the only form in which unity and substance have been presented to me. I have therefore no data for thinking one way or the other on the question. Some kind of unity between the several phenomena may exist, or it may not; but if it does exist, it exists in a manner of which I can form no conception; and if it does not exist, my faculties do not enable me to detect its absence." In other words (as Mr. O'Hanlon might have phrased it) "My friend Smith is I know a person,--therefore a substance. But Smith's hat and coat, being unconscious, lack the only forms in which unity and substance have been presented to me. Smith's coat is blue, its fabric woollen; his hat black, and of silken texture;--there may or may not be unities in which these phenomena of colour and structural appearance cohere; my faculties do not, however, enable me to decide whether hat and coat are or are not _positively_ substantial unifications. It would appear from all this, that hats and coats and other familiar so-called substances, are as little _essentially_ known to us as that vast territory of supernatural Being which has been named the "Unknowable." [133] From Mr. Wallace's translation of Hegel's Logik, pp. 65, 8, and 9. As the translator preserves the numbering of the Sections, reference is easy to the original German. Hegel adds a remark well worthy of attention:--"The scepticism of Hume, by whom this observation was chiefly made, should be clearly marked off from Greek scepticism. Hume founds his remarks on the truth of the empirical element, on feeling and sensation, and proceeds to attack universal truths and laws, because they do not derive their authority from sense-perception. So far was ancient scepticism from making feeling and sensation a canon of truth, that it turned against the deliverances of sense first of all."--Ibid. p. 69. [134] Pp. 234-341. The preface to this volume is dated February 1874. [135] Martineau's conception discussed by Spencer is hampered by a theory of Matter difficult _per se_. [136] See back pp. 76-8 and 107 (end of note) and connect with these passages the oft-repeated Wordsworthian maxim:-- "We murder to dissect." [137] See our Chapter VI. _On Causation_. [138] The paragraph cited in the text of Chapter III. concludes with these words:--"I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go." Now, no man can sit down and _calculate_ himself into Mr. Mill's conviction thus enounced; neither could any cool process of argument have ever kindled such a flame. A sternness of purpose like his must be either the skeleton-armour covering the thoughtless boy in Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette, or it is the reflection of a light intuitively flashed through the soul--the echo of a chord struck upon the writer's very heart-strings. Such and so deep, beyond doubt, was the ingenuous feeling of Mr. Mill. [139] La Science au point de Vue Philosophique, pp. 539-542. [140] Psychological Inquiries, second part, pp. 195-197. [141] Address (Presidential) to British Association at Liverpool, 1870, p. 15. [142] Loc. cit. pp. 199-200. [143] Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, January, 1873, p. 74. [144] Loc. cit. p. 64. [145] Loc. cit. pp. 69-70. [146] Loc. cit. pp. 16-17. [147] This quotation is from his _Matter and Force_, Chapter XIX. Büchner is never tired of emphasizing the Materialism of thought. In an address prefixed to his tenth Edition, speaking of the hypothesis of Mind acting on Brain he calls it "the tragi-comic pianoforte theory," and regrets that there should be so many "human pianofortes out of tune in the world." Büchner's own Materialism is outspoken, as may be judged from the following propositions:-- 1. Spirit without Body is unimaginable. 2. The Soul brings with it "no innate intuitions"; and 3. It is not an _ens per se_, but a product of external influences. 4. There is no individual immortality nor personal continuance after death. 5. The Soul's knowledge relates only to earthly things. 6. It becomes a _person_ by being opposed to earthly individualities. 7. (Adopted from C. Vogt) "The soul ... is a product of the development of the brain; just as muscular activity is a product of muscular development, and secretion a product of glandular development. So soon as the substances composing the brain are aggregated in a similar form, will they exhibit the same functions.... Mental activity changes with the periods of life, and ceases altogether at death." Büchner's writings are sufficiently known in this country. In America they are food for the million. Proposition No. 6 is particularly noticeable because it re-echoes the fallacy of Locke (see page 182-3 _ante_) on personal identity. By opposition to earthly individualities we do not "_become_" persons, but the sense of antagonism between ourselves and other externalities (both men and things), sharpens every day our belief in our own personality, and furnishes its daily verification. The grossness of this writer's Materialism does not hinder him from using the word "soul" on almost every page; and in one of his more recent publications he is candid enough to acknowledge that this old-fashioned entity is not yet quite improved off the face of the Earth. He says:--"Just the properties of the human mind and the impossibility of explaining them, were from the most ancient times one of the main supports of spiritualism and theological systems. True, their explanation is still wanting." Büchner, of course, looks for the speedy elimination of "Soul" proper, on exactly the same grounds which underlie his own whole system. Mental activity and Brain go together (he argues), as Force and Matter go together. It may be answered, that every practical reasoner knows the danger of arguing from _concomitancies_, however well-established, to _Causality_; and the risk is evidently much increased when a like argument is used to _Identity_. Besides, if Mental activity is resolvable into Brain, why should not Matter be likewise resolved into Force? Thus the whole Universe, inanimate and animated, material and psychical, becomes Force. The chain would run in this manner: Mind = Brain = Matter = Force. But how are we to know that Force must be all of one kind and description? Or, again, why may not the concomitancies be rather resolved some other way;--_e.g._, Matter (including Brain) = Force = Mind? Thus Materialism might slide into Idealism, Pantheism, or even Theism; since in some shape or other Mind would form and sustain the Universe. Our last citation of Büchner is taken from a New York Edition of his _Materialism_, p. 19. [148] In other words, that kind of law which pervades the lowest sphere of Nature is conceived as dominant over the highest also. The whole Universe is submitted to its iron rule. There is of Man's Mind as well as of the flagstone with which he paves his streets, one account, one law, one science, one philosophy; nay, strangely enough, as we shall see further on, one religion! The law of stocks and stones is supreme, it rules alike Man's present and his future, and ought to be the sole object of his veneration. Positivism, as is well known, makes many sciences and classifies them by an ascending scale of Laws. "La Philosophie Positive," writes Littré (_Paroles_, p. 10) ... "apercevant que, suivant la vraie conception, où la matière n'est pas séparable de ses propriétés, le mot de matérialisme n'avait plus d'emploi philosophique qu'en histoire, elle l'a renouvelé, et s'en est servie pour caractériser l'intrusion de la méthode de toute science inférieure dans la science supérieure." If Littré had said, "the intrusion of the _lowest_ into the highest," he would have rightly characterized the systems we are describing. Von Feuchtersleben puts the practical state of the question thus:--"All we can say is, that an intellectual world reveals itself to us, by the law of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and that a physical world manifests itself by those laws which act in space and time. What lies beyond these laws, as it were the substance of both worlds, we know not; we only call that of the physical world, matter or body in the abstract, that of the super-physical, we call spirit (Geist), and must never forget that hereby we have only pronounced an abstraction. "But now we ask further, wherein does this higher law manifest itself to us, as the physical law does in the material world? Nowhere but in man, and in him only through the medium of his cultivated and refined reason. What we feel, what we remember, nay, the very inmost sensations of our individual existence, may be referred to the world which surrounds us. Thought alone, exalted to the highest degree shows us another world. We are ourselves therefore not spirit, but we watch, as it were, what we call by that name, and which manifests itself to us only by its laws. (Est Deus in nobis.) Man, therefore, should be the link which connects the two worlds; and this is the problem, this is the enigma, which can never be solved." He adds in a note: "Materialism, that is, the view which will not allow the separation of the intellectual principle from the corporeal, but looks upon the former as a higher power of the latter, not only explains nothing, but makes the enigma still more obscure. _Medical Psychology_, Ed. Sydenham, pp. 15-16. [149] Compare footnote (_c_) pp. 56-7 _ante_. This whole theory is dreamlike,--a sort of romance or revel of a half-metaphysical, half-materializing imagination. The following rather long extract from Haeckel's book will shew the hypothesis on its most poetical side. But alas for its prose, and its plain practical application! "It is indeed," he writes, "not difficult to arrive through an unprejudiced consideration of facts, at a clear conviction that Theism, which has its origin in Mythology, and which, under the name of "Pure Monotheism," rules the civilized peoples of modern day, and plays even now so conspicuous a part in organic Morphology as the Myth of Creation, is in fact not Monotheism but AMPHITHEISM. This predominant religion was MONOTHEISM only so long as all Natural Phenomena were, without any exception, taken to be the direct result of the personal divine government of the world,--only so long as all inorganic or organic Phenomena--from the blowing of the wind and the rolling of the thunder, to the light of the sun and the course of the stars; from the flowery fragrance of plants and the wing of the bird, to the Mind-formation of Man and the development-history of peoples;--were direct actions of a monarchical, personal Creator. But when modern Natural Science demonstrated that the whole realm of inorganic Nature was governed by fixed, unvarying laws of Nature; when Physics and Chemistry reduced Abiology to mathematical formulæ, then the half of his realm was wrested from the personal Creator, and there remained to him organic Nature alone, and even the half of this was next set free by recent Physiology, so that organic Morphology alone remained subject to the personal, arbitrary government of the mediatised ruler of the world. Thus, out of the earlier Monotheism grew up that full-blown Amphitheism which at present rules the modern Cosmology of civilized peoples; and which appears in Science as the thoroughly perverted Dualism against which we have contended most determinedly in our General Morphology. For, what else is this Dualism but the battle between two Gods of fundamentally distinct natures? On the one hand, we see in the realm of Abiology, dominated by Mechanism, the exclusive sovereignty of unvarying and necessary Nature-laws, of the [Greek: anankê], which at all times and in all places constantly remains one and the same. "On the other hand, in the realm of Biology (which is still governed by Teleology), and especially in the realm of organic Morphology, we see the ridiculous arbitrary government of a personal and thoroughly humanlike Creator, who vainly wearies himself with endeavouring to create a 'perfect' Organism, and constantly rejects the earlier creations of a 'former age,' in that he is continually setting up new and improved editions in their places. We have already shewn, in our sixth chapter, why we must entirely reject this pitiful idea of a personal Creator (Vol. I. p. 173). It is in fact a degradation of the pure God-Idea. Most men picture to themselves this 'beloved God' as being thoroughly humanlike: he is in their eyes an architect, who is engaged in carrying on the construction of the world according to some previously rejected plan; but who never gets done with it, because during the process of completion, he is always hitting on new and better ideas; he is a Stage-manager, who directs the earth like a great puppet-play, and generally knows how to handle with tolerable skill the numerous threads by which he manages the hearts of men: he is a half-deprived king who only rules over the inorganic realm conditionally, and according to firmly fixed laws; rules on the other hand over the organic realm absolutely as patriarchal land-father, who in this domain allows himself to be led into a daily alteration of his world-plan by the wishes and prayers of his own children, among whom the most perfect Vertebrates are those principally favoured. "Let us turn away from this unworthy Anthropomorphism of modern Dogmatics, which degrade God himself into an aerial Vertebrate, and let us look on the contrary at the infinitely higher God-Idea to which Monism conducts us; in that it demonstrates the UNITY OF GOD in the whole of Nature, and abolishes the antithesis of an organic and inorganic God which sows the germ of a death-agony in the heart of that predominating Amphitheism. Our Cosmology knows only ONE SOLE GOD, and this ALMIGHTY GOD rules the whole of Nature without exception. We contemplate his operation in all phenomena of every description. To it the whole inorganic material world is subject, and so too the whole world of organization. If each body _in vacuo_ falls fifteen feet in the first second; if three atoms of Oxygen to one of Sulphur always produce Sulphuric Acid; if the angle which one columnar surface of rock crystal makes with the neighbouring one is always 120°; then, these phenomena are the immediate operations of God, equally with the blossoms of plants, the movements of animals, the thoughts of Mankind. We all exist by 'God's grace'; the stone as well as the water, the Radiolarian as well as the pine tree, the gorilla as much as the Emperor of China. "This Cosmology which contemplates GOD'S SPIRIT AND POWER IN ALL NATURAL PHENOMENA is alone worthy of His all-comprehensive greatness; only when we refer all forces and all phenomena of movement, all forms and properties of matter, to God, as the Author of all things, do we attain to that human intuition of God, and veneration of God, which really befits his immeasurable greatness. For 'in Him we live and move and have our being.' Thus the philosophy of Nature becomes in fact Theology. The worship of Nature becomes that true worship of God of which Göethe says:--'CERTAINLY THERE IS NO MORE BEAUTIFUL VENERATION OF GOD, THAN THAT WHICH ARISES FROM COMMUNION WITH NATURE IN OUR OWN BREASTS.' "GOD IS ALMIGHTY; he is the sole Author, the prime Cause of all things; that is, in other words, GOD IS THE UNIVERSAL CAUSAL LAW. God is absolutely perfect; he can never act otherwise than perfectly rightly, therefore he can never act arbitrarily or freely; that is to say, GOD IS NECESSITY. God is the sum of all forces; so also, therefore, of all Matter. Every conception of God, which separates him from Matter, opposes to him a sum of forces which are not of divine Nature; every such conception leads to Amphitheism, consequently to Polytheism. "Since MONISM demonstrates the UNITY OF THE WHOLE OF NATURE, it proves, likewise, that only ONE GOD exists, and that this God manifests himself in the collective phenomena of Nature. Since Monism grounds the collective phenomena of organic and inorganic Nature on the UNIVERSAL CAUSAL LAW, and displays them as the effects of 'active causes,' it shews at the same time, that GOD IS THE NECESSARY CAUSE OF ALL THINGS AND IS THE LAW ITSELF. Since Monism acknowledges no other beside the divine Forces in Nature, since it recognizes all laws of Nature as divine, it raises itself to the greatest and most elevated conception of which man, as the most perfect of all animals, is capable, to the conception of the UNITY OF GOD AND NATURE. 'Was wär' ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse! Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie Seine Kraft, nie Seinen Geist vermisst.'" Haeckel's _Generelle Morphologie der Organismen_. Vol. II. Book viii. Chap. 30. No one who reads the latter part of this quotation will doubt that Haeckel is a refined, or, in other words, a metaphysical Materialist. That he has produced an effect in materializing circles is evident; witness the following passages from Büchner "the crass." "To any one who does not stubbornly and obstinately cling to old prejudices, this new Cosmology which has superseded the dualism of former systems of philosophy and thought, must appear as clear, simple, free of dualism, easily intelligible and perfectly satisfactory. On account of this very antagonism to the dualistic character of the speculative philosophy of the past, I should like best to designate the philosophy of Materialism as _monistic philosophy_, or _philosophy of unity_; and the cosmology founded upon it as _monism_, in accordance with the suggestion of Professor Haeckel.... Since the indestructibility of matter, as previously described, has found its necessary complement in the indestructibility of force; and since the separation of force and matter has been recognized as a mere abstraction and existing only in our thoughts: it is really impossible to speak any longer of Materialism as a system which derives everything from matter only. Otherwise we might just as well speak of _Dynamism_, that is of a system that derives everything from force (dynamis). But in reality both are identical and inseparable; and therefore a philosophy built upon those ideas cannot be better designated than as _monistic_, or a _philosophy of unity_." (_Materialism, ut supra_ p. 24.) This last phrase is more metaphysical than Büchner's wont; but S. T. Coleridge, if alive, would tell him that what the world really wants, is a "Philosophy of Multeity in Unity." To annihilate the Manifold is to destroy our sole knowledge of the One. [150] It was previously intimated that the idealizing philosopher often escapes ethical censure more easily than he deserves. Idealism may, or may not, be a bar to irreligious materialism. For example:--"The materialism of Strauss was not inconsistent with an idealism of the Hegelian type; for, as he showed in his last work, the question between logically consistent idealists and materialists who carry out their principles is, at its roots, one of names and terms rather than of antagonistic principles." _Pall Mall Gazette_ for Feb. 11, 1874. The Idealism referred to, is that which identifies pure Being with Impersonal Thought. Now Berkeley's idealism culminated with the Divine Personality, through whose omnipresence and spiritual subsistence those properties or modes of existence, called material, are realized to us, who, together with all the world, exist in and by Him. Yet, as far as Berkeley's argument rests upon the common ground of idealistic reasoning, it is approachable by the Atheist or the Sceptic. Of Hobbes a reviewer has lately remarked: "He clearly demonstrated that the secondary qualities of body are purely subjective, and his language is almost strong enough to lead us to believe that he would have gone a long way with Berkeley. For he claims to have proved that 'as in vision, so also in _conceptions_ that arise from the other senses, the subject of their inherence is not the object but the sentient.'" _Westminster Review_, April, 1874, p. 387. The truth from which so many theories, physical and metaphysical, branch out, is thus clearly stated by Professor Huxley. "All the phenomena of nature are, in their ultimate analysis, known to us only as facts of consciousness." "On Descartes," _Lay Sermons_, p. 374. This statement is an incontrovertible proposition; and may help in persuading us to believe our own souls. At all events, we plainly see that the sum total of our human knowledge is potentially contained in their evidence. [151] A mongrel Word-book would be a valuable addition to popular science. How many metaphysicians proper, or how many skilled students of Natural Science, can explain that novel compound "Psychoplasm"? The _Westminster Review_ is _not_ lost in admiration for either this new coinage, or another specimen from the same mint,--"Metempirics." (See No. for July, 1874.) The _Fortnightly_ is more congratulatory. [152] Ravaisson, the great philosophical critic of France, considers Biology among the sciences directly antagonistic to Materialism. He classifies the tendencies of scientific studies thus. There are, he says, "Deux directions opposées auxquelles nous inclinent les deux ordres differents de connaissances:--la direction qui aboutit au Materialisme, et c'est celle dans laquelle nous engagent les mathématiques et la physique, et la direction qui mène au spiritualisme, et c'est celle où acheminent la biologie et surtout les sciences morales et esthétiques." (_La Philosophie en France_, p. 98.) His description of a certain degree of progress in the mind of Comte illustrates this same idea:--"Il comprit, en présence de la vie, que ce n'était pas assez, comme il avait pu le croire dans la sphère des choses mécaniques et physiques, de considérer des phénomènes à la suite ou à côté les uns des autres, mais que, de plus, que surtout il fallait prendre en considération l'ordre et l'ensemble. "En présence des êtres organisés, on s'aperçoit, disait-il, que le détail des phénomènes, quelque explication plus ou moins suffisante qu'on en donne, n'est ni le tout ni même le principal; que le principal, et l'on pourrait presque dire le tout, c'est l'ensemble dans l'espace, le progrès dans le temps, et qu'expliquer un être vivant, ce serait montrer la raison de cet ensemble et de ce progrès, qui est la vie même.... "Dans les sciences des choses inorganiques, disait-il encore, on procède par déduction des détails au tout; dans les sciences des êtres organisés, c'est de l'ensemble que se tire par déduction, la vraie connaissance des parties. "De plus, d'accord maintenant avec Platon, Aristote, Leibniz, il déclarait que l'ensemble étant le résultat et l'expression d'une certaine unité, à laquelle tout concourt et se co-ordonne et qui est le but où tout marche, c'est dans cette unité, c'est dans le but, c'est dans la fin ou cause finale qu'est le secret de l'organisme. "Le 16 Juillet 1843, écrivant à M. Stuart Mill, il exprimait l'opinion que, si ce savant ne le suivait pas dans les voies plus larges où dorénavant il allait marchait, c'est que, très-versé dans les études mathématiques et physiques, il n'était pas assez familier avec les phénomènes de la vie. Plus avancé dans la science biologique, M. Mill aurait mieux compris comment il faut, outre le détail des faits, quelque chose qui les domine, qui les combine et les co-ordonne." (_Ibid._ p. 75, _seq._) [153] These pages are inappropriate to that wide and momentous controversy:--Has each Science a Method of its own?--and by consequence its own terminology? That such a question remains to be debated, is a clear proof that most of our philosophizing is yet tentative; and has not passed over the critical "first stage." CHAPTER IV. BELIEFS OF REASON. "While we indulge to the _Sensitive_ or _Plantal_ Life, our delights are common to us with the creatures _below_ us: and 'tis likely, they exceed us as much in them, as in the senses their subjects; and that's a poor happiness for Man to aim at, in which Beasts are his Superiours. But those Mercurial spirits which were only lent the Earth to shew Men their folly in admiring it; possess delights of a nobler make and nature, which as it were antedate _Immortality_; and, at an humble distance, resemble the joyes of the world of _Light_ and _Glory_. The _Sun_ and _Stars_, are not the world's _Eyes_, but _These_: the _Celestial Argus_ cannot glory in such an universal view. These out-travel theirs, and their _Monarch's_ beams: passing into _Vortexes_ beyond their Light and Influence; and with an easie twinkle of an Intellectual Eye look into the _Centre_, which is obscur'd from the upper Luminaries. This is somewhat like the Image of _Omnipresence_. And what the _Hermetical Philosophy_ saith of _God_, is in a sense verifiable of the thus _ennobled soul_, That _its Centre is every where, but its circumference no where_.... ".... And yet there's an higher degree, to which _Philosophy_ sublimes us. For, as it teacheth a generous contempt of what the grovelling desires of _creeping_ Mortals Idolize and dote on: so it raiseth us to love and admire an Object, that is as much above terrestrial, as _Infinite_ can make it. If _Plutarch_ may have credit, the observation of Nature's Harmony in the _Celestial Motions_ was one of the first inducements to the belief of _a God_. And a greater then he affirms, that the visible things of the Creation declare him, that made them. What knowledge we have of them, we have in a sense of their Authour. His face cannot be beheld by Creature-Opticks, without the allay of a reflexion; and Nature is one of those mirrors, that represents him to us. And now, the more we know of him the more we love him, the more we are like him, the more we admire him. 'Tis here that _knowledge wonders_; and there's an _Admiration_, that's not the _Daughter_ of _Ignorance_. This indeed stupidly gazeth at the unwonted _effect_. But the Philosophical passion truly admires and adores the supreme _Efficient_ .... ".... And from this last article, I think I may conclude the charge, which hot-brained folly layes in against _Philosophy_; that it leads to _Irreligion_, frivolous and vain. I dare say, next after the divine _Word_, it's one of the best friends to _Piety_. Neither is it any more justly accountable for the impious irregularities of some, that have paid an homage to its shrine; than Religion itself for the extravagancies both _opinionative_ and _practick_ of high pretenders to it. It is a vulgar conceit, that _Philosophy_ holds a confederacy with _Atheism_ itself, but most _injurious_: for nothing can better antidote us against it: and they may as well say, that _Physitians_ are the only _murtherers_. A _Philosophick Atheist_, is as good sense as a Divine one."--_Glanvill's Apology for Philosophy_, at end of _Scepsis Scientifica_, Ed. I. p. 177, seq. * * * * * [Greek: Esti gar apaideusia to mê gignôskein tinôn dei zêtein apodeixin kai tinôn ou dei Holôs men gar hapantôn adynaton apodeixin einai; eis apeiron gar an badizoi, hôste mêd' houtôs einai apodeixin.] Arist. _Metaph._ IV. ([Greek: G]) cap. 4. The following is the translation of MM. Pierron et Zévort: "C'est de l'ignorance de ne pas savoir distinguer ce qui a besoin de démonstration de ce qui n'en a pas besoin. Il est absolument impossible de tout démontrer: il faudrait pour cela aller à l'infini; de sorte qu'il n'y aurait même pas de démonstration." Métaphysique d'Aristote, Tome I. p. 116. "Man's higher Instinct leads to lofty aspiration, To generous sentiment, and boundless desire, Till he seeks and finds the Author of his Soul. In seeking for him he perfects his virtue, By finding him he is made strong within, And being strong he strengthens his brethren." "Light is natural to the Eye, and the Eye improves under Light, So Truth is natural to the Mind, and the Mind improves under Truth. But the student of Goodness must himself become good, So far at least as to choose Goodness for his best portion. If base passion or worldliness is allowed to domineer, No man can gaze steadily at Purity and at God. And then perhaps he despairs of religious truth, And moralizes on Man's feebleness and limited faculties, So unfitted to fathom the Divine and to know the Eternal!" F. NEWMAN. _Theism_, pp. 2 and 12. "The world offers just now the spectacle, humiliating to us in many ways, of millions of people clinging to their old idolatrous religions, and refusing to change them even for a higher form; whilst in Christian Europe thousands of the most cultivated class are beginning to consider atheism a permissible, or even a desirable thing. The very instincts of the savage rebuke us. But just when we seem in danger of losing all, may come the moment of awakening to the dangers of our loss. A world where thought is a secretion of the brain-gland, where free-will is the dream of a madman that thinks he is an emperor though naked and in chains, where God is not, or at least not knowable, such is not the world as we learnt it, on which great lives have been lived out, great self-sacrifices dared, great piety and devotion have been bent to soften the sin, the ignorance, and the misery. It is a world from which the sun is withdrawn, and with it all light and life. But this is not our world as it was, not the world of our fathers. To live is to think and to will. To think is to see the chain of facts in creation, and passing along its golden links, to find the hand of God at its beginning, as we saw His handiwork in its course. And to will is to be able to know good and evil; and to will aright is to submit the will entirely to a will higher than ours. So that with God alone can we find true knowledge and true rest, the vaunted fruits of philosophy."--_Limits of Philosophical Inquiry_. By the Archbishop of York, p. 24. "The mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this frame of things * * * * * In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of quality and fabric more divine." WORDSWORTH. _The Prelude_, sub. fin. "Religion, Poetry is not dead; it will never die. Its dwelling and birth place is in the soul of man, and it is eternal as the being of man. In any point of space, in any section of Time, let there be a living Man; and there is an Infinitude above him and beneath him, and an Eternity encompasses him on this hand and on that; and tones of Sphere-music, and tidings from loftier worlds, will flit round him, if he can but listen, and visit him with holy influences, even in the thickest press of trivialities, or the din of busiest life. Happy the man, happy the nation, that can hear these tidings; that has them written in fit characters, legible to every eye, and the solemn import of them present at all moments to every heart! That there is, in these days, no nation so happy, is too clear; but that all nations, and ourselves in the van, are, with more or less discernment of its nature, struggling towards this happiness, is the hope and the glory of our time. To us, as to others, success, at a distant or a nearer day, cannot be uncertain. Meanwhile, the first condition of success is, that, in striving honestly ourselves, we honestly acknowledge the striving of our neighbour; that with a will unwearied in seeking Truth, we have a sense open for it wheresoever and howsoever it may arise."--CARLYLE. _Miscellanies_, p. 99, Last Edition. SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER IV. With the last Chapter closes what may be termed the more critical part of this Essay. The remainder is occupied with a series of affirmative arguments. The preparation for these arguments having been minutely made, explanatory additions become less necessary. The main object of the present chapter is to establish a tenable Theory respecting those Human Beliefs among which is included our primary Belief in Theism. Their nature and validity not having as yet been sufficiently investigated (see footnote (_b_) p. 256 _post_), some extent of discussion attends the inquiry. To many readers the territory opened out will appear new. It ought however to be traversed by all careful students of Psychology. * * * * * _Analysis_:--Tendencies of the Human Mind resulting in certain concrete Beliefs. The Inductive Principle, or Law of Uniformity, investigated. Various explanations of its origin examined and rejected; particularly the hypothesis which resolves it into Laws of Association. Shewn to be a primary Belief; at first pre-rational, afterwards limited and established by Reason. The latter process separates by a strong line of demarcation the realm of Humanity from that of the lower creation. Animal instincts, some improvable, some "survivals." Human instincts transformed by Reason. Certain primary Beliefs peculiar to Man. Hence his special culture. Theism. Fallacies from confusion between Tests of Speculative and of Practical Truth. Lesson of Mathematics. Speculative truths tested by analytic process; Practical by synthetic; their work becomes their ever-growing verification. Application of this test to two practical beliefs; our natural belief in externalities, and our belief in the Supernatural. Speculative difficulties intruded into the practical sphere become apparently insuperable. Both spheres essentially Human. Natural Realism compared with Realistic Theism. Formation and growth of Belief in the Supernatural as a Belief of Reason. Absurdities attaching to its rejection. Ennobling influences of its acceptance explained and exemplified. Ideal of Humanity, crowned by the Ideal of God, to Whom both the Natural and the Moral world bear witness. CHAPTER IV. BELIEFS OF REASON. In the last section, we have examined a number of intellectual perplexities, running closely parallel to certain _primâ-facie_ objections commonly alleged against Natural Theism. We have seen that they are, in reality, difficulties arising from the impotence of the Human Mind, whenever it is directed to the contemplation of first or supreme, Principles. In all reason therefore, they cease to be objections. We are, in fact, constantly finding ourselves obliged to accept as an undeniable truth, or a real existence, what when placed objectively before our mental vision, appears inexplicable, self-contradictory, or absolutely unthinkable. The power which compels us to many an admission of this kind is the _mind itself_, asserting a strength of insight, in-born and inalienable, notwithstanding the symptoms of weakness, which (psychologically speaking) may have seemed threatening to overcloud and disable it.[ac] Hence, we are led to suspect that some at least of those symptomatic weaknesses, are mistakes in diagnosis. This suspicion will be shared by most persons tolerably acquainted with the present state of psychology, and particularly with the manner in which foregone theories are supported by over-refined analysis. At all events, the reactionary strength of the mind is best shown in the concrete beliefs resulting from its own simplest activities. Our simplest mental activities are naturally our earliest. Amongst them, none are more distinctly marked than our impulses to believe and act upon certain definite pre-suppositions. These differ from the vague and purposeless dreams of childhood, by gradually becoming clear, practical, and expansive. One of the most vigorous, permanent, and prevailing, amongst them all, is our human belief in the existence of supernatural power. Upon another presupposition (not originally the clearest), seems to rest, in the first degree, that principle which gives validity to all the inductive sciences. We will carefully examine this latter belief, with the object of drawing from the process certain aids for an examination of the former.[ad] Induction is defined as the legitimate inference of the more general, from the less general;--the general from the particular;--and (with more startling distinctness) of the Unknown from the Known. It is at once evident that, whatever may be the logical form into which this mode of inferring is thrown, there must in the nature of things be some ulterior principle to give it legitimacy. This principle, when raised to the rank and dignity of a philosophic postulate, is commonly known as the Law of Natural Uniformity. A law claiming such extensive dominion that one cannot help asking in what code, human or Divine, of reason or of experience, it was originally found written. Let us have recourse to the code of reason first. Euclid gives admirable instances of things true by necessity of reason. The moment we understand what right lines are, we see at once and for all time that two straight lines, infinitely prolonged, can never inclose a space. No one ever did see a mathematical line of any kind ("length without thickness"),--no one ever saw or conceived any real or ideal thing of infinite extent, neither can we think infinity at all. Yet the terms of the geometrical proposition carry their own evidence. We may sum the case, as Euler the mathematician put it. He finished a demonstration upon _Arches_ by saying, "All experience is contrary to this, but that is no reason for doubting its truth." Now, there appears nothing in the least resembling this case, in the conception of Natural Uniformity. No thinker can predicate substantial impossibility of the idea that Nature should ever be otherwise than Uniform. Suppose, then, we consider the code of Experience. Where shall we find the experience required? Ours is far short of universal, either in an absolute or an approximate sense. We are the children of to-day--yet the law wanted must be to all intents universal. It has been answered to this obvious requirement, that we enjoy the results of an experience constant and uniform, "coextensive not with the life of the single individual who employs them, but with the entire history of the human race."[154] But in what history is any such experience written? History in its _letter_, is full of events which contradict Nature's uniformity, of interruptions, marvels, miracles. For cattle to speak, is quite a common occurrence in Livy. An ordinary Roman would have been perplexed by the absence of signs and wonders; he would have felt it something to be accounted for. History tells us on every written page to believe in what seems impossible; and some writers on historical evidence, claim for it a greater amount of credibility whenever it testifies to the greater number of improbable incidents. For, do not writers of fiction deal in probabilities?[155] Another method of giving force to the principle of natural Uniformity, is based on our alleged sense of personal subjection to the chain of events;--the outer world is said to penetrate the inner by an impression of its unvarying sequence, its laws of unbroken continuity. But does the lesson of life really go this way? Most men, when meditating over their own lives, think rather of the causation they have themselves exercised, or might have exercised, than of any iron links of causality in nature. So strongly do they feel their causal power, that, whereas one man boasts of being the architect of his own fortunes, another blames himself because he has been foolish enough to let things take their chance. What people chiefly realize and act upon, is the relation between Man and Nature--or, else between Man and Man;--relations prolific in consequences which we shall have to consider by-and-bye. A more summary mode of explaining our human impression of natural Uniformity, is by resolving it into certain laws of Association. We see antecedent and consequent every day, and get to consider them as indissolubly associated. If we see a present antecedent, we expect a coming consequent. The event and its futurity, are thus fused in a common solvent. Yet, one palpable objection lies against this theory, and it is fatal. Fatal against it, and against all theories which rest our belief upon experience, or upon any process of reasoning, inductive or demonstrated. The objection consists in the plain fact, that this belief resembles animal instinct[156] in _one_ definite particular--it exists previously to all observation or exercise of intelligence on the subject. We see it in all young creatures. The instinct of children is to act upon a supposition that the thing they have enjoyed or suffered shall recur regularly and without interruption. The darling brought down to dessert every day for a week, feels injured by a breach of the custom, just as the cat or dog fed from their masters' table expects the same hand to continue always kind. Child, kitten, and puppy, need no second scalding to look askance at the tea-kettle. Grown people's confidence in the stability of Empires often reposes on no much stronger foundation. Most men rest satisfied with an indefinite and unreasoning presumption all their lives long. They desire no further explanation--a happy circumstance, perhaps, considering the theories they might have to investigate. Mr. James Mill in his "Analysis of the Human Mind" made great and continual use of the laws of Association. He applied them (amongst other ways) to our belief in the uniform futurities of Nature. "There can" he writes "be no idea of the Future; because strictly speaking the Future is a non-entity--of nothing there can be no idea.... Our whole lives are but a series of changes, that is, of antecedents and consequents. The conjunction, therefore, is incessant; and, of course, the union of the ideas perfectly inseparable." (Vol. I. pp. 362-3.) And again, (p. 367,) "But I am told, that we have not only the idea of to-morrow, but the belief of to-morrow; and I am asked what that belief is. I answer, that you have not only the idea of to-morrow, but have it _inseparably_. It will also appear, that wherever the name belief is applied, there is a case of the indissoluble association of ideas. It will further appear, that, in instances without number, the name belief is applied to a mere case of indissoluble association; and no instance can be adduced in which anything besides an indissoluble association can be shewn in belief. It would seem to follow from this, with abundant evidence, that the whole of my notion of to-morrow, belief included, is nothing but a case of the inevitable sequence of ideas."--This theory Mr. Bain (no hostile critic) annotates as follows. "The case that is most thoroughly opposed to the theory of indissoluble association is our belief in the Uniformity of Nature. Our overweening tendency to anticipate the future from the past is shown prior to all association; the first effect of experience is to abridge and modify a strong primitive urgency. There is, no doubt, a certain stage when association co-operates to justify the believing state. After our headlong instinct has, by a series of reverses, been humbled and toned down, and after we have discovered that the Uniformity, at first imposed by the mind upon everything, applies to some things and not to others, we are confirmed by our experience in the cases where the uniformity prevails; and the intellectual growth of association counts for a small part of the believing impetus. Still, the efficacy of experience is perhaps negative rather than positive; it saves, in certain cases, the primitive force of anticipation from the attacks made upon it in the other cases where it is contradicted by the facts. It does not make belief, it conserves a pre-existing belief." In Mr. Bain's comment it is worthy of particular remark that he considers experience less as a foundation, than a _test_ always,--a _limit_ sometimes,--of that law which gives life to all the experimental sciences. "The uniformity imposed by the mind," he observes, "applies to some things but not to others." His view, therefore, places the principle itself in the light of a generality given by the mind and apprehended as a leading maxim. Its field is sometimes reasserted,--sometimes contracted,--by experience; but in both cases the effect is a process of discrimination. In support of this view, it may be fairly urged that a child calculates on the uniformity of human character and conduct, to an extent not justified in after life. Any child correctly expects a stone to fall when thrown into the air, without the least idea of that special reason for its fall, which can be mathematically extended to the stars. In like manner, our very earliest belief in the reality of men and objects outside us, confuses persons and things as resisting antagonists which ought to be punished and overcome. Experience, therefore, brings discrimination. Thus, too, the natural apprehension of a power above nature, occupies a more defined sphere in our own old age than the first radiant glimpses of our wondering upward-springing childhood. And the same may be said of the world's several eras of religious thinking. Yet, if some eminent writers are correct in contending that the belief in a Supreme "_Heaven-Father_," (so strong in the Aryan[157] family,) was of extreme antiquity, we must admit that our race's infancy cherished a more truly Theistic faith, than many intervening ages of moral degeneracy retained.[158] But, side by side with this admission, we ought to place _two_ notable facts,--_first_ that our sense of the supernatural has really educated the great heart of Man; teaching him from the love of God to love his neighbour likewise.--_Next_,--that the awful impression has, on the whole, grown with his growth, and strengthened with his strength; acquiring fresh light and beauty with every fresh access to his noblest illumination. Exactly in proportion, as man increasingly learns to love and live for his neighbour, he has always increased the depth and earnestness with which he lives for and loves his God. In these two facts is bound up the secret of our Western civilization. We must return, however, for a few paragraphs to the general consideration of what may be called our pre-rational beliefs.[ae] That they are pre-rational (account for them as we will), is evident since from them spring our first tendencies to reason in special directions, and our first ability to receive and assimilate such mental food as may be afforded us. "The primary facts of intelligence,"--says Sir W. Hamilton, "the facts which precede, as they afford the conditions of, all knowledge,--would not be original were they revealed to us under any other form than that of natural or necessary beliefs."[159] A central point this; and one most essential for the Psychologist! Indeed, every one who explains such beliefs into laws of association, commits the oversight of refining away the chief fact involved in those laws themselves. For, the very idea of association presupposes a guiding impulse. How can we classify without a standard of classification, arrange or connect without threads of connection or arrangement? Laws of association must cluster round an associating principle, just as translucent halos encircle the Sun. Laws of association do not make principles; but an operative principle evokes associations, and manifests itself in their law. Oversights like this, and the one before noted by Mr. Bain, are examples of the paralogism incident to all attempts at explaining the inexplicable. In his eagerness, the metaphysical refiner subtilizes away the truth under analysis. Even so, in days of old, Alchemists used to sublimate the gold intended for transmuting inferior metals, till it flew off in elastic vapour, and all that _had been_ precious, vanished from the eager speculative man. A frequent issue this, to searchers after our true philosopher's stone. The catalogue of pre-rational beliefs or impulses to believe, is considerable, and might easily be enlarged. But there is much to hinder a full enumeration. In the first place, they emerge from a border-land between the brute and the man; and border territories are proverbially fertile in disputes. Next, they have to be sought out and examined in the birthplace of intelligence; and the beginnings of knowledge like the beginnings of history are overshadowed by a twilight haze. Then, too, amongst the painters of human nature, (who after all are but men,) there prevails a disinclination to confess how largely our human life is cradled under the rule of unreason and impulsiveness. Most of us hardly know why we act, yet, every one likes to believe himself reasoning and reasonable. Finally, some religious minds shrink back from realizing the idea of an _instinctive_ belief in the moral antithesis of Right and Wrong, or in a Supreme First Cause and Judge of all men. They feel as if to admit it were almost degrading to Faith,--forgetful that the philosophic Apostle took this view and expressed it with the utmost boldness.[160] Forgetful, also, that from whatever source Man's reason sprang, from the same welled forth every bright stream of practical activity,--impelling him to work in spheres as yet unconquered by the force of his own understanding. The hindrances now described are, after all, grounded on an inadequate conception of the true distinction between the Animal and the Man. Apart from the fact that ultimate objects of instinct differ as widely as the idea of a future life differs from the poorest enjoyments of the brute world,--quite apart from all consideration of aims and ends,--the impulses themselves are in their own activities very far indeed from occupying the same level. There are instincts of the utmost importance to all self support and self protection, and to the sustenance and care of others, which appear in their own nature simple and unalterable;--unerring within their direct line, but beyond it helpless and narrow in their field of operation. Other instincts again,--such, for example, as impel animals to construction, and human beings to art,--are evidently influenced and enlarged by intelligence. Beavers adapt their dams, birds their nests, and the bee her comb, to all kinds of circumstances, so far as they can command the means of adaptation. Their intelligence also delights itself in different kinds of adornment.[161] But the power of meeting exigencies, is manifestly limited throughout the lower creation. The bee has, for ages, worked upon marvellously accurate principles, unintelligible to mathematicians before the calculus was invented, and only fully explained of late years. She always erects one effectual and skilful kind of barricade[162] against hostile swarms, as well as that dreaded assailant, the Death's head moth. Furthermore, she evinces readiness in fitting all her material structures to place, occasion, and circumstance. Yet, observe the same bee exhausting herself by vain struggles against the sloping roof of a greenhouse, of which every window is thrown wide open. She perseveres, hour after hour, in unavailing endeavours to escape by her one accustomed upward track of flight, unable to conceive the possibility of transparent but impenetrable glass; and incapable of learning the fact by her repeated disappointments. In this way, hundreds of bees, butterflies, and other winged insects, perish miserably every summer. So, too, the highly educated and intelligent dog, will try to scratch holes in hard flag stones, and, after trials innumerable, still scratches on without seeming to discover that he never succeeds in making a single hole. Thus, also, birds in captivity keep up the perpetual motion of their heads--(useful to the poor prisoner no longer!) and generations after generations of captives maintain the instinctive practice. Numberless instances might easily be adduced to the same effect. But _no_ similar observation holds good of man. The child soon discontinues its efforts to thrust an arm through a glass window; and every day learns some new lesson in the properties of material objects. The engineer builds dams as well as the beaver;--but, beside dams, what marvels innumerable does he achieve with his earthworks, his timbers, and his stones! Speaking generally, we perceive that man has an instinctive tendency to lay hold of a practical fact, idea, and law of action, as a concrete whole;[163]--seizing it, at first, as the animal does without being able to analyze, recompound, or extend it. But reason holds the candle to instinct.[af] The impulse deepens and widens,--becomes distinguished by boldness and comprehensive breadth;--and it is difficult, if not impossible, to fix boundaries to its ultimate expansion. An expansion coextensive with the completed destinies of mankind. We say thus much of our lower instincts, transformed and made glorious by reason shining through them; just as the setting sun transforms and glorifies the clouds floating high overhead, or the half-translucent foliage of the grove in which we walk. But there belong exclusively to Man, instinctive beliefs, impulses, and ideas, which possess a glory of their own;--raise him, _first_ above the brutes,--_next_ above himself as he now exists,--and make him know that he may aspire to become the denizen of a brighter world than this. Among them, is the feeling that Nature herself is (like the tree or cloud illumined by the sun), everywhere penetrated by a beauty and a power streaming through her;--compared with the reality of which she is but a filmy veil,--or it may be an illusive image. The sun himself, the light and life of the lower world, symbolizes an existence more truly kindling and ensouling, which animates and makes brilliant the blue arch of sky. Such thoughts as these haunted the first utterances of our race,--and it needed but another step to make us feel that this living light shines within ourselves,--and that, go where we will, a strength and Majesty go with us, which are not of the earth, earthy. Thus, the consciousness grew upon Man that his inner being glows with a radiance more sparkling than the stars, to which he lifts his bodily eyes. By-and-bye, he learned to think of the heaven within him, as symbolic also;--and to cherish a trembling trust that, when he dies, its brightness will grow pale, and vanish away only by reason of a glory which excelleth. The Apostle beloved of his Master, told us of a true Light that lighteth every man. Yet, we might have been slow to realize the purer splendours over-arching our human soul, if they had not autotyped themselves on the language we commonly speak. Perhaps, a more convincing proof still to some of us, is what every now and then becomes incidentally known;--the God-ward impulses of a happily developed childhood, under circumstances favourable to the growth of "natural piety." In the heart of a child, feelings like those we have described, dwell untutored, as in their native and and appropriate home. An awe and dread accompany them amongst the world of men, but to the child they are never overpowering or oppressive. His finely-strung imagination works painlessly. The voices he hears when no human voice speaks, cause him no fear;--they call to him from a region towards which his young soul springs up. They soothe him with sensations of hope and peace and love unutterable. This yearning affection for things unseen, makes the deepest joy of a happy childhood; it is a reason why Christ said, "Of such is the kingdom of Heaven." A beautiful childhood is a very beautiful reality. Partly because of the exquisite simplicity which tones down and harmonizes all its impulses. But, very often, its beauty is only known in its loss;--and we mourn in after years over hope, love, and peace, broken down by life's attrition;--yet fair to look upon, even in their ruins.[ag] No one is likely to doubt that the belief we have been describing, is peculiar to and characteristic of Man. A more subtle question would be this;--Suppose it could be taken away, how nearly would Man and brute approach each other?[164] A question deserving the attention of every one, who lives "In self-adoring pride securely mailed." Probably, the proudest of mankind little think how deeply their culture, art, and refinement, are indebted to a faith shared by the lowliest. One point, at least, seems clear,--if Morality did not perish in the wreck, a true and independent moral sense would bring us back to a belief in our own souls, their immortality, and their God. Another question more essential to our purpose has been buried under heaps of fallacy and misconception. Theists are often told that the ideas of a Deity,--a future life,--and generally all that is conceived as supernatural, have no absolute trustworthiness;--they are not self-evident axioms, and they cannot be demonstrated. One answer to these alleged difficulties has been implicitly given in the last Chapter. If such objections are valid at all, they are valid against every practical first-truth therein considered. They are valid against _all_ primary practical truths, looked at from the theoretical side, and tested by the rules proper to what is called pure Reason;--Reason, that is to say, not applied, but speculative. But, then, it is from this very employment of tests upon truth not _in pari materia_, that the first stage of fallacy begins. The _second_ step in error follows naturally from the first. Compared with the clearness and definition of mathematics, all other axioms and proofs appear dim and dubious. The consequence is, that our minds fall into trains of false comparison on the all-important subject of certitude. Errors of that kind are always growing mischiefs; our tongues follow the lead of our thoughts, and hazy thinking becomes hazy speaking. Not only so, but words develope themselves into the leaders of thought; and hazy speaking engenders a hazier thinking still. People take mathematical certainty to be the sole type of all true and valuable certainties. Practical maxims are spoken of, as merely probable, Right and Wrong as the efflux of moral sentiments.[165] Few seem to be aware _how_ the philosophical arrangements of first-truths ought to be applied. They should be applied to discriminate the _processes_, by which various kinds of truths are discoverable;--they stamp a character upon them, when discovered; but they do _not_ determine the intrinsic worth and validity of the discoveries. Why, let us ask, does Mathematical truth occupy so lofty a position? Because, _first_, the constitution of our nature obliges us to accept its axioms, and by consequence each successive step in its impregnable demonstrations. _Next_, because we can verify so many of its theorems objectively. We apply them to remote planetary and stellar spheres beyond our own reach; where our own minds can neither alter nor colour anything. What then ought to be the fair and legitimate inference from an issue magnificently tried throughout the celestial universe? Surely this, and no other. It confirms, in the very highest possible degree, the truth-telling power of our own human nature. Whatsoever our mental constitution clearly compels us to accept, that same we ought to hold true, and maintain unswervingly. Henceforth, therefore, we ought to look upon our Reason as having been put upon its conclusive trial. Every year that passes renders the verdict if possible more triumphant. We ought, henceforth, to make our assent absolute and unhesitating in the case of those other truths, which, while things continue as they now are, can never be tried and confirmed by an appeal of the same description. It is not difficult to see how opposite would have been the issue from an employment of improper tests;--the test, for instance, of the _Unthinkable_. The universe, we should then have said, must be thought of as finite or as infinite. Either way it is inconceivable;--therefore the Universe cannot exist objectively at all. Vicious as such a process would be, it is not so faulty as that of confounding the proper methods and attestations of speculative and practical truth.[166] Our human consciousness must in _both_ cases give our data. We have to ask and obtain its answers,--but, in the two different spheres of knowledge, we must frame our interrogatories differently, and expect assurances differing not in _degree_ of certainty, but in _kind_;--in _value_ to human action;--and in the _mode_ of their deliverance. We inquire into Speculative truth by _analysing_ it, until we arrive at undemonstrable axioms which assert their own validity. We assure ourselves that Practical principles are true by following them in their _synthetic_ growth. Do they spring from a maxim we find ourselves urged by our own nature to accept,--and the opposite of which we cannot but broadly reject;--and do they really _work_ in the world,--exert an ennobling influence within their own domain, and intertwine themselves with the other truths and activities of our human life? If so, we may be assured of their vitality and their certitude. We know them, in short, by their stringency,--and by a happy experience of their power. Consequently, our knowledge ought to grow and strengthen, as our human age and the world's age both roll on. Practical truth, thus tried and acknowledged, is indeed the silver thread which leads us always. Some shrink from trusting it when stretched across the grave; yet, without it, all beyond is lost in haze, and our present life becomes enigmatical and self-contradictory. Let us then apply the tests (found valid in their own practical sphere) to the case of our belief in a Supernatural and supreme Power. But, that we may do so with more evident effect, it will be well to place in juxtaposition with it _another_ powerful belief, and our progress will be rendered easier if we fix upon one which has already been, in part at least, under discussion. Nothing seems better fitted for this purpose, than what Professor Masson calls "the paramount fact," resulting alike to Hamilton and to Mill,--the universal persuasion in men of their own existence, as beings distinct from, but related to, an external world around them. It will be observed that, thus described, the fact is of a most concrete sort,--our inner reality in relation to an outer reality,--just as believing in a Supreme Being we believe in a Power that holds solemn relations to our individual selves and to our common Humanity. We have therefore to observe the impression made upon our human endowment of practical Reason, when looking face to face at these two fact-beliefs, which for brevity's sake we shall call the _Natural_ and the _Supernatural_. Did the uninstructed and stammering childhood of our race, separate, in thought, the _Supernatural_ from surrounding nature? Can we absolutely say either yes or no to this inquiry? The "Heaven-Father" of pre-historic[ah] day would seem if fully considered to make the separation clear. The type-idea, thus outlined, is drawn, not from symbolizing and personified Nature, but from an actual, living, fatherly, Man. And the tendency of primitive Man might rather be to raise natural objects into living beings, than to lower persons into things. It is so, we are sure, with our children's apprehension of the _Natural_. They know a world of persons and things antagonistic to their own wills and efforts, but they begin by making the things into _persons_. A thwarted baby-boy beats the table, his kitten, and his nurse indifferently. So far as observation has been extended to the religious apprehensions of the very young, they would seem to spiritualize the material universe;--to behold unseen powers in the changing clouds, and hear them in the sighing of the wind. Wordsworth's "Ode on Immortality" is a picture as full of childlike human truth, as it is of unearthly beauty. But, as regards _both_ principles, the human train of thought is nearly similar in its first rise, and grows in definiteness and expansion by a nearly similar process. A true Man sets each principle to work, and from its working gathers its real value and verification. If the world outside him were a phantastic shadow, the practical conclusion fairly inferred would be _quietism_. Bolingbroke said to King Richard-- "The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed The shadow of your face." But, suppose both face and sorrow were themselves only shadows? What worth in Man's body then,--what worth in his soaring mind? The natural issue would be to drift down the shadowy[167] stream into a darker abyss of Nothingness. Speculation[168] must lay down its arms, as powerless against such a supposition. The evidence of our senses[169] themselves is resolvable into shadows. It was not by speculation that our strong Western will encountered the ideal enigmas of every day life. Act upon externalities, and they will _re_act upon you. As a matter of fact, it is necessary to commence by admitting that the souls of others are as _impenetrable_ to us, as the material things into which we cannot force our way. But, things and persons react upon us _differently_; and we act upon them in widely _different_ ways. By an exertion of our will, we can change or stop a _natural_ tide of inorganic antecedents and consequents and direct it to our own purposes. _Beings_ like ourselves, we must allure, manage, inform, and persuade. Soon we find, by experience, that other human beings are very like ourselves; and the higher animals nearer to us than stocks and stones. We find this through the exercise of our own causal activities upon them. The idea of the _Supernatural_ marches along no very dissimilar route. The strong man subjects Nature, but the Supernatural is above both it, and him. He cannot even _possess_ the thought of the Supreme. Whether he will or no, it _possesses him_. To his reason, Nature cannot subsist, as the true and independent ground of anything;--her laws are the servants of his volition;--and her chain of antecedent and consequent hangs between a First and a Last, without giving any sufficient account of either. If the Universe began in a shining Nebula, the question remains unsolved,--what first brought the thin cloud into being? The practical Reason, confirmed by experience, distinctly perceives that productive nature transforms all things,--but originates nothing;--that, contrariwise, when human nature wills to commit a wrong,--it really _originates_ the crime. A disputant may assert that Man's will originates no act;--the criminal is never guilty,--and the judge and jury who try him are not answerable for their own decision. The same disputant may add that the Court in which, they sit is unreal, and their bodily persons only shadows. The one set of suppositions is as tenable as the other, and precisely as unpractical. In the common course of Nature, then, Mankind has learned to maintain, as a truth of reason, that the Supernatural Power is a Will,--that is a Personality. In other words Man becomes a Theist. As in Natural Realism, so in realistic Theism, we try how our principles will _work_. Realists in thought, we treat men and things as natural realities; diverse when compared together, but alike in outsideness as they stand related to ourselves. Action and reaction then go on as are to be expected. Life seems to us one long verification of the truth we began by accepting.--And so, too, it is with our belief in a Being Supernatural and Divine. If we succeed in figuring to ourselves a world of adaptation, order, law, progress, unity, we have but to open our eyes, and it appears spread out before us. If we think that the world's creation would blend all _physical_ needs into pleasurable pursuits and satisfactions, we may look and see the union accomplished. If we frame a scheme of trial and _moral_ discipline, to raise the feeble and confirm the strong, its realization is not wanting amongst us. From our own feelings, we can imagine how a Father's eye would look pityingly down upon fear and sorrow, and all the strains incidental to moving laws; the attrition of other wills, the tumults, failures, ill doings, and perversities of our sensitive and social existence. How a Father's hand would bind up all that is weak, wild, and wilful in his children, with threads of rainbow coloured hope and joyful anticipation; bidding them believe that ere long the uncertain dimness, which is as morning spread upon the mountains, shall brighten into steady splendour, shining on to a perfect and unclouded day. We find as a matter of fact that this hope is no stranger to the human breast; that numbers live in it; numbers have died for it; and pre-eminently those of whom the world was not worthy. The growth of thought from a bare idea of the Supernatural to a belief in a pure and sublime Theism,--and the sufficient account it renders of the world, ourselves, and our destinies, must be looked upon as matters of fact in the work-day history of mankind. Practical human reason has really travelled by this track, and, from day to day, perceives new truths to verify the old conclusion. Every attempt to adapt other theories to the working facts become, by their unfitness for the purpose, indirect evidence for Theism. How short a time has passed since Campbell lamented over-- "The hopeless dark Idolater of Chance;" and since the authors of "Rejected Addresses" ridiculed a system which made the universe an accident.[170]--_Now_, chance sounds as strangely in scientific ears as Fate did to our strong-willed forefathers. Next, came that unintelligible contradictory phrase, a "_blind intelligence_;" a thing called a _mind_, that goes it knows not whither, and moves it knows not why. From this thing, immersed in the darkest ignorance, and unconscious even of its own existence, we were asked to believe that arrangement, harmony, excellence, beauty, were the productions. No wonder if men soon concluded that a moving force,--material and soulless,--would equally fulfil the same exalted functions. And, surely, one _thing_ is an account of the Universe as reasonable and as sufficient as the other. If we place a non-theistic theory in relation to our human inner nature, there ensues the same monstrous incongruity. The plenitude of loveliness, which overflows creation, as it were with multitudinous waves of light, we are asked to think of as the work of blind non-being. But, there is a greater plenitude of loveliness, in the good and noble acts, words, and thoughts of one bright soul of heaven-aspiring Man. Must we, then, believe that truth, sincerity, justice, rightness, goodness, purity, are all the offspring of a something infinitely lower than our weakest human will?[171]--Is that unknown something to be also the beacon of our hopes, the refuge of each forlorn and shipwrecked brother, the happiness giving itself to satisfy the unsatisfied aspirations of our long-enduring hearts? Surely, the mockery of madness could go no further. What can the morally impotent or the morally imperfect do for us? Even to the careless eye of common sense, it is clear at a glance, that with the _Impersonal_ our distinctive spiritual life can have no possible relations. If this be so, the very first idea of Supernatural Power is not advanced.--Contrariwise, it is distorted, frustrated, nullified. And with it is destroyed our trust in our own conscious nature. The instinct of immortality lives and moves within us only to betray.--Man,--whose being is the highest reason for the world's whole being,--is henceforth a palpable inconsistency. There cannot in the dreams of fiction be found a stranger tissue of more startling,--or one might venture to say,--more revolting moral absurdities. And a moral absurdity contradicts the constitution of Man's mind, quite as thoroughly as an absurdity purely intellectual. It is, in reality, the most self-condemned of all conceivable contradictions. Let us place side by side with this issue, _first_, the commonly conceived relation between a Personal supreme Being and his creation;--_secondly_, the apprehension of Theistic truth within the soul, as it comes to us substantiated by religious men. We shall, at all events, gain the advantage of a strong contrast between Theism and non-Theism;--and strong contrast with shadows is often a strong enlightenment. First, then, to consider the idea of Creation as the work not of a blind thing, but a supremely wise and powerful Being. It is plain that (to say the very least) this idea is encompassed with slighter and fewer difficulties. If a doubter is not convinced by the ordinary argument from Design, he cannot avoid admitting the fact of its possibility;--that it is applicable, and has been applied, argued, and reargued, without any overwhelming rejoinder or refutation. And there are _two_ obvious reasons why it has never been successfully refuted. One--the evident truth that, whatever rival theories[172] might or might not be expected to do, this theory explains the world. Next--that no other attempted explanations have ever found a First ground for any existing thing. In the theory of Design it continues an open question how far we may conceive the Creator's first act as a grand finality,--the launch of a vast assemblage of worlds formed,--or, being formed;--so built upon law and guided by far-stretching wisdom, that the Universe sails gloriously through the Ocean of Space like a thing of Life; each breath of Force, each wave of Time wafting it securely on. But, let any idea of a true creation be admitted, and no belief in existing laws of any kind, will ever banish the great and good God from the world which He has created and made. His presence adds glory to its fabric, and, when we walk in its garden of delights, we feel that He walks and speaks there too.[173] The argument from Creation to Creator forms the subject of the next Chapters. Therefore, we press it no farther here. The point to be remembered now, is that this line of reasoning has alone offered a tenable explanation of the world's existence. And a like remark holds good of Natural Realism as opposed to Speculative Idealism. It is impossible (as we have seen), to prove or disprove either by bare argumentative abstractions. But, as a question of practical reason, the Natural Realist explains the outer world of individual existences, and his explanation tallies both with its phenomena and our own relations to them. Our material progress (that antithesis of oriental quietism), depends upon activities we should never have exerted had we not fully believed in a world of working energy within ourselves, and an outside world of reacting forces for us to work upon. From mere material progress, let us turn our eyes to the nobler civilization of Mankind. A respect for human life because it _is_ human,--honour paid to all men, inasmuch as manhood possesses an intrinsic title to honour,--the desire to do justice and love mercy,--sympathy with privation, suffering, and aberration, both moral and intellectual,--these are the true elements that soften and improve our race. And they are pre-eminently the dowry of nations believing in Theism. Theism is to these spiritual powers what Realism has been to material powers. Human beings are, by these two agencies, brought into contact with both the outer and the inner work of life. And as regards life's central work, the lesson of history is now what it always has been. To move man from a lower to a higher sphere, his soul must first be deeply stirred. And a spiritual stir and movement is the applied strength of a spiritual power.[ai] We propose, then, to see by example, what Theism may be to mankind. Many examples will not be needed, provided those selected are typical. We shall therefore choose some two or three distinctive types. The task of selection reminds us to protest, once for all, against the weak and cynical way of illustrating human nature which threatens to become prevalent. If we want to see what a true man is, we must not seek his fossil effigies, by delving into the scanty and disputable records of primæval savagery,[aj] and unearthing the crumbled seeds of better things, which died before coming to perfection. It is like estimating the Oak from a mouldy Acorn. It is worse!--Barbarism tends to distortion and degeneracy. We might as wisely pronounce a maimed dwarf with carefully flattened forehead, the beau ideal of human strength and beauty, as seek to know the mind of man amid its wrecks and perversities. We must rather look at our race in its strongest and noblest development. The healthy acorn grows into a spreading oak;--the truly human child becomes, not a crooked dwarf, but an upright intellectual giant. The investigation of maimed deformities may have its interest for comparative purposes, but no ancient Greek nor Hebrew, no modern European nor American, ought to be painted with lineaments which are revolting to his higher nature. Let us help the savage by every means we can, _except_ by asking him to sit for a _model of Humanity_. When we do this, we have assuredly lost our very best reason for helping him at all. The examples following, no one will doubt to be types of true and highly developed men. The first, is intended to shew how Theism stands out before the apprehension of a Man engaged in searching out _abstract_ truth. The Philosophy of Sir W. Hamilton has become familiar to most people, so far as his theory of "the Conditioned" is concerned. They are aware that his mind dwelt on the speculative difficulties surrounding a knowledge of the Absolute, the self-subsisting First Cause, and true Ground of all things. Yet, to the veracity of God he appeals for the veraciousness of our primary beliefs. Over against a whole school of Idealists, he places, as the one fatal objection, this same veracity--"Either maintaining the veracity of God, they must surrender their hypothesis;--or, maintaining their hypothesis, they must surrender the veracity of God."[174] And, if the existence of a Deity is known, there can be no doubt that His truth is amongst the highest and clearest _to us_, of all His essential attributes. We cannot (as Sir William says) "suppose that we are created capable of intelligence, in order to be made the victims of delusion; that God is a deceiver, and the root of our nature a lie."[175] Therefore, he drew a wide distinction between, on the one hand, knowing the Absolute and the Supreme so as to examine and explain His nature, and, on the other hand, believing that He truly is, so as to affirm the fact of His being, and the necessary consequences of His existence. "When I deny," he writes, "that the Infinite can by us be _known_, I am far from denying that by us it is, must, and ought to be, _believed_!"[176]--In this belief, Sir William saw a sufficient reason for accepting, as Mr. Mill advises all to accept, "the inexplicable fact." And indeed the problem of truth perpetually does come, (evade the conclusion as we will), in one shape or another, to this same necessity of final acceptance. Mr. Coleridge's _Friend_ is one long investigation into this necessity, and he fairly closes his argument by saying that always,--start from whatever point we may,--"reason will find a chasm, which the moral being only, which the spirit and religion of man alone can fill up."[177] 3 For Sir W. Hamilton, Theism bridged the vast abyss! No one could more strongly estimate its vastness, and the poverty of our visual powers when we stand beside it;--the dim feeling which makes us shrink back from its awful verge. But Theism became to him the strength of a noble life;--a life of much self-sacrifice, and meagre earthly recompense.[ak] The next typical thinker we shall quote is one pre-eminent for his careful study of the constitution of _Man_, the course, the aims, and aptitudes of his _moral_ existence. It seems hardly necessary to add the name of Bishop Butler. The reader will find pleasure and instruction, if he peruses Butler's two sermons on the Love of God, from the second of which the following passages are cited:-- "Nothing is more certain, than that an infinite Being may himself be, if he pleases, the supply to all the capacities of our nature. All the common enjoyments of life are from the faculties he hath endued us with, and the objects he hath made suitable to them. He may himself be to us infinitely more than all these: he may be to us all that we want. As our understanding can contemplate itself, and our affections be exercised upon themselves by reflection, so may each be employed in the same manner upon any other mind; and since the supreme Mind, the Author and Cause of all things, is the highest possible object to himself, he may be an adequate supply to all the faculties of our souls; a subject to our understanding, and an object to our affections. "Consider then: when we shall have put off this mortal body, when we shall be divested of sensual appetites, and those possessions which are now the means of gratification shall be of no avail; when this restless scene of business and vain pleasures, which now diverts us from ourselves, shall be all over; we, our proper self, shall still remain; we shall still continue the same creatures we are, with wants to be supplied, and capacities of happiness. We must have faculties of perception, though not sensitive ones; and pleasure or uneasiness from our perceptions, as now we have. "There are certain ideas, which we express by the words, order, harmony, proportion, beauty, the furthest removed from anything sensual. Now, what is there in those intellectual images, forms, or ideas, which begets that approbation, love, delight, and even rapture, which is seen in some persons' faces upon having those objects present to their minds?--'Mere enthusiasm!'--Be it what it will: there are objects, works of nature and of art, which all mankind have delight from, quite distinct from their affording gratification to sensual appetites; and from quite another view of them, than as being for their interest and further advantage. The faculties from which we are capable of these pleasures, and the pleasures themselves, are as natural, and as much to be accounted for, as any sensual appetite whatever, and the pleasure from its gratification. Words to be sure are wanting upon this subject: to say, that everything of grace and beauty throughout the whole of nature, everything excellent and amiable shared in differently lower degrees by the whole creation, meet in the Author and Cause of all things; this is an inadequate and perhaps improper way of speaking of the divine nature; but it is manifest that absolute rectitude, the perfection of being, must be in all senses, and in every respect, the highest object to the mind.... ".... Now, as our capacities of perception improve, we shall have, perhaps by some faculty entirely new, a perception of God's presence with us in a nearer and stricter way; since it is certain he is more intimately present with us than anything else can be. Proof of the existence and presence of any being is quite different from the immediate perception, the consciousness of it. What then will be the joy of heart, which his presence, and _the light of his countenance_, who is the life of the universe, will inspire good men with, when they shall have a sensation, that he is the sustainer of their being, that they exist in him; when they shall feel his influence to cheer and enliven and support their frame, in a manner of which we have now no conception? He will be in a literal sense _their strength and their portion for ever_."[178] Of the last writer here adduced, it is needless to say more than that amongst living authors, he is rarely equalled in his subtle analysis of the _tender and emotional side of humanity_. "The personal relation sought, is discerned and felt. The Soul understands and knows that God is _her_ God; dwelling with her more closely than any creature can; yea, neither Stars, nor Sea, nor smiling Nature hold God so intimately as the bosom of the Soul. What is He to it? what, but the Soul of the soul? It no longer seems profane to say, 'God is my bosom friend: God is for me, and I am for Him.' So Joy bursts out into Praise, and all things look brilliant; and hardship seems easy, and duty becomes delight, and contempt is not felt, and every morsel of bread is sweet.... ".... But Oh philosopher, is all this a contemptible dream? thou canst explain it all? or thou scornest it all? Whatever _theory_ thou may'st form concerning it, it is not the less a fact of human nature: one of some age too: for David thirsted after God and exceedingly rejoiced in Him, and so did Paul; and the feelings which they describe are reproduced in the present day. To despise wide-spread enduring facts is _not_ philosophic; and when they conduce to power of goodness and inward happiness, it might be wise to learn the phenomena by personal experience, _before_ theorizing about them. It was not a proud thing of Paul to say, but a simple truth, that the spiritual cannot be judged by the unspiritual. "The single thought, 'God is for my soul, and my soul is for Him,' suffices to fill a universe of feeling, and gives rise to a hundred metaphors. Spiritual persons have exhausted human relationships in the vain attempt to express their full feeling of what God (or Christ) is to them. Father, Brother, Friend, King, Master, Shepherd, Guide, are common titles. In other figures, God is their Tower, their Glory, their Rock, their Shield, their Sun, their Star, their Joy, their Portion, their Hope, their Trust, their Life."[179] Such is Theism, penetrating the head and heart of Man; appealing to his intellect, his conscience, and his affections. Such is Theism; sending upwards, out of Man's spirit, aspirations which "dumb driven cattle" cannot breathe--often the sole sweet incense from Earth to Heaven. It is possible that, to some readers, the passages extracted will sound like the accents of a foreign tongue. Of such it may properly be asked, whether any man has a right _so_ to call in question another sane man's honest consciousness, _as_ to deny its reality, worth, and excellence? There are ears on which the music of Shakespeare's words, or Mozart's notes, fall tuneless and unmeaning. Yet, who on that account would deny the true sense and delight of poetry, rhythm, and melody? We cannot, in reason, forget that even from ordinary men a small amount of affirmation, if conscientious, unselfish, and collected, outweighs and annihilates a host of perplexing doubts. But, every great Man's thought is at least a grand fact; every expression of it a benefaction to his fellow-men. And, as respects the mighty power with which Theism stirs and impels the soul, we may rest absolutely assured that, where one human being is found to give it utterance, thousands have felt the movement, and have silently governed their life's work by it. Happily, the brightest gifts of our existence are also the commonest;--the sunshine of the world, and the sunshine of the Soul. Countless numbers have, indeed, professed to discern by an inward sense the reflected reality of a Supreme Being. They who feel it most deeply, do not attempt to explain the Substance of which an imperfect copy exists within themselves, acknowledged, yet inexplicable; at once the greatest enigma, and the noblest fact of their essential being. They are content to look upwards to the Supreme Mind they have found;--to treasure such knowledge as they have; and adore its object. Many of those who have thus believed and acted are amongst the most excellent and perfect of our race. Has any theory of the Universe which ignores the original of an image discovered within ourselves, accounted for what we perceive through our senses, our consciousness, and our moral insight,--so well as _that_ theory which acknowledges and reverences a God? FOOTNOTES: [ac] "In vain," says Hume's Cleanthes, "In vain would the sceptic make a distinction between science and common life, or between one science and another. The arguments, employed in all, if just, are of a similar nature, and contain the same force and evidence. Or if there be any difference among them, the advantage lies entirely on the side of theology and natural religion."--_Dialogues, etc._, Part I. sub. fin. And our ultimate appeal--as for example concerning the subject next discussed in this chapter--is, he observes, to an instinctive operation of the mind which obliges us to accept and act upon what we cannot explain. Writing in his own person, Mr. Hume observes, "As nature has taught us the use of our limbs, without giving us the knowledge of the muscles and nerves by which they are actuated, so has she implanted in us an instinct, which carries forward the thought in a correspondent course to that which she has established among external objects; though we are ignorant of those powers and forces on which this regular course and succession of objects totally depends."--_Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding._ Section V., end. Compare footnote [d]. to this chapter, p. 269 _post_. [ad] The word Belief has been used in a variety of senses by modern writers of differing views from Jacobi to Sir. W. Hamilton, from Dr. Newman to Mr. Herbert Spencer. "This word," Mr. Spencer says, "is habitually applied to dicta of consciousness for which no proof can be assigned: both those which are unprovable because they underlie all proof, and those which are unprovable because of the absence of evidence." And again; "we commonly say we 'believe' a thing for which we can assign some preponderating evidence, or concerning which we have received some indefinable impression.... And it is the peculiarity of these beliefs, as contrasted with cognitions, that their connexions with antecedent states of consciousness may be easily severed, instead of being difficult to sever. But unhappily, the word 'belief' is also applied to each of those temporarily or permanently indissoluble connexions in consciousness, for the acceptance of which the only warrant is that it cannot be got rid of.... Thus the two opposite poles of knowledge go under the same name; and by the reverse connotations of this name, as used for the most coherent and least coherent relations of thought, profound misconceptions have been generated." Mr. Spencer made these remarks at separate intervals of time, and has repeated them in 1874 (_Essays_, III. 259-60). It would therefore appear that he thinks little has recently been done to discriminate the significations of so ambiguous a term. This chapter endeavours to investigate a small number of the genus "Beliefs" to which the _differentia_ "Of Reason" has been added by way of distinction. It also attempts to offer a contribution towards the useful work of explaining their specific validity, and if its argument be correct, they constitute a very important definable species of the Genus, carrying with them a persuasion pre-eminently their own. On his page 260, last referred to, Mr. Spencer remarks,--"that the belief which the moral and religious feelings are said to yield of a personal God, is not one of the beliefs which are unprovable because they underlie all proof"--and adds that works on Natural Theology treat that Belief as _inferential_. The view taken of this moral and religious belief in the present Essay, is that it is in its own nature _both_ primary and inferential. The former of these aspects is the one now under discussion. [154] Compare Fowler's Inductive Logic, p. 29. [Since the reference was made, Mr. Fowler has become Professor of Logic in the University of Oxford.] [155] Mr. Fowler, in the little volume just referred to, describes another "Theory of the Origin of Universal Beliefs," as follows:--"It would admit that all beliefs alike are ultimately derived from experience, and still it would freely adopt the language that there are some beliefs which are 'native to the human mind.' The word 'experience' as ordinarily employed by psychologists, includes not only the experience of the individual, but the recorded experience of mankind. On the theory, however, of which we are now speaking, it has a still more extended meaning; it includes experience, or to speak more strictly, a peculiar facility for forming certain experiences, _transmitted_ by hereditary descent from generation to generation. While some ideas occur only to particular individuals, at particular times, there are others which, from the frequency and constancy with which they are obtruded upon men's minds at all times and under all circumstances, become, after an accumulated experience of many generations, _connatural_, as it were, to the human mind. We assume them, often unconsciously, in our special perceptions, and when the propositions, which embody them, are propounded to us, we find it impossible, on reflection, to doubt their truth. It is by personal experience of external objects and their relations that each man recognises them, but the _tendency_ to recognise them is transmitted, like the physical or mental peculiarities of race, from preceding generations, and is anterior to any special experience whatever on the part of the individual. This theory, to which much of modern speculation appears to be converging, is advocated with great ability in the works of Mr. Herbert Spencer." _Inductive Logic_, p. 31. This account of our Belief in the Inductive Principle agrees, in effect, with the opinion of those who hold that our acceptance of its truth resembles our acceptance of Mathematical Truths in _two_ very important respects: (1) Its _Certitude_. To use Dr. Whewell's words; "We are as certain of it as of the truths of arithmetic and geometry. We cannot doubt that it must apply to all events past and future, in every part of the universe, just as truly as to those occurrences which we have ourselves observed. _What_ causes produce what effects;--what is the cause of any particular event;--what will be the effect of any peculiar process;--these are points on which experience may enlighten us. Observation and experience may be requisite, to enable us to judge respecting such matters. But that every event has _some_ cause, Experience cannot prove any more than she can disprove. She can add nothing to the evidence of the truth, however often she may exemplify it. This doctrine, then, cannot have been acquired by her teaching," Whewell's _Hist. of Scientific Ideas_, B. III. Cap. ii. (2) In the fact of its being _intuitive_; that is, as Mr. Fowler says, "connatural," or "native to the human mind." Whether we can trace the process through which it became one of the mental possessions characteristic of Mankind is a further question, and a very curious one. The subjects of improvement by education, and of the transmission of improvements thus acquired among men and the lower animals, belong in part to our next Chapter;--they are, of course, deeply interesting to every philanthropist, every promoter of true progress and wholesome civilization. [156] Galen remarks upon the immediate activity of animal instinct prior to example or habituation. Most Naturalists know his experiment of hatching three different sorts of eggs together. He was much struck to see the young aquatic bird, reptile, and eaglet, betake themselves at once, each to his vocation. Some persons referred these instincts to the influence of organs fitted for definite uses, yet, observes Galen, the young calf will butt before he has got horns. A good deal might be added to Galen's rejoinder. Animals seem often to work without fitness of organization,--or one might almost say in defiance of their organs. "There is nothing," says Sir C. Bell, "in the configuration of the black bear, particularly adapted for his catching fish; yet he will sit, on his hinder extremities, by the side of a stream, morning or evening, on the watch, like a practised fisher, and so perfectly motionless as to deceive the eye of the Indian, who mistakes him for the burnt trunk of a tree; when he sees his opportunity favourable, he will thrust out his fore-paw, and seize a fish with incredible celerity. The exterior organ is not, in this instance, the cause of the habit or of the propensity; and if we thus see the instinct bestowed without the appropriate organ, may we not the more readily believe, in other examples, when the two are conjoined, that the habit exists with the instrument, although not through it?" (_Bridgewater Treatise_, Chap. x. p. 250.)--In Captain Cook's third voyage there is another anecdote of bears equally curious. "The wild deer (barein) are far too swift for those lumbering sportsmen; so the bear perceives them at a distance by the scent; and, as they herd in low grounds, when he approaches them, he gets upon the adjoining eminence, from whence he rolls down pieces of rock; nor does he quit his ambush, and pursue, until he finds that some have been maimed." (Vol. 3, p. 306.) In such cases as these, there is a manifest want of correspondence between animal organisms and animal instincts, which many naturalists consider essentially interdependent. Yet on their mutual action and reaction some have founded a theory of evolution. [157] "We have in the Veda the invocation _Dya[=u]s pítar_, the Greek [Greek: Zeu pater], the Latin _Jupiter_; and that means in all the three languages what it meant before these three languages were torn asunder--it means Heaven-Father. These two words are not mere words; they are to my mind the oldest poem, the oldest prayer of mankind, or at least of that pure branch of it to which we belong--and I am as firmly convinced that this prayer was uttered, that this name was given to the unknown God before Sanskrit was Sanskrit, and Greek was Greek, as when I see the Lord's Prayer in the languages of Polynesia and Melanesia, I feel certain that it was first uttered in the language of Jerusalem." Professor Max Müller's _Science of Religion_. New Ed. p. 172. [158] This then would seem to be an instance of wide spread "moral regression." [ae] Our deep-rooted tendency to trust human testimony may yield a very curious example of the difficulties presented by the whole class of pre-rational beliefs. Mr. J. Mill in accordance with his system of foregone Associations "resolves" this case as follows (_Analysis_ I. p. 385-6): "Belief in testimony is but a case of the anticipation of the future from the past; and belief in the uniformity of the laws of nature is but another name for the same thing.... The testimony uniformly calls up the idea of the reality of the event, so closely, that I cannot disjoin them. But the idea, irresistibly forced upon me, of a real event, is Belief." On this explanation Mr. Bain remarks, "The belief in Testimony is derived from the primary credulity of the mind, in certain instances left intact under the wear and tear of adverse experience. Hardly any fact of the human mind is better attested than the primitive disposition to receive all testimony with unflinching credence. It never occurs to the child to question any statement made to it, until some positive force on the side of scepticism has been developed. Gradually we find that certain testimonies are inconsistent with fact; we have, therefore, to go through a long education in discriminating the good testimonies from the bad. To the one class, we adhere with the primitive force of conviction that in the other class has been shaken and worn away by the shocks of repeated contradictions." It seems quite possible that our "primary credulity" may be one example of a wider spread feeling of reliance engendered in part by affection and dependence. Its force varies considerably in various minds. Women whose lives have been happy and free from disappointment retain much of this primary intuitive belief to the end of their days. Among men, the trust in Testimony becomes controlled by their power of balancing probabilities; a faculty in which the very credulous and also the very sceptical are often observed to be deficient. The disappointed of both sexes proverbially incline to Scepticism. [159] _Metaph._ I. 44. [160] Acts xvii. 27, 28. Romans i. 32; ii. 14 seq. [161] Most persons have read with delight the observations on Insect Architecture from Huber downwards. Birds are generally well watched and well reported. Many Naturalists have written on these subjects, from a hope of creating in the minds of men some softer interest for their humble companions. Mr. Jesse naïvely prefaces a collection of anecdotes, by saying that, of all the nations in Europe, our own countrymen are perhaps the least inclined to treat the brute creation with tenderness. Wilson long ago observed that the nest building of birds was not always the same in the same species. The older birds built the better nests. M. Pouchet of Rouen proved that when the new streets of that city were erected, the window-swallows altered their nests and substantially improved them. A short account of his observations will be found in Wallace's _Contributions_, 228 A. Mr. Wallace adds several instances of bad nest building, especially by pigeons, rooks, and window-swallows, a circumstance also noticed by White of Selborne. Amongst the most remarkable bird-families with special ideas of construction, are the mound-builders, and bower birds of Australia, described by Mr. Gould. The former hatch their eggs in hillocks contrived to retain during the night, amid their warm vegetable linings, the solar heat of each successive day. The nests of one family are about a yard high and three wide. In another family, mounds of five yards in height and twelve in girth seem not uncommon; and the circumference of one mound in particular measured full fifty yards. These larger mounds are the work of many birds, through many years, and their firm sides are covered by ancient forest growth. The bower birds construct over-arching alleys of curved branches, decorated with pretty grasses, gay feathers, shells and bones, particularly near the entrances. These bowers seem to be used as meeting and recreation places for both sexes. They vary to some extent amongst the different species of this singular tribe. There can be no doubt of the power of adaptation among animals;--and those who study them most are least surprised at its extent. Horses will learn to go up and down stairs, cats to undo door latches; and one pony mentioned by Jesse used to unfasten the stable door, open and rob the corn chest. Still more curious, is the American bird called _neuntödter_, which catches grasshoppers and spears them upon twigs, not for the shamble-purposes of the butcher bird, but simply as baits to catch and eat the smaller birds attracted by the spoil. Schleiden (_Plant_ 232), tells a most singular story of a Kangaroo who tried to drown his pursuer, and shewed considerable craft in the way he set about the drowning. After knocking the hunter backwards into a pond, the "old man" (Australian for Kangaroo) kept pushing the poor fellow's head under water every time he raised it up. If Kangaroo had never drowned a human being before, he must have proceeded by analogy, and argued, as some Naturalists do, from the brute to the man. A dog, mentioned by Jesse, endeavoured to save his drowning master's life by the reverse process to Kangaroo's, and would not let the beloved head disappear under water for many a wintry hour after life had been extinguished. (_Country Life_, p. 119.) A person reflecting on these and similar facts, does not feel much surprised at Aristotle's appreciation of animal intelligence, (_e. g._, _Historiæ_ viii. 1, 2,) "[Greek: hôs gar en anthrôpô technê kai sophia kai synesis, houtôs eniois tôn zôôn esti tis hetera toiautê physikê dynamis.]" The animal power of adaptation, travelling beyond the routine of instinctive action, probably struck the philosopher very strongly. [162] These barricades are curiously galleried and casemated, like the defences of a fortress. The best account of them is given by the accurate and interesting Huber. [163] In Aristotle's Introduction to Physical Science, he remarks that Sense grasps at Wholes, so that in a certain way, the general may seem to take precedence with us of the particular. Language is a proof of this--Children's talk is apt to run in concretes;--every man or woman is a father or mother to them. See _Phys. Ausc._ I. 1, with Pacius' note. The old commentator unties a knot which some moderns appear to have tied fast again. _Addition._ Aristotle's illustration, it is alleged (_e. g._ by Dr. Whewell), goes in the wrong direction; fathers and mothers are less comprehensive terms than men and women; the truth seems to be that children fail to perceive the differences between parents and other human beings;--therefore they call men and women, parents. Pacius says:--"Nunc igitur totum esse nobis notius, probat à signo, id est, argumento sumto ab infantibus, qui initiò non distinguunt patrem ab aliis viris, nec matrem ab aliis mulieribus: postea verò distinguunt: nempe, quia ab initio habuerunt cognitionem magis confusam, neque cognoverunt proprietates parentis, sed tantum eum noverunt sub ratione universali, quatenus est homo, ideoque non potuerunt eum ab aliis hominibus sejungere. Postea verò progredientes ad cognitionem magis particularem, possunt patrem ab aliis discernere." Ed. 1608, p. 346. [af] It is quite conceivable that the presence of Reason may from its first dawn, give rise to a very wide difference between the highest animal instincts, and the lowest instinctive impulses of Man. The discussion would be far too extensive for these pages; but it is obvious that such a difference might clearly account for much that is obscure in the twilight territory of Mind. Hume, however, appears to have thought otherwise, as may be perceived in the Conclusion of his _Reason of Animals_. From his mention of "experimental reasoning" and the instances adduced, he would seem to attribute our Inductive process to a _simple_ instinct. He writes thus:--"Though animals learn many parts of their knowledge from observation, there are also many parts of it which they derive from the original hand of Nature, which much exceed the share of capacity they possess on ordinary occasions, and in which they improve little or nothing, by the longest practice and experience. These we denominate INSTINCTS, and are so apt to admire as something very extraordinary and inexplicable by all the disquisitions of human understanding. But our wonder will perhaps cease or diminish when we consider that the experimental reasoning itself, which we possess in common with beasts, and on which the whole conduct of life depends, is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power, that acts in us unknown to ourselves, and in its chief operations is not directed by any such relations or comparison of ideas as are the proper objects of our intellectual faculties. Though the instinct be different, yet still it is an instinct, which teaches a man to avoid the fire, as much as that which teaches a bird, with such exactness, the art of incubation, and the whole economy and order of its nursery." Compare foot-note (a) to this chapter, p. 255 _ante_. [ag] "Wisdom is Alchemy. Else it could not be Wisdom. This is its unfailing characteristic, that it 'finds good in everything,' that it renders all things more precious. In this respect also does it renew the spirit of childhood within us: while foolishness hardens our hearts and narrows our thoughts, it makes us feel a childlike curiosity and a childlike interest about all things. When our view is confined to ourselves, nothing is of value, except what ministers in one way or other to our own personal gratification: but in proportion as it widens, our sympathies increase and multiply: and when we have learnt to look on all things as God's works, then, as His works, they are all endeared to us. "Hence nothing can be further from true wisdom, than the mask of it assumed by men of the world, who affect a cold indifference about whatever does not belong to their own immediate circle of interests or pleasures." _Guesses at Truth_, 2nd Ed. 2nd Series, p. 200. [164] "Try to conceive a man without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth, of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite. An animal endowed with a memory of appearances and of facts might remain. But the man will have vanished, and you have instead a creature, _more subtle than any beast of the field_, but likewise _cursed above every beast of the field; upon the belly must it go, and dust must it eat all the days of its life_. But I recal myself from a train of thoughts little likely to find favour in this age of sense and selfishness." Coleridge, _Church and State_. Note p. 50, Ed. 1839. [165] Some people we may remark are unable to see any difference between sentiments and sentimentalities. [166] It was by a reverse procedure that Kant shewed his greatness. He kept the two fields of thought apart, and applied to each a criticism unsparing, but appropriate. Nothing could be more decisive than the result, though darkened in some degree by the critic's peculiar technicalities. Moral truth was placed upon the most sublime of elevations. Speculative reason could never rise beyond the limits of conditioned truth; any attempt to extend its sphere issued in antinomy or blank negation. It left the human mind apparently oscillating between Idealism and limited Insight. But to this must be added a most important point too commonly forgotten. Though Speculative reason does not demonstrably prove, it renders _conceivable_ by us those highest of all Ideas which our Practical reason shews to be necessarily and unquestionably _certain_ for every one of us. Moral Truth thus opens to Man's eye a clear vista into the Timeless and the Absolute, to an immortal life beyond the grave, and to God the Sovereign both of Nature and of Man. It tells us the secret of true Causation, and with it of all that is most worth living for, the intrinsically greatest and Best of Humanity. And it binds every human being, as by golden links, to that ever present Divine throne, the shrine and oracle set up within his own breast. We ought always to remember that upon those grand truths which if practically certain cannot be ultimately false, Kant staked his all. They were the crown alike of his labours and his life. _Addition._--By these remarks the present writer does not intend subscribing to all the Kantian conclusions respecting pure Speculative Reason, much less to those that have been asserted by many of Kant's disciples. Difference of opinion on such conclusions cannot, however, effect an honest appreciation of the clear and elevated principles maintained by Kant on the subject of independent Morality, as contradistinguished from the scheme which used to be termed Selfish, but is now commonly called Utilitarian.--See pp. 93-6 _ante_. [ah] "Thousands of years it may be before Homer and the Veda ... Dyaus did not mean the blue sky, nor was it simply the sky personified; it was meant for something else.... We shall have to learn the same lesson again and again in the Science of Religion, viz. that the place whereon we stand is holy ground. Thousands of years have passed since the Aryan nations separated to travel to the North and the South, the West and the East: they have each formed their languages, they have each founded empires and philosophies, they have each built temples and razed them to the ground; they have all grown older, and it may be wiser and better; but when they search for a name for what is most exalted and yet most dear to every one of us, when they wish to express both awe and love, the infinite and the finite, they can but do what their old fathers did when gazing up to the eternal sky, and feeling the presence of a Being as far as far and as near as near can be: they can but combine the self-same words, and utter once more the primeval Aryan prayer, Heaven-Father, in that form which will endure for ever, 'Our Father which art in Heaven.'"--Max Müller, _Lectures on the Science of Religion_, pp. 171-2, 3. [167] Compare the Indian phrase "the magical illusions of reality, the so-called Mâyâ of creation." Max Müller's _Sanskrit Literature_, p. 19. Also Ritter's _Gesch. der Philosophie_, I. 101 seq., and the account in both of the philosophy of Quietism. The attractive side of it is given by Max Müller, pp. 18, 19, and 29. The National results are elegantly painted, pp. 30, 31. He concludes: "It might therefore be justly said that India has no place in the political history of the world.... India has moved in such a small and degraded circle of political existence that it remained almost invisible to the eyes of other nations." Few feelings are more deeply rooted, as in our individual, so in our collective human nature, than this same conclusion. Quietism culminates when Action appears useless because of a conceived Necessity or Unreality of Nature:--"Life is but a Dream--Let all sit still and fold their hands to slumber." [168] Speculatively considered, what can the weapon commonly called argument do against Idealism? Both sides allow that man can neither cause nor annihilate sensible impressions. But they are supposably ideal phrases of susceptibility, which may be explained in more ways than one. On the inability of most men--(particularly Scotchmen,) to comprehend Berkeley's position, see _Fraser's Ed._, IV. 366, 7, 8, note. It gave rise to notably absurd rejoinders: "With the witty Voltaire ten thousand cannon balls, and ten thousand dead men, were ten thousand ideas, according to Berkeley. There is as much subtlety of thought, and more humour, in the Irish story of Berkeley's visit to Swift on a rainy day, when, by the Dean's orders, he was left to stand before the unopened door, because, if his philosophy was true, he could as easily enter with the door shut as open." [169] "We cannot possibly identify the perception of _expanded colour_, which is all that originally constitutes seeing, with the perception of _felt resistance_, which is all that originally constitutes touching. Coloured extension is antithetical to felt extension. In fact, we do not see, we never saw, and we never can see the orange of mere touch; we do not touch, we never touched, and we never can touch the orange of mere sight." _Ibid._ p. 394. [170] "From floating elements in chaos hurl'd, Self-form'd of atoms, sprang the infant world: No great _First Cause_ inspired the happy plot, But all was matter--and no matter what. Atoms, attracted by some law occult, Settling in spheres, the globe was the result: Pure child of _Chance_, which still directs the ball, As rotatory atoms rise or fall. In ether launch'd, the peopled bubble floats, A mass of particles, and confluent motes, "So nicely poised, that if one atom flings Its weight away, aloft the planet springs, And wings its course through realms of boundless space, Outstripping comets in eccentric race. Add but one atom more, it sinks outright Down to the realms of Tartarus and night." "_Rejected Addresses_," pp. 115, 116. [171] "What are the core and essence of this hypothesis? Strip it naked and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself--emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena--were once latent in a fiery cloud. Surely the mere statement of such a notion is more than a refutation." Tyndall, _Fragments of Science_, p. 163. [172] Mr. Mill speaks thus of the Design argument. "It is the best; and besides, it is by far the most persuasive. It would be difficult to find a stronger argument in favour of Theism, than that the eye must have been made by one who sees, and the ear by one who hears." Mill _On Hamilton_, p. 551. [173] So in Thomson's Hymn:-- "Thy beauty walks, Thy tenderness and love. Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm; Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles; And every sense, and every heart, is joy." [ai] "The idea of God, beyond all question or comparison, is the one great seminal principle; inasmuch as it combines and comprehends all the faculties of our nature, converging in it as their common centre; brings the reason to sanction the aspirations of the imagination; impregnates law with the vitality and attractiveness of the affections; and establishes the natural legitimate subordination of the body to the will, and of both to the _vis logica_ or reason, by involving the necessary and entire dependence of the created on the creator." _Guesses at Truth._ 1st Ed., pp. 122, 3. [aj] Perhaps every cynic delighting in those records should be asked to define what he means by Savagery. Of savages there are evidently many sorts, _e. g._:-- (1) The children of our race;--a condition not beautiful, yet not without hope. (2) Semi-civilized tribes, generally addicted to "fire-water" and other vices of civilization, without possession of its better things. (3) Barbarian princedoms, grown decrepit by reason of wars, caste domination, or a sensual and effete culture. (4) There are also a few wholly uncultured folk, who are more of gentlemen and ladies than our highly civilized peoples;--more truthful, honourable, and courteous;--while, (5) Not a few are savages indeed! These strictures serve as a reminder to add that by Theism is here intended the belief in a Supreme Being, the Father of Spirits, to Whom we shall give solemn account. But it is _not_ meant to include some civilized superstitions, by means of which many men degrade and torment their fellows. Of such men we say, They too are savages indeed! [174] _Reid's Works_, p. 751. [175] _Reid's Works_, p. 743. [176] _Metaph._ II. p. 530. [177] _The Friend_, vol iii. p. 214. Ed. 1844. [ak] The portrait of a lonely thinker searching out God has been painted in lively colours, as follows:--"O my friend, you would do me most grievous wrong, if you thought my heart empty of those feelings which make man the standing miracle of Nature. If your child fell into the river, would you stop to tell or think how you loved it, how dear and winsome and precious it was to you, how blank your home and bruised your heart would be without it? Or would you plunge into the stream in utter recklessness of your life, bear it swiftly out of the devouring flood, and then in silence strain the rescued little one to your bosom? Characters differ. It is mine to act, as well as to feel. What, do you imagine, prompts a thinker to give his days and nights to the rescue of man's faith in God, his heart-trust and moral inspiration and spiritual joy, when all these are put in jeopardy by the increase of a knowledge that is but half comprehended, even by those who in their own special lines are nobly increasing it? What lies back of the intense activity of his brain, as he toils over problems that wring the beads from his brow, gives up to the lonely pursuit of truth the hours that might be fertile of the prizes clutched after by the crowd, and turns his back on prizes that even he holds dear? What but a mighty hunger for God can explain this weary, unending search for Him? What else can explain the unthanked effort to make plain a path to Him that no man wants to travel?" American _Index_, Jan. 15, 1874. [178] Butler's Sermons, p. 184 seq. [179] _The Soul, her Sorrows and her Aspirations_, pp. 103, 104. CHAPTER V. PRODUCTION AND ITS LAW. "[Greek: Polla ta deina, kouden anthrôpou deinoteron pelei.]" Sophocles, _Antigone_. "These be the two parts of natural philosophy,--the inquisition of causes, and the production of effects; speculative, and operative; natural science, and natural prudence." Bacon's _Advancement of Learning_. Book II. "The perception of real affinities between events (that is to say, of _ideal_ affinities, for those only are real), enables the poet to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul. "Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other Truth," Emerson. _Idealism._ "The question of questions for mankind--the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other--is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things. Whence our race has come; what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature's power over us; to what goal we are tending; are the problems which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world." Huxley. _Man's Place in Nature_, p. 57. "Der Mensch ist das einzige Geschöpf, das erzogen werden muss. Unter der Erziehung nämlich verstehen wir die Wartung (Verpflegung, Unterhaltung), Disciplin (Zucht) und Unterweisung nebst der Bildung. Dem zufolge ist der Mensch Säugling,--Zögling--und Lehrling." Kant. _Pädagogik_, Einleitung. "Man's Intellectual Progress consists in the Idealization of Facts, and man's Moral Progress consists in the Realization of Ideas." Whewell's _Moral Philosophy, Additional Lectures_, p. 129. "Say! when the world was new and fresh from the hand of its Maker, Ere the first modelled frame thrilled with the tremors of life,... .... Forms of transcendent might--Beauty with Majesty joined, None to behold, and none to enjoy, and none to interpret? Say! was the WORK wrought out! Say was the GLORY complete? What could reflect, though dimly and faint, the INEFFABLE PURPOSE Which from chaotic powers, Order and Harmony drew? What but the reasoning spirit, the thought and the faith and the feeling? What, but the grateful sense, conscious of love and design? Man sprang forth at the final behest. His intelligent worship Filled up the void that was left. Nature at length had a Soul." Sir J. Herschel. _Essays, etc._, p. 737. "Wär ein verständiger Sinn auch mir doch beschieden gewesen! Aber es täuschte mich trügrischer Pfad, hieher mich, dann dorthin Lockend. Nun bin ich bejahrt und doch unbefriedigt von allem Forschen. Denn wo ich den Geist hinwende, da löst sich mir alles Auf in Eins und Dasselbe: da alles Seyende, allzeit Allwärts angezogen, in ähnliche, eine Natur tritt." Jacobi. _Werke, Vorrede zu David Hume_, p. 103. "Throughout all future time, as now, the human mind may occupy itself, not only with ascertained phenomena and their relations, but also with that unascertained something which phenomena and their relations imply. Hence if knowledge cannot monopolize consciousness--if it must always continue possible for the mind to dwell upon that which transcends knowledge; then there can never cease to be a place for something of the nature of Religion; since Religion under all its forms is distinguished from everything else in this, that its subject matter is that which passes the sphere of experience." Herbert Spencer. _First Principles_, p. 17. SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER V. The argument of this chapter turns upon the analysis of concrete processes carried on throughout human life; together with their correlations or correspondent factors visible _in rerum naturâ_. All these being complex activities, resolve themselves into series of simpler activities, which, though separable in thought, follow each other inseparably as real working elements of human or natural productions,--or of both. In each productive process of Mankind, we perceive:-- 1. A purpose conceived,--(the end or final cause.) 2. A power or force which has to be (a.) discovered and (b.) fitted to this human purpose. 2. (a.) This implies that the object in quest exists, or is capable of being evoked into active existence, as a Force or operative Law capable of producing real effects. Otherwise, it would be no auxiliary to Man. Viewed _per se_, and apart from its being fitted to his special purpose, it must therefore be a _natural_ power or law, and answers to what Bacon calls a Form or Formal cause.[180] (It is plain that human production requires some particular utilization of a producing force, wider in itself than this or any other ancillary application of its energies. Compare Bacon's philosophic observation[181] that the operative Form "deduces the given nature from some source of being which is inherent in more natures.") 2. (b.) A number of such powers, forces, laws, forms, present themselves to the intellectual eye of an inventor or producer. Possible _fitness_, (adaptability)--must therefore next be determined. And here the power is no longer considered separately, but in relation to some Formation. In 2, therefore, we have (a) a simple fact or general law of Force;--and (b) a correlated fact, or specialized law of Production. 3. Finally, for operative activity, there must be an efficient cause putting in movement the productive law, over and above its intelligent apprehension just presupposed. This efficient Cause, as seen always in human Production, is a Will. Now each several step in this series comes before us as an act of _Mind_. But out of this number one only needs to be examined here;--because Purpose (1) has been treated of in Chapter II. Will (3) occupies the close of this Essay. No. 2, therefore, (divisible into a and b,) makes the proper subject-matter of the present Chapter. It has been written to meet the difficulties felt by a certain number of reasoners respecting the argument from Design. They are very often indisposed to accept that argument, because its analogical nature makes it appear circuitous; and because they hesitate when attempting to appreciate its exact value: compare p. 53 _ante_. There is also a lurking dread of that spectral shadow called Anthropomorphism, haunting some minds with a pertinacity, which may be estimated from p. 54 _seq._ By such reasoners let the present Chapter,--which proceeds not by way of analogy, but through a direct analysis of acknowledged facts--be read as a substitute for Chapter II. Or, they may if they please, consider the present and two following Chapters as a Treatise entirely distinct from the rest of the volume; this present Chapter serving as a brief statement of the case for _physico-_theology; while the two arguments ensuing sketch out _Ethico-_ or _Moral_ Theology; on which complementary modes of thought see p. 107 _ante_, together with text and notes now about to follow. Finally, by all those who accept the reasoning from Design as already explained, let both it and our other various lines of argument be treated as separate evidences of Natural Theology, each resting on its own grounds, but all consilient at last. _Analysis._--Advance and Retrogression of Discovery and of Civilization. Progress dependent on realizing the relativity between Power and Function. This condition of success is examined at length. Perception of existing Relations, and creation of new ones by human Reason and Will. Illustrations from histories of Invention, Art, Education, and Self-Education. Production of Change within ourselves. Self conquest, Self formation, and Re-formation. Inability of animals arises from domination of motives unalterable by themselves and instinctively apprehended. Training relative to motor instincts of various sorts. Self-training requires freedom from the domination of any single unbalanced or unalterable impulse. It implies the power of using motives as counterpoises, and of introducing new elements into the sphere of our ideals. Influence of human presence upon the education of animals; influence of the Divine Idea upon Man. Transition from the sphere of Intellect to that of Will in relation to the World. The Spring of Production a movement of Will; the Idea of Production an insight into the Mind of Nature; discovered not logically, but as shewn in operation in Nature. Law and Idea, Intelligence and Matter. Manifold Forces imply a central Unity. Putting aside the analogical inference from apparent Purpose, the question of operative Law (Force, Form, Mind,) is examined in its many activities, their correlations and their underlying Oneness. Natural Law in action: hypothesis of limited intelligence. Case of Unreason, Creation by Chance. Breadth of Law seen in its general fitnesses, and grander unities. Exceptional effects in "Functioning." Character of Mind in Nature. Law, type, idea. Adaptation even if purposed is not Arbitrary. A Supreme Will must be a sovereign Reason. Perfection of Mind in Nature estimated from convergent fitnesses and correlations, as exemplified by Sight and Hearing. Also by their effects in producing Beauty, Happiness, and a sense of sympathy. Mind in Nature not bare intelligence, but possessing emotional attributes, not harsh nor unlovely, but tender and loveable. _Additional Note._ On the Doctrine of Chances applied to the structural Development of of the Eye, by Professor Pritchard. CHAPTER V. PRODUCTION AND ITS LAW. "Life," said Dr. Johnson, "has not many things better than this:"--"we were," Boswell explains, "driving rapidly along in a post-chaise." But what if the two men, congratulating themselves upon their speed, could have read (with some approach to second-sight) Dr. Darwin's lines-- "Soon shall thy arm, unconquer'd steam! afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car. Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying chariot through the fields of air." The slow barge now traverses the wide Atlantic as fast as even fast-living America can desire. The rapid car whirls across England in a few brief hours. With what half-envious astonishment, might Dr. Johnson have computed the arrowy flight of these iron creations over land or water;--with what sententious wisdom might he not have dilated on the uncontrolled dissemination, Sir, of books, knowledge, and civility;--to say nothing of vile whiggism or possible rebellion! No wide-waving wings have as yet wafted us over rivers and mountains. But some inventors still cherish a hope of applying steam steerage, and perhaps steam propulsion, to very large balloons. It is curious to think of the many centuries, during which men saw elastic vapour lifting their kettle lids, without catching the idea of steam power, or reflecting on the movement it produced. Curious, too, to remember how slowly the idea grew, after the Marquis of Worcester had explained the relation between the power and its movement-producing function. His "fire-water-work" (as he called it), "drove up water by fire," at a rate of 1250 lbs. through one foot, to the consumption of 1 lb. of coal. This is about 200 times the waste of a good modern engine. But the _principle_ was there. Water flowed without intermission, at a height of forty feet, driven only by the elastic force of steam. The introduction of atmospheric pressure half obscured the original conception; steam-power seemed in danger of losing its proper functions. Passing by Papin and Savery,[182] the descent of Newcomen's piston depended on the production of a vacuum beneath it; at much cost of heat and labour, much waste of fuel and force. Strange, that for so many years nobody thought of introducing steam-power above the piston, as well as below it. The retrograde path which science sometimes treads, is also clearly shewn in the long-delayed invention of the paddlewheel steam-boat. The first patent was taken out by Jonathan Hulls in 1736, and his rare pamphlet may be seen at the British Museum, or in Mr. Partington's reprint.[183] Strange, that so good a thing should have continued so long neglected;--up to the days of the first Napoleon, and, (fortunately perhaps for civilization,) under the Conqueror's imperial rule. The same fate, however, befel Trevithick's "walking engine" made in 1802. He applied high-pressure steam-power to a railway locomotive which really travelled (1805) at Merthyr Tydvil. Every one knows how slowly this invention has grown up into the useful goods-train or the luxurious roll of the express. The relation between a power so well tested, and propulsion, was thus long in being fitted with perfect mechanism, and presented to the eyes of mankind as a familiar every day phenomenon. But the idea of propelling carriages by other means than animal sinews, had been working the reverse way; and a desirable end suggested a search for means. Men tried to fit other powers to the function; the problem gave rise to wind-driven chariots, and other curious contrivances for travelling by land, which are graphically described by Lovell Edgeworth and several of his contemporaries. Then, too, came the desire to sail against the wind, and independently of water currents. A vignette in the first Edition of _Bewick's Birds_ (vol. 1, p. 257), published in 1797, shews us a ferry-boat crossing a river by means of a windmill which turns paddle wheels.[184] The engraver has marked by a ripple at the vessel's bows the strength and swiftness with which she stems the stream. The history of these machines carries with it a very useful moral. It furnishes an apt similitude to the delays and retrogressions which are found in the onward march of mankind, in the gains and triumphs of civilization. These sometimes occur to nations through error, violence, and wrong. Compulsory celibacy, forced upon the most cultured men, was, according to Mr. Darwin, one cause why Spain, notwithstanding her great generals, navigators, and inventors,[185] has been distanced by freer nations. Then, too, as he adds, "the holy Inquisition selected with extreme care the freest and boldest men in order to burn or imprison them.--In Spain alone, some of the best men ... were eliminated during three centuries at the rate of a thousand a year.[186] The streams of both invention and human improvement resemble, in this respect, the current of a mighty river. We always encounter--and always ought to expect--whirlpools, back-waters, and other sinuosities, as we descend the flowing tide. Very frequently, civilization is retarded by another kind of difficulty, also besetting the inventive arts. Like them, Progress depends upon its capacity for happily realizing the relativity[al] between Power and Function. The philanthropist sometimes,--the craftsman often,--has only to think of the function required, and to grasp a relation pre-existing in the laws of the natural world,--fit it to its own purposes, and usefully employ the adaptation. This was the case when elastic vapours of many kinds were examined relatively to their power of producing movement. Each deeper investigation brings a clearer insight into a more deeply-hidden law. The apprehension of "Heat as a mode of Motion,"[am] is an instance in point. Sometimes--in human affairs oftenest--the mind originates a new relation between Power and Function, and launches it, like an unimagined locomotive, whirling and dashing onwards throughout the world of men. The will of a powerful king or conqueror, statesman or missionary, evokes a new power; gives it life and motive energy, and sends it out to perform its intended function amongst millions of mankind, and for many generations. Hence, Kant said there were two things which filled him with awe: one, the starry heavens, that mightiest example of mighty powers orderly performing their appropriate functions; the other, Man's Will, a power less mighty in one sense, but belonging to a sphere where mass and measurement are not, and performing functions signalized too frequently by wrongful determination. Functions which, whether rightly or wrongly performed, involve a mightier _Something_ than all the inorganic worlds ever displayed, a _Something_ we define by that deepest of ideas and most awful of truths,--Responsibility. The whole subject admits of extensive illustration. The relativities of Power and Function are infinitely varied in Nature, Art, and Thought; in the unity of the whole world, and in the disunited world of Humanity. But, however varied in their sphere of operation, all relations between Power and Function coincide in one characteristic. They appeal to mind alone, and by mind alone can be apprehended so as to become operative. Those that belong to the _human_ sphere of activity are in part the _perceptions_ of Mind; in part they are evidenced to our consciousness as its own _creations_. If we look at the inorganic world, Man apprehends such a relativity as that between steam-power and propulsion, and applies it. In the realm of pure mathematics, there are powers of another sort, which (when applied) require allowances to be made in "_functioning_" them. Provided metal, timber, friction, and cross-circumstances have their proper margin given, those abstract entities,[187] absolute in truth, become realized in practice. When we come to organization, particularly higher organisms, the functions of the biological kingdom are more complex. Yet the trainer of animals knows how to combine and modify old powers so as to produce new ones. The pointer, the greyhound, the racehorse, and the hunter are all examples. Then, too, men manipulate men. See how the face of all Europe is covered with training establishments of every description.[an] Youths are fitted for army, navy, bar, parliament, politics. The powers of attention, memory, habit, are all pressed into service, just as the inventor of locomotives calculates the strength and tenacity of iron, brass, copper, and other materials, fits each pipe, crank, and wheel, to its intended function, and ends by speeding his fellows past the doors of their fellow-men. Now, the manipulation of these materials is a calculable process, and succeeds at last. But there is one disappointment often awaiting the manipulator of mankind. His failure arises from the fact that the moral purpose, which he must take for granted, is very commonly wanting among those he undertakes to educate. Another inventor of the highest sort, an artist, conceives a majestic thought. It becomes to him the work of his life, the function he ardently desires to realize. To the true Art-man, his conception is a noble ideal, and some instinct, or proclivity of his own nature, teaches him how to adapt it to the ears and eyes, the intellect and feelings of his race. There are sounds which die in their newborn sensations of delight, yet haunt the memory while consciousness remains. There are colours appealing to one single organ of perception, and, through it, penetrating the soul with images that rise again and again in nightly and daily dreams. And there are words, the forms and creations of our distinctive human mind, through which it exercises its sublimest powers, and which are (in themselves) among the most sublime. _They_ have their proper functions. Age after age, from country to country, from nation to nation,[188] they have moved the souls of readers to emotion, reasoning, will, activity. Noble words, expressing ideas unknown to all intelligences below man, and called into existence by him, prolong their own lives by extending his intellectual and affective life. They burn like incense within the temple of his spirit, but, unlike incense, survive undyingly in the immortal flame which kindles them. There is a still loftier and more solemn function we all exercise--or ought to exercise--in or upon the sphere of our own souls. To us is committed the task, our human task,--morally imperative on no sentient beings inferior to ourselves,--of transforming and reforming, that is (to all intents and purposes) _truly forming_ our own inward nature. We have not, at present, to consider how near heaven may and does draw to earth, in this highest of works known to us who dwell beneath the sky. But the absolutely human part of it belongs to this place. Every one has learned how hard it is to break through even one bad habit. The evil has in most cases enchained body as well as mind. A drunkard's hand is naturally reached out to lift the cups it has been used to lift. His thirst, too, recurs at the accustomed hour;--and the readers of "Elia" know something of what happens when it is left unslaked. A tingling and straining of the palate is associated with the sight of the eye; the drunkard's throat burns when he sees the draught before him; his frustrated desire is followed by the most frightful sufferings throughout his disorganized nervous system. The same is true of other like habituations; as may be read in De Quincey's Opium Eater, and in the last book of Charles Dickens, left behind him an unfinished fragment. It is true, also, of countless smaller customs which prevent many a man from achieving what Hooker calls "great masteries." Every muscle, fibre, and organ of our frame, performs easily the functions it has been used to perform, but undergoes a strain if put out of its usual course. The mind (as well as the body), has its laws of habit and association. We perceive this fact most readily in the less perfect intelligence of the animal kingdom, of untutored man, and of people who are more inured to action than to reflection. The more rudimentary the mind, the more real is its state of subservience to association and habit, which may then be properly termed its governing laws. But it would be improper to apply this word "governing" to the same laws in connection with higher natures. In a man whose reason and will have attained their manly majority, such laws have ceased to be governors;--their province is simply administrative. Deposed from their rule over his existence, they become his ministers, servants, instruments. There is, thus, a compensatory constitution of human nature, whereby the light within us, which lighteth every man, may be said to make us free.[189] It exempts us, that is, from the sway of customary laws which guide and reduce to subjection the merely animal intelligence. A habit broken is a customary law broken. And any one who breaks through a customary law already inwoven with the fibres of his own life, is a man _par excellence_. And the deeper that inweaving,--the greater the laceration of living fibres,--if he rends them in obedience to duty, and because to do otherwise would be to do wrong, the more truly and emphatically he is a _Man_. Again, if we proceed to ask by what means he breaks the bonds of custom, the Manhood of his act appears still more distinctly. His purpose may be, and often is, accomplished by setting a higher law of his being over against a lower;--putting a more really human power in movement to tame and quell some animal propensity. But then, what is that secret strength which apprehends and evokes the higher law? What is the central spring that moves the strictly human power, and converts it from a sleeping capacity for good, into an acting and living energy? Clearly, it is the Man's truest humanity;--the endowment which makes him Man. There are lives of men plainly told, and undoubted, where _re_-formation,--that is _self_-formation,--appears like a flash of electric fire. The Will in such men has energized, just as intellect flashes out in its noblest condition of genius; and can best be described by the poet or the seer who knows what it is to create, and new create. These lives more than realize Cæsar's boast;--the truly human soul came to itself,--saw itself,--and overcame. The conqueror did a deed which, (truly done,) was done for ever, and yielded him the presage of perpetual peace. Histories of self-conquest do, however, remarkably differ in respect of the _time_ employed upon the work. Some victories are, as we have said, rapid and brilliant as the march of Alexander,--others slow and embarrassed, like the weary path of a pilgrim through deserts of rolling sand. But no pilgrim who is in earnest need despair. Putting aside all consideration of supernatural aid, he may take courage from the essential greatness of his own human being, when contrasted with the being of all creatures below mankind. The _comparison_ sets out from this question:--What can merely animal nature do to raise itself? Man, we know, can train certain brutes--he can entrap all;--but no brute can in any wise deliver himself from the snare of a single appetite. The weakness, as well as the strength, of animal intelligence lies in the vividness of its instincts. Animals appear conscious of the working of powers within themselves; and they apprehend those functions, with the performances of which their powers are correlated. Hence, in part at least, the pleasure of a bird in nest-building; a bee in storing her comb, or a predacious creature in its successful pursuit of prey. But the relation between animal power and function appears so nearly fixed, as to be hedged round by narrow limits; and only in a _very_ small degree susceptible of modification. So far as we can discover, the brute is deficient in the means of self-education, for _three_ distinct reasons. _One_, because he cannot escape fulfilling the normal functions of his unreasoning impulse. In the _second_ place, because he is unable to overcome the urgency of one innate power, by opposing to it the claims and vigour of another. _Thirdly_, he can never introduce anything new into the relativity between power and function. He can command no spring of high aim or creative thought, which might give new purpose to his better powers, or open out some further sphere of activity before unknown.--Were this possible, he might lift the functions of his common life above their old destinies, and above themselves.--And _this_ would be a work of self-education. To pursue our comparison,--we must remember that the ability for self-education and the capacity for being educated, are correlatives; and we may measure the one by the other. The animal world has never shewn strength enough to raise itself very high;--it has never ceased to be distinctly animal. But, has it ever possessed latent powers for which opportunity was always wanting? Mankind, for their own purposes, have (we know) continually been testing[ao] the endowments of inferior creatures. How high, then, can man by his endeavours raise the animal race?--He can generally train them to a greater quickness in the exercise and nicety of their own instinctive powers, and a more enduring performance of their instinctively presented functions. By reward and punishment, he can inure them to some degree of self-restraint; and he takes advantage of a thousand pretty impulses and fondnesses of animal nature, to call into being attachment,--nay, often passionate devotion,--towards himself. In this sense, Man has been styled the God of his domestic brute--his horse, his dog, his elephant. It would be a curious subject of reflection, to inquire what effect might possibly be produced upon the _human_ mind by the visible presence, and incessant influence, of beings, as much higher than men, as men are higher than brutes? The moment we start this idea in our minds, it is difficult to evade an impression that Man must be a desolate creature, if he can never in some way see the Invisible.[ap] To leave this curious point. Nothing appears more really conclusive against all supposed capacity for _great_ development, than the history of what are called "learned animals";--of the mechanical means necessarily employed for teaching them, and the mechanical results obtained. There is indeed no better word to describe the true state of the case; than the term "mechanical," as opposed to everything that is ideal, or truly creative.[aq] If a brute could idealize the laws of outward nature,--or the laws connecting his own powers with their proper functions, he might see them as a Man does, and give them a fresh existence within his own intelligence. He would then be able to invent an alphabet, conceive a picture, and view the properties of outward objects as universals inwardly apprehended. In this way, he would acquire exemption from the reign of mechanism, and live a really creative life. Possible conceptions--ideal functions--would require new powers to realize them;--and these powers would be searched for and found. Or, _vice versâ_, an idealized power,--a power seen, (not as it is, but as it may be)--would lead to the discovery of fresh functions,--new fields of enterprise,--new realms of imagination. It is manifest at a glance, how far in fact these conquests are from the world of creatures, by us, therefore, called unreasoning. Art, letters, and abstract thought, are no visitants of the animal sphere. Words cannot come where thoughts are not; and therefore language, in the _human_ meaning of language, is unknown to brutes.[190] And no effort made by Man has ever been successful in sharing with his humble companions any one--(much less all) of these attainments. His artistic sense of Beauty, and power of giving it varied expression, find no Echo beneath himself; he can in no wise teach by historical record, poetry, abstract calculation, or abstract thought. Neither can he impart the true secret of social sympathy,--and forbid the stricken deer to weep and die alone. Intelligence without imagination, cannot conceive a sorrow so lonely or unseen. Therefore, it knows little of deep sorrow,--for even the mortally-wounded bird will strive to hide its wound.[191] Now, in each and all of these respects, every human being devoted to self-education starts from the plain fact, that Man is _educable_:-- "Parents first season us,--then schoolmasters." The master of many a middle-school has frequent occasion to say with Horace; ----"At ingenium ingens Inculto latet hoc sub corpore."-- And the schoolmaster, also, knows that a little spark will often light into fire some vast store of emotional as well as intellectual elements lying asleep within.[192] We therefore speak (if we speak correctly), of educating an animal in a totally different sense from educating a boy. For, facts are as we have stated them, whatever theories may be. There is _one_ more point of contrast to stimulate and encourage the self-educating portion of Mankind; and this point is the most characteristic endowment essential to Humanity. A man is not creative by virtue of his ideals alone, however bright and beautiful those visions of his intellect may be. He calls into existence that, which as yet is not, by virtue of his Will. We know this, although inexplicable, to be true;--partly from the evidence of our own Consciousness,--which asserts that it is so, and partly from the evidence of Morality,--which says that it must necessarily be so. Were it otherwise, no amount of Criminality could make a Criminal responsible. And this truth of responsibility is one which may occasion serious reflection to us all; to some of us sad remembrances. Man, considered as causal or creative mind, cannot but act upon the world without, as well as the world within himself. And perhaps the nearest idea we are able to form of the process of _production_, is the _inter_-action of power and function, evoked by a Will, (that is a Cause); and continuing operative by aid of ordinary laws and relativities of nature.[ar] One man resolves to construct a steam engine, and on steam-power he concentrates his thought. He conceives the relation between watery vapour and propulsion;--and by using arbitrary signs, formulates and measures it. Then, he considers the laws and properties of metals, fits each contrivance into place and produces his machine. _Another_ determines to commit a murder. He wavers--debates--wills the deed, and says,-- "I am settled, and bend up Each corporal agent to this terrible feat." Every reader of Macbeth sees displayed before his eyes the airy dagger; the human muscle strained to clutch the shadow first,--afterwards, the reality;--the time, place, circumstances, all combined, followed up--worked out, till the murderous man has chained all conditions of success to his behest;--fulfilled his slowly-matured purpose,--and become, as in Will, so in act, a murderer. A _third_ human being endeavours to invent a method for teaching the deaf and dumb;--spends a life in labouring among his silent tomb-like pupils, and succeeds to his joy and their inestimable benefit at last. He awakens powers lost in the shadow of death, and incites them to the performance of those true and appropriate functions, from which they had been incapacitated by a dwarfed and thwarted development. Before he aroused them, all such powers were only possibilities, visible to his hopeful eye. Now, they are utilized and happy activities; and, like impulses down a long electric chain, perpetuate themselves for generations after the benevolent inventor is taken from the race he had loved and educated. There are _two_ features in which all these productive men resemble each other. _One_, the creative influence of a purely human will, which not only sees what is not as though it is,--but also determines that it shall be. The _other_, a way of looking at, or rather, through Nature, as something more than an assemblage of facts or phenomena;--of penetrating to the _mind_ of Nature,--her ideal laws legible by the intellectual eye of Man;--and finally, of putting each required law into motion,--that is to say, converting an idea into a force, by the movement of the producer's Will. And the same is true of every useful producer, from the man who grows corn and wine, to the politician by whose foresight is arranged a treaty which gives Europe the blessing of half a century's peace. There is, probably, no example of production more definite than the work of a real statesman. A gifted human mind determines to pursue the thing that is just and right and good; sees where the means to be utilized may be found and enforced; touches the right spring of activity and power, and leads his fellow-men into a path of precedent or constitution for which ages may consecrate his memory.--But, let us suppose that he or any other true producer falls short of realizing his idea. Then, the act of Will would be in its _essence_ as noble a reality as the deed itself. Yet the work intended,--the _production_ must needs be lost. Creative will, as an efficient cause, would have moved within the moral sphere; but beyond, and into the outside world of men and things, its activity must have failed to penetrate. When the case comes before us in this manner and is fairly weighed, we see that the man who wills a good choice, reflects to his fellows the image we are accustomed to call Divine. And that the man who produces a good act reflects to his fellows the further likeness and idea of a Creator. The will of man reflects a supreme will, when it refuses the evil and chooses the good;--the creative energy of man reflects a supreme energy, when it produces actual good; working and remaining effectual in the world. These human reflections may be feeble shadows, and far away from the Supreme;--as distant as earth and stars asunder, but they are typical images nevertheless. Man, in whom the Theist finds the impress of God, is by his power of Causality, as far raised beyond the laws of material existence, as animal life and movement are superior to the clods of soil on which the living creature walks, with a consciousness of being exalted above what he treads upon. If these far away reflections, so striking to a Theist, are, by an unbeliever, pronounced insufficient proofs of Theism,--they remain still of very great value to the argument--Who shall, in the teeth of them, assert a reign of law in opposition to a reign of Causation, when we perceive that Causality is the grand endowment underlying the highest intelligence in this world, and distinguishing man from every inferior creature? A large class of objections dies in the fact that there is _known_ to us a power which can truly _originate_ actions;--a clear spring of volitional creativeness. And, as we have already seen, it is this human power which endows us with the faculty of self-education, and, at the same time, lays upon us the burden of responsibility. It exempts Man from what would otherwise be an iron chain of antecedents and consequents, linked together by mere mechanical laws. Man, we are sure, may interpolate in this chain; he may commence a new series within and over-riding it. The non-Theist would (if consistent), describe such an act of will as a miracle. Nevertheless, it is true to every-day life, and each guilty person, justly condemned, is a living example of this truth. Any reader who has been deterred from admitting the arguments for Theism by the strength of objections apparently unanswerable, may feel, if he will thoughtfully reperuse this chapter, that many very formidable difficulties have melted away. He may also be inclined to admit that, if _facts_ are to be considered the best grounds for reasoning with probability from the known to the unknown, the facts of nature, (including human nature,) make not against, but for, the conclusions of Natural Theology. And they do so all the more stringently, because they coincide with the higher and more spiritual tendencies of Man's being,--with the beliefs and aspirations of the most nobly endowed among his race. Many readers will go further than this. They will perceive in the constitution of our distinctive nature, and more particularly in the movement of Volition, a really probable though far away similitude with the producing Cause of all things. At all events they will say that no other similitude or illustration has ever been conceived with so much probability. To such minds the argument would appear sufficiently convincing if shaped as a very wide application of the analogous reasoning stated in our Chapter on Design. The limitations there laid down should in this case be carefully observed; above all as regards the _pivot_ on which such an argument must turn. A larger class of readers may prefer to leave the field of this inviting analogy untouched; and remain content with having noted its resources in passing. They will thus prefer to pursue the more direct line of thought already adopted, especially since it has the merit of avoiding even the most shadowy apparent assumption of the principle invidiously termed Anthropomorphism. We therefore continue to place Man's causative nature side by side with external Force, and to set the powers he exercises as an inventor, artist, and producer, over against those natural powers we see elicited and brought to light by his activities. This is the aspect of the world to which the Relativity between Power and Function most obviously conducts us. Surveyed from this aspect it becomes plain that Nature is not entirely a soulless mechanism;--but that the Mind of Man finds something which corresponds to his human Thought, and which answers the touch of his idealizing impulse by implicitly obeying it. He is able, in this manner, to distinguish Nature's Mind from Nature's raw material. Most of us are so accustomed to look at the world _ab extrâ_, and place ourselves in antithetical opposition to it, that we experience a kind of embarrassment in changing our point of view, and considering how much Nature and human nature correspond and harmonize together. There is something strange to many persons, in the thought that _law_ is an _idea_ put into operation;[as] that, when we speak of the dynamic agencies and living forces of nature, the dynamism is derived from _intelligence_; the life springs from mind. This is one of the puzzles and perplexities which hang a veil between God, who is pure Reason, and this outside world. No doubt there is much that appears dark and enigmatic in every attempted explanation of the subject. Yet it is clear that, whatever our conception of matter and mind may be, one of these two must be resolvably consequent upon the other; and the efforts of physicists have been strained for many years to diminish the distance between them. With these efforts, however, we have nothing to do beyond very distinctly adducing them[at] in order to shew where this particular difficulty really lies, and that it is by no means a special question of Natural Theology. The point for us, is rather to see how much we can discern respecting the action of Mind _in_ and _upon_ Nature. To see, that is, how many facts the realities of Production teach us. And throughout the whole realm of Productiveness (commencing from the steam-engine and ending with human self-formation), there is a certain sameness of procedure and of principle transparently discernible. And this truth, fairly examined, yields more than one kind of argument for Theism. At the first blush of the subject, it is evident that the scientific producer when he _begins_ to move, starts from the Causal power of mind. He moves _through_ ideas or impulses of which he is internally conscious, and which present to him a chosen aim to be realized, a goal to be attained. It is equally evident that, when his aim is to make or effect something external to himself, he _next_ proceeds to discover or accept one or more principles, existing _for Mind alone_,[193] but operative in Nature. Such principles yield to his reason the requisite proportionate relation of _Power_ employed, to _Function_ designed. Upon this intelligent perception of intelligible laws, he acts;--it works well, and succeeds;--and from this experience of working and success, he finds for his productive _intelligence_ a daily and hourly _verification_. It is well to place this subject in various lights before reasoning upon it. We may illustrate the relativities or laws, through which Intelligence acts, by saying that they are to the fabric of the world, what the motory nervous system is to a highly-developed living organism. And, putting aside for a moment the intellectual agency of man, and applying our similitude to illustrate natural production alone, we may say that, just as the _mandatory nerves_ imply some _volitional_ centre, so these _intelligent laws_ presuppose a _mind in Nature_. And we may not only make this clearer, but also evidence it more certainly, by pointing to the fact that amidst Nature's almost infinite manifoldness, we see everywhere harmony, symmetry, order. Forces, like lines of light, traverse the world, illuminating, (so to speak), the moving scenes of its magnificent transparency. And the one electric lamp that sends forth those illuminating rays, typifies the Unity from which emanate all cosmical Forces, and which shines visibly through them all.[au] There is nothing imaginative or metaphysical involved in this statement. It amounts to no more than what many very eminent physicists lay down, as implicitly contained in their sciences. On _this very_ ground, Professor Baden Powell holds the validity of the argument from Design, as was mentioned in a former chapter. He puts the case into a few words thus:--"In the present state of knowledge, law and order, physical causation and uniformity of action, are the elevated manifestations of Divinity, creation and providence."[194] A few passages further on, he repudiates with scorn the vulgar supposition that physical science can be confined to the circle of outward experience alone;[195] it includes within itself the principle of directing intelligence. According to Comte himself, "un fait s'explique par un fait d'un ordre supérieur, dont la perfection est sa raison, dont l'action qu'elle renferme est sa cause."[196] It does indeed seem as impossible to deny the existence and operation of _Mind_ in Nature, as it is to deny the existence and consciousness of our own minds. No tenable reason can ever be assigned why, when we look forth into the world surrounding us, we should be able to ascertain the fact of corporeal existence by means of our bodily senses, and be, at the same time, unable to ascertain the fact of existing intelligence by means of our mental intuitions. Each kind of existence has its appropriate evidence, and _both_ sorts of evidence claim our belief by appealing to the veracity of our human consciousness. If, therefore, it were possible to say with certitude "There is no God," the certainty would not, because it _could_ not, eliminate Mind from the Universe. The law of production exists in, and for the Mind,--and so far as we can know, Mind in some shape or other works through the intelligible law.[av] Suppose we frame a crucial case for investigation. Without speculating upon the first origin of things natural--without taking into the inquiry any preconception of a Divine personality--let us inquire what the world of Nature as it now exists can teach any man respecting the _kind_, _degree_, or _condition_ of Mind, which regulates and moulds it? We are obliged to say "moulds it";--for Nature is not presented to us as an inert mass. We see movement, change, and activity everywhere. And this fact makes a vast difference to the present question. Let us, then, suppose the inquirer setting out from an attempt to conceive mind as immersed in matter; either being _identical_ with it,[aw] or _pervading_ it, like a subtle fluid, or imponderable force. Let some such conception be supposed his starting point. What sort of a Power must he finally determine this mind to be? Could he possibly commence with a mundane intelligence inferior to the mind of Man?--The bee can build a cell, the beaver a dam--but the bee cannot construct a dam, nor the beaver a cell. The same is true universally. Animal intelligence acts in single right lines. We should, therefore, be obliged to conceive as _many minds_ immanent in nature, or as many modifications of mind, as there are varieties of production. And if this were true, what would become of the order and harmony of the Universe? We call it by that name, because we know that, (notwithstanding its marvellous diversity and manifoldness,) it forms a grand united whole. It would become necessary, _next_, to admit a governing intelligence, able to control the countless species of intelligent power employed in producing all sorts of effects. And it really seems easier, at once to conceive a supreme Mind, framing its ideas into intelligible laws, and launching the forces of the Universe in moving might along them. There are many obvious reasons why, after all, this would be the easiest,[197] and _therefore_ the preferable, conception. _One_ lies in the immeasurable width and extent of that relativity between power and function, which we have seen to underlie every known production,--and conceivable _possibility_ of ruling or moulding Nature. Now, under _power_ we class forces such as those which hold corpuscles in cohesion, balance the orbs of heaven, or control the growth of a crystal. Such as those, again, which make Life the counterbalance of dissolution and decay; and enable the animal frame to resist decomposing influences; to feed, to grow, to energize, and move freely on earth, in water, or in air. Such as those, finally, which yield us the _pabulum_ of sensation, thought, emotion; and subserve our efforts to attain whatever is highest or noblest in our human world. We know what sorts of intelligence are required to apprehend, and to do no more than apprehend, the rationale of many among these natural movements, forces, and processes. Some of them can be explained only by a very great mathematician, other some by an equally great chemist, biologist, or psychologist. And in some, Man of the 19th century is as much a _tyro_ and disciple,--as ignorant and as tentative--as his forefathers were two thousand years ago. What a complexity of Minds, or what a majestic supremacy of one Mind becomes thus discernible by the eye of Reason! Of Reason we say, meaning thereby the reason of a human being who looks facts in the face, puts them together and draws the inevitable conclusion. Were this drawn, it would amount to something very like a re-affirmation of Theism. At present, however, we will not press these topics further; since our object is to put an opposite conception on its complete trial, so as to see what is eventually implied in it. Suppose, for instance, a merely sensitive intelligence to represent the character of mind administering the Universe. Conceive, if you choose, the world to be like an animal as some old philosophies conceived it. The way in which a _human_ being sees Power and Function is altogether different from the way in which they would be viewed by the supposed mundane intelligence. _We_ do not see them as two entities _separately_ existing, and the relation which is of such vital consequence to all inventors and producers, as _something_ which ensues between them. To us, the causal essence of the Power lies in the _relativity_ itself, and we often actually recognize the Power passing over into its Function, and becoming lost in it. An example in point, lies in the active combination of uncombined atoms and molecules;--the _relativity_ (or, as in such a case it is termed, the _attraction_) is the immediate cause of the production. "Thus" says Dr. Tyndall[198] "we can get power out of oxygen and hydrogen by the act of their union, but once they are combined, and once the motion consequent on their combination has been expended, no further power can be got out of the mutual attraction of oxygen and hydrogen. As dynamic agents they are dead." We can, in this manner, produce from the combustion of coal, light, heat, and propulsive force; but coal and oxygen are _consumed_ in the producing process. Yet in this process, _what and how much_ would have come within the grasp of a merely sensitive intelligence? Simply the object coal,--the brilliant light,--the pleasant heat,--and the actual movement of an incomprehensible machine. Let Mundane Mind be thus conceived and Nature would necessarily be administered by an intelligence which never got below the surface. The result, as we may certainly perceive, must have always lain between either an unchanging sameness, or the instability of chance misdirection. A state of things which compared with our actual world would seem most unsatisfactory; but which never has in fact been realized, for a reason at once apparent to the reader's sagacity. Take another instance of change. The chemical elements of a Galvanic battery disappear in performing their function of causing a current, and the current may in turn disappear in the decomposition of water. But what merely sensitive intelligence could discern the invisible agency,--or measure the conversion of force, where nothing is visible except loss? Besides, in this latter example do we not see how truly correlative these two terms Power and Function are? We may intelligently think and speak of the chemical constituents of the battery, as conjoint _Power_;--and of their accomplishing their _Function_ in the Current. But we may also speak of the _current_ as a Power, accomplishing _its_ Function by evolving from water two elementary gases. In other words, the ideas of Power and Function, definite enough to the eye of reason, are in all other respects, _fluent_. They are neither things, nor phenomenal attributes of things. They _are_ power and function by virtue of a relation existing between them, and this relation is a fact not of the bare impressible sense, but of our purely reasoning intellect. The same consequence appears, (in a shape which to some minds may be easier,) from viewing in another light the very same example of a galvanic battery, applied to decompose water. At each end of the chain there are palpable materials, visible to corporeal sense. But, between them runs the true force;--and this is absolutely impalpable. We theorize upon this force, but, whatever our theories may be, we accept its reality as a fact clear to our human _mind_. And we also clearly see that no lower mind could possibly apprehend it. And here arises a curious question well worth a brief consideration. It is this:--To any kind of mind, the faculties of which are bound up in sense, _what_ would appear to be the realities, and _what_ the unrealities of the Universe? Galvanic wires or chains are perceptible to our bodily senses, but the traversing force is imperceptible. Hence, in our common speech, we are easily led to talk of the polar elements or objects (whatever they are) as realities _par excellence_;--but without in the least meaning to imply that the _nexus_ or relativity between them is any less real; or less a fact. What we do mean, is, that this reality is a fact to another, and a finer, faculty. But what would it be if the finer faculty were wanting?--Reality would in that case become phenomenal;--and phenomena (according to Dr. Whewell and other inductive philosophers), would at the same time cease to be facts. So far, therefore, as we know,--and we still limit this discussion to what we really do know,--were Reason wanting, all the nobler part of the Universe--its highest realities,--as understood by us, could not be held real. They would fade like an insubstantial pageant--or the baseless fabric of a dream. For, be it repeated,--_we_ do not see as a merely sensitive mind must see. Principles and laws, sustaining and administering the universal mechanism, are the visible realities of intellect; and are visible to intellect alone. Thus, no one ever saw the principle of the arch except by an act of intellectual sight, and yet in the strength of it all arches stand firm. So, too, an architect knows that the stability and beauty of his structure depend on much that is hidden from the uninstructed human eye. What meaner eye, then, could ever succeed in piercing the secret architecture of the Universe? To the mundane mind, if less than human, the most real would become unreal,--and the shadow appear to be the substance. No supposition can possibly seem more absurd! Yet, when people speak of a "blind intelligence" in Nature, they must mean something less than Reason by that strange contradictory appellation. The case for Unreason can never be improved by saying that 'The world, as it exists, is a system of accordant forces; tending to fulfil their functions through a kind of self-evolving movement, excited and controlled by correlation and correspondence, action and interaction. The products prevail, where they do prevail, through the completeness of their harmony with their surroundings. By virtue of this acquired excellence which becomes intrinsic, each finally develops itself into a permanent and integrated unit.' Here, obviously, the question of Intelligence recurs. If Mind were a necessary postulate before, how much more stringent the necessity now! From hosts of uncounted relativities we infer an Absolute;--surveying their rhythmical stir and onward strivings what shall we predicate respecting it? The world might have been a discord;--Whence came its first symphonious movement?--its after-waves of sphere-music majestically sweet to understanding ears;--its deeper and still deeper accordances;-- "The Diapason ending full in Man," that is to say, thus ending so far as the solemn march has been played out! What shall be hereafter, we know not now. But most marvellous of all as yet, is that first chord which struck the key-note of the whole harmonious performance.[199] It is evident that the answers to these inquiries, must have the effect of infinitely elevating our own idea of the intelligence discoverable in natural productions;--because they will add to our perception of its wonderful insight, a still more wonderful impression of _fore_sight,--a foresight extending over illimitable periods of time; and causing effects, for the calculation of which no power of intellect actually known to us, would have any adequate sufficiency. The only apparent evasion of this consequence, is to deny arrangement altogether. But, then, how great are the resulting difficulties! In the _first_ place, it would seem at once to restore covertly, if not openly, that very ancient Divine principle, Chance; whose banishment has long been agreed upon by reflective men. In the _next_ place, it is not clear how, looking at the scientific doctrine of Chances,[ax] they would, when calculated, yield any probability whatever of production;--or even (what appears a less thing), of development from a rudimentary or less perfect structure already existing. The consequence is, that one or more principles besides Chance must soon be postulated, and "blind laws" are held insufficient because not unlikely to become guilty of incidental misdirection. This need of auxiliary postulates has determined some very staunch advocates of Evolution to maintain that the circle of evolving laws or forces must certainly be ruled by some Intelligence, either inherent and immanent (mind and movement identical),--or else separate, transcendental, and probably personal, superintending and superior to them all.[ay] Indeed the affirmation of Mind in Nature as a positively perceived Fact appears to be the sure direction of our human understanding, if allowed to observe and judge in a common-sense way. And the reason of the thing is obvious. Whenever we perceive anything by bodily vision and touch, or other material instruments, we unhesitatingly attribute to it a material existence. We derive our impression from a material antecedent, and say _here_ is a corporeal substance,--in a word,--body. So, on the other hand, whenever material instruments are dispensed with, (because inadequate and unsuitable), and when Mind alone is used as our medium of perception, we are quite sure that what we perceive is not Body but Mind. In this manner, we know what to say of arrangement, counterbalance, superior excellence, (which means superior fitness), tendency to a function, (that is fitness in movement), or of a system of relation and correlation transcending the highest flight of human imagination. We say at once, _here_ is Mind. We do not think it necessary to employ a periphrasis, and reason on the properties of intelligence, any more than we should, when receiving information from our senses, commence a syllogism on the properties of Matter. We simply say in the two several cases,--here is body,--here is mind. And, as regards both propositions, we are in all likelihood equally safe in saying so. The real question, therefore, remains just as we before stated it. We then derived our statement from the process of production,--first by analyzing it, and next, by shewing that the analysis was verified in experience. We have since run some risk of repetition, in order to look at the whole subject of Mind in Nature from various points of view. The effect has been to confirm for us, the issue above raised as being the right and true question. We must not ask, "Is there Mind in the natural world?" but "What _kind_ and _degree_ of Intelligence do we, from our observation of facts, attribute to the Mind evidenced in the Universe?" It is in answering this question that the _fitnesses_ of organized structures yield so many important considerations. We are not however obliged to follow the chain of the Design argument, liken these structures to objects of human art, and say, here is Design implying a Designer. We may quite as easily look at them in the light of the great productive Law we have been investigating. Fitness consists in the nicety of the manner in which Function is correlated with Power. Throughout the realm of organisms, vegetable and animal, the most beautiful examples of such correlation meet us at every turn.[az] When therefore we put our query, what character may here be ascribed to the Mundane Intelligence, the reply cannot seem doubtful. Instances of pre-eminent Fitness (such as those adduced further on) need not be understood in any other sense than this, in order to accomplish the purpose for which they are described. Neither need such words as adaptation or design, used for brevity's sake, be taken as references to the analogical argument discussed in our second Chapter. Mr. Darwin himself has frequently employed the expressions "contrivance," "purpose," etc., without intending any such reference,--nay, rather with the full intention of arguing for a different account of the "contrivances" he specifies. From such wonderful examples of Fitness, many minds will choose at once to read the broad lesson of Teleology. Be it observed then that if this is done, the larger the generality under which the principle of Design is conceived, the better for its force in reasoning. As an argument, the idea has suffered from the imagination of readers dwelling upon the specialities recounted in many valuable books to the exclusion of wider and more universal conceptions. There is a vast difference,[ba] between the assertion of a grand Unity, (in subservience to which all other things have their several determinate purposes,) and the being able to say in _each_ smaller instance, here is _the_ design or intended relation between this individual structure or condition, and this sole and definite finality. A good specimen of the difficulty thus occasioned, is an objection of Littré's against the idea of Divinely beneficent adaptation. Why, he asks, should the bite of a mad dog have been allowed to produce hydrophobia? Why, that is, should the dog's saliva have been so _contrived_, as to convey so virulent a blood poison? The true answer, of course, must be that this effect is but _one_ operation of a much more extensive physiological law;--a law producing results, often of the most beneficial character. We must also, (as the same writer allows), draw a strong distinction between every law, and what is technically termed its "functioning."[200] Littré views Nature as a moving panorama of antecedents and consequents;--but he is obliged to confess that the _nexus_ is _not_ invariable. There are, indeed, variations, for which he employs this same "functioning," as a kind of apology. The necessity of such an apology is in itself a remarkable fact; since it shews how little rigorous is the common argument used by many physicists against the probability of Miracles. The necessity of natural sequence is, after all, no adamantine fatality; and therefore Testimony to an event contrary to our experience and expectation, may have a most decisive value.[201] We have already shewn that to see a law in Nature, is to see an actual instance of _wide_ intelligence. Now, so seen, it is known as existing _in rerum naturâ_--active--energizing--productive. But, suppose we for a moment conceive the intelligible law, as existing only in the intelligence itself,--a thought prior to its realization. The law is _then_ what writers on natural history often call a _type_;--or, as it is termed in the older philosophical language, an _idea_. The readers of S. T. Coleridge will not easily forget his chapter reconciling the Platonic and Baconian[bb] methods of Philosophy. It turns, in great part, upon the essential identity of _idea_ with _law_. (_Friend_, Vol. III. Essay ix.) If, therefore, we perceive in anything creative, or any _system_ whatsoever, a harmony of power with function, we call it fitness, or even adaptation when describing the actual matter of our own _observations_. But, if we speak of the same harmony _as an act of mind_, we call it intelligent adaptation. And, this at least, is what careful writers on Natural Theology mean by the word Design. Yet, certain careless objectors have misconceived the plain meaning, so far as to assert that if we would speak of any production as designed, it must first be proved not only intentional but _arbitrary_. This misconception--(the very opposite of our meaning)--seems to turn upon the mixture of two distinct notions,--the design of _reason_ and the determination of _caprice_. If Natural Theologians wished to prove that the Designer of the Universe was always doing wrong,--and was always right _because_ he did wrong,--it would be necessary to argue that design and caprice are one and the same thing. But Natural Theology endeavours to shew the exact contradictory. Its idea is, above all things, the Idea of a Sovereign Reason manifest in universal Law. The rejoinder has been made that at all events a Will is implied in Design;--and that he who wills acts arbitrarily. Of course, there is a certain sense in which this may be true. A Sovereign will _could_ at pleasure refuse the Right and choose the Wrong, but then it would cease to be a Sovereign Reason. That is, it would cease to be Sovereign at all, in any true Theology. And we may, likewise, add that the ordinary instances and illustrations of Design never aim at proving Will _directly_;--their immediate object is to shew Intelligence, foreseeing ends or functions, and purposing their attainment. It is clear that Will must _indirectly_ be implied in such an argument. But, then, it is so implied, partly because all Reason is _per se_ identical with Will, and partly because (as we shall endeavour to shew), Causation necessarily emanates from Will. The reader must, however, assign each conclusion to its proper argument, and keep each argument to its proper conclusion;--a rule which those who dispute for victory, and not for truth, frequently fail to observe. The use we are now making of fitness and adaptation is less to prove the existence of Mind in the Universe, than its grandeur, grasp, and comprehensiveness. For this purpose our clearest evidence arises from the _coincidence_ of several _diverse_ conditions, tending to one sovereign finality of function. And indeed, this argument from coincidence, is generally the most convincing;--the greater the _convergence_ of separate conditions,--the stronger is our assurance that Mind determined the result.[bc] Our sense of sight has always been a favourite subject in Natural Theology. It is familiar, and, so far as a broad outline of the function is concerned, may be easily studied by any common-sense person. It is, also, evidently _one_ Function; yet, even cursory observation shews a great diversity of powers contributing to produce it. How diverse they are, may be perceived by supposing first one and then another element of eyesight to be absent, and considering what the effect of _each_ deficiency must be. Suppose, there were no light. The eye then, however beautiful and perfect in structure, would not be a means serving any purpose of perception. It is clear thus that the eye is an optical instrument. Suppose, again, light and optical arrangement both in existence, but, also, that the eye had no power of _adjusting_ itself to the direction of objects and other circumstances; evidently its function of vision would be very much restricted. In relation to this end, the eye is a mechanical[202] instrument. We might, further, suppose the optical apparatus to work well, its adjustment also to be perfect,--and the picture on the retina no less so. But, with this perfect picture, suppose all ended. The function of eyesight would be as irretrievably gone as in our first case. This shews us that the eye does _not_ really see. It is the servant of an impressible Power,--and this impressible power uses it, and sees through it. Suppose, finally, that the picture on the retina set vibratory nerves in movement--each microscopic stroke producing its effect of vibration. Let something be seen by the impressible Power, but not apprehended as an object of _common_ perception. Let there be no comparison with other sensations; no transcript into sense-language, of what is at once seen, touched, heard, smelled, or tasted. Consider, how barren and unproductive the result! Eyesight is reduced to a play of coloured images. There can be no malleable material for Intelligence to work up. Nothing to be cast into any universal mould;--no possibility of a greedy Mind feeding eagerly through the quick perceiving eye. In the absence of information given, or thought stimulated, we must pronounce such sight unintelligent;--and the Eye an unintelligible phenomenon. But why? The anatomical structure remains perfect. It is the _adaptation_ that has been lost along with the finality, and this loss is fatal. Hence the paramount importance of finality. Any student may pursue this ruling idea of "_adaptation to a functional end_," through a vast range of the Animal kingdom. There are eyes fitted to long distances--almost telescopic;--eyes so contrived as to be absolutely microscopical. Then, as the refraction of water differs from that of air, the optical lenses of fishes become rounded almost like little balls. And, the observer who passes into the tribes of Invertebrata, will acquaint himself with eyes mounted upon footstalks,[203] and eyes multiplied and placed in different situations. Few natural objects are more wonderful than the contrivance of a compound eye. The many hexagonal tubes, which may be reckoned by the thousand, are cemented together on one expanded and swollen nervous disk, reminding us of the thalamus in the great plant order of Compositæ, (Syngenesia),--in the Elecampagne for instance, the Bur Marigold, Thistle, and Centaurea. A compound eye has a range of vision extending over about 180 degrees, (half a circle), and must from its structure be endowed with specializing distinctness. Mind in the Universe, is thus presented to us, as in the New Testament,--wide as the whole arch of heaven, but cognizant of a sparrow or a lily. A creature with diminished vision--such as the Mole--or the Amblyopsis, is a curiously interesting study in itself;--still more so as an example of adaptation. In old times, the Mole was accounted blind. Aristotle[204] observed that a structural eye exists, but that a skin is drawn over it, and this skin deprives the animal of sight. His observation has made work for commentators, from Simplicius downwards. Trendelenburg (on the _De Anima_) confines himself to criticism. Torstrik makes a kind of apology for not excising "_quæ loco_ [Greek: atopôtatôi] _de talpâ dicuntur_." Cardinal Tolet accepts the observation, and thinks the Mole's eyes thus admirably protected from the bad effects of a sudden access of light, when he rushes violently into appearance overground. Naturalists during many centuries, made the whole history of the mole a piece of guesswork, and no creature except the Sloth or the Earwig has ever been more generally misrepresented. Perhaps our familiar old English "Moldwarp" (West of England "Want"), might have remained a puzzle to this day had not a French courtier[205] fled from the Paris Revolution, and devoted his attention to Moles. The fact that the eye of our Western Mole is not completely closed, may be proved by throwing a living specimen into a pond. But, in the South and East of Europe the "blind mole" does really exist,[206] as has been shown by Erhard and the Prince of Musignano. In more than one species, the skin passes over the eyeball without any loss of hair. This diminution of eyesight is a case of what has been called "retrogression." Now the Mole is a highly developed Mammal, and his position in the animal kingdom entitles him to the best of eyes. But, they would not suit his habits. The same is true of the Blind-fish of Kentucky (Amblyopsis Spelæus). For such a creature, not the distinct vision of objects,--but a sensation of light,--was the _desirable_ possession,--and the creature has it.[207] It does not in the least matter, as a question of Fitness, whether this retrograde condition of the eye was brought about by natural laws slowly acting upon the animal frame, or produced in some more rapid way. The fitness is the same; and, as we are at present engaged, not on proving the existence of Mind, but in illustrating the greatness of a confessedly existing mind, these instances of far reaching adaptation are very strongly in point. Of the cavernous life and habits of the Amblyopsis there is not much to be said; though the idea of a happy existence amidst depths of sepulchral gloom, naturally excites our imagination. But "the little gentleman in black" whose health used to be enthusiastically drunk a century and a half ago, is a perfect study[208] in himself. We are interested by his fairy-like gift of hearing (noted by Shakespeare); his gluttony; his fleetness of foot; his combativeness; and his castle-building! As a civil and military engineer, he far surpasses the beaver, though dwelling in dark places, and with only a dubious pair of eyes in his scheming quick-conceiving head. Probably, the sense _we_ should all least wish to lose is our eyesight. Its perpetual delight, and its capacity for improvement by training are powerful motives for treasuring its possession. The savage and the microscopist, the artist and the astronomer, all train their faculty of vision; and how differently do these four classes of eyes see!--The difference is, we know, in exact proportion to the intelligence which employs and educates them. And, conversely, how the nobly-governed eye informs and educates the Mind! What a world of hope, then, as well as beauty, seems to die when we conceive the blind man in his dim solitude! Yet the contentment of its sightless inmates, is one of the most salient comforts of every blind asylum. Most likely, their cheerfulness depends on the great use of finger-dexterity, and the exquisite susceptibility of the ear. And these delicate endowments, which make our several senses inlets of happiness, are amongst the most fascinating illustrations of the Universal Mind with which we have to do. The structure of the ear is far less commonly dwelt upon by most writers, than the structure of the eye. Indeed, its organization seems to less certainty explained, the problem being, of course, to trace the transmission of sound to the auditory nerve. But, as in ancient Egypt, so in modern England, the treatment of disease in special organs has been divided amongst special therapeutists; and the ear does not fail to benefit by being better understood. There is, even now, room for hypothesis in some parts of the process of sonorous transmission,--and beyond that process, science does not pretend to go. Modern views, however, as Dr. Tyndall truly says, "present the phenomena in a connected and intelligible form, and should they be doomed to displacement by a more correct or comprehensive theory, it will assuredly be found that the wonder is not diminished by the substitution of the truth." No one has put the wonder into a more intelligible shape than this well known writer, at the close of his book upon Sound.[209] Employing instances of Design for the purpose, to us most relevant, and gleaning a few among hosts of shining illustrations, there is nothing more alluring than the spectacle of the organic world, considered as a source, not of life only, nor of information only, but of emotional pleasure and never failing enjoyment. No kind of existence can be more depressing to our highly-strung human nervous-system, than the shut up occupations which overgrown cities necessitate. Yet, with what unrepressed vigour of delight does the artizan, the physician, the schoolmaster, or the curate of a town parish, look upon the open world beyond! And, never has there existed any human being more truly impressible by Nature's loveliness, or more skilled in conveying the impression to the minds of others, than a genuine British Naturalist. For the holiday-maker to walk with such a lover of Nature through field and forest, over moor and mountain, by rivulet, lake or sea, is to gain a new sense of wonder and admiration;--new perceptions of excellence, symmetry, and unity; while freshened emotions of religious awe and trust keep springing upwards from them all. It is with outward nature, as it is with individual natures; the regard of a loving eye is the true revealer of hidden secrets. For in reality we see, not only with our bodily sense and our contemplative reason, but also with the strength and insight of affection. And thus many a weary Man perpetually finds the aspect of the visible universe indescribably soothing amidst his own confusions and disappointments. He may feel, at times, that his human heart can penetrate beyond what eye and head have taught him; and, while thoughtfully observing the footprints of creative mind, he can feel within his bosom a sense of superhuman tenderness, like the warm breath of his living Creator. The very fact that highly-endowed and deeply thoughtful men[210] have so felt and spoken, ought not to be without its influence. There is much conveyed--very much indeed--by the truth that the world is beautiful. If, when we examine natural production, intelligent operation is seen to imply an operative intelligence, is it not also true that realized beauty implies an ideal beauty, intelligently preconceived in a Mind itself beautiful? Had there been nothing in earth or sky to soothe, elevate, and make happy, with _what different feelings_, should we have attempted to picture productive Mind at work through an unlovely Universe! ADDITIONAL NOTE. ON THE DOCTRINE OF CHANCES APPLIED TO THE STRUCTURAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE EYE. The present Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford wrote, in 1867, as follows:-- "The chances of any accidental variation in such an instrument being an _improvement_ are small indeed. Suppose, for instance, one of the surfaces of the crystalline lens of the eye of a creature, possessing a crystalline and cornea, to be accidentally altered, then I say, that unless the form of the other surface is simultaneously altered, _in one only way_ out of millions of possible ways, the eye would not be optically _improved_. An alteration also in the two surfaces of the crystalline lens, whether accidental or otherwise, would involve a definite alteration in the form of the cornea, or in the distance of its surface from the centre of the crystalline lens, in order that the eye may be optically better. All these alterations must be simultaneous and definite in amount, and these definite amounts must coexist in obedience to an extremely complicated law. To my apprehension then, that so complex an instrument as an eye should undergo a succession of millions of _improvements_, by means of a succession of millions of _accidental_ alterations, is not less improbable, than if all the letters in the 'Origin of Species' were placed in a box, and on being shaken and poured out millions on millions of times, they should at last come out together in the order in which they occur in that fascinating and, in general, highly philosophical work. "But my objections do not stop here. The improvement of an organ must be an improvement relative to the new circumstances by which the organ is surrounded. Suppose, then, that an eye is altered for the better in relation to one set of circumstances under which it is placed. By-and-bye there arise a second set of circumstances, and the eye is again, by Natural Selection, altered and improved relatively to the second set of circumstances. What is there to make the second set of circumstances such that the second improvement (relative to them) shall be an improvement or progress _in the direction_ of the ultimate goal of the human eye? Why should not the second improvement be a retrogression _away from_ the ultimate organ now possessed by man, and necessary to his well-being? But all this suiting of the succession of circumstances is to go on, not once or twice, but millions on millions of times. If this be so, then not only must there be a BIAS in the order of the succession of the circumstances, or, at all events, in the vast outnumbering of the unfavourable circumstances by the favourable, but so strong a bias, as to remove the whole process from the accidental to the _intentional_. The _bias_ implies the existence of a Law, a Mind, a Will. The process becomes one not of Natural Selection, but of _Selection by an Intelligent Will_." _Analogies in the Progress of Nature and Grace_, (being the Hulsean Lectures for 1867,) Appendix A, p. 125 seq. The whole article should be carefully studied by the reader. FOOTNOTES: [180] Nov. Org. II. 4, last paragraph. "For a true and perfect rule of operation then the direction will be _that it be certain, free, and disposing or leading to action_. And this is the same thing with the discovery of the true Form. For the Form of a nature is such, that given the Form the nature infallibly follows. Therefore it is always present when the nature is present, and universally implies it, and is constantly inherent in it. Again, the Form is such, that if it be taken away the nature infallibly vanishes. Therefore it is always absent when the nature is absent, and implies its absence, and inheres in nothing else." [181] Sentence following immediately in N. O. II. 4. "Lastly, the true Form is such that it deduces the given nature from some source of being which is inherent in more natures, and which is better known in the natural order of things than the Form itself. For a true and perfect axiom of knowledge then the direction and precept will be, _that another nature be discovered which is convertible with the given nature, and yet is a limitation of a more general nature, as of a true and real genus_. Now these two directions, the one active the other contemplative, are one and the same thing; and what in operation is most useful, that in knowledge is most true." _Ellis and Spedding_, Vol. IV. pp. 121, 2. [182] Savery was celebrated by Dr. Darwin as the man, who,-- "Bade with cold streams the quick expansion stop And sank the immense of vapour to a drop." Savery's patent (the first granted for a steam engine), is dated 1698. Papin suggested in 1695 a partial vacuum under a piston for raising water, so as to make the pressure of the air the moving power. Most people are aware of the effect upon invention produced by the great mining interest,--the necessity of pumping out underground _adits_, water logged, and therefore inaccessible. [183] At the end of his Lectures on the Steam Engine. Hulls' was the first attempt to convert the reciprocating movement of the piston-rod into rotation; and it does not rival the crank in simplicity. But there is a contrivance for equalizing the first irregular motion by weights, which possesses real beauty, and has the further advantage of readily increasing or diminishing the velocity of the wheels. The wheels themselves are fixed at some little distance astern of his boat which he intends to be used for towing ships. They are thus (as Professor Rigaud observes) nearer "to what may be considered as the centre of the compound body, which they were the means of propelling." Such was the earliest patent; but proposals for the same object had been made still earlier. Papin submitted one to the Royal Society in 1708, comprehending a "boat to be rowed with oars moved with heat," and engines capable of throwing bullets and raising water. Sir Isaac Newton reported on the invention and recommended experiments, but the Society could not or would not grant a sum not exceeding £15 for the purpose. Again, the Acta Eruditorum for 1690, preserves a previous proposal made by Papin, accounts of which will be found in Farey's _Treatise on the Steam Engine_, and Professor Rigaud's _Early Proposals for Steam Navigation_. In the latter publication (a paper read to the Ashmolean Society) is also contained (pp. 11-14) a summary of the most wonderful among all records relating to this subject;--the trial of Blasco de Garay's steam-boat at Barcelona under Charles V. "The experiment was made the 17th June 1543 on board a vessel called the Trinidad, of 200 barrels burden, which had lately arrived with wheat from Colibre. The vessel was seen at a given moment to move forward and turn about at pleasure, without sail, or oar, or human agency, and without any visible mechanism except a huge boiler of hot water, and a complicated combination of wheels and paddles." The entire or partial credibility of this record has been often argued _pro_ and _con_. Professor Rigaud thinks it "not impossible that even a magnificent invention, like this, may have sunk into oblivion." Perhaps not, considering that the Spain of Cervantes is the Spain of Southey, and Mr. Borrow. A clock may stand still, but a nation which does so is retrograde. [184] The Chinese seeing our steam-ships at Chusan (in the war of 1841, 2), made paddlewheel vessels driven by men inside their hulls. Ignorant of steam-power, they achieved an engine without its principle. So too Prince Rupert gave a rotary motion to oars by horse-power, producing a greater velocity than sixteen watermen could impart to the Royal barge. [185] See second note on this chapter. [186] Darwin's _Descent of Man_, I. p. 179. Mr. Darwin adds in a note that "Sir C. Lyell had already (_Principles of Geology_, 1868. II. 489) called attention, in a striking passage, to the evil influence of the Holy Inquisition, in having lowered, through selection, the general standard of intelligence in Europe." [al] The term "relativity" is employed here on account of its breadth and comprehensiveness, and because it does not imply the adoption of some special hypothesis as to the essence of things or formative principles themselves;--such theorizing being no necessary condition of the present line of thought. Let it be observed, however, that any law of the natural world by virtue of which, the apprehended relativity becomes operative, must be conceived as in its own nature _genetic_ or _causative_, in order to explain Production. What is here meant may easily be understood by a few common-sense reflections. The word "Law" is one of the most ambiguous expressions possible. Perhaps its most familiar use is in statistical science, where it usually means the result gained from averages. For example, birth-rates, death-rates, and rates of exchange are spoken of as laws of increase, of mortality, and of the money market. Sometimes nothing but the generalized fact is signified; sometimes it is intended to imply that these formulæ govern, or ought to govern social questions, or problems of political economy. In like manner, when a law is the verbal embodiment of any principle, it may be considered as a perfectly abstract proposition; or else as a governing rule or maxim, under which definite and actual cases can be brought. The principles of arithmetic or geometry are laws to which every practical question involving number or measurement must be submitted. The laws of thought govern our reasonings, or at least they ought to do so. Another way of looking at Law is to consider it in its commonest origin--_i.e._, as the expression of a law-maker's will. But when a writer on Natural Theology speaks of the laws of the physical world, and then adds that "law implies a lawgiver," he either supposes himself to have demonstrated the applicability of this maxim in relation to his own science;--or if not he is simply assuming the whole question at issue. [Compare _Additional Note_ B, to Chapter II. p. 98, _seq._] The remaining most usual employment of the word, is to designate a _Force_, some actual moving power tending to realize itself in some way, working out a function either for good or evil, developing the secret of its own existence by the effects which it produces. Take an example from real life. A medical man coming to a certain rural district, observed its high death-rate, traced it to the very great prevalence of small-pox in the place, and formulated a law embodying the results of several years _averages_ which appeared sufficiently surprising. A further acquaintance with the habits of the neighbourhood disclosed the fact that inoculation was continually practised, and as continually kept secret on account of the penalties attached to it. The inquirer took advantage of the opportunity afforded by a custom he could not control to investigate its consequences. A few years later, he arrived at exact conclusions determining the law of activity exerted by the virus, under certain conditions. In other words, he found the _genetic_ law of its operation. Now, if the death-rate,--a piece of statistical law,--be contrasted with this last named law of virus-growth, the difference between these two formulæ is at once obvious. Without any scientific discussion or refining, we grasp a broad common-sense distinction, which is all that seems needed here. For our purpose, it would be useless to inquire whether the law of virus-growth may be resolved into laws higher and far more recondite still. An inventor seizing the useful law he wants, will not stop to ask any such questions; he will apply his power and realize the function he has in view at the moment. Another common-sense instance is to think of the properties of any familiar substance; the acridity of an alkali, for instance; its power of effervescing with acids, and neutralizing them; its behaviour as a reagent in a variety of ways, long to enumerate, but practically useful. When we have described all these properties, have we defined the whole substance? In other words, is the alkali anything more than a bundle of properties momentarily known to us? Undoubtedly there is one point more to be noticed; its principle of _permanence_, until brought under new conditions which dissolve its unity, and destroy the inter-coherence of its properties. Now whatever maintains this unity is the law of its substance. There are laws of nature under which both it and countless other substances are formed, continue, and are dissolved, making way for unending series of fresh combinations. And this mode of apprehending the unities we call substances, raises the self-same idea of genetic law which has been under consideration. If we are asked whether we can explain such laws further, we usually reply by saying "these are the forces of the natural world." Their correlations and modifications rule the kingdom of nature, and the great globe itself;--nay, they wield the empire of the Universe! Such laws, such forces, have engrossed the attention of physical philosophers from the rude beginnings of inquiry. They have led to speculations of all kinds;--the best known of which is the distinction between Form and Matter in existing objects;--a distinction in common use amongst persons who but dimly guess at the past issues which it raises. Nothing, however, can be said on such a topic here, except by way of reference to the philosophic system of Francis Bacon. [Compare p. 92 _ante_, and the Synopsis prefixed to this chapter.] [am] One of the most curious _morceaux_ in the history of Science, is the fact that the nature of Heat has been several times thus determined, viz., by Bacon, Locke, and Count Rumford. See Tyndall on _Heat as a Mode of Motion_, Section II., and Appendix. Bacon determines the nature of Heat by way of exemplifying "The Investigation of Forms." It is his sole instance, and is most instructive. (_Nov. Org._ II., 11 seq., in E. and S. Vol. IV., pp. 127-155.) "For example," he begins, "let the investigation be into the Form of Heat." It need scarcely be observed that the twofold relation of his "Forms" to Metaphysic and to Physic is one of the least explained parts of Bacon's vast system. How little his theory of Induction is commonly understood may be perceived by any skilled reader of Macaulay's well known Essay--a composition (to borrow a great schoolmaster's words) "displaying an almost inconceivable amount of nescience." [187] It is worth observation how often the abstract entity--(the principle of the whole realization)--is forgotten even by scientific persons. Forgotten, we say, since surely forgetfulness is the true origin of many futile attempts at explaining away essential principles. The following very curious case in point is narrated by S. T. Coleridge:--"There is still preserved in the Royal Observatory at Richmond the model of a bridge, constructed by the late justly celebrated Mr. Atwood (at that time, however, in the decline of life), in the confidence that he had explained the wonderful properties of the arch as resulting from the compound action of simple wedges, or of the rectilinear solids of which the material arch was composed; and of which supposed discovery his model was to exhibit ocular proof. Accordingly, he took a sufficient number of wedges of brass highly polished. Arranging these at first on a skeleton arch of wood, he then removed this scaffolding or support; and the bridge not only stood firm, without any cement between the squares, but he could take away any given portion of them, as a third or a half, and appending a correspondent weight, at either side, the remaining part stood as before. Our venerable sovereign, who is known to have had a particular interest and pleasure in all works and discoveries of mechanic science or ingenuity, looked at it for awhile stedfastly, and, as his manner was, with quick and broken expressions of praise and courteous approbation, in the form of answers to his own questions. At length turning to the constructor, he said, 'But Mr. Atwood, you have presumed the figure. You have put the arch first in this wooden skeleton. Can you build a bridge of the same wedges in any other figure? A straight bridge, or with two lines touching at the apex? If not, is it not evident that the bits of brass derive their continuance in the present position from the property of the arch, and not the arch from the property of the wedge?' The objection was fatal, the justice of the remark not to be resisted."--(_The Friend._ Vol. III., pp. 176, 7.) _Addition._ Of "those abstract entities absolute in truth," Bacon writes (_Nov. Org._ II. 9), "Let the investigation of Forms, which are (in the eye of reason at least, and in their essential law) eternal and immutable, constitute _Metaphysics_:" and again (Ibid. 15), "To God, truly, the Giver and Architect of Forms, and it may be to the angels and higher intelligences, it belongs to have an affirmative knowledge of forms immediately, and from the first contemplation. But this assuredly is more than man can do, to whom it is granted only to proceed at first by negatives, and at last to end in affirmatives, after exclusion has been exhausted." And of their utility, as applied truths, he says (Ibid. 2), "Though in nature nothing really exists beside individual bodies, performing pure individual acts according to a fixed law, yet in philosophy this very law, and the investigation, discovery, and explanation of it, is the foundation as well of knowledge as of operation. And it is this law, with its clauses, that I mean when I speak of _Forms_; a name which I the rather adopt because it has grown into use and become familiar." And these passages are in perfect harmony with Bacon's precept "that Physic should handle that which supposeth in Nature only a being and moving (and natural necessity), and Metaphysic should handle that which supposeth further in nature a reason, understanding, and platform (ideam)." (_Advancement._ II. E. and S. p. 353.) The reader will also perceive how natural it was for Bacon to place mathematical science "as a branch of metaphysic; for the subject of it being Quantity; not Quantity indefinite, which is but a relative and belongeth to _philosophia prima_ (as hath been said,) but Quantity determined or proportionable; it appeareth to be one of the Essential Forms of things; as that that is causative in nature of a number of effects; ... and it is true also that of all other forms (as we understand forms) it is the most abstracted and separable from matter, and therefore most proper to metaphysic; which hath likewise been the cause why it hath been better laboured and enquired than any of the other forms, which are more immersed into matter. For it being the nature of the mind of man (to the extreme prejudice of knowledge) to delight in the spacious liberty of generalities, as in a champion region, and not in the inclosures of particularity; the mathematics of all other knowledge were the goodliest fields to satisfy that appetite." (Ibid. p. 359.) Compare this _Essay_, p. 91 _ante_, together with foot-note. [an] "Observe," writes the late Sir B. Brodie, "observe the effect which the general diffusion of knowledge produces on society at large; how it draws the different classes of it into more free communication with each other; how its tendency is to make the laws more impartial, bring even the most despotic governments under the influence of public opinion, and show them that they have no real security except in the good will of the people. Knowledge goes hand-in-hand with civilization. It is necessary to the giving full effect to the precepts of the Christian faith. It was from the want of it that Galileo was tortured by the Inquisition, that Servetus was burned by Calvin, that the Huguenots were persecuted and slaughtered by Louis XIV., and that in numerous other instances one sect of Christians has conceived it to be their duty to exterminate another. It is a misapplication of the term civilization to apply it to any form of society in which ignorance is the rule and knowledge the exception. If a Being of superior intelligence were to look down from some higher sphere on our doings here on the earth, is it to be supposed that he would regard the Duke of Buckingham, dancing at the French Court, and scattering the pearls with which his dress was ornamented, on the floor, as being really superior to an Australian savage; or that he would see in the foreign Prince, who at a later period exhibited himself at another Court with his boots glittering with diamonds, any better emblem of civilization than in the negro chief, who gratifies his vanity by strutting about in the cast-off uniform of a general officer?" _Psychological Inquiries._ Part II., pp. 14, 15. [188] "A few phrases of Aristotle," says Dr. Brown, (Works I. p. 341,) "are perhaps even at this moment exercising no small sway on the very minds which smile at them with scorn." Mr. Carlyle asks, "Do not Books still accomplish _miracles_, as _Runes_ were fabled to do?... Consider whether any Rune, in the wildest imagination of Mythologist, ever did such wonders as, on the actual firm Earth, some Books have done." _Heroes_, p. 252. [189] No writer has ever dwelt more on this truth than Coleridge, and no writer ever had a stronger reason for dwelling upon it. Perhaps the ordinary public has seldom been more unjust than in its estimate of Coleridge's addiction to opium. The occasion of his first use of it was a venial error, his servitude was heavy, and the account of his sufferings and struggles most deeply affecting. Then, his final victory (respecting which so little is generally said) was a very noble moral achievement. [ao] Men have aimed at accomplishing their purpose partly by training animals, and partly by breeding through select specimens of each race. The two principles thus relied on are habit and heredity. Respecting the latter of these a note of considerable length had been intended in this place. But the reader interested in the general question can learn sufficient details in Dr. Carpenter's _Mental Physiology_ together with the authorities therein referred to by him. The following instances adduced by Mr. Wallace to show how improvement through heredity is visibly limited are very remarkable. "In the matter of speed, a limit of a definite kind as regards land animals does exist in nature. All the swiftest animals--deer, antelopes, hares, foxes, lions, leopards, horses, zebras, and many others--have reached very nearly the same degree of speed. Although the swiftest of each must have been for ages preserved, and the slowest must have perished, we have no reason to believe there is any advance of speed. The possible limit under existing conditions, and perhaps under possible terrestrial conditions, has been long ago reached." He immediately proceeds to place in contrast with these, some examples where progress is not thus barred. "In cases, however, where this limit had not been so nearly reached as in the horse, we have been enabled to make a more marked advance and to produce a greater difference of form. The wild dog is an animal that hunts much in company, and trusts more to endurance than to speed. Man has produced the greyhound, which differs much more from the wolf or the dingo than the racer does from the wild Arabian. Domestic dogs, again, have varied more in size and in form than the whole family of Canidæ in a state of Nature. No wild dog, fox, or wolf, is either so small as some of the smallest terriers and spaniels, or so large as the largest varieties of hound or Newfoundland dog. And, certainly, no two wild animals of the family differ so widely in form and proportions as the Chinese pug and the Italian greyhound, or the bulldog and the common greyhound. The known range of variation is, therefore, more than enough for the derivation of all the forms of Dogs, Wolves, and Foxes from a common ancestor." Wallace. _Natural Selection_, pp. 292, 3. Dr. Prichard's accounts of similar variations in his _Natural History of Man_ and other ethnological works are particularly interesting. Habit is a topic more germane to the subject of self-training, and is therefore examined at some length in our text. It seems natural that the empire of both Habit and Heredity should be strongest over the purely automatous, and the instinctive or semi-instinctive actions of mankind. Witness the effect of Caste institutions, Guilds, and family vocations. Regular occupation struck a certain visitor to this world as producing a like result:-- "Nimbly," quoth he, "do the fingers move If a man be but used to his trade." [ap] "They that deny a God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beast by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature. It destroys likewise magnanimity, and the raising of human nature; for take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a God, or 'melior natura'; which courage is manifestly such as that creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon divine protection and favour, gathereth a force and faith, which human nature in itself could not obtain'; therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty." Bacon. _Essay on Atheism_, p. 56. "What joy to watch in lower creature Such dawning of a moral nature, And how (the rule all things obey) They look to a higher mind to be their law and stay!" _Remains_ of A. H. Hallam, privately printed. [aq] The difference between brute and Man appeared so vast to Bacon that, following Telesius in this as in some other respects, he adopted as a doctrine the duality of the human soul. He maintains it at length in the _De Augmentis_ iv. 3, a chapter which begins thus:--"Let us now proceed to the doctrine which concerns the Human Soul, from the treasures whereof all other doctrines are derived. The parts thereof are two; the one treats of the rational soul, which is divine; the other of the irrational, which is common with brutes.... Now this soul (as it exists in man) is only the instrument of the rational soul, and has its origin like that of the brutes in the dust of the earth.... For there are many and great excellencies of the human soul above the souls of brutes, manifest even to those who philosophise according to the sense. Now wherever the mark of so many and great excellencies is found, there also a specific difference ought to be constituted; and therefore I do not much like the confused and promiscuous manner in which philosophers have handled the functions of the soul; as if the human soul differed from the spirit of brutes in degree rather than in kind; as the sun differs from the stars, or gold from metals." [190] We have it on Coleridge's authority that "Lord Erskine, speaking of animals, hesitating to call them brutes, hit upon that happy phrase--'the mute creation.'" Would this were true! exclaims some invalid, nervously agonized by cats and dogs, cocks and hens, and listening with horror to their various cries and noises. But strictly speaking Lord Erskine was right,--for the animal world is mute as far as real language is concerned. Compare Max Müller on the "Bow-wow Theory." _Lectures on Language_, Series I. Lecture ix. [191] The Poet's thought, not more imaginative than true, should be kept in mind when estimating the difference between gregariousness and society. If the latter be held a development of the former, it must have been transformed in the progress of its descent. Where affinities are really traceable between the human and the unreasoning world, they may perhaps be referred with greater probability to a common ancestry than to a lineal pedigree. And the more remote the alleged origin, the less unlikely it may appear. [192] "Sir Humphrey Davy, when a boy, was placed under a schoolmaster who neglected his duties, and adverting to this subject in a letter addressed to his mother after he was settled in London, he says, 'I consider it as fortunate that I was left much to myself as a child, and put on no particular plan of study, and that I enjoyed much idleness at Mr. Coryton's school. I, perhaps, owe to these circumstances the little talents I have, and their peculiar application. What I am I made myself. I say this without vanity, and in pure simplicity of heart.'" Brodie's _Psychological Inquiries_, I. 29. "The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School. What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its efforts in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it." Emerson. _Spiritual Laws._ [ar] "We can command Nature only by obeying her; nor can Art avail anything except as Nature's handmaiden. We can affect the conditions under which Nature works; but things artificial as well as things natural are in reality produced Not by Art but Nature. Our power is merely based upon our knowledge of the procedure which Nature follows. She is never really thwarted or controlled by our operations, though she may be induced to depart from her usual course, and under new and artificial conditions to produce new phenomena and new substances. "Natural philosophy, considered from this point of view, is therefore only an answer to the question, How does Nature work in the production of phenomena?" R. L. Ellis. _Preface to Bacon's Philosophical Works_, Vol. I. p. 59. [as] "The philosopher, not less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought. 'The problem of philosophy,' according to Plato, 'is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute.' It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena, which being known, the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions, strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula." Emerson. _Idealism._ "He who studies the concrete and neglects the abstract cannot be called an interpreter of nature. Such was Bacon's judgment." Robert Leslie Ellis, in _Bacon's Works_, Vol. I. p. 26. "If a man's knowledge be confined to the efficient and material causes (which are unstable causes, and merely vehicles, or causes which convey the form in certain cases) he may arrive at new discoveries in reference to substances in some degree similar to one another, and selected beforehand; but he does not touch the deeper boundaries of things. But whosoever is acquainted with Forms, embraces the unity of nature in substances the most unlike; and is able therefore to detect and bring to light things never yet done, and such as neither the vicissitudes of nature, nor industry in experimenting, nor accident itself, would ever have brought into act, and which would never have occurred to the thought of man. From the discovery of Forms therefore results truth in speculation and freedom in operation."--Bacon. _Novum Organon_, Book II. Aph. III. [at] The problem awaiting the philosophic physicist runs as follows:-- It remains to be seen how closely and with what degree of distinctness, science can approximate these impalpable forces governing the natural world, to the forces we are accustomed to call immaterial, because they become known to us by the activities of Thought and Will. This problem--the incorporeity of Matter, or a near approach to it--has been a favourite subject of speculation in all ages. The curious reader may track it from the pre-and post-Christian Greeks through Arabian and Jewish philosophies to the Schoolmen (who borrowed from Jews unknowingly) and so transmitted it down like an heirloom to our own later controversialists. The subject has been treated on Metaphysical grounds, for Religious interests, or as a weapon keen edged in demolishing antagonistic cosmologies. But it has not often been entertained for purely scientific reasons, and as one of those so-called "useless questions" which always turn out most prolific seminal principles, fertile in explaining nature and throwing out branches in numerous unforeseen directions. It was thus however and with no side views that the illustrious Faraday looked at this subject. With what effect may be best learned by putting together two separate accounts of his reasoning. In 1844, Dr. Bence Jones informs us Faraday (then in his 53rd year) indulged in "A speculation respecting that view of the nature of matter which considers its ultimate atoms as centres of force, and _not as so many little bodies surrounded by forces_.... The particle, indeed, is supposed to exist only by these forces, and where they are it is." This speculation did in fact give a tone to that memorable season--now thirty years ago. Dr. Tyndall says:--"On Friday, January 19, 1844, he opened the weekly evening meetings of the Royal Institution by a discourse entitled 'A speculation touching Electric Conduction and the nature of Matter.' In this discourse he not only attempts the overthrow of Dalton's Theory of Atoms, but also the subversion of all ordinary scientific ideas regarding the nature and relations of Matter and Force. He objected to the use of the term atom:--'I have not yet found a mind,' he says, 'that did habitually separate it from its accompanying temptations; and there can be no doubt that the words definite proportions, equivalent, primes, etc., which did and do fully express all the _facts_ of what is usually called the atomic theory in chemistry, were dismissed because they were not expressive enough, and did not say all that was in the mind of him who used the word atom in their stead,'" (_Faraday as a Discoverer_, pp. 119-20.) And again:--"With his usual courage and sincerity he pushes his view to its utmost consequences. 'This view of the constitution of matter,' he continues, 'would seem to involve necessarily the conclusion that matter fills all space, or at least all space to which gravitation extends; for gravitation is a property of matter dependent on a certain force, and it is this force which constitutes the matter. In that view matter is not merely mutually penetrable; but each atom extends, so to say, throughout the whole of the solar system, yet always retaining its own centre of force.'" Faraday "compares the interpenetration of two atoms to the coalescence of two distinct waves, which though for a moment blended to a single mass, preserve their individuality, and afterwards separate." (_Ibid._ pp. 123-4 and note.) The subject did not easily lose its hold on the philosopher's mind. "At the Institution," writes Dr. Bence Jones, "he gave eight lectures after Easter on the phenomena and philosophy of heat. He ended this course thus:--'We know nothing about matter but its forces--nothing in the creation but the effect of these forces; further our sensations and perceptions are not fitted to carry us; all the rest, which we may conceive we know, is only imagination.' He gave two Friday discourses: the first on the nature of matter, the other on recent improvements in the silvering of mirrors. "His notes of the first lecture begin thus:--'Speculations dangerous temptations; generally avoid them; but a time to speculate as well as to refrain, all depends upon the temper of the mind. I was led to consider the nature of space in relation to electric conduction, and so of matter, _i.e._ whether _continuous_ or consisting of _particles with intervening space_, according to its supposed constitution. Consider this point, _remarking the assumptions everywhere_. "'_Chemical considerations_ abundant, but almost all _assumption_. Easy to speak of atomic proportions, multiple proportions, isomeric and isomorphic phenomena and compound bases; and to account for effects we have only to hang on to assumed atoms the properties or arrangement of properties assumed to be sufficient for the purpose. But the fundamental and main facts are expressed by the term _definite proportion_,--the rest, including the atomic notion, is assumption. "'The view that physical chemistry necessarily takes of atoms is now very large and complicated; first many elementary atoms--next compound and complicated atoms. System within system, like the starry heavens, _may be right_--but may _be all wrong_. Thus see how little of general theory of matter is known as fact, and how _much_ is assumption. "'Final brooding impression, that particles are only centres of force; that the force or forces constitute the matter; that therefore there is no space between the particles distinct from the particles of matter; that they touch each other just as much in gases as in liquids or solids; and that they are materially penetrable, probably even to their very centres. That, for instance, water is not two particles of oxygen side by side, but two spheres of power mutually penetrated, and the centres even coinciding.'" Bence Jones--Life of Faraday, Vol. II., pp. 177-78. These views (best known as Boscovich's theory), though not generally held in scientific circles, are favoured by Bacon's most able commentator, Robert Leslie Ellis, and are pronounced by Professor Huxley a "tenable hypothesis." Mr. Spencer poises the balance as follows:--"Though the combining weights of the respective elements are termed by chemists their 'equivalents,' for the purpose of avoiding a questionable assumption, we are unable to think of the combination of such definite weights, without supposing it to take place between definite numbers of definite particles. And thus it would appear that the Newtonian view is at any rate preferable to that of Boscovich. A disciple of Boscovich, however, may reply that his master's theory is involved in that of Newton; and cannot indeed be escaped. 'What,' he may ask, 'is it that holds together the parts of these ultimate atoms?' 'A cohesive force,' his opponent must answer. 'And what,' he may continue, 'is it that holds together the parts of any fragments, into which, by sufficient force, an ultimate atom might be broken?' Again the answer must be--a cohesive force. 'And what,' he may still ask, 'if the ultimate atom were, as we can imagine it to be, reduced to parts as small in proportion to it, as it is in proportion to a tangible mass of matter--what must give each part the ability to sustain itself, and to occupy space?' Still there is no answer but--a cohesive force. Carry the process in thought as far as we may, until the extension of the parts is less than can be imagined, we still cannot escape the admission of forces by which the extension is upheld; and we can find no limit until we arrive at the conception of centres of force without any extension." _First Principles_, p. 54. It is evident that Faraday was able to think in a manner which has been often declared impossible. Mr. Spencer's statement of the counter case is alone sufficient to prove that the inquiry is sure to be recurrent. We may add with Dr. Tyndall that facts alone cannot satisfy the mind, and that when a law is established, the question "why" is inevitable. Compare _foot-note_ p. 324 _post_. [193] A familiar instance of one among these abstract entities may convey to some readers a clearer idea of their nature than many careful explanations. Three balks of timber are lying in our road,--one, a very large and heavy monster, directly across it. Desirous of driving by, and being without adequate help to remove an obstacle beyond our strength, we call to mind the following definition. "The lever is an inflexible bar, capable of free motion about a fixed axis, called the fulcrum." (Newth. _Natural Philosophy_, p. 33.) Acting upon this idea, we place one balk we can manage to move, upon a second which happens to lie conveniently, and so roll away the third heavy monster. This done, we replace No. 1 peaceably beside No. 2, and wend on our way rejoicing. Now the lever, as defined by Newth, existed ideally in our mind, and we realised and used it. Our lever and fulcrum are still lying on the road, though they are lever and fulcrum no longer. The leverage was an applied mental Form, but we no longer want the Form to be operative,--and along with it the Force has disappeared. [au] Our knowledge of Matter and of Motion;--our knowledge of their continuance while our forms and other forms are undergoing change;--all we most _certainly_ know of the material world, resolves itself into our knowledge of Force. Thus far Mr. Herbert Spencer is with us, as may be seen from the following paragraphs from his _First Principles_. "By the indestructibility of Matter, we really mean the indestructibility of the _force_ with which Matter affects us. As we become conscious of Matter only through that resistance which it opposes to our muscular energy, so do we become conscious of the permanence of Matter only through the permanence of this resistance; as either immediately or mediately proved to us. And this truth is made manifest not only by analysis of the _à posteriori_ cognition, but equally so by analysis of the _à priori_ one. For that which we cannot conceive to be diminished by the continued compression of Matter, is not its occupancy of space, but its ability to resist." (p. 179.) "It remains to be pointed out that the continuity of Motion, as well as the indestructibility of Matter, is really known to us in terms of _force_. That a certain manifestation of force remains for ever undiminished, is the ultimate content of the thought; whether reached _à posteriori_ or _à priori_." (p. 182.) And again (pp. 191-2). "What, in these two foregoing chapters, was proved true of Matter and Motion, is, _à fortiori_, true of the Force out of which our conceptions of Matter and Motion are built. Indeed, as we saw, that which is indestructible in matter and motion, is the force they present. And, as we here see, the truth that Force is indestructible, is the obverse of the truth that the Unknown Cause of the changes going on in consciousness is indestructible. So that the persistence of consciousness, constitutes at once our immediate experience of the persistence of Force, and imposes on us the necessity we are under of asserting its persistence.... Consciousness without this or that particular _form_ is possible; but consciousness without _contents_ is impossible." We are also quite at one with Mr. Herbert Spencer as regards an assertion made in his _Principles of Psychology_ (I. 161,) and repeated, to shew how anti-materialistic he is, in his last book. (_Essays_, III., p. 250.) "Of the two it seems easier to translate so-called Matter into so-called Spirit, than to translate so-called Spirit into so-called Matter, which latter is, indeed, wholly impossible." But though it is true, as he adds, that "no _translation_ can carry us beyond our symbols," it is no less true that we are impelled to inquire into that which underlies them. Mr. Spencer says further (_Psychology_ I. 162,) "The conditioned form under which Being is presented in the Subject, cannot, any more than the conditioned form under which Being is presented in the Object, be the Unconditioned Being common to the two." In this negation we are less at one with him, for, as we firmly believe, in that conditioned sphere we call our own subjective nature there is a Reality presented to our consciousness by every act of Volition which brings us far nearer than any objective or outside form of existence can bring us to that Unconditioned Being which is common to the two, and infinitely superior to them both. [194] Spirit of Inductive Philosophy, p. 165. [195] Ibid. pp. 169-170. "In the confined and literal notions, often ignorantly entertained, of the sciences of observation, our conclusions might be supposed restricted to the field of mere sensible experience; and in this sense we should fall short of any worthy apprehension of the Supreme Intelligence. But the truly inductive philosopher extends his contemplation to intellectual conceptions of a higher class, pointing to order and uniformity as constant and universal as the extent of nature itself in space and in time; and in the same proportion he recognises harmony and arrangement invested with the attributes of universality and eternity, and thus derives his loftier ideas of the Divine perfections." [196] See Ravaisson (_La Philosophie en France_, p. 82,) for an account of Comte's position in this particular. He characterizes it thus: "Du positivisme physique superficiel il est arrivé au positivisme moral." [av] Or else as some may prefer to state it, Mind _is_ the intelligible law. In other words, Law is the manifestation and energizing of the Mind in Nature, and we recognize mind in the energy of Law. Canon Mozley spoke as follows in 1872. "There is a great deal said now about Mind in Nature, and scientific men talk enthusiastically about Mind; the old notion of chance is obsolete, and in spite of the strength of a materialist school, there is a tendency to a consensus of scientific men that there is Mind in the universe. Would any one in any public meeting of scientific men dare to stand up and _deny_ that there was Mind in Nature? It would be thought monstrous. It would be set down as the revival of an old stupidity. It is the only form in which they find they can speak of nature which at all ennobles it or which satisfies their own idea of the sublimity of nature." _The Principle of Causation considered in opposition to Atheistic Theories_, p. 41. The learned writer goes on to connect this admitted idea of Mind with the collateral idea of Design. And this is a most natural sequence of thought. But, for reasons already mentioned, the main argument of this chapter pursues another track. Mind in Nature being directly intuited, (to use an expressive Kantian phrase) we supplement the evidence thus given by a cross-examination of facts for the purpose of eliciting an account of what manner of Intelligence this Mind in Nature must be. [aw] "It is true," says Canon Mozley, "that matter has lately been set before us as claiming more vicinity to mind than it has been usual to assign it; and a scientific man, of the highest genius, has regretted that 'mind and matter have ever been presented to us in the rudest contrast--the one as all noble, the other as all vile.'... Hobbes, in the 17th century, anticipated this claim, and laid down 'that all matter as matter is endued not only with figure and a capacity of motion, but also with an actual sense and perception, and wants only the organs and memory of animals to express its sensations,'" _On Causation_, as before, p. 38. The doctrine of an inferior and irrational, or as some phrase it "a blind intelligence" is the topic next discussed with some fulness in our text. This "blind intelligence" makes Nature, so to speak, "the instinct of the Universe." Thence it is "no long step" to a belief that the world is a living creature, neither are there wanting modern accounts of the principle of Vitality, and its powers of assimilation,--equally applicable to the accretive growth of a crystal. The renovators of philosophy were (as Mr. Leslie Ellis remarks) strongly inclined to this belief, its typical teacher being Campanella. Leibniz points out with his usual energy its affinity with the Scholastic doctrine of "substantial forms"--(a very different theory from Bacon's) "formas quasdam substantiales ejusmodi sibi imaginatus videtur, quæ per se sint causa motus in corporibus, quemadmodum Scholastici capiunt;" and proceeds to say, "ita reditur ad tot deunculos, quot formas substantiales, et Gentilem prope polytheismum.... Quum tamen revera in natura nulla sit sapientia, nullus appetitus, ordo vero pulcher ex eo oriatur, quia est horologium Dei." _Leibnitii Opera Philosophica_, Ed. Erdmann, pp. 52-3. [197] "Easiest" is here and elsewhere used to mean that which accounts in the most natural and perfect manner alike for a single fact and for the complex whole of facts presented to us. Such an "easiest account" is the law of Gravitation--it is at once the simplest and the most complete. [198] _Fragments of Science_, p. 88. [199] Struck it so truly that (to borrow Mr. Huxley's expression) a sufficient Intelligence might have predicted the Universe. But what an infinitude of knowledge would this "sufficiency" seem to presuppose! [ax] Taking an optical structure of the Eye as a test example, the chances of its Evolution _per accidens_ have been calculated by an eminent mathematician. His results may be seen in the _Additional Note_ appended to this Chapter. They are extracted from the Hulsean Lectures for 1867. [ay] For example:--No one holds the doctrine of Natural Selection more firmly than Mr. Wallace;--he is, in fact, known to have anticipated the Darwinian theory of Evolution. But he also holds that Natural Selection cannot account for certain of the physical peculiarities of Man; much less for his consciousness, his language, his moral sense, or his Volition. Mr. Wallace maintains likewise that (1) Atoms are centres of Force. (2) Force is known to us as Will. (3) The Will that governs the world is the Will of higher intelligences or of one supreme Intelligence. He quotes, as representing his own thought, the following lines from an American poetess:-- "God of the Granite and the Rose! Soul of the Sparrow and the Bee! The mighty tide of Being flows Through countless channels, Lord, from thee. It leaps to life in grass and flowers, Through every grade of being runs, While from Creation's radiant towers Its glory flames in Stars and Suns." To the above-mentioned points Mr. Wallace adds a spiritualistic belief in many sublime intelligences intermediate between the Deity and the Universe. Compare _Natural Selection_, Ed. 2. Essay X. with Notes. [az] That the perception of fitness, even when of the most exalted kind, does not to some thinkers carry with it a perception of Design, is plainly manifest from the ensuing paragraph:-- "The absurdity of the _à posteriori_ argument for a God consists in the assumption that what we call order, harmony, and adaptation are evidence of design, when it is evident that, _whether there be a God or not, order, harmony, and adaptation must have existed from eternity, and are not_ _therefore necessary proof of a designing cause_." (_American Index_, Jan. 11, 1873.) It is to be hoped that the writer of this rather strong statement had insight enough to perceive that these eternal harmonizers of the whole Universe do, in fact, constitute a self-existent Mind. [ba] With perfect fairness, Professor Huxley admits the force of this distinction. In a paragraph quoted p. 133, he wrote thus:--"It is necessary to remember that there is a wider Teleology, which is not touched by the doctrine of Evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of Evolution. That proposition is, that the whole world, living and not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed. If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay, potentially, in the cosmic vapour; and that a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say the state of the Fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapour of the breath in a cold winter's day." It is curious to compare Mr. Huxley's dictum on the Eye (cited p. 133) with a passage before part-quoted from Mr. Newman. "In saying that lungs _were intended_ to breathe, and eyes to see, we imply an argument from Fitness to Design, which carries conviction to the overwhelming majority of cultivated as well as uncultivated minds. Yet, in calling it an argument, we may seem to appeal to the logical faculty; and this would be an error. No syllogism is pretended, that _proves_ a lung to have been made to breathe; but _we see it_ by what some call Common-Sense, and some Intuition. If such a fact stood alone in the universe, and no other existences spoke of Design, it would probably remain a mere enigma to us; but when the whole human world is pervaded by similar instances, not to see a Universal Mind in nature appears almost a brutal insensibility; and if any one intelligently professes Atheism, the more acute he is, the more distinctly we perceive that he is deficient in the Religious Faculty. Just as, if he had no sense of Beauty in anything, we should not imagine that we could impart it by argument, so neither here.... No stress whatever needs here to be laid upon minute anatomy, as, for instance, of the eye: it signifies not, whether we do or do not understand its optical structure as a matter of science. If it had _no_ optical structure at all, if it differed in no respect (that we could discover) from a piece of marble, except that it sees, this would not impair the reasons for believing that it _is meant_ to see." _The Soul_, pp. 32-3. This extract from Mr. Newman raises the question--Is an eminent Biologist any better judge on the subject of _Design_, than any other eminent thinker? Clearly he is a judge of _Fitness_, but that fact is admitted on all sides;--the eyes of animals are practically fit for seeing with, and, what is more, they are fitted to the special fields of vision useful to their several owners. The first question is, Does the fact of seeing or the fitness to see raise a moral certainty or very strong probability of Design? And should a Biologist rejoin that there exists another account of organic facts and fitnesses probable and adequate; next comes the further inquiry, which is the most probable, the most adequate, in a word the easiest? In this connection it must likewise be asked with some urgency, what _non_-Biological reasons there are for preferring Design? Whether for instance any good reasons may be found for believing that there is somewhere subsisting in and over the Natural world an Intelligence of such order as to be capable of arranging fitness with a view to the harmony and general co-operation of natural Forces? The attempt has been made to shew cause on this side in the present Chapter. Of course, the case for Design must be rendered unanswerable if a certitude of Reason, either speculative or practical, or a very strong conclusion of moral argument, or a probability outweighing all other probabilities, shall in any way be shewn for accepting the still nobler belief in a self-existent Will and Personality. Now this latter idea is the subject of our two closing Chapters, and is contemplated on grounds with which the Biologist or Physicist, quâ Biologist or Physicist has no very special concern. It seems plain, however, that when a great Biologist is pre-eminently a philosophic thinker (as an author like Mr. Huxley must be acknowledged by competent judges)--then he possesses a strong vantage ground, and vast opportunities either for good or for evil. And these last six words remind us to add with Mr. Newman that after all _subjective_ conditions must not be forgotten. Would not a man without sense of the Beautiful be "colour-blind" to many among the harmonies of Nature? And is there not something in the "Religious insight" Mr. Newman speaks of which seems nothing less than a gift of vision and faculty divine? Man thus endowed may be in the highest sense Nature's interpreter, when he sees in her moving mirror the reflected lineaments of his own and Nature's God. To such a mind no idea can be more sublimely magnificent than the philosophic Teleology which Mr. Huxley bases on Evolution; it seems to compress into one the Past, the Present, and the Future; and to follow with winged thought that glance of an omniscient Creator which tongues of men and angels must for ever fail to describe. We ought to add that the principle of Evolution has been defined in more than one way. Some definitions would exclude the wide Teleologic view. What is here meant might (to borrow Mr. Spencer's remark) be more justly characterized as "INVOLUTION." [200] Comparing the life of Humanity with the life of an individual, and arguing for an all-pervading optimism as the general Law in both, Littré observes, "Pas plus dans un cas que dans l'autre, ne sont éliminées? _les maladies, les perturbations, les dérangements, en un mot, tous les accidents qui interviennent dans le fonctionnement de chaque loi_, et qui sont d'autant plus fréquents et plus graves que la loi dont il s'agit gouverne des rapports plus compliqués et plus élevés." _Paroles de Philosophie Positive_, p. 26. The italics are our own. [201] It is a curious problem to put testimony in the scale against alleged necessities, regarding the course of Nature. A certain Eastern prince had never seen ice--and obstinately rejected the idea of its possible existence. Was he wise or unwise in his disbelief? Wise, if we make the rule of actual experience our canon;--unwise if we admit the rule of modification by unseen possibilities; and still more, if we allow that a small amount of _affirmative_ testimony ought in reason to outweigh a large amount of _negative_ presupposition, or difficulty. A curious instance of this last rule is the natural history of the duck-billed platypus (the ornithorynchus), rightly called "_paradoxus_." The contradictory appearance of its organs created a world of scepticism, when its history was first reported to Naturalists. It was a question of improbability versus testimony;--and, to use the established phrase, "every school boy" now knows that Testimony was right. Compare Note (_c_) p. 264, _ante_. [bb] How Bacon can have been pictured by his admirers as neither ideal, nor metaphysical, seems to be one of those unintelligible mysteries of idolatry which idol-worshippers cannot themselves explain. How impossible it is on such a supposition to reconcile Bacon with himself will appear evident to any informed reader of Mr. Ellis's Preface to the Philosophical Works. Bacon's tribute to Plato was just, as well as discriminating, and to our purpose is most appropriate. He says (_De Augmentis_, III. 4) "For Metaphysic, I have already assigned to it the inquiry of Formal and Final Causes; which assignation, as far as it relates to Forms, may seem nugatory; because of a received and inveterate opinion that the Essential Forms or true differences of things cannot by any human diligence be found out; an opinion which in the meantime implies and admits that the invention of Forms is of all parts of knowledge the worthiest to be sought, if it be possible to be found. And as for the possibility of finding it, they are ill discoverers who think there is no land where they can see nothing but sea. But it is manifest that Plato, a man of sublime wit (and one that surveyed all things as from a lofty cliff), did in his doctrine concerning Ideas descry that Forms were the true object of knowledge; howsoever he lost the fruit of this most true opinion by considering and trying to apprehend Forms as absolutely abstracted from matter." This last path we have endeavoured to avoid; and have ourselves elected to follow the Baconian precept, and to treat the Law or Form of Production not logically, but as seen in operation, and existent _in rerum naturâ_; not _in ordine ad hominem_ but _in ordine ad Universum_. What Bacon himself expected from the investigation, he states plainly enough in continuation. "If we fix our eyes diligently seriously and sincerely upon action and use, it will not be difficult to discern and understand what those Forms are the knowledge whereof may wonderfully enrich and benefit the condition of men.... This part of Metaphysic I find deficient; whereat I marvel not, because I hold it not possible that the Forms of things can be invented by that course of invention hitherto used; the root of the evil, as of all others, being this: that men have used to sever and withdraw their thoughts too soon and too far from experience and particulars, and have given themselves wholly up to their own meditation and arguments. "But the use of this part of Metaphysic, which I reckon amongst the deficient, is of the rest the most excellent in two respects; the one, because it is the duty and virtue of all knowledge to abridge the circuits and long ways of experience (as much as truth will permit), and to remedy the ancient complaint that 'life is short and art is long.'... For God is holy in the multitude of his works, holy in the order or connexion of them, and holy in the union of them. And therefore the speculation was excellent in Parmenides and Plato (although in them it was but a bare speculation), 'that all things by a certain scale ascend to unity.'" (_Ibid._ Ellis and Spedding, IV. 360-362.) [bc] The Hulsean Lecturer before alluded to states this point with most distinct emphasis. Speaking of the Eye as an optical instrument, he says, "Here are _four_ conditions of things each utterly _independent_ of the others, viz. the nerve, then its non-reflecting coating, then a transparent medium investing it, then a most remarkable _ether_ surrounding the whole, the concurrence of all four being essential to the production of vision, nevertheless we are to believe that all these adjustments and adaptations are accidentally made, retained and handed down by inheritance. If there be not evidence here of the selecting, arranging, controlling power of _mind_, will, forethought, contrivance, then I feel that I have no evidence for the existence of the individuality of my own being." _Analogies_, _etc._, p. 124. [202] There is perhaps no familiar tribe in which the wonders of this mechanical arrangement, can be more easily studied than in the venerable family of owls. [203] The stalk-eyed Crustacea are known to most readers through the fascinating volume of Mr. Bell. [204] _De Anima_, III. 1, 4. _Hist. Animal._, I. 9, IV. 8. The structural eye is reduced to an ocellus. [205] M. Le Court: see Geoffrey St. Hilaire, _Cours d'Histoire Naturelle, des Mammifères_. [206] One is glad of this result for Shakespeare's sake, as well as Aristotle's; though a Warwickshire man might have been expected to know the exact truth so far as his county is concerned; which Shakespeare did not:-- "The blind mole casts Copp'd hills towards heaven." (_Pericles_, I. 1.) "Pray you tread softly that the blind mole may not Hear a footfall." (_Tempest_, IV. 1.) [207] The Proteus Anguinus has been rendered illustrious by Sir H. Davy's _Consolations in Travel_. Since his time, living specimens have been kept in England. [208] The English reader will be charmed with the account of him in Bell's _British Quadrupeds_. [209] "In the organ of hearing in man we have first of all the external orifice of the ear, which is closed at the bottom by the circular tympanic membrane. Behind that membrane is the cavity called the drum of the ear, this cavity being separated from the space between it and the brain by a bony partition, in which there are two orifices, the one round and the other oval. These orifices are also closed by fine membranes. Across the cavity of the drum stretches a series of four little bones: the first, called the _hammer_, is attached to the tympanic membrane; the second, called the _anvil_, is connected by a joint with the hammer; a third little round bone connects the anvil with the _stirrup bone_, which has its oval base planted against the membrane of the oval orifice above referred to. The base of the stirrup bone abuts against this membrane, almost covering it, and leaving but a narrow rim of the membrane surrounding the bone. Behind the bony partition, and between it and the brain, we have the extraordinary organ called the _labyrinth_, which is filled with water, and over the lining membrane of which, the terminal fibres of the auditory nerve are distributed. When the tympanic membrane receives a shock, that shock is transmitted through the series of bones above referred to, and is concentrated on the membrane against which the base of the stirrup bone is planted. That membrane transfers the shock to the water of the labyrinth, which, in its turn, transfers it to the nerves. "The transmission, however, is not direct. At a certain place within the labyrinth exceedingly fine elastic bristles, terminating in sharp points, grow up between the terminal nerve fibres. These bristles, discovered by Max Schultze, are eminently calculated to sympathise with those vibrations of the water which correspond to their proper periods. Thrown thus into vibration, the bristles stir the nerve fibres which lie between their roots, and excite audition. At another place in the labyrinth we have little crystalline particles called _otolithes_--the Hörsteine of the Germans--embedded among the nervous filaments, and which, when they vibrate, exert an intermittent pressure upon the adjacent nerve fibres, thus exciting audition. The otolithes probably subserve a different purpose from that fulfilled by the bristles of Schultze. They are fitted, by their weight, to accept and prolong the vibrations of evanescent sounds, which might otherwise escape attention. The bristles of Schultze, on the contrary, because of their extreme lightness, would instantly yield up an evanescent motion, while they are eminently fitted for the transmission of continuous vibrations. Finally, there is in the labyrinth a wonderful organ, discovered by the Marchese Corti, which is to all appearance a musical instrument, with its chords so stretched as to accept vibrations of different periods, and transmit them to the nerve filaments which traverse the organ. Within the ears of men, and without their knowledge or contrivance, this lute of 3,000 strings has existed for ages, accepting the music of the outer world, and rendering it fit for reception by the brain. Each musical tremor which falls upon this organ selects from its tensioned fibres the one appropriate to its own pitch, and throws that fibre into unisonant vibration. And thus, no matter how complicated the motion of the external air may be, those microscopic strings can analyse it and reveal the constituents of which it is composed." Tyndall. _On Sound_, pp. 323-4 and 5. We may add that the "fine elastic bristles," mentioned by Dr. Tyndall, are known to be prolongations of the free ends of the epithelial cells. The _other_ ends of these cells--(_i.e._ the deep or attached ends) are delicately ramified, and are said to be in connection with slender nerve-fibrils. [210] _E.g._, Coleridge. "I have at this moment before me, in the flowery meadow, on which my eye is now reposing, one of its most soothing chapters, in which there is no lamenting word, no one character of guilt or anguish. For never can I look and meditate on the vegetable creation without a feeling similar to that with which we gaze at a beautiful infant that has fed itself asleep at its mother's bosom, and smiles in its strange dream of obscure yet happy sensations. The same tender and genial pleasure takes possession of me, and this pleasure is checked and drawn inward by the like aching melancholy, by the same whispered remonstrance, and made restless by a similar impulse of aspiration. It seems as if the soul said to herself: From this state hast _thou_ fallen! Such shouldst thou still become, thyself all permeable to a holier power! thyself at once hidden and glorified by its own transparency, as the accidental and dividuous in this quiet and harmonious object is subjected to the life and light of nature; to that life and light of nature, I say, which shines in every plant and flower, even as the transmitted power, love and wisdom of God over all fills, and shines through, nature! But what the plant is, by an act not its own and unconsciously--_that_ must thou make thyself to _become_--must by prayer and by a watchful and unresisting spirit, join at least with the preventive and assisting grace to make thyself, in that light of conscience which inflameth not, and with that knowledge which puffeth not up!" _Statesman's Manual._ Appendix B. pp. 267, 8. Ed. 1839. CHAPTER VI. CAUSATION. "Chidhar, the Prophet ever-young Thus loosed the bridle of his tongue. "I journeyed by a goodly Town, Beset with many a garden fair, And asked of one who gathered down Large fruit, 'how long the Town was there He spoke, nor chose his hand to stay, 'The town has stood for many a day, And will be here for ever and aye.' "A thousand years passed by and then I went the self-same road again. "No vestige of that Town I traced,-- But one poor swain his horn employed,-- His sheep unconscious browsed and grazed, I asked 'when was that Town destroyed?' He spoke, nor would his horn lay by, 'One thing may grow and another die, But I know nothing of Towns--not I.' "A thousand years went on and then I passed the self-same place again. "There in the deep of waters cast His nets one lonely fisherman, And as he drew them up at last I asked him 'how that Lake began?' He looked at me and laughed to say, 'The waters spring for ever and aye, And fish is plenty every day.' "A thousand years passed by and then I went the self-same road again. "I found a country wild and rude, And, axe in hand, beside a tree, The Hermit of that Solitude,-- I asked 'how old that Wood might be?' He spoke, 'I count not time at all, A tree may rise, a tree may fall, The Forest overlives us all,' "A thousand years went on and then I passed the self-same place again. "And there a glorious City stood, And 'mid tumultuous market-cry, I asked 'Where rose the Town? where Wood Pasture and Lake forgotten lie?' They heard me not, and little blame,-- For them the world is as it came, And all things must be still the same. "A thousand years shall pass, and then I mean to try that road again." Lord Houghton, _after Rückert_. "What a modern talks of by the name, Forces of Nature, Laws of Nature; and does not figure as a divine thing; not even as one thing at all, but as a set of things, undivine enough,--saleable, curious, good for propelling steam-ships! With our Sciences and Cyclopædias, we are apt to forget the _divineness_, in those laboratories of ours. We ought not to forget it! That once well forgotten, I know not what else were worth remembering."--Carlyle. _Heroes_. "Two worlds, the one intellectual, the other sensual, were equally given to us from the beginning, and all attempts to deduce them from one principle (except the Deity) have failed."--Von Feuchtersleben. "What am I? how produced? and for what end? Whence drew I being? to what period tend? Am I th' abandon'd orphan of blind chance? Dropped by wild atoms in disorder'd dance? Or from an endless chain of causes wrought, And of unthinking substance, born with thought? By motion which began without a Cause, Supremely wise, without design or laws."--Arbuthnot. "Pouvoir c'est vouloir."--_Guesses at Truth._ "If only once weird Time had rent asunder The curtain of the Clouds, and shown us Night Climbing into the awful Infinite Those stairs whose steps are worlds, above and under, Glory on glory, wonder upon wonder!... "Ah! sure the heart of Man, too strongly tried By Godlike Presences so vast and fair, Withering with dread, or sick with love's despair, Had wept for ever, and to Heaven cried, Or struck with lightnings of delight had died! "But he, though heir of Immortality, With mortal dust too feeble for the sight, Draws thro' a veil God's overwhelming light; Use arms the Soul--anon there moveth by A more majestic Angel--and we die!" Frederick Tennyson. SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER VI. The two last Chapters are intended to be read consecutively, but are formally separated in order to mark the transition of Argument. If this is borne in mind, and the line of thought pursued continuously, there will appear to be little need for further elucidation. The main object of the present Chapter is to distinguish the physical chain of Sequency from Causation properly so termed. In other words to divide the World, as we see it, into two spheres; the Mechanical and the Personal. The former is characterized by invariable Sequency. The latter by Causation, and by causal interference with the mechanical chain of antecedent and consequent. Inferences are drawn from these contrasted facts. _Analysis._--Causation not explained by any of the empirical sciences. Time accounts for nothing. Explicit statements of scientific men on the subject. "Inquire elsewhere." This is one good reason for the study of Natural Theology. Only one kind of true Cause known to us by Experience. Distinction between a true Cause and the invariable antecedent of an invariable consequent. Antecedent enters Chain of natural sequency; Cause does not. Cause must account for the several links of Chain, for the connection between those links, and for the entire Chain considered as a Whole and Unity in Nature. This position illustrated and investigated. How grasped by the young mind. Its verification. Known facts of Causation result in the Unknowable; a condition which attaches to the most certain of all truths. Personality a case in point. Another case that of alterations caused by Volition in chains of Natural Sequency. Common-sense allowances made for this last fact. Application _à fortiori_ to the Divine Personality. Presumption for miracles; its nature and limits. Intervention does not destroy Order and Unity. Hence we distinguish two possible kinds of Evidence, from,-- 1. General Order of World. 2. Occasional variation. Both leading up to a Supreme causal Personality. CHAPTER VI. CAUSATION. This sixth Chapter occupies a totally different sphere of Thought from the one preceding it. Instead of examining the world as it now is, we shall inquire what its present existence necessarily presupposes. Time, in the ordinary meaning of the word, is no factor in our calculation. We have to deal with Time's antecedents. These words sound like a long farewell to our companion and auxiliary,--Natural Science! Geology, Palæontology, Astronomy, are unanimous in telling us of periods immeasurably remote. But, they are all silent on two more distant and profound subjects--a Beginning and an Eternity. In the world best known to us, vast cycles--each comprehending many ages of life--- point back to preceding cycles made up of ages more numerous still, during which the world was absolutely void of life. Upon that primæval fabric, are graved long records of changes beyond the reach of Thought. A single epoch,--the era when our globe, an incandescent mass of matter, was cooling in its flight,--is alone sufficient to exhaust all our imaginative powers. Did water first surround the glowing orb as a heated vapour? Did clouds first descend upon it like a fiery rain-storm? Suppose some sentient creature floating through ether to look upon the unformed world,--how wild, how weird must have been the spectacle! How different from what earth and ocean may appear to any similar Intelligence now. Science discoursing upon such topics is more poetical than the most sublime poetry. And the science that does speak of them is the widest of all sciences, After certain cycles of ages, the Biologist hands us over to the Mineralogist and the Chemist. After certain other cycles, we give up those guides in turn; and gauge nature by measuring mass, speed, force, comparing our own orb with kindred orbs, and trying to collect what the comparison can say respecting the earliest conditions of the Universe. But, all this is no answer to our proposed question concerning Time's antecedents. "The territory of physics" says a well-known physicist, "is wide, but it has its limits from which we look with vacant gaze into the region beyond."[211] And these words are evidently true. Time serves, in this respect, as the index of our incapacity. We travel back from the period of Man to the period of a ferny coal field, a trilobite or an Eozoon, and from thence to the period when nebulous light-masses shone out through illimitable space. No doubt, when we have learned to contemplate such vapoury states of attenuated matter, we have learned a great deal. Modern analysis finds in them the elementary constituents of our own planetary system; the same elements which glow with greater apparent brilliancy in our Sun. But this is not all. To the sober eye of science, those fires, which burned before stars were kindled, display in their splendours materials entering into the composition of our transitory frames; materials required continually by our bodies and by our productive arts. We live, if modern science may be trusted, by the assimilation of elements now shining in the celestial sphere; elements which glittered there through long cycles of ages before our Earth was. And we employ the same elements in the common industries of civilisation.[212] This bewildering thought seems to link us with that Sun, which is the glory of our day, with those wandering lamps which make night beautiful; and with all the hosts of heaven, which have always fascinated the upward gaze of man, and have sometimes won his heart to worship them. The more overwhelming these thoughts appear, the grander is the emphasis of our yet unanswered question. We have seen that we are able to travel backwards--not in fancy, but in reason--from era to era, however incalculable the measurement of each era may be; and, when our travels have reached their utmost goal, we find the marvellous Continuity of Nature still unbroken. And this very fact, is, in itself, a sufficient proof that we have not approached Time's antecedents. What we have really done, is to carry the Present with us into an immeasurably distant Past. We know not yet what is presupposed by both,--we cannot say what went before them. It is _very_ important for us to be thoroughly clear upon the result. For there is a sort of unreflecting idea afloat, that if vast periods of Time are conceived, the whole Universe is conceived also. All seems explained, since everything may come to pass in Time! So it may, in _one_ sense. Time gives opportunity; but then there must be a moving power[213] to work _in_ the opportunity. Let it therefore be distinctly borne in mind, that Time causes nothing. To dispense with a spring of action, is to imagine that Time will stop the river's flow, or that the river will stop without a cause in time:-- "Rusticus expectat, dum defluat amnis; at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum." In reality, Time accounts neither for good nor for evil, neither for the end nor yet for the beginning of any single work. And the same is true respecting any chain, however long, made up of antecedents and consequents, however numerous. We see in them movements propagating movements; but then we are obliged to ask, what moved the first of them? The reader may remember Professor Huxley's picture of a cosmic vapour, from a knowledge of which a sufficient Intelligence might have predicted our present world. Looking further, we find this cosmic vapour to be composed (as he says) of molecules possessing forces or properties; in other words, what he really described was a potential Universe; not a Cause, but an already caused production. What, then, caused it? It was not the Professor's business,--nor is it the business of any Physiologist or of any Physicist, to explain what lies beyond the territories of his science. Consequently he does _not_ account for the existence of this "primitive nebulosity." The "sufficient Intelligence" is only spoken of a possible interpreter or prophet. And Professor Huxley is right and wise in his reticence. Professor Tyndall is equally wise and right in telling us that "Science knows much of this intermediate phase of things that we call nature, of which it is the product; but science knows nothing of the origin or destiny of nature."[214] There is always a rightness and wisdom in stating a limit, and an issue, _distinctly_. No one endowed with clearness of vision, will think the Universe as likely to be adequately accounted for by an eternal nebula, as by an eternity of Mind. No one will exactly state to himself, the meaning of such words as Chance, Time, Law, and others of a like description; and, with those meanings _in remembrance_, pronounce that any or all of them can explain the origin of anything. But by popular lecturers and article-makers, immeasurable series of conditions are sometimes mentioned in a manner which almost implies that, because immeasurable, the speaker or writer supposes that such conditions may possibly be creative. Any reader of current literature will scarcely need reminding, that most modern _savants_ usually acquiesce in, and feel burdened by, a sense of "the Inscrutable." And therefore, when summing up the results of scientific truth, they honestly and consistently reduce their disciples to an _alternative_,--an alternative of which no disciple of any special science ought reasonably to complain. Choose, they tell him, between confessing, "here is the Incomprehensible--here I rest;" or, if you please, endeavouring to "find other means of knowledge, which we do _not_ pretend to furnish." This is no more than to say, and say fairly, "Be satisfied with such information as we can give,--or, if you please, inquire elsewhere." And this seems reasonable; for who would assert that a Professor of Poetry ought to give competent instruction in the Calculus? We may assume that every student of Natural Theology has made up his mind to "inquire elsewhere." And it is the part of an earnest man so to do. Were not the Future linked to the Present, we all might feel less earnest, less persevering, less anxious for inquiry. Yet, if there be a Future beyond our Present, we at once perceive a weight of reason beyond all powers of estimate, _why_ such a connecting chain must certainly exist. All our experience, every argument from analogy, and all morality, fall into one and the same scale. But of this, more hereafter. There is no doubt that our wisdom and our duty coincide with our natural instincts, in bringing us to this resolution. We may not be able to learn _all_ we could wish of that Future which follows our present; but what we can truly learn is to us a treasure beyond price. Let us, therefore, proceed as fellow-pilgrims in the search. It is an undeniable fact--one amongst the hard and actual facts which life teaches--that, in the whole of our experience, we never know of more than one kind of cause,--a cause, that is, in the true sense of _originating_ any event or series of events. Nothing can be more certain as respects our knowledge of the material world. From this point of view, Sir J. Herschel describes Brown's book on "Cause and Effect" as "a work of great acuteness and subtlety of reasoning on some points, but in which the whole train of argument is vitiated by one enormous oversight; the omission, namely, of a _distinct and immediate personal consciousness of causation_ in his enumeration of that _sequence of events_, by which the volition of the mind is made to terminate in the motion of material objects. I mean the consciousness of _effort_, accompanied with _intention thereby_ to accomplish an end, as a thing entirely distinct from mere _desire_ or _volition_ on the one hand, and from mere spasmodic contraction of muscles on the other."[215] This causation we experience continually. A heavy stone falls from a wall, and kills a man. No one threw it. We say it fell--or, as a physicist might express it, obeyed the law of gravitation. But we may remember that from the tower of Thebez "a certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech's head and all to break his scull." We form quite a different opinion of this event. We say, here is a case in which "the volition of the mind is made to terminate in the motion of a material object." Some might accuse, others excuse, the woman of Thebez; but all would argue that she caused the death of Abimelech. Your boy wants to beat a chair which has fallen upon him; you tell him why he must not, and all you say is sound philosophy. He also wants to kill his cat for devouring his canary bird; and again you philosophize correctly. But, suppose your young philosopher for his own pleasure wrings his canary bird's neck? The chair fell by mechanical law--the cat obeyed the law of her hungry instinct--but your boy is culpable. He was the true cause of his own cruel act,--in a word he was responsible. And this same truth of Causation, involved in Responsibility, and constituting one of its necessary factors, is like Mind in Mr. Mill,--a truth which we _must_ accept--inexplicable, but unquestionably real. We _know_ that Will is a Cause,--and we do _not_ actually know of any other cause in the wide Universe. The fact comes home to us in a variety of ways. Was Thurtell the cause or the physical antecedent of Weare's death? If not the cause, we ought never to think him, or any murderer, slaver, torturer, or tyrant, at all in the wrong; neither can we hold them in any manner responsible. Let the reader put this case to himself in as many different shapes as he can. The result will always come to the same issue. We may suppose a Nebula, Law, Force, so arranged as to be the physical antecedent of a world. And nothing can be more marvellous than the idea of such an arrangement! But we cannot imagine any existence really causing an effect, save one,--a Will. Therefore, if we wish to go beyond Nebula, Law, or Force, which are merely physical antecedents,--and ask what caused one or all of them, we are obliged (so far as we are disciples of experience) to say their Cause was a Will. And when we say this, we allege _a sufficient reason_. A few paragraphs back, we availed ourselves of the authoritative verdict pronounced by scientific thinkers, on the question of what is, and what is not, from their point of view, knowable. And we saw _where_ physics terminated,--that is, in a _Nebula_. This is their _limit_. Yet, there is nothing to hinder a physicist from becoming also a Natural Theologian. It is not every man who will rest in a negative conclusion. Professor Baden Powell was among the malcontents in this respect; and we desire now to quote from his writings some passages referred to in the argument of a former Chapter. But before doing so, it would be unfair to conceal that a tribute of gratitude appears due to writers who mark the boundary of their own thought, however little we ourselves desire to stay acquiescently within its limitations. There is honesty in their act;--there is an incitement for other men to try out their lines of thinking also. Finally, all such writers are unexceptionable witnesses to the interest and reality belonging to a separate science of Natural Theology. In all these respects, they occupy a totally different position from the indifferentist or sneering sceptic; and it would be injustice to confound such broad distinctions of moral aspect. With this acknowledgment let us return to Baden Powell. In his "Connexion of Natural and Divine Truth"[216] he writes thus:-- "The study of _physical causes_ (understood _in the simple meaning_ which we have before endeavoured to fix,) while it supplies the unassailable evidence of design and adjustment, as unavoidably carries us thence onward to the idea of an Intelligence from which that design emanated, and of an agency by which that adjustment was produced. It brings us, in a word, to recognise an influence of another kind, of an order _different from_, and far above that of _physical causes_ or material action:--to acknowledge a sublime _moral cause_, the universally operating source of creative power and providential wisdom.[bd]... We have already noticed, in other cases, the ambiguities arising from the diversity of meaning attached to the same term "cause." Here, then, it becomes more peculiarly necessary if we adopt the popular expression, "the First Cause," to recur carefully to the distinction, if we would preserve any clearness of reasoning. "We refer to senses of the term absolutely distinct _in kind_. Nor is it a term of mere verbal difference. It is of importance, whether in guarding against fallacies in evidence or in answering the cavils of scepticism.... When we ascend to the contemplation of creative intelligence, the distinction is not between a prior and a subsequent train of material action, but between _physical order_ and _moral volition_. It will thus be apparent that the metaphor so often used of the _chain_ of natural causes _whose last and highest link_ is its immediate connexion with the Deity;--the very phrase of a succession of _secondary_ causes traced up to a _first cause_,--and the like, (so commonly employed,) are founded on a totally mistaken analogy. "If we retain such metaphorical language at all, it would be a more just mode of speaking to describe the Deity as the Divine artificer of the whole chain,--not to connect Him with its links;--to represent the secondary causes as combined into joint operation by His power and will,--but not to make Him one of them." And again;--"If we require the aid of metaphor in attempting to give utterance to those vast conceptions with which the mind is overpowered, instead of speaking of the first and secondary links in a chain of causation, and the like, let us rather recur to the analogy of the _arch_ (before introduced,) and we shall be adopting at once a more just and expressive figure, and shall here run no risk of speaking as if we confounded the stones with the builder,--their mutually supporting force with the skill of the architect who adjusted them."[217] What Baden Powell called "physical causation," is now more commonly known as invariable antecedency, or invariable succession. Antecedents and consequents are phenomena of the natural world,--and the connection between them is their _Law_. Now, suppose we take the Alphabet to represent a series of these antecedents and consequents, the latter invariably following the former; it does not, (as far as argument goes,) in the least signify what the series really is, any more than when we calculate algebraically. But to make things plain, let the Alphabet represent 26 cycles of succession; each cycle containing as many millions of years, or ages, as you choose to grant for the duration of the Natural Universe. We may state the problem thus,--the _law_ of succession being assumed in our series as constant. If we have Z, there certainly must have been Y, and _conversely_;-- If there were no Y, there cannot possibly be Z. We go on,-- If Y, then certainly X; If no X, then Y is impossible. As we know Z in fact, we get back to Y; and, as we find Y, we retrogress to X. And the retrogression continues, say till we reach B,-- If B, certainly A; If no A, then B is impossible. But, what are we to say of A? If A then certainly--_what_? If no _what_?--then A is impossible. It does not signify how far the chain of physical law may extend. From its very essence and definition, you must arrive finally at a first link. Or, in other words, the Continuity of Nature may go back through Time immeasurable,--Time will after all lead you to Time's antecedents. And when you have arrived at your first link, and inquire _what_ must necessarily have preceded Time, it is well to consider the _sort_ of account which alone you can accept, _because_ it alone will _sufficiently_ satisfy your reason. You want, then, something which properly accounts first for A; _next_ for the link between A and B; and _thirdly_, by consequence, for the whole Alphabet. If, with this statement in mind, the reader turns back to the extracts made from Powell, he will see the force of several points strongly put by the Professor. He will see, for example, how inevitably _physical_ causation carries us back to _another_, and very _diverse_ Causation,--diverse in _kind_--not simply different in degree. Also, how the idea of Cause in this latter sense, takes us quite _out_ of the physical nexus. And, further, that the only admissible Conception of a First Universal Cause, must be a conception of something which will not only bring about A, but likewise _account_ for the entire series, linked together and consecutive, into one resulting _Whole_. For the Whole itself; in brief for the Many and the One. We have now to ask further, what Facts can tell us respecting these two kinds of Causation. And let us again employ our letters, but rather in a different way. Suppose P stands for a fact, which may also be described as a natural phenomenon. To account for P we go back to O, retrogress to N, M, and so on, as shewn already. Again, suppose another fact which cannot be described as a natural phenomenon. Let us try whether P may, with equal propriety, stand for a human production or performance. That is--whether, instead of being a mere _phenomenal_ fact, it may also be spoken of as an _act_. We want then to account for P, _thus_ considered. A striking circumstance appears at once evident, that to find the "_why_" of human activity we do not look to any antecedent;--we look to a _consequent_, or a series of consequences. The question we ask is,--with what _view_ P became an act? In other words, we try to account for P, _not_ by _O_, _N_, _M_, etc., but by _Q_, _R_, _S_, etc. For example: let P represent a murder. The crime was done for the sake of money, and for things which money will purchase; that is, the _consequents_,--_Q_, _R_, _S_, and so on, forming a series designed;--gains and purposes, long or short. But, no one would say that _another_ series _foregoing_ (O, N, M) _necessitated the act_;--that they were the _certain antecedents of a necessary consequent_ (P) _the murder_. If it were so, we should have to congratulate the murderer for having been _forced_ into so profitable a performance, and we should also have to leave him in the peaceable enjoyment of his profits. Acts, therefore,--or _volitional_ facts--move _forwards_ through a series of _consequents_; while phenomena--that is, _physical_ facts--run backwards through a series of _antecedents_. If pressed to find a Cause for an act, we are never in a position to say,-- If P, then certainly O; If no O, then P is impossible. We say, on the contrary, that the _Cause_ of the act was _Volitional_,--that is, it was done by an _agent or person acting_. And further, that the _consequents_ (Q, R, S, etc.) represent the _purpose_ of the actor or agent, and that he is responsible for having adopted them as his prevalent motives or inducements. But from these necessities of thought which hold alike as abstract truths, and in practical experience, several inferences follow:-- A volitional cause or agent, may stand before a series of consequents;--but cannot be ranged after such a series. Our series represented by the Alphabet, was taken to be a series of _invariable sequency_. That is, each factor (letter) presupposed antecedents, which _necessitated_ every factor in succession. Therefore we cannot represent any agent or volitional Cause, by an element (or letter) of that series at all. Nor yet his act. It follows on no such chain of antecedents. It is done _in view_ of certain consequents. If, therefore, we ask what can be conceived respecting the causation of the Universe,--its cause must (as Powell says), be placed absolutely outside and prior to the whole series. In other words,--a volitional or First cause can never belong to the physical chain of antecedent and consequent, bound together by natural law. And the reason is plain: in no true sense can such Cause ever be a necessary consequent at all. Such a Cause calls into existence, not only A, but the whole consecutive alphabet, representing cycles of millions of ages. Not the world's primæval state alone,--- but the whole law-connected Universe. Thus, First Cause, and Secondary cause, apply not to difference of sequency alone,--but to an _intrinsic and essential distinction_. And, this distinction is so vast, that between the World's First Cause, and any given Secondary cause, there is fixed a gulf of separation as wide as the whole potential Universe. Another way of looking at the subject of Causation may appear simpler to some minds. Let the reader recal the problems of Idealism and Realism already discussed. He will also remember what Mr. Masson calls "the paramount result" to Mill and Hamilton alike;--the inevitable persuasion all men have of their own distinctness from an external world of things and persons surrounding them. With this accepted result in remembrance, let the reader ask himself the further question, _how_ he became originally impressed with the grand division of that world of objectivity,--how he first separated _Persons_ from _Things_? He will account for the conception in some such way as this:--As a child, he was injured both by his nurse and his nursery table. He discovered that the table had been placed where it stood; but that his nurse struck him with a passionate intention of compelling him to obey her, against his own will. And, thus, in the succession of little troubles and events perpetually going on, he learned to distinguish them all into two broad classes: events dependent on previous circumstances, such as the position of the table; and events productive of intentional consequences, such as the ill temper of his nurse. The first class of events he could _control_ by a change of outside conditions;--he could either move the table or keep his body out of its way. But, the nurse he had to humour and conciliate; and he soon found, to his cost, that very often his efforts to win her favour were unavailing, because her temper was so very, very bad. And this whole process of Childish reasoning became confirmed in after life by his practical reason, and verified by finding it work well every day. The child who thus ceases to blame the table for hurting him, but blames the temper of the nurse, is the "father of the Man," who praises or blames only when he discovers a true _cause_; and steadily ascribes _Causation_ to a _Will_. And, employ what words we choose, this causative power is the grand tenable distinction between Persons and Things. And no amount of refined theory will ever induce us to act upon any other supposition. We remain fixed in our belief that a true Cause must, without exception, be always a true Personality. It is worth while observing, likewise, with what emphasis of words, mankind marks its sense of this fact. We all say that we see such and such a _cause_,--or such and such a _will_ at work. And the energy of expression is justified by analysis. For, when we see an orange or a cathedral, what we really perceive through our eye, may be summed as coloured surface, outline, light and shade. And seeing this, we say that we see the _solid_;--that is, seeing effects, we maintain that we see the cause. Moreover, this is true, if we remember that seeing is a compound process; the eye of the mind looking _through_ the eye of the body. And we ventured to use the same language in our last chapter, and also to justify it, when we spoke of seeing the Intelligible. The man, therefore, is not far wrong who says that he sees God everywhere. Look at the subject in whatever point of view we will,--as an abstract question--as a calculable problem--or an affair of plain common sense,--the result must finally come to one and the same thing. There can be no Cause,--no First to stand before (not in) the series of sequences, except a Being, Will, Personality. Now as a matter of truth, there must necessarily exist some sufficient account of the Universe. Physical Science is right to speak of it as unknowable[218] by Physical investigation. It cannot lie _in_ the physical series,--it must stand _prior_ to the whole. It admits of no antecedent; but the sum of all existence is its consequent. Therefore, the sufficient account is a first Being, Will, and Personality. We must accept the result and acknowledge its truth, because it is an inevitable fact, if the question is argued upon the ground of other facts practically known, and not of theory, conjecture, or supposed possibilities. But it involves theoretical difficulties which we must acknowledge to be inexplicable. We cannot, however, forget that many other truths and matters of fact are inexplicable also.[219] A circumstance equally true, and equally incapable of theoretical explanation, may be stated as follows. If we revert, once more, to our representative letters of the alphabet, it will be recollected that the letter P was taken to represent a crime,--a murder for the sake of gain. P had for its consequents _Q_, _R_, _S_, but did not depend on the antecedents _O_, _N_, _M_; it was introduced extraneously into the series. In other words, the crime entailed a number of _effects_, which had in reality been premeditated by the murderer; while, _in itself_, it was to be _accounted_ for only as the act of a Volitional Cause or Agent. And the remarkable point to us now, is the circumstance that such a _designed series of events_ can thus be introduced into the order of nature by _man's spontaneous choice_. These determinations are in fact alterations in the ordinary course of Nature; and contradictions of its absolutely invariable sequency.[be] This fact, again, appears to be theoretically inexplicable, yet is practically true; and we _verify_ its truth by determinations of the deepest interest and importance to our individual selves. Sometimes, men almost stand aghast at the consequences of choosing obstinately; and, through years of sorrow, accuse their own, and their friends' pertinacity. Possibly, the difficulty in theory may be in some degree softened by the admissions of physical philosophers,--inventors and craftsmen of all sorts,--respecting the considerable _allowance_ to be made for "functioning" their abstract calculations. The necessity of such allowance distinctly proves, that, even in the most exact of applied sciences, pure theory and practical result do not commonly coincide. And, when we look to the concerns of human society, it must be confessed that no amount of sovereign power, insight of statesmen, or experience grounded on precedent or on knowledge of mankind, does away with the absolute necessity of allowing what is called a "_margin_" for the actual working of any law, scheme, contrivance, or political constitution. Speculative people are apt to find this truth verified to their cost and disappointment; and, perhaps, one reason for the general success of English administrators in government and colonization, is their habit of making _very large_ allowances throughout all the practical arrangements. In managing the world, they consider the _non-calculable_ element of Will,--and allow for the way in which it breaks in, with sometimes tremendous effect, upon the otherwise regular current of affairs. But if this be true of the _human_ Will, what ought to be said of the _Divine_? If we, with our limited power and understanding, can thus interrupt many series of events in our world, what shall we say concerning the Volitional Cause of the whole Universe? Concerning a Personality, which was before the chain of phenomenal antecedent and consequent began, and Which (as we have shewn must hold true of a First Cause), actually willed the whole _as a whole_, and arranged the end from the beginning? Recurring to our selected figure of the Alphabet, this primary Will, this incomprehensible Person is, in our view, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, and beside Him there is none other.[220] So far, therefore, as a consideration of the world goes, and of mankind as existing in the world, arguments from analogy would lead to some positive expectation of Miracles. Our belief in the Uniformity of Nature does not exclude them; and our practical experience gives rise to a _probability_ of their occurrence. When, however, we lift up our eyes to the Divine Mind as Supreme Reason, Miracles appear to us inconceivable without an adequate occasion. For we ourselves strive to act on _true_, _fitting_, and _reasonable_ grounds of purpose; and shall we think less of Him, "Who teacheth Man knowledge"? But to pursue this last topic as it deserves, would carry us away from the domain of Natural Theology, and into that of Theology true and proper. Our business has lain with the Natural world, human nature itself included. And in examining the successional chain, we have perceived that it is not forged of Adamant. Yet there is so much connection and unity running throughout it, that we may with the greatest justice speak of the _order_ and _course_ of nature. And, perhaps the _highest_ kind of evidence to the being and attributes of God conceivable by us, lies in the concurrence of _two_ separate kinds of proof; both resting on the reality of Divine _causation_ viewed _relatively_ to the World we inhabit. The one,--when we trace (as in this Chapter we have shewn that men ought to trace), the chain of natural sequence up to a Personal First Cause. The other,--when we find reason to believe that the First Cause and Creator of the world, has seen fit to interfere with its orderly course in a manner which distinguishes His intervention from our common every-day experience. For such intervention, _we_ could probably conceive no greater fitness, no nobler occasion, than the purpose of raising Men above themselves, and assuring them that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in their Philosophies. And what human dream, vision, or philosophy, could ever have foreseen the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him? FOOTNOTES: [211] Tyndall's _Earlier Thoughts_; in his _Essays_, p. 72. Dr. Tyndall is never weary of repeating this useful truth, and we may honour him for so doing. The following references are to his last very popular work, and in each place the same thought will be found differently expressed according to the difference of subject-matter. _Fragments of Science_, pp. 93, 105, 121, 163, 442. [212] George Stephenson used to watch the speed of his locomotive, and pleasantly remark that he was utilizing the solar heat of the great coal-period. The words were his own. The idea was Herschel's. [213] "Time is no agent, as some people appear to think it, that it should accomplish anything of itself. Looking at a heap of stones for a thousand years, will do no more toward making a house of them, than looking at it for one moment. The cause is obvious. Time, when applied to works of any kind, being only a succession of relevant acts, each furthering the work to be accomplished, it is clear that even an infinite succession of irrelevant, and consequently useless acts, would no more achieve or forward the completion of it, than an infinite number of jumps in the same place would advance one toward a journey's end; for there is a motion without progress, in time as well as space; where that has often remained stationary which appeared to us, in leaving it behind, to have receded."--_Guesses at Truth._ First Ed., pp. 61-2. [214] _Fragments of Science_, p. 442. The passage has been referred to before--and its _pith_ alone is given here--_i.e._ the central sentence. [215] _Astronomy_, Chapter viii. init., note p. 264. Ed. 1850. [216] Page 178, seq. [bd] Compare our summary of Powell's argument on this point, pp. 173-4 _ante_. "We see the necessity of a Moral cause as distinguished from a physical antecedent, when we survey Nature. But Nature does not contain the idea in an _explicit_ shape. She only necessitates its acceptance." [217] Having before quoted at some length from this distinguished Professor, it seems needless to add anything here, except that the same sentiments will be found reasserted in his later works.--See _Spirit of Inductive Philosophy_, pp. 152-3, and 175-9; and compare Chapter II. _ante_, Additional notes D and E, pp. 103-107, where these passages are in part quoted and commented on. [218] Of course, if any man pronounces anything _absolutely_ unknowable, he says virtually, "my knowledge equals the sum total of all knowledge." [219] Every one who writes this word, must feel tempted to ask why such a condition attaches to any truth. This Essay avoids metaphysical inquiries; we must, therefore, rest content with having plainly shewn that it _does_ attach to the _most certain and necessary_ of _all_ truths. [be] The reader may be pleased to recal Professor Huxley's two necessary beliefs--necessary, that is, for making the world we live in less miserable and less ignorant. First, that the Order of Nature is practically ascertainable. Secondly, that our Volition counts for something as a condition in the course of Events. (_Lay Sermons_, p. 159,--already quoted pp. 247 and 8 _ante_.) Evidently, to count for _anything_, Volition must produce _effects_; that is, cause certain _changes_ in the natural order of things. This principle, therefore, is clearly asserted by the Professor,--and its consequences follow by logical necessity, as here deduced. Mr. Huxley's idea of the Order of Nature is also coincident with the view of it taken in this Chapter. The present writer is glad to mark these undesigned coincidences of thought. "Lay Sermons" had not reached him when this Essay was sent to the Oxford Registrar. Neither had he seen the Professor's Article in the Fortnightly Review. _Addition._--The doctrine in most complete antagonism with Mr. Huxley's position is described as follows by Dr. Carpenter:-- "The most thorough-going expression of this doctrine will be found in the 'Letters of the Laws of Man's Nature and Development,' by Henry G. Atkinson and Harriet Martineau. A few extracts will suffice to show the character of this system of Philosophy. 'Instinct, passion, thought, etc., are effects of organized substances.' 'All causes are material causes.' 'In material conditions I find the origin of all religions, all philosophies, all opinions, all virtues, all "spiritual conditions and influences," in the same manner that I find the origin of all diseases and of all insanities in material conditions and causes.' 'I am what I am; a creature of necessity; I claim neither merit nor demerit.' 'I feel that I am as completely the result of my nature, and impelled to do what I do, as the needle to point to the north, or the puppet to move according as the string is pulled.' 'I cannot alter my will, or be other than what I am, and cannot deserve either reward or punishment.'" Carpenter. _Mental Physiology_, p. 4. [220] Horace would have felt himself bewildered by some modern Philosophies. He says:-- "Unde nil majus generatur ipso _Nec_ viget quidquam _simile_ aut _secundum_." CHAPTER VII. RESPONSIBILITY. "The astronomers said, 'Give us matter, and a little motion, and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew.'"--Emerson. _Nature._ "The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all Pagan Mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness of Nature; sincere communion of man with the mysterious invisible Powers visibly seen at work in the world round him.... Such recognition of Nature one finds to be the chief element of Paganism: recognition of Man, and his Moral Duty, though this too is not wanting, comes to be the chief element only in purer forms of religion. Here, indeed, is a great distinction and epoch in Human Beliefs; a great landmark in the religious development of Mankind. Man first puts himself in relation with Nature and her Powers, wonders and worships over those; not till a later epoch does he discern that all Power is Moral, that the grand point is the distinction for him of Good and Evil, of _Thou shalt and Thou shalt not_."--Carlyle. _Heroes._ "Our Religion is not yet a horrible restless Doubt, still less a far horribler composed Cant; but a great heaven-high Unquestionability, encompassing, interpenetrating the whole of Life. Imperfect as we may be, we are here, to testify incessantly and indisputably to every heart, That this Earthly Life, and _its_ riches and possessions, and good and evil hap, are not intrinsically a reality at all, but _are_ a shadow of realities eternal, infinite; that this Time-world, as an air-image, fearfully _emblematic_, plays and flickers in the grand still mirror of Eternity; and man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great."--Carlyle. _Past and Present._ "Goodness and greatness are not means but ends. Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man?--Three treasures, life and light, And calm thoughts, regular as infant's breath; And three firm friends, more sure than day and night-- Himself, his Maker, and the Angel Death." S. T. Coleridge. "Omnia terrena Per vices sunt aliena: nescio sunt cuius; mea nunc, cras huius et huius. Dic, homo, quid speres, si mundo totus adheres; nulla tecum feres, licet tu solus haberes." From "_This World is false and vain_," lines 41-48. "Threefold is the march of Time, The Future, lame and lingering, totters on; Swift as a dart the Present hurries by; The Past stands fixed in mute Eternity. "To urge his slow advancing pace Impatience nought avails, Nor fear, nor doubt, can check his race, As fleetly past he sails. No spell, no deep remorseful throes Can move him from his stern repose. "Mortal! they bid thee read this rule sublime: Take for thy councillor the lingering one; Make not the flying visitor thy friend, Nor choose thy foe in him that standeth without end." _After Confucius_, by Sir. J. Herschel. "The world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of mine own frame that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation. Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders. The earth is a point not only in respect of the heavens above us, but of that heavenly and celestial part within us: that mass of flesh that circumscribes me, limits not my mind: that surface that tells the heavens it hath an end, cannot persuade me I have any: I take my circle to be above three hundred and sixty; though the number of the arc do measure my body, it comprehendeth not my mind: whilst I study to find how I am a microcosm, or little world, I find myself something more than the great. There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun." Sir T. Browne. _Religio Medici._ [Greek: ison de nyktessin aiei, isa d' en hamerais halion echontes aponesteron esloi dedorkanti bion, ou chthona tarassontes en cheros akma oude pontion hydôr keinan para diaitan; alla para men timiois theôn, hoitines echairon euorkiais, adakryn nemontai aiôna'.... ..... entha makarôn nasos ôkeanides aurai peripneois in, anthema de chrysou phlegei, ta men chersothen ap' aglaôn dendreôn, hydôr d'alla pherbei hormoisi tôn cheras anaplekonti kai kephalas.] Pindar. _Olymp._ II. "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God! O Duty! if that name thou love Who art a Light to guide, a Rod To check the erring, and reprove; Thou who art victory and law When empty terrors overawe; From vain temptations dost set free; From strife and from despair; a glorious ministry. * * * * * "I, loving freedom, and untried; No sport of every random gust, Yet being to myself a guide, Too blindly have reposed my trust: Resolved that nothing e'er should press Upon my present happiness, I shoved unwelcome tasks away; But thee I now would serve more strictly, if I may. "Through no disturbance of my soul, Or strong compunction in me wrought, I supplicate for thy controul; But in the quietness of thought: Me this uncharter'd freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance desires: My hopes no more must change their name, I long for a repose which ever is the same. "Yet not the less would I throughout Still act according to the voice Of my own wish; and feel past doubt That my submissiveness was choice: Not seeking in the school of pride For 'precepts over dignified,' Denial and restraint I prize No farther than they breed a second Will more wise. "Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear The Godhead's most benignant grace: Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face; Flowers laugh before thee on their beds; And Fragrance in thy footing treads; Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong; And the most ancient Heavens through Thee are fresh and strong. "To humbler functions, awful Power! I call thee: I myself commend Unto thy guidance from this hour; Oh! let my weakness have an end! Give unto me, made lowly wise, The spirit of self-sacrifice; The confidence of reason give; And in the light of truth thy Bondman let me live!" Wordsworth. _Poems_, 1807. SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER VII. The object of this Chapter is to shew that the universally enforced maxim of Responsibility unites in itself _two_ factors. (1.) A true power of Causation, as explained in Chapter VI. (2.) A moral distinction of Right and Wrong. This _second_ element of Responsibility is next investigated, and the Moral antithesis shewn to be inalienable. Right can never be Wrong, nor Wrong ever Right. Justice must certainly prevail at last. From the connection of Morality with Causation, it may be inferred that the moral Law has its ultimate existence in a Supreme Personality--a just and sovereign God. This conclusion is verified. Human life and Human death read us the same lesson. _Corollary._--If the conclusion just drawn be accepted, and to know God be Life Eternal, we may also infer an _à priori_ probability of some Supernatural assistances, intended to strengthen our human weaknesses and diminish our ignorance. This latter purpose would seem likely to include a better aid to happiness, and a more complete code of Moral Maxims. _Analysis._--As a social fact, Responsibility is universal, and accounted inalienable by any individual man. Responsibility involves Causation in the highest sense, together with Moral Sensibility. Attempts to refine away ethical Rightness. An appeal to consciousness proposed:--Distinctness of moral feeling;--and its _Permanence_. Antithesis of Right and Wrong an irreconcileable Antagonism. Contrasted with correlation of Power and Function; this antithesis never fluent, but rigorous, immutable, imperishable, absolute. Ultimate coincidence of Happiness with Virtue is a necessary result of Independent Morality. Moral Law exists conceivably in and by a Will alone; as-- 1. Its cause and spring of movement. 2. Its source of expression and practical authority. Being supreme, it exists in and by a Supreme Moral Will or Personality. That is to say, in and by God. This conception verified. World inexplicable without Man. Man inexplicable without God; Whom to know is Life Eternal. _Corollary._--Supernatural assistance apparently to be expected when Moral Law is viewed as a human endowment proceeding from God. Thus Man is made for God, and God has not made Man in vain. Confirmation from-- 1. Image of Divine Love in Nature. 2. Nature of religious Trust as a Belief of Reason. 3. Incompleteness of our ethical knowledge apart from such assistance. 4. Universal expectation of Mankind. _L'Envoy._ CHAPTER VII. RESPONSIBILITY. Responsibility is the most serious fact of our whole human world. The affairs of life could not go on for a single day if there were no Responsibility. We never release any man from its burden, without incapacitating him, at the same time, alike from business and from enjoyment. We lay it upon childhood, as soon as the child is able to reflect upon his own actions and to choose deliberately;--we do not take it away from a collected and self-controlled age. And every reasonable Man who stands by an open grave, or knows that he is rapidly approaching his own, feels, (above all other pressures,) the unending prospect of Responsibility. Looking at this prospect, we look into our deepest solitude;-- "Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die." None of our fellows, the dear companions of our Soul, can carry our burden then. And though they walk by our side in life, and cheer us with their love, they cannot really bear that burden _now_. And, thus, in the most serious and solemn fact of our existence, we are always isolated and alone. But Responsibility is something better to every one of us than a burden;--it is also an incalculable benefit. A man who has no true sense of responsibility, is an unformed human being;--and, in proportion as we feel it inwardly, and express the feeling by consideration and self-control, we make progress in real manliness. On this account, Responsibility may be pronounced our chief aid in the formation of a manly character. And, probably, among all the sources of human happiness, none yields a more unbroken serenity, than the habitual consciousness of being enabled to act up to the single mark of our responsibilities. When a man has attained such practical wisdom, it "maketh his face to shine." His daily endeavour to do right, instead of causing him anxiety and disquietude, gives a buoyancy to the spirit; which shows itself in a peculiar brightness of countenance, unlike every other cheerful glance and aspect. The beaming faces, with which early Italian artists painted their good men and saintly women, are excellent illustrations of this expressional beauty. Let us consider, through one chapter more, what Natural Theology has to say upon this subject. Responsibility has been shewn to involve, as one of its constituent principles, an idea of _Causation_. It is, also, clear that to hold a man responsible, he must be supposed to possess some power of distinguishing Right from Wrong. In our last chapter, we drew from the principle of Causation certain conclusions regarding the Universal First Cause. We have now to examine the principle of Moral Sensibility. Every one at all acquainted with modern controversy, is aware that few questions have been more keenly mooted, than the _origin_ of moral distinctions among mankind. The debate respecting them has run, for a great part of its course, parallel with that on the origin of our primary intellectual beliefs, alluded to in a former chapter. Neither of these controversies concerns us beyond a certain point. Our business lies with the facts of human nature, rather than with theories concerning any supposed possibilities as to their growth and accretion. But, one caution we suggested respecting the case of intellect, holds good and is important to every moral inquirer. _Let the analyst beware of his alembic!_ There is nothing more easy than to vaporize reality altogether, by way of exalting a philosophy.[221] And in Morality, the result is far worse than in speculation. The distinctive character of our Moral Consciousness is the "essence" which lends to a right action its peculiar fragrance and beauty. Invaluable _per se_, it will surely be found of a nature so delicate and fugitive as to escape the tests of analytic psychologists. Yet when this is fled, the residuum must be worthless to Moral philosophy. The "essence" just mentioned, merits a few minutes' attention. Men have been known to assert that their feeling of appreciation in respect of a very lovely woman, was precisely similar to their appreciation of a handsome horse. No doubt, the right answer is to tell such a man that he is utterly blind to the true loveliness of woman; and does not deserve to call a creature so excellent, his wife. You may, also, point out to him the various distinctive characters of female excellence,--refinement, purity, depth of feeling, self devotion, the noblest heroism, and so on. But if the man has put all his perceptions of diverse excellences into a private alembic, and sublimated them into one of the lowest among æsthetic susceptibilities; no argument will really convince him. The truly bright æsthetic eye--the grander imaginative powers are wanting,--the man is mentally colour-blind. The same truth holds good of theorists who tell us dogmatically that our Moral Sensibility is nothing better than an accretion of baser materials which may be stripped off from each other in the reverse order of their growth, just like the coats of a stalactite or a tulip-root. As may readily be surmised, there is great difference of dogma, when judgment comes to be pronounced on the _moral core_ and _centre_ of the whole. Some are for the needs of society,--some utility in general,--the greater part for individual advantage. Others take theoretically polar directions; and with them, rightness consists either in quietism, or else in self-immolation. Self-approving feelings, (each advocate tells us,) have clustered round his pet growing point; and the clustering has endowed us with all the moral sense we happen to possess. Here again, it is doubtful whether a right answer will convince the experimentalist, bent on turning lead into gold. Yet whether convincing or not, most honest hearts would prompt an indignant rejoinder. The world at large, however, is likely to prove a more successful arbiter. The utilitarian will find that he excites little sympathy even when general utility forms his moral kernel;--and, when it is no more than a personal gain of worldly advantages, he will not improbably be called a rascal. Then "Quietism" can never hope much favour in the busy workshop of the West. Though it may seem strange to some minds, self-immolation has by far the greatest chance of winning suffrages; one chief reason being, that the man who sacrifices his own private advantage, has evidently spurned expediency and selfishness. Even those who think his theoretical views erroneous--and possibly mischievous, will applaud his victory over the meaner passions. Each hour of thought the reader can bestow on moral distinctions, will turn to certain good. At the very least, it must help to form a habit of self-examination. And for this purpose, very simple interrogatories bring out very useful responses. If the reader be a rose grower, let him inquire into his own feelings, when he plucks the fairest flower in his garden, to give fragrance and colour to the sick room of a poor but sensitive little invalid. He will certainly perceive a wide interval between his pleasure in admiring the glowing rose, and his pleasure in adding to the scanty luxuries of the poor sick child. Thus, although a benevolent action be a truly beautiful thing, yet there is a difference between the rose grower's impressions of mere beauty, and of pure benevolence. A difference too between his enjoyment of beauty, and his enjoyment in benevolently resigning to another, the object which charmed him because it was beautiful. Time, also, makes a vast difference between the two emotions. We cannot recal a delicious odour, as truly as we can reproduce a pretty sight before our retrovertive eye. The image of the rose remains, after its sweet fragrance has departed. But much, much longer than either, remains the moral impression graved upon the mind. That little pleasure enjoyed in a brief self-denial, will repeat itself through half a century of years. Permanence is, indeed, one characteristic which demonstrates the paramount excellence of all moral impressions. It is so _difficult_ to repeat to ourselves the sensation of physical pleasure or physical pain, that many writers on pathologic topics speak of it as a thing impossible. Certainly, its greatest vividness is in dreams; and above all, "ægri somnia"--sick visions--seem to possess the strongest reproductive power. It is curious, however, to observe the manner in which dreams themselves put on a moral meaning. Who does not remember Sir W. Scott's lines in the "Lady of the Lake," on the returning phantoms of early youth,--change, loss, and separation? But those phantoms are pale shadows, compared with what we have all felt in our visionary hours,--the consciousness of our own absolute loneliness,--of our death,--of a hopeless, endless isolation. Even the very thought of our spiritual life,[222] as distinguished from mere corporeal life, is terrible to us and hardly to be borne. So overwhelming is the idea of the demand of Justice upon each of us;--the law of human Responsibility. It is remarkable, too, that the most common-sense practical people sometimes feel these impressions the most acutely. One reason may arise from the circumstance, that the spiritually imaginative temperament of such persons is vigorous,--has few occasions of employment; and throws its unexhausted force into those strong "Michel-Angelesque" realizations. Whatever may be thought on this point, there is no truth of our whole Manhood more striking, as well as more evident, than the _independent vitality_ of our Moral Consciousness. Let us suppose, for example's sake, that the reader was once unhappy enough to injure a neighbour, a friend, or relation. Let the injury be something which you in your heart know to be truly injurious;--a thing impossible in your better moments,--but still a thing done. Now, let years elapse, and when the thought recurs and the deed is reacted, you feel how wrongful it was. And when you grow old, and there are few left to love you, the feeling will become far more deep. Put oceans, continents, tropics, between yourself and your injured one; the reality is not at all less real. The same stars no longer look down upon you by night,--the sun does not bring back the same seasons at the same time,--but your act is _Timeless_;--and, though night and day vary, its criminality remains the same. And worst of all,--the injured one may die, whilst no act of reparation may have been performed by you,--no word of love or ruth escaped your lips. The deed is irremediable, and you are the doer of it. Neither Space nor Duration of years can alter the fact. There is a moral mark set upon your conscience; and no human sympathy can heal, nor even alleviate the sorrow. Most likely, you never attempt to explain to others the pain you feel, because were the case another's you would hardly comprehend it yourself. Thousands have gone to the grave, carrying heavy burdens of this kind almost or altogether unsuspected. Exemption from the laws of Time and Space, is perhaps the most _wonderful_ characteristic of our Moral Consciousness. With this solitary exception, we seem to find ourselves in perpetual subjection to those laws. But in the realm of Morals it is the reverse. The endless theoretical contradictions about the Finite and the Infinite, (to which we have more than once alluded,) bear witness to this fact. Morality at once puts the two together;--what in its sphere of commission was a finite crime, is likewise an infinite immorality. We count up our faults as sins; but, when viewed awhile in the light of conscience, they are most burdensome to us as being, not _sins_, but _Sin_. Look at the pre-Christian Eumenides; the last writing of St. John the Evangelist; the confessions of Augustine; and the life of John Bunyan; to which we might add more than one great Oxford life;--and, through them all, the profound sense of Sin underlies every other utterance. Another salient character of the moral sense, actually existing among mankind, may be outlined as follows. We have already considered the manner in which laws appear to human intelligence, as types, ideas, or relations. Amongst them, we paid particular attention to the relativity between Power and Function. And, when viewing these as polar opposites, with a chain or nexus between them, we saw that the opposition was, in a certain sense, _fluent_. Function changed into Power more than once, before each complex process of production became entirely accomplished. Power, in accomplishing its errand, continually was lost, and vanished away in Function. But between Right and Wrong, the opposition is fixed, contradictory, and enduring. Any Logic or Rhetoric which attempts to make the antithesis appear fluent, is justly condemned as special pleading, and the art of an oratorical Sophist. The only question asked of the Sophistical speaker, is whether the error he tries to excuse was wilful, or unintentional; whether it was a mistake, or a confusion of distinctly-opposed moral dictates. So Demosthenes says to OEschines, "Among all other men I observe these principles and these distinctions to prevail. Does any one wilfully do wrong? He is the object of indignation and of punishment. Does any one commit an error unintentionally? He is pardoned, not punished.... All this is established not only in all our jurisprudence, but by Nature herself in her unwritten laws, and in the very constitution of the human mind."[223] And we may all feel quite sure that this is the normal decision of Mankind. Right and Wrong stand out as irreconcileable antagonists, contending for the empire of the world. A man who watches the strife without deep interest, and never mingles in the fray because he thinks its issue immaterial, is no better than a Pessimist. Compare a Duty with a Function, (in the wide sense we assigned to the latter conception,) and two points will at once be evident. First, how strong the contrast, how wide the interval, between the Law of productive work, and the law of moral activity. Secondly, how inextinguishable the contradiction between Right and Wrong. One man undertakes some mechanical utilitarian function, dependent on the pleasure or life of a superior; to whom he is in no other respect bound, nor in any way accountable. Another is a husband, a father, or a son. The object of his natural affection, is also the being to whom his tender offices of devotion are morally due. For different reasons, the daily lives of both these men have become first irksome,--then, very wearisome,--finally, almost odious to themselves. The man of routine goes to visit his ailing superior, and is permitted to enter the sick room. He undraws a curtain and looks upon the face of a dead man. Between the departed and himself, there existed no natural love, nor any acquired hate, neither duty nor demand. The link was simply official, and it is broken. Next month, there will be a new Superior who knows not Joseph. Another subordinate will occupy the post of routine; and, under the circumstances, to be released from the old toil is a sort of happiness. The tedious function of the past is over; and he carries his powers into a more hopeful employment. Yet Man is always something to Man, if both are genuine; and there arise a thousand regretful memories, and thoughts of kindly interchange of gestures, looks, and words. After a time, the last change of all is thought of as a thing to be deplored, but gone by,--a thing simply irremediable. But how different, when the man who has been morally bound--say the son--sees a dead face upturned from his father's pillow! Here is another link of service broken;--service of another kind,--a duty. It is gone, the sick bed attendance, the harass, the vexation, endured with a recalcitrant feeling, and sometimes an openly determined opposition. And how much is gone besides! The feeling of resistance vanishes, when there is no longer a Will to be resisted; the harass and vexation appear unwholesome phantoms. To look on the life of a father or a near friend, after death, is like looking on a moonlighted landscape; its harsher features are lost in lengthening shadow; all that we thought rugged and stern, appears subdued and blended with a thousand fondly-remembered softnesses. A mild and silvery radiance flows over the whole familiar scene;--we gaze and sigh,--and sigh and gaze again. To think of its becoming veiled from our eyes, seems like losing a portion of our own existence. And what more is gone besides? The son's thought, which used to mingle so strangely with his feelings of distaste,--that, some day, he would fill up the measure of that which was consciously lacking in his filial duty and devotion. He has now no power of offering sorrow to obtain the remission of claims unsatisfied, no possibility of saying, "Father, I have sinned"! He would die by inches, if, with each slow degree of mortality he could revoke a short period of the Past. In other concerns of life all beyond human cure is also beyond human care; but this concern is a matter of Right and Wrong. To say the Wrong is irremediable, is to utter the sharpest cry of Remorse,--the last word of a long Despair. It is always thus, when the moral rule intervenes. It is so, when an injured friend dies,--the injurer is fast bound by the crime he has committed. It is so, when the Son thinks he has to face things undone which ought to have been done,--the opportunity of doing them now lost for ever. Inability to remedy a wrong makes our sorrow inextinguishable. And we know by experience, that such a sorrow is unlike every other sorrow. It differs in _kind_ from all trains of ordinary feeling, and seems to belong less to our emotional life than to be a dictate of our sovereign reason. And the moral rule is so. In the eye of Practical Reason which (so far as human nature goes), constitutes our supreme guide, a claim of Morality is absolutely rigorous--absolutely supreme--and if unsatisfied, absolutely inexorable. To suppose anything less, would be to annihilate the whole moral law. For, how can you, or I, or any one, be required to immolate our life, freedom, fortune, or even our ordinary enjoyments, unless the rule be perfectly unyielding; perfectly unchangeable? To be binding _now_,--it must be binding under _all_ circumstances, and binding _always_. If a single claim remain unsatisfied the admission is fatal. Broken once, the law is broken everlastingly. Every man might conceive that his own case was, possibly, just one marked for exception. Who, then, would sacrifice at the altar of Right-doing all earthly goods; undergo chains, ignominy, dungeon-solitude, pain, lingering hopelessness, and death? Who, then, would be able to stand by, and see all these inflictions undergone by one he loves best, when compliance with wrong-doing would surely set the sufferer free? It is the certainty of an equal and unrelenting law, which makes all kinds of endurance possible. If no other reason existed, this one would suffice to prove that, unless human nature is a falsehood, happiness must ultimately coincide with virtue. How distantly removed their final coincidence may be, is a point which can have no influence on the certitude of our knowledge. We speak here, as we speak of parallel lines which cannot meet through infinity;--only we speak the reverse way;--it is for all infinity that virtue must become happiness. If a man will seriously sit down, and try the contrary hypothesis out to himself, he will see that if held true, Morality ceases to be imperial, and Man ceases to be human. The claim of Right is to rule the Universe, entire, and in every part. Before that claim, all knowledge, scientific, phenomenal, inferential, must fail and vanish away. Whatever else be true or untrue, this must be rigorous, unalterable, imperishable truth. Upon this truth, each reasonable being, percipient of it, is required to act in his own individual person. Therefore, in the case of each individual it must hold absolutely true. And thus the moral endowment of Man is not a _general_ sense of Morality; no indeterminate impulse towards excellence floating before him; no mere thought that past generations were made for us, and we for a coming race. What we really know and acknowledge as moral truth, is _each_ Man's strict accountability, individual, isolated, and inalienable. Otherwise, individual rightness cannot be demanded, and individual suffering for conscience-sake must become, in some eyes Utopian,--to most sufferers intolerable. The moral law is therefore supreme, or it would be ineffectual. It is individually specializing, otherwise it could not claim individual obedience. And to be supreme, both in final effect and present empire over each human being, it must obviously be--(as our practical Reason apprehends it)--Universal. To such a sovereignty there is nothing great, nothing small. Time sets no bounds, while Reason beholds in it the ultimate perfection and sum of all that went before it. Towards that complete coincidence of happiness with virtue, the aspiration of good and the sighs of sorrowful souls, have been breathed continually. In its realization alone, can our noblest capabilities be realized. For, there is nothing in this world commensurate with the capacious longings of the human spirit. Here, too often, it droops like a beautiful plant in a strange unkindly soil; and, when it blooms its brightest, we feel that under other influences it might bloom more brightly still. True humanity is marked by its own specific character, as the fit inhabitant of a far more excellent sphere. We ask with some eagerness, how may these things be? And the _primary_ answer to this question lies within the circuit of our knowledge. Our own consciousness, the facts of life, and the reason of the thing, all agree in one result. Moral law exists only in, and for, a Will; and by a Will alone can it be made effectual. In this respect, it resembles the Law of Production, which, apprehended ideally by intelligence, becomes realized by the moving force of Will. Moreover, we have seen that Will is true Causation, and therefore in Will exists the first ground of Movement. We know in fact of no other. Neither is any other Causality conceivable by us, even in hypothesis; and we _think_ this causative power of Will only by knowing its real existence and verifying its workings through their issues. Yet further. The Moral Law, as a sovereign command, is addressed to our Wills; and unless it were the Expression of a Will, we know it could never be executed. The Law would remain a dead letter,--a _thought_ of Intelligence,--an abstract speculation,--ineffective because impractical. Therefore, when we speak of a Supreme Moral law, we speak of a Supreme Moral Will; an idea we sometimes express by true Being, or true Personality. We speak, that is, of God. Experience deepens to us every day the meaning of this final word. In the world of our present habitation, we see a confused mass of striving Wills,--the good and just not always in the ascendant,--rightful commands disregarded,--a sovereign rule not visibly asserted. To affirm the possible continuance of these practical contradictions, would be to deny the ultimate Moral Unity of moral purposes. This Divine consummation is, then, the finality towards which all things must in reason be tending. For even as human nature explains all other nature,--as the Moral Law explains all other law,--so God explains Man. Explains his existence, otherwise inexplicable, by the anticipated victory of Right over Wrong,--and the complete satisfaction of his unsatisfied aspirations. By presenting, that is to say, an adequate object,--a Personality infinitely great and infinitely good,--to the eye of Man's reason,--the desire of his heart,--the striving endeavour, and ceaseless energy of Man's whole essential being;--his affections, his will, his spirit. This elevating thought comes home to each one of us, bringing with it a peace of mind unutterable. We know that the time must come, when thought and memory shall grow faint. Our brain will lose its quick apprehensive motion, and all our bodily powers must sink and languish. Our eyes will refuse to see the faces of those we love; our hands to return their kindly pressure; our nerves to thrill at their voices. But, whosoever has learnt the lesson which God's world, and God's gifts to Man, were meant to teach him, may truthfully say--"My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for Ever." * * * * * _Corollary._--One reflection will probably have occurred to every reader of the last few pages. The rigour of the moral law demonstrates to us the necessary existence of a future state of recompense, and the supremacy of a sovereign Will--a divine Judge. Now, does not this very rigour leave man as hopeless, as if he were altogether without God? Can he ever expect to perform the behests of that pure and perfect Will? This difficulty would appear valid, were there nothing in the idea of God thus given us, to furnish rejoinders, such for example, as the following.--How could the Supreme Judge make any difference between those who are His anxious servants, and those who turn away from His infinite purity with hatred or indifference, if all men were alike overwhelmed in one common failure by reason of an inexorable law? How, again, could He satisfy the aspirations of earnest but half-hopeless human souls, without gathering them to His presence and to Himself? The manner in which such a happiness results to men, may be an enigma, so far as Natural Theology is concerned;--but if so, it is an enigma, of which, those who reason on this ground, may foresee that there will certainly be granted some solution. And we are not left quite in the dark as to _how_ that solution may be found;--a truth we may perceive from the ensuing considerations:-- The moral law is presented to Man's practical reason with all its consequences. The divine Idea, when once apprehended, becomes the object of Man's noblest affections. God, Who graved His law of Right and Wrong upon the conscious will of His creature, wrote also a law of love upon His creature's human heart. Hence we view the Supreme Being, as a God who formed and endowed Man for Himself. It was thus, that Man's nature received its only possible explanation. Hence, also, the sufficient account of a capacity for happiness which this world can never give;--and, along with it, the earnest of its ultimate satisfaction. But these evidences of the Divine finger, prove also a Divine _intention_. The supreme ruler of the Universe has, by them, written upon Man's nature a purpose of making His creature happy. And if so, we cannot but conclude that to the Divine attribute of love, which inspired the glad promise, we may look for its certain fulfilment. In this point of view, a miracle worked for such a moral and spiritual purpose as the ennoblement and blessedness of Humanity, ceases in one sense to be a miracle. It becomes not only credible, but probable. And in reality, any event appears _less improbable_ than that incredible and most unlovely issue,--the self-contradictory thought, that God has made Man in vain. These considerations are drawn from our Moral nature, as just described. There are other considerations at hand to confirm them. In treating the subject of Production, we saw Intelligence involved in every Idea, and preceding every process. When referred to the Universe, Intelligence was necessarily conceived as vast and immeasurable. In order to discern the other attributes of that universal Intelligence, we examined the characteristics of Design apparent in nature, and saw everywhere a spirit of superhuman tenderness breathed over our beautiful world. Thus, if there be any personal relation between the Author of Nature and our race, it ought to be one of trust on our side, demanded by care and beneficence on His. And this feeling is heightened by the charm of lavish kindness,--the prodigality of a love Divine. Again, if we turn to one chapter of this Essay farther back, and bring to mind the rise and progress of our primary beliefs, we cannot but ask ourselves the question, how is it that the first religious idea of the Aryan race--the "Heaven-father"--should coincide with the most typical utterances of our loveliest childhood, and our most advanced manhood, _now_?--Is He really our Father? If so, may we not expect much from His hand? He is a _Person_, not an Abstract Entity,--a Force,--or a Thing. Our Father will give us, not a stone--but bread;--bread from Heaven--bread from Himself. And we see that He giveth liberally, and upbraideth not. This is not all. The rigour of the Moral Law is an irreconcileable Antithesis between Right and Wrong,--a gulf which no human subtlety can bridge. But with all this rigour, it leaves unresolved, to a very considerable extent, one set of doubts perpetually recurring to an honest mind. Is _this_ or _that_ particular point a duty;--is it right or wrong;--or is its observance open to debate? There are obvious reasons, arising from the necessities of moral culture and improvement, why such points should, within certain limits, be indeterminate. This whole topic, however, belongs properly to Natural Religion, a separate subject from Natural Theology. Still, for our present purpose, an important consequence of the inexactness is clear.--It gives rise to a reasonable expectation of some more extensive code not unlikely to be vouchsafed us, harmonizing with, and supplementary to, the law of our moral consciousness. And at every age of Man's history, and throughout every country of his habitation, there always did, in fact, prevail an expectant attitude of mind, looking on all sides for the tokens of Divine Revelation. It was felt also by the wisest, that no human foresight could decide beforehand, what aids to higher knowledge and moral virtue might be given along with it. Certainly, every reasonable idea of the great and good God, formed a ground for hope and confident anticipation of the _Highest_ and the _Best_. * * * * * This Essay has reached its close. May it be permitted its writer to drop the tone of an Essayist, and to say that every word of it has come from his heart? May he likewise ask two favours of the intelligent reader; neither of them he trusts unreasonably onerous? His first request is that the _convergent_ effect of the separate considerations urged in this Essay, may be fairly taken into account. Indeed, the writer once thought of appending a kind of conspectus or "summing up."--But he would thus have added another full chapter to a book which has grown considerably in his hands. Neither might the summary be altogether welcome to the more candid minds amongst those who doubt, yet honestly debate. Most such readers prefer putting results and consilient reasonings into a connected shape for themselves. The writer may however venture on soliciting some special attention to the breadth of field ranged over;--the wide circumference from which his various arguments and illustrations have converged. This point is one of considerable value. Great credit is given to the accordant testimony of witnesses who have come together from distant parts of the world. The _other_ favour requested, is that every person who desires to form a deliberate judgment on the grand topics at issue, will carefully weigh in the balance _what_ alternative he can embrace, if he refuses to be a Theist. An alternative, that is, sufficient to account for the human Will and Reason, for such a world as our own, and for so symmetrical and beautiful a Universe. The system we have advocated on grounds of Reason, asserts that the first Cause of all Things and all Beings known to us, is God. This account alone is sufficingly complete, and coherent. Against it alone, no fatal objection has ever been alleged. And this single fact ought to have a preponderating weight in the balance. * * * * * When finally compared together, the _motives_ of our Choice (as presented by Natural Theology), stand thus:-- If explanations of the Universe explain unequally, _that_ account ought to be chosen which is easiest in itself, explains the most, and is the least self-contradictory. If several explanations appear equal to the deliberative eye, then we must choose the noblest _per se_; and, as Men, we ought to prefer that which is the most elevating, and most germane to Humanity. In it, will be contained the only true Law of human Progress. _Either_ motive of our final Choice--still more, _both_ these motives--will bring us to God; and with reason--"For we are also His offspring." FOOTNOTES: [221] Every reader of Ben Jonson must recal the Alchemical process of "Exaltation":-- "Son, be not hasty, I _exalt_ our med'cine, By hanging him _in balneo vaporoso_, And giving him solution; then _congeal_ him; And then _dissolve_ him; then again _congeal_ him." _The Alchemist_, Act II. Scene i. But who would wish the congelation of our Moral sense? If indeed it could possibly survive the rest of the process. Reading these lines, can any one wonder at the celebrated chemical analysis of bygone days, which ended in discovering an undetermined residuum of dirt? [222] Compare Job iv. 13, seq. [223] De Corona. Sect. 274. The translation in the text is Lord Brougham's, and his note on this passage is worth perusal. Trans. p. 185. THE END. Watson and Hazell, Printers, London and Aylesbury * * * * * Transcriber's Notes Typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variable hyphenation within the text has been standardised, and, where possible, inconsistent use of quotes. Other variations in spelling, accents, and punctuation are as in the original. The author has used recal (instead of recall) throughout. This has not been changed. Italics are represnted thus _italic_. [=u] represents u with a macron. 
505	----	HISTORY OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY IN CHRISTENDOM By Andrew Dickson White Two Volumes Combined To the Memory of EZRA CORNELL I DEDICATE THIS BOOK. Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we Breathe cheaply in the common air.--LOWELL Dicipulus est prioris posterior dies.--PUBLIUS SYRUS Truth is the daughter of Time.--BACON The Truth shall make you free.--ST. JOHN, viii, 32. INTRODUCTION My book is ready for the printer, and as I begin this preface my eye lights upon the crowd of Russian peasants at work on the Neva under my windows. With pick and shovel they are letting the rays of the April sun into the great ice barrier which binds together the modern quays and the old granite fortress where lie the bones of the Romanoff Czars. This barrier is already weakened; it is widely decayed, in many places thin, and everywhere treacherous; but it is, as a whole, so broad, so crystallized about old boulders, so imbedded in shallows, so wedged into crannies on either shore, that it is a great danger. The waters from thousands of swollen streamlets above are pressing behind it; wreckage and refuse are piling up against it; every one knows that it must yield. But there is danger that it may resist the pressure too long and break suddenly, wrenching even the granite quays from their foundations, bringing desolation to a vast population, and leaving, after the subsidence of the flood, a widespread residue of slime, a fertile breeding-bed for the germs of disease. But the patient mujiks are doing the right thing. The barrier, exposed more and more to the warmth of spring by the scores of channels they are making, will break away gradually, and the river will flow on beneficent and beautiful. My work in this book is like that of the Russian mujik on the Neva. I simply try to aid in letting the light of historical truth into that decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the modern world to mediaeval conceptions of Christianity, and which still lingers among us--a most serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the whole normal evolution of society. For behind this barrier also the flood is rapidly rising--the flood of increased knowledge and new thought; and this barrier also, though honeycombed and in many places thin, creates a danger--danger of a sudden breaking away, distressing and calamitous, sweeping before it not only out worn creeds and noxious dogmas, but cherished principles and ideals, and even wrenching out most precious religious and moral foundations of the whole social and political fabric. My hope is to aid--even if it be but a little--in the gradual and healthful dissolving away of this mass of unreason, that the stream of "religion pure and undefiled" may flow on broad and clear, a blessing to humanity. And now a few words regarding the evolution of this book. It is something over a quarter of a century since I labored with Ezra Cornell in founding the university which bears his honored name. Our purpose was to establish in the State of New York an institution for advanced instruction and research, in which science, pure and applied, should have an equal place with literature; in which the study of literature, ancient and modern, should be emancipated as much as possible from pedantry; and which should be free from various useless trammels and vicious methods which at that period hampered many, if not most, of the American universities and colleges. We had especially determined that the institution should be under the control of no political party and of no single religious sect, and with Mr. Cornell's approval I embodied stringent provisions to this effect in the charter. It had certainly never entered into the mind of either of us that in all this we were doing anything irreligious or unchristian. Mr. Cornell was reared a member of the Society of Friends; he had from his fortune liberally aided every form of Christian effort which he found going on about him, and among the permanent trustees of the public library which he had already founded, he had named all the clergymen of the town--Catholic and Protestant. As for myself, I had been bred a churchman, had recently been elected a trustee of one church college, and a professor in another; those nearest and dearest to me were devoutly religious; and, if I may be allowed to speak of a matter so personal to my self, my most cherished friendships were among deeply religious men and women, and my greatest sources of enjoyment were ecclesiastical architecture, religious music, and the more devout forms of poetry. So, far from wishing to injure Christianity, we both hoped to promote it; but we did not confound religion with sectarianism, and we saw in the sectarian character of American colleges and universities as a whole, a reason for the poverty of the advanced instruction then given in so many of them. It required no great acuteness to see that a system of control which, in selecting a Professor of Mathematics or Language or Rhetoric or Physics or Chemistry, asked first and above all to what sect or even to what wing or branch of a sect he belonged, could hardly do much to advance the moral, religious, or intellectual development of mankind. The reasons for the new foundation seemed to us, then, so cogent that we expected the co-operation of all good citizens, and anticipated no opposition from any source. As I look back across the intervening years, I know not whether to be more astonished or amused at our simplicity. Opposition began at once. In the State Legislature it confronted us at every turn, and it was soon in full blaze throughout the State--from the good Protestant bishop who proclaimed that all professors should be in holy orders, since to the Church alone was given the command, "Go, teach all nations," to the zealous priest who published a charge that Goldwin Smith--a profoundly Christian scholar--had come to Cornell in order to inculcate the "infidelity of the Westminster Review"; and from the eminent divine who went from city to city, denouncing the "atheistic and pantheistic tendencies" of the proposed education, to the perfervid minister who informed a denominational synod that Agassiz, the last great opponent of Darwin, and a devout theist, was "preaching Darwinism and atheism" in the new institution. As the struggle deepened, as hostile resolutions were introduced into various ecclesiastical bodies, as honored clergymen solemnly warned their flocks first against the "atheism," then against the "infidelity," and finally against the "indifferentism" of the university, as devoted pastors endeavoured to dissuade young men from matriculation, I took the defensive, and, in answer to various attacks from pulpits and religious newspapers, attempted to allay the fears of the public. "Sweet reasonableness" was fully tried. There was established and endowed in the university perhaps the most effective Christian pulpit, and one of the most vigorous branches of the Christian Association, then in the United States; but all this did nothing to ward off the attack. The clause in the charter of the university forbidding it to give predominance to the doctrines of any sect, and above all the fact that much prominence was given to instruction in various branches of science, seemed to prevent all compromise, and it soon became clear that to stand on the defensive only made matters worse. Then it was that there was borne in upon me a sense of the real difficulty--the antagonism between the theological and scientific view of the universe and of education in relation to it; therefore it was that, having been invited to deliver a lecture in the great hall of the Cooper Institute at New York, I took as my subject The Battlefields of Science, maintaining this thesis which follows: In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and science, and invariably; and, on the other hand, all untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion and science. The lecture was next day published in the New York Tribune at the request of Horace Greeley, its editor, who was also one of the Cornell University trustees. As a result of this widespread publication and of sundry attacks which it elicited, I was asked to maintain my thesis before various university associations and literary clubs; and I shall always remember with gratitude that among those who stood by me and presented me on the lecture platform with words of approval and cheer was my revered instructor, the Rev. Dr. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, at that time President of Yale College. My lecture grew--first into a couple of magazine articles, and then into a little book called The Warfare of Science, for which, when republished in England, Prof. John Tyndall wrote a preface. Sundry translations of this little book were published, but the most curious thing in its history is the fact that a very friendly introduction to the Swedish translation was written by a Lutheran bishop. Meanwhile Prof. John W. Draper published his book on The Conflict between Science and Religion, a work of great ability, which, as I then thought, ended the matter, so far as my giving it further attention was concerned. But two things led me to keep on developing my own work in this field: First, I had become deeply interested in it, and could not refrain from directing my observation and study to it; secondly, much as I admired Draper's treatment of the questions involved, his point of view and mode of looking at history were different from mine. He regarded the struggle as one between Science and Religion. I believed then, and am convinced now, that it was a struggle between Science and Dogmatic Theology. More and more I saw that it was the conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought--the theological and the scientific. So I kept on, and from time to time published New Chapters in the Warfare of Science as magazine articles in The Popular Science Monthly. This was done under many difficulties. For twenty years, as President of Cornell University and Professor of History in that institution, I was immersed in the work of its early development. Besides this, I could not hold myself entirely aloof from public affairs, and was three times sent by the Government of the United States to do public duty abroad: first as a commissioner to Santo Domingo, in 1870; afterward as minister to Germany, in 1879; finally, as minister to Russia, in 1892; and was also called upon by the State of New York to do considerable labor in connection with international exhibitions at Philadelphia and at Paris. I was also obliged from time to time to throw off by travel the effects of overwork. The variety of residence and occupation arising from these causes may perhaps explain some peculiarities in this book which might otherwise puzzle my reader. While these journeyings have enabled me to collect materials over a very wide range--in the New World, from Quebec to Santo Domingo and from Boston to Mexico, San Francisco, and Seattle, and in the Old World from Trondhjem to Cairo and from St. Petersburg to Palermo--they have often obliged me to write under circumstances not very favorable: sometimes on an Atlantic steamer, sometimes on a Nile boat, and not only in my own library at Cornell, but in those of Berlin, Helsingfors, Munich, Florence, and the British Museum. This fact will explain to the benevolent reader not only the citation of different editions of the same authority in different chapters, but some iterations which in the steady quiet of my own library would not have been made. It has been my constant endeavour to write for the general reader, avoiding scholastic and technical terms as much as possible and stating the truth simply as it presents itself to me. That errors of omission and commission will be found here and there is probable--nay, certain; but the substance of the book will, I believe, be found fully true. I am encouraged in this belief by the fact that, of the three bitter attacks which this work in its earlier form has already encountered, one was purely declamatory, objurgatory, and hortatory, and the others based upon ignorance of facts easily pointed out. And here I must express my thanks to those who have aided me. First and above all to my former student and dear friend, Prof. George Lincoln Burr, of Cornell University, to whose contributions, suggestions, criticisms, and cautions I am most deeply indebted; also to my friends U. G. Weatherly, formerly Travelling Fellow of Cornell, and now Assistant Professor in the University of Indiana,--Prof. and Mrs. Earl Barnes and Prof. William H. Hudson, of Stanford University,--and Prof. E. P Evans, formerly of the University of Michigan, but now of Munich, for extensive aid in researches upon the lines I have indicated to them, but which I could never have prosecuted without their co-operation. In libraries at home and abroad they have all worked for me most effectively, and I am deeply grateful to them. This book is presented as a sort of Festschrift--a tribute to Cornell University as it enters the second quarter-century of its existence, and probably my last tribute. The ideas for which so bitter a struggle was made at its foundation have triumphed. Its faculty, numbering over one hundred and, fifty; its students, numbering but little short of two thousand; its noble buildings and equipment; the munificent gifts, now amounting to millions of dollars, which it has received from public-spirited men and women; the evidences of public confidence on all sides; and, above all, the adoption of its cardinal principles and main features by various institutions of learning in other States, show this abundantly. But there has been a triumph far greater and wider. Everywhere among the leading modern nations the same general tendency is seen. During the quarter-century just past the control of public instruction, not only in America but in the leading nations of Europe, has passed more and more from the clergy to the laity. Not only are the presidents of the larger universities in the United States, with but one or two exceptions, laymen, but the same thing is seen in the old European strongholds of metaphysical theology. At my first visit to Oxford and Cambridge, forty years ago, they were entirely under ecclesiastical control. Now, all this is changed. An eminent member of the present British Government has recently said, "A candidate for high university position is handicapped by holy orders." I refer to this with not the slightest feeling of hostility toward the clergy, for I have none; among them are many of my dearest friends; no one honours their proper work more than I; but the above fact is simply noted as proving the continuance of that evolution which I have endeavoured to describe in this series of monographs--an evolution, indeed, in which the warfare of Theology against Science has been one of the most active and powerful agents. My belief is that in the field left to them--their proper field--the clergy will more and more, as they cease to struggle against scientific methods and conclusions, do work even nobler and more beautiful than anything they have heretofore done. And this is saying much. My conviction is that Science, though it has evidently conquered Dogmatic Theology based on biblical texts and ancient modes of thought, will go hand in hand with Religion; and that, although theological control will continue to diminish, Religion, as seen in the recognition of "a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," and in the love of God and of our neighbor, will steadily grow stronger and stronger, not only in the American institutions of learning but in the world at large. Thus may the declaration of Micah as to the requirements of Jehovah, the definition by St. James of "pure religion and undefiled," and, above all, the precepts and ideals of the blessed Founder of Christianity himself, be brought to bear more and more effectively on mankind. I close this preface some days after its first lines were written. The sun of spring has done its work on the Neva; the great river flows tranquilly on, a blessing and a joy; the mujiks are forgotten. A. D. W. LEGATION OF THE UNITED STATES, ST. PETERSBURG, April 14,1894. P.S.--Owing to a wish to give more thorough revision to some parts of my work, it has been withheld from the press until the present date. A. D. W. CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N.Y., August 15, 1895. CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. CHAPTER I. FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. I. The Visible Universe. Ancient and medieval views regarding the manner of creation Regarding the matter of creation Regarding the time of creation Regarding the date of creation Regarding the Creator Regarding light and darkness Rise of the conception of an evolution: among the Chaldeans, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans Its survival through the Middle Ages, despite the disfavour of the Church Its development in modern times.--The nebular hypothesis and its struggle with theology The idea of evolution at last victorious Our sacred books themselves an illustration of its truth The true reconciliation of Science and Theology II. Theological Teachings regarding the Animals and Man. Ancient and medieval representations of the creation of man Literal acceptance of the book of Genesis by the Christian fathers By the Reformers By modern theologians, Catholic and Protestant Theological reasoning as to the divisions of the animal kingdom The Physiologus, the Bestiaries, the Exempila Beginnings of sceptical observation Development of a scientific method in the study of Nature Breaking down of the theological theory of creation III. Theological and Scientific Theories of an Evolution in Animated Nature. Ideas of evolution among the ancients In the early Church In the medieval Church Development of these ideas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries The work of De Maillet Of Linneus Of Buffon Contributions to the theory of evolution at the close of the eighteenth century The work of Treviranus and Lamarck Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier Development of the theory up to the middle of the nineteenth century The contributions of Darwin and Wallace The opposition of Agassiz IV. The Final Effort of Theology. Attacks on Darwin and his theories in England In America Formation of sacro-scientific organizations to combat the theory of evolution The attack in France In Germany Conversion of Lyell to the theory of evolution The attack of Darwin's Descent of Man Difference between this and the former attack Hostility to Darwinism in America Change in the tone of the controversy.--Attempts at compromise Dying-out of opposition to evolution Last outbursts of theological hostility Final victory of evolution CHAPTER II. GEOGRAPHY I. The Form of the Earth. Primitive conception of the earth as flat In Chaldea and Egypt In Persia Among the Hebrews Evolution, among the Greeks, of the idea of its sphericity Opposition of the early Church Evolution of a sacred theory, drawn from the Bible Its completion by Cosmas Indicopleustes Its influence on Christian thought Survival of the idea of the earth's sphericity--its acceptance by Isidore and Bede Its struggle and final victory II. The Delineation of the Earth. Belief of every ancient people that its own central place was the centre of the earth Hebrew conviction that the earth's centre was at Jerusalem Acceptance of this view by Christianity Influence of other Hebrew conceptions--Gog and Magog, the "four winds," the waters "on an heap" III. The Inhabitants of the Earth. The idea of antipodes Its opposition by the Christian Church--Gregory Nazianzen, Lactantius, Basil, Ambrose, Augustine, Procopius of Gaza, Cosmas, Isidore Virgil of Salzburg's assertion of it in the eighth century Its revival by William of Conches and Albert the Great in the thirteenth Surrender of it by Nicolas d'Oresme Fate of Peter of Abano and Cecco d' Ascoli Timidity of Pierre d'Ailly and Tostatus Theological hindrance of Columbus Pope Alexander VI's demarcation line Cautious conservatism of Gregory Reysch Magellan and the victory of science IV. The Size of the Earth. Scientific attempts at measuring the earth The sacred solution of the problem Fortunate influence of the blunder upon Columbus V. The Character of the Earth's Surface. Servetus and the charge of denying the fertility of Judea Contrast between the theological and the religious spirit in their effects on science CHAPTER III. ASTRONOMY. I. The Old Sacred Theory of the Universe. The early Church's conviction of the uselessness of astronomy The growth of a sacred theory--Origen, the Gnostics, Philastrius, Cosmas, Isidore The geocentric, or Ptolemaic, theory, its origin, and its acceptance by the Christian world Development of the new sacred system of astronomy--the pseudo-Dionysius, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas Its popularization by Dante Its details Its persistence to modern times II. The Heliocentric Theory. Its rise among the Greeks--Pythagoras, Philolaus, Aristarchus Its suppression by the charge of blasphemy Its loss from sight for six hundred Years, then for a thousand Its revival by Nicholas de Cusa and Nicholas Copernicus Its toleration as a hypothesis Its prohibition as soon as Galileo teaches it as a truth Consequent timidity of scholars--Acosta, Apian Protestantism not less zealous in opposition than Catholicism--Luther Melanchthon, Calvin, Turretin This opposition especially persistent in England--Hutchinson, Pike, Horne, Horsley, Forbes, Owen, Wesley Resulting interferences with freedom of teaching Giordano Bruno's boldness and his fate The truth demonstrated by the telescope of Galileo III. The War upon Galileo. Concentration of the war on this new champion The first attack Fresh attacks--Elci, Busaeus, Caccini, Lorini, Bellarmin Use of epithets Attempts to entrap Galileo His summons before the Inquisition at Rome The injunction to silence, and the condemnation of the theory of the earth's motion The work of Copernicus placed on the Index Galileo's seclusion Renewed attacks upon Galileo--Inchofer, Fromundus IV. Victory of the Church over Galileo Publication of his Dialogo Hostility of Pope Urban VIII Galileo's second trial by the Inquisition His abjuration Later persecution of him Measures to complete the destruction of the Copernican theory Persecution of Galileo's memory Protestant hostility to the new astronomy and its champions V. Results of the Victory over Galileo. Rejoicings of churchmen over the victory The silencing of Descartes Persecution of Campanella and of Kepler Persistence and victory of science Dilemma of the theologians Vain attempts to postpone the surrender VI. The Retreat of the Church after its Victory over Galileo. The easy path for the Protestant theologians The difficulties of the older Church.--The papal infallibility fully committed against the Copernican theory Attempts at evasion--first plea: that Galileo was condemned not for affirming the earth's motion, but for supporting it from Scripture Its easy refutation Second plea: that he was condemned not for heresy, but for contumacy Folly of this assertion Third plea: that it was all a quarrel between Aristotelian professors and those favouring the experimental method Fourth plea: that the condemnation of Galileo was "provisory" Fifth plea: that he was no more a victim of Catholics than of Protestants Efforts to blacken Galileo's character Efforts to suppress the documents of his trial Their fruitlessness Sixth plea: that the popes as popes had never condemned his theory Its confutation from their own mouths Abandonment of the contention by honest Catholics Two efforts at compromise--Newman, De Bonald Effect of all this on thinking men The fault not in Catholicism more than in Protestantism--not in religion, but in theology CHAPTER IV. FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW IN THE HEAVENS. I. The Theological View. Early beliefs as to comets, meteors, and eclipses Their inheritance by Jews and Christians The belief regarding comets especially harmful as a source of superstitious terror Its transmission through the Middle Ages Its culmination under Pope Calixtus III Beginnings of scepticism--Copernicus, Paracelsus, Scaliger Firmness of theologians, Catholic and Protestant, in its support II. Theological Efforts to crush the Scientific View. The effort through the universities.--The effort through the pulpits Heerbrand at Tubingen and Dieterich at Marburg Maestlin at Heidelberg Buttner, Vossius, Torreblanca, Fromundus Father Augustin de Angelis at Rome Reinzer at Linz Celichius at Magdeburg Conrad Dieterich's sermon at Ulm Erni and others in Switzerland Comet doggerel Echoes from New England--Danforth, Morton, Increase Mather III. The Invasion of Scepticism. Rationalism of Cotton Mather, and its cause Blaise de Vigenere Erastus Bekker, Lubienitzky, Pierre Petit Bayle Fontenelle The scientific movement beneath all this IV. Theological Efforts at Compromise.--The Final Victory of Science. The admission that some comets are supralunar Difference between scientific and theological reasoning Development of the reasoning of Tycho and Kepler--Cassini, Hevel, Doerfel, Bernouilli, Newton Completion of the victory by Halley and Clairaut Survivals of the superstition--Joseph de Maistre, Forster Arago's statistics The theories of Whiston and Burnet, and their influence in Germany The superstition ended in America by the lectures of Winthrop Helpful influence of John Wesley Effects of the victory CHAPTER V. FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. I. Growth of Theological Explanations Germs of geological truth among the Greeks and Romans Attitude of the Church toward science Geological theories of the early theologians Attitude of the schoolmen Contributions of the Arabian schools Theories of the earlier Protestants Influence of the revival of learning II. Efforts to Suppress the Scientific View. Revival of scientific methods Buffon and the Sorbonne Beringer's treatise on fossils Protestant opposition to the new geology---the works of Burnet, Whiston, Wesley, Clark, Watson, Arnold, Cockburn, and others III. The First Great Effort of Compromise, based on the Flood of Noah. The theory that fossils were produced by the Deluge Its acceptance by both Catholics and Protestants--Luther, Calmet Burnet, Whiston, Woodward, Mazurier, Torrubia, Increase Mather Scheuchzer Voltaire's theory of fossils Vain efforts of enlightened churchmen in behalf of the scientific view Steady progress of science--the work of Cuvier and Brongniart Granvile Penn's opposition The defection of Buckland and Lyell to the scientific side Surrender of the theologians Remnants of the old belief Death-blow given to the traditional theory of the Deluge by the discovery of the Chaldean accounts Results of the theological opposition to science IV. Final Efforts at Compromise--The Victory of Science complete. Efforts of Carl von Raumer, Wagner, and others The new testimony of the caves and beds of drift as to the antiquity of man Gosse's effort to save the literal interpretation of Genesis Efforts of Continental theologians Gladstone's attempt at a compromise Its demolition by Huxley By Canon Driver Dean Stanley on the reconciliation of Science and Scripture CHAPTER VI. THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN, EGYPTOLOGY, AND ASSYRIOLOGY. I. The Sacred Chronology. Two fields in which Science has gained a definite victory over Theology Opinions of the Church fathers on the antiquity of man The chronology of Isidore Of Bede Of the medieval Jewish scholars The views of the Reformers on the antiquity of man Of the Roman Church Of Archbishop Usher Influence of Egyptology on the belief in man's antiquity La Peyrere's theory of the Pre-Adamites Opposition in England to the new chronology II. The New Chronology. Influence of the new science of Egyptology on biblical chronology Manetho's history of Egypt and the new chronology derived from it Evidence of the antiquity of man furnished by the monuments of Egypt By her art By her science By other elements of civilization By the remains found in the bed of the Nile Evidence furnished by the study of Assyriology CHAPTER VII. THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY. I. The Thunder-stones. Early beliefs regarding "thunder-stones" Theories of Mercati and Tollius regarding them Their identification with the implements of prehistoric man Remains of man found in caverns Unfavourable influence on scientific activity of the political conditions of the early part of the nineteenth century Change effected by the French Revolution of to {??} Rallying of the reactionary clerical influence against science II. The Flint Weapons and Implements. Boucher de Perthes's contributions to the knowledge of prehistoric man His conclusions confirmed by Lyell and others Cave explorations of Lartet and Christy Evidence of man's existence furnished by rude carvings Cave explorations in the British Islands Evidence of man's existence in the Drift period In the early Quaternary and in the Tertiary periods CHAPTER VIII. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. The two antagonistic views regarding the life of man on the earth The theory of "the Fall" among ancient peoples Inheritance of this view by the Christian Church Appearance among the Greeks and Romans of the theory of a rise of man Its disappearance during the Middle Ages Its development since the seventeenth century The first blow at the doctrine of "the Fall" comes from geology Influence of anthropology on the belief in this doctrine The finding of human skulls in Quaternary deposits Their significance Results obtained from the comparative study of the remains of human handiwork Discovery of human remains in shell-heaps on the shores of the Baltic Sea In peat-beds The lake-dwellers Indications of the upward direction of man's development Mr. Southall's attack on the theory of man's antiquity An answer to it Discovery of prehistoric human remains in Egypt Hamard's attack on the new scientific conclusions The survival of prehistoric implements in religious rites Strength of the argument against the theory of "the Fall of Man" CHAPTER IX. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY. The beginnings of the science of Comparative Ethnology Its testimony to the upward tendency of man from low beginning Theological efforts to break its force--De Maistre and DeBonald Whately's attempt The attempt of the Duke of Argyll Evidence of man's upward tendency derived from Comparative Philology From Comparative Literature and Folklore From Comparative Ethnography From Biology CHAPTER X. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. Proof of progress given by the history of art Proofs from general history Development of civilization even under unfavourable circumstances Advancement even through catastrophes and the decay of civilizations Progress not confined to man's material condition Theological struggle against the new scientific view Persecution of Prof. Winchell Of Dr. Woodrow Other interferences with freedom of teaching The great harm thus done to religion Rise of a better spirit The service rendered to religion by Anthropology CHAPTER XI. FROM "THE PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR" TO METEOROLOGY. I. Growth of a Theological Theory. The beliefs of classical antiquity regarding storms, thunder, and lightning Development of a sacred science of meteorology by the fathers of the Church Theories of Cosmas Indicopleustes Of Isidore Of Seville Of Bede Of Rabanus Maurus Rational views of Honorius of Autun Orthodox theories of John of San Geminiano Attempt of Albert the Great to reconcile the speculations of Aristotle with the theological views The monkish encyclopedists Theories regarding the rainbow and the causes of storms Meteorological phenomena attributed to the Almighty II. Diabolical Agency in Storms. Meteorological phenomena attributed to the devil--"the prince of the power of the air" Propagation of this belief by the medieval theologians Its transmission to both Catholics and Protestants--Eck, Luther The great work of Delrio Guacci's Compendium The employment of prayer against "the powers of the air" Of exorcisms Of fetiches and processions Of consecrated church bells III. The Agency of Witches. The fearful results of the witch superstition Its growth out of the doctrine of evil agency in atmospheric phenomena Archbishop Agobard's futile attempt to dispel it Its sanction by the popes Its support by confessions extracted by torture Part taken in the persecution by Dominicans and Jesuits Opponents of the witch theory--Pomponatius, Paracelsus, Agrippa of Nettesheim Jean Bodin's defence of the superstition Fate of Cornelius Loos Of Dietrich Flade Efforts of Spee to stem the persecution His posthumous influence Upholders of the orthodox view--Bishop Binsfeld, Remigius Vain protests of Wier Persecution of Bekker for opposing the popular belief Effect of the Reformation in deepening the superstition The persecution in Great Britain and America Development of a scientific view of the heavens Final efforts to revive the old belief IV. Franklin's Lightning-Rod. Franklin's experiments with the kite Their effect on the old belief Efforts at compromise between the scientific and theological theories Successful use of the lightning-rod Religious scruples against it in America In England In Austria In Italy Victory of the scientific theory This victory exemplified in the case of the church of the monastery of Lerins In the case of Dr. Moorhouse In the case of the Missouri droughts CHAPTER XII. FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. I. The Supremacy of Magic. Primitive tendency to belief in magic The Greek conception of natural laws Influence of Plato and Aristotle on the growth of science Effect of the establishment of Christianity on the development of the physical sciences The revival of thought in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Albert the Great Vincent of Beauvais Thomas Aquinas Roger Bacon's beginning of the experimental method brought to nought The belief that science is futile gives place to the belief that it is dangerous The two kinds of magic Rarity of persecution for magic before the Christian era The Christian theory of devils Constantine's laws against magic Increasing terror of magic and witchcraft Papal enactments against them Persistence of the belief in magic Its effect on the development of science Roger Bacon Opposition of secular rulers to science John Baptist Porta The opposition to scientific societies in Italy In England The effort to turn all thought from science to religion The development of mystic theology Its harmful influence on science Mixture of theological with scientific speculation This shown in the case of Melanchthon In that of Francis Bacon Theological theory of gases Growth of a scientific theory Basil Valentine and his contributions to chemistry Triumph of the scientific theory II. The Triumph of Chemistry and Physics. New epoch in chemistry begun by Boyle Attitude of the mob toward science Effect on science of the reaction following the French Revolution: {?} Development of chemistry since the middle of the nineteenth century Development of physics Modern opposition to science in Catholic countries Attack of scientific education in France In England In Prussia Revolt against the subordination of education to science Effect of the International Exhibition of ii {?} at London Of the endowment of State colleges in America by the Morrill Act of 1862 The results to religion CHAPTER XIII. FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE. I. THE EARLY AND SACRED THEORIES OF DISEASE. Naturalness of the idea of supernatural intervention in causing and curing disease Prevalence of this idea in ancient civilizations Beginnings of a scientific theory of medicine The twofold influence of Christianity on the healing art II. GROWTH OF LEGENDS OF HEALING.--THE LIFE OF XAVIER AS A TYPICAL EXAMPLE. Growth of legends of miracles about the lives of great benefactors of humanity Sketch of Xavier's career Absence of miraculous accounts in his writings and those of his contemporaries Direct evidence that Xavier wrought no miracles Growth of legends of miracles as shown in the early biographies of him As shown in the canonization proceedings Naturalness of these legends III. THE MEDIAEVAL MIRACLES OF HEALING CHECK MEDICAL SCIENCE. Character of the testimony regarding miracles Connection of mediaeval with pagan miracles Their basis of fact Various kinds of miraculous cures Atmosphere of supernaturalism thrown about all cures Influence of this atmosphere on medical science IV. THE ATTRIBUTION OF DISEASE TO SATANIC INFLUENCE.--"PASTORAL MEDICINE" CHECKS SCIENTIFIC EFFORT. Theological theory as to the cause of disease Influence of self-interest on "pastoral medicine" Development of fetichism at Cologne and elsewhere Other developments of fetich cure V. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO ANATOMICAL STUDIES. Medieval belief in the unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead Dissection objected to on the ground that "the Church abhors the shedding of blood" The decree of Boniface VIII and its results VI. NEW BEGINNINGS OF MEDICAL SCIENCE. Galen Scanty development of medical science in the Church Among Jews and Mohammedans Promotion of medical science by various Christian laymen of the Middle Ages By rare men of science By various ecclesiastics VII. THEOLOGICAL DISCOURAGEMENT OF MEDICINE. Opposition to seeking cure from disease by natural means Requirement of ecclesiastical advice before undertaking medical treatment Charge of magic and Mohammedanism against men of science Effect of ecclesiastical opposition to medicine The doctrine of signatures The doctrine of exorcism Theological opposition to surgery Development of miracle and fetich cures Fashion in pious cures Medicinal properties of sacred places Theological argument in favour of miraculous cures Prejudice against Jewish physicians VIII. FETICH CURES UNDER PROTESTANTISM.--THE ROYAL TOUCH. Luther's theory of disease The royal touch Cures wrought by Charles II By James II By William III By Queen Anne By Louis XIV Universal acceptance of these miracles IX. THE SCIENTIFIC STRUGGLE FOR ANATOMY. Occasional encouragement of medical science in the Middle Ages New impulse given by the revival of learning and the age of discovery Paracelsus and Mundinus Vesalius, the founder of the modern science of anatomy.--His career and fate X. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO INOCULATION, VACCINATION, AND THE USE OF ANAESTHETICS. Theological opposition to inoculation in Europe In America Theological opposition to vaccination Recent hostility to vaccination in England In Canada, during the smallpox epidemic Theological opposition to the use of cocaine To the use of quinine Theological opposition to the use of anesthetics XI. FINAL BREAKING AWAY OF THE THEOLOGICAL THEORY IN MEDICINE. Changes incorporated in the American Book of Common Prayer Effect on the theological view of the growing knowledge of the relation between imagination and medicine Effect of the discoveries in hypnotism In bacteriology Relation between ascertained truth and the "ages of faith" CHAPTER XIV. FROM FETICH TO HYGIENE. I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW OF EPIDEMICS AND SANITATION. The recurrence of great pestilences Their early ascription to the wrath or malice of unseen powers Their real cause want of hygienic precaution Theological apotheosis of filth Sanction given to the sacred theory of pestilence by Pope Gregory the Great Modes of propitiating the higher powers Modes of thwarting the powers of evil Persecution of the Jews as Satan's emissaries Persecution of witches as Satan's emissaries Case of the Untori at Milan New developments of fetichism.--The blood of St. Januarius at Naples Appearance of better methods in Italy.--In Spain II. GRADUAL DECAY OF THEOLOGICAL VIEWS REGARDING SANITATION. Comparative freedom of England from persecutions for plague-bringing, in spite of her wretched sanitary condition Aid sought mainly through church services Effects of the great fire in London The jail fever The work of John Howard Plagues in the American colonies In France.--The great plague at Marseilles Persistence of the old methods in Austria In Scotland III. THE TRIUMPH OF SANITARY SCIENCE. Difficulty of reconciling the theological theory of pestilences with accumulating facts Curious approaches to a right theory The law governing the relation of theology to disease Recent victories of hygiene in all countries In England.---Chadwick and his fellows In France IV. THE RELATION OF SANITARY SCIENCE TO RELIGION. The process of sanitary science not at the cost of religion Illustration from the policy of Napoleon III in France Effect of proper sanitation on epidemics in the United States Change in the attitude of the Church toward the cause and cure of pestilence CHAPTER XV. FROM "DEMONIACAL POSSESSION" TO INSANITY. I. THEOLOGICAL IDEAS OF LUNACY AND ITS TREATMENT. The struggle for the scientific treatment of the insane The primitive ascription of insanity to evil spirits Better Greek and Roman theories--madness a disease The Christian Church accepts the demoniacal theory of insanity Yet for a time uses mild methods for the insane Growth of the practice of punishing the indwelling demon Two sources whence better things might have been hoped.--The reasons of their futility The growth of exorcism Use of whipping and torture The part of art and literature in making vivid to the common mind the idea of diabolic activity The effects of religious processions as a cure for mental disease Exorcism of animals possessed of demons Belief in the transformation of human beings into animals The doctrine of demoniacal possession in the Reformed Church II. BEGINNINGS OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM. Rivalry between Catholics and Protestants in the casting out of devils Increased belief in witchcraft during the period following the Reformation Increase of insanity during the witch persecutions II {?} Attitude of physicians toward witchcraft I Religious hallucinations of the insane I Theories as to the modes of diabolic entrance into the possessed Influence of monastic life on the development of insanity Protests against the theological view of insanity--Wier, Montaigue Bekker Last struggles of the old superstition III. THE FINAL STRUGGLE AND VICTORY OF SCIENCE.--PINEL AND TUKE. Influence of French philosophy on the belief in demoniacal possession Reactionary influence of John Wesley Progress of scientific ideas in Prussia In Austria In America In South Germany General indifference toward the sufferings of madmen The beginnings of a more humane treatment Jean Baptiste Pinel Improvement in the treatment of the insane in England.--William Tuke The place of Pinel and Tuke in history CHAPTER XVI. FROM DIABOLISM TO HYSTERIA. I. THE EPIDEMICS OF "POSSESSION." Survival of the belief in diabolic activity as the cause of such epidemics Epidemics of hysteria in classical times In the Middle Ages The dancing mania Inability of science during the fifteenth century to cope with such diseases Cases of possession brought within the scope of medical research during the sixteenth century Dying-out of this form of mental disease in northern Europe In Italy Epidemics of hysteria in the convents The case of Martha Brossier Revival in France of belief in diabolic influence The Ursulines of Loudun and Urbain Grandier Possession among the Huguenots In New England.--The Salem witch persecution At Paris.--Alleged miracles at the grave of Archdeacon Paris In Germany.--Case of Maria Renata Sanger More recent outbreaks II. BEGINNINGS OF HELPFUL SCEPTICISM. Outbreaks of hysteria in factories and hospitals In places of religious excitement The case at Morzine Similar cases among Protestants and in Africa III. THEOLOGICAL "RESTATEMENTS."--FINAL TRIUMPH OF THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW AND METHODS. Successful dealings of medical science with mental diseases Attempts to give a scientific turn to the theory of diabolic agency in disease Last great demonstration of the old belief in England Final triumph of science in the latter half of the present century Last echoes of the old belief CHAPTER XVII. FROM BABEL TO COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. I. THE SACRED THEORY IN ITS FIRST FORM. Difference of the history of Comparative Philology from that of other sciences as regards the attitude of theologians Curiosity of early man regarding the origin, the primitive form, and the diversity of language The Hebrew answer to these questions The legend of the Tower of Babel The real reason for the building of towers by the Chaldeans and the causes of their ruin Other legends of a confusion of tongues Influence upon Christendom of the Hebrew legends Lucretius's theory of the origin of language The teachings of the Church fathers on this subject The controversy as to the divine origin of the Hebrew vowel points Attitude of the reformers toward this question Of Catholic scholars.--Marini Capellus and his adversaries The treatise of Danzius II. THE SACRED THEORY OF LANGUAGE IN ITS SECOND FORM. Theological theory that Hebrew was the primitive tongue, divinely revealed This theory supported by all Christian scholars until the beginning of the eighteenth century Dissent of Prideaux and Cotton Mather Apparent strength of the sacred theory of language III. BREAKING DOWN OF THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. Reason for the Church's ready acceptance of the conclusions of comparative philology Beginnings of a scientific theory of language Hottinger Leibnitz The collections of Catharine the Great, of Hervas, and of Adelung Chaotic period in philology between Leibnitz and the beginning of the study of Sanskrit Illustration from the successive editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica IV. TRIUMPH OF THE NEW SCIENCE. Effect of the discovery of Sanskrit on the old theory Attempts to discredit the new learning General acceptance of the new theory Destruction of the belief that all created things were first named by Adam Of the belief in the divine origin of letters Attempts in England to support the old theory of language Progress of philological science in France In Germany In Great Britain Recent absurd attempts to prove Hebrew the primitive tongue V. SUMMARY. Gradual disappearance of the old theories regarding the origin of speech and writing Full acceptance of the new theories by all Christian scholars The result to religion, and to the Bible CHAPTER XVIII. FROM THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS TO COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY, I. THE GROWTH OF EXPLANATORY TRANSFORMATION MYTHS. Growth of myths to account for remarkable appearances in Nature--mountains, rocks, curiously marked stones, fossils, products of volcanic action Myths of the transformation of living beings into natural objects Development of the science of Comparative Mythology II. MEDIAEVAL GROWTH OF THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS. Description of the Dead Sea Impression made by its peculiar features on the early dwellers in Palestine Reasons for selecting the Dead Sea myths for study Naturalness of the growth of legend regarding the salt region of Usdum Universal belief in these legends Concurrent testimony of early and mediaeval writers, Jewish and Christian, respecting the existence of Lot's wife as a "pillar of salt," and of the other wonders of the Dead Sea Discrepancies in the various accounts and theological explanations of them Theological arguments respecting the statue of Lot's wife Growth of the legend in the sixteenth century III. POST-REFORMATION CULMINATION OF THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS.--BEGINNINGS OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM. Popularization of the older legends at the Reformation Growth of new myths among scholars Signs of scepticism among travellers near the end of the sixteenth century Effort of Quaresmio to check this tendency Of Eugene Roger Of Wedelius Influence of these teachings Renewed scepticism--the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Efforts of Briemle and Masius in support of the old myths Their influence The travels of Mariti and of Volney Influence of scientific thought on the Dead Sea legends during the eighteenth century Reactionary efforts of Chateaubriand Investigations of the naturalist Seetzen Of Dr. Robinson The expedition of Lieutenant Lynch The investigations of De Saulcy Of the Duc de Luynes.--Lartet's report Summary of the investigations of the nineteenth century.--Ritter's verdict IV. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.--TRIUMPH OF THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. Attempts to reconcile scientific facts with the Dead Sea legends Van de Velde's investigations of the Dead Sea region Canon Tristram's Mgr. Mislin's protests against the growing rationalism The work of Schaff and Osborn Acceptance of the scientific view by leaders in the Church Dr. Geikie's ascription of the myths to the Arabs Mgr. Haussmann de Wandelburg and his rejection of the scientific view Service of theologians to religion in accepting the conclusions of silence in this field CHAPTER XIX. FROM LEVITICUS TO POLITICAL ECONOMY I. ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF HOSTILITY TO LOANS AT INTEREST. Universal belief in the sin of loaning money at interest The taking of interest among the Greeks and Romans Opposition of leaders of thought, especially Aristotle Condemnation of the practice by the Old and New Testaments By the Church fathers In ecclesiastical and secular legislation Exception sometimes made in behalf of the Jews Hostility of the pulpit Of the canon law Evil results of the prohibition of loans at interest Efforts to induce the Church to change her position Theological evasions of the rule Attitude of the Reformers toward the taking of interest Struggle in England for recognition of the right to accept interest Invention of a distinction between usury and interest II. RETREAT OF THE CHURCH, PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC. Sir Robert Filmer's attack on the old doctrine Retreat of the Protestant Church in Holland In Germany and America Difficulties in the way of compromise in the Catholic Church Failure of such attempts in France Theoretical condemnation of usury in Italy Disregard of all restrictions in practice Attempts of Escobar and Liguori to reconcile the taking of interest with the teachings of the Church Montesquieu's attack on the old theory Encyclical of Benedict XIV permitting the taking of interest Similar decision of the Inquisition at Rome Final retreat of the Catholic Church Curious dealings of theology with public economy in other fields CHAPTER XX. FROM THE DIVINE ORACLES TO THE HIGHER CRITICISM. I. THE OLDER INTERPRETATION. Character of the great sacred books of the world General laws governing the development and influence of sacred literature.--The law of its origin Legends concerning the Septuagint The law of wills and causes The law of inerrancy Hostility to the revision of King James's translation of the Bible The law of unity Working of these laws seen in the great rabbinical schools The law of allegorical interpretation Philo Judaeus Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria Occult significance of numbers Origen Hilary of Poitiers and Jerome Augustine Gregory the Great Vain attempts to check the flood of allegorical interpretations Bede.--Savonarola Methods of modern criticism for the first time employed by Lorenzo Valla Erasmus Influence of the Reformation on the belief in the infallibility of the sacred books.--Luther and Melanchthon Development of scholasticism in the Reformed Church Catholic belief in the inspiration of the Vulgate Opposition in Russia to the revision of the Slavonic Scriptures Sir Isaac Newton as a commentator Scriptural interpretation at the beginning of the eighteenth century II. BEGINNINGS OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION. Theological beliefs regarding the Pentateuch The book of Genesis Doubt thrown on the sacred theory by Aben Ezra By Carlstadt and Maes Influence of the discovery that the Isidorian Decretals were forgeries That the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite were serious Hobbes and La Peyrere Spinoza Progress of biblical criticism in France.--Richard Simon LeClerc Bishop Lowth Astruc Eichhorn's application of the "higher criticism" to biblical research Isenbiehl Herder Alexander Geddes Opposition to the higher criticism in Germany Hupfeld Vatke and Reuss Kuenen Wellhausen III. THE CONTINUED GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION. Progress of the higher criticism in Germany and Holland Opposition to it in England At the University of Oxford Pusey Bentley Wolf Niebuhr and Arnold Milman Thirlwall and Grote The publication of Essays and Reviews, and the storm raised by book IV. THE CLOSING STRUGGLE. Colenso's work on the Pentateuch The persecution of him Bishop Wilberforce's part in it Dean Stanley's Bishop Thirlwall's Results of Colenso's work Sanday's Bampton Lectures Keble College and Lux Mundi Progress of biblical criticism among the dissenters In France.--Renan In the Roman Catholic Church The encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII In America.--Theodore Parker Apparent strength of the old theory of inspiration Real strength of the new movement V. VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS. Confirmation of the conclusions of the higher criticism by Assyriology and Egyptology Light thrown upon Hebrew religion by the translation of the sacred books of the East The influence of Persian thought.--The work of the Rev. Dr. Mills The influence of Indian thought.--Light thrown by the study of Brahmanism and Buddhism The work of Fathers Huc and Gabet Discovery that Buddha himself had been canonized as a Christian saint Similarity between the ideas and legends of Buddhism and those of Christianity The application of the higher criticism to the New Testament The English "Revised Version" of Studies on the formation of the canon of Scripture Recognition of the laws governing its development Change in the spirit of the controversy over the higher criticism VI. RECONSTRUCTIVE FORCE OF SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM. Development of a scientific atmosphere during the last three centuries Action of modern science in reconstruction of religious truth Change wrought by it in the conception of a sacred literature Of the Divine Power.--Of man.---Of the world at large Of our Bible CHAPTER I. FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. I. THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. Among those masses of cathedral sculpture which preserve so much of medieval theology, one frequently recurring group is noteworthy for its presentment of a time-honoured doctrine regarding the origin of the universe. The Almighty, in human form, sits benignly, making the sun, moon, and stars, and hanging them from the solid firmament which supports the "heaven above" and overarches the "earth beneath." The furrows of thought on the Creator's brow show that in this work he is obliged to contrive; the knotted muscles upon his arms show that he is obliged to toil; naturally, then, the sculptors and painters of the medieval and early modern period frequently represented him as the writers whose conceptions they embodied had done--as, on the seventh day, weary after thought and toil, enjoying well-earned repose and the plaudits of the hosts of heaven. In these thought-fossils of the cathedrals, and in other revelations of the same idea through sculpture, painting, glass-staining, mosaic work, and engraving, during the Middle Ages and the two centuries following, culminated a belief which had been developed through thousands of years, and which has determined the world's thought until our own time. Its beginnings lie far back in human history; we find them among the early records of nearly all the great civilizations, and they hold a most prominent place in the various sacred books of the world. In nearly all of them is revealed the conception of a Creator of whom man is an imperfect image, and who literally and directly created the visible universe with his hands and fingers. Among these theories, of especial interest to us are those which controlled theological thought in Chaldea. The Assyrian inscriptions which have been recently recovered and given to the English-speaking peoples by Layard, George Smith, Sayce, and others, show that in the ancient religions of Chaldea and Babylonia there was elaborated a narrative of the creation which, in its most important features, must have been the source of that in our own sacred books. It has now become perfectly clear that from the same sources which inspired the accounts of the creation of the universe among the Chaldeo-Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Phoenician, and other ancient civilizations came the ideas which hold so prominent a place in the sacred books of the Hebrews. In the two accounts imperfectly fused together in Genesis, and also in the account of which we have indications in the book of Job and in the Proverbs, there, is presented, often with the greatest sublimity, the same early conception of the Creator and of the creation--the conception, so natural in the childhood of civilization, of a Creator who is an enlarged human being working literally with his own hands, and of a creation which is "the work of his fingers." To supplement this view there was developed the belief in this Creator as one who, having ... "from his ample palm Launched forth the rolling planets into space." sits on high, enthroned "upon the circle of the heavens," perpetually controlling and directing them. From this idea of creation was evolved in time a somewhat nobler view. Ancient thinkers, and especially, as is now found, in Egypt, suggested that the main agency in creation was not the hands and fingers of the Creator, but his VOICE. Hence was mingled with the earlier, cruder belief regarding the origin of the earth and heavenly bodies by the Almighty the more impressive idea that "he spake and they were made"--that they were brought into existence by his WORD.(1) (1) Among the many mediaeval representations of the creation of the universe, I especially recall from personal observation those sculptured above the portals of the cathedrals of Freiburg and Upsala, the paintings on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa, and most striking of all, the mosaics of the Cathedral of Monreale and those in the Capella Palatina at Palermo. Among peculiarities showing the simplicity of the earlier conception the representation of the response of the Almighty on the seventh day is very striking. He is shown as seated in almost the exact attitude of the "Weary Mercury" of classic sculpture--bent, and with a very marked expression of fatigue upon his countenance and in the whole disposition of his body. The Monreale mosaics are pictured in the great work of Gravina, and in the Pisa frescoes in Didron's Iconographie, Paris, 1843, p. 598. For an exact statement of the resemblances which have settled the question among the most eminent scholars in favour of the derivation of the Hebrew cosmogony from that of Assyria, see Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, Strassburg, 1890, pp. 304,306; also Franz Lukas, Die Grundbegriffe in den Kosmographien der alten Volker, Leipsic, 1893, pp. 35-46; also George Smith's Chaldean Genesis, especially the German translation with additions by Delitzsch, Leipsic, 1876, and Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, Giessen, 1883, pp. 1-54, etc. See also Renan, Histoire du peuple d'Israel, vol. i, chap i, L'antique influence babylonienne. For Egyptian views regarding creation, and especially for the transition from the idea of creation by the hands and fingers of the Creator to creation by his VOICE and his "word," see Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization, pp. 145-146. Among the early fathers of the Church this general view of creation became fundamental; they impressed upon Christendom more and more strongly the belief that the universe was created in a perfectly literal sense by the hands or voice of God. Here and there sundry theologians of larger mind attempted to give a more spiritual view regarding some parts of the creative work, and of these were St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine. Ready as they were to accept the literal text of Scripture, they revolted against the conception of an actual creation of the universe by the hands and fingers of a Supreme Being, and in this they were followed by Bede and a few others; but the more material conceptions prevailed, and we find these taking shape not only in the sculptures and mosaics and stained glass of cathedrals, and in the illuminations of missals and psalters, but later, at the close of the Middle Ages, in the pictured Bibles and in general literature. Into the Anglo-Saxon mind this ancient material conception of the creation was riveted by two poets whose works appealed especially to the deeper religious feelings. In the seventh century Caedmon paraphrased the account given in Genesis, bringing out this material conception in the most literal form; and a thousand years later Milton developed out of the various statements in the Old Testament, mingled with a theology regarding "the creative Word" which had been drawn from the New, his description of the creation by the second person in the Trinity, than which nothing could be more literal and material: "He took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store, to circumscribe This universe and all created things. One foot he centred, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, 'Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds: This be thy just circumference, O world!'"(2) (2) For Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and the general subject of the development of an evolution theory among the Greeks, see the excellent work by Dr. Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin, pp.33 and following; for Caedmon, see any edition--I have used Bouterwek's, Gutersloh, 1854; for Milton, see Paradise Lost, book vii, lines 225-231. So much for the orthodox view of the MANNER of creation. The next point developed in this theologic evolution had reference to the MATTER of which the universe was made, and it was decided by an overwhelming majority that no material substance existed before the creation of the material universe--that "God created everything out of nothing." Some venturesome thinkers, basing their reasoning upon the first verses of Genesis, hinted at a different view--namely, that the mass, "without form and void," existed before the universe; but this doctrine was soon swept out of sight. The vast majority of the fathers were explicit on this point. Tertullian especially was very severe against those who took any other view than that generally accepted as orthodox: he declared that, if there had been any pre-existing matter out of which the world was formed, Scripture would have mentioned it; that by not mentioning it God has given us a clear proof that there was no such thing; and, after a manner not unknown in other theological controversies, he threatens Hermogenes, who takes the opposite view, with the woe which impends on all who add to or take away from the written word. St. Augustine, who showed signs of a belief in a pre-existence of matter, made his peace with the prevailing belief by the simple reasoning that, "although the world has been made of some material, that very same material must have been made out of nothing." In the wake of these great men the universal Church steadily followed. The Fourth Lateran Council declared that God created everything out of nothing; and at the present hour the vast majority of the faithful--whether Catholic or Protestant--are taught the same doctrine; on this point the syllabus of Pius IX and the Westminster Catechism fully agree.(3) (3) For Tertullian, see Tertullian against Hermogenes, chaps. xx and xxii; for St. Augustine regarding "creation from nothing," see the De Genesi contra Manichaeos, lib, i, cap. vi; for St. Ambrose, see the Hexameron, lib, i, cap iv; for the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council, and the view received in the Church to-day, see the article Creation in Addis and Arnold's Catholic Dictionary. Having thus disposed of the manner and matter of creation, the next subject taken up by theologians was the TIME required for the great work. Here came a difficulty. The first of the two accounts given in Genesis extended the creative operation through six days, each of an evening and a morning, with much explicit detail regarding the progress made in each. But the second account spoke of "THE DAY" in which "the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." The explicitness of the first account and its naturalness to the minds of the great mass of early theologians gave it at first a decided advantage; but Jewish thinkers, like Philo, and Christian thinkers, like Origen, forming higher conceptions of the Creator and his work, were not content with this, and by them was launched upon the troubled sea of Christian theology the idea that the creation was instantaneous, this idea being strengthened not only by the second of the Genesis legends, but by the great text, "He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast"--or, as it appears in the Vulgate and in most translations, "He spake, and they were made; he commanded, and they were created." As a result, it began to be held that the safe and proper course was to believe literally BOTH statements; that in some mysterious manner God created the universe in six days, and yet brought it all into existence in a moment. In spite of the outcries of sundry great theologians, like Ephrem Syrus, that the universe was created in exactly six days of twenty-four hours each, this compromise was promoted by St. Athanasius and St. Basil in the East, and by St. Augustine and St. Hilary in the West. Serious difficulties were found in reconciling these two views, which to the natural mind seem absolutely contradictory; but by ingenious manipulation of texts, by dexterous play upon phrases, and by the abundant use of metaphysics to dissolve away facts, a reconciliation was effected, and men came at least to believe that they believed in a creation of the universe instantaneous and at the same time extended through six days.(4) (4) For Origen, see his Contra Celsum, cap xxxvi, xxxvii; also his De Principibus, cap. v; for St. Augustine, see his De Genesi conta Manichaeos and De Genesi ad Litteram, passim; for Athanasius, see his Discourses against the Arians, ii, 48,49. Some of the efforts to reconcile these two accounts were so fruitful as to deserve especial record. The fathers, Eastern and Western, developed out of the double account in Genesis, and the indications in the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the book of Job, a vast mass of sacred science bearing upon this point. As regards the whole work of creation, stress was laid upon certain occult powers in numerals. Philo Judaeus, while believing in an instantaneous creation, had also declared that the world was created in six days because "of all numbers six is the most productive"; he had explained the creation of the heavenly bodies on the fourth day by "the harmony of the number four"; of the animals on the fifth day by the five senses; of man on the sixth day by the same virtues in the number six which had caused it to be set as a limit to the creative work; and, greatest of all, the rest on the seventh day by the vast mass of mysterious virtues in the number seven. St. Jerome held that the reason why God did not pronounce the work of the second day "good" is to be found in the fact that there is something essentially evil in the number two, and this was echoed centuries afterward, afar off in Britain, by Bede. St. Augustine brought this view to bear upon the Church in the following statement: "There are three classes of numbers--the more than perfect, the perfect, and the less than perfect, according as the sum of them is greater than, equal to, or less than the original number. Six is the first perfect number: wherefore we must not say that six is a perfect number because God finished all his works in six days, but that God finished all his works in six days because six is a perfect number." Reasoning of this sort echoed along through the mediaeval Church until a year after the discovery of America, when the Nuremberg Chronicle re-echoed it as follows: "The creation of things is explained by the number six, the parts of which, one, two, and three, assume the form of a triangle." This view of the creation of the universe as instantaneous and also as in six days, each made up of an evening and a morning, became virtually universal. Peter Lombard and Hugo of St. Victor, authorities of vast weight, gave it their sanction in the twelfth century, and impressed it for ages upon the mind of the Church. Both these lines of speculation--as to the creation of everything out of nothing, and the reconciling of the instantaneous creation of the universe with its creation in six days--were still further developed by other great thinkers of the Middle Ages. St. Hilary of Poictiers reconciled the two conceptions as follows: "For, although according to Moses there is an appearance of regular order in the fixing of the firmament, the laying bare of the dry land, the gathering together of the waters, the formation of the heavenly bodies, and the arising of living things from land and water, yet the creation of the heavens, earth, and other elements is seen to be the work of a single moment." St. Thomas Aquinas drew from St. Augustine a subtle distinction which for ages eased the difficulties in the case: he taught in effect that God created the substance of things in a moment, but gave to the work of separating, shaping, and adorning this creation, six days.(5) (5) For Philo Judaeus, see his Creation of the World, chap. iii; for St. Augustine on the powers of numbers in creation, see his De Genesi ad Litteram iv, chap. ii; for Peter Lombard, see the Sententiae, lib. ii, dist. xv, 5; and for Hugo of St. Victor, see De Sacrementis, lib i, pars i; also, Annotat, Elucidat in Pentateuchum, cap. v, vi, vii; for St. Hilary, see De Trinitate, lib. xii; for St. Thomas Aquinas, see his Summa Theologica, quest lxxxiv, arts. i and ii; the passage in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493, is in fol. iii; for Vousset, see his Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle; for the sacredness of the number seven among the Babylonians, see especially Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, pp. 21,22; also George Smith et al.; for general ideas on the occult powers of various numbers, especially the number seven, and the influence of these ideas on theology and science, see my chapter on astronomy. As to medieaval ideas on the same subject, see Detzel, Christliche Ikonographie, Frieburg, 1894, pp. 44 and following. The early reformers accepted and developed the same view, and Luther especially showed himself equal to the occasion. With his usual boldness he declared, first, that Moses "spoke properly and plainly, and neither allegorically nor figuratively," and that therefore "the world with all creatures was created in six days." And he then goes on to show how, by a great miracle, the whole creation was also instantaneous. Melanchthon also insisted that the universe was created out of nothing and in a mysterious way, both in an instant and in six days, citing the text: "He spake, and they were made." Calvin opposed the idea of an instantaneous creation, and laid especial stress on the creation in six days: having called attention to the fact that the biblical chronology shows the world to be not quite six thousand years old and that it is now near its end, he says that "creation was extended through six days that it might not be tedious for us to occupy the whole of life in the consideration of it." Peter Martyr clinched the matter by declaring: "So important is it to comprehend the work of creation that we see the creed of the Church take this as its starting point. Were this article taken away there would be no original sin, the promise of Christ would become void, and all the vital force of our religion would be destroyed." The Westminster divines in drawing up their Confession of Faith specially laid it down as necessary to believe that all things visible and invisible were created not only out of nothing but in exactly six days. Nor were the Roman divines less strenuous than the Protestant reformers regarding the necessity of holding closely to the so-called Mosaic account of creation. As late as the middle of the eighteenth century, when Buffon attempted to state simple geological truths, the theological faculty of the Sorbonne forced him to make and to publish a most ignominious recantation which ended with these words: "I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses." Theologians, having thus settled the manner of the creation, the matter used in it, and the time required for it, now exerted themselves to fix its DATE. The long series of efforts by the greatest minds in the Church, from Eusebius to Archbishop Usher, to settle this point are presented in another chapter. Suffice it here that the general conclusion arrived at by an overwhelming majority of the most competent students of the biblical accounts was that the date of creation was, in round numbers, four thousand years before our era; and in the seventeenth century, in his great work, Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and one of the most eminent Hebrew scholars of his time, declared, as the result of his most profound and exhaustive study of the Scriptures, that "heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created all together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water," and that "this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B. C., at nine o'clock in the morning." Here was, indeed, a triumph of Lactantius's method, the result of hundreds of years of biblical study and theological thought since Bede in the eighth century, and Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth, had declared that creation must have taken place in the spring. Yet, alas! within two centuries after Lightfoot's great biblical demonstration as to the exact hour of creation, it was discovered that at that hour an exceedingly cultivated people, enjoying all the fruits of a highly developed civilization, had long been swarming in the great cities of Egypt, and that other nations hardly less advanced had at that time reached a high development in Asia.(6) (6) For Luther, see his Commentary on Genesis, 1545, introduction, and his comments on chap. i, verse 12; the quotations from Luther's commentary are taken mainly from the translation by Henry Cole, D.D., Edinburgh, 1858; for Melanchthon, see Loci Theologici, in Melanchthon, Opera, ed. Bretschneider, vol. xxi, pp. 269, 270, also pp. 637, 638--in quoting the text (Ps. xxiii, 9) I have used, as does Melanchthon himself, the form of the Vulgate; for the citations from Calvin, see his Commentary on Genesis (Opera omnia, Amsterdam, 1671, tom. i, cap. ii, p. 8); also in the Institutes, Allen's translation, London, 1838, vol. i, chap. xv, pp. 126,127; for the Peter Martyr, see his Commentary on Genesis, cited by Zockler, vol. i, p. 690; for articles in the Westminster Confession of Faith, see chap. iv; for Buffon's recantation, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, chap iii, p. 57. For Lightfoot's declaration, see his works, edited by Pitman, London, 1822. But, strange as it may seem, even after theologians had thus settled the manner of creation, the matter employed in it, the time required for it, and the exact date of it, there remained virtually unsettled the first and greatest question of all; and this was nothing less than the question, WHO actually created the universe? Various theories more or less nebulous, but all centred in texts of Scripture, had swept through the mind of the Church. By some theologians it was held virtually that the actual creative agent was the third person of the Trinity, who, in the opening words of our sublime creation poem, "moved upon the face of the waters." By others it was held that the actual Creator was the second person of the Trinity, in behalf of whose agency many texts were cited from the New Testament. Others held that the actual Creator was the first person, and this view was embodied in the two great formulas known as the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, which explicitly assigned the work to "God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." Others, finding a deep meaning in the words "Let US make," ascribed in Genesis to the Creator, held that the entire Trinity directly created all things; and still others, by curious metaphysical processes, seemed to arrive at the idea that peculiar combinations of two persons of the Trinity achieved the creation. In all this there would seem to be considerable courage in view of the fearful condemnations launched in the Athanasian Creed against all who should "confound the persons" or "divide the substance of the Trinity." These various stages in the evolution of scholastic theology were also embodied in sacred art, and especially in cathedral sculpture, in glass-staining, in mosaic working, and in missal painting. The creative Being is thus represented sometimes as the third person of the Trinity, in the form of a dove brooding over chaos; sometimes as the second person, and therefore a youth; sometimes as the first person, and therefore fatherly and venerable; sometimes as the first and second persons, one being venerable and the other youthful; and sometimes as three persons, one venerable and one youthful, both wearing papal crowns, and each holding in his lips a tip of the wing of the dove, which thus seems to proceed from both and to be suspended between them. Nor was this the most complete development of the medieval idea. The Creator was sometimes represented with a single body, but with three faces, thus showing that Christian belief had in some pious minds gone through substantially the same cycle which an earlier form of belief had made ages before in India, when the Supreme Being was represented with one body but with the three faces of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. But at the beginning of the modern period the older view in its primitive Jewish form was impressed upon Christians by the most mighty genius in art the world has known; for in 1512, after four years of Titanic labour, Michael Angelo uncovered his frescoes within the vault of the Sistine Chapel. They had been executed by the command and under the sanction of the ruling Pope, Julius II, to represent the conception of Christian theology then dominant, and they remain to-day in all their majesty to show the highest point ever attained by the older thought upon the origin of the visible universe. In the midst of the expanse of heaven the Almighty Father--the first person of the Trinity--in human form, august and venerable, attended by angels and upborne by mighty winds, sweeps over the abyss, and, moving through successive compartments of the great vault, accomplishes the work of the creative days. With a simple gesture he divides the light from the darkness, rears on high the solid firmament, gathers together beneath it the seas, or summons into existence the sun, moon, and planets, and sets them circling about the earth. In this sublime work culminated the thought of thousands of years; the strongest minds accepted it or pretended to accept it, and nearly two centuries later this conception, in accordance with the first of the two accounts given in Genesis, was especially enforced by Bossuet, and received a new lease of life in the Church, both Catholic and Protestant.(7) (7) For strange representations of the Creator and of the creation by one, two, or three persons of the Trinity, see Didron, Iconographie Chretienne, pp. 35, 178, 224, 483, 567-580, and elsewhere; also Detzel as already cited. The most naive of all survivals of the mediaeval idea of creation which the present writer has ever seen was exhibited in 1894 on the banner of one of the guilds at the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Munich Cathedral. Jesus of Nazareth, as a beautiful boy and with a nimbus encircling his head, was shown turning and shaping the globe on a lathe, which he keeps in motion with his foot. The emblems of the Passion are about him, God the Father looking approvingly upon him from a cloud, and the dove hovering between the two. The date upon the banner was 1727. But to these discussions was added yet another, which, beginning in the early days of the Church, was handed down the ages until it had died out among the theologians of our own time. In the first of the biblical accounts light is created and the distinction between day and night thereby made on the first day, while the sun and moon are not created until the fourth day. Masses of profound theological and pseudo-scientific reasoning have been developed to account for this--masses so great that for ages they have obscured the simple fact that the original text is a precious revelation to us of one of the most ancient of recorded beliefs--the belief that light and darkness are entities independent of the heavenly bodies, and that the sun, moon, and stars exist not merely to increase light but to "divide the day from the night, to be for signs and for seasons, and for days and for years," and "to rule the day and the night." Of this belief we find survivals among the early fathers, and especially in St. Ambrose. In his work on creation he tells us: "We must remember that the light of day is one thing and the light of the sun, moon, and stars another--the sun by his rays appearing to add lustre to the daylight. For before sunrise the day dawns, but is not in full refulgence, for the sun adds still further to its splendour." This idea became one of the "treasures of sacred knowledge committed to the Church," and was faithfully received by the Middle Ages. The medieval mysteries and miracle plays give curious evidences of this: In a performance of the creation, when God separates light from darkness, the stage direction is, "Now a painted cloth is to be exhibited, one half black and the other half white." It was also given more permanent form. In the mosaics of San Marco at Venice, in the frescoes of the Baptistery at Florence and of the Church of St. Francis at Assisi, and in the altar carving at Salerno, we find a striking realization of it--the Creator placing in the heavens two disks or living figures of equal size, each suitably coloured or inscribed to show that one represents light and the other darkness. This conception was without doubt that of the person or persons who compiled from the Chaldean and other earlier statements the accounts of the creation in the first of our sacred books.(8) (8) For scriptural indications of the independent existence of light and darkness, compare with the first verses of the chapter of Genesis such passages as Job xxxviii, 19,24; for the general prevalence of this early view, see Lukas, Kosmogonie, pp. 31, 33, 41, 74, and passim; for the view of St. Ambrose regarding the creation of light and of the sun, see his Hexameron, lib. 4, cap. iii; for an excellent general statement, see Huxley, Mr. Gladstone and Genesis, in the Nineteenth Century, 1886, reprinted in his Essays on Controverted Questions, London, 1892, note, pp. 126 et seq.; for the acceptance in the miracle plays of the scriptural idea of light and darkness as independent creations, see Wright, Essays on Archeological Subjects, vol. ii, p.178; for an account, with illustrations, of the mosaics, etc., representing this idea, see Tikkanen, Die Genesis-mosaiken von San Marco, Helsingfors, 1889, p. 14 and 16 of the text and Plates I and II. Very naively the Salerno carver, not wishing to colour the ivory which he wrought, has inscribed on one disk the word "LUX" and on the other "NOX." See also Didron, Iconographie, p. 482. Thus, down to a period almost within living memory, it was held, virtually "always, everywhere, and by all," that the universe, as we now see it, was created literally and directly by the voice or hands of the Almighty, or by both--out of nothing--in an instant or in six days, or in both--about four thousand years before the Christian era--and for the convenience of the dwellers upon the earth, which was at the base and foundation of the whole structure. But there had been implanted along through the ages germs of another growth in human thinking, some of them even as early as the Babylonian period. In the Assyrian inscriptions we find recorded the Chaldeo-Babylonian idea of AN EVOLUTION of the universe out of the primeval flood or "great deep," and of the animal creation out of the earth and sea. This idea, recast, partially at least, into monotheistic form, passed naturally into the sacred books of the neighbours and pupils of the Chaldeans--the Hebrews; but its growth in Christendom afterward was checked, as we shall hereafter find, by the more powerful influence of other inherited statements which appealed more intelligibly to the mind of the Church. Striking, also, was the effect of this idea as rewrought by the early Ionian philosophers, to whom it was probably transmitted from the Chaldeans through the Phoenicians. In the minds of Ionians like Anaximander and Anaximenes it was most clearly developed: the first of these conceiving of the visible universe as the result of processes of evolution, and the latter pressing further the same mode of reasoning, and dwelling on agencies in cosmic development recognised in modern science. This general idea of evolution in Nature thus took strong hold upon Greek thought and was developed in many ways, some ingenious, some perverse. Plato, indeed, withstood it; but Aristotle sometimes developed it in a manner which reminds us of modern views. Among the Romans Lucretius caught much from it, extending the evolutionary process virtually to all things. In the early Church, as we have seen, the idea of a creation direct, material, and by means like those used by man, was all-powerful for the exclusion of conceptions based on evolution. From the more simple and crude of the views of creation given in the Babylonian legends, and thence incorporated into Genesis, rose the stream of orthodox thought on the subject, which grew into a flood and swept on through the Middle Ages and into modern times. Yet here and there in the midst of this flood were high grounds of thought held by strong men. Scotus Erigena and Duns Scotus, among the schoolmen, bewildered though they were, had caught some rays of this ancient light, and passed on to their successors, in modified form, doctrines of an evolutionary process in the universe. In the latter half of the sixteenth century these evolutionary theories seemed to take more definite form in the mind of Giordano Bruno, who evidently divined the fundamental idea of what is now known as the "nebular hypothesis"; but with his murder by the Inquisition at Rome this idea seemed utterly to disappear--dissipated by the flames which in 1600 consumed his body on the Campo dei Fiori. Yet within the two centuries divided by Bruno's death the world was led into a new realm of thought in which an evolution theory of the visible universe was sure to be rapidly developed. For there came, one after the other, five of the greatest men our race has produced--Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton--and when their work was done the old theological conception of the universe was gone. "The spacious firmament on high"--"the crystalline spheres"--the Almighty enthroned upon "the circle of the heavens," and with his own lands, or with angels as his agents, keeping sun, moon, and planets in motion for the benefit of the earth, opening and closing the "windows of heaven," letting down upon the earth the "waters above the firmament," "setting his bow in the cloud," hanging out "signs and wonders," hurling comets, "casting forth lightnings" to scare the wicked, and "shaking the earth" in his wrath: all this had disappeared. These five men had given a new divine revelation to the world; and through the last, Newton, had come a vast new conception, destined to be fatal to the old theory of creation, for he had shown throughout the universe, in place of almighty caprice, all-pervading law. The bitter opposition of theology to the first four of these men is well known; but the fact is not so widely known that Newton, in spite of his deeply religious spirit, was also strongly opposed. It was vigorously urged against him that by his statement of the law of gravitation he "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism," and that he "substituted gravitation for Providence." But, more than this, these men gave a new basis for the theory of evolution as distinguished from the theory of creation. Especially worthy of note is it that the great work of Descartes, erroneous as many of its deductions were, and, in view of the lack of physical knowledge in his time, must be, had done much to weaken the old conception. His theory of a universe brought out of all-pervading matter, wrought into orderly arrangement by movements in accordance with physical laws--though it was but a provisional hypothesis--had done much to draw men's minds from the old theological view of creation; it was an example of intellectual honesty arriving at errors, but thereby aiding the advent of truths. Crippled though Descartes was by his almost morbid fear of the Church, this part of his work was no small factor in bringing in that attitude of mind which led to a reception of the thoughts of more unfettered thinkers. Thirty years later came, in England, an effort of a different sort, but with a similar result. In 1678 Ralph Cudworth published his Intellectual System of the Universe. To this day he remains, in breadth of scholarship, in strength of thought, in tolerance, and in honesty, one of the greatest glories of the English Church, and his work was worthy of him. He purposed to build a fortress which should protect Christianity against all dangerous theories of the universe, ancient or modern. The foundations of the structure were laid with old thoughts thrown often into new and striking forms; but, as the superstructure arose more and more into view, while genius marked every part of it, features appeared which gave the rigidly orthodox serious misgivings. From the old theories of direct personal action on the universe by the Almighty he broke utterly. He dwelt on the action of law, rejected the continuous exercise of miraculous intervention, pointed out the fact that in the natural world there are "errors" and "bungles," and argued vigorously in favour of the origin and maintenance of the universe as a slow and gradual development of Nature in obedience to an inward principle. The Balaks of seventeenth-century orthodoxy might well condemn this honest Balaam. Toward the end of the next century a still more profound genius, Immanuel Kant, presented the nebular theory, giving it, in the light of Newton's great utterances, a consistency which it never before had; and about the same time Laplace gave it yet greater strength by mathematical reasonings of wonderful power and extent, thus implanting firmly in modern thought the idea that our own solar system and others--suns, planets, satellites, and their various movements, distances, and magnitudes--necessarily result from the obedience of nebulous masses to natural laws. Throughout the theological world there was an outcry at once against "atheism," and war raged fiercely. Herschel and others pointed out many nebulous patches apparently gaseous. They showed by physical and mathematical demonstrations that the hypothesis accounted for the great body of facts, and, despite clamour, were gaining ground, when the improved telescopes resolved some of the patches of nebulous matter into multitudes of stars. The opponents of the nebular hypothesis were overjoyed; they now sang paeans to astronomy, because, as they said, it had proved the truth of Scripture. They had jumped to the conclusion that all nebula must be alike; that, if SOME are made up of systems of stars, ALL must be so made up; that none can be masses of attenuated gaseous matter, because some are not. Science halted for a time. The accepted doctrine became this: that the only reason why all the nebula are not resolved into distinct stars is that our telescopes are not sufficiently powerful. But in time came the discovery of the spectroscope and spectrum analysis, and thence Fraunhofer's discovery that the spectrum of an ignited gaseous body is non-continuous, with interrupting lines; and Draper's discovery that the spectrum of an ignited solid is continuous, with no interrupting lines. And now the spectroscope was turned upon the nebula, and many of them were found to be gaseous. Here, then, was ground for the inference that in these nebulous masses at different stages of condensation--some apparently mere pitches of mist, some with luminous centres--we have the process of development actually going on, and observations like those of Lord Rosse and Arrest gave yet further confirmation to this view. Then came the great contribution of the nineteenth century to physics, aiding to explain important parts of the vast process by the mechanical theory of heat. Again the nebular hypothesis came forth stronger than ever, and about 1850 the beautiful experiment of Plateau on the rotation of a fluid globe came in apparently to illustrate if not to confirm it. Even so determined a defender of orthodoxy as Mr. Gladstone at last acknowledged some form of a nebular hypothesis as probably true. Here, too, was exhibited that form of surrendering theological views to science under the claim that science concurs with theology, which we have seen in so many other fields; and, as typical, an example may be given, which, however restricted in its scope, throws light on the process by which such surrenders are obtained. A few years since one of the most noted professors of chemistry in the city of New York, under the auspices of one of its most fashionable churches, gave a lecture which, as was claimed in the public prints and in placards posted in the streets, was to show that science supports the theory of creation given in the sacred books ascribed to Moses. A large audience assembled, and a brilliant series of elementary experiments with oxygen, hydrogen, and carbonic acid was concluded by the Plateau demonstration. It was beautifully made. As the coloured globule of oil, representing the earth, was revolved in a transparent medium of equal density, as it became flattened at the poles, as rings then broke forth from it and revolved about it, and, finally, as some of these rings broke into satellites, which for a moment continued to circle about the central mass, the audience, as well they might, rose and burst into rapturous applause. Thereupon a well-to-do citizen arose and moved the thanks of the audience to the eminent professor for "this perfect demonstration of the exact and literal conformity of the statements given in Holy Scripture with the latest results of science." The motion was carried unanimously and with applause, and the audience dispersed, feeling that a great service had been rendered to orthodoxy. Sancta simplicitas! What this incident exhibited on a small scale has been seen elsewhere with more distinguished actors and on a broader stage. Scores of theologians, chief among whom of late, in zeal if not in knowledge, has been Mr. Gladstone, have endeavoured to "reconcile" the two accounts in Genesis with each other and with the truths regarding the origin of the universe gained by astronomy, geology, geography, physics, and chemistry. The result has been recently stated by an eminent theologian, the Hulsean Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He declares, "No attempt at reconciling genesis with the exacting requirements of modern sciences has ever been known to succeed without entailing a degree of special pleading or forced interpretation to which, in such a question, we should be wise to have no recourse."(9) (9) For an interesting reference to the outcry against Newton, see McCosh, The Religious Aspect of Evolution, New York, 1890, pp. 103, 104; for germs of an evolutionary view among the Babylonians, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, New York, 1876, pp. 74, 75; for a germ of the same thought in Lucretius, see his De Natura Rerum, lib. v, pp.187-194, 447-454; for Bruno's conjecture (in 1591), see Jevons, Principles of Science, London, 1874, vol. ii, p. 36; for Kant's statement, see his Naturgeschichte des Himmels; for his part in the nebular hypothesis, see Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. i, p.266; for the value of Plateau's beautiful experiment, very cautiously estimated, see Jevons, vol. ii, p. 36; also Elisee Reclus, The Earth, translated by Woodward, vol. i, pp. 14-18, for an estimate still more careful; for a general account of discoveries of the nature of nebulae by spectroscope, see Draper, Conflict between Religion and Science; for a careful discussion regarding the spectra of solid, liquid, and gaseous bodies, see Schellen, Spectrum Analysis, pp. 100 et seq.; for a very thorough discussion of the bearings of discoveries made by spectrum analysis upon the nebular hypothesis, ibid., pp. 532-537; for a presentation of the difficulties yet unsolved, see an article by Plummer in the London Popular Science Review for January, 1875; for an excellent short summary of recent observations and thoughts on this subject, see T. Sterry Hunt, Address at the Priestley Centennial, pp. 7, 8; for an interesting modification of this hypothesis, see Proctor's writings; for a still more recent view see Lockyer's two articles on The Sun's Place in Nature for February 14 and 25, 1895. The revelations of another group of sciences, though sometimes bitterly opposed and sometimes "reconciled" by theologians, have finally set the whole question at rest. First, there have come the biblical critics--earnest Christian scholars, working for the sake of truth--and these have revealed beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt the existence of at least two distinct accounts of creation in our book of Genesis, which can sometimes be forced to agree, but which are generally absolutely at variance with each other. These scholars have further shown the two accounts to be not the cunningly devised fables of priestcraft, but evidently fragments of earlier legends, myths, and theologies, accepted in good faith and brought together for the noblest of purposes by those who put in order the first of our sacred books. Next have come the archaeologists and philologists, the devoted students of ancient monuments and records; of these are such as Rawlinson, George Smith, Sayce, Oppert, Jensen, Schrader, Delitzsch, and a phalanx of similarly devoted scholars, who have deciphered a multitude of ancient texts, especially the inscriptions found in the great library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, and have discovered therein an account of the origin of the world identical in its most important features with the later accounts in our own book of Genesis. These men have had the courage to point out these facts and to connect them with the truth that these Chaldean and Babylonian myths, legends, and theories were far earlier than those of the Hebrews, which so strikingly resemble them, and which we have in our sacred books; and they have also shown us how natural it was that the Jewish accounts of the creation should have been obtained at that remote period when the earliest Hebrews were among the Chaldeans, and how the great Hebrew poetic accounts of creation were drawn either from the sacred traditions of these earlier peoples or from antecedent sources common to various ancient nations. In a summary which for profound thought and fearless integrity does honour not only to himself but to the great position which he holds, the Rev. Dr. Driver, Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church at Oxford, has recently stated the case fully and fairly. Having pointed out the fact that the Hebrews were one people out of many who thought upon the origin of the universe, he says that they "framed theories to account for the beginnings of the earth and man"; that "they either did this for themselves or borrowed those of their neighbours"; that "of the theories current in Assyria and Phoenicia fragments have been preserved, and these exhibit points of resemblance with the biblical narrative sufficient to warrant the inference that both are derived from the same cycle of tradition." After giving some extracts from the Chaldean creation tablets he says: "In the light of these facts it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the biblical narrative is drawn from the same source as these other records. The biblical historians, it is plain, derived their materials from the best human sources available.... The materials which with other nations were combined into the crudest physical theories or associated with a grotesque polytheism were vivified and transformed by the inspired genius of the Hebrew historians, and adapted to become the vehicle of profound religious truth." Not less honourable to the sister university and to himself is the statement recently made by the Rev. Dr. Ryle, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. He says that to suppose that a Christian "must either renounce his confidence in the achievements of scientific research or abandon his faith in Scripture is a monstrous perversion of Christian freedom." He declares: "The old position is no longer tenable; a new position has to be taken up at once, prayerfully chosen, and hopefully held." He then goes on to compare the Hebrew story of creation with the earlier stories developed among kindred peoples, and especially with the pre-existing Assyro-Babylonian cosmogony, and shows that they are from the same source. He points out that any attempt to explain particular features of the story into harmony with the modern scientific ideas necessitates "a non-natural" interpretation; but he says that, if we adopt a natural interpretation, "we shall consider that the Hebrew description of the visible universe is unscientific as judged by modern standards, and that it shares the limitations of the imperfect knowledge of the age at which it was committed to writing." Regarding the account in Genesis of man's physical origin, he says that it "is expressed in the simple terms of prehistoric legend, of unscientific pictorial description." In these statements and in a multitude of others made by eminent Christian investigators in other countries is indicated what the victory is which has now been fully won over the older theology. Thus, from the Assyrian researches as well as from other sources, it has come to be acknowledged by the most eminent scholars at the leading seats of Christian learning that the accounts of creation with which for nearly two thousand years all scientific discoveries have had to be "reconciled"--the accounts which blocked the way of Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and Laplace--were simply transcribed or evolved from a mass of myths and legends largely derived by the Hebrews from their ancient relations with Chaldea, rewrought in a monotheistic sense, imperfectly welded together, and then thrown into poetic forms in the sacred books which we have inherited. On one hand, then, we have the various groups of men devoted to the physical sciences all converging toward the proofs that the universe, as we at present know it, is the result of an evolutionary process--that is, of the gradual working of physical laws upon an early condition of matter; on the other hand, we have other great groups of men devoted to historical, philological, and archaeological science whose researches all converge toward the conclusion that our sacred accounts of creation were the result of an evolution from an early chaos of rude opinion. The great body of theologians who have so long resisted the conclusions of the men of science have claimed to be fighting especially for "the truth of Scripture," and their final answer to the simple conclusions of science regarding the evolution of the material universe has been the cry, "The Bible is true." And they are right--though in a sense nobler than they have dreamed. Science, while conquering them, has found in our Scriptures a far nobler truth than that literal historical exactness for which theologians have so long and so vainly contended. More and more as we consider the results of the long struggle in this field we are brought to the conclusion that the inestimable value of the great sacred books of the world is found in their revelation of the steady striving of our race after higher conceptions, beliefs, and aspirations, both in morals and religion. Unfolding and exhibiting this long-continued effort, each of the great sacred books of the world is precious, and all, in the highest sense, are true. Not one of them, indeed, conforms to the measure of what mankind has now reached in historical and scientific truth; to make a claim to such conformity is folly, for it simply exposes those who make it and the books for which it is made to loss of their just influence. That to which the great sacred books of the world conform, and our own most of all, is the evolution of the highest conceptions, beliefs, and aspirations of our race from its childhood through the great turning-points in its history. Herein lies the truth of all bibles, and especially of our own. Of vast value they indeed often are as a record of historical outward fact; recent researches in the East are constantly increasing this value; but it is not for this that we prize them most: they are eminently precious, not as a record of outward fact, but as a mirror of the evolving heart, mind, and soul of man. They are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history, and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity. To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a flower or a tree or a planet is not true; to scoff at them is to scoff at the law of the universe. In welding together into noble form, whether in the book of Genesis, or in the Psalms, or in the book of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions of men acting under earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or Chaldea, or India, or Persia, the compilers of our sacred books have given to humanity a possession ever becoming more and more precious; and modern science, in substituting a new heaven and a new earth for the old--the reign of law for the reign of caprice, and the idea of evolution for that of creation--has added and is steadily adding a new revelation divinely inspired. In the light of these two evolutions, then--one of the visible universe, the other of a sacred creation-legend--science and theology, if the master minds in both are wise, may at last be reconciled. A great step in this reconciliation was recently seen at the main centre of theological thought among English-speaking people, when, in the collection of essays entitled Lux Mundi, emanating from the college established in these latter days as a fortress of orthodoxy at Oxford, the legendary character of the creation accounts in our sacred books was acknowledged, and when the Archbishop of Canterbury asked, "May not the Holy Spirit at times have made use of myth and legend?"(10) (10) For the first citations above made, see The Cosmogony of Genesis, by the Rev. S. R. Driver, D.D., Canon of Christ Church and Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, in the Expositor for January, 1886; for the second series of citations, see the Early Narratives of Genesis, by Herbert Edward Ryle, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, London, 1892. For evidence that even the stiffest of Scotch Presbyterians have come to discard the old literal biblical narrative of creation and to regard the declaration of the Westminster Confession thereon as a "disproved theory of creation," see Principal John Tulloch, in Contemporary Review, March, 1877, on Religious Thought in Scotland--especially page 550. II. THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS REGARDING THE ANIMALS AND MAN. In one of the windows of the cathedral at Ulm a mediaeval glass-stainer has represented the Almighty as busily engaged in creating the animals, and there has just left the divine hands an elephant fully accoutred, with armour, harness, and housings, ready-for war. Similar representations appear in illuminated manuscripts and even in early printed books, and, as the culmination of the whole, the Almighty is shown as fashioning the first man from a hillock of clay and extracting from his side, with evident effort, the first woman. This view of the general process of creation had come from far, appearing under varying forms in various ancient cosmogonies. In the Egyptian temples at Philae and Denderah may still be seen representations of the Nile gods modelling lumps of clay into men, and a similar work is ascribed in the Assyrian tablets to the gods of Babylonia. Passing into our own sacred books, these ideas became the starting point of a vast new development of theology.(11) (11) For representations of Egyptian gods creating men out of lumps of clay, see Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of History, p. 156; for the Chaldean legends of the creation of men and animals, see ibid., p. 543; see also George Smith, Chaldean Accounts of Genesis, Sayce's edition, pp. 36, 72, and 93; also for similar legends in other ancient nations, Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire, pp. 17 et seq.; for mediaeval representations of the creation of man and woman, see Didron, Iconographie, pp. 35, 178, 224, 537. The fathers of the Church generally received each of the two conflicting creation legends in Genesis literally, and then, having done their best to reconcile them with each other and to mould them together, made them the final test of thought upon the universe and all things therein. At the beginning of the fourth century Lactantius struck the key-note of this mode of subordinating all other things in the study of creation to the literal text of Scripture, and he enforces his view of the creation of man by a bit of philology, saying the final being created "is called man because he is made from the ground--homo ex humo." In the second half of the same century this view as to the literal acceptance of the sacred text was reasserted by St. Ambrose, who, in his work on the creation, declared that "Moses opened his mouth and poured forth what God had said to him." But a greater than either of them fastened this idea into the Christian theologies. St. Augustine, preparing his Commentary on the Book of Genesis, laid down in one famous sentence the law which has lasted in the Church until our own time: "Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind." The vigour of the sentence in its original Latin carried it ringing down the centuries: "Major est Scripturae auctoritas quam omnis humani ingenii capacitas." Through the mediaeval period, in spite of a revolt led by no other than St. Augustine himself, and followed by a series of influential churchmen, contending, as we shall hereafter see, for a modification of the accepted view of creation, this phrase held the minds of men firmly. The great Dominican encyclopaedist, Vincent of Beauvais, in his Mirror of Nature, while mixing ideas brought from Aristotle with a theory drawn from the Bible, stood firmly by the first of the accounts given in Genesis, and assigned the special virtue of the number six as a reason why all things were created in six days; and in the later Middle Ages that eminent authority, Cardinal d' Ailly, accepted everything regarding creation in the sacred books literally. Only a faint dissent is seen in Gregory Reisch, another authority of this later period, who, while giving, in his book on the beginning of things, a full length woodcut showing the Almighty in the act of extracting Eve from Adam's side, with all the rest of new-formed Nature in the background, leans in his writings, like St. Augustine, toward a belief in the pre-existence of matter. At the Reformation the vast authority of Luther was thrown in favour of the literal acceptance of Scripture as the main source of natural science. The allegorical and mystical interpretations of earlier theologians he utterly rejected. "Why," he asks, "should Moses use allegory when he is not speaking of allegorical creatures or of an allegorical world, but of real creatures and of a visible world, which can be seen, felt, and grasped? Moses calls things by their right names, as we ought to do.... I hold that the animals took their being at once upon the word of God, as did also the fishes in the sea." Not less explicit in his adherence to the literal account of creation given in Genesis was Calvin. He warns those who, by taking another view than his own, "basely insult the Creator, to expect a judge who will annihilate them." He insists that all species of animals were created in six days, each made up of an evening and a morning, and that no new species has ever appeared since. He dwells on the production of birds from the water as resting upon certain warrant of Scripture, but adds, "If the question is to be argued on physical grounds, we know that water is more akin to air than the earth is." As to difficulties in the scriptural account of creation, he tells us that God "wished by these to give proofs of his power which should fill us with astonishment." The controlling minds in the Roman Church steadfastly held this view. In the seventeenth century Bossuet threw his vast authority in its favour, and in his Discourse on Universal History, which has remained the foundation not only of theological but of general historical teaching in France down to the present republic, we find him calling attention to what he regards as the culminating act of creation, and asserting that, literally, for the creation of man earth was used, and "the finger of God applied to corruptible matter." The Protestant world held this idea no less persistently. In the seventeenth century Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical scholar of his time, attempted to reconcile the two main legends in Genesis by saying that of the "clean sort of beasts there were seven of every kind created, three couples for breeding and the odd one for Adam's sacrifice on his fall, which God foresaw"; and that of unclean beasts only one couple was created. So literal was this whole conception of the work of creation that in these days it can scarcely be imagined. The Almighty was represented in theological literature, in the pictured Bibles, and in works of art generally, as a sort of enlarged and venerable Nuremberg toymaker. At times the accounts in Genesis were illustrated with even more literal exactness; thus, in connection with a well-known passage in the sacred text, the Creator was shown as a tailor, seated, needle in hand, diligently sewing together skins of beasts into coats for Adam and Eve. Such representations presented no difficulties to the docile minds of the Middle Ages and the Reformation period; and in the same spirit, when the discovery of fossils began to provoke thought, these were declared to be "models of his works approved or rejected by the great Artificer," "outlines of future creations," "sports of Nature," or "objects placed in the strata to bring to naught human curiosity"; and this kind of explanation lingered on until in our own time an eminent naturalist, in his anxiety to save the literal account in Genesis, has urged that Jehovah tilted and twisted the strata, scattered the fossils through them, scratched the glacial furrows upon them, spread over them the marks of erosion by water, and set Niagara pouring--all in an instant--thus mystifying the world "for some inscrutable purpose, but for his own glory."(12) (12) For the citation from Lactantius, see Divin. Instit., lib. ii, cap. xi, in Migne, tome vi, pp. 311, 312; for St. Augustine's great phrase, see the De Genes. ad litt., ii, 5; for St. Ambrose, see lib. i, cap. ii; for Vincent of Beauvais, see the Speculum Naturale, lib. i, cap. ii, and lib. ii, cap. xv and xxx; also Bourgeat, Etudes sur Vincent de Beauvais, Paris, 1856, especially chaps. vii, xii, and xvi; for Cardinal d"ailly, see the Imago Mundi, and for Reisch, see the various editions of the Margarita Philosophica; for Luther's statements, see Luther's Schriften, ed. Walch, Halle, 1740, Commentary on Genesis, vol. i; for Calvin's view of the creation of the animals, including the immutability of Species, see the Comm. in Gen., tome i of his Opera omnia, Amst., 1671, cap. i, v, xx, p. 5, also cap. ii, v, ii, p. 8, and elsewhere; for Bossuet, see his Discours sur l'Histoire universelle (in his OEuvres, tome v, Paris, 1846); for Lightfoot, see his works, edited by Pitman, London, 1822; for Bede, see the Hexaemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, p.21; for Mr. Gosse'smodern defence of the literal view, see his Omphalos, London, 1857, passim. The next important development of theological reasoning had regard to the DIVISIONS of the animal kingdom. Naturally, one of the first divisions which struck the inquiring mind was that between useful and noxious creatures, and the question therefore occurred, How could a good God create tigers and serpents, thorns and thistles? The answer was found in theological considerations upon SIN. To man's first disobedience all woes were due. Great men for eighteen hundred years developed the theory that before Adam's disobedience there was no death, and therefore neither ferocity nor venom. Some typical utterances in the evolution of this doctrine are worthy of a passing glance. St. Augustine expressly confirmed and emphasized the view that the vegetable as well as the animal kingdom was cursed on account of man's sin. Two hundred years later this utterance had been echoed on from father to father of the Church until it was caught by Bede; he declared that before man's fall animals were harmless, but were made poisonous or hurtful by Adam's sin, and he said, "Thus fierce and poisonous animals were created for terrifying man (because God foresaw that he would sin), in order that he might be made aware of the final punishment of hell." In the twelfth century this view was incorporated by Peter Lombard into his great theological work, the Sentences, which became a text-book of theology through the middle ages. He affirmed that "no created things would have been hurtful to man had he not sinned; they became hurtful for the sake of terrifying and punishing vice or of proving and perfecting virtue; they were created harmless, and on account of sin became hurtful." This theological theory regarding animals was brought out in the eighteenth century with great force by John Wesley. He declared that before Adam's sin "none of these attempted to devour or in any wise hurt one another"; "the spider was as harmless as the fly, and did not lie in wait for blood." Not only Wesley, but the eminent Dr. Adam Clarke and Dr. Richard Watson, whose ideas had the very greatest weight among the English Dissenters, and even among leading thinkers in the Established Church, held firmly to this theory; so that not until, in our own time, geology revealed the remains of vast multitudes of carnivorous creatures, many of them with half-digested remains of other animals in their stomachs, all extinct long ages before the appearance of man upon earth, was a victory won by science over theology in this field. A curious development of this doctrine was seen in the belief drawn by sundry old commentators from the condemnation of the serpent in Genesis--a belief, indeed, perfectly natural, since it was evidently that of the original writers of the account preserved in the first of our sacred books. This belief was that, until the tempting serpent was cursed by the Almighty, all serpents stood erect, walked, and talked. This belief was handed down the ages as part of "the sacred deposit of the faith" until Watson, the most prolific writer of the evangelical reform in the eighteenth century and the standard theologian of the evangelical party, declared: "We have no reason at all to believe that the animal had a serpentine form in any mode or degree until its transformation; that he was then degraded to a reptile to go upon his belly imports, on the contrary, an entire loss and alteration of the original form." Here, again, was a ripe result of the theologic method diligently pursued by the strongest thinkers in the Church during nearly two thousand years; but this "sacred deposit" also faded away when the geologists found abundant remains of fossil serpents dating from periods long before the appearance of man. Troublesome questions also arose among theologians regarding animals classed as "superfluous." St. Augustine was especially exercised thereby. He says: "I confess I am ignorant why mice and frogs were created, or flies and worms.... All creatures are either useful, hurtful, or superfluous to us.... As for the hurtful creatures, we are either punished, or disciplined, or terrified by them, so that we may not cherish and love this life." As to the "superfluous animals," he says, "Although they are not necessary for our service, yet the whole design of the universe is thereby completed and finished." Luther, who followed St. Augustine in so many other matters, declined to follow him fully in this. To him a fly was not merely superfluous, it was noxious--sent by the devil to vex him when reading. Another subject which gave rise to much searching of Scripture and long trains of theological reasoning was the difference between the creation of man and that of other living beings. Great stress was laid by theologians, from St. Basil and St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas and Bossuet, and from Luther to Wesley, on the radical distinction indicated in Genesis, God having created man "in his own image." What this statement meant was seen in the light of the later biblical statement that "Adam begat Seth in his own likeness, after his image." In view of this and of well-known texts incorporated from older creation legends into the Hebrew sacred books it came to be widely held that, while man was directly moulded and fashioned separately by the Creator's hand, the animals generally were evoked in numbers from the earth and sea by the Creator's voice. A question now arose naturally as to the DISTINCTIONS OF SPECIES among animals. The vast majority of theologians agreed in representing all animals as created "in the beginning," and named by Adam, preserved in the ark, and continued ever afterward under exactly the same species. This belief ripened into a dogma. Like so many other dogmas in the Church, Catholic and Protestant, its real origins are to be found rather in pagan philosophy than in the Christian Scriptures; it came far more from Plato and Aristotle than from Moses and St. Paul. But this was not considered: more and more it became necessary to believe that each and every difference of species was impressed by the Creator "in the beginning," and that no change had taken place or could have taken place since. Some difficulties arose here and there as zoology progressed and revealed ever-increasing numbers of species; but through the Middle Ages, and indeed long after the Reformation, these difficulties were easily surmounted by making the ark of Noah larger and larger, and especially by holding that there had been a human error in regard to its measurement.(13) (13) For St. Augustine, see De Genesis and De Trinitate, passim; for Bede, see Hexaemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, pp. 21, 36-38, 42; and De Sex Dierum Criatione, in Migne, tome xciii, p. 215; for Peter Lombard on "noxious animals," see his Sententiae, lib. ii, dist. xv, 3, Migne, tome cxcii, p. 682; for Wesley, Clarke, and Watson, see quotations from them and notes thereto in my chapter on Geology; for St. Augustine on "superfluous animals," see the De Genesi, lib. i, cap. xvi, 26; on Luther's view of flies, see the Table Talk and his famous utterance, "Odio muscas quia sunt imagines diaboli et hoereticorum"; for the agency of Aristotle and Plato in fastening the belief in the fixity of species into Christian theology, see Sachs, Geschichte der Botanik, Munchen, 1875, p. 107 and note, also p. 113. But naturally there was developed among both ecclesiastics and laymen a human desire to go beyond these special points in the history of animated beings--a desire to know what the creation really IS. Current legends, stories, and travellers' observations, poor as they were, tended powerfully to stimulate curiosity in this field. Three centuries before the Christian era Aristotle had made the first really great attempt to satisfy this curiosity, and had begun a development of studies in natural history which remains one of the leading achievements in the story of our race. But the feeling which we have already seen so strong in the early Church--that all study of Nature was futile in view of the approaching end of the world--indicated so clearly in the New Testament and voiced so powerfully by Lactantius and St. Augustine--held back this current of thought for many centuries. Still, the better tendency in humanity continued to assert itself. There was, indeed, an influence coming from the Hebrew Scriptures themselves which wrought powerfully to this end; for, in spite of all that Lactantius or St. Augustine might say as to the futility of any study of Nature, the grand utterances in the Psalms regarding the beauties and wonders of creation, in all the glow of the truest poetry, ennobled the study even among those whom logic drew away from it. But, as a matter of course, in the early Church and throughout the Middle Ages all such studies were cast in a theologic mould. Without some purpose of biblical illustration or spiritual edification they were considered futile too much prying into the secrets of Nature was very generally held to be dangerous both to body and soul; only for showing forth God's glory and his purposes in the creation were such studies praiseworthy. The great work of Aristotle was under eclipse. The early Christian thinkers gave little attention to it, and that little was devoted to transforming it into something absolutely opposed to his whole spirit and method; in place of it they developed the Physiologus and the Bestiaries, mingling scriptural statements, legends of the saints, and fanciful inventions with pious intent and childlike simplicity. In place of research came authority--the authority of the Scriptures as interpreted by the Physio Cogus and the Bestiaries--and these remained the principal source of thought on animated Nature for over a thousand years. Occasionally, indeed, fear was shown among the rulers in the Church, even at such poor prying into the creation as this, and in the fifth century a synod under Pope Gelasius administered a rebuke to the Physiologus; but the interest in Nature was too strong: the great work on Creation by St. Basil had drawn from the Physiologus precious illustrations of Holy Writ, and the strongest of the early popes, Gregory the Great, virtually sanctioned it. Thus was developed a sacred science of creation and of the divine purpose in Nature, which went on developing from the fourth century to the nineteenth--from St. Basil to St. Isidore of Seville, from Isidore to Vincent of Beauvais, and from Vincent to Archdeacon Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises. Like all else in the Middle Ages, this sacred science was developed purely by theological methods. Neglecting the wonders which the dissection of the commonest animals would have afforded them, these naturalists attempted to throw light into Nature by ingenious use of scriptural texts, by research among the lives of the saints, and by the plentiful application of metaphysics. Hence even such strong men as St. Isidore of Seville treasured up accounts of the unicorn and dragons mentioned in the Scriptures and of the phoenix and basilisk in profane writings. Hence such contributions to knowledge as that the basilisk kills serpents by his breath and men by his glance, that the lion when pursued effaces his tracks with the end of his tail, that the pelican nourishes her young with her own blood, that serpents lay aside their venom before drinking, that the salamander quenches fire, that the hyena can talk with shepherds, that certain birds are born of the fruit of a certain tree when it happens to fall into the water, with other masses of science equally valuable. As to the method of bringing science to bear on Scripture, the Physiologus gives an example, illustrating the passage in the book of Job which speaks of the old lion perishing for lack of prey. Out of the attempt to explain an unusual Hebrew word in the text there came a curious development of error, until we find fully evolved an account of the "ant-lion," which, it gives us to understand, was the lion mentioned by Job, and it says: "As to the ant-lion, his father hath the shape of a lion, his mother that of an ant; the father liveth upon flesh and the mother upon herbs; these bring forth the ant-lion, a compound of both and in part like to either; for his fore part is like that of a lion and his hind part like that of an ant. Being thus composed, he is neither able to eat flesh like his father nor herbs like his mother, and so he perisheth." In the middle of the thirteenth century we have a triumph of this theological method in the great work of the English Franciscan Bartholomew on The Properties of Things. The theological method as applied to science consists largely in accepting tradition and in spinning arguments to fit it. In this field Bartholomew was a master. Having begun with the intent mainly to explain the allusions in Scripture to natural objects, he soon rises logically into a survey of all Nature. Discussing the "cockatrice" of Scripture, he tells us: "He drieth and burneth leaves with his touch, and he is of so great venom and perilous that he slayeth and wasteth him that nigheth him without tarrying; and yet the weasel overcometh him, for the biting of the weasel is death to the cockatrice. Nevertheless the biting of the cockatrice is death to the weasel if the weasel eat not rue before. And though the cockatrice be venomous without remedy while he is alive, yet he looseth all the malice when he is burnt to ashes. His ashes be accounted profitable in working of alchemy, and namely in turning and changing of metals." Bartholomew also enlightens us on the animals of Egypt, and says, "If the crocodile findeth a man by the water's brim he slayeth him, and then he weepeth over him and swalloweth him." Naturally this good Franciscan naturalist devotes much thought to the "dragons" mentioned in Scripture. He says: "The dragon is most greatest of all serpents, and oft he is drawn out of his den and riseth up into the air, and the air is moved by him, and also the sea swelleth against his venom, and he hath a crest, and reareth his tongue, and hath teeth like a saw, and hath strength, and not only in teeth but in tail, and grieveth with biting and with stinging. Whom he findeth he slayeth. Oft four or five of them fasten their tails together and rear up their heads, and sail over the sea to get good meat. Between elephants and dragons is everlasting fighting; for the dragon with his tail spanneth the elephant, and the elephant with his nose throweth down the dragon.... The cause why the dragon desireth his blood is the coldness thereof, by the which the dragon desireth to cool himself. Jerome saith that the dragon is a full thirsty beast, insomuch that he openeth his mouth against the wind to quench the burning of his thirst in that wise. Therefore, when he seeth ships in great wind he flieth against the sail to take the cold wind, and overthroweth the ship." These ideas of Friar Bartholomew spread far and struck deep into the popular mind. His book was translated into the principal languages of Europe, and was one of those most generally read during the Ages of Faith. It maintained its position nearly three hundred years; even after the invention of printing it held its own, and in the fifteenth century there were issued no less than ten editions of it in Latin, four in French, and various versions of it in Dutch, Spanish, and English. Preachers found it especially useful in illustrating the ways of God to man. It was only when the great voyages of discovery substituted ascertained fact for theological reasoning in this province that its authority was broken. The same sort of science flourished in the Bestiaries, which were used everywhere, and especially in the pulpits, for the edification of the faithful. In all of these, as in that compiled early in the thirteenth century by an ecclesiastic, William of Normandy, we have this lesson, borrowed from the Physiologus: "The lioness giveth birth to cubs which remain three days without life. Then cometh the lion, breatheth upon them, and bringeth them to life.... Thus it is that Jesus Christ during three days was deprived of life, but God the Father raised him gloriously." Pious use was constantly made of this science, especially by monkish preachers. The phoenix rising from his ashes proves the doctrine of the resurrection; the structure and mischief of monkeys proves the existence of demons; the fact that certain monkeys have no tails proves that Satan has been shorn of his glory; the weasel, which "constantly changes its place, is a type of the man estranged from the word of God, who findeth no rest." The moral treatises of the time often took the form of works on natural history, in order the more fully to exploit these religious teachings of Nature. Thus from the book On Bees, the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpre, we learn that "wasps persecute bees and make war on them out of natural hatred"; and these, he tells us, typify the demons who dwell in the air and with lightning and tempest assail and vex mankind--whereupon he fills a long chapter with anecdotes of such demonic warfare on mortals. In like manner his fellow-Dominican, the inquisitor Nider, in his book The Ant Hill, teaches us that the ants in Ethiopia, which are said to have horns and to grow so large as to look like dogs, are emblems of atrocious heretics, like Wyclif and the Hussites, who bark and bite against the truth; while the ants of India, which dig up gold out of the sand with their feet and hoard it, though they make no use of it, symbolize the fruitless toil with which the heretics dig out the gold of Holy Scripture and hoard it in their books to no purpose. This pious spirit not only pervaded science; it bloomed out in art, and especially in the cathedrals. In the gargoyles overhanging the walls, in the grotesques clambering about the towers or perched upon pinnacles, in the dragons prowling under archways or lurking in bosses of foliage, in the apocalyptic beasts carved upon the stalls of the choir, stained into the windows, wrought into the tapestries, illuminated in the letters and borders of psalters and missals, these marvels of creation suggested everywhere morals from the Physiologus, the Bestiaries, and the Exempla.(14) (14) For the Physiologus, Bestiaries, etc., see Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Teratologiques; also Hippeau's edition of the Bestiare de Guillaume de Normandie, Caen, 1852, and such medieaval books of Exempla as the Lumen Naturae; also Hoefer, Histoire de la Zoologie; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation Francaise, Paris, 1885, vol i, pp. 368, 369; also Cardinal Pitra, preface to the Spicilegium Solismense, Paris, 1885, passim; also Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie; and for an admirable summary, the article Physiologus in the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the illuminated manuscripts in the Library of Cornell University are some very striking examples of grotesques. For admirably illustrated articles on the Bestiaries, see Cahier and Martin, Melanges d'Archeologie, Paris, 1851, 1852, and 1856, vol. ii of the first series, pp. 85-232, and second series, volume on Curiosities Mysterieuses, pp. 106-164; also J. R. Allen, Early Christian Symbolism in Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1887), lecture vi; for an exhaustive discussion of the subject, see Das Thierbuch des normannischen Dichters Guillaume le Clerc, herausgegeben von Reinisch, Leipsic, 1890; and for an Italian examlpe, Goldstaub and Wendriner, Ein Tosco-Venezianischer Bestiarius, Halle, 1892, where is given, on pp. 369-371, a very pious but very comical tradition regarding the beaver, hardly mentionable to ears polite. For Friar Bartholomew, see (besides his book itself) Medieval Lore, edited by Robert Steele, London, 1893, pp. 118-138. Here and there among men who were free from church control we have work of a better sort. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Abd Allatif made observations upon the natural history of Egypt which showed a truly scientific spirit, and the Emperor Frederick II attempted to promote a more fruitful study of Nature; but one of these men was abhorred as a Mussulman and the other as an infidel. Far more in accordance with the spirit of the time was the ecclesiastic Giraldus Cambrensis, whose book on the topography of Ireland bestows much attention upon the animals of the island, and rarely fails to make each contribute an appropriate moral. For example, he says that in Ireland "eagles live for so many ages that they seem to contend with eternity itself; so also the saints, having put off the old man and put on the new, obtain the blessed fruit of everlasting life." Again, he tells us: "Eagles often fly so high that their wings are scorched by the sun; so those who in the Holy Scriptures strive to unravel the deep and hidden secrets of the heavenly mysteries, beyond what is allowed, fall below, as if the wings of the presumptuous imaginations on which they are borne were scorched." In one of the great men of the following century appeared a gleam of healthful criticism: Albert the Great, in his work on the animals, dissents from the widespread belief that certain birds spring from trees and are nourished by the sap, and also from the theory that some are generated in the sea from decaying wood. But it required many generations for such scepticism to produce much effect, and we find among the illustrations in an edition of Mandeville published just before the Reformation not only careful accounts but pictured representations both of birds and of beasts produced in the fruit of trees.(15) (15) For Giraldus Cambrensis, see the edition in the Bohn Library, London, 1863, p. 30; for the Abd Allatif and Frederick II, see Hoefer, as above; for Albertus Magnus, see the De Animalibus, lib. xxiii; for the illustrations in Mandeville, see the Strasburg edition, 1484; for the history of the myth of the tree which produces birds, see Max Muller's lectures on the Science of Language, second series, lect. xii. This general employment of natural science for pious purposes went on after the Reformation. Luther frequently made this use of it, and his example controlled his followers. In 1612, Wolfgang Franz, Professor of Theology at Luther's university, gave to the world his sacred history of animals, which went through many editions. It contained a very ingenious classification, describing "natural dragons," which have three rows of teeth to each jaw, and he piously adds, "the principal dragon is the Devil." Near the end of the same century, Father Kircher, the great Jesuit professor at Rome, holds back the sceptical current, insists upon the orthodox view, and represents among the animals entering the ark sirens and griffins. Yet even among theologians we note here and there a sceptical spirit in natural science. Early in the same seventeenth century Eugene Roger published his Travels in Palestine. As regards the utterances of Scripture he is soundly orthodox: he prefaces his work with a map showing, among other important points referred to in biblical history, the place where Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, the cavern which Adam and Eve inhabited after their expulsion from paradise, the spot where Balaam's ass spoke, the place where Jacob wrestled with the angel, the steep place down which the swine possessed of devils plunged into the sea, the position of the salt statue which was once Lot's wife, the place at sea where Jonah was swallowed by the whale, and "the exact spot where St. Peter caught one hundred and fifty-three fishes." As to natural history, he describes and discusses with great theological acuteness the basilisk. He tells us that the animal is about a foot and a half long, is shaped like a crocodile, and kills people with a single glance. The one which he saw was dead, fortunately for him, since in the time of Pope Leo IV--as he tells us--one appeared in Rome and killed many people by merely looking at them; but the Pope destroyed it with his prayers and the sign of the cross. He informs us that Providence has wisely and mercifully protected man by requiring the monster to cry aloud two or three times whenever it leaves its den, and that the divine wisdom in creation is also shown by the fact that the monster is obliged to look its victim in the eye, and at a certain fixed distance, before its glance can penetrate the victim's brain and so pass to his heart. He also gives a reason for supposing that the same divine mercy has provided that the crowing of a cock will kill the basilisk. Yet even in this good and credulous missionary we see the influence of Bacon and the dawn of experimental science; for, having been told many stories regarding the salamander, he secured one, placed it alive upon the burning coals, and reports to us that the legends concerning its power to live in the fire are untrue. He also tried experiments with the chameleon, and found that the stories told of it were to be received with much allowance: while, then, he locks up his judgment whenever he discusses the letter of Scripture, he uses his mind in other things much after the modern method. In the second half of the same century Hottinger, in his Theological Examination of the History of Creation, breaks from the belief in the phoenix; but his scepticism is carefully kept within the limits imposed by Scripture. He avows his doubts, first, "because God created the animals in couples, while the phoenix is represented as a single, unmated creature"; secondly, "because Noah, when he entered the ark, brought the animals in by sevens, while there were never so many individuals of the phoenix species"; thirdly, because "no man is known who dares assert that he has ever seen this bird"; fourthly, because "those who assert there is a phoenix differ among themselves." In view of these attacks on the salamander and the phoenix, we are not surprised to find, before the end of the century, scepticism regarding the basilisk: the eminent Prof. Kirchmaier, at the University of Wittenberg, treats phoenix and basilisk alike as old wives' fables. As to the phoenix, he denies its existence, not only because Noah took no such bird into the ark, but also because, as he pithily remarks, "birds come from eggs, not from ashes." But the unicorn he can not resign, nor will he even concede that the unicorn is a rhinoceros; he appeals to Job and to Marco Polo to prove that this animal, as usually conceived, really exists, and says, "Who would not fear to deny the existence of the unicorn, since Holy Scripture names him with distinct praises?" As to the other great animals mentioned in Scripture, he is so rationalistic as to admit that behemoth was an elephant and leviathan a whale. But these germs of a fruitful scepticism grew, and we soon find Dannhauer going a step further and declaring his disbelief even in the unicorn, insisting that it was a rhinoceros--only that and nothing more. Still, the main current continued strongly theological. In 1712 Samuel Bochart published his great work upon the animals of Holy Scripture. As showing its spirit we may take the titles of the chapters on the horse: "Chapter VI. Of the Hebrew Name of the Horse." "Chapter VII. Of the Colours of the Six Horses in Zechariah." "Chapter VIII. Of the Horses in Job." "Chapter IX. Of Solomon's Horses, and of the Texts wherein the Writers praise the Excellence of Horses." "Chapter X. Of the Consecrated Horses of the Sun." Among the other titles of chapters are such as: Of Balaam's Ass; Of the Thousand Philistines slain by Samson with the Jawbone of an Ass; Of the Golden Calves of Aaron and Jeroboam; Of the Bleating, Milk, Wool, External and Internal Parts of Sheep mentioned in Scripture; Of Notable Things told regarding Lions in Scripture; Of Noah's Dove and of the Dove which appeared at Christ's Baptism. Mixed up in the book, with the principal mass drawn from Scripture, were many facts and reasonings taken from investigations by naturalists; but all were permeated by the theological spirit.(16) (16) For Franz and Kircher, see Perrier, La Philosophie Zoologique avant Darwin, 1884, p. 29; for Roger, see his La Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664, pp. 89-92, 130, 218, etc.; for Hottinger, see his Historiae Creatonis Examen theologico-philologicum, Heidelberg, 1659, lib. vi, quaest lxxxiii; for Kirchmaier, see his Disputationes Zoologicae (published collectively after his death), Jena, 1736; for Dannhauer, see his Disputationes Theologicae, Leipsic, 1707, p. 14; for Bochart, see his Hierozoikon, sive De Animalibus Sacre Scripturae, Leyden, 1712. The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method--the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically--the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts. At that time Edward Wotton led the way in England and Conrad Gesner on the Continent, by observations widely extended, carefully noted, and thoughtfully classified. This better method of interrogating Nature soon led to the formation of societies for the same purpose. In 1560 was founded an Academy for the Study of Nature at Naples, but theologians, becoming alarmed, suppressed it, and for nearly one hundred years there was no new combined effort of that sort, until in 1645 began the meetings in London of what was afterward the Royal Society. Then came the Academy of Sciences in France, and the Accademia del Cimento in Italy; others followed in all parts of the world, and a great new movement was begun. Theologians soon saw a danger in this movement. In Italy, Prince Leopold de' Medici, a protector of the Florentine Academy, was bribed with a cardinal's hat to neglect it, and from the days of Urban VIII to Pius IX a similar spirit was there shown. In France, there were frequent ecclesiastical interferences, of which Buffon's humiliation for stating a simple scientific truth was a noted example. In England, Protestantism was at first hardly more favourable toward the Royal Society, and the great Dr. South denounced it in his sermons as irreligious. Fortunately, one thing prevented an open breach between theology and science: while new investigators had mainly given up the medieval method so dear to the Church, they had very generally retained the conception of direct creation and of design throughout creation--a design having as its main purpose the profit, instruction, enjoyment, and amusement of man. On this the naturally opposing tendencies of theology and science were compromised. Science, while somewhat freed from its old limitations, became the handmaid of theology in illustrating the doctrine of creative design, and always with apparent deference to the Chaldean and other ancient myths and legends embodied in the Hebrew sacred books. About the middle of the seventeenth century came a great victory of the scientific over the theologic method. At that time Francesco Redi published the results of his inquiries into the doctrine of spontaneous generation. For ages a widely accepted doctrine had been that water, filth, and carrion had received power from the Creator to generate worms, insects, and a multitude of the smaller animals; and this doctrine had been especially welcomed by St. Augustine and many of the fathers, since it relieved the Almighty of making, Adam of naming, and Noah of living in the ark with these innumerable despised species. But to this fallacy Redi put an end. By researches which could not be gainsaid, he showed that every one of these animals came from an egg; each, therefore, must be the lineal descendant of an animal created, named, and preserved from "the beginning." Similar work went on in England, but under more distinctly theological limitations. In the same seventeenth century a very famous and popular English book was published by the naturalist John Ray, a fellow of the Royal Society, who produced a number of works on plants, fishes, and birds; but the most widely read of all was entitled The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation. Between the years 1691 and 1827 it passed through nearly twenty editions. Ray argued the goodness and wisdom of God from the adaptation of the animals not only to man's uses but to their own lives and surroundings. In the first years of the eighteenth century Dr. Nehemiah Grew, of the Royal Society, published his Cosmologia Sacra to refute anti-scriptural opinions by producing evidences of creative design. Discussing "the ends of Providence," he says, "A crane, which is scurvy meat, lays but two eggs in the year, but a pheasant and partridge, both excellent meat, lay and hatch fifteen or twenty." He points to the fact that "those of value which lay few at a time sit the oftener, as the woodcock and the dove." He breaks decidedly from the doctrine that noxious things in Nature are caused by sin, and shows that they, too, are useful; that, "if nettles sting, it is to secure an excellent medicine for children and cattle"; that, "if the bramble hurts man, it makes all the better hedge"; and that, "if it chances to prick the owner, it tears the thief." "Weasels, kites, and other hurtful animals induce us to watchfulness; thistles and moles, to good husbandry; lice oblige us to cleanliness in our bodies, spiders in our houses, and the moth in our clothes." This very optimistic view, triumphing over the theological theory of noxious animals and plants as effects of sin, which prevailed with so much force from St. Augustine to Wesley, was developed into nobler form during the century by various thinkers, and especially by Archdeacon Paley, whose Natural Theology exercised a powerful influence down to recent times. The same tendency appeared in other countries, though various philosophers showed weak points in the argument, and Goethe made sport of it in a noted verse, praising the forethought of the Creator in foreordaining the cork tree to furnish stoppers for wine-bottles. Shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century the main movement culminated in the Bridgewater Treatises. Pursuant to the will of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the President of the Royal Society selected eight persons, each to receive a thousand pounds sterling for writing and publishing a treatise on the "power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation." Of these, the leading essays in regard to animated Nature were those of Thomas Chalmers, on The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Condition of Man; of Sir Charles Bell, on The Hand as evincing Design; of Roget, on Animal and Vegetable Physiology with reference to Natural Theology; and of Kirby, on The Habits and Instincts of Animals with reference to Natural Theology. Besides these there were treatises by Whewell, Buckland, Kidd, and Prout. The work was well done. It was a marked advance on all that had appeared before, in matter, method, and spirit. Looking back upon it now we can see that it was provisional, but that it was none the less fruitful in truth, and we may well remember Darwin's remark on the stimulating effect of mistaken THEORIES, as compared with the sterilizing effect of mistaken OBSERVATIONS: mistaken observations lead men astray, mistaken theories suggest true theories. An effort made in so noble a spirit certainly does not deserve the ridicule that, in our own day, has sometimes been lavished upon it. Curiously, indeed, one of the most contemptuous of these criticisms has been recently made by one of the most strenuous defenders of orthodoxy. No less eminent a standard-bearer of the faith than the Rev. Prof. Zoeckler says of this movement to demonstrate creative purpose and design, and of the men who took part in it, "The earth appeared in their representation of it like a great clothing shop and soup kitchen, and God as a glorified rationalistic professor." Such a statement as this is far from just to the conceptions of such men as Butler, Paley, and Chalmers, no matter how fully the thinking world has now outlived them.(17) (17) For a very valuable and interesting study on the old idea of the generation of insects from carrion, see Osten-Sacken, on the Oxen-born Bees of the Ancients, Heidelberg, 1894; for Ray, see the work cited, London, 1827, p. 153; for Grew, see Cosmologia Sacra, or a Discourse on the Universe, as it is the Creature and Kingdom of God; chiefly written to demonstrate the Truth and Excellency of the Bible, by Dr. Nehemiah Grew, Fellow of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of London, 1701; for Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, see the usual editions; also Lange, History of Rationalism. Goethe's couplet ran as follows: "Welche Verehrung verdient der Weltenerschopfer, der Gnadig, Als er den Korkbaum erschuf, gleich auch die Stopfel erfand." For the quotation from Zoeckler, see his work already cited, vol. ii, pp. 74, 440. But, noble as the work of these men was, the foundation of fact on which they reared it became evidently more and more insecure. For as far back as the seventeenth century acute theologians had begun to discern difficulties more serious than any that had before confronted them. More and more it was seen that the number of different species was far greater than the world had hitherto imagined. Greater and greater had become the old difficulty in conceiving that, of these innumerable species, each had been specially created by the Almighty hand; that each had been brought before Adam by the Almighty to be named; and that each, in couples or in sevens, had been gathered by Noah into the ark. But the difficulties thus suggested were as nothing compared to those raised by the DISTRIBUTION of animals. Even in the first days of the Church this had aroused serious thought, and above all in the great mind of St. Augustine. In his City of God he had stated the difficulty as follows: "But there is a question about all these kinds of beasts, which are neither tamed by man, nor spring from the earth like frogs, such as wolves and others of that sort,.... as to how they could find their way to the islands after that flood which destroyed every living thing not preserved in the ark.... Some, indeed, might be thought to reach islands by swimming, in case these were very near; but some islands are so remote from continental lands that it does not seem possible that any creature could reach them by swimming. It is not an incredible thing, either, that some animals may have been captured by men and taken with them to those lands which they intended to inhabit, in order that they might have the pleasure of hunting; and it can not be denied that the transfer may have been accomplished through the agency of angels, commanded or allowed to perform this labour by God." But this difficulty had now assumed a magnitude of which St. Augustine never dreamed. Most powerful of all agencies to increase it were the voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Amerigo Vespucci, and other navigators of the period of discovery. Still more serious did it become as the great islands of the southern seas were explored. Every navigator brought home tidings of new species of animals and of races of men living in parts of the world where the theologians, relying on the statement of St. Paul that the gospel had gone into all lands, had for ages declared there could be none; until finally it overtaxed even the theological imagination to conceive of angels, in obedience to the divine command, distributing the various animals over the earth, dropping the megatherium in South America, the archeopteryx in Europe, the ornithorhynchus in Australia, and the opossum in North America. The first striking evidence of this new difficulty was shown by the eminent Jesuit missionary, Joseph Acosta. In his Natural and Moral History of the Indies, published in 1590, he proved himself honest and lucid. Though entangled in most of the older scriptural views, he broke away from many; but the distribution of animals gave him great trouble. Having shown the futility of St. Augustine's other explanations, he quaintly asks: "Who can imagine that in so long a voyage men woulde take the paines to carrie Foxes to Peru, especially that kinde they call 'Acias,' which is the filthiest I have seene? Who woulde likewise say that they have carried Tygers and Lyons? Truly it were a thing worthy the laughing at to thinke so. It was sufficient, yea, very much, for men driven against their willes by tempest, in so long and unknowne a voyage, to escape with their owne lives, without busying themselves to carrie Woolves and Foxes, and to nourish them at sea." It was under the impression made by this new array of facts that in 1667 Abraham Milius published at Geneva his book on The Origin of Animals and the Migration of Peoples. This book shows, like that of Acosta, the shock and strain to which the discovery of America subjected the received theological scheme of things. It was issued with the special approbation of the Bishop of Salzburg, and it indicates the possibility that a solution of the whole trouble may be found in the text, "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind." Milius goes on to show that the ancient philosophers agree with Moses, and that "the earth and the waters, and especially the heat of the sun and of the genial sky, together with that slimy and putrid quality which seems to be inherent in the soil, may furnish the origin for fishes, terrestrial animals, and birds." On the other hand, he is very severe against those who imagine that man can have had the same origin with animals. But the subject with which Milius especially grapples is the DISTRIBUTION of animals. He is greatly exercised by the many species found in America and in remote islands of the ocean--species entirely unknown in the other continents--and of course he is especially troubled by the fact that these species existing in those exceedingly remote parts of the earth do not exist in the neighbourhood of Mount Ararat. He confesses that to explain the distribution of animals is the most difficult part of the problem. If it be urged that birds could reach America by flying and fishes by swimming, he asks, "What of the beasts which neither fly nor swim?" Yet even as to the birds he asks, "Is there not an infinite variety of winged creatures who fly so slowly and heavily, and have such a horror of the water, that they would not even dare trust themselves to fly over a wide river?" As to fishes, he says, "They are very averse to wandering from their native waters," and he shows that there are now reported many species of American and East Indian fishes entirely unknown on the other continents, whose presence, therefore, can not be explained by any theory of natural dispersion. Of those who suggest that land animals may have been dispersed over the earth by the direct agency of man for his use or pleasure he asks: "Who would like to get different sorts of lions, bears, tigers, and other ferocious and noxious creatures on board ship? who would trust himself with them? and who would wish to plant colonies of such creatures in new, desirable lands?" His conclusion is that plants and animals take their origin in the lands wherein they are found; an opinion which he supports by quoting from the two narrations in Genesis passages which imply generative force in earth and water. But in the eighteenth century matters had become even worse for the theological view. To meet the difficulty the eminent Benedictine, Dom Calmet, in his Commentary, expressed the belief that all the species of a genus had originally formed one species, and he dwelt on this view as one which enabled him to explain the possibility of gathering all animals into the ark. This idea, dangerous as it was to the fabric of orthodoxy, and involving a profound separation from the general doctrine of the Church, seems to have been abroad among thinking men, for we find in the latter half of the same century even Linnaeus inclining to consider it. It was time, indeed, that some new theological theory be evolved; the great Linnaeus himself, in spite of his famous declaration favouring the fixity of species, had dealt a death-blow to the old theory. In his Systema Naturae, published in the middle of the eighteenth century, he had enumerated four thousand species of animals, and the difficulties involved in the naming of each of them by Adam and in bringing them together in the ark appeared to all thinking men more and more insurmountable. What was more embarrassing, the number of distinct species went on increasing rapidly, indeed enormously, until, as an eminent zoological authority of our own time has declared, "for every one of the species enumerated by Linnaeus, more than fifty kinds are known to the naturalist of to-day, and the number of species still unknown doubtless far exceeds the list of those recorded." Already there were premonitions of the strain made upon Scripture by requiring a hundred and sixty distinct miraculous interventions of the Creator to produce the hundred and sixty species of land shells found in the little island of Madeira alone, and fourteen hundred distinct interventions to produce the actual number of distinct species of a single well-known shell. Ever more and more difficult, too, became the question of the geographical distribution of animals. As new explorations were made in various parts of the world, this danger to the theological view went on increasing. The sloths in South America suggested painful questions: How could animals so sluggish have got away from the neighbourhood of Mount Ararat so completely and have travelled so far? The explorations in Australia and neighbouring islands made matters still worse, for there was found in those regions a whole realm of animals differing widely from those of other parts of the earth. The problem before the strict theologians became, for example, how to explain the fact that the kangaroo can have been in the ark and be now only found in Australia: his saltatory powers are indeed great, but how could he by any series of leaps have sprung across the intervening mountains, plains, and oceans to that remote continent? and, if the theory were adopted that at some period a causeway extended across the vast chasm separating Australia from the nearest mainland, why did not lions, tigers, camels, and camelopards force or find their way across it? The theological theory, therefore, had by the end of the eighteenth century gone to pieces. The wiser theologians waited; the unwise indulged in exhortations to "root out the wicked heart of unbelief," in denunciation of "science falsely so called," and in frantic declarations that "the Bible is true"--by which they meant that the limited understanding of it which they had happened to inherit is true. By the middle of the nineteenth century the whole theological theory of creation--though still preached everywhere as a matter of form--was clearly seen by all thinking men to be hopelessly lost: such strong men as Cardinal Wiseman in the Roman Church, Dean Buckland in the Anglican, and Hugh Miller in the Scottish Church, made heroic efforts to save something from it, but all to no purpose. That sturdy Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon honesty, which is the best legacy of the Middle Ages to Christendom, asserted itself in the old strongholds of theological thought, the universities. Neither the powerful logic of Bishop Butler nor the nimble reasoning of Archdeacon Paley availed. Just as the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the centre, and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs and purposes of man. They had developed a system of a very different sort, and this we shall next consider.(18) (18) For Acosta, see his Historia Natural y moral de las Indias, Seville, 1590--the quaint English translation is of London, 1604; for Abraham Milius, see his De Origine Animalium et Migratione Popularum, Geneva, 1667; also Kosmos, 1877, H. I, S. 36; for Linnaeus's declaration regarding species, see the Philosophia Botanica, 99, 157; for Calmet and Linnaeus, see Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 237. As to the enormously increasing numbers of species in zoology and botany, see President D. S. Jordan, Science Sketches, pp. 176, 177; also for pithy statement, Laing's Problems of the Future, chap. vi. III. THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES, OF AN EVOLUTION IN ANIMATED NATURE. We have seen, thus far, how there came into the thinking of mankind upon the visible universe and its inhabitants the idea of a creation virtually instantaneous and complete, and of a Creator in human form with human attributes, who spoke matter into existence literally by the exercise of his throat and lips, or shaped and placed it with his hands and fingers. We have seen that this view came from far; that it existed in the Chaldaeo-Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, and probably in others of the earliest date known to us; that its main features passed thence into the sacred books of the Hebrews and then into the early Christian Church, by whose theologians it was developed through the Middle Ages and maintained during the modern period. But, while this idea was thus developed by a succession of noble and thoughtful men through thousands of years, another conception, to all appearance equally ancient, was developed, sometimes in antagonism to it, sometimes mingled with it--the conception of all living beings as wholly or in part the result of a growth process--of an evolution. This idea, in various forms, became a powerful factor in nearly all the greater ancient theologies and philosophies. For very widespread among the early peoples who attained to much thinking power was a conception that, in obedience to the divine fiat, a watery chaos produced the earth, and that the sea and land gave birth to their inhabitants. This is clearly seen in those records of Chaldaeo-Babylonian thought deciphered in these latter years, to which reference has already been made. In these we have a watery chaos which, under divine action, brings forth the earth and its inhabitants; first the sea animals and then the land animals--the latter being separated into three kinds, substantially as recorded afterward in the Hebrew accounts. At the various stages in the work the Chaldean Creator pronounces it "beautiful," just as the Hebrew Creator in our own later account pronounces it "good." In both accounts there is placed over the whole creation a solid, concave firmament; in both, light is created first, and the heavenly bodies are afterward placed "for signs and for seasons"; in both, the number seven is especially sacred, giving rise to a sacred division of time and to much else. It may be added that, with many other features in the Hebrew legends evidently drawn from the Chaldean, the account of the creation in each is followed by a legend regarding "the fall of man" and a deluge, many details of which clearly passed in slightly modified form from the Chaldean into the Hebrew accounts. It would have been a miracle indeed if these primitive conceptions, wrought out with so much poetic vigour in that earlier civilization on the Tigris and Euphrates, had failed to influence the Hebrews, who during the most plastic periods of their development were under the tutelage of their Chaldean neighbours. Since the researches of Layard, George Smith, Oppert, Schrader, Jensen, Sayce, and their compeers, there is no longer a reasonable doubt that this ancient view of the world, elaborated if not originated in that earlier civilization, came thence as a legacy to the Hebrews, who wrought it in a somewhat disjointed but mainly monotheistic form into the poetic whole which forms one of the most precious treasures of ancient thought preserved in the book of Genesis. Thus it was that, while the idea of a simple material creation literally by the hands and fingers or voice of the Creator became, as we have seen, the starting-point of a powerful stream of theological thought, and while this stream was swollen from age to age by contributions from the fathers, doctors, and learned divines of the Church, Catholic and Protestant, there was poured into it this lesser current, always discernible and at times clearly separated from it--a current of belief in a process of evolution. The Rev. Prof. Sayce, of Oxford, than whom no English-speaking scholar carries more weight in a matter of this kind, has recently declared his belief that the Chaldaeo-Babylonian theory was the undoubted source of the similar theory propounded by the Ionic philosopher Anaximander--the Greek thinkers deriving this view from the Babylonians through the Phoenicians; he also allows that from the same source its main features were adopted into both the accounts given in the first of our sacred books, and in this general view the most eminent Christian Assyriologists concur. It is true that these sacred accounts of ours contradict each other. In that part of the first or Elohistic account given in the first chapter of Genesis the WATERS bring forth fishes, marine animals, and birds (Genesis, i, 20); but in that part of the second or Jehovistic account given in the second chapter of Genesis both the land animals and birds are declared to have been created not out of the water, but "OUT OF THE GROUND" (Genesis, ii, 19). The dialectic skill of the fathers was easily equal to explaining away this contradiction; but the old current of thought, strengthened by both these legends, arrested their attention, and, passing through the minds of a succession of the greatest men of the Church, influenced theological opinion deeply, if not widely, for ages, in favour of an evolution theory. But there was still another ancient source of evolution ideas. Thoughtful men of the early civilizations which were developed along the great rivers in the warmer regions of the earth noted how the sun-god as he rose in his fullest might caused the water and the rich soil to teem with the lesser forms of life. In Egypt, especially, men saw how under this divine power the Nile slime brought forth "creeping things innumerable." Hence mainly this ancient belief that the animals and man were produced by lifeless matter at the divine command, "in the beginning," was supplemented by the idea that some of the lesser animals, especially the insects, were produced by a later evolution, being evoked after the original creation from various sources, but chiefly from matter in a state of decay. This crude, early view aided doubtless in giving germs of a better evolution theory to the early Greeks. Anaximander, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and, greatest of all, Aristotle, as we have seen, developed them, making their way at times by guesses toward truths since established by observation. Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation, arrived at some results which, had Greek freedom of thought continued, might have brought the world long since to its present plane of biological knowledge; for he reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature. With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained, and as a typical example of it we may note the opinion of St. Basil the Great in the fourth century. Discussing the work of creation, he declares that, at the command of God, "the waters were gifted with productive power"; "from slime and muddy places frogs, flies, and gnats came into being"; and he finally declares that the same voice which gave this energy and quality of productiveness to earth and water shall be similarly efficacious until the end of the world. St. Gregory of Nyssa held a similar view. This idea of these great fathers of the Eastern Church took even stronger hold on the great father of the Western Church. For St. Augustine, so fettered usually by the letter of the sacred text, broke from his own famous doctrine as to the acceptance of Scripture and spurned the generally received belief of a creative process like that by which a toymaker brings into existence a box of playthings. In his great treatise on Genesis he says: "To suppose that God formed man from the dust with bodily hands is very childish.... God neither formed man with bodily hands nor did he breathe upon him with throat and lips." St. Augustine then suggests the adoption of the old emanation or evolution theory, shows that "certain very small animals may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter," argues that, even if this be so, God is still their creator, dwells upon such a potential creation as involved in the actual creation, and speaks of animals "whose numbers the after-time unfolded." In his great treatise on the Trinity--the work to which he devoted the best thirty years of his life--we find the full growth of this opinion. He develops at length the view that in the creation of living beings there was something like a growth--that God is the ultimate author, but works through secondary causes; and finally argues that certain substances are endowed by God with the power of producing certain classes of plants and animals.(19) (19) For the Chaldean view of creation, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, New York, 1876, pp. 14,15, and 64-86; also Lukas, as above; also Sayce, Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, pp. 371 and elsewhere; as to the fall of man, Tower of Babel, sacredness of the number seven, etc., see also Delitzsch, appendix to the German translation of Smith, pp. 305 et seq.; as to the almost exact adoption of the Chaldean legends into the Hebrew sacred account, see all these, as also Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, Giessen, 1883, early chapters; also article Babylonia in the Encyclopedia Britannica; as to similar approval of creation by the Creator in both accounts, see George Smith, p. 73; as to the migration of the Babylonian legends to the Hebrews, see Schrader, Whitehouse's translation, pp. 44,45; as to the Chaldaean belief ina solid firmament, while Schrader in 1883 thought it not proved, Jensen in 1890 has found it clearly expresses--see his Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp.9 et seq., also pp. 304-306, and elsewhere. Dr. Lukas in 1893 also fully accepts this view of a Chaldean record of a "firmament"--see Kosmologie, pp. 43, etc.; see also Maspero and Sayce, the Dawn of Civilization, and for crude early ideas of evolution in Egypt, see ibid., pp. 156 et seq. For the seven-day week among the Chaldeans and rest on the seventh day, and the proof that even the name "Sabbath" is of Chaldean origin, see Delitzsch, Beiga-ben zu Smith's Chald. Genesis, pp. 300 and 306; also Schrader; for St. Basil, see Hexaemeron and Homilies vii-ix; but for the steadfastness of Basil's view in regard to the immutability of species, see a Catholic writer on evolution and Faith in the Dublin Review for July, 1871, p. 13; for citations of St. Augustine on Genesis, see the De Genesi contra Manichoeos, lib. ii, cap. 14, in Migne, xxxiv, 188,--lib. v, cap. 5 and cap. 23,--and lib vii, cap I; for the citations from his work on the Trinity, see his De Trinitate, lib. iii, cap. 8 and 9, in Migne, xlii, 877, 878; for the general subject very fully and adequately presented, see Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin, New York, 1894, chaps. ii and iii. This idea of a development by secondary causes apart from the original creation was helped in its growth by a theological exigency. More and more, as the organic world was observed, the vast multitude of petty animals, winged creatures, and "creeping things" was felt to be a strain upon the sacred narrative. More and more it became difficult to reconcile the dignity of the Almighty with his work in bringing each of these creatures before Adam to be named; or to reconcile the human limitations of Adam with his work in naming "every living creature"; or to reconcile the dimensions of Noah's ark with the space required for preserving all of them, and the food of all sorts necessary for their sustenance, whether they were admitted by twos, as stated in one scriptural account, or by sevens, as stated in the other. The inadequate size of the ark gave especial trouble. Origen had dealt with it by suggesting that the cubit was six times greater than had been supposed. Bede explained Noah's ability to complete so large a vessel by supposing that he worked upon it during a hundred years; and, as to the provision of food taken into it, he declared that there was no need of a supply for more than one day, since God could throw the animals into a deep sleep or otherwise miraculously make one day's supply sufficient; he also lessened the strain on faith still more by diminishing the number of animals taken into the ark--supporting his view upon Augustine's theory of the later development of insects out of carrion. Doubtless this theological necessity was among the main reasons which led St. Isidore of Seville, in the seventh century, to incorporate this theory, supported by St. Basil and St. Augustine, into his great encyclopedic work which gave materials for thought on God and Nature to so many generations. He familiarized the theological world still further with the doctrine of secondary creation, giving such examples of it as that "bees are generated from decomposed veal, beetles from horseflesh, grasshoppers from mules, scorpions from crabs," and, in order to give still stronger force to the idea of such transformations, he dwells on the biblical account of Nebuchadnezzar, which appears to have taken strong hold upon medieval thought in science, and he declares that other human beings had been changed into animals, especially into swine, wolves, and owls. This doctrine of after-creations went on gathering strength until, in the twelfth century, Peter Lombard, in his theological summary, The Sentences, so powerful in moulding the thought of the Church, emphasized the distinction between animals which spring from carrion and those which are created from earth and water; the former he holds to have been created "potentially" the latter "actually." In the century following, this idea was taken up by St. Thomas Aquinas and virtually received from him its final form. In the Summa, which remains the greatest work of medieval thought, he accepts the idea that certain animals spring from the decaying bodies of plants and animals, and declares that they are produced by the creative word of God either actually or virtually. He develops this view by saying, "Nothing was made by God, after the six days of creation, absolutely new, but it was in some sense included in the work of the six days"; and that "even new species, if any appear, have existed before in certain native properties, just as animals are produced from putrefaction." The distinction thus developed between creation "causally" or "potentially," and "materially" or "formally," was made much of by commentators afterward. Cornelius a Lapide spread it by saying that certain animals were created not "absolutely," but only "derivatively," and this thought was still further developed three centuries later by Augustinus Eugubinus, who tells us that, after the first creative energy had called forth land and water, light was made by the Almighty, the instrument of all future creation, and that the light called everything into existence. All this "science falsely so called," so sedulously developed by the master minds of the Church, and yet so futile that we might almost suppose that the great apostle, in a glow of prophetic vision, had foreseen it in his famous condemnation, seems at this distance very harmless indeed; yet, to many guardians of the "sacred deposit of doctrine" in the Church, even so slight a departure from the main current of thought seemed dangerous. It appeared to them like pressing the doctrine of secondary causes to a perilous extent; and about the beginning of the seventeenth century we have the eminent Spanish Jesuit and theologian Suarez denouncing it, and declaring St. Augustine a heretic for his share in it. But there was little danger to the older idea just then; the main theological tendency was so strong that the world kept on as of old. Biblical theology continued to spin its own webs out of its own bowels, and all the lesser theological flies continued to be entangled in them; yet here and there stronger thinkers broke loose from this entanglement and helped somewhat to disentangle others.(20) (20) For Bede's view of the ark and the origin of insects, see his Hexaemeron, i and ii; for Isidore, see the Etymologiae, xi, 4, and xiii, 22; for Peter Lombard, see Sent., lib. ii, dist. xv, 4 (in Migne, cxcii, 682); for St. Thomas Aquinas as to the laws of Nature, see Summae Theologica, i, Quaest. lxvii, art. iv; for his discussion on Avicenna's theory of the origin of animals, see ibid., i Quaest. lxxi, vol. i, pp. 1184 and 1185, of Migne's edit.; for his idea as to the word of God being the active producing principle, see ibid., i, Quaest. lxxi, art. i; for his remarks on species, see ibid, i, Quaest. lxxii, art. i; for his ideas on the necessity of the procreation of man, see ibid, i, Quaest. lxxii, art. i; for the origin of animals from putrefaction, see ibid, i, Quaest. lxxix, art. i, 3; for Cornelius a Lapide on the derivative creation of animals, see his In Genesim Comment., cap. i, cited by Mivart, Genesis of Species, p. 282; for a reference to Suarez's denunciation of the view of St. Augustine, see Huxley's Essays. At the close of the Middle Ages, in spite of the devotion of the Reformed Church to the letter of Scripture, the revival of learning and the great voyages gave an atmosphere in which better thinking on the problems of Nature began to gain strength. On all sides, in every field, men were making discoveries which caused the general theological view to appear more and more inadequate. First of those who should be mentioned with reverence as beginning to develop again that current of Greek thought which the system drawn from our sacred books by the fathers and doctors of the Church had interrupted for more than a thousand years, was Giordano Bruno. His utterances were indeed vague and enigmatical, but this fault may well be forgiven him, for he saw but too clearly what must be his reward for any more open statements. His reward indeed came--even for his faulty utterances--when, toward the end of the nineteenth century, thoughtful men from all parts of the world united in erecting his statue on the spot where he had been burned by the Roman Inquisition nearly three hundred years before. After Bruno's death, during the first half of the seventeenth century, Descartes seemed about to take the leadership of human thought: his theories, however superseded now, gave a great impulse to investigation then. His genius in promoting an evolution doctrine as regards the mechanical formation of the solar system was great, and his mode of thought strengthened the current of evolutionary doctrine generally; but his constant dread of persecution, both from Catholics and Protestants, led him steadily to veil his thoughts and even to suppress them. The execution of Bruno had occurred in his childhood, and in the midst of his career he had watched the Galileo struggle in all its stages. He had seen his own works condemned by university after university under the direction of theologians, and placed upon the Roman Index. Although he gave new and striking arguments to prove the existence of God, and humbled himself before the Jesuits, he was condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike. Since Roger Bacon, perhaps, no great thinker had been so completely abased and thwarted by theological oppression. Near the close of the same century another great thinker, Leibnitz, though not propounding any full doctrine on evolution, gave it an impulse by suggesting a view contrary to the sacrosanct belief in the immutability of species--that is, to the pious doctrine that every species in the animal kingdom now exists as it left the hands of the Creator, the naming process by Adam, and the door of Noah's ark. His punishment at the hands of the Church came a few years later, when, in 1712, the Jesuits defeated his attempt to found an Academy of Science at Vienna. The imperial authorities covered him with honours, but the priests--ruling in the confessionals and pulpits--would not allow him the privilege of aiding his fellow-men to ascertain God's truths revealed in Nature. Spinoza, Hume, and Kant may also be mentioned as among those whose thinking, even when mistaken, might have done much to aid in the development of a truer theory had not the theologic atmosphere of their times been so unpropitious; but a few years after Leibnitz's death came in France a thinker in natural science of much less influence than any of these, who made a decided step forward. Early in the eighteenth century Benoist de Maillet, a man of the world, but a wide observer and close thinker upon Nature, began meditating especially upon the origin of animal forms, and was led into the idea of the transformation of species and so into a theory of evolution, which in some important respects anticipated modern ideas. He definitely, though at times absurdly, conceived the production of existing species by the modification of their predecessors, and he plainly accepted one of the fundamental maxims of modern geology--that the structure of the globe must be studied in the light of the present course of Nature. But he fell between two ranks of adversaries. On one side, the Church authorities denounced him as a freethinker; on the other, Voltaire ridiculed him as a devotee. Feeling that his greatest danger was from the orthodox theologians, De Maillet endeavoured to protect himself by disguising his name in the title of his book, and by so wording its preface and dedication that, if persecuted, he could declare it a mere sport of fancy; he therefore announced it as the reverie of a Hindu sage imparted to a Christian missionary. But this strategy availed nothing: he had allowed his Hindu sage to suggest that the days of creation named in Genesis might be long periods of time; and this, with other ideas of equally fearful import, was fatal. Though the book was in type in 1735, it was not published till 1748--three years after his death. On the other hand, the heterodox theology of Voltaire was also aroused; and, as De Maillet had seen in the presence of fossils on high mountains a proof that these mountains were once below the sea, Voltaire, recognising in this an argument for the deluge of Noah, ridiculed the new thinker without mercy. Unfortunately, some of De Maillet's vagaries lent themselves admirably to Voltaire's sarcasm; better material for it could hardly be conceived than the theory, seriously proposed, that the first human being was born of a mermaid. Hence it was that, between these two extremes of theology, De Maillet received no recognition until, very recently, the greatest men of science in England and France have united in giving him his due. But his work was not lost, even in his own day; Robinet and Bonnet pushed forward victoriously on helpful lines. In the second half of the eighteenth century a great barrier was thrown across this current--the authority of Linnaeus. He was the most eminent naturalist of his time, a wide observer, a close thinker; but the atmosphere in which he lived and moved and had his being was saturated with biblical theology, and this permeated all his thinking. He who visits the tomb of Linnaeus to-day, entering the beautiful cathedral of Upsala by its southern porch, sees above it, wrought in stone, the Hebrew legend of creation. In a series of medallions, the Almighty--in human form--accomplishes the work of each creative day. In due order he puts in place the solid firmament with the waters above it, the sun, moon, and stars within it, the beasts, birds, and plants below it, and finishes his task by taking man out of a little hillock of "the earth beneath," and woman out of man's side. Doubtless Linnaeus, as he went to his devotions, often smiled at this childlike portrayal. Yet he was never able to break away from the idea it embodied. At times, in face of the difficulties which beset the orthodox theory, he ventured to favour some slight concessions. Toward the end of his life he timidly advanced the hypothesis that all the species of one genus constituted at the creation one species; and from the last edition of his Systema Naturae he quietly left out the strongly orthodox statement of the fixity of each species, which he had insisted upon in his earlier works. But he made no adequate declaration. What he might expect if he openly and decidedly sanctioned a newer view he learned to his cost; warnings came speedily both from the Catholic and Protestant sides. At a time when eminent prelates of the older Church were eulogizing debauched princes like Louis XV, and using the unspeakably obscene casuistry of the Jesuit Sanchez in the education of the priesthood as to the relations of men to women, the modesty of the Church authorities was so shocked by Linnaeus's proofs of a sexual system in plants that for many years his writings were prohibited in the Papal States and in various other parts of Europe where clerical authority was strong enough to resist the new scientific current. Not until 1773 did one of the more broad-minded cardinals--Zelanda--succeed in gaining permission that Prof. Minasi should discuss the Linnaean system at Rome. And Protestantism was quite as oppressive. In a letter to Eloius, Linnaeus tells of the rebuke given to science by one of the great Lutheran prelates of Sweden, Bishop Svedberg. From various parts of Europe detailed statements had been sent to the Royal Academy of Science that water had been turned into blood, and well-meaning ecclesiastics had seen in this an indication of the wrath of God, certainly against the regions in which these miracles had occurred and possibly against the whole world. A miracle of this sort appearing in Sweden, Linnaeus looked into it carefully and found that the reddening of the water was caused by dense masses of minute insects. News of this explanation having reached the bishop, he took the field against it; he denounced this scientific discovery as "a Satanic abyss" (abyssum Satanae), and declared "The reddening of the water is NOT natural," and "when God allows such a miracle to take place Satan endeavours, and so do his ungodly, self-reliant, self-sufficient, and worldly tools, to make it signify nothing." In face of this onslaught Linnaeus retreated; he tells his correspondent that "it is difficult to say anything in this matter," and shields himself under the statement "It is certainly a miracle that so many millions of creatures can be so suddenly propagated," and "it shows undoubtedly the all-wise power of the Infinite." The great naturalist, grown old and worn with labours for science, could no longer resist the contemporary theology; he settled into obedience to it, and while the modification of his early orthodox view was, as we have seen, quietly imbedded in the final edition of his great work, he made no special effort to impress it upon the world. To all appearance he continued to adhere to the doctrine that all existing species had been created by the Almighty "in the beginning," and that since "the beginning" no new species had appeared. Yet even his great authority could not arrest the swelling tide; more and more vast became the number of species, more and more incomprehensible under the old theory became the newly ascertained facts in geographical distribution, more and more it was felt that the universe and animated beings had come into existence by some process other than a special creation "in the beginning," and the question was constantly pressing, "By WHAT process?" Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century one man was at work on natural history who might have contributed much toward an answer to this question: this man was Buffon. His powers of research and thought were remarkable, and his gift in presenting results of research and thought showed genius. He had caught the idea of an evolution in Nature by the variation of species, and was likely to make a great advance with it; but he, too, was made to feel the power of theology. As long as he gave pleasing descriptions of animals the Church petted him, but when he began to deduce truths of philosophical import the batteries of the Sorbonne were opened upon him; he was made to know that "the sacred deposit of truth committed to the Church" was, that "in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth" and that "all things were made at the beginning of the world." For his simple statement of truths in natural science which are to-day truisms, he was, as we have seen, dragged forth by the theological faculty, forced to recant publicly, and to print his recantation. In this he announced, "I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses."(21) (21) For Descartes and his relation to the Copernican theory, see Saisset, Descartes et ses Precurseurs; also Fouillee, Descartes, Paris, 1893, chaps. ii and iii; also other authorities cited in my chapter on Astronomy; for his relation to the theory of evolution, see the Principes de Philosophie, 3eme partie, S 45. For de Maillet, see Quatrefages, Darwin et ses Precurseurs francais, chap i, citing D'Archiac, Paleontologie, Stratigraphie, vol. i; also, Perrier, La Philosophie zoologique avant Darwin, chap. vi; also the admirable article Evolution, by Huxley, in Ency. Brit. The title of De Maillet's book is Telliamed, ou Entretiens d'un Philosophe indien avec un Missionaire francais sur la Diminution de la Mer, 1748, 1756. For Buffon, see the authorities previously given, also the chapter on Geology in this work. For the resistance of both Catholic and Protestant authorities to the Linnaean system and ideas, see Alberg, Life of Linnaeus, London, 1888, pp. 143-147, and 237. As to the creation medallions at the Cathedral of Upsala, it is a somewhat curious coincidence that the present writer came upon them while visiting that edifice during the preparation of this chapter. But all this triumph of the Chaldeo-Babylonian creation legends which the Church had inherited availed but little. For about the end of the eighteenth century fruitful suggestions and even clear presentations of this or that part of a large evolutionary doctrine came thick and fast, and from the most divergent quarters. Especially remarkable were those which came from Erasmus Darwin in England, from Maupertuis in France, from Oken in Switzerland, and from Herder, and, most brilliantly of all, from Goethe in Germany. Two men among these thinkers must be especially mentioned--Treviranus in Germany and Lamarck in France; each independently of the other drew the world more completely than ever before in this direction. From Treviranus came, in 1802, his work on biology, and in this he gave forth the idea that from forms of life originally simple had arisen all higher organizations by gradual development; that every living feature has a capacity for receiving modifications of its structure from external influences; and that no species had become really extinct, but that each had passed into some other species. From Lamarck came about the same time his Researches, and a little later his Zoological Philosophy, which introduced a new factor into the process of evolution--the action of the animal itself in its efforts toward a development to suit new needs--and he gave as his principal conclusions the following: 1. Life tends to increase the volume of each living body and of all its parts up to a limit determined by its own necessities. 2. New wants in animals give rise to new organs. 3. The development of these organs is in proportion to their employment. 4. New developments may be transmitted to offspring. His well-known examples to illustrate these views, such as that of successive generations of giraffes lengthening their necks by stretching them to gather high-growing foliage, and of successive generations of kangaroos lengthening and strengthening their hind legs by the necessity of keeping themselves erect while jumping, provoked laughter, but the very comicality of these illustrations aided to fasten his main conclusion in men's memories. In both these statements, imperfect as they were, great truths were embodied--truths which were sure to grow. Lamarck's declaration, especially, that the development of organs is in ratio to their employment, and his indications of the reproduction in progeny of what is gained or lost in parents by the influence of circumstances, entered as a most effective force into the development of the evolution theory. The next great successor in the apostolate of this idea of the universe was Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. As early as 1795 he had begun to form a theory that species are various modifications of the same type, and this theory he developed, testing it at various stages as Nature was more and more displayed to him. It fell to his lot to bear the brunt in a struggle against heavy odds which lasted many years. For the man who now took up the warfare, avowedly for science but unconsciously for theology, was the foremost naturalist then living--Cuvier. His scientific eminence was deserved; the highest honours of his own and other countries were given him, and he bore them worthily. An Imperial Councillor under Napoleon; President of the Council of Public Instruction and Chancellor of the University under the restored Bourbons; Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, a Peer of France, Minister of the Interior, and President of the Council of State under Louis Philippe; he was eminent in all these capacities, and yet the dignity given by such high administrative positions was as nothing compared to his leadership in natural science. Science throughout the world acknowledged in him its chief contemporary ornament, and to this hour his fame rightly continues. But there was in him, as in Linnaeus, a survival of certain theological ways of looking at the universe and certain theological conceptions of a plan of creation; it must be said, too, that while his temperament made him distrust new hypotheses, of which he had seen so many born and die, his environment as a great functionary of state, honoured, admired, almost adored by the greatest, not only in the state but in the Church, his solicitude lest science should receive some detriment by openly resisting the Church, which had recaptured Europe after the French Revolution, and had made of its enemies its footstool--all these considerations led him to oppose the new theory. Amid the plaudits, then, of the foremost church-men he threw across the path of the evolution doctrines the whole mass of his authority in favour of the old theory of catastrophic changes and special creations. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire stoutly withstood him, braving non-recognition, ill-treatment, and ridicule. Treviranus, afar off in his mathematical lecture-room at Bremen, seemed simply forgotten. But the current of evolutionary thought could not thus be checked: dammed up for a time, it broke out in new channels and in ways and places least expected; turned away from France, it appeared especially in England, where great paleontologists and geologists arose whose work culminated in that of Lyell. Specialists throughout all the world now became more vigorous than ever, gathering facts and thinking upon them in a way which caused the special creation theory to shrink more and more. Broader and more full became these various rivulets, soon to unite in one great stream of thought. In 1813 Dr. Wells developed a theory of evolution by natural selection to account for varieties in the human race. About 1820 Dean Herbert, eminent as an authority in horticulture, avowed his conviction that species are but fixed varieties. In 1831 Patrick Matthews stumbled upon and stated the main doctrine of natural selection in evolution; and others here and there, in Europe and America, caught an inkling of it. But no one outside of a circle apparently uninfluential cared for these things: the Church was serene: on the Continent it had obtained reactionary control of courts, cabinets, and universities; in England, Dean Cockburn was denouncing Mary Somerville and the geologists to the delight of churchmen; and the Rev. Mellor Brown was doing the same thing for the edification of dissenters. In America the mild suggestions of Silliman and his compeers were met by the protestations of the Andover theologians headed by Moses Stuart. Neither of the great English universities, as a rule, took any notice of the innovators save by sneers. To this current of thought there was joined a new element when, in 1844, Robert Chambers published his Vestiges of Creation. The book was attractive and was widely read. In Chambers's view the several series of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, were the result of two distinct impulses, each given once and for all time by the Creator. The first of these was an impulse imparted to forms of life, lifting them gradually through higher grades; the second was an impulse tending to modify organic substances in accordance with external circumstances; in fact, the doctrine of the book was evolution tempered by miracle--a stretching out of the creative act through all time--a pious version of Lamarck. Two results followed, one mirth-provoking, the other leading to serious thought. The amusing result was that the theologians were greatly alarmed by the book: it was loudly insisted that it promoted atheism. Looking back along the line of thought which has since been developed, one feels that the older theologians ought to have put up thanksgivings for Chambers's theory, and prayers that it might prove true. The more serious result was that it accustomed men's minds to a belief in evolution as in some form possible or even probable. In this way it was provisionally of service. Eight years later Herbert Spencer published an essay contrasting the theories of creation and evolution--reasoning with great force in favour of the latter, showing that species had undoubtedly been modified by circumstances; but still only few and chosen men saw the significance of all these lines of reasoning which had been converging during so many years toward one conclusion. On July 1, 1858, there were read before the Linnaean Society at London two papers--one presented by Charles Darwin, the other by Alfred Russel Wallace--and with the reading of these papers the doctrine of evolution by natural selection was born. Then and there a fatal breach was made in the great theological barrier of the continued fixity of species since the creation. The story of these papers the scientific world knows by heart: how Charles Darwin, having been sent to the University of Cambridge to fit him for the Anglican priesthood, left it in 1831 to go upon the scientific expedition of the Beagle; how for five years he studied with wonderful vigour and acuteness the problems of life as revealed on land and at sea--among volcanoes and coral reefs, in forests and on the sands, from the tropics to the arctic regions; how, in the Cape Verde and the Galapagos Islands, and in Brazil, Patagonia, and Australia he interrogated Nature with matchless persistency and skill; how he returned unheralded, quietly settled down to his work, and soon set the world thinking over its first published results, such as his book on Coral Reefs, and the monograph on the Cirripedia; and, finally, how he presented his paper, and followed it up with treatises which made him one of the great leaders in the history of human thought. The scientific world realizes, too, more and more, the power of character shown by Darwin in all this great career; the faculty of silence, the reserve of strength seen in keeping his great thought--his idea of evolution by natural selection--under silent study and meditation for nearly twenty years, giving no hint of it to the world at large, but working in every field to secure proofs or disproofs, and accumulating masses of precious material for the solution of the questions involved. To one man only did he reveal his thought--to Dr. Joseph Hooker, to whom in 1844, under the seal of secrecy, he gave a summary of his conclusions. Not until fourteen years later occurred the event which showed him that the fulness of time had come--the letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, to whom, in brilliant researches during the decade from 1848 to 1858, in Brazil and in the Malay Archipelago, the same truth of evolution by natural selection had been revealed. Among the proofs that scientific study does no injury to the more delicate shades of sentiment is the well-known story of this letter. With it Wallace sent Darwin a memoir, asking him to present it to the Linnaean Society: on examining it, Darwin found that Wallace had independently arrived at conclusions similar to his own--possibly had deprived him of fame; but Darwin was loyal to his friend, and his friend remained ever loyal to him. He publicly presented the paper from Wallace, with his own conclusions; and the date of this presentation--July 1, 1858--separates two epochs in the history, not merely of natural science, but of human thought. In the following year, 1859, came the first instalment of his work in its fuller development--his book on The Origin of Species. In this book one at least of the main secrets at the heart of the evolutionary process, which had baffled the long line of investigators and philosophers from the days of Aristotle, was more broadly revealed. The effective mechanism of evolution was shown at work in three ascertained facts: in the struggle for existence among organized beings; in the survival of the fittest; and in heredity. These facts were presented with such minute research, wide observation, patient collation, transparent honesty, and judicial fairness, that they at once commanded the world's attention. It was the outcome of thirty years' work and thought by a worker and thinker of genius, but it was yet more than that--it was the outcome, also, of the work and thought of another man of genius fifty years before. The book of Malthus on the Principle of Population, mainly founded on the fact that animals increase in a geometrical ratio, and therefore, if unchecked, must encumber the earth, had been generally forgotten, and was only recalled with a sneer. But the genius of Darwin recognised in it a deeper meaning, and now the thought of Malthus was joined to the new current. Meditating upon it in connection with his own observations of the luxuriance of Nature, Darwin had arrived at his doctrine of natural selection and survival of the fittest. As the great dogmatic barrier between the old and new views of the universe was broken down, the flood of new thought pouring over the world stimulated and nourished strong growths in every field of research and reasoning: edition after edition of the book was called for; it was translated even into Japanese and Hindustani; the stagnation of scientific thought, which Buckle, only a few years before, had so deeply lamented, gave place to a widespread and fruitful activity; masses of accumulated observations, which had seemed stale and unprofitable, were made alive; facts formerly without meaning now found their interpretation. Under this new influence an army of young men took up every promising line of scientific investigation in every land. Epoch-making books appeared in all the great nations. Spencer, Wallace, Huxley, Galton, Tyndall, Tylor, Lubbock, Bagehot, Lewes, in England, and a phalanx of strong men in Germany, Italy, France, and America gave forth works which became authoritative in every department of biology. If some of the older men in France held back, overawed perhaps by the authority of Cuvier, the younger and more vigorous pressed on. One source of opposition deserves to be especially mentioned--Louis Agassiz. A great investigator, an inspired and inspiring teacher, a noble man, he had received and elaborated a theory of animated creation which he could not readily change. In his heart and mind still prevailed the atmosphere of the little Swiss parsonage in which he was born, and his religious and moral nature, so beautiful to all who knew him, was especially repelled by sundry evolutionists, who, in their zeal as neophytes, made proclamations seeming to have a decidedly irreligious if not immoral bearing. In addition to this was the direction his thinking had received from Cuvier. Both these influences combined to prevent his acceptance of the new view. He was the third great man who had thrown his influence as a barrier across the current of evolutionary thought. Linnaeus in the second half of the eighteenth century, Cuvier in the first half, and Agassiz in the second half of the nineteenth--all made the same effort. Each remains great; but not all of them together could arrest the current. Agassiz's strong efforts throughout the United States, and indeed throughout Europe, to check it, really promoted it. From the great museum he had founded at Cambridge, from his summer school at Penikese, from his lecture rooms at Harvard and Cornell, his disciples went forth full of love and admiration for him, full of enthusiasm which he had stirred and into fields which he had indicated; but their powers, which he had aroused and strengthened, were devoted to developing the truth he failed to recognise; Shaler, Verrill, Packard, Hartt, Wilder, Jordan, with a multitude of others, and especially the son who bore his honoured name, did justice to his memory by applying what they had received from him to research under inspiration of the new revelation. Still another man deserves especial gratitude and honour in this progress--Edward Livingston Youmans. He was perhaps the first in America to recognise the vast bearings of the truths presented by Darwin, Wallace, and Spencer. He became the apostle of these truths, sacrificing the brilliant career on which he had entered as a public lecturer, subordinating himself to the three leaders, and giving himself to editorial drudgery in the stimulation of research and the announcement of results. In support of the new doctrine came a world of new proofs; those which Darwin himself added in regard to the cross-fertilization of plants, and which he had adopted from embryology, led the way, and these were followed by the discoveries of Wallace, Bates, Huxley, Marsh, Cope, Leidy, Haeckel, Muller, Gaudry, and a multitude of others in all lands.(22) (22) For Agassiz's opposition to evolution, see the Essay on Classification, vol. i, 1857, as regards Lamark, and vol. iii, as regards Darwin; also Silliman's Journal, July 1860; also the Atlantic Monthly, January 1874; also his Life and Correspondence, vol. ii, p. 647; also Asa Gray, Scientific Papers, vol. ii, p. 484. A reminiscence of my own enables me to appreciate his deep ethical and religious feeling. I was passing the day with him at Nahant in 1868, consulting him regarding candidates for various scientific chairs at the newly established Cornell University, in which he took a deep interest. As we discussed one after another of the candidates, he suddenly said: "Who is to be your Professor of Moral Philosophy? That is a far more important position than all the others." IV. THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. Darwin's Origin of Species had come into the theological world like a plough into an ant-hill. Everywhere those thus rudely awakened from their old comfort and repose had swarmed forth angry and confused. Reviews, sermons, books light and heavy, came flying at the new thinker from all sides. The keynote was struck at once in the Quarterly Review by Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. He declared that Darwin was guilty of "a tendency to limit God's glory in creation"; that "the principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God"; that it "contradicts the revealed relations of creation to its Creator"; that it is "inconsistent with the fulness of his glory"; that it is "a dishonouring view of Nature"; and that there is "a simpler explanation of the presence of these strange forms among the works of God": that explanation being--"the fall of Adam." Nor did the bishop's efforts end here; at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science he again disported himself in the tide of popular applause. Referring to the ideas of Darwin, who was absent on account of illness, he congratulated himself in a public speech that he was not descended from a monkey. The reply came from Huxley, who said in substance: "If I had to choose, I would prefer to be a descendant of a humble monkey rather than of a man who employs his knowledge and eloquence in misrepresenting those who are wearing out their lives in the search for truth." This shot reverberated through England, and indeed through other countries. The utterances of this the most brilliant prelate of the Anglican Church received a sort of antiphonal response from the leaders of the English Catholics. In an address before the "Academia," which had been organized to combat "science falsely so called," Cardinal Manning declared his abhorrence of the new view of Nature, and described it as "a brutal philosophy--to wit, there is no God, and the ape is our Adam." These attacks from such eminent sources set the clerical fashion for several years. One distinguished clerical reviewer, in spite of Darwin's thirty years of quiet labour, and in spite of the powerful summing up of his book, prefaced a diatribe by saying that Darwin "might have been more modest had he given some slight reason for dissenting from the views generally entertained." Another distinguished clergyman, vice-president of a Protestant institute to combat "dangerous" science, declared Darwinism "an attempt to dethrone God." Another critic spoke of persons accepting the Darwinian views as "under the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas," and of Darwin's argument as "a jungle of fanciful assumption." Another spoke of Darwin's views as suggesting that "God is dead," and declared that Darwin's work "does open violence to everything which the Creator himself has told us in the Scriptures of the methods and results of his work." Still another theological authority asserted: "If the Darwinian theory is true, Genesis is a lie, the whole framework of the book of life falls to pieces, and the revelation of God to man, as we Christians know it, is a delusion and a snare." Another, who had shown excellent qualities as an observing naturalist, declared the Darwinian view "a huge imposture from the beginning." Echoes came from America. One review, the organ of the most widespread of American religious sects, declared that Darwin was "attempting to befog and to pettifog the whole question"; another denounced Darwin's views as "infidelity"; another, representing the American branch of the Anglican Church, poured contempt over Darwin as "sophistical and illogical," and then plunged into an exceedingly dangerous line of argument in the following words: "If this hypothesis be true, then is the Bible an unbearable fiction;... then have Christians for nearly two thousand years been duped by a monstrous lie.... Darwin requires us to disbelieve the authoritative word of the Creator." A leading journal representing the same church took pains to show the evolution theory to be as contrary to the explicit declarations of the New Testament as to those of the Old, and said: "If we have all, men and monkeys, oysters and eagles, developed from an original germ, then is St. Paul's grand deliverance--'All flesh is not the same flesh; there is one kind of flesh of men, another of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds'--untrue." Another echo came from Australia, where Dr. Perry, Lord Bishop of Melbourne, in a most bitter book on Science and the Bible, declared that the obvious object of Chambers, Darwin, and Huxley is "to produce in their readers a disbelief of the Bible." Nor was the older branch of the Church to be left behind in this chorus. Bayma, in the Catholic World, declared, "Mr. Darwin is, we have reason to believe, the mouthpiece or chief trumpeter of that infidel clique whose well-known object is to do away with all idea of a God." Worthy of especial note as showing the determination of the theological side at that period was the foundation of sacro-scientific organizations to combat the new ideas. First to be noted is the "Academia," planned by Cardinal Wiseman. In a circular letter the cardinal, usually so moderate and just, sounded an alarm and summed up by saying, "Now it is for the Church, which alone possesses divine certainty and divine discernment, to place itself at once in the front of a movement which threatens even the fragmentary remains of Christian belief in England." The necessary permission was obtained from Rome, the Academia was founded, and the "divine discernment" of the Church was seen in the utterances which came from it, such as those of Cardinal Manning, which every thoughtful Catholic would now desire to recall, and in the diatribes of Dr. Laing, which only aroused laughter on all sides. A similar effort was seen in Protestant quarters; the "Victoria institute" was created, and perhaps the most noted utterance which ever came from it was the declaration of its vice-president, the Rev. Walter Mitchell, that "Darwinism endeavours to dethrone God."(23) (23) For Wilberforce's article, see Quarterly Review, July, 1860. For the reply of Huxley to the bishop's speech I have relied on the account given in Quatrefages, who had it from Carpenter; a somewhat different version is given in the Life and Letters of Darwin. For Cardinal Manning's attack, see Essays on Religion and Literature, London, 1865. For the review articles, see the Quarterly already cited, and that for July, 1874; also the North British Review, May 1860; also, F. O. Morris's letter in the Record, reprinted at Glasgow, 1870; also the Addresses of Rev. Walter Mitchell before the Victoria Institute, London, 1867; also Rev. B. G. Johns, Moses not Darwin, a Sermon, March 31, 1871. For the earlier American attacks, see Methodist Quarterly Review, April 1871; The American Church Review, July and October, 1865, and January, 1866. For the Australian attack, see Science and the Bible, by the Right Reverend Charles Perry, D. D., Bishop of Melbourne, London, 1869. For Bayma, see the Catholic World, vol. xxvi, p.782. For the Academia, see Essays edited by Cardinal Manning, above cited; and for the Victoria Institute, see Scientia Scientarum, by a member of the Victoria Institute, London, 1865. In France the attack was even more violent. Fabre d'Envieu brought out the heavy artillery of theology, and in a long series of elaborate propositions demonstrated that any other doctrine than that of the fixity and persistence of species is absolutely contrary to Scripture. The Abbe Desorges, a former Professor of Theology, stigmatized Darwin as a "pedant," and evolution as "gloomy". Monseigneur Segur, referring to Darwin and his followers, went into hysterics and shrieked: "These infamous doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions. Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions. They come from hell and return thither, taking with them the gross creatures who blush not to proclaim and accept them." In Germany the attack, if less declamatory, was no less severe. Catholic theologians vied with Protestants in bitterness. Prof. Michelis declared Darwin's theory "a caricature of creation." Dr. Hagermann asserted that it "turned the Creator out of doors." Dr. Schund insisted that "every idea of the Holy Scriptures, from the first to the last page, stands in diametrical opposition to the Darwinian theory"; and, "if Darwin be right in his view of the development of man out of a brutal condition, then the Bible teaching in regard to man is utterly annihilated." Rougemont in Switzerland called for a crusade against the obnoxious doctrine. Luthardt, Professor of Theology at Leipsic, declared: "The idea of creation belongs to religion and not to natural science; the whole superstructure of personal religion is built upon the doctrine of creation"; and he showed the evolution theory to be in direct contradiction to Holy Writ. But in 1863 came an event which brought serious confusion to the theological camp: Sir Charles Lyell, the most eminent of living geologists, a man of deeply Christian feeling and of exceedingly cautious temper, who had opposed the evolution theory of Lamarck and declared his adherence to the idea of successive creations, then published his work on the Antiquity of Man, and in this and other utterances showed himself a complete though unwilling convert to the fundamental ideas of Darwin. The blow was serious in many ways, and especially so in two--first, as withdrawing all foundation in fact from the scriptural chronology, and secondly, as discrediting the creation theory. The blow was not unexpected; in various review articles against the Darwinian theory there had been appeals to Lyell, at times almost piteous, "not to flinch from the truths he had formerly proclaimed." But Lyell, like the honest man he was, yielded unreservedly to the mass of new proofs arrayed on the side of evolution against that of creation. At the same time came Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, giving new and most cogent arguments in favour of evolution by natural selection. In 1871 was published Darwin's Descent of Man. Its doctrine had been anticipated by critics of his previous books, but it made, none the less, a great stir; again the opposing army trooped forth, though evidently with much less heart than before. A few were very violent. The Dublin University Magazine, after the traditional Hibernian fashion, charged Mr. Darwin with seeking "to displace God by the unerring action of vagary," and with being "resolved to hunt God out of the world." But most notable from the side of the older Church was the elaborate answer to Darwin's book by the eminent French Catholic physician, Dr. Constantin James. In his work, On Darwinism, or the Man-Ape, published at Paris in 1877, Dr. James not only refuted Darwin scientifically but poured contempt on his book, calling it "a fairy tale," and insisted that a work "so fantastic and so burlesque" was, doubtless, only a huge joke, like Erasmus's Praise of Folly, or Montesquieu's Persian Letters. The princes of the Church were delighted. The Cardinal Archbishop of Paris assured the author that the book had become his "spiritual reading," and begged him to send a copy to the Pope himself. His Holiness, Pope Pius IX, acknowledged the gift in a remarkable letter. He thanked his dear son, the writer, for the book in which he "refutes so well the aberrations of Darwinism." "A system," His Holiness adds, "which is repugnant at once to history, to the tradition of all peoples, to exact science, to observed facts, and even to Reason herself, would seem to need no refutation, did not alienation from God and the leaning toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a support in all this tissue of fables.... And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his own God--pride goes so far as to degrade man himself to the level of the unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of lifeless matter, thus unconsciously confirming the Divine declaration, WHEN PRIDE COMETH, THEN COMETH SHAME. But the corruption of this age, the machinations of the perverse, the danger of the simple, demand that such fancies, altogether absurd though they are, should--since they borrow the mask of science--be refuted by true science." Wherefore the Pope thanked Dr. James for his book, "so opportune and so perfectly appropriate to the exigencies of our time," and bestowed on him the apostolic benediction. Nor was this brief all. With it there came a second, creating the author an officer of the Papal Order of St. Sylvester. The cardinal archbishop assured the delighted physician that such a double honour of brief and brevet was perhaps unprecedented, and suggested only that in a new edition of his book he should "insist a little more on the relation existing between the narratives of Genesis and the discoveries of modern science, in such fashion as to convince the most incredulous of their perfect agreement." The prelate urged also a more dignified title. The proofs of this new edition were accordingly all submitted to His Eminence, and in 1882 it appeared as Moses and Darwin: the Man of Genesis compared with the Man-Ape, or Religious Education opposed to Atheistic. No wonder the cardinal embraced the author, thanking him in the name of science and religion. "We have at last," he declared, "a handbook which we can safely put into the hands of youth." Scarcely less vigorous were the champions of English Protestant orthodoxy. In an address at Liverpool, Mr. Gladstone remarked: "Upon the grounds of what is termed evolution God is relieved of the labour of creation; in the name of unchangeable laws he is discharged from governing the world"; and, when Herbert Spencer called his attention to the fact that Newton with the doctrine of gravitation and with the science of physical astronomy is open to the same charge, Mr. Gladstone retreated in the Contemporary Review under one of his characteristic clouds of words. The Rev. Dr. Coles, in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, declared that the God of evolution is not the Christian's God. Burgon, Dean of Chichester, in a sermon preached before the University of Oxford, pathetically warned the students that "those who refuse to accept the history of the creation of our first parents according to its obvious literal intention, and are for substituting the modern dream of evolution in its place, cause the entire scheme of man's salvation to collapse." Dr. Pusey also came into the fray with most earnest appeals against the new doctrine, and the Rev. Gavin Carlyle was perfervid on the same side. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge published a book by the Rev. Mr. Birks, in which the evolution doctrine was declared to be "flatly opposed to the fundamental doctrine of creation." Even the London Times admitted a review stigmatizing Darwin's Descent of Man as an "utterly unsupported hypothesis," full of "unsubstantiated premises, cursory investigations, and disintegrating speculations," and Darwin himself as "reckless and unscientific."(24) (24) For the French theological opposition to the Darwinian theory, see Pozzy, La Terre at le Recit Biblique de la Creation, 1874, especially pp. 353, 363; also Felix Ducane, Etudes sur la Transformisme, 1876, especially pp. 107 to 119. As to Fabre d'Envieu, see especially his Proposition xliii. For the Abbe Desogres, "former Professor of Philosophy and Theology," see his Erreurs Modernes, Paris, 1878, pp. 677 and 595 to 598. For Monseigneur Segur, see his La Foi devant la Science Moderne, sixth ed., Paris, 1874, pp. 23, 34, etc. For Herbert Spencer's reply to Mr. Gladstone, see his study of Sociology; for the passage in the Dublin Review, see the issue for July, 1871. For the Review in the London Times, see Nature for April 20, 1871. For Gavin Carlyle, see The Battle of Unbelief, 1870, pp. 86 and 171. For the attacks by Michelis and Hagermann, see Natur und Offenbarung, Munster, 1861 to 1869. For Schund, see his Darwin's Hypothese und ihr Verhaaltniss zu Religion und Moral, Stuttgart, 1869. For Luthardt, see Fundamental Truths of Christianity, translated by Sophia Taylor, second ed., Edinburgh, 1869. For Rougemont, see his L'Homme et le Singe, Neuchatel, 1863 (also in German trans.). For Constantin James, see his Mes Entretiens avec l'Empereur Don Pedro sur la Darwinisme, Paris, 1888, where the papal briefs are printed in full. For the English attacks on Darwin's Descent of Man, see the Edinburgh Review July, 1871 and elsewhere; the Dublin Review, July, 1871; the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, April, 1886. See also The Scripture Doctrine of Creation, by the Rev. T. R. Birks, London, 1873, published by the S. P. C. K. For Dr. Pusey's attack, see his Unscience, not Science, adverse to Faith, 1878; also Darwin's Life and Letters, vol. ii, pp. 411, 412. But it was noted that this second series of attacks, on the Descent of Man, differed in one remarkable respect--so far as England was concerned--from those which had been made over ten years before on the Origin of Species. While everything was done to discredit Darwin, to pour contempt upon him, and even, of all things in the world, to make him--the gentlest of mankind, only occupied with the scientific side of the problem--"a persecutor of Christianity," while his followers were represented more and more as charlatans or dupes, there began to be in the most influential quarters careful avoidance of the old argument that evolution--even by natural selection--contradicts Scripture. It began to be felt that this was dangerous ground. The defection of Lyell had, perhaps, more than anything else, started the question among theologians who had preserved some equanimity, "WHAT IF, AFTER ALL, THE DARWINIAN THEORY SHOULD PROVE TO BE TRUE?" Recollections of the position in which the Roman Church found itself after the establishment of the doctrines of Copernicus and Galileo naturally came into the minds of the more thoughtful. In Germany this consideration does not seem to have occurred at quite so early a day. One eminent Lutheran clergyman at Magdeburg called on his hearers to choose between Darwin and religion; Delitszch, in his new commentary on Genesis, attempted to bring science back to recognise human sin as an important factor in creation; Prof. Heinrich Ewald, while carefully avoiding any sharp conflict between the scriptural doctrine and evolution, comforted himself by covering Darwin and his followers with contempt; Christlieb, in his address before the Evangelical Alliance at New York in 1873, simply took the view that the tendencies of the Darwinian theory were "toward infidelity," but declined to make any serious battle on biblical grounds; the Jesuit, Father Pesch, in Holland, drew up in Latin, after the old scholastic manner, a sort of general indictment of evolution, of which one may say that it was interesting--as interesting as the display of a troop in chain armour and with cross-bows on a nineteenth-century battlefield. From America there came new echoes. Among the myriad attacks on the Darwinian theory by Protestants and Catholics two should be especially mentioned. The first of these was by Dr. Noah Porter, President of Yale College, an excellent scholar, an interesting writer, a noble man, broadly tolerant, combining in his thinking a curious mixture of radicalism and conservatism. While giving great latitude to the evolutionary teaching in the university under his care, he felt it his duty upon one occasion to avow his disbelief in it; but he was too wise a man to suggest any necessary antagonism between it and the Scriptures. He confined himself mainly to pointing out the tendency of the evolution doctrine in this form toward agnosticism and pantheism. To those who knew and loved him, and had noted the genial way in which by wise neglect he had allowed scientific studies to flourish at Yale, there was an amusing side to all this. Within a stone's throw of his college rooms was the Museum of Paleontology, in which Prof. Marsh had laid side by side, among other evidences of the new truth, that wonderful series of specimens showing the evolution of the horse from the earliest form of the animal, "not larger than a fox, with five toes," through the whole series up to his present form and size--that series which Huxley declared an absolute proof of the existence of natural selection as an agent in evolution. In spite of the veneration and love which all Yale men felt for President Porter, it was hardly to be expected that these particular arguments of his would have much permanent effect upon them when there was constantly before their eyes so convincing a refutation. But a far more determined opponent was the Rev. Dr. Hodge, of Princeton; his anger toward the evolution doctrine was bitter: he denounced it as thoroughly "atheistic"; he insisted that Christians "have a right to protest against the arraying of probabilities against the clear evidence of the Scriptures"; he even censured so orthodox a writer as the Duke of Argyll, and declared that the Darwinian theory of natural selection is "utterly inconsistent with the Scriptures," and that "an absent God, who does nothing, is to us no God"; that "to ignore design as manifested in God's creation is to dethrone God"; that "a denial of design in Nature is virtually a denial of God"; and that "no teleologist can be a Darwinian." Even more uncompromising was another of the leading authorities at the same university--the Rev. Dr. Duffield. He declared war not only against Darwin but even against men like Asa Gray, Le Conte, and others, who had attempted to reconcile the new theory with the Bible: he insisted that "evolutionism and the scriptural account of the origin of man are irreconcilable"--that the Darwinian theory is "in direct conflict with the teaching of the apostle, 'All scripture is given by inspiration of God'"; he pointed out, in his opposition to Darwin's Descent of Man and Lyell's Antiquity of Man, that in the Bible "the genealogical links which connect the Israelites in Egypt with Adam and Eve in Eden are explicitly given." These utterances of Prof. Duffield culminated in a declaration which deserves to be cited as showing that a Presbyterian minister can "deal damnation round the land" ex cathedra in a fashion quite equal to that of popes and bishops. It is as follows: "If the development theory of the origin of man," wrote Dr. Duffield in the Princeton Review, "shall in a little while take its place--as doubtless it will--with other exploded scientific speculations, then they who accept it with its proper logical consequences will in the life to come have their portion with those who in this life 'know not God and obey not the gospel of his Son.'" Fortunately, at about the time when Darwin's Descent of Man was published, there had come into Princeton University "deus ex machina" in the person of Dr. James McCosh. Called to the presidency, he at once took his stand against teachings so dangerous to Christianity as those of Drs. Hodge, Duffield, and their associates. In one of his personal confidences he has let us into the secret of this matter. With that hard Scotch sense which Thackeray had applauded in his well-known verses, he saw that the most dangerous thing which could be done to Christianity at Princeton was to reiterate in the university pulpit, week after week, solemn declarations that if evolution by natural selection, or indeed evolution at all, be true, the Scriptures are false. He tells us that he saw that this was the certain way to make the students unbelievers; he therefore not only checked this dangerous preaching but preached an opposite doctrine. With him began the inevitable compromise, and, in spite of mutterings against him as a Darwinian, he carried the day. Whatever may be thought of his general system of philosophy, no one can deny his great service in neutralizing the teachings of his predecessors and colleagues--so dangerous to all that is essential in Christianity. Other divines of strong sense in other parts of the country began to take similar ground--namely, that men could be Christians and at the same time Darwinians. There appeared, indeed, here and there, curious discrepancies: thus in 1873 the Monthly Religious Magazine of Boston congratulated its readers that the Rev. Mr. Burr had "demolished the evolution theory, knocking the breath of life out of it and throwing it to the dogs." This amazing performance by the Rev. Mr. Burr was repeated in a very striking way by Bishop Keener before the Oecumenical Council of Methodism at Washington in 1891. In what the newspapers described as an "admirable speech," he refuted evolution doctrines by saying that evolutionists had "only to make a journey of twelve hours from the place where he was then standing to find together the bones of the muskrat, the opossum, the coprolite, and the ichthyosaurus." He asserted that Agassiz--whom the good bishop, like so many others, seemed to think an evolutionist--when he visited these beds near Charleston, declared: "These old beds have set me crazy; they have destroyed the work of a lifetime." And the Methodist prelate ended by saying: "Now, gentlemen, brethren, take these facts home with you; get down and look at them. This is the watch that was under the steam hammer--the doctrine of evolution; and this steam hammer is the wonderful deposit of the Ashley beds." Exhibitions like these availed little. While the good bishop amid vociferous applause thus made comically evident his belief that Agassiz was a Darwinian and a coprolite an animal, scientific men were recording in all parts of the world facts confirming the dreaded theory of an evolution by natural selection. While the Rev. Mr. Burr was so loudly praised for "throwing Darwinism to the dogs," Marsh was completing his series leading from the five-toed ungulates to the horse. While Dr. Tayler Lewis at Union, and Drs. Hodge and Duffield at Princeton, were showing that if evolution be true the biblical accounts must be false, the indefatigable Yale professor was showing his cretaceous birds, and among them Hesperornis and Ichthyornis with teeth. While in Germany Luthardt, Schund, and their compeers were demonstrating that Scripture requires a belief in special and separate creations, the Archaeopteryx, showing a most remarkable connection between birds and reptiles, was discovered. While in France Monseigneur Segur and others were indulging in diatribes against "a certain Darwin," Gaudry and Filhol were discovering a striking series of "missing links" among the carnivora. In view of the proofs accumulating in favour of the new evolutionary hypothesis, the change in the tone of controlling theologians was now rapid. From all sides came evidences of desire to compromise with the theory. Strict adherents of the biblical text pointed significantly to the verses in Genesis in which the earth and sea were made to bring forth birds and fishes, and man was created out of the dust of the ground. Men of larger mind like Kingsley and Farrar, with English and American broad churchmen generally, took ground directly in Darwin's favour. Even Whewell took pains to show that there might be such a thing as a Darwinian argument for design in Nature; and the Rev. Samuel Houghton, of the Royal Society, gave interesting suggestions of a divine design in evolution. Both the great English universities received the new teaching as a leaven: at Oxford, in the very front of the High Church party at Keble College, was elaborated a statement that the evolution doctrine is "an advance in our theological thinking." And Temple, Bishop of London, perhaps the most influential thinker then in the Anglican episcopate, accepted the new revelation in the following words: "It seems something more majestic, more befitting him to whom a thousand years are as one day, thus to impress his will once for all on his creation, and provide for all the countless varieties by this one original impress, than by special acts of creation to be perpetually modifying what he had previously made." In Scotland the Duke of Argyll, head and front of the orthodox party, dissenting in many respects from Darwin's full conclusions, made concessions which badly shook the old position. Curiously enough, from the Roman Catholic Church, bitter as some of its writers had been, now came argument to prove that the Catholic faith does not prevent any one from holding the Darwinian theory, and especially a declaration from an authority eminent among American Catholics--a declaration which has a very curious sound, but which it would be ungracious to find fault with--that "the doctrine of evolution is no more in opposition to the doctrine of the Catholic Church than is the Copernican theory or that of Galileo." Here and there, indeed, men of science like Dawson, Mivart, and Wigand, in view of theological considerations, sought to make conditions; but the current was too strong, and eminent theologians in every country accepted natural selection as at least a very important part in the mechanism of evolution. At the death of Darwin it was felt that there was but one place in England where his body should be laid, and that this place was next the grave of Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. The noble address of Canon Farrar at his funeral was echoed from many pulpits in Europe and America, and theological opposition as such was ended. Occasionally appeared, it is true, a survival of the old feeling: the Rev. Dr. Laing referred to the burial of Darwin in Westminster Abbey as "a proof that England is no longer a Christian country," and added that this burial was a desecration--that this honour was given him because he had been "the chief promoter of the mock doctrine of evolution of the species and the ape descent of man." Still another of these belated prophets was, of all men, Thomas Carlyle. Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him to find more heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick the Great's generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him to see in the American civil war only the burning out of a foul chimney, he, with the petulance natural to a dyspeptic eunuch, railed at Darwin as an "apostle of dirt worship." The last echoes of these utterances reverberated between Scotland and America. In the former country, in 1885, the Rev. Dr. Lee issued a volume declaring that, if the Darwinian view be true, "there is no place for God"; that "by no method of interpretation can the language of Holy Scripture be made wide enough to re-echo the orang-outang theory of man's natural history"; that "Darwinism reverses the revelation of God" and "implies utter blasphemy against the divine and human character of our Incarnate Lord"; and he was pleased to call Darwin and his followers "gospellers of the gutter." In one of the intellectual centres of America the editor of a periodical called The Christian urged frantically that "the battle be set in array, and that men find out who is on the Lord's side and who is on the side of the devil and the monkeys." To the honour of the Church of England it should be recorded that a considerable number of her truest men opposed such utterances as these, and that one of them--Farrar, Archdeacon of Westminster--made a protest worthy to be held in perpetual remembrance. While confessing his own inability to accept fully the new scientific belief, he said: "We should consider it disgraceful and humiliating to try to shake it by an ad captandum argument, or by a clap-trap platform appeal to the unfathomable ignorance and unlimited arrogance of a prejudiced assembly. We should blush to meet it with an anathema or a sneer." All opposition had availed nothing; Darwin's work and fame were secure. As men looked back over his beautiful life--simple, honest, tolerant, kindly--and thought upon his great labours in the search for truth, all the attacks faded into nothingness. There were indeed some dark spots, which as time goes on appear darker. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Whewell, the "omniscient," author of the History of the Inductive Sciences, refused to allow a copy of the Origin of Species to be placed in the library. At multitudes of institutions under theological control--Protestant as well as Catholic--attempts were made to stamp out or to stifle evolutionary teaching. Especially was this true for a time in America, and the case of the American College at Beyrout, where nearly all the younger professors were dismissed for adhering to Darwin's views, is worthy of remembrance. The treatment of Dr. Winchell at the Vanderbilt University in Tennessee showed the same spirit; one of the truest of men, devoted to science but of deeply Christian feeling, he was driven forth for views which centred in the Darwinian theory. Still more striking was the case of Dr. Woodrow. He had, about 1857, been appointed to a professorship of Natural Science as connected with Revealed Religion, in the Presbyterian Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina. He was a devoted Christian man, and his training had led him to accept the Presbyterian standards of faith. With great gifts for scientific study he visited Europe, made a most conscientious examination of the main questions under discussion, and adopted the chief points in the doctrine of evolution by natural selection. A struggle soon began. A movement hostile to him grew more and more determined, and at last, in spite of the efforts made in his behalf by the directors of the seminary and by a large and broad-minded minority in the representative bodies controlling it, an orthodox storm, raised by the delegates from various Presbyterian bodies, drove him from his post. Fortunately, he was received into a professorship at the University of South Carolina, where he has since taught with more power than ever before. This testimony to the faith by American provincial Protestantism was very properly echoed from Spanish provincial Catholicism. In the year 1878 a Spanish colonial man of science, Dr. Chil y Marango, published a work on the Canary Islands. But Dr. Chil had the imprudence to sketch, in his introduction, the modern hypothesis of evolution, and to exhibit some proofs, found in the Canary Islands, of the barbarism of primitive man. The ecclesiastical authorities, under the lead of Bishop Urquinaona y Bidot, at once grappled with this new idea. By a solemn act they declared it "falsa, impia, scandalosa"; all persons possessing copies of the work were ordered to surrender them at once to the proper ecclesiastics, and the author was placed under the major excommunication. But all this opposition may be reckoned among the last expiring convulsions of the old theologic theory. Even from the new Catholic University at Washington has come an utterance in favour of the new doctrine, and in other universities in the Old World and in the New the doctrine of evolution by natural selection has asserted its right to full and honest consideration. More than this, it is clearly evident that the stronger men in the Church have, in these latter days, not only relinquished the struggle against science in this field, but have determined frankly and manfully to make an alliance with it. In two very remarkable lectures given in 1892 at the parish church of Rochdale, Wilson, Archdeacon of Manchester, not only accepted Darwinism as true, but wrought it with great argumentative power into a higher view of Christianity; and what is of great significance, these sermons were published by the same Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge which only a few years before had published the most bitter attacks against the Darwinian theory. So, too, during the year 1893, Prof. Henry Drummond, whose praise is in all the dissenting churches, developed a similar view most brilliantly in a series of lectures delivered before the American Chautauqua schools, and published in one of the most widespread of English orthodox newspapers. Whatever additional factors may be added to natural selection--and Darwin himself fully admitted that there might be others--the theory of an evolution process in the formation of the universe and of animated nature is established, and the old theory of direct creation is gone forever. In place of it science has given us conceptions far more noble, and opened the way to an argument for design infinitely more beautiful than any ever developed by theology.(24) (24) For the causes of bitterness shown regarding the Darwinian hypothesis, see Reusch, Bibel und Natur, vol. ii, pp. 46 et seq. For hostility in the United States regarding the Darwinian theory, see, among a multitude of writers, the following: Dr. Charles Hodge, of Princeton, monograph, What is Darwinism? New York, 1874; also his Systematic Theology, New York, 1872, vol. ii, part 2, Anthropology; also The Light by which we see Light, or Nature and the Scriptures, Vedder Lectures, 1875, Rutgers College, New York, 1875; also Positivism and Evolutionism, in the American Catholic Quarterly, October 1877, pp. 607, 619; and in the same number, Professor Huxley and Evolution, by Rev. A. M. Kirsch, pp. 662, 664; The Logic of Evolution, by Prof. Edward F. X. McSweeney, D. D., July, 1879, p. 561; Das Hexaemeron und die Geologie, von P. Eirich, Pastor in Albany, N. Y., Lutherischer Concordia-Verlag, St. Louis, Mo., 1878, pp. 81, 82, 84, 92-94; Evolutionism respecting Man and the Bible, by John T. Duffield, of Princeton, January, 1878, Princeton Review, pp. 151, 153, 154, 158, 159, 160, 188; a Lecture on Evolution, before the Nineteenth Century Club of New York, May 25, 1886, by ex-President Noah Porter, pp. 4, 26-29. For the laudatory notice of the Rev. E. F. Burr's demolition of evolution in his book Pater Mundi, see Monthly Religious Magazine, Boston, May, 1873, p. 492. Concerning the removal of Dr. James Woodrow, Professor of Natural Science in the Columbia Theological Seminary, see Evolution or Not, in the New York Weekly Sun, October 24, 1888. For the dealings of Spanish ecclesiastics with Dr. Chil and his Darwinian exposition, see the Revue d'Anthropologie, cited in the Academy for April 6, 1878; see also the Catholic World, xix, 433, A Discussion with an Infidel, directed against Dr. Louis Buchner and his Kraft und Stoff; also Mind and Matter, by Rev. james Tait, of Canada, p. 66 (in the third edition the author bemoans the "horrible plaudits" that "have accompanied every effort to establish man's brutal descent"); also The Church Journal, New York, May 28, 1874. For the effort in favour of a teleological evolution, see Rev. Samuel Houghton, F. R. S., Principles of Animal Mechanics, London, 1873, preface and p. 156 and elsewhere. For the details of the persecutions of Drs. Winchell and Woodrow, and of the Beyrout professors, with authorities cited, see my chapter on The Fall of Man and Anthropology. For more liberal views among religious thinkers regarding the Darwinian theory, and for efforts to mitigate and adapt it to theological views, see, among the great mass of utterances, the following: Charles Kingsley's letters to Darwin, November 18, 1859, in Darwin's Life and Letters, vol. ii, p. 82; Adam Sedgwick to Charles Darwin, December 24, 1859, see ibid., vol. ii, pp. 356-359; the same to Miss Gerard, January 2, 1860, see Sedgewick's Life and Letters, vol. ii, pp. 359, 360; the same in The Spectator, London, March 24, 1860; The Rambler, March 1860, cited by Mivart, Genesis of Species, p. 30; The Dublin Review, May, 1860; The Christian Examiner, May, 1860; Charles Kingsley to F. D. Maurice in 1863, in Kingsley's Life, vol. ii, p. 171; Adam Sedgwick to Livingstone (the explorer), March 16, 1865, in Life and Letters of Sedgwick, vol. ii, pp. 410-412; the Duke of Argyll, The Reign of Law, New York, pp. 16, 18, 31, 116, 117, 120, 159; Joseph P. Thompson, D. D., LL.D., Man in Genesis and Geology, New York, 1870, pp. 48, 49, 82; Canon H. P. Liddon, Sermons preached before the University of Oxford, 1871, Sermon III; St. George Mivart, Evolution and its Consequences, Contemporary Review, Jan. 1872; British and Foreign Evangelical Review, 1872, article on The Theory of Evolution; The Lutheran Quarterly, Gettysburg, Pa., April, 1872, article by Rev. Cyrus Thomas, Assistant United States Geological Survey on The Descent of Man, pp. 214, 239, 372-376; The Lutheran Quarterly, July, 1873, article on Some Assumptions against Christianity, by Rev. C. A. Stork, Baltimore, Md., pp. 325, 326; also, in the same number, see a review of Dr. Burr's Pater Mundi, pp. 474, 475, and contrast with the review in the Andover Review of that period; an article in the Religious Magazine and Monthly Review, Boston, on Religion and Evolution, by Rev. S. R. Calthrop, September, 1873, p. 200; The Popular Science Monthly, January, 1874, article Genesis, Geology, and Evolution; article by Asa Gray, Nature, London, June 4, 1874; Materialism, by Rev. W. Streissguth, Lutheran Quarterly, July, 1875, originally written in German, and translated by J. G. Morris, D. D., pp. 406, 408; Darwinismus und Christenthum, von R. Steck, Ref. Pfarrer in Dresden, Berlin, 1875, pp. 5,6, and 26, reprinted from the Protestantische Kirchenzeitung, and issued as a tract by the Protestantenverein; Rev. W. E. Adams, article in the Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1879, on Evolution: Shall it be Atheistic? John Wood, Bible Anticipations of Modern Science, 1880, pp. 18, 19, 22; Lutheran Quarterly, January, 1881, Some Postulates of the New Ethics, by Rev. C. A. Stork, D. D.; Lutheran Quarterly, January, 1882, The Religion of Evolution as against the Religion of Jesus, by Prof. W. H. Wynn, Iowa State Agricultural College--this article was republished as a pamphlet; Canon Liddon, prefatory note to sermon on The Recovery of St. Thomas, pp. 4, 11, 12, 13, and 26, preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, April 23, 1882; Lutheran Quarterly, January 1882, Evolution and the Scripture, by Rev. John A. Earnest, pp. 101, 105; Glimpses in the Twilight, by Rev. F. G. Lee, D. D., Edinburgh, 1885, especially pp. 18 and 19; the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, by Rev. Charles Beard, pp. 392, 393, et seq.; F. W. Farrar, D. D., Canon of Westminster, The History of Interpretation, being the Bampton Lectures for 1885, pp. 426, 427; Bishop Temple, Bampton Lectures, pp. 184-186; article Evolution in the Dictionary of Religion, edited by Rev. William Benham, 1887; Prof. Huxley, An Episcopal Trilogy, Nineteenth Century, November, 1887--this article discusses three sermons delivered by the bishops of Carlisle, Bedford, and Manchester, in Manchester Cathedral, during the meeting of the British Association, September, 1887--these sermons were afterward published in pamphlet form under the title The Advance of Science; John Fiske, Darwinism, and Other Essays, Boston, 1888; Harriet Mackenzie, Evolution illuminating the Bible, London, 1891, dedicated to Prof. Huxley; H. E. Rye, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, The Early Narratives of Genesis, London, 1892, preface, pp. vii-ix, pp. 7, 9, 11; Rev. G. M. Searle, of the Catholic University, Washington, article in the Catholic World, November, 1892, pp. 223, 227, 229, 231; for the statement from Keble College, see Rev. Mr. Illingworth, in Lux Mundi. For Bishop Temple, see citation in Laing. For a complete and admirable acceptance of the evolutionary theory as lifting Christian doctrine and practice to a higher plane, with suggestions for a new theology, see two Sermons by Archdeacon Wilson, of Manchester, S. P. C. K.. London, and Young & Co., New York, 1893; and for a characteristically lucid statement of the most recent development of evolution doctrines, and the relations of Spencer, Weismann, Galton, and others to them, see Lester F. Ward's Address as President of the Biological Society, Washington, 1891; also, recent articles in the leading English reviews. For a brilliant glorification of evolution by natural selection as a doctrine necessary to then highest and truest view of Christianity, see Prof. Drummond's Chautauqua Lectures, published in the British Weekly, London, from April 20 to May 11, 1893. CHAPTER II. GEOGRAPHY. I. THE FORM OF THE EARTH. Among various rude tribes we find survivals of a primitive idea that the earth is a flat table or disk, ceiled, domed, or canopied by the sky, and that the sky rests upon the mountains as pillars. Such a belief is entirely natural; it conforms to the appearance of things, and hence at a very early period entered into various theologies. In the civilizations of Chaldea and Egypt it was very fully developed. The Assyrian inscriptions deciphered in these latter years represent the god Marduk as in the beginning creating the heavens and the earth: the earth rests upon the waters; within it is the realm of the dead; above it is spread "the firmament"--a solid dome coming down to the horizon on all sides and resting upon foundations laid in the "great waters" which extend around the earth. On the east and west sides of this domed firmament are doors, through which the sun enters in the morning and departs at night; above it extends another ocean, which goes down to the ocean surrounding the earth at the horizon on all sides, and which is supported and kept away from the earth by the firmament. Above the firmament and the upper ocean which it supports is the interior of heaven. The Egyptians considered the earth as a table, flat and oblong, the sky being its ceiling--a huge "firmament" of metal. At the four corners of the earth were the pillars supporting this firmament, and on this solid sky were the "waters above the heavens." They believed that, when chaos was taking form, one of the gods by main force raised the waters on high and spread them out over the firmament; that on the under side of this solid vault, or ceiling, or firmament, the stars were suspended to light the earth, and that the rains were caused by the letting down of the waters through its windows. This idea and others connected with it seem to have taken strong hold of the Egyptian priestly caste, entering into their theology and sacred science: ceilings of great temples, with stars, constellations, planets, and signs of the zodiac figured upon them, remain to-day as striking evidences of this. In Persia we have theories of geography based upon similar conceptions and embalmed in sacred texts. From these and doubtless from earlier sources common to them all came geographical legacies to the Hebrews. Various passages in their sacred books, many of them noble in conception and beautiful in form, regarding "the foundation of the earth upon the waters," "the fountains of the great deep," "the compass upon the face of the depth," the "firmament," the "corners of the earth," the "pillars of heaven," the "waters above the firmament," the "windows of heaven," and "doors of heaven," point us back to both these ancient springs of thought.(25) (25) For survivals of the early idea, among the Eskimos, of the sky as supported by mountains, and, among sundry Pacific islanders, of the sky as a firmament or vault of stone, see Tylor, Early History of Mankind, second edition, London, 1870, chap. xi; Spencer, Sociology, vol. i, chap vii, also Andrew Lang, La Mythologie, Paris, 1886, pp. 68-73. For the Babylonian theories, see George Smith's Chaldean Genesis, and especially the German translation by Delitzsch, Leipsic, 1876; also, Jensen, Die Kosmogonien der Babylonier, Strasburg, 1890; see especially in the appendices, pp. 9 and 10, a drawing representing the whole Babylonian scheme so closely followed in the Hebrew book Genesis. See also Lukas, Die Grundbegriffe in den Kosmogonien der alten Volker, Leipsic, 1893, for a most thorough summing up of the whole subject, with texts showing the development of Hebrew out of Chaldean and Egyptian conceptions, pp. 44, etc.; also pp. 127 et seq. For the early view in India and Persia, see citations from the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap. i. For the Egyptian view, see Champollion; also Lenormant, Histoire Ancienne, Maspero, and others. As to the figures of the heavens upon the ceilings of Egyptian temples, see Maspero, Archeologie Egyptienne, Paris, 1890; and for engravings of them, see Lepsius, Denkmaler, vol. i, Bl. 41, and vol. ix, Abth. iv, Bl. 35; also the Description de l'Egypte, published by order of Napoleon, tome ii, Pl. 14; also Prisse d'Avennes, Art Egyptien, Atlas, tome i, Pl. 35; and especially for a survival at the Temple of Denderah, see Denon, Voyage en Egypte, Planches 129, 130. For the Egyptian idea of "pillars of heaven," as alluded to on the stele of victory of Thotmes III,in the Cairo Museum, see Ebers, Uarda, vol. ii, p. 175, note, Leipsic, 1877. For a similar Babylonian belief, see Sayce's Herodotus, Appendix, p. 403. For the belief of Hebrew scriptural writers in a solid "firmament," see especially Job, xxxviii, 18; also Smith's Bible Dictionary. For engravings showing the earth and heaven above it as conceived by Egyptians and Chaldeans, with "pillars of heaven" and "firmament," see Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of Civilization, London, 1894, pp. 17 and 543. But, as civilization was developed, there were evolved, especially among the Greeks, ideas of the earth's sphericity. The Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle especially cherished them. These ideas were vague, they were mixed with absurdities, but they were germ ideas, and even amid the luxuriant growth of theology in the early Christian Church these germs began struggling into life in the minds of a few thinking men, and these men renewed the suggestion that the earth is a globe.(26) (26) The agency of the Pythagoreans in first spreading the doctrine of the earth's sphericity is generally acknowledged, but the first full and clear utterance of it to the world was by Aristotle. Very fruitful, too, was the statement of the new theory given by Plato in the Timaeus; see Jowett's translation, 62, c. Also the Phaedo, pp.449 et seq. See also Grote on Plato's doctrine on the sphericity of the earth; also Sir G. C. Lewis's Astronomy of the Ancients, London, 1862, chap. iii, section i, and note. Cicero's mention of the antipodes, and his reference to the passage in the Timaeus, are even more remarkable than the latter, in that they much more clearly foreshadow the modern doctrine. See his Academic Questions, ii; also Tusc. Quest., i and v, 24. For a very full summary of the views of the ancients on the sphericity of the earth, see Kretschmer, Die physische Erkunde im christlichen Mittelalter, Wien, 1889, pp. 35 et seq.; also Eiken, Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, Stuttgart, 1887, Dritter Theil, chap. vi. For citations and summaries, see Whewell, Hist. Induct. Sciences, vol. i, p. 189, and St. Martin, Hist. de la Geog., Paris, 1873, p. 96; also Leopardi, Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi, Firenze, 1851, chap. xii, pp. 184 et seq. A few of the larger-minded fathers of the Church, influenced possibly by Pythagorean traditions, but certainly by Aristotle and Plato, were willing to accept this view, but the majority of them took fright at once. To them it seemed fraught with dangers to Scripture, by which, of course, they meant their interpretation of Scripture. Among the first who took up arms against it was Eusebius. In view of the New Testament texts indicating the immediately approaching, end of the world, he endeavoured to turn off this idea by bringing scientific studies into contempt. Speaking of investigators, he said, "It is not through ignorance of the things admired by them, but through contempt of their useless labour, that we think little of these matters, turning our souls to better things." Basil of Caesarea declared it "a matter of no interest to us whether the earth is a sphere or a cylinder or a disk, or concave in the middle like a fan." Lactantius referred to the ideas of those studying astronomy as "bad and senseless," and opposed the doctrine of the earth's sphericity both from Scripture and reason. St. John Chrysostom also exerted his influence against this scientific belief; and Ephraem Syrus, the greatest man of the old Syrian Church, widely known as the "lute of the Holy Ghost," opposed it no less earnestly. But the strictly biblical men of science, such eminent fathers and bishops as Theophilus of Antioch in the second century, and Clement of Alexandria in the third, with others in centuries following, were not content with merely opposing what they stigmatized as an old heathen theory; they drew from their Bibles a new Christian theory, to which one Church authority added one idea and another, until it was fully developed. Taking the survival of various early traditions, given in the seventh verse of the first chapter of Genesis, they insisted on the clear declarations of Scripture that the earth was, at creation, arched over with a solid vault, "a firmament," and to this they added the passages from Isaiah and the Psalms, in which it declared that the heavens are stretched out "like a curtain," and again "like a tent to dwell in." The universe, then, is like a house: the earth is its ground floor, the firmament its ceiling, under which the Almighty hangs out the sun to rule the day and the moon and stars to rule the night. This ceiling is also the floor of the apartment above, and in this is a cistern, shaped, as one of the authorities says, "like a bathing-tank," and containing "the waters which are above the firmament." These waters are let down upon the earth by the Almighty and his angels through the "windows of heaven." As to the movement of the sun, there was a citation of various passages in Genesis, mixed with metaphysics in various proportions, and this was thought to give ample proofs from the Bible that the earth could not be a sphere.(27) (27) For Eusebius, see the Proep. Ev., xv, 61. For Basil, see the Hexaemeron, Hom. ix. For Lactantius, see his Inst. Div., lib. iii, cap. 3; also citations in Whewell, Hist. Induct. Sciences, London, 1857, vol. i, p. 194, and in St. Martin, Histoire de la Geographie, pp. 216, 217. For the views of St. John Chrysostom, Ephraem Syrus, and other great churchmen, see Kretschmer as above, chap i. In the sixth century this development culminated in what was nothing less than a complete and detailed system of the universe, claiming to be based upon Scripture, its author being the Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes. Egypt was a great treasure-house of theologic thought to various religions of antiquity, and Cosmas appears to have urged upon the early Church this Egyptian idea of the construction of the world, just as another Egyptian ecclesiastic, Athanasius, urged upon the Church the Egyptian idea of a triune deity ruling the world. According to Cosmas, the earth is a parallelogram, flat, and surrounded by four seas. It is four hundred days' journey long and two hundred broad. At the outer edges of these four seas arise massive walls closing in the whole structure and supporting the firmament or vault of the heavens, whose edges are cemented to the walls. These walls inclose the earth and all the heavenly bodies. The whole of this theologico-scientific structure was built most carefully and, as was then thought, most scripturally. Starting with the expression applied in the ninth chapter of Hebrews to the tabernacle in the desert, Cosmas insists, with other interpreters of his time, that it gives the key to the whole construction of the world. The universe is, therefore, made on the plan of the Jewish tabernacle--boxlike and oblong. Going into details, he quotes the sublime words of Isaiah: "It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth;... that stretcheth out the heavens like a curtain, and spreadeth them out like a tent to dwell in"; and the passage in Job which speaks of the "pillars of heaven." He works all this into his system, and reveals, as he thinks, treasures of science. This vast box is divided into two compartments, one above the other. In the first of these, men live and stars move; and it extends up to the first solid vault, or firmament, above which live the angels, a main part of whose business it is to push and pull the sun and planets to and fro. Next, he takes the text, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters," and other texts from Genesis; to these he adds the text from the Psalms, "Praise him, ye heaven of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens" then casts all, and these growths of thought into his crucible together, finally brings out the theory that over this first vault is a vast cistern containing "the waters." He then takes the expression in Genesis regarding the "windows of heaven" and establishes a doctrine regarding the regulation of the rain, to the effect that the angels not only push and pull the heavenly bodies to light the earth, but also open and close the heavenly windows to water it. To understand the surface of the earth, Cosmas, following the methods of interpretation which Origen and other early fathers of the Church had established, studies the table of shew-bread in the Jewish tabernacle. The surface of this table proves to him that the earth is flat, and its dimensions prove that the earth is twice as long as broad; its four corners symbolize the four seasons; the twelve loaves of bread, the twelve months; the hollow about the table proves that the ocean surrounds the earth. To account for the movement of the sun, Cosmas suggests that at the north of the earth is a great mountain, and that at night the sun is carried behind this; but some of the commentators ventured to express a doubt here: they thought that the sun was pushed into a pit at night and pulled out in the morning. Nothing can be more touching in its simplicity than Cosmas's summing up of his great argument, He declares, "We say therefore with Isaiah that the heaven embracing the universe is a vault, with Job that it is joined to the earth, and with Moses that the length of the earth is greater than its breadth." The treatise closes with rapturous assertions that not only Moses and the prophets, but also angels and apostles, agree to the truth of his doctrine, and that at the last day God will condemn all who do not accept it. Although this theory was drawn from Scripture, it was also, as we have seen, the result of an evolution of theological thought begun long before the scriptural texts on which it rested were written. It was not at all strange that Cosmas, Egyptian as he was, should have received this old Nile-born doctrine, as we see it indicated to-day in the structure of Egyptian temples, and that he should have developed it by the aid of the Jewish Scriptures; but the theological world knew nothing of this more remote evolution from pagan germs; it was received as virtually inspired, and was soon regarded as a fortress of scriptural truth. Some of the foremost men in the Church devoted themselves to buttressing it with new texts and throwing about it new outworks of theological reasoning; the great body of the faithful considered it a direct gift from the Almighty. Even in the later centuries of the Middle Ages John of San Geminiano made a desperate attempt to save it. Like Cosmas, he takes the Jewish tabernacle as his starting-point, and shows how all the newer ideas can be reconciled with the biblical accounts of its shape, dimensions, and furniture.(28) (28) For a notice of the views of Cosmas in connection with those of Lactantius, Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, and others, see Schoell, Histoire de la Litterature Grecque, vol. vii, p. 37. The main scriptural passages referred to are as follows: (1) Isaiah xi, 22; (2) Genesis i, 6; (3) Genesis vii, 11; (4) Exodus xxiv, 10; (5) Job xxvi, 11, and xxxvii, 18 (6) Psalm cxlviii, 4, and civ, 9; (7) Ezekiel i, 22-26. For Cosmas's theory, see Montfaucon, Collectio Nova Patrum, Paris, 1706, vol. ii, p.188; also pp. 298, 299. The text is illustrated with engravings showing walls and solid vault (firmament), with the whole apparatus of "fountains of the great deep," "windows of heaven," angels, and the mountain behind which the sun is drawn. For reduction of one of them, see Peschel, Gesschichte der Erdkunds, p. 98; also article Maps, in Knight's Dictionary of Mechanics, New York, 1875. For curious drawings showing Cosmas's scheme in a different way from that given by Montfaucon, see extracts from a Vatican codex of the ninth century in Garucci, Storia de l'Arte Christiana, vol. iii, pp. 70 et seq. For a good discussion of Cosmas's ideas, see Santarem, Hist. de la Cosmographie, vol. ii, pp. 8 et seq., and for a very thorough discussion of its details, Kretschmer, as above. For still another theory, very droll, and thought out on similar principles, see Mungo Park, cited in De Morgan, Paradoxes, p. 309. For Cosmas's joyful summing up, see Montfaucon, Collectio Nova Patrum, vol. ii, p. 255. For the curious survival in the thirteenth century of the old idea of the "waters above the heavens," see the story in Gervase of Tilbury, how in his time some people coming out of church in England found an anchor let down by a rope out of the heavens, how there came voices from sailors above trying to loose the anchor, and, finally, how a sailor came down the rope, who, on reaching the earth, died as if drowned in water. See Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, edit. Liebrecht, Hanover, 1856, Prima Decisio, cap. xiii. The work was written about 1211. For John of San Germiniano, see his Summa de Exemplis, lib. ix, cap. 43. For the Egyptian Trinitarian views, see Sharpe, History of Egypt, vol. i, pp. 94, 102. From this old conception of the universe as a sort of house, with heaven as its upper story and the earth as its ground floor, flowed important theological ideas into heathen, Jewish, and Christian mythologies. Common to them all are legends regarding attempts of mortals to invade the upper apartment from the lower. Of such are the Greek legends of the Aloidae, who sought to reach heaven by piling up mountains, and were cast down; the Chaldean and Hebrew legends of the wicked who at Babel sought to build "a tower whose top may reach heaven," which Jehovah went down from heaven to see, and which he brought to naught by the "confusion of tongues"; the Hindu legend of the tree which sought to grow into heaven and which Brahma blasted; and the Mexican legend of the giants who sought to reach heaven by building the Pyramid of Cholula, and who were overthrown by fire from above. Myths having this geographical idea as their germ developed in luxuriance through thousands of years. Ascensions to heaven and descents from it, "translations," "assumptions," "annunciations," mortals "caught up" into it and returning, angels flying between it and the earth, thunderbolts hurled down from it, mighty winds issuing from its corners, voices speaking from the upper floor to men on the lower, temporary openings of the floor of heaven to reveal the blessedness of the good, "signs and wonders" hung out from it to warn the wicked, interventions of every kind--from the heathen gods coming down on every sort of errand, and Jehovah coming down to walk in Eden in the cool of the day, to St. Mark swooping down into the market-place of Venice to break the shackles of a slave--all these are but features in a vast evolution of myths arising largely from this geographical germ. Nor did this evolution end here. Naturally, in this view of things, if heaven was a loft, hell was a cellar; and if there were ascensions into one, there were descents into the other. Hell being so near, interferences by its occupants with the dwellers of the earth just above were constant, and form a vast chapter in medieval literature. Dante made this conception of the location of hell still more vivid, and we find some forms of it serious barriers to geographical investigation. Many a bold navigator, who was quite ready to brave pirates and tempests, trembled at the thought of tumbling with his ship into one of the openings into hell which a widespread belief placed in the Atlantic at some unknown distance from Europe. This terror among sailors was one of the main obstacles in the great voyage of Columbus. In a medieval text-book, giving science the form of a dialogue, occur the following question and answer: "Why is the sun so red in the evening?" "Because he looketh down upon hell." But the ancient germ of scientific truth in geography--the idea of the earth's sphericity--still lived. Although the great majority of the early fathers of the Church, and especially Lactantius, had sought to crush it beneath the utterances attributed to Isaiah, David, and St. Paul, the better opinion of Eudoxus and Aristotle could not be forgotten. Clement of Alexandria and Origen had even supported it. Ambrose and Augustine had tolerated it, and, after Cosmas had held sway a hundred years, it received new life from a great churchman of southern Europe, Isidore of Seville, who, however fettered by the dominant theology in many other things, braved it in this. In the eighth century a similar declaration was made in the north of Europe by another great Church authority, Bede. Against the new life thus given to the old truth, the sacred theory struggled long and vigorously but in vain. Eminent authorities in later ages, like Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and Vincent of Beauvais, felt obliged to accept the doctrine of the earth's sphericity, and as we approach the modern period we find its truth acknowledged by the vast majority of thinking men. The Reformation did not at first yield fully to this better theory. Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin were very strict in their adherence to the exact letter of Scripture. Even Zwingli, broad as his views generally were, was closely bound down in this matter, and held to the opinion of the fathers that a great firmament, or floor, separated the heavens from the earth; that above it were the waters and angels, and below it the earth and man. The main scope given to independent thought on this general subject among the Reformers was in a few minor speculations regarding the universe which encompassed Eden, the exact character of the conversation of the serpent with Eve, and the like. In the times immediately following the Reformation matters were even worse. The interpretations of Scripture by Luther and Calvin became as sacred to their followers as the Scripture itself. When Calixt ventured, in interpreting the Psalms, to question the accepted belief that "the waters above the heavens" were contained in a vast receptacle upheld by a solid vault, he was bitterly denounced as heretical. In the latter part of the sixteenth century Musaeus interpreted the accounts in Genesis to mean that first God made the heavens for the roof or vault, and left it there on high swinging until three days later he put the earth under it. But the new scientific thought as to the earth's form had gained the day. The most sturdy believers were obliged to adjust their, biblical theories to it as best they could.(29) (29) For a discussion of the geographical views of Isidore and Bede, see Santarem, Cosmographie, vol i, pp. 22-24. For the gradual acceptance of the idea of the earth's sphericity after the eighth century, see Kretschmer, pp. 51 et seq., where citations from a multitude of authors are given. For the views of the Reformers, see Zockler, vol. i, pp. 679 and 693. For Calixt, Musaeus, and others, ibid., pp. 673-677 and 761. II. THE DELINEATION OF THE EARTH. Every great people of antiquity, as a rule, regarded its own central city or most holy place as necessarily the centre of the earth. The Chaldeans held that their "holy house of the gods" was the centre. The Egyptians sketched the world under the form of a human figure, in which Egypt was the heart, and the centre of it Thebes. For the Assyrians, it was Babylon; for the Hindus, it was Mount Meru; for the Greeks, so far as the civilized world was concerned, Olympus or the temple at Delphi; for the modern Mohammedans, it is Mecca and its sacred stone; the Chinese, to this day, speak of their empire as the "middle kingdom." It was in accordance, then, with a simple tendency of human thought that the Jews believed the centre of the world to be Jerusalem. The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the middle of the earth, and all other parts of the world as set around the holy city. Throughout the "ages of faith" this was very generally accepted as a direct revelation from the Almighty regarding the earth's form. St. Jerome, the greatest authority of the early Church upon the Bible, declared, on the strength of this utterance of the prophet, that Jerusalem could be nowhere but at the earth's centre; in the ninth century Archbishop Rabanus Maurus reiterated the same argument; in the eleventh century Hugh of St. Victor gave to the doctrine another scriptural demonstration; and Pope Urban, in his great sermon at Clermont urging the Franks to the crusade, declared, "Jerusalem is the middle point of the earth"; in the thirteenth century an ecclesiastical writer much in vogue, the monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, declared, "As the heart in the midst of the body, so is Jerusalem situated in the midst of our inhabited earth,"--"so it was that Christ was crucified at the centre of the earth." Dante accepted this view of Jerusalem as a certainty, wedding it to immortal verse; and in the pious book of travels ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, so widely read in the Middle Ages, it is declared that Jerusalem is at the centre of the world, and that a spear standing erect at the Holy Sepulchre casts no shadow at the equinox. Ezekiel's statement thus became the standard of orthodoxy to early map-makers. The map of the world at Hereford Cathedral, the maps of Andrea Bianco, Marino Sanuto, and a multitude of others fixed this view in men's minds, and doubtless discouraged during many generations any scientific statements tending to unbalance this geographical centre revealed in Scripture.(30) (30) For beliefs of various nations of antiquity that the earth's center was in their most sacred place, see citations from Maspero, Charton, Sayce, and others in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap. iv. As to the Greeks, we have typical statements in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, where the stone in the altar at Delphi is repeatedly called "the earth's navel"--which is precisely the expression used regarding Jerusalem in the Septuagint translation of Ezekiel (see below). The proof texts on which the mediaeval geographers mainly relied as to the form of the earth were Ezekiel v, 5, and xxxviii, 12. The progress of geographical knowledge evidently caused them to be softened down somewhat in our King James's version; but the first of them reads, in the Vulgate, "Ista est Hierusalem, in medio gentium posui eam et in circuitu ejus terrae"; and the second reads, in the Vulgate, "in medio terrae," and in the Septuagint, [Greek]. That the literal centre of the earth was understood, see proof in St. Jerome, Commentat. in Ezekiel, lib. ii; and for general proof, see Leopardi, Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi, pp. 207, 208. For Rabanus Maurus, see his De Universo, lib. xii, cap. 4, in Migne, tome cxi, p. 339. For Hugh of St. Victor, se his De Situ Terrarum, cap. ii. For Dante's belief, see Inferno, canto xxxiv, 112-115: "E se' or sotto l'emisperio giunto, Ch' e opposito a quel che la gran secca Coverchia, e sotto il cui colmo consunto Fu l'uom che nacque e visse senza pecca." For orthodox geography in the Middle Ages, see Wright's Essays on Archaeology, vol. ii, chapter on the map of the world in Hereford Cathedral; also the rude maps in Cardinal d'Ailly's Ymago Mundi; also copies of maps of Marino Sanuto and others in Peschel, Erdkunde, p. 210; also Munster, Fac Simile dell' Atlante di Andrea Bianco, Venezia, 1869. And for discussions of the whole subject, see Satarem, vol. ii, p. 295, vol. iii, pp. 71, 183, 184, and elsewhere. For a brief summary with citations, see Eiken, Geschichte, etc., pp. 622, 623. Nor did medieval thinkers rest with this conception. In accordance with the dominant view that physical truth must be sought by theological reasoning, the doctrine was evolved that not only the site of the cross on Calvary marked the geographical centre of the world, but that on this very spot had stood the tree which bore the forbidden fruit in Eden. Thus was geography made to reconcile all parts of the great theologic plan. This doctrine was hailed with joy by multitudes; and we find in the works of medieval pilgrims to Palestine, again and again, evidence that this had become precious truth to them, both in theology and geography. Even as late as 1664 the eminent French priest Eugene Roger, in his published travels in Palestine, dwelt upon the thirty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel, coupled with a text from Isaiah, to prove that the exact centre of the earth is a spot marked on the pavement of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and that on this spot once stood the tree which bore the forbidden fruit and the cross of Christ.(31) (31) For the site of the cross on Calvary, as the point where stood "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" in Eden, at the centre of the earth, see various Eastern travellers cited in Tobler; but especially the travels of Bishop Arculf in the Holy Land, in Wright's Early Travels in Palestine, p. 8; also Travels of Saewulf, ibid, p. 38; also Sir John Mandeville, ibid., pp. 166, 167. For Roger, see his La Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664, pp. 89-217, etc.; see also Quaresmio, Terrae Sanctae Elucidatio, 1639, for similar view; and, for one narrative in which the idea was developed into an amazing mass of pious myths, see Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel, edited by Sir C. W. Wilson, London, 1885, p. 14. (The passage deserves to be quoted as an example of myth-making; it is as follows: "At the time of our Lord's crucifixion, when he gave up the ghost on the cross, the veil of the temple was rent, and the rock above Adam's skull opened, and the blood and water which flowed from Christ's side ran down through the fissure upon the skull, thus washing away the sins of men.") Nor was this the only misconception which forced its way from our sacred writings into medieval map-making: two others were almost as marked. First of these was the vague terror inspired by Gog and Magog. Few passages in the Old Testament are more sublime than the denunciation of these great enemies by Ezekiel; and the well-known statement in the Apocalypse fastened the Hebrew feeling regarding them with a new meaning into the mind of the early Church: hence it was that the medieval map-makers took great pains to delineate these monsters and their habitations on the maps. For centuries no map was considered orthodox which did not show them. The second conception was derived from the mention in our sacred books of the "four winds." Hence came a vivid belief in their real existence, and their delineation on the maps, generally as colossal heads with distended cheeks, blowing vigorously toward Jerusalem. After these conceptions had mainly disappeared we find here and there evidences of the difficulty men found in giving up the scriptural idea of direct personal interference by agents of Heaven in the ordinary phenomena of Nature: thus, in a noted map of the sixteenth century representing the earth as a sphere, there is at each pole a crank, with an angel laboriously turning the earth by means of it; and, in another map, the hand of the Almighty, thrust forth from the clouds, holds the earth suspended by a rope and spins it with his thumb and fingers. Even as late as the middle of the seventeenth century Heylin, the most authoritative English geographer of the time, shows a like tendency to mix science and theology. He warps each to help the other, as follows: "Water, making but one globe with the earth, is yet higher than it. This appears, first, because it is a body not so heavy; secondly, it is observed by sailors that their ships move faster to the shore than from it, whereof no reason can be given but the height of the water above the land; thirdly, to such as stand on the shore the sea seems to swell into the form of a round hill till it puts a bound upon our sight. Now that the sea, hovering thus over and above the earth, doth not overwhelm it, can be ascribed only to his Providence who 'hath made the waters to stand on an heap that they turn not again to cover the earth.'"(32) (32) For Gog and Magog, see Ezekiel xxxviii and xxxix, and Rev. xx, 8; and for the general subject, Toy, Judaism and Christianity, Boston, 1891, pp. 373, 374. For maps showing these two great terrors, and for geographical discussion regarding them, see Lelewel, Geog. du Moyen Age, Bruxelles, 1850, Atlas; also Ruge, Gesch. des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, Berlin, 1881, pp. 78, 79; also Peschel's Abhandlungen, pp.28-35, and Gesch. der Erdkunde, p. 210. For representations on maps of the "Four Winds," see Charton, Voyageurs, tome ii, p. 11; also Ruge, as above, pp. 324, 325; also for a curious mixture of the scriptural winds issuing from the bags of Aeolus, see a map of the twelfth century in Leon Gautier, La Chevalerie, p. 153; and for maps showing additional winds, see various editions of Ptolemy. For a map with angels turning the earth by means of cranks at the poles, see Grynaeus, Novus Orbis, Basileae, 1537. For the globe kept spinning by the Almighty, see J. Hondius's map, 1589; and for Heylin, his first folio, 1652, p. 27. III. THE INHABITANTS OF THE EARTH. Even while the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth was undecided, another question had been suggested which theologians finally came to consider of far greater importance. The doctrine of the sphericity of the earth naturally led to thought regarding its inhabitants, and another ancient germ was warmed into life--the idea of antipodes: of human beings on the earth's opposite sides. In the Greek and Roman world this idea had found supporters and opponents, Cicero and Pliny being among the former, and Epicurus, Lucretius, and Plutarch among the latter. Thus the problem came into the early Church unsolved. Among the first churchmen to take it up was, in the East, St. Gregory Nazianzen, who showed that to sail beyond Gibraltar was impossible; and, in the West, Lactantius, who asked: "Is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads?... that the crops and trees grow downward?... that the rains and snow and hail fall upward toward the earth?... I am at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once erred, steadily persevere in their folly and defend one vain thing by another." In all this contention by Gregory and Lactantius there was nothing to be especially regretted, for, whatever their motive, they simply supported their inherited belief on grounds of natural law and probability. Unfortunately, the discussion was not long allowed to rest on these scientific and philosophical grounds; other Christian thinkers followed, who in their ardour adduced texts of Scripture, and soon the question had become theological; hostility to the belief in antipodes became dogmatic. The universal Church was arrayed against it, and in front of the vast phalanx stood, to a man, the fathers. To all of them this idea seemed dangerous; to most of them it seemed damnable. St. Basil and St. Ambrose were tolerant enough to allow that a man might be saved who thought the earth inhabited on its opposite sides; but the great majority of the fathers doubted the possibility of salvation to such misbelievers. The great champion of the orthodox view was St. Augustine. Though he seemed inclined to yield a little in regard to the sphericity of the earth, he fought the idea that men exist on the other side of it, saying that "Scripture speaks of no such descendants of Adam," he insists that men could not be allowed by the Almighty to live there, since if they did they could not see Christ at His second coming descending through the air. But his most cogent appeal, one which we find echoed from theologian to theologian during a thousand years afterward, is to the nineteenth Psalm, and to its confirmation in the Epistle to the Romans; to the words, "Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." He dwells with great force on the fact that St. Paul based one of his most powerful arguments upon this declaration regarding the preachers of the gospel, and that he declared even more explicitly that "Verily, their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world." Thenceforth we find it constantly declared that, as those preachers did not go to the antipodes, no antipodes can exist; and hence that the supporters of this geographical doctrine "give the lie direct to King David and to St. Paul, and therefore to the Holy Ghost." Thus the great Bishop of Hippo taught the whole world for over a thousand years that, as there was no preaching of the gospel on the opposite side of the earth, there could be no human beings there. The great authority of Augustine, and the cogency of his scriptural argument, held the Church firmly against the doctrine of the antipodes; all schools of interpretation were now agreed--the followers of the allegorical tendencies of Alexandria, the strictly literal exegetes of Syria, the more eclectic theologians of the West. For over a thousand years it was held in the Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," that there could not be human beings on the opposite sides of the earth, even if the earth had opposite sides; and, when attacked by gainsayers, the great mass of true believers, from the fourth century to the fifteenth, simply used that opiate which had so soothing an effect on John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century--securus judicat orbis terrarum. Yet gainsayers still appeared. That the doctrine of the antipodes continued to have life, is shown by the fact that in the sixth century Procopius of Gaza attacks it with a tremendous argument. He declares that, if there be men on the other side of the earth, Christ must have gone there and suffered a second time to save them; and, therefore, that there must have been there, as necessary preliminaries to his coming, a duplicate Eden, Adam, serpent, and deluge. Cosmas Indicopleustes also attacked the doctrine with especial bitterness, citing a passage from St. Luke to prove that antipodes are theologically impossible. At the end of the sixth century came a man from whom much might be expected--St. Isidore of Seville. He had pondered over ancient thought in science, and, as we have seen, had dared proclaim his belief in the sphericity of the earth; but with that he stopped. As to the antipodes, the authority of the Psalmist, St. Paul, and St. Augustine silences him; he shuns the whole question as unlawful, subjects reason to faith, and declares that men can not and ought not to exist on opposite sides of the earth.(33) (33)For the opinions of Basil, Ambrose, and others, see Lecky, History of Rationalism in Europe, New York, 1872, vol. i, p. 279. Also Letronne, in Revue des Deux Mondes, March, 1834. For Lactantius, see citations already given. For St. Augustine's opinion, see the De Civitate Dei, xvi, 9, where this great father of the church shows that the antipodes "nulla ratione credendum est." For the unanimity of the fathers against the antipodes, see Zockler, vol. 1, p. 127. For a very naive summary, see Joseph Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, Grimston's translation, republished by the Hakluyt Soc., chaps. vii and viii; also citations in Buckle's Posthumous Works, vol. ii, p. 645. For Procopius of Gaza, see Kretschmer, p. 55. See also, on the general subject, Peschel, Geschichte der Erdkunde, pp. 96-97. For Isidore, see citations already given. To understand the embarrassment caused by these utterances of the fathers to scientific men of a later period, see letter of Agricola to Joachim Vadianus in 1514. Agricola asks Vadianus to give his views regarding the antipodes, saying that he himself does not know what to do, between the fathers on the one side and the learned men of modern times on the other. On the other hand, for the embarrassment caused to the Church by this mistaken zeal of the fathers, see Kepler's references and Fromund's replies; also De Morgan, Paradoxes, p. 58. Kepler appears to have taken great delight in throwing the views of Lactantius into the teeth of his adversaries. Under such pressure this scientific truth seems to have disappeared for nearly two hundred years; but by the eighth century the sphericity of the earth had come to be generally accepted among the leaders of thought, and now the doctrine of the antipodes was again asserted by a bishop, Virgil of Salzburg. There then stood in Germany, in those first years of the eighth century, one of the greatest and noblest of men--St. Boniface. His learning was of the best then known. In labours he was a worthy successor of the apostles; his genius for Christian work made him unwillingly primate of Germany; his devotion to duty led him willingly to martyrdom. There sat, too, at that time, on the papal throne a great Christian statesman--Pope Zachary. Boniface immediately declared against the revival of such a heresy as the doctrine of the antipodes; he stigmatized it as an assertion that there are men beyond the reach of the appointed means of salvation; he attacked Virgil, and called on Pope Zachary for aid. The Pope, as the infallible teacher of Christendom, made a strong response. He cited passages from the book of Job and the Wisdom of Solomon against the doctrine of the antipodes; he declared it "perverse, iniquitous, and against Virgil's own soul," and indicated a purpose of driving him from his bishopric. Whether this purpose was carried out or not, the old theological view, by virtue of the Pope's divinely ordered and protected "inerrancy," was re-established, and the doctrine that the earth has inhabitants on but one of its sides became more than ever orthodox, and precious in the mind of the Church.(34) (34) For Virgil of Salzburg, see Neander's History of the Christian Church, Torrey's translation, vol. iii, p. 63; also Herzog, Real-Encyklopadie, etc., recent edition by Prof. Hauck, s. v. Virgilius; also Kretschmer, pp. 56-58; also Whewell, vol. i, p. 197; also De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes, pp. 24-26. For very full notes as to pagan and Christian advocates of the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth and of the antipodes, and for extract from Zachary's letter, see Migne, Patrologia, vol. vi, p. 426, and vol. xli, p. 487. For St. Boniface's part, see Bonifacii Epistolae, ed. Giles, i, 173. Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Teratologiques, pp. 186-188, makes a curious attempt to show that Pope Zachary denounced the wrong man; that the real offender was a Roman poet--in the sixth book of the Aeneid and the first book of the Georgics. This decision seems to have been regarded as final, and five centuries later the great encyclopedist of the Middle Ages, Vincent of Beauvais, though he accepts the sphericity of the earth, treats the doctrine of the antipodes as disproved, because contrary to Scripture. Yet the doctrine still lived. Just as it had been previously revived by William of Conches and then laid to rest, so now it is somewhat timidly brought out in the thirteenth century by no less a personage than Albert the Great, the most noted man of science in that time. But his utterances are perhaps purposely obscure. Again it disappears beneath the theological wave, and a hundred years later Nicolas d'Oresme, geographer of the King of France, a light of science, is forced to yield to the clear teaching of the Scripture as cited by St. Augustine. Nor was this the worst. In Italy, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Church thought it necessary to deal with questions of this sort by rack and fagot. In 1316 Peter of Abano, famous as a physician, having promulgated this with other obnoxious doctrines in science, only escaped the Inquisition by death; and in 1327 Cecco d'Ascoli, noted as an astronomer, was for this and other results of thought, which brought him under suspicion of sorcery, driven from his professorship at Bologna and burned alive at Florence. Nor was this all his punishment: Orcagna, whose terrible frescoes still exist on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa, immortalized Cecco by representing him in the flames of hell.(35) (35) For Vincent of Beauvais and the antipode, see his Speculum Naturale, Book VII, with citations from St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, cap. xvi. For Albert the Great's doctrine regarding the antipodes, compare Kretschmer, as above, with Eicken, Geschichte, etc., p. 621. Kretschmer finds that Albert supports the doctrine, and Eicken finds that he denies it--a fair proof that Albert was not inclined to state his views with dangerous clearness. For D'Oresme, see Santerem, Histoire de la Cosmographie, vol. i, p. 142. For Peter of Abano, or Apono, as he is often called, see Tiraboschi, also Guinguene, vol. ii, p. 293; also Naude, Histoire des Grands Hommes soupconnes de Magie. For Cecco d'Ascoli, see Montucla, Histoire de Mathematiques, i, 528; also Daunou, Etudes Historiques, vol. vi, p. 320; also Kretschmer, p. 59. Concerning Orcagna's representation of Cecco in the flames of hell, see Renan, Averroes et l'Averroisme, Paris, 1867, p. 328. Years rolled on, and there came in the fifteenth century one from whom the world had a right to expect much. Pierre d'Ailly, by force of thought and study, had risen to be Provost of the College of St. Die in Lorraine; his ability had made that little village a centre of scientific thought for all Europe, and finally made him Archbishop of Cambray and a cardinal. Toward the end of the fifteenth century was printed what Cardinal d'Ailly had written long before as a summing up of his best thought and research--the collection of essays known as the Ymago Mundi. It gives us one of the most striking examples in history of a great man in theological fetters. As he approaches this question he states it with such clearness that we expect to hear him assert the truth; but there stands the argument of St. Augustine; there, too, stand the biblical texts on which it is founded--the text from the Psalms and the explicit declaration of St. Paul to the Romans, "Their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world." D'Ailly attempts to reason, but he is overawed, and gives to the world virtually nothing. Still, the doctrine of the antipodes lived and moved: so much so that the eminent Spanish theologian Tostatus, even as late as the age of Columbus, felt called upon to protest against it as "unsafe." He had shaped the old missile of St. Augustine into the following syllogism: "The apostles were commanded to go into all the world and to preach the gospel to every creature; they did not go to any such part of the world as the antipodes; they did not preach to any creatures there: ergo, no antipodes exist." The warfare of Columbus the world knows well: how the Bishop of Ceuta worsted him in Portugal; how sundry wise men of Spain confronted him with the usual quotations from the Psalms, from St. Paul, and from St. Augustine; how, even after he was triumphant, and after his voyage had greatly strengthened the theory of the earth's sphericity, with which the theory of the antipodes was so closely connected, the Church by its highest authority solemnly stumbled and persisted in going astray. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI, having been appealed to as an umpire between the claims of Spain and Portugal to the newly discovered parts of the earth, issued a bull laying down upon the earth's surface a line of demarcation between the two powers. This line was drawn from north to south a hundred leagues west of the Azores; and the Pope in the plenitude of his knowledge declared that all lands discovered east of this line should belong to the Portuguese, and all west of it should belong to the Spaniards. This was hailed as an exercise of divinely illuminated power by the Church; but difficulties arose, and in 1506 another attempt was made by Pope Julius II to draw the line three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. This, again, was supposed to bring divine wisdom to settle the question; but, shortly, overwhelming difficulties arose; for the Portuguese claimed Brazil, and, of course, had no difficulty in showing that they could reach it by sailing to the east of the line, provided they sailed long enough. The lines laid down by Popes Alexander and Julius may still be found upon the maps of the period, but their bulls have quietly passed into the catalogue of ludicrous errors. Yet the theological barriers to this geographical truth yielded but slowly. Plain as it had become to scholars, they hesitated to declare it to the world at large. Eleven hundred years had passed since St. Augustine had proved its antagonism to Scripture, when Gregory Reysch gave forth his famous encyclopaedia, the Margarita Philosophica. Edition after edition was issued, and everywhere appeared in it the orthodox statements; but they were evidently strained to the breaking point; for while, in treating of the antipodes, Reysch refers respectfully to St. Augustine as objecting to the scientific doctrine, he is careful not to cite Scripture against it, and not less careful to suggest geographical reasoning in favour of it. But in 1519 science gains a crushing victory. Magellan makes his famous voyage. He proves the earth to be round, for his expedition circumnavigates it; he proves the doctrine of the antipodes, for his shipmates see the peoples of the antipodes. Yet even this does not end the war. Many conscientious men oppose the doctrine for two hundred years longer. Then the French astronomers make their measurements of degrees in equatorial and polar regions, and add to their proofs that of the lengthened pendulum. When this was done, when the deductions of science were seen to be established by the simple test of measurement, beautifully and perfectly, and when a long line of trustworthy explorers, including devoted missionaries, had sent home accounts of the antipodes, then, and then only, this war of twelve centuries ended. Such was the main result of this long war; but there were other results not so fortunate. The efforts of Eusebius, Basil, and Lactantius to deaden scientific thought; the efforts of Augustine to combat it; the efforts of Cosmas to crush it by dogmatism; the efforts of Boniface and Zachary to crush it by force, conscientious as they all were, had resulted simply in impressing upon many leading minds the conviction that science and religion are enemies. On the other hand, what was gained by the warriors of science for religion? Certainly a far more worthy conception of the world, and a far more ennobling conception of that power which pervades and directs it. Which is more consistent with a great religion, the cosmography of Cosmas or that of Isaac Newton? Which presents a nobler field for religious thought, the diatribes of Lactantius or the calm statements of Humboldt?(36) (36) For D'Ailly's acceptance of St. Augustine's argument, see the Ymago Mundi, cap. vii. For Tostatus, see Zockler, vol. i, pp. 467, 468. He based his opposition on Romans x, 18. For Columbus, see Winsor, Fiske, and Adams; also Humboldt, Histoire de la Geographie du Nouveau Continent. For the bull of Alexander VI, see Daunou, Etudes Historiques, vol. ii, p. 417; also Peschel, Zeitalter der Entdeckungen, Book II, chap. iv. The text of the bull is given with an English translation in Arber's reprint of The First Three English Books on America, etc., Birmingham, 1885, pp. 201-204; also especially Peschel, Die Theilung der Erde unter Papst Alexander VI and Julius II, Leipsic, 1871, pp. 14 et seq. For remarks on the power under which the line was drawn by Alexander VI, see Mamiani, Del Papato nei Tre Ultimi Secoli, p. 170. For maps showing lines of division, see Kohl, Die beiden altesten General-Karten von Amerika, Weimar, 1860, where maps of 1527 and 1529 are reproduced; also Mercator, Atlas, tenth edition, Amsterdam, 1628, pp. 70, 71. For latest discussion on The Demarcation Line of Alexander VI, see E. G. Bourne in Yale Review, May, 1892. For the Margarita Philosophica, see the editions of 1503, 1509, 1517, lib. vii, cap. 48. For the effect of Magellan's voyages, and the reluctance to yield to proof, see Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vol. xiv, p. 395; St. Martin's Histoire de la Geographie, p. 369; Peschel, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, concluding chapters; and for an admirable summary, Draper, Hist. Int. Devel. of Europe, pp. 451-453; also an interesting passage in Sir Thomas Brown's Vulgar and Common Errors, Book I, chap. vi; also a striking passage in Acosta, chap. ii. For general statement as to supplementary proof by measurement of degrees and by pendulum, see Somerville, Phys. Geog., chap. i, par. 6, note; also Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. ii, p. 736, and vol. v, pp. 16, 32; also Montucla, iv, 138. As to the effect of travel, see Acosta's history above cited. The good missionary says, in Grimston's quaint translation, "Whatsoever Lactantius saith, wee that live now at Peru, and inhabite that parte of the worlde which is opposite to Asia and theire Antipodes, finde not ourselves to bee hanging in the aire, our heades downward and our feete on high." IV. THE SIZE OF THE EARTH. But at an early period another subject in geography had stirred the minds of thinking men--THE EARTH'S SIZE. Various ancient investigators had by different methods reached measurements more or less near the truth; these methods were continued into the Middle Ages, supplemented by new thought, and among the more striking results were those obtained by Roger Bacon and Gerbert, afterward Pope Sylvester II. They handed down to after-time the torch of knowledge, but, as their reward among their contemporaries, they fell under the charge of sorcery. Far more consonant with the theological spirit of the Middle Ages was a solution of the problem from Scripture, and this solution deserves to be given as an example of a very curious theological error, chancing to result in the establishment of a great truth. The second book of Esdras, which among Protestants is placed in the Apocrypha, was held by many of the foremost men of the ancient Church as fully inspired: though Jerome looked with suspicion on this book, it was regarded as prophetic by Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Ambrose, and the Church acquiesced in that view. In the Eastern Church it held an especially high place, and in the Western Church, before the Reformation, was generally considered by the most eminent authorities to be part of the sacred canon. In the sixth chapter of this book there is a summary of the works of creation, and in it occur the following verses: "Upon the third day thou didst command that the waters should be gathered in the seventh part of the earth; six parts hast thou dried up and kept them to the intent that of these some, being planted of God and tilled, might serve thee." "Upon the fifth day thou saidst unto the seventh part where the waters were gathered, that it should bring forth living creatures, fowls and fishes, and so it came to pass." These statements were reiterated in other verses, and were naturally considered as of controlling authority. Among the scholars who pondered on this as on all things likely to increase knowledge was Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly. As we have seen, this great man, while he denied the existence of the antipodes, as St. Augustine had done, believed firmly in the sphericity of the earth, and, interpreting these statements of the book of Esdras in connection with this belief, he held that, as only one seventh of the earth's surface was covered by water, the ocean between the west coast of Europe and the east coast of Asia could not be very wide. Knowing, as he thought, the extent of the land upon the globe, he felt that in view of this divinely authorized statement the globe must be much smaller, and the land of "Zipango," reached by Marco Polo, on the extreme east coast of Asia, much nearer than had been generally believed. On this point he laid stress in his great work, the Ymago Mundi, and an edition of it having been published in the days when Columbus was thinking most closely upon the problem of a westward voyage, it naturally exercised much influence upon his reasonings. Among the treasures of the library at Seville, there is nothing more interesting than a copy of this work annotated by Columbus himself: from this very copy it was that Columbus obtained confirmation of his belief that the passage across the ocean to Marco Polo's land of Zipango in Asia was short. But for this error, based upon a text supposed to be inspired, it is unlikely that Columbus could have secured the necessary support for his voyage. It is a curious fact that this single theological error thus promoted a series of voyages which completely destroyed not only this but every other conception of geography based upon the sacred writings.(37) (37) For this error, so fruitful in discovery, see D'Ailly, Ymago Mundi; the passage referred to is fol. 12 verso. For the passage from Esdras, see chap. vi, verses 42, 47, 50, and 52; see also Zockler, Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Theologie und Naturweissenschaft, vol. i, p. 461. For one of the best recent statements, see Ruge, Gesch. des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, Berlin, 1882, pp. 221 et seq. For a letter of Columbus acknowledging his indebtedness to this mistake in Esdras, see Navarrete, Viajes y Descubrimientos, Madrid, 1825, tome i, pp. 242, 264; also Humboldt, Hist. de la Geographie du Nouveau Continent, vol. i, pp. 68, 69. V. THE CHARACTER OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE. It would be hardly just to dismiss the struggle for geographical truth without referring to one passage more in the history of the Protestant Church, for it shows clearly the difficulties in the way of the simplest statement of geographical truth which conflicted with the words of the sacred books. In the year 1553 Michael Servetus was on trial for his life at Geneva on the charge of Arianism. Servetus had rendered many services to scientific truth, and one of these was an edition of Ptolemy's Geography, in which Judea was spoken of, not as "a land flowing with milk and honey," but, in strict accordance with the truth, as, in the main, meagre, barren, and inhospitable. In his trial this simple statement of geographical fact was used against him by his arch-enemy John Calvin with fearful power. In vain did Servetus plead that he had simply drawn the words from a previous edition of Ptolemy; in vain did he declare that this statement was a simple geographical truth of which there were ample proofs: it was answered that such language "necessarily inculpated Moses, and grievously outraged the Holy Ghost."(38) (38) For Servetus's geographical offense, see Rilliet, Relation du Proces criminel contre Michel Servet d'apres les Documents originaux, Geneva, 1844, pp. 42,43; also Willis, Servetus and Calvin, London, 1877, p. 325. The passage condemned is in the Ptolemy of 1535, fol. 41. It was discreetly retrenched in a reprint of the same edition. In summing up the action of the Church upon geography, we must say, then, that the dogmas developed in strict adherence to Scripture and the conceptions held in the Church during many centuries "always, every where, and by all," were, on the whole, steadily hostile to truth; but it is only just to make a distinction here between the religious and the theological spirit. To the religious spirit are largely due several of the noblest among the great voyages of discovery. A deep longing to extend the realms of Christianity influenced the minds of Prince John of Portugal, in his great series of efforts along the African coast; of Vasco da Gama, in his circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope; of Magellan, in his voyage around the world; and doubtless found a place among the more worldly motives of Columbus.(39) (39) As to the earlier mixture in the motives of Columbus, it may be well to compare with the earlier biographies the recent ones by Dr. Winsor and President Adams. Thus, in this field, from the supremacy accorded to theology, we find resulting that tendency to dogmatism which has shown itself in all ages the deadly foe not only of scientific inquiry but of the higher religious spirit itself, while from the love of truth for truth's sake, which has been the inspiration of all fruitful work in science, nothing but advantage has ever resulted to religion. CHAPTER III. ASTRONOMY. I. THE OLD SACRED THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE. The next great series of battles was fought over the relations of the visible heavens to the earth. In the early Church, in view of the doctrine so prominent in the New Testament, that the earth was soon to be destroyed, and that there were to be "new heavens and a new earth," astronomy, like other branches of science, was generally looked upon as futile. Why study the old heavens and the old earth, when they were so soon to be replaced with something infinitely better? This feeling appears in St. Augustine's famous utterance, "What concern is it to me whether the heavens as a sphere inclose the earth in the middle of the world or overhang it on either side?" As to the heavenly bodies, theologians looked on them as at best only objects of pious speculation. Regarding their nature the fathers of the Church were divided. Origen, and others with him, thought them living beings possessed of souls, and this belief was mainly based upon the scriptural vision of the morning stars. singing together, and upon the beautiful appeal to the "stars and light" in the song of the three children--the Benedicite--which the Anglican communion has so wisely retained in its Liturgy. Other fathers thought the stars abiding-places of the angels, and that stars were moved by angels. The Gnostics thought the stars spiritual beings governed by angels, and appointed not to cause earthly events but to indicate them. As to the heavens in general, the prevailing view in the Church was based upon the scriptural declarations that a solid vault--a "firmament"--was extended above the earth, and that the heavenly bodies were simply lights hung within it. This was for a time held very tenaciously. St. Philastrius, in his famous treatise on heresies, pronounced it a heresy to deny that the stars are brought out by God from his treasure-house and hung in the sky every evening; any other view he declared "false to the Catholic faith." This view also survived in the sacred theory established so firmly by Cosmas in the sixth century. Having established his plan of the universe upon various texts in the Old and New Testaments, and having made it a vast oblong box, covered by the solid "firmament," he brought in additional texts from Scripture to account for the planetary movements, and developed at length the theory that the sun and planets are moved and the "windows of heaven" opened and shut by angels appointed for that purpose. How intensely real this way of looking at the universe was, we find in the writings of St. Isidore, the greatest leader of orthodox thought in the seventh century. He affirms that since the fall of man, and on account of it, the sun and moon shine with a feebler light; but he proves from a text in Isaiah that when the world shall be fully redeemed these "great lights" will shine again in all their early splendour. But, despite these authorities and their theological finalities, the evolution of scientific thought continued, its main germ being the geocentric doctrine--the doctrine that the earth is the centre, and that the sun and planets revolve about it.(40) (40) For passage cited from Clement of Alexandria, see English translation, Edinburgh, 1869, vol. ii, p. 368; also the Miscellanies, Book V, cap. vi. For typical statements by St. Augustine, see De Genesi, ii, cap. ix, in Migne, Patr. Lat., tome xxiv, pp. 270-271. For Origen's view, see the De Principiis, lib. i, cap. vii; see also Leopardi's Errori Populari, cap. xi; also Wilson's Selections from the Prophetic Scriptures in Ante-Nicene Library, p. 132. For Philo Judaeus, see On the Creation of the World, chaps. xviii and xix, and On Monarchy, chap. i. For St. Isidore, see the De Ordine Creaturarum, cap v, in Migne, Patr. Lat., lxxxiii, pp. 923-925; also 1000, 1001. For Philastrius, see the De Hoeresibus, chap. cxxxiii, in Migne, tome xii, p. 1264. For Cosmas's view, see his Topographia Christiana, in Montfaucon, Col. Nov. Patrum, ii, p. 150, and elsewhere as cited in my chapter on Geography. This doctrine was of the highest respectability: it had been developed at a very early period, and had been elaborated until it accounted well for the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies; its final name, "Ptolemaic theory," carried weight; and, having thus come from antiquity into the Christian world, St. Clement of Alexandria demonstrated that the altar in the Jewish tabernacle was "a symbol of the earth placed in the middle of the universe": nothing more was needed; the geocentric theory was fully adopted by the Church and universally held to agree with the letter and spirit of Scripture.(41) (41) As to the respectibility of the geocentric theory, etc., see Grote's Plato, vol. iii, p. 257; also Sir G. C. Lewis's Astronomy of the Ancients, chap. iii, sec. 1, for a very thoughtful statement of Plato's view, and differing from ancient statements. For plausible elaboration of it, and for supposed agreement of the Scripture with it, see Fromundus, Anti-Aristarchus, Antwerp, 1631; also Melanchthon's Initia Doctrinae Physicae. For an admirable statement of the theological view of the geocentric theory, antipodes, etc., see Eicken, Geschichte und System der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, pp. 618 et seq. Wrought into this foundation, and based upon it, there was developed in the Middle Ages, mainly out of fragments of Chaldean and other early theories preserved in the Hebrew Scriptures, a new sacred system of astronomy, which became one of the great treasures of the universal Church--the last word of revelation. Three great men mainly reared this structure. First was the unknown who gave to the world the treatises ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite. It was unhesitatingly believed that these were the work of St. Paul's Athenian convert, and therefore virtually of St. Paul himself. Though now known to be spurious, they were then considered a treasure of inspiration, and an emperor of the East sent them to an emperor of the West as the most worthy of gifts. In the ninth century they were widely circulated in western Europe, and became a fruitful source of thought, especially on the whole celestial hierarchy. Thus the old ideas of astronomy were vastly developed, and the heavenly hosts were classed and named in accordance with indications scattered through the sacred Scriptures. The next of these three great theologians was Peter Lombard, professor at the University of Paris. About the middle of the twelfth century he gave forth his collection of Sentences, or Statements by the Fathers, and this remained until the end of the Middle Ages the universal manual of theology. In it was especially developed the theological view of man's relation to the universe. The author tells the world: "Just as man is made for the sake of God--that is, that he may serve Him,--so the universe is made for the sake of man--that is, that it may serve HIM; therefore is man placed at the middle point of the universe, that he may both serve and be served." The vast significance of this view, and its power in resisting any real astronomical science, we shall see, especially in the time of Galileo. The great triad of thinkers culminated in St. Thomas Aquinas--the sainted theologian, the glory of the mediaeval Church, the "Angelic Doctor," the most marvellous intellect between Aristotle and Newton; he to whom it was believed that an image of the Crucified had spoken words praising his writings. Large of mind, strong, acute, yet just--even more than just--to his opponents, he gave forth, in the latter half of the thirteenth century, his Cyclopaedia of Theology, the Summa Theologica. In this he carried the sacred theory of the universe to its full development. With great power and clearness he brought the whole vast system, material and spiritual, into its relations to God and man.(42) (42) For the beliefs of Chaldean astronomers in revolving spheres carrying sun, moon, and planets, in a solid firmament supporting the celestial waters, and in angels as giving motion to the planets, see Lenormant; also Lethaby, 13-21; also Schroeder, Jensen, Lukas, et al. For the contribution of the pseudo-Dionysius to mediaeval cosmology, see Dion. Areopagita, De Coelesti Hierarchia, vers. Joan. Scoti, in Migne, Patr. Lat., cxxii. For the contribution of Peter Lombard, see Pet. Lomb., Libr. Sent., II, i, 8,-IV, i, 6, 7, in Migne, tome 192. For the citations from St. Thomas Aquinas, see the Summa, ed. Migne, especially Pars I, Qu. 70, (tome i, pp. 1174-1184); also Quaestio 47, Art. iii. For good general statement, see Milman, Latin Christianity, iv, 191 et seq.; and for relation of Cosmas to these theologians of western Europe, see Milman, as above, viii, 228, note. Thus was the vast system developed by these three leaders of mediaeval thought; and now came the man who wrought it yet more deeply into European belief, the poet divinely inspired who made the system part of the world's LIFE. Pictured by Dante, the empyrean and the concentric heavens, paradise, purgatory, and hell, were seen of all men; the God Triune, seated on his throne upon the circle of the heavens, as real as the Pope seated in the chair of St. Peter; the seraphim, cherubim, and thrones, surrounding the Almighty, as real as the cardinals surrounding the Pope; the three great orders of angels in heaven, as real as the three great orders, bishops, priests, and deacons, on earth; and the whole system of spheres, each revolving within the one above it, and all moving about the earth, subject to the primum mobile, as real as the feudal system of western Europe, subject to the Emperor.(43) (43) For the central sun, hierarchy of angels, and concentric circles, see Dante, Paradiso, canto xxviii. For the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, showing to Virgil and Dante the great theologians of the Middle Ages, see canto x, and in Dean Plumptre's translation, vol. ii, pp. 56 et seq.; also Botta, Dante, pp. 350, 351. As to Dante's deep religious feeling and belief in his own divine mission, see J. R. Lowell, Among my Books, vol. i, p. 36. For a remarkable series of coloured engravings, showing Dante's whole cosmology, see La Materia della Divina Comedia di Dante dichiriata in vi tavole, da Michelangelo Caetani, published by the monks of Monte Cassino, to whose kindness I am indebted for my copy. Let us look into this vast creation--the highest achievement of theology--somewhat more closely. Its first feature shows a development out of earlier theological ideas. The earth is no longer a flat plain inclosed by four walls and solidly vaulted above, as theologians of previous centuries had believed it, under the inspiration of Cosmas; it is no longer a mere flat disk, with sun, moon, and stars hung up to give it light, as the earlier cathedral sculptors had figured it; it has become a globe at the centre of the universe. Encompassing it are successive transparent spheres, rotated by angels about the earth, and each carrying one or more of the heavenly bodies with it: that nearest the earth carrying the moon; the next, Mercury; the next, Venus; the next, the Sun; the next three, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; the eighth carrying the fixed stars. The ninth was the primum mobile, and inclosing all was the tenth heaven--the Empyrean. This was immovable--the boundary between creation and the great outer void; and here, in a light which no one can enter, the Triune God sat enthroned, the "music of the spheres" rising to Him as they moved. Thus was the old heathen doctrine of the spheres made Christian. In attendance upon the Divine Majesty, thus enthroned, are vast hosts of angels, who are divided into three hierarchies, one serving in the empyrean, one in the heavens, between the empyrean and the earth, and one on the earth. Each of these hierarchies is divided into three choirs, or orders; the first, into the orders of Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; and the main occupation of these is to chant incessantly--to "continually cry" the divine praises. The order of Thrones conveys God's will to the second hierarchy, which serves in the movable heavens. This second hierarchy is also made up of three orders. The first of these, the order of Dominions, receives the divine commands; the second, the order of Powers, moves the heavens, sun, moon, planets, and stars, opens and shuts the "windows of heaven," and brings to pass all other celestial phenomena; the third, the order of Empire, guards the others. The third and lowest hierarchy is also made up of three orders. First of these are the Principalities, the guardian spirits of nations and kingdoms. Next come Archangels; these protect religion, and bear the prayers of the saints to the foot of God's throne. Finally come Angels; these care for earthly affairs in general, one being appointed to each mortal, and others taking charge of the qualities of plants, metals, stones, and the like. Throughout the whole system, from the great Triune God to the lowest group of angels, we see at work the mystic power attached to the triangle and sacred number three--the same which gave the triune idea to ancient Hindu theology, which developed the triune deities in Egypt, and which transmitted this theological gift to the Christian world, especially through the Egyptian Athanasius. Below the earth is hell. This is tenanted by the angels who rebelled under the lead of Lucifer, prince of the seraphim--the former favourite of the Trinity; but, of these rebellious angels, some still rove among the planetary spheres, and give trouble to the good angels; others pervade the atmosphere about the earth, carrying lightning, storm, drought, and hail; others infest earthly society, tempting men to sin; but Peter Lombard and St. Thomas Aquinas take pains to show that the work of these devils is, after all, but to discipline man or to mete out deserved punishment. All this vast scheme had been so riveted into the Ptolemaic view by the use of biblical texts and theological reasonings that the resultant system of the universe was considered impregnable and final. To attack it was blasphemy. It stood for centuries. Great theological men of science, like Vincent of Beauvais and Cardinal d'Ailly, devoted themselves to showing not only that it was supported by Scripture, but that it supported Scripture. Thus was the geocentric theory embedded in the beliefs and aspirations, in the hopes and fears, of Christendom down to the middle of the sixteenth century.(44) (44) For the earlier cosmology of Cosmas, with citations from Montfaucon, see the chapter on Geography in this work. For the views of mediaeval theologians, see foregoing notes in this chapter. For the passages of Scripture on which the theological part of this structure was developed, see especially Romans viii, 38; Ephesians i, 21; Colossians i, 16 and ii, 15; and innumerable passages in the Old Testament. As to the music of the spheres, see Dean Plumptre's Dante, vol. ii, p. 4, note. For an admirable summing up of the mediaeval cosmology in its relation to thought in general, see Rydberg, Magic of the Middle Ages, chap. i, whose summary I have followed in the main. For striking woodcuts showing the view taken of the successive heavens with their choirs of angels, the earth being at the centre with the spheres about it, and the Almighty on his throne above all, see the Neuremberg Chronicle, ff. iv and v; its date is 1493. For charts showing the continuance of this general view down to the beginning of the sixteenth century, see the various editions of the Margarita Philosophica, from that of 1503 onward, astronomical part. For interesting statements regarding the Trinities of gods in ancient Egypt, see Sharpe, History of Egypt, vol. i, pp. 94 and 101. The present writer once heard a lecture in Cairo, from an eminent Scotch Doctor of Medicine, to account for the ancient Hindu and Egyptian sacred threes and trinities. The lecturer's theory was that, when Jehovah came down into the Garden of Eden and walked with Adam in "the cool of the day," he explained his triune character to Adam, and that from Adam it was spread abroad to the various ancient nations. II. THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY. But, on the other hand, there had been planted, long before, the germs of a heliocentric theory. In the sixth century before our era, Pythagoras, and after him Philolaus, had suggested the movement of the earth and planets about a central fire; and, three centuries later, Aristarchus had restated the main truth with striking precision. Here comes in a proof that the antagonism between theological and scientific methods is not confined to Christianity; for this statement brought upon Aristarchus the charge of blasphemy, and drew after it a cloud of prejudice which hid the truth for six hundred years. Not until the fifth century of our era did it timidly appear in the thoughts of Martianus Capella: then it was again lost to sight for a thousand years, until in the fifteenth century, distorted and imperfect, it appeared in the writings of Cardinal Nicholas de Cusa. But in the shade cast by the vast system which had grown from the minds of the great theologians and from the heart of the great poet there had come to this truth neither bloom nor fruitage. Quietly, however, the soil was receiving enrichment and the air warmth. The processes of mathematics were constantly improved, the heavenly bodies were steadily observed, and at length appeared, far from the centres of thought, on the borders of Poland, a plain, simple-minded scholar, who first fairly uttered to the modern world the truth--now so commonplace, then so astounding--that the sun and planets do not revolve about the earth, but that the earth and planets revolve about the sun: this man was Nicholas Copernicus. Copernicus had been a professor at Rome, and even as early as 1500 had announced his doctrine there, but more in the way of a scientific curiosity or paradox, as it had been previously held by Cardinal de Cusa, than as the statement of a system representing a great fact in Nature. About thirty years later one of his disciples, Widmanstadt, had explained it to Clement VII; but it still remained a mere hypothesis, and soon, like so many others, disappeared from the public view. But to Copernicus, steadily studying the subject, it became more and more a reality, and as this truth grew within him he seemed to feel that at Rome he was no longer safe. To announce his discovery there as a theory or a paradox might amuse the papal court, but to announce it as a truth--as THE truth--was a far different matter. He therefore returned to his little town in Poland. To publish his thought as it had now developed was evidently dangerous even there, and for more than thirty years it lay slumbering in the mind of Copernicus and of the friends to whom he had privately intrusted it. At last he prepared his great work on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, and dedicated it to the Pope himself. He next sought a place of publication. He dared not send it to Rome, for there were the rulers of the older Church ready to seize it; he dared not send it to Wittenberg, for there were the leaders of Protestantism no less hostile; he therefore intrusted it to Osiander, at Nuremberg.(45) (45) For the germs of heliocentric theory planted long before, see Sir G. C. Lewis; and for a succinct statement of the claims of Pythagoras, Philolaus, Aristarchus, and Martianus Capella, see Hoefer, Histoire de l'Astronomie, 1873, p. 107 et seq.; also Heller, Geschichte der Physik, Stuttgart, 1882, vol. i, pp. 12, 13; also pp. 99 et seq. For germs among thinkers of India, see Whewell, vol. i, p. 277; also Whitney, Oriental and Linguistic Studies, New York, 1874; Essay on the Lunar Zodiac, p. 345. For the views of Vincent of Beauvais, see his Speculum Naturale, lib. xvi, cap. 21. For Cardinal d'Ailly's view, see his treatise De Concordia Astronomicae Veritatis cum Theologia (in his Ymago Mundi and separately). For general statement of De Cusa's work, see Draper, Intellectual Development of Europe, p. 512. For skilful use of De Cusa's view in order to mitigate censure upon the Church for its treatment of Copernicus's discovery, see an article in the Catholic World for January, 1869. For a very exact statement, in the spirit of judicial fairness, see Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, p. 275, and pp. 379, 380. In the latter, Whewell cites the exact words of De Cusa in the De Docta Ignorantia, and sums up in these words: "This train of thought might be a preparation for the reception of the Copernican system; but it is very different from the doctrine that the sun is the centre of the planetary system." Whewell says: "De Cusa propounded the doctrine of the motion of the earth more as a paradox than as a reality. We can not consider this as any distinct anticipation of a profound and consistent view of the truth." On De Cusa, see also Heller, vol. i, p. 216. For Aristotle's views, and their elaboration by St. Thomas Aquinas, see the De Coelo et Mundo, sec. xx, and elsewhere in the latter. It is curious to see how even such a biographer as Archbishop Vaughan slurs over the angelic Doctor's errors. See Vaughan's Life and Labours of St. Thomas of Aquin, pp. 459, 460. As to Copernicus's danger at Rome, the Catholic World for January, 1869, cites a speech of the Archbishop of Mechlin before the University of Louvain, to the effect that Copernicus defended his theory at Rome, in 1500, before two thousand scholars; also, that another professor taught the system in 1528, and was made apostolic notary by Clement VIII. All this, even if the doctrines taught were identical with Copernicus as finally developed--which is simply not the case--avails nothing against the overwhelming testimony that Copernicus felt himself in danger--testimony which the after-history of the Copernican theory renders invincible. The very title of Fromundus's book, already cited, published within a few miles of the archbishop's own cathedral, and sanctioned expressly by the theological faculty of that same University of Louvain in 1630, utterly refutes the archbishop's idea that the Church was inclined to treat Copernicus kindly. The title is as follows: Ant-Aristarchus sive Orbis-Terrae Immobilis, in quo decretum S. Congregationis S. R. E. Cardinal. an. M.DC.XVI adversus Pythagorico-Copernicanos editum defenditur, Antverpiae, MDCXXI. L'Epinois, Galilee, Paris, 1867, lays stress, p. 14, on the broaching of the doctrine by De Cusa in 1435, and by Widmanstadt in 1533, and their kind treatment by Eugenius IV and Clement VII; but this is absolutely worthless in denying the papal policy afterward. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. i, pp. 217, 218, while admitting that De Cusa and Widmanstadt sustained this theory and received honors from their respective popes, shows that, when the Church gave it serious consideration, it was condemned. There is nothing in this view unreasonable. It would be a parallel case to that of Leo X, at first inclined toward Luther and others, in their "squabbles with the envious friars," and afterward forced to oppose them. That Copernicus felt the danger, is evident, among other things, by the expression in the preface: "Statim me explodendum cum tali opinione clamitant." For dangers at Wittenberg, see Lange, as above, vol. i, p. 217. But Osiander's courage failed him: he dared not launch the new thought boldly. He wrote a grovelling preface, endeavouring to excuse Copernicus for his novel idea, and in this he inserted the apologetic lie that Copernicus had propounded the doctrine of the earth's movement not as a fact, but as a hypothesis. He declared that it was lawful for an astronomer to indulge his imagination, and that this was what Copernicus had done. Thus was the greatest and most ennobling, perhaps, of scientific truths--a truth not less ennobling to religion than to science--forced, in coming before the world, to sneak and crawl.(46) (46) Osiander, in a letter to Copernicus, dated April 20, 1541, had endeavored to reconcile him to such a procedure, and ends by saying, "Sic enim placidiores reddideris peripatheticos et theologos quos contradicturos metuis." See Apologia Tychonis in Kepler's Opera Omnia, Frisch's edition, vol. i, p. 246. Kepler holds Osiander entirely responsible for this preface. Bertrand, in his Fondateurs de l'astronomie moderne, gives its text, and thinks it possible that Copernicus may have yielded "in pure condescension toward his disciple." But this idea is utterly at variance with expressions in Copernicus's own dedicatory letter to the Pope, which follows the preface. For a good summary of the argument, see Figuier, Savants de la Renaissance, pp. 378, 379; see also citation from Gassendi's Life of Copernicus, in Flammarion, Vie de Copernic, p. 124. Mr. John Fiske, accurate as he usually is, in his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy appears to have followed Laplace, Delambre, and Petit into the error of supposing that Copernicus, and not Osiander, is responsible for the preface. For the latest proofs, see Menzer's translation of Copernicus's work, Thorn, 1879, notes on pp. 3 and 4 of the appendix. On the 24th of May, 1543, the newly printed book arrived at the house of Copernicus. It was put into his hands; but he was on his deathbed. A few hours later he was beyond the reach of the conscientious men who would have blotted his reputation and perhaps have destroyed his life. Yet not wholly beyond their reach. Even death could not be trusted to shield him. There seems to have been fear of vengeance upon his corpse, for on his tombstone was placed no record of his lifelong labours, no mention of his great discovery; but there was graven upon it simply a prayer: "I ask not the grace accorded to Paul; not that given to Peter; give me only the favour which Thou didst show to the thief on the cross." Not till thirty years after did a friend dare write on his tombstone a memorial of his discovery.(47) (47) See Flammarion, Vie de Copernic, p. 190. The preface of Osiander, pretending that the book of Copernicus suggested a hypothesis instead of announcing a truth, served its purpose well. During nearly seventy years the Church authorities evidently thought it best not to stir the matter, and in some cases professors like Calganini were allowed to present the new view purely as a hypothesis. There were, indeed, mutterings from time to time on the theological side, but there was no great demonstration against the system until 1616. Then, when the Copernican doctrine was upheld by Galileo as a TRUTH, and proved to be a truth by his telescope, the book was taken in hand by the Roman curia. The statements of Copernicus were condemned, "until they should be corrected"; and the corrections required were simply such as would substitute for his conclusions the old Ptolemaic theory. That this was their purpose was seen in that year when Galileo was forbidden to teach or discuss the Copernican theory, and when were forbidden "all books which affirm the motion of the earth." Henceforth to read the work of Copernicus was to risk damnation, and the world accepted the decree.(48) The strongest minds were thus held fast. If they could not believe the old system, they must PRETEND that they believed it;--and this, even after the great circumnavigation of the globe had done so much to open the eyes of the world! Very striking is the case of the eminent Jesuit missionary Joseph Acosta, whose great work on the Natural and Moral History of the Indies, published in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, exploded so many astronomical and geographical errors. Though at times curiously credulous, he told the truth as far as he dared; but as to the movement of the heavenly bodies he remained orthodox--declaring, "I have seen the two poles, whereon the heavens turn as upon their axletrees." (48) The authorities deciding this matter in accordance with the wishes of Pope V and Cardinal Bellarmine were the Congregation of the Index, or cardinals having charge of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Recent desperate attempts to fasten the responsibility on them as individuals seem ridiculous in view of the simple fact that their work was sanctioned by the highest Church authority, and required to be universally accepted by the Church. Eleven different editions of the Index in my own possession prove this. Nearly all of these declare on their title-pages that they are issued by order of the pontiff of the period, and each is preface by a special papal bull or letter. See especially the Index of 1664, issued under order of Alexander VII, and that of 1761, under Benedict XIV. Copernicus's statements were prohibited in the Index "donec corrigantur." Kepler said that it ought to be worded "donec explicetur." See Bertand, Fondateurs de l'Astronomie moderne, p. 57. De Morgan, pp. 57-60, gives the corrections required by the Index of 1620. Their main aim seems to be to reduce Copernicus to the grovelling level of Osiander, making his discovery a mere hypothesis; but occasionally they require a virtual giving up of the whole Copernican doctrine--e.g., "correction" insisted upon for chap. viii, p. 6. For a scholarly account of the relation between Prohibitory and Expurgatory Indexes to each other, see Mendham, Literary Policy of the Church of Rome; also Reusch, Index der verbotenen Bucher, Bonn, 1855, vol. ii, chaps i and ii. For a brief but very careful statement, see Gebler, Galileo Galilei, English translation, London, 1879, chap. i; see also Addis and Arnold's Catholic Dictionary, article Galileo, p.8. There was, indeed, in Europe one man who might have done much to check this current of unreason which was to sweep away so many thoughtful men on the one hand from scientific knowledge, and so many on the other from Christianity. This was Peter Apian. He was one of the great mathematical and astronomical scholars of the time. His brilliant abilities had made him the astronomical teacher of the Emperor Charles V. His work on geography had brought him a world-wide reputation; his work on astronomy brought him a patent of nobility; his improvements in mathematical processes and astronomical instruments brought him the praise of Kepler and a place in the history of science: never had a true man better opportunity to do a great deed. When Copernicus's work appeared, Apian was at the height of his reputation and power: a quiet, earnest plea from him, even if it had been only for ordinary fairness and a suspension of judgment, must have carried much weight. His devoted pupil, Charles V, who sat on the thrones of Germany and Spain, must at least have given a hearing to such a plea. But, unfortunately, Apian was a professor in an institution of learning under the strictest Church control--the University of Ingolstadt. His foremost duty was to teach SAFE science--to keep science within the line of scriptural truth as interpreted by theological professors. His great opportunity was lost. Apian continued to maunder over the Ptolemaic theory and astrology in his lecture-room. The attack on the Copernican theory he neither supported nor opposed; he was silent; and the cause of his silence should never be forgotten so long as any Church asserts its title to control university instruction.(49) (49) For Joseph Acosta's statement, see the translation of his History, published by the Hakluyt Society, chap. ii. For Peter Apian, see Madler, Geschichte der Astronomie, Braunschweig, 1873, vol. i, p. 141. For evidences of the special favour of Charles V, see Delambre, Histoire de l'Astronomie au Moyen Age, p. 390; also Bruhns, in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie. For an attempted apology for him, see Gunther, Peter and Philipp Apian, Prag, 1822, p. 62. Doubtless many will exclaim against the Roman Catholic Church for this; but the simple truth is that Protestantism was no less zealous against the new scientific doctrine. All branches of the Protestant Church--Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican--vied with each other in denouncing the Copernican doctrine as contrary to Scripture; and, at a later period, the Puritans showed the same tendency. Said Martin Luther: "People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth." Melanchthon, mild as he was, was not behind Luther in condemning Copernicus. In his treatise on the Elements of Physics, published six years after Copernicus's death, he says: "The eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty-four hours. But certain men, either from the love of novelty, or to make a display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves; and they maintain that neither the eighth sphere nor the sun revolves.... Now, it is a want of honesty and decency to assert such notions publicly, and the example is pernicious. It is the part of a good mind to accept the truth as revealed by God and to acquiesce in it." Melanchthon then cites the passages in the Psalms and Ecclesiastes, which he declares assert positively and clearly that the earth stands fast and that the sun moves around it, and adds eight other proofs of his proposition that "the earth can be nowhere if not in the centre of the universe." So earnest does this mildest of the Reformers become, that he suggests severe measures to restrain such impious teachings as those of Copernicus.(50) (50) See the Tischreden in the Walsch edition of Luther's Works, 1743, vol. xxii, p. 2260; also Melanchthon's Initia Doctrinae Physicae. This treatise is cited under a mistaken title by the Catholic World, September, 1870. The correct title is as given above; it will be found in the Corpus Reformatorum, vol. xiii (ed. Bretschneider, Halle, 1846), pp. 216, 217. See also Madler, vol. i, p. 176; also Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. i, p. 217; also Prowe, Ueber die Abhangigkeit des Copernicus, Thorn, 1865, p. 4; also note, pp. 5, 6, where text is given in full. While Lutheranism was thus condemning the theory of the earth's movement, other branches of the Protestant Church did not remain behind. Calvin took the lead, in his Commentary on Genesis, by condemning all who asserted that the earth is not at the centre of the universe. He clinched the matter by the usual reference to the first verse of the ninety-third Psalm, and asked, "Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?" Turretin, Calvin's famous successor, even after Kepler and Newton had virtually completed the theory of Copernicus and Galileo, put forth his compendium of theology, in which he proved, from a multitude of scriptural texts, that the heavens, sun, and moon move about the earth, which stands still in the centre. In England we see similar theological efforts, even after they had become evidently futile. Hutchinson's Moses's Principia, Dr. Samuel Pike's Sacred Philosophy, the writings of Horne, Bishop Horsley, and President Forbes contain most earnest attacks upon the ideas of Newton, such attacks being based upon Scripture. Dr. John Owen, so famous in the annals of Puritanism, declared the Copernican system a "delusive and arbitrary hypothesis, contrary to Scripture"; and even John Wesley declared the new ideas to "tend toward infidelity."(51) (51) On the teachings on Protestantism as regards the Copernican theory, see citations in Canon Farrar's History of Interpretation, preface, xviii; also Rev. Dr. Shields, of Princeton, The Final Philosophy, pp. 60, 61. And Protestant peoples were not a whit behind Catholic in following out such teachings. The people of Elbing made themselves merry over a farce in which Copernicus was the main object of ridicule. The people of Nuremberg, a Protestant stronghold, caused a medal to be struck with inscriptions ridiculing the philosopher and his theory. Why the people at large took this view is easily understood when we note the attitude of the guardians of learning, both Catholic and Protestant, in that age. It throws great light upon sundry claims by modern theologians to take charge of public instruction and of the evolution of science. So important was it thought to have "sound learning" guarded and "safe science" taught, that in many of the universities, as late as the end of the seventeenth century, professors were forced to take an oath not to hold the "Pythagorean"--that is, the Copernican--idea as to the movement of the heavenly bodies. As the contest went on, professors were forbidden to make known to students the facts revealed by the telescope. Special orders to this effect were issued by the ecclesiastical authorities to the universities and colleges of Pisa, Innspruck, Louvain, Douay, Salamanca, and others. During generations we find the authorities of these Universities boasting that these godless doctrines were kept away from their students. It is touching to hear such boasts made then, just as it is touching now to hear sundry excellent university authorities boast that they discourage the reading of Mill, Spencer, and Darwin. Nor were such attempts to keep the truth from students confined to the Roman Catholic institutions of learning. Strange as it may seem, nowhere were the facts confirming the Copernican theory more carefully kept out of sight than at Wittenberg--the university of Luther and Melanchthon. About the middle of the sixteenth century there were at that centre of Protestant instruction two astronomers of a very high order, Rheticus and Reinhold; both of these, after thorough study, had convinced themselves that the Copernican system was true, but neither of them was allowed to tell this truth to his students. Neither in his lecture announcements nor in his published works did Rheticus venture to make the new system known, and he at last gave up his professorship and left Wittenberg, that he might have freedom to seek and tell the truth. Reinhold was even more wretchedly humiliated. Convinced of the truth of the new theory, he was obliged to advocate the old; if he mentioned the Copernican ideas, he was compelled to overlay them with the Ptolemaic. Even this was not thought safe enough, and in 1571 the subject was intrusted to Peucer. He was eminently "sound," and denounced the Copernican theory in his lectures as "absurd, and unfit to be introduced into the schools." To clinch anti-scientific ideas more firmly into German Protestant teaching, Rector Hensel wrote a text-book for schools entitled The Restored Mosaic System of the World, which showed the Copernican astronomy to be unscriptural. Doubtless this has a far-off sound; yet its echo comes very near modern Protestantism in the expulsion of Dr. Woodrow by the Presbyterian authorities in South Carolina; the expulsion of Prof. Winchell by the Methodist Episcopal authorities in Tennessee; the expulsion of Prof. Toy by Baptist authorities in Kentucky; the expulsion of the professors at Beyrout under authority of American Protestant divines--all for holding the doctrines of modern science, and in the last years of the nineteenth century.(52) (52) For treatment of Copernican ideas by the people, see The Catholic World, as above; also Melanchthon, ubi supra; also Prowe, Copernicus, Berlin, 1883, vol. i, p. 269, note; also pp. 279, 280; also Madler, i, p.167. For Rector Hensel, see Rev. Dr. Shield's Final Philosophy, p. 60. For details of recent Protestant efforts against evolution doctrines, see the chapter on the Fall of Man and Anthropology in this work. But the new truth could not be concealed; it could neither be laughed down nor frowned down. Many minds had received it, but within the hearing of the papacy only one tongue appears to have dared to utter it clearly. This new warrior was that strange mortal, Giordano Bruno. He was hunted from land to land, until at last he turned on his pursuers with fearful invectives. For this he was entrapped at Venice, imprisoned during six years in the dungeons of the Inquisition at Rome, then burned alive, and his ashes scattered to the winds. Still, the new truth lived on. Ten years after the martyrdom of Bruno the truth of Copernicus's doctrine was established by the telescope of Galileo.(53) (53) For Bruno, see Bartholmess, Vie de Jordano Bruno, Paris, 1846, vol. i, p.121 and pp. 212 et seq.; also Berti, Vita di Giordano Bruno, Firenze, 1868, chap. xvi; also Whewell, vol. i, pp. 272, 273. That Whewell is somewhat hasty in attributing Bruno's punishment entirely to the Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante will be evident, in spite of Montucla, to anyone who reads the account of the persecution in Bartholmess or Berti; and even if Whewell be right, the Spaccio would never have been written but for Bruno's indignation at ecclesiastical oppression. See Tiraboschi, vol. vii, pp. 466 et seq. Herein was fulfilled one of the most touching of prophecies. Years before, the opponents of Copernicus had said to him, "If your doctrines were true, Venus would show phases like the moon." Copernicus answered: "You are right; I know not what to say; but God is good, and will in time find an answer to this objection." The God-given answer came when, in 1611, the rude telescope of Galileo showed the phases of Venus.(54) (54) For the relation of these discoveries to Copernicus's work, see Delambre, Histoire de l'Astronomie moderne, discours preliminaire, p. xiv; also Laplace, Systeme du Monde, vol. i, p. 326; and for more careful statements, Kepler's Opera Omnia, edit. Frisch, tome ii, p. 464. For Copernicus's prophecy, see Cantu, Histoire Univerelle, vol. xv, p. 473. (Cantu was an eminent Roman Catholic.) III. THE WAR UPON GALILEO. On this new champion, Galileo, the whole war was at last concentrated. His discoveries had clearly taken the Copernican theory out of the list of hypotheses, and had placed it before the world as a truth. Against him, then, the war was long and bitter. The supporters of what was called "sound learning" declared his discoveries deceptions and his announcements blasphemy. Semi-scientific professors, endeavouring to curry favour with the Church, attacked him with sham science; earnest preachers attacked him with perverted Scripture; theologians, inquisitors, congregations of cardinals, and at last two popes dealt with him, and, as was supposed, silenced his impious doctrine forever.(55) (55) A very curious example of this sham science employed by theologians is seen in the argument, frequently used at that time, that, if the earth really moved, a stone falling from a height would fall back of a point immediately below its point of starting. This is used by Fromundus with great effect. It appears never to have occurred to him to test the matter by dropping a stone from the topmast of a ship. Bezenburg has mathematically demonstrated just such an aberration in falling bodies, as is mathematically required by the diurnal motion of the earth. See Jevons, Principles of Science, pp. 388, 389, second edition, 1877. I shall present this warfare at some length because, so far as I can find, no careful summary of it has been given in our language, since the whole history was placed in a new light by the revelations of the trial documents in the Vatican Library, honestly published for the first time by L'Epinois in 1867, and since that by Gebler, Berti, Favaro, and others. The first important attack on Galileo began in 1610, when he announced that his telescope had revealed the moons of the planet Jupiter. The enemy saw that this took the Copernican theory out of the realm of hypothesis, and they gave battle immediately. They denounced both his method and its results as absurd and impious. As to his method, professors bred in the "safe science" favoured by the Church argued that the divinely appointed way of arriving at the truth in astronomy was by theological reasoning on texts of Scripture; and, as to his results, they insisted, first, that Aristotle knew nothing of these new revelations; and, next, that the Bible showed by all applicable types that there could be only seven planets; that this was proved by the seven golden candlesticks of the Apocalypse, by the seven-branched candlestick of the tabernacle, and by the seven churches of Asia; that from Galileo's doctrine consequences must logically result destructive to Christian truth. Bishops and priests therefore warned their flocks, and multitudes of the faithful besought the Inquisition to deal speedily and sharply with the heretic.(56) (56) See Delambre on the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter as the turning-point with the heliocentric doctrine. As to its effects on Bacon, see Jevons, p. 638, as above. For argument drawn from the candlestick and the seven churches, see Delambre, p. 20. In vain did Galileo try to prove the existence of satellites by showing them to the doubters through his telescope: they either declared it impious to look, or, if they did look, denounced the satellites as illusions from the devil. Good Father Clavius declared that "to see satellites of Jupiter, men had to make an instrument which would create them." In vain did Galileo try to save the great truths he had discovered by his letters to the Benedictine Castelli and the Grand-Duchess Christine, in which he argued that literal biblical interpretation should not be applied to science; it was answered that such an argument only made his heresy more detestable; that he was "worse than Luther or Calvin." The war on the Copernican theory, which up to that time had been carried on quietly, now flamed forth. It was declared that the doctrine was proved false by the standing still of the sun for Joshua, by the declarations that "the foundations of the earth are fixed so firm that they can not be moved," and that the sun "runneth about from one end of the heavens to the other."(57) (57) For principle points as given, see Libri, Histoire des Sciences mathematiques en Italie, vol. iv, p. 211; De Morgan, Paradoxes, p. 26, for account of Father Clavius. It is interesting to know that Clavius, in his last years, acknowledged that "the whole system of the heavens is broken down, and must be mended," Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xv, p. 478. See Th. Martin, Galilee, pp. 34, 208, and 266; also Heller, Geschichte der Physik, Stuttgart, 1882, vol. i, p. 366. For the original documents, see L'Epinois, pp.34 and 36; or better, Gebler's careful edition of the trial (Die Acten des Galileischen Processes, Stuttgart, 1877), pp. 47 et seq. Martin's translation seems somewhat too free. See also Gebler, Galileo Galilei, English translation, London, 1879, pp. 76-78; also Reusch, Der Process Galilei's und die Jesuiten, Bonn, 1879, chaps. ix, x, xi. But the little telescope of Galileo still swept the heavens, and another revelation was announced--the mountains and valleys in the moon. This brought on another attack. It was declared that this, and the statement that the moon shines by light reflected from the sun, directly contradict the statement in Genesis that the moon is "a great light." To make the matter worse, a painter, placing the moon in a religious picture in its usual position beneath the feet of the Blessed Virgin, outlined on its surface mountains and valleys; this was denounced as a sacrilege logically resulting from the astronomer's heresy. Still another struggle was aroused when the hated telescope revealed spots upon the sun, and their motion indicating the sun's rotation. Monsignor Elci, head of the University of Pisa, forbade the astronomer Castelli to mention these spots to his students. Father Busaeus, at the University of Innspruck, forbade the astronomer Scheiner, who had also discovered the spots and proposed a SAFE explanation of them, to allow the new discovery to be known there. At the College of Douay and the University of Louvain this discovery was expressly placed under the ban, and this became the general rule among the Catholic universities and colleges of Europe. The Spanish universities were especially intolerant of this and similar ideas, and up to a recent period their presentation was strictly forbidden in the most important university of all--that of Salamanca.(58) (58) See Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, vol. iii. Such are the consequences of placing the instruction of men's minds in the hands of those mainly absorbed in saving men's souls. Nothing could be more in accordance with the idea recently put forth by sundry ecclesiastics, Catholic and Protestant, that the Church alone is empowered to promulgate scientific truth or direct university instruction. But science gained a victory here also. Observations of the solar spots were reported not only from Galileo in Italy, but from Fabricius in Holland. Father Scheiner then endeavoured to make the usual compromise between theology and science. He promulgated a pseudo-scientific theory, which only provoked derision. The war became more and more bitter. The Dominican Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?" and this wretched pun upon the great astronomer's name ushered in sharper weapons; for, before Caccini ended, he insisted that "geometry is of the devil," and that "mathematicians should be banished as the authors of all heresies." The Church authorities gave Caccini promotion. Father Lorini proved that Galileo's doctrine was not only heretical but "atheistic," and besought the Inquisition to intervene. The Bishop of Fiesole screamed in rage against the Copernican system, publicly insulted Galileo, and denounced him to the Grand-Duke. The Archbishop of Pisa secretly sought to entrap Galileo and deliver him to the Inquisition at Rome. The Archbishop of Florence solemnly condemned the new doctrines as unscriptural; and Paul V, while petting Galileo, and inviting him as the greatest astronomer of the world to visit Rome, was secretly moving the Archbishop of Pisa to pick up evidence against the astronomer. But by far the most terrible champion who now appeared was Cardinal Bellarmin, one of the greatest theologians the world has known. He was earnest, sincere, and learned, but insisted on making science conform to Scripture. The weapons which men of Bellarmin's stamp used were purely theological. They held up before the world the dreadful consequences which must result to Christian theology were the heavenly bodies proved to revolve about the sun and not about the earth. Their most tremendous dogmatic engine was the statement that "his pretended discovery vitiates the whole Christian plan of salvation." Father Lecazre declared "it casts suspicion on the doctrine of the incarnation." Others declared, "It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah's ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour?" Nor was this argument confined to the theologians of the Roman Church; Melanchthon, Protestant as he was, had already used it in his attacks on Copernicus and his school. In addition to this prodigious theological engine of war there was kept up a fire of smaller artillery in the shape of texts and scriptural extracts. But the war grew still more bitter, and some weapons used in it are worth examining. They are very easily examined, for they are to be found on all the battlefields of science; but on that field they were used with more effect than on almost any other. These weapons are the epithets "infidel" and "atheist." They have been used against almost every man who has ever done anything new for his fellow-men. The list of those who have been denounced as "infidel" and "atheist" includes almost all great men of science, general scholars, inventors, and philanthropists. The purest Christian life, the noblest Christian character, have not availed to shield combatants. Christians like Isaac Newton, Pascal, Locke, Milton, and even Fenelon and Howard, have had this weapon hurled against them. Of all proofs of the existence of a God, those of Descartes have been wrought most thoroughly into the minds of modern men; yet the Protestant theologians of Holland sought to bring him to torture and to death by the charge of atheism, and the Roman Catholic theologians of France thwarted him during his life and prevented any due honours to him after his death.(59) (59) For various objectors and objections to Galileo by his contemporaries, see Libri, Histoire des Sciences mathematiques en Italie, vol. iv, p. 233, 234; also Martin, Vie de Galilee. For Father Lecazre's argument, see Flammarion, Mondes imaginaires et mondes reels, 6th ed., pp. 315, 316. For Melanchthon's argument, see his Initia in Opera, vol. iii, Halle, 1846. These epithets can hardly be classed with civilized weapons. They are burning arrows; they set fire to masses of popular prejudice, always obscuring the real question, sometimes destroying the attacking party. They are poisoned weapons. They pierce the hearts of loving women; they alienate dear children; they injure a man after life is ended, for they leave poisoned wounds in the hearts of those who loved him best--fears for his eternal salvation, dread of the Divine wrath upon him. Of course, in these days these weapons, though often effective in vexing good men and in scaring good women, are somewhat blunted; indeed, they not infrequently injure the assailants more than the assailed. So it was not in the days of Galileo; they were then in all their sharpness and venom.(60) (60) For curious exemplification of the way in which these weapons have been hurled, see lists of persons charged with "infidelity" and "atheism," in the Dictionnaire des Athees., Paris, (1800); also Lecky, History of Rationalism, vol. ii, p. 50. For the case of Descartes, see Saisset, Descartes et ses Precurseurs, pp. 103, 110. For the facility with which the term "atheist" has been applied from the early Aryans down to believers in evolution, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 420. Yet a baser warfare was waged by the Archbishop of Pisa. This man, whose cathedral derives its most enduring fame from Galileo's deduction of a great natural law from the swinging lamp before its altar, was not an archbishop after the noble mould of Borromeo and Fenelon and Cheverus. Sadly enough for the Church and humanity, he was simply a zealot and intriguer: he perfected the plan for entrapping the great astronomer. Galileo, after his discoveries had been denounced, had written to his friend Castelli and to the Grand-Duchess Christine two letters to show that his discoveries might be reconciled with Scripture. On a hint from the Inquisition at Rome, the archbishop sought to get hold of these letters and exhibit them as proofs that Galileo had uttered heretical views of theology and of Scripture, and thus to bring him into the clutch of the Inquisition. The archbishop begs Castelli, therefore, to let him see the original letter in the handwriting of Galileo. Castelli declines. The archbishop then, while, as is now revealed, writing constantly and bitterly to the Inquisition against Galileo, professes to Castelli the greatest admiration of Galileo's genius and a sincere desire to know more of his discoveries. This not succeeding, the archbishop at last throws off the mask and resorts to open attack. The whole struggle to crush Galileo and to save him would be amusing were it not so fraught with evil. There were intrigues and counter-intrigues, plots and counter-plots, lying and spying; and in the thickest of this seething, squabbling, screaming mass of priests, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, appear two popes, Paul V and Urban VIII. It is most suggestive to see in this crisis of the Church, at the tomb of the prince of the apostles, on the eve of the greatest errors in Church policy the world has known, in all the intrigues and deliberations of these consecrated leaders of the Church, no more evidence of the guidance or presence of the Holy Spirit than in a caucus of New York politicians at Tammany Hall. But the opposing powers were too strong. In 1615 Galileo was summoned before the Inquisition at Rome, and the mine which had been so long preparing was sprung. Sundry theologians of the Inquisition having been ordered to examine two propositions which had been extracted from Galileo's letters on the solar spots, solemnly considered these points during about a month and rendered their unanimous decision as follows: "THE FIRST PROPOSITION, THAT THE SUN IS THE CENTRE AND DOES NOT REVOLVE ABOUT THE EARTH, IS FOOLISH, ABSURD, FALSE IN THEOLOGY, AND HERETICAL, BECAUSE EXPRESSLY CONTRARY TO HOLY SCRIPTURE"; AND "THE SECOND PROPOSITION, THAT THE EARTH IS NOT THE CENTRE BUT REVOLVES ABOUT THE SUN, IS ABSURD, FALSE IN PHILOSOPHY, AND, FROM A THEOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW AT LEAST, OPPOSED TO THE TRUE FAITH." The Pope himself, Paul V, now intervened again: he ordered that Galileo be brought before the Inquisition. Then the greatest man of science in that age was brought face to face with the greatest theologian--Galileo was confronted by Bellarmin. Bellarmin shows Galileo the error of his opinion and orders him to renounce it. De Lauda, fortified by a letter from the Pope, gives orders that the astronomer be placed in the dungeons of the Inquisition should he refuse to yield. Bellarmin now commands Galileo, "in the name of His Holiness the Pope and the whole Congregation of the Holy Office, to relinquish altogether the opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the earth moves, nor henceforth to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing." This injunction Galileo acquiesces in and promises to obey.(61) (61) I am aware that the theory proposed by Wohwill and developed by Gebler denied that this promise was ever made by Galileo, and holds that the passage was a forgery devised later by the Church rulers to justify the proceedings of 1632 and 1644. This would make the conduct of the Church worse, but authorities as eminent consider the charge not proved. A careful examination of the documents seems to disprove it. This was on the 26th of February, 1616. About a fortnight later the Congregation of the Index, moved thereto, as the letters and documents now brought to light show, by Pope Paul V, solemnly rendered a decree that "THE DOCTRINE OF THE DOUBLE MOTION OF THE EARTH ABOUT ITS AXIS AND ABOUT THE SUN IS FALSE, AND ENTIRELY CONTRARY TO HOLY SCRIPTURE"; and that this opinion must neither be taught nor advocated. The same decree condemned all writings of Copernicus and "ALL WRITINGS WHICH AFFIRM THE MOTION OF THE EARTH." The great work of Copernicus was interdicted until corrected in accordance with the views of the Inquisition; and the works of Galileo and Kepler, though not mentioned by name at that time, were included among those implicitly condemned as "affirming the motion of the earth." The condemnations were inscribed upon the Index; and, finally, the papacy committed itself as an infallible judge and teacher to the world by prefixing to the Index the usual papal bull giving its monitions the most solemn papal sanction. To teach or even read the works denounced or passages condemned was to risk persecution in this world and damnation in the next. Science had apparently lost the decisive battle. For a time after this judgment Galileo remained in Rome, apparently hoping to find some way out of this difficulty; but he soon discovered the hollowness of the protestations made to him by ecclesiastics, and, being recalled to Florence, remained in his hermitage near the city in silence, working steadily, indeed, but not publishing anything save by private letters to friends in various parts of Europe. But at last a better vista seemed to open for him. Cardinal Barberini, who had seemed liberal and friendly, became pope under the name of Urban VIII. Galileo at this conceived new hopes, and allowed his continued allegiance to the Copernican system to be known. New troubles ensued. Galileo was induced to visit Rome again, and Pope Urban tried to cajole him into silence, personally taking the trouble to show him his errors by argument. Other opponents were less considerate, for works appeared attacking his ideas--works all the more unmanly, since their authors knew that Galileo was restrained by force from defending himself. Then, too, as if to accumulate proofs of the unfitness of the Church to take charge of advanced instruction, his salary as a professor at the University of Pisa was taken from him, and sapping and mining began. Just as the Archbishop of Pisa some years before had tried to betray him with honeyed words to the Inquisition, so now Father Grassi tried it, and, after various attempts to draw him out by flattery, suddenly denounced his scientific ideas as "leading to a denial of the Real Presence in the Eucharist." For the final assault upon him a park of heavy artillery was at last wheeled into place. It may be seen on all the scientific battlefields. It consists of general denunciation; and in 1631 Father Melchior Inchofer, of the Jesuits, brought his artillery to bear upon Galileo with this declaration: "The opinion of the earth's motion is of all heresies the most abominable, the most pernicious, the most scandalous; the immovability of the earth is thrice sacred; argument against the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the incarnation, should be tolerated sooner than an argument to prove that the earth moves." From the other end of Europe came a powerful echo. From the shadow of the Cathedral of Antwerp, the noted theologian Fromundus gave forth his famous treatise, the Ant-Aristarclius. Its very title-page was a contemptuous insult to the memory of Copernicus, since it paraded the assumption that the new truth was only an exploded theory of a pagan astronomer. Fromundus declares that "sacred Scripture fights against the Copernicans." To prove that the sun revolves about the earth, he cites the passage in the Psalms which speaks of the sun "which cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber." To prove that the earth stands still, he quotes a passage from Ecclesiastes, "The earth standeth fast forever." To show the utter futility of the Copernican theory, he declares that, if it were true, "the wind would constantly blow from the east"; and that "buildings and the earth itself would fly off with such a rapid motion that men would have to be provided with claws like cats to enable them to hold fast to the earth's surface." Greatest weapon of all, he works up, by the use of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, a demonstration from theology and science combined, that the earth MUST stand in the centre, and that the sun MUST revolve about it.(62) Nor was it merely fanatics who opposed the truth revealed by Copernicus; such strong men as Jean Bodin, in France, and Sir Thomas Browne, in England, declared against it as evidently contrary to Holy Scripture. (62) For Father Inchofer's attack, see his Tractatus Syllepticus, cited in Galileo's letter to Deodati, July 28, 1634. For Fromundus's more famous attack, see his Ant-Aristarchus, already cited, passim, but especially the heading of chap. vi, and the argument in chapters x and xi. A copy of this work may be found in the Astor Library at New York, and another in the White Library at Cornell University. For interesting references to one of Fromundus's arguments, showing, by a mixture of mathematics and theology, that the earth is the centre of the universe, see Quetelet, Histoire des Sciences mathematiques et physiques, Bruxelles, 1864, p. 170; also Madler, Geschichte der Astronomie, vol. i, p. 274. For Bodin's opposition to the Copernican theory, see Hallam, Literature of Europe; also Lecky. For Sir Thomas Brown, see his Vulgar and Common Errors, book iv, chap. v; and as to the real reason for his disbelief in the Copernican view, see Dr. Johnson's preface to his Life of Browne, vol. i, p. xix, of his collected works. IV. VICTORY OF THE CHURCH OVER GALILEO. While news of triumphant attacks upon him and upon the truth he had established were coming in from all parts of Europe, Galileo prepared a careful treatise in the form of a dialogue, exhibiting the arguments for and against the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems, and offered to submit to any conditions that the Church tribunals might impose, if they would allow it to be printed. At last, after discussions which extended through eight years, they consented, imposing a humiliating condition--a preface written in accordance with the ideas of Father Ricciardi, Master of the Sacred Palace, and signed by Galileo, in which the Copernican theory was virtually exhibited as a play of the imagination, and not at all as opposed to the Ptolemaic doctrine reasserted in 1616 by the Inquisition under the direction of Pope Paul V. This new work of Galileo--the Dialogo--appeared in 1632, and met with prodigious success. It put new weapons into the hands of the supporters of the Copernican theory. The pious preface was laughed at from one end of Europe to the other. This roused the enemy; the Jesuits, Dominicans, and the great majority of the clergy returned to the attack more violent than ever, and in the midst of them stood Pope Urban VIII, most bitter of all. His whole power was now thrown against Galileo. He was touched in two points: first, in his personal vanity, for Galileo had put the Pope's arguments into the mouth of one of the persons in the dialogue and their refutation into the mouth of another; but, above all, he was touched in his religious feelings. Again and again His Holiness insisted to all comers on the absolute and specific declarations of Holy Scripture, which prove that the sun and heavenly bodies revolve about the earth, and declared that to gainsay them is simply to dispute revelation. Certainly, if one ecclesiastic more than another ever seemed NOT under the care of the Spirit of Truth, it was Urban VIII in all this matter. Herein was one of the greatest pieces of ill fortune that has ever befallen the older Church. Had Pope Urban been broad-minded and tolerant like Benedict XIV, or had he been taught moderation by adversity like Pius VII, or had he possessed the large scholarly qualities of Leo XIII, now reigning, the vast scandal of the Galileo case would never have burdened the Church: instead of devising endless quibbles and special pleadings to escape responsibility for this colossal blunder, its defenders could have claimed forever for the Church the glory of fearlessly initiating a great epoch in human thought. But it was not so to be. Urban was not merely Pope; he was also a prince of the house of Barberini, and therefore doubly angry that his arguments had been publicly controverted. The opening strategy of Galileo's enemies was to forbid the sale of his work; but this was soon seen to be unavailing, for the first edition had already been spread throughout Europe. Urban now became more angry than ever, and both Galileo and his works were placed in the hands of the Inquisition. In vain did the good Benedictine Castelli urge that Galileo was entirely respectful to the Church; in vain did he insist that "nothing that can be done can now hinder the earth from revolving." He was dismissed in disgrace, and Galileo was forced to appear in the presence of the dread tribunal without defender or adviser. There, as was so long concealed, but as is now fully revealed, he was menaced with torture again and again by express order of Pope Urban, and, as is also thoroughly established from the trial documents themselves, forced to abjure under threats, and subjected to imprisonment by command of the Pope; the Inquisition deferring in this whole matter to the papal authority. All the long series of attempts made in the supposed interest of the Church to mystify these transactions have at last failed. The world knows now that Galileo was subjected certainly to indignity, to imprisonment, and to threats equivalent to torture, and was at last forced to pronounce publicly and on his knees his recantation, as follows: "I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before your Eminences, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth."(63) (63) For various utterances of Pope Urban against the Copernican theory at this period, see extracts from the original documents given by Gebler. For punishment of those who had shown some favor to Galileo, see various citations, and especially those from the Vatican manuscript, Gebler, p. 216. As to the text of the abjuration, see L'Epinois; also Polacco, Anticopernicus, etc., Venice, 1644; and for a discussion regarding its publication, see Favaro, Miscellanea Galileana, p. 804. It is not probable that torture in the ordinary sense was administered to Galileo, though it was threatened. See Th. Martin, Vie de Galilee, for a fair summing up of the case. He was vanquished indeed, for he had been forced, in the face of all coming ages, to perjure himself. To complete his dishonour, he was obliged to swear that he would denounce to the Inquisition any other man of science whom he should discover to be supporting the "heresy of the motion of the earth." Many have wondered at this abjuration, and on account of it have denied to Galileo the title of martyr. But let such gainsayers consider the circumstances. Here was an old man--one who had reached the allotted threescore years and ten--broken with disappointments, worn out with labours and cares, dragged from Florence to Rome, with the threat from the Pope himself that if he delayed he should be "brought in chains"; sick in body and mind, given over to his oppressors by the Grand-Duke who ought to have protected him, and on his arrival in Rome threatened with torture. What the Inquisition was he knew well. He could remember as but of yesterday the burning of Giordano Bruno in that same city for scientific and philosophic heresy; he could remember, too, that only eight years before this very time De Dominis, Archbishop of Spalatro, having been seized by the Inquisition for scientific and other heresies, had died in a dungeon, and that his body and his writings had been publicly burned. To the end of his life--nay, after his life was ended--the persecution of Galileo was continued. He was kept in exile from his family, from his friends, from his noble employments, and was held rigidly to his promise not to speak of his theory. When, in the midst of intense bodily sufferings from disease, and mental sufferings from calamities in his family, he besought some little liberty, he was met with threats of committal to a dungeon. When, at last, a special commission had reported to the ecclesiastical authorities that he had become blind and wasted with disease and sorrow, he was allowed a little more liberty, but that little was hampered by close surveillance. He was forced to bear contemptible attacks on himself and on his works in silence; to see the men who had befriended him severely punished; Father Castelli banished; Ricciardi, the Master of the Sacred Palace, and Ciampoli, the papal secretary, thrown out of their positions by Pope Urban, and the Inquisitor at Florence reprimanded for having given permission to print Galileo's work. He lived to see the truths he had established carefully weeded out from all the Church colleges and universities in Europe; and, when in a scientific work he happened to be spoken of as "renowned," the Inquisition ordered the substitution of the word "notorious."(64) (64) For the substitution of the word "notorious" for "renowned" by order of the Inquisition, see Martin, p.227. And now measures were taken to complete the destruction of the Copernican theory, with Galileo's proofs of it. On the 16th of June, 1633, the Holy Congregation, with the permission of the reigning Pope, ordered the sentence upon Galileo, and his recantation, to be sent to all the papal nuncios throughout Europe, as well as to all archbishops, bishops, and inquisitors in Italy and this document gave orders that the sentence and abjuration be made known "to your vicars, that you and all professors of philosophy and mathematics may have knowledge of it, that they may know why we proceeded against the said Galileo, and recognise the gravity of his error, in order that they may avoid it, and thus not incur the penalties which they would have to suffer in case they fell into the same."(65) (65) For a copy of this document, see Gebler, p. 269. As to the spread of this and similar documents notifying Europe of Galileo's condemnation, see Favaro, pp. 804, 805. As a consequence, the processors of mathematics and astronomy in various universities of Europe were assembled and these documents were read to them. To the theological authorities this gave great satisfaction. The Rector of the University of Douay, referring to the opinion of Galileo, wrote to the papal nuncio at Brussels: "The professors of our university are so opposed to this fanatical opinion that they have always held that it must be banished from the schools. In our English college at Douay this paradox has never been approved and never will be." Still another step was taken: the Inquisitors were ordered, especially in Italy, not to permit the publication of a new edition of any of Galileo's works, or of any similar writings. On the other hand, theologians were urged, now that Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler were silenced, to reply to them with tongue and pen. Europe was flooded with these theological refutations of the Copernican system. To make all complete, there was prefixed to the Index of the Church, forbidding "all writings which affirm the motion of the earth," a bull signed by the reigning Pope, which, by virtue of his infallibility as a divinely guided teacher in matters of faith and morals, clinched this condemnation into the consciences of the whole Christian world. From the mass of books which appeared under the auspices of the Church immediately after the condemnation of Galileo, for the purpose of rooting out every vestige of the hated Copernican theory from the mind of the world, two may be taken as typical. The first of these was a work by Scipio Chiaramonti, dedicated to Cardinal Barberini. Among his arguments against the double motion of the earth may be cited the following: "Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles; the earth has no limbs or muscles, therefore it does not move. It is angels who make Saturn, Jupiter, the sun, etc., turn round. If the earth revolves, it must also have an angel in the centre to set it in motion; but only devils live there; it would therefore be a devil who would impart motion to the earth.... "The planets, the sun, the fixed stars, all belong to one species--namely, that of stars. It seems, therefore, to be a grievous wrong to place the earth, which is a sink of impurity, among these heavenly bodies, which are pure and divine things." The next, which I select from the mass of similar works, is the Anticopernicus Catholicus of Polacco. It was intended to deal a finishing stroke at Galileo's heresy. In this it is declared: "The Scripture always represents the earth as at rest, and the sun and moon as in motion; or, if these latter bodies are ever represented as at rest, Scripture represents this as the result of a great miracle.... "These writings must be prohibited, because they teach certain principles about the position and motion of the terrestrial globe repugnant to Holy Scripture and to the Catholic interpretation of it, not as hypotheses but as established facts...." Speaking of Galileo's book, Polacco says that it "smacked of Copernicanism," and that, "when this was shown to the Inquisition, Galileo was thrown into prison and was compelled to utterly abjure the baseness of this erroneous dogma." As to the authority of the cardinals in their decree, Polacco asserts that, since they are the "Pope's Council" and his "brothers," their work is one, except that the Pope is favoured with special divine enlightenment. Having shown that the authority of the Scriptures, of popes, and of cardinals is against the new astronomy, he gives a refutation based on physics. He asks: "If we concede the motion of the earth, why is it that an arrow shot into the air falls back to the same spot, while the earth and all things on it have in the meantime moved very rapidly toward the east? Who does not see that great confusion would result from this motion?" Next he argues from metaphysics, as follows: "The Copernican theory of the earth's motion is against the nature of the earth itself, because the earth is not only cold but contains in itself the principle of cold; but cold is opposed to motion, and even destroys it--as is evident in animals, which become motionless when they become cold." Finally, he clinches all with a piece of theological reasoning, as follows: "Since it can certainly be gathered from Scripture that the heavens move above the earth, and since a circular motion requires something immovable around which to move,... the earth is at the centre of the universe."(66) (66) For Chiaramonti's book and selections given, see Gebler as above, p. 271. For Polacco, see his work as cited, especially Assertiones i, ii, vii, xi, xiii, lxxiii, clcccvii, and others. The work is in the White Library at Cornell University. The date of it is 1644. But any sketch of the warfare between theology and science in this field would be incomplete without some reference to the treatment of Galileo after his death. He had begged to be buried in his family tomb in Santa Croce; this request was denied. His friends wished to erect a monument over him; this, too, was refused. Pope Urban said to the ambassador Niccolini that "it would be an evil example for the world if such honours were rendered to a man who had been brought before the Roman Inquisition for an opinion so false and erroneous; who had communicated it to many others, and who had given so great a scandal to Christendom." In accordance, therefore, with the wish of the Pope and the orders of the Inquisition, Galileo was buried ignobly, apart from his family, without fitting ceremony, without monument, without epitaph. Not until forty years after did Pierrozzi dare write an inscription to be placed above his bones; not until a hundred years after did Nelli dare transfer his remains to a suitable position in Santa Croce, and erect a monument above them. Even then the old conscientious hostility burst forth: the Inquisition was besought to prevent such honours to "a man condemned for notorious errors"; and that tribunal refused to allow any epitaph to be placed above him which had not been submitted to its censorship. Nor has that old conscientious consistency in hatred yet fully relented: hardly a generation since has not seen some ecclesiastic, like Marini or De Bonald or Rallaye or De Gabriac, suppressing evidence, or torturing expressions, or inventing theories to blacken the memory of Galileo and save the reputation of the Church. Nay, more: there are school histories, widely used, which, in the supposed interest of the Church, misrepresent in the grossest manner all these transactions in which Galileo was concerned. Sancta simplicitas! The Church has no worse enemies than those who devise and teach these perversions. They are simply rooting out, in the long run, from the minds of the more thoughtful scholars, respect for the great organization which such writings are supposed to serve.(67) (67) For the persecutions of Galileo's memory after his death, see Gebler and Wohwill, but especially Th. Martin, p. 243 and chaps. ix and x. For documentary proofs, see L'Epinois. For a collection of the slanderous theories invented against Galileo, see Martin, final chapters and appendix. Both these authors are devoted to the Church, but unlike Monsignor Marini, are too upright to resort to the pious fraud of suppressing documents or interpolating pretended facts. The Protestant Church was hardly less energetic against this new astronomy than the mother Church. The sacred science of the first Lutheran Reformers was transmitted as a precious legacy, and in the next century was made much of by Calovius. His great learning and determined orthodoxy gave him the Lutheran leadership. Utterly refusing to look at ascertained facts, he cited the turning back of the shadow upon King Hezekiah's dial and the standing still of the sun for Joshua, denied the movement of the earth, and denounced the whole new view as clearly opposed to Scripture. To this day his arguments are repeated by sundry orthodox leaders of American Lutheranism. As to the other branches of the Reformed Church, we have already seen how Calvinists, Anglicans, and, indeed, Protestant sectarians generally, opposed the new truth.(68) (68) For Clovius, see Zoeckler, Geschichte, vol. i, pp. 684 and 763. For Calvin and Turretin, see Shields, The Final Philosophy, pp. 60, 61. In England, among the strict churchmen, the great Dr. South denounced the Royal Society as "irreligious," and among the Puritans the eminent John Owen declared that Newton's discoveries were "built on fallible phenomena and advanced by many arbitrary presumptions against evident testimonies of Scripture." Even Milton seems to have hesitated between the two systems. At the beginning of the eighth book of Paradise Lost he makes Adam state the difficulties of the Ptolemaic system, and then brings forward an angel to make the usual orthodox answers. Later, Milton seems to lean toward the Copernican theory, for, referring to the earth, he says: "Or she from west her silent course advance With inoffensive pace, that spinning sleeps On her soft axle, while she faces even And bears thee soft with the smooth air along." English orthodoxy continued to assert itself. In 1724 John Hutchinson, professor at Cambridge, published his Moses' Principia, a system of philosophy in which he sought to build up a complete physical system of the universe from the Bible. In this he assaulted the Newtonian theory as "atheistic," and led the way for similar attacks by such Church teachers as Horne, Duncan Forbes, and Jones of Nayland. But one far greater than these involved himself in this view. That same limitation of his reason by the simple statements of Scripture which led John Wesley to declare that, "unless witchcraft is true, nothing in the Bible is true," led him, while giving up the Ptolemaic theory and accepting in a general way the Copernican, to suspect the demonstrations of Newton. Happily, his inborn nobility of character lifted him above any bitterness or persecuting spirit, or any imposition of doctrinal tests which could prevent those who came after him from finding their way to the truth. But in the midst of this vast expanse of theologic error signs of right reason began to appear, both in England and America. Noteworthy is it that Cotton Mather, bitter as was his orthodoxy regarding witchcraft, accepted, in 1721, the modern astronomy fully, with all its consequences. In the following year came an even more striking evidence that the new scientific ideas were making their way in England. In 1722 Thomas Burnet published the sixth edition of his Sacred Theory of the Earth. In this he argues, as usual, to establish the scriptural doctrine of the earth's stability; but in his preface he sounds a remarkable warning. He mentions the great mistake into which St. Augustine led the Church regarding the doctrine of the antipodes, and says, "If within a few years or in the next generation it should prove as certain and demonstrable that the earth is moved, as it is now that there are antipodes, those that have been zealous against it, and engaged the Scripture in the controversy, would have the same reason to repent of their forwardness that St. Augustine would now, if he were still alive." Fortunately, too, Protestantism had no such power to oppose the development of the Copernican ideas as the older Church had enjoyed. Yet there were some things in its warfare against science even more indefensible. In 1772 the famous English expedition for scientific discovery sailed from England under Captain Cook. Greatest by far of all the scientific authorities chosen to accompany it was Dr. Priestley. Sir Joseph Banks had especially invited him. But the clergy of Oxford and Cambridge interfered. Priestley was considered unsound in his views of the Trinity; it was evidently suspected that this might vitiate his astronomical observations; he was rejected, and the expedition crippled. The orthodox view of astronomy lingered on in other branches of the Protestant Church. In Germany even Leibnitz attacked the Newtonian theory of gravitation on theological grounds, though he found some little consolation in thinking that it might be used to support the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation. In Holland the Calvinistic Church was at first strenuous against the whole new system, but we possess a comical proof that Calvinism even in its strongholds was powerless against it; for in 1642 Blaer published at Amsterdam his book on the use of globes, and, in order to be on the safe side, devoted one part of his work to the Ptolemaic and the other to the Copernican scheme, leaving the benevolent reader to take his choice.(69) (69) For the attitude of Leibnetz, Hutchinson, and the others named toward the Newtonian theory, see Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. ix. For John Wesley, see his Compendium of Natural Philosophy, being a Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation, London, 1784. See also Leslie Stephen, Eighteenth Century, vol. ii, p. 413. For Owen, see his Works, vol. xix, p. 310. For Cotton Mather's view, see The Christian Philosopher, London, 1721, especially pp. 16 and 17. For the case of Priestley, see Weld, History of the Royal Society, vol. ii, p. 56, for the facts and the admirable letter of Priestley upon this rejection. For Blaer, see his L'Usage des Globes, Amsterdam, 1642. Nor have efforts to renew the battle in the Protestant Church been wanting in these latter days. The attempt in the Church of England, in 1864, to fetter science, which was brought to ridicule by Herschel, Bowring, and De Morgan; the assemblage of Lutheran clergy at Berlin, in 1868, to protest against "science falsely so called," are examples of these. Fortunately, to the latter came Pastor Knak, and his denunciations of the Copernican theory as absolutely incompatible with a belief in the Bible, dissolved the whole assemblage in ridicule. In its recent dealings with modern astronomy the wisdom of the Catholic Church in the more civilized countries has prevented its yielding to some astounding errors into which one part of the Protestant Church has fallen heedlessly. Though various leaders in the older Church have committed the absurd error of allowing a text-book and sundry review articles to appear which grossly misstate the Galileo episode, with the certainty of ultimately undermining confidence in her teachings among her more thoughtful young men, she has kept clear of the folly of continuing to tie her instruction, and the acceptance of our sacred books, to an adoption of the Ptolemaic theory. Not so with American Lutheranism. In 1873 was published in St. Louis, at the publishing house of the Lutheran Synod of Missouri, a work entitled Astronomische Unterredung, the author being well known as a late president of a Lutheran Teachers' Seminary. No attack on the whole modern system of astronomy could be more bitter. On the first page of the introduction the author, after stating the two theories, asks, "Which is right?" and says: "It would be very simple to me which is right, if it were only a question of human import. But the wise and truthful God has expressed himself on this matter in the Bible. The entire Holy Scripture settles the question that the earth is the principal body (Hauptkorper) of the universe, that it stands fixed, and that sun and moon only serve to light it." The author then goes on to show from Scripture the folly, not only of Copernicus and Newton, but of a long line of great astronomers in more recent times. He declares: "Let no one understand me as inquiring first where truth is to be found--in the Bible or with the astronomers. No; I know that beforehand--that my God never lies, never makes a mistake; out of his mouth comes only truth, when he speaks of the structure of the universe, of the earth, sun, moon, and stars.... "Because the truth of the Holy Scripture is involved in this, therefore the above question is of the highest importance to me.... Scientists and others lean upon the miserable reed (Rohrstab) that God teaches only the order of salvation, but not the order of the universe." Very noteworthy is the fact that this late survival of an ancient belief based upon text-worship is found, not in the teachings of any zealous priest of the mother Church, but in those of an eminent professor in that branch of Protestantism which claims special enlightenment.(70) (70) For the amusing details of the attempt in the English Church to repress science, and of the way in which it was met, see De Morgan, Paradoxes, p. 42. For Pastor Knak and his associates, see the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1868. Of the recent Lutheran works against the Copernican astronomy, see especially Astronomische Unterredung zwischen einem Liebhaber der Astronomie und mehreren beruhmten Astronomer der Neuzeit, by J. C. W. L., St. Louis, 1873. Nor has the warfare against the dead champions of science been carried on by the older Church alone. On the 10th of May, 1859, Alexander von Humboldt was buried. His labours had been among the glories of the century, and his funeral was one of the most imposing that Berlin had ever seen. Among those who honoured themselves by their presence was the prince regent, afterward the Emperor William I; but of the clergy it was observed that none were present save the officiating clergyman and a few regarded as unorthodox.(71) (71) See Bruhns and Lassell, Life of Humboldt, London, 1873, vol. ii, p. 411. V. RESULTS OF THE VICTORY OVER GALILEO. We return now to the sequel of the Galileo case. Having gained their victory over Galileo, living and dead, having used it to scare into submission the professors of astronomy throughout Europe, conscientious churchmen exulted. Loud was their rejoicing that the "heresy," the "infidelity" the "atheism" involved in believing that the earth revolves about its axis and moves around the sun had been crushed by the great tribunal of the Church, acting in strict obedience to the expressed will of one Pope and the written order of another. As we have seen, all books teaching this hated belief were put upon the Index of books forbidden to Christians, and that Index was prefaced by a bull enforcing this condemnation upon the consciences of the faithful throughout the world, and signed by the reigning Pope. The losses to the world during this complete triumph of theology were even more serious than at first appears: one must especially be mentioned. There was then in Europe one of the greatest thinkers ever given to mankind--Rene Descartes. Mistaken though many of his reasonings were, they bore a rich fruitage of truth. He had already done a vast work. His theory of vortices--assuming a uniform material regulated by physical laws--as the beginning of the visible universe, though it was but a provisional hypothesis, had ended the whole old theory of the heavens with the vaulted firmament and the direction of the planetary movements by angels, which even Kepler had allowed. The scientific warriors had stirred new life in him, and he was working over and summing up in his mighty mind all the researches of his time. The result would have made an epoch in history. His aim was to combine all knowledge and thought into a Treatise on the World, and in view of this he gave eleven years to the study of anatomy alone. But the fate of Galileo robbed him of all hope, of all courage; the battle seemed lost; he gave up his great plan forever.(72) (72) For Descartes's discouragement, see Humboldt, Cosmos, London, 1851, vol iii, p. 21; also Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, English translation, vol. i, pp. 248, 249, where the letters of Descartes are given, showing his despair, and the relinquishment of his best thoughts and works in order to preserve peace with the Church; also Saisset, Descartes et ses Precurseurs, pp. 100 et seq.; also Jolly, Histoire du Mouvement intellectuel au XVI Siecle, vol. i, p. 390. But ere long it was seen that this triumph of the Church was in reality a prodigious defeat. From all sides came proofs that Copernicus and Galileo were right; and although Pope Urban and the inquisition held Galileo in strict seclusion, forbidding him even to SPEAK regarding the double motion of the earth; and although this condemnation of "all books which affirm the motion of the earth" was kept on the Index; and although the papal bull still bound the Index and the condemnations in it on the consciences of the faithful; and although colleges and universities under Church control were compelled to teach the old doctrine--it was seen by clear-sighted men everywhere that this victory of the Church was a disaster to the victors. New champions pressed on. Campanella, full of vagaries as he was, wrote his Apology for Galileo, though for that and other heresies, religious, and political, he seven times underwent torture. And Kepler comes: he leads science on to greater victories. Copernicus, great as he was, could not disentangle scientific reasoning entirely from the theological bias: the doctrines of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as to the necessary superiority of the circle had vitiated the minor features of his system, and left breaches in it through which the enemy was not slow to enter; but Kepler sees these errors, and by wonderful genius and vigour he gives to the world the three laws which bear his name, and this fortress of science is complete. He thinks and speaks as one inspired. His battle is severe. He is solemnly warned by the Protestant Consistory of Stuttgart "not to throw Christ's kingdom into confusion with his silly fancies," and as solemnly ordered to "bring his theory of the world into harmony with Scripture": he is sometimes abused, sometimes ridiculed, sometimes imprisoned. Protestants in Styria and Wurtemberg, Catholics in Austria and Bohemia, press upon him but Newton, Halley, Bradley, and other great astronomers follow, and to science remains the victory.(73) (73) For Campanella, see Amabile, Fra Tommaso Campanella, Naples, 1882, especially vol. iii; also Libri, vol. iv, pp. 149 et seq. Fromundus, speaking of Kepler's explanation, says, "Vix teneo ebullientem risum." This is almost equal to the New York Church Journal, speaking of John Stuart Mill as "that small sciolist," and of the preface to Dr. Draper's great work as "chippering." How a journal, generally so fair in its treatment of such subjects, can condescend to such weapons is one of the wonders of modern journalism. For the persecution of Kepler, see Heller, Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, pp. 281 et seq; also Reuschle, Kepler und die Astronomie, Frankfurt a. M., 1871, pp. 87 et seq. There is a poetic justice in the fact that these two last-named books come from Wurtemberg professors. See also The New-Englander for March, 1884, p. 178. Yet this did not end the war. During the seventeenth century, in France, after all the splendid proofs added by Kepler, no one dared openly teach the Copernican theory, and Cassini, the great astronomer, never declared for it. In 1672 the Jesuit Father Riccioli declared that there were precisely forty-nine arguments for the Copernican theory and seventy-seven against it. Even after the beginning of the eighteenth century--long after the demonstrations of Sir Isaac Newton--Bossuet, the great Bishop of Meaux, the foremost theologian that France has ever produced, declared it contrary to Scripture. Nor did matters seem to improve rapidly during that century. In England, John Hutchinson, as we have seen, published in 1724 his Moses' Principia maintaining that the Hebrew Scriptures are a perfect system of natural philosophy, and are opposed to the Newtonian system of gravitation; and, as we have also seen, he was followed by a long list of noted men in the Church. In France, two eminent mathematicians published in 1748 an edition of Newton's Principia; but, in order to avert ecclesiastical censure, they felt obliged to prefix to it a statement absolutely false. Three years later, Boscovich, the great mathematician of the Jesuits, used these words: "As for me, full of respect for the Holy Scriptures and the decree of the Holy Inquisition, I regard the earth as immovable; nevertheless, for simplicity in explanation I will argue as if the earth moves; for it is proved that of the two hypotheses the appearances favour this idea." In Germany, especially in the Protestant part of it, the war was even more bitter, and it lasted through the first half of the eighteenth century. Eminent Lutheran doctors of divinity flooded the country with treatises to prove that the Copernican theory could not be reconciled with Scripture. In the theological seminaries and in many of the universities where clerical influence was strong they seemed to sweep all before them; and yet at the middle of the century we find some of the clearest-headed of them aware of the fact that their cause was lost.(74) (74) For Cassini's position, see Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vol. xiii, p. 175. For Riccioli, see Daunou, Etudes Historiques, vol. ii, p. 439. For Boussuet, see Bertrand, p. 41. For Hutchinson, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, p. 48. For Wesley, see his work, already cited. As to Boscovich, his declaration, mentioned in the text, was in 1746, but in 1785 he seemed to feel his position in view of history, and apologized abjectly; Bertrand, pp. 60, 61. See also Whewell's notice of Le Sueur and Jacquier's introduction to their edition of Newton's Principia. For the struggle in Germany, see Zoeckler, Geschichte der Beziehungenzwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, vol. ii, pp. 45 et seq. In 1757 the most enlightened perhaps in the whole line of the popes, Benedict XIV, took up the matter, and the Congregation of the Index secretly allowed the ideas of Copernicus to be tolerated. Yet in 1765 Lalande, the great French astronomer, tried in vain at Rome to induce the authorities to remove Galileo's works from the Index. Even at a date far within our own nineteenth century the authorities of many universities in Catholic Europe, and especially those in Spain, excluded the Newtonian system. In 1771 the greatest of them all, the University of Salamanca, being urged to teach physical science, refused, making answer as follows: "Newton teaches nothing that would make a good logician or metaphysician; and Gassendi and Descartes do not agree so well with revealed truth as Aristotle does." Vengeance upon the dead also has continued far into our own century. On the 5th of May, 1829, a great multitude assembled at Warsaw to honour the memory of Copernicus and to unveil Thorwaldsen's statue of him. Copernicus had lived a pious, Christian life; he had been beloved for unostentatious Christian charity; with his religious belief no fault had ever been found; he was a canon of the Church at Frauenberg, and over his grave had been written the most touching of Christian epitaphs. Naturally, then, the people expected a religious service; all was understood to be arranged for it; the procession marched to the church and waited. The hour passed, and no priest appeared; none could be induced to appear. Copernicus, gentle, charitable, pious, one of the noblest gifts of God to religion as well as to science, was evidently still under the ban. Five years after that, his book was still standing on the Index of books prohibited to Christians. The edition of the Index published in 1819 was as inexorable toward the works of Copernicus and Galileo as its predecessors had been; but in the year 1820 came a crisis. Canon Settele, Professor of Astronomy at Rome, had written an elementary book in which the Copernican system was taken for granted. The Master of the Sacred Palace, Anfossi, as censor of the press, refused to allow the book to be printed unless Settele revised his work and treated the Copernican theory as merely a hypothesis. On this Settele appealed to Pope Pius VII, and the Pope referred the matter to the Congregation of the Holy Office. At last, on the 16th of August, 1820, it was decided that Settele might teach the Copernican system as established, and this decision was approved by the Pope. This aroused considerable discussion, but finally, on the 11th of September, 1822, the cardinals of the Holy Inquisition graciously agreed that "the printing and publication of works treating of the motion of the earth and the stability of the sun, in accordance with the general opinion of modern astronomers, is permitted at Rome." This decree was ratified by Pius VII, but it was not until thirteen years later, in 1835, that there was issued an edition of the Index from which the condemnation of works defending the double motion of the earth was left out. This was not a moment too soon, for, as if the previous proofs had not been sufficient, each of the motions of the earth was now absolutely demonstrated anew, so as to be recognised by the ordinary observer. The parallax of fixed stars, shown by Bessel as well as other noted astronomers in 1838, clinched forever the doctrine of the revolution of the earth around the sun, and in 1851 the great experiment of Foucault with the pendulum showed to the human eye the earth in motion around its own axis. To make the matter complete, this experiment was publicly made in one of the churches at Rome by the eminent astronomer, Father Secchi, of the Jesuits, in 1852--just two hundred and twenty years after the Jesuits had done so much to secure Galileo's condemnation.(75) (75) For good statements of the final action of the Church in the matter, see Gebler; also Zoeckler, ii, 352. See also Bertrand, Fondateurs de l'Astronomie moderne, p. 61; Flammarion, Vie de Copernic, chap. ix. As to the time when the decree of condemnation was repealed, there have been various pious attempts to make it earlier than the reality. Artaud, p. 307, cited in an apologetic article in the Dublin Review, September, 1865, says that Galileo's famous dialogue was published in 1714, at Padua, entire, and with the usual approbations. The same article also declares that in 1818, the ecclesiastical decrees were repealed by Pius VII in full Consistory. Whewell accepts this; but Cantu, an authority favourable to the Church, acknowledges that Copernicus's work remained on the Index as late as 1835 (Cantu, Histoire universelle, vol. xv, p. 483); and with this Th. Martin, not less favourable to the Church, but exceedingly careful as to the facts, agrees; and the most eminent authority of all, Prof. Reusch, of Bonn, in his Der Index der vorbotenen Bucher, Bonn, 1885, vol. ii, p. 396, confirms the above statement in the text. For a clear statement of Bradley's exquisite demonstration of the Copernican theory by reasonings upon the rapidity of light, etc., and Foucault's exhibition of the rotation of the earth by the pendulum experiment, see Hoefer, Histoire de l'Astronomie, pp. 492 et seq. For more recent proofs of the Copernican theory, by the discoveries of Bunsen, Bischoff, Benzenberg, and others, see Jevons, Principles of Science. VI. THE RETREAT OF THE CHURCH AFTER ITS VICTORY OVER GALILEO. Any history of the victory of astronomical science over dogmatic theology would be incomplete without some account of the retreat made by the Church from all its former positions in the Galileo case. The retreat of the Protestant theologians was not difficult. A little skilful warping of Scripture, a little skilful use of that time-honoured phrase, attributed to Cardinal Baronius, that the Bible is given to teach us, not how the heavens go, but how men go to heaven, and a free use of explosive rhetoric against the pursuing army of scientists, sufficed. But in the older Church it was far less easy. The retreat of the sacro-scientific army of Church apologists lasted through two centuries. In spite of all that has been said by these apologists, there no longer remains the shadow of a doubt that the papal infallibility was committed fully and irrevocably against the double revolution of the earth. As the documents of Galileo's trial now published show, Paul V, in 1616, pushed on with all his might the condemnation of Galileo and of the works of Copernicus and of all others teaching the motion of the earth around its own axis and around the sun. So, too, in the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, and in all the proceedings which led up to it and which followed it, Urban VIII was the central figure. Without his sanction no action could have been taken. True, the Pope did not formally sign the decree against the Copernican theory THEN; but this came later. In 1664 Alexander VII prefixed to the Index containing the condemnations of the works of Copernicus and Galileo and "all books which affirm the motion of the earth" a papal bull signed by himself, binding the contents of the Index upon the consciences of the faithful. This bull confirmed and approved in express terms, finally, decisively, and infallibly, the condemnation of "all books teaching the movement of the earth and the stability of the sun."(76) (76) See Rev. William W. Roberts, The Pontifical Decrees against the Doctrine of the Earth's Movement, London, 1885, p. 94; and for the text of the papal bull, Speculatores domus Israel, pp. 132, 133, see also St. George Mivart's article in the Nineteenth Century for July, 1885. For the authentic publication of the bull, see preface to the Index of 1664, where the bull appears, signed by the Pope. The Rev. Mr. Roberts and Mr. St. George Mivart are Roman Catholics and both acknowledge that the papal sanction was fully given. The position of the mother Church had been thus made especially difficult; and the first important move in retreat by the apologists was the statement that Galileo was condemned, not because he affirmed the motion of the earth, but because he supported it from Scripture. There was a slight appearance of truth in this. Undoubtedly, Galileo's letters to Castelli and the grand duchess, in which he attempted to show that his astronomical doctrines were not opposed to Scripture, gave a new stir to religious bigotry. For a considerable time, then, this quibble served its purpose; even a hundred and fifty years after Galileo's condemnation it was renewed by the Protestant Mallet du Pan, in his wish to gain favour from the older Church. But nothing can be more absurd, in the light of the original documents recently brought out of the Vatican archives, than to make this contention now. The letters of Galileo to Castelli and the Grand-Duchess were not published until after the condemnation; and, although the Archbishop of Pisa had endeavoured to use them against him, they were but casually mentioned in 1616, and entirely left out of view in 1633. What was condemned in 1616 by the Sacred Congregation held in the presence of Pope Paul V, as "ABSURD, FALSE IN THEOLOGY, AND HERETICAL, BECAUSE ABSOLUTELY CONTRARY TO HOLY SCRIPTURE," was the proposition that "THE SUN IS THE CENTRE ABOUT WHICH THE EARTH REVOLVES"; and what was condemned as "ABSURD, FALSE IN PHILOSOPHY, AND FROM A THEOLOGIC POINT OF VIEW, AT LEAST, OPPOSED TO THE TRUE FAITH," was the proposition that "THE EARTH IS NOT THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE AND IMMOVABLE, BUT HAS A DIURNAL MOTION." And again, what Galileo was made, by express order of Pope Urban, and by the action of the Inquisition under threat of torture, to abjure in 1633, was "THE ERROR AND HERESY OF THE MOVEMENT OF THE EARTH." What the Index condemned under sanction of the bull issued by Alexander VII in 1664 was, "ALL BOOKS TEACHING THE MOVEMENT OF THE EARTH AND THE STABILITY OF THE SUN." What the Index, prefaced by papal bulls, infallibly binding its contents upon the consciences of the faithful, for nearly two hundred years steadily condemned was, "ALL BOOKS WHICH AFFIRM THE MOTION OF THE EARTH." Not one of these condemnations was directed against Galileo "for reconciling his ideas with Scripture."(77) (77) For the original trial documents, copied carefully from the Vatican manuscripts, see the Roman Catholic authority, L'Epinois, especially p. 35, where the principal document is given in its original Latin; see also Gebler, Die Acten des galilei'schen Processes, for still more complete copies of the same documents. For minute information regarding these documents and their publication, see Favaro, Miscellanea Galileana Inedita, forming vol. xxii, part iii, of the Memoirs of the Venetian Institute for 1887, and especially pp. 891 and following. Having been dislodged from this point, the Church apologists sought cover under the statement that Galileo was condemned not for heresy, but for contumacy and want of respect toward the Pope. There was a slight chance, also, for this quibble: no doubt Urban VIII, one of the haughtiest of pontiffs, was induced by Galileo's enemies to think that he had been treated with some lack of proper etiquette: first, by Galileo's adhesion to his own doctrines after his condemnation in 1616; and, next, by his supposed reference in the Dialogue of 1632 to the arguments which the Pope had used against him. But it would seem to be a very poor service rendered to the doctrine of papal infallibility to claim that a decision so immense in its consequences could be influenced by the personal resentment of the reigning pontiff. Again, as to the first point, the very language of the various sentences shows the folly of this assertion; for these sentences speak always of "heresy" and never of "contumacy." As to the last point, the display of the original documents settled that forever. They show Galileo from first to last as most submissive toward the Pope, and patient under the papal arguments and exactions. He had, indeed, expressed his anger at times against his traducers; but to hold this the cause of the judgment against him is to degrade the whole proceedings, and to convict Paul V, Urban VIII, Bellarmin, the other theologians, and the Inquisition, of direct falsehood, since they assigned entirely different reasons for their conduct. From this position, therefore, the assailants retreated.(78) (78) The invention of the "contumacy" quibble seems due to Monsignor Marini, who appears also to have manipulated the original documents to prove it. Even Whewell was evidently somewhat misled by him, but Whewell wrote before L'Epinois had shown all the documents, and under the supposition that Marini was an honest man. The next rally was made about the statement that the persecution of Galileo was the result of a quarrel between Aristotelian professors on one side and professors favouring the experimental method on the other. But this position was attacked and carried by a very simple statement. If the divine guidance of the Church is such that it can be dragged into a professorial squabble, and made the tool of a faction in bringing about a most disastrous condemnation of a proved truth, how did the Church at that time differ from any human organization sunk into decrepitude, managed nominally by simpletons, but really by schemers? If that argument be true, the condition of the Church was even worse than its enemies have declared it; and amid the jeers of an unfeeling world the apologists sought new shelter. The next point at which a stand was made was the assertion that the condemnation of Galileo was "provisory"; but this proved a more treacherous shelter than the others. The wording of the decree of condemnation itself is a sufficient answer to this claim. When doctrines have been solemnly declared, as those of Galileo were solemnly declared under sanction of the highest authority in the Church, "contrary to the sacred Scriptures," "opposed to the true faith," and "false and absurd in theology and philosophy"--to say that such declarations are "provisory" is to say that the truth held by the Church is not immutable; from this, then, the apologists retreated.(79) (79) This argument also seems to have been foisted upon the world by the wily Monsignor Marini. Still another contention was made, in some respects more curious than any other: it was, mainly, that Galileo "was no more a victim of Catholics than of Protestants; for they more than the Catholic theologians impelled the Pope to the action taken."(80) (80) See the Rev. A. M. Kirsch on Professor Huxley and Evolution, in The American Catholic Quarterly, October, 1877. The article is, as a whole, remarkably fair-minded, and in the main, just, as to the Protestant attitude, and as to the causes underlying the whole action against Galileo. But if Protestantism could force the papal hand in a matter of this magnitude, involving vast questions of belief and far-reaching questions of policy, what becomes of "inerrancy"--of special protection and guidance of the papal authority in matters of faith? While this retreat from position to position was going on, there was a constant discharge of small-arms, in the shape of innuendoes, hints, and sophistries: every effort was made to blacken Galileo's private character: the irregularities of his early life were dragged forth, and stress was even laid upon breaches of etiquette; but this succeeded so poorly that even as far back as 1850 it was thought necessary to cover the retreat by some more careful strategy. This new strategy is instructive. The original documents of the Galileo trial had been brought during the Napoleonic conquests to Paris; but in 1846 they were returned to Rome by the French Government, on the express pledge by the papal authorities that they should be published. In 1850, after many delays on various pretexts, the long-expected publication appeared. The personage charged with presenting them to the world was Monsignor Marini. This ecclesiastic was of a kind which has too often afflicted both the Church and the world at large. Despite the solemn promise of the papal court, the wily Marini became the instrument of the Roman authorities in evading the promise. By suppressing a document here, and interpolating a statement there, he managed to give plausible standing-ground for nearly every important sophistry ever broached to save the infallibility of the Church and destroy the reputation of Galileo. He it was who supported the idea that Galileo was "condemned not for heresy, but for contumacy." The first effect of Monsignor Marini's book seemed useful in covering the retreat of the Church apologists. Aided by him, such vigorous writers as Ward were able to throw up temporary intrenchments between the Roman authorities and the indignation of the world. But some time later came an investigator very different from Monsignor Marini. This was a Frenchman, M. L'Epinois. Like Marini, L'Epinois was devoted to the Church; but, unlike Marini, he could not lie. Having obtained access in 1867 to the Galileo documents at the Vatican, he published several of the most important, without suppression or pious-fraudulent manipulation. This made all the intrenchments based upon Marini's statements untenable. Another retreat had to be made. And now came the most desperate effort of all. The apologetic army, reviving an idea which the popes and the Church had spurned for centuries, declared that the popes AS POPES had never condemned the doctrines of Copernicus and Galileo; that they had condemned them as men simply; that therefore the Church had never been committed to them; that the condemnation was made by the cardinals of the inquisition and index; and that the Pope had evidently been restrained by interposition of Providence from signing their condemnation. Nothing could show the desperation of the retreating party better than jugglery like this. The fact is, that in the official account of the condemnation by Bellarmin, in 1616, he declares distinctly that he makes this condemnation "in the name of His Holiness the Pope."(81) (81) See the citation from the Vatican manuscript given in Gebler, p. 78. Again, from Pope Urban downward, among the Church authorities of the seventeenth century the decision was always acknowledged to be made by the Pope and the Church. Urban VIII spoke of that of 1616 as made by Pope Paul V and the Church, and of that of 1633 as made by himself and the Church. Pope Alexander VII in 1664, in his bull Speculatores, solemnly sanctioned the condemnation of all books affirming the earth's movement.(82) (82) For references by Urban VIII to the condemnation as made by Pope Paul V see pp. 136, 144, and elsewhere in Martin, who much against his will is forced to allow this. See also Roberts, Pontifical decrees against the Earth's Movement, and St. George Mivart's article, as above quoted; also Reusch, Index der verbotenen Bucher, Bonn, 1885, vol. ii, pp. 29 et seq. When Gassendi attempted to raise the point that the decision against Copernicus and Galileo was not sanctioned by the Church as such, an eminent theological authority, Father Lecazre, rector of the College of Dijon, publicly contradicted him, and declared that it "was not certain cardinals, but the supreme authority of the Church," that had condemned Galileo; and to this statement the Pope and other Church authorities gave consent either openly or by silence. When Descartes and others attempted to raise the same point, they were treated with contempt. Father Castelli, who had devoted himself to Galileo, and knew to his cost just what the condemnation meant and who made it, takes it for granted, in his letter to the papal authorities, that it was made by the Church. Cardinal Querenghi, in his letters; the ambassador Guicciardini, in his dispatches; Polacco, in his refutation; the historian Viviani, in his biography of Galileo--all writing under Church inspection and approval at the time, took the view that the Pope and the Church condemned Galileo, and this was never denied at Rome. The Inquisition itself, backed by the greatest theologian of the time (Bellarmin), took the same view. Not only does he declare that he makes the condemnation "in the name of His Holiness the Pope," but we have the Roman Index, containing the condemnation for nearly two hundred years, prefaced by a solemn bull of the reigning Pope binding this condemnation on the consciences of the whole Church, and declaring year after year that "all books which affirm the motion of the earth" are damnable. To attempt to face all this, added to the fact that Galileo was required to abjure "the heresy of the movement of the earth" by written order of the Pope, was soon seen to be impossible. Against the assertion that the Pope was not responsible we have all this mass of testimony, and the bull of Alexander VII in 1664.(83) (83) For Lecazre's answer to Gassendi, see Martin, pp. 146, 147. For the attempt to make the crimes of Galileo breach of etiquette, see Dublin Review, as above. Whewell, vol. i, p. 283. Citation from Marini: "Galileo was punished for trifling with the authorities, to which he refused to submit, and was punished for obstinate contumacy, not heresy." The sufficient answer to all this is that the words of the inflexible sentence designating the condemned books are "libri omnes qui affirmant telluris motum." See Bertrand, p. 59. As to the idea that "Galileo was punished for not his opinion, but for basing it on Scripture," the answer may be found in the Roman Index of 1704, in which are noted for condemnation "Libri omnes docentes mobilitatem terrae et immobilitatem solis." For the way in which, when it was found convenient in argument, Church apologists insisted that it WAS "the Supreme Chief of the Church by a pontifical decree, and not certain cardinals," who condemned Galileo and his doctrine, see Father Lecazre's letter to Gassendi, in Flammarion, Pluralite des Mondes, p. 427, and Urban VIII's own declarations as given by Martin. For the way in which, when necessary, Church apologists asserted the very contrary of this, declaring that it was "issued in a doctrinal degree of the Congregation of the Index, and NOT as the Holy Father's teaching," see Dublin Review, September, 1865. This contention, then, was at last utterly given up by honest Catholics themselves. In 1870 a Roman Catholic clergy man in England, the Rev. Mr. Roberts, evidently thinking that the time had come to tell the truth, published a book entitled The Pontifical Decrees against the Earth's Movement, and in this exhibited the incontrovertible evidences that the papacy had committed itself and its infallibility fully against the movement of the earth. This Catholic clergyman showed from the original record that Pope Paul V, in 1616, had presided over the tribunal condemning the doctrine of the earth's movement, and ordering Galileo to give up the opinion. He showed that Pope Urban VIII, in 1633, pressed on, directed, and promulgated the final condemnation, making himself in all these ways responsible for it. And, finally, he showed that Pope Alexander VII, in 1664, by his bull--Speculatores domus Israel--attached to the Index, condemning "all books which affirm the motion of the earth," had absolutely pledged the papal infallibility against the earth's movement. He also confessed that under the rules laid down by the highest authorities in the Church, and especially by Sixtus V and Pius IX, there was no escape from this conclusion. Various theologians attempted to evade the force of the argument. Some, like Dr. Ward and Bouix, took refuge in verbal niceties; some, like Dr. Jeremiah Murphy, comforted themselves with declamation. The only result was, that in 1885 came another edition of the Rev. Mr. Roberts's work, even more cogent than the first; and, besides this, an essay by that eminent Catholic, St. George Mivart, acknowledging the Rev. Mr. Roberts's position to be impregnable, and declaring virtually that the Almighty allowed Pope and Church to fall into complete error regarding the Copernican theory, in order to teach them that science lies outside their province, and that the true priesthood of scientific truth rests with scientific investigators alone.(84) (84) For the crushing answer by two eminent Roman Catholics to the sophistries cited--an answer which does infinitely more credit to the older Church that all the perverted ingenuity used in concealing the truth or breaking the force of it--see Roberts and St. George Mivart, as already cited. In spite, then, of all casuistry and special pleading, this sturdy honesty ended the controversy among Catholics themselves, so far as fair-minded men are concerned. In recalling it at this day there stand out from its later phases two efforts at compromise especially instructive, as showing the embarrassment of militant theology in the nineteenth century. The first of these was made by John Henry Newman in the days when he was hovering between the Anglican and Roman Churches. In one of his sermons before the University of Oxford he spoke as follows: "Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary, and science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at rest. How can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth till we know what motion is? If our idea of motion is but an accidental result of our present senses, neither proposition is true and both are true: neither true philosophically; both true for certain practical purposes in the system in which they are respectively found." In all anti-theological literature there is no utterance more hopelessly skeptical. And for what were the youth of Oxford led into such bottomless depths of disbelief as to any real existence of truth or any real foundation for it? Simply to save an outworn system of interpretation into which the gifted preacher happened to be born. The other utterance was suggested by De Bonald and developed in the Dublin Review, as is understood, by one of Newman's associates. This argument was nothing less than an attempt to retreat under the charge of deception against the Almighty himself. It is as follows: "But it may well be doubted whether the Church did retard the progress of scientific truth. What retarded it was the circumstance that God has thought fit to express many texts of Scripture in words which have every appearance of denying the earth's motion. But it is God who did this, not the Church; and, moreover, since he saw fit so to act as to retard the progress of scientific truth, it would be little to her discredit, even if it were true, that she had followed his example." This argument, like Mr. Gosse's famous attempt to reconcile geology to Genesis--by supposing that for some inscrutable purpose God deliberately deceived the thinking world by giving to the earth all the appearances of development through long periods of time, while really creating it in six days, each of an evening and a morning--seems only to have awakened the amazed pity of thinking men. This, like the argument of Newman, was a last desperate effort of Anglican and Roman divines to save something from the wreckage of dogmatic theology.(85) (85) For the quotation from Newman, see his Sermons on the Theory of Religious Belief, sermon xiv, cited by Bishop Goodwin in Contemporary Review for January, 1892. For the attempt to take the blame off the shoulders of both Pope and cardinals and place it upon the Almighty, see the article above cited, in the Dublin Review, September 1865, p. 419 and July, 1871, pp. 157 et seq. For a good summary of the various attempts, and for replies to them in a spirit of judicial fairness, see Th. Martin, Vie de Galilee, though there is some special pleading to save the infallibility of the Pope and Church. The bibliography at the close is very valuable. For details of Mr. Gosse's theory, as developed in his Omphalos, see the chapter on Geology in this work. As to a still later attempt, see Wegg-Prosser, Galileo and his Judges, London, 1889, the main thing in it being an attempt to establish, against the honest and honourable concessions of Catholics like Roberts and Mivart, sundry far-fetched and wire-drawn distinctions between dogmatic and disciplinary bulls--an attempt which will only deepen the distrust of straightforward reasoners. The author's point of view is stated in the words, "I have maintained that the Church has a right to lay her restraining hand on the speculations of natural science" (p. 167). All these well-meaning defenders of the faith but wrought into the hearts of great numbers of thinking men the idea that there is a necessary antagonism between science and religion. Like the landsman who lashes himself to the anchor of the sinking ship, they simply attached Christianity by the strongest cords of logic which they could spin to these mistaken ideas in science, and, could they have had their way, the advance of knowledge would have ingulfed both together. On the other hand, what had science done for religion? Simply this: Copernicus, escaping persecution only by death; Giordano Bruno, burned alive as a monster of impiety; Galileo, imprisoned and humiliated as the worst of misbelievers; Kepler, accused of "throwing Christ's kingdom into confusion with his silly fancies"; Newton, bitterly attacked for "dethroning Providence," gave to religion stronger foundations and more ennobling conceptions. Under the old system, that princely astronomer, Alphonso of Castile, seeing the inadequacy of the Ptolemaic theory, yet knowing no other, startled Europe with the blasphemy that, if he had been present at creation, he could have suggested a better order of the heavenly bodies. Under the new system, Kepler, filled with a religious spirit, exclaimed, "I do think the thoughts of God." The difference in religious spirit between these two men marks the conquest made in this long struggle by Science for Religion.(86) (86) As a pendant to this ejaculation of Kepler may be cited the words of Linnaeus: "Deum ominpotentem a tergo transeuntem vidi et obstupui." Nothing is more unjust than to cast especial blame for all this resistance to science upon the Roman Church. The Protestant Church, though rarely able to be so severe, has been more blameworthy. The persecution of Galileo and his compeers by the older Church was mainly at the beginning of the seventeenth century; the persecution of Robertson Smith, and Winchell, and Woodrow, and Toy, and the young professors at Beyrout, by various Protestant authorities, was near the end of the nineteenth century. Those earlier persecutions by Catholicism were strictly in accordance with principles held at that time by all religionists, Catholic and Protestant, throughout the world; these later persecutions by Protestants were in defiance of principles which all Protestants to-day hold or pretend to hold, and none make louder claim to hold them than the very sects which persecuted these eminent Christian men of our day, men whose crime was that they were intelligent enough to accept the science of their time, and honest enough to acknowledge it. Most unjustly, then, would Protestantism taunt Catholicism for excluding knowledge of astronomical truths from European Catholic universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while real knowledge of geological and biological and anthropological truth is denied or pitifully diluted in so many American Protestant colleges and universities in the nineteenth century. Nor has Protestantism the right to point with scorn to the Catholic Index, and to lay stress on the fact that nearly every really important book in the last three centuries has been forbidden by it, so long as young men in so many American Protestant universities and colleges are nursed with "ecclesiastical pap" rather than with real thought, and directed to the works of "solemnly constituted impostors," or to sundry "approved courses of reading," while they are studiously kept aloof from such leaders in modern thought as Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Draper, and Lecky. It may indeed be justly claimed by Protestantism that some of the former strongholds of her bigotry have become liberalized; but, on the other hand, Catholicism can point to the fact that Pope Leo XIII, now happily reigning, has made a noble change as regards open dealing with documents. The days of Monsignor Marini, it may be hoped, are gone. The Vatican Library, with its masses of historical material, has been thrown open to Protestant and Catholic scholars alike, and this privilege has been freely used by men representing all shades of religious thought. As to the older errors, the whole civilized world was at fault, Protestant as well as Catholic. It was not the fault of religion; it was the fault of that short-sighted linking of theological dogmas to scriptural texts which, in utter defiance of the words and works of the Blessed Founder of Christianity, narrow-minded, loud-voiced men are ever prone to substitute for religion. Justly is it said by one of the most eminent among contemporary Anglican divines, that "it is because they have mistaken the dawn for a conflagration that theologians have so often been foes of light."(87) (87) For an exceedingly striking statement, by a Roman Catholic historian of genius, as to the POPULAR demand for persecution and the pressure of the lower strata in ecclesiastical organizations for cruel measures, see Balmes's Le Protestantisme compare au Catholicisme, etc., fourth edition, Paris, 1855, vol. ii. Archbishop Spaulding has something of the same sort in his Miscellanies. L'Epinois, Galilee, p. 22 et seq., stretches this as far as possible to save the reputation of the Church in the Galileo matter. As to the various branches of the Protestant Church in England and the United States, it is a matter of notoriety that the smug, well-to-do laymen, whether elders, deacons, or vestrymen, are, as a rule, far more prone to heresy-hunting than are their better educated pastors. As to the cases of Messrs. Winchell, Woodrow, Toy, and all the professors at Beyrout, with details, see the chapter in this series on The Fall of Man and Anthropology. Among Protestant historians who have recently been allowed full and free examination of the treasures in the Vatican Library, and even those involving questions between Catholicism and Protestantism, are von Sybel, of Berlin, and Philip Schaff, of New York. It should be added that the latter went with commendatory letters from eminent prelates in the Catholic Church in America and Europe. For the closing citation, see Canon Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 432. CHAPTER IV. FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW IN THE HEAVENS. I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. Few things in the evolution of astronomy are more suggestive than the struggle between the theological and the scientific doctrine regarding comets--the passage from the conception of them as fire-balls flung by an angry God for the purpose of scaring a wicked world, to a recognition of them as natural in origin and obedient to law in movement. Hardly anything throws a more vivid light upon the danger of wresting texts of Scripture to preserve ideas which observation and thought have superseded, and upon the folly of arraying ecclesiastical power against scientific discovery.(88) (88) The present study, after its appearance in the Popular Science Monthly as a "new chapter in the Warfare of Science," was revised and enlarged to nearly its present form, and read before the American Historical Association, among whose papers it was published, in 1887, under the title of A History of the Doctrine of Comets. Out of the ancient world had come a mass of beliefs regarding comets, meteors, and eclipses; all these were held to be signs displayed from heaven for the warning of mankind. Stars and meteors were generally thought to presage happy events, especially the births of gods, heroes, and great men. So firmly rooted was this idea that we constantly find among the ancient nations traditions of lights in the heavens preceding the birth of persons of note. The sacred books of India show that the births of Crishna and of Buddha were announced by such heavenly lights.(89) The sacred books of China tell of similar appearances at the births of Yu, the founder of the first dynasty, and of the inspired sage, Lao-tse. According to the Jewish legends, a star appeared at the birth of Moses, and was seen by the Magi of Egypt, who informed the king; and when Abraham was born an unusual star appeared in the east. The Greeks and Romans cherished similar traditions. A heavenly light accompanied the birth of Aesculapius, and the births of various Caesars were heralded in like manner.(90) (89) For Crishna, see Cox, Aryan Mythology, vol. ii, p. 133; the Vishnu Purana (Wilson's translation), book v, chap. iv. As to lights at the birth, or rather at the conception, of Buddha, see Bunsen, Angel Messiah, pp. 22,23; Alabaster, Wheel of the Law (illustrations of Buddhism), p. 102; Edwin Arnold, Light of Asia; Bp. Bigandet, Life of Gaudama, the Burmese Buddha, p. 30; Oldenberg, Buddha (English translation), part i, chap. ii. (90) For Chinese legends regarding stars at the birth of Yu and Lao-tse, see Thornton, History of China, vol. i, p. 137; also Pingre, Cometographie, p. 245. Regarding stars at the birth of Moses and Abraham, see Calmet, Fragments, part viii; Baring-Gould, Legends of Old Testament Characters, chap. xxiv; Farrar, Life of Christ, chap. iii. As to the Magi, see Higgins, Anacalypsis; Hooykaas, Ort, and Kuenen, Bible for Learners, vol. iii. For Greek and Roman traditions, see Bell, Pantheon, s. v. Aesculapius and Atreus; Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. i, pp. 151, 590; Farrar, Life of Christ (American edition), p. 52; Cox, Tales of Ancient Greece, pp. 41, 61, 62; Higgins, Anacalypsis, vol. i, p. 322; also Suetonius, Caes., Julius, p.88, Claud., p. 463; Seneca, Nat. Quaest, vol. 1, p. 1; Virgil, Ecl., vol. ix, p. 47; as well as Ovid, Pliny, and others. The same conception entered into our Christian sacred books. Of all the legends which grew in such luxuriance and beauty about the cradle of Jesus of Nazareth, none appeals more directly to the highest poetic feeling than that given by one of the evangelists, in which a star, rising in the east, conducted the wise men to the manger where the Galilean peasant-child--the Hope of Mankind, the Light of the World--was lying in poverty and helplessness. Among the Mohammedans we have a curious example of the same tendency toward a kindly interpretation of stars and meteors, in the belief of certain Mohammedan teachers that meteoric showers are caused by good angels hurling missiles to drive evil angels out of the sky. Eclipses were regarded in a very different light, being supposed to express the distress of Nature at earthly calamities. The Greeks believed that darkness overshadowed the earth at the deaths of Prometheus, Atreus, Hercules, Aesculapius, and Alexander the Great. The Roman legends held that at the death of Romulus there was darkness for six hours. In the history of the Caesars occur portents of all three kinds; for at the death of Julius the earth was shrouded in darkness, the birth of Augustus was heralded by a star, and the downfall of Nero by a comet. So, too, in one of the Christian legends clustering about the crucifixion, darkness overspread the earth from the sixth to the ninth hour. Neither the silence regarding it of the only evangelist who claims to have been present, nor the fact that observers like Seneca and Pliny, who, though they carefully described much less striking occurrences of the same sort and in more remote regions, failed to note any such darkness even in Judea, have availed to shake faith in an account so true to the highest poetic instincts of humanity. This view of the relations between Nature and man continued among both Jews and Christians. According to Jewish tradition, darkness overspread the earth for three days when the books of the Law were profaned by translation into Greek. Tertullian thought an eclipse an evidence of God's wrath against unbelievers. Nor has this mode of thinking ceased in modern times. A similar claim was made at the execution of Charles I; and Increase Mather thought an eclipse in Massachusetts an evidence of the grief of Nature at the death of President Chauncey, of Harvard College. Archbishop Sandys expected eclipses to be the final tokens of woe at the destruction of the world, and traces of this feeling have come down to our own time. The quaint story of the Connecticut statesman who, when his associates in the General Assembly were alarmed by an eclipse of the sun, and thought it the beginning of the Day of Judgment, quietly ordered in candles, that he might in any case be found doing his duty, marks probably the last noteworthy appearance of the old belief in any civilized nation.(91) (91) For Hindu theories, see Alabaster, Wheel of the Law, 11. For Greek and Roman legends, See Higgins, Anacalypsis, vol. i, pp. 616, 617.; also Suetonius, Caes., Julius, p. 88, Claud., p. 46; Seneca, Quaest. Nat., vol. i, p. 1, vol. vii, p. 17; Pliny, Hist. Nat., vol. ii, p. 25; Tacitus, Ann., vol. xiv, p. 22; Josephus, Antiq., vol. xiv, p. 12; and the authorities above cited. For the tradition of the Jews regarding the darkness of three days, see citation in Renan, Histoire du Peuple Israel, vol. iv, chap. iv. For Tertullian's belief regarding the significance of an eclipse, see the Ad Scapulum, chap. iii, in Migne, Patrolog. Lat., vol. i, p. 701. For the claim regarding Charles I, see a sermon preached before Charles II, cited by Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, p. 65. Mather thought, too, that it might have something to do with the death of sundry civil functionaries of the colonies; see his Discourse concerning comets, 1682. For Archbishop Sandy's belief, see his eighteenth sermon (in Parker Soc. Publications). The story of Abraham Davenport has been made familiar by the poem of Whittier. In these beliefs regarding meteors and eclipses there was little calculated to do harm by arousing that superstitious terror which is the worst breeding-bed of cruelty. Far otherwise was it with the belief regarding comets. During many centuries it gave rise to the direst superstition and fanaticism. The Chaldeans alone among the ancient peoples generally regarded comets without fear, and thought them bodies wandering as harmless as fishes in the sea; the Pythagoreans alone among philosophers seem to have had a vague idea of them as bodies returning at fixed periods of time; and in all antiquity, so far as is known, one man alone, Seneca, had the scientific instinct and prophetic inspiration to give this idea definite shape, and to declare that the time would come when comets would be found to move in accordance with natural law. Here and there a few strong men rose above the prevailing superstition. The Emperor Vespasian tried to laugh it down, and insisted that a certain comet in his time could not betoken his death, because it was hairy, and he bald; but such scoffing produced little permanent effect, and the prophecy of Seneca was soon forgotten. These and similar isolated utterances could not stand against the mass of opinion which upheld the doctrine that comets are "signs and wonders."(92) (92) For terror caused in Rome by comets, see Pingre, Cometographie, pp. 165, 166. For the Chaldeans, see Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 10 et seq., and p. 181 et seq.; also Pingre, chap. ii. For the Pythagorean notions, see citations from Plutarch in Costard, History of Astronomy, p. 283. For Seneca's prediction, see Guillemin, World of Comets (translated by Glaisher), pp. 4, 5; also Watson, On Comets, p. 126. For this feeling in antiquity generally, see the preliminary chapters of the two works last cited. The belief that every comet is a ball of fire flung from the right hand of an angry God to warn the grovelling dwellers of earth was received into the early Church, transmitted through the Middle Ages to the Reformation period, and in its transmission was made all the more precious by supposed textual proofs from Scripture. The great fathers of the Church committed themselves unreservedly to it. In the third century Origen, perhaps the most influential of the earlier fathers of the universal Church in all questions between science and faith, insisted that comets indicate catastrophes and the downfall of empires and worlds. Bede, so justly revered by the English Church, declared in the eighth century that "comets portend revolutions of kingdoms, pestilence, war, winds, or heat"; and John of Damascus, his eminent contemporary in the Eastern Church, took the same view. Rabanus Maurus, the great teacher of Europe in the ninth century, an authority throughout the Middle Ages, adopted Bede's opinion fully. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great light of the universal Church in the thirteenth century, whose works the Pope now reigning commends as the centre and source of all university instruction, accepted and handed down the same opinion. The sainted Albert the Great, the most noted genius of the medieval Church in natural science, received and developed this theory. These men and those who followed them founded upon scriptural texts and theological reasonings a system that for seventeen centuries defied every advance of thought.(93) (93) For Origen, se his De Princip., vol. i, p. 7; also Maury, Leg. pieuses, p. 203, note. For Bede and others, see De Nat., vol. xxiv; Joh. Dam., De Fid. Or.,vol. ii, p. 7; Maury, La Magie et l'Astronomie, pp. 181, 182. For Albertus Magnus, see his Opera, vol. i, tr. iii, chaps. x, xi. Among the texts of Scripture on which this belief rested was especially Joel ii, 30, 31. The main evils thence arising were three: the paralysis of self-help, the arousing of fanaticism, and the strengthening of ecclesiastical and political tyranny. The first two of these evils--the paralysis of self-help and the arousing of fanaticism--are evident throughout all these ages. At the appearance of a comet we constantly see all Christendom, from pope to peasant, instead of striving to avert war by wise statesmanship, instead of striving to avert pestilence by observation and reason, instead of striving to avert famine by skilful economy, whining before fetiches, trying to bribe them to remove these signs of God's wrath, and planning to wreak this supposed wrath of God upon misbelievers. As to the third of these evils--the strengthening of ecclesiastical and civil despotism--examples appear on every side. It was natural that hierarchs and monarchs whose births were announced by stars, or whose deaths were announced by comets, should regard themselves as far above the common herd, and should be so regarded by mankind; passive obedience was thus strengthened, and the most monstrous assumptions of authority were considered simply as manifestations of the Divine will. Shakespeare makes Calphurnia say to Caesar: "When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes." Galeazzo, the tyrant of Milan, expressing satisfaction on his deathbed that his approaching end was of such importance as to be heralded by a comet, is but a type of many thus encouraged to prey upon mankind; and Charles V, one of the most powerful monarchs the world has known, abdicating under fear of the comet of 1556, taking refuge in the monastery of San Yuste, and giving up the best of his vast realms to such a scribbling bigot as Philip II, furnishes an example even more striking.(94) (94) For Caesar, see Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act ii, sc. 2. For Galeazzo, see Guillemin, World of Comets, p. 19. For Charles V, see Prof. Wolf's essay in the Monatschrift des wissenschaftlichen Vereins, Zurich, 1857, p. 228. But for the retention of this belief there was a moral cause. Myriads of good men in the Christian Church down to a recent period saw in the appearance of comets not merely an exhibition of "signs in the heavens" foretold in Scripture, but also Divine warnings of vast value to humanity as incentives to repentance and improvement of life-warnings, indeed, so precious that they could not be spared without danger to the moral government of the world. And this belief in the portentous character of comets as an essential part of the Divine government, being, as it was thought, in full accord with Scripture, was made for centuries a source of terror to humanity. To say nothing of examples in the earlier periods, comets in the tenth century especially increased the distress of all Europe. In the middle of the eleventh century a comet was thought to accompany the death of Edward the Confessor and to presage the Norman conquest; the traveller in France to-day may see this belief as it was then wrought into the Bayeux tapestry.(95) (95) For evidences of this widespread terror, see chronicles of Raoul Glaber, Guillaume de Nangis, William of Malmesbury, Florence of Worcester, Ordericus Vitalis, et al., passim, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (in the Rolls Series). For very thrilling pictures of this horror in England, see Freeman, Norman Conquest, vol. iii, pp. 640-644, and William Rufus, vol. ii, p. 118. For the Bayeau tapestry, see Bruce, Bayeux Tapestry Elucidated, plate vii and p. 86; also Guillemin, World of Comets, p. 24. There is a large photographic copy, in the South Kensington Museum at London, of the original, wrought, as is generally believed, by the wife of William the Conqueror and her ladies, and is still preserved in the town museum at Bayeux. Nearly every decade of years throughout the Middle Ages saw Europe plunged into alarm by appearances of this sort, but the culmination seems to have been reached in 1456. At that time the Turks, after a long effort, had made good their footing in Europe. A large statesmanship or generalship might have kept them out; but, while different religious factions were disputing over petty shades of dogma, they had advanced, had taken Constantinople, and were evidently securing their foothold. Now came the full bloom of this superstition. A comet appeared. The Pope of that period, Calixtus III, though a man of more than ordinary ability, was saturated with the ideas of his time. Alarmed at this monster, if we are to believe the contemporary historian, this infallible head of the Church solemnly "decreed several days of prayer for the averting of the wrath of God, that whatever calamity impended might be turned from the Christians and against the Turks." And, that all might join daily in this petition, there was then established that midday Angelus which has ever since called good Catholics to prayer against the powers of evil. Then, too, was incorporated into a litany the plea, "From the Turk and the comet, good Lord, deliver us." Never was papal intercession less effective; for the Turk has held Constantinople from that day to this, while the obstinate comet, being that now known under the name of Halley, has returned imperturbably at short periods ever since.(96) (96) The usual statement is, that Calixtus excommunicated the comet by a bull, and this is accepted by Arago, Grant, Hoefer, Guillemin, Watson, and many historians of astronomy. Hence the parallel is made on a noted occasion by President Lincoln. No such bull, however, is to be found in the published Bulleria, and that establishing the Angelus (as given by Raynaldus in the Annales Eccl.) contains no mention of the comet. But the authority of Platina (in his Vitae Pontificum, Venice, 1479, sub Calistus III) who was not only in Rome at the time, but when he wrote his history, archivist of the Vatican, is final as to the Pope's attitude. Platina's authority was never questioned until modern science changed the ideas of the world. The recent attempt of Pastor (in his Geschichte der Papste) to pooh-pooh down the whole matter is too evident an evasion to carry weight with those who know how even the most careful histories have to be modified to suit the views of the censorship at Rome. But the superstition went still further. It became more and more incorporated into what was considered "scriptural science" and "sound learning." The encyclopedic summaries, in which the science of the Middle Ages and the Reformation period took form, furnish abundant proofs of this. Yet scientific observation was slowly undermining this structure. The inspired prophecy of Seneca had not been forgotten. Even as far back as the ninth century, in the midst of the sacred learning so abundant at the court of Charlemagne and his successors, we find a scholar protesting against the accepted doctrine. In the thirteenth century we have a mild question by Albert the Great as to the supposed influence of comets upon individuals; but the prevailing theological current was too strong, and he finally yielded to it in this as in so many other things. So, too, in the sixteenth century, we have Copernicus refusing to accept the usual theory, Paracelsus writing to Zwingli against it, and Julius Caesar Scaliger denouncing it as "ridiculous folly."(97) (97) As to encyclopedic summaries, see Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Naturale, and the various editions of Reisch's Margarita Philosophica. For Charlemagne's time, see Champion, La Fin du Monde, p. 156; Leopardi, Errori Popolari, p. 165. As to Albert the Great's question, see Heller, Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, p. 188. As to scepticism in the sixteenth century, see Champion, La Fin du Monde, pp. 155, 156; and for Scaliger, Dudith's book, cited below. At first this scepticism only aroused the horror of theologians and increased the vigour of ecclesiastics; both asserted the theological theory of comets all the more strenuously as based on scriptural truth. During the sixteenth century France felt the influence of one of her greatest men on the side of this superstition. Jean Bodin, so far before his time in political theories, was only thoroughly abreast of it in religious theories: the same reverence for the mere letter of Scripture which made him so fatally powerful in supporting the witchcraft delusion, led him to support this theological theory of comets--but with a difference: he thought them the souls of men, wandering in space, bringing famine, pestilence, and war. Not less strong was the same superstition in England. Based upon mediaeval theology, it outlived the revival of learning. From a multitude of examples a few may be selected as typical. Early in the sixteenth century Polydore Virgil, an ecclesiastic of the unreformed Church, alludes, in his English History, to the presage of the death of the Emperor Constantine by a comet as to a simple matter of fact; and in his work on prodigies he pushes this superstition to its most extreme point, exhibiting comets as preceding almost every form of calamity. In 1532, just at the transition period from the old Church to the new, Cranmer, paving the way to his archbishopric, writes from Germany to Henry VIII, and says of the comet then visible: "What strange things these tokens do signify to come hereafter, God knoweth; for they do not lightly appear but against some great matter." Twenty years later Bishop Latimer, in an Advent sermon, speaks of eclipses, rings about the sun, and the like, as signs of the approaching end of the world.(98) (98) For Bodin, see Theatr., lib. ii, cited by Pingre, vol. i, p. 45; also a vague citation in Baudrillart, Bodin et son Temps, p. 360. For Polydore Virgil, see English History, p. 97 (in Camden Society Publications). For Cranmer, see Remains, vol. ii, p. 535 (in Parker Society Publications). For Latimer, see Sermons, second Sunday in Advent, 1552. In 1580, under Queen Elizabeth, there was set forth an "order of prayer to avert God's wrath from us, threatened by the late terrible earthquake, to be used in all parish churches." In connection with this there was also commended to the faithful "a godly admonition for the time present"; and among the things referred to as evidence of God's wrath are comets, eclipses, and falls of snow. This view held sway in the Church of England during Elizabeth's whole reign and far into the Stuart period: Strype, the ecclesiastical annalist, gives ample evidence of this, and among the more curious examples is the surmise that the comet of 1572 was a token of Divine wrath provoked by the St. Bartholomew massacre. As to the Stuart period, Archbishop Spottiswoode seems to have been active in carrying the superstition from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth, and Archbishop Bramhall cites Scripture in support of it. Rather curiously, while the diary of Archbishop Laud shows so much superstition regarding dreams as portents, it shows little or none regarding comets; but Bishop Jeremy Taylor, strong as he was, evidently favoured the usual view. John Howe, the eminent Nonconformist divine in the latter part of the century, seems to have regarded the comet superstition as almost a fundamental article of belief; he laments the total neglect of comets and portents generally, declaring that this neglect betokens want of reverence for the Ruler of the world; he expresses contempt for scientific inquiry regarding comets, insists that they may be natural bodies and yet supernatural portents, and ends by saying, "I conceive it very safe to suppose that some very considerable thing, either in the way of judgment or mercy, may ensue, according as the cry of persevering wickedness or of penitential prayer is more or less loud at that time."(99) (99) For Liturgical Services of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, see Parker Society Publications, pp. 569, 570. For Strype, see his Ecclesiastical Memorials, vol. iii, part i, p. 472; also see his Annals of the reformation, vol. ii, part ii, p. 151; and his Life of Sir Thomas Smith, pp. 161, 162. For Spottiswoode, see History of the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh reprint, 1851), vol. i, pp. 185, 186. For Bramhall, see his Works, Oxford, 1844, vol. iv, pp. 60, 307, etc. For Jeremy Taylor, see his Sermons on the Life of Christ. For John Howe, see his Works, London, 1862, vol. iv, pp. 140, 141. The Reformed Church of Scotland supported the superstition just as strongly. John Knox saw in comets tokens of the wrath of Heaven; other authorities considered them "a warning to the king to extirpate the Papists"; and as late as 1680, after Halley had won his victory, comets were announced on high authority in the Scottish Church to be "prodigies of great judgment on these lands for our sins, for never was the Lord more provoked by a people." While such was the view of the clergy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the laity generally accepted it as a matter of course, Among the great leaders in literature there was at least general acquiescence in it. Both Shakespeare and Milton recognise it, whether they fully accept it or not. Shakespeare makes the Duke of Bedford, lamenting at the bier of Henry V, say: "Comets, importing change of time and states, Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky; And with them scourge the bad revolting stars, That have consented unto Henry's death." Milton, speaking of Satan preparing for combat, says: "On the other side, Incensed with indignation, Satan stood. Unterrified, and like a comet burned, That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge In the arctic sky, and from its horrid hair Shakes pestilence and war." We do indeed find that in some minds the discoveries of Tycho Brahe and Kepler begin to take effect, for, in 1621, Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy alludes to them as changing public opinion somewhat regarding comets; and, just before the middle of the century, Sir Thomas Browne expresses a doubt whether comets produce such terrible effects, "since it is found that many of them are above the moon."(100) Yet even as late as the last years of the seventeenth century we have English authors of much power battling for this supposed scriptural view and among the natural and typical results we find, in 1682, Ralph Thoresby, a Fellow of the Royal Society, terrified at the comet of that year, and writing in his diary the following passage: "Lord, fit us for whatever changes it may portend; for, though I am not ignorant that such meteors proceed from natural causes, yet are they frequently also the presages of imminent calamities." Interesting is it to note here that this was Halley's comet, and that Halley was at this very moment making those scientific studies upon it which were to free the civilized world forever from such terrors as distressed Thoresby. (100) For John Knox, see his Histoire of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1732), lib. iv; also Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland, vol. ii, pp 410-412. For Burton, see his Anatomy of Melancholy, part ii, sect 2. For Browne, see the Vulgar and Common Errors, book vi, chap. xiv. The belief in comets as warnings against sin was especially one of those held "always, everywhere, and by all," and by Eastern Christians as well as by Western. One of the most striking scenes in the history of the Eastern Church is that which took place at the condemnation of Nikon, the great Patriarch of Moscow. Turning toward his judges, he pointed to a comet then blazing in the sky, and said, "God's besom shall sweep you all away!" Of all countries in western Europe, it was in Germany and German Switzerland that this superstition took strongest hold. That same depth of religious feeling which produced in those countries the most terrible growth of witchcraft persecution, brought superstition to its highest development regarding comets. No country suffered more from it in the Middle Ages. At the Reformation Luther declared strongly in favour of it. In one of his Advent sermons he said, "The heathen write that the comet may arise from natural causes, but God creates not one that does not foretoken a sure calamity." Again he said, "Whatever moves in the heaven in an unusual way is certainly a sign of God's wrath." And sometimes, yielding to another phase of his belief, he declared them works of the devil, and declaimed against them as "harlot stars."(101) (101) For Thoresby, see his Diary, (London, 1830). Halley's great service is described further on in this chapter. For Nikon's speech, see Dean Stanley's History of the Eastern Church, p. 485. For very striking examples of this mediaeval terror in Germany, see Von Raumer, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen, vol. vi, p. 538. For the Reformation period, see Wolf, Gesch. d. Astronomie; also Praetorius, Ueber d. Cometstern (Erfurt, 1589), in which the above sentences of Luther are printed on the title page as epigraphs. For "Huren-Sternen," see the sermon of Celichius, described later. Melanchthon, too, in various letters refers to comets as heralds of Heaven's wrath, classing them, with evil conjunctions of the planets and abortive births, among the "signs" referred to in Scripture. Zwingli, boldest of the greater Reformers in shaking off traditional beliefs, could not shake off this, and insisted that the comet of 1531 betokened calamity. Arietus, a leading Protestant theologian, declared, "The heavens are given us not merely for our pleasure, but also as a warning of the wrath of God for the correction of our lives." Lavater insisted that comets are signs of death or calamity, and cited proofs from Scripture. Catholic and Protestant strove together for the glory of this doctrine. It was maintained with especial vigour by Fromundus, the eminent professor and Doctor of Theology at the Catholic University of Louvain, who so strongly opposed the Copernican system; at the beginning of the seventeenth century, even so gifted an astronomer as Kepler yielded somewhat to the belief; and near the end of that century Voigt declared that the comet of 1618 clearly presaged the downfall of the Turkish Empire, and he stigmatized as "atheists and Epicureans" all who did not believe comets to be God's warnings.(102) (102) For Melanchthon, see Wolf, ubi supra. For Zwingli, see Wolf, p. 235. For Arietus, see Madler, Geschichte der Himmelskunde, vol. ii. For Kepler's superstition, see Wolf, p. 281. For Voight, see Himmels-Manaten Reichstage, Hamburg, 1676. For both Fromundus and Voigt, see also Madler, vol. ii, p. 399, and Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, p.28. II. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS TO CRUSH THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. Out of this belief was developed a great series of efforts to maintain the theological view of comets, and to put down forever the scientific view. These efforts may be divided into two classes: those directed toward learned men and scholars, through the universities, and those directed toward the people at large, through the pulpits. As to the first of these, that learned men and scholars might be kept in the paths of "sacred science" and "sound learning," especial pains was taken to keep all knowledge of the scientific view of comets as far as possible from students in the universities. Even to the end of the seventeenth century the oath generally required of professors of astronomy over a large part of Europe prevented their teaching that comets are heavenly bodies obedient to law. Efforts just as earnest were made to fasten into students' minds the theological theory. Two or three examples out of many may serve as types. First of these may be named the teaching of Jacob Heerbrand, professor at the University of Tubingen, who in 1577 illustrated the moral value of comets by comparing the Almighty sending a comet, to the judge laying the executioner's sword on the table between himself and the criminal in a court of justice; and, again, to the father or schoolmaster displaying the rod before naughty children. A little later we have another churchman of great importance in that region, Schickhart, head pastor and superintendent at Goppingen, preaching and publishing a comet sermon, in which he denounces those who stare at such warnings of God without heeding them, and compares them to "calves gaping at a new barn door." Still later, at the end of the seventeenth century, we find Conrad Dieterich, director of studies at the University of Marburg, denouncing all scientific investigation of comets as impious, and insisting that they are only to be regarded as "signs and wonders."(103) (103) For the effect of the anti-Pythagorean oath, see Prowe, Copernicus; also Madler and Wolf. For Heerbrand, see his Von dem erschrockenlichen Wunderzeichen, Tubingen, 1577. For Schickart, see his Predigt vom Wunderzeichen, Stuttgart, 1621. For Deiterich, see his sermon, described more fully below. The results of this ecclesiastical pressure upon science in the universities were painfully shown during generation after generation, as regards both professors and students; and examples may be given typical of its effects upon each of these two classes. The first of these is the case of Michael Maestlin. He was by birth a Swabian Protestant, was educated at Tubingen as a pupil of Apian, and, after a period of travel, was settled as deacon in the little parish of Backnang, when the comet of 1577 gave him an occasion to apply his astronomical studies. His minute and accurate observation of it is to this day one of the wonders of science. It seems almost impossible that so much could be accomplished by the naked eye. His observations agreed with those of Tycho Brahe, and won for Maestlin the professorship of astronomy in the University of Heidelberg. No man had so clearly proved the supralunar position of a comet, or shown so conclusively that its motion was not erratic, but regular. The young astronomer, though Apian's pupil, was an avowed Copernican and the destined master and friend of Kepler. Yet, in the treatise embodying his observations, he felt it necessary to save his reputation for orthodoxy by calling the comet a "new and horrible prodigy," and by giving a chapter of "conjectures on the signification of the present comet," in which he proves from history that this variety of comet betokens peace, but peace purchased by a bloody victory. That he really believed in this theological theory seems impossible; the very fact that his observations had settled the supralunar character and regular motion of comets proves this. It was a humiliation only to be compared to that of Osiander when he wrote his grovelling preface to the great book of Copernicus. Maestlin had his reward: when, a few years, later his old teacher, Apian, was driven from his chair at Tubingen for refusing to sign the Lutheran Concord-Book, Maestlin was elected to his place. Not less striking was the effect of this theological pressure upon the minds of students. Noteworthy as an example of this is the book of the Leipsic lawyer, Buttner. From no less than eighty-six biblical texts he proves the Almighty's purpose of using the heavenly bodies for the instruction of men as to future events, and then proceeds to frame exhaustive tables, from which, the time and place of the comet's first appearance being known, its signification can be deduced. This manual he gave forth as a triumph of religious science, under the name of the Comet Hour-Book.(104) (104) For Maestlin, see his Observatio et Demonstration Cometae, Tubingen, 1578. For Buttner, see his Cometen Stundbuchlein, Leipsic, 1605. The same devotion to the portent theory is found in the universities of Protestant Holland. Striking is it to see in the sixteenth century, after Tycho Brahe's discovery, the Dutch theologian, Gerard Vossius, Professor of Theology and Eloquence at Leyden, lending his great weight to the superstition. "The history of all times," he says, "shows comets to be the messengers of misfortune. It does not follow that they are endowed with intelligence, but that there is a deity who makes use of them to call the human race to repentance." Though familiar with the works of Tycho Brahe, he finds it "hard to believe" that all comets are ethereal, and adduces several historical examples of sublunary ones. Nor was this attempt to hold back university teaching to the old view of comets confined to Protestants. The Roman Church was, if possible, more strenuous in the same effort. A few examples will serve as types, representing the orthodox teaching at the great centres of Catholic theology. One of these is seen in Spain. The eminent jurist Torreblanca was recognised as a controlling authority in all the universities of Spain, and from these he swayed in the seventeenth century the thought of Catholic Europe, especially as to witchcraft and the occult powers in Nature. He lays down the old cometary superstition as one of the foundations of orthodox teaching: Begging the question, after the fashion of his time, he argues that comets can not be stars, because new stars always betoken good, while comets betoken evil. The same teaching was given in the Catholic universities of the Netherlands. Fromundus, at Louvain, the enemy of Galileo, steadily continued his crusade against all cometary heresy.(105) (105) For Vossius, see the De Idololatria (in his Opera, vol. v, pp. 283-285). For Torreblanc, see his De Magia, Seville, 1618, and often reprinted. For Fromundus, see his Meteorologica. But a still more striking case is seen in Italy. The reverend Father Augustin de Angelis, rector of the Clementine College at Rome, as late as 1673, after the new cometary theory had been placed beyond reasonable doubt, and even while Newton was working out its final demonstration, published a third edition of his Lectures on Meteorology. It was dedicated to the Cardinal of Hesse, and bore the express sanction of the Master of the Sacred Palace at Rome and of the head of the religious order to which De Angelis belonged. This work deserves careful analysis, not only as representing the highest and most approved university teaching of the time at the centre of Roman Catholic Christendom, but still more because it represents that attempt to make a compromise between theology and science, or rather the attempt to confiscate science to the uses of theology, which we so constantly find whenever the triumph of science in any field has become inevitable. As to the scientific element in this compromise, De Angelis holds, in his general introduction regarding meteorology, that the main material cause of comets is "exhalation," and says, "If this exhalation is thick and sticky, it blazes into a comet." And again he returns to the same view, saying that "one form of exhalation is dense, hence easily inflammable and long retentive of fire, from which sort are especially generated comets." But it is in his third lecture that he takes up comets specially, and his discussion of them is extended through the fourth, fifth, and sixth lectures. Having given in detail the opinions of various theologians and philosophers, he declares his own in the form of two conclusions. The first of these is that "comets are not heavenly bodies, but originate in the earth's atmosphere below the moon; for everything heavenly is eternal and incorruptible, but comets have a beginning and ending--ergo, comets can not be heavenly bodies." This, we may observe, is levelled at the observations and reasonings of Tycho Brahe and Kepler, and is a very good illustration of the scholastic and mediaeval method--the method which blots out an ascertained fact by means of a metaphysical formula. His second conclusion is that "comets are of elemental and sublunary nature; for they are an exhalation hot and dry, fatty and well condensed, inflammable and kindled in the uppermost regions of the air." He then goes on to answer sundry objections to this mixture of metaphysics and science, and among other things declares that "the fatty, sticky material of a comet may be kindled from sparks falling from fiery heavenly bodies or from a thunderbolt"; and, again, that the thick, fatty, sticky quality of the comet holds its tail in shape, and that, so far are comets from having their paths beyond the moon's orbit, as Tycho Brahe and Kepler thought, he himself in 1618 saw "a bearded comet so near the summit of Vesuvius that it almost seemed to touch it." As to sorts and qualities of comets, he accepts Aristotle's view, and divides them into bearded and tailed.(106) He goes on into long disquisitions upon their colours, forms, and motions. Under this latter head he again plunges deep into a sea of metaphysical considerations, and does not reappear until he brings up his compromise in the opinion that their movement is as yet uncertain and not understood, but that, if we must account definitely for it, we must say that it is effected by angels especially assigned to this service by Divine Providence. But, while proposing this compromise between science and theology as to the origin and movement of comets, he will hear to none as regards their mission as "signs and wonders" and presages of evil. He draws up a careful table of these evils, arranging them in the following order: Drought, wind, earthquake, tempest, famine, pestilence, war, and, to clinch the matter, declares that the comet observed by him in 1618 brought not only war, famine, pestilence, and earthquake, but also a general volcanic eruption, "which would have destroyed Naples, had not the blood of the invincible martyr Januarius withstood it." (106) Barbata et caudata. It will be observed, even from this sketch, that, while the learned Father Augustin thus comes infallibly to the mediaeval conclusion, he does so very largely by scientific and essentially modern processes, giving unwonted prominence to observation, and at times twisting scientific observation into the strand with his metaphysics. The observations and methods of his science are sometimes shrewd, sometimes comical. Good examples of the latter sort are such as his observing that the comet stood very near the summit of Vesuvius, and his reasoning that its tail was kept in place by its stickiness. But observations and reasonings of this sort are always the first homage paid by theology to science as the end of their struggle approaches.(107) (107) See De Angelis, Lectiones Meteorologicae, Rome, 1669. Equally striking is an example seen a little later in another part of Europe; and it is the more noteworthy because Halley and Newton had already fully established the modern scientific theory. Just at the close of the seventeenth century the Jesuit Reinzer, professor at Linz, put forth his Meteorologia Philosophico-Politica, in which all natural phenomena received both a physical and a moral interpretation. It was profusely and elaborately illustrated, and on account of its instructive contents was in 1712 translated into German for the unlearned reader. The comet receives, of course, great attention. "It appears," says Reinzer, "only then in the heavens when the latter punish the earth, and through it (the comet) not only predict but bring to pass all sorts of calamity.... And, to that end, its tail serves for a rod, its hair for weapons and arrows, its light for a threat, and its heat for a sign of anger and vengeance." Its warnings are threefold: (1) "Comets, generated in the air, betoken NATURALLY drought, wind, earthquake, famine, and pestilence." (2) "Comets can indirectly, in view of their material, betoken wars, tumults, and the death of princes; for, being hot and dry, they bring the moistnesses (Feuchtigkeiten) in the human body to an extraordinary heat and dryness, increasing the gall; and, since the emotions depend on the temperament and condition of the body, men are through this change driven to violent deeds, quarrels, disputes, and finally to arms: especially is this the result with princes, who are more delicate and also more arrogant than other men, and whose moistnesses are more liable to inflammation of this sort, inasmuch as they live in luxury and seldom restrain themselves from those things which in such a dry state of the heavens are especially injurious." (3) "All comets, whatever prophetic significance they may have naturally in and of themselves, are yet principally, according to the Divine pleasure, heralds of the death of great princes, of war, and of other such great calamities; and this is known and proved, first of all, from the words of Christ himself: 'Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.'"(108) (108) See Reinzer, Meteorologica Philosophico-Politica (edition of Augsburg, 1712), pp. 101-103. While such pains was taken to keep the more highly educated classes in the "paths of scriptural science and sound learning;" at the universities, equal efforts were made to preserve the cometary orthodoxy of the people at large by means of the pulpits. Out of the mass of sermons for this purpose which were widely circulated I will select just two as typical, and they are worthy of careful study as showing some special dangers of applying theological methods to scientific facts. In the second half of the sixteenth century the recognised capital of orthodox Lutheranism was Magdeburg, and in the region tributary to this metropolis no Church official held a more prominent station than the "Superintendent," or Lutheran bishop, of the neighbouring Altmark. It was this dignitary, Andreas Celichius by name, who at Magdeburg, in 1578, gave to the press his Theological Reminder of the New Comet. After deprecating as blasphemous the attempt of Aristotle to explain the phenomenon otherwise than as a supernatural warning from God to sinful man, he assures his hearers that "whoever would know the comet's real source and nature must not merely gape and stare at the scientific theory that it is an earthy, greasy, tough, and sticky vapour and mist, rising into the upper air and set ablaze by the celestial heat." Far more important for them is it to know what this vapour is. It is really, in the opinion of Celichius, nothing more or less than "the thick smoke of human sins, rising every day, every hour, every moment, full of stench and horror, before the face of God, and becoming gradually so thick as to form a comet, with curled and plaited tresses, which at last is kindled by the hot and fiery anger of the Supreme Heavenly Judge." He adds that it is probably only through the prayers and tears of Christ that this blazing monument of human depravity becomes visible to mortals. In support of this theory, he urges the "coming up before God" of the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah and of Nineveh, and especially the words of the prophet regarding Babylon, "Her stench and rottenness is come up before me." That the anger of God can produce the conflagration without any intervention of Nature is proved from the Psalms, "He sendeth out his word and melteth them." From the position of the comet, its course, and the direction of its tail he augurs especially the near approach of the judgment day, though it may also betoken, as usual, famine, pestilence, and war. "Yet even in these days," he mourns, "there are people reckless and giddy enough to pay no heed to such celestial warnings, and these even cite in their own defence the injunction of Jeremiah not to fear signs in the heavens." This idea he explodes, and shows that good and orthodox Christians, while not superstitious like the heathen, know well "that God is not bound to his creation and the ordinary course of Nature, but must often, especially in these last dregs of the world, resort to irregular means to display his anger at human guilt."(109) (109) For Celichius, or Celich, see his own treatise, as above. The other typical case occurred in the following century and in another part of Germany. Conrad Dieterich was, during the first half of the seventeenth century, a Lutheran ecclesiastic of the highest authority. His ability as a theologian had made him Archdeacon of Marburg, Professor of Philosophy and Director of Studies at the University of Giessen, and "Superintendent," or Lutheran bishop, in southwestern Germany. In the year 1620, on the second Sunday in Advent, in the great Cathedral of Ulm, he developed the orthodox doctrine of comets in a sermon, taking up the questions: 1. What are comets? 2. What do they indicate? 3. What have we to do with their significance? This sermon marks an epoch. Delivered in that stronghold of German Protestantism and by a prelate of the highest standing, it was immediately printed, prefaced by three laudatory poems from different men of note, and sent forth to drive back the scientific, or, as it was called, the "godless," view of comets. The preface shows that Dieterich was sincerely alarmed by the tendency to regard comets as natural appearances. His text was taken from the twenty-fifth verse of the twenty-first chapter of St. Luke: "And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring." As to what comets are, he cites a multitude of philosophers, and, finding that they differ among themselves, he uses a form of argument not uncommon from that day to this, declaring that this difference of opinion proves that there is no solution of the problem save in revelation, and insisting that comets are "signs especially sent by the Almighty to warn the earth." An additional proof of this he finds in the forms of comets. One, he says, took the form of a trumpet; another, of a spear; another of a goat; another, of a torch; another, of a sword; another, of an arrow; another, of a sabre; still another, of a bare arm. From these forms of comets he infers that we may divine their purpose. As to their creation, he quotes John of Damascus and other early Church authorities in behalf of the idea that each comet is a star newly created at the Divine command, out of nothing, and that it indicates the wrath of God. As to their purpose, having quoted largely from the Bible and from Luther, he winds up by insisting that, as God can make nothing in vain, comets must have some distinct object; then, from Isaiah and Joel among the prophets, from Matthew, Mark, and Luke among the evangelists, from Origen and John Chrysostom among the fathers, from Luther and Melanchthon among the Reformers, he draws various texts more or less conclusive to prove that comets indicate evil and only evil; and he cites Luther's Advent sermon to the effect that, though comets may arise in the course of Nature, they are still signs of evil to mankind. In answer to the theory of sundry naturalists that comets are made up of "a certain fiery, warm, sulphurous, saltpetery, sticky fog," he declaims: "Our sins, our sins: they are the fiery heated vapours, the thick, sticky, sulphurous clouds which rise from the earth toward heaven before God." Throughout the sermon Dieterich pours contempt over all men who simply investigate comets as natural objects, calls special attention to a comet then in the heavens resembling a long broom or bundle of rods, and declares that he and his hearers can only consider it rightly "when we see standing before us our Lord God in heaven as an angry father with a rod for his children." In answer to the question what comets signify, he commits himself entirely to the idea that they indicate the wrath of God, and therefore calamities of every sort. Page after page is filled with the records of evils following comets. Beginning with the creation of the world, he insists that the first comet brought on the deluge of Noah, and cites a mass of authorities, ranging from Moses and Isaiah to Albert the Great and Melanchthon, in support of the view that comets precede earthquakes, famines, wars, pestilences, and every form of evil. He makes some parade of astronomical knowledge as to the greatness of the sun and moon, but relapses soon into his old line of argument. Imploring his audience not to be led away from the well-established belief of Christendom and the principles of their fathers, he comes back to his old assertion, insists that "our sins are the inflammable material of which comets are made," and winds up with a most earnest appeal to the Almighty to spare his people.(110) (110) For Deiterich, see Ulmische Cometen-Predigt, von dem Cometen, so nechst abgewischen 1618 Jahrs im Wintermonat erstenmahls in Schwaben sehen lassen,... gehalten zu Ulm... durch Conrad Dieterich, Ulm, 1620. For a life of the author, see article Dieterich in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. See also Wolf. Similar efforts from the pulpit were provoked by the great comet of 1680. Typical among these was the effort in Switzerland of Pastor Heinrich Erni, who, from the Cathedral of Zurich, sent a circular letter to the clergy of that region showing the connection of the eleventh and twelfth verses of the first chapter of Jeremiah with the comet, giving notice that at his suggestion the authorities had proclaimed a solemn fast, and exhorting the clergy to preach earnestly on the subject of this warning. Nor were the interpreters of the comet's message content with simple prose. At the appearance of the comet of 1618, Grasser and Gross, pastors and doctors of theology at Basle, put forth a collection of doggerel rhymes to fasten the orthodox theory into the minds of school-children and peasants. One of these may be translated: "I am a Rod in God's right hand threatening the German and foreign land." Others for a similar purpose taught: "Eight things there be a Comet brings, When it on high doth horrid range: Wind, Famine, Plague, and Death to Kings, War, Earthquakes, Floods, and Direful Change." Great ingenuity was shown in meeting the advance of science, in the universities and schools, with new texts of Scripture; and Stephen Spleiss, Rector of the Gymnasium at Schaffhausen, got great credit by teaching that in the vision of Jeremiah the "almond rod" was a tailed comet, and the "seething pot" a bearded one.(111) (111) For Erni, see Wolf, Gesch. d. Astronomie, p. 239. For Grassner and Gross, see their Christenliches Bedenken... von dem erschrockenlichen Cometen, etc., Zurich, 1664. For Spleiss, see Beilauftiger Bericht von dem jetzigen Cometsternen, etc., schaffhausen, 1664. It can be easily understood that such authoritative utterances as that of Dieterich must have produced a great effect throughout Protestant Christendom; and in due time we see their working in New England. That same tendency to provincialism, which, save at rare intervals, has been the bane of Massachusetts thought from that day to this, appeared; and in 1664 we find Samuel Danforth arguing from the Bible that "comets are portentous signals of great and notable changes," and arguing from history that they "have been many times heralds of wrath to a secure and impenitent world." He cites especially the comet of 1652, which appeared just before Mr. Cotton's sickness and disappeared after his death. Morton also, in his Memorial recording the death of John Putnam, alludes to the comet of 1662 as "a very signal testimony that God had then removed a bright star and a shining light out of the heaven of his Church here into celestial glory above." Again he speaks of another comet, insisting that "it was no fiery meteor caused by exhalation, but it was sent immediately by God to awaken the secure world," and goes on to show how in that year "it pleased God to smite the fruits of the earth--namely, the wheat in special--with blasting and mildew, whereby much of it was spoiled and became profitable for nothing, and much of it worth little, being light and empty. This was looked upon by the judicious and conscientious of the land as a speaking providence against the unthankfulness of many,... as also against voluptuousness and abuse of the good creatures of God by licentiousness in drinking and fashions in apparel, for the obtaining whereof a great part of the principal grain was oftentimes unnecessarily expended." But in 1680 a stronger than either of these seized upon the doctrine and wielded it with power. Increase Mather, so open always to ideas from Europe, and always so powerful for good or evil in the cloonies, preached his sermon on "Heaven's Alarm to the World,... wherein is shown that fearful sights and signs in the heavens are the presages of great calamities at hand." The texts were taken from the book of Revelation: "And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning, as it were a lamp," and "Behold, the third woe cometh quickly." In this, as in various other sermons, he supports the theological cometary theory fully. He insists that "we are fallen into the dregs of time," and that the day of judgment is evidently approaching. He explains away the words of Jeremiah--"Be not dismayed at signs in the heavens"--and shows that comets have been forerunners of nearly every form of evil. Having done full justice to evils thus presaged in scriptural times, he begins a similar display in modern history by citing blazing stars which foretold the invasions of Goths, Huns, Saracens, and Turks, and warns gainsayers by citing the example of Vespasian, who, after ridiculing a comet, soon died. The general shape and appearance of comets, he thinks, betoken their purpose, and he cites Tertullian to prove them "God's sharp razors on mankind, whereby he doth poll, and his scythe whereby he doth shear down multitudes of sinful creatures." At last, rising to a fearful height, he declares: "For the Lord hath fired his beacon in the heavens among the stars of God there; the fearful sight is not yet out of sight. The warning piece of heaven is going off. Now, then, if the Lord discharge his murdering pieces from on high, and men be found in their sins unfit for death, their blood shall be upon them." And again, in an agony of supplication, he cries out: "Do we see the sword blazing over us? Let it put us upon crying to God, that the judgment be diverted and not return upon us again so speedily.... Doth God threaten our very heavens? O pray unto him, that he would not take away stars and send comets to succeed them."(112) (112) For Danforth, see his Astronomical Descritption of the Late Comet or Blazing Star, Together with a Brief Theological Application Thereof, 1664. For Morton, see his Memorial, pp. 251, 252,; also 309, 310. Texts cited by Mather were Rev., viii, 10, and xi, 14. Two years later, in August, 1682, he followed this with another sermon on "The Latter Sign," "wherein is showed that the voice of God in signal providences, especially when repeated and iterated, ought to be hearkened unto." Here, too, of course, the comet comes in for a large share of attention. But his tone is less sure: even in the midst of all his arguments appears an evident misgiving. The thoughts of Newton in science and Bayle in philosophy were evidently tending to accomplish the prophecy of Seneca. Mather's alarm at this is clear. His natural tendency is to uphold the idea that a comet is simply a fire-ball flung from the hand of an avenging God at a guilty world, but he evidently feels obliged to yield something to the scientific spirit; hence, in the Discourse concerning Comets, published in 1683, he declares: "There are those who think that, inasmuch as comets may be supposed to proceed from natural causes, there is no speaking voice of Heaven in them beyond what is to be said of all other works of God. But certain it is that many things which may happen according to the course of Nature are portentous signs of Divine anger and prognostics of great evils hastening upon the world." He then notices the eclipse of August, 1672, and adds: "That year the college was eclipsed by the death of the learned president there, worthy Mr. Chauncey and two colonies--namely, Massachusetts and Plymouth--by the death of two governors, who died within a twelvemonth after.... Shall, then, such mighty works of God as comets are be insignificant things?"(113) (113) Increase Mather's Heaven's Alarm to the World was first printed at Boston in 1681, but was reprinted in 1682, and was appended, with the sermon on The Latter Sign, to the Discourse on Comets (Boston, 1683). III. THE INVASION OF SCEPTICISM. Vigorous as Mather's argument is, we see scepticism regarding "signs" continuing to invade the public mind; and, in spite of his threatenings, about twenty years after we find a remarkable evidence of this progress in the fact that this scepticism has seized upon no less a personage than that colossus of orthodoxy, his thrice illustrious son, Cotton Mather himself; and him we find, in 1726, despite the arguments of his father, declaring in his Manuductio: "Perhaps there may be some need for me to caution you against being dismayed at the signs of the heavens, or having any superstitious fancies upon eclipses and the like.... I am willing that you be apprehensive of nothing portentous in blazing stars. For my part, I know not whether all our worlds, and even the sun itself, may not fare the better for them."(114) (114) For Cotton Mather, see the Manuductio, pp. 54, 55. Curiously enough, for this scientific scepticism in Cotton Mather there was a cause identical with that which had developed superstition in the mind of his father. The same provincial tendency to receive implicitly any new European fashion in thinking or speech wrought upon both, plunging one into superstition and drawing the other out of it. European thought, which New England followed, had at last broken away in great measure from the theological view of comets as signs and wonders. The germ of this emancipating influence was mainly in the great utterance of Seneca; and we find in nearly every century some evidence that this germ was still alive. This life became more and more evident after the Reformation period, even though theologians in every Church did their best to destroy it. The first series of attacks on the old theological doctrine were mainly founded in philosophic reasoning. As early as the first half of the sixteenth century we hear Julius Caesar Scaliger protesting against the cometary superstition as "ridiculous folly."(115) Of more real importance was the treatise of Blaise de Vigenere, published at Paris in 1578. In this little book various statements regarding comets as signs of wrath or causes of evils are given, and then followed by a very gentle and quiet discussion, usually tending to develop that healthful scepticism which is the parent of investigation. A fair example of his mode of treating the subject is seen in his dealing with a bit of "sacred science." This was simply that "comets menace princes and kings with death because they live more delicately than other people; and, therefore, the air thickened and corrupted by a comet would be naturally more injurious to them than to common folk who live on coarser food." To this De Vigenere answers that there are very many persons who live on food as delicate as that enjoyed by princes and kings, and yet receive no harm from comets. He then goes on to show that many of the greatest monarchs in history have met death without any comet to herald it. (115) For Scaliger, see p. 20 of Dudith's book, cited below. In the same year thoughtful scepticism of a similar sort found an advocate in another part of Europe. Thomas Erastus, the learned and devout professor of medicine at Heidelberg, put forth a letter dealing in the plainest terms with the superstition. He argued especially that there could be no natural connection between the comet and pestilence, since the burning of an exhalation must tend to purify rather than to infect the air. In the following year the eloquent Hungarian divine Dudith published a letter in which the theological theory was handled even more shrewdly, for he argued that, if comets were caused by the sins of mortals, they would never be absent from the sky. But these utterances were for the time brushed aside by the theological leaders of thought as shallow or impious. In the seventeenth century able arguments against the superstition, on general grounds, began to be multiplied. In Holland, Balthasar Bekker opposed this, as he opposed the witchcraft delusion, on general philosophic grounds; and Lubienitzky wrote in a compromising spirit to prove that comets were as often followed by good as by evil events. In France, Pierre Petit, formerly geographer of Louis XIII, and an intimate friend of Descartes, addressed to the young Louis XIV a vehement protest against the superstition, basing his arguments not on astronomy, but on common sense. A very effective part of the little treatise was devoted to answering the authority of the fathers of the early Church. To do this, he simply reminded his readers that St. Augustine and St. John Damascenus had also opposed the doctrine of the antipodes. The book did good service in France, and was translated in Germany a few years later.(116) (116) For Blaise de Vigenere, see his Traite des Cometes, Paris, 1578. For Dudith, see his De Cometarum Dignificatione, Basle, 1579, to which the letter of Erastus is appended. Bekker's views may be found in his Onderzoek van de Betekening der Cometen, Leeuwarden, 1683. For Lubienitsky's, see his Theatrum Cometicum, Amsterdam, 1667, in part ii: Historia Cometarum, preface "to the reader." For Petit, see his Dissertation sur la Nature des Cometes, Paris, 1665 (German translation, Dresden and Zittau, 1681). All these were denounced as infidels and heretics, yet none the less did they set men at thinking, and prepare the way for a far greater genius; for toward the end of the same century the philosophic attack was taken up by Pierre Bayle, and in the whole series of philosophic champions he is chief. While professor at the University of Sedan he had observed the alarm caused by the comet of 1680, and he now brought all his reasoning powers to bear upon it. Thoughts deep and witty he poured out in volume after volume. Catholics and Protestants were alike scandalized. Catholic France spurned him, and Jurieu, the great Reformed divine, called his cometary views "atheism," and tried hard to have Protestant Holland condemn him. Though Bayle did not touch immediately the mass of mankind, he wrought with power upon men who gave themselves the trouble of thinking. It was indeed unfortunate for the Church that theologians, instead of taking the initiative in this matter, left it to Bayle; for, in tearing down the pretended scriptural doctrine of comets, he tore down much else: of all men in his time, no one so thoroughly prepared the way for Voltaire. Bayle's whole argument is rooted in the prophecy of Seneca. He declares: "Comets are bodies subject to the ordinary law of Nature, and not prodigies amenable to no law." He shows historically that there is no reason to regard comets as portents of earthly evils. As to the fact that such evils occur after the passage of comets across the sky, he compares the person believing that comets cause these evils to a woman looking out of a window into a Paris street and believing that the carriages pass because she looks out. As to the accomplishment of some predictions, he cites the shrewd saying of Henry IV, to the effect that "the public will remember one prediction that comes true better than all the rest that have proved false." Finally, he sums up by saying: "The more we study man, the more does it appear that pride is his ruling passion, and that he affects grandeur even in his misery. Mean and perishable creature that he is, he has been able to persuade men that he can not die without disturbing the whole course of Nature and obliging the heavens to put themselves to fresh expense. In order to light his funeral pomp. Foolish and ridiculous vanity! If we had a just idea of the universe, we should soon comprehend that the death or birth of a prince is too insignificant a matter to stir the heavens."(117) (117) Regarding Bayle, see Madler, Himmelskunde, vol. i, p. 327. For special points of interest in Bayle's arguments, see his Pensees Diverses sur les Cometes, Amsterdam, 1749, pp. 79, 102, 134, 206. For the response to Jurieu, see the continuation des Pensees, Rotterdam, 1705; also Champion, p. 164, Lecky, ubi supra, and Guillemin, pp. 29, 30. This great philosophic champion of right reason was followed by a literary champion hardly less famous; for Fontenelle now gave to the French theatre his play of The Comet, and a point of capital importance in France was made by rendering the army of ignorance ridiculous.(118) (118) See Fontenelle, cited by Champion, p. 167. Such was the line of philosophic and literary attack, as developed from Scaliger to Fontenelle. But beneath and in the midst of all of it, from first to last, giving firmness, strength, and new sources of vitality to it, was the steady development of scientific effort; and to the series of great men who patiently wrought and thought out the truth by scientific methods through all these centuries belong the honours of the victory. For generations men in various parts of the world had been making careful observations on these strange bodies. As far back as the time when Luther and Melanchthon and Zwingli were plunged into alarm by various comets from 1531 to 1539, Peter Apian kept his head sufficiently cool to make scientific notes of their paths through the heavens. A little later, when the great comet of 1556 scared popes, emperors, and reformers alike, such men as Fabricius at Vienna and Heller at Nuremberg quietly observed its path. In vain did men like Dieterich and Heerbrand and Celich from various parts of Germany denounce such observations and investigations as impious; they were steadily continued, and in 1577 came the first which led to the distinct foundation of the modern doctrine. In that year appeared a comet which again plunged Europe into alarm. In every European country this alarm was strong, but in Germany strongest of all. The churches were filled with terror-stricken multitudes. Celich preaching at Magdeburg was echoed by Heerbrand preaching at Tubingen, and both these from thousands of other pulpits, Catholic and Protestant, throughout Europe. In the midst of all this din and outcry a few men quietly but steadily observed the monster; and Tycho Brahe announced, as the result, that its path lay farther from the earth than the orbit of the moon. Another great astronomical genius, Kepler, confirmed this. This distinct beginning of the new doctrine was bitterly opposed by theologians; they denounced it as one of the evil results of that scientific meddling with the designs of Providence against which they had so long declaimed in pulpits and professors' chairs; they even brought forward some astronomers ambitious or wrong-headed enough to testify that Tycho and Kepler were in error.(119) (119) See Madler, Himmelskunde, vol. i, pp. 181, 197; also Wolf, Gesch. d. Astronomie, and Janssen, Gesch. d. deutschen Volkes, vol. v, p. 350. Heerbrand's sermon, cited above, is a good specimen of the theologic attitude. See Pingre, vol. ii, p. 81. Nothing could be more natural than such opposition; for this simple announcement by Tycho Brahe began a new era. It shook the very foundation of cometary superstition. The Aristotelian view, developed by the theologians, was that what lies within the moon's orbit appertains to the earth and is essentially transitory and evil, while what lies beyond it belongs to the heavens and is permanent, regular, and pure. Tycho Brahe and Kepler, therefore, having by means of scientific observation and thought taken comets out of the category of meteors and appearances in the neighbourhood of the earth, and placed them among the heavenly bodies, dealt a blow at the very foundations of the theological argument, and gave a great impulse to the idea that comets are themselves heavenly bodies moving regularly and in obedience to law. IV. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.--THE FINAL VICTORY OF SCIENCE. Attempts were now made to compromise. It was declared that, while some comets were doubtless supralunar, some must be sublunar. But this admission was no less fatal on another account. During many centuries the theory favoured by the Church had been, as we have seen, that the earth was surrounded by hollow spheres, concentric and transparent, forming a number of glassy strata incasing one another "like the different coatings of an onion," and that each of these in its movement about the earth carries one or more of the heavenly bodies. Some maintained that these spheres were crystal; but Lactantius, and with him various fathers of the Church, spoke of the heavenly vault as made of ice. Now, the admission that comets could move beyond the moon was fatal to this theory, for it sent them crashing through these spheres of ice or crystal, and therefore through the whole sacred fabric of the Ptolemaic theory.(120) (120) For these features in cometary theory, see Pingre, vol. i, p. 89; also Humboldt, Cosmos (English translation, London, 1868), vol. iii, p. 169. Here we may pause for a moment to note one of the chief differences between scientific and theological reasoning considered in themselves. Kepler's main reasoning as to the existence of a law for cometary movement was right; but his secondary reasoning, that comets move nearly in straight lines, was wrong. His right reasoning was developed by Gassendi in France, by Borelli in Italy, by Hevel and Doerfel in Germany, by Eysat and Bernouilli in Switzerland, by Percy and--most important of all, as regards mathematical demonstration--by Newton in England. The general theory, which was true, they accepted and developed; the secondary theory, which was found untrue, they rejected; and, as a result, both of what they thus accepted and of what they rejected, was evolved the basis of the whole modern cometary theory. Very different was this from the theological method. As a rule, when there arises a thinker as great in theology as Kepler in science, the whole mass of his conclusions ripens into a dogma. His disciples labour not to test it, but to establish it; and while, in the Catholic Church, it becomes a dogma to be believed or disbelieved under the penalty of damnation, it becomes in the Protestant Church the basis for one more sect. Various astronomers laboured to develop the truth discovered by Tycho and strengthened by Kepler. Cassini seemed likely to win for Italy the glory of completing the great structure; but he was sadly fettered by Church influences, and was obliged to leave most of the work to others. Early among these was Hevel. He gave reasons for believing that comets move in parabolic curves toward the sun. Then came a man who developed this truth further--Samuel Doerfel; and it is a pleasure to note that he was a clergyman. The comet of 1680, which set Erni in Switzerland, Mather in New England, and so many others in all parts of the world at declaiming, set Doerfel at thinking. Undismayed by the authority of Origen and St. John Chrysostom, the arguments of Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli, the outcries of Celich, Heerbrand, and Dieterich, he pondered over the problem in his little Saxon parsonage, until in 1681 he set forth his proofs that comets are heavenly bodies moving in parabolas of which the sun is the focus. Bernouilli arrived at the same conclusion; and, finally, this great series of men and works was closed by the greatest of all, when Newton, in 1686, having taken the data furnished by the comet of 1680, demonstrated that comets are guided in their movements by the same principle that controls the planets in their orbits. Thus was completed the evolution of this new truth in science. Yet we are not to suppose that these two great series of philosophical and scientific victories cleared the field of all opponents. Declamation and pretended demonstration of the old theologic view were still heard; but the day of complete victory dawned when Halley, after most thorough observation and calculation, recognised the comet of 1682 as one which had already appeared at stated periods, and foretold its return in about seventy-five years; and the battle was fully won when Clairaut, seconded by Lalande and Mme. Lepaute, predicted distinctly the time when the comet would arrive at its perihelion, and this prediction was verified.(121) Then it was that a Roman heathen philosopher was proved more infallible and more directly under Divine inspiration than a Roman Christian pontiff; for the very comet which the traveller finds to-day depicted on the Bayeux tapestry as portending destruction to Harold and the Saxons at the Norman invasion of England, and which was regarded by Pope Calixtus as portending evil to Christendom, was found six centuries later to be, as Seneca had prophesied, a heavenly body obeying the great laws of the universe, and coming at regular periods. Thenceforth the whole ponderous enginery of this superstition, with its proof-texts regarding "signs in the heavens," its theological reasoning to show the moral necessity of cometary warnings, and its ecclesiastical fulminations against the "atheism, godlessness, and infidelity" of scientific investigation, was seen by all thinking men to be as weak against the scientific method as Indian arrows against needle guns. Copernicus, Galileo, Cassini, Doerfel, Newton, Halley, and Clairaut had gained the victory.(122) (121) See Pingre, vol. i, p. 53; Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, p. 305, etc., etc. For a curious partial anticipation by Hooke, in 1664, of the great truth announced by Halley in 1682, see Pepy's Diary for March 1, 1664. For excellent summaries of the whole work of Halley and Clairaut and their forerunners and associates, see Pingre, Madler, Wolf, Arago, et al. (122) In accordance with Halley's prophecy, the comet of 1682 has returned in 1759 and 1835. See Madler, Guillemin, Watson, Grant, Delambre, Proctor, article Astronomy in Encycl. Brit., and especially for details, Wolf, pp. 407-412 and 701-722. For clear statement regarding Doerfel, see Wolf, p. 411. It is instructive to note, even after the main battle was lost, a renewal of the attempt, always seen under like circumstances, to effect a compromise, to establish a "safe science" on grounds pseudo-scientific and pseudo-theologic. Luther, with his strong common sense, had foreshadowed this; Kepler had expressed a willingness to accept it. It was insisted that comets might be heavenly bodies moving in regular orbits, and even obedient to law, and yet be sent as "signs in the heavens." Many good men clung longingly to this phase of the old belief, and in 1770 Semler, professor at Halle, tried to satisfy both sides. He insisted that, while from a scientific point of view comets could not exercise any physical influence upon the world, yet from a religious point of view they could exercise a moral influence as reminders of the Just Judge of the Universe. So hard was it for good men to give up the doctrine of "signs in the heavens," seemingly based upon Scripture and exercising such a healthful moral tendency! As is always the case after such a defeat, these votaries of "sacred science" exerted the greatest ingenuity in devising statements and arguments to avert the new doctrine. Within our own century the great Catholic champion, Joseph de Maistre, echoed these in declaring his belief that comets are special warnings of evil. So, too, in Protestant England, in 1818, the Gentleman's Magazine stated that under the malign influence of a recent comet "flies became blind and died early in the season," and "the wife of a London shoemaker had four children at a birth." And even as late as 1829 Mr. Forster, an English physician, published a work to prove that comets produce hot summers, cold winters, epidemics, earthquakes, clouds of midges and locusts, and nearly every calamity conceivable. He bore especially upon the fact that the comet of 1665 was coincident with the plague in London, apparently forgetting that the other great cities of England and the Continent were not thus visited; and, in a climax, announces the fact that the comet of 1663 "made all the cats in Westphalia sick." There still lingered one little cloud-patch of superstition, arising mainly from the supposed fact that comets had really been followed by a marked rise in temperature. Even this poor basis for the belief that they might, after all, affect earthly affairs was swept away, and science won here another victory; for Arago, by thermometric records carefully kept at Paris from 1735 to 1781, proved that comets had produced no effect upon temperature. Among multitudes of similar examples he showed that, in some years when several comets appeared, the temperature was lower than in other years when few or none appeared. In 1737 there were two comets, and the weather was cool; in 1785 there was no comet, and the weather was hot; through the whole fifty years it was shown that comets were sometimes followed by hot weather, sometimes by cool, and that no rule was deducible. The victory of science was complete at every point.(123) (123) For Forster, see his Illustrations of the Atmospherical Origin of Epidemic Diseases, Chelmsford, 1829, cited by Arago; also in Quarterly Review for April, 1835. For the writings of several on both sides, and especially those who sought to save, as far as possible, the sacred theory of comets, see Madler, vol. ii, p. 384 et seq., and Wolf, p. 186. But in this history there was one little exhibition so curious as to be worthy of notice, though its permanent effect upon thought was small. Whiston and Burnet, so devoted to what they considered sacred science, had determined that in some way comets must be instruments of Divine wrath. One of them maintained that the deluge was caused by the tail of a comet striking the earth; the other put forth the theory that comets are places of punishment for the damned--in fact, "flying hells." The theories of Whiston and Burnet found wide acceptance also in Germany, mainly through the all-powerful mediation of Gottsched, so long, from his professor's chair at Leipsic, the dictator of orthodox thought, who not only wrote a brief tractate of his own upon the subject, but furnished a voluminous historical introduction to the more elaborate treatise of Heyn. In this book, which appeared at Leipsic in 1742, the agency of comets in the creation, the flood, and the final destruction of the world is fully proved. Both these theories were, however, soon discredited. Perhaps the more interesting of them can best be met by another, which, if not fully established, appears much better based--namely, that in 1868 the earth passed directly through the tail of a comet, with no deluge, no sound of any wailings of the damned, with but slight appearances here and there, only to be detected by the keen sight of the meteorological or astronomical observer. In our own country superstitious ideas regarding comets continued to have some little currency; but their life was short. The tendency shown by Cotton Mather, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, toward acknowledging the victory of science, was completed by the utterances of Winthrop, professor at Harvard, who in 1759 published two lectures on comets, in which he simply and clearly revealed the truth, never scoffing, but reasoning quietly and reverently. In one passage he says: "To be thrown into a panic whenever a comet appears, on account of the ill effects which some few of them might possibly produce, if they were not under proper direction, betrays a weakness unbecoming a reasonable being." A happy influence in this respect was exercised on both continents by John Wesley. Tenaciously as he had held to the supposed scriptural view in so many other matters of science, in this he allowed his reason to prevail, accepted the demonstrations of Halley, and gloried in them.(124) (124) For Heyn, see his Versuch einer Betrachtung uber die cometun, die Sundfluth und das Vorspeil des jungsten Gerichts, Leipsic, 1742. A Latin version, of the same year, bears the title, Specimen Cometologiae Sacre. For the theory that the earth encountered the tail of a comet, see Guillemin and Watson. For survival of the old idea in America, see a Sermon of Israel Loring, of Sudbury, published in 1722. For Prof. J. Winthrop, see his Comets. For Wesley, see his Natural Philosophy, London, 1784, vol. iii, p. 303. The victory was indeed complete. Happily, none of the fears expressed by Conrad Dieterich and Increase Mather were realized. No catastrophe has ensued either to religion or to morals. In the realm of religion the Psalms of David remain no less beautiful, the great utterances of the Hebrew prophets no less powerful; the Sermon on the Mount, "the first commandment, and the second, which is like unto it," the definition of "pure religion and undefiled" by St. James, appeal no less to the deepest things in the human heart. In the realm of morals, too, serviceable as the idea of firebrands thrown by the right hand of an avenging God to scare a naughty world might seem, any competent historian must find that the destruction of the old theological cometary theory was followed by moral improvement rather than by deterioration. We have but to compare the general moral tone of society to-day, wretchedly imperfect as it is, with that existing in the time when this superstition had its strongest hold. We have only to compare the court of Henry VIII with the court of Victoria, the reign of the later Valois and earlier Bourbon princes with the present French Republic, the period of the Medici and Sforzas and Borgias with the period of Leo XIII and Humbert, the monstrous wickedness of the Thirty Years' War with the ennobling patriotism of the Franco-Prussian struggle, and the despotism of the miserable German princelings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the reign of the Emperor William. The gain is not simply that mankind has arrived at a clearer conception of law in the universe; not merely that thinking men see more clearly that we are part of a system not requiring constant patching and arbitrary interference; but perhaps best of all is the fact that science has cleared away one more series of those dogmas which tend to debase rather than to develop man's whole moral and religious nature. In this emancipation from terror and fanaticism, as in so many other results of scientific thinking, we have a proof of the inspiration of those great words, "THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE." CHAPTER V. FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. I. GROWTH OF THEOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS. Among the philosophers of Greece we find, even at an early period, germs of geological truth, and, what is of vast importance, an atmosphere in which such germs could grow. These germs were transmitted to Roman thought; an atmosphere of tolerance continued; there was nothing which forbade unfettered reasoning regarding either the earth's strata or the remains of former life found in them, and under the Roman Empire a period of fruitful observation seemed sure to begin. But, as Christianity took control of the world, there came a great change. The earliest attitude of the Church toward geology and its kindred sciences was indifferent, and even contemptuous. According to the prevailing belief, the earth was a "fallen world," and was soon to be destroyed. Why, then, should it be studied? Why, indeed, give a thought to it? The scorn which Lactantius and St. Augustine had cast upon the study of astronomy was extended largely to other sciences. (125) (125) For a compact and admirable statement as to the dawn of geological conceptions in Greece and Rome, see Mr. Lester Ward's essay on paleobotany in the Fifth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, for 1883-'84. As to the reasons why Greek philosophers did comparatively so little for geology, see D'Archiac, Geologie, p. 18. For the contempt felt by Lactantius and St. Augustine toward astronomical science, see foregoing chapters on Astronomy and Geography. But the germs of scientific knowledge and thought developed in the ancient world could be entirely smothered neither by eloquence nor by logic; some little scientific observation must be allowed, though all close reasoning upon it was fettered by theology. Thus it was that St. Jerome insisted that the broken and twisted crust of the earth exhibits the wrath of God against sin, and Tertullian asserted that fossils resulted from the flood of Noah. To keep all such observation and reasoning within orthodox limits, St. Augustine, about the beginning of the fifth century, began an effort to develop from these germs a growth in science which should be sacred and safe. With this intent he prepared his great commentary on the work of creation, as depicted in Genesis, besides dwelling upon the subject in other writings. Once engaged in this work, he gave himself to it more earnestly than any other of the earlier fathers ever did; but his vast powers of research and thought were not directed to actual observation or reasoning upon observation. The keynote of his whole method is seen in his famous phrase, "Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind." All his thought was given to studying the letter of the sacred text, and to making it explain natural phenomena by methods purely theological.(126) (126) For citations and authorities on these points, see the chapter on Meteorology. Among the many questions he then raised and discussed may be mentioned such as these: "What caused the creation of the stars on the fourth day?" "Were beasts of prey and venomous animals created before, or after, the fall of Adam? If before, how can their creation be reconciled with God's goodness; if afterward, how can their creation be reconciled to the letter of God's Word?" "Why were only beasts and birds brought before Adam to be named, and not fishes and marine animals?" "Why did the Creator not say, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' to plants as well as to animals?"(127) (127) See Augustine, De Genesi, ii, 13, 15, et seq.; ix, 12 et seq. For the reference to St. Jerome, see Shields, Final Philosophy, p. 119; also Leyell, Introduction to Geology, vol. i, chap. ii. Sundry answers to these and similar questions formed the main contributions of the greatest of the Latin fathers to the scientific knowledge of the world, after a most thorough study of the biblical text and a most profound application of theological reasoning. The results of these contributions were most important. In this, as in so many other fields, Augustine gave direction to the main current of thought in western Europe, Catholic and Protestant, for nearly thirteen centuries. In the ages that succeeded, the vast majority of prominent scholars followed him implicitly. Even so strong a man as Pope Gregory the Great yielded to his influence, and such leaders of thought as St. Isidore, in the seventh century, and the Venerable Bede, in the eighth, planting themselves upon Augustine's premises, only ventured timidly to extend their conclusions upon lines he had laid down. In his great work on Etymologies, Isidore took up Augustine's attempt to bring the creation into satisfactory relations with the book of Genesis, and, as to fossil remains, he, like Tertullian, thought that they resulted from the Flood of Noah. In the following century Bede developed the same orthodox traditions.(128) (128) For Isidore, see the Etymologiae, xi, 4, xiii, 22. For Bede, see the Hexaemeron, i, ii, in Migne, tome xci. The best guess, in a geological sense, among the followers of St. Augustine was made by an Irish monkish scholar, who, in order to diminish the difficulty arising from the distribution of animals, especially in view of the fact that the same animals are found in Ireland as in England, held that various lands now separated were once connected. But, alas! the exigencies of theology forced him to place their separation later than the Flood. Happily for him, such facts were not yet known as that the kangaroo is found only on an island in the South Pacific, and must therefore, according to his theory, have migrated thither with all his progeny, and along a causeway so curiously constructed that none of the beasts of prey, who were his fellow-voyagers in the ark, could follow him. These general lines of thought upon geology and its kindred science of zoology were followed by St. Thomas Aquinas and by the whole body of medieval theologians, so far as they gave any attention to such subjects. The next development of geology, mainly under Church guidance, was by means of the scholastic theology. Phrase-making was substituted for investigation. Without the Church and within it wonderful contributions were thus made. In the eleventh century Avicenna accounted for the fossils by suggesting a "stone-making force";(129) in the thirteenth, Albert the Great attributed them to a "formative quality;"(130) in the following centuries some philosophers ventured the idea that they grew from seed; and the Aristotelian doctrine of spontaneous generation was constantly used to prove that these stony fossils possessed powers of reproduction like plants and animals.(131) (129) Vis lapidifica. (130) Virtus formativa. (131) See authorities given in Mr. Ward's assay, as above. Still, at various times and places, germs implanted by Greek and Roman thought were warmed into life. The Arabian schools seem to have been less fettered by the letter of the Koran than the contemporary Christian scholars by the letter of the Bible; and to Avicenna belongs the credit of first announcing substantially the modern geological theory of changes in the earth's surface.(132) (132) For Avicenna, see Lyell and D'Archiac. The direct influence of the Reformation was at first unfavourable to scientific progress, for nothing could be more at variance with any scientific theory of the development of the universe than the ideas of the Protestant leaders. That strict adherence to the text of Scripture which made Luther and Melanchthon denounce the idea that the planets revolve about the sun, was naturally extended to every other scientific statement at variance with the sacred text. There is much reason to believe that the fetters upon scientific thought were closer under the strict interpretation of Scripture by the early Protestants than they had been under the older Church. The dominant spirit among the Reformers is shown by the declaration of Peter Martyr to the effect that, if a wrong opinion should obtain regarding the creation as described in Genesis, "all the promises of Christ fall into nothing, and all the life of our religion would be lost."(133) (133) See his Commentary on Genesis, cited by Zoeckler, Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, vol. i, p. 690. In the times immediately succeeding the Reformation matters went from bad to worse. Under Luther and Melanchthon there was some little freedom of speculation, but under their successors there was none; to question any interpretation of Luther came to be thought almost as wicked as to question the literal interpretation of the Scriptures themselves. Examples of this are seen in the struggles between those who held that birds were created entirely from water and those who held that they were created out of water and mud. In the city of Lubeck, the ancient centre of the Hanseatic League, close at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Pfeiffer, "General Superintendent" or bishop in those parts, published his Pansophia Mosaica, calculated, as he believed, to beat back science forever. In a long series of declamations he insisted that in the strict text of Genesis alone is safety, that it contains all wisdom and knowledge, human and divine. This being the case, who could care to waste time on the study of material things and give thought to the structure of the world? Above all, who, after such a proclamation by such a ruler in the Lutheran Israel, would dare to talk of the "days" mentioned in Genesis as "periods of time"; or of the "firmament" as not meaning a solid vault over the universe; or of the "waters above the heavens" as not contained in a vast cistern supported by the heavenly vault; or of the "windows of heaven" as a figure of speech?(134) (134) For Pfeiffer, see Zoeckler, vol. i, pp. 688, 689. In England the same spirit was shown even as late as the time of Sir Matthew Hale. We find in his book on the Origination of Mankind, published in 1685, the strictest devotion to a theory of creation based upon the mere letter of Scripture, and a complete inability to draw knowledge regarding the earth's origin and structure from any other source. While the Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Anglican Reformers clung to literal interpretations of the sacred books, and turned their faces away from scientific investigation, it was among their contemporaries at the revival of learning that there began to arise fruitful thought in this field. Then it was, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, that Leonardo da Vinci, as great a genius in science as in art, broached the true idea as to the origin of fossil remains; and his compatriot, Fracastoro, developed this on the modern lines of thought. Others in other parts of Europe took up the idea, and, while mixing with it many crudities, drew from it more and more truth. Toward the end of the sixteenth century Bernard Palissy, in France, took hold of it with the same genius which he showed in artistic creation; but, remarkable as were his assertions of scientific realities, they could gain little hearing. Theologians, philosophers, and even some scientific men of value, under the sway of scholastic phrases, continued to insist upon such explanations as that fossils were the product of "fatty matter set into a fermentation by heat"; or of a "lapidific juice";(135) or of a "seminal air";(136) or of a "tumultuous movement of terrestrial exhalations"; and there was a prevailing belief that fossil remains, in general, might be brought under the head of "sports of Nature," a pious turn being given to this phrase by the suggestion that these "sports" indicated some inscrutable purpose of the Almighty. (135) Succus lapidificus. (136) Aura seminalis. This remained a leading orthodox mode of explanation in the Church, Catholic and Protestant, for centuries. II. EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. But the scientific method could not be entirely hidden; and, near the beginning of the seventeenth century, De Clave, Bitaud, and De Villon revived it in France. Straightway the theological faculty of Paris protested against the scientific doctrine as unscriptural, destroyed the offending treatises, banished their authors from Paris, and forbade them to live in towns or enter places of public resort.(137) (137) See Morley, Life of Palissy the Potter, vol. ii, p. 315 et seq. The champions of science, though depressed for a time, quietly laboured on, especially in Italy. Half a century later, Steno, a Dane, and Scilla, an Italian, went still further in the right direction; and, though they and their disciples took great pains to throw a tub to the whale, in the shape of sundry vague concessions to the Genesis legends, they developed geological truth more and more. In France, the old theological spirit remained exceedingly powerful. About the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon made another attempt to state simple geological truths; but the theological faculty of the Sorbonne dragged him at once from his high position, forced him to recant ignominiously, and to print his recantation. It runs as follows: "I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact. I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses." This humiliating document reminds us painfully of that forced upon Galileo a hundred years before. It has been well observed by one of the greatest of modern authorities that the doctrine which Buffon thus "abandoned" is as firmly established as that of the earth's rotation upon its axis.(138) Yet one hundred and fifty years were required to secure for it even a fair hearing; the prevailing doctrine of the Church continued to be that "all things were made at the beginning of the world," and that to say that stones and fossils were made before or since "the beginning" is contrary to Scripture. Again we find theological substitutes for scientific explanation ripening into phrases more and more hollow--making fossils "sports of Nature," or "mineral concretions," or "creations of plastic force," or "models" made by the Creator before he had fully decided upon the best manner of creating various beings. (138) See citation and remark in Lyell's Principles of Geology, chap. iii, p. 57; also Huxley, Essays on Controverted Questions, p. 62. Of this period, when theological substitutes for science were carrying all before them, there still exists a monument commemorating at the same time a farce and a tragedy. This is the work of Johann Beringer, professor in the University of Wurzburg and private physician to the Prince-Bishop--the treatise bearing the title Lithographiae Wirceburgensis Specimen Primum, "illustrated with the marvellous likenesses of two hundred figured or rather insectiform stones." Beringer, for the greater glory of God, had previously committed himself so completely to the theory that fossils are simply "stones of a peculiar sort, hidden by the Author of Nature for his own pleasure,"(139) that some of his students determined to give his faith in that pious doctrine a thorough trial. They therefore prepared a collection of sham fossils in baked clay, imitating not only plants, reptiles, and fishes of every sort that their knowledge or imagination could suggest, but even Hebrew and Syriac inscriptions, one of them the name of the Almighty; and these they buried in a place where the professor was wont to search for specimens. The joy of Beringer on unearthing these proofs of the immediate agency of the finger of God in creating fossils knew no bounds. At great cost he prepared this book, whose twenty-two elaborate plates of facsimiles were forever to settle the question in favour of theology and against science, and prefixed to the work an allegorical title page, wherein not only the glory of his own sovereign, but that of heaven itself, was pictured as based upon a pyramid of these miraculous fossils. So robust was his faith that not even a premature exposure of the fraud could dissuade him from the publication of his book. Dismissing in one contemptuous chapter this exposure as a slander by his rivals, he appealed to the learned world. But the shout of laughter that welcomed the work soon convinced even its author. In vain did he try to suppress it; and, according to tradition, having wasted his fortune in vain attempts to buy up all the copies of it, and being taunted by the rivals whom he had thought to overwhelm, he died of chagrin. Even death did not end his misfortunes. The copies of the first edition having been sold by a graceless descendant to a Leipsic bookseller, a second edition was brought out under a new title, and this, too, is now much sought as a precious memorial of human credulity.(140) (139) See Beringer's Lithographiae, etc., p. 91. (140) See Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie, Munich, 1872, p. 467, note, and Reusch, Bibel und Natur, p. 197. A list of authorities upon this episode, with the text of one of the epigrams circulated at poor Beringer's expense, is given by Dr. Reuss in the Serapeum for 1852, p. 203. The book itself (the original impression) is in the White Library at Cornell University. For Beringer himself, see especially the encyclopedia of Ersch and Gruber, and the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie. But even this discomfiture did not end the idea which had caused it, for, although some latitude was allowed among the various theologico-scientific explanations, it was still held meritorious to believe that all fossils were placed in the strata on one of the creative days by the hand of the Almighty, and that this was done for some mysterious purpose, probably for the trial of human faith. Strange as it may at first seem, the theological war against a scientific method in geology was waged more fiercely in Protestant countries than in Catholic. The older Church had learned by her costly mistakes, especially in the cases of Copernicus and Galileo, what dangers to her claim of infallibility lay in meddling with a growing science. In Italy, therefore, comparatively little opposition was made, while England furnished the most bitter opponents to geology so long as the controversy could be maintained, and the most active negotiators in patching up a truce on the basis of a sham science afterward. The Church of England did, indeed, produce some noble men, like Bishop Clayton and John Mitchell, who stood firmly by the scientific method; but these appear generally to have been overwhelmed by a chorus of churchmen and dissenters, whose mixtures of theology and science, sometimes tragic in their results and sometimes comic, are among the most instructive things in modern history.(141) (141) For a comparison between the conduct of Italian and English ecclesiastics as regards geology, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, tenth English edition, vol. i, p. 33. For a philosophical statement of reasons why the struggle was more bitter and the attempt at deceptive compromises more absurd in England than elsewhere, see Maury, L'Ancienne Academie des Sciences, second edition, p. 152. For very frank confessions of the reasons why the Catholic Church has become more careful in her dealings with science, see Roberts, The Pontifical Decrees against the Earth's Movement, London, 1885, especially pp. 94 and 132, 133, and St. George Mivart's article in the Nineteenth Century for July 1885. The first of these gentlemen, it must not be forgotten, is a Roman Catholic clergyman and the second an eminent layman of the same Church, and both admit that it was the Pope, speaking ex cathedra, who erred in the Galileo case; but their explanation is that God allowed the Pope and Church to fall into this grievous error, which has cost so dear, in order to show once and for all that the Church has no right to decide questions in Science. We have already noted that there are generally three periods or phases in a theological attack upon any science. The first of these is marked by the general use of scriptural texts and statements against the new scientific doctrine; the third by attempts at compromise by means of far-fetched reconciliations of textual statements with ascertained fact; but the second or intermediate period between these two is frequently marked by the pitting against science of some great doctrine in theology. We saw this in astronomy, when Bellarmin and his followers insisted that the scientific doctrine of the earth revolving about the sun is contrary to the theological doctrine of the incarnation. So now against geology it was urged that the scientific doctrine that fossils represent animals which died before Adam contradicts the theological doctrine of Adam's fall and the statement that "death entered the world by sin." In this second stage of the theological struggle with geology, England was especially fruitful in champions of orthodoxy, first among whom may be named Thomas Burnet. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, just at the time when Newton's great discovery was given to the world, Burnet issued his Sacred Theory of the Earth. His position was commanding; he was a royal chaplain and a cabinet officer. Planting himself upon the famous text in the second epistle of Peter,(142) he declares that the flood had destroyed the old and created a new world. The Newtonian theory he refuses to accept. In his theory of the deluge he lays less stress upon the "opening of the windows of heaven" than upon the "breaking up of the fountains of the great deep." On this latter point he comes forth with great strength. His theory is that the earth is hollow, and filled with fluid like an egg. Mixing together sundry texts from Genesis and from the second epistle of Peter, the theological doctrine of the "Fall," an astronomical theory regarding the ecliptic, and various notions adapted from Descartes, he insisted that, before sin brought on the Deluge, the earth was of perfect mathematical form, smooth and beautiful, "like an egg," with neither seas nor islands nor valleys nor rocks, "with not a wrinkle, scar, or fracture," and that all creation was equally perfect. (142) See II Peter iii, 6. In the second book of his great work Burnet went still further. As in his first book he had mixed his texts of Genesis and St. Peter with Descartes, he now mixed the account of the Garden of Eden in Genesis with heathen legends of the golden age, and concluded that before the flood there was over the whole earth perpetual spring, disturbed by no rain more severe than the falling of the dew. In addition to his other grounds for denying the earlier existence of the sea, he assigned the reason that, if there had been a sea before the Deluge, sinners would have learned to build ships, and so, when the Deluge set in, could have saved themselves. The work was written with much power, and attracted universal attention. It was translated into various languages, and called forth a multitude of supporters and opponents in all parts of Europe. Strong men rose against it, especially in England, and among them a few dignitaries of the Church; but the Church generally hailed the work with joy. Addison praised it in a Latin ode, and for nearly a century it exercised a strong influence upon European feeling, and aided to plant more deeply than ever the theological opinion that the earth as now existing is merely a ruin; whereas, before sin brought on the Flood, it was beautiful in its "egg-shaped form," and free from every imperfection. A few years later came another writer of the highest standing--William Whiston, professor at Cambridge, who in 1696 published his New Theory of the Earth. Unlike Burnet, he endeavoured to avail himself of the Newtonian idea, and brought in, to aid the geological catastrophe caused by human sin, a comet, which broke open "the fountains of the great deep." But, far more important than either of these champions, there arose in the eighteenth century, to aid in the subjection of science to theology, three men of extraordinary power--John Wesley, Adam Clarke, and Richard Watson. All three were men of striking intellectual gifts, lofty character, and noble purpose, and the first-named one of the greatest men in English history; yet we find them in geology hopelessly fettered by the mere letter of Scripture, and by a temporary phase in theology. As in regard to witchcraft and the doctrine of comets, so in regard to geology, this theological view drew Wesley into enormous error.(143) The great doctrine which Wesley, Watson, Clarke, and their compeers, following St. Augustine, Bede, Peter Lombard, and a long line of the greatest minds in the universal Church, thought it especially necessary to uphold against geologists was, that death entered the world by sin--by the first transgression of Adam and Eve. The extent to which the supposed necessity of upholding this doctrine carried Wesley seems now almost beyond belief. Basing his theology on the declaration that the Almighty after creation found the earth and all created things "very good," he declares, in his sermon on the Cause and Cure of Earthquakes, that no one who believes the Scriptures can deny that "sin is the moral cause of earthquakes, whatever their natural cause may be." Again, he declares that earthquakes are the "effect of that curse which was brought upon the earth by the original transgression." Bringing into connection with Genesis the declaration of St. Paul that "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now," he finds additional scriptural proof that the earthquakes were the result of Adam's fall. He declares, in his sermon on God's Approbation of His Works, that "before the sin of Adam there were no agitations within the bowels of the earth, no violent convulsions, no concussions of the earth, no earthquakes, but all was unmoved as the pillars of heaven. There were then no such things as eruptions of fires; no volcanoes or burning mountains." Of course, a science which showed that earthquakes had been in operation for ages before the appearance of man on the planet, and which showed, also, that those very earthquakes which he considered as curses resultant upon the Fall were really blessings, producing the fissures in which we find today those mineral veins so essential to modern civilization, was entirely beyond his comprehension. He insists that earthquakes are "God's strange works of judgment, the proper effect and punishment of sin." (143) For his statement that "the giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible," see Welsey's Journal, 1766-'68. So, too, as to death and pain. In his sermon on the Fall of Man he took the ground that death and pain entered the world by Adam's transgression, insisting that the carnage now going on among animals is the result of Adam's sin. Speaking of the birds, beasts, and insects, he says that, before sin entered the world by Adam's fall, "none of these attempted to devour or in any way hurt one another"; that "the spider was then as harmless as the fly and did not then lie in wait for blood." Here, again, Wesley arrayed his early followers against geology, which reveals, in the fossil remains of carnivorous animals, pain and death countless ages before the appearance of man. The half-digested fragments of weaker animals within the fossilized bodies of the stronger have destroyed all Wesley's arguments in behalf of his great theory.(144) (144) See Wesley's sermon on God's Approbation of His Works, parts xi and xii. Dr. Adam Clarke held similar views. He insisted that thorns and thistles were given as a curse to human labour, on account of Adam's sin, and appeared upon the earth for the first time after Adam's fall. So, too, Richard Watson, the most prolific writer of the great evangelical reform period, and the author of the Institutes, the standard theological treatise on the evangelical side, says, in a chapter treating of the Fall, and especially of the serpent which tempted Eve: "We have no reason at all to believe that the animal had a serpentine form in any mode or degree until his transformation. That he was then degraded to a reptile, to go upon his belly, imports, on the contrary, an entire alteration and loss of the original form." All that admirable adjustment of the serpent to its environment which delights naturalists was to the Wesleyan divine simply an evil result of the sin of Adam and Eve. Yet here again geology was obliged to confront theology in revealing the PYTHON in the Eocene, ages before man appeared.(145) (145) See Westminster Review, October, 1870, article on John Wesley's Cosmogony, with citations from Wesley's Sermons, Watson's Institutes of Theology, Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, etc. The immediate results of such teaching by such men was to throw many who would otherwise have resorted to observation and investigation back upon scholastic methods. Again reappears the old system of solving the riddle by phrases. In 1733, Dr. Theodore Arnold urged the theory of "models," and insisted that fossils result from "infinitesimal particles brought together in the creation to form the outline of all the creatures and objects upon and within the earth"; and Arnold's work gained wide acceptance.(146) (146) See citation in Mr. Ward's article, as above, p. 390. Such was the influence of this succession of great men that toward the close of the last century the English opponents of geology on biblical grounds seemed likely to sweep all before them. Cramping our whole inheritance of sacred literature within the rules of a historical compend, they showed the terrible dangers arising from the revelations of geology, which make the earth older than the six thousand years required by Archbishop Usher's interpretation of the Old Testament. Nor was this feeling confined to ecclesiastics. Williams, a thoughtful layman, declared that such researches led to infidelity and atheism, and are "nothing less than to depose the Almighty Creator of the universe from his office." The poet Cowper, one of the mildest of men, was also roused by these dangers, and in his most elaborate poem wrote: "Some drill and bore The solid earth, and from the strata there Extract a register, by which we learn That He who made it, and revealed its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age!" John Howard summoned England to oppose "those scientific systems which are calculated to tear up in the public mind every remaining attachment to Christianity." With this special attack upon geological science by means of the dogma of Adam's fall, the more general attack by the literal interpretation of the text was continued. The legendary husks and rinds of our sacred books were insisted upon as equally precious and nutritious with the great moral and religious truths which they envelop. Especially precious were the six days--each "the evening and the morning"--and the exact statements as to the time when each part of creation came into being. To save these, the struggle became more and more desperate. Difficult as it is to realize it now, within the memory of many now living the battle was still raging most fiercely in England, and both kinds of artillery usually brought against a new science were in full play, and filling the civilized world with their roar. About half a century since, the Rev. J. Mellor Brown, the Rev. Henry Cole, and others were hurling at all geologists alike, and especially at such Christian scholars as Dr. Buckland and Dean Conybeare and Pye Smith and Prof. Sedgwick, the epithets of "infidel," "impugner of the sacred record," and "assailant of the volume of God."(147) (147) For these citations, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, introduction. The favourite weapon of the orthodox party was the charge that the geologists were "attacking the truth of God." They declared geology "not a subject of lawful inquiry," denouncing it as "a dark art," as "dangerous and disreputable," as "a forbidden province," as "infernal artillery," and as "an awful evasion of the testimony of revelation."(148) (148) See Pye Smith, D. D., Geology and Scripture, pp. 156, 157, 168, 169. This attempt to scare men from the science having failed, various other means were taken. To say nothing about England, it is humiliating to human nature to remember the annoyances, and even trials, to which the pettiest and narrowest of men subjected such Christian scholars in our own country as Benjamin Silliman and Edward Hitchcock and Louis Agassiz. But it is a duty and a pleasure to state here that one great Christian scholar did honour to religion and to himself by quietly accepting the claims of science and making the best of them, despite all these clamours. This man was Nicholas Wiseman, better known afterward as Cardinal Wiseman. The conduct of this pillar of the Roman Catholic Church contrasts admirably with that of timid Protestants, who were filling England with shrieks and denunciations.(149) (149) Wiseman, Twelve Lectures on the Connection between Science and Revealed Religion, first American edition, New York, 1837. As to the comparative severity of the struggle regarding astronomy, geology, etc., in the Catholic and Protestant countries, see Lecky's England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. ix, p. 525. And here let it be noted that one of the most interesting skirmishes in this war occurred in New England. Prof. Stuart, of Andover, justly honoured as a Hebrew scholar, declared that to speak of six periods of time for the creation was flying in the face of Scripture; that Genesis expressly speaks of six days, each made up of "the evening and the morning," and not six periods of time. To him replied a professor in Yale College, James Kingsley. In an article admirable for keen wit and kindly temper, he showed that Genesis speaks just as clearly of a solid firmament as of six ordinary days, and that, if Prof. Stuart had surmounted one difficulty and accepted the Copernican theory, he might as well get over another and accept the revelations of geology. The encounter was quick and decisive, and the victory was with science and the broader scholarship of Yale.(150) (150) See Silliman's Journal, vol. xxx, p. 114. Perhaps the most singular attempt against geology was made by a fine survival of the eighteenth century Don--Dean Cockburn, of York--to SCOLD its champions off the field. Having no adequate knowledge of the new science, he opened a battery of abuse, giving it to the world at large from the pulpit and through the press, and even through private letters. From his pulpit in York Minster he denounced Mary Somerville by name for those studies in physical geography which have made her name honoured throughout the world. But the special object of his antipathy was the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He issued a pamphlet against it which went through five editions in two years, sent solemn warnings to its president, and in various ways made life a burden to Sedgwick, Buckland, and other eminent investigators who ventured to state geological facts as they found them. These weapons were soon seen to be ineffective; they were like Chinese gongs and dragon lanterns against rifled cannon; the work of science went steadily on.(151) (151) Prof. Goldwin Smith informs me that the papers of Sir Robert Peel, yet unpublished, contain very curious specimens of the epistles of Dean Cockburn. See also Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville, Boston, 1874, pp. 139 and 375. Compare with any statement of his religious views that Dean Cockburn was able to make, the following from Mrs. Somerville: "Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and mathematical science which have been, by slow degrees, vouchsafed to man--and are still granted in these latter times by the differential calculus, now superseded by the higher algebra--all of which must have existed in that sublimely omniscient mind from eternity." See also The Life and Letters of Adam Sedgwick, Cambridge, 1890, vol. ii, pp. 76 and following. III. THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE, BASED ON THE FLOOD OF NOAH. Long before the end of the struggle already described, even at a very early period, the futility of the usual scholastic weapons had been seen by the more keen-sighted champions of orthodoxy; and, as the difficulties of the ordinary attack upon science became more and more evident, many of these champions endeavoured to patch up a truce. So began the third stage in the war--the period of attempts at compromise. The position which the compromise party took was that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah. This position was strong, for it was apparently based upon Scripture. Moreover, it had high ecclesiastical sanction, some of the fathers having held that fossil remains, even on the highest mountains, represented animals destroyed at the Deluge. Tertullian was especially firm on this point, and St. Augustine thought that a fossil tooth discovered in North Africa must have belonged to one of the giants mentioned in Scripture.(152) (152) For Tertullian, see his De Pallio, c. ii (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. ii, p. 1033). For Augustine's view, see Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossements fossiles, fourth edition, vol. ii, p. 143. In the sixteenth century especially, weight began to be attached to this idea by those who felt the worthlessness of various scholastic explanations. Strong men in both the Catholic and the Protestant camps accepted it; but the man who did most to give it an impulse into modern theology was Martin Luther. He easily saw that scholastic phrase-making could not meet the difficulties raised by fossils, and he naturally urged the doctrine of their origin at Noah's Flood.(153) (153) For Luther's opinion, see his Commentary on Genesis. With such support, it soon became the dominant theory in Christendom: nothing seemed able to stand against it; but before the end of the same sixteenth century it met some serious obstacles. Bernard Palissy, one of the most keen-sighted of scientific thinkers in France, as well as one of the most devoted of Christians, showed that it was utterly untenable. Conscientious investigators in other parts of Europe, and especially in Italy, showed the same thing; all in vain.(154) In vain did good men protest against the injury sure to be brought upon religion by tying it to a scientific theory sure to be exploded; the doctrine that fossils are the remains of animals drowned at the Flood continued to be upheld by the great majority of theological leaders for nearly three centuries as "sound doctrine," and as a blessed means of reconciling science with Scripture. To sustain this scriptural view, efforts energetic and persistent were put forth both by Catholics and Protestants. (154) For a very full statement of the honourable record of Italy in this respect, and for the enlightened views of some Italian churchmen, see Stoppani, Il Dogma a le Scienze Positive, Milan, 1886, pp. 203 et seq. In France, the learned Benedictine, Calmet, in his great works on the Bible, accepted it as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, believing the mastodon's bones exhibited by Mazurier to be those of King Teutobocus, and holding them valuable testimony to the existence of the giants mentioned in Scripture and of the early inhabitants of the earth overwhelmed by the Flood.(155) (155) For the steady adherence to this sacred theory, see Audiat, Vie de Palissy, p. 412, and Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xv, p. 492. For Calmet, see his Dissertation sur les Geants, cited in Berger de Xivery, Traditions Teratologiques, p. 191. But the greatest champion appeared in England. We have already seen how, near the close of the seventeenth century, Thomas Burnet prepared the way in his Sacred Theory of the Earth by rejecting the discoveries of Newton, and showing how sin led to the breaking up of the "foundations of the great deep," and we have also seen how Whiston, in his New Theory of the Earth, while yielding a little and accepting the discoveries of Newton, brought in a comet to aid in producing the Deluge; but far more important than these in permanent influence was John Woodward, professor at Gresham College, a leader in scientific thought at the University of Cambridge, and, as a patient collector of fossils and an earnest investigator of their meaning, deserving of the highest respect. In 1695 he published his Natural History of the Earth, and rendered one great service to science, for he yielded another point, and thus destroyed the foundations for the old theory of fossils. He showed that they were not "sports of Nature," or "models inserted by the Creator in the strata for some inscrutable purpose," but that they were really remains of living beings, as Xenophanes had asserted two thousand years before him. So far, he rendered a great service both to science and religion; but, this done, the text of the Old Testament narrative and the famous passage in St. Peter's Epistle were too strong for him, and he, too, insisted that the fossils were produced by the Deluge. Aided by his great authority, the assault on the true scientific position was vigorous: Mazurier exhibited certain fossil remains of a mammoth discovered in France as bones of the giants mentioned in Scripture; Father Torrubia did the same thing in Spain; Increase Mather sent to England similar remains discovered in America, with a like statement. For the edification of the faithful, such "bones of the giants mentioned in Scripture" were hung up in public places. Jurieu saw some of them thus suspended in one of the churches of Valence; and Henrion, apparently under the stimulus thus given, drew up tables showing the size of our antediluvian ancestors, giving the height of Adam as 123 feet 9 inches and that of Eve as 118 feet 9 inches and 9 lines.(156) (156) See Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossements fossiles, fourth edition, vol. ii, p. 56; also Geoffrey St.-Hilaire, cited by Berger de Xivery, Traditions Teratologiques, p. 190. But the most brilliant service rendered to the theological theory came from another quarter for, in 1726, Scheuchzer, having discovered a large fossil lizard, exhibited it to the world as the "human witness of the Deluge":(157) this great discovery was hailed everywhere with joy, for it seemed to prove not only that human beings were drowned at the Deluge, but that "there were giants in those days." Cheered by the applause thus gained, he determined to make the theological position impregnable. Mixing together various texts of Scripture with notions derived from the philosophy of Descartes and the speculations of Whiston, he developed the theory that "the fountains of the great deep" were broken up by the direct physical action of the hand of God, which, being literally applied to the axis of the earth, suddenly stopped the earth's rotation, broke up "the fountains of the great deep," spilled the water therein contained, and produced the Deluge. But his service to sacred science did not end here, for he prepared an edition of the Bible, in which magnificent engravings in great number illustrated his view and enforced it upon all readers. Of these engravings no less than thirty-four were devoted to the Deluge alone.(158) (157) Homo diluvii testis. (158) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 172; also Scheuchzer, Physica Sacra, Augustae Vindel et Ulmae, 1732. For the ancient belief regarding giants, see Leopoldi, Saggio. For accounts of the views of Mazaurier and Scheuchzer, see Cuvier; also Buchner, Man in Past, Present, and Future, English translation, pp. 235, 236. For Increase Mather's views, see Philosophical Transactions, vol. xxiv, p. 85. As to similar fossils sent from New York to the Royal Society as remains of giants, see Weld, History of the Royal Society, vol. i, p. 421. For Father Torrubia and his Gigantologia Espanola, see D'Archiac, Introduction a l'Etude de la Paleontologie Stratigraphique, Paris, 1864, p. 201. For admirable summaries, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, London, 1867; D'Archiac, Geologie et Paleontologie, Paris, 1866; Pictet, Traite de Paleontologie, Paris, 1853; Vezian, Prodrome de la Geologie, Paris, 1863; Haeckel, History of Creation, English translation, New York, 1876, chap. iii; and for recent progress, Prof. O. S. Marsh's Address on the History and Methods of Paleontology. In the midst all this came an episode very comical but very instructive; for it shows that the attempt to shape the deductions of science to meet the exigencies of dogma may mislead heterodoxy as absurdly as orthodoxy. About the year 1760 news of the discovery of marine fossils in various elevated districts of Europe reached Voltaire. He, too, had a theologic system to support, though his system was opposed to that of the sacred books of the Hebrews; and, fearing that these new discoveries might be used to support the Mosaic accounts of the Deluge, all his wisdom and wit were compacted into arguments to prove that the fossil fishes were remains of fishes intended for food, but spoiled and thrown away by travellers; that the fossil shells were accidentally dropped by crusaders and pilgrims returning from the Holy Land; and that the fossil bones found between Paris and Etampes were parts of a skeleton belonging to the cabinet of some ancient philosopher. Through chapter after chapter, Voltaire, obeying the supposed necessities of his theology, fought desperately the growing results of the geologic investigations of his time.(159) (159) See Voltaire, Dissertation sur les Changements arrives dans notre Globe; also Voltaire, Les Singularities de la Nature, chap. xii; also Jevons, Principles of Science, vol. ii, p. 328. But far more prejudicial to Christianity was the continued effort on the other side to show that the fossils were caused by the Deluge of Noah. No supposition was too violent to support this theory, which was considered vital to the Bible. By taking the mere husks and rinds of biblical truth for truth itself, by taking sacred poetry as prose, and by giving a literal interpretation of it, the followers of Burnet, Whiston, and Woodward built up systems which bear to real geology much the same relation that the Christian Topography of Cosmas bears to real geography. In vain were exhibited the absolute geological, zoological, astronomical proofs that no universal deluge, or deluge covering any large part of the earth, had taken place within the last six thousand or sixty thousand years; in vain did so enlightened a churchman as Bishop Clayton declare that the Deluge could not have extended beyond that district where Noah lived before the Flood; in vain did others, like Bishop Croft and Bishop Stillingfleet, and the nonconformist Matthew Poole, show that the Deluge might not have been and probably was not universal; in vain was it shown that, even if there had been a universal deluge, the fossils were not produced by it: the only answers were the citation of the text, "And all the high mountains which were under the whole heaven were covered," and, to clinch the matter, Worthington and men like him insisted that any argument to show that fossils were not remains of animals drowned at the Deluge of Noah was "infidelity." In England, France, and Germany, belief that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah was widely insisted upon as part of that faith essential to salvation.(160) (160) For a candid summary of the proofs from geology, astronomy, and zoology, that the Noachian Deluge was not universally or widely extended, see McClintock and Strong, Cyclopedia of Biblical Theology and Ecclesiastical Literature, article Deluge. For general history, see Lyell, D'Archiac, and Vezian. For special cases showing the bitterness of the conflict, see the Rev. Mr. Davis's Life of Rev. Dr. Pye Smith, passim. For a late account, see Prof. Huxley on The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science, in the Nineteenth Century for July, 1890. But the steady work of science went on: not all the force of the Church--not even the splendid engravings in Scheuchzer's Bible--could stop it, and the foundations of this theological theory began to crumble away. The process was, indeed, slow; it required a hundred and twenty years for the searchers of God's truth, as revealed in Nature--such men as Hooke, Linnaeus, Whitehurst, Daubenton, Cuvier, and William Smith--to push their works under this fabric of error, and, by statements which could not be resisted, to undermine it. As we arrive at the beginning of the nineteenth century, science is becoming irresistible in this field. Blumenbach, Von Buch, and Schlotheim led the way, but most important on the Continent was the work of Cuvier. In the early years of the present century his researches among fossils began to throw new light into the whole subject of geology. He was, indeed, very conservative, and even more wary and diplomatic; seeming, like Voltaire, to feel that "among wolves one must howl a little." It was a time of reaction. Napoleon had made peace with the Church, and to disturb that peace was akin to treason. By large but vague concessions Cuvier kept the theologians satisfied, while he undermined their strongest fortress. The danger was instinctively felt by some of the champions of the Church, and typical among these was Chateaubriand, who in his best-known work, once so great, now so little--the Genius of Christianity--grappled with the questions of creation by insisting upon a sort of general deception "in the beginning," under which everything was created by a sudden fiat, but with appearances of pre-existence. His words are as follows: "It was part of the perfection and harmony of the nature which was displayed before men's eyes that the deserted nests of last year's birds should be seen on the trees, and that the seashore should be covered with shells which had been the abode of fish, and yet the world was quite new, and nests and shells had never been inhabited."(161) But the real victory was with Brongniart, who, about 1820, gave forth his work on fossil plants, and thus built a barrier against which the enemies of science raged in vain.(162) (161) Genie du Christianisme, chap.v, pp. 1-14, cited by Reusch, vol. i, p. 250. (162) For admirable sketches of Brongniart and other paleobotanists, see Ward, as above. Still the struggle was not ended, and, a few years later, a forlorn hope was led in England by Granville Penn. His fundamental thesis was that "our globe has undergone only two revolutions, the Creation and the Deluge, and both by the immediate fiat of the Almighty"; he insisted that the Creation took place in exactly six days of ordinary time, each made up of "the evening and the morning"; and he ended with a piece of that peculiar presumption so familiar to the world, by calling on Cuvier and all other geologists to "ask for the old paths and walk therein until they shall simplify their system and reduce their numerous revolutions to the two events or epochs only--the six days of Creation and the Deluge."(163) The geologists showed no disposition to yield to this peremptory summons; on the contrary, the President of the British Geological Society, and even so eminent a churchman and geologist as Dean Buckland, soon acknowledged that facts obliged them to give up the theory that the fossils of the coal measures were deposited at the Deluge of Noah, and to deny that the Deluge was universal. (163) See the Works of Granville Penn, vol. ii, p. 273. The defection of Buckland was especially felt by the orthodox party. His ability, honesty, and loyalty to his profession, as well as his position as Canon of Christ Church and Professor of Geology at Oxford, gave him great authority, which he exerted to the utmost in soothing his brother ecclesiastics. In his inaugural lecture he had laboured to show that geology confirmed the accounts of Creation and the Flood as given in Genesis, and in 1823, after his cave explorations had revealed overwhelming evidences of the vast antiquity of the earth, he had still clung to the Flood theory in his Reliquiae Diluvianae. This had not, indeed, fully satisfied the anti-scientific party, but as a rule their attacks upon him took the form not so much of abuse as of humorous disparagement. An epigram by Shuttleworth, afterward Bishop of Chichester, in imitation of Pope's famous lines upon Newton, ran as follows: "Some doubts were once expressed about the Flood: Buckland arose, and all was clear as mud." On his leaving Oxford for a journey to southern Europe, Dean Gaisford was heard to exclaim: "Well, Buckland is gone to Italy; so, thank God, we shall have no more of this geology!" Still there was some comfort as long as Buckland held to the Deluge theory; but, on his surrender, the combat deepened: instead of epigrams and caricatures came bitter attacks, and from the pulpit and press came showers of missiles. The worst of these were hurled at Lyell. As we have seen, he had published in 1830 his Principles of Geology. Nothing could have been more cautious. It simply gave an account of the main discoveries up to that time, drawing the necessary inferences with plain yet convincing logic, and it remains to this day one of those works in which the Anglo-Saxon race may most justly take pride,--one of the land-marks in the advance of human thought. But its tendency was inevitably at variance with the Chaldean and other ancient myths and legends regarding the Creation and Deluge which the Hebrews had received from the older civilizations among their neighbours, and had incorporated into the sacred books which they transmitted to the modern world; it was therefore extensively "refuted." Theologians and men of science influenced by them insisted that his minimizing of geological changes, and his laying stress on the gradual action of natural causes still in force, endangered the sacred record of Creation and left no place for miraculous intervention; and when it was found that he had entirely cast aside their cherished idea that the great geological changes of the earth's surface and the multitude of fossil remains were due to the Deluge of Noah, and had shown that a far longer time was demanded for Creation than any which could possibly be deduced from the Old Testament genealogies and chronicles, orthodox indignation burst forth violently; eminent dignitaries of the Church attacked him without mercy and for a time he was under social ostracism. As this availed little, an effort was made on the scientific side to crush him beneath the weighty authority of Cuvier; but the futility of this effort was evident when it was found that thinking men would no longer listen to Cuvier and persisted in listening to Lyell. The great orthodox text-book, Cuvier's Theory of the Earth, became at once so discredited in the estimation of men of science that no new edition of it was called for, while Lyell's work speedily ran through twelve editions and remained a firm basis of modern thought.(164) (164) For Buckland and the various forms of attack upon him, see Gordon, Life of Buckland, especially pp. 10, 26, 136. For the attack on Lyell and his book, see Huxley, The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science. As typical of his more moderate opponents we may take Fairholme, who in 1837 published his Mosaic Deluge, and argued that no early convulsions of the earth, such as those supposed by geologists, could have taken place, because there could have been no deluge "before moral guilt could possibly have been incurred"--that is to say, before the creation of mankind. In touching terms he bewailed the defection of the President of the Geological Society and Dean Buckland--protesting against geologists who "persist in closing their eyes upon the solemn declarations of the Almighty" Still the geologists continued to seek truth: the germs planted especially by William Smith, "the Father of English Geology" were developed by a noble succession of investigators, and the victory was sure. Meanwhile those theologians who felt that denunciation of science as "godless" could accomplish little, laboured upon schemes for reconciling geology with Genesis. Some of these show amazing ingenuity, but an eminent religious authority, going over them with great thoroughness, has well characterized them as "daring and fanciful." Such attempts have been variously classified, but the fact regarding them all is that each mixes up more or less of science with more or less of Scripture, and produces a result more or less absurd. Though a few men here and there have continued these exercises, the capitulation of the party which set the literal account of the Deluge of Noah against the facts revealed by geology was at last clearly made.(165) (165) For Fairholme, see his Mosaic Deluge, London, 1837, p. 358. For a very just characterization of various schemes of "reconciliation," see Shields, The Final Philosophy, p. 340. One of the first evidences of the completeness of this surrender has been so well related by the eminent physiologist, Dr. W. B. Carpenter, that it may best be given in his own words: "You are familiar with a book of considerable value, Dr. W. Smith's Dictionary of the Bible. I happened to know the influences under which that dictionary was framed. The idea of the publisher and of the editor was to give as much scholarship and such results of modern criticism as should be compatible with a very judicious conservatism. There was to be no objection to geology, but the universality of the Deluge was to be strictly maintained. The editor committed the article Deluge to a man of very considerable ability, but when the article came to him he found that it was so excessively heretical that he could not venture to put it in. There was not time for a second article under that head, and if you look in that dictionary you will find under the word Deluge a reference to Flood. Before Flood came, a second article had been commissioned from a source that was believed safely conservative; but when the article came in it was found to be worse than the first. A third article was then commissioned, and care was taken to secure its 'safety.' If you look for the word Flood in the dictionary, you will find a reference to Noah. Under that name you will find an article written by a distinguished professor of Cambridge, of which I remember that Bishop Colenso said to me at the time, 'In a very guarded way the writer concedes the whole thing.' You will see by this under what trammels scientific thought has laboured in this department of inquiry."(166) (166) See Official Report of the National Conference of Unitarian and other Christian Churches held at Saratoga, 1882, p. 97. A similar surrender was seen when from a new edition of Horne's Introduction to the Scriptures, the standard textbook of orthodoxy, its accustomed use of fossils to prove the universality of the Deluge was quietly dropped.(167) (167) This was about 1856; see Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 329. A like capitulation in the United States was foreshadowed in 1841, when an eminent Professor of Biblical Literature and interpretation in the most important theological seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Dr. Samuel Turner, showed his Christian faith and courage by virtually accepting the new view; and the old contention was utterly cast away by the thinking men of another great religious body when, at a later period, two divines among the most eminent for piety and learning in the Methodist Episcopal Church inserted in the Biblical Cyclopaedia, published under their supervision, a candid summary of the proofs from geology, astronomy, and zoology that the Deluge of Noah was not universal, or even widely extended, and this without protest from any man of note in any branch of the American Church.(168) (168) For Dr. Turner, see his Companion to the Book of Genesis, London and New York, 1841, pp. 216-219. For McClintock and Strong, see their Cyclopaedia of Biblical Knowledge, etc., article Deluge. For similar surrenders of the Deluge in various other religious encyclopedias and commentaries, see Huxley, Essays on controverted questions, chap. xiii. The time when the struggle was relinquished by enlightened theologians of the Roman Catholic Church may be fixed at about 1862, when Reusch, Professor of Theology at Bonn, in his work on The Bible and Nature, cast off the old diluvial theory and all its supporters, accepting the conclusions of science.(169) (169) See Reusch, Bibel und Natur, chap. xxi. But, though the sacred theory with the Deluge of Noah as a universal solvent for geological difficulties was evidently dying, there still remained in various quarters a touching fidelity to it. In Roman Catholic countries the old theory was widely though quietly cherished, and taught from the religious press, the pulpit, and the theological professor's chair. Pope Pius IX was doubtless in sympathy with this feeling when, about 1850, he forbade the scientific congress of Italy to meet at Bologna.(170) (170) See Whiteside, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, vol. iii, chap. xiv. In 1856 Father Debreyne congratulated the theologians of France on their admirable attitude: "Instinctively," he says, "they still insist upon deriving the fossils from Noah's Flood."(171) In 1875 the Abbe Choyer published at Paris and Angers a text-book widely approved by Church authorities, in which he took similar ground; and in 1877 the Jesuit father Bosizio published at Mayence a treatise on Geology and the Deluge, endeavouring to hold the world to the old solution of the problem, allowing, indeed, that the "days" of Creation were long periods, but making atonement for this concession by sneers at Darwin.(172) (171) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 472. (172) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 478, and Bosizio, Geologie und die Sundfluth, Mayence, 1877, preface, p. xiv. In the Russo-Greek Church, in 1869, Archbishop Macarius, of Lithuania, urged the necessity of believing that Creation in six days of ordinary time and the Deluge of Noah are the only causes of all that geology seeks to explain; and, as late as 1876, another eminent theologian of the same Church went even farther, and refused to allow the faithful to believe that any change had taken place since "the beginning" mentioned in Genesis, when the strata of the earth were laid, tilted, and twisted, and the fossils scattered among them by the hand of the Almighty during six ordinary days.(173) (173) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 472, 571, and elsewhere; also citations in Reusch and Shields. In the Lutheran branch of the Protestant Church we also find echoes of the old belief. Keil, eminent in scriptural interpretation at the University of Dorpat, gave forth in 1860 a treatise insisting that geology is rendered futile and its explanations vain by two great facts: the Curse which drove Adam and Eve out of Eden, and the Flood that destroyed all living things save Noah, his family, and the animals in the ark. In 1867, Phillippi, and in 1869, Dieterich, both theologians of eminence, took virtually the same ground in Germany, the latter attempting to beat back the scientific hosts with a phrase apparently pithy, but really hollow--the declaration that "modern geology observes what is, but has no right to judge concerning the beginning of things." As late as 1876, Zugler took a similar view, and a multitude of lesser lights, through pulpit and press, brought these antiscientific doctrines to bear upon the people at large--the only effect being to arouse grave doubts regarding Christianity among thoughtful men, and especially among young men, who naturally distrusted a cause using such weapons. For just at this time the traditional view of the Deluge received its death-blow, and in a manner entirely unexpected. By the investigations of George Smith among the Assyrian tablets of the British Museum, in 1872, and by his discoveries just afterward in Assyria, it was put beyond a reasonable doubt that a great mass of accounts in Genesis are simply adaptations of earlier and especially of Chaldean myths and legends. While this proved to be the fact as regards the accounts of Creation and the fall of man, it was seen to be most strikingly so as regards the Deluge. The eleventh of the twelve tablets, on which the most important of these inscriptions was found, was almost wholly preserved, and it revealed in this legend, dating from a time far earlier than that of Moses, such features peculiar to the childhood of the world as the building of the great ship or ark to escape the flood, the careful caulking of its seams, the saving of a man beloved of Heaven, his selecting and taking with him into the vessel animals of all sorts in couples, the impressive final closing of the door, the sending forth different birds as the flood abated, the offering of sacrifices when the flood had subsided, the joy of the Divine Being who had caused the flood as the odour of the sacrifice reached his nostrils; while throughout all was shown that partiality for the Chaldean sacred number seven which appears so constantly in the Genesis legends and throughout the Hebrew sacred books. Other devoted scholars followed in the paths thus opened--Sayce in England, Lenormant in France, Schrader in Germany--with the result that the Hebrew account of the Deluge, to which for ages theologians had obliged all geological research to conform, was quietly relegated, even by most eminent Christian scholars, to the realm of myth and legend.(174) (174) For George Smith, see his Chaldean Account of Genesis, New York, 1876, especially pp. 36, 263, 286; also his special work on the subject. See also Lenormant, Les Origins de l'Histoire, Paris, 1880, chap. viii. For Schrader, see his The Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament, Whitehouse's translation, London, 1885, vol. i, pp. 47-49 and 58-60, and elsewhere. Sundry feeble attempts to break the force of this discovery, and an evidently widespread fear to have it known, have certainly impaired not a little the legitimate influence of the Christian clergy. And yet this adoption of Chaldean myths into the Hebrew Scriptures furnishes one of the strongest arguments for the value of our Bible as a record of the upward growth of man; for, while the Chaldean legend primarily ascribes the Deluge to the mere arbitrary caprice of one among many gods (Bel), the Hebrew development of the legend ascribes it to the justice, the righteousness, of the Supreme God; thus showing the evolution of a higher and nobler sentiment which demanded a moral cause adequate to justify such a catastrophe. Unfortunately, thus far, save in a few of the broader and nobler minds among the clergy, the policy of ignoring such new revelations has prevailed, and the results of this policy, both in Roman Catholic and in Protestant countries, are not far to seek. What the condition of thought is among the middle classes of France and Italy needs not to be stated here. In Germany, as a typical fact, it may be mentioned that there was in the year 1881 church accommodation in the city of Berlin for but two per cent of the population, and that even this accommodation was more than was needed. This fact is not due to the want of a deep religious spirit among the North Germans: no one who has lived among them can doubt the existence of such a spirit; but it is due mainly to the fact that, while the simple results of scientific investigation have filtered down among the people at large, the dominant party in the Lutheran Church has steadily refused to recognise this fact, and has persisted in imposing on Scripture the fetters of literal and dogmatic interpretation which Germany has largely outgrown. A similar danger threatens every other country in which the clergy pursue a similar policy. No thinking man, whatever may be his religious views, can fail to regret this. A thoughtful, reverent, enlightened clergy is a great blessing to any country, and anything which undermines their legitimate work of leading men out of the worship of material things to the consideration of that which is highest is a vast misfortune.(175) (175) For the foregoing statements regarding Germany the writer relies on his personal observation as a student at the University of Berlin in 1856, as a traveller at various periods afterward, and as Minister of the United States in 1879, 1880, and 1881. IV. FINAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.--THE VICTORY OF SCIENCE COMPLETE. Before concluding, it may be instructive to note a few especially desperate attempts at truces or compromises, such as always appear when the victory of any science has become absolutely sure. Typical among the earliest of these may be mentioned the effort of Carl von Raumer in 1819. With much pretension to scientific knowledge, but with aspirations bounded by the limits of Prussian orthodoxy, he made a laboured attempt to produce a statement which, by its vagueness, haziness, and "depth," should obscure the real questions at issue. This statement appeared in the shape of an argument, used by Bertrand and others in the previous century, to prove that fossil remains of plants in the coal measures had never existed as living plants, but had been simply a "result of the development of imperfect plant embryos"; and the same misty theory was suggested to explain the existence of fossil animals without supposing the epochs and changes required by geological science. In 1837 Wagner sought to uphold this explanation; but it was so clearly a mere hollow phrase, unable to bear the weight of the facts to be accounted for, that it was soon given up. Similar attempts were made throughout Europe, the most noteworthy appearing in England. In 1853 was issued an anonymous work having as its title A Brief and Complete Refutation of the Anti-Scriptural Theory of Geologists: the author having revived an old idea, and put a spark of life into it--this idea being that "all the organisms found in the depths of the earth were made on the first of the six creative days, as models for the plants and animals to be created on the third, fifth, and sixth days."(176) (176) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 475. But while these attempts to preserve the old theory as to fossil remains of lower animals were thus pressed, there appeared upon the geological field a new scientific column far more terrible to the old doctrines than any which had been seen previously. For, just at the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, geologists began to examine the caves and beds of drift in various parts of the world; and within a few years from that time a series of discoveries began in France, in Belgium, in England, in Brazil, in Sicily, in India, in Egypt, and in America, which established the fact that a period of time much greater than any which had before been thought of had elapsed since the first human occupation of the earth. The chronologies of Archbishop Usher, Petavius, Bossuet, and the other great authorities on which theology had securely leaned, were found worthless. It was clearly seen that, no matter how well based upon the Old Testament genealogies and lives of the patriarchs, all these systems must go for nothing. The most conservative geologists were gradually obliged to admit that man had been upon the earth not merely six thousand, or sixty thousand, or one hundred and sixty thousand years. And when, in 1863, Sir Charles Lyell, in his book on The Antiquity of Man, retracted solemnly his earlier view--yielding with a reluctance almost pathetic, but with a thoroughness absolutely convincing--the last stronghold of orthodoxy in this field fell.(177) (177) See Prof. Marsh's address as President of the Society for the Advancement of Science, in 1879; and for a development of the matter, see the chapters on The Antiquity of Man and Egyptology and the Fall of Man and Anthropology, in this work. The supporters of a theory based upon the letter of Scripture, who had so long taken the offensive, were now obliged to fight upon the defensive and at fearful odds. Various lines of defence were taken; but perhaps the most pathetic effort was that made in the year 1857, in England, by Gosse. As a naturalist he had rendered great services to zoological science, but he now concentrated his energies upon one last effort to save the literal interpretation of Genesis and the theological structure built upon it. In his work entitled Omphalos he developed the theory previously urged by Granville Penn, and asserted a new principle called "prochronism." In accordance with this, all things were created by the Almighty hand literally within the six days, each made up of "the evening and the morning," and each great branch of creation was brought into existence in an instant. Accepting a declaration of Dr. Ure, that "neither reason nor revelation will justify us in extending the origin of the material system beyond six thousand years from our own days," Gosse held that all the evidences of convulsive changes and long epochs in strata, rocks, minerals, and fossils are simply "APPEARANCES"--only that and nothing more. Among these mere "appearances," all created simultaneously, were the glacial furrows and scratches on rocks, the marks of retreat on rocky masses, as at Niagara, the tilted and twisted strata, the piles of lava from extinct volcanoes, the fossils of every sort in every part of the earth, the foot-tracks of birds and reptiles, the half-digested remains of weaker animals found in the fossilized bodies of the stronger, the marks of hyenas' teeth on fossilized bones found in various caves, and even the skeleton of the Siberian mammoth at St. Petersburg with lumps of flesh bearing the marks of wolves' teeth--all these, with all gaps and imperfections, he urged mankind to believe came into being in an instant. The preface of the work is especially touching, and it ends with the prayer that science and Scripture may be reconciled by his theory, and "that the God of truth will deign so to use it, and if he do, to him be all the glory."(177) At the close of the whole book Gosse declared: "The field is left clear and undisputed for the one witness on the opposite side, whose testimony is as follows: 'In six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is.'" This quotation he placed in capital letters, as the final refutation of all that the science of geology had built. (177) See Gosse, Omphalos, London, 1857, p. 5, and passim; and for a passage giving the keynote of the whole, with a most farcical note on coprolites, see pp. 353, 354. In other parts of Europe desperate attempts were made even later to save the letter of our sacred books by the revival of a theory in some respects more striking. To shape this theory to recent needs, vague reminiscences of a text in Job regarding fire beneath the earth, and vague conceptions of speculations made by Humboldt and Laplace, were mingled with Jewish tradition. Out of the mixture thus obtained Schubert developed the idea that the Satanic "principalities and powers" formerly inhabiting our universe plunged it into the chaos from which it was newly created by a process accurately described in Genesis. Rougemont made the earth one of the "morning stars" of Job, reduced to chaos by Lucifer and his followers, and thence developed in accordance with the nebular hypothesis. Kurtz evolved from this theory an opinion that the geological disturbances were caused by the opposition of the devil to the rescue of our universe from chaos by the Almighty. Delitzsch put a similar idea into a more scholastic jargon; but most desperate of all were the statements of Dr. Anton Westermeyer, of Munich, in The Old Testament vindicated from Modern Infidel Objections. The following passage will serve to show his ideas: "By the fructifying brooding of the Divine Spirit on the waters of the deep, creative forces began to stir; the devils who inhabited the primeval darkness and considered it their own abode saw that they were to be driven from their possessions, or at least that their place of habitation was to be contracted, and they therefore tried to frustrate God's plan of creation and exert all that remained to them of might and power to hinder or at least to mar the new creation." So came into being "the horrible and destructive monsters, these caricatures and distortions of creation," of which we have fossil remains. Dr. Westermeyer goes on to insist that "whole generations called into existence by God succumbed to the corruption of the devil, and for that reason had to be destroyed"; and that "in the work of the six days God caused the devil to feel his power in all earnest, and made Satan's enterprise appear miserable and vain."(178) (178) See Shields's Final Philosophy, pp. 340 et seq., and Reusch's Nature and the Bible (English translation, 1886), vol. i, pp. 318-320. Such was the last important assault upon the strongholds of geological science in Germany; and, in view of this and others of the same kind, it is little to be wondered at that when, in 1870, Johann Silberschlag made an attempt to again base geology upon the Deluge of Noah, he found such difficulties that, in a touching passage, he expressed a desire to get back to the theory that fossils were "sports of Nature."(179) (179) See Reusch, vol. i, p. 264. But the most noted among efforts to keep geology well within the letter of Scripture is of still more recent date. In the year 1885 Mr. Gladstone found time, amid all his labours and cares as the greatest parliamentary leader in England, to take the field in the struggle for the letter of Genesis against geology. On the face of it his effort seemed Quixotic, for he confessed at the outset that in science he was "utterly destitute of that kind of knowledge which carries authority," and his argument soon showed that this confession was entirely true. But he had some other qualities of which much might be expected: great skill in phrase-making, great shrewdness in adapting the meanings of single words to conflicting necessities in discussion, wonderful power in erecting showy structures of argument upon the smallest basis of fact, and a facility almost preternatural in "explaining away" troublesome realities. So striking was his power in this last respect, that a humorous London chronicler once advised a bigamist, as his only hope, to induce Mr. Gladstone to explain away one of his wives. At the basis of this theologico-geological structure Mr. Gladstone placed what he found in the text of Genesis: "A grand fourfold division" of animated Nature "set forth in an orderly succession of times." And he arranged this order and succession of creation as follows: "First, the water population; secondly, the air population; thirdly, the land population of animals; fourthly, the land population consummated in man." His next step was to slide in upon this basis the apparently harmless proposition that this division and sequence "is understood to have been so affirmed in our time by natural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact." Finally, upon these foundations he proceeded to build an argument out of the coincidences thus secured between the record in the Hebrew sacred books and the truths revealed by science as regards this order and sequence, and he easily arrived at the desired conclusion with which he crowned the whole structure, namely, as regards the writer of Genesis, that "his knowledge was divine."(180) (180) See Mr. Gladstone's Dawn of Creation and Worship, a reply to Dr. Reville, in the Nineteenth Century for November, 1885. Such was the skeleton of the structure; it was abundantly decorated with the rhetoric in which Mr. Gladstone is so skilful an artificer, and it towered above "the average man" as a structure beautiful and invincible--like some Chinese fortress in the nineteenth century, faced with porcelain and defended with crossbows. Its strength was soon seen to be unreal. In an essay admirable in its temper, overwhelming in its facts, and absolutely convincing in its argument, Prof. Huxley, late President of the Royal Society, and doubtless the most eminent contemporary authority on the scientific questions concerned, took up the matter. Mr. Gladstone's first proposition, that the sacred writings give us a great "fourfold division" created "in an orderly succession of times," Prof. Huxley did not presume to gainsay. As to Mr. Gladstone's second proposition, that "this great fourfold division... created in an orderly succession of times... has been so affirmed in our own time by natural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact," Prof. Huxley showed that, as a matter of fact, no such "fourfold division" and "orderly succession" exist; that, so far from establishing Mr. Gladstone's assumption that the population of water, air, and land followed each other in the order given, "all the evidence we possess goes to prove that they did not"; that the distribution of fossils through the various strata proves that some land animals originated before sea animals; that there has been a mixing of sea, land, and air "population" utterly destructive to the "great fourfold division" and to the creation "in an orderly succession of times"; that, so far is the view presented in the sacred text, as stated by Mr. Gladstone, from having been "so affirmed in our own time by natural science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact" that Mr. Gladstone's assertion is "directly contradictory to facts known to every one who is acquainted with the elements of natural science"; that Mr. Gladstone's only geological authority, Cuvier, had died more than fifty years before, when geological science was in its infancy (and he might have added, when it was necessary to make every possible concession to the Church); and, finally, he challenged Mr. Gladstone to produce any contemporary authority in geological science who would support his so-called scriptural view. And when, in a rejoinder, Mr. Gladstone attempted to support his view on the authority of Prof. Dana, Prof. Huxley had no difficulty in showing from Prof. Dana's works that Mr. Gladstone's inference was utterly unfounded. But, while the fabric reared by Mr. Gladstone had been thus undermined by Huxley on the scientific side, another opponent began an attack from the biblical side. The Rev. Canon Driver, professor at Mr. Gladstone's own University of Oxford, took up the question in the light of scriptural interpretation. In regard to the comparative table drawn up by Sir J. W. Dawson, showing the supposed correspondence between the scriptural and the geological order of creation, Canon Driver said: "The two series are evidently at variance. The geological record contains no evidence of clearly defined periods corresponding to the 'days' of Genesis. In Genesis, vegetation is complete two days before animal life appears. Geology shows that they appear simultaneously--even if animal life does not appear first. In Genesis, birds appear together with aquatic creatures, and precede all land animals; according to the evidence of geology, birds are unknown till a period much later than that at which aquatic creatures (including fishes and amphibia) abound, and they are preceded by numerous species of land animals--in particular, by insects and other 'creeping things.'" Of the Mosaic account of the existence of vegetation before the creation of the sun, Canon Driver said, "No reconciliation of this representation with the data of science has yet been found"; and again: "From all that has been said, however reluctant we may be to make the admission, only one conclusion seems possible. Read without prejudice or bias, the narrative of Genesis i, creates an impression at variance with the facts revealed by science." The eminent professor ends by saying that the efforts at reconciliation are "different modes of obliterating the characteristic features of Genesis, and of reading into it a view which it does not express." Thus fell Mr. Gladstone's fabric of coincidences between the "great fourfold division" in Genesis and the facts ascertained by geology. Prof. Huxley had shattered the scientific parts of the structure, Prof. Driver had removed its biblical foundations, and the last great fortress of the opponents of unfettered scientific investigation was in ruins. In opposition to all such attempts we may put a noble utterance by a clergyman who has probably done more to save what is essential in Christianity among English-speaking people than any other ecclesiastic of his time. The late Dean of Westminster, Dr. Arthur Stanley, was widely known and beloved on both continents. In his memorial sermon after the funeral of Sir Charles Lyell he said: "It is now clear to diligent students of the Bible that the first and second chapters of Genesis contain two narratives of the creation side by side, differing from each other in almost every particular of time and place and order. It is well known that, when the science of geology first arose, it was involved in endless schemes of attempted reconciliation with the letter of Scripture. There were, there are perhaps still, two modes of reconciliation of Scripture and science, which have been each in their day attempted, AND EACH HAS TOTALLY AND DESERVEDLY FAILED. One is the endeavour to wrest the words of the Bible from their natural meaning and FORCE IT TO SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE." And again, speaking of the earliest known example, which was the interpolation of the word "not" in Leviticus xi, 6, he continues: "This is the earliest instance of THE FALSIFICATION OF SCRIPTURE TO MEET THE DEMANDS OF SCIENCE; and it has been followed in later times by the various efforts which have been made to twist the earlier chapters of the book of Genesis into APPARENT agreement with the last results of geology--representing days not to be days, morning and evening not to be morning and evening, the Deluge not to be the Deluge, and the ark not to be the ark." After a statement like this we may fitly ask, Which is the more likely to strengthen Christianity for its work in the twentieth century which we are now about to enter--a large, manly, honest, fearless utterance like this of Arthur Stanley, or hair-splitting sophistries, bearing in their every line the germs of failure, like those attempted by Mr. Gladstone? The world is finding that the scientific revelation of creation is ever more and more in accordance with worthy conceptions of that great Power working in and through the universe. More and more it is seen that inspiration has never ceased, and that its prophets and priests are not those who work to fit the letter of its older literature to the needs of dogmas and sects, but those, above all others, who patiently, fearlessly, and reverently devote themselves to the search for truth as truth, in the faith that there is a Power in the universe wise enough to make truth-seeking safe and good enough to make truth-telling useful.(181) (181) For the Huxley-Gladstone controversy, see The Nineteenth Century for 1885-'86. For Canon Driver, see his article, The Cosmogony of Genesis, in The Expositor for January, 1886. CHAPTER VI. THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN EGYPTOLOGY, AND ASSYRIOLOGY. I. THE SACRED CHRONOLOGY. In the great ranges of investigation which bear most directly upon the origin of man, there are two in which Science within the last few years has gained final victories. The significance of these in changing, and ultimately in reversing, one of the greatest currents of theological thought, can hardly be overestimated; not even the tide set in motion by Cusa, Copernicus, and Galileo was more powerful to bring in a new epoch of belief. The first of these conquests relates to the antiquity of man on the earth. The fathers of the early Christian Church, receiving all parts of our sacred books as equally inspired, laid little, if any, less stress on the myths, legends, genealogies, and tribal, family, and personal traditions contained in the Old and the New Testaments, than upon the most powerful appeals, the most instructive apologues, and the most lofty poems of prophets, psalmists, and apostles. As to the age of our planet and the life of man upon it, they found in the Bible a carefully recorded series of periods, extending from Adam to the building of the Temple at Jerusalem, the length of each period being explicitly given. Thus they had a biblical chronology--full, consecutive, and definite--extending from the first man created to an event of known date well within ascertained profane history; as a result, the early Christian commentators arrived at conclusions varying somewhat, but in the main agreeing. Some, like Origen, Eusebius, Lactantius, Clement of Alexandria, and the great fathers generally of the first three centuries, dwelling especially upon the Septuagint version of the Scriptures, thought that man's creation took place about six thousand years before the Christian era. Strong confirmation of this view was found in a simple piece of purely theological reasoning: for, just as the seven candlesticks of the Apocalypse were long held to prove the existence of seven heavenly bodies revolving about the earth, so it was felt that the six days of creation prefigured six thousand years during which the earth in its first form was to endure; and that, as the first Adam came on the sixth day, Christ, the second Adam, had come at the sixth millennial period. Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, in the second century clinched this argument with the text, "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years." On the other hand, Eusebius and St. Jerome, dwelling more especially upon the Hebrew text, which we are brought up to revere, thought that man's origin took place at a somewhat shorter period before the Christian era; and St. Jerome's overwhelming authority made this the dominant view throughout western Europe during fifteen centuries. The simplicity of these great fathers as regards chronology is especially reflected from the tables of Eusebius. In these, Moses, Joshua, and Bacchus,--Deborah, Orpheus, and the Amazons,--Abimelech, the Sphinx, and Oedipus, appear together as personages equally real, and their positions in chronology equally ascertained. At times great bitterness was aroused between those holding the longer and those holding the shorter chronology, but after all the difference between them, as we now see, was trivial; and it may be broadly stated that in the early Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," it was held as certain, upon the absolute warrant of Scripture, that man was created from four to six thousand years before the Christian era. To doubt this, and even much less than this, was to risk damnation. St. Augustine insisted that belief in the antipodes and in the longer duration of the earth than six thousand years were deadly heresies, equally hostile to Scripture. Philastrius, the friend of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, whose fearful catalogue of heresies served as a guide to intolerance throughout the Middle Ages, condemned with the same holy horror those who expressed doubt as to the orthodox number of years since the beginning of the world, and those who doubted an earthquake to be the literal voice of an angry God, or who questioned the plurality of the heavens, or who gainsaid the statement that God brings out the stars from his treasures and hangs them up in the solid firmament above the earth every night. About the beginning of the seventh century Isidore of Seville, the great theologian of his time, took up the subject. He accepted the dominant view not only of Hebrew but of all other chronologies, without anything like real criticism. The childlike faith of his system may be imagined from his summaries which follow. He tells us: "Joseph lived one hundred and five years. Greece began to cultivate grain." "The Jews were in slavery in Egypt one hundred and forty-four years. Atlas discovered astrology." "Joshua ruled for twenty-seven years. Ericthonius yoked horses together." "Othniel, forty years. Cadmus introduced letters into Greece." "Deborah, forty years. Apollo discovered the art of medicine and invented the cithara." "Gideon, forty years. Mercury invented the lyre and gave it to Orpheus." Reasoning in this general way, Isidore kept well under the longer date; and, the great theological authority of southern Europe having thus spoken, the question was virtually at rest throughout Christendom for nearly a hundred years. Early in the eighth century the Venerable Bede took up the problem. Dwelling especially upon the received Hebrew text of the Old Testament, he soon entangled himself in very serious difficulties; but, in spite of the great fathers of the first three centuries, he reduced the antiquity of man on the earth by nearly a thousand years, and, in spite of mutterings against him as coming dangerously near a limit which made the theological argument from the six days of creation to the six ages of the world look doubtful, his authority had great weight, and did much to fix western Europe in its allegiance to the general system laid down by Eusebius and Jerome. In the twelfth century this belief was re-enforced by a tide of thought from a very different quarter. Rabbi Moses Maimonides and other Jewish scholars, by careful study of the Hebrew text, arrived at conclusions diminishing the antiquity of man still further, and thus gave strength throughout the Middle Ages to the shorter chronology: it was incorporated into the sacred science of Christianity; and Vincent of Beauvais, in his great Speculum Historiale, forming part of that still more enormous work intended to sum up all the knowledge possessed by the ages of faith, placed the creation of man at about four thousand years before our era.(182) (182) For a table summing up the periods, from Adam to the building of the Temple, explicitly given in the Scriptures, see the admirable paper on The Pope and the Bible, in The Contemporary Review for April, 1893. For the date of man's creation as given by leading chronologists in various branches of the Church, see L'Art de Verifier les Dates, Paris, 1819, vol. i, pp. 27 et seq. In this edition there are sundry typographical errors; compare with Wallace, True Age of the World, London, 1844. As to preference for the longer computation by the fathers of the Church, see Clinton, Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii, p. 291. For the sacred significance of the six days of creation in ascertaining the antiquity of man, see especially Eichen, Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung; also Wallace, True Age of the World, pp. 2,3. For the views of St. Augustine, see Topinard, Anthropologie, citing the De Civ. Dei., lib. xvi, c. viii, c. x. For the views of Philastrius, see the De Hoeresibus, c. 102, 112, et passim, in Migne, tome xii. For Eusebius's simple credulity, see the tables in Palmer's Egyptian Chronicles, vol. ii, pp. 828, 829. For Bede, see Usher's Chronologia Sacra, cited in Wallace, True Age of the World, p. 35. For Isidore of Seville, see the Etymologia, lib. v, c. 39; also lib. iii, in Migne, tome lxxxii. At the Reformation this view was not disturbed. The same manner of accepting the sacred text which led Luther, Melanchthon, and the great Protestant leaders generally, to oppose the Copernican theory, fixed them firmly in this biblical chronology; the keynote was sounded for them by Luther when he said, "We know, on the authority of Moses, that longer ago than six thousand years the world did not exist." Melanchthon, more exact, fixed the creation of man at 3963 B.C. But the great Christian scholars continued the old endeavour to make the time of man's origin more precise: there seems to have been a sort of fascination in the subject which developed a long array of chronologists, all weighing the minutest indications in our sacred books, until the Protestant divine De Vignolles, who had given forty years to the study of biblical chronology, declared in 1738 that he had gathered no less than two hundred computations based upon Scripture, and no two alike. As to the Roman Church, about 1580 there was published, by authority of Pope Gregory XIII, the Roman Martyrology, and this, both as originally published and as revised in 1640 under Pope Urban VIII, declared that the creation of man took place 5199 years before Christ. But of all who gave themselves up to these chronological studies, the man who exerted the most powerful influence upon the dominant nations of Christendom was Archbishop Usher. In 1650 he published his Annals of the Ancient and New Testaments, and it at once became the greatest authority for all English-speaking peoples. Usher was a man of deep and wide theological learning, powerful in controversy; and his careful conclusion, after years of the most profound study of the Hebrew Scriptures, was that man was created 4004 years before the Christian era. His verdict was widely received as final; his dates were inserted in the margins of the authorized version of the English Bible, and were soon practically regarded as equally inspired with the sacred text itself: to question them seriously was to risk preferment in the Church and reputation in the world at large. The same adhesion to the Hebrew Scriptures which had influenced Usher brought leading men of the older Church to the same view: men who would have burned each other at the stake for their differences on other points, agreed on this: Melanchthon and Tostatus, Lightfoot and Jansen, Salmeron and Scaliger, Petavius and Kepler, inquisitors and reformers, Jesuits and Jansenists, priests and rabbis, stood together in the belief that the creation of man was proved by Scripture to have taken place between 3900 and 4004 years before Christ. In spite of the severe pressure of this line of authorities, extending from St. Jerome and Eusebius to Usher and Petavius, in favour of this scriptural chronology, even devoted Christian scholars had sometimes felt obliged to revolt. The first great source of difficulty was increased knowledge regarding the Egyptian monuments. As far back as the last years of the sixteenth century Joseph Scaliger had done what he could to lay the foundations of a more scientific treatment of chronology, insisting especially that the historical indications in Persia, in Babylon, and above all in Egypt, should be brought to bear on the question. More than that, he had the boldness to urge that the chronological indications of the Hebrew Scriptures should be fully and critically discussed in the light of Egyptian and other records, without any undue bias from theological considerations. His idea may well be called inspired; yet it had little effect as regards a true view of the antiquity of man, even upon himself, for the theological bias prevailed above all his reasonings, even in his own mind. Well does a brilliant modern writer declare that, "among the multitude of strong men in modern times abdicating their reason at the command of their prejudices, Joseph Scaliger is perhaps the most striking example." Early in the following century Sir Walter Raleigh, in his History of the World (1603-1616), pointed out the danger of adhering to the old system. He, too, foresaw one of the results of modern investigation, stating it in these words, which have the ring of prophetic inspiration: "For in Abraham's time all the then known parts of the world were developed.... Egypt had many magnificent cities,... and these not built with sticks, but of hewn stone,... which magnificence needed a parent of more antiquity than these other men have supposed." In view of these considerations Raleigh followed the chronology of the Septuagint version, which enabled him to give to the human race a few more years than were usually allowed. About the middle of the seventeenth century Isaac Vossius, one of the most eminent scholars of Christendom, attempted to bring the prevailing belief into closer accordance with ascertained facts, but, save by a chosen few, his efforts were rejected. In some parts of Europe a man holding new views on chronology was by no means safe from bodily harm. As an example of the extreme pressure exerted by the old theological system at times upon honest scholars, we may take the case of La Peyrere, who about the middle of the seventeenth century put forth his book on the Pre-Adamites--an attempt to reconcile sundry well-known difficulties in Scripture by claiming that man existed on earth before the time of Adam. He was taken in hand at once; great theologians rushed forward to attack him from all parts of Europe; within fifty years thirty-six different refutations of his arguments had appeared; the Parliament of Paris burned the book, and the Grand Vicar of the archdiocese of Mechlin threw him into prison and kept him there until he was forced, not only to retract his statements, but to abjure his Protestantism. In England, opposition to the growing truth was hardly less earnest. Especially strong was Pearson, afterward Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester. In his treatise on the Creed, published in 1659, which has remained a theologic classic, he condemned those who held the earth to be more than fifty-six hundred years old, insisted that the first man was created just six days later, declared that the Egyptian records were forged, and called all Christians to turn from them to "the infallible annals of the Spirit of God." But, in spite of warnings like these, we see the new idea cropping out in various parts of Europe. In 1672, Sir John Marsham published a work in which he showed himself bold and honest. After describing the heathen sources of Oriental history, he turns to the Christian writers, and, having used the history of Egypt to show that the great Church authorities were not exact, he ends one important argument with the following words: "Thus the most interesting antiquities of Egypt have been involved in the deepest obscurity by the very interpreters of her chronology, who have jumbled everything up (qui omnia susque deque permiscuerunt), so as to make them match with their own reckonings of Hebrew chronology. Truly a very bad example, and quite unworthy of religious writers." This sturdy protest of Sir John against the dominant system and against the "jumbling" by which Eusebius had endeavoured to cut down ancient chronology within safe and sound orthodox limits, had little effect. Though eminent chronologists of the eighteenth century, like Jackson, Hales, and Drummond, gave forth multitudes of ponderous volumes pleading for a period somewhat longer than that generally allowed, and insisting that the received Hebrew text was grossly vitiated as regards chronology, even this poor favour was refused them; the mass of believers found it more comfortable to hold fast the faith committed to them by Usher, and it remained settled that man was created about four thousand years before our era. To those who wished even greater precision, Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical scholar of his time, gave his famous demonstration from our sacred books that "heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water," and that "this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on the twenty-third of October, 4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning." This tide of theological reasoning rolled on through the eighteenth century, swollen by the biblical researches of leading commentators, Catholic and Protestant, until it came in much majesty and force into our own nineteenth century. At the very beginning of the century it gained new strength from various great men in the Church, among whom may be especially named Dr. Adam Clarke, who declared that, "to preclude the possibility of a mistake, the unerring Spirit of God directed Moses in the selection of his facts and the ascertaining of his dates." All opposition to the received view seemed broken down, and as late as 1835--indeed, as late as 1850--came an announcement in the work of one of the most eminent Egyptologists, Sir J. G. Wilkinson, to the effect that he had modified the results he had obtained from Egyptian monuments, in order that his chronology might not interfere with the received date of the Deluge of Noah.(183) (183) For Lightfoot, see his Prolegomena relating to the age of the world at the birth of Christ; see also in the edition of his works, London, 1822, vol. 4, pp. 64, 112. For Scaliger, see in the De Emendatione Temporum, 1583; also Mark Pattison, Essays, Oxford, 1889, vol. i, pp. 162 et seq. For Raleigh's misgivings, see his History of the World, London, 1614, p. 227, book ii of part i, section 7 of chapter i; also Clinton's Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii, p. 293. For Usher, see his Annales Vet. et Nov. Test., London, 1650. For Pearson, see his Exposition of the Creed, sixth edition, London, 1692, pp. 59 et seq. For Marsham, see his Chronicus Canon Aegypticus, Ebraicus, Graecus, et Disquisitiones, London, 1672. For La Peyrere, see especially Quatrefarges, in Revue de Deux Mondes for 1861; also other chapters in this work. For Jackson, Hales, and others, see Wallace's True Age of the World. For Wilkinson, see various editions of his work on Egypt. For Vignolles, see Leblois, vol. iii, p. 617. As to the declaration in favor of the recent origin of man, sanctioned by Popes Gregory XIII and Urban VIII, see Strachius, cited in Wallace, p. 97. For the general agreement of Church authorities, as stated, see L'Art de Verifier les Dates, as above. As to difficulties of scriptural chronology, see Ewald, History of Israel, English translation, London, 1883, pp. 204 et seq. II. THE NEW CHRONOLOGY. But all investigators were not so docile as Wilkinson, and there soon came a new train of scientific thought which rapidly undermined all this theological chronology. Not to speak of other noted men, we have early in the present century Young, Champollion, and Rosellini, beginning a new epoch in the study of the Egyptian monuments. Nothing could be more cautious than their procedure, but the evidence was soon overwhelming in favour of a vastly longer existence of man in the Nile Valley than could be made to agree with even the longest duration then allowed by theologians. For, in spite of all the suppleness of men like Wilkinson, it became evident that, whatever system of scriptural chronology was adopted, Egypt was the seat of a flourishing civilization at a period before the "Flood of Noah," and that no such flood had ever interrupted it. This was bad, but worse remained behind: it was soon clear that the civilization of Egypt began earlier than the time assigned for the creation of man, even according to the most liberal of the sacred chronologists. As time went on, this became more and more evident. The long duration assigned to human civilization in the fragments of Manetho, the Egyptian scribe at Thebes in the third century B.C., was discovered to be more accordant with truth than the chronologies of the great theologians; and, as the present century has gone on, scientific results have been reached absolutely fatal to the chronological view based by the universal Church upon Scripture for nearly two thousand years. As is well known, the first of the Egyptian kings of whom mention is made upon the monuments of the Nile Valley is Mena, or Menes. Manetho had given a statement, according to which Mena must have lived nearly six thousand years before the Christian era. This was looked upon for a long time as utterly inadmissible, as it was so clearly at variance with the chronology of our own sacred books; but, as time went on, large fragments of the original work of Manetho were more carefully studied and distinguished from corrupt transcriptions, the lists of kings at Karnak, Sacquarah, and the two temples at Abydos were brought to light, and the lists of court architects were discovered. Among all these monuments the scholar who visits Egypt is most impressed by the sculptured tablets giving the lists of kings. Each shows the monarch of the period doing homage to the long line of his ancestors. Each of these sculptured monarchs has near him a tablet bearing his name. That great care was always taken to keep these imposing records correct is certain; the loyalty of subjects, the devotion of priests, and the family pride of kings were all combined in this; and how effective this care was, is seen in the fact that kings now known to be usurpers are carefully omitted. The lists of court architects, extending over the period from Seti to Darius, throw a flood of light over the other records. Comparing, then, all these sources, and applying an average from the lengths of the long series of well-known reigns to the reigns preceding, the most careful and cautious scholars have satisfied themselves that the original fragments of Manetho represent the work of a man honest and well informed, and, after making all allowances for discrepancies and the overlapping of reigns, it has become clear that the period known as the reign of Mena must be fixed at more than three thousand years B.C. In this the great Egyptologists of our time concur. Mariette, the eminent French authority, puts the date at 5004 B.C.; Brugsch, the leading German authority, puts it at about 4500 B.C.; and Meyer, the latest and most cautious of the historians of antiquity, declares 3180 B.C. the latest possible date that can be assigned it. With these dates the foremost English authorities, Sayce and Flinders Petrie, substantially agree. This view is also confirmed on astronomical grounds by Mr. Lockyer, the Astronomer Royal. We have it, then, as the result of a century of work by the most acute and trained Egyptologists, and with the inscriptions upon the temples and papyri before them, both of which are now read with as much facility as many medieval manuscripts, that the reign of Mena must be placed more than five thousand years ago. But the significance of this conclusion can not be fully understood until we bring into connection with it some other facts revealed by the Egyptian monuments. The first of these is that which struck Sir Walter Raleigh, that, even in the time of the first dynasties in the Nile Valley, a high civilization had already been developed. Take, first, man himself: we find sculptured upon the early monuments types of the various races--Egyptians, Israelites, negroes, and Libyans--as clearly distinguishable in these paintings and sculptures of from four to six thousand years ago as the same types are at the present day. No one can look at these sculptures upon the Egyptian monuments, or even the drawings of them, as given by Lepsius or Prisse d' Avennes, without being convinced that they indicate, even at that remote period, a difference of races so marked that long previous ages must have been required to produce it. The social condition of Egypt revealed in these early monuments of art forces us to the same conclusion. Those earliest monuments show that a very complex society had even then been developed. We not only have a separation between the priestly and military orders, but agriculturists, manufacturers, and traders, with a whole series of subdivisions in each of these classes. The early tombs show us sculptured and painted representations of a daily life which even then had been developed into a vast wealth and variety of grades, forms, and usages. Take, next, the political and military condition. One fact out of many reveals a policy which must have been the result of long experience. Just as now, at the end of the nineteenth century, the British Government, having found that they can not rely upon the native Egyptians for the protection of the country, are drilling the negroes from the interior of Africa as soldiers, so the celebrated inscription of Prince Una, as far back as the sixth dynasty, speaks of the Maksi or negroes levied and drilled by tens of thousands for the Egyptian army. Take, next, engineering. Here we find very early operations in the way of canals, dikes, and great public edifices, so bold in conception and thorough in execution as to fill our greatest engineers of these days with astonishment. The quarrying, conveyance, cutting, jointing, and polishing of the enormous blocks in the interior of the Great Pyramid alone are the marvel of the foremost stone-workers of our century. As regards architecture, we find not only the pyramids, which date from the very earliest period of Egyptian history, and which are to this hour the wonder of the world for size, for boldness, for exactness, and for skilful contrivance, but also the temples, with long ranges of colossal columns wrought in polished granite, with wonderful beauty of ornamentation, with architraves and roofs vast in size and exquisite in adjustment, which by their proportions tax the imagination, and lead the beholder to ask whether all this can be real. As to sculpture, we have not only the great Sphinx of Gizeh, so marvellous in its boldness and dignity, dating from the very first period of Egyptian history, but we have ranges of sphinxes, heroic statues, and bas-reliefs, showing that even in the early ages this branch of art had reached an amazing development. As regards the perfection of these, Lubke, the most eminent German authority on plastic art, referring to the early works in the tombs about Memphis, declares that, "as monuments of the period of the fourth dynasty, they are an evidence of the high perfection to which the sculpture of the Egyptians had attained." Brugsch declares that "every artistic production of those early days, whether picture, writing, or sculpture, bears the stamp of the highest perfection in art." Maspero, the most eminent French authority in this field, while expressing his belief that the Sphinx was sculptured even before the time of Mena, declares that "the art which conceived and carved this prodigious statue was a finished art--an art which had attained self-mastery and was sure of its effects"; while, among the more eminent English authorities, Sayce tells us that "art is at its best in the age of the pyramid-builders," and Sir James Fergusson declares, "We are startled to find Egyptian art nearly as perfect in the oldest periods as in any of the later." The evidence as to the high development of Egyptian sculpture in the earlier dynasties becomes every day more overwhelming. What exquisite genius the early Egyptian sculptors showed in their lesser statues is known to all who have seen those most precious specimens in the museum at Cairo, which were wrought before the conventional type was adopted in obedience to religious considerations. In decorative and especially in ceramic art, as early as the fourth and fifth dynasties, we have vases, cups, and other vessels showing exquisite beauty of outline and a general sense of form almost if not quite equal to Etruscan and Grecian work of the best periods. Take, next, astronomy. Going back to the very earliest period of Egyptian civilization, we find that the four sides of the Great Pyramid are adjusted to the cardinal points with the utmost precision. "The day of the equinox can be taken by observing the sun set across the face of the pyramid, and the neighbouring Arabs adjust their astronomical dates by its shadow." Yet this is but one out of many facts which prove that the Egyptians, at the earliest period of which their monuments exist, had arrived at knowledge and skill only acquired by long ages of observation and thought. Mr. Lockyer, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, has recently convinced himself, after careful examination of various ruined temples at Thebes and elsewhere, that they were placed with reference to observations of stars. To state his conclusion in his own words: "There seems a very high probability that three thousand, and possibly four thousand, years before Christ the Egyptians had among them men with some knowledge of astronomy, and that six thousand years ago the course of the sun through the year was practically very well known, and methods had been invented by means of which in time it might be better known; and that, not very long after that, they not only considered questions relating to the sun, but began to take up other questions relating to the position and movement of the stars." The same view of the antiquity of man in the Nile valley is confirmed by philologists. To use the words of Max Duncker: "The oldest monuments of Egypt--and they are the oldest monuments in the world--exhibit the Egyptian in possession of the art of writing." It is found also, by the inscriptions of the early dynasties, that the Egyptian language had even at that early time been developed in all essential particulars to the highest point it ever attained. What long periods it must have required for such a development every scholar in philology can imagine. As regards medical science, we have the Berlin papyrus, which, although of a later period, refers with careful specification to a medical literature of the first dynasty. As regards archaeology, the earliest known inscriptions point to still earlier events and buildings, indicating a long sequence in previous history. As to all that pertains to the history of civilization, no man of fair and open mind can go into the museums of Cairo or the Louvre or the British Museum and look at the monuments of those earlier dynasties without seeing in them the results of a development in art, science, laws, customs, and language, which must have required a vast period before the time of Mena. And this conclusion is forced upon us all the more invincibly when we consider the slow growth of ideas in the earlier stages of civilization as compared with the later--a slowness of growth which has kept the natives of many parts of the world in that earliest civilization to this hour. To this we must add the fact that Egyptian civilization was especially immobile: its development into castes is but one among many evidences that it was the very opposite of a civilization developed rapidly. As to the length of the period before the time of Mena, there is, of course, nothing exact. Manetho gives lists of great personages before that first dynasty, and these extend over twenty-four thousand years. Bunsen, one of the most learned of Christian scholars, declares that not less than ten thousand years were necessary for the development of civilization up to the point where we find it in Mena's time. No one can claim precision for either of these statements, but they are valuable as showing the impression of vast antiquity made upon the most competent judges by the careful study of those remains: no unbiased judge can doubt that an immensely long period of years must have been required for the development of civilization up to the state in which we there find it. The investigations in the bed of the Nile confirm these views. That some unwarranted conclusions have at times been announced is true; but the fact remains that again and again rude pottery and other evidences of early stages of civilization have been found in borings at places so distant from each other, and at depths so great, that for such a range of concurring facts, considered in connection with the rate of earthy deposit by the Nile, there is no adequate explanation save the existence of man in that valley thousands on thousands of years before the longest time admitted by our sacred chronologists. Nor have these investigations been of a careless character. Between the years 1851 and 1854, Mr. Horner, an extremely cautious English geologist, sank ninety-six shafts in four rows at intervals of eight English miles, at right angles to the Nile, in the neighbourhood of Memphis. In these pottery was brought up from various depths, and beneath the statue of Rameses II at Memphis from a depth of thirty-nine feet. At the rate of the Nile deposit a careful estimate has declared this to indicate a period of over eleven thousand years. So eminent a German authority, in geography as Peschel characterizes objections to such deductions as groundless. However this may be, the general results of these investigations, taken in connection with the other results of research, are convincing. And, finally, as if to make assurance doubly sure, a series of archaeologists of the highest standing, French, German, English, and American, have within the past twenty years discovered relics of a savage period, of vastly earlier date than the time of Mena, prevailing throughout Egypt. These relics have been discovered in various parts of the country, from Cairo to Luxor, in great numbers. They are the same sort of prehistoric implements which prove to us the early existence of man in so many other parts of the world at a geological period so remote that the figures given by our sacred chronologists are but trivial. The last and most convincing of these discoveries, that of flint implements in the drift, far down below the tombs of early kings at Thebes, and upon high terraces far above the present bed of the Nile, will be referred to later. But it is not in Egypt alone that proofs are found of the utter inadequacy of the entire chronological system derived from our sacred books. These results of research in Egypt are strikingly confirmed by research in Assyria and Babylonia. Prof. Sayce exhibits various proofs of this. To use his own words regarding one of these proofs: "On the shelves of the British Museum you may see huge sun-dried bricks, on which are stamped the names and titles of kings who erected or repaired the temples where they have been found.... They must... have reigned before the time when, according to the margins of our Bibles, the Flood of Noah was covering the earth and reducing such bricks as these to their primeval slime." This conclusion was soon placed beyond a doubt. The lists of king's and collateral inscriptions recovered from the temples of the great valley between the Tigris and Euphrates, and the records of astronomical observations in that region, showed that there, too, a powerful civilization had grown up at a period far earlier than could be made consistent with our sacred chronology. The science of Assyriology was thus combined with Egyptology to furnish one more convincing proof that, precious as are the moral and religious truths in our sacred books and the historical indications which they give us, these truths and indications are necessarily inclosed in a setting of myth and legend.(184) (184) As to Manetho, see, for a very full account of his relations to other chronologists, Palmer, Egyptian Chronicles, vol. i, chap. ii. For a more recent and readable account, see Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, English edition, London, 1879, chap. iv. For lists of kings at Abydos and elsewhere, also the lists of architects, see Brugsch, Palmer, Mariette, and others; also illustrations in Lepsius. For proofs that the dynasties given were consecutive and not contemporeaneous, as was once so fondly argued by those who tried to save Archbishop Usher's chronology, see Mariette; also Sayce's Herodotus, appendix, p. 316. For the various race types given on early monuments, see the coloured engravings in Lepsius, Denkmaler; also Prisse d'Avennes, and the frontpiece in the English edition of Brugsch; see also statement regarding the same subject in Tylor, Anthropology, chap. i. For the fulness of development of Egyptian civilization in the earliest dynasties, see Rawlinson's Egypt, London, 1881, chap. xiii; also Brugsch and other works cited. For the perfection of Egyptian engineering, I rely not merely upon my own observation, but on what is far more important, the testimony of my friend the Hon. J. G. Batterson, probably the largest and most experienced worker in granite in the United States, who acknowledges, from personal observation, that the early Egyptian work is, in boldness and perfection, far beyond anything known since, and a source of perpetual wonder to him. As to the perfection of Egyptian architecture, see very striking statements in Fergusson, History of Architecture, book i, chap. i. As to the pyramids, showing a very high grade of culture already reached under the earliest dynasties, see Lubke, Gesch. der Arch., book i. For Sayce's views, see his Herodotus, appendix, p. 348. As to sculpture, see for representations photographs published by the Boulak Museum, and such works as the Description de l'Egypte, Lepsius's Denkmaler, and Prisse d'Avennes; see also a most small work, easy of access, Maspero, Archeology, translated by Miss A. B. Edwards, New York and London, 1887, chaps. i and ii. See especially in Prisse, vol. ii, the statue of Chafre the Scribe, and the group of "Tea" and his wife. As to the artistic value of the Sphinx, see Maspero, as above, pp. 202, 203. See also similar ideas in Lubke's History of Sculpture, vol. i, p. 24. As to astronomical knowledge evidenced by the Great Pyramid, see Tylor, as above, p. 21; also Lockyer, On Some Points in the Early History of Astronomy, in Nature for 1891, and especially in the issues of June 4th and July 2d; also his Dawn of Astronomy, passim. For a recent and conservative statement as to the date of Mena, see Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, London, 1894, chap. ii. For delineations of vases, etc., showing Grecian proportion and beauty of form under the fourth and fifth dynasties, see Prisse, vol. ii, Art Industriel. As to the philological question, and the development of language in Egypt, with the hieroglyphic sytem of writing, see Rawlinson's Egypt, London, 1881, chap. xii; also Lenormanr; also Max Duncker, Geschichte des Alterthums, Abbott's translation, 1877. As to the medical papyrus of Berlin, see Brugsch, vol. i, p. 58, but especially the Papyrus Ebers. As to the corruption of later copies of Manetho and fidelity of originals as attested by the monuments, see Brugsch, chap. iv. On the accuracy of the present Egyptian chronology as regards long periods, see ibid, vol. i, p. 32. As to the pottery found deep in the Nile and the value of Horner's discovery, see Peschel, Races of Man, New York, 1876, pp. 42-44. For succinct statement, see also Laing, Problems of the Future, p. 94. For confirmatory proofs from Assyriology, see Sayce, Lectures on the Religion of the Babylonians (Hibbert Lectures for 1887), London, 1887, introductory chapter, and especially pp. 21-25. See also Laing, Human Origins, chap. ii, for an excellent summary. For an account of flint implements recently found in gravel terraces fifteen hundred feet above the present level of the Nile, and showing evidences of an age vastly greater even than those dug out of the gravel at Thebes, see article by Flinders Petrie in London Times of April 18th, 1895. CHAPTER VII. THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY I. THE THUNDER-STONES. While the view of chronology based upon the literal acceptance of Scripture texts was thus shaken by researches in Egypt, another line of observation and thought was slowly developed, even more fatal to the theological view. From a very early period there had been dug from the earth, in various parts of the world, strangely shaped masses of stone, some rudely chipped, some polished: in ancient times the larger of these were very often considered as thunderbolts, the smaller as arrows, and all of them as weapons which had been hurled by the gods and other supernatural personages. Hence a sort of sacredness attached to them. In Chaldea, they were built into the wall of temples; in Egypt, they were strung about the necks of the dead. In India, fine specimens are to this day seen upon altars, receiving prayers and sacrifices. Naturally these beliefs were brought into the Christian mythology and adapted to it. During the Middle Ages many of these well-wrought stones were venerated as weapons, which during the "war in heaven" had been used in driving forth Satan and his hosts; hence in the eleventh century an Emperor of the East sent to the Emperor of the West a "heaven axe"; and in the twelfth century a Bishop of Rennes asserted the value of thunder-stones as a divinely-appointed means of securing success in battle, safety on the sea, security against thunder, and immunity from unpleasant dreams. Even as late as the seventeenth century a French ambassador brought a stone hatchet, which still exists in the museum at Nancy, as a present to the Prince-Bishop of Verdun, and claimed for it health-giving virtues. In the last years of the sixteenth century Michael Mercati tried to prove that the "thunder-stones" were weapons or implements of early races of men; but from some cause his book was not published until the following century, when other thinkers had begun to take up the same idea, and then it had to contend with a theory far more accordant with theologic modes of reasoning in science. This was the theory of the learned Tollius, who in 1649 told the world that these chipped or smoothed stones were "generated in the sky by a fulgurous exhalation conglobed in a cloud by the circumposed humour." But about the beginning of the eighteenth century a fact of great importance was quietly established. In the year 1715 a large pointed weapon of black flint was found in contact with the bones of an elephant, in a gravel bed near Gray's Inn Lane, in London. The world in general paid no heed to this: if the attention of theologians was called to it, they dismissed it summarily with a reference to the Deluge of Noah; but the specimen was labelled, the circumstances regarding it were recorded, and both specimen and record carefully preserved. In 1723 Jussieu addressed the French Academy on The Origin and Uses of Thunder-stones. He showed that recent travellers from various parts of the world had brought a number of weapons and other implements of stone to France, and that they were essentially similar to what in Europe had been known as "thunder-stones." A year later this fact was clinched into the scientific mind of France by the Jesuit Lafitau, who published a work showing the similarity between the customs of aborigines then existing in other lands and those of the early inhabitants of Europe. So began, in these works of Jussieu and Lafitau, the science of Comparative Ethnography. But it was at their own risk and peril that thinkers drew from these discoveries any conclusions as to the antiquity of man. Montesquieu, having ventured to hint, in an early edition of his Persian Letters, that the world might be much older than had been generally supposed, was soon made to feel danger both to his book and to himself, so that in succeeding editions he suppressed the passage. In 1730 Mahudel presented a paper to the French Academy of Inscriptions on the so-called "thunder-stones," and also presented a series of plates which showed that these were stone implements, which must have been used at an early period in human history. In 1778 Buffon, in his Epoques de la Nature, intimated his belief that "thunder-stones" were made by early races of men; but he did not press this view, and the reason for his reserve was obvious enough: he had already one quarrel with the theologians on his hands, which had cost him dear--public retraction and humiliation. His declaration, therefore, attracted little notice. In the year 1800 another fact came into the minds of thinking men in England. In that year John Frere presented to the London Society of Antiquaries sundry flint implements found in the clay beds near Hoxne: that they were of human make was certain, and, in view of the undisturbed depths in which they were found, the theory was suggested that the men who made them must have lived at a very ancient geological epoch; yet even this discovery and theory passed like a troublesome dream, and soon seemed to be forgotten. About twenty years later Dr. Buckland published a discussion of the subject, in the light of various discoveries in the drift and in caves. It received wide attention, but theology was soothed by his temporary concession that these striking relics of human handiwork, associated with the remains of various extinct animals, were proofs of the Deluge of Noah. In 1823 Boue, of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, showed to Cuvier sundry human bones found deep in the alluvial deposits of the upper Rhine, and suggested that they were of an early geological period; this Cuvier virtually, if not explicitly, denied. Great as he was in his own field, he was not a great geologist; he, in fact, led geology astray for many years. Moreover, he lived in a time of reaction; it was the period of the restored Bourbons, of the Voltairean King Louis XVIII, governing to please orthodoxy. Boue's discovery was, therefore, at first opposed, then enveloped in studied silence. Cuvier evidently thought, as Voltaire had felt under similar circumstances, that "among wolves one must howl a little"; and his leading disciple, Elie de Beaumont, who succeeded, him in the sway over geological science in France, was even more opposed to the new view than his great master had been. Boue's discoveries were, therefore, apparently laid to rest forever.(185) (185) For the general history of early views regarding stone implements, see the first chapters in Cartailhac, La France Prehistorique; also Jolie, L'Homme avant les Metaux; also Lyell, Lubbock, and Evans. For lightning-stones in China and elsewhere, see citation from a Chinese encyclopedia of 1662, in Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 209. On the universality of this belief, on the surviving use of stone implements even into civilized times, and on their manufacture to-day, see ibid., chapter viii. For the treatment of Boue's discovery, see especially Morillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, p. 11. For the suppression of the passage in Montesquieu's Persian Letters, see Letter 113, cited in Schlosser's History of the Eighteenth Century (English translation), vol. i, p. 135. In 1825 Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, was explored by the Rev. Mr. McEnery, a Roman Catholic clergyman, who seems to have been completely overawed by orthodox opinion in England and elsewhere; for, though he found human bones and implements mingled with remains of extinct animals, he kept his notes in manuscript, and they were only brought to light more than thirty years later by Mr. Vivian. The coming of Charles X, the last of the French Bourbons, to the throne, made the orthodox pressure even greater. It was the culmination of the reactionary period--the time in France when a clerical committee, sitting at the Tuileries, took such measures as were necessary to hold in check all science that was not perfectly "safe"; the time in Austria when Kaiser Franz made his famous declaration to sundry professors, that what he wanted of them was simply to train obedient subjects, and that those who did not make this their purpose would be dismissed; the time in Germany when Nicholas of Russia and the princelings and ministers under his control, from the King of Prussia downward, put forth all their might in behalf of "scriptural science"; the time in Italy when a scientific investigator, arriving at any conclusion distrusted by the Church, was sure of losing his place and in danger of losing his liberty; the time in England when what little science was taught was held in due submission to Archdeacon Paley; the time in the United States when the first thing essential in science was, that it be adjusted to the ideas of revival exhorters. Yet men devoted to scientific truth laboured on; and in 1828 Tournal, of Narbonne, discovered in the cavern of Bize specimens of human industry, with a fragment of a human skeleton, among bones of extinct animals. In the following year Christol published accounts of his excavations in the caverns of Gard; he had found in position, and under conditions which forbade the idea of after-disturbance, human remains mixed with bones of the extinct hyena of the early Quaternary period. Little general notice was taken of this, for the reactionary orthodox atmosphere involved such discoveries in darkness. But in the French Revolution of 1830 the old politico-theological system collapsed: Charles X and his advisers fled for their lives; the other continental monarchs got glimpses of new light; the priesthood in charge of education were put on their good behaviour for a time, and a better era began. Under the constitutional monarchy of the house of Orleans in France and Belgium less attention was therefore paid by Government to the saving of souls; and we have in rapid succession new discoveries of remains of human industry, and even of human skeletons so mingled with bones of extinct animals as to give additional proofs that the origin of man was at a period vastly earlier than any which theologians had dreamed of. A few years later the reactionary clerical influence against science in this field rallied again. Schmerling in 1833 had explored a multitude of caverns in Belgium, especially at Engis and Engihoul, and had found human skulls and bones closely associated with bones of extinct animals, such as the cave bear, hyena, elephant, and rhinoceros, while mingled with these were evidences of human workmanship in the shape of chipped flint implements; discoveries of a similar sort had been made by De Serres in France and by Lund in Brazil; but, at least as far as continental Europe was concerned, these discoveries were received with much coolness both by Catholic leaders of opinion in France and Belgium and by Protestant leaders in England and Holland. Schmerling himself appears to have been overawed, and gave forth a sort of apologetic theory, half scientific, half theologic, vainly hoping to satisfy the clerical side. Nor was it much better in England. Sir Charles Lyell, so devoted a servant of prehistoric research thirty years later, was still holding out against it on the scientific side; and, as to the theological side, it was the period when that great churchman, Dean Cockburn, was insulting geologists from the pulpit of York Minster, and the Rev. Mellor Brown denouncing geology as "a black art," "a forbidden province" and when, in America, Prof. Moses Stuart and others like him were belittling the work of Benjamin Silliman and Edward Hitchcock. In 1840 Godwin Austin presented to the Royal Geological Society an account of his discoveries in Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, and especially of human bones and implements mingled with bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, cave bear, hyena, and other extinct animals; yet this memoir, like that of McEnery fifteen years before, found an atmosphere so unfavourable that it was not published. II. THE FLINT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS. At the middle of the nineteenth century came the beginning of a new epoch in science--an epoch when all these earlier discoveries were to be interpreted by means of investigations in a different field: for, in 1847, a man previously unknown to the world at large, Boucher de Perthes, published at Paris the first volume of his work on Celtic and Antediluvian Antiquities, and in this he showed engravings of typical flint implements and weapons, of which he had discovered thousands upon thousands in the high drift beds near Abbeville, in northern France. The significance of this discovery was great indeed--far greater than Boucher himself at first supposed. The very title of his book showed that he at first regarded these implements and weapons as having belonged to men overwhelmed at the Deluge of Noah; but it was soon seen that they were something very different from proofs of the literal exactness of Genesis: for they were found in terraces at great heights above the river Somme, and, under any possible theory having regard to fact, must have been deposited there at a time when the river system of northern France was vastly different from anything known within the historic period. The whole discovery indicated a series of great geological changes since the time when these implements were made, requiring cycles of time compared to which the space allowed by the orthodox chronologists was as nothing. His work was the result of over ten years of research and thought. Year after year a force of men under his direction had dug into these high-terraced gravel deposits of the river Somme, and in his book he now gave, in the first full form, the results of his labour. So far as France was concerned, he was met at first by what he calls "a conspiracy of silence," and then by a contemptuous opposition among orthodox scientists, at the head of whom stood Elie de Beaumont. This heavy, sluggish opposition seemed immovable: nothing that Boucher could do or say appeared to lighten the pressure of the orthodox theological opinion behind it; not even his belief that these fossils were remains of men drowned at the Deluge of Noah, and that they were proofs of the literal exactness of Genesis seemed to help the matter. His opponents felt instinctively that such discoveries boded danger to the accepted view, and they were right: Boucher himself soon saw the folly of trying to account for them by the orthodox theory. And it must be confessed that not a little force was added to the opposition by certain characteristics of Boucher de Perthes himself. Gifted, far-sighted, and vigorous as he was, he was his own worst enemy. Carried away by his own discoveries, he jumped to the most astounding conclusions. The engravings in the later volume of his great work, showing what he thought to be human features and inscriptions upon some of the flint implements, are worthy of a comic almanac; and at the National Museum of Archaeology at St. Germain, beneath the shelves bearing the remains which he discovered, which mark the beginning of a new epoch in science, are drawers containing specimens hardly worthy of a penny museum, but from which he drew the most unwarranted inferences as to the language, religion, and usages of prehistoric man. Boucher triumphed none the less. Among his bitter opponents at first was Dr. Rigollot, who in 1855, searching earnestly for materials to refute the innovator, dug into the deposits of St. Acheul--and was converted: for he found implements similar to those of Abbeville, making still more certain the existence of man during the Drift period. So, too, Gaudry a year later made similar discoveries. But most important was the evidence of the truth which now came from other parts of France and from other countries. The French leaders in geological science had been held back not only by awe of Cuvier but by recollections of Scheuchzer. Ridicule has always been a serious weapon in France, and the ridicule which finally overtook the supporters of the attempt of Scheuchzer, Mazurier, and others, to square geology with Genesis, was still remembered. From the great body of French geologists, therefore, Boucher secured at first no aid. His support came from the other side of the Channel. The most eminent English geologists, such as Falconer, Prestwich, and Lyell, visited the beds at Abbeville and St. Acheul, convinced themselves that the discoveries of Boucher, Rigollot, and their colleagues were real, and then quietly but firmly told England the truth. And now there appeared a most effective ally in France. The arguments used against Boucher de Perthes and some of the other early investigators of bone caves had been that the implements found might have been washed about and turned over by great floods, and therefore that they might be of a recent period; but in 1861 Edward Lartet published an account of his own excavations at the Grotto of Aurignac, and the proof that man had existed in the time of the Quaternary animals was complete. This grotto had been carefully sealed in prehistoric times by a stone at its entrance; no interference from disturbing currents of water had been possible; and Lartet found, in place, bones of eight out of nine of the main species of animals which characterize the Quaternary period in Europe; and upon them marks of cutting implements, and in the midst of them coals and ashes. Close upon these came the excavations at Eyzies by Lartet and his English colleague, Christy. In both these men there was a carefulness in making researches and a sobriety in stating results which converted many of those who had been repelled by the enthusiasm of Boucher de Perthes. The two colleagues found in the stony deposits made by the water dropping from the roof of the cave at Eyzies the bones of numerous animals extinct or departed to arctic regions--one of these a vertebra of a reindeer with a flint lance-head still fast in it, and with these were found evidences of fire. Discoveries like these were thoroughly convincing; yet there still remained here and there gainsayers in the supposed interest of Scripture, and these, in spite of the convincing array of facts, insisted that in some way, by some combination of circumstances, these bones of extinct animals of vastly remote periods might have been brought into connection with all these human bones and implements of human make in all these different places, refusing to admit that these ancient relics of men and animals were of the same period. Such gainsayers virtually adopted the reasoning of quaint old Persons, who, having maintained that God created the world "about five thousand sixe hundred and odde yeares agoe," added, "And if they aske what God was doing before this short number of yeares, we answere with St. Augustine replying to such curious questioners, that He was framing Hell for them." But a new class of discoveries came to silence this opposition. At La Madeleine in France, at the Kessler cave in Switzerland, and at various other places, were found rude but striking carvings and engravings on bone and stone representing sundry specimens of those long-vanished species; and these specimens, or casts of them, were soon to be seen in all the principal museums. They showed the hairy mammoth, the cave bear, and various other animals of the Quaternary period, carved rudely but vigorously by contemporary men; and, to complete the significance of these discoveries, travellers returning from the icy regions of North America brought similar carvings of animals now existing in those regions, made by the Eskimos during their long arctic winters to-day.(186) (186) For the explorations in Belgium, see Dupont, Le Temps Prehistorique en Belgique. For the discoveries by McEnery and Godwin Austin, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, London, 1869, chap. x; also Cartailhac, Joly, and others above cited. For Boucher de Perthes, see his Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes, Paris, 1847-'64, vol. iii, pp. 526 et seq. For sundry extravagances of Boucher de Perthes, see Reinach, Description raisonne du Musee de St.-Germain-en-Laye, Paris, 1889, vol. i, pp. 16 et seq. For the mixture of sound and absurd results in Boucher's work, see Cartailhac as above, p. 19. Boucher had published in 1838 a work entitled De la Creation, but it seems to have dropped dead from the press. For the attempts of Scheuchzer to reconcile geology and Genesis by means of the Homo diluvii testis, and similar "diluvian fossils," see the chapter on Geology in this series. The original specimens of these prehistoric engravings upon bone and stone may best be seen at the Archaeological Museum of St.-Germain and the British Museum. For engravings of some of the most recent, see especially Dawkin's Early Man in Britain, chap. vii, and the Description du Musee de St.-Germain. As to the Kessler etchings and their antiquity, see D. G. Brinton, in Science, August 12, 1892. For comparison of this prehistoric work with that produced to-day by the Eskimos and others, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, chapters x and xiv. For very striking exhibitions of this same artistic gift in a higher field to-day by descendants of the barbarian tribes of northern America, see the very remarkable illustrations in Rink, Danish Greenland, London, 1877, especially those in chap. xiv. As a result of these discoveries and others like them, showing that man was not only contemporary with long-extinct animals of past geological epochs, but that he had already developed into a stage of culture above pure savagery, the tide of thought began to turn. Especially was this seen in 1863, when Lyell published the first edition of his Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man; and the fact that he had so long opposed the new ideas gave force to the clear and conclusive argument which led him to renounce his early scientific beliefs. Research among the evidences of man's existence in the early Quaternary, and possibly in the Tertiary period, was now pressed forward along the whole line. In 1864 Gabriel Mortillet founded his review devoted to this subject; and in 1865 the first of a series of scientific congresses devoted to such researches was held in Italy. These investigations went on vigorously in all parts of France and spread rapidly to other countries. The explorations which Dupont began in 1864, in the caves of Belgium, gave to the museum at Brussels eighty thousand flint implements, forty thousand bones of animals of the Quaternary period, and a number of human skulls and bones found mingled with these remains. From Germany, Italy, Spain, America, India, and Egypt similar results were reported. Especially noteworthy were the further explorations of the caves and drift throughout the British Islands. The discovery by Colonel Wood, In 1861, of flint tools in the same strata with bones of the earlier forms of the rhinoceros, was but typical of many. A thorough examination of the caverns of Brixham and Torquay, by Pengelly and others, made it still more evident that man had existed in the early Quaternary period. The existence of a period before the Glacial epoch or between different glacial epochs in England, when the Englishman was a savage, using rude stone tools, was then fully ascertained, and, what was more significant, there were clearly shown a gradation and evolution even in the history of that period. It was found that this ancient Stone epoch showed progress and development. In the upper layers of the caves, with remains of the reindeer, who, although he has migrated from these regions, still exists in more northern climates, were found stone implements revealing some little advance in civilization; next below these, sealed up in the stalagmite, came, as a rule, another layer, in which the remains of reindeer were rare and those of the mammoth more frequent, the implements found in this stratum being less skilfully made than those in the upper and more recent layers; and, finally, in the lowest levels, near the floors of these ancient caverns, with remains of the cave bear and others of the most ancient extinct animals, were found stone implements evidently of a yet ruder and earlier stage of human progress. No fairly unprejudiced man can visit the cave and museum at Torquay without being convinced that there were a gradation and an evolution in these beginnings of human civilization. The evidence is complete; the masses of breccia taken from the cave, with the various soils, implements, and bones carefully kept in place, put this progress beyond a doubt. All this indicated a great antiquity for the human race, but in it lay the germs of still another great truth, even more important and more serious in its consequences to the older theologic view, which will be discussed in the following chapter. But new evidences came in, showing a yet greater antiquity of man. Remains of animals were found in connection with human remains, which showed not only that man was living in times more remote than the earlier of the new investigators had dared dream, but that some of these early periods of his existence must have been of immense length, embracing climatic changes betokening different geological periods; for with remains of fire and human implements and human bones were found not only bones of the hairy mammoth and cave bear, woolly rhinoceros, and reindeer, which could only have been deposited there in a time of arctic cold, but bones of the hyena, hippopotamus, sabre-toothed tiger, and the like, which could only have been deposited when there was in these regions a torrid climate. The conjunction of these remains clearly showed that man had lived in England early enough and long enough to pass through times when there was arctic cold and times when there was torrid heat; times when great glaciers stretched far down into England and indeed into the continent, and times when England had a land connection with the European continent, and the European continent with Africa, allowing tropical animals to migrate freely from Africa to the middle regions of England. The question of the origin of man at a period vastly earlier than the sacred chronologists permitted was thus absolutely settled, but among the questions regarding the existence of man at a period yet more remote, the Drift period, there was one which for a time seemed to give the champions of science some difficulty. The orthodox leaders in the time of Boucher de Perthes, and for a considerable time afterward, had a weapon of which they made vigorous use: the statement that no human bones had yet been discovered in the drift. The supporters of science naturally answered that few if any other bones as small as those of man had been found, and that this fact was an additional proof of the great length of the period since man had lived with the extinct animals; for, since specimens of human workmanship proved man's existence as fully as remains of his bones could do, the absence or even rarity of human and other small bones simply indicated the long periods of time required for dissolving them away. Yet Boucher, inspired by the genius he had already shown, and filled with the spirit of prophecy, declared that human bones would yet be found in the midst of the flint implements, and in 1863 he claimed that this prophecy had been fulfilled by the discovery at Moulin Quignon of a portion of a human jaw deep in the early Quaternary deposits. But his triumph was short-lived: the opposition ridiculed his discovery; they showed that he had offered a premium to his workmen for the discovery of human remains, and they naturally drew the inference that some tricky labourer had deceived him. The result of this was that the men of science felt obliged to acknowledge that the Moulin Quignon discovery was not proven. But ere long human bones were found in the deposits of the early Quaternary period, or indeed of an earlier period, in various other parts of the world, and the question regarding the Moulin Quignon relic was of little importance. We have seen that researches regarding the existence of prehistoric man in England and on the Continent were at first mainly made in the caverns; but the existence of man in the earliest Quaternary period was confirmed on both sides of the English Channel, in a way even more striking, by the close examination of the drift and early gravel deposits. The results arrived at by Boucher de Perthes were amply confirmed in England. Rude stone implements were found in terraces a hundred feet and more above the levels at which various rivers of Great Britain now flow, and under circumstances which show that, at the time when they were deposited, the rivers of Great Britain in many cases were entirely different from those of the present period, and formed parts of the river system of the European continent. Researches in the high terraces above the Thames and the Ouse, as well as at other points in Great Britain, placed beyond a doubt the fact that man existed on the British Islands at a time when they were connected by solid land with the Continent, and made it clear that, within the period of the existence of man in northern Europe, a large portion of the British Islands had been sunk to depths between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred feet beneath the Northern Ocean,--had risen again from the water,--had formed part of the continent of Europe, and had been in unbroken connection with Africa, so that elephants, bears, tigers, lions, the rhinoceros and hippopotamus, of species now mainly extinct, had left their bones in the same deposits with human implements as far north as Yorkshire. Moreover, connected with this fact came in the new conviction, forced upon geologists by the more careful examination of the earth and its changes, that such elevations and depressions of Great Britain and other parts of the world were not necessarily the results of sudden cataclysms, but generally of slow processes extending through vast cycles of years--processes such as are now known to be going on in various parts of the world. Thus it was that the six or seven thousand years allowed by the most liberal theologians of former times were seen more and more clearly to be but a mere nothing in the long succession of ages since the appearance of man. Confirmation of these results was received from various other parts of the world. In Africa came the discovery of flint implements deep in the hard gravel of the Nile Valley at Luxor and on the high hills behind Esneh. In America the discoveries at Trenton, N.J., and at various places in Delaware, Ohio, Minnesota, and elsewhere, along the southern edge of the drift of the Glacial epochs, clinched the new scientific truth yet more firmly; and the statement made by an eminent American authority is, that "man was on this continent when the climate and ice of Greenland extended to the mouth of New York harbour." The discoveries of prehistoric remains on the Pacific coast, and especially in British Columbia, finished completely the last chance at a reasonable contention by the adherents of the older view. As to these investigations on the Pacific slope of the United States, the discoveries of Whitney and others in California had been so made and announced that the judgment of scientific men regarding them was suspended until the visit of perhaps the greatest living authority in his department, Alfred Russel Wallace, in 1887. He confirmed the view of Prof. Whitney and others with the statement that "both the actual remains and works of man found deep under the lava-flows of Pliocene age show that he existed in the New World at least as early as in the Old." To this may be added the discoveries in British Columbia, which prove that, since man existed in these regions, "valleys have been filled up by drift from the waste of mountains to a depth in some cases of fifteen hundred feet; this covered by a succession of tuffs, ashes, and lava-streams from volcanoes long since extinct, and finally cut down by the present rivers through beds of solid basalt, and through this accumulation of lavas and gravels." The immense antiquity of the human remains in the gravels of the Pacific coast is summed up by a most eminent English authority and declared to be proved, "first, by the present river systems being of subsequent date, sometimes cutting through them and their superincumbent lava-cap to a depth of two thousand feet; secondly, by the great denudation that has taken place since they were deposited, for they sometimes lie on the summits of mountains six thousand feet high; thirdly, by the fact that the Sierra Nevada has been partly elevated since their formation."(187) (187) For the general subject of investigations in British prehistoric remains, see especially Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain and his Place in the Tertiary Period, London, 1880. For Boucher de Perthes's account of his discovery of the human jaw at Moulin Quignon, see his Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes, vol. iii, p. 542 et seq., Appendix. For an excellent account of special investigations in the high terraces above the Thames, see J. Allen Brown, F. G. S., Palaeolithic Man in Northwest Middlesex, London, 1887. For discoveries in America, and the citations regarding them, see Wright, the Ice Age in North America, New York, 1889, chap. xxi. Very remarkable examples of these specimens from the drift at Trenton may be seen in Prof. Abbott's collections at the University of Pennsylvania. For an admirable statement, see Prof. Henry W. Haynes, in Wright, as above. For proofs of the vast antiquity of man upon the Pacific coast, cited in the text, see Skertchley, F. G. S., in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1887, p. 336; see also Wallace, Darwinism, London, 1890, chap. xv; and for a striking summary of the evidence that man lived before the last submergence of Britain, see Brown, Palaeolithic Man in Northwest Middlesex, as above cited. For proofs that man existed in a period when the streams were flowing hundreds of feet above their present level, see ibid., p. 33. As to the evidence of the action of the sea and of glacial action in the Welsh bone caves after the remains of extinct animals and weapons of human workmanship had been deposited, see ibid., p. 198. For a good statement of the slowness of the submergance and emergence of Great Britain, with an illustration from the rising of the shore of Finland, see ibid., pp. 47, 48. As to the flint implements of Palaeolithic man in the high terraced gravels throughout the Thames Valley, associated with bones of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, etc., see Brown, p. 31. For still more conclusive proofs that man inhabited North Wales before the last submergence of the greater part of the British Islands to a depth of twelve hundred to fourteen hundred feet, see ibid., pp. 199, 200. For maps showing the connection of the British river system with that of the Continent, see Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, London, 1880, pp. 18, 41, 73; also Lyell, Antiquity of Man, chap. xiv. As to the long continuance of the early Stone period, see James Geikie, The Great Ice Age, New York, 1888, p. 402. As to the impossibility of the animals of the arctic and torrid regions living together or visiting the same place at different times in the same year, see Geikie, as above, pp. 421 et seq.; and for a conclusive argument that the animals of the period assigned lived in England not since, but before, the Glacial period, or in the intergalcial period, see ibid., p. 459. For a very candid statement by perhaps the foremost leader of the theological rear-guard, admitting the insuperable difficulties presented by the Old Testament chronology as regards the Creation and the Deluge, see the Duke of Argyll's Primeval Man, pp. 90-100, and especially pp. 93, 124. For a succinct statement on the general subject, see Laing, Problems of the Future, London, 1889, chapters v and vi. For discoveries of prehistoric implements in India, see notes by Bruce Foote, F. G. S., in the British Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1886 and 1887. For similar discoveries in South Africa, see Gooch, in Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. xi, pp. 124 et seq. For proofs of the existance of Palaeolithic man in Egypt, see Mook, Haynes, Pitt-Rivers, Flinders-Petrie, and others, cited at length in the next chapter. For the corroborative and concurrent testimony of ethnology, philology, and history to the vast antiquity of man, see Tylor, Anthropology, chap. i. As an important supplement to these discoveries of ancient implements came sundry comparisons made by eminent physiologists between human skulls and bones found in different places and under circumstances showing vast antiquity. Human bones had been found under such circumstances as early as 1835 at Cannstadt near Stuttgart, and in 1856 in the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf; but in more recent searches they had been discovered in a multitude of places, especially in Germany, France, Belgium, England, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America. Comparison of these bones showed that even in that remote Quaternary period there were great differences of race, and here again came in an argument for the yet earlier existence of man on the earth; for long previous periods must have been required to develop such racial differences. Considerations of this kind gave a new impulse to the belief that man's existence might even date back into the Tertiary period. The evidence for this earlier origin of man was ably summed up, not only by its brilliant advocate, Mortillet, but by a former opponent, one of the most conservative of modern anthropologists, Quatrefages; and the conclusion arrived at by both was, that man did really exist in the Tertiary period. The acceptance of this conclusion was also seen in the more recent work of Alfred Russel Wallace, who, though very cautious and conservative, placed the origin of man not only in the Tertiary period, but in an earlier stage of it than most had dared assign--even in the Miocene. The first thing raising a strong presumption, if not giving proof, that man existed in the Tertiary, was the fact that from all explored parts of the world came in more and more evidence that in the earlier Quaternary man existed in different, strongly marked races and in great numbers. From all regions which geologists had explored, even from those the most distant and different from each other, came this same evidence--from northern Europe to southern Africa; from France to China; from New Jersey to British Columbia; from British Columbia to Peru. The development of man in such numbers and in so many different regions, with such differences of race and at so early a period, must have required a long previous time. This argument was strengthened by discoveries of bones bearing marks apparently made by cutting instruments, in the Tertiary formations of France and Italy, and by the discoveries of what were claimed to be flint implements by the Abbe Bourgeois in France, and of implements and human bones by Prof. Capellini in Italy. On the other hand, some of the more cautious men of science are still content to say that the existence of man in the Tertiary period is not yet proven. As to his existence throughout the Quaternary epoch, no new proofs are needed; even so determined a supporter of the theological side as the Duke of Argyll has been forced to yield to the evidence. Of attempts to make an exact chronological statement throwing light on the length of the various prehistoric periods, the most notable have been those by M. Morlot, on the accumulated strata of the Lake of Geneva; by Gillieron, on the silt of Lake Neufchatel; by Horner, in the delta deposits of Egypt; and by Riddle, in the delta of the Mississippi. But while these have failed to give anything like an exact result, all these investigations together point to the central truth, so amply established, of the vast antiquity of man, and the utter inadequacy of the chronology given in our sacred books. The period of man's past life upon our planet, which has been fixed by the universal Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," is thus perfectly proved to be insignificant compared with those vast geological epochs during which man is now known to have existed.(188) (188) As to the evidence of man in the Tertiary period, see works already cited, especially Quatrefages, Cartailhac, and Mortillet. For an admirable summary, see Laing, Human Origins, chap. viii. See also, for a summing up of the evidence in favour of man in the Tertiary period, Quatrefages, History Generale des Races Humaines, in the Bibliotheque Ethnologique, Paris, 1887, chap. iv. As to the earlier view, see Vogt, Lectures on Man, London, 1864, lecture xi. For a thorough and convincing refutation of Sir J. W. Dawson's attempt to make the old and new Stone periods coincide, see H. W. Haynes, in chap. vi of the History of America, edited by Justin Winsor. For development of various important points in the relation of anthropology to the human occupancy of our planet, see Topinard, Anthropology, London, 1890, chap. ix. CHAPTER VIII. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY In the previous chapters we have seen how science, especially within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has thoroughly changed the intelligent thought of the world in regard to the antiquity of man upon our planet; and how the fabric built upon the chronological indications in our sacred books--first, by the early fathers of the Church, afterward by the medieval doctors, and finally by the reformers and modern orthodox chronologists--has virtually disappeared before an entirely different view forced upon us, especially by Egyptian and Assyrian studies, as well as by geology and archeology. In this chapter I purpose to present some outlines of the work of Anthropology, especially as assisted by Ethnology, in showing what the evolution of human civilization has been. Here, too, the change from the old theological view based upon the letter of our sacred books to the modern scientific view based upon evidence absolutely irrefragable is complete. Here, too, we are at the beginning of a vast change in the basis and modes of thought upon man--a change even more striking than that accomplished by Copernicus and Galileo, when they substituted for a universe in which sun and planets revolved about the earth a universe in which the earth is but the merest grain or atom revolving with other worlds, larger and smaller, about the sun; and all these forming but one among innumerable systems. Ever since the beginning of man's effective thinking upon the great problems around him, two antagonistic views have existed regarding the life of the human race upon earth. The first of these is the belief that man was created "in the beginning" a perfect being, endowed with the highest moral and intellectual powers, but that there came a "fall," and, as its result, the entrance into the world of evil, toil, sorrow, and death. Nothing could be more natural than such an explanation of the existence of evil, in times when men saw everywhere miracle and nowhere law. It is, under such circumstances, by far the most easy of explanations, for it is in accordance with the appearances of things: men adopted it just as naturally as they adopted the theory that the Almighty hangs up the stars as lights in the solid firmament above the earth, or hides the sun behind a mountain at night, or wheels the planets around the earth, or flings comets as "signs and wonders" to scare a wicked world, or allows evil spirits to control thunder, lightning, and storm, and to cause diseases of body and mind, or opens the "windows of heaven" to let down "the waters that be above the heavens," and thus to give rain upon the earth. A belief, then, in a primeval period of innocence and perfection--moral, intellectual, and physical--from which men for some fault fell, is perfectly in accordance with what we should expect. Among the earliest known records of our race we find this view taking shape in the Chaldean legends of war between the gods, and of a fall of man; both of which seemed necessary to explain the existence of evil. In Greek mythology perhaps the best-known statement was made by Hesiod: to him it was revealed, regarding the men of the most ancient times, that they were at first "a golden race," that "as gods they were wont to live, with a life void of care, without labour and trouble; nor was wretched old age at all impending; but ever did they delight themselves out of the reach of all ills, and they died as if overcome by sleep; all blessings were theirs: of its own will the fruitful field would bear them fruit, much and ample, and they gladly used to reap the labours of their hands in quietness along with many good things, being rich in flocks and true to the blessed gods." But there came a "fall," caused by human curiosity. Pandora, the first woman created, received a vase which, by divine command, was to remain closed; but she was tempted to open it, and troubles, sorrow, and disease escaped into the world, hope alone remaining. So, too, in Roman mythological poetry the well-known picture by Ovid is but one among the many exhibitions of this same belief in a primeval golden age--a Saturnian cycle; one of the constantly recurring attempts, so universal and so natural in the early history of man, to account for the existence of evil, care, and toil on earth by explanatory myths and legends. This view, growing out of the myths, legends, and theologies of earlier peoples, we also find embodied in the sacred tradition of the Jews, and especially in one of the documents which form the impressive poem beginning the books attributed to Moses. As to the Christian Church, no word of its Blessed Founder indicates that it was committed by him to this theory, or that he even thought it worthy of his attention. How, like so many other dogmas never dreamed of by Jesus of Nazareth and those who knew him best, it was developed, it does not lie within the province of this chapter to point out; nor is it worth our while to dwell upon its evolution in the early Church, in the Middle Ages, at the Reformation, and in various branches of the Protestant Church: suffice it that, though among English-speaking nations by far the most important influence in its favour has come from Milton's inspiration rather than from that of older sacred books, no doctrine has been more universally accepted, "always, everywhere, and by all," from the earliest fathers of the Church down to the present hour. On the other hand appeared at an early period the opposite view--that mankind, instead of having fallen from a high intellectual, moral, and religious condition, has slowly risen from low and brutal beginnings. In Greece, among the philosophers contemporary with Socrates, we find Critias depicting a rise of man, from a time when he was beastlike and lawless, through a period when laws were developed, to a time when morality received enforcement from religion; but among all the statements of this theory the most noteworthy is that given by Lucretius in his great poem on The Nature of Things. Despite its errors, it remains among the most remarkable examples of prophetic insight in the history of our race. The inspiration of Lucretius gave him almost miraculous glimpses of truth; his view of the development of civilization from the rudest beginnings to the height of its achievements is a wonderful growth, rooted in observation and thought, branching forth into a multitude of striking facts and fancies; and among these is the statement regarding the sequence of inventions: "Man's earliest arms were fingers, teeth, and nails, And stones and fragments from the branching woods; Then copper next; and last, as latest traced, The tyrant, iron." Thus did the poet prophesy one of the most fruitful achievements of modern science: the discovery of that series of epochs which has been so carefully studied in our century. Very striking, also, is the statement of Horace, though his idea is evidently derived from Lucretius. He dwells upon man's first condition on earth as low and bestial, and pictures him lurking in caves, progressing from the use of his fists and nails, first to clubs, then to arms which he had learned to forge, and, finally, to the invention of the names of things, to literature, and to laws.(189) (189) For the passage in Hesiod, as given, see the Works and Days, lines 109-120, in Banks's translation. As to Horace, see the Satires, i, 3, 99. As to the relation of the poetic account of the Fall in Genesis to Chaldean myths, see Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, pp. 13, 17. For a very instructive separation of the Jehovistic and Elohistic parts of Genesis, with the account of the "Fall" as given in the former, see Lenormant, La Genese, Paris, 1883, pp. 166-168; also Bacon, Genesis of Genesis. Of the lines of Lucretius-- "Arma antiqua, manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt, Et lapides, et item sylvarum fragmina rami, Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta, Sed prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus"--- the translation is that of Good. For a more exact prose translation, see Munro's Lucretius, fourth edition, which is much more careful, at least in the proof-reading, than the first edition. As regards Lucretius's propheitc insight into some of the greatest conclusions of modern science, see Munro's translation and notes, fourth edition, book v, notes ii, p. 335. On the relation of several passages in Horace to the ideas of Lucretius, see Munro as above. For the passage from Luther, see the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, p. 242. During the mediaeval ages of faith this view was almost entirely obscured, and at the Reformation it seemed likely to remain so. Typical of the simplicity of belief in "the Fall" cherished among the Reformers is Luther's declaration regarding Adam and Eve. He tells us, "they entered into the garden about noon, and having a desire to eat, she took the apple; then came the fall--according to our account at about two o'clock." But in the revival of learning the old eclipsed truth reappeared, and in the first part of the seventeenth century we find that, among the crimes for which Vanini was sentenced at Toulouse to have his tongue torn out and to be burned alive, was his belief that there is a gradation extending upward from the lowest to the highest form of created beings. Yet, in the same century, the writings of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal were evidently undermining the old idea of "the Fall." Bodin especially, brilliant as were his services to orthodoxy, argued lucidly against the doctrine of general human deterioration. Early in the eighteenth century Vico presented the philosophy of history as an upward movement of man out of animalism and barbarism. This idea took firm hold upon human thought, and in the following centuries such men as Lessing and Turgot gave new force to it. The investigations of the last forty years have shown that Lucretius and Horace were inspired prophets: what they saw by the exercise of reason illumined by poetic genius, has been now thoroughly based upon facts carefully ascertained and arranged--until Thomsen and Nilsson, the northern archaeologists, have brought these prophecies to evident fulfilment, by presenting a scientific classification dividing the age of prehistoric man in various parts of the world between an old stone period, a new stone period, a period of beaten copper, a period of bronze, and a period of iron, and arraying vast masses of facts from all parts of the world, fitting thoroughly into each other, strengthening each other, and showing beyond a doubt that, instead of a FALL, there has been a RISE of man, from the earliest indications in the Quaternary, or even, possibly, in the Tertiary period.(190) (190) For Vanini, see Topinard, Elements of Anthropologie, p. 52. For a brief and careful summary of the agency of Eccard in Germany, Goguet in France, Hoare in England, and others in various parts of Europe, as regards this development of the scientific view during the eighteenth century, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, chap. i. For the agency of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal, see Flint, Philosophy of History, introduction, pp. 28 et seq. For a shorter summary, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Man. For the statements by the northern archaeologists, see Nilsson, Worsaae, and the other main works cited in this article. For a generous statement regarding the great services of the Danish archaeologists in this field, see Quatrefages, introduction to Cartailhac, Les Ages Prehistoriques de l'Espagne et du Portugal. The first blow at the fully developed doctrine of "the Fall" came, as we have seen, from geology. According to that doctrine, as held quite generally from its beginnings among the fathers and doctors of the primitive Church down to its culmination in the minds of great Protestants like John Wesley, the statement in our sacred books that "death entered the world by sin" was taken as a historic fact, necessitating the conclusion that, before the serpent persuaded Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, death on our planet was unknown. Naturally, when geology revealed, in the strata of a period long before the coming of man on earth, a vast multitude of carnivorous tribes fitted to destroy their fellow-creatures on land and sea, and within the fossilized skeletons of many of these the partially digested remains of animals, this doctrine was too heavy to be carried, and it was quietly dropped. But about the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrine of the rise of man as opposed to the doctrine of his "fall" received a great accession of strength from a source most unexpected. As we saw in the last chapter, the facts proving the great antiquity of man foreshadowed a new and even more remarkable idea regarding him. We saw, it is true, that the opponents of Boucher de Perthes, while they could not deny his discovery of human implements in the drift, were successful in securing a verdict of "Not proven" as regarded his discovery of human bones; but their triumph was short-lived. Many previous discoveries, little thought of up to that time, began to be studied, and others were added which resulted not merely in confirming the truth regarding the antiquity of man, but in establishing another doctrine which the opponents of science regarded with vastly greater dislike--the doctrine that man has not fallen from an original high estate in which he was created about six thousand years ago, but that, from a period vastly earlier than any warranted by the sacred chronologists, he has been, in spite of lapses and deteriorations, rising. A brief review of this new growth of truth may be useful. As early as 1835 Prof. Jaeger had brought out from a quantity of Quaternary remains dug up long before at Cannstadt, near Stuttgart, a portion of a human skull, apparently of very low type. A battle raged about it for a time, but this finally subsided, owing to uncertainties arising from the circumstances of the discovery. In 1856, in the Neanderthal, near Dusseldorf, among Quaternary remains gathered on the floor of a grotto, another skull was found bearing the same evidence of a low human type. As in the case of the Cannstadt skull, this again was fiercely debated, and finally the questions regarding it were allowed to remain in suspense. But new discoveries were made: at Eguisheim, at Brux, at Spy, and elsewhere, human skulls were found of a similarly low type; and, while each of the earlier discoveries was open to debate, and either, had no other been discovered, might have been considered an abnormal specimen, the combination of all these showed conclusively that not only had a race of men existed at that remote period, but that it was of a type as low as the lowest, perhaps below the lowest, now known. Research was now redoubled, and, as a result, human skulls and complete skeletons of various types began to be discovered in the ancient deposits of many other parts of the world, and especially in France, Belgium, Germany, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America. But soon began to emerge from all these discoveries a fact of enormous importance. The skulls and bones found at Cro Magnon, Solutre, Furfooz, Grenelle, and elsewhere, were compared, and it was thus made certain that various races had already appeared and lived in various grades of civilization, even in those exceedingly remote epochs; that even then there were various strata of humanity ranging from races of a very low to those of a very high type; and that upon any theory--certainly upon the theory of the origin of mankind from a single pair--two things were evident: first, that long, slow processes during vast periods of time must have been required for the differentiation of these races, and for the evolution of man up to the point where the better specimens show him, certainly in the early Quaternary and perhaps in the Tertiary period; and, secondly, that there had been from the first appearance of man, of which we have any traces, an UPWARD tendency.(191) (191) For Wesley's statement of the amazing consequences of the entrance of death into the world by sin, see citations in his sermon on The Fall of Man in the chapter on Geology. For Boucher de Perthes, see his Life by Ledieu, especially chapters v and xix; also letters in the appendix; also Les Antiquities Celtiques et Antediluviennes, as cited in previous chapters of this work. For an account of the Neanderthal man and other remains mentioned, see Quatrefages, Human Species, chap. xxvi; also Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, pp. 232 et seq.; also other writers cited in this chapter. For the other discoveries mentioned, see the same sources. For an engraving of the skull and the restored human face of the Neanderthal man, see Reinach, Antiquities Nationales, etc., vol. i, p. 138. For the vast regions over which that early race spread, see Quatrefages as above, p. 307. See also the same author, Histoire Generale des Races Humaines, in the Bibliotheque Ethnologique, Paris, 1887, p. 4. In the vast mass of literature bearing on this subject, see Quatrefages, Dupont, Reinach, Joly, Mortillet, Tylor, and Lubbock, in works cited through these chapters. This second conclusion, the upward tendency of man from low beginnings, was made more and more clear by bringing into relations with these remains of human bodies and of extinct animals the remains of human handiwork. As stated in the last chapter, the river drift and bone caves in Great Britain, France, and other parts of the world, revealed a progression, even in the various divisions of the earliest Stone period; for, beginning at the very lowest strata of these remains, on the floors of the caverns, associated mainly with the bones of extinct animals, such as the cave bear, the hairy elephant, and the like, were the rudest implements then, in strata above these, sealed in the stalagmite of the cavern floors, lying with the bones of animals extinct but more recent, stone implements were found, still rude, but, as a rule, of an improved type; and, finally, in a still higher stratum, associated with bones of animals like the reindeer and bison, which, though not extinct, have departed to other climates, were rude stone implements, on the whole of a still better workmanship. Such was the foreshadowing, even at that early rude Stone period, of the proofs that the tendency of man has been from his earliest epoch and in all parts of the world, as a rule, upward. But this rule was to be much further exemplified. About 1850, while the French and English geologists were working more especially among the relics of the drift and cave periods, noted archaeologists of the North--Forchammer, Steenstrup, and Worsaae--were devoting themselves to the investigation of certain remains upon the Danish Peninsula. These remains were of two kinds: first, there were vast shell-heaps or accumulations of shells and other refuse cast aside by rude tribes which at some unknown age in the past lived on the shores of the Baltic, principally on shellfish. That these shell-heaps were very ancient was evident: the shells of oysters and the like found in them were far larger than any now found on those coasts; their size, so far from being like that of the corresponding varieties which now exist in the brackish waters of the Baltic, was in every case like that of those varieties which only thrive in the waters of the open salt sea. Here was a clear indication that at the time when man formed these shell-heaps those coasts were in far more direct communication with the salt sea than at present, and that sufficient time must have elapsed since that period to have wrought enormous changes in sea and land throughout those regions. Scattered through these heaps were found indications of a grade of civilization when man still used implements of stone, but implements and weapons which, though still rude, showed a progress from those of the drift and early cave period, some of them being of polished stone. With these were other evidences that civilization had progressed. With implements rude enough to have survived from early periods, other implements never known in the drift and bone caves began to appear, and, though there were few if any bones of other domestic animals, the remains of dogs were found; everything showed that there had been a progress in civilization between the former Stone epoch and this. The second series of discoveries in Scandinavia was made in the peat-beds: these were generally formed in hollows or bowls varying in depth from ten to thirty feet, and a section of them, like a section of the deposits in the bone caverns, showed a gradual evolution of human culture. The lower strata in these great bowls were found to be made up chiefly of mosses and various plants matted together with the trunks of fallen trees, sometimes of very large diameter; and the botanical examination of the lowest layer of these trees and plants in the various bowls revealed a most important fact: for this layer, the first in point of time, was always of the Scotch fir--which now grows nowhere in the Danish islands, and can not be made to grow anywhere in them--and of plants which are now extinct in these regions, but have retreated within the arctic circle. Coming up from the bottom of these great bowls there was found above the first layer a second, in which were matted together masses of oak trees of different varieties; these, too, were relics of a bygone epoch, since the oak has almost entirely disappeared from Denmark. Above these came a third stratum made up of fallen beech trees; and the beech is now, and has been since the beginning of recorded history, the most common tree of the Danish Peninsula. Now came a second fact of the utmost importance as connected with the first. Scattered, as a rule, through the lower of these deposits, that of the extinct fir trees and plants, were found implements and weapons of smooth stone; in the layer of oak trees were found implements of bronze; and among the layer of beeches were found implements and weapons of iron. The general result of these investigations in these two sources, the shell mounds and the peat deposits, was the same: the first civilization evidenced in them was marked by the use of stone implements more or less smooth, showing a progress from the earlier rude Stone period made known by the bone caves; then came a later progress to a higher civilization, marked by the use of bronze implements; and, finally, a still higher development when iron began to be used. The labours of the Danish archaeologists have resulted in the formation of a great museum at Copenhagen, and on the specimens they have found, coupled with those of the drift and bone caves, is based the classification between the main periods or divisions in the evolution of the human race above referred to. It was not merely in Scandinavian lands that these results were reached; substantially the same discoveries were made in Ireland and France, in Sardinia and Portugal, in Japan and in Brazil, in Cuba and in the United States; in fact, as a rule, in nearly every part of the world which was thoroughly examined.(192) (192) For the general subject, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, p. 498, et passim. For examples of the rude stone implements, improving as we go from earlier to later layers in the bone caves, see Boyd Hawkins, Early Man in Britain, chap. vii, p. 186; also Quatrefages, Human Species, New York, 1879, pp. 305 et seq. An interesting gleam of light is thrown on the subject in De Baye, Grottes Prehistoriques de la Marne, pp. 31 et seq.; also Evans, as cited in the previous chapter. For the more recent investigations in the Danish shell-heaps, see Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, pp. 303, 304. For these evidences of advanced civilization in the shell-heaps, see Mortillet, p. 498. He, like Nilsson, says that only the bones of the dog were found; but compare Dawkins, p. 305. For the very full list of these discoveries, with their bearing on each other, see Mortillet, p. 499. As to those in Scandanavian countries, see Nilsson, The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, third edition, with Introduction by Lubbock, London, 1868; also the Pre-History of the North, by Worsaae, English translation, London, 1886. For shell-mounds and their contents in the Spanish Peninsula, see Cartailhac's greater work already cited. For summary of such discoveries throughout the world, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, pp. 497 et seq. But from another quarter came a yet more striking indication of this same evolution. As far back as the year 1829 there were discovered, in the Lake of Zurich, piles and other antiquities indicating a former existence of human dwellings, standing in the water at some distance from the shore; but the usual mixture of thoughtlessness and dread of new ideas seems to have prevailed, and nothing was done until about 1853, when new discoveries of the same kind were followed up vigorously, and Rutimeyer, Keller, Troyon, and others showed not only in the Lake of Zurich, but in many other lakes in Switzerland, remains of former habitations, and, in the midst of these, great numbers of relics, exhibiting the grade of civilization which those lake-dwellers had attained. Here, too, were accumulated proofs of the upward tendency of the human race. Implements of polished stone, bone, leather, pottery of various grades, woven cloth, bones of several kinds of domestic animals, various sorts of grain, bread which had been preserved by charring, and a multitude of evidences of progress never found among the earlier, ruder relics of civilization, showed yet more strongly that man had arrived here at a still higher stage than his predecessor of the drift, cave, and shell-heap periods, and had gone on from better to better. Very striking evidences of this upward tendency were found in each class of implements. As by comparing the chipped flint implements of the lower and earlier strata in the cave period with those of the later and upper strata we saw progress, so, in each of the periods of polished stone, bronze, and iron, we see, by similar comparisons, a steady progress from rude to perfected implements; and especially is this true in the remains of the various lake-dwellings, for among these can be traced out constant increase in the variety of animals domesticated, and gradual improvements in means of subsistence and in ways of living. Incidentally, too, a fact, at first sight of small account, but on reflection exceedingly important, was revealed. The earlier bronze implements were frequently found to imitate in various minor respects implements of stone; in other words, forms were at first given to bronze implements natural in working stone, but not natural in working bronze. This showed the DIRECTION of the development--that it was upward from stone to bronze, not downward from bronze to stone; that it was progress rather than decline. These investigations were supplemented by similar researches elsewhere. In many other parts of the world it was found that lake-dwellers had existed in different grades of civilization, but all within a certain range, intermediate between the cave-dwellers and the historic period. To explain this epoch of the lake-dwellers, history came in with the account given by Herodotus of the lake-dwellings on Lake Prasias, which gave protection from the armies of Persia. Still more important, Comparative Ethnography showed that to-day, in various parts of the world, especially in New Guinea and West Africa, races of men are living in lake-dwellings built upon piles, and with a range of implements and weapons strikingly like many of those discovered in these ancient lake deposits of Switzerland. In Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, and other countries, remains of a different sort were also found, throwing light on this progress. The cromlechs, cranogs, mounds, and the like, though some of them indicate the work of weaker tribes pressed upon by stronger, show, as a rule, the same upward tendency. At a very early period in the history of these discoveries, various attempts were made--nominally in the interest of religion, but really in the interest of sundry creeds and catechisms framed when men knew little or nothing of natural laws--to break the force of such evidences of the progress and development of the human race from lower to higher. Out of all the earlier efforts two may be taken as fairly typical, for they exhibit the opposition to science as developed under two different schools of theology, each working in its own way. The first of these shows great ingenuity and learning, and is presented by Mr. Southall in his book, published in 1875, entitled The Recent Origin of the World. In this he grapples first of all with the difficulties presented by the early date of Egyptian civilization, and the keynote of his argument is the statement made by an eminent Egyptologist, at a period before modern archaeological discoveries were well understood, that "Egypt laughs the idea of a rude Stone age, a polished Stone age, a Bronze age, an Iron age, to scorn." Mr. Southall's method was substantially that of the late excellent Mr. Gosse in geology. Mr. Gosse, as the readers of this work may remember, felt obliged, in the supposed interest of Genesis, to urge that safety to men's souls might be found in believing that, six thousand years ago, the Almighty, for some inscrutable purpose, suddenly set Niagara pouring very near the spot where it is pouring now; laid the various strata, and sprinkled the fossils through them like plums through a pudding; scratched the glacial grooves upon the rocks, and did a vast multitude of things, subtle and cunning, little and great, in all parts of the world, required to delude geologists of modern times into the conviction that all these things were the result of a steady progress through long epochs. On a similar plan, Mr. Southall proposed, at the very beginning of his book, as a final solution of the problem, the declaration that Egypt, with its high civilization in the time of Mena, with its races, classes, institutions, arrangements, language, monuments--all indicating an evolution through a vast previous history--was a sudden creation which came fully made from the hands of the Creator. To use his own words, "The Egyptians had no Stone age, and were born civilized." There is an old story that once on a time a certain jovial King of France, making a progress through his kingdom, was received at the gates of a provincial town by the mayor's deputy, who began his speech on this wise: "May it please your Majesty, there are just thirteen reasons why His Honour the Mayor can not be present to welcome you this morning. The first of these reasons is that he is dead." On this the king graciously declared that this first reason was sufficient, and that he would not trouble the mayor's deputy for the twelve others. So with Mr. Southall's argument: one simple result of scientific research out of many is all that it is needful to state, and this is, that in these later years we have a new and convincing evidence of the existence of prehistoric man in Egypt in his earliest, rudest beginnings; the very same evidence which we find in all other parts of the world which have been carefully examined. This evidence consists of stone implements and weapons which have been found in Egypt in such forms, at such points, and in such positions that when studied in connection with those found in all other parts of the world, from New Jersey to California, from France to India, and from England to the Andaman Islands, they force upon us the conviction that civilization in Egypt, as in all other parts of the world, was developed by the same slow process of evolution from the rudest beginnings. It is true that men learned in Egyptology had discouraged the idea of an earlier Stone age in Egypt, and that among these were Lepsius and Brugsch; but these men were not trained in prehistoric archaeology; their devotion to the study of the monuments of Egyptian civilization had evidently drawn them away from sympathy, and indeed from acquaintance, with the work of men like Boucher de Perthes, Lartet, Nilsson, Troyon, and Dawkins. But a new era was beginning. In 1867 Worsaae called attention to the prehistoric implements found on the borders of Egypt; two years later Arcelin discussed such stone implements found beneath the soil of Sakkara and Gizeh, the very focus of the earliest Egyptian civilization; in the same year Hamy and Lenormant found such implements washed out from the depths higher up the Nile at Thebes, near the tombs of the kings; and in the following year they exhibited more flint implements found at various other places. Coupled with these discoveries was the fact that Horner and Linant found a copper knife at twenty-four feet, and pottery at sixty feet, below the surface. In 1872 Dr. Reil, director of the baths at Helouan, near Cairo, discovered implements of chipped flint; and in 1877. Dr. Jukes Brown made similar discoveries in that region. In 1878 Oscar Fraas, summing up the question, showed that the stone implements were mainly such as are found in the prehistoric deposits of other countries, and that, Zittel having found them in the Libyan Desert, far from the oases, there was reason to suppose that these implements were used before the region became a desert and before Egypt was civilized. Two years later Dr. Mook, of Wurzburg, published a work giving the results of his investigations, with careful drawings of the rude stone implements discovered by him in the upper Nile Valley, and it was evident that, while some of these implements differed slightly from those before known, the great mass of them were of the character so common in the prehistoric deposits of other parts of the world. A yet more important contribution to this mass of facts was made by Prof. Henry Haynes, of Boston, who in the winter of 1877 and 1878 began a very thorough investigation of the subject, and discovered, a few miles east of Cairo, many flint implements. The significance of Haynes's discoveries was twofold: First, there were, among these, stone axes like those found in the French drift beds of St. Acheul, showing that the men who made or taught men how to make these in Egypt were passing through the same phase of savagery as that of Quaternary France; secondly, he found a workshop for making these implements, proving that these flint implements were not brought into Egypt by invaders, but were made to meet the necessities of the country. From this first field Prof. Haynes went to Helouan, north of Cairo, and there found, as Dr. Reil had done, various worked flints, some of them like those discovered by M. Riviere in the caves of southern France; thence he went up the Nile to Luxor, the site of ancient Thebes, began a thorough search in the Tertiary limestone hills, and found multitudes of chipped stone implements, some of them, indeed, of original forms, but most of forms common in other parts of the world under similar circumstances, some of the chipped stone axes corresponding closely to those found in the drift beds of northern France. All this seemed to show conclusively that, long ages before the earliest period of Egyptian civilization of which the monuments of the first dynasties give us any trace, mankind in the Nile Valley was going through the same slow progress from the period when, standing just above the brutes, he defended himself with implements of rudely chipped stone. But in 1881 came discoveries which settled the question entirely. In that year General Pitt-Rivers, a Fellow of the Royal Society and President of the Anthropological Institute, and J. F. Campbell, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of England, found implements not only in alluvial deposits, associated with the bones of the zebra, hyena, and other animals which have since retreated farther south, but, at Djebel Assas, near Thebes, they found implements of chipped flint in the hard, stratified gravel, from six and a half to ten feet below the surface; relics evidently, as Mr. Campbell says, "beyond calculation older than the oldest Egyptian temples and tombs." They certainly proved that Egyptian civilization had not issued in its completeness, and all at once, from the hand of the Creator in the time of Mena. Nor was this all. Investigators of the highest character and ability--men like Hull and Flinders Petrie--revealed geological changes in Egypt requiring enormous periods of time, and traces of man's handiwork dating from a period when the waters in the Nile Valley extended hundreds of feet above the present level. Thus was ended the contention of Mr. Southall. Still another attack upon the new scientific conclusions came from France, when in 1883 the Abbe Hamard, Priest of the Oratory, published his Age of Stone and Primitive Man. He had been especially vexed at the arrangement of prehistoric implements by periods at the Paris Exposition of 1878; he bitterly complains of this as having an anti-Christian tendency, and rails at science as "the idol of the day." He attacks Mortillet, one of the leaders in French archaeology, with a great display of contempt; speaks of the "venom" in books on prehistoric man generally; complains that the Church is too mild and gentle with such monstrous doctrines; bewails the concessions made to science by some eminent preachers; and foretells his own martyrdom at the hands of men of science. Efforts like this accomplished little, and a more legitimate attempt was made to resist the conclusions of archaeology by showing that knives of stone were used in obedience to a sacred ritual in Egypt for embalming, and in Judea for circumcision, and that these flint knives might have had this later origin. But the argument against the conclusions drawn from this view was triple: First, as we have seen, not only stone knives, but axes and other implements of stone similar to those of a prehistoric period in western Europe were discovered; secondly, these implements were discovered in the hard gravel drift of a period evidently far earlier than that of Mena; and, thirdly, the use of stone implements in Egyptian and Jewish sacred functions within the historic period, so far from weakening the force of the arguments for the long and slow development of Egyptian civilization from the men who used rude flint implements to the men who built and adorned the great temples of the early dynasties, is really an argument in favour of that long evolution. A study of comparative ethnology has made it clear that the sacred stone knives and implements of the Egyptian and Jewish priestly ritual were natural survivals of that previous period. For sacrificial or ritual purposes, the knife of stone was considered more sacred than the knife of bronze or iron, simply because it was ancient; just as to-day, in India, Brahman priests kindle the sacred fire not with matches or flint and steel, but by a process found in the earliest, lowest stages of human culture--by violently boring a pointed stick into another piece of wood until a spark comes; and just as to-day, in Europe and America, the architecture of the Middle Ages survives as a special religious form in the erection of our most recent churches, and to such an extent that thousands on thousands of us feel that we can not worship fitly unless in the midst of windows, decorations, vessels, implements, vestments, and ornaments, no longer used for other purposes, but which have survived in sundry branches of the Christian Church, and derived a special sanctity from the fact that they are of ancient origin. Taking, then, the whole mass of testimony together, even though a plausible or very strong argument against single evidences may be made here and there, the force of its combined mass remains, and leaves both the vast antiquity of man and the evolution of civilization from its lowest to its highest forms, as proved by the prehistoric remains of Egypt and so many other countries in all parts of the world, beyond a reasonable doubt. Most important of all, the recent discoveries in Assyria have thrown a new light upon the evolution of the dogma of "the fall of man." Reverent scholars like George Smith, Sayce, Delitzsch, Jensen, Schrader, and their compeers have found in the Ninevite records the undoubted source of that form of the fall legend which was adopted by the Hebrews and by them transmitted to Christianity.(193) (193) For Mr. Southall's views, see his Recent Origin of Man, p. 20 and elsewhere. For Mr. Gosse'e views, see his Omphalos as cited in the chapter on Geology in this work. For a summary of the work of Arcelin, Hamy, Lenormant, Richard, Lubbock, Mook, and Haynes, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, passim. As to Zittel's discovery, see Oscar Fraas's Aus dem Orient, Stuttgart, 1878. As to the striking similarities of the stone implements found in Egypt with those found in the drift and bone caves, see Mook's monograph, Wurzburg, 1880, cited in the next chapter, especially Plates IX, XI, XII. For even more striking reproductions of photographs showing this remarkable similarity between Egyptian and European chipped stone remains, see H. W. Haynes, Palaeolithic Implements in Upper Egypt, Boston, 1881. See also Evans, Ancient Stone Implements, chap. i, pp. 8, 9, 44, 102, 316, 329. As to stone implements used by priests of Jehovah, priests of Baal, priests of Moloch, priests of Odin, and Egyptian priests, as religious survivals, see Cartailhac, as above, 6 and 7; also Lartet, in De Luynes, Expedition to the Dead Sea; also Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, pp. 96, 97; also Sayce, Herodotus, p. 171, note. For the discoveries by Pitt-Rivers, see the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for 1882, vol. xi, pp. 382 et seq.; and for Campbell's decision regarding them, see ibid., pp. 396, 397. For facts summed up in the words, "It is most probable that Egypt at a remote period passed like many other countries through its stone period," see Hilton Price, F. S. A., F. G. S., paper in the Journal of the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for 1884, p. 56. Specimens of Palaeolithic implements from Egypt--knives, arrowheads, spearheads, flakes, and the like, both of peculiar and ordinary forms--may be seen in various museums, but especially in that of Prof. Haynes, of Boston. Some interesting light is also thrown into the subject by the specimens obtained by General Wilson and deposited in the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. For Abbe Hamard's attack, see his L'Age de la Pierre et L'Homme Primitif, Paris, 1883--especially his preface. For the stone weapon found in the high drift behind Esneh, see Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, chap. i. Of these discoveries by Pitt-Rivers and others, Maspero appears to know nothing. CHAPTER IX. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY. We have seen that, closely connected with the main lines of investigation in archaeology and anthropology, there were other researches throwing much light on the entire subject. In a previous chapter we saw especially that Lafitau and Jussieu were among the first to collect and compare facts bearing on the natural history of man, gathered by travellers in various parts of the earth, thus laying foundations for the science of comparative ethnology. It was soon seen that ethnology had most important bearings upon the question of the material, intellectual, moral, and religious evolution of the human race; in every civilized nation, therefore, appeared scholars who began to study the characteristics of various groups of men as ascertained from travellers, and to compare the results thus gained with each other and with those obtained by archaeology. Thus, more and more clear became the evidences that the tendency of the race has been upward from low beginnings. It was found that groups of men still existed possessing characteristics of those in the early periods of development to whom the drift and caves and shell-heaps and pile-dwellings bear witness; groups of men using many of the same implements and weapons, building their houses in the same way, seeking their food by the same means, enjoying the same amusements, and going through the same general stages of culture; some being in a condition corresponding to the earlier, some to the later, of those early periods. From all sides thus came evidence that we have still upon the earth examples of all the main stages in the development of human civilization; that from the period when man appears little above the brutes, and with little if any religion in any accepted sense of the word, these examples can be arranged in an ascending series leading to the highest planes which humanity has reached; that philosophic observers may among these examples study existing beliefs, usages, and institutions back through earlier and earlier forms, until, as a rule, the whole evolution can be easily divined if not fully seen. Moreover, the basis of the whole structure became more and more clear: the fact that "the lines of intelligence have always been what they are, and have always operated as they do now; that man has progressed from the simple to the complex, from the particular to the general." As this evidence from ethnology became more and more strong, its significance to theology aroused attention, and naturally most determined efforts were made to break its force. On the Continent the two great champions of the Church in this field were De Maistre and De Bonald; but the two attempts which may be especially recalled as the most influential among English-speaking peoples were those of Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, and the Duke of Argyll. First in the combat against these new deductions of science was Whately. He was a strong man, whose breadth of thought and liberality in practice deserve all honour; but these very qualities drew upon him the distrust of his orthodox brethren; and, while his writings were powerful in the first half of the present century to break down many bulwarks of unreason, he seems to have been constantly in fear of losing touch with the Church, and therefore to have promptly attacked some scientific reasonings, which, had he been a layman, not holding a brief for the Church, he would probably have studied with more care and less prejudice. He was not slow to see the deeper significance of archaeology and ethnology in their relations to the theological conception of "the Fall," and he set the battle in array against them. His contention was, to use his own words, that "no community ever did or ever can emerge unassisted by external helps from a state of utter barbarism into anything that can be called civilization"; and that, in short, all imperfectly civilized, barbarous, and savage races are but fallen descendants of races more fully civilized. This view was urged with his usual ingenuity and vigour, but the facts proved too strong for him: they made it clear, first, that many races were without simple possessions, instruments, and arts which never, probably, could have been lost if once acquired--as, for example, pottery, the bow for shooting, various domesticated animals, spinning, the simplest principles of agriculture, household economy, and the like; and, secondly, it was shown as a simple matter of fact that various savage and barbarous tribes HAD raised themselves by a development of means which no one from outside could have taught them; as in the cultivation and improvement of various indigenous plants, such as the potato and Indian corn among the Indians of North America; in the domestication of various animals peculiar to their own regions, such as the llama among the Indians of south America; in the making of sundry fabrics out of materials and by processes not found among other nations, such as the bark cloth of the Polynesians; and in the development of weapons peculiar to sundry localities, but known in no others, such as the boomerang in Australia. Most effective in bringing out the truth were such works as those of Sir John Lubbock and Tylor; and so conclusive were they that the arguments of Whately were given up as untenable by the other of the two great champions above referred to, and an attempt was made by him to form the diminishing number of thinking men supporting the old theological view on a new line of defence. This second champion, the Duke of Argyll, was a man of wide knowledge and strong powers in debate, whose high moral sense was amply shown in his adhesion to the side of the American Union in the struggle against disunion and slavery, despite the overwhelming majority against him in the high aristocracy to which he belonged. As an honest man and close thinker, the duke was obliged to give up completely the theological view of the antiquity of man. The whole biblical chronology as held by the universal Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," he sacrificed, and gave all his powers in this field to support the theory of "the Fall." Noblesse oblige: the duke and his ancestors had been for centuries the chief pillars of the Church of Scotland, and it was too much to expect that he could break away from a tenet which forms really its "chief cornerstone." Acknowledging the insufficiency of Archbishop Whately's argument, the duke took the ground that the lower, barbarous, savage, brutal races were the remains of civilized races which, in the struggle for existence, had been pushed and driven off to remote and inclement parts of the earth, where the conditions necessary to a continuance in their early civilization were absent; that, therefore, the descendants of primeval, civilized men degenerated and sank in the scale of culture. To use his own words, the weaker races were "driven by the stronger to the woods and rocks," so that they became "mere outcasts of the human race." In answer to this, while it was conceded, first, that there have been examples of weaker tribes sinking in the scale of culture after escaping from the stronger into regions unfavourable to civilization, and, secondly, that many powerful nations have declined and decayed, it was shown that the men in the most remote and unfavourable regions have not always been the lowest in the scale; that men have been frequently found "among the woods and rocks" in a higher state of civilization than on the fertile plains, such examples being cited as Mexico, Peru, and even Scotland; and that, while there were many examples of special and local decline, overwhelming masses of facts point to progress as a rule. The improbability, not to say impossibility, of many of the conclusions arrived at by the duke appeared more and more strongly as more became known of the lower tribes of mankind. It was necessary on his theory to suppose many things which our knowledge of the human race absolutely forbids us to believe: for example, it was necessary to suppose that the Australians or New Zealanders, having once possessed so simple and convenient an art as that of the potter, had lost every trace of it; and that the same tribes, having once had so simple a means of saving labour as the spindle or small stick weighted at one end for spinning, had given it up and gone back to twisting threads with the hand. In fact, it was necessary to suppose that one of the main occupations of man from "the beginning" had been the forgetting of simple methods, processes, and implements which all experience in the actual world teaches us are never entirely forgotten by peoples who have once acquired them. Some leading arguments of the duke were overthrown by simple statements of fact. Thus, his instance of the Eskimo as pushed to the verge of habitable America, and therefore living in the lowest depths of savagery, which, even if it were true, by no means proved a general rule, was deprived of its force by the simple fact that the Eskimos are by no means the lowest race on the American continent, and that various tribes far more centrally and advantageously placed, as, for instance, those in Brazil, are really inferior to them in the scale of culture. Again, his statement that "in Africa there appear to be no traces of any time when the natives were not acquainted with the use of iron," is met by the fact that from the Nile Valley to the Cape of Good Hope we find, wherever examination has been made, the same early stone implements which in all other parts of the world precede the use of iron, some of which would not have been made had their makers possessed iron. The duke also tried to show that there were no distinctive epochs of stone, bronze, and iron, by adducing the fact that some stone implements are found even in some high civilizations. This is indeed a fact. We find some few European peasants to-day using stone mallet-heads; but this proves simply that the old stone mallet-heads have survived as implements cheap and effective. The argument from Comparative Ethnology in support of the view that the tendency of mankind is upward has received strength from many sources. Comparative Philology shows that in the less civilized, barbarous, and savage races childish forms of speech prevail--frequent reduplications and the like, of which we have survivals in the later and even in the most highly developed languages. In various languages, too, we find relics of ancient modes of thought in the simplest words and expressions used for arithmetical calculations. Words and phrases for this purpose are frequently found to be derived from the words for hands, feet, fingers, and toes, just as clearly as in our own language some of our simplest measures of length are shown by their names to have been measures of parts of the human body, as the cubit, the foot, and the like, and therefore to date from a time when exactness was not required. To add another out of many examples, it is found to-day that various rude nations go through the simplest arithmetical processes by means of pebbles. Into our own language, through the Latin, has come a word showing that our distant progenitors reckoned in this way: the word CALCULATE gives us an absolute proof of this. According to the theory of the Duke of Argyll, men ages ago used pebbles (CALCULI) in performing the simplest arithmetical calculations because we to-day "CALCULATE." No reduction to absurdity could be more thorough. The simple fact must be that we "calculate" because our remote ancestors used pebbles in their arithmetic. Comparative Literature and Folklore also show among peoples of a low culture to-day childish modes of viewing nature, and childish ways of expressing the relations of man to nature, such as clearly survive from a remote ancestry; noteworthy among these are the beliefs in witches and fairies, and multitudes of popular and poetic expressions in the most civilized nations. So, too, Comparative Ethnography, the basis of Ethnology, shows in contemporary barbarians and savages a childish love of playthings and games, of which we have many survivals. All these facts, which were at first unobserved or observed as matters of no significance, have been brought into connection with a fact in biology acknowledged alike by all important schools; by Agassiz on one hand and by Darwin on the other--namely, as stated by Agassiz, that "the young states of each species and group resemble older forms of the same group," or, as stated by Darwin, that "in two or more groups of animals, however much they may at first differ from each other in structure and habits, if they pass through closely similar embryonic stages, we may feel almost assured that they have descended from the same parent form, and are therefore closely related."(194) (194) For the stone forms given to early bronze axes, etc., see Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, London, 1868, Lubbock's Introduction, p. 31; and for plates, see Lubbock's Prehistoric Man, chap. ii; also Cartailhac, Les Ages Prehistoriques de l'Espagne et du Portugal, p. 227. Also Keller, Lake Dwellings; also Troyon, Habitations Lacustres; also Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Great Britain, p. 191; also Lubbock, p. 6; also Lyell, Antiquity of Man,chap. ii. For the cranogs, etc., in the north of Europe, see Munro, Ancient Scottish Lake Dwellings, Edinburgh, 1882. For mounds and greater stone constructions in the extreme south of Europe, see Cartailhac's work on Spain and Portugal above cited, part iii, chap. iii. For the source of Mr. Southall's contention, see Brugsch, Egypt of the Pharoahs. For the two sides of the question whether in the lower grades of savagery there is really any recognition of a superior power, or anything which can be called, in any accepted sense, religion, compare Quatrefages with Lubbock, in works already cited. For a striking but rather ad captandum effort to show that there is a moral and religious sense in the very lowest of Australian tribes, see one of the discourses of Archbishop Vaughn on Science and Religion, Baltimore, 1879. For one out of multitiudes of striking and instructive resemblances in ancient stone implements and those now in use among sundry savage tribes, see comparison between old Scandanavian arrowheads and those recently brought from Tierra del Fuego, in Nilsson, as above, especially in Plate V. For a brief and admirable statement of the arguments on both sides, see Sir J. Lubbock's Dundee paper, given in the appendix to the American edition of his Origin of Civilization, etc. For the general argument referred to between Whately and the Duke of Argyll on one side, and Lubbock on the other, see Lubbock's Dundee paper as above cited; Tylor, Early History of Mankind, especially p. 193; and the Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, part iv. For difficulties of savages in arithmetic, see Lubbock, as above, pp. 459 et seq. For a very temperate and judicial view of the whole question, see Tylor as above, chaps. vii and xiii. For a brief summary of the scientific position regarding the stagnation and deterioration of races, resulting in the statement that such deterioration "in no way contradicts the theory that civilization itself is developed from low to high stages," see Tylor, Anthropology, chap. i. For striking examples of the testimony of language to upward progress, see Tylor, chap. xii. CHAPTER X. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. The history of art, especially as shown by architecture, in the noblest monuments of the most enlightened nations of antiquity; gives abundant proofs of the upward tendency of man from the rudest and simplest beginnings. Many columns of early Egyptian temples or tombs are but bundles of Nile reeds slightly conventionalized in stone; the temples of Greece, including not only the earliest forms, but the Parthenon itself, while in parts showing an evolution out of Egyptian and Assyrian architecture, exhibit frequent reminiscences and even imitations of earlier constructions in wood; the medieval cathedrals, while evolved out of Roman and Byzantine structures, constantly show unmistakable survivals of prehistoric construction. (195) (195) As to evolution in architecture, and especially of Greek forms and ornaments out of Egyptian and Assyrian, with survivals in stone architecture of forms obtained in Egypt when reeds were used, and in Greece when wood construction prevailed, see Fergusson's Handbook of Architecture, vol. i, pp. 100, 228, 233, and elsewhere; also Otfried Muller, Ancient Art and its Remains, English translation, London, 1852, pp. 219, passim. For a very brief but thorough statement, see A. Magnard's paper in the Proceedings of the American Oriental Society, October, 1889, entitled Reminiscences of Egypt in Doric Architecture. On the general subject, see Hommel, Babylonien, ch. i, and Meyer, Alterthum, i, S 199. So, too, general history has come in, illustrating the unknown from the known: the development of man in the prehistoric period from his development within historic times. Nothing is more evident from history than the fact that weaker bodies of men driven out by stronger do not necessarily relapse into barbarism, but frequently rise, even under the most unfavourable circumstances, to a civilization equal or superior to that from which they have been banished. Out of very many examples showing this law of upward development, a few may be taken as typical. The Slavs, who sank so low under the pressure of stronger races that they gave the modern world a new word to express the most hopeless servitude, have developed powerful civilizations peculiar to themselves; the barbarian tribes who ages ago took refuge amid the sand-banks and morasses of Holland, have developed one of the world's leading centres of civilization; the wretched peasants who about the fifth century took refuge from invading hordes among the lagoons and mud banks of Venetia, developed a power in art, arms, and politics which is among the wonders of human history; the Puritans, driven from the civilization of Great Britain to the unfavourable climate, soil, and circumstances of early New England,--the Huguenots, driven from France, a country admirably fitted for the highest growth of civilization, to various countries far less fitted for such growth,--the Irish peasantry, driven in vast numbers from their own island to other parts of the world on the whole less fitted to them--all are proofs that, as a rule, bodies of men once enlightened, when driven to unfavourable climates and brought under the most depressing circumstances, not only retain what enlightenment they have, but go on increasing it. Besides these, we have such cases as those of criminals banished to various penal colonies, from whose descendants has been developed a better morality; and of pirates, like those of the Bounty, whose descendants, in a remote Pacific island, became sober, steady citizens. Thousands of examples show the prevalence of this same rule--that men in masses do not forget the main gains of their civilization, and that, in spite of deteriorations, their tendency is upward. Another class of historic facts also testifies in the most striking manner to this same upward tendency: the decline and destruction of various civilizations brilliant but hopelessly vitiated. These catastrophes are seen more and more to be but steps in, this development. The crumbling away of the great ancient civilizations based upon despotism, whether the despotism of monarch, priest, or mob--the decline and fall of Roman civilization, for example, which, in his most remarkable generalization, Guizot has shown to have been necessary to the development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared to be a mere catastrophe, but are now seen to have brought in, with the downfall of feudalism, the beginnings of the centralizing, civilizing monarchical period; the French Revolution, once thought a mere outburst of diabolic passion, but now seen to be an unduly delayed transition from the monarchical to the constitutional epoch: all show that even widespread deterioration and decline--often, indeed, the greatest political and moral catastrophes--so far from leading to a fall of mankind, tend in the long run to raise humanity to higher planes. Thus, then, Anthropology and its handmaids, Ethnology, Philology, and History, have wrought out, beyond a doubt, proofs of the upward evolution of humanity since the appearance of man upon our planet. Nor have these researches been confined to progress in man's material condition. Far more important evidences have been found of upward evolution in his family, social, moral, intellectual, and religious relations. The light thrown on this subject by such men as Lubbock, Tylor, Herbert Spencer, Buckle, Draper, Max Muller, and a multitude of others, despite mistakes, haltings, stumblings, and occasional following of delusive paths, is among the greatest glories of the century now ending. From all these investigators in their various fields, holding no brief for any system sacred or secular, but seeking truth as truth, comes the same general testimony of the evolution of higher out of lower. The process has been indeed slow and painful, but this does not prove that it may not become more rapid and less fruitful in sorrow as humanity goes on.(196) (196) As to the good effects of migration, see Waitz, Introduction to Anthropology, London, 1863, p. 345. While, then, it is not denied that many instances of retrogression can be found, the consenting voice of unbiased investigators in all lands has declared more and more that the beginnings of our race must have been low and brutal, and that the tendency has been upward. To combat this conclusion by examples of decline and deterioration here and there has become impossible: as well try to prove that, because in the Mississippi there are eddies in which the currents flow northward, there is no main stream flowing southward; or that, because trees decay and fall, there is no law of upward growth from germ to trunk, branches, foliage, and fruit. A very striking evidence that the theological theory had become untenable was seen when its main supporter in the scientific field, Von Martius, in the full ripeness of his powers, publicly declared his conversion to the scientific view. Yet, while the tendency of enlightened human thought in recent times is unmistakable, the struggle against the older view is not yet ended. The bitterness of the Abbe Hamard in France has been carried to similar and even greater extremes among sundry Protestant bodies in Europe and America. The simple truth of history mates it a necessity, unpleasant though it be, to chronicle two typical examples in the United States. In the year 1875 a leader in American industrial enterprise endowed at the capital of a Southern State a university which bore his name. It was given into the hands of one of the religious sects most powerful in that region, and a bishop of that sect became its president. To its chair of Geology was called Alexander Winchell, a scholar who had already won eminence as a teacher and writer in that field, a professor greatly beloved and respected in the two universities with which he had been connected, and a member of the sect which the institution of learning above referred to represented. But his relations to this Southern institution were destined to be brief. That his lectures at the Vanderbilt University were learned, attractive, and stimulating, even his enemies were forced to admit; but he was soon found to believe that there had been men earlier than the period as signed to Adam, and even that all the human race are not descended from Adam. His desire was to reconcile science and Scripture, and he was now treated by a Methodist Episcopal Bishop in Tennessee just as, two centuries before, La Peyrere had been treated, for a similar effort, by a Roman Catholic vicar-general in Belgium. The publication of a series of articles on the subject, contributed by the professor to a Northern religious newspaper at its own request, brought matters to a climax; for, the articles having fallen under the notice of a leading Southwestern organ of the denomination controlling the Vanderbilt University, the result was a most bitter denunciation of Prof. Winchell and of his views. Shortly afterward the professor was told by Bishop McTyeire that "our people are of the opinion that such views are contrary to the plan of redemption," and was requested by the bishop to quietly resign his chair. To this the professor made the fitting reply: "If the board of trustees have the manliness to dismiss me for cause, and declare the cause, I prefer that they should do it. No power on earth could persuade me to resign." "We do not propose," said the bishop, with quite gratuitous suggestiveness, "to treat you as the Inquisition treated Galileo." "But what you propose is the same thing," rejoined Dr. Winchell. "It is ecclesiastical proscription for an opinion which must be settled by scientific evidence." Twenty-four hours later Dr. Winchell was informed that his chair had been abolished, and its duties, with its salary, added to those of a colleague; the public were given to understand that the reasons were purely economic; the banished scholar was heaped with official compliments, evidently in hope that he would keep silence. Such was not Dr. Winchell's view. In a frank letter to the leading journal of the university town he stated the whole matter. The intolerance-hating press of the country, religious and secular, did not hold its peace. In vain the authorities of the university waited for the storm to blow over. It was evident, at last, that a defence must be made, and a local organ of the sect, which under the editorship of a fellow-professor had always treated Dr. Winchell's views with the luminous inaccuracy which usually characterizes a professor's ideas of a rival's teachings, assumed the task. In the articles which followed, the usual scientific hypotheses as to the creation were declared to be "absurd," "vague and unintelligible," "preposterous and gratuitous." This new champion stated that "the objections drawn from the fossiliferous strata and the like are met by reference to the analogy of Adam and Eve, who presented the phenomena of adults when they were but a day old, and by the Flood of Noah and other cataclysms, which, with the constant change of Nature, are sufficient to account for the phenomena in question"! Under inspiration of this sort the Tennessee Conference of the religious body in control of the university had already, in October, 1878, given utterance to its opinion of unsanctified science as follows: "This is an age in which scientific atheism, having divested itself of the habiliments that most adorn and dignify humanity, walks abroad in shameless denudation. The arrogant and impertinent claims of this 'science, falsely so called,' have been so boisterous and persistent, that the unthinking mass have been sadly deluded; but our university alone has had the courage to lay its young but vigorous hand upon the mane of untamed Speculation and say, 'We will have no more of this.'" It is a consolation to know how the result, thus devoutly sought, has been achieved; for in the "ode" sung at the laying of the corner-stone of a new theological building of the same university, in May, 1880, we read: "Science and Revelation here In perfect harmony appear, Guiding young feet along the road Through grace and Nature up to God." It is also pleasing to know that, while an institution calling itself a university thus violated the fundamental principles on which any institution worthy of the name must be based, another institution which has the glory of being the first in the entire North to begin something like a university organization--the State University of Michigan--recalled Dr. Winchell at once to his former professorship, and honoured itself by maintaining him in that position, where, unhampered, he was thereafter able to utter his views in the midst of the largest body of students on the American Continent. Disgraceful as this history was to the men who drove out Dr. Winchell, they but succeeded, as various similar bodies of men making similar efforts have done, in advancing their supposed victim to higher position and more commanding influence.(197) (197) For Dr. Winchell's original statements, see Adamites and Pre-Adamites, Syracuse, N. Y., 1878. For the first important denunciation of his views, see the St. Louis Christian Advocate, May 22, 1878. For the conversation with Bishop McTyeire, see Dr. Winchell's own account in the Nashville American of July 19, 1878. For the further course of the attack in the denominational organ of Dr. Winchell's oppressors, see the Nashville Christian Advocate, April 26, 1879. For the oratorical declaration of the Tennessee Conference upon the matter, see the Nashville American, October 15, 1878; and for the "ode" regarding the "harmony of science and revelation" as supported at the university, see the same journal for May 2, 1880 A few years after this suppression of earnest Christian thought at an institution of learning in the western part of our Southern States, there appeared a similar attempt in sundry seaboard States of the South. As far back as the year 1857 the Presbyterian Synod of Mississippi passed the following resolution: "WHEREAS, We live in an age in which the most insidious attacks are made on revealed religion through the natural sciences, and as it behooves the Church at all times to have men capable of defending the faith once delivered to the saints; "RESOLVED, That this presbytery recommend the endowment of a professorship of Natural Science as connected with revealed religion in one or more of our theological seminaries." Pursuant to this resolution such a chair was established in the theological seminary at Columbia, S.C., and James Woodrow was appointed professor. Dr. Woodrow seems to have been admirably fitted for the position--a devoted Christian man, accepting the Presbyterian standards of faith in which he had been brought up, and at the same time giving every effort to acquaint himself with the methods and conclusions of science. To great natural endowments he added constant labours to arrive at the truth in this field. Visiting Europe, he made the acquaintance of many of the foremost scientific investigators, became a student in university lecture rooms and laboratories, an interested hearer in scientific conventions, and a correspondent of leading men of science at home and abroad. As a result, he came to the conclusion that the hypothesis of evolution is the only one which explains various leading facts in natural science. This he taught, and he also taught that such a view is not incompatible with a true view of the sacred Scriptures. In 1882 and 1883 the board of directors of the theological seminary, in fear that "scepticism in the world is using alleged discoveries in science to impugn the Word of God," requested Prof. Woodrow to state his views in regard to evolution. The professor complied with this request in a very powerful address, which was published and widely circulated, to such effect that the board of directors shortly afterward passed resolutions declaring the theory of evolution as defined by Prof. Woodrow not inconsistent with perfect soundness in the faith. In the year 1884 alarm regarding Dr. Woodrow's teachings began to show itself in larger proportions, and a minority report was introduced into the Synod of South Carolina declaring that "the synod is called upon to decide not upon the question whether the said views of Dr. Woodrow contradict the Bible in its highest and absolute sense, but upon the question whether they contradict the interpretation of the Bible by the Presbyterian Church in the United States." Perhaps a more self-condemnatory statement was never presented, for it clearly recognized, as a basis for intolerance, at least a possible difference between "the interpretation of the Bible by the Presbyterian Church" and the teachings of "the Bible in its highest and absolute sense." This hostile movement became so strong that, in spite of the favourable action of the directors of the seminary, and against the efforts of a broad-minded minority in the representative bodies having ultimate charge of the institution, the delegates from the various synods raised a storm of orthodoxy and drove Dr. Woodrow from his post. Happily, he was at the same time professor in the University of South Carolina in the same city of Columbia, and from his chair in that institution he continued to teach natural science with the approval of the great majority of thinking men in that region; hence, the only effect of the attempt to crush him was, that his position was made higher, respect for him deeper, and his reputation wider. In spite of attempts by the more orthodox to prevent students of the theological seminary from attending his lectures at the university, they persisted in hearing him; indeed, the reputation of heresy seemed to enhance his influence. It should be borne in mind that the professor thus treated had been one of the most respected and beloved university instructors in the South during more than a quarter of a century, and that he was turned out of his position with no opportunity for careful defence, and, indeed, without even the formality of a trial. Well did an eminent but thoughtful divine of the Southern Presbyterian Church declare that "the method of procedure to destroy evolution by the majority in the Church is vicious and suicidal," and that "logical dynamite has been used to put out a supposed fire in the upper stories of our house, and all the family in the house at that." Wisely, too, did he refer to the majority as "sowing in the fields of the Church the thorns of its errors, and cumbering its path with the debris and ruin of its own folly." To these recent cases may be added the expulsion of Prof. Toy from teaching under ecclesiastical control at Louisville, and his election to a far more influential chair at Harvard University; the driving out from the American College at Beyrout of the young professors who accepted evolution as probable, and the rise of one of them, Mr. Nimr, to a far more commanding position than that which he left--the control of three leading journals at Cairo; the driving out of Robertson Smith from his position at Edinburgh, and his reception into the far more important and influential professorship at the English University of Cambridge; and multitudes of similar cases. From the days when Henry Dunster, the first President of Harvard College, was driven from his presidency, as Cotton Mather said, for "falling into the briers of Antipedobaptism" until now, the same spirit is shown in all such attempts. In each we have generally, on one side, a body of older theologians, who since their youth have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, sundry professors who do not wish to rewrite their lectures, and a mass of unthinking ecclesiastical persons of little or no importance save in making up a retrograde majority in an ecclesiastical tribunal; on the other side we have as generally the thinking, open-minded, devoted men who have listened to the revelation of their own time as well as of times past, and who are evidently thinking the future thought of the world. Here we have survivals of that same oppression of thought by theology which has cost the modern world so dear; the system which forced great numbers of professors, under penalty of deprivation, to teach that the sun and planets revolve about the earth; that comets are fire-balls flung by an angry God at a wicked world; that insanity is diabolic possession; that anatomical investigation of the human frame is sin against the Holy Ghost; that chemistry leads to sorcery; that taking interest for money is forbidden by Scripture; that geology must conform to ancient Hebrew poetry. From the same source came in Austria the rule of the "Immaculate Oath," under which university professors, long before the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was defined by the Church, were obliged to swear to their belief in that dogma before they were permitted to teach even arithmetic or geometry; in England, the denunciation of inoculation against smallpox; in Scotland, the protests against using chloroform in childbirth as "vitiating the primal curse against woman"; in France, the use in clerical schools of a historical text-book from which Napoleon was left out; and, in America, the use of Catholic manuals in which the Inquisition is declared to have been a purely civil tribunal, or Protestant manuals in which the Puritans are shown to have been all that we could now wish they had been. So, too, among multitudes of similar efforts abroad, we have during centuries the fettering of professors at English and Scotch universities by test oaths, subscriptions to articles, and catechisms without number. In our own country we have had in a vast multitude of denominational colleges, as the first qualification for a professorship, not ability in the subject to be taught, but fidelity to the particular shibboleth of the denomination controlling the college or university. Happily, in these days such attempts generally defeat themselves. The supposed victim is generally made a man of mark by persecution, and advanced to a higher and wider sphere of usefulness. In withstanding the march of scientific truth, any Conference, Synod, Board of Commissioners, Board of Trustees, or Faculty, is but as a nest of field-mice in the path of a steam plough. The harm done to religion in these attempts is far greater than that done to science; for thereby suspicions are widely spread, especially among open-minded young men, that the accepted Christian system demands a concealment of truth, with the persecution of honest investigators, and therefore must be false. Well was it said in substance by President McCosh, of Princeton, that no more sure way of making unbelievers in Christianity among young men could be devised than preaching to them that the doctrines arrived at by the great scientific thinkers of this period are opposed to religion. Yet it is but justice here to say that more and more there is evolving out of this past history of oppression a better spirit, which is making itself manifest with power in the leading religious bodies of the world. In the Church of Rome we have to-day such utterances as those of St. George Mivart, declaring that the Church must not attempt to interfere with science; that the Almighty in the Galileo case gave her a distinct warning that the priesthood of science must remain with the men of science. In the Anglican Church and its American daughter we have the acts and utterances of such men as Archbishop Tait, Bishop Temple, Dean Stanley, Dean Farrar, and many others, proving that the deepest religious thought is more and more tending to peace rather than warfare with science; and in the other churches, especially in America, while there is yet much to be desired, the welcome extended in many of them to Alexander Winchell, and the freedom given to views like his, augur well for a better state of things in the future. From the science of Anthropology, when rightly viewed as a whole, has come the greatest aid to those who work to advance religion rather than to promote any particular system of theology; for Anthropology and its subsidiary sciences show more and more that man, since coming upon the earth, has risen, from the period when he had little, if any, idea of a great power above him, through successive stages of fetichism, shamanism, and idolatry, toward better forms of belief, making him more and more accessible to nobler forms of religion. The same sciences show, too, within the historic period, the same tendency, and especially within the events covered by our sacred books, a progress from fetichism, of which so many evidences crop out in the early Jewish worship as shown in the Old Testament Scriptures, through polytheism, when Jehovah was but "a god above all gods," through the period when he was "a jealous God," capricious and cruel, until he is revealed in such inspired utterances as those of the nobler Psalms, the great passages in Isaiah, the sublime preaching of Micah, and, above all, through the ideal given to the world by Jesus of Nazareth. Well indeed has an eminent divine of the Church of England in our own time called on Christians to rejoice over this evolution, "between the God of Samuel, who ordered infants to be slaughtered, and the God of the Psalmist, whose tender mercies are over all his works; between the God of the Patriarchs, who was always repenting, and the God of the Apostles, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, with whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning, between the God of the Old Testament, who walked in the garden in the cool of the day, and the God of the New Testament, whom no man hath seen nor can see; between the God of Leviticus, who was so particular about the sacrificial furniture and utensils, and the God of the Acts, who dwelleth not in temples made with hands; between the God who hardened Pharaoh's heart, and the God who will have all men to be saved; between the God of Exodus, who is merciful only to those who love him, and the God of Christ--the heavenly Father--who is kind unto the unthankful and the evil." However overwhelming, then, the facts may be which Anthropology, History, and their kindred sciences may, in the interest of simple truth, establish against the theological doctrine of "the Fall"; however completely they may fossilize various dogmas, catechisms, creeds, confessions, "plans of salvation" and "schemes of redemption," which have been evolved from the great minds of the theological period: science, so far from making inroads on religion, or even upon our Christian development of it, will strengthen all that is essential in it, giving new and nobler paths to man's highest aspirations. For the one great, legitimate, scientific conclusion of anthropology is, that, more and more, a better civilization of the world, despite all its survivals of savagery and barbarism, is developing men and women on whom the declarations of the nobler Psalms, of Isaiah, of Micah, the Sermon on the Mount, the first great commandment, and the second, which is like unto it, St. Paul's praise of charity and St. James's definition of "pure religion and undefiled," can take stronger hold for the more effective and more rapid uplifting of our race.(198) (198) For the resolution of the Presbyterian Synod of Mississippi in 1857, see Prof. Woodrow's speech before the Synod of South Carolina, October 27 and 28, 1884, p. 6. As to the action of the Board of Directors of the Theological Seminary of Columbia, see ibid. As to the minority report in the Synod of South Carolina, see ibid., p. 24. For the pithy sentences regarding the conduct of the majority in the synods toward Dr. Woodrow, see the Rev. Mr. Flynn's article in the Southern Presbyterian Review for April, 1885, p. 272, and elsewhere. For the restrictions regarding the teaching of the Copernican theory and the true doctrine of comets in German universities, see various histories of astronomy, especially Madler. For the immaculate oath (Immaculaten-Eid) as enforced upon the Austrian professors, see Luftkandl, Die Josephinischen Ideen. For the effort of the Church in France, after the restoration of the Bourbons, to teach a history of that country from which the name of Napoleon should be left out, see Father Loriquet's famous Histoire de France a l'Usage de la Jeunesse, Lyon, 1820, vol. ii, see especially table of contents at the end. The book bears on its title-page the well known initials of the Jesuit motto, A. M. D. G. (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam). For examples in England and Scotland, see various English histories, and especially Buckle's chapters on Scotland. For a longer collection of examples showing the suppression of anything like unfettered thought upon scientific subjects in American universities, see Inaugural Address at the Opening of Cornell University, by the author of these chapters. For the citation regarding the evolution of better and nobler ideas of God, see Church and Creed: Sermons preached in the Chapel of the Foundling Hospital, London, by A. W. Momerie, M. A., LL. D., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in King's College, London, 1890. For a very vigorous utterance on the other side, see a recent charge of the Bishop of Gloucester. CHAPTER XI. FROM "THE PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR" TO METEOROLOGY I. GROWTH OF A THEOLOGICAL THEORY. The popular beliefs of classic antiquity regarding storms, thunder, and lightning, took shape in myths representing Vulcan as forging thunderbolts, Jupiter as flinging them at his enemies, Aeolus intrusting the winds in a bag to Aeneas, and the like. An attempt at their further theological development is seen in the Pythagorean statement that lightnings are intended to terrify the damned in Tartarus. But at a very early period we see the beginning of a scientific view. In Greece, the Ionic philosophers held that such phenomena are obedient to law. Plato, Aristotle, and many lesser lights, attempted to account for them on natural grounds; and their explanations, though crude, were based upon observation and thought. In Rome, Lucretius, Seneca, Pliny, and others, inadequate as their statements were, implanted at least the germs of a science. But, as the Christian Church rose to power, this evolution was checked; the new leaders of thought found, in the Scriptures recognized by them as sacred, the basis for a new view, or rather for a modification of the old view. This ending of a scientific evolution based upon observation and reason, and this beginning of a sacred science based upon the letter of Scripture and on theology, are seen in the utterances of various fathers in the early Church. As to the general features of this new development, Tertullian held that sundry passages of Scripture prove lightning identical with hell-fire; and this idea was transmitted from generation to generation of later churchmen, who found an especial support of Tertullian's view in the sulphurous smell experienced during thunderstorms. St. Hilary thought the firmament very much lower than the heavens, and that it was created not only for the support of the upper waters, but also for the tempering of our atmosphere.(199) St. Ambrose held that thunder is caused by the winds breaking through the solid firmament, and cited from the prophet Amos the sublime passage regarding "Him that establisheth the thunders."(200) He shows, indeed, some conception of the true source of rain; but his whole reasoning is limited by various scriptural texts. He lays great stress upon the firmament as a solid outer shell of the universe: the heavens he holds to be not far outside this outer shell, and argues regarding their character from St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians and from the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm. As to "the waters which are above the firmament," he takes up the objection of those who hold that, this outside of the universe being spherical, the waters must slide off it, especially if the firmament revolves; and he points out that it is by no means certain that the OUTSIDE of the firmament IS spherical, and insists that, if it does revolve, the water is just what is needed to lubricate and cool its axis. (199) For Tertullian, see the Apol. contra gentes, c. 47; also Augustin de Angelis, Lectiones Meteorologicae, p. 64. For Hilary, see In Psalm CXXXV. (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. ix, p. 773). (200) "Firmans tonitrua" (Amos iv, 13); the phrase does not appear in our version. St. Jerome held that God at the Creation, having spread out the firmament between heaven and earth, and having separated the upper waters from the lower, caused the upper waters to be frozen into ice, in order to keep all in place. A proof of this view Jerome found in the words of Ezekiel regarding "the crystal stretched above the cherubim."(201) (201) For Ambrose, see the Hexaemeron, lib. ii, cap. 3,4; lib. iii, cap. 5 (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xiv, pp. 148-150, 153, 165). The passage as to lubrication of the heavenly axis is as follows: "Deinde cum ispi dicant volvi orbem coeli stellis ardentibus refulgentem, nonne divina providentia necessario prospexit, ut intra orbem coeli, et supra orbem redundaret aqua, quae illa ferventis axis incendia temperaret?" For Jerome, see his Epistola, lxix, cap. 6 (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xxii, p.659). The germinal principle in accordance with which all these theories were evolved was most clearly proclaimed to the world by St. Augustine in his famous utterance: "Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind."(202) No treatise was safe thereafter which did not breathe the spirit and conform to the letter of this maxim. Unfortunately, what was generally understood by the "authority of Scripture" was the tyranny of sacred books imperfectly transcribed, viewed through distorting superstitions, and frequently interpreted by party spirit. (202) "Major est quippe Scripturae hujas auctoritas, quam omnis humani ingenii capacitas."--Augustine, De Genesi ad Lit., lib. ii, cap. 5 (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xxxiv, pp. 266, 267). Or, as he is cited by Vincent of Beauvais (Spec. Nat., lib. iv, 98): "Non est aliquid temere diffiniendum, sed quantum Scriptura dicit accipiendum, cujus major est auctoritas quam omnis humani ingenii capacitas." Following this precept of St. Augustine there were developed, in every field, theological views of science which have never led to a single truth--which, without exception, have forced mankind away from the truth, and have caused Christendom to stumble for centuries into abysses of error and sorrow. In meteorology, as in every other science with which he dealt, Augustine based everything upon the letter of the sacred text; and it is characteristic of the result that this man, so great when untrammelled, thought it his duty to guard especially the whole theory of the "waters above the heavens." In the sixth century this theological reasoning was still further developed, as we have seen, by Cosmas Indicopleustes. Finding a sanction for the old Egyptian theory of the universe in the ninth chapter of Hebrews, he insisted that the earth is a flat parallelogram, and that from its outer edges rise immense walls supporting the firmament; then, throwing together the reference to the firmament in Genesis and the outburst of poetry in the Psalms regarding the "waters that be above the heavens," he insisted that over the terrestrial universe are solid arches bearing a vault supporting a vast cistern "containing the waters"; finally, taking from Genesis the expression regarding the "windows of heaven," he insisted that these windows are opened and closed by the angels whenever the Almighty wishes to send rain upon the earth or to withhold it. This was accepted by the universal Church as a vast contribution to thought; for several centuries it was the orthodox doctrine, and various leaders in theology devoted themselves to developing and supplementing it. About the beginning of the seventh century, Isidore, Bishop of Seville, was the ablest prelate in Christendom, and was showing those great qualities which led to his enrolment among the saints of the Church. His theological view of science marks an epoch. As to the "waters above the firmament," Isidore contends that they must be lower than, the uppermost heaven, though higher than the lower heaven, because in the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm they are mentioned AFTER the heavenly bodies and the "heaven of heavens," but BEFORE the terrestrial elements. As to their purpose, he hesitates between those who held that they were stored up there by the prescience of God for the destruction of the world at the Flood, as the words of Scripture that "the windows of heaven were opened" seemed to indicate, and those who held that they were kept there to moderate the heat of the heavenly bodies. As to the firmament, he is in doubt whether it envelops the earth "like an eggshell," or is merely spread over it "like a curtain"; for he holds that the passage in the one hundred and fourth Psalm may be used to support either view. Having laid these scriptural foundations, Isidore shows considerable power of thought; indeed, at times, when he discusses the rainbow, rain, hail, snow, and frost, his theories are rational, and give evidence that, if he could have broken away from his adhesion to the letter of Scripture, he might have given a strong impulse to the evolution of a true science.(203) (203) For Cosmas, see his Topographia Christiana (in Montfaucon, Collectio nova patrum, vol. ii), and the more complete account of his theory given in the chapter on Geography in this work. For Isidore, see the Etymologiae, lib. xiii, cap. 7-9, De ordine creaturarum, cap. 3, 4, and De natura rerum, cap. 29, 30. (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. lxxxii, pp. 476, 477, vol. lxxxiii, pp. 920-922, 1001-1003). About a century later appeared, at the other extremity of Europe, the second in the trio of theological men of science in the early Middle Ages--Bede the Venerable. The nucleus of his theory also is to be found in the accepted view of the "firmament" and of the "waters above the heavens," derived from Genesis. The firmament he holds to be spherical, and of a nature subtile and fiery; the upper heavens, he says, which contain the angels, God has tempered with ice, lest they inflame the lower elements. As to the waters placed above the firmament, lower than the spiritual heavens, but higher than all corporeal creatures, he says, "Some declare that they were stored there for the Deluge, but others, more correctly, that they are intended to temper the fire of the stars." He goes on with long discussions as to various elements and forces in Nature, and dwells at length upon the air, of which he says that the upper, serene air is over the heavens; while the lower, which is coarse, with humid exhalations, is sent off from the earth, and that in this are lightning, hail, snow, ice, and tempests, finding proof of this in the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm, where these are commanded to "praise the Lord from the earth."(204) (204) See Bede, De natura rerum (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xc). So great was Bede's authority, that nearly all the anonymous speculations of the next following centuries upon these subjects were eventually ascribed to him. In one of these spurious treatises an attempt is made to get new light upon the sources of the waters above the heavens, the main reliance being the sheet containing the animals let down from heaven, in the vision of St. Peter. Another of these treatises is still more curious, for it endeavours to account for earthquakes and tides by means of the leviathan mentioned in Scripture. This characteristic passage runs as follows: "Some say that the earth contains the animal leviathan, and that he holds his tail after a fashion of his own, so that it is sometimes scorched by the sun, whereupon he strives to get hold of the sun, and so the earth is shaken by the motion of his indignation; he drinks in also, at times, such huge masses of the waves that when he belches them forth all the seas feel their effect." And this theological theory of the tides, as caused by the alternate suction and belching of leviathan, went far and wide.(205) (205) See the treatise De mundi constitutione, in Bede's Opera (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xc, p. 884). In the writings thus covered with the name of Bede there is much showing a scientific spirit, which might have come to something of permanent value had it not been hampered by the supposed necessity of conforming to the letter of Scripture. It is as startling as it is refreshing to hear one of these medieval theorists burst out as follows against those who are content to explain everything by the power of God: "What is more pitiable than to say that a thing IS, because God is able to do it, and not to show any reason why it is so, nor any purpose for which it is so; just as if God did everything that he is able to do! You talk like one who says that God is able to make a calf out of a log. But DID he ever do it? Either, then, show a reason why a thing is so, or a purpose wherefore it is so, or else cease to declare it so."(206) (206) For this remonstrance, see the Elementa philosophiae, in Bede's Opera (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol xc, p. 1139). This treatise, which has also been printed, under the title of De philosophia mundi, among the works of Honorius of Autun, is believed by modern scholars (Haureau, Werner, Poole) to be the production of William of Conches. The most permanent contribution of Bede to scientific thought in this field was his revival of the view that the firmament is made of ice; and he supported this from the words in the twenty-sixth chapter of Job, "He bindeth up the waters in his thick cloud, and the cloud is not rent under them." About the beginning of the ninth century appeared the third in that triumvirate of churchmen who were the oracles of sacred science throughout the early Middle Ages--Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda and Archbishop of Mayence. Starting, like all his predecessors, from the first chapter of Genesis, borrowing here and there from the ancient philosophers, and excluding everything that could conflict with the letter of Scripture, he follows, in his work upon the universe, his two predecessors, Isidore and Bede, developing especially St. Jerome's theory, drawn from Ezekiel, that the firmament is strong enough to hold up the "waters above the heavens," because it is made of ice. For centuries the authority of these three great teachers was unquestioned, and in countless manuals and catechisms their doctrine was translated and diluted for the common mind. But about the second quarter of the twelfth century a priest, Honorius of Autun, produced several treatises which show that thought on this subject had made some little progress. He explained the rain rationally, and mainly in the modern manner; with the thunder he is less successful, but insists that the thunderbolt "is not stone, as some assert." His thinking is vigorous and independent. Had theorists such as he been many, a new science could have been rapidly evolved, but the theological current was too strong. (207) (207) For Rabanus Maurus, see the Comment. in Genesim and De Universo (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. cvii, cxi). For a charmingly naive example of the primers referred to, see the little Anglo-Saxon manual of astronomy, sometimes attributed to Aelfric; it is in the vernacular, but is translated in Wright's Popular Treatises on Science during the Middle Ages. Bede is, of course, its chief source. For Honorius, see De imagine mundi and Hexaemeron (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. clxxii). The De philosophia mundi, the most rational of all, is, however, believed by modern scholars to be unjustly ascribed to him. See note above. The strength of this current which overwhelmed the thought of Honorius is seen again in the work of the Dominican monk, John of San Geminiano, who in the thirteenth century gave forth his Summa de Exemplis for the use of preachers in his order. Of its thousand pages, over two hundred are devoted to illustrations drawn from the heavens and the elements. A characteristic specimen is his explanation of the Psalmist's phrase, "The arrows of the thunder." These, he tells us, are forged out of a dry vapour rising from the earth and kindled by the heat of the upper air, which then, coming into contact with a cloud just turning into rain, "is conglutinated like flour into dough," but, being too hot to be extinguished, its particles become merely sharpened at the lower end, and so blazing arrows, cleaving and burning everything they touch.(208) (208) See Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa, c. 75. But far more important, in the thirteenth century, was the fact that the most eminent scientific authority of that age, Albert the Great, Bishop of Ratisbon, attempted to reconcile the speculations of Aristotle with theological views derived from the fathers. In one very important respect he improved upon the meteorological views of his great master. The thunderbolt, he says, is no mere fire, but the product of black clouds containing much mud, which, when it is baked by the intense heat, forms a fiery black or red stone that falls from the sky, tearing beams and crushing walls in its course: such he has seen with his own eyes.(209) (209) See Albertus Magnus, II Sent., Op., vol. xv, p. 137, a. (cited by Heller, Gesch. d. Physik, vol. i, p. 184) and his Liber Methaurorum, III, iv, 18 (of which I have used the edition of Venice, 1488). The monkish encyclopedists of the later Middle Ages added little to these theories. As we glance over the pages of Vincent of Beauvais, the monk Bartholomew, and William of Conches, we note only a growing deference to the authority of Aristotle as supplementing that of Isidore and Bede and explaining sacred Scripture. Aristotle is treated like a Church father, but extreme care is taken not to go beyond the great maxim of St. Augustine; then, little by little, Bede and Isidore fall into the background, Aristotle fills the whole horizon, and his utterances are second in sacredness only to the text of Holy Writ. A curious illustration of the difficulties these medieval scholars had to meet in reconciling the scientific theories of Aristotle with the letter of the Bible is seen in the case of the rainbow. It is to the honour of Aristotle that his conclusions regarding the rainbow, though slightly erroneous, were based upon careful observation and evolved by reasoning alone; but his Christian commentators, while anxious to follow him, had to bear in mind the scriptural statement that God had created the rainbow as a sign to Noah that there should never again be a Flood on the earth. Even so bold a thinker as Cardinal d'Ailly, whose speculations as to the geography of the earth did so much afterward in stimulating Columbus, faltered before this statement, acknowledging that God alone could explain it; but suggested that possibly never before the Deluge had a cloud been suffered to take such a position toward the sun as to cause a rainbow. The learned cardinal was also constrained to believe that certain stars and constellations have something to do in causing the rain, since these would best explain Noah's foreknowledge of the Deluge. In connection with this scriptural doctrine of winds came a scriptural doctrine of earthquakes: they were believed to be caused by winds issuing from the earth, and this view was based upon the passage in the one hundred and thirty-fifth Psalm, "He bringeth the wind out of his treasuries."(210) (210) For D'Ailly, see his Concordia astronomicae veritatis cum theologia (Paris, 1483--in the Imago mundi--and Venice, 1490); also Eck's commentary on Aristotle's Meteorologica (Ausburg, 1519), lib. ii, nota 2; also Reisch, Margarita philosophica, lib. ix, c. 18. Such were the main typical attempts during nearly fourteen centuries to build up under theological guidance and within scriptural limitations a sacred science of meteorology. But these theories were mainly evolved in the effort to establish a basis and general theory of phenomena: it still remained to account for special manifestations, and here came a twofold development of theological thought. On one hand, these phenomena were attributed to the Almighty, and, on the other, to Satan. As to the first of these theories, we constantly find the Divine wrath mentioned by the earlier fathers as the cause of lightning, hailstorms, hurricanes, and the like. In the early days of Christianity we see a curious struggle between pagan and Christian belief upon this point. Near the close of the second century the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in his effort to save the empire, fought a hotly contested battle with the Quadi, in what is now Hungary. While the issue of this great battle was yet doubtful there came suddenly a blinding storm beating into the faces of the Quadi, and this gave the Roman troops the advantage, enabling Marcus Aurelius to win a decisive victory. Votaries of each of the great religions claimed that this storm was caused by the object of their own adoration. The pagans insisted that Jupiter had sent the storm in obedience to their prayers, and on the Antonine Column at Rome we may still see the figure of Olympian Jove casting his thunderbolts and pouring a storm of rain from the open heavens against the Quadi. On the other hand, the Christians insisted that the storm had been sent by Jehovah in obedience to THEIR prayers; and Tertullian, Eusebius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Jerome were among those who insisted upon this meteorological miracle; the first two, indeed, in the fervour of their arguments for its reality, allowing themselves to be carried considerably beyond exact historical truth.(211) (211) For the authorities, pagan and Christian, see the note of Merivale, in his History of the Romans under the Empire, chap. lxviii. He refers for still fuller citations to Fynes Clinton's Fasti Rom., p. 24. As time went on, the fathers developed this view more and more from various texts in the Jewish and Christian sacred books, substituting for Jupiter flinging his thunderbolts the Almighty wrapped in thunder and sending forth his lightnings. Through the Middle Ages this was fostered until it came to be accepted as a mere truism, entering into all medieval thinking, and was still further developed by an attempt to specify the particular sins which were thus punished. Thus even the rational Florentine historian Villani ascribed floods and fires to the "too great pride of the city of Florence and the ingratitude of the citizens toward God," which, "of course," says a recent historian, "meant their insufficient attention to the ceremonies of religion."(212) (212) See Trollope, History of Florence, vol. i, p. 64. In the thirteenth century the Cistercian monk, Caesarius of Heisterbach, popularized the doctrine in central Europe. His rich collection of anecdotes for the illustration of religious truths was the favourite recreative reading in the convents for three centuries, and exercised great influence over the thought of the later Middle Ages. In this work he relates several instances of the Divine use of lightning, both for rescue and for punishment. Thus he tells us how the steward (cellerarius) of his own monastery was saved from the clutch of a robber by a clap of thunder which, in answer to his prayer, burst suddenly from the sky and frightened the bandit from his purpose: how, in a Saxon theatre, twenty men were struck down, while a priest escaped, not because he was not a greater sinner than the rest, but because the thunderbolt had respect for his profession! It is Cesarius, too, who tells us the story of the priest of Treves, struck by lightning in his own church, whither he had gone to ring the bell against the storm, and whose sins were revealed by the course of the lightning, for it tore his clothes from him and consumed certain parts of his body, showing that the sins for which he was punished were vanity and unchastity.(213) (213) See Caesarius Heisterbacensis, Dialogus miraculorum, lib. x, c. 28-30. This mode of explaining the Divine interference more minutely is developed century after century, and we find both Catholics and Protestants assigning as causes of unpleasant meteorological phenomena whatever appears to them wicked or even unorthodox. Among the English Reformers, Tyndale quotes in this kind of argument the thirteenth chapter of I. Samuel, showing that, when God gave Israel a king, it thundered and rained. Archbishop Whitgift, Bishop Bale, and Bishop Pilkington insisted on the same view. In Protestant Germany, about the same period, Plieninger took a dislike to the new Gregorian calendar and published a volume of Brief Reflections, in which he insisted that the elements had given utterance to God's anger against it, calling attention to the fact that violent storms raged over almost all Germany during the very ten days which the Pope had taken out for the correction of the year, and that great floods began with the first days of the corrected year.(214) (214) For Tyndale, see his Doctrinal Treatises, p. 194, and for Whitgift, see his Works, vol. ii, pp. 477-483; Bale, Works, pp. 244, 245; and Pilkington, Works, pp. 177, 536 (all in Parker Society Publications). Bishop Bale cites especially Job xxxviii, Ecclesiasticus xiii, and Revelation viii, as supporting the theory. For Plieninger's words, see Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, vol. v, p. 350. Early in the seventeenth century, Majoli, Bishop of Voltoraria, in southern Italy, produced his huge work Dies Canicularii, or Dog Days, which remained a favourite encyclopedia in Catholic lands for over a hundred years. Treating of thunder and lightning, he compares them to bombs against the wicked, and says that the thunderbolt is "an exhalation condensed and cooked into stone," and that "it is not to be doubted that, of all instruments of God's vengeance, the thunderbolt is the chief"; that by means of it Sennacherib and his army were consumed; that Luther was struck by lightning in his youth as a caution against departing from the Catholic faith; that blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking are the sins to which this punishment is especially assigned, and he cites the case of Dathan and Abiram. Fifty years later the Jesuit Stengel developed this line of thought still further in four thick quarto volumes on the judgments of God, adding an elaborate schedule for the use of preachers in the sermons of an entire year. Three chapters were devoted to thunder, lightning, and storms. That the author teaches the agency in these of diabolical powers goes without saying; but this can only act, he declares, by Divine permission, and the thunderbolt is always the finger of God, which rarely strikes a man save for his sins, and the nature of the special sin thus punished may be inferred from the bodily organs smitten. A few years later, in Protestant Swabia, Pastor Georg Nuber issued a volume of "weather-sermons," in which he discusses nearly every sort of elemental disturbances--storms, floods, droughts, lightning, and hail. These, he says, come direct from God for human sins, yet no doubt with discrimination, for there are five sins which God especially punishes with lightning and hail--namely, impenitence, incredulity, neglect of the repair of churches, fraud in the payment of tithes to the clergy, and oppression of subordinates, each of which points he supports with a mass of scriptural texts.(215) (215) For Majoli, see Dies Can., I, i; for Stengel, see the De judiciis divinis, vol. ii, pp. 15-61, and especially the example of the impurus et saltator sacerdos, fulmine castratus, pp. 26, 27. For Nuber, see his Conciones meteoricae, Ulm, 1661. This doctrine having become especially precious both to Catholics and to Protestants, there were issued handbooks of prayers against bad weather: among these was the Spiritual Thunder and Storm Booklet, produced in 1731 by a Protestant scholar, Stoltzlin, whose three or four hundred pages of prayer and song, "sighs for use when it lightens fearfully," and "cries of anguish when the hailstorm is drawing on," show a wonderful adaptability to all possible meteorological emergencies. The preface of this volume is contributed by Prof. Dilherr, pastor of the great church of St. Sebald at Nuremberg, who, in discussing the Divine purposes of storms, adds to the three usually assigned--namely, God's wish to manifest his power, to display his anger, and to drive sinners to repentance--a fourth, which, he says, is that God may show us "with what sort of a stormbell he will one day ring in the last judgment." About the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century we find, in Switzerland, even the eminent and rational Professor of Mathematics, Scheuchzer, publishing his Physica Sacra, with the Bible as a basis, and forced to admit that the elements, in the most literal sense, utter the voice of God. The same pressure was felt in New England. Typical are the sermons of Increase Mather on The Voice of God in Stormy Winds. He especially lays stress on the voice of God speaking to Job out of the whirlwind, and upon the text, "Stormy wind fulfilling his word." He declares, "When there are great tempests, the angels oftentimes have a hand therein,... yea, and sometimes evil angels." He gives several cases of blasphemers struck by lightning, and says, "Nothing can be more dangerous for mortals than to contemn dreadful providences, and, in particular, dreadful tempests." His distinguished son, Cotton Mather, disentangled himself somewhat from the old view, as he had done in the interpretation of comets. In his Christian Philosopher, his Thoughts for the Day of Rain, and his Sermon preached at the Time of the Late Storm (in 1723), he is evidently tending toward the modern view. Yet, from time to time, the older view has reasserted itself, and in France, as recently as the year 1870, we find the Bishop of Verdun ascribing the drought afflicting his diocese to the sin of Sabbath-breaking.(216) (216) For Stoltzlin, see his Geistliches Donner- und Wetter-Buchlein (Zurich, 1731). For Increase Mather, see his The Voice of God, etc. (Boston, 1704). This rare volume is in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester. For Cotton Mather's view, see the chapter From Signs and Wonders to Law, in this work. For the Bishop of Verdun, see the Semaine relig. de Lorraine, 1879, p. 445 (cited by "Paul Parfait," in his Dossier des Pelerinages, pp. 141-143). This theory, which attributed injurious meteorological phenomena mainly to the purposes of God, was a natural development, and comparatively harmless; but at a very early period there was evolved another theory, which, having been ripened into a doctrine, cost the earth dear indeed. Never, perhaps, in the modern world has there been a dogma more prolific of physical, mental, and moral agony throughout whole nations and during whole centuries. This theory, its development by theology, its fearful results to mankind, and its destruction by scientific observation and thought, will next be considered. II. DIABOLIC AGENCY IN STORMS. While the fathers and schoolmen were labouring to deduce a science of meteorology from our sacred books, there oozed up in European society a mass of traditions and observances which had been lurking since the days of paganism; and, although here and there appeared a churchman to oppose them, the theologians and ecclesiastics ere long began to adopt them and to clothe them with the authority of religion. Both among the pagans of the Roman Empire and among the barbarians of the North the Christian missionaries had found it easier to prove the new God supreme than to prove the old gods powerless. Faith in the miracles of the new religion seemed to increase rather than to diminish faith in the miracles of the old; and the Church at last began admitting the latter as facts, but ascribing them to the devil. Jupiter and Odin sank into the category of ministers of Satan, and transferred to that master all their former powers. A renewed study of Scripture by theologians elicited overwhelming proofs of the truth of this doctrine. Stress was especially laid on the declaration of Scripture, "The gods of the heathen are devils."(217) Supported by this and other texts, it soon became a dogma. So strong was the hold it took, under the influence of the Church, that not until late in the seventeenth century did its substantial truth begin to be questioned. (217) For so the Vulgate and all the early versions rendered Ps. xcvi, 5. With no field of action had the sway of the ancient deities been more identified than with that of atmospheric phenomena. The Roman heard Jupiter, and the Teuton heard Thor, in the thunder. Could it be doubted that these powerful beings would now take occasion, unless hindered by the command of the Almighty, to vent their spite against those who had deserted their altars? Might not the Almighty himself be willing to employ the malice of these powers of the air against those who had offended him? It was, indeed, no great step, for those whose simple faith accepted rain or sunshine as an answer to their prayers, to suspect that the untimely storms or droughts, which baffled their most earnest petitions, were the work of the archenemy, "the prince of the power of the air." The great fathers of the Church had easily found warrant for this doctrine in Scripture. St. Jerome declared the air to be full of devils, basing this belief upon various statements in the prophecies of Isaiah and in the Epistle to the Ephesians. St. Augustine held the same view as beyond controversy.(218) (218) For St. Jerome, see his Com. in Ep. ad Ephesios (lib. iii, cap.6): commenting on the text, "Our battle is not with flesh and blood," he explains this as meaning the devils in the air, and adds, "Nam et in alio loco de daemonibus quod in aere isto vagentur, Apostolus ait: In quibus ambulastis aliquando juxta Saeculum mundi istius, secundum principem potestatis aeris spiritus, qui nunc operatur in filos diffidentiae (Eph, ii,2). Haec autem omnium doctorum opinio est, quod aer iste qui coelum et terram medius dividens, inane appellatur, plenus sit contrariis fortitudinibus." See also his Com. in Isaiam, lib. xiii, cap. 50 (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xxiv, p. 477). For Augustine, see the De Civitate Dei, passim. During the Middle Ages this doctrine of the diabolical origin of storms went on gathering strength. Bede had full faith in it, and narrates various anecdotes in support of it. St. Thomas Aquinas gave it his sanction, saying in his all authoritative Summa, "Rains and winds, and whatsoever occurs by local impulse alone, can be caused by demons." "It is," he says, "a dogma of faith that the demons can produce wind, storms, and rain of fire from heaven." Albert the Great taught the same doctrine, and showed how a certain salve thrown into a spring produced whirlwinds. The great Franciscan--the "seraphic doctor"--St. Bonaventura, whose services to theology earned him one of the highest places in the Church, and to whom Dante gave special honour in paradise, set upon this belief his high authority. The lives of the saints, and the chronicles of the Middle Ages, were filled with it. Poetry and painting accepted the idea and developed it. Dante wedded it to verse, and at Venice this thought may still be seen embodied in one of the grand pictures of Bordone: a shipload of demons is seen approaching Venice in a storm, threatening destruction to the city, but St. Mark, St. George, and St. Nicholas attack the vessel, and disperse the hellish crew.(219) (219) For Bede, see the Hist. Eccles., vol. i, p. 17; Vita Cuthberti, c. 17 (Migne, tome xliv). For Thomas Aquinas, see the Summa, pars I, qu. lxxx, art. 2. The second citation I owe to Rydberg, Magic of the Middle Ages, p. 73, where the whole interesting passage is given at length. For Albertus Magnus, see the De Potentia Daemonum (cited by Maury, Legendes Pieuses). For Bonaventura, see the Comp. Theol. Veritat., ii, 26. For Dante, see Purgatorio, c. 5. On Bordone's picture, see Maury, Legendes Pieuses, p. 18, note. The popes again and again sanctioned this doctrine, and it was amalgamated with various local superstitions, pious imaginations, and interesting arguments, to strike the fancy of the people at large. A strong argument in favour of a diabolical origin of the thunderbolt was afforded by the eccentricities of its operation. These attracted especial attention in the Middle Ages, and the popular love of marvel generalized isolated phenomena into rules. Thus it was said that the lightning strikes the sword in the sheath, gold in the purse, the foot in the shoe, leaving sheath and purse and shoe unharmed; that it consumes a human being internally without injuring the skin; that it destroys nets in the water, but not on the land; that it kills one man, and leaves untouched another standing beside him; that it can tear through a house and enter the earth without moving a stone from its place; that it injures the heart of a tree, but not the bark; that wine is poisoned by it, while poisons struck by it lose their venom; that a man's hair may be consumed by it and the man be unhurt.(220) (220) See, for lists of such admiranda, any of the early writers--e. g., Vincent of Beauvais, Reisch's Margarita, or Eck's Aristotle. These peculiar phenomena, made much of by the allegorizing sermonizers of the day, were used in moral lessons from every pulpit. Thus the Carmelite, Matthias Farinator, of Vienna, who at the Pope's own instance compiled early in the fifteenth century that curious handbook of illustrative examples for preachers, the Lumen Animae, finds a spiritual analogue for each of these anomalies.(221) (221) See the Lumen animae, Eichstadt, 1479. This doctrine grew, robust and noxious, until, in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, we find its bloom in a multitude of treatises by the most learned of the Catholic and Protestant divines, and its fruitage in the torture chambers and on the scaffolds throughout Christendom. At the Reformation period, and for nearly two hundred years afterward, Catholics and Protestants vied with each other in promoting this growth. John Eck, the great opponent of Luther, gave to the world an annotated edition of Aristotle's Physics, which was long authoritative in the German universities; and, though the text is free from this doctrine, the woodcut illustrating the earth's atmosphere shows most vividly, among the clouds of mid-air, the devils who there reign supreme.(222) (222) See Eck, Aristotelis Meteorologica, Augsburg, 1519. Luther, in the other religious camp, supported the superstition even more zealously, asserting at times his belief that the winds themselves are only good or evil spirits, and declaring that a stone thrown into a certain pond in his native region would cause a dreadful storm because of the devils, kept prisoners there.(223) (223) For Luther, see the Table Talk; also Michelet, Life of Luther (translated by Hazlitt, p. 321). Just at the close of the same century, Catholics and Protestants welcomed alike the great work of Delrio. In this, the power of devils over the elements is proved first from the Holy Scriptures, since, he declares, "they show that Satan brought fire down from heaven to consume the servants and flocks of Job, and that he stirred up a violent wind, which overwhelmed in ruin the sons and daughters of Job at their feasting." Next, Delrio insists on the agreement of all the orthodox fathers, that it was the devil himself who did this, and attention is called to the fact that the hail with which the Egyptians were punished is expressly declared in Holy Scripture to have been brought by the evil angels. Citing from the Apocalypse, he points to the four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the winds and preventing their doing great damage to mortals; and he dwells especially upon the fact that the devil is called by the apostle a "prince of the power of the air." He then goes on to cite the great fathers of the Church--Clement, Jerome, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.(224) (224) For Delrio, see his Disquisitiones Magicae, first printed at Liege in 1599-1600, but reprinted again and again throughout the seventeenth century. His interpretation of Psalm lxxviii, 47-49, was apparently shared by the translators of our own authorized edition. For citations by him, see Revelation vii, 1,; Ephesians ii, 2. Even according to modern commentators (e.g., Alford), the word here translated "power" denotes not MIGHT, but GOVERNMENT, COURT, HIERARCHY; and in this sense it was always used by the ecclesiastical writers, whose conception is best rendered by our plural--"powers." See Delrio, Disquisitiones Magicae, lib. ii, c. 11. This doctrine was spread not only in ponderous treatises, but in light literature and by popular illustrations. In the Compendium Maleficarum of the Italian monk Guacci, perhaps the most amusing book in the whole literature of witchcraft, we may see the witch, in propria persona, riding the diabolic goat through the clouds while the storm rages around and beneath her; and we may read a rich collection of anecdotes, largely contemporary, which establish the required doctrine beyond question. The first and most natural means taken against this work of Satan in the air was prayer; and various petitions are to be found scattered through the Christian liturgies--some very beautiful and touching. This means of escape has been relied upon, with greater or less faith, from those days to these. Various medieval saints and reformers, and devoted men in all centuries, from St. Giles to John Wesley, have used it with results claimed to be miraculous. Whatever theory any thinking man may hold in the matter, he will certainly not venture a reproachful word: such prayers have been in all ages a natural outcome of the mind of man in trouble.(225) (225) For Guacci, see his Compendium Maleficarum (Milan, 1608). For the cases of St. Giles, John Wesley, and others stilling the tempests, see Brewer, Dictionary of Miracles, s. v. Prayer. But against the "power of the air" were used other means of a very different character and tendency, and foremost among these was exorcism. In an exorcism widely used and ascribed to Pope Gregory XIII, the formula is given: "I, a priest of Christ,... do command ye, most foul spirits, who do stir up these clouds,... that ye depart from them, and disperse yourselves into wild and untilled places, that ye may be no longer able to harm men or animals or fruits or herbs, or whatsoever is designed for human use." But this is mild, indeed, compared to some later exorcisms, as when the ritual runs: "All the people shall rise, and the priest, turning toward the clouds, shall pronounce these words: 'I exorcise ye, accursed demons, who have dared to use, for the accomplishment of your iniquity, those powers of Nature by which God in divers ways worketh good to mortals; who stir up winds, gather vapours, form clouds, and condense them into hail.... I exorcise ye,... that ye relinquish the work ye have begun, dissolve the hail, scatter the clouds, disperse the vapours, and restrain the winds.'" The rubric goes on to order that then there shall be a great fire kindled in an open place, and that over it the sign of the cross shall be made, and the one hundred and fourteenth Psalm chanted, while malodorous substances, among them sulphur and asafoetida, shall be cast into the flames. The purpose seems to have been literally to "smoke out" Satan.(226) (226) See Polidorus Valerius, Practica exorcistarum; also the Thesaurus exorcismorum (Cologne, 1626), pp. 158-162. Manuals of exorcisms became important--some bulky quartos, others handbooks. Noteworthy among the latter is one by the Italian priest Locatelli, entitled Exorcisms most Powerful and Efficacious for the Dispelling of Aerial Tempests, whether raised by Demons at their own Instance or at the Beck of some Servant of the Devil.(227) (227) That is, Exorcismi, etc. A "corrected" second edition was printed at Laybach, 1680, in 24mo, to which is appended another manual of Preces et conjurationes contra aereas tempestates, omnibus sacerdotibus utiles et necessaria, printed at the monastery of Kempten (in Bavaria) in 1667. The latter bears as epigraph the passage from the gospels describing Christ's stilling of the winds. The Jesuit Gretser, in his famous book on Benedictions and Maledictions, devotes a chapter to this subject, dismissing summarily the scepticism that questions the power of devils over the elements, and adducing the story of Job as conclusive.(228) (228) See Gretser, De benedictionibus et maledictionibus, lib. ii, c. 48. Nor was this theory of exorcism by any means confined to the elder Church. Luther vehemently upheld it, and prescribed especially the first chapter of St. John's gospel as of unfailing efficacy against thunder and lightning, declaring that he had often found the mere sign of the cross, with the text, "The word was made flesh," sufficient to put storms to flight.(229) (229) So, at least, says Gretser (in his De ben. et aml., as above). From the beginning of the Middle Ages until long after the Reformation the chronicles give ample illustration of the successful use of such exorcisms. So strong was the belief in them that it forced itself into minds comparatively rational, and found utterance in treatises of much importance. But, since exorcisms were found at times ineffectual, other means were sought, and especially fetiches of various sorts. One of the earliest of these appeared when Pope Alexander I, according to tradition, ordained that holy water should be kept in churches and bedchambers to drive away devils.(230) Another safeguard was found in relics, and of similar efficacy were the so-called "conception billets" sold by the Carmelite monks. They contained a formula upon consecrated paper, at which the devil might well turn pale. Buried in the corner of a field, one of these was thought to give protection against bad weather and destructive insects.(231) (230) "Instituit ut aqua quam sanctum appellamus sale admixta interpositus sacris orationibus et in templis et in cubiculis ad fugandos daemones retineretur." Platina, Vitae Pontif. But the story is from the False Decretals. (231) See Rydberg, The Magic of the Middle Ages, translated by Edgren, pp. 63-66. But highest in repute during centuries was the Agnus Dei--a piece of wax blessed by the Pope's own hand, and stamped with the well-known device representing the "Lamb of God." Its powers were so marvellous that Pope Urban V thought three of these cakes a fitting gift from himself to the Greek Emperor. In the Latin doggerel recounting their virtues, their meteorological efficacy stands first, for especial stress is laid on their power of dispelling the thunder. The stress thus laid by Pope Urban, as the infallible guide of Christendom, on the efficacy of this fetich, gave it great value throughout Europe, and the doggerel verses reciting its virtues sank deep into the popular mind. It was considered a most potent means of dispelling hail, pestilence, storms, conflagrations, and enchantments; and this feeling was deepened by the rules and rites for its consecration. So solemn was the matter, that the manufacture and sale of this particular fetich was, by a papal bull of 1471, reserved for the Pope himself, and he only performed the required ceremony in the first and seventh years of his pontificate. Standing unmitred, he prayed: "O God,... we humbly beseech thee that thou wilt bless these waxen forms, figured with the image of an innocent lamb,... that, at the touch and sight of them, the faithful may break forth into praises, and that the crash of hailstorms, the blast of hurricanes, the violence of tempests, the fury of winds, and the malice of thunderbolts may be tempered, and evil spirits flee and tremble before the standard of thy holy cross, which is graven upon them."(232) (232) These pious charms are still in use in the Church, and may be found described in any ecclesiastical cyclopaedia. The doggerel verses run as follows: "Tonitrua magna terret, Inimicos nostras domat Et peccata nostra delet; Praegnantem cum partu salvat, Ab incendio praeservat, Dona dignis multa confert, A subersione servat, Utque malis mala defert. A morte cita liberat, Portio, quamvis parva sit, Et Cacodaemones fugat, Ut magna tamen proficit." See these verses cited in full faith, so late as 1743, in Father Vincent of Berg's Enchiridium, pp. 23, 24, where is an ample statement of the virtues of the Agnus Dei, and istructions for its use. A full account of the rites used in consecrating this fetich, with the prayers and benedictions which gave colour to this theory of the powers of the Agnus Dei, may be found in the ritual of the Church. I have used the edition entitled Sacrarum ceremoniarum sive rituum Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae libri tres, Rome, 1560, in folio. The form of the papal prayer is as follows: "Deus... te supplicater deprecamur, ut... has cereas formas, innocentissimi agni imagine figuritas, benedicere... digneris, ut per ejus tactum et visum fideles invitentur as laudes, fragor grandinum, procella turbinum, impetus tempestatum, ventorum rabies, infesta tonitrua temperentur, fugiant atque tremiscant maligni spiritus ante Sanctae Crucis vexillum, quod in illis exculptum est...."(Sacr. Cer. Rom. Eccl., as above). If any are curious as to the extent to which this consecrated wax was a specific for all spiritual and most temporal ills during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, let them consult the Jesuit Litterae annuae, passim. Another favourite means with the clergy of the older Church for bringing to naught the "power of the air," was found in great processions bearing statues, relics, and holy emblems through the streets. Yet even these were not always immediately effective. One at Liege, in the thirteenth century, thrice proved unsuccessful in bringing rain, when at last it was found that the image of the Virgin had been forgotten! A new procession was at once formed, the Salve Regina sung, and the rain came down in such torrents as to drive the devotees to shelter.(233) (233) John of Winterthur describes many such processions in Switzerland in the thirteenth century, and all the monkish chronicles speak of them. See also Rydberg, Magic of the Middle Ages, p. 74. In Catholic lands this custom remains to this day, and very important features in these processions are the statues and the reliquaries of patron saints. Some of these excel in bringing sunshine, others in bringing rain. The Cathedral of Chartres is so fortunate as to possess sundry relics of St. Taurin, especially potent against dry weather, and some of St. Piat, very nearly as infallible against wet weather. In certain regions a single saint gives protection alternately against wet and dry weather--as, for example, St. Godeberte at Noyon. Against storms St. Barbara is very generally considered the most powerful protectress; but, in the French diocese of Limoges, Notre Dame de Crocq has proved a most powerful rival, for when, a few years since, all the neighbouring parishes were ravaged by storms, not a hailstone fell in the canton which she protected. In the diocese of Tarbes, St. Exupere is especially invoked against hail, peasants flocking from all the surrounding country to his shrine.(234) (234) As to protection by special saints as stated, see the Guide du touriste et du pelerin a Chartes, 1867 (cited by "Paul Parfait," in his Dossier des Pelerinages); also pp. 139-145 of the Dossier. But the means of baffling the powers of the air which came to be most widely used was the ringing of consecrated church bells. This usage had begun in the time of Charlemagne, and there is extant a prohibition of his against the custom of baptizing bells and of hanging certain tags(235) on their tongues as a protection against hailstorms; but even Charlemagne was powerless against this current of medieval superstition. Theological reasons were soon poured into it, and in the year 968 Pope John XIII gave it the highest ecclesiastical sanction by himself baptizing the great bell of his cathedral church, the Lateran, and christening it with his own name.(236) (235) Perticae. See Montanus, Hist. Nachricht van den Glocken (Chenmitz, 1726), p. 121; and Meyer, Der Aberglaube des Mittelalters, p. 186. (236) For statements regarding Pope John and bell superstitions, see Higgins's Anacalypsis, vol. ii, p. 70. See also Platina, Vitae Pontif., s. v. John XIII, and Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici, sub anno 968. The conjecture of Baronius that the bell was named after St. John the Baptist, is even more startling than the accepted tradition of the Pope's sponsorship. This idea was rapidly developed, and we soon find it supported in ponderous treatises, spread widely in sermons, and popularized in multitudes of inscriptions cast upon the bells themselves. This branch of theological literature may still be studied in multitudes of church towers throughout Europe. A bell at Basel bears the inscription, "Ad fugandos demones." Another, in Lugano, declares "The sound of this bell vanquishes tempests, repels demons, and summons men." Another, at the Cathedral of Erfurt, declares that it can "ward off lightning and malignant demons." A peal in the Jesuit church at the university town of Pont-a-Mousson bore the words, "They praise God, put to flight the clouds, affright the demons, and call the people." This is dated 1634. Another bell in that part of France declares, "It is I who dissipate the thunders"(Ego sum qui dissipo tonitrua).(237) (237) For these illustrations, with others equally striking, see Meyer, Der Aberglaube des Mittelalters, pp. 185, 186. For the later examples, see Germain, Anciennes cloches lorraines (Nancy, 1885), pp. 23, 27. Another, in one of the forest cantons of Switzerland, bears a doggerel couplet, which may be thus translated: "On the devil my spite I'll vent, And, God helping, bad weather prevent."(238) (238) "An dem Tufel will cih mich rachen, Mit der hilf gotz alle bosen wetter erbrechen." (See Meyer, as above.) Very common were inscriptions embodying this doctrine in sonorous Latin. Naturally, then, there grew up a ritual for the consecration of bells. Knollys, in his quaint translation of the old chronicler Sleidan, gives us the usage in the simple English of the middle of the sixteenth century: "In lyke sorte (as churches) are the belles used. And first, forsouth, they must hange so, as the Byshop may goe round about them. Whiche after he hath sayde certen Psalmes, he consecrateth water and salte, and mingleth them together, wherwith he washeth the belle diligently both within and without, after wypeth it drie, and with holy oyle draweth in it the signe of the crosse, and prayeth God, that whan they shall rynge or sounde that bell, all the disceiptes of the devyll may vanyshe away, hayle, thondryng, lightening, wyndes, and tempestes, and all untemperate weathers may be aswaged. Whan he hath wipte out the crosse of oyle wyth a linen cloth, he maketh seven other crosses in the same, and within one only. After saying certen Psalmes, he taketh a payre of sensours and senseth the bel within, and prayeth God to sende it good lucke. In many places they make a great dyner, and kepe a feast as it were at a solemne wedding."(239) (239) Sleiden's Commentaries, English translation, as above, fol. 334 (lib. xxi, sub anno 1549). These bell baptisms became matters of great importance. Popes, kings, and prelates were proud to stand as sponsors. Four of the bells at the Cathedral of Versailles having been destroyed during the French Revolution, four new ones were baptized, on the 6th of January, 1824, the Voltairean King, Louis XVIII, and the pious Duchess d'Angouleme standing as sponsors. In some of these ceremonies zeal appears to have outrun knowledge, and one of Luther's stories, at the expense of the older Church, was that certain authorities thus christened a bell "Hosanna," supposing that to be the name of a woman. To add to the efficacy of such baptisms, water was sometimes brought from the river Jordan.(240) (240) See Montanus, as above, who cites Beck, Lutherthum vor Luthero, p. 294, for the statement that many bells were carried to the Jordan by pilgrims for this purpose. The prayers used at bell baptisms fully recognise this doctrine. The ritual of Paris embraces the petition that, "whensoever this bell shall sound, it shall drive away the malign influences of the assailing spirits, the horror of their apparitions, the rush of whirlwinds, the stroke of lightning, the harm of thunder, the disasters of storms, and all the spirits of the tempest." Another prayer begs that "the sound of this bell may put to flight the fiery darts of the enemy of men"; and others vary the form but not the substance of this petition. The great Jesuit theologian, Bellarmin, did indeed try to deny the reality of this baptism; but this can only be regarded as a piece of casuistry suited to Protestant hardness of heart, or as strategy in the warfare against heretics.(241) (241) For prayers at bell baptisms, see Arago, Oeuvres, Paris, 1854, vol. iv, p. 322. Forms of baptism were laid down in various manuals sanctioned directly by papal authority, and sacramental efficacy was everywhere taken for granted.(242) The development of this idea in the older Church was too strong to be resisted;(243) but, as a rule, the Protestant theologians of the Reformation, while admitting that storms were caused by Satan and his legions, opposed the baptism of bells, and denied the theory of their influence in dispersing storms. Luther, while never doubting that troublesome meteorological phenomena were caused by devils, regarded with contempt the idea that the demons were so childish as to be scared by the clang of bells; his theory made them altogether too powerful to be affected by means so trivial. The great English Reformers, while also accepting very generally the theory of diabolic interference in storms, reproved strongly the baptizing of bells, as the perversion of a sacrament and involving blasphemy. Bishop Hooper declared reliance upon bells to drive away tempests, futile. Bishop Pilkington, while arguing that tempests are direct instruments of God's wrath, is very severe against using "unlawful means," and among these he names "the hallowed bell"; and these opinions were very generally shared by the leading English clergy.(244) (242) As has often been pointed out, the ceremony was in all its details--even to the sponsors, the wrapping a garment about the baptised, the baptismal fee, the feast--precisely the same as when a child was baptised. Magius, who is no sceptic, relates from his own experience an instant of this sort, where a certain bishop stood sponsor for two bells, giving them both his own name--William. (See his De Tintinnabulis, vol. xiv.) (243) And no wonder, when the oracle of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, expressly pronounced church bells, "provided they have been duly consecrated and baptised," the foremost means of "frustrating the atmospheric mischiefs of the devil," and likened steeples in which bells are ringing to a hen brooding her chickens, "for the tones of the consecrated metal repel the demons and avert storm and lightning"; when pre-Reformation preachers of such universal currency as Johannes Herolt declared, "Bells, as all agree, are baptised with the result that they are secure from the power of Satan, terrify the demons, compel the powers"; when Geiler of Kaiserberg especially commended bell-ringing as a means of beating off the devil in storms; and when a canonist like Durandus explained the purpose of the rite to be, that "the demons hearing the trumpets of the Eternal King, to wit, the bells, may flee in terror, and may cease from the stirring up of tempests." See Herolt, Sermones Discipuli, vol. xvii, and Durandus, De ritibus ecclesiae, vol. ii, p. 12. I owe the first of these citations to Rydberg, and the others to Montanus. For Geiler, see Dacheux, Geiler de Kaiserberg, pp. 280, 281. (244) The baptism of bells was indeed, one of the express complaints of the German Protestant princes at the Reformation. See their Gravam. Cent. German. Grav., p. 51. For Hooper, see his Early Writings, p. 197 (in Parker Society Publications). For Pilkington, see his Works, p. 177 (in same). Among others sharing these opinions were Tyndale, Bishop Ridley, Archbishop Sandys, Becon, Calfhill, and Rogers. It is to be noted that all of these speak of the rite as "baptism." Toward the end of the sixteenth century the Elector of Saxony strictly forbade the ringing of bells against storms, urging penance and prayer instead; but the custom was not so easily driven out of the Protestant Church, and in some quarters was developed a Protestant theory of a rationalistic sort, ascribing the good effects of bell-ringing in storms to the calling together of the devout for prayer or to the suggestion of prayers during storms at night. As late as the end of the seventeenth century we find the bells of Protestant churches in northern Germany rung for the dispelling of tempests. In Catholic Austria this bell-ringing seems to have become a nuisance in the last century, for the Emperor Joseph II found it necessary to issue an edict against it; but this doctrine had gained too large headway to be arrested by argument or edict, and the bells may be heard ringing during storms to this day in various remote districts in Europe.(245) For this was no mere superficial view. It was really part of a deep theological current steadily developed through the Middle Ages, the fundamental idea of the whole being the direct influence of the bells upon the "Power of the Air"; and it is perhaps worth our while to go back a little and glance over the coming of this current into the modern world. Having grown steadily through the Middle Ages, it appeared in full strength at the Reformation period; and in the sixteenth century Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Upsala and Primate of Sweden, in his great work on the northern nations, declares it a well-established fact that cities and harvests may be saved from lightning by the ringing of bells and the burning of consecrated incense, accompanied by prayers; and he cautions his readers that the workings of the thunderbolt are rather to be marvelled at than inquired into. Even as late as 1673 the Franciscan professor Lealus, in Italy, in a schoolbook which was received with great applause in his region, taught unhesitatingly the agency of demons in storms, and the power of bells over them, as well as the portentousness of comets and the movement of the heavens by angels. He dwells especially, too, upon the perfect protection afforded by the waxen Agnus Dei. How strong this current was, and how difficult even for philosophical minds to oppose, is shown by the fact that both Descartes and Francis Bacon speak of it with respect, admitting the fact, and suggesting very mildly that the bells may accomplish this purpose by the concussion of the air.(246) (245) For Elector of Saxony, see Peuchen, Disp. circa tempestates, Jena, 1697. For the Protestant theory of bells, see, e. g., the Ciciones Selectae of Superintendent Conrad Dieterich (cited by Peuchen, Disp. circa tempestates). For Protestant ringing of bells to dispel tempests, see Schwimmer, Physicalische Luftfragen, 1692 (cited by Peuchen, as above). He pictures the whole population of a Thuringinian district flocking to the churches on the approach of a storm. (246) For Olaus Magnus, see the De gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555), lib. i, c. 12, 13. For Descartes, see his De meteor., cent. 2, 127. In his Historia Ventorum he again alludes to the belief, and without comment. But no such moderate doctrine sufficed, and the renowned Bishop Binsfeld, of Treves, in his noted treatise on the credibility of the confessions of witches, gave an entire chapter to the effect of bells in calming atmospheric disturbances. Basing his general doctrine upon the first chapter of Job and the second chapter of Ephesians, he insisted on the reality of diabolic agency in storms; and then, by theological reasoning, corroborated by the statements extorted in the torture chamber, he showed the efficacy of bells in putting the hellish legions to flight.(247) This continued, therefore, an accepted tenet, developed in every nation, and coming to its climax near the end of the seventeenth century. At that period--the period of Isaac Newton--Father Augustine de Angelis, rector of the Clementine College at Rome, published under the highest Church authority his lectures upon meteorology. Coming from the centre of Catholic Christendom, at so late a period, they are very important as indicating what had been developed under the influence of theology during nearly seventeen hundred years. This learned head of a great college at the heart of Christendom taught that "the surest remedy against thunder is that which our Holy Mother the Church practises, namely, the ringing of bells when a thunderbolt impends: thence follows a twofold effect, physical and moral--a physical, because the sound variously disturbs and agitates the air, and by agitation disperses the hot exhalations and dispels the thunder; but the moral effect is the more certain, because by the sound the faithful are stirred to pour forth their prayers, by which they win from God the turning away of the thunderbolt." Here we see in this branch of thought, as in so many others, at the close of the seventeenth century, the dawn of rationalism. Father De Angelis now keeps demoniacal influence in the background. Little, indeed, is said of the efficiency of bells in putting to flight the legions of Satan: the wise professor is evidently preparing for that inevitable compromise which we see in the history of every science when it is clear that it can no longer be suppressed by ecclesiastical fulminations.(248) (247) See Binsfeld, De Confessionbus Malef., pp. 308-314, edition of 1623. (248) For De Angelis, see his Lectiones Meteorol., p. 75. III. THE AGENCY OF WITCHES. But, while this comparatively harmless doctrine of thwarting the powers of the air by fetiches and bell-ringing was developed, there were evolved another theory, and a series of practices sanctioned by the Church, which must forever be considered as among the most fearful calamities in human history. Indeed, few errors have ever cost so much shedding of innocent blood over such wide territory and during so many generations. Out of the old doctrine--pagan and Christian--of evil agency in atmospheric phenomena was evolved the belief that certain men, women, and children may secure infernal aid to produce whirlwinds, hail, frosts, floods, and the like. As early as the ninth century one great churchman, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, struck a heavy blow at this superstition. His work, Against the Absurd Opinion of the Vulgar touching Hail and Thunder, shows him to have been one of the most devoted apostles of right reason whom human history has known. By argument and ridicule, and at times by a lofty eloquence, he attempted to breast this tide. One passage is of historical significance. He declares: "The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe."(249) (249) For a very interesting statement of Agobard's position and work, with citations from his Liber contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis, see Poole, Illustrations of the History of Mediaeval Thought, pp. 40 et seq. The works of Agobard are in vol. civ of Migne's Patrol. Lat. All in vain; the tide of superstition continued to roll on; great theologians developed it and ecclesiastics favoured it; until as we near the end of the medieval period the infallible voice of Rome is heard accepting it, and clinching this belief into the mind of Christianity. For, in 1437, Pope Eugene IV, by virtue of the teaching power conferred on him by the Almighty, and under the divine guarantee against any possible error in the exercise of it, issued a bull exhorting the inquisitors of heresy and witchcraft to use greater diligence against the human agents of the Prince of Darkness, and especially against those who have the power to produce bad weather. In 1445 Pope Eugene returned again to the charge, and again issued instructions and commands infallibly committing the Church to the doctrine. But a greater than Eugene followed, and stamped the idea yet more deeply into the mind of the Church. On the 7th of December, 1484, Pope Innocent VIII sent forth his bull Summis Desiderantes. Of all documents ever issued from Rome, imperial or papal, this has doubtless, first and last, cost the greatest shedding of innocent blood. Yet no document was ever more clearly dictated by conscience. Inspired by the scriptural command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," Pope Innocent exhorted the clergy of Germany to leave no means untried to detect sorcerers, and especially those who by evil weather destroy vineyards, gardens, meadows, and growing crops. These precepts were based upon various texts of Scripture, especially upon the famous statement in the book of Job; and, to carry them out, witch-finding inquisitors were authorized by the Pope to scour Europe, especially Germany, and a manual was prepared for their use--the Witch-Hammer, Malleus Maleficarum. In this manual, which was revered for centuries, both in Catholic and Protestant countries, as almost divinely inspired, the doctrine of Satanic agency in atmospheric phenomena was further developed, and various means of detecting and punishing it were dwelt upon.(250) (250) For the bull of Pope Eugene, see Raynaldus, Annales Eccl., pp. 1437, 1445. The Latin text of the bull Summis Desiderantes may now be found in the Malleus Maleficarum, in Binsfeld's De Confessionibus cited below, or in Roskoff's Geschichte des Teufles (Leipsic, 1869), vol. i, pp. 222-225. There is, so far as I know, no good analysis, in any English book, of the contents of the Witch-Hammer; but such may be found in Roskoff's Geschichte des Teufels, or in Soldan's Geschichte der Hexenprozesse. Its first dated edition is that of 1489; but Prof. Burr has shown that it was printed as early as 1486. It was, happily, never translated into any modern tongue. With the application of torture to thousands of women, in accordance with the precepts laid down in the Malleus, it was not difficult to extract masses of proof for this sacred theory of meteorology. The poor creatures, writhing on the rack, held in horror by those who had been nearest and dearest to them, anxious only for death to relieve their sufferings, confessed to anything and everything that would satisfy the inquisitors and judges. All that was needed was that the inquisitors should ask leading questions(251) and suggest satisfactory answers: the prisoners, to shorten the torture, were sure sooner or later to give the answer required, even though they knew that this would send them to the stake or scaffold. Under the doctrine of "excepted cases," there was no limit to torture for persons accused of heresy or witchcraft; even the safeguards which the old pagan world had imposed upon torture were thus thrown down, and the prisoner MUST confess. (251) For still extant lists of such questions, see the Zeitschrift fur deutsche Culturgeschichte for 1858, pp. 522-528, or Diefenbach, Der Hexenwahn in Deutschland, pp. 15-17. Father Vincent of Berg (in his Enchiridium) gives a similar list for use by priests in the confession of the accused. Manuscript lists of this sort which have actually done service in the courts of Baden and Bavaria may be seen in the library of Cornell University. The theological literature of the Middle Ages was thus enriched with numberless statements regarding modes of Satanic influence on the weather. Pathetic, indeed, are the records; and none more so than the confessions of these poor creatures, chiefly women and children, during hundreds of years, as to their manner of raising hailstorms and tempests. Such confessions, by tens of thousands, are still to be found in the judicial records of Germany, and indeed of all Europe. Typical among these is one on which great stress was laid during ages, and for which the world was first indebted to one of these poor women. Crazed by the agony of torture, she declared that, returning with a demon through the air from the witches' sabbath, she was dropped upon the earth in the confusion which resulted among the hellish legions when they heard the bells sounding the Ave Maria. It is sad to note that, after a contribution so valuable to sacred science, the poor woman was condemned to the flames. This revelation speedily ripened the belief that, whatever might be going on at the witches' sabbath--no matter how triumphant Satan might be--at the moment of sounding the consecrated bells the Satanic power was paralyzed. This theory once started, proofs came in to support it, during a hundred years, from the torture chambers in all parts of Europe. Throughout the later Middle Ages the Dominicans had been the main agents in extorting and promulgating these revelations, but in the centuries following the Reformation the Jesuits devoted themselves with even more keenness and vigour to the same task. Some curious questions incidentally arose. It was mooted among the orthodox authorities whether the damage done by storms should or should not be assessed upon the property of convicted witches. The theologians inclined decidedly to the affirmative; the jurists, on the whole, to the negative.(252) (252) For proofs of the vigour of the Jesuits in this persecution, see not only the histories of witchcraft, but also the Annuae litterae of the Jesuits themselves, passim. In spite of these tortures, lightning and tempests continued, and great men arose in the Church throughout Europe in every generation to point out new cruelties for the discovery of "weather-makers," and new methods for bringing their machinations to naught. But here and there, as early as the sixteenth century, we begin to see thinkers endeavouring to modify or oppose these methods. At that time Paracelsus called attention to the reverberation of cannon as explaining the rolling of thunder, but he was confronted by one of his greatest contemporaries. Jean Bodin, as superstitious in natural as he was rational in political science, made sport of the scientific theory, and declared thunder to be "a flaming exhalation set in motion by evil spirits, and hurled downward with a great crash and a horrible smell of sulphur." In support of this view, he dwelt upon the confessions of tortured witches, upon the acknowledged agency of demons in the Will-o'-the-wisp, and specially upon the passage in the one hundred and fourth Psalm, "Who maketh his angels spirits, his ministers a flaming fire." To resist such powerful arguments by such powerful men was dangerous indeed. In 1513, Pomponatius, professor at Padua, published a volume of Doubts as to the Fourth Book of Aristotle's Meteorologica, and also dared to question this power of devils; but he soon found it advisable to explain that, while as a PHILOSOPHER he might doubt, yet as a CHRISTIAN he of course believed everything taught by Mother Church--devils and all--and so escaped the fate of several others who dared to question the agency of witches in atmospheric and other disturbances. A few years later Agrippa of Nettesheim made a somewhat similar effort to breast this theological tide in northern Europe. He had won a great reputation in various fields, but especially in natural science, as science was then understood. Seeing the folly and cruelty of the prevailing theory, he attempted to modify it, and in 1518, as Syndic of Metz, endeavoured to save a poor woman on trial for witchcraft. But the chief inquisitor, backed by the sacred Scriptures, the papal bulls, the theological faculties, and the monks, was too strong for him; he was not only forced to give up his office, but for this and other offences of a similar sort was imprisoned, driven from city to city and from country to country, and after his death his clerical enemies, especially the Dominicans, pursued his memory with calumny, and placed over his grave probably the most malignant epitaph ever written. As to argument, these efforts were met especially by Jean Bodin in his famous book, the Demonomanie des Sorciers, published in 1580. It was a work of great power by a man justly considered the leading thinker in France, and perhaps in Europe. All the learning of the time, divine and human, he marshalled in support of the prevailing theory. With inexorable logic he showed that both the veracity of sacred Scripture and the infallibility of a long line of popes and councils of the Church were pledged to it, and in an eloquent passage this great publicist warned rulers and judges against any mercy to witches--citing the example of King Ahab condemned by the prophet to die for having pardoned a man worthy of death, and pointing significantly to King Charles IX of France, who, having pardoned a sorcerer, died soon afterward.(253) (253) To the argument cited above, Bodin adds: "Id certissimam daemonis praesentiam significat; nam ubicunque daemones cum hominibus nefaria societatis fide copulantur, foedissimum semper relinquunt sulphuris odorem, quod sortilegi saepissime experiuntur et confitentur." See Bodin's Universae Naturae Theatrum, Frankfort, 1597, pp. 208-211. The first edition of the book by Pomponatius, which was the earliest of his writings, is excessively rare, but it was reprinted at Venice just a half-century later. It is in his De incantationibus, however, that he speaks especially of devils. As to Pomponatius, see, besides these, Creighton's History of the Papacy during the Reformation, and an excellent essay in Franck's Moralistes et Philosophes. For Agrippa, see his biography by Prof. Henry Morley, London, 1856. For Bodin, see a statement of his general line of argument in Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, chap. 1. In the last years of the sixteenth century the persecutions for witchcraft and magic were therefore especially cruel; and in the western districts of Germany the main instrument in them was Binsfeld, Suffragan Bishop of Treves. At that time Cornelius Loos was a professor at the university of that city. He was a devoted churchman, and one of the most brilliant opponents of Protestantism, but he finally saw through the prevailing belief regarding occult powers, and in an evil hour for himself embodied his idea in a book entitled True and False Magic. The book, though earnest, was temperate, but this helped him and his cause not at all. The texts of Scripture clearly sanctioning belief in sorcery and magic stood against him, and these had been confirmed by the infallible teachings of the Church and the popes from time immemorial; the book was stopped in the press, the manuscript confiscated, and Loos thrown into a dungeon. The inquisitors having wrought their will upon him, in the spring of 1593 he was brought out of prison, forced to recant on his knees before the assembled dignitaries of the Church, and thenceforward kept constantly under surveillance and at times in prison. Even this was considered too light a punishment, and his arch-enemy, the Jesuit Delrio, declared that, but for his death by the plague, he would have been finally sent to the stake.(254) (254) What remains of the manuscript of Loos, which until recently was supposed to be lost, was found, hidden away on the shelves of the old Jesuit library at Treves, by Mr. George Lincoln Burr, now a professor at Cornell University; and Prof. Burr's copy of the manuscript is now in the library of that institution. For a full account of the discovery and its significance, see the New York Nation for November 11, 1886. The facts regarding the after-life of Loos were discovered by Prof. Burr in manuscript records at Brussels. That this threat was not unmeaning had been seen a few years earlier in a case even more noted, and in the same city. During the last decades of the sixteenth century, Dietrich Flade, an eminent jurist, was rector of the University of Treves, and chief judge of the Electoral Court, and in the latter capacity he had to pass judgment upon persons tried on the capital charge of magic and witchcraft. For a time he yielded to the long line of authorities, ecclesiastical and judicial, supporting the reality of this crime; but he at last seems to have realized that it was unreal, and that the confessions in his torture chamber, of compacts with Satan, riding on broomsticks to the witch-sabbath, raising tempests, producing diseases, and the like, were either the results of madness or of willingness to confess anything and everything, and even to die, in order to shorten the fearful tortures to which the accused were in all cases subjected until a satisfactory confession was obtained. On this conviction of the unreality of many at least of the charges Flade seems to have acted, and he at once received his reward. He was arrested by the authority of the archbishop and charged with having sold himself to Satan--the fact of his hesitation in the persecution being perhaps what suggested his guilt. He was now, in his turn, brought into the torture chamber over which he had once presided, was racked until he confessed everything which his torturers suggested, and finally, in 1589, was strangled and burnt. Of that trial a record exists in the library of Cornell University in the shape of the original minutes of the case, and among them the depositions of Flade when under torture, taken down from his own lips in the torture chamber. In these depositions this revered and venerable scholar and jurist acknowledged the truth of every absurd charge brought against him--anything, everything, which would end the fearful torture: compared with that, death was nothing.(255) (255) For the case of Flade, see the careful study by Prof. Burr, The Fate of Dietrich Flade, in the Papers of the American Historical Association, 1891. Nor was even a priest secure who ventured to reveal the unreality of magic. When Friedrich Spee, the Jesuit poet of western Germany, found, in taking the confessions of those about to be executed for magic, that without exception, just when about to enter eternity and utterly beyond hope of pardon, they all retracted their confessions made under torture, his sympathies as a man rose above his loyalty to his order, and he published his Cautio Criminalis as a warning, stating with entire moderation the facts he had observed and the necessity of care. But he did not dare publish it under his own name, nor did he even dare publish it in a Catholic town; he gave it to the world anonymously, and, in order to prevent any tracing of the work to him through the confessional, he secretly caused it to be published in the Protestant town of Rinteln. Nor was this all. Nothing shows so thoroughly the hold that this belief in magic had obtained as the conduct of Spee's powerful friend and contemporary, John Philip von Schonborn, later the Elector and Prince Archbishop of Mayence. As a youth, Schonborn had loved and admired Spee, and had especially noted his persistent melancholy and his hair whitened even in his young manhood. On Schonborn's pressing him for the cause, Spee at last confessed that his sadness, whitened hair, and premature old age were due to his recollections of the scores of men and women and children whom he had been obliged to see tortured and sent to the scaffold and stake for magic and witchcraft, when he as their father confessor positively knew them to be innocent. The result was that, when Schonborn became Elector and Archbishop of Mayence, he stopped the witch persecutions in that province, and prevented them as long as he lived. But here was shown the strength of theological and ecclesiastical traditions and precedents. Even a man so strong by family connections, and enjoying such great temporal and spiritual power as Schonborn, dared not openly give his reasons for this change of policy. So far as is known, he never uttered a word publicly against the reality of magic, and under his successor in the electorate witch trials were resumed. The great upholders of the orthodox view retained full possession of the field. The victorious Bishop Binsfeld, of Treves, wrote a book to prove that everything confessed by the witches under torture, especially the raising of storms and the general controlling of the weather, was worthy of belief; and this book became throughout Europe a standard authority, both among Catholics and Protestants. Even more inflexible was Remigius, criminal judge in Lorraine. On the title-page of his manual he boasts that within fifteen years he had sent nine hundred persons to death for this imaginary crime.(256) (256) For Spee and Schonborn, see Soldan and other German authorities. There are copies of the first editions of the Cautio Criminalis in the library of Cornell University. Binsfeld's book bore the title of Tractatus de confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum. First published at Treves in 1589, it appeared subsequently four times in the original Latin, as well as in two distinct German translations, and in a French one. Remigius's manual was entitled Daemonolatreia, and was first printed at Lyons in 1595. Protestantism fell into the superstition as fully as Catholicism. In the same century John Wier, a disciple of Agrippa, tried to frame a pious theory which, while satisfying orthodoxy, should do something to check the frightful cruelties around him. In his book De Praestigiis Daemonum, published in 1563, he proclaimed his belief in witchcraft, but suggested that the compacts with Satan, journeys through the air on broomsticks, bearing children to Satan, raising storms and producing diseases--to which so many women and children confessed under torture--were delusions suggested and propagated by Satan himself, and that the persons charged with witchcraft were therefore to be considered "as possessed"--that is, rather as sinned against than sinning.(257) (257) For Wier, or Weyer, see, besides his own works, the excellent biography by Prof. Binz, of Bonn. But neither Catholics nor Protestants would listen for a moment to any such suggestion. Wier was bitterly denounced and persecuted. Nor did Bekker, a Protestant divine in Holland, fare any better in the following century. For his World Bewitched, in which he ventured not only to question the devil's power over the weather, but to deny his bodily existence altogether, he was solemnly tried by the synod of his Church and expelled from his pulpit, while his views were condemned as heresy, and overwhelmed with a flood of refutations whose mere catalogue would fill pages; and these cases were typical of many. The Reformation had, indeed, at first deepened the superstition; the new Church being anxious to show itself equally orthodox and zealous with the old. During the century following the first great movement, the eminent Lutheran jurist and theologian Benedict Carpzov, whose boast was that he had read the Bible fifty-three times, especially distinguished himself by his skill in demonstrating the reality of witchcraft, and by his cruelty in detecting and punishing it. The torture chambers were set at work more vigorously than ever, and a long line of theological jurists followed to maintain the system and to extend it. To argue against it, or even doubt it, was exceedingly dangerous. Even as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Christian Thomasius, the greatest and bravest German between Luther and Lessing, began the efforts which put an end to it in Protestant Germany, he did not dare at first, bold as he was, to attack it in his own name, but presented his views as the university thesis of an irresponsible student.(258) (258) For Thomasius, see his various bigraphies by Luden and others; also the treatises on witchcraft by Soldan and others. Manuscript notes of his lectures, and copies of his earliest books on witchcraft as well as on other forms of folly, are to be found in the library of Cornell University. The same stubborn resistance to the gradual encroachment of the scientific spirit upon the orthodox doctrine of witchcraft was seen in Great Britain. Typical as to the attitude both of Scotch and English Protestants were the theory and practice of King James I, himself the author of a book on Demonology, and nothing if not a theologian. As to theory, his treatise on Demonology supported the worst features of the superstition; as to practice, he ordered the learned and acute work of Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, one of the best treatises ever written on the subject, to be burned by the hangman, and he applied his own knowledge to investigating the causes of the tempests which beset his bride on her voyage from Denmark. Skilful use of unlimited torture soon brought these causes to light. A Dr. Fian, while his legs were crushed in the "boots" and wedges were driven under his finger nails, confessed that several hundred witches had gone to sea in a sieve from the port of Leith, and had raised storms and tempests to drive back the princess. With the coming in of the Puritans the persecution was even more largely, systematically, and cruelly developed. The great witch-finder, Matthew Hopkins, having gone through the county of Suffolk and tested multitudes of poor old women by piercing them with pins and needles, declared that county to be infested with witches. Thereupon Parliament issued a commission, and sent two eminent Presbyterian divines to accompany it, with the result that in that county alone sixty persons were hanged for witchcraft in a single year. In Scotland matters were even worse. The auto da fe of Spain was celebrated in Scotland under another name, and with Presbyterian ministers instead of Roman Catholic priests as the main attendants. At Leith, in 1664, nine women were burned together. Condemnations and punishments of women in batches were not uncommon. Torture was used far more freely than in England, both in detecting witches and in punishing them. The natural argument developed in hundreds of pulpits was this: If the Allwise God punishes his creatures with tortures infinite in cruelty and duration, why should not his ministers, as far as they can, imitate him? The strongest minds in both branches of the Protestant Church in Great Britain devoted themselves to maintaining the superstition. The newer scientific modes of thought, and especially the new ideas regarding the heavens, revealed first by Copernicus and Galileo and later by Newton, Huygens, and Halley, were gradually dissipating the whole domain of the Prince of the Power of the Air; but from first to last a long line of eminent divines, Anglican and Calvinistic, strove to resist the new thought. On the Anglican side, in the seventeenth century, Meric Casaubon, Doctor of Divinity and a high dignitary of Canterbury,--Henry More, in many respects the most eminent scholar in the Church,--Cudworth, by far the most eminent philosopher, and Dr. Joseph Glanvil, the most cogent of all writers in favour of witchcraft, supported the orthodox superstition in treatises of great power; and Sir Matthew Hale, the greatest jurist of the period, condemning two women to be burned for witchcraft, declared that he based his judgment on the direct testimony of Holy Scripture. On the Calvinistic side were the great names of Richard Baxter, who applauded some of the worst cruelties in England, and of Increase and Cotton Mather, who stimulated the worst in America; and these marshalled in behalf of this cruel superstition a long line of eminent divines, the most earnest of all, perhaps, being John Wesley. Nor was the Lutheran Church in Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries behind its sister churches, either in persecuting witchcraft or in repressing doubts regarding the doctrine which supported it. But in spite of all these great authorities in every land, in spite of such summary punishments as those of Flade, Loos, and Bekker, and in spite of the virtual exclusion from church preferment of all who doubted the old doctrine, the new scientific view of the heavens was developed more and more; the physical sciences were more and more cultivated; the new scientific atmosphere in general more and more prevailed; and at the end of the seventeenth century this vast growth of superstition began to wither and droop. Montaigne, Bayle, and Voltaire in France, Thomasius in Germany, Calef in New England, and Beccaria in Italy, did much also to create an intellectual and moral atmosphere fatal to it. And here it should be stated, to the honour of the Church of England, that several of her divines showed great courage in opposing the dominant doctrine. Such men as Harsnet, Archbishop of York, and Morton, Bishop of Lichfield, who threw all their influence against witch-finding cruelties even early in the seventeenth century, deserve lasting gratitude. But especially should honour be paid to the younger men in the Church, who wrote at length against the whole system: such men as Wagstaffe and Webster and Hutchinson, who in the humbler ranks of the clergy stood manfully for truth, with the certainty that by so doing they were making their own promotion impossible. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the doctrine was evidently dying out. Where torture had been abolished, or even made milder, "weather-makers" no longer confessed, and the fundamental proofs in which the system was rooted were evidently slipping away. Even the great theologian Fromundus, at the University of Louvain, the oracle of his age, who had demonstrated the futility of the Copernican theory, had foreseen this and made the inevitable attempt at compromise, declaring that devils, though OFTEN, are not ALWAYS or even for the most part the causes of thunder. The learned Jesuit Caspar Schott, whose Physica Curiosa was one of the most popular books of the seventeenth century, also ventured to make the same mild statement. But even such concessions by such great champions of orthodoxy did not prevent frantic efforts in various quarters to bring the world back under the old dogma: as late as 1743 there was published in Catholic Germany a manual by Father Vincent of Berg, in which the superstition was taught to its fullest extent, with the declaration that it was issued for the use of priests under the express sanction of the theological professors of the University of Cologne; and twenty-five years later, in 1768, we find in Protestant England John Wesley standing firmly for witchcraft, and uttering his famous declaration, "The giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible." The latest notable demonstration in Scotland was made as late as 1773, when "the divines of the Associated Presbytery" passed a resolution declaring their belief in witchcraft, and deploring the general scepticism regarding it.(259) (259) For Carpzov and his successors, see authorities already given. The best account of James's share in the extortion of confessions may be found in the collection of Curious Tracts published at Edinburgh in 1820. See also King James's own Demonologie, and Pitcairn's Criminal Trials of Scotland, vol. i, part ii, pp. 213-223. For Casaubon, see his Credulity and Incredulity in Things Natural, pp. 66, 67. For Glanvil, More, Casaubon, Baxter, Wesley, and others named, see Lecky, as above. As to Increase Mather, in his sermons, already cited, on The Voice of God in Stormy Winds, Boston, 1704, he says: "when there are great tempests, the Angels oftentimes have a Hand therein.. .. Yea, and sometimes, by Divine Permission, Evil Angels have a Hand in such Storms and Tempests as are very hurtful to Men on the Earth." Yet "for the most part, such Storms are sent by the Providence of God as a Sign of His Displeasure for the Sins of Men," and sometimes "as Prognosticks and terrible Warnings of Great Judgements not far off." From the height of his erudition Mather thus rebukes the timid voice of scientific scepticism: "There are some who would be esteemed the Wits of the World, that ridicule those as Superstitious and Weak Persons, which look upon Dreadful Tempests as Prodromous of other Judgements. Nevertheless, the most Learned and Judicious Writers, not only of the Gentiles, but amongst Christians, have Embraced such a Persuasion; their Sentiments therein being Confirmed by the Experience of many Ages." For another curious turn given to this theory, with reference to sanitary science, see Deodat Lawson's famous sermon at Salem, in 1692, on Christ's Fidelity a Shield against Satan's Malignity, p. 21 of the second edition. For Cotton Mather, see his biography by Barrett Wendell, pp. 91, 92; also the chapter on Diabolism and Hysteria in this work. For Fromundus, see his Meteorologica (London, 1656), lib. iii, c. 9, and lib. ii, c. 3. For Schott, see his Physica Curiosa (edition of Wurzburg, 1667), p. 1249. For Father Vincent of Berg, see his Enchiridium quadripartitum (Cologne, 1743). Besides benedictions and exorcisms for all emergencies, it contains full directions for the manufacture of Agnes Dei, and of another sacred panacea called "Heiligthum," not less effective against evil powers,--gives formulae to be worn for protection against the devil,--suggests a list of signs by which diabolical possession may be recognised, and prescribes the question to be asked by priests in the examination of witches. For Wesley, see his Journal for 1768. The whole citation is given in Lecky. IV. FRANKLIN'S LIGHTNING-ROD. But in the midst of these efforts by Catholics like Father Vincent and by Protestants like John Wesley to save the old sacred theory, it received its death-blow. In 1752 Franklin made his experiments with the kite on the banks of the Schuylkill; and, at the moment when he drew the electric spark from the cloud, the whole tremendous fabric of theological meteorology reared by the fathers, the popes, the medieval doctors, and the long line of great theologians, Catholic and Protestant, collapsed; the "Prince of the Power of the Air" tumbled from his seat; the great doctrine which had so long afflicted the earth was prostrated forever. The experiment of Franklin was repeated in various parts of Europe, but, at first, the Church seemed careful to take no notice of it. The old church formulas against the Prince of the Power of the Air were still used, but the theological theory, especially in the Protestant Church, began to grow milder. Four years after Franklin's discovery Pastor Karl Koken, member of the Consistory and official preacher to the City Council of Hildesheim, was moved by a great hailstorm to preach and publish a sermon on The Revelation of God in Weather. Of "the Prince of the Power of the Air" he says nothing; the theory of diabolical agency he throws overboard altogether; his whole attempt is to save the older and more harmless theory, that the storm is the voice of God. He insists that, since Christ told Nicodemus that men "know not whence the wind cometh," it can not be of mere natural origin, but is sent directly by God himself, as David intimates in the Psalm, "out of His secret places." As to the hailstorm, he lays great stress upon the plague of hail sent by the Almighty upon Egypt, and clinches all by insisting that God showed at Mount Sinai his purpose to startle the body before impressing the conscience. While the theory of diabolical agency in storms was thus drooping and dying, very shrewd efforts were made at compromise. The first of these attempts we have already noted, in the effort to explain the efficacy of bells in storms by their simple use in stirring the faithful to prayer, and in the concession made by sundry theologians, and even by the great Lord Bacon himself, that church bells might, under the sanction of Providence, disperse storms by agitating the air. This gained ground somewhat, though it was resisted by one eminent Church authority, who answered shrewdly that, in that case, cannon would be even more pious instruments. Still another argument used in trying to save this part of the theological theory was that the bells were consecrated instruments for this purpose, "like the horns at whose blowing the walls of Jericho fell."(260) (260) For Koken, see his Offenbarung Gottes in Wetter, Hildesheim, c1756; and for the answer to Bacon, see Gretser's De Benedictionibus, lib. ii, cap. 46. But these compromises were of little avail. In 1766 Father Sterzinger attacked the very groundwork of the whole diabolic theory. He was, of course, bitterly assailed, insulted, and hated; but the Church thought it best not to condemn him. More and more the "Prince of the Power of the Air" retreated before the lightning-rod of Franklin. The older Church, while clinging to the old theory, was finally obliged to confess the supremacy of Franklin's theory practically; for his lightning-rod did what exorcisms, and holy water, and processions, and the Agnus Dei, and the ringing of church bells, and the rack, and the burning of witches, had failed to do. This was clearly seen, even by the poorest peasants in eastern France, when they observed that the grand spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which neither the sacredness of the place, nor the bells within it, nor the holy water and relics beneath it, could protect from frequent injuries by lightning, was once and for all protected by Franklin's rod. Then came into the minds of multitudes the answer to the question which had so long exercised the leading theologians of Europe and America, namely, "Why should the Almighty strike his own consecrated temples, or suffer Satan to strike them?" Yet even this practical solution of the question was not received without opposition. In America the earthquake of 1755 was widely ascribed, especially in Massachusetts, to Franklin's rod. The Rev. Thomas Prince, pastor of the Old South Church, published a sermon on the subject, and in the appendix expressed the opinion that the frequency of earthquakes may be due to the erection of "iron points invented by the sagacious Mr. Franklin." He goes on to argue that "in Boston are more erected than anywhere else in New England, and Boston seems to be more dreadfully shaken. Oh! there is no getting out of the mighty hand of God." Three years later, John Adams, speaking of a conversation with Arbuthnot, a Boston physician, says: "He began to prate upon the presumption of philosophy in erecting iron rods to draw the lightning from the clouds. He railed and foamed against the points and the presumption that erected them. He talked of presuming upon God, as Peter attempted to walk upon the water, and of attempting to control the artillery of heaven." As late as 1770 religious scruples regarding lightning-rods were still felt, the theory being that, as thunder and lightning were tokens of the Divine displeasure, it was impiety to prevent their doing their full work. Fortunately, Prof. John Winthrop, of Harvard, showed himself wise in this, as in so many other things: in a lecture on earthquakes he opposed the dominant theology; and as to arguments against Franklin's rods, he declared, "It is as much our duty to secure ourselves against the effects of lightning as against those of rain, snow, and wind by the means God has put into our hands." Still, for some years theological sentiment had to be regarded carefully. In Philadelphia, a popular lecturer on science for some time after Franklin's discovery thought it best in advertising his lectures to explain that "the erection of lightning-rods is not chargeable with presumption nor inconsistent with any of the principles either of natural or revealed religion."(261) (261) Regarding opposition to Franklin's rods in America, see Prince's sermon, especially p. 23; also Quincy, History of Harvard University, vol. ii, p. 219; also Works of John Adams, vol. ii, pp. 51, 52; also Parton's Life of Franklin, vol. i, p. 294. In England, the first lightning conductor upon a church was not put up until 1762, ten years after Franklin's discovery. The spire of St. Bride's Church in London was greatly injured by lightning in 1750, and in 1764 a storm so wrecked its masonry that it had to be mainly rebuilt; yet for years after this the authorities refused to attach a lightning-rod. The Protestant Cathedral of St. Paul's, in London, was not protected until sixteen years after Franklin's discovery, and the tower of the great Protestant church at Hamburg not until a year later still. As late as 1783 it was declared in Germany, on excellent authority, that within a space of thirty-three years nearly four hundred towers had been damaged and one hundred and twenty bell-ringers killed. In Roman Catholic countries a similar prejudice was shown, and its cost at times was heavy. In Austria, the church of Rosenberg, in the mountains of Carinthia, was struck so frequently and with such loss of life that the peasants feared at last to attend service. Three times was the spire rebuilt, and it was not until 1778--twenty-six years after Franklin's discovery--that the authorities permitted a rod to be attached. Then all trouble ceased. A typical case in Italy was that of the tower of St. Mark's, at Venice. In spite of the angel at its summit and the bells consecrated to ward off the powers of the air, and the relics in the cathedral hard by, and the processions in the adjacent square, the tower was frequently injured and even ruined by lightning. In 1388 it was badly shattered; in 1417, and again in 1489, the wooden spire surmounting it was utterly consumed; it was again greatly injured in 1548, 1565, 1653, and in 1745 was struck so powerfully that the whole tower, which had been rebuilt of stone and brick, was shattered in thirty-seven places. Although the invention of Franklin had been introduced into Italy by the physicist Beccaria, the tower of St. Mark's still went unprotected, and was again badly struck in 1761 and 1762; and not until 1766--fourteen years after Franklin's discovery--was a lightning-rod placed upon it; and it has never been struck since.(262) (262) For reluctance in England to protect churches with Franklin's rods, see Priestley, History of Electricity, London, 1775, vol. i, pp. 407, 465 et seq. So, too, though the beautiful tower of the Cathedral of Siena, protected by all possible theological means, had been struck again and again, much opposition was shown to placing upon it what was generally known as "the heretical rod," but the tower was at last protected by Franklin's invention, and in 1777, though a very heavy bolt passed down the rod, the church received not the slightest injury. This served to reconcile theology and science, so far as that city was concerned; but the case which did most to convert the Italian theologians to the scientific view was that of the church of San Nazaro, at Brescia. The Republic of Venice had stored in the vaults of this church over two hundred thousand pounds of powder. In 1767, seventeen years after Franklin's discovery, no rod having been placed upon it, it was struck by lightning, the powder in the vaults was exploded, one sixth of the entire city destroyed, and over three thousand lives were lost.(263) (263) See article on Lightning in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1844. Such examples as these, in all parts of Europe, had their effect. The formulas for conjuring off storms, for consecrating bells to ward off lightning and tempests, and for putting to flight the powers of the air, were still allowed to stand in the liturgies; but the lightning-rod, the barometer, and the thermometer, carried the day. A vigorous line of investigators succeeding Franklin completed his victory, The traveller in remote districts of Europe still hears the church bells ringing during tempests; the Polish or Italian peasant is still persuaded to pay fees for sounding bells to keep off hailstorms; but the universal tendency favours more and more the use of the lightning-rod, and of the insurance offices where men can be relieved of the ruinous results of meteorological disturbances in accordance with the scientific laws of average, based upon the ascertained recurrence of storms. So, too, though many a poor seaman trusts to his charm that has been bathed in holy water, or that has touched some relic, the tendency among mariners is to value more and more those warnings which are sent far and wide each day over the earth and under the sea by the electric wires in accordance with laws ascertained by observation. Yet, even in our own time, attempts to revive the old theological doctrine of meteorology have not been wanting. Two of these, one in a Roman Catholic and another in a Protestant country, will serve as types of many, to show how completely scientific truth has saturated and permeated minds supposed to be entirely surrendered to the theological view. The Island of St. Honorat, just off the southern coast of France, is deservedly one of the places most venerated in Christendom. The monastery of Lerins, founded there in the fourth century, became a mother of similar institutions in western Europe, and a centre of religious teaching for the Christian world. In its atmosphere, legends and myths grew in beauty and luxuriance. Here, as the chroniclers tell us, at the touch of St. Honorat, burst forth a stream of living water, which a recent historian of the monastery declares a greater miracle than that of Moses; here he destroyed, with a touch of his staff, the reptiles which infested the island, and then forced the sea to wash away their foul remains. Here, to please his sister, Sainte-Marguerite, a cherry tree burst into full bloom every month; here he threw his cloak upon the waters and it became a raft, which bore him safely to visit the neighbouring island; here St. Patrick received from St. Just the staff with which he imitated St. Honorat by driving all reptiles from Ireland. Pillaged by Saracens and pirates, the island was made all the more precious by the blood of Christian martyrs. Popes and kings made pilgrimages to it; saints, confessors, and bishops went forth from it into all Europe; in one of its cells St. Vincent of Lerins wrote that famous definition of pure religion which, for nearly fifteen hundred years, has virtually superseded that of St. James. Naturally the monastery became most illustrious, and its seat "the Mediterranean Isle of Saints." But toward the close of the last century, its inmates having become slothful and corrupt, it was dismantled, all save a small portion torn down, and the island became the property first of impiety, embodied in a French actress, and finally of heresy, embodied in an English clergyman. Bought back for the Church by the Bishop of Frejus in 1859, there was little revival of life for twelve years. Then came the reaction, religious and political, after the humiliation of France and the Vatican by Germany; and of this reaction the monastery of St. Honorat was made one of the most striking outward and visible signs. Pius IX interested himself directly in it, called into it a body of Cistercian monks, and it became the chief seat of their order in France. To restore its sacredness the strict system of La Trappe was established--labour, silence, meditation on death. The word thus given from Rome was seconded in France by cardinals, archbishops, and all churchmen especially anxious for promotion in this world or salvation in the next. Worn-out dukes and duchesses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain united in this enterprise of pious reaction with the frivolous youngsters, the petits creves, who haunt the purlieus of Notre Dame de Lorette. The great church of the monastery was handsomely rebuilt and a multitude of altars erected; and beautiful frescoes and stained windows came from the leaders of the reaction. The whole effect was, perhaps, somewhat theatrical and thin, but it showed none the less earnestness in making the old "Isle of Saints" a protest against the hated modern world. As if to bid defiance still further to modern liberalism, great store of relics was sent in; among these, pieces of the true cross, of the white and purple robes, of the crown of thorns, sponge, lance, and winding-sheet of Christ,--the hair, robe, veil, and girdle of the Blessed Virgin; relics of St. John the Baptist, St. Joseph, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Paul, St. Barnabas, the four evangelists, and a multitude of other saints: so many that the bare mention of these treasures requires twenty-four distinct heads in the official catalogue recently published at the monastery. Besides all this--what was considered even more powerful in warding off harm from the revived monastery--the bones of Christian martyrs were brought from the Roman catacombs and laid beneath the altars.(264) (264) See the Guide des Visiteurs a Lerins, published at the Monastery in 1880, p. 204; also the Histoire de Lerins, mentioned below. All was thus conformed to the medieval view; nothing was to be left which could remind one of the nineteenth century; the "ages of faith" were to be restored in their simplicity. Pope Leo XIII commended to the brethren the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas as their one great object of study, and works published at the monastery dwelt upon the miracles of St. Honorat as the most precious refutation of modern science. High in the cupola, above the altars and relics, were placed the bells. Sent by pious donors, they were solemnly baptized and consecrated in 1871, four bishops officiating, a multitude of the faithful being present from all parts of Europe, and the sponsors of the great tenor bell being the Bourbon claimant to the ducal throne of Parma and his duchess. The good bishop who baptized the bells consecrated them with a formula announcing their efficacy in driving away the "Prince of the Power of the Air" and the lightning and tempests he provokes. And then, above all, at the summit of the central spire, high above relics, altars, and bells, was placed--A LIGHTNING-ROD!(265) (265) See Guide, as above, p. 84. Les Isles de Lerins, by the Abbe Alliez (Paris, 1860), and the Histoire de Lerins, by the same author, are the authorities for the general history of the abbey, and are especially strong in presenting the miracles of St. Honorat, etc. The Cartulaire of the monastery, recently published, is also valuable. But these do not cover the recent revival, for an account of which recourse must be had to the very interesting and naive Guide already cited. The account of the monastery, published under the direction of the present worthy abbot, more than hints at the saving, by its bells, of a ship which was wrecked a few years since on that coast; and yet, to protect the bells and church and monks and relics from the very foe whom, in the medieval faith, all these were thought most powerful to drive away, recourse was had to the scientific discovery of that "arch-infidel," Benjamin Franklin! Perhaps the most striking recent example in Protestant lands of this change from the old to the new occurred not long since in one of the great Pacific dependencies of the British crown. At a time of severe drought an appeal was made to the bishop, Dr. Moorhouse, to order public prayers for rain. The bishop refused, advising the petitioners for the future to take better care of their water supply, virtually telling them, "Heaven helps those who help themselves." But most noteworthy in this matter was it that the English Government, not long after, scanning the horizon to find some man to take up the good work laid down by the lamented Bishop Fraser, of Manchester, chose Dr. Moorhouse; and his utterance upon meteorology, which a few generations since would have been regarded by the whole Church as blasphemy, was universally alluded to as an example of strong good sense, proving him especially fit for one of the most important bishoprics in England. Throughout Christendom, the prevalence of the conviction that meteorology is obedient to laws is more and more evident. In cities especially, where men are accustomed each day to see posted in public places charts which show the storms moving over various parts of the country, and to read in the morning papers scientific prophecies as to the weather, the old view can hardly be very influential. Significant of this was the feeling of the American people during the fearful droughts a few years since in the States west of the Missouri. No days were appointed for fasting and prayer to bring rain; there was no attribution of the calamity to the wrath of God or the malice of Satan; but much was said regarding the folly of our people in allowing the upper regions of their vast rivers to be denuded of forests, thus subjecting the States below to alternations of drought and deluge. Partly as a result of this, a beginning has been made of teaching forest culture in many schools, tree-planting societies have been formed, and "Arbor Day" is recognised in several of the States. A true and noble theology can hardly fail to recognise, in the love of Nature and care for our fellow-men thus promoted, something far better, both from a religious and a moral point of view, than any efforts to win the Divine favour by flattery, or to avert Satanic malice by fetichism. CHAPTER XII. FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. I. In all the earliest developments of human thought we find a strong tendency to ascribe mysterious powers over Nature to men and women especially gifted or skilled. Survivals of this view are found to this day among savages and barbarians left behind in the evolution of civilization, and especially is this the case among the tribes of Australia, Africa, and the Pacific coast of America. Even in the most enlightened nations still appear popular beliefs, observances, or sayings, drawn from this earlier phase of thought. Between the prehistoric savage developing this theory, and therefore endeavouring to deal with the powers of Nature by magic, and the modern man who has outgrown it, appears a long line of nations struggling upward through it. As the hieroglyphs, cuneiform inscriptions, and various other records of antiquity are read, the development of this belief can be studied in Egypt, India, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, and Phoenicia. From these civilizations it came into the early thought of Greece and Rome, but especially into the Jewish and Christian sacred books. Both in the Old Testament and in the New we find magic, witchcraft, and soothsaying constantly referred to as realities.(266) (266) For magic in prehistoric times and survivals of it since, with abundant citation of authorities, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, chap. iv; also The Early History of Mankind, by the same author, third edition, pp. 115 et seq., also p. 380.; also Andrew Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. i, chap iv. For magic in Egypt, see Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, chaps. vi-viii; also Maspero, Histoire Ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient; also Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 282, and for the threat of magicians to wreck heaven, see ibid, p. 17, note, and especially the citations from Chabas, Le Papyrus Magique Harris, in chap. vii; also Maury, La Magie et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquite et au Moyen Age. For magic in Chaldea, see Lenormant as above; also Maspero and Sayce, pp. 780 et seq. For examples of magical powers in India, see Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East, vol. xvi, pp. 121 et seq. For a legendary view of magic in Media, see the Zend Avesta, part i, p. 14, translated by Darmsteter; and for a more highly developed view, see the Zend Avesta, part iii, p. 239, translated by Mill. For magic in Greece and Rome, and especially in the Neoplatonic school, as well as in the Middle Ages, see especially Maury, La Magie et l'Astrologie, chaps. iii-v. For various sorts of magic recognised and condemned in our sacred books, see Deuteronomy xviii, 10, 11; and for the burning of magical books at Ephesus under the influence of St. Paul, see Acts xix, 14. See also Ewald, History of Israel, Martineau's translation, fourth edition, vol. iii, pp. 45-51. For a very elaborate summing up of the passages in our sacred books recognizing magic as a fact, see De Haen, De Magia, Leipsic, 1775, chaps. i, ii, and iii, of the first part. For the general subject of magic, see Ennemoser, History of Magic, translated by Howitt, which, however, constantly mixes sorcery with magic proper. The first distinct impulse toward a higher view of research into natural laws was given by the philosophers of Greece. It is true that philosophical opposition to physical research was at times strong, and that even a great thinker like Socrates considered certain physical investigations as an impious intrusion into the work of the gods. It is also true that Plato and Aristotle, while bringing their thoughts to bear upon the world with great beauty and force, did much to draw mankind away from those methods which in modern times have produced the best results. Plato developed a world in which the physical sciences had little if any real reason for existing; Aristotle, a world in which the same sciences were developed largely indeed by observation of what is, but still more by speculation on what ought to be. From the former of these two great men came into Christian theology many germs of medieval magic, and from the latter sundry modes of reasoning which aided in the evolution of these; yet the impulse to human thought given by these great masters was of inestimable value to our race, and one legacy from them was especially precious--the idea that a science of Nature is possible, and that the highest occupation of man is the discovery of its laws. Still another gift from them was greatest of all, for they gave scientific freedom. They laid no interdict upon new paths; they interposed no barriers to the extension of knowledge; they threatened no doom in this life or in the next against investigators on new lines; they left the world free to seek any new methods and to follow any new paths which thinking men could find. This legacy of belief in science, of respect for scientific pursuits, and of freedom in scientific research, was especially received by the school of Alexandria, and above all by Archimedes, who began, just before the Christian era, to open new paths through the great field of the inductive sciences by observation, comparison, and experiment.(267) (267) As to the beginnings of physical science in Greece, and of the theological opposition to physical science, also Socrates's view regarding certain branches as interdicted to human study, see Grote's History of Greece, vol. i, pp. 495 and 504, 505; also Jowett's introduction to his translation of the Timaeus, and Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences. For examples showing the incompatibility of Plato's methods in physical science with that pursued in modern times, see Zeller, Plato and the Older Academy, English translation by Alleyne and Goodwin, pp. 375 et. seq. The supposed opposition to freedom of opinion in the Laws of Plato, toward the end of his life, can hardly make against the whole spirit of Greek thought. The establishment of Christianity, beginning a new evolution of theology, arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years. The cause of this arrest was twofold: First, there was created an atmosphere in which the germs of physical science could hardly grow--an atmosphere in which all seeking in Nature for truth as truth was regarded as futile. The general belief derived from the New Testament Scriptures was, that the end of the world was at hand; that the last judgment was approaching; that all existing physical nature was soon to be destroyed: hence, the greatest thinkers in the Church generally poured contempt upon all investigators into a science of Nature, and insisted that everything except the saving of souls was folly. This belief appears frequently through the entire period of the Middle Ages; but during the first thousand years it is clearly dominant. From Lactantius and Eusebius, in the third century, pouring contempt, as we have seen, over studies in astronomy, to Peter Damian, the noted chancellor of Pope Gregory VII, in the eleventh century, declaring all worldly sciences to be "absurdities" and "fooleries," it becomes a very important element in the atmosphere of thought.(268) (268) For the view of Peter Damian and others through the Middle Ages as to the futility of scientific investigation, see citations in Eicken, Geschichte und System der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, chap. vi. Then, too, there was established a standard to which all science which did struggle up through this atmosphere must be made to conform--a standard which favoured magic rather than science, for it was a standard of rigid dogmatism obtained from literal readings in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. The most careful inductions from ascertained facts were regarded as wretchedly fallible when compared with any view of nature whatever given or even hinted at in any poem, chronicle, code, apologue, myth, legend, allegory, letter, or discourse of any sort which had happened to be preserved in the literature which had come to be held as sacred. For twelve centuries, then, the physical sciences were thus discouraged or perverted by the dominant orthodoxy. Whoever studied nature studied it either openly to find illustrations of the sacred text, useful in the "saving of souls," or secretly to gain the aid of occult powers, useful in securing personal advantage. Great men like Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Rabanus Maurus, accepted the scriptural standard of science and used it as a means of Christian edification. The views of Bede and Isidore on kindred subjects have been shown in former chapters; and typical of the view taken by Rabanus is the fact that in his great work on the Universe there are only two chapters which seem directly or indirectly to recognise even the beginnings of a real philosophy of nature. A multitude of less-known men found warrant in Scripture for magic applied to less worthy purposes.(269) (269) As typical examples, see utterances of Eusibius and Lactantius regarding astronomers given in the chapter on Astronomy. For a summary of Rabanus Maurus's doctrine of physics, see Heller, Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, pp. 172 et seq. For Bede and Isidore, see the earlier chapters of this work. For an excellent statement regarding the application of scriptural standards to scientific research in the Middle Ages, see Kretschemr, Die physische Erdkunde im christlichen Mittelalter, pp. 5 et seq. For the distinctions in magic recognised in the mediaeval Church, see the long catalogue of various sorts given in the Abbe Migne's Encyclopedie Theologique, third series, article Magic. But after the thousand years had passed to which various thinkers in the Church, upon supposed scriptural warrant, had lengthened out the term of the earth's existence, "the end of all things" seemed further off than ever; and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, owing to causes which need not be dwelt upon here, came a great revival of thought, so that the forces of theology and of science seemed arrayed for a contest. On one side came a revival of religious fervour, and to this day the works of the cathedral builders mark its depth and strength; on the other side came a new spirit of inquiry incarnate in a line of powerful thinkers. First among these was Albert of Bollstadt, better known as Albert the Great, the most renowned scholar of his time. Fettered though he was by the methods sanctioned in the Church, dark as was all about him, he had conceived better methods and aims; his eye pierced the mists of scholasticism. he saw the light, and sought to draw the world toward it. He stands among the great pioneers of physical and natural science; he aided in giving foundations to botany and chemistry; he rose above his time, and struck a heavy blow at those who opposed the possibility of human life on opposite sides of the earth; he noted the influence of mountains, seas, and forests upon races and products, so that Humboldt justly finds in his works the germs of physical geography as a comprehensive science. But the old system of deducing scientific truth from scriptural texts was renewed in the development of scholastic theology, and ecclesiastical power, acting through thousands of subtle channels, was made to aid this development. The old idea of the futility of physical science and of the vast superiority of theology was revived. Though Albert's main effort was to Christianize science, he was dealt with by the authorities of the Dominican order, subjected to suspicion and indignity, and only escaped persecution for sorcery by yielding to the ecclesiastical spirit of the time, and working finally in theological channels by, scholastic methods. It was a vast loss to the earth; and certainly, of all organizations that have reason to lament the pressure of ecclesiasticism which turned Albert the Great from natural philosophy to theology, foremost of all in regret should be the Christian Church, and especially the Roman branch of it. Had there been evolved in the Church during the thirteenth century a faith strong enough to accept the truths in natural science which Albert and his compeers could have given, and to have encouraged their growth, this faith and this encouragement would to this day have formed the greatest argument for proving the Church directly under Divine guidance; they would have been among the brightest jewels in her crown. The loss to the Church by this want of faith and courage has proved in the long run even greater than the loss to science.(270) (270) For a very careful discussion of Albert's strength in investigation and weakness in yielding to scholastic authority, see Kopp, Ansichten uber die Aufgabe der Chemie von Geber bis Stahl, Braunschweig, 1875, pp. 64 et seq. For a very extended and enthusiastic biographical sketch, see Pouchet. For comparison of his work with that of Thomas Aquinas, see Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol. vi, p. 461. "Il etat aussi tres-habile dans les arts mecaniques, ce que le fit soupconner d'etre sorcier" (Sprengel, Histoire de la Medecine, vol. ii, p. 389). For Albert's biography treated strictly in accordance with ecclesiastical methods, see Albert the Great, by Joachim Sighart, translated by the Rev. T. A. Dickson, of the Order of Preachers, published under the sanction of the Dominican censor and of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, London, 1876. How an Englishman like Cardinal Manning could tolerate among Englishmen such glossing over of historical truth is one of the wonders of contemporary history. For choice specimens, see chapters ii, and iv. For one of the best and most recent summaries, see Heller, Geschichte der Physik, Stuttgart, 1882, vol. i, pp. 179 et seq. The next great man of that age whom the theological and ecclesiastical forces of the time turned from the right path was Vincent of Beauvais. During the first half of the twelfth century he devoted himself to the study of Nature in several of her most interesting fields. To astronomy, botany, and zoology he gave special attention, but in a larger way he made a general study of the universe, and in a series of treatises undertook to reveal the whole field of science. But his work simply became a vast commentary on the account of creation given in the book of Genesis. Beginning with the work of the Trinity at the creation, he goes on to detail the work of angels in all their fields, and makes excursions into every part of creation, visible and invisible, but always with the most complete subordination of his thought to the literal statements of Scripture. Could he have taken the path of experimental research, the world would have been enriched with most precious discoveries; but the force which had given wrong direction to Albert of Bollstadt, backed as it was by the whole ecclesiastical power of his time, was too strong, and in all the life labour of Vincent nothing appears of any permanent value. He reared a structure which the adaptation of facts to literal interpretations of Scripture and the application of theological subtleties to nature combine to make one of the most striking monuments of human error.(271) (271) For Vincent de Beauvais, see Etudes sur Vincent de Beauvais, par l'Abbe Bourgeat, chaps. xii, xiii, and xiv; also Pouchet, Histoire des Sciences Naturelles au Moyen Age, Paris, 1853, pp. 470 et seq; also other histories cited hereafter. But the theological spirit of the thirteenth century gained its greatest victory in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. In him was the theological spirit of his age incarnate. Although he yielded somewhat at one period to love of natural science, it was he who finally made that great treaty or compromise which for ages subjected science entirely to theology. He it was who reared the most enduring barrier against those who in that age and in succeeding ages laboured to open for science the path by its own methods toward its own ends. He had been the pupil of Albert the Great, and had gained much from him. Through the earlier systems of philosophy, as they were then known, and through the earlier theologic thought, he had gone with great labour and vigour; and all his mighty powers, thus disciplined and cultured, he brought to bear in making a truce which was to give theology permanent supremacy over science. The experimental method had already been practically initiated: Albert of Bollstadt and Roger Bacon had begun their work in accordance with its methods; but St. Thomas gave all his thoughts to bringing science again under the sway of theological methods and ecclesiastical control. In his commentary on Aristotle's treatise upon Heaven and Earth he gave to the world a striking example of what his method could produce, illustrating all the evils which arise in combining theological reasoning and literal interpretation of Scripture with scientific facts; and this work remains to this day a monument of scientific genius perverted by theology.(272) (272) For citations showing this subordination of science to theology, see Eicken, chap. vi. The ecclesiastical power of the time hailed him as a deliverer, it was claimed that miracles were vouchsafed, proving that the blessing of Heaven rested upon his labours, and among the legends embodying this claim is that given by the Bollandists and immortalized by a renowned painter. The great philosopher and saint is represented in the habit of his order, with book and pen in hand, kneeling before the image of Christ crucified, and as he kneels the image thus addresses him: "Thomas, thou hast written well concerning me; what price wilt thou receive for thy labour?" The myth-making faculty of the people at large was also brought into play. According to a widespread and circumstantial legend, Albert, by magical means, created an android--an artificial man, living, speaking, and answering all questions with such subtlety that St. Thomas, unable to answer its reasoning, broke it to pieces with his staff. Historians of the Roman Church like Rohrbacher, and historians of science like Pouchet, have found it convenient to propitiate the Church by dilating upon the glories of St. Thomas Aquinas in thus making an alliance between religious and scientific thought, and laying the foundations for a "sanctified science"; but the unprejudiced historian can not indulge in this enthusiastic view: the results both for the Church and for science have been most unfortunate. It was a wretched delay in the evolution of fruitful thought, for the first result of this great man's great compromise was to close for ages that path in science which above all others leads to discoveries of value--the experimental method--and to reopen that old path of mixed theology and science which, as Hallam declares, "after three or four hundred years had not untied a single knot or added one unequivocal truth to the domain of philosophy"--the path which, as all modern history proves, has ever since led only to delusion and evil.(273) (273) For the work of Aquinas, see his Liber de Caelo et Mundo, section xx; also Life and Labours of St. Thomas of Aquin, by Archbishop Vaughn, pp. 459 et seq. For his labours in natural science, see Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, Paris, 1843, vol. i, p. 381. For theological views of science in the Middle Ages, and rejoicing thereat, see Pouchet, Hist. des Sci. Nat. au Moyen Age, ubi supra. Pouchet says: " En general au milieu du moyen age les sciences sont essentiellement chretiennes, leur but est tout-a-fait religieux, et elles sembent beaucoup moins s'inquieter de l'avancement intellectuel de l'homme que de son salut eternel." Pouchet calls this "conciliation" into a "harmonieux ensemble" "la plus glorieuse des conquetes intellectuelles du moyen age." Pouchet belongs to Rouen, and the shadow of the Rouen Cathedral seems thrown over all his history. See, also, l'Abbe Rohrbacher, Hist. de l'Eglise Catholique, Paris, 1858, vol. xviii, pp. 421 et seq. The abbe dilates upon the fact that "the Church organizes the agreement of all the sciences by the labours of St. Thomas of Aquin and his contemporaries." For the complete subordination of science to theology by St. Thomas, see Eicken, chap. vi. For the theological character of science in the Middle Ages, recognised by a Protestant philosophic historian, see the well-known passage in Guizot, History of Civilization in Europe; and by a noted Protestant ecclesiatic, see Bishop Hampden's Life of Thomas Aquinas, chaps. xxxvi, xxxvii; see also Hallam, Middle Ages, chap. ix. For dealings of Pope John XXII, of the Kings of France and England, and of the Republic of Venice, see Figuier, L'Alchimie et la Alchimistes, pp. 140, 141, where, in a note, the text of the bull Spondet paritur is given. For popular legends regarding Albert and St. Thomas, see Eliphas Levi, Hist. de la Magie, liv. iv, chap. iv. The theological path thus opened by these strong men became the main path for science during ages, and it led the world ever further and further from any fruitful fact or useful method. Roger Bacon's investigations already begun were discredited: worthless mixtures of scriptural legends with imperfectly authenticated physical facts took their place. Thus it was that for twelve hundred years the minds in control of Europe regarded all real science as FUTILE, and diverted the great current of earnest thought into theology. The next stage in this evolution was the development of an idea which acted with great force throughout the Middle Ages--the idea that science is DANGEROUS. This belief was also of very ancient origin. From the time when the Egyptian magicians made their tremendous threat that unless their demands were granted they would reach out to the four corners of the earth, pull down the pillars of heaven, wreck the abodes of the gods above and crush those of men below, fear of these representatives of science is evident in the ancient world. But differences in the character of magic were recognised, some sorts being considered useful and some baleful. Of the former was magic used in curing diseases, in determining times auspicious for enterprises, and even in contributing to amusement; of the latter was magic used to bring disease and death on men and animals or tempests upon the growing crops. Hence gradually arose a general distinction between white magic, which dealt openly with the more beneficent means of nature, and black magic, which dealt secretly with occult, malignant powers. Down to the Christian era the fear of magic rarely led to any persecution very systematic or very cruel. While in Greece and Rome laws were at times enacted against magicians, they were only occasionally enforced with rigour, and finally, toward the end of the pagan empire, the feeling against them seemed dying out altogether. As to its more kindly phases, men like Marcus Aurelius and Julian did not hesitate to consult those who claimed to foretell the future. As to black magic, it seemed hardly worth while to enact severe laws, when charms, amulets, and even gestures could thwart its worst machinations. Moreover, under the old empire a real science was coming in, and thought was progressing. Both the theory and practice of magic were more and more held up to ridicule. Even as early a writer as Ennius ridiculed the idea that magicians, who were generally poor and hungry themselves, could bestow wealth on others; Pliny, in his Natural Philosophy, showed at great length their absurdities and cheatery; others followed in the same line of thought, and the whole theory, except among the very lowest classes, seemed dying out. But with the development of Christian theology came a change. The idea of the active interference of Satan in magic, which had come into the Hebrew mind with especial force from Persia during the captivity of Israel, had passed from the Hebrew Scriptures into Christianity, and had been made still stronger by various statements in the New Testament. Theologians laid stress especially upon the famous utterances of the Psalmist that "all the gods of the heathen are devils," and of St. Paul that "the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils"; and it was widely held that these devils were naturally indignant at their dethronement and anxious to wreak vengeance upon Christianity. Magicians were held to be active agents of these dethroned gods, and this persuasion was strengthened by sundry old practitioners in the art of magic--impostors who pretended to supernatural powers, and who made use of old rites and phrases inherited from paganism. Hence it was that as soon as Christianity came into power it more than renewed the old severities against the forbidden art, and one of the first acts of the Emperor Constantine after his conversion was to enact a most severe law against magic and magicians, under which the main offender might be burned alive. But here, too, it should be noted that a distinction between the two sorts of magic was recognised, for Constantine shortly afterward found it necessary to issue a proclamation stating that his intention was only to prohibit deadly and malignant magic; that he had no intention of prohibiting magic used to cure diseases and to protect the crops from hail and tempests. But as new emperors came to the throne who had not in them that old leaven of paganism which to the last influenced Constantine, and as theology obtained a firmer hold, severity against magic increased. Toleration of it, even in its milder forms, was more and more denied. Black magic and white were classed together. This severity went on increasing and threatened the simplest efforts in physics and chemistry; even the science of mathematics was looked upon with dread. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the older theology having arrived at the climax of its development in Europe, terror of magic and witchcraft took complete possession of the popular mind. In sculpture, painting, and literature it appeared in forms ever more and more striking. The lives of saints were filled with it. The cathedral sculpture embodied it in every part. The storied windows made it all the more impressive. The missal painters wrought it not only into prayer books, but, despite the fact that hardly a trace of the belief appears in the Psalms, they illustrated it in the great illuminated psalters from which the noblest part of the service was sung before the high altar. The service books showed every form of agonizing petition for delivery from this dire influence, and every form of exorcism for thwarting it. All the great theologians of the Church entered into this belief and aided to develop it. The fathers of the early Church were full and explicit, and the medieval doctors became more and more minute in describing the operations of the black art and in denouncing them. It was argued that, as the devil afflicted Job, so he and his minions continue to cause diseases; that, as Satan is the Prince of the power of the air, he and his minions cause tempests; that the cases of Nebuchadnezzar and Lot's wife prove that sorcerers can transform human beings into animals or even lifeless matter; that, as the devils of Gadara were cast into swine, all animals could be afflicted in the same manner; and that, as Christ himself had been transported through the air by the power of Satan, so any human being might be thus transported to "an exceeding high mountain." Thus the horror of magic and witchcraft increased on every hand, and in 1317 Pope John XXII issued his bull Spondent pariter, levelled at the alchemists, but really dealing a terrible blow at the beginnings of chemical science. That many alchemists were knavish is no doubt true, but no infallibility in separating the evil from the good was shown by the papacy in this matter. In this and in sundry other bulls and briefs we find Pope John, by virtue of his infallibility as the world's instructor in all that pertains to faith and morals, condemning real science and pseudo-science alike. In two of these documents, supposed to be inspired by wisdom from on high, he complains that both he and his flock are in danger of their lives by the arts of the sorcerers; he declares that such sorcerers can send devils into mirrors and finger rings, and kill men and women by a magic word; that they had tried to kill him by piercing a waxen image of him with needles in the name of the devil. He therefore called on all rulers, secular and ecclesiastical, to hunt down the miscreants who thus afflicted the faithful, and he especially increased the powers of inquisitors in various parts of Europe for this purpose. The impulse thus given to childish fear and hatred against the investigation of nature was felt for centuries; more and more chemistry came to be known as one of the "seven devilish arts." Thus began a long series of demonstrations against magic from the centre of Christendom. In 1437, and again in 1445, Pope Eugene IV issued bulls exhorting inquisitors to be more diligent in searching out and delivering over to punishment magicians and witches who produced bad weather, the result being that persecution received a fearful impulse. But the worst came forty years later still, when, in 1484, there came the yet more terrible bull of Pope Innocent VIII, known as Summis Desiderantes, which let inquisitors loose upon Germany, with Sprenger at their head, armed with the Witch-Hammer, the fearful manual Malleus Maleficarum, to torture and destroy men and women by tens of thousands for sorcery and magic. Similar bulls were issued in 1504 by Julius II, and in 1523 by Adrian VI. The system of repression thus begun lasted for hundreds of years. The Reformation did little to change it, and in Germany, where Catholics and Protestants vied with each other in proving their orthodoxy, it was at its worst. On German soil more than one hundred thousand victims are believed to have been sacrificed to it between the middle of the fifteenth and the middle of the sixteenth centuries. Thus it was that from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas, from Aquinas to Luther, and from Luther to Wesley, theologians of both branches of the Church, with hardly an exception, enforced the belief in magic and witchcraft, and, as far as they had power, carried out the injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." How this was ended by the progress of scientific modes of thought I shall endeavour to show elsewhere: here we are only concerned with the effect of this widespread terrorism on the germs and early growth of the physical sciences. Of course, the atmosphere created by this persecution of magicians was deadly to any open beginnings of experimental science. The conscience of the time, acting in obedience to the highest authorities of the Church, and, as was supposed, in defence of religion, now brought out a missile which it hurled against scientific investigators with deadly effect. The mediaeval battlefields of thought were strewn with various forms of it. This missile was the charge of unlawful compact with Satan, and it was most effective. We find it used against every great investigator of nature in those times and for ages after. The list of great men in those centuries charged with magic, as given by Naude, is astounding; it includes every man of real mark, and in the midst of them stands one of the most thoughtful popes, Sylvester II (Gerbert), and the foremost of mediaeval thinkers on natural science, Albert the Great. It came to be the accepted idea that, as soon as a man conceived a wish to study the works of God, his first step must be a league with the devil. It was entirely natural, then, that in 1163 Pope Alexander III, in connection with the Council of Tours, forbade the study of physics to all ecclesiastics, which, of course, in that age meant prohibition of all such scientific studies to the only persons likely to make them. What the Pope then expressly forbade was, in the words of the papal bull, "the study of physics or the laws of the world," and it was added that any person violating this rule "shall be avoided by all and excommunicated."(274) (274) For the charge of magic against scholars and others, see Naude, Apologie pour les Grands Hommes soupconnes de Magie, passim; also Maury, Hist. de la Magie, troisieme edition, pp. 214, 215; also Cuvier, Hist. des Sciences Naturelles, vol. i, p. 396. For the prohibition by the Council of Tours and Alexander III, see the Acta Conciliorum (ed. Harduin), tom. vi, pars ii, p. 1598, Canon viii. The first great thinker who, in spite of some stumbling into theologic pitfalls, persevered in a truly scientific path, was Roger Bacon. His life and works seem until recently to have been generally misunderstood: he was formerly ranked as a superstitious alchemist who happened upon some inventions, but more recent investigation has shown him to be one of the great masters in the evolution of human thought. The advance of sound historical judgment seems likely to bring the fame of the two who bear the name of Bacon nearly to equality. Bacon of the chancellorship and of the Novum Organum may not wane, but Bacon of the prison cell and the Opus Majus steadily approaches him in brightness. More than three centuries before Francis Bacon advocated the experimental method, Roger Bacon practised it, and the results as now revealed are wonderful. He wrought with power in many sciences, and his knowledge was sound and exact. By him, more than by any other man of the Middle Ages, was the world brought into the more fruitful paths of scientific thought--the paths which have led to the most precious inventions; and among these are clocks, lenses, and burning specula, which were given by him to the world, directly or indirectly. In his writings are found formulae for extracting phosphorus, manganese, and bismuth. It is even claimed, with much appearance of justice, that he investigated the power of steam, and he seems to have very nearly reached some of the principal doctrines of modern chemistry. But it should be borne in mind that his METHOD of investigation was even greater than its RESULTS. In an age when theological subtilizing was alone thought to give the title of scholar, he insisted on REAL reasoning and the aid of natural science by mathematics; in an age when experimenting was sure to cost a man his reputation, and was likely to cost him his life, he insisted on experimenting, and braved all its risks. Few greater men have lived. As we follow Bacon's process of reasoning regarding the refraction of light, we see that he was divinely inspired. On this man came the brunt of the battle. The most conscientious men of his time thought it their duty to fight him, and they fought him steadily and bitterly. His sin was not disbelief in Christianity, not want of fidelity to the Church, not even dissent from the main lines of orthodoxy; on the contrary, he showed in all his writings a desire to strengthen Christianity, to build up the Church, and to develop orthodoxy. He was attacked and condemned mainly because he did not believe that philosophy had become complete, and that nothing more was to be learned; he was condemned, as his opponents expressly declared, "on account of certain suspicious novelties"--"propter quasdam novitates suspectas." Upon his return to Oxford, about 1250, the forces of unreason beset him on all sides. Greatest of all his enemies was Bonaventura. This enemy was the theologic idol of the period: the learned world knew him as the "seraphic Doctor"; Dante gave him an honoured place in the great poem of the Middle Ages; the Church finally enrolled him among the saints. By force of great ability in theology he had become, in the middle of the thirteenth century, general of the Franciscan order: thus, as Bacon's master, his hands were laid heavily on the new teaching, so that in 1257 the troublesome monk was forbidden to lecture; all men were solemnly warned not to listen to his teaching, and he was ordered to Paris, to be kept under surveillance by the monastic authorities. Herein was exhibited another of the myriad examples showing the care exercised over scientific teaching by the Church. The reasons for thus dealing with Bacon were evident: First, he had dared attempt scientific explanations of natural phenomena, which under the mystic theology of the Middle Ages had been referred simply to supernatural causes. Typical was his explanation of the causes and character of the rainbow. It was clear, cogent, a great step in the right direction as regards physical science: but there, in the book of Genesis, stood the legend regarding the origin of the rainbow, supposed to have been dictated immediately by the Holy Spirit; and, according to that, the "bow in the cloud" was not the result of natural laws, but a "sign" arbitrarily placed in the heavens for the simple purpose of assuring mankind that there was not to be another universal deluge. But this was not the worst: another theological idea was arrayed against him--the idea of Satanic intervention in science; hence he was attacked with that goodly missile which with the epithets "infidel" and "atheist" has decided the fate of so many battles--the charge of magic and compact with Satan. He defended himself with a most unfortunate weapon--a weapon which exploded in his hands and injured him more than the enemy; for he argued against the idea of compacts with Satan, and showed that much which is ascribed to demons results from natural means. This added fuel to the flame. To limit the power of Satan was deemed hardly less impious than to limit the power of God. The most powerful protectors availed him little. His friend Guy of Foulques, having in 1265 been made Pope under the name of Clement IV, shielded him for a time; but the fury of the enemy was too strong, and when he made ready to perform a few experiments before a small audience, we are told that all Oxford was in an uproar. It was believed that Satan was about to be let loose. Everywhere priests, monks, fellows, and students rushed about, their garments streaming in the wind, and everywhere rose the cry, "Down with the magician!" and this cry, "Down with the magician!" resounded from cell to cell and from hall to hall. Another weapon was also used upon the battlefields of science in that time with much effect. The Arabs had made many noble discoveries in science, and Averroes had, in the opinion of many, divided the honours with St. Thomas Aquinas; these facts gave the new missile--it was the epithet "Mohammedan"; this, too, was flung with effect at Bacon. The attack now began to take its final shape. The two great religious orders, Franciscan and Dominican, then in all the vigour of their youth, vied with each other in fighting the new thought in chemistry and physics. St. Dominic solemnly condemned research by experiment and observation; the general of the Franciscan order took similar ground. In 1243 the Dominicans interdicted every member of their order from the study of medicine and natural philosophy, and in 1287 this interdiction was extended to the study of chemistry. In 1278 the authorities of the Franciscan order assembled at Paris, solemnly condemned Bacon's teaching, and the general of the Franciscans, Jerome of Ascoli, afterward Pope, threw him into prison, where he remained for fourteen years, Though Pope Clement IV had protected him, Popes Nicholas III and IV, by virtue of their infallibility, decided that he was too dangerous to be at large, and he was only released at the age of eighty--but a year or two before death placed him beyond the reach of his enemies. How deeply the struggle had racked his mind may be gathered from that last affecting declaration of his, "Would that I had not given myself so much trouble for the love of science!" The attempt has been made by sundry champions of the Church to show that some of Bacon's utterances against ecclesiastical and other corruptions in his time were the main cause of the severity which the Church authorities exercised against him. This helps the Church but little, even if it be well based; but it is not well based. That some of his utterances of this sort made him enemies is doubtless true, but the charges on which St. Bonaventura silenced him, and Jerome of Ascoli imprisoned him, and successive popes kept him in prison for fourteen years, were "dangerous novelties" and suspected sorcery. Sad is it to think of what this great man might have given to the world had ecclesiasticism allowed the gift. He held the key of treasures which would have freed mankind from ages of error and misery. With his discoveries as a basis, with his method as a guide, what might not the world have gained! Nor was the wrong done to that age alone; it was done to this age also. The nineteenth century was robbed at the same time with the thirteenth. But for that interference with science the nineteenth century would be enjoying discoveries which will not be reached before the twentieth century, and even later. Thousands of precious lives shall be lost, tens of thousands shall suffer discomfort, privation, sickness, poverty, ignorance, for lack of discoveries and methods which, but for this mistaken dealing with Roger Bacon and his compeers, would now be blessing the earth. In two recent years sixty thousand children died in England and in Wales of scarlet fever; probably quite as many died in the United States. Had not Bacon been hindered, we should have had in our hands, by this time, the means to save two thirds of these victims; and the same is true of typhoid, typhus, cholera, and that great class of diseases of whose physical causes science is just beginning to get an inkling. Put together all the efforts of all the atheists who have ever lived, and they have not done so much harm to Christianity and the world as has been done by the narrow-minded, conscientious men who persecuted Roger Bacon, and closed the path which he gave his life to open. But despite the persecution of Bacon and the defection of those who ought to have followed him, champions of the experimental method rose from time to time during the succeeding centuries. We know little of them personally; our main knowledge of their efforts is derived from the endeavours of their persecutors. Under such guidance the secular rulers were naturally vigorous. In France Charles V forbade, in 1380, the possession of furnaces and apparatus necessary for chemical processes; under this law the chemist John Barrillon was thrown into prison, and it was only by the greatest effort that his life was saved. In England Henry IV, in 1404, issued a similar decree. In Italy the Republic of Venice, in 1418, followed these examples. The judicial torture and murder of Antonio de Dominis were not simply for heresy his investigations in the phenomena of light were an additional crime. In Spain everything like scientific research was crushed out among Christians. Some earnest efforts were afterward made by Jews and Moors, but these were finally ended by persecution; and to this hour the Spanish race, in some respects the most gifted in Europe, which began its career with everything in its favour and with every form of noble achievement, remains in intellectual development behind every other in Christendom. To question the theological view of physical science was, even long after the close of the Middle Ages, exceedingly perilous. We have seen how one of Roger Bacon's unpardonable offences was his argument against the efficacy of magic, and how, centuries afterward, Cornelius Agrippa, Weyer, Flade, Loos, Bekker, and a multitude of other investigators and thinkers, suffered confiscation of property, loss of position, and even torture and death, for similar views.(275) (275) For an account of Bacon's treatise, De Nullitate Magiae, see Hoefer. For the uproar caused by Bacon's teaching at Oxford, see Kopp, Geschichte der Chemie, Braunschweig, 1869, vol. i, p. 63; and for a somewhat reactionary discussion of Bacon's relation to the progress of chemistry, see a recent work by the same author, Ansichten uber die Aufgabe der Chemie, Braunschweig, 1874, pp. 85 et seq.; also, for an excellent summary, see Hoefer, Hist. de la Chimie, vol. i, pp. 368 et seq. For probably the most thorough study of Bacon's general works in science, and for his views of the universe, see Prof. Werner, Die Kosmologie und allgemeine Naturlehre des Roger Baco, Wein, 1879. For summaries of his work in other fields, see Whewell, vol. i, pp. 367, 368; Draper, p. 438; Saisset, Descartes et ses Precurseurs, deuxieme edition, pp. 397 et seq.; Nourrisson, Progres de la Pensee humaine, pp. 271, 272; Sprengel, Histoire de la Medecine, Paris, 1865, vol. ii, p. 397; Cuvier, Histoire des Sciences Naturelles, vol. i, p. 417. As to Bacon's orthodoxy, see Saisset, pp. 53, 55. For special examination of causes of Bacon's condemnation, see Waddington, cited by Saisset, p. 14. For a brief but admirable statement of Roger Bacon's realtion to the world in his time, and of what he might have done had he not been thwarted by theology, see Dollinger, Studies in European History, English translation, London, 1890, pp. 178, 179. For a good example of the danger of denying the full power of Satan, even in much more recent times and in a Protestant country, see account of treatment in Bekker's Monde Enchante by the theologians of Holland, in Nisard, Histoire des Livres Populaires, vol. i, pp. 172, 173. Kopp, in his Ansichten, pushes criticism even to some scepticism as to Roger Bacon being the DISCOVERER of many of the things generally attributed to him; but, after all deductions are carefully made, enough remains to make Bacon the greatest benefactor to humanity during the Middle Ages. For Roger Bacon's deep devotion to religion and the Church, see citation and remarks in Schneider, Roger Bacon, Augsburg, 1873, p. 112; also, citation from the Opus Majus, in Eicken, chap. vi. On Bacon as a "Mohammedan," see Saisset, p. 17. For the interdiction of studies in physical science by the Dominicans and Franciscans, see Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vol. iv, p. 283. For suppression of chemical teaching by the Parliament of Paris, see ibid., vol. xii, pp. 14, 15. For proofs that the world is steadily working toward great discoveries as to the cause and prevention of zymotic diseases and their propogation, see Beale's Disease Germs, Baldwin Latham's Sanitary Engineering, Michel Levy's Traite a Hygiene Publique et Privee. For a summary of the bull Spondent pariter, and for an example of injury done by it, see Schneider, Geschichte der Alchemie, p. 160; and for a studiously moderate statement, Milman, Latin Christianity, book xii, chap. vi. For character and general efforts of John XXII, see Lea, Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 436, also pp. 452 et seq. For the character of the two papal briefs, see Rydberg, p. 177. For the bull Summis Desiderantes, see previous chapters of this work. For Antonio de Dominis, see Montucla, Hist. des Mathematiques, vol. i, p. 705; Humboldt, Cosmos; Libri, vol. iv, pp. 145 et seq. For Weyer, Flade, Bekker, Loos, and others, see the chapters of this work on Meteorology, Demoniacal Possession and Insanity, and Diabolism and Hysteria. The theological atmosphere, which in consequence settled down about the great universities and colleges, seemed likely to stifle all scientific effort in every part of Europe, and it is one of the great wonders in human history that in spite of this deadly atmosphere a considerable body of thinking men, under such protection as they could secure, still persisted in devoting themselves to the physical sciences. In Italy, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, came a striking example of the difficulties which science still encountered even after the Renaissance had undermined the old beliefs. At that time John Baptist Porta was conducting his investigations, and, despite a considerable mixture of pseudo-science, they were fruitful. His was not "black magic," claiming the aid of Satan, but "white magic," bringing into service the laws of nature--the precursor of applied science. His book on meteorology was the first in which sound ideas were broached on this subject; his researches in optics gave the world the camera obscura, and possibly the telescope; in chemistry he seems to have been the first to show how to reduce the metallic oxides, and thus to have laid the foundation of several important industries. He did much to change natural philosophy from a black art to a vigorous open science. He encountered the old ecclesiastical policy. The society founded by him for physical research, "I Secreti," was broken up, and he was summoned to Rome by Pope Paul III and forbidden to continue his investigations. So, too, in France. In 1624, some young chemists at Paris having taught the experimental method and cut loose from Aristotle, the faculty of theology beset the Parliament of Paris, and the Parliament prohibited these new chemical researches under the severest penalties. The same war continued in Italy. Even after the belief in magic had been seriously weakened, the old theological fear and dislike of physical science continued. In 1657 occurred the first sitting of the Accademia del Cimento at Florence, under the presidency of Prince Leopold de' Medici This academy promised great things for science; it was open to all talent; its only fundamental law was "the repudiation of any favourite system or sect of philosophy, and the obligation to investigate Nature by the pure light of experiment"; it entered into scientific investigations with energy. Borelli in mathematics, Redi in natural history, and many others, enlarged the boundaries of knowledge. Heat, light, magnetism, electricity, projectiles, digestion, and the incompressibility of water were studied by the right method and with results that enriched the world. The academy was a fortress of science, and siege was soon laid to it. The votaries of scholastic learning denounced it as irreligious, quarrels were fomented, Leopold was bribed with a cardinal's hat and drawn away to Rome, and, after ten years of beleaguering, the fortress fell: Borelli was left a beggar; Oliva killed himself in despair. So, too, the noted Academy of the Lincei at times incurred the ill will of the papacy by the very fact that it included thoughtful investigators. It was "patronized" by Pope Urban VIII in such manner as to paralyze it, and it was afterward vexed by Pope Gregory XVI. Even in our own time sessions of scientific associations were discouraged and thwarted by as kindly a pontiff as Pius IX.(276) (276) For Porta, see the English translation of his main summary, Natural Magick, London, 1658. The first chapters are especially interesting, as showing what the word "magic" had come to mean in the mind of a man in whom mediaeval and modern ideas were curiously mixed; see also Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, vol. ii, pp. 102-106; also Kopp; also Sprengel, Histoire de la Medecine, vol. iii, p. 239; also Musset-Pathay. For the Accademia del Cimento, see Napier, Florentine History, vol. v, p. 485; Tiraboschi, Storia della Litteratura; Henri Martin, Histoire de France; Jevons, Principles of Science, vol. ii, pp. 36-40. For value attached to Borelli's investigations by Newton and Huygens, see Brewster's Life of Sir Isaac Newton, London, 1875, pp. 128, 129. Libri, in his first Essai sur Galilee, p. 37, says that Oliva was summoned to Rome and so tortured by the Inquisition that, to escape further cruelty, he ended his life by throwing himself from a window. For interference by Pope Gregory XVI with the Academy of the Lincei, and with public instruction generally, see Carutti, Storia della Accademia dei Lincei, p. 126. Pius IX, with all his geniality, seems to have allowed his hostility to voluntary associations to carry him very far at times. For his answer to an application made through Lord Odo Russell regarding a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals and his answer that "such an association could not be sanctioned by the Holy See, being founded on a theological error, to wit, that Christians owed any duties to animals," see Frances Power Cobbe, Hopes of the Human Race, p. 207. A hostility similar in kind, though less in degree, was shown in Protestant countries. Even after Thomasius in Germany and Voltaire in France and Beccaria in Italy had given final blows to the belief in magic and witchcraft throughout Christendom, the traditional orthodox distrust of the physical sciences continued for a long time. In England a marked dislike was shown among various leading ecclesiastics and theologians towards the Royal Society, and later toward the Association for the Advancement of Science; and this dislike, as will hereafter be seen, sometimes took shape in serious opposition. As a rule, both in Protestant and Catholic countries instruction in chemistry and physics was for a long time discouraged by Church authorities; and, when its suppression was no longer possible, great pains were taken to subordinate it to instruction supposed to be more fully in accordance with the older methods of theological reasoning. I have now presented in outline the more direct and open struggle of the physical sciences with theology, mainly as an exterior foe. We will next consider their warfare with the same foe in its more subtle form, mainly as a vitiating and sterilizing principle in science itself. We have seen thus far, first, how such men as Eusebius, Lactantius, and their compeers, opposed scientific investigation as futile; next, how such men as Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the multitude who followed them, turned the main current of medieval thought from science to theology; and, finally, how a long line of Church authorities from Popes John XXII and Innocent VIII, and the heads of the great religious orders, down to various theologians and ecclesiastics, Catholic and Protestant, of a very recent period, endeavoured first to crush and afterward to discourage scientific research as dangerous. Yet, injurious as all this was to the evolution of science, there was developed something in many respects more destructive; and this was the influence of mystic theology, penetrating, permeating, vitiating, sterilizing nearly every branch of science for hundreds of years. Among the forms taken by this development in the earlier Middle Ages we find a mixture of physical science with a pseudo-science obtained from texts of Scripture. In compounding this mixture, Jews and Christians vied with each other. In this process the sacred books were used as a fetich; every word, every letter, being considered to have a divine and hidden meaning. By combining various scriptural letters in various abstruse ways, new words of prodigious significance in magic were obtained, and among them the great word embracing the seventy-two mystical names of God--the mighty word "Schemhamphoras." Why should men seek knowledge by observation and experiment in the book of Nature, when the book of Revelation, interpreted by the Kabbalah, opened such treasures to the ingenious believer? So, too, we have ancient mystical theories of number which the theological spirit had made Christian, usurping an enormous place in medieval science. The sacred power of the number three was seen in the Trinity; in the three main divisions of the universe--the empyrean, the heavens, and the earth; in the three angelic hierarchies; in the three choirs of seraphim, cherubim, and thrones; in the three of dominions, virtues, and powers; in the three of principalities, archangels, and angels; in the three orders in the Church--bishops, priests, and deacons; in the three classes--the baptized, the communicants, and the monks; in the three degrees of attainment--light, purity, and knowledge; in the three theological virtues--faith, hope, and charity--and in much else. All this was brought into a theologico-scientific relation, then and afterward, with the three dimensions of space; with the three divisions of time--past, present, and future; with the three realms of the visible world--sky, earth, and sea; with the three constituents of man--body, soul, and spirit; with the threefold enemies of man--the world, the flesh, and the devil; with the three kingdoms in nature--mineral, vegetable, and animal; with "the three colours"--red, yellow, and blue; with "the three eyes of the honey-bee"--and with a multitude of other analogues equally precious. The sacred power of the number seven was seen in the seven golden candlesticks and the seven churches in the Apocalypse; in the seven cardinal virtues and the seven deadly sins; in the seven liberal arts and the seven devilish arts, and, above all, in the seven sacraments. And as this proved in astrology that there could be only seven planets, so it proved in alchemy that there must be exactly seven metals. The twelve apostles were connected with the twelve signs in the zodiac, and with much in physical science. The seventy-two disciples, the seventy-two interpreters of the Old Testament, the seventy-two mystical names of God, were connected with the alleged fact in anatomy that there were seventy-two joints in the human frame. Then, also, there were revived such theologic and metaphysical substitutes for scientific thought as the declaration that the perfect line is a circle, and hence that the planets must move in absolute circles--a statement which led astronomy astray even when the great truths of the Copernican theory were well in sight; also, the declaration that nature abhors a vacuum--a statement which led physics astray until Torricelli made his experiments; also, the declaration that we see the lightning before we hear the thunder because "sight is nobler than hearing." In chemistry we have the same theologic tendency to magic, and, as a result, a muddle of science and theology, which from one point of view seems blasphemous and from another idiotic, but which none the less sterilized physical investigation for ages. That debased Platonism which had been such an important factor in the evolution of Christian theology from the earliest days of the Church continued its work. As everything in inorganic nature was supposed to have spiritual significance, the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation were turned into an argument in behalf of the philosopher's stone; arguments for the scheme of redemption and for transubstantiation suggested others of similar construction to prove the transmutation of metals; the doctrine of the resurrection of the human body was by similar mystic jugglery connected with the processes of distillation and sublimation. Even after the Middle Ages were past, strong men seemed unable to break away from such reasoning as this--among them such leaders as Basil Valentine in the fifteenth century, Agricola in the sixteenth, and Van Helmont in the seventeenth. The greatest theologians contributed to the welter of unreason from which this pseudo-science was developed. One question largely discussed was, whether at the Redemption it was necessary for God to take the human form. Thomas Aquinas answered that it was necessary, but William Occam and Duns Scotus answered that it was not; that God might have taken the form of a stone, or of a log, or of a beast. The possibilities opened to wild substitutes for science by this sort of reasoning were infinite. Men have often asked how it was that the Arabians accomplished so much in scientific discovery as compared with Christian investigators; but the answer is easy: the Arabians were comparatively free from these theologic allurements which in Christian Europe flickered in the air on all sides, luring men into paths which led no-whither. Strong investigators, like Arnold of Villanova, Raymond Lully, Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and their compeers, were thus drawn far out of the only paths which led to fruitful truths. In a work generally ascribed to the first of these, the student is told that in mixing his chemicals he must repeat the psalm Exsurge Domine, and that on certain chemical vessels must be placed the last words of Jesus on the cross. Vincent of Beauvais insisted that, as the Bible declares that Noah, when five hundred years old, had children born to him, he must have possessed alchemical means of preserving life; and much later Dickinson insisted that the patriarchs generally must have owed their long lives to such means. It was loudly declared that the reality of the philosopher's stone was proved by the words of St. John in the Revelation. "To him that overcometh I will give a white stone." The reasonableness of seeking to develop gold out of the baser metals was for many generations based upon the doctrine of the resurrection of the physical body, which, though explicitly denied by St. Paul, had become a part of the creed of the Church. Martin Luther was especially drawn to believe in the alchemistic doctrine of transmutation by this analogy. The Bible was everywhere used, both among Protestants and Catholics, in support of these mystic adulterations of science, and one writer, as late as 1751, based his alchemistic arguments on more than a hundred passages of Scripture. As an example of this sort of reasoning, we have a proof that the elect will preserve the philosopher's stone until the last judgment, drawn from a passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, "We have this treasure in earthen vessels." The greatest thinkers devoted themselves to adding new ingredients to this strange mixture of scientific and theologic thought. The Catholic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the Protestant mysticism of Jacob Boehme, and the alchemistic reveries of Basil Valentine were all cast into this seething mass. And when alchemy in its old form had been discredited, we find scriptural arguments no less perverse, and even comical, used on the other side. As an example of this, just before the great discoveries by Stahl, we find the valuable scientific efforts of Becher opposed with the following syllogism: "King Solomon, according to the Scriptures, possessed the united wisdom of heaven and earth; but King Solomon knew nothing about alchemy (or chemistry in the form it then took), and sent his vessels to Ophir to seek gold, and levied taxes upon his subjects; ergo alchemy (or chemistry) has no reality or truth." And we find that Becher is absolutely turned away from his labours, and obliged to devote himself to proving that Solomon used more money than he possibly could have obtained from Ophir or his subjects, and therefore that he must have possessed a knowledge of chemical methods and the philosopher's stone as the result of them.(277) (277) For an extract from Agrippa's Occulta Philosophia, giving examples of the way in which mystical names were obtained from the Bible, see Rydberg, Magic of the Middle Ages, pp. 143 et seq. For the germs of many mystic beliefs regarding number and the like, which were incorporated into mediaeval theology, see Zeller, Plato and the Older Academy, English translation, pp. 254 and 572, and elsewhere. As to the connection of spiritual things with inorganic nature in relation to chemistry, see Eicken, p. 634. On the injury to science wrought by Platonism acting through mediaeval theology, see Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, vol. i, p. 90. As to the influence of mysticism upon strong men in science, see Hoefer; also Kopp, Geschichte der Alchemie, vol. i, p. 211. For a very curious Catholic treatise on sacred numbers, see the Abbe Auber, Symbolisme Religieux, Paris, 1870; also Detzel, Christliche Ikonographie, pp. 44 et seq.; and for an equally important Protestant work, see Samuell, Seven the Sacred number, London 1887. It is interesting to note that the latter writer, having been forced to give up the seven planets, consoles himself with the statement that "the earth is the seventh planet, counting from Neptune and calling the asteroids one" (see p. 426). For the electrum magicum, the seven metals composing it, and its wonderful qualities, see extracts from Paracelsus's writings in Hartmann's Life of Paracelsus, London, 1887, pp. 168 et seq. As to the more rapid transition of light than sound, the following expresses the scholastic method well: "What is the cause why we see sooner the lightning than we heare the thunder clappe? That is because our sight is both nobler and sooner perceptive of its object than our eare; as being the more active part, and priore to our hearing: besides, the visible species are more subtile and less corporeal than the audible species."--Person's Varieties, Meteors, p. 82. For Basil Valentine's view, see Hoefer, vol. i, pp. 453-465; Schmieder, Geschichte der Alchemie, pp. 197-209; Allgemeine deutsche Biographies, article Basilius. For the discussions referred to on possibilities of God assuming forms of stone, or log, or beast, see Lippert, Christenthum, Volksglaube, und Volksbrauch, pp. 372, 373, where citations are given, etc. For the syllogism regarding Solomon, see Figuier, L'Alchimie et les Alchimistes, pp. 106, 107. For careful appreciation of Becher's position in the history of chemistry, see Kopp, Ansichten uber die Aufgabe der Chemie, etc., von Geber bis Stahl, Braunschweig, 1875, pp. 201 et seq. For the text proving the existence of the philosopher's stone from the book of Revelation, see Figuier, p. 22. Of the general reasoning enforced by theology regarding physical science, every age has shown examples; yet out of them all I will select but two, and these are given because they show how this mixture of theological with scientific ideas took hold upon the strongest supporters of better reasoning even after the power of medieval theology seemed broken. The first of these examples is Melanchthon. He was the scholar of the Reformation, and justly won the title "Preceptor of Germany." His mind was singularly open, his sympathies broad, and his usual freedom from bigotry drew down upon him that wrath of Protestant heresy-hunters which embittered the last years of his life and tortured him upon his deathbed. During his career at the University of Wittenberg he gave a course of lectures on physics, and in these he dwelt upon scriptural texts as affording scientific proofs, accepted the interference of the devil in physical phenomena as in other things, and applied the medieval method throughout his whole work.(278) (278) For Melanchthon's ideas on physics, see his Initia Doctrinae Physicae, Wittenberg, 1557, especially pp. 243 and 274; also in vol. xiii of Bretschneider's edition of the collected works, and especially pp. 339-343. Yet far more remarkable was the example, a century later, of the man who more than any other led the world out of the path opened by Aquinas, and into that through which modern thought has advanced to its greatest conquests. Strange as it may at first seem, Francis Bacon, whose keenness of sight revealed the delusions of the old path and the promises of the new, and whose boldness did so much to turn the world from the old path into the new, presents in his own writings one of the most striking examples of the evil he did so much to destroy. The Novum Organon, considering the time when it came from his pen, is doubtless one of the greatest exhibitions of genius in the history of human thought. It showed the modern world the way out of the scholastic method and reverence for dogma into the experimental method and reverence for fact. In it occur many passages which show that the great philosopher was fully alive to the danger both to religion and to science arising from their mixture. He declares that the "corruption of philosophy from superstition and theology introduced the greatest amount of evil both into whole systems of philosophy and into their parts." He denounces those who "have endeavoured to found a natural philosophy on the books of Genesis and Job and other sacred Scriptures, so 'seeking the dead among the living.'" He speaks of the result as "an unwholesome mixture of things human and divine; not merely fantastic philosophy, but heretical religion." He refers to the opposition of the fathers to the doctrine of the rotundity of the earth, and says that, "thanks to some of them, you may find the approach to any kind of philosophy, however improved, entirely closed up." He charges that some of these divines are "afraid lest perhaps a deeper inquiry into nature should, penetrate beyond the allowed limits of sobriety"; and finally speaks of theologians as sometimes craftily conjecturing that, if science be little understood, "each single thing can be referred more easily to the hand and rod of God," and says, "THIS IS NOTHING MORE OR LESS THAN WISHING TO PLEASE GOD BY A LIE." No man who has reflected much upon the annals of his race can, without a feeling of awe, come into the presence of such clearness of insight and boldness of utterance, and the first thought of the reader is that, of all men, Francis Bacon is the most free from the unfortunate bias he condemns; that he, certainly, can not be deluded into the old path. But as we go on through his main work we are surprised to find that the strong arm of Aquinas has been stretched over the intervening ages, and has laid hold upon this master-thinker of the seventeenth century; for only a few chapters beyond those containing the citations already made we find Bacon alluding to the recent voyage of Columbus, and speaking of the prophecy of Daniel regarding the latter days, that "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge be increased," as clearly signifying "that... the circumnavigation of the world and the increase of science should happen in the same age."(279) (279) See the Novum Organon, translated by the Rev. G. W. Kitchin, Oxford, 1855, chaps. lxv and lxxxix. In his great work on the Advancement of Learning the firm grasp which the methods he condemned held upon him is shown yet more clearly. In the first book of it he asserts that "that excellent book of Job, if it be revolved with diligence, will be found pregnant and swelling with natural philosophy," and he endeavours to show that in it the "roundness of the earth," the "fixing of the stars, ever standing at equal distances," the "depression of the southern pole," the "matter of generation," and "matter of minerals" are "with great elegancy noted." But, curiously enough, he uses to support some of these truths the very texts which the fathers of the Church used to destroy them, and those for which he finds Scripture warrant most clearly are such as science has since disproved. So, too, he says that Solomon was enabled in his Proverbs, "by donation of God, to compile a natural history of all verdure."(280) (280) See Bacon, Advancement of Learning, edited by W. Aldis Wright, London, 1873, pp. 47, 48. Certainly no more striking examples of the strength of the evil which he had all along been denouncing could be exhibited that these in his own writings. Nothing better illustrates the sway of the mediaeval theology, or better explains his blindness to the discoveries of Copernicus and to the experiments of Gilbert. For a very contemptuous statement of Lord Bacon's claim to his position as a philosopher, see Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, Leipsic, 1872, vol i, p. 219. For a more just statement, see Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac Newton, London, 1874, vol. ii, p. 298. Such was the struggle of the physical sciences in general. Let us now look briefly at one special example out of many, which reveals, as well as any, one of the main theories which prompted theological interference with them. It will doubtless seem amazing to many that for ages the weight of theological thought in Christendom was thrown against the idea of the suffocating properties of certain gases, and especially of carbonic acid. Although in antiquity we see men forming a right theory of gases in mines, we find that, early in the history of the Church, St. Clement of Alexandria put forth the theory that these gases are manifestations of diabolic action, and that, throughout Christendom, suffocation in caverns, wells, and cellars was attributed to the direct action of evil spirits. Evidences of this view abound through the medieval period, and during the Reformation period a great authority, Agricola, one of the most earnest and truthful of investigators, still adhered to the belief that these gases in mines were manifestations of devils, and he specified two classes--one of malignant imps, who blow out the miners' lamps, and the other of friendly imps, who simply tease the workmen in various ways. He went so far as to say that one of these spirits in the Saxon mine of Annaberg destroyed twelve workmen at once by the power of his breath. At the end of the sixteenth century we find a writer on mineralogy complaining that the mines in France and Germany had been in large part abandoned on account of the "evil spirits of metals which had taken possession of them." Even as late as the seventeenth century, Van Helmont, after he had broken away from alchemy and opened one of the great paths to chemistry--even after he had announced to the world the existence of various gases and the mode of their generation--was not strong enough to free himself from theologic bias; he still inclined to believe that the gases he had discovered, were in some sense living spirits, beneficent or diabolical. But at various. periods glimpses of the truth had been gained. The ancient view had not been entirely forgotten; and as far back as the first part of the thirteenth century Albert the Great suggested a natural cause in the possibility of exhalations from minerals causing a "corruption of the air"; but he, as we have seen, was driven or dragged off into, theological studies, and the world relapsed into the theological view. Toward the end of the fifteenth century there had come a great genius laden with important truths in chemistry, but for whom the world was not ready--Basil Valentine. His discoveries anticipated much that has brought fame and fortune to chemists since, yet so fearful of danger was he that his work was carefully concealed. Not until after his death was his treatise on alchemy found, and even then it was for a long time not known where and when he lived. The papal bull, Spondent pariter, and the various prohibitions it bred, forcing other alchemists to conceal their laboratories, led him to let himself be known during his life at Erfurt simply as an apothecary, and to wait until after his death to make a revelation of truth which during his lifetime might have cost him dear. Among the legacies of this greatest of the alchemists was the doctrine that the air which asphyxiates workers in mines is similar to that which is produced by fermentation of malt, and a recommendation that, in order to drive away the evil and to prevent serious accidents, fires be lighted and jets of steam used to ventilate the mines--stress being especially laid upon the idea that the danger in the mines is produced by "exhalations of metals." Thanks to men like Valentine, this idea of the interference of Satan and his minions with the mining industry was gradually weakened, and the working of the deserted mines was resumed; yet even at a comparatively recent period we find it still lingering, and among leading divines in the very heart of Protestant Germany. In 1715 a cellar-digger having been stifled at Jena, the medical faculty of the university decided that the cause was not the direct action of the devil, but a deadly gas. Thereupon Prof. Loescher, of the University of Wittenberg, entered a solemn protest, declaring that the decision of the medical faculty was "only a proof of the lamentable license which has so taken possession of us, and which, if we are not earnestly on our guard, will finally turn away from us the blessing of God."(281) But denunciations of this kind could not hold back the little army of science; in spite of adverse influences, the evolution of physics and chemistry went on. More and more there rose men bold enough to break away from theological methods and strong enough to resist ecclesiastical bribes and threats. As alchemy in its first form, seeking for the philosopher's stone and the transmutation of metals, had given way to alchemy in its second form, seeking for the elixir of life and remedies more or less magical for disease, so now the latter yielded to the search for truth as truth. More and more the "solemnly constituted impostors" were resisted in every field. A great line of physicists and chemists began to appear.(282) (281) For Loescher's protest, see Julian Schmidt, Geschichte des geistigen Lebens, etc., vol. i, p. 319. (282) For the general view of noxious gases as imps of Satan, see Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, vol. i, p. 350; vol. ii, p. 48. For the work of Black, Priestley, Bergmann, and others, see main authorities already cited, and especially the admirable paper of Dr. R. G. Eccles on The Evolution of Chemistry, New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1891. For the treatment of Priesley, see Spence's Essays, London, 1892; also Rutt, Life and Correspondence of Priestley, vol. ii, pp. 115 et seq. II. Just at the middle of the seventeenth century, and at the very centre of opposition to physical science, Robert Boyle began the new epoch in chemistry. Strongly influenced by the writings of Bacon and the discoveries of Galileo, he devoted himself to scientific research, establishing at Oxford a laboratory and putting into it a chemist from Strasburg. For this he was at once bitterly attacked. In spite of his high position, his blameless life, his liberal gifts to charity and learning, the Oxford pulpit was especially severe against him, declaring that his researches were destroying religion and his experiments undermining the university. Public orators denounced him, the wits ridiculed him, and his associates in the peerage were indignant that he should condescend to pursuits so unworthy. But Boyle pressed on. His discoveries opened new paths in various directions and gave an impulse to a succession of vigorous investigators. Thus began the long series of discoveries culminating those of Black, Bergmann, Cavendish, Priestley, and Lavoisier, who ushered in the chemical science of the nineteenth century. Yet not even then without a sore struggle against unreason. And it must here be noticed that this unreason was not all theological. The unreasoning heterodox when intrusted with irresponsible power can be as short-sighted and cruel as the unreasoning orthodox. Lavoisier, one of the best of our race, not only a great chemist but a true man, was sent to the scaffold by the Parisian mob, led by bigoted "liberals" and atheists, with the sneer that the republic had no need of savants. As to Priestley, who had devoted his life to science and to every good work among his fellow-men, the Birmingham mob, favoured by the Anglican clergymen who harangued them as "fellow-churchmen," wrecked his house, destroyed his library, philosophical instruments, and papers containing the results of long years of scientific research, drove him into exile, and would have murdered him if they could have laid their hands upon him. Nor was it entirely his devotion to rational liberty, nor even his disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity, which brought on this catastrophe. That there was a deep distrust of his scientific pursuits, was evident when the leaders of the mob took pains to use his electrical apparatus to set fire to his papers. Still, though theological modes of thought continued to sterilize much effort in chemistry, the old influence was more and more thrown off, and truth sought more and more for truth's sake. "Black magic" with its Satanic machinery vanished, only reappearing occasionally among marvel-mongers and belated theologians. "White magic" became legerdemain. In the early years of the nineteenth century, physical research, though it went on with ever-increasing vigour, felt in various ways the reaction which followed the French Revolution. It was not merely under the Bourbons and Hapsburgs that resistance was offered; even in England the old spirit lingered long. As late as 1832, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science first visited Oxford, no less amiable a man than John Keble--at that time a power in the university--condemned indignantly the conferring of honorary degrees upon the leading men thus brought together. In a letter of that date to Dr. Pusey he complained bitterly, to use his own words, that "the Oxford doctors have truckled sadly to the spirit of the times in receiving the hotchpotch of philosophers as they did." It is interesting to know that among the men thus contemptuously characterized were Brewster, Faraday, and Dalton. Nor was this a mere isolated exhibition of feeling; it lasted many years, and was especially shown on both sides of the Atlantic in all higher institutions of learning where theology was dominant. Down to a period within the memory of men still in active life, students in the sciences, not only at Oxford and Cambridge but at Harvard and Yale, were considered a doubtful if not a distinctly inferior class, intellectually and socially--to be relegated to different instructors and buildings, and to receive their degrees on a different occasion and with different ceremonies from those appointed for students in literature. To the State University of Michigan, among the greater American institutions of learning which have never possessed or been possessed by a theological seminary, belongs the honour of first breaking down this wall of separation. But from the middle years of the century chemical science progressed with ever-accelerating force, and the work of Bunsen, Kirchhoff, Dalton, and Faraday has, in the last years of the century, led up to the establishment of Mendeleef's law, by which chemistry has become predictive, as astronomy had become predictive by the calculations of Newton, and biology by the discoveries of Darwin. While one succession of strong men were thus developing chemistry out of one form of magic, another succession were developing physics out of another form. First in this latter succession may be mentioned that line of thinkers who divined and reasoned out great physical laws--a line extending from Galileo and Kepler and Newton to Ohm and Faraday and Joule and Helmholtz. These, by revealing more and more clearly the reign of law, steadily undermined the older theological view of arbitrary influence in nature. Next should be mentioned the line of profound observers, from Galileo and Torricelli to Kelvin. These have as thoroughly undermined the old theologic substitution of phrases for facts. When Galileo dropped the differing weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he began the end of Aristotelian authority in physics. When Torricelli balanced a column of mercury against a column of water and each of these against a column of air, he ended the theologic phrase that "nature abhors a vacuum." When Newton approximately determined the velocity of sound, he ended the theologic argument that we see the flash before we hear the roar because "sight is nobler than hearing." When Franklin showed that lightning is caused by electricity, and Ohm and Faraday proved that electricity obeys ascertained laws, they ended the theological idea of a divinity seated above the clouds and casting thunderbolts. Resulting from the labour of both these branches of physical science, we have the establishment of the great laws of the indestructibility of matter, the correlation of forces, and chemical affinity. Thereby is ended, with various other sacred traditions, the theological theory of a visible universe created out of nothing, so firmly imbedded in the theological thought of the Middle Ages and in the Westminster Catechism.(283) (283) For a reappearance of the fundamental doctrines of black magic among theologians, see Rev. Dr. Jewett, Professor of Pastoral Theology in the Prot. Episc. Gen. Theolog. Seminary of New York, Diabolology: The Person and the Kingdom of Satan, New York, 1889. For their appearance among theosophists, see Eliphas Levi, Histoire de la Magie, especially the final chapters. For opposition to Boyle and chemistry studies at Oxford in the latter half of the seventeenth century, see the address of Prof. Dixon, F. R. S., before the British Association, 1894. For the recent progress of chemistry, and opposition to its earlier development at Oxford, see Lord Salisbury's address as President of the British Association, in 1894. For the Protestant survival of the mediaeval assertion that the universe was created out of nothing, see the Westminster Catechism, question 15. In our own time some attempt has been made to renew this war against the physical sciences. Joseph de Maistre, uttering his hatred of them, declaring that mankind has paid too dearly for them, asserting that they must be subjected to theology, likening them to fire--good when confined and dangerous when scattered about--has been one of the main leaders among those who can not relinquish the idea that our body of sacred literature should be kept a controlling text-book of science. The only effect of such teachings has been to weaken the legitimate hold of religion upon men. In Catholic countries exertion has of late years been mainly confined to excluding science or diluting it in university teachings. Early in the present century a great effort was made by Ferdinand VII of Spain. He simply dismissed the scientific professors from the University of Salamanca, and until a recent period there has been general exclusion from Spanish universities of professors holding to the Newtonian physics. So, too, the contemporary Emperor of Austria attempted indirectly something of the same sort; and at a still later period Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX discouraged, if they did not forbid, the meetings of scientific associations in Italy. In France, war between theology and science, which had long been smouldering, came in the years 1867 and 1868 to an outbreak. Toward the end of the last century, after the Church had held possession of advanced instruction for more than a thousand years, and had, so far as it was able, kept experimental science in servitude--after it had humiliated Buffon in natural science, thrown its weight against Newton in the physical sciences, and wrecked Turgot's noble plans for a system of public instruction--the French nation decreed the establishment of the most thorough and complete system of higher instruction in science ever known. It was kept under lay control and became one of the glories of France; but, emboldened by the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, the Church began to undermine this hated system, and in 1868 had made such progress that all was ready for the final assault. Foremost among the leaders of the besieging party was the Bishop of Orleans, Dupanloup, a man of many winning characteristics and of great oratorical power. In various ways, and especially in an open letter, he had fought the "materialism" of science at Paris, and especially were his attacks levelled at Profs. Vulpian and See and the Minister of Public instruction, Duruy, a man of great merit, whose only crime was devotion to the improvement of education and to the promotion of the highest research in science.(284) (284) For the exertions of the restored Bourbons to crush the universities of Spain, see Hubbard, Hist. Contemporaine de l'Espagne, Paris, 1878, chaps. i and ii. For Dupanloup, Lettre a un Cardinal, see the Revue de Therapeutique of 1868, p. 221. The main attack was made rather upon biological science than upon physics and chemistry, yet it was clear that all were involved together. The first onslaught was made in the French Senate, and the storming party in that body was led by a venerable and conscientious prelate, Cardinal de Bonnechose, Archbishop of Rouen. It was charged by him and his party that the tendencies of the higher scientific teaching at Paris were fatal to religion and morality. Heavy missiles were hurled--such phrases as "sapping the foundations," "breaking down the bulwarks," and the like; and, withal, a new missile was used with much effect--the epithet "materialist." The results can be easily guessed: crowds came to the lecture-rooms of the attacked professors, and the lecture-room of Prof. See, the chief offender, was crowded to suffocation. A siege was begun in due form. A young physician was sent by the cardinal's party into the heterodox camp as a spy. Having heard one lecture of Prof. See, he returned with information that seemed to promise easy victory to the besieging party: he brought a terrible statement--one that seemed enough to overwhelm See, Vulpian, Duruy, and the whole hated system of public instruction in France--the statement that See had denied the existence of the human soul. Cardinal Bonnechose seized the tremendous weapon at once. Rising in his place in the Senate, he launched a most eloquent invective against the Minister of State who could protect such a fortress of impiety as the College of Medicine; and, as a climax, he asserted, on the evidence of his spy fresh from Prof. See's lecture-room, that the professor had declared, in his lecture of the day before, that so long as he had the honour to hold his professorship he would combat the false idea of the existence of the soul. The weapon seemed resistless and the wound fatal, but M. Duruy rose and asked to be heard. His statement was simply that he held in his hand documentary proofs that Prof. See never made such a declaration. He held the notes used by Prof. See in his lecture. Prof. See, it appeared, belonged to a school in medical science which combated certain ideas regarding medicine as an ART. The inflamed imagination of the cardinal's heresy-hunting emissary had, as the lecture-notes proved, led him to mistake the word "art" for "ame," and to exhibit Prof. See as treating a theological when he was discussing a purely scientific question. Of the existence of the soul the professor had said nothing. The forces of the enemy were immediately turned; they retreated in confusion, amid the laughter of all France; and a quiet, dignified statement as to the rights of scientific instructors by Wurtz, dean of the faculty, completed their discomfiture. Thus a well-meant attempt to check science simply ended in bringing ridicule on religion, and in thrusting still deeper into the minds of thousands of men that most mistaken of all mistaken ideas: the conviction that religion and science are enemies.(285) (285) For a general account of the Vulpian and See matter, see Revue des Deux Mondes, 31 mai, 1868, "Chronique de la Quinzaine," pp. 763-765. As to the result on popular thought, may be noted the following comment on the affair by the Revue, which is as free as possible from anything like rabid anti-ecclesiastical ideas: "Elle a ete vraiment curieuse, instructive, assez triste et meme un peu amusante." For Wurtz's statement, see Revue de Therapeutique for 1868, p. 303. But justice forbids raising an outcry against Roman Catholicism for this. In 1864 a number of excellent men in England drew up a declaration to be signed by students in the natural sciences, expressing "sincere regret that researches into scientific truth are perverted by some in our time into occasion for casting doubt upon the truth and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures." Nine tenths of the leading scientific men of England refused to sign it; nor was this all: Sir John Herschel, Sir John Bowring, and Sir W. R. Hamilton administered, through the press, castigations which roused general indignation against the proposers of the circular, and Prof. De Morgan, by a parody, covered memorial and memorialists with ridicule. It was the old mistake, and the old result followed in the minds of multitudes of thoughtful young men.(286) (286) De Morgan, Paradoxes, pp. 421-428; also Daubeny's Essays. And in yet another Protestant country this same mistake was made. In 1868 several excellent churchmen in Prussia thought it their duty to meet for the denunciation of "science falsely so called." Two results followed: upon the great majority of these really self-sacrificing men--whose first utterances showed complete ignorance of the theories they attacked--there came quiet and widespread contempt; upon Pastor Knak, who stood forth and proclaimed views of the universe which he thought scriptural, but which most schoolboys knew to be childish, came a burst of good-natured derision from every quarter of the German nation.(287) (287) See the Berlin newspapers for the summer of 1868, especially Kladderdatsch. But in all the greater modern nations warfare of this kind, after the first quarter of the nineteenth century, became more and more futile. While conscientious Roman bishops, and no less conscientious Protestant clergymen in Europe and America continued to insist that advanced education, not only in literature but in science, should be kept under careful control in their own sectarian universities and colleges, wretchedly one-sided in organization and inadequate in equipment; while Catholic clerical authorities in Spain were rejecting all professors holding the Newtonian theory, and in Austria and Italy all holding unsafe views regarding the Immaculate Conception, and while Protestant clerical authorities in Great Britain and America were keeping out of professorships men holding unsatisfactory views regarding the Incarnation, or Infant Baptism, or the Apostolic Succession, or Ordination by Elders, or the Perseverance of the Saints; and while both Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastics were openly or secretly weeding out of university faculties all who showed willingness to consider fairly the ideas of Darwin, a movement was quietly in progress destined to take instruction, and especially instruction in the physical and natural sciences, out of its old subordination to theology and ecclesiasticism.(288) (288) Whatever may be thought of the system of philosophy advocated by President McCosh at Princeton, every thinking man must honor him for the large way in which he, at least, broke away from the traditions of that centre of thought; prevented, so far as he was able, persecution of scholars for holding to the Darwinian view; and paved the way for the highest researches in physical science in that university. For a most eloquent statement of the opposition of modern physical science to mediaeval theological views, as shown in the case of Sir Isaac Newton, see Dr. Thomas Chalmers, cited in Gore, Art of Scientific Discovery, London, 1878, p. 247. The most striking beginnings of this movement had been seen when, in the darkest period of the French Revolution, there was founded at Paris the great Conservatory of Arts and Trades, and when, in the early years of the nineteenth century, scientific and technical education spread quietly upon the Continent. By the middle of the century France and Germany were dotted with well-equipped technical and scientific schools, each having chemical and physical laboratories. The English-speaking lands lagged behind. In England, Oxford and Cambridge showed few if any signs of this movement, and in the United States, down to 1850, evidences of it were few and feeble. Very significant is it that, at that period, while Yale College had in its faculty Silliman and Olmsted--the professor of chemistry and the professor of physics most widely known in the United States--it had no physical or chemical laboratory in the modern sense, and confined its instruction in these subjects to examinations upon a text-book and the presentation of a few lectures. At the State University of Michigan, which had even then taken a foremost place in the higher education west of the Great Lakes, there was very meagre instruction in chemistry and virtually none in physics. This being the state of things in the middle of the century in institutions remarkably free from clerical control, it can be imagined what was the position of scientific instruction in smaller colleges and universities where theological considerations were entirely dominant. But in 1851, with the International Exhibition at London, began in Great Britain and America a movement in favour of scientific education; men of wealth and public spirit began making contributions to them, and thus came the growth of a new system of instruction in which Chemistry and Physics took just rank. By far the most marked feature in this movement was seen in America, when, in 1857, Justin S. Morrill, a young member of Congress from Vermont, presented the project of a law endowing from the public lands a broad national system of colleges in which scientific and technical studies should be placed on an equality with studies in classical literature, one such college to be established in every State of the Union. The bill, though opposed mainly by representatives from the Southern States, where doctrinaire politics and orthodox theology were in strong alliance with negro slavery, was passed by both Houses of Congress, but vetoed by President Buchanan, in whom the doctrinaire and orthodox spirit was incarnate. But Morrill persisted and again presented his bill, which was again carried in spite of the opposition of the Southern members, and again vetoed in 1859 by President Buchanan. Then came the civil war; but Morrill and his associates did not despair of the republic. In the midst of all the measures for putting vast armies into the field and for saving the Union from foreign interference as well as from domestic anarchy, they again passed the bill, and in 1862, in the darkest hour of the struggle for national existence, it became a law by the signature of President Lincoln. And here it should not be unrecorded, that, while the vast majority of the supporters of the measure were laymen, most efficient service was rendered by a clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Amos Brown, born in New Hampshire, but at that time an instructor in a little village of New York. His ideas were embodied in the bill, and his efforts did much for its passage. Thus was established, in every State of the American Union, at least one institution in which scientific and technical studies were given equal rank with classical, and promoted by laboratories for research in physical and natural science. Of these institutions there are now nearly fifty: all have proved valuable, and some of them, by the addition of splendid gifts from individuals and from the States in which they are situated, have been developed into great universities. Nor was this all. Many of the older universities and colleges thus received a powerful stimulus in the new direction. The great physical and chemical laboratories founded by gifts from public-spirited individuals, as at Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, or by enlightened State legislators, as in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, Kansas, and Nebraska, have also become centres from which radiate influences favouring the unfettered search for truth as truth. This system has been long enough in operation to enable us to note in some degree its effects on religion, and these are certainly such as to relieve those who have feared that religion was necessarily bound up with the older instruction controlled by theology. While in Europe, by a natural reaction, the colleges under strict ecclesiastical control have sent forth the most powerful foes the Christian Church has ever known, of whom Voltaire and Diderot and Volney and Sainte-Beuve and Renan are types, no such effects have been noted in these newer institutions. While the theological way of looking at the universe has steadily yielded, there has been no sign of any tendency toward irreligion. On the contrary, it is the testimony of those best acquainted with the American colleges and universities during the last forty-five years that there has been in them a great gain, not only as regards morals, but as regards religion in its highest and best sense. The reason is not far to seek. Under the old American system the whole body of students at a university were confined to a single course, for which the majority cared little and very many cared nothing, and, as a result, widespread idleness and dissipation were inevitable. Under the new system, presenting various courses, and especially courses in various sciences, appealing to different tastes and aims, the great majority of students are interested, and consequently indolence and dissipation have steadily diminished. Moreover, in the majority of American institutions of learning down to the middle of the century, the main reliance for the religious culture of students was in the perfunctory presentation of sectarian theology, and the occasional stirring up of what were called "revivals," which, after a period of unhealthy stimulus, inevitably left the main body of students in a state of religious and moral reaction and collapse. This method is now discredited, and in the more important American universities it has become impossible. Religious truth, to secure the attention of the modern race of students in the better American institutions, is presented, not by "sensation preachers," but by thoughtful, sober-minded scholars. Less and less avail sectarian arguments; more and more impressive becomes the presentation of fundamental religious truths. The result is, that while young men care less and less for the great mass of petty, cut-and-dried sectarian formulas, they approach the deeper questions of religion with increasing reverence. While striking differences exist between the European universities and those of the United States, this at least may be said, that on both sides of the Atlantic the great majority of the leading institutions of learning are under the sway of enlightened public opinion as voiced mainly by laymen, and that, this being the case, the physical and natural sciences are henceforth likely to be developed normally, and without fear of being sterilized by theology or oppressed by ecclesiasticism. CHAPTER XIII. FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE. I. THE EARLY AND SACRED THEORIES OF DISEASE. Nothing in the evolution of human thought appears more inevitable than the idea of supernatural intervention in producing and curing disease. The causes of disease are so intricate that they are reached only after ages of scientific labour. In those periods when man sees everywhere miracle and nowhere law,--when he attributes all things which he can not understand to a will like his own,--he naturally ascribes his diseases either to the wrath of a good being or to the malice of an evil being. This idea underlies the connection of the priestly class with the healing art: a connection of which we have survivals among rude tribes in all parts of the world, and which is seen in nearly every ancient civilization--especially in the powers over disease claimed in Egypt by the priests of Osiris and Isis, in Assyria by the priests of Gibil, in Greece by the priests of Aesculapius, and in Judea by the priests and prophets of Jahveh. In Egypt there is evidence, reaching back to a very early period, that the sick were often regarded as afflicted or possessed by demons; the same belief comes constantly before us in the great religions of India and China; and, as regards Chaldea, the Assyrian tablets recovered in recent years, while revealing the source of so many myths and legends transmitted to the modern world through the book of Genesis, show especially this idea of the healing of diseases by the casting out of devils. A similar theory was elaborated in Persia. Naturally, then, the Old Testament, so precious in showing the evolution of religious and moral truth among men, attributes such diseases as the leprosy of Miriam and Uzziah, the boils of Job, the dysentery of Jehoram, the withered hand of Jeroboam, the fatal illness of Asa, and many other ills, to the wrath of God or the malice of Satan; while, in the New Testament, such examples as the woman "bound by Satan," the rebuke of the fever, the casting out of the devil which was dumb, the healing of the person whom "the devil ofttimes casteth into the fire"--of which case one of the greatest modern physicians remarks that never was there a truer description of epilepsy--and various other episodes, show this same inevitable mode of thought as a refracting medium through which the teachings and doings of the Great Physician were revealed to future generations. In Greece, though this idea of an occult evil agency in producing bodily ills appeared at an early period, there also came the first beginnings, so far as we know, of a really scientific theory of medicine. Five hundred years before Christ, in the bloom period of thought--the period of Aeschylus, Phidias, Pericles, Socrates, and Plato--appeared Hippocrates, one of the greatest names in history. Quietly but thoroughly he broke away from the old tradition, developed scientific thought, and laid the foundations of medical science upon experience, observation, and reason so deeply and broadly that his teaching remains to this hour among the most precious possessions of our race. His thought was passed on to the School of Alexandria, and there medical science was developed yet further, especially by such men as Herophilus and Erasistratus. Under their lead studies in human anatomy began by dissection; the old prejudice which had weighed so long upon science, preventing that method of anatomical investigation without which there can be no real results, was cast aside apparently forever.(289) (289) For extended statements regarding medicine in Egypt, Judea, and Eastern nations generally, see Sprengel, Histoire de la Medecine, and Haeser; and for more succinct accounts, Baas, Geschichte der Medicin, pp. 15-29; also Isensee; also Fredault, Histoire de la Medecine, chap. i. For the effort in Egyptian medicine to deal with demons and witches, see Heinrich Brugsch, Die Aegyptologie, Leipsic, 1891, p. 77; and for references to the Papyrus Ebers, etc., pp. 155, 407, and following. For fear of dissection and prejudices against it in Egypt, like those in mediaeval Europe, see Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of Civilization, p. 216. For the derivation of priestly medicine in Egypt, see Baas, pp. 16, 22. For the fame of Egyptian medicine at Rome, see Sharpe, History of Egypt, vol. ii, pp. 151, 184. For Assyria, see especially George Smith in Delitzsch's German translation, p. 34, and F. Delitzsch's appendix, p. 27. On the cheapness and commonness of miracles of healing in antiquity, see Sharpe, quoting St. Jerome, vol. ii, pp. 276, 277. As to the influence of Chaldean ideas of magic and disease, see Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. i, p. 404 and note. But, on the other hand, see reference in Homer to diseases caused by a "demon." For the evolution of medicine before and after Hippocrates, see Sprengel. For a good summing up of the work of Hippocrates, see Baas, p. 201. For the necessary passage of medicine in its early stages under priestly control, see Cabanis, The Revolution of Medical Science, London, 1806, chap. ii. On Jewish ideas regarding demons, and their relation to sickness, see Toy, Judaism and Christianity, Boston, 1891, pp. 168 et seq. For avoidance of dissections of human subjects even by Galen and his disciples, see Maurice Albert, Les Medecins Grecs a Rome, Paris, 1894, chap. xi. For Herophilus, Erasistratus, and the School of Alexandria, see Sprengel, vol. i, pp. 433, 434 et seq. But with the coming in of Christianity a great new chain of events was set in motion which modified this development most profoundly. The influence of Christianity on the healing art was twofold: there was first a blessed impulse--the thought, aspiration, example, ideals, and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. This spirit, then poured into the world, flowed down through the ages, promoting self-sacrifice for the sick and wretched. Through all those succeeding centuries, even through the rudest, hospitals and infirmaries sprang up along this blessed stream. Of these were the Eastern establishments for the cure of the sick at the earliest Christian periods, the Infirmary of Monte Cassino and the Hotel-Dieu at Lyons in the sixth century, the Hotel-Dieu at Paris in the seventh, and the myriad refuges for the sick and suffering which sprang up in every part of Europe during the following centuries. Vitalized by this stream, all medieval growths of mercy bloomed luxuriantly. To say nothing of those at an earlier period, we have in the time of the Crusades great charitable organizations like the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and thenceforward every means of bringing the spirit of Jesus to help afflicted humanity. So, too, through all those ages we have a succession of men and women devoting themselves to works of mercy, culminating during modern times in saints like Vincent de Paul, Francke, Howard, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, and Muhlenberg. But while this vast influence, poured forth from the heart of the Founder of Christianity, streamed through century after century, inspiring every development of mercy, there came from those who organized the Church which bears his name, and from those who afterward developed and directed it, another stream of influence--a theology drawn partly from prehistoric conceptions of unseen powers, partly from ideas developed in the earliest historic nations, but especially from the letter of the Hebrew and Christian sacred books. The theology deveLoped out of our sacred literature in relation to the cure of disease was mainly twofold: first, there was a new and strong evolution of the old idea that physical disease is produced by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan, or by a combination of both, which theology was especially called in to explain; secondly, there were evolved theories of miraculous methods of cure, based upon modes of appeasing the Divine anger, or of thwarting Satanic malice. Along both these streams of influence, one arising in the life of Jesus, and the other in the reasonings of theologians, legends of miracles grew luxuriantly. It would be utterly unphilosophical to attribute these as a whole to conscious fraud. Whatever part priestcraft may have taken afterward in sundry discreditable developments of them, the mass of miraculous legends, Century after century, grew up mainly in good faith, and as naturally as elms along water-courses or flowers upon the prairie. II. GROWTH OF LEGENDS OF HEALING. --THE LIFE OF XAVIER AS A TYPICAL EXAMPLE. Legends of miracles have thus grown about the lives of all great benefactors of humanity in early ages, and about saints and devotees. Throughout human history the lives of such personages, almost without exception, have been accompanied or followed by a literature in which legends of miraculous powers form a very important part--a part constantly increasing until a different mode of looking at nature and of weighing testimony causes miracles to disappear. While modern thought holds the testimony to the vast mass of such legends in all ages as worthless, it is very widely acknowledged that great and gifted beings who endow the earth with higher religious ideas, gaining the deepest hold upon the hearts and minds of multitudes, may at times exercise such influence upon those about them that the sick in mind or body are helped or healed. We have within the modern period very many examples which enable us to study the evolution of legendary miracles. Out of these I will select but one, which is chosen because it is the life of one of the most noble and devoted men in the history of humanity, one whose biography is before the world with its most minute details--in his own letters, in the letters of his associates, in contemporary histories, and in a multitude of biographies: this man is St. Francis Xavier. From these sources I draw the facts now to be given, but none of them are of Protestant origin; every source from which I shall draw is Catholic and Roman, and published under the sanction of the Church. Born a Spanish noble, Xavier at an early age cast aside all ordinary aims, devoted himself to study, was rapidly advanced to a professorship at Paris, and in this position was rapidly winning a commanding influence, when he came under the sway of another Spaniard even greater, though less brilliantly endowed, than himself--Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus. The result was that the young professor sacrificed the brilliant career on which he had entered at the French capital, went to the far East as a simple missionary, and there devoted his remaining years to redeeming the lowest and most wretched of our race. Among the various tribes, first in lower India and afterward in Japan, he wrought untiringly--toiling through village after village, collecting the natives by the sound of a hand-bell, trying to teach them the simplest Christian formulas; and thus he brought myriads of them to a nominal Confession of the Christian faith. After twelve years of such efforts, seeking new conquests for religion, he sacrificed his life on the desert island of San Chan. During his career as a missionary he wrote great numbers of letters, which were preserved and have since been published; and these, with the letters of his contemporaries, exhibit clearly all the features of his life. His own writings are very minute, and enable us to follow him fully. No account of a miracle wrought by him appears either in his own letters or in any contemporary document.(290) At the outside, but two or three things occurred in his whole life, as exhibited so fully by himself and his contemporaries, for which the most earnest devotee could claim anything like Divine interposition; and these are such as may be read in the letters of very many fervent missionaries, Protestant as well as Catholic. For example, in the beginning of his career, during a journey in Europe with an ambassador, one of the servants in fording a stream got into deep water and was in danger of drowning. Xavier tells us that the ambassador prayed very earnestly, and that the man finally struggled out of the stream. But within sixty years after his death, at his canonization, and by various biographers, this had been magnified into a miracle, and appears in the various histories dressed out in glowing colours. Xavier tells us that the ambassador prayed for the safety of the young man; but his biographers tell us that it was Xavier who prayed, and finally, by the later writers, Xavier is represented as lifting horse and rider out of the stream by a clearly supernatural act. (290) This statement was denied with much explosive emphasis by a writer in the Catholic World for September and October, 1891, but he brought no FACT to support this denial. I may perhaps be allowed to remind the reverend writer that since the days of Pascal, whose eminence in the Church he will hardly dispute, the bare assertion even of a Jesuit father against established facts needs some support other than mere scurrility. Still another claim to miracle is based upon his arriving at Lisbon and finding his great colleague, Simon Rodriguez, ill of fever. Xavier informs us in a very simple way that Rodriguez was so overjoyed to see him that the fever did not return. This is entirely similar to the cure which Martin Luther wrought upon Melanchthon. Melanchthon had broken down and was supposed to be dying, when his joy at the long-delayed visit of Luther brought him to his feet again, after which he lived for many years. Again, it is related that Xavier, finding a poor native woman very ill, baptized her, saying over her the prayers of the Church, and she recovered. Two or three occurrences like these form the whole basis for the miraculous account, so far as Xavier's own writings are concerned. Of miracles in the ordinary sense of the word there is in these letters of his no mention. Though he writes of his doings with especial detail, taking evident pains to note everything which he thought a sign of Divine encouragement, he says nothing of his performing miracles, and evidently knows nothing of them. This is clearly not due to his unwillingness to make known any token of Divine favour. As we have seen, he is very prompt to report anything which may be considered an answer to prayer or an evidence of the power of religious means to improve the bodily or spiritual health of those to whom he was sent. Nor do the letters of his associates show knowledge of any miracles wrought by him. His brother missionaries, who were in constant and loyal fellowship with him, make no allusions to them in their communications with each other or with their brethren in Europe. Of this fact we have many striking evidences. Various collections of letters from the Jesuit missionaries in India and the East generally, during the years of Xavier's activity, were published, and in not one of these letters written during Xavier's lifetime appears any account of a miracle wrought by him. As typical of these collections we may take perhaps the most noted of all, that which was published about twenty years after Xavier's death by a Jesuit father, Emanuel Acosta. The letters given in it were written by Xavier and his associates not only from Goa, which was the focus of all missionary effort and the centre of all knowledge regarding their work in the East, but from all other important points in the great field. The first of them were written during the saint's lifetime, but, though filled with every sort of detail regarding missionary life and work, they say nothing regarding any miracles by Xavier. The same is true of various other similar collections published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In not one of them does any mention of a miracle by Xavier appear in a letter from India or the East contemporary with him. This silence regarding his miracles was clearly not due to any "evil heart of unbelief." On the contrary, these good missionary fathers were prompt to record the slightest occurrence which they thought evidence of the Divine favour: it is indeed touching to see how eagerly they grasp at the most trivial things which could be thus construed. Their ample faith was fully shown. One of them, in Acosta's collection, sends a report that an illuminated cross had been recently seen in the heavens; another, that devils had been cast out of the natives by the use of holy water; another, that various cases of disease had been helped and even healed by baptism; and sundry others sent reports that the blind and dumb had been restored, and that even lepers had been cleansed by the proper use of the rites of the Church; but to Xavier no miracles are imputed by his associates during his life or during several years after his death. On the contrary, we find his own statements as to his personal limitations, and the difficulties arising from them, fully confirmed by his brother workers. It is interesting, for example, in view of the claim afterward made that the saint was divinely endowed for his mission with the "gift of tongues," to note in these letters confirmation of Xavier's own statement utterly disproving the existence of any such Divine gift, and detailing the difficulties which he encountered from his want of knowing various languages, and the hard labour which he underwent in learning the elements of the Japanese tongue. Until about ten years after Xavier's death, then, as Emanuel Acosta's publication shows, the letters of the missionaries continued without any indication of miracles performed by the saint. Though, as we shall see presently, abundant legends had already begun to grow elsewhere, not one word regarding these miracles came as yet from the country which, according to later accounts accepted and sanctioned by the Church, was at this very period filled with miracles; not the slightest indication of them from the men who were supposed to be in the very thick of these miraculous manifestations. But this negative evidence is by no means all. There is also positive evidence--direct testimony from the Jesuit order itself--that Xavier wrought no miracles. For not only did neither Xavier nor his co-workers know anything of the mighty works afterward attributed to him, but the highest contemporary authority on the whole subject, a man in the closest correspondence with those who knew most about the saint, a member of the Society of Jesus in the highest standing and one of its accepted historians, not only expressly tells us that Xavier wrought no miracles, but gives the reasons why he wrought none. This man was Joseph Acosta, a provincial of the Jesuit order, its visitor in Aragon, superior at Valladolid, and finally rector of the University of Salamanca. In 1571, nineteen years after Xavier's death, Acosta devoted himself to writing a work mainly concerning the conversion of the Indies, and in this he refers especially and with the greatest reverence to Xavier, holding him up as an ideal and his work as an example. But on the same page with this tribute to the great missionary Acosta goes on to discuss the reasons why progress in the world's conversion is not so rapid as in the early apostolic times, and says that an especial cause why apostolic preaching could no longer produce apostolic results "lies in the missionaries themselves, because there is now no power of working miracles." He then asks, "Why should our age be so completely destitute of them?" This question he answers at great length, and one of his main contentions is that in early apostolic times illiterate men had to convert the learned of the world, whereas in modern times the case is reversed, learned men being sent to convert the illiterate; and hence that "in the early times miracles were necessary, but in our time they are not." This statement and argument refer, as we have seen, directly to Xavier by name, and to the period covered by his activity and that of the other great missionaries of his time. That the Jesuit order and the Church at large thought this work of Acosta trustworthy is proved by the fact that it was published at Salamanca a few years after it was written, and republished afterward with ecclesiastical sanction in France.(291) Nothing shows better than the sequel how completely the evolution of miraculous accounts depends upon the intellectual atmosphere of any land and time, and how independent it is of fact. (291)The work of Joseph Acosta is in the Cornell University Library, its title being as follows: De Natura Novi Orbis libri duo et De Promulgatione Evangelii apud Barbaros, sive De Procuranda Indorum Salute, libri sex, autore Jesepho Acosta, presbytero Societis Jesu. I. H. S. Salmanticas, apud Guillelmum Foquel, MDLXXXIX. For the passages cited directly contradicting the working of miracles by Xavier and his associates, see lib. ii, cap. ix, of which the title runs, Cur Miracula in Conversione gentium non fiant nunc, ut olim, a Christi praedicatoribus, especially pp. 242-245; also lib. ii, cap. viii, pp. 237 et seq. For a passage which shows that Xavier was not then at all credited with "the miraculous gift of tongues," see lib. i, cap. vii, p. 173. Since writing the above, my attention has been called to the alleged miraculous preservation of Xavier's body claimed in sundry letters contemporary with its disinterment at San Chan and reinterment at Goa. There is no reason why this preservation in itself need be doubted, and no reason why it should be counted miraculous. Such exceptional preservation of bodies has been common enough in all ages, and, alas for the claims of the Church, quite as common of pagans or Protestants as of good Catholics. One of the most famous cases is that of the fair Roman maiden, Julia, daughter of Claudius, over whose exhumation at Rome, in 1485, such ado was made by the sceptical scholars of the Renaissance. Contemporary observers tell us enthusiastically that she was very beautiful, perfectly preserved, "the bloom of youth still upom her cheeks," and exhaling a "sweet odour"; but this enthusiasm was so little to the taste of Pope Innocent VIII that he had her reburied secretly by night. Only the other day, in June of the year 1895, there was unearthed at Stade, in Hanover, the "perfectly preserved" body of a soldier of the eighth century. So, too, I might mention the bodies preserved at the church of St. Thomas at Strasburg, beneath the Cathedral of Bremen, and elsewhere during hundreds of years past; also the cases of "adiposeration" in various American cemeteries, which never grow less wonderful by repetition from mouth to mouth and in the public prints. But, while such preservation is not incredible or even strange, there is much reason why precisely in the case of a saint like St. Francis Xavier the evidence for it should be received with especial caution. What the touching fidelity of disciples may lead them to believe and proclaim regarding an adored leader in a time when faith is thought more meritorious than careful statement, and miracle more probable than the natural course of things, is seen, for example, in similar pious accounts regarding the bodies of many other saints, especially that of St. Carlo Borromeo, so justly venerated by the Church for his beautiful and charitable life. And yet any one looking at the relics of various saints, especially those of St. Carlo, preserved with such tender care in the crypt of Milan Cathedral, will see that they have shared the common fate, being either mummified or reduced to skeletons; and this is true in all cases, as far as my observation has extended. What even a great theologian can be induced to believe and testify in a somewhat similar matter, is seen in St. Augustine's declaration that the flesh of the peacock, which in antiquity and in the early Church was considered a bird somewhat supernaturally endowed, is incorruptible. The saint declares that he tested it and found it so (see the De Civitate dei, xxi, c. 4, under the passage beginning Quis enim Deus). With this we may compare the testimony of the pious author of Sir John Mandeville's Travels, that iron floats upon the Dead Sea while feathers sink in it, and that he would not have believed this had he not seen it. So, too, testimony to the "sweet odour" diffused by the exhumed remains of the saint seem to indicate feeling rather than fact--those highly wrought feelings of disciples standing by--the same feeling which led those who visited St. Simon Stylites on his heap of ordure, and other hermits unwashed and living in filth, to dwell upon the delicious "odour of sanctity" pervading the air. In point, perhaps, is Louis Veuillot's idealization of the "parfum de Rome," in face of the fact, to which the present writer and thousands of others can testify, that under Papal rule Rome was materially one of the most filthy cities in Christendom. For the case of Julia, see the contemporary letter printed by Janitschek, Gesellschaft der Renaissance in Italien, p. 120, note 167; also Infessura, Diarium Rom. Urbis, in Muratori, tom. iii, pt. 2, col. 1192, 1193, and elsewhere; also Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: Age of Despots, p. 22. For the case at Stade, see press dispatch from Berlin in newspapers of June 24, 25, 1895. The copy of Emanuel Acosta I have mainly used is that in the Royal Library at Munich, De Japonicus rebus epistolarum libri iii, item recogniti; et in Latinum ex Hispanico sermone conversi, Dilingae, MDLXXI. I have since obtained and used the work now in the library of Cornell University, being the letters and commentary published by Emanuel Acosta and attached to Maffei's book on the History of the Indies, published at Antwerp in 1685. For the first beginnings of miracles wrought by Xavier, as given in the letters of the missionaries, see that of Almeida, lib. ii, p. 183. Of other collections, or selections from collections, of letters which fail to give any indication of miracles wrought by Xavier during his life, see Wytfliet and Magin, Histoire Universelle des Indes Occidentales et Orientales, et de la Conversion des Indiens, Douay, 1611. Though several letters of Xavier and his fellow-missionaries are given, dated at the very period of his alleged miracles, not a trace of miracles appears in these. Also Epistolae Japonicae de multorum in variis Insulis Gentilium ad Christi fidem Conversione, Lovanii, 1570. These letters were written by Xavier and his companions from the East Indies and Japan, and cover the years from 1549 to 1564. Though these refer frequently to Xavier, there is no mention of a miracle wrought by him in any of them written during his lifetime. For, shortly after Xavier's heroic and beautiful death in 1552, stories of miracles wrought by him began to appear. At first they were few and feeble; and two years later Melchior Nunez, Provincial of the Jesuits in the Portuguese dominions, with all the means at his command, and a correspondence extending throughout Eastern Asia, had been able to hear of but three. These were entirely from hearsay. First, John Deyro said he knew that Xavier had the gift of prophecy; but, unfortunately, Xavier himself had reprimanded and cast off Deyro for untruthfulness and cheatery. Secondly, it was reported vaguely that at Cape Comorin many persons affirmed that Xavier had raised a man from the dead. Thirdly, Father Pablo de Santa Fe had heard that in Japan Xavier had restored sight to a blind man. This seems a feeble beginning, but little by little the stories grew, and in 1555 De Quadros, Provincial of the Jesuits in Ethiopia, had heard of nine miracles, and asserted that Xavier had healed the sick and cast out devils. The next year, being four years after Xavier's death, King John III of Portugal, a very devout man, directed his viceroy Barreto to draw up and transmit to him an authentic account of Xavier's miracles, urging him especially to do the work "with zeal and speedily." We can well imagine what treasures of grace an obsequious viceroy, only too anxious to please a devout king, could bring together by means of the hearsay of ignorant, compliant natives through all the little towns of Portuguese India. But the letters of the missionaries who had been co-workers or immediate successors of Xavier in his Eastern field were still silent as regards any miracles by him, and they remained silent for nearly ten years. In the collection of letters published by Emanuel Acosta and others no hint at any miracles by him is given, until at last, in 1562, fully ten years after Xavier's death, the first faint beginnings of these legends appear in them. At that time the Jesuit Almeida, writing at great length to the brethren, stated that he had found a pious woman who believed that a book left behind by Xavier had healed sick folk when it was laid upon them, and that he had met an old man who preserved a whip left by the saint which, when properly applied to the sick, had been found good both for their bodies and their souls. From these and other small beginnings grew, always luxuriant and sometimes beautiful, the vast mass of legends which we shall see hereafter. This growth was affectionately garnered by the more zealous and less critical brethren in Europe until it had become enormous; but it appears to have been thought of little value by those best able to judge. For when, in 1562, Julius Gabriel Eugubinus delivered a solemn oration on the condition and glory of the Church, before the papal legates and other fathers assembled at the Council of Trent, while he alluded to a multitude of things showing the Divine favour, there was not the remotest allusion to the vast multitude of miracles which, according to the legends, had been so profusely lavished on the faithful during many years, and which, if they had actually occurred, formed an argument of prodigious value in behalf of the special claims of the Church. The same complete absence of knowledge of any such favours vouchsafed to the Church, or at least of any belief in them, appears in that great Council of Trent among the fathers themselves. Certainly there, if anywhere, one might on the Roman theory expect Divine illumination in a matter of this kind. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the midst of it was especially claimed, and yet its members, with all their spiritual as well as material advantages for knowing what had been going on in the Church during the previous thirty years, and with Xavier's own friend and colleague, Laynez, present to inform them, show not the slightest sign of any suspicion of Xavier's miracles. We have the letters of Julius Gabriel to the foremost of these fathers assembled at Trent, from 1557 onward for a considerable time, and we have also a multitude of letters written from the Council by bishops, cardinals, and even by the Pope himself, discussing all sorts of Church affairs, and in not one of these is there evidence of the remotest suspicion that any of these reports, which they must have heard, regarding Xavier's miracles, were worthy of mention. Here, too, comes additional supplementary testimony of much significance. With these orations and letters, Eugubinus gives a Latin translation of a letter, "on religious affairs in the Indies," written by a Jesuit father twenty years after Xavier's death. Though the letter came from a field very distant from that in which Xavier laboured, it was sure, among the general tokens of Divine favour to the Church and to the order, on which it dwelt, to have alluded to miracles wrought by Xavier had there been the slightest ground for believing in them; but no such allusion appears.(292) (292) For the work referred to, see Julii Gabrielii Eugubini orationum et epistolarum, etc., libri duo (et) Epitola de rebus Indicis a quodam Societatis Jesu presbytero, etc., Venetiis, 1569. The Epistola begins at fol. 44. So, too, when in 1588, thirty-six years after Xavier's death, the Jesuit father Maffei, who had been especially conversant with Xavier's career in the East, published his History of India, though he gave a biography of Xavier which shows fervent admiration for his subject, he dwelt very lightly on the alleged miracles. But the evolution of miraculous legends still went on. Six years later, in 1594, Father Tursellinus published his Life of Xavier, and in this appears to have made the first large use of the information collected by the Portuguese viceroy and the more zealous brethren. This work shows a vast increase in the number of miracles over those given by all sources together up to that time. Xavier is represented as not only curing the sick, but casting out devils, stilling the tempest, raising the dead, and performing miracles of every sort. In 1622 came the canonization proceedings at Rome. Among the speeches made in the presence of Pope Gregory XV, supporting the claims of Xavier to saintship, the most important was by Cardinal Monte. In this the orator selects out ten great miracles from those performed by Xavier during his lifetime and describes them minutely. He insists that on a certain occasion Xavier, by the sign of the cross, made sea-water fresh, so that his fellow-passengers and the crew could drink it; that he healed the sick and raised the dead in various places; brought back a lost boat to his ship; was on one occasion lifted from the earth bodily and transfigured before the bystanders; and that, to punish a blaspheming town, he caused an earthquake and buried the offenders in cinders from a volcano: this was afterward still more highly developed, and the saint was represented in engravings as calling down fire from heaven and thus destroying the town. The most curious miracle of all is the eighth on the cardinal's list. Regarding this he states that, Xavier having during one of his voyages lost overboard a crucifix, it was restored to him after he had reached the shore by a crab. The cardinal also dwelt on miracles performed by Xavier's relics after his death, the most original being that sundry lamps placed before the image of the saint and filled with holy water burned as if filled with oil. This latter account appears to have deeply impressed the Pope, for in the Bull of Canonization issued by virtue of his power of teaching the universal Church infallibly in all matters pertaining to faith and morals, His Holiness dwells especially upon the miracle of the lamp filled with holy water and burning before Xavier's image. Xavier having been made a saint, many other Lives of him appeared, and, as a rule, each surpassed its predecessor in the multitude of miracles. In 1622 appeared that compiled and published under the sanction of Father Vitelleschi, and in it not only are new miracles increased, but some old ones are greatly improved. One example will suffice to show the process. In his edition of 1596, Tursellinus had told how, Xavier one day needing money, and having asked Vellio, one of his friends, to let him have some, Vellio gave him the key of a safe containing thirty thousand gold pieces. Xavier took three hundred and returned the key to Vellio; whereupon Vellio, finding only three hundred pieces gone, reproached Xavier for not taking more, saying that he had expected to give him half of all that the strong box contained. Xavier, touched by this generosity, told Vellio that the time of his death should be made known to him, that he might have opportunity to repent of his sins and prepare for eternity. But twenty-six years later the Life of Xavier published under the sanction of Vitelleschi, giving the story, says that Vellio on opening the safe found that ALL HIS MONEY remained as he had left it, and that NONE AT ALL had disappeared; in fact, that there had been a miraculous restitution. On his blaming Xavier for not taking the money, Xavier declares to Vellio that not only shall he be apprised of the moment of his death, but that the box shall always be full of money. Still later biographers improved the account further, declaring that Xavier promised Vellio that the strong box should always contain money sufficient for all his needs. In that warm and uncritical atmosphere this and other legends grew rapidly, obedient to much the same laws which govern the evolution of fairy tales.(293) (293) The writer in the Catholic World, already mentioned, rather rashly asserts that there is no such Life of Xavier as that I have above quoted. The reverend Jesuit father has evidently glanced over the bibliographies of Carayon and De Backer, and, not finding it there under the name of Vitelleschi, has spared himself further trouble. It is sufficient to say that the book may be seen by him in the library of Cornell University. Its full title is as follows: Compendio della Vita del s. p. Francesco Xaviero dell Campagnia di Giesu, Canonizato con s. Ignatio Fondatore dell' istessa Religione dalla Santita di N. S. Gregorio XV. Composto, e dato in luce per ordine del Reverendiss. P Mutio Vitelleschi Preposito Generale della Comp. di Giesu. In Venetia, MDCXXII, Appresso Antonio Pinelli. Con Licenza de' Superiori. My critic hazards a guess that the book may be a later edition of Torsellino (Tursellinus), but here again he is wrong. It is entirely a different book, giving in its preface a list of sources comprising eleven authorities besides Torsellino. In 1682, one hundred and thirty years after Xavier's death, appeared his biography by Father Bouhours; and this became a classic. In it the old miracles of all kinds were enormously multiplied, and many new ones given. Miracles few and small in Tursellinus became many and great in Bouhours. In Tursellinus, Xavier during his life saves one person from drowning, in Bouhours he saves during his life three; in Tursellinus, Xavier during his life raises four persons from the dead, in Bouhours fourteen; in Tursellinus there is one miraculous supply of water, in Bouhours three; in Tursellinus there is no miraculous draught of fishes, in Bouhours there is one; in Tursellinus, Xavier is transfigured twice, in Bouhours five times: and so through a long series of miracles which, in the earlier lives appearing either not at all or in very moderate form, are greatly increased and enlarged by Tursellinus, and finally enormously amplified and multiplied by Father Bouhours. And here it must be borne in mind that Bouhours, writing ninety years after Tursellinus, could not have had access to any new sources. Xavier had been dead one hundred and thirty years, and of course all the natives upon whom he had wrought his miracles, and their children and grandchildren, were gone. It can not then be claimed that Bouhours had the advantage of any new witnesses, nor could he have had anything new in the way of contemporary writings; for, as we have seen, the missionaries of Xavier's time wrote nothing regarding his miracles, and certainly the ignorant natives of India and Japan did not commit any account of his miracles to writing. Nevertheless, the miracles of healing given in Bouhours were more numerous and brilliant than ever. But there was far more than this. Although during the lifetime of Xavier there is neither in his own writings nor in any contemporary account any assertion of a resurrection from the dead wrought by him, we find that shortly after his death stories of such resurrections began to appear. A simple statement of the growth of these may throw some light on the evolution of miraculous accounts generally. At first it was affirmed that some people at Cape Comorin said that he had raised one person; then it was said that there were two persons; then in various authors--Emanuel Acosta, in his commentaries written as an afterthought nearly twenty years after Xavier's death, De Quadros, and others--the story wavers between one and two cases; finally, in the time of Tursellinus, four cases had been developed. In 1622, at the canonization proceedings, three were mentioned; but by the time of Father Bouhours there were fourteen--all raised from the dead by Xavier himself during his lifetime--and the name, place, and circumstances are given with much detail in each case.(294) (294) The writer in the Catholic World, already referred to, has based an attack here upon a misconception--I will not call it a deliberate misrepresentation--of his own by stating that these resurrections occurred after Xavier's death, and were due to his intercession or the use of his relics. The statement of the Jesuit father is utterly without foundation, as a simple reference to Bouhours will show. I take the liberty of commending to his attention The Life of St. Francis Xavier, by Father Dominic Bouhours, translated by James Dryden, Dublin, 1838. For examples of raising the dead by the saint DURING HIS LIFETIME, see pp. 69, 82, 93, 111, 218, 307, 316, 321--fourteen cases in all. It seems to have been felt as somewhat strange at first that Xavier had never alluded to any of these wonderful miracles; but ere long a subsidiary legend was developed, to the effect that one of the brethren asked him one day if he had raised the dead, whereat he blushed deeply and cried out against the idea, saying: "And so I am said to have raised the dead! What a misleading man I am! Some men brought a youth to me just as if he were dead, who, when I commanded him to arise in the name of Christ, straightway arose." Noteworthy is the evolution of other miracles. Tursellinus, writing in 1594, tells us that on the voyage from Goa to Malacca, Xavier having left the ship and gone upon an island, was afterward found by the persons sent in search of him so deeply absorbed in prayer as to be unmindful of all things about him. But in the next century Father Bouhours develops the story as follows: "The servants found the man of God raised from the ground into the air, his eyes fixed upon heaven, and rays of light about his countenance." Instructive, also, is a comparison between the successive accounts of his noted miracle among the Badages at Travancore, in 1544 Xavier in his letters makes no reference to anything extraordinary; and Emanuel Acosta, in 1571, declares simply that "Xavier threw himself into the midst of the Christians, that reverencing him they might spare the rest." The inevitable evolution of the miraculous goes on; and twenty years later Tursellinus tells us that, at the onslaught of the Badages, "they could not endure the majesty of his countenance and the splendour and rays which issued from his eyes, and out of reverence for him they spared the others." The process of incubation still goes on during ninety years more, and then comes Father Bouhours's account. Having given Xavier's prayer on the battlefield, Bouhours goes on to say that the saint, crucifix in hand, rushed at the head of the people toward the plain where the enemy was marching, and "said to them in a threatening voice, 'I forbid you in the name of the living God to advance farther, and on His part command you to return in the way you came.' These few words cast a terror into the minds of those soldiers who were at the head of the army; they remained confounded and without motion. They who marched afterward, seeing that the foremost did not advance, asked the reason of it. The answer was returned from the front ranks that they had before their eyes an unknown person habited in black, of more than human stature, of terrible aspect, and darting fire from his eyes.... They were seized with amazement at the sight, and all of them fled in precipitate confusion." Curious, too, is the after-growth of the miracle of the crab restoring the crucifix. In its first form Xavier lost the crucifix in the sea, and the earlier biographers dwell on the sorrow which he showed in consequence; but the later historians declare that the saint threw the crucifix into the sea in order to still a tempest, and that, after his safe getting to land, a crab brought it to him on the shore. In this form we find it among illustrations of books of devotion in the next century. But perhaps the best illustration of this evolution of Xavier's miracles is to be found in the growth of another legend; and it is especially instructive because it grew luxuriantly despite the fact that it was utterly contradicted in all parts of Xavier's writings as well as in the letters of his associates and in the work of the Jesuit father, Joseph Acosta. Throughout his letters, from first to last, Xavier constantly dwells upon his difficulties with the various languages of the different tribes among whom he went. He tells us how he surmounted these difficulties: sometimes by learning just enough of a language to translate into it some of the main Church formulas; sometimes by getting the help of others to patch together some pious teachings to be learned by rote; sometimes by employing interpreters; and sometimes by a mixture of various dialects, and even by signs. On one occasion he tells us that a very serious difficulty arose, and that his voyage to China was delayed because, among other things, the interpreter he had engaged had failed to meet him. In various Lives which appeared between the time of his death and his canonization this difficulty is much dwelt upon; but during the canonization proceedings at Rome, in the speeches then made, and finally in the papal bull, great stress was laid upon the fact that Xavier possessed THE GIFT OF TONGUES. It was declared that he spoke to the various tribes with ease in their own languages. This legend of Xavier's miraculous gift of tongues was especially mentioned in the papal bull, and was solemnly given forth by the pontiff as an infallible statement to be believed by the universal Church. Gregory XV having been prevented by death from issuing the Bull of Canonization, it was finally issued by Urban VIII; and there is much food for reflection in the fact that the same Pope who punished Galileo, and was determined that the Inquisition should not allow the world to believe that the earth revolves about the sun, thus solemnly ordered the world, under pain of damnation, to believe in Xavier's miracles, including his "gift of tongues," and the return of the crucifix by the pious crab. But the legend was developed still further: Father Bouhours tells us, "The holy man spoke very well the language of those barbarians without having learned it, and had no need of an interpreter when he instructed." And, finally, in our own time, the Rev. Father Coleridge, speaking of the saint among the natives, says, "He could speak the language excellently, though he had never learned it." In the early biography, Tursellinus writes. "Nothing was a greater impediment to him than his ignorance of the Japanese tongues; for, ever and anon, when some uncouth expression offended their fastidious and delicate ears, the awkward speech of Francis was a cause of laughter." But Father Bouhours, a century later, writing of Xavier at the same period, says, "He preached in the afternoon to the Japanese in their language, but so naturally and with so much ease that he could not be taken for a foreigner." And finally, in 1872, Father Coleridge, of the Society of Jesus, speaking of Xavier at this time, says, "He spoke freely, flowingly, elegantly, as if he had lived in Japan all his life." Nor was even this sufficient: to make the legend complete, it was finally declared that, when Xavier addressed the natives of various tribes, each heard the sermon in his own language in which he was born. All this, as we have seen, directly contradicts not only the plain statements of Xavier himself, and various incidental testimonies in the letters of his associates, but the explicit declaration of Father Joseph Acosta. The latter historian dwells especially on the labour which Xavier was obliged to bestow on the study of the Japanese and other languages, and says, "Even if he had been endowed with the apostolic gift of tongues, he could not have spread more widely the glory of Christ."(295) (295) For the evolution of the miracles of Xavier, see his Letters, with Life, published by Leon Pages, Paris, 1855; also Maffei, Historiarum Indicarum libri xvi, Venice, 1589; also the lives by Tursellinus, various editions, beginning with that of 1594; Vitelleschi, 1622; Bouhours, 1683; Massei, second edition, 1682 (Rome), and others; Bartoli, Baltimore, 1868; Coleridge, 1872. In addition to these, I have compared, for a more extended discussion of this subject hereafter, a very great number of editions of these and other biographies of the saint, with speeches at the canonization, the bull of Gregory XV, various books of devotion, and a multitude of special writings, some of them in manuscript, upon the glories of the saint, including a large mass of material at the Royal Library in Munich and in the British Museum. I have relied entirely upon Catholic authors, and have not thought it worth while to consult any Protestant author. The illustration of the miracle of the crucifix and the crab in its final form is given in La Devotion de Dix Vendredis a l'Honneur de St. Francois Xavier, Bruxelles, 1699, Fig. 24: the pious crab is represented as presenting the crucifix by which a journey of forty leagues he has brought from the depths of the ocean to Xavier, who walks upon the shore. The book is in the Cornell University Library. For the letter of King John to Barreto, see Leon Pages's Lettres de Francois Xavier, Paris, 1855, vol. ii, p. 465. For the miracle among the Badages, compare Tursellinus, lib. ii, c. x, p. 16, with Bouhours, Dryden's translation, pp. 146, 147. For the miracle of the gift of tongues, in its higher development, see Bouhours, p. 235, and Coleridge, vo. i, pp. 151, 154, and vol. ii, p. 551 It is hardly necessary to attribute to the orators and biographers generally a conscious attempt to deceive. The simple fact is, that as a rule they thought, spoke, and wrote in obedience to the natural laws which govern the luxuriant growth of myth and legend in the warm atmosphere of love and devotion which constantly arises about great religious leaders in times when men have little or no knowledge of natural law, when there is little care for scientific evidence, and when he who believes most is thought most meritorious.(296) (296) Instances can be given of the same evolution of miraculous legend in our own time. To say nothing of the sacred fountain at La Salette, which preserves its healing powers in spite of the fact that the miracle that gave rise to them has twice been pronounced fraudulent by the French courts, and to pass without notice a multitude of others, not only in Catholic but in Protestant countries, the present writer may allude to one which in the year 1893 came under his own observation. On arriving in St. Petersburg to begin an official residence there, his attention was arrested by various portraits of a priest of the Russo-Greek Church; they were displayed in shop windows and held an honoured place in many private dwellings. These portraits ranged from lifelike photographs, which showed a plain, shrewd, kindly face, to those which were idealized until they bore a strong resemblance to the conventional representations of Jesus of Nazareth. On making inquiries, the writer found that these portraits represented Father Ivan, of Cronstadt, a priest noted for his good works, and very widely believed to be endowed with the power of working miracles. One day, in one of the most brilliant reception rooms of the northern capital, the subject of Father Ivan's miracles having been introduced, a gentleman in very high social position and entirely trustworthy spoke as follows: "There is something very surprising about these miracles. I am slow to believe in them, but I know the following to be a fact: The late Metropolitan Archbishop of St. Petersburg loved quiet, and was very adverse to anything which could possibly cause scandal. Hearing of Father Ivan's miracles, he summoned him to his presence and solemnly commanded him to abstain from all of the things which had given rise to his reported miracles, and with this injunction, dismissed him. Hardly had the priest left the room when the archbishop was struck with blindness and remained in this condition until the priest returned and removed his blindness by intercessory prayers." When the present writer asked the person giving this account if he directly knew these facts, he replied that he was, of course, not present when the miracle was wrought, but that he had the facts immediately from persons who knew all the parties concerned and were cognizant directly of the circumstances of the case. Some time afterward, the present writer being at an afternoon reception at one of the greater embassies, the same subject was touched upon, when an eminent general spoke as follows: "I am not inclined to believe in miracles, in fact am rather sceptical, but the proofs of those wrought by Father Ivan are overwhelming." He then went on to say that the late Metropolitan Archbishop was a man who loved quiet and disliked scandal; and that on this account he had summoned Father Ivan to his palace and ordered him to put an end to the conduct which had caused the reports concerning his miraculous powers, and then, with a wave of the arm, had dismissed him. The priest left the room, and from that moment the archbishop's arm was paralyzed, and it remained so until the penitent prelate summoned the priest again, by whose prayers the arm was restored to its former usefulness. There was present at the time another person besides the writer who had heard the previous statement as to the blindness of the archbishop, and on their both questioning the general if he were sure that the archbishop's arm was paralyzed, as stated, he declared that he could not doubt it, as he had it directly from persons entirely trustworthy, who were cognizant of all the facts. Some time later, the present writer, having an interview with the most eminent lay authority in the Greek Church, a functionary whose duties had brought him into almost daily contact with the late archbishop, asked him which of these stories was correct. This gentleman answered immediately: "Neither; I saw the archbishop constantly, and no such event occurred; he was never paralyzed and never blind." The same gentleman went on to say that, in his belief, Father Ivan had shown remarkable powers in healing the sick, and the greatest charity in relieving the distressed. It was made clearly evident that Father Ivan is a saintlike man, devoted to the needy and distressed and exercising an enormous influence over them--an influence so great that crowds await him whenever he visits the capital. In the atmosphere of Russian devotion myths and legends grow luxuriantly about him, nor is belief in him confined to the peasant class. In the autumn of 1894 he was summoned to the bedside of the Emperor Alexander III. Unfortunately for the peace of Europe, his intercession at that time proved unavailing. These examples will serve to illustrate the process which in thousands of cases has gone on from the earliest days of the Church until a very recent period. Everywhere miraculous cures became the rule rather than the exception throughout Christendom. III. THE MEDIAEVAL MIRACLES OF HEALING CHECK MEDICAL SCIENCE. So it was that, throughout antiquity, during the early history of the Church, throughout the Middle Ages, and indeed down to a comparatively recent period, testimony to miraculous interpositions which would now be laughed at by a schoolboy was accepted by the leaders of thought. St. Augustine was certainly one of the strongest minds in the early Church, and yet we find him mentioning, with much seriousness, a story that sundry innkeepers of his time put a drug into cheese which metamorphosed travellers into domestic animals, and asserting that the peacock is so favoured by the Almighty that its flesh will not decay, and that he has tested it and knows this to be a fact. With such a disposition regarding the wildest stories, it is not surprising that the assertion of St. Gregory of Nazianzen, during the second century, as to the cures wrought by the martyrs Cosmo and Damian, was echoed from all parts of Europe until every hamlet had its miracle-working saint or relic. The literature of these miracles is simply endless. To take our own ancestors alone, no one can read the Ecclesiastical History of Bede, or Abbot Samson's Miracles of St. Edmund, or the accounts given by Eadmer and Osbern of the miracles of St. Dunstan, or the long lists of those wrought by Thomas a Becket, or by any other in the army of English saints, without seeing the perfect naturalness of this growth. This evolution of miracle in all parts of Europe came out of a vast preceding series of beliefs, extending not merely through the early Church but far back into paganism. Just as formerly patients were cured in the temples of Aesculapius, so they were cured in the Middle Ages, and so they are cured now at the shrines of saints. Just as the ancient miracles were solemnly attested by votive tablets, giving names, dates, and details, and these tablets hung before the images of the gods, so the medieval miracles were attested by similar tablets hung before the images of the saints; and so they are attested to-day by similar tablets hung before the images of Our Lady of La Salette or of Lourdes. Just as faith in such miracles persisted, in spite of the small percentage of cures at those ancient places of healing, so faith persists to-day, despite the fact that in at least ninety per cent of the cases at Lourdes prayers prove unavailing. As a rule, the miracles of the sacred books were taken as models, and each of those given by the sacred chroniclers was repeated during the early ages of the Church and through the medieval period with endless variations of circumstance, but still with curious fidelity to the original type. It should be especially kept in mind that, while the vast majority of these were doubtless due to the myth-making faculty and to that development of legends which always goes on in ages ignorant of the relation between physical causes and effects, some of the miracles of healing had undoubtedly some basis in fact. We in modern times have seen too many cures performed through influences exercised upon the imagination, such as those of the Jansenists at the Cemetery of St. Medard, of the Ultramontanes at La Salette and Lourdes, of the Russian Father Ivan at St. Petersburg, and of various Protestant sects at Old Orchard and elsewhere, as well as at sundry camp meetings, to doubt that some cures, more or less permanent, were wrought by sainted personages in the early Church and throughout the Middle Ages.(297) (297) For the story of travellers converted into domestic animals, see St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, liber xviii, chaps. xvii, xviii, in Migne, tom. xli, p.574. For Gregory of Nazianen and the similarity of these Christian cures in general character to those wrought in the temples of Aesculapius, see Sprengel, vol. ii, pp. 145, 146. For the miracles wrought at the shrine of St. Edmund, see Samsonis Abbatis Opus de Miraculis Sancti Aedmundi, in the Master of the Rolls' series, passim, but especially chaps. xiv and xix for miracles of healing wrought on those who drank out of the saint's cup. For the mighty works of St. Dunstan, see the Mirac. Sancti Dunstani, auctore Eadmero and auctore Osberno, in the Master of the Rolls' series. As to Becket, see the Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, in the same series, and especially the lists of miracles--the mere index of them in the first volume requires thirteen octavo pages. For St. Martin of Tours, see the Guizot collection of French Chronicles. For miracle and shrine cures chronicled by Bede, see his Ecclesiastical History, passim, but especially from page 110 to page 267. For similarity between the ancient custom of allowing invalids to sleep in the temples of Serapis and the mediaeval custom of having them sleep in the church of St. Anthony of Padua and other churches, see Meyer, Aberglaube des Mittelalters, Basel, 1884, chap. iv. For the effect of "the vivid belief in supernatural action which attaches itself to the tombs of the saints," etc., as "a psychic agent of great value," see Littre, Medecine et Medecins, p. 131. For the Jansenist miracles at Paris, see La Verite des Miracles operes par l'Intercession de M. de Paris, par Montgeron, Utrecht, 1737, and especially the cases of Mary Anne Couronneau, Philippe Sargent, and Gautier de Pezenas. For some very thoughtful remarks as to the worthlessness of the testimony to miracles presented during the canonization proceedings at Rome, see Maury, Legendes Pieuses, pp. 4-7. There are undoubtedly serious lesions which yield to profound emotion and vigorous exertion born of persuasion, confidence, or excitement. The wonderful power of the mind over the body is known to every observant student. Mr. Herbert Spencer dwells upon the fact that intense feeling or passion may bring out great muscular force. Dr. Berdoe reminds us that "a gouty man who has long hobbled about on his crutch, finds his legs and power to run with them if pursued by a wild bull"; and that "the feeblest invalid, under the influence of delirium or other strong excitement, will astonish her nurse by the sudden accession of strength."(298) (298) For the citation in the text, as well as for a brief but remarkably valuable discussion of the power of the mind over the body in disease, see Dr. Berdoe's Medical View of the Miracles at Lourdes, in The Nineteenth Century for October, 1895. But miraculous cures were not ascribed to persons merely. Another growth, developed by the early Church mainly from germs in our sacred books, took shape in miracles wrought by streams, by pools of water, and especially by relics. Here, too, the old types persisted, and just as we find holy and healing wells, pools, and streams in all other ancient religions, so we find in the evolution of our own such examples as Naaman the Syrian cured of leprosy by bathing in the river Jordan, the blind man restored to sight by washing in the pool of Siloam, and the healing of those who touched the bones of Elisha, the shadow of St. Peter, or the handkerchief of St. Paul. St. Cyril, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and other great fathers of the early Church, sanctioned the belief that similar efficacy was to be found in the relics of the saints of their time; hence, St. Ambrose declared that "the precepts of medicine are contrary to celestial science, watching, and prayer," and we find this statement reiterated from time to time throughout the Middle Ages. From this idea was evolved that fetichism which we shall see for ages standing in the way of medical science. Theology, developed in accordance with this idea, threw about all cures, even those which resulted from scientific effort, an atmosphere of supernaturalism. The vividness with which the accounts of miracles in the sacred books were realized in the early Church continued the idea of miraculous intervention throughout the Middle Ages. The testimony of the great fathers of the Church to the continuance of miracles is overwhelming; but everything shows that they so fully expected miracles on the slightest occasion as to require nothing which in these days would be regarded as adequate evidence. In this atmosphere of theologic thought medical science was at once checked. The School of Alexandria, under the influence first of Jews and later of Christians, both permeated with Oriental ideas, and taking into their theory of medicine demons and miracles, soon enveloped everything in mysticism. In the Byzantine Empire of the East the same cause produced the same effect; the evolution of ascertained truth in medicine, begun by Hippocrates and continued by Herophilus, seemed lost forever. Medical science, trying to advance, was like a ship becalmed in the Sargasso Sea: both the atmosphere about it and the medium through which it must move resisted all progress. Instead of reliance upon observation, experience, experiment, and thought, attention was turned toward supernatural agencies.(299) (299) For the mysticism which gradually enveloped the School of Alexandria, see Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, De l'Ecole d'Alexandrie, Paris, 1845, vol. vi, p. 161. For the effect of the new doctrines on the Empire of the East, see Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 240. As to the more common miracles of healing and the acknowledgment of non-Christian miracles of healing by Christian fathers, see Fort, p. 84. IV. THE ATTRIBUTION OF DISEASE TO SATANIC INFLUENCE. --"PASTORAL MEDICINE" CHECKS SCIENTIFIC EFFORT. Especially prejudicial to a true development of medical science among the first Christians was their attribution of disease to diabolic influence. As we have seen, this idea had come from far, and, having prevailed in Chaldea, Egypt, and Persia, had naturally entered into the sacred books of the Hebrews. Moreover, St. Paul had distinctly declared that the gods of the heathen were devils; and everywhere the early Christians saw in disease the malignant work of these dethroned powers of evil. The Gnostic and Manichaean struggles had ripened the theologic idea that, although at times diseases are punishments by the Almighty, the main agency in them is Satanic. The great fathers and renowned leaders of the early Church accepted and strengthened this idea. Origen said: "It is demons which produce famine, unfruitfulness, corruptions of the air, pestilences; they hover concealed in clouds in the lower atmosphere, and are attracted by the blood and incense which the heathen offer to them as gods." St. Augustine said: "All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to these demons; chiefly do they torment fresh-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless, newborn infants." Tertullian insisted that a malevolent angel is in constant attendance upon every person. Gregory of Nazianzus declared that bodily pains are provoked by demons, and that medicines are useless, but that they are often cured by the laying on of consecrated hands. St. Nilus and St. Gregory of Tours, echoing St. Ambrose, gave examples to show the sinfulness of resorting to medicine instead of trusting to the intercession of saints. St. Bernard, in a letter to certain monks, warned them that to seek relief from disease in medicine was in harmony neither with their religion nor with the honour and purity of their order. This view even found its way into the canon law, which declared the precepts of medicine contrary to Divine knowledge. As a rule, the leaders of the Church discouraged the theory that diseases are due to natural causes, and most of them deprecated a resort to surgeons and physicians rather than to supernatural means.(300) (300) For Chaldean, Egyptian, and Persian ideas as to the diabolic origin of disease, see authorities already cited, especially Maspero and Sayce. For Origen, see the Contra Celsum, lib. viii, chap. xxxi. For Augustine, see De Divinatione Daemonum, chap. iii (p.585 of Migne, vol. xl). For Turtullian and Gregory of Nazianzus, see citations in Sprengel and in Fort, p. 6. For St. Nilus, see his life, in the Bollandise Acta Sanctorum. For Gregory of Tours, see his Historia Francorum, lib. v, cap. 6, and his De Mirac. S. Martini, lib. ii, cap. 60. I owe these citations to Mr. Lea (History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, vol. iii, p. 410, note). For the letter of St. Bernard to the monks of St. Anastasius, see his Epistola in Migne, tom. 182, pp. 550, 551. For the canon law, see under De Consecratione, dist. v, c. xxi, "Contraria sunt divinae cognitioni praecepta medicinae: a jejunio revocant, lucubrare non sinunt, ab omni intentione meditiationis abducunt." For the turning of the Greek mythology into a demonology as largely due to St. Paul, see I Corinthians x, 20: "The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God." Out of these and similar considerations was developed the vast system of "pastoral medicine," so powerful not only through the Middle Ages, but even in modern times, both among Catholics and Protestants. As to its results, we must bear in mind that, while there is no need to attribute the mass of stories regarding miraculous cures to conscious fraud, there was without doubt, at a later period, no small admixture of belief biased by self-interest, with much pious invention and suppression of facts. Enormous revenues flowed into various monasteries and churches in all parts of Europe from relics noted for their healing powers. Every cathedral, every great abbey, and nearly every parish church claimed possession of healing relics. While, undoubtedly, a childlike faith was at the bottom of this belief, there came out of it unquestionably a great development of the mercantile spirit. The commercial value of sundry relics was often very high. In the year 1056 a French ruler pledged securities to the amount of ten thousand solidi for the production of the relics of St. Just and St. Pastor, pending a legal decision regarding the ownership between him and the Archbishop of Narbonne. The Emperor of Germany on one occasion demanded, as a sufficient pledge for the establishment of a city market, the arm of St. George. The body of St. Sebastian brought enormous wealth to the Abbey of Soissons; Rome, Canterbury, Treves, Marburg, every great city, drew large revenues from similar sources, and the Venetian Republic ventured very considerable sums in the purchase of relics. Naturally, then, corporations, whether lay or ecclesiastical, which drew large revenue from relics looked with little favour on a science which tended to discredit their investments. Nowhere, perhaps, in Europe can the philosophy of this development of fetichism be better studied to-day than at Cologne. At the cathedral, preserved in a magnificent shrine since about the twelfth century, are the skulls of the Three Kings, or Wise Men of the East, who, guided by the star of Bethlehem, brought gifts to the Saviour. These relics were an enormous source of wealth to the cathedral chapter during many centuries. But other ecclesiastical bodies in that city were both pious and shrewd, and so we find that not far off, at the church of St. Gereon, a cemetery has been dug up, and the bones distributed over the walls as the relics of St. Gereon and his Theban band of martyrs! Again, at the neighbouring church of St. Ursula, we have the later spoils of another cemetery, covering the interior walls of the church as the bones of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgin martyrs: the fact that many of them, as anatomists now declare, are the bones of MEN does not appear in the Middle Ages to have diminished their power of competing with the relics at the other shrines in healing efficiency. No error in the choice of these healing means seems to have diminished their efficacy. When Prof. Buckland, the eminent osteologist and geologist, discovered that the relics of St. Rosalia at Palermo, which had for ages cured diseases and warded off epidemics, were the bones of a goat, this fact caused not the slightest diminution in their miraculous power. Other developments of fetich cure were no less discouraging to the evolution of medical science. Very important among these was the Agnus Dei, or piece of wax from the Paschal candles, stamped with the figure of a lamb and consecrated by the Pope. In 1471 Pope Paul II expatiated to the Church on the efficacy of this fetich in preserving men from fire, shipwreck, tempest, lightning, and hail, as well as in assisting women in childbirth; and he reserved to himself and his successors the manufacture of it. Even as late as 1517 Pope Leo X issued, for a consideration, tickets bearing a cross and the following inscription: "This cross measured forty times makes the height of Christ in his humanity. He who kisses it is preserved for seven days from falling-sickness, apoplexy, and sudden death." Naturally, the belief thus sanctioned by successive heads of the Church, infallible in all teaching regarding faith and morals, created a demand for amulets and charms of all kinds; and under this influence we find a reversion to old pagan fetiches. Nothing, on the whole, stood more constantly in the way of any proper development of medical science than these fetich cures, whose efficacy was based on theological reasoning and sanctioned by ecclesiastical policy. It would be expecting too much from human nature to imagine that pontiffs who derived large revenues from the sale of the Agnus Dei, or priests who derived both wealth and honours from cures wrought at shrines under their care, or lay dignitaries who had invested heavily in relics, should favour the development of any science which undermined their interests.(301) (301) See Fort's Medical Economy during the Middle Ages, pp. 211-213; also the Handbooks of Murray and Baedeker for North Germany, and various histories of medicine passim; also Collin de Plancy and scores of others. For the discovery that the relics of St. Rosaria at Palermo are simply the bones of a goat, see Gordon, Life of Buckland, pp. 94-96. For an account of the Agnes Dei, see Rydberg, pp. 62, 63; and for "Conception Billets," pp. 64 and 65. For Leo X's tickets, see Hausser (professor at Heidelberg), Period of Reformation, English translation, p. 17. V. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO ANATOMICAL STUDIES. Yet a more serious stumbling-block, hindering the beginnings of modern medicine and surgery, was a theory regarding the unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead. This theory, like so many others which the Church cherished as peculiarly its own, had really been inherited from the old pagan civilizations. So strong was it in Egypt that the embalmer was regarded as accursed; traces of it appear in Greco-Roman life, and hence it came into the early Church, where it was greatly strengthened by the addition of perhaps the most noble of mystic ideas--the recognition of the human body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. Hence Tertullian denounced the anatomist Herophilus as a butcher, and St. Augustine spoke of anatomists generally in similar terms. But this nobler conception was alloyed with a medieval superstition even more effective, when the formula known as the Apostles' Creed had, in its teachings regarding the resurrection of the body, supplanted the doctrine laid down by St. Paul. Thence came a dread of mutilating the body in such a way that some injury might result to its final resurrection at the Last Day, and additional reasons for hindering dissections in the study of anatomy. To these arguments against dissection was now added another--one which may well fill us with amazement. It is the remark of the foremost of recent English philosophical historians, that of all organizations in human history the Church of Rome has caused the greatest spilling of innocent blood. No one conversant with history, even though he admit all possible extenuating circumstances, and honour the older Church for the great services which can undoubtedly be claimed for her, can deny this statement. Strange is it, then, to note that one of the main objections developed in the Middle Ages against anatomical studies was the maxim that "the Church abhors the shedding of blood." On this ground, in 1248, the Council of Le Mans forbade surgery to monks. Many other councils did the same, and at the end of the thirteenth century came the most serious blow of all; for then it was that Pope Boniface VIII, without any of that foresight of consequences which might well have been expected in an infallible teacher, issued a decretal forbidding a practice which had come into use during the Crusades, namely, the separation of the flesh from the bones of the dead whose remains it was desired to carry back to their own country. The idea lying at the bottom of this interdiction was in all probability that which had inspired Tertullian to make his bitter utterance against Herophilus; but, be that as it may, it soon came to be considered as extending to all dissection, and thereby surgery and medicine were crippled for more than two centuries; it was the worst blow they ever received, for it impressed upon the mind of the Church the belief that all dissection is sacrilege, and led to ecclesiastical mandates withdrawing from the healing art the most thoughtful and cultivated men of the Middle Ages and giving up surgery to the lowest class of nomadic charlatans. So deeply was this idea rooted in the mind of the universal Church that for over a thousand years surgery was considered dishonourable: the greatest monarchs were often unable to secure an ordinary surgical operation; and it was only in 1406 that a better beginning was made, when the Emperor Wenzel of Germany ordered that dishonour should no longer attach to the surgical profession.(302) (302) As to religious scruples against dissection, and abhorrence of the Paraschites, or embalmer, see Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 216. For denunciation of surgery by the Church authorities, see Sprengel, vol. ii, pp. 432-435; also Fort, pp. 452 et seq.; and for the reasoning which led the Church to forbid surgery to priests, see especially Fredault, Histoire de la Medecine, p. 200. As to the decretal of Boniface VIII, the usual statement is that he forbade all dissections. While it was undoubtedly construed universally to prohibit dissections for anatomical purposes, its declared intent was as stated in the text; that it was constantly construed against anatomical investigations can not for a moment be denied. This construction is taken for granted in the great Histoire Litteraire de la France, founded by the Benedictines, certainly a very high authority as to the main current of opinion in the Church. For the decretal of Boniface VIII, see the Corpus Juris Canonici. I have also used the edition of Paris, 1618, where it may be found on pp. 866, 867. See also, in spite of the special pleading of Giraldi, the Benedictine Hist. Lit. de la France, tome xvi, p. 98. VI. NEW BEGINNINGS OF MEDICAL SCIENCE. In spite of all these opposing forces, the evolution of medical science continued, though but slowly. In the second century of the Christian era Galen had made himself a great authority at Rome, and from Rome had swayed the medical science of the world: his genius triumphed over the defects of his method; but, though he gave a powerful impulse to medicine, his dogmatism stood in its way long afterward. The places where medicine, such as it thus became, could be applied, were at first mainly the infirmaries of various monasteries, especially the larger ones of the Benedictine order: these were frequently developed into hospitals. Many monks devoted themselves to such medical studies as were permitted, and sundry churchmen and laymen did much to secure and preserve copies of ancient medical treatises. So, too, in the cathedral schools established by Charlemagne and others, provision was generally made for medical teaching; but all this instruction, whether in convents or schools, was wretchedly poor. It consisted not in developing by individual thought and experiment the gifts of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, but almost entirely in the parrot-like repetition of their writings. But, while the inherited ideas of Church leaders were thus unfavourable to any proper development of medical science, there were two bodies of men outside the Church who, though largely fettered by superstition, were far less so than the monks and students of ecclesiastical schools: these were the Jews and Mohammedans. The first of these especially had inherited many useful sanitary and hygienic ideas, which had probably been first evolved by the Egyptians, and from them transmitted to the modern world mainly through the sacred books attributed to Moses. The Jewish scholars became especially devoted to medical science. To them is largely due the building up of the School of Salerno, which we find flourishing in the tenth century. Judged by our present standards its work was poor indeed, but compared with other medical instruction of the time it was vastly superior: it developed hygienic principles especially, and brought medicine upon a higher plane. Still more important is the rise of the School of Montpellier; this was due almost entirely to Jewish physicians, and it developed medical studies to a yet higher point, doing much to create a medical profession worthy of the name throughout southern Europe. As to the Arabians, we find them from the tenth to the fourteenth century, especially in Spain, giving much thought to medicine, and to chemistry as subsidiary to it. About the beginning of the ninth century, when the greater Christian writers were supporting fetich by theology, Almamon, the Moslem, declared, "They are the elect of God, his best and most useful servants, whose lives are devoted to the improvement of their rational faculties." The influence of Avicenna, the translator of the works of Aristotle, extended throughout all Europe during the eleventh century. The Arabians were indeed much fettered by tradition in medical science, but their translations of Hippocrates and Galen preserved to the world the best thus far developed in medicine, and still better were their contributions to pharmacy: these remain of value to the present hour.(303) (303) For the great services rendered to the development of medicine by the Jews, see Monteil, Medecine en France, p. 58; also the historians of medicine generally. For the quotation from Almamon, see Gibbon, vol. x, p. 42. For the services of both Jews and Arabians, see Bedarride, Histoire des Juifs, p. 115; also Sismondi, Histoire des Francais, tome i, p. 191. For the Arabians, especially, see Rosseeuw Saint-Hilaire, Histoire d'Espagne, Paris, 1844, vol. iii, pp. 191 et seq. For the tendency of the Mosaic books to insist on hygienic rather than therapeutical treatment, and its consequences among Jewish physicians, see Sprengel, but especially Fredault, p.14. Various Christian laymen also rose above the prevailing theologic atmosphere far enough to see the importance of promoting scientific development. First among these we may name the Emperor Charlemagne; he and his great minister, Alcuin, not only promoted medical studies in the schools they founded, but also made provision for the establishment of botanic gardens in which those herbs were especially cultivated which were supposed to have healing virtues. So, too, in the thirteenth century, the Emperor Frederick II, though under the ban of the Pope, brought together in his various journeys, and especially in his crusading expeditions, many Greek and Arabic manuscripts, and took special pains to have those which concerned medicine preserved and studied; he also promoted better ideas of medicine and embodied them in laws. Men of science also rose, in the stricter sense of the word, even in the centuries under the most complete sway of theological thought and ecclesiastical power; a science, indeed, alloyed with theology, but still infolding precious germs. Of these were men like Arnold of Villanova, Bertrand de Gordon, Albert of Bollstadt, Basil Valentine, Raymond Lully, and, above all, Roger Bacon; all of whom cultivated sciences subsidiary to medicine, and in spite of charges of sorcery, with possibilities of imprisonment and death, kept the torch of knowledge burning, and passed it on to future generations.(304) (304) For the progress of sciences subsidiary to medicine even in the darkest ages, see Fort, pp. 374, 375; also Isensee, Geschichte der Medicin, pp. 225 et seq.; also Monteil, p. 89; Heller, Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, bk. 3; also Kopp, Geschichte der Chemie. For Frederick II and his Medicinal-Gesetz, see Baas, p. 221, but especially Von Raumer, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen, Leipsic, 1872, vol. iii, p. 259. From the Church itself, even when the theological atmosphere was most dense, rose here and there men who persisted in something like scientific effort. As early as the ninth century, Bertharius, a monk of Monte Cassino, prepared two manuscript volumes of prescriptions selected from ancient writers; other monks studied them somewhat, and, during succeeding ages, scholars like Hugo, Abbot of St. Denis,--Notker, monk of St. Gall,--Hildegard, Abbess of Rupertsberg,--Milo, Archbishop of Beneventum,--and John of St. Amand, Canon of Tournay, did something for medicine as they understood it. Unfortunately, they generally understood its theory as a mixture of deductions from Scripture with dogmas from Galen, and its practice as a mixture of incantations with fetiches. Even Pope Honorius III did something for the establishment of medical schools; but he did so much more to place ecclesiastical and theological fetters upon teachers and taught, that the value of his gifts may well be doubted. All germs of a higher evolution of medicine were for ages well kept under by the theological spirit. As far back as the sixth century so great a man as Pope Gregory I showed himself hostile to the development of this science. In the beginning of the twelfth century the Council of Rheims interdicted the study of law and physic to monks, and a multitude of other councils enforced this decree. About the middle of the same century St. Bernard still complained that monks had too much to do with medicine; and a few years later we have decretals like those of Pope Alexander III forbidding monks to study or practise it. For many generations there appear evidences of a desire among the more broad-minded churchmen to allow the cultivation of medical science among ecclesiastics: Popes like Clement III and Sylvester II seem to have favoured this, and we even hear of an Archbishop of Canterbury skilled in medicine; but in the beginning of the thirteenth century the Fourth Council of the Lateran forbade surgical operations to be practised by priests, deacons, and subdeacons; and some years later Honorius III reiterated this decree and extended it. In 1243 the Dominican order forbade medical treatises to be brought into their monasteries, and finally all participation of ecclesiastics in the science and art of medicine was effectually prevented.(305) (305) For statements as to these decrees of the highest Church and monastic authorities against medicine and surgery, see Sprengel, Baas, Geschichte der Medicin, p. 204, and elsewhere; also Buckle, Posthumous Works, vol. ii, p. 567. For a long list of Church dignitaries who practised a semi-theological medicine in the Middle Ages, see Baas, pp. 204, 205. For Bertharius, Hildegard, and others mentioned, see also Sprengel and other historians of medicine. For clandestine study and practice of medicine by sundry ecclesiastics in spite of the prohibition by the Church, see Von Raumer, Hohenstaufen, vol. vi, p. 438. For some remarks on this subject by an eminent and learned ecclesiastic, see Ricker, O. S. B., professor in the University of Vienna, Pastoral-Psychiatrie, 1894, pp. 12,13. VII. THEOLOGICAL DISCOURAGEMENT OF MEDICINE. While various churchmen, building better than they knew, thus did something to lay foundations for medical study, the Church authorities, as a rule, did even more to thwart it among the very men who, had they been allowed liberty, would have cultivated it to the highest advantage. Then, too, we find cropping out every where the feeling that, since supernatural means are so abundant, there is something irreligious in seeking cure by natural means: ever and anon we have appeals to Scripture, and especially to the case of King Asa, who trusted to physicians rather than to the priests of Jahveh, and so died. Hence it was that St. Bernard declared that monks who took medicine were guilty of conduct unbecoming to religion. Even the School of Salerno was held in aversion by multitudes of strict churchmen, since it prescribed rules for diet, thereby indicating a belief that diseases arise from natural causes and not from the malice of the devil: moreover, in the medical schools Hippocrates was studied, and he had especially declared that demoniacal possession is "nowise more divine, nowise more infernal, than any other disease." Hence it was, doubtless, that the Lateran Council, about the beginning of the thirteenth century, forbade physicians, under pain of exclusion from the Church, to undertake medical treatment without calling in ecclesiastical advice. This view was long cherished in the Church, and nearly two hundred and fifty years later Pope Pius V revived it by renewing the command of Pope Innocent and enforcing it with penalties. Not only did Pope Pius order that all physicians before administering treatment should call in "a physician of the soul," on the ground, as he declares, that "bodily infirmity frequently arises from sin," but he ordered that, if at the end of three days the patient had not made confession to a priest, the medical man should cease his treatment, under pain of being deprived of his right to practise, and of expulsion from the faculty if he were a professor, and that every physician and professor of medicine should make oath that he was strictly fulfilling these conditions. Out of this feeling had grown up another practice, which made the development of medicine still more difficult--the classing of scientific men generally with sorcerers and magic-mongers: from this largely rose the charge of atheism against physicians, which ripened into a proverb, "Where there are three physicians there are two atheists."(306) (306) "Ubi sunt tres medici ibi sunt duo athei." For the bull of Pius V, see the Bullarium Romanum, ed. Gaude, Naples, 1882, tom. vii, pp. 430, 431. Magic was so common a charge that many physicians seemed to believe it themselves. In the tenth century Gerbert, afterward known as Pope Sylvester II, was at once suspected of sorcery when he showed a disposition to adopt scientific methods; in the eleventh century this charge nearly cost the life of Constantine Africanus when he broke from the beaten path of medicine; in the thirteenth, it gave Roger Bacon, one of the greatest benefactors of mankind, many years of imprisonment, and nearly brought him to the stake: these cases are typical of very many. Still another charge against physicians who showed a talent for investigation was that of Mohammedanism and Averroism; and Petrarch stigmatized Averroists as "men who deny Genesis and bark at Christ."(307) (307) For Averroes, see Renan, Averroes et l'Averroisme, Paris, 1861, pp. 327-335. For a perfectly just statement of the only circumstances which can justify a charge of atheism, see Rev. Dr. Deems, in Popular Science Monthly, February, 1876. The effect of this widespread ecclesiastical opposition was, that for many centuries the study of medicine was relegated mainly to the lowest order of practitioners. There was, indeed, one orthodox line of medical evolution during the later Middle Ages: St. Thomas Aquinas insisted that the forces of the body are independent of its physical organization, and that therefore these forces are to be studied by the scholastic philosophy and the theological method, instead of by researches into the structure of the body; as a result of this, mingled with survivals of various pagan superstitions, we have in anatomy and physiology such doctrines as the increase and decrease of the brain with the phases of the moon, the ebb and flow of human vitality with the tides of the ocean, the use of the lungs to fan the heart, the function of the liver as the seat of love, and that of the spleen as the centre of wit. Closely connected with these methods of thought was the doctrine of signatures. It was reasoned that the Almighty must have set his sign upon the various means of curing disease which he has provided: hence it was held that bloodroot, on account of its red juice, is good for the blood; liverwort, having a leaf like the liver, cures diseases of the liver; eyebright, being marked with a spot like an eye, cures diseases of the eyes; celandine, having a yellow juice, cures jaundice; bugloss, resembling a snake's head, cures snakebite; red flannel, looking like blood, cures blood-taints, and therefore rheumatism; bear's grease, being taken from an animal thickly covered with hair, is recommended to persons fearing baldness.(308) (308) For a summary of the superstitions which arose under the theological doctrine of signatures, see Dr. Eccles's admirable little tract on the Evolution of Medical Science, p. 140; see also Scoffern, Science and Folk Lore, p. 76. Still another method evolved by this theological pseudoscience was that of disgusting the demon with the body which he tormented--hence the patient was made to swallow or apply to himself various unspeakable ordures, with such medicines as the livers of toads, the blood of frogs and rats, fibres of the hangman's rope, and ointment made from the body of gibbeted criminals. Many of these were survivals of heathen superstitions, but theologic reasoning wrought into them an orthodox significance. As an example of this mixture of heathen with Christian magic, we may cite the following from a medieval medical book as a salve against "nocturnal goblin visitors": "Take hop plant, wormwood, bishopwort, lupine, ash-throat, henbane, harewort, viper's bugloss, heathberry plant, cropleek, garlic, grains of hedgerife, githrife, and fennel. Put these worts into a vessel, set them under the altar, sing over them nine masses, boil them in butter and sheep's grease, add much holy salt, strain through a cloth, throw the worts into running water. If any ill tempting occur to a man, or an elf or goblin night visitors come, smear his body with this salve, and put it on his eyes, and cense him with incense, and sign him frequently with the sign of the cross. His condition will soon be better."(309) (309) For a list of unmentionable ordures used in Germany near the end of the seventeenth century, see Lammert, Volksmedizin und medizinischer Aberglaube in Bayern, Wurzburg, 1869, p. 34, note. For the English prescription given, see Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wort-cunning, and Star-craft of Early England, in the Master of the Rolls' series, London, 1865, vol. ii, pp. 345 and following. Still another of these prescriptions given by Cockayne covers three or four octavo pages. For very full details of this sort of sacred pseudo-science in Germany, with accounts of survivals of it at the present time, see Wuttke, Prof. der Theologie in Halle, Der Deutsche Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart, Berlin, 1869, passim. For France, see Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation francaise, pp. 371 et seq. As to surgery, this same amalgamation of theology with survivals of pagan beliefs continued to check the evolution of medical science down to the modern epoch. The nominal hostility of the Church to the shedding of blood withdrew, as we have seen, from surgical practice the great body of her educated men; hence surgery remained down to the fifteenth century a despised profession, its practice continued largely in the hands of charlatans, and down to a very recent period the name "barber-surgeon" was a survival of this. In such surgery, the application of various ordures relieved fractures; the touch of the hangman cured sprains; the breath of a donkey expelled poison; friction with a dead man's tooth cured toothache.(310) (310) On the low estate of surgery during the Middle Ages, see the histories of medicine already cited, and especially Kotelmann, Gesundheitspflege im Mittelalter, Hamburg, 1890, pp. 216 et seq. The enormous development of miracle and fetich cures in the Church continued during century after century, and here probably lay the main causes of hostility between the Church on the one hand and the better sort of physicians on the other; namely, in the fact that the Church supposed herself in possession of something far better than scientific methods in medicine. Under the sway of this belief a natural and laudable veneration for the relics of Christian martyrs was developed more and more into pure fetichism. Thus the water in which a single hair of a saint had been dipped was used as a purgative; water in which St. Remy's ring had been dipped cured fevers; wine in which the bones of a saint had been dipped cured lunacy; oil from a lamp burning before the tomb of St. Gall cured tumours; St. Valentine cured epilepsy; St. Christopher, throat diseases; St. Eutropius, dropsy; St. Ovid, deafness; St. Gervase, rheumatism; St. Apollonia, toothache; St. Vitus, St. Anthony, and a multitude of other saints, the maladies which bear their names. Even as late as 1784 we find certain authorities in Bavaria ordering that any one bitten by a mad dog shall at once put up prayers at the shrine of St. Hubert, and not waste his time in any attempts at medical or surgical cure.(311) In the twelfth century we find a noted cure attempted by causing the invalid to drink water in which St. Bernard had washed his hands. Flowers which had rested on the tomb of a saint, when steeped in water, were supposed to be especially efficacious in various diseases. The pulpit everywhere dwelt with unction on the reality of fetich cures, and among the choice stories collected by Archbishop Jacques de Vitry for the use of preachers was one which, judging from its frequent recurrence in monkish literature, must have sunk deep into the popular mind: "Two lazy beggars, one blind, the other lame, try to avoid the relics of St. Martin, borne about in procession, so that they may not be healed and lose their claim to alms. The blind man takes the lame man on his shoulders to guide him, but they are caught in the crowd and healed against their will."(312) (311) See Baas, p. 614; also Biedermann. (312) For the efficacy of flowers, see the Bollandist Lives of the Saints, cited in Fort, p. 279; also pp. 457, 458. For the story of those unwillingly cured, see the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, edited by Prof. T. F. Crane, of Cornell University, London, 1890, pp. 52, 182. Very important also throughout the Middle Ages were the medical virtues attributed to saliva. The use of this remedy had early Oriental sanction. It is clearly found in Egypt. Pliny devotes a considerable part of one of his chapters to it; Galen approved it; Vespasian, when he visited Alexandria, is said to have cured a blind man by applying saliva to his eves; but the great example impressed most forcibly upon the medieval mind was the use of it ascribed in the fourth Gospel to Jesus himself: thence it came not only into Church ceremonial, but largely into medical practice.(313) (313) As to the use of saliva in medicine, see Story, Castle of St. Angelo, and Other Essays, London, 1877, pp. 208 and elsewhere. For Pliny, Galen, and others, see the same, p. 211; see also the book of Tobit, chap. xi, 2-13. For the case of Vespasian, see Suetonius, Life of Vespasian; also Tacitus, Historiae, lib. iv, c. 81. For its use by St. Francis Xavier, see Coleridge, Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, London, 1872. As the theological atmosphere thickened, nearly every country had its long list of saints, each with a special power over some one organ or disease. The clergy, having great influence over the medical schools, conscientiously mixed this fetich medicine with the beginnings of science. In the tenth century, even at the School of Salerno, we find that the sick were cured not only by medicine, but by the relics of St. Matthew and others. Human nature, too, asserted itself, then as now, by making various pious cures fashionable for a time and then allowing them to become unfashionable. Just as we see the relics of St. Cosmo and St. Damian in great vogue during the early Middle Ages, but out of fashion and without efficacy afterward, so we find in the thirteenth century that the bones of St. Louis, having come into fashion, wrought multitudes of cures, while in the fourteenth, having become unfashionable, they ceased to act, and gave place for a time to the relics of St. Roch of Montpellier and St. Catherine of Sienna, which in their turn wrought many cures until they too became out of date and yielded to other saints. Just so in modern times the healing miracles of La Salette have lost prestige in some measure, and those of Lourdes have come into fashion.(314) (314) For one of these lists of saints curing diseaes, see Pettigrew, On Superstitions connected with Medicine; for another, see Jacob, Superstitions Populaires, pp. 96-100; also Rydberg, p. 69; also Maury, Rambaud, and others. For a comparison of fashions in miracles with fashions in modern healing agents, see Littre, Medecine et Medecins, pp. 118, 136 and elsewhere; also Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 143. Even such serious matters as fractures, calculi, and difficult parturition, in which modern science has achieved some of its greatest triumphs, were then dealt with by relics; and to this hour the ex votos hanging at such shrines as those of St. Genevieve at Paris, of St. Antony at Padua, of the Druid image at Chartres, of the Virgin at Einsiedeln and Lourdes, of the fountain at La Salette, are survivals of this same conception of disease and its cure. So, too, with a multitude of sacred pools, streams, and spots of earth. In Ireland, hardly a parish has not had one such sacred centre; in England and Scotland there have been many; and as late as 1805 the eminent Dr. Milner, of the Roman Catholic Church, gave a careful and earnest account of a miraculous cure wrought at a sacred well in Flintshire. In all parts of Europe the pious resort to wells and springs continued long after the close of the Middle Ages, and has not entirely ceased to-day. It is not at all necessary to suppose intentional deception in the origin and maintenance of all fetich cures. Although two different judicial investigations of the modern miracles at La Salette have shown their origin tainted with fraud, and though the recent restoration of the Cathedral of Trondhjem has revealed the fact that the healing powers of the sacred spring which once brought such great revenues to that shrine were assisted by angelic voices spoken through a tube in the walls, not unlike the pious machinery discovered in the Temple of Isis at Pompeii, there is little doubt that the great majority of fountain and even shrine cures, such as they have been, have resulted from a natural law, and that belief in them was based on honest argument from Scripture. For the theological argument which thus stood in the way of science was simply this: if the Almighty saw fit to raise the dead man who touched the bones of Elisha, why should he not restore to life the patient who touches at Cologne the bones of the Wise Men of the East who followed the star of the Nativity? If Naaman was cured by dipping himself in the waters of the Jordan, and so many others by going down into the Pool of Siloam, why should not men still be cured by bathing in pools which men equally holy with Elisha have consecrated? If one sick man was restored by touching the garments of St. Paul, why should not another sick man be restored by touching the seamless coat of Christ at Treves, or the winding-sheet of Christ at Besancon? And out of all these inquiries came inevitably that question whose logical answer was especially injurious to the development of medical science: Why should men seek to build up scientific medicine and surgery, when relics, pilgrimages, and sacred observances, according to an overwhelming mass of concurrent testimony, have cured and are curing hosts of sick folk in all parts of Europe? (315) (315) For sacred fountains in modern times, see Pettigrew, as above, p. 42; also Dalyell, Darker Superstitions of Scotland, pp. 82 and following; also Montalembert, Les Moines d'Occident, tome iii, p. 323, note. For those in Ireland, with many curious details, see S. C. Hall, Ireland, its Scenery and Character, London, 1841, vol. i, p. 282, and passim. For the case in Flintshire, see Authentic Documents relative to the Miraculous Cure of Winifred White, of the Town of Wolverhampton, at Holywell, Flintshire, on the 28th of June, 1805, by John Milner, D. D., Vicar Apostolic, etc., London, 1805. For sacred wells in France, see Chevart, Histoire de Chartres, vol. i, pp. 84-89, and French local histories generally. For superstitions attaching to springs in Germany, see Wuttke, Volksaberglaube, Sections 12 and 356. For one of the most exquisitely wrought works of modern fiction, showing perfectly the recent evolution of miraculous powers at a fashionable spring in France, see Gustave Droz, Autour d'une Source. The reference to the old pious machinery at Trondhjem is based upon personal observation by the present writer in August, 1893. Still another development of the theological spirit, mixed with professional exclusiveness and mob prejudice, wrought untold injury. Even to those who had become so far emancipated from allegiance to fetich cures as to consult physicians, it was forbidden to consult those who, as a rule, were the best. From a very early period of European history the Jews had taken the lead in medicine; their share in founding the great schools of Salerno and Montpellier we have already noted, and in all parts of Europe we find them acknowledged leaders in the healing art. The Church authorities, enforcing the spirit of the time, were especially severe against these benefactors: that men who openly rejected the means of salvation, and whose souls were undeniably lost, should heal the elect seemed an insult to Providence; preaching friars denounced them from the pulpit, and the rulers in state and church, while frequently secretly consulting them, openly proscribed them. Gregory of Tours tells us of an archdeacon who, having been partially cured of disease of the eyes by St. Martin, sought further aid from a Jewish physician, with the result that neither the saint nor the Jew could help him afterward. Popes Eugene IV, Nicholas V, and Calixtus III especially forbade Christians to employ them. The Trullanean Council in the eighth century, the Councils of Beziers and Alby in the thirteenth, the Councils of Avignon and Salamanca in the fourteenth, the Synod of Bamberg and the Bishop of Passau in the fifteenth, the Council of Avignon in the sixteenth, with many others, expressly forbade the faithful to call Jewish physicians or surgeons; such great preachers as John Geiler and John Herolt thundered from the pulpit against them and all who consulted them. As late as the middle of the seventeenth century, when the City Council of Hall, in Wurtemberg, gave some privileges to a Jewish physician "on account of his admirable experience and skill," the clergy of the city joined in a protest, declaring that "it were better to die with Christ than to be cured by a Jew doctor aided by the devil." Still, in their extremity, bishops, cardinals, kings, and even popes, insisted on calling in physicians of the hated race.(316) (316) For the general subject of the influence of theological idea upon medicine, see Fort, History of Medical Economy during the Middle Ages, New York, 1883, chaps. xiii and xviii; also Colin de Plancy, Dictionnaire des Reliques, passim; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation francaise, Paris, 1885, vol. i, chap. xviii; also Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 345, and elsewhere; also Baas and others. For proofs that the School of Salerno was not founded by the monks, Benedictine or other, but by laymen, who left out a faculty of theology from their organization, see Haeser, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin, vol. i, p. 646; also Baas. For a very strong statement that married professors, women, and Jews were admitted to professional chairs, see Baas, pp. 208 et seq.; also summary by Dr. Payne, article in the Encyc. Brit. Sprengel's old theory that the school was founded by Benedictines seems now entirely given up; see Haeser and Bass on the subject; also Daremberg, La Medecine, p. 133. For the citation from Gregory of Tours, see his Hist. Francorum, lib. vi. For the eminence of Jewish physicians and proscription of them, see Beugnot, Les Juifs d'Occident, Paris, 1824, pp. 76-94; also Bedarride, Les Juifs en France, en Italie, et en Espagne, chaps. v, viii, x, and xiii; also Renouard, Histoire de la Medecine, Paris, 1846, tome i, p. 439; also especially Lammert, Volksmedizin, etc., in Bayern, p. 6, note. For Church decrees against them, see the Acta Conciliorum, ed. Hardouin, vol. x, pp. 1634, 1700, 1870, 1873, etc. For denunciations of them by Geiler and others, see Kotelmann, Gesundheitspflege im Mittelalter, pp. 194, 195. For a list of kings and popes who persisted in having Jewish physicians and for other curious information of the sort, see Prof. Levi of Vercelli, Cristiani ed Ebrei nel Medio Evo, pp. 200-207; and for a very valuable summary, see Lecky, History of Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii, pp. 265-271. VIII. FETICH CURES UNDER PROTESTANTISM.--THE ROYAL TOUCH. The Reformation made no sudden change in the sacred theory of medicine. Luther, as is well known, again and again ascribed his own diseases to "devils' spells," declaring that "Satan produces all the maladies which afflict mankind, for he is the prince of death," and that "he poisons the air"; but that "no malady comes from God." From that day down to the faith cures of Boston, Old Orchard, and among the sect of "Peculiar People" in our own time, we see the results among Protestants of seeking the cause of disease in Satanic influence and its cure in fetichism. Yet Luther, with his sturdy common sense, broke away from one belief which has interfered with the evolution of medicine from the dawn of Christianity until now. When that troublesome declaimer, Carlstadt, declared that "whoso falls sick shall use no physic, but commit his case to God, praying that His will be done," Luther asked, "Do you eat when you are hungry?" and the answer being in the affirmative, he continued, "Even so you may use physic, which is God's gift just as meat and drink is, or whatever else we use for the preservation of life." Hence it was, doubtless, that the Protestant cities of Germany were more ready than others to admit anatomical investigation by proper dissections.(317) (317) For Luther's belief and his answer to Carlstadt, see his Table Talk, especially in Hazlitt's edition, pp. 250-257; also his letters passim. For recent "faith cures," see Dr. Buckley's articles on Faith Healing and Kindred Phenomena, in The Century, 1886. For the greater readiness of Protestant cities to facilitate dissections, see Toth, Andreas Vesalius, p. 33. Perhaps the best-known development of a theological view in the Protestant Church was that mainly evolved in England out of a French germ of theological thought--a belief in the efficacy of the royal touch in sundry diseases, especially epilepsy and scrofula, the latter being consequently known as the king's evil. This mode of cure began, so far as history throws light upon it, with Edward the Confessor in the eleventh century, and came down from reign to reign, passing from the Catholic saint to Protestant debauchees upon the English throne, with ever-increasing miraculous efficacy. Testimony to the reality of these cures is overwhelming. As a simple matter of fact, there are no miracles of healing in the history of the human race more thoroughly attested than those wrought by the touch of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, the Stuarts, and especially of that chosen vessel, Charles II. Though Elizabeth could not bring herself fully to believe in the reality of these cures, Dr. Tooker, the Queen's chaplain, afterward Dean of Lichfield, testifies fully of his own knowledge to the cures wrought by her, as also does William Clowes, the Queen's surgeon. Fuller, in his Church History, gives an account of a Roman Catholic who was thus cured by the Queen's touch and converted to Protestantism. Similar testimony exists as to cures wrought by James I. Charles I also enjoyed the same power, in spite of the public declaration against its reality by Parliament. In one case the King saw a patient in the crowd, too far off to be touched, and simply said, "God bless thee and grant thee thy desire"; whereupon, it is asserted, the blotches and humours disappeared from the patient's body and appeared in the bottle of medicine which he held in his hand; at least so says Dr. John Nicholas, Warden of Winchester College, who declares this of his own knowledge to be every word of it true. But the most incontrovertible evidence of this miraculous gift is found in the case of Charles II, the most thoroughly cynical debauchee who ever sat on the English throne before the advent of George IV. He touched nearly one hundred thousand persons, and the outlay for gold medals issued to the afflicted on these occasions rose in some years as high as ten thousand pounds. John Brown, surgeon in ordinary to his Majesty and to St. Thomas's Hospital, and author of many learned works on surgery and anatomy, published accounts of sixty cures due to the touch of this monarch; and Sergeant-Surgeon Wiseman devotes an entire book to proving the reality of these cures, saying, "I myself have been frequent witness to many hundreds of cures performed by his Majesty's touch alone without any assistance of chirurgery, and these many of them had tyred out the endeavours of able chirurgeons before they came thither." Yet it is especially instructive to note that, while in no other reign were so many people touched for scrofula, and in none were so many cures vouched for, in no other reign did so many people die of that disease: the bills of mortality show this clearly, and the reason doubtless is the general substitution of supernatural for scientific means of cure. This is but one out of many examples showing the havoc which a scientific test always makes among miracles if men allow it to be applied. To James II the same power continued; and if it be said, in the words of Lord Bacon, that "imagination is next of kin to miracle--a working faith," something else seems required to account for the testimony of Dr. Heylin to cures wrought by the royal touch upon babes in their mothers' arms. Myth-making and marvel-mongering were evidently at work here as in so many other places, and so great was the fame of these cures that we find, in the year before James was dethroned, a pauper at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, petitioning the General Assembly to enable him to make the voyage to England in order that he may be healed by the royal touch. The change in the royal succession does not seem to have interfered with the miracle; for, though William III evidently regarded the whole thing as a superstition, and on one occasion is said to have touched a patient, saying to him, "God give you better health and more sense," Whiston assures us that this person was healed, notwithstanding William's incredulity. As to Queen Anne, Dr. Daniel Turner, in his Art of Surgery, relates that several cases of scrofula which had been unsuccessfully treated by himself and Dr. Charles Bernard, sergeant-surgeon to her Majesty, yielded afterward to the efficacy of the Queen's touch. Naturally does Collier, in his Ecclesiastical History, say regarding these cases that to dispute them "is to come to the extreme of scepticism, to deny our senses and be incredulous even to ridiculousness." Testimony to the reality of these cures is indeed overwhelming, and a multitude of most sober scholars, divines, and doctors of medicine declared the evidence absolutely convincing. That the Church of England accepted the doctrine of the royal touch is witnessed by the special service provided in the Prayer-Book of that period for occasions when the King exercised this gift. The ceremony was conducted with great solemnity and pomp: during the reading of the service and the laying on of the King's hands, the attendant bishop or priest recited the words, "They shall lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover"; afterward came special prayers, the Epistle and Gospel, with the blessing, and finally his Majesty washed his royal hands in golden vessels which high noblemen held for him. In France, too, the royal touch continued, with similar testimony to its efficacy. On a certain Easter Sunday, that pious king, Louis XIV, touched about sixteen hundred persons at Versailles. This curative power was, then, acknowledged far and wide, by Catholics and Protestants alike, upon the Continent, in Great Britain, and in America; and it descended not only in spite of the transition of the English kings from Catholicism to Protestantism, but in spite of the transition from the legitimate sovereignty of the Stuarts to the illegitimate succession of the House of Orange. And yet, within a few years after the whole world held this belief, it was dead; it had shrivelled away in the growing scientific light at the dawn of the eighteenth century.(318) (318) For the royal touch, see Becket, Free and Impartial Inquiry into the Antiquity and Efficacy of Touching for the King's Evil, 1772, cited in Pettigrew, p. 128, and elsewhere; also Scoffern, Science and Folk Lore, London, 1870, pp. 413 and following; also Adams, The Healing Art, London, 1887, vol. i, pp. 53-60; and especially Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. i, chapter on The Conversion of Rome; also his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, chap. i. For curious details regarding the mode of conducting the ceremony, see Evelyn's Diary; also Lecky, as above. For the royal touch in France, and for a claim to its possession in feudal times by certain noble families, see Rambaud, Hist. de la Civ. francaise, p. 375. IX. THE SCIENTIFIC STRUGGLE FOR ANATOMY. We may now take up the evolution of medical science out of the medieval view and its modern survivals. All through the Middle Ages, as we have seen, some few laymen and ecclesiastics here and there, braving the edicts of the Church and popular superstition, persisted in medical study and practice: this was especially seen at the greater universities, which had become somewhat emancipated from ecclesiastical control. In the thirteenth century the University of Paris gave a strong impulse to the teaching of medicine, and in that and the following century we begin to find the first intelligible reports of medical cases since the coming in of Christianity. In the thirteenth century also the arch-enemy of the papacy, the Emperor Frederick II, showed his free-thinking tendencies by granting, from time to time, permissions to dissect the human subject. In the centuries following, sundry other monarchs timidly followed his example: thus John of Aragon, in 1391, gave to the University of Lerida the privilege of dissecting one dead criminal every three years.(319) (319) For the promotion of medical science and practice, especially in the thirteenth century, by the universities, see Baas, pp. 222-224. During the fifteenth century and the earlier years of the sixteenth the revival of learning, the invention of printing, and the great voyages of discovery gave a new impulse to thought, and in this medical science shared: the old theological way of thinking was greatly questioned, and gave place in many quarters to a different way of looking at the universe. In the sixteenth century Paracelsus appears--a great genius, doing much to develop medicine beyond the reach of sacred and scholastic tradition, though still fettered by many superstitions. More and more, in spite of theological dogmas, came a renewal of anatomical studies by dissection of the human subject. The practice of the old Alexandrian School was thus resumed. Mundinus, Professor of Medicine at Bologna early in the fourteenth century, dared use the human subject occasionally in his lectures; but finally came a far greater champion of scientific truth, Andreas Vesalius, founder of the modern science of anatomy. The battle waged by this man is one of the glories of our race. From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master. In the search for real knowledge he risked the most terrible dangers, and especially the charge of sacrilege, founded upon the teachings of the Church for ages. As we have seen, even such men in the early Church as Tertullian and St. Augustine held anatomy in abhorrence, and the decretal of Pope Boniface VIII was universally construed as forbidding all dissection, and as threatening excommunication against those practising it. Through this sacred conventionalism Vesalius broke without fear; despite ecclesiastical censure, great opposition in his own profession, and popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that could give useful results. No peril daunted him. To secure material for his investigations, he haunted gibbets and charnel-houses, braving the fires of the Inquisition and the virus of the plague. First of all men he began to place the science of human anatomy on its solid modern foundations--on careful examination and observation of the human body: this was his first great sin, and it was soon aggravated by one considered even greater. Perhaps the most unfortunate thing that has ever been done for Christianity is the tying it to forms of science which are doomed and gradually sinking. Just as, in the time of Roger Bacon, excellent men devoted all their energies to binding Christianity to Aristotle; just as, in the time of Reuchlin and Erasmus, they insisted on binding Christianity to Thomas Aquinas; so, in the time of Vesalius, such men made every effort to link Christianity to Galen. The cry has been the same in all ages; it is the same which we hear in this age for curbing scientific studies: the cry for what is called "sound learning." Whether standing for Aristotle against Bacon, or for Aquinas against Erasmus, or for Galen against Vesalius, the cry is always for "sound learning": the idea always has been that the older studies are "SAFE." At twenty-eight years of age Vesalius gave to the world his great work on human anatomy. With it ended the old and began the new; its researches, by their thoroughness, were a triumph of science; its illustrations, by their fidelity, were a triumph of art. To shield himself, as far as possible, in the battle which he foresaw must come, Vesalius dedicated the work to the Emperor Charles V, and in his preface he argues for his method, and against the parrot repetitions of the mediaeval text-books; he also condemns the wretched anatomical preparations and specimens made by physicians who utterly refused to advance beyond the ancient master. The parrot-like repeaters of Galen gave battle at once. After the manner of their time their first missiles were epithets; and, the vast arsenal of these having been exhausted, they began to use sharper weapons--weapons theologic. In this case there were especial reasons why the theological authorities felt called upon to intervene. First, there was the old idea prevailing in the Church that the dissection of the human body is forbidden to Christians: this was used with great force against Vesalius, but he at first gained a temporary victory; for, a conference of divines having been asked to decide whether dissection of the human body is sacrilege, gave a decision in the negative. The reason was simple: the great Emperor Charles V had made Vesalius his physician and could not spare him; but, on the accession of Philip II to the throne of Spain and the Netherlands, the whole scene changed. Vesalius now complained that in Spain he could not obtain even a human skull for his anatomical investigations: the medical and theological reactionists had their way, and to all appearance they have, as a rule, had it in Spain ever since. As late as the last years of the eighteenth century an observant English traveller found that there were no dissections before medical classes in the Spanish universities, and that the doctrine of the circulation of the blood was still denied, more than a century and a half after Sarpi and Harvey had proved it. Another theological idea barred the path of Vesalius. Throughout the Middle Ages it was believed that there exists in man a bone imponderable, incorruptible, incombustible--the necessary nucleus of the resurrection body. Belief in a resurrection of the physical body, despite St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, had been incorporated into the formula evolved during the early Christian centuries and known as the Apostles' Creed, and was held throughout Christendom, "always, everywhere, and by all." This hypothetical bone was therefore held in great veneration, and many anatomists sought to discover it; but Vesalius, revealing so much else, did not find it. He contented himself with saying that he left the question regarding the existence of such a bone to the theologians. He could not lie; he did not wish to fight the Inquisition; and thus he fell under suspicion. The strength of this theological point may be judged from the fact that no less eminent a surgeon than Riolan consulted the executioner to find out whether, when he burned a criminal, all the parts were consumed; and only then was the answer received which fatally undermined this superstition. Yet, in 1689 we find it still lingering in France, stimulating opposition in the Church to dissection. Even as late as the eighteenth century, Bernouilli having shown that the living human body constantly undergoes a series of changes, so that all its particles are renewed in a given number of years, so much ill feeling was drawn upon him, from theologians, who saw in this statement danger to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that for the sake of peace he struck out his argument on this subject from his collected works.(320) (320) For permissions to dissect the human subject, given here and there during the Middle Ages, see Roth's Andreas Vesalius, Berlin, 1892, pp. 3, 13 et seq. For religious antipathies as a factor in the persecution of Vesalius, see the biographies by Boerhaave and Albinos, 1725; Burggraeve's Etudes, 1841; also Haeser, Kingsley, and the latest and most thorough of all, Roth, as above. Even Goethals, despite the timidity natural to a city librarian in a town like Brussels, in which clerical power is strong and relentless, feels obliged to confess that there was a certain admixture of religious hatred in the treatment of Vesalius. See his Notice Biographique sur Andre Vesale. For the resurrection bones, see Roth, as above, pp. 154, 155, and notes. For Vesalius, see especially Portal, Hist. de l'Anatomie et de la Chirurgie, Paris, 1770, tome i, p. 407. For neglect of dissection and opposition to Harvey's discovery in Spain, see Townsend's Travels, edition of 1792, cited in Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol. ii, pp. 74, 75. Also Henry Morley, in his Clement Marot, and Other Essays. For Bernouilli and his trouble with the theologians, see Wolf, Biographien zur Culturgeschichte der Schweiz, vol. ii, p. 95. How different Mundinus's practice of dissection was from that of Vesalius may be seen by Cuvier's careful statement that the entire number of dissections by the former was three; the usual statement is that there were but two. See Cuvier, Hist. des Sci. Nat., tome ii, p. 7; also Sprengel, Fredault, Hallam, and Littre. Also Whewell, Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, vol. iii, p. 328; also, for a very full statement regarding the agency of Mundinus in the progress of Anatomy, see Portal, vol. i, pp. 209-216. Still other encroachments upon the theological view were made by the new school of anatomists, and especially by Vesalius. During the Middle Ages there had been developed various theological doctrines regarding the human body; these were based upon arguments showing what the body OUGHT TO BE, and naturally, when anatomical science showed what it IS, these doctrines fell. An example of such popular theological reasoning is seen in a widespread belief of the twelfth century, that, during the year in which the cross of Christ was captured by Saladin, children, instead of having thirty or thirty-two teeth as before, had twenty or twenty-two. So, too, in Vesalius's time another doctrine of this sort was dominant: it had long been held that Eve, having been made by the Almighty from a rib taken out of Adam's side, there must be one rib fewer on one side of every man than on the other. This creation of Eve was a favourite subject with sculptors and painters, from Giotto, who carved it upon his beautiful Campanile at Florence, to the illuminators of missals, and even to those who illustrated Bibles and religious books in the first years after the invention of printing; but Vesalius and the anatomists who followed him put an end among thoughtful men to this belief in the missing rib, and in doing this dealt a blow at much else in the sacred theory. Naturally, all these considerations brought the forces of ecclesiasticism against the innovators in anatomy.(321) (321) As to the supposed change in the number of teeth, see the Gesta Philippi Augusti Francorum Regis,... descripta a magistro Rigardo, 1219, edited by Father Francois Duchesne, in Histories Francorum Scriptores, tom. v, Paris, 1649, p. 24. For representations of Adam created by the Almighty out of a pile of dust, and of Eve created from a rib of Adam, see the earlier illustrations in the Nuremberg Chronicle. As to the relation of anatomy to theology as regards to Adam's rib, see Roth, pp. 154, 155. A new weapon was now forged: Vesalius was charged with dissecting a living man, and, either from direct persecution, as the great majority of authors assert, or from indirect influences, as the recent apologists for Philip II admit, he became a wanderer: on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, apparently undertaken to atone for his sin, he was shipwrecked, and in the prime of his life and strength he was lost to the world. And yet not lost. In this century a great painter has again given him to us. By the magic of Hamann's pencil Vesalius again stands on earth, and we look once more into his cell. Its windows and doors, bolted and barred within, betoken the storm of bigotry which rages without; the crucifix, toward which he turns his eyes, symbolizes the spirit in which he labours; the corpse of the plague-stricken beneath his hand ceases to be repulsive; his very soul seems to send forth rays from the canvas, which strengthen us for the good fight in this age.(322) (322) The original painting of Vesalius at work in his cell, by Hamann, is now at Cornell University. His death was hastened, if not caused, by men who conscientiously supposed that he was injuring religion: his poor, blind foes aided in destroying one of religion's greatest apostles. What was his influence on religion? He substituted, for the repetition of worn-out theories, a conscientious and reverent search into the works of the great Power giving life to the universe; he substituted, for representations of the human structure pitiful and unreal, representations revealing truths most helpful to the whole human race. The death of this champion seems to have virtually ended the contest. Licenses to dissect soon began to be given by sundry popes to universities, and were renewed at intervals of from three to four years, until the Reformation set in motion trains of thought which did much to release science from this yoke.(323) (323) For a curious example of weapons drawn from Galen and used against Vesalius, see Lewes, Life of Goethe, p. 343, note. For proofs that I have not overestimated Vesalius, see Portal, ubi supra. Portal speaks of him as "le genie le plus droit qu'eut l'Europe"; and again, "Vesale me parait un des plus grands hommes qui ait existe." For the charge that anatomists dissected living men--against men of science before Vesalius's time--see Littre's chapter on Anatomy. For the increased liberty given anatomy by the Reformation, see Roth's Vesalius, p. 33. X. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO INOCULATION, VACCINATION, AND THE USE OF ANAESTHETICS. I hasten now to one of the most singular struggles of medical science during modern times. Early in the last century Boyer presented inoculation as a preventive of smallpox in France, and thoughtful physicians in England, inspired by Lady Montagu and Maitland, followed his example. Ultra-conservatives in medicine took fright at once on both sides of the Channel, and theology was soon finding profound reasons against the new practice. The French theologians of the Sorbonne solemnly condemned it; the English theologians were most loudly represented by the Rev. Edward Massey, who in 1772 preached and published a sermon entitled The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation. In this he declared that Job's distemper was probably confluent smallpox; that he had been inoculated doubtless by the devil; that diseases are sent by Providence for the punishment of sin; and that the proposed attempt to prevent them is "a diabolical operation." Not less vigorous was the sermon of the Rev. Mr. Delafaye, entitled Inoculation an Indefensible Practice. This struggle went on for thirty years. It is a pleasure to note some churchmen--and among them Madox, Bishop of Worcester--giving battle on the side of right reason; but as late as 1753 we have a noted rector at Canterbury denouncing inoculation from his pulpit in the primatial city, and many of his brethren following his example. The same opposition was vigorous in Protestant Scotland. A large body of ministers joined in denouncing the new practice as "flying in the face of Providence," and "endeavouring to baffle a Divine judgment." On our own side of the ocean, also, this question had to be fought out. About the year 1721 Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, a physician in Boston, made an experiment in inoculation, one of his first subjects being his own son. He at once encountered bitter hostility, so that the selectmen of the city forbade him to repeat the experiment. Foremost among his opponents was Dr. Douglas, a Scotch physician, supported by the medical profession and the newspapers. The violence of the opposing party knew no bounds; they insisted that inoculation was "poisoning," and they urged the authorities to try Dr. Boylston for murder. Having thus settled his case for this world, they proceeded to settle it for the next, insisting that "for a man to infect a family in the morning with smallpox and to pray to God in the evening against the disease is blasphemy"; that the smallpox is "a judgment of God on the sins of the people," and that "to avert it is but to provoke him more"; that inoculation is "an encroachment on the prerogatives of Jehovah, whose right it is to wound and smite." Among the mass of scriptural texts most remote from any possible bearing on the subject one was employed which was equally cogent against any use of healing means in any disease--the words of Hosea: "He hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up." So bitter was this opposition that Dr. Boylston's life was in danger; it was considered unsafe for him to be out of his house in the evening; a lighted grenade was even thrown into the house of Cotton Mather, who had favoured the new practice, and had sheltered another clergyman who had submitted himself to it. To the honour of the Puritan clergy of New England, it should be said that many of them were Boylston's strongest supporters. Increase and Cotton Mather had been among the first to move in favour of inoculation, the latter having called Boylston's attention to it; and at the very crisis of affairs six of the leading clergymen of Boston threw their influence on Boylston's side and shared the obloquy brought upon him. Although the gainsayers were not slow to fling into the faces of the Mathers their action regarding witchcraft, urging that their credulity in that matter argued credulity in this, they persevered, and among the many services rendered by the clergymen of New England to their country this ought certainly to be remembered; for these men had to withstand, shoulder to shoulder with Boylston and Benjamin Franklin, the same weapons which were hurled at the supporters of inoculation in Europe--charges of "unfaithfulness to the revealed law of God." The facts were soon very strong against the gainsayers: within a year or two after the first experiment nearly three hundred persons had been inoculated by Boylston in Boston and neighbouring towns, and out of these only six had died; whereas, during the same period, out of nearly six thousand persons who had taken smallpox naturally, and had received only the usual medical treatment, nearly one thousand had died. Yet even here the gainsayers did not despair, and, when obliged to confess the success of inoculation, they simply fell back upon a new argument, and answered: "It was good that Satan should be dispossessed of his habitation which he had taken up in men in our Lord's day, but it was not lawful that the children of the Pharisees should cast him out by the help of Beelzebub. We must always have an eye to the matter of what we do as well as the result, if we intend to keep a good conscience toward God." But the facts were too strong; the new practice made its way in the New World as in the Old, though bitter opposition continued, and in no small degree on vague scriptural grounds, for more than twenty years longer.(324) (324) For the general subject, see Sprengel, Histoire de la Medecine, vol. vi, pp. 39-80. For the opposition of the Paris faculty of Theology to inoculation, see the Journal de Barbier, vol. vi, p. 294; also the Correspondance de Grimm et Diderot, vol. iii, pp. 259 et seq. For bitter denunciations of inoculation by the English clergy, and for the noble stand against them by Madox, see Baron, Life of Jenner, vol. i, pp. 231, 232, and vol. ii, pp. 39, 40. For the strenuous opposition of the same clergy, see Weld, History of the Royal Society, vol. i, p. 464, note; also, for its comical side, see Nichol's Literary Illustrations, vol. v, p. 800. For the same matter in Scotland, see Lecky's History of the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii, p. 83. For New England, see Green, History of Medicine in Massachusetts, Boston, 1881, pp. 58 et seq; also chapter x of the Memorial History of Boston, by the same author and O. W. Holmes. For a letter of Dr. Franklin's, see Massachusetts Historical Collections, second series, vol. vii, p. 17. Several most curious publications issued during the heat of the inoculation controversy have been kindly placed in my hands by the librarians of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Historical Society, among them A Reply to Increase Mather, by John Williams, Boston, printed by J. Franklin, 1721, from which the above scriptural arguments are cited. For the terrible virulence of the smallpox in New England up to the introduction of the inoculation, see McMaster, History of the People of the United States, first edition, vol. i, p. 30. The steady evolution of scientific medicine brings us next to Jenner's discovery of vaccination. Here, too, sundry vague survivals of theological ideas caused many of the clergy to side with retrograde physicians. Perhaps the most virulent of Jenner's enemies was one of his professional brethren, Dr. Moseley, who placed on the title-page of his book, Lues Bovilla, the motto, referring to Jenner and his followers, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do": this book of Dr. Moseley was especially indorsed by the Bishop of Dromore. In 1798 an Anti-vaccination Society was formed by physicians and clergymen, who called on the people of Boston to suppress vaccination, as "bidding defiance to Heaven itself, even to the will of God," and declared that "the law of God prohibits the practice." As late as 1803 the Rev. Dr. Ramsden thundered against vaccination in a sermon before the University of Cambridge, mingling texts of Scripture with calumnies against Jenner; but Plumptre and the Rev. Rowland Hill in England, Waterhouse in America, Thouret in France, Sacco in Italy, and a host of other good men and true, pressed forward, and at last science, humanity, and right reason gained the victory. Most striking results quickly followed. The diminution in the number of deaths from the terrible scourge was amazing. In Berlin, during the eight years following 1783, over four thousand children died of the smallpox; while during the eight years following 1814, after vaccination had been largely adopted, out of a larger number of deaths there were but five hundred and thirty-five from this disease. In Wurtemberg, during the twenty-four years following 1772, one in thirteen of all the children died of smallpox, while during the eleven years after 1822 there died of it only one in sixteen hundred. In Copenhagen, during twelve years before the introduction of vaccination, fifty-five hundred persons died of smallpox, and during the sixteen years after its introduction only one hundred and fifty-eight persons died of it throughout all Denmark. In Vienna, where the average yearly mortality from this disease had been over eight hundred, it was steadily and rapidly reduced, until in 1803 it had fallen to less than thirty; and in London, formerly so afflicted by this scourge, out of all her inhabitants there died of it in 1890 but one. As to the world at large, the result is summed up by one of the most honoured English physicians of our time, in the declaration that "Jenner has saved, is now saving, and will continue to save in all coming ages, more lives in one generation than were destroyed in all the wars of Napoleon." It will have been noticed by those who have read this history thus far that the record of the Church generally was far more honourable in this struggle than in many which preceded it: the reason is not difficult to find; the decline of theology enured to the advantage of religion, and religion gave powerful aid to science. Yet there have remained some survivals both in Protestantism and in Catholicism which may be regarded with curiosity. A small body of perversely ingenious minds in the medical profession in England have found a few ardent allies among the less intellectual clergy. The Rev. Mr. Rothery and the Rev. Mr. Allen, of the Primitive Methodists, have for sundry vague theological reasons especially distinguished themselves by opposition to compulsory vaccination; but it is only just to say that the great body of the English clergy have for a long time taken the better view. Far more painful has been the recent history of the other great branch of the Christian Church--a history developed where it might have been least expected: the recent annals of the world hardly present a more striking antithesis between Religion and Theology. On the religious side few things in the history of the Roman Church have been more beautiful than the conduct of its clergy in Canada during the great outbreak of ship-fever among immigrants at Montreal about the middle of the present century. Day and night the Catholic priesthood of that city ministered fearlessly to those victims of sanitary ignorance; fear of suffering and death could not drive these ministers from their work; they laid down their lives cheerfully while carrying comfort to the poorest and most ignorant of our kind: such was the record of their religion. But in 1885 a record was made by their theology. In that year the smallpox broke out with great virulence in Montreal. The Protestant population escaped almost entirely by vaccination; but multitudes of their Catholic fellow-citizens, under some vague survival of the old orthodox ideas, refused vaccination; and suffered fearfully. When at last the plague became so serious that travel and trade fell off greatly and quarantine began to be established in neighbouring cities, an effort was made to enforce compulsory vaccination. The result was, that large numbers of the Catholic working population resisted and even threatened bloodshed. The clergy at first tolerated and even encouraged this conduct: the Abbe Filiatrault, priest of St. James's Church, declared in a sermon that, "if we are afflicted with smallpox, it is because we had a carnival last winter, feasting the flesh, which has offended the Lord; it is to punish our pride that God has sent us smallpox." The clerical press went further: the Etendard exhorted the faithful to take up arms rather than submit to vaccination, and at least one of the secular papers was forced to pander to the same sentiment. The Board of Health struggled against this superstition, and addressed a circular to the Catholic clergy, imploring them to recommend vaccination; but, though two or three complied with this request, the great majority were either silent or openly hostile. The Oblate Fathers, whose church was situated in the very heart of the infected district, continued to denounce vaccination; the faithful were exhorted to rely on devotional exercises of various sorts; under the sanction of the hierarchy a great procession was ordered with a solemn appeal to the Virgin, and the use of the rosary was carefully specified. Meantime, the disease, which had nearly died out among the Protestants, raged with ever-increasing virulence among the Catholics; and, the truth becoming more and more clear, even to the most devout, proper measures were at last enforced and the plague was stayed, though not until there had been a fearful waste of life among these simple-hearted believers, and germs of scepticism planted in the hearts of their children which will bear fruit for generations to come.(325) (325) For the opposition of concientious men to vaccination in England, see Baron, Life of Jenner, as above; also vol. ii, p. 43; also Dun's Life of Simpson, London, 1873, pp. 248, 249; also Works of Sir J. Y. Simpson, vol. ii. For a multitude of statistics ahowing the diminution of smallpox after the introduction of vaccination, see Russell, p. 380. For the striking record in London for 1890, see an article in the Edinburgh review for January, 1891. The general statement referred to was made in a speech some years since by Sir Spencer Wells. For recent scattered cases of feeble opposition to vaccination by Protestant ministers, see William White, The Great Delusion, London, 1885, passim. For opposition of the Roman Catholic clergy and peasantry in Canada to vaccination during the smallpox plague of 1885, see the English, Canadian, and American newspapers, but especially the very temperate and accurate correspondence in the New York Evening Post during September and October of that year. Another class of cases in which the theologic spirit has allied itself with the retrograde party in medical science is found in the history of certain remedial agents; and first may be named cocaine. As early as the middle of the sixteenth century the value of coca had been discovered in South America; the natives of Peru prized it highly, and two eminent Jesuits, Joseph Acosta and Antonio Julian, were converted to this view. But the conservative spirit in the Church was too strong; in 1567 the Second Council of Lima, consisting of bishops from all parts of South America, condemned it, and two years later came a royal decree declaring that "the notions entertained by the natives regarding it are an illusion of the devil." As a pendant to this singular mistake on the part of the older Church came another committed by many Protestants. In the early years of the seventeenth century the Jesuit missionaries in South America learned from the natives the value of the so-called Peruvian bark in the treatment of ague; and in 1638, the Countess of Cinchon, Regent of Peru, having derived great benefit from the new remedy, it was introduced into Europe. Although its alkaloid, quinine, is perhaps the nearest approach to a medical specific, and has diminished the death rate in certain regions to an amazing extent, its introduction was bitterly opposed by many conservative members of the medical profession, and in this opposition large numbers of ultra-Protestants joined, out of hostility to the Roman Church. In the heat of sectarian feeling the new remedy was stigmatized as "an invention of the devil"; and so strong was this opposition that it was not introduced into England until 1653, and even then its use was long held back, owing mainly to anti-Catholic feeling. What the theological method on the ultra-Protestant side could do to help the world at this very time is seen in the fact that, while this struggle was going on, Hoffmann was attempting to give a scientific theory of the action of the devil in causing Job's boils. This effort at a quasi-scientific explanation which should satisfy the theological spirit, comical as it at first seems, is really worthy of serious notice, because it must be considered as the beginning of that inevitable effort at compromise which we see in the history of every science when it begins to appear triumphant.(326) (326) For the opposition of the South American Church authorities to the introduction of coca, etc., see Martindale, Coca, Cocaine, and its Salts, London, 1886, p. 7. As to theological and sectarian resistance to quinine, see Russell, pp. 194, 253; also Eccles; also Meryon, History of Medicine, London, 1861, vol. i, p. 74, note. For the great decrease in deaths by fever after the use of Peruvian bark began, see statistical tables given in Russell, p. 252; and for Hoffmann's attempt at compromise, ibid., p. 294. But I pass to a typical conflict in our days, and in a Protestant country. In 1847, James Young Simpson, a Scotch physician, who afterward rose to the highest eminence in his profession, having advocated the use of anaesthetics in obstetrical cases, was immediately met by a storm of opposition. This hostility flowed from an ancient and time-honoured belief in Scotland. As far back as the year 1591, Eufame Macalyane, a lady of rank, being charged with seeking the aid of Agnes Sampson for the relief of pain at the time of the birth of her two sons, was burned alive on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh; and this old theological view persisted even to the middle of the nineteenth century. From pulpit after pulpit Simpson's use of chloroform was denounced as impious and contrary to Holy Writ; texts were cited abundantly, the ordinary declaration being that to use chloroform was "to avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman." Simpson wrote pamphlet after pamphlet to defend the blessing which he brought into use; but he seemed about to be overcome, when he seized a new weapon, probably the most absurd by which a great cause was ever won: "My opponents forget," he said, "the twenty-first verse of the second chapter of Genesis; it is the record of the first surgical operation ever performed, and that text proves that the Maker of the universe, before he took the rib from Adam's side for the creation of Eve, caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam." This was a stunning blow, but it did not entirely kill the opposition; they had strength left to maintain that the "deep sleep of Adam took place before the introduction of pain into the world--in a state of innocence." But now a new champion intervened--Thomas Chalmers: with a few pungent arguments from his pulpit he scattered the enemy forever, and the greatest battle of science against suffering was won. This victory was won not less for religion. Wisely did those who raised the monument at Boston to one of the discoverers of anaesthetics inscribe upon its pedestal the words from our sacred text, "This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working."(327) (327) For the case of Eufame Macalyane, se Dalyell, Darker Superstitions of Scotland, pp. 130, 133. For the contest of Simpson with Scotch ecclesiatical authorities, see Duns, Life of Sir J. Y. Simpson, London, 1873, pp. 215-222, and 256-260. XI. FINAL BREAKING AWAY OF THE THEOLOGICAL THEORY IN MEDICINE. While this development of history was going on, the central idea on which the whole theologic view rested--the idea of diseases as resulting from the wrath of God or malice of Satan--was steadily weakened; and, out of the many things which show this, one may be selected as indicating the drift of thought among theologians themselves. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the most eminent divines of the American branch of the Anglican Church framed their Book of Common Prayer. Abounding as it does in evidences of their wisdom and piety, few things are more noteworthy than a change made in the exhortation to the faithful to present themselves at the communion. While, in the old form laid down in the English Prayer Book, the minister was required to warn his flock not "to kindle God's wrath" or "provoke him to plague us with divers diseases and sundry kinds of death," from the American form all this and more of similar import in various services was left out. Since that day progress in medical science has been rapid indeed, and at no period more so than during the last half of the nineteenth century. The theological view of disease has steadily faded, and the theological hold upon medical education has been almost entirely relaxed. In three great fields, especially, discoveries have been made which have done much to disperse the atmosphere of miracle. First, there has come knowledge regarding the relation between imagination and medicine, which, though still defective, is of great importance. This relation has been noted during the whole history of the science. When the soldiers of the Prince of Orange, at the siege of Breda in 1625, were dying of scurvy by scores, he sent to the physicians "two or three small vials filled with a decoction of camomile, wormwood, and camphor, gave out that it was a very rare and precious medicine--a medicine of such virtue that two or three drops sufficed to impregnate a gallon of water, and that it had been obtained from the East with great difficulty and danger." This statement, made with much solemnity, deeply impressed the soldiers; they took the medicine eagerly, and great numbers recovered rapidly. Again, two centuries later, young Humphry Davy, being employed to apply the bulb of the thermometer to the tongues of certain patients at Bristol after they had inhaled various gases as remedies for disease, and finding that the patients supposed this application of the thermometer-bulb was the cure, finally wrought cures by this application alone, without any use of the gases whatever. Innumerable cases of this sort have thrown a flood of light upon such cures as those wrought by Prince Hohenlohe, by the "metallic tractors," and by a multitude of other agencies temporarily in vogue, but, above all, upon the miraculous cures which in past ages have been so frequent and of which a few survive. The second department is that of hypnotism. Within the last half-century many scattered indications have been collected and supplemented by thoughtful, patient investigators of genius, and especially by Braid in England and Charcot in France. Here, too, great inroads have been made upon the province hitherto sacred to miracle, and in 1888 the cathedral preacher, Steigenberger, of Augsburg, sounded an alarm. He declared his fears "lest accredited Church miracles lose their hold upon the public," denounced hypnotism as a doctrine of demons, and ended with the singular argument that, inasmuch as hypnotism is avowedly incapable of explaining all the wonders of history, it is idle to consider it at all. But investigations in hypnotism still go on, and may do much in the twentieth century to carry the world yet further from the realm of the miraculous. In a third field science has won a striking series of victories. Bacteriology, beginning in the researches of Leeuwenhoek in the seventeenth century, continued by O. F. Muller in the eighteenth, and developed or applied with wonderful skill by Ehrenberg, Cohn, Lister, Pasteur, Koch, Billings, Bering, and their compeers in the nineteenth, has explained the origin and proposed the prevention or cure of various diseases widely prevailing, which until recently have been generally held to be "inscrutable providences." Finally, the closer study of psychology, especially in its relations to folklore, has revealed processes involved in the development of myths and legends: the phenomena of "expectant attention," the tendency to marvel-mongering, and the feeling of "joy in believing." In summing up the history of this long struggle between science and theology, two main facts are to be noted: First, that in proportion as the world approached the "ages of faith" it receded from ascertained truth, and in proportion as the world has receded from the "ages of faith" it has approached ascertained truth; secondly, that, in proportion as the grasp of theology Upon education tightened, medicine declined, and in proportion as that grasp has relaxed, medicine has been developed. The world is hardly beyond the beginning of medical discoveries, yet they have already taken from theology what was formerly its strongest province--sweeping away from this vast field of human effort that belief in miracles which for more than twenty centuries has been the main stumbling-block in the path of medicine; and in doing this they have cleared higher paths not only for science, but for religion.(328) (328) For the rescue of medical education from the control of theology, especially in France, see Rambaud, La Civilisation Contemporaine en France, pp. 682, 683. For miraculous cures wrought by imagination, see Tuke, Influence of Mind on Body, vol. ii. For opposition to the scientific study of hypnotism, see Hypnotismus und Wunder: ein Vortrag, mit Weiterungen, von Max Steigenberger, Domprediger, Augsburg, 1888, reviewed in Science, Feb. 15, 1889, p. 127. For a recent statement regarding the development of studies in hypnotism, see Liegeois, De la Suggestion et du Somnambulisme dans leurs rapports avec la Jurisprudence, Paris, 1889, chap. ii. As to joy in believing and exaggerating marvels, see in the London Graphic for January 2, 1892, an account of Hindu jugglers by "Professor" Hofmann, himself an expert conjurer. He shows that the Hindu performances have been grossly and persistently exaggerated in the accounts of travellers; that they are easily seen through, and greatly inferior to the jugglers' tricks seen every day in European capitals. The eminent Prof. De Gubernatis, who also had witnessed the Hindu performances, assured the present writer that the current accounts of them were monstrously exaggerated. As to the miraculous in general, the famous Essay of Hume holds a most important place in the older literature of the subject; but, for perhaps the most remarkable of all discussions of it, see Conyers Middleton, D. D., A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church, London, 1749. For probably the most judicially fair discussion, see Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. i, chap. iii; also his Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, chaps. i and ii; and for perhaps the boldest and most suggestive of recent statements, see Max Muller, Physical Religion, being the Gifford Lectures before the University of Glasgow for 1890, London, 1891, lecture xiv. See also, for very cogent statements and arguments, Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma, especially chap. v, and, for a recent utterance of great clearness and force, Prof. Osler's Address before the Johns Hopkins University, given in Science for March 27, 1891. CHAPTER XIV. FROM FETICH TO HYGIENE. I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW OF EPIDEMICS AND SANITATION. A very striking feature in recorded history has been the recurrence of great pestilences. Various indications in ancient times show their frequency, while the famous description of the plague of Athens given by Thucydides, and the discussion of it by Lucretius, exemplify their severity. In the Middle Ages they raged from time to time throughout Europe: such plagues as the Black Death and the sweating sickness swept off vast multitudes, the best authorities estimating that of the former, at the middle of the fourteenth century, more than half the population of England died, and that twenty-five millions of people perished in various parts of Europe. In 1552 sixty-seven thousand patients died of the plague at Paris alone, and in 1580 more than twenty thousand. The great plague in England and other parts of Europe in the seventeenth century was also fearful, and that which swept the south of Europe in the early part of the eighteenth century, as well as the invasions by the cholera at various times during the nineteenth, while less terrible than those of former years, have left a deep impress upon the imaginations of men. From the earliest records we find such pestilences attributed to the wrath or malice of unseen powers. This had been the prevailing view even in the most cultured ages before the establishment of Christianity: in Greece and Rome especially, plagues of various sorts were attributed to the wrath of the gods; in Judea, the scriptural records of various plagues sent upon the earth by the Divine fiat as a punishment for sin show the continuance of this mode of thought. Among many examples and intimations of this in our sacred literature, we have the epidemic which carried off fourteen thousand seven hundred of the children of Israel, and which was only stayed by the prayers and offerings of Aaron, the high priest; the destruction of seventy thousand men in the pestilence by which King David was punished for the numbering of Israel, and which was only stopped when the wrath of Jahveh was averted by burnt-offerings; the plague threatened by the prophet Zechariah, and that delineated in the Apocalypse. From these sources this current of ideas was poured into the early Christian Church, and hence it has been that during nearly twenty centuries since the rise of Christianity, and down to a period within living memory, at the appearance of any pestilence the Church authorities, instead of devising sanitary measures, have very generally preached the necessity of immediate atonement for offences against the Almighty. This view of the early Church was enriched greatly by a new development of theological thought regarding the powers of Satan and evil angels, the declaration of St. Paul that the gods of antiquity were devils being cited as its sufficient warrant.(329) (329) For plague during the Peloponnesian war, see Thucydides, vol. ii, pp.47-55, and vol. iii, p. 87. For a general statement regarding this and other plagues in ancient times, see Lucretius, vol. vi, pp. 1090 et seq.; and for a translation, see vol. i, p. 179, in Munro's edition of 1886. For early views of sanitary science in Greece and Rome, see Forster's Inquiry, in The Pamphleteer, vol. xxiv, p. 404. For the Greek view of the interference of the gods in disease, especially in pestilence, see Grote's History of Greece, vol. i, pp. 251, 485, and vol. vi, p. 213; see also Herodotus, lib. iii, c. xxxviii, and elsewhere. For the Hebrew view of the same interference by the Almighty, see especially Numbers xi, 4-34; also xvi, 49; I Samuel xxiv; also Psalm cvi, 29; also the well-known texts in Zechariah and Revelation. For St. Paul's declaration that the gods of the heathen are devils, see I Cor. x, 20. As to the earlier origin of the plague in Egypt, see Haeser, 'Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin und der epidemischen Krankheiten, Jena, 1875-'82, vol. iii, pp. 15 et seq. Moreover, comets, falling stars, and earthquakes were thought, upon scriptural authority, to be "signs and wonders"--evidences of the Divine wrath, heralds of fearful visitations; and this belief, acting powerfully upon the minds of millions, did much to create a panic-terror sure to increase epidemic disease wherever it broke forth. The main cause of this immense sacrifice of life is now known to have been the want of hygienic precaution, both in the Eastern centres, where various plagues were developed, and in the European towns through which they spread. And here certain theological reasonings came in to resist the evolution of a proper sanitary theory. Out of the Orient had been poured into the thinking of western Europe the theological idea that the abasement of man adds to the glory of God; that indignity to the body may secure salvation to the soul; hence, that cleanliness betokens pride and filthiness humility. Living in filth was regarded by great numbers of holy men, who set an example to the Church and to society, as an evidence of sanctity. St. Jerome and the Breviary of the Roman Church dwell with unction on the fact that St. Hilarion lived his whole life long in utter physical uncleanliness; St. Athanasius glorifies St. Anthony because he had never washed his feet; St. Abraham's most striking evidence of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither his hands nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body save her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in which the nuns religiously abstained from bathing. St. Mary of Egypt was eminent for filthiness; St. Simnon Stylites was in this respect unspeakable--the least that can be said is, that he lived in ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors. The Lives of the Saints dwell with complacency on the statement that, when sundry Eastern monks showed a disposition to wash themselves, the Almighty manifested his displeasure by drying up a neighbouring stream until the bath which it had supplied was destroyed. The religious world was far indeed from the inspired utterance attributed to John Wesley, that "cleanliness is near akin to godliness." For century after century the idea prevailed that filthiness was akin to holiness; and, while we may well believe that the devotion of the clergy to the sick was one cause why, during the greater plagues, they lost so large a proportion of their numbers, we can not escape the conclusion that their want of cleanliness had much to do with it. In France, during the fourteenth century, Guy de Chauliac, the great physician of his time, noted particularly that certain Carmelite monks suffered especially from pestilence, and that they were especially filthy. During the Black Death no less than nine hundred Carthusian monks fell victims in one group of buildings. Naturally, such an example set by the venerated leaders of thought exercised great influence throughout society, and all the more because it justified the carelessness and sloth to which ordinary humanity is prone. In the principal towns of Europe, as well as in the country at large, down to a recent period, the most ordinary sanitary precautions were neglected, and pestilences continued to be attributed to the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. As to the wrath of God, a new and powerful impulse was given to this belief in the Church toward the end of the sixth century by St. Gregory the Great. In 590, when he was elected Pope, the city of Rome was suffering from a dreadful pestilence: the people were dying by thousands; out of one procession imploring the mercy of Heaven no less than eighty persons died within an hour: what the heathen in an earlier epoch had attributed to Apollo was now attributed to Jehovah, and chroniclers tell us that fiery darts were seen flung from heaven into the devoted city. But finally, in the midst of all this horror, Gregory, at the head of a penitential procession, saw hovering over the mausoleum of Hadrian the figure of the archangel Michael, who was just sheathing a flaming sword, while three angels were heard chanting the Regina Coeli. The legend continues that the Pope immediately broke forth into hallelujahs for this sign that the plague was stayed, and, as it shortly afterward became less severe, a chapel was built at the summit of the mausoleum and dedicated to St. Michael; still later, above the whole was erected the colossal statue of the archangel sheathing his sword, which still stands to perpetuate the legend. Thus the greatest of Rome's ancient funeral monuments was made to bear testimony to this medieval belief; the mausoleum of Hadrian became the castle of St. Angelo. A legend like this, claiming to date from the greatest of the early popes, and vouched for by such an imposing monument, had undoubtedly a marked effect upon the dominant theology throughout Europe, which was constantly developing a great body of thought regarding the agencies by which the Divine wrath might be averted. First among these agencies, naturally, were evidences of devotion, especially gifts of land, money, or privileges to churches, monasteries, and shrines--the seats of fetiches which it was supposed had wrought cures or might work them. The whole evolution of modern history, not only ecclesiastical but civil, has been largely affected by the wealth transferred to the clergy at such periods. It was noted that in the fourteenth century, after the great plague, the Black Death, had passed, an immensely increased proportion of the landed and personal property of every European country was in the hands of the Church. Well did a great ecclesiastic remark that "pestilences are the harvests of the ministers of God."(330) (330) For triumphant mention of St. Hilarion's filth, see the Roman Breviary for October 21st; and for details, see S. Hieronymus, Vita S. Hilarionis Eremitae, in Migne, Patrologia, vol. xxiii. For Athanasius's reference to St. Anthony's filth, see works of St. Athanasius in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. iv, p. 209. For the filthiness of the other saints named, see citations from the Lives of the Saints, in Lecky's History of European Morals, vol. ii, pp. 117, 118. For Guy de Chauliac's observation on the filthiness of Carmelite monks and their great losses by pestilence, see Meryon, History of Medicine, vol. i, p. 257. For the mortality among the Carthusian monks in time of plague, see Mrs. Lecky's very interesting Visit to the Grand Chartreuse, in The Nineteenth Century for March, 1891. For the plague at Rome in 590, the legend regarding the fiery darts, mentioned by Pope Gregory himself, and that of the castle of St. Angelo, see Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, vol. ii, pp. 26-35; also Story, Castle of St. Angelo, etc., chap. ii. For the remark that "pestilences are the harvest of the ministers of God," see reference to Charlevoix, in Southey, History of Brazil, vol. ii, p. 254, cited in Buckle, vol. i, p. 130, note. Other modes of propitiating the higher powers were penitential processions, the parading of images of the Virgin or of saints through plague-stricken towns, and fetiches innumerable. Very noted in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were the processions of the flagellants, trooping through various parts of Europe, scourging their naked bodies, shrieking the penitential psalms, and often running from wild excesses of devotion to the maddest orgies. Sometimes, too, plagues were attributed to the wrath of lesser heavenly powers. Just as, in former times, the fury of "far-darting Apollo" was felt when his name was not respectfully treated by mortals, so, in 1680, the Church authorities at Rome discovered that the plague then raging resulted from the anger of St. Sebastian because no monument had been erected to him. Such a monument was therefore placed in the Church of St. Peter ad Vincula, and the plague ceased. So much for the endeavour to avert the wrath of the heavenly powers. On the other hand, theological reasoning no less subtle was used in thwarting the malice of Satan. This idea, too, came from far. In the sacred books of India and Persia, as well as in our own, we find the same theory of disease, leading to similar means of cure. Perhaps the most astounding among Christian survivals of this theory and its resultant practices was seen during the plague at Rome in 1522. In that year, at that centre of divine illumination, certain people, having reasoned upon the matter, came to the conclusion that this great scourge was the result of Satanic malice; and, in view of St. Paul's declaration that the ancient gods were devils, and of the theory that the ancient gods of Rome were the devils who had the most reason to punish that city for their dethronement, and that the great amphitheatre was the chosen haunt of these demon gods, an ox decorated with garlands, after the ancient heathen manner, was taken in procession to the Colosseum and solemnly sacrificed. Even this proved vain, and the Church authorities then ordered expiatory processions and ceremonies to propitiate the Almighty, the Virgin, and the saints, who had been offended by this temporary effort to bribe their enemies. But this sort of theological reasoning developed an idea far more disastrous, and this was that Satan, in causing pestilences, used as his emissaries especially Jews and witches. The proof of this belief in the case of the Jews was seen in the fact that they escaped with a less percentage of disease than did the Christians in the great plague periods. This was doubtless due in some measure to their remarkable sanitary system, which had probably originated thousands of years before in Egypt, and had been handed down through Jewish lawgivers and statesmen. Certainly they observed more careful sanitary rules and more constant abstinence from dangerous foods than was usual among Christians; but the public at large could not understand so simple a cause, and jumped to the conclusion that their immunity resulted from protection by Satan, and that this protection was repaid and the pestilence caused by their wholesale poisoning of Christians. As a result of this mode of thought, attempts were made in all parts of Europe to propitiate the Almighty, to thwart Satan, and to stop the plague by torturing and murdering the Jews. Throughout Europe during great pestilences we hear of extensive burnings of this devoted people. In Bavaria, at the time of the Black Death, it is computed that twelve thousand Jews thus perished; in the small town of Erfurt the number is said to have been three thousand; in Strasburg, the Rue Brulee remains as a monument to the two thousand Jews burned there for poisoning the wells and causing the plague of 1348; at the royal castle of Chinon, near Tours, an immense trench was dug, filled with blazing wood, and in a single day one hundred and sixty Jews were burned. Everywhere in continental Europe this mad persecution went on; but it is a pleasure to say that one great churchman, Pope Clement VI, stood against this popular unreason, and, so far as he could bring his influence to bear on the maddened populace, exercised it in favour of mercy to these supposed enemies of the Almighty.(331) (331) For an early conception in India of the Divinity acting through medicine, see The Bhagavadgita, translated by Telang, p. 82, in Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East. For the necessity of religious means of securing knowledge of medicine, see the Anugita, translated by Telang, in Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East, p. 388. For ancient Persian ideas of sickness as sent by the spirit of evil and to be cured by spells, but not excluding medicine and surgery, and for sickness generally as caused by the evil principle in demons, see the Zend-Avesta, Darmesteter's translation, introduction, passim, but especially p. xciii. For diseases wrought by witchcraft, see the same, pp. 230, 293. On the preferences of spells in healing over medicine and surgery, see Zend-Avesta, vol. i, pp. 85, 86. For healing by magic in ancient Greece, see, e. g., the cure of Ulysses in the Odyssey, "They stopped the black blood by a spell" (Odyssey, xxix, 457). For medicine in Egypt as partly priestly and partly in the hands of physicians, see Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ii, p. 136, note. For ideas of curing of disease by expulsion of demons still surviving among various tribes and nations of Asia, see J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: a Study of Comparative Religion, London, 1890, pp. 184-192. For the Flagellants and their processions at the time of the Black Death, see Lea, History of the Inquisition, New York, 1888, vol. ii, pp. 381 et seq. For the persecution of the Jews in time of pestilence, see ibid., p. 379 and following, with authorities in the notes. For the expulsion of the Jews from Padua, see the Acta Sanctorum, September, tom. viii, p. 893. Yet, as late as 1527, the people of Pavia, being threatened with plague, appealed to St. Bernardino of Feltro, who during his life had been a fierce enemy of the Jews, and they passed a decree promising that if the saint would avert the pestilence they would expel the Jews from the city. The saint apparently accepted the bargain, and in due time the Jews were expelled. As to witches, the reasons for believing them the cause of pestilence also came from far. This belief, too, had been poured mainly from Oriental sources into our sacred books and thence into the early Church, and was strengthened by a whole line of Church authorities, fathers, doctors, and saints; but, above all, by the great bull, Summis Desiderantes, issued by Pope Innocent VIII, in 1484. This utterance from the seat of St. Peter infallibly committed the Church to the idea that witches are a great cause of disease, storms, and various ills which afflict humanity; and the Scripture on which the action recommended against witches in this papal bull, as well as in so many sermons and treatises for centuries afterward, was based, was the famous text, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." This idea persisted long, and the evolution of it is among the most fearful things in human history.(332) (332) On the plagues generally, see Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages, passim; but especially Haeser, as above, III. Band, pp. 1-202; also Sprengel, Baas, Isensee, et al. For brief statement showing the enormous loss of life in these plagues, see Littre, Medecine et Medecins, Paris, 1875, pp. 3 et seq. For a summary of the effects of the Black Plague throughout England, see Green's Short History of the English People, chap. v. For the mortality in the Paris hospitals, see Desmazes, Supplices, Prisons et Graces en France, Paris 1866. For striking descriptions of plague-stricken cities, see the well-known passages in Thucydides, Boccaccio, De Foe, and, above all, Manzoni's Promessi Sposi. For examples of averting the plagues by processions, see Leopold Delisle, Etudes sur la Condition de la Classe Agricole, etc., en Normandie au Moyen Age, p. 630; also Fort, chap. xxiii. For the anger of St. Sebastian as a cause of the plague at Rome, and its cessation when a monument had been erected to him, see Paulus Diaconus, cited in Gregorovius, vol. ii. p. 165. For the sacrifice of an ox in the Colosseum to the ancient gods as a means of averting the plague of 1522, at Rome, see Gregorovius, vol. viii, p. 390. As to massacres of the Jews in order to avert the wrath of God in pestilence, see L'Ecole et la Science, Paris, 1887, p. 178; also Hecker, and especially Hoeniger, Gang und Verbreitung des Schwarzen Todes in Deutschalnd, Berlin, 1889. For a long list of towns in which burnings of Jews took place for this imaginary cause, see pp. 7-11. As to absolute want of sanitary precautions, see Hecker, p. 292. As to condemnation by strong religionists of medical means in the plague, see Fort, p. 130. For a detailed account of the action of Popes Eugene IV, Innocent VIII, and other popes, against witchcraft, ascribing to it storms and diseases, and for the bull Summis Desiderantes, see the chapters on Meteorology and Magic in this series. The text of the bull is given in the Malleus Maleficarum, in Binsfield, and in Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels, Leipzig, 1869, vol. i, pp. 222-225, and a good summary and analysis of it in Soldan, Geschichte der Hexenprocesse. For a concise and admirable statement of the contents and effects of the bull, see Lea, History of the Inquisition, vol. iii, pp. 40 et seq.; and for the best statement known to me of the general subject, Prof. George L. Burr's paper on The Literature of Witchcraft, read before the American Historical Association at Washington, 1890. In Germany its development was especially terrible. From the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, Catholic and Protestant theologians and ecclesiastics vied with each other in detecting witches guilty of producing sickness or bad weather; women were sent to torture and death by thousands, and with them, from time to time, men and children. On the Catholic side sufficient warrant for this work was found in the bull of Pope Innocent VIII, and the bishops' palaces of south Germany became shambles,--the lordly prelates of Salzburg, Wurzburg, and Bamberg taking the lead in this butchery. In north Germany Protestantism was just as conscientiously cruel. It based its theory and practice toward witches directly upon the Bible, and above all on the great text which has cost the lives of so many myriads of innocent men, women, and children, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Naturally the Protestant authorities strove to show that Protestantism was no less orthodox in this respect than Catholicism; and such theological jurists as Carpzov, Damhouder, and Calov did their work thoroughly. An eminent authority on this subject estimates the number of victims thus sacrificed during that century in Germany alone at over a hundred thousand. Among the methods of this witch activity especially credited in central and southern Europe was the anointing of city walls and pavements with a diabolical unguent causing pestilence. In 1530 Michael Caddo was executed with fearful tortures for thus besmearing the pavements of Geneva. But far more dreadful was the torturing to death of a large body of people at Milan, in the following century, for producing the plague by anointing the walls; and a little later similar punishments for the same crime were administered in Toulouse and other cities. The case in Milan may be briefly summarized as showing the ideas on sanitary science of all classes, from highest to lowest, in the seventeenth century. That city was then under the control of Spain; and, its authorities having received notice from the Spanish Government that certain persons suspected of witchcraft had recently left Madrid, and had perhaps gone to Milan to anoint the walls, this communication was dwelt upon in the pulpits as another evidence of that Satanic malice which the Church alone had the means of resisting, and the people were thus excited and put upon the alert. One morning, in the year 1630, an old woman, looking out of her window, saw a man walking along the street and wiping his fingers upon the walls; she immediately called the attention of another old woman, and they agreed that this man must be one of the diabolical anointers. It was perfectly evident to a person under ordinary conditions that this unfortunate man was simply trying to remove from his fingers the ink gathered while writing from the ink-horn which he carried in his girdle; but this explanation was too simple to satisfy those who first observed him or those who afterward tried him: a mob was raised and he was thrown into prison. Being tortured, he at first did not know what to confess; but, on inquiring from the jailer and others, he learned what the charge was, and, on being again subjected to torture utterly beyond endurance, he confessed everything which was suggested to him; and, on being tortured again and again to give the names of his accomplices, he accused, at hazard, the first people in the city whom he thought of. These, being arrested and tortured beyond endurance, confessed and implicated a still greater number, until members of the foremost families were included in the charge. Again and again all these unfortunates were tortured beyond endurance. Under paganism, the rule regarding torture had been that it should not be carried beyond human endurance; and we therefore find Cicero ridiculing it as a means of detecting crime, because a stalwart criminal of strong nerves might resist it and go free, while a physically delicate man, though innocent, would be forced to confess. Hence it was that under paganism a limit was imposed to the torture which could be administered; but, when Christianity had become predominant throughout Europe, torture was developed with a cruelty never before known. There had been evolved a doctrine of "excepted cases"--these "excepted cases" being especially heresy and witchcraft; for by a very simple and logical process of theological reasoning it was held that Satan would give supernatural strength to his special devotees--that is, to heretics and witches--and therefore that, in dealing with them, there should be no limit to the torture. The result was in this particular case, as in tens of thousands besides, that the accused confessed everything which could be suggested to them, and often in the delirium of their agony confessed far more than all that the zeal of the prosecutors could suggest. Finally, a great number of worthy people were sentenced to the most cruel death which could be invented. The records of their trials and deaths are frightful. The treatise which in recent years has first brought to light in connected form an authentic account of the proceedings in this affair, and which gives at the end engravings of the accused subjected to horrible tortures on their way to the stake and at the place of execution itself, is one of the most fearful monuments of theological reasoning and human folly. To cap the climax, after a poor apothecary had been tortured into a confession that he had made the magic ointment, and when he had been put to death with the most exquisite refinements of torture, his family were obliged to take another name, and were driven out from the city; his house was torn down, and on its site was erected "The Column of Infamy," which remained on this spot until, toward the end of the eighteenth century, a party of young radicals, probably influenced by the reading of Beccaria, sallied forth one night and leveled this pious monument to the ground. Herein was seen the culmination and decline of the bull Summis Desiderantes. It had been issued by him whom a majority of the Christian world believes to be infallible in his teachings to the Church as regards faith and morals; yet here was a deliberate utterance in a matter of faith and morals which even children now know to be utterly untrue. Though Beccaria's book on Crimes and Punishments, with its declarations against torture, was placed by the Church authorities upon the Index, and though the faithful throughout the Christian world were forbidden to read it, even this could not prevent the victory of truth over this infallible utterance of Innocent VIII.(333) (333) As to the fearful effects of the papal bull Summis Desiderantes in south Germany, as to the Protestant severities in north Germany, as to the immense number of women and children put to death for witchcraft in Germany generally for spreading storms and pestilence, and as to the monstrous doctrine of "excepted cases," see the standard authorities on witchcraft, especially Wachter, Beitrage zur Geschichte des Strafrechts, Soldan, Horst, Hauber, and Langin; also Burr, as above. In another series of chapters on The Warfare of Humanity with Theology, I hope to go more fully into the subject. For the magic spreading of the plague at Milan, see Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi and La Colonna Infame; and for the origin of the charges, with all the details of the trail, see the Precesso Originale degli Untori, Milan, 1839, passim, but especially the large folding plate at the end, exhibiting the tortures. For the after-history of the Column of Infamy, and for the placing of Beccaria's book on the Index, see Cantu, Vita di Beccaria. For the magic spreading of the plague in general, see Littre, pp. 492 and following. As the seventeenth century went on, ingenuity in all parts of Europe seemed devoted to new developments of fetichism. A very curious monument of this evolution in Italy exists in the Royal Gallery of Paintings at Naples, where may be seen several pictures representing the measures taken to save the city from the plague during the seventeenth century, but especially from the plague of 1656. One enormous canvas gives a curious example of the theological doctrine of intercession between man and his Maker, spun out to its logical length. In the background is the plague-stricken city: in the foreground the people are praying to the city authorities to avert the plague; the city authorities are praying to the Carthusian monks; the monks are praying to St. Martin, St. Bruno, and St. Januarius; these three saints in their turn are praying to the Virgin; the Virgin prays to Christ; and Christ prays to the Almighty. Still another picture represents the people, led by the priests, executing with horrible tortures the Jews, heretics, and witches who were supposed to cause the pestilence of 1656, while in the heavens the Virgin and St. Januarius are interceding with Christ to sheathe his sword and stop the plague. In such an atmosphere of thought it is no wonder that the death statistics were appalling. We hear of districts in which not more than one in ten escaped, and some were entirely depopulated. Such appeals to fetich against pestilence have continued in Naples down to our own time, the great saving power being the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius. In 1856 the present writer saw this miracle performed in the gorgeous chapel of the saint forming part of the Cathedral of Naples. The chapel was filled with devout worshippers of every class, from the officials in court dress, representing the Bourbon king, down to the lowest lazzaroni. The reliquary of silver-gilt, shaped like a large human head, and supposed to contain the skull of the saint, was first placed upon the altar; next, two vials containing a dark substance said to be his blood, having been taken from the wall, were also placed upon the altar near the head. As the priests said masses, they turned the vials from time to time, and the liquefaction being somewhat delayed, the great crowd of people burst out into more and more impassioned expostulation and petitions to the saint. Just in front of the altar were the lazzaroni who claimed to be descendants of the saint's family, and these were especially importunate: at such times they beg, they scold, they even threaten; they have been known to abuse the saint roundly, and to tell him that, if he did not care to show his favour to the city by liquefying his blood, St. Cosmo and St. Damian were just as good saints as he, and would no doubt be very glad to have the city devote itself to them. At last, on the occasion above referred to, the priest, turning the vials suddenly, announced that the saint had performed the miracle, and instantly priests, people, choir, and organ burst forth into a great Te Deum; bells rang, and cannon roared; a procession was formed, and the shrine containing the saint's relics was carried through the streets, the people prostrating themselves on both sides of the way and throwing showers of rose leaves upon the shrine and upon the path before it. The contents of these precious vials are an interesting relic indeed, for they represent to us vividly that period when men who were willing to go to the stake for their religious opinions thought it not wrong to save the souls of their fellowmen by pious mendacity and consecrated fraud. To the scientific eye this miracle is very simple: the vials contain, no doubt, one of those mixtures fusing at low temperature, which, while kept in its place within the cold stone walls of the church, remains solid, but upon being brought out into the hot, crowded chapel, and fondled by the warm hands of the priests, gradually softens and becomes liquid. It was curious to note, at the time above mentioned, that even the high functionaries representing the king looked at the miracle with awe: they evidently found "joy in believing," and one of them assured the present writer that the only thing which COULD cause it was the direct exercise of miraculous power. It may be reassuring to persons contemplating a visit to that beautiful capital in these days, that, while this miracle still goes on, it is no longer the only thing relied upon to preserve the public health. An unbelieving generation, especially taught by the recent horrors of the cholera, has thought it wise to supplement the power of St. Januarius by the "Risanamento," begun mainly in 1885 and still going on. The drainage of the city has thus been greatly improved, the old wells closed, and pure water introduced from the mountains. Moreover, at the last outburst of cholera a few years since, a noble deed was done which by its moral effect exercised a widespread healing power. Upon hearing of this terrific outbreak of pestilence, King Humbert, though under the ban of the Church, broke from all the entreaties of his friends and family, went directly into the plague-stricken city, and there, in the streets, public places, and hospitals, encouraged the living, comforted the sick and dying, and took means to prevent a further spread of the pestilence. To the credit of the Church it should also be said that the Cardinal Archbishop San Felice joined him in this. Miracle for miracle, the effect of this visit of the king seems to have surpassed anything that St. Januarius could do, for it gave confidence and courage which very soon showed their effects in diminishing the number of deaths. It would certainly appear that in this matter the king was more directly under Divine inspiration and guidance than was the Pope; for the fact that King Humbert went to Naples at the risk of his life, while Leo XIII remained in safety at the Vatican, impressed the Italian people in favour of the new regime and against the old as nothing else could have done. In other parts of Italy the same progress is seen under the new Italian government. Venice, Genoa, Leghorn, and especially Rome, which under the sway of the popes was scandalously filthy, are now among the cleanest cities in Europe. What the relics of St. Januarius, St. Anthony, and a multitude of local fetiches throughout Italy were for ages utterly unable to do, has been accomplished by the development of the simplest sanitary principles. Spain shows much the same characteristics of a country where theological considerations have been all-controlling for centuries. Down to the interference of Napoleon with that kingdom, all sanitary efforts were looked upon as absurd if not impious. The most sober accounts of travellers in the Spanish Peninsula until a recent period are sometimes irresistibly comic in their pictures of peoples insisting on maintaining arrangements more filthy than any which would be permitted in an American backwoods camp, while taking enormous pains to stop pestilence by bell-ringings, processions, and new dresses bestowed upon the local Madonnas; yet here, too, a healthful scepticism has begun to work for good. The outbreaks of cholera in recent years have done some little to bring in better sanitary measures.(334) (334) As to the recourse to fetichism in Italy in time of plague, and the pictures showing the intercession of Januarius and other saints, I have relied on my own notes made at various visits to Naples. For the general subject, see Peter, Etudes Napolitaines, especially chapters v and vi. For detailed accounts of the liquefaction of St. Januarius's blood by eye-witnesses, one an eminent Catholic of the seventeenth century, and the other a distinguished Protestant of our own time, see Murray's Handbook for South Italy and Naples, description of the Cathedral of San Gennaro. For an interesting series of articles on the subject, see The Catholic World for September, October, and November, 1871. For the incredible filthiness of the great cities of Spain, and the resistance of the people, down to a recent period, to the most ordinary regulations prompted by decency, see Bascome, History of the Epidemic Pestilences, especially pp. 119, 120. See also the Autobiography of D'Ewes, London, 1845, vol. ii, p. 446; also, for various citations, the second volume of Buckle, History of Civilization in England. II. GRADUAL DECAY OF THEOLOGICAL VIEWS REGARDING SANITATION. We have seen how powerful in various nations especially obedient to theology were the forces working in opposition to the evolution of hygiene, and we shall find this same opposition, less effective, it is true, but still acting with great power, in countries which had become somewhat emancipated from theological control. In England, during the medieval period, persecutions of Jews were occasionally resorted to, and here and there we hear of persecutions of witches; but, as torture was rarely used in England, there were, from those charged with producing plague, few of those torture-born confessions which in other countries gave rise to widespread cruelties. Down to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the filthiness in the ordinary mode of life in England was such as we can now hardly conceive: fermenting organic material was allowed to accumulate and become a part of the earthen floors of rural dwellings; and this undoubtedly developed the germs of many diseases. In his noted letter to the physician of Cardinal Wolsey, Erasmus describes the filth thus incorporated into the floors of English houses, and, what is of far more importance, he shows an inkling of the true cause of the wasting diseases of the period. He says, "If I entered into a chamber which had been uninhabited for months, I was immediately seized with a fever." He ascribed the fearful plague of the sweating sickness to this cause. So, too, the noted Dr. Caius advised sanitary precautions against the plague, and in after-generations, Mead, Pringle, and others urged them; but the prevailing thought was too strong, and little was done. Even the floor of the presence chamber of Queen Elizabeth in Greenwich Palace was "covered with hay, after the English fashion," as one of the chroniclers tells us. In the seventeenth century, aid in these great scourges was mainly sought in special church services. The foremost English churchmen during that century being greatly given to study of the early fathers of the Church; the theological theory of disease, so dear to the fathers, still held sway, and this was the case when the various visitations reached their climax in the great plague of London in 1665, which swept off more than a hundred thousand people from that city. The attempts at meeting it by sanitary measures were few and poor; the medical system of the time was still largely tinctured by superstitions resulting from medieval modes of thought; hence that plague was generally attributed to the Divine wrath caused by "the prophaning of the Sabbath." Texts from Numbers, the Psalms, Zechariah, and the Apocalypse were dwelt upon in the pulpits to show that plagues are sent by the Almighty to punish sin; and perhaps the most ghastly figure among all those fearful scenes described by De Foe is that of the naked fanatic walking up and down the streets with a pan of fiery coals upon his head, and, after the manner of Jonah at Nineveh, proclaiming woe to the city, and its destruction in forty days. That sin caused this plague is certain, but it was sanitary sin. Both before and after this culmination of the disease cases of plague were constantly occurring in London throughout the seventeenth century; but about the beginning of the eighteenth century it began to disappear. The great fire had done a good work by sweeping off many causes and centres of infection, and there had come wider streets, better pavements, and improved water supply; so that, with the disappearance of the plague, other diseases, especially dysenteries, which had formerly raged in the city, became much less frequent. But, while these epidemics were thus checked in London, others developed by sanitary ignorance raged fearfully both there and elsewhere, and of these perhaps the most fearful was the jail fever. The prisons of that period were vile beyond belief. Men were confined in dungeons rarely if ever disinfected after the death of previous occupants, and on corridors connecting directly with the foulest sewers: there was no proper disinfection, ventilation, or drainage; hence in most of the large prisons for criminals or debtors the jail fever was supreme, and from these centres it frequently spread through the adjacent towns. This was especially the case during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the Black Assize at Oxford, in 1577, the chief baron, the sheriff, and about three hundred men died within forty hours. Lord Bacon declared the jail fever "the most pernicious infection next to the plague." In 1730, at the Dorsetshire Assize, the chief baron and many lawyers were killed by it. The High Sheriff of Somerset also took the disease and died. A single Scotch regiment, being infected from some prisoners, lost no less than two hundred. In 1750 the disease was so virulent at Newgate, in the heart of London, that two judges, the lord mayor, sundry aldermen, and many others, died of it. It is worth noting that, while efforts at sanitary dealing with this state of things were few, the theological spirit developed a new and special form of prayer for the sufferers and placed it in the Irish Prayer Book. These forms of prayer seem to have been the main reliance through the first half of the eighteenth century. But about 1750 began the work of John Howard, who visited the prisons of England, made known their condition to the world, and never rested until they were greatly improved. Then he applied the same benevolent activity to prisons in other countries, in the far East, and in southern Europe, and finally laid down his life, a victim to disease contracted on one of his missions of mercy; but the hygienic reforms he began were developed more and more until this fearful blot upon modern civilization was removed.(335) (335) For Erasmus, see the letter cited in Bascome, History of Epidemic Pestilences, London, 1851. For the account of the condition of Queen Elizabeth's presence chamber, see the same, p. 206; see also the same for attempts at sanitation by Caius, Mead, Pringle, and others; also see Baas and various medical authorities. For the plague in London, see Green's History of the English People, chap. ix, sec. 2; and for a more detailed account, see Lingard, History of England, enlarged edition of 1849, vol. ix, pp. 107 et seq. For full scientific discussion of this and other plagues from a medical point of view, see Creighton, History of Epidemics in Great Britain, vol. ii, chap. i. For the London plague as a punishment for Sabbath-breaking, see A Divine Tragedie lately acted, or A collection of sundry memorable examples of God's judgements upon Sabbath Breakers and other like libertines, etc., by the worthy divine, Mr. Henry Burton, 1641. The book gives fifty-six accounts of Sabbath-breakers sorely punished, generally struck dead, in England, with places, names, and dates. For a general account of the condition of London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the diminution of the plague by the rebuilding of some parts of the city after the great fire, see Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, pp. 592, 593. For the jail fever, see Lecky, vol. i, pp. 500-503. The same thing was seen in the Protestant colonies of America; but here, while plagues were steadily attributed to Divine wrath or Satanic malice, there was one case in which it was claimed that such a visitation was due to the Divine mercy. The pestilence among the INDIANS, before the arrival of the Plymouth Colony, was attributed in a notable work of that period to the Divine purpose of clearing New England for the heralds of the gospel; on the other hand, the plagues which destroyed the WHITE population were attributed by the same authority to devils and witches. In Cotton Mather's Wonder of the Invisible World, published at Boston in 1693, we have striking examples of this. The great Puritan divine tells us: "Plagues are some of those woes, with which the Divil troubles us. It is said of the Israelites, in 1 Cor. 10. 10. THEY WERE DESTROYED OF THE DESTROYER. That is, they had the Plague among them. 'Tis the Destroyer, or the Divil, that scatters Plagues about the World: Pestilential and Contagious Diseases, 'tis the Divel, who do's oftentimes Invade us with them. 'Tis no uneasy thing, for the Divel, to impregnate the Air about us, with such Malignant Salts, as meeting with the Salt of our Microcosm, shall immediately cast us into that Fermentation and Putrefaction, which will utterly dissolve All the Vital Tyes within us; Ev'n as an Aqua Fortis, made with a conjunction of Nitre and Vitriol, Corrodes what it Siezes upon. And when the Divel has raised those Arsenical Fumes, which become Venomous. Quivers full of Terrible Arrows, how easily can he shoot the deleterious Miasms into those Juices or Bowels of Men's Bodies, which will soon Enflame them with a Mortal Fire! Hence come such Plagues, as that Beesome of Destruction which within our memory swept away such a throng of people from one English City in one Visitation: and hence those Infectious Feavers, which are but so many Disguised Plagues among us, Causing Epidemical Desolations." Mather gives several instances of witches causing diseases, and speaks of "some long Bow'd down under such a Spirit of Infirmity" being "Marvelously Recovered upon the Death of the Witches," of which he gives an instance. He also cites a case where a patient "was brought unto death's door and so remained until the witch was taken and carried away by the constable, when he began at once to recover and was soon well."(336) (336) For the passages from Cotton Mather, see his book as cited, pp. 17, 18, also 134, 145. Johnson declares that "by this meanes Christ... not only made roome for His people to plant, but also tamed the hard and cruell hearts of these barbarous Indians, insomuch that a halfe a handful of His people landing not long after in Plymouth Plantation, found little resistance." See The History of New England, by Edward Johnson, London, 1654. Reprinted in the Massachusetts Historical Society's Collection, second series, vol. i, p. 67. In France we see, during generation after generation, a similar history evolved; pestilence after pestilence came, and was met by various fetiches. Noteworthy is the plague at Marseilles near the beginning of the last century. The chronicles of its sway are ghastly. They speak of great heaps of the unburied dead in the public places, "forming pestilential volcanoes"; of plague-stricken men and women in delirium wandering naked through the streets; of churches and shrines thronged with great crowds shrieking for mercy; of other crowds flinging themselves into the wildest debauchery; of robber bands assassinating the dying and plundering the dead; of three thousand neglected children collected in one hospital and then left to die; and of the death-roll numbering at last fifty thousand out of a population of less than ninety thousand. In the midst of these fearful scenes stood a body of men and women worthy to be held in eternal honour--the physicians from Paris and Montpellier; the mayor of the city, and one or two of his associates; but, above all, the Chevalier Roze and Bishop Belzunce. The history of these men may well make us glory in human nature; but in all this noble group the figure of Belzunce is the most striking. Nobly and firmly, when so many others even among the regular and secular ecclesiastics fled, he stood by his flock: day and night he was at work in the hospitals, cheering the living, comforting the dying, and doing what was possible for the decent disposal of the dead. In him were united the two great antagonistic currents of religion and of theology. As a theologian he organized processions and expiatory services, which, it must be confessed, rather increased the disease than diminished it; moreover, he accepted that wild dream of a hysterical nun--the worship of the material, physical sacred heart of Jesus--and was one of the first to consecrate his diocese to it; but, on the other hand, the religious spirit gave in him one of its most beautiful manifestations in that or any other century; justly have the people of Marseilles placed his statue in the midst of their city in an attitude of prayer and blessing. In every part of Europe and America, down to a recent period, we find pestilences resulting from carelessness or superstition still called "inscrutable providences." As late as the end of the eighteenth century, when great epidemics made fearful havoc in Austria, the main means against them seem to have been grovelling before the image of St. Sebastian and calling in special "witch-doctors"--that is, monks who cast out devils. To seek the aid of physicians was, in the neighbourhood of these monastic centres, very generally considered impious, and the enormous death rate in such neighbourhoods was only diminished in the present century, when scientific hygiene began to make its way. The old view of pestilence had also its full course in Calvinistic Scotland; the only difference being that, while in Roman Catholic countries relief was sought by fetiches, gifts, processions, exorcisms, burnings of witches, and other works of expiation, promoted by priests; in Scotland, after the Reformation, it was sought in fast-days and executions of witches promoted by Protestant elders. Accounts of the filthiness of Scotch cities and villages, down to a period well within this century, seem monstrous. All that in these days is swept into the sewers was in those allowed to remain around the houses or thrown into the streets. The old theological theory, that "vain is the help of man," checked scientific thought and paralyzed sanitary endeavour. The result was natural: between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries thirty notable epidemics swept the country, and some of them carried off multitudes; but as a rule these never suggested sanitary improvement; they were called "visitations," attributed to Divine wrath against human sin, and the work of the authorities was to announce the particular sin concerned and to declaim against it. Amazing theories were thus propounded--theories which led to spasms of severity; and, in some of these, offences generally punished much less severely were visited with death. Every pulpit interpreted the ways of God to man in such seasons so as rather to increase than to diminish the pestilence. The effect of thus seeking supernatural causes rather than natural may be seen in such facts as the death by plague of one fourth of the whole population of the city of Perth in a single year of the fifteenth century, other towns suffering similarly both then and afterward. Here and there, physicians more wisely inspired endeavoured to push sanitary measures, and in 1585 attempts were made to clean the streets of Edinburgh; but the chroniclers tell us that "the magistrates and ministers gave no heed." One sort of calamity, indeed, came in as a mercy--the great fires which swept through the cities, clearing and cleaning them. Though the town council of Edinburgh declared the noted fire of 1700 "a fearful rebuke of God," it was observed that, after it had done its work, disease and death were greatly diminished.(337) (337) For the plague at Marseilles and its depopulation, see Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vol. xv, especially document cited in appendix; also Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. xliii; also Rambaud. For the resort to witch doctors in Austria against pestilence, down to the end of the eighteenth century, see Biedermann, Deutschland im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert. For the resort to St. Sebastian, see the widespread editions of the Vita et Gesta Sancti Sebastiani, contra pestem patroni, prefaced with commendations from bishops and other high ecclesiastics. The edition in the Cornell University Library is that of Augsburg, 1693. For the reign of filth and pestilence in Scotland, see Charles Rogers, D. D., Social Life in Scotland, Edinburgh, 1884, vol. i, pp. 305-316; see also Buckle's second volume. III. THE TRIUMPH OF SANITARY SCIENCE. But by those standing in the higher places of thought some glimpses of scientific truth had already been obtained, and attempts at compromise between theology and science in this field began to be made, not only by ecclesiastics, but first of all, as far back as the seventeenth century, by a man of science eminent both for attainments and character--Robert Boyle. Inspired by the discoveries in other fields, which had swept away so much of theological thought, he could no longer resist the conviction that some epidemics are due--in his own words--"to a tragical concourse of natural causes"; but he argued that some of these may be the result of Divine interpositions provoked by human sins. As time went on, great difficulties showed themselves in the way of this compromise--difficulties theological not less than difficulties scientific. To a Catholic it was more and more hard to explain the theological grounds why so many orthodox cities, firm in the faith, were punished, and so many heretical cities spared; and why, in regions devoted to the Church, the poorer people, whose faith in theological fetiches was unquestioning, died in times of pestilence like flies, while sceptics so frequently escaped. Difficulties of the same sort beset devoted Protestants; they, too, might well ask why it was that the devout peasantry in their humble cottages perished, while so much larger a proportion of the more sceptical upper classes were untouched. Gradually it dawned both upon Catholic and Protestant countries that, if any sin be punished by pestilence, it is the sin of filthiness; more and more it began to be seen by thinking men of both religions that Wesley's great dictum stated even less than the truth; that not only was "cleanliness akin to godliness," but that, as a means of keeping off pestilence, it was far superior to godliness as godliness was then generally understood.(338) (338) For Boyle's attempt at compromise, see Discourse on the Air, in his works, vol. iv, pp. 288, 289, cited by Buckle, vol. i, pp. 128, 129, note. The recent history of sanitation in all civilized countries shows triumphs which might well fill us with wonder, did there not rise within us a far greater wonder that they were so long delayed. Amazing is it to see how near the world has come again and again to discovering the key to the cause and cure of pestilence. It is now a matter of the simplest elementary knowledge that some of the worst epidemics are conveyed in water. But this fact seems to have been discovered many times in human history. In the Peloponnesian war the Athenians asserted that their enemies had poisoned their cisterns; in the Middle Ages the people generally declared that the Jews had poisoned their wells; and as late as the cholera of 1832 the Parisian mob insisted that the water-carriers who distributed water for drinking purposes from the Seine, polluted as it was by sewage, had poisoned it, and in some cases murdered them on this charge: so far did this feeling go that locked covers were sometimes placed upon the water-buckets. Had not such men as Roger Bacon and his long line of successors been thwarted by theological authority,--had not such men as Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, and Albert the Great been drawn or driven from the paths of science into the dark, tortuous paths of theology, leading no whither,--the world to-day, at the end of the nineteenth century, would have arrived at the solution of great problems and the enjoyment of great results which will only be reached at the end of the twentieth century, and even in generations more remote. Diseases like typhoid fever, influenza and pulmonary consumption, scarlet fever, diphtheria, pneumonia, and la grippe, which now carry off so many most precious lives, would have long since ceased to scourge the world. Still, there is one cause for satisfaction: the law governing the relation of theology to disease is now well before the world, and it is seen in the fact that, just in proportion as the world progressed from the sway of Hippocrates to that of the ages of faith, so it progressed in the frequency and severity of great pestilences; and that, on the other hand, just in proportion as the world has receded from that period when theology was all-pervading and all-controlling, plague after plague has disappeared, and those remaining have become less and less frequent and virulent.(339) (339) For the charge of poisoning water and producing pestilence among the Greeks, see Grote, History of Greece, vol. vi, p. 213. For a similar charge against the Jews in the Middle Ages, see various histories already cited; and for the great popular prejudice against water-carriers at Paris in recent times, see the larger recent French histories. The recent history of hygiene in all countries shows a long series of victories, and these may well be studied in Great Britain and the United States. In the former, though there had been many warnings from eminent physicians, and above all in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from men like Caius, Mead, and Pringle, the result was far short of what might have been gained; and it was only in the year 1838 that a systematic sanitary effort was begun in England by the public authorities. The state of things at that time, though by comparison with the Middle Ages happy, was, by comparison with what has since been gained, fearful: the death rate among all classes was high, but among the poor it was ghastly. Out of seventy-seven thousand paupers in London during the years 1837 and 1838, fourteen thousand were suffering from fever, and of these nearly six thousand from typhus. In many other parts of the British Islands the sanitary condition was no better. A noble body of men grappled with the problem, and in a few years one of these rose above his fellows--the late Edwin Chadwick. The opposition to his work was bitter, and, though many churchmen aided him, the support given by theologians and ecclesiastics as a whole was very far short of what it should have been. Too many of them were occupied in that most costly and most worthless of all processes, "the saving of souls" by the inculcation of dogma. Yet some of the higher ecclesiastics and many of the lesser clergy did much, sometimes risking their lives, and one of them, Sidney Godolphin Osborne, deserves lasting memory for his struggle to make known the sanitary wants of the peasantry. Chadwick began to be widely known in 1848 as a member of the Board of Health, and was driven out for a time for overzeal; but from one point or another, during forty years, he fought the opposition, developed the new work, and one of the best exhibits of its results is shown in his address before the Sanitary Conference at Brighton in 1888. From this and other perfectly trustworthy sources some idea may be gained of the triumph of the scientific over the theological method of dealing with disease, whether epidemic or sporadic. In the latter half of the seventeenth century the annual mortality of London is estimated at not less than eighty in a thousand; about the middle of this century it stood at twenty-four in a thousand; in 1889 it stood at less than eighteen in a thousand; and in many parts the most recent statistics show that it has been brought down to fourteen or fifteen in a thousand. A quarter of a century ago the death rate from disease in the Royal Guards at London was twenty in a thousand; in 1888 it had been reduced to six in a thousand. In the army generally it had been seventeen in a thousand, but it has been reduced until it now stands at eight. In the old Indian army it had been sixty-nine in a thousand, but of late it has been brought down first to twenty, and finally to fourteen. Mr. Chadwick in his speech proved that much more might be done, for he called attention to the German army, where the death rate from disease has been reduced to between five and six in a thousand. The Public Health Act having been passed in 1875, the death rate in England among men fell, between 1871 and 1880, more than four in a thousand, and among women more than six in a thousand. In the decade between 1851 and 1860 there died of diseases attributable to defective drainage and impure water over four thousand persons in every million throughout England: these numbers have declined until in 1888 there died less than two thousand in every million. The most striking diminution of the deaths from such causes was found in 1891, in the case of typhoid fever, that diminution being fifty per cent. As to the scourge which, next to plagues like the Black Death, was formerly the most dreaded--smallpox--there died of it in London during the year 1890 just one person. Drainage in Bristol reduced the death rate by consumption from 4.4 to 2.3; at Cardiff, from 3.47 to 2.31; and in all England and Wales, from 2.68 in 1851 to 1.55 in 1888. What can be accomplished by better sanitation is also seen to-day by a comparison between the death rate among the children outside and inside the charity schools. The death rate among those outside in 1881 was twelve in a thousand; while inside, where the children were under sanitary regulations maintained by competent authorities, it has been brought down first to eight, then to four, and finally to less than three in a thousand. In view of statistics like these, it becomes clear that Edwin Chadwick and his compeers among the sanitary authorities have in half a century done far more to reduce the rate of disease and death than has been done in fifteen hundred years by all the fetiches which theological reasoning could devise or ecclesiastical power enforce. Not less striking has been the history of hygiene in France: thanks to the decline of theological control over the universities, to the abolition of monasteries, and to such labours in hygienic research and improvement as those of Tardieu, Levy, and Bouchardat, a wondrous change has been wrought in public health. Statistics carefully kept show that the mean length of human life has been remarkably increased. In the eighteenth century it was but twenty-three years; from 1825 to 1830 it was thirty-two years and eight months; and since 1864, thirty-seven years and six months. IV. THE RELATION OF SANITARY SCIENCE TO RELIGION. The question may now arise whether this progress in sanitary science has been purchased at any real sacrifice of religion in its highest sense. One piece of recent history indicates an answer to this question. The Second Empire in France had its head in Napoleon III, a noted Voltairean. At the climax of his power he determined to erect an Academy of Music which should be the noblest building of its kind. It was projected on a scale never before known, at least in modern times, and carried on for years, millions being lavished upon it. At the same time the emperor determined to rebuild the Hotel-Dieu, the great Paris hospital; this, too, was projected on a greater scale than anything of the kind ever before known, and also required millions. But in the erection of these two buildings the emperor's determination was distinctly made known, that with the highest provision for aesthetic enjoyment there should be a similar provision, moving on parallel lines, for the relief of human suffering. This plan was carried out to the letter: the Palace of the Opera and the Hotel-Dieu went on with equal steps, and the former was not allowed to be finished before the latter. Among all the "most Christian kings" of the house of Bourbon who had preceded him for five hundred years, history shows no such obedience to the religious and moral sense of the nation. Catharine de' Medici and her sons, plunging the nation into the great wars of religion, never showed any such feeling; Louis XIV, revoking the Edict of Nantes for the glory of God, and bringing the nation to sorrow during many generations, never dreamed of making the construction of his palaces and public buildings wait upon the demands of charity. Louis XV, so subservient to the Church in all things, never betrayed the slightest consciousness that, while making enormous expenditures to gratify his own and the national vanity, he ought to carry on works, pari passu, for charity. Nor did the French nation, at those periods when it was most largely under the control of theological considerations, seem to have any inkling of the idea that nation or monarch should make provision for relief from human suffering, to justify provision for the sumptuous enjoyment of art: it was reserved for the second half of the nineteenth century to develop this feeling so strongly, though quietly, that Napoleon III, notoriously an unbeliever in all orthodoxy, was obliged to recognise it and to set this great example. Nor has the recent history of the United States been less fruitful in lessons. Yellow fever, which formerly swept not only Southern cities but even New York and Philadelphia, has now been almost entirely warded off. Such epidemics as that in Memphis a few years since, and the immunity of the city from such visitations since its sanitary condition was changed by Mr. Waring, are a most striking object lesson to the whole country. Cholera, which again and again swept the country, has ceased to be feared by the public at large. Typhus fever, once so deadly, is now rarely heard of. Curious is it to find that some of the diseases which in the olden time swept off myriads on myriads in every country, now cause fewer deaths than some diseases thought of little account, and for the cure of which people therefore rely, to their cost, on quackery instead of medical science. This development of sanitary science and hygiene in the United States has also been coincident with a marked change in the attitude of the American pulpit as regards the theory of disease. In this country, as in others, down to a period within living memory, deaths due to want of sanitary precautions were constantly dwelt upon in funeral sermons as "results of national sin," or as "inscrutable Providences." That view has mainly passed away among the clergy of the more enlightened parts of the country, and we now find them, as a rule, active in spreading useful ideas as to the prevention of disease. The religious press has been especially faithful in this respect, carrying to every household more just ideas of sanitary precautions and hygienic living. The attitude even of many among the most orthodox rulers in church and state has been changed by facts like these. Lord Palmerston refusing the request of the Scotch clergy that a fast day be appointed to ward off cholera, and advising them to go home and clean their streets,--the devout Emperor William II forbidding prayer-meetings in a similar emergency, on the ground that they led to neglect of practical human means of help,--all this is in striking contrast to the older methods. Well worthy of note is the ground taken in 1893, at Philadelphia, by an eminent divine of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The Bishop of Pennsylvania having issued a special call to prayer in order to ward off the cholera, this clergyman refused to respond to the call, declaring that to do so, in the filthy condition of the streets then prevailing in Philadelphia, would be blasphemous. In summing up the whole subject, we see that in this field, as in so many others, the triumph of scientific thought has gradually done much to evolve in the world not only a theology but also a religious spirit more and more worthy of the goodness of God and of the destiny of man.(340) (340) On the improvement in sanitation in London and elsewhere in the north of Europe, see the editorial and Report of the Conference on Sanitation at Brighton, given in the London Times of August 27, 1888. For the best authorities on the general subject in England, see Sir John Simon on English Sanitary Institutions, 1890; also his published Health Reports for 1887, cited in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1891. See also Parkes's Hygiene, passim. For the great increase in the mean length of life in France under better hygienic conditions, see Rambaud, La Civilisation contemporaine en France, p. 682. For the approach to depopulation at Memphis, under the cesspool system in 1878, see Parkes, Hygiene, American appendix, p. 397. For the facts brought out in the investigation of the department of the city of New York by the Committee of the State Senate, of which the present writer was a member, see New York Senate Documents for 1865. For decrease of death rate in New York city under the new Board of Health, beginning in 1866, and especially among children, see Buck, Hygiene and Popular Health, New York, 1879, vol. ii, p. 573; and for wise remarks on religious duties during pestilence, see ibid., vol. ii, p. 579. For a contrast between the old and new ideas regarding pestilences, see Charles Kingsley in Fraser's Magazine, vol. lviii, p. 134; also the sermon of Dr. Burns, in 1875, at the Cathedral of Glasgow before the Social Science Congress. For a particularly bright and valuable statement of the triumphs of modern sanitation, see Mrs. Plunkett's article in The Popular Science Monthly for June, 1891. For the reply of Lord Palmerston to the Scotch clergy, see the well-known passage in Buckle. For the order of the Emperor William, see various newspapers for September, 1892, and especially Public Opinion for September 24th. CHAPTER XV. FROM "DEMONIACAL POSSESSION" TO INSANITY. I. THEOLOGICAL IDEAS OF LUNACY AND ITS TREATMENT. Of all the triumphs won by science for humanity, few have been farther-reaching in good effects than the modern treatment of the insane. But this is the result of a struggle long and severe between two great forces. On one side have stood the survivals of various superstitions, the metaphysics of various philosophies, the dogmatism of various theologies, the literal interpretation of various sacred books, and especially of our own--all compacted into a creed that insanity is mainly or largely demoniacal possession; on the other side has stood science, gradually accumulating proofs that insanity is always the result of physical disease. I purpose in this chapter to sketch, as briefly as I may, the history of this warfare, or rather of this evolution of truth out of error. Nothing is more simple and natural, in the early stages of civilization, than belief in occult, self-conscious powers of evil. Troubles and calamities come upon man; his ignorance of physical laws forbids him to attribute them to physical causes; he therefore attributes them sometimes to the wrath of a good being, but more frequently to the malice of an evil being. Especially is this the case with diseases. The real causes of disease are so intricate that they are reached only after ages of scientific labour; hence they, above all, have been attributed to the influence of evil spirits.(341) (341) On the general attribution of disease to demoniacal influence, see Sprenger, History of Medicine, passim (note, for a later attitude, vol. ii, pp. 150-170, 178); Calmeil, De la Folie, Paris, 1845, vol. i, pp. 104, 105; Esquirol, Des Maladies Mentales, Paris, 1838, vol. i, p. 482; also Tylor, Primitive Culture. For a very plain and honest statement of this view in our own sacred books, see Oort, Hooykaas, and Kuenen, The Bible for Young People, English translation, chap. v, p. 167 and following; also Farrar's Life of Christ, chap. xvii. For this idea in Greece and elsewhere, see Maury, La Magie, etc., vol. iii, p. 276, giving, among other citations, one from book v of the Odyssey. On the influence of Platonism, see Esquirol and others, as above--the main passage cited is from the Phaedo. For the devotion of the early fathers and doctors to this idea, see citations from Eusebius, Lactantius, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory Nazianzen, in Tissot, L'Imagination, p. 369; also Jacob (i.e., Paul Lecroix), Croyances Populaires, p. 183. For St. Augustine, see also his De Civitate Dei, lib. xxii, chap. vii, and his Enarration in Psal., cxxxv, 1. For the breaking away of the religious orders in Italy from the entire supremacy of this idea, see Becavin, L'Ecole de Salerne, Paris, 1888; also Daremberg, Histoire de la Medecine. Even so late as the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther maintained (Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, London, 1872, pp. 250, 256) that "Satan produces all the maladies which afflict mankind." But, if ordinary diseases were likely to be attributed to diabolical agency, how much more diseases of the brain, and especially the more obscure of these! These, indeed, seemed to the vast majority of mankind possible only on the theory of Satanic intervention: any approach to a true theory of the connection between physical causes and mental results is one of the highest acquisitions of science. Here and there, during the whole historic period, keen men had obtained an inkling of the truth; but to the vast multitude, down to the end of the seventeenth century, nothing was more clear than that insanity is, in many if not in most cases, demoniacal possession. Yet at a very early date, in Greece and Rome, science had asserted itself, and a beginning had been made which seemed destined to bring a large fruitage of blessings.(342) In the fifth century before the Christian era, Hippocrates of Cos asserted the great truth that all madness is simply disease of the brain, thereby beginning a development of truth and mercy which lasted nearly a thousand years. In the first century after Christ, Aretaeus carried these ideas yet further, observed the phenomena of insanity with great acuteness, and reached yet more valuable results. Near the beginning of the following century, Soranus went still further in the same path, giving new results of research, and strengthening scientific truth. Toward the end of the same century a new epoch was ushered in by Galen, under whom the same truth was developed yet further, and the path toward merciful treatment of the insane made yet more clear. In the third century Celius Aurelianus received this deposit of precious truth, elaborated it, and brought forth the great idea which, had theology, citing biblical texts, not banished it, would have saved fifteen centuries of cruelty--an idea not fully recognised again till near the beginning of the present century--the idea that insanity is brain disease, and that the treatment of it must be gentle and kind. In the sixth century Alexander of Tralles presented still more fruitful researches, and taught the world how to deal with melancholia; and, finally, in the seventh century, this great line of scientific men, working mainly under pagan auspices, was closed by Paul of Aegina, who under the protection of Caliph Omar made still further observations, but, above all, laid stress on the cure of madness as a disease, and on the absolute necessity of mild treatment. (342) It is significant of this scientific attitude that the Greek word for superstition means, literally, fear of gods or demons. Such was this great succession in the apostolate of science: evidently no other has ever shown itself more directly under Divine grace, illumination, and guidance. It had given to the world what might have been one of its greatest blessings.(343) (343) For authorities regarding this development of scientific truth and mercy in antiquity, see especially Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch des Psychiatrie, Stuttgart, 1888, p. 40 and the pages following; Trelat, Recherches Historiques sur la Folie, Paris, 1839; Semelaigne, L'Alienation mentale dans l'Antiquitie, Paris, 1869; Dagron, Des Alienes, Paris, 1875; also Calmeil, De la Folie, Sprenger, and especially Isensee, Geschichte der Medicin, Berlin, 1840. This evolution of divine truth was interrupted by theology. There set into the early Church a current of belief which was destined to bring all these noble acquisitions of science and religion to naught, and, during centuries, to inflict tortures, physical and mental, upon hundreds of thousands of innocent men and women--a belief which held its cruel sway for nearly eighteen centuries; and this belief was that madness was mainly or largely possession by the devil. This idea of diabolic agency in mental disease had grown luxuriantly in all the Oriental sacred literatures. In the series of Assyrian mythological tablets in which we find those legends of the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and other early conceptions from which the Hebrews so largely drew the accounts wrought into the book of Genesis, have been discovered the formulas for driving out the evil spirits which cause disease. In the Persian theology regarding the struggle of the great powers of good and evil this idea was developed to its highest point. From these and other ancient sources the Jews naturally received this addition to their earlier view: the Mocker of the Garden of Eden became Satan, with legions of evil angels at his command; and the theory of diabolic causes of mental disease took a firm place in our sacred books. Such cases in the Old Testament as the evil spirit in Saul, which we now see to have been simply melancholy--and, in the New Testament, the various accounts of the casting out of devils, through which is refracted the beautiful and simple story of that power by which Jesus of Nazareth soothed perturbed minds by his presence or quelled outbursts of madness by his words, give examples of this. In Greece, too, an idea akin to this found lodgment both in the popular belief and in the philosophy of Plato and Socrates; and though, as we have seen, the great leaders in medical science had taught with more or less distinctness that insanity is the result of physical disease, there was a strong popular tendency to attribute the more troublesome cases of it to hostile spiritual influence.(344) (344) For the exorcism against disease found at Ninevah, see G. Smith, Delitzsch's German translation, p. 34. For a very interesting passage regarding the representaion of a diabolic personage on a Babylonian bronze, and for a very frank statement regarding the transmission of ideas regarding Satanic power to our sacred books, see Sayce, Herodotus, appendix ii, p. 393. It is, indeed, extremely doubtful whether Plato himself or his contemporaries knew anything of evil demons, this conception probably coming into the Greek world, as into the Latin, with the Oriental influences that began to prevail about the time of the birth of Christ; but to the early Christians, a demon was a demon, and Plato's, good or bad, were pagan, and therefore devils. The Greek word "epilepsy" is itself a survival of the old belief, fossilized in a word, since its literal meaning refers to the SEIZURE of the patient by evil spirits. From all these sources, but especially from our sacred books and the writings of Plato, this theory that mental disease is caused largely or mainly by Satanic influence passed on into the early Church. In the apostolic times no belief seems to have been more firmly settled. The early fathers and doctors in the following age universally accepted it, and the apologists generally spoke of the power of casting out devils as a leading proof of the divine origin of the Christian religion. This belief took firm hold upon the strongest men. The case of St. Gregory the Great is typical. He was a pope of exceedingly broad mind for his time, and no one will think him unjustly reckoned one of the four Doctors of the Western Church. Yet he solemnly relates that a nun, having eaten some lettuce without making the sign of the cross, swallowed a devil, and that, when commanded by a holy man to come forth, the devil replied: "How am I to blame? I was sitting on the lettuce, and this woman, not having made the sign of the cross, ate me along with it."(345) (345) For a striking statement of the Jewish belief in diabolical interference, see Josephus, De Bello Judaico, vii, 6, iii; also his Antiquities, vol. viii, Whiston's translation. On the "devil cast out," in Mark ix, 17-29, as undoubtedly a case of epilepsy, see Cherullier, Essai sur l'Epilepsie; also Maury, art. Demonique in the Encyclopedie Moderne. In one text, at least, the popular belief is perfectly shown as confounding madness and possession: "He hath a devil, and is mad," John x, 20. Among the multitude of texts, those most relied upon were Matthew viii, 28, and Luke x, 17; and for the use of fetiches in driving out evil spirits, the account of the cures wrought by touching the garments of St. Paul in Acts xix, 12. On the general subject, see authorities already given, and as a typical passage, Tertullian, Ad. Scap., ii. For the very gross view taken by St. Basil, see Cudworth, Intellectual System, vol. ii, p. 648; also Archdeacon Farrar's Life of Christ. For the case related by St. Gregory the Great with comical details, see the Exempla of Archbishop Jacques de Vitrie, edited by Prof. T. F. Crane, of Cornell University, p. 59, art. cxxx. For a curious presentation of Greek views, see Lelut, Le demon Socrate, Paris, 1856; and for the transmission of these to Christianity, see the same, p. 201 and following. As a result of this idea, the Christian Church at an early period in its existence virtually gave up the noble conquests of Greek and Roman science in this field, and originated, for persons supposed to be possessed, a regular discipline, developed out of dogmatic theology. But during the centuries before theology and ecclesiasticism had become fully dominant this discipline was, as a rule, gentle and useful. The afflicted, when not too violent, were generally admitted to the exercises of public worship, and a kindly system of cure was attempted, in which prominence was given to holy water, sanctified ointments, the breath or spittle of the priest, the touching of relics, visits to holy places, and submission to mild forms of exorcism. There can be no doubt that many of these things, when judiciously used in that spirit of love and gentleness and devotion inherited by the earlier disciples from "the Master," produced good effects in soothing disturbed minds and in aiding their cure. Among the thousands of fetiches of various sorts then resorted to may be named, as typical, the Holy Handkerchief of Besancon. During many centuries multitudes came from far and near to touch it; for, it was argued, if touching the garments of St. Paul at Ephesus had cured the diseased, how much more might be expected of a handkerchief of the Lord himself! With ideas of this sort was mingled a vague belief in medical treatment, and out of this mixture were evolved such prescriptions as the following: "If an elf or a goblin come, smear his forehead with this salve, put it on his eyes, cense him with incense, and sign him frequently with the sign of the cross." "For a fiend-sick man: When a devil possesses a man, or controls him from within with disease, a spew-drink of lupin, bishopswort, henbane, garlic. Pound these together, add ale and holy water." And again: "A drink for a fiend-sick man, to be drunk out of a church bell: Githrife, cynoglossum, yarrow, lupin, flower-de-luce, fennel, lichen, lovage. Work up to a drink with clear ale, sing seven masses over it, add garlic and holy water, and let the possessed sing the Beati Immaculati; then let him drink the dose out of a church bell, and let the priest sing over him the Domine Sancte Pater Omnipotens."(346) (346) See Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wort-cunning, and Star-Craft of Early England in the Rolls Series, vol. ii, p. 177; also pp. 355, 356. For the great value of priestly saliva, see W. W. Story's essays. Had this been the worst treatment of lunatics developed in the theological atmosphere of the Middle Ages, the world would have been spared some of the most terrible chapters in its history; but, unfortunately, the idea of the Satanic possession of lunatics led to attempts to punish the indwelling demon. As this theological theory and practice became more fully developed, and ecclesiasticism more powerful to enforce it, all mildness began to disappear; the admonitions to gentle treatment by the great pagan and Moslem physicians were forgotten, and the treatment of lunatics tended more and more toward severity: more and more generally it was felt that cruelty to madmen was punishment of the devil residing within or acting upon them. A few strong churchmen and laymen made efforts to resist this tendency. As far back as the fourth century, Nemesius, Bishop of Emesa, accepted the truth as developed by pagan physicians, and aided them in strengthening it. In the seventh century, a Lombard code embodied a similar effort. In the eighth century, one of Charlemagne's capitularies seems to have had a like purpose. In the ninth century, that great churchman and statesman, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, superior to his time in this as in so many other things, tried to make right reason prevail in this field; and, near the beginning of the tenth century, Regino, Abbot of Prum, in the diocese of Treves, insisted on treating possession as disease. But all in vain; the current streaming most directly from sundry texts in the Christian sacred books, and swollen by theology, had become overwhelming.(347) (347) For a very thorough and interesting statement on the general subject, see Kirchhoff, Beziehungen des Damonen- und Hexenwesens zur deutschen Irrenpflege in the Allgemeine Zeitschrift fur Psychiatrie, Berlin, 1888, Bd. xliv, Heft 25. For Roman Catholic authority, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, article Energumens. For a brief and eloquent summary, see Krefft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, as above; and for a clear view of the transition from pagan mildness in the care of the insane to severity and cruelty under the Christian Church, see Maudsley, The Pathology of the Mind, London, 1879, p. 523. See also Buchmann, Die undfreie und die freie Kirche, Bresleau, 1873, p. 251. For other citations, see Kirchoff, as above, pp. 334-346. For Bishop Nemesius, see Trelat, p. 48. For an account of Agobard's general position in regard to this and allied superstitions, see Reginald Lane Poole's Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, London, 1884. The first great tributary poured into this stream, as we approach the bloom of the Middle Ages, appears to have come from the brain of Michael Psellus. Mingling scriptural texts, Platonic philosophy, and theological statements by great doctors of the Church, with wild utterances obtained from lunatics, he gave forth, about the beginning of the twelfth century, a treatise on The Work of Demons. Sacred science was vastly enriched thereby in various ways; but two of his conclusions, the results of his most profound thought, enforced by theologians and popularized by preachers, soon took special hold upon the thinking portion of the people at large. The first of these, which he easily based upon Scripture and St. Basil, was that, since all demons suffer by material fire and brimstone, they must have material bodies; the second was that, since all demons are by nature cold, they gladly seek a genial warmth by entering the bodies of men and beasts.(348) (348) See Baas and Werner, cited by Kirchhoff, as above; also Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, p. 68, and note, New York, 1884. As to Basil's belief in the corporeality of devils, see his Commentary on Isaiah, cap. i. Fed by this stream of thought, and developed in the warm atmosphere of medieval devotion, the idea of demoniacal possession as the main source of lunacy grew and blossomed and bore fruit in noxious luxuriance. There had, indeed, come into the Middle Ages an inheritance of scientific thought. The ideas of Hippocrates, Celius Aurelianus, Galen, and their followers, were from time to time revived; the Arabian physicians, the School of Salerno, such writers as Salicetus and Guy de Chauliac, and even some of the religious orders, did something to keep scientific doctrines alive; but the tide of theological thought was too strong; it became dangerous even to seem to name possible limits to diabolical power. To deny Satan was atheism; and perhaps nothing did so much to fasten the epithet "atheist" upon the medical profession as the suspicion that it did not fully acknowledge diabolical interference in mental disease. Following in the lines of the earlier fathers, St. Anselm, Abelard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, all the great doctors in the medieval Church, some of them in spite of occasional misgivings, upheld the idea that insanity is largely or mainly demoniacal possession, basing their belief steadily on the sacred Scriptures; and this belief was followed up in every quarter by more and more constant citation of the text "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." No other text of Scripture--save perhaps one--has caused the shedding of so much innocent blood. As we look over the history of the Middle Ages, we do, indeed, see another growth from which one might hope much; for there were two great streams of influence in the Church, and never were two powers more unlike each other. On one side was the spirit of Christianity, as it proceeded from the heart and mind of its blessed Founder, immensely powerful in aiding the evolution of religious thought and effort, and especially of provision for the relief of suffering by religious asylums and tender care. Nothing better expresses this than the touching words inscribed upon a great medieval hospital, "Christo in pauperibus suis." But on the other side was the theological theory--proceeding, as we have seen, from the survival of ancient superstitions, and sustained by constant reference to the texts in our sacred books--that many, and probably most, of the insane were possessed by the devil or in league with him, and that the cruel treatment of lunatics was simply punishment of the devil and his minions. By this current of thought was gradually developed one of the greatest masses of superstitious cruelty that has ever afflicted humanity. At the same time the stream of Christian endeavour, so far as the insane were concerned, was almost entirely cut off. In all the beautiful provision during the Middle Ages for the alleviation of human suffering, there was for the insane almost no care. Some monasteries, indeed, gave them refuge. We hear of a charitable work done for them at the London Bethlehem Hospital in the thirteenth century, at Geneva in the fifteenth, at Marseilles in the sixteenth, by the Black Penitents in the south of France, by certain Franciscans in northern France, by the Alexian Brothers on the Rhine, and by various agencies in other parts of Europe; but, curiously enough, the only really important effort in the Christian Church was stimulated by the Mohammedans. Certain monks, who had much to do with them in redeeming Christian slaves, found in the fifteenth century what John Howard found in the eighteenth, that the Arabs and Turks made a large and merciful provision for lunatics, such as was not seen in Christian lands; and this example led to better establishments in Spain and Italy. All honour to this work and to the men who engaged in it; but, as a rule, these establishments were few and poor, compared with those for other diseases, and they usually degenerated into "mad-houses," where devils were cast out mainly by cruelty.(349) (349) For a very full and learned, if somewhat one-sided, account of the earlier effects of this stream of charitable thought, see Tollemer, Des Origines de la Charite Catholique, Paris, 1858. It is instructive to note that, while this book is very full in regard to the action of the Church on slavery and on provision for the widows and orphans, the sick, infirm, captives, and lepers, there is hardly a trace of any care for the insane. This same want is incidentally shown by a typical example in Kriegk, Aerzte, Heilanstalten und Geisteskranke im mittelalterlichen Frankfurt, Frankfurt a. M., 1863, pp. 16, 17; also Kirschhof, pp. 396, 397. On the general subject, see Semelaigne, as above, p. 214; also Calmeil, vol. i, pp. 116, 117. For the effect of Muslem example in Spain and Italy, see Krafft-Ebing, as above, p. 45, note. The first main weapon against the indwelling Satan continued to be the exorcism; but under the influence of inferences from Scripture farther and farther fetched, and of theological reasoning more and more subtle, it became something very different from the gentle procedure of earlier times, and some description of this great weapon at the time of its highest development will throw light on the laws which govern the growth of theological reasoning, as well as upon the main subject in hand. A fundamental premise in the fully developed exorcism was that, according to sacred Scripture, a main characteristic of Satan is pride. Pride led him to rebel; for pride he was cast down; therefore the first thing to do, in driving him out of a lunatic, was to strike a fatal blow at his pride,--to disgust him. This theory was carried out logically, to the letter. The treatises on the subject simply astound one by their wealth of blasphemous and obscene epithets which it was allowable for the exorcist to use in casting out devils. The Treasury of Exorcisms contains hundreds of pages packed with the vilest epithets which the worst imagination could invent for the purpose of overwhelming the indwelling Satan.(350) (350) Thesaurus Exorcismorum atque Conjurationum terribilium, potentissimorum, efficacissimorum, cum PRACTICA probatissima: quibus spiritus maligni, Daemones Maleficiaque omnia de Corporibus humanis obsessis, tanquam Flagellis Fustibusque fugantur, expelluntur,... Cologne, 1626. Many of the books of the exorcists were put upon the various indexes of the Church, but this, the richest collection of all, and including nearly all those condemned, was not prohibited until 1709. Scarcely less startling manuals continued even later in use; and exorcisms adapted to every emergency may of course still be found in all the Benedictionals of the Church, even the latest. As an example, see the Manuale Benedictionum, published by the Bishop of Passau in 1849, or the Exorcismus in Satanam, etc., issued in 1890 by the present Pope, and now on sale at the shop of the Propoganda in Rome. Some of those decent enough to be printed in these degenerate days ran as follows: "Thou lustful and stupid one,... thou lean sow, famine-stricken and most impure,... thou wrinkled beast, thou mangy beast, thou beast of all beasts the most beastly,... thou mad spirit,... thou bestial and foolish drunkard,... most greedy wolf,... most abominable whisperer,... thou sooty spirit from Tartarus!... I cast thee down, O Tartarean boor, into the infernal kitchen!... Loathsome cobbler,... dingy collier,... filthy sow (scrofa stercorata),... perfidious boar,... envious crocodile,... malodorous drudge,... wounded basilisk,... rust-coloured asp,... swollen toad,... entangled spider,... lousy swine-herd (porcarie pedicose),... lowest of the low,... cudgelled ass," etc. But, in addition to this attempt to disgust Satan's pride with blackguardism, there was another to scare him with tremendous words. For this purpose, thunderous names, from Hebrew and Greek, were imported, such as Acharon, Eheye, Schemhamphora, Tetragrammaton, Homoousion, Athanatos, Ischiros, Aecodes, and the like.(351) (351) See the Conjuratio on p. 300 of the Thesaurus, and the general directions given on pp. 251, 251. Efforts were also made to drive him out with filthy and rank-smelling drugs; and, among those which can be mentioned in a printed article, we may name asafoetida, sulphur, squills, etc., which were to be burned under his nose. Still further to plague him, pictures of the devil were to be spat upon, trampled under foot by people of low condition, and sprinkled with foul compounds. But these were merely preliminaries to the exorcism proper. In this the most profound theological thought and sacred science of the period culminated. Most of its forms were childish, but some rise to almost Miltonic grandeur. As an example of the latter, we may take the following: "By the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, which God hath given to make known unto his servants those things which are shortly to be; and hath signified, sending by his angel,... I exorcise you, ye angels of untold perversity! "By the seven golden candlesticks,... and by one like unto the Son of man, standing in the midst of the candlesticks; by his voice, as the voice of many waters;... by his words, 'I am living, who was dead; and behold, I live forever and ever; and I have the keys of death and of hell,' I say unto you, Depart, O angels that show the way to eternal perdition!" Besides these, were long litanies of billingsgate, cursing, and threatening. One of these "scourging" exorcisms runs partly as follows: "May Agyos strike thee, as he did Egypt, with frogs!... May all the devils that are thy foes rush forth upon thee, and drag thee down to hell!... May... Tetragrammaton... drive thee forth and stone thee, as Israel did to Achan!... May the Holy One trample on thee and hang thee up in an infernal fork, as was done to the five kings of the Amorites!... May God set a nail to your skull, and pound it in with a hammer, as Jael did unto Sisera!... May... Sother... break thy head and cut off thy hands, as was done to the cursed Dagon!... May God hang thee in a hellish yoke, as seven men were hanged by the sons of Saul!" And so on, through five pages of close-printed Latin curses.(352) (352) Thesaurus Exorcismorum, pp. 812-817. Occasionally the demon is reasoned with, as follows: "O obstinate, accursed, fly!... why do you stop and hold back, when you know that your strength is lost on Christ? For it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks; and, verily, the longer it takes you to go, the worse it will go with you. Begone, then: take flight, thou venomous hisser, thou lying worm, thou begetter of vipers!"(353) (353) Ibid., p. 859. This procedure and its results were recognised as among the glories of the Church. As typical, we may mention an exorcism directed by a certain Bishop of Beauvais, which was so effective that five devils gave up possession of a sufferer and signed their names, each for himself and his subordinate imps, to an agreement that the possessed should be molested no more. So, too, the Jesuit fathers at Vienna, in 1583, gloried in the fact that in such a contest they had cast out twelve thousand six hundred and fifty-two living devils. The ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, and, indeed, of a later period, abound in boasts of such "mighty works."(354) (354) In my previous chapters, especially that on meteorology, I have quoted extensively from the original treatises, of which a very large collection is in my posession; but in this chapter I have mainly availed myself of the copious translations given by M. H. Dziewicki, in his excellent article in The Nineteenth Century for October, 1888, entitled Exorcizo Te. For valuable citations on the origin and spread of exorcism, see Lecky's European Morals (third English edition), vol. i, pp. 379-385. Such was the result of a thousand years of theological reasoning, by the strongest minds in Europe, upon data partly given in Scripture and partly inherited from paganism, regarding Satan and his work among men. Under the guidance of theology, always so severe against "science falsely so called," the world had come a long way indeed from the soothing treatment of the possessed by him who bore among the noblest of his titles that of "The Great Physician." The result was natural: the treatment of the insane fell more and more into the hands of the jailer, the torturer, and the executioner. To go back for a moment to the beginnings of this unfortunate development. In spite of the earlier and more kindly tendency in the Church, the Synod of Ancyra, as early as 314 A.D., commanded the expulsion of possessed persons from the Church; the Visigothic Christians whipped them; and Charlemagne, in spite of some good enactments, imprisoned them. Men and women, whose distempered minds might have been restored to health by gentleness and skill, were driven into hopeless madness by noxious medicines and brutality. Some few were saved as mere lunatics--they were surrendered to general carelessness, and became simply a prey to ridicule and aimless brutality; but vast numbers were punished as tabernacles of Satan. One of the least terrible of these punishments, and perhaps the most common of all, was that of scourging demons out of the body of a lunatic. This method commended itself even to the judgment of so thoughtful and kindly a personage as Sir Thomas More, and as late as the sixteenth century. But if the disease continued, as it naturally would after such treatment, the authorities frequently felt justified in driving out the demons by torture.(355) (355) For prescription of the whipping-post by Sir Thomas More, see D. H. Tuke's History of Insanity in the British Isles, London, 1882, p. 41. Interesting monuments of this idea, so fruitful in evil, still exist. In the great cities of central Europe, "witch towers," where witches and demoniacs were tortured, and "fool towers," where the more gentle lunatics were imprisoned, may still be seen. In the cathedrals we still see this idea fossilized. Devils and imps, struck into stone, clamber upon towers, prowl under cornices, peer out from bosses of foliage, perch upon capitals, nestle under benches, flame in windows. Above the great main entrance, the most common of all representations still shows Satan and his imps scowling, jeering, grinning, while taking possession of the souls of men and scourging them with serpents, or driving them with tridents, or dragging them with chains into the flaming mouth of hell. Even in the most hidden and sacred places of the medieval cathedral we still find representations of Satanic power in which profanity and obscenity run riot. In these representations the painter and the glass-stainer vied with the sculptor. Among the early paintings on canvas a well-known example represents the devil in the shape of a dragon, perched near the head of a dying man, eager to seize his soul as it issues from his mouth, and only kept off by the efforts of the attendant priest. Typical are the colossal portrait of Satan, and the vivid picture of the devils cast out of the possessed and entering into the swine, as shown in the cathedral-windows of Strasburg. So, too, in the windows of Chartres Cathedral we see a saint healing a lunatic: the saint, with a long devil-scaring formula in Latin issuing from his mouth; and the lunatic, with a little detestable hobgoblin, horned, hoofed, and tailed, issuing from HIS mouth. These examples are but typical of myriads in cathedrals and abbeys and parish churches throughout Europe; and all served to impress upon the popular mind a horror of everything called diabolic, and a hatred of those charged with it. These sermons in stones preceded the printed book; they were a sculptured Bible, which preceded Luther's pictorial Bible.(356) (356) I cite these instances out of a vast number which I have personally noted in visits to various cathedrals. For striking examples of mediaeval grotesques, see Wright's History of Caricature and the Grotesque, London, 1875; Langlois's Stalles de la Cathedrale de Rouen, 1838; Adeline's Les Sculptures Grotesques et Symboliques, Rouen, 1878; Viollet le Duc, Dictionnaire de l'Architecture; Gailhabaud, Sur l'Architecture, etc. For a reproduction of an illuminated manuscript in which devils fly out of the mouths of the possessed under the influence of exorcisms, see Cahier and Martin, Nouveaux Melanges d' Archeologie for 1874, p. 136; and for a demon emerging from a victim's mouth in a puff of smoke at the command of St. Francis Xavier, see La Devotion de Dix Vendredis, etc., Plate xxxii. Satan and his imps were among the principal personages in every popular drama, and "Hell's Mouth" was a piece of stage scenery constantly brought into requisition. A miracle-play without a full display of the diabolic element in it would have stood a fair chance of being pelted from the stage.(357) (357) See Wright, History of Caricature and the Grotesque; F. J. Mone, Schauspiele des Mittelalters, Carlsruhe, 1846; Dr. Karl Hase, Miracle-Plays and Sacred Dramas, Boston,1880 (translation from the German). Examples of the miracle-plays may be found in Marriott's Collection of English Miracle-Plays, 1838; in Hone's Ancient Mysteries; in T. Sharpe's Dissertaion on the Pageants.. . anciently performed at Coventry, Coventry, 1828; in the publications of the Shakespearean and other societies. See especially The Harrowing of Hell, a miracle-play, edited from the original now in the British Museum, by T. O. Halliwell, London, 1840. One of the items still preserved is a sum of money paid for keeping a fire burning in hell's mouth. Says Hase (as above, p. 42): "In wonderful satyrlike masquerade, in which neither horns, tails, nor hoofs were ever... wanting, the devil prosecuted on the stage his business of fetching souls," which left the mouths of the dying "in the form of small images." Not only the popular art but the popular legends embodied these ideas. The chroniclers delighted in them; the Lives of the Saints abounded in them; sermons enforced them from every pulpit. What wonder, then, that men and women had vivid dreams of Satanic influence, that dread of it was like dread of the plague, and that this terror spread the disease enormously, until we hear of convents, villages, and even large districts, ravaged by epidemics of diabolical possession!(358) (358) I shall discuss these epidemics of possession, which form a somewhat distinct class of phenomena, in the next chapter. And this terror naturally bred not only active cruelty toward those supposed to be possessed, but indifference to the sufferings of those acknowledged to be lunatics. As we have already seen, while ample and beautiful provision was made for every other form of human suffering, for this there was comparatively little; and, indeed, even this little was generally worse than none. Of this indifference and cruelty we have a striking monument in a single English word--a word originally significant of gentleness and mercy, but which became significant of wild riot, brutality, and confusion--Bethlehem Hospital became "Bedlam." Modern art has also dwelt upon this theme, and perhaps the most touching of all its exhibitions is the picture by a great French master, representing a tender woman bound to a column and exposed to the jeers, insults, and missiles of street ruffians.(359) (359) The typical picture representing a priest's struggle with the devil is in the city gallery of Rouen. The modern picture is Robert Fleury's painting in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris. Here and there, even in the worst of times, men arose who attempted to promote a more humane view, but with little effect. One expositor of St. Matthew, having ventured to recall the fact that some of the insane were spoken of in the New Testament as lunatics and to suggest that their madness might be caused by the moon, was answered that their madness was not caused by the moon, but by the devil, who avails himself of the moonlight for his work.(360) (360) See Geraldus Cambrensis, cited by Tuke, as above, pp. 8, 9. One result of this idea was a mode of cure which especially aggravated and spread mental disease: the promotion of great religious processions. Troops of men and women, crying, howling, imploring saints, and beating themselves with whips, visited various sacred shrines, images, and places in the hope of driving off the powers of evil. The only result was an increase in the numbers of the diseased. For hundreds of years this idea of diabolic possession was steadily developed. It was believed that devils entered into animals, and animals were accordingly exorcised, tried, tortured, convicted, and executed. The great St. Ambrose tells us that a priest, while saying mass, was troubled by the croaking of frogs in a neighbouring marsh; that he exorcised them, and so stopped their noise. St. Bernard, as the monkish chroniclers tell us, mounting the pulpit to preach in his abbey, was interrupted by a cloud of flies; straightway the saint uttered the sacred formula of excommunication, when the flies fell dead upon the pavement in heaps, and were cast out with shovels! A formula of exorcism attributed to a saint of the ninth century, which remained in use down to a recent period, especially declares insects injurious to crops to be possessed of evil spirits, and names, among the animals to be excommunicated or exorcised, mice, moles, and serpents. The use of exorcism against caterpillars and grasshoppers was also common. In the thirteenth century a Bishop of Lausanne, finding that the eels in Lake Leman troubled the fishermen, attempted to remove the difficulty by exorcism, and two centuries later one of his successors excommunicated all the May-bugs in the diocese. As late as 1731 there appears an entry on the Municipal Register of Thonon as follows: "RESOLVED, That this town join with other parishes of this province in obtaining from Rome an excommunication against the insects, and that it will contribute pro rata to the expenses of the same." Did any one venture to deny that animals could be possessed by Satan, he was at once silenced by reference to the entrance of Satan into the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and to the casting of devils into swine by the Founder of Christianity himself.(361) (361) See Menabrea, Proces au Moyen Age contre les Animaux, Chambery, 1846, pp. 31 and following; also Desmazes, Supplices, Prisons et Grace en France, pp. 89, 90, and 385-395. For a formula and ceremonies used in excommunicating insects, see Rydberg, pp. 75 and following. One part of this superstition most tenaciously held was the belief that a human being could be transformed into one of the lower animals. This became a fundamental point. The most dreaded of predatory animals in the Middle Ages were the wolves. Driven from the hills and forests in the winter by hunger, they not only devoured the flocks, but sometimes came into the villages and seized children. From time to time men and women whose brains were disordered dreamed that they had been changed into various animals, and especially into wolves. On their confessing this, and often implicating others, many executions of lunatics resulted; moreover, countless sane victims, suspected of the same impossible crime, were forced by torture to confess it, and sent unpitied to the stake. The belief in such a transformation pervaded all Europe, and lasted long even in Protestant countries. Probably no article in the witch creed had more adherents in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries than this. Nearly every parish in Europe had its resultant horrors. The reformed Church in all its branches fully accepted the doctrines of witchcraft and diabolic possession, and developed them still further. No one urged their fundamental ideas more fully than Luther. He did, indeed, reject portions of the witchcraft folly; but to the influence of devils he not only attributed his maladies, but his dreams, and nearly everything that thwarted or disturbed him. The flies which lighted upon his book, the rats which kept him awake at night, he believed to be devils; the resistance of the Archbishop of Mayence to his ideas, he attributed to Satan literally working in that prelate's heart; to his disciples he told stories of men who had been killed by rashly resisting the devil. Insanity, he was quite sure, was caused by Satan, and he exorcised sufferers. Against some he appears to have advised stronger remedies; and his horror of idiocy, as resulting from Satanic influence, was so great, that on one occasion he appears to have advised the killing of an idiot child, as being the direct offspring of Satan. Yet Luther was one of the most tender and loving of men; in the whole range of literature there is hardly anything more touching than his words and tributes to children. In enforcing his ideas regarding insanity, he laid stress especially upon the question of St. Paul as to the bewitching of the Galatians, and, regarding idiocy, on the account in Genesis of the birth of children whose fathers were "sons of God" and whose mothers were "daughters of men." One idea of his was especially characteristic. The descent of Christ into hell was a frequent topic of discussion in the Reformed Church. Melanchthon, with his love of Greek studies, held that the purpose of the Saviour in making such a descent was to make himself known to the great and noble men of antiquity--Plato, Socrates, and the rest; but Luther insisted that his purpose was to conquer Satan in a hand-to-hand struggle. This idea of diabolic influence pervaded his conversation, his preaching, his writings, and spread thence to the Lutheran Church in general. Calvin also held to the same theory, and, having more power with less kindness of heart than Luther, carried it out with yet greater harshness. Beza was especially severe against those who believed insanity to be a natural malady, and declared, "Such persons are refuted both by sacred and profane history." Under the influence, then, of such infallible teachings, in the older Church and in the new, this superstition was developed more and more into cruelty; and as the biblical texts, popularized in the sculptures and windows and mural decorations of the great medieval cathedrals, had done much to develop it among the people, so Luther's translation of the Bible, especially in the numerous editions of it illustrated with engravings, wrought with enormous power to spread and deepen it. In every peasant's cottage some one could spell out the story of the devil bearing Christ through the air and placing him upon the pinnacle of the Temple--of the woman with seven devils--of the devils cast into the swine. Every peasant's child could be made to understand the quaint pictures in the family Bible or the catechism which illustrated vividly all those texts. In the ideas thus deeply implanted, the men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries struggled against this mass of folly and cruelty found the worst barrier to right reason.(362) (362) For Luther, see, among the vast number of similar passages in his works, the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, pp. 251, 252. As to the grotesques in mediaeval churches, the writer of this article, in visiting the town church of Wittenberg, noticed, just opposite the pulpit where Luther so often preached, a very spirited figure of an imp peering out upon the congregation. One can but suspect that this mediaeval survival frequently suggested Luther's favourite topic during his sermons. For Beza, see his Notes on the New Testament, Matthew iv, 24. Such was the treatment of demoniacs developed by theology, and such the practice enforced by ecclesiasticism for more than a thousand years. How an atmosphere was spread in which this belief began to dissolve away, how its main foundations were undermined by science, and how there came in gradually a reign of humanity, will now be related. II. BEGINNINGS OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM. We have now seen the culmination of the old procedure regarding insanity, as it was developed under theology and enforced by ecclesiasticism; and we have noted how, under the influence of Luther and Calvin, the Reformation rather deepened than weakened the faith in the malice and power of a personal devil. Nor was this, in the Reformed churches any more than in the old, mere matter of theory. As in the early ages of Christianity, its priests especially appealed, in proof of the divine mission, to their power over the enemy of mankind in the bodies of men, so now the clergy of the rival creeds eagerly sought opportunities to establish the truth of their own and the falsehood of their opponents' doctrines by the visible casting out of devils. True, their methods differed somewhat: where the Catholic used holy water and consecrated wax, the Protestant was content with texts of Scripture and importunate prayer; but the supplementary physical annoyance of the indwelling demon did not greatly vary. Sharp was the competition for the unhappy objects of treatment. Each side, of course, stoutly denied all efficacy to its adversaries' efforts, urging that any seeming victory over Satan was due not to the defeat but to the collusion of the fiend. As, according to the Master himself, "no man can by Beelzebub cast out devils," the patient was now in greater need of relief than before; and more than one poor victim had to bear alternately Lutheran, Roman, and perhaps Calvinistic exorcism.(363) (363) For instances of this competition, see Freytag, Aus dem Jahrh. d. Reformation, pp. 359-375. The Jesuit Stengel, in his De judiciis divinis (Ingolstadt, 1651), devotes a whole chapter to an exorcism, by the great Canisius, of a spirit that had baffled Protestant conjuration. Among the most jubilant Catholic satires of the time are those exulting in Luther's alleged failure as an exorcist. But far more serious in its consequences was another rivalry to which in the sixteenth century the clergy of all creeds found themselves subject. The revival of the science of medicine, under the impulse of the new study of antiquity, suddenly bade fair to take out of the hands of the Church the profession of which she had enjoyed so long and so profitable a monopoly. Only one class of diseases remained unquestionably hers--those which were still admitted to be due to the direct personal interference of Satan--and foremost among these was insanity.(364) It was surely no wonder that an age of religious controversy and excitement should be exceptionally prolific in ailments of the mind; and, to men who mutually taught the utter futility of that baptismal exorcism by which the babes of their misguided neighbours were made to renounce the devil and his works, it ought not to have seemed strange that his victims now became more numerous.(365) But so simple an explanation did not satisfy these physicians of souls; they therefore devised a simpler one: their patients, they alleged, were bewitched, and their increase was due to the growing numbers of those human allies of Satan known as witches. (364) For the attitude of the Catholic clergy, the best sources are the confidential Jesuit Litterae Annuae. To this day the numerous treatises on "pastoral medicine" in use in the older Church devote themselves mainly to this sort of warfare with the devil. (365) Baptismal exorcism continued in use among the Lutherans till the eighteenth century, though the struggle over its abandonment had been long and sharp. See Krafft, Histories vom Exorcismo, Hamburg, 1750. Already, before the close of the fifteenth century, Pope Innocent VIII had issued the startling bull by which he called on the archbishops, bishops, and other clergy of Germany to join hands with his inquisitors in rooting out these willing bond-servants of Satan, who were said to swarm throughout all that country and to revel in the blackest crimes. Other popes had since reiterated the appeal; and, though none of these documents touched on the blame of witchcraft for diabolic possession, the inquisitors charged with their execution pointed it out most clearly in their fearful handbook, the Witch-Hammer, and prescribed the special means by which possession thus caused should be met. These teachings took firm root in religious minds everywhere; and during the great age of witch-burning that followed the Reformation it may well be doubted whether any single cause so often gave rise to an outbreak of the persecution as the alleged bewitchment of some poor mad or foolish or hysterical creature. The persecution, thus once under way, fed itself; for, under the terrible doctrine of "excepted cases," by which in the religious crimes of heresy and witchcraft there was no limit to the use of torture, the witch was forced to confess to accomplices, who in turn accused others, and so on to the end of the chapter.(366) (366) The Jesuit Stengel, professor at Ingolstadt, who (in his great work, De judiciis divinis) urges, as reasons why a merciful God permits illness, his wish to glorify himself through the miracles wrought by his Church, and his desire to test the faith of men by letting them choose between the holy aid of the Church and the illicit resort to medicine, declares that there is a difference between simple possession and that brought by bewitchment, and insists that the latter is the more difficult to treat. The horrors of such a persecution, with the consciousness of an ever-present devil it breathed and the panic terror of him it inspired, could not but aggravate the insanity it claimed to cure. Well-authenticated, though rarer than is often believed, were the cases where crazed women voluntarily accused themselves of this impossible crime. One of the most eminent authorities on diseases of the mind declares that among the unfortunate beings who were put to death for witchcraft he recognises well-marked victims of cerebral disorders; while an equally eminent authority in Germany tells us that, in a most careful study of the original records of their trials by torture, he has often found their answers and recorded conversations exactly like those familiar to him in our modern lunatic asylums, and names some forms of insanity which constantly and un mistakably appear among those who suffered for criminal dealings with the devil.(367) The result of this widespread terror was naturally, therefore, a steady increase in mental disorders. A great modern authority tells us that, although modern civilization tends to increase insanity, the number of lunatics at present is far less than in the ages of faith and in the Reformation period. The treatment of the "possessed," as we find it laid down in standard treatises, sanctioned by orthodox churchmen and jurists, accounts for this abundantly. One sort of treatment used for those accused of witchcraft will also serve to show this--the "tortura insomniae." Of all things in brain-disease, calm and regular sleep is most certainly beneficial; yet, under this practice, these half-crazed creatures were prevented, night after night and day after day, from sleeping or even resting. In this way temporary delusion became chronic insanity, mild cases became violent, torture and death ensued, and the "ways of God to man" were justified.(368) But the most contemptible creatures in all those centuries were the physicians who took sides with religious orthodoxy. While we have, on the side of truth, Flade sacrificing his life, Cornelius Agrippa his liberty, Wier and Loos their hopes of preferment, Bekker his position, and Thomasius his ease, reputation, and friends, we find, as allies of the other side, a troop of eminently respectable doctors mixing Scripture, metaphysics, and pretended observations to support the "safe side" and to deprecate interference with the existing superstition, which seemed to them "a very safe belief to be held by the common people."(369) (367) See D. H. Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles, London, 1822, p. 36; also Kirchhoff, p. 340. The forms of insanity especially mentioned are "dementia senilis" and epilepsy. A striking case of voluntary confession of witchcraft by a woman who lived to recover from the delusion is narrated in great detail by Reginald Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, London, 1584. It is, alas, only too likely that the "strangeness" caused by slight and unrecognised mania led often to the accusation of witchcraft instead of to the suspicion of possession. (368) See Kirchhoff, as above. (369) For the arguments used by creatures of this sort, see Diefenbach, Der Hexenwahn vor und nach der Glaubensspaltung in Deutschland, pp. 342-346. A long list of their infamous names is given on p. 345. Against one form of insanity both Catholics and Protestants were especially cruel. Nothing is more common in all times of religious excitement than strange personal hallucinations, involving the belief, by the insane patient, that he is a divine person. In the most striking representation of insanity that has ever been made, Kaulbach shows, at the centre of his wonderful group, a patient drawing attention to himself as the Saviour of the world. Sometimes, when this form of disease took a milder hysterical character, the subject of it was treated with reverence, and even elevated to sainthood: such examples as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena in Italy, St. Bridget in Sweden, St. Theresa in Spain, St. Mary Alacoque in France, and Louise Lateau in Belgium, are typical. But more frequently such cases shocked public feeling, and were treated with especial rigour: typical of this is the case of Simon Marin, who in his insanity believed himself to be the Son of God, and was on that account burned alive at Paris and his ashes scattered to the winds.(370) (370) As to the frequency among the insane of this form of belief, see Calmeil, vol. ii, p. 257; also Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, pp. 201, 202, and 418-424; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation en France, vol. ii, p. 110. For the peculiar abberations of the saints above named and other ecstatics, see Maudsley, as above, pp. 71, 72, and 149, 150. Maudsley's chapters on this and cognate subjects are certainly among the most valuable contributions to modern thought. For a discussion of the most recent case, see Warlomont, Louise Lateau, Paris, 1875. The profundity of theologians and jurists constantly developed new theories as to the modes of diabolic entrance into the "possessed." One such theory was that Satan could be taken into the mouth with one's food--perhaps in the form of an insect swallowed on a leaf of salad, and this was sanctioned, as we have seen, by no less infallible an authority than Gregory the Great, Pope and Saint--Another theory was that Satan entered the body when the mouth was opened to breathe, and there are well-authenticated cases of doctors and divines who, when casting out evil spirits, took especial care lest the imp might jump into their own mouths from the mouth of the patient. Another theory was that the devil entered human beings during sleep; and at a comparatively recent period a King of Spain was wont to sleep between two monks, to keep off the devil.(371) (371) As to the devil's entering into the mouth while eating, see Calmeil, as above, vol. ii, pp. 105, 106. As to the dread of Dr. Borde lest the evil spirit, when exorcised, might enter his own body, see Tuke, as above, p. 28. As to the King of Spain, see the noted chapter in Buckle's History of Civilization in England. The monasteries were frequent sources of that form of mental disease which was supposed to be caused by bewitchment. From the earliest period it is evident that monastic life tended to develop insanity. Such cases as that of St. Anthony are typical of its effects upon the strongest minds; but it was especially the convents for women that became the great breeding-beds of this disease. Among the large numbers of women and girls thus assembled--many of them forced into monastic seclusion against their will, for the reason that their families could give them no dower--subjected to the unsatisfied longings, suspicions, bickerings, petty jealousies, envies, and hatreds, so inevitable in convent life--mental disease was not unlikely to be developed at any moment. Hysterical excitement in nunneries took shapes sometimes comical, but more generally tragical. Noteworthy is it that the last places where executions for witchcraft took place were mainly in the neighbourhood of great nunneries; and the last famous victim, of the myriads executed in Germany for this imaginary crime, was Sister Anna Renata Singer, sub-prioress of a nunnery near Wurzburg.(372) (372) Among the multitude of authorities on this point, see Kirchhoff, as above, p. 337; and for a most striking picture of this dark side of convent life, drawn, indeed, by a devoted Roman Catholic, see Manzoni's Promessi Sposi. On Anna Renata there is a striking essay by the late Johannes Scherr, in his Hammerschlage und Historien. On the general subject of hysteria thus developed, see the writings of Carpenter and Tuke; and as to its natural development in nunneries, see Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, p. 9. Especial attention will be paid to this in the chapter on Diabolism and Hysteria. The same thing was seen among young women exposed to sundry fanatical Protestant preachers. Insanity, both temporary and permanent, was thus frequently developed among the Huguenots of France, and has been thus produced in America, from the days of the Salem persecution down to the "camp meetings" of the present time.(373) (373) This branch of the subject will be discussed more at length in a future chapter. At various times, from the days of St. Agobard of Lyons in the ninth century to Pomponatius in the sixteenth, protests or suggestions, more or less timid, had been made by thoughtful men against this system. Medicine had made some advance toward a better view, but the theological torrent had generally overwhelmed all who supported a scientific treatment. At last, toward the end of the sixteenth century, two men made a beginning of a much more serious attack upon this venerable superstition. The revival of learning, and the impulse to thought on material matters given during the "age of discovery," undoubtedly produced an atmosphere which made the work of these men possible. In the year 1563, in the midst of demonstrations of demoniacal possession by the most eminent theologians and judges, who sat in their robes and looked wise, while women, shrieking, praying, and blaspheming, were put to the torture, a man arose who dared to protest effectively that some of the persons thus charged might be simply insane; and this man was John Wier, of Cleves. His protest does not at this day strike us as particularly bold. In his books, De Praestigiis Daemonum and De Lamiis, he did his best not to offend religious or theological susceptibilities; but he felt obliged to call attention to the mingled fraud and delusion of those who claimed to be bewitched, and to point out that it was often not their accusers, but the alleged witches themselves, who were really ailing, and to urge that these be brought first of all to a physician. His book was at once attacked by the most eminent theologians. One of the greatest laymen of his time, Jean Bodin, also wrote with especial power against it, and by a plentiful use of scriptural texts gained to all appearance a complete victory: this superstition seemed thus fastened upon Europe for a thousand years more. But doubt was in the air, and, about a quarter of a century after the publication of Wier's book there were published in France the essays of a man by no means so noble, but of far greater genius--Michel de Montaigne. The general scepticism which his work promoted among the French people did much to produce an atmosphere in which the belief in witchcraft and demoniacal possession must inevitably wither. But this process, though real, was hidden, and the victory still seemed on the theological side. The development of the new truth and its struggle against the old error still went on. In Holland, Balthazar Bekker wrote his book against the worst forms of the superstition, and attempted to help the scientific side by a text from the Second Epistle of St. Peter, showing that the devils had been confined by the Almighty, and therefore could not be doing on earth the work which was imputed to them. But Bekker's Protestant brethren drove him from his pulpit, and he narrowly escaped with his life. The last struggles of a great superstition are very frequently the worst. So it proved in this case. In the first half of the seventeenth century the cruelties arising from the old doctrine were more numerous and severe than ever before. In Spain, Sweden, Italy, and, above all, in Germany, we see constant efforts to suppress the evolution of the new truth. But in the midst of all this reactionary rage glimpses of right reason began to appear. It is significant that at this very time, when the old superstition was apparently everywhere triumphant, the declaration by Poulet that he and his brother and his cousin had, by smearing themselves with ointment, changed themselves into wolves and devoured children, brought no severe punishment upon them. The judges sent him to a mad-house. More and more, in spite of frantic efforts from the pulpit to save the superstition, great writers and jurists, especially in France, began to have glimpses of the truth and courage to uphold it. Malebranche spoke against the delusion; Seguier led the French courts to annul several decrees condemning sorcerers; the great chancellor, D'Aguesseau, declared to the Parliament of Paris that, if they wished to stop sorcery, they must stop talking about it--that sorcerers are more to be pitied than blamed.(374) (374) See Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales, vol. i, pp. 488, 489; vol. ii, p. 529. But just at this time, as the eighteenth century was approaching, the theological current was strengthened by a great ecclesiastic--the greatest theologian that France has produced, whose influence upon religion and upon the mind of Louis XIV was enormous--Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. There had been reason to expect that Bossuet would at least do something to mitigate the superstition; for his writings show that, in much which before his day had been ascribed to diabolic possession, he saw simple lunacy. Unfortunately, the same adherence to the literal interpretation of Scripture which led him to oppose every other scientific truth developed in his time, led him also to attack this: he delivered and published two great sermons, which, while showing some progress in the form of his belief, showed none the less that the fundamental idea of diabolic possession was still to be tenaciously held. What this idea was may be seen in one typical statement: he declared that "a single devil could turn the earth round as easily as we turn a marble."(375) (375) See the two sermons, Sur les Demons (which are virtually but two versions of the same sermon), in Bousset's works, edition of 1845, vol. iii, p. 236 et seq.; also Dziewicki, in The Nineteenth Century, as above. On Bousset's resistance to other scientific truths, especially in astronomy, geology, and political economy, see other chapters in this work. III. THE FINAL STRUGGLE AND VICTORY OF SCIENCE.--PINEL AND TUKE. The theological current, thus re-enforced, seemed to become again irresistible; but it was only so in appearance. In spite of it, French scepticism continued to develop; signs of quiet change among the mass of thinking men were appearing more and more; and in 1672 came one of great significance, for, the Parliament of Rouen having doomed fourteen sorcerers to be burned, their execution was delayed for two years, evidently on account of scepticism among officials; and at length the great minister of Louis XIV, Colbert, issued an edict checking such trials, and ordering the convicted to be treated for madness. Victory seemed now to incline to the standard of science, and in 1725 no less a personage than St. Andre, a court physician, dared to publish a work virtually showing "demoniacal possession" to be lunacy. The French philosophy, from the time of its early development in the eighteenth century under Montesquieu and Voltaire, naturally strengthened the movement; the results of post-mortem examinations of the brains of the "possessed" confirmed it; and in 1768 we see it take form in a declaration by the Parliament of Paris, that possessed persons were to be considered as simply diseased. Still, the old belief lingered on, its life flickering up from time to time in those parts of France most under ecclesiastical control, until in these last years of the nineteenth century a blow has been given it by the researches of Charcot and his compeers which will probably soon extinguish it. One evidence of Satanic intercourse with mankind especially, on which for many generations theologians had laid peculiar stress, and for which they had condemned scores of little girls and hundreds of old women to a most cruel death, was found to be nothing more than one of the many results of hysteria.(376) (376) For Colbert's influence, see Dagron, p. 8; also Rambaud, as above, vol. ii, p. 155. For St. Andre, see Lacroix, as above, pp. 189, 190. For Charcot's researches into the disease now known as Meteorismus hystericus, but which was formerly regarded in the ecclesiastical courts as an evidence of pregnancy through relations with Satan, see Snell, Hexenprocesse un Geistesstorung, Munchen, 1891, chaps. xii and xiii. In England the same warfare went on. John Locke had asserted the truth, but the theological view continued to control public opinion. Most prominent among those who exercised great power in its behalf was John Wesley, and the strength and beauty of his character made his influence in this respect all the more unfortunate. The same servitude to the mere letter of Scripture which led him to declare that "to give up witchcraft is to give up the Bible," controlled him in regard to insanity. He insisted, on the authority of the Old Testament, that bodily diseases are sometimes caused by devils, and, upon the authority of the New Testament, that the gods of the heathen are demons; he believed that dreams, while in some cases caused by bodily conditions and passions, are shown by Scripture to be also caused by occult powers of evil; he cites a physician to prove that "most lunatics are really demoniacs." In his great sermon on Evil Angels, he dwells upon this point especially; resists the idea that "possession" may be epilepsy, even though ordinary symptoms of epilepsy be present; protests against "giving up to infidels such proofs of an invisible world as are to be found in diabolic possession"; and evidently believes that some who have been made hysterical by his own preaching are "possessed of Satan." On all this, and much more to the same effect, he insisted with all the power given to him by his deep religious nature, his wonderful familiarity with the Scriptures, his natural acumen, and his eloquence. But here, too, science continued its work. The old belief was steadily undermined, an atmosphere favourable to the truth was more and more developed, and the act of Parliament, in 1735, which banished the crime of witchcraft from the statute book, was the beginning of the end. In Germany we see the beginnings of a similar triumph for science. In Prussia, that sturdy old monarch, Frederick William I, nullified the efforts of the more zealous clergy and orthodox jurists to keep up the old doctrine in his dominions; throughout Protestant Germany, where it had raged most severely, it was, as a rule, cast out of the Church formulas, catechisms, and hymns, and became more and more a subject for jocose allusion. From force of habit, and for the sake of consistency, some of the more conservative theologians continued to repeat the old arguments, and there were many who insisted upon the belief as absolutely necessary to ordinary orthodoxy; but it is evident that it had become a mere conventionality, that men only believed that they believed it, and now a reform seemed possible in the treatment of the insane.(377) (377) For John Locke, see King's Life of Locke, pp. 326, 327. For Wesley, out of his almost innumerable writings bearing on the subject, I may select the sermon on Evil Angels, and his Letter to Dr. Middleton; and in his collected works, there are many striking statements and arguments, especially in vols. iii, vi, and ix. See also Tyerman's Life of Wesley, vol. ii, pp. 260 et seq. Luther's great hymn, Ein' feste Burg, remained, of course, a prominent exception to the rule; but a popular proverb came to express the general feeling: "Auf Teufel reimt sich Zweifel." See Langin, as above, pp. 545, 546. In Austria, the government set Dr. Antonio Haen at making careful researches into the causes of diabolic possession. He did not think it best, in view of the power of the Church, to dispute the possibility or probability of such cases, but simply decided, after thorough investigation, that out of the many cases which had been brought to him, not one supported the belief in demoniacal influence. An attempt was made to follow up this examination, and much was done by men like Francke and Van Swieten, and especially by the reforming emperor, Joseph II, to rescue men and women who would otherwise have fallen victims to the prevalent superstition. Unfortunately, Joseph had arrayed against himself the whole power of the Church, and most of his good efforts seemed brought to naught. But what the noblest of the old race of German emperors could not do suddenly, the German men of science did gradually. Quietly and thoroughly, by proofs that could not be gainsaid, they recovered the old scientific fact established in pagan Greece and Rome, that madness is simply physical disease. But they now established it on a basis that can never again be shaken; for, in post-mortem examinations of large numbers of "possessed" persons, they found evidence of brain-disease. Typical is a case at Hamburg in 1729. An afflicted woman showed in a high degree all the recognised characteristics of diabolic possession: exorcisms, preachings, and sanctified remedies of every sort were tried in vain; milder medical means were then tried, and she so far recovered that she was allowed to take the communion before she died: the autopsy, held in the presence of fifteen physicians and a public notary, showed it to be simply a case of chronic meningitis. The work of German men of science in this field is noble indeed; a great succession, from Wier to Virchow, have erected a barrier against which all the efforts of reactionists beat in vain.(378) (378) See Kirchhoff, pp. 181-187; also Langin, Religion und Hexenprozess, as above cited. In America, the belief in diabolic influence had, in the early colonial period, full control. The Mathers, so superior to their time in many things, were children of their time in this: they supported the belief fully, and the Salem witchcraft horrors were among its results; but the discussion of that folly by Calef struck it a severe blow, and a better influence spread rapidly throughout the colonies. By the middle of the eighteenth century belief in diabolic possession had practically disappeared from all enlightened countries, and during the nineteenth century it has lost its hold even in regions where the medieval spirit continues strongest. Throughout the Middle Ages, as we have seen, Satan was a leading personage in the miracle-plays, but in 1810 the Bavarian Government refused to allow the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau if Satan was permitted to take any part in it; in spite of heroic efforts to maintain the old belief, even the childlike faith of the Tyrolese had arrived at a point which made a representation of Satan simply a thing to provoke laughter. Very significant also was the trial which took place at Wemding, in southern Germany, in 1892. A boy had become hysterical, and the Capuchin Father Aurelian tried to exorcise him, and charged a peasant's wife, Frau Herz, with bewitching him, on evidence that would have cost the woman her life at any time during the seventeenth century. Thereupon the woman's husband brought suit against Father Aurelian for slander. The latter urged in his defence that the boy was possessed of an evil spirit, if anybody ever was; that what had been said and done was in accordance with the rules and regulations of the Church, as laid down in decrees, formulas, and rituals sanctioned by popes, councils, and innumerable bishops during ages. All in vain. The court condemned the good father to fine and imprisonment. As in a famous English case, "hell was dismissed, with costs." Even more significant is the fact that recently a boy declared by two Bavarian priests to be possessed by the devil, was taken, after all Church exorcisms had failed, to Father Kneipp's hydropathic establishment and was there speedily cured.(379) (379) For remarkably interesting articles showing the recent efforts of sundry priests in Italy and South Germany to revive the belief in diabolic possession--efforts in which the Bishop of Augsburg took part--see Prof. E. P. Evans, on Modern Instances of Diabolic Possession, and on Recent Recrudescence of Superstition in The Popular Science Monthly for Dec. 1892, and for Oct., Nov., 1895. Speaking of the part played by Satan at Ober-Ammergau, Hase says: "Formerly, seated on his infernal throne, surrounded by his hosts with Sin and Death, he opened the play,... and... retained throughout a considerable part; but he has been surrendered to the progress of that enlightenment which even the Bavarian highlands have not been able to escape" (p. 80). The especial point to be noted is, that from the miracle-play of the present day Satan and his works have disappeared. The present writer was unable to detect, in a representation of the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau, in 1881, the slightest reference to diabolic interference with the course of events as represented from the Old Testament, or from the New, in a series of tableaux lasting, with a slight intermission, from nine in the morning to after four in the afternoon. With the most thorough exhibition of minute events in the life of Christ, and at times with hundreds of figures on the stage, there was not a person or a word which recalled that main feature in the mediaeval Church plays. The present writer also made a full collection of the photographs of tableaux, of engravings of music, and of works bearing upon these representations for twenty years before, and in none of these was there an apparent survival of the old belief. But, although the old superstition had been discarded, the inevitable conservatism in theology and medicine caused many old abuses to be continued for years after the theological basis for them had really disappeared. There still lingered also a feeling of dislike toward madmen, engendered by the early feeling of hostility toward them, which sufficed to prevent for many years any practical reforms. What that old theory had been, even under the most favourable circumstances and among the best of men, we have seen in the fact that Sir Thomas More ordered acknowledged lunatics to be publicly flogged; and it will be remembered that Shakespeare makes one of his characters refer to madmen as deserving "a dark house and a whip." What the old practice was and continued to be we know but too well. Taking Protestant England as an example--and it was probably the most humane--we have a chain of testimony. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Bethlehem Hospital was reported too loathsome for any man to enter; in the seventeenth century, John Evelyn found it no better; in the eighteenth, Hogarth's pictures and contemporary reports show it to be essentially what it had been in those previous centuries.(380) (380) On Sir Thomas More and the condition of Bedlam, see Tuke, History of the Insane in the British Isles, pp. 63-73. One of the passages of Shakespeare is in As You Like It, Act iii, scene 2. As to the survival of indifference to the sufferings of the insane so long after the belief which caused it had generally disappeared, see some excellent remarks in Maudsley's Responsibility in Mental Disease, London, 1885, pp. 10-12. The older English practice is thus quaintly described by Richard Carew (in his Survey of Cornwall, London, 1602, 1769): "In our forefathers' daies, when devotion as much exceeded knowledge, as knowledge now commeth short of devotion, there were many bowssening places, for curing of mad men, and amongst the rest, one at Alternunne in this Hundred, called S. Nunnespoole, which Saints Altar (it may be)... gave name to the church... The watter running from S. Nunnes well, fell into a square and close walled plot, which might bee filled at what depth they listed. Vpon this wall was the franticke person set to stand, his backe towards the poole, and from thence with a sudden blow in the brest, tumbled headlong into the pond; where a strong fellowe, provided for the nonce, tooke him, and tossed him vp and downe, alongst and athwart the water, vntill the patient, by forgoing strength, had somewhat forgot his fury. Then there was hee conveyed to the Church, and certain Masses sung over him; vpon which handling, if his right wits returned, S. Nunne had the thanks; but if there appeared any small amendment, he was bowsened againe, and againe, while there remayned in him any hope of life, for recovery." The first humane impulse of any considerable importance in this field seems to have been aroused in America. In the year 1751 certain members of the Society of Friends founded a small hospital for the insane, on better principles, in Pennsylvania. To use the language of its founders, it was intended "as a good work, acceptable to God." Twenty years later Virginia established a similar asylum, and gradually others appeared in other colonies. But it was in France that mercy was to be put upon a scientific basis, and was to lead to practical results which were to convert the world to humanity. In this case, as in so many others, from France was spread and popularized not only the scepticism which destroyed the theological theory, but also the devotion which built up the new scientific theory and endowed the world with a new treasure of civilization. In 1756 some physicians of the great hospital at Paris known as the Hotel-Dieu protested that the cruelties prevailing in the treatment of the insane were aggravating the disease; and some protests followed from other quarters. Little effect was produced at first; but just before the French Revolution, Tenon, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and others took up the subject, and in 1791 a commission was appointed to undertake a reform. By great good fortune, the man selected to lead in the movement was one who had already thrown his heart into it--Jean Baptiste Pinel. In 1792 Pinel was made physician at Bicetre, one of the most extensive lunatic asylums in France, and to the work there imposed upon him he gave all his powers. Little was heard of him at first. The most terrible scenes of the French Revolution were drawing nigh; but he laboured on, modestly and devotedly--apparently without a thought of the great political storm raging about him. His first step was to discard utterly the whole theological doctrine of "possession," and especially the idea that insanity is the result of any subtle spiritual influence. He simply put in practice the theory that lunacy is the result of bodily disease. It is a curious matter for reflection, that but for this sway of the destructive philosophy of the eighteenth century, and of the Terrorists during the French Revolution, Pinel's blessed work would in all probability have been thwarted, and he himself excommunicated for heresy and driven from his position. Doubtless the same efforts would have been put forth against him which the Church, a little earlier, had put forth against inoculation as a remedy for smallpox; but just at that time the great churchmen had other things to think of besides crushing this particular heretic: they were too much occupied in keeping their own heads from the guillotine to give attention to what was passing in the head of Pinel. He was allowed to work in peace, and in a short time the reign of diabolism at Bicetre was ended. What the exorcisms and fetiches and prayers and processions, and drinking of holy water, and ringing of bells, had been unable to accomplish during eighteen hundred years, he achieved in a few months. His method was simple: for the brutality and cruelty which had prevailed up to that time, he substituted kindness and gentleness. The possessed were taken out of their dungeons, given sunny rooms, and allowed the liberty of pleasant ground for exercise; chains were thrown aside. At the same time, the mental power of each patient was developed by its fitting exercise, and disease was met with remedies sanctioned by experiment, observation, and reason. Thus was gained one of the greatest, though one of the least known, triumphs of modern science and humanity. The results obtained by Pinel had an instant effect, not only in France but throughout Europe: the news spread from hospital to hospital. At his death, Esquirol took up his work; and, in the place of the old training of judges, torturers, and executioners by theology to carry out its ideas in cruelty, there was now trained a school of physicians to develop science in this field and carry out its decrees in mercy.(381) (381) For the services of Tenon and his associates, and also for the work of Pinel, see especially Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales, Paris, 1838, vol. i, p. 35; and for the general subject, and the condition of the hospitals at this period, see Dagron, as above. A similar evolution of better science and practice took place in England. In spite of the coldness, and even hostility, of the greater men in the Established Church, and notwithstanding the scriptural demonstrations of Wesley that the majority of the insane were possessed of devils, the scientific method steadily gathered strength. In 1750 the condition of the insane began to attract especial attention; it was found that mad-houses were swayed by ideas utterly indefensible, and that the practices engendered by these ideas were monstrous. As a rule, the patients were immured in cells, and in many cases were chained to the walls; in others, flogging and starvation played leading parts, and in some cases the patients were killed. Naturally enough, John Howard declared, in 1789, that he found in Constantinople a better insane asylum than the great St. Luke's Hospital in London. Well might he do so; for, ever since Caliph Omar had protected and encouraged the scientific investigation of insanity by Paul of Aegina, the Moslem treatment of the insane had been far more merciful than the system prevailing throughout Christendom.(382) (382) See D. H. Tuke, as above, p. 110; also Trelat, as already cited. In 1792--the same year in which Pinel began his great work in France--William Tuke began a similar work in England. There seems to have been no connection between these two reformers; each wrought independently of the other, but the results arrived at were the same. So, too, in the main, were their methods; and in the little house of William Tuke, at York, began a better era for England. The name which this little asylum received is a monument both of the old reign of cruelty and of the new reign of humanity. Every old name for such an asylum had been made odious and repulsive by ages of misery; in a happy moment of inspiration Tuke's gentle Quaker wife suggested a new name; and, in accordance with this suggestion, the place became known as a "Retreat." From the great body of influential classes in church and state Tuke received little aid. The influence of the theological spirit was shown when, in that same year, Dr. Pangster published his Observations on Mental Disorders, and, after displaying much ignorance as to the causes and nature of insanity, summed up by saying piously, "Here our researches must stop, and we must declare that 'wonderful are the works of the Lord, and his ways past finding out.'" Such seemed to be the view of the Church at large: though the new "Retreat" was at one of the two great ecclesiastical centres of England, we hear of no aid or encouragement from the Archbishop of York or from his clergy. Nor was this the worst: the indirect influence of the theological habit of thought and ecclesiastical prestige was displayed in the Edinburgh Review. That great organ of opinion, not content with attacking Tuke, poured contempt upon his work, as well as on that of Pinel. A few of Tuke's brother and sister Quakers seem to have been his only reliance; and in a letter regarding his efforts at that time he says, "All men seem to desert me."(383) (383) See D. H. Tuke, as above, p. 116-142, and 512; also the Edinburgh Review for April, 1803. In this atmosphere of English conservative opposition or indifference the work could not grow rapidly. As late as 1815, a member of Parliament stigmatized the insane asylums of England as the shame of the nation; and even as late as 1827, and in a few cases as late as 1850, there were revivals of the old absurdity and brutality. Down to a late period, in the hospitals of St. Luke and Bedlam, long rows of the insane were chained to the walls of the corridors. But Gardner at Lincoln, Donnelly at Hanwell, and a new school of practitioners in mental disease, took up the work of Tuke, and the victory in England was gained in practice as it had been previously gained in theory. There need be no controversy regarding the comparative merits of these two benefactors of our race, Pinel and Tuke. They clearly did their thinking and their work independently of each other, and thereby each strengthened the other and benefited mankind. All that remains to be said is, that while France has paid high honours to Pinel, as to one who did much to free the world from one of its most cruel superstitions and to bring in a reign of humanity over a wide empire, England has as yet made no fitting commemoration of her great benefactor in this field. York Minster holds many tombs of men, of whom some were blessings to their fellow-beings, while some were but "solemnly constituted impostors" and parasites upon the body politic; yet, to this hour, that great temple has received no consecration by a monument to the man who did more to alleviate human misery than any other who has ever entered it. But the place of these two men in history is secure. They stand with Grotius, Thomasius, and Beccaria--the men who in modern times have done most to prevent unmerited sorrow. They were not, indeed, called to suffer like their great compeers; they were not obliged to see their writings--among the most blessed gifts of God to man--condemned, as were those of Grotius and Beccaria by the Catholic Church, and those of Thomasius by a large section of the Protestant Church; they were not obliged to flee for their lives, as were Grotius and Thomasius; but their effort is none the less worthy. The French Revolution, indeed, saved Pinel, and the decay of English ecclesiasticism gave Tuke his opportunity; but their triumphs are none the less among the glories of our race; for they were the first acknowledged victors in a struggle of science for humanity which had lasted nearly two thousand years. CHAPTER XVI. FROM DIABOLISM TO HYSTERIA. I. THE EPIDEMICS OF "POSSESSION." In the foregoing chapter I have sketched the triumph of science in destroying the idea that individual lunatics are "possessed by devils," in establishing the truth that insanity is physical disease, and in substituting for superstitious cruelties toward the insane a treatment mild, kindly, and based upon ascertained facts. The Satan who had so long troubled individual men and women thus became extinct; henceforth his fossil remains only were preserved: they may still be found in the sculptures and storied windows of medieval churches, in sundry liturgies, and in popular forms of speech. But another Satan still lived--a Satan who wrought on a larger scale--who took possession of multitudes. For, after this triumph of the scientific method, there still remained a class of mental disorders which could not be treated in asylums, which were not yet fully explained by science, and which therefore gave arguments of much apparent strength to the supporters of the old theological view: these were the epidemics of "diabolic possession" which for so many centuries afflicted various parts of the world. When obliged, then, to retreat from their old position in regard to individual cases of insanity, the more conservative theologians promptly referred to these epidemics as beyond the domain of science--as clear evidences of the power of Satan; and, as the basis of this view, they cited from the Old Testament frequent references to witchcraft, and, from the New Testament, St. Paul's question as to the possible bewitching of the Galatians, and the bewitching of the people of Samaria by Simon the Magician. Naturally, such leaders had very many adherents in that class, so large in all times, who find that "To follow foolish precedents and wink With both our eyes, is easier than to think."(384) (384) As to eminent physicians' finding a stumbling-block in hysterical mania, see Kirchhoff's article, p. 351, cited in previous chapter. It must be owned that their case seemed strong. Though in all human history, so far as it is closely known, these phenomena had appeared, and though every classical scholar could recall the wild orgies of the priests, priestesses, and devotees of Dionysus and Cybele, and the epidemic of wild rage which took its name from some of these, the great fathers and doctors of the Church had left a complete answer to any scepticism based on these facts; they simply pointed to St. Paul's declaration that the gods of the heathen were devils: these examples, then, could be transformed into a powerful argument for diabolic possession.(385) (385) As to the Maenads, Corybantes, and the disease "Corybantism," see, for accessible and adequate statements, Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities and Lewis and Short's Lexicon; also reference in Hecker's Essays upon the Black Death and the Dancing Mania. For more complete discussion, see Semelaigne, L'Alienation mentale dans l'Antiquite, Paris, 1869. But it was more especially the epidemics of diabolism in medieval and modern times which gave strength to the theological view, and from these I shall present a chain of typical examples. As early as the eleventh century we find clear accounts of diabolical possession taking the form of epidemics of raving, jumping, dancing, and convulsions, the greater number of the sufferers being women and children. In a time so rude, accounts of these manifestations would rarely receive permanent record; but it is very significant that even at the beginning of the eleventh century we hear of them at the extremes of Europe--in northern Germany and in southern Italy. At various times during that century we get additional glimpses of these exhibitions, but it is not until the beginning of the thirteenth century that we have a renewal of them on a large scale. In 1237, at Erfurt, a jumping disease and dancing mania afflicted a hundred children, many of whom died in consequence; it spread through the whole region, and fifty years later we hear of it in Holland. But it was the last quarter of the fourteenth century that saw its greatest manifestations. There was abundant cause for them. It was a time of oppression, famine, and pestilence: the crusading spirit, having run its course, had been succeeded by a wild, mystical fanaticism; the most frightful plague in human history--the Black Death--was depopulating whole regions--reducing cities to villages, and filling Europe with that strange mixture of devotion and dissipation which we always note during the prevalence of deadly epidemics on a large scale. It was in this ferment of religious, moral, and social disease that there broke out in 1374, in the lower Rhine region, the greatest, perhaps, of all manifestations of "possession"--an epidemic of dancing, jumping, and wild raving. The cures resorted to seemed on the whole to intensify the disease: the afflicted continued dancing for hours, until they fell in utter exhaustion. Some declared that they felt as if bathed in blood, some saw visions, some prophesied. Into this mass of "possession" there was also clearly poured a current of scoundrelism which increased the disorder. The immediate source of these manifestations seems to have been the wild revels of St. John's Day. In those revels sundry old heathen ceremonies had been perpetuated, but under a nominally Christian form: wild Bacchanalian dances had thus become a semi-religious ceremonial. The religious and social atmosphere was propitious to the development of the germs of diabolic influence vitalized in these orgies, and they were scattered far and wide through large tracts of the Netherlands and Germany, and especially through the whole region of the Rhine. At Cologne we hear of five hundred afflicted at once; at Metz of eleven hundred dancers in the streets; at Strasburg of yet more painful manifestations; and from these and other cities they spread through the villages and rural districts. The great majority of the sufferers were women, but there were many men, and especially men whose occupations were sedentary. Remedies were tried upon a large scale-exorcisms first, but especially pilgrimages to the shrine of St. Vitus. The exorcisms accomplished so little that popular faith in them grew small, and the main effect of the pilgrimages seemed to be to increase the disorder by subjecting great crowds to the diabolic contagion. Yet another curative means was seen in the flagellant processions--vast crowds of men, women, and children who wandered through the country, screaming, praying, beating themselves with whips, imploring the Divine mercy and the intervention of St. Vitus. Most fearful of all the main attempts at cure were the persecutions of the Jews. A feeling had evidently spread among the people at large that the Almighty was filled with wrath at the toleration of his enemies, and might be propitiated by their destruction: in the principal cities and villages of Germany, then, the Jews were plundered, tortured, and murdered by tens of thousands. No doubt that, in all this, greed was united with fanaticism; but the argument of fanaticism was simple and cogent; the dart which pierced the breast of Israel at that time was winged and pointed from its own sacred books: the biblical argument was the same used in various ages to promote persecution; and this was, that the wrath of the Almighty was stirred against those who tolerated his enemies, and that because of this toleration the same curse had now come upon Europe which the prophet Samuel had denounced against Saul for showing mercy to the enemies of Jehovah. It is but just to say that various popes and kings exerted themselves to check these cruelties. Although the argument of Samuel to Saul was used with frightful effect two hundred years later by a most conscientious pope in spurring on the rulers of France to extirpate the Huguenots, the papacy in the fourteenth century stood for mercy to the Jews. But even this intervention was long without effect; the tide of popular superstition had become too strong to be curbed even by the spiritual and temporal powers.(386) (386) See Wellhausen, article Israel, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth edition; also the reprint of it in his History of Israel, London, 1885, p. 546. On the general subject of the demoniacal epidemics, see Isensee, Geschichte der Medicin, vol. i, pp. 260 et seq.; also Hecker's essay. As to the history of Saul, as a curious landmark in the general development of the subject, see The Case of Saul, showing that his Disorder was a Real Spiritual Possession, by Granville Sharp, London, 1807, passim. As to the citation of Saul's case by the reigning Pope to spur on the French kings against the Huguenots, I hope to give a list of authorities in a future chapter on The Church and International Law. For the general subject, with interesting details, see Laurent, Etudes sur l'Histoire de l'Humanities. See also Maury, La Magie et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquite et au Moyen Age. Against this overwhelming current science for many generations could do nothing. Throughout the whole of the fifteenth century physicians appeared to shun the whole matter. Occasionally some more thoughtful man ventured to ascribe some phase of the disease to natural causes; but this was an unpopular doctrine, and evidently dangerous to those who developed it. Yet, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, cases of "possession" on a large scale began to be brought within the scope of medical research, and the man who led in this evolution of medical science was Paracelsus. He it was who first bade modern Europe think for a moment upon the idea that these diseases are inflicted neither by saints nor demons, and that the "dancing possession" is simply a form of disease, of which the cure may be effected by proper remedies and regimen. Paracelsus appears to have escaped any serious interference: it took some time, perhaps, for the theological leaders to understand that he had "let a new idea loose upon the planet," but they soon understood it, and their course was simple. For about fifty years the new idea was well kept under; but in 1563 another physician, John Wier, of Cleves, revived it at much risk to his position and reputation.(387) (387) For Paracelsus, see Isensee, vol. i, chap. xi; also Pettigrew, Superstitions connected with the History and Practice of Medicine and Surgery, London, 1844, introductory chapter. For Wier, see authorities given in my previous chapter. Although the new idea was thus resisted, it must have taken some hold upon thoughtful men, for we find that in the second half of the same century the St. Vitus's dance and forms of demoniacal possession akin to it gradually diminished in frequency and were sometimes treated as diseases. In the seventeenth century, so far as the north of Europe is concerned, these displays of "possession" on a great scale had almost entirely ceased; here and there cases appeared, but there was no longer the wild rage extending over great districts and afflicting thousands of people. Yet it was, as we shall see, in this same seventeenth century, in the last expiring throes of this superstition, that it led to the worst acts of cruelty.(388) (388) As to this diminution of widespread epidemic at the end of the sixteenth century, see citations from Schenck von Grafenberg in Hecker, as above; also Horst. While this Satanic influence had been exerted on so great a scale throughout northern Europe, a display strangely like it, yet strangely unlike it, had been going on in Italy. There, too, epidemics of dancing and jumping seized groups and communities; but they were attributed to a physical cause--the theory being that the bite of a tarantula in some way provoked a supernatural intervention, of which dancing was the accompaniment and cure. In the middle of the sixteenth century Fracastoro made an evident impression on the leaders of Italian opinion by using medical means in the cure of the possessed; though it is worthy of note that the medicine which he applied successfully was such as we now know could not by any direct effects of its own accomplish any cure: whatever effect it exerted was wrought upon the imagination of the sufferer. This form of "possession," then, passed out of the supernatural domain, and became known as "tarantism." Though it continued much longer than the corresponding manifestations in northern Europe, by the beginning of the eighteenth century it had nearly disappeared; and, though special manifestations of it on a small scale still break out occasionally, its main survival is the "tarantella," which the traveller sees danced at Naples as a catchpenny assault upon his purse.(389) (389) See Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 87-104; also extracts and observations in Carpenter's Mental Physiology, London, 1888, pp. 321-315; also Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, pp. 73 and following. But, long before this form of "possession" had begun to disappear, there had arisen new manifestations, apparently more inexplicable. As the first great epidemics of dancing and jumping had their main origin in a religious ceremony, so various new forms had their principal source in what were supposed to be centres of religious life--in the convents, and more especially in those for women. Out of many examples we may take a few as typical. In the fifteenth century the chroniclers assure us that, an inmate of a German nunnery having been seized with a passion for biting her companions, her mania spread until most, if not all, of her fellow-nuns began to bite each other; and that this passion for biting passed from convent to convent into other parts of Germany, into Holland, and even across the Alps into Italy. So, too, in a French convent, when a nun began to mew like a cat, others began mewing; the disease spread, and was only checked by severe measures.(390) (390) See citation from Zimmermann's Solitude, in Carpenter, pp. 34, 314. In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation gave new force to witchcraft persecutions in Germany, the new Church endeavouring to show that in zeal and power she exceeded the old. But in France influential opinion seemed not so favourable to these forms of diabolical influence, especially after the publication of Montaigne's Essays, in 1580, had spread a sceptical atmosphere over many leading minds. In 1588 occurred in France a case which indicates the growth of this sceptical tendency even in the higher regions of the french Church, In that year Martha Brossier, a country girl, was, it was claimed, possessed of the devil. The young woman was to all appearance under direct Satanic influence. She roamed about, begging that the demon might be cast out of her, and her imprecations and blasphemies brought consternation wherever she went. Myth-making began on a large scale; stories grew and sped. The Capuchin monks thundered from the pulpit throughout France regarding these proofs of the power of Satan: the alarm spread, until at last even jovial, sceptical King Henry IV was disquieted, and the reigning Pope was asked to take measures to ward off the evil. Fortunately, there then sat in the episcopal chair of Angers a prelate who had apparently imbibed something of Montaigne's scepticism--Miron; and, when the case was brought before him, he submitted it to the most time-honoured of sacred tests. He first brought into the girl's presence two bowls, one containing holy water, the other ordinary spring water, but allowed her to draw a false inference regarding the contents of each: the result was that at the presentation of the holy water the devils were perfectly calm, but when tried with the ordinary water they threw Martha into convulsions. The next experiment made by the shrewd bishop was to similar purpose. He commanded loudly that a book of exorcisms be brought, and under a previous arrangement, his attendants brought him a copy of Virgil. No sooner had the bishop begun to read the first line of the Aeneid than the devils threw Martha into convulsions. On another occasion a Latin dictionary, which she had reason to believe was a book of exorcisms, produced a similar effect. Although the bishop was thereby led to pronounce the whole matter a mixture of insanity and imposture, the Capuchin monks denounced this view as godless. They insisted that these tests really proved the presence of Satan--showing his cunning in covering up the proofs of his existence. The people at large sided with their preachers, and Martha was taken to Paris, where various exorcisms were tried, and the Parisian mob became as devoted to her as they had been twenty years before to the murderers of the Huguenots, as they became two centuries later to Robespierre, and as they more recently were to General Boulanger. But Bishop Miron was not the only sceptic. The Cardinal de Gondi, Archbishop of Paris, charged the most eminent physicians of the city, and among them Riolan, to report upon the case. Various examinations were made, and the verdict was that Martha was simply a hysterical impostor. Thanks, then, to medical science, and to these two enlightened ecclesiastics who summoned its aid, what fifty or a hundred years earlier would have been the centre of a widespread epidemic of possession was isolated, and hindered from producing a national calamity. In the following year this healthful growth of scepticism continued. Fourteen persons had been condemned to death for sorcery, but public opinion was strong enough to secure a new examination by a special commission, which reported that "the prisoners stood more in need of medicine than of punishment," and they were released.(391) (391) For the Brossier case, see Clameil, La Folie, tome i, livre 3, c. 2. For the cases at Tours, see Madden, Phantasmata, vol. i, pp. 309, 310. But during the seventeenth century, the clergy generally having exerted themselves heroically to remove this "evil heart of unbelief" so largely due to Montaigne, a theological reaction was brought on not only in France but in all parts of the Christian world, and the belief in diabolic possession, though certainly dying, flickered up hectic, hot, and malignant through the whole century. In 1611 we have a typical case at Aix. An epidemic of possession having occurred there, Gauffridi, a man of note, was burned at the stake as the cause of the trouble. Michaelis, one of the priestly exorcists, declared that he had driven out sixty-five hundred devils from one of the possessed. Similar epidemics occurred in various parts of the world.(392) (392) See Dagron, chap. ii. Twenty years later a far more striking case occurred at Loudun, in western France, where a convent of Ursuline nuns was "afflicted by demons." The convent was filled mainly with ladies of noble birth, who, not having sufficient dower to secure husbands, had, according to the common method of the time, been made nuns. It is not difficult to understand that such an imprisonment of a multitude of women of different ages would produce some woeful effects. Any reader of Manzoni's Promessi Sposi, with its wonderful portrayal of the feelings and doings of a noble lady kept in a convent against her will, may have some idea of the rage and despair which must have inspired such assemblages in which pride, pauperism, and the attempted suppression of the instincts of humanity wrought a fearful work. What this work was may be seen throughout the Middle Ages; but it is especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we find it frequently taking shape in outbursts of diabolic possession.(393) (393) On monasteries as centres of "possession" and hysterical epidemics, see Figuier, Le Merveilleux, p. 40 and following; also Calmeil, Langin, Kirchhoff, Maudsley, and others. On similar results from excitement at Protestant meetings in Scotland and camp meetings in England and America, see Hecker's Essay, concluding chapters. In this case at Loudun, the usual evidences of Satanic influence appeared. One after another of the inmates fell into convulsions: some showed physical strength apparently supernatural; some a keenness of perception quite as surprising; many howled forth blasphemies and obscenities. Near the convent dwelt a priest--Urbain Grandier--noted for his brilliancy as a writer and preacher, but careless in his way of living. Several of the nuns had evidently conceived a passion for him, and in their wild rage and despair dwelt upon his name. In the same city, too, were sundry ecclesiastics and laymen with whom Grandier had fallen into petty neighbourhood quarrels, and some of these men held the main control of the convent. Out of this mixture of "possession" within the convent and malignity without it came a charge that Grandier had bewitched the young women. The Bishop of Poictiers took up the matter. A trial was held, and it was noted that, whenever Grandier appeared, the "possessed" screamed, shrieked, and showed every sign of diabolic influence. Grandier fought desperately, and appealed to the Archbishop of Bordeaux, De Sourdis. The archbishop ordered a more careful examination, and, on separating the nuns from each other and from certain monks who had been bitterly hostile to Grandier, such glaring discrepancies were found in their testimony that the whole accusation was brought to naught. But the enemies of Satan and of Grandier did not rest. Through their efforts Cardinal Richelieu, who appears to have had an old grudge against Grandier, sent a representative, Laubardemont, to make another investigation. Most frightful scenes were now enacted: the whole convent resounded more loudly than ever with shrieks, groans, howling, and cursing, until finally Grandier, though even in the agony of torture he refused to confess the crimes that his enemies suggested, was hanged and burned. From this centre the epidemic spread: multitudes of women and men were affected by it in various convents; several of the great cities of the south and west of France came under the same influence; the "possession" went on for several years longer and then gradually died out, though scattered cases have occurred from that day to this.(394) (394) Among the many statements of Grandier's case, one of the best in English may be found in Trollope's Sketches from French History, London, 1878. See also Bazin, Louis XIII. A few years later we have an even more striking example among the French Protestants. The Huguenots, who had taken refuge in the mountains of the Cevennes to escape persecution, being pressed more and more by the cruelties of Louis XIV, began to show signs of a high degree of religious exaltation. Assembled as they were for worship in wild and desert places, an epidemic broke out among them, ascribed by them to the Almighty, but by their opponents to Satan. Men, women, and children preached and prophesied. Large assemblies were seized with trembling. Some underwent the most terrible tortures without showing any signs of suffering. Marshal de Villiers, who was sent against them, declared that he saw a town in which all the women and girls, without exception, were possessed of the devil, and ran leaping and screaming through the streets. Cases like this, inexplicable to the science of the time, gave renewed strength to the theological view.(395) (395) See Bersot, Mesmer et la Magnetisme animal, third edition, Paris, 1864, pp. 95 et seq. Toward the end of the same century similar manifestations began to appear on a large scale in America. The life of the early colonists in New England was such as to give rapid growth to the germs of the doctrine of possession brought from the mother country. Surrounded by the dark pine forests; having as their neighbours Indians, who were more than suspected of being children of Satan; harassed by wild beasts apparently sent by the powers of evil to torment the elect; with no varied literature to while away the long winter evenings; with few amusements save neighbourhood quarrels; dwelling intently on every text of Scripture which supported their gloomy theology, and adopting its most literal interpretation, it is not strange that they rapidly developed ideas regarding the darker side of nature.(396) (396) For the idea that America before the Pilgims had been especially given over to Satan, see the literature of the early Puritan period, and especially the poetry of Wigglesworth, treated in Tylor's History of American Literature, vol. ii, p. 25 et seq. This fear of witchcraft received a powerful stimulus from the treatises of learned men. Such works, coming from Europe, which was at that time filled with the superstition, acted powerfully upon conscientious preachers, and were brought by them to bear upon the people at large. Naturally, then, throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century we find scattered cases of diabolic possession. At Boston, Springfield, Hartford, Groton, and other towns, cases occurred, and here and there we hear of death-sentences. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century the fruit of these ideas began to ripen. In the year 1684 Increase Mather published his book, Remarkable Providences, laying stress upon diabolic possession and witchcraft. This book, having been sent over to England, exercised an influence there, and came back with the approval of no less a man than Richard Baxter: by this its power at home was increased. In 1688 a poor family in Boston was afflicted by demons: four children, the eldest thirteen years of age, began leaping and barking like dogs or purring like cats, and complaining of being pricked, pinched, and cut; and, to help the matter, an old Irishwoman was tried and executed. All this belief might have passed away like a troubled dream had it not become incarnate in a strong man. This man was Cotton Mather, the son of Increase Mather. Deeply religious, possessed of excellent abilities, a great scholar, anxious to promote the welfare of his flock in this world and in the next, he was far in advance of ecclesiastics generally on nearly all the main questions between science and theology. He came out of his earlier superstition regarding the divine origin of the Hebrew punctuation; he opposed the old theologic idea regarding the taking of interest for money; he favoured inoculation as a preventive of smallpox when a multitude of clergymen and laymen opposed it; he accepted the Newtonian astronomy despite the outcries against its "atheistic tendency"; he took ground against the time-honoured dogma that comets are "signs and wonders." He had, indeed, some of the defects of his qualities, and among them pedantic vanity, pride of opinion, and love of power; but he was for his time remarkably liberal and undoubtedly sincere. He had thrown off a large part of his father's theology, but one part of it he could not throw off: he was one of the best biblical scholars of his time, and he could not break away from the fact that the sacred Scriptures explicitly recognise witchcraft and demoniacal possession as realities, and enjoin against witchcraft the penalty of death. Therefore it was that in 1689 he published his Memorable Providences relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions. The book, according to its title-page, was "recommended by the Ministers of Boston and Charleston," and its stories soon became the familiar reading of men, women, and children throughout New England. Out of all these causes thus brought to bear upon public opinion began in 1692 a new outbreak of possession, which is one of the most instructive in history. The Rev. Samuel Parris was the minister of the church in Salem, and no pope ever had higher ideas of his own infallibility, no bishop a greater love of ceremony, no inquisitor a greater passion for prying and spying.(397) (397) For curious examples of this, see Upham's History of Salem Witchcraft, vol. i. Before long Mr. Parris had much upon his hands. Many of his hardy, independent parishioners disliked his ways. Quarrels arose. Some of the leading men of the congregation were pitted against him. The previous minister, George Burroughs, had left the germs of troubles and quarrels, and to these were now added new complications arising from the assumptions of Parris. There were innumerable wranglings and lawsuits; in fact, all the essential causes for Satanic interference which we saw at work in and about the monastery at Loudun, and especially the turmoil of a petty village where there is no intellectual activity, and where men and women find their chief substitute for it in squabbles, religious, legal, political, social, and personal. In the darkened atmosphere thus charged with the germs of disease it was suddenly discovered that two young girls in the family of Mr. Parris were possessed of devils: they complained of being pinched, pricked, and cut, fell into strange spasms and made strange speeches--showing the signs of diabolic possession handed down in fireside legends or dwelt upon in popular witch literature--and especially such as had lately been described by Cotton Mather in his book on Memorable Providences. The two girls, having been brought by Mr. Parris and others to tell who had bewitched them, first charged an old Indian woman, and the poor old Indian husband was led to join in the charge. This at once afforded new scope for the activity of Mr. Parris. Magnifying his office, he immediately began making a great stir in Salem and in the country round about. Two magistrates were summoned. With them came a crowd, and a court was held at the meeting-house. The scenes which then took place would have been the richest of farces had they not led to events so tragical. The possessed went into spasms at the approach of those charged with witchcraft, and when the poor old men and women attempted to attest their innocence they were overwhelmed with outcries by the possessed, quotations of Scripture by the ministers, and denunciations by the mob. One especially--Ann Putnam, a child of twelve years--showed great precocity and played a striking part in the performances. The mania spread to other children; and two or three married women also, seeing the great attention paid to the afflicted, and influenced by that epidemic of morbid imitation which science now recognises in all such cases, soon became similarly afflicted, and in their turn made charges against various persons. The Indian woman was flogged by her master, Mr. Parris, until she confessed relations with Satan; and others were forced or deluded into confession. These hysterical confessions, the results of unbearable torture, or the reminiscences of dreams, which had been prompted by the witch legends and sermons of the period, embraced such facts as flying through the air to witch gatherings, partaking of witch sacraments, signing a book presented by the devil, and submitting to Satanic baptism. The possessed had begun with charging their possession upon poor and vagrant old women, but ere long, emboldened by their success, they attacked higher game, struck at some of the foremost people of the region, and did not cease until several of these were condemned to death, and every man, woman, and child brought under a reign of terror. Many fled outright, and one of the foremost citizens of Salem went constantly armed, and kept one of his horses saddled in the stable to flee if brought under accusation. The hysterical ingenuity of the possessed women grew with their success. They insisted that they saw devils prompting the accused to defend themselves in court. Did one of the accused clasp her hands in despair, the possessed clasped theirs; did the accused, in appealing to Heaven, make any gesture, the possessed simultaneously imitated it; did the accused in weariness drop her head, the possessed dropped theirs, and declared that the witch was trying to break their necks. The court-room resounded with groans, shrieks, prayers, and curses; judges, jury, and people were aghast, and even the accused were sometimes thus led to believe in their own guilt. Very striking in all these cases was the alloy of frenzy with trickery. In most of the madness there was method. Sundry witches charged by the possessed had been engaged in controversy with the Salem church people. Others of the accused had quarrelled with Mr. Parris. Still others had been engaged in old lawsuits against persons more or less connected with the girls. One of the most fearful charges, which cost the life of a noble and lovely woman, arose undoubtedly from her better style of dress and living. Old slumbering neighbourhood or personal quarrels bore in this way a strange fruitage of revenge; for the cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God. Any person daring to hint the slightest distrust of the proceedings was in danger of being immediately brought under accusation of a league with Satan. Husbands and children were thus brought to the gallows for daring to disbelieve these charges against their wives and mothers. Some of the clergy were accused for endeavouring to save members of their churches.(398) (398) This is admirably brought out by Upham, and the lawyerlike thoroughness with which he has examined all these hidden springs of the charges is one of the main things which render his book one of the most valuable contributions to the history and philosophy of demoniacal possession ever written. One poor woman was charged with "giving a look toward the great meeting-house of Salem, and immediately a demon entered the house and tore down a part of it." This cause for the falling of a bit of poorly nailed wainscoting seemed perfectly satisfactory to Dr. Cotton Mather, as well as to the judge and jury, and she was hanged, protesting her innocence. Still another lady, belonging to one of the most respected families of the region, was charged with the crime of witchcraft. The children were fearfully afflicted whenever she appeared near them. It seemed never to occur to any one that a bitter old feud between the Rev. Mr. Parris and the family of the accused might have prejudiced the children and directed their attention toward the woman. No account was made of the fact that her life had been entirely blameless; and yet, in view of the wretched insufficiency of proof, the jury brought in a verdict of not guilty. As they brought in this verdict, all the children began to shriek and scream, until the court committed the monstrous wrong of causing her to be indicted anew. In order to warrant this, the judge referred to one perfectly natural and harmless expression made by the woman when under examination. The jury at last brought her in guilty. She was condemned; and, having been brought into the church heavily ironed, was solemnly excommunicated and delivered over to Satan by the minister. Some good sense still prevailed, and the Governor reprieved her; but ecclesiastical pressure and popular clamour were too powerful. The Governor was induced to recall his reprieve, and she was executed, protesting her innocence and praying for her enemies.(399) (399) See Drake, The Witchcraft Delusion in New England, vol. iii, pp. 34 et seq. Another typical case was presented. The Rev. Mr. Burroughs, against whom considerable ill will had been expressed, and whose petty parish quarrel with the powerful Putnam family had led to his dismissal from his ministry, was named by the possessed as one of those who plagued them, one of the most influential among the afflicted being Ann Putnam. Mr. Burroughs had led a blameless life, the main thing charged against him by the Putnams being that he insisted strenuously that his wife should not go about the parish talking of her own family matters. He was charged with afflicting the children, convicted, and executed. At the last moment he repeated the Lord's Prayer solemnly and fully, which it was supposed that no sorcerer could do, and this, together with his straightforward Christian utterances at the execution, shook the faith of many in the reality of diabolic possession. Ere long it was known that one of the girls had acknowledged that she had belied some persons who had been executed, and especially Mr. Burroughs, and that she had begged forgiveness; but this for a time availed nothing. Persons who would not confess were tied up and put to a sort of torture which was effective in securing new revelations. In the case of Giles Corey the horrors of the persecution culminated. Seeing that his doom was certain, and wishing to preserve his family from attainder and their property from confiscation, he refused to plead. Though eighty years of age, he was therefore pressed to death, and when, in his last agonies, his tongue was pressed out of his mouth, the sheriff with his walking-stick thrust it back again. Everything was made to contribute to the orthodox view of possession. On one occasion, when a cart conveying eight condemned persons to the place of execution stuck fast in the mire, some of the possessed declared that they saw the devil trying to prevent the punishment of his associates. Confessions of witchcraft abounded; but the way in which these confessions were obtained is touchingly exhibited in a statement afterward made by several women. In explaining the reasons why, when charged with afflicting sick persons, they made a false confession, they said: "... By reason of that suddain surprizal, we knowing ourselves altogether Innocent of that Crime, we were all exceedingly astonished and amazed, and consternated and affrighted even out of our Reason; and our nearest and dearest Relations, seeing us in that dreadful condition, and knowing our great danger, apprehending that there was no other way to save our lives,... out of tender... pitty persuaded us to confess what we did confess. And indeed that Confession, that it is said we made, was no other than what was suggested to us by some Gentlemen; they telling us, that we were Witches, and they knew it, and we knew it, and they knew that we knew it, which made us think that it was so; and our understanding, our reason, and our faculties almost gone, we were not capable of judging our condition; as also the hard measures they used with us, rendered us uncapable of making our Defence, but said anything and everything which they desired, and most of what we said, was in effect a consenting to what they said...."(400) (400) See Calef, in Drake, vol ii; also Upham. Case after case, in which hysteria, fanaticism, cruelty, injustice, and trickery played their part, was followed up to the scaffold. In a short time twenty persons had been put to a cruel death, and the number of the accused grew larger and larger. The highest position and the noblest character formed no barrier. Daily the possessed became more bold, more tricky, and more wild. No plea availed anything. In behalf of several women, whose lives had been of the purest and gentlest, petitions were presented, but to no effect. A scriptural text was always ready to aid in the repression of mercy: it was remembered that "Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light," and above all resounded the Old Testament injunction, which had sent such multitudes in Europe to the torture-chamber and the stake, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Such clergymen as Noyes, Parris, and Mather, aided by such judges as Stoughton and Hathorn, left nothing undone to stimulate these proceedings. The great Cotton Mather based upon this outbreak of disease thus treated his famous book, Wonders of the Invisible World, thanking God for the triumphs over Satan thus gained at Salem; and his book received the approbation of the Governor of the Province, the President of Harvard College, and various eminent theologians in Europe as well as in America. But, despite such efforts as these, observation, and thought upon observation, which form the beginning of all true science, brought in a new order of things. The people began to fall away. Justice Bradstreet, having committed thirty or forty persons, became aroused to the absurdity of the whole matter; the minister of Andover had the good sense to resist the theological view; even so high a personage as Lady Phips, the wife of the Governor, began to show lenity. Each of these was, in consequence of this disbelief, charged with collusion with Satan; but such charges seemed now to lose their force. In the midst of all this delusion and terrorism stood Cotton Mather firm as ever. His efforts to uphold the declining superstition were heroic. But he at last went one step too far. Being himself possessed of a mania for myth-making and wonder-mongering, and having described a case of witchcraft with possibly greater exaggeration than usual, he was confronted by Robert Calef. Calef was a Boston merchant, who appears to have united the good sense of a man of business to considerable shrewdness in observation, power in thought, and love for truth; and he began writing to Mather and others, to show the weak points in the system. Mather, indignant that a person so much his inferior dared dissent from his opinion, at first affected to despise Calef; but, as Calef pressed him more and more closely, Mather denounced him, calling him among other things "A Coal from Hell." All to no purpose: Calef fastened still more firmly upon the flanks of the great theologian. Thought and reason now began to resume their sway. The possessed having accused certain men held in very high respect, doubts began to dawn upon the community at large. Here was the repetition of that which had set men thinking in the German bishoprics when those under trial for witchcraft there had at last, in their desperation or madness, charged the very bishops and the judges upon the bench with sorcery. The party of reason grew stronger. The Rev. Mr. Parris was soon put upon the defensive: for some of the possessed began to confess that they had accused people wrongfully. Herculean efforts were made by certain of the clergy and devout laity to support the declining belief, but the more thoughtful turned more and more against it; jurymen prominent in convictions solemnly retracted their verdicts and publicly craved pardon of God and man. Most striking of all was the case of Justice Sewall. A man of the highest character, he had in view of authority deduced from Scripture and the principles laid down by the great English judges, unhesitatingly condemned the accused; but reason now dawned upon him. He looked back and saw the baselessness of the whole proceedings, and made a public statement of his errors. His diary contains many passages showing deep contrition, and ever afterward, to the end of his life, he was wont, on one day in the year, to enter into solitude, and there remain all the day long in fasting, prayer, and penitence. Chief-Justice Stoughton never yielded. To the last he lamented the "evil spirit of unbelief" which was thwarting the glorious work of freeing New England from demons. The church of Salem solemnly revoked the excommunications of the condemned and drove Mr. Parris from the pastorate. Cotton Mather passed his last years in groaning over the decline of the faith and the ingratitude of a people for whom he had done so much. Very significant is one of his complaints, since it shows the evolution of a more scientific mode of thought abroad as well as at home: he laments in his diary that English publishers gladly printed Calef's book, but would no longer publish his own, and he declares this "an attack upon the glory of the Lord." About forty years after the New England epidemic of "possession" occurred another typical series of phenomena in France. In 1727 there died at the French capital a simple and kindly ecclesiastic, the Archdeacon Paris. He had lived a pious, Christian life, and was endeared to multitudes by his charity; unfortunately, he had espoused the doctrine of Jansen on grace and free will, and, though he remained in the Gallican Church, he and those who thought like him were opposed by the Jesuits, and finally condemned by a papal bull. His remains having been buried in the cemetery of St. Medard, the Jansenists flocked to say their prayers at his grave, and soon miracles began to be wrought there. Ere long they were multiplied. The sick being brought and laid upon the tombstone, many were cured. Wonderful stories were attested by eye-witnesses. The myth-making tendency--the passion for developing, enlarging, and spreading tales of wonder--came into full play and was given free course. Many thoughtful men satisfied themselves of the truth of these representations. One of the foremost English scholars came over, examined into them, and declared that there could be no doubt as to the reality of the cures. This state of things continued for about four years, when, in 1731, more violent effects showed themselves. Sundry persons approaching the tomb were thrown into convulsions, hysterics, and catalepsy; these diseases spread, became epidemic, and soon multitudes were similarly afflicted. Both religious parties made the most of these cases. In vain did such great authorities in medical science as Hecquet and Lorry attribute the whole to natural causes: the theologians on both sides declared them supernatural--the Jansenists attributing them to God, the Jesuits to Satan. Of late years such cases have been treated in France with much shrewdness. When, about the middle of the present century, the Arab priests in Algiers tried to arouse fanaticism against the French Christians by performing miracles, the French Government, instead of persecuting the priests, sent Robert-Houdin, the most renowned juggler of his time, to the scene of action, and for every Arab miracle Houdin performed two: did an Arab marabout turn a rod into a serpent, Houdin turned his rod into two serpents; and afterward showed the people how he did it. So, too, at the last International Exposition, the French Government, observing the evil effects produced by the mania for table turning and tipping, took occasion, when a great number of French schoolmasters and teachers were visiting the exposition, to have public lectures given in which all the business of dark closets, hand-tying, materialization of spirits, presenting the faces of the departed, and ghostly portraiture was fully performed by professional mountebanks, and afterward as fully explained. So in this case. The Government simply ordered the gate of the cemetery to be locked, and when the crowd could no longer approach the tomb the miracles ceased. A little Parisian ridicule helped to end the matter. A wag wrote up over the gate of the cemetery. "De par le Roi, defense a Dieu De faire des miracles dans ce lieu"-- which, being translated from doggerel French into doggerel English, is-- "By order of the king, the Lord must forbear To work any more of his miracles here." But the theological spirit remained powerful. The French Revolution had not then intervened to bring it under healthy limits. The agitation was maintained, and, though the miracles and cases of possession were stopped in the cemetery, it spread. Again full course was given to myth-making and the retailing of wonders. It was said that men had allowed themselves to be roasted before slow fires, and had been afterward found uninjured; that some had enormous weights piled upon them, but had supernatural powers of resistance given them; and that, in one case, a voluntary crucifixion had taken place. This agitation was long, troublesome, and no doubt robbed many temporarily or permanently of such little brains as they possessed. It was only when the violence had become an old story and the charm of novelty had entirely worn off, and the afflicted found themselves no longer regarded with especial interest, that the epidemic died away.(401) (401) See Madden, Phantasmata, chap. xiv; also Sir James Stephen, History of France, lecture xxvi; also Henry Martin, Histoire de France, vol. xv, pp. 168 et seq.; also Calmeil, liv. v, chap. xxiv; also Hecker's essay; and, for samples of myth-making, see the apocryphal Souvenirs de Crequy. But in Germany at that time the outcome of this belief was far more cruel. In 1749 Maria Renata Singer, sub-prioress of a convent at Wurzburg, was charged with bewitching her fellow-nuns. There was the usual story--the same essential facts as at Loudun--women shut up against their will, dreams of Satan disguised as a young man, petty jealousies, spites, quarrels, mysterious uproar, trickery, utensils thrown about in a way not to be accounted for, hysterical shrieking and convulsions, and, finally, the torture, confession, and execution of the supposed culprit.(402) (402) See Soldan, Scherr, Diefenbach, and others. Various epidemics of this sort broke out from time to time in other parts of the world, though happily, as modern scepticism prevailed, with less cruel results. In 1760 some congregations of Calvinistic Methodists in Wales became so fervent that they began leaping for joy. The mania spread, and gave rise to a sect called the "Jumpers." A similar outbreak took place afterward in England, and has been repeated at various times and places since in our own country.(403) (403) See Adam's Dictionary of All Religions, article on Jumpers; also Hecker. In 1780 came another outbreak in France; but this time it was not the Jansenists who were affected, but the strictly orthodox. A large number of young girls between twelve and nineteen years of age, having been brought together at the church of St. Roch, in Paris, with preaching and ceremonies calculated to arouse hysterics, one of them fell into convulsions. Immediately other children were similarly taken, until some fifty or sixty were engaged in the same antics. This mania spread to other churches and gatherings, proved very troublesome, and in some cases led to results especially painful. About the same period came a similar outbreak among the Protestants of the Shetland Isles. A woman having been seized with convulsions at church, the disease spread to others, mainly women, who fell into the usual contortions and wild shriekings. A very effective cure proved to be a threat to plunge the diseased into a neighbouring pond. II. BEGINNINGS OF HELPFUL SCEPTICISM. But near the end of the eighteenth century a fact very important for science was established. It was found that these manifestations do not arise in all cases from supernatural sources. In 1787 came the noted case at Hodden Bridge, in Lancashire. A girl working in a cotton manufactory there put a mouse into the bosom of another girl who had a great dread of mice. The girl thus treated immediately went into convulsions, which lasted twenty-four hours. Shortly afterward three other girls were seized with like convulsions, a little later six more, and then others, until, in all, twenty-four were attacked. Then came a fact throwing a flood of light upon earlier occurrences. This epidemic, being noised abroad, soon spread to another factory five miles distant. The patients there suffered from strangulation, danced, tore their hair, and dashed their heads against the walls. There was a strong belief that it was a disease introduced in cotton, but a resident physician amused the patients with electric shocks, and the disease died out. In 1801 came a case of like import in the Charite Hospital in Berlin. A girl fell into strong convulsions. The disease proved contagious, several others becoming afflicted in a similar way; but nearly all were finally cured, principally by the administration of opium, which appears at that time to have been a fashionable remedy. Of the same sort was a case at Lyons in 1851. Sixty women were working together in a shop, when one of them, after a bitter quarrel with her husband, fell into a violent nervous paroxysm. The other women, sympathizing with her, gathered about to assist her, but one after another fell into a similar condition, until twenty were thus prostrated, and a more general spread of the epidemic was only prevented by clearing the premises.(404) (404) For these examples and others, see Tuke, Influence of the Mind upon the Body, vol. i, pp. 100, 277; also Hecker's essay. But while these cases seemed, in the eye of Science, fatal to the old conception of diabolic influence, the great majority of such epidemics, when unexplained, continued to give strength to the older view. In Roman Catholic countries these manifestations, as we have seen, have generally appeared in convents, or in churches where young girls are brought together for their first communion, or at shrines where miracles are supposed to be wrought. In Protestant countries they appear in times of great religious excitement, and especially when large bodies of young women are submitted to the influence of noisy and frothy preachers. Well-known examples of this in America are seen in the "Jumpers," "Jerkers," and various revival extravagances, especially among the negroes and "poor whites" of the Southern States. The proper conditions being given for the development of the disease--generally a congregation composed mainly of young women--any fanatic or overzealous priest or preacher may stimulate hysterical seizures, which are very likely to become epidemic. As a recent typical example on a large scale, I take the case of diabolic possession at Morzine, a French village on the borders of Switzerland; and it is especially instructive, because it was thoroughly investigated by a competent man of science. About the year 1853 a sick girl at Morzine, acting strangely, was thought to be possessed of the devil, and was taken to Besancon, where she seems to have fallen into the hands of kindly and sensible ecclesiastics, and, under the operation of the relics preserved in the cathedral there--especially the handkerchief of Christ--the devil was cast out and she was cured. Naturally, much was said of the affair among the peasantry, and soon other cases began to show themselves. The priest at Morzine attempted to quiet the matter by avowing his disbelief in such cases of possession; but immediately a great outcry was raised against him, especially by the possessed themselves. The matter was now widely discussed, and the malady spread rapidly; myth-making and wonder-mongering began; amazing accounts were thus developed and sent out to the world. The afflicted were said to have climbed trees like squirrels; to have shown superhuman strength; to have exercised the gift of tongues, speaking in German, Latin, and even in Arabic; to have given accounts of historical events they had never heard of; and to have revealed the secret thoughts of persons about them. Mingled with such exhibitions of power were outbursts of blasphemy and obscenity. But suddenly came something more miraculous, apparently, than all these wonders. Without any assigned cause, this epidemic of possession diminished and the devil disappeared. Not long after this, Prof. Tissot, an eminent member of the medical faculty at Dijon, visited the spot and began a series of researches, of which he afterward published a full account. He tells us that he found some reasons for the sudden departure of Satan which had never been published. He discovered that the Government had quietly removed one or two very zealous ecclesiastics to another parish, had sent the police to Morzine to maintain order, and had given instructions that those who acted outrageously should be simply treated as lunatics and sent to asylums. This policy, so accordant with French methods of administration, cast out the devil: the possessed were mainly cured, and the matter appeared ended. But Dr. Tissot found a few of the diseased still remaining, and he soon satisfied himself by various investigations and experiments that they were simply suffering from hysteria. One of his investigations is especially curious. In order to observe the patients more carefully, he invited some of them to dine with him, gave them without their knowledge holy water in their wine or their food, and found that it produced no effect whatever, though its results upon the demons when the possessed knew of its presence had been very marked. Even after large draughts of holy water had been thus given, the possessed remained afflicted, urged that the devil should be cast out, and some of them even went into convulsions; the devil apparently speaking from their mouths. It was evident that Satan had not the remotest idea that he had been thoroughly dosed with the most effective medicine known to the older theology.(405) (405) For an amazing delineation of the curative and other virtues of holy water, see the Abbe Gaume, L'Eau benite au XIXme Siecle, Paris, 1866. At last Tissot published the results of his experiments, and the stereotyped answer was soon made. It resembled the answer made by the clerical opponents of Galileo when he showed them the moons of Jupiter through his telescope, and they declared that the moons were created by the telescope. The clerical opponents of Tissot insisted that the non-effect of the holy water upon the demons proved nothing save the extraordinary cunning of Satan; that the archfiend wished it to be thought that he does not exist, and so overcame his repugnance to holy water, gulping it down in order to conceal his presence. Dr. Tissot also examined into the gift of tongues exercised by the possessed. As to German and Latin, no great difficulty was presented: it was by no means hard to suppose that some of the girls might have learned some words of the former language in the neighbouring Swiss cantons where German was spoken, or even in Germany itself; and as to Latin, considering that they had heard it from their childhood in the church, there seemed nothing very wonderful in their uttering some words in that language also. As to Arabic, had they really spoken it, that might have been accounted for by the relations of the possessed with Zouaves or Spahis from the French army; but, as Tissot could discover no such relations, he investigated this point as the most puzzling of all. On a close inquiry, he found that all the wonderful examples of speaking Arabic were reduced to one. He then asked whether there was any other person speaking or knowing Arabic in the town. He was answered that there was not. He asked whether any person had lived there, so far as any one could remember, who had spoken or understood Arabic, and he was answered in the negative. He then asked the witnesses how they knew that the language spoken by the girl was Arabic: no answer was vouchsafed him; but he was overwhelmed with such stories as that of a pig which, at sight of the cross on the village church, suddenly refused to go farther; and he was denounced thoroughly in the clerical newspapers for declining to accept such evidence. At Tissot's visit in 1863 the possession had generally ceased, and the cases left were few and quiet. But his visits stirred a new controversy, and its echoes were long and loud in the pulpits and clerical journals. Believers insisted that Satan had been removed by the intercession of the Blessed Virgin; unbelievers hinted that the main cause of the deliverance was the reluctance of the possessed to be shut up in asylums. Under these circumstances the Bishop of Annecy announced that he would visit Morzine to administer Confirmation, and word appears to have spread that he would give a more orthodox completion to the work already done, by exorcising the devils who remained. Immediately several new cases of possession appeared; young girls who had been cured were again affected; the embers thus kindled were fanned into a flame by a "mission" which sundry priests held in the parish to arouse the people to their religious duties--a mission in Roman Catholic countries being akin to a "revival" among some Protestant sects. Multitudes of young women, excited by the preaching and appeals of the clergy, were again thrown into the old disease, and at the coming of the good bishop it culminated. The account is given in the words of an eye-witness: "At the solemn entrance of the bishop into the church, the possessed persons threw themselves on the ground before him, or endeavoured to throw themselves upon him, screaming frightfully, cursing, blaspheming, so that the people at large were struck with horror. The possessed followed the bishop, hooted him, and threatened him, up to the middle of the church. Order was only established by the intervention of the soldiers. During the confirmation the diseased redoubled their howls and infernal vociferations, and tried to spit in the face of the bishop and to tear off his pastoral raiment. At the moment when the prelate gave his benediction a still more outrageous scene took place. The violence of the diseased was carried to fury, and from all parts of the church arose yells and fearful howling; so frightful was the din that tears fell from the eyes of many of the spectators, and many strangers were thrown into consternation." Among the very large number of these diseased persons there were only two men; of the remainder only two were of advanced age; the great majority were young women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five years. The public authorities shortly afterward intervened, and sought to cure the disease and to draw the people out of their mania by singing, dancing, and sports of various sorts, until at last it was brought under control.(406) (406) See Tissot, L'Imagination: ses Bienfaits et ses Egarements sutout dans le Domaine du Merveilleux, Paris, 1868, liv. iv, ch. vii, S 7: Les Possedees de Morzine; also Constans, Relation sur une Epidemie de Hystero-Demonopathies, Paris, 1863. Scenes similar to these, in their essential character, have arisen more recently in Protestant countries, but with the difference that what has been generally attributed by Roman Catholic ecclesiastics to Satan is attributed by Protestant ecclesiastics to the Almighty. Typical among the greater exhibitions of this were those which began in the Methodist chapel at Redruth in Cornwall--convulsions, leaping, jumping, until some four thousand persons were seized by it. The same thing is seen in the ruder parts of America at "revivals" and camp meetings. Nor in the ruder parts of America alone. In June, 1893, at a funeral in the city of Brooklyn, one of the mourners having fallen into hysterical fits, several other cases at once appeared in various parts of the church edifice, and some of the patients were so seriously affected that they were taken to a hospital. In still another field these exhibitions are seen, but more after a medieval pattern: in the Tigretier of Abyssinia we have epidemics of dancing which seek and obtain miraculous cures. Reports of similar manifestations are also sent from missionaries from the west coast of Africa, one of whom sees in some of them the characteristics of cases of possession mentioned in our Gospels, and is therefore inclined to attribute them to Satan.(407) (407) For the cases in Brooklyn, see the New York Tribune of about June 10, 1893. For the Tigretier, with especially interesting citations, see Hecker, chap. iii, sec. 1. For the cases in western Africa, see the Rev. J. L. Wilson, Western Africa, p. 217. III. THEOLOGICAL "RESTATEMENTS."--FINAL TRIUMPH OF THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW AND METHODS. But, happily, long before these latter occurrences, science had come into the field and was gradually diminishing this class of diseases. Among the earlier workers to this better purpose was the great Dutch physician Boerhaave. Finding in one of the wards in the hospital at Haarlem a number of women going into convulsions and imitating each other in various acts of frenzy, he immediately ordered a furnace of blazing coals into the midst of the ward, heated cauterizing irons, and declared that he would burn the arms of the first woman who fell into convulsions. No more cases occurred.(408) (408) See Figuier, Histoire de Merveilleux, vol. i, p. 403. These and similar successful dealings of medical science with mental disease brought about the next stage in the theological development. The Church sought to retreat, after the usual manner, behind a compromise. Early in the eighteenth century appeared a new edition of the great work by the Jesuit Delrio which for a hundred years had been a text-book for the use of ecclesiastics in fighting witchcraft; but in this edition the part played by Satan in diseases was changed: it was suggested that, while diseases have natural causes, it is necessary that Satan enter the human body in order to make these causes effective. This work claims that Satan "attacks lunatics at the full moon, when their brains are full of humours"; that in other cases of illness he "stirs the black bile"; and that in cases of blindness and deafness he "clogs the eyes and ears." By the close of the century this "restatement" was evidently found untenable, and one of a very different sort was attempted in England. In the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1797, under the article Daemoniacs, the orthodox view was presented in the following words: "The reality of demoniacal possession stands upon the same evidence with the gospel system in general." This statement, though necessary to satisfy the older theological sentiment, was clearly found too dangerous to be sent out into the modern sceptical world without some qualification. Another view was therefore suggested, namely, that the personages of the New Testament "adopted the vulgar language in speaking of those unfortunate persons who were generally imagined to be possessed with demons." Two or three editions contained this curious compromise; but near the middle of the present century the whole discussion was quietly dropped. Science, declining to trouble itself with any of these views, pressed on, and toward the end of the century we see Dr. Rhodes at Lyons curing a very serious case of possession by the use of a powerful emetic; yet myth-making came in here also, and it was stated that when the emetic produced its effect people had seen multitudes of green and yellow devils cast forth from the mouth of the possessed. The last great demonstration of the old belief in England was made in 1788. Near the city of Bristol at that time lived a drunken epileptic, George Lukins. In asking alms, he insisted that he was "possessed," and proved it by jumping, screaming, barking, and treating the company to a parody of the Te Deum. He was solemnly brought into the Temple Church, and seven clergymen united in the effort to exorcise the evil spirit. Upon their adjuring Satan, he swore "by his infernal den" that he would not come out of the man--"an oath," says the chronicler, "nowhere to be found but in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, from which Lukins probably got it." But the seven clergymen were at last successful, and seven devils were cast out, after which Lukins retired, and appears to have been supported during the remainder of his life as a monument of mercy. With this great effort the old theory in England seemed practically exhausted. Science had evidently carried the stronghold. In 1876, at a little town near Amiens, in France, a young woman suffering with all the usual evidences of diabolic possession was brought to the priest. The priest was besought to cast out the devil, but he simply took her to the hospital, where, under scientific treatment, she rapidly became better.(409) (409) See Figuier; also Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernale, article Posseses. The final triumph of science in this part of the great field has been mainly achieved during the latter half of the present century. Following in the noble succession of Paracelsus and John Hunter and Pinel and Tuke and Esquirol, have come a band of thinkers and workers who by scientific observation and research have developed new growths of truth, ever more and more precious. Among the many facts thus brought to bear upon this last stronghold of the Prince of Darkness, may be named especially those indicating "expectant attention"--an expectation of phenomena dwelt upon until the longing for them becomes morbid and invincible, and the creation of them perhaps unconscious. Still other classes of phenomena leading to epidemics are found to arise from a morbid tendency to imitation. Still other groups have been brought under hypnotism. Multitudes more have been found under the innumerable forms and results of hysteria. A study of the effects of the imagination upon bodily functions has also yielded remarkable results. And, finally, to supplement this work, have come in an array of scholars in history and literature who have investigated myth-making and wonder-mongering. Thus has been cleared away that cloud of supernaturalism which so long hung over mental diseases, and thus have they been brought within the firm grasp of science.(410) (410) To go into even leading citations in this vast and beneficent literature would take me far beyond my plan and space, but I may name, among easily accessible authorities, Brierre de Boismont on Hallucinations, Hulme's translation, 1860; also James Braid, The Power of the Mind over the Body, London, 1846; Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, Stuttgart, 1888; Tuke, Influence of the Mind on the Body, London, 1884; Maudsley, Pathology of the Mind, London, 1879; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, sixth edition, London, 1888; Lloyd Tuckey, Faith Cure, in The Nineteenth Century for December, 1888; Pettigrew, Superstitions connected with the Practice of Medicine and Surgery, London, 1844; Snell, Hexenprocesse und Geistesstorung, Munchen, 1891. For a very valuable study of interesting cases, see The Law of Hypnotism, by Prof. R. S. Hyer, of the Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas, 1895. As to myth-making and wonder-mongering, the general reader will find interesting supplementary accounts in the recent works of Andrew Lang and Baring-Gould. A very curious evidence of the effects of the myth-making tendency has recently come to the attention of the writer of this article. Periodically, for many years past, we have seen, in books of travel and in the newspapers, accounts of the wonderful performances of the jugglers in India; of the stabbing of a child in a small basket in the midst of an arena, and the child appearing alive in the surrounding crowd; of seeds planted, sprouted, and becoming well-grown trees under the hand of the juggler; of ropes thrown into the air and sustained by invisible force. Count de Gubernatis, the eminent professor and Oriental scholar at Florence, informed the present writer that he had recently seen and studied these exhibitions, and that, so far from being wonderful, they were much inferior to the jugglery so well known in all our Western capitals. Conscientious men still linger on who find comfort in holding fast to some shred of the old belief in diabolic possession. The sturdy declaration in the last century by John Wesley, that "giving up witchcraft is giving up the Bible," is echoed feebly in the latter half of this century by the eminent Catholic ecclesiastic in France who declares that "to deny possession by devils is to charge Jesus and his apostles with imposture," and asks, "How can the testimony of apostles, fathers of the Church, and saints who saw the possessed and so declared, be denied?" And a still fainter echo lingers in Protestant England.(411) (411) See the Abbe Barthelemi, in the Dictionnaire de la Conversation; also the Rev. W. Scott's Doctrine of Evil Spirits proved, London, 1853; also the vigorous protest of Dean Burgon against the action of the New Testament revisers, in substituting the word "epileptic" for "lunatic" in Matthew xvii, 15, published in the Quarterly Review for January, 1882. But, despite this conscientious opposition, science has in these latter days steadily wrought hand in hand with Christian charity in this field, to evolve a better future for humanity. The thoughtful physician and the devoted clergyman are now constantly seen working together; and it is not too much to expect that Satan, having been cast out of the insane asylums, will ere long disappear from monasteries and camp meetings, even in the most unenlightened regions of Christendom. CHAPTER XVII. FROM BABEL TO COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. I. THE SACRED THEORY IN ITS FIRST FORM. Among the sciences which have served as entering wedges into the heavy mass of ecclesiastical orthodoxy--to cleave it, disintegrate it, and let the light of Christianity into it--none perhaps has done a more striking work than Comparative Philology. In one very important respect the history of this science differs from that of any other; for it is the only one whose conclusions theologians have at last fully adopted as the result of their own studies. This adoption teaches a great lesson, since, while it has destroyed theological views cherished during many centuries, and obliged the Church to accept theories directly contrary to the plain letter of our sacred books, the result is clearly seen to have helped Christianity rather than to have hurt it. It has certainly done much to clear our religious foundations of the dogmatic rust which was eating into their structure. How this result was reached, and why the Church has so fully accepted it, I shall endeavour to show in the present chapter. At a very early period in the evolution of civilization men began to ask questions regarding language; and the answers to these questions were naturally embodied in the myths, legends, and chronicles of their sacred books. Among the foremost of these questions were three: "Whence came language?" "Which was the first language?" "How came the diversity of language?" The answer to the first of these was very simple: each people naturally held that language was given it directly or indirectly by some special or national deity of its own; thus, to the Chaldeans by Oannes, to the Egyptians by Thoth, to the Hebrews by Jahveh. The Hebrew answer is embodied in the great poem which opens our sacred books. Jahveh talks with Adam and is perfectly understood; the serpent talks with Eve and is perfectly understood; Jahveh brings the animals before Adam, who bestows on each its name. Language, then, was God-given and complete. Of the fact that every language is the result of a growth process there was evidently, among the compilers of our sacred books, no suspicion. The answer to the second of these questions was no less simple. As, very generally, each nation believed its own chief divinity to be "a god above all gods,"--as each believed itself "a chosen people,"--as each believed its own sacred city the actual centre of the earth, so each believed its own language to be the first--the original of all. This answer was from the first taken for granted by each "chosen people," and especially by the Hebrews: throughout their whole history, whether the Almighty talks with Adam in the Garden or writes the commandments on Mount Sinai, he uses the same language--the Hebrew. The answer to the third of these questions, that regarding the diversity of languages, was much more difficult. Naturally, explanations of this diversity frequently gave rise to legends somewhat complicated. The "law of wills and causes," formulated by Comte, was exemplified here as in so many other cases. That law is, that, when men do not know the natural causes of things, they simply attribute them to wills like their own; thus they obtain a theory which provisionally takes the place of science, and this theory forms a basis for theology. Examples of this recur to any thinking reader of history. Before the simpler laws of astronomy were known, the sun was supposed to be trundled out into the heavens every day and the stars hung up in the firmament every night by the right hand of the Almighty. Before the laws of comets were known, they were thought to be missiles hurled by an angry God at a wicked world. Before the real cause of lightning was known, it was supposed to be the work of a good God in his wrath, or of evil spirits in their malice. Before the laws of meteorology were known, it was thought that rains were caused by the Almighty or his angels opening "the windows of heaven" to let down upon the earth "the waters that be above the firmament." Before the laws governing physical health were known, diseases were supposed to result from the direct interposition of the Almighty or of Satan. Before the laws governing mental health were known, insanity was generally thought to be diabolic possession. All these early conceptions were naturally embodied in the sacred books of the world, and especially in our own.(412) (412) Any one who wishes to realize the mediaeval view of the direct personal attention of the Almighty to the universe, can perhaps do so most easily by looking over the engravings in the well-known Nuremberg Chronicle, representing him in the work of each of the six days, and resting afterward. So, in this case, to account for the diversity of tongues, the direct intervention of the Divine Will was brought in. As this diversity was felt to be an inconvenience, it was attributed to the will of a Divine Being in anger. To explain this anger, it was held that it must have been provoked by human sin. Out of this conception explanatory myths and legends grew as thickly and naturally as elms along water-courses; of these the earliest form known to us is found in the Chaldean accounts, and nowhere more clearly than in the legend of the Tower of Babel. The inscriptions recently found among the ruins of Assyria have thrown a bright light into this and other scriptural myths and legends: the deciphering of the characters in these inscriptions by Grotefend, and the reading of the texts by George Smith, Oppert, Sayce, and others, have given us these traditions more nearly in their original form than they appear in our own Scriptures. The Hebrew story of Babel, like so many other legends in the sacred books of the world, combined various elements. By a play upon words, such as the history of myths and legends frequently shows, it wrought into one fabric the earlier explanations of the diversities of human speech and of the great ruined tower at Babylon. The name Babel (bab-el) means "Gate of God" or "Gate of the Gods." All modern scholars of note agree that this was the real significance of the name; but the Hebrew verb which signifies TO CONFOUND resembles somewhat the word Babel, so that out of this resemblance, by one of the most common processes in myth formation, came to the Hebrew mind an indisputable proof that the tower was connected with the confusion of tongues, and this became part of our theological heritage. In our sacred books the account runs as follows: "And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. "And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. "And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. "And they said, Go to, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. "And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. "And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. "So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. "Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth." (Genesis xi, 1-9.) Thus far the legend had been but slightly changed from the earlier Chaldean form in which it has been found in the Assyrian inscriptions. Its character is very simple: to use the words of Prof. Sayce, "It takes us back to the age when the gods were believed to dwell in the visible sky, and when man, therefore, did his best to rear his altars as near them as possible." And this eminent divine might have added that it takes us back also to a time when it was thought that Jehovah, in order to see the tower fully, was obliged to come down from his seat above the firmament. As to the real reasons for the building of the towers which formed so striking a feature in Chaldean architecture--any one of which may easily have given rise to the explanatory myth which found its way into our sacred books--there seems a substantial agreement among leading scholars that they were erected primarily as parts of temples, but largely for the purpose of astronomical observations, to which the Chaldeans were so devoted, and to which their country, with its level surface and clear atmosphere, was so well adapted. As to the real cause of the ruin of such structures, one of the inscribed cylinders discovered in recent times, speaking of a tower which most of the archaeologists identify with the Tower of Babel, reads as follows: "The building named the Stages of the Seven Spheres, which was the Tower of Borsippa, had been built by a former king. He had completed forty-two cubits, but he did not finish its head. During the lapse of time, it had become ruined; they had not taken care of the exit of the waters, so that rain and wet had penetrated into the brickwork; the casing of burned brick had swollen out, and the terraces of crude brick are scattered in heaps." We can well understand how easily "the gods, assisted by the winds," as stated in the Chaldean legend, could overthrow a tower thus built. It may be instructive to compare with the explanatory myth developed first by the Chaldeans, and in a slightly different form by the Hebrews, various other legends to explain the same diversity of tongues. The Hindu legend of the confusion of tongues is as follows: "There grew in the centre of the earth the wonderful 'world tree,' or 'knowledge tree.' It was so tall that it reached almost to heaven. It said in its heart, 'I shall hold my head in heaven and spread my branches over all the earth, and gather all men together under my shadow, and protect them, and prevent them from separating.' But Brahma, to punish the pride of the tree, cut off its branches and cast them down on the earth, when they sprang up as wata trees, and made differences of belief and speech and customs to prevail on the earth, to disperse men upon its surface." Still more striking is a Mexican legend: according to this, the giant Xelhua built the great Pyramid of Cholula, in order to reach heaven, until the gods, angry at his audacity, threw fire upon the building and broke it down, whereupon every separate family received a language of its own. Such explanatory myths grew or spread widely over the earth. A well-known form of the legend, more like the Chaldean than the Hebrew later form, appeared among the Greeks. According to this, the Aloidae piled Mount Ossa upon Olympus and Pelion upon Ossa, in their efforts to reach heaven and dethrone Jupiter. Still another form of it entered the thoughts of Plato. He held that in the golden age men and beasts all spoke the same language, but that Zeus confounded their speech because men were proud and demanded eternal youth and immortality.(413) (413) For the identification of the Tower of Babel with the "Birs Nimrad" amid the ruins of the city of Borsippa, see Rawlinson; also Schrader, The Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament, London, 1885, pp. 106-112 and following; and especially George Smith, Assyrian Discoveries, p. 59. For some of these inscriptions discovered and read by George Smith, see his Chaldean Account of Genesis, new York, 1876, pp. 160-162. For the statement regarding the origin of the word Babel, see Ersch and Gruber, article Babylon; also the Rev. Prof. A. H. Sayce in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; also Colenso, Pentateuch Examined, part iv, p. 302; also John Fiske, Myths and Myth-makers, p. 72; also Lenormont, Histoire Ancienne de l'Orient, Paris, 1881, vol. i, pp. 115 et seq. As to the character and purpose of the great tower of the temple of Belus, see Smith's Bible Dictionary, article Babel, quoting Diodorus; also Rawlinson, especially in Journal of the Asiatic Society for 1861; also Sayce, Religion of the Ancient Babylonians (Hibbert Lectures for 1887), London, 1887, chap. ii and elsewhere, especially pages 96, 397, 407; also Max Duncker, History of Antiquity, Abbott's translation, vol. ii, chaps. ii, and iii. For similar legends in other parts of the world, see Delitzsch; also Humboldt, American Researches; also Brinton, Myths of the New World; also Colenso, as above. The Tower of Cholula is well known, having been described by Humboldt and Lord Kingsborough. For superb engravings showing the view of Babel as developed by the theological imagination, see Kircher, Turris Babel, Amsterdam, 1679. For the Law of Wills and Causes, with deductions from it well stated, see Beattie Crozier, Civilization and Progress, London, 1888, pp. 112, 178, 179, 273. For Plato, see the Politicus, p. 272, ed. Stephani, cited in Ersch and Gruber, article Babylon. For a good general statement, see Bible Myths, New York, 1883, chap. iii. For Aristotle's strange want of interest in any classification of the varieties of human speech, see Max Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language, London, 1864, series i, chap. iv, pp. 123-125. But naturally the version of the legend which most affected Christendom was that modification of the Chaldean form developed among the Jews and embodied in their sacred books. To a thinking man in these days it is very instructive. The coming down of the Almighty from heaven to see the tower and put an end to it by dispersing its builders, points to the time when his dwelling was supposed to be just above the firmament or solid vault above the earth: the time when he exercised his beneficent activity in such acts as opening "the windows of heaven" to give down rain upon the earth; in bringing out the sun every day and hanging up the stars every night to give light to the earth; in hurling comets, to give warning; in placing his bow in the cloud, to give hope; in, coming down in the cool of the evening to walk and talk with the man he had made; in making coats of skins for Adam and Eve; in enjoying the odour of flesh which Noah burned for him; in eating with Abraham under the oaks of Mamre; in wrestling with Jacob; and in writing with his own finger on the stone tables for Moses. So came the answer to the third question regarding language; and all three answers, embodied in our sacred books and implanted in the Jewish mind, supplied to the Christian Church the germs of a theological development of philology. These germs developed rapidly in the warm atmosphere of devotion and ignorance of natural law which pervaded the early Church, and there grew a great orthodox theory of language, which was held throughout Christendom, "always, everywhere, and by all," for nearly two thousand years, and to which, until the present century, all science has been obliged, under pains and penalties, to conform. There did, indeed, come into human thought at an early period some suggestions of the modern scientific view of philology. Lucretius had proposed a theory, inadequate indeed, but still pointing toward the truth, as follows: "Nature impelled man to try the various sounds of the tongue, and so struck out the names of things, much in the same way as the inability to speak is seen in its turn to drive children to the use of gestures." But, among the early fathers of the Church, the only one who seems to have caught an echo of this utterance was St. Gregory of Nyssa: as a rule, all the other great founders of Christian theology, as far as they expressed themselves on the subject, took the view that the original language spoken by the Almighty and given by him to men was Hebrew, and that from this all other languages were derived at the destruction of the Tower of Babel. This doctrine was especially upheld by Origen, St. Jerome, and St. Augustine. Origen taught that "the language given at the first through Adam, the Hebrew, remained among that portion of mankind which was assigned not to any angel, but continued the portion of God himself." St. Augustine declared that, when the other races were divided by their own peculiar languages, Heber's family preserved that language which is not unreasonably believed to have been the common language of the race, and that on this account it was henceforth called Hebrew. St. Jerome wrote, "The whole of antiquity affirms that Hebrew, in which the Old Testament is written, was the beginning of all human speech." Amid such great authorities as these even Gregory of Nyssa struggled in vain. He seems to have taken the matter very earnestly, and to have used not only argument but ridicule. He insists that God does not speak Hebrew, and that the tongue used by Moses was not even a pure dialect of one of the languages resulting from "the confusion." He makes man the inventor of speech, and resorts to raillery: speaking against his opponent Eunomius, he says that, "passing in silence his base and abject garrulity," he will "note a few things which are thrown into the midst of his useless or wordy discourse, where he represents God teaching words and names to our first parents, sitting before them like some pedagogue or grammar master." But, naturally, the great authority of Origen, Jerome, and Augustine prevailed; the view suggested by Lucretius, and again by St. Gregory of Nyssa, died, out; and "always, everywhere, and by all," in the Church, the doctrine was received that the language spoken by the Almighty was Hebrew,--that it was taught by him to Adam,--and that all other languages on the face of the earth originated from it at the dispersion attending the destruction of the Tower of Babel.(414) (414) For Lucretius's statement, see the De Rerum Natura, lib. v, Munro's edition, with translation, Cambridge, 1886, vol. iii. p. 141. For the opinion of Gregory of Nyssa, see Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft in Deutschland, Munchen, 1869, p. 179; and for the passage cited, see Gregory of Nyssa in his Contra Eunomium, xii, in Migne's Patr. Graeca, vol. ii, p. 1043. For St. Jerome, see his Epistle XVIII, in Migne's Patr. Lat., vol. xxii, p. 365. For citation from St. Augustine, see the City of God, Dod's translation, Edinburgh, 1871, vol. ii, p. 122. For citation from Origen, see his Homily XI, cited by Guichard in preface to L'Harmonie Etymologique, Paris, 1631, lib. xvi, chap. xi. For absolutely convincing proofs that the Jews derived the Babel and other legends of their sacred books fro the Chaldeans, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, passim; but especially for a most candid though somewhat reluctant summing up, see p. 291. This idea threw out roots and branches in every direction, and so developed ever into new and strong forms. As all scholars now know, the vowel points in the Hebrew language were not adopted until at some period between the second and tenth centuries; but in the mediaeval Church they soon came to be considered as part of the great miracle,--as the work of the right hand of the Almighty; and never until the eighteenth century was there any doubt allowed as to the divine origin of these rabbinical additions to the text. To hesitate in believing that these points were dotted virtually by the very hand of God himself came to be considered a fearful heresy. The series of battles between theology and science in the field of comparative philology opened just on this point, apparently so insignificant: the direct divine inspiration of the rabbinical punctuation. The first to impugn this divine origin of these vocal points and accents appears to have been a Spanish monk, Raymundus Martinus, in his Pugio Fidei, or Poniard of the Faith, which he put forth in the thirteenth century. But he and his doctrine disappeared beneath the waves of the orthodox ocean, and apparently left no trace. For nearly three hundred years longer the full sacred theory held its ground; but about the opening of the sixteenth century another glimpse of the truth was given by a Jew, Elias Levita, and this seems to have had some little effect, at least in keeping the germ of scientific truth alive. The Reformation, with its renewal of the literal study of the Scriptures, and its transfer of all infallibility from the Church and the papacy to the letter of the sacred books, intensified for a time the devotion of Christendom to this sacred theory of language. The belief was strongly held that the writers of the Bible were merely pens in the hand of God (Dei calami.{;?} Hence the conclusion that not only the sense but the words, letters, and even the punctuation proceeded from the Holy Spirit. Only on this one question of the origin of the Hebrew points was there any controversy, and this waxed hot. It began to be especially noted that these vowel points in the Hebrew Bible did not exist in the synagogue rolls, were not mentioned in the Talmud, and seemed unknown to St. Jerome; and on these grounds some earnest men ventured to think them no part of the original revelation to Adam. Zwingli, so much before most of the Reformers in other respects, was equally so in this. While not doubting the divine origin and preservation of the Hebrew language as a whole, he denied the antiquity of the vocal points, demonstrated their unessential character, and pointed out the fact that St. Jerome makes no mention of them. His denial was long the refuge of those who shared this heresy. But the full orthodox theory remained established among the vast majority both of Catholics and Protestants. The attitude of the former is well illustrated in the imposing work of the canon Marini, which appeared at Venice in 1593, under the title of Noah's Ark: A New Treasury of the Sacred Tongue. The huge folios begin with the declaration that the Hebrew tongue was "divinely inspired at the very beginning of the world," and the doctrine is steadily maintained that this divine inspiration extended not only to the letters but to the punctuation. Not before the seventeenth century was well under way do we find a thorough scholar bold enough to gainsay this preposterous doctrine. This new assailant was Capellus, Professor of Hebrew at Saumur; but he dared not put forth his argument in France: he was obliged to publish it in Holland, and even there such obstacles were thrown in his way that it was ten years before he published another treatise of importance. The work of Capellus was received as settling the question by very many open-minded scholars, among whom was Hugo Grotius. But many theologians felt this view to be a blow at the sanctity and integrity of the sacred text; and in 1648 the great scholar, John Buxtorf the younger, rose to defend the orthodox citadel: in his Anticritica he brought all his stores of knowledge to uphold the doctrine that the rabbinical points and accents had been jotted down by the right hand of God. The controversy waxed hot: scholars like Voss and Brian Walton supported Capellus; Wasmuth and many others of note were as fierce against him. The Swiss Protestants were especially violent on the orthodox side; their formula consensus of 1675 declared the vowel points to be inspired, and three years later the Calvinists of Geneva, by a special canon, forbade that any minister should be received into their jurisdiction until he publicly confessed that the Hebrew text, as it to-day exists in the Masoretic copies, is, both as to the consonants and vowel points, divine and authentic. While in Holland so great a man as Hugo Grotius supported the view of Capellus, and while in France the eminent Catholic scholar Richard Simon, and many others, Catholic and Protestant, took similar ground against this divine origin of the Hebrew punctuation, there was arrayed against them a body apparently overwhelming. In France, Bossuet, the greatest theologian that France has ever produced, did his best to crush Simon. In Germany, Wasmuth, professor first at Rostock and afterward at Kiel, hurled his Vindiciae at the innovators. Yet at this very moment the battle was clearly won; the arguments of Capellus were irrefragable, and, despite the commands of bishops, the outcries of theologians, and the sneering of critics, his application of strictly scientific observation and reasoning carried the day. Yet a casual observer, long after the fate of the battle was really settled, might have supposed that it was still in doubt. As is not unusual in theologic controversies, attempts were made to galvanize the dead doctrine into an appearance of life. Famous among these attempts was that made as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century by two Bremen theologians, Hase and Iken. They put forth a compilation in two huge folios simultaneously at Leyden and Amsterdam, prominent in which work is the treatise on The Integrity of Scripture, by Johann Andreas Danzius, Professor of Oriental Languages and Senior Member of the Philosophical Faculty of Jena, and, to preface it, there was a formal and fulsome approval by three eminent professors of theology at Leyden. With great fervour the author pointed out that "religion itself depends absolutely on the infallible inspiration, both verbal and literal, of the Scripture text"; and with impassioned eloquence he assailed the blasphemers who dared question the divine origin of the Hebrew points. But this was really the last great effort. That the case was lost was seen by the fact that Danzius felt obliged to use other missiles than arguments, and especially to call his opponents hard names. From this period the old sacred theory as to the origin of the Hebrew points may be considered as dead and buried. II. THE SACRED THEORY OF LANGUAGE IN ITS SECOND FORM. But the war was soon to be waged on a wider and far more important field. The inspiration of the Hebrew punctuation having been given up, the great orthodox body fell back upon the remainder of the theory, and intrenched this more strongly than ever: the theory that the Hebrew language was the first of all languages--that which was spoken by the Almighty, given by him to Adam, transmitted through Noah to the world after the Deluge--and that the "confusion of tongues" was the origin of all other languages. In giving account of this new phase of the struggle, it is well to go back a little. From the Revival of Learning and the Reformation had come the renewed study of Hebrew in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and thus the sacred doctrine regarding the origin of the Hebrew language received additional authority. All the early Hebrew grammars, from that of Reuchlin down, assert the divine origin and miraculous claims of Hebrew. It is constantly mentioned as "the sacred tongue"--sancta lingua. In 1506, Reuchlin, though himself persecuted by a large faction in the Church for advanced views, refers to Hebrew as "spoken by the mouth of God." This idea was popularized by the edition of the Margarita Philosophica, published at Strasburg in 1508. That work, in its successive editions a mirror of human knowledge at the close of the Middle Ages and the opening of modern times, contains a curious introduction to the study of Hebrew, In this it is declared that Hebrew was the original speech "used between God and man and between men and angels." Its full-page frontispiece represents Moses receiving from God the tables of stone written in Hebrew; and, as a conclusive argument, it reminds us that Christ himself, by choosing a Hebrew maid for his mother, made that his mother tongue. It must be noted here, however, that Luther, in one of those outbursts of strong sense which so often appear in his career, enforced the explanation that the words "God said" had nothing to do with the articulation of human language. Still, he evidently yielded to the general view. In the Roman Church at the same period we have a typical example of the theologic method applied to philology, as we have seen it applied to other sciences, in the statement by Luther's great opponent, Cajetan, that the three languages of the inscription on the cross of Calvary "were the representatives of all languages, because the number three denotes perfection." In 1538 Postillus made a very important endeavour at a comparative study of languages, but with the orthodox assumption that all were derived from one source, namely, the Hebrew. Naturally, Comparative Philology blundered and stumbled along this path into endless absurdities. The most amazing efforts were made to trace back everything to the sacred language. English and Latin dictionaries appeared, in which every word was traced back to a Hebrew root. No supposition was too absurd in this attempt to square Science with Scripture. It was declared that, as Hebrew is written from right to left, it might be read either way, in order to produce a satisfactory etymology. The whole effort in all this sacred scholarship was, not to find what the truth is--not to see how the various languages are to be classified, or from what source they are really derived--but to demonstrate what was supposed necessary to maintain what was then held to be the truth of Scripture; namely, that all languages are derived from the Hebrew. This stumbling and blundering, under the sway of orthodox necessity, was seen among the foremost scholars throughout Europe. About the middle of the sixteenth century the great Swiss scholar, Conrad Gesner, beginning his Mithridates, says, "While of all languages Hebrew is the first and oldest, of all is alone pure and unmixed, all the rest are much mixed, for there is none which has not some words derived and corrupted from Hebrew." Typical, as we approach the end of the sixteenth century, are the utterances of two of the most noted English divines. First of these may be mentioned Dr. William Fulke, Master of Pembroke Hall, in the University of Cambridge. In his Discovery of the Dangerous Rock of the Romish Church, published in 1580, he speaks of "the Hebrew tongue,... the first tongue of the world, and for the excellency thereof called 'the holy tongue.'" Yet more emphatic, eight years later, was another eminent divine, Dr. William Whitaker, Regius Professor of Divinity and Master of St. John's College at Cambridge. In his Disputation on Holy Scripture, first printed in 1588, he says: "The Hebrew is the most ancient of all languages, and was that which alone prevailed in the world before the Deluge and the erection of the Tower of Babel. For it was this which Adam used and all men before the Flood, as is manifest from the Scriptures, as the fathers testify." He then proceeds to quote passages on this subject from St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and others, and cites St. Chrysostom in support of the statement that "God himself showed the model and method of writing when he delivered the Law written by his own finger to Moses."(415) (415) For the whole scriptural argument, embracing the various texts on which the sacred science of Philology was founded, with the use made of such texts, see Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft in Deutschland, Munchen, 1869, pp. 22-26. As to the origin of the vowel points, see Benfey, as above; he holds that they began to be inserted in the second century A.D., and that the process lasted until about the tenth. For Raymundus and his Pugio Fidei, see G. L. Bauer, Prolegomena to his revision of Glassius's Philologia Sacra, Leipsic, 1795,--see especially pp. 8-14, in tome ii of the work. For Zwingli, see Praef. in Apol. comp. Isaiae (Opera, iii). See also Morinus, De Lingua primaeva, p.447. For Marini, see his Arca Noe: Thesaurus Linguae Sanctae, Venet., 1593, and especially the preface. For general account of Capellus, see G. L. Bauer, in his Prolegomena, as above, vol. ii, pp. 8-14. His Arcanum Premetationis Revelatum was brought out at Leyden in 1624; his Critica Sacra ten years later. See on Capellus and Swiss theologues, Wolfius, Bibliotheca Nebr., tome ii, p. 27. For the struggle, see Schnedermann, Die Controverse des Ludovicus Capellus mit den Buxtorfen, Leipsic, 1879, cited in article Hebrew, in Encyclopaedia Britannica. For Wasmuth, see his Vindiciae Sanctae Hebraicae Scripturae, Rostock, 1664. For Reuchlin, see the dedicatory preface to his Rudimenta Hebraica, Pforzheim, 1506, folio, in which he speaks of the "in divina scriptura dicendi genus, quale os Dei locatum est." The statement in the Margarita Philosophica as to Hebrew is doubtless based on Reuchlin's Rudimenta Hebraica, which it quotes, and which first appeared in 1506. It is significant that this section disappeared from the Margarita in the following editions; but this disappearence is easily understood when we recall the fact that Gregory Reysch, its author, having become one of the Papal Commission to judge Reuchlin in his quarrel with the Dominicans, thought it prudent to side with the latter, and therefore, doubtless, considered it wise to suppress all evidence of Reuchlin's influence upon his beliefs. All the other editions of the Margarita in my possession are content with teaching, under the head of the Alphabet, that the Hebrew letters were invented by Adam. On Luther's view of the words "God said," see Farrar, Language and Languages. For a most valuable statement regarding the clashing opinions at the Reformation, see Max Muller, as above, lecture iv, p. 132. For the prevailing view among the Reformers, see Calovius, vol. i, p. 484, and Thulock, The Doctrine of Inspiration, in Theolog. Essays, Boston, 1867. Both Muller and Benfey note, as especially important, the difference between the Church view and the ancient heathen view regarding "barbarians." See Muller, as above, lecture iv, p. 127, and Benfey, as above, pp. 170 et seq. For a very remarkable list of Bibles printed at an early period, see Benfey, p. 569. On the attempts to trace all words back to Hebrew roots, see Sayce, Introduction to the Science of Language, chap. vi. For Gesner, see his Mithridates (de differentiis linguarum), Zurich, 1555. For a similar attempt to prove that Italian was also derived from Hebrew, see Giambullari, cited in Garlanda, p. 174. For Fulke, see the Parker Society's Publications, 1848, p. 224. For Whitaker, see his Disputation on Holy Scripture in the same series, pp. 112-114. This sacred theory entered the seventeenth century in full force, and for a time swept everything before it. Eminent commentators, Catholic and Protestant, accepted and developed it. Great prelates, Catholic and Protestant, stood guard over it, favouring those who supported it, doing their best to destroy those who would modify it. In 1606 Stephen Guichard built new buttresses for it in Catholic France. He explains in his preface that his intention is "to make the reader see in the Hebrew word not only the Greek and Latin, but also the Italian, the Spanish, the French, the German, the Flemish, the English, and many others from all languages." As the merest tyro in philology can now see, the great difficulty that Guichard encounters is in getting from the Hebrew to the Aryan group of languages. How he meets this difficulty may be imagined from his statement, as follows: "As for the derivation of words by addition, subtraction, and inversion of the letters, it is certain that this can and ought thus to be done, if we would find etymologies--a thing which becomes very credible when we consider that the Hebrews wrote from right to left and the Greeks and others from left to right. All the learned recognise such derivations as necessary;... and... certainly otherwise one could scarcely trace any etymology back to Hebrew." Of course, by this method of philological juggling, anything could be proved which the author thought necessary to his pious purpose. Two years later, Andrew Willett published at London his Hexapla, or Sixfold Commentary upon Genesis. In this he insists that the one language of all mankind in the beginning "was the Hebrew tongue preserved still in Heber's family." He also takes pains to say that the Tower of Babel "was not so called of Belus, as some have imagined, but of confusion, for so the Hebrew word ballal signifieth"; and he quotes from St. Chrysostom to strengthen his position. In 1627 Dr. Constantine l'Empereur was inducted into the chair of Philosophy of the Sacred Language in the University of Leyden. In his inaugural oration on The Dignity and Utility of the Hebrew Tongue, he puts himself on record in favour of the Divine origin and miraculous purity of that language. "Who," he says, "can call in question the fact that the Hebrew idiom is coeval with the world itself, save such as seek to win vainglory for their own sophistry?" Two years after Willett, in England, comes the famous Dr. Lightfoot, the most renowned scholar of his time in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; but all his scholarship was bent to suit theological requirements. In his Erubhin, published in 1629, he goes to the full length of the sacred theory, though we begin to see a curious endeavour to get over some linguistic difficulties. One passage will serve to show both the robustness of his faith and the acuteness of his reasoning, in view of the difficulties which scholars now began to find in the sacred theory." Other commendations this tongue (Hebrew) needeth none than what it hath of itself; namely, for sanctity it was the tongue of God; and for antiquity it was the tongue of Adam. God the first founder, and Adam the first speaker of it.... It began with the world and the Church, and continued and increased in glory till the captivity in Babylon.... As the man in Seneca, that through sickness lost his memory and forgot his own name, so the Jews, for their sins, lost their language and forgot their own tongue.... Before the confusion of tongues all the world spoke their tongue and no other but since the confusion of the Jews they speak the language of all the world and not their own." But just at the middle of the century (1657) came in England a champion of the sacred theory more important than any of these--Brian Walton, Bishop of Chester. His Polyglot Bible dominated English scriptural criticism throughout the remainder of the century. He prefaces his great work by proving at length the divine origin of Hebrew, and the derivation from it of all other forms of speech. He declares it "probable that the first parent of mankind was the inventor of letters." His chapters on this subject are full of interesting details. He says that the Welshman, Davis, had already tried to prove the Welsh the primitive speech; Wormius, the Danish; Mitilerius, the German; but the bishop stands firmly by the sacred theory, informing us that "even in the New World are found traces of the Hebrew tongue, namely, in New England and in New Belgium, where the word Aguarda signifies earth, and the name Joseph is found among the Hurons." As we have seen, Bishop Walton had been forced to give up the inspiration of the rabbinical punctuation, but he seems to have fallen back with all the more tenacity on what remained of the great sacred theory of language, and to have become its leading champion among English-speaking peoples. At that same period the same doctrine was put forth by a great authority in Germany. In 1657 Andreas Sennert published his inaugural address as Professor of Sacred Letters and Dean of the Theological Faculty at Wittenberg. All his efforts were given to making Luther's old university a fortress of the orthodox theory. His address, like many others in various parts of Europe, shows that in his time an inaugural with any save an orthodox statement of the theological platform would not be tolerated. Few things in the past are to the sentimental mind more pathetic, to the philosophical mind more natural, and to the progressive mind more ludicrous, than addresses at high festivals of theological schools. The audience has generally consisted mainly of estimable elderly gentlemen, who received their theology in their youth, and who in their old age have watched over it with jealous care to keep it well protected from every fresh breeze of thought. Naturally, a theological professor inaugurated under such auspices endeavours to propitiate his audience. Sennert goes to great lengths both in his address and in his grammar, published nine years later; for, declaring the Divine origin of Hebrew to be quite beyond controversy, he says: "Noah received it from our first parents, and guarded it in the midst of the waters; Heber and Peleg saved it from the confusion of tongues." The same doctrine was no less loudly insisted upon by the greatest authority in Switzerland, Buxtorf, professor at Basle, who proclaimed Hebrew to be "the tongue of God, the tongue of angels, the tongue of the prophets"; and the effect of this proclamation may be imagined when we note in 1663 that his book had reached its sixth edition. It was re-echoed through England, Germany, France, and America, and, if possible, yet more highly developed. In England Theophilus Gale set himself to prove that not only all the languages, but all the learning of the world, had been drawn from the Hebrew records. This orthodox doctrine was also fully vindicated in Holland. Six years before the close of the seventeenth century, Morinus, Doctor of Theology, Professor of Oriental Languages, and pastor at Amsterdam, published his great work on Primaeval Language. Its frontispiece depicts the confusion of tongues at Babel, and, as a pendant to this, the pentecostal gift of tongues to the apostles. In the successive chapters of the first book he proves that language could not have come into existence save as a direct gift from heaven; that there is a primitive language, the mother of all the rest; that this primitive language still exists in its pristine purity; that this language is the Hebrew. The second book is devoted to proving that the Hebrew letters were divinely received, have been preserved intact, and are the source of all other alphabets. But in the third book he feels obliged to allow, in the face of the contrary dogma held, as he says, by "not a few most eminent men piously solicitous for the authority of the sacred text," that the Hebrew punctuation was, after all, not of Divine inspiration, but a late invention of the rabbis. France, also, was held to all appearance in complete subjection to the orthodox idea up to the end of the century. In 1697 appeared at Paris perhaps the most learned of all the books written to prove Hebrew the original tongue and source of all others. The Gallican Church was then at the height of its power. Bossuet as bishop, as thinker, and as adviser of Louis XIV, had crushed all opposition to orthodoxy. The Edict of Nantes had been revoked, and the Huguenots, so far as they could escape, were scattered throughout the world, destined to repay France with interest a thousandfold during the next two centuries. The bones of the Jansenists at Port Royal were dug up and scattered. Louis XIV stood guard over the piety of his people. It was in the midst of this series of triumphs that Father Louis Thomassin, Priest of the Oratory, issued his Universal Hebrew Glossary. In this, to use his own language, "the divinity, antiquity, and perpetuity of the Hebrew tongue, with its letters, accents, and other characters," are established forever and beyond all cavil, by proofs drawn from all peoples, kindreds, and nations under the sun. This superb, thousand-columned folio was issued from the royal press, and is one of the most imposing monuments of human piety and folly--taking rank with the treatises of Fromundus against Galileo, of Quaresmius on Lot's Wife, and of Gladstone on Genesis and Geology. The great theologic-philologic chorus was steadily maintained, and, as in a responsive chant, its doctrines were echoed from land to land. From America there came the earnest words of John Eliot, praising Hebrew as the most fit to be made a universal language, and declaring it the tongue "which it pleased our Lord Jesus to make use of when he spake from heaven unto Paul." At the close of the seventeenth century came from England a strong antiphonal answer in this chorus; Meric Casaubon, the learned Prebendary of Canterbury, thus declared: "One language, the Hebrew, I hold to be simply and absolutely the source of all." And, to swell the chorus, there came into it, in complete unison, the voice of Bentley--the greatest scholar of the old sort whom England has ever produced. He was, indeed, one of the most learned and acute critics of any age; but he was also Master of Trinity, Archdeacon of Bristol, held two livings besides, and enjoyed the honour of refusing the bishopric of Bristol, as not rich enough to tempt him. Noblesse oblige: that Bentley should hold a brief for the theological side was inevitable, and we need not be surprised when we hear him declaring: "We are sure, from the names of persons and places mentioned in Scripture before the Deluge, not to insist upon other arguments, that the Hebrew was the primitive language of mankind, and that it continued pure above three thousand years until the captivity in Babylon." The power of the theologic bias, when properly stimulated with ecclesiastical preferment, could hardly be more perfectly exemplified than in such a captivity of such a man as Bentley. Yet here two important exceptions should be noted. In England, Prideaux, whose biblical studies gave him much authority, opposed the dominant opinion; and in America, Cotton Mather, who in taking his Master's degree at Harvard had supported the doctrine that the Hebrew vowel points were of divine origin, bravely recanted and declared for the better view.(416) (416) The quotation from Guichard is from L'Harmonie Etymologique des Langues,... dans laquelle par plusiers Antiquites et Etymologies de toute sorte, je demonstre evidemment que toutes les langues sont descendues de l'Hebraique; par M. Estienne Guichard, Paris, 1631. The first edition appeared in 1606. For Willett, see his Hexapla, London, 1608, pp. 125-128. For the Address of L'Empereur, see his publication, Leyden, 1627. The quotation from Lightfoot, beginning "Other commendations," etc., is taken from his Erubhin, or Miscellanies, edition of 1629; see also his works, vol. iv, pp. 46, 47, London, 1822. For Bishop Brian Walton, see the Cambridge edition of his works, 1828, Prolegomena S 1 and 3. As to Walton's giving up the rabbinical points, he mentions in one of the latest editions of his works the fact that Isaac Casabon, Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Vossius, Grotius, Beza, Luther, Zwingli, Brentz, Oecolampadius, Calvin, and even some of the Popes were with him in this. For Sennert, see his Dissertation de Ebraicae S. S. Linguae Origine, etc., Wittenberg, 1657; also his Grammitica Orientalis, Wittenberg, 1666. For Buxtorf, see the preface to his Thesaurus Grammaticus Linguae Sanctae Hebraeae, sixth edition, 1663. For Gale, see his Court of the Gentiles, Oxford, 1672. For Morinus, see his Exercitationes de Lingua Primaeva, Utrecht, 1697. For Thomassin, see his Glossarium Universale Hebraicum, Paris, 1697. For John Eliot's utterance, see Mather's Magnalia, book iii, p. 184. For Meric Casaubon, see his De Lingua Anglia Vet., p. 160, cited by Massey, p. 16 of Origin and Progress of Letters. For Bentley, see his works, London, 1836, vol. ii, p. 11, and citations by Welsford, Mithridates Minor, p. 2. As to Bentley's position as a scholar, see the famous estimate in Macaulay's Essays. For a short but very interesting account of him, see Mark Pattison's article in vol. iii of the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The postion of Pattison as an agnostic dignitary in the English Church eminently fitted him to understand Bentley's career, both as regards the orthodox and the scholastic world. For perhaps the most striking account of the manner in which Bentley lorded it in the scholastic world of his time, see Monk's Life of Bentley, vol. ii, chap. xvii, and especially his contemptuous reply to the judges, as given in vol. ii, pp. 211, 212. For Cotton Mather, see his biography by Samuel Mather, Boston, 1729, pp. 5, 6. But even this dissent produced little immediate effect, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century this sacred doctrine, based upon explicit statements of Scripture, seemed forever settled. As we have seen, strong fortresses had been built for it in every Christian land: nothing seemed more unlikely than that the little groups of scholars scattered through these various countries could ever prevail against them. These strongholds were built so firmly, and had behind them so vast an army of religionists of every creed, that to conquer them seemed impossible. And yet at that very moment their doom was decreed. Within a few years from this period of their greatest triumph, the garrisons of all these sacred fortresses were in hopeless confusion, and the armies behind them in full retreat; a little later, all the important orthodox fortresses and forces were in the hands of the scientific philologists. How this came about will be shown in the third part of this chapter. III. BREAKING DOWN OF THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. We have now seen the steps by which the sacred theory of human language had been developed: how it had been strengthened in every land until it seemed to bid defiance forever to advancing thought; how it rested firmly upon the letter of Scripture, upon the explicit declarations of leading fathers of the Church, of the great doctors of the Middle Ages, of the most eminent theological scholars down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, and was guarded by the decrees of popes, kings, bishops, Catholic and Protestant, and the whole hierarchy of authorities in church and state. And yet, as we now look back, it is easy to see that even in that hour of its triumph it was doomed. The reason why the Church has so fully accepted the conclusions of science which have destroyed the sacred theory is instructive. The study of languages has been, since the Revival of Learning and the Reformation, a favourite study with the whole Western Church, Catholic and Protestant. The importance of understanding the ancient tongues in which our sacred books are preserved first stimulated the study, and Church missionary efforts have contributed nobly to supply the material for extending it, and for the application of that comparative method which, in philology as in other sciences, has been so fruitful. Hence it is that so many leading theologians have come to know at first hand the truths given by this science, and to recognise its fundamental principles. What the conclusions which they, as well as all other scholars in this field, have been absolutely forced to accept, I shall now endeavour to show. The beginnings of a scientific theory seemed weak indeed, but they were none the less effective. As far back as 1661, Hottinger, professor at Heidelberg, came into the chorus of theologians like a great bell in a chime; but like a bell whose opening tone is harmonious and whose closing tone is discordant. For while, at the beginning, Hottinger cites a formidable list of great scholars who had held the sacred theory of the origin of language, he goes on to note a closer resemblance to the Hebrew in some languages than in others, and explains this by declaring that the confusion of tongues was of two sorts, total and partial: the Arabic and Chaldaic he thinks underwent only a partial confusion; the Egyptian, Persian, and all the European languages a total one. Here comes in the discord; here gently sounds forth from the great chorus a new note--that idea of grouping and classifying languages which at a later day was to destroy utterly the whole sacred theory. But the great chorus resounded on, as we have seen, from shore to shore, until the closing years of the seventeenth century; then arose men who silenced it forever. The first leader who threw the weight of his knowledge, thought, and authority against it was Leibnitz. He declared, "There is as much reason for supposing Hebrew to have been the primitive language of mankind as there is for adopting the view of Goropius, who published a work at Antwerp in 1580 to prove that Dutch was the language spoken in paradise." In a letter to Tenzel, Leibnitz wrote, "To call Hebrew the primitive language is like calling the branches of a tree primitive branches, or like imagining that in some country hewn trunks could grow instead of trees." He also asked, "If the primeval language existed even up to the time of Moses, whence came the Egyptian language?" But the efficiency of Leibnitz did not end with mere suggestions. He applied the inductive method to linguistic study, made great efforts to have vocabularies collected and grammars drawn up wherever missionaries and travellers came in contact with new races, and thus succeeded in giving the initial impulse to at least three notable collections--that of Catharine the Great, of Russia; that of the Spanish Jesuit, Lorenzo Hervas; and, at a later period, the Mithridates of Adelung. The interest of the Empress Catharine in her collection of linguistic materials was very strong, and her influence is seen in the fact that Washington, to please her, requested governors and generals to send in materials from various parts of the United States and the Territories. The work of Hervas extended over the period from 1735 to 1809: a missionary in America, he enlarged his catalogue of languages to six volumes, which were published in Spanish in 1800, and contained specimens of more than three hundred languages, with the grammars of more than forty. It should be said to his credit that Hervas dared point out with especial care the limits of the Semitic family of languages, and declared, as a result of his enormous studies, that the various languages of mankind could not have been derived from the Hebrew. While such work was done in Catholic Spain, Protestant Germany was honoured by the work of Adelung. It contained the Lord's Prayer in nearly five hundred languages and dialects, and the comparison of these, early in the nineteenth century, helped to end the sway of theological philology. But the period which intervened between Leibnitz and this modern development was a period of philological chaos. It began mainly with the doubts which Leibnitz had forced upon Europe, and ended only with the beginning of the study of Sanskrit in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and with the comparisons made by means of the collections of Catharine, Hervas, and Adelung at the beginning of the nineteenth. The old theory that Hebrew was the original language had gone to pieces; but nothing had taken its place as a finality. Great authorities, like Buddeus, were still cited in behalf of the narrower belief; but everywhere researches, unorganized though they were, tended to destroy it. The story of Babel continued indeed throughout the whole eighteenth century to hinder or warp scientific investigation, and a very curious illustration of this fact is seen in the book of Lord Nelme on The Origin and Elements of Language. He declares that connected with the confusion was the cleaving of America from Europe, and he regards the most terrible chapters in the book of Job as intended for a description of the Flood, which in all probability Job had from Noah himself. Again, Rowland Jones tried to prove that Celtic was the primitive tongue, and that it passed through Babel unharmed. Still another effect was made by a Breton to prove that all languages took their rise in the language of Brittany. All was chaos. There was much wrangling, but little earnest controversy. Here and there theologians were calling out frantically, beseeching the Church to save the old doctrine as "essential to the truth of Scripture"; here and there other divines began to foreshadow the inevitable compromise which has always been thus vainly attempted in the history of every science. But it was soon seen by thinking men that no concessions as yet spoken of by theologians were sufficient. In the latter half of the century came the bloom period of the French philosophers and encyclopedists, of the English deists, of such German thinkers as Herder, Kant, and Lessing; and while here and there some writer on the theological side, like Perrin, amused thinking men by his flounderings in this great chaos, all remained without form and void.(417) (417) For Hottinger, see the preface to his Etymologicum Orientale, Frankfort, 1661. For Leibnitz, Catharine the Great, Hervas, and Adelung, see Max Muller, as above, from whom I have quoted very fully; see also Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, etc., p. 269. Benfey declares that the Catalogue of Hervas is even now a mine for the philologist. For the first two citations from Leibnitz, as well as for a statement of his importance in the history of languages, see Max Muller, as above, pp. 135, 136. For the third quotation, Leibnitz, Opera, Geneva, 1768, vi, part ii, p. 232. For Nelme, see his Origin and Elements of Language, London, 1772, pp. 85-100. For Rowland Jones, see The Origin of Language and Nations, London, 1764, and preface. For the origin of languages in Brittany, see Le Brigant, Paris, 1787. For Herder and Lessing, see Canon Farrar's treatise; on Lessing, see Sayce, as above. As to Perrin, see his essay Sur l'Origine et l'Antiquite des Langues, London, 1767. Nothing better reveals to us the darkness and duration of this chaos in England than a comparison of the articles on Philology given in the successive editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The first edition of that great mirror of British thought was printed in 1771: chaos reigns through the whole of its article on this subject. The writer divides languages into two classes, seems to indicate a mixture of divine inspiration with human invention, and finally escapes under a cloud. In the second edition, published in 1780, some progress has been made. The author states the sacred theory, and declares: "There are some divines who pretend that Hebrew was the language in which God talked with Adam in paradise, and that the saints will make use of it in heaven in those praises which they will eternally offer to the Almighty. These doctors seem to be as certain in regard to what is past as to what is to come." This was evidently considered dangerous. It clearly outran the belief of the average British Philistine; and accordingly we find in the third edition, published seventeen years later, a new article, in which, while the author gives, as he says, "the best arguments on both sides," he takes pains to adhere to a fairly orthodox theory. This soothing dose was repeated in the fourth and fifth editions. In 1824 appeared a supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions, which dealt with the facts so far as they were known; but there was scarcely a reference to the biblical theory throughout the article. Three years later came another supplement. While this chaos was fast becoming cosmos in Germany, such a change had evidently not gone far in England, for from this edition of the Encyclopaedia the subject of philology was omitted. In fact, Babel and Philology made nearly as much trouble to encyclopedists as Noah's Deluge and Geology. Just as in the latter case they had been obliged to stave off a presentation of scientific truth, by the words "For Deluge, see Flood" and "For Flood, see Noah," so in the former they were obliged to take various provisional measures, some of them comical. In 1842 came the seventh edition. In this the first part of the old article on Philology which had appeared in the third, fourth, and fifth editions was printed, but the supernatural part was mainly cut out. Yet we find a curious evidence of the continued reign of chaos in a foot-note inserted by the publishers, disavowing any departure from orthodox views. In 1859 appeared the eighth edition. This abandoned the old article completely, and in its place gave a history of philology free from admixture of scriptural doctrines. Finally, in the year 1885, appeared the ninth edition, in which Professors Whitney of Yale and Sievers of Tubingen give admirably and in fair compass what is known of philology, making short work of the sacred theory--in fact, throwing it overboard entirely. IV. TRIUMPH OF THE NEW SCIENCE. Such was that chaos of thought into which the discovery of Sanskrit suddenly threw its great light. Well does one of the foremost modern philologists say that this "was the electric spark which caused the floating elements to crystallize into regular forms." Among the first to bring the knowledge of Sanskrit to Europe were the Jesuit missionaries, whose services to the material basis of the science of comparative philology had already been so great; and the importance of the new discovery was soon seen among all scholars, whether orthodox or scientific. In 1784 the Asiatic Society at Calcutta was founded, and with it began Sanskrit philology. Scholars like Sir William Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Foster, Colebrooke, did noble work in the new field. A new spirit brooded over that chaos, and a great new orb of science was evolved. The little group of scholars who gave themselves up to these researches, though almost without exception reverent Christians, were recognised at once by theologians as mortal foes of the whole sacred theory of language. Not only was the dogma of the multiplication of languages at the Tower of Babel swept out of sight by the new discovery, but the still more vital dogma of the divine origin of language, never before endangered, was felt to be in peril, since the evidence became overwhelming that so many varieties had been produced by a process of natural growth. Heroic efforts were therefore made, in the supposed interest of Scripture, to discredit the new learning. Even such a man as Dugald Stewart declared that the discovery of Sanskrit was altogether fraudulent, and endeavoured to prove that the Brahmans had made it up from the vocabulary and grammar of Greek and Latin. Others exercised their ingenuity in picking the new discovery to pieces, and still others attributed it all to the machinations of Satan. On the other hand, the more thoughtful men in the Church endeavoured to save something from the wreck of the old system by a compromise. They attempted to prove that Hebrew is at least a cognate tongue with the original speech of mankind, if not the original speech itself; but here they were confronted by the authority they dreaded most--the great Christian scholar, Sir William Jones himself. His words were: "I can only declare my belief that the language of Noah is irretrievably lost. After diligent search I can not find a single word used in common by the Arabian, Indian, and Tartar families, before the intermixture of dialects occasioned by the Mohammedan conquests." So, too, in Germany came full acknowledgment of the new truth, and from a Roman Catholic, Frederick Schlegel. He accepted the discoveries in the old language and literature of India as final: he saw the significance of these discoveries as regards philology, and grouped the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Germany under the name afterward so universally accepted--Indo-Germanic. It now began to be felt more and more, even among the most devoted churchmen, that the old theological dogmas regarding the origin of language, as held "always, everywhere, and by all," were wrong, and that Lucretius and sturdy old Gregory of Nyssa might be right. But this was not the only wreck. During ages the great men in the Church had been calling upon the world to admire the amazing exploit of Adam in naming the animals which Jehovah had brought before him, and to accept the history of language in the light of this exploit. The early fathers, the mediaeval doctors, the great divines of the Reformation period, Catholic and Protestant, had united in this universal chorus. Clement of Alexandria declared Adam's naming of the animals proof of a prophetic gift. St. John Chrysostom insisted that it was an evidence of consummate intelligence. Eusebius held that the phrase "That was the name thereof" implied that each name embodied the real character and description of the animal concerned. This view was echoed by a multitude of divines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Typical among these was the great Dr. South, who, in his sermon on The State of Man before the Fall, declared that "Adam came into the world a philosopher, which sufficiently appears by his writing the nature of things upon their names." In the chorus of modern English divines there appeared one of eminence who declared against this theory: Dr. Shuckford, chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty George II, in the preface to his work on The Creation and Fall of Man, pronounced the whole theory "romantic and irrational." He goes on to say: "The original of our speaking was from God; not that God put into Adam's mouth the very sounds which he designed he should use as the names of things; but God made Adam with the powers of a man; he had the use of an understanding to form notions in his mind of the things about him, and he had the power to utter sounds which should be to himself the names of things according as he might think fit to call them." This echo of Gregory of Nyssa was for many years of little avail. Historians of philosophy still began with Adam, because only a philosopher could have named all created things. There was, indeed, one difficulty which had much troubled some theologians: this was, that fishes were not specially mentioned among the animals brought by Jehovah before Adam for naming. To meet this difficulty there was much argument, and some theologians laid stress on the difficulty of bringing fishes from the sea to the Garden of Eden to receive their names; but naturally other theologians replied that the almighty power which created the fishes could have easily brought them into the garden, one by one, even from the uttermost parts of the sea. This point, therefore, seems to have been left in abeyance.(418) (418) For the danger of "the little system of the history of the world," see Sayce, as above. On Dugald Stewart's contention, see Max Muller, Lectures on Language, pp. 167, 168. For Sir William Jones, see his Works, London, 1807, vol. i, p. 199. For Schlegel, see Max Muller, as above. For an enormous list of great theologians, from the fathers down, who dwelt on the divine inspiration and wonderful gifts of Adam on this subject, see Canon Farrar, Language and Languages. The citation from Clement of Alexandria is Strom.. i, p. 335. See also Chrysostom, Hom. XIV in Genesin; also Eusebius, Praep. Evang. XI, p. 6. For the two quotations given above from Shuckford, see The Creation and Fall of Man, London, 1763, preface, p. lxxxiii; also his Sacred and Profane History of the World, 1753; revised edition by Wheeler, London, 1858. For the argument regarding the difficulty of bringing the fishes to be named into the Garden of Eden, see Massey, Origin and Progress of Letters, London, 1763, pp. 14-19. It had continued, then, the universal belief in the Church that the names of all created things, except possibly fishes, were given by Adam and in Hebrew; but all this theory was whelmed in ruin when it was found that there were other and indeed earlier names for the same animals than those in the Hebrew language; and especially was this enforced on thinking men when the Egyptian discoveries began to reveal the pictures of animals with their names in hieroglyphics at a period earlier than that agreed on by all the sacred chronologists as the date of the Creation. Still another part of the sacred theory now received its death-blow. Closely allied with the question of the origin of language was that of the origin of letters. The earlier writers had held that letters were also a divine gift to Adam; but as we go on in the eighteenth century we find theological opinion inclining to the belief that this gift was reserved for Moses. This, as we have seen, was the view of St. John Chrysostom; and an eminent English divine early in the eighteenth century, John Johnson, Vicar of Kent, echoed it in the declaration concerning the alphabet, that "Moses first learned it from God by means of the lettering on the tables of the law." But here a difficulty arose--the biblical statement that God commanded Moses to "write in a book" his decree concerning Amalek before he went up into Sinai. With this the good vicar grapples manfully. He supposes that God had previously concealed the tables of stone in Mount Horeb, and that Moses, "when he kept Jethro's sheep thereabout, had free access to these tables, and perused them at discretion, though he was not permitted to carry them down with him." Our reconciler then asks for what other reason could God have kept Moses up in the mountain forty days at a time, except to teach him to write; and says, "It seems highly probable that the angel gave him the alphabet of the Hebrew, or in some other way unknown to us became his guide." But this theory of letters was soon to be doomed like the other parts of the sacred theory. Studies in Comparative Philology, based upon researches in India, began to be reenforced by facts regarding the inscriptions in Egypt, the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria, the legends of Chaldea, and the folklore of China--where it was found in the sacred books that the animals were named by Fohi, and with such wisdom and insight that every name disclosed the nature of the corresponding animal. But, although the old theory was doomed, heroic efforts were still made to support it. In 1788 James Beattie, in all the glory of his Oxford doctorate and royal pension, made a vigorous onslaught, declaring the new system of philology to be "degrading to our nature," and that the theory of the natural development of language is simply due to the beauty of Lucretius' poetry. But his main weapon was ridicule, and in this he showed himself a master. He tells the world, "The following paraphrase has nothing of the elegance of Horace or Lucretius, but seems to have all the elegance that so ridiculous a doctrine deserves": "When men out of the earth of old A dumb and beastly vermin crawled; For acorns, first, and holes of shelter, They tooth and nail, and helter skelter, Fought fist to fist; then with a club Each learned his brother brute to drub; Till, more experienced grown, these cattle Forged fit accoutrements for battle. At last (Lucretius says and Creech) They set their wits to work on SPEECH: And that their thoughts might all have marks To make them known, these learned clerks Left off the trade of cracking crowns, And manufactured verbs and nouns." But a far more powerful theologian entered the field in England to save the sacred theory of language--Dr. Adam Clarke. He was no less severe against Philology than against Geology. In 1804, as President of the Manchester Philological Society, he delivered an address in which he declared that, while men of all sects were eligible to membership, "he who rejects the establishment of what we believe to be a divine revelation, he who would disturb the peace of the quiet, and by doubtful disputations unhinge the minds of the simple and unreflecting, and endeavour to turn the unwary out of the way of peace and rational subordination, can have no seat among the members of this institution." The first sentence in this declaration gives food for reflection, for it is the same confusion of two ideas which has been at the root of so much interference of theology with science for the last two thousand years. Adam Clarke speaks of those "who reject the establishment of what, WE BELIEVE, to be a divine revelation." Thus comes in that customary begging of the question--the substitution, as the real significance of Scripture, of "WHAT WE BELIEVE" for what IS. The intended result, too, of this ecclesiastical sentence was simple enough. It was, that great men like Sir William Jones, Colebrooke, and their compeers, must not be heard in the Manchester Philological Society in discussion with Dr. Adam Clarke on questions regarding Sanskrit and other matters regarding which they knew all that was then known, and Dr. Clarke knew nothing. But even Clarke was forced to yield to the scientific current. Thirty years later, in his Commentary on the Old Testament, he pitched the claims of the sacred theory on a much lower key. He says: "Mankind was of one language, in all likelihood the Hebrew.... The proper names and other significations given in the Scripture seem incontestable evidence that the Hebrew language was the original language of the earth,--the language in which God spoke to man, and in which he gave the revelation of his will to Moses and the prophets." Here are signs that this great champion is growing weaker in the faith: in the citations made it will be observed he no longer says "IS," but "SEEMS"; and finally we have him saying, "What the first language was is almost useless to inquire, as it is impossible to arrive at any satisfactory information on this point." In France, during the first half of the nineteenth century, yet more heavy artillery was wheeled into place, in order to make a last desperate defence of the sacred theory. The leaders in this effort were the three great Ultramontanes, De Maistre, De Bonald, and Lamennais. Condillac's contention that "languages were gradually and insensibly acquired, and that every man had his share of the general result," they attacked with reasoning based upon premises drawn from the book of Genesis. De Maistre especially excelled in ridiculing the philosophic or scientific theory. Lamennais, who afterward became so vexatious a thorn in the side of the Church, insisted, at this earlier period, that "man can no more think without words than see without light." And then, by that sort of mystical play upon words so well known in the higher ranges of theologic reasoning, he clinches his argument by saying, "The Word is truly and in every sense 'the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.'" But even such champions as these could not stay the progress of thought. While they seemed to be carrying everything before them in France, researches in philology made at such centres of thought as the Sorbonne and the College of France were undermining their last great fortress. Curious indeed is it to find that the Sorbonne, the stronghold of theology through so many centuries, was now made in the nineteenth century the arsenal and stronghold of the new ideas. But the most striking result of the new tendency in France was seen when the greatest of the three champions, Lamennais himself, though offered the highest Church preferment, and even a cardinal's hat, braved the papal anathema, and went over to the scientific side.(419) (419) For Johnson's work, showing how Moses learned the alphabet, see the Collection of Discourses by Rev. John Johnson, A. M., Vicar of Kent, London, 1728, p. 42, and the preface. For Beattie, see his Theory of Language, London, 1788, p. 98; also pp. 100, 101. For Adam Clarke, see, for the speech cited, his Miscellaneous Works, London, 1837; for the passage from his Commentary, see the London edition of 1836, vol. i, p. 93; for the other passage, see Introduction to Bibliographical Miscellany, quoted in article, Origin of Language and Alphabetical Characters, in Methodist Magazine, vol. xv, p. 214. For De Bonald, see his Recherches Philosophiques, part iii, chap. ii, De l'Origine du Language, in his Oeuvres, Bruxelles, 1852, vol. i, Les Soirees de Saint Petersbourg, deuxieme entretien, passim. For Lamennais, see his Oeuvres Completes, Paris, 1836-'37, tome ii, pp.78-81, chap. xv of Essai sur l'Indifference en Matiere de Religion. In Germany philological science took so strong a hold that its positions were soon recognised as impregnable. Leaders like the Schlegels, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and above all Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm, gave such additional force to scientific truth that it could no longer be withstood. To say nothing of other conquests, the demonstration of that great law in philology which bears Grimm's name brought home to all thinking men the evidence that the evolution of language had not been determined by the philosophic utterances of Adam in naming the animals which Jehovah brought before him, but in obedience to natural law. True, a few devoted theologians showed themselves willing to lead a forlorn hope; and perhaps the most forlorn of all was that of 1840, led by Dr. Gottlieb Christian Kayser, Professor of Theology at the Protestant University of Erlangen. He does not, indeed, dare put in the old claim that Hebrew is identical with the primitive tongue, but he insists that it is nearer it than any other. He relinquishes the two former theological strongholds--first, the idea that language was taught by the Almighty to Adam, and, next, that the alphabet was thus taught to Moses--and falls back on the position that all tongues are thus derived from Noah, giving as an example the language of the Caribbees, and insisting that it was evidently so derived. What chance similarity in words between Hebrew and the Caribbee tongue he had in mind is past finding out. He comes out strongly in defence of the biblical account of the Tower of Babel, and insists that "by the symbolical expression 'God said, Let us go down,' a further natural phenomenon is intimated, to wit, the cleaving of the earth, whereby the return of the dispersed became impossible--that is to say, through a new or not universal flood, a partial inundation and temporary violent separation of great continents until the time of the rediscovery" By these words the learned doctor means nothing less than the separation of Europe from America. While at the middle of the nineteenth century the theory of the origin and development of language was upon the continent considered as settled, and a well-ordered science had there emerged from the old chaos, Great Britain still held back, in spite of the fact that the most important contributors to the science were of British origin. Leaders in every English church and sect vied with each other, either in denouncing the encroachments of the science of language or in explaining them away. But a new epoch had come, and in a way least expected. Perhaps the most notable effort in bringing it in was made by Dr. Wiseman, afterward Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. His is one of the best examples of a method which has been used with considerable effect during the latest stages of nearly all the controversies between theology and science. It consists in stating, with much fairness, the conclusions of the scientific authorities, and then in persuading one's self and trying to persuade others that the Church has always accepted them and accepts them now as "additional proofs of the truth of Scripture." A little juggling with words, a little amalgamation of texts, a little judicious suppression, a little imaginative deduction, a little unctuous phrasing, and the thing is done. One great service this eminent and kindly Catholic champion undoubtedly rendered: by this acknowledgment, so widely spread in his published lectures, he made it impossible for Catholics or Protestants longer to resist the main conclusions of science. Henceforward we only have efforts to save theological appearances, and these only by men whose zeal outran their discretion. On both sides of the Atlantic, down to a recent period, we see these efforts, but we see no less clearly that they are mutually destructive. Yet out of this chaos among English-speaking peoples the new science began to develop steadily and rapidly. Attempts did indeed continue here and there to save the old theory. Even as late as 1859 we hear the eminent Presbyterian divine, Dr. John Cumming, from his pulpit in London, speaking of Hebrew as "that magnificent tongue--that mother-tongue, from which all others are but distant and debilitated progenies." But the honour of producing in the nineteenth century the most absurd known attempt to prove Hebrew the primitive tongue belongs to the youngest of the continents, Australia. In the year 1857 was printed at Melbourne The Triumph of Truth, or a Popular Lecture on the Origin of Languages, by B. Atkinson, M.R.C.P.L.--whatever that may mean. In this work, starting with the assertion that "the Hebrew was the primary stock whence all languages were derived," the author states that Sanskrit is "a dialect of the Hebrew," and declares that "the manuscripts found with mummies agree precisely with the Chinese version of the Psalms of David." It all sounds like Alice in Wonderland. Curiously enough, in the latter part of his book, evidently thinking that his views would not give him authority among fastidious philologists, he says, "A great deal of our consent to the foregoing statements arises in our belief in the Divine inspiration of the Mosaic account of the creation of the world and of our first parents in the Garden of Eden." A yet more interesting light is thrown upon the author's view of truth, and of its promulgation, by his dedication: he says that, "being persuaded that literary men ought to be fostered by the hand of power," he dedicates his treatise "to his Excellency Sir H. Barkly," who was at the time Governor of Victoria. Still another curious survival is seen in a work which appeared as late as 1885, at Edinburgh, by William Galloway, M.A., Ph.D., M.D. The author thinks that he has produced abundant evidence to prove that "Jehovah, the Second Person of the Godhead, wrote the first chapter of Genesis on a stone pillar, and that this is the manner by which he first revealed it to Adam; and thus Adam was taught not only to speak but to read and write by Jehovah, the Divine Son; and that the first lesson he got was from the first chapter of Genesis." He goes on to say: "Jehovah wrote these first two documents; the first containing the history of the Creation, and the second the revelation of man's redemption,... for Adam's and Eve's instruction; it is evident that he wrote them in the Hebrew tongue, because that was the language of Adam and Eve." But this was only a flower out of season. And, finally, in these latter days Mr. Gladstone has touched the subject. With that well-known facility in believing anything he wishes to believe, which he once showed in connecting Neptune's trident with the doctrine of the Trinity, he floats airily over all the impossibilities of the original Babel legend and all the conquests of science, makes an assertion regarding the results of philology which no philologist of any standing would admit, and then escapes in a cloud of rhetoric after his well-known fashion. This, too, must be set down simply as a survival, for in the British Isles as elsewhere the truth has been established. Such men as Max Muller and Sayce in England,--Steinthal, Schleicher, Weber, Karl Abel, and a host of others in Germany,--Ascoli and De Gubernatis in Italy,--and Whitney, with the scholars inspired by him, in America, have carried the new science to a complete triumph. The sons of Yale University may well be proud of the fact that this old Puritan foundation was made the headquarters of the American Oriental Society, which has done so much for the truth in this field.(420) (420) For Mr. Gladstone's view, see his Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, London, 1890, pp. 241 et seq. The passage connecting the trident of Neptune with the Trinity is in his Juventus Mundi. To any American boy who sees how inevitably, both among Indian and white fishermen, the fish spear takes the three-pronged form, this utterance of Mr. Gladstone is amazing. V. SUMMARY. It may be instructive, in conclusion, to sum up briefly the history of the whole struggle. First, as to the origin of speech, we have in the beginning the whole Church rallying around the idea that the original language was Hebrew; that this language, even including the medieval rabbinical punctuation, was directly inspired by the Almighty; that Adam was taught it by God himself in walks and talks; and that all other languages were derived from it at the "confusion of Babel." Next, we see parts of this theory fading out: the inspiration of the rabbinical points begins to disappear. Adam, instead of being taught directly by God, is "inspired" by him. Then comes the third stage: advanced theologians endeavour to compromise on the idea that Adam was "given verbal roots and a mental power." Finally, in our time, we have them accepting the theory that language is the result of an evolutionary process in obedience to laws more or less clearly ascertained. Babel thus takes its place quietly among the sacred myths. As to the origin of writing, we have the more eminent theologians at first insisting that God taught Adam to write; next we find them gradually retreating from this position, but insisting that writing was taught to the world by Noah. After the retreat from this position, we find them insisting that it was Moses whom God taught to write. But scientific modes of thought still progressed, and we next have influential theologians agreeing that writing was a Mosaic invention; this is followed by another theological retreat to the position that writing was a post-Mosaic invention. Finally, all the positions are relinquished, save by some few skirmishers who appear now and then upon the horizon, making attempts to defend some subtle method of "reconciling" the Babel myth with modern science. Just after the middle of the nineteenth century the last stage of theological defence was evidently reached--the same which is seen in the history of almost every science after it has successfully fought its way through the theological period--the declaration which we have already seen foreshadowed by Wiseman, that the scientific discoveries in question are nothing new, but have really always been known and held by the Church, and that they simply substantiate the position taken by the Church. This new contention, which always betokens the last gasp of theological resistance to science, was now echoed from land to land. In 1856 it was given forth by a divine of the Anglican Church, Archdeacon Pratt, of Calcutta. He gives a long list of eminent philologists who had done most to destroy the old supernatural view of language, reads into their utterances his own wishes, and then exclaims, "So singularly do their labours confirm the literal truth of Scripture." Two years later this contention was echoed from the American Presbyterian Church, and Dr. B. W. Dwight, having stigmatized as "infidels" those who had not incorporated into their science the literal acceptance of Hebrew legend, declared that "chronology, ethnography, and etymology have all been tortured in vain to make them contradict the Mosaic account of the early history of man." Twelve years later this was re-echoed from England. The Rev. Dr. Baylee, Principal of the College of St. Aidan's, declared, "With regard to the varieties of human language, the account of the confusion of tongues is receiving daily confirmation by all the recent discoveries in comparative philology." So, too, in the same year (1870), in the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, Dr. John Eadie, Professor of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, declared, "Comparative philology has established the miracle of Babel." A skill in theology and casuistry so exquisite as to contrive such assertions, and a faith so robust as to accept them, certainly leave nothing to be desired. But how baseless these contentions are is shown, first, by the simple history of the attitude of the Church toward this question; and, secondly, by the fact that comparative philology now reveals beyond a doubt that not only is Hebrew not the original or oldest language upon earth, but that it is not even the oldest form in the Semitic group to which it belongs. To use the words of one of the most eminent modern authorities, "It is now generally recognised that in grammatical structure the Arabic preserves much more of the original forms than either the Hebrew or Aramaic." History, ethnology, and philology now combine inexorably to place the account of the confusion of tongues and the dispersion of races at Babel among the myths; but their work has not been merely destructive: more and more strong are the grounds for belief in an evolution of language. A very complete acceptance of the scientific doctrines has been made by Archdeacon Farrar, Canon of Westminster. With a boldness which in an earlier period might have cost him dear, and which merits praise even now for its courage, he says: "For all reasoners except that portion of the clergy who in all ages have been found among the bitterest enemies of scientific discovery, these considerations have been conclusive. But, strange to say, here, as in so many other instances, this self-styled orthodoxy--more orthodox than the Bible itself--directly contradicts the very Scriptures which it professes to explain, and by sheer misrepresentation succeeds in producing a needless and deplorable collision between the statements of Scripture and those other mighty and certain truths which have been revealed to science and humanity as their glory and reward." Still another acknowledgment was made in America through the instrumentality of a divine of the Methodist Episcopal Church, whom the present generation at least will hold in honour not only for his scholarship but for his patriotism in the darkest hour of his country's need--John McClintock. In the article on Language, in the Biblical Cyclopaedia, edited by him and the Rev. Dr. Strong, which appeared in 1873, the whole sacred theory is given up, and the scientific view accepted.(421) (421) For Kayser, see his work, Ueber die Ursprache, oder uber eine Behauptung Mosis, dass alle Sprachen der Welt von einer einzigen der Noahhischen abstammen, Erlangen, 1840; see especially pp. 5, 80, 95, 112. For Wiseman, see his Lectures on the Connection between Science and Revealed Religion, London, 1836. For examples typical of very many in this field, see the works of Pratt, 1856; Dwight, 1858; Jamieson, 1868. For citation from Cumming, see his Great Tribulation, London, 1859, p. 4; see also his Things Hard to be Understood, London, 1861, p. 48. For an admirable summary of the work of the great modern philologists, and a most careful estimate of the conclusions reached, see Prof. Whitney's article on Philology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A copy of Mr. Atkinson's book is in the Harvard College Library, it having been presented by the Trustees of the Public Library of Victoria. For Galloway, see his Philosophy of the Creation, Edinburgh and London, 1885, pp. 21, 238, 239, 446. For citation from Baylee, see his Verbal Inspiration the True Characteristic of God's Holy Word, London, 1870, p. 14 and elsewhere. For Archdeacon Pratt, see his Scripture and Science not at Variance, London, 1856, p. 55. For the citation from Dr. Eadie, see his Biblical Cyclopaedia, London, 1870, p. 53. For Dr. Dwight, see The New-Englander, vol. xvi, p. 465. For the theological article referred to as giving up the sacred theory, see the Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, prepared by Rev. John McClintock, D. D., and James Strong, New York, 1873, vol. v, p. 233. For Arabic as an earlier Semitic development than Hebrew, as well as for much other valuable information on the questions recently raised, see article Hebrew, by W. R. Smith, in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For quotation from Canon Farrar, see his language and Languages, London, 1878, pp. 6,7. It may, indeed, be now fairly said that the thinking leaders of theology have come to accept the conclusions of science regarding the origin of language, as against the old explanations by myth and legend. The result has been a blessing both to science and to religion. No harm has been done to religion; what has been done is to release it from the clog of theories which thinking men saw could no longer be maintained. No matter what has become of the naming of the animals by Adam, of the origin of the name Babel, of the fear of the Almighty lest men might climb up into his realm above the firmament, and of the confusion of tongues and the dispersion of nations; the essentials of Christianity, as taught by its blessed Founder, have simply been freed, by Comparative Philology, from one more great incubus, and have therefore been left to work with more power upon the hearts and minds of mankind. Nor has any harm been done to the Bible. On the contrary, this divine revelation through science has made it all the more precious to us. In these myths and legends caught from earlier civilizations we see an evolution of the most important religious and moral truths for our race. Myth, legend, and parable seem, in obedience to a divine law, the necessary setting for these truths, as they are successively evolved, ever in higher and higher forms. What matters it, then, that we have come to know that the accounts of Creation, the Fall, the Deluge, and much else in our sacred books, were remembrances of lore obtained from the Chaldeans? What matters it that the beautiful story of Joseph is found to be in part derived from an Egyptian romance, of which the hieroglyphs may still be seen? What matters it that the story of David and Goliath is poetry; and that Samson, like so many men of strength in other religions, is probably a sun-myth? What matters it that the inculcation of high duty in the childhood of the world is embodied in such quaint stories as those of Jonah and Balaam? The more we realize these facts, the richer becomes that great body of literature brought together within the covers of the Bible. What matters it that those who incorporated the Creation lore of Babylonia and other Oriental nations into the sacred books of the Hebrews, mixed it with their own conceptions and deductions? What matters it that Darwin changed the whole aspect of our Creation myths; that Lyell and his compeers placed the Hebrew story of Creation and of the Deluge of Noah among legends; that Copernicus put an end to the standing still of the sun for Joshua; that Halley, in promulgating his law of comets, put an end to the doctrine of "signs and wonders"; that Pinel, in showing that all insanity is physical disease, relegated to the realm of mythology the witch of Endor and all stories of demoniacal possession; that the Rev. Dr. Schaff, and a multitude of recent Christian travellers in Palestine, have put into the realm of legend the story of Lot's wife transformed into a pillar of salt; that the anthropologists, by showing how man has risen everywhere from low and brutal beginnings, have destroyed the whole theological theory of "the fall of man"? Our great body of sacred literature is thereby only made more and more valuable to us: more and more we see how long and patiently the forces in the universe which make for righteousness have been acting in and upon mankind through the only agencies fitted for such work in the earliest ages of the world--through myth, legend, parable, and poem. CHAPTER XVIII. FROM THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS TO COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY, I. THE GROWTH OF EXPLANATORY TRANSFORMATION MYTHS. A few years since, Maxime Du Camp, an eminent member of the French Academy, travelling from the Red Sea to the Nile through the Desert of Kosseir, came to a barren slope covered with boulders, rounded and glossy. His Mohammedan camel-driver accounted for them on this wise: "Many years ago Hadji Abdul-Aziz, a sheik of the dervishes, was travelling on foot through this desert: it was summer: the sun was hot and the dust stifling; thirst parched his lips, fatigue weighed down his back, sweat dropped from his forehead, when looking up he saw--on this very spot--a garden beautifully green, full of fruit, and, in the midst of it, the gardener. "'O fellow-man,' cried Hadji Abdul-Aziz, 'in the name of Allah, clement and merciful, give me a melon and I will give you my prayers.'" The gardener answered: 'I care not for your prayers; give me money, and I will give you fruit.' "'But,' said the dervish, 'I am a beggar; I have never had money; I am thirsty and weary, and one of your melons is all that I need.' "'No,' said the gardener; 'go to the Nile and quench your thirst.' "Thereupon the dervish, lifting his eyes toward heaven, made this prayer: 'O Allah, thou who in the midst of the desert didst make the fountain of Zem-Zem spring forth to satisfy the thirst of Ismail, father of the faithful: wilt thou suffer one of thy creatures to perish thus of thirst and fatigue? ' "And it came to pass that, hardly had the dervish spoken, when an abundant dew descended upon him, quenching his thirst and refreshing him even to the marrow of his bones. "Now at the sight of this miracle the gardener knew that the dervish was a holy man, beloved of Allah, and straightway offered him a melon. "'Not so,' answered Hadji Abdul-Aziz; 'keep what thou hast, thou wicked man. May thy melons become as hard as thy heart, and thy field as barren as thy soul!' "And straightway it came to pass that the melons were changed into these blocks of stone, and the grass into this sand, and never since has anything grown thereon." In this story, and in myriads like it, we have a survival of that early conception of the universe in which so many of the leading moral and religious truths of the great sacred books of the world are imbedded. All ancient sacred lore abounds in such mythical explanations of remarkable appearances in nature, and these are most frequently prompted by mountains, rocks, and boulders seemingly misplaced. In India we have such typical examples among the Brahmans as the mountain-peak which Durgu threw at Parvati; and among the Buddhists the stone which Devadatti hurled at Buddha. In Greece the Athenian, rejoicing in his belief that Athena guarded her chosen people, found it hard to understand why the great rock Lycabettus should be just too far from the Acropolis to be of use as an outwork; but a myth was developed which explained all. According to this, Athena had intended to make Lycabettus a defence for the Athenians, and she was bringing it through the air from Pallene for that very purpose; but, unfortunately, a raven met her and informed her of the wonderful birth of Erichthonius, which so surprised the goddess that she dropped the rock where it now stands. So, too, a peculiar rock at Aegina was accounted for by a long and circumstantial legend to the effect that Peleus threw it at Phocas. A similar mode of explaining such objects is seen in the mythologies of northern Europe. In Scandinavia we constantly find rocks which tradition accounts for by declaring that they were hurled by the old gods at each other, or at the early Christian churches. In Teutonic lands, as a rule, wherever a strange rock or stone is found, there will be found a myth or a legend, heathen or Christian, to account for it. So, too, in Celtic countries: typical of this mode of thought in Brittany and in Ireland is the popular belief that such features in the landscape were dropped by the devil or by fairies. Even at a much later period such myths have grown and bloomed. Marco Polo gives a long and circumstantial legend of a mountain in Asia Minor which, not long before his visit, was removed by a Christian who, having "faith as a grain of mustard seed," and remembering the Saviour's promise, transferred the mountain to its present place by prayer, "at which marvel many Saracens became Christians."(422) (422) For Maxime Du Camp, see Le Nil: Egypte et Nubie, Paris, 1877, chapter v. For India, see Duncker, Geschichte des Alterthums, vol. iii, p. 366; also Coleman, Mythology of the Hindus, p. 90. For Greece, as to the Lycabettus myth, see Leake, Topography of Athens, vol. i, sec. 3; also Burnouf, La Legende Athenienne, p. 152. For the rock at Aegina, see Charton, vol. i, p. 310. For Scandanavia, see Thorpe, Northern Antiquities, passim. For Teutonic countries, see Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie; Panzer, Beitrag zur deutschen Mythologie, vol. ii; Zingerle, Sagen aus Tyrol, pp. 111 et seq., 488, 504, 543; and especially J. B. Friedrich, Symbolik und Mythologie der Natur, pp. 116 et seq. For Celtic examples I am indebted to that learned and genial scholar, Prof. J. P. Mahaffy, of Trinity College, Dublin. See also story of the devil dropping a rock when forced by the archangel Michael to aid him in building Mont Saint-Michel on the west coast of France, in Sebillot's Traditions de la Haute Bretagne, vol. i, p. 22; also multitudes of other examples in the same work. For Marco Polo, see in Grynaeus, p. 337; also Charton, Voyageurs anciens et modernes, tome ii, pp. 274 et seq., where the legend is given in full. Similar mythical explanations are also found, in all the older religions of the world, for curiously marked meteoric stones, fossils, and the like. Typical examples are found in the imprint of Buddha's feet on stones in Siam and Ceylon; in the imprint of the body of Moses, which down to the middle of the last century was shown near Mount Sinai; in the imprint of Poseidon's trident on the Acropolis at Athens; in the imprint of the hands or feet of Christ on stones in France, Italy, and Palestine; in the imprint of the Virgin's tears on stones at Jerusalem; in the imprint of the feet of Abraham at Jerusalem and of Mohammed on a stone in the Mosque of Khait Bey at Cairo; in the imprint of the fingers of giants on stones in the Scandinavian Peninsula, in north Germany, and in western France; in the imprint of the devil's thighs on a rock in Brittany, and of his claws on stones which he threw at churches in Cologne and Saint-Pol-de-Leon; in the imprint of the shoulder of the devil's grand mother on the "elbow-stone" at the Mohriner see; in the imprint of St. Otho's feet on a stone formerly preserved in the castle church at Stettin; in the imprint of the little finger of Christ and the head of Satan at Ehrenberg; and in the imprint of the feet of St. Agatha at Catania, in Sicily. To account for these appearances and myriads of others, long and interesting legends were developed, and out of this mass we may take one or two as typical. One of the most beautiful was evolved at Rome. On the border of the medieval city stands the church of "Domine quo vadis"; it was erected in honour of a stone, which is still preserved, bearing a mark resembling a human footprint--perhaps the bed of a fossil. Out of this a pious legend grew as naturally as a wild rose in a prairie. According to this story, in one of the first great persecutions the heart of St. Peter failed him, and he attempted to flee from the city: arriving outside the walls he was suddenly confronted by the Master, whereupon Peter in amazement asked, "Lord, whither goest thou?" (Domine quo vadis?); to which the Master answered, "To Rome, to be crucified again." The apostle, thus rebuked, returned to martyrdom; the Master vanished, but left, as a perpetual memorial, his footprint in the solid rock. Another legend accounts for a curious mark in a stone at Jerusalem. According to this, St. Thomas, after the ascension of the Lord, was again troubled with doubts, whereupon the Virgin Mother threw down her girdle, which left its imprint upon the rock, and thus converted the doubter fully and finally. And still another example is seen at the very opposite extreme of Europe, in the legend of the priestess of Hertha in the island of Rugen. She had been unfaithful to her vows, and the gods furnished a proof of her guilt by causing her and her child to sink into the rock on which she stood.(423) (423) For myths and legend crystallizing about boulders and other stones curiously shaped or marked, see, on the general subject, in addition to works already cited, Des Brosses, Les Dieux Fetiches, 1760, passim, but especially pages 166, 167; and for a condensed statement as to worship paid them, see Gerard de Rialle, Mythologie comparee, vol. vi, chapter ii. For imprints of Buddha's feet, see Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind, London, 1878, pp. 115 et seq.; also Coleman, p. 203, and Charton, Voyageurs anciens et modernes, tome i, pp. 365, 366, where engravings of one of the imprints, and of the temple above another, are seen. There are five which are considered authentic by the Siamese, and a multitude of others more or less strongly insisted upon. For the imprint os Moses' body, see travellers from Sir John Mandeville down. For the mark of Neptune's trident, see last edition of Murray's Handbook of Greece, vol. i, p. 322; and Burnouf, La Legende Athenienne, p. 153. For imprint of the feet of Christ, and of the Virgin's girdle and tears, see many of the older travellers in Palestine, as Arculf, Bouchard, Roger, and especially Bertrandon de la Brocquiere in Wright's collection, pp. 339, 340; also Maundrell's Travels, and Mandeville. For the curious legend regarding the imprint of Abraham's foot, see Weil, Biblische Legenden der Muselmanner, pp. 91 et seq. For many additional examples in Palestine, particularly the imprints of the bodies of three apostles on stones in the Garden of Gethsemane and of St. Jerome's body in the desert, see Beauvau, Relation du Voyage du Lavant, Nancy, 1615, passim. For the various imprints made by Satan and giants in Scandanavia and Germany, see Thorpe, vol. ii, p. 85; Friedrichs, pp. 126 and passim. For a very rich collection of such explanatory legends regarding stones and marks in Germany, see Karl Bartsch, Sagen, Marchen und Gebrauche aus Meklenburg, Wien, 1880, vol. ii, pp. 420 et seq. For a woodcut representing the imprint of Christ's feet on the stone from which he ascended to heaven, see woodcut in Mandeville, edition of 1484, in the White Library, Cornell University. For the legend of Domine quo vadis, see many books of travel and nearly all guide books for Rome, from the mediaeval Mirabilia Romae to the latest edition of Murray. The footprints of Mohammed at Cairo were shown to the present writer in 1889. On the general subject, with many striking examples, see Falsan, La Periode glaciaire, Paris, 1889, pp. 17, 294, 295. Another and very fruitful source of explanatory myths is found in ancient centres of volcanic action, and especially in old craters of volcanoes and fissures filled with water. In China we have, among other examples, Lake Man, which was once the site of the flourishing city Chiang Shui--overwhelmed and sunk on account of the heedlessness of its inhabitants regarding a divine warning. In Phrygia, the lake and morass near Tyana were ascribed to the wrath of Zeus and Hermes, who, having visited the cities which formerly stood there, and having been refused shelter by all the inhabitants save Philemon and Baucis, rewarded their benefactors, but sunk the wicked cities beneath the lake and morass. Stories of similar import grew up to explain the crater near Sipylos in Asia Minor and that of Avernus in Italy: the latter came to be considered the mouth of the infernal regions, as every schoolboy knows when he has read his Virgil. In the later Christian mythologies we have such typical legends as those which grew up about the old crater in Ceylon; the salt water in it being accounted for by supposing it the tears of Adam and Eve, who retreated to this point after their expulsion from paradise and bewailed their sin during a hundred years. So, too, in Germany we have multitudes of lakes supposed to owe their origin to the sinking of valleys as a punishment for human sin. Of these are the "Devil's Lake," near Gustrow, which rose and covered a church and its priests on account of their corruption; the lake at Probst-Jesar, which rose and covered an oak grove and a number of peasants resting in it on account of their want of charity to beggars; and the Lucin Lake, which rose and covered a number of soldiers on account of their cruelty to a poor peasant. Such legends are found throughout America and in Japan, and will doubtless be found throughout Asia and Africa, and especially among the volcanic lakes of South America, the pitch lakes of the Caribbean Islands, and even about the Salt Lake of Utah; for explanatory myths and legends under such circumstances are inevitable.(424) (424) As to myths explaining volcanic craters and lakes, and embodying ideas of the wrath of Heaven against former inhabitants of the neighboring country, see Forbiger, Alte Geographie, Hamburg, 1877, vol. i, p. 563. For exaggerations concerning the Dead Sea, see ibid., vol. i, p. 575. For the sinking of Chiang Shui and other examples, see Denny's Folklore of China, pp. 126 et seq. For the sinking of the Phrygian region, the destruction of its inhabitants, and the saving of Philemon and Baucis, see Ovid's Metamorphoses, book viii; also Botticher, Baumcultus der Alten, etc. For the lake in Ceylon arising from the tears of Adam and Eve, see variants of the original legend in Mandeville and in Jurgen Andersen, Reisebeschreibung, 1669, vol. ii, p. 132. For the volcanic nature of the Dead Sea, see Daubeny, cited in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, s.v. Palestine. For lakes in Germany owing their origin to human sin and various supernatural causes, see Karl Bartsch, Sagen, Marche und Gebrauche aus Meklenburg, vol. i, pp. 397 et seq. For lakes in America, see any good collection of Indian legends. For lakes in Japan sunk supernaturally, see Braun's Japanesische Marche und Sagen, Leipsic, 1885, pp. 350, 351. To the same manner of explaining striking appearances in physical geography, and especially strange rocks and boulders, we mainly owe the innumerable stories of the transformation of living beings, and especially of men and women, into these natural features. In the mythology of China we constantly come upon legends of such transformations--from that of the first Counsellor of the Han dynasty to those of shepherds and sheep. In the Brahmanic mythology of India, Salagrama, the fossil ammonite, is recognised as containing the body of Vishnu's wife, and the Binlang stone has much the same relation to Siva; so, too, the nymph Ramba was changed, for offending Ketu, into a mass of sand; by the breath of Siva elephants were turned into stone; and in a very touching myth Luxman is changed into stone but afterward released. In the Buddhist mythology a Nat demon is represented as changing himself into a grain of sand. Among the Greeks such transformation myths come constantly before us--both the changing of stones to men and the changing of men to stones. Deucalion and Pyrrha, escaping from the flood, repeopled the earth by casting behind them stones which became men and women; Heraulos was changed into stone for offending Mercury; Pyrrhus for offending Rhea; Phineus, and Polydectes with his guests, for offending Perseus: under the petrifying glance of Medusa's head such transformations became a thing of course. To myth-making in obedience to the desire of explaining unusual natural appearances, coupled with the idea that sin must be followed by retribution, we also owe the well-known Niobe myth. Having incurred the divine wrath, Niobe saw those dearest to her destroyed by missiles from heaven, and was finally transformed into a rock on Mount Sipylos which bore some vague resemblance to the human form, and her tears became the rivulets which trickled from the neighbouring strata. Thus, in obedience to a moral and intellectual impulse, a striking geographical appearance was explained, and for ages pious Greeks looked with bated breath upon the rock at Sipylos which was once Niobe, just as for ages pious Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans looked with awe upon the salt pillar at the Dead Sea which was once Lot's wife. Pausanias, one of the most honest of ancient travellers, gives us a notable exhibition of this feeling. Having visited this monument of divine vengeance at Mount Sipylos, he tells us very naively that, though he could discern no human features when standing near it, he thought that he could see them when standing at a distance. There could hardly be a better example of that most common and deceptive of all things--belief created by the desire to believe. In the pagan mythology of Scandinavia we have such typical examples as Bors slaying the giant Ymir and transforming his bones into boulders; also "the giant who had no heart" transforming six brothers and their wives into stone; and, in the old Christian mythology, St. Olaf changing into stone the wicked giants who opposed his preaching. So, too, in Celtic countries we have in Ireland such legends as those of the dancers turned into stone; and, in Brittany, the stones at Plesse, which were once hunters and dogs violating the sanctity of Sunday; and the stones of Carnac, which were once soldiers who sought to kill St. Cornely. Teutonic mythology inherited from its earlier Eastern days a similar mass of old legends, and developed a still greater mass of new ones. Thus, near the Konigstein, which all visitors to the Saxon Switzerland know so well, is a boulder which for ages was believed to have once been a maiden transformed into stone for refusing to go to church; and near Rosenberg in Mecklenburg is another curiously shaped stone of which a similar story is told. Near Spornitz, in the same region, are seven boulders whose forms and position are accounted for by a long and circumstantial legend that they were once seven impious herdsmen; near Brahlsdorf is a stone which, according to a similar explanatory myth, was once a blasphemous shepherd; near Schwerin are three boulders which were once wasteful servants; and at Neustadt, down to a recent period, was shown a collection of stones which were once a bride and bridegroom with their horses--all punished for an act of cruelty; and these stories are but typical of thousands. At the other extremity of Europe we may take, out of the multitude of explanatory myths, that which grew about the well-known group of boulders near Belgrade. In the midst of them stands one larger than the rest: according to the legend which was developed to account for all these, there once lived there a swineherd, who was disrespectful to the consecrated Host; whereupon he was changed into the larger stone, and his swine into the smaller ones. So also at Saloniki we have the pillars of the ruined temple, which are widely believed, especially among the Jews of that region, to have once been human beings, and are therefore known as the "enchanted columns." Among the Arabs we have an addition to our sacred account of Adam--the legend of the black stone of the Caaba at Mecca, into which the angel was changed who was charged by the Almighty to keep Adam away from the forbidden fruit, and who neglected his duty. Similar old transformation legends are abundant among the Indians of America, the negroes of Africa, and the natives of Australia and the Pacific islands. Nor has this making of myths to account for remarkable appearances yet ceased, even in civilized countries. About the beginning of this century the Grand Duke of Weimar, smitten with the classical mania of his time, placed in the public park near his palace a little altar, and upon this was carved, after the manner so frequent in classical antiquity, a serpent taking a cake from it. And shortly there appeared, in the town and the country round about, a legend to explain this altar and its decoration. It was commonly said that a huge serpent had laid waste that region in the olden time, until a wise and benevolent baker had rid the world of the monster by means of a poisoned biscuit. So, too, but a few years since, in the heart of the State of New York, a swindler of genius having made and buried a "petrified giant," one theologian explained it by declaring it a Phoenician idol, and published the Phoenician inscription which he thought he had found upon it; others saw in it proofs that "there were giants in those days," and within a week after its discovery myths were afloat that the neighbouring remnant of the Onondaga Indians had traditions of giants who frequently roamed through that region.(425) (425) For transformation myths and legends, identifying rocks and stones with gods and heroes, see Welcker, Gotterlehre, vol. i, p. 220. For recent and more accessible statements for the general reader, see Robertson Smith's admirable Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, Edinburgh, 1889, pp. 86 et seq. For some thoughtful remarks on the ancient adoration of stones rather than statues, with refernce to the anointing of stones at Bethel by Jacob, see Dodwell, Tour through Greece, vol. ii, p. 172; also Robertson Smith, as above, Lecture V. For Chinese transformation legends, see Denny's Folklore of China, pp. 96, 128. For Hindu and other ancient legends of transformations, see Dawson, Dictionary of Hindu Mythology; also Coleman, as above; also Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations, pp. 81-97, etc. For such transformations in Greece, see the Iliad, and Ovid, as above; also Stark, Niobe und die Niobiden, p. 444 and elsewhere; also Preller, Griechische Mythologie, passim; also Baumeister, Denkmaler des classischen Alterthums, article Niobe; also Botticher, as above; also Curtius, Griechische Geschichte, vol i, pp. 71, 72. For Pausanius's naive confession regarding the Sipylos rock, see book i, p. 215. See also Texier, Asie Mineure, pp. 265 et seq.; also Chandler, Travels in Greece, vol. ii, p. 80, who seems to hold to the later origin of the statue. At the end of Baumeister there is an engraving copied from Stuart which seems to show that, as to the Niobe legend, at a later period, Art was allowed to help Nature. For the general subject, see Scheiffle, Programm des K. Gymnasiums in Ellwangen: Mythologische Parallelen, 1865. For Scandinavian and Teutonic transformation legends, see Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, vierte Ausg., vol. i, p. 457; also Thorpe, Northern Antiquities; also Friedrich, passim, especially p. 116 et seq.; also, for a mass of very curious ones, Karl Bartsch, Sagen, Marchen und gebrauche aus Meklenburg, vol. i, pp. 420 et seq.; also Karl Simrock's edition of the Edda, ninth edition, p. 319; also John Fiske, Myths and Myth-makers, pp. 8, 9. On the universality of such legends and myths, see Ritter's Erdkunde, vol. xiv, pp. 1098-1122. For Irish examples, see Manz, Real-Encyclopadie, article Stein; and for multitudes of examples in Brittany, see Sebillot, Traditions de la Haute-Bretagne. For the enchanted columns at Saloniki, see the latest edition of Murray's Handbook of Turkey, vol. ii, p. 711. For the legend of the angel changed into stone for neglecting to guard Adam, see Weil, university librarian at Heidelberg, Biblische Legende der Muselmanner, Frankfort-am-Main, 1845, pp. 37, 84. For similar transformation legends in Australia and among the American Indians, see Andrew Lang, Mythology, French translation, pp. 83, 102; also his Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. i, pp. 150 et seq., citing numerous examples from J. G. Muller, Urreligionen, and Dorman's Primitive Superstitions; also Report of the Bureau of Ethnoligy for 1880-'81; and for an African example, see account of the rock at Balon which was once a woman, in Berenger-Feraud, Contes populaires de la Senegambie, chap. viii. For the Weimar legend, see Lewes, Life of Goethe, book iv. For the myths which arose about the swindling "Cardiff giant" in the State of New York, see especially an article by G. A. Stockwell, M. D., in The Popular Science Monthly for June, 1878; see also W. A. McKinney in The New-Englander for October, 1875; and for the "Phoenician inscription," given at length with a translation, see the Rev. Alexander McWhorter, in The Galaxy for July, 1872. The present writer visited the "giant" shortly after it was "discovered," carefully observed it, and the myths to which it gave rise, has in his possession a mass of curious documents regarding this fraud, and hopes ere long to prepare a supplement to Dr. Stockwell's valuable paper. To the same stage of thought belongs the conception of human beings changed into trees. But, in the historic evolution of religion and morality, while changes into stone or rock were considered as punishments, or evidences of divine wrath, those into trees and shrubs were frequently looked upon as rewards, or evidences of divine favour. A very beautiful and touching form of this conception is seen in such myths as the change of Philemon into the oak, and of Baucis into the linden; of Myrrha into the myrtle; of Melos into the apple tree; of Attis into the pine; of Adonis into the rose tree; and in the springing of the vine and grape from the blood of the Titans, the violet from the blood of Attis, and the hyacinth from the blood of Hyacinthus. Thus it was, during the long ages when mankind saw everywhere miracle and nowhere law, that, in the evolution of religion and morality, striking features in physical geography became connected with the idea of divine retribution.(426) (426) For the view taken in Greece and Rome of transformations into trees and shrubs, see Botticher, Baumcultus der Hellenen, book i, chap. xix; also Ovid, Metamorphoses, passim; also foregoing notes. But, in the natural course of intellectual growth, thinking men began to doubt the historical accuracy of these myths and legends--or, at least, to doubt all save those of the theology in which they happened to be born; and the next step was taken when they began to make comparisons between the myths and legends of different neighbourhoods and countries: so came into being the science of comparative mythology--a science sure to be of vast value, because, despite many stumblings and vagaries, it shows ever more and more how our religion and morality have been gradually evolved, and gives a firm basis to a faith that higher planes may yet be reached. Such a science makes the sacred books of the world more and more precious, in that it shows how they have been the necessary envelopes of our highest spiritual sustenance; how even myths and legends apparently the most puerile have been the natural husks and rinds and shells of our best ideas; and how the atmosphere is created in which these husks and rinds and shells in due time wither, shrivel, and fall away, so that the fruit itself may be gathered to sustain a nobler religion and a purer morality. The coming in of Christianity contributed elements of inestimable value in this evolution, and, at the centre of all, the thoughts, words, and life of the Master. But when, in the darkness that followed the downfall of the Roman Empire, there was developed a theology and a vast ecclesiastical power to enforce it, the most interesting chapters in this evolution of religion and morality were removed from the domain of science. So it came that for over eighteen hundred years it has been thought natural and right to study and compare the myths and legends arising east and west and south and north of Palestine with each other, but never with those of Palestine itself; so it came that one of the regions most fruitful in materials for reverent thought and healthful comparison was held exempt from the unbiased search for truth; so it came that, in the name of truth, truth was crippled for ages. While observation, and thought upon observation, and the organized knowledge or science which results from these, progressed as regarded the myths and legends of other countries, and an atmosphere was thus produced giving purer conceptions of the world and its government, myths of that little geographical region at the eastern end of the Mediterranean retained possession of the civilized world in their original crude form, and have at times done much to thwart the noblest efforts of religion, morality, and civilization. II. MEDIAEVAL GROWTH OF THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS. The history of myths, of their growth under the earlier phases of human thought and of their decline under modern thinking, is one of the most interesting and suggestive of human studies; but, since to treat it as a whole would require volumes, I shall select only one small group, and out of this mainly a single myth--one about which there can no longer be any dispute--the group of myths and legends which grew upon the shore of the Dead Sea, and especially that one which grew up to account for the successive salt columns washed out by the rains at its southwestern extremity. The Dead Sea is about fifty miles in length and ten miles in width; it lies in a very deep fissure extending north and south, and its surface is about thirteen hundred feet below that of the Mediterranean. It has, therefore, no outlet, and is the receptacle for the waters of the whole system to which it belongs, including those collected by the Sea of Galilee and brought down thence by the river Jordan. It certainly--or at least the larger part of it--ranks geologically among the oldest lakes on earth. In a broad sense the region is volcanic: On its shore are evidences of volcanic action, which must from the earliest period have aroused wonder and fear, and stimulated the myth-making tendency to account for them. On the eastern side are impressive mountain masses which have been thrown up from old volcanic vents; mineral and hot springs abound, some of them spreading sulphurous odours; earthquakes have been frequent, and from time to time these have cast up masses of bitumen; concretions of sulphur and large formations of salt constantly appear. The water which comes from the springs or oozes through the salt layers upon its shores constantly brings in various salts in solution, and, being rapidly evaporated under the hot sun and dry wind, there has been left, in the bed of the lake, a strong brine heavily charged with the usual chlorides and bromides--a sort of bitter "mother liquor" This fluid has become so dense as to have a remarkable power of supporting the human body; it is of an acrid and nauseating bitterness; and by ordinary eyes no evidence of life is seen in it. Thus it was that in the lake itself, and in its surrounding shores, there was enough to make the generation of explanatory myths on a large scale inevitable. The main northern part of the lake is very deep, the plummet having shown an abyss of thirteen hundred feet; but the southern end is shallow and in places marshy. The system of which it forms a part shows a likeness to that in South America of which the mountain lake Titicaca is the main feature; as a receptacle for surplus waters, only rendering them by evaporation, it resembles the Caspian and many other seas; as a sort of evaporating dish for the leachings of salt rock, and consequently holding a body of water unfit to support the higher forms of animal life, it resembles, among others, the Median lake of Urumiah; as a deposit of bitumen, it resembles the pitch lakes of Trinidad.(427) (427) For modern views of the Dead Sea, see the Rev. Edward Robinson, D. D., Biblical Researches, various editions; Lynch's Exploring Expedition; De Saulcy, Voyage autour de la Mer Morte; Stanley's Palestine and Syria; Schaff's Through Bible Lands; and other travellers hereafter quoted. For good photogravures, showing the character of the whole region, see the atlas forming part of De Luynes's monumental Voyage d'Exploration. For geographical summaries, see Reclus, La Terre, Paris, 1870, pp. 832-834; Ritter, Erdkunde, volumes devoted to Palestine and especially as supplemented in Gage's translation with additions; Reclus, Nouvelle Geographie Universelle, vol. ix, p. 736, where a small map is given presenting the difference in depth between the two ends of the lake, of which so much was made theologically before Lartet. For still better maps, see De Saulcy, and especially De Luynes, Voyage d'Exploration (atlas). For very interesting panoramic views, see last edition of Canon Tristram's Land of Israel, p. 635. For the geology, see Lartet, in his reports to the French Geographical Society, and especially in vol. iii of De Luynes's work, where there is an admirable geological map with sections, etc.; also Ritter; also Sir J. W. Dawson's Egypt and Syria, published by the Religious Tract Society; also Rev. Cunningham Geikie, D. D., Geology of Palestine; and for pictures showing salt formation, Tristram, as above. For the meteorology, see Vignes, report to De Luynes, pp. 65 et seq. For chemistry of the Dead Sea, see as above, and Terreil's report, given in Gage's Ritter, vol. iii, appendix 2, and tables in De Luynes's third volume. For zoology of the Dead Sea, as to entire absence of life in it, see all earlier travellers; as to presence of lower forms of life, see Ehrenberg's microscopic examinations in Gage's Ritter. See also reports in third volume of De Luynes. For botany of the Dead Sea, and especially regarding "apples of Sodom," see Dr. Lortet's La Syrie, p. 412; also Reclus, Nouvelle Geographie, vol. ix, p. 737; also for photographic representations of them, see portfolio forming part of De Luynes's work, plate 27. For Strabo's very perfect description, see his Geog., lib. xvi, cap. ii; also Fallmerayer, Werke, pp. 177, 178. For names and positions of a large number of salt lakes in various parts of the world more or less resembling the Dead Sea, see De Luynes, vol. iii, pp. 242 et seq. For Trinidad "pitch lakes," found by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595, see Lengegg, El Dorado, part i, p. 103, and part ii, p. 101; also Reclus, Ritter, et al. For the general subject, see Schenkel, Bibel-Lexikon, s.v. Todtes Meer, an excellent summery. The description of the Dead Sea in Lenormant's great history is utterly unworthy of him, and must have been thrown together from old notes after his death. It is amazing to see in such a work the old superstitions that birds attempting to fly over the sea are suffocated. See Lenormant, Histoire ancienne de l'Orient, edition of 1888, vol. vi, p. 112. For the absorption and adoption of foreign myths and legends by the Jews, see Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, p. 390. For the views of Greeks and Romans, see especially Tacitus, Historiae, book v, Pliny, and Strabo, in whose remarks are the germs of many of the mediaeval myths. For very curious examples of these, see Baierus, De Excidio Sodomae, Halle, 1690, passim. In all this there is nothing presenting any special difficulty to the modern geologist or geographer; but with the early dweller in Palestine the case was very different. The rocky, barren desolation of the Dead Sea region impressed him deeply; he naturally reasoned upon it; and this impression and reasoning we find stamped into the pages of his sacred literature, rendering them all the more precious as a revelation of the earlier thought of mankind. The long circumstantial account given in Genesis, its application in Deuteronomy, its use by Amos, by Isaiah, by Jeremiah, by Zephaniah, and by Ezekiel, the references to it in the writings attributed to St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. Jude, in the Apocalypse, and, above all, in more than one utterance of the Master himself--all show how deeply these geographical features impressed the Jewish mind. At a very early period, myths and legends, many and circumstantial, grew up to explain features then so incomprehensible. As the myth and legend grew up among the Greeks of a refusal of hospitality to Zeus and Hermes by the village in Phrygia, and the consequent sinking of that beautiful region with its inhabitants beneath a lake and morass, so there came belief in a similar offence by the people of the beautiful valley of Siddim, and the consequent sinking of that valley with its inhabitants beneath the waters of the Dead Sea. Very similar to the accounts of the saving of Philemon and Baucis are those of the saving of Lot and his family. But the myth-making and miracle-mongering by no means ceased in ancient times; they continued to grow through the medieval and modern period until they have quietly withered away in the light of modern scientific investigation, leaving to us the religious and moral truths they inclose. It would be interesting to trace this whole group of myths: their origin in times prehistoric, their development in Greece and Rome, their culmination during the ages of faith, and their disappearance in the age of science. It would be especially instructive to note the conscientious efforts to prolong their life by making futile compromises between science and theology regarding them; but I shall mention this main group only incidentally, confining my self almost entirely to the one above named--the most remarkable of all--the myth which grew about the salt pillars of Usdum. I select this mainly because it involves only elementary principles, requires no abstruse reasoning, and because all controversy regarding it is ended. There is certainly now no theologian with a reputation to lose who will venture to revive the idea regarding it which was sanctioned for hundreds, nay, thousands, of years by theology, was based on Scripture, and was held by the universal Church until our own century. The main feature of the salt region of Usdum is a low range of hills near the southwest corner of the Dead Sea, extending in a southeasterly direction for about five miles, and made up mainly of salt rock. This rock is soft and friable, and, under the influence of the heavy winter rains, it has been, without doubt, from a period long before human history, as it is now, cut ever into new shapes, and especially into pillars or columns, which sometimes bear a resemblance to the human form. An eminent clergyman who visited this spot recently speaks of the appearance of this salt range as follows: "Fretted by fitful showers and storms, its ridge is exceedingly uneven, its sides carved out and constantly changing;... and each traveller might have a new pillar of salt to wonder over at intervals of a few years."(428) (428) As to the substance of the "pillars" or "statues" or "needles" of salt at Usdum, many travellers speak of it as "marl and salt." Irby and Mangles, in their Travels in Egypt, Nubia, Syria, and the Holy Land, chap. vii, call it "salt and hardened sand." The citation as to frequent carving out of new "pillars" is from the Travels in Palestine of the Rev. H. F. Osborn, D. D.; see also Palmer, Desert of the Exodus, vol ii, pp. 478, 479. For engravings of the salt pillar at different times, compare that given by Lynch in 1848, when it appeared as a column forty feet high, with that given by Palmer as the frontpiece to his Desert of the Exodus, Cambridge, England, 1871, when it was small and "does really bear a curious resemblance to an Arab woman with a child upon he shoulders", and this again with the picture of the salt formation at Usdum given by Canon Tristram, at whose visit there was neither "pillar" nor "statue." See The Land of Israel, by H. B. Tristram, D. D., F. R. S., London, 1882, p. 324. For similar pillars of salt washed out from the mud at Catalonia, see Lyell. Few things could be more certain than that, in the indolent dream-life of the East, myths and legends would grow up to account for this as for other strange appearances in all that region. The question which a religious Oriental put to himself in ancient times at Usdum was substantially that which his descendant to-day puts to himself at Kosseir. "Why is this region thus blasted?" "Whence these pillars of salt?" or "Whence these blocks of granite?" "What aroused the vengeance of Jehovah or of Allah to work these miracles of desolation?" And, just as Maxime Du Camp recorded the answer of the modern Shemite at Kosseir, so the compilers of the Jewish sacred books recorded the answer of the ancient Shemite at the Dead Sea; just as Allah at Kosseir blasted the land and transformed the melons into boulders which are seen to this day, so Jehovah at Usdum blasted the land and transformed Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, which is seen to this day. No more difficulty was encountered in the formation of the Lot legend, to account for that rock resembling the human form, than in the formation of the Niobe legend, which accounted for a supposed resemblance in the rock at Sipylos: it grew up just as we have seen thousands of similar myths and legends grow up about striking natural appearances in every early home of the human race. Being thus consonant with the universal view regarding the relation of physical geography to the divine government, it became a treasure of the Jewish nation and of the Christian Church--a treasure not only to be guarded against all hostile intrusion, but to be increased, as we shall see, by the myth-making powers of Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans for thousands of years. The spot where the myth originated was carefully kept in mind; indeed, it could not escape, for in that place alone were constantly seen the phenomena which gave rise to it. We have a steady chain of testimony through the ages, all pointing to the salt pillar as the irrefragable evidence of divine judgment. That great theological test of truth, the dictum of St. Vincent of Lerins, would certainly prove that the pillar was Lot's wife, for it was believed so to be by Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans from the earliest period down to a time almost within present memory--"always, everywhere, and by all." It would stand perfectly the ancient test insisted upon by Cardinal Newman," Securus judicat orbis terrarum." For, ever since the earliest days of Christianity, the identity of the salt pillar with Lot's wife has been universally held and supported by passages in Genesis, in St. Luke's Gospel, and in the Second Epistle of St. Peter--coupled with a passage in the book of the Wisdom of Solomon, which to this day, by a majority in the Christian Church, is believed to be inspired, and from which are specially cited the words, "A standing pillar of salt is a monument of an unbelieving soul."(429) (429) For the usual biblical citations, see Genesis xix, 26; St. Luke xvii, 32; II Peter ii, 6. For the citation from Wisdom, see chap. x, v. 7. For the account of the transformation of Lot's wife put into its proper relations with the Jehovistic and Elohistic documents, see Lenormant's La Genese, Paris, 1883, pp. 53, 199, and 317, 318. Never was chain of belief more continuous. In the first century of the Christian era Josephus refers to the miracle, and declares regarding the statue, "I have seen it, and it remains at this day"; and Clement, Bishop of Rome, one of the most revered fathers of the Church, noted for the moderation of his statements, expresses a similar certainty, declaring the miraculous statue to be still standing. In the second century that great father of the Church, bishop and martyr, Irenaeus, not only vouched for it, but gave his approval to the belief that the soul of Lot's wife still lingered in the statue, giving it a sort of organic life: thus virtually began in the Church that amazing development of the legend which we shall see taking various forms through the Middle Ages--the story that the salt statue exercised certain physical functions which in these more delicate days can not be alluded to save under cover of a dead language. This addition to the legend, which in these signs of life, as in other things, is developed almost exactly on the same lines with the legend of the Niobe statue in the rock of Mount Sipylos and with the legends of human beings transformed into boulders in various mythologies, was for centuries regarded as an additional confirmation of revealed truth. In the third century the myth burst into still richer bloom in a poem long ascribed to Tertullian. In this poem more miraculous characteristics of the statue are revealed. It could not be washed away by rains; it could not be overthrown by winds; any wound made upon it was miraculously healed; and the earlier statements as to its physical functions were amplified in sonorous Latin verse. With this appeared a new legend regarding the Dead Sea; it became universally believed, and we find it repeated throughout the whole medieval period, that the bitumen could only he dissolved by such fluids as in the processes of animated nature came from the statue. The legend thus amplified we shall find dwelt upon by pious travellers and monkish chroniclers for hundreds of years: so it came to be more and more treasured by the universal Church, and held more and more firmly--"always, everywhere, and by all." In the two following centuries we have an overwhelming mass of additional authority for the belief that the very statue of salt into which Lot's wife was transformed was still existing. In the fourth, the continuance of the statue was vouched for by St. Silvia, who visited the place: though she could not see it, she was told by the Bishop of Segor that it had been there some time before, and she concluded that it had been temporarily covered by the sea. In both the fourth and fifth centuries such great doctors in the Church as St. Jerome, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Cyril of Jerusalem agreed in this belief and statement; hence it was, doubtless, that the Hebrew word which is translated in the authorized English version "pillar," was translated in the Vulgate, which the majority of Christians believe virtually inspired, by the word "statue"; we shall find this fact insisted upon by theologians arguing in behalf of the statue, as a result and monument of the miracle, for over fourteen hundred years afterward.(430) (430) See Josephus, Antiquities, book i, chap. xi; Epist. I; Cyril Hieros, Catech., xix; Chrysostom, Hom. XVIII, XLIV, in Genes.; Irenaeus, lib. iv, c. xxxi, of his Heresies, edition Oxon., 1702. For St. Silvia, see S. Silviae Aquitanae Peregrinatio ad Loca Sancta, Romae, 1887, p. 55; also edition of 1885, p. 25. For recent translation, see Pilgrimage of St. Silvia, p. 28, in publications of Palestine Text Society for 1891. For legends of signs of continued life in boulders and stones into which human beings have been transformed for sin, see Karl Bartsch, Sage, etc., vol. ii, pp. 420 et seq. About the middle of the sixth century Antoninus Martyr visited the Dead Sea region and described it, but curiously reversed a simple truth in these words: "Nor do sticks or straws float there, nor can a man swim, but whatever is cast into it sinks to the bottom." As to the statue of Lot's wife, he threw doubt upon its miraculous renewal, but testified that it was still standing. In the seventh century the Targum of Jerusalem not only testified that the salt pillar at Usdum was once Lot's wife, but declared that she must retain that form until the general resurrection. In the seventh century too, Bishop Arculf travelled to the Dead Sea, and his work was added to the treasures of the Church. He greatly develops the legend, and especially that part of it given by Josephus. The bitumen that floats upon the sea "resembles gold and the form of a bull or camel"; "birds can not live near it"; and "the very beautiful apples" which grow there, when plucked, "burn and are reduced to ashes, and smoke as if they were still burning." In the eighth century the Venerable Bede takes these statements of Arculf and his predecessors, binds them together in his work on The Holy Places, and gives the whole mass of myths and legends an enormous impulse.(431) (431) For Antoninus Martyr, see Tobler's edition of his work in the Itinera, vol. i, p. 100, Geneva, 1877. For the Targum of Jerusalem, see citation in Quaresmius, Terrae Sanctae Elucidation, Peregrinatio vi, cap. xiv; new Venice edition. For Arculf, see Tobler. For Bede, see his De Locis Sanctis in Tobler's Itinera, vol. i, p. 228. For an admirable statement of the mediaeval theological view of scientific research, see Eicken, Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, Stuttgart, 1887, chap. vi. In the tenth century new force is given to it by the pious Moslem Mukadassi. Speaking of the town of Segor, near the salt region, he says that the proper translation of its name is "Hell"; and of the lake he says, "Its waters are hot, even as though the place stood over hell-fire." In the crusading period, immediately following, all the legends burst forth more brilliantly than ever. The first of these new travellers who makes careful statements is Fulk of Chartres, who in 1100 accompanied King Baldwin to the Dead Sea and saw many wonders; but, though he visited the salt region at Usdum, he makes no mention of the salt pillar: evidently he had fallen on evil times; the older statues had probably been washed away, and no new one had happened to be washed out of the rocks just at that period. But his misfortune was more than made up by the triumphant experience of a far more famous traveller, half a century later--Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela. Rabbi Benjamin finds new evidences of miracle in the Dead Sea, and develops to a still higher point the legend of the salt statue of Lot's wife, enriching the world with the statement that it was steadily and miraculously rene wed; that, though the cattle of the region licked its surface, it never grew smaller. Again a thrill of joy went through the monasteries and pulpits of Christendom at this increasing "evidence of the truth of Scripture." Toward the end of the thirteenth century there appeared in Palestine a traveller superior to most before or since--Count Burchard, monk of Mount Sion. He had the advantage of knowing something of Arabic, and his writings show him to have been observant and thoughtful. No statue of Lot's wife appears to have been washed clean of the salt rock at his visit, but he takes it for granted that the Dead Sea is "the mouth of hell," and that the vapour rising from it is the smoke from Satan's furnaces. These ideas seem to have become part of the common stock, for Ernoul, who travelled to the Dead Sea during the same century, always speaks of it as the "Sea of Devils." Near the beginning of the fourteenth century appeared the book of far wider influence which bears the name of Sir John Mandeville, and in the various editions of it myths and legends of the Dead Sea and of the pillar of salt burst forth into wonderful luxuriance. This book tells us that masses of fiery matter are every day thrown up from the water "as large as a horse"; that, though it contains no living thing, it has been shown that men thrown into it can not die; and, finally, as if to prove the worthlessness of devout testimony to the miraculous, he says: "And whoever throws a piece of iron therein, it floats; and whoever throws a feather therein, it sinks to the bottom; and, because that is contrary to nature, I was not willing to believe it until I saw it." The book, of course, mentions Lot's wife, and says that the pillar of salt "stands there to-day," and "has a right salty taste." Injustice has perhaps been done to the compilers of this famous work in holding them liars of the first magnitude. They simply abhorred scepticism, and thought it meritorious to believe all pious legends. The ideal Mandeville was a man of overmastering faith, and resembled Tertullian in believing some things "because they are impossible"; he was doubtless entirely conscientious; the solemn ending of the book shows that he listened, observed, and wrote under the deepest conviction, and those who re-edited his book were probably just as honest in adding the later stories of pious travellers. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, thus appealing to the popular heart, were most widely read in the monasteries and repeated among the people. Innumerable copies were made in manuscript, and finally in print, and so the old myths received a new life.(432) (432) For Fulk of Chartres and crusading travellers generally, see Bongars' Gesta Dei and the French Recueil; also Histories of the Crusades by Wilken, Sybel, Kugler, and others; see also Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. ii, p. 109, and Tobler, Bibliographia Geographica Palestinae, 1867, p. 12. For Benjamin of Tudela's statement, see Wright's Collection of Travels in Palestine, p. 84, and Asher's edition of Benjamin of Tudela's travels, vol. i, pp. 71, 72; also Charton, vol. i, p. 180. For Borchard or Burchard, see full text in the Reyssbuch dess Heyligen Landes; also Grynaeus, Nov. Orbis, Basil, 1532, fol. 298, 329. For Ernoul, see his L'Estat de la Cite de Hierusalem, in Michelant and Reynaud, Itineraires Francaises au 12me et 13me Siecles. For Petrus Diaconus, see his book De Locis Sanctis, edited by Gamurrini, Rome, 1887, pp. 126, 127. For Mandeville I have compared several editions, especially those in the Reyssbuch, in Canisius, and in Wright, with Halliwell's reprint and with the rare Strasburg edition of 1484 in the Cornell University Library: the whole statement regarding the experiment with iron and feathers is given differently in different copies. The statement that he saw the feathers sink and the iron swim is made in the Reyssbuch edition, Frankfort, 1584. The story, like the saints' legends, evidently grew as time went on, but is none the less interesting as showing the general credulity. Since writing the above, I have been glad to find my view of Mandeville's honesty confirmed by the Rev. Dr. Robinson, and by Mr. Gage in his edition of Ritter's Palestine. In the fifteenth century wonders increased. In 1418 we have the Lord of Caumont, who makes a pilgrimage and gives us a statement which is the result of the theological reasoning of centuries, and especially interesting as a typical example of the theological method in contrast with the scientific. He could not understand how the blessed waters of the Jordan could be allowed to mingle with the accursed waters of the Dead Sea. In spite, then, of the eye of sense, he beheld the water with the eye of faith, and calmly announced that the Jordan water passes through the sea, but that the two masses of water are not mingled. As to the salt statue of Lot's wife, he declares it to be still existing; and, copying a table of indulgences granted by the Church to pious pilgrims, he puts down the visit to the salt statue as giving an indulgence of seven years. Toward the end of the century we have another traveller yet more influential: Bernard of Breydenbach, Dean of Mainz. His book of travels was published in 1486, at the famous press of Schoeffer, and in various translations it was spread through Europe, exercising an influence wide and deep. His first important notice of the Dead Sea is as follows: "In this, Tirus the serpent is found, and from him the Tiriac medicine is made. He is blind, and so full of venom that there is no remedy for his bite except cutting off the bitten part. He can only be taken by striking him and making him angry; then his venom flies into his head and tail." Breydenbach calls the Dead Sea "the chimney of hell," and repeats the old story as to the miraculous solvent for its bitumen. He, too, makes the statement that the holy water of the Jordan does not mingle with the accursed water of the infernal sea, but increases the miracle which Caumont had announced by saying that, although the waters appear to come together, the Jordan is really absorbed in the earth before it reaches the sea. As to Lot's wife, various travellers at that time had various fortunes. Some, like Caumont and Breydenbach, took her continued existence for granted; some, like Count John of Solms, saw her and were greatly edified; some, like Hans Werli, tried to find her and could not, but, like St. Silvia, a thousand years before, were none the less edified by the idea that, for some inscrutable purpose, the sea had been allowed to hide her from them; some found her larger than they expected, even forty feet high, as was the salt pillar which happened to be standing at the visit of Commander Lynch in 1848; but this only added a new proof to the miracle, for the text was remembered, "There were giants in those days." Out of the mass of works of pilgrims during the fifteenth century I select just one more as typical of the theological view then dominant, and this is the noted book of Felix Fabri, a preaching friar of Ulm. I select him, because even so eminent an authority in our own time as Dr. Edward Robinson declares him to have been the most thorough, thoughtful, and enlightened traveller of that century. Fabri is greatly impressed by the wonders of the Dead Sea, and typical of his honesty influenced by faith is his account of the Dead Sea fruit; he describes it with almost perfect accuracy, but adds the statement that when mature it is "filled with ashes and cinders." As to the salt statue, he says: "We saw the place between the sea and Mount Segor, but could not see the statue itself because we were too far distant to see anything of human size; but we saw it with firm faith, because we believed Scripture, which speaks of it; and we were filled with wonder." To sustain absolute faith in the statue he reminds his reader's that "God is able even of these stones to raise up seed to Abraham," and goes into a long argument, discussing such transformations as those of King Atlas and Pygmalion's statue, with a multitude of others, winding up with the case, given in the miracles of St. Jerome, of a heretic who was changed into a log of wood, which was then burned. He gives a statement of the Hebrews that Lot's wife received her peculiar punishment because she had refused to add salt to the food of the angels when they visited her, and he preaches a short sermon in which he says that, as salt is the condiment of food, so the salt statue of Lot's wife "gives us a condiment of wisdom."(433) (433) For Bernard of Breydenbach, I have used the Latin edition, Mentz, 1486, in the White collection, Cornell University, also the German edition in the Reyssbuch. For John of Solms, Werli, and the like, see the Reyssbuch, which gives a full text of their travels. For Fabri (Schmid), see, for his value, Robinson; also Tobler, Bibliographia, pp. 53 et seq.; and for texts, see Reyssbuch, pp. 122b et seq., but best the Fratris Fel. Fabri Evagatorium, ed. Hassler, Stuttgart, 1843, vol. iii, pp. 172 et seq. His book now has been translated into English by the Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society. There were, indeed, many discrepancies in the testimony of travellers regarding the salt pillar--so many, in fact, that at a later period the learned Dom Calmet acknowledged that they shook his belief in the whole matter; but, during this earlier time, under the complete sway of the theological spirit, these difficulties only gave new and more glorious opportunities for faith. For, if a considerable interval occurred between the washing of one salt pillar out of existence and the washing of another into existence, the idea arose that the statue, by virtue of the soul which still remained in it, had departed on some mysterious excursion. Did it happen that one statue was washed out one year in one place and another statue another year in another place, this difficulty was surmounted by believing that Lot's wife still walked about. Did it happen that a salt column was undermined by the rains and fell, this was believed to be but another sign of life. Did a pillar happen to be covered in part by the sea, this was enough to arouse the belief that the statue from time to time descended into the Dead Sea depths--possibly to satisfy that old fatal curiosity regarding her former neighbours. Did some smaller block of salt happen to be washed out near the statue, it was believed that a household dog, also transformed into salt, had followed her back from beneath the deep. Did more statues than one appear at one time, that simply made the mystery more impressive. In facts now so easy of scientific explanation the theologians found wonderful matter for argument. One great question among them was whether the soul of Lot's wife did really remain in the statue. On one side it was insisted that, as Holy Scripture declares that Lot's wife was changed into a pillar of salt, and as she was necessarily made up of a soul and a body, the soul must have become part of the statue. This argument was clinched by citing that passage in the Book of Wisdom in which the salt pillar is declared to be still standing as "the monument of an unbelieving SOUL." On the other hand, it was insisted that the soul of the woman must have been incorporeal and immortal, and hence could not have been changed into a substance corporeal and mortal. Naturally, to this it would be answered that the salt pillar was no more corporeal than the ordinary materials of the human body, and that it had been made miraculously immortal, and "with God all things are possible." Thus were opened long vistas of theological discussion.(434) (434) For a brief statement of the main arguments for and against the idea that the soul of Lot's wife remained within the salt statue, see Cornelius a Lapide, Commentarius in Pentateuchum, Antwerp, 1697, chap. xix. As we enter the sixteenth century the Dead Sea myths, and especially the legends of Lot's wife, are still growing. In 1507 Father Anselm of the Minorites declares that the sea sometimes covers the feet of the statue, sometimes the legs, sometimes the whole body. In 1555, Gabriel Giraudet, priest at Puy, journeyed through Palestine. His faith was robust, and his attitude toward the myths of the Dead Sea is seen by his declaration that its waters are so foul that one can smell them at a distance of three leagues; that straw, hay, or feathers thrown into them will sink, but that iron and other metals will float; that criminals have been kept in them three or four days and could not drown. As to Lot's wife, he says that he found her "lying there, her back toward heaven, converted into salt stone; for I touched her, scratched her, and put a piece of her into my mouth, and she tasted salt." At the centre of all these legends we see, then, the idea that, though there were no living beasts in the Dead Sea, the people of the overwhelmed cities were still living beneath its waters, probably in hell; that there was life in the salt statue; and that it was still curious regarding its old neighbours. Hence such travellers in the latter years of the century as Count Albert of Lowenstein and Prince Nicolas Radziwill are not at all weakened in faith by failing to find the statue. What the former is capable of believing is seen by his statement that in a certain cemetery at Cairo during one night in the year the dead thrust forth their feet, hands, limbs, and even rise wholly from their graves. There seemed, then, no limit to these pious beliefs. The idea that there is merit in credulity, with the love of myth-making and miracle-mongering, constantly made them larger. Nor did the Protestant Reformation diminish them at first; it rather strengthened them and fixed them more firmly in the popular mind. They seemed destined to last forever. How they were thus strengthened at first, under Protestantism, and how they were finally dissolved away in the atmosphere of scientific thought, will now be shown.(435) (435) For Father Anselm, see his Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, in H. Canisius, Thesaurus Monument Eccles., Basnage edition, Amsterdam, 1725, vol. iv, p. 788. For Giraudet, see his Discours du Voyage d'Outre-Mer, Paris, 1585, p. 56a. For Radziwill and Lowenstein, see the Reyssbuch, especially p. 198a. III. POST-REFORMATION CULMINATION OF THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS.--BEGINNINGS OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM. The first effect of the Protestant Reformation was to popularize the older Dead Sea legends, and to make the public mind still more receptive for the newer ones. Luther's great pictorial Bible, so powerful in fixing the ideas of the German people, showed by very striking engravings all three of these earlier myths--the destruction of the cities by fire from heaven, the transformation of Lot's wife, and the vile origin of the hated Moabites and Ammonites; and we find the salt statue, especially, in this and other pictorial Bibles, during generation after generation. Catholic peoples also held their own in this display of faith. About 1517 Francois Regnault published at Paris a compilation on Palestine enriched with woodcuts: in this the old Dead Sea legend of the "serpent Tyrus" reappears embellished, and with it various other new versions of old stories. Five years later Bartholomew de Salignac travels in the Holy Land, vouches for the continued existence of the Lot's wife statue, and gives new life to an old marvel by insisting that the sacred waters of the Jordan are not really poured into the infernal basin of the Dead Sea, but that they are miraculously absorbed by the earth. These ideas were not confined to the people at large; we trace them among scholars. In 1581, Bunting, a North German professor and theologian, published his Itinerary of Holy Scripture, and in this the Dead Sea and Lot legends continue to increase. He tells us that the water of the sea "changes three times every day"; that it "spits forth fire" that it throws up "on high" great foul masses which "burn like pitch" and "swim about like huge oxen"; that the statue of Lot's wife is still there, and that it shines like salt. In 1590, Christian Adrichom, a Dutch theologian, published his famous work on sacred geography. He does not insist upon the Dead Sea legends generally, but declares that the statue of Lot's wife is still in existence, and on his map he gives a picture of her standing at Usdum. Nor was it altogether safe to dissent from such beliefs. Just as, under the papal sway, men of science were severely punished for wrong views of the physical geography of the earth in general, so, when Calvin decided to burn Servetus, he included in his indictment for heresy a charge that Servetus, in his edition of Ptolemy, had made unorthodox statements regarding the physical geography of Palestine.(436) (436) For biblical engravings showing Lot's wife transformed into a salt statue, etc., see Luther's Bible, 1534, p. xi; also the pictorial Electoral Bible; also Merian's Icones Biblicae of 1625; also the frontpiece of the Luther Bible published at Nuremberg in 1708; also Scheuchzer's Kupfer-Bibel, Augsburg, 1731, Tab. lxxx. For the account of the Dead Sea serpent "Tyrus," etc., see La Grande Voyage de Hierusalem, Paris (1517?), p. xxi. For De Salignac's assertion regarding the salt pillar and suggestion regarding the absorption of the Jordan before reaching the Dead Sea, see his Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae, Magdeburg, 1593, SS 34 and 35. For Bunting, see his Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae, Magdeburg, 1589, pp. 78, 79. For Andrichom's picture of the salt statue, see map, p. 38, and text, p. 205, of his Theatrum Terrae Sanctae, 1613. For Calvin and Servetus, see Willis, Servetus and Calvin, pp. 96, 307; also the Servetus edition of Ptolemy. Protestants and Catholics vied with each other in the making of new myths. Thus, in his Most Devout Journey, published in 1608, Jean Zvallart, Mayor of Ath in Hainault, confesses himself troubled by conflicting stories about the salt statue, but declares himself sound in the faith that "some vestige of it still remains," and makes up for his bit of freethinking by adding a new mythical horror to the region--"crocodiles," which, with the serpents and the "foul odour of the sea," prevented his visit to the salt mountains. In 1615 Father Jean Boucher publishes the first of many editions of his Sacred Bouquet of the Holy Land. He depicts the horrors of the Dead Sea in a number of striking antitheses, and among these is the statement that it is made of mud rather than of water, that it soils whatever is put into it, and so corrupts the land about it that not a blade of grass grows in all that region. In the same spirit, thirteen years later, the Protestant Christopher Heidmann publishes his Palaestina, in which he speaks of a fluid resembling blood oozing from the rocks about the Dead Sea, and cites authorities to prove that the statue of Lot's wife still exists and gives signs of life. Yet, as we near the end of the sixteenth century, some evidences of a healthful and fruitful scepticism begin to appear. The old stream of travellers, commentators, and preachers, accepting tradition and repeating what they have been told, flows on; but here and there we are refreshed by the sight of a man who really begins to think and look for himself. First among these is the French naturalist Pierre Belon. As regards the ordinary wonders, he had the simple faith of his time. Among a multitude of similar things, he believed that he saw the stones on which the disciples were sleeping during the prayer of Christ; the stone on which the Lord sat when he raised Lazarus from the dead; the Lord's footprints on the stone from which he ascended into heaven; and, most curious of all, "the stone which the builders rejected." Yet he makes some advance on his predecessors, since he shows in one passage that he had thought out the process by which the simpler myths of Palestine were made. For, between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, he sees a field covered with small pebbles, and of these he says: "The common people tell you that a man was once sowing peas there, when Our Lady passed that way and asked him what he was doing; the man answered 'I am sowing pebbles' and straightway all the peas were changed into these little stones." His ascribing belief in this explanatory transformation myth to the "common people" marks the faint dawn of a new epoch. Typical also of this new class is the German botanist Leonhard Rauwolf. He travels through Palestine in 1575, and, though devout and at times credulous, notes comparatively few of the old wonders, while he makes thoughtful and careful mention of things in nature that he really saw; he declines to use the eyes of the monks, and steadily uses his own to good purpose. As we go on in the seventeenth century, this current of new thought is yet more evident; a habit of observing more carefully and of comparing observations had set in; the great voyages of discovery by Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, and others were producing their effect; and this effect was increased by the inductive philosophy of Bacon, the reasonings of Descartes, and the suggestions of Montaigne. So evident was this current that, as far back as the early days of the century, a great theologian, Quaresmio of Lodi, had made up his mind to stop it forever. In 1616, therefore, he began his ponderous work entitled The Historical, Theological, and Moral Explanation of the Holy Land. He laboured upon it for nine years, gave nine years more to perfecting it, and then put it into the hands of the great publishing house of Plantin at Antwerp: they were four years in printing and correcting it, and when it at last appeared it seemed certain to establish the theological view of the Holy Land for all time. While taking abundant care of other myths which he believed sanctified by Holy Scripture, Quaresmio devoted himself at great length to the Dead Sea, but above all to the salt statue; and he divides his chapter on it into three parts, each headed by a question: First, "HOW was Lot's wife changed into a statue of salt?" secondly, "WHERE was she thus transformed?" and, thirdly, "DOES THAT STATUE STILL EXIST?" Through each of these divisions he fights to the end all who are inclined to swerve in the slightest degree from the orthodox opinion. He utterly refuses to compromise with any modern theorists. To all such he says, "The narration of Moses is historical and is to be received in its natural sense, and no right-thinking man will deny this." To those who favoured the figurative interpretation he says, "With such reasonings any passage of Scripture can be denied." As to the spot where the miracle occurred, he discusses four places, but settles upon the point where the picture of the statue is given in Adrichom's map. As to the continued existence of the statue, he plays with the opposing view as a cat fondles a mouse; and then shows that the most revered ancient authorities, venerable men still living, and the Bedouins, all agree that it is still in being. Throughout the whole chapter his thoroughness in scriptural knowledge and his profundity in logic are only excelled by his scorn for those theologians who were willing to yield anything to rationalism. So powerful was this argument that it seemed to carry everything before it, not merely throughout the Roman obedience, but among the most eminent theologians of Protestantism. As regards the Roman Church, we may take as a type the missionary priest Eugene Roger, who, shortly after the appearance of Quaresmio's book, published his own travels in Palestine. He was an observant man, and his work counts among those of real value; but the spirit of Quaresmio had taken possession of him fully. His work is prefaced with a map showing the points of most importance in scriptural history, and among these he identifies the place where Samson slew the thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, and where he hid the gates of Gaza; the cavern which Adam and Eve inhabited after their expulsion from paradise; the spot where Balaam's ass spoke; the tree on which Absalom was hanged; the place where Jacob wrestled with the angel; the steep place where the swine possessed of devils plunged into the sea; the spot where the prophet Elijah was taken up in a chariot of fire; and, of course, the position of the salt statue which was once Lot's wife. He not only indicates places on land, but places in the sea; thus he shows where Jonah was swallowed by the whale, and "where St. Peter caught one hundred and fifty-three fishes." As to the Dead Sea miracles generally, he does not dwell on them at great length; he evidently felt that Quaresmio had exhausted the subject; but he shows largely the fruits of Quaresmio's teaching in other matters. So, too, we find the thoughts and words of Quaresmio echoing afar through the German universities, in public disquisitions, dissertations, and sermons. The great Bible commentators, both Catholic and Protestant, generally agreed in accepting them. But, strong as this theological theory was, we find that, as time went on, it required to be braced somewhat, and in 1692 Wedelius, Professor of Medicine at Jena, chose as the subject of his inaugural address The Physiology of the Destruction of Sodom and of the Statue of Salt. It is a masterly example of "sanctified science." At great length he dwells on the characteristics of sulphur, salt, and thunderbolts; mixes up scriptural texts, theology, and chemistry after a most bewildering fashion; and finally comes to the conclusion that a thunderbolt, flung by the Almighty, calcined the body of Lot's wife, and at the same time vitrified its particles into a glassy mass looking like salt.(437) (437) For Zvallart, see his Tres-devot Voyage de Ierusalem, Antwerp, 1608, book iv, chapter viii. His journey was made twenty years before. For Father Boucher, see his Bouquet de la Terre Saincte, Paris, 1622, pp. 447, 448. For Heidmann, see his Palaestina, 1689, pp. 58-62. For Belon's credulity in matters referred to, see his Observations de Plusieurs Singularitez, etc., Paris, 1553, pp. 141-144; and for the legend of the peas changed into pebbles, p. 145; see also Lartet in De Luynes, vol. iii, p. 11. For Rauwolf, see the Reyssbuch, and Tobler, Bibliographia. For a good acoount of the influence of Montaigne in developing French scepticism, see Prevost-Paradol's study on Montaigne prefixed to the Le Clerc edition of the Essays, Paris, 1865; also the well-known passages in Lecky's Rationalism in Europe. For Quaresmio I have consulted both the Plantin edition of 1639 and the superb new Venice edition of 1880-'82. The latter, though less prized by book fanciers, is the more valuable, since it contains some very interesting recent notes. For the above discussion, see Plantin edition, vol. ii, pp. 758 et seq., and Venice edition, vol. ii, pp. 572-574. As to the effect of Quaresmio on the Protestant Church, see Wedelius, De Statua Salis, Jenae, 1692, pp.6, 7, and elsewhere. For Eugene Roger, see his La Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664; the map, showing various sites referred to, is in the preface; and for basilisks, salamanders, etc., see pp. 89-92, 139, 218, and elsewhere. Not only were these views demonstrated, so far as theologico-scientific reasoning could demonstrate anything, but it was clearly shown, by a continuous chain of testimony from the earliest ages, that the salt statue at Usdum had been recognised as the body of Lot's wife by Jews, Mohammedans, and the universal Christian Church, "always, everywhere, and by all." Under the influence of teachings like these--and of the winter rains--new wonders began to appear at the salt pillar. In 1661 the Franciscan monk Zwinner published his travels in Palestine, and gave not only most of the old myths regarding the salt statue, but a new one, in some respects more striking than any of the old--for he had heard that a dog, also transformed into salt, was standing by the side of Lot's wife. Even the more solid Benedictine scholars were carried away, and we find in the Sacred History by Prof. Mezger, of the order of St. Benedict, published in 1700, a renewal of the declaration that the salt statue must be a "PERPETUAL memorial." But it was soon evident that the scientific current was still working beneath this ponderous mass of theological authority. A typical evidence of this we find in 1666 in the travels of Doubdan, a canon of St. Denis. As to the Dead Sea, he says that he saw no smoke, no clouds, and no "black, sticky water"; as to the statue of Lot's wife, he says, "The moderns do not believe so easily that she has lasted so long"; then, as if alarmed at his own boldness, he concedes that the sea MAY be black and sticky in the middle; and from Lot's wife he escapes under cover of some pious generalities. Four years later another French ecclesiastic, Jacques Goujon, referring in his published travels to the legends of the salt pillar, says: "People may believe these stories as much as they choose; I did not see it, nor did I go there." So, too, in 1697, Morison, a dignitary of the French Church, having travelled in Palestine, confesses that, as to the story of the pillar of salt, he has difficulty in believing it. The same current is observed working still more strongly in the travels of the Rev. Henry Maundrell, an English chaplain at Aleppo, who travelled through Palestine during the same year. He pours contempt over the legends of the Dead Sea in general: as to the story that birds could not fly over it, he says that he saw them flying there; as to the utter absence of life in the sea, he saw small shells in it; he saw no traces of any buried cities; and as to the stories regarding the statue of Lot's wife and the proposal to visit it, he says, "Nor could we give faith enough to these reports to induce us to go on such an errand." The influence of the Baconian philosophy on his mind is very clear; for, in expressing his disbelief in the Dead Sea apples, with their contents of ashes, he says that he saw none, and he cites Lord Bacon in support of scepticism on this and similar points. But the strongest effect of this growing scepticism is seen near the end of that century, when the eminent Dutch commentator Clericus (Le Clerc) published his commentary on the Pentateuch and his Dissertation on the Statue of Salt. At great length he brings all his shrewdness and learning to bear against the whole legend of the actual transformation of Lot's wife and the existence of the salt pillar, and ends by saying that "the whole story is due to the vanity of some and the credulity of more." In the beginning of the eighteenth century we find new tributaries to this rivulet of scientific thought. In 1701 Father Felix Beaugrand dismisses the Dead Sea legends and the salt statue very curtly and dryly--expressing not his belief in it, but a conventional wish to believe. In 1709 a scholar appeared in another part of Europe and of different faith, who did far more than any of his predecessors to envelop the Dead Sea legends in an atmosphere of truth--Adrian Reland, professor at the University of Utrecht. His work on Palestine is a monument of patient scholarship, having as its nucleus a love of truth as truth: there is no irreverence in him, but he quietly brushes away a great mass of myths and legends: as to the statue of Lot's wife, he treats it warily, but applies the comparative method to it with killing effect, by showing that the story of its miraculous renewal is but one among many of its kind.(438) (438) For Zwinner, see his Blumenbuch des Heyligen Landes, Munchen, 1661, p. 454. For Mezger, see his Sacra Historia, Augsburg, 1700, p. 30. For Doubdan, see his Voyage de la Terre-Sainte, Paris, 1670, pp. 338, 339; also Tobler and Gage's Ritter. For Goujon, see his Histoire et Voyage de la Terre Saincte, Lyons, 1670, p. 230, etc. For Morison, see his Voyage, book ii, pp. 516, 517. For Maundrell, see in Wright's Collection, pp. 383 et seq. For Clericus, see his Dissertation de Salis Statua, in his Pentateuch, edition of 1696, pp. 327 et seq. For Father Beaugrand, see his Voyage, Paris, 1701, pp. 137 et seq. For Reland, see his Palaestina, Utrecht, 1714, vol. i, pp. 61-254, passim. Yet to superficial observers the old current of myth and marvel seemed to flow into the eighteenth century as strong as ever, and of this we may take two typical evidences. The first of these is the Pious Pilgrimage of Vincent Briemle. His journey was made about 1710; and his work, brought out under the auspices of a high papal functionary some years later, in a heavy quarto, gave new life to the stories of the hellish character of the Dead Sea, and especially to the miraculous renewal of the salt statue. In 172O came a still more striking effort to maintain the old belief in the north of Europe, for in that year the eminent theologian Masius published his great treatise on The Conversion of Lot's Wife into a Statue of Salt. Evidently intending that this work should be the last word on this subject in Germany, as Quaresmio had imagined that his work would be the last in Italy, he develops his subject after the high scholastic and theologic manner. Calling attention first to the divine command in the New Testament, "Remember Lot's wife," he argues through a long series of chapters. In the ninth of these he discusses "the impelling cause" of her looking back, and introduces us to the question, formerly so often treated by theologians, whether the soul of Lot's wife was finally saved. Here we are glad to learn that the big, warm heart of Luther lifted him above the common herd of theologians, and led him to declare that she was "a faithful and saintly woman," and that she certainly was not eternally damned. In justice to the Roman Church also it should be said that several of her most eminent commentators took a similar view, and insisted that the sin of Lot's wife was venial, and therefore, at the worst, could only subject her to the fires of purgatory. The eleventh chapter discusses at length the question HOW she was converted into salt, and, mentioning many theological opinions, dwells especially upon the view of Rivetus, that a thunderbolt, made up apparently of fire, sulphur, and salt, wrought her transformation at the same time that it blasted the land; and he bases this opinion upon the twenty-ninth chapter of Deuteronomy and the one hundred and seventh Psalm. Later, Masius presents a sacred scientific theory that "saline particles entered into her until her whole body was infected"; and with this he connects another piece of sanctified science, to the effect that "stagnant bile" may have rendered the surface of her body "entirely shining, bitter, dry, and deformed." Finally, he comes to the great question whether the salt pillar is still in existence. On this he is full and fair. On one hand he allows that Luther thought that it was involved in the general destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he cites various travellers who had failed to find it; but, on the other hand, he gives a long chain of evidence to show that it continued to exist: very wisely he reminds the reader that the positive testimony of those who have seen it must outweigh the negative testimony of those who have not, and he finally decides that the salt statue is still in being. No doubt a work like this produced a considerable effect in Protestant countries; indeed, this effect seems evident as far off as England, for, in 172O, we find in Dean Prideaux's Old and New Testament connected a map on which the statue of salt is carefully indicated. So, too, in Holland, in the Sacred Geography published at Utrecht in 1758 by the theologian Bachiene, we find him, while showing many signs of rationalism, evidently inclined to the old views as to the existence of the salt pillar; but just here comes a curious evidence of the real direction of the current of thought through the century, for, nine years later, in the German translation of Bachiene's work we find copious notes by the translator in a far more rationalistic spirit; indeed, we see the dawn of the inevitable day of compromise, for we now have, instead of the old argument that the divine power by one miraculous act changed Lot's wife into a salt pillar, the suggestion that she was caught in a shower of sulphur and saltpetre, covered by it, and that the result was a lump, which in a general way IS CALLED in our sacred books "a pillar of salt."(439) (439) For Briemle, see his Andachtige Pilgerfahrt, p. 129. For Masius, see his De Uxore Lothi in Statuam Salis Conversa, Hafniae, 1720, especially pages 29-31. For Dean Prideaux, see his Old and New Testament connected in the History of the Jews, 1720, map at page 7. For Bachiene, see his Historische und geographische Beschreibung von Palaestina, Leipzig, 1766, vol. i, pp. 118-120, and notes. But, from the middle of the eighteenth century, the new current sets through Christendom with ever-increasing strength. Very interesting is it to compare the great scriptural commentaries of the middle of this century with those published a century earlier. Of the earlier ones we may take Matthew Poole's Synopsis as a type: as authorized by royal decree in 1667 it contains very substantial arguments for the pious belief in the statue. Of the later ones we may take the edition of the noted commentary of the Jesuit Tirinus seventy years later: while he feels bound to present the authorities, he evidently endeavours to get rid of the subject as speedily as possible under cover of conventionalities; of the spirit of Quaresmio he shows no trace.(440) (440) For Poole (Polus) see his Synopsis, 1669, p. 179; and for Titinus, the Lyons edition of his Commentary, 1736, p. 10. About 1760 came a striking evidence of the strength of this new current. The Abate Mariti then published his book upon the Holy Land; and of this book, by an Italian ecclesiastic, the most eminent of German bibliographers in this field says that it first broke a path for critical study of the Holy Land. Mariti is entirely sceptical as to the sinking of the valley of Siddim and the overwhelming of the cities. He speaks kindly of a Capuchin Father who saw everywhere at the Dead Sea traces of the divine malediction, while he himself could not see them, and says, "It is because a Capuchin carries everywhere the five senses of faith, while I only carry those of nature." He speaks of "the lies of Josephus," and makes merry over "the rude and shapeless block" which the guide assured him was the statue of Lot's wife, explaining the want of human form in the salt pillar by telling him that this complete metamorphosis was part of her punishment. About twenty years later, another remarkable man, Volney, broaches the subject in what was then known as the "philosophic" spirit. Between the years 1783 and 1785 he made an extensive journey through the Holy Land and published a volume of travels which by acuteness of thought and vigour of style secured general attention. In these, myth and legend were thrown aside, and we have an account simply dictated by the love of truth as truth. He, too, keeps the torch of science burning by applying his geological knowledge to the regions which he traverses. As we look back over the eighteenth century we see mingled with the new current of thought, and strengthening it, a constantly increasing stream of more strictly scientific observation and reflection. To review it briefly: in the very first years of the century Maraldi showed the Paris Academy of Sciences fossil fishes found in the Lebanon region; a little later, Cornelius Bruyn, in the French edition of his Eastern travels, gave well-drawn representations of fossil fishes and shells, some of them from the region of the Dead Sea; about the middle of the century Richard Pococke, Bishop of Meath, and Korte of Altona made more statements of the same sort; and toward the close of the century, as we have seen, Volney gave still more of these researches, with philosophical deductions from them. The result of all this was that there gradually dawned upon thinking men the conviction that, for ages before the appearance of man on the planet, and during all the period since his appearance, natural laws have been steadily in force in Palestine as elsewhere; this conviction obliged men to consider other than supernatural causes for the phenomena of the Dead Sea, and myth and marvel steadily shrank in value. But at the very threshold of the nineteenth century Chateaubriand came into the field, and he seemed to banish the scientific spirit, though what he really did was to conceal it temporarily behind the vapours of his rhetoric. The time was propitious for him. It was the period of reaction after the French Revolution, when what was called religion was again in fashion, and when even atheists supported it as a good thing for common people: of such an epoch Chateaubriand, with his superficial information, thin sentiment, and showy verbiage, was the foreordained prophet. His enemies were wont to deny that he ever saw the Holy Land; whether he did or not, he added nothing to real knowledge, but simply threw a momentary glamour over the regions he described, and especially over the Dead Sea. The legend of Lot's wife he carefully avoided, for he knew too well the danger of ridicule in France. As long as the Napoleonic and Bourbon reigns lasted, and indeed for some time afterward, this kind of dealing with the Holy Land was fashionable, and we have a long series of men, especially of Frenchmen, who evidently received their impulse from Chateaubriand. About 1831 De Geramb, Abbot of La Trappe, evidently a very noble and devout spirit, sees vapour above the Dead Sea, but stretches the truth a little--speaking of it as "vapour or smoke." He could not find the salt statue, and complains of the "diversity of stories regarding it." The simple physical cause of this diversity--the washing out of different statues in different years--never occurs to him; but he comforts himself with the scriptural warrant for the metamorphosis.(441) (441) For Mariti, see his Voyage, etc., vol. ii, pp. 352-356. For Tobler's high opinion of him, see the Bibliographia, pp. 132, 133. For Volney, see his Voyage en Syrie et Egypte, Paris, 1807, vol. i, pp. 308 et seq.; also, for a statement of contributions of the eighteenth century to geology, Lartet in De Luynes's Mer Morte, vol. iii, p. 12. For Cornelius Bruyn, see French edition of his works, 1714 (in which his name is given as "Le Brun"), especially for representations of fossils, pp. 309, 375. For Chateaubriand, see his Voyage, etc., vol. ii, part iii. For De Geramb, see his Voyage, vol. ii, pp. 45-47. But to the honour of scientific men and scientific truth it should be said that even under Napoleon and the Bourbons there were men who continued to explore, observe, and describe with the simple love of truth as truth, and in spite of the probability that their researches would be received during their lifetime with contempt and even hostility, both in church and state. The pioneer in this work of the nineteenth century was the German naturalist Ulrich Seetzen. He began his main investigation in 1806, and soon his learning, courage, and honesty threw a flood of new light into the Dead Sea questions. In this light, myth and legend faded more rapidly than ever. Typical of his method is his examination of the Dead Sea fruit. He found, on reaching Palestine, that Josephus's story regarding it, which had been accepted for nearly two thousand years, was believed on all sides; more than this, he found that the original myth had so grown that a multitude of respectable people at Bethlehem and elsewhere assured him that not only apples, but pears, pomegranates, figs, lemons, and many other fruits which grow upon the shores of the Dead Sea, though beautiful to look upon, were filled with ashes. These good people declared to Seetzen that they had seen these fruits, and that, not long before, a basketful of them which had been sent to a merchant of Jaffa had turned to ashes. Seetzen was evidently perplexed by this mass of testimony and naturally anxious to examine these fruits. On arriving at the sea he began to look for them, and the guide soon showed him the "apples." These he found to be simply an asclepia, which had been described by Linnaeus, and which is found in the East Indies, Arabia, Egypt, Jamaica, and elsewhere--the "ashes" being simply seeds. He looked next for the other fruits, and the guide soon found for him the "lemons": these he discovered to be a species of solanum found in other parts of Palestine and elsewhere, and the seeds in these were the famous "cinders." He looked next for the pears, figs, and other accursed fruits; but, instead of finding them filled with ashes and cinders, he found them like the same fruits in other lands, and he tells us that he ate the figs with much pleasure. So perished a myth which had been kept alive two thousand years,--partly by modes of thought natural to theologians, partly by the self-interest of guides, and partly by the love of marvel-mongering among travellers. The other myths fared no better. As to the appearance of the sea, he found its waters not "black and sticky," but blue and transparent; he found no smoke rising from the abyss, but tells us that sunlight and cloud and shore were pleasantly reflected from the surface. As to Lot's wife, he found no salt pillar which had been a careless woman, but the Arabs showed him many boulders which had once been wicked men. His work was worthily continued by a long succession of true investigators,--among them such travellers or geographers as Burckhardt, Irby, Mangles, Fallmerayer, and Carl von Raumer: by men like these the atmosphere of myth and legend was steadily cleared away; as a rule, they simply forgot Lot's wife altogether. In this noble succession should be mentioned an American theologian, Dr. Edward Robinson, professor at New York. Beginning about 1826, he devoted himself for thirty years to the thorough study of the geography of Palestine, and he found a worthy coadjutor in another American divine, Dr. Eli Smith. Neither of these men departed openly from the old traditions: that would have cost a heart-breaking price--the loss of all further opportunity to carry on their researches. Robinson did not even think it best to call attention to the mythical character of much on which his predecessors had insisted; he simply brought in, more and more, the dry, clear atmosphere of the love of truth for truth's sake, and, in this, myths and legends steadily disappeared. By doing this he rendered a far greater service to real Christianity than any other theologian had ever done in this field. Very characteristic is his dealing with the myth of Lot's wife. Though more than once at Usdum,--though giving valuable information regarding the sea, shore, and mountains there, he carefully avoids all mention of the salt pillar and of the legend which arose from it. In this he set an example followed by most of the more thoughtful religious travellers since his time. Very significant is it to see the New Testament injunction, "Remember Lot's wife," so utterly forgotten. These later investigators seem never to have heard of it; and this constant forgetfulness shows the change which had taken place in the enlightened thinking of the world. But in the year 1848 came an episode very striking in its character and effect. At that time, the war between the United States and Mexico having closed, Lieutenant Lynch, of the United States Navy, found himself in the port of Vera Cruz, commanding an old hulk, the Supply. Looking about for something to do, it occurred to him to write to the Secretary of the Navy asking permission to explore the Dead Sea. Under ordinary circumstances the proposal would doubtless have been strangled with red tape; but, fortunately, the Secretary at that time was Mr. John Y. Mason, of Virginia. Mr. Mason was famous for his good nature. Both at Washington and at Paris, where he was afterward minister, this predominant trait has left a multitude of amusing traditions; it was of him that Senator Benton said, "To be supremely happy he must have his paunch full of oysters and his hands full of cards." The Secretary granted permission, but evidently gave the matter not another thought. As a result, came an expedition the most comical and one of the most rich in results to be found in American annals. Never was anything so happy-go-lucky. Lieutenant Lynch started with his hulk, with hardly an instrument save those ordinarily found on shipboard, and with a body of men probably the most unfit for anything like scientific investigation ever sent on such an errand; fortunately, he picked up a young instructor in mathematics, Mr. Anderson, and added to his apparatus two strong iron boats. Arriving, after a tedious voyage, on the coast of Asia Minor, he set to work. He had no adequate preparation in general history, archaeology, or the physical sciences; but he had his American patriotism, energy, pluck, pride, and devotion to duty, and these qualities stood him in good stead. With great labour he got the iron boats across the country. Then the tug of war began. First of all investigators, he forced his way through the whole length of the river Jordan and from end to end of the Dead Sea. There were constant difficulties--geographical, climatic, and personal; but Lynch cut through them all. He was brave or shrewd, as there was need. Anderson proved an admirable helper, and together they made surveys of distances, altitudes, depths, and sundry simple investigations in a geological, mineralogical, and chemical way. Much was poorly done, much was left undone, but the general result was most honourable both to Lynch and Anderson; and Secretary Mason found that his easy-going patronage of the enterprise was the best act of his official life. The results of this expedition on public opinion were most curious. Lynch was no scholar in any sense; he had travelled little, and thought less on the real questions underlying the whole investigation; as to the difference in depth of the two parts of the lake, he jumped--with a sailor's disregard of logic--to the conclusion that it somehow proved the mythical account of the overwhelming of the cities, and he indulged in reflections of a sort probably suggested by his recollections of American Sunday-schools. Especially noteworthy is his treatment of the legend of Lot's wife. He found the pillar of salt. It happened to be at that period a circular column of friable salt rock, about forty feet high; yet, while he accepts every other old myth, he treats the belief that this was once the wife of Lot as "a superstition." One little circumstance added enormously to the influence of this book, for, as a frontispiece, he inserted a picture of the salt column. It was delineated in rather a poetic manner: light streamed upon it, heavy clouds hung above it, and, as a background, were ranged buttresses of salt rock furrowed and channelled out by the winter rains: this salt statue picture was spread far and wide, and in thousands of country pulpits and Sunday-schools it was shown as a tribute of science to Scripture. Nor was this influence confined to American Sunday-school children: Lynch had innocently set a trap into which several European theologians stumbled. One of these was Dr. Lorenz Gratz, Vicar-General of Augsburg, a theological professor. In the second edition of his Theatre of the Holy Scriptures, published in 1858, he hails Lynch's discovery of the salt pillar with joy, forgets his allusion to the old theory regarding it as a superstition, and does not stop to learn that this was one of a succession of statues washed out yearly by the rains, but accepts it as the originaL Lot's wife. The French churchmen suffered most. About two years after Lynch, De Saulcy visited the Dead Sea to explore it thoroughly, evidently in the interest of sacred science--and of his own promotion. Of the modest thoroughness of Robinson there is no trace in his writings. He promptly discovered the overwhelmed cities, which no one before or since has ever found, poured contempt on other investigators, and threw over his whole work an air of piety. But, unfortunately, having a Frenchman's dread of ridicule, he attempted to give a rationalistic explanation of what he calls "the enormous needles of salt washed out by the winter rain," and their connection with the Lot's wife myth, and declared his firm belief that she, "being delayed by curiosity or terror, was crushed by a rock which rolled down from the mountain, and when Lot and his children turned about they saw at the place where she had been only the rock of salt which covered her body." But this would not do at all, and an eminent ecclesiastic privately and publicly expostulated with De Saulcy--very naturally declaring that "it was not Lot who wrote the book of Genesis." The result was that another edition of De Saulcy's work was published by a Church Book Society, with the offending passage omitted; but a passage was retained really far more suggestive of heterodoxy, and this was an Arab legend accounting for the origin of certain rocks near the Dead Sea curiously resembling salt formations. This in effect ran as follows: "Abraham, the friend of God, having come here one day with his mule to buy salt, the salt-workers impudently told him that they had no salt to sell, whereupon the patriarch said: 'Your words are, true, you have no salt to sell,' and instantly the salt of this whole region was transformed into stone, or rather into a salt which has lost its savour." Nothing could be more sure than this story to throw light into the mental and moral process by which the salt pillar myth was originally created. In the years 1864 and 1865 came an expedition on a much more imposing scale: that of the Duc de Luynes. His knowledge of archaeology and his wealth were freely devoted to working the mine which Lynch had opened, and, taking with him an iron vessel and several savants, he devoted himself especially to finding the cities of the Dead Sea, and to giving less vague accounts of them than those of De Saulcy. But he was disappointed, and honest enough to confess his disappointment. So vanished one of the most cherished parts of the legend. But worse remained behind. In the orthodox duke's company was an acute geologist, Monsieur Lartet, who in due time made an elaborate report, which let a flood of light into the whole region. The Abbe Richard had been rejoicing the orthodox heart of France by exhibiting some prehistoric flint implements as the knives which Joshua had made for circumcision. By a truthful statement Monsieur Lartet set all France laughing at the Abbe, and then turned to the geology of the Dead Sea basin. While he conceded that man may have seen some volcanic crisis there, and may have preserved a vivid remembrance of the vapour then rising, his whole argument showed irresistibly that all the phenomena of the region are due to natural causes, and that, so far from a sudden rising of the lake above the valley within historic times, it has been for ages steadily subsiding. Since Balaam was called by Balak to curse his enemies, and "blessed them altogether," there has never been a more unexpected tribute to truth. Even the salt pillar at Usdum, as depicted in Lynch's book, aided to undermine the myth among thinking men; for the background of the picture showed other pillars of salt in process of formation; and the ultimate result of all these expeditions was to spread an atmosphere in which myth and legend became more and more attenuated. To sum up the main points in this work of the nineteenth century: Seetzen, Robinson, and others had found that a human being could traverse the lake without being killed by hellish smoke; that the waters gave forth no odours; that the fruits of the region were not created full of cinders to match the desolation of the Dead Sea, but were growths not uncommon in Asia Minor and elsewhere; in fact, that all the phenomena were due to natural causes. Ritter and others had shown that all noted features of the Dead Sea and the surrounding country were to be found in various other lakes and regions, to which no supernatural cause was ascribed among enlightened men. Lynch, Van de Velde, Osborne, and others had revealed the fact that the "pillar of salt" was frequently formed anew by the rains; and Lartet and other geologists had given a final blow to the myths by making it clear from the markings on the neighbouring rocks that, instead of a sudden upheaval of the sea above the valley of Siddim, there had been a gradual subsidence for ages.(442) (442) For Seetzen, see his Reisen, edited by Kruse, Berlin, 1854-'59; for the "Dead Sea Fruits," vol. ii, pp. 231 et seq.; for the appearance of the sea, etc., p. 243, and elsewhere; for the Arab explanatory transformation legends, vol. iii, pp. 7, 14, 17. As to similarity of the "pillars of salt" to columns washed out by rains elsewhere, see Kruse's commentary in vol. iv, p. 240; also Fallmerayer, vol. i, p. 197. For Irby and Mangles, see work already cited. For Robinson, see his Biblical Researches, London,1841; also his Later Biblical Researches, London, 1856. For Lynch, see his Narrative, London, 1849. For Gratz, see his Schauplatz der Heyl. Schrift, pp. 186, 187. For De Saulcy, see his Voyage autour de la Mer Morte, Paris, 1853, especially vol. i, p. 252, and his journal of the early months of 1851, in vol. ii, comparing it with his work of the same title published in 1858 in the Bibliotheque Catholique de Voyages et du Romans, vol. i, pp. 78-81. For Lartet, see his papers read before the Geographical Society at Paris; also citations in Robinson; but, above all, his elaborate reports which form the greater part of the second and third volumes of the monumental work which bears the name of De Luynes, already cited. For exposures of De Saulcey's credulity and errors, see Van de Velde, Syria and Palestine, passim; also Canon Tristram's Land of Israel; also De Luynes, passim. Even before all this evidence was in, a judicial decision had been pronounced upon the whole question by an authority both Christian and scientific, from whom there could be no appeal. During the second quarter of the century Prof. Carl Ritter, of the University of Berlin, began giving to the world those researches which have placed him at the head of all geographers ancient or modern, and finally he brought together those relating to the geography of the Holy Land, publishing them as part of his great work on the physical geography of the earth. He was a Christian, and nothing could be more reverent than his treatment of the whole subject; but his German honesty did not permit him to conceal the truth, and he simply classed together all the stories of the Dead Sea--old and new--no matter where found, whether in the sacred books of Jews, Christians, or Mohammedans, whether in lives of saints or accounts of travellers, as "myths" and "sagas." From this decision there has never been among intelligent men any appeal. The recent adjustment of orthodox thought to the scientific view of the Dead Sea legends presents some curious features. As typical we may take the travels of two German theologians between 1860 and 1870--John Kranzel, pastor in Munich, and Peter Schegg, lately professor in the university of that city. The archdiocese of Munich-Freising is one of those in which the attempt to suppress modern scientific thought has been most steadily carried on. Its archbishops have constantly shown themselves assiduous in securing cardinals' hats by thwarting science and by stupefying education. The twin towers of the old cathedral of Munich have seemed to throw a killing shadow over intellectual development in that region. Naturally, then, these two clerical travellers from that diocese did not commit themselves to clearing away any of the Dead Sea myths; but it is significant that neither of them follows the example of so many of their clerical predecessors in defending the salt-pillar legend: they steadily avoid it altogether. The more recent history of the salt pillar, since Lynch, deserves mention. It appears that the travellers immediately after him found it shaped by the storms into a spire; that a year or two later it had utterly disappeared; and about the year 1870 Prof. Palmer, on visiting the place, found at some distance from the main salt bed, as he says, "a tall, isolated needle of rock, which does really bear a curious resemblance to an Arab woman with a child upon her shoulders." And, finally, Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, the standard work of reference for English-speaking scholars, makes its concession to the old belief regarding Sodom and Gomorrah as slight as possible, and the myth of Lot's wife entirely disappears. IV. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.--TRIUMPH OF THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. The theological effort to compromise with science now came in more strongly than ever. This effort had been made long before: as we have seen, it had begun to show itself decidedly as soon as the influence of the Baconian philosophy was felt. Le Clerc suggested that the shock caused by the sight of fire from heaven killed Lot's wife instantly and made her body rigid as a statue. Eichhorn suggested that she fell into a stream of melted bitumen. Michaelis suggested that her relatives raised a monument of salt rock to her memory. Friedrichs suggested that she fell into the sea and that the salt stiffened around her clothing, thus making a statue of her. Some claimed that a shower of sulphur came down upon her, and that the word which has been translated "salt" could possibly be translated "sulphur." Others hinted that the salt by its antiseptic qualities preserved her body as a mummy. De Saulcy, as we have seen, thought that a piece of salt rock fell upon her, and very recently Principal Dawson has ventured the explanation that a flood of salt mud coming from a volcano incrusted her. But theologians themselves were the first to show the inadequacy of these explanations. The more rationalistic pointed out the fact that they were contrary to the sacred text: Von Bohlen, an eminent professor at Konigsberg, in his sturdy German honesty, declared that the salt pillar gave rise to the story, and compared the pillar of salt causing this transformation legend to the rock in Greek mythology which gave rise to the transformation legend of Niobe. On the other hand, the more severely orthodox protested against such attempts to explain away the clear statements of Holy Writ. Dom Calmet, while presenting many of these explanations made as early as his time, gives us to understand that nearly all theologians adhered to the idea that Lot's wife was instantly and really changed into salt; and in our own time, as we shall presently see, have come some very vigorous protests. Similar attempts were made to explain the other ancient legends regarding the Dead Sea. One of the most recent of these is that the cities of the plain, having been built with blocks of bituminous rock, were set on fire by lightning, a contemporary earthquake helping on the work. Still another is that accumulations of petroleum and inflammable gas escaped through a fissure, took fire, and so produced the catastrophe.(443) (443) For Kranzel, see his Reise nach Jerusalem, etc. For Schegg, see his Gedenkbuch einer Pilgerreise, etc., 1867, chap. xxiv. For Palmer, see his Desert of the Exodus, vol. ii, pp. 478, 479. For the various compromises, see works already cited, passim. For Von Bohlen, see his Genesis, Konigsberg, 1835, pp. 200-213. For Calmet, see his Dictionarium, etc, Venet., 1766. For very recent compromises, see J. W. Dawson and Dr. Cunningham Geikie in works cited. The revolt against such efforts to RECONCILE scientific fact with myth and legend had become very evident about the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1851 and 1852 Van de Velde made his journey. He was a most devout man, but he confessed that the volcanic action at the Dead Sea must have been far earlier than the catastrophe mentioned in our sacred books, and that "the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing to do with this." A few years later an eminent dignitary of the English Church, Canon Tristram, doctor of divinity and fellow of the Royal Society, who had explored the Holy Land thoroughly, after some generalities about miracles, gave up the whole attempt to make science agree with the myths, and used these words: "It has been frequently assumed that the district of Usdum and its sister cities was the result of some tremendous geological catastrophe.... Now, careful examination by competent geologists, such as Monsieur Lartet and others, has shown that the whole district has assumed its present shape slowly and gradually through a succession of ages, and that its peculiar phenomena are similar to those of other lakes." So sank from view the whole mass of Dead Sea myths and legends, and science gained a victory both for geology and comparative mythology. As a protest against this sort of rationalism appeared in 1876 an edition of Monseigneur Mislin's work on The Holy Places. In order to give weight to the book, it was prefaced by letters from Pope Pius IX and sundry high ecclesiastics--and from Alexandre Dumas! His hatred of Protestant missionaries in the East is phenomenal: he calls them "bagmen," ascribes all mischief and infamy to them, and his hatred is only exceeded by his credulity. He cites all the arguments in favour of the salt statue at Usdum as the identical one into which Lot's wife was changed, adds some of his own, and presents her as "a type of doubt and heresy." With the proverbial facility of dogmatists in translating any word of a dead language into anything that suits their purpose, he says that the word in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis which is translated "statue" or "pillar," may be translated "eternal monument"; he is especially severe on poor Monsieur De Saulcy for thinking that Lot's wife was killed by the falling of a piece of salt rock; and he actually boasts that it was he who caused De Saulcy, a member of the French Institute, to suppress the obnoxious passage in a later edition. Between 1870 and 1880 came two killing blows at the older theories, and they were dealt by two American scholars of the highest character. First of these may be mentioned Dr. Philip Schaff, a professor in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at New York, who published his travels in 1877. In a high degree he united the scientific with the religious spirit, but the trait which made him especially fit for dealing with this subject was his straightforward German honesty. He tells the simple truth regarding the pillar of salt, so far as its physical origin and characteristics are concerned, and leaves his reader to draw the natural inference as to its relation to the myth. With the fate of Dr. Robertson Smith in Scotland and Dr. Woodrow in South Carolina before him--both recently driven from their professorships for truth-telling--Dr. Schaff deserves honour for telling as much as he does. Similar in effect, and even more bold in statement, were the travels of the Rev. Henry Osborn, published in 1878. In a truly scientific spirit he calls attention to the similarity of the Dead Sea, with the river Jordan, to sundry other lake and river systems; points out the endless variations between writers describing the salt formations at Usdum; accounts rationally for these variations, and quotes from Dr. Anderson's report, saying, "From the soluble nature of the salt and the crumbling looseness of the marl, it may well be imagined that, while some of these needles are in the process of formation, others are being washed away." Thus came out, little by little, the truth regarding the Dead Sea myths, and especially the salt pillar at Usdum; but the final truth remained to be told in the Church, and now one of the purest men and truest divines of this century told it. Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, visiting the country and thoroughly exploring it, allowed that the physical features of the Dead Sea and its shores suggested the myths and legends, and he sums up the whole as follows: "A great mass of legends and exaggerations, partly the cause and partly the result of the old belief that the cities were buried under the Dead Sea, has been gradually removed in recent years." So, too, about the same time, Dr. Conrad Furrer, pastor of the great church of St. Peter at Zurich, gave to the world a book of travels, reverent and thoughtful, and in this honestly acknowledged that the needles of salt at the southern end of the Dead Sea "in primitive times gave rise to the tradition that Lot's wife was transformed into a statue of salt." Thus was the mythical character of this story at last openly confessed by Leading churchmen on both continents. Plain statements like these from such sources left the high theological position more difficult than ever, and now a new compromise was attempted. As the Siberian mother tried to save her best-beloved child from the pursuing wolves by throwing over to them her less favoured children, so an effort was now made in a leading commentary to save the legends of the valley of Siddim and the miraculous destruction of the cities by throwing overboard the legend of Lot's wife.(444) (444) For Mislin, see his Les Saints Lieux, Paris, vol. iii, pp. 290-293, especially note at foot of page 292. For Schaff, see his Through Bible Lands, especially chapter xxix; see also Rev. H. S. Osborn, M. A., The Holy Land, pp. 267 et seq.; also Stanley's Sinai and Palestine, London, 1887, especially pp. 290-293. For Furrer, see his En Palestine, Geneva, 1886, vol. i, p.246. For the attempt to save one legend by throwing overboard the other, see Keil and Delitzsch, Biblischer Commentar uber das Alte Testament, vol. i, pp. 155, 156. For Van de Velde, see his Syria and Palestine, vol. ii, p. 120. An amusing result has followed this development of opinion. As we have already seen, traveller after traveller, Catholic and Protestant, now visits the Dead Sea, and hardly one of them follows the New Testament injunction to "remember Lot's wife." Nearly every one of them seems to think it best to forget her. Of the great mass of pious legends they are shy enough, but that of Lot's wife, as a rule, they seem never to have heard of, and if they do allude to it they simply cover the whole subject with a haze of pious rhetoric.(445) (445) The only notice of the Lot's wife legend in the editions of Robinson at my command is a very curious one by Leopold von Buch, the eminent geologist. Robinson, with a fearlessness which does him credit, consulted Von Buch, who in his answer was evidently inclined to make things easier for Robinson by hinting that Lot was so much struck by the salt formations that HE IMAGINED that his wife had been changed into salt. On this theory, Robinson makes no comment. See Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine, etc., London, 1841, vol. ii, p. 674. Naturally, under this state of things, there has followed the usual attempt to throw off from Christendom the responsibility of the old belief, and in 1887 came a curious effort of this sort. In that year appeared the Rev. Dr. Cunningham Geikie's valuable work on The Holy Land and the Bible. In it he makes the following statement as to the salt formation at Usdum: "Here and there, hardened portions of salt withstanding the water, while all around them melts and wears off, rise up isolated pillars, one of which bears among the Arabs the name of 'Lot's wife.'" In the light of the previous history, there is something at once pathetic and comical in this attempt to throw the myth upon the shoulders of the poor Arabs. The myth was not originated by Mohammedans; it appears, as we have seen, first among the Jews, and, I need hardly remind the reader, comes out in the Book of Wisdom and in Josephus, and has been steadily maintained by fathers, martyrs, and doctors of the Church, by at least one pope, and by innumerable bishops, priests, monks, commentators, and travellers, Catholic and Protestant, ever since. In thus throwing the responsibility of the myth upon the Arabs Dr. Geikie appears to show both the "perfervid genius" of his countrymen and their incapacity to recognise a joke. Nor is he more happy in his rationalistic explanations of the whole mass of myths. He supposes a terrific storm, in which the lightning kindled the combustible materials of the cities, aided perhaps by an earthquake; but this shows a disposition to break away from the exact statements of the sacred books which would have been most severely condemned by the universal Church during at least eighteen hundred years of its history. Nor would the explanations of Sir William Dawson have fared any better: it is very doubtful whether either of them could escape unscathed today from a synod of the Free Church of Scotland, or of any of the leading orthodox bodies in the Southern States of the American Union.(446) (446) For these most recent explanations, see Rev. Cunningham Geikie, D. D., in work cited; also Sir J. W. Dawson, Egypt and Syria, published by the Religious Tract Society, 1887, pp. 125, 126; see also Dawson's article in The Expositor for January, 1886. How unsatisfactory all such rationalism must be to a truly theological mind is seen not only in the dealings with Prof. Robertson Smith in Scotland and Prof. Woodrow in South Carolina, but most clearly in a book published in 1886 by Monseigneur Haussmann de Wandelburg. Among other things, the author was Prelate of the Pope's House-hold, a Mitred Abbot, Canon of the Holy Sepulchre, and a Doctor of Theology of the Pontifical University at Rome, and his work is introduced by approving letters from Pope Leo XIII and the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Monseigneur de Wandelburg scorns the idea that the salt column at Usdum is not the statue of Lot's wife; he points out not only the danger of yielding this evidence of miracle to rationalism, but the fact that the divinely inspired authority of the Book of Wisdom, written, at the latest, two hundred and fifty years before Christ, distinctly refers to it. He summons Josephus as a witness. He dwells on the fact that St. Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Hegesippus, and St. Cyril, "who as Bishop of Jerusalem must have known better than any other person what existed in Palestine," with St. Jerome, St. Chrysostom, and a multitude of others, attest, as a matter of their own knowledge or of popular notoriety, that the remains of Lot's wife really existed in their time in the form of a column of salt; and he points triumphantly to the fact that Lieutenant Lynch found this very column. In the presence of such a continuous line of witnesses, some of them considered as divinely inspired, and all of them greatly revered--a line extending through thirty-seven hundred years--he condemns most vigorously all those who do not believe that the pillar of salt now at Usdum is identical with the wife of Lot, and stigmatizes them as people who "do not wish to believe the truth of the Word of God." His ignorance of many of the simplest facts bearing upon the legend is very striking, yet he does not hesitate to speak of men who know far more and have thought far more upon the subject as "grossly ignorant." The most curious feature in his ignorance is the fact that he is utterly unaware of the annual changes in the salt statue. He is entirely ignorant of such facts as that the priest Gabriel Giraudet in the sixteenth century found the statue lying down; that the monk Zwinner found it in the seventeenth century standing, and accompanied by a dog also transformed into salt; that Prince Radziwill found no statue at all; that the pious Vincent Briemle in the eighteenth century found the monument renewing itself; that about the middle of the nineteenth century Lynch found it in the shape of a tower or column forty feet high; that within two years afterward De Saulcy found it washed into the form of a spire; that a year later Van de Velde found it utterly washed away; and that a few years later Palmer found it "a statue bearing a striking resemblance to an Arab woman with a child in her arms." So ended the last great demonstration, thus far, on the side of sacred science--the last retreating shot from the theological rear guard. It is but just to say that a very great share in the honour of the victory of science in this field is due to men trained as theologians. It would naturally be so, since few others have devoted themselves to direct labour in it; yet great honour is none the less due to such men as Reland, Mariti, Smith, Robinson, Stanley, Tristram, and Schat. They have rendered even a greater service to religion than to science, for they have made a beginning, at least, of doing away with that enforced belief in myths as history which has become a most serious danger to Christianity. For the worst enemy of Christianity could wish nothing more than that its main Leaders should prove that it can not be adopted save by those who accept, as historical, statements which unbiased men throughout the world know to be mythical. The result of such a demonstration would only be more and more to make thinking people inside the Church dissemblers, and thinking people outside, scoffers. Far better is it to welcome the aid of science, in the conviction that all truth is one, and, in the light of this truth, to allow theology and science to work together in the steady evolution of religion and morality. The revelations made by the sciences which most directly deal with the history of man all converge in the truth that during the earlier stages of this evolution moral and spiritual teachings must be inclosed in myth, legend, and parable. "The Master" felt this when he gave to the poor peasants about him, and so to the world, his simple and beautiful illustrations. In making this truth clear, science will give to religion far more than it will take away, for it will throw new life and light into all sacred literature. CHAPTER XIX. FROM LEVITICUS TO POLITICAL ECONOMY I. ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF HOSTILITY TO LOANS AT INTEREST. Among questions on which the supporters of right reason in political and social science have only conquered theological opposition after centuries of war, is the taking of interest on loans. In hardly any struggle has rigid adherence to the letter of our sacred books been more prolonged and injurious. Certainly, if the criterion of truth, as regards any doctrine, be that of St. Vincent of Lerins--that it has been held in the Church "always, everywhere, and by all"--then on no point may a Christian of these days be more sure than that every savings institution, every loan and trust company, every bank, every loan of capital by an individual, every means by which accumulated capital has been lawfully lent even at the most moderate interest, to make men workers rather than paupers, is based on deadly sin. The early evolution of the belief that taking interest for money is sinful presents a curious working together of metaphysical, theological, and humanitarian ideas. In the main centre of ancient Greek civilization, the loaning of money at interest came to be accepted at an early period as a condition of productive industry, and no legal restriction was imposed. In Rome there was a long process of development: the greed of creditors in early times led to laws against the taking of interest; but, though these lasted long, that strong practical sense which gave Rome the empire of the world substituted finally, for this absolute prohibition, the establishment of rates by law. Yet many of the leading Greek and Roman thinkers opposed this practical settlement of the question, and, foremost of all, Aristotle. In a metaphysical way he declared that money is by nature "barren"; that the birth of money from money is therefore "unnatural"; and hence that the taking of interest is to be censured and hated. Plato, Plutarch, both the Catos, Cicero, Seneca, and various other leaders of ancient thought, arrived at much the same conclusion--sometimes from sympathy with oppressed debtors; sometimes from dislike of usurers; sometimes from simple contempt of trade. From these sources there came into the early Church the germ of a theological theory upon the subject. But far greater was the stream of influence from the Jewish and Christian sacred books. In the Old Testament stood various texts condemning usury--the term usury meaning any taking of interest: the law of Moses, while it allowed usury in dealing with strangers, forbade it in dealing with Jews. In the New Testament, in the Sermon on the Mount, as given by St. Luke, stood the text "Lend, hoping for nothing again." These texts seemed to harmonize with the most beautiful characteristic of primitive Christianity; its tender care for the poor and oppressed: hence we find, from the earliest period, the whole weight of the Church brought to bear against the taking of interest for money.(448) (448) On the general allowance of interest for money in Greece, even at high rates, see Bockh, Public Economy of the Athenians, translated by Lamb, Boston, 1857, especially chaps. xxii, xxiii, and xxiv of book i. For a view of usury taken by Aristotle, see his Politics and Economics, translated by Walford, p. 27; also Grote, History of Greece, vol. iii, chap. xi. For summary of opinions in Greece and Rome, and their relation to Christian thought, see Bohm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest, translated by Smart, London, 1890, chap. i. For a very full list of scripture texts against the taking of interest, see Pearson, The Theories on Usury in Europe, 1100-1400, Cambridge (England), 1876, p. 6. The texts most frequently cited were Leviticus xxv, 36, 37; Deuteronomy xxiii, 19 and 26; Psalms, xv, 5; Ezekiel xviii, 8 and 17; St. Luke, vi, 35. For a curious modern use of them, see D. S. Dickinson's speech in the State of New York, in vol. i of his collected writings. See also Lecky, History of Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii, chap. vi; and above all, as the most recent historical summary by a leading historian of political economy, Bohm-Bawerk, as above. The great fathers of the Eastern Church, and among them St. Basil, St. Chrysostom, and St. Gregory of Nyssa,--the fathers of the Western Church, and among them Tertullian, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome, joined most earnestly in this condemnation. St. Basil denounces money at interest as a "fecund monster," and says, "The divine law declares expressly, 'Thou shalt not lend on usury to thy brother or thy neighbour.'" St. Gregory of Nyssa calls down on him who lends money at interest the vengeance of the Almighty. St. Chrysostom says: "What can be more unreasonable than to sow without land, without rain, without ploughs? All those who give themselves up to this damnable culture shall reap only tares. Let us cut off these monstrous births of gold and silver; let us stop this execrable fecundity." Lactantius called the taking of interest "robbery." St. Ambrose declared it as bad as murder, St. Jerome threw the argument into the form of a dilemma, which was used as a weapon against money-lenders for centuries. Pope Leo the Great solemnly adjudged it a sin worthy of severe punishment.(449) (449) For St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nyssa, see French translation of their diatribes in Homelies contre les Usuriers, Paris, Hachette, 1861-'62, especially p. 30 of St. Basil. For some doubtful reservations by St. Augustine, see Murray, History of Usury. For St. Ambrose, see De Officiis, lib. iii, cap. ii, in Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xvi; also the De Tobia, in Migne, vol. xiv. For St. Augustine, see De Bapt. contr Donat., lib. iv, cap. ix, in Migne, vol. xliii. For Lactantius, see his Opera, Leyden, 1660, p. 608. For Cyprian, see his Testimonies against the Jews, translated by Wallis, book iii, article 48. For St. Jerome, see his Com. in Ezekiel, xviii, 8, in Migne, vol. xxv, pp. 170 et seq. For Leo the Great, see his letter to the bishops of various provinces of Italy, cited in the Jus. Can., cap. vii, can. xiv, qu. 4. For very fair statements of the attitude of the fathers on this question, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, London, 1884, and Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, London, 1875-'80; in each, under article Usury. This unanimity of the fathers of the Church brought about a crystallization of hostility to interest-bearing loans into numberless decrees of popes and councils and kings and legislatures throughout Christendom during more than fifteen hundred years, and the canon law was shaped in accordance with these. At first these were more especially directed against the clergy, but we soon find them extending to the laity. These prohibitions were enforced by the Council of Arles in 314, and a modern Church apologist insists that every great assembly of the Church, from the Council of Elvira in 306 to that of Vienne in 1311, inclusive, solemnly condemned lending money at interest. The greatest rulers under the sway of the Church--Justinian, in the Empire of the East; Charlemagne, in the Empire of the West; Alfred, in England; St. Louis, in France--yielded fully to this dogma. In the ninth century Alfred went so far as to confiscate the estates of money-lenders, denying them burial in Consecrated ground; and similar decrees were made in other parts of Europe. In the twelfth century the Greek Church seems to have relaxed its strictness somewhat, but the Roman Church grew more severe. St. Anselm proved from the Scriptures that the taking of interest is a breach of the Ten Commandments. Peter Lombard, in his Sentences, made the taking of interest purely and simply theft. St. Bernard, reviving religious earnestness in the Church, took the same view. In 1179 the Third Council of the Lateran decreed that impenitent money-lenders should be excluded from the altar, from absolution in the hour of death, and from Christian burial. Pope Urban III reiterated the declaration that the passage in St. Luke forbade the taking of any interest whatever. Pope Alexander III declared that the prohibition in this matter could never be suspended by dispensation. In the thirteenth century Pope Gregory IX dealt an especially severe blow at commerce by his declaration that even to advance on interest the money necessary in maritime trade was damnable usury; and this was fitly followed by Gregory X, who forbade Christian burial to those guilty of this practice; the Council of Lyons meted out the same penalty. This idea was still more firmly fastened upon the world by the two greatest thinkers of the time: first, by St. Thomas Aquinas, who knit it into the mind of the Church by the use of the Scriptures and of Aristotle; and next by Dante, who pictured money-lenders in one of the worst regions of hell. About the beginning of the fourteenth century the "Subtile Doctor" of the Middle Ages, Duns Scotus, gave to the world an exquisite piece of reasoning in evasion of the accepted doctrine; but all to no purpose: the Council of Vienne, presided over by Pope Clement V, declared that if any one "shall pertinaciously presume to affirm that the taking of interest for money is not a sin, we decree him to be a heretic, fit for punishment." This infallible utterance bound the dogma with additional force on the conscience of the universal Church. Nor was this a doctrine enforced by rulers only; the people were no less strenuous. In 1390 the city authorities of London enacted that, "if any person shall lend or put into the hands of any person gold or silver to receive gain thereby, such person shall have the punishment for usurers." And in the same year the Commons prayed the king that the laws of London against usury might have the force of statutes throughout the realm. In the fifteenth century the Council of the Church at Salzburg excluded from communion and burial any who took interest for money, and this was a very general rule throughout Germany. An exception was, indeed, sometimes made: some canonists held that Jews might be allowed to take interest, since they were to be damned in any case, and their monopoly of money-lending might prevent Christians from losing their souls by going into the business. Yet even the Jews were from time to time punished for the crime of usury; and, as regards Christians, punishment was bestowed on the dead as well as the living--the bodies of dead money-lenders being here and there dug up and cast out of consecrated ground. The popular preachers constantly declaimed against all who took interest. The medieval anecdote books for pulpit use are especially full on this point. Jacques de Vitry tells us that demons on one occasion filled a dead money-lender's mouth with red-hot coins; Cesarius of Heisterbach declared that a toad was found thrusting a piece of money into a dead usurer's heart; in another case, a devil was seen pouring molten gold down a dead money-lender's throat.(450) (450) For an enumeration of councils condemning the taking of interest for money, see Liegeois, Essai sur l'Histoire et la Legislation de l'Usure, Paris, 1865, p. 78; also the Catholic Dictionary as above. For curious additional details and sources regarding mediaeval horror of usurers, see Ducange, Glossarium, etc., article Caorcini. T he date 306, for the Council of Elvira is that assigned by Hefele. For the decree of Alexander III, see citation from the Latin text in Lecky. For a long catalogue of ecclesiastical and civil decrees against taking of interest, see Petit, Traite de l'Usure, Paris, 1840. For the reasoning at the bottom of this, see Cunningham, Christian Opinion on Usury, London, 1884. For the Salzburg decrees, see Zillner, Salzburgusche Culturgeschichte, p. 232; and for Germany generally, see Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland, Halle, 1865, especially pp. 22 et seq; also Roscher, National-Oeconomis. For effect of mistranslation of the passage of Luke in the Vulgate, see Dollinger, p. 170, and especially pp. 224, 225 For the capitularies of Charlemagne against usury, see Liegeois, p. 77. For Gregory X and the Council of Lyons, see Sextus Decretalium liber, pp. 669 et. seq. For Peter Lombard, see his Lib. Sententiarum, III, dist. xxxvii, 3. For St. Thomas Aquinas, see his works, Migne, vol. iii, Paris 1889, quaestio 78, pp. 587 et seq., citing the Scriptures and Aristotle, and especially developing Aristotle's metaphysical idea regarding the "barrenness" of money. For a very good summary of St. Thomas's ideas, see Pearson. pp. 30 et seq. For Dante, see in canto xi of the Inferno a revelation of the amazing depth of the hostility to the taking of interest. For the London law of 1390 and the petition to the king, see Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, pp. 210, 326; also the Abridgment of the Records in the Tower of London, p. 339. For the theory that Jews, being damned already, might be allowed to practice usury, see Liegeois, Histoire de l'Usure, p. 82. For St. Bernard's view, see Epist. CCCLXIII, in Migne, vol. clxxxii, p. 567. For ideas and anecdotes for preachers' use, see Joannes a San Geminiano, Summa de Exemplis, Antwerp, 1629, fol. 493, a; also the edition of Venice, 1584, ff. 132, 159; but especially, for multitudes of examples, see the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, edited by Prof. T. F. Crane, of Cornell University, London, 1890, pp. 203 et seq. For the canon law in regard to interest, see a long line of authorities cited in Die Wucherfrage, St. Louis, 1869, pp. 92 et seq., and especially Decret. Gregor., lib v, lit. 19, cap. iii, and Clementin., lib. v, lit. 5, sec. 2; see also the Corpus Juris Canonici, Paris, 1618, pp. 227, 228. For the position of the English Church, see Gibson's Corpus Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani, pp. 1070, 1071, 1106. This theological hostility to the taking of interest was imbedded firmly in the canon law. Again and again it defined usury to be the taking of anything of value beyond the exact original amount of a loan; and under sanction of the universal Church it denounced this as a crime and declared all persons defending it to be guilty of heresy. What this meant the world knows but too well. The whole evolution of European civilization was greatly hindered by this conscientious policy. Money could only be loaned in most countries at the risk of incurring odium in this world and damnation in the next; hence there was but little capital and few lenders. The rates of interest became at times enormous; as high as forty per cent in England, and ten per cent a month in Italy and Spain. Commerce, manufactures, and general enterprise were dwarfed, while pauperism flourished. Yet worse than these were the moral results. Doing what one holds to be evil is only second in bad consequences to doing what is really evil; hence, all lending and borrowing, even for the most legitimate purposes and at the most reasonable rates, tended to debase both borrower and lender. The prohibition of lending at interest in continental Europe promoted luxury and discouraged economy; the rich, who were not engaged in business, finding no easy way of employing their incomes productively, spent them largely in ostentation and riotous living. One evil effect is felt in all parts of the world to this hour. The Jews, so acute in intellect and strong in will, were virtually drawn or driven out of all other industries or professions by the theory that their race, being accursed, was only fitted for the abhorred profession of money-lending.(451) (451) For evil economic results, and especially for the rise of the rate of interest in England and elsewhere at times to forty per cent, see Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Cambridge, 1890, p. 189; and for its rising to ten per cent a month, see Bedarride, Les Juifs en France, en Italie, at en Espagne, p. 220; see also Hallam's Middle Ages, London, 1853, pp. 401, 402. For the evil moral effects of the Church doctrine against taking interest, see Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, lib. xxi, chap. xx; see also Sismondi, cited in Lecky. For the trifling with conscience, distinction between "consumptibles" and "fungibles," "possessio" and "dominium," etc., see Ashley, English Economic History, New York, pp. 152, 153; see also Leopold Delisle, Etudes, pp. 198, 468. For the effects of these doctrines on the Jews, see Milman, History of the Jews, vol. iii, p. 179; also Wellhausen, History of Israel, London, 1885, p. 546; also Beugnot, Les Juifs d'Occident, Paris, 1824, pt. 2, p. 114 (on driving Jews out of other industries than money-lending). For a noted mediaeval evasion of the Church rules against usury, see Peruzzi, Storia del Commercio e dei Banchieri di Firenze, Florence, 1868, pp. 172, 173. These evils were so manifest, when trade began to revive throughout Europe in the fifteenth century, that most earnest exertions were put forth to induce the Church to change its position. The first important effort of this kind was made by John Gerson. His general learning made him Chancellor of the University of Paris; his sacred learning made him the leading orator at the Council of Constance; his piety led men to attribute to him The Imitation of Christ. Shaking off theological shackles, he declared, "Better is it to lend money at reasonable interest, and thus to give aid to the poor, than to see them reduced by poverty to steal, waste their goods, and sell at a low price their personal and real property." But this idea was at once buried beneath citations from the Scriptures, the fathers, councils, popes, and the canon law. Even in the most active countries there seemed to be no hope. In England, under Henry VII, Cardinal Morton, the lord chancellor, addressed Parliament, asking it to take into consideration loans of money at interest. The result was a law which imposed on lenders at interest a fine of a hundred pounds besides the annulment of the loan; and, to show that there was an offence against religion involved, there was added a clause "reserving to the Church, notwithstanding this punishment, the correction of their souls according to the laws of the same." Similar enactments were made by civil authority in various parts of Europe; and just when the trade, commerce, and manufactures of the modern epoch had received an immense impulse from the great series of voyages of discovery by such men as Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, and the Cabots, this barrier against enterprise was strengthened by a decree from no less enlightened a pontiff than Leo X. The popular feeling warranted such decrees. As late as the end of the Middle Ages we find the people of Piacenza dragging the body of a money-lender out of his grave in consecrated ground and throwing it into the river Po, in order to stop a prolonged rainstorm; and outbreaks of the same spirit were frequent in other countries. (452) (452) For Gerson's argument favouring a reasonable rate of interest, see Coquelin and Guillaumin, Dictionnaire, article Interet. For the renewed opposition to the taking of interest in England, see Craik, History of British Commerce, chap. vi. The statute cited is 3 Henry VII, chap. vi; it is found in Gibson's Corpus Juris Eccles. Anglic., p. 1071. For the adverse decree of Leo X, see Liegeois, p. 76. See also Lecky, Rationalism, vol. ii. For the dragging out of the usurer's body at Piacenza, see Burckhardt, The Renaissance in Italy, London, 1878, vol. ii, p. 339. For public opinion of similar strength on this subject in England, see Cunningham, p. 239; also Pike, History of Crime in England, vol. i, pp. 127, 193. For good general observations on the same, see Stephen, History of Criminal Law in England, London, 1883, vol. iii, pp. 195-197. For usury laws in Castile and Aragon, see Bedarride, pp. 191, 192. For exceedingly valuable details as to the attitude of the mediaeval Church, see Leopold Delisle, Etudes sur la Classe Agricole en Normandie au Moyen Age, Evreux, 1851, pp. 200 et seq., also p. 468. For penalties in France, see Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, in the Rolls Series, especially vol. iii, pp. 191, 192. For a curious evasion, sanctioned by Popes Martin V and Calixtus III when Church corporations became money-lenders, see H. C. Lea on The Ecclesiastical Treatment of Usury, in the Yale Review for February, 1894. For a detailed development of interesting subordinate points, see Ashley, Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, vol. ii, ch, vi. Another mode of obtaining relief was tried. Subtle theologians devised evasions of various sorts. Two among these inventions of the schoolmen obtained much notoriety. The first was the doctrine of "damnum emergens": if a lender suffered loss by the failure of the borrower to return a loan at a date named, compensation might be made. Thus it was that, if the nominal date of payment was made to follow quickly after the real date of the loan, the compensation for the anticipated delay in payment had a very strong resemblance to interest. Equally cogent was the doctrine of "lucrum cessans": if a man, in order to lend money, was obliged to diminish his income from productive enterprises, it was claimed that he might receive in return, in addition to his money, an amount exactly equal to this diminution in his income. But such evasions were looked upon with little favour by the great body of theologians, and the name of St. Thomas Aquinas was triumphantly cited against them. Opposition on scriptural grounds to the taking of interest was not confined to the older Church. Protestantism was led by Luther and several of his associates into the same line of thought and practice. Said Luther. "To exchange anything with any one and gain by the exchange is not to do a charity; but to steal. Every usurer is a thief worthy of the gibbet. I call those usurers who lend money at five or six per cent." But it is only just to say that at a later period Luther took a much more moderate view. Melanchthon, defining usury as any interest whatever, condemned it again and again; and the Goldberg Catechism of 1558, for which he wrote a preface and recommendation, declares every person taking interest for money a thief. From generation to generation this doctrine was upheld by the more eminent divines of the Lutheran Church in all parts of Germany. The English reformers showed the same hostility to interest-bearing loans. Under Henry VIII the law of Henry VII against taking interest had been modified for the better; but the revival of religious feeling under Edward VI caused in 1552 the passage of the "Bill of Usury." In this it is said, "Forasmuch as usury is by the word of God utterly prohibited, as a vice most odious and detestable, as in divers places of the Holy Scriptures it is evident to be seen, which thing by no godly teachings and persuasions can sink into the hearts of divers greedy, uncharitable, and covetous persons of this realm, nor yet, by any terrible threatenings of God's wrath and vengeance," etc., it is enacted that whosoever shall thereafter lend money "for any manner of usury, increase, lucre, gain, or interest, to be had, received, or hoped for," shall forfeit principal and interest, and suffer imprisonment and fine at the king's pleasure.(453) (453) For Luther's views, see his sermon, Von dem Wucher, Wittenberg, 1519; also the Table Talk, cited in Coquelin and Guillaumin, article Interet. For the later, more moderate views of Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli, making a compromise with the needs of society, see Bohm-Bawerk, p. 27, citing Wiskemann. For Melanchthon and a long line of the most eminent Lutheran divines who have denounced the taking of interest, see Die Wucherfrage, St. Louis, 1869, pp. 94 et seq. For the law against usury under Edward VI, see Cobbett's Parliamentary History, vol. i, p. 596; see also Craik, History of British Commerce, chap. vi. But, most fortunately, it happened that Calvin, though at times stumbling over the usual texts against the taking of interest for money, turned finally in the right direction. He cut through the metaphysical arguments of Aristotle, and characterized the subtleties devised to evade the Scriptures as "a childish game with God." In place of these subtleties there was developed among Protestants a serviceable fiction--the statement that usury means ILLEGAL OR OPPRESSIVE INTEREST. Under the action of this fiction, commerce and trade revived rapidly in Protestant countries, though with occasional checks from exact interpreters of Scripture. At the same period in France, the great Protestant jurist Dumoulin brought all his legal learning and skill in casuistry to bear on the same side. A certain ferretlike acuteness and litheness seem to have enabled him to hunt down the opponents of interest-taking through the most tortuous arguments of scholasticism. In England the struggle went on with varying fortune; statesmen on one side, and theologians on the other. We have seen how, under Henry VIII, interest was allowed at a fixed rate, and how, the development of English Protestantism having at first strengthened the old theological view, there was, under Edward VI, a temporarily successful attempt to forbid the taking of interest by law. The Puritans, dwelling on Old Testament texts, continued for a considerable time especially hostile to the taking of any interest. Henry Smith, a noted preacher, thundered from the pulpit of St. Clement Danes in London against "the evasions of Scripture" which permitted men to lend money on interest at all. In answer to the contention that only "biting" usury was oppressive, Wilson, a noted upholder of the strict theological view in political economy, declared: "There is difference in deed between the bite of a dogge and the bite of a flea, and yet, though the flea doth lesse harm, yet the flea doth bite after hir kinde, yea, and draweth blood, too. But what a world this is, that men will make sin to be but a fleabite, when they see God's word directly against them!" The same view found strong upholders among contemporary English Catholics. One of the most eminent of these, Nicholas Sanders, revived very vigorously the use of an old scholastic argument. He insisted that "man can not sell time," that time is not a human possession, but something which is given by God alone: he declared, "Time was not of your gift to your neighbour, but of God's gift to you both." In the Parliament of the period, we find strong assertions of the old idea, with constant reference to Scripture and the fathers. In one debate, Wilson cited from Ezekiel and other prophets and attributed to St. Augustine the doctrine that "to take but a cup of wine is usury and damnable." Fleetwood recalled the law of King Edward the Confessor, which submitted usurers to the ordeal. But arguments of this sort had little influence upon Elizabeth and her statesmen. Threats of damnation in the next world troubled them little if they could have their way in this. They re-established the practice of taking interest under restrictions, and this, in various forms, has remained in England ever since. Most notable in this phase of the evolution of scientific doctrine in political economy at that period is the emergence of a recognised difference between USURY and INTEREST. Between these two words, which had so long been synonymous, a distinction now appears: the former being construed to indicate OPPRESSIVE INTEREST, and the latter JUST RATES for the use of money. This idea gradually sank into the popular mind of Protestant countries, and the scriptural texts no longer presented any difficulty to the people at large, since there grew up a general belief that the word "usury," as employed in Scripture, had ALWAYS meant exorbitant interest; and this in spite of the parable of the Talents. Still, that the old Aristotelian quibble had not been entirely forgotten, is clearly seen by various passages in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. But this line of reasoning seems to have received its quietus from Lord Bacon. He did not, indeed, develop a strong and connected argument on the subject; but he burst the bonds of Aristotle, and based interest for money upon natural laws. How powerful the new current of thought was, is seen from the fact that James I, of all monarchs the most fettered by scholasticism and theology, sanctioned a statute dealing with interest for money as absolutely necessary. Yet, even after this, the old idea asserted itself; for the bishops utterly refused to agree to the law allowing interest until a proviso was inserted that "nothing in this law contained shall be construed or expounded to allow the practice of usury in point of religion or conscience." The old view cropped out from time to time in various public declarations. Famous among these were the Treatise of Usury, published in 1612 by Dr. Fenton, who restated the old arguments with much force, and the Usury Condemned of John Blaxton, published in 1634. Blaxton, who also was a clergyman, defined usury as the taking of any interest whatever for money, citing in support of this view six archbishops and bishops and over thirty doctors of divinity in the Anglican Church, some of their utterances being very violent and all of them running their roots down into texts of Scripture. Typical among these is a sermon of Bishop Sands, in which he declares, regarding the taking of interest: "This canker hath corrupted all England; we shall doe God and our country true service by taking away this evill; represse it by law, else the heavy hand of God hangeth over us and will strike us." II. RETREAT OF THE CHURCH, PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC. But about the middle of the seventeenth century Sir Robert Filmer gave this doctrine the heaviest blow it ever received in England. Taking up Dr. Fenton's treatise, he answered it, and all works like it, in a way which, however unsuitable to this century, was admirably adapted to that. He cites Scripture and chops logic after a masterly manner. Characteristic is this declaration: "St. Paul doth, with one breath, reckon up seventeen sins, and yet usury is none of them; but many preachers can not reckon up seven deadly sins, except they make usury one of them." Filmer followed Fenton not only through his theology, but through his political economy, with such relentless keenness that the old doctrine seems to have been then and there practically worried out of existence, so far as England was concerned. Departures from the strict scriptural doctrines regarding interest soon became frequent in Protestant countries, and they were followed up with especial vigour in Holland. Various theologians in the Dutch Church attempted to assert the scriptural view by excluding bankers from the holy communion; but the commercial vigour of the republic was too strong: Salmasius led on the forces of right reason brilliantly, and by the middle of the seventeenth century the question was settled rightly in that country. This work was aided, indeed, by a far greater man, Hugo Grotius; but here was shown the power of an established dogma. Great as Grotius was--and it may well be held that his book on War and Peace has wrought more benefit to humanity than any other attributed to human authorship--he was, in the matter of interest for money, too much entangled in theological reasoning to do justice to his cause or to himself. He declared the prohibition of it to be scriptural, but resisted the doctrine of Aristotle, and allowed interest on certain natural and practical grounds. In Germany the struggle lasted longer. Of some little significance, perhaps, is the demand of Adam Contzen, in 1629, that lenders at interest should be punished as thieves; but by the end of the seventeenth century Puffendorf and Leibnitz had gained the victory. Protestantism, open as it was to the currents of modern thought, could not long continue under the dominion of ideas unfavourable to economic development, and perhaps the most remarkable proof of this was presented early in the eighteenth century in America, by no less strict a theologian than Cotton Mather. In his Magnalia he argues against the whole theological view with a boldness, acuteness, and good sense which cause us to wonder that this can be the same man who was so infatuated regarding witchcraft. After an argument so conclusive as his, there could have been little left of the old anti-economic doctrine in New England.(454) (454) For Calvin's views, see his letter published in the appendix to Pearson's Theories on Usury. His position is well-stated in Bohm-Bawerk, pp. 28 et seq., where citations are given. See also Economic Tracts, No. IV, New York, 1881, pp. 34, 35; and for some serviceable Protestant fictions, see Cunningham, Christian Opinion on Usury, pp. 60, 61. For Dumoulin (Molinaeus), see Bohm-Bawerk, as above, pp. 29 et seq. For debates on usury in the British Parliament in Elizabeth's time, see Cobbett, Parliamentary History, vol. i, pp 756 et seq. A striking passage in Shakespeare is found in the Merchant of Venice, Act I, scene iii: "If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not as to thy friend; for when did friendship take a breed for barren metal of his friend?" For the right direction taken by Lord Bacon, see Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland, Halle, 1864, pp. 497, 498. For Salmasius, see his De Usuris, Leyden, 1638, and for others mentioned, see Bohm-Bawerk, pp. 34 et seq.; also Lecky, vol. ii. p. 256. For the saving clause inderted by the bishops in the statute of James I, see the Corpus Juris Eccles. Anglic., p. 1071; also Murray, History of Usury, Philadelphia, 1866, p. 49. For Blaxton, see his English Usurer, or Usury Condemned, by John Blaxton, Preacher of God's Word, London, 1634. Blaxton gives some of Calvin's earlier utterances against interest. For Bishop Sands;s sermon, see p. 11. For Filmer, see his Quaestio Quodlibetica, London, 1652, reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, vol x, pp. 105 et seq. For Grotius, see the De Jure Belli ac Pacis, lib. ii, cap. xii. For Cotton Mather's argument, see the Magnalia, London, 1702, pp. 5, 52. But while the retreat of the Protestant Church from the old doctrine regarding the taking of interest was henceforth easy, in the Catholic Church it was far more difficult. Infallible popes and councils, with saints, fathers, and doctors, had so constantly declared the taking of any interest at all to be contrary to Scripture, that the more exact though less fortunate interpretation of the sacred text relating to interest continued in Catholic countries. When it was attempted in France in the seventeenth century to argue that usury "means oppressive interest," the Theological Faculty of the Sorbonne declared that usury is the taking of any interest at all, no matter how little; and the eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel was cited to clinch this argument. Another attempt to ease the burden of industry and commerce was made by declaring that "usury means interest demanded not as a matter of favour but as a matter of right." This, too, was solemnly condemned by Pope innocent XI. Again an attempt was made to find a way out of the difficulty by declaring that "usury is interest greater than the law allows." This, too, was condemned, and so also was the declaration that "usury is interest on loans not for a fixed time." Still the forces of right reason pressed on, and among them, in the seventeenth century, in France, was Richard Simon. He attempted to gloss over the declarations of Scripture against lending at interest, in an elaborate treatise, but was immediately confronted by Bossuet. Just as Bossuet had mingled Scripture with astronomy and opposed the Copernican theory, so now he mingled Scripture with political economy and denounced the lending of money at interest. He called attention to the fact that the Scriptures, the councils of the Church from the beginning, the popes, the fathers, had all interpreted the prohibition of "usury" to be a prohibition of any lending at interest; and he demonstrated this interpretation to be the true one. Simon was put to confusion and his book condemned. There was but too much reason for Bossuet's interpretation. There stood the fact that the prohibition of one of the most simple and beneficial principles in political and economical science was affirmed, not only by the fathers, but by twenty-eight councils of the Church, six of them general councils, and by seventeen popes, to say nothing of innumerable doctors in theology and canon law. And these prohibitions by the Church had been accepted as of divine origin by all obedient sons of the Church in the government of France. Such rulers as Charles the Bald in the ninth century, and St. Louis in the thirteenth, had riveted this idea into the civil law so firmly that it seemed impossible ever to detach it.(455) (455) For the declaration of the Sorbonne in the seventeenth century against taking of interest, see Lecky, Rationalism, vol. ii, p. 248, note. For the special condemnation by Innocent XI, see Viva, Damnatae Theses, Pavia, 1715, pp. 112-114. For consideration of various ways of escaping the difficulty regarding interest, see Lecky, Rationalism, vol. ii, pp. 249, 250. For Bousset's strong declaration against taking interest, see his Oeuvres, Paris, 1845-'46, vol. i, p. 734, vol. vi, p. 654, and vol. ix, p. 49 et seq. For the number of councils and popes condemning usury, see Lecky, as above, vol. ii, p. 255, note, citing Concina. As might well be expected, Italy was one of the countries in which the theological theory regarding usury--lending at interest--was most generally asserted and assented to. Among the great number of Italian canonists who supported the theory, two deserve especial mention, as affording a contrast to the practical manner in which the commercial Italians met the question. In the sixteenth century, very famous among canonists was the learned Benedictine, Vilagut. In 1589 he published at Venice his great work on usury, supporting with much learning and vigour the most extreme theological consequences of the old doctrine. He defines usury as the taking of anything beyond the original loan, and declares it mortal sin; he advocates the denial to usurers of Christian burial, confession, the sacraments, absolution, and connection with the universities; he declares that priests receiving offerings from usurers should refrain from exercising their ministry until the matter is passed upon by the bishop. About the middle of the seventeenth century another ponderous folio was published in Venice upon the same subject and with the same title, by Onorato Leotardi. So far from showing any signs of yielding, he is even more extreme than Vilagut had been, and quotes with approval the old declaration that lenders of money at interest are not only robbers but murderers. So far as we can learn, no real opposition was made in either century to this theory, as a theory; as to PRACTICE, it was different. The Italian traders did not answer theological argument; they simply overrode it. In spite of theology, great banks were established, and especially that of Venice at the end of the twelfth century, and those of Barcelona and Genoa at the beginning of the fifteenth. Nowhere was commerce carried on in more complete defiance of this and other theological theories hampering trade than in the very city where these great treatises were published. The sin of usury, like the sin of commerce with the Mohammedans, seems to have been settled for by the Venetian merchants on their deathbeds; and greatly to the advantage of the magnificent churches and ecclesiastical adornments of the city. By the seventeenth century the clearest thinkers in the Roman Church saw that her theology must be readjusted to political economy: so began a series of amazing attempts to reconcile a view permitting usury with the long series of decrees of popes and councils forbidding it. In Spain, the great Jesuit casuist Escobar led the way, and rarely had been seen such exquisite hair-splitting. But his efforts were not received with the gratitude they perhaps deserved. Pascal, revolting at their moral effect, attacked them unsparingly in his Provincial Letters, citing especially such passages as the following: "It is usury to receive profit from those to whom one lends, if it be exacted as justly due; but, if it be exacted as a debt of gratitude, it is not usury." This and a multitude of similar passages Pascal covered with the keen ridicule and indignant denunciation of which he was so great a master. But even the genius of Pascal could not stop such efforts. In the eighteenth century they were renewed by a far greater theologian than Escobar--by him who was afterward made a saint and proclaimed a doctor of the Church--Alphonso Liguori. Starting with bitter denunciations of usury, Liguori soon developed a multitude of subtle devices for escaping the guilt of it. Presenting a long and elaborate theory of "mental, usury" he arrives at the conclusion that, if the borrower pay interest of his own free will, the lender may keep it. In answer to the question whether the lender may keep what the borrower paid, not out of gratitude but out of fear--fear that otherwise loans might be refused him in future--Liguori says, "To be usury it must be paid by reason of a contract, or as justly due; payment by reason of such a fear does not cause interest to be paid as an actual price." Again Liguori tells us, "It is not usury to exact something in return for the danger and expense of regaining the principal." The old subterfuges of "Damnum emergens" and "Lucrum cessans" are made to do full duty. A remarkable quibble is found in the answer to the question whether he sins who furnishes money to a man whom he knows to intend employing it in usury. After citing affirmative opinions from many writers, Liguori says, "Notwithstanding these opinions, the better opinion seems to me to be that the man thus putting out his money is not bound to make restitution, for his action is not injurious to the borrower, but rather favourable to him," and this reasoning the saint develops at great length. In the Latin countries this sort of casuistry eased the relations of the Church with the bankers, and it was full time; for now there came arguments of a different kind. The eighteenth century philosophy had come upon the stage, and the first effective onset of political scientists against the theological opposition in southern Europe was made in Italy--the most noted leaders in the attack being Galiani and Maffei. Here and there feeble efforts were made to meet them, but it was felt more and more by thinking churchmen that entirely different tactics must be adopted. About the same time came an attack in France, and though its results were less immediate at home, they were much more effective abroad. In 1748 appeared Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. In this famous book were concentrated twenty years of study and thought by a great thinker on the interests of the world about him. In eighteen months it went through twenty-two editions; it was translated into every civilized language; and among the things on which Montesquieu brought his wit and wisdom to bear with especial force was the doctrine of the Church regarding interest on loans. In doing this he was obliged to use a caution in forms which seems strangely at variance with the boldness of his ideas. In view of the strictness of ecclesiastical control in France, he felt it safest to make his whole attack upon those theological and economic follies of Mohammedan countries which were similar to those which the theological spirit had fastened on France.(456) (456) For Vilagut, see his Tractatus de Usuris, Venice, 1589, especially pp. 21, 25, 399. For Leotardi, see his De Usuris, Venice, 1655, especially preface, pp. 6, 7 et seq. For Pascal and Escobar, see the Provincial Letters, edited by Sayres, Cambridge, 1880, Letter VIII, pp. 183-186; also a note to the same letter, p. 196. For Liguori, see his Theologia Moralis, Paris, 1834, lib. iii, tract v, cap. iii: De Contractibus, dub, vii. For the eighteenth century attack in Italy, see Bohm-Bawerk, pp. 48 et seq. For Montesquieu's view of interest on loans, see the Esprit des Lois, livre xxii. By the middle of the eighteenth century the Church authorities at Rome clearly saw the necessity of a concession: the world would endure theological restriction no longer; a way of escape MUST be found. It was seen, even by the most devoted theologians, that mere denunciations and use of theological arguments or scriptural texts against the scientific idea were futile. To this feeling it was due that, even in the first years of the century, the Jesuit casuists had come to the rescue. With exquisite subtlety some of their acutest intellects devoted themselves to explaining away the utterances on this subject of saints, fathers, doctors, popes, and councils. These explanations were wonderfully ingenious, but many of the older churchmen continued to insist upon the orthodox view, and at last the Pope himself intervened. Fortunately for the world, the seat of St. Peter was then occupied by Benedict XIV, certainly one of the most gifted, morally and intellectually, in the whole line of Roman pontiffs. Tolerant and sympathetic for the oppressed, he saw the necessity of taking up the question, and he grappled with it effectually: he rendered to Catholicism a service like that which Calvin had rendered to Protestantism, by shrewdly cutting a way through the theological barrier. In 1745 he issued his encyclical Vix pervenit, which declared that the doctrine of the Church remained consistent with itself; that usury is indeed a sin, and that it consists in demanding any amount beyond the exact amount lent, but that there are occasions when on special grounds the lender may obtain such additional sum. What these "occasions" and "special grounds" might be, was left very vague; but this action was sufficient. At the same time no new restrictions upon books advocating the taking of interest for money were imposed, and, in the year following his encyclical, Benedict openly accepted the dedication of one of them--the work of Maffei, and perhaps the most cogent of all. Like the casuistry of Boscovich in using the Copernican theory for "convenience in argument," while acquiescing in its condemnation by the Church authorities, this encyclical of Pope Benedict broke the spell. Turgot, Quesnay, Adam Smith, Hume, Bentham, and their disciples pressed on, and science won for mankind another great victory.(457) (457) For Quesnay, see his Observations sur l'Interet de l'Argent, in his Oeuvres, Frankfort and Paris, 1888, pp. 399 et seq. For Turgot, see the Collections des Economistes, Paris, 1844, vols. iii and iv; also Blanqui, Histoire de l'Economie Politique, English translation, p. 373. For an excellent though brief summary of the efforts of the Jesuits to explain away the old action of the Church, see Lecky, vol. ii, pp 256, 257. For the action of Benedict XIV, see Reusch, Der Index der Vorbotenen Bucher, Bonn, 1885, vol. ii, pp 847, 848. For a comical picture of the "quagmire' into which the hierarchy brought itself in the squaring of its practice with its theory, see Dollinger, as above, pp. 227, 228. For cunningly vague statements of the action of Benedict XIV, see Mastrofini, Sur l'Usure, French translation, Lyons, 1834, pp. 125, 255. The abbate, as will be seen, has not the slightest hesitaion in telling an untruth in order to preserve the consistency of papal action in the matter of usury--e.g., pp. 93, 94 96, and elsewhere. Yet in this case, as in others, insurrections against the sway of scientific truth appeared among some overzealous religionists. When the Sorbonne, having retreated from its old position, armed itself with new casuistries against those who held to its earlier decisions, sundry provincial doctors in theology protested indignantly, making the old citations from the Scriptures, fathers, saints, doctors, popes, councils, and canonists. Again the Roman court intervened. In 1830 the Inquisition at Rome, with the approval of Pius VIII, though still declining to commit itself on the DOCTRINE involved, decreed that, as to PRACTICE, confessors should no longer disturb lenders of money at legal interest. But even this did not quiet the more conscientious theologians. The old weapons were again furbished and hurled by the Abbe Laborde, Vicar of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Auch, and by the Abbe Dennavit, Professor of Theology at Lyons. Good Abbe Dennavit declared that he refused absolution to those who took interest and to priests who pretend that the sanction of the civil law is sufficient. But the "wisdom of the serpent" was again brought into requisition, and early in the decade between 1830 and 1840 the Abbate Mastrofini issued a work on usury, which, he declared on its title-page, demonstrated that "moderate usury is not contrary to Holy Scripture, or natural law, or the decisions of the Church." Nothing can be more comical than the suppressions of truth, evasions of facts, jugglery with phrases, and perversions of history, to which the abbate is forced to resort throughout his book in order to prove that the Church has made no mistake. In the face of scores of explicit deliverances and decrees of fathers, doctors, popes, and councils against the taking of any interest whatever for money, he coolly pretended that what they had declared against was EXORBITANT interest. He made a merit of the action of the Church, and showed that its course had been a blessing to humanity. But his masterpiece is in dealing with the edicts of Clement V and Benedict XIV. As to the first, it will be remembered that Clement, in accord with the Council of Vienne, had declared that "any one who shall pertinaciously presume to affirm that the taking of interest for money is not a sin, we decree him to be a heiretic fit for punishment," and we have seen that Benedict XIV did not at all deviate from the doctrines of his predecessors. Yet Mastrofini is equal to his task, and brings out, as the conclusion of his book, the statement put upon his title-page, that what the Church condemns is only EXORBITANT interest. This work was sanctioned by various high ecclesiastical dignitaries, and served its purpose; for it covered the retreat of the Church. In 1872 the Holy Office, answering a question solemnly put by the Bishop of Ariano, as solemnly declared that those who take eight per cent interest per annum are "not to be disquieted"; and in 1873 appeared a book published under authority from the Holy See, allowing the faithful to take moderate interest under condition that any future decisions of the Pope should be implicitly obeyed. Social science as applied to political economy had gained a victory final and complete. The Torlonia family at Rome to-day, with its palaces, chapels, intermarriages, affiliations, and papal favour--all won by lending money at interest, and by liberal gifts, from the profits of usury, to the Holy See--is but one out of many growths of its kind on ramparts long since surrendered and deserted.(458) (458) For the decree forbidding confessors to trouble lenders of money at legal interest, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, as above; also Mastrofini, as above, in the appendix, where various other recent Roman decrees are given. As to the controversy generally, see Mastrofini; also La Replique des douze Docteurs, cited by Guillaumin and Coquelin; also Reusch, vol. ii, p. 850. As an example of Mastrofini's way of making black appear white, compare the Latin text of the decree on page 97 with his statements regarding it; see also his cunning substitution of the new significance of the word usury for the old in various parts of his book. A good historical presentation of the general subject will be found in Roscher, Geschichte der National-Oeconomie in Deutschland, Munchen, 1874, under articles Wucher and Zinsnehmen. For France, see especially Petit, Traite de l'Usure, Paris, 1840; and for Germany, see Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland, Halle, 1865. For the view of a modern leader of thought in this field, see Jeremy Bentham, Defence of Usury, Letter X. For an admirable piece of research into the nicer points involved in the whole subject, see H. C. Lea, The Ecclesiatical Treatment of Usury, in the Yale Review for February, 1894. The dealings of theology with public economy were by no means confined to the taking of interest for money. It would be interesting to note the restrictions placed upon commerce by the Church prohibition of commercial intercourse with infidels, against which the Republic of Venice fought a good fight; to note how, by a most curious perversion of Scripture in the Greek Church, many of the peasantry of Russia were prevented from raising and eating potatoes; how, in Scotland, at the beginning of this century, the use of fanning mills for winnowing grain was widely denounced as contrary to the text, "The wind bloweth where it listeth," etc., as leaguing with Satan, who is "Prince of the powers of the air," and therefore as sufficient cause for excommunication from the Scotch Church. Instructive it would be also to note how the introduction of railways was declared by an archbishop of the French Church to be an evidence of the divine displeasure against country innkeepers who set meat before their guests on fast days, and who were now punished by seeing travellers carried by their doors; how railways and telegraphs were denounced from a few noted pulpits as heralds of Antichrist; and how in Protestant England the curate of Rotherhithe, at the breaking in of the Thames Tunnel, so destructive to life and property, declared it from his pulpit a just judgment upon the presumptuous aspirations of mortal man. The same tendency is seen in the opposition of conscientious men to the taking of the census in Sweden and the United States, on account of the terms in which the numbering of Israel is spoken of in the Old Testament. Religious scruples on similar grounds have also been avowed against so beneficial a thing as life insurance. Apparently unimportant as these manifestations are, they indicate a widespread tendency; in the application of scriptural declarations to matters of social economy, which has not yet ceased, though it is fast fading away.(459) (459) For various interdicts laid upon commerce by the Church, see Heyd, Histoire du Commerce du Levant au Moyen-Age, Leipsic, 1886, vol. ii, passim. For the injury done to commerce by prohibition of intercourse with the infidel, see Lindsay, History of Merchant Shipping, London, 1874, vol. ii. For superstitions regarding the introduction of the potato in Russia, and the name "devil's root" given it, see Hellwald, Culturgeschichte, vol. ii, p. 476; also Haxthausen, La Russie. For opposition to winnowing machines, see Burton, History of Scotland, vol. viii, p. 511; also Lecky, Eighteenth Century, vol. ii, p. 83; also Mause Headrigg's views in Scott's Old Mortality, chap. vii. For the case of a person debarred from the communion for "raising the devil's wind" with a winnowing machine, see Works of Sir J. Y. Simpson, vol. ii. Those doubting the authority or motives of Simpson may be reminded that he was to the day of his death one of the strictest adherants to Scotch orthodoxy. As to the curate of Rotherhithe, see Journal of Sir I. Brunel for May 20, 1827, in Life of I. K. Brunel, p. 30. As to the conclusions drawn from the numbering of Israel, see Michaelis, Commentaries on the Laws of Moses, 1874, vol. ii, p. 3. The author of this work himself witnessed the reluctance of a very conscientious man to answer the questions of a census marshal, Mr. Lewis Hawley, of Syracuse, New York; and this reluctance was based upon the reasons assigned in II Samuel xxiv, 1, and I Chronicles xxi,1, for the numbering of the children of Israel. Worthy of especial study, too, would be the evolution of the modern methods of raising and bettering the condition of the poor,--the evolution, especially, of the idea that men are to be helped to help themselves, in opposition to the old theories of indiscriminate giving, which, taking root in some of the most beautiful utterances of our sacred books, grew in the warm atmosphere of medieval devotion into great systems for the pauperizing of the labouring classes. Here, too, scientific modes of thought in social science have given a new and nobler fruitage to the whole growth of Christian benevolence.(460) (460) Among the vast number of authorities regarding the evolution of better methods in dealing with pauperism, I would call attention to a work which is especially suggestive--Behrends, Christianity and Socialism, New York, 1886. CHAPTER XX. FROM THE DIVINE ORACLES TO THE HIGHER CRITICISM. I. THE OLDER INTERPRETATION. The great sacred books of the world are the most precious of human possessions. They embody the deepest searchings into the most vital problems of humanity in all its stages: the naive guesses of the world's childhood, the opening conceptions of its youth, the more fully rounded beliefs of its maturity. These books, no matter how unhistorical in parts and at times, are profoundly true. They mirror the evolution of man's loftiest aspirations, hopes, loves, consolations, and enthusiasms; his hates and fears; his views of his origin and destiny; his theories of his rights and duties; and these not merely in their lights but in their shadows. Therefore it is that they contain the germs of truths most necessary in the evolution of humanity, and give to these germs the environment and sustenance which best insure their growth and strength. With wide differences in origin and character, this sacred literature has been developed and has exercised its influence in obedience to certain general laws. First of these in time, if not in importance, is that which governs its origin: in all civilizations we find that the Divine Spirit working in the mind of man shapes his sacred books first of all out of the chaos of myth and legend; and of these books, when life is thus breathed into them, the fittest survive. So broad and dense is this atmosphere of myth and legend enveloping them that it lingers about them after they have been brought forth full-orbed; and, sometimes, from it are even produced secondary mythical and legendary concretions--satellites about these greater orbs of early thought. Of these secondary growths one may be mentioned as showing how rich in myth-making material was the atmosphere which enveloped our own earlier sacred literature. In the third century before Christ there began to be elaborated among the Jewish scholars of Alexandria, then the great centre of human thought, a Greek translation of the main books constituting the Old Testament. Nothing could be more natural at that place and time than such a translation; yet the growth of explanatory myth and legend around it was none the less luxuriant. There was indeed a twofold growth. Among the Jews favourable to the new version a legend rose which justified it. This legend in its first stage was to the effect that the Ptolemy then on the Egyptian throne had, at the request of his chief librarian, sent to Jerusalem for translators; that the Jewish high priest Eleazar had sent to the king a most precious copy of the Scriptures from the temple at Jerusalem, and six most venerable, devout, and learned scholars from each of the twelve tribes of Israel; that the number of translators thus corresponded with the mysterious seventy-two appellations of God; and that the combined efforts of these seventy-two men produced a marvellously perfect translation. But in that atmosphere of myth and marvel the legend continued to grow, and soon we have it blooming forth yet more gorgeously in the statement that King Ptolemy ordered each of the seventy-two to make by himself a full translation of the entire Old Testament, and shut up each translator in a separate cell on the island of Pharos, secluding him there until the work was done; that the work of each was completed in exactly seventy-two days; and that when, at the end of the seventy-two days, the seventy-two translations were compared, each was found exactly like all the others. This showed clearly Jehovah's APPROVAL. But out of all this myth and legend there was also evolved an account of a very different sort. The Jews who remained faithful to the traditions of their race regarded this Greek version as a profanation, and therefore there grew up the legend that on the completion of the work there was darkness over the whole earth during three days. This showed clearly Jehovah's DISAPPROVAL. These well-known legends, which arose within what--as compared with any previous time--was an exceedingly enlightened period, and which were steadfastly believed by a vast multitude of Jews and Christians for ages, are but single examples among scores which show how inevitably such traditions regarding sacred books are developed in the earlier stages of civilization, when men explain everything by miracle and nothing by law.(461) (461) For the legend regarding the Septaguint, especially as developed by the letters of Pseudo-Aristeas, and for quaint citations from the fathers regarding it, see The History of the Seventy-two Interpretors, from the Greek of Aristeas, translated by Mr. Lewis, London, 1715; also Clement of Alexandria, in the Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Edinburgh, 1867, p. 448. For interesting summaries showing the growth of the story, see Drummond, Philo Judaeus and the Growth of the Alexandrian Philosophy, London, 1888, vol. i, pp. 231 et seq.; also Renan, Histoire du Peuple Israel, vol. iv, chap. iv; also, for Philo Judaeus's part in developing the legend, see Rev. Dr. Sanday's Bampton Lectures for 1893, on Inspiration, pp. 86, 87. As the second of these laws governing the evolution of sacred literature may be mentioned that which we have constantly seen so effective in the growth of theological ideas--that to which Comte gave the name of the Law of Wills and Causes. Obedient to this, man attributes to the Supreme Being a physical, intellectual, and moral structure like his own; hence it is that the votary of each of the great world religions ascribes to its sacred books what he considers absolute perfection: he imagines them to be what he himself would give the world, were he himself infinitely good, wise, and powerful. A very simple analogy might indeed show him that even a literature emanating from an all-wise, beneficent, and powerful author might not seem perfect when judged by a human standard; for he has only to look about him in the world to find that the work which he attributes to an all-wise, all-beneficent, and all-powerful Creator is by no means free from evil and wrong. But this analogy long escapes him, and the exponent of each great religion proves to his own satisfaction, and to the edification of his fellows, that their own sacred literature is absolutely accurate in statement, infinitely profound in meaning, and miraculously perfect in form. From these premises also he arrives at the conclusion that his own sacred literature is unique; that no other sacred book can have emanated from a divine source; and that all others claiming to be sacred are impostures. Still another law governing the evolution of sacred literature in every great world religion is, that when the books which compose it are once selected and grouped they come to be regarded as a final creation from which nothing can be taken away, and of which even error in form, if sanctioned by tradition, may not be changed. The working of this law has recently been seen on a large scale. A few years since, a body of chosen scholars, universally acknowledged to be the most fit for the work, undertook, at the call of English-speaking Christendom, to revise the authorized English version of the Bible. Beautiful as was that old version, there was abundant reason for a revision. The progress of biblical scholarship had revealed multitudes of imperfections and not a few gross errors in the work of the early translators, and these, if uncorrected, were sure to bring the sacred volume into discredit. Nothing could be more reverent than the spirit of the revisers, and the nineteenth century has known few historical events of more significant and touching beauty than the participation in the holy communion by all these scholars--prelates, presbyters, ministers, and laymen of churches most widely differing in belief and observance--kneeling side by side at the little altar in Westminster Abbey. Nor could any work have been more conservative and cautious than theirs; as far as possible they preserved the old matter and form with scrupulous care. Yet their work was no sooner done than it was bitterly attacked and widely condemned; to this day it is largely regarded with dislike. In Great Britain, in America, in Australia, the old version, with its glaring misconceptions, mistranslations, and interpolations, is still read in preference to the new; the great body of English-speaking Christians clearly preferring the accustomed form of words given by the seventeenth-century translators, rather than a nearer approach to the exact teaching of the Holy Ghost. Still another law is, that when once a group of sacred books has been evolved--even though the group really be a great library of most dissimilar works, ranging in matter from the hundredth Psalm to the Song of Songs, and in manner from the sublimity of Isaiah to the offhand story-telling of Jonah--all come to be thought one inseparable mass of interpenetrating parts; every statement in each fitting exactly and miraculously into each statement in every other; and each and every one, and all together, literally true to fact, and at the same time full of hidden meanings. The working of these and other laws governing the evolution of sacred literature is very clearly seen in the great rabbinical schools which flourished at Jerusalem, Tiberias, and elsewhere, after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, and especially as we approach the time of Christ. These schools developed a subtlety in the study of the Old Testament which seems almost preternatural. The resultant system was mainly a jugglery with words, phrases, and numbers, which finally became a "sacred science," with various recognised departments, in which interpretation was carried on sometimes by attaching a numerical value to letters; sometimes by interchange of letters from differently arranged alphabets; sometimes by the making of new texts out of the initial letters of the old; and with ever-increasing subtlety. Such efforts as these culminated fitly in the rabbinical declaration that each passage in the law has seventy distinct meanings, and that God himself gives three hours every day to their study. After this the Jewish world was prepared for anything, and it does not surprise us to find such discoveries in the domain of ethical culture as the doctrine that, for inflicting the forty stripes save one upon those who broke the law, the lash should be braided of ox-hide and ass-hide; and, as warrant for this construction of the lash, the text, "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth not know"; and, as the logic connecting text and lash, the statement that Jehovah evidently intended to command that "the men who know not shall be beaten by those animals whose knowledge shames them." By such methods also were revealed such historical treasures as that Og, King of Bashan, escaped the deluge by wading after Noah's ark. There were, indeed, noble exceptions to this kind of teaching. It can not be forgotten that Rabbi Hillel formulated the golden rule, which had before him been given to the extreme Orient by Confucius, and which afterward received a yet more beautiful and positive emphasis from Jesus of Nazareth; but the seven rules of interpretation laid down by Hillel were multiplied and refined by men like Rabbi Ismael and Rabbi Eleazar until they justified every absurd subtlety.(462) (462) For a multitude of amusing examples of rabbinical interpretations, see an article in Blackwood's Magazine for November, 1882. For a more general discussion, see Archdeacon Farrar's History of Interpretation, lect. i and ii, and Rev. Prof. H. P. Smith's Inspiration and Inerrancy, Cincinnati, 1893, especially chap. iv; also Reuss, History of the New Testament, English translation, pp. 527, 528. An eminent scholar has said that while the letter of Scripture became ossified in Palestine, it became volatilized at Alexandria; and the truth of this remark was proved by the Alexandrian Jewish theologians just before the beginning of our era. This, too, was in obedience to a law of development, which is, that when literal interpretation clashes with increasing knowledge or with progress in moral feeling, theologians take refuge in mystic meanings--a law which we see working in all great religions, from the Brahmans finding hidden senses in the Vedas, to Plato and the Stoics finding them in the Greek myths; and from the Sofi reading new meanings into the Koran, to eminent Christian divines of the nineteenth century giving a non-natural sense to some of the plainest statements in the Bible. Nothing is more natural than all this. When naive statements of sacred writers, in accord with the ethics of early ages, make Brahma perform atrocities which would disgrace a pirate; and Jupiter take part in adventures worthy of Don Juan; and Jahveh practise trickery, cruelty, and high-handed injustice which would bring any civilized mortal into the criminal courts, the invention of allegory is the one means of saving the divine authority as soon as men reach higher planes of civilization. The great early master in this evolution of allegory, for the satisfaction of Jews and Christians, was Philo: by him its use came in as never before. The four streams of the garden of Eden thus become the four virtues; Abraham's country and kindred, from which he was commanded to depart, the human body and its members; the five cities of Sodom, the five senses; the Euphrates, correction of manners. By Philo and his compeers even the most insignificant words and phrases, and those especially, were held to conceal the most precious meanings. A perfectly natural and logical result of this view was reached when Philo, saturated as he was with Greek culture and nourished on pious traditions of the utterances at Delphi and Dodona, spoke reverently of the Jewish Scriptures as "oracles". Oracles they became: as oracles they appeared in the early history of the Christian Church; and oracles they remained for centuries: eternal life or death, infinite happiness or agony, as well as ordinary justice in this world, being made to depend on shifting interpretations of a long series of dark and doubtful utterances--interpretations frequently given by men who might have been prophets and apostles, but who had become simply oracle-mongers. Pressing these oracles into the service of science, Philo became the forerunner of that long series of theologians who, from Augustine and Cosmas to Mr. Gladstone, have attempted to extract from scriptural myth and legend profound contributions to natural science. Thus he taught that the golden candlesticks in the tabernacle symbolized the planets, the high priest's robe the universe, and the bells upon it the harmony of earth and water--whatever that may mean. So Cosmas taught, a thousand years later, that the table of shewbread in the tabernacle showed forth the form and construction of the world; and Mr. Gladstone hinted, more than a thousand years later still, that Neptune's trident had a mysterious connection with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.(463) (463) For Philo Judaeus, see Yonge's translation, Bohn's edition; see also Sanday, Inspiration, pp. 78-85. For admirable general remarks on this period in history of exegesis, see Bartlett, Bampton Lectures, 1888, p. 29. For efforts in general to save the credit of myths by allegorical interpretation, and for those of Philo in particular, see Drummond, Philo Judaeus, London, 1888, vol. i, pp. 18, 19, and notes. For interesting examples of Alexandrian exegesis and for Philo's application of the term "oracle" to the Jewish Scriptures, see Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 147 and note. For his discovery of symbols of the universe in the furniture of the tabernacle, see Drummond, as above, pp. 269 et seq. For the general subject, admirably discussed from a historical point of view, see the Rev. Edwin Hatch, D. D., The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, Hibbert Lectures for 1888, chap. iii. For Cosmas, see my chapters on Geography and Astronomy. For Mr. Gladstone's view of the connection between Neptune's trident and the doctrine of the Trinity, see his Juventus Mundi. These methods, as applied to the Old Testament, had appeared at times in the New; in spite of the resistance of Tertullian and Irenaeus, they were transmitted to the Church; and in the works of the early fathers they bloomed forth luxuriantly. Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria vigorously extended them. Typical of Justin's method is his finding, in a very simple reference by Isaiah to Damascus, Samaria, and Assyria, a clear prophecy of the three wise men of the East who brought gifts to the infant Saviour; and in the bells on the priest's robe a prefiguration of the twelve apostles. Any difficulty arising from the fact that the number of bells is not specified in Scripture, Justin overcame by insisting that David referred to this prefiguration in the nineteenth Psalm: "Their sound is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." Working in this vein, Clement of Alexandria found in the form, dimensions, and colour of the Jewish tabernacle a whole wealth of interpretation--the altar of incense representing the earth placed at the centre of the universe; the high priest's robe the visible world; the jewels on the priest's robe the zodiac; and Abraham's three days' journey to Mount Moriah the three stages of the soul in its progress toward the knowledge of God. Interpreting the New Testament, he lessened any difficulties involved in the miracle of the barley loaves and fishes by suggesting that what it really means is that Jesus gave mankind a preparatory training for the gospel by means of the law and philosophy; because, as he says, barley, like the law, ripens sooner than wheat, which represents the gospel; and because, just as fishes grow in the waves of the ocean, so philosophy grew in the waves of the Gentile world. Out of reasonings like these, those who followed, especially Cosmas, developed, as we have seen, a complete theological science of geography and astronomy.(464) (464) For Justin, see the Dialogue with Trypho, chaps. xlii, lxxvi, and lxxxiii. For Clement of Alexandria, see his Miscellanies, book v, chaps. vi and xi, and book vii, chap. xvi, and especially Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, as above, pp. 76, 77. As to the loose views of the canon held by these two fathers and others of their time, see Ladd, Doctrine of the Sacred Scriptures, vol. ii, pp. 86, 88; also Diestel, Geschichte des alten Testaments. But the instrument in exegesis which was used with most cogent force was the occult significance of certain numbers. The Chaldean and Egyptian researches of our own time have revealed the main source of this line of thought; the speculations of Plato upon it are well known; but among the Jews and in the early Church it grew into something far beyond the wildest imaginings of the priests of Memphis and Babylon. Philo had found for the elucidation of Scripture especially deep meanings in the numbers four, six, and seven; but other interpreters soon surpassed him. At the very outset this occult power was used in ascertaining the canonical books of Scripture. Josephus argued that, since there were twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, there must be twenty-two sacred books in the Old Testament; other Jewish authorities thought that there should be twenty-four books, on account of the twenty-four watches in the temple. St. Jerome wavered between the argument based upon the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet and that suggested by the twenty-four elders in the Apocalypse. Hilary of Poitiers argued that there must be twenty-four books, on account of the twenty-four letters in the Greek alphabet. Origen found an argument for the existence of exactly four gospels in the existence of just four elements. Irenaeus insisted that there could be neither more nor fewer than four gospels, since the earth has four quarters, the air four winds, and the cherubim four faces; and he denounced those who declined to accept this reasoning as "vain, ignorant, and audacious."(465) (465) For Jerome and Origen, see notes on pages following. For Irenaeus, see Irenaeus, Adversus Hoeres., lib. iii, cap. xi, S 8. For the general subject, see Sanday, Inspiration, p. 115; also Farrar and H. P. Smith as above. For a recent very full and very curious statement from a Roman Catholic authority regarding views cherished in the older Church as to the symbolism of numbers, see Detzel, Christliche Iconographie, Freiburg in Bresigau, Band i, Einleitung, p. 4. But during the first half of the third century came one who exercised a still stronger influence in this direction--a great man who, while rendering precious services, did more than any other to fasten upon the Church a system which has been one of its heaviest burdens for more than sixteen hundred years: this was Origen. Yet his purpose was noble and his work based on profound thought. He had to meet the leading philosophers of the pagan world, to reply to their arguments against the Old Testament, and especially to break the force of their taunts against its imputation of human form, limitations, passions, weaknesses, and even immoralities to the Almighty. Starting with a mistaken translation of a verse in the book of Proverbs, Origen presented as a basis for his main structure the idea of a threefold sense of Scripture: the literal, the moral, and the mystic--corresponding to the Platonic conception of the threefold nature of man. As results of this we have such masterpieces as his proof, from the fifth verse of chapter xxv of Job, that the stars are living beings, and from the well-known passage in the nineteenth chapter of St. Matthew his warrant for self-mutilation. But his great triumphs were in the allegorical method. By its use the Bible was speedily made an oracle indeed, or, rather, a book of riddles. A list of kings in the Old Testament thus becomes an enumeration of sins; the waterpots of stone, "containing two or three firkins apiece," at the marriage of Cana, signify the literal, moral, and spiritual sense of Scripture; the ass upon which the Saviour rode on his triumphal entry into Jerusalem becomes the Old Testament, the foal the New Testament, and the two apostles who went to loose them the moral and mystical senses; blind Bartimeus throwing off his coat while hastening to Jesus, opens a whole treasury of oracular meanings. The genius and power of Origen made a great impression on the strong thinkers who followed him. St. Jerome called him "the greatest master in the Church since the apostles," and Athanasius was hardly less emphatic. The structure thus begun was continued by leading theologians during the centuries following: St. Hilary of Poitiers--"the Athanasius of Gaul"--produced some wonderful results of this method; but St. Jerome, inspired by the example of the man whom he so greatly admired, went beyond him. A triumph of his exegesis is seen in his statement that the Shunamite damsel who was selected to cherish David in his old age signified heavenly wisdom. The great mind of St. Augustine was drawn largely into this kind of creation, and nothing marks more clearly the vast change which had come over the world than the fact that this greatest of the early Christian thinkers turned from the broader paths opened by Plato and Aristotle into that opened by Clement of Alexandria. In the mystic power of numbers to reveal the sense of Scripture Augustine found especial delight. He tells us that there is deep meaning in sundry scriptural uses of the number forty, and especially as the number of days required for fasting. Forty, he reminds us, is four times ten. Now, four, he says, is the number especially representing time, the day and the year being each divided into four parts; while ten, being made up of three and seven, represents knowledge of the Creator and creature, three referring to the three persons in the triune Creator, and seven referring to the three elements, heart, soul, and mind, taken in connection with the four elements, fire, air, earth, and water, which go to make up the creature. Therefore this number ten, representing knowledge, being multiplied by four, representing time, admonishes us to live during time according to knowledge--that is, to fast for forty days. Referring to such misty methods as these, which lead the reader to ask himself whether he is sleeping or waking, St. Augustine remarks that "ignorance of numbers prevents us from understanding such things in Scripture." But perhaps the most amazing example is to be seen in his notes on the hundred and fifty and three fishes which, according to St. John's Gospel, were caught by St. Peter and the other apostles. Some points in his long development of this subject may be selected to show what the older theological method could be made to do for a great mind. He tells us that the hundred and fifty and three fishes embody a mystery; that the number ten, evidently as the number of the commandments, indicates the law; but, as the law without the spirit only kills, we must add the seven gifts of the spirit, and we thus have the number seventeen, which signifies the old and new dispensations; then, if we add together every several number which seventeen contains from one to seventeen inclusive, the result is a hundred and fifty and three--the number of the fishes. With this sort of reasoning he finds profound meanings in the number of furlongs mentioned in he sixth chapter of St. John. Referring to the fact that the disciples had rowed about "twenty-five or thirty furlongs," he declares that "twenty-five typifies the law, because it is five times five, but the law was imperfect before the gospel came; now perfection is comprised in six, since God in six days perfected the world, hence five is multiplied by six that the law may be perfected by the gospel, and six times five is thirty." But Augustine's exploits in exegesis were not all based on numerals; he is sometimes equally profound in other modes. Thus he tells us that the condemnation of the serpent to eat dust typifies the sin of curiosity, since in eating dust he "penetrates the obscure and shadowy"; and that Noah's ark was "pitched within and without with pitch" to show the safety of the Church from the leaking in of heresy. Still another exploit--one at which the Church might well have stood aghast--was his statement that the drunkenness of Noah prefigured the suffering and death of Christ. It is but just to say that he was not the original author of this interpretation: it had been presented long before by St. Cyprian. But this was far from Augustine's worst. Perhaps no interpretation of Scripture has ever led to more cruel and persistent oppression, torture, and bloodshed than his reading into one of the most beautiful parables of Jesus of Nazareth--into the words "Compel them to come in"--a warrant for religious persecution: of all unintended blasphemies since the world began, possibly the most appalling. Another strong man follows to fasten these methods on the Church: St. Gregory the Great. In his renowned work on the book of Job, the Magna Moralia, given to the world at the end of the sixth century, he lays great stress on the deep mystical meanings of the statement that Job had seven sons. He thinks the seven sons typify the twelve apostles, for "the apostles were selected through the sevenfold grace of the Spirit; moreover, twelve is produced from seven--that is, the two parts of seven, four and three, when multiplied together give twelve." He also finds deep significance in the number of the apostles; this number being evidently determined by a multiplication of the number of persons in the Trinity by the number of quarters of the globe. Still, to do him justice, it must be said that in some parts of his exegesis the strong sense which was one of his most striking characteristics crops out in a way very refreshing. Thus, referring to a passage in the first chapter of Job, regarding the oxen which were ploughing and the asses which were feeding beside them, he tells us pithily that these typify two classes of Christians: the oxen, the energetic Christians who do the work of the Church; the asses, the lazy Christians who merely feed.(466) (466) For Origen, see the De Principiis, book iv, chaps. i-vii et seq., Crombie's translation; also the Contra Celsum, vol. vi, p. 70; vol. vii, p. 20, etc.; also various citations in Farrar. For Hilary, see his Tractatus super Psalmos, cap. ix, li, etc. in Migne, vol. ix, and De Trinitate, lib. ii, cap. ii. For Jerome's interpretation of the text relating to the Shunamite woman, see Epist. lii, in Migne, vol. xxii, pp. 527, 528. For Augustine's use of numbers, see the De Doctrina Christiana, lib. ii, cap. xvi; and for the explanation of the draught of fishes, see Augustine in, In Johan. Evangel., tractat. cxxii; and on the twenty-five to thirty furlongs, ibid., tract. xxv, cap. 6; and for the significance of the serpent eating dust, De Gen., lib. ii, c. 18. or the view that the drunkenness of Noah prefigured the suffering of Christ, as held by SS. Cyprian and Augustine, see Farrar, as above, pp. 181, 238. For St. Gregory, see the Magna Moralia, lib. i, cap. xiv. Thus began the vast theological structure of oracular interpretation applied to the Bible. As we have seen, the men who prepared the ground for it were the rabbis of Palestine and the Hellenized Jews of Alexandria; and the four great men who laid its foundation courses were Origen, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Gregory. During the ten centuries following the last of these men this structure continued to rise steadily above the plain meanings of Scripture. The Christian world rejoiced in it, and the few great thinkers who dared bring the truth to bear upon it were rejected. It did indeed seem at one period in the early Church that a better system might be developed. The School of Antioch, especially as represented by Chrysostom, appeared likely to lead in this better way, but the dominant forces were too strong; the passion for myth and marvel prevailed over the love of real knowledge, and the reasonings of Chrysostom and his compeers were neglected.(467) (467) For the work of the School of Antioch, and especially of Chrysostom, see the eloquent tribute to it by Farrar, as above. In the ninth century came another effort to present the claims of right reason. The first man prominent in this was St. Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, whom an eminent historian has well called the clearest head of his time. With the same insight which penetrated the fallacies and follies of image worship, belief in witchcraft persecution, the ordeal, and the judicial duel, he saw the futility of this vast fabric of interpretation, protested against the idea that the Divine Spirit extended its inspiration to the mere words of Scripture, and asked a question which has resounded through every generation since: "If you once begin such a system, who can measure the absurdity which will follow?" During the same century another opponent of this dominant system appeared: John Scotus Erigena. He contended that "reason and authority come alike from the one source of Divine Wisdom"; that the fathers, great as their authority is, often contradict each other; and that, in last resort, reason must be called in to decide between them. But the evolution of unreason continued: Agobard was unheeded, and Erigena placed under the ban by two councils--his work being condemned by a synod as a "Commentum Diaboli." Four centuries later Honorius III ordered it to be burned, as "teeming with the venom of hereditary depravity"; and finally, after eight centuries, Pope Gregory XIII placed it on the Index, where, with so many other works which have done good service to humanity, it remains to this day. Nor did Abelard, who, three centuries after Agobard and Erigena, made an attempt in some respects like theirs, have any better success: his fate at the hands of St. Bernard and the Council of Sens the world knows by heart. Far more consonant with the spirit of the universal Church was the teaching in the twelfth century of the great Hugo of St. Victor, conveyed in these ominous words, "Learn first what is to be believed" (Disce primo quod credendum est), meaning thereby that one should first accept doctrines, and then find texts to confirm them. These principles being dominant, the accretions to the enormous fabric of interpretation went steadily on. Typical is the fact that the Venerable Bede contributed to it the doctrine that, in the text mentioning Elkanah and his two wives, Elkanah means Christ and the two wives the Synagogue and the Church. Even such men as Alfred the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas were added to the forces at work in building above the sacred books this prodigious structure of sophistry. Perhaps nothing shows more clearly the tenacity of the old system of interpretation than the sermons of Savonarola. During the last decade of the fifteenth century, just at the close of the medieval period, he was engaged in a life-and-death struggle at Florence. No man ever preached more powerfully the gospel of righteousness; none ever laid more stress on conduct; even Luther was not more zealous for reform or more careless of tradition; and yet we find the great Florentine apostle and martyr absolutely tied fast to the old system of allegorical interpretation. The autograph notes of his sermons, still preserved in his cell at San Marco, show this abundantly. Thus we find him attaching to the creation of grasses and plants on the third day an allegorical connection with the "multitude of the elect" and with the "sound doctrines of the Church," and to the creation of land animals on the sixth day a similar relation to "the Jewish people" and to "Christians given up to things earthly."(468) (468) For Agobard, see the Liber adversus Fredigisum, cap. xii; also Reuter's Relig. Aufklarung im Mittelalter, vol. i, p. 24; also Poole, Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, London, 1884, pp. 38 et seq. For Erigena, see his De Divisione Naturae, lib. iv, cap. v; also i, cap. lxvi-lxxi; and for general account, see Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, New York, 1871, vol. i, pp. 358 et seq.; and for the treatment of his work by the Church, see the edition of the Index under Leo XIII, 1881. For Abelard, see the Sic et Non, Prologue, Migne, vol. iii, pp. 371-377. For Hugo of St. Victor, see Erudit. Didask., lib. vii, vi, 4, in Migne, clxxvi. For Savonarola's interpretations, see various references to his preaching in Villari's life of Savonarola, English translation, London, 1890, and especially the exceedingly interesting table in the appendix to vol. i, chap. vii. The revival of learning in the fifteenth century seemed likely to undermine this older structure. Then it was that Lorenzo Valla brought to bear on biblical research, for the first time, the spirit of modern criticism. By truly scientific methods he proved the famous "Letter of Christ to Abgarus" a forgery; the "Donation of Constantine," one of the great foundations of the ecclesiastical power in temporal things, a fraud; and the "Apostles' Creed" a creation which post-dated the apostles by several centuries. Of even more permanent influence was his work upon the New Testament, in which he initiated the modern method of comparing manuscripts to find what the sacred text really is. At an earlier or later period he would doubtless have paid for his temerity with his life; fortunately, just at that time the ruling pontiff and his Contemporaries cared much for literature and little for orthodoxy, and from their palaces he could bid defiance to the Inquisition. While Valla thus initiated biblical criticism south of the Alps, a much greater man began a more fruitful work in northern Europe. Erasmus, with his edition of the New Testament, stands at the source of that great stream of modern research and thought which is doing so much to undermine and dissolve away the vast fabric of patristic and scholastic interpretation. Yet his efforts to purify the scriptural text seemed at first to encounter insurmountable difficulties, and one of these may stimulate reflection. He had found, what some others had found before him, that the famous verse in the fifth chapter of the First Epistle General of St. John, regarding the "three witnesses," was an interpolation. Careful research through all the really important early manuscripts showed that it appeared in none of them. Even after the Bible had been corrected, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Nicholas, cardinal and librarian of the Roman Church, "in accordance with the orthodox faith," the passage was still wanting in the more authoritative Latin manuscripts. There was not the slightest tenable ground for believing in the authenticity of the text; on the contrary, it has been demonstrated that, after a universal silence of the orthodox fathers of the Church, of the ancient versions of the Scriptures, and of all really important manuscripts, the verse first appeared in a Confession of Faith drawn up by an obscure zealot toward the end of the fifth century. In a very mild exercise, then, of critical judgment, Erasmus omitted this text from the first two editions of his Greek Testament as evidently spurious. A storm arose at once. In England, Lee, afterward Archbishop of York; in Spain, Stunica, one of the editors of the Complutensian Polyglot; and in France, Bude, Syndic of the Sorbonne, together with a vast army of monks in England and on the Continent, attacked him ferociously. He was condemned by the University of Paris, and various propositions of his were declared to be heretical and impious. Fortunately, the worst persecutors could not reach him; otherwise they might have treated him as they treated his disciple, Berquin, whom in 1529 they burned at Paris. The fate of this spurious text throws light into the workings of human nature in its relations to sacred literature. Although Luther omitted it from his translation of the New Testament, and kept it out of every copy published during his lifetime, and although at a later period the most eminent Christian scholars showed that it had no right to a place in the Bible, it was, after Luther's death, replaced in the German translation, and has been incorporated into all important editions of it, save one, since the beginning of the seventeenth century. So essential was it found in maintaining the dominant theology that, despite the fact that Sir Isaac Newton, Richard Porson, the nineteenth-century revisers, and all other eminent authorities have rejected it, the Anglican Church still retains it in its Lectionary, and the Scotch Church continues to use it in the Westminster Catechism, as a main support of the doctrine of the Trinity. Nor were other new truths presented by Erasmus better received. His statement that "some of the epistles ascribed to St. Paul are certainly not his," which is to-day universally acknowledged as a truism, also aroused a storm. For generations, then, his work seemed vain. On the coming in of the Reformation the great structure of belief in the literal and historical correctness of every statement in the Scriptures, in the profound allegorical meanings of the simplest texts, and even in the divine origin of the vowel punctuation, towered more loftily and grew more rapidly than ever before. The Reformers, having cast off the authority of the Pope and of the universal Church, fell back all the more upon the infallibility of the sacred books. The attitude of Luther toward this great subject was characteristic. As a rule, he adhered tenaciously to the literal interpretation of the Scriptures; his argument against Copernicus is a fair example of his reasoning in this respect; but, with the strong good sense which characterized him, he from time to time broke away from the received belief. Thus, he took the liberty of understanding certain passages in the Old Testament in a different sense from that given them by the New Testament, and declared St. Paul's allegorical use of the story of Sarah and Hagar "too unsound to stand the test." He also emphatically denied that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by St. Paul, and he did this in the exercise of a critical judgment upon internal evidence. His utterance as to the Epistle of St. James became famous. He announced to the Church: "I do not esteem this an apostolic, epistle; I will not have it in my Bible among the canonical books," and he summed up his opinion in his well-known allusion to it as "an epistle of straw." Emboldened by him, the gentle spirit of Melanchthon, while usually taking the Bible very literally, at times revolted; but this was not due to any want of loyalty to the old method of interpretation: whenever the wildest and most absurd system of exegesis seemed necessary to support any part of the reformed doctrine, Luther and Melanchthon unflinchingly developed it. Both of them held firmly to the old dictum of Hugo of St. Victor, which, as we have seen, was virtually that one must first accept the doctrine, and then find scriptural warrant for it. Very striking examples of this were afforded in the interpretation by Luther and Melanchthon of certain alleged marvels of their time, and one out of several of these may be taken as typical of their methods. In 1523 Luther and Melanchthon jointly published a work under the title Der Papstesel--interpreting the significance of a strange, ass-like monster which, according to a popular story, had been found floating in the Tiber some time before. This book was illustrated by startling pictures, and both text and pictures were devoted to proving that this monster was "a sign from God," indicating the doom of the papacy. This treatise by the two great founders of German Protestantism pointed out that the ass's head signified the Pope himself; "for," said they, "as well as an ass's head is suited to a human body, so well is the Pope suited to be head over the Church." This argument was clinched by a reference to Exodus. The right hand of the monster, said to be like an elephant's foot, they made to signify the spiritual rule of the Pope, since "with it he tramples upon all the weak": this they proved from the book of Daniel and the Second Epistle to Timothy. The monster's left hand, which was like the hand of a man, they declared to mean the Pope's secular rule, and they found passages to support this view in Daniel and St. Luke. The right foot, which was like the foot of an ox, they declared to typify the servants of the spiritual power; and proved this by a citation from St. Matthew. The left foot, like a griffin's claw, they made to typify the servants of the temporal power of the Pope, and the highly developed breasts and various other members, cardinals, bishops, priests, and monks, "whose life is eating, drinking, and unchastity": to prove this they cited passages from Second Timothy and Philippians. The alleged fish-scales on the arms, legs, and neck of the monster they made to typify secular princes and lords; "since," as they said, "in St. Matthew and Job the sea typifies the world, and fishes men." The old man's head at the base of the monster's spine they interpreted to mean "the abolition and end of the papacy," and proved this from Hebrews and Daniel. The dragon which opens his mouth in the rear and vomits fire, "refers to the terrible, virulent bulls and books which the Pope and his minions are now vomiting forth into the world." The two great Reformers then went on to insist that, since this monster was found at Rome, it could refer to no person but the Pope; "for," they said, "God always sends his signs in the places where their meaning applies." Finally, they assured the world that the monster in general clearly signified that the papacy was then near its end. To this development of interpretation Luther and Melanchthon especially devoted themselves; the latter by revising this exposition of the prodigy, and the former by making additions to a new edition. Such was the success of this kind of interpretation that Luther, hearing that a monstrous calf had been found at Freiburg, published a treatise upon it--showing, by citations from the books of Exodus, Kings, the Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel, and the Gospel of St. John, that this new monster was the especial work of the devil, but full of meaning in regard to the questions at issue between the Reformers and the older Church. The other main branch of the Reformed Church appeared for a time to establish a better system. Calvin's strong logic seemed at one period likely to tear his adherents away from the older method; but the evolution of scholasticism continued, and the influence of the German reformers prevailed. At every theological centre came an amazing development of interpretation. Eminent Lutheran divines in the seventeenth century, like Gerhard, Calovius, Coccerus, and multitudes of others, wrote scores of quartos to further this system, and the other branch of the Protestant Church emulated their example. The pregnant dictum of St. Augustine--"Greater is the authority of Scripture than all human capacity"--was steadily insisted upon, and, toward the close of the seventeenth century, Voetius, the renowned professor at Utrecht, declared, "Not a word is contained in the Holy Scriptures which is not in the strictest sense inspired, the very punctuation not excepted"; and this declaration was echoed back from multitudes of pulpits, theological chairs, synods, and councils. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to find what the "authority of Scripture" really was. To the greater number of Protestant ecclesiastics it meant the authority of any meaning in the text which they had the wit to invent and the power to enforce. To increase this vast confusion, came, in the older branch of the Church, the idea of the divine inspiration of the Latin translation of the Bible ascribed to St. Jerome--the Vulgate. It was insisted by leading Catholic authorities that this was as completely a product of divine inspiration as was the Hebrew original. Strong men arose to insist even that, where the Hebrew and the Latin differed, the Hebrew should be altered to fit Jerome's mistranslation, as the latter, having been made under the new dispensation, must be better than that made under the old. Even so great a man as Cardinal Bellarmine exerted himself in vain against this new tide of unreason.(469) (469) For Valla, see various sources already named; and for an especially interesting account, Symond's Renaissance in Italy, the Revival of Learning, pp. 260-269; and for the opinion of the best contemporary judge, see Erasmus, Opera, Leyden, 1703, tom. iii, p. 98. For Erasmus and his opponents, see Life of Erasmus, by Butler, London, 1825, pp. 179-182; but especially, for the general subject, Bishop Creighton's History of the Papacy during the Reformation. For the attack by Bude and the Sorbonne and the burning of Berquin, see Drummond, Life and character of Erasmus, vol. ii, pp. 220-223; also pp. 230-239. As to the text of the Three Witnesses, see Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xxxvi, notes 116-118; also Dean Milman's note thereupon. For a full and learned statement of the evidence against the verse, see Porson's Letters to Travis, London, 1790, in which an elaborate discussion of all the MSS. is given. See also Jowett in Essays and Reviews, p. 307. For a very full and impartial history of the long controversy over this passage, see Charles Butler's Horae Biblicae, reprinted in Jared Sparks's Theological Essays and Tracts, vol. ii. For Luther's ideas of interpretation, see his Sammtliche Schriften, Walch edition, vol. i, p. 1199, vol. ii, p. 1758, vol. viii, p. 2140; for some of his more free views, vol. xiv, p. 472, vol. vi, p. 121, vol. xi, p. 1448, vol. xii, p. 830; also Tholuck, Doctrine of Inspiration, Boston, 1867, citing the Colloquia, Frankfort, 1571, vol. ii, p. 102; also the Vorreden zu der deutschen Bibelubersetzung, in Walch's edition, as above, vol. xiv, especially pp. 94, 98, and 146-150. As to Melanchthon, see especially his Loci Communes, 1521; and as to the enormous growth of commentaries in the generations immediately following, see Charles Beard, Hibbert Lectures for 1883, on the Reformation, especially the admirable chapter on Protestant Scholasticism; also Archdeacon Farrar, history of Interpretation. For the Papstesel, etc., see Luther's Sammtliche Schriften, edit. Walch, vol. xiv, pp. 2403 et seq.; also Melanchthon's Opera, edit. Bretschneider, vol. xx, pp. 665 et seq. In the White Library of Cornell University will be found an original edition of the book, with engravings of the monster. For the Monchkalb, see Luther's works as above, vol. xix, pp. 2416 et seq. For the spirit of Calvin in interpretation, see Farrar, ans especially H. P. Smith, D. D., Inspiration and Inerrancy, chap. iv, and the very brilliant essay forming chap. iii of the same work, by L. J. Evans, pp. 66 and 67, note. For the attitude of the older Church toward the Vulgate, see Pallavicini, Histoire du Concile de Trente, Montrouge, 1844, tome i, pp 19,20; but especially Symonds, The Catholic Reaction, vol. i, pp. 226 et seq. As to a demand for the revision of the Hebrew Bible to correct its differences from the Vulgate, see Emanuel Deutsch's Literary Remains, New York, 1874, p. 9. For the work and spirit of Calovius and other commentators immediately following the Reformation, see Farrar, as above; also Beard, Schaff, and Hertzog, Geschichte des alten Testaments in der christlichen Kirche, pp. 527 et seq. As to extreme views of Voetius and others, see Tholuck, as above. For the Formula Concensus Helvetica, which in 1675 affirmed the inspiration of the vowel points, see Schaff, Creeds. Nor was a fanatical adhesion to the mere letter of the sacred text confined to western Europe. About the middle of the seventeenth century, in the reign of Alexis, father of Peter the Great, Nikon, Patriarch of the Russian Greek Church, attempted to correct the Slavonic Scriptures and service-books. They were full of interpolations due to ignorance, carelessness, or zeal, and in order to remedy this state of the texts Nikon procured a number of the best Greek and Slavonic manuscripts, set the leading and most devout scholars he could find at work upon them, and caused Russian Church councils in 1655 and 1666 to promulgate the books thus corrected. But the same feelings which have wrought so strongly against our nineteenth-century revision of the Bible acted even more forcibly against that revision in the seventeenth century. Straightway great masses of the people, led by monks and parish priests, rose in revolt. The fact that the revisers had written in the New Testament the name of Jesus correctly, instead of following the old wrong orthography, aroused the wildest fanaticism. The monks of the great convent of Solovetsk, when the new books were sent them, cried in terror: "Woe, woe! what have you done with the Son of God?" They then shut their gates, defying patriarch, council, and Czar, until, after a struggle lasting seven years, their monastery was besieged and taken by an imperial army. Hence arose the great sect of the "Old Believers," lasting to this day, and fanatically devoted to the corrupt readings of the old text.(470) (470) The present writer, visiting Moscow in the spring of 1894, was presented by Count Leo Tolstoi to one of the most eminent and influential members of the sect of "Old Believers," which dates from the reform of Nikon. Nothing could exceed the fervor with which this venerable man, standing in the chapel of his superb villa, expatiated on the horrors of making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two. His argument was that the TWO fingers, as used by the "Old Believers," typify the divine and human nature of our Lord, and hence that the use of them is strictly correct; whereas signing with THREE fingers, representing the blessed Trinity, is "virtually to crucify all three persons of the Godhead afresh." Not less cogent were his arguments regarding the immense value of the old text of Scripture as compared with the new. For the revolt against Nikon and his reforms, see Rambaud, History of Russia, vol. i, pp. 414-416; also Wallace, Russia, vol. ii, pp. 307-309; also Leroy-Beaulieu, L'Empire des Tsars, vol. iii, livre iii. Strange to say, on the development of Scripture interpretation, largely in accordance with the old methods, wrought, about the beginning of the eighteenth century, Sir Isaac Newton. It is hard to believe that from the mind which produced the Principia, and which broke through the many time-honoured beliefs regarding the dates and formation of scriptural books, could have come his discussions regarding the prophecies; still, at various points even in this work, his power appears. From internal evidence he not only discarded the text of the Three Witnesses, but he decided that the Pentateuch must have been made up from several books; that Genesis was not written until the reign of Saul; that the books of Kings and Chronicles were probably collected by Ezra; and, in a curious anticipation of modern criticism, that the book of Psalms and the prophecies of Isaiah and Daniel were each written by various authors at various dates. But the old belief in prophecy as prediction was too strong for him, and we find him applying his great powers to the relation of the details given by the prophets and in the Apocalypse to the history of mankind since unrolled, and tracing from every statement in prophetic literature its exact fulfilment even in the most minute particulars. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the structure of scriptural interpretation had become enormous. It seemed destined to hide forever the real character of our sacred literature and to obscure the great light which Christianity had brought into the world. The Church, Eastern and Western, Catholic and Protestant, was content to sit in its shadow, and the great divines of all branches of the Church reared every sort of fantastic buttress to strengthen or adorn it. It seemed to be founded for eternity; and yet, at this very time when it appeared the strongest, a current of thought was rapidly dissolving away its foundations, and preparing that wreck and ruin of the whole fabric which is now, at the close of the nineteenth century, going on so rapidly. The account of the movement thus begun is next to be given.(471) (471) For Newton's boldness in textual criticism, compared with his credulity as to the literal fulfilment of prophecy, see his Observations upon the Prophesies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, in his works, edited by Horsley, London, 1785, vol. v, pp. 297-491. II. BEGINNINGS OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION. At the base of the vast structure of the older scriptural interpretation were certain ideas regarding the first five books of the Old Testament. It was taken for granted that they had been dictated by the Almighty to Moses about fifteen hundred years before our era; that some parts of them, indeed, had been written by the corporeal finger of Jehovah, and that all parts gave not merely his thoughts but his exact phraseology. It was also held, virtually by the universal Church, that while every narrative or statement in these books is a precise statement of historical or scientific fact, yet that the entire text contains vast hidden meanings. Such was the rule: the exceptions made by a few interpreters here and there only confirmed it. Even the indifference of St. Jerome to the doctrine of Mosaic authorship did not prevent its ripening into a dogma. The book of Genesis was universally held to be an account, not only divinely comprehensive but miraculously exact, of the creation and of the beginnings of life on the earth; an account to which all discoveries in every branch of science must, under pains and penalties, be made to conform. In English-speaking lands this has lasted until our own time: the most eminent of recent English biologists has told us how in every path of natural science he has, at some stage in his career, come across a barrier labelled "No thoroughfare Moses." A favourite subject of theological eloquence was the perfection of the Pentateuch, and especially of Genesis, not only as a record of the past, but as a revelation of the future. The culmination of this view in the Protestant Church was the Pansophia Mosaica of Pfeiffer, a Lutheran general superintendent, or bishop, in northern Germany, near the beginning of the seventeenth century. He declared that the text of Genesis "must be received strictly"; that "it contains all knowledge, human and divine"; that "twenty-eight articles of the Augsburg Confession are to be found in it"; that "it is an arsenal of arguments against all sects and sorts of atheists, pagans, Jews, Turks, Tartars, papists, Calvinists, Socinians, and Baptists"; "the source of all sciences and arts, including law, medicine, philosophy, and rhetoric"; "the source and essence of all histories and of all professions, trades, and works"; "an exhibition of all virtues and vices"; "the origin of all consolation." This utterance resounded through Germany from pulpit to pulpit, growing in strength and volume, until a century later it was echoed back by Huet, the eminent bishop and commentator of France. He cited a hundred authors, sacred and profane, to prove that Moses wrote the Pentateuch; and not only this, but that from the Jewish lawgiver came the heathen theology--that Moses was, in fact, nearly the whole pagan pantheon rolled into one, and really the being worshipped under such names as Bacchus, Adonis, and Apollo.(472) (472) For the passage from Huxley regarding Mosaic barriers to modern thought, see his Essays, recently published. For Pfeiffer, see Zoeckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, vol. i, pp. 688, 689. For St. Jerome's indifference as to the Mosaic authorship, see the first of the excellent Sketches of the Pentateuch Criticism, by the Rev. S. J. Curtiss, in the Bibliotheca Sacra for January, 1884. For Huet, see also Curtiss, ibid. About the middle of the twelfth century came, so far as the world now knows, the first gainsayer of this general theory. Then it was that Aben Ezra, the greatest biblical scholar of the Middle Ages, ventured very discreetly to call attention to certain points in the Pentateuch incompatible with the belief that the whole of it had been written by Moses and handed down in its original form. His opinion was based upon the well-known texts which have turned all really eminent biblical scholars in the nineteenth century from the old view by showing the Mosaic authorship of the five books in their present form to be clearly disproved by the books themselves; and, among these texts, accounts of Moses' own death and burial, as well as statements based on names, events, and conditions which only came into being ages after the time of Moses. But Aben Ezra had evidently no aspirations for martyrdom; he fathered the idea upon a rabbi of a previous generation, and, having veiled his statement in an enigma, added the caution, "Let him who understands hold his tongue."(473) (473) For the texts referred to by Aben Ezra as incompatible with the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, see Meyer, Geschichte der Exegese, vol. i, pp. 85-88; and for a pithy short account, Moore's introduction to The Genesis of Genesis, by B. W. Bacon, Hartford, 1893, p. 23; also Curtiss, as above. For a full exhibition of the absolute incompatibility of these texts with the Mosaic authorship, etc., see The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch, by C. A. Briggs, D. D., New York, 1893, especially chap. iv; also Robertson Smith, art. Bible, in Encycl. Brit. For about four centuries the learned world followed the prudent rabbi's advice, and then two noted scholars, one of them a Protestant, the other a Catholic, revived his idea. The first of these, Carlstadt, insisted that the authorship of the Pentateuch was unknown and unknowable; the other, Andreas Maes, expressed his opinion in terms which would not now offend the most orthodox, that the Pentateuch had been edited by Ezra, and had received in the process sundry divinely inspired words and phrases to clear the meaning. Both these innovators were dealt with promptly: Carlstadt was, for this and other troublesome ideas, suppressed with the applause of the Protestant Church; and the book of Maes was placed by the older Church on the Index. But as we now look back over the Revival of Learning, the Age of Discovery, and the Reformation, we can see clearly that powerful as the older Church then was, and powerful as the Reformed Church was to be, there was at work something far more mighty than either or than both; and this was a great law of nature--the law of evolution through differentiation. Obedient to this law there now began to arise, both within the Church and without it, a new body of scholars--not so much theologians as searchers for truth by scientific methods. Some, like Cusa, were ecclesiastics; some, like Valla, Erasmus, and the Scaligers, were not such in any real sense; but whether in holy orders, really, nominally, or not at all, they were, first of all, literary and scientific investigators. During the sixteenth century a strong impulse was given to more thorough research by several very remarkable triumphs of the critical method as developed by this new class of men, and two of these ought here to receive attention on account of their influence upon the whole after course of human thought. For many centuries the Decretals bearing the great name of Isidore had been cherished as among the most valued muniments of the Church. They contained what claimed to be a mass of canons, letters of popes, decrees of councils, and the like, from the days of the apostles down to the eighth century--all supporting at important points the doctrine, the discipline, the ceremonial, and various high claims of the Church and its hierarchy. But in the fifteenth century that sturdy German thinker, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, insisted on examining these documents and on applying to them the same thorough research and patient thought which led him, even before Copernicus, to detect the error of the Ptolemaic astronomy. As a result, he avowed his scepticism regarding this pious literature; other close thinkers followed him in investigating it, and it was soon found a tissue of absurd anachronisms, with endless clashing and confusion of events and persons. For a time heroic attempts were made by Church authorities to cover up these facts. Scholars revealing them were frowned upon, even persecuted, and their works placed upon the Index; scholars explaining them away--the "apologists" or "reconcilers" of that day--were rewarded with Church preferment, one of them securing for a very feeble treatise a cardinal's hat. But all in vain; these writings were at length acknowledged by all scholars of note, Catholic and Protestant, to be mainly a mass of devoutly cunning forgeries. While the eyes of scholars were thus opened as never before to the skill of early Church zealots in forging documents useful to ecclesiasticism, another discovery revealed their equal skill in forging documents useful to theology. For more than a thousand years great stress had been laid by theologians upon the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of St. Paul. Claiming to come from one so near the great apostle, they were prized as a most precious supplement to Holy Writ. A belief was developed that when St. Paul had returned to earth, after having been "caught up to the third heaven," he had revealed to Dionysius the things he had seen. Hence it was that the varied pictures given in these writings of the heavenly hierarchy and the angelic ministers of the Almighty took strong hold upon the imagination of the universal Church: their theological statements sank deeply into the hearts and minds of the Mystics of the twelfth century and the Platonists of the fifteenth; and the ten epistles they contained, addressed to St. John, to Titus, to Polycarp, and others of the earliest period, were considered treasures of sacred history. An Emperor of the East had sent these writings to an Emperor of the West as the most precious of imperial gifts. Scotus Erigena had translated them; St. Thomas Aquinas had expounded them; Dante had glorified them; Albert the Great had claimed that they were virtually given by St. Paul and inspired by the Holy Ghost. Their authenticity was taken for granted by fathers, doctors, popes, councils, and the universal Church. But now, in the glow of the Renascence, all this treasure was found to be but dross. Investigators in the old Church and in the new joined in proving that the great mass of it was spurious. To say nothing of other evidences, it failed to stand the simplest of all tests, for these writings constantly presupposed institutions and referred to events of much later date than the time of Dionysius; they were at length acknowledged by all authorities worthy of the name, Catholic as well as Protestant, to be simply--like the Isidorian Decretals--pious frauds. Thus arose an atmosphere of criticism very different from the atmosphere of literary docility and acquiescence of the "Ages of Faith"; thus it came that great scholars in all parts of Europe began to realize, as never before, the part which theological skill and ecclesiastical zeal had taken in the development of spurious sacred literature; thus was stimulated a new energy in research into all ancient documents, no matter what their claims. To strengthen this feeling and to intensify the stimulating qualities of this new atmosphere came, as we have seen, the researches and revelations of Valla regarding the forged Letter of Christ to Abgarus, the fraudulent Donation of Constantine, and the late date of the Apostles' Creed; and, to give this feeling direction toward the Hebrew and Christian sacred books, came the example of Erasmus.(474) (474) For very fair statements regarding the great forged documents of the Middle Ages, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, articles Dionysius the Areopagite and False Decretals, and in the latter the curious acknowledgment that the mass of pseudo-Isidorian Decretals "is what we now call a forgery." For the derivation of Dionysius's ideas from St. Paul, and for the idea of inspiration attributed to him, see Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, vol. xiii, early chapters and chap. vi. For very interesting details on this general subject, see Dollinger, Das Papstthum, chap. ii; also his Fables respecting the Popes of the Middle Ages, translated by Plummer and H. B. Smith, part i, chap. v. Of the exposure of these works, see Farrar, as above, pp. 254, 255; also Beard, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 4, 354. For the False Decretals, see Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol. ii, pp. 373 et seq. For the great work of the pseudo-Dionysius, see ibid., vol. iii, p. 352, and vol. vi, pp. 402 et seq., and Canon Westcott's article on Dionysius the Areopagite in vol. v of the Contemporary Review; also the chapters on Astronomy in this work. Naturally, then, in this new atmosphere the bolder scholars of Europe soon began to push more vigorously the researches begun centuries before by Aben Ezra, and the next efforts of these men were seen about the middle of the seventeenth century, when Hobbes, in his Leviathan, and La Pevrere, in his Preadamites, took them up and developed them still further. The result came speedily. Hobbes, for this and other sins, was put under the ban, even by the political party which sorely needed him, and was regarded generally as an outcast; while La Peyrere, for this and other heresies, was thrown into prison by the Grand Vicar of Mechlin, and kept there until he fully retracted: his book was refuted by seven theologians within a year after its appearance, and within a generation thirty-six elaborate answers to it had appeared: the Parliament of Paris ordered it to be burned by the hangman. In 1670 came an utterance vastly more important, by a man far greater than any of these--the Tractatus Thrologico-Politicus of Spinoza. Reverently but firmly he went much more deeply into the subject. Suggesting new arguments and recasting the old, he summed up all with judicial fairness, and showed that Moses could not have been the author of the Pentateuch in the form then existing; that there had been glosses and revisions; that the biblical books had grown up as a literature; that, though great truths are to be found in them, and they are to be regarded as a divine revelation, the old claims of inerrancy for them can not be maintained; that in studying them men had been misled by mistaking human conceptions for divine meanings; that, while prophets have been inspired, the prophetic faculty has not been the dowry of the Jewish people alone; that to look for exact knowledge of natural and spiritual phenomena in the sacred books is an utter mistake; and that the narratives of the Old and New Testaments, while they surpass those of profane history, differ among themselves not only in literary merit, but in the value of the doctrines they inculcate. As to the authorship of the Pentateuch, he arrived at the conclusion that it was written long after Moses, but that Moses may have written some books from which it was compiled--as, for example, those which are mentioned in the Scriptures, the Book of the Wars of God, the Book of the Covenant, and the like--and that the many repetitions and contradictions in the various books show a lack of careful editing as well as a variety of original sources. Spinoza then went on to throw light into some other books of the Old and New Testaments, and added two general statements which have proved exceedingly serviceable, for they contain the germs of all modern broad churchmanship; and the first of them gave the formula which was destined in our own time to save to the Anglican Church a large number of her noblest sons: this was, that "sacred Scripture CONTAINS the Word of God, and in so far as it contains it is incorruptible"; the second was, that "error in speculative doctrine is not impious." Though published in various editions, the book seemed to produce little effect upon the world at that time; but its result to Spinoza himself was none the less serious. Though so deeply religious that Novalis spoke of him as "a God-intoxicated man," and Schleiermacher called him a "saint," he had been, for the earlier expression of some of the opinions it contained, abhorred as a heretic both by Jews and Christians: from the synagogue he was cut off by a public curse, and by the Church he was now regarded as in some sort a forerunner of Antichrist. For all this, he showed no resentment, but devoted himself quietly to his studies, and to the simple manual labour by which he supported himself; declined all proffered honours, among them a professorship at Heidelberg; found pleasure only in the society of a few friends as gentle and affectionate as himself; and died contentedly, without seeing any widespread effect of his doctrine other than the prevailing abhorrence of himself. Perhaps in all the seventeenth century there was no man whom Jesus of Nazareth would have more deeply loved, and no life which he would have more warmly approved; yet down to a very recent period this hatred for Spinoza has continued. When, about 1880, it was proposed to erect a monument to him at Amsterdam, discourses were given in churches and synagogues prophesying the wrath of Heaven upon the city for such a profanation; and when the monument was finished, the police were obliged to exert themselves to prevent injury to the statue and to the eminent scholars who unveiled it. But the ideas of Spinoza at last secured recognition. They had sunk deeply into the hearts and minds of various leaders of thought, and, most important of all, into the heart and mind of Lessing; he brought them to bear in his treatise on the Education of the World, as well as in his drama, Nathan the Wise, and both these works have spoken with power to every generation since. In France, also, came the same healthful evolution of thought. For generations scholars had known that multitudes of errors had crept into the sacred text. Robert Stephens had found over two thousand variations in the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament, and in 1633 Jean Morin, a priest of the Oratory, pointed out clearly many of the most glaring of these. Seventeen years later, in spite of the most earnest Protestant efforts to suppress his work, Cappellus gave forth his Critica Sacra, demonstrating not only that the vowel pointing of Scripture was not divinely inspired, but that the Hebrew text itself, from which the modern translations were made, is full of errors due to the carelessness, ignorance, and doctrinal zeal of early scribes, and that there had clearly been no miraculous preservation of the "original autographs" of the sacred books. While orthodox France was under the uneasiness and alarm thus caused, appeared a Critical History of the Old Testament by Richard Simon, a priest of the Oratory. He was a thoroughly religious man and an acute scholar, whose whole purpose was to develop truths which he believed healthful to the Church and to mankind. But he denied that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, and exhibited the internal evidence, now so well known, that the books were composed much later by various persons, and edited later still. He also showed that other parts of the Old Testament had been compiled from older sources, and attacked the time-honoured theory that Hebrew was the primitive language of mankind. The whole character of his book was such that in these days it would pass, on the whole, as conservative and orthodox; it had been approved by the censor in 1678, and printed, when the table of contents and a page of the preface were shown to Bossuet. The great bishop and theologian was instantly aroused; he pronounced the work "a mass of impieties and a bulwark of irreligion"; his biographer tells us that, although it was Holy Thursday, the bishop, in spite of the solemnity of the day, hastened at once to the Chancellor Le Tellier, and secured an order to stop the publication of the book and to burn the whole edition of it. Fortunately, a few copies were rescued, and a few years later the work found a new publisher in Holland; yet not until there had been attached to it, evidently by some Protestant divine of authority, an essay warning the reader against its dangerous doctrines. Two years later a translation was published in England. This first work of Simon was followed by others, in which he sought, in the interest of scriptural truth, to throw a new and purer light upon our sacred literature; but Bossuet proved implacable. Although unable to suppress all of Simon's works, he was able to drive him from the Oratory, and to bring him into disrepute among the very men who ought to have been proud of him as Frenchmen and thankful to him as Christians. But other scholars of eminence were now working in this field, and chief among them Le Clerc. Virtually driven out of Geneva, he took refuge at Amsterdam, and there published a series of works upon the Hebrew language, the interpretation of Scripture, and the like. In these he combated the prevalent idea that Hebrew was the primitive tongue, expressed the opinion that in the plural form of the word used in Genesis for God, "Elohim," there is a trace of Chaldean polytheism, and, in his discussion on the serpent who tempted Eve, curiously anticipated modern geological and zoological ideas by quietly confessing his inability to see how depriving the serpent of feet and compelling him to go on his belly could be punishment--since all this was natural to the animal. He also ventured quasi-scientific explanations of the confusion of tongues at Babel, the destruction of Sodom, the conversion of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, and the dividing of the Red Sea. As to the Pentateuch in general, he completely rejected the idea that it was written by Moses. But his most permanent gift to the thinking world was his answer to those who insisted upon the reference by Christ and his apostles to Moses as the author of the Pentateuch. The answer became a formula which has proved effective from his day to ours: "Our Lord and his apostles did not come into this world to teach criticism to the Jews, and hence spoke according to the common opinion." Against all these scholars came a theological storm, but it raged most pitilessly against Le Clerc. Such renowned theologians as Carpzov in Germany, Witsius in Holland, and Huet in France berated him unmercifully and overwhelmed him with assertions which still fill us with wonder. That of Huet, attributing the origin of pagan as well as Christian theology to Moses, we have already seen; but Carpzov showed that Protestantism could not be outdone by Catholicism when he declared, in the face of all modern knowledge, that not only the matter but the exact form and words of the Bible had been divinely transmitted to the modern world free from all error. At this Le Clerc stood aghast, and finally stammered out a sort of half recantation.(475) (475) For Carlstadt, and Luther's dealings with him on various accounts, see Meyer, Geschichte der exegese, vol. ii, pp. 373, 397. As to the value of Maes's work in general, see Meyer, vol. ii, p. 125; and as to the sort of work in question, ibid., vol. iii, p. 425, note. For Carlstadt, see also Farrar, History of Interpretation, and Moore's introduction, as above. For Hobbes's view that the Pentateuch was written long after Moses's day, see the Leviathan, vol. iii, p. 33. For La Peyrere's view, see especially his Prae-Adamitae, lib. iv, chap. ii, also lib. ii, passim; also Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, p. 294; also interesting points in Bayle's Dictionary. For Spinoza's view, see the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chaps. ii and iii, and for the persecution, see the various biographies. Details regarding the demonstration against the unveiling of his statue were given to the present writer at the time by Berthold Auerbach, who took part in the ceremony. For Morinus and Cappellus, see Farrar, as above, p. 387 and note. For Richard Simon, see his Histoire Critique de l'Ancien Testament, liv. i, chaps. ii, iii, iv, v, and xiii. For his denial of the prevailing theory regarding Hebrew, see liv. i, chap. iv. For Morinus (Morin) and his work, see the Biog. Univ. and Nouvelle Biog. Generale; also Curtiss. For Bousset's opposition to Simon, see the Histoire de Bousser in the Oeuvres de Bousset, Paris, 1846, tome xii, pp. 330, 331; also t. x, p. 378; also sundry attacks in various volumes. It is interesting to note that among the chief instigators of the persecution were the Port-Royalists, upon whose persecution afterward by the Jesuits so much sympathy has been lavished by the Protestant world. For Le Clerc, see especially his Pentateuchus, Prolegom, dissertat. i; also Com. in Genes., cap. vi-viii. For a translation of selected passages on the points noted, see Twelve Dissertations out of Monsieur LeClerc's Genesis, done out of Latin by Mr. Brown, London, 1696; also Le Clerc's Sentiments de Quelques Theologiens de Hollande, passim; also his work on Inspiration, English translation, Boston, 1820, pp. 47-50, also 57-67. For Witsius and Carpzov, see Curtiss, as above. For some subordinate points in the earlier growth of the opinion at present dominant, see Briggs, The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch, New York, 1893, chap. iv. During the eighteenth century constant additions were made to the enormous structure of orthodox scriptural interpretation, some of them gaining the applause of the Christian world then, though nearly all are utterly discredited now. But in 1753 appeared two contributions of permanent influence, though differing vastly in value. In the comparative estimate of these two works the world has seen a remarkable reversal of public opinion. The first of these was Bishop Lowth's Prelections upon the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews. In this was well brought out that characteristic of Hebrew poetry to which it owes so much of its peculiar charm--its parallelism. The second of these books was Astruc's Conjectures on the Original Memoirs which Moses used in composing the Book of Genesis. In this was for the first time clearly revealed the fact that, amid various fragments of old writings, at least two main narratives enter into the composition of Genesis; that in the first of these is generally used as an appellation of the Almighty the word "Elohim," and in the second the word "Yahveh" (Jehovah); that each narrative has characteristics of its own, in thought and expression, which distinguish it from the other; that, by separating these, two clear and distinct narratives may be obtained, each consistent with itself, and that thus, and thus alone, can be explained the repetitions, discrepancies, and contradictions in Genesis which so long baffled the ingenuity of commentators, especially the two accounts of the creation, so utterly inconsistent with each other. Interesting as was Lowth's book, this work by Astruc was, as the thinking world now acknowledges, infinitely more important; it was, indeed, the most valuable single contribution ever made to biblical study. But such was not the judgment of the world THEN. While Lowth's book was covered with honour and its author promoted from the bishopric of St. David's to that of London, and even offered the primacy, Astruc and his book were covered with reproach. Though, as an orthodox Catholic, he had mainly desired to reassert the authorship of Moses against the argument of Spinoza, he received no thanks on that account. Theologians of all creeds sneered at him as a doctor of medicine who had blundered beyond his province; his fellow-Catholics in France bitterly denounced him as a heretic; and in Germany the great Protestant theologian, Michaelis, who had edited and exalted Lowth's work, poured contempt over Astruc as an ignoramus. The case of Astruc is one of the many which show the wonderful power of the older theological reasoning to close the strongest minds against the clearest truths. The fact which he discovered is now as definitely established as any in the whole range of literature or science. It has become as clear as the day, and yet for two thousand years the minds of professional theologians, Jewish and Christian, were unable to detect it. Not until this eminent physician applied to the subject a mind trained in making scientific distinctions was it given to the world. It was, of course, not possible even for so eminent a scholar as Michaelis to pooh-pooh down a discovery so pregnant; and, curiously enough, it was one of Michaelis's own scholars, Eichhorn, who did the main work in bringing the new truth to bear upon the world. He, with others, developed out of it the theory that Genesis, and indeed the Pentateuch, is made up entirely of fragments of old writings, mainly disjointed. But they did far more than this: they impressed upon the thinking part of Christendom the fact that the Bible is not a BOOK, but a LITERATURE; that the style is not supernatural and unique, but simply the Oriental style of the lands and times in which its various parts were written; and that these must be studied in the light of the modes of thought and statement and the literary habits generally of Oriental peoples. From Eichhorn's time the process which, by historical, philological, and textual research, brings out the truth regarding this literature has been known as "the higher criticism." He was a deeply religious man, and the mainspring of his efforts was the desire to bring back to the Church the educated classes, who had been repelled by the stiff Lutheran orthodoxy; but this only increased hostility to him. Opposition met him in Germany at every turn; and in England, Lloyd, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, who sought patronage for a translation of Eichhorn's work, was met generally with contempt and frequently with insult. Throughout Catholic Germany it was even worse. In 1774 Isenbiehl, a priest at Mayence who had distinguished himself as a Greek and Hebrew scholar, happened to question the usual interpretation of the passage in Isaiah which refers to the virgin-born Immanuel, and showed then--what every competent critic knows now--that it had reference to events looked for in older Jewish history. The censorship and faculty of theology attacked him at once and brought him before the elector. Luckily, this potentate was one of the old easy-going prince-bishops, and contented himself with telling the priest that, though his contention was perhaps true, he "must remain in the old paths, and avoid everything likely to make trouble." But at the elector's death, soon afterward, the theologians renewed the attack, threw Isenbiehl out of his professorship and degraded him. One insult deserves mention for its ingenuity. It was declared that he--the successful and brilliant professor--showed by the obnoxious interpretation that he had not yet rightly learned the Scriptures; he was therefore sent back to the benches of the theological school, and made to take his seat among the ingenuous youth who were conning the rudiments of theology. At this he made a new statement, so carefully guarded that it disarmed many of his enemies, and his high scholarship soon won for him a new professorship of Greek--the condition being that he should cease writing upon Scripture. But a crafty bookseller having republished his former book, and having protected himself by keeping the place and date of publication secret, a new storm fell upon the author; he was again removed from his professorship and thrown into prison; his book was forbidden, and all copies of it in that part of Germany were confiscated. In 1778, having escaped from prison, he sought refuge with another of the minor rulers who in blissful unconsciousness were doing their worst while awaiting the French Revolution, but was at once delivered up to the Mayence authorities and again thrown into prison. The Pope, Pius VI, now intervened with a brief on Isenbiehl's book, declaring it "horrible, false, perverse, destructive, tainted with heresy," and excommunicating all who should read it. At this, Isenbiehl, declaring that he had written it in the hope of doing a service to the Church, recanted, and vegetated in obscurity until his death in 1818. But, despite theological faculties, prince-bishops, and even popes, the new current of thought increased in strength and volume, and into it at the end of the eighteenth century came important contributions from two sources widely separated and most dissimilar. The first of these, which gave a stimulus not yet exhausted, was the work of Herder. By a remarkable intuition he had anticipated some of those ideas of an evolutionary process in nature and in literature which first gained full recognition nearly three quarters of a century after him; but his greatest service in the field of biblical study was his work, at once profound and brilliant, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. In this field he eclipsed Bishop Lowth. Among other things of importance, he showed that the Psalms were by different authors and of different periods--the bloom of a great poetic literature. Until his time no one had so clearly done justice to their sublimity and beauty; but most striking of all was his discussion of Solomon's Song. For over twenty centuries it had been customary to attribute to it mystical meanings. If here and there some man saw the truth, he was careful, like Aben Ezra, to speak with bated breath. The penalty for any more honest interpretation was seen, among Protestants, when Calvin and Beza persecuted Castellio, covered him with obloquy, and finally drove him to starvation and death, for throwing light upon the real character of the Song of Songs; and among Catholics it was seen when Philip II allowed the pious and gifted Luis de Leon, for a similar offence, to be thrown into a dungeon of the Inquisition and kept there for five years, until his health was utterly shattered and his spirit so broken that he consented to publish a new commentary on the song, "as theological and obscure as the most orthodox could desire." Here, too, we have an example of the efficiency of the older biblical theology in fettering the stronger minds and in stupefying the weaker. Just as the book of Genesis had to wait over two thousand years for a physician to reveal the simplest fact regarding its structure, so the Song of Songs had to wait even longer for a poet to reveal not only its beauty but its character. Commentators innumerable had interpreted it; St. Bernard had preached over eighty sermons on its first two chapters; Palestrina had set its most erotic parts to sacred music; Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, from Origen to Aben Ezra and from Luther to Bossuet, had uncovered its deep meanings and had demonstrated it to be anything and everything save that which it really is. Among scores of these strange imaginations it was declared to represent the love of Jehovah for Israel; the love of Christ for the Church; the praises of the Blessed Virgin; the union of the soul with the body; sacred history from the Exodus to the Messiah; Church history from the Crucifixion to the Reformation; and some of the more acute Protestant divines found in it references even to the religious wars in Germany and to the Peace of Passau. In these days it seems hard to imagine how really competent reasoners could thus argue without laughing in each other's faces, after the manner of Cicero's augurs. Herder showed Solomon's Song to be what the whole thinking world now knows it to be--simply an Oriental love-poem. But his frankness brought him into trouble: he was bitterly assailed. Neither his noble character nor his genius availed him. Obliged to flee from one pastorate to another, he at last found a happy refuge at Weimar in the society of Goethe, Wieland, and Jean Paul, and thence he exercised a powerful influence in removing noxious and parasitic growths from religious thought. It would hardly be possible to imagine a man more different from Herder than was the other of the two who most influenced biblical interpretation at the end of the eighteenth century. This was Alexander Geddes--a Roman Catholic priest and a Scotchman. Having at an early period attracted much attention by his scholarship, and having received the very rare distinction, for a Catholic, of a doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, he began publishing in 1792 a new translation of the Old Testament, and followed this in 1800 with a volume of critical remarks. In these he supported mainly three views: first, that the Pentateuch in its present form could not have been written by Moses; secondly, that it was the work of various hands; and, thirdly, that it could not have been written before the time of David. Although there was a fringe of doubtful theories about them, these main conclusions, supported as they were by deep research and cogent reasoning, are now recognised as of great value. But such was not the orthodox opinion then. Though a man of sincere piety, who throughout his entire life remained firm in the faith of his fathers, he and his work were at once condemned: he was suspended by the Catholic authorities as a misbeliever, denounced by Protestants as an infidel, and taunted by both as "a would-be corrector of the Holy Ghost." Of course, by this taunt was meant nothing more than that he dissented from sundry ideas inherited from less enlightened times by the men who just then happened to wield ecclesiastical power. But not all the opposition to him could check the evolution of his thought. A line of great men followed in these paths opened by Astruc and Eichhorn, and broadened by Herder and Geddes. Of these was De Wette, whose various works, especially his Introduction to the Old Testament, gave a new impulse early in the nineteenth century to fruitful thought throughout Christendom. In these writings, while showing how largely myths and legends had entered into the Hebrew sacred books, he threw especial light into the books Deuteronomy and Chronicles. The former he showed to be, in the main, a late priestly summary of law, and the latter a very late priestly recast of early history. He had, indeed, to pay a penalty for thus aiding the world in its march toward more truth, for he was driven out of Germany, and obliged to take refuge in a Swiss professorship; while Theodore Parker, who published an English translation of his work, was, for this and similar sins, virtually rejected by what claimed to be the most liberal of all Christian bodies in the United States. But contributions to the new thought continued from quarters whence least was expected. Gesenius, by his Hebrew Grammar, and Ewald, by his historical studies, greatly advanced it. To them and to all like them during the middle years of the nineteenth century was sturdily opposed the colossus of orthodoxy--Hengstenberg. In him was combined the haughtiness of a Prussian drill-sergeant, the zeal of a Spanish inquisitor, and the flippant brutality of a French orthodox journalist. Behind him stood the gifted but erratic Frederick William IV--a man admirably fitted for a professorship of aesthetics, but whom an inscrutable fate had made King of Prussia. Both these rulers in the German Israel arrayed all possible opposition against the great scholars labouring in the new paths; but this opposition was vain: the succession of acute and honest scholars continued: Vatke, Bleek, Reuss, Graf, Kayser, Hupfeld, Delitzsch, Kuenen, and others wrought on in Germany and Holland, steadily developing the new truth. Especially to be mentioned among these is Hupfeld, who published in 1853 his treatise on The Sources of Genesis. Accepting the Conjectures which Astruc had published just a hundred years before, he established what has ever since been recognised by the leading biblical commentators as the true basis of work upon the Pentateuch--the fact that THREE true documents are combined in Genesis, each with its own characteristics. He, too, had to pay a price for letting more light upon the world. A determined attempt was made to punish him. Though deeply religious in his nature and aspirations, he was denounced in 1865 to the Prussian Government as guilty of irreverence; but, to the credit of his noble and true colleagues who trod in the more orthodox paths--men like Tholuck and Julius Muller--the theological faculty of the University of Halle protested against this persecuting effort, and it was brought to naught. The demonstrations of Hupfeld gave new life to biblical scholarship in all lands. More and more clear became the evidence that throughout the Pentateuch, and indeed in other parts of our sacred books, there had been a fusion of various ideas, a confounding of various epochs, and a compilation of various documents. Thus was opened a new field of thought and work: in sifting out this literature; in rearranging it; and in bringing it into proper connection with the history of the Jewish race and of humanity. Astruc and Hupfeld having thus found a key to the true character of the "Mosaic" Scriptures, a second key was found which opened the way to the secret of order in all this chaos. For many generations one thing had especially puzzled commentators and given rise to masses of futile "reconciliation": this was the patent fact that such men as Samuel, David, Elijah, Isaiah, and indeed the whole Jewish people down to the Exile, showed in all their utterances and actions that they were utterly ignorant of that vast system of ceremonial law which, according to the accounts attributed to Moses and other parts of our sacred books, was in full force during their time and during nearly a thousand years before the Exile. It was held "always, everywhere, and by all," that in the Old Testament the chronological order of revelation was: first, the law; secondly, the Psalms; thirdly, the prophets. This belief continued unchallenged during more than two thousand years, and until after the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet, as far back as 1835, Vatke at Berlin had, in his Religion of the Old Testament, expressed his conviction that this belief was unfounded. Reasoning that Jewish thought must have been subject to the laws of development which govern other systems, he arrived at the conclusion that the legislation ascribed to Moses, and especially the elaborate paraphernalia and composite ceremonies of the ritual, could not have come into being at a period so rude as that depicted in the "Mosaic" accounts. Although Vatke wrapped this statement in a mist of Hegelian metaphysics, a sufficient number of watchmen on the walls of the Prussian Zion saw its meaning, and an alarm was given. The chroniclers tell us that "fear of failing in the examinations, through knowing too much, kept students away from Vatke's lectures." Naturally, while Hengstenberg and Frederick William IV were commanding the forces of orthodoxy, Vatke thought it wise to be silent. Still, the new idea was in the air; indeed, it had been divined about a year earlier, on the other side of the Rhine, by a scholar well known as acute and thoughtful--Reuss, of Strasburg. Unfortunately, he too was overawed, and he refrained from publishing his thought during more than forty years. But his ideas were caught by some of his most gifted scholars; and, of these, Graf and Kayser developed them and had the courage to publish them. At the same period this new master key was found and applied by a greater man than any of these--by Kuenen, of Holland; and thus it was that three eminent scholars, working in different parts of Europe and on different lines, in spite of all obstacles, joined in enforcing upon the thinking world the conviction that the complete Levitical law had been established not at the beginning, but at the end, of the Jewish nation--mainly, indeed, after the Jewish nation as an independent political body had ceased to exist; that this code had not been revealed in the childhood of Israel, but that it had come into being in a perfectly natural way during Israel's final decay--during the period when heroes and prophets had been succeeded by priests. Thus was the historical and psychological evolution of Jewish institutions brought into harmony with the natural development of human thought; elaborate ceremonial institutions being shown to have come after the ruder beginnings of religious development instead of before them. Thus came a new impulse to research, and the fruitage was abundant; the older theological interpretation, with its insoluble puzzles, yielded on all sides. The lead in the new epoch thus opened was taken by Kuenen. Starting with strong prepossessions in favour of the older thought, and even with violent utterances against some of the supporters of the new view, he was borne on by his love of truth, until his great work, The Religion of Israel, published in 1869, attracted the attention of thinking scholars throughout the world by its arguments in favour of the upward movement. From him now came a third master key to the mystery; for he showed that the true opening point for research into the history and literature of Israel is to be found in the utterances of the great prophets of the eighth century before our era. Starting from these, he opened new paths into the periods preceding and following them. Recognising the fact that the religion of Israel was, like other great world religions, a development of higher ideas out of lower, he led men to bring deeper thinking and wider research into the great problem. With ample learning and irresistible logic he proved that Old Testament history is largely mingled with myth and legend; that not only were the laws attributed to Moses in the main a far later development, but that much of their historical setting was an afterthought; also that Old Testament prophecy was never supernaturally predictive, and least of all predictive of events recorded in the New Testament. Thus it was that his genius gave to the thinking world a new point of view, and a masterly exhibition of the true method of study. Justly has one of the most eminent divines of the contemporary Anglican Church indorsed the statement of another eminent scholar, that "Kuenen stood upon his watch-tower, as it were the conscience of Old Testament science"; that his work is characterized "not merely by fine scholarship, critical insight, historical sense, and a religious nature, but also by an incorruptible conscientiousness, and a majestic devotion to the quest of truth." Thus was established the science of biblical criticism. And now the question was, whether the Church of northern Germany would accept this great gift--the fruit of centuries of devoted toil and self-sacrifice--and take the lead of Christendom in and by it. The great curse of Theology and Ecclesiasticism has always been their tendency to sacrifice large interests to small--Charity to Creed, Unity to Uniformity, Fact to Tradition, Ethics to Dogma. And now there were symptoms throughout the governing bodies of the Reformed churches indicating a determination to sacrifice leadership in this new thought to ease in orthodoxy. Every revelation of new knowledge encountered outcry, opposition, and repression; and, what was worse, the ill-judged declarations of some unwise workers in the critical field were seized upon and used to discredit all fruitful research. Fortunately, a man now appeared who both met all this opposition successfully, and put aside all the half truths or specious untruths urged by minor critics whose zeal outran their discretion. This was a great constructive scholar--not a destroyer, but a builder--Wellhausen. Reverently, but honestly and courageously, with clearness, fulness, and convicting force, he summed up the conquests of scientific criticism as bearing on Hebrew history and literature. These conquests had reduced the vast structures which theologians had during ages been erecting over the sacred text to shapeless ruin and rubbish: this rubbish he removed, and brought out from beneath it the reality. He showed Jewish history as an evolution obedient to laws at work in all ages, and Jewish literature as a growth out of individual, tribal, and national life. Thus was our sacred history and literature given a beauty and high use which had long been foreign to them. Thereby was a vast service rendered immediately to Germany, and eventually to all mankind; and this service was greatest of all in the domain of religion.(476) (476) For Lowth, see the Rev. T. K. Cheyne, D. D., Professor of the Interpretation of the Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford, Founders of the Old Testament Criticism, London, 1893, pp. 3, 4. For Astruc's very high character as a medical authority, see the Dictionnaire des Sciences Medicales, Paris, 1820; it is significant that at first he concealed his authorship of the Conjectures. For a brief statement, see Cheyne; also Moore's introduction to Bacon's Genesis of Genesis; but for a statement remarkably full and interesting, and based on knowledge at first hand of Astruc's very rare book, see Curtiss, as above. For Michaelis and Eichorn, see Meyer, Geschichte der Exegese; also Cheyne and Moore. For Isenbiehl, see Reusch, in Allg. deutsche Biographie. The texts cited against him were Isaiah vii, 14, and Matt. i, 22, 23. For Herder, see various historians of literature and writers in exegesis, and especially Pfleiderer, Development of Theology in Germany, chap. ii. For his influence, as well as that of Lessing, see Beard's Hibbert Lectures, chap. x. For a brief comparison of Lowth's work with that of Herder, see Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 377. For examples of interpretations of the Song of Songs, see Farrar, as above, p. 33. For Castellio (Chatillon), his anticipation of Herder's view of Solomon's Song, and his persecution by Calvin and Beza, which drove him to starvation and death, see Lecky, Rationalism, etc., vol. ii, pp. 46-48; also Bayle's Dictionary, article Castalio; also Montaigne's Essais, liv,. i, chap. xxxiv; and especially the new life of him by Buisson. For the persecution of Luis de Leon for a similar offence, see Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, vol. ii, pp. 41, 42, and note. For a remarkably frank acceptance of the consequences flowing from Herder's view of it, see Sanday, Inspiration, pp. 211, 405. For Geddes, see Cheyne, as above. For Theodore Parker, see his various biographies, passim. For Reuss, Graf, and Kuenen, see Cheyne, as above; and for the citations referred to, see the Rev. Dr. Driver, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, in The Academy, October 27, 1894; also a note to Wellhausen's article Pentateuch in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For a generous yet weighty tribute to Kuenen's method, see Pfleiderer, as above, book iii, chap. ii. For the view of leading Christian critics on the book of Chronicles, see especially Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, pp. 495 et seq.; also Wellhausen, as above; also Hooykaas, Oort, and Kuenen, Bible for Learners. For many of the foregoing, see also the writings of Prof. W. Robertson Smith; also Beard's Hibbert Lectures, chap. x. For Hupfield and his discovery, see Cheyne, Founders, etc., as above, chap. vii; also Moore's Introduction. For a justly indignant judgment of Hengstenberg and his school, see Canon Farrar, as above, p. 417, note; and for a few words throwing a bright light into his character and career, see C. A. Briggs, D. D., Authority of Holy Scripture, p. 93. For Wellhausen, see Pfleiderer, as above, book iii, chap. ii. For an excellent popular statement of the general results of German criticism, see J. T. Sunderland, The Bible, Its Origin, Growth, and Character, New York and London, 1893. III. THE CONTINUED GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION. The science of biblical criticism was, as we have seen, first developed mainly in Germany and Holland. Many considerations there, as elsewhere, combined to deter men from opening new paths to truth: not even in those countries were these the paths to preferment; but there, at least, the sturdy Teutonic love of truth for truth's sake, strengthened by the Kantian ethics, found no such obstacles as in other parts of Europe. Fair investigation of biblical subjects had not there been extirpated, as in Italy and Spain; nor had it been forced into channels which led nowhither, as in France and southern Germany; nor were men who might otherwise have pursued it dazzled and drawn away from it by the multitude of splendid prizes for plausibility, for sophistry, or for silence displayed before the ecclesiastical vision in England. In the frugal homes of North German and Dutch professors and pastors high thinking on these great subjects went steadily on, and the "liberty of teaching," which is the glory of the northern Continental universities, while it did not secure honest thinkers against vexations, did at least protect them against the persecutions which in other countries would have thwarted their studies and starved their families.(477) (477) As to the influence of Kant on honest thought in Germany, see Pfleiderer, as above, chap. i. In England the admission of the new current of thought was apparently impossible. The traditional system of biblical interpretation seemed established on British soil forever. It was knit into the whole fabric of thought and observance; it was protected by the most justly esteemed hierarchy the world has ever seen; it was intrenched behind the bishops' palaces, the cathedral stalls, the professors' chairs, the country parsonages--all these, as a rule, the seats of high endeavour and beautiful culture. The older thought held a controlling voice in the senate of the nation; it was dear to the hearts of all classes; it was superbly endowed; every strong thinker seemed to hold a brief, or to be in receipt of a retaining fee for it. As to preferment in the Church, there was a cynical aphorism current, "He may hold anything who will hold his tongue."(478) (478) For an eloquent and at the same time profound statement of the evils flowing from the "moral terrorism" and "intellectual tyrrany" at Oxford at the period referred to, see quotation in Pfleiderer, Development of Theology, p. 371. For the alloy of interested motives among English Church dignitiaries, see the pungent criticism of Bishop Hampden by Canon Liddon, in his Life of Pusey, vol. i, p. 363. Yet, while there was inevitably much alloy of worldly wisdom in the opposition to the new thought, no just thinker can deny far higher motives to many, perhaps to most, of the ecclesiastics who were resolute against it. The evangelical movement incarnate in the Wesleys had not spent its strength; the movement begun by Pusey, Newman, Keble, and their compeers was in full force. The aesthetic reaction, represented on the Continent by Chateaubriand, Manzoni, and Victor Hugo, and in England by Walter Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and above all by Wordsworth, came in to give strength to this barrier. Under the magic of the men who led in this reaction, cathedrals and churches, which in the previous century had been regarded by men of culture as mere barbaric masses of stone and mortar, to be masked without by classic colonnades and within by rococo work in stucco and papier mache, became even more beloved than in the thirteenth century. Even men who were repelled by theological disputations were fascinated and made devoted reactionists by the newly revealed beauties of medieval architecture and ritual.(479) (479) A very curious example of this insensibility among persons of really high culture is to be found in American literature toward the end of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Adams, wife of John Adams, afterward President of the United States, but at that time minister to England, one of the most gifted women of her time, speaking, in her very interesting letters from England, of her journey to the seashore, refers to Canterbury Cathedral, seen from her carriage windows, and which she evidently did not take the trouble to enter, as "looking like a vast prison." So, too, about the same time, Thomas Jefferson, the American plenipotentiary in France, a devoted lover of classical and Renaissance architecture, giving an account of his journey to Paris, never refers to any of the beautiful cathedrals or churches upon his route. The centre and fortress of this vast system, and of the reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century, was the University of Oxford. Orthodoxy was its vaunt, and a special exponent of its spirit and object of its admiration was its member of Parliament, Mr. William Ewart Gladstone, who, having begun his political career by a laboured plea for the union of church and state, ended it by giving that union what is likely to be a death-blow. The mob at the circus of Constantinople in the days of the Byzantine emperors was hardly more wildly orthodox than the mob of students at this foremost seat of learning of the Anglo-Saxon race during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The Moslem students of El Azhar are hardly more intolerant now than these English students were then. A curious proof of this had been displayed just before the end of that period. The minister of the United States at the court of St. James was then Edward Everett. He was undoubtedly the most accomplished scholar and one of the foremost statesmen that America had produced; his eloquence in early life had made him perhaps the most admired of American preachers; his classical learning had at a later period made him Professor of Greek at Harvard; he had successfully edited the leading American review, and had taken a high place in American literature; he had been ten years a member of Congress; he had been again and again elected Governor of Massachusetts; and in all these posts he had shown amply those qualities which afterward made him President of Harvard, Secretary of State of the United States, and a United States Senator. His character and attainments were of the highest, and, as he was then occupying the foremost place in the diplomatic service of his country, he was invited to receive an appropriate honorary degree at Oxford. But, on his presentation for it in the Sheldonian Theatre, there came a revelation to the people he represented, and indeed to all Christendom: a riot having been carefully prepared beforehand by sundry zealots, he was most grossly and ingeniously insulted by the mob of undergraduates and bachelors of art in the galleries and masters of arts on the floor; and the reason for this was that, though by no means radical in his religious opinions, he was thought to have been in his early life, and to be possibly at that time, below what was then the Oxford fashion in belief, or rather feeling, regarding the mystery of the Trinity. At the centre of biblical teaching at Oxford sat Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew, a scholar who had himself remained for a time at a German university, and who early in life had imbibed just enough of the German spirit to expose him to suspicion and even to attack. One charge against him at that time shows curiously what was then expected of a man perfectly sound in the older Anglican theology. He had ventured to defend holy writ with the argument that there were fishes actually existing which could have swallowed the prophet Jonah. The argument proved unfortunate. He was attacked on the scriptural ground that the fish which swallowed Jonah was created for that express purpose. He, like others, fell back under the charm of the old system: his ideas gave force to the reaction: in the quiet of his study, which, especially after the death of his son, became a hermitage, he relapsed into patristic and medieval conceptions of Christianity, enforcing them from the pulpit and in his published works. He now virtually accepted the famous dictum of Hugo of St. Victor--that one is first to find what is to be believed, and then to search the Scriptures for proofs of it. His devotion to the main features of the older interpretation was seen at its strongest in his utterances regarding the book of Daniel. Just as Cardinal Bellarmine had insisted that the doctrine of the incarnation depends upon the retention of the Ptolemaic astronomy; just as Danzius had insisted that the very continuance of religion depends on the divine origin of the Hebrew punctuation; just as Peter Martyr had made everything sacred depend on the literal acceptance of Genesis; just as Bishop Warburton had insisted that Christianity absolutely depends upon a right interpretation of the prophecies regarding Antichrist; just as John Wesley had insisted that the truth of the Bible depends on the reality of witchcraft; just as, at a later period, Bishop Wilberforce insisted that the doctrine of the Incarnation depends on the "Mosaic" statements regarding the origin of man; and just as Canon Liddon insisted that Christianity itself depends on a literal belief in Noah's flood, in the transformation of Lot's wife, and in the sojourn of Jonah in the whale: so did Pusey then virtually insist that Christianity must stand or fall with the early date of the book of Daniel. Happily, though the Ptolemaic astronomy, and witchcraft, and the Genesis creation myths, and the Adam, Noah, Lot, and Jonah legends, and the divine origin of the Hebrew punctuation, and the prophecies regarding Antichrist, and the early date of the book of Daniel have now been relegated to the limbo of ontworn beliefs, Christianity has but come forth the stronger. Nothing seemed less likely than that such a vast intrenched camp as that of which Oxford was the centre could be carried by an effort proceeding from a few isolated German and Dutch scholars. Yet it was the unexpected which occurred; and it is instructive to note that, even at the period when the champions of the older thought were to all appearance impregnably intrenched in England, a way had been opened into their citadel, and that the most effective agents in preparing it were really the very men in the universities and cathedral chapters who had most distinguished themselves by uncompromising and intolerant orthodoxy. A rapid survey of the history of general literary criticism at that epoch will reveal this fact fully. During the last decade of the seventeenth century there had taken place the famous controversy over the Letters of Phalaris, in which, against Charles Boyle and his supporters at Oxford, was pitted Richard Bentley at Cambridge, who insisted that the letters were spurious. In the series of battles royal which followed, although Boyle, aided by Atterbury, afterward so noted for his mingled ecclesiastical and political intrigues, had gained a temporary triumph by wit and humour, Bentley's final attack had proved irresistible. Drawing from the stores of his wonderfully wide and minute knowledge, he showed that the letters could not have been written in the time of Phalaris--proving this by an exhibition of their style, which could not then have been in use, of their reference to events which had not then taken place, and of a mass of considerations which no one but a scholar almost miraculously gifted could have marshalled so fully. The controversy had attracted attention not only in England but throughout Europe. With Bentley's reply it had ended. In spite of public applause at Atterbury's wit, scholars throughout the world acknowledged Bentley's victory: he was recognised as the foremost classical scholar of his time; the mastership of Trinity, which he accepted, and the Bristol bishopric, which he rejected, were his formal reward. Although, in his new position as head of the greatest college in England, he went to extreme lengths on the orthodox side in biblical theology, consenting even to support the doctrine that the Hebrew punctuation was divinely inspired, this was as nothing compared with the influence of the system of criticism which he introduced into English studies of classical literature in preparing the way for the application of a similar system to ALL literature, whether called sacred or profane. Up to that period there had really been no adequate criticism of ancient literature. Whatever name had been attached to any ancient writing was usually accepted as the name of the author: what texts should be imputed to an author was settled generally on authority. But with Bentley began a new epoch. His acute intellect and exquisite touch revealed clearly to English scholars the new science of criticism, and familiarized the minds of thinking men with the idea that the texts of ancient literature must be submitted to this science. Henceforward a new spirit reigned among the best classical scholars, prophetic of more and more light in the greater field of sacred literature. Scholars, of whom Porson was chief, followed out this method, and though at times, as in Porson's own case, they were warned off, with much loss and damage, from the application of it to the sacred text, they kept alive the better tradition. A hundred years after Bentley's main efforts appeared in Germany another epoch-making book--Wolf's Introduction to Homer. In this was broached the theory that the Iliad and Odyssey are not the works of a single great poet, but are made up of ballad literature wrought into unity by more or less skilful editing. In spite of various changes and phases of opinion on this subject since Wolf's day, he dealt a killing blow at the idea that classical works are necessarily to be taken at what may be termed their face value. More and more clearly it was seen that the ideas of early copyists, and even of early possessors of masterpieces in ancient literature, were entirely different from those to which the modern world is accustomed. It was seen that manipulations and interpolations in the text by copyists and possessors had long been considered not merely venial sins, but matters of right, and that even the issuing of whole books under assumed names had been practised freely. In 1811 a light akin to that thrown by Bentley and Wolf upon ancient literature was thrown by Niebuhr upon ancient history. In his History of Rome the application of scientific principles to the examination of historical sources was for the first time exhibited largely and brilliantly. Up to that period the time-honoured utterances of ancient authorities had been, as a rule, accepted as final: no breaking away, even from the most absurd of them, was looked upon with favour, and any one presuming to go behind them was regarded as troublesome and even as dangerous. Through this sacred conventionalism Niebuhr broke fearlessly, and, though at times overcritical, he struck from the early history of Rome a vast mass of accretions, and gave to the world a residue infinitely more valuable than the original amalgam of myth, legend, and chronicle. His methods were especially brought to bear on students' history by one of the truest men and noblest scholars that the English race has produced--Arnold of Rugby--and, in spite of the inevitable heavy conservatism, were allowed to do their work in the field of ancient history as well as in that of ancient classical literature. The place of myth in history thus became more and more understood, and historical foundations, at least so far as SECULAR history was concerned, were henceforth dealt with in a scientific spirit. The extension of this new treatment to ALL ancient literature and history was now simply a matter of time. Such an extension had already begun; for in 1829 had appeared Milman's History of the Jews. In this work came a further evolution of the truths and methods suggested by Bentley, Wolf, and Niebuhr, and their application to sacred history was made strikingly evident. Milman, though a clergyman, treated the history of the chosen people in the light of modern knowledge of Oriental and especially of Semitic peoples. He exhibited sundry great biblical personages of the wandering days of Israel as sheiks or emirs or Bedouin chieftains; and the tribes of Israel as obedient then to the same general laws, customs, and ideas governing wandering tribes in the same region now. He dealt with conflicting sources somewhat in the spirit of Bentley, and with the mythical, legendary, and miraculous somewhat in the spirit of Niebuhr. This treatment of the history of the Jews, simply as the development of an Oriental tribe, raised great opposition. Such champions of orthodoxy as Bishop Mant and Dr. Faussett straightway took the field, and with such effect that the Family Library, a very valuable series in which Milman's history appeared, was put under the ban, and its further publication stopped. For years Milman, though a man of exquisite literary and lofty historical gifts, as well as of most honourable character, was debarred from preferment and outstripped by ecclesiastics vastly inferior to him in everything save worldly wisdom; for years he was passed in the race for honours by divines who were content either to hold briefs for all the contemporary unreason which happened to be popular, or to keep their mouths shut altogether. This opposition to him extended to his works. For many years they were sneered at, decried, and kept from the public as far as possible. Fortunately, the progress of events lifted him, before the closing years of his life, above all this opposition. As Dean of St. Paul's he really outranked the contemporary archbishops: he lived to see his main ideas accepted, and his History of Latin Christianity received as certainly one of the most valuable, and no less certainly the most attractive, of all Church histories ever written. The two great English histories of Greece--that by Thirlwall, which was finished, and that by Grote, which was begun, in the middle years of the nineteenth century--came in to strengthen this new development. By application of the critical method to historical sources, by pointing out more and more fully the inevitable part played by myth and legend in early chronicles, by displaying more and more clearly the ease with which interpolations of texts, falsifications of statements, and attributions to pretended authors were made, they paved the way still further toward a just and fruitful study of sacred literature.(480) (480) For Mr. Gladstone's earlier opinion, see his Church and State, and Macaulay's review of it. For Pusey, see Mozley, Ward, Newman's Apologia, Dean Church, etc., and especially his Life, by Liddon. Very characteristic touches are given in vol. i, showing the origin of many of his opinions (see letter on p. 184). For the scandalous treatment of Mr. Everett by the clerical mob at Oxford, see a rather jaunty account of the preparations and of the whole performance in a letter written at the time from Oxford by the late Dean Church, in The Life and Letters of Dean Church, London, 1894, pp. 40, 41. For a brief but excellent summary of the character and services of Everett, see J. F. Rhodes's History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, New York, 1893, vol. i, pp. 291 et seq. For a succinct and brilliant history of the Bentley-Boyle controversy, see Macauley's article on Bentley in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; also Beard's Hibbert Lectures for 1893, pp. 344, 345; also Dissertation in Bentley's work, edited by Dyce, London, 1836, vol. i, especially the preface. For Wolf, see his Prolegomena ad Homerum, Halle, 1795; for its effects, see the admirable brief statement in Beard, as above, p. 345. For Niebuhr, see his Roman History, translated by Hare and Thirlwall, London, 1828; also Beard, as above. For Milman's view, see, as a specimen, his History of the Jews, last edition, especially pp. 15-27. For a noble tribute to his character, see the preface to Lecky's History of European Morals. For Thirlwall, see his History of Greece, passim; also his letters; also his Charge of the Bishop of St. David's, 1863. Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the traditionally orthodox side of English scholarship, while it had not been able to maintain any effective quarantine against Continental criticism of classical literature, had been able to keep up barriers fairly strong against Continental discussions of sacred literature. But in the second half of the nineteenth century these barriers were broken at many points, and, the stream of German thought being united with the current of devotion to truth in England, there appeared early in 1860 a modest volume entitled Essays and Reviews. This work discussed sundry of the older theological positions which had been rendered untenable by modern research, and brought to bear upon them the views of the newer school of biblical interpretation. The authors were, as a rule, scholars in the prime of life, holding influential positions in the universities and public schools. They were seven--the first being Dr. Temple, a successor of Arnold at Rugby; and the others, the Rev. Dr. Rowland Williams, Prof. Baden Powell, the Rev. H. B. Wilson, Mr. C. W. Goodwin, the Rev. Mark Pattison, and the Rev. Prof. Jowett--the only one of the seven not in holy orders being Goodwin. All the articles were important, though the first, by Temple, on The Education of the World, and the last, by Jowett, on The Interpretation of Scripture, being the most moderate, served most effectually as entering wedges into the old tradition. At first no great attention was paid to the book, the only notice being the usual attempts in sundry clerical newspapers to pooh-pooh it. But in October, 1860, appeared in the Westminster Review an article exulting in the work as an evidence that the new critical method had at last penetrated the Church of England. The opportunity for defending the Church was at once seized by no less a personage than Bishop Wilberforce, of Oxford, the same who a few months before had secured a fame more lasting than enviable by his attacks on Darwin and the evolutionary theory. His first onslaught was made in a charge to his clergy. This he followed up with an article in the Quarterly Review, very explosive in its rhetoric, much like that which he had devoted in the same periodical to Darwin. The bishop declared that the work tended "toward infidelity, if not to atheism"; that the writers had been "guilty of criminal levity"; that, with the exception of the essay by Dr. Temple, their writings were "full of sophistries and scepticisms." He was especially bitter against Prof. Jowett's dictum, "Interpret the Scripture like any other book"; he insisted that Mr. Goodwin's treatment of the Mosaic account of the origin of man "sweeps away the whole basis of inspiration and leaves no place for the Incarnation"; and through the article were scattered such rhetorical adornments as the words "infidel," "atheistic," "false," and "wanton." It at once attracted wide attention, but its most immediate effect was to make the fortune of Essays and Reviews, which was straightway demanded on every hand, went through edition after edition, and became a power in the land. At this a panic began, and with the usual results of panic--much folly and some cruelty. Addresses from clergy and laity, many of them frantic with rage and fear, poured in upon the bishops, begging them to save Christianity and the Church: a storm of abuse arose: the seven essayists were stigmatized as "the seven extinguishers of the seven lamps of the Apocalypse," "the seven champions NOT of Christendom." As a result of all this pressure, Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the last of the old, kindly, bewigged pluralists of the Georgian period, headed a declaration, which was signed by the Archbishop of York and a long list of bishops, expressing pain at the appearance of the book, but doubts as to the possibility of any effective dealing with it. This letter only made matters worse. The orthodox decried it as timid, and the liberals denounced it as irregular. The same influences were exerted in the sister island, and the Protestant archbishops in Ireland issued a joint letter warning the faithful against the "disingenuousness" of the book. Everything seemed to increase the ferment. A meeting of clergy and laity having been held at Oxford in the matter of electing a Professor of Sanscrit, the older orthodox party, having made every effort to defeat the eminent scholar Max Miller, and all in vain, found relief after their defeat in new denunciations of Essays and Reviews. Of the two prelates who might have been expected to breast the storm, Tait, Bishop of London, afterward Archbishop of Canterbury, bent to it for a period, though he soon recovered himself and did good service; the other, Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's, bided his time, and, when the proper moment came, struck most effective blows for truth and justice. Tait, large-minded and shrewd, one of the most statesmanlike of prelates, at first endeavoured to detach Temple and Jowett from their associates; but, though Temple was broken down with a load of care, and especially by the fact that he had upon his shoulders the school at Rugby, whose patrons had become alarmed at his connection with the book, he showed a most refreshing courage and manliness. A passage from his letters to the Bishop of London runs as follows: "With regard to my own conduct I can only say that nothing on earth will induce me to do what you propose. I do not judge for others, but in me it would be base and untrue." On another occasion Dr. Temple, when pressed in the interest of the institution of learning under his care to detach himself from his associates in writing the book, declared to a meeting of the masters of the school that, if any statements were made to the effect that he disapproved of the other writers in the volume, he should probably find it his duty to contradict them. Another of these letters to the Bishop of London contains sundry passages of great force. One is as follows: "Many years ago you urged us from the university pulpit to undertake the critical study of the Bible. You said that it was a dangerous study, but indispensable. You described its difficulties, and those who listened must have felt a confidence (as I assuredly did, for I was there) that if they took your advice and entered on the task, you, at any rate, would never join in treating them unjustly if their study had brought with it the difficulties you described. Such a study, so full of difficulties, imperatively demands freedom for its condition. To tell a man to study, and yet bid him, under heavy penalties, come to the same conclusions with those who have not studied, is to mock him. If the conclusions are prescribed, the study is precluded." And again, what, as coming from a man who has since held two of the most important bishoprics in the English Church, is of great importance: "What can be a grosser superstition than the theory of literal inspiration? But because that has a regular footing it is to be treated as a good man's mistake, while the courage to speak the truth about the first chapter of Genesis is a wanton piece of wickedness." The storm howled on. In the Convocation of Canterbury it was especially violent. In the Lower House Archdeacon Denison insisted on the greatest severity, as he said, "for the sake of the young who are tainted, and corrupted, and thrust almost to hell by the action of this book." At another time the same eminent churchman declared: "Of all books in any language which I ever laid my hands on, this is incomparably the worst; it contains all the poison which is to be found in Tom Paine's Age of Reason, while it has the additional disadvantage of having been written by clergymen." Hysterical as all this was, the Upper House was little more self-contained. Both Tait and Thirlwall, trying to make some headway against the swelling tide, were for a time beaten back by Wilberforce, who insisted on the duty of the Church to clear itself publicly from complicity with men who, as he said, "gave up God's Word, Creation, redemption, and the work of the Holy Ghost." The matter was brought to a curious issue by two prosecutions--one against the Rev. Dr. Williams by the Bishop of Salisbury, the other against the Rev. Mr. Wilson by one of his clerical brethren. The first result was that both these authors were sentenced to suspension from their offices for a year. At this the two condemned clergymen appealed to the Queen in Council. Upon the judicial committee to try the case in last resort sat the lord chancellor, the two archbishops, and the Bishop of London; and one occurrence now brought into especial relief the power of the older theological reasoning and ecclesiastical zeal to close the minds of the best of men to the simplest principles of right and justice. Among the men of his time most deservedly honoured for lofty character, thorough scholarship, and keen perception of right and justice was Dr. Pusey. No one doubted then, and no one doubts now, that he would have gone to the stake sooner than knowingly countenance wrong or injustice; and yet we find him at this time writing a series of long and earnest letters to the Bishop of London, who, as a judge, was hearing this case, which involved the livelihood and even the good name of the men on trial, pointing out to the bishop the evil consequences which must follow should the authors of Essays and Reviews be acquitted, and virtually beseeching the judges, on grounds of expediency, to convict them. Happily, Bishop Tait was too just a man to be thrown off his bearings by appeals such as this. The decision of the court, as finally rendered by the lord chancellor, virtually declared it to be no part of the duty of the tribunal to pronounce any opinion upon the book; that the court only had to do with certain extracts which had been presented. Among these was one adduced in support of a charge against Mr. Wilson--that he denied the doctrine of eternal punishment. On this the court decided that it did "not find in the formularies of the English Church any such distinct declaration upon the subject as to require it to punish the expression of a hope by a clergyman that even the ultimate pardon of the wicked who are condemned in the day of judgment may be consistent with the will of Almighty God." While the archbishops dissented from this judgment, Bishop Tait united in it with the lord chancellor and the lay judges. And now the panic broke out more severely than ever. Confusion became worse confounded. The earnest-minded insisted that the tribunal had virtually approved Essays and Reviews; the cynical remarked that it had "dismissed hell with costs." An alliance was made at once between the more zealous High and Low Church men, and Oxford became its headquarters: Dr. Pusey and Archdeacon Denison were among the leaders, and an impassioned declaration was posted to every clergyman in England and Ireland, with a letter begging him, "for the love of God," to sign it. Thus it was that in a very short time eleven thousand signatures were obtained. Besides this, deputations claiming to represent one hundred and thirty-seven thousand laymen waited on the archbishops to thank them for dissenting from the judgment. The Convocation of Canterbury also plunged into the fray, Bishop Wilberforce being the champion of the older orthodoxy, and Bishop Tait of the new. Caustic was the speech made by Bishop Thirlwall, in which he declared that he considered the eleven thousand names, headed by that of Pusey, attached to the Oxford declaration "in the light of a row of figures preceded by a decimal point, so that, however far the series may be advanced, it never can rise to the value of a single unit." In spite of all that could be done, the act of condemnation was carried in Convocation. The last main echo of this whole struggle against the newer mode of interpretation was heard when the chancellor, referring to the matter in the House of Lords, characterized the ecclesiastical act as "simply a series of well-lubricated terms--a sentence so oily and saponaceous that no one can grasp it; like an eel, it slips through your fingers, and is simply nothing." The word "saponaceous" necessarily elicited a bitter retort from Bishop Wilberforce; but perhaps the most valuable judgment on the whole matter was rendered by Bishop Tait, who declared, "These things have so effectually frightened the clergy that I think there is scarcely a bishop on the bench, unless it be the Bishop of St. David's (Thirlwall), that is not useless for the purpose of preventing the widespread alienation of intelligent men." During the whole controversy, and for some time afterward, the press was burdened with replies, ponderous and pithy, lurid and vapid, vitriolic and unctuous, but in the main bearing the inevitable characteristics of pleas for inherited opinions stimulated by ample endowments. The authors of the book seemed for a time likely to be swept out of the Church. One of the least daring but most eminent, finding himself apparently forsaken, seemed, though a man of very tough fibre, about to die of a broken heart; but sturdy English sense at last prevailed. The storm passed, and afterward came the still, small voice. Really sound thinkers throughout England, especially those who held no briefs for conventional orthodoxy, recognised the service rendered by the book. It was found that, after all, there existed even among churchmen a great mass of public opinion in favour of giving a full hearing to the reverent expression of honest thought, and inclined to distrust any cause which subjected fair play to zeal. The authors of the work not only remained in the Church of England, but some of them have since represented the broader views, though not always with their early courage, in the highest and most influential positions in the Anglican Church.(481) (481) For the origin of Essays and Reviews, see Edinburgh Review, April, 1861, p. 463. For the reception of the book, see the Westminster Review, October, 1860. For the attack on it by Bishop Wilberforce, see his article in the Quarterly Review, January, 1861; for additional facts, Edinburgh Review, April, 1861, pp. 461 et seq. For action on the book by Convocation, see Dublin Review, May, 1861, citing Jelf et al.; also Davidson's Life of Archbishop Tate, vol. i, chap. xii. For the Archepiscopal Letter, see Dublin Review, as above; also Life of Bishop Wilberforce, by his son, London, 1882, vol. iii, pp. 4,5; it is there stated that Wilberforce drew upon the letter. For curious inside views of the Essays and Reviews controversy, including the course of Bishop Hampden, Tait, et al., see Life of Bishop Wilberforce, by his son, as above, pp. 3-11; also pp. 141-149. For the denunciation of the present Bishop of London (Temple) as a "leper," etc., see ibid., pp. 319, 320. For general treatment of Temple, see Fraser's Magazine, December, 1869. For very interesting correspondence, see Davidson's Life of Archbishop Tait, as above. For Archdeacon Denison's speeches, see ibid, vol. i, p. 302. For Dr. Pusey's letter to Bishop Tait, urging conviction of the Essayists and Reviewers, ibid, p. 314. For the striking letters of Dr. Temple, ibid., pp. 290 et seq.; also The Life and Letters of Dean Stanley. For replies, see Charge of the Bishop of Oxford, 1863; also Replies to Essays and Reviews, Parker, London, with preface by Wilberforce; also Aids to Faith, edited by the Bishop of Gloucester, London, 1861; also those by Jelf, Burgon, et al. For the legal proceedings, see Quarterly Review, April, 1864; also Davidson, as above. For Bishop Thirlwall's speech, see Chronicle of Convocation, quoted in Life of Tait, vol. i, p. 320. For Tait's tribute to Thirlwall, see Life of Tait, vol. i, p. 325. For a remarkable able review, and in most charming form, of the ideas of Bishop Wilberforce and Lord Chancellor Westbury, see H. D. Traill, The New Lucian, first dialogue. For the cynical phrase referred to, see Nash, Life of Lord Westbury, vol. ii, p. 78, where the noted epitaph is given, as follows: "RICHARD BARON WESTBURY Lord High Chancellor of England, He was an eminent Christian, An energetic and merciful Statesman, And a still more eminent and merciful Judge. During his three years' tenure of office He abolished the ancient method of conveying land, The time-honoured institution of the Insolvent's Court, And The Eternity of Punishment. Toward the close of his early career, In the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, He dismissed Hell with costs, And took away from the Orthodox members of the Church of England Their last hope of everlasting damnation." IV. THE CLOSING STRUGGLE. The storm aroused by Essays and Reviews had not yet subsided when a far more serious tempest burst upon the English theological world. In 1862 appeared a work entitled The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined its author being Colenso, Anglican Bishop of Natal, in South Africa. He had formerly been highly esteemed as fellow and tutor at Cambridge, master at Harrow, author of various valuable text-books in mathematics; and as long as he exercised his powers within the limits of popular orthodoxy he was evidently in the way to the highest positions in the Church: but he chose another path. His treatment of his subject was reverent, but he had gradually come to those conclusions, then so daring, now so widespread among Christian scholars, that the Pentateuch, with much valuable historical matter, contains much that is unhistorical; that a large portion of it was the work of a comparatively late period in Jewish history; that many passages in Deuteronomy could only have been written after the Jews settled in Canaan; that the Mosaic law was not in force before the captivity; that the books of Chronicles were clearly written as an afterthought, to enforce the views of the priestly caste; and that in all the books there is much that is mythical and legendary. Very justly has a great German scholar recently adduced this work of a churchman relegated to the most petty of bishoprics in one of the most remote corners of the world, as a proof "that the problems of biblical criticism can no longer be suppressed; that they are in the air of our time, so that theology could not escape them even if it took the wings of the morning and dwelt in the uttermost parts of the sea." The bishop's statements, which now seem so moderate, then aroused horror. Especial wrath was caused by some of his arithmetical arguments, and among them those which showed that an army of six hundred thousand men could not have been mobilized in a single night; that three millions of people, with their flocks and herds, could neither have obtained food on so small and arid a desert as that over which they were said to have wandered during forty years, nor water from a single well; and that the butchery of two hundred thousand Midianites by twelve thousand Israelites, "exceeding infinitely in atrocity the tragedy at Cawnpore, had happily only been carried out on paper." There was nothing of the scoffer in him. While preserving his own independence, he had kept in touch with the most earnest thought both among European scholars and in the little flock intrusted to his care. He evidently remembered what had resulted from the attempt to hold the working classes in the towns of France, Germany, and Italy to outworn beliefs; he had found even the Zulus, whom he thought to convert, suspicious of the legendary features of the Old Testament, and with his clear practical mind he realized the danger which threatened the English Church and Christianity--the danger of tying its religion and morality to interpretations and conceptions of Scripture more and more widely seen and felt to be contrary to facts. He saw the especial peril of sham explanations, of covering up facts which must soon be known, and which, when revealed, must inevitably bring the plain people of England to regard their teachers, even the most deserving, as "solemnly constituted impostors"--ecclesiastics whose tenure depends on assertions which they know to be untrue. Therefore it was that, when his catechumens questioned him regarding some of the Old Testament legends, the bishop determined to tell the truth. He says: "My heart answered in the words of the prophet, 'Shall a man speak lies in the name of the Lord?' I determined not to do so." But none of these considerations availed in his behalf at first. The outcry against the work was deafening: churchmen and dissenters rushed forward to attack it. Archdeacon Denison, chairman of the committee of Convocation appointed to examine it, uttered a noisy anathema. Convocation solemnly condemned it; and a zealous colonial bishop, relying upon a nominal supremacy, deposed and excommunicated its author, declaring him "given over to Satan." On both sides of the Atlantic the press groaned with "answers," some of these being especially injurious to the cause they were intended to serve, and none more so than sundry efforts by the bishops themselves. One of the points upon which they attacked him was his assertion that the reference in Leviticus to the hare chewing its cud contains an error. Upon this Prof. Hitzig, of Leipsic, one of the best Hebrew scholars of his time, remarked: "Your bishops are making themselves the laughing-stock of Europe. Every Hebraist knows that the animal mentioned in Leviticus is really the hare;... every zoologist knows that it does not chew the cud."(482) (482) For the citation referred to, see Pfleiderer, as above, book iv, chap. ii. For the passages referred to as provoking especial wrath, see Colenso, Lectures on the Pentateuch and the Moabite Stone, 1876, p. 217. For the episode regarding the hare chewing the cud, see Cox, Life of Colenso, vol. i, p. 240. The following epigram went the rounds: "The bishops all have sworn to shed their blood To prove 'tis true that the hare doth chew the cud. O bishops, doctors, and divines, beware--Weak is the faith that hangs upon a HAIR!" On Colenso's return to Natal, where many of the clergy and laity who felt grateful for his years of devotion to them received him with signs of affection, an attempt was made to ruin these clergymen by depriving them of their little stipends, and to terrify the simple-minded laity by threatening them with the same "greater excommunication" which had been inflicted upon their bishop. To make the meaning of this more evident, the vicar-general of the Bishop of Cape Town met Colenso at the door of his own cathedral, and solemnly bade him "depart from the house of God as one who has been handed over to the Evil One." The sentence of excommunication was read before the assembled faithful, and they were enjoined to treat their bishop as "a heathen man and a publican." But these and a long series of other persecutions created a reaction in his favour. There remained to Colenso one bulwark which his enemies found stronger than they had imagined--the British courts of justice. The greatest efforts were now made to gain the day before these courts, to humiliate Colenso, and to reduce to beggary the clergy who remained faithful to him; and it is worthy of note that one of the leaders in preparing the legal plea of the com mittee against him was Mr. Gladstone. But this bulwark proved impregnable: both the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the Rolls Court decided in Colenso's favour. Not only were his enemies thus forbidden to deprive him of his salary, but their excommunication of him was made null and void; it became, indeed, a subject of ridicule, and even a man so nurtured in religious sentiment as John Keble confessed and lamented that the English people no longer believed in excommunication. The bitterness of the defeated found vent in the utterances of the colonial metropolitan who had excommunicated Colenso--Bishop Gray, "the Lion of Cape Town"--who denounced the judgment as "awful and profane," and the Privy Council as "a masterpiece of Satan" and "the great dragon of the English Church." Even Wilberforce, careful as he was to avoid attacking anything established, alluded with deep regret to "the devotion of the English people to the law in matters of this sort." Their failure in the courts only seemed to increase the violence of the attacking party. The Anglican communion, both in England and America, was stirred to its depths against the heretic, and various dissenting bodies strove to show equal zeal. Great pains were taken to root out his reputation: it was declared that he had merely stolen the ideas of rationalists on the Continent by wholesale, and peddled them out in England at retail; the fact being that, while he used all the sources of information at his command, and was large-minded enough to put himself into relations with the best biblical scholarship of the Continent, he was singularly independent in his judgment, and that his investigations were of lasting value in modifying Continental thought. Kuenen, the most distinguished of all his contemporaries in this field, modified, as he himself declared, one of his own leading theories after reading Colenso's argument; and other Continental scholars scarcely less eminent acknowledged their great indebtedness to the English scholar for original suggestions.(483) (483) For interesting details of the Colenso persecution, see Davidson's Life of Tait, chaps. xii and xiv; also the Lives of Bishops Wilberforce and Gray. For full accounts of the struggle, see Cox, Life of Bishop Colenso, London, 1888, especially vol. i, chap. v. For the dramatic performance at Colenso's cathedral, see vol. ii, pp. 14-25. For a very impartial and appreciative statement regarding Colenso's work, see Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism, London, 1893, chap. ix. For testimony to the originality and value of Colenso's contributions, see Kuenen, Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch, Introduction, pp. xx, as follows: "Colenso directed my attention to difficulties which I had hitherto failed to observe or adequately to reckon with; and as to the opinion of his labours current in Germany, I need only say that, inasmuch as Ewald, Bunsen, Bleek, and Knabel were every one of them logically forced to revise their theories in the light of the English bishop's research, there was small reason in the cry that his methods were antiquated and his objections stale." For a very brief but effective tribute to Colenso as an independent thinker whose merits are now acknowledged by Continental scholars, see Pfleiderer, Development of Theory, as above. But the zeal of the bishop's enemies did not end with calumny. He was socially ostracized--more completely even than Lyell had been after the publication of his Principles of Geology thirty years before. Even old friends left him, among them Frederick Denison Maurice, who, when himself under the ban of heresy, had been defended by Colenso. Nor was Maurice the only heretic who turned against him; Matthew Arnold attacked him, and set up, as a true ideal of the work needed to improve the English Church and people, of all books in the world, Spinoza's Tractatus. A large part of the English populace was led to regard him as an "infidel," a "traitor," an "apostate," and even as "an unclean being"; servants left his house in horror; "Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart were let loose upon him"; and one of the favourite amusements of the period among men of petty wit and no convictions was the devising of light ribaldry against him.(484) (484) One of the nonsense verses in vogue at the time summed up the controversy as follows: "A bishop there was of Natal, Who had a Zulu for his pal; Said the Zulu, 'My dear, Don't you think Genesis queer?' Which coverted my lord of Natal." But verses quite as good appeared on the other side, one of them being as follows: "Is this, then, the great Colenso, Who all the bishops offends so? Said Sam of the Soap, Bring fagots and rope, For oh! he's got no friends, oh!" For Matthew Arnold's attack on Colenso, see Macmillan's Magazine, January, 1863. For Maurice, see the references already given. In the midst of all this controversy stood three men, each of whom has connected his name with it permanently. First of these was Samuel Wilberforce, at that time Bishop of Oxford. The gifted son of William Wilberforce, who had been honoured throughout the world for his efforts in the suppression of the slave trade, he had been rapidly advanced in the English Church, and was at this time a prelate of wide influence. He was eloquent and diplomatic, witty and amiable, always sure to be with his fellow-churchmen and polite society against uncomfortable changes. Whether the struggle was against the slave power in the United States, or the squirearchy in Great Britain, or the evolution theory of Darwin, or the new views promulgated by the Essayists and Reviewers, he was always the suave spokesman of those who opposed every innovator and "besought him to depart out of their coasts." Mingling in curious proportions a truly religious feeling with care for his own advancement, his remarkable power in the pulpit gave him great strength to carry out his purposes, and his charming facility in being all things to all men, as well as his skill in evading the consequences of his many mistakes, gained him the sobriquet of "Soapy Sam." If such brethren of his in the episcopate as Thirlwall and Selwyn and Tait might claim to be in the apostolic succession, Wilberforce was no less surely in the succession from the most gifted and eminently respectable Sadducees who held high preferment under Pontius Pilate. By a curious coincidence he had only a few years before preached the sermon when Colenso was consecrated in Westminster Abbey, and one passage in it may be cited as showing the preacher's gift of prophecy both hortatory and predictive. Wilberforce then said to Colenso: "You need boldness to risk all for God--to stand by the truth and its supporters against men's threatenings and the devil's wrath;... you need a patient meekness to bear the galling calumnies and false surmises with which, if you are faithful, that same Satanic working, which, if it could, would burn your body, will assuredly assail you daily through the pens and tongues of deceivers and deceived, who, under a semblance of a zeal for Christ, will evermore distort your words, misrepresent your motives, rejoice in your failings, exaggerate your errors, and seek by every poisoned breath of slander to destroy your powers of service."(485) (485) For the social ostracism of Colenso, see works already cited; also Cox's Life of Colenso. For the passage from Wilberforce's sermon at the consecration of Colenso, see Rev. Sir G. W. Cox, The Church of England and the Teaching of Bishop Colenso. For Wilberforce's relations to the Colenso case in general, see his Life, by his son, vol. iii, especially pp. 113-126, 229-231. For Keble's avowal that no Englishman believes in excommunication, ibid., p. 128. For a guarded statement of Dean Stanley's opinion regarding Wilberforce and Newman, see a letter from Dean Church to the Warden of Keble, in Life and Letters of Dean Church, p. 293. Unfortunately, when Colenso followed this advice his adviser became the most untiring of his persecutors. While leaving to men like the Metropolitan of Cape Town and Archdeacon Denison the noisy part of the onslaught, Wilberforce was among those who were most zealous in devising more effective measures. But time, and even short time, has redressed the balance between the two prelates. Colenso is seen more and more of all men as a righteous leader in a noble effort to cut the Church loose from fatal entanglements with an outworn system of interpretation; Wilberforce, as the remembrance of his eloquence and of his personal charm dies away, and as the revelations of his indiscreet biographers lay bare his modes of procedure, is seen to have left, on the whole, the most disappointing record made by any Anglican prelate during the nineteenth century. But there was a far brighter page in the history of the Church of England; for the second of the three who linked their names with that of Colenso in the struggle was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster. His action during this whole persecution was an honour not only to the Anglican Church but to humanity. For his own manhood and the exercise of his own intellectual freedom he had cheerfully given up the high preferment in the Church which had been easily within his grasp. To him truth and justice were more than the decrees of a Convocation of Canterbury or of a Pan-Anglican Synod; in this as in other matters he braved the storm, never yielded to theological prejudice, from first to last held out a brotherly hand to the persecuted bishop, and at the most critical moment opened to him the pulpit of Westminster Abbey.(486) (486) For interesting testimony to Stanley's character, from a quarter from whence it would have been least expected, see a reminiscence of Lord Shaftesbury in the Life of Frances Power Cobbe, London and New York, 1894. The late Bishop of Massachusetts, Phillips Brooks, whose death was a bereavement to his country and to the Church universal, once gave the present writer a vivid description of a scene witnessed by him in the Convocation of Canterbury, when Stanley virtually withstood alone the obstinate traditionalism of the whole body in the matter of the Athanasian Creed. It is to be hoped that this account may be brought to light among the letters written by Brooks at that time. See also Dean Church's Life and Letters, p. 294, for a very important testimony. The third of the high ecclesiastics of the Church of England whose names were linked in this contest was Thirlwall. He was undoubtedly the foremost man in the Church of his time--the greatest ecclesiastical statesman, the profoundest historical scholar, the theologian of clearest vision in regard to the relations between the Church and his epoch. Alone among his brother bishops at this period, he stood "four square to all the winds that blew," as during all his life he stood against all storms of clerical or popular unreason. He had his reward. He was never advanced beyond a poor Welsh bishopric; but, though he saw men wretchedly inferior constantly promoted beyond him, he never flinched, never lost heart or hope, but bore steadily on, refusing to hold a brief for lucrative injustice, and resisting to the last all reaction and fanaticism, thus preserving not only his own self-respect but the future respect of the English nation for the Church. A few other leading churchmen were discreetly kind to Colenso, among them Tait, who had now been made Archbishop of Canterbury; but, manly as he was, he was somewhat more cautious in this matter than those who most revere his memory could now wish. In spite of these friends the clerical onslaught was for a time effective; Colenso, so far as England was concerned, was discredited and virtually driven from his functions. But this enforced leisure simply gave him more time to struggle for the protection of his native flock against colonial rapacity and to continue his great work on the Bible. His work produced its effect. It had much to do with arousing a new generation of English, Scotch, and American scholars. While very many of his minor statements have since been modified or rejected, his main conclusion was seen more and more clearly to be true. Reverently and in the deepest love for Christianity he had made the unhistorical character of the Pentateuch clear as noonday. Henceforth the crushing weight of the old interpretation upon science and morality and religion steadily and rapidly grew less and less. That a new epoch had come was evident, and out of many proofs of this we may note two of the most striking. For many years the Bampton Lectures at Oxford had been considered as adding steadily and strongly to the bulwarks of the old orthodoxy. If now and then orthodoxy had appeared in danger from such additions to the series as those made by Dr. Hampden, these lectures had been, as a rule, saturated with the older traditions of the Anglican Church. But now there was an evident change. The departures from the old paths were many and striking, until at last, in 1893, came the lectures on Inspiration by the Rev. Dr. Sanday, Ireland Professor of Exegesis in the University of Oxford. In these, concessions were made to the newer criticism, which at an earlier time would have driven the lecturer not only out of the Church but out of any decent position in society; for Prof. Sanday not only gave up a vast mass of other ideas which the great body of churchmen had regarded as fundamental, but accepted a number of conclusions established by the newer criticism. He declared that Kuenen and Wellhausen had mapped out, on the whole rightly, the main stages of development in the history of Hebrew literature; he incorporated with approval the work of other eminent heretics; he acknowledged that very many statements in the Pentateuch show "the naive ideas and usages of a primitive age." But, most important of all, he gave up the whole question in regard to the book of Daniel. Up to a time then very recent, the early authorship and predictive character of the book of Daniel were things which no one was allowed for a moment to dispute. Pusey, as we have seen, had proved to the controlling parties in the English Church that Christianity must stand or fall with the traditional view of this book; and now, within a few years of Pusey's death, there came, in his own university, speaking from the pulpit of St. Mary's whence he had so often insisted upon the absolute necessity of maintaining the older view, this professor of biblical criticism, a doctor of divinity, showing conclusively as regards the book of Daniel that the critical view had won the day; that the name of Daniel is only assumed; that the book is in no sense predictive, but was written, mainly at least, after the events it describes; that "its author lived at the time of the Maccabean struggle"; that it is very inaccurate even in the simple facts which it cites; and hence that all the vast fabric erected upon its predictive character is baseless. But another evidence of the coming in of a new epoch was even more striking. To uproot every growth of the newer thought, to destroy even every germ that had been planted by Colenso and men like him, a special movement was begun, of which the most important part was the establishment, at the University of Oxford, of a college which should bring the old opinion with crushing force against the new thought, and should train up a body of young men by feeding them upon the utterances of the fathers, of the medieval doctors, and of the apologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and should keep them in happy ignorance of the reforming spirit of the sixteenth and the scientific spirit of the nineteenth century. The new college thus founded bore the name of the poet most widely beloved among high churchmen; large endowments flowed in upon it; a showy chapel was erected in accordance throughout with the strictest rules of medieval ecclesiology. As if to strike the keynote of the thought to be fostered in the new institution, one of the most beautiful of pseudo-medieval pictures was given the place of honour in its hall; and the college, lofty and gaudy, loomed high above the neighbouring modest abode of Oxford science. Kuenen might be victorious in Holland, and Wellhausen in Germany, and Robertson Smith in Scotland--even Professors Driver, Sanday, and Cheyne might succeed Dr. Pusey as expounders of the Old Testament at Oxford--but Keble College, rejoicing in the favour of a multitude of leaders in the Church, including Mr. Gladstone, seemed an inexpugnable fortress of the older thought. But in 1889 appeared the book of essays entitled Lux Mundi, among whose leading authors were men closely connected with Keble College and with the movement which had created it. This work gave up entirely the tradition that the narrative in Genesis is a historical record, and admitted that all accounts in the Hebrew Scriptures of events before the time of Abraham are mythical and legendary; it conceded that the books ascribed to Moses and Joshua were made up mainly of three documents representing different periods, and one of them the late period of the exile; that "there is a considerable idealizing element in Old Testament history"; that "the books of Chronicles show an idealizing of history" and "a reading back into past records of a ritual development which is really later," and that prophecy is not necessarily predictive--"prophetic inspiration being consistent with erroneous anticipations." Again a shudder went through the upholders of tradition in the Church, and here and there threats were heard; but the Essays and Reviews fiasco and the Colenso catastrophe were still in vivid remembrance. Good sense prevailed: Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, instead of prosecuting the authors, himself asked the famous question, "May not the Holy Spirit make use of myth and legend?" and the Government, not long afterward, promoted one of these authors to a bishopric.(487) (487) Of Pusey's extreme devotion to his view of the book of Daniel, there is a curious evidence in a letter to Stanley in the second volume of the latter's Life and Letters. For the views referred to in Lux Mundi, see pp. 345-357; also, on the general subject, Bishop Ellicott's Christus Comprobator. In the sister university the same tendency was seen. Robertson Smith, who had been driven out of his high position in the Free Church of Scotland on account of his work in scriptural research, was welcomed into a professorship at Cambridge, and other men, no less loyal to the new truths, were given places of controlling influence in shaping the thought of the new generation. Nor did the warfare against biblical science produce any different results among the dissenters of England. In 1862 Samuel Davidson, a professor in the Congregational College at Manchester, published his Introduction to the Old Testament. Independently of the contemporary writers of Essays and Reviews, he had arrived in a general way at conclusions much like theirs, and he presented the newer view with fearless honesty, admitting that the same research must be applied to these as to other Oriental sacred books, and that such research establishes the fact that all alike contain legendary and mythical elements. A storm was at once aroused; certain denominational papers took up the matter, and Davidson was driven from his professorial chair; but he laboured bravely on, and others followed to take up his work, until the ideas which he had advocated were fully considered. So, too, in Scotland the work of Robertson Smith was continued even after he had been driven into England; and, as votaries of the older thought passed away, men of ideas akin to his were gradually elected into chairs of biblical criticism and interpretation. Wellhausen's great work, which Smith had introduced in English form, proved a power both in England and Scotland, and the articles upon various books of Scripture and scriptural subjects generally, in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, having been prepared mainly by himself as editor or put into the hands of others representing the recent critical research, this very important work of reference, which had been in previous editions so timid, was now arrayed on the side of the newer thought, insuring its due consideration wherever the English language is spoken. In France the same tendency was seen, though with striking variations from the course of events in other countries--variations due to the very different conditions under which biblical students in France were obliged to work. Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the orthodoxy of Bossuet, stiffly opposing the letter of Scripture to every step in the advance of science, had only yielded in a very slight degree. But then came an event ushering in a new epoch. At that time Jules Simon, afterward so eminent as an author, academician, and statesman, was quietly discharging the duties of a professorship, when there was brought him the visiting card of a stranger bearing the name of "Ernest Renan, Student at St. Sulpice." Admitted to M. Simon's library, Renan told his story. As a theological student he had devoted himself most earnestly, even before he entered the seminary, to the study of Hebrew and the Semitic languages, and he was now obliged, during the lectures on biblical literature at St. Sulpice, to hear the reverend professor make frequent comments, based on the Vulgate, but absolutely disproved by Renan's own knowledge of Hebrew. On Renan's questioning any interpretation of the lecturer, the latter was wont to rejoin: "Monsieur, do you presume to deny the authority of the Vulgate--the translation by St. Jerome, sanctioned by the Holy Ghost and the Church? You will at once go into the chapel and say 'Hail Mary' for an hour before the image of the Blessed Virgin." "But," said Renan to Jules Simon, "this has now become very serious; it happens nearly every day, and, MON DIEU! Monsieur, I can not spend ALL my time in saying, Hail Mary, before the statue of the Virgin." The result was a warm personal attachment between Simon and Renan; both were Bretons, educated in the midst of the most orthodox influences, and both had unwillingly broken away from them. Renan was now emancipated, and pursued his studies with such effect that he was made professor at the College de France. His Life of Jesus, and other books showing the same spirit, brought a tempest upon him which drove him from his professorship and brought great hardships upon him for many years. But his genius carried the day, and, to the honour of the French Republic, he was restored to the position from which the Empire had driven him. From his pen finally appeared the Histoire du Peuple Israel, in which scholarship broad, though at times inaccurate in minor details, was supplemented by an exquisite acuteness and a poetic insight which far more than made good any of those lesser errors which a German student would have avoided. At his death, in October, 1892, this monumental work had been finished. In clearness and beauty of style it has never been approached by any other treatise on this or any kindred subject: it is a work of genius; and its profound insight into all that is of importance in the great subjects which he treated will doubtless cause it to hold a permanent place in the literature not only of the Latin nations but of the world. An interesting light is thrown over the history of advancing thought at the end of the nineteenth century by the fact that this most detested of heresiarchs was summoned to receive the highest of academic honours at the university which for ages had been regarded as a stronghold of Presbyterian orthodoxy in Great Britain. In France the anathemas lavished upon him by Church authorities during his life, their denial to him of Christian burial, and their refusal to allow him a grave in the place he most loved, only increased popular affection for him during his last years and deepened the general mourning at his death.(488) (488) For a remarkably just summary of Renan's work, eminently judicial and at the same time deeply appreciative, see the Rev. Dr. Pfleiderer, professor at the University of Berlin, Development of Theology in Germany, pp. 241, 242, note. The facts as to the early relations between Renan and Jules Simon were told in 1878 by the latter to the present writer at considerable length and with many interesting details not here given. The writer was also present at the public funeral of the great scholar, and can testify of his own knowledge to the deep and hearty evidences of gratitude and respect then paid to Renan, not merely by eminent orators and scholars, but by the people at large. As to the refusal of the place of burial that Renan especially chose, see his own Souvenirs, in which he laments the inevitable exclusion of his grave from the site which he most loved. As to calumnies, one masterpiece, very widely spread, through the zeal of clerical journals, was that Renan received enormous sums from the Rothschilds for attacking Christianity. In spite of all resistance, the desire for more light upon the sacred books penetrated the older Church from every side. In Germany, toward the close of the eighteenth century, Jahn, Catholic professor at Vienna, had ventured, in an Introduction to Old Testament Study, to class Job, Jonah, and Tobit below other canonical books, and had only escaped serious difficulties by ample amends in a second edition. Early in the nineteenth century, Herbst, Catholic professor at Tubingen, had endeavoured in a similar Introduction to bring modern research to bear on the older view; but the Church authorities took care to have all passages really giving any new light skilfully and speedily edited out of the book. Later still, Movers, professor at Breslau, showed remarkable gifts for Old Testament research, and much was expected of him; but his ecclesiastical superiors quietly prevented his publishing any extended work. During the latter half of the nineteenth century much the same pressure has continued in Catholic Germany. Strong scholars have very generally been drawn into the position of "apologists" or "reconcilers," and, when found intractable, they have been driven out of the Church. The same general policy had been evident in France and Italy, but toward the last decade of the century it was seen by the more clear-sighted supporters of the older Church in those countries that the multifarious "refutations" and explosive attacks upon Renan and his teachings had accomplished nothing; that even special services of atonement for his sin, like the famous "Triduo" at Florence, only drew a few women, and provoked ridicule among the public at large; that throwing him out of his professorship and calumniating him had but increased his influence; and that his brilliant intuitions, added to the careful researches of German and English scholars, had brought the thinking world beyond the reach of the old methods of hiding troublesome truths and crushing persistent truth-tellers. Therefore it was that about 1890 a body of earnest Roman Catholic scholars began very cautiously to examine and explain the biblical text in the light of those results of the newer research which could no longer be gainsaid. Among these men were, in Italy, Canon Bartolo, Canon Berta, and Father Savi, and in France Monseigneur d'Hulst, the Abbe Loisy, professor at the Roman Catholic University at Paris, and, most eminent of all, Professor Lenormant, of the French Institute, whose researches into biblical and other ancient history and literature had won him distinction throughout the world. These men, while standing up manfully for the Church, were obliged to allow that some of the conclusions of modern biblical criticism were well founded. The result came rapidly. The treatise of Bartolo and the great work of Lenormant were placed on the Index; Canon Berta was overwhelmed with reproaches and virtually silenced; the Abbe Loisy was first deprived of his professorship, and then ignominiously expelled from the university; Monseigneur d'Hulst was summoned to Rome, and has since kept silence.(489) (489) For the frustration of attempts to admit light into scriptural studies in Roman Catholic Germany, see Bleek, Old Testament, London, 1882, vol. i, pp. 19, 20. For the general statement regarding recent suppression of modern biblical study in France and Italy, see an article by a Roman Catholic author in the Contemporary Review, September, 1894, p. 365. For the papal condemnations of Lenormant and Bartolo, see the Index Librorum Prohibitorum Sanctissimi Domini Nostri, Leonis XIII, P.M., etc., Rome, 1891; Appendices, July, 1890, and May, 1891. The ghastly part of the record, as stated in this edition of the Index, is that both these great scholars were forced to abjure their "errors" and to acquiesce in the condemnation--Lenorment doing this on his deathbed. The matter was evidently thought serious in the higher regions of the Church, for in November, 1893, appeared an encyclical letter by the reigning Pope, Leo XIII, on The Study of Sacred Scripture. Much was expected from it, for, since Benedict XIV in the last century, there had sat on the papal throne no Pope intellectually so competent to discuss the whole subject. While, then, those devoted to the older beliefs trusted that the papal thunderbolts would crush the whole brood of biblical critics, votaries of the newer thought ventured to hope that the encyclical might, in the language of one of them, prove "a stupendous bridge spanning the broad abyss that now divides alleged orthodoxy from established science."(490) (490) For this statement, see an article in the Contemporary Review, April, 1894, p. 576. Both these expectations were disappointed; and yet, on the whole, it is a question whether the world at large may not congratulate itself upon this papal utterance. The document, if not apostolic, won credit as "statesmanlike." It took pains, of course, to insist that there can be no error of any sort in the sacred books; it even defended those parts which Protestants count apocryphal as thoroughly as the remainder of Scripture, and declared that the book of Tobit was not compiled of man, but written by God. His Holiness naturally condemned the higher criticism, but he dwelt at the same time on the necessity of the most thorough study of the sacred Scriptures, and especially on the importance of adjusting scriptural statements to scientific facts. This utterance was admirably oracular, being susceptible of cogent quotation by both sides: nothing could be in better form from an orthodox point of view; but, with that statesmanlike forecast which the present Pope has shown more than once in steering the bark of St. Peter over the troubled waves of the nineteenth century, he so far abstained from condemning any of the greater results of modern critical study that the main English defender of the encyclical, the Jesuit Father Clarke, did not hesitate publicly to admit a multitude of such results--results, indeed, which would shock not only Italian and Spanish Catholics, but many English and American Protestants. According to this interpreter, the Pope had no thought of denying the variety of documents in the Pentateuch, or the plurality of sources of the books of Samuel, or the twofold authorship of Isaiah, or that all after the ninth verse of the last chapter of St. Mark's Gospel is spurious; and, as regards the whole encyclical, the distinguished Jesuit dwelt significantly on the power of the papacy at any time to define out of existence any previous decisions which may be found inconvenient. More than that, Father Clarke himself, while standing as the champion of the most thorough orthodoxy, acknowledged that, in the Old Testament, "numbers must be expected to be used Orientally," and that "all these seventies and forties, as, for example, when Absalom is said to have rebelled against David for forty years, can not possibly be meant numerically"; and, what must have given a fearful shock to some Protestant believers in plenary inspiration, he, while advocating it as a dutiful Son of the Church, wove over it an exquisite web with the declaration that "there is a human element in the Bible pre-calculated for by the Divine."(491) (491) For these admissions of Father Clarke, see his article The Papal Encyclical on the Bible, in the Contemporary Review for July, 1894. Considering the difficulties in the case, the world has reason to be grateful to Pope Leo and Father Clarke for these utterances, which perhaps, after all, may prove a better bridge between the old and the new than could have been framed by engineers more learned but less astute. Evidently Pope Leo XIII is neither a Paul V nor an Urban VIII, and is too wise to bring the Church into a position from which it can only be extricated by such ludicrous subterfuges as those by which it was dragged out of the Galileo scandal, or by such a tortuous policy as that by which it writhed out of the old doctrine regarding the taking of interest for money. In spite, then, of the attempted crushing out of Bartolo and Berta and Savi and Lenormant and Loisy, during this very epoch in which the Pope issued this encyclical, there is every reason to hope that the path has been paved over which the Church may gracefully recede from the old system of interpretation and quietly accept and appropriate the main results of the higher criticism. Certainly she has never had a better opportunity to play at the game of "beggar my neighbour" and to drive the older Protestant orthodoxy into bankruptcy. In America the same struggle between the old ideas and the new went on. In the middle years of the century the first adequate effort in behalf of the newer conception of the sacred books was made by Theodore Parker at Boston. A thinker brave and of the widest range,--a scholar indefatigable and of the deepest sympathies with humanity,--a man called by one of the most eminent scholars in the English Church "a religious Titan," and by a distinguished French theologian "a prophet," he had struggled on from the divinity school until at that time he was one of the foremost biblical scholars, and preacher to the largest regular congregation on the American continent. The great hall in Boston could seat four thousand people, and at his regular discourses every part of it was filled. In addition to his pastoral work he wielded a vast influence as a platform speaker, especially in opposition to the extension of slavery into the Territories of the United States, and as a lecturer on a wide range of vital topics; and among those whom he most profoundly influenced, both politically and religiously, was Abraham Lincoln. During each year at that period he was heard discussing the most important religious and political questions in all the greater Northern cities; but his most lasting work was in throwing light upon our sacred Scriptures, and in this he was one of the forerunners of the movement now going on not only in the United States but throughout Christendom. Even before he was fairly out of college his translation of De Wette's Introduction to the Old Testament made an impression on many thoughtful men; his sermon in 1841 on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity marked the beginning of his great individual career; his speeches, his lectures, and especially his Discourse on Matters pertaining to Religion, greatly extended his influence. His was a deeply devotional nature, and his public prayers exercised by their touching beauty a very strong religious influence upon his audiences. He had his reward. Beautiful and noble as were his life and his life-work, he was widely abhorred. On one occasion of public worship in one of the more orthodox churches, news having been received that he was dangerously ill, a prayer was openly made by one of the zealous brethren present that this arch-enemy might be removed from earth. He was even driven out from the Unitarian body. But he was none the less steadfast and bold, and the great mass of men and women who thronged his audience room at Boston and his lecture rooms in other cities spread his ideas. His fate was pathetic. Full of faith and hope, but broken prematurely by his labours, he retired to Italy, and died there at the darkest period in the history of the United States--when slavery in the state and the older orthodoxy in the Church seemed absolutely and forever triumphant. The death of Moses within sight of the promised land seems the only parallel to the death of Parker less than six months before the publication of Essays and Reviews and the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, of the United States.(492) (492) For the appellation "religious Titan" applied to Theodore Parker, see a letter of Jowett, Master of Balliol, to Frances Power Cobbe, in her Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 357, and for Reville's statement, ibid., p. 9. For a pathetic account of Parker's last hours at Florence, ibid., vol. i, pp. 10, 11. As to the influence of Theodore Parker on Lincoln, see Rhodes's History of the United States, as above, vol. ii, p. 312. For the statement regarding Parker's audiences and his power over them, the present writer trusts to his own memory. But here it must be noted that Parker's effort was powerfully aided by the conscientious utterances of some of his foremost opponents. Nothing during the American struggle against the slave system did more to wean religious and God-fearing men and women from the old interpretation of Scripture than the use of it to justify slavery. Typical among examples of this use were the arguments of Hopkins, Bishop of Vermont, a man whose noble character and beautiful culture gave him very wide influence in all branches of the American Protestant Church. While avowing his personal dislike to slavery, he demonstrated that the Bible sanctioned it. Other theologians, Catholic and Protestant, took the same ground; and then came that tremendous rejoinder which echoed from heart to heart throughout the Northern States: "The Bible sanctions slavery? So much the worse for the Bible." Then was fulfilled that old saying of Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg: "Press not the breasts of Holy Writ too hard, lest they yield blood rather than milk."(493) (493) There is a curious reference to Bishop Hopkins's ideas on slavery in Archbishop Tait's Life and Letters. For a succinct statement of the biblical proslavery argument referred to, see Rhodes, as above, vol. i, pp. 370 et seq. Yet throughout Christendom a change in the mode of interpreting Scripture, though absolutely necessary if its proper authority was to be maintained, still seemed almost hopeless. Even after the foremost scholars had taken ground in favour of it, and the most conservative of those whose opinions were entitled to weight had made concessions showing the old ground to be untenable, there was fanatical opposition to any change. The Syllabus of Errors put forth by Pius IX in 1864, as well as certain other documents issued from the Vatican, had increased the difficulties of this needed transition; and, while the more able-minded Roman Catholic scholars skilfully explained away the obstacles thus created, others published works insisting upon the most extreme views as to the verbal inspiration of the sacred books. In the Church of England various influential men took the same view. Dr. Baylee, Principal of St. Aidan's College, declared that in Scripture "every scientific statement is infallibly accurate; all its histories and narrations of every kind are without any inaccuracy. Its words and phrases have a grammatical and philological accuracy, such as is possessed by no human composition." In 1861 Dean Burgon preached in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, as follows: "No, sirs, the Bible is the very utterance of the Eternal: as much God's own word as if high heaven were open and we heard God speaking to us with human voice. Every book is inspired alike, and is inspired entirely. Inspiration is not a difference of degree, but of kind. The Bible is filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit of God; the books of it and the words of it and the very letters of it." In 1865 Canon MacNeile declared in Exeter Hall that "we must either receive the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament or deny the veracity, the insight, the integrity of our Lord Jesus Christ as a teacher of divine truth." As late as 1889 one of the two most eloquent pulpit orators in the Church of England, Canon Liddon, preaching at St. Paul's Cathedral, used in his fervour the same dangerous argument: that the authority of Christ himself, and therefore of Christianity, must rest on the old view of the Old Testament; that, since the founder of Christianity, in divinely recorded utterances, alluded to the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, to Noah's ark and the Flood, and to the sojourn of Jonah in the whale, the biblical account of these must be accepted as historical, or that Christianity must be given up altogether. In the light of what was rapidly becoming known regarding the Chaldean and other sources of the accounts given in Genesis, no argument could be more fraught with peril to the interest which the gifted preacher sought to serve. In France and Germany many similar utterances in opposition to the newer biblical studies were heard; and from America, especially from the college at Princeton, came resounding echoes. As an example of many may be quoted the statement by the eminent Dr. Hodge that the books of Scripture "are, one and all, in thought and verbal expression, in substance, and in form, wholly the work of God, conveying with absolute accuracy and divine authority all that God meant to convey without human additions and admixtures"; and that "infallibility and authority attach as much to the verbal expression in which the revelation is made as to the matter of the revelation itself." But the newer thought moved steadily on. As already in Protestant Europe, so now in the Protestant churches of America, it took strong hold on the foremost minds in many of the churches known as orthodox: Toy, Briggs, Francis Brown, Evans, Preserved Smith, Moore, Haupt, Harper, Peters, and Bacon developed it, and, though most of them were opposed bitterly by synods, councils, and other authorities of their respective churches, they were manfully supported by the more intellectual clergy and laity. The greater universities of the country ranged themselves on the side of these men; persecution but intrenched them more firmly in the hearts of all intelligent well-wishers of Christianity. The triumphs won by their opponents in assemblies, synods, conventions, and conferences were really victories for the nominally defeated, since they revealed to the world the fact that in each of these bodies the strong and fruitful thought of the Church, the thought which alone can have any hold on the future, was with the new race of thinkers; no theological triumphs more surely fatal to the victors have been won since the Vatican defeated Copernicus and Galileo. And here reference must be made to a series of events which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, have contributed most powerful aid to the new school of biblical research. V. VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS. While this struggle for the new truth was going on in various fields, aid appeared from a quarter whence it was least expected. The great discoveries by Botta and Layard in Assyria were supplemented by the researches of Rawlinson, George Smith, Oppert, Sayce, Sarzec, Pinches, and others, and thus it was revealed more clearly than ever before that as far back as the time assigned in Genesis to the creation a great civilization was flourishing in Mesopotamia; that long ages, probably two thousand years, before the scriptural date assigned to the migration of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, this Chaldean civilization had bloomed forth in art, science, and literature; that the ancient inscriptions recovered from the sites of this and kindred civilizations presented the Hebrew sacred myths and legends in earlier forms--forms long antedating those given in the Hebrew Scriptures; and that the accounts of the Creation, the Tree of Life in Eden, the institution and even the name of the Sabbath, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, and much else in the Pentateuch, were simply an evolution out of earlier Chaldean myths and legends. So perfect was the proof of this that the most eminent scholars in the foremost seats of Christian learning were obliged to acknowledge it.(494) (494) As to the revelations of the vast antiquity of Chaldean civilization, and especially regarding the Nabonidos inscription, see Records of the Past, vol. i, new series, first article, and especially pp. 5, 6, where a translation of that inscription is given; also Hommel, Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, introduction, in which, on page 12, an engraving of the Sargon cylinder is given; also, on the general subject, especially pp. 116 et seq., 309 et seq.; also Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, pp. 161-163; also Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of Civilization, p. 555 and note. For the earlier Chaldean forms of the Hebrew Creation accounts, Tree of Life in Eden, Hebrew Sabbath, both the institution and the name, and various other points of similar interest, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, throughout the work, especially p. 308 and chaps. xvi, xvii; also Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier; also Schrader, The Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament; also Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire; also Sayce, The Assyrian Story of Creation, in Records of the Past, new series, vol. i. For a general statement as to earlier sources of much in the Hebrew sacred origins, see Huxley, Essays on Controverted Questions, English edition, p. 525. The more general conclusions which were thus given to biblical criticism were all the more impressive from the fact that they had been revealed by various groups of earnest Christian scholars working on different lines, by different methods, and in various parts of the world. Very honourable was the full and frank testimony to these results given in 1885 by the Rev. Francis Brown, a professor in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at New York. In his admirable though brief book on Assyriology, starting with the declaration that "it is a great pity to be afraid of facts," he showed how Assyrian research testifies in many ways to the historical value of the Bible record; but at the same time he freely allowed to Chaldean history an antiquity fatal to the sacred chronology of the Hebrews. He also cast aside a mass of doubtful apologetics, and dealt frankly with the fact that very many of the early narratives in Genesis belong to the common stock of ancient tradition, and, mentioning as an example the cuneiform inscriptions which record a story of the Accadian king Sargon--how "he was born in retirement, placed by his mother in a basket of rushes, launched on a river, rescued and brought up by a stranger, after which he became king"--he did not hesitate to remind his readers that Sargon lived a thousand years and more before Moses; that this story was told of him several hundred years before Moses was born; and that it was told of various other important personages of antiquity. The professor dealt just as honestly with the inscriptions which show sundry statements in the book of Daniel to be unhistorical; candidly making admissions which but a short time before would have filled orthodoxy with horror. A few years later came another testimony even more striking. Early in the last decade of the nineteenth century it was noised abroad that the Rev. Professor Sayce, of Oxford, the most eminent Assyriologist and Egyptologist of Great Britain, was about to publish a work in which what is known as the "higher criticism" was to be vigorously and probably destructively dealt with in the light afforded by recent research among the monuments of Assyria and Egypt. The book was looked for with eager expectation by the supporters of the traditional view of Scripture; but, when it appeared, the exultation of the traditionalists was speedily changed to dismay. For Prof. Sayce, while showing some severity toward sundry minor assumptions and assertions of biblical critics, confirmed all their more important conclusions which properly fell within his province. While his readers soon realized that these assumptions and assertions of overzealous critics no more disproved the main results of biblical criticism than the wild guesses of Kepler disproved the theory of Copernicus, or the discoveries of Galileo, or even the great laws which bear Kepler's own name, they found new mines sprung under some of the most lofty fortresses of the old dogmatic theology. A few of the statements of this champion of orthodoxy may be noted. He allowed that the week of seven days and the Sabbath rest are of Babylonian origin; indeed, that the very word "Sabbath" is Babylonian; that there are two narratives of Creation on the Babylonian tablets, wonderfully like the two leading Hebrew narratives in Genesis, and that the latter were undoubtedly drawn from the former; that the "garden of Eden" and its mystical tree were known to the inhabitants of Chaldea in pre-Semitic days; that the beliefs that woman was created out of man, and that man by sin fell from a state of innocence, are drawn from very ancient Chaldean-Babylonian texts; that Assyriology confirms the belief that the book Genesis is a compilation; that portions of it are by no means so old as the time of Moses; that the expression in our sacred book, "The Lord smelled a sweet savour" at the sacrifice made by Noah, is "identical with that of the Babylonian poet"; that "it is impossible to believe that the language of the latter was not known to the biblical writer" and that the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife was drawn in part from the old Egyptian tale of The Two Brothers. Finally, after a multitude of other concessions, Prof. Sayce allowed that the book of Jonah, so far from being the work of the prophet himself, can not have been written until the Assyrian Empire was a thing of the past; that the book of Daniel contains serious mistakes; that the so-called historical chapters of that book so conflict with the monuments that the author can not have been a contemporary of Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus; that "the story of Belshazzar's fall is not historical"; that the Belshazzar referred to in it as king, and as the son of Nehuchadnezzar, was not the son of Nebuchadnezzar, and was never king; that "King Darius the Mede," who plays so great a part in the story, never existed; that the book associates persons and events really many years apart, and that it must have been written at a period far later than the time assigned in it for its own origin. As to the book of Ezra, he tells us that we are confronted by a chronological inconsistency which no amount of ingenuity can explain away. He also acknowledges that the book of Esther "contains many exaggerations and improbabilities, and is simply founded upon one of those same historical tales of which the Persian chronicles seem to have been full." Great was the dissatisfaction of the traditionalists with their expected champion; well might they repeat the words of Balak to Balaam, "I called thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast altogether blessed them."(495) (495) For Prof. Brown's discussion, see his Assyriology, its Use and Abuse in Old Testament Study, New York, 1885, passim. For Prof. Sayce's views, see The Higher Criticism and the Monuments, third edition, London, 1894, and especially his own curious anticipation, in the first lines of the preface, that he must fail to satisfy either side. For the declaration that the "higher critic" with all his offences is no worse than the orthodox "apologist," see p. 21. For the important admission that the same criterion must be applied in researches into our own sacred books as into others, and even into the mediaeval chronicles, see p. 26. For justification of critical scepticism regarding the history given in the book of Daniel, see pp. 27, 28, also chap. ix. For very full and explicit statements, with proofs, that the "Sabbath," both in name and nature, was derived by the Hebrews from the Chaldeans, see pp. 74 et seq. For a very full and fair acknowledgment of the "Babylonian element in Genesis," see chap. iii, including the statement regarding the statement in our sacred book, "The Lord smelled a sweet savour," at the sacrifice made by Noah, etc., on p. 119. For an excellent summary of the work, see Dr. Driver's article in the Contemporary Review for March, 1894. For a pungent but well-deserved rebuke of Prof. Sayce's recent attempts to propitiate pious subscribers to his archaeological fund, see Prof. A. A. Bevan, in the Contemporary Review for December, 1895. For the inscription on the Assyrian tablets relating in detail the exposure of King Sargon in a basket of rushes, his rescue and rule, see George Smith, Chaldean account of Genesis, Sayce's edition, London, 1880, pp. 319, 320. For the frequent recurrence of the Sargon and Moses legend in ancient folklore, see Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of History, p. 598 and note. For various other points of similar interest, see ibid., passim, especially chaps. xvi and xvii; also Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, and Schrader, The Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament; also Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire. No less fruitful have been modern researches in Egypt. While, on one hand, they have revealed a very considerable number of geographical and archaeological facts proving the good faith of the narratives entering into the books attributed to Moses, and have thus made our early sacred literature all the more valuable, they have at the same time revealed the limitations of the sacred authors and compilers. They have brought to light facts utterly disproving the sacred Hebrew date of creation and the main framework of the early biblical chronology; they have shown the suggestive correspondence between the ten antediluvian patriarchs in Genesis and the ten early dynasties of the Egyptian gods, and have placed by the side of these the ten antediluvian kings of Chaldean tradition, the ten heroes of Armenia, the ten primeval kings of Persian sacred tradition, the ten "fathers" of Hindu sacred tradition, and multitudes of other tens, throwing much light on the manner in which the sacred chronicles of ancient nations were generally developed. These scholars have also found that the legends of the plagues of Egypt are in the main but natural exaggerations of what occurs every year; as, for example, the changing of the water of the Nile into blood--evidently suggested by the phenomena exhibited every summer, when, as various eminent scholars, and, most recent of all, Maspero and Sayce, tell us, "about the middle of July, in eight or ten days the river turns from grayish blue to dark red, occasionally of so intense a colour as to look like newly shed blood." These modern researches have also shown that some of the most important features in the legends can not possibly be reconciled with the records of the monuments; for example, that the Pharaoh of the Exodus was certainly not overwhelmed in the Red Sea. As to the supernatural features of the Hebrew relations with Egypt, even the most devoted apologists have become discreetly silent. Egyptologists have also translated for us the old Nile story of The Two Brothers, and have shown, as we have already seen, that one of the most striking parts of our sacred Joseph legend was drawn from it; they have been obliged to admit that the story of the exposure of Moses in the basket of rushes, his rescue, and his subsequent greatness, had been previously told, long before Moses's time, not only of King Sargon, but of various other great personages of the ancient world; they have published plans of Egyptian temples and copies of the sculptures upon their walls, revealing the earlier origin of some of the most striking features of the worship and ceremonial claimed to have been revealed especially to the Hebrews; they have found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and in various inscriptions of the Nile temples and tombs, earlier sources of much in the ethics so long claimed to have been revealed only to the chosen people in the Book of the Covenant, in the ten commandments, and elsewhere; they have given to the world copies of the Egyptian texts showing that the theology of the Nile was one of various fruitful sources of later ideas, statements, and practices regarding the brazen serpent, the golden calf, trinities, miraculous conceptions, incarnations, resurrections, ascensions, and the like, and that Egyptian sacro-scientific ideas contributed to early Jewish and Christian sacred literature statements, beliefs, and even phrases regarding the Creation, astronomy, geography, magic, medicine, diabolical influences, with a multitude of other ideas, which we also find coming into early Judaism in greater or less degree from Chaldean and Persian sources. But Egyptology, while thus aiding to sweep away the former conception of our sacred books, has aided biblical criticism in making them far more precious; for it has shown them to be a part of that living growth of sacred literature whose roots are in all the great civilizations of the past, and through whose trunk and branches are flowing the currents which are to infuse a higher religious and ethical life into the civilizations of the future.(496) (496) For general statements of agreements and disagreements between biblical accounts and the revelations of the Egyptian monuments, see Sayce, The Higher Criticism and the Monuments, especially chap. iv. For discrepancies between the Hebrew sacred accounts of Jewish relations with Egypt and the revelations of modern Egyptian research, see Sharpe, History of Egypt; Flinders, Patrie, History of Egypt; and especially Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization in Egypt and Chaldea, London, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1894. For the statement regarding the Nile, that about the middle of July "in eight or ten days it turns from grayish blue to dark red, occasionally of so intense a colour as to look like newly shed blood," see Maspero and Sayce, as above, p. 23. For the relation of the Joseph legend to the Tale of Two Brothers, see Sharpe and others cited. For examples of exposure of various great personages of antiquity in their childhood, see G. Smith, Chaldean Accounts of Genesis, Sayce's edition, p. 320. For the relation of the Book of the Dead, etc., to Hebrew ethics, see a striking passage in Huxley's essay on The Evolution of Theology, also others cited in this chapter. As to trinities in Egypt and Chaldea, see Maspero and Sayce, especially pp. 104-106, 175, and 659-663. For miraculous conception and birth of sons of Ra, ibid., pp. 388, 389. For ascension of Ra into heaven, ibid., pp. 167, 168; for resurrections, see ibid., p. 695, also representations in Lepsius, Prisse d'Avennes, et al.; and for striking resemblance between Egyptian and Hebrew ritual and worship, and especially the ark, cherubim, ephod, Urim and Thummim, and wave offerings, see the same, passim. For a very full exhibition of the whole subject, see Renan, Histoire du Peuple Israel, vol. i, chap. xi. For Egyptian and Chaldean ideas in astronomy, out of which Hebrew ideas of "the firmament," "pillars of heaven," etc., were developed, see text and engravings in Maspero and Sayce, pp. 17 and 543. For creation of man out of clay by a divine being in Egypt, see Maspero and Sayce, p. 154; for a similar idea in Chaldea, see ibid., p. 545; and for the creation of the universe by a word, ibid., pp. 146, 147. For Egyptian and Chaldean ideas on magic and medicine, dread of evil spirits, etc., anticipating those of the Hebrew Scriptures, see Maspero and Sayce, as above, pp. 212-214, 217, 636; and for extension of these to neighboring nations, pp. 782, 783. For visions and use of dreams as oracles, ibid., p. 641 and elsewhere. See also, on these and other resemblances, Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire, vol. i, passim; see also George Smith and Sayce, as above, chaps. xvi and xvii, for resemblances especially striking, combining to show how simple was the evolution of many Hebrew sacred legends and ideas out of those earlier civilizations. For an especially interesting presentation of the reasons why Egyptian ideas of immortality were not seized upon by the Jews, see the Rev. Barham Zincke's work upon Egypt. For the sacrificial vessels, temple rites, etc., see the bas-reliefs, figured by Lepsius, Prisse d'Avennes, Mariette, Maspero, et. al. For a striking summary by a brilliant scholar and divine of the Anglican Church, see Mahaffy, Prolegomena to Anc. Hist., cited in Sunderland, The Bible, New York, 1893, p. 21, note. But while archaeologists thus influenced enlightened opinion, another body of scholars rendered services of a different sort--the centre of their enterprise being the University of Oxford. By their efforts was presented to the English-speaking world a series of translations of the sacred books of the East, which showed the relations of the more Eastern sacred literature to our own, and proved that in the religions of the world the ideas which have come as the greatest blessings to mankind are not of sudden revelation or creation, but of slow evolution out of a remote past. The facts thus shown did not at first elicit much gratitude from supporters of traditional theology, and perhaps few things brought more obloquy on Renan, for a time, than his statement that "the influence of Persia is the most powerful to which Israel was submitted." Whether this was an overstatement or not, it was soon seen to contain much truth. Not only was it made clear by study of the Zend Avesta that the Old and New Testament ideas regarding Satanic and demoniacal modes of action were largely due to Persian sources, but it was also shown that the idea of immortality was mainly developed in the Hebrew mind during the close relations of the Jews with the Persians. Nor was this all. In the Zend Avesta were found in earlier form sundry myths and legends which, judging from their frequent appearance in early religions, grow naturally about the history of the adored teachers of our race. Typical among these was the Temptation of Zoroaster. It is a fact very significant and full of promise that the first large, frank, and explicit revelation regarding this whole subject in form available for the general thinking public was given to the English-speaking world by an eminent Christian divine and scholar, the Rev. Dr. Mills. Having already shown himself by his translations a most competent authority on the subject, he in 1894 called attention, in a review widely read, to "the now undoubted and long since suspected fact that it pleased the Divine Power to reveal some of the important articles of our Catholic creed first to the Zoroastrians, and through their literature to the Jews and ourselves." Among these beliefs Dr. Mills traced out very conclusively many Jewish doctrines regarding the attributes of God, and all, virtually, regarding the attributes of Satan. There, too, he found accounts of the Miraculous Conception, Virgin Birth, and Temptation of Zoroaster, As to the last, Dr. Mills presented a series of striking coincidences with our own later account. As to its main features, he showed that there had been developed among the Persians, many centuries before the Christian era, the legend of a vain effort of the arch-demon, one seat of whose power was the summit of Mount Arezura, to tempt Zoroaster to worship him,--of an argument between tempter and tempted,--and of Zoroaster's refusal; and the doctor continued: "No Persian subject in the streets of Jerusalem, soon after or long after the Return, could have failed to know this striking myth." Dr. Mills then went on to show that, among the Jews, "the doctrine of immortality was scarcely mooted before the later Isaiah--that is, before the captivity--while the Zoroastrian scriptures are one mass of spiritualism, referring all results to the heavenly or to the infernal worlds." He concludes by saying that, as regards the Old and New Testaments, "the humble, and to a certain extent prior, religion of the Mazda worshippers was useful in giving point and beauty to many loose conceptions among the Jewish religious teachers, and in introducing many ideas which were entirely new, while as to the doctrines of immortality and resurrection--the most important of all--it positively determined belief."(498) (498) For the passages in the Vendidad of special importance as regards the Temptation myth, see Fargard, xix, 18, 20, 26, also 140, 147. Very striking is the account of the Temptation in the Pelhavi version of the Vendidad. The devil is represented as saying to Zaratusht (Zoroaster): "I had the worship of thy ancestors; do thou also worship me." I am indebted to Prof. E. P. Evans, formerly of the University of Michigan, but now of Munich, for a translation of the original text from Spiegel's edition. For a good account, see also Haug, Essays on the Sacred Language, etc., of the Parsees, edited by West, London, 1884, pp. 252 et seq.; see also Mills's and Darmesteter's work in Sacred Books of the East. For Dr. Mills's article referred to, see his Zoroaster and the Bible, in The Nineteenth Century, January, 1894. For the citation from Renan, see his Histoire du Peuple Israel, tome xiv, chap. iv; see also, for Persian ideas of heaven, hell and resurrection, Haug, as above, p. 310 et seq. For an interesting resume of Zoroastrianism, see Laing, A Modern Zoroastrian, chap. xii, London, eighth edition, 1893. For the Buddhist version of the judgment of Solomon, etc., see Fausboll, Buddhist Birth Stories, translated by Rhys Davids, London, 1880, vol. 1, p. 14 and following. For very full statements regarding the influence of Persian ideas upon the Jews during the captivity, see Kahut, Ueber die judische Angelologie und Daemonologie in ihren Abhangigkeit vom Parsismus, Leipzig, 1866. Even more extensive were the revelations made by scientific criticism applied to the sacred literature of southern and eastern Asia. The resemblances of sundry fundamental narratives and ideas in our own sacred books with those of Buddhism were especially suggestive. Here, too, had been a long preparatory history. The discoveries in Sanscrit philology made in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, by Sir William Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Foster, Colebrooke, and others, had met at first with some opposition from theologians. The declaration by Dugald Stewart that the discovery of Sanscrit was fraudulent, and its vocabulary and grammar patched together out of Greek and Latin, showed the feeling of the older race of biblical students. But researches went on. Bopp, Burnouf, Lassen, Weber, Whitney, Max Muller, and others continued the work during the nineteenth century. More and more evident became the sources from which many ideas and narratives in our own sacred books had been developed. Studies in the sacred books of Brahmanism, and in the institutions of Buddhism, the most widespread of all religions, its devotees outnumbering those of all branches of the Christian Church together, proved especially fruitful in facts relating to general sacred literature and early European religious ideas. Noteworthy in the progress of this knowledge was the work of Fathers Huc and Gabet. In 1839 the former of these, a French Lazarist priest, set out on a mission to China. Having prepared himself at Macao by eighteen months of hard study, and having arrayed himself like a native, even to the wearing of the queue and the staining of his skin, he visited Peking and penetrated Mongolia. Five years later, taking Gabet with him, both disguised as Lamas, he began his long and toilsome journey to the chief seats of Buddhism in Thibet, and, after two years of fearful dangers and sufferings, accomplished it. Driven out finally by the Chinese, Huc returned to Europe in 1852, having made one of the most heroic, self-denying, and, as it turned out, one of the most valuable efforts in all the noble annals of Christian missions. His accounts of these journevs, written in a style simple, clear, and interesting, at once attracted attention throughout the world. But far more important than any services he had rendered to the Church he served was the influence of his book upon the general opinions of thinking men; for he completed a series of revelations made by earlier, less gifted, and less devoted travellers, and brought to the notice of the world the amazing similarity of the ideas, institutions, observances, ceremonies, and ritual, and even the ecclesiastical costumes of the Buddhists to those of his own Church. Buddhism was thus shown with its hierarchy, in which the Grand Lama, an infallible representative of the Most High, is surrounded by its minor Lamas, much like cardinals; with its bishops wearing mitres, its celibate priests with shaven crown, cope, dalmatic, and censer; its cathedrals with clergy gathered in the choir; its vast monasteries filled with monks and nuns vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience; its church arrangements, with shrines of saints and angels; its use of images, pictures, and illuminated missals; its service, with a striking general resemblance to the Mass; antiphonal choirs; intoning of prayers; recital of creeds; repetition of litanies; processions; mystic rites and incense; the offering and adoration of bread upon an altar lighted by candles; the drinking from a chalice by the priest; prayers and offerings for the dead; benediction with outstretched hands; fasts, confessions, and doctrine of purgatory--all this and more was now clearly revealed. The good father was evidently staggered by these amazing facts; but his robust faith soon gave him an explanation: he suggested that Satan, in anticipation of Christianity, had revealed to Buddhism this divinely constituted order of things. This naive explanation did not commend itself to his superiors in the Roman Church. In the days of St. Augustine or of St. Thomas Aquinas it would doubtless have been received much more kindly; but in the days of Cardinal Antonelli this was hardly to be expected: the Roman authorities, seeing the danger of such plain revelations in the nineteenth century, even when coupled with such devout explanations, put the book under the ban, though not before it had been spread throughout the world in various translations. Father Huc was sent on no more missions. Yet there came even more significant discoveries, especially bearing upon the claims of that great branch of the Church which supposes itself to possess a divine safeguard against error in belief. For now was brought to light by literary research the irrefragable evidence that the great Buddha--Sakya Muni himself--had been canonized and enrolled among the Christian saints whose intercession may be invoked, and in whose honour images, altars, and chapels may be erected; and this, not only by the usage of the medieval Church, Greek and Roman, but by the special and infallible sanction of a long series of popes, from the end of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth--a sanction granted under one of the most curious errors in human history. The story enables us to understand the way in which many of the beliefs of Christendom have been developed, especially how they have been influenced from the seats of older religions; and it throws much light into the character and exercise of papal infallibility. Early in the seventh century there was composed, as is now believed, at the Convent of St. Saba near Jerusalem, a pious romance entitled Barlaam and Josaphat--the latter personage, the hero of the story, being represented as a Hindu prince converted to Christianity by the former. This story, having been attributed to St. John of Damascus in the following century became amazingly popular, and was soon accepted as true: it was translated from the Greek original not only into Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic, but into every important European language, including even Polish, Bohemian, and Icelandic. Thence it came into the pious historical encyclopaedia of Vincent of Beauvais, and, most important of all, into the Lives of the Saints. Hence the name of its pious hero found its way into the list of saints whose intercession is to be prayed for, and it passed without challenge until about 1590, when, the general subject of canonization having been brought up at Rome, Pope Sixtus V, by virtue of his infallibility and immunity against error in everything relating to faith and morals, sanctioned a revised list of saints, authorizing and directing it to be accepted by the Church; and among those on whom he thus forever infallibly set the seal of Heaven was included "The Holy Saint Josaphat of India, whose wonderful acts St. John of Damascus has related." The 27th of November was appointed as the day set apart in honour of this saint, and the decree, having been enforced by successive popes for over two hundred and fifty years, was again officially approved by Pius IX in 1873. This decree was duly accepted as infallible, and in one of the largest cities of Italy may to-day be seen a Christian church dedicated to this saint. On its front are the initials of his Italianized name; over its main entrance is the inscription "Divo Josafat"; and within it is an altar dedicated to the saint--above this being a pedestal bearing his name and supporting a large statue which represents him as a youthful prince wearing a crown and contemplating a crucifix. Moreover, relics of this saint were found; bones alleged to be parts of his skeleton, having been presented by a Doge of Venice to a King of Portugal, are now treasured at Antwerp. But even as early as the sixteenth century a pregnant fact regarding this whole legend was noted: for the Portuguese historian Diego Conto showed that it was identical with the legend of Buddha. Fortunately for the historian, his faith was so robust that he saw in this resemblance only a trick of Satan; the life of Buddha being, in his opinion, merely a diabolic counterfeit of the life of Josaphat centuries before the latter was lived or written--just as good Abbe Huc saw in the ceremonies of Buddhism a similar anticipatory counterfeit of Christian ritual. There the whole matter virtually rested for about three hundred years--various scholars calling attention to the legend as a curiosity, but none really showing its true bearings--until, in 1859, Laboulaye in France, Liebrecht in Germany, and others following them, demonstrated that this Christian work was drawn almost literally from an early biography of Buddha, being conformed to it in the most minute details, not only of events but of phraseology; the only important changes being that, at the end of the various experiences showing the wretchedness of the world, identical with those ascribed in the original to the young Prince Buddha, the hero, instead of becoming a hermit, becomes a Christian, and that for the appellation of Buddha--"Bodisat"--is substituted the more scriptural name Josaphat. Thus it was that, by virtue of the infallibility vouchsafed to the papacy in matters of faith and morals, Buddha became a Christian saint. Yet these were by no means the most pregnant revelations. As the Buddhist scriptures were more fully examined, there were disclosed interesting anticipations of statements in later sacred books. The miraculous conception of Buddha and his virgin birth, like that of Horus in Egypt and of Krishna in India; the previous annunciation to his mother Maja; his birth during a journey by her; the star appearing in the east, and the angels chanting in the heavens at his birth; his temptation--all these and a multitude of other statements were full of suggestions to larger thought regarding the development of sacred literature in general. Even the eminent Roman Catholic missionary Bishop Bigandet was obliged to confess, in his scholarly life of Buddha, these striking similarities between the Buddhist scriptures and those which it was his mission to expound, though by this honest statement his own further promotion was rendered impossible. Fausboll also found the story of the judgment of Solomon imbedded in Buddhist folklore; and Sir Edwin Arnold, by his poem, The Light of Asia, spread far and wide a knowledge of the anticipation in Buddhism of some ideas which down to a recent period were considered distinctively Christian. Imperfect as the revelations thus made of an evolution of religious beliefs, institutions, and literature still are, they have not been without an important bearing upon the newer conception of our own sacred books: more and more manifest has become the interdependence of all human development; more and more clear the truth that Christianity, as a great fact in man's history, is not dependent for its life upon any parasitic growths of myth and legend, no matter how beautiful they may be.(498) (498) For Huc and Gabet, see Souvenirs d'un Voyage dans la Tartarie, le Thibet, et la Chine, English translation by Hazlitt, London, 1851; also supplementary work by Huc. For Bishop Bigandet, see his Life of Buddha, passim. As for authority for the fact that his book was condemned at Rome and his own promotion prevented, the present writer has the bishop's own statement. For notices of similarities between Buddhist and Christian institutions, rituals, etc., see Rhys David's Buddhism, London, 1894, passim; also Lillie, Buddhism and Christianity, especially chaps. ii and xi. It is somewhat difficult to understand how a scholar so eminent as Mr. Rhys Davids should have allowed the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, which published his book, to eliminate all the interesting details regarding the birth of Buddha, and to give so fully everything that seemed to tell against the Roman Catholic Church; cf. p. 27 with p. 246 et seq. For more thorough presentation of the development of features in Buddhism and Brahmanism which anticipate those of Christianity, see Schroeder, Indiens Literatur und Cultur, Leipsic, 1887, especially Vorlesung XXVIII and following. For full details of the canonization of Buddha under the name of St. Josaphat, see Fausboll, Buddhist Birth Stories, translated by Rhys Davids, London, 1880, pp. xxxvi and following; also Prof. Max Muller in the Contemporary Review for July, 1890; also the article Barlaam and Josaphat, in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For the more recent and full accounts, correcting some minor details in the foregoing authorities, see Kuhn, Barlaam und Joasaph, Munich, 1893, especially pages 82, 83. For a very thorough discussion of the whole subject, see Zotenberg, Notice sur le livre de Barlaam et Joasaph, Paris, 1886; especially for arguments fixing date of the work, see parts i to iii; also Gaston Paris in the Revue de Paris for June, 1895. For the transliteration between the appellation of Buddha and the name of the saint, see Fausboll and Sayce, as above, p. xxxvii, note; and for the multitude of translations of the work ascribed to St. John of Damascus, see Table III, on p. xcv. The reader who is curious to trace up a multitude of the myths and legends of early Hebrew and Christian mythology to their more eastern and southern sources can do so in Bible Myths, New York, 1883. The present writer gladly avails himself of the opportunity to thank the learned Director of the National Library at Palermo, Monsignor Marzo, for his kindness in showing him the very interesting church of San Giosafat in that city; and to the custodians of the church for their readiness to allow photographs of the saint to be taken. The writer's visit was made in April, 1895, and copies of the photographs may be seen in the library of Cornell University. As to the more rare editions of Barlaam and Josaphat, a copy of the Icelandic translation is to be seen in the remarkable collection of Prof. Willard Fiske, at Florence. As to the influence of these translations, it may be noted that when young John Kuncewicz, afterward a Polish archbishop, became a monk, he took the name of the sainted Prince Josafat; and, having fallen a victim to one of the innumerable murderous affrays of the seventeenth century between different sorts of fanatics--Greek, Catholic, and Protestant--in Poland, he also was finally canonized under that name, evidently as a means of annoying the Russian Government. (See Contieri, Vita di S. Giosafat, Arcivesco e Martira Rutena, Roma, 1867.) No less important was the closer research into the New Testament during the latter part of the nineteenth century. To go into the subject in detail would be beyond the scope of this work, but a few of the main truths which it brought before the world may be here summarized.(499) (499) For a brief but thorough statement of the work of Strauss, Baur, and the earlier cruder efforts in New Testament exegesis, see Pfleiderer, as already cited, book ii, chap. i; and for the later work on Supernatural Religion and Lightfoot's answer, ibid., book iv. chap. ii. By the new race of Christian scholars it has been clearly shown that the first three Gospels, which, down to the close of the last century, were so constantly declared to be three independent testimonies agreeing as to the events recorded, are neither independent of each other nor in that sort of agreement which was formerly asserted. All biblical scholars of any standing, even the most conservative, have come to admit that all three took their rise in the same original sources, growing by the accretions sure to come as time went on--accretions sometimes useful and often beautiful, but in no inconsiderable degree ideas and even narratives inherited from older religions: it is also fully acknowledged that to this growth process are due certain contradictions which can not otherwise be explained. As to the fourth Gospel, exquisitely beautiful as large portions of it are, there has been growing steadily and irresistibly the conviction, even among the most devout scholars, that it has no right to the name, and does not really give the ideas of St. John, but that it represents a mixture of Greek philosophy with Jewish theology, and that its final form, which one of the most eminent among recent Christian scholars has characterized as "an unhistorical product of abstract reflection," is mainly due to some gifted representative or representatives of the Alexandrian school. Bitter as the resistance to this view has been, it has during the last years of the nineteenth century won its way more and more to acknowledgment. A careful examination made in 1893 by a competent Christian scholar showed facts which are best given in his own words, as follows: "In the period of thirty years ending in 1860, of the fifty great authorities in this line, FOUR TO ONE were in favour of the Johannine authorship. Of those who in that period had advocated this traditional position, one quarter--and certainly the very greatest--finally changed their position to the side of a late date and non-Johannine authorship." Of those who have come into this field of scholarship since about 1860, some forty men of the first class, two thirds reject the traditional theory wholly or very largely. Of those who have contributed important articles to the discussion from about 1880 to 1890, about TWO TO ONE reject the Johannine authorship of the Gospel in its present shape--that is to say, while forty years ago great scholars were FOUR TO ONE IN FAVOUR OF, they are now TWO TO ONE AGAINST, the claim that the apostle John wrote this Gospel as we have it. Again, one half of those on the conservative side to-day--scholars like Weiss, Beyschlag, Sanday, and Reynolds--admit the existence of a dogmatic intent and an ideal element in this Gospel, so that we do not have Jesus's thought in his exact words, but only in substance."(500) (500) For the citations given regarding the development of thought in relation to the fourth gospel, see Crooker, The New Bible and its Uses, Boston, 1893, pp. 29, 30. For the characterization of St. John's Gospel above referred to, see Robertson Smith in the Encyc. Brit., 9th edit., art. Bible, p. 642. For a very careful and candid summary of the reasons which are gradually leading the more eminent among the newer scholars to give up the Johannine authorship ot the fourth Gospel, see Schurer, in the Contemporary Review for September, 1891. American readers, regarding this and the whole series of subjects of which this forms a part, may most profitably study the Rev. Dr. Cone's Gospel Criticism and Historic Christianity, one of the most lucid and judicial of recent works in this field. In 1881 came an event of great importance as regards the development of a more frank and open dealing with scriptural criticism. In that year appeared the Revised Version of the New Testament. It was exceedingly cautious and conservative; but it had the vast merit of being absolutely conscientious. One thing showed, in a striking way, ethical progress in theological methods. Although all but one of the English revisers represented Trinitarian bodies, they rejected the two great proof texts which had so long been accounted essential bulwarks of Trinitarian doctrine. Thus disappeared at last from the Epistle of St. John the text of the Three Witnesses, which had for centuries held its place in spite of its absence from all the earlier important manuscripts, and of its rejection in later times by Erasmus, Luther, Isaac Newton, Porson, and a long line of the greatest biblical scholars. And with this was thrown out the other like unto it in spurious origin and zealous intent, that interpolation of the word "God" in the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of the First Epistle to Timothy, which had for ages served as a warrant for condemning some of the noblest of Christians, even such men as Newton and Milton and Locke and Priestley and Channing. Indeed, so honest were the revisers that they substituted the correct reading of Luke ii, 33, in place of the time-honoured corruption in the King James version which had been thought necessary to safeguard the dogma of the virgin birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus came the true reading, "His FATHER and his mother" instead of the old piously fraudulent words "JOSEPH and his mother." An even more important service to the new and better growth of Christianity was the virtual setting aside of the last twelve verses of the Gospel according to St. Mark; for among these stood that sentence which has cost the world more innocent blood than any other--the words "He that believeth not shall be damned." From this source had logically grown the idea that the intellectual rejection of this or that dogma which dominant theology had happened at any given time to pronounce essential, since such rejection must bring punishment infinite in agony and duration, is a crime to be prevented at any cost of finite cruelty. Still another service rendered to humanity by the revisers was in substituting a new and correct rendering for the old reading of the famous text regarding the inspiration of Scripture, which had for ages done so much to make our sacred books a fetich. By this more correct reading the revisers gave a new charter to liberty in biblical research.(501) (501) The texts referred to as most beneficially changed by the revisers are I John v, 7 and I Timothy iii, 16. Mention may also be made of the fact that the American revision gave up the Trinitarian version of Romans ix, 5, and that even their more conservative British brethren, while leaving it in the text, discredited it in the margin. Though revisers thought it better not to suppress altogether the last twelve verses of St. Mark's Gospel, they softened the word "damned" to "condemned," and separated them from the main Gospel, adding a note stating that "the two oldest Greek manuscripts, and some other authorities, omit from verse nine to the end"; and that "some other authorities have a different ending to this Gospel." The resistance of staunch high churchmen of the older type even to so mild a reform as the first change above noted may be exemplified by a story told of Philpotts, Bishop of Exeter, about the middle of the nineteenth century. A kindly clergyman reading an invitation to the holy communion, and thinking that so an affectionate a call was disfigured by the harsh phrase "eateth and drinketh to his own damnation," ventured timidly to substitute the word "condemnation." Thereupon the bishop, who was kneeling with the rest of the congregation, threw up his head and roared "DAMNATION!" The story is given in T. A. Trollope's What I Remember, vol. i, p. 444. American churchmen may well rejoice that the fathers of the American branch of the Anglican Church were wise enough and Christian enough to omit from their Prayer Book this damnatory clause, as well as the Commination Service and the Athanasian Creed. Most valuable, too, have been studies during the latter part of the nineteenth century upon the formation of the canon of Scripture. The result of these has been to substitute something far better for that conception of our biblical literature, as forming one book handed out of the clouds by the Almighty, which had been so long practically the accepted view among probably the majority of Christians. Reverent scholars have demonstrated our sacred literature to be a growth in obedience to simple laws natural and historical; they have shown how some books of the Old Testament were accepted as sacred, centuries before our era, and how others gradually gained sanctity, in some cases only fully acquiring it long after the establishment of the Christian Church. The same slow growth has also been shown in the New Testament canon. It has been demonstrated that the selection of the books composing it, and their separation from the vast mass of spurious gospels, epistles, and apocalyptic literature was a gradual process, and, indeed, that the rejection of some books and the acceptance of others was accidental, if anything is accidental. So, too, scientific biblical research has, as we have seen, been obliged to admit the existence of much mythical and legendary matter, as a setting for the great truths not only of the Old Testament but of the New. It has also shown, by the comparative study of literatures, the process by which some books were compiled and recompiled, adorned with beautiful utterances, strengthened or weakened by alterations and interpolations expressing the views of the possessors or transcribers, and attributed to personages who could not possibly have written them. The presentation of these things has greatly weakened that sway of mere dogma which has so obscured the simple teachings of Christ himself; for it has shown that the more we know of our sacred books, the less certain we become as to the authenticity of "proof texts," and it has disengaged more and more, as the only valuable residuum, like the mass of gold at the bottom of the crucible, the personality, spirit, teaching, and ideals of the blessed Founder of Christianity. More and more, too, the new scholarship has developed the conception of the New Testament as, like the Old, the growth of literature in obedience to law--a conception which in al probability will give it its strongest hold on the coming centuries. In making this revelation Christian scholarship has by no means done work mainly destructive. It has, indeed, swept away a mass of noxious growths, but it has at the same time cleared the ground for a better growth of Christianity--a growth through which already pulsates the current of a nobler life. It has forever destroyed the contention of scholars like those of the eighteenth century who saw, in the multitude of irreconcilable discrepancies between various biblical statements, merely evidences of priestcraft and intentional fraud. The new scholarship has shown that even such absolute contradictions as those between the accounts of the early life of Jesus by Matthew and Luke, and between the date of the crucifixion and details of the resurrection in the first three Gospels and in the fourth, and other discrepancies hardly less serious, do not destroy the historical character of the narrative. Even the hopelessly conflicting genealogies of the Saviour and the evidently mythical accretions about the simple facts of his birth and life are thus full of interest when taken as a natural literary development in obedience to the deepest religious feeling.(502) (502) Among the newer English works of the canon of Scripture, especially as regards the Old Testament, see Ryle in work cited. As to the evidences of frequent mutilations of the New Testament text, as well as of frequent charge of changing texts made against each other by early Christian writers, see Reuss, History of the New Testament, vol. ii, S 362. For a reverent and honest treatment of some of the discrepancies and contradictions which are absolutely irreconcilable, see Crooker, as above, appendix; also Cone, Gospel Criticism and Historic Christianity, especially chap. ii; also Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, and God and the Bible, especially chap. vi; and for a brief but full showing of them in a judicial and kindly spirit, see Laing, Problems of the Future, chap. ix, on The Historical Element in the Gospels. Among those who have wrought most effectively to bring the leaders of thought in the English-speaking nations to this higher conception, Matthew Arnold should not be forgotten. By poetic insight, broad scholarship, pungent statement, pithy argument, and an exquisitely lucid style, he aided effectually during the latter half of the nineteenth century in bringing the work of specialists to bear upon the development of a broader and deeper view. In the light of his genius a conception of our sacred books at the same time more literary as well as more scientific has grown widely and vigorously, while the older view which made of them a fetich and a support for unchristian dogmas has been more and more thrown into the background. The contributions to these results by the most eminent professors at the great Christian universities of the English-speaking world, Oxford and Cambridge taking the lead, are most hopeful signs of a new epoch. Very significant also is a change in the style of argument against the scientific view. Leading supporters of the older opinions see more and more clearly the worthlessness of rhetoric against ascertained fact: mere dogged resistance to cogent argument evidently avails less and less; and the readiness of the more prominent representatives of the older thought to consider opposing arguments, and to acknowledge any force they may have, is certainly of good omen. The concessions made in Lux Mundi regarding scriptural myths and legends have been already mentioned. Significant also has been the increasing reprobation in the Church itself of the profound though doubtless unwitting immoralities of RECONCILERS. The castigation which followed the exploits of the greatest of these in our own time--Mr. Gladstone, at the hands of Prof. Huxley--did much to complete a work in which such eminent churchmen as Stanley, Farrar, Sanday, Cheyne, Driver, and Sayce had rendered good service. Typical among these evidences of a better spirit in controversy has been the treatment of the question regarding mistaken quotations from the Old Testament in the New, and especially regarding quotations by Christ himself. For a time this was apparently the most difficult of all matters dividing the two forces; but though here and there appear champions of tradition, like the Bishop of Gloucester, effectual resistance to the new view has virtually ceased; in one way or another the most conservative authorities have accepted the undoubted truth revealed by a simple scientific method. Their arguments have indeed been varied. While some have fallen back upon Le Clerc's contention that "Christ did not come to teach criticism to the Jews," and others upon Paley's argument that the Master shaped his statements in accordance with the ideas of his time, others have taken refuge in scholastic statements--among them that of Irenaeus regarding "a quiescence of the divine word," or the somewhat startling explanation by sundry recent theologians that "our Lord emptied himself of his Godhead."(504) (504) For Matthew Arnold, see, besides his Literature and Dogma, his St. Paul and Protestantism. As to the quotations in the New Testament from the Old, see Toy, Quotations in the New Testament, 1889, p. 72; also Kuenen, The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel. For Le Clerc's method of dealing with the argument regarding quotations from the Old Testament in the New, see earlier parts of the present chapter. For Paley's mode, see his Evidences, part iii, chapter iii. For the more scholastic expressions from Irenaeus and others, see Gore, Bampton Lectures, 1891, especially note on p. 267. For a striking passage on the general subject see B. W. Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, p. 33, ending with the words, "We must decline to stake the authority of Jesus Christ on a question of literary criticism." Nor should there be omitted a tribute to the increasing courtesy shown in late years by leading supporters of the older view. During the last two decades of the present century there has been a most happy departure from the older method of resistance, first by plausibilities, next by epithets, and finally by persecution. To the bitterness of the attacks upon Darwin, the Essayists and Reviewers, and Bishop Colenso, have succeeded, among really eminent leaders, a far better method and tone. While Matthew Arnold no doubt did much in commending "sweet reasonableness" to theological controversialists, Mr. Gladstone, by his perfect courtesy to his opponents, even when smarting under their heaviest blows, has set a most valuable example. Nor should the spirit shown by Bishop Ellicott, leading a forlorn hope for the traditional view, pass without a tribute of respect. Truly pathetic is it to see this venerable and learned prelate, one of the most eminent representatives of the older biblical research, even when giving solemn warnings against the newer criticisms, and under all the temptations of ex cathedra utterance, remaining mild and gentle and just in the treatment of adversaries whose ideas he evidently abhors. Happily, he is comforted by the faith that Christianity will survive; and this faith his opponents fully share.(505) (505) As an example of courtesy between theologic opponents may be cited the controversy between Mr. Gladstone and Prof. Huxley, Principal Gore's Bampton Lectures for 1891, and Bishop Ellicott's Charges, published in 1893. To the fact that the suppression of personal convictions among "the enlightened" did not cease with the Medicean popes there are many testimonies. One especially curious was mentioned to the present writer by a most honoured diplomatist and scholar at Rome. While this gentleman was looking over the books of an eminent cardinal, recently deceased, he noticed a series of octavos bearing on their backs the title "Acta Apostolorum." Surprised at such an extension of the Acts of Apostles, he opened a volume and found the series to be the works of Voltaire. As to a similar condition of things in the Church of England may be cited the following from Froude's Erasmus: "I knew various persons of high reputation a few years ago who thought at the bottom very much as Bishop Colenso thought, who nevertheless turned and rent him to clear their own reputations--which they did not succeed in doing." See work cited, close of Lecture XI. VI. RECONSTRUCTIVE FORCE OF SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM. For all this dissolving away of traditional opinions regarding our sacred literature, there has been a cause far more general and powerful than any which has been given, for it is a cause surrounding and permeating all. This is simply the atmosphere of thought engendered by the development of all sciences during the last three centuries. Vast masses of myth, legend, marvel, and dogmatic assertion, coming into this atmosphere, have been dissolved and are now dissolving quietly away like icebergs drifted into the Gulf Stream. In earlier days, when some critic in advance of his time insisted that Moses could not have written an account embracing the circumstances of his own death, it was sufficient to answer that Moses was a prophet; if attention was called to the fact that the great early prophets, by all which they did and did not do, showed that there could not have existed in their time any "Levitical code," a sufficient answer was "mystery"; and if the discrepancy was noted between the two accounts of creation in Genesis, or between the genealogies or the dates of the crucifixion in the Gospels, the cogent reply was "infidelity." But the thinking world has at last been borne by the general development of a scientific atmosphere beyond that kind of refutation. If, in the atmosphere generated by the earlier developed sciences, the older growths of biblical interpretation have drooped and withered and are evidently perishing, new and better growths have arisen with roots running down into the newer sciences. Comparative Anthropology in general, by showing that various early stages of belief and observance, once supposed to be derived from direct revelation from heaven to the Hebrews, are still found as arrested developments among various savage and barbarous tribes; Comparative Mythology and Folklore, by showing that ideas and beliefs regarding the Supreme Power in the universe are progressive, and not less in Judea than in other parts of the world; Comparative Religion and Literature, by searching out and laying side by side those main facts in the upward struggle of humanity which show that the Israelites, like other gifted peoples, rose gradually, through ghost worship, fetichism, and polytheism, to higher theological levels; and that, as they thus rose, their conceptions and statements regarding the God they worshipped became nobler and better--all these sciences are giving a new solution to those problems which dogmatic theology has so long laboured in vain to solve. While researches in these sciences have established the fact that accounts formerly supposed to be special revelations to Jews and Christians are but repetitions of widespread legends dating from far earlier civilizations, and that beliefs formerly thought fundamental to Judaism and Christianity are simply based on ancient myths, they have also begun to impress upon the intellect and conscience of the thinking world the fact that the religious and moral truths thus disengaged from the old masses of myth and legend are all the more venerable and authoritative, and that all individual or national life of any value must be vitalized by them.(506) (506) For plaintive lamentations over the influence of this atmosphere of scientific thought upon the most eminent contemporary Christian scholars, see the Christus Comprobator, by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, London, 1893, and the article in the Contemporary Review for May, 1892, by the Bishop of Colchester, passim. For some less known examples of sacred myths and legends inherited from ancient civilizations, see Lenormant, Les Origines de l'Histoire, passim, but especially chaps. ii, iv, v, vi; see also Goldziher. If, then, modern science in general has acted powerfully to dissolve away the theories and dogmas of the older theologic interpretation, it has also been active in a reconstruction and recrystallization of truth; and very powerful in this reconstruction have been the evolution doctrines which have grown out of the thought and work of men like Darwin and Spencer. In the light thus obtained the sacred text has been transformed: out of the old chaos has come order; out of the old welter of hopelessly conflicting statements in religion and morals has come, in obedience to this new conception of development, the idea of a sacred literature which mirrors the most striking evolution of morals and religion in the history of our race. Of all the sacred writings of the world, it shows us our own as the most beautiful and the most precious; exhibiting to us the most complete religious development to which humanity has attained, and holding before us the loftiest ideals which our race has known. Thus it is that, with the keys furnished by this new race of biblical scholars, the way has been opened to treasures of thought which have been inaccessible to theologians for two thousand years. As to the Divine Power in the universe: these interpreters have shown how, beginning with the tribal god of the Hebrews--one among many jealous, fitful, unseen, local sovereigns of Asia Minor--the higher races have been borne on to the idea of the just Ruler of the whole earth, as revealed by the later and greater prophets of Israel, and finally to the belief in the Universal Father, as best revealed in the New Testament. As to man: beginning with men after Jehovah's own heart--cruel, treacherous, revengeful--we are borne on to an ideal of men who do right for right's sake; who search and speak the truth for truth's sake; who love others as themselves. As to the world at large: the races dominant in religion and morals have been lifted from the idea of a "chosen people" stimulated and abetted by their tribal god in every sort of cruelty and injustice, to the conception of a vast community in which the fatherhood of God overarches all, and the brotherhood of man permeates all. Thus, at last, out of the old conception of our Bible as a collection of oracles--a mass of entangling utterances, fruitful in wrangling interpretations, which have given to the world long and weary ages of "hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness"; of fetichism, subtlety, and pomp; of tyranny bloodshed, and solemnly constituted imposture; of everything which the Lord Jesus Christ most abhorred--has been gradually developed through the centuries, by the labours, sacrifices, and even the martyrdom of a long succession of men of God, the conception of it as a sacred literature--a growth only possible under that divine light which the various orbs of science have done so much to bring into the mind and heart and soul of man--a revelation, not of the Fall of Man, but of the Ascent of Man--an exposition, not of temporary dogmas and observances, but of the Eternal Law of Righteousness--the one upward path for individuals and for nations. No longer an oracle, good for the "lower orders" to accept, but to be quietly sneered at by "the enlightened"--no longer a fetich, whose defenders must be persecutors, or reconcilers, or "apologists"; but a most fruitful fact, which religion and science may accept as a source of strength to both.